by Kate Hamer
Phoebe stops, glances upwards as if she’s sensed someone there, and I draw back. She hesitates, then carries on pacing and talking. I strain to listen even as I hear Grace’s footsteps coming down the landing behind me.
‘Meet me now,’ Phoebe says downstairs. ‘I can’t bear it if you don’t. If you don’t meet me now I’ll have to come over to your house and hammer on your fucking front door until you let me in.’
35
Phoebe
My heart is knifed.
Can I keep up the pretence that he still passionately wants me? I want to convince myself so much that someone still does I had to speak to him. He sounded so, so cold on the phone. He sounded like my call was the very last thing he wanted. ‘Phoebe, what we did was wrong,’ he kept saying – ‘I realise that now.’ ‘It’s too late for that,’ I shouted and he went quiet.
Oh, but I can’t bear it. Three times I asked Orla and three times she said no, once by a mere shrug of her shoulders. She is the mother and the sister and the husband and the wife to me, and if I don’t have love then I am marooned on an icy rock where nothing grows or will ever grow. Thank God I didn’t take my tab like the others did. I’m bleeding out, just like that man against the wall. The pain is unbearable. I will tear at anybody or anything to make it go away. I am completely and utterly unloved. I don’t even possess a beetle’s soul, just a piece of slime – something that people want to wipe away.
I think of the bloody story. How Macbeth thinks of death, of killing, and just the image of it suffices for a time. For a while he doesn’t need to do the act anywhere except for in his brain, because he can go and look at it there safely any time he wants; and the sight of it in his head makes the electricity he craves, the want and the wish and the desire go through him again and again. I understand. That’s how I feel. If I think of the knife being just next to Lucas, in his radius by ten metres, it makes me feel so much better. It is the same relief I feel when I used to do the other thing with the knife that I don’t like to think about.
The idea of having a knife close by without him even knowing plunges through me in a shock and wakes me up from this lank and dreadful state. The pointed carving knife is too sharp to hide in my pocket – it would slice right through. I take it out of the drawer. The curve of it has a deathly menace. In this house it’s used for carving, boning, forcing deep into the flesh and twisting there. It’s been here for as long as I remember, and each and every time I’ve glimpsed that menace it’s caused me to shudder, even at the age of five, so now, it seems the most fitting and best thing to take, like it’s been waiting for its purpose all along. He will not see it. He will not know it’s there. Only I will know that, how close it’s got to him, and when he leaves, when I see his figure moving off away across the fields, only I will know that there was another scenario already played out in my mind, one where I’ve torn out my anger and fear on him, one where he is left ripped and bloody, his insides hanging out in ribbons. And knowing that will cause electricity to stir about me. It will make my hair stand straight up with static and the power of it will gather inside my belly. It will keep me going for days. It will show me how I’m in control, of my thoughts and everything, and if I order it all correctly they can work for me rather than against. I take one of my mother’s snowy tea towels – bleached then boiled for an hour on the stove’s top until a season of mist and rain fogs the windows – and I wrap it round and round the shining blade, and with precise care insert the package in the pocket of my mac.
I take a moment, and into this, into the silence of the house, there’s a sudden and terrible shattering noise from the other room. The sound goes through me like a scream, like pain does. It makes me gasp then stop breathing. I find for a moment I cannot move. Then, floating almost, the breath only in my throat now and in small gasps, I move towards it.
‘No, no, no, no.’ My voice sounds breathy and small in the vast cavern of the study.
I put my hands to my eyes as if I could block the sight out, but then I take them away and it’s the same. Grace is standing, swaying slightly; the doors to the cabinet are open. Across the carpet is glinting broken glass. Bone-like ceramic flowers stud the floor around her feet.
‘Fuck, so sorry,’ she garbles and picks up one of the biggest shards, which bites into her hand. ‘Fuck, ouch.’ She drops it and blood begins to drip steadily down onto the mess.
What’s to be done? What’s to be done? It’s like rats are here. They’ve invaded and they are everywhere and I’ll have no chance at all of expelling them before she gets home. They are gnawing on the rugs and furniture, leaving great holes that even I can’t fill in. I’m sick, nauseous, cold. I thank the Lord again I took no LSD. What would I do with this vision if I had? Walk across the broken glass in bloody feet until bones stuck out? Force a jagged shard into my vein?
‘Grace,’ I manage to say with a thick tongue, ‘your hand is bleeding.’
She looks at the dripping blood in bewilderment and then at the glistening mess. Then she takes off her sweatshirt and wraps it round her arm. Our eyes meet above the glass and her face turns into a whinny of suppressed laughter.
‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s not funny.’ But all the same she can’t stop hacking out coughs of laughter and it does something to me.
It is as if something has been breached and the world has just exploded. The skin of it has been irreparably ruptured and I must slip beneath and choke in the drowning waters. There is no surviving this, no soothing or downcast averted eyes or ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry’ or promises for the future or explanations can avert this disaster.
‘I’m going,’ I say.
‘Where? You can’t. We have to clear this up. I’m not in a fit state. Don’t leave me here either – this place freaks me out.’
She looks over my shoulder and I turn to see Orla there, open-mouthed in the doorway. ‘You mustn’t go on your own,’ she says. ‘We’ll come too. He might be dangerous.’ She looks white and strange. Her lips pinched. It’s the jealousy again – I’ve got her back! My heart swells. There’s triumph and relief. I shrug.
‘You don’t know where I’m going,’ I say.
‘Yes I do. I heard.’
‘Look, don’t worry about it. You both go home if you don’t want to stay here. Don’t worry about the mess and all the broken stuff. None of it matters any more. I’ll clear it all up before they get home and I’ll just have to apologise for the breakages and, I don’t know, do some chores or something to make up for them. If anyone asks I’ll say it was all my fault, I did it all and you both got frightened and ran away. Don’t worry, Orla, I just need to meet him one more time to let him know what he’s done. You’re both right, he’s a terrible man. He’s awful but he won’t stop pestering me. I’m going to let him know that I never want to see him again and that he needs to stay away from me. I’m going to leave him in absolutely no doubt.’
36
Phoebe
Of course that was all lies, lies, lies.
I had a strange moment looking over the glittering mess, Orla and Grace standing there with their mouths open. It felt like I’d left my body. I’d entered some new state and it was approaching calm. I touched a void inside that was past panic, past fear. It made me see things utterly clearly. It was as clear as seeing ancient Rome that day, or the bubbling frogspawn, something that goes through and through the soul.
I realised I can never come back here.
I know exactly what has to happen. I know how I’m going to do it. I’ll pull up my plait for the last time. I’ll pack it up neatly and take it with me. It’s the only thing I want. She can have everything else – diary, clothes, even all the spell-making instruments strewn across her best tablecloth. They will be relics falling into the empty hole of my presence. This glass can stay on the floor with the blood dripped in bright rubies on it. I won’t even bother sweeping it to one side. She needs to know this world has shattered and cannot be mended. It doesn’
t exist any longer. My presence will be mere shadow, something belonging to the past, and the skin of reality will finally be broken.
When I see Lucas I’m going to ask him to take me off somewhere. The power of my need will brook no disagreement. I’ll make him do it. All the power of hell will be unleashed if he doesn’t, because I will tell absolutely everyone what happened and what he did. I’ll leave it to the coven of mothers at the school to deal with him. I’ll tell him exactly how his wife will exact my revenge for me if he doesn’t do as I ask. He’ll have no option.
As I put on my coat, it weighs heavily to one side with the knife, and I feel almost bright and breezy! Inside the study I hear Grace crunching over glass in her socked feet and both of them whimpering and talking in hushed urgent voices, and the sound of it all almost makes me smile. How glorious to destroy a world. What sublime relief it is. The thought of walking out of here and leaving the blood and the mess and the awfulness behind, of never seeing my family again, has made me feel a dizzying freedom I don’t ever remember having before. I’m not about to let Orla know that, though. She’ll hold onto my sleeve until she rips my arm off. She’ll never let me go.
Outside, the normal everyday sounds overwhelm me. I tremble to their beauty. The evening birdsong is as brilliant as diamonds in my ear. I don’t even need drugs, I think. I don’t need witchcraft. I just need to dwell in this state I’ve entered forever. Sometimes I stop, struck by the crystal flow of the river or the sway of the whiskery tops of the wild wheat that fringes it. Sometimes I remember what’s happened with a jolt and it brings me back inside myself. I feel sick then and have to squint in the Technicolor of my surroundings until I remember what it is I must do and hurry along. It’s hard when there seems such strange beauty in the pink and gold evening, when I am so struck down with everything. It’s the shock, I think.
I crawl through the gap in the wall. I half expect him to be there already, but no. I have to wait patiently. He won’t have found it easy to get away. He’ll have to come up with all sorts of subterfuge and excuses. I know exactly what that’s like so I’m prepared to give him some leeway for being late. I lean against a tree and pretend to examine my nails.
If they think I don’t know they’re there, then they must think I’m stupid.
There’s the flash of Orla’s pink cardigan sleeve. There’s Grace’s stifled giggle.
I walk up and down next to the cluster of branches they’re hiding under.
‘I know you’re there.’ I say. I hang my coat by its loop on the branch of a hawthorn tree.
There’s silence; even Grace stops laughing. I walk up and down again, addressing the air. ‘Just to let you know, you two don’t bother me one bit. You can eavesdrop all you want. I think it’s pathetic you’ve followed me here, but as long as you keep your mouths tight shut I really don’t care, and you better had or I’ll tell my mum you smashed the place up deliberately.’
I bite my lip and clamber up the base of the wall to scan the horizon. I’ll just have to put up with the possibility of them overhearing what I’ve got to say. I’ll lead him away from them anyway, so they’ll have trouble catching it. I’m aware that if I scream at them now to leave he’ll see their figures fleeing across the field and he’ll run the other way. ‘He’ll be here any minute,’ I call out. ‘And if you mess anything up for me or make a single noise I’ll go crazy.’ I know I’m about to start crying now so I stop talking and wait.
37
Grace
It was Orla’s idea.
‘Granny’s footsteps,’ she said.
As we crept behind Phoebe, keeping hidden, I kept exploding with giggles. It was the relief of getting out of that house. I can’t imagine what her mum’s going to do when she sees that carnage. She’s going to go absolutely nuts. I don’t understand why Phoebe isn’t hysterical. It must be the drugs making her not take in the implications of it all, the same drugs that for me are colouring the sky a precise and extremely beautiful shade of mauve. Earlier, sparkles of silver stars slid down it and exploded in a shower on the ground that looked like very fine shattering glass and I laughed wildly because shattering glass seemed to be the theme of the evening. As we followed her it looked like Phoebe was well off on one too; she’d got changed and was wearing a white dress that practically came down to her ankles and made her look like one of those women on a nineteen-seventies album cover, holding a guitar and sitting in a rocking chair. She carried her old trench coat over her arm because the evening had turned hot and she didn’t need it. She kept stopping like she’d got stuck to the ground. It looked absolutely hilarious.
Now the curve of Orla’s cheek is only inches away as we hide out. She lets off a smell, hot and animal-like. I lean forward to sniff and she turns and nearly bangs into me and raises her finger to her lips.
I’m flying now. The woodland explodes with life, the leaves shimmering and twirling, and I get stuck too, examining a teardrop-shaped green leaf and following all its veins that take its leaf blood all around it. How happy is this leaf? It doesn’t have to worry about eating or dying. It doesn’t have to worry about anything. It almost makes me cry thinking about it. How I envy its simple little life. I’m so intent on it that I don’t notice Mr Jonasson has arrived until I see Orla craning forward.
I can see them both through the criss-crossing of the branches. Phoebe takes him off in the direction of the wishing bowl; as she passes she sticks her middle finger up at us behind her back and I have to take the sweatshirt off my cut hand and stuff it inside my mouth to stop the laughter. The cut has closed up, the two sides of the slit touching together now and turning a bluish purple.
‘Stop it,’ I hiss to Orla as she stretches out her neck even further. ‘What are you doing? He’ll see you.’
Orla looks back and her eyes have gone buggy and huge. ‘Sssh, I’m trying to hear what they’re saying. She’s taken him over to the wishing bowl. They’re having some sort of argument.’ The skin around her hairline is sweaty and she’s trembling in excitement.
A hoot of male laughter floats over but it’s not a happy sort of laughter – it’s the kind when you are taking the piss out of something and calling it ridiculous.
Orla gets on her hands and knees, and her big arse bobbing around in the air means I have to stuff the sweatshirt back in my mouth. Outside our nest I see them both still, Phoebe with her dark shock of hair, him with his jacket off, standing with it hooked over one finger and draped over his shoulder. His jaw is thrust out and he looks tired and scared.
‘Orla, leave them,’ I say. It feels sordid spying on them now, not a childish game, and I’m wishing to God we’d never followed her here, wishing I’d never agreed to ever staying with Phoebe, wishing I was at home and putting on tea for Mum and me, and stopping to have a sneaky fag with Daniel on the balcony. And in that moment I feel all the delicious ordinariness of them both so acutely. I realise how it’s the way they do things – how Daniel scratches behind his left ear if he’s thinking, how Mum puts far too much butter on her teacake, how she whistles sometimes under her breath and says it’s the same tunes her father used to whistle. All this and the soft loving looks from them – those up to now and those to come – have altered the warp and weft of me so much it’s like we are all knitted together in places as one.
‘Orla, hold me,’ I say, but so softly she doesn’t hear and I turn my head and somehow the movement of that is a trigger for everything to go wild. The woodland springs up, alive. The trees all clap their leaves together like they’re an audience applauding and I feel the roots beneath us and how they weave into each other and make a basket to hold us and the insects whizz in and out of the bark, flashing their iridescent colours, and the bacteria in the soil moves it about. And I can see the movement, in fast frame – on some kind of loop of a film that’s spooling through me – and the branches thrash into my face. Leaves stuff in my open mouth and poke into my eyes. I stumble forward blindly. And I see my hands and they are shiny with blood
and there’s a knife in one of them and it’s smeared red nearly to the hilt. And I look to the others, questioning, trying to understand what I’m doing there, what’s happening, why we three are standing in a circle around Mr Jonasson with Orla and Phoebe’s mouths hanging open and great splatters of blood like ribbons across Phoebe’s white dress. And I don’t want to but I do. I turn my head and there’s blood leaping out of Mr Jonasson’s neck like there’s a hosepipe stuck inside, and tentatively Phoebe reaches out and pushes him, just with two fingers, so that he stumbles a step backwards and at first I shake my head in confusion until I realise what she is doing and the reason she’s pushed him back like that is so that he’s standing on his own jacket to catch the blood that’s pouring out of him. And we all stand there watching silently with our eyes as big as rabbits in the headlights as he dies in front of us.
38
Phoebe
The cold shock of the water causes me to whisk back into myself for I really had left my body this time. I saw it all from above, how he bled out onto his coat. How finally he could not stand any more. Someone, and it could’ve been me, steadied him with her arms and gently helped him down so he could curl up on the floor.
I looked at my hands and they were bright-painted, gloved with the blood from fingertip to wrist that shone in a shaft of sun through the trees so my hands almost looked golden. I wiped them down my front and made two huge red runners down my dress.
Then the plunge and the deep shocking chill of the river.