by Katie Hale
I lean against the legs of the easy chair and close my eyes. This is how objects are understood: through touch. Colour and the way an object looks in the light, these come later, like the paint used to decorate a tired house. To understand how an object is made, you have to put these things aside. To understand the truth of it, you have to look at it with your eyes closed.
I let my fingers wander. I explore the shapes and textures of my collection. I learn the precise mechanics of their bodies.
I think of a cloud bank tracing the tops of trees, the way it is both separate to the forest and a part of it. I imagine my hand is a rolling cloud bank, and I’m pushing my fingers through the branches. I am separate from these objects and yet a part of them. I think of myself brushing through soft pine needles to learn about the spaces in between. If I look down, there’s a darkening corridor and a brown carpet running the length of the forest floor.
And I’m falling, falling out of the cloud bank and down through the tangle of trees, down towards that brown-carpeted corridor . . .
I’m in the tunnel now.
I’m running down the tunnel in the Seed Vault.
My footsteps spark and resound off the concrete, off all the corrugated metal, and it’s smaller than I remember, tighter, like a ridged trachea squeezing me down into a lung without enough air.
And now I’m in the vault, packed into the cubby-hole I built from plastic boxes to keep out the worst of the cold, and there’s only the dim glow of the emergency exit sign, and opposite me, Erik.
Both of us standing, now, in the metal and concrete vault room, me and Erik, drawn and gaunt in the half-light. My whole body’s fluttering and burning, though the first time this happened – when it really happened – I was cold. I was so cold my feet felt like iron bars and then they felt like nothing at all.
Which is why we’re standing, Erik and me, standing and stamping the blood back into our frozen feet.
And Erik stops.
And me – the me in the dream, the me who knows where this is leading, what happens next – that me wants to scream at him to keep going, to keep moving, to bully him back into action. But I don’t – I can’t control him. I’m trapped in the dream me, and there’s nothing the dream me can do or say to change what happens next.
He stops. His arms flop to his sides and his face collapses. His eyes are streaming and he looks at me again. He whispers, ‘Is she dead?’
In the crucible of the vault it sounds like a hurricane.
‘Sofia and the baby – are they dead?’
And I tell him yes and I keep stamping.
He’s crying now and I want him to stop, I need him to stop – me then and me now, the real me and the dream me, we both need him to stop, because what is the fucking point?
‘They’re gone,’ he sobs. ‘They’re gone they’re gone they’re gone they’re gone—’
And just as he did the first time, he reaches out to touch me. He lifts a metal-cold arm to touch me because he’s grieving and isn’t that what grieving people do, and apart from our collapse into the tunnel while fleeing the missiles he hasn’t touched another person in months, and because he isn’t a survivor he needs that reminder of what it is to be human.
And because he’s broken and can’t be fixed and I hate him, I spit at his face, ‘Get off!’
But because he’s driven by need and can’t help himself, he puts his raw hand on my cheek.
His skin is clammy and plastic and I pull back. And because his hand is the hand of my father who died alone within days of my mother, and because for a second he’s snivelling Harry Symmonds, and because weakness disgusts me, I shove him away.
In the dream version, he crumples the moment my hands push into his body.
He doesn’t fall, too unsteady with grief even to hold his own weight upright. He doesn’t stumble back into the concrete wall of the vault and hit his head and let it crack the life from him. He doesn’t leak blood across the floor like a split carton. His eyes don’t turn to stone.
In the dream version, none of that needs to happen. In the dream, he’s gone the second I touch him.
I wake and I’m hot.
For a second Erik is there, sprawled on the scrubbed laminate floor, those blank eyes – then I blink and he’s gone.
But the shadow’s still here – the shadow that’s been with me all day, circling the front of my brain. My legs itch in the heat of the kitchen fire. There’s a spasm in my thigh and a feeling of depth in my stomach. My body is tensed like wire, like I could twang and set the whole world shaking. The air tastes thin and metallic.
I think of Monster, how she is a thing unto herself and yet all mine, how she has become a part of me like a daughter and so her touch does not repulse me, how I have teased out and discarded all the feral parts of her – how even when they surface, like today with that filthy magazine, I can turn her away from them. I try to think of her as an extension of me, like an extra limb, a calm part of my body. And I try to picture that calmness flowing from her back into me.
I think of Monster like this and I become a little less storm-tossed.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
I hold my body less stiffly.
I sit like this for a few moments, trying to keep my mind from falling apart. I imagine what would happen if I let it. I imagine all its miniature cogs and springs spilling across the laminate floor.
I breathe in.
I breathe out.
In the quiet, there’s a small, held-back moan from the room above, as if Monster is having a nightmare. It bumps up against my stillness and sets all the taut parts of me quivering again.
Another moan. Dear god, Monster, stop. Dear god, leave my precious peace alone.
But Monster is the rock I have anchored my little boat to. Where she goes, I go, and anyway, we all want to be woken from our nightmares.
The shadow hurries with me back up the stairs, and I’m breathing fast and my legs are itching again. I slam back the door – and it’s Erik, contorted and broken on the bed—
And then it’s Monster – my Monster, disobedient, naked and sprawling, that picture stuck to her thigh. My Monster, my refuge. My words are all jangle and fury and my hand is a wild bird smacking her face.
And I’m out of the room with the picture in my hand and I’m down the stairs and stuffing it onto the kitchen fire and the flames take it and it’s gone – and I do all this quickly so I can’t think about Monster’s face, hiding herself from me in the dark, about her desire, how I smacked her and I saw her face redden and how the ribbon that ran between us snapped.
My knees give way and I rock backwards and forwards by the fire as the world contracts around me.
PART TWO
MONSTER
‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse.’
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
My name is Monster.
I am small and bony like a blackbird. My feet turn in when I walk and there is nearly always dust in my knuckles. My hair is thick and dark. When I sweat it sticks down the back of my neck and I can feel it clinging there.
Mother says I am like water.
You can’t grab hold of water. It has nothing to grip onto. It goes where it wants to, like a thought, except that thoughts can run uphill and water can’t.
There’s nothing true about water. It fills the shape of whatever bowl or cup or tin you put it in. I think what Mother means when she says that I am like water is that I am good at filling the shape I am supposed to fill. What I mean is, Mother cups her hands and I lay myself in them and she thinks that is the shape I am. And I do try to be that shape, the way Mother wants me to be. I try, but I am not very good at it.
Mother thinks all my words belong to her. I know this, because when she tells me a word, she does it like she’s giving me something precious and new. But sometimes the words she gives me are more like things that used to be mine already, so really all Mother i
s doing is giving them back.
She thinks I don’t remember any people but her, either. She thinks I get confused by the pictures of people we find in the City, but I know they are pictures of people who are now all dead. I know that the woman in the shiny picture is also dead, that she died when all the other people died. And I know that now there is only me and Mother.
But I know that there were other people before. I’ve seen them in the buildings where the wolf-dogs haven’t got at them. And I remember a woman.
I don’t know who she is. She’s not Mother, so she must be one of the dead people, but I know that she was more than just a dead person. I remember holding her hand, and how her hand felt warm and happy in mine. And I remember that she was beautiful. Not beautiful like the shiny woman in the picture, but soft like a petal, with big eyes and a small pink smile.
Mother is not beautiful, not like the shiny woman or like the soft woman. Mother is sharp and spiky like me. We are two not-beautiful people trying to keep ourselves alive in a tumbledown farmhouse on the edge of the City. But maybe that is beautiful as well.
The soft woman did not try to keep herself alive. She wasn’t hard and certain like Mother.
I only remember her once. I mean, I only remember one moment of her.
It was on the edge of a city. Not the City where I go now with Mother to find things we can’t get at our farmhouse. A different city. It was next to a river, and the river had a bridge over it. The bridge was high above the river, so that when you stood on the bridge it was always windy, and the river looked hard and small at the bottom.
I remember standing on that bridge with the soft woman. I must have been very small because I had to look almost straight up to see into her face.
She sat me on the railing so that my feet hung over the space, and held onto me so that I wouldn’t fall. Her hand on my back was warm and strong, but it was also shaking. I remember not liking that her hand was shaking. And I remember when I looked down I could see my feet with round blue shoes on, and below them this little fierce grey river.
The soft woman climbed up to sit next to me on the edge of the railing, and she held my hand. Both of us looked down at our feet dangling above the river.
Then she looked at me, and her face was the softest and warmest it had been. And sad. When I think of her now, I know she was sad. But I knew that being next to me made her less sad, the same way that being next to her made me feel warmer. And I knew that she was going to fall off the edge of that high bridge, that she wanted to fall, and that she wanted me to keep holding her hand, and to fall with her. And I wanted to. I wanted to stay next to this warm soft woman even when we were falling from the bridge.
But then her hand in mine was shaking. Her warm hand turned cold and slippery. She shook and shook and now she didn’t feel like the soft woman any more, she felt like a person I didn’t know, and she took a deep breath before she jumped and I let go.
I let go.
I remember her falling, how it took a long time for her to fall but also not very long at all. I remember she made a sound as she fell, like a wolf-dog sound, but sadder. Sometimes when I dream about her, I wake up still hearing that sound, and for a moment I forget how to speak.
I haven’t told Mother about the soft woman. If I told her it would mean sharing the soft woman, and at the moment she is all mine. I clutch her to my chest, wear her hidden under my shirt like the picture of the shiny woman.
Mother doesn’t know about her, either.
*
Mother says the picture is dirty, that the woman is dirty too. But I think it’s clean. When I first held the shiny woman in my hands, her skin was as bright as the cooker flame. What I mean is, she shone so brightly I could see all the dust in my knuckles and the dirt and chicken mess under my nails. For the first time I understood what Mother means when she tells me I’m a filthy child, and for the first time I wanted to be clean.
We are the same and not the same, the shiny woman and me.
She’s lying on her back, propped up on a pillow so that she looks straight at me out of the picture. It’s so clever the way she does that – as if she can really see me. Like she’s so close I could touch her, and when I do, the paper is smooth and warm, the way her skin looks like it ought to feel.
All the way home from the City, I keep her hidden. She waits under my shirt while I boil the potatoes and Mother cooks two cans on the fire.
I can feel her lying there. In the heat of the kitchen, the paper is warm and sticky against my body. I want to touch that sweaty, itchy patch of skin, but Mother might realise and make me take her back to the City. Or maybe she will shout and pull at my hair, and make me burn her on the kitchen fire, the way we burn book pages to make it light. I do not want to make Mother shout at me.
I can make a picture in my head of the shiny woman surrounded by flames, her long clean legs glowing like the copper pan while her big eyes keep looking out. I think it would be a little bit beautiful to see her burning like that, but she’s more beautiful kept like this, on shiny paper – like the vegetables that Mother keeps fresh and new by pickling them in jars so that we have sweet and good things when it’s cold. I think the woman is a sweet and good thing too. I mean, I think she is something I want to keep for as long as I can, which means I can’t let Mother discover her.
As soon as dinner is done, I run upstairs and hide her in the dust under my mattress. I think about her as we wash and dry the dishes, glowing in that room full of grime and dirt. I tell Mother I want to go to bed early.
When I’m alone, after Mother has emptied the wash-water and tucked up my blankets, I take the shiny woman out again. She is so bright that even with just the moon for light I can see her clearly. Those big eyes look at me. They are the colour of tea when Mother lets me put the milk powder in it, and I think if I fall into them they will be warm and milky and I will come apart in them like a sugar cube.
I take off my nightclothes and prop myself up on the pillows. I spread my legs apart like hers with the knees bent up.
Even though I’m not wearing anything, all the firm bits of my body are hot. I put the picture on the top bit of my leg so I can see her, and she sticks to my skin.
I want to copy her, this beautiful woman. I want to see all the ways we are the same.
I try to flatten out my hair on the pillow, but while hers glows red like it’s made of a sunrise, mine is tough and knotted and I can only split it into three damp clumps.
The woman watches me. I think that even if she was real and not just a picture, she would watch me like that. Not blinking, not calling me a silly girl, not telling me to be quicker or to give up trying to be beautiful. She would just watch, swirling me round in those tea-coloured eyes.
One of her hands is on her chest, her pointing finger resting on the red-pink bump there. Her chest is soft and round. I make a bowl of my hand around my own chest. It fits neatly into the space, like my hand is supposed to curl around it. Maybe that’s what hands are made for, for filling. It is my own little curve – smaller, but warm and beautiful like the woman’s. So far, we are the same.
I think Mother is the same, too. Sometimes when she washes or changes into her nightclothes, I see the curves of her chest. I don’t know if they would fill her hands or not. Maybe she doesn’t know either – Mother doesn’t understand how things are beautiful. She doesn’t understand this shiny woman with her hot, glowing skin, or how I need to keep her.
I rest my pointing finger on the red-pink bump of my own chest. The touch of it feels like a shiver, like when the corner of the blanket touches against my skin too lightly, so lightly I almost can’t feel it. It feels like that on the red-pink bump of my chest, and it sends that shivering feeling right through my whole body, so I can feel it even in the hard bottoms of my feet.
The woman’s other hand is touching between her legs. Her skin there is red and swollen, and makes me think of old tomatoes.
I wonder if my skin there is the same colou
r. I’ve never looked at it. Mother always says that part of the body is dirty because it’s where the toilet bits come from. Maybe that’s why Mother called the picture dirty, because the woman is touching those toilet parts with her hands and no paper.
I touch my own toilet parts to see what they feel like. I expect it to feel like ordinary skin, but it’s slippy and warm, like egg yolk. I move my hand around and my whole body tightens. It feels as if everything’s being pulled inwards, like there’s a string that runs right up inside my body and it’s getting tighter and tighter until it will pull me inside out – and I want it to. I want to turn in and out of myself.
I move my hand again, both hands, and it’s like someone has put their finger on the string, like the shiny woman has plucked the string that runs inside the length of my body and it’s shaking, the way the tight string on the gate latch trembles and makes music when I pluck it.
And I can’t stop my voice sounding. My voice is making quiet noises and the shiny woman is watching me with her warm brown eyes, and I’m watching her and I think I really am falling apart in them, or that maybe I have gone and put her on the fire and I’m on it with her and I don’t care – I don’t care—
There’s a bang as the door smacks the bedroom wall, and Mother’s boy-cat screech – ‘What are you doing!’
‘Mother . . .’ It’s like she didn’t exist. Like in that room and the whole of everywhere was only me and the shiny woman – until suddenly there was Mother. Loud, hard, unbeautiful Mother.
‘You bitch!’ she screams, and it isn’t a word I know, so I think of the closest thing I can and make a picture of it in my head.
You bitch, I think. You bridge.
Mother’s word becomes a high place on the edge of a city, and the feeling of hanging over an empty space.