Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

  ‘Did you read it?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. But I don’t remember it so well now.’ She fussed over the screw top on a milk carton for a while, twisting it on and off a few times. Then she shrugged.

  ‘No, I can’t remember why, but I think you should read it.’

  ‘I’ll read it soon,’ I said and felt a burning in the roof of my mouth when Carral gulped her first sip of the scalding hot milky tea. She touched her mouth, just as I did. ‘Bloody hot!’ I heard behind me as I walked to the bathroom door.

  In the bathroom I rinsed my mouth out before filling the sink with cold water, and rigorously washing my face. Then I stood and looked at myself in the mirror, poking a finger in my mouth. The roof of my mouth felt normal and cold. But the mirror shook in front of me, and all around me everything was moving; thin rings were forming on the water surface in the sink. The honey fungus rocked by the bath’s rim. The grass tufts between the floorboards swayed gently. I turned off the tap and listened. There was a thump that sounded like it came from inside the concrete. When I put my ear to the wall, I heard a soft knocking sound, through the cistern rush.

  ‘Can you hear that knocking?’ I called out to Carral in the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s Pym. He mentioned he’d be working a bit today.’

  I sat down on the toilet seat with my hand against the wall and felt the beating in there, like a tiny heart that grew inside the wall.

  The knocking continued through the night with the storm. When I got up to pee in the half-light, I wondered if Pym, assuming he was the one who knocked, could hear us as we heard him, if he could hear me pee, if he could hear the difference between my sharp fast stream and Carral’s slow dripping trickle.

  The next morning when I woke up it was light and the knocking had stopped. I heard the wind’s howl and in the distance ferocious waves broke against the pier. The news told of electricity pylons on the main line that had been blown down, and that power was to be unreliable all day long. Lightbulbs flickered over the kitchen table, the fridge stopped its humming and started again, the TV flickered. The tin ceiling wasn’t sealed properly and when the wind caught it silverfish and beetles would tumble down the steel beams.

  ‘We have to get the bins in,’ Carral said when I returned from a trip to Aygros. ‘They’re gonna fly away.’

  ‘But it’ll stink.’

  ‘We’ll put them under the stairs. There’s not a lot, just some in the compost, and it’s sealed pretty well.’

  The wind almost knocked us off the stairs. Carral carried the bins, and afterwards we each took hold of an end of the coffin-like compost container holding the old apples. The smell of rot on my hands was faint and familiar, and when we put the container down under the stairs I remembered how, when we’d dumped the apples in it, I had imagined we were cleaning out paradise. I got a sudden urge to open the compost and look at the apples. Carral sat on the lid, and I sat next to her. Her arm was near mine. Her skin was soft, softer than I remembered, as if she was rotten too, a fallen Eve. Under us I could hear the apples rumble. Not a real sound, but a sort of internal buzzing, like how you can imagine hearing nails and hair growing or buds opening.

  Goldapple Stems

  I WOKE UP DURING the night and saw that the bathroom light was on. Downstairs I found Carral sitting on the bathroom floor with a fistful of yellow hair in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. She jumped when I opened the door. On her head were several bald spots.

  ‘It just came off, I woke up and there was hair everywhere …’ she whispered and sank into a pile of hair, crying. I sat down next to her and stroked her cheek. Her head jerked. A yellow lock of hair stuck to my hand, warm and soft, almost liquid.

  ‘Do you want me to help you?’ I asked, and twisted the scissors gently out of her hand.

  There really was hair everywhere. Some locks were cut, but others looked like they had just come loose and slipped down her shoulders, gotten stuck in the folds on her nightshirt or on her arms. It looked like she had hair growing all the way down to the floor, where it fastened. The bathroom mushroom’s white eye glared at us.

  ‘I’m starting,’ I told Carral, who nodded silently, and then I rested the scissors close to her scalp and cut. The locks of hair fell down in my lap like peelings from a golden apple, and as I was cutting more and more from her naked head, I noticed that I was crossing a line, that I gleaned and gathered something painful from her that didn’t fall to the floor, but that braided itself into my body from hers.

  When I finished she had only millimetres of hair left, her scalp having become a glistening white button mushroom.

  I stroked her head. ‘You look lovely,’ I said. ‘Like a Buddhist priest.’

  Carral was completely silent.

  I continued: ‘Come on, you can sleep over at mine.’

  On my mezzanine she whispered in the darkness: ‘Remember the time when I lay here and had wet myself?’

  This was the first time she’d mentioned it. The words felt strange, as though her voice just decided that it had really happened that night.

  ‘Yeah, I remember,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t on purpose. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine. I told you that.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But I just wanted to apologise anyway. There’s something in me that makes me … lose control sometimes. I fall asleep. And I …’

  I turned towards her, could only just make out the contours of her face in the dark.

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘I come over to yours.’

  ‘Is that you losing control?’

  ‘No, maybe not.’

  ‘I thought you were scared or something.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s it. I feel … different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t understand what’s happening. It just feels like this is where I should be.’

  I turned around with my head facing the plasterboard. It smelled rotten, of wood and mould.

  ‘I saw the two of you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You and Pym, on the mezzanine, fucking like rabbits. You should have told me that’s what you wanted.’

  ‘Oh, Little Jo. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean it … I don’t really understand how it happened. I only meant to kiss him, and … I don’t remember much after that.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I think I was just … afraid to lose you.’

  ‘What do you mean lose me?’

  ‘I don’t know … you’ll fall in love … and then you’ll move out … and then I’ll be alone here again …’

  ‘Move out? I don’t even like him! And you didn’t need to fuck him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jo.’

  The floorboards creaked loudly when I turned and rolled out of bed. Her arm stroked my back, but I pulled away. My insides were pounding. Then it was quiet for a little while before she whispered: ‘But you’re saying you don’t like him?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I just wish you’d told me about it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jo, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you gonna move out?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Yes,’ I said.

  She pulled my shoulder back so I lay down again. Then she turned me toward her, her face against mine. ‘Don’t go. Come back to me.’

  Our foreheads were touching. Two thin crusts of landmass.

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ I said.

  Later it happened again. I dreamt of Carral’s golden hair locks twisting around me like a warm golden exoskeleton. When I woke up, our bodies were clammy and damp. The mattress stank of urine. Warm, thin fluid trickled onto my hand next to her thigh, and I thought about tea with milk and sugar. I could hear the water drip from the ceiling, from the walls, from every corner, and I thought that it dripped with us, for us.

  Eden

  THE NEXT MORNING the storm had abated, but a torrential rain followed it and t
he air in the brewery became ever more damp and clammy. Carral was still sleeping when I got up. Her smooth, newly shaved head was beaded with sweat. On the way to the bathroom I felt rainwater drip on me through cracks in the tin roof, and the living room mezzanine was covered with a thin white layer of moss that couldn’t be scraped off. I could only barely make out the street below. There were no people, no trams, and I couldn’t even see the tracks, as if all of Aybourne had been rubbed out overnight.

  The compost was still beneath the stairs. The stench of rotten fruit had spread through the entire flat. It felt like the brewery had been transformed into a big wet tank that was waiting for Carral and I to decompose within it: a rotten, reeking Garden of Eden. The apples were in the bin where we’d left them, mouldy and collapsed. Flies with long legs buzzed around a torn dark-red Bloody Ploughman. The Honeygold next to it had its peel intact, like a shrivelled urine-coloured pearl. Some of the apples were unrecognisable, covered in grey-white fur like little dead animals. And under them, in the far corner of the apple pile, I noticed something different: a notebook, yellowed and soft. I recognised the colour: it was Pym’s notebook. Did Carral put it there? I thought while I fished it out and brushed off the worst of the mould stains. Then I hauled the compost behind me through the factory and lugged it to its usual spot outside the front door, chucked the notebook in my backpack and walked towards the university. As I walked it felt like the rotten apples were rolling behind me, braided together to form a sticky yellow-brown trail.

  That night I brought the notebook to the bathroom. The honey mushroom sat with its head on the bathtub edge. It had changed colour and was a deep yellow, almost black. While I ran the bath, I sat down to read the book. The mushroom leant against my shoulder and read with me in silence.

  Pym’s little novel started with the same verses that I remembered from that night around the kitchen table:

  The biologist creates the world;

  The world of biology.

  Puts emotion in honey jars with spiders and bees.

  Can’t see the difference between people and trees.

  Everything she sees she understands;

  Everything can be made from her hands.

  It wasn’t a long story, and I read most of it before the tub was full. It was the mythical tale of a girl, a biologist, whom I guessed was supposed to be me. The girl met a man, who of course reminded me of Pym:

  His body so tight, his arms so strong,

  His hair as red as fire.

  The biologist had created the world, but she had also created another girl – who had to be Carral – and the whole thing ended in a strange sex orgy where the two girls took turns at satisfying the man’s every sexual fantasy and eventually melted into him:

  They thought him strong, he thought them pale.

  They covered him like a long, white veil.

  And so he saw the world through her eyes,

  The world that she created.

  THE END

  I splashed some water in my face and shook my head. Was this really how he saw me? Did he want me to show him a different world, or did he just want to have a threesome with Carral and I? I went to close the book, but noticed little prints on the paper. I turned the page. On the flip side of what I had thought was the final page were several more stanzas written in completely different handwriting:

  But wait! This story isn’t over yet,

  Another scene has just been set.

  And then Pym’s book continued with a short grotesque feast:

  The women feast on the poor man’s flesh,

  And chew each bone whilst it is fresh,

  So the two women can become one with a kiss;

  The dream of every biologist!

  To grow together is their pursuit,

  And his red flesh their forbidden fruit,

  He stumbles and gasps and finally dies;

  From his ashes will a four-breasted creature arise.

  I recognised the handwriting from notes and shopping lists. Carral’s. I shut the book and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to push the final lines out of my head. But behind my eyelids the images returned again and again, as I dried my hair, brushed my teeth and snuck out of the bathroom: Carral looking straight at me while Pym thrust himself in and out of her body, Pym’s tongue burrowing into my mouth, Franziska saying, ‘You seem so close,’ Carral giving me a muffin, sitting next to me on the compost lid, peeing down my thigh.

  There she was, in the middle of the kitchen floor outside the bathroom, waiting for me. It was dark now and there was no light on, so I couldn’t see her face, just the silhouette of her body shining in the glints of light from the chandelier. She moved towards me on slender legs that stuck out under a nightshirt, silent and jagged, a deer sneaking tentatively into a clearing.

  ‘Jo? Have you been in the bathroom this whole time?’

  ‘I guess.’

  I held up Pym’s book to her and continued: ‘Did you write the last page?’

  ‘Oh, Jo, it was just a joke.’

  ‘A joke?’

  She laughed lightly.

  ‘Almost all of it. And some of it … for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Come.’

  That was the first time I was on her mezzanine, and when she turned and lay behind me, firmly against my body, I thought we were synchronized, or I wished we were: that she should dream what I’d dreamt, that she should taste what my mouth tasted. And in my mouth I felt two tongues, mine and hers, licking each other’s lips and swallowing each other’s spit.

  Her breasts push gently against my backbone. I can’t feel her nipples, just smooth skin, and where the nipples are supposed to be there are instead two small holes. From these two holes grow two thin stems that burrow through my skin and flesh, twisting and tangling around my spine. Along my back little yellow fruits start to grow. I feel their taste in my mouth: cold sweet sap.

  Then there’s a rush through me, her stalks and fingers and veins spread through my entire body like a new soft skeleton.

  Black Fruit

  THE BREWERY WAS QUIET, the kind of quiet that resembles sleep. Carral twitched like a dog that dreams of running. Every twitch pinched my skin, and the last thing I thought before I disappeared into sleep was that sleep is an animal, an animal body. And then I was gone, unconscious: paws and claws grew out of my fists, fur spun out between my legs and wove around our bodies.

  I dreamt of two bodies, girls’ bodies, our bodies: our upper bodies had melted together and our necks twisted around each other, thin and long like swans’ necks. The girls were naked and hairless. The faces were shadowed. It was impossible to tell who was who. The cracks between them were covered in white mould fur, as if they shared a skin woven around them.

  One of the girls turned her head towards the other and said, ‘Let me tell you a fairy tale,’ and the other girl nodded. So the first continued:

  ‘I’ll tell you the fairy tale of the apple. Eve ate the apple, and then Adam came and did so too. Afterwards the apple was forgotten, and it was assumed that it rolled away in the grass while Adam and Eve were chased out of the garden. But that’s not true, because secretly the apple rolled in between Eve’s legs, scratched open her flesh and burrowed into her crotch. It stayed there with the white bite marks facing out, and after a while the fruit-flesh started to shrivel, and mould threads grew from the edges of the peel. The mould threads became pubic hair and the bite mark became the slit between the labia. Soon all of Eden followed the apple’s example and started to decompose and rot, and since then this has happened in all gardens and everything in nature, and honey mushrooms came into existence, and rot and parasites and beetles arose. But the apple was first, and it never stops rotting, it just gets blacker. The apple has no end, just like this fairy tale.’

  While the girl recounted the story, a forest grew around their two bodies, a forest that at once was and wasn’t the brewery. The pine tree crowns burrowed through the roof, a waterfall splintered
the stairs from the mezzanine, the floorboards melted into yellow and green heather, and then it started to rain, a mild autumn rain that whipped the girls’ bodies soft and smooth. A deer walked out between the trees with an apple in its mouth. It had Pym’s face.

  ‘Jo?’ Carral’s voice rang.

  I opened my eyes and saw that I was still on the mezzanine. The heather in my dream was grass, the grass that had grown in between the floorboards. Carral was glued to me, and I thought of the girl-bodies in the dream, how they looked like fantasy creatures, and remembered the last sentence that Carral had written in Pym’s book:

  From his ashes a four-breasted creatures arises.

  Carral whispered, ‘Do you remember the tough girl I told you about? The one I lay next to naked?’

  ‘I told you that story,’ I said.

  ‘What? No, I remember it happening. I can’t have been more than seven, and I was at Emma’s house, Emma with the plaits. She had bunk beds. We were in the top bunk, naked.’

  ‘That’s right, we were in the top bunk, I remember, but that’s my story.’

  Now I was confused.

  ‘I remember being so scared of pregnancy, even though I knew it was impossible. The rest of the night I wore all my clothes,’ Carral whispered.

  ‘Yeah, I even buttoned up my coat. How did you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me finish the story,’ she continued. ‘That night I dreamt of a snake hidden under my bed, a snake that could sneak up under my duvet and in between my legs.’

  ‘And I had to fold the duvet and put my legs around it …’

  ‘Like a kind of protection.’

  ‘I thought: anything can inseminate me now,’ I whispered, ‘anything can get into me.’

  ‘I know. That’s my story too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I can hear you.’