I am calm now, calm in the face of your blood. It trickles, slipping along the valley of your thigh and soaking into the sheet beneath.
Just a touch is all it should take, and I couldn’t cut deeper anyway, not for the promise of heaven itself. I put the leather cover back in place and slide the scalpel under my pillow. And all the time the blood flows, as I expected, as family tradition demands. The skin around the tiny cut puckers and rises up into thick ridges, bulging outwards, until cracks form that glow orange and expand to let out a lava, so bright that I think it might wake you. But no, you sleep on, and your skin peels back like leaves crisping in the heat. The lava fountains, bubbling up, and it does not fall back down. It elongates until it forms a pillar, standing free from your body, pulsing in time with your slow, even breaths.
Then it begins to change.
It twists and splits and curls, forming arcs and whorls, circles and swirls. It forms a flower; no, a creature. A creature of the sea, as fine and formless as a jellyfish, with too many tentacles to count. They sway, as if dancing in the deep. The lava turns from orange to red, yellow, white, and then it makes a sound. A song. Quiet harmonies, harp-like, reach out to a sweet clear note, and I know what I must do when that note is reached.
I wait. I listen, and when the moment is upon me I reach out and pluck the creation.
It is smooth and cold to the touch. It is glass.
The room returns to darkness. You have not changed. There is nothing different about you, apart from a small raised mark on your stomach, where the skin is no longer seamless. A scar. You might not even notice it’s there. Or that something inside you has gone for good.
* * *
My family’s sculptures have been exhibited all over the world. Irreplaceable, they are called. In a culture of manufactured precision, nobody can understand why the secret to the method of their creation cannot be unlocked. Each piece remains unique – a form never seen before, beyond any modern technique. The occasional journalist, a young man who wants to make his name, turns up on the doorstep and says, Your Grandfather really never passed the secret on? Before he—
They dress it up with some phrase that they have planned in advance. Passed is the word they choose most often, and I correct them. Killed himself. No. He never did.
This is not true. He told my mother when she turned thirteen as was the custom, and when I turned thirteen, she told me.
You must find someone who really loves you, she said. It doesn’t work without it. Because what you’re taking from them is a part of that love. You take it, extract it, and turn it into glass.
How come you never did it? I asked her. Did nobody love you enough? Children can be so cruel. The memory of myself at that age always interfered with my own desire to have children, until it was too late to try. I have not been the bravest person, looking back.
She didn’t answer my question. I filled in her half of the conversation years later, piecing her together from the unspoken clues. She had watched her father take love from her mother a tiny cut at a time, and perhaps one day there was nothing left to take. My grandmother died when my mother was sixteen; she would have known the secret by then. She would have seen what was happening. Heart problems, they said. While the world admired the glass woodland animals of my grandfather, so delicate, so perfect in form, my mother watched him take the credit.
No doubt he felt guilt; enough of it to open his veins and bleed out on the bathroom floor. How selfish to die without passing on his talents, they dared to say. I agree that he was selfish, but for different reasons. It raises the question – how much love can you take?
* * *
It’s the weekend, so you’re sleeping late. I sit on the end of the bed and hold my glass creature of the deep. I’ve looked through the pile of photographs in the spare room and come across one that sits next to me now. It was taken on the morning of my mother’s wedding. Nobody stands beside her; there was nobody to give her away.
Maybe she always suspected that my father didn’t love her quite enough to have any to spare. Although it occurs to me now that she might have tried it, just once. Imagine opening up your husband and finding nothing inside. No glow, no glass. Empty.
I am suddenly and completely aware of how much I love you.
I stay in the moment, guilty and grateful, until you shift and wake up. You have so many lines on your loose, unguarded face and your hair is sticking up, thick and resistant to the hand you run through it, and I love you, I love you. Do you love me just a little bit less?
“Did you dream?” I ask.
You cough, then say, “Hmm.”
“What about?”
You shrug. You choose to never remember your dreams. “How long have you been up?”
“Ages.” I show you the sculpture. My jellyfish. “I made this.”
I want to know if you will catch me out and recognise this came from you, not me. Can we see the parts of ourselves that we lose along the way?
“But I thought you didn’t know how.”
I’m prepared for this. “I was playing around with my grandfather’s old tools and I, I remembered something he said, taught me, when I was very little. I think it’s been buried inside me. For years. What do you think?”
You move down the bed, closer to me, and I can feel your senses sharpening, focusing on the creature. “It’s really beautiful. Is it a jellyfish?”
“I think so.”
“It’s amazing.”
Yes, yes it is. It is amazing, because it’s you.
* * *
It turns out I need at least five pieces to cause a decent stir. The agent is a young man who gets very excited when he sees the jellyfish. I tell him that’s all there is and ever will be, but he shakes his head and says that’s not the way the world works anymore. There must be more. And so I agree to try.
There are many ways I justify this, later on:
I have lived such a normal life, in the shadow of my family name, and don’t I deserve just a little success of my own?
I have been a good lover, so giving, so true. As if love is a bank, and after so many years of saving I deserve to make a withdrawal.
I am not hurting you. In fact, I am showing off your wonderful heart to the world.
I am the last of my family line. The gift will die with me; it would be a crime not to use it.
I tell myself all these things as I cut you four more times. How many times, before your love will be gone, all poured away into glass? I don’t know, but I do it anyway.
The creatures of the deep come forth. An urchin, every spike needle-thin and a swirl of colour at its heart like a shy surprise. A crustacean with rough-textured shell and furred claws; a delight to explore with the fingers. A seahorse with a jaunty angle to its segmented tail, its fins fine and splayed as if caught in a current. And a skeletal network of coral, blushing like a bride in shades of becoming pink, maze-like in its complexity.
Could I claim they are part of you and part of me? Maybe this is as close as I’ll get to having children. These creations are endlessly fascinating, and I spend hours alone with them, examining them, hoping I’ll work out what part of your love for me has been captured in the glass.
No, they are not children. The more I look at them, the more I realise they do not add something to my life. They take something away. And I feel such guilt; it manifests in dreams, in the form of my grandfather. I see him sitting on the bathroom floor, putting the scalpel to his right wrist and cutting down through the skin and veins, so deliberate, so determined. Then he searches through the spurting blood, pushing his fingers into the cut, but there is no sculpture within him.
I jerk awake, as if I have fallen from a height, and I put my hand out in a panic to check: you’re there. I can be calm. I am not my grandfather.
I have given you five scars: your stomach, your thigh, the back of your hand, your shoulder blade, and in the soft, deep place behind your earlobe. I won’t scar you again.
* * *
The auction is a success. We attend, incognito. How mysterious and, well, rich that sounds. Only wealthy people do things incognito, and we are certainly that.
When we get home, you are distracted. I see it in the way you talk to me, as if one of us is not quite there. You make a cup of tea and forget to ask me if I want one. We are such an old married couple that surely a bit of forgetfulness can be forgiven. But it terrifies me that this isn’t age taking its toll. Maybe I took the part that remembers me right. I don’t understand how I could have been so selfish. What have my sculptures proved? What have they changed?
The world is filled with more excitable young men, from many professions, and they all seem to have my phone number. I’m too polite to hang up, on the whole, but not so polite that I let them talk me into anything. So, I’m preparing my no without paying much attention to the latest young man, until I realise that he is talking about the past, not the future. He says my mother’s name.
Once his meaning gets through to me, I agree to come to his office.
The young man has the sculptures ready for me, on his desk. There are seven of them. He hovers beside them with a careful intimacy that both irritates and amuses me. He feels personally involved, no doubt.
“The instructions were not to inform you of their existence until you’d made your own sculptures,” he says. “Perhaps she didn’t want to influence you, do you think? These now belong to you, to do as you see fit, although we wouldn’t recommend transporting them without great care, of course, and we could arrange for a valuation to take place here…”
His voice runs on and on, and I let him talk.
They aren’t sea creatures. They are birds, and they are so beautiful that I find myself expecting them to sing. Wren, robin, swift, wagtail, bullfinch, kingfisher and hummingbird. So small, that hummingbird; I could crush it with a finger.
My father must have loved her after all. He must have loved her very much, right up until she took it all out of him and made these birds. I wonder if that was why he decided to leave and never look back. All his love is here, on this table, used up.
I make arrangements for the solicitor to take care of them for now, while I decide what to do with them, and I go home.
You seem pleased to see me.
* * *
I watch you sleep.
A thought has come to me and I can’t push it away. I understood nothing. I pieced together the puzzle and made something so ugly from it. I must wake you and change everything, but I let you sleep for a moment longer. We are not young anymore, are we? We are not beautiful; at least, not on the outside.
“Wake up,” I say. “Wake up.”
You come awake in a rush, and say, “What?” as if you were waiting for this, as if you were expecting something to be wrong.
“I need you to check me.”
“Check you? For what?”
“For scars.”
You don’t ask questions. You know me well enough to know I am serious, so you turn on the bedside light and help me to pull up my nightdress and you carefully feel your way over my body, your hands so familiar, so sure against my sagging skin. “They might be tiny,” I tell you. “Check everywhere.”
“Sshhh. I am.”
From my toes to my knees to my hips, you search. Under the low curves of my breasts, over the hard calluses of my soles, along the thick bow of my back. My neck, my chin, behind my ears.
Then in my hair, that was once brown and thick. Now it’s lighter, wispier; perhaps that’s why you find the scars that I have never noticed.
“Here,” you say, and I feel your fingers slide over such small puckerings. Seven of them, on the crown of my head.
What part of my love did she take out of me? What am I missing? I am not a complete person inside, and yet I feel love for her, I swear I do.
You ask me what the scars mean. I tell you. I describe how my family has perfected this unique talent and what it has meant. How my mother has done it to me, and how I have done it to you. I point out your own scars. I was right. You hadn’t noticed them.
“But I don’t feel different,” you say. You don’t seem angry.
“Me neither,” I say. How much love is there in one person? Perhaps some kinds of love don’t come with limits. Who is to say that it can be used up so easily? I am glad that my mother cut me and scarred me and made something from the way I felt. We created such wonderful birds together. Beyond the words she did not say and the stories she never told me, there is such truth.
I fetch the scalpel, and show it to you, and ask you to help me.
At first you are adamant: this is something you can’t do. But I reassure you by describing how we will make the very smallest of cuts. Barely more than a scratch. Besides, you know I’ll do this alone if you don’t help me.
You turn off the lamp. I think it will be easier that way, in the dark. I lie back and put the scalpel to my stomach. You wrap your hand around mine and hold it as steady as you can. But we both tremble.
We make the cut. It doesn’t hurt at all. Then we wait to see what kind of creature will emerge.
COMPEL
Day One
It’s a bizarre business, to feel grateful for an alien invasion. But it certainly gives meaning in a way few events can. It is change, change itself, change embodied, and there is a strong possibility it will change me. How exciting. I feel alive for the first time in decades.
I call them the compellers, not because that is their name but because nobody else will give one to them. The rest of humanity is mute on this matter; they are compelled to silence. They cannot speak of the arrival, or, apparently, write about it, if my newspaper and television is any indication of events. It surprises me that I can name them here, but maybe that is because I have been recording my thoughts for fifty-three years within my diaries and it is not the existence of the compellers that I place upon the page but my own construction of them. Possibly it takes fifty-three years of writing to recognise the difference.
It seems that this onanistic navel-gazing of an activity known as being a diarist might be good for something after all.
So, I will record the arrival of the compellers in full and I will name today – Day One. Look at the capitalisation! And the use of exclamation marks! I can’t remember the last time I used two exclamation marks in one journal entry. Yesterday’s entry reflected upon the nature of my ongoing battle with athlete’s foot; the punctuation involved reflected the nature of the complaint. Low, repetitive and tedious.
Compellers are worthy of extreme punctuation; I’m certain of that. The world contained behind the screen of mobile phones (that everyone was forever staring at on public transport; I never stooped to owning one myself) would be bristling with dots and squiggles if the compellers had not removed the ability to express oneself in such a manner. But this morning, as I walked to get my paper, nobody was staring at a phone. No interest whatsoever in the world of funny little faces and snapped moments. I can’t say I’m sad. Such a reductive form of expression would hardly be appropriate in the face of actual alien existence. And not just that, but alien existence upon each street corner, simply there, simply – there! How can one explain it? One can’t, of course. That’s the problem. Even I am compelled to silence upon this point.
I must be careful not to overdo the exclamation marks.
Here’s what I can record (words work for me – shimmying and squeezing around the block the compellers have somehow placed within my mind – I may be the only person on the planet who has this ability):
I first saw one upon stepping out of the house. It was at the bus stop. People were standing near it, staring, not talking. It wasn’t looking back at them. It wasn’t doing anything, but it was doing something. I have no idea what it was doing, but it was doing it.
I mustn’t give in to repetition.
It wasn’t big. It wasn’t small. It wasn’t clever or stupid by any definition I could apply. It didn’t remind me of a giant porcupin
e with the head of a bluebottle and it didn’t resemble a multicoloured gladiolus sprouting from a chrome toaster.
I walked past it. I saw another one, at the entrance to Milton Lane. A crowd had gathered nearby – businesspeople in their suits, many of them holding their bags and briefcases against their chests, arms wrapped tightly, as if they were a form of protection. A last form of protection? The final layer of normality, and their fear at it being stripped away! It was palpable. Unlike the compeller, which looked much the same as the first one, and yet not. It was not fat, this time. Also, it was not really thin. It was not pale and it did not contain a darkness. It could not be likened to the rotting corpse of a whale partially covered with a chequered tablecloth and it in no way brought to mind canvas espadrilles.
I saw three more before I reached the mini-market. I bought my paper from Mr Iannopolous and we had a brief conversation about the weather, while his eyes, his eyes, his eyes, I must stop, his eyes, his eyes.
For some reason I cannot write upon that subject.
Moving on, then.
The newspaper contained no report of the compellers and I found I was not surprised. I read it from cover to cover in the park. Well, I say from cover to cover; I read what had been printed. From page eight onwards there were large white spaces where stories should have been, but nobody had yet written them. It was as if the writers had given up on the whole idea and simply stayed silent instead.
So, I returned home, switched on the television and found the glamorous yet intent presenter of the news channel I favour sitting in her studio staring at the camera, her eyes fixed, her mouth opening and closing like that of a large fish. She swam speechlessly in her own vacillation for hours.
From the Neck Up and Other Stories Page 13