A loud bang from the bedroom makes us jump up; it sounds like a gunshot. Micha sprints towards the bedroom door, not before shooting me a suspicious look. I rush after him, the only thought on my mind is that the room is a desperate, unventilated mess.
We both fix our eyes on the fallen shelf, and on the nearly empty water glass that is now shards on the floor. Don’t walk in barefoot, Sheila. I stare with horror at the several pairs of pants strewn about; a single frayed bra, yellowing with age, is gaping before him, covered entirely in bits of glass, as if inlaid with precious gemstones. Precious and rancid.
“How did this happen?” he asks.
“I’d like to know that myself,” I reply, recalling a similar instance in my old apartment. I had just moved in with Maor when the shelf collapsed with a loud thud in the middle of the night; I woke up screaming. Maybe these shelves are equipped with sensors alerting you to dubious young men.
“Looks like the suspension mechanism is shoddy,” he says, while examining the shelf up close, his words lingering in the air. Neither of us brings up Naama again, but she’s hanging between us, with the rope she tied around her neck, black, they said.
I study him as he fixes the shelf back onto the wall. There’s something confidence-instilling in a man labouring for you with his hands; in his case, large, squarish hands, while his movements are gentle, almost feminine, but there’s nothing feminine about a man putting up shelves. He gathers up the bits of glass while I stand by the door, staring at him like an idiot.
“Say, what did Dina look like?” I can’t help myself.
“You were her friend,” he replies without meeting my eye.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, well, I was hoping I was wrong,” he says drily. That doesn’t stop me.
“I have to know, when they carved the word ‘mother’ into her forehead, was there a lot of blood?” I picture Dina, her big dark eyes gazing blindly ahead, streams of blood trickling down from the open wound. Becoming a mother always hurts.
“You’re crazy.”
“So, was there a lot of bleeding?”
“Not even a little, actually,” he replies, still not looking at me.
“Huh. That means they carved it post-mortem,” I say, enlisting one of my many facts acquired through binge-watching hospital shows. “I guess that’s something.”
But why on her forehead, why? The area reserved for the mark of Cain; since when is motherhood a curse? Motherhood has always been synonymous with valour and virtue, hasn’t it? At least in this neck of the woods. And all this time I’m creeping up behind him, until finally I’m close enough to kick the stinky yellowing bra under the bed and make it disappear.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly the moment he decides to turn around.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you trying to hide there?” And he reaches out and yanks the bra out from under the bed. It stretches, and when he lets go, splinters of glass ricochet onto his hand, grazing his fingers. We both gape at the fine droplets of blood. He takes the filthy bra, shakes it and wraps it around his hand, God help me.
“The reason Dina didn’t bleed is because they didn’t carve the word ‘mother’ on her forehead, they just wrote it,” he says quietly.
“Wrote?” I ask, still focused on his hand swathed in my bra like a stuffed cabbage roll. “You mean with a pen?”
“No.”
“Marker?”
“No.”
“Bodily discharge?”
“Don’t be a pervert.”
You ain’t seen nothing yet, my friend, I think to myself and say, “I’m the pervert? What about the person who did that to her?”
He remains silent.
“Paintbrush?”
“No.”
“Chalk? Eyeliner?”
“Getting warmer,” he replies.
“So it has to do with make-up?”
“Hot, hot, boiling,” he says in a tone that brings to mind the child he once was, which, I remind myself, wasn’t that long ago.
“Maybe lipstick?” I ask.
“Good job, Detective,” he says. “They wrote it in lipstick.”
I’m still processing that “detective,” when it dawns on me that there’s only one colour possible. “Did it happen to be red lipstick?”
“You’re getting better at this,” he says, waving his bandaged hand. “Blood-red.”
I close my eyes. “Interesting,” I remark, “Dina was against using lipstick, using any make-up really.”
Like everything else with Dina, this too was a matter of principle. She had no qualms about buying the finest, most expensive clothes, or grooming that lush dark hair of hers, but she was adamantly against any kind of make-up. Don’t paint on masks, my sisters, but she never had to trick young men about her reproductive viability, did she? She never had to hide her fading youth with layers of make-up. What you see is what you get.
“We’re certainly aware of all that,” he says, “and we have a few interesting leads.” Almost despite himself, his gaze is drawn to my make-up set, particularly to my collection of lipsticks standing to attention like a row of soldiers. I spare him the need to ask.
“Blood-red isn’t my colour, Mister Police Officer.” I smile at him and almost – just almost – spew out the rest of the sentence, “but I happen to know whose colour it is.”
8
JUST LIKE BACK THEN, in college, all eyes are on Ronit.
Some linger by our table, trying to figure out where they recognize her from, and there’s a weirdo standing at a distance, taking a photo on his mobile phone. At least he’s not coming over to our table to ask for a selfie.
Obviously, she’s enjoying every moment of this, Ronit, despite her feeble attempts to pretend she isn’t. She was never good at pretending, never really tried, which is exactly why you hated her. I feel the familiar acid crawling up my oesophagus and quickly bury my face in the menu, only then noticing that it’s the child’s menu. SpongeBob SquarePants is blowing me a puckered kiss.
Ronit smiles at me with those lush lips of hers, painted with the same old red lipstick down to the
