by Michel Faber
His clumsiness in solving the idiosyncrasy of the back-door lock was excruciating; she could sense he would love to batter it open but was afraid of failure or alerting the neighbours, or both. Instead he fumbled on, twisting the key, now gently, now roughly, grunting with frustration.
Again on impulse, she ran over to him and laid her hand over his, slipping her fingers through his, feeling for the key. He shuddered convulsively and the door sprang open.
‘Yes, yes,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You bastard.’
He heard nothing, and yet he turned, his anxious bewildered face inches away from hers, scrutinising the unfamiliar furniture.
‘Go on, go on,’ she urged him. ‘Get out.’
As if pulling himself together by a strenuous effort of will, he turned away from her and stepped out into the back yard, moving so fast that she had to run to catch up. Once again the supernatural keenness of her senses startled her: walking close behind him, she could hear not only his nervous breathing and the rustle of his clothing, but his heartbeat – distinctly in his chest, faintly in his temples. She could smell the rain-soaked grass under his shoes as he trampled it close to the soil; she could smell the unopened buds on the bushes, the scattered dandelions, the ivy on the back gate, the traces of detergent in her T-shirts and underwear fluttering on the washing line.
The thought that she would never wear those clothes again, that they would hang there until someone got permission to put them into a labelled plastic bag, made her want to weep. She glanced, one last time as she followed him, at the knickers with the faded strawberry pattern, washed so many times, yet still perfect for her, snug, warm, forgiving of the weight she was at … the weight she no longer had.
She could tell from the way her killer was dressed and from the appearance of the sky that it was chilly in the world today, but she felt nothing, not even the breeze that was fluttering her clothing on the washing line. She smelled the breeze, but didn’t feel it. Under her naked feet, as she followed her killer through the gate into the back lane, the grit and cobblestones and shards of broken glass felt no different from the carpet in her house. She wept then, for the irrelevance of clothes.
He had a small blue van waiting in the lane; he opened the door on the driver’s side and she got in immediately, sliding across to the passenger seat. She thought he would get in next to her, but he opened the hatch at the back instead, and retraced his steps to her house. Thank God for that! She hoped he would return with something valuable, to take away the sting of being killed for a pocketful of rings and brooches which the pawnshop might reject.
In the meantime, she examined the interior of the van to get to know her man a little better, and discovered to her bemused distaste that he was the sort who played scuffed and faded cassettes with titles like Heavy Metal Gold and 1993: The Big Ones. But one thing was interesting: even with the van wide open, draughty with fresh air and uncollected garbage, she could easily detect the subtler odours of a woman’s facial cleanser, toner, deodorant, blood. Not the blood of death, either, but the blood of routine fertility.
That was good, good, good: it suited her that he had a wife.
He returned, a minute later, with her television, then went back for her cassette player and her juice extractor. Evidently, that was as much as his nerves were up to. Slamming the van’s hatch shut, he swung himself into the driver’s seat with an anxious grunt and set the engine revving.
By the time they were lying in bed together late that night, she had learned a lot about him, including his name. She was whispering it now, over and over, into his ear, and every repetition added another furrow on his sweating forehead and deepened the crease between his brows. She could see in the dark, which was something his wife couldn’t do, of course. But then his wife didn’t need to see him, knowing him so well, knowing him so much better than anyone.
‘You’ve been with another woman,’ his wife said, dangerously sleepless next to him in the bed. She had her back to him, her cool hard shoulderblades only a few inches from his corpse-like, clammy body. Inside those few inches between them, she lay, fitting easily, yet exerting pressure.
‘What are you talking about?’ he coughed.
‘I can smell it on you,’ came the reply.
‘You’re off your head,’ he retorted. An invisible hand stroked his prick, teasing the blood into it.
‘I told you before,’ stated his wife frigidly. ‘One more time and it’s the end.’
‘I haven’t done nothing,’ he pleaded angrily. In his ear, a woman seemed to be whispering his name, urging him to let go and let it happen. In an agony of undischarged guilt and fear and desire, he reached out for his wife.
‘Take your filthy hands off me,’ his wife hissed. ‘Save it for her.’
And in between them, as his vital fluid pumped out silently into nowhere, she curled up in the impossible space and went to sleep.
Somewhere Warm and Comfortable
SCOTT HAD TO stand on tiptoe to reach the magazines at the top of the rack; he was a late developer, at least as far as height went. A moment before he made his move, he checked that the newsagent lady was still bending down below the counter, searching for a customer’s order: by the time she surfaced, Scott had fingertipped a magazine into free-fall, caught it, folded it in half, and shoved it down the front of his trousers. The glossy paper slid easily between the cotton of his underpants and the denim of his jeans; it was cold against his thighs. He wondered which one he’d got: it was either Busty Babes or Men Only: on tiptoe he hadn’t been able to look and grab at the same time. But he knew it was one of them, by the space that was left up there.
It wasn’t the first time he’d shoplifted, but it was the first time he’d shoplifted something other than Mars bars and football cards. This was a different league: these things were expensive. Funnily enough, he did actually have the money to pay for the magazine he was stealing, because his sister always gave him £2 out of the movie money to keep quiet about the fact that she hadn’t taken him to the movies at all. She would go off with her boyfriend to his house, and Scott would hang around the shops until late afternoon, when Christine met up with him again behind the cinema and took him home. Christine had been going to her boyfriend’s house every week for months now, so Scott had a bit of money saved up which he fantasised about spending on Lego. He couldn’t, of course: Christine’s boyfriend was a secret from Mum, so the money they saved on movies, swimming and the zoo was a secret too. He had no choice but to spend it on ice creams, Mars bars, sherbet – well, no, he didn’t buy that anymore. That was for kids.
He wished he could simply have bought the sex magazine, because that would have proved he looked eighteen, whereas he knew he looked about eleven, a couple of years younger than he really was. Everyone treated him as if he was still in primary school, as if they could keep him sweet with a ticket to The Flintstones. He resented his sister for having become a sexual being so effortlessly: it was so easy for girls – sex just fell into their lap, didn’t it? She didn’t have to steal magazines of naked girls, that’s for sure: she could be a naked girl herself, just by taking her clothes off. And she could have sex, which was more than he’d probably ever do, what with his big stick-out ears and puny body.
‘There you are!’
He froze, rigid with panic, but it wasn’t the newsagent lady collaring him, it was Christine.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said, his voice husky with nerves (or was it breaking at last?).
‘Come outside,’ she hissed at him, not angrily, but with urgency.
He obeyed, the magazine’s hard spine and sharp feathery pages chafing his thighs as he walked. There was a public toilet behind the library with a big green door that shut with a latch. Whatever Christine wanted, she had better not delay him getting there.
‘You’ve got to come with me,’ she said.
‘Come with you? What for?’ He couldn’t imagine being allowed into the house where the sex was had. Maybe s
he’d ask him to sit quietly in another room. No way!
‘I thought I could go through it alone,’ she said. ‘But I’m scared.’ Scott noticed suddenly that she was pale and had bags under her eyes.
He fell into step beside her; they were walking in the opposite direction from where her boyfriend lived. The magazine inside his trousers was starting to warm up and the way it pressed against the bulb-like genitals in his tight Thunderbirds briefs felt very good. He hoped the girls in the magazine wouldn’t have anything obscuring the view between their legs, the way the naked girls in the Sunday Sport always did.
He looked up at his sister again as they walked, and this time he noticed that she didn’t have as much make-up on as usual and that she wasn’t wearing one of her ‘cleavage’ tops but a loose white jumper.
‘Where are we going?’
‘We’re there.’
They had arrived at an ugly single-storey house with a large car-park and a plaque on the door. Inside, there was a sort of a waiting room and a sort of a secretary who told Christine to take a seat. There was no one else waiting.
‘What are we doing here?’ whispered Scott to his sister, who had gone the same colour as the telephones.
‘I’m going to have an operation,’ she told him. ‘Just a little one.’
‘An operation?’ Scott leaned forward in disbelief, the magazine digging into his flesh. ‘Why isn’t Mum here?’
‘Mum mustn’t know about this. She’d worry herself to death. You know – because of Aunt Marian and Aunt Annie and Uncle Frank and Grandma and Grandpa.’
Scott swallowed hard. These were all people who had died of cancer, some of them at a young age. Mum was always anxious about her own health, countering Christine’s pleas for greater freedom with her own plea that she needed a bit of looking after, that she might have a time bomb inside of her, waiting to go off.
‘Is it cancer?’ whispered Scott.
‘Not exactly,’ said Christine, looking down at the hands clasped in her lap. ‘It’s a kind of … growth. The doctor says he can take it out and it’ll never come back. But you know Mum would never believe that.’
They both sat back, a skin of anxiety forming over their conversation, holding the words under. The waiting room wasn’t like any doctor’s waiting room Scott had ever been in before; it had a patterned carpet and the receptionist had dark-red nails. She made a telephone call to someone who seemed to be a friend of hers; she talked in a sort of code and said ‘Jesus’ and worse things, albeit under her breath. Christine kept looking at him strangely, as if she wanted him to do something, but then every few seconds she would hug herself and sniff the way she always did when she was irritated by him. Scott picked up one of the magazines lying on an empty seat. It was one of those women’s magazines about face lotions and lipsticks and bonking. He flipped through it, looking for pubic hair, but it was all hidden behind beach towels and bath sponges and big fancy lettering. There were some nipples, even a couple that were sticking out like crazy, but he couldn’t get too excited about them. He was too old for that maybe: he was ready now for what he had inside his trousers. Besides, if the receptionist caught him trying to tear a page out of one of her magazines he would die of embarrassment.
After a few more minutes, Christine was called by a deep male voice behind a door. The look on her face as she was standing up to go was just horrible, like in horror movies when people smile and say they’re fine but really they’ve got an alien creature hiding inside of them.
‘You’ll wait for me, won’t you,’ she said.
Of course he waited.
She was gone for about half an hour. The waiting room was deathly still, the receptionist having run out of friends to call. Scott read all the women’s magazines; well, bits. Kim Basinger, no bimbo anymore, faces her thirties with newfound maturity and still turns heads. Aramis ignites the flame of passion. Rod Stewart says he has dipped his banana in the fruit bowl for the last time. Camille Paglia scoffs that most men don’t even know what the word ‘cunnilingus’ means. Scott made a mental note: he would have to look that one up when he got home.
Finally Christine came out of the doctor’s room. She looked the same as before, fully dressed, no white surgical gown or anything, no bandages that Scott could see. The only thing was, she was taking very careful little steps, as if walking on eggs.
‘Let’s go,’ she said hoarsely.
Out on the street, she walked beside him for a few minutes and then had to stop and lean against a brick wall.
‘I can’t go home yet,’ she gasped. ‘We have to go somewhere else first. Somewhere I can lie down.’
‘Why don’t you go to your boyfriend’s place?’ suggested Scott.
‘We can’t go there.’
‘Why not?’
‘We just can’t, that’s all.’ And she started to cry.
Scott was moved and frightened by his sister’s distress, which was different from the tantrums he was used to at home when Mum and Christine fought about what she was and wasn’t allowed to do. He was struck, too, by the way she kept saying ‘we’ – she never said that to him usually. He was always the accessory, the excuse, the tool with which she could propel herself far away, into someone else’s company. He hadn’t submitted without a fight; he had refused to get dumped at the zoo or a movie theatre, he’d refused to tell her which shops he’d be in while she was off doing ‘whatever you do’; he’d demanded two pounds instead of one. But she looked fragile and small now, lost in her big white jumper as she slumped against the wall. He cleared his throat, trying to meet her half-way with the suggestion:
‘How about we go to the movies?’
She laughed and a spray of clear, innocent snot came out of her pale nose. She wiped it on her sleeve and shook her head.
‘I can’t sit down on a hard seat,’ she said wearily. ‘I need to lie down.’
‘How about the picnic area in the zoo?’
‘Somewhere warm and comfortable, you idiot.’
She took him to the Art Gallery, where neither of them had ever been before. Richie Fuller’s mum worked there as a cloakroom attendant.
‘Put your parka in the cloakroom,’ Christine instructed him, but he refused. The magazine in his trousers was rather bent by now, suppled up by the warmth and movement, and he was afraid that if he took his parka off people would see it poking through his football shirt. Christine looked at him imploringly, but he couldn’t help her on this one, and she could see it in his face. Instead, she went up to Mrs Fuller and said hello to her, making forty-five seconds of cheery conversation. But when Christine rejoined Scott, she was as white as the marble statues guarding the entrance to The Nineteenth Century.
‘Take me by the hand,’ she whispered anxiously. ‘Everything’s going black …’
Scott hesitated, terrified. He wasn’t big or strong enough to catch his sister if she fell, didn’t want to have an unconscious girl sprawled at his feet with people swarming around asking questions.
‘Take me somewhere, Scott, for fuck’s sake!’
He grabbed her hand, which was cool and damp, and led her into The Nineteenth Century, where there was an upholstered bench in the middle of the room. He sat down on one edge, guiding Christine as she collapsed onto the rest of it; she grabbed him round the waist with a groan. Once horizontal she immediately seemed to relax, adjusting her position with infantile abandon, treating his thighs as a pillow. Within moments she was asleep.
Scott sat as still as he could, so as not to disturb her. Her head in his lap felt strange: he couldn’t see her face, though he felt her damp breath permeating his jeans through to his thighs, couldn’t feel her head except as an indistinct pressure on the magazine, whose buckled spine and sweaty pages were cutting into his groin. He wondered if Christine was in a coma, or if she would vomit, like Auntie Marian always used to after an operation, except into his lap.
‘Chris?’ he ventured, shaking her gently.
‘Leave me alone,’
she slurred. ‘Stay with me.’
For almost three hours Scott sat there, trying to shift his weight subtly from one buttock to the other so that only half of his bum went to sleep at a time. At one point, even his genitals went to sleep, torturing him when the feeling came back. Christine slept through his muffled complaints and his changes of position, but when he tried to lift her off him altogether, she whimpered and clutched. And so, he stayed. Impossibly bored at first, he soon passed into a state beyond boredom, in which he stared in a meditative trance at the four paintings he could see from his seat.
The one straight in front of him was of a naked woman combing her hair at the side of a pool, with three old men peeking at her over the top of some shrubs. They had long beards and robes, and their faces looked as if they’d just seen a laser bomb go off nearby. The woman had a ghost-like, silvery veil between her legs, and glistening hair obscuring one breast. She was beautiful. Her eyes were as green and luminous as Ghostbusters ectoplasm. Her one naked breast was as real as his own desire. He would remember this picture until he died.
Closing time came, and a gallery guide asked Scott and Christine to leave. Fortunately, Christine woke up at the sound of the stranger’s voice, seemingly in better shape after her rest, and together they left the building, Scott limping more than his sister by this time. It was six o’clock, already two hours later than Mum expected them home, and they still had to get there, of course.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Scott as they stood at the bus stop.
‘I’ll survive,’ said his sister. The sun was setting and the wind turning chilly. She hugged herself, rubbed her palms against the white fluff of her jumper. Scott simply zipped up his parka. Lower down, the cold breeze was heavenly against his chafed and overheated groin. He longed to go home and get undressed, into pyjamas, into bed. Unknown to him, so did his sister.
‘Hey, Scott?’ She was crying again, reaching for his hand again. ‘Thanks, kid.’
‘No problem … old woman,’ he retorted, stung and sentimental.