Burntcoat

by Sarah Hall

  We learnt each other, domestically. It was like a hastily arranged marriage. We sat on the little balcony talking, watching the river transport colours and the occasional swan. There was no screaming from the school playgrounds. No traffic. A mute sky.

  It’s amazing, all the birdsong. So quickly they’ve taken over.

  A republic of birds.

  Don’t you think the air feels different?

  Clearer?

  Yes.

  The cathedral bells were not being tolled by staff but were running automatically – minor-key refrains repeating every hour. The chiming was exact, eerie in the lack of human syncing.

  I don’t like that, I confessed.

  What don’t you like?

  The bells – it sounds like a death knell.

  Knell? I don’t know that word.

  When someone dies, they ring three church bells. They have different names. For the stages of death, I think.

  You nodded. Perhaps you already knew.

  In Islam they call the Friday sela. Then they say who has died. Before it’s too late, pray. Death finds all of us. We came from Allah, we go to Allah. Every creature will taste death.

  You tutted and looked up.

  I don’t like that. It’s to scare us, make us behave.

  Are you scared?

  Are you?

  No. I think we would know by now. If we had it.

  Your eyes in exterior light became greyer, clearer; in photographs their colour can hardly be seen. It seemed you were a different creature outside.

  We planted tomatoes in the yard, pretending we were on an island. People our age were sick. The stronger the immune system, the worse the fight when it turned against the host. It was so hard to believe, when our bodies were flourishing. The city was very quiet, but faintly, in the distance, we could hear sirens on the main road to the hospital.

  No one knew how long confinement would go on, how long we would be cooped up, how long society would be shut down. I didn’t mind. I thought about Naomi’s cottage at the end of the valley, the weeks of packed snow, shovelling a path to the car and the hard black ice underneath that meant, even in thaw, the road was still too lethal to drive.

  All the strange, secret behaviour that was now allowed, could flourish behind the barricades. Creative, restive acts, pastimes run amok, violence. There’d been a rush on petbuying, and already animals were being dumped as the reality and expense of care became too much.

  I’d like a dog, I told you. Where I come from everyone had dogs.

  Are you serious?

  Your expression was dark, disapproving, I thought.

  You want one now? you asked.

  Yes.

  Are you absolutely sure?

  It was a joke, Halit.

  You shouldn’t joke about those things.

  I looked at you, confused. Had I hit a nerve? We were about to have our first silly argument, and over nothing, animals, status symbols, ownership, I did not understand what. You sniffed the air loudly, once, twice. Then you dropped to your knees and went forward onto your hands. You began to walk on all fours, smelling the table, my feet, the floor. The total lack of inhibition took a moment to process.

  Oh, I see.

  You barked, padded back to me and I started laughing.

  Yes, I get it.

  You barked again, walked to the door and scratched it, whined. The impression was remarkably good, far too earnest. I felt a hot, embarrassed blush on my neck.

  OK, OK, stop. Get up.

  You let your tongue hang out, stared at me with remedial, slavish eyes. Then you howled and scratched at the floor. I had to play along.

  What do you want, dog? To go out?

  You shook your head.

  Come in?

  You came to me obediently, sniffed my knees. You licked my shins, nipped at the wool socks I was wearing.

  Hey! Stop that! That’s bad.

  You whined, chastised, then began to lick my legs again, the knees, higher.

  Oh my God, you have to stop now. Please.

  Your head disappeared under my cotton shirt; the sensation changed, long strokes of the tongue. Your hands slid up to my buttocks, under the thin cotton underwear, and the game dissolved, became human. You pulled the cotton to the side, breathed warmly. I pulled up the shirt so I could see you, then unbuttoned it and threw it on the floor. Your tongue was like a soft wet razor, sharpening at the tip, drawing itself again and again along a soft strop. I put my hands in your hair, tried to steady myself. Your sounds were human now.

  Can we go to the bed?

  You didn’t reply. The air felt too thin to hold me upright. You pulled me down on the floor, positioned me in front, clasped hold, curled over my back and began. If we went deep enough into each other, there would be a hiding place.

  The images are so strong from that time. The nurse standing in the empty aisle, her back to us, hair dishevelled and her uniform crumpled, the weight of the shopping basket, though it is empty, pulling her body downwards. The Pope, kneeling in the rain in a deserted St Peter’s Square. Cuban volunteer doctors exiting the plane in Naples, where a variant has become unstoppable, their faces like bronze casts, the hands of the airport workers frozen mid-applause. And a plane full of equipment sitting on the runway at Heathrow, its cargo door closing, caught in some snare of bureaucracy. The Welsh doctor who has cut the bottom off a large water cooler and placed it over his head as a mask – ripples in the plastic amplifying the ripples in his brow; he would be among the first medical staff to die.

  I’ve looked at those images often, the spontaneous moments – which seem to frieze history, to make it, in a fixed moment, epic, still kinetic. It is chance. Or the gift of the photographer to predict, to respond. Jonah would say, there is skill, but it’s luck, there’s no eye faster than fate. Frame by frame, it is all caught. Now. We are afraid. Now. We are suffering. Now. Our devastation begins.

  And the images later – I look at those too – of hastily built warehouses for patients; they are hangars not hospices, their ranks of beds untended. An aerial shot of cars snaking up to the hospital gates, doors open, people emerging to assess the delay, and, so tiny in the picture that she might be missed, a woman is running, past the cars, with a body slung over her shoulder. She is insectile, strong as an ant.

  Now. We are no longer human. Now. We fight unambiguously, to save, to survive.

  Ambulances parked in a tight row across the entrance of the hospital, dark-screened, ready to be deployed, or unmanned and shouldered close like bulls, like soldiers. Military vehicles on the streets, a single pedestrian passing an armed unit, not looking up, no longer surprised by the deadly presence of guns.

  We closed our eyes but our minds still made images. There were lurid quarantine dreams. Yours were immigrant’s anxiety, the guilt of separation written up in the long reel of night. Your family, one by one, were executed. The civil war, so long feared by everyone, was declared by your subconscious, and you were drafted. Your mother was always sick, bleeding internally, her skin tallow as a candle, or your father was missing: he’d been taken back across the border, shot in the Crazy Forest. I heard you mumbling in your sleep, your fists clenched over your chest, the blood seeping back in your arms. In the morning your fingers would be numb – it would take half an hour for sensation to return. Sometimes you ticked like a clock in your sleep, tiny jerks, your breath apnoeic. I pressed your shoulder, tried to turn you without waking. You spoke in the half-state, moving up through languages as you woke.

  Ne. Sağol, sorry. There was a bus collecting us …

  The close heat of our bodies was a hothouse for nightmares.

  In mine I was afloat again. Burntcoat had come loose from the bank and was drifting, rushing towards black falls, or pitching up colossal ripping waves in an ocean.

  I dreamt of a little girl. Her body was a previous version of mine – sculpted shoulder blades, a fast heart jumping visibly under the skin like a frog’s, one of her eyes s
lightly hooded. She had pale, copperish hair. I didn’t tell you about her at first, in case you thought it was some proposition. She came unprovoked. I was, I’ve always been, ambivalent about children. But I dreamt of this girl so often that for a few weeks she seemed like our child. She was so clear to me. Sitting at the table drawing, absorbed completely by the rub on the page. Little milk teeth inside big gums, her hair spilling finely from its fastening. That reduced palette of facial expressions; moods seeming, in children, so categorical. She would run between rooms in her underpants, her body lean and gleaming, the soft tummy sucking in and out like bellows. Its navel was missing – she was unborn.

  Finally, I told you about her. You were charmed – I’d not learnt yet that men from your country possess incautious joy towards children. You hadn’t been raised with the recoil of English boys.

  We should give her a name, you said.

  OK.

  You thought about it.

  How about Hülya?

  That’s a nice name.

  It means dream.

  You would even ask me in the mornings.

  Did you see Hülya? What did she do?

  She was in the bath. She was putting hairs from the drain onto a bar of soap, very carefully. She was making a picture with them.

  The girl didn’t speak. She gnawed at my curiosity. I’ve never believed in muses. But I thought about trying to make her in the studio, a kind of prop project – the fable commission had stalled. I needed more propane for the Bullfinches but there was nowhere to get it. She should be life-size, something I’d never really tried, and greenwood, maybe. When I began her, the idea corrupted. I saw scarecrows in the field, brittle straw hair. Ugly hessian sea-dollies, stitched with holes in their crotches by sailors, passed around below deck, absorbent enough to relieve half the crew.

  Under such circumstances, the pressure of love and catastrophe, the mind breaks a little, spills its mysteries and confidences. I understand psychological theory. In therapy I was once asked to select random objects and make a map of the people in my life, deceased and alive. The symbolism and positioning would have meaning, help me visualise and reveal my tendency.

  Do it without thinking too much, the therapist said. It doesn’t have to be art.

  I must have looked at her sceptically, that turpentine look, which, I’ve been told, strips people.

  I understand there have been a lot of casualties, she said. But let’s give it a go.

  Leaves, rocks, sea glass. Lego people, badges, bric-a-brac. Souvenirs, junk: all of it could be vested with association. Naomi and I: wooden peg dolls tied with string. At the edge of the relief, a father, headless, plastic. A few friends and colleagues, scattered and assorted. I chose you last, the eye-shaped, silver-worked agate, sat it on top of a mirror. I stood and looked down at the constellation I’d made, tried, when the therapist asked, to explain the meaning and coordinates, the spaces between.

  Do you feel any guilt?

  Maybe.

  How do you feel about your condition?

  Which one.

  Who is this, Edith?

  Both of them.

  It’s a simple exercise, in which we see and read our small, inconsequential lives, and realise we are, in part, curator. It’s all art, even thought, everything is. What we make is made of not only the self but a thousand other naive or rarefied versions. I was left alone with my hands, my impulses. I’ve pulled from myself all manner of binary things, constructed them in spaces where they belong without assignment, brute, interpretable figures in the landscape. Those are not my children. Hecky is not mine. I’m responsible for her creation but can’t say what she is or isn’t. A talisman for travellers. Some prehistoric female conduit. All the women punished for deviance, for capacity: women who were put to the fire, who blackened, became mutant, and got up from the pyre, inoculated. There is the mother, but when there is no definite mother something else emerges through its own cunt, with genes that are destructed and more resilient. I can’t say I wasn’t prepared.

  At art school, students were inducted into all the workshops – metalwork and wood, the darkrooms and studio spaces. We could use them whenever we wanted, in theory. Few women took up metal and laser-cutting, and by the end of the year I was the only one left. I’d experimented with painting for a while, which was fashionable; my drafting was good, but I always wanted to step behind the canvas. For a while I sourced vellum, painted on both sides and built images outwards, tricking dimension. My classmates frowned and recoiled.

  It’s no worse than your leather shoes, I said.

  Naomi had handwritten The Reddening on ordinary brown baking paper, long scrolls of it, then had paid the typist. It suited her new language, I think, the physical aspect of dysphasia, though seemed also a mix of material prudence and disinvestment. The manuscript process was very difficult. The typist accepted the rolls, grudgingly. She didn’t like the story, or thought it was an amateur’s novel, a waste of money. When we arrived at the house to collect chapters, she would hand over the stack and squint behind her Fresnel lenses.

  Surely this unfortunate girl has a name? I may have missed it somewhere in the text.

  She doesn’t have a name, Naomi told her again.

  Oh, what an unusual thing. Might I ask, why aren’t there any adults to help her?

  Because it’s her story. There are no adults.

  Gracious!

  In the workshop, the machines were old. The spaces were shabby and had the smell of grease and filings. The morning lectures were interesting and progressive enough, but they were disconnected from the misogyny of practice, the manliness of history. It was the technicians, not the lecturers, who were the real teachers, the keepers of knowledge.

  There was a limit to what a woman was expected to achieve. Once, I overheard a discussion about my work: I was just doing it to prove a point. One or two instructors were glad of the genuine interest. I worked with a blacksmith called Carlo. Even the boys considered his field antiquated, too agricultural. Carlo was small and compact. Under his shredded jumpers he seemed more like a chimney sweep than the proverbial village ironmonger. Smithing required more stamina than strength, he said.

  I liked it – the forced grace of elements in a molten, malleable state, a craft that felt earned. Work at the furnace was tedious, sweaty and hard, but it was distracting. I didn’t have to think about how I didn’t fit in. The other students were rapidly pairing and getting flats together, competing in levels of squalor; one or two were getting pregnant and acting like a baby was just another creative experience. They drank and smoked, went to raves, missed class. I was four hours away from Naomi and the cottage, and reeked of innocent competence.

  Through Carlo I met my first boyfriend. Ali worked in the art school, had once been a student but was now a kind of go-to man for stock and transport, as well as dope and tickets to local gigs. He hung out with the first-years, flirted puppyishly with the girls and developed churlish camaraderie with the boys. His looks were beautiful and slightly repellent, feminine, almost lecherous: hazel eyes, their colour noosed around large pupils, a smooth full mouth. He applied Vaseline from a small yellow tin every night. His head was shaved at the sides and Brylcreemed, he wore laced boots even in summer, an orange-and-black National Coal Board jacket – homage to an era of dead labour movements. People recognised him across campus, the dropout socialist. His car, a cheap white Escort, always ran at a quarter-tank or less, the petrol light endlessly flicking on.

  I agreed to let him shave my head too. He said I would look like a particular French actress he liked who was sexy, tough – famous for the opening credits of a film where a man is going down on her. I watched the curled tresses slither to the ground.

  There she is. Shall I do anywhere else?

  Ali was from the south; he teased me about my inexperience, called me E. He knew how to gently undermine and make himself seem heroic, while submitting to moods of bitter disappointment. The half-filled sketchbooks and aborted
poems. The bar stories, which were better than the experiences. He could strum the basic chords of protest songs on a guitar, would take off his shirt while playing, his skin unblemished and sallow, both nipples pierced. I didn’t understand his interest in me, didn’t understand that jealousy loves to keep wounding itself.

  There are periods of self-mutilation in youth, experiments with identity; mine have been in liminal spaces, between loss and success. We lived together in his flat. It was damp, nearly windowless, the lower half of a house on a main road near the racetrack. There had been a lot of other women, I understood. He believed in me, he said.

  The sex was unemotional, schooling, gradually lacking foreplay; after straight-seeming congress he wanted to wear certain clothes, nylon tights that held the bulge. He found it difficult to climax, needed pressure, which brought me pain. He asked me to take the pill; it made me feel hormonally unaligned, slightly crazed. The first shaving joke had been serious. He liked depilation, told me to hold still and trust him as the clippers buzzed.

  I spent hours trying to understand the situation, to predict when he would be loving or callous, and comprehend why. Why tenderness became rough. Why I endured it. One infection travelled up to my kidneys. I spent three days in a fever, passing blood, before he drove me to the student clinic.