How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  Be brave, Mary.

  She took two steps inside and heard each step and each step’s echo, four knocks on wood. The air smelt different: outside air, indoors. It had a visiting tang that could have traveled from anywhere. A peppering of smoke, the spice of someone’s barbecue. Her house had opened up and let the world blow in. “Hello?” she asked quietly. When she had called out earlier, in Eric and Michelle’s hall, the question had felt rhetorical. But now she was less sure there would be no reply. She left the door open, for a faster exit.

  In the hall, by the entrance to the lounge, she found her handbag, sprawled on its side with its contents spilt—crumpled receipts, the wrapper of her favorite health bar, a lidless lipstick forlornly crimped. The long strap traced a wobbly shape on the floorboards, like one of those outlines detectives used to chalk around corpses. She crouched to check for her wallet and was surprised to see it, the sight of it immediately undoing several hypotheses. Maybe she had got away with leaving the door open, because surely no one would have broken in and left her wallet?

  Mary was unsure where to start. If someone was hiding on the other side of the lounge door, going to the top of the house would give them a chance to escape. “Yeah, I’m going upstairs,” she said aloud to her imaginary assistant. “Meet you here in a sec.” With a glimmer of inspiration, she darted to the kitchen and from the wooden block withdrew the cleaver.

  She stamped her feet and coughed theatrically on the stairs, the blade joggling in her hands. After the bathroom—all clear behind the shower curtain—the first door she reached was the study. She flicked on the light and jumped as her own face leapt in the window. Christ! She looked like a madwoman with that knife. She switched off the light and let the darkness resettle, nestle back into its basket. How different the room seemed compared with the same one next door, where barely an hour before she had bent over the rail of Flora’s cot. Little legs kicking. Her fist climbing cords of Mary’s hair. The honeyed smell of her. Along the wall where Flora’s cot would be, half-empty shelves of books collected dust. You couldn’t have a study and a nursery in these houses, which said everything about what became of women when children arrived. Beyond that, the room was sparsely furnished. There were more books in boxes. One of the two remaining dining chairs—her share of the set—was tucked under the old desk, its surface a patchwork of bills and solicitor’s letters. The room was inviolate. Not inviolate. The room, like all the rooms, was empty. It rebuffed any question of trespass with its explicit sense of desertion.

  Mary checked the linen cupboard—clear—and crept to the spare bedroom. The blind was down, and again this space struck her above all as uninhabited. Maybe it was the act of searching that made her see it, but each time she pushed a door in dread, it was the emptiness that hit her. Mark had left behind the bedside table and lamp but taken the bed. Which made it just a side table. The walls, which he’d painted a few years ago, looked grubbily blank, apart from where the furniture had stood and left its crisp outlines, the pristine white ghosts of a bed and a wardrobe.

  Mary reached her own room last. She strained for a sound from the floor below but heard only a closet thudding shut on the other side of the wall, the vibration of a low voice of indeterminate gender. She swapped the knife to the other hand and wiped the first hand on her dress. Space was pretty tight in her wardrobe, but she scooped the clothes aside to check, throwing backward glances to the door. She opened Mark’s wardrobe and gasped at the musty lunge of trapped air. Her free hand brushed the few leftover clothes. She squeezed the arm of a shirt, and the pale blue cotton was cold. On her way to the door, she stooped to pick up a slim yellow leaf from the floor: a riddle, in this innermost room, where all the windows were shut. As she slipped the leaf into her pocket, she stumbled over a gruff sound below.

  She tiptoed toward the landing, obeying a sudden urge for quietness. Sweat slickened the handle of the knife. She looked over the banister. The stairs, a slice of hall. The knife twitched slippery in her palm. There was a movement, a knocking.

  “Are you here?” she heard.

  She let out a long, deep sigh, a rush of all the captured breath from her patrol.

  “Mary?”

  “Who is it?” she called, thinking where the hell had he sprung from, and how dare he! Mark’s upturned face entered the square of hall, caught in a cage of balustrade spindles.

  “… I got worried…,” he was saying.

  She watched the bottom stair to see if his foot would appear on it, but the hand that held the knife stayed behind her back. She didn’t want him to think she was afraid of life without him. “I’m coming down,” she said, and as she descended the stairs, Mark edged toward the front door, as if she were pushing him. That was more like it. By the time she reached the bottom step, he was outside. “Hold up,” he said, thrusting a foot onto the doormat. “Are you OK?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Well, I thought I heard you scream. I hadn’t gone far. I ran back, saw your door wide open … I’m an inconsiderate git. I should have walked you home.”

  “Did I scream?” She was asking herself.

  “So you’re OK?”

  She laughed. “Look. Thanks. But really, I’m fine. Tired is all. So, thanks, but goodnight … OK?” She began to shut the door, then changed her mind. It would be better to watch him go.

  After she had drawn the bolts, Mary walked back down the hall and noticed that Mark had neatly propped the lounge door with the hen doorstop. She entered the room, frowning. She walked to the front window and closed the shutters. She checked behind the sofa and leant over the top of the TV, but her search had become perfunctory. There was no one in the house. The whole place crawled with loneliness. Please let Mark not have seen that.

  She checked in the cloakroom, and in the kitchen dropped the knife wearily into the block. There was nowhere for anyone to hide in here. The room was tiny. She unlocked the back door. A few stray stars glimmered, and the sky seemed peaceful. She filled her lungs with the night, the same free air that had roamed the house. It tasted good. That was the funny thing: it had been refreshing to come home and find the place different. She wished she had wine, she thought, opening the cupboard where she kept the glasses to prolong the wish. Her hand on the knob stiffened. Just beyond the kitchen wall, a steady drawl of flip-flops was scraping the silence. Crossing the patio. A slap of soles. Out the window nothing to see. Just her own face sharpened. The knife block, somewhere off to the right, behind her, she was thinking. Around the edge of the door came a determined jaw, stiff, wiry whiskers, the summit of an ear. She was watching these things appear, piecing them together to form his face, lost in his quartz eye, when the lino click-clacked with his front claws. Christ almighty, he was half in the house.

  Block his path to the hall, she should. But she was on the wrong side of him for that. The kitchen so narrow. To pass him, she would have to touch him. The black circle of his snout strained toward the worktop, while her hands wrapped around the handle of the cupboard to keep her fingers safe, and her toes recoiled in her sandals. Would the fox bite or jump or otherwise exercise his intellect for sudden movement? She stamped her foot, and he watched her with a puzzled expression. But he did not move, and she took a couple of sideways steps to open up a view of his flank. His hind legs arrowed behind him in a fractional crouch, as if their mission were perpetually to point against the direction of his body. They made him look two-faced, capable of sudden reversals, but he was not reversing now.

  “Not indoors!” she choked. A strong smell hit the back of her throat. It went straight there, bypassing her nose, and she knew it first by taste: a burnt sweet flavor, like a misjudged toffee. Infiltrating the sweetness was a strong dark note between malt and musk, with a smoky edge as if blown through an exhaust. He shifted his paws a couple of clicks. The scent circled the kitchen. It had her surrounded. He hoisted his tail high over his back, training on her the white torch of its tip. It occurred to her that he could be on his o
wn patrol for intruders and, who knows, believed he had found one. Behind him loomed the wall of Eric and Michelle’s side return. Imagine, just imagine, she thought. If Michelle could see me now.

  One after another his hind feet gained the concrete step.

  “Go!” she said. The word cracked in her throat. Fascination had stolen her power to move or speak, and in a small corner of her head, a voice was telling her to watch what he did when given the freedom to choose. That it was the only way to find out what he wanted. But it was one thing to see him in the garden, the house was—no way. Just no way. There was nothing to rap on. There was nothing between them. “Out!” she shouted.

  He lifted his nose and continued to examine the air.

  Just a faint streak of mouse, long dead.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  For a moment he lingered on the threshold, half in her world, half out, as if he wanted to take the air and doing so inside was as invigorating for him as a walk in the park was for her. His body was busy in its stillness, twitching with diligence and industry, the workload of constant attention, checking and rechecking, a job to be performed every second and never completed. His snout tipped up. His nostrils widened and contracted; the black dome glistened, caviar speckles. The stainless-steel bin flashed a patch of white chest, like the rolling beam of a lighthouse. Then he swooped his muzzle to the floor and gave it a lick.

  From behind Mary, in Tangle Wood, a door clicked. She guessed the fabled son, whom Mrs. Farnworth had loved to talk about but apparently never saw, had dropped by to check on the house. The fox heard it too. Before she could say a word, he sprang round, his tail brushing the side of the units. She watched the light of his tag dim into night.

  It was a relief he had gone, but the relief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been there at all. It seemed to pace around her, like his smell. His intrusion was an affront to all that she had won when she had lost Mark. There she went again. She caught herself in the moment of weakness. Lost Mark! What she meant was, the fox threatened everything she had won when she had got rid of Mark: a place of her own, whose walls worked hard to keep the world out and her safe inside. But tonight she had lost that too, and no locking of doors would get it back. Now all the knots in the floorboards would scurry and jump like round-backed mice. He had barely stepped inside, but already the house felt alive with other lives.

  She leant outside to satisfy herself that the fox had gone, and her eye snagged on something in the place where he had stood. A discarded glove sprawled on her step, its fingers stiffened by heat into supplication. She picked it up and thumbed its palm. Even in this state she could tell that the leather had once been expensively soft. Embroidered across the wrist in elegant cursive was the phrase Town & Country. First boxers, now this. She felt confused. He had brought her a gardening glove, but there was no sign of its pair. He hadn’t carried the glove when she saw him next door, so where had he got it? And why just one? It took a moment for her to realize that this was a symbolic gift rather than a practical one. It was a token, the kind a knight pledges before going into battle. The glove was an oath of allegiance.

  He was in her service. And she was in his.

  * * *

  WHEN MARY WOKE that night, it was a sudden, definitive awakening that carried her straight to full and open-eyed consciousness. She was alert so quickly she had time to witness her own lids opening, the creak as her eyelashes unstuck, her feet swiveling to the floor. “You haven’t seen me in five months,” he’d said. At the time, she had registered Mark’s comment as a reminder of the duration of their separation. But now it seemed to disclose an extra, silent clause within—one in which he implied that while she hadn’t seen him, he had seen her. Over and over she replayed the conversation, but each time verified only the previous playing. She had no way of knowing if what she remembered hearing was what she had heard or what he really had said.

  Mary kept her perch on the edge of the bed. The duvet, thrown off in her sleep, frothed in a heap on top of the clothes on the floor. Sweat slicked up the side of her finger as she drew it between her breasts, and she kicked herself for wondering, yet again, if it was possible to incite an early menopause through lack of sexual activity.

  She went to the spare room to open the window there too. The white blind ran up like a flag, and she thought she saw something in the woods behind the garden, a sliver of light, a bright ellipse, like a beam or a giant eye turned partially in her direction and then borne away. She grabbed the cord of the lamp and flicked the switch on. Off. On. Off. On. Off. She waited for a reply, and when it didn’t come, she went back to bed and dreamt that the woods were full of search beams. Out of the light Mark came walking up her garden, into her kitchen. He kept walking at her until her back hit the units, a cupboard doorknob kneading her buttock. Then he took the hem of her dress in his hands, and, while it floated up, he edged his fingers inside the leg of her knickers like a blade opening a tin. With his new muscles, he lifted her up, the dark sky creeping into the house behind him. And then, just as she started to judder, Mark’s face began to disintegrate. First his eyes went, then a strip of his cheek, his chin. She panicked. He was vanishing in segments. Her body stilled, waiting, but she knew what was coming, and she tried to stop it, but there was no stopping it. This picture of Mark was rearranging itself, piece by piece, into the face of the fox.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Mary took the glove to the shed. It didn’t belong in the house, but she was disinclined to bin it. Tucked at the dark end of the garden, by the woods, the shed was a place she rarely visited. Occasionally, if Michelle was out, Eric would mow Mary’s grass at the same time he did theirs. But since Flora had been born, Michelle was always home. Mary opened the door, and the shed puffed out the same strain of musk that she had smelt last night. Had she carried it in on the glove, or was the smell already in the shed? Light stole in dustily on the far side. She moved her foot into a clear patch of floor between the teeth of a rusty saw and a lawn rake whose long handle was jammed diagonally from one slatted wall to the other. She put down the glove and found the torch on its peg, a relic of Mark’s thorough organization. The beam raked over the frames of lame deck chairs, a pyramid of empty paint cans, plant pots holding pieces of broken plant pots. Crouching, she aimed the torch at the panel where light crept in. A few slats had broken away. She swept the beam slowly round each wall, lighting up the raggedy windbreak, the wheelbarrow, two green eyes. Mary jumped and stumbled backward over the rake handle. There was a thud and a clatter from the back of the shed, and the bristly scrape of slats on his back.

  * * *

  FROM HIGH UP on his perch at the top of her lime, the pigeon looked down on Mary. He had found a spot of sun and so had she, sitting at the little table on the patio, the one the shop had said was a bistro table. She had slept so badly, just lying there, thinking about Mark, she couldn’t stop rubbing her eyes. New Mark. Mark MK II, she ought to call him. He bore so little resemblance to the one she knew. Her hand lifted and dropped the phone on the table. She had the urge to speak to someone, to talk through the things she couldn’t understand. Where was Mark living? And had anything else changed, beyond the muscles? These were the questions she had lain awake puzzling over, until she consoled herself that, if nothing else, they at least explained her dream.

  That thought brought to mind the fox.

  So far, he had not actually taken anything from her. In fact, when she analyzed the past couple of weeks, Mary had a distinct but unquantifiable feeling of gain. But if she tried to put her finger on what this comprised, she faltered. Certainly life felt busier. One by one over the past few years her friends had had children, and although at first Mary had visited them, her visits had petered out. Mark had organized their free time, and eventually the friends without babies had fallen away too. She thought about Saba and Charlotte, the people she had let slip. Mark had been gone for months, but she still hadn’t found the courage to contact anyone. She was too lonely f
or that. She dropped the phone. Yes, the gain was quite straightforward. At the end of her garden she had found a friend.

  She bit into a slice of toast, and the crumbs began to seep greasy blotches into her magazine, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t reading. The pages lay open before her, a decoy in case anyone looked over the fence from next door, a territory she now considered hostile. She could hear them all out there, fussing over shade and blankets and who had what and who didn’t. Just an ordinary Sunday morning. In and out of the house to fetch forgotten things. Bollocking George for never doing as he was told. She sat there listening to their griping while she raked over Eric and Michelle’s act of treachery, all the permutations of its meaning.

  She imagined Mark babysitting next door while she, Mary, spent Saturday night at home. Not implausible. He would be relaxing on the other side of her lounge wall, knowing she was there and without her knowing that he knew. She saw him walking past the house, looking in the window and seeing her not seeing him. He would love that. He would hear the TV and know she had nothing better to do. If she went to bed early, which sometimes happened even on Saturdays, he would listen for her feet alone climbing the stairs. In retrospect, her whole evening felt as if an invasion had taken place. How many times must she now sit in her lounge, wondering if the noise she could hear on the other side of the wall was really Eric and Michelle or Mark the babysitter? She scratched at the gnat bite on her arm. For all she knew, Mark was in their garden right now. She could smell their coffee. And on top of all this, the total insult of them thinking that he would make the better babysitter.