Broken Things (Salt Modern Fiction)

by Padrika Tarrant

  Sleeper

  AT THREE O’CLOCK in the morning, Charlotte turns, half-wakes; the springs of her little bed creak as she folds her arms and draws her knees up tight. Ward Nineteen is quiet; in eleven cubicles, people are sleeping.

  In the twelfth, a girl is crouched on the floor beside her bed, smoking a fag, although it’s not allowed. Her hair is waist-length and very tangled. She’s pregnant, although she doesn’t know it yet.

  Charlotte knows it though, as she sleeps. That babe is curled like a fern, tiny as a fingertip; it feels Charlotte, feels her and flicks its little budding limbs. Charlotte’s heartbeat replies like a lullaby.

  The girl with tangled hair has bandages on her arms. She is looking at the floor, where the pattern on the carpet looks like scattered words. The night is very long; beyond the walls, the darkness stirs dry leaves by the fire escape.

  At four o’clock the atmosphere is thin. Charlotte doesn’t mind; she is dreaming of water, and her dreams bathe Ward Nineteen in soft, clean air. The girl with tangled hair is in her bed now, holding her eyes shut by willpower alone. The babe inside her is thinking secret thoughts; Charlotte hears them and she smiles.

  The dormitory door opens then, impossibly quietly, spreading white-yellow light along the floors and the curtains that mark out each bed space. The curtains are thick and orange and flame-retardant. A nurse without a uniform slides each one open in turn, peeks at every sleeping face with a pen-torch.

  Charlotte feels the light against her eyelids, and her dream deepens. Without struggling, she pushes her back straight and turns onto her stomach. The nurse has a little clot of cancer gathering in her breast; Charlotte chides it, gently, like a misbehaving toddler. It is ashamed then, and begins to melt away. Charlotte sleeps in silence, with her grey hair thick in her face, and her hands spread out, trusting.

  At six, the songbirds ask permission. To tell them yes, Charlotte throws out an arm, as if the gesture meant nothing at all; then she unsmoothes a swathe of blanket with her knee. The birds are grateful; they begin to sing.

  At six o’clock, the girl with tangled hair is up again, and her face is shiny with crying. With no dressing gown to wear, she gets out of her bed and creeps into the bright corridor.

  She hesitates at the nurses’ station, then treads the dull floor as far as the smoke room. It is hours until medication. She wonders how she will cope. Charlotte is breathing like the ocean, and knows that she will manage somehow.

  Then, all of a sudden, it’s seven o’clock, and the winter night might not last forever after all. Charlotte is sleeping still, in her hospital-issue nightshirt, and while she sleeps, her face is uncreased and young and not afraid.

  When she sleeps, her bed is warm, and the universe grows a little warmer with it. All this is true: she is all energy and love when she is sleeping, but when Charlotte is awake, she knows nothing of it.

  Still, at half past seven, the dawn uncloaks the Drayton High Road and pales the windows of Ward Nineteen. Soon, the dayshift will park their cars in the cold and arrive in their coats and make coffee before the eight o’clock handover. They will talk of last night’s telly and bitch about an auxiliary who’s still off sick, and the night staff will rub their noses and yawn.

  Soon, the curtains will be opened in the dorm, and the bell will ring for breakfast and pills. The people will wake up, frightened, depressed, angry, all trying their best or not at all. They will make Charlotte get out of bed and she will cry and flinch and whisper to herself, but it is only because of her that the earth still revolves on its perfect, crooked axis. It is only because of Charlotte.

  Waiting

  THE POST IS late on Stanley Avenue; it’s where the man who does the Thorpe Road route ends his shift. The post is late, and so is the dawn on winter mornings. The post is late at number 10, where the house has been carved into joints, and every door along the hallway is stopped up with a Yale lock.

  The letters flump dryly into a thick wire cage, and the landlady creeps down the stairs like a spider in slippers. She is holding a key, and she turns her wrist to undo the padlock. Then, she stands in hallway, and looks through a sheaf of envelopes. Her husband’s gone out for a paper, and he’s been ages. She is annoyed.

  There’s a water bill for the house, and BT quarterlies for each bedsit. She sorts them into little piles along the dresser, one for every room. There’s a postcard for her at 10a, from someone called Maria, who’s in Cypress and is enjoying the sun. the sea and the you-know-what.

  The landlady’s lip tautens like elastic, and she flips it to peer at the picture, which is of half-dressed skinny people and water of an unhealthy blue. A colour, the landlady thinks, that you’d find in a bag of sweets. She stands there, frowning, until she comes to a decision; then, she tears the postcard from Maria in two, and tucks the bits into the pocket of her cardigan.

  The rest of the morning’s mail is secured in brown envelopes, and they cannot be investigated even if held up to the light, so the landlady concedes defeat on these, and begins to stuff them into the letter racks screwed side by side on the wall. Two for 10a, one for 10b, five for 10c. (This is excessive, she thinks. Whatever is he up to in there?)

  The landlady herself, and her husband, live in 10d, in the attic floor, where the roof slices the wall off into slopes. She patters slowly up the stairs and closes her door quietly, the way she tells her tenants to. She does not slam it; merely closes it, decently, avoiding unreasonable noise, and applies the chain to the inside for security.

  Her husband only nipped out for the paper. He is taking forever; she is angry. The landlady goes to his armchair, where there is a cup of coffee on the table, untouched and tepid and growing a milky skin.

  She tsks and picks it up; the surface cracks into thin icebergs that float and collide on the liquid’s surface. She holds her face tight as she conveys it to the sink, like a radioactive thing held out at arm’s length with tongs.

  The landlady washes Larry’s cup with a tiny drop of Morning Fresh, rinses it, then places it on the draining board, upside-down. Then she stands at the sink with her fingers braced against the bottom of the basin, looking out of the window. Larry is taking his own sweet time.

  She will have to go out herself and buy milk, as he’s not back yet. Probably, when he does turn up, he’ll have bought milk too and they’ll have too much to drink and it’ll be wasted. The last time she saw him, he was whitefaced and tense, and sweat was rolling down his neck from the pain.

  All the nagging she had in her had done no mite of good. His cough grew more and more, and, although he denied it, he seemed to hurt everywhere: his back, his belly, his legs, even. He did not believe in doctors, butchers the lot of them; and pills stuck against his throat and gave him bellyache.

  So, over months, he went away from her; he’d sit inside the fortress of himself, spitting and splitting from pain and fear, and fury at the way in which she went on at him.

  Before he nipped out for his paper, she’d heard him beside her in bed; heard him all night, breathing and wincing and muttering curses, lying stiff as a twig all that time. He was up before five; said he was going to get the Mail because they do a good telly supplement. He had taken the car, even though the Esso garage is on the Yarmouth Road, and that’s just a matter of yards. He isn’t back yet. She tightens her knuckles and steps away to fetch her coat.

  The landlady dons her coat like a carapace; the sheepskin makes a better layer than her own skin, which is transparent and thin. Her hair is fine and bluerinsed; the pink curve of her scalp shows right through. She puts her rainhood over her little round head, and fastens it securely beneath her chin. It isn’t raining, but there’s a nasty wind, so she won’t look too peculiar with it on. She needs to have something between herself and the sky. Then, she pulls on her big black shoes, and her calf leather gloves, and she goes out of the door.

  As she is tiptoeing dow
nstairs, the door shuts with a bang; the landlady jumps and grips her purse between her two hands, but it isn’t Larry. The inner door to 10a smacks just as loudly; it’s that insolent girl with a friend called Maria, slamming around as if she owns the place.

  The landlady is furious and she arrives on the bottom hallway shaking like a Jack Russell. She hovers outside 10a for a whole five minutes, eavesdropping, smirking and sneering at the careless sounds of feet and kettle, then singing when she puts the radio on. If that foolish woman only knew how awful she sounded, all elephant feet and off-key music. The landlady laughs quietly, and then lets herself out, watching for cyclists on the pavement. She passes a gang of children at the corner of the road; they hoot and jeer at her furious, glaring face.

  Larry is still not back when she returns. Four months is an awfully long time to take when you only nipped out for a newspaper. She is livid, but still she sets out both their lunches on the table. It’s a nice bit of pork pie, and half a tomato each, and a spoonful of the piccalilli that he especially likes. She begins without him.

  Larry is living it up at sea, soothed and softened by the salty waves; and now his body is as supple as kelp, tumour and all. Larry isn’t hurting at all, and the little fishes have helped themselves to the gold from his teeth and his Barclaycard.

  Larry went all the way to Cromer for his newspaper, and he did the crossword on the pier. And, when he was done, he was done. He folded it up in his coat pocket, and breathed in really hard, noting the pain, reeling with the pain, making his choice through, and with, and because of the pain.

  After that, he jumped, and by lucky chance got snaggled with some netting behind one of the huge wooden struts. And there, Larry’s happy enough, out of the rain and the lines from crabbers, waving in the tides and waving them out again. He isn’t back in time for lunch.

  The landlady chews rapidly and thoroughly, and ends her meal with a couple of spearmint Rennies. Larry’s plate is by Larry’s chair, its glisten and the scent of cured, cooked pork lurking in the living room. She lets in the fresh air to chase it away, hissing and muttering about her wretched useless husband, and she brews two fresh cups of tea.

  At half past one, she turns on the television, sound muted, subtitles on, so she can watch, and listen to the tenants at the same time. One stupid woman talks to another stupid woman about postnatal depression, and then the adverts are all about stairlifts.

  At two the tenant from number 10a goes out. The landlady can tell it’s her by the clatter of her heels, and the time in seconds between the bedsit door closing and the main house door banging shut.

  The landlady is delighted; she’s sure now, after a week of record-keeping, that she has either left her job or been dismissed from it. Bold as you like, the woman had been coming and going from her house at all hours of the daytime, so she was sure as eggs not working full-time at the Thomas Cook on the high street as she claimed.

  The landlady balanced her special notepaper on the arm of her chair, and composed a letter, in which she demanded explanation. If she was in fact jobless, the landlady wanted to know by what means, pray, did she propose to pay the rent, late as it was by a full nine days already? He only went out for a paper. She is furious.

  The landlady stands outside 10a once more, letter in hand. Thoughtfully, she tries the handle, but it’s locked, of course. The landlady shows her teeth, then stoops to push it under the door. She doesn’t want Maria’s friend to wait until morning to discover that she has a new letter. She imagines her coming home from the pub, laughing into her mobile phone, then bending on her stilettos to catch the landlady’s note from the carpet.

  The landlady straightens up, pleased, and wonders where the devil Larry has got to. Without quite meaning to, she goes to the front door to see if he is coming down the road right now. As she is holding it open, and looking, a kid from a garden opposite chucks a conker and it hits the landlady in the glasses. She gives him a look of pure hatred, but he stares her out until she turns to go back inside.

  Upstairs, while the kettle’s boiling for Larry’s chicken gravy, she logs the child’s assault in her spiral bound book, with date and time and injuries received, as part of her campaign to get the little monster back into care. Even by bedtime, Larry isn’t home.

  Underpass

  THIS IS THE music of my death: the tunnel-echoes of my breathing, and the rhythmic yap and snarl of a dog. This is the place of my death: the underpass that ducks below the river; the joint between worlds.

  I knew they’d come for me. I just turned twenty-six, which is twice thirteen and an evil number. This is a dangerous city; I know this full well. I was always careful not to leave traces for the bad things to follow. I flushed uneaten food down the toilet, and I never gave people eye contact. I burnt till receipts with matches. But the bad things always get you in the end. Although I tried to think quietly, lied when I was asked my name, they get to know the smell of you, and then you’re done for. They always want to take you away with them.

  The underworld is not as far away as you’d think; it’s spread against the city like cellophane: thin, and shiny; transparent. You can hear the sound of horses when you stand by the lifts in the Castle Mall, and women with long white hair can turn into birds if they want to. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, in the Memorial Gardens, but the police hushed it up, and the Evening News wouldn’t print my letter.

  I hadn’t been concentrating today, not enough. The Poundland bags were cutting the palms of my hands with their handles; I’d bought broken biscuits and bubble bath and tights that would ladder in minutes. I’m careful with money; I don’t suppose it matters now. I used to have a coffee jar with 20ps in, to save for electric cards, back when I was alive.

  He is stalking around me in circles, one way and then doubling back, cutting off three sides of the tunnel. I’m stranded where the underpass splits four ways, turning slowly to face him, my shopping spilled at my feet. He is glossy-black like broken coal and proud as an idol.

  I can feel the river above my head: greasy and slow, and somehow beneath some different sky than the one I left outside the underpass. The current drags sideways at your skin. There’s only one way he’ll let me go, and that is forward, across the water that’s surging past the ceiling, and through to where the air is much too thick.

  The black dog was a dropped glove in the high street, lying in the gutter and getting wet. I stopped for a moment to pick it up; something about the touch of it, the veiny stitching on its empty palm made me flinch. I looked around for somewhere to put it, and I plonked it on the top of a postbox, grateful to let the thing go. I was careless, gave him my scent. I have only myself to blame.

  I glance behind me, just for a second, because the black dog is sitting on his haunches now, and I wonder if I could run, but then he’s up and snap-snapping at my face again. I lean away from him and catch my ankle on a Tesco bag; before I know it, I have taken another step backward, one step further across the river. He puts his head on one side and lolls his tongue. The underpass becomes just a little bit less real. I find that I am crying.

  The black dog was the cola in a paper cup; it was waiting on the table in McDonald’s when I came over with a milkshake and a doughnut. I knocked it over with the corner of my tray, and it spread darkly over the table as I sat down. I sighed, and got up to fetch a tissue, but when I came back the table was dry.

  At first I didn’t know that he was a dog. By the Jet garage he was only a shadow, the movement at the corner of your eye that you don’t quite resister. Once, he was a threat of hail in the sky; the second time, a baby in a black knitted bonnet; then he was a taxicab, a silhouetted pigeon, and the shadow under a market researcher’s eyes.

  He is gorgeous as death, and tall as my chest. The inside of his mouth is an anatomical pink, and his teeth are small and blunt, and neat as dentures. He pulls his lip right off them once in a while, and shakes his head to sh
ed a string of drool. He yaps and then snarls again; yaps and snarls.

  I thought he was a rat in the car park, or a little cat or something, but by the time I was walking through the mall I knew that he was a dog. He wasn’t hiding any more, just loping along, a few feet behind me with his nose low to the floor. The people that I passed didn’t seem to notice him: he weaved easily among them and I couldn’t get rid of him on the escalator.

  On Gentlemen’s Walk, he began to herd me, forcing me like some dark shepherd until I met the mouth of the underpass. The road, the grass verges, the noises around me grew vague and metally, like the reflection of a world on polished copper, with only the path in front of me seeming quite there. And then, it dawned on me for the first time: Saint Stephen’s Street is the portal to hell.

  When I understood this, it was way too late, and he was driving me into the underpass’s narrow throat. I was cowering backwards now, staggering past the flower stall with my feet among my plastic bags, concerned only that if I tripped he’d have me by the face. I managed to stop myself where the pathway broke into a crossroads, halfway over the river. That’s where I’m standing now.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw someone coming: a woman with a little child. I whispered to her for help; she stared at me for just one second, and then she put her head down against her scarf and she turned the buggy round, and hurried back the way she’d come. I called after her, loud as I dared: Please help me, I said to the back of her coat, Please help, because the dog is here and he’ll make me cross the river into hell. All I got were the squeaking wheels of the pushchair and dwindling footsteps.

  I must have been here all night; daylight is blinding the exit beyond the river. The milk has drained from the plastic bottle that I stood on, the last time that I tripped. I’m tired now, too tired to be frightened. All there is left for me are the rhythmic yap and snarl of a dog and the river, the joint between worlds. This is the place of my death.