The Harpy

by Megan Hunter

  Stop it. For God’s sake, pull yourself together. Calm down. Christ.

  I stared into his face, hoping to see what I was looking for: guilt, shame, the dismal music of a future darkened by his mistake, an eternal repentance. I breathed hard, said nothing as I looked. I had often wondered how many times you have to look at a face for it to become truly familiar; Jake’s still eluded me, still had new angles to present, lost corners, inches that could not be memorized. I still couldn’t see him, not really.

  He looked down.

  I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry. I’ve done it. I’ve told her . . .

  He still had my hands between his; I could feel the heat of his palms against the inside of my wrists, the veined part, the arm joining the hand just as he joined words together, put her name in his mouth, next to his teeth, his mouth that had been on hers, his tongue . . .

  I creased up my face in a way I knew must have looked repulsive, my eyebrows lowering to my cheeks, my mouth drooping, collapsing. I let words come out.

  It’s disgusting. You disgust me.

  I’m sorry. I mean it. I really am.

  He was almost whining now, a curdled kind of sound. I could feel saliva building in my cheeks, tingling and rising to the surface, nausea starting up again. I thought of spitting in his face. Jake was breathing fast, his eyes clouded. Maybe, I thought, he wants me to do it. He wants to have to reach up and wipe me from his cheeks, off the lenses of his glasses. He wants to be in the right, even if only for a second. But just as I moved my mouth, he dropped my wrists, turned his head towards a noise.

  I will never get a precise measurement of it: the exact length of time that Paddy – in his spaceship pyjamas, holding his old toy dog – stood on the stairs, listening to us, maybe even seeing us, seeing his father holding his mother back by the wrists. I only know what we did, once we knew, the way we became his parents, actors switching out of their roles, instantly, as though at a fire alarm, someone collapsed in the audience. I felt immediately sober, my dress too tight, the sourness of wine coating my teeth.

  Why do you smell funny? Paddy asked, as we tucked him back in.

  Why are you wearing that? He ran his fingers over the diamanté shape, stroked the black smoothness in the middle, his eyes heavy, fluttering. He was barely awake. Maybe in the morning, he would think it was all a dream.

  Jake had left before me, as though he couldn’t bear to watch, giving Paddy a quick peck on the head, calling out Goodnight, sleep tight from the doorway. When I got downstairs, he was sitting at the kitchen table. He was drinking whisky from a heavy glass, the top buttons of his wrinkled work shirt undone.

  Perhaps, I thought, this was how my mother and father felt after one of their fights. There was nothing we could do to take it back. Nothing in human history that said you could make things un-happen, take them away from memory, away from the mind. I once heard about a drug that gives the recipient amnesia after a traumatic injury or event. But presumably no doctor would give it to Paddy, for having witnessed whatever he’d seen.

  I went to sit next to Jake, tried unsuccessfully to pull my dress around my breasts, over my stomach and legs. I reached for my glass of wine from the counter, sniffed it, made a face.

  That wine’s been open for like two months, he said.

  There was something in his eyes: amusement, I thought at first. His mouth was completely set, it was hard to tell. For the first time in years, I didn’t know what he was feeling. I could not imagine a single one of his thoughts. Only his actions were clear now: the way he reached over his face with one huge hand, moved his glasses up, rubbed his eyes. His other hand fell loose, palm up on the table.

  Without thinking much about it, I shifted my hand until it was next to Jake’s, then over it, flattened against it. He was still covering his eyes with his left hand, the fingers close together, slightly cupped. I could see his breath, moving his shirt up and down. We held hands.

  It started off as a squeeze, like when you assure someone you are still thinking of them in the cinema, or at an emotional moment at a wedding. But when I pressed on Jake’s hand, he didn’t press back. Maybe that’s why I did it.

  I carried on pressing, harder and harder, knowing my nails were digging in. Jake moved his fingers from his eyes; he looked at our hands, entwined on the table, their different tones blurring together. He breathed in sharply, once. He carried on looking, but he didn’t move his hand away.

  Only when I’d stopped, my face feeling hot, a little short of breath, did he speak.

  That’s what you want, isn’t it, Lucy? To hurt me.

  He was folding his lower lip into his mouth, his eyes were bright, moist, but it didn’t feel like an accusation. It felt like a statement, one of his scientific proclamations, a simple observation based on the facts.

  ~

  Am I a good woman? The rare prize the Bible talks about, precious above jewels. I know I am not.

  But I know other things too: how easy it is to leap from your life: as easy as your first step, your first period, the first time you let a man exist inside you, feel your body grip him, keep him in place.

  ~

  14

  For a few seconds after I woke up, I forgot it all. Without words, with only the sun-bleach of a peaceful mind, I knew that Jake was downstairs making tea, that soon they would all be on the bed, and we would talk about school and clubs and playdates that week, the boys yelling approval or hatred, lying down like puppies to have their tummies tickled.

  In these few seconds Jake had not fucked anyone else: our world had not changed at all. I reached my hand across the bed, felt the coolness under the pillow next to mine. I remembered.

  Last night, after Jake said it – That’s what you want, isn’t it? – he’d held out his hand again, showing me the nail marks, deep pink crescent moons, a pattern across his lifeline. The marks were clear, indisputable: it was deliberate, this time.

  You can do it again. You want to.

  You’re drunk, I’d told him. Go to bed.

  I’m not drunk. I’ve only had one whisky. He’d held his palm up again, like my dad used to, a wide thing to aim for.

  Punch me, my father would say, when I was angry with him about some trivial thing. You’ll break your hand like that, he’d say, moving my thumb to the right position.

  Last night, I looked at Jake’s skin, shining in the kitchen lights. There were so many details, so many pathways. I thought of all the times I had kissed his fingers, rubbed them against my own.

  Look, he’d said, I know how much I’ve hurt you. I’m so, so sorry, Lu. I don’t know how else to say it. A deep breath here, a gathering. But you can – you can hurt me back. He’d lowered his hand, but kept his eyes on me.

  Why don’t you just try it, see if it helps? He was almost pleading.

  You can do it a few times, he’d said. How many? Three?

  He was smiling, very slightly, his eyes glazed, the muscles of his face tensed. It sounded like a joke. But somehow I knew – through the alcohol, the blur of his hands on my wrists, my fingers pressed down on his skin – that Jake was completely serious.

  Three. I’d said it out loud, after he did. It made a kind of neat sense, something religious about its structure. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Peter betrayed Jesus three times. A familiar number, for a good Christian girl like me. I remember being allowed to ring the bell, in church: three times, I was told.

  Now, I shifted in bed, and my stomach lurched, threatened to rise up out of my throat. Why should I be the one who feels sick? The thought came to me as though spoken from above, or from a tiny microphone inside my head. Surely, I agreed with the voice, it should be Jake who was being emptied, who had a hand reaching inside him, pulling everything out. Or if not him, Vanessa, gripping her belly, crying out. Or both of them, separately, wailing, swearing. If there was anything that could be compared to the agony of childbirth – which neither of them had experienced – it was surely an upset stomach. Gastric flu. The body
at war with itself, the illusion of comfort broken forever.

  ~

  At university, I chose to study Classics, of course: I chose as much of it as I could.

  Sometimes, when I was meant to be doing something else, I would look for pictures of her in the library.

  Twisted face, claws instead of hands. A certain roundness in her cheeks, her eyes heavily hooded: even then, there was a thump of recognition.

  Originally, I read, the harpy was not a monster at all. She signified storms, thunder. Just bad weather, nothing more.

  ~

  15

  Instead of helping Jake get the boys ready that morning, I stayed in bed.

  I’m ill, I shouted down the stairs, and it was enough. Paddy and Ted both came to the door, one by one, to wave, not to kiss, so no germs were passed on. I heard the thuds and cracks and clanging of the three of them preparing to leave the house. Jake called out a goodbye, from the bottom of the stairs, but didn’t come up. Maybe he’s forgotten, I thought. Maybe he was drunk after all. But in the middle of the morning, there was a text.

  I had been numbly watching old episodes of an American sitcom on my laptop, the simplicity of screen lives taunting me, their fresh faces, the blessed closure of every episode. My stomach washed and gurgled as I moved my hand over it, an underwater world, shifting beneath my skin.

  I didn’t read the text straight away. I saw Jake’s name and turned the phone over. I looked back to the laptop, to a couple in a diner, arguing over coffee. Was anything that Jake said worth reading? I had the invalid’s sense that bed was a place you could live in, that there was a possibility of permanence in this state, my body damp and receptive to itself, my mind stretched thin by boredom, light entertainment.

  You can hurt me back. Three times – then we’ll be even?

  Jake had always written his texts in full sentences, full words. He signed off with a single kiss: always one, never two or three. He was consistent in that way, I used to remind myself when we were first together. He didn’t – as I did – get carried away in the realm of four or five kisses. He was always himself. Now, there were no kisses, but there was something else, something that seemed better: a promise, a plan. A way to make things right.

  ~

  As I got older, I moved closer and closer to her: BA, Masters, years of a PhD, narrowing, winnowing, until the harpy was my only subject.

  I gathered the scraps I could. A man-killer. A monstrous form. Golden wings. Golden hair. Perfect body, the feet of a bird. A face made ugly by anger. Frightening. Seductive.

  The more I read, the less clear I became. And yet: I needed to know everything, to work out the truth.

  ~

  16

  I got out of bed as soon as I’d read the text, pulled on some jeans and a jumper. I would go to the market, I decided. I would make something fresh and delicious for supper, something everyone would love. Recently, every meal had been boring, expected: the same thing on the same day. It used to be normal: my grandmother made fish every Friday, chops every Wednesday. But now, I knew our meals should express the world itself, be varied and fascinating, an adventure on the plate. My grandmother never liked too many herbs, or spicy food, was known to ask for a boiled egg, like a child. Her taste buds were grown in blandness, in the stodge and slurp of a childhood of over-cooked vegetables, lumpen, inexpertly made pastry.

  Her mother – my great-grandmother – couldn’t cook at all. She was a suffragette. According to my mother, she set fire to a department store, then ran from the police across the rooftops of London. She barely cleaned, or cooked. She liked to read for the whole day, to lie around in her dressing gown until her children came home from school.

  Lazy! my grandmother called her. Self-indulgent. In rebellion, she tried to be a perfect housewife, cooked her husband gluey meat stews and potatoes, scoured and disinfected, gave birth to child after child. When she used to comb my tangled hair, she would pull it; she would shout. She yelled and swore and banged the hairbrush on the sink in frustration, making the mirror shake.

  I used to imagine her anger as a parasite that lived in her stomach, that passed through the wall of her womb to my mother, who passed it to me.

  ~

  She became my days: all I did with my life, for years, was read about her, people rustling, light leaving the library around me.

  The harpy rips out eyes, I read. She drags and burns and scrapes and mutilates. She is ordered to do these things by the gods, but she is not reluctant. She does it with gleaming eyes: cut, smother. Poison.

  It should not have come as a surprise to anyone. It should not have been a shock.

  ~

  It is the first time. I have cleaned the house, from the loft to the kitchen door. I have not dressed up, but I am wearing decent, neat clothes. I have brushed my hair.

  •

  I have left my bed behind: I have stripped it, put the sheets in the wash, fitted fresh linen, run my hand across the perfect plainness.

  I have cooked one of Jake’s favourite meals, a pasta sauce with aubergines, reduced for a long time, until the oil shimmers, gold leaf on deep red heat.

  •

  The boys are calm, in a good mood; after school I did not put them in front of the television. I have played games with them, card games and word games and games of the imagination: You are a horse, Mummy, I am your daddy.

  When Jake comes home, I do not meet him at the door, with slippers. That would be too much. But I am in the kitchen, smiling, stirring a pot. His sons run to the door, their faces alert, their eyes happy.

  •

  I would like to say that I almost do not do it. That when I serve the meal, I look at Jake, and nearly give him our sauce, not reaching for the separate pot at the back of the stove. But that would be a lie. I give Jake his portion first, spooning on a large quantity of sauce, garnishing the dish with leaves of basil.

  He is unsure, I can tell, of what has happened. Of why I am smiling, wearing an apron.

  Feeling better? he asks me, aware of the boys listening, his fork lifting to his mouth, and I nod.

  Much better, I say, lifting my glass of wine to my lips. Jake is hungry: he takes bite after bite, barely chewing, letting the soft pasta and vegetables slide down his throat.

  I feel fine now, I say, lifting my fork, beginning to eat my own meal.

  17

  In the morning, the nausea did not arrive, as it had on other mornings. My stomach was clear and light, my whole body in comfort, wrapped in itself. But the smell of the house was unmistakable. I found Jake in the tiny downstairs toilet, his head hanging over the bowl, groaning and spitting.

  I’ve been up all night, he said. It must be— He paused here to retch, and I backed away: I have always hated to see people vomit, even the children. But he was already at the dry heaving stage, it seemed. He sat back from the toilet, his head against the wall, his long legs halfway out of the door, almost touching my feet as I held it open. The smell was intolerable now, acidic and fermented, making me put my hand over my nose.

  – must be that bug you had, he finished. It’s awful. I’ve been sick about ten times.

  Last year, during a particularly tedious spell of work, I had written an advice leaflet for an emetic. It had never occurred to me before that there was medicine for this. I had only ever heard the word emetic once before, in an elective literature seminar, referring to the prose style of a particular writer, a never-ceasing stream of words.

  Care must be taken, some accompanying notes to the medicine had advised me, that people did not use the drug for the wrong reasons. These reasons were eating-disorder related, I surmised, rather than anything else. This was for girls who took laxatives and emetics, who wanted to clear themselves out, to flush themselves away.

  Jake stood up, staggering slightly, holding onto the sink. I could feel the words rising through my chest, small bubbles, like something exciting, something to look forward to. Even with the smell in the bathroom, I didn’t fee
l sick. My head felt extraordinarily clear, my perception tingling at the edges, as after lots of coffee or exercise. I can tell him, I felt at that moment, the rising again, my mouth opening to speak.

  Jake, you know the pasta we ate last night? I gave you a separate one – I – I put something in the sauce.

  I would not delay, soap-opera style: it was done. Another surge of energy, a pulsing in my fingers.

  This is the first one – like we agreed? My voice was weaker now, fraying at the edges.

  Jake was lifting his head from the sink, slowly. His hands were gripping its sides, his hair limp and damp across his forehead.

  What? His eyes were narrowed. He breathed out a stream of acrid air, moving his head from side to side. You did what?

  Shhh. The boys. I put a hand out, as though to touch him. He raised his head to look at me. I could see the emotions travelling over his face: there was something beautiful in it, like watching a shadow pass across a landscape from the window of a plane. He was repulsed, shocked, but then – the shadow moving, the shapes changed by sudden darkness – he was thinking something else. Now, I too had done something terrible. I would hate myself, wish I had never done it.

  But I didn’t. Not yet.

  We should do something today, I said. Go somewhere. We should – we should go to the sea.

  Jake looked at me again, an exaggerated frown taking over his features.

  What? he said again. I . . . I feel awful, Lucy. There’s no way I could drive anywhere.

  I’ll drive. I’d had my licence since I was eighteen, but when we’d had the children, Jake became the driver. I needed to be in the back of the car, in the early days, sometimes lifting my breast out of my clothes to feed them as they stayed strapped in their seats. Even as they got older, sitting in the back listening to stories or watching screens, the tradition had continued. I was the one with the snack bag, handing out fruit, opening windows if one child turned green.