A Twist Of Light

by Joyce Mandeville

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

When Lizzy is only twelve, she and her older sister Ellie discover their mother lying dead in a pool of vomit. Behaving with the practical aplomb that only young girls possess, they bury her body and drive out of town.

But Lizzy hadn't counted on Ellie's boyfriend coming along for the ride. Steve is a convicted juvenile criminal and, more importantly for Lizzy, his colours are bad. For as long as she can remember, Lizzy had seen bands of colour around people. Some were good, some not so; Steve's colours were almost black. And, as Lizzy predicts, the journey does not lead to happiness . . .

Now a mother herself, Lizzy writes of her past to her own daughter, patching together her curious upbringing afresh: a brave and heart-warming process, revealing the secrets and mysteries at the core of her life.

A stirring, ultimately uplifting novel of love, loyalty and survival.

Release date: April 2, 1998

Publisher: Time Warner Paperbacks

Print pages: 336

Sample

The new mother moved the sacking away from the tiny red face, marvelling at the perfect mouth and the arc of dark eyebrows
of the child she cradled. ‘Did you ever see anything so pretty?’ She spoke to no one in particular, but addressed her question
to the group of women huddled inside the hut. Fashioned from cardboard and corrugated iron, the hut wasn’t much bigger than
the flatbed of the truck that had brought her here.


‘Nothing’s quite as pretty as a healthy baby.’ The flat vowels marked the midwife’s origins in Oklahoma as surely as her faded
sunbonnet and her residence in the labour camp. Set up less than two months ago, it already bulged with over five hundred
people who’d been blown out of their homes along with rich topsoil. Ida leaned over the midwife’s shoulder as she tried to
get a better look in the dim lamplight.


‘My baby.’ The girl’s voice was as scratched as an old gramophone record. Harsh from a day and night of screaming and praying
and yelling for Hoyt to come and find her. Thinking maybe he would finally be coming back to claim her and his child. If the
stories were true the work was out there. California was a place a man could find a job if he just knew where to look.


‘Ida, move back. I can’t see if you keep blocking the light with your big butt.’ Teeth gone, the midwife’s nose almost met
her chin as she grimaced at the other woman. She’d tired of Ida’s hanging around like a vulture hours ago. ‘Should have slowed
down some by now.’ She kneaded the palm of her hand into the spongy white belly of the girl, hoping to make the weary organ
contract and stop bleeding. ‘Somebody see if there’s any ice around here.’


‘Nearest ice would be down to the store. Should we send for some?’ Ida watched the old woman shove more sacking under the
girl. In the flickering light the blood seemed to spread like slick, black oil.


‘Wont be time and probably wouldn’t change things.’ She moved her attention to the girl’s face and lifted one of the half-lowered
lids with a blood-streaked finger. ‘See how her pupil is getting cloudy? This child is going to Jesus.’


Jesus came quickly, sweeping into the tent and carrying the bloodied girl with him to his Pentecostal heaven. The newborn
was handed over to Ida, whose baby had been stillborn a week before. Gratefully she put the tiny mouth to her milk-engorged
breast, relieved to feel the pressure abate as the infant suckled. She’d named her little blue boy Lee, after Robert E., before
letting him be buried in the rich California dirt. ‘Lorilee. I’ll call you Lorilee so’s I don’t forget my real child.’ She
watched her other breast, now working as it should, as it pumped milk across Lorilee’s foot.


Cotherstone, West Sussex, January 22nd

Dearest Mary,


Wonderful to talk to you yesterday, darling. I’m going to do the shop later today and I will be sure to buy your Marmite (gag).
One thing that will always set me apart from the rest of you is my loathing of that glop. I rue the day your grandmother handed
you your first piece of Marmite-slathered toast.


It sounds as though you’re having a wonderful time. In spite of it being my home state, I’m afraid I never saw much of California.
The aunts weren’t great travellers and I never even saw San Francisco or Los Angeles until I was in my late teens. By the
time you return in July you will be our resident expert on things ‘Golden Stateish’.


As to your thoughts on taking a sentimental journey to my hometown, I’m really pretty neutral. There is nothing much to see
and I’m afraid you’d be disappointed. My clan didn’t leave much of a dent on the landscape. We simply passed through. Apart
from that, Clifford doesn’t have a thing to recommend itself. Local wags used to refer to it as the ‘armpit of the West’.


One of the reasons (albeit minor) I married your father (instead of Prince Charles or Paul McCartney) is all the bits that
surrounded him, all those things which give him roots. Things like the trunks at your gran’s place, his going to the same
school as his grandfather, his uncle’s watch, even this house. I found it all terribly exotic and at the same time wonderfully
reassuring. Rock solid, your father.


I know I’ve always been rather vague about my early days. To me they’ve become the junk at the bottom of the wardrobe. I think of those times as the things you aren’t going to throw away,
but you know you’ll never use or even look at again. Now, having written that, I find myself taking a new look. I must tell
you that some terrible things happened, but there were some wonderful things as well. Memory is a funny thing, it’s so hard
to know how much it can be trusted.


I’d better close now and get my day started. Daddy and Chaz send their love. Let me sift through my past a little more before
I dish it up. I want to make sure I’ve truly separated fact from fiction.


Love and God bless

Mummy

PS See if you can find a few of those sachets of dried sourdough starters to send me. After all these years, I still maintain
it’s the best bread in the whole wide world. XXXOOO

Liz took the letter from her printer and reread it before putting the pages in an envelope. She glanced at her watch and ran
down the stairs to put the letter in the slot before the postman was due. She knew she’d committed herself now and didn’t
want to give herself the out of not sending the letter.


‘“Rather vague” – my shiny blue bottom! I’ve been “rather vague”.’ The small black dog wagged his tail enthusiastically at
her words. He ran to the front hall and grabbed a leather lead from a hook by the door.


‘What are you trying to tell me, Patch?’ He circled the hall with the lead in his mouth. ‘OK, we’ll go for a walk. Maybe I’ll
be able to figure out how to make my mother sound like someone our girl wouldn’t mind having for a grandmother.’ She shrugged
into her duffel coat and grabbed his lead. ‘Come on, Patch.’


While the dog snuffled at the backside of an elderly poodle, Liz watched the water crashing against the shingle. The winds
were high and a few flakes of snow scuttled through the cold air. She lifted her chin and squinted, trying to see France as
she had the first time she’d stood on the beach. Of course France remained invisible, but the thought of that country always
reminded her of her mother. Until she was almost thirty her mother told her daughters that she intended to die in Paris. Liz
thought the woman came across this idea about the same time she fashioned herself from Lorilee Shook into Laura Sinclair.
She had often wondered if the worst of the drinking had started after her mother turned thirty because by then she knew she’d
end up dying less than ten miles from where she’d been born.


Clifford, California, July 1962

‘See if she’s breathing, Lizzy. I don’t want to have to touch her.’ Ellie turned her face away and ran her hands through her
dark hair.


‘I know she’s dead, Ellie. Her colours are all gone.’ The girl wrapped her thin arms across her chest and rocked slightly.
She could feel the tears inside her brain, but didn’t want them to come out, not yet. She smelled vomit and recognized the
scent of the heavy fortified wine her mother loved. A sugar wasp, having already found its way through the torn window screen,
sat on the collar of the body’s stained bathrobe.


‘I told you not to talk about that. Makes you sound even crazier than you are.’ The girl put her hand to her mouth and made a retching sound. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’


‘It’s not crazy and I know what I see.’ Ever since Lizzy could remember she’d seen bands of colours bobbing and waving around
people. Her mother was the only one who hadn’t thought it was strange.


‘What do you think we should do?’

‘I guess we’d better go down the road and call somebody.’ Months before, their mother had decided her limited funds were better
spent on bottles of wine than telephone bills. There was a telephone booth in front of the corner store, about a quarter of
a mile away. Typical of their mother, she’d decided they didn’t need a phone about the same time she decided she didn’t need
to drive any more.


‘I don’t know who to call.’ Shorter than her younger sister, Ellie’s full figure and heavy eye make-up made her look like
a tired twenty-year-old who’d just spent three days on a Greyhound bus. Fourteen years old, she had been the de facto head of the family for over six months. Their mother hadn’t left the house since New Year’s Day. ‘Help me think of something,
Lizzy. You’re the one who’s supposed to be the genius in the family.’


‘Near genius.’ Lizzy liked to be specific. She’d spent her twelve years seeing what happened when people weren’t specific.
She felt most of her mother’s problems stemmed from lack of specificity. Her mother had always reminded her of the fuzzy stuff
that flew out of milkweed pods. Never clear about what she really wanted or needed, she’d seemed content to let herself and
her daughters be blown around by her changing circumstances and love of wine.


Lizzy had allowed her older sister to take over most of her mother’s job, but they all knew Lizzy was better at making decisions,
as well as possessing a flair for long-term planning. Their mother didn’t seem to mind the shift in responsibility and Ellie
had enjoyed the illusion of power and status. Lizzy thought of it as the brains and brawn solution to their problems.


‘Near genius or near moron, more like it. You’ve got to help me figure something out. I don’t know what to do.’ The black
eyeliner was already beginning to move down her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what to do.’


It looked as though Laura Sinclair had tried to get a glass of water in the bathroom to top off the three bottles of Thunderbird
wine she had enjoyed for brunch. (Normally she would have had a bottle for breakfast and another bottle for lunch. Perhaps
she’d been celebrating, or feeling especially flush since the cheque from the Welfare Department had arrived the day before.)
Things had apparently gone wrong, as she had fallen on her back and choked on her own vomit.


‘Let’s cover her face. I don’t think she would want us to look at her.’ Lizzy knew she didn’t want to look at that face any
more. She could remember when her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. She made Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy
look like ugly old bags of bones. She knew this wasn’t a nice thing to think about the First Lady, but their mother had been
the most beautiful thing ever. The air around her seemed to sparkle with bright shafts of colour. It had only been in the
last two or three years that all the wine and confusion had caught up with the beauty, bloating and smudging those fine features.
Her bright, shimmering colours had faded to the dullness of a Polaroid snapshot left too long in the sun. Lizzy grabbed a
ragged pink towel from the hook above the bathtub and placed it over her mother’s face, careful not to touch her.


‘This is your idea of a solution, cover her face? Why don’t I feel this has helped?’

‘Give me a break, Ellie. I’m thinking as fast as I can! You can’t spring something like this on an impressionable child.’
Lizzy needed to use the toilet. She’d noticed before that you needed to go the most when it was the least convenient.


She scratched the bridge of her nose, then slowly peeled a piece of sunburned skin off. She hated summers. Forced away from
school for almost three months, Lizzy spent as much time as she could down at the river. Not only was it cooler than the little house, but down there she could pretend things were
the way she knew they really should be. Down at the river she would spend the day swimming and writing stories about how she’d
been tricked into the wrong life.


‘Stop picking at your nose and think. Darn thing’s going to fall off if you keep doing that.’ Ellie gave her hand a light
slap.


The younger girl ignored her sister’s slap and worried another bit of skin on her nose. ‘We bury her someplace, it doesn’t
matter where, and then we leave town. If we’re all three of us gone nobody will think anything about it.’ Lizzy had been wanting
to leave town for some time. The only interesting place in the whole town was the library and even there she couldn’t see
the really good books because she was only twelve. ‘If they know she’s dead they’ll put us in different foster homes and split
us up.’ That’s the way it had happened to her friend Candy Johnson. Her dad was gone and her mother had been killed in an
accident at the cannery last fall. All three kids had gone in different directions. Nobody would take all three. ‘We’re gonna
have to take care of each other, El.’ Lizzy glanced at her sister, knowing she’d have her work cut out. At fourteen, Ellie
had already acquired a taste for boys and cigarettes.


‘What do we do for money? We need to get the cheque and the commodities. What do we do about that? What happens when one of
the Welfare people wants to talk to her?’ Eleanor pointed at the body as though Lizzy wouldn’t be able to figure out which
‘her’ she was referring to.


Since Laura had been fired from the Safeway, the family had been living on the cheque and the box. Lizzy had especially enjoyed
the box stuffed with surplus commodities. She loved knowing, according to the Department of Agriculture, that the huge cans
of peanut butter, the bags of powdered milk and the fat sacks of cornmeal met virtually all of her nutritional needs. Ellie
hated it, of course. She hated being on welfare and she loathed coming home on the bus with the big box stamped ‘USDA Commodities’. Lizzy knew someday she’d be an artist or a writer and that she was going to have to be poor, at least
until she was really rich and famous. She figured she was just getting it out of the way before it mattered all that much.


‘Let me think for a minute, will you? I can’t think if you keep talking.’ Lizzy glared at her sister, but knew Ellie’s keeping
quiet wasn’t going to make much of a difference in her planning ability. She looked down at her mother, amazed at just how
empty a dead body looked.


‘Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.’ Ellie sniffed and wiped at her cheeks before smiling at her sister. ‘We’ll make
money, the way people are supposed to. The way Mom did before she was so drunk all the time. Remember what the President said?
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Well, we are going to take care of ourselves,
for ourselves and for the country.’ Lizzy watched her sister’s spine straighten as she spoke the words. By the time she’d
finished her little speech, Ellie was standing up tall and thrusting her round breasts out, as if Lizzy was a parade of soldiers
going off to war and the bumps under her blouse were the last sweet things they were going to see for a long time.


‘First thing we do, Lizzy, is get out of here. You’re right about that, we have to get away from Clifford. We have the car.
We can steal some gas from Mrs Kirby’s and get as far as Nevada. We’ll give ourselves new names and I can get a job there,
easy.’ By now Ellie seemed pretty sure they could do anything.


‘You don’t know how to drive and that car hasn’t been started in over six months.’ Her mother had parked the car at the back
of the house and tossed the keys on the kitchen table the day she lost her job at the Safeway. Somebody had found a few empty
bottles of Thunderbird wine in the ladies’ toilet. The manager didn’t have to look any further than Laura, with her hiccupping
and her inability to balance her cash drawer, to figure out who the culprit was.


‘It’s an automatic, I only have to point it. I know it works because sometimes Steve drives it.’

Steve was Ellie’s current boyfriend. He reminded Lizzy of a pimply wolf with his pinched face and gnarly teeth. He had black
half-moons under his nails and stank of car parts and Clearasil. She didn’t know how Ellie could stand those dirty hands all
over the body parts she was so proud of. They’d met at one of those dances the Lions Club held every summer to show they cared
about young people and what happened to them. Lizzy thought having a dance where girls could meet boys like Steve was a stupid
way to show public spirit and concern for American youth.


‘We still need money. We need money until we can make some.’ Lizzy glanced down as she chewed thoughtfully on a cuticle. ‘We
also have to bury Mom. We’d better do it pretty fast because it’s supposed to be over a hundred degrees today.’ She remembered
the time they’d left a package of meat in the Ford by mistake. The car still smelled like you were going by the county dump
even when you were miles away from it.


‘Right, right. OK, get something to wrap her in. Her bedspread should do the trick.’ Ellie looked at her Timex. ‘We’ll wrap
her up, but we won’t bury her until after dark.’


‘Where are we going to bury her?’ Lizzy was amazed that Ellie could plan this as though she was sorting out how to pay the
light bill. Most mornings her sister couldn’t figure out what to wear or what to eat for breakfast. Usually, if she had more
than two things to think about, she couldn’t decide whether to wind her butt or scratch her watch.


‘Same place we steal the gas – Mrs Kirby’s. There’s bound to be some soft ground around the vines where she’s been irrigating.’
Mrs Kirby lived by herself on a small farm, down the road from their house. The girls figured she was at least a thousand
years old. She only had about twenty acres of grape vines, which she tended herself with the help of one of the seasonal crews
that travelled up and down the Valley during the season. The next crew wouldn’t be needed until early September.


‘And what are we going to do for money? We still need money.’ As the family’s near genius, Lizzy wasn’t sure she could trust
Ellie’s plans. She didn’t have any ideas herself, but felt duty-bound to keep a sarcastic tone in her voice. It wouldn’t do
either of them much good to mess with Lizzy’s brains and brawn solution. Not now, not when they wouldn’t even have the Welfare
cheque or the sacks of cornmeal.


‘We can get everything we need at Mrs Kirby’s. One-stop shopping, just like the Quik-Stop. Between the money she gets from
her grapes and Social Security, I bet she’s loaded. Now shut up and get the bedspread.’ Ellie glanced in the cracked mirror
above the basin and wiped at the make-up smeared under her eyes. ‘Look at me. With all this blubbering I look like a raccoon.’


‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this, Ellie.’ Lizzy ignored the raccoon remark. Typical of her sister to go from discussing robbery
to her smudged eye make-up. Ellie’s mind wandered around like the Incredible Blob thing she’d seen at the movies once. Gulp,
spit, gulp, spit; that was the way her mind worked, when it worked. Lizzy took a deep breath, then blew it out through her
teeth. Just keeping Ellie’s mind going in a straight line was like trying to dig a ditch with a teaspoon. ‘What happened to
working for money and President Kennedy?’ She almost smiled, was actually pleased to have found some problem with her sister’s
plans. Not that she’d ever thought she could rely on Ellie’s reasoning ability. Nobody who knew Steve would give Ellie high
marks for smarts or objective thinking.


Stealing gas wasn’t so bad. It was bad, but not so bad, because all the farms had a big tank or two around the back for the
tractors and other equipment. Gas was cheap and nobody would notice or miss the few gallons a car would take. Burying Mom
wasn’t a problem either. It made a lot of sense. Funerals were really expensive and this way they could keep it private. Sort
of exclusive. Their mother would have liked the idea of something exclusive. Probably only really, really rich or famous people had private funerals.


The money was different. Money was really stealing. Money wasn’t like gas or funerals. Stealing money meant going to jail
and living in disgrace, and probably going to Hell. Especially stealing from Jolena Kirby. She was a washed-in-the-blood Baptist.
Lizzy figured she could send you to Hell just by pointing at you. Lizzy was firmly convinced about Hell because so much had
been written about it. Nobody would waste time writing about a place that was made up. There were only a few books about places
like Oz or Narnia, but millions about Hell. Lizzy imagined Hell would be like the USSR, only hotter, much hotter. It would
be awful to have your hair catching on fire and knowing you weren’t even protected by the US constitution or the FBI.


‘Fine, Elizabeth Ann Sinclair. I’ll do it all, and I will leave you here. I’ll send you postcards from Las Vegas and you can
show them to all your new friends at the foster home. I think with my training as a junior lettergirl it shouldn’t be too
hard to get a job as a dancer or something.’ Ellie folded her arms under her breasts as though she was displaying her courage.


‘But Mrs Kirby? She’s an old, old lady. What if she sees us and calls the police? She knows who we are! What if we scare her
to death?’ She could see the old woman staring at her. Right now, at three in the afternoon, she was probably sitting in front
of her Amana air-conditioner, sipping Lipton iced tea and knowing what they were planning.


‘She lives alone and, little sister, she doesn’t hear very well. She also doesn’t keep a dog, which is pretty stupid if you
ask me. As soon as we get a new house you’d better believe we are going to have a dog.’ Ellie flipped her dark hair off her
shoulder. ‘Two girls living alone will need a dog for protection.’


‘We can have a dog?’ Laura had never let them have pets. Said it was trashy to have pets all over the place. Lizzy had tried
to tell her about the Queen of England having those stubby-looking little dogs, but she didn’t seem to hear. Laura, especially during the last few months, had exhibited the ability to hear
only what she wanted to hear.


‘We can have a dog and anything else we want. We can have a house where we are the bosses. Nobody can come in who we don’t
like. We can leave all the doors inside open, and no hairy old men are going to hang around because the dog will run them
off if they even get on the sidewalk in front of our house. We’ll take care of each other better than she ever did.’


Lizzy looked down. She had tried never to think about the men. Ugly, stinking men who visited their mother and sometimes said
awful things, especially to Ellie. They always kept a chair wedged against their bedroom doorknob in case one of the hairy
men got confused in the night. They always made sure the door was wedged tight, but they never talked about why. The men were
like ghosts neither girl could quite admit to seeing. ‘I just wish we didn’t have to steal. It seems so wrong.’


‘I wish we didn’t have to either, but we do. We do it once, that’s all.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise, Liz.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die? Stick ten needles in your eye? Think about your answer, El, because I’m going to hold you
to it.’ Lizzy stared into her sister’s eyes to gauge whether or not she was telling the truth. She decided she couldn’t tell
a thing by looking in her eyes so she moved her focus just above Ellie’s head, staring until the bands of colour revealed
themselves.


‘Listen to me, Lizzy. Everything is different now, but it’s going to be better. I promise.’

‘I hope you’re right, Ellie.’ Lizzy hoped, but her sister’s colours were in the wrong place and she didn’t know if that was
something she needed to worry about or not.


‘What’s that?’ Ellie was straightening the bedspread over their mother’s body. The bedspread was a white ‘George Washington’ one her mother had saved months to buy. When she bought it during
a J.C. Penney White Sale for almost half-price she’d been as happy as a child on Christmas morning. She’d told her daughters
it had a timeless style and would become a family heirloom. Lizzy thought Laura must have bought the bedspread about three
years ago when she was so sure she was about to be made a senior cashier at the Safeway.


‘A mason jar. I put Mom’s name and life history on a piece of paper and stuck it in the jar. We put it in her hands and if
she’s ever dug up they’ll know who she is, or was, and that she didn’t die of foul play.’ Lizzy was a little disappointed
that she hadn’t been able to think of a whole lot for the life history. It was mostly about how she’d been real pretty once
before some lousy decisions, mostly about wine and men, caught up with her.


‘Where did you ever get such a stupid idea?’ Ellie kept arranging the George Washington bedspread around her mother as if
she could make it look more like a family heirloom if she got it just right.


‘The Grapes of Wrath. The ladies at the library thought I might like to read it. I went in there one day after that stuck-up Leslie Rawnsley had
been calling me an Okie. Anyway, that’s what they did in the book when an old lady died. They buried her with a mason jar
that had her life history in it. I figured since Mom was born an Okie it would be kind of nice. A tradition.’ Lizzy shrugged
her shoulders, knowing it wasn’t much as far as traditions go.


‘I don’t think our mother would have been pleased to be buried with an Okie tradition.’ Laura usually said her folks were
from Kansas, a place of origin more kindly regarded by most Californians than Oklahoma.


‘Well, I guess the other option would be a Viking funeral, but that doesn’t seem practical.’

‘What’s that?’ Ellie tugged the makeshift shroud smooth over her mother’s shoulder.

‘The Vikings were warriors in Scandinavia about a thousand years ago.’

‘I know that, Lizzy. I saw the movie, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. You always make it sound like you’re the only one who
knows anything.’


‘Then you should know the Vikings put their dead bodies in a burning boat and set it out to drift and burn away. That’s if
it was somebody important who they really liked. Sometimes if they didn’t like someone they would just stake them out at low
tide and let the crabs nibble on them until they drowned. Of course I was thinking about the burning boat for Mom. I think
they used the crabs mostly when they wanted to get rid of Irish priests because those guys made Odin mad. Odin was their main
god, but they had a whole bunch of gods just like the Greeks and Romans.’


She paused and took a deep breath, sensing she’d wandered from her original plan. ‘Anyway, I got the Viking idea because I
looked up “Sinclair” once and it was originally a Viking name. They ended up in Scotland, but they were Vikings. Since we
don’t live by the ocean, I thought the mason jar would be simpler.’ She didn’t mention reading that ‘Sinclair’ might have
been French once and really been St Claire because she thought Ellie might get all excited about being French. She’d think
it was kind of sexy and probably start saying ‘ooh la la’ all the time.


‘That’s a wonderful story, Lizzy. Have you heard the one about the tooth fairy?’

‘What do you mean?’ Lizzy was rethinking the idea of sending a flaming boat down the Kings River. There was a pretty wide
stretch about a mile below where the kids usually went swimming and it wouldn’t be that hard to steal a boat from the bait