Cult

When Alice woke on the morning after Lara's disappearance she thought for a minute she could hear her in the kitchen, causing a fuss, doing the washing up, laughing. The sense of relief made her get up. But it wasn't Lara and it wasn't laughter. Lara wasn't one of the three drinking tea, growing quiet, as Alice walked in.  She was gone.  The expressions around the kitchen table all said it was her fault; Jo, Fran, Beth; they wouldn’t look at her. Jo picked her nail, Fran rubbed her face, Beth got up and filled the kettle. Alice took a mug down from the shelf. "It's only been twenty-four hours. Maybe she's thinking." But Lara didn't think. She soared and fell with the primal currents of her mind. Unchecked, un-rooted, she trusted nothing inside of her head and out of it, only Alice.  Jo said, "Her father rang again." He’d had Alice on the phone for an hour last night. Accusations, blame, didn’t she know how fragile Lara was. Until she’d picked up the phone, she hadn’t known Lara wasn’t upstairs as usual, squirreling away pieces of scrap writing and drawing watercolours of the moon.  She’d gone to Lara’s room and found a note on the floor saying, Please don’t send me away. I know what I have to do.

Alice leaned against the sink, her cup dangling from her hand and watched the steam building from the kettle spout. To stop their men from fighting, Lysistrata persuaded the women of her city to deny them sex until peace was declared. Alice had read it when she was twelve. She’d sneaked into her father’s dressing room and found it on his desk. She wasn’t supposed to be there; it was a room out of bounds but how else could she get close? The long lunches in shaded courtyards, the conversations she could only hover by, the crease of his eyes, his soft hands; these were unreachable. Cocooned in the scent of that place, as if lemon trees grew in the pockets of his suits, she’d kicked off her shoes and on his bed, crossed legged, she’d sat with the story open on her lap. Even then she’d known it wasn’t enough. Even as a virgin. She’d got into Cambridge, his college, to read Classics. She’d thought he’d be pleased but he hadn’t visited once. Released into the atmosphere she’d been too far away to sneak into his dressing room and soon found she didn’t want to anymore. By the end of her first year, the idea had grown into a curvaceous argument, a long-legged advantage, a beautiful workable weapon.  Her feet up on the kitchen table in her student flat, she’d asked, “What if women refused to breed?” Her housemates had called it outlandish. She’d argued, “no, listen. Imagine the ramifications. If we refused to breed it would bring down governments, the economy would collapse, we have all the power here,” and she’d touch her belly, “to make them listen. Isn’t peace what we want? Isn’t a fair society, equality, compassion what we deserve? They won’t listen, they refuse to see us but we can make them see, we can make ourselves heard.” Her housemates, who liked nothing better than putting the world to rights in long-winded words and convoluted sentences, said she was dreaming. She’d got angry, dropped out and moved into a squat on the Harrow Road. She’d taken over the space with her arguments. Those who didn’t like it moved out. Those who did became The Cult of the Un-Holy Mothers bringing forth a missing generation. Jo, Fran, Beth, Alice committed to withholding that one unassailable power of women until men stopped being such dicks. They would not have children. They encouraged all women to do the same. They made t-shirts that said Refuse To Breed in big stark letters and wore them to parties and wore people down. Men got aggressive. Women got defensive. It was fun until Lara.

Lara was into it immediately. She bought the t-shirt, made the tea, joined the hours of spliffs and strategies round the kitchen table, smiling into her cup, never saying much. They’d heard about her from a mate in the rave scene; a girl in a north London psychiatric ward locked up for flooding the cafe where she worked; the cult of the Un-Holy Mothers had piled into Alice’s camper van and found Lara in a room of stopped clocks. They’d told the nurses she was family and bundled her down in a lift that buzzed and flashed strobe flits upon the walls. From that day on she’d clung to Alice’s words as if they were a rope ladder dropped to save her.

Fran got up and filled the teapot. Jo got the milk out. Alice put her feet up on the rungs of Jo’s chair, a mug of tea cooling beside her. She leaned her elbows on her knees. The room was cold, her dressing gown thin, her pyjamas, old. She’d been wearing the same when Lara told her she was pregnant; the grey gown pulled over her shoulders as she’d sat up in bed half awake and taken in Lara’s stark frame perched uncomfortably, the panicked face, sorry to have woken her. Alice remembered thinking, Why am I the only one who gets it? Lara had said, "Will you ever forgive me?"

A bang on the front door made everyone jump. Fran went down to see. Alice rewrapped her dressing gown. Beth rolled a cigarette. Jo blew her nose. When Fran came back she stood aside and said, "He’s here."

David was the handsomest man Alice had ever met. He filled the door in immaculate suit, there were gentle creases at his eyes, around him circled the scent of lemon trees and when she stood up and held out her hand, the skin of his quick touch was soft. The others moved nervously, made excuses and left them alone. Alice persuaded him to wait while she got dressed and took him to a pub across the road.

Over sandwiches he said, “You know it’s probably a phantom, don’t you.  Pregnancy’s her thing.  A huge fuss, a drama and it turns out she’s made it up.”  Young, forty at most, just a hint of grey at the temple. “I didn’t tell her she had to go.” Alice tried to sound firm. He replied, “She’s bi-polar, Alice,” and he carried on speaking but she was lost in the sound of her name on his lips. Over coffee she found herself saying I’m sorry. He helped her on with her coat. “I’ll find her, I usually do.” By mistake, as they were leaving, she cried.

Alice and David lay amongst tangled sheets in the cosy timelessness of Sunday morning; the papers strewn between them, cooling coffee cups and toast on the bedside table, the radio on. Lara had been found roaming Dartmoor and returned to the psychiatric hospital.  Alice had left the squat, the others wouldn’t talk to her.  They hadn’t listened when she’d said it didn’t count if you were in love. She touched her belly. It lifted the covers into a gentle mound where David laid his head.