by Naomi Booth
The man’s still looking at me. His voice is barely audible: a horrible sound cracks out of him. He doesn’t make words at first: it’s just his gummy mouth, trying to find traction. He gulps a couple of times, and then he spits it out: ‘Sorry.’ It’s the driest, ugliest word I’ve ever heard.
‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ I say. ‘We can help you sort all this out, if you want us to. I just need to know if you’ve seen Pete.’
The man’s head lolls back down onto his chest, but, ever so slowly, he raises his left arm. Scarecrow-like, his hand hangs from his wrist, and he points with a finger over to my right, to the darkest part of the house.
I put my sleeve back over my mouth, press it firmly over my nose, take a step further in. I can still smell it though, the horrible metallic tang, vivid with faeces now as well. There’s a living-room area over in the darkness, a rug of some kind that looks thick with filth. There’s a couch, an upright museum-piece, and there are two high-backed chairs turned towards it, facing away from me. I take another step in. I’m fighting back a shiver of nausea, but I have to see, I have to look more closely, because there’s something in that chair over to the right of me, there’s a wisp of white hair above the seat and, as I move towards it, I can see something claw-like – a hand, a set of nails, digging-in, holding hard onto the end of the arm-rest. Christ. Fucking Christ. It’s a woman, barely a woman, an emaciated old coot in a dressing gown, hard with rigor mortis, the flesh still on her but wet and red and starting to melt down into the chair, so that you can see the bones in places, the tiny bones of her fingers, braced hard, digging into the chair and, at the end of the fingers, her perfectly lacquered mauve fingernails. My stomach twists but I don’t move. Her face is still mostly intact, so she can’t be that long dead, not in this heat. Her face is the worst: her eyes are wide open. Her eyeballs haven’t yet shrunk, but the vitreous is parching away, making them look like old seafood. She is staring straight ahead, sightless, as if she’s watching a bomb-blast on the other side. The tendons in her neck are braced hard and her cheeks are beginning to clot into gore. The middle of her face is unmistakeable: a white, shiny mask sealing up the nose and mouth. I let myself hope, just for a moment, that I might be wrong. That it’s the spiders who’ve done this, those creatures squatting outside, waiting for death; that some funnel-web has filled her in, entered through her nose and made a home in her wet skull. I take a half-step closer, and then there’s no mistaking it. The mask is her own: a weird, white, fleshy mesh, perfectly intact. Her lips are sealed, her nose is blocked, the skin is stringy and taut and dead still. Cutis.
I don’t scream. I don’t make a single sound. I’m not sure I can even move. My breath is high-up in my chest, coming fast and shallow. I turn my head slowly to look towards the old man, so slowly that I feel as if the scene is an old film full of glitches, slowing, stopping, stopping, stuttering. The old man is still there, and he’s still pointing. Or the film is stuck, and I’m seeing it again and again – I’m trapped in this moment, his arm still pointing over to the corner of the room, the bones of his hand dancing like a marionette’s, only now I see that at the side of him there’s a long gun laid on the floor, an old rifle. The tennis racket we thought we saw.
I need to get out of here, I need to get out of here so fast, but I’m locked to the spot and I turn back to the living-room and follow the man’s gaze, and his drooping arm. It’s then I see the telephone-table. Right at the back of the room, in the corner, an old-fashioned telephone-table with an adjacent seat. And an old telephone sits there, a phone with a circular face, just sitting there, all prim and neat and ready to dial. I could cry at the sight of it. I can call the hospital, and find out what’s happened to Pete, and work my way out of here, and get someone to help with all of this.
‘I need to use your phone, mate,’ I say. ‘It’s not about your wife. I’m not interested in your wife. It’s just, I’m in trouble, and I need to call the hospital.’
‘Dead,’ the old man says. ‘Telephone’s bloody dead. Forgot, didn’t I? He couldn’t have used it anyway. Bloody idiot.’ His scarecrow hand slowly and repeatedly hits the side of his own head. ‘I forgot.’ He starts to moan, an awful, low, keening sound. ‘Didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.’
‘He? Do you mean Pete? Did Pete try to use the phone?’
‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘Sorry mate.’ And he carries on talking, and I can’t listen to the words because I’m walking, I’m walking towards the phone, and there, keeled over behind the sofa, is another body.
I laugh. That’s what happens next. I hear myself laugh. Bloody Pete, bloody curled up on the floor. I recognise his t-shirt, and the round of his back, and I recognise the warm brown muscles of his calves. The way he’s curled over means that I can’t see his face. But I can see the soles of his shoes, and the nape of his neck, and the backs of his knees. And all around him is a shimmering pool. The smell is so strong, the smell of fresh blood and fat. The smell of a butcher’s shop.
‘Pete.’ The word comes out as a whisper at first, as shallow as my breath. Then I’m shouting it. ‘Pete. Pete, get up, Pete.’ I’m round the back of the sofa now, kicking Pete from behind. ‘Fucking get up Pete, stop pissing about.’ Pete just takes the impact, his head nodding again and again as I kick him. And the pool around him dances and splashes up over my feet, bright, bright red.
And all the time the man is talking at me in the background, chuntering away as though he can’t stop, barely sensible, ‘…and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, he wouldn’t just go away… and I told him not to come in, I told him me and Susan didn’t want disturbing… you can shoot a man if he’s in your house… we didn’t want disturbing, can’t have them interfering, I can’t have them trying to take her away again… and he wouldn’t stop… after the shot, he went down bloody hard, he really went down… didn’t think it’d hit him… I didn’t mean to… he went down so bloody hard… and he was still talking, saying “Alice, Alice,” over and over, “you’ve got to help my Alice”…’
I kneel down in the blood and I run my hands through Pete’s hair. His scalp is still warm. I can’t look at his face.
* * *
When the next pain hits, I’m out on the threshold of the man’s house. I manage to get myself off his porch and on to the lawn before I vomit. I stay there for a while, on my hands and knees in the long grass, while the pain works through me. I can still hear the man’s voice, warbling on. You can kill a man who comes into your house… I didn’t mean to. Something moves in the long grass close by and I catch the stink of cat piss: yellow eyes gleam at me through the foliage with all the compassion of an alligator. I will not give birth here; I will not die on this lawn and let myself be eaten by his mangy fucking pussycat. I have to move, I have to put everything else out of my mind and focus on moving.
When the pain has passed, I’m back on the road. After that house, after that dark, filthy space, the world feels even bigger and brighter and more horrifying. The sky rises above me, burning blue all the way up to that blistering sun, and beyond that to god knows what, to those impossible, infinite spaces hurtling beyond. I lock my eyes back down to the horizon. But there’s nothing comforting there either: the Blue Mountains sprawl ahead of me, further than I can properly imagine, hundreds of thousands of miles of rock and forest and swamp. And seeing the massive outline of the mountains makes me think of how much is below them too: how many miles of compacted dirt and bone and nickel are under my feet before you get to the glittering centre that once burned so hard it convulsed these mountains up and out, birthing them with such force that they stand here still: violent effigies of that first fire. It’s hot, it’s too hot. There is no air. There is not air enough to make all this breathable. I can feel my lips cracking. But I keep on up towards Mountain View. Everything is behind me now. I know where I need to be. I’ve got to get myself somewhere small and dark and cool. I need to get back to the house, I need to hide myself away, to fold myself up into the tini
est space I can find. I lurch forwards in this awful stumble-run. I’m moving as best as I can, the weight in my body pulling me forward, making me gallop, then tumble, again and again, almost falling, staggering, my hands grazing the things I stumble against: the sharp edges of old paint, hardened and peeling away from the fence at the side of the road, the tarmac of the pavement as I wheel forwards, almost falling flat on my stomach, coming to rest on my hands and knees, my palms burning. I push myself up. I go again, tumbling at least twice more. No cars pass me now, though two water planes fly overhead, low to the ground, like they do when there are bush fires.
When I get back to the house the front door is wide open. I must have left it this way, demented in my rush to get out. It’s obscene, the house hinged-open like this, totally exposed to this vast, teeming, diseased world. I’m inside lickety-split and I slam the door behind me. The living-room is so full of light. It’s irradiated in the midday sun, everything white and dead: the beer bottles from last night, Pete’s sweater discarded over a chair, his trainers kicked off at the side of the room. We should have gotten blinds. I should have got curtains. I could tape up paper, but the light would still find its way through. I turn around and around in the room. I’ve got to find a place to hide, a small, dark hole I can disappear into. The strangest thoughts flash through my mind, as brief, mad moments of hope: I think about going up to our bedroom and dragging out our biggest suitcase, curling up inside it, and being zipped in. I imagine waiting until night falls, going out into the yard and digging myself a grave. I’ll climb in and splutter out this thing inside me, both of us a secret in the cool, wet darkness, and then I’ll cover us over and we’ll disappear into the earth. I know these things can’t happen. I know I can’t dig a hole or contort myself inside a case. It’s happening too quickly, it’s pushing so hard now, and I can’t help but push back, and everything feels like it’s about to come apart.
It’s then that I remember the small space under the stairs, a tiny dark triangle of a hole that we haven’t yet filled with our things. I dart towards it as the pain subsides. There’s a naked bulb descending from above, the underside of the stairs making a staggered ceiling like one of those geometrically impossible paintings. It’s a space too small for a human body, and it’s about to be crammed full of two. I don’t try the light switch. I just push myself in, folding my body into the space, my coccyx against the floor, my head jammed against the inverse of a step, my legs pushed upwards against the wall, and I pull the door closed behind me. There’s still a tiny crack of light, but the rest of the space is dark enough to dull my vision so that I don’t have to see my body. The weight in my stomach has moved: ordinarily I’d be choked in this position, but everything is moving downwards now. I let my head rest against the cool plaster and I groan, long and hard. If I could howl I would: I don’t have the energy. I’ll take a nap, I think, a tiny little nap, and all of this will fade into dream, and then I’ll wake up and the last few hours will melt away and me and Pete will be back in bed together, planning our escape.
I close my eyes and try to blank myself out. In the dark I see the curve of Pete’s back on the old man’s floor again. Where was the shot? I saw the blood, thin and bright as fine wine, but not the wound. It must have been in his belly, he must have folded himself over the bullet. I should have looked at his face. I should have made sure his eyes were closed. I should have closed them with my fingertips and kissed them, kissed the folds of his eyes like he used to kiss mine, so tender, before we went to sleep. How could I have left him there? Pete would never have left me. He’d have stayed with me, he’d have carried me up the road and kept me close to him. All the times that he’s kept me close. Not just after my mother had gone; my whole life, our whole lives, he’s kept me so close. We’re nine, and I’m going to a new school, and I tell him that I don’t like the walk home, that trucks rush past on the main road and the older boys shout things at me. And the next day I see him, a distance off, trailing me the whole way home on his bike. He stays close to me until I tell him to stop, until I tell him it’s weird, and he looks hurt and confused. We’re fourteen and we’ve been sent home from school because a storm is coming, a massive storm that has brought flash floods in the north. I’m walking home with friends when the light changes: the sky turns dark and the air makes us suddenly shiver. We pick up our pace, but the sky moves more quickly and, even before the rain hits us, the drains start to gurgle with the water that is coming. We start running, and then somehow Pete is beside me. ‘Keep hold of me, Ali,’ he says, gripping me hard, ‘we need to run faster,’ and before I know it we are home and Pete is putting bags of flour against my mother’s door and lining the window frames with towels, and he holds our hands as the flood waters surge through the estate, brown and foaming. The water’s gone as quickly as it came and it leaves behind a horrible trail of sewage and trash and car parts and street signs. ‘No one’s going anywhere,’ Pete says, proud of himself as our protector. ‘Until I’ve been out and checked we’ve got the all clear.’ We’re nineteen and we’re camping at the edge of the bush. A place he’s been to before, with his brother and father. A place he wants to show me. We hike in the day, and he packs things for us to eat along the way. The heat makes me feel full, so I won’t eat the semolina cake his mother has given us. ‘You’ll get bonk,’ he says. ‘Like cyclists. Your legs will suddenly give way.’ We keep walking until we find a small lake, hidden in a depression at the foot of the mountains. ‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is the most magical place I’ve ever been. This is what I wanted you to see.’ And he kisses me, shyly, and turns around in the open space, tilting his face up to the sun. The dust underfoot is red; the pool is bright blue and still as glass. Tall orange flowers surround the water, their blooms like orbs of fire. It’s strange, this place, but Pete loves it. We sit on rocks and throw pebbles into the lake, which swallows them with barely a ripple. And Pete balls the semolina cake into little patties and feeds them to me as if I’m a tiny chick. That night we curl up in our tent and he talks into my hair, barely audible, when he thinks I’m asleep. ‘You’re my best thing, Alice,’ he says, ‘you’re my most precious thing.’
There’s a new dart of pain, hard and deathly through my pelvis. I gag again and nothing comes up. I’m cold and shivery now and the old sensations are back, the needling across my stomach and down through my pelvis. It’s trying to prise me apart, this thing inside me, and I can feel it moving downwards, I can feel the force of it tearing at me.
And suddenly I need to let it out, I need to open my legs and push as hard as I can to get this thing out of me. I’ve got to get out of the closet. I barge the door open and fall out into the living-room. I pull my knees up to my chest and I start to dig at my own flesh, pulling myself apart. The sensation isn’t right; it feels as though I’m touching myself with gloves on. My skin is numb and I can’t feel my own hands across my pubis. But I can feel the shape of a head, bulging between my legs, and I cup it in my hands; my hands move across numb flesh, again and again. And again. There’s no opening. There’s no opening in the skin. I run my fingers back and forth, searching, but I can only find a ridge of skin, rising above the baby’s head. Fucking Christ. I crawl to the kitchen, looking for something I can use as a mirror so I can see what’s going on, so I can see if this is really happening or if it’s some kind of birthing delirium. I’ve heard that people see things when they’re giving birth, that they say strange things, that time loses all meaning. Who’s to say I’m not hallucinating?
I’ve got to check. I stagger upright. There isn’t anything I can use in here. I turn around and the light catches on a large mirror hanging back in the living-room. It’s not easy to get it down from the wall, but once I have it, I lean it against the boxes in the corner of the room and slowly lower myself in front of it. I take a deep breath. I open my legs and stare hard at my reflection. The woman there is barely recognisable: her hair hangs in damp clumps and her face is flushed, split veins running like red spid
ers across her cheeks. The rest of her skin looks sallow. Her eyes are dark and sunken; her legs are streaked with gore and her feet are horrible – they’re covered in dried blood, the skin stained to leather. I lean in to look at my reflection more closely, to see if what I can feel is true. And, as I search and search, all I can find is skin, new skin, skin meshing into new fabric. And there it is, I can see it in the mirror, a newly-knitted thin white seam between my legs. My fingers scramble at it over and over, looking for a snag or a break. There is none. And it’s what I always feared, it’s what I tried to outrun but can’t: I’m sealed, I’m sealing up, I’m being wrapped inside myself. I can feel the round weight of the baby’s skull pressing into my hand, pushing to come out. And inside, I can feel it pressing on the inside too: a bright burning sensation, the bones of my pelvis pulling apart and being held fast.