Broken Things (Salt Modern Fiction)

by Padrika Tarrant

  As Mrs Hope walked, her way was guided by a vibration, a distant thrumming that pulsed through the street like the beating of horses’ hooves. After a minute or two, she leant against a wall and eased off her shoes so that she should be able to feel it better; at any rate, they made her feet hurt. Mrs Hope’s ankles were swollen and thick, and the poor hot flesh was not used to the cool of the outdoors at night. Her tights thinned to holes beneath her toes as she went along the cold dry road.

  The shopping mall was open late on a Tuesday, but by half past six it was very quiet. Mrs Hope stood on the escalator with her mind as open as the huge sweeping thoroughfares. The drumming carried her around to the left, until she stopped beside the lifts opposite the Post Office. There, in nodding streams beside the metal shutters, the horses were dancing for her.

  She stood there for a long time as the horses processed through the Castle Mall. As she stood, with the Christmas lights reflecting on her skin, it dawned on Mrs Hope that her entire life had only been preparation. This was a curious thought, in a way; one might have thought it negated everything that came before, but Mrs Hope knew that nothing whatever had been a waste.

  Not a second, not her childhood colouring books, not Eric, not her job at the shoe factory, not her long patient years of motherhood, not even the sudden graveside or the horrified silence of the living room, not one bit, she knew now, not one bit had been in vain. Everything narrowed: the whole of life had been sharpening, growing smaller and more precise around her, so as to meet in a point at the moment in which she was called to stand before a procession of horses.

  They appeared from nowhere, as if they stepped right out of the solid wall, and they pranced and pawed for miles until they were invisibly small. Somehow, the thirty feet between the Post Office and the HMV encompassed the distances between planets. The hollow clop of their hooves and the snorting, blowing sounds that they made, filled up the Castle Mall like steam and made the fine hairs on Mrs Hope’s temple stick down against her skin.

  They slowed as they passed her, tossing their heads and moving their mossy-soft lips as though whispering some equine language. They gaped and rolled their eyes, as though they could not quite believe her, as if they wanted to press her into their memories, to be sure.

  They passed her by the thousand, calm reserved mares with gawky foals, and arrogant, headstrong stallions that showed off to her about their sweaty flanks and the arches of their necks. Mrs Hope nodded to every one, knew each to be perfect. They passed her by the thousand, and they did not stop when the cleaners came out of the service door with a floor polisher. Then, suddenly, a tall palomino drew to a stop and stood, anxious and stamping.

  Mrs Hope hesitated for just one moment, looked behind her as the tannoy announced that they were closing. Then she placed her flat hand against that horse’s side and felt the realness of him: his sweat and odour and the great slow thud of his heart. After that, Mrs Hope and the horse began their journey.

  Sunset

  WHEN THE SUN didn’t rise, I slept late until I was thick-headed and sluggish. I finally woke when my mother came into the room and stood beside my bed. She said nothing, just stared at her wrist until I rubbed my face and rolled out of bed. The carpet was thin under my feet, and the air was oddly cold. I put on my dressing gown.

  My mother had been awake for a while; I sat at the table while the kettle boiled, holding the kitchen clock in my hands. My mother had taken it from the wall when I came downstairs. She held it out to me, shoved it forward, asked me the time.

  It said twenty to three. I was confused, wondered how long I’d slept. I shook the clock, held it to my ear; its slow tick was calm as stones. I stood up and went to fetch my watch from beside the sink; it patiently read the time as two forty-one.

  After that, I collected every clock we had in the house and brought them to the table, where my mother sat and sipped at her tea. Even the ugly little watch that my grandmother had worn as a ring all declared that it was before three.

  We went to the back door and forced the sticky catch; behind the pear tree the sky was the colour of a sore eye. There was almost no light; just enough to pick out the blade-tips of the grass and the starlings in silhouette on the fence. I put my hand in my mother’s and leaned against her side. My head came up to the top of her ribcage. She didn’t move. I pulled my mother’s hand over my head so her arm was around my shoulders. She still didn’t move.

  The hours drooled along until it should have been evening. I waited for my mother to cook, but she just wanted to sit at the table and watch the garden through the window, so in the end I stole three biscuits and a slice from the cheese. When it should have been night, I pulled at her elbow, tried to make her get up to go to bed, but she wouldn’t. I didn’t sleep much.

  Life lost its shape. The house grew cold, although it was still August. The grass in the garden turned the queer white of things that live in caves and my mother sleepwalked between rooms as if she were hardly alive. I eked out the food in the cupboards; I was forbidden from using the stove. Once I did try, but I gave myself such a scare with the fierce blue fire of it that I daren’t touch it after that.

  The longer that the sun stayed unrisen, the less colour there was in the world. The cherry tree’s leaves became ghosts of leaves and the garden began to starve. The lights in our house started to attract the miserable creatures that lived outside, as if they thought I might have some trick to save them.

  A robin beat itself to death against the window, like a huge, bleeding moth. Starlings scraped their feet on the glass panes, and a fox with a broken tail barked and shrieked outside the door for hours at a time. Once, he tried to force himself through the letterbox. He failed, but I was badly frightened.

  When the larder contained nothing more than cough sweets and a bottle of vinegar, I tried to take charge. I took my mother’s purse from her handbag and put on her heavy overcoat. It trailed along the floor as I opened a big umbrella, with which I hoped to protect myself from the animals.

  I got no further than the front door; the moment it was opened the air was full of wings and beaks and the murderous claws of cats. I forced them away as best I could with my tattering umbrella, and heaved the door shut. I was not a cruel child; they only wanted to be in the light; they wanted the light so badly. From the living room window I could see what was left of my attempt to go shopping: there were feathers and corpses and black splashes of blood. Hundreds of eyes flashed from the flower borders and the lane beyond. I sat on the floor and cried.

  It was the bulb in the kitchen that blew first. There was a fizz, and then that was that. I fled the darkness and went to sit in the bathroom. I tried to make my mother come too, but when the light vanished she just closed her eyes and wouldn’t open them. I had to leave her. My mother had discovered the bright place behind her eyelids, and she had gone to live there. I couldn’t really blame her.

  The lights began to wear out, one by one. I didn’t eat for weeks; I grew past hunger, bundled up inside my jumpers. After an age, I began to wish for a crisis: anything to force things towards an end. One mad hour, when the clocks all read two fifty, I ran from room to room upstairs, high with despair and laughing, and I smashed the lights out with my umbrella. When I came to myself again, a pile of time later, I couldn’t believe what I had done.

  So it was that I came to the living room and stood beneath its fragile, hissing bulb, looking out past the curtains at the white garden crowded with creatures that wanted just to die in the light. I looked at all their faces and at the sore, sunless sky, and, bracing myself, I opened the window for them.

  Nightswimming

  I STOOD AT the hallway mirror, memorising my face, trying to discern some hint of a coming change. Sure enough, there I was, thin as a prophet, a woman made of papier mâché, the skin terribly dry and aching to be shed. I brushed my hair: one hundred careful strokes. I pushed the fringe away from my
eyes; my hair would never be bound again. The hallway held its breath and watched.

  After that, I stepped from room to room like an exorcist: I made my old bed, wound up my alarm clock and turned the pillow. I bolted the tiny window and closed the patchwork curtains, so no corner of the night could peep through; after that I started the fire.

  In my mother’s room I lined up the lavender bags from the top drawer; they looked like murdered kittens tied up in muslin. I snipped their ribbons with the nail scissors and spread them flat. I looked in the wardrobe and counted the coats and stroked the fox fur, although it was well beyond saving. The catch caught with a metal snick. After that, I started the fire.

  When I came down the stairs I was as coy as a bride. I lit the pyres that balanced at the base of every straight-backed banister. The flames were pretty.

  The kitchen was ready for burning, after all those sorry years; I let the stove fulfil its secret ambition. The tea towels were bandage-dry, and the table would go up too, but that would take a long time.

  Up the step and along the hall; I stopped at the mirror and saw myself with a smoky halo, listened to the talking of the fire. I opened the piano stool and laid a blaze among the sheet music. I fed it doilies, one by one, until it was too hot to see.

  I closed the front door softly, so as not to wake any poor old ghosts. The windows held swirling mists of smoke, but the alarm might not be raised for an hour. With this thought, I unbuckled my wristwatch and posted it through the letterbox. My hands were black, but they wouldn’t stay dirty for long.

  It wasn’t far to the river. I gazed at its calm green depths and jumped with a graceless tangle of legs. It was cold, my it was cold. I kicked and clawed at the surface, gasping and flailing at the moon. I got a last skew-eyed glimpse of the blackness of sky and one heartless star, and then, thank god, it changed.

  There is a moment where violence becomes beauty; when you fill your lungs with water, you become a fish. My face was washed clean, and the clanging of water became a call, a message from the place that I was seeking. I opened my eyes, and, now that they would never close again, I saw everything plainly. There is perfection in the world after all. My hair was drifting weed when I struck out towards the sea, and my T-shirt billowed as I swam.

  It was a long journey, it took me weeks, until the sudden bite of salt made all the seas of all the earth a single, open space: a garden.

  When the water grew warm, I felt the music; felt it with my tongue before my ears. There are voices within the ebbing of the ocean, sweeter than brine, and there’s light between the fishes’ tails. I didn’t have a passport, so I showed them how to make a fox’s silhouette with my hands.

  Our city is small and our dwellings modest; we dig the coral sand with our fingers and we make castles. We weave our dresses from the latticed fronds of kelp. We are happy.

  Cutpurse

  FEAR AND POWER are very nearly the same thing. When I am afraid, I am untethered, and I whip in the wind. When I think that you night catch me out, I’m strung as high as heroin. And I’m a dangerous secret; bleach in a lemonade bottle.

  I love to steal. I love the suspense of it, and also the tenderness; to pick pockets one must be as attentive as a doctor. It is a kind of love.

  Stolen chocolate is toxic. So is stolen money; it coats the skin like chicken fat. So is a baby’s feeder cup of juice, eased out of the pushchair when the mother’s looking at the label on a tin can and the baby’s staring at me.

  So is the fingernail I’ve clipped from your hand, whilst you’re sleeping on the late-night train from Liverpool Street. All that’s here are you and me, and the lights in the window from houses, and rows and rows of empty seats. Your fingernail is polished, pear-drop red and manicured, and the curve of it bows slightly under the pressure of my hand. These things are gorgeous, gorgeous poison. These things make me happy.

  My beginnings were small, tentative as childish experiments often are, but prophetic and magical also. I learned my own religion; discovered my true form. One day before school, in the spring of 1986, in the town where I used to live, every street on the estate was named for a tree: Cedar Drive; Maple Walk; Holly Road. For all my life I was a little girl, compliant, obedient, mediocre; I was barely there at all. I tried too hard; I was rolled with puppy fat.

  Then, that morning in April, as the sun shone brightly on my skin like lemon squash, I was walking past the rank that we used to call The Top Shops. The idea struck me like an instruction from God, sharp like a fork on a dinner plate. Half reluctant, as if following some new calling, I slunk into the newsagents and stole a bar of chocolate. Nonchalant and trembling, I walked out of the shop as steadily as I could, thinking my skin might burst outwards from the pressure. Ten yards down the road, I ran.

  That day I took the chocolate was vivid and painful; I found myself real in a way that I had never been before. I cried for an hour and a half, until the Mars bar in my fist turned to squitch. When I split the wrapper with my teeth it was soft and warm and luscious, raw somehow. I devoured it; I felt it become some extra part of me: a new internal organ, perhaps, or a modification of the blood; rendering it thicker, darker; sweeter; like the cheap ruby port that I nicked from the caretaker’s cubby the next week. That wine was rich enough to make you sick, unless your blood was accustomed to it. Mine took to it readily enough. That first theft made me powerful; that day, I roared with it. And that first night, I slept for thirteen hours; slept like the drugged, dreaming of nothing.

  My grades improved; my teachers began to administer house points, and called me Shelly instead of Michelle. They put it down to a blossoming maturity; my dad bought me a brand new bike, and I went to a proper hairdresser’s for a feather cut.

  I even began to attend a youth group at the church, where I palmed little palm-leafed crosses, and silver coins from the collection plate. In my bedroom, my possessions accrued, catalogued in little finicky lists, wrapped in pale blue Kleenex.

  Still, as time went on these things became easy. I stole purses from shopping bags; trinkets from the Christian Bookshop. After a while, I felt that I needed something new.

  Stealing a dog was a piece of cake. It was a horrible little thing, fluffy and shaved in places, with a tongue like a drippy scarf. Some old dear unclipped it from its lead when I was sitting in the park, thinking about cutlery, about my shoe boxful of spoons. I scooped it up as it came yapping past me, holding it by the face in case it should try to bite.

  I sat for a couple of hours inside a hedge, wondering what to do with my haul, whist the biddy walked up and down past me, calling, Pippin? Here boy! I didn’t care, but neither did I want a dog, and then the revelation struck that I didn’t have to want the thing I stole any more; I didn’t even need to keep it. This knowledge made me stronger yet.

  When the calling for the dog grew angry, then pleading, and finally died out altogether, I came out of hiding with it. Now that I was on my feet, it began to struggle again, wrestling its short little backbone against the line of my forearm.

  I took it to the duck pond’s muddy lip, and I threw it as hard as I could, then shaded my eyes and watched it paddle all the way back to dry land, as far away from me as possible.

  And, as my maturity did blossom, I grew to understand the intimacy of thieving, the kindness. A pickpocket is a lover, reaching deep inside the beloved, slipping inside coat or ribcage, drawing out jewellery or fragile fragments of lung.

  One beautiful day, I took my scissors to town with me. In the Post Office, the queue for tellers reached right along the mall, as far as the lifts. The people stood there, single-file, sighing, and easing their weight from one foot to another.

  The woman in front of me tossed her head and sent a handful of hair flicking over her shoulder. It was long and blonde and very straight. I edged towards her, indecently close. She smelled of shampoo and cigarette smoke. She stepped backwards, careless, oblivio
us, and I jumped out of the way, quick as a flame. She did not notice. I crept forwards again, smelling the shampoo and the smoke, so ghastly with power and with fear that any moment I might burst out laughing. My scissors were as stealthy as me; I sheared off one lock and wrapped it in a leather glove. When my turn came up at the tills, I bought stamps, and then I tiptoed home.

  Which brings me to now, watching you sleeping on the Intercity, in an empty, clanking carriage, waiting for the train to terminate. I’m as quiet as a knife, and I’m frightened and I am powerful, next to you on a table seat, loving as a mother, with ten little red half-moons lined up beside your blunted fingers. And, I’m sitting here, with my long-nosed silver scissors, wondering what else I’d like to take from you.

  Passing

  THEY PICK HER up whenever they come across her; the police patrols all know her by name. They call her Lorna as if she was a little child, and then they telephone her daughter and they take her home.

  They tell her that the streets are not safe, that she will catch her death with all this wandering. Her daughter says, what is she expected to do? She can hardly lock her in; what if there was a fire? This happens frequently now, more so as she grows older, as if an elderly lady out all by herself at night is against some unspoken law. Lorna’s insomnia is her secret talent.

  They make her sound aimless, as if she simply drifts along the streets. Lorna does not wander, and she is never aimless, although she rarely speaks any more. People misunderstand her silence, her calm, closed face and her faint smile. She has simply said enough already and she has nothing more to add. These days, Lorna prefers to listen.

  Lorna loves the dark, and the city when it rains, because these are the moments when the world belongs to her, is solely in her care. They have not picked her up tonight. Her daughter and her grandchild, and her daughter’s thin, resentful husband, are all sleeping, in bed and cradle, and none of them can hear the rain.