Fen

by Daisy Johnson

  There are times I hear about my son. You have to know what you are looking for and I’ve been looking long enough to know. Someone in the North drawing crowds, saying they can hold their breath for hours; someone along the coast hunting hospitals, breaking into rooms.

  Do you want to see the photos of him? There are some from when he was older; ones he sent to me. Do you want to see the room he slept in? People normally want to see that. No? I can tell you about him anyway. It’s been a while since anyone visited.

  He came big; came with a slick of dark hair almost to his shoulders and a set of fine white teeth that bit onto my finger. It was the summer the fields flooded and stayed that way so long all the trees rotted to pulp. I took him to meet my friends and they all held him and bounced him on their knees. He was a quiet baby. He made little fuss. We passed him round the table in the pub. I almost forgot, then – watching him move from hand to hand – what he was.

  The first time it happened he was still small. A little twisted shape of skin and bone, narrow wrists balancing big, heavy hands. He was useless, wrenching from side to side on his back, legs pedalling like a beetle. I was not afraid of him then. He was sickly, caught colds, had a cough all the time. I kept the house warm and we stayed mostly here, in the kitchen. I filled the sink with warm water, held him. He liked it there.

  To begin with I didn’t understand. There was an ache. Here. Across my belly. I don’t remember what the first thing to go was. Only that it was a single word, a city I’d been thinking of perhaps, or my mother’s maiden name. He made a sound. A gurgle, I thought. Though it was a word. He was excited by it, thrashing in my hands. I tried to say the word back to him but there was nothing there. An absence.

  That first week I lost things fast. Single words, whole memories, sentences I’d once said to someone. He took what I said or was thinking. At the start I wrote lists of all the words I wanted to keep, tested myself on questions when he was asleep. What is the name of the town you live in? How old are you? Those are the ones he took first. The ones I needed most.

  I left him in the bedroom with the sides of the cot locked. It did not make any difference what room he was in. Doors and walls and locks had no power.

  I thought of treating him the way they would hundreds of years ago. Leaving him out where the cold or the foxes would get him. But that was not a thing possible to do.

  He grew fast with his takings. Faster than I could have imagined. His hair was longer than mine. I plaited it, tied it in a tight knot on top of his head. When he slept he tore it loose and lay beneath it. His toenails were claws. I cut them warily, watching his face while he watched me do it. He looked like me. More and more. The colour of his eyes, the shape of his face, his shoulders.

  He was barely a year old though after the first few stealings he’d crawled and soon after that I caught him walking, stumbling from one piece of furniture to the next, clinging on. Turning his big smile towards me.

  Do you remember – he would say after that. I would shake my head. He talked about days I was certain had been mine, people I thought I must have known. In the shop he would run ahead, stalking around the aisles. Look, he would say, pointing at someone I did not remember. Look. And people would stare.

  Do you want something to eat or drink? You don’t look comfortable. It is cold, I know. I have not been to the shop but there might be tea or something in the cupboards. You’re free to look. You can stay until it gets dark. You don’t talk much.

  Some people came to the house once. They wore stiff green coats and woollen hats though it was a hot summer. I knew I made them nervous because I looked like him; I walked and talked the way he did. I did not want to let them in but beneath their coats they were bunched with muscle, thick at the neck and shoulder. Their bodies were heavy devotion. They wanted only caffeine-free – I did not have it – they would not drink the beer I gave them.

  They sat on the edge of the sofa, tipped forwards onto the shined toes of their shoes. When I moved my hands or face I could see them wince; I looked like a mistake who’d stolen his shape. I wanted to tell them that was not the way it was.

  What can you tell us about him?

  I got out the photos I keep in the drawer. He did not like them to be taken, most were of the back of his head or the flat of his hand raised in protest. There were scabs on his knees, his nose broken from when he fell off his bike. They were not interested in that; did not want to see him that way.

  Tell us about the things he did, they said and I knew what they wanted me to say. One got out a notebook and balanced it on the huge bridge of his knee, held the pen in his fist.

  What did he do to the heating?

  They tilted further forward.

  He didn’t do anything to the heating.

  What about when you had meat, one said. He stood, legs splayed.

  Nothing happened when we had meat, I said.

  Maybe, the one with the notebook said, you didn’t notice when the meat was better than you first thought, more free range.

  An easy mistake, said the other.

  I would give them nothing. They got desperate. They asked if he ever saved roadkill.

  Maybe he fixed your washing machine or television when it broke.

  They didn’t break, I said.

  People came over the years, though they quickly learnt I was no good for it. Some mornings there were threats: soft, stinking packages pushed through the letter box, broken windows. They wrote things on the Internet I will not repeat. They came less and less. I was no good as a mythmaker. Never have been.

  * * *

  Yes, you can come closer if you want. Sit here, by the lamp. Are you someone who knew him? Maybe you could tell me about him. I would like to hear about the way he was when he was older, whether he was a good person.

  One day he came home from school talking about William Jeff’s father who was a pilot and had a good car.

  Who is my dad? he asked.

  It was the one thing I had managed to keep from him, the one memory I kept sufficiently locked up he could not take it.

  I moved my hands, miming anything I could think of. Distracted him with photos of astronauts and doctors.

  But his question had sent me back to that night in the cornfield. A smell or the sound of husks breaking underfoot; the soft pop of pomegranate seeds between fingers; an arm thrust forward, the skin puckered, the nub of something breaking through: a feather. Then it was gone, the memory. I loved him more then. When I did not remember his conception.

  It was too late, though I tried another story on him – a fiction, but no more one than anything else. I spent a month building the story, making it a memory. When I woke in the mornings I would lie in bed and think about it until I believed in it.

  When I was younger, I told him, I met a boy. We messed around in the back of his father’s car; took our clothes off out by the estuary where we thought no one could see. We had some plans. They were small and simple to carry out. We bought a house in the town we grew up in. He gave me that jug over there as a gift. It was often filled with flowers. The year we knew that you were growing in me, we found there was something, also, that grew in him. I remember the funeral very well.

  You don’t seem to like that story. Well, what would you have told him when he asked about his father?

  It was no good. He understood now where he’d come from. He’d taken the memory of it from me. He changed after that. At night I listened to him foraging through the house. He was taller than me. All body. He had long hands. He looked as if he were made – I always thought this – of scaffolding, rafters. He drew on all the walls and floor. Mostly it was drawings of what he could see. He drew the fridge with the door open and then closed, drew light bulbs hanging from the ceilings of rooms and growing from floors; plug sockets and extension cords. He drew them as if they were creatures in a forest. He drew them more than he ever drew me. I came only as an afterthought: a tiny, out-of-proportion figure in the corners of rooms or emerging
from piles of cables.

  The stealings carried on. Often he tried so hard not to take anything; curled at the back of the wardrobe, hands pressed over his ears.

  But soon I did not remember my name or the names of food or the sense of things. I have memories now I didn’t have for ten years. The sight of someone running, I think it is my sister, over a wet field; my father shovelling knuckles of coal into a fire. I had a boyfriend once. I only remembered that the other day.

  Towards the end I would hear him crying in the night. He couldn’t, he would say, turn bricks into skin, skin into bricks. He did bring home roadkill. Left them sitting for days at a time. As if thinking it was only patience he needed to bring them alive again. When it rained he would stand out in front of the house with his hands held up. Like this. Standing there until it stopped. I was never certain whether he thought he was the one to do that.

  I forgot ever giving birth to him; thought maybe I had found him. I forgot the way he was when he was a baby, seeming almost human. I forgot the speed with which he grew, burning through skins. I forgot the way I would sometimes wake and he’d be watching me sleep. The way, the more I forgot to eat, he fed me. He knew how to make the things I liked.

  And then, one day, there was a man in my house and I did not know who he was. I was afraid of him. You would have been afraid of him too. I got a knife from the kitchen and I think maybe, if I could, I would have killed him. He looked at me and understood he had taken everything he could and then he left.

  * * *

  I listen to the radio. I know about him working the hospitals, opening incubators and lifting out the babies too small to breathe on their own. I get all the local newspapers and each hospital is closer. Some days I check the locks on the doors three or four times. No, I do not know why he is coming back. Only that he is.

  It is getting dark out. Do you see? Perhaps you have been here longer than you meant. Maybe you should go.

  He sent postcards. In the beginning he sent one a week. In the postcards he used the language he thought he was supposed to. He spoke often about the End of Days. He stopped giving dates when the dates came and went. Near the start he stuck to some of the cults and communes. Those countryside tribes of deep believers living off what scrawny potatoes they could grow; great broods of children. His handwriting was bad and, besides, I was having to learn language anew, picking up stray words. But later, when I’d regained enough to understand, he wrote that it was nice to find someone who believed in him and I knew he was saying that I’d failed in that regard.

  I don’t think he stayed with any of them long.

  After a while he must have got far enough away that I could have all my words again. I began looking at objects and then knowing what they were, replacing the gaps with knowledge. Plant pot, fridge, door. I moved around the house; I went to the shop, picked things up and named them: tin of tomatoes, bottle of milk.

  The memories were slower to come. Some of them never came back. But that is to be expected – we all lose memories over time, no? None of us remembers everything. But some of my memories did return, and some of them he gave back to me. Wrote them on postcards: Do you remember and I’d realise that, again, I did. He gave me the things he thought were important. He left out anything he was embarrassed about. He was always, as a child, filled with huge bouts of embarrassment, shocking his face full of blood – I remembered that. But I wanted to ask him what happened when I first kissed someone, who it was and how it had gone. This was a thing he would never tell me and I would never ask.

  That’s when he started sending the photos. In each one he looks like a different person. As if no single body is strong enough to hold him. He wears his hair the way he thinks he is supposed to: long and loose. In the last photo there was a stripe of white, almost a burn, in his fringe.

  I wonder often how he would have been if his father were a man. If I am being truthful I do not think of much else. Maybe he would be here now, would have got a job working at the pub or in a shop somewhere. There would be a woman or a man he loved; he would come round and cook me beef stew and dumplings the way I like it and I would enjoy his visits. He would not think he could bring back the dead.

  I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no.

  THE SCATTERING

  A story in three parts

  After the Hunt

  WELL, IT WAS done, it was through, it was finished with. The fox sat on its haunches on the floor of the hall and looked up at her. There was a moment, less than that, when she thought she would break it between the ribs or at the neckline. The words she’d given it, his words, would come out easy, as easy as making a baby from clay, easy as swimming to the sea when you had fins rather than legs.

  The creature, rusted across the chest, put its head on one side and cracked its mouth an inch or so, panted. She waited for what it would say. A farewell or thank-you or promise of return.

  Open the door, the fox said, and though she hesitated she did: then stood and watched until it was gone.

  The Scattering

  THERE WAS A time she had more than one brother.

  He would come to her smelling of the nights he’d grown accustomed to. He would come to her smelling of everything he could get his hands on to drink. Come to her smelling of bonfires and cold sleep. Come to her lit through with a sort of sadness or bruised with unthinking rage. Come to her cut up and proud. She’d wake to the sound of him falling through her window, rising up, grinning hard.

  What have you done?

  Well, he’d angered in the pub at something mis-said or overheard, winked the culprit – it didn’t much matter who – out into the car park, fought them to bleeding on the gravel. But he didn’t ever want to talk about that. Instead he’d come to her with a story burning so hot in his mouth he couldn’t help but tell it: the house that fell in love with a girl, the girl that starved into a fish. He’d come to her drunk enough to sleep at the foot of her bed the way a cat would, her awake and listening all night to make sure he breathed on through.

  So Arch was a different creature than her though they’d come from the same place. She was threaded through with cynicism, taut with anti-belief. He grew still and nervous at the chattering of birds on trees or chimney stacks; worried himself sleepless the summer the cows in the field behind the house milked blood; believed that snakes didn’t die only began anew every time they shed their skin.

  When the three of them were children Arch almost had her persuaded that nothing was as it seemed. All of them in the long bath and his soggy face near to her ear.

  I saw something flying that shouldn’t be able to fly. I saw something with skin on the inside. I saw a dog with a personface.

  That’s bollocks, Marco said. He was on the other side of her, emptying all the shampoo and conditioner bottles into the water. He dug his hands under and upped out a great eruption of foam.

  She was younger than them and a girl. They would not fight in front of her. But later she’d find one of them with a bruise the size of their own hand though that was not where it came from. Later she’d catch Arch washing red from his clothes, the colour seeping to clear.

  It’s tomato juice, he’d tell her if he was hurt enough to fail at imagining. Or he’d say he’d caught something trying to get in the house and he’d stopped it.

  Even then, the only thing the boys shared, twelve years old and she not quite eleven, was that they never understood the fear of violence other people had.

  And everything anybody said about twins was a lie. They said twins could tell what each other were thinking across the room; could live in one pronoun happily enough and were connected with invisible, pliable bones. Well, if Arch and Marco were tied together they were trying mightily hard to break apart. And if they knew what the other was thinking it was only because they’d beaten it out of them earlier that day.

  When
tired, their mother said they should have been separated at birth, should have been fostered out to the bears or ferrets because that is where they really belonged. They could feud then, she would say, in the forest where they wouldn’t hurt anybody with their aggressions. They could forge wars with animals on each side and flint as weapons and they would not miss anybody: they would forget there ever had been anybody to miss.

  Matilda always wanted to say: but they would miss her. They would come back to visit her; bring her the animals too timid to fight their wars; bring her whatever presents the forest gave up. She wanted to tell her mother that sometimes she dreamt of Arch in the forest. There were dead rabbits and birds swinging from the cuffs of his trousers, his face slicked with war marks of black mud, his hands blue and cut from shucking the oysters which had started to grow in the canals at his bidding.

  By the time they were teenagers, her friends at school fancied one or the other of them. They were two years above her and wore their scars as if they were medals. She tried to answer her friends’ questions fairly. She told them that Marco was a steady guy: could do crosswords pretty well, knew how to cook fish and chips and not much else, played the cello because he’d heard Jacqueline du Pré on the radio and told their mother – he was ten years old but already a bit of an arsehole – that he was pretty certain he could do the end bit better. By nine he knew all the swear words there were to know and used them eloquently.

  She told them Arch could outrun a beat-up car; could stand on his head longer than anybody would believe and liked old films with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in them. She didn’t tell them that he could hunt an animal clear across the flats or hear a rabbit before it heard itself.