by Megan Hunter
The Harpy
MEGAN HUNTER
Contents
I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
II
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
III
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
IV
Thank You
For Emma
Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a . . . divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, Laugh of the Medusa
Bird-bodied, girl-faced things they are; abominable their droppings, their hands are talons, their faces haggard with hunger insatiable
VIRGIL, Aeneid
It is the last time. He lies down, a warm night, his shirt pulled up, his head turned away. It is the kind of evening that used to make me want to fly through the sky, the kind that makes you believe it will never get dark.
Neighbours are having barbeques: the smell of the meat – sweet and homely – moves across his face. Downstairs our children are in their beds, dreaming through the hours, their doors closed, the late light blocked by their curtains.
We have agreed on a small nick, his upper thigh, a place that will be behind jeans, under shirts. A place of thick flesh, solid bone, almost no hair. A smooth place, waiting.
Jake is not squeamish: he is like a man expecting a tattoo. His hair is getting long, curling over the nape of his neck. His eyes are closed: not screwed shut, just closed, like a skilful child pretending to be asleep.
•
They were colleagues, then friends, and at first I suspected nothing. There were long emails, glimpses appearing on his phone, apparitions. The virgin blue of his notification light in the darkness. Nights where we couldn’t watch TV, because she was calling. Nights I went to bed early, enjoyed the whole bed to myself.
If I went in there – to get something, or turn a light off – I heard his voice sounding different. Not romantic, or gentle, just on show. His outside voice, the one he used with postmen, salesmen, people from work. I thought that was a good sign.
•
I lift the razor up – I have sterilized it, carefully, watching YouTube instructions – and rest it against his skin. I press down, very gently, and then with slightly more force.
•
Jake’s skin was one of the first things I noticed when we met. It was like the skin of a young boy – he was a young boy – someone milk-fed, comfort-raised. Someone who wore large, voluminous boxer shorts. Who slept silently, on his side. Who had a blond head of curls, like an angel. Even his eyelashes were curly. Tears used to get caught in them when we argued. On his stomach, his skin was hairless and as soft as a woman’s. The first time we went to bed, I kissed it.
•
I confronted him once, late at night, in my pyjamas, leaning against the fridge.
Do you want to sleep with her? I asked him. I think it’s best if we’re just really clear about this.
He laughed. I wish you’d get to know her, he said. She’s— He paused, the silence standing in for dullness, advanced age, sour breath.
She’s married, he said, finally. He looked at me, almost kindly. We didn’t touch.
•
I lift the razor and a fairy-tale drop of blood escapes from under the silver. The colours are the brightest I have ever seen: stark and cartoon-like, white skin and sea-blue shirt and dark red, rolling and seeking. He doesn’t make a sound.
I
~
I wonder if people would believe me if I said I have never been a violent person. I have never held an animal’s neck warm in my elbow and cricked the life from it. I have never been one of those women who dreams of smothering her children when they are naughty, who catches the image tracking through her mind like a fast-moving train.
I have never forced myself on anyone, reached into their clothes and tried to milk love from a body. None of that.
Even as a child, I remember the seeping feeling that guilt had, when I tipped my finger over an insect, and another one, and another one. I watched the universe blink, from life to death, flash over as they said a nuclear bomb would. I saw what my finger could do, and I stopped it.
~
1
It happened on a Friday, the boys in their last rhythm of the week, me trying to stay steady for them, a ship in dock, something you could hardly see the end of. I picked them up from school, administering snacks, absorbing shreds of their days, the wrappers from their sweets. It was almost midwinter: the sun was setting as we walked home, dying down against the playing field at the back of our house. Birds flew away from us, crayoned lines across the colours.
Back then, I was always hearing flocks of geese over our roof, feeling as if I lived on a marsh instead of at the edge of a small, rich town. I would close my eyes and feel it: the green ooze of the earth’s water, rising through my skin.
~
If anyone ever finds out, I know what they will conclude: I am an awful person. I am an awful person, and they – the finder – are a good person. A kind, large-hearted, pleasant person. Attractive, with a nice smell. This person – this woman, perhaps – would never do the things that I have done. She would never even try.
~
2
The boys were happy that day; there were no dramas, no small children lying in the middle of the road.
When they were younger, I was constantly picking them up from the pavement, facing the possibility that I would be stuck on the journey for a minute more, an hour more. A week. The eldest, Paddy, never got over the birth of his brother, and when he was younger he raged daily, making it seem as though we would be stuck in that moment forever.
Just before I found out, I had started to feel that the children were creatures I’d released from a cage. They were suddenly free, agile beings, looping around me. Paddy, especially, had a new internal quiet that I had come to recognize as a self, thoughts that were beginning to form dense and mysterious places, whole worlds I would never know about.
That afternoon he was being kind to his little brother, his gentleness a relief like a blessing, Ted so keen at every moment to stay in his good light, the almost mystical clearness of it, like sunshine at the bottom of a swimming pool. They were collecting sticks, fir cones; Ted had rolled up the bottom of his school jumper, was placing them in the bunched material, his little fingers pink with cold.
Put your gloves on! After seven years the phrases had long become empty, but I still used them. It seemed odd, that I had to monitor the children’s discomfort, rather than simply accepting that they did not care, that they maybe even liked the sensation: flesh turned to ice, numb and tingling.
As we walked past the field, the sun was burning to death, so low that we could almost look right at it. Ted clung to me, and it was terrifying, when you thought about it: a ball of fire so close to our home.
The house had, in recent years, started to seem like a personal friend of mine, something close to a lover, a surface that had absorbed so many hours of my life, my being soaked into its walls like smoke. I could easily ima
gine it winking at us as we walked towards it, its windows so obviously eyes, the closed, discreet straightness of its back-door mouth. Even though I had been there all day, I looked forward to feeling it again: the calm, automated warmth of central heating, the steady presence of its walls.
When we got in, the sun’s orange light was moving to the house’s edges, up the curtains, ebbing away. The boys collapsed onto the sofa, their hands already seeking a remote. I was always liberal about television; I don’t know if I would have survived otherwise, without the children’s thoughts separated from my own, peeled away and placed in a box. When Ted was a baby and Paddy a toddler, I used to put it on for hours in the afternoon, the little jingles joining my heartbeat, becoming part of me. Even years later, when I heard the music of the programmes Paddy liked back then, it seemed sinister. You are a bad mother, sang the talking monkeys, the purple giraffes. You have fucked it aaaaaa-ll up.
Paddy was always capable of watching, calmly and quietly, without getting bored or distracted. In the early days, it had given me time to feed Ted, those long sessions that newborns need, sucking and sucking, the regular rhythm of his little mouth, Paddy breathing slowly next to me, feeding on TV.
Now, after school, I spent my afternoons as a kind of waitress, and I didn’t mind it. Maybe it reminded me of the times I did actual waitressing, and coffee-making, and floor-sweeping, for money. I liked those jobs, the simplicity of them, the way they made me feel so tired I became transparent, completely open to the world. Tiredness was different when nothing was expected of me: it was a pleasure, sliding into a leather booth after work with my colleagues. Drinking so much I could hardly see.
I made the boys’ snacks with the skills I learned back then, laying the pieces of bread on the counter in rows, spreading the butter all at once. I remembered my old boss at the sandwich shop, telling me how the butter formed a barrier, so the fillings wouldn’t leak. They were always very stressed, those bosses, and I floated under their feelings, blank-faced, lazy. I felt a bit like that now, delivering the sandwiches to the boys on the sofa; Jake was always telling me I shouldn’t feed them there, that it would attract vermin. And he was right – I had started to hear scratching in the walls, or the floorboards: I could never figure out where it came from. I spread out cloths on the boys’ laps, put the sandwiches down, told them not to drop crumbs.
I was going back into the kitchen when my phone rang. It made a kind of quiet bleating, easy to ignore, but I moved towards it with something like urgency, thinking of Jake, wondering what train he was on. I had become used to the worst-case scenario, the 7.15, the children already in bed, his supper under a plate, the house and me alone, waiting for him. But I still hoped for the best, for the 5.45, for his burst of outside-world energy, just as the bath was running, as the dishwasher needed to go on. Daddy for bedtime, I would grin at the boys when we heard the particular blast of the front door, and their cheeks would rise up with joy.
I say that I was thinking of Jake, and his train, when I heard the phone ring, but I know it is possible that I am only inserting that now, as a perfect contrast to what followed. I missed the call – it seemed to ring so briefly – and saw that it was an unknown number on the screen. A collection of numbers instead of a name always seemed hostile to me, the sign of people ringing for money or favours. I turned the phone over, reached into the fridge for a packet of chicken, switched the oven on. It started again, the lamb-like building of single high notes, so close to my hand now, no ignoring it. I turned it over, saw it was my voicemail, lifted it to my ear.
~
This is it: the last moment. The children are watching television. The sun has gone, the garden nothing but rectangular darkness at the back door. I look at myself: I look at her.
She turns the dial, the oven is on, back-lit as a theatre, a wave of hot breath. The phone, lifted. She doesn’t know. She knows hardly anything. Her skin is clear, unlined: she is only midway through her thirties. Not beautiful. Not exceptional in any way. But she has this: her lack of knowledge, stretching from this moment into forever, hers.
~
3
After the beep at first there was nothing, then a deep intake of breath, like the noise someone makes before sighing. Then there were the words, less like words than atom-crushers, some scientific experiment altering the composition of the universe, the plastic-wrapped chicken I held in my hand, the cooker, the sink, the radio.
This is David Holmes. I am the husband of Vanessa Holmes. I thought you should know . . .
A gulp here, or a swallow, something too guttural to hear over the phone, the inner, liquid workings of another person’s body.
Your husband – Jake, Jake Stevenson – is sleeping with my wife. He is – I found out today. I thought you should know.
He said that twice: he thought I should know. The way he said it – even with the splits in his voice, the way it was balancing, like an adolescent boy, between high and deep – it seemed significant. Well thought out, as though he knew that knowledge was important in a marriage, that it was correct. He was careful to use surnames, for everyone. To make it official. He had a serious, professor’s voice, maybe that was it. I have always had a weakness for listening to academic men, for believing what they say. I trained in the art of this at one point.
And so when I heard him say those words, the first thing I did was nod, very quickly, and put the chicken down.
4
I imagined how a woman in a film would react, on receiving this news. She would shake: I held out my hand, to see if it was shaking. But my hands have always had a slight tremor. I watched my fingers, their individual movements, separate creatures twitching in the kitchen lights.
The TV continued in the next room, pulsing on regardless. When I was a child I was disappointed to realize that television would not keep me safe: I had thought of it as an intelligent presence, able to sense danger. But then I saw a police reconstruction of a murder, and the woman was dead on her sofa, the TV talking over her head.
Please can I have a drink, Mummy! We had taught the children to say please, but had not taught them to come into the kitchen and pour water from a plastic jug set at a low height. We had not done this, and yet we blamed them, rolled our eyes at each other whenever they called out to us, their servants. When I was alone it was easier to be a servant, to lose myself in this particular pattern of movement, from cupboard to sink, sink to hallway to their thirsty faces. People complain that women lose themselves to motherhood, but aren’t so many of the things we do an attempt to lose ourselves? I never minded the practical aspects much: the fetching and carrying, the work of the hands.
I started the dinner. I could only make a few dishes, simple things mostly. I had a whole shelf of recipe books, like most people do, and I cooked from them, occasionally, in a new-year burst of good intentions, or a sudden inclination following a dream. But these recipes never stuck, however simple. This is what stuck: a chicken breast, sliced into sections, each part lowered into a bowl of seasoned flour. Even seasoning the flour felt fancy, the faith that salt and pepper would somehow cling to the white powder and make some difference to the taste of the chicken. Cooking always seemed mysterious to me, the art of the unseen.
As I sliced the chicken, I noticed that it had changed, the fibres of the meat altered, more granular, the skinless surface almost opalescent. I am a woman whose husband is having an affair, I said to myself in my head, as though these words would make some difference to reality. Then I said them out loud, wanting to taste the phrase under my tongue, to pass its particular rhythms through my lips. I said her name.
Vanessa. The first times I saw her: laughing at our Christmas party. A soft handshake at a work do, then later: straight backed, clapping. A neat suit jacket, her hair tucked behind her ears. Where did she buy those jackets? I imagined that she had a personal shopper, someone who presented her with racks of almost identical jackets, described their subtle differences of tailoring. Vanessa Holmes. A rai
sed eyebrow, plucked to a wisp, the tail of a tiny animal.
I noticed that I felt sick; I noticed this as you would notice that a book has fallen from a shelf: impartially, at a distance. When I was offered pethidine in labour with Paddy, they said it wouldn’t take away the pain, but it would make me care about it less. You’ll see it there, said the midwife, but it won’t matter to you. It appealed to me, this separate pain, but there was no time to take the drugs, as suddenly Paddy was coming, and the choice was gone.
After the chicken was cut I squeezed an entire lemon over the top, like my mother taught me to do. My mother didn’t like cooking, but she knew certain things. She knew about clamping your fist down on the thick yellow skin, digging your nails in, squeezing tight. As I did it I noticed – apart again, from a small space away – how it made me feel, as though a cool wind was blowing through my chest. I squeezed harder, the juice falling into the sizzling pan, my teeth coming together, my jaw clenched. I kept doing it, feeling my face contorting into an ugly shape. When I had finished – when there was not one drop of lemon juice left in that fruit – I turned around to throw the skin away. Ted was there in the doorway watching me, his mouth hanging half open.
~
There is a trail of anger flowing through my bloodline, from my great-grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me. Perhaps it goes even further back too, to my great-great-grandmother, who had twelve children, three of whom died.
One of them, so the story goes, was left out in a pram until his face blistered over in the sun. This is a story I have known since childhood, but when I told it to my mother, she said that I had made it up. I am left with the mystery of this woman of many children; was she too busy to notice the baby in the pram? Did she forget?
~