Closure

by Jacob Ross

  Now it was gently pulsating in Charu Deol’s horrified hand.

  The knowledge inside the hymen did not manifest in good and tidy order, like a narrative on a TV screen. It was more, thought Charu Deol, like being a djinn or a soul snake, slipping inside the twenty-seven-year-old woman’s skin and looking out through her eyes. He had the discomforting feeling that her body was a bad fit, and stifling, like a hot-water bottle around his thinner, browner self, baggy at the elbows and around the nose. He knew the woman was still with her boyfriend and that she had thought about what she’d do if he ever squeezed her arm again. Charu Deol knew they pretended that the arm-squeeze and the not-stopping was a nothing, or a small thing, instead of the cruel thing it was, and that the hair on her arm where the boyfriend gripped her was like a singed patch of grass that never grew again.

  Charu Deol sat down on the floor of the law-office church and saw that his hands were shaking. The hymen felt like thin silk between his fingers. What was he to do with it? To discard it was like throwing out a prayer book or a sacred chalice. Before he knew what he was doing, he took a new dusting cloth from his cart, carefully wrapped it around the hymen and placed it in his pocket.

  When he got home, he stole a small, plastic bag from his landlady’s kitchen – the kind she packed with naan and Worcestershire sauce – and tied it up with a plastic-covered piece of wire for work. She would be angry when she discovered his theft, so he left a pound coin on the floor, to the left of the refrigerator, as if he’d dropped it.

  She’d put the coin in her pocket without asking if it belonged to him.

  Alone in his room, he unwrapped the tiny, silken, throbbing thing and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He was assaulted with the woman’s story again: the squeeze, the disbelief, the lurking, tiny fear. This was why, when the boyfriend slapped the backs of friends or laughed too loud, a small part of the twenty-seven-year-old woman winced and moved away.

  Charu Deol placed the hymen inside the plastic bag and sealed it, setting it on the nightstand where he could see it.

  He was a witness, and that was important.

  He couldn’t sleep, conscious of the lumpy mattress, the large cupboard that took up most of his boxroom, the smell of the thin blue blankets his landlady stole from the old people’s home where she worked. No one wants them, she said, no one has any use for them. He didn’t know why she stole them; all she did was stack them in the cupboard.

  He thought of his father, a man who had never held him or, as far as he knew, been proud of him at all.

  He got up and slipped the plastic bag in between the ninth and tenth blue blanket. Before he did so, he examined it one more time. In the dim light, the hymen looked like a beautiful eye: brown and dark and soft and wet, its worn edges like eyelashes, an expression he couldn’t fathom at its centre.

  Charu Deol took long walks. That was what big-city people did. He went to a small and well-manicured park during the hours he should have been sleeping. He bent his head near the small park pond and dipped his long cracked toes in the water until someone stared and he realised he was up to his ankles at the cold, dank lip. He watched a man teach his two girls cricket with a tennis racket. He watched an orange-helmeted man run down the path, holding his son’s scooter, laughing and calling, Use your brakes! He thought about city people soaking in baths and whether they noticed the scum floating to the surface like bad tea, and about the landlady asking him if he’d like her bath water after she got out and how he’d stammered, No thank you. That’s the way you do it here, she said, and her face reminded him of his mother’s when his father’s wife went out to get sweet biscuits at the end of a meal – his mother’s long, dignified neck.

  A woman walked past with a shrill voice and a plaid shirt and a friend eating grapes, while he dried his cold feet on the grass. When they were gone, he saw the small, iridescent thing by his big toe and wanted to ignore it, or to decide it was a lost earring. He closed his eyes. But he could not leave it there, forsaking his new knowledge, as if he had no responsibility.

  Charu Deol lay on the grass, curled around the hymen, and played nudge-chase with it, like a cat with half-dead prey, snatching at the air above it, using his thin sleeve to push it around under the soft edges of the setting sun. This shrill-voiced woman’s hymen was not as soft or simple as the brown eye that lay between the ninth and tenth blue blankets in his room. This one was round, with seven holes in its centre, reminding him of the way thin, raw bread dough broke when you dragged it across a hot stove; but he’d never seen dough encrusted with stars. This hymen glittered so ferociously against the wet grass, he thought it might leave him and soar into the sky where it belonged.

  He touched it, expecting it to burn him.

  The woman with the shrill voice had been raped twice before her tenth birthday, each time by her father, who smelled expensive then, and still did now. It was not the pain the woman remembered, but the shuddering of her father’s body and the way he closed his eyes, as if he could see the burning face of God. She had never had an orgasm because she couldn’t bear that same shuddering inside of her; if it broke free, it might kill all the flowers that ever were. Charu Deol knew all this and also that the shrill-voiced woman sometimes wondered why no more than twice? Was it because her father had stopped loving her?

  Charu Deol shivered on the grass. After a while, he picked up the silver-star hymen and put it into the plastic bag in his coat pocket because part of him had known another would come. He watched the geese until a park attendant nudged him with a broom. What’s up, chappie, he said. He was an older man, with the dark chin of an uncle.

  What do you do when evil comes, asked Charu Deol.

  The attendant took out a pack of mentholated cigarettes. He sat down next to Charu Deol and smoked two while watching the geese. I don’t know, said the park attendant. But I think you have to be rational and careful about these things.

  Charu Deol took the plastic bag out of his coat pocket and showed it to him.

  I think you’re very emotional, said the park attendant, and bared his teeth. He didn’t seem to see the bag. Chin up, laddie, he said.

  Charu Deol sat on his lumpy bed that night and examined the bagged and beautiful hymens. Surely, he thought, they belonged to virgins. But neither of these violated women were pure. Was this a strange sickness of city women that no one had thought to tell him? Certainly he hadn’t known city women before, with so many ideas and so many of them about him. More than once, he’d found himself feeling sorry for them, even the ones who looked at him strangely on the 453 bus and moved their purses to the left when they saw him.

  His Tuesday job was for a company that made industrial bleach. He liked it best there. Despite the smell of ammonia, his cart shone and the teeth of his lady boss also shone and she looked into his face, not through the back of his head – and laughed loudly when he told her about the cracks in every one of his landlady’s china cups.

  Is your country very beautiful, Charu?

  He thought it very familiar of her to address him so. He could see she was made of the same stuff as his mother’s maid, very different from the finer skin of his father. She lifted the hair off her neck, which was something he thought she should only do with a man she knew well. Nevertheless, he nodded politely and the boss lady left and he went to the large unisex toilet and scrubbed yellow and brown stains out of the bowls, his rubber gloves rolled all the way up his wrists and forearms.

  When he backed out of the stall and turned around, there were three hymens on the floor. One of them was like a piece of thunder singing a dark song and rolling back and forth – the hymen of a woman in her fifties who got something called a good backhander when she talked too much, and a pinch on the waist when her opinions sounded more clever than her husband’s. The second reminded him of a teardrop. When he lifted it to his face, it filled him with memories of a woman whose husband once ironed the inside of her left thigh like a shirt. The third one slipped him inside t
he skin of a woman who had a happy life except for the time she’d walked home from school and a stranger crept up behind her, put his hand up her skirt and clutched her vulva.

  Charu Deol was so startled by the sudden feeling of invasion that he dropped the hymen in the soap dish and had to fish it out again. Two more hung from the rolling towels, like wind chimes, twins: one raped, one not, but he knew the untouched sister stayed with the violated twin because she wished it had been her instead. He clutched the sink; he couldn’t see his reflection because there was a spray of crystalline hymens across the mirror, each smaller than the last. He bent closer and realised it was only one after all, exploded across the glass like a sneeze. The woman it belonged to had clouted her best friend’s fiancée when he’d tried to hold her down. He hit her so hard in return he made her deaf in one ear. She had never told her best friend, but she didn’t go to her house anymore and that had caused problems between them. The blood from her ear had tinged the hymen spray a shy blush-pink.

  Charu Deol set about gathering them all.

  He thought them safe, slipped between the blue blankets, until Friday. Friday was his landlady’s cleaning day; till then he was expected to keep his own room clean, and did so. But he came home to find her shining his floors with a coconut husk and changing the sheets on his bed, her fat, brown back unexpectedly familiar. The blue blankets were stacked on the floor, one plastic bag peeping out from a crevice. He was so frightened she might have thrown them away, or hurt them, that before he knew it he was speaking in his father’s baritone, demanding she respect his privacy, please and thank you, and if she couldn’t, she could find someone else to pay her every Sunday for this shithole. It was a city word and he felt powerful saying it to her.

  The landlady stared at him as if he was a new and rare object. Please yourself, she said, and shuffled away from the half-polished room. Do someone a favour, he heard her muttering, as he scooped up the plastic bags. Look what you get.

  He bought himself a long coat from a charity shop. The coat had many pockets and, after his Sunday job, he sat on his bed and sewed more into the lining. His Sunday job was at a university, where he cleaned staff offices and found thirty-eight hymens. Some were like bright cherry-red fingernails; one was s-shaped, glimmering wrought iron; he tapped it and heard a ting-ting sound like his mother’s bracelet on her kitchen pots. One reminded him of a cat’s paw; another smelled like a fresh sea urchin; another like a wet leaf. It didn’t surprise him to find that eleven were from women abused by scholarly, well-respected men.

  As the numbers increased, anxiety overtook him: the risk of forgetting even one precious story. To forget would be sacrilege. He stole two reams of recycled typing paper from his Sunday job and wrote down the stories of the women and read them at night, trying to commit them to memory. On Wednesday, he was fired from his Wednesday job when he refused to take off his suspiciously bulging coat for the security guard. On Thursday, the landlady left a note from his Sunday job, to say he must not come back – their cameras had recorded his theft of paper.

  At his Tuesday job, the boss who was overly familiar left her hymen on the edge of her computer desk.

  It was so pretty he mistook it for a small, white daisy. When he touched it, his head reeled with alcohol: cranberry vodka and alcopops. The previous Friday she’d gone around the back of the pub with two men who seemed quite nice; she was sexually aroused but also frightened and when one of them said something lewd and dark, she wanted to run back into the pub but the second one had a hand on her hip and she decided she might as well bite her lip because making a fuss might. Might. Might just.

  Hurt.

  She found Charu Deol weeping for her, his cheek hard against her computer screen and fired him for the way he looked at her, his face broken open. She said if he told anybody about unfair dismissal, she would say he tried to rape her.

  Don’t look at me, she said. You don’t know.

  Charu Deol’s head is light and empty as he walks through the early morning sunshine. The coat full of hymens rubs his ankles; the satchel on his back is stuffed with scribbled paper. He is concerned about himself. He has taken to muttering in public places, to stopping men on the road to tell them about women. He needs help. He cannot witness these stories alone. If he could just explain; if he could just ask them, politely, not to hurt anyone; if he could just talk to enough of them, it might stem the tide. Most thrust him away, mistaking him for drunk.

  It’s not true, say the few who listen when he tells them that it’s one in every three women he sees. It’s complicated, say the men. What can I do, they say.

  He doesn’t know.

  His skin hurt. He feared it was transparent, exposing his internal organs. This was not a job for one man, not for a man who needed to pay rent, although he found himself less concerned with such banalities. He didn’t speak to women at all; he didn’t want to hurt or offend them. He found himself respectful with his landlady, since his last harsh words, cleaning not just his own room, but the entire house, including her roof, and digging her backyard until she yelled at him. He was relieved that she was among the unscathed, and marvelled at women on the streets for their luck or stoicism.

  One tall lady left a trail of hymen strands behind her like golden cobwebs, a story so long, fractured and dark that he bent over in the busy street and cried out his mother’s name. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again; if he could bear to take the risk, now that he was witness. He watched the golden cobweb woman laughing with a friend, swinging her bag, her heels clicking. How was she standing upright? How did they restrain themselves from screaming through the world, cleaving heads asunder, raking eyeballs? How did the universe not break into small pieces?

  He became convinced that the hymens in his coat were rotting. Despite their beauty they were pieces of flesh, after all. At other times, he imagined them glass; feared he would trip and fall and shatter them, piercing his veins and tendons. Still, he walked every day and gathered more. They littered his room, piled under the bed and towards the ceiling.

  He bought a lock for his door.

  On Monday, or perhaps it was Thursday, he took himself to the church that was a law office. The gravestones ached with the weight of early Spring daffodils. The rector found him bent over one of the graves, inserting his fingers into the damp earth, hands going from coat pocket to soil. When he said, Son, can I help you, Charu Deol asked if this was blessed earth, and would it protect blessed things. He clutched the area around his heart, then the area around his neck, and whined like a dog when the rector tried to soothe him.

  Can you not see them, Charu Deol said.

  What, my son, asked the rector.

  Charu Deol grasped the man’s lapels and dragged himself upright. He was weeping, and frightening a holy man, but the hymens were thick on the ground like blossom, and the task was suddenly, ferociously beyond him. He released the rector and ran through the graveyard, past clinking, bleeding, surging, mumbling pieces of women.

  The hymens were a sea in his landlady’s front yard. He crushed them underfoot, howling and spitting and weeping, feeling them splinter, break, snap, squelch under his heels, like pieces of liver. He tried his key, once, twice, again, wrenched it to the left, and pushed inside. The place was quiet, the dull, lugubrious walls mercifully blank, his bed cool against his face.

  The landlady knocked and entered. Lawks lad, she said. I’m worried about you. It can’t be all that bad, now. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him.

  He remembered a son she’d once mentioned; he’d never taken the time to listen. Tell me of your son, he said.

  She did, saying that she knew young men. All they needed was a firm hand and a loving heart. The two of them, they’d got off to a bad start, but now she saw he was in need of help. Would he like a cup of tea? He was too handsome a lad to get on so. Charu Deol sniffed, tried to smile, inched forward, put his head on her soft knee. She patted him awkwardly, and he felt a mother’s touch
in the fingers, and a fatigued kind of hope. He crawled further up her knee, put his face into her hipbone. She smelled familiar. His teeth felt sharp, his fingers sweaty. He could hear flesh outside, beating on the door, crawling up the windowpanes.

  He didn’t see the hymen inching down her thigh, like a rubied snail, like torn underwear.

  GAYLENE GOULD

  CHOCOLATE TEA

  Dollo can’t remember how to make the Chocolate Tea. With an unsteady hand, she pours the viscous condensed milk into the pan and then shakes a carpet of cocoa powder on top. She wonders whether the sweetness might kick off his diabetes. Once they receive the results, she’ll be rid of him. But if his disease progresses he’ll have to stay. She stops pouring and snaps the lid back onto the cocoa tub.

  In the week leading up to his arrival, she’d trawled the one shop that sold the kinds of goods she’d spent the last forty years trying to forget. She dusted tins and packets of carcinogenic items: condensed milk, hard-dough bread and heavily salted fish. She checked their sell-by dates before slipping them into a basket lined with a soiled local newspaper. After his arrival, she’d risen early every morning to fix his breakfast but, of course, he never had a good word to say. The porridge wasn’t cornmeal and there was no plantain with his eggs. She explained that too much fried food wasn’t good for his condition. He said she’d become too English, which was why she has trouble keeping a man.

  She was shocked when she caught sight of Dick at the Arrivals. The breadth in his shoulders was gone and his thin, birdlike neck strained out of an overly large shirt collar. Even his gait, once long and graceful, snapped awkwardly like a rooster’s.

  When his eyes caught hers, her heart jump-started. His smile suggested he was pleased to see her. She’d gathered up her shopping from between her feet, and pushed her way to the end of the barrier.