by Ben Holden
Felicity shrugged, ‘It was nothing. Now clear up your face. Here’s a tissue. A bit of spit and polish should do the job.’
Selina took the proffered tissue and applied it to her running mascara. Felicity walked towards the door. ‘This has been an invaluable chat, Selina.’
Selina nodded and pushed her hair behind her ears, ‘It has, Felicity, and thanks again.’
Felicity smiled and opened the door. Before she closed it behind her, however, she turned and said somewhat distractedly, ‘I’m sorry to rush off like this, Selina, but my hearing aid is playing up. I think it’s dust or the batteries. It’s been driving me mad with its buzzing for the last fifteen minutes or so.’
Selina smiled. ‘That’s all right.’
As the door closed, she stuffed Felicity’s tissue into her mouth and bit down hard.
(1993)
Patrick Ness has written nine books: two novels for adults, The Crash of Hennington (2003) and The Crane Wife (2013); one short-story collection, also for adults, Topics About Which I Know Nothing (2005); and six novels for young adults, including the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls (2011), which he also adapted as a feature film for director Juan Antonio Bayona. His numerous awards include two Carnegie Medals and the Costa Children’s Book of the Year.
★
True Love
by Sharon Olds
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex – surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.
(1986)
★
DEBORAH TREISMAN
In ‘Scheherazade’, Haruki Murakami gives us a contemporary version of A Thousand and One Nights. His mysterious hero, Nobutaka Habara, has been transported to a house in a small city north of Tokyo, which he cannot leave – whether for his own protection or in punishment for some kind of crime, we are never told and Murakami himself claims not to know. (‘Of course, I have a few ideas about what might be the cause, but I expect my readers do as well,’ he told me. ‘In fact, I think if you took their hypotheses and mine and stacked them on top of each other, you’d have an important form of author–reader communication. Because what’s important isn’t what caused Habara’s situation but, rather, how we ourselves would act in similar circumstances.’) In the house, Habara’s only contact with the outside world is through bi-weekly visits from a housewife and part-time nurse, who brings him food, books and DVDs, and tends to his sexual needs. Habara nicknames this woman Scheherazade, because after sex she tells him stories, perhaps invented, perhaps true, but always riveting for her lonely listener. ‘Scheherazade’ is a story about isolation, about obsession, about passion, and about the unlikely connections that can form between people who are thrown together by circumstance. But it is also, and foremost, a story about story-telling, a story about how stories can not only distract, entertain and seduce us but even, sometimes, save our lives.
Scheherazade
by Haruki Murakami
Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the next morning. (She never stayed with him till morning, anyway.) She told Habara the stories because she wanted to, because, he guessed, she enjoyed curling up in bed and talking to a man during those languid, intimate moments after making love. And also, probably, because she wished to comfort Habara, who had to spend every day cooped up indoors.
Because of this, Habara had dubbed the woman Scheherazade. He never used the name to her face, but it was how he referred to her in the small diary he kept. ‘Scheherazade came today,’ he’d note in ballpoint pen. Then he’d record the gist of that day’s story in simple, cryptic terms that were sure to baffle anyone who might read the diary later.
Habara didn’t know whether her stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented. He had no way of telling. Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in her narratives. Habara therefore enjoyed them as a child might, without questioning too much. What possible difference could it make to him, after all, if they were lies or truth, or a complicated patchwork of the two?
Whatever the case, Scheherazade had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart. No matter what sort of story it was, she made it special. Her voice, her timing, her pacing were all flawless. She captured her listener’s attention, tantalized him, drove him to ponder and speculate, and then, in the end, gave him precisely what he’d been seeking. Enthralled, Habara was able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment. Like a blackboard wiped with a damp cloth, he was erased of worries, of unpleasant memories. Who could ask for more? At this point in his life, that kind of forgetting was what Habara desired more than anything else.
Scheherazade was thirty-five, four years older than Habara, and a full-time housewife with two children in elementary school (though she was also a registered nurse and was apparently called in for the occasional job). Her husband was a typical company man. Their home was a twenty-minute drive away from Habara’s. This was all (or almost all) the personal information she had volunteered. Habara had no way of verifying any of it, but he could think of no particular reason to doubt her. She had never revealed her name. ‘There’s no need for you to know, is there?’ Scheherazade had asked. Nor had she ever called Habara by his name, though of course she knew what it was. She judiciously steered clear of the name, as if it would somehow be unlucky or inappropriate to have it pass her lips.
On the surface, at least, this Scheherazade had nothing in common with the beautiful queen of A Thousand and One Nights. She was on the road to middle age and already running to flab, with jowls and lines webbing the corners of her eyes. Her hair style, her makeup, and her manner of dress weren’t exactly slapdash, but neither were they likely to receive any compliments. Her features were not unattractive, but her face lacked focus, so that the impression she left was somehow blurry. As a consequence, those who walked by her on the street, or shared the same elevator, probably took little notice of her. Ten years earlier, she might well have been a lively and attractive young woman, perhaps even turned a few heads. At some point, however, the curtain had fallen on that part of her life and it seemed unlikely to rise again.
Scheherazade came to see Habara twice a week. Her days were not fixed, but she never came on weekends. No doubt she spent that time with her family. She always phoned an hour before arriving. She bought groceries at the local supermarket and brought them to him in her car, a small blue Mazda hatchback. An older model, it had a dent in its rear bumper and its wheels were black with grime. Parking it in the reserved space assigned to the house, she would carry the bags to the front door and ring the bell. After checking the peephole, Habara would rel
ease the lock, unhook the chain, and let her in. In the kitchen, she’d sort the groceries and arrange them in the refrigerator. Then she’d make a list of things to buy for her next visit. She performed these tasks skillfully, with a minimum of wasted motion, and saying little throughout.
Once she’d finished, the two of them would move wordlessly to the bedroom, as if borne there by an invisible current. Scheherazade quickly removed her clothes and, still silent, joined Habara in bed. She barely spoke during their lovemaking, either, performing each act as if completing an assignment. When she was menstruating, she used her hand to accomplish the same end. Her deft, rather businesslike manner reminded Habara that she was a licensed nurse.
After sex, they lay in bed and talked. More accurately, she talked and he listened, adding an appropriate word here, asking the occasional question there. When the clock said four-thirty, she would break off her story (for some reason, it always seemed to have just reached a climax), jump out of bed, gather up her clothes, and get ready to leave. She had to go home, she said, to prepare dinner.
Habara would see her to the door, replace the chain, and watch through the curtains as the grimy little blue car drove away. At six o’ clock, he made a simple dinner and ate it by himself. He had once worked as a cook, so putting a meal together was no great hardship. He drank Perrier with his dinner (he never touched alcohol) and followed it with a cup of coffee, which he sipped while watching a DVD or reading. He liked long books, especially those he had to read several times to understand. There wasn’t much else to do. He had no one to talk to. No one to phone. With no computer, he had no way of accessing the Internet. No newspaper was delivered, and he never watched television. (There was a good reason for that.) It went without saying that he couldn’t go outside. Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone.
Habara was not overly concerned about this prospect. If that happens, he thought, it will be hard, but I’ll scrape by one way or another. I’m not stranded on a desert island. No, he thought, I am a desert island. He had always been comfortable being by himself. What did bother him, though, was the thought of not being able to talk in bed with Scheherazade. Or, more precisely, missing the next installment of her story.
‘I was a lamprey eel in a former life,’ Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple, straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular opinion on the subject.
‘Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?’ she asked.
He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.
‘Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.’
‘Huh? Eels have jaws?’
‘Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?’ she said, surprised.
‘I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.’
‘Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.’
Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.
‘Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.’
‘I wouldn’t like to be a trout,’ Habara said.
‘Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.’
Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either.
‘The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,’ Scheherazade said. ‘The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember – being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eyeing the fat trout swimming by above me.’
‘Can you remember eating them?’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘That’s a relief,’ Habara said. ‘But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey – swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?’
‘A former life can’t be called up just like that,’ she said. ‘If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?’
‘No, not one,’ Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one.
‘Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in Star Wars. And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the sky.’
‘And you can see all these things now?’
‘As clear as day,’ Scheherazade said. ‘The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.’
‘To what you were thinking then?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What do lampreys think about?’
‘Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?’
‘Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?’
‘Sure,’ Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. ‘Can’t you?’
No, he said. He couldn’t.
‘Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.’
‘Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives’ was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.
Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier. He had been transported to this house, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his ‘support liaison’. Since he couldn’t go outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house. She also tracked down whatever books and magazines he wished to read, and any CDs he wanted to listen to. In addition, she chose an assortment of DVDs – though he had a hard time accepting her criteria for selection on this front.
A week after he arrived, as if it were a self-evident next step, Scheherazade had taken him to bed. There had been condoms on the bedside table when he arrived. Habara guessed that sex was one of her assigned duties – or perhaps ‘support activities’ was the term they used. Whatever the term, and whatever her motivation, he’d gone with the flow and accepted her proposal without hesitation.
Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. She seemed to be on guard, lest they grow too enthusiastic – just as a driving instructor might not want his students to get too excited about their driving. Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike, either. It may have begun as one of her duties (or, at least, as something that was strongly encouraged), but at a certain point she seemed – if only in a small way – to have found a kind of pleasure in it. Habara could tell this from certain subtle ways in which her body responded, a response that
delighted him as well. After all, he was not a wild animal penned up in a cage but a human being equipped with his own range of emotions, and sex for the sole purpose of physical release was hardly fulfilling. Yet to what extent did Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her personal life? He couldn’t tell.
This was true of other things, too. Habara often found Scheherazade’s feelings and intentions hard to read. For example, she wore plain cotton panties most of the time. The kind of panties he imagined housewives in their thirties usually wore – though this was pure conjecture, since he had no experience with housewives of that age. Some days, however, she turned up in colorful, frilly silk panties instead. Why she switched between the two he hadn’t a clue.
The other thing that puzzled him was the fact that their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked, making it hard to tell where one ended and the other began. He had never experienced anything like this before: although he didn’t love her, and the sex was so-so, he was tightly bound to her physically. It was all rather confusing.
‘I was a teenager when I started breaking into empty houses,’ she said one day as they lay in bed.
Habara – as was often the case when she told stories – found himself at a loss for words.
‘Have you ever broken into somebody’s house?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ he answered in a dry voice.
‘Do it once and you get addicted.’
‘But it’s illegal.’
‘You betcha. It’s dangerous, but you still get hooked.’
Habara waited quietly for her to continue.
‘The coolest thing about being in someone else’s house when there’s no one there,’ Scheherazade said, ‘is how silent it is. Not a sound. It’s like the quietest place in the world. That’s how it felt to me, anyway. When I sat on the floor and kept absolutely still, my life as a lamprey came back to me. I told you about my being a lamprey in a former life, right?’
‘Yes, you did.’
