Come Let Us Sing Anyway

by Leone Ross

  When he came back he kissed me, and I bit a chunk out of his tongue. He sat on the floor with blood coming out of his mouth. I stepped on his right hand and twisted my high heel. I kicked him in the face. I grabbed his testicles and squeezed. He grunted softly, and tears poured down his face.

  But his eyes were different.

  It was never the same after that; I really see that now. But I kept on beating him anyway. I broke his jaw with a rolling pin when he was late for dinner. I poured hot oats across his bare arms at breakfast. And still, his eyes were different. There was a kind of peace there. A kind of contentment. Hagar’s belly swelled. I’d let him have his way; I never should have done it.

  And now I couldn’t hurt him any more.

  I tried to get a little bit of joy. In the supermarket a baby was crying too damned much and his mother was looking away, so I put my nails down his plump back, and watched his stupid mother’s face crumpling when she heard his wail go up a notch. I found a dead bird full of dancing maggots in my neighbour’s garden, and sat watching them until she called me in for brunch. I drove down the street and shrieked my brakes across a dog’s back, got out of the car, ran up to the owner splayed out on his knees in front of his dog’s hopping, dying body: ‘Oh my god, I am so sorry, I didn’t see it in time.’

  Then you arrived, like a jack in the box, on my doorstep. I didn’t want to open the door – I was watching old horror movies, winding, rewinding on faces, jagged, broken open, distended cheekbones, pupils dilating, brown ones and green ones and blues ones. But you kept knocking. How did you know I was special?

  *

  I didn’t think it would be so pretty here. It looks like a summer cottage for rich people. I feel like I’m home; I felt that from the minute we arrived. It was raining, but we didn’t care. Me and Zak parked, and then walked up the trail. He was holding my hand and skipping, and I had to trot to keep up with him. The air was fresh and I thought, I’ve done it, I’ve done it. Zak said: ‘Mamma, we drove hundreds and thousands and trillions of miles!’ and I said, ‘Hundreds and thousands and trillions,’ and he said, ‘Like through space in a time ship!’ and I laughed and said, ‘Yes, like through time in a space ship!’ And he said, ‘You smilin’!’ like it was a miracle. Then he let go of my hand and ran through the rain up to the gate. He was like a jewel under the clouds; I could see that underneath his baby fat there was this whole promise of change, and I thought it would be majestic to watch, but it would take too long.

  Zak ran up to Brian immediately. I’m not surprised he chose Brian, from all of the men here. Brian is good with children, and Zak must have known that; he was tending the big fire out back, and I could smell the sweet meat on the barbecue, and I realised I was hungry. Zak stared at the fire.

  ‘Yay, fire!’ he said.

  ‘Yay, fire!’ I said.

  Brian knew our names. Well, of course you told him. Zak was hopping up and down on one foot. He asked Brian whose fire it was, and Brian told him it was everyone’s fire. And Zak, well, you know how kids are, he said, could it be his fire, and Brian just smiled at him and said of course it could.

  *

  I set my sweet sixteen birthday on fire. I watched parents grab their kids as the tablecloth went up and the pretty candles melted and sweltered in the heat, and I broke my ankle chain off and put my fist through the cake.

  *

  I didn’t know I was crying until you came to my door and wiped my face.

  *

  Daddy gave me a kitten after he’d cleared away the black cake and the shocked kids. It was grey and white, with a little white moustache and silver socks. Daddy insisted I sleep with it in my bed. He took a picture of it in my arms, after he put a bell on the baby-blue collar around its neck. I liked the cat. I liked the sounds it made. I think I was getting tired of fighting my father to see me, not this idea in his head. I think that if not for that kitten I’d be a good little girl today. Pink nails, high heels, all pretty with my husband.

  When I woke up the kitten was warm, but it was very still. It was an accident, I swear. A wonderful accident. I tiptoed into the garden and hid it by the back gate, feeling how heavy and floppy it was.

  Daddy didn’t notice it was gone.

  Two days later I went back to see the body. I put a finger on the fur and jumped back. It was hard, like rocks. Its belly was swollen, and its tongue was black. I sat back on my heels and tried to remember what it felt like when it was alive. I pressed a finger into the belly. It made a ssss sound and there was a bad smell. Once it was alive and now it was dead. I was so excited. Did you feel that way the first time? Sure you did; makes you laugh to remember, doesn’t it?

  Remember when we were innocent?

  *

  Women bring style to the task. We make it personal. Who did you do? Your boss? That’s hilarious. What was he like? Big condescending asshole, huh? Yeah, I know the type. Walking around you in the office, not seeing who you are, or your power, not seeing all you could do. You mean you carted him all the way down here? Wait, I know how you did it: he thought he was getting some sex, right?

  What did you use? A candelabra? That’s so funny.

  Did it take a long time?

  You can tell me.

  Your brochures made me really nervous. History has shown a domestic tendency in women. Female members should make all necessary efforts to take their projects out of the home. The craft should be more than a cottage industry. It made me worry my entry presentation wasn’t going to be enough, even after I’d come all this way. I felt like an amateur. But you made me feel better, you gave me confidence, said the problem was that women brought husbands all the time.

  I’m just checking again: Zak was fine at entry level, but I’m going to have to look elsewhere quickly, right? You don’t have kids, do you? No. So I guess you didn’t have the option. Would you have taken it? No? Wow. So, I’m the first?

  Yesterday I heard Brian humming the song Zak taught him. Remember them singing together that first day? Zak was singing loud, in his baby voice, and Brian was trailing along behind.

  ‘Father Abr’am had many sons…’

  ‘…had many sons…’

  ‘And many sons had Father Abr’am…’

  ‘…Father Abraham…’

  ‘And I am one of them, and so are you…’

  ‘…so are you…’

  ‘So let’s jus’ praise the Lord, right han’, left han’…’

  ‘Right foot, left foot…’

  Right before I did it I thought of the kitten. Its body blowing up, then shrinking, flesh to bones, the sinew toughening and the fur flaking to the earth and the black blood. I thought of my father’s face when he found me with it, the honest horror, the slow realisation as he looked down at the guts on my hands and my face. I tried to hug him, I was so happy. I mean, finally. He saw me, he saw me.

  I wanted to use my hands. There is joy in that. Flesh on flesh. I leaned down to him, close as a whisper. And he said, ‘Whatcha doin’, Mamma?’ and I said, ‘This is the adventure, baby,’ and the fear in his eyes filled the whole world.

  I went up to look at him yesterday. He’s under the moon and the stars. Getting on nicely. He’s still swelling. I think about it at night, his body changing. Crumbling and darkening. I’m going to put him on the fire when the time is right.

  When can I do the next one?

  THE MULLERIAN EMINENCE

  The Müllerian ducts end in an epithelial [membranous tissue] elevation, [called] the Müllerian eminence… in the male [foetus] the Müllerian ducts atrophy, but traces … are represented by the testes… In the female [foetus] the Müllerian ducts… undergo further development. The portions which lie in the genital core fuse to form the uterus and vagina… The hymen represents the remains of the Müllerian eminence.

  In adult women, the Müllerian eminence has no function.

  — Anatomy of the Human Body, Henry Gray, 1918

  Charu Deol lived in the large cold city for five months
and four days before he found the hymen, wedged between a wall and a filing cabinet in the small law office where he cleaned on Thursday nights. The building was an old government-protected church, but the local people only worshipped on the weekend, so the rector rented out the empty rooms. If Charu Deol had been a half-inch to the right, he might have missed the hymen, but the dying sunshine coming through the stained-glass window in streams of red, blue and green illuminated the corner where it lay.

  Charu Deol thought it strange that a building could be protected. There were people playing music on the trains for money and two nights ago he’d seen a man wailing for cold in the street. He thought the government of such a fine, big city might make sure people were protected first.

  Still, he’d known several buildings that acted like people, including his father’s summer house, with its white walls and sweating ceiling and its tendency to dance and creak when his parents argued. They’d argued a great deal, mostly because his mother worked there as a maid and complained that the walls were conspiring with his father’s wife. Charu Deol was also aware of a certain nihilism in the character of the room where he now lived – the eaves and floor crumbling at an ever-increasing and truculent rate. When he ate the reheated kebab with curry sauce his landlady left him in the evenings before work, he could hear the room complaining loudly.

  The hymen didn’t look anything like the small and fleshy curtain he might have imagined, not that he had ever thought about such a thing. At first, it didn’t occur to Charu Deol that he’d found a sample of that much-prized remnant of gestational development, the existence – or lack thereof – which had caused so much pain and misery for millennia. He hardly knew what a hymen was, having only ever laid down with one woman in his life: the supple fifty-something maid who worked for his mother.

  Away from his father’s summer house, his mother had her own maid, because what else did you work for, after all? The maid had offered warm and sausagey arms, the sweet breath of a much younger woman, and a kind of delighted amusement at his nakedness. After he’d expelled himself inside her – something that took longer than he’d foreseen, distracted as he was by the impending return of his mother – she’d not let him up, but gripped his buttocks in her hands, pressing her entire pelvis into him and pistoning her hips with great purpose and breathlessness.

  He was left quite sore and with the discouraging suspicion that she’d used him as one might a firm cushion, the curved end of a table, the water jetting out of a spigot, or any other thing that facilitated frottage. Afterwards, she treated him exactly as before: as if he was a vase she had to clean under and never quite found a place for.

  He used the side of his broom to pull the soft, tiny crescent-shaped thing toward him, then, bent double, he touched the hymen with his forefinger.

  First, he realised it was a hymen. Next, that the hymen had lived inside a twenty-seven-year-old woman, for twenty-seven years. When she was twenty-four, her boyfriend returned home, bad tempered from a quarrel with his boss. When she asked him what was wrong one too many times, the boyfriend – who prior to that moment had washed dishes and protected her from the rain and gone with her to see band concerts and helped her home when she was drunk and collapsed laughing with her on the sofa – grabbed her arm and squeezed it as tight as he could, causing a sharp pain in her shoulder and her heart. When she said, ‘You’re hurting me’, like the women in movies and books, he squeezed all the tighter and looked happy doing of it, and the little flesh crescent inside her slid through her labia and down the leg of her jeans and onto their kitchen floor. The boyfriend swept it up the next day. The bin bag burst in the apartment rubbish dispenser; the hymen got stuck to the edge of someone’s yellow skirts and, helter-skelter, this little pink crescent was pulled along the cold and windy city streets.

  Now it was gently pulsating in Charu Deol’s horrified hand.

  The knowledge inside the hymen did not manifest in good and tidy order, like a narrative on a TV screen. It was more, thought Charu Deol, like being a djinn or a soul snake, slipping inside the twenty-seven-year-old woman’s skin and looking out through her eyes. He had the discomforting feeling that her body was a bad fit, and stifling, like a hot-water bottle around his thinner, browner self, baggy at the elbows and around the nose. He knew the woman was still with her boyfriend, and that she thought about what she’d do if he ever squeezed her arm again. Charu Deol knew they pretended that the arm squeeze and the not-stopping was a nothing, or a small thing, instead of the cruel thing it was, and that the hair on her arm where the boyfriend gripped her was like a singed patch of grass that never grew again.

  Charu Deol sat down on the floor of the law-office church and saw that his hands were shaking. The hymen felt like thin silk between his fingers. What was he to do with it? To discard it was like throwing out a prayer book or a sacred chalice. Before he knew what he was doing, he took a new dusting cloth from his cart, carefully wrapped it around the hymen and placed it in his pocket.

  *

  When he got home, he stole a small, plastic bag from his landlady’s kitchen – the kind she packed with naan and Worcestershire sauce and tied up with a plastic-covered piece of wire for work. She would be angry when she discovered his theft, so he left a pound coin on the floor, to the left of the refrigerator, as if he’d dropped it.

  She’d put the coin in her pocket without asking if it belonged to him.

  Alone in his room, he unwrapped the tiny, silken, throbbing thing and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He was assaulted with the woman’s story again: the squeeze, the disbelief, the lurking, tiny fear. This was why, when the boyfriend slapped the backs of friends or laughed too loud, a small part of the twenty-seven-year-old woman winced and moved away.

  Charu Deol placed the hymen inside the plastic bag and sealed it, setting it on the nightstand where he could see it.

  He was a witness, and that was important.

  He couldn’t sleep, conscious of the lumpy mattress, the large cupboard that took up most of his box room, the smell of the thin blue blankets his landlady stole from the old people’s home where she worked. ‘No one wants them,’ she said, ‘no one has any use for them.’ He didn’t know why she stole them; all she did was stack them in the cupboard.

  He thought of his father, a man who had never held him or as far as he knew, been proud of him at all.

  He got up and slipped the plastic bag in between the ninth and tenth blue blanket. Before he did so, he examined it one more time. In the dim light, the hymen looked like a beautiful eye: brown and dark and soft and wet, its worn edges like eyelashes, an expression he couldn’t fathom at its centre.

  *

  Charu Deol took long walks. That was what big city people did. He went to a small and well-manicured park during the hours he should have been sleeping. He bent his head near the small park pond and dipped his long cracked toes in the water until someone stared and he realised he was up to his ankles at the cold, dank lip. He watched a man teach his two girls cricket with a tennis racket. He watched an orange-helmeted man run down the path, holding his son’s scooter, laughing and calling, ‘Use your brakes!’ He thought about city people soaking in baths and whether they noticed the scum floating to the surface like bad tea, and about the landlady asking him if he’d like her bath water after she got out and how he’d stammered, ‘No thank you.’

  ‘That’s the way you do it here,’ she said, and her face reminded him of his mother’s when his father’s wife went out to get sweet biscuits at the end of a meal.

  A woman walked past with a shrill voice and a plaid shirt and a friend eating grapes, while he dried his cold feet on the grass. When they were gone, he saw the small, iridescent thing by his big toe and wanted to ignore it, or to decide it was a lost earring. He closed his eyes. But he could not leave it there, forsaking his new knowledge, as if he had no responsibility.

  Charu Deol lay on the grass, curled around the hymen, and played nudge-chase with it, like a c
at with half-dead prey, snatching at the air above it, using his thin sleeve to push it around under the soft edges of the setting sun. The shrill-voiced woman’s hymen was not as soft or simple as the brown eye that lay between the ninth and tenth blue blankets in his room. This one was round, with seven holes in its centre, reminding him of the way thin, raw bread-dough broke when you dragged it across a hot stove; but he’d never seen dough encrusted with stars. This hymen glittered so ferociously against the wet grass, he thought it might leave him and soar into the sky where it belonged.

  He touched it, expecting it to burn him.

  The woman with the shrill voice had been raped twice before her tenth birthday, each time by her father, who smelled expensive then, and still did now. It was not the pain the woman remembered, but the shuddering of her father’s body and the way he closed his eyes, as if he could see the burning face of God. She had never had an orgasm because she couldn’t bear that same shuddering inside of her; if it broke free, it might kill all the flowers that ever were. Charu Deol knew all this and also that the shrill-voiced woman sometimes wondered: Why no more than twice? Was it because her father had stopped loving her?

  Charu Deol shivered on the grass. After a while, he picked up the silver-star hymen and put it into the plastic bag in his coat pocket because part of him had known another would come. He watched the geese until a park attendant nudged him with a broom.

  ‘What’s up, chappie,’ he said. He was an older man, with the dark chin of an uncle.

  ‘What do you do when evil comes?’ asked Charu Deol.

  The attendant took out a pack of mentholated cigarettes. He sat down next to Charu Deol and smoked two cigarettes and watched the geese. ‘I don’t know,’ said the park attendant. ‘But I think you have to be rational and careful about these things.’

  Charu Deol took the plastic bag out of his coat pocket and showed it to him.