In the City of Love's Sleep

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  A mermaid?

  She said a merman, corrects the smallest visitor.

  Is it real? asks the tallest.

  Iris is careful not to smile.

  If you mean real in the way mermaids are real, then yes.

  Can we see it? the tallest girl asks. The funny picture?

  Iris clicks on the attachment Raif has sent her. It is not of the merman in her museum but another, which he has been writing about. The girls pass it round in silence. It’s neither scary nor comical enough for them to know how to respond. David passes the phone without looking.

  Is this what you do? asks the littlest guest. Do you look after a merman?

  This is a question Kate and Lou would never ask. They take for granted that their mother works in a museum and that she is a conservator. They know that this means mending things. They’ve visited the museum plenty of times and have seen all there is to see but now their friend is interested.

  Can we see the merman, Mum? asks Kate.

  This one’s not at my museum but we do have one.

  But can we see it?

  Of course. Only I’m working on it at the moment so it’s not on public display.

  But we’re not public so can we see it?

  Iris is pleased by their interest but confused by the fact that it has been prompted by a message from Raif.

  No one can see it while I’m working on it. Not even you.

  There had been a bubble of excitement, of the girls having something to offer their friends, and she has ruined it.

  But of course, as soon as it’s ready, you’ll be the very first.

  It’s not really real, though, is it? says Lou in punishment.

  No, it’s not. It’s more real than real in that we need to … we all need …

  They wait for her to say more.

  It’s a metaphor, isn’t it? says the littlest guest so quietly that she appears to be talking to herself.

  Exactly, Iris says. A metaphor of how we’re made. And our fears.

  Mum, you’re being weird, says Lou.

  So weird that I made you a cake. It’s the usual botch, of course, but at least I made it.

  She produces the butterfly cake. Kate and Lou maintain a rigidly neutral expression until the littlest guest, the one they most want to be their friend, claps her hands and exclaims Butterflies! They all clap while David takes the cake and carries it to the table and Lou stands to blow out her twelve candles. Iris reaches for her phone to take a picture – a precious picture of her girl on her birthday – and what is she thinking about? Whether or not Raif noticed the girls’ photo on her phone when he picked it up for her at the station. If he assumed that she’s married. (She is.)

  When the girls go off to watch another film, David helps clear the table. No one has eaten more than a couple of mouthfuls of cake. Iris is not a cook and while she has modelled some beautiful butterflies, the cake itself is greasy and dry. David stacks the plates too carelessly and drops them, smashing three. Iris gives a small sigh, a habit that has enraged David for years.

  I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry my coordination is fucked and my nerves are fucked. My brain is full of holes, remember?

  With that the frail triumph of the birthday tea collapses. Iris wants to go and sit with her daughters but they no longer require her. She’s about to open the back door and have a cigarette when the doorbell rings.

  That’ll be Martin, she says to David. He’s dropping them all off. Could you answer?

  Me? I’m just a guest.

  I can’t—

  What? Say hello to Martin?

  David goes to the door to see the visitors out. When he comes back Iris manages to thank him, refusing to notice that this is agony for him, this coming home and having to leave again. Most of the time David feels turned inside out by the pain. Sitting with his daughters he is put right and now he’s about to be turned inside out again.

  He thinks Iris is cold and somewhere in herself she agrees with him. She feels no pity, only irritation and a deep animal contempt for his weakness. She keeps herself busy till he leaves and then sits on the back doorstep smoking and contemplating her stalled attempts at a garden. The erupted paving slabs are puddled with moss and the narrow strip where she lifted them to create a flowerbed is full of mildewed weeds and cat shit. She keeps meaning to put the slabs back.

  Now and then she looks at the image of the merman Raif sent and eventually she sends a reply.

  Is he a warning or a cry for help?

  It takes some time for Raif, working his way through student essays while Helen mends a light socket, to grasp what she’s referring to. It’s as if he doesn’t know he sent her the merman or has somehow forgotten.

  *

  Martin is the father of the tallest girl. Some years ago he invited David to a Sunday-morning football game on the common and they became friends too. The two families spent time together but there was always a certain unease.

  Have you got a problem with Martin? David asked Iris.

  We don’t have much to say.

  She wasn’t interested in who Martin was. She found him dull while he found her frightening. The reason they were reserved in each other’s company was because they had a sexual similarity which both recognised. It was dangerous.

  One night they met at a friend’s birthday drinks. Iris was alone because Kate and Lou had chickenpox and David stayed to look after them. Martin’s wife was just home from hospital with their third child. Iris felt a migraine starting, as it always did with a pain behind her left eye, but she was desperate to get out of the house.

  I’m cooking for us, David announced as she left. So be back by eight thirty.

  She hadn’t said she would.

  Martin was the first person she spoke to. Nothing interesting was said but they enjoyed each other. At half past eight, Iris said she should be going and Martin offered her a lift. When they got outside, his car wouldn’t start.

  Shall we call a cab? she asked.

  He looked down the street as if towards his wife, his children, the new baby and all they required of him, before telling Iris that he’d call a cab for her but he should stay and get someone to jump-start the car. Iris, also looking down the street, insisted on staying too. When they finally set off, Iris remembered something.

  Will we go past a late-night chemist? I meant to pick up some migraine pills on the way here.

  You need them tonight?

  I think I might.

  Well, I need to run the car for a good while anyway so let’s go and find some.

  It was as if they’d been handed the script for a spontaneous act. Martin could think of nothing more exciting than driving round the city with Iris. He knew he understood her better than her husband did. David called her Iris of the Many Walls. Martin saw no walls.

  They were giggly and animated and so unlike the careful selves who met on doorsteps and over Sunday lunches, when they made sure they didn’t so much as brush against one another in passing. Now, arriving at a chemist an hour’s drive from home, they held hands as they rushed in. David wouldn’t have recognised this boisterous, leaping version of Iris. He’d never met her.

  By the time Martin pulled up outside her house, it was almost midnight. They hadn’t really tried to find the way back and travelled miles across the city in the wrong direction, finding themselves on the overpass and seeing every exit just a little too late. Even now Iris didn’t hurry to get out of the car. They talked a little more and she kissed him on the cheek, leaning against him for a moment. As she approached the house, pain started to cage her head and she welcomed it.

  Three streets away Martin stepped into his dark home, relieved that his wife was sleeping. In the morning he would be his amiable, detached self – the man out of armour everyone took him for. The next Sunday, on the common, he came over to David to apologise. He’d felt bad that Iris stayed while he got the car started and so it seemed only fair to help her find those pills. He’d had no idea it would
turn into such a quest. He presumed David had heard the whole story but Iris had said nothing. Martin told it anxiously, in too much detail. David listened, all the while envisaging Martin and Iris having sex in the car in some side street. He made a point of being as friendly as ever to Martin while ensuring that he and Iris were not left alone again.

  *

  Lou was pleased with her party and relieved that her parents had behaved well. She’d decided not to complain about having to let Kate join in. The other girls had said her sister was very grown-up for her age. But she, Lou, was the one whose body and mind had started to unanchor. Some days she woke up feeling as if she were underwater. Other days she was a genius superhero. All this internal activity thrilled and drained her. She wanted to worry about her parents but she didn’t have the energy. She watched them perform being her parents for her friends and wondered when she would learn to do likewise – to be able to be her best self whenever necessary and to know when not to speak or think or look.

  It was one of those evenings when Iris forgot to come up and say goodnight. Being in the attic meant that the girls could anyway stay up as late as they chose, providing they were quiet. They often communicated through gestures. Not speaking was becoming a way of giving each other a bit of space. Lou watched as Kate put something in the cupboard by her bed. When the door was shut again, she went and sat down beside her and raised her hands in a questioning shrug. Kate turned the matter over and then unlocked the cupboard. For years it had been a motley sort of doll’s house but now it had been cleared. There was a single item on the top shelf. Their father had left the cable for his phone charger at the house that afternoon and here it was, carefully coiled. Lou took her time in contemplating this. Then she went to her desk and wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to Kate, who placed it precisely beside the cable. It was a date and a number.

  They both woke early and this was when they talked.

  I don’t think David should be drinking, said Lou.

  Or Iris.

  But she hasn’t got a diagnosis.

  Lou, what if she has but she doesn’t know or she’s just not telling us?

  Lou deflects this anxiety by moving the conversation on. It’s something else she knows she has to learn how to do.

  She thinks we want David to move back in.

  For a long moment neither speaks.

  Do you actually? says Kate in the end.

  Only now does Lou realise what she feels.

  I dunno.

  But he’s not well so we have to say yes. We’re family.

  But is he actually?

  What? Not well or family?

  the sting

  In their last year of living together, David insisted on taking Iris out once a month or so to a bad local restaurant. He said it was proof of his desire to make things work. Iris came to dread it. He would sit opposite her, wary and monosyllabic, as if she were about to hand over the results of a test. One night they were sitting in the restaurant’s garden. The tables had been pushed too closely together and she became aware that the people on either side were fascinated by her and David’s silence. She saw them glancing over and started to talk warmly to David, wanting to prove them wrong, but he looked back at her as if he too were a stranger. He had a gift for exempting himself.

  Iris screamed. There’d been something on her arm and she’d tried to brush it off. It was a bee and it stung her, which hurt but not so much that she should have cried out as she did. The man on her right turned to her immediately, took some ice from their jug of water, wrapped it in a napkin and gave it to her to press against the sting. Her arm was swelling badly. Someone produced an antihistamine.

  It was only a bee sting but everyone in that garden was upset by it.

  You poor thing, they said. Does it hurt? Are you alright?

  Iris said that she was fine, it was nothing. David sipped his wine and watched.

  When they got home he came into the bathroom where she was putting cream on her arm.

  Did you have to involve the entire restaurant? Those poor people were trying to have a quiet night out and you staged such a drama that they felt obliged to rescue you. It was a sting. It didn’t even hurt all that much, did it. I’ve never felt so embarrassed.

  It doesn’t matter, she said. We won’t be going there again.

  The man on Iris’s right had been very attentive but she knew that she was getting the best of him. We start with our best selves. Had the woman he was with been stung like that, David would have leapt about finding ice and she would have been like Iris – smiling and grateful and dismissive of her pain.

  They would linger, best self to best self, as if polishing the moment so as to have something shiny to take home: a shield to raise against the dull person you live with, to dazzle them with what you are capable of, to warn them.

  an anatomical model of a horse

  Here is a body that can be taken apart and put back together without evident damage. So not exactly lifelike. It has no surface and so there is nothing to pierce in order to reach its inner workings but the glossy raw red of its muscles repels even now. Who would want to touch a creature with no skin? We do our best to retain our surfaces.

  Visitors to the museum take for granted that the horse is still intact after a hundred and fifty years. At the time it was made, anatomy lessons depended on corpses, which quickly decayed, or wax models, which were easily damaged. The horse is made out of paper, glue, cork and clay. Each part was mass-produced in a lead mould by the leading manufacturer of anatomical and botanical models in France at that time: Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux. He demonstrated his models at the Great Exhibition of 1851, eleven years before Goddard arrived with his cloud mirror.

  Auzoux was living in the last years of the great age of horses. He made this model look as real as he could but scale was a practical matter. His horse is only half-life-size, waist-high to most visitors. They had, without knowing it, envisaged the horses they knew: in fields, on plinths, among the pages of storybooks – either majestic or in miniature and always elegant, unlike this thing whose size brought to mind a large sheep or dog.

  Auzoux’s horse is a subject for investigation whose parts are already labelled. It remains clear. It is not the horse we know. It is not the real thing.

  an understanding of its parts

  Iris was preparing to give a talk on the horse as part of the museum’s autumn lunchtime series. This may have been why she’d mentioned it to Raif. She sent him the flyer and he replied that he looked forward to it.

  She enters the museum’s modest lecture theatre and finds herself with an audience of ten. There are three women in their sixties or seventies, four postgraduate students, someone from the museum’s education department, and a tall woman with heavy glasses and heavy hair. Iris cannot make her out but beside her is Raif. There are empty seats to either side of them which means they’ve chosen to sit together which means he brought her with him and what does that mean?

  Iris has thirty-six images, mostly pertaining to the model’s construction. She has analysed the clay that Auzoux added to the papier-mâché to make it more durable as well as the stability of the egg tempera used to pick out muscle tissue and arteries. She has researched fully the technical and commercial reasons for building the model at half-life-size.

  She planned to extemporise from notes, to keep it light and sparkling, but she’s thrown by Raif’s presence and affronted by the woman in glasses. So she reads the points she’s prepared and fails in each case to think of something further to say. She is finished in twenty minutes, having repeated one point twice because the woman took off her glasses and shook out her hair.

  Raif’s face is fixed in the smallest possible smile, which Iris thinks at first is friendly then amused then pitying. The woman’s holding her phone and seems to be recording the talk, which makes Iris stumble all the more. How lazy and rude, she thinks, while noticing that Raif isn’t bothering to take notes either. Finally Iris
asks if there are any questions. Four hands are raised, including the woman’s.

  Iris smiles at someone else, who introduces herself as a professor of veterinary science.

  I myself found anatomical models useful, of course, and one can admire the specificity of Auzoux’s beast. But as an instrument of learning, is it not a blizzard of detail?

  The woman with the glasses is nodding. Raif gives no indication of his view.

  Before Iris can decide what to say, and she’s determined on an impressive response, someone answers the question for her.

  But didn’t Auzoux’s labelling make it possible for the student to learn at their own pace? He numbered each part so that the student was guided by the order in which the animal should be dissected.

  The woman with the glasses speaks next. She has a charming elusive accent, so everyone is listening, but her gaze wanders. She seems to be speaking to the air.

  You take something apart and put it together over and over, learning the names for each component and how they fit. You accrue detail rather than attempt to absorb it all at once.

  There are noises of approval but the veterinary professor shakes her head.

  I think the starting point is contact with the real thing. Papier-mâché and varnish, parts that come apart or click into place, that’s not what anyone’s going to find when they cut open a body.

  This was supposed to be Iris’s discussion.

  Why don’t we …?

  They seem surprised that she’s still there.

  Why don’t we continue this conversation in the veterinary gallery, she says, where we can see the horse itself?

  And after that why don’t we walk up to the park, adds the woman in glasses, and see a horse itself?

  Everyone laughs except Iris. She leads the way and does not let herself look back. Raif and his friend take their time, the group has to wait, and when they arrive they walk through the door arm in arm. Iris can’t think of anything to say. She stares at the horse.