How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  When he shifted his weight, she glimpsed the remains of an old mattress beneath him. “What is it?” she said. Something was wrong to make him stand so suddenly. She peered through the gaps in the leaves and saw a pigeon labor on a skinny branch, shaking out each wing as if it was wriggling into a gray suit jacket. It could have been the flapping that disturbed him or the heavy clatter of the building site on Shepherds Bridge Walk.

  He returned to the mattress and pressed himself deeper into it. All four ears were pricked. Human male voices drifted downwind.

  She was so close to him, she could feel every muscle prepare itself in continuous decision. She thought she heard Mark, but she knew this was just her fear searching for its worst form, because she could see only one human. Through the gaps in the leaves, she pieced together fragments of a male standing with his back to them, a garden length away. In their den, they kept each other updated through the tension of their bodies. The male was stepping backward. Mary saw a waist, an arm. Black vest. One hand. Black gloved. He was talking, but she could not pick out words. She dared not move. Her mouth opened, and the air entered silently. The man kneeled. A bald head came into view. He looked over his shoulder, and she caught the word “activity.” If he turned, he would see her eyes. She killed her headlamps.

  The voices drifted away. Her fox’s breath slowed through the mattress, through her legs against his flank. When she next looked, his eyes were a thin gleam, his tail pegged beneath his snout. It had been a long night. There in the warm, with the humming dimming, she laid her head on his shoulder and slept.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She woke to find herself alone in the den. Somehow he had levered his body free, wriggled from beneath her, and replaced her head on the mattress while she slept. She had played this thing all wrong. It was impossible to live together in his world. How she wished she had tried to take him into hers. Now she would have to go home and pretend sympathy to her neighbors and their fox catcher.

  As Mary climbed into her garden, she looked up at her house and saw that the lounge sash was slightly raised, which was not how she remembered leaving it. Most of the window shone green and leaf-dappled, while a lower strip divulged the discarded mail that fluttered on her table. She walked slowly up her lawn listening to the music grow louder. At the edge of the patio, coffee rose in her lung. The scent poured from the house through the open door.

  Mary was still staring at the space where the door should have been when Mark stepped into the kitchen from the hall. He was wearing a concerned expression, as if he had come to investigate a mysterious noise, as if her appearance here were the mystery, and his a function of normal household security. When he saw her, his inquiring look cracked into a smile. “You’re safe!” he said, moving toward her. “Thank God! Where the hell have you been?”

  It was the wrong question. The wrong person asking the question. Mark was in her house, with the back door open—because that was how he got in? Or because he knew that was the way she would come home? He leant into the frame, a slab of tan forearm planked against the wood. Mark was the doorway now, eyeing her as if his name was still on the mortgage. She let the surprise of seeing him settle in her stomach. Maybe this was how spiders felt when they came home to find company waiting in the web.

  “I went for a walk. In the woods,” she said, in a voice she hoped would disguise her unease. When she was small, her mother liked to scare her with a story about an old school friend who had watched helpless while an intruder fatally stabbed her husband. Afterward, the killer turned to the woman. Fearing for her own life, she said the one thing that came into her head and offered him a cup of tea. It was the brilliant, unfazed ordinariness that disarmed him. They drank it together while they waited for the police.

  “Have you been here long?” she asked, meaning to defuse his threat by submitting to the version of normality he was trying so hard to create.

  Mark opened his arms and pulled her toward him. “You had me worried,” he said into her hair. “Empty house, the door not double-locked…”

  Mary heard the sole of her shoe prevaricate on the lino with a sticky stammer. Was it safer outside or in?

  “… The lights blown and the oven clock flashing as if the power had been cut,” Mark was saying. “You hadn’t brushed your teeth. House reeking something rotten…” Six months apart, in which she had traveled as far from him as she could. She had bought him out. Wanted nothing except the chance to recover from him in solitude. Their relationship, such a strong arm around her. But wherever she went, he was there too, stalking her periphery. And now he was actually in her house, had been the one to invite her in, and even though she knew what he was doing, even though she recognized his old trick of deploying consideration as a means of control, she asked in the most casual voice she could find, “What brings you here?”

  “Eric. Called me this morning,” Mark said as his biceps wrapped her in a hard jersey clench. “Said he couldn’t get hold of you on the phone. No answer at the door.”

  Mary tried to find daylight, but by squirming she managed only to nose further into Mark’s chest. She opened her mouth to breathe, and his T-shirt furred on her lip with the movement of his muscles: he was roughly forking through her hair. As he worked, her view enlarged to a sliver of light between his sleeve and his ribs, through which she saw that the oven clock had been reset to 14:31. His hand picked over her head, flicking leaves with a dry crackle onto the patio behind her. The fumes of sandalwood cologne were so stifling she assumed they rose from both their bodies. “What have you put in your hair?” he asked. “It stinks. Some sort of organic mask?”

  “What do you mean, Eric called?” she said, trying to push herself free of his chest. “Why would Eric call you?” She tried to liberate a second nostril, but his shoulder flexed against her skull and involuntarily her hand found his back. His body felt different, but something about the structure of the embrace, the clamp of his chin on her scalp, the rhythm of his breath against the movement of his fingers, treading small steps along their old path down her spine, made her feel as if she had returned from the woods to a different time—about a year and a half ago—when Mark, unraveling at her refusal to commit, had begun to grow angry. She thought of New Year’s Day. It was such a commonplace to say that you had made someone angry. But she didn’t mean she’d got to him that once. For months she had worked away at calm and steady Mark until she had altered him, turned him into something he wasn’t. And he had done the same to her, made her weak and defensive and desperate with his relentless cornering of her. They were both to blame, she thought, lost within his dark embrace. They worked on each other’s tender spots like acid.

  She pushed him hard in the chest.

  “Hey, easy! What’s the matter?” he said, regaining his footing. Somehow he had managed to hold on to her shoulders, and he gripped them more firmly. “What happened was Eric phoned. He was looking for you, to talk about last night. He said he knocked several times. Then he asked me to try. That was about eleven. I’ve been waiting for”—he glanced at the oven—“three hours. What am I thinking? You must be thirsty,” he said, releasing her.

  For the first time, perhaps because it had started to spin, she registered the washing machine, its whir of apple-green cotton.

  In spring, after Mark moved out, Mary had rearranged all the cupboards. But now she saw that the first door he opened was the right door. In his brief occupation of her kitchen, he appeared to have rehabituated himself. He withdrew her favorite mug, the one they had bought from a potter in Crete, spun the stove knob to off, and poured out coffee. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, handing her the cup. “I opened a few windows. It smelt weird in here. Kind of pungent.”

  She kept her bag on her shoulder and her nose inside the mug, staring at the white crescent of its base, hoping to find an answer. But the cup was just another burrow that didn’t go far enough. “Eric?” she said, and he frowned at her, leaning back against the oven with one foot cross
ed over the other in the old way. “What did he say about last night?”

  He licked his finger and rubbed at a coffee ring on the worktop. “That a fox entered their house and took Flora. You found her. Michelle was pretty hardcore.”

  “He said a fox took her?” she asked. “Definitely? I mean, not did he definitely say it, but is that what he definitely thought happened? Because I said I saw one go into their garden, but I don’t think it could have taken Flora.” He could. She knew he could. But she wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Tiredness washed over her. She let her eyes close in turns, watching Mark through the open one, certain he knew more than he was saying. She swallowed the last of the coffee, and the china mooned her own face back at her.

  Mark opened his mouth and shut it again, as he did when he was thinking carefully. Then he said, “I’m going to run you a bath. Get you a bit more human. After your bath, I’ll explain everything.”

  * * *

  THROUGH THE CEILING she heard the plug clang into place, water clatter on the bottom of the tub, and then quiet to a steady gush. Sweet, calming rose floated into the kitchen: her favorite oil. Quietly Mary followed the scent to the hall, past Mark’s rucksack, hung on the newel post where it used to hang, up the stairs. From the landing, she eyed a slice of Mark’s back through the doorway. He was leaning into the bath, swishing the water. A towel lay folded on the stool. Next to it a flame wobbled in a jar. She had seen the candle before, but it took a minute to place it. Three Christmases ago, he had given it to her in her stocking, and she had buried it in her bedside drawer.

  He was still leaning over the bath, crooning to the music. Swirls of steam rose from the water, and his birthmark glimmered slickly. It seemed to suggest itself as something to aim for. Because, after all, she had a legal right to defend her property against intruders. Calling the police was out of the question; Michelle would see the patrol car, and she, Mary, would end the day as a baby snatcher. She pictured the heavy base of the lamp in the spare room. The bathroom clouded with vapor. Moisture speckled the ceiling where the paint had begun to blister and where a pair of tiny folded wings shadowed the base of the porcelain light. God knows how a moth had got in there, because the shade was stuck flush to the ceiling. He must have flown to the light, stolen in, and found no exit.

  “How did you get inside?” she asked.

  “Spare key,” Mark said, over his shoulder. By now he would be flopped over the edge of the bath. “I see you keep the back-door key in the little pot still.”

  “What?”

  “The pot on the draining board.”

  “What? You used your old key?”

  “Yes.” He sounded surprised. “You didn’t change the locks.”

  “I didn’t know I needed to,” she snapped.

  “It was an emergency, Mary,” he said. “I had no choice.”

  “Emergency!” she scoffed. “For who? Well, come on, if it was an emergency, what did Eric say? What danger am I in?”

  “Bath first, Mary. You need to get back to some kind of…” He frowned. “Normality, I suppose. Then tackle the … tricky things.” He fussed at an imaginary leaf in her hair, took in her muddy tracksuit trousers, the thick rim of dust around her ankles. “You look a state. Beautiful. Extremely sexy. But a total mess. It’s going to be OK, you know. I’m going to make everything all right.” He moved toward her, and his hands closed lightly over her elbows, his thumbs rubbing her arms. “Try to remember how we were. When things were good. Trust me. Like you used to trust me.”

  He tugged at the hem of one sleeve, and the neckline of her top scooped her shoulder. She had no memory of dressing, but now she registered the absence of a bra strap. He bent her arm upward, and she watched her own hand offer a limp wave. “It’s OK. I can do this,” she said. He was holding her elbow and maneuvering it back up inside her sleeve to the armhole and then inside the body of her top, and she was surprised to find his look of concentration endearing, like a parent patiently undressing a child.

  “There we go,” he said, waggling the empty sleeve. “Not too difficult, was it? Oh, Mary! Your arm!” He ran his fingers along the scratches and fine crusts of blood. “They’re not deep,” he said, more to himself than to her. “How did you get them? You’re absolutely covered.” He touched her cheek, and she felt a sudden sting.

  “I told you. I went for a walk in the woods,” she said.

  “Jesus.” He stepped back and rubbed his face vigorously with his hands. “All right. The bath will help,” he said, returning to address the other sleeve. “It will help everything.” Soon her second arm hung down inside her top, pulling it across her chest like a straitjacket.

  “I can manage from here,” she said.

  “It’s OK. I’m not looking.” He held her gaze to prove it.

  She trawled his warm blue eyes, not glancing away even when his hands on the hem of her top began to lift. She pulled in her stomach. He was going to lift it all the way, wasn’t he? She kept the question out of her eyes, and his face looked back oddly serious and immobile, apart from when his knuckle bumped her nipple, and then he smiled.

  The top hung around her neck like a scarf. His hands clung to the fabric; his wrists rested on the way-post of her collarbone.

  “It’s OK. I’ve got this,” she said, trying to take the top from him.

  “I told you. I’m not looking.”

  Her whole body trembled on the line of its decision. She did want to get in the bath. She did want to be taken care of. For a short while. She did want everything to be OK, to be the acknowledged bystander of an unexplained crime, so she would not have to hide from her neighbors and herself like a guilty thing. She did want to feel another warm body close. Could she take what she wanted and leave the rest? The remnants of Mark’s power still, slightly, fascinated her. Partly, she tried to persuade herself, because she wanted to discover how far she had strengthened too. Could she resist him? She looked at the vapor glistening in tiny beads on the beginning of his stubble. The candle, scent, music … In a few hours, he had created an impeccable home within her home. It resembled a historical reenactment, in which every detail was exact, and the exactness was precisely what betrayed the artifice.

  Mary was thinking all this through, thinking how to play her part in this drama, when Mark flipped the top over her head so that she was naked from the waist up, watching him stare at her breasts.

  “I’m going to leave you to have your bath,” he said.

  * * *

  STEAM HUNG LOW as she stepped onto the landing, hair dripping down her back. Now she had left the safety of the locked bathroom, she had the feeling that Mark had turned the house into a trap, and she was his quarry. She pulled the towel tightly around her chest. He had changed the music. It was Amy Winehouse now. They’d listened to her the night they met. Maybe Mark was running through the greatest hits of their shared life. He was trying to lull her with comforts and care into accepting him back, with his foibles and his excessive domesticity, his compulsive everything has its place and your place is my place. How quickly all those small controls were reasserting themselves. It was those, rather than the occasional explosions, that had most cowed her: the obsessive scheduling of their social life, which was in practice an intolerance of any independent friendship, the advice about what she could and couldn’t eat, screwing lids and windows too tight so she had to ask him (weakly) to open them. She gasped for air, but all she could taste out here on the stair was rose. The scent tucked over her drowsiness, made her woozy. Somehow she had to keep her brain sharp.

  There was no sound of Mark. She would dress, then find him.

  In her bedroom, she made for the wardrobe.

  “Knock, knock.” Mark was already in the room when he said it. “I brought you this.” He set a glass on the bedside table and left. The goblet was chilled and clouded, which made her question how long it took to cool a bottle of wine. How much planning had gone into this? The bowl wobbled heavily to her lips as she thumbed
the hangers. She knew the effect she intended—self-possessed, authoritative—but not the exact piece of clothing. She took another sip and reached for the stripy shirtdress.

  “I used to love you in that,” he murmured.

  His mouth was so close to her ear, the movement of his lips touched her as pure heat. She glanced down and saw his leg locked into a bend, taking the strain of his effort to lower his body to her height. His tanned shin gleamed along the bone to his ankle.

  “You forgot to dry your back,” he said, wiping away a droplet with a finger slipped inside the towel. She was still holding the sleeve of the shirtdress as the finger inched along her back, then dipped under her arm. It moved as if on cruise control, maintaining its speed despite the ascent even as it climbed her breast. When it reached the peak, it slid down and tapped three times on her nipple. “Can I come in?” Mark said in a funny voice.

  She let go of the dress and made a noise that was not a word. His mouth was on the back of her neck. With her free hand, she tried to bolster the place where the towel was fastened, but his hand caught hers first, and the towel slid down. It clung to the curve of her bottom till he retracted his hips to give it free passage to the floor. It had been such a long time.

  She heard him spit and lick, then a hand reached round, and he began to soak her left nipple, his saliva shining down her stomach like a snail’s trail, until his signet ring snagged on the fringe of her pubic hair. She turned into him, reaching for a body to hide inside, wanting him to be where she could see him, but he gripped her wrists and took a step back. “Relax,” he soothed her. “You’re going to enjoy this.”

  He bent her arms behind her back and held them there, as if his hands were cuffs. Dream on, Mark. Don’t you know it’s the other way round, and as soon as I’m done, you’re out of here. She watched the top of his head descend. It bobbed around her belly button while his tongue fought its way through the overgrowth of her bikini line. She had not kept on top of things, and a sort of rewilding had gone on. She had slept for a hundred years, and he was scything through the forest of thorns. He freed her wrists, and his hands slid down to her hips.