by Polly Hall
In the early days we used to shower together, letting the water ricochet from our bodies, lathering the gel onto each other’s skin, reaching into crevices with our fingers, wanting to claim every inch like conquistadors. You’d hold the loofah between both your hands, and pull me toward you, rolling the rough fibers against my back while kissing me gently on my forehead, cheeks and eyelids as the water cascaded between us.
I sank into you then. But today there is dryness between us where familiarity has drained away the immediacy of union. We no longer share those moments of cleansing.
I hear the drains gurgle as you step out onto the bathmat, squeaky fresh and dripping. The cockerel crows outside and a robin lands on the windowsill looking directly at me, his eyes like shining black beads. I watch for a moment. Then he is gone, as if an invisible hand has erased him from a sketch.
The music is on repeat and Bing Crosby starts singing again about his dreams. “Where the tree tops glisten and children listen . . .” It won’t snow today; it is too still and cold. Besides, the ground is a lake of ice. We may as well be the lonely cherry on the top of all that grey icing.
“. . . just like the ones we used to know . . .” Your voice echoes down the hallway as you appear for the final verse of the song dressed in jeans and a thick fisherman’s sweater. You rub your hair with a towel and smile at me and I feel safe. I sense your warmth and know that as long as you are near, I will be complete.
“This is going to be a wonderful Christmas.” You kneel beside me and stroke my knee. “I love you so much.”
You set about lighting the fire. There is a pile of dry logs against the wall, enough to last for several days if it is kept alight. First you kneel down and clear the ash, place a fire starter and some kindling on top of a few rolled up scraps of newspaper. Then, lighting a match with one strike against the brick fireplace, you hold it there and I watch as the flames appear. Magic. You load more wood and I watch as the flames grow and channel up the flue.
But as the fire takes hold and roars, so too do the stuffed animals in our home. The mammals, wary of fire, try to bolt, but remain stationed in their bodies. I can taste their emotions like charred wood. Then the birds attempt to fly away from the flames. And those creatures more suited to an aqueous environment attempt to hop or crawl from the heat radiating toward them. It is a struggle that tugs and stretches me in all directions. Fire does not unite; it cleanses and absolves. What do they fear? I know. But do you?
All you do is gaze at the fire as you would a painting. And then you gaze at me and all your creations lined up like odd spectators in a Christmas nativity gone wrong.
March
March became roadkill month. It was a bountiful free supermarket out there if you got up in time and other road users had already done the deed. Badgers, foxes, pheasants, buzzards, rabbits, squirrels—most of the rural wildlife ventured out at night only to be taken clean out by a vehicle. Sometimes the driver didn’t even notice they’d killed an animal or bird, oblivious, unless of course they felt the impact or their vehicle was damaged. You told me a stag could total a car; sometimes the stag would right itself, shudder and carry on running, leaving behind the wreckage.
Mornings were not my favorite time of day, but for the sake of art I would rise earlier than usual. Well, for your art I suppose. Raw material is key when practicing an art, you said. Practice makes perfect. It’s like cooking. If you have the best raw ingredients, you will produce a tastier dish than if you have inferior ones. The same with taxidermy—the more perfectly preserved the specimen, the more lifelike its representation. And the fresher, the better.
So, 5am at the beginning of March, I was dressed and waiting in the truck. It was one of those frosty, slow mornings so we didn’t anticipate many people on the roads. The light was gaining but the darkness still held on with obsidian fingers. I loved the smell of those mornings when we ventured out early, as if the earth were defrosting, giving up its layers of scent one by one. I enjoyed watching the dogs wag their whole back ends with excitement when I took them out in the fields. They couldn’t even contain themselves, orgiastic delight spilling from their pink tongues as they panted and foraged with wet noses in the undergrowth.
Our lawn slopes down to the hawthorn hedge then further to the pond where it levels out with the surrounding land. The house was elevated from the surrounding moor, our own personal island. On those March days, we could see the mist delineating where the water once lay before the land was filtered and drained. I half expected a fleet of silent boats to emerge carrying ghost merchants from the Far East, stuck in a time loop, still searching for precious metals in what had once been a valuable trading destination.
Some say Jesus came here once—to Somerset. He sailed with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, and visited Glastonbury. The stories appear all over the place like objects placed behind glass cases and labeled in a scrolling font. Just like the glass cases you sometimes used to display your creatures, traditional fishing or countryside scenes where a fox is carrying a pheasant in its mouth. Those images infused this land of apples, Summerland, although it seemed so far from summer during those short, bitter winter days.
The windscreen is scraped clear of the cold white layer and the heater put on full blast to clear the glass. You got your gun in case there were any creatures that needed a final dispatching (this did happen, and I learned quickly that it was kinder to put them out of their misery—you would not hesitate to shoot an injured deer.)
The dogs jumped in the back of the truck and we were off, bumping down the drive. “We’ll go the back way,” you said. Soon we slipped down a side road and headed off toward the flat, narrow lanes of the moor, the truck clattering and the dogs whining with half-contained excitement.
We’d not gone far when I saw it, the dark shadow of a badger lying on its side as if sleeping. It was probably killed only a few hours before, as the bloat hadn’t set in. Top of the food chain, not many creatures eat badgers in the wild. They tend to have a tough outer layer too hard for the birds or other mammals to penetrate. I wondered what they tasted like; they had once been eaten in times when food was scarce. They could not have been a first choice. Not even the carrion seemed to have a taste for their tough flesh; some badgers remained intact for days at the side of a road.
One day when traveling to the Dorset coast, I counted fourteen of varying sizes and states of decay. Those badgers followed me all day, dragging behind at a distance in the back of my mind, as if wanting to keep moving toward a death that had already happened. I shook them off when I dived into the sea and let the waves crash over my ears, drowning out their grunts and snuffles. It was my attention that had allowed them to latch onto my thoughts.
“He’ll do,” you said, and jumped out to retrieve the carcass. It was a big old dog badger with hardly a mark on him. Probably a car had clipped him and he’d died at the side of the road. I noticed that most of them seemed to make it to the side of the road as if one final burst of adrenaline launched them to the verge before their journey to the underworld.
We carried on across the North Drain and I saw a heron rise up out of the mist. It appeared prehistoric, a reincarnated pterodactyl with an angular, thin head and wings, a mechanical wind-up bird that looked as if it didn’t belong in this time. I enjoyed the serenity of those birds when I came across them undisturbed at the edge of a rhyne, gazing into the water. They seemed pared back to the bones as they stood on spindly legs, in-between worlds, balanced between the space of reality and legend. With their beaks they pierced the water, yet they remained on land and swept up in slow motion on wide wings as if fighting through something denser than air. I had a lot to learn from herons. Their stoic patience made them looked stuffed even while alive, as if they had already been taxidermied and put among the reeds to outstare the fish.
Later that morning we found a hare with blood up its hind quarters, angled like a sleeping dancer across the road. I felt my heart sink. You killed the engine of the
truck and we sat in silence looking through the windscreen. Distinctively larger than a rabbit, these magnificent creatures were a rare sight. To see a hare run wild was to witness a miracle; they flew on land like a witch riding low on her broomstick. The pagan folk used to say they were shape-shifters, the embodiment of magic, their elusiveness giving rise to their mystery. Yet they were difficult to catch sight of, experts at hiding, although the diminished shelter offered in the low fields kept clean by machinery seemed to make them all the more distant, as if they were removed from this world and faded beyond the veil into the Avalonian past.
There is a legend out here on the moor that to see a hare portends a tempest. The hare was symbolic of a grief-stricken woman who had returned to haunt her unfaithful lover. That hare was a message to the both of us and I know you felt it too.
We continued to look through the windscreen of the truck until our breath started to steam the glass and obscure the view. Then simultaneously we both got out and walked toward where the hare lay, and, reverently, we stood before it. Its eyes were open just as they would’ve been when it was born. Hares, unlike rabbits, are fully furred at birth, you once told me—bright eyed as a hare—glimpsing the world as soon as they entered it. This was an adult Brown Hare, still sporting the grey of its winter coat. These lunar creatures were said to be crazy, moon-struck, exhibiting wild displays at night-time that gave rise to the legend of the mad march hare.
“Will you use it?” I broke the silence first.
“I have to,” was all you replied, and crouched down to lift the limp body. You carried it in both your hands as if carrying a tiny sleeping infant. We went home after that. Neither of us uttered a word. Even the dogs had quieted down by then. I felt glad you would resurrect it, even knowing it would never live as it had, racing wild across the fields at dusk.
When we returned and drove up the driveway, I could hear the ducks noisily initiating pairings, ready for spring. Their busy bodies were upturned in the pond, ripples radiating outwards like an old LP. The sun felt hot and sharp behind the glass of the truck window, but I knew it was still chilly.
March was on the cusp of change, plants tentatively poking through hardened winter soil, sap rising and buds bulging with promise. The birds knew the score. They were a barometric signifier, tuned to the slightest dip or rise in air pressure. They knew when to gather in and take shelter from impending storms.
The rooks reached a crescendo of white noise from the trees, then subsided into background nasal tones with an uneven tempo. And the sun emerged from behind a hook-shaped cloud. Stillness, but not silence. Even in the space between the rooks cawing, the trees still spoke in watery hushed tones and the earth pulsed beneath us. I wanted you more than ever then. I wanted each cell of yours to merge with mine. I wanted us to create something together through passionate union. My body ached for you even when you were inside me. The more you wanted me, the more I succumbed. My darling Pepper, you know how I will always ache for you. I remember our Valentine’s Day pact. Will you honor it, too?
March was about the time I dispensed with cutlery and ate with my bare hands. Even the messy, intractable foodstuffs like fiddly peas and beans. I ripped steak between my incisors then chewed meditatively, the juices still running down my palms until I licked them clean. I even scooped up cream with my fingers. Yes, it was disgusting! How could it not be? But strangely it excited me as you watched me ingest with such relish the things you had prepared for our dinner, such primal delight. You’d make these small grunts too, almost imperceptible as if emerging from beneath your beard. Then when you finished your meal, satiated, you’d sigh and wipe your mouth on a napkin like some Lord of the Manor and toss it onto the table. I, on the other hand, would suck each one of my fingers clean as if taunting you to taste me.
“Is this some kind of protest toward cutlery?” you asked.
But I couldn’t explain it to you then. It was as if I needed to literally get my hands dirty. You must’ve understood this; you were always burrowing yours into the afterlives of animals.
Since I had been living with you, I had less and less compassion for the human race, preferring the complexities of our animal neighbors. You were my one exception. Although at times you behaved like the animals you were working with: a wily old fox, a watchful egret. I could measure the colors of your mood by your responses—morning orange or midnight blue. I read once that most of human communication is nonverbal and wondered why we bothered to speak at all. Most of the time when I turned on the radio, I turned it off again almost immediately.
You were in the kitchen searching for something but would not let me help you. So you continued to open cupboards, at first just tentatively fingering jars and tins aside, but then removing some larger objects and shoving them blindly up onto the worktop: a glass bowl, a metal grater, an electric whisk. Then the drawers were pried open like a dentist would stretch a patient’s jaw to its limits, reaching to the very back to discover if decay had set in. You pushed your hand to the back of the drawer, a thick, hairy arm with your rucked-up sleeve straining at the lip of the counter. I heard the utensils swish like stones in a basket under your probing digits. You were like one of the badgers that ransacked our garden foraging for food, trampling the plants and knocking over anything that stood in its path.
“Can I help you, Mr. Pepper? What are you looking for?” I posed the questions as a test of your mood, a gauge for the start of a guessing game. Another device of mine to incite you. But I wasn’t even sure you were listening. The furrows on your forehead were stationed like sand on a beach at low-tide, rigid and shadowed, waiting for the next wash of lunar movements to push them flat and malleable again.
You knelt on the floor, looking into the corner cupboard, the one whose door opened like a pop-out greeting card, a false hinge concealing more space behind. More space to fill with needless things. I don’t even remember buying most of my belongings; they seemed to collect over time but I’d left nearly all of them at my flat when I moved in with you, as if shedding my old life like a skin. I even forgot the sketches I had drawn and framed, and all my old photographs.
I stood behind you, watching. You looked heavy on your hands and knees, like a piece of ancient stone planted firm on the earth. Your head was halfway in the cupboard, inquisitively searching in an unknown territory, when you reached forward with one arm and retrieved something. I could not see immediately, but without retracting your head, you slid it back past your kneeling body and placed it behind you—a colander. The one we would use to strain elderflower and blackberries later in the year. We had not made elderflower cordial together, but you promised me that when it bloomed in May or June, we would pick it together and make our own. The colander trailed a neglectful thread of an old cobweb; a relic of your life before I moved in with you, shoved to the back of a cupboard. Where do all these things come from? I continued watching you search for whatever it was you wanted. Then as if all the effort was worth it, you casually pulled a pack of brown luggage labels from the cupboard, stood up awkwardly and left me to tidy the mess you had left behind.
Your moods could test me to the limit. It was the silence within you that viciously penetrated me. I endured those lingering days when you pretended I did not exist, not responding to my voice or moving away when I tried to touch you. You turned me into a ghost. Each time I heard the door close and your footsteps recede to your workshop, you took a thread within me and uncoiled it. When I tempted you with my warm body on yours, you would lie motionless like a cold corpse until I sighed and moved off you. It was only when I was close to breaking that you’d switch back to being my sweet love, an ember within you flaring to give back to me the warmth I had expended.
You had lived in this house with a whole host of other women whom I tried not to think about. I imagined their footsteps echoing on the slate tiles and the house filling up with more and more belongings. Where there is space, it will be filled. I had filled that space, hadn’t I? You reassured me it
was my home as well as yours.
I could see that neither you, nor previous residents, enjoyed gardening; the weeds had spread like wild fire. Even after I started clearing them, I swear they waited until I turned my back and spurted like triffids from the cracks, as if playing a childhood game.
Tendrils pushed up through the paving slabs and along the stone wall. Ivy twined its flat, shiny hearts across any surface it could find. I ripped at its suckered ropes held fast like a captain’s oath, great ribbons of emerald green suffocating the tree trunks as if the ground had birthed a monster with ravenous veins. A climbing ladder like Jack’s beanstalk would burst to the sky-giants if I didn’t stop it, and once I started ripping and clearing the neverending tangle of weeds, it became a meditative obsession that I could not contain; I needed to strip back to the bare bones of the garden.
Bindweed, goose grass, nettle, all rampant and verdant, fought back spitefully, sticking thorns in my fingers as I tried to wrench the stubborn roots. When I paused, I saw the futility of my efforts. No matter how much I tore at it, it would renew and re-grow. I may as well have been a mere lone insect in this vast jungle. So I retreated, cutting the lawn up to the edges and leaving the wildness to dip down to the rhynes and woodland and fields that surrounded our home.
“Land—it’s the only thing that lasts, Miss Scarlett!” you faked a mock Irish accent like Scarlett O’Hara’s father and waved a branch at me. But was it? What if we could last forever too, you and I? What if we could stave off the ravages of time to become our own legends? That was when I began feeling sick in the mornings and my belly felt rock hard. I thought of what Rhett had said on the phone. Knocked up. Just like him to be so crass and so correct at the same time.