Salt Slow

by Julia Armfield

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  After failing to finish the rice I had given her, Cassandra sat back against the sofa cushions and asked when I’d last cut my hair. She held her glass of juice a little slackly and I felt nervous that she might decide to pour it on the carpet or throw it in my face. Sitting low against the blanket my mother had crocheted to cover the boot marks on my second-hand sofa, she was a gentle sort of horror; the look of a girl removed from a coffin by a lunatic and placed upright to partake in a dinner party.

  She told me idly that she had found a bunch of flowers against her headstone with a label reading RIP Clive and that she had spent the best part of an hour wandering the cemetery looking for the correct place to put it. There weren’t any Clives anywhere near me, she explained, but it felt churlish not to look. She had eventually ended up leaving the bouquet at the graveside of someone named Trevor, a name which she claimed to be close enough to Clive in era and sociological type as to be tantamount to the same thing. What I mean to say by all this is that I’m sorry it took me so long to get here, she added, setting her juice down on the coffee table and moving a hand to my leg. Her fingernails, I noted, were filthy, her expression odd, and my body felt tight as a fist, chilly tension seizing up the muscles in my legs.

  Traditional Catholic funeral custom strongly favours burial over the ritual of cremation. This is mostly to do with the belief in the resurrection of the body, an oddly terms-and-conditions approach to the holy mysteries which dictates that only those buried intact will be granted eternal life. The thought has always reminded me of a Sunday school gag – my cousins smoking cigarettes under the vestibule window, flicking ash onto the toes of my shoes and getting me to kick upwards: And on the third day he rose again! Oh no, wait, he was cremated. False alarm. My girlfriend was not a Catholic but chose to be buried anyway, a decision she had communicated to me in a highly considered fashion one day whilst refusing to explain her logic or why she had brought it up. I told her that I wanted to be cremated, although this was more of a snipe at the fact that I happened to be chilly that day. She took my hands and blew on them and I felt unaccountably irritated, pulling one hand away and wiping it when she blew too hard and left little flecks of spit on my fingertips. There’s a selfishness to you, she said, perhaps in response to this or perhaps to something other. A mean streak. You’re not always very kind to people. I objected to this and took her judgement away to stew over, finally coming to the conclusion that she was right after all and enjoying that, in a childish, contrary way. It became oddly like permission, this acknowledgement – the mean streak, once spoken aloud, a quality I found too easy to excuse in myself.

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  She had told me that the women in her family tended to die oddly, writing a list on the back of a canteen serviette after finishing a slice of opera cake. It was an oddly sexy move, flipping the napkin before she slid it over to me, like an offer in a silent auction. I flipped it back and read it while she asked for the bill, taking note of the tall, bent consonants that seemed to smuggle vowels across the paper.

  Great-Aunt Helen, died in the surf at Margate, blanketed with jellyfish

  Grandma Louise, tried to kill herself first by eating a pot of poinsettias (which didn’t work) and then by swallowing bleach (which did)

  Third Cousin Caroline, fell from a fourth-storey window taking delivery of a Christmas tree

  The list ran to some twelve or thirteen bullets and devolved from close kin to the merely tangential. Second Cousin Anya (some five times removed) was documented to have been impaled on the antlers of a stag, whilst Marina (relation unspecified – something to do with her great-grandma’s third husband) was rather cryptically billed as having become convinced of a terrible thirst. She paid the bill while I was reading and waved a hand at my protestation. Stands to reason I won’t be around as long as you, she said, tapping her finger against the napkin, might as well throw my money around.

  This trip to the canteen was our third date, although only on a kind of technicality. The first date (so-called) comprised the encounter in the bookshop. The second was prompted by a panicked late-night phone call, which I had instigated after convincing myself I wasn’t going to and she suggested a drink. I dressed quickly after ending that call, throwing on a dark red jumper which I hoped might distract her attention from the scab I had picked at my chin. She found me outside the pub she had suggested, fifteen minutes after we were due to meet, saying cheerfully that she had been around the whole place twice and hadn’t recognised me at all. The date was a curious mix of natural and stilted, Cassandra asking once if I had somewhere else to be but only smiling when I queried this. Chill out. You’re wriggling around all over the place.

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  There was a place in the side of her cheek where the skin had come away enough to reveal the upward slant of her teeth. I stared at it as she talked, thinking of the cutaway drawings in biology textbooks, the human body half revealed like a dollhouse, layers of dermis and fatty tissue drawn back to show an annotated cross-section of liver and lungs. I took away the unfinished bowl of rice and the juice glass and set them on the kitchen counter, squinting as I did so at the postcard she had once tacked to my fridge. A cartoon print of a city, underscored by thick black print: There may be no heaven anywhere but somewhere there is a San Francisco. I had taken this postcard down and put it up again several times in the weeks after she died, pacing the kitchen with it held between thumb and forefinger, approaching the bin but never moving to throw it away. I had done all kinds of things in those tight, toothsome weeks which had latched themselves to my body like fangs embedded in flesh. I’d burned smudge sticks and thrown open the windows, hoping birds would fly into the house. I’d called up radio stations and taken part in competitions to win Toyotas and kitchen blenders and holidays to Spain. One morning, possessed of a strange mania, I had pulled two fingernails out at the root and afterwards had stood looking at them for several minutes before wrapping them, dropping them in the toilet and flushing them away.

  Where’s all your fruit, Cassandra said, having meanwhile shifted from the sofa and moved to join me by the fridge. She was wet, a clammy waterlogged permanence, and her hair dripped silt onto the kitchen tiles. She was looking over at my fruit bowl, which I had allowed to grow delinquent and furry with ancient pomegranates. I told her I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been shopping and she rolled her eyes at me. I’ve always thought it’s a miracle you don’t get scurvy. I thought about all the other things I had ceased to do reliably – the electric bills I’d put through the shredder, the dwarf irises I had allowed to die in their planters. She told me she would pop to the corner shop when it got a little lighter and buy me a bag of blood oranges but I told her she might scare the other customers. Well I wouldn’t want to embarrass you, she said coolly in response to this. I found I suddenly doubted the strength in my upper body, a sensation of air leaking from tyres slashed by glass. The fear that had settled at the small of my back crept a little higher, clutching like unfriendly hands.

  Beyond the kitchen window, the sky was the colour of whaleskin. It occurred to me that I was sweating, although the night was chilly, my legs smudged green with bruises from all the times I had slammed them into doors and the sides of coffee tables, wandering the house in a daze. So anyway, Cassandra said, as if resuming a perfectly normal conversation, tell me everything. I want to know what you’ve been up to. I looked at her and thought about how I had always loved her attention and simultaneously hated too much of it. She met my gaze with equanimity, the split in her lip like a lightning-burst strip of fence. Nothing much, I said, after a pause, getting on with things. I’m more interested to know what’s been going on with you.

  She shook her head. You never want to talk about you. I know you think it’s being polite but actually it just makes me feel like you don’t trust me. I sighed, trying to balance the logic of her language against the insanity of her appearance in my kitchen. She shook her head again and a segment of earthworm dropp
ed out of her ear.

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  She had taken me to galleries and Ukrainian cafés and the unfamiliar sections of bookshops. Afternoon dates, lemon-skied and out in the open – I had held her hand on the overground and let her kiss me over rugelach. Look at your hair, she had often said, look at your hands, look at the way you say things. It was her way of complimenting me, though it also doubled as a kind of homework, to be held up to such scrutiny. For my birthday, two months after we’d first met, she took me for Muscadet and oysters at a place she knew in the city and we both managed to get ludicrously drunk in the space of about an hour. The oysters were good, cheaply decadent; pucker-salt and bone and tide. I watched her throat moving as she swallowed and thought of all the boys I had ever kissed at school. What d’you think? she asked, licking her bottom lip and then the points of her incisors. I told her about how my father had always liked to pinch lemon over oysters, the quailing shrink of the creamy little creatures from the sting. I didn’t realise you’d had them before, she’d replied, swinging back on her barstool as though pushed. There’s me thinking I’m broadening your horizons! I laughed at this, refilled her wine glass and threw back an oyster with uncharacteristic elan. You’re so patronising. Pass me another.

  In the evenings after our dates, I took to smearing my hands with lotion to force myself to wait before replying to her messages. Had a gorgeous time, she would text me, then a picture of a dog she had seen on a train. I would wait until my hands dried, cycling as I did through impatience, through apathy, through the surprising and fleeting desire to never text her again. Me too, I would always reply, shortly after getting over this last impulse and starting the cycle anew. Then I would tell her what music I was listening to and she would give me her opinions and we would go on that way until one of us fell asleep.

  So you’re a lesbian now, a friend had asked me, over tea and boxed doughnuts. I had tried to explain my thoughts on the Kinsey scale, to explain that it wasn’t that exactly but it wasn’t bisexuality either, and had given up halfway through.

  One night, Cassandra and I had gone out together to a mostly male gay club in the city. It was almost autumn, chilly weather scraping like nails down a board, and she threw her jacket over my shoulders in the queue. I kissed her in response to this and immediately wished I hadn’t, for a group of men on the kerb cheered us and I pulled away embarrassed and turned my ankle off the edge of my shoe. Inside, I bought us drinks and tried to avoid being kissed again, though she caught me on the cheek and then on the corner of my lip. On the dancefloor, she slung her bare arms around my shoulders and gave me such a violent electric shock that I staggered away from her. We ended up dancing with a group of largely indifferent men, the friendliest of whom tugged my ponytail and shouted, apropos of nothing much, I love a trier. I sank suddenly, doused by tequila and loud music, danced ridiculously and wrapped my arms around my girlfriend’s neck. It’s so cheesy! I apparently screamed at her at one point and she petted my face and told me not to offend the clientele.

  When we left the club, I found that someone had stolen my wallet and I ended the evening crying messily in an all-night café. Sitting slanted at a table by the window, I scrambled repeatedly through my handbag, lash-stuck and salty with the start of dry heaves. Cassandra slotted sharply into my vision, squatting down with her hands on my thighs. I remember little of what was actually said that night, but I know I told her this felt like a punishment and I know she rolled her eyes. It can’t always be about shame, she said, gesturing around her in a way I knew was meant to encompass more than just the café; the whole night, everything.

  The next day, I woke up hungover and went to the Catholic church at the end of my road, a place I had never once been. The place smelled, not of incense, as Catholic churches do in memoirs, but of sweat and furniture polish, stale bread and Gucci Guilty. Someone at the door handed me a hymnal – finger marks on sticky-back plastic. I sat in a pew near the back and leafed through the index, trying to decipher the Sunday school graffiti: Roxane was here; one holy catholic and APOSTOLIC church; saint cecilia was a lezzer & so was saint louise.

  Afterwards, Cassandra came to find me, bearing coffee and apple turnovers and offering to help me order a new bank card and a new driving licence. She slid an arm around me and kissed me on the side of mouth in a way that made me love her terribly, though I had promised God the opposite only minutes before.

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  You could tell the library book on mourning customs was dated, primarily because of the emphasis it placed on the bereaved abstaining from balls and galas in the months after a death.

  One is advised, it read, to refrain from public functions during the mourning period, as well as private parties and large events hosted in the home. One may dine with select friends and continue such sports and pastimes as might be considered reasonably appropriate, but costume should be dark-coloured and suited only to the sport at hand.

  A widow, it continued, should accept no overt or clandestine romantic attentions for the space of one year. If this rule is disregarded, all mourning attire and pretence of adherence to the mourning period should be entirely dropped.

  In the kitchen, Cassandra had turned on the radio and was singing along to the song by Barry Manilow about waving goodbye and being back in a city where nothing seemed clear. In the overhead light, I could see how thin her hair was and the way her teeth rattled oddly in their sockets, displaced by so much dirt and so much time spent out of sight. Is this a haunting? I asked her and she looked at me as if surprised. No, she said, turning the radio down, not technically. More like a manifestation. I accused her of quibbling over semantics and she accused me of being incapable of nuance. We argued and it all felt very much the way it used to, except for the way her bones showed through her skin.

  Is ‘haunted’ something you feel, particularly? she queried, and I looked at her quickly. Her expression was even but there was something pointed and rather bitter about the air-starved cast of her gaze. I mean in general, she prodded, though I refused to take the bait.

  You look tired, she said at length and reached out to push my hair away from my face, although her fingers were clammy and made my forehead feel clammy too. I don’t think, I wanted to say, that I ever deserved your attention, though I only shrugged and turned away from her, trying to remember how people banished ghosts in films. On the kitchen countertop, I noted that my phone was flashing – green light, rather than blue, which meant it was a message from someone on a dating website.

  New here, my profile said, not sure what I’m looking for.

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  The weekend after I’d first slept with my girlfriend, I went to get a haircut. My hairdresser, a woman prone to overshare, told me unprompted that a female friend of hers had recently ‘gone gay’ and that she, my hairdresser, wasn’t sure she still wanted to invite her to a standing dinner they held every second Sunday of the month. The sensation was not unlike the slip of missing a step, or the realisation that someone you are having an emotional moment with is much drunker than you’d thought they were. She continued to cut my hair and I remained in my seat and did not ask her to explain what she meant exactly. After she finished, I removed the black smock she had velcroed around me and my hair fell like something tipped from a jar.

  Cassandra was a good kisser, a good talker, a good judge of pace. I was bad at sex and knew it, though I had always been bad at it and stressed that this was not about her. I explained to her the way I felt I floated up out of myself and observed the whole thing loosely, from a distance. I explained the way I felt no better or worse after doing it, only an overwhelming sense of having missed the point. She shook her head at this and kissed me and told me I was taking things far too seriously. Later on, we fell asleep together and I woke up gasping from a nightmare that she was sinking claws into my sides.

  I had a bad body around that time – creaking joints and difficult digestion, a martyr to mouth ulcers and bleeding gums. My turn-ons included being bitten and
being grabbed by the roots of my hair. During sex, my girlfriend sometimes told me she had never wanted anyone more and I sometimes told her the same thing and sometimes didn’t say anything at all. After sex, she liked to eat individual rice puddings which she kept in the fridge at my house. On Saturday mornings, she would go swimming in the lake near the common whilst I did my laundry and vacuumed the house. She would come back smelling of moss and duckweed and I would towel her hair and read her horoscope from the back pages of the paper. On Sundays, we would stay in, just us, watch movies together and make up pasta sauces, and those were often my favourite times.

  It’s kind of a holiday though, isn’t it, a friend asked me, licking jam and doughnut sugar from the knuckle of one thumb. The girl thing. Only a temporary solution. I thought about Cassandra’s list on the back of the napkin, the tacitly promised respite – Great-Aunt Helen, died in the surf – and did not know what to say. Occasionally, I convinced myself I had made it all up – love, attraction, all of it – that I had made it up with everyone I’d ever met.

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  I was worried that the sun would start coming up and that she would still be there. I wanted to know whether the mourning book had any etiquette notes on visitations from the recently deceased but it seemed insensitive to check it in front of her. For all her insistence that her presence didn’t constitute a haunting, there seemed a strange intent behind her aimlessness, an inability to say something pressing that put me stupidly in mind of movies about ghosts with unfinished business – poltergeists who plagued stately homes in lieu of stating grievances aloud. She circled my kitchen several times, picking things up and dropping them, rearranging the magnets on the fridge. I found myself wishing she’d come back as a vampire or a werewolf, something with fangs and a destructive will. As it was, the onus seemed to be on me to make something of the visit.