She opened up the laptop and sent an email. It was nearly noon.
Hi, Joanna, it’s Lizzie. Are you all right?
She lit a cigarette and placed the lighter upright on the kitchen table. A bead of sweat slid from under her armpit down to her waist. She waited. Her chest was tight. She tried to breathe.
I’m just asking, just thought to say hi, touch base. Don’t worry if you’re busy. We don’t need to talk now. Am sure you’re busy.
If she’d come here lost and down on herself and looking for a place to feel at home, she had certainly gained, in addition to that, a feeling that had outgrown the sadness, like ivy growing in a pot of something else. This had become the dominant state of mind, and perhaps it was easier to manage that way, to see the state of unease as being like a monkey to carry about that needed constant soothing. Whereas the sadness was not so easy to feel; it was a constant, colorless thing about being human and getting hurt and losing; in the end it was too much to take in, too much to be close to. So Lizzie had become the frizzy wick striding around the woods in jeans, wringing hands sometimes. Other times she had shrunk into the sofa and gone very quiet. They had picked up each other’s moods. It had been impossible not to. Fretfulness had thrived in her from never having had an honest conversation, never quite knowing the whole story, or being able to trust that the man lying beside her was who he said he was.
“What do you think the problem is, Jacob?”
“With what, Lizzie? With who?”
“With me, Jacob. With us.”
There wasn’t an answer.
There was one person in these woods who’d heard her, who’d seen her, with frustration, years ago, with a big branch she’d broken off a tree, smashing a patch of earth and the bark of another tree. Then he’d seen her again, the same man, whacking the earth up on the common a week ago. More frustration. Nasty old meddlesome man. He suspected her: he knew she was up to something. It was only a matter of days before he came here and knocked on the door.
What do you mean?
Not sure. Just lacking the thing that tells people if they’re all right or not, I think. You know?
Can I help?
There was a pause.
I don’t know. Are you frightened? Do you ever feel trapped? Like this feeling that you can’t get out, or that someone is coming to get you, someone…you know? Like funny smells? I have this thing about smells. I can’t stop. I sniff everything, all the time.
Would you like me to come down to see you, Lizzie? I can come this evening. It’s honestly fine. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Poss just a little more.
Not today. Not now. No.
Do you not think Jacob would have wanted me to pop in and see if you’re all right? Especially if you’re not?
I am all right!
He left you, Lizzie!
I know!
It’s not your fault.
Yes.
He left you, Lizzie! He left you.
You’re so kind! I don’t deserve it. Really don’t. Not good. Not fit for a friend. Heaven knows. Goodbye.
Lizzie used her long legs and ran into the garden. She left the back door open and the dog came running after her. She bounded over the mud on the turfed-up lawn and leaped over the wall. She cracked twigs underfoot and pushed through the bracken. She stumbled over branches, heard the dog bark. She wasn’t the gentle pale woman who slipped out of things anymore, but a tougher thing of bone and sinew smashing through the woods. Everywhere she looked there was dark and damp; and dripping, seething, slimy wood life growing over cracks and dark and green moss.
She tripped and fell, got up and pushed herself to run faster, thumping her stomach with her hand as she went. Fifty-five, and a garden spade.
What was left for her, then, was the moment-by-moment construction of a life without feeling, of not, for one moment, holding an eye; of not looking at that which would show her what it was to be base, which was cruelty, and hatefulness, of a deep, terrifying, battering rage that came out of nowhere and turned on its own. She had failed to civilize. She had not known enough, had enough, to become gracious and elegant and wise. Now there was only life left living on the edge, eking something out that felt manageable without feeling. That was it now, forever.
Lizzie ran through the trees and burst into an open field where she kept her mouth shut and the air in as she ran, feeling her lungs constrict as she tried not to breathe. She ran through the wet grass, flicking mud behind her heels, and didn’t stop for the stitch in her side or the aching breasts juddering in an old, gray bra. She pushed forward with her thigh muscles and with her neck, and with her lips pursed and all the blood filling her face so that she looked truly mad, truly red with human blood and rage and a stomach full of her husband’s flesh, and behind her, excited, the dog ran and barked and together they made it up onto the common where Lizzie fell down and sat, straight-legged, back on the thin grass.
It was over. It was too much. It had beaten her. Of course it had. The only thing she could do now was go home and get in the car and drive to the police station in Farnham and wait to be seen.
She would walk in, up the steps, past the little blue lamp on the right side of the door, and take a seat in the waiting room. There was no rush, after all; it certainly wasn’t an emergency and there was nothing she’d be able to do about the people in the future screaming her name.
She’d go to prison for the rest of her life, and it wouldn’t matter what anyone did to her there. They could spit and kick and beat and punch. They could come at night and knife her in the side while she was sleeping. What did it matter? Of course she wouldn’t be able to use her skills as a practical person to make life better for herself there. Sooner or later there would come a time when she was ready to die, but doing that to herself now, committing suicide, and leaving half of him in the freezer, and the back door open with the dog wandering around, seemed not just silly, and selfish, and messy for everyone to cope with, but far too frightening, requiring will and energy she was sure she didn’t have.
The neighbors would want an explanation; Nic would come back and she and Mike would want to know about the woman behind their cake, and poor Tom Vickory, who’d sat in the kitchen with Jacob Prain’s heart in the oven, would need to be told something, would need to have someone who could explain.
I’ve come to make a confession, she’d say to the woman at the desk. I’ve come to confess a crime. Whereupon the woman at the desk would most likely roll her eyes and take in the white face and jeans and the waxed green jacket and turn to her colleague, also at the desk, and mutter something only the two of them would be able to understand. They’d have a code word. So many people came in with wringing hands and a sense of guilt these days. So many people out of work and wondering what to do with their lives. People getting stuck and fighting with each other, smashing things, or quietly, meanly, turning away. And Lizzie would be standing there knowing she’d murdered him, knowing she’d eaten him, and was waiting now to tell this to the woman with the orange face and rolling eyes whose colleague was leaning over helping someone who’d lost her bag or had it nicked to fill in a form, and Lizzie would have to wait to tell them. She’d killed her husband one morning in March and had eaten most of him.
They would say: Wait! What would they do? Who would call the supervisor? Would it suddenly get very hot in the police station, very hot, very strained? Would it go quiet, or loud? How long before she was cuffed? Would the lights go out around the station as people inside tried to keep calm?
183. You have eaten an awful lot of protein.
184. Symptoms of a protein overdose include: abdominal cramps, constipation, and mental disturbance.
185. It is therefore understandable that, fearing loss of your mind, you have whittled your options down to (a) suicide, or (b) confession.
186. Nothing has changed from where you were before. You are doing well, safe in your little world—house, garden, woodland isolation, fire in the evenings, bo
ttle of wine with your meal—before you reached out and tried to make a friend.
187. There is also an option (c).
188. You can do nothing.
189. Go home now and have a quiet day. Sit out in the garden with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and run yourself a nice bath. Get some much-needed sleep. In the morning, you will feel ready to get on.
It had begun to drizzle with rain. It was the afternoon. There was darkness and then there was light. Each moment could be isolated. She saw the cows in the distance, and spoke softly, calling the dog’s name.
She tugged the collar of her coat up against the cold and went round the edges of the field. Images of Jacob as he had been in the beginning, gentle with her, nice to her, came in like butterflies and disappeared. Thought didn’t cling to the images—and her head was without voices. She wouldn’t be going to Scotland. She wouldn’t need to eat anymore. The car would get her to the police station and she would walk on in. It felt better. She kicked the ground with her boot. She put her hands in the pockets of her coat, then took them out and folded them across her breasts.
She looked at the cows, and the church spire in the distance. It was a wet, gray day, but the countryside around here was beautiful. The dog scurried and dashed about with its tongue lolling pink and huge from its sopping mouth.
This was freedom. This was what it felt like.
She closed her eyes.
She watched the dog and felt very quiet in the air at the top of the field. Her decision was made. She took a deep breath and whispered her relief to the clouds on the horizon. She stood up and put her hands in her pockets. Then she backtracked into the woods, going a different path to get home. She felt like a different person. She’d let go of the struggle, she’d surrendered to prudence and now her conscience might make a tentative return.
She was almost at the farm. She cut through the trees and joined Tubford Lane, turning left to walk the distance home. There were bumps and puddles in the lane. She saw two bikes disappearing round the bend ahead of her, and she peered into the gray light after them.
The car was up ahead in the lane, parked as usual, where it had been for years. The piece of paper had been taped to the back windscreen, with masking tape, the black-and-white picture was grainy, but Jacob’s face and form were clear. He was grinning, with his teeth exposed. She put a hand out to the boot and leaned her weight against it as she stared at the pitiful poster and the photograph of her husband. She read the word: MISSING. Then underneath that, printed in red: CIRCUMSTANCES MYSTERIOUS AND POSSIBLY SINISTER.
Lizzie ripped the paper off the back of the car. She went into the house through the front door and walked in her boots to the kitchen, crushing the paper and tape into a sticky ball. She pushed it far down into the bin with the onion skins and the carrot peelings and the haricot beans she hadn’t used. In the garage she fed the dog and filled the bowl with clean water. Then she sat at the kitchen table carefully peeling the skin from an apple with a fruit knife.
190. Book an appointment at the hairdresser’s.
191. Resolve to take all your money out of the joint account and close it down.
192. Close down his email account. Close down your own.
193. You’ve done so well. You’re nearly there. Soon everything will be empty and tidy and you can start all over again!
194. Even at the end of the world.
195. Do not think, btw, that you have come to the end of the world.
196. You haven’t.
197. You’re all right, Lizzie Prain. You’re going to be all right.
The left arm and the right arm went into the microwave, one after the other. She shaved them on the sideboard and then bent them on the baking tray so that they looked like boomerangs. She lifted one off and tried fitting it into the microwave in an acute triangle. Between wrist and shoulder stump there wasn’t much. It would work. She took the joint back out to prepare it.
She was in her apron again, oven on, radio on. She cracked black pepper, sprinkled salt. She sloshed with olive oil and tucked some garlic cloves underneath the elbow joints. She chopped an onion and threw it on: five minutes in the microwave, ping, then into the oven, and from the freezer she lifted the remaining thigh.
Out in the garden she chopped with the axe. The bits of thigh were split in two. Each could go in the microwave, like the arms, pale, stuffed in; the microwave would be useless after all this: it could be thrown on the bonfire and exploded with a bit of meths and a match.
Boom!
She wiped the kitchen surfaces with the lemon spray till all was sparkly clean. On the sideboard the bits of thigh were piled up under a tea towel.
She took his arms from the oven and cut them into the rings she’d make of a baguette, using the serrated edge of the bread knife. The hairs had singed; they stank. Even the marrow inside his bones would be eaten now she was back in the mood; and there wouldn’t be any more thinking of silly things like running off to the police station to tell someone, or reaching out to make friends.
She was absolutely back on course. And she knew that her eyes were fixed open; she wasn’t blinking. She’d ripped that poster off the car.
She sat at the table and ate the meat, using a steak knife to cut the flesh from his upper arms away from the bone, and then using a teaspoon to scoop out the funny-tasting marrow, which was a little muddy, and dry.
Lizzie sat for one and a half hours and chewed what was in her mouth, and swallowed. Then she went upstairs to lie down.
She slipped under the duvet in all of her clothes, and she lay very still, on her back, and stared at the ceiling for a while. Oak, he’d wanted. For its longevity and rotund glory. A tree that would go on when he was gone. The garden and its trees growing down in the dark by the wall would be there after she’d left. So early, and he’d been out already. Trying to dig a hole. In the frost. She’d got dressed into the clothes she’d been wearing all weekend. Nothing new bought for years. No linen trousers, no nice shoes. Nothing like Joanna. Through to the kitchen. Because of the job? Because of Joanna? Because of the cakes? Because of the Pearl? Because she hadn’t had the imagination to get away? Bringing the spade down on the back of his head. Then the small mental adjustment. Doing it again. Nothing. Like a car crash. She’d turned him over, slipped on the grass, his head had lolled in the hole; she’d hauled it back up, and tried to pull him down at the feet and straighten him out on the grass.
There was meat to eat. She would have to press her mouth against a wall of cold thigh.
She lay there retching, and she curled on her side.
There was still all this to go.
“I am sorry,” she said, and she heard the words come right out.
One could learn to be alive.
She’d put the last of the bones and fat in the stockpot with bouquet garni and celery. She would need the clothes peg on again while it boiled and simmered and this she would do with candles burning before she went to bed, and reduce it with wine, then blend again, reduce for an hour more till she got a stock which could be stored. She had to keep going. And ignore what sounded to her like repeated knocks on the front door. A little scratching at the bathroom window. Only wind, she thought. Only trees.
There would be a final meal.
Lizzie Prain chopped her husband into bits.
They had been an isolated couple.
Living quietly.
In the Surrey Hills.
Five minutes from the A31 to Farnham.
It’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The cushions on the garden chairs had been there Lizzie’s whole lifetime.
They’d been bought by his aunt.
They’d listened to the news on the radio, not having a subscription or being members of a newspaper readership. Or members of anything at all.
Not that she’d wanted it.
Not from the sofa. With the television on. And not feeling anything for him. How could she have felt anything for him?
/> Though it might have been nice to meet some people.
It might have been nice.
She blinked, and she understood that it was mechanical. There was nothing to fear. She would go north on the train, after that frozen emotional state—one movement at a time.
Tom
She came back from Scotland on Thursday. I’d been there since Sunday. I came back from work that night and saw that the lights were on. At first I thought it might have been her husband returned from abroad. I put my bike up against the yew hedge and went in.
The dog was sniffing around in the hall. I stepped into the kitchen and saw the bags there, by the back door. The cool bag was open and it was full of sopping, stinking newspaper and polythene. I didn’t want to go near it. Even Rita recoiled. She barked and growled, sat back on her haunches, then leaped forward and backed away. I called out for Lizzie. I didn’t go out to the garden and I felt sure that she wasn’t in the house. I assumed she’d gone for a walk in the lane or popped up to the pub for a drink, so I took the box of pizza I’d brought, and then went into the living room with a book. There wasn’t anything in that room but the old sofa and a fireplace. I’d been using the fire in the evenings.
While I was sitting in the living room the back door to the kitchen opened and banged shut. I heard her washing her hands at the sink. I knew it was her, without having to look round, so I simply stayed where I was, with an unchewed bit of pizza in my mouth.
All of a sudden I felt very scared. I can’t honestly explain where the feeling came from, but it was real and had no thought attached to it. It was as if my heart just stopped for a beat or two, and my nervous system was flooded with adrenaline.
I stood up and turned round as she came into the room.
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