by Diana Evans
‘I am not your woman. I am not anybody’s woman.’
She wrenched his arm away and ran into the kitchen. She did not know where she was going. The house was a prison. It was cursed. She did not want to go upstairs because she might wake the children and the night thing that was Lily and that was getting inside Ria was up there and she couldn’t bear the sound of the floorboards. She wanted to go outside but it was raining, and even if she could get out back, there was only that mean square of concrete and the barrier of fence to escape to. She was trapped. Michael followed her. He was saying sorry but she kept on walking away from him. Once she reached the passage there was nowhere else to go and she started to weep.
‘Look, Mel,’ he said, reaching out for her, ‘let’s just —’
‘Don’t call me Mel! I hate it when you call me Mel!’ She swung round to face him. He said, ‘OK,’ curtly, putting his hands up, then turned and went to the wine rack. He needed more. He too needed to escape. He found a glass and poured, with a miserable, defeated expression on his face, the beginnings of an old man. The drinking was giving him a paunch.
‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough? You’re drunk.’
‘Yeah, and I have every reason to be, coming home to this shit.’
‘Coming home to this shit? Try being at home, with this shit. Do you have any idea what I’ve been dealing with here today? Oh yes, you don’t, because you didn’t answer your phone. But if you had answered your phone, you would know that Ria is sick now too. She’s got Blake’s tonsillitis. And there’s something … oh god, you have to listen to me, Michael. There’s something horrible happening. There’s something evil in this house. There is. There is. Don’t tell me I’m being ridiculous or I’m overthinking it because I’m not. You’re not here all day to know what’s happening. All I know is that we’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to. I’m scared of what will happen to her if we don’t. What if she takes Blake too?’
‘Who? What if who takes Blake?’ He was looking at her full of derision, like a doctor would look at a patient he has given up on.
She whispered it. ‘Lily.’
He wanted to laugh. He held it back, at least he tried his best to, but a little bit of it came out by itself. It was not that he found it funny, as much as that he didn’t know how to respond. He felt speechless, as if she had exited to another world and they had lost their language. His face, then, after the bit of laughter, assumed a calmer look, that first kindness she had loved in him, but with a sharp edge.
‘OK,’ he said in this calmer, factual tone, moving the bottle to one side on the kitchen counter. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, all right? But I think there’s something going on with you, Mel – sorry, Melissa – that you need some help with. Lots of women get postnatal depression after having a baby. It’s common. Damian was saying Stephanie had it after Summer was born. It’s an actual real thing. I’ve been reading about it online. It can happen to anyone … yes, even you. It can cause delusions, breakdowns. I’m serious, man, you need to talk to someone. It’s worrying, the way you’re carrying on …’
Listening to this, a bitter, spiteful determination had taken over Melissa’s body, curling her lips inwards, clenching the sinews in her arms, her shoulders. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to make him feel small and humiliated and dismissed, the way he was making her feel. ‘Why, thank you,’ she sneered. ‘Thank you so much for your concern. Is that what you’ve been doing all evening, huh? Sitting there with Damian talking about your crazy woman, your postnatally-depressed woman who won’t fuck you any more? You clueless, insensitive bastard. Did Damian make any other suggestions perhaps? Any other revelations? Did he enlighten you at all on how to get down with this woman? On what to do when there’s trouble in Paradise? Did he tell you to go and sleep with someone else’s woman instead, like he did?’
‘What d’you mean? What are you talking about?’
Melissa glared at him, waiting for it to dawn on him. When it did it cut him right through his heart. It went straight into the blade of light and set him on fire. It was a physical pain. It broke him, like he’d told Perry she would one day, all that time ago in Montego Bay.
‘You?’ He shrank with the word, afraid of it.
‘Yeah, that’s right. Me.’
‘With Damian? You mean, you … and Damian?’ He laughed again, only very briefly. He had taken on some of Melissa’s habit of laughing in response to something negative. He looked haggard suddenly, his shoulders and torso hanging limp in his suit. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘No I am not kidding you.’
Melissa started to feel cold along her arms and chest. A fear, a different kind of fear, was stealing up on her. She went past him into the living room to get the blanket from the sofa and wrapped it around her, partly just to get away from him for a minute, to not have to behold the expression in his eyes, the hurt, the incredible hurt, the wet shine of it. She did not go back into the kitchen but stayed near the dining table, looking in at him through the doorway, from the shadows.
‘When?’ he said.
Her voice quietened. ‘In Spain.’
‘In Spain? When in Spain? When we were all there, together?’
He wanted to know everything, every detail, the exact circumstances. He forced her to tell him, the pool, whether she had liked it, what shape, how many times. Then he exploded and kicked over the dustbin. As he did so more sawdust came spilling out on to the paprika from the gash in the wall. The storm shook the house with another blast of thunder. The monkeys in the monkey house were screaming. The parrots in the parrot house were shrieking. The mice under the bath were playing their violins in a frenzy. ‘And he was there?’ Michael said. ‘He was there tonight, drinking with me. Chatting with me like nothing’s happened?’
‘What are you so angry for?’ Melissa said. ‘You did the same thing, remember? You went there first. I didn’t react like this, did I?’
‘Oh, so is that why you did it? To get back at me?’
‘No!’
‘Why, then? Why’d you go there with him, of all people? He’s my friend. How can you disrespect me like that?’
Melissa could hear the lullaby again, playing from above, drifting down the stairs, If that mockingbird won’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring, if that diamond ring turns brass, Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass … She glanced up towards the halfway landing. An upper floorboard creaked. ‘It was … I didn’t’ – but she lost her train of thought.
‘I’ll tell you why I’m angry,’ Michael said. ‘Let me tell you why I’m so upset,’ and the words of John Legend’s Used To Love U were reverberating in his head as he did so. ‘It’s because I love you. That’s why. Hear that? At least, I used to love you, because I’m not so sure I do any more. So yes, it hurts me that you’ve shared your body with someone else. That was my temple, my sacred place – it was mine, get it? I’ve been dying here waiting and waiting for you to let me in and you go with someone else, with Damian, oh man … And do you want to know the reason why I have to explain this to you? Why you can’t even work it out for your fucking self, the reason you didn’t react like this? Well, that’s because you don’t love me. You never have, have you? I can see it now. I think I’ve known it all along but I was too scared to face it. I’m so stupid. I’m so fucking stupid …’
He had backed away towards the passage so that the shape of him filled the failed double doorway, the top of his head almost touching the frame. There were tears coming down his face, his mouth was slack and distorted. There was a new, deeper bend in his posture, a caving in, almost immediate, like a plant that has wilted in an instant yet the actual movement is impossible to witness. She watched him, full of compassion, wishing she had not told him. It would have been better if she hadn’t told him. It was nothing to her, what the body did or whom it belonged to. It was different from love. Love was a palace and the body was just an object inside it, but he didn’t see it that way, to his detriment.
How could she explain it to him?
‘I do love you,’ she said, but it felt like someone else was saying it, not her true self, which was somewhere outside these walls. He was shaking his head, refusing.
‘No, you don’t. You can’t. You’re a liar. I’ve never been enough for you. I’ve never been what you wanted. I bet you think being with me is the biggest mistake of your life – ’
‘No, no, it’s not true – ’
‘You think I’m a failure. You think I’ve put you in a cage the way your dad put you in a cage. That I’ve forced you to live such a plain and ordinary life, the same as everybody else. Do you think I wanted to be this? Do you think I wanted – ’
‘Michael, look!’
Behind him, just missing the back of his head, Erykah Badu fell to the floor in her frame. Her glittered sky-blue boots, her raised fist and shimmering dreads, their glass home shattered, sending shards of light across the paprika. Before the picture had fallen, Melissa had seen it slide first to one side on the wall and then the other, making itself crooked like the dancers, before coming fully off its nail at some secret pressure from behind. Now Barack Obama was doing the same thing, his calm and thoughtful face dipped to one side, then the other side, smashing as it landed.
‘What’s happening?’ Michael said.
‘I told you. See? She’s doing it. She’s here, all over the house. I have to save her. Help me, Michael, I can’t do it on my own.’
The felled dustbin rolled across the floor by itself. More sawdust came spilling out of the wall.
‘It’s the wind. It’s just the wind,’ Michael said, closing the window. ‘Can’t you hear the storm?’
‘Come with me.’
She was holding out her hand to him from beneath the blanket, pleading with him, moving from one bare foot to the other on the kitchen step. She was all gone now, that woman she once was, that light creature, that lovely flame. He had lost her and this woman here before him, he did not know her.
Directly above her head, Melissa, the other Melissa, she was no longer sure which one was which, heard the floorboards moaning again, creaking and bending and resounding a terrible pressure. She was coming. She was trailing her white hand along the wavy black line. She was coming down the first three stairs, one step, another, quicker step, one step, another, quicker step. It was almost too late. Melissa ran to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. She would be coming now. Yes, there, turning into the halfway landing, that dreadful crooked gait, to come to a pause underneath the skylight, looking down at them – it was her. Ria was almost all gone. The powdered hands. The shine of the broach. The face was too thin, no light in it, only in the broach. And she was so pale.
‘Oh god,’ Melissa said, clutching the blanket to her chest. Michael was behind her now.
‘Daddy,’ the girl said, the voice too deep, and a different accent – Deddy.
‘Don’t touch her. It’s not Ria.’
The girl reached out her white hand to her father and started descending towards him.
‘Lily, stop!’ Melissa shouted. She thought that if she exercised the courage to address her directly and with force, she would listen. Michael turned to her, feverish with anger and confusion.
‘What?’ he said.
‘She’s taken her. She’s making her sick!’
‘What are you talking about? This is Ria. It’s Ria, your daughter.’
‘Deddy,’ Lily called out, ‘I don’t feel well …’
‘Get away from her, get away from my daughter!’ Mellissa went up and grabbed Lily by the arm, feeling disgusted by her awful white hand, tugging at her as though Lily were a coat that must be taken off. There was the sound of crying, this close, too-deep, ghostly crying, and another, smaller crying, a baby, from further away.
‘Hey!’ shouted Michael. But he was too late. Lily shook Ria from the inside as Melissa was trying to pull her off, so that Ria stumbled. She came tumbling down the last seven stairs, down the wavy black lines on either side, and rolled to a heap in his arms, her skin burning hot, her pyjamas soaked through with sweat.
There was a horrified silence, in which everything came to stillness, even the storm. The house was holding its breath.
Michael said, his face consumed with hatred, ‘Look what you’ve done.’
And Melissa saw the crumpled girl at the bottom of the stairs. She was shivering. Her face was hidden away. The back of her neck was like Ria’s neck, soft, with the dark down. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh …’ catching herself in the hallway mirror and not recognising herself. She saw only the creature who Michael hated. There in the glass, she saw the picture from her dream of the two of them in the boat, her wildly rowing, he lying dead, and she understood now that it was his love that was dead, not his body, and hence she was alone, but without herself. She was untraceable, irretrievable. She did not know where she was and so she did not know what to do. All around her there was a sense of things throbbing and vibrating. The leaves of the peace lily by the window twins were gently shaking. The frames of the windows themselves seemed to be bulging outwards. The curve of the ecclesiastical arch was pulsating. The black flecks of the inner trees of the crooked floorboards were rising. The other pictures in the passage of the heroes were sliding, melting, losing their solidity.
‘I have to get out,’ she said, backing away towards the front door. ‘I have to get out of here. Something’s – happened to me, I’ve lost something …’ She lifted her arms, looking down at them as if studying some unknown object. ‘I have to get out!’ she cried again, as the throbbing spread further and further outwards, becoming more violent, it was below her, above her. The dancers in the master court were tumbling. The birds in the Tanzania square were twitching. The raffia at the windows was splitting. The toy figures outside in the playhouse were snapping. The yellow teddy bear on the red bench was rocking. All around her the dust was falling, raining down. She swung open the front door and ran out into the street, the blanket still around her shoulders but her feet bare, and as she walked quickly along the damp pavement she could hardly feel its wetness. Down she went to the bottom of Paradise looking for her house, and up she went to the top of Paradise searching for her self, past the block of flats where Pauline’s light was still turned off, around the corner where the red-lit peak of the Crystal Palace tower came into view, and there the throbbing grew bigger still, took on a greater, older stature, the sculptures in the Grecian Court were crumbling, the tiles in the Moorish Court were cracking, the frescos on the ceilings of the Renaissance Court were dissolving, the lions in a circle in Alhambra were howling, the bulls of the Assyrian Court were stamping, the tomb of Beni Hassan was opening, the colossi of Abu Simbel were toppling, and the ferro-vitreous edges of the ferro-vitreous arches were loosening, and the heads of the statues of the Greeks in the grasses were rolling, and the dinosaurs made of old science were groaning, the spirals of the spiral staircases were spinning, the mummies in the Egyptian Court were wailing, the echoes in the organ loft were deafening, the big glass panes of the central transept were crashing –
And it was there, in the central transept, that on that cold November night in 1936, the final fire started. It began quietly, as fires often do, with a small, orange flame. It swept through the transept in its fast red gown, taking the spirals, the arches, the inside elms and the crystal walls. Into the aviaries it went, sending the birds flying out into freedom. The manacles and the Welsh gold were taken, the Indian silk and the obelisks were ablaze, the cannons, the lace, the Belgian chiffon, all lost in an inferno of molten glass and iron. The flames were visible from the southern shores of the English Channel, and when the fire was at its highest, a flock of those dark birds was seen circling above it, soaring and lifting, higher and higher, up and out into the relative safety of Pissarro’s skies.
14
THE WORST THING
The cemetery at Hither Green is set across a sweeping breadth of green hill at the very southern edge of London, close to pla
ces like Eltham and Lee, where many of us have never been. The graves form rows of greyed stone arches along the wider arches of the hill, and their flowers are prey to the moods and extremities of the weather, which today is cool and pressing towards winter, the golds and reds of late October falling in the leaves, an east wind toying with their journeys to the ground, and carried on the wind a distant smell of woodsmoke, marking the entrance to the cold season. Through these loose amber leaves Damian walks on a day off from work, wearing trainers and a black Parka, a light growth of neatened stubble over his jaw, looking for one grave in particular, which according to his map is in the north-west corner of the necropolis, in the third row down. The funeral seems like a lifetime ago yet it is only a year. He cannot remember the direction the hearse took or where exactly it stopped, only the lowering of the coffin into the ground and the shovelling of the earth on top, how much earth it seemed, how deep it went. As he walks he remembers these things more clearly, and it is as if he is attending for the first time, fully present. He is holding flowers. He also has one of his father’s carvings from the boxes in the garage, an old man with hunched shoulders and streaks of white hair, which he intends to leave with him to change and erode with the climate.
When he gets there, to the third row in the north-west corner, there is a woman at the foot of the grave, bending down and arranging some flowers. They are wonderful flowers, extreme in their colours, orange roses, gyp, bright yellows, a mass of them. The woman is wearing a purple coat with a yellow scarf. As Damian gets closer, he begins to recognise the movements of her hands, the way she bends strictly at the waist with her spine straight and the backs of her knees pushed out. The colours she has chosen for her offering are the same colours that used to sit on the dining table, and in the pots on the balcony. And her coat, most of all the coat, the exact shade of the purple cardigan she used to wear. The gold of the autumn leaves at her feet are reminiscent of those gold buttons.