“It must’ve been the fishy one who called me dirty,” Lily muttered, sulkily, pulling her brown bath towel tighter around her skinny midriff as she stared, shivering slightly, into Sara’s hen coop. “I never even spoke to the bald one before. I never even went near him.”
In her hand, Lily held a sharp blade. Her fingers were cold and clumsy. The hens clucked, to the rear of the coop, suddenly nervous, all in a cluster.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Fifteen
Sara walked the longest possible route for her own cautious reasons and ended up in the nature reserve, where you either went forwards or backwards but couldn’t easily meander. She wanted to meander though. She’d lost her nerve. To the right of the raised bank and footpath that she tripped along billy-goat-gruffly in her summer sandals – lay the salt flats and the sea; to the left, the freshwater river, and beyond that, just fields.
“I am a farmer’s wife,” she kept incanting, “and I farm boar.”
If she went on saying it then she could almost stop herself from hoping.
“I farm boar.”
The summer dress had been a mistake. Of course. She was no sophisticate and it was spitting.
“Fool’s rain,” she told herself, because while it seemed harmless, only a fool would consider venturing out into it unprotected.
“I am a farmer’s wife.”
It rained harder. It grew darker.
“I am ridiculous.”
Up ahead, to her left, stood a birdwatchers’ hide; mawkish and hutchy on its tall stilts. She wiped the rain from her cheeks and ran over to it. The wood was harsh and splintery under her wet hand. As she began to climb, cool sea air billowed out her skirt and slipped up the back of her dress with all the smart, fine scratch of a beak and a claw. She clambered up the steps, her dress snagging, her sandals clicking.
She’d never been in a hide before. She imagined that it would be black inside and that it would smell of dark things, of treacle and pitch. She presumed that all the peep holes and hatches would be closed, so prepared herself for the shock of darkness. The door handle was wet and turned loosely. She pushed at the door with her knee and clambered inside. The rain followed her. She shut the door and then leaned her back up against it, puffing out her cheeks in the sudden, hollow silence with a sense of genuine relief.
It did not smell sweet and treacly like she’d imagined. It smelled of fish. One hatch was slightly ajar. Its pegs had come free and its latch had slipped by an inch or so. Her eyes focused on this bright gap greedily, on the pearly raindrops that sprang through it and into the hide as if escaping from an infinite frying white heat outside.
But here it was black and warm. Sara stretched a tentative foot sideways to see if she could locate a bench. Her leg touched something woody. She bent over and felt for it, blindly. Her fingers grasped it. She found its corner and then exhaled sharply as her middle finger pushed into a splinter.
She cursed and sat down, at first miscalculating and almost missing the bench. But it was slim and backless so she straddled it like a rocking horse. She sucked her finger. Her tongue explored the nail and pad of her finger gingerly until it located the scratchy woodchip. The chip snicked her tongue’s tip and somehow thrilled her.
Her eyes were closed. Or were they? They were closed. But it made no difference. She imagined herself inside an oak casket. She’d gone and stowed herself away. She was wet and the rain on her lips was salty. She licked it. The fishy air. It was low and saucy. It smelled of sex. Of sealife. Damp and crude and tainted. Catfood. Pilchards. In oil, in oil.
Oh yes.
Under her left thigh lay a small bolt which held the top of the bench to its leg. It felt loose. She rocked herself. It wobbled. She shifted slightly and repositioned herself over it. It scratched and it niggled so delightfully. It found no focus. It had a clumsy accuracy. The best kind, she thought, and pulled up her wet skirts to feel her soaking thighs, her damp knees. The bench rocked. A little a little a little.
She felt her knee-bone, the fragile bits at the side, the gulf at the rear. She arched backwards and touched her calves, her ankles, her tinkling sandal buckles which she pulled open, yanking them off and tossing them sideways. Water dripped from her hair, on to her arms, down, down her throat. She was all at sea. She imagined Luke. Was that his name? He was a horse, a pit-pony, barrel-chested, round and solid, hard and musky. Strong hooves. Wide back. Glossy.
She rested her palms right behind her, clung on to the bench with her fingers. And she rocked and she rode, her toes pointing backwards, her hair pulling loose, her ankles aching, the letter D in flesh. Her breasts and her belly the curve, her stiff arms that letter’s lovely backbone. Punctuated, utterly, by that delicious bolt. But this was just a tiny part of a long, long sentence. A conversation. It wouldn’t end. It couldn’t. Not right there and not right then and not right now. Oh…
Where would it go? And owl Uh…how?
Mermaid, she panted, taking all things into account on this wonderful ramble into a scramble of nouns and sounds and resonance and consonants…asp…kedgeree…the arc of a boar’s tusk…oh yes, oh yes…salt, straw, honey…pockets, bacon rind, a little bruise…a giant ocean, grapefruit, whiskers…uh…ink, foam, clay, liquorice, see-saw, she-sore, sea shore…
She wanted more. She wanted so…go…flow…much more. She wanted that bench to break. She wanted to break its back before she broke her own. So she rocked it, she lunged, she pushed and she swivelled. Her arms were unhinging at their elbows, her feet were twisted, her chest all rent and rasping. Her neck and head were yanked and tilting.
It came, it was coming! She could feel that bolt loosening, a shifting, a shunting.
One! she said, her own voice stunning her like the sting of a wet rope, Two and Three and Four! She counted and counted. Sometimes she lost the thread but then the numbers came back to her like swearwords.
Oh fuck! On thirty-six her hips went dead. On thirty-eight that bench just buckled with the sweetesthardestloudest creaking. Crack! She went down with it. This was the hottest and the wettest vandalism. She gasped out laughing. Ashamed and glistening.
The floor was dusty. Her face, inky-rosy. She rolled off. Her limbs were shaking. Her dress was tangled. She tugged some skirt out from under. She put a hand to her medical underwear. She felt herself, holding her breath, suddenly cautious, as though testing the ripeness of an avocado. Oh shit, she whispered, All torn! She staggered to the door. She yanked it open.
“Excuse me…”
A voice, from deep in the dark behind her, so muffled, so muffled that it could have been something wildly unbidden hidden inside her own head.
“I think,” Luke stuttered, clutching her abandoned sandals to his wide chest, his face as white and ghastly on emerging from the hide’s darkness as what little remained of the bleak afternoon light, “I think, Sara, I honestly believe you’ve gone and killed me.”
Her face was black with mascara as she watched his knees give way.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Sixteen
The doctor was a family friend, naturally. And Connie knew, and Kitty her mother knew, that Connie knew, that Kitty had been fucking him, on and off, for the previous ten years. Kitty was magnificently post-menopausal, with great white curls, snazzy lips and eyes as soft, grey and glossy as a rabbit’s ears. And tall. Almost five nine. She rendered Connie dwarf-like by comparison.
Her mother hovered, decorously, on the perimeter of the blue room, smelling of White Linen and a heavy French hand cream, recently applied. She’d been completing the washing-up from supper when she’d heard the crash. Connie wouldn’t believe that she’d sprained her wrist. She kept touching it to check if it hurt. And it did, but only slightly.
“You may well be concussed,” the doctor said.
“But I didn’t hit my head when I tripped…” she was automatic, “only my knees and my palms.”
“But you have a bruise, darling,” her mother volunteered, “on your cheek.”
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Connie was dazzled at this notion. She had merely pressed her cheek to the floor and listened to her own blood pumping. She had thought she understood her own strength, her own silliness. But apparently not. The doctor had already bandaged up her wrist, made a sling and put some kind of elasticated material on top for support.
“It was a tiny fall,” she repeated, feeling a charlatan. She’d only told her mother she’d tripped to save fuss, not to cause it.
“When I found her,” Kitty said anxiously, twisting her wedding ring around on her finger, “flat out like that, I was utterly petrified.”
“How about,” the doctor said softly, “I have a quiet word with Connie here while you fetch her something warm and sweet to drink?”
Kitty pursed her lips and laced her fingers together, softly resisting, but then she nodded and quietly left them.
Connie resented being alone with him. As a child she’d called him Doctor Donald. Now she called him Donald. He had metallic hair and a dimple in his chin that any girl could fall into. He was a big man and perpetually peaking, she felt; always on top form. He was ruddy and Brylcreemed and reeked of suede and clean tweed. Considerably younger, she couldn’t help noting, than her father had been.
He was so polite. The situation, the affair, had been so polite. No feathers ruffled, as far as she remembered. Merely her own.
“Your mother is anxious,” he said gently, “about the will and the special bequest.”
“That’s her business,” Connie said abruptly, stretching out her legs under the covers, “and my business. Nobody else’s.”
She imagined that her knees were two volcanoes. In Sumatra there were over a hundred volcanoes. Or so Monica had written. Over a hundred volcanoes. Eighteen active.
“The simple fact of the matter is that nobody actually cares,” Donald said, staring at her intently, thoroughly logical, “so there’s really no need for any of this.”
She brought up her legs defensively. “Any of what?”
“Any of this…commotion.”
“In truth…” Connie pondered what she was about to say for a moment, “it isn’t even my mother’s business, strictly speaking. It’s mine. My business. My loan.”
“Have you been sleeping?”
“Why?” He’d caught her off her guard.
“Did you take the pills I prescribed?”
She nodded. “Yes. I took them.”
She hadn’t slept. She hadn’t taken the tablets either. It had been five long months. Waking and dreaming were merging so wonderfully now. And what could be the harm in that?
“So you’re still determined to sell?”
Connie nodded. “Certainly. The money for the premises, the flat above, the stock, everything else should just about make up the required amount.”
Donald was perched uneasily on the desk’s small pine chair. He adjusted his weight slightly and it creaked. It was a girl’s chair, she thought, and he was no girl.
“What saddens me is that your father clearly wanted you to make a go of this business. He wanted you to be secure.”
“No,” Connie shook her head, “he didn’t want me to be secure. He wanted me to commit myself. Which is something altogether different.”
“I don’t see that.”
She was irritating him. He still saw her as a small child. She was a mere toddler. Her knees wobbled, her feet faltered. In his eyes she would always be, at the very best, a dewdrop on life’s river bank. She could never cause a splash, the most she could hope for would be to glimmer slightly and then to evaporate. That’s what he’d always wanted.
But Connie saw it differently. She had another slant, which she sensed was her father’s slant too. The slant was inherited, it was legitimate, she felt, and as such it had to be embraced, it had to be hugged and treasured and cosseted. When she had called herself inconstant to Nathan, that morning, she had not meant it lightly. It was absolutely true.
She was a small blonde flea and she jumped from place to place, from man to man, from job to job. And yes, sometimes she’d found her feet, but only briefly, and on one of these occasions she’d remained static long enough to qualify as an optician. Got the certificate. Got the frames and the lenses and the premises. Did all that stuff. And Daddy loaned her. No conditions. But when he wrote her the cheque he’d said, “I have a strong suspicion you’ll pay me back.”
What had he meant, exactly? Even at the time she’d wondered. And yet now she was paying him back. But she didn’t happen to know how or why. At first she’d thought it was the other way around, that he was paying her back. Now, however, she sensed that doubt itself was his legacy. His gift.
Donald was staring at her. “What on earth could your father have been thinking of?”
She shrugged. “Me. Probably.”
“And your mother? What about her feelings?”
Connie felt absolutely no desire whatsoever to discuss any of this with Doctor Donald. Why should she? She sighed languorously. “My knees feel so heavy,” she said.
♦
The Head had instructed Lily not to wash. For the month of August. August was gorgeously equable weather-wise, so she’d perspire less, he said. Nobody would even notice. And hitherto she’d done just as he’d asked. Until now.
Lily gazed at the bath water. She felt slightly dizzy but couldn’t think why. She wondered idly what would happen if she disregarded The Head’s wishes. Her stomach nagged her. It was a feeling akin to hunger. A pinchy, poky anxiety. She gnawed at her tongue. Then she abandoned her reserve, yelped and sprang in.
Once submerged she forgot all about The Head. Instead she watched her small breasts bobbing in the water. She tried to line up her nipples with her toes. She closed her eyes and focused hard, like a fighter pilot squinting through his viewfinder. Left a little. Right a little. Pow!
Out of the corner of her eye she sensed a movement. She blinked. She sat up and peered around her. Hot water lapped against her ribs. She looked down between her knees and saw a tiny line of gravel on the bath’s enamel base. She felt vaguely perplexed. But then she sniffed, casually, and picked up a bar of soap.
Five minutes and the water had cooled perceptibly. She rinsed herself off and then clambered out. She looked around for her towel. The brown towel. It was not on the floor. She turned in a circle, still looking. She inspected the towel rack. There was a pink hand towel, nothing else. She grabbed hold of the hand towel and tried to cover herself.
She wanted the brown towel. Still looking, she walked to the door. She pushed it wide and watched steam escape into the crooked hallway. She walked down and along. On the landing at the top of the stairs she thought she saw the brown towel, all in a heap. Carelessly abandoned. Lily stared at it a while. Could she remember dropping it in that place? It was such a small detail but she scowled because it didn’t fit. She wanted it to fit.
She bent down to pick it up anyway. Her hand touched the towel and it felt as light as thistledown. She tried to lift it. It lifted, but not by any significant amount before it fractured in her hand and under its own weight. It was like dust and ashes. It was cobweb, snuff and soft fur.
She gave a little yell. She withdrew and then kicked out with her foot. The towel sprang into the free air at the top of the stairs like a skinny, vital, flat brown creature. A flying squirrel, a feathery, heathery fruitbat. Then it disintegrated. But Lily didn’t see this happen. She had sprung backwards and was yodelling because her foot was stinging. She hopped and then whimpered, clutching her injured toes in her hands. There was blood on her foot, and a mark which could have been a scratch, or a nettle sting or, more disgustingly, it could have been a bite.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Seventeen
Ronny had been weaving around in the prefab’s open doorway, in a state remarkably close to hysteria, for well over an hour. He was ludicrously buoyant, Jim felt, and for the silliest of reasons. “The rain hitting the sea!” he kept exclaiming, “Whap! Whap! Whap!” From the rear he resem
bled a little wooden puppet, a stick-doll, which somehow struck Jim as very poignant. He took a deep breath and then tried his utmost to focus on piling up the kindling in the fireplace.
In fact he found the puppet image a surprisingly resonant one, perhaps because for the first time in a long while he felt as though his own strings were being twitched – but not in a terrible way, not in a calculated way – and he was perplexed, jarred, undone, even, by the multiplicity of sensations it afforded him.
Usually he lived on one level. He preferred it that way. His colours were one colour, his music a monotone. That’s how he liked it. Even so, he couldn’t really understand Ronny’s apparent fixation on honing things down. To simplify life, certainly, but to achieve this end only through such petty deprivations? He told himself that Ronny had too much time on his hands. Which was true. But Ronny seemed to have no actual notion of time and what it really meant.
“What?”
Ronny had stopped jiggling and was peering sideways, out of the doorway, gesticulating madly into the rain.
Again.
“What?” he said, and then, “who, me?”
Quick as a flash he bolted.
Jim paused, threw down the kindling and walked to the doorway himself. A short distance down the beach Ronny joined a man and a woman. The woman seemed to be supporting the man although he was almost half her size again. Ronny procrastinated, just for a moment, and then took hold of the man’s other arm and helped to carry him, staggering, towards the prefab.
As they drew closer Jim saw that the man was Luke.
“What’s happened?”
Jim assisted them inside. Luke looked terrible. The woman didn’t look much better. Ronny was short of breath. “He thinks he’s had a heart attack,” he explained, panting.
They lay Luke down on the sofa. He seemed calm but was pale and incapable of speech.
“Do you have a phone?” the woman asked Ronny. Ronny shook his head. He turned to Jim. “You should drive him to hospital. That’d be quicker than an ambulance. His Volvo’s right outside.”
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