She has her hand on a door. The door to university, to a classroom, to a life she is not sure she can engage in, and she is hesitating, sweating. She knows her heart rate is climbing and what she is really scared of is having a panic attack in front of someone else, of hyperventilating on the floor while an unbearable fear pummels her consciousness, and she has always been terrified of this, she realises, as she plays back to her first day at school, and every lunchtime, every break time it is not always so painful and she does not even understand it in life—all she knows is: she feels uncomfortable around people.
She is in the university classroom in the back row and she has some diazepam in her bag and she keeps her head down and takes careful, precise notes.
Age seven, she is stood in front of a drawer with a monkey on it and being told that is her drawer and that is her name and that she must put her new jotters in there and a rubber and at break time they will gather in front of a crate of small bottles of milk and they will be given this to drink and a square of cheese, and it is meant to be a treat but when she gets there, she will find the milk is warm and the cheese is sweating, and she will eat it anyway because that is what they all must do.
The man to the right often sits looking down the hill behind the pods. There does not appear to be anything at the bottom of the hill and she wonders if they are only playing a night and day sky to appease them. Last evening the sky was impressive; she saw several satellites and forgot her discomfort at being unable to blink. She wants to ask him how long he has been here. Nobody asks anyone anything; they do not speak. There are thousands of them—one old lady seven pods along does Tai Chi every morning. The silence is astounding. It might be because of the lack of vocal cords, or the inability to work them, although occasionally they hear singing and look in the direction of this sound with utter awe and somehow it makes the whole place feel peaceful.
She cannot get used to how rare it is to hear anything here. In your pod, of course, you can hear every sob and fart and grunt and orgasm; and every sneeze and every laugh, and every sigh and every snore, and every plea to another for love—enough to heal the hurt—the past—the things within themselves they had all evidently found too difficult to bear.
That is what she struggles with as she looks at the others along the line and realises if this were a class, they would all be getting Fs and maybe that is why they are here. She cannot take the footage again and decides to walk to the bottom of that hill and see what happens; it is absolutely unclear who or what is in charge here. She had been looking forward to seeing so many people but it turns out—just as in life—right now, she is alone. Making a decision. To walk to the bottom of a hill. It feels like the hardest thing she’s ever done—all that space—so exposed, she goes forward feeling exposed away from the pods; she will do it so she will be more comfortable later, and maybe even rest (they don’t sleep here) with ease.
She is watching the hours she has cried—it is depressing even now and she realises each area of her life can be watched chronologically or under headers such as crying, orgasms, telly, painting nails, on the telephone, travelling, ordering takeaway, walking, appreciating, seeing friends, getting dumped—dancing, cycling; she did a fair bit of that.
She spent 19 days of her life ordering takeaway food. She has spent 17 months crying. This is the most extraordinary thing and although maths was her weakest subject, she still knows that is quite-a-fucking-lot.
No waves today. She needs another one of those. Everything here feels more unreal than it did down there, but more than that, the guilt is utterly unbearable. The man three pods along left yesterday. He walked down the hill and has not come back. She will go down the hill tomorrow; she only made it about 30 feet yesterday before she had to return.
She is laying in a hospital parting her legs as a woman inserts four fingers, and the little sticky tabs on her tummy are blue and the screen is beginning to beep and people are running into the room and she is asking if the baby is okay.
The man with black legs looks in her pod at her. She looks back. He smiles. She gets out of the pod and the two of them just stand there for about an hour, looking at each other. The sky turns orange. He writes something in the sand.
Are you okay?
She writes back with her toe—I don’t know. How did you get here?
I don’t want to talk about it.
You got here the same way I did, he says.
She is so shocked that she climbs back into her pod.
Every so often, she glances back without turning her head and she can tell he is still there. To soften her deep unease, she replays a field of lavender and as she walks through it she lets the long grass skim her hands. There is a plough two fields away from her and it is throwing up earth and yellow spikes of hay; a young farmer turns it around. She takes her shirt off to sunbathe unseen while mice burrow and make nests. Above her was a sky. Azure. Hopeful. She fell asleep like that and a tick settled on her arm, opened its arachnid mouth, and bit down.
She goes back to that moment, zooms in on the thing, millions of years of evolution creating black legs, an exoskeleton and the ability to infect. In the field she dreams on, happily unaware. It is quite beautiful. Her face is not as saggy as she thought it was. She does things in her sleep that she has never seen before. Words muttered under her breath. Scratching. A twitch on her right eye and turning often, this way, then that. As if sleep is an uncomfortable place but she cannot remember that, not that day, sleeping in the sunshine, the sound of the wind and the smell of honeysuckle and long grasses swishing gently as a broom on a wooden floor.
Later, she walks home with burnt shoulders, at peace.
It is the day her brain broke. She is walking across a green and a tractor appears to be circling around her; she is getting angry, she is muttering—what’s-your-fucking-problem! The tractor is cutting grass and spraying it out and the noise is so loud she is holding her ears.
Grey sky, no bench, vast expanse, walking to the bridge, baby is with Grandma, the doctors have tried, one tablet, another, none of them work, they make her feel as if she is on LSD. It is winning, the exhaustion, years of it. Her face registers nothing. She cannot watch what comes next. She cannot watch. She slips out of the pod and wishes she could close her eyes.
A vast expanse of grass and feeling her head actually break and if she panics (she was panicking) there will be nothing to grab for support, her legs may give way, she has to slow down, but the panic attack gains speed as she reaches an outdoor ladies’ toilet and realises that instead of being able to just run in and hide from the street (hyperventilate in peace, as she has learned to do, to cure the agoraphobia—evidently not a foolproof cure), what she is realising as she begins to hyperventilate outside the ugly, small building is that you need 30p, in change; then you have to pay the woman (whose back of head is curly haired and tabard is on, blue, checked, over a jumper, as it is cold), so instead she walks across the road and goes into a store where the lights glare and she realises that whatever has happened to her is not going to go away.
A million years of fight-or-flight giving her enough adrenaline to outrun a dinosaur and at the counter in the supermarket, it is only the girl who always has eyeliner on and braces on her teeth, the one she saw (and was surprised to see) in a sports car with a man. She is serving her and she is not a dinosaur, but her body does not understand the difference anymore.
While paying, she grips onto the credit card slot, types in 9765, puts her groceries into the bag, all the while wanting to run, screaming, from the store. When she walks out of there (still upright, nobody else any the wiser), she is convinced she is a national hero. A superhero. The overcomer (or accepter) of fear.
It is barely the beginning.
When the man with the black legs holds his hand out to her she notices there is a flower tucked behind his ear. She holds his hand. It feels warm. She wants to know where her grandma is. It’s the only thing she really looked forward to in coming here. Th
e man is writing a word in the sand. Love. The word he writes out is ‘love’. The effort tires him out, quite evidently and she feels ashamed that she wants him to explain this place to her, explain everything to her, but she doesn’t know who else to ask. He hobbles back on his swollen legs with their metal pins and she notices that his toes are mashed and short. She will not push him for answers even although he is the only one who will communicate with her; she must wait until he is stronger.
It’s a moon. It’s far away. Further away than our moon. Perhaps it is Venus’s or just some other moon (equally pretty). She is glad it is here and she is walking down the hill again and nobody seems to notice. The grass is cool under her bare feet, it is soothing to her and she needs this walk, this space; the part of her life she watched today is a part she’d forgotten and had not wanted to watch again and she will not think of it now, not even to herself; she will repeat the word ‘love’. Love. Love.
Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. The thing about words is they can alter the molecular compositions of things; this is most noticeable in water—a Japanese scientist said different words to a glass of water and depending on which words he said, the molecular components changed accordingly. ‘Love’ is the word she must say. It is not the first time she has had to retrain her brain—the areas of her brain dimmed in a scan, showing damage, unable to continue, needing respite, the lights going out from the inside.
Inside, out.
What she does when she wants to commit suicide: is dance. She picks a CD. It takes a while. She closes the curtains (light is not her friend), she hooks up her vintage amp and the two Marshall speakers that make up her stereo and she presses ‘play’. Everything in her is utterly unable to bear this pain, but she has no choice. There is no deadline. There is no out-date. There is no guarantee she will ever feel better and in fact she might only feel worse and to this—fact—she chooses to dance.
Her cats on the back of the tiny sofa, nose to nose, watch her as she stretches her arms up and shakes her hips and she might be crying, but she can still move!
She is leaning against her pod and so is the man with the black legs who, it turns out, is called Jim. He wrote it with his short toe. She wrote hers. They are sitting against their pods and it is starry and the breeze is cool, although she has never been cold here, not yet. They are watching two women a few pods along who are dancing with each other, a waltz; one lets her head fall back and the other expertly supports her waist and her body flips back up and they turn like that, the sand underneath their feet patterned with swirls, indents where heels have slammed into the ground, trails where feet have skimmed the sand that they all walk on. Later on, she sits on top of her pod and Jim sits on top of his and they are happy. Even later still, they go to get back in their pods but at the last minute she looks at Jim (who has been holding her hand for the last hour) and—they swap.
They swap pods.
She didn’t know they could do that.
It’s time to make a Christmas cake with her grandma. It will take three months. The first part is the most important part. She goes to the store with Grandma. They buy a bottle of gin, a bottle of some cherry stuff, some brandy. Fruit. Dried. Four bags. Home up the hill, past the stone square in the middle of the council estate that was built to be used as a paddling pool for the kids in the summer
—as a focal point, as a place where families might meet and picnic, but the water founts broke and it laid empty all her lifetime. She would jump in and out of it to play there, though. Take skipping ropes in and jump for hours. At Grandma’s, on the side path she once found a war-time coin and it was worth money and she got slapped for suggesting she could keep it (not by Grandma) and in the footage they are unpacking bags in her long, thin kitchen and there is a cupboard at the end that Grandma made into a larder. A radio plays and there is a table with a Formica top where they are laying out the fruit and alcohol and the glass bowl with curved edges at the top in the shapes of fruit and the glass ladles and Grandma is telling her about when she was in the Wrens in the war and they used to stand on that table (her girlfriends) and they would use teabags to stain their legs brown when they could not afford stockings, and then go out dancing. She always said that the wartime years were the best years of her life.
She wishes she were back next door in her pod watching that instead of Jim, who is walking through the city. He has stepped out of an office, he is upset, he has an engagement ring in his pocket and he is wearing a mack and when he gets to the bridge she wants to shout out and the cars just whizz by and it is windy and he walks along and there are boats. Further out there are platforms, small rigs, there is a tall ship in the distance with four white sails and his face, as he climbs over; she is crying now and she has her hand up against the screen, her fingers splayed out as he jumps and his coat billows like a balloon—it slows his fall by only a fraction of a fraction, but it is enough.
Impact.
Under water.
Pressure above like the earth itself is on top of her head, like she is Atlas, unable to bear the weight, like nothing she could possibly imagine and only the deepest, instant, most complete regret.
She cannot watch her funeral. She cannot see the faces of those she loves, she cannot see her child without experiencing a pain more unbearable than any she knew in life, Jim is outside her pod holding her foot and in the sand he has written the word—‘forgive’.
Jim doesn’t die; as he hits the water his leg bones break in 103 places, the coastguard boat drives by at that minute, fishes him out, a helicopter is called in, the noise of the whirrs as it lands, he is taken to a hospital and his lower body placed in a cast for three years.
How could he do it again?
Jim goes back to work. He has black legs. Nobody knows. He sits on buses. He goes to the swimming pool and makes himself stand at the edge holding onto the metal ladder until he stills and then he swims.
He swims free of the edge.
She cries as she watches it. They have swapped pods but she must go back to hers and she will, in a minute, but for now she watches his head dip under the water, his face rising up, his goggles, steamy around the edges, the echo of the pool, the glimpse of a beach outside the window. He looks happy.
They sit on top of the pods, holding hands. She knows he has watched the bits she can’t watch yet and he knows she has watched the unseen bits of his life and neither of them can walk down the hill yet. But in her head, every day, she is practising words that might positively alter the molecular composition of water.
ALISON LITTLEWOOD
The Entertainment Arrives
The professor drove slowly down the rainlashed promenade, passing sign after dispirited sign that marked the boarding houses still clinging to whatever sorry living this place could afford. Westingsea in early May, and the angry sky flung handfuls of rain at its houses and pavements and the battered old black Wolseley he drove, drowning out any other sound. He could see the sea, black and heaving to his right, shifting in as surly a fashion as it always did, but only the rain was listening to any murmur it made. He knew without looking that the belligerent clouds, fierce as he’d ever seen them, were indifferent to whatever lay beneath. Of humanity there was no sign, unless it was the mean slivers of light trying to escape the windows of the blank-faced, three storey properties along the front.
None of it mattered to the Professor. In fact, it was probably better this way; there was no one to see him arrive and no one to see him leave. He required no witnesses, no applause; there would be enough of that later. He knew where he was going and he knew what he would find when he got there, since it was always the same. The jaded, the worn out and the mad: that was who he had come for. Momentarily, he closed his eyes. After the strife, he thought, after the rain, the entertainment. He could almost smell their clothes, redolent of overboiled potatoes and their own unloved skin. He could almost feel the texture of it on his hands, and his fingers, resting on the steering wheel, twitched—th
ough sometimes it seemed to him that the car responded to his thoughts, or someone else’s, rather than his touch. He suddenly wanted to look over his shoulder at the things on the old and clawed back seat, but he didn’t need to look. He could feel them, as if their eyes were fixed on his shoulder blades, boring into him. Punch had woken, then. He must be nearly there; he saw the spark of irritation from a neon sign to his left, HO EL, it said, the T too spent to play its part any longer, and he spun the wheel, or it spun under his hands; he wasn’t sure which. The even movement of wheels on road gave way to the jolt and judder of potholes and the car drew to a halt facing a crumbling brick wall, drenched and rain-darkened. He stared at it. He still didn’t want to turn around, though he never eluded what he did; it was his—what? Duty? That seemed too mild a word, for duty could be shirked. It’s who he was. He was the entertainment, and he was here to entertain, and entertain he would. After the rain …
But for now the rain showed no sign of ceasing. It hammered on the roof and spat at the windows, and he switched off the engine and thus the wipers, and the deluge blurred the world entirely. He realised he hadn’t even looked for the name of the hotel, but he had no need to do so; it had called him here and he had answered, just as he always did, even when the day wasn’t special, as this one was.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 20