by Joanna Walsh
When it is all done, what shall we do? Or – no – there is no reason to think about that: it will never be done, it will always be doing. Once we reach a certain level, it will continue to do, even as we watch ourselves doing it. And that’s the joy in it, though always to be thinking about the story – which is to always be thinking about thinking about the story – will become such a tremendous effort that it will be difficult ever to be light about it, which, sometimes, is what the story of our nation most requires. How wonderful it would be to stop thinking, or rather, to pause from thinking, to turn the story inside out like a glove, and lay it seamy side out, if only for an instant. How painstaking, what delicate work. But, look! There. It’s done, and with hardly any effort either (except that the two types of gloves I have are (1) sheepskin ‘driving’ gloves, that I do not use for driving, but which nevertheless have ridges of external decorative stitching, and (2) rubber gloves, which have no seams at all). Whatever. The story of our nation needs these sudden turns, I could say volte-face(s?), but I might be straying beyond our national remit.
Being on the inside (as everyone is) I could cheat – one leaf’s as good as another – but I’ve only occasionally been tempted to fiddle the figures. No, not when the girls in Information check my stats against the pale bulk of my body, but to fix issues, as when performing a new filter the page is reset to page 0, or where the map will not zoom properly, or to clarify tooltips so they better reflect the correct key presses after rebinding the associated keys. I’ve never given in to these temptations. My job – our job – is only to observe. Even to measure is to move, which implies, also: to disturb the dust, to make waves. To minimise this we have been issued with rubber gloves, with wellingtons, with waterproof trousers, with mudguards, with condoms. We have been issued with hairnets, fishnets, falsies, gas masks, hygienic paper toilet seat covers, cling film. We will change nothing, not even by being there.
The motorways lie quiet.
Nothing new is made.
Only nature we cannot stop. And thought, if that’s a thing.
Changes of season are the most difficult. Yesterday the spiders appeared (where do they come from?). Just past midsummer they lay trails from branch to branch suspending shields visible only by their live centres. These spiders are brown and stripy. The spiders that come later are black. I do not remember them coming this early before. Is this anomaly or just memoryfail?
In the fields behind the hedge I am presently working on, I can see people stooping to furrows with calibrators and rulers. The scent of hedge-roses has reached it highest concentration of ouE, but I have no need to worry. It’s being covered. A SWAT team has been flown in to work on the spiders. They are videoed audioed tasted pinched analysed.
I type results into my handheld. As they are numbers on a screen, there is room for many more, as many as there are leaves on a tree.
One day, when I have finished with hedges, I will turn my attention to horse chestnuts.
Blue
I am on holiday in a house with no mirrors.
My friend is here with me. She has agreed to share the house I have rented for the summer.
I see my friend in her swimsuit. She has good legs, very good legs. I can see them but I cannot see my own legs. If I want to see my own legs I must stand on the chair in the dark dining room and look at them reflected in the glass of the dark picture above the mantelpiece. Even attached to no one I know they are my legs and I know they are not so good as my friend’s.
The house is furnished with the dirt-ring of its owners’ lives. Some of it is very good, some of it is very bad, but nothing is perfect. The chairs’ legs are curved and polished, but they are chipped. The curved handles of the teacups are chipped, but they have gold rims, which are worn. The bathroom cabinet is made of chipboard. Its legs are missing. It has only plastic and metal stumps.
The decor of the house is blue, which I do not like. My friend is reading a book I do not like. Though I have not read it, I know it is not a good book. This makes things more even.
The bottom of the swimming pool outside the house is painted blue. The sky is blue, unclouded. The grass is blue in the strong sun. I pull a long string of skin, like dried grass, from a scratch on my shin. My friend jumps into the pool, her good legs flow behind her like contrails.
I read my book.
Simple Hans
This morning I had my first-ever cup of coffee. It was a very tiny cup, and made me feel like a giant. We were in a coffee shop. He was much younger than me. I knew that, but he didn’t. He was a grown-up, but a very new one. I have spent a very long time as a young child, much longer than most. I dyed my hair for the occasion, but the chin hairs were already growing on me. They were sharp and tough as pig bristles. He was nervous. He told me about something called the internet. I pretended I knew all about it already.
When we went to bed, his limbs were white and speckled. They had too many angles. His cock was a right-angle to mine. There seemed too many of them, always going in and out of something else. Outside the cafe, an old friend of my father’s had seen me walking with him, and had shouted, ‘Cradle snatcher!’ We pretended she was trying to communicate with someone else.
After that we spoke by instant message. He sent me ‘Who knew cheese exploded?!?!?’
I tried to send him a guinea pig, but it wouldn’t go through the screen, though I pushed and pushed.
He wasn’t there. The guinea pig remained with me. I tried to put my cock in the screen. It didn’t work. It hardly mattered. After the guinea pig, the pale guy didn’t want to see me again.
I tried other things: Grindr, Tinder, OkCupid, but they were all the same. There seemed to be no communication in the world, so I left the town where I was born, as all youngest sons should. It was time for me to go and seek my fortune.
I rented a bedsit in a suburb of a small seaside town. After a week in this new place no fortune arrived. It was winter. The sun slanted quick and narrow across the day. Dark came too soon and I slept. There was not enough daylight for a fortune to appear.
In the meantime I liked to look at the ads in corner-shop windows, which made me feel part of this new place, and also allowed me a frisson of contempt for the sellers of second-hand children’s clothes, and Ironing Services, and Bums ’n Tums for Mums. This is not nice but it’s OK: I am not from here and, being lucky, don’t have to worry about such things. I saw Helen’s ad in the shop window. On a small card it said, Victorias Secret Massages for the Discerning. I thought, I’d have put a semicolon, or a colon. There wasn’t even a full stop. Or an apostrophe. Of course she wasn’t called Victoria.
I booked an appointment on the phone. ‘What name?’ said Helen, who, I had thought, was called Victoria. I said my name. ‘You don’t want to give your name?’ said Helen. ‘That’s OK.’ ‘That is my name,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ said Helen, ‘I know.’
Helen lived in a flat above another shop in the same high street. It sold electrical goods. Or maybe the flat was where she worked. I sat in a room that might have been a waiting room or might have been a living room. There was a floral sofa. She shouldn’t have bought such a pale print. No, it was a waiting room, not a front room; there was no direction anywhere, not towards a telly, or a fireplace, or a window. Everything faced in, the chairs not quite towards each other. They nudged each other’s corners, tried not to notice. I stared at a patch of wall under a shelf made of stick-on wood-effect vinyl with a pot plant on it.
Helen was wearing a white uniform like a nurse. I could see what she was wearing underneath, like a comedy nurse, not a real healthcare official. When I took the pale boy to A&E the nurses wore garments like grocery plastic bags in pastel blues and greens, gathered around their wrists and ankles with elastic. They wore jellyfish on their heads, which were also in marine colours. You couldn’t tell if they were boy or girl.
Helen said, ‘Normally there’s me or Isa, but today there’s just me. Isa�
�s here on Saturdays, Sundays, and Tuesday afternoons. If you want Isa you’ll have to book one of those slots. I’m here all the time.’ She said, ‘How old are you?’ She said, ‘It’s adults only. And usually men.’ I said, ‘I’m not a woman, you know, and I’m not as young as I look.’
She took me next door and I stripped and lay on a hospital gurney on a fresh white towel.
When she had massaged me for a while, I pulled her towards me and she said that wasn’t in the deal. She said I’d have to pay extra but frankly no one ever wanted extras – this was a stingy town. And unimaginative: think of all the churches. This is the part in the story when it’s normal for youngest sons to resist, or perhaps to give in: I can’t remember. Her cunt was dry and unused, having never been part of a deal, ever. I stuck my head between her legs and rubbed my hair into hers causing static electricity. She opened like an oyster bread-bun lips forced apart by a whorl of stiff whipped cream – you can buy them in Greggs Bakery on the high street. It tasted of salt and air, just the same as the cream. They say the sea air’s good for you. Or perhaps she had the window open. A little knob of flesh stood out at the top of her cunt. I wanted to bite it, but she pulled back as my teeth snapped closed.
I came again on Tuesday afternoon. I brought her something shiny. This was what the gift guide in the magazine said ladies like. I’d lifted it from the shop where I’d seen her advert. I pulled flowers from gardens as I passed, but Isa was there, not Helen. Isa said, “Hello my name is Claudia.” I paid, stripped and lay down. She swished her long dyed ponytail over my body. She unbuttoned her nurse’s coat and swung out her dumbbell breasts, straddled me and lowered herself so they bulged against my chest. The whole of her was flattened against me at a right angle like she’d dropped there from the ceiling, like she’d overbalanced, and couldn’t get up again. I could feel air between us in the gap underneath her breasts. The rest was sweaty. We unpeeled.
Isa said if I wanted to see her or Helen again I should go away for a long time. I said, should I complete three tasks? The tasks would be hard, I knew. But I am lucky, and in the end they were easy. I came back anyway.
There was a little old man helped me, and a donkey. I thought it should talk, but it didn’t, however I tried to make it. But those bits are for other stories. Like the youngest sons in fairytales, I treated them to what they seemed to ask for, so that when I asked them for help again they did exactly what I told them to.
In the high street there were lights. On the chimney pot of the flat above the chemist, a Santa, lit from inside, ready to plunge. I walked past the Christmas houses with the lights on, boxes in different shapes, all designed to keep something in, or out. You could scream here and they’d never notice; or maybe they would: it’s only bricks and mortar. All those boxes, all close together, all built to be the best shape to capture happiness. Did any of them work?
When I returned to Helen, she asked me to cut off her head, and I did it. Isa held her down and I used an axe from the hardware store where I’d also seen an astrology 2005 decorative dish still hopefully for sale. I could have gone for a saw, but it was the axe I lifted for her. I think she was meant to transform but I can’t think what into: she was already a woman. I think we were meant to get married or something, after, and that showers of gold would pour from the wound, but nothing happened. Nothing except what you’d expect.
I’m not very good with words. I use them here but often they can’t get out. I’m trying to tell you what it was – to cut into this thing that should be sacred, that thing we can’t question, to make it just a thing like any other – which is what it becomes when you cut into it, when you cut it off. This is the moment the good things happen in stories, but this is real life. She was meant to change into something else. But she did. I looked into both of the parts of Helen that were left after, but neither of them answered.
So I didn’t get a fortune this time. But I am the youngest son, and a boy. Luck follows me, Simple Hans.
In any case, I’d only come for the week.
Me and the Fat Woman – Joanna Walsh
Since black holes by their very definition cannot be directly observed, proving their existence is difficult. The strongest evidence for black holes comes from binary systems in which a visible star can be shown to be orbiting a massive but unseen companion.
I can’t remember when she appeared, or how I entered her orbit, but in the beginning we were quite chummy. The fat woman sat squarely on her patch. I sidled in from the sidelines. She offered me something from her basket. It was I who had solicited the acquaintance, although, had I known anything about her, it would have been obvious this is what she’d immediately have done.
Food is so expensive here (to import it over such distances!) that it’s cheaper to bring some from home. I always had so much to carry that I brought very little, and so remained thin. The fat woman was stronger than me. Her basket was bigger. It tested her muscles, and what was in it sustained her. Though she gave from it freely, it did not seem ever to run out and, because she proffered, I asked for more. That seemed to be the way things went. I gave her as much pleasure by taking as she did me by giving, or so I reasoned. Oh we had some good times, me and the fat woman: picnics by the side of the road (I, always anxious that the basket from which she distributed might run dry, she never telling me what was in it, or how much was left).
Each day, at 4 o’clock, the fat woman took tea. You could set your watch by her as you passed and, in fact, that’s what all of us did, though I – being increasingly close to her – had no need to do more than peer over at her wrist’s large dial, losing only milliseconds in the glancing. Time went slow there. She unfolded her folding chair which, naturally, she had brought with her and, when she sat, time gathered round her like a picnic rug. I perched on her event horizon, hardly making a dent in it, never relaxing enough to cross the line, or so I thought. I looked at my own watch, which seemed to tick at the normal rate. She unfolded today’s newspaper from 1919.
(The fat woman liked to keep up to date.)
It said:
“LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS… BUT NOBODY NEED WORRY”
She had such gravity, she could only be behind The Times. Each time I looked across the space between us, I looked back. Light followed her, as she sat in the groove she had made. You might have said she was an angel in her setting with all she brought of out her basket arranged around her: her Le Creuset, her Le Chameaus, her Illy, her Bridgewater, her Falke, and those things she got from Lidl only you’d never have known it. Putting stuff into space-time bends it further, and objects may interact with one another, but the stuff that fell into her, we never saw again. A lot of it was stuff I’d never seen before, such as Vacherin, samphire, sourdough, celeriac, strings of spaghetti she said she’d made herself, and – although she simultaneously disapproved – occasional whole tubs of foie gras. ‘Is that Danish Blue?’ I asked. ‘Dolcelatte,’ she replied. Due to gravitational time dilation, we never even saw these things disappear. When I asked where they went, she dismissed my question. ‘Things tend,’ she said, ‘towards a state of disorder, but why waste energy over it?’ She laughed, continued to take things lightly. I, having only my own universe’s sense of causality, absorbed this information carefully, reproduced it until it became me, until I became the Le Creuset, the Falke, the Vacherin, the foie gras, the Le Chameaus, or so you would have thought.
That I was not fat was not a problem, oh no not at all. She knew that I was not like the other thin women. Although insubstantial, it was obvious I was on her side. As for wanting to be thin, the fat woman was above all that. She preferred to reach out to those who were less significant than her, or, at least, she attracted them. Some took offence at her offers, others took what she offered, chagrined. Each time she reached out, the insignificant got further and further away from her, so she knew less and less about them. She thought I was insignificant, and I did not disabuse her, as, indeed, I was. But I was the on
ly one who stayed by her, admiring her mass, and the things she produced, never-endingly, from her basket, including the production of space and time, which she placed between herself and everyone else (except me).
In order to bridge the gap between herself and the others, the fat woman began to take up more and more space. To accommodate her, I pared myself down further, until I was practically flat, then hardly more than one-dimensional. I stripped myself of the word righteous, and the word… well, all the words, until I wasn’t feeling myself any more, until I was numb, uncalled for, but she had no need to call me: I was always there. Minus these words I looked no different. She didn’t notice they had ever been attached to me. Lighter without them, she was able to lift me with her strong arms, pulling me out of ditches, setting me back on the side of the road. Sometimes I am frightened that the fat woman will kill me. But I’m stuck with her now, pressed here against her side, enfolded in her folds. It keeps me warm, at least.
The fat woman expanded because I let her, made room for her, clearing not only myself but the others away, whenever someone needed putting in their place, had overstepped the mark. And so she bulged far beyond hers, or at least beyond the mark of one person. Soon, her rotating body was everywhere in space, if you looked back far enough. Really, the arrogance of the fat woman. That she was so much more solid than I, that everything about her carried more weight. There had begun to be periods of quiescence between us: whether hers or mine, I don’t know. I’d started to grow beyond her, or at least that’s what I’d thought, though I can only see things from my perspective. From elsewhere in the universe, the whole thing may have looked entirely different. It depends how you understand the direction of time, which, to the eye, is not reversible.