The Taxidermist's Lover

by Polly Hall

  I didn’t normally disturb you in your workshop, but I couldn’t wait until the evening. You were stretching the skin of a zebra over a head mount, its black and white markings looked out of place without its eyes, but I could tell what it was from its thin layer of short, coarse hair and the color of its markings. You looked up and smiled. The smell met me more strongly than usual in your workshop with the doors shut, but I swallowed and tried to hold my breath.

  “I couldn’t wait to tell you . . .” I beamed at you with a smile probably too wide for my true feelings.

  “Scarlett. Just a moment.” You finished positioning the hide, then turned and faced me.

  “I’ve done three tests already this morning.” I waved the last of the pregnancy wands at you, its blue line stating the result in more than words.

  “Tests?—Oh! Scarlett. Come here . . .” You looked around for a cloth and not finding one, wiped your sticky hands on your apron and held out your arms to me. I fell into them and cried, unable to hold it in any longer.

  “You are happy, aren’t you?” I wanted you to be happy so that perhaps I could ride on your bliss.

  “Of course, of course.” You were smiling but I saw a flicker of doubt in your jaw. Was it because you felt you were too old to be a father? Or that you doubted us being parents so early in our relationship? My tears continued hot and wet even as you wiped them away. I cannot tell you if I felt happiness or fear. The bond between us was thickening.

  Memories of my parents are hazy. Rhett and I were only ten when they died, and there was no one else to fill in the gaps of family history after they were gone. There was a time when I saw my mother’s face almost everywhere. Clouds formed into the shape of her eyes or the soft curve of her neck; her face would look down on me from the sky before dissipating into cloud again. The back of her head materialized as I followed strangers through crowded streets, making me rush and push so as not to lose sight of her, in case it really was her, miraculously reanimated. Reflections from glass bottles and windows, even puddles, mimicked her smile. I’d even catch my own reflection and think it was her looking back for a split second. And for all the visitations I used to get from other dead things, my mother never, ever returned. Not even in my dreams. I liked to think this was because she was happy and had no need to revisit, but I also wondered in my darker hours if it was because she had never been good at goodbyes and simply chose not to look back.

  The last day I saw her was not exceptional. We’d not planned any great event; it was a weekend and my father was due home after working away. With just Rhett and me to entertain, Mother had left the washing on the line, given us both a talking to because we’d left chewing-gum on the windowsill and it had become a stringy, sticky mess that the cat had trodden in and stretched from his paw to the carpet. Then to make matters worse, Rhett decided to iron the carpet, as if to remove a stain. This was a ten-year-old boy’s understanding of domestic science. Not wanting to get into more trouble, we tried to clean it up ourselves. The burning chewing-gum smelled sweet yet acrid as it was sizzling and spreading out on the plate of the hot iron.

  “It’s part of the process,” Rhett had said, laying on the carpet and peering at the bottom of the iron. “It will melt then evaporate.” I watched him with a sinking feeling in my stomach, knowing he was blagging, but half hoping he might be right.

  It not only wrecked the carpet and the iron but the curtains as well. We were not popular even when we explained that we had both tried our best to clean it up.

  Butch, that’s what our cat was called. He was long-haired and grey with the squashed, disgruntled face of a reincarnated mafia boss. He was not too impressed by the chewing gum episode either; we had to shave a chunk of his fur off his leg, which left a bald patch.

  We didn’t really expect any treats that day, seeing as our parents needed a new iron, a new carpet and new curtains. But my father was home after working away for several weeks and Mother wanted to make the most of it, as a family.

  “Let’s enjoy family time,” he said amicably when Mother explained what had happened. He was due to fly out to the Middle East after the weekend so she wanted us to have our family picnic together, and afterwards Rhett and I would go stay over at a friend’s house.

  Mother had made egg sandwiches and they stank. Rhett called them fartwiches and scrunched his face. We had all sorts of party food in Tupperware: crisps, sausage rolls, pork pies, scotch eggs, tomatoes and celery, those chocolate teacakes with the marshmallow on the top. It was the only food she was really good at. In fact, it was no different than our normal meals at home, only this was outside, all laid out on the picnic rug at the edge of a wood, near a stream.

  After we’d eaten, Rhett had gone off to explore down the shallow stream with an empty plastic pot and a spoon to catch tadpoles or minnows or some unsuspecting creature minding its own business. Mother and Father sat together side by side, legs outstretched, his arm protectively at her back. We looked like a normal family.

  I was looking up at the trees, wondering why the sparrows used so much energy hopping when they could just walk, when out from the edge of the woods a wolf came loping toward us. I screamed and leapt up from the blanket with visions of Little Red Riding Hood being tricked and eaten, just like her grandmother. The wolf headed straight for me, and I saw my father scramble to his feet shouting, “Scarlett,” and Mother retreating on her hands and knees, although I couldn’t see her as I was running really fast. Or so I thought.

  The wolf sank its teeth into my leg. It pulled me backwards and pushed me down at the same time. I was waving my arms and still screaming when my father whacked it on its jaw with the bat we’d used to play cricket earlier. I heard it crack as the bat came into contact with the wolf’s massive head. The wolf just slumped down on my leg as I lay screaming. I blacked out but then felt its cruel, hot weight on me so couldn’t have fainted for long.

  When I woke, a fat man was stumbling toward us and Father was pulling me out from underneath the limp creature, his hands hooked under my arms. I glimpsed nervously toward the wolf, which lay heavy on the grass as if it had just decided to go to sleep. Only it wasn’t an actual wolf but one of those dogs that looked like a wolf, a Siberian husky or a Tamaskan? My eyes drank in its now-docile expression, tongue protruding from its bloody muzzle.

  “Sorry—sorry.” The fat man was breathless as he came toward the grizzly scene. “He slipped his collar.”

  Father looked up at him and down at the unconscious dog.

  “Bruno—Bruno boy?” the man wheezed as he knelt down by his dog, the dog’s lead swinging round his neck like a stethoscope. “What happened?”

  I had buried my head into my mother’s jumper but quickly looked down at my leg to see I had only been scratched by the dog’s paw as he had jumped at my back. There were no bite marks as I had imagined. There wasn’t even any blood, just a long pink scratch.

  “What happened?” the man kept asking the question and wheezed as he moved his weight from one knee to another. He was holding the dog’s head in his lap, the blood seeped from the side of its jaw discoloring its teeth. The man lifted the dog’s eyelids like you would an unconscious patient. “What have you done?” He looked up at my father, then toward the cricket bat that now lay conspicuously on the grass, then back up at my father. So many emotions flickered across that man’s chubby face that I began to feel confused. His eyes seemed to flicker about like midges over a stagnant pond.

  “You shouldn’t let a dangerous animal off its lead.” Father moved me and Mother away from the man and his dog.

  “Bruno’s not dangerous—what h-have you done? You’ve hit him, h-haven’t you? With that bat?” The man waved his hand to the pale wood slightly smeared with red.

  “He attacked my daughter.” Father sounded calm, so I hid behind him looking down at the dog; my heart was racing. I was responsible for the death of an innocent creature. It made me feel sick and excited all at once.

  “You’ve f-fucki
ng killed my dog!” I’d never heard that swear word before and it was the word that made me jump, not the volume of the man’s voice. He said it with such vehemence I actually felt it penetrate me. And I thought he was going to punch my father but he just puffed and stooped and struggled to lift Bruno over his shoulder. Then he carried him off in the direction he had come. And then he was gone.

  “Is the dog really dead?” I asked my mother forgetting the sore scratch on my leg.

  “No, I think he’s just concussed.”

  “What’s concussed?”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  “So he’s not dead?”

  “Scarlett.” My father turned to me. “Enough!”

  I sat down on the blanket and twisted my leg to look at the scratch on my calf. Mother held me in her arms, and I could not stop the tears. Not because my leg stung and pulsed at the same time, but for Bruno the wolf-dog. I knew he was dead. My father had murdered him with Rhett’s cricket bat.

  As we drove home, Mother and Father were talking in hushed tones. I tried to catch what they were saying, but Rhett was being loud and boisterous, indignant that he had missed the whole drama while he’d foraged in the woods and splashed in the stream.

  “There aren’t any wolves here anymore, stupid,” he said to me, holding his helicopter toy and swooping it about in front of him, bashing it into Father’s headrest and making crashing noises.

  “It looked like a wolf to me,” I told him.

  “No bears either—we’ve killed them all off.”

  “It attacked me,” I said, reinforcing my father’s flaky story.

  “Can’t believe I missed it. Did Dad whack it like he was playing cricket?”

  “That’s enough, Rhett.” Mother stuck her hand back between the car seats to squeeze Rhett’s leg.

  “Dad killed a dog,” Rhett taunted me, “and it’s all your fault.”

  We celebrated the night of the three pregnancy tests with a bottle of homemade wine. A small glass won’t hurt, you’d said, and we curled up by the fire.

  “What shall we call her?”

  “How do you know it’s a “her”?” I said.

  “Him then? What shall we call him?”

  “Do you think it’s too early to talk names?” I felt superstitious. Not wanting to plan anything. This wasn’t planned.

  “We could call her Halo if she’s born on October 31st?”

  “What? As in Halloween?” I screwed up my nose at you. “God, imagine all four of us having the same birthday.”

  “Four?”

  “You, me, Rhett and it, of course.”

  “Oh, I forget you’re a twin sometimes. So how about Halo?”

  “Isn’t that a Beyoncé song?”

  You laughed and said, “I’ve no idea!” and slurped your wine as I readjusted to get comfortable on the sofa. “How about Bruno?”

  As you said the name, I felt a jolt of pain through my abdomen and flinched.

  “Scarlett—what’s wrong?”

  I sat up and breathed deeply to ease the pain. “Nothing, just sat awkwardly.”

  “Was it something I said?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I lied.

  Visions of my father pulling me out from under the dead dog danced before my eyes.

  “I’m going for a lie down.”

  I woke in a hot sweat later that night with my nightdress all screwed up behind my back. You were snoring. As I pulled it back down over my body, the sheet felt sticky and cooler somehow. There was a slipperiness between my legs, and when I reached down I felt the warm wet. It was dark in our room, so I held my fingers up to my face and sniffed but I already knew that this was blood, lots of it, from my own body. I swung my feet round onto the floor and paced to the bathroom, flicking on the light to reveal a bright red patch all over the white cotton of my nightdress. Scarlett, I thought, just like my name.

  I froze, looking down, not sure what to do. It was on my hands and smudged on my arms, between my thighs, down my legs. Should I pee first? Or wake you? Did I need to go to hospital?

  I felt sick and woozy but there was no significant pain, just a dull ache like the start of a period. I knew what had happened and, for a moment, a surge of relief kicked in. I turned the shower on and stepped into the bath tub watching the blood wash away down the plughole, and then I saw it. As I sat underneath the shower stream with the water rushing over my head and down my body, I watched the clots of blood slide down the tub toward the plug hole where they rested being cleansed by the currents.

  I shuffled forward to clear the plughole with my forefinger. And there was what looked like a tiny amphibious creature with head and knobbly limbs curled up, as if resting. It stuck to my finger, not wanting to be washed away. I wanted to show you so I placed it carefully on the edge of the bath tub and turned off the shower. All the while, as I dried my skin and wrapped myself up in a dressing gown and put on clean underwear, I came back to look at the edge of the bathtub feeling numb. That’s when you came in.

  “I want to keep him,” I said. You understood what had happened and nodded.

  You didn’t speak but looked at the tiny creature on the edge of the bathtub. You knew what to do. You could preserve animals, so why not our own flesh and blood? He could just as easily have been washed away down the plughole or in the toilet. But I caught him and kept him here. With us. You understood my need, didn’t you? He was made from the both of us.

  Christmas Day—Today

  Mid-morning

  We are lost songs in the morning mist.

  I can hear them fighting one another. The crow is cack-cacking at the rabbit. Trapped inside one body, stitched together for eternity, these creatures fight with all their might for freedom. Survival of the fittest. Indignant crow, grounded by the rabbit’s mammalian traits, his wings replaced with what? A furry back and paws. He tries to launch into the air but finds he only flops forward on all fours. Mopsy, flopsy, cotton-tailed humiliation.

  Crow, once harbinger of death, carrier of souls, now a lowly half-breed, emasculated into a doe rabbit’s body—at least he still has his head. I feel frustration spike from him in sharp jabs; he does not know who he is. How is he defined now his wings have been stitched to another species? And what of poor rabbit, demoted to a headless ball of fluff doctored with a beak and wings? The crow’s head watches, but the rabbit is blinded by decapitation—she can only sense with her body, a tail still twitching, a paw lifting tentatively to taste the air without a tongue.

  They are agitated. Something is coming, they say. Listen. The waves are breaking in the distance. The ice is being cut.

  April

  I noticed the first butterfly appearing like a small flake of fire over the hedge. It always lifted my spirits to see one, especially the first one of spring, an awakening, a transformation occurring before my eyes. This was a Red Admiral, living up to its name, commanding attention. I stopped and followed its jagged flight across the garden and out of sight, and as I stood marveling at the warm sunshine on my face another signifier of spring cut an arc across the sky—two diving swallows.

  April—yet some bare trees still silhouetted the skyline behind the freshness of new growth. I tentatively exposed my skin as the sun strengthened. I wondered at the way the color green lifted my mood. On those spring days it was as if the earth started sighing again in contentment. I breathed in deeply. There is a certain faith in the cycles of life, and you had instilled that kind of faith in me. Natural cycles and patterns swam between us, defined us.

  “How does it hurt you?” you asked as I curled up in a ball on the sofa that time of the month, cradling my belly.

  “It feels like my insides are being tied into knots,” I answered, grateful that you were not flippant, but curious and tender. “Then the ache spreads through me. It’s better when the flow starts.”

  “Like a release?”

  “Yes, a release and a mourning too.”

  Then you rubbed the small of my back while perched on th
e arm of the sofa, your touch sending messages to my core. In those moments of intimacy we were so in tune like the rhythms of nature. We were destined to mutate into something else. Only we didn’t know it then, when the buds were protruding like sweet tight cotyledons.

  You watched the wilderness creep up on our home as you watched all things, letting it absorb your identity with a quiet playfulness. I think that was how you recreated those specimens with such accuracy. You observed and absorbed. Then, as if by magic, they became something new while their essence remained.

  It was more than sculpture; they looked as if they could come back to life at any moment, launch into action and scamper or leap or launch into flight.

  “The fox does not run like the badger,” you said. I assumed at the time you meant this literally, but there was always another layer of meaning brushing amongst your words. “It scurries, stops, sniffs, darts. Whereas the badger lopes, slinks and sways.” Did you mean that no matter how we were changed, we never could escape ourselves?

  “You need to show its true character,” you said. “It’s no good placing a fallow on a mount with his ears up, looking about. He should look dopey, like a clown.”

  “But I’ve seen a deer look alert . . .”

  “Yes, sika deer—now there’s a different character. On that type I would position the mount with its head looking up.”

  You saw beauty in all those creatures who revealed their essence to you. With careful study you would resurrect them as they were in life. Did you know then that you could stitch parts of their soul back to their spent body? Some days I wished I could have a new body. I felt so fragile at certain times of the month, bruised and tender.

  I remember watching three feral pigeons on our broken fence like musical notes on a staff, each staccato head a restless note. A whisper of breeze lifted their feathers and their silent crisp movement softened. Two faced inwards, one away—a dance of mimicry. This was a ménage-a-trois staged grey on brown, intuitive, magnetic, heads facing east then west. They looked oversized, filled with seed, and I envied them. I was jealous of the common feral pigeon. Why? They belonged. They were so completely in the moment like all the other creatures, they merely seemed to react on instinct.