Title: Charades

Author: Annamarie Jagose

In: Sport 16: Autumn 1996

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 1996, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Prose Literature

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Sport 16: Autumn 1996

Annamarie Jagose — Charades

page 35

Annamarie Jagose

Charades

I could not be fonder of Frannie but when she is around I don’t feel safe. I feel like an ordinary person endangered, like the President’s bodyguard, or the king’s official taster, the royal meal curdling on my tongue even as my pupils dilate, rolling upward in my skull, onlookers turning their faces from my bluish countenance and my last acidic breath. I never know what she will do or say next. I suffer her faux pas as if they were mine. After one of her unexpected dinner party sallies, I will look around the ring of guests for that sideways smirk, that slight jerk of the shoulder betraying a secret leg pressed pointedly against another under cover of the table, which I myself might have been doing had Frannie not been my sister, my Achilles’ heel.

After one incident which to this day Frannie calls political but just looked like bad manners at the time, we have tended to invite her for dinner by herself. Or rather, given that the three of us do things together often enough, we ask her to bring someone with her. The first time I tried this, it came out sounding awkward.

‘Come over for dinner on Saturday night, Frannie,’ I said one time, as we were finishing a phone call. ‘Bring a friend.’ I sounded like a sorority girl or our mother, someone for whom a friend vibrated in a polite but unmistakably erotic key. If Frannie noticed, she said nothing and turned up the next Saturday with a young man called Phil or Bill, I can’t remember now, who sat silently through the meal, nodding his head thoughtfully as he chewed, as if he had something weighty to say after every mouthful, but finding himself with an empty mouth each time could think of nothing better than to fill it. Mitch became very avuncular, smiling too much and slapping his palms down on the table on either side of his plate, trying, as he said later, to draw him out. But Phil—or Bill—was not to be drawn. He sat nodding and chewing as Frannie related story after story in which he starred, in which he was funny or pithy or devastating. He seemed as unfamiliar with these stories as Mitch and I were, nodding his head in deference to such a character.

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Later, as we were washing up, Mitch said, ‘Do you think that’s her boyfriend?’ I had assumed it was. Frannie was not at all secretive about her life—it was so different from mine that I want to call it her lifestyle —but her stories were held together with such criss-crossings of proper names, the houses she lived in always had such fluid populations, that it was hard to determine quite what the actual relations were.

‘I suppose so.’ I made the kind of jutting lower lip and raised eyebrows that go with shrugged shoulders to suggest that it might as easily not be the case.

Mitch chewed air and nodded in a bucolic impersonation of our dinner guest.

But the next time there was another man, something of the same type, in a dark turtleneck sweater, hair pulled back in a damp ponytail as if he had just been scrubbed up for the evening. And the next, a Japanese exchange student who had overstayed his visa, was growing out his fringe and practising new expressions like catch you later and the whole catastrophe. Sometimes Frannie brought along women with old-fashioned
flowery names. There was an Iris, a Hyacinth, a Violet.

‘Hyacinth,’ I said, wondering if Frannie could be playing some private game, having brought along three blooms in as many months. ‘That’s a nice name.’ I was appalled to hear how old I could sound with Frannie and her friends.

‘It’s not my own, given name,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I used to be Helen but I think everyone should name themselves.’

One night, Frannie arrived with two friends, a young woman called Rose who was a theatre director and a man in so much black—black shirt and jeans, black socks, black sunglasses—that I imagined he was one of those invisible men that moves props against a black backdrop between scenes. Frannie told me later that Neil was an artistic consultant which left me unsure as to what he actually did. Rose was exactly as I thought a director should be: no make-up, the kind of prescription frame glasses you used to get teased for wearing at school, broad hands with prominent veins and an economic set of gestures which could signal variations on a theme with the raising of a finger, the half-turn of a shoulder: amusement, comic horror, pretended amusement. I half-expected her to page 37 have a megaphone hanging on a cord from her belt but I think that’s only in the movies. Beside her, I felt frowsy and suburban, too successful a method actor.

Rose was taken with Lulu. She had an easy way with her I liked. Most people on meeting Lulu for the first time seem stretched by that encounter, stained in ways that are hard to prevent or alleviate. I was no different myself that first time in the chimpanzee laboratory, slipping on leather-palmed gloves before handing her into her cage although the technician said at the time that she would be happier in my lap. There was something impossibly touching about her three-week-old ugliness, her protruding belly and wasted arms and legs with their shock of static hair, that made me struggle after the scientific even as I saw how close to brutality it ran. As I looked into that as yet unnamed face, there was a kind of maternal ache, not where you might expect it at the breast or even the womb but running across my gums like an allergic reaction, which made me glad that I had marked myself out with the accoutrements of research, of experimentation, the closely-woven cage, the animal-handling gloves.

Rose seemed unaffected by any of the anxieties that commonly grip those meeting Lulu. While Neil grinned with a ceaseless foolishness, she looked at Lulu with careful interest, directing remarks her way without affectation. She did not presume a friendship with Lulu as I have seen some do but nor did she conceal her pleasure at their meeting. She had the contained satisfaction of one who has secured a difficult introduction. Neil was talking a great deal, one nervous eye on Lulu, or perhaps
he was a natural talker, I couldn’t tell. He was telling us about a play that Rose was directing at the moment which was soon to open at one of the city’s premier alternative theatre venues. I didn’t recognise the name of the theatre but Frannie told me about it as we were clearing the plates over the sink. The phrase ‘premier theatre venue’ is hers. She surprises me, often. Hers doesn’t look the mouth for specialist vocabulary.

I can’t remember now the name of the play but it had a kind of murder mystery title and somehow brought to mind a clock, like ‘Once Before Midnight’ or ‘The Third Stroke of Death’. Neil explained that the whole purpose of the play was to make people think they were going to see a murder mystery when, in fact, the play was something else altogether. All page 38 the publicity about the play emphasised the cunningness of the play’s plot, urging audiences to pit their skills against those of the sleuth, Detective Hunningwell. Citations of fake reviews from non-existent magazines and newspapers compared the playwright to Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe. The programme listed actors and characters who never appeared in the play, among them a couple of policemen, an old woman and even Detective Hunningwell. Neil never stopped grinning: his lips were taken up in a smile even while he was talking. It was as if he were playing some joke on us which he knew we would guess before he finished. Lulu had taken Rose’s hand in her own and Rose let it lie there, not pulling back, not manipulating the clasp into something more ambititious, as comfortably as if it were her own hand she were holding. Neil’s grin could not get any wider, it was pegged out like the fly of a tent, but he barely took his eyes off Lulu’s hairy arm in Rose’s lap.

‘So what’s the point of it?’ Mitch had a fall guy’s polite lack of interest but Neil attributed to him a quite genuine curiosity.

‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘Uh-huh. So? What’s the point of it?’ With this last question, he raised his eyes from Rose’s lap for a moment in order to catch her attention. He seemed prepared, having done all the hard work, to defer to her now as if she were a visiting dignitary who might perform the last ritual gesture, the cutting of a red silk ribbon or the smoothing of the final trowel of cement. Rose waved her free hand as one waves away a fly. Neil’s grin wavered for a moment. He waved his own hand as Rose had done, a couple of tentative movements back and forth, then his arm gesticulated more expansively.

‘The point, the point is this. After some fifteen minutes of scripted play, the whole thing starts to come apart at the seams. Maybe one of the cast acts as if he has flubbed his lines, says again something he has already said. The person he is playing against misses a beat, rallies, covers for him but it is too much. The first man exits hastily and the remaining actor launches into some pointless soliloquy: you can see it all over her face, the show must go on.’ Neil arranges his own face in just such a resolute expression but the effect is spoiled by his grin which remains unchanged. ‘Someone else, inexplicably dressed in tennis whites as if for a later scene, enters and the two go back and forth for a while, repeating themselves page 39 hideously. The audience who were at first sympathetic, their hearts going out to the poor girl who has been abandoned centre-stage, even thrilled by her discomfort which they imagine will be temporary, become impatient. There is such a thing as professionalism, after all: they have paid for their tickets.’ Neil spreads his hands in the air, palms upward, remarking in pantomime on the audience’s peculiar double bind. His face hangs white against the black of his clothes like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show.

‘Or maybe,’ he continues, ‘maybe it is a different scenario. What if the play is going splendidly but at the fifteen-minute mark, there is some noise off-stage, some scuffling or something heavy falling? An actor enters but he seems distracted and delivers his lines without conviction. Perhaps there is a scream, a billow of smoke even, perhaps this actor approaches the footlights and addresses the audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a small fire in the ladies’ dressing-room but it is nearly under control now. You are almost certainly in no danger.” Or maybe it is nothing so logical. Maybe the actors begin to punctuate their dialogue with unknown words, then phrases, until their whole speech is in some weird gibberish which no one can understand but which seems, to them at least, impelling.’

‘And what is the point of that?’ Mitch has a dogged but patient tone. It is as if he is teaching Neil something. He looks as I imagine he looks when taking a tutorial, drawing from his students things they didn’t know they knew. Neil is too excited to be careful.

‘Well, how much will they take?’ He points across at the wall between us and the kitchen as if that were where the audience was, row after row of half-lit heads and shoulders, a full house. ‘Half an hour? An hour? Will they object? Imagine someone standing up and saying what everyone else is doubtless thinking: “My wife and I paid good money for these seats. Pull yourselves together.” This seems to amuse Neil. He says again, ‘Pull yourselves together,’ shaking his head while he laughs silently. ‘Will they begin to talk among themselves? Or, slowly, in the groups in which they arrived, take their leave?’

Frannie, who has been leafing through a book as if she had heard all this before, asks, ‘What usually happens?’

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‘We’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘So how long will you keep it up?’

‘Until we can’t go on.’

Neil throws himself back in his chair with some satisfaction. He looks again to Rose’s face which is still bent over Lulu’s arm, crooked dark in her lap. I am even less certain now about their project but Neil, who seemed to be made almost entirely of words, has stopped talking.

‘I’m still not sure,’ says Mitch. He frowns but just a little to show how lightly his not knowing rests on him. ‘You are trying to teach the audience something. Is it an exercise in group dynamics?’

‘It is not an exercise,’ says Rose. She remains bent over Lulu’s arm. Lulu has fallen asleep beside her although she has not loosened her grip. ‘It’s a reality thing. The theatre is a place of artifice.’ Rose speaks in small grabs as if she were being interviewed for television. ‘We are like a drama school. We train audiences not actors. What might it take to break the fantasy of fantasy?’ Mitch has lost interest in this conversation. He comes across the room and removes Lulu’s hand from Rose’s.

‘I’ll just take her up to bed.’

Rose does not object. She lets Lulu’s hand go as if she were offering up something, a wish or a prayer. She continues to talk in those short, telegraphic sentences. ‘Lulu is real. In this world, where nothing is as it seems, Lulu is real. You can’t be fake with her. She has no time for it.’ This is how Frannie’s friends talk. I am used to it by now. Usually I would roll my eyes at Mitch but I can hear him moving around upstairs putting Lulu to bed and anyway what Rose is saying does not seem entirely foreign to me. I would not put it as she does but there is something in Lulu that I am prepared for others to call her realness.

Rose produces a joint from some inner pocket and, putting the whole thing into her mouth with only the tip remaining between her fingernails, she drags it between her lips a couple of times. I thought it was a cigarette until she did this. Neil and Frannie seem to pay her no attention but they have a new alertness like dogs before feeding time. The kind of etiquettes and rituals Frannie’s friends perform around marijuana unnerve Mitch and me. There seems always too generous a margin for error or miscalculation. For example, I am never sure if, having had a puff or page 41 two, it is necessary to continue to take your turn until everyone is finished. Can you can just pass the joint on without smoking it or is it necessary to say something to this effect, Nothing more for me thanks, that was lovely? I prefer not to have to talk about it. Frannie says that when I say ‘marijuana’ I sound like one of those governmental health films they screen in secondary schools. At first I thought it was my pronunciation that amused her but it turns out that she and her friends prefer the generic term ‘drugs’, which I can’t say in this context without sounding more foolish. I make myself say ‘joint’ but it comes without conviction. I sound like those sociolinguists in my department who study the subcultural vocabularies of surfers or biker gangs and give papers in which they talk about ‘tubing’ or ‘catching the fat’.

Mitch comes back, flushed from bending over Lulu’s crib or just awkward with the tight circle we have made in his absence. He stands in the doorway, one leg crossed against the other, a hand playing at his lip, in a mime of relaxation. When Neil passes me the joint, smoke rising in dribbles from each side of his grinning mouth, I walk it across to Mitch. I have such a sense of my passing between the three behind me still hunkered on the floor and Mitch ahead that the word peace-pipe turns buoyantly in my mind like a slice of lemon rising in the bubbles of a gin and tonic. Mitch throws an arm across my shoulder and the two of us stand side by side in the narrow reach of the doorway. He smokes too much in his eagerness to catch up, to make himself like us again. I look back as if across a distance to where the others are, Frannie and Neil looking at each other’s shoes, Rose with her head tilted up at the ceiling, no one speaks. The carpet feels spongy under my feet, almost fungal.

‘Well,’ I say, that word going nowhere but providing some cover for that moment when I shrug off Mitch’s arm and get myself to the relative stability of an armchair.

‘Shall we play emotions?’ Rose speaks as though she were finishing my sentence yet she is looking not at me, but at Frannie and Neil, the three of them sharing a quick moment of complicity. Mitch notices nothing, swaying in the doorway, the blackened butt held awkwardly between his fingernails, but I see at once how they must have discussed this possibility on the way over in the car. I can hear Frannie saying, ‘Kate and Mitch can page 42 be pretty uptight,’ as clearly as if I had been sitting alongside her in the back seat. I am not sure if uptight is a word Frannie would actually use but there would have been some way she indicated her fond tolerance of our difference from her and her friends, our laboured casualness, our bookishness. Once I overheard her saying to a friend, ‘I love Kate like a sister but that girl is so wired she twangs.’ I don’t know what the game Rose is suggesting involves but I imagine some dreadful theatrical roleplaying in which people open up to themselves and others but which will almost certainly have Mitch and me closing down like bivalves.

Indeed, Mitch looks as if he has already shut down somehow, roped himself off. He gets a dead fish look in his eye, a kind of opacity there, a translucent third eyelid such as dogs are said to have. He has pulled his hands up into his sleeves as if they were dangerous bait which could not be left lying out in the open. His fists make hidden shapes just above the empty wrists of his shirtsleeves. I love Mitch when he has been smoking, when he is like this. I have a certainty then about how I love him, not for what reason but the exact processes of my fierce affection. It is a hard thing to explain and will sound banal enough if I say that his vulnerability at these moments makes me threaten him in circumspect ways, always confident that if I have misjudged, there is enough of me to comfort and reassure him. Now, I pat the arm of my chair and he comes over like a small dog, grateful to be called, to be told, to have a claim made on him.

Frannie has gone off for scraps of paper and returns with something fished out of the rubbish bin in the kitchen, slightly damp and spattered with tea leaves. The game is a version of charades but it is always an emotion of some sort that is acted out and guessed. It doesn’t seem very interesting to me. Not that parlour games have ever been my thing but at least in charades proper there is a kind of established etiquette where you get to make the cranking action which indicates that it is a film title or open your hands, pressed palms together, when the clue is a book. As if by some unspeakable process of natural selection, the visitors form one team leaving Mitch and me as the other.

‘Think of an emotion,’ I say to Mitch. I can think of any number but, as if I were the experimental psychologist, I am interested to see what he comes up with. Mitch studies my face carefully as if he thinks I might be page 43 tricking him somehow. The others are in a huddle, writing on scraps of paper and laughing with their hands over their mouths as if even the timbre of their laughter might alert us to the nature of the word they are passing from one to another.

‘Crying,’ says Mitch.

‘That’s an action, not an emotion.’

Mitch smirks with embarrassment. His mouth is so dry I can hear the corners of his lips squeak over his teeth when he smiles.

‘Sorrow then,’ he says finally, although I had expected the less formal sadness.

‘OK, you’ve got the idea now,’ I say, ‘but we can’t use that one because the others have heard.’

‘No, no, we haven’t,’ says Neil politely.

Neil is the first actor in Frannie’s group. He has to mime resentful. He reads his clue and then wags his head appreciatively at Mitch and me, as if to make friendly acknowledgement of the fact that we have been canny enough to allude to some tendency of his. He pats his forearm with three fingers.

‘Three. Three syllables.’ Frannie is leaning forward, chin on a raised knee, while Rose manages to look even more attentive lying back on a cushion, hands clasped behind her head. Neil’s performance is so obscure that at first I forget what our clue was. He is walking back and forth between the sofa and the window, hands in his pockets, chest puffed out, looking from side to side with smugly downcast eyes.

‘Rich?’ says Frannie uncertainly, and has to be reminded that that is not an emotion. Mitch gives me a delighted elbow in the ribs, whether because someone else has made his mistake or because our clue is not being solved I couldn’t say.

‘Haughtiness. Arrogance. Egoism.’ Despite her languid pose, Rose is playing with a serious efficiency, each suggestion made without a trace of a question to it. Now Neil drops that impersonation and walks crouchingly, covetously beside the first character who continues invisibly to strut back and forth. He clenches his hands and rolls his eyes back in his head. In an elaborate but utterly bankrupt set of gestures, he casts backward glances over his shoulder, strikes at his heart with a balled fist.

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‘Malicious. Furious. Malignant.’ Neil gives an impatient shake of his head, puts a hand to his forehead in thought. This sets Frannie off on a false trail that lasts until the end of the game.

‘Thoughtful?’ she says. ‘Is that an emotion? Thinking?’ Neil turns in a desperate last performance as the clock ticks down. He runs a hand over his bare wrist, points across the room, looks again at his wrist, then makes the ritualised passes of a magician as if he were drawing something to him. Mitch and I look at each other in polite satisfaction:

‘Time,’ says Mitch, holding his cuff back from his watch in an efficient version of Neil’s last moments.

‘What was it?’ Rose addresses her question to Mitch and me as if Neil cannot be trusted with the clue at all.

‘Resentful,’ says Neil. He is still standing in the middle of the floor, one hand rubbing the back of his neck.

‘I thought you were thinking.’ Frannie is hoping for some late recognition.

‘What’s the word for that? Cogitation?’

‘Why were you scratching your wrist?’ Rose is a little fierce although she keeps her voice casual: a game is a game, after all.

‘I was showing that I didn’t have a watch,’ says Neil.

(‘But you do have a watch.’ Frannie points to Neil’s left wrist, to a gold watch with a contradictory gleam.)

‘And that I wanted that other man’s watch.’

‘That’s covetous.’ Rose is dismissive. ‘What other man?’

‘The man I was being first.’ Neil gives a few pigeon-chested steps as a reminder.

‘Oh yes.’ Rose laughs. ‘The rich man.’

My clue is rage. It is written in Frannie’s sloping script. I imagine there is some anticipated pleasure for her in seeing me enact such an uncharacteristic emotion or even in my laughable rendering of that passion in
modest, scaled down gestures and facial expressions. I tap my finger on my forearm as I had seen Neil do. Mitch is looking at me but he is not concentrating. He seems caught in some private freeze-frame, even his eyes are set, as if in jellied aspic. I can see in the hunch of his shoulders, his uncertain smile, half-unfurled, that he is suffering a more pressing page 45 awareness of himself as the centre of attention. I am reminded of some televised nature programme in which a moth or frog escapes detection through its motionless cleaving to tree bark.

Like a conductor before an orchestra, I tap my finger again. Mitch starts as if waking from a dream.

‘One. One syllable.’ Frannie, Rose and Neil are watching me closely, less like an audience than a panel of judges. Since reading the clue, I have considered my options. There is the possibility of an unadorned rage in which I shake my first and stamp my foot, perhaps even holding my breath until my face reddens and my eyes protrude. The secret here would be to let out all the stops, impressing Frannie and her friends with a bravura performance. Or there is the possibility of a more stylised display, a melodramatic, almost Biblical rage in which I pull at my hair and smite my chest. I would be more comfortable with this but I think Mitch could mistake it for grief or sorrow. Mitch and I look at each other with drugged awkwardness. I wish the others were gone and I could roll him across our mattress.

It occurs to me now that marijuana effects a certain predictable transformation, turning everything into its opposite. I see my body internally illuminated like a Space Invader screen and imagine my tissues slowly changing colour as if suffused with dye until I am altered to some critical point. I guess I am quite stoned—Frannie says wasted or smashed—because it seems to me I can hear the noise my blood makes at the point of conversion, a kind of high frequency chatter like the soundtrack of a science fiction film. When I calculate that I am wholly not myself, I make a series of meaningless gestures with all the formulaic delicacy of a Balinese temple dancer. One hand flutters at shoulder height, for instance, while the other, its thumb and index finger joined in a circle, describes an arc from my nose to my hip. Or, one elbow leading, I spin a slow circle. I am quite taken by my own performance and it is only Neil’s hunched concentration over his wristwatch that keeps me in check.

Frannie is not even trying to hide her delight. Grinning hugely, leaning into Rose, their cheeks actually touching—this distracts me momentarily, are they sleeping together?—she can’t take her eyes off me. Neither can Mitch. He is fixed on me as before. I figure a minute has passed before I slip in Lulu’s sign for angry. I point as if off-stage, eyes hard page 46 right, while under cover of this distraction, I make the more familiar sign, holding my hand open in front of my forehead and bringing it down to my chin while closing it in a fist, as if drawing a tiny roller blind. Some spark of cognition flints in Mitch like the small speck of light that gleams in the middle of an old television screen as the tube warms up. Before he can speak, two fingers of my left hand graze my lips in a diagonal slash— silent—as I turn my right palm up and push outwards—wait. I have his attention now, I feel it straining against me like a dog on a lead.

‘Fifteen seconds.’ Neil and the others are relaxed in their amusement. They are paying me less attention now than the watch. I feel like a spy with a homemade Morse code machine, transmitting a precise sense under a hubbub of unintelligible static. Sounds like, one hand cups my ear, cage, I make the sign for Lulu’s carrying cage. A finger circles, as if distractedly, the corner of my mouth before pointing at Mitch, speak.

‘Rage,’ says Mitch as I knew he would, as I was convinced he wouldn’t. We are so smug we can hardly look at each other. Mitch examines the back of his hand, his nails, as if his next clue were modesty. The others are too surprised to pretend otherwise. I want to say the watch slips from Neil’s fingers but to be fair I think he simply lays it aside.

‘You only had six seconds to go.’ Frannie’s pleasure in our success is as heartfelt as that she would have taken in our defeat. Later, when they were leaving, Rose shook my hand intently, as if we were men, saying with undeniable though ambiguous emphasis, ‘Thank you, it was most interesting.’

‘Any friend of Frannie’s is a friend of ours,’ said Mitch, closing the door on that lie so we could laugh at last, actually holding our sides as I have often seen described but never before found necessary.

Frannie never brought the same person twice to our place which made me worry that coming to our house for dinner was some treat or joke among her circle of friends, something you would do once, like paragliding or spending the day at a nudist beach. Mitch and I grumbled to each other when they were gone—I think everyone should name themselves, said Mitch in the unblinking way of Hyacinth—but we made no secret of the fact that we enjoyed this new arrangement, liked our Saturday night dinners where talk was more likely to turn to companion planting or page 47 chakra alignment than university budgets. One night a friend of Frannie’s had described for us a drugged hallucination in which she had spoken with Mrs Bridges, the bluff cook in the British television programme Upstairs, Downstairs. It seemed a mild enough encounter, not quite worth hallucinating about: Mrs Bridges had been as she always was, her large, marshmallowy face under hair loosely bunned, her white apron with the wide straps that crossed at the back between the broad planes of her shoulder blades. She carried a large teapot, her thick, no-nonsense arm curled about it at an odd angle and gave soothing advice that was forgotten as soon as her own outline lost resolution and flickered out against the pattern of the bedroom wallpaper. This story was not disregarded exactly by those who sat around our table that night but there was the kind of collective head nodding that suggested Mrs Bridges’ visitations could be worn easily enough. Hyacinth allowed the barest of pauses before continuing to advise on the best method of changing one’s name. She was very sure that, when renaming yourself, you should pick a name that started with the initial you already had.

Helen. Hyacinth.’ She aspirated heavily on the h sound, before turning her palms up to the ceiling in a neat gesture which implied that some proof had been satisfactorily demonstrated.

‘Don’t you feel attached to your initial?’ I felt unmodishly attached to my whole name but didn’t let on.

‘It can’t be a sudden thing. When you think your new name has chosen you, live with it for a week or so to make sure it’s you.’ Frannie smiled at me across the table, shaking her head at Hyacinth, as if she distinguished between this weirdness and the more defensible versions with which she surrounded herself and felt quite at home.

‘Well,’ said Mitch, in bed that night. ‘What’ll your new name be?’

‘It can’t be a sudden thing.’ I rolled on top of him, feeling his ribs swing out between my knees as he laughed. A little later, I asked, ‘What’s yours?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said in the slow voice he uses for the last things said before sleep.

‘What’s Lulu’s?’

‘Lily,’ he said, as if he had worked this out some time ago.