THE CROOKED LITTLE PIECES by Sophia Lambton
Crepuscular Musings - her recently spawned cultural
Substack - provides vivid explorations of tv and cinema
together with reviews of operas, concerts and recitals at
The Crooked Little Pieces is her first literary saga. Currently
she's working on her second.
She lives in London.
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EXCERPT
The Crooked Little Pieces
Volume I
2nd September 1968.
The tapping of Isabel’s spoon was beginning to irk her. It was a particularly idiosyncratic form of warfare,
Anneliese inferred: her sister longing to drum into her a new responsibility. This so-called responsibility involved
some happiness being thrust into her heart – a happiness she should have felt for Isabel.
The odds were hardly in her favour.
It so happened that the infantry that could have wielded joy in Anneliese restrained themselves from this invasion.
They turned and became renegades, clinging seditiously to their objection. Gloom was the path that she was taking
despite Isabel’s unspoken pleas.
A memory bounced to the forefront of her mind. She and Isabel were four years old and at a park in Zurich.
Crouched down in the little hut at the slide’s peak, Isabel had wrapped her hands around the cold and shiny metal
bar for fear of slipping. She was staring down at Anneliese in an imperious fervour: her way of commanding her to
roll the ball along the slide. Anneliese propelled it to ascend the slope with all ten fingers. It tumbled with a bump
before a nail of Isabel’s could even poke it. But Isabel would not relent. With Anneliese’s every try her glare grew
meaner – simultaneously more demeaning. Four minutes later she was staring at her sister to denounce her as a
traitor. Her glance would have suggested she was looking at a person who had chosen to support the Axis powers
there in Switzerland.
Now at forty-eight years old they played a new game. The rules, ethics and score were the same. Anneliese felt like
the littler twin. Isabel was sure she was inferior. No victory was ever gained but both of them infallibly assumed
the other won.
Isabel finished her ice cream. Crossing over to her purple music stand, she saw along its spine the strokes and
dashes of a scribbled scarlet acronym: ‘I.v.d.H; C.H.S.’ She had no clue what could have urged her, aged eleven
at the time of writing, to interpolate a semi-colon between two sets of initials. It was preposterous.
Quickly she returned to sit before her sister. Isabel’s intentions were deliberately opaque; she simply didn’t know
that Anneliese’s bore a hue of the same shade. Her eyes met fixedly with the clock’s face.
‘Is it safe to cross the date off now?’
Anneliese took her own turn to read the time.
‘Ten thirty-seven.’
‘That’s an hour to go.’
‘Well, it’s over...’
The felt-tip pen was wandering already in her clammy clasp. Isabel drew a cross through the ‘2’ and shrugged
girlishly.
‘The main part is over.’
There was something excessively timid about her; her voice was too soft. And after striking through the date she
loosed a sigh so long and swirled it mirrored wispy smoke departing a volcano.
Isabel threw a half-smile at her sister. Yet her stock of weaponry appeared to be depleted. She couldn’t make the
effort and the smile was faint. Her mouth’s shape quickly collapsed into an uncurved line.
Then she smirked on purpose – gently, not mockingly – with no ill will. She hadn’t exercised ill will for a long
time now. In Anneliese’s eyes it had been far too long for Isabel.
‘Liesa...’ She exhaled heavily through her nostrils. ‘You’re unimpressed with me.’
But it was one of the few times that Isabel was incorrect in that assumption. Anneliese’s voice became breathy.
‘No. No, Isabel...’ She laid her hands down on her lap. Perhaps it would have stopped them from unwanted
gesturing. ‘You’re acting... your behaviour is guided by a smartness, resolution, cleverness... so many features that
I didn’t know you – I mean, I...’ She itched behind her ear. ‘I wouldn’t have expected so much.’
Isabel faintly half-smiled once more – feebly again.
‘That’s funny.’ She leant her hands on the edge of the table. ‘See, I worry for you, Liesa, ‘cause I assumed you
would have – I thought... I’m not speaking of accomplishment. I just meant... I had hoped that you’d be safe.’
There came the rebuttal:
‘I’m not in physical danger, superficially it seems to be that way, but—’
‘No, I meant... I just meant, professionally, erm...’ She parted her lips noisily in nervousness. ‘I imagined you in
the kind of situation that would seem impressive on paper. I didn’t expect you to be listed in the phone book
with the same...’ Isabel shut her eyes tightly. ‘No, that was very horrible of me.’
Anneliese almost laughed.
‘It’s very understandable.’ She crossed her legs the other way. ‘Did he say something to you tonight – after the...’
‘No.’ Isabel shook her head. She picked up her felt-tip pen and started playing with it. ‘I know it wasn't the best
tactic but... he knows all of my routes. He’s not going to...’ Palpable fondness even percolated her description. She
almost snickered from endearment. ‘He isn’t going to be surprised.’
‘So you have... a sign of consent?’
‘Well, yes.’ The felt-tip pen tumbled onto the table.
The blue bowl in the corner of the room jogged her attention.
‘Goodness.’ Isabel effused as she stormed over to the bowl. ‘Look how many sweets I put out, and the girls didn’t
want them.’
Back at the table she began picking them out and unwrapped one.
‘Well...’ Anneliese had been hesitant to admit it all evening. ‘Isabel... the entire upstairs was locked.’
‘That’s impossible – I wanted all the rooms to be available.’
‘You didn’t unlock them, Isabel. At least – you didn’t tell the caretaker to...’ She folded her arms. ‘They were
locked, Isabel – that’s why everyone congregated downstairs.’
Isabel’s eyes appeared struck by hypnosis. Her voice emerged in a whisper.
‘How did I? I could have sworn’ – she used the expression of her fingers to help herself out – ‘the—’
Something was off. Anneliese didn’t want to remark it, she didn’t want to vocalise her view. Her sister was too
jittery for that. But it was tangible.
She didn’t realise Isabel possessed a slender feeling of superiority. She didn’t realise Isabel had the sensation
she was stable; that her sister had cascaded into some obscured abyss, that Isabel desired most of all to yank her
sister out of it and didn’t know how to enforce such an extraction. Maybe the lighting in the room made Anneliese
appear red-faced, but such was Isabel’s impression.
‘I check the papers every day.’
Anneliese was somewhat stunned.
‘For what?’
‘In case there’s an announcement of the pregnancy. Penelope’s pregnancy.’
Immediately Anneliese shifted in her chair. The tension simmered in her eyes. To Isabel they looked forlorn.
They looked as they had once done in their infancy when Anneliese had burned her finger on the candle and
extended sobs along Aunt Liesel’s shoulder.
‘Isabel, that is irrelevant to both of us.’
‘It’s not.’
‘Isabel... that’s...’
‘Am I prodding too much?’
‘Even I don’t prod that far, and I’m the one who... yet it’s not my situation, Isabel.’ ‘But he—’
‘No.’
‘I can’t just forsake his existence, Liesa. The summer of ‘65 you told me—’
‘I don’t want to dwell on it. Verbally or otherwise.’
‘No.’ Isabel darted a sarcastic look at her. ‘You reserve all that for conversations with Susanna.’
Anneliese slouched back in her chair.
‘Yes. But you can’t—’
‘I figured...’ Isabel picked up another sweet and unwrapped. ‘What’s wrong with your appetite?’
‘Mine?’ Anneliese gasped.
‘You haven’t taken any chocolate.’
Anneliese now had to take a chocolate to sustain an adamant impression of apparent normalcy.
‘So I was... trying to realise... what...’ Isabel was struggling to unwrap her golden ball. ‘What they had in
common.’
‘Who?’
‘Mine. Yours.’
Anneliese shook her head in embarrassment.
‘I’d really rather not—’
If Anneliese insisted on abstaining from discussing men she would obliterate the possibility of any conversation
with her sister. If she emphatically withheld her feelings when it came to her affairs their whole exchange would
be unequal. She was trapped.
‘You know...’ Isabel pointed out. ‘They’re both killers, in some way.’
She was trying to be amusing. Anneliese only appeared shellshocked.
‘OK, OK.’ Isabel nodded. Her use of the two letters bothered Anneliese, together with other Americanisms her
sister had picked up. ‘Actually...’ Isabel cleared her throat. ‘I meant to ask, during the reception – what does
Susanna think of my predicament?’
If only Anneliese had grasped Susanna’s limitless capacity for lying. The latter’s view of Isabel’s ‘predicament’
was certainly among the numerous conceptions the psychiatrist had welded in her mind. But she cared not to
divulge it – for that matter, even to herself.
‘She has nothing against it.’ was the phrase she flung off casually. Isabel almost snorted.
‘Liesa.’ ‘What?’
‘The credence in your words...’ She sighed. ‘I was asking, because... I know what she has in her head.’
‘You couldn’t possibly divine what—’
‘I meant to say – she would know.’
‘About what?’
Isabel tossed a sweet to the side.
‘Paralysis.’
Anneliese despised these foul intrusions – even more so when they obviously derived from such uneducated
guesses.
‘She doesn’t make the correlation, Isabel.’ ‘He isn’t anything like her.’
‘I know.’ Anneliese confirmed. ‘But you can talk to me about it. I don’t want you to imagine that I missed your life.’
Isabel paused. When she opened her mouth she spoke wispily.
‘Liesa...’ She grabbed hold of a sweet immediately to play with it as if it were a gadget. ‘You were aware of the
synopsis of my life; I wasn’t even aware of the outline of yours. So... so, now that this is where I am, and you’re
not here... we’ll just have to speak more regularly.’
Anneliese blinked. That was something that she had inherited from Susanna, albeit unintentionally. She looked
at the clock.
‘Oh...’ Quickly she scratched her neck. ‘My train leaves in forty minutes.’
‘I know.’
Anneliese stood up. Gradually Isabel walked over to her.
‘You should really come more often, Liesa. I mean... it’s so sunny here.’ She stroked her left arm with her right
and sighed melodically. ‘And I miss you.’
Anneliese understood this to be a bad sign. Had her sister genuinely been exulting, if the spring in her heart
couldn’t have resisted leaping, if she’d been engulfed by that extent of ecstasy it never would have been
externalised in such a way. Isabel would have forgotten the words, ‘I miss you’. She would have replaced them
with a future tense; twisted the phrase into a hypothetical addendum: ‘You know how much I’ll miss you!’
They hugged.
‘I’ll wait until the taxi comes.’ insisted Isabel.
They stood outside in pitch black darkness. The taller one barely discerned her sister’s silhouette.
‘We’re going to keep each other more abreast of everything that happens, Liesa; be more obedient in this way.
Set up a regime. And call me... er... I’ll still be at home at seven. Call me then.’
A few minutes later they parted, squeezing each other warmly.
|
Both of them already knew the truth. If Isabel called every day her news would be the distribution of a reportage: a linear account of what her girls had done. His name would rarely pop up in the conversation. And Isabel had no doubt that her sister would be reticent to unstitch sentiments she kept sewn-up with fastened knots. At the same time they wouldn’t settle for pretence and falsehood from each other. Instead they would glean substance from each other’s intonations. These would be the only packages they sent that properly conveyed their inner states. After a journey that encumbered Anneliese with five stops, seven periods of waiting and the missiles of a bristling cold, she was at home at half past six. Thirty minutes later she dialled Isabel’s number. Nobody picked up the telephone.  |
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