by Evie Wyld
My big toes point straight upwards pressing against the tops of my boots. Horror is a physical thing. I regret asking the question.
‘And he thrashed me for some time, taking breathers, having a drink here and there, pausing to look out the window and hum a tune, puff on his cigar. Broke my nose rather badly, which is why it has this rather attractive bump in it.’ He touches the bridge of his nose, where it’s skewed slightly. ‘And then when he was tired, and I should think I was getting too bloody to keep in his room, he ordered me back to bed. He said, There’s something you won’t forget in a hurry. And he was so pleased with himself.’
There is a silence, in which both of us look at the floor.
‘Anyway,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘Really I ought to have killed the bastard, it would have been absolutely worth it. I could have shouted There’s something you won’t forget in a hurry as he tumbled out of the train – it would have been glorious.’
‘How old were you?’
‘I expect I was fourteen.’
‘Couldn’t you tell anyone?’
Christopher looks up at me and for the first time since he started talking we have eye contact.
‘Who? I’m afraid our father had his attention elsewhere – and dear old Ruth, you know. It was hard to tell what she was thinking. Your father and I only started calling her Mum in our twenties, because we sensed she needed it. She wasn’t our mother. And you know, even if Mother had been alive, I just don’t know. You didn’t report these things. It was all part of life, we were led to believe. And honestly there was much worse that went on. Your poor father had a beastly time. He was a dreamy sort of person, and very pretty.’
Christopher seems to snap a little out of his thoughts, perhaps remembering who I am to that pretty boy.
‘In actual fact, there was a time just after all that went on that I considered saying something. I thought up a way of talking to Ruth about it – I’d run it past your mother actually. I was going to talk to Ruth and tell her. I was going to ask if she could convince our father to take us out. I rehearsed it and everything, went down on those rocks right there –’ he points with his glass out of the window – ‘and practised it into the wind. There was this vicar here at the time, he was a real creep, he was all connected with the schoolmasters, had this thing about the cold – he encouraged them to turn off the heating and make us have cold showers in term time, said it brought us closer to God. Anyway, he found me out there, and I don’t know if he heard anything, but he just had this way about him that implied he knew whatever you were thinking. Ghastly man, so convinced he was sitting on the right hand of God. Do you believe in God, Viv?’
It takes me by surprise. ‘I – no. No, I suppose I don’t.’
‘Not many of your generation do, do you? It was rather built into us. Not your mother, though.’
‘Mum believes in ghosts.’
‘Yes, well, those she has seen with her own eyes. But anyway, like a strike from God, before I quite had the courage there was an accident and Ruth lost her baby, and after that I really couldn’t bring it up. It was too much. And she was quite different after that. Dear old Ruth. I expect she was quite terrifying when you were small.’
‘I didn’t know she had a baby.’
‘No, well, she went out walking on the rocks or something, and she was quite far along, and something happened, and anyway, she lost the baby. Rather horrible for her, and for our father, though he was away. And Dad, rather hideously of him, left quite soon after.’
‘A catastrophe.’
‘Yes! Yes I suppose it was.’ He laughs, pours again. ‘Funny how things all meet at once like that sometimes.’
‘I’m so sorry all that happened.’ It is an awkward thing to say, it is just like the hand squeeze, but I have to say something. Christopher gallantly doesn’t let it fall flat. He refills my glass, though it already has a large measure in it.
‘Well, you know, I was lucky in many ways. I’m still alive. They were beastly non-stop to –’ there is a pause which I interpret as your father – ‘a lot of the other boys. And I suppose you might have heard about the drama when they looked into it however long ago.’
‘Didn’t your housemaster get into trouble, even then?’
‘Oh no. What he was doing was thought of as rather quotidian for the time. As I said, there were worse things going on.’
Beastly.
‘I do so wish I had thrown him from the train.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ says Christopher, ‘to my friend Wally.’
‘Wally,’ I say, and we clink glasses again.
When I was eleven, I stayed over at a friend’s house and woke in the night knowing something dreadful was coming. I stayed still for the longest time, whispered my friend’s name, but she didn’t stir. I crawled out of bed and went down the hallway to find the telephone, called home at 4 a.m. Dad answered, and before I’d spoken three words he said I’m on my way, just hang tight, and he collected me with a blanket from the front step, posted a note through the letterbox and drove me home in silence, the orange street lights streaking the wet pavement.
It is not fully dark but the promenade has a ghostly feel. The girl is late. The parcel has a little moisture seeping out, it has left a small stain on her dress where she was not careful. The way back is cut in half by crossing through the woods. The seep from the stewing steak is growing.
The truth is the girl met her friend and they had sat back to back on a bench at the shore, and watched the gannets rise and fall off the rock, sharing a bottle of cider her friend had stolen off her father’s farm. The friend produced in the girl a warmth of feeling that no one else did. It was not just the cider that kept them talking, it was a need to tell her, to know her and the peculiar feeling of her friend’s shoulder blades pressed against hers, interlocking wings. She thought of the other girl’s hair, washed in hard soap and pinned up on the top of her head with leaves of it snaking down her dark neck.
Entering the woods she is distracted for a moment again by the leak of her package – the cook will complain the meat has been fed with water, and the girl will have to hide the hem of her dress, or pretend her monthlies have surprised her.
She sees ahead of her the master’s oldest son, and keeps her head down. Close up a smell of flowers. He touches his brim at her, doesn’t slow his step. ‘Evening,’ he says and she dips her head but says nothing. She glances behind her twice afterwards, but he has gone.
She did not tell her friend she had allowed the footman to do what he wanted in the hope that the feeling about her friend would be replaced with something more in keeping with nature. The footman had quietly toiled away, and she had felt nothing other than a blistering from his dirty hands.
When she hears the twigs breaking behind her, she feels something rolling over in her stomach, and knows she has made an error. There is such a sharp scratch suddenly in the air that she drops her package and begins to run, doubts herself only a second, thinks of the fury of Cook when she comes home late and empty-handed, but there is the master’s son, his hat and coat gone, his stick raised above his head, running fast and silent at her.
She scrambles off the path, an animal part of her tries to hide among the dead leaves and bracken, the damp black soil, and he pauses, catches sight of her white hand glowing in the dark and is on her, and no scream comes from her, the best she can hope for is that nobody finds out, she shouldn’t have leaned up against her friend, she shouldn’t have drunk the cider, and been late, she shouldn’t have taken the shortcut, he pushes his thumbs into the soft dip in her throat like he is pushing through the thick skin of an orange.
The Law
I
In London the sky outside my window is white and the treetops black against it; they sway with the first winds of a storm we’ve been promised. I have a cold glass of water and it rests on my belly. I drink from it whenever the silence feels too deliberate. We are lying in the crumpled remains of my bed. The
previous twenty-five minutes of sex have been loud and . . . I am trying to find the correct adjective to describe them. Urgent? No, Vincent had not seemed urgent, he had seemed confident the sex would happen. Passionate? Still wrong – we’re not young enough for that to be the right word. It was not slow but it was hard. Animal? That’s closer. But it was not as erotic as that sounds. Unhurried but hard. That’s as close as I get.
At any rate we have ended up between the sheet and the mattress protector. I am glad of the mattress protector – a Christmas present from Katherine long ago – she had felt it would lead me in the right direction.
‘What,’ Vincent says, ‘is your favourite food?’
I put down the glass and pull the sheet up to cover my front. He pulls the cover back off and rests his hand on my belly.
‘I like seafood.’
‘Which one?’
‘I eat a lot of clams.’
‘I don’t know if that’s sexy or not,’ he says.
‘Probably not, they’re mostly tinned. What about you?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘What do you like to eat? Don’t say something disgusting about clams, I won’t laugh.’
‘Er.’ He is nuzzling my shoulder. ‘I like the flesh of a freshly fucked woman.’ His teeth catch a little on my skin.
‘Tickling.’ I flinch. ‘I hate being tickled, which is not an invitation.’ This is always a stupid thing to say, it is always received as an invitation.
Vincent sits upright in bed and makes little bunny ears with his fingers, fixing me with a peculiar look, his teeth bared.
‘What are you supposed to be, the fucking Easter bunny?’
He carries on staring, moving closer, begins sort of purring or growling. I have missed something. He straddles my chest and his thighs clamp tight around me. He bends down close to my face. I remain smiling, because there is a joke I’m not getting and that is all it is.
‘I am the thing that watches you through your window at night,’ he whispers. There is a moment, just a pulse, like when you step out into the road and a car sweeps by close enough that you feel it as a wind on your face, and you feel it to the tips of your fingers, but then it’s gone and what remains is anger.
‘Can you get off me please? You’re heavy.’
Vincent takes down his bunny ears, and I think he will dismount but instead he begins to tickle me.
‘Oh fuck off!’ I go to roll him off, expecting him to allow me but he does not, so I slap at his chest, ‘Get off me,’ but he keeps going, digging at my ribs, that awful feeling coming on me, the loss of breath, the loss of control, and I hit him hard in a panic, make contact with his ear, and he grabs my wrists and holds me down and the panic worsens. ‘What the fuck?’ I hear myself say over and over again, because no other words will come, and the breath is gone. He lowers his face so that his nose touches mine and he sits staring into my eyes, close up, squeezing hard with his thighs and his hands on my wrists, breathing through his nose like a bull, and I say, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ tears in my voice but he remains silent, his head pushing down on mine.
It feels like it goes on for a long time. And then he sits up and gets off me and walks to the loo without saying anything, closes the door. I lie in bed for a moment then I get up and pull on my jeans and a T-shirt, am fumbling for my bag when he comes back in, brushing his teeth with my toothbrush.
‘What the fuck you doing?’ he asks through a mouthful of foam.
‘What the fuck am I doing?’ is all I can think to say.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘What the fuck are you doing? Why are you dressed? I was going to make some clams or something.’
‘Vincent – what the hell was that?’
He casts his eyes about the room. ‘What? How’d you mean – is there a spider?’
‘What you just did.’
He holds out the toothbrush and looks at it. ‘Are you angry I used your toothbrush?’
‘No – what, I don’t understand what that was, just now, in bed.’
‘What are you saying?’ A look of horror comes over him. He swallows as much of the foam as he can.
‘The tickling.’
He exhales. ‘Jesus,’ he says and smiles. ‘Fuck, for a minute I thought you were going to say I raped you or something.’
‘The tickling, it was not OK.’
‘The tickling?’
‘Yes, the fucking tickling.’ The more I speak the more stupid I feel. ‘You made that face and then you tickled me.’
He narrows one eye. ‘You’re angry I tickled you?’ He sounds so very confused. I feel so very stupid. ‘Sorry, did I miss something?’
‘I told you I hate being tickled.’
‘Yeah, but so does everyone – and anyway, you knew the moment you said that, you knew that you were going to get tickled. That’s how it works. It’s an invitation. Fuck, you want me to apologise to you because after fucking you, I tickled you? Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry.’ He turns round and walks back into the bathroom, slamming the door. I sit on the edge of the bed, embarrassed.
I meet Katherine at the Southbank and we have coffee. She is disordered. Her face is puffy, like she’s been sleeping too much. When she takes a tissue out of her coat pocket, an unwrapped tampon comes with it as well as half a dozen old receipts.
‘Shit,’ she says.
‘How is it at Mum’s?’ She blows her nose on the tissue. We are in the unlikely position where I know I have a pristine pack of tissues in my bag, and Katherine is blowing her nose on some rough loo roll that has twisted and come apart in her pocket. It leaves fluff on her nose. I don’t offer her one of my balsam-covered ones. It would be unkind.
‘It’s fine. Mum’s giving me space. She tries to make me do the puzzles in the paper with her in the morning, but that’s it.’
‘Do you want to talk about what’s going on?’
‘No,’ she says. We sit for a moment in the quiet. We both drink our coffees. Next to us a woman wrangles a baby on her lap while trying to get a forkful of quiche into her mouth. She is only just successful. Katherine watches her without trying to disguise it. The woman colours a little and sits back, unlacing the baby’s fingers from her hair.
‘I had an abortion about six weeks ago,’ Katherine says.
I nod. ‘It was the right thing to do.’
‘Yes. It was.’
‘I’m sorry, though. Was it awful?’
‘Not really. I just wondered if it had something to do with why I feel so . . . unhinged. The hormones.’
We sit with our coffees, drinking them slowly. What we will do once the coffee is gone is a concern.
‘Do you want another one?’ I ask.
‘A baby?’
‘A coffee.’
‘Oh. But then what?’ she says. She puts her hands over her face and pushes. I hear the wet noise of pressure on her eyeballs. She sniffs and looks up like she’s risen from a deep sleep.
‘He just won’t stop calling. And texting.’
‘Turn your phone off.’
‘I’m scared to. It just sits there collecting his . . . pain. He sent one last night saying he was outside Mum’s and if I didn’t come out he was going to do something.’
‘What does that mean?’
She shrugs.
‘Find a good therapist?’
Katherine smiles; it is a rarity to be able to make her smile and I am caught unawares by the warm feeling that floods through me.
‘He’s just so lost and hurt,’ she says. ‘I didn’t expect him to react this way, but I think maybe he really does love me.’
I pick aggressively at the quick of my thumbnail and then start to bite it. His hand on my back, his mouth on mine. What would a good person do at this point? Tell her it doesn’t matter if he does love her – it only matters that she does not love him? Admit to her we kissed, so that she can see him as the creep he is? Admit to myself we fucked once or in reality twice, but the second time I quit it halfway through, if you count a
whole fuck to be from penetration to ejaculation. I stand up, and she looks at me.
‘What are you doing?’
I sit down, and scratch vigorously at my leg.
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you all right? You don’t look all right.’
‘Please stop that.’
‘Stop what?’
‘I’m not the one that’s not OK this time. Stop trying to be extra good by being kind to me while you’re falling apart.’
Ordinarily, this kind of snipe would spark decades-old bickering between us, which would end in a silence of a fortnight until she suggests a drink or dinner with Mum and then we carry on like nothing has happened. If I’m honest, that is what I’m hoping for. Instead she makes a face I do not recognise. She opens her mouth wide and silently, I think for a second she’s going to be sick, but she’s crying. I don’t recall ever seeing that. The reddening of eyes, at Dad’s funeral, a flick away of a tear, nothing more than an irritant greenfly – but this is the picture of physical pain. She covers her face quickly when she sees my look of alarm. I take out my fancy tissues.
‘Hey, sorry,’ I say, ‘here.’ I push one into her clenched fist. Her hand is cold. The woman with the baby leaves her half-eaten quiche and takes herself and her child away from us.
Katherine makes no sound in her crying, but she cries for a long time, hiding her face. She doesn’t get up to go to the toilets because I can see she is not capable of moving. I chew my thumb, taste the blood, scratch and scratch at my leg but frustratingly it will not bleed.
