by Sophie Ward
A smallest flicker at the back of her eye. Tick. Tick. Tick. She shook her head, remembered she was not alone. But today was a good day. They all were. This was her party, the way she saw it. Every stage of life had a party, so she was throwing her own final festivities.
She wondered if she should have told Greg about the party, if it would have made visiting her any easier. She thought probably not, disconnected as he was from his own father’s death. There wasn’t any celebration in Illinois, as far as Rachel knew; Greg’s parents were not the partying kind. And maybe it was a little sacrilegious to spend your final days in frivolity. She hadn’t read much literature on the subject since receiving her last prognosis, but she doubted there were any books advising the dying to spend every day as if you had forever and almost nothing mattered.
Maybe she would have a look next time she went to the library. She was due another Hal outing soon and the library had become her favourite place. Not a particular library; they had worked their way through most of the East London public facilities and a few of the University collections using Eliza’s credentials. The small libraries at the end of residential streets were best but there weren’t so many of those left. The new centralised temples impressed her with their ambition; computer terminals nestled amongst last century’s Encyclopaedia Britannica. But the books themselves felt marginalized, a scenic backdrop for a coffee shop rather than the business at hand.
She tugged the sleeves of her jumper over her wrists and eyed her feet. Only a pair of socks between her and the tile floor and the pads of her toes were numb. She grabbed a glass and a clutch of pill bottles and headed upstairs.
The old hardback that rested on top of the pile by her bedside had two postcards stuck between the pages. One to keep her place, and one that she had taken to putting at the front of every book she read. Rachel picked up the book and removed the first card. The illustration was of a child in the style of Kate Greenaway. A Victorian girl in a long skirt and boots stood at an imposing front door. The colours were faded by time but the redness of the girl’s bonnet perched above wild brown curls still contrasted with the grey formality of the house and the upright figure in the fawn dress. The reverse side of the card bore her mother’s copperplate handwriting. Dearest Rachel, Every day I listen for your key in the door to see my ray of sunshine.
The card had been found in a box the last time her parents had moved.
‘Do you want any of this stuff?’ Rachel’s mother had dismissed the contents of the Devon house with a jerk of her chin and a sniff. ‘It’s ruined by damp. This house tried to kill us all.’
Rachel had taken a battered suitcase of letters and a rocking chair. The books and records and rugs and curtains were spotted with mildew. Her father had lit a bonfire and thrown everything he could on it. When a neighbour came over, he helped drag a mattress down the stairs to lay it on top of the smouldering books and clothes. The two men stood in front of the fire and waited until the mattress was a pile of metal coils.
‘Your father’s a pyromaniac,’ said Rachel’s mother, ‘like his father before him. It’s all about control.’
Rachel watched from the sitting room where her mother was directing the packing.
‘Are there any mental health issues our family may have missed?’
Rachel’s mother looked at her daughter for a moment. ‘It’s not all about you, Rachel.’
Her parents moved from south-west England to the north-east coast of Brazil and found a different kind of damp; festering and hot. Her father continued to paint and her mother apparently studied capoeira and smoked pot in street cafés. They kept in touch with their daughter through email and sent her links to articles about herbal cures when she became ill. Rachel tried to call them but only her mother owned a phone and she never answered, or never picked up when Rachel rang. Perhaps she spoke to everyone else, Rachel thought as she pressed the redial button on her mobile once again. People who weren’t dying, or not so imminently. Her mother was rather a good amateur nurse but she had never liked the hopeless cases. ‘I know it’s awful, darling, but I can’t see the point if they’re going to die anyway.’ It was five o’clock in the morning in Fortaleza. After six rings, Rachel hung up.
She took the book across the hall and ran a bath. She peeled off the layers of clothes and for party spirit poured quantities of rosemary oil into the hot water but when she lay back in the tub and opened her book she could still catch the traces of mould from her mother’s postcard through the scented steam. She checked the stamp on the card again. The date was blurred but that didn’t matter, the oddness was the presence of a postmark at all. Why had her mother written a card that said she was waiting for Rachel to come home when it was Rachel’s mother who had been away? It was the sort of double bind she had often been placed in by her mother; a compliment laced with accusation.
‘You’re always happy, aren’t you, Rachel?’
As though Rachel’s happiness, like her absence from whatever front door Rachel’s mother was living behind, was a deliberate offence.
Rachel tucked the card away and opened the book. She was working her way through the libraries’ Victorian novels, as a present to herself. She had read some Trollope in her teens and promised herself that one day ‘when I have time’ she would return to him, and now, having exhausted Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, the Brontës and her English teacher’s favourite, George Meredith, she found she both had and did not have the time. That was the thing about dying, the micro and the macro of it. Slowing down so that a whole lifetime seemed available in a day while all the while, the very finite amount of life she had left was running through the hourglass as fast as water. The telescopic sensation of giant tiny moments reminded her of lying on the grass as a child and feeling the vastness of the sky on top of her, her fingers and toes stinging with life and energy as though her small body were being watched from above, and parts of her loomed as large as the universe itself.
The book was heavy in her hands and she tilted sideways to rest it on the lip of the bath, wiping the water droplets from the vinyl cover with her forearm. She admired the heroine’s white satin dress, still glowing through the textured plastic. Eliza said she didn’t understand Rachel’s interest in Victorian novels. Reading for Eliza meant work, though it seemed to give her pleasure. She read the latest articles and journals, in an attempt to keep on top of scientific developments and claimed the stories that absorbed Rachel were desperate cries of help from the chained audience of Plato’s cave, forced to interpret the world from the shadows on the wall.
‘We don’t need fairy tales.’
Rachel had laughed. ‘Every time you say that an angel loses its wings.’
‘You’re confusing Christianity with pantomime,’ Eliza said.
She had relented a little though, Rachel thought, since the trip to Paris for Arthur’s birthday. There had been a moment at the theme park. Rachel put her hand to her face and stroked the bump of her brow. Eliza had seen, she was sure of it. And how could you not believe in fairies when your own wife had a spirit living in her head? They had spoken of it, that night, when Arthur was asleep and they sat on the balcony overlooking the mouse-ear flowerbeds.
‘Is it there now?’ Eliza’s frown had extended to her eyes. Scraps of kohl gathered in the creases under her lashes. ‘Can you feel it?’
‘Not how you imagine. It’s there all the time, the way your nose is, or your tongue. I don’t feel it as something extra. Unless I focus.’
But they didn’t name it.
Rachel stared at the typeface in front of her and frowned. The words were indistinct. She closed her eyes and pushed the book a little further away. She didn’t need glasses to read. She corrected herself; she hadn’t needed glasses to read. The tumour had brought changes, of course, all the time. Balance, memory, sensation had been affected at different times. The radiation replaced the symptoms with side effects. Her toes curled at the memory of the mask, the sickness and the exhaustion. But at no poin
t so far had her sight deteriorated.
She opened her eyes. The print in front of her was another language. She could make out the individual letters but the grouping meant nothing and as she watched the words, the edges of the typeface became coarse and the ink bled into the paper. Lines spidered across the pages and disappeared into the crease. Rachel shut the book and squeezed the covers together, compressing the words, the ideas, all the life between the pages. All the death beyond. Was there more to understand once she crossed that threshold? Would the stories, her story, come with her? Or was it all to be left behind, a book for someone else to read after all? She could feel a small pulse at the edge of her temple. The ant was there.
On her last visit to her parents, in the time between her recovery and her relapse, Rachel had seen a dead horse lying by the side of the road on their way back from the beach. Vultures stood around politely as though waiting their turn at a delicatessen. When she drove past the next day, the carcass was almost picked clean, the jutting bones waving lean ribbons of flesh in the ocean breeze.
‘Not a scratch that doesn’t have an animal feeding off it soon enough,’ Rachel’s father had said. ‘Keep your shoes on.’
After that she had thought differently about her visitor. Instead of causing her tumour, perhaps the creature had been drawn by the scent of her decay, was ready to feed off her sickness. She advanced the theory to Eliza on her return.
‘Symbiosis?’ Eliza said.
‘Think of all the bugs we already have living on us and in us.’
‘Microscopic bacteria and mites.’
Rachel nodded. ‘So it’s a question of scale.’
‘It’s a question of scale that stops you walking through walls.’
Eliza had not yet looked in Rachel’s eye at the park and seen the ant for herself.
‘Not everything that happens is about reproducible laboratory experiments.’ Rachel threw a handful of vitamins into her mouth and swallowed hard. ‘We have autonomy. We have miracles.’
‘Do we?’ Eliza turned away.
When the cancer came back, Eliza didn’t mention the theory and Rachel was grateful. Still, she clung to the idea that the ant might in some way have helped her condition. Perhaps because she could not separate the arrival of the ant and of Arthur, so entwined were the events in her mind.
She sat up in the bath and pulled the book to her chest, wrapping her arms around her folded knees. The ant had crawled in to her eye one night and changed her life. The first changes were with Eliza, whom she had loved for years but who had moved into her life one piece at a time and kept some of the pieces back. After the ant, Eliza was present in a way that Rachel had almost given up hope of expecting. It was Eliza who’d had taken the initiative and bought an ovulation test and it was Eliza who followed up the conversation they had started with Hal some months before. With Eliza on her side, Rachel had gone through with the IUI, and conceived on her second cycle. And along came Arthur.
The pulsing in her temple had quietened. She ran the hot water, book in one hand, and waited for the bath to warm up before she released her grip and looked back at the disruptive page. The words were recognisable, the ink intact. She took a deep breath. She was still at the party. She lay down and let her head drift back into the cocoon of the bath.
Eliza told her it was impossible for an ant to get into your brain through your eye and she soon stopped talking about that night altogether. Rachel knew Eliza minded because she couldn’t believe in the impossible whereas Rachel thought the impossible happened all the time. Even the way she had met Eliza as the flower shop was closing at the end of a Friday and only the sprays for the next day’s weddings ready in the fridge and Rachel still at work because she had been late that morning so stayed on to make up the hours and Eliza turning back to look at her from the glass door of the fridge and asking for just one of the wedding table decorations for her friend Hal’s birthday breakfast table and Rachel thinking Well, why not just one? I could make up another if I came in first thing or went to market to get them myself. And saying that out loud and Eliza saying, What market?
All of those events lined up in such a way that Rachel and Eliza had gone to the market together the following week and had coffee, which led to lunch. Whenever Rachel thought about how many obstacles had been overcome to bring the two of them together, she knew she believed in the impossible. Even in the back of a flower shop on an ordinary Friday in Dalston.
She didn’t press Eliza about the ant. She went to the doctor and she bathed her eye and she made sure Eliza knew how happy she was that Eliza had gone ahead with the plans for their baby. All she needed to know was that Eliza trusted her; the rest, Rachel understood, would follow.
Over the years she had tried to communicate with the ant. They were a partnership of sorts, the ant and she. Rachel second-guessing the motivation for certain movements, a scurrying or scratching. Wanting to understand the pattern, wondering what the ant was trying to say. When she had told Eliza that she couldn’t feel the ant she was telling the truth, except for those very particular sensations. The stiller she was, the more aware of the ant she became, not simply quiet in her body but in her mind. The moments before, and after, sleep or sex. When she cooked or when she sat with Arthur, stroking his toes while they chatted about his day. The ant would be there. Tick. Tick. Tick. The bath was the perfect communal moment, just as when she was pregnant Arthur had seized the opportunity to get comfortable and Rachel would find a small foot protruding from her ribs or, in the final months, watch her entire stomach heave from one side to the other.
She had wondered during the pregnancy if the ant would leave her when she gave birth, and in the several weeks she took to settle in at home with the new baby, to learn to feed and comfort him and to understand the implications of having the baby outside her body instead of inside, the ant was silent. On the day the ticking started again, she was lying in bed with a sleeping Arthur propped up against her breast, his head in the crook of her arm. In her free hand she clutched a copy of Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a book she alternately snarled at and wept into. At that moment she was making a mental note to get to a library and borrow every book Cusk mentioned (she had never read any Olivia Manning for instance) when the familiar rubber-band tension of electricity tore across her scalp. Her hand flew up to the miniature metronome buried in her head. Tick. Tick. Tick.
In the bath, her hair floated in fine tendrils round her face, the fight of her former unruly curls long lost. Her heartbeat was quickening, knocking at her chest in sudden bursts. This day, this moment, was connected to those other days. The first time she kissed Eliza, under the glow of an orange street light, pressed up to her parked car, the almond scent of Eliza’s breath as their lips touched. The slip of Arthur’s shoulders between her thighs as he dived into the world. The burn of the ant slicing into her tear duct.
She thought of the night she had first seen the tiny column of insects marching in single file up the wall from the skirting board in the corner of their bedroom in the flat they shared. And of the peppermint oil Eliza had bought as a deterrent but never put down because that night the ant had found her and while she was sleeping crawled into her eye. The bite ripped into her dream and when she woke she couldn’t distinguish between the story in her sleep and the real event, so that for several moments she lay panting and frightened, her hand over her eye, convinced that she was hurt.
She sat up at the memory, splashing bath water on to the floor, almost losing her grip on the book. The force of her heart against her narrow ribcage shook her arms as she tried to steady herself. She was back in the dream. A shadow cast across a sunny day. A figure crouched over her. Eliza’s voice in the distance instructing her to stay still. She held her breath. The bite would come next, the nip of acid at the membrane and the explosion of pain from her eye to her entire head. Hunched in the tepid water, she squeezed her eyes shut and waited. In that moment, with her whole body tensed against the ant, she saw the figu
re again.
She couldn’t see his face. A man in dark clothes, a shabby figure but distinguished in some way. A hat, a tie. He swayed over her as she lay on the dream grass, the sun behind his head, his mouth opening and closing. Words she didn’t recognise, another language in a lilting, patterned tone, a poem or an incantation. His features hidden from the light. She had to see him. The ant was coming; she could feel the start of the pain. She had to open her eyes to see who was there. She flicked a look up at the sun, at the figure, and the man looked down at her. She saw his face and knew him for the first time. Her own dark eyes set in the man’s rough olive skin returned her stare. With a shiver that shook her whole body she sat straight up.
She was cold now, the water cooler than her blood. She pulled the bath plug, reached for the hot tap and shifted in the tub to let the new water circulate. She had seen his stooped body, his shabby suit. And she saw herself reflected in his eyes, the saddest eyes in the world. The saddest eyes in the world at the happiest place on earth. Eliza had teased her. That was where she had seen him. He had been at the theme park on the same ride as her wife and son. Eliza and Arthur had boarded a giant blue teacup and across from them, in a green cup, was the man in his dark suit. Rachel had watched as the ride started and the cups whirled around, Arthur’s body an exclamation of delight at the wheel, Eliza anxious and preoccupied beside him. From his cup, the dark-suited man gazed into the distance as though re-living a car crash for the hundredth time. A look of horror muted by experience. Rachel had turned away to catch her breath. Tick. Tick. Tick.
She felt the pull of her weight in the bath as the water drained away and she bent forward to replace the plug. The book in her hand was damp, the pages curling. She would have to pay the library. She turned the hot water up higher. Her skin was numb.