She’d never really given up something for anyone. You could do anything else, she told herself; you could break everything in half and scoop out the middle and put it back in. You could write a book or a play or cure infertility. She was eighteen and school was done and she could go to Cambridge or Oxford or London and study maths or English. She could travel. Except she had time for all that. And she had time for him.
If you don’t want to marry me you don’t have to, he said, a little sulky with it.
I do want to. OK?
Yeah. OK.
Her parents didn’t like to argue but, after she told them, she caught them studying her face in a sort of confusion. As if they would discover, looking hard enough, the trick of the matter, the deal she’d been forced into. As if she would slide a note across to them if they waited long enough and it would say: Help me.
At the wedding she turned and looked at their bemused faces. There was no one there but them and Harrow’s mother, who was dressed in red and crying. Nora waited for the day to be over and then it was.
She wished someone had told her what living with a man was like. She would not have changed tack but she thought, all the same, a degree of warning would have been good. The musky smell; the stains on the toilet he did not seem to see; the handfuls of tissue she pulled out from down the side of the bed. There were days she thought on what she’d given away. Days she tried to read two books at a time to catch up. Days she went into the city and handed out CVs and saw what little she could get with good marks at school and an attractive husband.
Even then there was never a consideration of going. The shape of him beneath her hands in the morning, the words he said when he was sleepy enough not to think about them, the way he remembered things she told him.
Well, except Harrow had died. Barely a year and she only nineteen, but there it was. She stood next to his mother at the hospital and thought she understood what they were saying except she was certain they were wrong. There wasn’t a blood clot in his lung that had, probably, been there since he was born and only now exploded. That was not what had happened. Harrow, she was certain, had died because he decided he loved her after all. He was an eight or a nine and she was a three or a four and the maths of that all added up to Harrow never having been hers to begin with.
At the funeral her parents told her she had to come home, had to grow a life out of whatever she had. They talked about universities and scholarships and jobs in the city and fish in the sea. They were the way she used to be, she saw that now: they were doers. She told them she would get around to it but right now she had to look after Harrow’s mother and she hoped they understood.
She was called Sarah and was older than most of the other parents. Nora thought her sort of beautiful; she looked, anyway, a bit like Harrow and held herself in the same unselfconscious way. She’d not seemed to have much comment to make on them marrying but she had, Nora thought, liked her.
Those days Sarah didn’t always seem to know where she was and sometimes she talked about Harrow as if he’d just gone out for a stroll or was running errands. Though these were not things Harrow would ever have done.
Nora did the cooking and cleaned and the rest of the time she read or sat in the sort of stupor that comes from losing the trick of sleeping. She didn’t try any more. There wasn’t any use trying once it had gone that way.
Nora knew what people said about her. She was up-and-down odd and now Harrow was gone she should move on into a life that more befitted a broad-hipped, glasses-wearing girl who looked – well, it was fine – old before her time.
Part of her always thought Harrow would come back. Maybe she thought it because they were particles entangled. Or because her want was surely strong enough to curse him awake. Or because she’d given up things and – a balancing – needed something in return.
In the end it was none of these things. It was only Sarah.
What are you doing? Nora asked when she found the fragments of tiny animal bones in the bin, tripped over piles of smooth stones in the front garden, tried to make sense of the small dirt offerings: in a cup in the airing cupboard, under her bed, in the bath.
Sarah would not answer her, went out into the garden with her mixing bowl.
When Harrow came back Nora decided she wasn’t going to overthink it. Only be a little grateful she hadn’t argued harder for a cremation the way she’d wanted to.
There was dirt all over him and he must have – the way they did in the films – dug himself out because there was blood on his hands and most of his nails were cut badly.
Sarah had brought him back, wished him out. Still – she put the kitchen table between her and him and, scouting around for something to wield, picked up the rolling pin and held it at chest height.
It’s all right, Nora said. She held her hand up to Harrow’s mouth. He pressed his lips to it hard, leaving a dirt-shaped kiss, and she saw that he was just as relieved as she was.
Let’s run a bath, she said. He’ll be fine when he’s clean.
She took off his suit in the bathroom and then poked and prodded till he climbed into the hot water and stood, arms swinging a little. He wouldn’t sit down so she got the sponge and scrubbed until he looked as clean as she could manage, then she towelled him down. He didn’t say anything, though he followed her motions with his eyes, touched her hands. She didn’t say anything either, only waited. Outside the bathroom she could hear Sarah waiting too.
There were signs she could have read off him that she did not see or chose to ignore: his breathing high and a little laboured, as if air didn’t work well in him any more; the odd smell of him: like concrete setting or the cold dredged up on riverbanks.
In the morning she turned in the bed and he was looking at her the way he used to across the classroom or as they passed in the hall when everything they were doing was a secret so he could save face. She felt the rise of him against her leg, held him in her fist and moved her hand. A little later, feeling the comfortable known of his hips against hers, she thought that his time away had lost them nothing, had given them only a perspective of loss. A knowledge of absence. Except, when he arched back his head, mouth open, and let out a one-syllabled word, there was a sharp pain in the roof of her mouth. She rolled out from under him. He lay back, one hand under his head, sweat on his forehead and neck.
Are you all right?
She put a hand over her lips, eyes watering, probed the roof of her mouth with her tongue, felt the pulse of ulcers gathering in rings.
What is it?
It was clear now: again the skid of hurt against her teeth at his words. She rocked back off the bed, one hand warding him away, though he followed, dog-like, reaching out. She caught the door in her fist, shut it between them. His voice, coming muffled through the wood, burnt her mouth and eyes.
What is it? Sarah said, coming down the hallway.
Nora watched, clenching her teeth, as the force of Harrow’s muffled words started to hit Sarah’s face.
The impact of Harrow’s language on Sarah seemed much worse than it was on her – a single syllable eliciting vomiting, sentences starting nosebleeds – so Nora took Harrow to the garage and sat with the door pulled closed.
He wrote: I don’t want to.
She told him she didn’t care. Turned the light out so he couldn’t see what was happening to her. Gripped him by the wrist and told him what to do.
They tried out all the letters one by one, cycling through the alphabet twice until she dug her nails hard into his palms and then he was quiet. They worked through nouns, verbs, adjectives. She made him try out adverbs, pronouns and prepositions. She tested herself by waiting for pain, noting down the area and velocity at which it came. When a word seemed to elicit less pain or appear in an area which seemed less extreme (for example her arms or legs as opposed to her face or torso) she squeezed his hand twice to make him repe
at it. Mostly the word repeated would bring on pain in a different area or of a different type and then they would carry on. If the word caused in any way a similar reaction she noted it down.
At first the word ‘partial’ seemed to have a reaction less extreme than others. This was later proved to be otherwise. At first the phrase ‘wanted scrabble she’ appeared to elicit pain after a longer than normal waiting period. This too turned out to be incorrect.
But if anyone could fix him it was her.
She caught the neighbour’s rabbit on one of its escape trips and brought it down in her arms into the garage.
He wrote: That’s enough. I don’t need to speak.
She held the rabbit, not wriggling, only sniffing a little, in her arms. Come on, she said.
He wrote: Fuck you backwards with a broomstick.
She told him to go through his consonants the way they’d done before and she would tell him when to stop. She sat numbly as he did it, holding the rabbit. It fought her. She could feel his words on its body.
Later she went round with the rabbit in a plastic bag, told them she’d found it in the garden.
At the end of the week they caught him trying to jemmy the window with a slat broken off his bed. Sarah went down quickly under the onslaught he unleashed against them – unconnected words, curses, quotes Nora recognised from films, the names of people they’d gone to school with. He only stopped when Nora caught, with her finger, the quick trickle of blood from her own nostril, raised her hand to show him.
Most days, when she woke, she could feel it was too late anyway; his words were in her system like a sickness. She could feel the spiky pressure of letters against her gut, the sticks of Ks and Ts and Ls on her insides. She could hear Sarah coughing as if something, a spark plug or wire, had come loose in her. They were not sleeping in the same bed because – though he never had before – he’d started talking in his sleep.
One morning she made a cup of tea, went and opened the door to the sitting room. He was asleep on the sofa. She tightened her stomach in case of an involuntary syllable, a slipped-out sentence. Asleep he looked as if he were an animal, something quiet and wondering, something beautifully thoughtless. She bent to wake him the way she always used to, a slipped tongue in his ear, but, at his eyes flickering, she panicked, dropped the cup of tea, clapped a hand across his mouth to silence whatever might be coming.
She saw the look in his eyes: reproachful, angry. Tried to kiss it away, wiping the hot tea off him with her hands and mouth, felt only that look trained on her while she did.
The house was now perpetually twilight; all the curtains drawn so nobody would see what had come back to them. She and Harrow spent days on the sofa, pen and paper between them, writing long notes to one another, legs tangled beneath the blanket. Once he wrote: Tell me about the particles. Slipped a hand beneath the edge of her dressing gown. Wrote: How does this feel? What does this feel like?
She could hear – pretended not to and watched him doing the same – Sarah hacking something up in the bathroom.
Most days were not like that. I’m trapped. He wrote: I’m going fucking mad. She ordered him television box sets; ordered him a running machine which he stood and watched her putting together and then refused to use; ordered him books and exotic food and audio tapes.
Let me go out, he wrote, sat across the kitchen table from her. I’ll wear a hood. Just for an hour. Just for a moment. Nobody will notice. She shook her head.
She sat and watched him wolfing, restless, about the sitting room. The floor was covered in the spread of half-finished jigsaws, half-played games of Monopoly and Cluedo. Now and then a television programme would be turned on but it only ever lasted a moment before the channel was changed. She watched him doing press-ups on the sitting-room floor or pulling himself up by the lintel of a door and, though she had seen this before, he seemed to do it with a new ease, barely breaking a sweat.
It took another month for the words he wrote to become infected too. Sarah was making a concerted effort to spend time with him, though more and more she looked as if she were emptying out of her body, thinning away to nothing. Nora would leave them alone in the kitchen, listen to the strange tick-over of their conversation: the scratch of Harrow’s pen on the paper, the slow answers Sarah gave. (Harrow asked things on the page he would never have asked, or thought to ask, when he was verbal.) She listened to the pauses between his questions and Sarah’s answers. At one point she could hear him writing for a long time, the fast sound of the words. She could hear it still as she made three cups of tea, carried them in on a tray. There were red blisters coming up on Sarah’s arms, on her chest and face. Harrow had not noticed, was writing and writing with a sort of furious intent, nose almost touching the page. Nora tore it away from him and, for a second, he wrote on the table, the letters etched in.
She put Sarah to bed and then went round the house finding all the scattered pages of his words and pushed them into the bin bag. She tried not to see them, those dense, tight little letters against the sick white of the paper; but by the time she was done, she’d caught sight of enough half-words that she had to rest against the corridor wall, breathing hard.
She took the pages out into the garden. Crossed the back field and balled them up and set fire to them. She stood there till it was done. Stood and wondered if the ash would destroy the crop when it grew. The cold air burnt the rash the pages had raised on her arms and chest.
It doesn’t matter, she told him when she went back in. He was still sat at the kitchen table. She picked up the pen and put it in the bin, watched his eyes following her. It doesn’t matter. She pressed her nose against the solid bone of his face.
Doesn’t it?
She bent double. Straightened with difficulty to look at him. He looked back as if she were a creature he’d never seen before.
They spent the rest of the day at the table devising a system of signs. They came up with hand motions for all the words he cared most about. When they were done he seemed changed, smiling at her. He pointed at himself with one finger, jabbed the finger into the O of his other fist, then pointed at her.
She took off her clothes, laughed as he jerked his hands around, forming signs they hadn’t discovered yet, commenting. The impact of his language on her over the weeks was clear. She’d never been bony before but she almost was now, the press of ribs more bruise than anything else, the stretch of cheekbone. She took his clothes off, looked for a change on him. He was not loosening the way she’d thought he might. Instead he seemed bigger, stronger; the muscles defined on his chest. She was – no time to stop the feeling – afraid of him. The mass of him: his hands were the size of books flattened open.
He could have stopped her; he could have done anything he wanted. He only watched with wide, brown eyes; let her ball a sock into his mouth, fasten his wrists to the chair with the handcuffs he’d bought her. She pressed her knees into either side of his body as if she could burrow on in if she tried hard enough. She wanted this to mean: nothing has changed. She wanted this to mean: there are signs for everything we can think of and it’s not a language anyone else needs to know.
When she was done she pulled the sock out so she could press her mouth to his. Sat straight to look down at him and, when he smiled, felt the wordless expression rot into her insides, sharp explosions of pain in her mouth and on her hands and face and chest.
She kicked backwards, pressed her knuckles eye-ways so she could not see him. On the floor she fell over the scattered remains of his livings: half-full teacups, board games he’d been playing against himself.
I don’t want, he said –
Beneath her foot a plate was broken.
– to hurt you. Each word was an attack and before each word she could feel the thought of it – like an echo preceding its sound.
In the corridor on the way to their room his words brought her down and she
went on hands and knees. At the bedroom she pushed the door closed, put her weight against it and put her hands over her ears. She could hear the churn of his brain, the guttering end of half-formed thoughts. Most of them were roars that deafened everything else out of her.
She stuffed the gap at the bottom of the door with T-shirts, played music loud. It did not matter. It did not matter that she could not hear if he spoke, that she’d burnt every fragment of his writing: his thoughts were loud enough to blister, to inch belly-ways and shard outwards.
She’d explained to herself before and – though the words didn’t taste as good and fresh as they had that first time – did it again now: you could do anything. There was a coil of rope in the wardrobe. The handcuffs were still in the sitting room; she would have to do without. At the last moment, the click of his thoughts turning in her, she snapped two rungs off a chair, held them together: a wobbly cross. She would cover her bases. There were lines from the Qur’an she’d learnt once; stray phrases from the Torah and the Old Testament that she mouthed over, tried to hold onto.
She closed her eyes and took the hallway blind, not touching the walls. There was the smell – though she had not noticed it before – of something turning bad. She could feel the dull pulse of his living, a sucking heat. Expected, every moment, to come upon a mass of muscle, a mouth poised open. In the bathroom she emptied the cabinet of sleeping pills.
Best British Short Stories 2017 Page 17
