After Sundown

by Mark Morris

  And I think of Crispin with you, and Crispin on top of you, and Crispin within you – and I wonder, are you enjoying it more than I did? Do you take well to the gas? Are you better at love? At making love, at feeling love, at even knowing what love is? And when will you start turning into me?

  * * *

  This time the Deep Mood took me for over a week – nine whole days, in fact! – and when I recovered my senses I still wasn’t able to talk for a while. Crispin wheeled me into the back room, and there he fed me tomato soup so hot that it made my throat smart. “What am I going to do with you?” he asked me, though he knew I couldn’t reply. “You’re getting worse and worse, it breaks my heart. And I need someone working at reception!”

  He left me sitting there, facing the other Mrs. Watt, my predecessor. And that felt cruel, but maybe it was merely tactless – and it was like staring into a broken mirror. And I doubt the other Mrs. Watt even knew I was there, but once in a while she made a sound that was like laughter, and her eyes would roll, and with no teeth to stop it her tongue would flop out and hang wetly over her lips.

  “Do you still love me?” I asked Crispin this morning, and I could see how pleased he was I could talk again. “Of course I love you!” he said, and he gave me a hug. And I dare say he meant it as he said it, but the hug felt awkward to me, it wasn’t the hug you gave a wife but a dying grandmother. He said, “I love you very much, how can you doubt it? But I am not in love with you. It isn’t your fault. It’s just what it is. But if I were in love with you, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen, would it?” And his smile was still kind and reassuring, and his mouth so full of teeth.

  So I ask you – how many times has he told you he loves you? And how does he do it? Does he tell you, like he told me, that he was lonely? And he needed some tenderness in his life? That his wife couldn’t properly satisfy his desires? That he was a good man, really, a good man – and a good man surely deserves a little happiness?

  How did he get his hooks into you?

  I would go to see his wife at reception when I came for my appointment. Not talkative today – just points a finger at where I should wait. Does she know? She must know. I try to smile at her kindly, but I think it comes out wrong. She doesn’t smile back, the sow.

  You’ll wonder if I didn’t feel ashamed. There was certainly shame. Numbed somewhere behind the gas. The wife of John felt guilty, the mother of Eloise felt guilty – but in the soft dentist’s chair I was no longer simply wife or mother. I was becoming someone else. Oh, the sweet transformative power of love.

  I let him extract three perfectly good teeth before I told him how I felt about him. He was preparing the nitrous oxide, he was sucking it down and was about to blow it into my lungs, and I just came out with it. Said that my front molar wasn’t hurting me at all, there was no need for further use of the pliers. I had only wanted the excuse to see him again. And at that he laughed so much, and I don’t think it was just the gas. He said I was such a silly. And I’d never felt like a silly before, Mother and Father had wanted me to be a sensible upright girl, and now I liked the idea of being silly. We kissed, and it wasn’t a medical procedure this time, it was lips and tongues and chewing and gulping, and it’s true, there wasn’t really a great deal of difference, but there was an honesty to it, I think, a relief that our feelings were all out in the open.

  “I want to make love to you right now,” Crispin then said, and he lifted up my petticoats. I asked him whether we should at least close the door, his wife would be able to see us both at it from the reception desk! But he told me his wife was having one of her Deep Moods, and she’d be dead to the world for hours. She couldn’t walk with her thick ulcerous legs. She could barely talk these days.

  We made love then on the dentist’s chair, and the lights were on, and I had never made love in the brightness before, and it all seemed so different when you could see all the bits flying about. I could see the strain on Crispin’s face, and it made him look a little ridiculous, as if he were trying so very hard to do a difficult thing when it was really terribly easy, wasn’t it? And I thought of how John’s face must have looked all those years, and how mercifully protected I’d been from his facial contortions by the darkness, and I began to laugh. And Crispin laughed too, and then suddenly stopped, and I could see the horror on his face, and he pulled off me, he was staring at me, his eyes wide open, so frightened.

  “Oh G_d,” he said. “No, G_d, not again, please, not again!”

  And I tried to speak, but I couldn’t; and I put my hand up to my throat, and my hand was big and meaty and decked in liver spots; and the skin around the throat felt looser, as if breaking into coils; I was becoming looser, softer, I was melting into a fat puddle.

  “Not again,” he said, and he wasn’t looking at me. He was trying not to look at me at all. “It isn’t fair! Why does everyone I love end up getting so broken?”

  I stared into the dull metal of his dental instruments, and the reflection that came back was distorted – but – it was her, it was her. It was the woman who sat at reception, the sour-faced fat dumpling of a wife. And I tried to scream, but it hurt, the sound that issued was a low rasp.

  “Ssh, ssh, darling,” he said. “I know what to do, I’ve done it before.”

  He went down on one knee, and he took my hand. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “You’re old and ugly, but you’re mine, and I’ll never abandon you. Even if I find other lovers, you must know there’ll always be room for you in my heart. You’re my wife.” And I wanted to pull away, but that scrawny wrist of his was stronger than it looked. And besides, his eyes were pricking with tears, I had never seen a man so moved by emotion before. How could I deny the sincerity of his love?

  That was the first time he took me to his back room. There sat his other wife, and I stared at her, and properly at last, and I couldn’t help it – because I knew now that was what I looked like, and this is what he’d done to us.

  I couldn’t talk for two days. He’d come and feed us both soup. He’d tell us he loved us. He’d give us both hugs. He’d tell us he was sorry.

  And two things kept nagging at me. He’d said ‘again’, this was happening ‘again’, this ‘kept’ happening to him. How many other women had he transformed into his fat wife?

  And what had he done with them?

  He didn’t call me by my name anymore. He called me Alice. Just as he called his other wife Alice. And when I could talk again, he moved me into reception. He showed me how to take appointments. What to write in the ledger. And I told him, Crispin, I know. I already know how the ledger works. I’ve been doing this job for years.

  Sometimes I am Alice. And sometimes I fall into my Deep Moods, and I’m really nobody at all, there’s nobody home, and I sleep a bit. And sometimes, not very often, but just once in a while – I remember I am a woman who has a daughter named Eloise. And I try to write this letter.

  The police looked for me. It was in all the newspapers, I saw it from the ones left in the waiting room. The police even came to the dentists. Nobody could tell them anything. I couldn’t tell them anything either, I didn’t know anything that day, and when I tried to make my brain work it spluttered and stalled, and my tongue hung heavy in my mouth with the effort.

  * * *

  I am writing you a letter.

  I am in the back room again. It is very cramped in the back room, just space for me and my other self. That’s probably why Crispin doesn’t come to visit very often.

  I am writing you a letter. That is what I am doing.

  I have not been taken out of the back room for some time now. I don’t know what that means.

  I am writing you a letter. I must remember. A letter, just for you.

  It is hard to work out how words fit together. The Moods are really very Deep. But sometimes it all comes back to me in a rush – words, and syntax, and grammar. And meaning! It’s so
exciting.

  I am writing. You a letter.

  Yesterday my thoughts returned at such a rush and it was like a sudden burst of sunshine piercing the darkness, and the excitement was too much or my fingers were too thick or maybe I was just too fat and ugly and old and unloved – and I dropped the letter, I dropped the letter, it fell from my hands down, down onto the floor.

  I couldn’t move. My legs too thick and heavy, even if they weren’t so ulcerated, I simply wouldn’t have the strength to shift them. All these pages, written over so long, and I couldn’t reach them.

  I had vowed never to cry. But I had also vowed never to visit a dentist, and look where that had got me. So I cried.

  I wasn’t shy about it, I think I wailed rather. And perhaps it was the sound of my distress, or maybe the sight of all those tears running down my pudding cheeks. But the Alice opposite me seemed to stiffen. She roused, as if from a long sleep.

  If I couldn’t move, I knew she couldn’t have moved either. Her skin was nothing but ulcers now, it was hard to see the human being underneath. But her hands tensed upon the armrests, I saw old veins bulge and pop with the effort. As she heaved her body out of its chair.

  Alice looked at me. Her face was listless. There wasn’t enough energy to put expression into it – she was saving all that for sheer physical exertion. She shuffled closer, one foot, then the other, as if forcing them to remember how movement worked. She came right to me.

  I am writing you a letter.

  And she bent down. I heard bones creak and snap. I saw ulcers burst. She bent down to the scattered pages on the floor.

  Slowly, so slowly, she straightened up, and handed them to me.

  Our faces so close we could have kissed. She stank of the gas. How much I wanted the gas.

  I did not kiss her. I gave her a smile of thanks.

  But she hadn’t finished. She reached her hands inside her pocket. She took out an envelope, stuffed with a letter of its own. It was almost too much for her. She tossed it onto my lap.

  Then she dragged herself back to her chair, almost at a rush, now that the task was done – she collapsed into it.

  I opened the envelope. I seemed to recognise the handwriting.

  I have been trying to write to you for some little while now, but every time I do it comes out wrong.

  I stared.

  And my numbed brain began to whirl. The memories I had recorded in the letter, how many had been truly mine? I had lost my body to Crispin’s embrace, but I had always believed my mind at least was intact, that the story I told was my own. Was I just parroting Alice’s own account – was it Alice who had been afraid of dentists, who had married John, who had destroyed her life? As I told the tale of my affair, was I just narrating hers? (Oh, Eloise! She was my daughter, wasn’t she? Tell me she was mine.)

  So I refused to read further, I closed my eyes against the words.

  When I opened them again, I saw that Alice had more envelopes. Where had she got them from? Why so many? They were strewn across her lap, there must have been a dozen or more.

  She managed a smile. I like to think it was a smile of comradeship, or at least of solidarity. But I don’t know, I just don’t know.

  I am writing you a letter.

  And I now understand why I am writing you a letter. It is not a warning. It is too late for that. It is a testimony. To be repeated and reinforced, along with all the others.

  I can’t be sure. But I think. I think that may be more valuable.

  Or perhaps you will never read this. Who knows? Perhaps with you it really is true love. You’ll be strong enough to love as yourself, and you’ll never change. I hope so. I hate you. I hate you with every last fading fibre of my being. But I hope so.

  I am writing you a letter, and there is no more left to write. It is a relief to finish. My fingers hurt, and my head pounds from having to squint at the paper. And I know it’s impossible, because there is nothing left in my mouth, nothing at all – no teeth, no gums, not even a tongue. But even so, in spite of that, I do seem to have the most dreadful toothache.

  Bokeh

  Thana Niveau

  Vera wasn’t eavesdropping, but she couldn’t help overhearing. Keeley was talking to someone. The child’s high-pitched voice carried from the garden and Vera caught the word ‘Rappy’. She smiled. Once Vera had repaired the velociraptor’s broken leg, Rappy had become Keeley’s favourite toy again. She only talked to her favourites.

  There were the usual dinosaur roars and growls, along with pleading from the unlikely victims as Rappy terrorised the miniature landscape by Rhodie Forest. ‘Rhododendrons’ was as hard for Keeley to pronounce as ‘velociraptor’, so she had renamed the area. It was only a couple of shrubs, but to a six-year-old they must seem massive.

  Vera moved to the open window for a peek. It took her a few moments to locate her daughter. The child’s bright green shirt made her blend in with the surrounding plants. But her jet-black hair gave her away: a dark smudge in the garden.

  Keeley was crouched with her back to the cottage, one hand on Rappy and the other on a model horse. The horse towered over the little dinosaur, but Rappy was undaunted. Vera had to squint to make out the details. As she watched, the raptor sprang at the horse, going for the throat and thrashing from side to side until the horse fell in the grass, where it kicked and flailed for so long that Vera began to feel uneasy watching it. Even more unsettling were the noises Keeley made to approximate the poor horse’s dying screams. Plastic or not, Vera would never have let her toys suffer like that when she was Keeley’s age.

  But she found herself curiously transfixed. She watched until the horse was finally still, and then Rappy began to feast. The dinosaur ate lustily, all slurps and nom-nom gobbling noises. Vera kept waiting for it to end, but the orgy of violence went on and on, and her blurred vision only made it worse. She could all too easily imagine gouts of blood spraying from the poor beast’s wounds and her hand drifted to her mouth as a wave of nausea rose in the back of her throat.

  Remember what the therapist said, she reminded herself. It’s just her way of working through the divorce.

  Being abandoned by their father was bound to give any kid dark fantasies, no matter how young. But Vera seemed to remember other peculiar games from before it was just the two of them. Games that had made her feel as though she were standing beneath a dripping icicle. Voices Keeley had claimed to hear in the night, secret ‘friends’ who seemed just a little too secretive.

  Rappy finally finished eating. Keeley covered the dead horse with leaves, and Vera wondered how the dinosaur interpreted the giant hand appearing from above. Was Keeley a god in this make-believe world?

  Then the little girl did something really odd. She held Rappy in both hands, lifted her up to the rhododendrons, and bowed her head. Vera thought she could see Keeley’s lips moving, like someone praying, but maybe that was just her eyes playing tricks. They’d been doing that a lot lately. Possibly her own reaction to the hellish separation.

  Rappy lay in the girl’s open palms, and Vera half expected to see the creature twitch and start to move on its own. Was a bolt of lightning about to strike and bring it to life?

  But her flight of fancy came to an end as Keeley suddenly froze. She dropped her hands and spun her head to look directly at Vera. Her eyes didn’t have to rove across the cottage to discover the window at which her mother stood, which made Vera feel even more uneasy.

  Keeley didn’t move or speak. She didn’t do anything but stare, her expression unreadable. Vera arranged her features into a sheepish smile and raised her hand in a little wave, but Keeley didn’t return either. She merely continued to stare until Vera was forced to break the uncomfortable impasse and turn away.

  She waited a long time before daring to look outside again, and this time she used a different window, the one halfway up the stairs. Keeley wa
s still staring. Right at her.

  * * *

  “And when I came back an hour later, she was still there.”

  Steve laughed. “Aw, kids are just weird. You know that.” At his feet, Cosmo barked, as if in agreement. Keeley glanced up from the sandpit at the sound, then returned to her digging.

  Steve was Vera’s only friend in the village and, like Vera, he had also been dumped by a cheating husband. Fortunately, he had retained sole custody of their golden retriever, Cosmo.

  Vera sighed. “Yeah. But mine seems especially weird.”

  “Trust me,” Steve said, shaking his head, “it’s nothing compared to what my brother’s kid comes up with.”

  “Oh? Do tell.”

  “He says there’s a foot living in the airing cupboard.”

  Vera blinked. “A foot. What, just the one?”

  “Yup. It hops.”

  Vera grimaced. “Okay, yeah, that’s weird. Jesus, where do kids get these ideas?”

  She looked over at the sandpit. Keeley was alone there except for Rappy. If the child ever intended to resurrect the poor horse she’d sacrificed earlier, she hadn’t done it yet. Vera had been tempted to dig it up herself, but the idea made her feel anxious. She hadn’t been able to rid herself of the idea that she’d be unearthing an actual corpse. In her mind the tiny horse was ripped and gouged from the raptor’s claws, with long red furrows revealing exposed bones and viscera.

  Something wet touched Vera’s fingers and she gasped. But it was only Cosmo, snuffling his nose under her hand. She smiled and scratched him behind the ears and he made a little sound of pleasure, the doggy equivalent of purring. He’d probably sensed her disquiet and come to reassure her.