Liminal

by Bee Lewis

  As she handled the wood, she remembered the carving. She’d hidden it underneath one of the seat cushions on the sofa, not wanting to share it with Dan just yet. Lifting the cushion, she felt around until her fingers closed over it, happy to make contact with it again. She sank back into the seat and turned the disc over in her hands. There were no marks on it that she could use to identify how old it was or where it came from. Her fingers traced the outline of the hares and she noticed that they were carved as an optical illusion. Each hare had two ears, but one ear also formed half of the next pair.

  She sat, stroking the carving, deep in thought. As she relaxed, the walls and floor of the sitting room seemed to flex and curve, moving around her as she half slept, taking her back to a time she’d tried to forget, but which was imprinted on her subconscious.

  The overhead strip light hummed. Esther focused all her attention on it to distract herself from her nagging bladder. Outside the room, she could hear shoes squeaking on linoleum and curtains swishing on metal rails. Somewhere down the corridor, a phone rang and rang. Still Esther looked at the ceiling. There were 108 ceiling tiles, arranged in twelve rows of nine. She began to count them again. Something about this room wasn’t right. She’d been here before, but last time the door was on the left. And hadn’t the bed been on the other wall?

  After what felt like hours, but could only have been minutes, the sonographer came back, bringing with her the corridor smell of overcooked food and disinfectant. Her smile reached her quick, hazel eyes, bright with just the right balance of efficiency and kindness. Esther looked at the sonographer’s name badge. Belinda Button. The kind of name a sonographer should have. The kind of name that made wishes come true.

  Belinda Button asked Esther to lift her top and push her trousers down, past her hips. Then she smeared the icy jelly over Esther’s stomach. Her skin contracted in protest. Esther scanned the monitor next to her bed. She could hear a pulsing, whooshing sound as Belinda pressed the transducer into her abdomen. Dan held her hand and smiled down at her.

  Belinda peered closer at the monitor and said, in a rounded Bristolian accent, ‘Hmm. One second, my love, I’m just going to see can I move things round a bit.’ She turned the monitor away from Esther and Dan and moved the transducer around, pressing harder than was comfortable.

  ‘What’s wrong? There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ Dan’s voice, piano-wire tight, sliced across the room. Belinda Button didn’t answer.

  ‘Tell us what’s wrong!’ he demanded.

  Esther stayed quiet; in her own way she’d known that this would happen. Her body began to dissolve as she sank further into the thin foam of the bed.

  Belinda, fiddling with a setting on the monitor, clapped her hands. ‘Ah, there we go.’ She turned the monitor back around to face the bed.

  ‘Well now, Esther. That’s just grand. The heartbeat’s very strong. Will you have a look at this lovely picture? Can you see your baby?’

  Esther and Dan looked at Martian static on the screen. ‘I think so,’ Esther replied, not certain what she was seeing.

  ‘Here, look. This is the body.’ She pointed to the screen. ‘And this is the head.’

  Esther relaxed and Dan bent down to kiss her forehead. This time it was all going to be just fine.

  ‘And you can just make out the tail here, see?’

  ‘The . . . the tail?’ Esther’s eyes widened in horror and her mouth followed suit.

  ‘Why, yes dear. And look, you can just make out the others behind him.’ The sonographer pointed to six dark dots on the screen. ‘I count seven little leverets in total, though there could be more hiding. They’re tricksy little blighters at this stage.’

  Dan let go of her hand. Esther fell through the bed, through the floor and onto the sofa in the cottage.

  Dan slammed the front door, the sudden noise jolting Esther from her sleep. It took her a few seconds to gather her thoughts and she looked around her, puzzled. The antiseptic hospital smell hung in the air and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more than just a dream. The carving had fallen out of her hand and onto the floor, and Esther quickly scooted it under the sofa, out of Dan’s vision.

  ‘Un-fucking-believable.’ He threw his keys onto the kitchen table, pacing between the kitchen and sitting room, paying no attention to Esther, who sat watching him, not daring to speak.

  ‘The fucking car has a fucking puncture and no fucking spare.’ His features twisted into a Francis Bacon image. ‘I got about three quarters of a mile up the main road and had to pull over. I’ve had to walk all the way back. And the fucking fog is as bad as before. There’s no way out of here.’

  Esther stayed quiet. She’d witnessed too many heated rows when she was a little girl to try to intervene now. She made herself as small as possible and burrowed into the corner of the sofa, hoping her stillness would shield her from his temper.

  ‘For fuck’s sake! Still no fucking signal and still we have this . . .’ He waved his hand in the general direction of the fog.

  Her stomach lurched. The fog seemed to be rolling towards them, pushing in at the window. She imagined the glass shattering, covering them in deadly diamond shards. She closed her eyes in silent prayer. Please let his mood lift. Please.

  ‘I’m sick to death of this weather and not being able to get hold of anyone. FUCK!’ He thumped both hands on the wall, then turned and started pacing in the other direction around the room.

  She glanced at her watch. He’d been gone more than three hours.

  ‘Wait. What did you say happened?’ His story didn’t add up.

  ‘I said.’ He paused, before emphasising every word. ‘The car has a puncture and no spare. I had to leave it a mile up the road and walk back. Why?’

  ‘Because you’ve been over three hours, that’s why. Three hours! Where have you been?’ Even as she spoke, she knew she’d lost any chance of keeping him onside. He hated being challenged and she’d just backed him into a corner.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are talking to? Since when did I have to answer to you? His face was contorted with anger and as he spoke, little flecks of spit landed on her cheek.

  She felt a column of acrimony rising through her body to her mouth where it spilled out of her.

  ‘Since you decided to be so fucking economical with the truth. Since YOU decided not to tell me you’d lost your job and pretended to go to work anyway. Since the day I couldn’t get hold of you to tell you I was losing OUR child and had to face the shame and confusion of calling your office to be told you lost your job two months earlier. That’s when.’

  There was a small part of her that knew she’d gone too far, but it felt good to say the words that she’d held onto for so long, to let them loose, to hear how they sounded and to see the impact as each one struck home.

  ‘Jesus, Esther. You’re a sanctimonious bitch sometimes.’

  ‘And you’re a fucking automaton.’

  They stood facing each other, each surveying their wounds. The intensity of their savagery shocking them both into silence. For a moment, it seemed like it could go either way with their relationship shattering into a million shards. Esther shifted her weight to spread it more evenly and in the process, took a small step towards him. The atmosphere shifted and they both spoke at the same time.

  ‘Dan, we can’t carry on like this.’

  ‘Essie. We have to stop this.’

  He reached out and cupped her cheek with his hand, wincing as she flinched from his touch.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. You have every right to be angry, every right to want to know where I am. I know I took your trust for granted, but I will win it back.’

  Esther, wary, allowed herself to relax a little. He seemed genuinely contrite and she decided that it was time she was honest with him. There were too many unspoken thoughts between them, stopping any re
al progress.

  ‘I felt so let down. I don’t care about you losing your job – not in the way you think I do. But it pulls me up short sometimes – that something so big happened and you didn’t turn to me. It made me feel . . . redundant.’

  She watched him recoil as the word fizzled and died, wanting to wound him just one more time.

  He hung his head, avoiding her eye. ‘I’ll never make you feel that way again. All of this,’ he gestured, ‘all of this is for us. Me, you, the baby.’ He reached out to pull her close to him.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ she said, his shoulder half-muffling her words. ‘So many strange things have happened since we’ve been here. I feel jittery and on edge. Haven’t you noticed anything weird about this place?’

  ‘Just that it’s all new for us and this odd weather is making it that much harder to adjust. By now we should have explored the area a bit, been on walks, got to know the place a bit better. We’ve got cabin fever, that’s all.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Let’s be a bit kinder to each other. You are so important to me and I want our child to be happy and secure, with two parents who love him.’

  ‘Or her.’

  ‘Or her.’ Dan smiled and kissed the top of her head. ‘I know it could be a girl or a boy and I’d be just as pleased with either, but I can’t help thinking it’s a boy.’

  And I’m equally sure she’s a girl. ‘You’re right. This should be a happy time for us. We’ve got so much to look forward to – maybe more than we ever did in Bristol.’

  ‘Come on, to prove how much of a new man I am, I’ll make dinner tonight.’

  Despite herself, she laughed at him. It felt good to be in his arms, talking about the future and he was trying, she had to credit him for that. Even so, she was half-conscious of the jagged thought burrowing into her mind.

  He didn’t actually tell me what had taken so long, or where he’d been.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier.’

  Dan stopped stirring the gravy and turned towards Esther. ‘What?’

  ‘You know, about being kinder to each other and making sure our child is happy and secure.’ She paused, uncertain how to continue. She didn’t want to risk a repeat of their earlier row, but wanted to capitalise on Dan’s apparent willingness to talk.

  He turned the gas off and waited for her to speak again, pulling out the pocket-sized bottle of hand gel from his jeans and squirting some onto his hands.

  ‘I know we don’t talk about it much, but we never had that, did we? We never had the security we want to give to our child. Neither of us can really remember what it was like to have two parents.’ She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, the chair legs shrieking across the stone floor. ‘It’s one of the things we had in common at the beginning.’

  Dan finished cleaning his hands and pulled up a chair opposite her, careful to lift the legs so they didn’t scrape across the floor. ‘Yeah, I guess. I have very specific memories from childhood, like getting a pair of roller skates when I wanted a bike. Or the time I cut my foot in the sea on a shell. I know mum was there and she must have tended to the cut, but she’s more like a shadow at the edge of my vision.’

  Esther nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I would be hard pushed to remember a conversation with her and sometimes I struggle to recall what she looked like. But it’s her perfume I remember most vividly – Shalimar – and the softness of her cheek against mine.’

  ‘Perfume?’ A note of disbelief crept into her voice. Knowing how Eric was, perfume seemed rather worldly, especially such a heavy-hitting fragrance. She surprised herself at how easy it was to slip into Eric’s closed-minded ways.

  Dan didn’t seem to have noticed her tone, or at least, hadn’t noticed the implied criticism.

  ‘Yes. She always wore a dab of it behind her ears and on her wrists. No matter where she was going or what she was doing. So Dad says, anyway.’

  ‘Do you think he misses her?’

  ‘Oh, Es. He does. I know it. Every night before bed, he says a prayer then kisses their wedding photograph. He thinks no-one else knows, but I’ve seen him. She meant the world to him, the way you do to me.’

  She reached out across the table, placing her hand over Dan’s. ‘I didn’t know that about him.’

  ‘I get it, Essie. You look at him and see a resentful, angry man. But to me, he’s just someone who has forgotten how to be at peace.’

  Esther looked at her husband and saw him more clearly than she had for months. It was as though they’d been separated for a long time and now he was coming back to her. His eyes had softened to the colour of mountain slate and all the tension, so evident in recent months, had left his body.

  ‘But you’re right. Neither of us had the kind of upbringing we want for our own child. You might not have had your dad, but you at least had your mum.’

  She gave a low whistle. ‘Yes, that’s true, but it still wasn’t easy. She did the best she could for me – but she didn’t leave him, even when she had chance to.’

  ‘Do you blame Anthea for the accident?’

  ‘No! Is that how it sounded? No. Dad was to blame. He was drinking, he was out of control. He should never have been behind the wheel.’ And I should never have been in the car with him.

  ‘Logically though, if Anthea had left him, the accident wouldn’t have happened. Therefore, she must shoulder some responsibility?’

  Esther started fidgeting. The kitchen felt very warm and she pulled the collar of her jumper away from her neck. This wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go. She could feel the man she wanted slipping away from her again.

  ‘What could she have done? She had a small child and nowhere to go.’

  ‘But she lied to you.’

  ‘She lied about Dad, yes. I might have done the same in her shoes. I was eight years old and horribly maimed. I nearly died. I can’t imagine how she must have felt seeing me go through all that pain. She didn’t want me to know he was in prison for what he’d done to me, or that woman and her children, so in her mind telling me he’d left was kinder. She didn’t want me to feel any guilt about what had happened to Dad.’

  The steel returned to Dan’s eyes. ‘But she still lied.’

  Esther bridled at his insistence, knowing he was testing her somehow. ‘What’s your point, Dan?’

  ‘Just that sometimes we lie to protect the ones we love.’ He moved his hand from under hers and reached for the hand gel.

  The kitchen table had become Esther’s makeshift work space. Dan had commandeered the desk in the sitting room and although he never said anything, she knew him well enough to understand he liked to keep his desk neat and tidy and she would be an unwelcome intrusion. The sheaf of papers on the table could probably wait, but she needed something to fill her time; the endless fog sapped her energy and purpose. Pulling the paperwork towards her, she shuffled through the various documents, sorting them into three piles as she went: legal, business, personal. The legal pile mostly comprised of letters backwards and forwards from their solicitor about the sale of the apartment and the purchase of Rosgill. There wasn’t much for her to do, so she set about putting them in date order, ready for filing. Dan would approve.

  The sound of hammering from the living room made her jump. Not realising Dan had come back into the cottage, she followed the sound and saw him hanging a rectangular mirror on the wall next to the window.

  ‘Is it level?’

  Esther stood back, squinting. ‘Er . . . yeah. I think so. Where’d you find it?’

  ‘It was propped up against the wall in the store room. D’you like it?’

  It was hideous. She didn’t know what to say. The dark, heavily carved frame looked clumsy and fussy compared to the other furniture in the room. Panels of carved leaves ran along each edge of the frame, linked at t
he corners by a trefoil design. It looked vaguely religious, like it would be more at home in a gothic pile than in her sitting room. There was no way he’d have allowed such an ugly object in their previous home.

  ‘Maybe we can paint the frame? It’s a bit chunky.’

  ‘I like it. Look at the craftsmanship in that carving. And it looks good there.’ He stood back and surveyed the wall. He tutted but avoided looking at her as he stepped forward again, making tiny adjustments to the mirror’s position, running his fingers over the carved leaves. ‘There. That’s better.’

  ‘It’s such a departure from your usual style, Dan. I never thought you’d go for the country cottage look. What’s next, horse brasses?’

  ‘It’s a mirror. You’re over-thinking it.’

  Her eyes widened a fraction – the type of micro-expression that a poker player would pounce on, but he continued.

  ‘We’re in a different place now. Besides, it’s just a mirror.’ His voice softened. ‘Come here.’

  She stood next to him and looked into the mirror at the two people gazing back. Dan, taller than her and rangy with it. He had the body of a distance runner, angular and without padding. He’d started to wear his hair differently, running gel through it so that it was messier, spikier, and the stubble on his chin seemed more groomed, curated. She wondered if others could see past his spiky outer casing, whether they thought it was worth getting to the seed inside. As much as she loved him, she had her doubts. He wasn’t easy to live with and made it hard for people to get to know him. She couldn’t remember him ever having a close friend before; she’d been that for him. But now there was Mike. How had he managed to win Dan’s trust so easily?

  Dan put his arm around her shoulders, still staring at his own reflection in the mirror, seemingly unwilling to meet her eye.

  ‘What do you see in the mirror, Dan?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘When you look at our reflection, what do you see?’

  ‘I see the two of us, here in our new home, ready to face our new life together.’ He smiled and kissed the top of her head, like he was pleased he’d given her the right answer.