Deborah Levy - Black Vodka

‘I’m not going to move out.’

‘I know you’re not.’

Pavel is lying on his side of the bed and his girlfriend won’t let him touch her. After a while Ella turns towards Pavel and pulls his ponytail, hard.

‘You look fucking ridiculous.’

‘I know.’

‘Cut it off.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I want you to be someone else.’

‘Who do you want me to be?’

‘I want you to be kind and wise. I want you to be a father who loves his children. I want you to be attentive to me and faithful for ever. I want you to always fancy me and respect and admire me and I want you to be older and more confident.’

‘But I’m not,’ Pavel says. ‘I’m not a father. I’m not very wise.’

‘I know.’ Ella turns away from him.

Pavel’s hands are not just white. They are the alabaster white of Catholic saints. Ella’s father had wide, dark brown hands. But he was not wise. He left the house one night and never came back to tell her mother why. He left home to make another home and other children and then he left that home as well. Her father had many homes but no home. He was not wise. Only in his hands. His hands were strong and in a way, they were wise. When he held her in his arms, she could feel his love for her. And when she was three years old she stood on his hands and he’d lift her up into the air until she touched the ceiling.

‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Pavel risks kissing the back of her neck.

‘We can walk by the Thames to that Portuguese place and have coffee.’

When Ella kneels down and ties the laces of her shoes, Pavel glares at them. It’s quite unusual for a woman to own the same shoes as a man. Especially Scottish dancing shoes, men’s dancing shoes with long laces that criss-cross up the shins. They walk on the paved bank of the Thames, cold and silent, listening to a busker play the bagpipes while two huge industrial barges sway on the oily churning water.

‘Look, he’s also got the same shoes as you!’ Pavel points at the busker. He laughs now, squeezing Ella’s hand. ‘They must be very common, this kind of shoe.’

‘Not really,’ Ella replies, trying not to smile. ‘It’s not common for women to wear men’s dancing shoes and to find a bookseller who wears them too. Specially as he’s not Scottish and neither am I.’

They walk into the Portuguese cafe and kiss the owner’s new baby, who was born last week and is now the star of the establishment.

‘Good evening, your royal highness,’ Pavel says when she is passed into his arms.

Later, when Pavel and Ella, now too tired to walk home, wait by the bus stop, he tells her he did not get the job in Dublin. The word ‘Dublin’ makes his girlfriend stiffen and move away from him. Pavel touches his throat. More than anything he wants a glass of water.

‘Have you ever had that weird feeling in an airport when you panic and don’t know what to do? One screen says Departures and another screen says Arrivals and for a moment you don’t know which one you are. You think, am I an arrival or am I a departure?’

Ella is frowning, looking out for the bus.

‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’ Ella’s voice is suddenly angry. ‘Do you mean you don’t know whether you’re staying or leaving. . is that what you’re trying to say to me?’

‘I’m sorry about Dublin,’ Pavel murmurs into her hostile brown ear.

The bus arrives and they step inside, fumbling for change. Not knowing if everything is all right between them, they glance at the passengers in their scarves and hats and overcoats. Some of them are drinking fizzy cold drinks from cans. They hold the drink to their lips, eyes half shut, tense and concentrated as they gulp down the liquid, briefly stopping to catch their breath before lifting the can once more to their lips.

My sister Cass thinks that ice cubes in the shape of hearts will change her life. Cass is a Stone Age girl. She hopes hearts will bring her love in the same way the Ancients thought dancing for the Gods would bring rain. She does the whole atmosphere business: turns off all the lights in the house and burns up a bargain pack of Tesco night-lights to make fake moonlight in her bedroom. After a while she makes herself what she calls a Piña Colada (some sort of milkshake), lies on the bed and sobs to a CD. It’s hard to believe that that small silver disc can spin her to the other side and back. Cass wants to be somewhere else. She has been abducted by visions of paradise that are not here, and to punish me for being happy, she twisted her hair into a tight plait and cut the whole lot off. I used to be scared of open spaces until I realised it was indoors that was the most frightening.

At night the satellite dishes on the roofs and walls throw spectral shadows across the tamed gardens. I have grown to love the bronze doorknobs in the shape of jungle beasts: a lion’s head, a tiger, a snake. These seem to me to be caveman icons on the doors of the bankers and dentists who live here, a way of keeping in touch with The Divine. Sometimes I lie flat out on the gravel under one of the new shrubs and feel the electricity charge me up. The TV repeats. The CD players and video hires, personal computers, microwaves, dishwashers and hairdryers. It gives me a thrill because I know the world is very old. At night, I sometimes hope that an Ancient will find me shivering in front of the TV eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. He will teach me how to sharpen flint and I won’t know what to teach him because I don’t know how to make antibiotics.

And then one night Cass told me her secret. Unburdened her confidence on my white-boy shoulders. She said she wants a sex change.

‘What, into a man?’

‘No, into a woman.’

‘But you are a woman.’

‘I want to be another kind of woman.’

‘What does that mean, Cass?’

‘I want to be light-hearted,’ she begins, and already the worry lines on her forehead come into focus. ‘I want to be airy.’ My sister is whispering this to me under the new shrub in the dark. Her sad girl breath makes me dizzy. She says, ‘I want to have blue eyes for a start, that’s the trick. Blue eyes are the gentlest, sexiest, most ambivalent eyes. My blue eyes will cut out, but they will also be very much there.’ When Cass says ‘very much there’, a thrill jolts through my stomach. She chews her nails for a while and then says, ‘I want to be a pretend woman.’

I’m glad the gravel is clean and all the cats well fed here. I hate the way butchers display the insides of animals on silver trays.

Cass continues talking, her eyes shut tight and the light from the little lamp post chuffing over her shorn black hair. I’ve found a surgeon to do the op, she says in a flat voice. I can already see him drilling a hole in my sister’s forehead with a rusty nail. I don’t want to talk to her any more.

There’s been a pile-up on the motorway nearby. A furniture van collided with a baker’s truck. The drivers crawled out of their vehicles streaked in blood to find a load of chocolate éclairs and cream cakes splattered on leather sofas and office chairs. I don’t want to see anything shocking ever again.

So this woman walks up the gravel drive, long legs, wearing sandals even though it’s raining. Sandals with little heels and criss-cross straps over the instep. Dragging her bag with limp wrists, smiling under a dirty blond fringe, and the bluest eyes, kind of flat eyes, can’t get inside ’em but she’s got energy in her body and she says, ‘Hi Bruv. Do you like my fake snake?’ I don’t know who she is or what she’s talking about and then I see she’s pointing to her fake snakeskin sandals.

‘I’m Cass,’ she smiles, dimpling her cheek.