by James Hannah
“No, true,” she says thoughtfully. “But rules are there to be bent, aren’t they? It’s only a game.”
Anus
Anus, I write.
I straighten the photocopied handout on the school desk in front of me and adjust my grip on my fountain pen. A potent blob of black ink spreads across my knuckle, working into the tiny lines and creases of my skin and cuticle. I wipe it on my trousers.
Black trousers, black ink, no worries.
There are two outlines of human bodies on the class handout, with straight lines pointing to various parts.
“And I’ll stop you after ten minutes,” says Mr. Miller, perching his wiry frame on the stool at the front of the lab, making the crotch of his musty trousers wrinkle up in a cat’s whisker shape. “And use the proper names, please.”
I draw my own connecting line from the word anus to the relevant area of the male silhouette. I don’t know what’s made me do it. There’s no undoing it. It’s in pen. But a real, slightly frightening sense of freedom is swelling in my belly. Maybe now is the time to say it: Mr. Miller, you, me, and biology, we were never meant to be. Let’s call it quits, eh?
Kelvin and the new kid look at what I’ve written, and Kelvin laughs a silent and heartening laugh. The new kid doesn’t laugh. His face smiles without his mouth smiling—maybe it’s in the brow—and he watches on with a cool detachment.
Balls (hairy), I add, and then underline the A and B, before quickly coming up with C, D, and E, all from the same source. Cock, dong, erection. We both tense up with silent laughter.
Fanny, counters Kelvin, arcing a line out to the female. Gonads.
Horn.
Incest.
I frown at him. “Incest isn’t a part of the body,” I mutter.
“No, but when it happens, it makes a dysfunctional human. It’s genetic.” He connects it to a line to the male’s midriff, and then the female’s for good measure. “They’re brother and sister.”
I look at the new kid, and the new kid arches an eyebrow at me. We’re not convinced. Still: Jugs.
Knob.
“Doesn’t that begin with n?”
“Mine doesn’t.”
Lips.
Mammaries, nipples.
Orifice.
We’re silent-laughing in that way that makes me kind of queasy. The mash-it-all-up childishness you can only get in a hot afternoon of triple science.
Prick.
Queer. A connecting line to the wrist.
Rim.
Slit.
Tit.
Urethra.
Vadge, wang.
Kelvin chews his pen while he mulls over the crowded diagram for what to put for X.
In the meantime I add yum-yums, Zeppelins, and draw lines to the boobs with a grand flourish.
Suddenly and with detached confidence, the new kid picks up his own pen, plucks off the lid, and writes X chromosome. He draws a line to the midriff. I look up at him, and he looks at me, and I don’t get it. But he smiles, and I smile back, and I look at Kelvin. Kelvin doesn’t get it either.
“I’ll take that, thank you.” The paper is whipped from beneath my pen, and Mr. Miller leans on the new kid’s desk. “Malachy, I see it was a mistake to put you with these two. I’ll see all three of you afterward.”
• • •
“I still don’t know how Jef poaches those eggs so well,” says Sheila. “I try to do them at home, and they go all mangled.”
“Mangled eggs,” I say with a weak smile. I don’t mean it as a joke. Just reporting what my brain is feeding back to me. But it’s quite funny, I suppose.
“Ha! Mangled eggs. That could be my signature dish, couldn’t it?”
Ah, I don’t know, I can’t eat. I’m made of stone inside. Honestly, I don’t want to be difficult.
Sheila perches on the edge of the visitors’ chair and slots her hands between her knees.
“I think it would be a good idea if you could manage just a little bit of it. You don’t want to make yourself feel worse by not eating. I know the last thing you want to do is eat, I really do. But believe you me, I’ve walked up and down this corridor for eight years, and I tell you, it always helps. It always helps when you eat it. Sets you right for the day.”
I should. I know I should.
“Do you want me to get him to make you some fried eggs? Honestly, it’ll be no bother. And if he says no, I’ll do them myself.”
Bless her, she does try to make me laugh.
What passes for a laugh these days. Wheeze and cough.
“Or I could come over there and do choo-choo trains with you, if you’d rather try that,” she says, unclasping her hands and absently checking the positioning of the little upside-down watch clipped to her breast.
I can feel myself being persuaded along, like a boat at rising tide, my hull lifting with the wash, scraping along the wet sand and stopping, scraping along and stopping.
It’s you I need now.
If I imagine it right, I can…I can sense you, enthusiastic you, telling me, Yeah, you can do it.
I can do it.
Of course you can.
Of course I can. If I just…if I just remember you right…I can sense your face…the way it used to move when you’d decided on something.
This is going to happen.
Here it is. I love it. I love this blueprint of you, here in me.
This is going to happen.
It feels to me like you’re here. I can hear the comforting tones of your voice. I can actually hear the sounds. Or the memory of the sounds. They remain in my brain. I can be persuaded.
What is that, when you can hear someone’s voice without really hearing it through your ears? I’m not hearing you, but I’m hereing you. I’m H-E-R-E-ing you. You ignite my gray brain. Light me up. Spark me into being.
If you eat now, you’ll thank yourself later.
I lift my heavy hand and reach out for the fork.
I know, I know. I need to try to eat.
Chew chew. Chew chew and think of you.
Ankle
Does it count in the A to Z game if it’s someone else’s ankle and not mine?
I can’t beat the best ankle story of all time, which absolutely belongs to Laura. She went down in the history of our family with her ankle. I cannot believe how perfect the whole thing was, and I cannot believe how out of order I was.
What would I have been, about twelve? So she’d have been seventeen. I think I said to her—did I?—yes, I told her that her boyfriend at the time—what was his name?—I told her her boyfriend at the time had told me that he thought she had a fat arse.
He never did. He never said anything like it. Why did I ever even think to say something so cruel? I didn’t feel the cruelty at the time. It was only a joke.
Her boyfriend must have delivered a persuasive explanation of not knowing anything about it, because she came storming back to me later in the day, absolutely spitting venom, and calling me a little shit.
Mum took my side, again. She told Laura I would never do something like that on purpose, and that it must have been some sort of misunderstanding. And she said—poor Laura—Mum said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone did say you had a fat backside, the kind of skimpy shorts you waltz around in.”
Of course Laura rushed upstairs in floods of tears. And the irony, the beautiful irony of it was that Laura must have dumped herself down on her bed with such a leaden sulk that she fractured her ankle between the bed frame and her arse.
There’s not a year goes by that I don’t think what utter humiliation she must have felt, shuffling on her backside down the narrow staircase to tell us, wailing, that she needed to go to the ER.
It’s no wonder she ended up going the way she did.
• • •
“Le
t me get that.” Sheila lifts my abandoned plate away. I’ve managed a few bites. “All right, you’ve done well there, haven’t you? How are you doing now? Have you been able to lie back at all?”
I shake my head.
“Starts you coughing, does it? Did you sit up all night too?”
Minimal nod.
Shaking your head means no. Nodding it means yes. Why would that be? I’ll save that for H in my A to Z.
“It’s a problem, that, isn’t it? You try to get a moment’s respite because you’re cold, and then your lungs start filling up because you’re lying down. It hardly seems fair, does it?”
She stands with her weight on one hip, as if she’s never encountered anyone with such a problem before.
“I’m all right,” I say.
Sheila rearranges the knife and fork less precariously on the plate and considers me for a while. “Give me a shout, anyway, if you want any blankets or anything. Or a nice cup of something warm. Although we’ve run out of mugs again.” She lowers her voice. “I don’t know why people can’t read the sign and bring their mugs back to the coffee machine. It says it right there. It’s not too much to ask, is it?”
She takes the plate away and puts it on a cart in the corridor.
“I mean, I don’t mind washing all the dregs out if they just leave the mugs there, but I haven’t got time to go around doing a collection every twenty minutes. Have you filled in your lunch card yet?”
“No. Will he make me some chicken soup? My mum always used to make me chicken soup when I was sick.”
She smiles. It’s a sweet smile.
She understands and leaves to make inquiries.
Stay lifted. Self-sufficient. I can do this thing.
What thing?
Look out of the window. Look at the wall. Look at the bedsheets. Look at my arms.
God, look at them against the bedsheets. Like great big useless horses’ forelegs. What are they? A connecting piece between chest and hand. Between neck and hand. Between heart and hand. Well, what? They’re arms, aren’t they?
Look at them. The superhighway of the body. They’re history. A hopeless historical map, plotting clots and craters of short-lived attempts to spark me into being. They have evolved into someone else’s arms. An old man’s arms, not the arms of a forty-year-old. Purple and yellow, brown and bruised. Every vein is collapsed. Every entry point blocked off. Lumped-up fistula scars now useless, no way in anymore. My insides are sealed off from the outside forever.
They’re numb cold, my arms. Cold arms are the price to pay. I can’t keep them under the covers. They feel like they’re dead already.
Arms
I flick the syringe lightly with shaking fingertips, and the bubble unsticks itself from the plunger and creeps sullenly through the liquid toward the needle.
“Come on, man, the little ones don’t matter.”
“That’s not a little bubble, though, is it?”
It settles up around by the needle, and I flick again. Flick harder.
“Careful, man. You’re losing the liquid out the top.”
“I’m not injecting bubbles.”
“It’s only a little one.”
“Listen, man—fuck off. It’s up to me, yeah?”
Mal sits back, surprised. I never talk to him like this.
I don’t like this.
Feels wrong. This is not me.
All I can think of is you. What if this goes wrong? What if…what if it changes me forever? What if you find out? I’ll lose you.
No, no. All this is bullshit. This is exactly like I was before I took my first trip. I was scared there would be no way back. But there is a way back. And anyway, this is the first and last time.
Try anything once. Once only.
• • •
Sheila’s head eclipses the television screen a moment as she walks past. She’s doing her Closing Ceremony.
“I’m just on my way, Ivo,” she says. “Got to go home and see what that useless lump of a husband’s been up to overnight.”
“You should…you should get him in here. Ask him to come here.”
“What? Come in here and I can look after everyone at the same time? That’s not a bad idea, that. Save me coming and going every day, wouldn’t it? Now, how are you doing? You’re looking perkier than when I came in earlier. I want to see more of the same later, please. Do you need anything sorting out before I head off?”
I don’t want her to go. Don’t go, Sheila.
“No.”
“You’re comfortable, are you?”
I nod.
“How are your arms and shoulders?” She rests her olive-skinned hand on my arm, uninvited. I don’t mind. Everything everyone does to me now is uninvited, and it’s rarely so tender. “Are they a bit cold? Do you want me to get a blanket?”
I nod. “They are cold. They ache.”
“It’s always a problem,” she says, opening the bedside cabinet and beginning to rummage. “Because with most people it’s all these drips and taps and pipes, they have to keep their arms exposed for them. It’s always the same. Where are these spare blankets? Honestly, people must just come in and—” She stands up and looks about.
I know what’s coming.
“Oh, here,” she says, reaching down into my bag. She’s got the crochet blanket.
No, no. Don’t ask.
“Put this around your shoulders. That’ll keep you nice and warm, won’t it?”
No, don’t.
She casts the blanket about my shoulders, and your scent wafts up, perfectly preserved, and floods my senses.
I don’t want her to see, I don’t want her to see, but she’s looking up at my face, and she can see now there’s something wrong. My throat’s so tight. Hot, tight, tight, dry. That’s normally what passes for crying with me. It’s a dry throat. It’s not being able to breathe.
But this time, for once, gratifying tears begin to prickle.
“Oh, lovey…” she says, quietly.
She doesn’t make a fuss. She must be used to unexplained fluids leaking from patients.
How weird, tears. I trickle water for you.
Sheila sits on the side of the bed, takes up my hand, and strokes the back of it.
“Is there anything I can do, lovey?” she says in the softest, gentlest voice.
My throat aches, hot. “Sorry, sorry. Stupid.”
“Not at all.”
“This blanket,” I say. “Lot of memories.”
“Really?”
“My girlfriend made it for me.”
“Oh. I wasn’t sure if you had a girlfriend or anything.”
“Ex.”
“Oh, I see.”
She doesn’t see, of course.
“Mmm.” I sniff. “She crocheted it specially for me.”
“No—she did all this? It’s lovely.”
“I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. Been talking to her. In my mind.”
“Special one, was she? It’s a shame, isn’t it? Sometimes.”
“Anyway, you’d better go,” I say.
“No, no. There’s no hurry.”
“No, I’m fine. And husbands don’t just look after themselves, do they?”
“No, you’re right there. Well, if you’re sure you’re OK? I’m happy to stay.”
“No, no. Thanks.”
She rises from her perch on the side of the bed and places my hand down on the sheets.
“I’ll be back tonight, all right? Press the button if you want Jackie. Don’t be shy, now.”
She gives me a regretful little smile and leaves me. I’m wrapped up to my neck in crochet, up to my neck in you.
I would give everything I have ever had and everything I will ever have just to put my arms around you, have y
ou put your arms around me.
Our bodies simply fit, yours and mine.
That’s what I’m going to think of now. That will see me off to sleep. Those arms of yours, wrapped tight, tight around me.
B
Back
I’m lying facedown, with my head sideways on your pillow. My senses are wide, wide open. I have never, ever experienced anything like this while sober. My hearing is absolutely clear, and the scents I am breathing in are blossoming and blooming in my brain. The clean, fresh smell of your hair from the pillow, the smell of the resin of the wood of your bedstead.
This is the first time I’ve had my shirt off with you, and the feel of the sheets on my skin is just so vital.
And now I am tracking your lips in my mind as they prickle down from the base of my neck, down past my shoulders, down, down my spine. And your fingertips too trace back and forth, outward and back in, in the line of my ribs, delicate, delicate, your hair now hanging down, brushing softly from side to side on my skin, a tingling trace in its wake.
You find your way down to the lowest of my ribs, and I suddenly flinch and tense, almost fling you from me.
“No,” I say. “That bit’s too ticklish.”
You lie up against me and murmur in my ear—“That’s what I was looking for”—before heading back down, and kissing there again, right there. And now my whole back is unable to take any more, and I cry out and turn over, and I can see you there, laughing wickedly.
“I love that bit,” you say. “It’s torture.”
• • •
Awake now.
I’m awake.
What?
I can see the gray-green plane of the lawn beyond the magnolia tree through the window. Did that light just come on? Or was it always on, and it was only me who flicked on?
I’m confused.
What woke me then? I’m sure there was—
(((Uuuuuh)))
Oh, oh no.
It’s her next door again. The groaning woman and her groans. It’s at a frequency where I can sort of hear it in the wall. Thin wall, then; hollow partition.
(((Uuuuuh)))
I put my hand on my brow, and for a moment that’s all there is of me. A hand on a brow, swashing and scrunching and scratching, and knuckling the eyeballs now. Itch, itch, itch to get this sound out of my head.
