by Jenny Hval
Outside your room your sister’s spinning
As the song transitioned into an interlude, the melody paled. The echoes of the words remained, as if they had fallen into themselves and continued to be there, smaller and smaller:
Alison, I said we’re sinking
I lay surrounded by plasterboard and bricks and felt feverish. When the song faded out, I noticed that the air in the factory had become dense and stuffy. I removed my headphones, stood and climbed down the ladder to the kitchen. The house seemed different, snugger, as if the building had contracted. The kitchen table covered a larger portion of the floor, and the light bulbs swung wide on their cords. Maybe someone had been here, while we slept so deeply, and put a new set of walls up over the old ones, a new plaster layer on the inside of the boards covering our mezzanines. I imagined these things as I walked across the floor to the kitchen counter. My feet trod carefully on the floorboards, as if to avoid bumping into something I couldn’t see, but that was still there. It hit me that this was how Carral walked. Had I begun this recently or had I been doing it a long time? I looked down at my feet. They were soft and white on the floorboards, almost liquid.
Carral came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her hair and another one around her torso. I hadn’t heard a sound from the bathroom. The toilet wasn’t hissing, and the shower head didn’t drip. She must have been there ages. The sound of her steps mingled with the sound of the kettle boiling.
‘Good morning. Is the bath free now?’
She nodded hello, shuffled past me and disappeared up to her mezzanine. When I went into the bathroom it smelled faintly of urine and the liquid in the toilet bowl was the colour of melted butter. Carral hadn’t flushed. When my stream hit the surface it bubbled and as I peed I looked down between my legs and watched the two liquids mixing.
Under the shower head I let the water run so hot it scalded my skin. I imagined I was scrubbing off the manager’s disgusting comments and rubbing out Carral’s sudden presence in my bed. The shower gel foamed on my skin, a frothy cover between me and the night before, between my body and hers. All the while I saw her behind my eyelids: a soft, blurry face on the pillow next to me, silver-white in the darkness. The water rushed from the shower head, and the sound gained a different, softer quality against the soapy froth that covered the bath. It reminded me of the head on a beer. I forced the image of Carral out of my head and pictured the bathtub, the bathroom, the whole house, as a beer glass slowly filling with sweet fermented hops.
‘Is it true that this is an old brewery?’ I asked Carral once I was dressed. She looked so tired, almost blurry, sitting at the kitchen table in an old, thin bathrobe. Moon Lips was in front of her, closed.
‘Yeah, I think so. A long time ago. The neighbour told me.’
‘It must have been empty for a long time?’
‘Yeah, I’ve no idea how long, but probably several years.’ She closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead.
‘Do you have a fever?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m just really tired. We smoked a little yesterday; I hardly remember anything. And I slept terribly.’
I nodded. It was quiet between us again, and at once the image of her in my bed returned, her grey face and warm body so close to mine. Carral yawned and stared down into her book. Her index finger stroked the cover, traced the edges around the sketched full moon in circles. My palms were sweating.
‘Is it a good book?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s trash,’ she answered. ‘But I need it.’
‘Trash can be fun.’
‘Yeah, but it’s a little sad when I think about how I used to read lots of challenging, gloomy books, proper books … And now wolves, mystical powers and love is all that matters to me.’ She smiled sleepily and held the book up with the cover towards me, and continued: ‘Jo … I’m sorry if I said anything stupid yesterday. I didn’t mean to call you young and innocent.’
‘It’s fine. I mean, I am. And that’s pretty funny.’
‘But actually you’re really mature. I heard you dodged the manager.’
‘He thought I was a lesbian. He asked me if I’d ever been with … a man.’ I could feel my face getting hot just by repeating it.
‘I’m sorry you had to meet him like that. He was really drunk. But I heard you handled it well.’
‘Yeah. But it was gross. He’s right though. I’ve never …’ My voice became faint. But Carral smiled, leant over the table and put her hands on my shoulders.
‘You haven’t? Blimey, a virgin! I didn’t know.’
I looked down. She sat down again and continued:
‘But Jo, that’s not a problem! That’s nothing. We’ll find someone for you.’
‘Oh no, please don’t. Definitely not someone from your work.’
Carral laughed. For a moment she looked almost well. She put her hand over her heart. ‘I promise.’
I felt relieved and went to pack up my books. Behind me I heard Carral go up the stairs to the living room. Apparently, she was not working today. When I yelled to say goodbye, she didn’t answer. I could see her back leant against the railing, slumped over her book up on the mezzanine. Then I opened the door and took a deep breath, felt the whole great white sky fill my mouth.
Franziska met me at the uni pub after the seminar that day.
‘A brewery!’ she said.
‘Yeah, I wonder how old it is.’
‘I went on a tour of the breweries the day I got here. Brew of the Bourne.’
‘Was it fun?’
‘It was horrible. We had to learn drinking songs. I think I remember one.’
Franziska sang a few bars:
Then come, my boon fellows,
Let’s drink it around;
It keeps us from the grave,
Though it lays us on ground.
With her dark voice and heavy German accent the song sounded sombre and serious, as if there was no difference between the grave and on the ground.
‘Should we grab a pint? A few people from the seminar are coming.’
‘I’ve got to go I think,’ I answered. ‘Carral’s kind of tired. I promised I’d cook her dinner.’
When I got home, Carral was sleeping on the pillows on the mezzanine. Her bathrobe had loosened and slipped off her, and through the white cotton fabric of her pants I could see a dark, soft mound, a cress bed of hair. Her cheek was squeezed against the window, her breath fogging the glass. Her skin was flushed, feverish. I leant over her.
‘Carral?’
‘Hi.’
She stretched, rubbed her cold cheek.
‘Still not well? Do you want something to eat?’
She shook her head and pulled the bathrobe over herself.
‘Just tea, if you don’t mind.’
I nodded and went down to the kitchen, filled the kettle and opened a packet of biscuits. When I returned to the mezzanine with her tea, she’d fallen asleep again. I sat beside her for a while and read my seminar texts, but every time my fingers touched the paper, I thought of the paper in Moon Lips, how it was brittle and rough from the big stain. Next to me steam stopped rising from the tea. It cooled and pearls of milk fat spread on the surface. The fluid congealed along the edge and started to sink.
Carral’s deep breaths pulled her chest up and released in an even rhythm. With every inhalation her belly, chest, and whole body swelled and collapsed, like a white, slippery dough left to rise. When I eventually lay down next to her, she turned abruptly, grabbed my arm and put it around her.
‘Jo,’ she whispered, ‘are you staying with me?’
‘Of course.’
‘You don’t want to move out?’
Her eyes were still closed.
‘No.’
Carral smiled. Then she pressed me close, hard, as if she wanted to pull me inside her.
My arm is around Carral. This is the second night we have slept in the same bed. Through the railing I can see the dim flickering lights from
the rotating chandelier by the front door. Then my eyes slip shut and the rays of light become smaller and smaller until the darkness is impenetrable. The whole apartment is slathered with black grease, as though we are in a tarred lung.
In the morning I got out of bed, and went to get milk and toast. Downstairs in the kitchen were several plates with food from the day before that Carral clearly hadn’t touched. She didn’t want breakfast either.
‘But you haven’t eaten anything at all,’ I whispered.
‘I’m full.’
‘Full of what?’
‘I’m just full-up.’
She was right. Her stomach bulged. Her whole body had swelled in those few hours, and when I snuggled up next to her I could feel how she felt. From her ears I could hear a soft rushing sound, as if from a conch shell. If I closed my eyes, I could hear the house creak and it swayed as though we were at sea. And later in the afternoon, it was as if we were in the sea and carried the house inside us. In my dreams I could feel metal push against my throat and I imagined that I had swallowed the railing, the taps, the window handles, every piece of furniture in the house.
‘Tonight, when you feel better, we’ll get drunk,’ I said.
Carral opened her eyes tentatively and let out a low giggle. ‘That’ll be nice.’
Then I stroked her arms, her thighs, her belly. Together we filled each other to the brim and lay there slumped in an all-consuming doze, like gorged snakes digesting their prey.
Pym
THAT NIGHT CARRAL seemed a lot better. Outside, the weather was unusually mild, and we sat on the roof terrace for a while, eating crackers and brie and drinking cheap wine from a carton. For every glass I had, Carral had three, and after a while she was pretty drunk and swayed by the TV antenna like the captain on a pirate ship. Behind her Aybourne was a sea of low houses, already in shadow, waves breaking in crests of electric light. She called me over and put her arm around my shoulders, began a sort of wobbly dance and spilt what remained of the wine in her glass. Suddenly we heard a knocking coming from down in the flat. Carral lifted her arm, as if she was conducting an orchestra, signalled for the movement of bodies, wine and clouds to stop, and declared:
‘I think we’ve got company.’
We heard several more knocks. I caught her arm.
‘I don’t want company.’
‘Little Jo, it’s probably just the neighbour.’
‘I don’t think anyone should see us like this.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s dirty here. And we look weird.’
‘We are wine, we are cheese, we are crackers.’
‘Carral.’
‘Come on. You might like him,’ she said and looked at me, blinking a few times.
She climbed lurchingly down the ladder humming to herself. Her feet landed heavily on each rung and over the kitchen floor. Her steps were different, clear and heavy, like my steps.
That was how Pym came into our lives, from the apartment next door. He was older than us, in his early thirties, and was the size of Carral and I combined: a tall, ruddy and broad-shouldered man with a whisky bottle in his hand. His hair was thick and red and flattened behind his ears with hair gel. His shirt was half open, thick sun-bleached hair on his chest. He said he was from a small town in the south with waves and farmers and whisky, and that he came to the town to work as a journalist. While in between temp jobs at the Aybourne Post he worked on an apple farm in Castlehill and wrote some of his ‘own stuff’.
‘What do you study?’ he asked.
‘Biology, but I’m not sure what I’m specializing in yet. I just started.’
‘Of course she knows,’ Carral said and put her hands at her side, still in a pirate mood. She laughed loudly and stuck up her nose, as if she was balancing something on it. Pym looked at her for a while before his eyes trailed back to me. I didn’t want to look at him, and looked down into a spoon. My eye stared back, upside down.
‘What are you most interested in then?’ Pym asked.
Carral was quiet, leaning further and further back in her chair, and I realised I had to join the conversation. I looked up from the spoon and directly at Pym, who scratched his chin.
‘I don’t know. I like mycology.’
‘Mycology?’ I heard him put the stress on myc.
‘Fungi,’ I said, running my fingers through my bangs, feeling a sudden urge to scratch my chin too.
‘And you? What are you writing?’
‘It’s a novel, but in verse.’
‘A novel, wow,’ I replied.
‘Roman, Johanna, roman.’ My head sang the Norwegian for novel when I looked at Pym again. He had lifted his whisky bottle and was pouring it into a small shot glass Carral had produced.
‘Do you want any?’
I shook my head. He poured some in my glass anyway. His huge freckled upper arm tensed a little while he poured. I wasn’t sure if I could stretch even both hands around his arm. He moved continuously, tensing his body and relaxing it again, and I realised that in spite of myself, I was following the muscles in his arms, his neck, his chest. The whisky was sloshing in my wine glass. It was a sticky reddish brown, and had a sharp scent, just like Pym. When I took a tiny sip, I imagined for a second that it came from his body, and it made me cough. When I got up to make some tea, I pictured him grinning behind me.
The sink was full of plates and glasses, dried-up leftovers, mugs and tins. I poked what was left of some baked beans while waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘What’s your book about?’ I asked.
‘You can read it if you like.’
‘Carral’s the literary one.’
‘Really?’
‘Definitely. You should get her to read it. Right, Carral?’
I turned to her. Her chair was tipped backwards; she seemed to be getting sleepy and was humming a broken tune, making noises intermittently like a dripping tap. I poured milk in the tea and walked over to the table.
‘Maybe you’ll both want to read it?’ Pym leant towards me. A lock of his red hair fell over his face, dividing his eye in two. I hesitated.
‘I’m better at biology.’
‘This novel is different,’ Pym said.
‘Really?’
‘It’s full of nature, full of facts.’
‘Hm.’
‘I’ll let you read it.’
I poked Carral’s arm. No reaction.
‘Carral’s drunk.’
‘Sloshed, Carral giggled with stiff lips and without moving.
‘I think I should get her to bed.’
‘I’m fine, I’ll stay here,’ she said.
‘You sure?’
‘Of course! And I want to know more about the book … And about what you study.’
‘You know.’
Carral leant over the table towards Pym and whispered: ‘I think she studies me.’
Her hand was on my arm. I felt her pulse tick in her wrist. Feet arched under the chair. Up on the mezzanine the print of our bodies glowed.
‘Is she a fungus?’ Pym grinned at me.
‘Fungi don’t get wasted,’ I said. I spoke to Carral. He spoke to me. Carral spoke to the kitchen table:
‘Am I myco … myco … what did you call it?’
‘Mycology.’
‘My-co-lo-gi-cal?’ She forced every syllable, her lips stiff again, and her cheeks flushed.
Then she blinked a few times, and every time she closed her eyes she looked like she was drifting off, a lightbulb about to go out. Finally, she put her head on the table and fell asleep.
The light bulb dangled above our heads, rocking our shadows back and forth over the kitchen table. In the dim light I could see dark stripes in Pym’s hair, from the comb’s teeth. The walls were blurry and the brewery seemed open like a great hall. On the floor, crumbs sparkled.
‘Here, let me show you the beginning of the book,’ Pym said and started writing on a napkin. He held a pen between his thick fingers and arched hi
s back over the thin paper. I pictured his back as he wrote, muscles braiding together as he moved the pen.
A few sips of whisky later the napkin was filled with slanted writing. Pym held the pen like a needle between thumb and index finger, concealing the paper with his free hand as he wrote. My hands cupped my tea. He handed me the napkin.
‘It’s the story of a girl, sort of, in rhyme.’
I accepted the napkin, smoothed it out, felt it stick to my palm.
‘It’s not finished, though.’
He was apparently a little nervous, because he poured more whisky in his glass and swallowed it in one gulp.
‘She’, I read, ‘creates the world.’
I felt blood rush to my cheeks, salt in my eyes.
The world of biology.
Puts emotion in honey jars with spiders and bees.
Can’t see the difference between people and trees.
Through the empty glass in front of him his skin appeared dazzling, as things can sometimes seem, glinting in the distance. I didn’t know what to say so I read it again, as though I was struggling with it.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘I don’t get it. Is this what I’m like?’
‘I just wrote what I think.’
‘But it could be anyone. Any student.’
‘I could have described you as well. Your hair.’
‘No, no. No hair. No eyes. No lips.’
I tried to smile, feeling like I’d said something wrong. One word too many: lips. The word brought a barrage of thoughts: licking them, biting them, kissing them. I imagined that I bit his tanned neck, and couldn’t help but think, this is it, Johanna, it’s happening, and I was sure he could read it on my lips. His shoulders swelled as he tensed and relaxed his muscles. He leant his head towards me.
‘Oh, I see. You’re a feminist.’
‘That’s not what I said, I just think you’ve written enough.’
‘I just wanted to give you a compliment. You have nice lips,’ he said, as if adding a coda to the poem, and I squinted back at him, sucking in my lips as though in retreat from his mouth. In my head the words from Moon Lips were throbbing:
