Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  I can’t tell you, Is, what a feeling there is among the men.

  No, she thought. You can’t tell me. She shrank from his euphoria as if it were a flame that might burn her. He was so considerate, too. He left behind a thick packet of directions, to be opened ‘in the eventuality of my death’. And he told the she-elephant of the packet’s existence, but not Isabel. Josephine could not resist one fatal hint, and Isabel was on to it like a tiger.

  They saw Isabel at last, those elephants of north London.

  Here they are again, at the top of the hill. Here is Clara, taking the rope. Isabel holds the sledge, steadying it.

  ‘Ready, Clara?’

  She pushes the sledge and it reaches the lip of the hill. It hesitates, then glides forward, gathering speed.

  There is her daughter, flying away from her. Stephen, from the bottom of the world, shades his eyes to see Clara fly.

  AT THE INSTITUTE WITH KM

  I LIE AND bathe in the warmth of the cows. That’s what I’m here for, or rather it’s what the cows are here for. It’s beneficial to inhale the mild steam of cows. Everything happens for a reason at the Institute. Even lying down has its purpose. I want to resist it, but I haven’t the energy any more.

  I lie on my couch in the hayloft. Down below, the cows shift and stir and tear the hay from the manger, and send up billows of breath. They shit as they eat, and the shit smells both sweet and acrid as it spatters down their legs and clots the hair of their tails.

  The cows are beautiful. I could think about them all day long. Their movements, their long shuddery sighs, the noise of their teeth, the sensitivity of their lips, the strings of slobber that drop from their jaws. They are benign. We lie in a row and think about the benignity of cows.

  I wish I’d been chosen to learn to milk, but I wasn’t. I used to work in the vegetable garden. Last summer we produced more than two thousand pounds of tomatoes. Sometimes I think of those tomatoes, too, as a change from thinking about the cows. They are not quite like the tomatoes on market stalls. They are thick-skinned and warm. As the vines shrivel, the pungency of tomatoes grows until you start to imagine that they are the fruit Adam ate in Eden.

  But we don’t eat tomatoes very often at the Institute. No doubt there’s some reason for that.

  I worked hard in that vegetable garden. Even when the sun was full in the sky I didn’t rest. My hoe scritch-scratched up and down the rows of onions and I watered the tomatoes evenly so that their skin wouldn’t split. If my mother could have seen me, she would have rubbed her eyes.

  I used to be a strong child, I know that. I wasn’t always like this. I was a stout, foursquare little boy in my white embroidered smock and loose trousers. Doesn’t my mother remember that? It was only later on that this filthy disease took hold of me and made me what I am now.

  I’m twenty-seven, that’s all. I look at myself in the mirror and I know far too much about myself. The bony skull and the big teeth that make me look as if I’m heehawing like a donkey. Why didn’t my skull have the grace to stay hidden? I’m still alive. I don’t want to see it.

  Some days there are as many as ten of us, lying in a row in the hayloft, absorbing the shit-sweet breath of the cows. I stare up at the pictures on the ceiling. Mr de Saltzmann painted them. They are beautiful and funny and they do exactly what they are meant to do: they divert us.

  It wasn’t my choice to come to the Institute. It wasn’t my vision. G has been very patient about this. He could tell instantly that I wasn’t a disciple. It was my mother who wanted me to come, and in the end it was too much trouble to resist her. I thought G might throw me out, and even after a few days I was afraid of being thrown out. But he didn’t. He said I could work, and join in the fast.

  Fasting is strange. If you’ve never done it, you’ve no idea how it will make you feel. Ever since I’ve been ill, people have been urging me to eat. My mother most of all. She can’t bear my thinness: literally can’t bear it. I don’t blame her. It’s disgusting to be so thin. I disgust myself. I took off all my clothes and stood in front of the mirror and there I was. Collarbones like coat-hangers. Rounded shoulders and sucked-in ribs. My feet were bony and enormous. My elbows – why should anybody have such elbows? And for God’s sake, my knees. I looked at it all for a long time and then I covered it up again. These days I prefer to contemplate the cows in all their fullness.

  My poor mother with her little pancakes filled with cream and chocolate sauce, her nourishing soups and her sudden frenzies for the blackest, most expensive caviar or for dried reindeer tongue which has to be bought in slivers which are more expensive than gold leaf.

  ‘In Lapland, they just heal themselves, quite simply, with berries and moss and reindeer tongue.’

  I’m sure they do, my dear mother. But what I couldn’t bear was the frightened, pleading look on your face as you ordered yet another dish of sweetbreads or quails’ eggs or whatever it was that offered a day’s hope. I turned away. I always turned away. I literally could not swallow it.

  ‘Please, my darling, just one spoonful for me.’

  She has been frightened like that, and pleading, since I came back from the war. Pleading with me not to know the things I know. Frightened that they will burst out of me in a rage that nothing will be able to extinguish. Maybe that’s what everyone over the age of forty really feels. They want to silence us. To stop our mouths with food.

  So I fasted. I can’t tell you what a relief it was. Everything else dropped away. We began the season of fasting with enemas. It doesn’t sound too pleasant, does it? But soon we were empty. Transparent. It didn’t disgust me at all. Would you ever imagine that an enema could have the eloquence of a ritual?

  We did eat during the fast. I can’t remember the exact progression. One day there was vegetable juice, I know that. I was so purified, and I was strong. I could have walked out into the fields and worked. You might ask what on earth was going on? I did at first. It made me laugh to think of us fasting. There we were, already skeletons, gargoyles. Why add to it? But after a while – a few days, maybe more – I began to see the point of it. I felt stronger. I was doing to myself what even my sickness could not do, and by my own choice. Not only was I still alive, I was more alive than I had been for months. Years.

  G didn’t say anything. Didn’t even smile or look a little satisfied. In fact the next day someone said to me in passing, ‘You’re to come off the fast today.’ And I was sick with disappointment, if you can believe it. Because I’d been so close to where I wanted to be, so empty, so pure, having so little and needing so little. And it wouldn’t have taken much longer for me to understand so many things. Maybe only another two days of fasting would have brought me to it.

  I kept awake all night long during the fast. I didn’t need sleep any more, you see. I’d realised how unnecessary they were, all these things of the body that we cling to and can’t imagine living without. I listened to the cows pulling the hay from the manger and then tearing it, and chewing it slowly, for hour after hour, sometimes shifting from one foot to another. I could hear every hesitation in the rhythm of their feeding. I understood that the hesitations don’t break the rhythm: no, it is the hesitations that make the rhythm.

  I was so close then. If I’d reached out just a little further I would have touched what I wanted to touch.

  The Englishwoman is asleep. She’s not really an Englishwoman, in fact. No, it turns out that she comes from the other side of the world. Her nose has the sharp, nipped-in look that means she’s going to die soon. I understand that look very well. I’m not sure yet whether she knows its significance. But very likely she does. She works hard. She likes to be outdoors. All the English here prefer to work outdoors. She speaks French, but we don’t talk much, even when we’re lying side by side. Sometimes I know that she’s lying awake. You can always tell. But I don’t say anything. I expect she prefers listening to the cows, as I do.

  I’ve talked about fasting, but I haven’t really explained a
bout working. Sometimes I shook and sweat sprang out all over my skin and I couldn’t see anything but blackness. But that’s not important. When I did my work I was strong.

  ‘Be careful. Rest. Don’t try to do too much.’

  Ever since I’ve had this filthy disease, that is what they’ve been telling me. Go south in the winter, go up into the mountains, take your temperature night and morning and maybe four times in between, swallow this medicine and that medicine, pay over fat coins to fat doctors (my mother paid so many coins, I can’t begin to count what she paid), take a raw egg beaten up in milk night and morning, weigh yourself before eating or weigh yourself after eating. Your life is so precious suddenly. Isn’t it comical? After those years of trying to kill us, now they want us alive.

  Avoid stimulation and over-excitement. An absolutely regular life, fresh air, plenty of sleep. And of course give up any thought, my dear boy, of ever marrying.

  Here at the Institute, I do too much. I work until I drop. Sometimes I really have dropped, out there in the fields, in the hot August sun. And I can tell you that when you drop it isn’t the end of everything. There you are, flat on your face among the stalks and roots. Slowly the blackness parts and the ringing in your head stops. You notice some little insects scrabbling at the base of the stalks. There’s a noise of crickets. You’ve dropped, but everything’s still going on and your body fits against the earth as if it’s been made to lie there.

  After a long time I got up and found my hoe where it had fallen. I picked it up and drove it into the earth again. The sun was hot on my back. I’d worked until I’d fallen, and then I’d got up and now I would work again. I imagined G watching me. Of course he knew nothing about it, but that was what I liked to imagine. That he was watching, and perhaps approving. That he might find something harmonious in my fall.

  One of the cows isn’t happy. Her udder is too full. If I knew how to milk, I’d clamber down the ladder from this hayloft, and sit on a stool at her side, and ease her pain. It looks so easy when you see somebody else milking a cow. You almost imagine that you know how to do it yourself.

  The Englishwoman stirs, and turns towards me. Her face is still asleep. I shouldn’t call her the Englishwoman. I know her name perfectly well.

  ‘You’re jealous, that’s what it is.’ How well I can hear my mother saying that. ‘You’re just jealous. Jealousy is an ugly emotion. It even makes you look ugly. Go on, go and look in the mirror and see if I’m right or not.’

  It’s true that I was a jealous child. Always wanting too much of something and spitting with rage when I didn’t get it. I would lie on the ground and beat the floor with my strong boots because my sister was praised more than I was.

  I’m jealous because the Englishwoman is going to die before me. She’s farther on the road, she has fasted more resolutely and worked herself into the ground more obediently. She’s got rid of everything, you can tell that. Even her husband. She has a husband, but she’s rubbed him off like the husk on an ear of corn. G likes her. She’s one of his favourites, anyone can see it, even if she seems quite unimpressed by it.

  She hasn’t really noticed me. Why should she? We’re just lying side by side, listening to the cows, and she’s asleep. So worn out and so weary and so close to death that anyone but me would feel pity for her. I don’t feel any pity. She is closer to it than I am, almost within touching distance. She has stopped clinging to life, although perhaps she doesn’t yet know it. How I envy her, because in spite of everything I’ve said, I am still clinging like a sick monkey who doesn’t know how to let go. When my temperature goes up I can scarcely breathe for panic. I calm myself with the thought that it’s natural to run a little fever after dark. I keep imagining that I’m putting on weight. Sometimes I’m even weak enough to say to someone else, ‘Don’t you think these trousers are getting a little tight for me?’ and then they have to hide their look of pity and astonishment as they murmur, ‘No, no, the trousers are fine, they’re a perfect fit.’ The trousers are hanging off me, of course.

  G told me once that it was purely a fault of the organism, that it couldn’t recognise its own death. He looked at me, not with pity, but as if waiting for me to learn a difficult lesson that I kept failing over and over again.

  Her lips are slightly open. She’s been asleep for a long time now. The cow moans again. Soon someone will come in and milk her. I hope to God they will. I would rather shoot the cow than listen to her moaning all night long.

  I had another haemorrhage two weeks ago. It wasn’t very big. The thing is that you mustn’t be frightened and start to think that you won’t be able to breathe. You can breathe right through it. I stared at the patch of blood on my pillow for a long time, as if I was looking at a cow. Please don’t believe that I’m feeling sorry for myself. That’s the last impression I would want to give. Very often I stop feeling jealous entirely. It empties out of me, quite late in the evening, when it’s dark and a chill rises from the earth and I realise that the tomatoes have all been picked a long time ago and it’s not summer any more, or even autumn. You know that feeling when you’re playing a game of hide-and-seek out of doors, and it’s growing dark, thick grainy dark gathering all around you, and one minute the yard is full of children and the next they’ve melted away. But you are still in hiding, waiting to be found. It sounds forlorn, but it’s exciting too. Only you, out of everybody that was playing, still out in the dark. The dark thickens, thickens. You don’t know if you want to hear a voice raised up, calling your name, or if you want to stay out in the dark forever.

  The Englishwoman’s eyes are open. She’s breathing very gently, in through her mouth, out through her nose. The line of her nose is sharp. Yes, she has a line all around her now, defined and dazzling.

  I want to say to her that it will soon be over. All the horror of it. The rotting stink of your own breath. The labour of walking. Creeping from the chair to the door, resting, gathering strength to turn the door handle. The ugliness of it all. Perhaps I don’t need to tell her. Perhaps she knows. She looks quizzical, but she says nothing. Is the husband coming soon? He’d better. But however soon he comes he will never get this moment we’ve got. The cows below us, big and square and warm-breathing. The scent of the packed hay. If I were not myself, I would be jealous of myself. The thought is so ridiculous that I smile, and immediately the same smile lights her face, as if we’re two children sharing a pillow.

  ‘It’s raining,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  I’ve been hearing the rain for hours. Not listening to it exactly. The rain isn’t music and it doesn’t require any attention from me.

  ‘It’s pouring,’ she says, as if the thought pleases her.

  ‘Yes. Good for the soil.’

  ‘Yes.’

  If it were not for the rain, and the mud, and what it did to us, I would not have this disease. I am convinced of it. I was so glad to be alive, to have outwitted everything that tried to kill me. We drank, and drank, and drank. I can’t tell you how we drank. Until we were barking at each other like dogs. The war was over, and we were not.

  ‘C’est foutue, la guerre!’

  ‘Et moi je m’en fous de la guerre!’

  Yes, the rain and the mud. You never forget the smell of it. Rank, raw, clayey, clinging. It sucks on your boots like a lover. Fall in it and you’re finished. That’s what I used to tell myself when I was slithering along the duckboards. Fall in it and you’re finished. But I’ve forgotten all that. I never think of it. It’s not good to think of it, if you want to get the better of this filthy disease that seizes on every weak point. You know the way a butcher cleaves a rib of beef into chops? He finds the weak point first. A gentle chip of a cut, and then up with the chopper and whack!

  So I never think of any of it. Only the noise of the rain reminds me sometimes.

  ‘I wish I could feel it falling on me,’ she says.

  I don’t say anything. A black bubble of bitterness has lodged in my throat. I want
to cry out. I want to say to her, ‘You’ll feel it soon enough, don’t worry. You’ll be out in the rain forever.’

  But I don’t. I look sideways down the row of beds, all empty now but for hers and mine. They’ve left us here together, in the hayloft. No doubt there are exercises in progress in the room with the parquet floor. The Dervish Dance, the Big Prayer, the Enneagram. Everybody will be gathered. G will sit there with his expression of wise calm. I can picture it so clearly that my absence doesn’t matter at all.

  Yes, it’s raining heavily. The shadows are big. We have only one small lantern to light us up here. You have to be very careful in a hayloft, in case of fire.

  ‘I wish I could feel the rain,’ she says again.

  I can’t think of any answer now. The black bubble shrinks, shrinks and finally dissolves. I can breathe a little more easily. She’s lying on her side. Her nose is sharper than ever in her sunken face. Her eyes are fixed on me. I can’t even distinguish her pupils in the darkness, but I know that look.

  I have become someone else. I’ve seen it happen many times when a man is dying, and now it’s happening with this woman. I don’t speak. I don’t want to break the spell of being the person she thinks I am.

  I reach out. Her hand is as cold as I thought it would be. But it’s not time yet, not quite, not for either of us. In a minute her vision will clear and she’ll see me for what I am. Someone she doesn’t know, who has about as much meaning as a signpost in a language you can’t read, on a journey that seems as if it will never come to an end. And your feet have got to labour on, until the mud reaches your lips.

  Nothing can change what’s got to happen. But all the same, I fold her hand in mine.

  GRACE POOLE HER TESTIMONY

  READER, I MARRIED him. Those are her words for sure. She would have him at the time and place she chose, with every dish on the table to her appetite.