WOUNDING

by Heidi James

  Joyce sits back, watching Cora, assessing her. ‘OK. If you step in there,’ Joyce points to the closed door on their right. ‘Get undressed, evacuate your bladder and bowels if you can and wait to be summoned. You can leave your things on the stool in there. Please leave your gift for me in the envelope provided. We have thirty minutes left.’

  Cora opens the door and steps into the bathroom. A small mirror hangs above the sink. A shower cubicle takes up most of the space, surrounded by a glass barrier. She undresses, placing her clothes on the stool provided. She leaves the money in the envelope and squats on the toilet bowl as instructed. Shame conceals her nakedness. She washes her hands, feeling nothing: the acid of hatred has burnt away her nerve endings. In the mirror she sees the features of herself. Recognising the face, the hair, the neck. She is a composition, a collection of features that mark her out. She pictures the children, their demanding, clutching limbs, their hungry faces, their toes and fingers, grasping, grasping. Natural demands that ask too much of her. She is defined by what she is unable to give. She is defined by her lack. She is lack, a void, a blank space that devours. Takes, takes, takes. She cannot give.

  The door opens. ‘On your knees and follow me.’ Cora follows Joyce, crawling on her hands and knees through the room and down the corridor. Her blood flows, carrying oxygen to her organs, her brain. Tied by blood to the children, it’s in the blood, the poisoned code. The rough carpet needles against her hands and knees. Suspended on its fibres, held apart from the ground beneath her. Joyce opens the door ahead of them and waits for Cora. ‘Hurry up.’ Already the experience has become a farce. The room is large and clean. The walls are padded and covered in bright red rubber sheeting. Black rubber- and leather-covered tables and benches furnish the room. It is dark, lit only by a couple of small lamps. Cora doesn’t know the names of the items she can see. She is without the language necessary to belong. She is only flesh. Shelves line one wall, and under these whips and canes hang from hooks like drying carcasses. A metal frame with ropes and pulleys stands in the centre of the room. There is nothing original present. Everything is as one would expect. Like a cartoon. People demand absolute knowledge, which can only lead to cliché. Like duty and exhausted expectations from which one can only ever fail.

  ‘We’ll warm you up first.’ Already there is too much talking. Cora’s mouth fills with saliva. She swallows it back. Once she was a girl capable of feeling intensely. Now she is alive only to hatred. She has anaesthetised herself. She must be pulled back. ‘Lean over the pommel horse there, now.’ Joyce points to a humped four-legged piece, an imitation of gym equipment. She leans over it, the smooth covering of leather pressed delicately against her skin, animal to animal. Joyce bends down, pulling on Cora’s wrists and buckling her to the legs of the furniture, spread armed, then spread legged over the decapitated thing. Cora can smell the counterfeit peach perfume of Joyce’s shampoo. Exposed, she is in direct contact with the air. She breathes in herself, molecules that have clung to her own skin and hair, she breathes them in and then out. Exposed to herself. She does not resist, lies slack over the pommel, held tight by the ligatures that tie off the poison. She is a host, a community of bacteria and parasites. She closes her eyes, blinding her self.

  Behind her she can hear the other woman moving around the room, lifting objects, putting things back. She is content to stay in the luxury of this bondage. Unable to move, she is waiting. She is a machine that produces unsatisfactory merchandise. She is ready to be fixed. The footsteps move towards her and further away from her. She is the centre of the room. The reason for its being. She must service the room as it must service her. Together they exist. The room and her. She is only what the room will make of her. Done up as it as in cheap theatricals, a set designed to showcase her suffering. It doesn’t matter. Only that she is forced back into shape, that repentance will bring change. That her materials are altered irrevocably. She demands that she is transformed by suffering.

  The room is hot, but columns of cooler air are pumped from the ceiling. Blood runs to her head, pooling in the cup of her skull. Discomfort begins to spread through her body. Love comes packaged in violence. A split second is marked by the sharp crack of a whip. Her buttocks tense, the muscles contract, electrical pulses signal the nerve endings. Cora exhales. Her hands and feet are numb. She sees only black. Her body sags against the support of the horse. Another second is counted out, crack, then another and another. She gasps, that counts out two seconds. She has access to the purity of physical time. Time played out in sensation and movement. Time that transcends the play of light. Joyce changes tack. Changes the weapon that will deliver the passion to Cora.

  Cora feels the split straps of the flogger curling around her thighs as they impact. She is forced back into herself. She is entirely alone inside her body, isolated, held apart. The sensation lingers and vibrates, remaining to greet the next impact. Joyce changes tack again: this time the sting of a riding crop flicks against her thighs, as fleeting as a dizzy spell on rising from a chair; time is defined by sensation. The split pulse of a slap: quavers, crochets, semibreves. Together she and Joyce battle with her degradation. She is unworthy of Joyce’s attention. She hangs there in contemplation, approaching sanctification. It continues, time beaten out. Repeats. She silences herself; she must endure without a sound. Annulled, she is nothing more than a being capable of sensation; she’s an animal at last. No thoughts, no longing for a belief system in which she could deposit her anguish. Stripped bare she is immersed in a private pool of mortification, a series of perfect pains. She pays for the failure of her flesh, for the promiscuity of molecules that gave birth to the children.

  Cora is lost in the rapture of forgetting, of returning to her body, entirely feeling. She is bestial. A live thing: alive. Crawling; breathing; eating; defecating. She feasts on the intimacy of being beaten. Of being recognised. A dung beetle collecting shit. Joyce mothers her, castigates and loves. Love is labouring to improve our defective loved ones. Love takes as its responsibility the need to chastise and remould. Love takes a half-formed thing and remakes it into something worth having around. Alive, living fully, her blood rushing through her, she exhausts her self. Panting like a dog, drool drips from the corner of Cora’s mouth onto the floor. She has marked the room. Her thighs and buttocks burn. She wants more. Forces the word from her animal mouth, twisting her tongue around the sound. ‘More. More.’ Behind her the arm raises and falls, beating out the seconds and minutes. There are no hours left.

  ‘Harder.’ It can never be hard enough. ‘More.’

  ‘Time’s up I’m afraid.’

  ‘More.’ Cora shakes her head, trying to see Joyce as she moves about the room re-hanging the implements she used, after wiping them with antiseptic. She turns the lights up. The room is revealed. Truth penetrates the dark, unveiling the farce, the ludicrous nature of Cora’s self-delusion. Joyce kneels in front of her. Unbuckling the restraints around her wrists and ankles.

  ‘You did really well! I thought we’d have to stop or at least move you around. Well done!’

  Cora’s body is heavy, outraged. She is numb. She is an illusion.

  ‘Up you get. Slowly, though. OK. When you’re ready. I’ve got another one booked in so we need to get the room tidied and cleaned.’ Cora attempts to stand. Her head fuddled by too much blood. She is limp with knowledge. Disembodied. The pain failed to eradicate her hatred. She pulls herself up and leans on the pommel. It continues to support her. Her skin is raw. She reaches her fingertips to her buttocks. She can trace the elegant welts that identify her. She has been written on.

  ‘Right then, let’s get you into the changing room.’ This excess of words, of a tried and tested language harries at Cora. She feels sick. Standing on an unsteady floor, she rocks back and forth. Movement forwards on her feet is beyond her. Staying absolutely still, rooted to the spot is her only possibility of redemption. An excess of growth, limbs could become
boughs, become leaves; unmoving, tree-like she could cling to the ground and be saved. Moving now, she can go in only one direction. She must leave the room, get dressed, leave the building and be at liberty, on the loose. She must move. There is no choice. She can only move forwards.

  In the bathroom she dabs at her new wounds. They smart and twitch as she presses them; thin lines of watery blood stain the tissue. She pulls her underwear on over her cuts and dresses herself. She is neither possessed by the wounds nor does she possess them. She is unmoved. Unchanged. Except she now has this encounter to add to her original shame. She has suffered but it makes no difference whatsoever. She continues to recede; her animal shape is reclaimed by her human stupidity, her cruelty and desires.

  The receptionist waits for Cora in the corridor. She is to be ushered out to protect both her and the new customer’s privacy. There must be no crossover, no mistaken recognition of a fellow penitent. They must remain anonymous. The girl smiles, a token of harmlessness, her blue eyes thickly rimmed with black make-up. She moves past Cora back into the bathroom. She discreetly, but still within full sight, pockets the envelope, checking first that it contains the requisite amount of money. Satisfied, she smiles again at Cora and pushes her hair from her face. She has small hands. Tiny hands like a child, almost deformed, but not quite: they are perfectly formed, just out of proportion as if the growth of her hands were stunted by a genetic abnormality. She notices Cora staring and tucks her midget hands behind her back.

  ‘Is everything OK? Do you need anything before you go?’ Cora shakes her head. There is nothing more they can do for her. Nothing penetrates the thick hide covering her rage. ‘Would you like to book in your next appointment? Mistress Joyce will give you a ten percent discount if you book five appointments in advance.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Cora moves forwards, only forwards. She has no other choice. The paint on the front door is chipped. Everything is disintegrating. Forwards through the door. The door is shut behind her. She will not go back there. She stands on the landing loitering for one moment. The bright blue of the summer sky is suspended in the window frame ahead of her.

  I don’t know you anymore. Can you ever really know someone? Can you ever really even know yourself? With everything in constant flux, nothing and no one stays the same. I understand this and I understand that relationships can’t remain static. I know that our needs change, but I imagined that we would change and grow together, that we would talk about these things, I didn’t imagine you would just go and have an affair. I know there is someone else. There are signs. I can read you like a book. You are so distant and snappy with me. You aren’t where you say you will be, I call you at work and you’re not there, they say you’ve taken the day off sick, but you aren’t at home. What the hell else can that mean? When you get dressed for bed, you turn away from me so I can’t see your body. You won’t have sex with me and when we do, it’s like you’re thinking about someone else. You hardly look at me. I know there is someone else, I know. You’re smoking again. I smell it on you and you gave up for me, for the kids, all that time ago. It’s another betrayal, another promise you’ve broken. Maybe that’s what you do with him. You have sex and you smoke post-coital cigarettes together. You have long lunches together and then fuck in a hotel, or his flat, perhaps he’s not married. Maybe you make plans together about leaving and setting up a new life. I’m sure you’ve told him all about our children, he probably imagines he could be their new dad, I imagine he looks at the photos of them in your purse and thinks to himself how charming they are and how he could love them. Who the fuck does he think he is? The bastard. What does he look like, I wonder? How did you meet him? Where? When? Endless questions that are driving me mad. But the kids can’t suffer because of this. It will be the children that are victims in all this and I won’t allow that. They must be protected at all cost. It’s my fault. I’ve not paid enough attention to you and now you’ve met someone else. It’s my fault. I understand. Perhaps I should’ve done more for you; perhaps I’ve missed the early warning signs. Actually, I don’t understand, it’s not my fault. I’ve tried, I try every day.

  I think about you, and I think about me and the worst thought I have is that we, as we know ourselves, as we think about ourselves and each other, my worst imagining is that we don’t really exist, that all we are is mimics, that all us humans somehow just mimic behaviour, like a million parrots, a million mynah birds, pretending to speak and pretending to mean something. Meaning nothing. There is nothing original in all this. That is my worst thought. That none of this is real. That what we call love is just a pattern of behaviours that we’ve picked up along the way. I can’t bear the idea that these feelings I have for you all are just something I’ve learnt to imagine. That we are only ever reproductions of a set of expectations. Anything else, we can survive. I need to know we are real, that these feelings are mine and mine alone. I will get over it. It’s only sex, and good marriages weather the storm. People have affairs. They do, they have them and they survive and their marriage is all the stronger for it. This is a good marriage. It is. And I won’t let you take the kids. I won’t. I’m a good man and a good dad. You’re a good mother. You will not leave me. I won’t let you go, because I know you love the children so very much that you will take them with you and I can’t allow that. I won’t be a weekend father, gradually becoming a stranger to our children. Hanging around parks and pizza restaurants in the few hours you and the court would grant me with them, ashamed to take them back to my flat. I know the story; I’ve seen it happen to my friends. It won’t happen that way for us.

  The kids have woken up. They’ve switched the TV on in the sitting room. Are you really asleep I wonder? Or are you lying there waiting for me to go so that you can be alone with thoughts of him. What does it matter? We will talk; you and I, and we will fix this. We were made for each other and we’ll be happy again. I’ll go down, make tea and clean the kitchen. Get everything ready. I want to make you happy, Cora. That’s all.

  A shock of birds flies past the window, interrupting the blue with the brown flicker of wings. Cora turns her palms inwards to hide her lies. Standing at the top of the stairs. The truth exceeds the facts. She is mad with the desire for grace. She can only move forwards. Her body intervenes in the space between herself and the outside world. She can’t move without there being a consequence that is unacceptable to her. Thoughts resembling the birds outside dart about her head. She breathes, in and out. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The house: the children: the car: the husband: her parents. She forgets them. Like birds the thoughts escape their cage. They fly away. They never existed. She forgets.

  Forgetting takes no time at all. She looks down at her hands. They are clean. She leaves, moves down the stairs, into the street. She walks to her car. She reaches down and removes her shoes, placing them neatly together. Next to them she places her bag. She moves forwards, there is only forwards. She is only human and has no capacity for moving in any other direction. She places one foot in front of the other, toe to heel, heel to toe. Pigeon steps. She has forgotten that winter will come. She feels however, with absolute certainty, the direction of the metallic currents of the Earth’s magnetic fields. She is bound by its unyielding rules. Its flow.

  Barefoot, she moves forwards. At the kerb, she stands still. Looking up at the blue space, she has a new vision, a new sight that is freed from habits and history. All around her it is business as usual. People, traffic, a dog, cats, birds. Sounds penetrate her new wounds. Everything continues as before. It repeats with the occasional minor variation. The Earth alters in minute side steps. No one will notice. Why should they? She is innocent, has made no impression on the world that will not be forgotten almost immediately. It is the most she can hope for.

  Lifting her arms up as if she is about to leap or take flight, she steps forward, unthinking like an animal; she trusts only the immutable laws of physics. She is bound by the holiness of gravity, the second l
aw of force. Faithful, hoping for grace; stepping only forwards, her feet bold beyond the edge of the kerb. She can’t turn back; there is no opportunity for erasing what has been. As she walks out, she experiences nothing but sensation. She is nothing but flesh: sensate, animal, alive.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to those who have encouraged, critiqued, read, read and read again, listened, told me to shut up and get on with it and most importantly, those who believed I could. My amazing teachers, lecturers and mentor: Mrs Joan Howard, Mr. Bell, Prof Russell Celyn Jones, Will Self, Blake Morrison and Prof Simon Morgan Wortham. My incredible friends and family: Joe, Boo, Indie and Raif. Pearl and Sid Lamb. Rose, Bess and Rufus. Michelle, Rebekah, Tara, Gwynnie, Rosie and Geraldine. Vikki. Adelle and Ben. Sara and Lindsay. Julia. My brilliant editor, Hetha and equally wonderful publisher, Kevin. And of course, the many, many writers I’ve read and learnt from, been inspired by and can only trail behind...