Eddie placed his hand under her skirt as she climbed the narrow stairs in front. She didn’t hesitate – that was her answer. She felt sick. Vicious. Aroused. In some kind of danger. She carried on walking at the same pace, down the familiar corridor toward his room. She recalled the feeling of being that young, which was the rush of feeling adult.
They’d used to talk about the experience after it was over, like they had both just emerged from a film. He was the first person to make her come, the body who’d revealed what hers could do if she climbed on top without self-consciousness. That was what he’d meant by animal. She could never quite access that place now, not in the way she once had. It was too bound up with shame, or worries about the future, which animals didn’t have.
She would tell herself that because she knew what was possible, and that because sometimes she could still get close, even tantalisingly so, like the parallel curve on a hairpin bend, it was the same. But it wasn’t, she thought with fresh clarity as Ed put his thumb to the back of her neck and held her throat, it was not at all the same. She felt sudden grief for all the wasted time, the sacrifice she’d made for Luke’s empty promise of security.
He closed the door and began taking off his shirt. As it passed over his head she saw that he was perfectly preserved. It was as if he’d been frozen cryogenically in this room, which was also just as it had been. She remembered that she hadn’t shaved or waxed in months. It hardly mattered now.
The first time she met him was at a party on Mill Road. He’d been set upon by several girls after arguing that females only liked guys who posed a sexual threat. She thought of this provocation again as he pushed her forward and put her hand between her legs to show her what she knew – that she was wet already. He nudged her legs apart with his knee and wound her long hair around his fist so that her neck yanked back and it was hard to breathe. Her body locked into position. She saw it just at the edge of her vision, eyeballs straining as her head bent back toward the ceiling, all reflected in the same mirror that, aged twenty-one, he’d screwed to the inside of the door.
Ed had once whispered he would like to fuck her pregnant. He found the taut bellies and breasts of pregnant women arousing. Now she told him, the only person she would tell, and he let her neck go slack for a moment so she made eye contact with her own reflection.
The lamp beside the bed fell and smashed, glass flying everywhere. He didn’t stop. All she could do was hold her breath, his teeth pulling at her ear, the shadow of him on the ceiling.
At last he let her climb over him and a dark wall of heat came down.
She woke around dawn, tongue thick, the radiator on full blast, and tried to slip out of bed but he snorted and grabbed her wrist.
Where are you off to Annie?
The old name repelled her. She hadn’t been planning to leave, only to get water, but now she decided on leaving.
Don’t.
He wrapped his arm around her back and pulled her down against his chest. The smell in the cave of his arm was overpowering. She looked down at their bodies – his hairy and muscled, hers covered in smears of blood. Tiny scratches. She’d forgotten the broken glass.
I really need to go.
But I love you! he whined in a girlish voice.
She wriggled free and started pulling on her clothes, feet bleeding now too.
Will you tell your fiancé?
Who told you?
I can’t remember. But you’re getting married right?
Mm hm.
Next stop, death. That’ll probably be the next thing I hear about you.
Until he said that, her mother had not been dead.
It’s pessimism that drives people to get married. To lock something up so it can’t run off.
I see.
She pulled her boots on but they were like hot irons now. She took them off and held them in one hand.
Goodbye Ed.
Clasping the boots to her chest, she bent down, grabbed her bag and staggered through the door, down the stairs and out again into the cold. There was snow underfoot and she gasped.
For a moment she was disoriented – she knew this street, like the back of her hand, but was unable to place it on a map. The city was all made in the same stone, pretty much, seamless like a video game – no rough or discordant textures. At night it had always felt safe, if a little eerie. The homogenous unity meant walking along the empty street felt only marginally different to walking through the rooms of a house. She tipped her face to the sky and started walking, still barefoot. The street lamps seemed to be communicating with her, with each other. Communing even. She felt protected by their light and this oceanic feeling, like no harm could come to her. She walked the rest of the way as if she was being held.
On the train back to London the unknown caller became more insistent. I’d not wanted to answer because then the hope that it was Luke would be extinguished and I would instead have to have a conversation with Daria about my mother, or maybe even one of Mira’s irate, book-burning Serbs who was probably hacking into her messages. I wanted to put off that moment of painful certainty, hoping it might somehow be averted. That I would wake up as if from a nightmare, the way my younger tutees ended all their stories.
When I finally answered, the caller was none of those. My aunt said she’d heard about my mother and had been trying to get hold of me. She was worried. She was herself distressed by the news. As I submitted to her gentle scolding, I found I could not contain myself any longer. I turned my face toward the window to avoid the other passengers.
She hadn’t seen my mother for years but the people she knew with Alzheimer’s didn’t have any sense of danger, or were free of certain fears. One man near hers in Killin kept leaving his house and locking himself out, ending up in all sorts of places – the middle of the local stone circle or by a busy road. These people became a danger to themselves, yes, but they had to have their liberty. My father was right to leave her that. Even with what happened. Did I understand that? I stayed silent, not wanting to. We passed a whole field of cars tossed on top of each other like toys and it occurred to me how different things look depersonalised like that. The ball in my throat was back. Choking me. I could come and stay again, she said patiently, if I needed or wanted that. Her son Nikolaj, who went by Calum now, was working nearby and could drive me to and from the station.
The last time I stayed with her there, a house she had moved to an hour and a half north of Glasgow, was just after my first term at university. It was the first time I’d been back. Michaelmas term had ended. Drago was not yet dead. Life could now begin.
I get the train to Glasgow Central then walk from there to Queen Street. I have an hour until my next train and wander slowly to kill the time. The familiar hoppy smell makes me anxious and the pubs are full with jacked-up, warlike men. Celtic are playing Rangers. Whenever I feel intimidated by strangers on the street like that, I tell myself I’m more likely to be murdered by someone close to me. At Crianlarich, still fourteen miles from Killin, the line splits. I have to get off there and wait for Calum to get me. After Glasgow, the air is so pure and cold it hurts my lungs. There is snow on the ground and the sky throbs as if to promise more. Birds’ nests sit exposed in the bare arms of trees. I pace beneath them, shivering in my charity-shop fur coat. After twenty minutes, I can’t feel my hands or feet. I will learn to drive, I think, then I won’t be dependent on men like him. I decide to ask Ed for lessons.
I try to picture Nikolaj. I try to remember to call him Calum. I’ve just spent eight weeks free of his tyranny, his face has blurred in my mind. He looks misshapen – a piece of overstuffed taxidermy. He’s doing it on purpose, I know. Making me wait in this forbidding place, to establish who is powerful here. After three cars roar by I try calling him but get no answer. He has always hated me, but I’m expecting him to be merciless now I’ve started university. Finally his car swerves in beside me and he is grinning through the open window. Metallica, ‘Fade to Black’. Happenin
Oxford? He has called me this since the day I got in to Cambridge. He eyes my fur coat and sodden wheelie bag with amusement. His head’s shaved and his teeth have dark rims as if he’s swallowed ink. I notice, as he drives, a new tattoo. The saltire, beside the existing kilted man dragging on a spliff.
As far as I know Calum’s only political views involve Scottish independence. To the extent that I live in my head and cling to cities, my cousin exults in his KGB carapace of muscle and bone, and hungers for the wild. Before coming out here to work as a ghillie he tried to be a participant on a reality show that required people to survive on an uninhabited island. He was not accepted, to my aunt’s relief, but while I was revising he would watch it and sneer at the inexpert way the fud who had made the cut ahead of him now tanned animal skins or whittled spoons from logs.
He always resented his mother for leaving Yugoslavia when she did, before he was born, before he got to have that opportunity. He used to get excited at the sight of burning tanks and sparking wires, the bodies sleeping in the sun, murmuring, as we watched the news, that if he could he’d join the Tigers. The paramilitaries all had names like that. Tigers, White Eagles, Yellow Wasps. When he talked that way my aunt slapped him.
On the back seat now, I can see his rifle. We pass the falls – a white slalom against black rock – and he tells me about the big estate he works for, which has a haunted house. The wallpaper is laced with arsenic he says. But it’s not the wallpaper he wants to show me. He will take me to the cottage he shares with his mother later, but first I’m to come with him. There is something immediately suspicious in the way he says this, but I know I can’t refuse.
We get out by some sheds and he chucks me clothing from the boot. The dogs bark excitedly. I am strapped into Gore-tex, then he passes me a white lab coat. I ask if this is a joke. It’s snowing up there, pure baltic he says, I’ll need camouflage.
In the Argocat, we head up into the hills. He explains the general principles of managing the herd. Hunting deer is a matter of conservation. I have this as my frame of reference when Luke explains it to me, seven years later when we meet. I wonder if the move away from Glasgow has been good for him, a healthy outlet, or if he’s just high on this new authority. He is doing real work while I’m a fandan at university.
Are you going to make me shoot a stag?
Pure gallus, Oxford. I’ll shoot a hind.
Are they the women?
He rolls his eyes.
When we get to the top it is snowing heavily. In spite of the vast landscape, I feel trapped. I put the lab coat on and keep close behind, my head bowed against the wind as I follow his boots, which go quickly over the uneven terrain. Beneath the snow, the ground is either sharp rock or boggy, and every now and then I can hear the sound of water rushing away.
My eyes and nose stream. Each time we stop I look up in silence, confronted by a new scene, and wonder how I have ended up here, on the surface of another planet, with this man, in a lab coat. My lungs are in agony from running. I wonder if this is where I will die.
He points out a bird of prey and I collapse in the snow and then we are running again. My whole body is on fire except my hands and feet which are numb. Suddenly he drops down, behind a mossy verge, and I drop down beside him, relieved. He passes me a pair of binoculars – pointing out the group of hinds. They are in the distance, I know, but in the viewfinder they are right in front of me as if they have been cut out and placed there as Christmas decorations. As I’m looking, three stags dart across, only feet away, like dancers, antler arms aloft, then vanish into mist. We have to crawl up the burn, stopping every so often with the wind so they can’t catch our scent.
Finally Calum holds up his hand and gives me some kind of signal, then disappears over the ridge. He is gone for a while. Inside my hood I can hear my heart beat inside my ears. I wonder if Calum counts as the kind of already-known person who might kill me, but otherwise it is peaceful, lying in the bright curve of the snow.
I return with the shot. Muffled as it was by my hood and the wind, I hear it, like a book falling flat from a shelf. I stand cautiously, stumbling toward the sound like there has been an accident. Calum is on his knees talking to it. Had a yearling, he says as I approach, we’ll have to go after it in a bit. Too young to survive without a mother. Then he pulls out his knife and slits the soft belly open. The stomach must be cut out right now, he explains, and the animal bled, or the meat will spoil. The blood spills into the snow. I have never seen anything be taken apart like this. The stomach is a neat, translucent sack with a greenish tint. He slashes it open and soft, steaming grass swells from the incision, melting a patch of snow. He extracts the heart – the bullet is lodged inside. Wait here, he says. I sit beside the lifeless animal while he goes to find her young. The eyes are open but turning milky. Disembowelled, its skin looks like my coat. I stare at the entrails, splayed out on the snow, repulsed and in the same breath transfixed by them.
Beside their cottage on the estate, there is an outbuilding where he hangs the mother and then the child from hooks. He bifurcates and dismembers them in turn. I watch. He is surprisingly tender. Sliding into their flesh in a way that makes the swaying bodies open up for him like a folded-up toy – a puzzle all connected. He seems to delight in my expression, even more than the mutilation. He knows all the correct anatomical terms, and some I’ve never heard of. Knackery, stink pit. A stink pit, he laughs, is where dead animals are left as bait to trap more animals – foxes and other pests. He takes a cereal bar from his pocket with bloody gloves and I want to gag when he shows me pictures on his digital camera. Instead I dull my nausea with the thought of going back in a few weeks and handing in my essay on Shakespeare and the concept of authority. I will be cleansed and whole again, severing this person.
Anja? Are you still there?
She waited, listening to my breathing, then said, as she had once before, that my anger was a poison that would only end up hurting me. After she hung up I kept the phone to my ear. I clung to it first for its solidity, then as though I might break it.
When I get out at King’s Cross the sky is huge. I am suspicious of the way winter is thawing, the bright blossom against pebble-dash houses. Things have come around too early.
The past keeps intruding. We are sick to death of it.
I find I am not welcome in my own home. My own country. Again and again this happens. I seem to be the common denominator. This realisation is, at first, the end of a cigarette in the dark, then a train sucking me toward it as it passes through my station. My brain is approaching the mode of concentration I know it is capable of. I focus my mind on this idea like a deeply rooted hair.
I am on the bus after my brother’s suicide, not knowing I need to grieve until that moment, when I realise I can’t, and I stumble off into the street where a group of men are playing saxophones. ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. It strikes me the song is not happy but apocalyptic. I am wild-eyed. I want to be in that number. Chain-smoking again. I put my hands out and watch them dance, throbbing like an electrocuted cartoon character.
Ear-splitting sounds, the kind only children and animals can make, gasping for air in the intervals until my sister slaps me across the face. We are safe, she screams, shut the fuck up.
I walk from the bus stop, a woman is walking behind me in a pair of worn-down high heels, the rubber caps need replacing. Tack, tack, tack, tack. For a moment she is the target of all my rage. It hits me what a find my notebook will make for some other passenger sitting in that aircraft. Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord is reproduced there. I google. Right under the text, at the end of the third section, the one voiced by an observer, is an ad featuring a red raw beef patty on a grill with an ice cube in the centre, melting like a puffy nipple on the meat.
After seeing why he places an ice cube on his burger when grilling, I’ll never make one any other way.
The crowd parts as my mother, held up by my father and Mira’s on either side, walks away from the grave like
a too-thin carnival figure. Veering into people, her cardboard head jerking, eyes rolling, her hands shaking uncontrollably as she tries to drink from a small bottle. The one she didn’t send away has left.
I reach the iron gate. I look up to see if Mira has the lights on. As I walk I imagine small creatures fleeing, moving out of my way. Shuffling and hopping and diving. Luke striding through the long grass with his scythe.
I no longer feel the need to hold myself together. I am just training my gaze.
13
Something had been unfrozen through fucking. It felt like a trick, the way parts of me were coming back to life. The raw, jellied pink, the uncooked meat at the centre of things. By the time I returned to the asylum, my arms imprinted with the strap of my bag, I suspected I’d got a UTI. Mira had just left a date and called to tell me about it while I tried to pee unsuccessfully.
He’s an angry man. We went for dinner and he broke a plate. Stabbed his steak knife into it ranting about Eurocrats and must have hit a weak spot. It went all over the restaurant. But it was the end of the date, at least. The other one I’m on my way to now. He’s an alcoholic, I think. When we had sex last time I could smell it, in his skin. How was your reunion thing?
I could see myself in the bathroom mirror as I laughed. My eyes were all pupil. I am saying I but it feels like we. That will sound like I have delusions of grandeur, yet there is someone else now, inside me. I has dissolved. It comes and goes. It’s like I’m learning a new language.
*
The next morning Mira was still not back. Her phone went straight to voicemail. I could see she was not reading my messages. I tried to push paranoid thoughts from my mind but decided not to leave the flat until she returned to it. I could barricade myself in if necessary.
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