Our Kind of Cruelty

by Araminta Hall

  Even though I dreamt of her all night, the only one I clearly remember is her standing in her new doorway holding her eagle towards me. She had ripped the chain from her neck and it lay crumpled and pathetic in her hands. Be careful, I said to her, or you’ll lose it. It doesn’t matter, she answered, you’re not coming are you?

  I didn’t feel any better when my alarm sounded in the morning, in fact if anything I felt worse, a deep sickness now also lodged in my stomach. I called work and left a message explaining I was ill, something I couldn’t ever remember doing before. I slept most of that Monday as well, my dreams not unlike a rough sea. But by evening I knew I was over the worst of the fever. I ordered food on my laptop from my bed, chicken soup and dumplings, with fine noodles. I paid enough for it to be delicious and fresh and for a while I felt better as I ate it slowly, leaning against my pillows, listening to the news on the radio.

  But my thoughts have always waited in darkened corners for me, watching for moments in which I am lulled into a false sense of security.

  Their favourite torture is to remind me of my solitude. That there is no one to bring me chicken soup or feel my head or even care about my fever. As I lay weakened in bed they dragged up a memory of standing behind the bars of what must be a cot, my nappy so wet I can feel the urine stinging my skin, my throat raw from crying, my hands freezing. I don’t know how this memory ends because it is fogged. I don’t even know if it is a single memory or something that happened many times.

  I have always preferred the ones which feel more concrete. It’s easier to cling on to the hard facts: my stomach rumbled so much in class other boys used to gurgle at me in the playground; my trousers would often fall to my knees because there was nothing to hold them up; I had to explain in front of the whole class that we didn’t have any books in our house; I faked illness whenever we had a school trip because it would have meant bringing in a packed lunch; I was never asked to one other child’s house or birthday party; I spat at my feet to stop myself crying; cold can penetrate into your marrow in a way that nothing else can; I was very, very good at lying about the origins of my bruises and scratches.

  The last time I was properly with my mother she was lying on the sofa in our flat, her body already floppy from drink, her speech slurring. Miss Highland had had me in her office again the day before to remind me I didn’t have any duty to protect someone who didn’t protect me. I had nodded and smiled and presumed nothing would change. But it must have done, because when the familiar knock sounded on our door that evening I let them in. I didn’t lie down flat on the floor so they couldn’t see me when they looked through the letter box, like Mum had taught me. I didn’t even try to wake Mum or bother to formulate a ready lie. I just opened the door and let them walk through into the living room covered with mouldy plates and overflowing mugs of cigarettes. I let them gag at the stench in the bathroom and stare open-mouthed at the piles of empty beer cans and bottles in the kitchen. I confirmed my name and let them lead me to a car. It was only afterwards, on our drive to the home, that I realised I hadn’t even asked what was going to happen to Mum. But it was too late by then.

  I stayed in bed again on Tuesday, ordering in more food and managing to make it to the kitchen for cups of tea. I noticed that the weather was glorious with streaming sunshine and clear blue skies and I thought late summer was the perfect time to be getting married. By the end of the day I felt stronger and after a shower I felt well enough to put on some shorts and sit in the garden for half an hour with the sun on my face. Tomorrow I would have to get back to some serious workouts as I was determined to look as perfect as possible for Saturday.

  I woke the next morning with the distinct impression I had forgotten something, but it was only on my run that I realised what it was. I hadn’t bought V a wedding present. The thought was so ghastly I had to stop and bend over, pretending I had developed a sudden cramp. I couldn’t quite believe I had been so negligent. If I wasn’t meant to stop the wedding, then my gift had to be very important.

  It was my next move in our new Crave and I felt sure would be the first present V opened.

  It was all I could think of throughout the day. Even when the chairman popped his head round my door and asked me if I was feeling better, I know I didn’t give him my full attention. I was even quite dismissive when he said there was a new project he thought would suit me and he shut my door with a look of vague confusion on his face.

  Just before I left for America V and I were asked to the wedding of an old friend of hers from university. At the bottom of the invitation they had written: ‘No presents please, your presence is the only present we need.’ V had fake retched when she’d read that. What crap, she’d said, everyone wants presents.

  It came to me the next morning and so I went at lunchtime to a rare bookshop I found on Google. There were hardly any books of the type I requested, he’d told me over the phone, but naturally he did have one. Its rarity, he warned me, would make it more expensive than the hideously expensive ones all around us in the musty, over-crowded shop, but I had expected that. I waited while he went to fetch it, breathing in the dust of centuries and running my fingers across worn and broken spines, the leather cracked and chipped.

  I was pleased by the size of the book which he laid on to the wooden table at the back of the shop and, as soon as he turned the first page, I knew I was going to buy it. There were pages and pages of detailed, gorgeous pictures of eagles, each one protected by a thin layer of white tissue paper. The prints were good enough to cut out and frame, something the dealer told me had happened to so many of these types of books. I was lucky, he said, that I had found his shop because he could guarantee he was the only person in London to have such a magnificent item in stock. But I was barely listening, instead marvelling at the riches in front of me, the golds and blues, the intricate details, the amazing scenes. He told me he could let it go for £3,500 and I didn’t bother to bargain because I would have paid double, maybe even triple, for a gift so perfect.

  I had the book professionally wrapped at another place I found on Google, leaving it overnight and collecting it at lunchtime. From there I had it couriered to Steeple House. I could have taken it back to the office to accomplish all these tasks, but couldn’t bear answering questions about it all afternoon in the office. I didn’t want to turn up with it on the day and, more than that, I hoped V would open it before the wedding, I hoped she would get the message.

  V once told me that I’m useless at interpreting signs and at the time she was probably right. We were lying on the grass near to her home in Sussex and it was one of those blisteringly hot summer days which only really seem to exist in memory. We had taken a picnic to a nearby field and V had laid our rug in the semi-shade of a tree. We had eaten well and drunk a bottle of wine, and I was on my back, V was resting on my chest, my arm lazily slung around her. I could feel her head rise and fall with my breathing and I remember thinking that this was what bliss felt like. That you could put a picture of us next to the word in the dictionary and everyone would understand. And I also knew it was the first time I had ever truly felt that way. Of course Elaine and Barry had made me feel happy and safe and even loved, but this feeling, which seemed to spread through my blood, into my toes, up through my head, along my muscles, this was new. It was also delicious; it was like a drug and I was already addicted.

  ‘Look, there’s a swan,’ V said, pointing upwards.

  I looked into the sky but there was nothing there. ‘Can they fly?’

  She laughed. ‘No, not an actual swan. A cloud swan.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Didn’t you ever play that game when you were young? You know, making shapes out of the clouds.’

  ‘No. We didn’t play any games.’

  She leant up on her elbow so she was looking down on me and her hair brushed against my cheek. ‘Sorry, Mikey. I didn’t think.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ I reached up and wound a piece of her hair round my finger. ‘
It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘Was it very terrible?’

  I tried to think of something to say about my childhood, but all that came to mind was the colour grey and the feeling of cold concrete. It had only been three years since I had last seen my mother by then but she had already blurred and morphed into more of a feeling than a person and I found I couldn’t grab hold of a memory which felt real. ‘It wasn’t all bad,’ I tried, but that sounded wrong. ‘Elaine and Barry were great.’

  ‘Of course,’ V said. ‘But what was your mother like?’

  V and I had only known each other for about six months at that point and I had never spoken to anyone before about my mother. But with V I always had the feeling that nothing was ever enough, that we could never do or say or know enough about each other. If I could have turned myself inside out to show her how I worked I would have done.

  ‘She was very sad,’ I said finally, which sounded true as I said it.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In every way.’ I tightened my twist on V’s hair and realised how easy it would be to rip it from its roots. ‘I think she drank as a way of blocking life out.’ The conversation was starting to make me feel funny, as if there was something I was forgetting.

  ‘What about your dad?’

  ‘I don’t have a dad.’

  ‘Everyone has a dad,’ V said, her eyes locked on me.

  ‘No, the space is blank on my birth certificate. My mother said it could have been one of a few men, none of whom she was still in contact with.’ The words sounded unreal outside of myself, where they had lived for so long. I almost wanted to catch them like butterflies and put them back. I couldn’t meet V’s eyes in case I had made her hate me.

  But she leant down and kissed me very softly on the side of my mouth. ‘Oh, poor baby,’ she said, so gently I could have cried. Then she laid her head back on my chest and we breathed together for a few minutes. ‘The swan is still there,’ she said.

  I looked back into the sky, but all I saw were wispy clouds against the peacock blue. ‘I still can’t see it.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re not very good at interpreting things, are you?’

  I pulled her closer to me. ‘I love you,’ I said, needing to say it so much at that moment I thought it might burst out of me if I didn’t.

  She was quiet for a moment, but then, ‘I love you too,’ she said.

  I can’t tell you why V loved me as much as she did. I spent the first year of our relationship terrified that she would wake up and realise she had made a stupid mistake, or identify me as the faulty goods I had always presumed myself to be. But it didn’t happen and I came to realise that she loved me in spite of who I was, which was not something I had ever imagined happening. At times I even let myself believe that she loved me because of who I was, although that thought never seemed quite real to me.

  I thought it was a joke when she came up to me at a party I hadn’t wanted to go to in our second year at university. I thought once she had her light she would walk off, but she leant against the wall and asked me my name and what I was reading and where I was from and all those normal questions. And I was so stunned I didn’t ask her any in return, which I only remembered after I got back to my room hours later. I sat at my desk then and wrote out a list of things I wanted to know about her, all the things I would ask her next time, if the phone number she had given me proved to be real. And I also marvelled at the fact that I had even been at the party, via a series of odd coincidences, which was the first time I considered the possibility that fate had wanted us to meet.

  There’s a French film called something like The Red Bicycle, I can’t remember the exact title. I saw it years ago late at night on BBC2 and I was so mesmerised by it I forgot to wonder at the name until weeks later, by which time I couldn’t find any reference to it, to the extent that I sometimes wonder if I dreamt it or if I really watched it.

  In the film there is a boy who works in a shop and a girl who cycles past the shop every day on her red bicycle. They nearly meet a hundred times, their paths crossing, but never merging. As the film goes on you get the feeling that they need to meet, that it’s imperative to humanity, that when they do something magical will happen. But still they never do. Then they both board a ferry on an ordinary day. They sit near each other, but still fail to notice each other. Even when the storm rolls in and catastrophe strikes, even when it is obvious the boat is sinking rapidly, even when people are losing hope, still they fail to notice each other. The boat sinks and people are dying, perishing, leaving, but still they are flailing on their own. Then the camera pans out and we are watching the event as news footage. The newscaster is telling us it is the worst maritime disaster in French waters since the war, that it is feared only two people have survived. There is a shaky shot of two people being helped off the upturned hull into a lifeboat. They are the only two people left, and they look at each other, and you know immediately that all it was ever going to take for them was one glance.

  And what that means is that sometimes two people need each other so much it is worth sacrificing others to make sure they end up together.

  The weather on the morning of V’s wedding was perfect. Blue skies and warm sunshine, neither too hot nor too cold. The air felt like a kiss on your skin and there was a sense of anticipation in the atmosphere, almost as if you could feel the plants growing and the flowers blooming. I had bought a new suit for the occasion, a beige linen which I wore with a white shirt and brown tie. I had been careful in my choice, not wanting to seem like I wanted to stand out, but also making sure that it showed off my body to the best of its advantage. I had also bought some new cufflinks, two old silver coins fashioned into a new purpose. In fact, I had bought two pairs, simply because I had been unable to resist a pair of antique engraved cufflinks I saw in the window of a shop in Burlington Arcade. Their flowing lines were very subtle, but still undeniably in the shape of a V. I had considered wearing them, but decided against it because they were the cufflinks I would wear to our wedding.

  I left the house at 11 a.m. sharp because, even though the service was in Sussex at 3 p.m., I couldn’t risk being in any way late. Funnily I was in a good mood.

  I knew it wasn’t real, I knew it was all part of our Crave and I was determined to enjoy myself. Apart from anything else, I hadn’t visited V at either work or home since my illness the week before and I was desperate to see her.

  As I walked down my path Lottie’s front door opened and Kaitlyn came out. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said.

  She had become like some weird presence in my life and she unnerved me slightly. I almost wondered if she had been watching my house from Lottie’s window and had engineered leaving at the same time as me.

  ‘Bye,’ she called to Lottie, who waved and shut the door.

  We fell into step together on the pavement. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve just been to LBT.’ I presumed she meant some sort of exercise class as she was wearing Lycra.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know you and Lottie were so friendly.’

  She laughed. ‘Yes, we are.’ We walked on and then she said, ‘You look very smart. Where are you going?’

  ‘A wedding.’

  ‘No Verity?’ I thought I could hear a note of amusement in her voice, which made me want to slap her.

  ‘She’s there already. It’s her sister who’s getting married, at their parents’ house in Sussex.’

  ‘Oh, how nice.’

  ‘Yes, it’s an amazing house. It’s got its own chapel in the garden, which is where the wedding is taking place. It dates from Norman times and there’s a rumour that there’s a tunnel which runs from the house to the chapel underground.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ We’d reached the main road and she was turning in a different direction. ‘Well, have fun. See you Monday.’

  I felt myself heat up as I continued on to the Tube. What had I been thinking of saying something like that? Now, when V came to live wi
th me, I would have to change jobs, maybe even move house. Because Kaitlyn would no doubt keep popping up and she was just the sort of annoying person to ask V about her sister or the wedding.

  I turned and watched Kaitlyn cross the road, almost wishing a bus would speed over the hill and drag her under its wheels.

  The train journey calmed me somewhat as we left the urban sprawl and started to glide through quintessentially English countryside. It couldn’t all happen instantly which meant I would be able to secure new employment before V did move in. You couldn’t just get married and then immediately get divorced and, even when you did, it would no doubt take a bit of time. I let my eyes relax as I stared out of the window and the countryside began to blur and merge, until it became a series of soft greens flowing past me.

  I still hadn’t worked out exactly what V wanted me to do, which bothered me. Usually I knew my role in a Crave and we played by set rules. I understood that the American incident meant V had changed the rules and that she was punishing me by not revealing them to me. I comforted myself with the thought that at least I knew the purpose or the end game. I knew we were heading towards the inevitability of being together, I just didn’t know yet exactly what was expected of me. All I could be sure of was that it was going to be something big, something which undeniably and irrefutably proved my love for V for ever more.

  I arrived nearly two hours early, so went to sit in the village pub I knew so well, before walking up the lane to Steeple Chapel. I ordered a pint and went to sit outside with the paper, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to read a word. There was a group of people dressed for a wedding already there and their voices rose into the soft air. Angus’s friends, I thought, looking at their bright clothes and tousled hair.