The Harpy

by Megan Hunter

  But when he left, I felt it rush through every part of my body. I threw myself on the closed door as though it was his chest, hitting the wood again and again until my hands ached. I expected Jake to come back upstairs, but I heard nothing. I expected that I would pass out on the floor, but at some point I must have crawled back into bed, and fallen asleep.

  ~

  Sometimes, as a child, I would get the book out just to look at the harpies, to trace the way the wings grew out of their backs, easy extensions of their shoulders, lifting into the air.

  I wanted to know why their faces were like that: sunken, creased by hate. I wanted to ask my mother more questions, but the words dried in my mouth, sat sour under my tongue, unspoken.

  ~

  10

  The rest of the weekend passed in a haze of routine. I was struck by how easy it was to barely speak to Jake, let alone touch him. Sunday was slow, its minutes thick and draining, the children grumpy and unsettled by its end. But by Monday something had changed. We were quicker in our movements, it seemed, as though the backing track of our lives had been moved up tempo, into some other realm, a fast-forward reality.

  The memory of Saturday night was still strong, raising my stomach as I spooned coffee into a glass jug, infusing the grounds with its flavour. I poured hot water from the kettle, seeing again the way Jake had looked at me, for a second, as though he had never seen me before. In that moment, we were strangers again. We had not slept beside each other, over and over, thousands of times. He had not watched me give birth to his children.

  The Jake of Saturday was, it seemed, an entirely different man to the one who sat at the kitchen table in the Monday sun, his hair filled with light, flattened on one side from the sofa bed. He was making silly faces at the boys, getting Ted to eat an extra three bites of cereal. Paddy found him hilarious, was howling, rocking back and forth on his chair until Jake switched to serious mode, told him to stop rocking, to sit up straight.

  I had always observed this as a kind of wonder: the way Jake knew how to pretend to be normal in front of the children. It was something my parents never managed; every dispute was aired completely openly, as though they had never been told that this was bad for children. As I grew up, I used to wonder whether, in fact, they had some liberal idea that children should be exposed to everything, for the strengthening of their minds or souls. Later on, I realized that there was no theory or plan at all: that was just the way they were.

  There were some similarities between then and now, some taste of the past in the air. I remembered how energetic my parents often were, after an argument. How our house seemed to be on its own trajectory, moving more quickly than the rest of the planet, making me wonder how we were all still attached to the ground.

  I’d always suspected that, after they made up, the arguments disappeared from their minds, dissolved as though they’d never taken place. But for me, the fights came back constantly: under doorways, through the paper of books I read, a weakening smell. To be around their aggression was one thing, but to not be around it was worse: jumping at noises, forever having strange fears, of fairground rides, loud building work, dogs.

  Today, for us, there was no routine farewell, no kiss goodbye. Even Jake, the expert in normality, couldn’t manage it. He waved instead, while turning around, no eye contact. From the door, I watched him take off with the boys, his hand wrapped around the school bags they refused to carry, his voice marshalling them to cross the road. He was wearing a thick coat, a knitted hat. Under his coat, a good jumper his mother had given him. Under that, a cotton shirt: off-white, blue stripes. Under that, I knew, was the scratch: even paler now, peach-coloured, the skin already beginning to close over it, to regrow.

  Jake would have known the proper terms for the healing: he could name it exactly. He had a scientific mind, was a biologist by profession; he studied bees, would bring home the tiniest fragments of his work, facts dangled on sticks, things I could understand. Apparently, he told me once, the name Queen Bee is misleading: she doesn’t control the hive, her sole function is to serve as the reproducer. But over this, she has almost perfect control.

  ~

  At school, the teachers asked why I always drew her: the woman with wings, her hair long, her belly distended. Is she a bird, they asked me? Is she a witch? I shook my head, refused to tell them anything.

  I never shared her with my friends, never named her in our games. I kept her inside me, at the edges of my vision, moving in and out of sight.

  ~

  11

  After they left, I felt my mind fall, its scattered attentions sinking into the watchfulness of empty rooms. It was in this house that I first started working from home, as in living from home, relocating my entire existence to these rented walls. I had lived in this town for most of my life – only leaving to go to university in its similarly privileged twin – and had never managed to own a piece of it. But here, in this house, I belonged, if only for a fixed term. Wasn’t life temporary, anyway, I asked myself; wasn’t permanence a fantasy? But I couldn’t help but want it: a mirage of safety, the pretence that four walls could keep your life, could hold you present on the earth.

  We were, in our earlier years, cavalier about owning a house, or too poor, or too afraid – depending on which story we told – until it was no longer possible. Jake’s career progression had been modest, mine had been in reverse, and meanwhile the prices in our area had risen quickly, silently, like mould along the inside of a neglected jar. The only people who could buy here now were bankers, corporate lawyers, high-level employees of multinational pharmaceutical companies, people whose values seemed somehow at odds with their aesthetics, their Edwardian stained glass, wooden bookshelves filled with books from their days at university.

  In these houses, most of the women stayed at home; their husbands were busy enough that they wanted a housekeeper, a nanny, a constant, hovering presence. The woman – the wife – could be all of these things, and she could keep her hand in, she could join the PTA.

  I don’t know why I thought I was any different; I was surely the same, with less money. Today, as on every other work day, I was writing copy: a manual for an industrial gluing device. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer, imagined I would write something more meaningful than the sentence I had perfected today: To avoid accidents lay the cables so that they will not cause any risk of stumbling. But perhaps I could never have written anything as useful as this, anything that would prevent a death.

  Pre-children, I found work at a university press, still within touching distance of intellectual life, of the PhD I had once abandoned. I moved between lines of dense, taut prose, seizing mistakes, making it perfect. I even stayed there when I had Paddy, submitting cringing apologies for every illness he had, every forced day off. I was surrounded by male colleagues working late, picking up speed, their sweat permeating the small office. Ambition was here, somewhere, I knew. But when I went freelance – after Ted was born, to be more available for the children – I was hired by whoever would have me: hotel brochures, private school prospectuses, company training materials. I told myself that I was seeing the world, that I was writing the world. Maybe I was.

  But today I couldn’t concentrate. I walked in and out of rooms without purpose, looking out of windows, trying to find something to see. I watched a mother crossing the road with her children, all colour drawn from her face into the street around her, the houses, her children’s wide faces and bright clothes. As they moved across the street, she put her body in front, before theirs, the first thing that would be hit.

  In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea, tried to drink it before it was cool enough, felt the scorch on the end of my tongue. I couldn’t stop thinking of Vanessa: her quick glances, her self-possession, the way I’d seen her smiling at Jake. Like a son, I used to think. My stomach turned. I closed my eyes, tried to slow my breathing, but all I could see was the shape of Jake in the dark, the quickness of my movement towards him, th
e spectral outline of his scratch: like a drawn-on mouth, trying to speak.

  12

  Jake was late that night, and I knew it wasn’t the trains. I had checked them online while the boys were in the bath, crouched on the loft stairs, the light from my phone a cool comfort in the twilight. My thumb streamed through the arrivals: every single one had a green tick beside it, running on time. These were just facts, I reminded myself, pieces of information: they weren’t personal.

  There was no text. There was nothing from him, the expectant blankness of my phone reminding me of evenings – early on – when I had waited for him to reply. The first days of mobiles, the elegant, longhand notification: 1 Message Received. I would leave the phone in my room and go for baths for two or three hours, putting off the moment when I had to return to the screen. Jake and I were practically children when we met, I used to tell people. We were twenty, idealists, babies intent on saving the world. We didn’t know what we were doing.

  I got the boys out of the bath, lifting each of them high, rubbing their hair, pretending to be some kind of robot – the drying robot! – blowing raspberries in their necks. They went along with it, laughed at me, leaned back their heads and let me do it. Ted snuggled in my armpit after, wriggled with delight. But as Paddy brushed his teeth I saw him watching me, his eyes tipping down, something like suspicion making them narrow, his mouth full of toothpaste foam. He watched as I flipped the plug up, as I grabbed the bath mat, shaking it vigorously, scooped dirty socks from the floor with one hand while guiding the toothbrush back in Ted’s mouth with the other.

  Are you okay, Mummy?

  For their sake, I tried to calm down. Surely there were plenty of explanations for lateness; accident, illness, mechanical failure. Terrorist attack. Or: Jake could have decided to go for a drink with a colleague. He had done that before. I watched a wave of my own ignorance gathering at the edge of my thoughts, low, like tsunamis seemed to be from a distance, threatening to overtake everything.

  How, I wondered, had I believed him so many times, barely even listened, in fact, to his excuses? Often, I knew, I was relieved when he didn’t come home. After a day of the children’s bodies soaking into me, I wanted nothing more than quiet, bathwater, my own skin. I had always needed a lot of time alone; in this way, you could say I was unsuited to marriage from the start. But we were happy, for a long time: I knew we were. There were pictures of us from the day we got engaged, standing at the top of a hill. Our faces were so young they seemed to blend into the sky. We were squinting, disappearing, our grins almost erased by the sun.

  As soon as Ted was asleep I gripped the padded bed rail, swung my legs over his heavy body. I went into the bathroom, stood in front of the full-length mirror. I could barely see myself; I pulled down the blinds, switched on the light. My dress was damp under my arms and lightly stained with the oil I had fried for dinner. My mascara was smudged across my cheek. I had to ask the question, at last: how did I compare? I knew what she looked like; this was not the question. I even knew what she smelled like; I had smelled it on Jake a few times, I realized now. Shower gel, laundry detergent. Something else, from deep inside her.

  Vanessa. I gripped the sink, retched into the plughole. Horrifying, how plugholes are, when you look closely. Some kind of slime, a greenness, reaching. I knew it would never go away, no matter how many chemicals I poured in.

  Just sex.

  I gagged again, spitting into the sink, wiping my mouth. At that moment, I found it hard to envisage them – Jake and Vanessa, Vanessa and Jake – in anything other than the most pornographic set-ups. I found it almost impossible to see their faces. I could only, if I tried hard, see a graphic close-up of their sexual organs, one inserted into the other, a basic mechanism, the simplest of actions. Something had happened to my imagination: it had become X-rated, an adventure in the furthest corners of the Internet, a place where porn adverts stacked like origami paper, a hundred edges framing the place where a penis entered a woman’s mouth and left it, over and over to eternity.

  He was not back by ten. I had drunk half a bottle of wine by then, a strong red that tasted more bitter the more I drank. I had taken off my stained dress, found something black and shiny in the back of the wardrobe instead, pulling cloth in fists from the hangers, throwing T-shirts and skirts on the floor. I knew that, according to movie logic, I should have been emptying Jake’s wardrobe, not my own. But that didn’t appeal: I didn’t want to touch any of his things. I didn’t want to smell her again.

  The top note – the perfumed, manufactured part, shampoo, maybe, or deodorant – had an earthy smell, more like a man’s perfume, or something unisex. Something that suggested whisky and cigars and steaming pools of volcanic water plunged into after chopping logs. A man’s good sweat on a tartan shirt, rubbed with fragrant leaves. A camping holiday, without kids. I could see her on this holiday, not me. I saw the way she would sit in the doorway of the tent, with some elegant copy of a classic novel, her legs crossed at the ankle. She would flick her hair, laugh as Jake said something. Under her skirt, under her leggings, she would be as tight as the day she was born. I saw Jake whispering in her ear, telling her how sweet she was, how good she tasted, how much better than me . . .

  I had to move to stop myself thinking, had to start doing something. I put a load of washing on, even though there was nowhere to hang it, even though the house was already draped with clothes, filled with their dampness, not warm enough in the larger rooms, even with the heating on. I should make a fire, I thought, but I didn’t know how. Jake had always done it. I swept up instead, moving quickly around the rooms in my short black dress, a diamanté embellishment between my breasts. I used to wear the dress to formal halls at Jake’s old college, a cocktail dress, very flattering, skimming over my hips. Now it was pulled too high by some rearrangement of my flesh, the caesarean surgeon’s knife, the trainee who had been learning how to cut. My breasts loomed out of the deep neckline, my full-cup bra visible. If I lowered my neck, I could bury my head in my own flesh. I wondered, briefly, if I could suffocate myself like this, if I pushed down for long enough, if I really made an effort.

  I swept and swept, then got down on my hands and knees to scrub the dirty patches. Our kitchen floor was the most neglected part of our house, mopping often delayed by the busyness of our lives, which, now I looked from this perspective – on the floor, miniaturized, the kitchen a giant around me – were not busy at all. There was plenty of time, plenty of time for Jake to fuck me and fuck her, for months. We’d had great sex lately, both of us exhausted afterwards, muted, gazing at the ceiling. He had come from her, of course he had—

  Another retch, onto the kitchen floor, a thin line of spit trailing to the ground. I sat back, propped myself against the cupboards. These were the ones where we kept the Tupperware, the dozens of plastic boxes without lids, with the wrong lids, a stacked confusion. I was always planning to organize them; I never did. The house and I had agreed, long ago, to ignore things like this: pockets of disarray, small, hidden places where chaos broke through.

  I reached for my wine, winced as I swigged it. I had barely eaten for hours: a couple of cold fish fingers from Ted’s plate, one piece so mangled that I suspected it had been in his mouth before mine.

  Far away, in the next room, the door opened, slower, more tentative than usual. I nearly got up. I nearly combed my hair, splashed my face, ate a piece of chewing gum. I could have run upstairs, changed out of the dress, worn something sensible. But I did none of that. I stayed on the floor.

  13

  I gripped the glass in my hands: I wondered how much pressure it would take to shatter it. I imagined the blood mixing with the wine, which would suddenly seem thin in comparison, a pale watery red next to the density that would pour from the cuts. I had seen this before, I thought – I could see it in such detail – but I couldn’t remember when.

  Lucy?

  Jake sounded sober, grown-up: I could hear his thick-soled leather shoes comi
ng towards me. I had an urge to laugh. Was it possible I was married to this man, who was now returning to me, calling my name? Surely it was more likely that we had been pretending, all along.

  He was in the doorway, his hand somewhere near his face. A pause.

  Lucy? Luce? Are you okay?

  He squinted down from his great height, as though I was a stranger, collapsed on the street, a vagrant, in need of rescue by a suited man.

  Where have you been? I said to the floor, copying him, asking something I knew the answer to, just to hear the words coming out of my mouth, to make a sound. Maybe, I thought, we could do this forever, our relationship a series of non-communications, until the end of time. Out, he could have said, shrugging. Or How are the boys? But he didn’t.

  I’ve been with Vanessa. We – we just talked, Lucy. I told her it’s over. That’s it now.

  Eleven o’clock. Just talked? There was too much time for that. There was time for sex, at least, but worse – much worse – there was endless time for tenderness, hugging, carefully worded goodbyes. Suddenly, the porn visuals made no sense, were replaced by romance, gentleness, small moans into a neck or an ear.

  Our house was small; there were only three paces between me and him, only a few seconds of me scrabbling up, flying at him as I had seen my mother fly at my father so many times, my fists closed against his shoulders, my eyes almost shut, only an indistinct darkness, someone yelling, someone else screaming.

  Fuck you, Jake. Fucking bastard.

  I could hear the words, but I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. I could feel only a blur of fabric, limbs lifted and falling against each other, a clash, a cataclysm of familiarity. Jake grabbed my wrists, hissed under his breath: