Broken Things (Salt Modern Fiction)

by Padrika Tarrant

  On the bus I caught it digging a split in the seat, dragging out the hairy stuffing with its blade. I shoved it in my bag but I found that it had carved my name in the plastic handrail. By the time I got off, it had put sticky smears all over my English book. I rubbed at the stains with my finger; it smelled like money, or the bars of the climbing frame in the park. Luckily we had to cover all our exercise books with shiny fablon stuff. Maybe it’s in case we got blood on them. I felt sick again at the thought. I dumped the knife in someone’s front garden and wiped my fingers on my skirt.

  I don’t like going home much. School is a pain, in a way, but I do like learning things, even though the other kids say I’m Keen. That’s an insult, but I don’t care, because I like reading; it makes you forget where you are. My favourite word is Sanguine: it is cheerful, and calm; it shushes like the ocean, or the tiny rustle of burning that you hear when you draw on a cigarette. I’m not keen really; I just like forgetting where I am.

  I stayed out as long as I could, walking around, looking in shop windows, until it got so cold I had to go to my house. A light was on in the hallway, and I knew He must have come back. My mum wouldn’t be there; she doesn’t finish work until nine. They open late on a Wednesday, you see, so she has a long shift. It’s just me on Wednesdays; I’m supposed to get my own tea.

  I dithered for a bit; finally I decided to wait outside and watch. The knife was there already, shiny and sly on the low wall. I sat down next to it, wishing that I’d nicked a smoke off my mum before I left for school.

  He was in there; I could feel his sweat and the bristles on his chin. I sat, wondering what to do. After a little while, the door opened, but I didn’t flinch. My dad came out with a holdall on his shoulder; he was limping really badly, gripping the muscle of his thigh.

  I looked at him, silent; he glanced at me sideways, and the knife slithered towards me, protective. I heard the metal scrape of it against the bricks. He didn’t say a word, just struggled off down Lothian Street with his bag. I stood up very slowly, looking at the open door, and then back at the sticky knife. Then I took it indoors.

  Listen

  THE ONLY PERFECT silence in the world is at the centre of perfect noise: the still point in a hurricane, or the core of you when you have been pushed so far that you’re reamed right out. That’s when you are completely calm. The nicest noises are unbroken, rhythmic or continuous; torrential raining or road drills. If the noise is complete, it doesn’t matter where you are, because nothing can touch you; not even the chicken factory, the feathers and the blood. You’re safe, inside noise.

  It’s only when you can’t hear yourself scream that you can find the microscopic prickle of your nerves, and nothing, nothing, else. That’s where the quiet hides. Then, you are aware of the silences inside yourself: the soft rhythms of blood and oxygen and carbon dioxide.

  There is noise in sleep, when it’s good sleep. The best dreams are deafening; the very worst are made of tiny sounds, half-heard: heavy topplings and the hollow sounds of breaking. The worst kind of dreams makes me thrash my bedsheets into twisted ropes and buck my body, ’til I make a space between my bed and the wall.

  I just got my final warning, typed and printed and in a brown envelope. I opened it there and then; I had to strip off a latex glove with my teeth, with the supervisor leaning over his desk, both of us standing. I’m holding one screwed-up inside-out glove and one mucky still-on glove, and the envelope is under my arm and I’m trying to read it really quickly and my forehead is welling up with sweat.

  There’s a noise that fills your mouth when you know you’re going to faint: a noise like the buzzing of a moth when it’s trapped between the lampshade and the bulb. I hear that, for just a moment, but it fades and I’m okay after all.

  The supervisor is an alright bloke; he’s sorry, he really is, but it’s his neck on the line, I must see that. At that, he waves his arm at the door, towards the shopfloor, at the chickens swaying along the conveyor, and he snips his fingers across his throat like a mechanical blade. Then he lets out a weak hahaha that rolls over the table like ball bearings before it spills away.

  Rules are rules, you see, and they are imposed with good reason. The supervisor is staring at me, flicking from one of my eyes to the other one and back again, as if he’s trying to figure out if I am listening carefully. I am staring back.

  If he was to let me get away with this one breach, they’d all be at it. Before long, the safeguards will have all gone to buggery and they’ll end up closing us down when some daft sod loses a hand. Or goes deaf. And it’s the likes of him who’d catch it then.

  The supervisor has a point. The factory is noisy, and it is a matter of common sense that you should wear ear defenders when you’re at the machines. But I like noise. I need noise.

  When I was a kid there were noises in my house; late-night noises from the kitchen. They used to burrow into my dreams; muffled thuds and voices too, Spitting Image caricatures of people that I knew. There’d be my mother’s voice, or something like it, but the high tones hard and shrill, and my father low and dangerous like a nail in a carpet.

  By the morning I might easily have dreamed it. My mother would be just the same as herself. She’d be there like always, smoking in the kitchen, looking at her lap, as if there were something sitting on it, invisible or impossibly small. My dad would throw back his coffee like vodka before snatching up his keys. He would kiss the top of her head then, and she’d carry on looking at her lap ’til the front door slammed.

  I like the factory in a way, at least, I don’t hate it the way that some of them do. The first day, everything smells really bad, but by the third you don’t notice it any more. All there are is layers and layers of sound. The noise is so perfect that I can put up with the mess, no problem.

  The last night that I spent at home did not end in head-kissing. I lay awake for a long time, trying not to hear my parents’ puppet show voices; then there was a huge sound, like a table falling sideways, and a high, seagull crying. I put my hands over my ears, but I could still hear it with my fingernails.

  You know what’s what with the factory; the noise is massive and flat and perfectly safe. Sighs, swearing, the sound of your feet: against the machines and the birds and the clattering it’s all as good as silenced. You could sing at the top of your voice if you took a mind to. My eviserator’s like a vacuum cleaner; when they’re slaughtered and scalded and all that stuff, the chickens come round to me, all still dangling by their feet. I have to put the hose in and suck out what’s inside.

  After that big crash downstairs, I knew I’d never get to sleep, so instead I stood up; my legs were shaking like a newborn kitten’s. I only wanted to close the door, but I ended up creeping downstairs; I discovered myself outside the kitchen. I didn’t want to, but somehow I did. There, on naked feet, I stood, listening; not wanting to listen.

  There was an open, flattish sound, like a frying steak slapped against a worktop, and my mother’s voice, almost; raw like bones, bloody, incoherent. She sounded like a barking dog.

  After that, there was a bellow and a crash, and a different sort of crash. Then I heard the oddest thing, a wet, hollow thumping, as if she was pounding bread dough with a rolling pin, and sobbing at the same time; one thump, one sob. There was thumping and sobbing, over and over; she thumped and sobbed as I ran up the stairs and wrapped myself in my duvet and wedged myself lengthways in the space between my bed and the wall.

  I didn’t see my mum after that, not at the funeral, not even after they let her out of prison. The judge was very sympathetic; she only got twelve months, and was out after nine.

  At the machines you don’t have to talk, there’d be no point if you did anyway, and I’m a good little worker; efficient; clockwork-quick. The supervisor thinks I’m an example to others my age, if only I’d stick to the rules and wear my bloody ear-defenders. My social worker says I am a star, a
nd she reckons I’ll have my own flat by the time I’m eighteen.

  But when you wear ear defenders, it ruins everything. You sound like the bottom of the swimming pool; the space inside your skull gets jammed up with echoes and the sound of knocking. The silence gets in your ears first, and then it gets in your sinuses and your lungs, and the pressure and the knocking fills you up like inhaled Vaseline, and you know it might just kill you.

  So here I am, looking up at the supervisor, and he smiles, so I smile too, sort of, and I take off my other glove to shake his hand. He looks at me the way a teacher might; with his face all creased from smiling, he tells me to run along, now. Then, suddenly, he reaches forward again, and takes the ear-defenders from around my neck, where I’m wearing them like Walkman headphones, and he puts them on my ears with another hahaha, only this time I haha too, just a little bit. And then I’m off, back to the eviserator, with my head filling up with echoes and pressure and half-heard thumping.

  Demon

  I DON’T GO in bins as a rule. I have my pride, after all. Even so, you do spot things from time to time that it’d be a sin to waste. When I was doing my rounds yesterday, I did find a real treasure, or that was how it looked. I’d been doing a spot of tidying up before the light went; found a really nice trolley in the Safeway car park. Its wheels were good; that’s the main thing with trolleys. Some kids had already prised out the pound coin, but it had a separate compartment where you can put your valuables and things.

  There wasn’t anyone around, so I pushed it round the back, all casual like, and when I’d hidden it up nicely I went to get my old trolley. There was a dirty great seagull sitting in it when I came over, picking with his great big beak at all my lovely things. They’re born thieves, birds: crows are always after my tinfoil and the golden paper from Benson and Hedges boxes, and the gulls are forever trying to rob away my dinner. I shooed him off, but he’d already nabbed a slice of bread out of my Homepride bag.

  I love tidying up. In half an hour I had all my treasures organised in layers with plastic bags in between. I had thirteen Coke cans that had been squashed by cars; they’re beautiful when they’re flat; I could run my hands over their contours for a month. I had more then twenty blue things, including one baby shoe that had been lost by someone and found by someone else. When I came across it, it was spiked up in the rain on a black set of railings, blue and wet and gorgeous.

  By the back doors of the supermarket, where the bakery is and they put out the rubbish, there’s always bin bags, lovely strong black ones. My plastic top sheet was a bit tatty, so I went to get some from him who works in the storeroom. He’s a good boy, calls me Miss, he does, and he gives me my bags, and sometimes stuff that’s going out of date. Not that I beg, you understand; I am not a case for anyone’s charity. I thanked him very gravely with a slight bow, and I’m just tucking them over the top of my trolley when I spot something shiny on top of a heaped up wheelie bin.

  There wasn’t anyone to see, so I went to have a proper look. It was a half-bottle of whisky, that’s what I thought at first glance, anyway. So I tucked it into my big coat pocket and pushed my lovely new tidy trolley up towards the high street. It was a lucky day for sure, because I found two ice lolly sticks with jokes on them (different ones) and it turned out that my nice alcove was empty.

  Recently, my alcove has been stolen sometimes, by nasty swearing kids with scabby arms, who sit and whine for spare change from anyone walking past and shout at each other. They sneer and call me grandma. No respect. It’s a lovely alcove, raised up on a step, with its own street lamp, nicely out of the wind and with a pretty view of the jeweller’s.

  After I’d settled myself with my blankets and my Bible, I took the bottle out to have a proper look. The seal was still intact, and it was full right up with something golden, like whisky or brandy, or maybe rum. It was one of those that’s got two flat sides, and there was no label, which was odd.

  Now I’m no drinker, you understand, not with how it ruined my old mum, but it was a pretty thing, this bottle. Its shape made me think of a round bottle that’s got left in the sun and gone gooey, ’til the sides sank flat. There was something though, like a tangle of threads within the liquid, that gave me a pause. I found my glasses inside my bag of things made of glass, and I held it up to the streetlight.

  At the centre of a fragile web of blood vessels was a tiny knot of something living, something that had a huge blue eye and a little throbbing heart in its middle. I was surprised, in a way, but then I thought, well everything has got a life of a sort, hasn’t it?

  I watched it for ages, pulsing in its network of bubbles and nerves; after half an hour I realised that it was growing, slow but visible like the minute hand on a clock. Delicate mauve buds developed and began to become limbs, and a tiny squashy face began to pick itself out of the softness.

  Before I knew it, it was kicking out time at the pub over the road, so I thought I had better keep myself a low profile. It was getting a bit on the nippy side, and I was worried about the baby, so I put the bottle inside my clothes and pretended to be asleep until all the laughter and shouts had died away.

  There’s a sound to the night, the proper night, between the last of the drunks and the security guards walking home at five with sleep in their eyes. In the proper night it’s so quiet you can hear the wind stirring litter and the creaking of the hanging signs of shops. In the proper night, tomcats maraud in the gardens and people have their throats cut whilst they’re sleeping.

  I dozed a bit, until the proper night woke me up. Inside my cardigan there were two rhythms now: the stubborn beat of my chest and the hopeful flutter of the baby. When I took the bottle out, it occupied half of the space inside; it had developed stubby wings, studded with the itchy points of sprouting feathers. When it saw me, it began to drum its little hooves. I put my thumb against the glass, and it trailed its miniature fingers against the inside of the bottle where I had touched.

  I ate some of my bread whilst I watched the baby forming. It grew, quicker and more quickly now; its eyes darkened to a chocolate brown, and it learned to blink at half past three. Sunlight was straining the dark by a quarter to five as the baby heaved its wings against the sides of the bottle; by now they were longer than its body and stuck at a painful angle against the corner.

  It had grown a fragile pelt, fine as suede and a bluish white, and its silvery hooves were sharp and precise as a lamb’s. A cloud of hair, the colour of whisky, had gathered over its head by six, and it began to tap on the glass and mouth words to me. I put my ear against it, but all I could hear were bubbles.

  I feared for that baby’s life by seven; it was crushed by the bottle on all sides. I asked, by way of dumb show, if it wanted me to break the bottle, and it nodded. So, even though it’s a sin to break glass, I broke it. The poor thing flinched with every blow; on the third knock against the ground it shattered and the baby was sprawled and gasping in a bright sea of splinters. I picked it up and dried it on my cardigan, flicking off as much broken glass as I could.

  After that, we looked at each other for a long time, almost embarrassed, whilst the baby’s wings dried out and unbent in the air. The girls who worked the tills at the Safeway’s were coming into work in ones and twos by the time the baby tried to fly.

  It couldn’t; the wings would heave at the air, and it’d almost lift, but the chubby baby body was just a tiny bit too heavy. I’ve seen it before with swifts that end up grounded; they can swoop and soar, but only when they’re helped into the wind. So I picked it up, weighed it in my hand for a moment, and threw it away as hard as I could.

  That did the trick. It spread its feathers and filled them with sky. After a moment of fluttering it began to glide, and finally it turned in the air and flapped slowly away without looking back. I watched it go, and finally gathered up my blankets and started to tidy up my trolley. By ten I was off on my rounds, and wanted to look in at
the Day Centre because Jo said that she’d get me a new coat. It wasn’t until dusk that I arrived back at my alcove.

  When I did I was a bit surprised. All over the step were a heap of blue things, so many that I found myself getting to my knees before it, amazed. There was a flower, a blue plastic one like something plucked out a cheap straw hat. There was a blue stripe ripped from a Tesco bag. There was a broken string from a necklace with four lapis beads still threaded on. There was a glassy chunk smashed out from the blue light on an ambulance, and a shred of blue cloth from a nightshirt. On this last was a drying smear of blood.

  Witness

  I DON’T SLEEP well. At the Elim House you get a key for your room, and they get your Housing Benefit, and that’s about it. There’s a bathroom between each dozen of you; there’s no plug in the sink and you have to stop it up with loo roll. I wouldn’t touch that scummy bath with a bargepole. There’s a kitchen, as if anyone was together enough to cook; we’re all the Not-Quite people, here. Any worse, they’d not let us stay, but if we were any more alive than we are, we wouldn’t be able to bear it. Or maybe we’re just that bit too alive, too aware; skinless.

  Leon next door, he’s a junkie; he keeps it low key, else they’d throw him out. There’s a girl at the end of the corridor, who I think is called Helen; well, she’s on the game, but as long as she doesn’t bring anyone here, it’s okay. Most of us are just normal: we do our best and wait for our Giro every other Tuesday.

  My CPN suggested this place to me; I’ve been here ages now. It’s worst at night, it all gets inside your nerves: if you hold your breath and listen there’s the sound of fifty lives all jammed together, all off-key and clashing like a child banging on a piano. Tonight, most of them were sleeping: four or five were dreaming, one thought he was falling and he screamed and screamed inside his head.