Fen

by Daisy Johnson

  Somehow it has become that you are not the woman for him when all along it was supposed to be the other way around.

  Six.

  Watch out for the affection. It comes at odd, awful moments, mainly when he is not there: brushing your teeth, opening the door for a parcel, at the photocopying machine. There is nothing much about him you can see which would do this to you. Affection, you tell your housemates, is a sort of sickness. They roll their eyes and tell you they can hear you at night.

  That’s not affection, you say. That’s sex.

  You lose conviction in this statement fast. You worry about what is happening to you but it happens anyway. At the cinema you look over the curve of his arm and see other girls looking over other arms back at you. In restaurants he has an uncanny trick of holding your wrist while eating with the other hand. You want to tell him it’s very clever but you can’t eat that way.

  He texts you song lyrics while you’re at work and often there are books he has bought you on the bed. You want to tell him you can buy your own books; that you do not want something everybody else is reading, that you are a snob without any taste but that your taste is better than that. You don’t.

  He sets to trying to make you orgasm as if this is what he was made for. You think his jaw must ache in the mornings; you think his fingers must move involuntarily when he’s trying to do other things. You do not tell him the harder he tries the more you feel your orgasm is a conquest, something grey-eyed and eel-shaped with thoughts and digressions all its own.

  You see how you irk him. Sometimes you see how you do it on purpose. Catch him wincing at the sound of metal spoons on his Teflon pans; watching his face as you comment on radio shows, television programmes, people on the street. He does not like it when you piss with the door open.

  He sees how he irks you and you know he never means to. The way he falls asleep fast as an animal, in the middle of films or on public transport or at night when you can barely sleep two hours through to their end. The way he reads out lines from books, voice cocked up an ironic octave.

  You go running and find yourself making long, angry, screaming lists of everything that annoys you about him. The way he eats standing up; the way he forgets people’s names; the way he ends texts with his initials.

  When you get back you are calm. When you get back you want him again, quick and quiet, his face pillowed into your neck as he finishes. You want him in the mornings, mouth sour on his. You ask him to meet you on your lunch break, find quiet places in cold fields. On the weekends you want nothing more than to stay in bed with him until it gets dark.

  There are days you welcome it. Affection is not something which is happening to you; affection is not AIDS or hay fever or a tetanus shot. This is something you have let in of your own volition and it lengthens days into summers. He says you are funny, grasps you round the waist and says you are softening like butter. Listen, you want to tell him. Listen to me.

  When he asks you to move in with him you say yes without thinking.

  Five.

  You try not to let yourself be lulled by the thought of easy sex with someone who’s already got past the hurdle of seeing you naked. You understand that easy sex is one of those lies married people tell their single friends.

  You have your phone with you at times you shouldn’t – half asleep, drinking whilst sad – and text him. You realise you have started something you were not supposed to start. You know only that this is the beginning of the end and that you called it on; you whistled this up. There will be no storm warning; there will be no shipping forecast to pre-empt what will come.

  You wait in the Fox and Hound for him. It feels like days have passed. You say his name over and over to make sure you don’t forget it: Lou, Lou, Lou. You do not think you will recognise him from the other night but you do. He buys you both a drink. There is no clear moment when you decide it is too late and you like him. Perhaps when he bends his face low over the Guess Who board or when he talks, excited as a child, about the structure of Radiohead songs.

  You take him home with you again. When you wake his hands are working already over your hips and chest. You are angry for a moment, as if he were a cat belonging to someone else, snuck in. You want to tell him that he is the one you don’t know; he is the one you do not want to know.

  Four.

  You decide it is the first and only time you will do this and keep all the lights on.

  As you take your clothes off, watching him do the same, you think about all the others. If they were older they would always go down on you as soon as you got into the bedroom. They pride themselves on respecting the female orgasm and want you to have one before you fuck. You never did but that’s all right.

  If they were younger, you wouldn’t make it to the bedroom. It’s always uncomfortable against the kitchen counter and worse on the carpet, where you get burns on your elbows before you’ve even done much moving. When they are younger you lose your pants in the hall, their fingers curved like fish hooks, flicking the elastic loose. If they are younger than you they pant with the condom wrapper ripping between their teeth on the pavement outside the front door. You always wanted to tell them they were like dogs at the racetracks, faces rubbed furless in a muzzle and so excited they couldn’t even see the rabbit.

  It is different from the other times. He knows things they have not known before. He seems to be able to tell when you are bored with a position or when your toes are cramping. He holds your hands above your head at the wrist. You enjoy his tongue in your ear.

  After you’ve done it once he says he wants to sleep. You tell him he can sleep when he’s dead, laughing like it’s a joke, and, because you feel the urge, take him in your mouth. This is not a promise; this is not a relationship. When he starts to move his hips up and down and holds onto the back of your head you stop.

  It is better the second time. His hands on your back, yours round his neck, the edge of the bed shifting you into that position you like; the bolt of his bottom lip between your teeth. He is thinner than you, his hip bones cutting in so you find their marks in the shower the next day.

  You are careful not to let the words he says do anything to what you’ve started. When he says he likes your boobs or that your bottom is tight or that you’re pretty fun aren’t you, you tell him words are cheap enough to spit and push his face the place you want it to go.

  When you find yourself thinking about the slight burr he places on the word legs or the way he pronounces your name a little off-key, you remind yourself he used the word pussy as a pun and move on.

  You wake in the night, half asleep, and ask for his number.

  Three.

  When the others leave, you go to the bar with Gabby and do a shot. You watch the skin on your wrist and arms and her neck as you do it. When you put your shot glass down it makes more noise than it should.

  You stand and smoke in the car park. One of the passable ones comes out with his friends and asks to bum a cigarette, asks where’s good to go. You pretend you haven’t seen him at the fish-and-chip shop or never went to school with his younger brother or didn’t catch him, red-faced, in a suit on the way to an interview in the city for a job he wasn’t ever going to get.

  You watch yourself pretend you’ve never known anything in your life and never much felt the compulsion to. You want to make him think you have no history or education; that you might have had language once but it’s gone now. You want to make him think you’re so scrubbed clean of any sort of intelligence that he can lay himself out on you and you’ll soak him up.

  He says his name is Lou.

  You know where you’re going. You don’t grow up from being young in this town without knowing the only place which is any place is the estuary. You all traipse down there in a row, following the drag lines of smoke. You feed him cigarettes as if they were words. He says he never smokes unless he’s drinking. He looks better with one in his mouth, hands free for a couple of breaths.

  At the ed
ge of the field you lift one shoe, dark with mud up the thin heel, and tell him he’ll have to carry you. You think he has probably pegged you as docile and a little shy – his type – and this is a surprise. His hands holding onto the tops of your thighs feel, for both of you, like an omen.

  He carries you all the way and, though you can hear it’s pretty hard going near the end, you let him. You let him. At the estuary you slither free without his help and you and Gabby start towards the water. You’ve done this before.

  The water and the white light coming sky-ways. When you were children and it was summer there were no days you did not spend here, stripped to your pants, duck-diving. Your parents told you if you kept going they’d have to keep you in the house; it was dangerous, there were pylons sunk deep into the water there.

  More besides, your father would say.

  You and your friends would mimic him, a threatening bring-on of a chant: Cars and shopping trolleys and dead foxes and murdered women. Cars and shopping trolleys and dead foxes and murdered women.

  You were always better at being in the water than the rest. Sometimes you would come up and they’d be shouting your name, one of them crying.

  We thought you drowned. We thought you drowned.

  You both take off your tights and shoes but keep the rest of your clothes on. You are not children any more. The men have brought out bottles of cider and are smoking pot. You give him a good look. Take Gabby’s hand and jump in. Let go and swim down deep, pylon hunting, reaching out your fingers to find them.

  You think: this is how to fuck a man you don’t know. This is how to go about forgetting names and syllables.

  You used to go out to the estuary at times it was too cold or late for anybody else to be there and practise holding your breath. One day you asked Gabby to come with you. You would not trust anybody else but you trusted her. She sat on the bank with a timer and you went into the water, came out triumphant, sucking in air.

  How long? How long?

  She was holding the timer tight, her face very still. Fifteen minutes, she said, and you thought maybe you shouldn’t have shown her. Fifteen minutes.

  This time you do not stay under that long. Imagine him watching from the bank, leant back on his bony elbows talking about amps or video games. You understand the way he thinks. You’re his sort of girl, the sort that can’t breathe under water any longer than he can.

  But you stay under long enough that you feel the star-shaped explosion of his body entering the water. You feel him looking for you, pushing at the water; wait for the hungry gulp of him resurfacing and then follow him up, come up close enough that he can feel you.

  Shit, he says. Shit. Gabby is laughing, pulling herself onto the bank as if she’d been an otter before she got bored of it. One of his friends tosses her a beer and in exchange she wrings her hair out onto his lap.

  You scull away slowly so he can follow you. Swim out to the middle where the water feels deep enough to drown and feel the ripple of him coming after.

  You hold your breath pretty good, he says, as if you were kids playing dares.

  You kick up high and then pull the dress over your head. Feel him, solid enough that it must hurt, against your leg. You let him touch your breasts through the thin bra. He gets cold before you.

  * * *

  Two.

  You wear that dress. The one that girl Gabby inexplicably likes, called your prostitute dress, pausing to spin her hands through your wardrobe, as if to say: well, one of them anyway. Gabby said she was a relationshipper, a boyfriender. She’d never fuck anybody unless she could see the whites of their children’s eyes when he orgasmed.

  You put on those red shoes. The others take flats in their bags and they tell you to do the same but you don’t.

  You go to the Fox and Hound. In a pub in the city you’d be overdressed but here you’re fine because there’s nowhere else for anybody to go and everybody understands that.

  In the pub you all fall into a lexis you know and use without much work. You talk in generalisations, cut bodies down to minor glances, swivel your faces with intent over the rims of your pint or wine glasses. There is a beautiful man in the corner you all think wears his clothes like skin; that isn’t the one you want to take home. Men like that know too well what they look like and will make you pay for it later. There are a couple more you use words like not bad and good enough about. You are not bad people; this is just the place you have ended up.

  You drink enough to eye round the room with some sort of confidence. Drink enough you feel it in the ends of your fingers, the muscles of your legs. You stop after that. Some of the others are doing shots of tequila or cheap vodka at the bar but you don’t join them. You’ve got a way to go yet.

  One.

  You do not shave your legs or pubic hair. It is not a wedding night, not a parade or a party or an invitation. You are not a welcome mat.

  You speak in aggressions and facts bullet-pointed enough to cut; tell your friends you are going to get laid, this is the night. They laugh and open wine or sprawl out on their elbows and look at you. Say: yeah. Do it. They’ve heard it from you before and from themselves and mostly it’s just something that tastes pretty good in your mouth. This is different. You don’t need to tell them that.

  They will know what has happened later: from the sound of the bed against the wall or the funnel noise of piss falling into the toilet from a standing height or from meeting him in the morning, trapped trying to open the front door.

  LANGUAGE

  HARROW WILLIAMS WAS the sort of boy who got away with things. Harrow Williams was not fat, only big; built through with power. She was not small-boned herself, you could have that fact for nothing, but what she liked most about Harrow was that he was taller than all the other boys and spanned across the shoulders like a bear. He’d been big when he was a child, violent with it, but had only seemed now to grow into his size. She’d loved him since they were four and he’d leant over, planted a red-paint handprint onto her chest, almost knocking her down. As if he owned her already.

  And what sort of a device was she? At sixteen Nora Marlow Carr was good at all those things nobody much wanted to be good at. She could do maths in her head the way other people came up with sentences; remembered pretty much everything she saw written down or heard told to her; knew the ins and outs of string theory and could, if she had the urge, take apart a hefty radio and jam it back together. She didn’t sleep much and she knew it made her look like someone had beaten her about the face, but there it was. She was larger than was fashionable; sometimes caught herself looking with something akin to lust at all those bones that protruded out of girls at school; the solipsism of legs and arms, the buds of them. Mostly, though, she thought they looked as if they hadn’t grown properly. She understood – because she was logical and somewhat cold with it – that they saw her with the same confusion; imagined her bready with everything she carried, watched with distaste the motion of her childbearing hips, her milk-carrying breasts and wave-making thighs. She was a natural woman, they sang to one another under their breath when they saw her, and meant nothing good by it.

  Harrow had worked through those bony women and them through him and she’d watched with dry fascination. In reception, it was little Marty Brewer who was the first girl to have her ears pierced and who held his hand for a day before holding someone else’s. Nora listened to the gossip, knew Harrow liked to take a girl on the bus to the cinema in the city and then to Subway. If he liked you enough he’d kiss you on the way back. Later she knew, because she understood about biology, there was more than hand-holding going on.

  The year she turned sixteen she decided enough was enough. She was not the sort of girl who waited for something to come her way and, if she wanted a thing bad enough, she thought she could probably find a way to get it. She waited until after sports when all the other boys had gone home and Harrow was out with Ms Hasin practising for the 2,000 metres. He was heavy for a track runner but there w
as enough power in those limbs – legs more like a horse than a boy. Everybody said he was building himself up for the next Olympics.

  She went out into the car park and leant against his car and when he came walking up she looked at him. There was no one else there.

  He screwed up his face so lines appeared between his nose and around his eyes.

  Nora, right? he said, as if they hadn’t been in the same school since they were four, as if he’d never planted that red handprint. Well, that didn’t matter now.

  She thought the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard was entanglement theory. She told Harrow that was what they were: two particles forever linked and fated to change one another. He looked at her askance and she tried hard to think how to put it into a language he would understand.

  When she looked back at him he’d taken his cock out. It was not miraculous the way she’d imagined, not beautiful or serene or possessed of any great power. All the same she liked the strange nod of it moving seemingly unconnected to the rest, recognised it was circumcised and liked that; liked the small, dark spots at its base.

  You need me to tell you what to do? Harrow said.

  She shook her head. She’d read the literature.

  Harrow meant it to be a one-time event and that was a fine thing for him to think, but she knew he didn’t really understand entanglement theory at all, only liked hearing things he couldn’t comprehend, and that it would be a while longer before they’d shake one another.

  She knew the way it worked. She was supposed to be coy and shy and give him her home number and wait to see if he’d call her.

  That was one way of going about it.

  She rang him the next night until he picked up. Didn’t let him speak but told him everything she was going to do to him. When she was done she stopped and let him think on it.

  All right, he said.

  His mother worked the night shift and her parents hadn’t ever worried she was the sneaking-out type, so they met at his. She knew why it was so good, why it was better than everything she’d overheard from the girls at school who spoke about it with a sort of aged disappointment. Because he didn’t think he had to treat her the way he would one of the skinny women he’d marry, and she had nothing to lose. Afterwards he gave her the lines he’d picked up from American films and she let him get them out: he wasn’t looking for a relationship, he just wanted to have some fun; she was a great girl, she really was.