Little Wing

by Joanne Horniman

  He didn’t look out. He didn’t see her, standing in the shadows on the other side of the street.

  There was someone with him: Cat (‘like the animal!’). Emily saw her walk in front of the window – she watched as Cat turned around and said something. Did Emily hear a laugh?

  And then they began to dance, their arms around each other, soft and close and slow.

  Emily clenched her hands into her pockets and walked quickly away down the street.

  Last night we couldn’t sleep, it was so hot – we moved the mattress out onto the grass. The sky was clear and there were lots of stars. Then a breeze came up, and we danced naked in the moonlight, close together, but my belly is so big now that it was kind of awkward. But the dancing was just the best thing.

  10

  Emily had known that Martin was married, and that he had friends, but that part of his life never seemed real to her. She had only ever seen him in relation to herself and Pete, offering cups of tea, playing with Pete in the park, not minding when she fell asleep at his house in the afternoons, smiling, writing in his notebook while she watched. But he had a whole other life. Why should he bother with someone like her?

  Two days after the party, even though his front door was shut when she went past, she knocked. No one answered, but when she pushed at the door it opened, and that seemed like an invitation to go in. Martin never minded: he was the type who always said ‘Make yourself at home’. And Emily did, because she felt as much at home at his place as she did at Charlotte’s, or anywhere.

  She stepped into the house and made her way down the hallway, calling out shyly as she went, but without hope, for the house was obviously deserted. In the kitchen a wooden pepper-grinder stood in the middle of the table. The remains of the birthday cake (chocolate, with the letters rtin sitting on the top in thick white piping) sat under a plastic dome-shaped cover. A sharp knife was next to it.

  Emily took an upturned glass from the edge of the sink and drew some water from the tap. She heard herself swallow, and the clink of the glass as she returned it to the bench.

  I exist, she told herself. This is me. I am here.

  A bread knife stood upright, poking out of the utensil drainer. She shoved it into a kitchen drawer, along with the knife beside the cake.

  After the drawer had slid shut, the silence in the house seemed even more pronounced. She pressed herself against the kitchen sink and looked out the window without seeing. She wished that Martin and Pete had been home. She wished someone other than herself would make a noise. She wished that her own footsteps didn’t sound so hollow as she walked back slowly through the house.

  Pete’s bed was unmade, and a scatter of Lego bricks was spilt across his floor.

  She’d never been in Martin’s bedroom. Martin and Cat’s. The bed had a printed Indian cover with blue and red elephants on it. Emily stood on the striped rug next to it and wondered which side was Martin’s.

  There was a small chest of drawers on either side of the bed. On top of one was a bottle of massage oil, a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary, a pen, and the small covered notebook that Emily had left wrapped up in the laundry on the day of the party. The other table carried a hairbrush, nail scissors, and a bowl with several pairs of earrings in it.

  Emily sat down on the side of the bed that had her notebook next to it. She touched its golden silk cover with one finger. It existed, all right. She didn’t open it to see if anything had been written in it.

  And because it was her habit to sleep in this house, and because she was suddenly so tired, she lay back against the pillow (did it smell of Martin?) and closed her eyes.

  She woke when someone entered the room. It was Cat. She looked exactly as she had at the party – very confident and smooth, and glowing with a kind of inner certainty. She stood just inside the doorway with a look of amazement on her face. Then Pete ran in. ‘Emmy! Here you are . . . you didn’t come to the party and I waited for you all day!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Emily whispered, unable to take her eyes from Cat (Cat like the animal; Cat who didn’t look too pleased to find a strange girl in her bed).

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. She was on her feet. She fled down the hallway and out the front door.

  11

  Emily felt she would never be able to go to Martin’s house again. She could see how peculiar it was, walking into someone’s house, falling asleep on their bed. She knew that she didn’t behave the way you were meant to. But she knew of no other way to be. This was what she was like now. Better to stay away from other people.

  She slept her mornings away. She walked to the lookout and back, the way she had in her pre-Martin and Pete days. She found herself crying for no reason. And then she’d wipe away her tears and get on with doing whatever it was she did next.

  A few days later she sat in the park where once she and Martin and Pete had eaten the iceblocks. There was a pigeon huddled on the ground under a tree. Emily sat for a long time and watched it. Another pigeon, probably its mate, stood nearby. The huddled pigeon shifted about from time to time, but its eyes were hooded and sick-looking. When someone walked past, the pigeon that was waiting fluttered into the air.

  At some time in the afternoon Emily became aware that the huddled pigeon was no longer alive. Life had leaked slowly from it while she’d been sitting there. She got up and went to kneel beside it. When she lifted it up, its head flopped to one side. The bird was just a loose collection of bones and flesh inside a mass of ruffled feathers.

  ‘Emily.’

  She looked up, the lifeless bird cradled in her hands.

  ‘It’s dead,’ she said.

  Martin knelt down beside her. ‘Where have you been? I haven’t seen you for ages.’

  She didn’t say anything for a long time, and then – ‘I’m sorry I upset Cat,’ she said.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  After a while he added, ‘What are you going to do with the bird? Do you want to bury it?’

  Emily stared in front of her. Life seemed too sad and futile for her to deal with. ‘I’ve nothing to dig with,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s just a bird.’

  ‘Let’s put it under these dead leaves over here. Under the bush, where no one walks.’

  After they’d concealed the bird, Emily stood with her hands hanging at her sides. Without the small bundle to hold, she had no idea what to do with them. They didn’t even feel like her hands.

  Martin took her by the shoulders, gently, the way he held Pete sometimes when he was getting too speedy for his own good, and led her over to the path.

  They passed a young man. Emily had often seen him walking the streets. His hair was matted and long, and his feet were bare. His skin had a raw, weathered look to it. He never smiled.

  When they were well past him, Martin said, ‘His eyes are so blue.’

  He found them a seat. ‘Sit down here and watch people with me. It’s always surprising what you see.’

  In ten minutes they saw a child with a dummy stuck in its mouth being wheeled in a pram by an old woman in slippers, a black dog with short legs going for a walk on its own (‘A very busy dog,’ said Martin, ‘probably late for an appointment’), and a man Emily recognised as the shark man (though she didn’t tell Martin this). He wasn’t muttering anything that day, but he gave them a swift, angry glance as he went past.

  Martin said, ‘What is it, Emily? Why are you always so sad?’

  She said, ‘I did something . . .’

  He was looking at her.

  ‘Something terrible.’

  ‘You can tell me,’ he said. ‘Nothing shocks me.’

  She said, looking at the ground, ‘I had a baby. A baby girl.’ She looked up at him to see his reaction.

  Martin was looking at her with a face full of tenderness and dismay. And he didn’t rearrange his expression to one that he felt suitable for the occasion. ‘A baby,’ he said softly.

  ‘I couldn’t look after her properly,’ said Emily, surprised at h
ow easily she could tell him this, something she had never said to anyone. ‘And I was so scared I’d do something dreadful to her that I had to leave her.

  ‘What kind of mother does that?’ she asked him.

  12

  Emily took Martin back and introduced him to Charlotte; she saw how Charlotte, while reaching out to shake his hand with a smile, sized him up behind her cool, vague exterior. In the kitchen, Emily poured glasses of cranberry juice. Martin drank slowly, gazing at the coloured glass bottles on the windowsill. They sat for a while in the cluttered living room, and he looked at the picture of the angel in the green dress, and smiled. ‘Chagall,’ he said affectionately, as if he’d just met an old friend. ‘The man who painted that picture,’ he added, when he saw Emily’s puzzled expression. He nodded at another print, of a man and a woman floating in an embrace above the ordinary domesticity of their living room, the woman with a bunch of flowers in her hand. ‘Love can be like that.’

  Emily looked again at the picture. The woman had a most tender and expectant expression as she raised her face to be kissed; both she and her lover hovered gracefully, gravity pulling at their feet, their bodies fluid like lengths of ribbon falling to the ground.

  ‘How do you learn to do that?’ she said. ‘Float above everything so effortlessly?’

  ‘In a radiant and ecstatic way? If I ever get hold of the instructions I’ll give them to you.’

  As he left he said, at the gate, ‘I do think Charlotte’s house needs more in it, don’t you? It’s a bit bare as it is. Just a bit more furniture, a few more books and pictures, a couple of ornaments here and there, might make it look more lived-in, don’t you think?’

  Emily giggled, and Martin kissed her on the cheek and departed. He turned to say, ‘Come round to see us!’ and she watched him walk all the way up the street.

  ‘Isn’t he a bit old for you?’ said Charlotte later.

  ‘No,’ said Emily, with a rising inflection. ‘He’s just turned twenty-seven.

  ‘And he’s married, with a five-year-old child.

  ‘And we’re just friends. It’s okay to have a guy for a friend, isn’t it?’

  That night, they ate dinner off their laps watching television; macaroni cheese, in hand-made blue bowls made by one of Charlotte’s friends. While they ate they watched The Simpsons, which Charlotte said she didn’t really get. It didn’t matter to Emily what show was on, she watched all television these days without seeing or hearing it properly. She kept her eyes fixed on the screen and forked macaroni into her mouth without tasting it; it was soft and mushy and comforting. And all the time, on the walls above them, the lovers levitated and the angel in the green dress flew with her posy of flowers.

  Afterwards, Charlotte switched off the television and picked up Emily’s empty bowl. Emily sat on a cushion on the floor, leaning back against the sofa, staring at the pictures on the wall. ‘Chagall,’ she said slowly. ‘I didn’t know that painter was called Chagall.’

  Charlotte paused at the door to the kitchen with her hands full of crockery. ‘When I was your age, one of the nuns at school, Sister Charles, introduced me to him. That was pretty amazing for a nun in those days – he isn’t what you’d call a traditional religious painter. But he is religious, in his own wonderful way.’

  Charlotte clattered about in the kitchen. When she returned she plopped down on the sofa behind Emily and lifted Emily’s hair into her hands. ‘This needs cutting,’ she said. ‘How long since you’ve been to the hairdresser?’

  Emily shrugged, and Charlotte picked up a brush from the side table. ‘And so tangled!’ she said, as she began to brush it. When she’d finished she leaned forward and kissed Emily lightly on the cheek. ‘I can take you for a trim this week, if you’d like.’

  When Emily didn’t reply, Charlotte peered at her face and said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t like hairdressers,’ said Emily. ‘Any more.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. How about I cut it for you? I have some hair scissors. Would you mind me doing it?’

  ‘No,’ said Emily, in a low voice. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t mind if you did it.’

  Next day, Charlotte sat Emily on a chair in the yard with a towel round her neck, and started to clip.

  ‘When your mum and I were at boarding school together the girls were forbidden to touch each other. No hugs and kisses or hanging off each other the way girls do these days. I think the nuns were afraid we’d get unnaturally interested in each other or something.’ She laughed.

  ‘But, away from our families, we craved to be touched. The only thing that was considered to be all right was brushing each other’s hair. A lot of hair-brushing went on, I can tell you.

  ‘There were so many hang-ups. You were either a good girl or a bad girl.

  ‘We were good girls. The bad girls sneaked out to meet boys – boys from the nearby boys’ school, or boys they’d met in town. They used to talk about how far they’d gone with them – quite far, in many cases. There’s nothing quite like being educated by nuns to make girls keen on sex. They make it seem so special and holy and forbidden – too much of a temptation altogether, I can tell you. I think I was good because I was too afraid of the consequences.

  ‘I secretly admired the bad girls.

  ‘The most daring thing your mother and I did was the day we took off our clothes and swam in the creek while we were on a cross-country race. No one saw us – we found a hidden part of the creek just a little way from the track. It was all shaded and secluded, all soft silt on the bottom, and overhung by huge old trees. And we floated there for ages with our boobs bobbing on top of the water like balloons, while dozens of girls thundered past. It felt wonderful. Do you know it was the first time I’d seen another girl naked – we always undressed with our backs to everyone.

  ‘We were the last to get back that day – and our hair was all damp and stringy, and Sister Cyril looked at us suspiciously, but we didn’t get found out.’

  Charlotte brushed Emily’s newly trimmed hair free of loose ends.

  ‘She never told me that story.’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she? She always was a bit stuffy. Took me a lot of persuading to get her to take off her clothes.’

  Emily hadn’t bothered to have her hair cut for a long time. Nor had she trimmed her fingernails; she bit them down if they annoyed her. When her toenails got too long she snipped them off with paper scissors.

  Emily, who had once loved her body, never thought about it now. She no longer looked at herself in the mirror (and it had once pleased her to see herself reflected back). She often didn’t bother to clean her teeth. She dressed in anything that came to hand – usually an old tracksuit.

  That night, in the dark, she ran her hands over her body. Once, she’d often touched herself with delight. Now, she felt detached, and it gave her no pleasure. She could feel that she was thinner now than she’d ever been. The bones of her hips stuck out, and her belly dipped, concave like a hammock, surprisingly still firm after being stretched by pregnancy.

  Every one of her ribs stood out. Her breasts were small.

  You might never have known that she’d had a baby.

  Emily took one of her nipples between her fingers and squeezed. Eventually, a very small bead of milk came to the surface. She licked it from her finger. It tasted sweet, and thin, and warm.

  When i look at my baby i feel nothing, and i’m scared.

  Two

  1

  When Martin left Emily at her front gate, he strode away with his arms swinging freely, his chest open and expansive. He felt the air passing in and out of his lungs, easy and slow. He was pleased that he’d found her again.

  When he got to his place the front door was shut, and he took a key from his pocket and unlocked it. Cat kept the front door closed, but Martin always left it open, and the back door, too, in all but the worst weather, or at night. It wasn’t so much the flow of air that he wanted, but the sense that the house was open to the world, and that every
thing could flow through it. He hated houses to be isolated, self-contained boxes. He wanted to feel that anyone in the world might come to his door. He remembered the day that Emily had first stood there, looking ready to flee. If the door had been closed, she might never have knocked.

  As he made his way down the hallway, Cat called from the bedroom, and he went in. She was sitting at the dressing table, doing things to her face. He dropped down onto the bed and lay with his hands behind his head. ‘You going out?’ he asked. It was obvious from the care she was taking with her appearance that she was, though he often wondered why she bothered. To him, she looked nicer in plain old everyday clothes – jeans and a sweater and brightly coloured sneakers.

  ‘Don’t you remember? We’re meant to be going to Michelle and Damien’s for dinner.’

  ‘That’s cool. I’m ready when you are.’

  Cat kept looking at herself in the mirror. ‘Pete’s had a bath but he’s probably dirty again by now. Where were you all afternoon?’

  Martin sat up and leaned on one elbow. ‘I met Emily.’ He stopped. Then he said, ‘I found her, Cat. She was sitting in the park . . . Cat, she told me that she’s had a baby, but that she left it – I haven’t asked all the details yet, but imagine how she’s feeling . . .’

  Cat turned to look at him. He saw that she was annoyed with him, but all she said was, ‘She’s a very strange girl.’ She said it cautiously, as though she was keeping another comment in check. ‘When I found her sleeping on our bed that afternoon . . .’ She frowned. ‘It’s all a bit much, really.’

  When he didn’t reply, Cat said, ‘Why do you encourage her? I mean, she’s such a kid. A troubled one, by the sound of it.’

  Martin thought for a moment. ‘She needs people to talk to,’ he said. ‘Some place to go. And Pete likes her. Most of the time.’