Some nights I think it’s his voice that’s woken me, but when I kneel up off my stretcher his mouth holds nothing, the knowledge in his irises flattened.
We met in the slate vault of a cathedral. We’d been sightseeing, on our OE. He’d been checking me out in the loud queue into the grounds, but when we filed through the nave a hush came down, so we grabbed the straps of our packs and shivered. We both got the chill of something ancient. Up the central chamber columns of knights were laid out, stationed in their cool stone boats. We stopped at each carved body, wondered at their chainmail, their spiked crowns, the serenity of their crossed feet. Our yellow-laced boots were too weathered and downunder. I heard him exhale, and a curse come straight from home.
That’s butchery. Holy fuck.
He meant the graffiti. There were ruts gouged into the engravings, the stone beds defaced with crosshatched names.
Who’d tamper with this much history. Seriously. What kind of person would stand here and do that?
I shook my head. The notches were sacrilege. And it looked no different from the lists in a toilet stall. Who’d fucked who. Knifed in granite. Who was proud about it.
They should be . . . fucking smote.
Yeah. He grinned back at me. If there’s a God, he should smite them.
Sometimes, running a cloth against the dome of his ribs, I feel the same. His vacant temples. His shoulders waning, rocked from the collarbone, his nape on a yaw. His greyed crown of follicles. His abdomen chalked with breath, the scrape of the rag edging all of his helpless creases. The fastenings of his eyelashes, granular along the rim.
There is zero recognition. But sometimes his parched lips tic with lost language.
I think of the marks that I left for him, a signature I may as well have scraped into his side.
When we walked deeper that day into the chapel, the steeple was too high for me to see. I couldn’t crane up, and my pack threatened to topple me. So he helped me shrug its burden, told me his name, said, you can trust me, eh. He offered his palm to brace my neck, let the glory at the apex lie me back on a lean. And all the stains at the zenith poured down on me.
a floor plan with FIRE EXITS highlighted is mounted
on the back of your door
It happens because you are trying to do wrong. The hotel wall turns into a windshield. Something was deadlocked under land, but now it has blown out. Your voice is exploding with it. You don’t know what you’re captive in, a space of glass and roar. All the lines of the hotel have fractured. There’s an apocalypse of plaster.
When you can, you run out. The minibar fridge is a landmine. Your bare feet are chattering. The lift is cabled to hell. The doors that number the shouting have all bust open the faces hidden behind. The sprinklers baptise you, the carpet is barbed, a downhill of splinters. People climb out with you, wearing red tape. The tank in the foyer has been torn loose. The fish are drastic, lying there, lip-reading.
The streets are not breathing. You pass other people, frozen or stumbling, and you squint at each other and sometimes call, but all your words are smudged out by mouthfuls of shock. Sound is coming through the wrong end of the telescope. A distant siren is pinpointed inside your head. Its squeal may never leave you. Some people are hoisting what’s broken, clawing their way over stacks, their feet and hair toppling, pieces jerked from their hands as they clamber and yell. Others are motionless, blinking the world back together again. As if they ever could. There’s a woman whose trunk is a parquet of blood. There’s a man running with a leaden child. The black map of tarmac has sunk, and cars are running downstream. The buildings gush with shards and hang with water, the alarms pour down your mind. Your car is muzzled, front end knuckleboned. There’s a gale of smoke, and a dog barking at it. Your legs go out, an aftershock, and you watch the hotel wall, for a while, turn to powder. Like it always held your ashes.
There is a path home, but your footprints crack it. Your dress is riven. Your baby is an insect buzz. You keep passing people whose houses are quartered. Families squatting in foothills of glass. Aluminium in backfired continents. You walk stop-motion, and people take shape out of smoke, with limbo in their eyes. Everything sounds hydraulic. Someone has skeletoned the world. There’s a man dragging along a keyboard, and a woman clutching an arrangement of flowers. Some people wave at you, even try to stop you, but you blunder on. There’s an undertow of black where the bridge once lived. A man with a loudspeaker calls to you to halt. But your baby is hot and your feet are in the basement of the world where the liquid is deep and full of ghosts. Your heart is an epicentre. A palette of red sound slides off your tongue. All you can think of to say is sorry.
keep bones from moving, do not try to straighten
I think Dad’s taking me to visit Mum’s grave when he asks me to tag along today. One thing Dad holds on to: my mother’s headstone never got a scratch on it, so he can sit there from time to time, prop up a new sprig of flowers, chat with her undented angel. But we pull up instead on a road in a nice suburb. I wonder then if we’re lost. But I don’t want to push him: he’s ashamed of what’s happened to his bearings. It’s one of the zones that looks almost untouched, still stately, bar the odd crimp in the kerb, a slur in a paling or gatehead here and there.
We come to a stop across the road from a villa nestled in silk trees. Its verandah is iced, and wisteria trails the trim. Dark leaves have been box-cut into globes along its formal front path. Its intactness, right-angled, looks surreal.
Very Alice in Wonderland, I tell him. So where in fact are we?
But he can’t get past the street number. The cab vinyl echoes his convulsions. My touch doesn’t stop it. He’s bowed by tears, beyond reaching. He drops his face against the wheel.
We have to sit a long time. Once it slows, he fiddles with the dash, like something’s going on in the dials, the mileage, the meter, some tampering he has to get straight.
Then he says, It was my fare yester –
The sobs in his chest pull the sentence up short. He swallows, starts again. People tell me, that’s all. They hop in the cab, and they talk. And I know it’s what they need.
But you need, too, Dad. Come on, tell me.
It was just a lad. He didn’t mean anything by it. Just full of himself. He seemed – excited by everything. Like he was –
Amped up.
Dad nods.
Then he just kept going. Didn’t stop –
To think where you might have been.
Never gave it a thought. They made a stretcher out of pipes, used their jackets, he told me, him and his mate. On the day. He was doing his bit, I suppose. He seemed a good kid. Rushing round, the two of them, being heroes. And he just kept on.
Detail you didn’t need.
No. I should have . . . just been glad he had life in him. They don’t, you know, day after day. My fares. Some get in, and they don’t even know where they’re heading. Like I’m an ambulance, but they’ve no idea where they need to be. So I should have been glad he had some spark. But . . . what upset me was the way he said it. He said they’d loaded a girl onto their stretcher. Already gone. She’d been checked and checked. More than once. She was signed off. A sheet pulled up. Everything. But they were walking her away, and she lifted her head. They got such a scare they let her crash down. She’s all right. She came around. Just like that, he said. She sat back up. And she was talking away. She got up, and started walking home again. But . . . he told it like – it was a joke. Which it probably is. Cause for laughing. In the right light. I know I need to look for the upside.
He sighs. His hands are still on the dash, working.
It was just . . . because it was a girl. A young lady. I just found myself thinking –
She didn’t arise, his fare that day. I’m busting. Christ who art with me. Please. We lift them to the Lord. Despite his prayer, he lost her voice.
It’s stupid. I know it’s pointless. But it seemed – why couldn’t she have woken back up.
T
hen he’s sobbing again. Because I was late.
He repeats: I was late. And if I hadn’t been, she could have. Been in there.
The house is what he’s waving at. The address she’d chanted at him from the backseat, like they could still find their way. There’s a bike, vintage, black-spoked, propped on the porch. There’s a trellis, staked with deadhead roses. It has lace-lined windows, ivory sashed. It’s a dream.
I might have got her home. Or close. I could have gotten her at least –
Dad, no.
I’m not late. I’m never the sort who. But I can’t change it. I was. It was me.
In the rubble, he lost her voice behind him. He tried to keep praying through her last vowels. Then he heard a gored sound, liquid and unbreathable. It wasn’t even long before the first slabs of stonework were lifted from the cab. But all her talk was over.
Those minutes would not have made a difference.
Yes, they could.
You don’t know that. Dad. How can you.
He stares back at the house, as if someone might swoop through the door, cross over to the taxi, take a swing, smash the windscreen. He cowers in the driver’s seat like he deserves it.
She would have been your age. It might have been you doing something. And someone had been the one. And what would I think, if they had been. Like me. Made you late. If they took those last minutes off you.
But you didn’t lose me, I tell him.
No, he says. I didn’t. He’s looking at the villa. Sunlit timbers. The dark bell waiting to chime at its door. Then back at me. As if he’s not certain.
Dad. You didn’t lose me.
I think he’s going to pray then. His hands drop from dials he can’t turn back. The numbers don’t mean anything. Minutes, payment, routes erased.
Then he turns and stares at me. That’s what we all have to think of, I suppose, he says.
I reach for his hand.
Of what we didn’t have taken, he says. Of what we didn’t lose.
I know it is time to wake. To get up and walk.
know the natural warning signs
I’d said I was leaving, and he should do the same. We should meet at the hotel, then just take off, aim somewhere like outlaws, put miles between us and them. I wasn’t even planning to break the news about the baby. I’d barely broken it to myself. It was a figment, a glitch of hope I hadn’t bought into. I wouldn’t tell him until deep into our getaway. I had a horizon in mind, and I must have thought I could lie there in a no-strings dress and sell it to him, smile wide, legs spread, suitcase splayed. Like some juvenile runaway.
But he was late.
I think I knew, waiting on the black chair.
I told myself his lateness meant nothing. He was always running late. Such a paradox, a guy who always moved at top speed, always paced and revved and fidgeted, should also be the one who was always thudding through the door, full-charm, in a tardy skid, a barrage of cute mock-reasons ready to wipe out any mutter of irritation. He was just always late, his energy pulling him in all directions, so he couldn’t toe the line, keep his movements timed and straight. Just adorably late, in his DNA, babe get used to it. I’d plan the next time to be so damn backward and delayed, no excuses, so I could get back at him. But I couldn’t stick to it. The next time a meeting came round I was twitching in the drift of my skirt. I couldn’t keep pinned to a seat at home for an instant. I’d be staring at the clock hands bang. I’d be panting at the magnitude of hunger I had to get across town to him.
When they found his body, it was foetal, in his chair. At the arrowhead of an anonymous desk. Intact, all the strands of his building unplaited. Steel cords wrapped him with the tonnage above. There was no way of knowing if he’d ever been conscious, had to wait, or if he’d been blindsided, instant. There was no way of even beginning to think such things. Although I do, when I’m at the white chairs. Sitting in the eerie parade of their stillness, gaunt, unnamed, their bodies in negative. The baby seat stiffened, its scoured fleece cradle. The office chair, aerodynamic, with its tough back, hydraulics on its thick base, weight-distributed. The star of wheels that could take him clear across the room – because I’d seen him do it, I’d called into the office, just to sneak another look, and watched him, the force of him, belting his seat across the lino in long warped joyrides, laughing, as he nearly brought a head-on collision, spinning on his tomfool axis, the life of the office, the bad-news spark of it, the mischief, jazzing up the mundane tasks with his offbeat antics, racing his chair past the cubicles in loony jackass stunts. For my benefit. Catching me side-on, on one rotation, gliding me along for a circuit, the temperature-controlled air rushing into my protest, as he flung us into a spiral, a long wonky spill of us, side-car and gasping, my husband just shaking his sober head across the room. Stay away from him, my husband shouted over, laughing. Stay away from him, he’s a disaster.
How is it possible not to know your world is falling? Because it didn’t seem that I could be pulling our home down around his head, that I could be cheating on everything that held us upright, eating away our foundation, and my husband could not feel it coming, couldn’t sense the slightest shift.
I think I knew, waiting on the black chair.
Lovers say it breaks us, makes us bleed, leaves scars. Love hurts. We call ourselves crushed.
Today, at the hospital, my husband’s wheelchair arrived.
the hotel is equipped with an alarm system
How to be haunted: have no photos. No images of his body in the doorway, the light along his muscles so fine it looks acoustic, or stretched half out of the fishtailed sheets, grinning with misbehaviour. None of him coming towards you, hungry for a takedown, slipknotting your waist, while you give him lip, make little pouty sallies against him, lie back with your thighs in his thumbs’ soft garotte. None of his diehard smile, just that, filling the frame. Just that, giving you amnesia. None of his hypermasculine walk, a bareface strut really, too much not to snicker at, until you draw near to the swagger of it, musky and iambic. None of him dreaming – because he can do that, just slump into sleep in an easy instant, his trunk rolled deep, his forearms untethered, his eyelids tweaking like unlucky stars. None of you, hacking into his dreams, messing with him lying there in lazy extremis, because you can’t stand to let him slip free of you so smoothly, to shrug aside and drop into a no-worries snore, so you brood and nip and meddle, subtracting him from his doze, until he backfires like you crave and pins you giggling by your wrists. None of his cute domesticated shuffle round the kitchenette, a goofy parody of serving you tea, flicking little sachets and acting like a butler, with his cock still looking half interested. None of his face, close-up, when you ration him, making him beg, giving him a glistening inch. None of it, forlorn, when the time’s up, and you can’t stand the feel of your clothes, their weight and their fastening, and you pause at the door both wearing a sadness you don’t want but have no choice but to take. None of him shivering as you open the throat of his shirt again, like this is an emergency. None of it stop-motion. None of it ever. No messages, no texts. No images. No evidence.
Just a letter, lost in a red zone, that thinks it knows what love is.
protect your head and neck with your arms
I’m coming back from the hospital when I pass a line of people. Their faces are stoic, filing to a wide desk, waiting for their turn. They’re queuing to add their names to a register, saying they promise to stay, rebuild the city. I watch a woman turning from the book, peeling a sticker that she lines over the heart of her t-shirt, smooths with a palm. It reads I have signed the Pledge.
I’ve seen her a few times now, different places. She parks up a blue, beaten five-door, panels rippled with quake – just a light brush of death in the metalwork, no big deal, still running. The rear door is too warped to pop, so she has to half-crawl in, drag her easel and supplies out the side, heavy body on a camber. She pants with the strain; she’s not such a young woman, the movements aren’t easy for her. Bu
t she does it. Juts the tripod out, angles her canvas. Squats, to recover for a while, on a low stool. Watches. Then looks down, mixes her pigment. If there was a moment when I would go and speak to her, it wouldn’t be this one. The work of grief is just between her and the paint.
She stares a long time at the wreck, as if she plans to enshrine detail, pick out the splintered updraft of hallways, the doorways smothered, the harpooned walls. But she doesn’t. She draws what no longer stands. She recreates what’s missing. Stroke by stroke, she lifts the stone. Her brush restores and stiffens the framework. The ghost of the structures that used to stretch beyond her she raises back from lengths of paint. Her resurrected buildings are whole and smoothed. And there’s always a blue light she pastes round their angles, a bold resistant cloudless shade, a sky that makes the walls thicker, roofs toughened in relief. The colour of hope, a blinded postcard blue. It sets with a determined sheen. I don’t know what to make of it: two parts faith, one fake.
People buy them before the paint is dry. I don’t think she’s in it for the turnover. She takes the cash, hands over the canvas. I have signed the Pledge. But I can’t read the look on her face.
There are never any people in her frames.
There are some things that won’t rise again.
stay low to the floor, stay away from the windows
I can’t find a way to get to the letter. But there are buildings that I can get into. Some nights I walk, without aim, where nothing’s left to scale, and I break in anywhere I can. When you push through the cartilage of other houses, you find a mausoleum of familiar things: shoes, utensils, rooms anchored by stone. No one has heirlooms to pass down – they have junk to dump, shake off, not worth coming back for. I take risks. One bathroom is a cameo of mould, the sinktop edged in pearls, the shelves baroque with bird shit. The shower drain is eyewitness testimony, silver over a sunlit void. The botched touchdown of a cot lies under the last windowpane. My steps feel high-wire but something has been here with claws: there are pellets on the couch. The curtains experiment with shadows. The walls do balancing acts they were never meant for.
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