The White Room

by Craig Higginson

  You tried to sit up. You asked what they were doing. But they only glanced up at you with gold-leaf eyes – dead like the eyes of a fish. Not knowing what else to do, you leaned back on your elbows and watched them eat.

  The rain in Paris is not the rain you grew up with. This steady mizzle can last for months, it seems, so that you forget the colour of the sky, and the sound of your name, and the reason you came here in the first place. Perhaps it would feel different if you had a home to sit in, or at least one room that you could call your own, but your new apartment belongs to a boy who made you sick and who will be coming back from Spain one of these days to claim you – or perhaps simply to claim his old apartment back.

  At times, you even doubt that your own body belongs to you. During your childhood in Africa, it was so available to the sun. You wore it, you laughed with it. You lived through it. But here you hide it away from the world, you wrap it up like a bandaged foot. On the rare occasions you unclothe it, it stands there, pale blue and questioning.

  You feel lost as soon as you let anyone in. Yet you have grown tired of your own company.

  Outward: 17/03/2003: leave 20.45, arrive 11.08

  Return: 19/03/2003: leave 11.53, arrive 14.17

  Ref: RBIKCJ

  Outward: Carriage 14, Seat 58

  Return: Carriage 15, Seat 34

  A leaf that survived the winter, the husk of a star, cartwheeling across the street.

  Why is it that you lose respect for those who try to love you? It’s as if they have disappointed you by loving you. Perhaps you don’t want to be loved. You are happier to love than to be loved. You don’t like the distorted perspective of yourself reflected back at you.

  He falls all over himself to please you. Your first thought: I can do whatever I like with him. But what do you want to do with him? Nothing at all. Only enjoy his arrival: sitting in the sun on a park bench after long days of rain.

  He came into my room. He was standing right over my bed. I could hear his breathing. I screamed and turned on the light and he was gone.

  Finances: £2000

  £200 per month, bills

  £300 per month, living|

  = 4 months

  New email: Code de connection: fti/hannahmeade

  Mot de passe: aardvark2003

  Code de messagerie: hannahmeade

  Email address: hannahmeade@wanadoo.fr

  Something about him has enabled you to fight off the other two. He reminds you of a time when you had more will left in you, when you still wanted things and went out to get them. But then he dragged you all the way back to Africa, like a policeman dragging a screaming child back to a parent who beats her.

  Before it happens, you feel estranged for a day, your arms disconnected, your feet belonging to someone else – and the only constant the heaviness in your lower intestines, as if there’s a stone sitting there the size of a fist. Then you need to pee every ten minutes, then every five – until the pee comes out only three drops at a time, the third and final drop as sharp as glass. Yes – you start to pee glass and you can’t stop yourself. By the next day, even if you’ve started on the antibiotics, the dripping glass has turned to blood.

  Dream

  I was walking inside the eye of a horse: the deep blue lake lying behind me, bottomless and still, and a wrinkled coppery mountain-scape rising up before me. The sky above me was a blurred fog – the world beyond inaccessible and long forgotten.

  I was tired and felt I had been walking for a whole day when I entered a steep gully, where there was a dark forest ascending the cliffs. The place was completely silent. Not an insect or a bird moved in that wet fug.

  I made my way through the murky light, towards what appeared at first as a distant green glow, as though a thousand fireflies had gathered there. It was the first sign of life in that place – of something I could work towards and hope to call my own.

  * * *

  When I reached the forest clearing, it was to find a mound of moss. Perched slightly to one side on top of it was a radiant green sphere, like some weird fruit – a kind of gooseberry, perhaps, about seven feet high.

  What was most remarkable was not the fruit, but the pale naked girl floating inside it. Her eyes were closed and her yellow hair was drifting slowly in the liquid.

  On approaching, I saw that her feet were grafted into the base of the fruit, which now resembled an over-ripe spider. I understood then that the sleeping girl couldn’t step aside from the fruit that sustained her.

  I looked down at my own body and saw that I had become a boy. Maybe I had been a boy all along and had only now remembered it.

  I wanted to get nearer the girl, so I stepped right up to the fruit and reached out a hand and touched it. It was warm, full of humming potential, like the head of a baby – with the same velvety texture.

  Then the girl opened her eyes and looked at me, and her whole body seemed to shudder slightly, as if the contact of my hand had reached her like a kiss.

  It was then, as she looked at me, the hint of a smile growing inside her, that everything changed – and became urgent and horrific.

  It was as if some primordial intelligence had shifted inside the fruit and decided to turn against her. The fruit manoeuvred itself around its roots, hunkered down, and started to suck at her, as if intending to drain all the life out of her – like a plant preparing for autumn.

  The girl emitted a silent scream, her thin limbs flailing, and I knew then that I had to get her out of there. I only had a moment – maybe less than a minute.

  I took a rock and started hacking at the fruit. The skin, thankfully, was easy to pierce – and the liquid, hot and sticky and sweet, came gushing out, all over me.

  But still the girl struggled inside the shrinking leaking skin, fighting to get free. I cut the skin away and threw it aside, until she lay there exposed, meekly pulling away at the place where her feet should have been.

  She gestured for me to free her from the fruit, which was still snarling with toxic juices, apparently intending to pull her back into the earth, away from the light of day – to where a million spiders were waiting to claw at her.

  So I picked up the rock again and brought it down hard at the black roots, which were tough and slippery, like a shark’s egg. This didn’t seem to hurt her, so I shut my mind against what I had to do and smashed away at the place, again and again, until dark purple blood, slow as oil, oozed out of the pulp.

  Eventually, I could pluck her free, her stumps slowly leaking that thick blood – and the second she was free, she gasped, and breathed in for the first time. Her untested lungs filled with air, and she started coughing, as one who has just been revived after almost drowning.

  She clung to me, her skin slippery with the pale green gooseberry flesh – and all went dizzy.

  * * *

  We must have made love, although I have no memory of that. All I know is that I emerged into consciousness not long afterwards to find her spent in my arms, her lips small and papery, her fingers locked into mine, bloodless and blue – and the blood still oozing from her stumps like sap.

  I tore my T-shirt into strips and bound her limbs. I gathered wood and made a fire.

  In the dream, I was able to make fire with two stones and an expert flick of the wrist. The fire caught quickly because it was such a dry and brittle place, slippery with wet, but only ever on the surface of things. Underneath everything, it was as if there was no life, no sustenance – only the expectation of death.

  The only life in that place, it seemed, came from me. The girl was drawn to me as I was drawn to the fire. So I had to keep returning to her to hold her, and kiss her, and encourage her towards life.

  * * *

  The dream seemed to go on forever. With me trying to reassure her in between finding water for her to drink and food for her to eat. But everything I fed her only seemed to weaken her further.

  There were dark purple strawberries growing there on the mound, but these tasted bitter a
nd only made you more thirsty. The water I fetched from a still pool nearby was brackish and warm, like tears, and it didn’t help. There were also slow fish that you could easily catch and lift out of the water, but when you broke them open they were dry inside as packed feathers – and the flesh got stuck in your throat.

  I wanted to pick her up and take her out of there, but each time I tried to move her she howled pitifully, like an animal in a trap, small and afraid. This was the only sound she ever made, for she seemed to have no tongue, like a fish.

  It appeared enough for the girl just to have me near her, so at last I gave up and lay down with her, stroking her hair and holding her. I sang her whatever silly songs came into my head and spoke nonsense words – because she understood no language and seemed to have no name.

  * * *

  When the girl was dead, I buried her some distance from the festering fruit.

  * * *

  I made a small pile of pebbles where her simple heart lay.

  * * *

  Then I took a burning log and threw it into the jagged maw of the dead gooseberry and watched it burn, pumping its heavy smoke like a dying octopus exuding the last of its ink.

  * * *

  I walked away with bones heavier than the girl might have hoped, the thread of smoke marking the place where the fruit was slowly burning. There were tears wetting my cheeks. I was weeping silently. But as I walked back down into the quiet valley, my heart grew lighter, and the girl rose up inside me like freshly baked bread.

  * * *

  Little did I suspect that even then the seeds for a new fruit were beginning to work away inside the girl’s stomach.

  * * *

  Our child, a pale golden girl like her mother, would grow up on a mound where the wild strawberries grew. She would suffer the same fate as generations of women had before her.

  XVI

  Hannah

  Finally, he closes the book:

  So you aren’t even English? he says.

  I’m sorry, but not at all.

  And you never thought to tell me this?

  INTERVAL

  London

  Pierre

  I

  The first half ends like an electric bolt that leaves him mute and aghast and smoking slightly. It’s as if he’s back in one of his childhood nightmares, alone in the attic, the smell of burned hair and burned flesh lingering amongst the rafters.

  * * *

  Pierre waits in the darkness, expecting the lights to come on and for him to be identified as the culprit – the man responsible for this horrible play.

  But nothing happens.

  The light filters back into the auditorium from some far horizon and the audience begins to stir, regain their bodies, glance at their watches, extract their phones, their minds turning towards an interval drink.

  Drink? he says to Suzanne, testing out his voice.

  Why not?

  She isn’t looking at Pierre and he has no idea of what she thinks of the play. He has no idea of what he thinks of it either. All he feels is a floating grieving feeling – for the young man he was, for the man he has become, and for the difficult years in between.

  * * *

  How did we end up here? he wonders, following Suzanne into the theatre foyer. And what have we become?

  * * *

  They have been married for ten years now and at first Pierre believed he had never been happier. When he met Suzanne, he thought she was everything he was not: steely, unsentimental, ambitious. Because she expected the same qualities in him, he was able to reproduce them for a while – and soon he started to find new opportunities in his translating work. They imagined moving to the countryside and having a family together, and everything was going according to plan until Suzanne’s first miscarriage. Only then did it emerge that she had been unhappy all along and that he had not noticed it. She called him passive, moody, weak, uncommitted to anything but his fragile sense of self. She claimed he even managed to be absent during sex.

  * * *

  There is still no sign of Hannah Meade, but Pierre is glad about that. The shame he feels right now is the same shame he felt when he first read through her notebooks. It was not so much the act of stealing them that shamed him as much as the act of reading them – and the sense of complicity that came with it. It was like lifting a rock and finding a dense nest of red ants underneath, and then realising that the ants were all over your hand and up your arm and inside your clothes. You wanted to tear away at yourself and get away from there, but the ants were already inside you – climbing through your blood.

  * * *

  As Suzanne heads outside for a cigarette, he descends to the bar area to buy two glasses of the house red. His hands are numb, his tongue is stuck, and by now he feels assaulted by such a range of conflicting emotions that he can barely orientate himself. He concentrates on carrying the drinks without spilling them – through the bodies that loom at him from the dark like enormous fish.

  Fuck her.

  Fuck her.

  Fuck her.

  He is repeating as he walks.

  He is doing all he can not to throw the glasses against the red walls, tear at his clothes, weep. Who would have thought that an hour in the theatre could make his body such a site for mourning? He hates himself. He hates his wife. Most of all, he hates Hannah Meade for doing this to him. Her arrogance. Her blind assumption that she would know how to represent him. And then encouraging him to come here tonight to witness the spectacle with his wife. A wife whose violence is like a tornado trapped inside a jam jar – forever looking for a way to get out. Hannah has no idea of the devastation she is about to cause in his life.

  * * *

  Your wine, darling.

  Suzanne is standing on the crest of the steps as if balancing on the edge of a wave. Over her shoulder she holds her first – but probably not her last – cigarette of the day. The smoke drifts up and away from her, before being sucked into the waiting void that is London.

  So what was that about? Suzanne asks, her voice dangerously level.

  He hands her the wine in order to think.

  The play?

  Don’t act dumb, Pierre. That man in there – that was you. He even had your bloody name.

  Yes – strange that.

  What exactly is going on?

  Suzanne is what could be described as a jealous woman. She is jealous of other women, real and imaginary, but most of all she is jealous of any happiness he can salvage for himself. However, she has never been jealous before over a play. A work of fiction. Something that is claiming to be wholly made up. And this gives Pierre some source of hope – or perhaps a small piece of rope to play with, and skip around, before he hangs himself.

  It’s only a play, Suzanne.

  A play about a boy from the Congo who lives in a village called Pouilly and has a yellow kayak? Are you being serious? You can’t make that stuff up!

  Yes – well.

  Well?

  Yes.

  So you knew her? This woman? This Hannah whatever-the-fuck-her-name-is?

  She was my English teacher.

  That much is evident. Why didn’t you tell me about any of this?

  Because I didn’t think it was important.

  Suzanne huffs on her cigarette and glowers at the night. The city stands like the sea before them, roaring dimly, but neither of them is aware of it.

  So you had no idea that this play was all about you and that – dreadful girl?

  None. And anyway, that isn’t me —

  Who is it then? Some twin? Some twin you didn’t think I needed to know about?

  It was all years ago – and the vast majority of what just happened in there is all made up.

  This is far from true, but Suzanne has no way of knowing that. His only hope is that Hannah doesn’t come up to them and expose his lies. Suzanne wouldn’t think twice about cross-examining the playwright herself – lawyer that she is.

  You’re telling me
that you never had sex with that girl?

  That girl was just an actress!

  You know what the fuck I mean!

  I never had sex with my English teacher, he assures her – lowering his voice as bystanders peer at them.

  And you never stole her notebooks?

  No – not once.

  Right!

  I was practically a kid, Suzanne. And Hannah – she was my teacher. We had a few lessons in her apartment and then she went away again – and that was the end of it. It was nothing. I promise you. She meant nothing to me.

  And when exactly did this happen? Before or after I met you in Paris?

  Before – long before.

  Then why didn’t you bother to mention her?

  Because she was never important!

  It is ridiculous, but Pierre is probably the most faithful husband in Somerset. Not once has he strayed. Yet these arguments are so frequent that he may as well be the Don Juan of the local village. The only explanation for it, Pierre has thought, is that it is Suzanne who is the unfaithful one. Up there with her colleagues in Bristol, with their concrete offices overlooking the leaden sea.

  That woman might have meant nothing to you, Suzanne continues, but you sure as hell meant a great deal to her. She’s remembered every single detail about your life. And she’s written a fucking play about it!

  By now their glasses are empty. If there was a bottle at hand, they would already be refilling them. Wine has provided the fuel for some of their best arguments. These days Suzanne can drink at least a bottle a day without even noticing it.

  She was a sad and lonely girl, he says. I never loved her.

  Of course you did, Suzanne says, mimicking the play. Otherwise you wouldn’t say it like that.