by Sarah Hall
You’re making a lot of fuss, E. Everyone gets them.
Suffering was universal, Ali said – it was the only thing that kept people levelled. He liked Blake, Courbet, de Sade. I knew he was wrong. I’d watched my mother climb back up from ruin, hobbling against physiotherapists, releasing and holding her urine, exercising her jaw and her tongue. But I listened to the theories and stayed the course. There were subtle warnings from Carlo, issued to me when I seemed quiet and troubled, if I’d arrived too early at college.
Know where your boundary is, that’s all I’m saying. These pieces know what they’re doing. I see a lot of wannabes but there’s no glory in a lifestyle.
Ali was scathing of students who sold works in their final degree shows.
Look at that pretentious shit with the price tag.
In front of others, he would play proud, deferential.
E is a genius, she works like a navvy, twice as talented as I ever was.
To me he said, it’s going to look hysterical if you try anything bigger.
Though she was largely insensitive, Naomi hated Ali. I could see the signs, the breakdown in her safe behaviours, phrases she would not normally have used. Ali despised his own family and often came to the cottage when I visited, though he complained about the narrow, unmade road over the moors, called the house Arse-end-dale.
He was interested in Naomi, her unusualness, her programming, the fact that she’d been an author. Her fallen status appealed on several levels; he spoke to her as if they were equals and made her tense and disorganised. His bare-chested presence in the small kitchen, the silver rings shining in their softly erect beds, his ashtrays and spreadeagled ease. Alpha displays. She’d not had a man in her domain since my father – even after I’d left home.
Every week she and I wrote to each other; Ali thought it ridiculous.
What could she possibly have to say? She only sees the fucking squirrels. She doesn’t even have a telly.
She’s not very good with that kind of light.
Riiiight.
Naomi was still teaching, subsisting meanly. He would ask her about writing, test her, reading old copies of her novels at night by the fire, then questioning why a character had said this or that.
I don’t remember, Alistair. It was written a long time ago.
She never asked him what he’d accomplished, or what he hoped to, and the assumption of permanent failure was clear.
Why does she always hum under her breath like that?
It helps her concentrate.
Why does she want to be in the middle of nowhere?
It makes her feel safe.
Safe?
When he really wanted to stir, he asked,
Have you never thought about seeing your dad?
I made the mistake of telling Ali what had happened to her, the whole story. It’s true she had become odder, her face often froze in startlement when someone spoke to her, and there were habitual tics. She wore the same clothes day after day, and the big shabby velvet housecoat; sometimes she put one of the quails in the gown’s pocket to warm it. She walked outside barefoot, her heels cracked, her toes hooked and red. Ali tried to goad and gaslight her.
It is Tuesday today, isn’t it, Naomi? For a minute I thought I’d gone mad.
It’s Wednesday, Alistair. We take the bins up to the milkstand on Tuesdays.
Wednesday, Wednesday, right. Thanks.
Naomi would use my full name immediately after Ali had called me by his nickname.
Edith, can you pass me the butter?
We were in my old bedroom, one wall’s span from Naomi’s head. I don’t know why I let him do the things he did there. For years she and I had protected ourselves, but I let him in.
One morning, while we were alone in the kitchen, she turned to me.
Why does he eat the dark, Edith?
Sorry? What do you mean?
There was always that potential for glitch, but in this instance Naomi had nailed it.
Eating the dark. Yes. That’s what he does. Eating it, and shitting it out on everyone. Do you enjoy it too?
She was looking directly at me in her guileless way. I avoided her eyes.
I don’t know what you mean. I think you’re confused.
She set two bowls and two spoons on the table. Every time I had to add the third and tell myself, habit, it’s just habit. I went to the cupboard to get another dish and spoon, expecting the usual phrase to follow, Thank you, I can stand. Instead she slowly tipped the chair at Ali’s setting backwards, and it thumped and clattered on the stone floor.
OK, Edith. Why don’t you draw me a picture of how I should feel about Ali.
I was stunned. The tone, the sarcasm – I didn’t know her capable of it any more. It was so rare that anything broke the surface. I was angry, ashamed, unwilling to admit my bad choices. Now, now that I’m independent and don’t need her, I thought, she’s acting like my mother?
Ali and I left a day early, in a fug of hostility, with Naomi staring hard at me, as if I might still answer her question. On the drive back, Ali kept shaking his head and blowing air through his nose.
Fucking nonsense was that. Just grow up, the pair of you.
The relationship swiftly began to fall apart. Ali went out drinking, didn’t come home. He began to speak to me in a way I knew was over the line.
You’re acting like a paranoid cunt. I just need some space.
I was filled with anxiety. There were nights when I was sure Naomi was dead, that the call would come in the morning. I would lie, paralysed, crying silently next to Ali. I stopped taking the pill and my periods went haywire. I stopped writing letters to my mother. The things I was making at the furnace with Carlo were disturbing and compelling, pushing the possible scale. My tutors commended the ideas, began to take the work seriously exactly as I began to fall apart.
There was a day I came back to the flat early from college and found the door bolted inside. I knocked but there was silence. I knocked again, called to Ali to let me in. I thought I heard a thud, a window sash lifting or something being set down heavily on a table. The door remained shut. I banged harder. A cold feeling trickled into me. He was with someone; I knew it. Another girl from the art school – the intuition was inexplicable but I was suddenly sure. Her name was Helena. I barely knew her but she’d been smiling at me, asking how I was, complimenting my portfolio. She was slender-chested with pixie hair and a tattoo of her father’s air-force number on her shoulder. Exactly, authentically what Ali would like. I kept pounding, my fist going numb. Then I stood quietly, waiting, imagining them continuing behind the locked door, her small breasts nipped between his fingers.
I found him later in one of the city’s pubs, not a student haunt but an old man’s drinking hole, a hideaway. It was November; I was soaked and freezing cold, had searched hours for him, asking who had seen him. Carlo had finally told me. Ali accused me of being insane. I shoved him against the bar while the punters stared, followed him outside, shouting that he was a liar. He pushed me over in the street, was arrested and spent the night in a cell. Then he went to find Helena. It seemed impossible we would continue, that I’d ever put the needle back in.
A day later I developed pain in my lower abdomen, and the watery brown blood of the past few weeks became fast and bright red. I walked to the medical centre, vomited on the floor and collapsed. An ambulance was called. The pregnancy was ectopic and rupturing. When I woke, I’d been catheterised and was wearing a morphine belt. The incision was weeping into its bandage, had been hastily closed. The fallopian tube was irreparable and had been removed.
Ali was sitting by the bed. His face was pitiful, an expression of sorrow almost operatic. He wanted to look after me, he said, make amends, come home with me for Christmas. He tried to thaw the atmosphere, talked about announcing an engagement that had never been proposed. I played dead, agreed, pretended to sleep. I didn’t press the anaesthetic button, letting the pain mount. When the nurse removed
the drain I started screaming, had to be held on the bed.
After I was discharged, I spent a week at the flat, limping to the toilet, dozing, trying to focus. I’d been prescribed sedatives but hadn’t broken the seal on the box. Ali attended to me then left me alone; I was sure he was still fucking her, and I knew I’d reached the end. When I was able, I packed a bag of clothes and left it under the bed. I took a bus to the college and told Carlo I was dropping out. He sat me down.
No, you’re bloody not. Just take a longer holiday. Get pissed with your mates. I’ll swing it with the department – no one else is getting a distinction.
The wound in my side ached and stung sharply as the nerves knit together. I wrote to Naomi, told her where to be and when – the walk to the postbox felt like the most important thing I had ever done in my life. Two days later, when Ali had left for work, I took a taxi to the station, got on the train and hunkered in a seat in the furthest carriage. I didn’t breathe properly until we shuddered forward, began passing bridges and tenements. A woman sitting nearby in the carriage smiled and asked,
Is it the monthlies, pet? Would you like an aspirin?
I kept looking down the aisle for the orange-and-black coat. I tried to sleep. Each time a train rushed past on the other tracks the explosion of sound was terrifying. A winter moon had been abandoned in the daylight.
Naomi was waiting at the station for me. I carried my bag down the platform as if there was no injury, no missing piece. I followed her quietly round the supermarket. I wanted to touch the back of her skirt. She asked what I would like for Christmas dinner, whether we should celebrate – neither of us liked the holiday.
Soup’s fine.
OK, soup. I need to go to the bank, she said. I’ll just give you money as your present.
In the car, looking straight ahead, I bit my lip and told her what had happened. There was snow on the hilltops that made them look taller, more important. Deep teal over the horizon as the paler blue drew north.
Right, she said, yes. It was a baby.
I didn’t know.
I was glad for the lack of tears. I was twenty-one. I had done without a childhood. It seemed too late.
She kept driving, didn’t pull over and hug me when I said I was afraid.
He won’t come, she said. He’s a coward and you’ve beaten him.
But the air felt sprung and I could not shake the feeling of dread.
He’s not really gone. I don’t think I can handle him.
Take the tablets, Naomi said. Do what the doctors say, Edith.
Every time the phone rang in the cottage, I flinched, held my breath until it became apparent she was talking to someone else. I knew she was wrong. Ali was no minor player in the theatre of women. There would be a reckoning.
The sound of the medevac helicopter regularly working along the western flight path of the city unsettled me most. By late spring the sky was loaded with casualties. There were reports of ambulances not arriving to call-outs, hospitals declaring red status. There’s a tipping point, when disasters that are civilly met overtake. Airport closures, food shortages, queuing as if in a war. The serious business of domestic death behind closed curtains, in a bedroom dressed safely with rose wallpaper, on the department-store bed.
In poorer boroughs, along lines of ethnicity and poverty, the virus spread wildly, exposing the country’s bias, its rotten structures. There were the first desperate acts and breakages – fights at food banks, burgled shops, town halls vandalised. Crimes were reported and the police failed to come. Lives fell below the line; women whose secondary salaries the government would not protect, care workers struggling without equipment. The atmosphere was tindered.
People flouted the rules and marched. Protests were broken up; there were fines, arrests. It did not stop the gatherings.
This was the most dangerous phase, we were told by the prime minister. On screen, she looked gaunter, greyer; within weeks some private cosmeticist had whitened her hair. It was getting into us, infiltrating the mind as well as infecting the body. Cooperation was needed. The hours of darkness would therefore be barred for all but emergency personnel and cornerstone workers. People would have to prove why they’d left their homes; they would be asked for National Insurance numbers, attestations written before departure. And the military would be redeployed, to help manage the situation. The realist: you’d predicted this.
First they let us be spoiled children, now we must be given a discipline.
The complacency and dissonance I’d felt seemed ridiculous. There were good locks on the exterior doors of Burntcoat – the equipment downstairs was expensive. I hadn’t before been concerned about every window, the main gate, the sensors in the yard. The shadow of a cat walking along the wall.
We’d not really been going out – occasionally you checked the restaurant or I went for bread. The first night of curfew had a clear, beautiful edge. It had rained and there was a mineral smell to the air, the river flowed sensually. We took the canoe out. You sat behind me, and we floated downstream, harmless criminals – under the branches of willows, through the cold tunnels of bridges. Boats were moored and fastened and mould had begun to gather along the door seals. The streetlights exposed us briefly before we disappeared back into darkness. By a jetty, something small and fast slipped into the inky water. Further down on the far bank, in the industrial estate, a car was burning, its fire reflected across the river. There were silhouettes moving. We glided past, the buoyant slipperiness of the boat responding to the lightest touch as we steered away. You shipped the paddle, spanned my neck with a hand, then took my hair between your fingers and pulled me gently backwards against your chest. I could hear your thoughts.
We will do this together.
Do you remember? Is that even possible? The dark, burning river. The turning tide; everything loosening beneath tight forces. None of it was happening and it was all unstoppable. Closing the door when we got back, and promising each other we would be all right. All we had was love, its useless currency, its powerful denial.
I remember. Musk on your body. A petrol taste in my mouth from the car fire. You stood looking at my bared chest with the eye of a sniper, the erection obvious in its unhoused state. The wall behind pinned me like an accomplice. The meat of your thighs braced between mine and the thrusts were compact, tests of strength. A final blare of pleasure and you sank to the floor, as if capable of being up on hind legs only to rut. The wall let me go. I stepped forward, put a hand on your head, and began spilling what you’d put into me.
No generation expects its crisis, the hole that opens at the centre, dragging everything in. Madmen and mesmerists, God’s heralds, a lone predicting scientist: the prophets are ignored, lost, ridiculed until they prove true. No one could see into the government meetings or read the hasty minutes, the arguments. No one knew what was not being revealed – the true estimate, the loss and cost. Parliament was suspended, the cameras in chamber switched off. The country was busy falling apart, tending its sick, tallying what was left in the cupboard and mourning freedom. Town after town, cities north and south, and into the quiet villages it spread.
I’ll say it again. It was – it is – perfect. Perfectly composed, star-like, and timed for the greatest chaos, for transmission across borders, replication, creating galaxies of itself. Perfectly operating in each victim – the patient incubation, methodical progression through the body, careful removal of the defensive sheath. It ascends, hellishly, erupting inside its host. A fever that becomes critical, so destructive the body might kill itself. The virus dies with the host or survives, retreating deep into the cells, lying dormant.
Wards were closed off behind disinfectant bays, but videos kept being posted, of delirious, liquefying patients, last words, hands held through plastic sheets. New morgues were built and immediately overwhelmed. Twenty thousand, fifty thousand, two hundred thousand, half a million. There were no funerals. The bodies were burnt. Crematoriums and hospital incinerators ran e
very hour of the day. Government-issue urns stood in ranks, waiting for families to be given permission to collect them: white, plastic, unremarkable in exterior and content.
There was no manual for this death, or palliative care. People died alone, in corridors, in waiting areas. They died in their beds, with infected children in the next room. It robbed entire families. Like a fiend from legend it seemed to smoke through windows and keyholes, able, when its name was spoken, to materialise. It was in the drops of fluid, under friable skin, on the breath. It was in the water, on the counter, the letter, the gift of each kiss.
Soon everyone knew someone infected. Kendra sent me a message:
Nova here. Nick incredibly unwell. Stay safe.
I slept in your arms, sweated, turned restlessly. Summer had arrived early; the days were hot and clear. The dogwoods along the river opened their bracts and the towpath grass grew high. We began to wake suddenly for no reason, jolted by a conviction that one of us was sick. Or by the sudden howl of a siren on the road nearby. We were in hiding, but it was harder and harder to keep our world airtight. I was working in the mornings, not able to concentrate. A bone in the throat seemed inconsequential. There was a sense of something implicit when I looked at the sculpture, meaning I hadn’t yet found. Shun had talked about the material, and the present, as undetermined, as wood’s future memory. I kept thinking, time feels wrong, everything leads to failure. What is missing?
