by Rebecca Ley
He looked hurt. He ran his hands through his hair. ‘What do you mean?’
I shrugged my shoulders, examining my shoes. ‘I don’t know if we’re right for each other. I don’t know if we belong together.’
He reached a hand out to me but I didn’t take it. ‘Where’s this coming from? I thought things were going along well.’
I shrugged again and didn’t look at him.
‘So that’s it then? Just like that. You’re done?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and folded my arms.
‘And you’re not going to change your mind?’
‘No,’ I said, quietly, looking up at him.
‘And you won’t give me a better explanation than that?’ He stepped towards me. I swallowed, and lowered my head again.
‘There’s nothing else to say.’ I exhaled loudly, and my eyes started to smart despite myself. ‘I should just go.’ I looked up at him and he just stood there, unmoving. He watched me and smiled, this time with malice. I turned to walk towards the door, putting my hands in my coat pockets one more time.
He said, ‘I saw you, don’t think I didn’t. Talking to Jaminder, to Gloria. What have they been filling your head with?’
‘What do you mean?’ I said, but it sounded nothing like a question. I turned back to face him. I tried to crumple the paper to nothing, then, in my hand. I’d already memorised the number.
‘Give me the papers,’ he said. I looked blankly at him. ‘The papers you stole from me.’
‘Where’s Gwendolyn?’ I said.
It happened just like that, and I can’t say anything about it other than that I was surprised. If I had seen it all coming, unravelling before me like a spool of red satin ribbon in the shop, I would’ve left sooner. I wouldn’t have let it begin. I suppose I should’ve realised. But I didn’t.
All I remember is blinking and being on the floor, a burning pain emanating from my head, so hot I thought I’d been scalded by an iron taken from the fireplace. The world in front of me was black, but I still had the sense to raise my hand to my head and feel the wetness there. I brought my hand back to the floor and leant on it. When my vision reappeared, I saw my fingers had been dipped in a pool of red, which I’d smeared on the kitchen tile. I looked up and saw George, with my coat in his hands. I wondered how long I’d been out for. He didn’t notice me sitting up at first. I looked at his hands. I looked at what they were doing. I looked at the counter. There was a rolling pin there, but I couldn’t even tell now if I was sure that’s what he used.
I watched his hands, afraid. I saw them grasp at the papers that I thought I had kept so perfectly hidden.
He looked down at me, he lifted them towards me. ‘If I explained them to you, you still wouldn’t be able to understand.’ he said. ‘It’s better you don’t think of things that don’t concern you.’ George laughed, turned on the gas hob and lit the papers up before throwing them in the sink. He laid my jacket down on the work surface. He hadn’t seen Jaminder’s scrap of paper, then. It probably would have meant nothing to him if he’d found it. But I felt a small triumph that I had something that was still my own.
He lifted me and carried me up the stairs. I weakly felt for his lapel, for something to hold onto as the bannister spun around me and the floor merged into the wall. I felt my consciousness drifting, so out of my control, that blackness. It was as though someone was pouring warm oil over my head and all I could do was let it; the heaviness and pleasure of nothing.
I leant my head towards him, I tried to stop it. ‘Why,’ I think I said, or I thought, my mouth not opening.
He hitched me up again, to get a better grip on my body, before laying me on the bed. ‘You’re wrong, Matilda. We are right for each other. We are.’
My eyes closed.
3
I awoke the next morning propped up in bed, a spoon being forced into my mouth. Sweet, sickly, crystalline. I moaned.
‘It’s honey,’ George said, as though to a child, dotingly. ‘It’ll help.’
‘No,’ I said, trying to move my head away, but I couldn’t. I swallowed it.
‘Are you upset with me?’ He kissed my shoulder, sitting beside me. There was a tray on my lap of elaborate cakes made out of every colour that food wasn’t. ‘I brought you a bit of everything, to make you feel better.’
I opened my mouth to protest, but my tongue lay there, immovable, dead.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, lowering the spoon. ‘You can’t imagine the kind of pressure I’m under. We’re on a knife’s edge.’ He gestured to himself with the spoon, and it got stuck on his shirt, leaving a small, sticky honey stain, but he didn’t look down. ‘I’m on a knife’s edge. And you – you’re with me, you’re helping me just by being here. I need someone like you, to keep me sane. I need you.’
I frowned, I still couldn’t speak. I tried to move my fingers, one by one, and each time they relented. I couldn’t lift my hand. I wanted to touch my head. But I could see on the nightstand that there was a curl of bandages, and he’d tried to patch me up. I felt pain everywhere, not just in my head. He clattered the spoon down on the tray and put the jar of honey down next to it. He took my face in both his hands, leaning across me.
‘I know everything about you, Matilda. Didn’t you think? I gave you that ration card, those fruits, the sugar, I gave you everything. You know what happens to people that steal? That try and cheat the system? Do you know where the women go that choose not to reproduce when they can perfectly well, who don’t have someone like me to help them?’ He squeezed my face. I could feel each finger’s imprint on my cheekbones, in my jaw. ‘I want to help you.’ He let go, he leaned back. ‘Don’t be foolish.’
He moved my tray from across my lap and lay down on the bed next to me. Wetness pooled around my clavicle but I could barely move my head to look, I could barely move my eyes to look at him, to watch his hands all over me, and under the sheets. I thought it might be blood, running all down me, from my head, spoiling the sheets.
He moved up against me. ‘Come on, now,’ he said. ‘You can’t be angry with me. Don’t you love me? Because I love you.’ He felt his way around me, slid off my clothes. All I could do was close my eyes, which is when I realised it was not blood, after all, but wetness from my eyes. All I could do was lie there, remembering what Gloria had said, that we are just bodies.
And he kept saying things, over and over, things that were just words. Not words in the way that anyone else spoke them, words that had meaning or sentimentality, or anything that made them more than just air and dust. All I could do was lie there. All I could do was let him.
He brought the radio up, and tried to set it to my favourite station. But the reception was terrible and the whole thing crackled. He didn’t bother to turn it off as he was upon me. I held onto that sound; that white noise. I held onto it to try and drown everything else out.
Afterwards, I lay there, as dead in my mind as I’d ever known it to possibly be; only the black and yellow shapes of darkness and the searing wonder of pain beyond what I ever knew to exist. If in those minutes, I managed to form a word, or a thought, or an image resembling anything from my life, it was only to berate myself, to tell myself how stupid I’d been. I’d never even taken that ration card, had I? But I had deliberated, I had wanted to. And what I hadn’t realised then, which weighed upon me now, in the night of my mind, was that it didn’t matter if I’d taken it or not. I’d taken other things. I’d gone to those parties and eaten that food. I was complicit. Solely by his offering it, I already owed him something.
When I could feel for my head, and could stand, and George had left for work, I stood in the kitchen. I felt my scalp’s solidity, guarding my inner life. And the sealed wound, still healing. I tried to comb my hair over it to hide the dressing. I lifted the telephone off the hook, and it released a dial tone. I turned on the kitchen light switch, just to check, and even in bright daylight it beamed on. I turned it off immediately.
I looked around the
house to see if I could find (if I’d even recognise) anything that would be monitoring me. Did he have machines that did that? Were they in the walls? I laid my palm across every wall, feeling for anything different. I knocked at them, softly, to try and hear an echo. If honey made a noise through a wall, what would it be? I was sure everything was hidden behind them, I was sure if they could speak they would tell me. I tried the handle of the locked room filled with jars. It was tightly shut. It took all my power just to try and open it.
The front door wasn’t locked, neither were the windows. But there was an implicit understanding that I wouldn’t leave. And why would I? Did I want my grandmother to suffer? Did I want my life smaller and more narrowed than it was? It was just like Gloria said, we say nothing. Is that all we say?
I lifted the phone. I dialled the number. I waited.
‘Hullo?’
‘Hello.’
‘Mathilde, is that you? Where are you calling from?’
‘Can we talk, Jaminder? Are we able to?’
Exhale. ‘We’re talking now.’
‘But I mean, really talk.’
‘No, don’t. Put the phone down, Mathilde. Put it down.’
‘But —’
‘I’ll see you later, at the party. You’ll be there won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I need to talk to you now.’
There was a crackle as she exhaled. ‘Meet me by Queen Anne’s Gate, at the bottom of the steps, by the park. I’ll be there in an hour.’
The dial tone droned. I stood there, the phone up to my ear for a long time, breathing into the receiver. It crackled again, and I thought about the people left who still made phones. People who sold them, if such people still existed. And what little electricity was needed for them, and how that was a miracle, because it meant that they were one of the few things that had survived. They’d endured centuries, relatively unchanged. The wiring was nearly all the same, and they worked just the same, and they still worked, and that was one of the few miracles we had left. When everything else went down, and people lamented the loss of everything they could remember (what was real or exaggerated, it was hard to tell), the telephone remained. The telephone still crackled.
I checked the gash on my head in the bathroom. It had crusted over. I tried to clean it again and re-dress it. I put my brown shoes on and left everything in the house untouched.
I left the house straight away to wait by the park’s entrance, afraid that I’d miss Jaminder. She arrived after what felt like several hours, and I was sitting on the bottom step, away from the road, across from the park. She appeared beside me, barely stopping. She looked down at me swiftly, without a word, and I stood up and followed her.
I trotted alongside her. ‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘You look like hell.’ She kept looking straight ahead, her tread swift.
‘I know, I’m sorry,’ I said, stroking the ends of my hair with my fingers. I looked down at her shoes, old and worn, crunching on the path. ‘Did you walk here from your flat?’
She let out a small laugh at that. ‘No, I arrived by chauffeur.’ She pulled at my arm, as we turned down a side street and into a small pub on the corner.
The pub was crowded with people, dense with dark wood panelling. The room sat under a cloud of smoke that stung my eyes, and people at the bar sloshed golden liquid from mugs. I’d never been in a pub before.
‘C’mon,’ Jaminder said, pulling me down at a small sticky table in the corner, immediately grabbing a cigarette from her pocket and lighting up. ‘Do you want one?’ she said, the cigarette waggling from her mouth as she flicked the lighter on.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘Jaminder, I don’t have any money,’ I raised my hands palm up, afraid of being in a public house with no way to buy a drink.
‘Oh,’ she waved a hand to dismiss me. ‘I know the guy,’ she said, and then raised two fingers up at the bar and down to the table.
The man behind the bar brought us two tumblers of some kind of spirit, slapping them down with a cheerful, ‘There you are Jam-jar.’ He looked at me, leaning over the table so that I could see his red chapped skin beneath his stubbled face. ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Thanks, Tony,’ she said, patting his arm and taking another drag. ‘Just put it on my tab.’
He stood up and let out a laugh. ‘Oh yeah, that tab. Shame your old man isn’t around to pay it one of these days, huh.’
‘That is a shame,’ she said, smiling back at him. He laughed to himself and went back to the bar, slapping his hands together in amusement.
Her smile slipped as soon as he left and she turned back to me. ‘It’s safe here,’ she said. ‘No one who’d bother to listen to us talk.’ She flicked her cigarette over the ash tray and sat forward, her thumb between her teeth. ‘What did he do?’ she said, quietly.
I felt my throat close up at her question, and my hands shake. ‘I didn’t know who else to call.’
She reached across the table and lifted a piece of my hair up, and then tucked it softly behind my ear. ‘He hurt you.’
‘It came out of nowhere,’ I said, and clasped my hands together in my lap. ‘I’m scared, Jaminder. I don’t know what to do.’
Her face turned white and puckered, but she didn’t look surprised. ‘That bastard,’ she said, before sliding the cigarette between her lips. Exhale. ‘I should’ve dragged you from that party that first night,’ she said.
‘Maybe.’ I felt my limbs ache at the weight of being inside my body, at the pressure of all my bad decisions.
‘I’ve been trying to call Gloria all morning, but there’s no answer. After you talked to her last night, I worried about you. I wondered what she’d said. I wondered what we could do, maybe,’ she put a hand up to her face and dragged it across as though trying to reveal something in her mind, ‘I don’t know what I thought.’
‘She wouldn’t tell me anything, she wouldn’t say.’ I felt my vision start to blur and my breathing change in anxiety. ‘Has Gwendolyn turned up yet?’
Jaminder shrugged her shoulders, looking down at the table. ‘I don’t know.’
‘And George? Gloria thinks he’s involved in something, doesn’t she?’
Jaminder sighed. ‘We have to talk to her.’
‘I feel so alone in it, Jaminder, I’m at sea.’ I put my hands up to cover my face, and was relieved when she didn’t ask how I’d remember what being on any sea was like.
‘I need to talk to Gloria first,’ I heard her say. ‘If the damn woman would just answer her phone. Anyone would think she’s just vanished.’
I put my hands down and looked across at her, worried. She shook her head. She reached across for me then, over our tumblers, and squeezed my arm. It warmed me. She looked at me in a familial way, letting her cigarette burn through, and then remembered herself, pushed my tumbler towards me and tapped her cigarette. ‘Well, with a face like that, of course you’re in trouble.’ She smiled. ‘Drink your drink.’ She knocked hers back in one go, and I watched the liquid slide easily down her throat. ‘Better,’ she said, as she waited for me to do the same.
After three bitter, salty gulps, my glass was emptied. I felt the liquid warm me. ‘Better,’ I agreed.
She promised me we’d talk, all three of us, at the party. She said she couldn’t do a thing without Gloria, and I wondered what that meant. Mostly, I thought it meant that she was afraid too, and it was the only thing that she could say. She gestured for another round and I thanked her, while saying I couldn’t stay long.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Best to go back and pretend all’s okay for now. And then later, we’ll talk.’
I felt my throat twist sickeningly at the thought of going back to George, and seeing his face, and letting him lay even a hand on my shoulder.
‘I don’t know how this happened,’ I said, after the second round was put away. ‘I don’t know how I got here.’
‘The best of us do it,’ she said, lighting another cigarette.
‘Do what?’
‘String ourselves up for love.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know if I did it for that.’
She took a drag of her cigarette, exhaled through pursed lips, nodded. She sat back in her chair, waved her hand at me, gesturing for me to continue.
‘Sleeping with a man, it’s sometimes…it can be awful, can’t it?’ I said.
‘Excruciating.’
‘Sometimes I feel that my body is a desert. And I can’t believe that we were ever made for it. Because my body is so against it, and so unwilling, and it doesn’t want another body anywhere near it, and it was never designed for that. How men ever thought that our bodies, above all else that they could do, were primarily for that… If they could only feel the desert I felt, and the way I could do other things, how my legs could run and how my heart could feel and brain could think, they’d never even ask for it.’
Jaminder looked at me, unmoving. Her eyes narrowed, as though she were seeing me for the first time.
‘Sometimes I feel like it’s impossible we were ever designed for each other, in that way at least.’
She smiled. ‘Completely,’ she said in a non-committal way.
‘Then other times, it’s all you can think about. And your body changes. And the thought of it consumes you. And all you want and all you dream about and all you desire in the dead of night is another body pressed on top of your body, just for the weight of it, just for the smell of pure skin, and the plummy weight of it underneath your fingers.’ I patted a hand to my chest. ‘Sometimes the world won’t do without the weight of a man.’
She looked away. ‘I suppose so.’ She took a drag of her cigarette, then patted it down in the ashtray. ‘Have you ever been in love, Mathilde?’ she said, seriously.
‘With a man?’
‘Sure,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.
‘Not in the way I’m sure I’m supposed to.’
She nodded.
‘But I have been in love, many times over. With cities, with the women in my life, my mother, my grandmother, the way they loved each other. With my friends.’