Male Tears

by Benjamin Myers

  Her husband had long since stopped accompanying her. Once, they had been young and in love, and their future had been a bright ball of fire as certain as the burning sun, and they had climbed the hill with a blanket and a basket and made a day of it, stepping hand in hand, like generations of couples before them. Then they had stripped and swum and dried off on the rocks that lined the giant basin; rocks chiselled and shaped by the rough callused hands of rough callous men born into a century already alien today.

  As the water lapped at shoes inappropriate for the terrain, she stooped and washed the stains from her hands. She watched the dark-brown patches come alive again and then drip from her skin, one red droplet at a time, diluting into nothingness, two dozen drops amongst fifty thousand square metres of water.

  She kicked off her pumps and slowly began to remove her clothes. She saw the flecks and droplets on her blouse. The dried dots as mute reminders. She felt too the throbbing in her knuckles and wrists. She touched the jagged, crusted graze on her neck that looked like a Morse code message scratched into her skin, and inspected the fading marks left by digits that had curled too tightly around forearms and loose biceps.

  As she folded her garments she tried not to look at a body she barely recognised. She felt her way around folds and ripples that she did not remember, but which mapped a body near ruined by childbirth. His words, not hers: Birthing has ruined you. Ruined it.

  There had been no turning moment – no single deciding factor – but rather a series of barbed comments, laden silences and the occasional burst of noise or movement that had seemed too large and complicated for their restricted domestic life. The collapse of what once was had been comprised of dozens of gestures, scores of things left unsaid and hundreds of resentments spread over the thousands of days that all stacked up to create millions of tiny moments of muffled misery. Drink had played its part too – him, not her – though it had only brought out what was already there: a nasty streak that had spread within him like rust. This bitterness had become a parasite that strangled any compassion she still believed he must once have had.

  She had watched the steady souring of this man she’d mistakenly thrown her lot in with.

  She had swum here as a child. She had played and paddled and splashed here. Warm sticky pop and wasps and crisps you could wear on your fingers like rings. Dragonflies scudding low across the water. T-shirt suntans. Insect bites. The evaporating vapour trails of distant planes.

  The water bit as she walked into it. Snapped at her. She felt the shock of it in the tiny bones in her feet and then in her ankles and running up through her legs.

  She had not slept and she needed this jolt.

  Only as the reservoir took her breath away did she realise that this was why she had left the house with its curtains closed and the duvet balled and tangled and stained and clotted, a chair upended and the kitchen drawer hanging open, to walk through town just as the sky was streaking with the first tendrils of morning, then on up the hill to step silently into this vast black body of water: because she had needed to feel the cold water quicken her pulse. To move beyond intuition or instinct and instead experience the visceral.

  She disturbed the perfect stillness and let herself fall forward, half diving and half flopping into it. They say that the submerging of the heart is the hardest part. Once that has felt the shock of the cold, then the rest of the body follows. The blood pumps, the skin stiffens and dimples.

  She put her heart beneath the meniscus and held it there, then went all the way under. Her senses rushed to readjust.

  When she emerged, the woman pulled herself forward with a breaststroke. As a teenager she had been a strong swimmer. Athletic, even. She had had a body suited to it and a northern constitution untroubled by the challenging elements. She was not one of those who broke the ice in winter to prove something to others, yet she could always withstand a level of coldness that others had withdrawn from. She could withstand many more things then, but time and circumstance had chipped away at her resistance until she felt she could no longer breathe and something snapped.

  The computer. That was to blame too, along with many other things. The amount of time he spent on it, pretending to be working on his ‘project’, an amorphous pursuit whose content and purpose had changed over the years. First it was documenting the birdlife of the upland way, and then it was researching a book about the history of all the old mills in the area, then building a website about myths and legends of the valley. Then something about real ale – perhaps.

  But she knew the truth of it. The adult sites. The films and the photos and the chat rooms. Filth. She would rather he had gone off with someone else than pursue betrayal through quiet neglect. At least affairs were tangible. Actions that warranted reactions.

  Her feet searched for the bottom of the reservoir but they could not find it, so she swam on, out towards the centre. Here, from the middle of this huge hollow on the hilltop, a new view presented itself. Beyond the boulders of the basin’s rim there was nothing visible but water and sky, their colours combining and merging into one sweep of cloud and sunlight, and all around her those shimmering triangles that played upon the surface like shards of a mirror smashed in anger.

  Blood. She felt it coursing around her body as if bubbles were fizzing through her arms and into her fingertips. She felt effervescent, drunk on her own internal fire.

  She thought of the children for the first time since those early hours when the night had slowed and swirled and the house had seemed like an endless new dimension of darkening horror. For a moment she regretted their existence, if only for the repercussions they would have to suffer. Not just the trauma of their losses but also the burden of history. The stigma of a family name from this day forward.

  The woman turned on to her back and saw the shore far off in the distance. She could just make out her shoes neatly placed side by side. The water felt smooth and viscous against her skin, like oil. Like mercury.

  And it wasn’t just the drink or the computer or the moods. Unemployment also. Her having to work and cook and shop and clean while he devoted himself to inertia and cruelty. And he had been cruel – and very good at it too. Manipulative was the word she would use. That ability to twist and control. To wear masks. To deceive.

  There were many things she wished she had said over the years. All those retorts that only ever came later, when her anger had simmered. But instead she had held them inside her. Made herself into a bottle and kept the resentments there, locked away. But bottles pop and bottles break. The pressure builds or something cracks.

  She swam for a long time. She swam with her eyes closed and felt the morning unfurl around her. She felt the full, rising sun on her face and heard the birdsong again. The woman swam until her legs and arms ached and a hunger grew in her stomach like an opening bud.

  In the end, it had been the tiniest thing. A trigger. Certainly nothing that she could have predicted. Not a raised hand but a sneer – the same sneer she had seen a thousand times but would never see again: one of disbelief at the announcement of her avowed intention to educate herself. To better herself. To move her life onwards, beyond him.

  She had rehearsed her announcement for weeks, only for it to be met with a sneer and one word, repeated: You? You?

  A sneer and that one word, and then an object being thrown. Her hand grasping at something. The picture frame, was it? No. It had felt heavier in her hand than that. She couldn’t for the life of her remember what, though. Something that could do damage. And then the fight back. Fists and knuckles and nails. A grappling. Fingers at her throat. A cracked mirror. The kitchen drawer. A frantic hand feeling for something. The cat fleeing. And all the while silence, save only for the sound of their own heavy, awkward breathing and their feet squeaking on the lino. No words. Just a thrusting and then an alien sensation of metal and flesh. Metal into flesh. A final release of pressure, years of it, released like a burst tyre. A puncture. Messy, yet contained. An English ending.r />
  And then the stains drying in the rising morning sun.

  She was as far from land as she could get now. The reservoir surrounded her and she could swim no more. She slowly trod water and kicked her legs just enough to keep her mouth above the surface. Exhaustion pulled at every muscle, then turned her limbs to stone.

  In the far distance she saw the wild moorland grasses bending with the breeze. The water felt colder here. Cold and dark and deep. Perhaps, she thought, the reservoir was not a reservoir at all, but the great, gaping opening of a tunnel that ran for miles into the centre of the earth.

  A tiny feather floated beside her. It was down from a duck or a goose, curled upwards in such a way that it looked sculptural as it lay upon the unbroken surface, only a small part of it actually touching the water. Perfectly buoyant.

  The woman watched it float there, undisturbed, alone, brilliant, white, perhaps the last pure and beautiful thing left in the world.

  A River

  As a boy he tickled trout here. He learned to lift the sleepy fish slowly from the river as if they were sunken silver treasures, raising them like gleaming offerings to the burning sun.

  As a teenager he swam in cool bubbling pools the colour of over-stewed tea and later, as a young man, he returned to propose to his wife on the bankside as the winter water ran by like mercury and hip-flask whiskey warmed their throats.

  Now he has three children and often when he drives along the motorway he remembers the river that flowed where today there is nothing but miles of bitumen, smiling with tears in his eyes as he recalls the way the light hit the fishes’ scales, turning them into bejewelled objects of wonder.

  The Longest, Brightest Day

  The stalks of wheat part as the dogs run ahead into the golden thickness of the field, flushing out whatever creature might be crouched there, cowering in its shallow hollows.

  The woman calls them back as the man steers the swine herd with a flick-crack of a split birch branch behind their ears. One hound returns, but the other has pushed on through the patch that stretches as far as the earth’s undulations allow.

  The woman whistles and the man shouts.

  He grabs the first dog by a knot of skin at the back of its neck and twists it to stillness.

  They see the other hound carve a darting path of flattened grain through the field, and then it stops and everything is still for a moment, and even the swine seem to pause in unison. The sun is beating down on them and they are slothful. They think only of the next shaded pool, the next drink.

  The day hums with more unseen insects than there are stars in the night sky.

  Then something explodes upwards from the wheat field: a fat bird taking clumsy flight. It is too far away for the man to bring down with spear or slingshot.

  And then, a moment later, a hare comes tearing from the wheat and makes for the stubbled open meadow beyond it. The hare is only running at half-speed, the tensile sinews of its hind legs flexing, its nostrils flared and ears cocked to track the frantic steps of the dog that is far behind it, a diminishing dot slowing in the heat.

  ‘Useless hound,’ says the man, but he is already looking around for danger signs. He knows that a cultivated field means people, and people mean trouble, especially if their crop has been trampled upon by strangers driving beasts.

  The woman whistles and this time the dog turns back. They wait for it, and when it comes to heel it is wide-eyed and panting, but they do not let it rest. The man gestures to the hill ahead of them with his split birch stick, and the woman understands.

  They press on.

  They find water and a place for the hogs to drink and to wade in the cool shadows of a leafy overhang.

  The noise they make disturbs a heron, which unfolds its wings and rises flying from its nest. It banks towards the sun, a black shape set against the white glare of the long dry season, its beak stitching the sky with invisible thread.

  The man unwraps a large rag containing nuts and acorns and he scatters them for the pigs, who greedily gulp them, and then he unrolls a stiff hide and they both rest a while.

  When they wake the woman carefully reaches into her pouch and lifts three eggs from a loose basket of protective hawthorn branches.

  At the edge of the trees she crouches and breaks the egg on a rock, then tips the contents on the dry earth. She takes something from her pocket. It is a small branch that she strips of its dried leaves, and these she crumbles and stirs with a stick into the mess while muttering words to herself.

  The woman carefully taps around the crown of the second egg with a flint head until there is a hole and she gives it to the man, who speaks some unheard words to the ground, a private prayer or incantation, and then tips it back and swallows the contents. She does the same, wiping a gluey string from her chin.

  A fistful of nuts and hard dried beans follow. They chew slowly and quietly, crunching them between the jagged surfaces of their worn teeth.

  The dogs lie on their sides near the water, their chests rising and falling.

  The stream is shallow. Many fish hang suspended in the current. They are each of a hand’s length and they dart in different directions when the man bends over and tugs at a clump of cress, shaking the drops from it. He chews a leaf then he gives the woman some.

  He swallows, and squints towards the sun.

  ‘Far?’ he wonders, but she just shrugs and begins to roll up the hide, then pulls the pouch cord over her head to rest on the narrow bone of her shoulder.

  She whistles to the sleeping dogs and their indolent eyes turn in their heads, and then they slowly stand.

  As they walk, the sun is a scowling face that snaps at their heels. The sun stings like nettles on their dirt-dark necks. The sun is the tiny creatures that crawl and fly and feast on flesh, gorging on the thick, wet redness that pulses within skin.

  They lick their lips and their lips taste of river stones. They swallow and swallow again.

  The dogs stop and sigh, their rough tongues unrolling like strips of tanned wrist lagging.

  The sun is harvest-time blisters and skin stripped bare. The sun is the prickles of thorns plucked. The sun is a song that keeps singing. The sky is clear and still and it urges them to join the bones of their fathers.

  They trudge onwards, following the swine that stray across the plain.

  The dogs keep the herd from wandering away and the man and woman adjust the hides, the pouches, the food and the tools that are strapped across their backs.

  They feel exposed out on the plain but know that anyone approaching them will be seen too.

  The trees offer cover but it is also where people have made their homes in clearings made by rooting out stumps, felling trees, setting traps.

  It has not rained for a long time and the green grass is turning yellow. Fissures split the soil and they pass several parched quags where once there was water but now there are only drooping rushes and thickets of wilting nettles.

  As she walks, the woman idly rubs the heads of grass until they turn to dust and then she winds the grass stalks around her fingers. She ties them until they snap or unravel and fall to the ground. She pulls out more long, dry strands and plaits them into tight, neat strips and later she will tie them at eyeline on low branches to help guide the way back.

  The woman has heard stories told of these wide-open quarters being used to grow new things to eat; more produce than a man or woman or family could ever need. She wonders what will await them across the bone-dry plains and if, when they reach that point where the sky meets the land, everything will drop away into a deep black pit of nothingness.

  But the sky keeps going and the land keeps going.

  Through daytime and darktime.

  Going and going.

  Endless.

  He watches her. He looks at the back of her head. He admires the way she walks, the shape of her.

  He remembers how her strong hips feel when he curls his hand around the bone there.

  She is s
killed and brave too. She can craft things and she has the knowledge of the land. Is useful with her hands. She can lift. Navigate. Forage. Manage the animals.

  He feels excited when he sees tiny beads of sweat gather on her top lip, or when she smiles at him from a distance.

  He enjoys watching her peel off her clothes to step into a pool, his eyes lingering on the dark target of the midriff, her brown skin turning golden. Her limbs becoming tangents when submerged.

  The small dark dots on her back, her biceps.

  The fields are the skin of the land.

  Now and then the man and the woman discern the movement of shapes in the distance, and often they are aware of things in the grass, low scuttling creatures questing through the tangled wildness.

  Up above, birds hover and screech, sometimes in great flocks in a perpetual state of reshaping, but at other times solitary species swoop down to snatch at something helpless, and lift it up and away to where the gods sit watching on.

  ‘They say there is much water out there,’ says the woman.

  ‘I told you that,’ comes the man’s reply.

  ‘No. I heard it before, in Father’s stories. So much water, and so deep, that a man could never cross it.’

  ‘The gods made it so.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘It is wasteful to wonder. Better to think about things that matter, like the swine, and what we will get for them.’

  ‘They are good hogs.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, they are.’

  ‘We have reared them well.’

  ‘Well enough.’

  ‘At the circle in the centre of it all someone will want what we have to offer,’ says the woman.

  ‘I hope so,’ says the man. ‘We have been good to the gods, and the gods will be good to us.’