The television goes blank, falls silent.
The man on the floor arches his back. He licks his shoulder.
The silence is worse than the television. The abandoned crossword puzzle accuses her, evidence of the deficiency of her personality.
'Do you do crosswords?’ she asks him. ‘I haven't the patience.'
Her visitor gets up and starts to prowl. He examines the terrain of the drawing room the way last night he examined the kitchen. She feels insulted; inadequate; too tired to think.
'I'll get you a drink,’ she says.
The man springs up into Howard's chair. He squats there facing her, knees bent, back straight. His penis is erect, perfectly visible through the tight soft cloth of his trousers.
Leanne prickles with gooseflesh. She is suddenly conscious of her nightwear.
'I'm just going to fetch a cardigan,’ she says.
At that, he jumps down and comes frisking towards her again.
This time she says nothing. She lets him reach her. When he does, she shuts her eyes and opens her mouth. A small, tight noise escapes her.
The man in the cat mask rubs his head against her breasts.
Leanne opens her eyes. She looks at the whiskers on his mask. They are made of the finest silver wire, sewn on with the tiniest, neatest stitches. The man's own chin is clean shaven.
Leanne realises she has stopped breathing.
In the stillness they hear the sound of the front gate opening.
The intruder bristles. He starts, as if to dash out of the room.
'No.’ Leanne finds she is holding him by the shoulder, restraining him. She can feel every muscle in his body taut, humming.
The key slides into the lock. The front door shudders open.
'Darling?'
It is Howard.
Leanne does not answer. She and the man in the mask stand together, motionless.
Her husband's footsteps go past the drawing room, to the foot of the stairs.
'Are you in bed?'
Now they move towards the kitchen.
Leanne breaks away from her accomplice. She goes out of the room, shutting the door behind her, and walks firmly towards the kitchen.
'Hello, darling,’ she calls.
Howard is already turning round, coming back. He glances at her, past her into the hall, as if suspecting something. He accepts a kiss on the cheek.
'I was just watching some television,’ she says.
'What's on?’ Howard asks. Clearly he fancies some distraction himself.
'Nothing, really,’ says his wife. ‘Just some stupid thing.'
Howard starts back up the hall away from her, towards the drawing room.
Leanne raises her voice. ‘Are you hungry?’ she says. ‘Can I get you something?'
Her husband walks on, muttering a refusal. It is as if the word television is a spell to draw him. Leanne curses herself for speaking it.
He opens the door of the drawing room, and goes in.
She hurries in there after him.
He is alone. He has picked up the remote control and is turning the television on.
The curtains are closed; the windows too.
On the screen, a sultry woman gloats over shampoo. Howard changes the channel. A butterfly sits on a leaf. Reverently, a man's voice describes its habits.
Howard continues to change channels. Unable to look anywhere else, Leanne wills her heart to beat and her lungs to breathe as she watches the screen.
Under a tree, two men discuss variations in arboriculture. A muscular builder in a yellow safety helmet points at a half-constructed house. A bald vicar winks, and bites into a bar of chocolate.
'How was your day?’ Leanne hears herself ask.
'Fucking awful.'
Howard leans over the back of the couch to pick up the discarded newspaper. He starts leafing through it.
Leanne stands there in her bare feet. She holds the neck of her nightdress tightly.
'What's that?'
Her husband is pointing at something on the floor.
It is something small, made of material. It is crumpled black velvet, with hints of blue along its folds.
Leanne picks it up and crushes it in her hand. She holds it behind her back, like something she is ashamed of.
'I do wish you could learn not to scatter your clothes all over the house,’ she hears her husband say. ‘You never know when I might be bringing someone home.'
She hears herself apologising. She hears him saying: ‘This whole place could do with tidying up.'
He does not ask about the cat, which is still missing.
In bed she remembers how her visitor looked in the garden. He had bowed to her, courtly and grave. Puss in Boots. She smiles.
She slips her hand under her pillow, to touch the mask.
She falls asleep, and dreams she is in a place of tall rocks, where the ground is running with water. There are other people there, somewhere: she can hear them talking. She knows she is supposed to be with them. She searches among the rocks, but she cannot find them.
It is the third night. On the side of the hill the darkness lies like a blanket. The houses wait behind their hedges, their windows like yellow staring eyes.
The air is hot and heavy. On the main road, the traffic growls.
The front door of the house is open. On the doorstep stands the woman, calling his name.
The hallway gapes behind her like an open throat. The light is on. He cannot see her face.
He springs once more onto the path.
She does not react. She wears her dressing gown, tightly belted. Her body is tense with something, some conviction or displeasure.
There is something strange about her tonight. Something about her face.
She has his mask on.
He throws back his head and sings to the zenith of the night, a long, high, wavering note.
'Quiet!’ she says. Her voice is deep now as his is high.
She makes fists of her hands. She places them on her hips.
He prowls back and forth.
'Come on, then, Timothy,’ she says. ‘Come on. Come on, then. Good boy.'
She steps back into the hallway. She walks backwards, her hands on her sash.
He starts to croon again. He feels the sound, hard and stinging in the back of his throat.
'Ah, Timothy...'
With a clumsy gesture, the woman opens her gown. Underneath, she is naked, smooth and pink. At her crotch she bears one small, ridiculous tuft of fur.
'Timothy...'
He leaps the step.
Her gown flaps like the wings of a stricken bird. Is she trying to pull it back on?
He plunges after her into the dining room. Inside, it is dark. He swipes the gown from her shoulder.
She claps her hand to her shoulder and gasps, long and hard.
He presses her back against the dinner table. A vase of flowers rocks.
He nuzzles her under the chin. The smell of her is rich, fresh, salty.
She pushes his head away, roughly, her hand against the side of his face.
He ducks under her hand. There are red lines on her shoulder where his claws caught her, tiny beads of red blood on her pink skin. He nips her neck with his teeth.
She reaches for the back of his head and pulls him away by the hair.
The room pulsates. The furniture shouts at him.
She puts her lips to his ear. ‘Upstairs,’ she says.
He resists. He barely recognises the word.
Places to sleep and places to hunt...
He tries to grasp her with fingers suddenly unfamiliar. She wriggles. She bolts for the stairs, hauling her dressing gown like a broken tail. She laughs, breathless and high.
He gives chase. Pink skin flickers between the banisters as she stumbles upstairs. Her bare bottom flashes round the corner of the landing.
He bounds up after her, three steps at a time.
She is in the bedroom. She has the dressing gown
on again, though she is making no attempt to close it. She poses provocatively, leaning back on the bed. One foot is stretched out towards him, the other leg drawn up. The fingers of her right hand toy with the tuft of fur.
He springs upon her. Fiercely he nuzzles her neck. She wraps her arms around his back. His nostrils fill with the musk of her desire.
Still she stops, pulling back a moment. She holds very still on the bed as he writhes upon her body.
'This is all wrong, Timothy,’ she says.
She pauses while his racing heart beats four times, while he tries to pin her hips between his knees.
She slips one hand suddenly beneath him, palm up. She caresses the length of the erection that strains the tight fabric of his trousers.
'Cats don't wear clothes...'
She rubs her breasts against his shirt.
He mauls them with his hands. She gasps again, and arches her back. He tries to bite her mask. Her eyes stare from it, penetrating him.
She twists onto her belly, crawls away across the bed. Her elbows dent the duvet.
He grabs her ankle. He paws at his clothes, forgetting buttons and zips.
'Wait,’ she says. ‘Shh. Wait. Wait.'
She comes to him again and strips him. She purrs in her throat as she releases the firm weight of his penis. He thrusts it between her legs, shoving blindly.
'No no no,’ she says. ‘Wait. Wait. Here.'
She goes up on all fours. She looks at him over her shoulder. The dressing gown covers her. She reaches behind her, and tosses it up over her back.
The pink cleft smiles at him.
His nails squeeze her ribs as he enters her from behind. He snarls. He is hot and hard.
She snarls, echoing him, replying. She is soft and wet.
She smells like fish.
The pair mate like beasts, pounding the bed against the wall. Cries threaten the suburban night. A lamp goes over and the bulb smashes. In their lounge Nonnie frowns at Jack, who raises his eyebrows. Mrs Mandelbaum tuts and turns up the volume on her television.
Howard comes in to find Leanne fast asleep on top of the bed, naked. The bed is a mess. What on earth can she have been doing? She has even managed to knock her bedside lamp over. He goes to pick it up, sees the broken glass, and decides, sourly, to leave it for the morning.
His wife's skin glows dimly in the streetlight that filters through the curtains. Howard lays a hand on her abdomen. She does not stir. Though the window is open, there is a strange, rank smell in the room.
In the morning at a quarter to seven Leanne wakes. She wakes like a young child, suddenly and completely, feeling refreshed.
She turns her head. Howard lies beside her as always, solid and unmoving. He is frowning in his sleep. His mouth is open.
Leanne feels a weight lying on her feet. She lifts herself on one elbow to see.
'Timothy?’ she says.
It is the cat, returned at last. He has found his way onto the bed, as usual. There he lies, curled up, fast asleep.
His mistress reaches one hand down to fondle behind his ear. She wonders what it is he dreams of.
* * * *
Walking home once, years ago, on a warm summer night, I passed a house where the front door was open. A woman stood outside calling a name, a masculine name. I'm not sure the name was Timothy, in fact; but whatever it was, I assumed it was the name of her cat.
As someone constantly bewildered by the world, and by the confidence with which everyone else professes to understand what goes on, I habitually mistrust my assumptions. Nothing and no one I've encountered has ever been quite what I expected beforehand. People are taller, shorter, nicer, nastier. Lovers turn into scorpions, frogs into princes. I don't see any reason to imagine that will ever change. So I'm always ready to make an imaginative leap. Like many people with a taste for the fantastic, I feel more at home with the improbable.
So then, walking on between the trees and over the hill, I thought to myself, Why should it be a cat? What if it isn't? Or what if the name she's calling turns out to be the name of something else, someone else? What if someone answers the summons and is not at all who she was expecting?
Colin Greenland
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Hunger
Vandana Singh
She woke up early as usual. The apartment, with its plump sofas like sleeping walruses, the pictures on the walls slightly and mysteriously askew, pale light from the windows glinting off yesterday's glasses she'd forgotten on the coffee table—the apartment seemed as though it had been traveling through alien universes all night and had only now landed in this universe, cautiously letting in the unfamiliar air. Outside the birds were stirring, parakeets in the neem trees, mynahs strutting on the roadsides, their calls mingling with the beep beep beep of a car backing in the parking area below.
How strange everything was! In the dream last night it had been the most natural thing in the world to be dancing with a tree, to be nibbling gently at the red fruit hanging from its branches as they swayed. Vikas hadn't been with her in that dream, and she had felt slightly guilty dancing with someone else, even in a dream, even if that someone had been a tree that could walk. But it had seemed so natural, so familiar, that in that moment she'd been convinced, finally, that she had found her home planet. And just as she'd started feeling at home, her eyes had opened, and there she was, lying in a strange bed next to a strange beast that she slowly recognized as her very dear husband, Vikas.
And where have you been? she wanted to ask him, but he was asleep. If she told him her dream he would laugh and threaten to find a shrink. Not for you, Divya, he would say, but for me. He liked to say that she was beyond redemption, reading those trashy science fiction novels. But sometimes she wanted to ask him quite seriously how to explain the way she felt in the mornings: that even the most familiar thing felt strange, that she had to—almost—learn the world anew. Try explaining that! she said to Vikas's imaginary shrink.
Their daughter lay asleep in her room, curled like an embryo among the sheets. She was twelve today, there was going to be a big party, what was she, Divya, doing, standing in the doorway of the child's room, thinking about alien universes! The child herself—how much longer a child? So strange, so different from the squalling, wrinkled little creature she had first held in her arms twelve years ago! Her face still so young, so innocent, and yet on the inside she was developing layers, convolutions; she was becoming someone that Divya as yet did not know. Divya sighed and went out of the room, drifting through the apartment, touching and straightening things as though to make sure they were there, they were fine. She picked up the glasses from the coffee table and went into the kitchen, which (being on the northwest side of the apartment) was still in darkness. With the usual trepidation she turned on the light.
As light flooded the room, mice fled to dark corners. Divya stepped gingerly in. The kitchen was never hers at night but belonged, for that duration, to the denizens of another world. There were cockroach cocktail parties and mouse reunions, and (in the monsoons) conferences of lost frogs. In the kitchen sink, the nali-ka-kida, the drain insects, whatever they were, waited hopefully for darkness, waving their feelers. None of the other creatures—mice and muskrats and frogs—bothered Divya like the cockroaches and nali-ka-kida. But it unnerved her that she had somehow, quite unknowingly, surrendered ownership of the kitchen at night.
She put the glasses noisily in the sink. Kallu the crow flew down to the windowsill from the neem tree outside, and cawed at her. His presence was a relief. She gave him a piece of the paratha that she had been saving up from last night to eat later. The parathas were fat, stuffed with spiced potatoes and peas, the best that the cook Damyanti had ever made. For a moment Divya wanted desperately to curl up in bed with the parathas and a book with a title like The Aliens of Malgudi or Antariksh ki Yatra. The day stretched before her, rife with impossibilities—to get all that food cooked, the whole house cleaned, and then to entertain the
families of Vikas's colleagues without a faux pas ... It simply couldn't be done. She wasn't made for such things—she was from another planet, where you danced with trees and ate parathas and read trashy science fiction novels.
But it had to be done. “Take me with you, Kallu,” she told the crow, but he only cawed sardonically at her and flew heavily off. She sighed and began to wash the glasses. If only Vikas hadn't gotten that big promotion, she thought, feeling guilty for thinking so. Now he was junior vice-president, which was not at all as exciting as a president of vices ought to be—and they had to move amongst the upper echelons of the company, VPs and CEOs, whose houses were completely air-conditioned and windows all shut, so that mice and cockroaches and frogs would have to line up and come in at the main entrance, with the permission of the doorkeeper, like everybody else. The most innocent of things, like children's birthdays, were now minor political extravaganzas with the women all made up, clinking with expensive jewelry, sniping gently at each other while calling each other “darling,” and the men talking on like robots about stocks and shares.
She went to the back door and found the newspaper on the landing. As she straightened she smelled it—a stench rolling down from the top of the stairs. The pungent, sharp, stale odor of urine.
The old man was responsible for the smell. He lived on the top landing, which was little used because it led to the rooftop terrace. Divya looked at the door of the servants’ flat. It was shut tight. So was the door of the apartment opposite hers, where the morose and silent Mr. Kapadia lived. She took a deep breath and knocked loudly on the servant quarter door, where Ranu, Mr. Kapadia's cook, lived with her husband.
The woman herself opened the door. She turned her nose up at the smell.
"All right, all right,” she spat, before Divya could say a word. She turned and yelled for her husband. “Wash the stairs, you lazy lout, that good-for-nothing fellow has wet his bed again!” She looked at Divya, hands on hips, nostrils flared.
"Satisfied?"
"Why don't you let the old man use the bathroom in the night?” Divya said angrily. “The poor fellow is your father-in-law—treat him with some respect! And listen, make sure the stairs stay clean all day. We have people coming over!"
Interfictions Page 21