The Body

by Dean Clayton Edwards

  "You know you and Matilda are very similar," Isla said.

  "No, we're not."

  "You were both ostracised by the others."

  "So were you."

  "No, I ostracised myself. You two were both cast out. You both tried to take the body for yourselves."

  "So?"

  "And you both got out of captivity."

  "She did," Lara said, reliving the moment Matilda's draw shut on her arm. She saw it as if from above, as if she'd already left the body at that point. She saw the chest eating her and then the top drawer coming out and smashing her in the face. She hadn't been out of the body at that point. She just remembered it that way, because it was less painful and because she felt like she should have seen it coming. She saw herself struggling to free herself and tutted. Pathetic.

  "How did Matilda free herself?" Isla asked.

  "You know how," Lara said, ashamed.

  "I want to know what you think."

  "She learnt how to take the body by force."

  "How else?"

  "I don't really want to think about all that right now."

  "How else?"

  "I touched her," Lara admitted. "And then she knocked me out, cold, so that I couldn't resist. In the confusion, she took over."

  "How did she knock you out?"

  "Her drawer."

  "How did she move her drawer?"

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do."

  For a moment, Lara thought that the insight would appear like an air bubble from a drowned corpse, but nothing surfaced. This was just additional torment.

  "She went mad," Lara said. "She started mumbling to herself and then she went quiet and then she went inside herself and learnt stuff and then she could move her drawers and she used that knowledge to smash me in the face."

  "She went mad, did she?"

  "She was talking to herself. We all heard her."

  "You're talking to yourself."

  "That's different."

  "Why?"

  "Because I know that you're not real. And there's no-one around to hear me. If the sisters were here, I wouldn't be talking to you. I'm talking to you to stop myself going mad, because I'm afraid to be al-..."

  "You are alone," Isla said. Gentle, but insistent. "Roger thinks Matilda's you. Matilda's going to keep it that way. Our sisters are gone. And I'm dead. You are alone, Lara."

  "You're supposed to be helping me. If you're going to talk like that, you might as well go."

  In the nothingness, Isla seemed to be thinking that over.

  "Isla? Isla?"

  "Matilda wanted to be free. You wanted to be free. Snap."

  Lara was glad that the voice was back, even though it wasn't real, even though it was saying these things. She feared being alone more than anything in the world.

  "Why don't you want to be alone?" Isla asked.

  "Nobody wants to be alone," Lara told her.

  "I did. Do you know what I used to do when I had the body? I'd go into London on the train. I'd go to the busiest parts. Picadilly Circus. Leicester Square. The Strand. And I'd walk. From one to the other to the other, just to feel truly alone. I've never been so truly alone as when I've been surrounded by strangers. The anonymity of the crowd. I thrived on it. I needed it."

  Was that even true, Lara thought. Did Isla really say something like that once or was it just something she'd read in a book from Tanya's bookshelf, something she'd half-remembered in a forgotten film. It sounded like the narration of a movie trailer.

  "I've never been like that," Lara said. "I like people."

  "You like people who like you," Isla said.

  Electricity. That was something else she could hear in the otherwise silent cottage. Cars. Aeroplanes. And electricity, humming like beehives inside the walls, industrious, growing, wanting to be free.

  "What's wrong with that?" Lara asked at last.

  "If you see yourself through the eyes of other people," Isla said carefully, "then you never really exist. You're no more real than I am."

  Lara tried to dismiss the statement, but she couldn't stop thinking about it, even though it took her in circles, like hanging onto the tail of a stupid dog.

  "Are you saying that I don't exist? That's ridiculous."

  "You don't know who you are," Isla said. "That's ridiculous."

  "I'm Lara," she said.

  "No, you're not."

  She closed her mind. I'm not going mad. I'm not going mad. I can't go mad in here. I've got to get out. One day, I might get out of here and I need to be sane.

  "When you're Sarah, you know that you're not really Sarah. Take it one step further. In here, with me, in the dark, you're not Lara anymore either. There is no Lara. You're no more Lara than I am Isla."

  Lara laughed. There didn't seem to be anything else for it.

  "I'm Lara," she assured herself, chuckling.

  "There's no such thing as Lara," Isla said. "It's just a name that someone gave you. It doesn't mean anything. You're Sarah to people who call you Sarah. You're Lara to people who call you Lara. But when you're alone, you're not Sarah and you're not Lara and you're not anything that anyone could possibly call you. You're not anything. You're nothing."

  She didn't like it. It was nonsense, but, even so, it bothered her. Perhaps because if it was coming out of Isla's mouth then it was coming out of Lara's mind and that meant that she was thinking nonsense, which meant that she was going mad.

  "You're never going to be free of the stool," Isla said, "unless you get free from yourself or at least your ideas about yourself that aren't even yours in the first place."

  "And how do I do that?" Lara spat.

  "Look into the darkness."

  Lara drifted back to the door side of the stool. Yep. There was darkness alright. Darkness aplenty. Nothing but darkness as far as the eye couldn't see.

  "Not there," Isla said. "Inside yourself."

  *

  She didn't do it at first, but there was plenty of time to get used to the idea.

  "Everyone went into that shop wanting to escape something," Lara mused. "An abusive husband, a jail sentence, old age. Everyone got what they wanted out of Sarah, except for me. I wanted to escape myself, but I never managed it. Every eleven months, there I was, looking back at myself through her eyes, feeling how fraudulent I was, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to wrong person, just like always, and having everyone laugh at me. Instead of being stupid Lara, I was stupid Sarah, but they still let me play with them, because my eyes were the right shade of blue and my hair was the right shade of blonde and I hated them, because if they knew who I really was they'd have shunned me, just like always, but because I looked the part and I had the right name it was all different to them. They forgave me for being me and I hated their forgiveness.

  "I wanted to tell them to save their forgiveness, because all that fawning and smiling was an act. I never do anything because I want to. I do things so people think well of me.

  "The truth is that I've never really cared about anyone. Never anyone who didn't care about me. I'm just a mirror. Like you. I show people what I think they want to see. There is no me.

  "There is no me.

  "There is no me."

  *

  The idea became less scary and more appealing over time, particularly as the alternative was to think about the future, which might never come, and the past, which was nothing more than a series of painful memories, every one of them tainted by her deception by Matilda.

  I was gullible, Lara thought, but now I'm nothing.

  She remembered Roger's attempts to get her to bed on their wedding night and how she'd wanted to lie with him but had been afraid of being found wanting, because she didn't know what to do, and so she'd disappointed him on purpose. Again and again.

  I was shy, Lara thought, awkward, but now I'm nothing.

  She remembered that night in the boot of the car while Roger and Matilda stayed in a hotel that she could only imagine,
even now, because she'd not been let out of the car the entire journey. There hadn't even been a slither of light, like now.

  Lara was jealous, Lara thought, but I'm nothing.

  *

  Inside Roger too, there was nothing. As much as she had thought that she loved him, she could see now that she'd loved the fact that he'd loved her. He'd been the one to suggest that they get married. Her spontaneity had come from his plan. He said that she was amazing and special and she had liked how that made her feel, but inside Roger there was a nothing. Someone had called him Roger and he went by that name, but when he went to sleep at night, he was nothing and for a few seconds when he woke up in the morning, he was nothing until he got all filled up with the something that people told him he was. When he was alone, worrying about bank debts and loan sharks and broken knees, he was about as close to nothing as he could get while conscious. You had to bury yourself inside yourself for a long time to really appreciate that there was nothing there and she didn't think that he'd ever done that. He was too good at pretending for it to have been false and he'd been too easily fooled by Matilda to be that self-aware.

  Matilda was nothing and she knew it. Inside Sarah, she was looking out, completely nothing, completely real. It made her capable and calm and cold. Matilda hadn't gone mad; she'd simply gone. And now she was nothing, as she was supposed to be.

  This stool, Lara thought. She'd almost forgotten about the stool, which was supposedly her prison.

  Her salvation more like.

  The stool had been a tree once, perhaps even several trees, and before that it had been a seed and air and rain and light. Now it was dead. It didn't know that people called it a stool. It didn't know what it was for or what it had been. Just like her, just like Roger, it was nothing.

  On thinking that, she felt her world move. A tremor rippled through the darkness, rippled through her and helped her to let go. The stool was moving and she was doing it.

  She'd stopped trying to move the stool long ago and now here she was, doing it without even trying.

  "Lara," Isla whispered hesitantly, as if Lara were holding a loaded gun.

  "You're part of me that's still holding on to the past," Lara said. "The past has gone and so you should go too."

  "Then I guess this is goodb-"

  Isla was over.

  "It's just a matter of time before Matilda realises I'm awake," Lara thought. "I'll have to play it down or she won't get near. I'd better occupy my mind."

  In the end, it wasn't Matilda who took her from the wardrobe. It was Roger. He removed the towels and stacked them up on the floor, like piling sky upon sky upon sky, and then he grabbed the stool in both hands and was off with it, moving through darkness illuminated by torchlight. The silver light made shards on the doorframe and then new walls and a table and the metallic-green leaves of a massive pot plant and then he was putting the stool down on the floor in the corner of the room and he was standing on it.

  This was the moment she'd been waiting for. She wasn't going to get a better opportunity than this.

  There wasn't time to wonder for the thousandth time how long she'd been inside the stool. Time spent wasted thinking would damn her to a life back inside the stool and this time it might really be until the place burnt down or until Matilda died, leaving everything to Roger, in which case Roger would have everything put into storage and she'd be back where she started, only wiser and thus more damaged.

  His feet slid on the surface of the stool.

  He was wearing trainers, which was not like him. He'd always worn smart shoes. His shoes had clipped and clopped on the floorboards and then that had stopped. He was all slippers and trainers now.

  He stood on tiptoe.

  No, she wasn't going back. Not to the others. Not to the wardrobe. She had to remember how to be nothing for just a little longer, because if she were nothing and Roger were nothing, there was no reason why they shouldn't trade places.

  She raised the shoulder of the stool and as two of its feet left the ground, Roger said:

  "Fu-uck!"

  He fell, landing on his back and making the sound of heavy laundry bags being thrown to the floor. He groaned and bent one leg, then let it fall, not ready to try to get up.

  He was looking straight up at the ceiling where he hadn't managed to get the lights back on, so he heard but didn't see the stool creeping towards him across the floor.

  He thought that something must be dragging the stool across the floor, perhaps a dog had got in somehow and its lead had got caught around the stool's legs. Or maybe it wasn't a stool at all, he'd only thought it was, in fact, some manner of creature that he'd affronted by standing on it. Maybe, he thought, maybe I hit my head really hard and now I need to lie here for a minute and stop thinking crazy thoughts.

  He had the crazy thought that the stool was humping his leg, which was ridiculous enough to make him laugh and then scream, because it was touching him, it had definitely moved across the room and was touching him, and before he could scrabble to his feet, he felt his mind give way, the way his body had done. Falling had been an inevitable result of the stool tipping up, lifting up and throwing him off balance. His mind succumbed in a similar fashion. He was aware of his consciousness falling away from his body, and he seemed to know that it must fall, even though it was a mind, and not subject to the rules of gravity like physical things. What he did not appreciate and did not understand was where his mind ended up.

  From low down on the ground, he saw his own body. The feet twitched and then the legs bent and the body got up, but it wasn't him anymore, because he was trapped on the floor, at its feet. He saw himself stretch and rub his head and see that there was blood. He heard his own voice laugh. And then he was staring down at himself with a mad look on his face, a look of wonder and surprise and confusion. Slowly, the smile untwisted and left a straight line, making him look as serious as he'd ever looked. Then his body walked away and left his mind behind.

  LARA

  Matilda entered the cottage with two large laundry bags and dropped them on the floor in the dark before flicking the switch on and off, on and off, to no effect.

  "Roger?" she said. "You in here?"

  "Uh-huh," Roger said. His voice came from the doorway to the rest of the cottage. She saw his shadowy form in the fading light from the doorway. The shutters were closed. You would have thought that he would have opened them so he could see a little.

  "I take it all the lights are out," she said.

  "Uh-huh."

  She moved towards him through the gloom and slipped her hands around his waist. He was tense, as if afraid of the dark. She gave him a kiss on the lips and he didn't respond. It was like kissing a mannekin, except it was warm, and scented, but unresponsive enough to make her own lips feel weird. She'd only had that experience of doing all the kissing once.

  As a girl, she'd practised kissing her hand in preparation for asking out the boy down the road. That boy was an old man now. He still lived in the village and she'd seen him not two days ago, shuffling into the bakery to buy bread, and each time she saw him she waved and he looked at her admiringly and waved back with his wrinkly old fingers, not knowing that she was Mathilde, a little girl who had felt ridiculous about kissing her own hand and had never asked him out at all. Whenever she saw him, she felt warmth towards him, but also embarrassment. That embarrassment came back to her now stronger than ever and with it, like an after shock, she felt fear.

  "Roger, are you are okay?" she said.

  "Uh-huh."

  She backed away, her eyes searching where she thought his eyes ought to be, but he was all shadows.

  "Did you at least find a torch?"

  He extended it to her.

  She took it, shaking her head at his sudden incompetence, and flicked it on. The first thing she did was shine it at his face to see what was going on there. He raised his hand against the glare.

  "Jesus, Roger," she said, "how long have you been in the dark like t
his? You've seen me flick the fuse switch a hundred times. Why didn't just take a chair and turn the power back on."

  He stood there like a zombie while she lost what little patience she had and grabbed a rickety chair from beside the table and put it in the corner beneath where the black fuse box was set high up on the wall. With the torch in her left hand, she used her right to push the big red button. It went clunk and a light came on in the next room, silhouetting Roger in the doorway.

  The refrigerator rattled and clonked and buzzed. The walls hummed again with that beehive sound. The place had been disturbed and was full of anger.

  "Hit the light now?" Matilda suggested sarcastically, still standing on the chair. "Roger, what's got into you?"

  Finally, she saw Roger leave his position in the internal doorway to turn on the light to the main room.

  Matilda was getting down from the chair when she noticed the old stool on the floor beside the table. She looked from the stool to Roger and then back to the stool.

  "Roger, you didn't ..." she said and even as she did so she realised that she wasn't talking to Roger at all.

  "I guess he didn't think that chair could take his weight," Lara said in Roger's voice, using Roger's lips, his mouth, his body. "You were never going to let me out of there," Lara continued, "so I took the opportunity to let myself out."

  "What have you done?" Matilda demanded, stepping down from the chair. Her eyes were wide with shock. She didn't want to believe that this was happening, but she faced it, because it was happening whether she liked it or not. "What have you done with Roger?"

  Matilda was holding the torch as if it were a knife, but it was only a torch in the end and although Lara was unarmed she had Roger's, which was bigger and significantly stronger than Sarah's.

  "I think he's in the stool," Lara said, frankly and fascinated. "I took him by force, and he had nowhere to go, so I think we swapped places."

  "Why Roger?" Matilda asked. "Why not me?"

  "Because you never came."

  Matilda swallowed.

  "You spent half of your time talking to Isla," Matilda whispered. "Whenever I tuned in, you were talking with her. But Isla's dead. Of course I didn't let you out. You were in no condition to be let out."