The Harpy

by Megan Hunter

  But I could do it: I could drive. I had dreamed about the ocean, I remembered now, waking in the night to the empty wrinkled whiteness of the bed, thinking it was foam, the very edge of the world. We needed it, the dream seemed to say: the wordless confirmation of the beach, the vastness of water.

  We should go today. It was the kind of decision that we used to make together, when we were younger, when we had more time, more faith in the power of relocation. We would wake up on an empty day and decide to go to Norfolk, or Sussex, or Kent. We would speed away, our hearts running with the road, any morning tiredness ebbing into the sky.

  But: Jake was white, could barely stand.

  No. God no, he said, his hands at his temples. He looked much older, suddenly, confused.

  Maybe tomorrow, then?

  I have to go back to bed. He turned, not towards the sofa, but to the stairs, started climbing them slowly, holding onto the handrail. I heard him greet Ted on the landing – All right, mate? – could imagine him ruffling Ted’s fluffy hair as he passed. A small, sleepy voice:

  Are you okay, Daddy? Are you poorly?

  Hearing this, I could feel that something wanted to collapse inside me. Something wanted to give up, to stop everything. But I didn’t let it. Jake was going up to our bed, I noted. He felt entitled to this, now. He would lie in our bed, and feel his weakness. He would know – as I had known for years, forever – how easy it was for a body to be destroyed.

  ~

  Whatever people might think, I am just like them. I always wanted to be good, to be right, to receive a pat on the head, a touch in the small of my back. Well done.

  I never imagined that I would hurt a single person. When I first held those boys – my babies – I was afraid that I would drop them, swing them from a window, turn their prams over in the road. It seemed to be a miracle, that this didn’t happen. That we made it through alive.

  ~

  18

  On the way to the sea, there was almost no traffic; Ted had just grown out of car sickness but we kept one window open anyway, the coolness passing over us, the leafless landscape clouding by. Jake was feeling better, had even put some music on; I wondered if he had chosen it deliberately, an album from the beginning of our relationship, from our early drives. I used to rest my legs on the dashboard, let my hand lie on his jeans. Now, our bodies seemed to be miles apart, glowing with the separateness of strangeness. I held the steering wheel tightly, peered over the wheel. I could tell Jake was nervous, tapping along with the music, occasionally out of time, taking sharp intakes of breath as I rounded a bend at speed, slowed too hard behind another car.

  Today, Jake looked almost normal, some colour back in his skin, but in the night I couldn’t stop seeing it: his whole body sickly, weakened. I had slept badly, waking at what felt like hourly intervals, as though by a newborn. But there was no one there: Jake had gone back to the sofa without me having to say anything. It was my own mind waking me up, the same pictures flashing through, fast as a flip book. In the deep, tangled space of 3 a.m., there was no triumph, no energy. My mind had become light, rootless, easily blown from one subject to the next, every one of them dangerous.

  This morning I had put make-up on my face, covering the black circles under my eyes with a glossy beige paste. I had phoned the school, told them the boys were ill, the lie coming out easily, simply. I had never done this before, had never been able to cope with the anxiety of the transgression, the image of the teachers’ faces, sensing an untruth. Now, it seemed like nothing. Even Jake had called in sick without complaining. He just nodded and did it straight away, mumbled a few words into his phone in another room.

  When we arrived, the seaside village looked different, warped, somehow, rough at the edges. We had never been there in winter, and at first the boys were bewildered, slow-boned, reluctant to get out of the car. I remembered that feeling, the sense that the journey was sufficient without an arrival, all that time watching the world unfurl itself, accompanied by music.

  Jake had grown up near the sea. He was healthier by the ocean, he always said, his breathing and sleeping easier. Something in the atmosphere made his hair even curlier, as though he was returning to his true self. Today, I craved the smell at the edge too, its sharpness, gulls circling above fish, snatching them as they flickered into sight. We seemed to need this rawness, the place where comprehensible life gave way to mystery, salt water, death. Perhaps, I found myself thinking, this would heal Jake, heal both of us. Make everything better.

  We crunched across the gravel path that led to the beach, the boys running ahead, their feet hitting sand before ours did, sinking deeply. On the shore, the sun was bitterly bright, completely unobstructed; I could see for miles, further than I ever remembered being able to before. It reminded me of the first time I wore glasses, aged eleven or twelve, the way the world suddenly became clear, complicated, every tree with separate leaves, every distant person with their own particular features.

  Jake played with Paddy, showing him how to skim stones, bending down at an angle, releasing flat shapes over the water. The waves were too big; the stones kept falling instead of skipping. I tried to get Ted interested in making a castle, but the wind blew sand in his eyes. He cried, buried his face in my chest, his hair flying upwards, teardrops raw on his cheeks. I rocked him from side to side, pressing my nose to his sweet-head smell, watching Jake and Paddy play their game against the sea, their bodies almost silhouettes in the glaring light.

  We ate our picnic lunch in the dunes, the wind and sun less brutal here, facing the marshes instead of the churning ocean. This part of the coast was a nature reserve, a haven for rare birds and rodents, pure green stretches in sight of the nuclear dome. The boys were calmer away from the sand and waves, with food in their stomachs. They balanced along the wooden boardwalks across the marshes, their legs teetering above the waving grasses, their arms wide out for balance. It was parental perfection: they were free, but we could see them, could – if needed – swoop down at any moment.

  I smiled at a silly wave Paddy was doing at us, sticking his bottom out, his hands flapping by his face. I saw Jake watching too, but he wasn’t smiling. He hadn’t eaten much, just a couple of crisps, a few bites of an apple before sailing it into the dunes.

  How are you feeling now? I forced the words out slowly, continuing to watch Paddy.

  Better. He pulled up a clump of sea-grass beside him, tossed it away.

  The boys seemed to have invented a game now, Paddy in the lead, directing his little brother with his finger.

  We’re carrying on with it, aren’t we? My voice was reedy against the sound of the sea, the yells of the boys.

  Jake blew out his breath, tugged at the grass again.

  Yes, he said quietly. The word crept across the sand with the wind.

  Yes, he said again, louder this time, more convincing. I think we should. He turned to me, not smiling or frowning, his face entirely open, his gaze steady. I saw myself reflected in his eyes, miniaturized. Harmless.

  There are so many different ways to make a family: to keep making it, day after day. And this was ours: the plan was real, had already begun, was as tangible as our hands in the sand, the small boys we had created from nothing. Trips away had always made our lives feel malleable, easy to change, a toy world, lit from above. In this place – with the sea behind us, the marshes in front, the landscape stretching to the horizon – things were, at last, wide and simple: a man and a woman, our legs folded under us, our children playing in front of our eyes.

  II

  ~

  I have never strangled an animal, but I have eaten dead ones, over and over and over again. I have wrapped my hands around a classmate’s arm, twisted, as though wringing out damp washing, watching redness spread underneath. I have read many books about a girl murderer, a child whose eyes were invisible in photographs, two pits I couldn’t see the ends of.

  I have stood in the kitchen with my face folding, my nose sharper, my brow
lowered, my changing turned to the wall.

  ~

  19

  It was nearly Christmas; I knew the next one would have to wait. What we were doing had no place in the boys’ cyclical sense of time, the reassurance of the same ornament coming out of the box, the same song being sung at school. There was no tradition for our actions, no precedent; we were making it up as we went along. Certain boundaries had been established: they would all be surprises, we had agreed, like the first. He wouldn’t know what was coming.

  I was saying no a lot, declining invitations to drinks, carol singing, book club socials. I spent most evenings by myself, pretending to work. I had some new hobbies, it seemed, interests that were nothing to do with my life, made no money, contributed negatively to the smooth running of our household. Jake was often home late, having texted me carefully – too carefully – with all the details of his train mishaps: signal failures, leaves, bodies on the line. I put the boys to bed as early as I could, went upstairs to my warmly lit desk, to the open mouth of a search engine.

  My laptop was now my most intimate companion, a thin space containing so many places to slip to. One week, I looked at nothing but tornados, giant dark chimneys of air spinning around fields, followed by the camera, an eye that revealed its humanness every time it retreated, realizing it had gone too close. Every time, I willed it to keep going, to go straight through the swirling, smoke-grey mass, through the cows and chairs lifted in the air, right into the centre, where everything is calm. Occasionally, one of the children would wander in sleepily; I shut the laptop fast, before they could even glimpse what was on the screen.

  I watched tsunamis, bodies of water that were able to bring down buildings, to lift and carry cars, sweep away a city like the wipe of a cloth. The website suggested other videos I might like: landslides, helicopter crashes, explosions. I clicked from one catastrophe to the next, soothed by their repetition, by the way terror unfolded across the smooth shapes of my bedroom. The images stopped – for a few minutes at a time – the racing of my mind, its skimming over the surface of my life, across the surface of the planet itself, unable to slow down. I had not felt such speed since my early twenties, learning forgotten languages, feeling their contours rise and open as I pressed them. Before my eyes, ancient symbols became moist, pliable: they gave themselves to me, gladly. But now my own pace scared me: I was barely in control, it seemed, lifting endlessly through columns of thought with no clear way to land.

  I was always ashamed the next morning, as though I had spent the night looking at bad porn instead of witness accounts, live footage, shaking images, covered in screams. I could see that there were legitimate cravings for violence, and repugnant ones; watching news footage, at the time, was acceptable. Watching it five or ten years later was not. Reading true-crime books, listening to podcasts about mass murder: all fine. Watching a video of a man dragging his bleeding friend down the street, listening to the audio of a school gun attack, a plane going into a building, over and over again: these were signs of disturbance. And yet, I wasn’t alone. Ten million views, twenty million, three hundred million views, said the pale grey text below the clips, the number sometimes scrolling upwards even while I watched.

  On Christmas Eve, we were due to have our annual drinks party for neighbours and friends, featuring fairy lights, mistletoe, mulled wine, no one left sober. All year, it was my single gesture towards sociability, towards making friends of our school acquaintances, people we knew from choirs and sports clubs and taking out the bins. To not have it would show that something was wrong, I reasoned, during one sleepless night. It would make people ask what was happening.

  We’re not doing that this year, are we? Jake had said, when I’d brought it up casually one breakfast time, the garden winter-bare behind us, a weak, egg-white sun beginning to break through the clouds.

  Why not? I’d replied, daring him to answer in front of the boys, to break their absorption in bowls of cereal, their thick morning breathing. Jake said nothing, his eyes shadowed from lack of sleep. Every morning, he staggered from the living room in boxers and a T-shirt, waving cheerily to the children as though it was normal.

  I had tried not to think of last year’s party. Or I had thought of it, deliberately, until the thought made me feel I was coiling inside, twisting like a swinging rope. Vanessa and David Holmes, both of them in elegant, timeless clothes, hovering by the tree like the elder statesmen of the party, at least ten years older than everyone else. David’s message on my voicemail – left unanswered and whole, deleted automatically after seven days – had only just left my mind, and now there was this to remember. The awkward, last-minute invitation – Jake’d sent Vanessa a text, he told me – the obviousness of their difference from the rest of our guests.

  They had seemed to find it quaint, the colourful paper cups, napkins instead of plates, people dropping food all over the carpet. One of the neighbours was wearing his cycling clothes. Another had brought a breastfeeding toddler who pulled up her mother’s shirt whenever she felt like it, wrapping her body around, arranging the small strawberry of her mouth into position.

  I had seen Vanessa’s eyes moving over all of this: she had the quiet amusement of someone who is past certain things, has grown above them, like a tall tree. Perhaps, I thought, after all of her generation are dead, there will be no more like her, people who are able to look at everything so calmly, as though, just outside the door or ten thousand miles away, there isn’t a tornado just beginning, roaring into life.

  ~

  Nobody thinks they will become that woman until it happens. They walk down the street, knowing it will never be them.

  They have no idea how it is: like the turning of a foot on a crack in the pavement, the slip of an ankle from the kerb, a falling, a single instant, the briefest action, changing it all.

  ~

  20

  I had ample time to make arrangements for the party; work was slow at this time of year, my days unnaturally clear, full of space. I could hover around the boys, drop them off and pick them up every day. This was the ideal, I’d supposed. As a child, my mother had rarely picked me up from school: she was too busy working. Sometimes, both of them went out in the evenings, putting me to bed without saying anything. Once, I’d woken up to a babysitter I had never seen before, a teenage boy, his long legs a sharp V on our sofa. I was embarrassed in my thin nightie, no pants, my hair tangled with sleep.

  I would do things differently, I’d promised myself. I would be there. But so often, my children seemed restless, bored with my company, as though they’d rather I was someone else. And when there was no work, I was left like this, a woman of leisure, the house and I staring at each other through every empty hour. At least, I’d realized, the party would give me something to do.

  On the day before Christmas Eve, I cycled to the shops to buy a few extra supplies. Paddy and Jake were at home, the television murmuring into dim rooms. Ted was in his child seat behind me, singing a long and complex song about death.

  Some people die of canceeeer, he intoned, his little voice lifting as we went over a bump in the road. And some die of . . . BUUUM! This last word was delivered in a triumphant, tuneless boom. A couple turned as we passed them by: from the front, you couldn’t see a child, so it looked, at first, as if I was singing these songs to myself.

  Everything about the preparations reminded me of last year, of the strangeness of having one of Jake’s colleagues at our Christmas drinks: he had never invited any of them before. But Vanessa lived in the same town, she was local. She had just arrived in Jake’s department from a university in Scotland: he was being friendly, he was helping her settle in. These were the phrases he used, at the beginning, when the coffees and lunches and then evening drinks were happening. He had been perfectly transparent, open, in many ways back to his old self, the sweet-breathed, clean-underwear boy I’d met years ago.

  In the supermarket, as I put the mulled wine in the basket, I remembered Vanessa’s ques
tion last year: This is lovely, Lucy. Did you make it yourself?

  I had explained to her – smiling, touching my hair – the triumphant sense of having, for years, successfully thrown a party that required nothing to be made, almost no preparation, barely any tidying up. The message was clear: I am a terrible hostess! And also: I am the best hostess, the one who has overcome all the shoddy manacles of domestic enslavement. I take little care, and everything turns out perfectly. Her lines, in response, were meant to be a generalized compliment, one that acknowledged all I had achieved without even trying.

  I should have known right then: at the exact moment when I held the bone of self-deprecation out to her, dangled it in the air. This was an offering, an agreement between women that she should, however falsely, take into her mouth. But she spat it out.

  Oh, she said, her mouth rising in the small way that conceals repulsion. Right. The mouth again, the briefest nod of the head. I made an excuse:

  I’ve got to check on something . . .

  And moved away, seeing as I did the way Vanessa turned to her husband, pointed to a book on the shelf, one of Jake’s. The Development of Superior Species Characteristics, perhaps.

  Such an interesting . . . I had walked away before I could hear the rest of her sentence, poured myself another glass of mulled wine in the kitchen, let its warmth flood through me like pleasure.

  Now, I asked Ted to help me get four packets of mince pies down from the shelf, knowing that the assignment of a task would lower the chances of a frenzied performance of lack, the unleashing of animal instincts all over the shop floor. No matter if every young child behaved like this: these explosions always carried a sense of particular failure, of personal motherly insufficiency.