Antarctica

by Claire Keegan

‘There,’ he said, showing her a tiny speck of food. ‘It’s gone now.’

  When they walked out on to the market-place, a thick fog had fallen on the town, so thick she could hardly read the signs. A straggle of Sunday vendors, out to win the Christmas trade, were demonstrating their wares.

  ‘Done your Christmas shopping?’ she said.

  ‘Nah, got nobody to buy for, have I? I’m an orphan. Remember?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Come on. Let’s walk.’

  He gripped her hand and took her down a dirt road that led into a black wood beyond the houses.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ she said.

  He loosened his hold but he did not say sorry. Light drained out of that day. Dusk stoked the sky, bribing daylight into darkness. They walked for a long time without talking, just feeling the Sunday hush, listening to the trees straining against the icy wind.

  ‘I was married once, went off to Africa for a honeymoon,’ he said suddenly. ‘It didn’t last. I had a big house, furniture, all that. She was a good woman too, a wonderful gardener. You know that plant in my lounge? Well, that was hers. I’ve been waiting for years for that plant to die, but the fucking thing, it keeps on growing.’

  She pictured the plant sprawled across the floor, the length of a grown man, its pot no bigger than a small saucepan, dried roots snarling up over the pot. A miracle it was still alive.

  ‘Some things you just have no control over,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘She said I wouldn’t last a year without her. Boy, was she wrong.’ He looked at her then, and smiled, a strange smile of victory.

  They had walked deep into the woods by now; except for the sound of their footsteps on the road and the ribbon of sky between the trees, she could not have been sure where the path was. He grabbed her suddenly and pulled her in under the trees, pushed her back against a tree-trunk. She couldn’t see. She felt the bark through her coat, his belly against hers, could smell gin on his breath.

  ‘You won’t forget me,’ he said, smoothing her hair back from her eyes. ‘Say it. Say you won’t forget me.’

  ‘I won’t forget you,’ she said.

  In the darkness, he ran his fingers across her face, same as he was a blind man trying to memorise her. ‘Nor I, you. A little piece of you will be ticking right here,’ he said, taking her hand and placing it inside his shirt. She felt his heart beneath his hot skin, beating. He kissed her then as if there was something in her mouth he wanted. Words, probably. At that moment the cathedral bells rang and she wondered what time it was. Her train left at six but she was all packed, there was no real hurry.

  ‘Did you check out this morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘They think I’m the tidiest guest they’ve ever had. My bag’s in the lobby.’

  ‘Come to my place. I’ll get you a taxi, see you off.’

  She wasn’t in the mood for sex. In her mind she had already packed up and left, was facing her husband in the doorway. She felt clean and full and warm; all she wanted now was a good snooze on the train. But in the end she could think of no reason not to go and, yielding like a parting gift to him, said yes.

  They retreated from the darkness of the woods, walked down Vicar’s Close and emerged below the moat near the hotel. The seagulls were inland. They hovered above the water fowl, swooping down and snapping up the bread a bunch of Americans were throwing to the swans. She collected her suitcase and walked the slippery streets to his place. The rooms were cold. Yesterday’s dirty dishes lay soaking in the sink, a rim of greasy water on the steel. Remnant daylight filtered through gaps between the curtains, but he did not turn a light on.

  ‘Come here,’ he said. He took his jacket off and knelt before her. He unlaced her boots, undid the knots slowly, peeled her stockings off, eased her underwear down around her ankles. He stood up and took her coat off, opened her blouse carefully, admired the buttons, unzipped her skirt, slid her watch down over her hand. Then he reached up under her hair and took her earrings out. They were dangly earrings, gold leaves her husband had given her for their anniversary. He stripped her as if he had all the time in the world. She felt like a child being put to bed. She didn’t have to do anything to him, for him. No duties, all she had to do was be there.

  ‘Lie back,’ he said.

  Naked, she fell back into the goose-down.

  ‘I could go to sleep,’ she said, shutting her eyes.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  The room was cold, but he was sweating; she could smell his sweat. He pinned her wrists back above her head with one hand and kissed her throat. A drop of sweat fell on to her neck. A drawer opened and something jingled. Handcuffs. She was startled, but did not think fast enough to object.

  ‘You’ll like this,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’

  He bound her wrists to the brass bed-head. A section of her mind panicked. There was something deliberate about him, something silent and overpowering. More sweat fell on her. She tasted the tangy salt on his skin. He retreated and advanced, made her ask for it, made her come.

  He got up. He went out and left her there, handcuffed to the headboard. The kitchen light came on. She smelled coffee, heard him breaking eggs. He came in with a tray and sat over her.

  ‘I have to –’

  ‘Don’t move.’ He said it very quietly. He was dead calm.

  ‘Take these off –’

  ‘Shhhhh,’ he said. ‘Eat. Eat before you go.’ He extended a bite of scrambled egg on a fork and she swallowed it. It tasted of salt and pepper. She turned her head. The clock read 5:32.

  ‘Christ, look at the time –’

  ‘Don’t swear,’ he said. ‘Eat. And drink. Drink this. I’ll get the keys.’

  ‘Why won’t you –’

  ‘Just take a drink. Come on. I drank with you, remember?’

  Still handcuffed, she drank the coffee he tilted from the mug. It only took a minute. A warm, dark feeling spread over her and then she slept.

  *

  When she woke, he was standing in the harsh fluorescent light, dressing. She was still handcuffed to the bed. She tried to speak. She was gagged. One of her ankles, too, was bound to the foot of the bed with another pair of handcuffs. He continued dressing, clipping the studs of his denim shirt closed.

  ‘I have to go to work,’ he said, tying his bootlaces. ‘It can’t be helped.’

  He went out, came back in with a basin. ‘In case you need it,’ he said, leaving it on the bed. He tucked her in and kissed her then, a quick, normal kiss, and turned the light out. He stopped in the hall and turned to face her. His shadow loomed over the bed. Her eyes were very big and pleading. She was reaching out to him with her eyes. He held his hands out, showing his palms.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. ‘It really isn’t. I love you, you see. Try to understand.’

  And then he turned and left. She listened to him leave, heard him on the stairs, a zipper closing. The hall light was doused, the door banged, she heard his walk on the pavement, footsteps ebbing.

  Frantic, she tried her best to undo the handcuffs. She did everything to get free. She was a strong woman. She tried to disconnect the headboard, but when she nudged the sheet back, she could see the bed-head, bolted to the frame. For a long time she rattled the bed. She wanted to yell ‘fire!’ – that’s what police told women to yell in emergencies – but she couldn’t chew through the cloth. She managed to get her loose foot on the floor and thumped the carpet. Then she remembered granny, deaf, downstairs. Hours passed before she calmed down to think and listen. Her breathing steadied. She heard the curtain flapping in the next room. He’d left the window open. The duvet had fallen on the floor in all the fuss and she was naked. She couldn’t reach it. Cold was moving in, spilling into the house, filling up the rooms. She shivered. Cold air falls, she thought. Eventually the shivering stopped. Chronic numbness spread through her; she imagined the blood slowing in her veins, her heart shrinking. The cat sprang up and landed on the bed, prowled
the mattress. Her dulled rage changed to terror. That too passed. The curtain in the next room slapped the wall faster now: the wind was rising. She thought of him and felt nothing. She thought about her husband and her children. They might never find her. She might never see them again. It didn’t matter. She could see her own breath in the gloom, feel the cold closing over her head. It began to dawn on her, a cold, slow sun bleaching the east. Was it her imagination or was that snow falling beyond the window panes? She watched the clock on his bedside table, the red numbers changing. The cat was watching her, his eyes dark as apple seeds. She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of Hell, and then eternity.

  Love in the Tall Grass

  Cordelia wakes on a white-cold afternoon, watches woodsmoke pluming beyond the trembling hedge. She rises, opens the window outward, hears the swoon of matinee music in the road. Winter air teems in on this, the last day of the twentieth century. Cordelia strips naked, pours water from the steel jug, half-fills the basin, wrings out the wash-cloth, soaps her hands, her face. When the pipes burst in late November, she never got the plumber in, broke the ice in the rain-barrel under the shoot and dipped the bucket down. This water is colder than a broken dream. She dries herself and dresses, slowly, in a green dress, fastens the clasp of a platinum locket around her neck. She bends and laces up her flat black shoes, knowing that when this day is over, nothing will ever be the same.

  In the kitchen she lowers a little brown egg into an old saucepan, puts the kettle on, takes out the stainless-steel egg-cup, its tarnished spoon, the stripy mug and plate, and waits until it’s ready. Somewhere somebody is chopping wood. This kettle always sings before it boils. By the open door she sits. She’s slept, now she must eat. She spreads a teacloth across her lap and breaks the shell, salts the egg, spreads butter over bread, pours tea. Withered leaves skid in across the marbled lino. The Burmese believe that wind carrying betel leaves into the bride’s house will bring bad luck and unhappiness to the married couple. So many small, useless facts rattle around like old currency inside Cordelia’s head. The clock on the mantel ticks happily. Not long now, it seems to say. Not long now. When she’s finished, she turns the empty eggshell upside-down, a trick she played in childhood that turned to habit. She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve and wipes her mouth. It is time. She undoes her braid and brushes out her hair. She knows no other woman whose hair’s turned white at forty. Lastly, she takes her good black coat from its crook on the back door, opens the latch and goes out into what’s left of the December wind.

  It is almost nine years since Cordelia has walked this road. It dips down between new bungalows into the village. The Silver Dollar Takeaway stands in darkness; a neglected ice-cream van’s wheels sag from the weight of winter neglect, its HB sign well faded, but there’s a light in the Lone Star Guesthouse and the little souvenir shop’s door is open. She suspects that after the new century’s ushered in, they’ll clamp closed once again, wait for summer’s gaggle of tourists, the trampoline of kids. She becomes aware of faces behind net curtains. She stops at the chapel, slides back the glass porch door, blesses herself with water from the font. Inside, the chapel’s empty, the marble altar-railing she remembered, gone. A statue ornaments each side of the altar: the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph. One in brown, the other blue. Why is Mary always blue? she wonders. She lights a candle at her feet, she looks so lonely. Near the altar stands a coffin covered in cloth, burgundy folds, such a small coffin, but then she realises it’s the church organ. She backs down into the empty confession box, slides the grid across and whispers:

  ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  That takes her back. A sudden draught travels through the chapel, sounding strangely like a motor race, a high, revving wind. She sits in the bottom pew and opens the missal at random, reads the lesson from Palm Sunday and thinks Judas Iscariot a beautiful name.

  Cordelia continues the steep descent. She stops and sits by the roadside, empties a pebble from her shoe. Gorse shelters this road, green, shuddering gorse that bursts into relentless yellow for half the year. It is getting dark; she feels the light draining, watches the blue dusk deepening in the west. She gets up, puts one foot in front of the other. A shroud of mist thickens fast over the barren dunes. She feels her heart beating, feels tired, bone tired, and evening deepens all around her quickly, so very quickly. She still has far to go, two miles or more. She must get there before dark or be lost. She remembers the waiting room, the gleam of the stethoscope on the doctor’s table, the promise spoken, the sincerity in his voice, and hurries on.

  *

  So too was it dusk when Cordelia met the doctor, a late September dusk of fallen fruit. Exasperated, she had taken a mallet from the shed and driven a staked sign down outside the front gate. apples, the sign read. Gale force winds had shaken the trees bare overnight. She’d woken and found the orchard grounds carpeted: Cox’s orange pippin, Golden Delicious, Bramley, Red Janets, crab apples. They all lay abundant and bruised in the long grass. She filled buckets, basins, big saucepans, the old Moses basket – but the surplus abounded beneath the trees.

  When the doctor’s car turned into her driveway, Cordelia was sitting on the steps outside the front door, turning the Jams & Jellies pages of her cook-book. On the window ledge above her head stood jam jars of drowned wasps, their striped bodies floating on the cloudy water. The doctor threw a tall and steady shadow over her. He looked like a man who could jump a fence and climb a tree. She led him up the orchard path, where he took his hands out of his pockets and shook his head.

  ‘Do you have a spade?’

  He took his jacket off, rolled up his sleeves. His arms were pale for summer, the pale blue veins in his wrists, his inner arm like a blue branch a child might draw on a white page. But his hands were brown to the wrists, as if he had dipped them in permanent ink that could not be washed off. While the sun burned an orange hole in the sky, the doctor dug a pit in Cordelia’s orchard. They lined the pit with straw and carefully laid the apples down so they would not touch.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘apples all year round.’

  ‘Come in and wash your hands.’

  Her kitchen was dark and cool and smelled strangely of must and something else the doctor could not place. Cordelia gave him the bar of carbolic soap and he washed his hands. She filled a cup with milk, which he drank before he left with a shallow enamel basinful of apples. Cordelia gathered her skirt into a pouch and filled that too. The doctor noticed her knees, marked where she had knelt on the grass, her brown thighs, and thought of them as he drove back home to his wife and children, the fallen apples from Cordelia’s orchard rolling around on his back seat.

  The doctor came back. He returned the basin, refilled it at Cordelia’s insistence, and returned again. It became habitual, on Thursdays, for the doctor to stop, and if the weather was warm, Cordelia and the doctor drank tea outdoors. They leant against the tree-trunks in dappled shade. The doctor dawdled over his tea, sipped it like a girl while the afternoon sun shone bashfully through the trees. Cordelia asked him about medical school, the surgery, and listened. She listened to the words and the accent and the tone, the silences, the hesitation. She noticed he did not mention his wife. Up close, she smelled mothballs in his winter jacket; he smelled like an old drawer that hadn’t been opened in a very long time.

  On her thirtieth birthday, Cordelia sat with her feet in a basin of hot water all morning and listened to a thunderstorm. She drank three big vodkas with shaken orange juice and tied a ribbon in her hair. When the doctor arrived, she took his hand and led him out under the chestnut tree whose limbs drooped low to the ground. Cordelia used to sit there as a child and imagine she was sitting inside a giant’s green skirt. Overhead a patch of blue sky showed through the leaves like a bruised knee.

  That afternoon the doctor did not ask for tea. Instead he wound her long yellow hair like a bandage around his hand, and kissed her. It turned dark as
night under the tree, so when he looked at the time, he had to put the face of his watch up close to his, then rushed off home, leaving skid-marks in Cordelia’s drive.

  That night Cordelia lay in bed above the green-dark orchard while drowsy bluebottles struggled against the window panes. She watched the sudden, fast shadows of swallows who flew past her window in fleeting pairs, subtracting light from her room, and marvelled how living things could suspend themselves in mid-air. She lay and listened, imagined she heard the last of the overripe fruit, the latecomers, falling in the slightest breeze. She did not have the heart to pluck them. She heard them falling, imagined the stem weakening, the fruit clinging to its source, losing, loosening, letting go, falling, falling.

  The doctor told his wife he was out on house-calls. Because his car was so conspicuous, they started to meet in the sand dunes at Strandhill. They brought drumsticks, flasks of coffee, cake and bars of Belgian chocolate because the doctor had a sweet tooth. On warmer days, he opened his shirt and she kicked her boots off and let her hair down. But mostly they just lay there with Cordelia’s big black coat over them, listening to the tide, he with his head hidden in the reeds. Sometimes they fell into shallow sleep, but always Cordelia was aware of the irreversible ticking of the doctor’s gold watch: Tick, tick, tick. Not long now, it seemed to say. Not long now. She hated that watch; she wanted to stand up and throw it in the ocean.

  Cordelia dreamt of them together in a room with a green, flapping curtain she could not pull back. She could see out, but nobody would ever be able to see in. When she told the doctor of this dream, he started talking about his wife. Cordelia did not want to know about his wife. She wanted him to bang on her door in the middle of the night with his fist, to come in with a suitcase in his hand and call her by her name and say, ‘I have come to live with you at my own peril.’ She wanted him to carry her into a strange house and close the door. The doctor said his wife went to bed early, well before him. He said on fine nights he sat out on the step behind his house and smoked a cigarette. From there he could see the headland further up, see where the road curved down towards the lights of her village.