The Harpy

by Megan Hunter

  Thank you, Mrs Stevenson. I understand this must be very hard.

  Mrs Stevenson?

  Mrs Stevenson raised her head. A woman on a hospital ward talking to a doctor raised her head, and nodded. She thanked him – Dr Davies. She looked away, so she didn’t have to shake his hand. She felt the curtains at her back, looked at her husband – Mr Stevenson – lying in bed, his curls sinking into the pillow, his face colourless. She stared out of the window again, at the miles and miles of sky, stretching into an unknown horizon. The cars leaving the car park, their red lights shining like something new. Teams of swallows flying to the next field, the next tree; they were just practising, Paddy had told her once. They were just getting ready, preparing their wings for months of continuous flight.

  ~

  She still thinks she knows what she is doing. She will go home, she imagines, and she will make food for her children, for her in-laws.

  She will smile and clean and soothe. She will make it all okay.

  ~

  36

  I stepped out of the hospital, squinted in the light. My head was air-filled, flying into the world around me, the car park, the shuffling patients in flapping gowns, the buildings that loomed and shifted above me.

  I walked a few yards: my body felt clumsy, enormous, the weight on my back even heavier. I knew I needed to move, to travel faster, escape the slowness of foot against pavement. I called a taxi, rested my head against its window, gave the driver my address without opening my eyes. I’d had a text from my mother-in-law, knew everyone was at the park, would be there for hours still, the boys licking ice creams and gliding down slides, oblivious.

  At the house, the empty rooms looked at me as though I was a stranger. The sun passed through, blocks of shine on the walls. A blue vase, a wedding present, photos in silver frames: a family, smiling. Magazines, shoes, letters, decks of playing cards. Every object seemed to have its own mind, the stuffed dinosaur forlorn, a stack of dishes in the sink accusing. It had been wrong, I saw now, to get attached to this place, just a building, one I didn’t even own. I wrestled my bike out of the side alley, pedalled down the street as though it was a normal day, into nothing, having no idea where I was going.

  I had always loved cycling, the wheels turning under me, as easy as walking should be, idling gently or speeding, feeling almost airborne. Years ago, before leaving my PhD, I had spent whole days doing rings of another, similar town, going from common land to common land, contemplating lying under a cow, rolling in mud. Anything seemed better than going back to the library. I had been feeling my motivation ebbing, had noticed a hope, rather than a fear, that I would fall pregnant, that I could push all those books away.

  Now, I realized I was ravenous, the huge hunger still there, despite it all, an engine working without thought, consuming everything. I went to a burger place, ordered a supersized meal, sat in a booth where my legs stuck to the seats. The eating worked, as it had before, all thought blotted out by sensation, by chewing, the morphing of solid objects into a flood of taste and swallow, salt swept down by fizz, meat giving its oils to my fingers.

  But when I finished, my stomach taut, the thinking came back: David Holmes, his grey eyebrows moving upwards:

  I believe in forgiveness. As do you, I presume?

  To forgive is divine, I was taught growing up. So when I first saw my father slap my mother across the face, I decided to forgive him. I closed my eyes and prayed to God to help me, to pour his quiet pastel lights over the image in my mind, the continual replay, the way she fell. And within hours, I noticed my feelings towards my father change. When he asked how I was, I stopped scowling and turning away. I started saying, Fine, thanks. I had forgiven him, it seemed, God had helped me; it was done.

  But little by little, I noticed another feeling growing inside me. The image of my mother – on the carpet, crying – was not gone, I realized, but transformed. My anger had been diluted, bleached into a pale trace of its form, a covert operator that I would continually – for months, for years – mistake for something else.

  ~

  In primary school: a boy who fancied me. Who would push me against the brick walls, pretend it was a game, a joke.

  Once, he kicked me hard in the stomach. A corner of the playground, a dip in the brick. From the edge of the sky: a single wing tip, slicing into view.

  My first kiss: a boy called Mike held his arm in front of a door, told me I couldn’t go back inside until I did it. The inside of his mouth was a watery cave, a place I thought I might never escape.

  Somewhere at the back, near his throat: a clawed shape, moving towards me.

  ~

  37

  When I left the burger place, it was still light outside, the sky electric blue at its peak, softening as it curved, flattened itself against the town. I sat on a bench by the river, watched the water travelling beyond me, the ducks passively moved along its surface. When a rowing boat sliced past – the cox screaming through a microphone – I turned my head away. I waited until it was clear: no boats, no people. Just water, waiting.

  I looked at the phone in my hands, my nails hooked around it. I lifted my arm and threw: such a small gesture, one second, less. A tiny moment, something that could be blanked out later. The razor. Pressing harder. The phone through the air, landing in the water, sinking quickly, easily. Gone.

  I glanced around, to see if anyone was watching. Was this a crime? Throwing my phone away? Polluting the river. When I was a child, I was terrified I would accidentally steal things, that I would put things in my bag without realizing. I imagined the moment of discovery, the way I would be guilty, without even knowing it, without even trying.

  If my dad caught me being naughty, there would be slaps on the backs of my legs, nothing major, the same as my friends had. The worst thing, by far, was her face. My mother’s disappointment was an energy source: it could power a whole country.

  I’m sorry, Mama, I used to say, going to lie on my bed, the sting on my thighs the best thing I had – sharp, clear – the voices starting up their old routine. Disgusting girl. Stupid idiot.

  She would tell me to pray to God whenever I got angry. To help me become a better person. My good girl. She liked me to be next to her at the altar, for us to lift our hands for the wafer together, our knees close on the velvet.

  I always looked at the priest in that moment, had the worst thought I could manage. The pendulum of his cock and balls, swinging like a bell under his robes. The distant crusted cavities of his nose, the slimed alien of his tongue. I thought of pressing the wafer back into his throat, the way his eyes would round in surprise. I was never my mother’s good girl.

  I tried my fucking best. I realized I had said that out loud, glanced around to check if anyone had heard. There was no one: only trees, the city light hazing their leaves in a peached glow. Then: a single swan gliding downstream, the arc of her neck a question mark, the soft curve of her feathers like a yes on the water.

  ~

  The first harpies I saw were almost faceless, their eyes pale slits, their hair thick black lines, flying in shapes behind their heads.

  Like my hair, I used to say as a child, touching the page, the hair, the skeletal wings.

  No, my mother said, frowning, moving my hand away. Not like you at all.

  ~

  38

  As I cycled closer to the centre of town, I saw groups of people out for the night, dressed for the heat in short-sleeved shirts, tiny dresses. It was Friday, I realized; I couldn’t remember when this had last meant something to me. I thought of the first proper party I went to, the lapis blue halter-neck dress I wore, no bra. I remembered kissing fifteen boys that night, their hands on my waist, the way the whole thing went from excitement to self-reproach so fluidly, hardly a gap at all.

  You did what? my mother said, when I’d told her some of it.

  You little slut! One boy at a time!

  I’d cowered, felt the rot creeping up my legs, another word to
add to my litany. Slut. She’d laughed then, offered me an arm. Silly girl. She’d kissed the top of my head.

  As I cycled, I tried to stay beside trees, close to buildings, turning my head away. It was possible, I had begun to realize, that Jake had told the truth now, that people were looking for me. My face could be on the Internet, on posters. Vicious assault on husband. But I was relieved to discover, as I passed groups of people, couples, students, drunk men in tight shirts, that I was as invisible as ever.

  Elderly women are said to be invisible, but I found that it happened much earlier than that: I blamed motherhood, the stains on my clothes, the darkness of fatigue under my eyes, my head down, hurrying. Of course, women will always look, will notice the way your jeans are slightly too tight, the good colour of your hair. But now the men looked away. Even when I stopped under a group of builders working late, there were no calls, no whistles. They played their loud music, and they laughed, possibly at me. They laughed and let their legs hang down, not even looking at how far they could fall.

  I curved over the handlebars, lifted my shoulders, pedalled away. When I was a teenager, I almost developed a hunchback from trying to hide my breasts. From trying not to let anyone see.

  Stand up straight, my father would say. But I saw what happened if I did that. When I ordered drinks in a cafe, in a bar, men stared directly at my chest, as though ordering from me. At a certain point, I lost weight – tits on a stick, boys in my class laughed – and every time I left the house men called to me; they followed me home. I watched them in every shop, every street, every library. Grown men, old men, holding their wives’ hands, staring at me, running their eyes up and down, taking me in.

  One night I left a club alone after a fight with a friend, staggered to find my own taxi. In the morning I woke up aching inside. No wallet, no phone. Nothing left but bruises, a sourness that seemed to have become my whole body. A blackout. The darkness was full of holes, I discovered, tiny memories that seeped out, one by one. A sharp smell, a turn of a head. Fingers at my hips, against my throat. My fault.

  ~

  For a long time, I used to lie in bed and pray to the harpy to get the ones who hurt me, to punish them, scratch their faces, their hands.

  I imagined their surprise when they saw her: a shadow growing, taking shape in the air.

  ~

  39

  It started to seem that I had been cycling forever, my body drenched in itself, my limbs molten with exertion, still pushing me on. I was on a long, ugly road now, lined with exiled supermarkets, car garages, strings of grey-edged houses ringed by the traffic. At its end, I knew, was a tiny, crouched chapel built for lepers a thousand years ago. I wondered if it would be open, if I could lie down on the pews, be blessed by something that might feel like God. There would be silence, the strange, continuous hum of my mind, the odd harmony that I knew underlay everything, if you listened carefully enough.

  But I was afraid, still, of things worse than me: ghosts and killers, beer-breathed men in the dark. Even now, I thought someone would want me, or want to kill me; this seemed to be the same thing. I cycled straight past the chapel, looping back towards the scented, still world of the university town at night, patched with grassland, bridges, the ancient buildings that were meant to be beautiful.

  I reached the river again: the world was beginning to blur, to merge into an undifferentiated mass, a prehistory whirl of plants, birds, the occasional, dizzying burst of sky. The water lurched beside me, leathery black, welcoming. I followed its bends, a thick ribbon that pulled me with it, on and on, until it veered away and I rejoined the endless flood of cars, hearing radios, phone calls home, talk of dinner and back soon.

  I kept going this time, even when the road went over a motorway, layered bridges shocked by the thunder of heavy goods trucks. Concrete and metal and – somewhere, far away – the sky. This was the gouged dividing line, the place where house prices dropped, pristine medieval ornaments giving way to simple geometry: the flat line of a field of wheat, the squared-off rolling of clouds. The cars passed me too close, indifferent to the way their wing mirrors came within inches of my handlebars. I kept pushing, kept moving, the hedges breaking at intervals to reveal the full evening light across the landscape, its deep yellow pinking at the edges, smoked by fumes.

  I went through one village, and another, my legs raw with fatigue now, bruised-feeling, overripe fruit before it drops to the ground. I considered cycling even further, until I reached the sea, perhaps, some two hundred miles. I would pedal until my wheels got stuck in the sand, until I had to lie the bike down on its side, lie beside it, let the beach be shaped by my body.

  But I was not going to the ocean: I was moving towards a still and familiar point, back to what I knew. The next village was an opening of memory, framed images of lost life. The school gates, mute and mysterious in the dusk, the patch of green, darkened by tall trees, where I’d swigged neat vodka, its taste brutal against the leaves. A small shop, a church bell tower in the distance, and I was there: the turning that became too familiar, over the years, its reoccurrence only disappointment, by the time I left. But now it was something else: a sagging, collapsed version of itself, a picture of time.

  I was unsure, at first, if this was even the same house: I did not remember its window-eyes sinking towards the door like that, the grimace of its defeat, as though embarrassed, unwilling to look at me. A farmer had rented it to my parents cheaply, and since they’d left a series of even worse tenants – or squatters – had made their mark, scored a burn above the kitchen, a scrawl of graffiti across the door.

  It didn’t take much pushing: the locks were old and rotten, loosened by those who’d been there before me. They had left themselves scattered: beer cans, a single shoe, the sea-creature curls of abandoned condoms. My parents had always rented – like me – always managed to find places with problems. This one, the place we stayed longest, had mould and damp even when we lived there, and now it covered every wall, a deep black-green reaching beyond itself, to the garden and beyond, places where there were no other walls for miles.

  When they first viewed the house, my mother said it appealed to them, to be on their own. Detached. No one listening. And the garden: an acre of it, a tamed patch, the wildness at its edges always trying to get through, my mother and father fighting it with seed packets, weedkiller, a common enemy. The house itself was always cracking and dark at the corners, but my mother tried to keep it nice: she scrubbed and fussed, just as I had fussed and scrubbed. And my father helped, just like Jake, and he fucked other women, just as my husband had.

  I’d heard them screaming about it, right in this room, could, if I squinted, see their voices moving across the walls, as clear as the mould, a palimpsest of their presence. When he finally left, just before I did, what struck me most was the silence: the way my mother and I, together, made almost no sound. For years, I would forget that she had died – suddenly, her heart simply giving up one afternoon – would want to ask her questions, ask her opinion, create noise to replace the time when we didn’t speak.

  The last I knew of my father, he’d left the country, gone somewhere sweet and hot. It made sense to me, that he had run away to that place, where people’s lives seemed to swim with pleasure: good food, clear light, beautiful bodies. He would never have to return to this dampness, see the garden as it was now, a jungle at the windows.

  I trailed through the rooms, looking for things I knew I would never find: old toys, my best picture book. I looked for the place where I had scratched my name, below the windowsill, but found only faded white paint, a blank silence. Underneath the quiet, I could feel the people who had been here after us, shifting traces of their unknown lives.

  There was a mattress in the corner of the room, a scrappy old blanket. I lay down on my side, feeling my back settle as I did, my mind now filling every pore of my skin, starting a gentle fire, the tip of a candle along my arms, my legs, my shoulders. I was drained, entirely exhausted, b
ut this surface was flaring, flocking into the edges of myself, the places where I touched the mattress, the points where I ended and the world began.

  There was still some light at the window: the last of this day, weak and indifferent. There was no one wanting me, nothing to do. There was the window, asking nothing. The door, simply itself, no needs, no loud voice. The sound of my heartbeat, the feel of my limbs against the blanket. My skin, warm and restless. I began to take my clothes off, piece by piece, thinking of the dirty mattress as I did it, other sensations stronger, more important.

  I ran the brittle, cracked cusps of my fingernails up and down my skin, pure, unspeakable relief. It was the feeling of rare foreign holidays as a child, covered in mosquito bites that my mother told me not to scratch, the unleashed bliss of finally letting myself do it, of sensation meeting its answer in my own hand. I thought of the scratch mitts that the boys had had to wear as newborns, the way that Ted’s face looked, the one time I was too busy to remember to put them on. Covered in his own scratches, red lines across his chin, his cheeks, his forehead. My baby, I had moaned. He’d looked ruined, at that moment. I’ve let it happen, I’d told myself. Should have stopped him, somehow.

  I got up, as though I would leave, get back on my bike, ride through the night to their skins, their sweet breath on mine. But it was completely dark now: the windows showed me nothing. I sank to my knees, closed my eyes, seeing lights in the corners of my vision, hearing a roaring in my ears, a rush like the wind passing over the tops of trees. I moved my nails into my hair, hunched over, the weight on my back like two hands, pressing me down.