On the Floor

by Aifric Campbell

  ‘You have no idea what it’s like to be always hungry. It’s like a fierce burning pain. And if I don’t eat I get into a rage like I might break something.’

  I sneak a glance round, there are traces of an old supply trail – a flattened pack of Jaffa cakes lies on the floor by the wardrobe. What might once have been a fruit bowl on the dressing table, full of loose change and paper clips. This is what I am thinking: how much is there in the fridge, in the cupboards? I remember Frosties on the counter, Rex’s bowl on the floor. Is there enough food? What happens if we run out of food? Has he bought enough to last for this impromptu kidnap event, and will he be afraid to go out to the shops and leave me on my own in case I escape? Or scream the house down, which I surely will.

  ‘Maybe it’s your metabolic rate.’

  But he is not listening, he is scrabbling fiercely at his brows as if they are gripped by some infestation. ‘You think you’re so smart. So cool. So—’ he loses the word. ‘You and that moron.’

  ‘You mean Rob.’ I will give him up as a moron any day. ‘I’m not like him.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be like him, but you are.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Swinging it about, thinking you own the place, thinking you’re above us all. Well, you’re not.’

  ‘We’re not.’

  ‘All your money, all you’ve earned. All your big bonuses. I don’t care. The clock is ticking, you know, and it’s people like me who are going to be running the show soon. At least you should be able to understand that. Moron doesn’t even know his time is up.’

  ‘“The most disgusting and hateful thing about money is that it even endows people with talent, And it will do so till the end of the world.”’

  ‘The whole point is you do have talent.’

  ‘I was quoting. Dostoevsky. The Idiot again, as it happens.’

  ‘What do you actually care about, Geri? What do you actually value? Nothing important. You waste your natural gift, you drink yourself silly all the time, sleep with lots of different people and hang around with – with losers. You probably have sex with your clients as well.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘I don’t care if you do. You don’t care what you do. You’re pathetic. You don’t even have a job anymore; all you have is a dog.’

  I scratch Rex’s head. This is not the right moment to cry but I cannot will the tear back and it rolls in slow uneven motion down to my lip.

  I’m thinking how all stars die, just in lots of different ways. The biggest ones die soonest and in the most spectacular fashion. A red super giant that explodes into a supernova and for the briefest of moments shines brighter than all the other stars in the galaxy put together. But collapse is inevitable, it all ends in a black hole so dense that not even light can escape.

  Burnout is final. That’s how it goes.

  ‘Open the robe,’ he says.

  I look up but his is not a stare I can hold, something in his extinguished eyes makes me think of the tabernacle on Good Friday when the light has gone out, when God is dead and we are left alone with our darkness.

  ‘Open the robe.’ Rex growls faintly, a little ridge of fur stiffening on his spine.

  ‘I’ve already seen everything, you know,’ Pie Man is breathing hard. ‘And you’re not even all that great.’

  He reaches forward and opens the robe, slides it apart right to my shoulders. ‘Your tits are small.’ Lips curled downwards like he’s looking at a piece of dogshit. ‘Not what you’d call sexy.’ There is something like nausea rising in my lungs and I swallow hard though maybe spewing all over my skinny tits would be the best thing that could happen right now. His eyes narrow and blackening, his fat finger prods my collarbone and begins a slow trail down the middle of my chest, he is watching me clench my teeth, his finger slipping slow and steady down over the swell. It stops, hovers just above my breast. I close my eyes.

  Out of my limbs a sort of spasm, I am trying not to shake. Rex stirs, turns his golden head and I open my eyes to see him twist his neck and look at me. Sadly, it seems.

  ‘If you hurt me, he will bite you.’

  Pie Man doesn’t register my voice, his eyes are closed and all air sucked out of me now, my throat in some kind of traction, he slumps forward making some kind of moan and I scream ‘HELP’ but his hand clamps down over my nose and mouth, my jaws so wide I cannot bite into the flesh and I am kicking underneath the tangle of sheet and Rex is barking, Pie Man is saying ‘All right Rex, all right Rex,’ and Rex, who is backing away, off the bed, then Pie Man’s curdled face close up, holding my head in his hands.

  ‘If I wanted to fuck you I could have done it while you were passed out.’ He pushes me back and sideways, my temple snaps against the board and it is this that roars my brain and I swing my left arm wide, high, close, my wristwatch catching his cheek, but he does not release me, just holds it in easy victory. I am so completely disarmable.

  ‘Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand anything, Geri? Any man can take whatever he wants from you.’ A pronouncement or a forecast. A lesson taught or delivered.

  I hear my own whimpering and Rex’s nails clicking away on the wooden hallway. He wants no part in this humiliation. And so I am truly alone. This has the feel of my soul shrivelling up to die. Pie Man lets my arm slip, grabs a pillow and strips the case from it, twists it and stuffs it in my whining mouth, ties it fast and hard behind my head. I am gagged, bound, the sound of my own shortening breaths against the cloth. He pats his cheek, inspects the little smear of blood on his fingers. My saliva coming fast and free. I cannot swallow, I will be sick and I will choke, so I close my eyes. I must will myself out of this body, detach and disengage like a shuttle that sheds its casing, my own self unhooked from all this. For this is only one possible world. In another I am running free now, like Setanta whose feet never touched the forest floor. My hair is a streaming banner behind me, Rex bounds alongside like a fearless warrior hound, and in this world I can ford the deepest rivers, scale the highest mountain, I am untouchable, uncatchable, I am soaring above it all.

  The mattress heaves upwards. Pie Man rises without looking at me. He turns and leaves but does not close the door. There is a rustling sound from the galley kitchen and I strain to listen. He is muttering to Rex, he could be reassuring him with food, bamboozling him with biscuits to make him forget that I lie bound and gagged in the bedroom. But I get to work on the pillowcase gag, scrabble and tug and it slips down my chin just as he walks back into the room.

  ‘Corporate Slave Animal,’ I tell his approach and he stops by the bed, takes in the pillowcase lying crumpled around my neck. He nods. But at least his hands are empty. I am too scared now to keep silent, to leave him alone with his thoughts and I am a salesperson after all and I am not without resourcefulness. This would be the wrong time to cave. So let’s just be clever about this, Geri, let’s keep talking, keep him interested, and steer him away from thin ice to safer ground. Let’s just stay alive till the next best thing.

  ‘Corporate Slave Animal,’ I repeat. ‘You know Kenichi-san out in Tokyo? It’s what he calls the office workers. It’s a way of thinking about things. When you don’t own yourself anymore.’

  There is a fading flush about his cheeks, a patchy unshavenness and a whiff of stale flesh. And in the slump of his shoulders, his flab seems to be pulling him lower as if a great tiredness adds to the weight. He takes a step towards the window where the night sky is washed with light glow. His lips move, he seems to be whispering something and then he yawns, a great long hippo gape of the jaws, that from down here on the bed seems to play in slow motion.

  ‘You’re tired,’ I say, ‘you haven’t slept.’ He shakes his sagging head and looks wildly around the room and the chaos he has created. And I realise that he needs me to show him a way out of this. So I must tread carefully, proceed with caution. My heart batters against its cage. ‘You look exhausted,’ I say again and pat the bed. ‘Sit down.’

  He nods at me,
at the mattress and then lowers his bulk onto the bed so that he is facing the window with his back to me. ‘Lie down,’ I tell him and he reels backwards like a felled log, his head at right angles to my hip. And the light sinks, as if a dimmer switch has been thrown over the city. From this view his hair is thick and brown, dull and choppily cut, an uneven stab at layering around the crown. His lids close, perhaps he is just exhausted by event, by all that has happened to him at the hands of others, defeated by the bit players and the jocks who steal the spotlight and get the girls. His huge red legs anchor him to the floor and now he spreads his arms wide in cruciform.

  Rex appears in the doorway, head cocked in uncharacteristic hesitation as if he is weighing up the alternatives. But instead of bounding over to the bed he stands silent and watchful. There is a new sobriety here, a new attentiveness to the situation, as if he has finally arrived at the gates of adulthood. He pads demurely over and hops onto the bed with an impressive delicacy, positioning himself democratically between Pie Man and me.

  ‘You want to know about my circus trick?’ Pie Man doesn’t answer. ‘You want to hear the story?’ He doesn’t even open his eyes, but there is a quality of stillness that I will take for assent.

  ‘Long multiplication was the beginning of my unmasking.’ Rex turns over to lie on his back with his paws in the air. I scratch his tummy and he sighs contentedly in a trusting sprawl.

  ‘Mrs Donovan, fourth class. So I was nine.’ A sea of plaits and bobbles. Desks with sloped lids, stained with old ink.

  ‘Geraldine Molloy, show me how you worked it out.’ She slapped the ruler on my desk.

  ‘I did them in my head.’

  ‘Don’t be a silly, Geraldine. Those sums are far too complicated to do in your head. Now show me where you worked them out.’ She slid the ruler underneath my orange copybook and lifted it, as if there might be something hidden underneath. ‘Open it up and show me.’

  I opened it slowly to reveal the graph paper, a pristine universe of unsullied squares, the backdrop for all the numbers I could project in my head.

  ‘Right then, Geraldine.’ Mrs Donovan stiffened inside her cardigan. ‘So I suppose you can work out 276 times 98 in your head?’

  ‘27,048.’

  The girls shuffled in their chairs. Orla sniggering behind me. Mrs Donovan tightened her grip on the ruler.

  ‘Or 322 times 59?’

  ‘18,998.’

  Her hand twisting at a pink button. My fingertips damp, barely pressing on the wood, a hot buzz of defiance blazing at my neck. I tipped my chin upwards.

  ‘Ask me another,’ my little girl voice swelling thick in my throat. Emer’s thumb drifted into her open mouth, the way it did when she was nervous. Mrs Donovan staring down at me the way you’d take the measure of a snarling dog. Suspicion glittering in her dark irises, the deep furrow of her brow. That she might be the butt end of some unpleasant prank here, some trick played by silly girls to make teachers look stupid in front of a class that was growing restless now, gripping the desk edges with excited fingers.

  ‘433 times 78.’

  ‘33,774.’

  ‘45 times 23.’

  ‘1035.’

  She stalled. A little quiver in her peach lip. I stood up, stepped to the right so I could see the test questions on the backboard behind her and I reeled off the answers in loud sing-song:

  ‘And 872 times 63 is 54,936.’

  ‘469 times 86 is 40,334.’

  ‘777 times 99 is 76,923.’

  The wall clock ticked. The girls held their breath all around me. Pink blobs appeared on Mrs Donovan’s cheeks like she’d been slapped.

  ‘You’re not even checking my answers,’ I told her.

  Through the corner of my eye I could see Orla suck in her cheeks with the effort of suppressing giggles, she threw a covert glance at Emer and then there was a loud explosion from Marian, helpless over by the window and then they were all at it, the whole class laughing their heads off and I was laughing too and looking round, laughing at them laughing at me, for they too believed I had found some clever trick.

  Mrs Donovan banged her ruler down on my desk, slammed so hard it snapped and a piece clattered to the floor. She stood clutching the broken stub like a knife. No one was laughing now. The bell hammered above the door.

  There was a little plaque that read ‘Headmistress’ on Mrs Murphy’s door. A half-eaten Rich Tea beside her teacup.

  ‘No one likes a cheat, Geraldine.’

  ‘I wasn’t cheating. I was doing the sums.’

  ‘Enough now,’ Mrs Murphy raised her hand. ‘Concentrate on your lessons. Your brother was always a such good boy. Why don’t you take a leaf out of Kieran’s book?’

  In the playground the girls were playing hopscotch. Orla stopped on one leg.

  ‘God, did you see Donovan’s face, I though she’d burst.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Did you get lines, did you?’

  ‘Where did you have the answers?’

  ‘Had you the sums up your sleeve or something?’

  ‘Did you learn them off by heart?’

  ‘Will you show us how you do it?’

  ‘Will you do it again tomorrow?’

  ‘I didn’t have anything up my sleeve. I didn’t learn them off by heart. I just did it, like I said.’

  ‘Yeh, course you did.’ Orla tugged her plait frowning.

  ‘I worked them out in my head.’

  ‘Course you did.’

  Emer picked at her pinafore pocket. Marian bit her fingernail, stared.

  ‘I DID.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘Say that again.’ I pucked Orla with my elbow.

  ‘No one can do those sums in their head. Mrs Donovan said so.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘You’re such a show-off,’ she said, hands on hips. ‘It’s a trick.’

  ‘It’s not a trick.’

  ‘Like magic or something,’ she flicked her plait behind her shoulder. ‘Like when they take rabbits out of hats.’

  ‘Or pennies behind your ears.’

  ‘My dad can do that.’

  ‘It’s a trick.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s all tricks.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Is so.’

  ‘NOT.’

  ‘SO.’

  ‘Not.’

  ‘Liar. Cheat.’

  ‘BITCH.’ I pushed her hard. Orla wobbled backwards, then flew at me but I grabbed her plait, thick and rough like rope, yanked as hard as I could. She screamed, ‘GETOFFMECHEAT’, and I kicked her shin. She was on her knees and I jumped on her, ground her ugly face into the tarmac, the girls were yelling, ‘Miss, Miss, come quick,’ and I was screaming ‘I AM NOT A CHEAT’ and Orla lay there roaring until the teachers’ hands like clamps on my arms dragged me away.

  ‘Now, Geraldine,’ prompted the headmistress. I stood beside her desk facing down the audience that was arranged in a little semicircle before me. My mother sat fidgeting with the clasp of her handbag. There was an empty middle chair where Orla should have been, but instead she squirmed on her own mother’s lap, trying to make herself small and cuddlable, a big pink scratch on her cheek, a plaster on her knee with iodine smeared underneath, a bruised shin. Eyes sparkling with the righteous thrill of the wounded.

  ‘Geraldine?’ Mrs Murphy’s voice was sharp.

  I stretched my neck as high as it would go. Facing down my mother’s tight lips. Refusing to offer the expected apology.

  ‘She said I was a liar.’ I looked down the line of my nose at Orla who sniffled, dabbed her nose with her hanky. Her mother ran a comforting hand over her head, arched her brows.

  ‘Geraldine,’ my mother urged in a whisper.

  ‘Come along now,’ Mrs Murphy’s pitch rose in warning. But I was rising higher and higher, floating above them all. I was unreachable with my new-found disdain, up there in the thin air.r />
  ‘Well then,’ the headmistress sighed, shook her head and stood up.

  ‘Do you want to stay and watch?’ I snarled at Orla.

  ‘You will be QUIET,’ Mrs Murphy rapped her knuckle on the desk. Orla was shepherded away bawling. My mother stared aghast at this daughter-turned-sinner and then backed out the door.

  ‘I have never had call to use this on any girl before,’ the headmistress picked up her cane from the coat rack. ‘But you leave me no choice.’ She looked grimly at the shiny bamboo. ‘Now hold out your hand.’

  I did not flinch at the first stroke. She paused, checked my face for some sign of remorse but I held firm, waiting. Her lips tightened sourly and she whacked again, this time harder and I kept my head high and watched her closely and I knew that she hated what I had made her do – three – four – five – but I was stronger. Though I didn’t know where all the cussedness came from, I had discovered a deep and velvet well of power.

  Rex is whimper snoring, I pat him into stillness and Pie Man’s red mountain stirs. ‘Why didn’t you talk to your mum and dad? Surely someone would have—’

  ‘Sshh,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t interrupt.’

  My father talked to me in the dining room that Saturday and told me to be a good girl and not to be getting in trouble at school. I told him they said I was a liar and a cheat. ‘Ah, well now,’ he said. ‘Keep your head down, Geraldine, and just get on with your work. Take a leaf out of your brother’s book,’ he said, just like everyone else. My father didn’t take girlfights seriously and anyway he was checking his watch, the three o’clock at Newmarket would be on telly soon.

  I wanted to tell him I was afraid, that this thing with numbers felt like a birthmark, a deformity that singled me out. I wanted to tell him how the numbers followed me, how they hovered even on the edge of sleep. How they swirled across the wallpaper, wobbling and swooping into position. How I lay awake at night taking comfort in what I would later discover are called prime numbers, hunting them down like hidden treasure that you pick and weigh in your hand, testing their shape and properties, lining them up on my bookshelf atop the uneven sweep of volumes. 7 above Black Beauty, 29 above the Children’s Bible, 73 above Little Women. Sometimes I paraded them in a ring on the floor of my bedroom and each time I found a new one I arranged a steeplechase of primes – the highest didn’t always win. I wanted to tell my dad that sometimes I felt the numbers were choking me and that there might be something terribly wrong with me since I could not leave them alone, like a feverish compulsion to scratch at your skin till it bleeds.