Hood

by Emma Donoghue

  After I had resorted to reading the book’s bibliography – it was the least depressing section – it was my turn at last. The vet was a tired man in his sixties. He lifted the animal’s leg very gently, and removed the rest of the netting. Yes, he could drop it round to a shelter tonight after the surgery closed. As a wild animal handled by humans, it was under extreme stress, but they had been known to survive this kind of trauma.

  ‘Will it get better, then?’

  ‘No way of telling, Miss O’Grady.’

  I didn’t bother saying ‘Ms’. I thanked him and cast a last glance at the quivering spiky ball before I went.

  Stopped at the traffic lights, I sniffed my wrist for the tang of chlorine. Tiredness weighed down my arms. I had done my good deed for the day; surely I had earned a warm bath, a fluffy towel, and dinner for two by the fire? As I drove down past the woods towards the big house, a detail I’d forgotten from that first day after swimming floated into my mind. At dinner with the Walls, I’d managed to swap our forks: when Kate put hers down beside mine, I rested my palm over them both, and raised hers to my mouth. Nobody noticed. It gave me such bliss to close my teeth over the stainless steel that had just come from between her lips. Of course I got a cold the next day, and suffered agonies of guilt over the germs, but Kate turned out to be fine. What outrageous gall my young self once had.

  The dark pink honeysuckle was making a cloud of sweetness around the front door; I stood and breathed it in till I was reeling. A bird in the long grass was making a sound like the clicking of spoons. ‘I’m back,’ I called as I stepped on to the mat. No sign of dinner yet, but I was only just getting hungry.

  Preparing my bath, I was ridiculously gay. The taps roared as I lined up a new apple soap, sea sponge and loofah. I shut off the taps when the bath was half-full. ‘Kate?’ I shouted, leaning round the door of the bathroom. ‘I’m just having a bath before dinner.’ I turned on the hot tap again. Then I thought she might need help finding utensils, so I wrapped the biggest towel round me and walked down the stairs, a little shyly.

  The windows were too wide; it had got dark without my noticing. Kate wasn’t watching telly in the living-room. Night was settling over the curves of the sofa; a street-lamp glared in the bay window. Nor was she sitting in the kitchen, where the light spilled out the window, yellowing the rough wall of the yard. Nor in the back garden, nor in Mr. Wall’s room, nor upstairs in the middle bedroom, which was just as it had been a week ago, except that the bed had been stripped. I stared at it stupidly.

  Eventually I found the folded note in the middle of the kitchen table. It was the pivot of this house, which was suddenly obviously empty, even sounded empty; why hadn’t I heard it before?

  Pen, it began, this disembodied voice in blue ballpoint, you must excuse my leaving without saying goodbye, but really all things considered I have decided I can’t bear to haul myself up as early tomorrow as I would need to in order to get to the airport by taxi by six thirty, so I thought it might be best if I went out to the airport hotel now and overnighted so I need only get up two hours before my plane. I should have thought of this before but it only just occurred to me.

  Many thanks for looking after me during my stay. It is not a visit I will forget. Give my best wishes to my father and I hope to see either or both of you again if you’re ever passing through Boston.

  All the best,

  Kate Wall.

  P.S. Good luck with the hedgehog.

  I re-read the note. The wind was a black cat outside, rattling the chimney and spitting at the windows. Fingertip tracing the lines, I counted: it had taken her a hundred and forty panic-stricken words to say nothing at all.

  I was sitting wrapped in a towel at the centre of an empty house on a Friday night, getting colder by the minute. Soon my legs would be numb and I would forget I had them. My lips would go blue. I would put my head down on my marbled arms and future explorers might find me there: ‘Almost magically preserved by trace elements of chlorine,’ they would announce, ‘the skin of the Female Colossus is still glossy.’

  I scanned the note again. Good luck with the hedgehog, for god’s sake. Standing up with a shiver, I rubbed my arms, but that only brought up more goose-bumps. Wandering into the living-room, I reached to turn on the telly, but then I realized that by the law of chance there would be nothing good on, and that the demented flicker of images would make the room even darker around the edges. I turned on the light, but that was a waste, because there was nothing to look at; I turned it off again as I left the room. No sign of Grace. A rummage in the larder produced nothing worth eating. Must shop tomorrow, I instructed myself automatically. Maybe it wasn’t appetite that kept us living, only habit. I found a slab of cooking chocolate and nibbled at the corner, but (as with every such attempt since childhood) it was mild and disappointing. The smell of chlorine on my fingers reminded me of the bath, and I pounded upstairs.

  Water was gurgling down the overflow. I turned off the taps and dipped my hand through the scorching water down to the plug to let some more out, then held it under the cold tap to reduce the pain. As I bent over, the towel came undone. I threw it over the radiator. Waiting for the water level to sink, I stared at myself in the steamy mirror. Such a blank page, this body; the years had left no signature marks so far. Once, my hand down Cara’s jeans, I didn’t notice my knuckle was grinding against the denim till afterwards, when it was bleeding. When my mother asked about it, I said I’d grazed it off a wall. The scar faded, much too soon.

  I sat on the edge of the bath. The colder and more miserable I got, the better the water was going to feel. In my mind I was chasing to the airport hotel in a taxi, pounding on the door of room number seven, where Kate would be nervous in a white towelling robe, and I would be the sure one, and I would be the free spirit, and I would have my way.

  Best to get all the puerile fantasies over with now, so they wouldn’t keep me awake later. I put the plug back in and poured a little lavender oil on to the water, as a soporific. It broke into little gleaming circles. Such a stupid fantasy, anyway, a sick joke. What had I to go on? All I knew was that Kate Wall had flirted a little, that she had seemed to like me more than could have been expected, and that several times today I had had the outrageous notion of trying to keep her up all night so she’d miss her plane. As for my motives, it was probably best not to pry too deeply into them.

  It wasn’t true, I realized now, shivering on the edge of the bath, what I had once told Cara about not having room in my head for more than one woman. Yes, I meant that I wouldn’t actually sleep with more than one, would cling to my technical fidelity, because it made me feel better. (Better meaning better than Cara, I supposed, but most importantly, better than the Pen I would have been if I’d degraded the whole business by going to bed with other women just so I could say I had.) But it would be nearer the truth to say that there were always two women in my head. And that there was more than one kind of infidelity.

  How many times over the years had Cara, teasing or serious, asked me who I’d been in love with at school? First I tried to play it down, by saying oh, she didn’t know her, wouldn’t remember her face, and it didn’t matter anyway – but Cara remained tantalized. Only when I finally said that I couldn’t tell her, that I was protecting someone, did she give up. But the only someone I was protecting was me. I used to tell myself that if Cara knew what I had felt for Kate, what I still felt in occasional dreams and on restless afternoons in traffic jams, she would go mad with jealousy, but in fact she was much more likely to turn it into a giggly anecdote. Cara and I discussed so much, scattered so many words over so many subjects, that I had to keep something safe from her tickling fingers. Something, anything, my longest, most untouched fantasy, spun out of air, wound round the blurred image of a haughty schoolgirl. Something that had little or no real connection with the thirty-year-old American who was in a taxi halfway to the airport right now. How on earth had I considered trying to take fourteen years of idle
fancy and make them flesh?

  Let it go, Pen, I told myself, almost aloud. Kate’s not here, she’s not a dyke, and she’s not what you need. None of these things are her fault. You went to school with her for a year, back when bell-bottoms were the coolest thing to wear. You once put her fork in your mouth. You’ve shared a house with her for five of the worst days of your life, maybe of hers too. Now shut the book. Let the woman go home.

  When I stood up, there was red on the white rim of the bath. It couldn’t be, it was only two weeks…well, but stress was known to mess up the hormones. ‘“The curse has come upon me,” cried the Lady of Shalott,’ as Cara used to groan into her pillow. That explained some of the rattiness and even the unreasonable lust. PMT always acted on me like the flower from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, making me pine for the next person I laid eyes on. I should be sane by morning, I thought.

  The blood was trickling down the edge of the bath now, so I climbed in and let out my breath in a long gasp as the heat took hold of my muscles, layer by layer, and my breasts began to float. One of my earliest childhood fantasies was of being Cleopatra, bathed by her attendants; the plain white soap became a rare unguent brought at great risk from the island of High Brazil. I liked to squeeze my stomach muscles until my belly-button was emptied of water; I would pause a second, then dip my back and flood the whole landscape again.

  Baths on my own would take less getting used to than bed on my own. Baths offered reliable bliss, no matter who was in them. I was briefly troubled by a memory of a picnic bath I’d shared with Cara a summer or two ago; a peach had fallen in and bobbed along beside us, cooking slowly, until I’d wiped it on the towel and bit in, spilling the hot juice, and Cara had leaned over to lick the drops from my throat. Well, never mind. There would be peaches next summer. They would still taste like peaches, or almost the same.

  I could feel my stomach begin to tighten in a cramp. My fingers throbbed in unison; I let them sink into the water, resting my wrists on my hips, willing myself to relax.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid woman; a Saturday night crash wasn’t even an original way to go. I could see no sense in this early walkout. Surely we would have got the hang of it, if we’d had a few years longer; our relationship was like a picture hung on a wall that needed to be adjusted a little every time you walked by. There were lots of things I was intending to have my say on eventually; so many issues I put to one side, assuming we’d have time to work them out. I had known well that I shouldn’t nanny Cara or smother her or try to run her life for her, and any year now I was planning to really put this wisdom into practice. Or the whole GogMagogamy business, as she used to call it in moments of flippancy; yes, I’d accepted the fact that she went to bed with somebody else the odd time, but secretly I had thought of it as a short-term compromise. Any year now, when Cara trailed back and laid her eyes on my shoulder till the wool was soaked through, I would say, enough of this nonsense. (Perhaps I would wear a tails suit, every inch the Victorian patriarch.) Enough of this wandering and bruising yourself and me and god knows who else, I would boom. Haven’t you had enough freedom yet? Doesn’t it go stale in your mouth, tire your jaw, coat your tongue? And haven’t I earned a bit of settling down? Haven’t I proved my love with truly troubadour patience?

  And Cara would murmur yes, oh yes. Here I am now, she’d say. It’s all so clear and simple. You’re the only one. I’m yours. We were meant to be together. And other such preciously anticipated clichés.

  I lay in a daze of heat, my heart thumping irregularly. If I stayed in the bath too long, I might fall asleep, slipping below the skin of the water and breathing in a lungful. No, stupid thought. Shut up, Pen. How bored I was already with these self-generated, self-pitying conversations. Cara, come back, all is forgiven.

  No, scrap that, nothing is forgiven.

  My hand reached down through the skin of water to comb out my curls and open me up to the water. A clot, silky between finger and thumb. It looked like a baked raspberry, leaking two or three little jewels which fell and went floating on separate eddies. I leaned my elbow on my padded ribs and held the cluster of blood up to the light. Women who slept with men, it occurred to me, felt enormous gratitude or grief when the blood came down, depending on what they were wanting. Kate took a pill every day of her life to make sure the cycles kept spinning safely. I opened my fingers, the chips of ruby clinging to their tips. For me this month, it was a proof of something similar, of life surviving in this separate, single body of mine, whether or not I asked it to.

  So this was my first bleeding with Cara not in the world. I waited to register the thought, trying the pain on for size. This blood was the sound of a body clock ticking in my ear, not telling me the shortness of life, like the magazines say it does for childless women, but tolling its length. Life in this unnatural century being generally longer than any one passion or journey, so that even when the story for which you seem to have been born is told, the body clicks on, telling you that you’re alive, you’re alone, you’re alive, you’re alone, and you cannot have one without the other. The choice of dead and together not being available to you, because if you ran after the one you love into death, like a squalling child, she might easily be angry and say, you’re always following me, give me space to miss you in, back off a bit, all right? If I stayed here, not in this bath but in this rapidly cooling life, if I stayed here and lived out however many years were allotted to me, then surely by the time I got to heaven Cara would be impatient to sweep me off my feet?

  I climbed out of the bath with a crash of water and dried myself carefully to avoid bloodying the towel. To bed quickly now, before the emptiness of the house had a chance to suck me down. I lined up the resources on my shelf; a glass of water, a small packet of aspirin, a packet of lemon puffs, my walkman with Bach already loaded and extra batteries. I pulled back the duvet and studied the markings of the sheets. I speculated on which faint tracks were Cara’s, which were mine, which were the most recent, and how we’d made that V-shaped tear in the bottom of the sheet. I hoped I wouldn’t leak tonight; it would seem disloyal to lay down a fresh mark, as if sealing a new document that superseded the old.

  I settled on my back and shut my eyes. The ache below my waist was just beginning. The only thing that ever really helped it was not a tablet but Cara’s sure hand, lapping at the red, eager to heal. ‘Strictly for medicinal motives,’ she’d murmur in my ear. That was not a painkiller I’d ever have again, I told myself, and then I told myself to shut up, because my self was too tired for reality tonight, it would rather take any bit of oblivion going.

  What Cara liked best was the taste of me bleeding. She got her red wings – don’t ask me where she picked up the phrase, very Air Force – when we were seventeen or so. In her vegetarian phase, I figured it was her primary source of iron.

  Blood could be dangerous. About two years ago we started reading those articles on safe sex seriously rather than skimming over them; the first I remembered was a piece in Cara’s newsletter, about how little the scientists had bothered to discover about woman-to-woman transmission. We had decided that, rather than having Cara take a test, we’d make our practices safe from now on. (I suggested this because I didn’t want to hear exactly what risks she had taken, or was planning to take, with which people.) In fact the biggest change we made was to stop sharing a toothbrush.

  Cara came home with a free dental dam from a club once; it was made of such thick latex that we got the giggles and ripped eye-holes in it for a Zorba mask. Instead of barrier methods – the phrase always sounded to me like strategic nuclear defence – we agreed to give up the taste of blood. For a while Cara sulked, like a vampire denied her prey. We felt fearful and ignorant, like schoolgirls all over again, only this time there was no book of secrets to borrow from our mothers’ shelves. We were a little angry with each other, and very angry with whoever was failing to tell us just what we were risking. Thinking about it now, I suspected that avoiding blood was more of a token sacr
ifice in this long Lent. It was as if we were saying, we’re not so arrogant that we think we’re absolutely safe, so in the meantime, death, here is something we will leave to you, a small thing, but the most intimate.

  When I shut my eyes now, I was hovering over Cara, an inch from her cherry-red clitoris.

  The hood of the clitoris was not a hood to take off, only to push back In fact the whole thing was a series of folds and layers, a magical Pass the Parcel in which the gift was not inside the wrappings, but was the wrappings. If you touched the glans directly it would be too sharp, like a blow. It was touching it indirectly, through and with the hood, that felt so astonishing. Like an endearment in a mundane sentence, or a cherry on a rockbun, the combination was all. It was not the bald revelation that thrilled me, but the moment of revealing; not the veil or the bare body, but the movement of unveiling.

  I rolled over until my forehead was pressed into a cool part of the pillow. The quilt was heavy on my back.

  Even if I had had any basis for comparison, I think Cara’s clitoris would have seemed to me to be the most beautiful thing. I remembered one time when not licking her turned me on even more than licking her could. Perverse and Catholic, no doubt, but just calling up the memory of it softened and hardened me.

  I slide on to my back. She reaches over in exhaustion for a throatful of water; the glass lurches in her hand, sloshing water over the bedside table. I wait till she has put it down in the puddle, then pull her to sit over my face, without asking. There are berry-black tide marks on the tops of her thighs, and a clear droplet suspended in her rusty fuzz. She arches her back, holds herself away from my face. ‘Gimme,’ I say gently. ‘I’m thirsty for it.’