by Jenny Hval
‘I might travel instead,’ she said when I asked her what she was thinking of doing. ‘South. I’ve saved up some money.’ But she stayed at home and made me go to the shop and to the post office to pay our rent and electricity. She would often sit by the window on the open mezzanine, as if she was guarding the brewery and couldn’t leave her station. She didn’t mention her plans to travel again. But she looked after me too: more often than not, I would wake up with her body next to mine, moist and milky.
It was always her that came to me, but I was always the one left lying awake next to her as she slept. Her curls slipped down her cheek and her skin gently rubbed against the pillow as she snuggled to get comfortable. She would lift a knee and, as it touched my thigh, I’d feel a warm and cold shiver spread from there and out into my whole body. Mostly I would stay still and feel the rhythm of her soft breath on my neck. Sometimes I was sure I could feel little sprouts appear under the skin where she’d breathed.
The plasterboard too produced new summer growth in the house. One day I was in the bathtub, about to fall asleep reading Moon Lips:
He let his hand gently touch her soft, swelling lips …
Suddenly my hand grazed something that felt like thin soft skin by the bathtub rim. I turned around and looked straight into a white gaping eye: a mushroom, still quivering slightly from my touch, had grown out of the narrow wedge between the bathtub and the wall. The warm spores from its surface melted into slime on my fingers, slipping between the grooves in my skin.
After my bath I warmed some milk for Carral in the kitchen and imagined it was that mushroom in the pot, melting and bubbling.
‘Did you see the mushroom?’ I asked when I got back to the mezzanine.
‘A mushroom? Where?’
She held the milk mug between both hands, gently blowing on it.
‘In the bathroom, in the bathtub.’
‘Wow, no, it must’ve grown quickly.’
‘Mushrooms grow incredibly fast. They can sprout in a few hours actually.’
Carral nodded and sipped her milk slowly; as she swallowed I felt something warm, slimy white in my throat. I coughed. She turned towards me.
‘Don’t get rid of it.’ She looked serious, and added, ‘It’s handy evidence of the mould damage, for when the cleaning company arrives, I mean.’
‘OK,’ I coughed. ‘We could see how big it gets.’
‘Definitely! Is it edible, do you think?’
Carral giggled. When she dipped her tongue in the surface of the warm milk and licked up the skin, I felt the tip of my own tongue get warmer, and when she closed her mouth I could almost feel the milk skin against the roof of my mouth, like slimy cigarette paper.
Later that night when she came over and breathed on my neck again, I felt the same soft skin melt against mine as I’d felt earlier, touching the mushroom cap. I didn’t move but let her envelop me.
The Lighthouse
DEWDROPS TRICKLED down from the beams. The railing was slimy and moist. Carral sat on the mezzanine on a large pile of pillows and watched television on mute, the only sound the hum of the TV set and a brief click now and then when the brightness changed. When I sat next to her, she didn’t look up. Her lips were pursed tightly, she looked almost frozen, but when I put my arm on her hand her skin wasn’t cold, just clear, as if it had grown thinner. Underneath the pallor I could see pink flesh and a delicate network of veins that glowed in the TV gleam like neon. On the screen I saw a man stand in front of three women, brandishing a long sword. It had to be Charmed, because when the man pointed at the women, their faces transformed into red beastly devil-heads.
Moon Lips lay next to Carral. After a while she took it and began tugging at the cover.
‘How’s university?’ she asked, without turning from the TV.
‘It’s alright,’ I answered.
‘Are you making friends?’
‘Yeah, some. But most of the students are really young.’
Carral opened Moon Lips, slid her index finger across the stain on the paper that I’d touched too. Then she put her finger to her face and smelled it.
‘Anyone you like particularly?’
‘Sure. Franziska, the German one I told you about, I see all the time. Sometimes we hang out with some of the boys in chemistry class.’
On the TV screen the beast-women started to fade, as though a light was being shone through them. Then they disappeared one by one into the man’s blade, dissolving in white fog.
‘Finally! That’s the end of the demon women,’ Carral whispered and put her index finger in her mouth.
The man sheathed his blade at his hip and crossed his arms.
‘Maybe you should bring your friends here sometime,’ Carral said, turned towards me.
‘Come out with me tonight if you like, then you can meet them yourself,’ I answered and started to collect my things. I didn’t expect an answer, certainly not that she would say yes, but as I washed my face in the bathroom later, she appeared behind me wearing a dress and tights, and just said, ‘I’m ready.’
On the street I walked first and Carral followed, as if she needed to trace my footsteps. It was the first time I’d brought her out, and the first time in a while that she’d left the flat.
‘It’s cold,’ she said, and shivered a little.
The asphalt felt easy and smooth under my feet, everything was firm and dry out here in comparison with the clammy warm air in the brewery. But even though Aybourne’s streets still led to the same places, and the old brick buildings housed the same shops and offices, something felt different that night with Carral. When we crossed the little clearing by City Hall, I saw the sundial, elevated above the crisp winter grass, and the bare pale clock face reminded me of the honey mushroom by the bathtub rim. A few minutes later we walked past the hostel where I’d stayed during my very first days in Aybourne. The windowpanes looked dirty, as though they had grown shut. On the other side of the road was the sea, quiet as ice.
Our walk ended at the student bar. I introduced Carral to Franziska and the other biology students, and she briefly told everyone about herself:
‘I have a BA, but at the moment I mostly work temp jobs in offices,’ she said. ‘It’s boring but I kind of don’t know what I want yet. There’s just so much that interests me.’
She seemed amazingly normal in comparison to how I saw her at home. Curled up on the sofa pillows in the daytime or hugging me tightly at night. She seemed more alert and healthy than in the brewery.
‘You live in Hawthorn, right?’ Franziska asked politely. Carral nodded. ‘In the old brewery.’
‘I didn’t think anyone lived there,’ Leigh said, a girl from my genetics class with dark hair and high leather boots.
‘Yeah sure, just not that many,’ I said.
‘I hear it’s haunted,’ Leigh whispered.
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah, my boyfriend was in that house once, before it was renovated. He said it was haunted …’
‘Are you saying we’re ghosts?’ Carral smiled attentively.
‘No, no, but maybe you’ve seen some?’ Franziska said.
‘Apparently a girl died there,’ said Leigh, ‘the brewery owner’s daughter, I think. They say she fell in a tank and drowned … in beer.’
Carral started laughing, louder than usual, so loud that I ended up watching her.
‘I’ve heard that story too. It’s pretty crazy,’ she said.
‘Tragic, too,’ said Franziska, watching me with her serious German eyes.
‘I actually thought I’d seen that drowned girl a couple of times,’ Carral said with round eyes. ‘But every time it just turned out to be Little Jo.’
She put her arm around my shoulder.
Later I was standing in the bar with Franziska. She’d put on make-up. Her cheeks were red, as though she’d rubbed a Pink Lady apple against her skin.
‘You speak differently with Carral,’ she said.
‘Differently?’
‘As if you change accents.’
‘I adapt quickly. You know how it is, with English as a second language.’
‘Yeah, but with her you speak exactly … like her.’
‘A Brighton accent?’
‘Yeah, if that’s how she talks. And you act strange. When you were looking at her just now. Are you … together?’
‘Together?’ I asked. A sticky heat oozed thickly into my head and down into my abdomen.
‘It’s OK if you are, I’m just curious.’
‘No, no, we just live together,’ I said firmly.
In that moment I noticed Carral, under a big lamp that changed colours at regular intervals. She laughed and squeezed the arms of the chemistry class boys, at first seemingly at random, but later methodically, as if she was in the vegetable aisle, searching for a ripe avocado. And all the while, she looked back at me as she squeezed. Her face was psychedelically gleaming in red and yellow from the lamp.
‘I’m sorry to ask,’ Franziska said, ‘you just seem so close.’ She blushed faintly, and stirred her drink carefully with a straw.
‘In a way we are,’ I answered, ‘in that weird house with those paper-thin walls. Sometimes I’m not sure what’s going on.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know how to explain it.’
I felt a heat between my legs. In front of me, red and yellow liquids were mixing in Franziska’s glass.
‘It’s been a while since I kissed anyone,’ Carral whispered to me when we met outside the door to the women’s toilets. Her hand rested on my neck as she stroked her thumb along my spine. My whole body was throbbing.
‘How long?’ I asked, but she didn’t react, just kept stroking my back, bone by bone.
‘Do you like any of the boys here?’ Carral asked.
Her lips touched my earlobe, eyes turned towards the group of biology students. I shrugged, and took a step back.
‘They’re too young for me,’ I said.
‘They’re not that much younger than you, nineteen maybe,’ Carral giggled and stared at one in particular, a really tall boy with a long fringe and chest hair that stuck out of his T-shirt.
‘That’s plenty younger,’ I said and walked back to the bar.
Then Pym was there. He stood in the middle of the dance floor with two shirt buttons open and his eyes gleaming. A few locks of hair dangled over his cheek.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Wow, you’re here,’ I said.
‘Carral said you were going.’
‘Carral? When did you see Carral?’
Pym threw back his head; his hair fell back over his cheek.
‘Been a while,’ he whispered.
‘I’ve got a lot of reading,’ I answered quickly.
‘Have you read my book yet?’
‘Nearly finished,’ I lied.
‘And what do you think?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you like the idea?’
I didn’t answer. He tossed his hair back again, and suddenly he’d put his hand over mine. I hadn’t felt it happen, and kept my eyes on our hands.
‘It’s just for you.’ He let go, but his hand remained in the air just above mine.
‘Did you see Carral?’ I asked again, but I didn’t get a reply; in that instant his tongue was in my mouth. I wanted to tear myself from him but his lips were clamped on mine, his tongue filled my whole mouth like a Spanish slug, antennas tickling the roof my mouth. I felt dizzy and tried to catch my breath, but both air and spit was sucked out of me and into his body and in return I got his sticky whisky taste down my throat. His arms grabbed me and held me tight. He closed his eyes. From the outside it must have looked calm, two people kissing each other quietly, but I know what happened inside of me, and I was suddenly afraid to be sucked into him and disappear.
Finally he let me go. I breathed heavily and touched my lips, resisting the urge to spit on the floor. Then I turned around and walked to the bar. I didn’t look back. Carral had seen the whole thing from her corner with the biology boys. She had turned her eyes to the bar, but from the tension in her body I could tell she was following my movements. Her fingers had seen what happened, her shoulders, her back and neck had seen it too.
Later that night, Franziska and I said goodbye with a nervous hug.
‘Jo, there’s a room free at ours, if you want.’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just in case. You said you don’t know what’s going on.’
She seemed a little anxious.
‘Thanks. Can I think about it?’
Franziska nodded and disappeared into the darkness. I looked around, but Carral was gone, Pym too, and I walked home alone with bated breath and steps that seemed to get me nowhere. Soon I saw the silo far off with the rock face behind it, the crag’s overwhelming concrete-coloured mouth.
In the brewery, I can see the kitchen over the plasterboard on my mezzanine, with the table like an island in the middle. Behind the table is the ladder to Carral’s mezzanine. The rest of her mezzanine is hidden behind a wall like my own. Yet throughout the room I can hear creaking and low voices, muted sounds. I hear them so clearly that I can see what’s happening, like an x-ray through the board. I see Pym’s thick arms move across Carral’s back, envelop her, grip her tight. He puts one hand on her shoulder-blade and the other in the small of her back and she bends over. Then she stretches out and looks right at me, as if knowing that I can see her through the wall, her eyes shining white in her warm reddish face, like splinters sticking out of a compound fracture. Under Pym her spine trembles like a white-tipped mane. The moonlight tints arched joints white, and her tailbone blinks when he pulls her away: a lighthouse signalling the way in the horizon
there, not there, there, not there
The Storm
THAT NIGHT I LAY with brine in my throat and the image of Carral and Pym together behind my eyelids. My mouth still tasted of Pym’s tongue. Neither drinking water nor eating Fruit Pastilles had helped. On my little mezzanine I felt like I was sinking into my own body, into a dark, tight box made of skin and flesh. After a while I fell asleep, and when I woke up a sharp draught hit my face through a crack in the concrete. From the other mezzanine I heard Carral leafing through a book. I wondered if Pym was still there, if they were reading his novel together, if he was touching her. I put on some music, but the song that started playing was from Björk’s Vespertine album, so intimate it only took me closer to Pym and Carral. The strings and voice sounded like myriads of intimate touches, and each beat sounded like it was played from inside someone’s body. I wondered if he was here still, inside her, on the mezzanine across from me. I turned the music off and decided to get up and leave.
The ladder steps from the mezzanine were damp and slippery, like on a quayside ladder. The kitchen floor was moist too, as if dew had formed on the little grass tufts that grew between the floorboards. Lime-stained water drops trickled from the cracks in the wall. And in the bathroom, the bathtub flooded as I showered. The mushroom from the plasterboard was beaded with water, like a shower head.
Out in the streets of Aybourne the gusts were icy. Behind the silo, big grey clouds devoured the mountains and on the other side, sea, islands and sky were tossed together in a great gob of fog and froth. As I leant inwards and walked to the university, I felt the wind pierce every fibre in my clothing, felt sand and dirt gather in the corner of my eye. In the vestibule of Earth Sciences an excitable meteorology professor had hung up a note on the spring weather:
As always, the forecast is again partly cloudy, with a strong gale coming in from the west. This will shake the dust off those barometers!
Next to the blackboard hung an exhibition of old barometers and the broken arrows veered back and forth between STORM, RAIN and CHANGE, like an old seismograph at the start of an earthquake.
While Dr Spitlip lectured on evolutionary theory, Franziska whispered: ‘And then he threw himself at you?’
&nbs
p; ‘Like an animal.’ I illustrated with my hands like claws. ‘A MANimal.’
‘How gross! Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine, thanks. It was gross, but he’s just some desperate and pathetic loser.’ I smiled and Franziska laughed in her slow manner.
‘Was he the neighbour you talked about? The one that wrote about you?’
‘Pym, yeah.’
Franziska rolled her eyes. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see!’
‘You didn’t exactly miss anything.’
With every word I told Franziska about Pym, he faded a little inside me.
‘I’m sorry that I probed you about Carral,’ she said suddenly.
‘That’s OK. There really isn’t anything between us, we just live together.’
Franziska nodded and smiled. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘because I saw her kissing someone … late, right before we left.’
‘Did you? I didn’t see that.’ I tried to smile.
‘Or … it might not have been her. It was dark. And she was with a big guy.’
‘Maybe that was Pym too.’
Franziska laughed, but I thought about Pym and Carral, that it probably had been them, and I wanted to tell Franziska about what I’d seen when I got home, but I didn’t quite know what to say, what words to use. Outside the house the world was dry and sharp and normal, and it didn’t quite correspond with what seemed to grow between the brewery walls: something moist, skinless and quiet.
When I got home Carral sat by the kitchen table. Pym was nowhere to be seen. She pulled her bathrobe close around her and yawned. Her body seemed to be endlessly far inside it.
‘Where did you go last night? I couldn’t find you when I was leaving,’ she said.
‘I was there, with Franziska. Same place. Where were you?’
My face was stiff from my walk through the cold wind, and I rubbed my cheeks.
‘In the bar. Pym walked me home,’ she answered and poured water in a mug, dropped a tea bag in it with a splash. ‘He says hi by the way. He’s wondering if you’ll be reading his book anytime soon.’
