Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  Eventually, it was four in the morning and even his quarrelsome neighbours went to sleep. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom. The house was eerily silent. He slumped onto the mattress, waiting for exhaustion to claim him. Nothing ticked. There was no noise. There was no movement. Utter stillness. David twitched, reached out his hand to the space beside him where he was accustomed to feeling Carolina’s tiny body stirring, fragile as a hummingbird, but there was nothing—absence, loneliness, a hole in a thing that should not have been empty.

  David dreamed that Carolina had died in her sleep, and his arm was wrapped around a cold, stiff corpse covered in grave-dirt. But there was an odd sort of comfort to it, even if she was dead, she was still there, and that was better than nothing. He felt her clammy cold hand in his and was relieved at its presence. He touched her stomach, her face, her breasts as chilly as cups of tea left out too long. None of it was right. None of it was her. He thought he should feel sad, but he didn’t. He held the hand and he tugged the dead body closer to him and he breathed in the dead-earth smell, the scent of earthworms and insects, the corn-dry hair of her head tickling his nostril, and he dreamed and he dreamed and he dreamed it would never end. But then it did end, and that mouldering smell stayed in his nostrils, the smell of damp earth, but also the smell of her—Carolina—and then something really was tickling him, but it was soft, and it felt so much like Carolina except it wasn’t dead. David knew it wasn’t dead, because it was moving. He didn’t open his eyes, he kept them jammed shut. What if he opened in his eyes and it was Carolina, and then he couldn’t stop the love again? He couldn’t bury her, he knew he couldn’t make it stop a second time. So his eyes stayed shut. But something moved against him, a lump in the bed, it brushed his leg, his thigh, and then he did open his eyes.

  It wasn’t Carolina. He knew it could not be Carolina, but it smelled like her, and it was soft and pink and just the feeling of having something in that space beside him dampened the shock of what he saw: not Carolina, but it wore Carolina’s cashmere sweater, Carolina’s discarded earrings, her tongue-lolling lonely sneaker. It did not speak, but it moved beside him again, settling into the nook made by the curvature of his body. A mass of broken, forgotten things packed in with dirt. It was beautiful, David thought, drowsily, not quite believing, not quite caring. He let his arms settle around it. It wasn’t warm as Carolina had been, and there were odd edges to it, corners, a sharpness Carolina had never had. But in that moment it was close enough—it was something—and so he slept.

  On the morning of the second day after Carolina left him, David woke to find dirt in the bed, under his fingernails, crushed into his skin, but David didn’t mind. It felt good. He went downstairs, he made coffee. His hands were very still, precise. When he drank it, it tasted as good as Carolina’s used to in the morning—his heart gave a little ping, just a little one, and David smiled. He spent the day the way he usually spent his days: he went to work, he made important business phone calls, he said “good morning” to colleagues. When Carolina didn’t call him at lunch as she usually did, his heart gave another little ping—this one a bit more intense, and he worried that the love was coming back, but it was all right, it wasn’t too much. He went and chatted to the copper-haired secretary who stapled things for him and brought his coffee. Her name was Annie. He had never quite managed to remember that. The conversation was awkward getting started, but it turned out that she had watched the same police procedural the night before, so they had a bit of a laugh about it. Wasn’t television shitty these days? Wasn’t it hard to find good programming? She gave him a list of things she was watching. He hadn’t been watching anything in particular—Carolina had found TV crass, had preferred reading the paper in the evening and doing the crossword together—so he named a number of things he’d seen adverts for but had never bothered watching. At the end of the day, he offered an appropriately weary “good evening” to his colleagues and he even waved to Annie as he left.

  When he got home, he made his own dinner—ping, ping, he was sweating a bit now—and then turned to the paper. He started in on the crossword puzzle and there was a very palpable lurch from his chest. Too much, he thought, it was too much. He took the newspaper and he stumbled out to the backyard where he began to dig. He didn’t use the shovel this time: the earth was loose and easy to scrape aside with his hands. It had a warm loamy smell to it, like springtime, and thinking about that eased the franticness of his racing heart. When the work was done, he looked down on the bundle of things he had left, and he saw the pink argyle sweater poking out from the bags. He touched it, once. And then he saw the lone sneaker at the foot of the grave, the rubber sole lolling away. Seeing it there, a single discarded thing, his love came out of his mouth all at once in a rush like vomit, and he caught it in the newspaper with a violent grab. He wrapped it up gently, and laid it in the hole.

  That night David did not sleep. He drank extra coffee, and he read as late as he could into the night—past the hours when Annie’s television shows played, past the noise and the fighting from next door. When his eyelids started to drift downward, he pinched his arm. And again. And again. And when he dreamed, he dreamed he was dead and he had been laid at the bottom of a deep, deep hole, walls of earth cathedralling around him into the sky. And when Carolina came, he didn’t recognize her, she was so old and it was only when she slipped open her blouse and he saw the gold ormolu face gleaming in the moonlight that he knew it was her. She said to him that it was all right, the clock had stopped ticking and they had time now, they could be together. But he didn’t want to be with her. She frightened him she was so different. There were all of these pieces of her that he didn’t recognize anymore—whatever she said, she was a ticking thing, and when she spoke her words ticked out of her. When she touched his chest it was cold and chilly, and the smell of dirt was the smell of the grave. It wasn’t a light touch or a gentle one, there was something insistent about it, and then she was opening up the chest and she was taking all the love out of him.

  He woke with a start, body frozen up in a cold sweat, muscles aching and he wanted to call out to Carolina that he’d had a nightmare. But then he remembered the nightmare, and he was suddenly afraid that if he looked over, he would see that she had come back. But, no, there was something beside him on the bed. He could smell loam and earth, and this time he reached out, and in the space where Carolina used to sleep there was a warm, dark thing that smelled like springtime. He breathed out. It was all right. He held it in his arms, his face pressed up against the pink argyle sweater that no longer quite smelled like Carolina, but that was all right too. And it pressed its picture-frame arms around him, its broken-sunglasses arms, its discarded-stockings arms. David felt warm and happy, and he could feel the love inside it, his love, but that was all right too.

  On the morning of the third day after Carolina left him, David found dirt tracks on the carpet—one perfect shoeprint and one long, dark smear beside it. On the stairs, the waffle-print of her sneaker. In the kitchen, one clear set of tracks to the backyard and a sinuous slur of dirt trailing behind. David considered the tracks, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to clean them up. He found himself at work remembering the feel of the warm argyle sweater, the weight of those arms around him so very much like Carolina’s. He thought about Annie’s arms—she waved to him as he came in—but, no, Annie’s arms were tiny and thin and covered with freckles. She smelled like candy and he imagined she probably listened to loud music in the evenings and didn’t need reading glasses.

  At lunchtime, David jumped when Annie put a call through. He didn’t imagine his phone would ever ring again at lunchtime; it was just one more thing that had been cut out of the fabric of his life. His heart gave a little jolt, but only a very small one. It had learned now. He picked up the phone very tentatively, and said hello. He waited. He waited a little longer. Nothing. He looked through his window at Annie, but she just gave a little shrug and then a little smile. There was still not
hing on the other end. But then—it wasn’t just nothing. He heard a tiny noise, a scratching sound. Like the creaking of plastic, like the rustle of wool. And this time—he was amazed—his heart did speed up a tiny bit.

  “Is it you?” he asked, and he heard nothing in reply. Nothing but the scratching, the rustling. “Carolina?” It wasn’t, he knew it wasn’t, but he found he didn’t want it to be. “Don’t go back there,” David said. “Don’t go back into the hole. You don’t have to. It’s okay. I love you.” There was nothing on the other line. “I love you. You don’t have to sleep in the hole. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please don’t go back there.”

  The line disconnected.

  That night, David did not go home. He took the car down Banks Avenue, into the north end of town where Carolina’s mother lived, and he parked it three blocks away. He waited. When it was late enough, when all the lights in the windows had gone out, then he fetched the key out from under the mat where her mother kept it. Silently, he slid the door open. Silently, he crept up the stairs. He knew where Carolina slept. He had been here for countless Christmases and birthdays and barbecues over the years, and he thought that it might kill him, being in a place that was so solidly Carolina, where photographs of her as a child dotted the walls, the place where she had grown up, where the bric-a-brac of all her life had come to rest. But it didn’t. They were just thing now, cells sloughed off like skin, and there wasn’t any love in them after all. His heart was slow and gentle, and it was only when he saw, outside the door to her bedroom, a discarded shoe—the frayed laces and the scuffed sole—that his heart gave a little lurch.

  David opened the door carefully so as not to wake her. He knew how lightly she slept, how a bad movie might upset her and then she would ask him to hold her and stroke her hair until the memory of it was gone. How she might wake in the night to a noise, a backfiring car, a midnight screaming match next door, and she would clutch his arm, “David, David,” she would say, and he would hold her again.

  He stepped lightly into the room, past the lonely shoe, and there she was in her old bed, covered in a lilac duvet. He could make out the curve of her shoulder, her body so thin and tiny in the giant bed. He suddenly felt very unsure about why he had come. Carolina—’Lina, he thought—looked very peaceful, and he could barely make out the slow tick-ticking of the clock in her chest.

  He made to move toward her, to touch her, perhaps, and see how chilly she would feel under his hand, how cold she would be without a heart. But the floorboards creaked, and her eyelids fluttered very briefly. The blankets rustled as she moved, as her arm crept out into the open space beside her and then gradually retreated to the pillows. Her mouth twitched, and David couldn’t make out whether it was a smile or something else.

  He left her bedroom as silently as he could. The walls were thick here, there were no neighbours, she wouldn’t be used to noise. When he closed the door, a final sliver of light remained, a tiny crack between the door and the frame deliberately preserved so that the lock wouldn’t catch. The noise, you see.

  He stood on the landing. The house seemed so small now, so much smaller than he had remembered it being when he had first met ’Lina. He barely recognized it, and when he looked at the pictures on the walls, he had to squint because he didn’t have his glasses. He realized they weren’t ’Lina after all, they were just an array of nieces and sisters and cousins, they never had been ’Lina. But the shoe. He bent down and he picked up the shoe, and he remembered all the times she had laced it up, had worn it through until it was broken and it didn’t fit her anymore. But she had loved it so much she hadn’t wanted to throw it out. She had wanted to carry it with her, here, she couldn’t get rid of it, long past the point she should have.

  It was all right. It was all right then. David’s heart was calm and full and the love settled deep in his chest like a sleeping kitten. He tucked the shoe under his arm, and he left.

  [ stomach ]

  THE MOUTH, OPEN

  “It’s rude,” Jonah’s brother-in-law, Petar, whispered beforehand, “to turn down food. We’ve found the trick is to leave a little room at the end of the first helping so you can take some more when my aunt asks you.”

  At the time, Jonah had agreed, but when ten o’clock rolled around, after the plane trip to Zagreb and the ensuing drive, the thirty-year-old programmer found that he was starving. Petar’s aunt served up a pot of peppers stuffed with rice and pork, mashed potatoes, thick crusty bread, baked string beans, and another bowl full of potatoes fried with mushrooms. Jonah began to salivate, and try as he might to follow Petar’s advice, he found his plate heaped higher and higher with food. He couldn’t help it. He never could.

  “Aunt Katica may look stern,” Petar had told him, “but she’ll love you. You’re family after all, what with Deborah and I.” When he said that, he leaned over and kissed Deborah—Jonah’s super-beauty of a little sister—on the cheek. She smiled, and wriggled her body again at Petar in a way Jonah didn’t entirely approve of. “She’s just very old fashioned, you know, caught in the old ways. Her sons died when the Serbs bombed Dubrovnik back in the War of Independence. She takes good care of us now. And she’ll feed you until you’re fit to burst.”

  Jonah had been doubtful about the trip, and about his reception with this new family he was supposed to be part of. He wasn’t terribly close to Deborah. He had showed up to her wedding late, and missed most of the major festivities before and after. And, so when he arrived in Petar’s family home, back in the old country that Deborah had told him so much about, when they started piling food in front of him, despite the doctor’s warning, despite his avowal to drop thirty pounds, and despite Petar’s advice, he began to eat.

  Travelling made him nervous, Petar’s family made him nervous, and when he was nervous he wanted to eat. After all, eating meant that you didn’t have to talk.

  He shovelled forkful after forkful into his mouth, long after Petar and Deborah had stopped, while Petar’s cousins chatted to each other in Croatian. They were big, burly men, all of them, with bulky biceps and skin burnt to an attractive red-gold. Jonah, on the other hand, felt pudgy and fish-belly white. He went to the gym when he could, but sitting in front of a computer all day did nothing for either his complexion or his physique. So his own wife had told him before she packed her bags to leave him for her fitness instructor.

  “You’ve let yourself go, honey,” Sarah said, eyes big with concern. “I can’t watch you doing this to yourself anymore. I don’t want to see who you are becoming.”

  Doing what? He had wanted to ask. Working twelve to fourteen hours a day organising trade routes for shipping companies, implementing database systems, waking at six in the morning to answer his Blackberry all so that she could have a beautiful apartment in the nice part of town and spend hours at the high-end FemChic gym in Yorkville?

  But Jonah had not said that. He had said nothing when Sarah left, and so here he was, joining his little sister, her husband and his Herculean cousins in an apartment in Dubrovnik.

  “What you need is to get away,” Deborah had told him, patting his hand with that awkward breed of affection and contempt that only family can get away with. “Come with Dam and I. He won’t mind. And his family is our family now.”

  They certainly didn’t look like his—Jonah’s—family. The younger Malinaric men had large foreheads and faces that seemed moulded from clay. They had welcomed Jonah solemnly, drank a shot of šljìvovica with him, and then ignored him completely in favour of Petar, the prodigal son, and his beautiful bride.

  Mashed potatoes it was then, mixed with tomatoes and onions, and a second piece of bread that he could stuff in his face, so that when, at last, all the bronze, golem-faces turned to him, he could shrug and mumble apologetically.

  “You don’t have to eat so much,” Deborah leaned over to whisper discreetly. “Really, you can just say no. They’ll understand. You aren’t from here.”

 
; Jonah wanted to point out that neither was she, but Deborah, being Deborah, had left a smattering of meat and vegetables on her plate just to prove that she had really, really tried and that she was definitely good and full.

  Jonah instantly put down the piece of bread he’d been about to finish off. “Okay, Sis,” he whispered. “Thanks.”

  But when she turned away, he quickly popped the stub into his mouth and chewed as fast as he could. Petar shot him a look, a friendly are-you-having-a-good-time smile, but Jonah caught the quick eye-flick to his belly, bulging out from beneath his navy t-shirt.

  Only the aging Aunt Katica, a buttery-looking woman with sagging skin and sharp, bird-like eyes, looked on in approval. When at last Jonah’s plate was clear, she tapped a wooden spoon against her chin twice, and smiled at him. It was a strange smile, but the only genuine smile he had received since he arrived.

  Deborah and Petar wanted to go with the cousins to a nightclub and they insisted that Jonah tag along as well.

  “The women here are beautiful,” Petar said. “My parents were shocked that I found a Canadian girl as pretty as the girls in Dubrovnik.”

  “Prettier,” Deborah added. “And Canadians age well. It’s the cold. Keeps us well-preserved.”

  They kissed then, a long post-honeymoon but pre-anniversary kind of kiss that involved a lot of tongue. Afterwards, they bobbed along, hand in hand, like two buoys floating in the ocean. Jonah felt a pang as he watched them. Sarah would have fit right in here. All the Croatian girls had surprisingly perfect bodies. It was the kind of place where everyone felt comfortable wearing bikini-tops. The cousins had each managed to find themselves identical counterparts: tanned, well-built girls with dark curling hair and sombre faces.