by Megan Hunter
What? He turned to me.
Nothing. I exhaled slowly. I could feel his stare, the prickle of his looking like a touch on my face.
You seem to be doing okay, he said. After – after everything.
So, he definitely knew. Everyone knew. I drew on my cigarette for a beat too long, filled my lungs with the chemical rush. Why was I the one who was looked at as damaged, faulty? Jake had been unfaithful, but somehow this reflected badly on me, I could tell. Just a housewife, really. Nothing achieved, no publications under my name. Not worth staying faithful to.
For the whole party, meanwhile, Jake had seemed relaxed, laughing with friends, moving his hair out of his eyes. I still thought – one last time – about reaching for Antonio. He would go along with it, I sensed. But Jake: what would he feel? He had never been jealous. I could imagine him shrugging, even smiling.
Good for you, Luce, he might say; he might not be hurt at all.
24
When Antonio and I got back to the house, people were starting to leave, drunkenness washing away the last of their politeness:
Where is Jake? Tell him to fuck off if you need to (this in a whisper). Arsehole. Do the kids know?
I couldn’t help raising my eyebrows at this last question. Oh yes, I imagined saying. We told little Paddy and Ted all about the way my husband started fucking his co-worker in hotels after work. Once, we said to them, Daddy had sex in a train toilet! Isn’t that brilliant?
Goodbye, I said instead, keeping my face tight and serene. Take care, see you soon; I played the gracious hostess well, seemed genuinely sad to see them go.
Mary was the last to leave; the sex had left her looking touched-out, pouchy, as though kept up all night by a teething baby. In fact, I had seen her in that state too: it was an accurate comparison, hair coming loose, clothes pulled around. After she left, I shut the door, turned the lights off, locked up, walking straight past piles of the party’s activity, not stopping to clear away a single glass or half-eaten pie.
I went upstairs; I had told everyone this is where Jake was, having a lie-down. As I passed the bathroom I saw, through its unfrosted glass, the field fading into the night, barely distinguishable from the sky, a black strip running smoothly towards morning. If he was gone, I thought, I could bear it, could become as clear as this sight, moving forwards with simplicity, with poise.
In our room, the lights were off but Jake was still just visible, rolled on his side. I could tell he was awake: his breathing was inaudible, the room crackling with wakefulness.
Oh God.
I sank onto the bed, groaning.
Let’s never have another one of those parties ever again, okay?
My voice sounded normal, calm. I knew I had said those words after other parties, on other years. Jake shifted around on the bed, still wearing his jeans and shirt, facing me. He was surprised, I imagined, to hear those words, that tone. No swearing, no accusations. Better still: I had referred to the future. Lately, the future had been banned. Our current reality was a lopsided version of mindfulness: no future, infinite present but also infinite past, filled with lies, half-truths, a dozen versions of the same story.
Really, he said. Let’s not. Ever. I couldn’t take it any more. His head was resting on his hands; in the near darkness his skin looked completely smooth, dully luminous, like the surface of a distant planet.
I saw Mary and Pete having sex behind the shed, I told him, and we laughed. We had not laughed together for a long time. We had not even come close. Jake put his arm out, as though he was going to rest it on my shoulder. I jerked back, a large, imprecise movement after all the mulled wine, the small, scattered dinner of canapés and sweets.
No. I shivered slightly, as though shaking him off another time.
There was a long silence, me sitting on the edge of the bed, my feet only just touching the floor, Jake quiet, still lying on his side. I realized I was waiting for him to go downstairs, to make up the sofa bed. I wanted to feel the room’s emptiness again. I wanted to rest. I said nothing, heard the bed springs whining as he got up.
I saw you and Antonio in the garden, you know. He laughed, briefly. What are you doing?
The question seemed to have no answer, to have nothing to do with anything I could know, as though he had asked me the day the world would end, or whether it would rain in a month. I thought about all the eyes at the party, the way they’d looked at me. And here he was, hiding away from it all. Not even ashamed, it seemed at that moment. Safe and calm, wanting to put his hands on me.
I almost rose up, snarling, spitting with rage. But instead I looked straight at him.
I think maybe he fancies me. Maybe we’ll . . .
There was another silence; it felt long, but was probably only a few seconds.
Fancies you? I don’t think so, Luce. He’s pretty happy with Jen.
Jen was a lithe blonde yoga enthusiast who had popped out their three children seemingly painlessly, without any noticeable change to her body. Of course.
You think I can’t do what you did, is that it, Jake? You think I’m just going to stay here at home, snivelling, feeling sorry for myself?
Well, you got pretty good at it. He was reaching for the door now, leaving, just at the point when I wanted him to stay, when I wanted to rage at him, over and over again. Wanted to press my hands into him. Wanted to do something – anything – to get rid of what I was feeling now: a bodyful of bile, more, an amount that felt barely containable within one person, one skin. An amount that felt infinite, as though it could drain out of me, flood our house, lift our furniture, take over the world.
~
What is a harpy? This is the question I have asked myself, over and over.
Unnatural, she was called. Other names: Snatcher, the Stench, Whirlwind, Fleet-Foot, Storm-Swift. Ugly. Hungry. Foul.
~
25
For hours afterwards, I crept around the house, feeling completely awake. What are you doing? the house seemed to say, echoing Jake. But to this space, these walls, an answer came more easily. I ran my hand across countertops, felt the soft thickness of double-glazed glass. I knew it all so well.
I knew the one place you could hear the neighbours as though they were in the same room, every word of their conversations, strangely bland, as though they knew they were being overheard. I knew what it felt like in the boys’ bedroom, the way the air changed when they were not there, the way it settled like dust, becoming part of every object in the room.
And in return, the house saw me as I was. Not as I had become: an average-looking woman in her thirties. Nothing like this.
I’m doing what we agreed, I whispered aloud. I have to do something.
It could not wait until after Christmas after all: this seemed to be a passing illusion now, an unreality of coloured lights, empty boxes wrapped in shining paper.
I went into the lounge as quietly as I could – Jake was a very light sleeper – the toes of my socks squeaking on the floorboards. I eased his phone from the coffee table where it lay, turned to aeroplane mode. He was so much more sensible than me, would never scroll through social media or emails in the middle of the night. He stirred, turning over, moving his mouth and making nonsense sounds, the room already thick with his sleep, the smell that men make in the night.
I tiptoed away, the phone beginning to sweat in my fist.
~
The harpy is an expert at stealing things.
She has always been dispatched to create disappearance: to make things not exist. Precious objects, people, the food from their plates, bites they were lifting to their mouths.
Like sudden wind, she comes down: she takes it all away.
~
It is the second time. Nearby, another, larger Christmas party is ending. There are fireworks, an amateur display, an uneven rhythm against the garden’s bare branches. The quiet grass, the quiet field: the world is in its deepest sleep, but its people are awake, throwing fire into the sky, trying t
o light it up.
•
For a few minutes, I sit and watch the coloured flashes: I do nothing. I do not even attempt to enter the code on Jake’s phone. I hold it in my hand, inanimate, like a large pebble, smoothed and worn by years in the ocean.
There is total darkness in the room, and then a flash of cascading light every few minutes, blanching the fridge, my legs, the window ledge with its small pots of herbs. There are cheers, somewhere, and the kind of wild, keening animal cry that teenagers make at a certain time of night.
Every time the light comes, it feels at first like a blessing, a benediction from God or space, and then like a warning, the totalizing light of disaster. Christmas morning, nearly.
I turn the phone over, its steady light so different from the fireworks, friendly, almost. There is a text from Jake’s mother, but I can only partially read it: the phone is still locked. I try a series of numbers: his birthdate, Paddy’s, Ted’s. I try the date of our wedding.
One attempt remaining, the phone informs me, something humane about these words in the darkness, my only company.
09.10.84. My birthday: the phone gives way, all of its functions laid out, available. For a few seconds more I do nothing, weighing the moment, feeling its textures. I am tired; my eyes are heavy. I think of climbing into bed, of being able to sleep, if only for an hour or two. I could turn the phone off now, return it to Jake’s sleeping side.
But I think of his sleeping, of the satisfied childish calm of it. Of the women at the party, Mary’s face as she turned to me on the street. Antonio: pity, not desire, I realize now, his features softening towards me again in my mind’s eye.
•
I open the photos app, and for a long time there is nothing. Or rather: there are the boys, our boys, the unfolding flowers of their faces, the mysterious shortening of their legs, their reverse growth, like time-lapse plants across the screen, moving backwards from school age to irresistible toddlerhood. Did we realize, at the time, how beautiful they were? Do we realize now?
There are tears coming now, dropping over the phone’s screen. Waterproof, Jake had said when he first got it. You can immerse it up to ten metres deep. And I’d imagined Jake as a diver in a perfect Aegean sea, spinning downwards, the device cupped in his hands.
I wipe the moisture from the screen with my sleeve, breathe outwards, shudderingly, into the bad weather of my own crying. No photos. No evidence.
Then I see it: of course I do. A folder. Work pictures, it’s called. There is one last shining moment of hope, when I imagine microscopic images of bees: their honey sacs, their small, furred, long-dead legs.
Instead: how to describe what I see? It is the end of my life, I think, the end of life like the end of the world in a children’s book, a flatness you can fall into, a waterfall that encircles me. Here is Vanessa, and Vanessa, and Vanessa, and Jake, and Jake and Vanessa, and Jake, and Vanessa and Jake. She is naked, of course, or wearing just a bra, or just underwear. He is shirtless, and naked, and alone, and with her.
I breathe. I keep breathing, taking air into my body, releasing it. I try not to do it too fast, try not to hyperventilate. That would not help me now. I select one photo: they are both naked, they are kissing, their bodies one sordid body made whole, visible from the waist up, the camera held by Jake’s arm above his head.
I click on the tiny box, the tiny arrow. I am shaking, but this makes no difference. The tiny box, the tiny arrow. Taking aim.
The list of options: email is the last, the original. I choose this one, complete the movement before I can stop myself: body memory, a mechanical gesture, as easy as riding a bike. I only need to enter one letter – f – and it appears: facultystaff@. So easy. Send. Message sent.
Undo, the phone offers me, kindly. Undo. But I do not undo anything. I let it go.
III
~
When everyone knows, surely they will say they saw it coming.
They will speak of the things I did: the time I laughed at a schoolmate’s tights wrinkling around her knees, laughed and pointed and told others to laugh. Boyfriends I dumped or ignored. Words of hatred written in my diary.
We always knew she was like that, they will say, afraid of the truth. They knew nothing.
~
26
It was a beautiful early spring, the most delicate since the months after Ted was born. That year, I thought the world would never be beautiful again. The winter went on for years, an endless circling of sleepless nights, stagnant, swamped days. Baby-rearing, with the first child, had been a kind of somnolence, an amnesia in which I was happy to relent to the cow-self for months, to find pleasure in the cleaning of shit, in the flow of milk from my breasts. The second time, it was a combat zone.
My caesarean scar became infected, leaked pus until I was certain my body would split in two, exposing me. I found it difficult to accept that so many had seen my insides: the surgeon, and his assistant, and her assistant. They’d had a view of myself that I would never have, the exact, endlessly personal nature of my organs, their strange shapes, their unique arrangement.
At thirty, I presumed my life to be over, to have been taken over by the qualities that were always promised to arrive one day: pain, work, exhaustion. But the things of spring came, eventually – dimmed evenings and broken soil, a quickening smell – and I discovered that they were real. They could be called names, and the names would stick, would hold fast, as though there was no separation between the object and its sound. Tree, I would think, looking at a tree, and nod. It was true: this was a tree. It was a tree fringed with pink froth, a ridiculous sight, but real anyway, pieces of tree floating to the ground, a rosy snow. I even showed the baby, showed Ted, pointed and spoke for him: Tree. And in this way we carried on, continued to live. Maybe I would never be young again. But I was alive anyway. I was there.
This spring, years later, was similar, just as clear in its colours, its surprise. I had forgotten how much the house enjoyed it, being bathed in a warmer light, for longer. We had daffodils on the kitchen table, something comic in their familiarity, the droop of their heads, like grumpy children dressed by their mothers.
But Jake kept sneezing. He was at home much more now: allergic to most flowers, he would look at me accusingly every time he covered his mouth with his hand, let out an enormous noise.
Can you just stop buying them? he’d say, his voice muffled by the tissue pressed against his face. I would nod, empty out their sour water in the sink, fold their stems into their faces, carry them out to the garden bin. And the next day, I would buy them again.
This was how things were now; somehow, for the first time in our marriage, I had become the quiet, almost obedient wife, Jake the angry man, barking. He was suspended from work after the picture went out, pending an investigation. He’d got the first reply on Boxing Day, the reaction delayed by turkey and pudding, choirboys singing carols.
What the fuck is this, Jake?
You okay J? Is this a joke?
He’d read them out to me, his voice getting louder with each fragment, every movement of his thumb. It was almost a relief: for the whole of Christmas Day I’d felt my mind becoming lighter than ever, its engine propelling my movements into overdrive, my heart threatening to split out of my chest.
As the boys had ripped open their toys, like starving people unwrapping bread, I’d provided a rapid, high-pitched commentary –
What is it, Ted? What’s Father Christmas brought you? A mini-guitar? Amazing!
– while Jake filmed. He’d filmed even though we both knew how unsatisfying these videos were afterwards, when the gifts had long been abandoned, the preserved excitement of the day rendered distasteful, performative. My voice in these films was the worst representation of myself I could imagine: sickly sweet, wheedling, as though begging my sons to enjoy the toys we’d bought them.
I had tried to forget what I heard the night after the messages came. Stumbling exhausted to bed, using my hands to help me cli
mb the stairs. For the first few seconds, I thought it was the children. The stifled, musical tones of crying in bed, mouth opening into damp cloth. I stopped, and listened. It was Jake, I realized: sobbing, making the same sound, over and over again.
Nothing had happened to Vanessa, he informed me one evening soon after. He was speaking through the bars of his fingers, his hands over his face, his rage so enormous that I feared – for the very first time since I’d met him – that he might hurt me, might pin me to the wall, as I’d seen my father do to my mother, bruising her wrists, leaving marks that she would cover the next day, pulling her sleeves over her hands.
It was my phone, he’d said. My email address. It looked like – like I’d done it deliberately, to get back at V.
V? I couldn’t help myself. I’d never heard him call her that before. V?
He raised his head, and I saw it: what I thought – my many-layered outrage – counted for very little. It gave me no advantage; it carried no weight. Not any more.
Just to be clear, Jake said, as though he knew my thoughts. This is over now, okay? No three times bollocks, nothing else. You’ve gone too far. He almost laughed there, sending his eyes to the ceiling. My God, Lucy. I could lose my job. Do you understand that? How are we going to pay the fucking rent?
Here it comes, I thought. He was getting up from the sofa. I felt a shiver through my body, something in between total fear and a mild, barely-there excitement. But: excitement. I filed that away, to be examined later. Is that how my mother felt? He was coming towards me, I was stepping back.
Jake, I—
But he didn’t hit me. He didn’t touch me. He just walked past, into the kitchen, where I heard him turn the kettle on. Just like that: a click, such a normal, everyday gesture. The kettle would boil, and life would go on.
His life would go on. I was the one who had done the worst thing, it was agreed now. My sleep had reduced to half-hour slivers, places where I could not even reach a dream. Instead, I lay awake, trying to figure out how this had happened. In disbelief, I turned over its stages, its unfolding, its unfathomable narrative. I had become one of those women. The ones I’d read about, who have slipped away from the world, who exist on their own plane of scorn. My hands were no longer my own, I began to suspect. They belonged to someone else. Mrs Stevenson, perhaps. The woman who married Jake, who became a wife and mother, who would never be a real person again.