Under the Blue

by Oana Aristide

  The sky is beautifully, cheerfully blue. There never was such a long stretch of glorious days.

  The cut on his palm heals, but now he has only Fairy Liquid for washing. New lines and cracks appear on the back of his hands, and in the gap between the middle and the index finger there’s an angry, itchy redness.

  One day he’s in the kitchen when he hears the cow again, its plangent lowing replaced by shorter, formless cries. He covers his ears, sits there holding his head and staring at the scratch card on the fridge. Willing it to be his ticket out of this nightmare.

  After a week the water stops running. He waits until the sun disappears behind the treetops, and then he carries water from the stream, makes himself a reservoir out of the bathtub.

  Maybe it’s from the effort, but his right knee starts shaking again, as it did on the trip from London; little, timid tremors that seem to draw attention to all not being well. Unable to make it stop, after a while he imagines it as a song, thinks about writing down the beat. He could call it ‘The Song of Fear’, and make it the soundtrack to his next installation. He wanders between the sweltering rooms, the red silk of the robe rippling softly about him. Trying to lose the tremor in the knee.

  At night he is tormented by memories. The email he got from Tim – the boy would have been about seventeen – asking if he could come and stay with him in London for the summer; take some driving lessons with him. There were reassurances that he had his foster parents’ blessing, and that he needed the driving licence to travel to a job in a neighbouring town. At a supermarket, or some such place. Very polite, very timid, and so he was moved by the tone and stupidly shot back a positive reply straight away.

  There was even a bizarre attachment: a photo of Tim standing in front of some sort of grocer’s, next to an elderly Indian-looking woman. The boy’s hair was cut very short; he was wearing a green apron. The woman looked proudly into the camera, while Tim had a puzzled, uncertain expression. The photo was like something out of a local paper. Last year he had dug it up, as a possible candidate for the painting, but rejected it on account of it being too staged.

  After a couple of days of making the promise to Tim, he started to regret it. A houseguest, for two months! He needed peace and quiet to work, not this enormous inconvenience.

  Sometimes he revolts against the memories, becomes suspicious and resentful of their sentimentality. He tries a more sober appraisal. Old friends, exes, fellow artists are paraded before an imaginary jury and asked to give their honest opinion on his character, on the circumstances of the case. Sometimes they repeat things they’ve said to him in real life, sometimes they just parrot his own words.

  Financially, it was impossible. You can’t just dump a teenager on someone already struggling to make ends meet.

  All artists are selfish. What do you expect?

  It is always abstract with him, isn’t it? Harry loves kindness in the abstract, just not when it’s required of him.

  Leave my Harry alone, an ex winks at him.

  Harry was adopted. That boy is Harry’s adoptive parents’ grandchild. What kind of man would ignore that debt?

  His solicitor will say, We have established that the defendant fully intended to one day make it up to Tim.

  He wonders at these old memories, things he’d thought he had forgotten, or never listened to in the first place. Now, with the empty stretch of days before him, he even remembers the sound of his voice in some of these conversations: prickly, defensive. A womanish whine.

  He is standing in the doorway one morning, grimacing at the cup in his hand: he left the coffee on the kitchen counter in London, so he’s drinking this ancient builders’ tea he found at the cottage. Without milk, the tea coats his mouth in a bitter film, and his days feel slightly tainted from the start.

  He’s about to turn back in, when he notices an odd shape on the footpath. He sees an outline only, the colours obliterated in the glare. It looks like a mound of earth.

  But it wasn’t there yesterday.

  Wide awake now, he walks to the gate. He strains his eyes to make sense of the shape. The angle and light change subtly.

  He opens the gate.

  A dead cow, he realises, the cow, when he comes nearer and sees the absurdly swollen udder, the puce webbing on the taut skin. The poor beast’s head and neck are stretched upwards, as though wanting to distance itself from the diseased udder. An exposed eye is a crawling mass of flies and ants.

  A dead cow. Twenty feet from his house. The thought occurs to him that the cow might have something to do with the epidemic, and he pulls the collar of the dressing gown across his mouth and nose. This spooks the flies, and they lift in a swarm. A green metallic shine flickers above the path.

  Disgusted, he gathers the dressing gown about him and flees indoors.

  He sips his tea by the kitchen window, glancing at the footpath. Seen from here, the cow seems to have grown larger since he first noticed it. Or moved nearer. He certainly cannot understand how he didn’t recognise it as a cow straight away.

  It is only morning, and he feels exhausted.

  He changes into shorts and T-shirt and walks to the little stream downhill. He spends half an hour on its bank, eyes trained on the shallow waters. The stream is clear, but because of the sun coming through foliage the surface seems speckled; it shimmers unhelpfully. But he thinks he sees fish, and on the walk back he breaks off a branch. At home he makes himself a miniature fishing rod out of the branch, a length of black thread, and a safety pin. He practises flipping the rod in the living room.

  ‘This is the life,’ he says, smacking his lips, trying to get rid of the bitter tea flavour.

  Then, he’s spinning around on his heels, staring in disbelief at the open window. He’s a caught a whiff of something; a sweetish, sinister smell.

  He drops the rod and slumps on the sofa. What did he think? That rats would show up and eat it, that it would dry without rotting? That someone, somewhere, would consider his situation, and not send him yet more grief?

  He doesn’t have the slightest clue as to how long a carcass can stink. He thinks of leaving the cottage, sleeping in the fields for a few days. Of burning the whole thing.

  He grabs his hair. He needs to make an effort to think like a normal man, in normal times, faced with a normal problem.

  Half an hour later he is on his way to the car, the rusty chain from the shed in a pile in his arms. It is past noon by now, and the sun is shockingly powerful. His car doesn’t have a tow bar, so he opens the car door and clambers through the back seat with the chain, threading it through the car. He makes a knot behind the rear window. He pulls, leans on the chain with all his weight. The knot tightens with a metallic crunch.

  He considers the cow.

  To avoid touching the carcass, he swings the chain around the back of the cow and then drags it in position around the cow’s midriff. But the chain with its rings is uneven, the cow is heavy, and he manages one, two inches at a time after which he has to catch his breath. Some of the flies, disturbed by the jolting, abandon the cow’s eyes and settle on his face. The whole business is disgusting.

  After he has tied the chain around the cow, he gets into the car, starts the engine and gently, very gently, steps on the gas. He advances maybe two feet, sensing resistance, and some adjustment as the chain tightens. There is scratching, the thud of the knot against the chassis. The car’s hinges and joints creak in protest. He presses the gas pedal again, but now the car refuses to budge, and he has to give it more power, more still, until there is a forwards judder and then the car darts away and he cheers through the rattling and shaking, slaps the dashboard, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

  He stops the car a hundred or so yards away. He slumps in the seat, relieved. He doesn’t even mean to look in the rear-view mirror and check for the cow.

  Something is wrong, he thinks, adjusting the mirror. Where’s the carcass?

  True enough, he can see in the mirror now, the cow is far behind, more
or less where it was to begin with. The chain must have broken. But he can’t quite make sense of what he’s seeing, and when he brings his nose closer to the mirror he realises that where the beast’s head should be, there’s only a glistening black stump.

  He hurries out of the car, strides past the carcass, refusing to look at it or at the head that trails the back of the car. He almost runs inside the cottage, straight for the kitchen, grabs an opened bottle of wine and swills it down. He wishes it were spirits.

  He slumps in the armchair. Sweat runs off him. He doesn’t want to move any more; above all, he doesn’t want to go outside. Through the open windows and door he watches the light changing, the sun moving across the sky. The oily shimmer above the carcass as the overheated ground releases damp.

  He can almost see the stench wafting into the house.

  The sun has long dipped past the treetops when he steps back out. The smell hangs heavy now, no longer just a whiff. He has wrapped a T-shirt around his mouth and nose, and with an old bed sheet he has covered the carcass. It’s obvious what happened from the angle of the front legs: the chain slid past them by breaking that upper joint and bending the legs the wrong way, then it got snagged in the horns.

  He plunges the spade into the ground, vigorously he thinks. The earth is hard and dry and the metal hardly breaks the surface.

  ‘Fucking cow,’ he curses, then clamps his mouth shut, wary of the smell.

  The earth beneath the carcass is blackened and sticky, and blood from the neck has already seeped through the white sheet, staining it a sickly purplish brown. It’s like a scene of carnage.

  He is very, very slow. After an hour he has dug up to his shins. He doubts that he will finish by nightfall, and he knows he won’t have it in him to stay after dark. He pushes himself harder, puts his whole weight on the spade, then chides himself: if the spade breaks, that’s it.

  He is in the hole up to his knees. The earth has gradually turned more stony, and some of the stones are so big he has to dig around them and then hoist them out of the hole with his hands. His mind blank with digging, now and again he marvels at the pointlessness of his effort. To do all this not as a means to achieve something, bring about an improvement, but only to be back in a situation he already thinks is minimally bearable. It feels beneath his dignity. Come to think of it, every single thing that has happened to him lately is beneath his dignity.

  By the time it is too dark to see, he has only dug down three feet. He is exhausted, and his palms are blistered. When he straightens up, his back protests, a searing pain coursing across his shoulders. It is an effort to lift his arm and pull the T-shirt off his face. He has forgotten why it was there, and is taken aback by the viciousness of the stench. He scrambles out of the hole, leaves everything, and goes to the cottage, where he collapses on to the bed.

  He cannot believe he feels like this and yet the carcass is still there in front of his house. Surely there is an easier way around this? A dead animal, it cannot be such an insurmountable problem. ‘I should eat it!’ he says, and the thought of working his way through that rotted flesh makes him break out in a nervous, exhausted cough.

  In the morning the first thing he is aware of is pain. In his back and shoulders, in his forearms once he sits up in bed and tries to push himself upright. On his palms half the skin is blistered, half is barely crusted wounds. Then: the smell. This cow, he thinks, covering his face with a pillow, this animal, somehow it means him harm. It will not go away.

  He has to force himself to get up.

  Outside in the glare, the body of the cow seems to have swollen in size. He will need to pay attention not to stand right beneath the carcass, in case the side of the hole gives way.

  He is unprepared for how much more difficult the digging becomes once he has to lift the spade laden with dirt above his waist. His palms hurt, even though he’s wearing a pair of old leather gloves. He thinks of the cow now as a punishment. It is easier to do so; a punishment makes more sense than this random misfortune. He has to subject himself to the ordeal, and something will be achieved by it. Somewhere, someone will tick a box noting that Harry has been duly punished.

  Within a couple of hours, the sun is beating down on him. The stench seeps through the T-shirt. He cowers under the towel he has wrapped around his head, tries to make himself small. Sweat runs off him, but every pause means he will spend longer in the presence of that stench. He’s sure that if the smell becomes even slightly worse, he will not be able to approach the carcass. He is filled with a bitter regret for the hours he wasted yesterday morning. He even regrets not just burning the carcass, taking the risk of a fire. He feels, right now, it would not be entirely wrong if cow, cottage and forest were all to go up in flames.

  He works mechanically, without care or method. Dirt spills back into the hole, he lifts half-full shovels. He no longer cares where in the damn hole he stands. The pain in his shoulders and back has become familiar, and within a certain range of movement it fades into the background. It is only when he goes deeper and the angle of the digging shifts that the pain is so bad he has to clench his teeth. His hands are boiling in their gloves.

  He increasingly has the feeling that, having missed the beginning of what happened, he has lost some essential connection with the world. That he has permanently lost the plot. He sees no possible route, no bridge from his past self to this man digging a hole under a rotting cow.

  Several times he has to climb out and spread the pile of dirt he has removed to make room for more. He is careful then, doesn’t want it too far from the hole. It will all have to be tipped back in.

  By noon he is chest-deep. He is in a state of exhaustion that precludes thoughts, save for a dim awareness of the cow looming over him. He occasionally falls to his knees and presses his forehead against the damp, cool soil. At this depth, the earth is soothing. Once, he thinks he has fallen asleep like that, a moment only, marked by a sudden twitch and the presence of dirt on his lips.

  He has spent eons burying this cow.

  The earth has turned softer again and he takes to digging on his knees, scoops out a pile of dirt, and only when he has made a small mound does he stand up to shovel it out. For a while now there’s been nowhere to hide from the sun. He falls into repetitive thoughts, the last one a worry that he hasn’t properly addressed dying. Hasn’t dealt with it, the way he should, for a man in his situation. Hasn’t properly connected the two parts of the equation: as the receiver of a great kindness, he failed to return it. Now, on his knees at the bottom of a hole, this problem seems to him quite separate from trying to somehow make it up to Tim. He repeats to himself that he must consider all this, properly, once his ordeal is over. Hours of digging with this one thought – that he must, some time soon, give proper attention to death and dying.

  At around three he is done. Just like that, he knows he cannot dig an inch more. But this decision gives him energy, and he hoists himself up and sets about getting the carcass into the hole. A frenzy to his efforts: he tries to heave it with the spade, kick it, tug its back hooves. He sits on the grass and, propping himself up against the ground, pushes at the bulk with his feet. He realises he is sitting in the cow’s rotten blood, his gloved hands are full of the stuff, the mass underneath the sheet yields disgustingly as skin comes loose from flesh, but it doesn’t matter now, he moves along the length of the carcass and slowly pushes it in. Inch by inch, the cow is pushed towards the edge, until with a slow lurch it falls in. A foul cloud of dust and stench rises from the hole.

  He walks to the cow’s skull, grabs the chain, puts one foot on top of the skull, and tugs until it slides off the horns. He kicks and drags it over to the hole.

  On the other side now, he pushes himself against the pile of dirt, tries to topple it in. This work is quick, so much quicker than digging. Another few shovelfuls and the ground over the cow is mostly level. It only takes about half the dirt pile, the volume of the cow has filled up the rest. The carcass is no more than tw
o feet underground, but it is enough. The cow is gone, as far as he is concerned. He will not know of it again.

  He peels off the gloves, then, in demented haste, throws off all his clothes and naked he gets into the car. He drives over the mound, flattens it, drives back and forth half a dozen times. He hates that cow.

  He staggers to the river, and sits in the shallows, lets the water wash over his legs. His hands are swollen. He registers, and decides to ignore, the many flies, corpse-fresh, that have followed him here. He touches the surface of the water with his palms, considers lying down but knows he may fall asleep and drown. All he could do today, he has done.

  He is in the garden one afternoon, a wet towel tucked under a baseball cap to help him cope with the sun. He’s checking whether there’s anything worth taking the trouble to water among all those weeds when he hears noises. Footsteps, coming up the path. He panics. He runs inside and grabs the axe. He hides by the window. The door is ajar but he is afraid to touch it now, the steps are too near. He’s so afraid his stomach cramps. He fumbles with the towel, wraps it around his nose and mouth.

  The precautions he should have taken come to him in a flash: he should have blocked the gate, put up signs. He should have hidden some of his food, hidden the petrol.

  The footsteps are by the gate now. A couple of women come into view, but he can hardly trust his eyes. One of them is Twenty-Two. He wonders if he is hallucinating: this qualifies as an apparition. They are not even wearing any masks.

  TALOS

  Arctic Circle

  June 2017

  Session 891

  Talos XI Is that you, Dr Dahlen?

  Dr Dahlen Good morning, Talos. So, the new sensors are working. How do you like seeing?