Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  We had our picnic at four o’clock on a shaded patch of earth outside the train station. The onigiri had disintegrated, the tsukemono had wilted, the karaage had dried and the sandwich edges had curled and hardened, but we ate them all.

  *

  We had three coldrooms that were set at a temperature of one degree Celsius and a fourth, a walk-in freezer, that was set at minus twenty degrees. The freezer contained a mix of prepared foods and uncommon cuts of meat; one of the two coldrooms held chicken and the other prepared foods and marinated meats. My favourite was the last and largest in which hung game and sides of beef, pork and horsemeat and in which Michi, having asked to be shown the coldrooms at about the age at which one learns that the meat on one’s plate comes from an animal that bears little resemblance to the fluffy, stuffed and stitched package one hugs to sleep at night, had burst into tears.

  Michi and I had come closest to falling out shortly after that visit, when we had attempted to play with our cuddly toys and dolls together. While she and Keiko were content to enact tea ceremonies, happy families and school lessons with the dolls, I favoured stripping them, disjointing them to the extent possible and hanging them from a piece of string extended from a door handle to a drawer knob, like sides of meat we could then offer for sale in a game of ‘butcher’s shop’. While they treasured their manicured, anthropoid puppets, I loathed mine for the audacity they had to mimic human form, however inadequately. When still very young, I demanded my mother rid my room of the insultingly empty, humanoid shells my friends saw fit to amuse themselves with.

  The back room of our house on the ground floor, the one directly behind the shop, was the butcher’s proper, the preparation room in which joints were filleted and meats generally prepared for presentation in the shop in metal trays. On the walls above the prep room’s marble tops, wooden chopping blocks, mincers and many steels, cleavers and boning knives, were pinned posters of drawings of animals in profile that detailed, by means of dotted lines, the precise anatomical cuts of beef, pork and horsemeat – simpler, consumer-friendly versions of which decorated the shop walls in order to help my parents’ customers with their orders. As a joke, Takumi-san, my parents’ shop assistant, tacked a large sheet of paper to the prep room wall on which had been printed a stylised, heavily inked frontal outline of a man tattooed with his own dotted cutting lines that denoted fingers, hands, arms, chest, stomach and so on. The frontal, featureless outline had been very well drawn and the sheet laminated so that the whole held its own against the professionally executed posters of animal silhouettes. I found it strangely compelling and would stand there staring at it until I could see myself filling the thickly delineated space entirely and looking out at the prep room from the wall. One day, quite unexpectedly, it felt as though the outline had stepped off the poster and onto and around me, like a new, thick additional layer of skin. This sensation delighted me; I felt both highlighted, more real than others in the real world, and, too, the lead cartoon character in my own anime world.

  ‘Does it amuse you?’ asked my father. I hadn’t noticed him watching me.

  ‘I am invincible,’ I replied happily.

  My father appeared nonplussed.

  ‘I am me,’ I added helpfully.

  ‘Of course you are!’

  He squatted and hugged me, keeping his arms straight and his unwashed hands away from me, and kissed me on the forehead. I could feel his strength and the depth of his affection despite my newly acquired squidgy second skin.

  I’m not sure that my father had welcomed having that picture of a dissected human being on the wall, but he had left it there in recognition of Takumi-san’s efforts; my liking it gave him an additional reason for retaining it, so there it stayed.

  Not long after, Takumi-san lost the tips of two fingers in an accident in the prep room. My father teased that the outline of the man was Takumi-san and that he had been intending to use it as a guide to his own cannibalisation, starting with his fingers. Our customers joked that Takumi-san had lost his finger tips in the mincer when serving a customer, who had returned the following day to ask for more of that quite delicious-tasting mince.

  My parents allowed me to wander in and out of the shop on quieter weekdays; my only instructions were never to touch a knife and never to run, for fear that I might slip on the prep room floor where, invariably, bits of meat, fat and gristle would be spilled like landmarks around miniature lake-like drops of blood. I liked the singsong greetings and farewells that accompany shoppers in my home country and loved adding my shrill soprano to my father’s bass and Takumi-san’s baritone and to the ding-dong of a bell that signalled the shop door opening. On hot days, I would enter the coldroom that housed the disassembled herbivores and walk among them as they hung there in their declining, reducing state. Live and whole once, they had been killed, skinned, disembowelled and bisected after their heads and hooves had been cut off. From here, they would be butchered neatly in our prep room, quartered, filleted and reduced to manageable sizes and recognisable portions, cut into ever-smaller pieces until, soon, we’d hold a morsel of them between our chopsticks before digesting them in an irreversible reduction that ensured their elimination. As they hung there, pink and purple in the grey-blue light of the walk-in fridge, I couldn’t help but consider them at the start of their lives, not so much in vitro but in limbo, this room an ante-chamber from which they’d be released into the world and would grow heads and hooves and gambol, graze and gallop in rich green fields. I knew I was just confusing them with me as I hung in a stasis of seasons, school terms, play dates and homework, waiting for my real life to begin.

  *

  ‘Mie-chan! What are you doing?’ The panic and incomprehension in my father’s voice startled me so that I nearly lost my balance on the pile of boxes and crates I had stacked in the midst of the thicket of hanging meat. I saw him through the animal corpses, framed in the open doorway, and I saw myself through his eyes and felt foolish, although I didn’t think I had actually done anything wrong. He pushed his way through the sides of beef and horsemeat that thudded as they hit each other and made the butchers’ hooks jangle. His livid, pallid face looking up to me in the artificial light was ghastly and his hair stood on end.

  ‘Come here.’ He held his arms out to me and felt around my neck – finding no rope, to his relief. Helping me off the rickety stack, he exclaimed, ‘You are freezing to the touch!’ He walked me upstairs, wrapped me in his coat and sat me on his lap. ‘What on earth were you doing?’

  I could detect no hint of reprimand in his voice; just anxiety, fear and a desire to understand.

  ‘I was just wondering what it was like to be one of them. You know, what it’s like to be hanging there, waiting for your life to begin, waiting for that next step in your life. There’s no need for you to be so worried.’

  Later, at the coldroom door, I would understand my father’s concern, his visceral fear. The overhead light failed to penetrate the tangle of carcasses so that the lower part of the room remained in shadow and the boxes I’d been standing on must have been quite invisible to him. That night, I hugged him ever so tightly and said, ‘I’m sorry to have frightened you, Otoo–san. I would never, ever…’ I didn’t know how to finish the sentence, how to tell my father that his daughter was so arrogantly certain of herself, of her being, that she would harm others before she’d harm herself.

  Sharon

  I had the smallest bedroom in our terraced house in south-west London. It was easy to understand why. Mum and Dad had to share a bedroom, so they had to have the biggest one, and even then it was not big enough for them to have a bed each; they had to share one. It’s like tennis: a doubles team needs the bigger doubles court to play in. Sherah had the next biggest bedroom, obviously, as she was the oldest of we children and needed the space for her dolls, her old records and new CDs and her clothes; besides which, she was untidy and needed a big bedroom because how would she otherwise have found anything? Seamus, being the young
est and smallest of us, needed the next biggest bedroom so that he had the space to grow into, evidently.

  I suspected that Sherah kept her better dolls for no other reason than she knew I wanted them. I had Sherah’s old dolls, unloved by her and dirty from our having played in the garden with them. Hers, for the most part, were in national costume and remained in the cartons they had come in, lightweight cardboard coffins of which one or two sides were sheet plastic and arranged on two shelves of a bookcase. Beautiful doll from Holland: doll can be undressed, read one such box. I would have loved to undress Lieke but I never dared.

  Sherah’s bedroom door closed and with the palm of my hand pressed against it, heart beating quickly for fear that she might catch me in her room and the top of my head barely level with the light switch, I would stand at the end of the two rows of dolls and consider myself their equal. I was just another, bigger version of them in the international dress of a young girl: plimsolls, short skirt, T-shirt, hooded sweatshirt and ponytail. Like them, I was in suspension, waiting for someone to breathe life into me, to flick the switch that grated against the back of my head and spark me into existence, give me definition, a role, a drive. If I knew who I was, I would know what to do. I would stand quite still, unblinking, then, when I raised my head, my eyelids would fall, quite deliberately, just as Lieke’s did. If I knew what others wanted me to do, I would know who to be. When I lowered my head, my eyes opened again.

  *

  I am, more often than not, up and down before anyone else. I empty the dishwasher and lay the breakfast table.

  ‘Who else ever lays the breakfast table?’ asks Sherah. ‘Where on earth did you get the idea to do that from?’

  ‘From an American soap on TV, I bet,’ says Dad from behind his newspaper.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to do it, do it properly,’ says Sherah, waving a spoon at me. ‘You know I don’t like these round soup spoons – ever – I only ever want to use the dessert spoons, even for my cereals. Go on, get me the right spoon.’ Sherah throws the round soup spoon at me that I fail to catch. ‘Clumsy clot!’

  ‘Sherah.’ Mum’s not a great talker first thing in the mornings.

  ‘No! Don’t put it back in the drawer,’ says Sherah. ‘It’s been on the floor. Put it in the dishwasher.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ I protest.

  ‘While you’re up, Sharon, put some toast in the toaster for me, will you, please,’ says Mum.

  ‘For me too,’ demands Seamus, without looking up from his colouring-in and join-the-dots books.

  ‘It’s not toast that you put in the toaster,’ says Dad, still obscured by his newspaper. ‘It’s bread. Toast is what you take out of the toaster. If you’ve remembered to push the thingy down, that is.’

  ‘Funny bloke,’ says Mum.

  Dad reads the sports section of the newspaper first, then the business pages, then the obituaries, then the op eds, as he calls them, and the news only last. ‘The news is always the same even when it’s different,’ is what we hear him say to anyone who cares to listen. He seems proud of the fact that he doesn’t read the same newspaper consistently and says to anyone who is still listening, ‘A man should choose his newspaper like he chooses his friends, in order to challenge him in his opinions rather than to confirm his prejudices.’

  ‘But you’ve got no friends,’ said Mum once, to which Dad just smiled.

  *

  For years I thought that my family consisted of me, my brother, my sister, my mother and a newspaper on legs. At the end of one term I went with my primary school to see a play. When the curtain rose, the audience was presented with a domestic scene I recognised immediately: a round pine table set for breakfast, at which was seated to one side behind a broadsheet newspaper a man, whose outstretched, ankle-crossed legs and newspaper-gripping knuckles alone were visible. I knew him at once and stood and shouted, ‘That’s Daddy!’ Everyone laughed and many children turned their heads and looked at me appreciatively. When the man eventually lowered his arms I saw that it wasn’t Dad, just someone pretending to be him, but I was pleased that I had entertained others and, thinking about this, I missed much of the first half of the play. I missed much of the second, too, as it dawned on me then that there were people inhabiting other people’s skins and the realisation of this thrilled me. When the actors took their bow, adults and children alike on their feet and clapping enthusiastically, I felt a mix of admiration and, I had to admit to myself, acute jealousy.

  When Mum came to pick me up, a teacher recounted the story to her and my Mum laughed and patted me, and when Mum told the story to Dad, I stood by his side proudly, smiling in anticipation of his approval and laughter. The palm of Dad’s hand came down across my cheek and mouth casually, not forcefully yet firmly, painful only for its being so unforeseen, in what he called his forehand. ‘Don’t ever make a joke at my expense again,’ he said quietly, almost indifferently.

  Mum hissed at him and pressed me to her. ‘Honestly!’ She stroked my hair.

  Dad backed off and, keeping his eyes on Mum, held his hands up in apology.

  I lined my dolls up by the fireplace and re-enacted the play – well, my version of it; I was as taken with my actors’ costume changes and the colour combinations of their clothes as with the story. ‘You naughty girl!’ said one doll to another and he hit her in the face. A sudden chill descended like a stage curtain and I looked up to see Dad staring down at me from above his newspaper in horror.

  *

  Dad’s unfinished face resembled the papier-mâché heads children make at school, while Seamus and Sherah already looked the finished article. Dad’s chin was like a roll of plasticine that, attached, had yet to be flattened and shaped and his nose was like a blob of clay, the maker of which had been called off to playtime before addressing its contours with a palette knife. I imagined that while Dad kept his newspaper up, some force was at work finishing his features and, every time he lowered it, I anticipated the change that never came. My sister’s and brother’s hair was dark and wiry like his; mine was blond and straight like my mother’s. Standing in front of the full length mirror on the inside of my parents’ wardrobe door, I would reflect on a friendly-looking, green-eyed girl of perfectly average build and shape who, I would think, was the real, fuller me. Our fingers would touch, first one hand, then the other, and she would stay on her side of the mirror neither inviting me in nor refuting me, just smiling back at me, solid, complete and self-possessed in a way in which I wasn’t.

  If Dad caught me standing there, he would say, ‘Admiring yourself again?’ Or, ‘Have you got nothing better to do?’ Or, ‘Get your own mirror.’ Once, though, I saw him looking at me, not at me but at the girl in the mirror, as though she was someone else, and I took my hand away from hers and he took his eyes away from her and left the room without saying anything.

  Mum, if Dad wasn’t around, would come up behind me, place her hands on my shoulders and plant a kiss on my crown and I would lean gently back into her while I placed my hands on hers and looked at my larger twin in the mirror.

  ‘Mum, why don’t I look like Dad?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course you do!’

  ‘But I don’t!’ I thought she was joking.

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Sherah and Seamus don’t think so.’

  ‘You do.’ Mum gripped my shoulders.

  Isabella

  Eleanor and Deborah live two doors from us. Deborah is my age and Eleanor two years older. They look like twins even though Eleanor is fair and Deborah dark; they are of the same height and build, Deborah being that little bit tall and Eleanor short for their respective ages. They love visiting the ‘butterfly house’, as they call it; it’s the only thing that can compete with their dolls for their attention. I am proud to show it to them, along with my father at his best: interested and interesting, kind and attentive, patient and tolerant in a way that Mama and I rarely witness. Mama is so anxious about saying the wrong thing – of confusi
ng insect orders and butterfly species with families, of muddling larvae and caterpillars with pupae and chrysalises – that she no longer visits the pavilion.

  Papa drops to his knees in an eerily precise visual echo of Uncle James’ genuflections and places his arms caringly around Eleanor’s and Deborah’s shoulders, their three pairs of eyes immediately level with the two rows of wooden-framed breeding cages, flower pot cages and flower pots that run the length of the greenhouse on trestle tables. Above them, black netting cylindrical cages hang along the middle of the greenhouse. Butterfly nets and bait traps, collecting boxes, tubes and other types of container, an assortment of magnifying lenses in their steel and brass swivelling cases, store boxes and display cases, killing jars and setting boards are ordered tidily in the shed end, in which garden tools are consigned to the one, dark corner. An old bathroom cabinet, long relegated from the house, contains boxes of pins, field reference books and bottles of ethyl acetate, isopropyl alcohol, ethylene glycol, relaxing fluid and wing repair cement. The door that permits access to the shed from the conservatory is kept open by one leg of a pine armchair that belongs to the set in the kitchen and that Papa sits on when consulting his books or admiring his butterflies or – on those occasions when I mistakenly stray to the far end of the garden, emulating Mama, poorly – bouncing me up and down on a lean lap in an activity that, I am certain, gives him more pleasure than it does me.

  Still squatting, Papa directs Eleanor’s and Deborah’s attention to a flowerpot cage crowded with pale pink flowers on slender, upright stems that shove against the fine nylon netting that forms the cage.