by Joe Heap
‘Sure.’ She sits back down.
Tony takes the smaller of the knives and picks up the rabbit by its back legs. She closes her eyes for a second and forces herself to talk.
‘Good day at work?’
‘Just the usual. Not too busy.’
She looks again as Tony brings the knife to the rabbit’s ankle, slicing around it with a shallow cut. Her breath catches, and for a second Tony stops.
‘You okay, love?’ The words are friendly but there is no warmth there. For this moment, Kate is sure he is doing it on purpose. She won’t give him the satisfaction.
‘Fine – I just have a headache.’
‘You should take something.’
‘Mm.’
She rises from the table and goes to the cupboard where they keep medicines and boxes of tea. She takes her time finding tablets, pours herself a glass of water. All the time she can hear Tony making further cuts. She swallows the tablets, looking out of the tiny kitchen window. She will make her excuses now, go for a bath …
‘Actually, you could help me with this bit.’
She turns slowly to see Tony holding the rabbit by its hind legs. She expected there to be a lot of blood, but his hands are almost clean.
‘I just need you to hold its feet while I get the skin off.’
There is a dull weight in Kate’s stomach as she steps towards the table. She feels sick. She struggles to keep her face straight as she leans forward and takes hold of the feet.
‘What’s up? Not squeamish, are you?’
‘No, of course not.’ She takes the feet from him, feeling the claws like chips of stone. ‘It’s only a headache.’
‘Just hold tight,’ Tony says, then starts to pull on the skin.
Kate tries to look somewhere else, anywhere else, but it is in her peripheral vision, and once she’s seen it, it’s no good closing her eyes. She can feel the vibration as skin peels from flesh. It sizzles – a sound like meat in the frying pan. She can see pink muscles and the thinnest layer of nicotine-yellow fat.
‘I think I’m going to have a shower.’
Kate drops the half-skinned rabbit and walks calmly from the kitchen to the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind her. She bends over the toilet but is not sick. She sits on the tiles, shivering. Her breaths quiver in and out of her. Is this a panic attack? She expects Tony will knock on the door, to ask if she’s okay, but he doesn’t.
She needs a distraction, and grabs the toothpaste tube from the sink. She reads the ingredients – hydrated silica, sorbitol, PVM/MA copolymer – as though the words are a spell to stop her thinking. Slowly, her breaths grow longer, and she wipes a slick of cold sweat from her brow. The trick half works, and after another minute she feels well enough to stand.
From the kitchen, she can hear Tony cooking – cutting and frying the meat in oil, and she realizes that she still has to eat the meal. A fresh wave of nausea rises up her throat. She turns the shower on and undresses quickly, desperate to feel something other than the eerie prickle on her skin. She steps into the bathtub and turns up the heat. The water is so hot she has to move around constantly, bringing tears to her eyes. Her skin turns red. She gets used to the heat but the tears keep flowing.
Kate stays there for a long time, until the heat exhausts her. She gets out of the shower, puts on her bathrobe and quietly takes her phone to the bedroom. The flat smells of rabbit stew, and Kate knows she should find it delicious, but it just smells of iron. Of blood. Kate has never considered becoming vegetarian. She has always liked meat. But eating meat never seemed so … cannibalistic.
On her phone, she opens the message chain with Nova and reads through the conversations. The old words calm her immediately, like a morphine shot. Kate takes several deep breaths – hesitates – and starts to type.
Fourteen
February
‘HAVE YOU BEEN GETTING out much? Practising?’
Alex’s flat is very clean and very modern. Nova has always found it a little uncomfortable – all the armchairs and sofas are too firm, with low backs so she can’t slouch. Now, being able to see it and compare it to her own cluttered home, it’s like looking at a completely different ecosystem. It’s like her flat is a lush, overgrown forest, and Alex’s is an arid, beige desert.
What makes up for any discomfort is her brother’s ability to make mint tea. Nova waits patiently, answering his questions, while the infusion of mint leaves, tea and sugar steeps in the pot.
‘Practising?’
‘Practising your seeing.’
‘Yeah, sure. Loads.’
More and more, Nova’s Rules of Seeing are less like a guide to learning a new skill, and more like an instruction manual for operating a broken brain.
RULE OF SEEING NO.183
Sometimes moving objects will appear to ‘stutter’. The smooth flow of coffee poured into a mug will be broken into strobing snapshots, and before you know it there is coffee all over the table.
RULE OF SEEING NO.184
The brain will hang onto objects after you have stopped looking. Stare too long at the duck pond and the pavement will look wavy. Stare too long at the pavement and the duckpond will look gritty.
‘But have you been getting out? Or have you just been holed up in your flat?’
‘As a matter of fact, I went to the zoo the other day,’ Nova lies. It’s a couple of months since she and Kate went to the zoo, but she wants to talk about Kate without making it seem like a big thing.
‘The zoo? London Zoo?’
‘I saw fish, and penguins, and an orange snake, and a kangaroo …’ Nova reels off the animals that she had seen clearly, though many more had briefly appeared in front of her, as though passing through a break in the foliage. The memory makes her smile. Alex gives the teapot one last swill, places a metal strainer over one of the teacups, and pours.
‘I’m impressed. You got around all right on your own?’
‘I didn’t go on my own.’
‘A friend?’
‘Someone I met.’
‘What, a date?’
‘No … a girl I met at the hospital.’
Alex laughs.
‘A doctor? I’ve got to tell you, Jilly, we don’t make the best husbands. Or wives, rather.’
Nova sighs melodramatically. ‘Not a doctor, dumdum. A patient.’
‘A patient? In the neurology ward? What was she there for?’
‘What business is it of yours? She’s a perfectly nice girl. An architect.’
At ‘architect’, Alex makes a noise of approval, to which Nova makes a corresponding grunt of irritation. ‘Still, it’s a funny place to find a friend. I hope she’s not crazy.’
Nova punches him on the arm.
‘Ow! I could have been pouring!’
‘I could see you weren’t. Anyway, I was there as well – are you saying I’m crazy?’
‘No comment.’ Alex rubs the spot where she caught him. ‘I just think it’s not the best place to be looking for love.’
‘Ugh! Who said anything about love? Just give me the tea.’
Nova sips from the cup, a shiver of warmth passing up her spine. She’s annoyed with Alex, but mostly because she has her own concerns. Kate had messaged her the other night, asking if she wanted to meet up. For the first time, she hadn’t replied straight away.
Kate is kind and gentle and funny. But since her strange turn in front of the tiger enclosure, and the awkward dinner party, Nova wonders if she’s getting too deeply into someone else’s problems, when she has enough problems of her own.
‘Does this girl have a name?’
‘Kate. She’s Italian. Well, her parents are.’
Alex sits back a little more, though not to the point of seeming comfortable, and sips his tea. Their mum used to make them this tea, once a day, when they got back from school.
‘And you met her in the neurology ward?’ he repeats.
‘Ugh, like I said: what difference does it make where I met
her?’
Alex holds up his hands to placate her. He is slowly getting used to signalling feelings to his sister with his hands or face. He is starting to understand what she can see and what she can understand. Paradoxically, Nova has always talked with her hands, but the gestures were all her own. She seemed to be feeling the shape of the idea in front of her, rather than trying to communicate anything.
‘I’m just saying, be careful.’
When Kate gets home from work, there is music on in the kitchen and the sound of the kettle boiling. The radio is on some crappy station, but Kate doesn’t care, because the relief of coming back to this warm, noisy bubble is physical – she feels a tingling rush sweep over her as though she’s just stepped into a hot bath.
She can hear Tony making something in the kitchen, opening cupboards and chopping, and even this makes her smile. She takes her time getting out of her boots and coat, happy to delay the moment. Running her hands over her eyes, she walks through to the kitchen.
Tony is standing with his back to her, rinsing vegetables in the sink. Kate opens her mouth to say hello, but the word never comes out. She catches sight of it in her peripheral vision, on the table. Later, she will think how, if she had been Nova, she would never have spotted it. Such a small shape in a room full of so many other shapes. But she does see it, and the shape stops her dead – a green rectangle.
Her birth control pills.
She stands, rooted, looking at the out-of-place shape, as all the warmth drains out of her.
He turns. The radio is playing a dance track that keeps repeating the words LOVE and NOW and UNIQUE in revolving combinations, with a robotic, echo-saturated voice.
‘Well?’ He dries his hands on a tea towel and waits for her to talk. She searches for the right answer, like the first move in a game.
‘Where—’
‘No,’ he cuts her off before she can finish the question. ‘You don’t get to ask where I found these. You don’t get to ask me questions, because I’ve done nothing wrong.’
The final word is a snarl, and Tony takes a step towards her. The words have dried up in her throat.
‘Well?’ he asks again, and Kate thinks this is what he must be like at work, interrogating suspects. But there are no recordings here, or one-way mirrors where people might be looking into their cell. She is all alone. She tries again
‘Those are old—’
As she says the word, Tony steps forward again, brings his arm back and slaps her, hard, on the cheek. Her neck snaps to one side and she gasps.
Kate isn’t aware of anything for a moment except the pain and the tears that are breaking her vision into pieces. Then Tony speaks into her ear, close enough to feel his breath.
‘Don’t ever lie to me.’
And he is gone, out of the kitchen and out of the flat.
Kate is shaking. It’s not from the pain – she’s had worse. She stepped on a nail on a building site once that went right through her foot. She’s had two electric shocks. No, it’s that Tony hit her.
He hadn’t been drinking. It hadn’t been a heat-of-the-moment thing. He had waited for her to come home. He had waited patiently to strike her.
But here she is, and she doesn’t feel like she’s about to leave. She sits there for a long time, feeling the tingle in her cheek. Then she gets up, takes the card of pills and pops them out into the sink, one by one, turns the warm tap on and watches them dissolve.
Fifteen
March
‘WHAT IS IT?’ NOVA turns the lump of metal and plastic over in her hands. Looking at the object hasn’t helped her identify it, but neither has holding it. Kate guesses that nobody has handed her one before. They are standing in Trafalgar Square, and Nova is wearing a giant, fuzzy brown jacket, like one half of a bear costume. Kate has no idea where it came from, but wants to hug and be hugged by Nova in her ridiculous jacket.
‘It’s a camera. Look, this switches it on …’ Kate guides her, positioning Nova’s fingers. ‘And this button takes a picture.’ The shutter clicks, and a picture of one of the fountains flashes up on the small screen.
‘Kate, this is very kind, but I can’t—’
‘Oh! I’m so sorry, I thought you’d be able to use it.’
‘No, I mean, I can’t accept this. It’s too generous.’
‘Don’t be silly – I owe you for saving me at the zoo. Think of it as a late Christmas present.’
‘You don’t owe me anything.’ Nova pauses, then asks, ‘Are you okay? You’ve changed colour.’
Kate doesn’t know what she means for a moment, then realizes she must be blushing. She ignores her, trying to hide her nerves. She didn’t tell Tony about buying the camera. She bought it with her own money, of course. And it’s just a gift – a gift from one friend to another.
‘I was thinking about how you said it was frustrating, because nothing holds still, so you can’t figure out what it is. But if you can take a picture’ – Kate presses the button again to hear the click – ‘you can take all the time you need to work it out.’
Nova smiles reluctantly, looking at her face. Kate stays still, trying to be a photo. She stares into Nova’s eyes, dazzling blue in the sunlight. Finally, Nova looks down.
‘Does this have a strap? Help me put it on.’
Kate takes the camera from her, bending down to hang it around her neck. As she does, Nova leans forward and kisses her.
It’s over in a moment, and then Nova is pulling Kate through the square, and Kate hopes that she can’t feel the pulse that is racing in her hand.
RULE OF SEEING NO.189
When you go walking, remember that your vision will bob up and down like a boat on the ocean. This is normal.
Kate guides Nova towards the National Gallery, through the crowds, dodging tourists and scattering pigeons. Every so often, Nova pauses to take a picture. Then she carefully turns the camera off and takes Kate’s arm again. Kate likes being her guide, though she never knows how much Nova really needs her. She’s begun to feel like it’s the other way around – like she can only face the world when Nova is there.
They reach the gallery and Kate feels more sheltered. It’s quiet in here, and when they’re past the entrance hall there are only a few people in each room. Nova can’t use her camera, but it doesn’t matter – she can just stand and stare at the gigantic canvasses, trying to take in every detail. They move slowly over the Parquet floors, polished smooth like slabs of toffee. They stop in front of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, looking up at the running, tumbling figures. Nova has gone very quiet.
‘What are you seeing?’ Kate asks, looking up at Bacchus in mid-leap.
‘People …’ she replies, sounding uncertain.
‘Yes.’
‘But weird people.’
Kate looks again at the picture. She doesn’t know anything about it, or the myth it represents. It doesn’t look like a happy story – there’s a man with snakes writhing around his naked body, a decapitated deer’s head on the floor. The chariot is being drawn by two cheetahs. The more she looks, the more uncomfortable she feels.
‘What’s it called?’ Nova asks, and Kate tells her. ‘Oh, so that’s Bacchus’ – Nova points to the figure leaping from the chariot – ‘and that’s Ariadne. He’s seeing her for the first time – love at first sight.’
‘How do you know that?’
Nova shrugs. ‘I like stories. This one’s in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hang on …’ Nova screws up her eyes, something she often does when trying to concentrate. ‘So that she might shine among the eternal stars, he took the crown from her forehead, and set it in the sky …’
Kate doesn’t know what to say. She’s feeling something she doesn’t understand. Nova senses that she’s wanting to move away from the picture, and follows after.
Nova likes Van Gogh’s sunflowers. ‘It’s so … yellow,’ she whispers, then makes a little humph, knowing that she hasn’t expressed what she means.
‘I know what you mean
,’ Kate says.
They move on. They wander through religious iconography, pictures of people ascending into Heaven or descending into Hell. Nova can’t quite fathom these pictures, the people hovering in space, the wings and tails that sprout from otherwise human figures.
In person, Kate can’t deny what she feels for the interpreter. Nova isn’t an abstract idea, or an answer to a question. Kate is not interested in her because she represents freedom, or another way of living. She doesn’t ‘see herself’ in the younger woman.
She’s interested in Nova because she has a crush. A massive, schoolgirl crush on this strange, sexy person.
And she hasn’t felt this way for so long. Which wouldn’t matter if she didn’t feel, suddenly, like she’s been faking it for the longest time.
‘What’re you thinking about, runner bean?’
Nova crashes her inner dialogue, nudging Kate in the ribs. She has unzipped her fuzzy jacket, and today’s T-shirt reads, CLUELESS WONDER.
Kate drags her attention back to the picture in front of them – an oil painting of Venice.
‘You didn’t tell me about your holiday.’ She points at the painting, to make the connection clear.
‘Oh, is that what this is?’ Nova squints at the frame as though looking through a fog. ‘It doesn’t look anything like that.’
‘Well, I guess it’s quite an old picture; Venice has probably changed.’
‘No, but the light is all wrong …’ Nova remembers the too-bright colours, the hazy sun shearing off the roofs, the flashes from water and windows.
‘Anyway, that’s not what I meant. Did you have a nice time?’
‘It was fine … nice. We had a nice time. The food was good.’
Nova seems to squirm a bit under the question, and Kate thinks she must resent this intrusion into her private life. Still, she asks:
‘Did, uh, Rebecca enjoy it?’
Nova turns to her, looks up into the architect’s face and frowns. For a moment, Kate forgets to breathe.
‘You … have dots on your face.’
‘I have dots?’ Kate puzzles for a moment, then laughs. ‘Freckles! I have freckles.’