The Body

by Dean Clayton Edwards

  Lara trembled, rattling against the floor of the boot. If she had wanted to do it, she would have been unable, but the emotions within her were so great that when she willed herself to stop now it was to no avail.

  Matilda did not reply to Roger's renewed declaration of love.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  (Tell him. Tell him!)

  "Nothing," Matilda said softly. Lara wondered if she reached for his hand then. Was he stroking her face? "That's beautiful, Roger," she continued. "Thank you."

  They got out of the car and their voices drifted away again.

  It wasn't until what might have been several hours later that the boot of the car flew open and Lara was dazzled by a grey sky, framing Matilda as she leaned into the car and removed the bag from the compartment.

  (She's going to forget me. She came back for the bag. She's going to forget me!)

  Matilda dropped the bag to the ground and lifted Lara out of the boot.

  (Thank you! Thank you! Thank you.)

  They were at the end of a long, gravel drive. Ahead was a field overrun with tall grass that would probably come up to a woman's waist. It was waving and whispering in the breeze and Lara wanted to run among them. She wanted to lie in the damp grass and disappear from sight, only to emerge with a hair full of hay and light reflecting in her eyes. She had been in the dark for so long that she saw Sarah doing these things. Not her and not Matilda.

  The field was populated here and there with trees that appeared to have been deliberately planted. Fruit trees perhaps, but she couldn't get a good look, because Matilda was closing the boot, throwing the bag over her shoulder and then carrying Lara away from the car. She did so politely, using two hands, as though she were a gift or a sacrificial offering. Either way, there was respect there and perhaps even reverence and Lara enjoyed the sensation.

  Beyond the field, the side of a valley rose up out of the fog. There were so many trees! A forest. She was able to take in another field and farm buildings facing them in the distance. She wanted to be everywhere all at once and found herself making lists of places to explore as soon as she was back in the body.

  Buffeted from side to side, Lara now saw the cottage that Matilda had often spoken about. It was large and squat, with painted white stone walls and red shutters. Roses and ivy crawled over its face, making it look even more a part of the landscape. It looked as if it belonged here and could not have been anywhere else. She felt the same about the three of them.

  "Well done, Matilda," Lara said. "You did it."

  "We did it," Matilda said quietly and carefully so as not to be seen talking to a stool. "I couldn't have done it without you."

  "I didn't do anything," Lara said.

  "And that was what allowed this to happen," Matilda said.

  Lara laughed bitterly to herself. She'd almost gone mad in the stool, in the boot, and it had only been a couple of days. It was the darkness. The darkness stretched everything out. It had stretched her and truth be told it take a while for her to regain her original shape.

  She listened to the sound of Matilda's feet crunching on the gravel and imagined that they were hers; just as sure and just as steady, marching towards the finish line. She felt as if she hadn't participated in the race, but then reassured herself that it was a relay and that she would do her bit soon enough.

  Roger was standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips and a darling smile on his face.

  (Roger! Darling Roger!)

  "You can go in," Matilda said. "This is your home now too."

  "To be honest," he said, "I wouldn't know how to do that."

  He took a couple of drags on a cigarette before grinding the cigarette into the stones with his heel and following Matilda and Lara inside.

  "Where's that going?" Roger enquired of the stool.

  The front door opened immediately onto a large living area dominated by a solid oak table on which there stood a glass vase full of dead flowers. Matilda set her down on the table, so she could take in everything around her. Directly above, in the centre of the ceiling, was a massive candelabra with eight candles half burned down. Cobwebs stretched from each one and clung to the wooden ceiling. Lara was thankful for the light filtering in from the small window at the back of the room and from two giant windows in the front.

  It was a magnificent room and looked as if it might have served generations of Matilda's family in various configurations. To one end of the room was an enormous fireplace with a layer of ash and dry wood stacked up against the wall. At the rear was an iron plate, black and grey and cracked with use.

  On the same wall, a solid wooden door led into another area that could have been a storage area or another room.

  On the opposite wall, was an impressive wall unit containing crockery, mugs and glasses, and another door with glass revealing another well-lit room, or rooms judging from the size of this place from the outside.

  At the back of the main area was a modern, pine staircase that led up to a converted attic space of one kind or another.

  There were books and paintings and even the stones of the walls seemed to hold stories of their own, but what Lara wanted most was to be outside again, in that meadow, running with her shoes in her hands and her hair free, trailing behind her, while Roger attempted to catch her and wrestle her to the ground. She imagined herself laughing. She imagined how that might look to Roger. She imagined herself happy again. She imagined how it would feel to be free for the first time.

  "We should celebrate our safe arrival," Roger said. "Where's the bedroom?"

  Matilda smiled easily. It bothered Lara, although Matilda deftly went on to say: "There's some work to do before we settle in." She went to the corner of the room near the bottom of the stairs and pushed a large button that made an ominous clunk. Then she pulled out a chair and climbed up to flick a fuse switch.

  "Why don't you let me help you with that?" Roger said.

  "Because you'd break the chair," Matilda laughed.

  "Maybe," Roger said, patting his stomach, "but rather that than anything happen to you."

  Lara was relieved that they didn't discuss using her stool to reach the switches. There was something about being climbed on and having someone's muddy shoes on you that was unsavoury. Even if they were Roger's muddy shoes. She wanted to touch him, but not like that. Not like that.

  Roger insisted that she allow him to help so they could hurry off to the bedroom.

  "I'll let you help," Matilda said, "but after all that driving, I'm tired."

  "Tired again, eh?" Roger said. "A massage then?"

  Matilda said nothing.

  They left the cottage together.

  The silence that followed was worse than that of the boot. In the boot, she had imagined that the two of them were becoming closer, but part of her had hoped it wasn't true. Sitting on the main room table, she couldn't help but see it. Matilda and Roger were as much a couple as any other she had met. They looked and sounded good together. They'd connected during their journey here.

  *

  Matilda busied herself with unpacking her things, but that didn't take more than forty minutes because they had travelled so light.

  Roger made coffee and then they sat at the kitchen table and took in their new surroundings. If felt good to have all three of them together. Lara gazed at Roger as he sipped his drink and gazed at Matilda. Matilda's eyes were on the window, far away.

  "I used to sit here as a little girl," Matilda said, "wanting it to stop raining so my parents would allow me outside to play."

  "Well, it finally stopped raining," Roger said.

  They raised their coffee cups and toasted better weather.

  "Let's get this off the table," Roger said and reached for the stool.

  "I'll do it."

  Roger sat down and withdrew his hands. His fingers hadn't quite connected with the wooden surface and Lara sighed with longing.

  Matilda carried her under one arm so she could open up the
wooden door that led not into another room. There was a single bed, stripped, up against the far wall, beneath a square window and the room was furnished as a guest room/study with a desk and lamp in one corner and a wardrobe against the opposite wall. It was a nice room, but Matilda was walking deeper and deeper into it and she knew what was going to happen next.

  "Matilda. No. No! Don't you dare."

  Matilda frowned as she felt Lara's attempt to leave the stool without being invited or allowed. Her perplexed facial expression was a precursor to something, but Lara didn't know if she was about to smile or laugh or explode with rage. She tried again to leave the stool, not with any forethought, but with desperation not to be alone again. It would be better to suffer the sound of Matilda and Roger talking and not be able to join in than it would be to remain in yet another room by herself. Not for the first time, she appalled herself by openly admitting that she missed her sisters. They had been horrible, but they had been company.

  Matilda set the stool on the floor in the shadow of the tall wardrobe.

  "No, Matilda! Please."

  "Shh!" Matilda thought.

  She took a step back and rubbed her fingertips against each other, as if to remove a tingling sensation.

  "Not a bad effort," Matilda thought, "but there's no need. We're sisters and partners. You don't know your way around yet. Roger's going to be asking a lot of questions - where things are and how to turn things on - and you don't know the answers. I need to make sure he's settled before you get your turn and I need to bring you up to speed."

  "Just one night," Lara pleaded. "I just want to lie in his arms. We won't even have to talk."

  Matilda smiled.

  "That's not what I mean," Lara said. "You don't know what it's like to need someone and have them right there but not be able to touch them."

  "You don't know as much as you think you do."

  "One night," Lara persisted. "An hour. I'd give you the body back afterwards, in the middle of the night if you like. I promise."

  "You're not thinking straight," Matilda said. "You're forgetting something."

  "What?"

  "Where would I go? Inside Roger? I don't have my chest."

  Lara sighed.

  "It's on its way. Express delivery. You'll have to wait until it arrives. Then we'll talk and we can switch, work out a schedule."

  Lara let the seconds grind by as she considered the wait ahead.

  "I suppose that makes sense," she said grudgingly.

  "You don't have any choice," Matilda said. "Try to take some comfort in that, will you? It won't be for much longer. Look at all we've done. Don't blow it. Sit tight."

  "You're right; I have no choice," Lara commented.

  Next door, they heard the sound of a chair scraping back against the tiles.

  "I'm going," Matilda said.

  "Could you move me forward a little bit?" Lara begged. "I can't see the window."

  Matilda hesitated and it took a while for Lara to realise that she was apprehensive. She could tell by the way her fingers twitched, but she didn't make an immediate move forward.

  "I want to be in the light," Lara said. "I want to see outside."

  "Soon it will be your turn on the body and you can do what you like, go where you like," said Matilda. "You can be with your beloved Roger. It's going to be alright. You'll see."

  Finally, she took the stool by its corners and dragged it forward a foot. Her eyes never left the stool.

  True to her word, Lara had not tried to take the body again.

  "Is that okay?" Matilda asked.

  It appeared to be a sunny day. The window magnified the light and threw rays over the bed and into the room. She wondered what patterns it would make throughout the day. She was sure that it would be beautiful, but she hoped that she would only have to see it once.

  "When will you be back?" Lara asked.

  "I'll come in several times a day," Matilda said.

  "How many days are you planning to have me in here?"

  "As few as possible, Lara," Matilda said. The irritation was evident in her voice. "This isn't easy, you know. I'll be back tonight."

  It looked as if Roger might enter the room, but Matilda left quickly then and pulled the door to behind her.

  Lara gazed at the window as if it were a porthole revealing her future. It was bright outside and the glass glowed intermittently as clouds drifted in front of the sun.

  She tried not to stare at the furnishings of the room, but there wasn't much here to occupy her mind. She looked at the bed, which was just a curved metal frame with bolts attaching the legs and a blue mattress with white stripes on top. A single. She thought of Sylvia and wondered what state she was in now. She remembered her sisters' sobs and half-stifled screams. Sylvia had been sorry in the end, when the removal men had pulled her apart and carried her out of the bedroom, piece by piece. Lara imagined her upended in a storage unit, perhaps with other items piled on top of her or hanging from her legs. For sure, she was sorry now. There was little she could have done about her fate, but she had waited too long to appeal to Matilda for mercy. The majority of them had spent their time telling tales of how merciless Matilda was and they had got what they should have expected, if not deserved. They'd all relied on Imelda to save them, but for the most part she had been silent. Perhaps she more than any of them had known what was coming.

  The walls were stone in this room too and there were a couple of paintings on the opposite wall. A sea view with a sail boat in a harbour and another of a beach ball on sand. It was as if whoever had been living here had wanted to escape too, as if everyone's escape was a prison to someone else. Everyone wanted to change.

  With that thought, Lara settled into waiting. She didn't want to be like so many others, unsatisfied with her lot until she changed it, only to be unsatisfied with the result. That pattern was a trap in itself. She spent the time instead reflecting on all she had achieved. Without her, Roger and Matilda would not be here. Roger would have been home when the bailiffs or gangsters or whatever they were came to trash the place and they would have trashed him too, breaking fingers and knees and lips in the process. She imagined him lying on the floor with blood and spit draining from his broken mouth. She'd saved him from that. She'd saved Matilda too. If it weren't for her, she'd still be in the shed, turning green and becoming unrecognisable, inside and out. They'd be bits falling off. Eventually one of her legs would have collapsed and she'd have toppled over, crushed by the weight of her own loneliness and insanity, one of which Lara knew well and the other she was coming to know, piece by piece.

  She had rescued herself too, from a life with the sisters, in which Imelda made the rules for everyone and the others were too blind, too cowed or too trusting to see that their unofficial leader only wanted what was best for herself.

  She felt a pang of fear imagining Imelda now, in storage with Sylvia and the others. She could hardly imagine her rage and was glad that she was not there to hear it, night in and night out, while people placed treasured objects in the containers either side of them and across the corridor, but nobody ever came for them. The only people who could free them were in this cottage and none of them had any intention of doing such a thing.

  There had been casualties, of course. She thought of Anna, who hadn't been all that bad, but she consoled herself by remembering the times when she had laughed at her when she'd said something silly. Anna hadn't been the worst of them, but she hadn't helped. She was cool and smart and streetwise and it had been easy for her to laugh at someone less fortunate and less gifted. That was a pretty despicable trait. She could rock back and forth in the storage unit thinking about that now. Despite all her skills, the ability to be kind had not been one of them. Shame on her.

  And, of course, there was Isla. In the hours that followed in the spare room, Lara wondered over and over whether the removal man had dropped Isla or whether she had thrown herself from his fingers. The more she thought about it, the more she tho
ught the latter. Isla certainly would not have wanted to remain with her sisters in storage, but perhaps she hadn't wished to travel with Matilda either. Her dearest wish might have been to remain in the house, alone, but even a mind as peaceful as Isla's had been would surely have turned in there, week by week, month by month, year by year.

  Lara wondered how long she might last in this room. It was a welcome relief from the boot of a car, but a prison is a prison. How long could someone be alone before they forgot who they were?

  "You're not alone," she imagined Isla saying. "You'll never be alone."

  "I know," Lara said to the empty room. "I do."

  "I know you do."

  *

  "It's been three weeks and three days," Lara said. "The sun's going down. Again. How long does it take for an express delivery?"

  "I don't know."

  "You know what I'm thinking?"

  "That she hasn't sent the chest at all."

  "Precisely."

  "I'm way ahead of you."

  "Why would she order it? I've asked myself over and over. Why would the escaped lion travel with its cage?"

  "And the answers always the same. The lion would do exactly that if the loss of the cage meant the loss of the soul."

  "Is that what happened to you? Did the mirror breaking destroy your soul?"

  "Something changed in me when the mirror broke."

  "Me too. Isla? Did you do it on purpose?"

  "Why does it matter? It's all about you now."

  "Yeah, all about me, in this room, in this cottage that I've not even seen. I've exchanged one prison for another."

  "We're all in a prison of one kind or another."

  "Except for you."

  "Even me."

  "I'm glad you came back to talk to me. I don't know what I'd do without you. I think I'd go mad if I didn't have you with me."