She usually showers before sleeping and overnight her hair dries into ridiculous contours, pale blonde and fluffy with static from her percale sheets. She jokes about her hair having a life of its own and he tugs gently at it, pulls his hand away in a mime of alarm.
‘Something bit me!’
‘You think you’re so funny.’
Mornings have been the hardest things to adapt to; company after three decades of waking up alone. She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at four p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.
‘I like quiet in the mornings,’ she had told him once, pressing a hand to his mouth before he was properly conscious so that he had woken up blinking rapidly and thinking he was being attacked.
Once he had understood her, he had done as she asked, dressing with his tongue between his teeth, and she had found herself talking to him anyway. Holding up two shirts and asking for an opinion, catching his eye in the mirror and feeling guilty as he mimed incapability, a stitched-up voodoo mouth.
‘You can talk,’ she had said at last. ‘I’m sorry.’
Pulling invisible threads from his lips, dragging out his voice like something caught in a net.
He leaves earlier than she does, pulling on his wax jacket and his backpack, too tall for her without her shoes. On the way out, she hears him calling good morning to her elderly neighbour, Mrs Lumis, who occupies the basement flat and has taken to loitering in the corridor to tell him he has no business messing with lonely girls.
‘Don’t think I don’t see you, my lad. You think you can move about beneath my notice but I see what you do. Watch your step. Mind your feet.’
‘I will, Mrs Lumis. I’ve got my walking boots on.’
In the fifteen minutes after he leaves, the relief of space falls flush against the greater relief of missing him. Maggie tames her hair with pins, lipsticks her mouth. Leaving for work, she finds Mrs Lumis still in the hallway, waiting to fix her with a wounded look and call her ‘Margaret’, which is not her given name.
‘It’s Maggie, Mrs Lumis. Just Maggie. You know, we don’t need to be so formal with each other. We’ve been neighbours for two years.’
Mrs Lumis stares at her – wraithish figure in the corridor, as though the dust from all the unswept corners has been thrown by some disturbance into brief corporeality. She is a sore-boned woman, grimly hyaline, wigged to cover the bald head that Maggie has glimpsed occasionally – pale through the basement window bars.
‘Your visitor slams doors,’ her voice like a path picked through glass. ‘All night the noise. Slamming and footsteps. Stops me sleeping.’
‘I’m sorry if he does,’ Maggie replies, unaccountably depressed by the droop of Mrs Lumis’ wrists, eggskin sliver of white between her nose and upper lip. In recent weeks, Mrs Lumis’s eyes have started losing colour at their centres. Maggie imagines the morning crusts at the corners of her eyelids as flecks of iris that have leaked out in the night. ‘I have to go to work now but I’ll talk to him about it.’
‘You needn’t do that.’ Mrs Lumis speaks quickly, the scrambling fright of someone caught in a lie. ‘Just don’t have him here any more, then he won’t have doors to slam.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘Better for everyone,’ Mrs Lumis barrels on, face set with some unpleasant meaning, ‘in the long run. Better for him to not be here.’
Maggie looks at her, at the rubbed-off corners of her lonely body, and registers a certain pricking horror. A hot, unsettled recognition. All the way to work she feels it, needles in the hollows of her feet.
+
Morning sky, gasp of purple, like the dark part at the back of a throat. Day like a swallow. Promise of snow.
A chilly sliver of floor. She picks barefoot across the kitchen to gather coffee, croissants warmed in the oven. She piles a tray with milk and butter knives, honey and apricot jam. Thinks about it for a second and then forces open the frosted kitchen window, pulling a spray of winter cyclamen from the planter outside. This she arranges in a water glass beside the coffee press, standing anxiously back to assess the effect. On impulse, she pulls the flowers from the glass and tucks them behind her ear. Thinks better of it and returns them to the glass again.
‘You have a wet ear,’ he says when she brings in the tray. His voice is bad today, gravelled with cold, and as she clambers in beside him he turns away from her to sneeze. She has a funny impulse to kiss him then, to take his germs or whatever is wrong with him into herself on a long inhalation. A disgusting sort of perversion, love.
Her bedroom is warm, rat-king of tights on the dressing-table chair. His shoes are upside down and drying on the radiator. At work the previous day, he had turned his ankle on a patch of slate paving. The skin around the bone is already mottled, dark spread like a spilling, blue and grey.
‘Better stay off your feet for the weekend,’ she had said, waggling her eyebrows at him to make him laugh. He had stolen arnica from her bathroom cupboard to bring out the bruising, smell of antiseptic on his palms.
After coffee and croissants, he presses her down into the mattress. In her tenderised, meat-coloured room he holds her wrists together, bites her neck. Stone-weight of him, a reassuring breadth.
Later on, she goes back to the kitchen to wash up. Looking out into the shared garden, she sees Mrs Lumis making a shuffling tour of the lawn in the first of the snow. A strange sight, spectral. Like death walking in the morning, looking for its lost cat.
+
The key, she has been taught by the books she reads, is to love a man slightly less than he loves you. That way you remain in some sense unreachable. An inch above the floor.
It is the shape of his mouth that makes this impossible. The crest of freckles up his back. He sleeps as if murdered, as if set in concrete, flat out and immobile. On one of their first nights together, he had set seven alarms to go off at three-minute intervals and in the morning had slept through every one. She had lain there confused, dead man in her bed. Had realised that there could be no way of loving sensibly if every morning started with the relief of finding him still alive.
Her friends call him ‘the gorgeous man’. Say it to his face sometimes, the way one might address a dog: ‘And how is the gorgeous man today?’ In meeting him, they seem collectively to have forgotten that they ever accused her of being fussy. ‘Worth the wait,’ they tell her smugly, as if the advice had been theirs, ‘he’s a paragon. Now for God’s sake don’t screw it up.’
+
The snow settles – city pressed in clay. You can feel the confusion, a tightening of formerly unsolid things. Ice on car windows, difficult breath.
His ankle has continued to trouble him, an irritation that lasts into the week. On the Wednesday, he rolls up his trouser leg and she sees that the bruise has blurred down into something stranger, greyer; an unexpected goriness that makes her bite her lip.
‘Is it painful?’ she asks, watching him hop about her kitchen, though he only shakes his head, chops onions, reaches for the salt.
‘Not particularly. It’s mostly just annoying.’
He tells her that when he was thirteen, he grew nine inches in the space of a summer and was barely able to walk. ‘My mother called it the Bad Summer,’ he says, gesturing to his hip. ‘The tops of my legs kept popping out of their sockets because everything was growing too fast. She tells these stories about me falling down stairs because I couldn’t get a measure of myself, these great piles of limbs she’d find everywhere. Like my body was coming apart or like something was trying to get out. It sounds brutal but honestly, I barely remember it now.’
She loves stories like this, loves to describe her childhood back to him, her own swift descent of stairs. Finding points of congruence is a never-ceasing fascination, the smells and morning newspapers an
d little superstitions that bridged their early lives, every similarity more meaningful than she knows it ought to be. In truth, of course, there is little correlation. He grew up further north than she did; a big house, an anthology of cousins, a string of dynastic family dogs. Her childhood was a smaller thing. Ugly duckling, her teeth birdcaged with braces. Barely five feet tall by the age of fifteen, she had spent her schooldays being left off netball teams, styling her hair to cover her face. Her mother, a narrow-lipped, resourceful woman, had told her at her university graduation that no one was going to marry her with a miserable face like that.
She likes to tell him things like this and watch his forehead contract as he tries and fails to picture it. In this way, she becomes aware of the curious history of the world, the wide gulfs of experience that can exist between lovers.
After dinner, they watch television and she takes his feet into her lap. In the dark, his skin has a blue tinge, as though it has been through the wash with a new pair of jeans. She rubs circles in his ankle with her thumb, frowning at the texture. The skin is dry beneath her fingers, a sensation like wax, like the breaking down of a doll.
+
It is easy enough, of course, to forget that she loves him. On the days between frenzies, when he leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen lino, when he whistles through his teeth. No one, she is sure, is capable of loving all the time, without interruptions or reprieves. Occasionally, there will simply be days when he smells wrong, when she thinks she spots something different inside him, and then she will push him away when he tries to kiss her, wipe her mouth with the back of her hand.
Sometimes, she fantasises that he has died. Died in some cinematic disaster; run down by a motorcycle, a clot on his lungs. In these dreams, she goes to his funeral in a Spanish mantilla and afterwards moves far away to a place where it rains. The fantasy is detailed, though changeable. She gets a job in a cafe or a cinema, learns to roast a chicken. Sometimes, she has his name tattooed on her ankle and sometimes she pierces her ears. Eventually, she moves in with some handsome local man with no passions and no interests who kisses well and doesn’t need to be loved. They live together in the broad forgetful blue of this town, sharing nothing of themselves, perfectly happy.
The culmination of these fantasies always scares her and she finds herself calling him up at his house just to hear him, bleary and irritated at some throwaway hour of the night.
‘I just called to say I love you,’ she will say and he will tell her to stop quoting eighties pop music at him and to call him again at nine.
Her friends are impatient with her inconsistencies, tell her she is looking for excuses.
‘You have what you wanted. Why pick holes in it?’
She tries to tell them that that isn’t what she means to do. Sour with salted crisps and mulish at being, as she sees it, wilfully misunderstood. She leans forward over her knees and says again that she is happy with him, she isn’t disputing that fact, but her friends only move the wine away from her and remind her of what she was like before he came along. ‘Maybe you were alone too long to find it easy now, Maggie, but that shouldn’t be an excuse.’
These lectures leave her feeling self-righteous, unfairly chastised. Coming home sticky-lipped from the wine and the argument, she will grumble and thrash her way through a solitary evening, watching television alone and ignoring her friends’ messages, heating dinner in the microwave. She will canonise her former loneliness with a tang of self-pity, pretend to revel in the re-established silence, the remote control and sofa to herself. Before him, she had often wondered whether solitude was a skill one could lose like schoolgirl Latin, or whether it was simply a talent one acquired, bike-like, never afterwards forgotten. Now, of course, she knows her limits better. By the end of a single evening alone, she is usually sated. Calls him up to ask what he’s up to and whether he wouldn’t rather come and be with her.
+
Mrs Lumis is on the basement stairs without her wig, skunk-like in a balding housecoat. Maggie tries to get past without comment, but Mrs Lumis never emerges unless she has something to say.
‘Your visitor was at it again – all night the slamming and the crashing. Rockslides through my ceiling. Not a wink of sleep.’
‘He really wasn’t, Mrs Lumis.’ Maggie is tired, carrying Chinese food that is burning through her shirt. ‘We went to bed at nine thirty. He doesn’t get up in the night.’
Mrs Lumis shakes her head and Maggie finds herself guiltily transfixed by the eggcup curve of her skull. She thinks of the box of wigs with which her mother had once encouraged her to play dress-up – imagines herself fitting polyester hair to her neighbour’s head; the bobbed red wig, the sleek Elvira.
‘Better to send him away, with all that banging,’ Mrs Lumis continues. ‘Doesn’t suit it here. Better to send him off.’
Maggie is distracted, eager to get upstairs.
‘If you are hearing anything, Mrs Lumis, I can promise you it isn’t him. Maybe we have a ghost.’ Or maybe you’re making it up, she doesn’t quite say, only hiking the bag of Chinese food higher up her chest.
Mrs Lumis shakes her head.
‘No ghosts, dear. Just you and me and him.’
She escapes without good manners, gesturing to her food in half-apology and staggering backwards up the steps. She finds him in her kitchen, awkwardly collecting up pieces of a bowl he has apparently just smashed.
‘And I told Mrs Lumis you weren’t the one making noise,’ she sighs, putting down her Chinese food and crouching to help him, swatting his apologies away. The bowl is glazed blue pottery, a tourist purchase from a week in Stoke, and he pieces it back together with a sweet precision, promising to find some glue. She pulls his hands away, already laughing, though the shock of his fingers is enough to blunt her smile. He is cold, even for a chilly evening, and she quickly sets him to unpacking the hot plastic tubs of beef chow mein.
He has been off work the past couple of days at her insistence. His ankle is worse and frustrating him and his cold seems no better. At night, his breathing is difficult, a crumbling thing, like a flaking off of paint. He tells her, shrugging, that he had pneumonia as a boy and is simply more susceptible to cold and flu, though his shrug makes such a blur of cracking noises that she is almost too distracted to respond.
‘You shouldn’t work outside,’ she tells him later, eating sesame noodles on the sofa and drawing distracted circles in his leg. Propped on the coffee table, his feet are white and bloodless, a peculiar beating of his pulse high up in his knees. ‘Not in the snow, anyway. Not in weather like this.’
‘Got to earn my filthy lucre,’ he replies, nudging her hand deliberately off his leg. ‘Keep you in a manner to which you’re accustomed.’
It is a joke, though a weary one, and he yawns right through its middle in a way which messes up the tone. Rolling his shoulder – another fluster of splintering sounds – he slides further down the sofa. A banging sound starts up, noise like pipes thumping up through the floorboards, and it takes Maggie several moments to realise that Mrs Lumis is beating at her ceiling with something like a broomstick. A rhythmic imperative – get out.
+
The first time they had slept together had also been the first time. She has never told anybody this; she is, after all, practically thirty.
She had bled, of course, and passed it off as her period – talk about bad timing – a nervous snort of a laugh. He had ignored this, kissed her chin and eased her over onto her side, and she had loved him then about as much as she ever would come to later, loved him for the ache of his kindness and the things he chose not to see.
The pain had been worse than expected, though not in the way she had imagined it might hurt. She had always pictured men battering away at her; a great internal shearing, a falling all to bits. In truth, of course, it was all very much as her most honest friends had assured her – ineffably more boring and more enjoyable, the pain sharper and more localised; egg crack against the rim of a bowl
.
Afterwards, he had not smoked a cigarette or talked or tried to hold her, only fallen asleep for a curious half hour and then woken again, asking whether he had been snoring. Pale man in her meat-coloured bedroom, long blue eyes and his smell like grass and eiderdown and something stranger; damp down a wall. Looking at him then, she had thought about all the men who might have preceded him, the men she had allowed to take her out to movies and sit-down dinners but forestalled before letting them into her flat. Always a reason, of course; a stupid comment or a quick flash of violence, a seam of cruelty in some region of their bodies (a grabbing hand, a dark and fleshy underside). Enough, whatever the reason, to make her wish to bar their way any further, to invent excuses and take the train back home alone.
‘There’s always something with you,’ her friends had said to her. ‘Always something with any man you meet. It’s like you don’t want a man at all, you want an object. Something you can put away.’
In truth, she had often wondered whether the problem was actually her – whether she brought out the monsters in them. By logic alone, after all, they couldn’t all be as dreadful as they seemed when she got to know them, or else why would anyone marry them, want to have them near? Prolonged contact, she had reasoned when slick with Chardonnay, deep in self-pitying vein, that must be it. Too long with me and they all turn, become worse.
That first night with him, she had watched for the change. A shifting in aspect, a re-carving of the bones in his face. She has watched for it every night since, that sudden monstering, but so far has found nothing. Perhaps, she hopes, whatever power she has is waning. Perhaps she can control it with a man she loves.
+
‘Look at this.’
She is brushing her hair in the dressing-table mirror. Wide yawn of morning. The snow is packed tight outside, soft pulse like the struggle of bound wings.
Still looking in the mirror, she sees him holding up his hands. The skin around his fingernails is mottled dark, as though he has soaked his hands in vinegar. As she watches, he rubs one wrist against the other, a strange solidity of movement, rattle as of something thrown. In the foxed glass, there seems little delineation between his fingers. They bunch together stiffly, unyielding and brittle as handfuls of cutlery.
Salt Slow Page 9