Asylum Road

by Olivia Sudjic

  He knew I had no phone so I assumed he would not be late. At the appointed time, I stood waiting in the street.

  He came out unhurriedly at last, wearing his suit. Looking more like a stranger than he usually did. It was more pronounced, maybe, in this world where I did not belong.

  He directed us eastward and bought vegetarian gyoza for us both from a street food market. My stomach was tight as a ball.

  He led me into a small park inside a square I’d never seen before. I remember the light gliding through the mulberry trees, down to where their bellies crept along the ground.

  I watched as he tried his first real sentence. This took a long time. I formed what was supposed to be an expression of encouragement. A lack of reproach. Inside, the cold fire burned my chest.

  At last I prompted him, so is this over? and he just sat there in silence again, before finally saying I guess – despondently, as if it was all my idea.

  I sat for several moments, looking into the distance. Then, before I could stop myself, blurted out is there someone else? and he looked angry, as if I should know the answer to such a vulgar question, when I had no idea, any longer, what I knew.

  What did he say?

  That he has some stuff to work out.

  He wants you to give him space?

  Yes. That’s all it is. I think he needs space to think.

  In response Christopher emailed a link to a story about a lovesick Chinese woman who’d spent a week in KFC because she needed time to think.

  Christopher invented the game What Can Anya Eat? The answer was usually one small plate of cucumber, thinly shaved.

  He brought things to me for the first few days, then insisted I come to the kitchen, like a stray he was patiently rehoming. The game was satisfying, he said. It was satisfying for me too, to feel myself wasting away.

  When he insisted I accompany him to the supermarket to guide him, everything on the shelves seemed useless, as if it was only packaging. I could not imagine what purpose any of it served.

  Most nights I lay awake on the sofa reading old emails, comparing them to happier ones, putting words into the search box, as if this was a problem I could solve with research. When I did sleep, I felt as if I was still aware of everything, like the dolphins from the documentary Christopher and I had watched. They slept one brain hemisphere at a time, allowing them to swim continuously. I didn’t dream, I just lay there in wait until the birds started up, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. When I woke, before I even remembered, there was already something pinning me down, a weight on my chest. It felt like waking inside a corpse. If I started awake in the middle of the night, I would imagine I was next to him as he whimpered. His shoulder would shine in the darkness and I’d say soothing things, tell him where he was. Wait for him to understand. Sometimes I groped for him in the empty space. My second thought on waking was that the day would end the same.

  After several weeks I wanted to move. Not far from the sofa but in small circles around the room – joints swollen, head too light on my neck. My arms felt weightless, as if I’d just put down two heavy bags. This lightness sickened me, but I also felt disgusted by the more substantial parts, the way my thighs touched as I walked.

  Soon I ventured up and down the street and to the nearest park. I felt myself to be allergic to strange bodies which were, and then were not, him.

  I watched a skein of geese pass over me. There was, the formation seemed to say, safety in numbers, safer than within a single pair.

  I thought of him out with his friends while I took my lonely weekend walks. Imagining the complaints he would have made about me, the assembled men revolted by my flagrant needs.

  Out of nowhere, I began to run. No one was chasing me, I just felt myself speed up. It gave me a brief feeling of control, of self-direction.

  December came with no word from him. Though I barely left the house except to exercise, I’d inched closer to the borrowing limit on my credit card. Christopher tried to make me come to gatherings, which I knew really meant drug-fuelled parties with hundreds of people. I said I couldn’t bear the idea of strangers, when I really meant the smell. There were new proportions to smell now, I noticed. Sometimes I caught a sweet smell of rot when I was alone in my makeshift room, its origin unclear.

  How much sooner I might’ve realised if I hadn’t been used to near-permanent nausea.

  At first, when it had been too long since my last period, I put the absence down to the Dubrovnik Escapelle. To the upheaval. The shock. Over-exercise. Near starvation. Then one afternoon I gave in and bought a pregnancy test.

  As I waited on Christopher’s bathroom floor, I studied myself in the mirror for the first time in weeks. I had muscles everywhere. Hollow cheeks. Rough, red patches on my palms. More blue veins in my wrists. The test turned positive. I stood rooted, the slight weight of it in my hand, wishing that every time I’d had a fearful instinct to confirm, I could have peed on a stick.

  Until I’d quit, the plan had always been to finish the PhD before considering a family, except at certain points when I’d thought it would be easier to have a child. Luke was ambivalent too, for environmental reasons, but also knew how that would go down with Anne.

  Now I found I did not want to evict the seed-sized thing, and nor did I want it to grow much more. What I wanted, if I wanted anything then, was to stay in pregnant limbo for as long as possible. To be pregnant was to be shielded by other, non-pregnant people.

  I didn’t tell anyone. Even Christopher. Every day I opened the cap to check the fibrous pink of the test until its validation faded. When it did, it felt like harbouring a criminal, both intimate and alien.

  I had the sense that when I moved I glided. My breasts became two live creatures. They prickled against shirts.

  My sister emailed about the ring Hana had finally turned in but I could not bring myself to answer. Something about the email, however, or just what it reminded me of, decided the question of the pregnancy.

  The hold-music on the phone was relaxing at first. But after ten minutes it transitioned to electric guitar. By contrast the waiting room, when I arrived at the clinic, was very quiet. The sonographer moved along my abdomen, frowning at a monitor I could not see. I watched her face instead, deciphering the mystery of my insides in aseptic black and white. I imagined my womb like a dark basement.

  Your bladder is full, she said.

  The first time I’d been present for something like this had been in Glasgow. My aunt had given her teenage son a pet chameleon for his birthday. We were disappointed that his colouring never seemed to change. In the light, he did get a bit brighter maybe. Nikolaj, who was not yet Calum then, had christened him AJ. Who knows why. It made me think of AJ from the Backstreet Boys, and there was a similarity. But after only a few months, AJ grew gravely ill. He sat in a corner of his cage and wouldn’t eat anything he was offered. My aunt put us all in the car and took him to the vet, who took an X-ray and announced that AJ was full of rocks. Why’s he eating rocks? we asked. My aunt said she didn’t know. She had to syringe feed him, and at first he seemed stronger, but then he stopped swallowing that too.

  My aunt got a second opinion. The second vet said AJ had stopped eating as her belly was full of eggs. He, my cousin said, correcting her. No, she. AJ was a female chameleon, she repeated. This was a shock, and then we tried to understand how she’d managed to get pregnant too. The vet grew more stern with us, irritated by our ignorance. She’s not laying the eggs because she hasn’t got a laying tray. Female lizards need a tray. She pointed at the scan, her pen circling where the mature follicles clustered like grapes.

  Discovering his pet was in fact a girl, Nikolaj immediately lost interest.

  In the wild she’d have dug a deep hole, the vet continued, but she can’t do that in captivity. Or not in this cage. She’s holding them in until she can nest.

  AJ died that afternoon. I helped bury her under the hibiscus.

  On my way back to Christopher’s, I too
k out my credit card and bought heat pads, eye pads, sanitary pads, notepads. White socks, white shirts, not, in the end, white underwear. Seeing some of this spread out on the floor when he came home, Christopher stopped and surveyed the scene, but he did not say anything except to enquire what oligarch’s child I was now tutoring.

  For my last trip to the clinic I wore a supersized pad in preparedness. The new doctor spoke very fast, almost slurring while explaining the various elements of the procedure in so much detail that she must have found the repetition monotonous and I found her incomprehensible.

  I lodged the first tablet against my gums, which made it hard to ask questions anyway. The nurse insisted that if no one was collecting me, I had to get a taxi, could I give her my home address? Initially I gave the wrong one out of habit.

  The roads were blocked with traffic. I began to feel hot, then faint. I thought again of the chameleon. My ears started ringing. Loudly. Suddenly I needed a bathroom. I have to get out, I said. I have to get out of the car. I stumbled the last few streets, tried to open the front door. I can’t see, I said, now to nobody, and spat the remainder out.

  Somehow I got the door open, ears still ringing, mouth foaming, and then there were rooms of pain. My vision swam. In and out, black spots, intense heat and then a chill, and then a kind of equilibrium where the pain subsided, before the fire returned, hotter than before. I felt it rising, moving up my body. Catching, rising upward, smoke. In my ears now, something hissing.

  I woke and Christopher was there. I don’t know how I ended up on the sofa, lowing like a cow. The jumbo pad crackled when I moved.

  Do you want anything?

  I shook my head.

  Did Luke contact you?

  Yes.

  He looked at me for a beat, unsure if I was telling him the truth.

  I woke up in the dark and knew immediately that I’d bled through. Returning to the sofa from the bathroom, I unzipped the soiled coverings from the cushions and reached for my laptop, then felt my stomach lurch. An email from him. Blank, but forwarding one from Mira, addressed to us both, apologising since she only had Luke’s address. I read her words over several times, wondering how Luke would have experienced reading it.

  She no longer felt secure or like she could achieve what she wanted work-wise, while living in Belgrade. She’d thought about moving to the Czech offices but that probably wasn’t far enough. She was considering Berlin where she knew one or two people, and London, where she knew us and some publishing friends. It occurred to me Mira would’ve used the threats as her excuse for leaving to her mother. She would be in London before Christmas, at least until January to have meetings, scope things out, hopefully find a place to live, might she stay with us? If not, no problem, she could sort something else. She signed off with love and hoped our wedding plans were shaping up.

  I knew Luke would not respond, but I kept putting off a reply. Then a few days later, Christopher said one of his commune friends was looking to sublet. Cheap, in your price range, he added. They were looking for someone long-term, in case, he softened his voice, that ended up being my situation.

  Christopher stayed with his mother in Manchester for two weeks over Christmas every year. I was welcome to remain on his sofa, but what did I think about the room?

  It was true I had a deep pain in my lower back, near-constant behind my kidney, from sleeping on a sofa bed which had lost a wheel so that, unfolded, it tilted toward the floor. But the idea of moving into a commune, however temporarily, during the time I was most tempted to become a hermit, was unbearable.

  When I finally replied to Mira and explained the situation, I’d meant to put her off. Instead she said she would love to share the sublet, what a perfect solution that was. She’d arrived a few days ago and was staying in an Airbnb on a noisy street, having no luck on SpareRoom. Presumably my friend wanted their sofa back and she’d take the flat long-term.

  I arranged to meet her in a restaurant I’d found near where she was staying in Shepherd’s Bush. It was too far to walk and too cold. On the bus heading west, I sat on the top deck. I still felt nauseous, still had a too-keen sense of smell, but now I felt my body humming with concentration. There was a clap of thunder and the glass became wet with rain. A woman seated alone a few seats ahead threw back her head and crowed:

  Pussy HOLE!

  Then again, more insistently.

  PU-SSY-HO-OO-LE!

  The last hole had infinite vowels in it, like the blast of an ocean liner.

  Normally this woman would have unnerved me, but just then I found I admired her.

  When Mira arrived, I could tell she was disappointed.

  Is this a chain? she asked over my Serbian greeting, I’m only speaking English now.

  We left.

  I don’t really want to talk about it, I said as we resettled ourselves at a bar of her choosing. I’m trying to put it out of my mind. This felt as close as I could get to the kind of assertiveness that she had.

  She opened her bag and handed me an uncorrected proof. I recognised the name.

  Not light reading, she warned, but should be a distraction.

  She told me the last time she was in London was five years ago, during the Olympics. It felt very different now, like the scales had fallen from most people’s eyes.

  How was it with your family?

  Oh, I grimaced. A waste of carbon as far as Luke’s concerned.

  I meant how was it for you with them? Would Daria leave Sarajevo now?

  I don’t think so. No.

  There’s a whole Serbian crew that moved to Peckham, did I tell you? They squatted there. I met some of them in Belgrade. I told one guy the name of the road and he knew the place we’re moving to.

  I said nothing.

  I think this will be good for you Anja. Independence.

  But I’ll be living with you.

  I mean living for yourself – not pleasing other people.

  It occurred to me I wanted Luke to hear I’d moved out of Christopher’s. I didn’t like that he could picture where I was while I had so many blanks for his activity.

  The waiter arrived, his bald head glossy under a low-hanging bulb. I let Mira order. When he left again, she took out her phone, pulled up her photos and passed them to me. She’d been to see the commune that morning.

  But that word . . . she rolled her eyes. A ‘commune’ is a stretch.

  Listening to her as I scrolled through the photos I felt a surge of possibility. I noted the ease with which I could speak, or not speak, and have her instinctively understand my mood.

  To us, she said, raising her glass. I still can’t believe the road.

  I’d let myself be copied into emails without reading them, choosing from the automated menu for suggested response.

  What about it?

  Asylum Road? By the way, you’ve lost too much weight.

  I looked down again at my plate and pushed some chickpeas around it.

  Anyway, next thing to sort out is getting your stuff back.

  I nodded meekly.

  She helped me compose a message to Luke that she would send, editing down everything I’d written to:

  I’ll be coming tomorrow for Anja’s things.

  Then she paid the bill for food only she had eaten.

  Are you sure you don’t want to come with me tonight?

  She was going to a party with someone she’d met on a dating app that week.

  I kept my mouth shut, feeling a tremor in my lip.

  Well OK, I’ll meet you at Luke’s and we’ll get a taxi from there together tomorrow. Yes?

  I nodded again, unable to say thanks.

  When I got back, Christopher was still at work and I started watching another documentary. So far I’d avoided ones with human beings as their subject, finding animals much safer, but this time I felt brave enough to try something about a once-famous folk singer. It turned out she lost her voice after her husband left her. I turned it off, reached for Mira’s book a
nd lay with it unopened.

  Then a response from Luke arrived, forwarded by Mira.

  Fine with me, let me know if I can help.

  His efficiency was merciless. Google suggested three responses:

  OK

  Bye

  Thanks!

  When Christopher returned he sat on the end of the sofa and told me about a case that was going on. The defendant was representing himself and identified only as a freeman of the land. Freemen, Christopher was coming to learn, believed that laws only bind people because the state had issued them with a birth certificate. By this logic, if they rejected a state-given name, they would become free of the law.

  How was your friend?

  We’re taking it.

  The commune?

  Yes.

  Anya the anarchist!

  I’m never going to be able to repay you, I hope you’re aware of that.

  Fuck off, he grinned. It’s been nice to have you here. When you go I’ll have to get a cat.

  I woke up at four in the morning with a knife twisting in my side. It was hard to breathe and I worried the abortion had caused internal rupturing. I got up, put Christopher’s parka over my pyjamas, and walked out into the night. Without knowing where I was going, I carried on for several hours and reached the Albert Embankment. The majority of tourists don’t seem to know that those benches, on little individual plinths, give the best view of the Houses of Parliament. I was careful to stand in a non-suicidal pose, though there were few pedestrians in sight. Luke once told me the eels in the Thames were full of hormones and cocaine. I resisted the mental image but now I saw a roiling orgy of eels beneath the surface. Still, the walking had soothed my stomach, or the cold had numbed it, and for the first time since leaving Luke’s, I understood that I was free now to do whatever I wanted. I wanted to be here, exactly where I stood, watching grey water moving somewhere.