Burntcoat

by Sarah Hall

  For days I could barely operate. Walking was a battle; I was reminded every few steps of the enormous damage, the point to which my body had been taken. White noise, on high and low frequencies, came and went. I lived off stale cereal and chocolate, whatever was left in the cupboards that I could get at; my hands were weak as petals. I lost so much mass that the joints in my shoulders looked like brackets. And I could hear every beat of my heart, a dull miracle I didn’t believe.

  I wasn’t the last of a kind and I wasn’t alone in the trauma of surviving. The outer levels are difficult to re-enter after such things. Patients lucky enough to be in hospital have spoken of feeling as if they were leaving monasteries when they were discharged. No one knew what to do with the terrible gift they’d been given – passports back home, albeit temporary. To sit in a cafe and drink tea, to pass other people close by in the street, brush against a stranger, kiss, all of it was transgressive.

  I couldn’t get past the door of Burntcoat. I could hardly talk to friends, and so many were also in shock. I thought of the safest places: the cedar forest behind the grandfather house, its roof luminescing at twilight, its immense trunks soundproofing the interior. The avenue up Mount Haguro – I imagined the stone steps leading through infinite trees, and thought, just one more, every day. My mother had done it, exercising her tongue, training the signals, repeating I, I, I, am Na-o-mi. Standing, unassisted. I waited with everyone else for the storm to pass, for rations and vitamins to be delivered, and sat and read about the world, its history, as if looking for proof.

  It was not possible to stand before a mirror. I watched light wracking inside the frame, saw a shadow instead of my reflection and a sea of bright particles behind me, like an optical migraine. There was strobing opposite wherever mirrors hung. I felt soluble, draining towards the disrupted patch, atom by atom, and so I took all the mirrors down. To be inside a body is to assume its rim and edge, separation, to be trapped in an extraordinary vehicle, steering and thinking, regulating a thousand systems at once. I didn’t know how. Or who I might be. I found myself online, all the profiles that said I existed. In the studio I took the bone from the throat of the wolf and held it, millions of years in my hands, and then I put it back.

  When I emerged, the park grass was still tall and wild, like a meadow. Chaff was blowing across the streets and the leaves were already thinning, beginning to crisp and colour. The mornings were cool and I wrapped myself in a scarf and jumpers, underweight, and spent, after the strange aestivation. I practised walking to the end of the road and back, then further, along the river, into the centre of the city. I walked to Biraz. Its window was boarded up, a smoke-blackened frame around it. A stranger took hold of my arm and I realised I was weeping.

  At first I wanted to deny it, to believe the problems were nerve damage, or the aftermath of trauma. There were momentary losses of perception, and the visual and auditory disturbances came regularly. They were hard to describe to the doctor. Dark and light constituents flushing together and apart, bands, currents. It might be on the periphery, folds in the corner of my eye. Or I would look up and see it directly ahead, a colourless aurora, sometimes with the corona of red and green. The sounds, even if above or below my register of hearing, still affected my body. My skin and the hairs on my limbs responded as if swept. The waves penetrated me, passed through with no resistance. Other times there was just a steady static monologue.

  I was told it would resolve as I got better, but it didn’t. I began sleeping in the studio, as I had done before the building was renovated, on a makeshift bed – the largest space, where nothing felt close. On bad days I wore the Peltors I used when operating the compressor and lathe. My eyes and ears were tested. The results were normal. The doctor prescribed tinted glasses with large wraparound lenses, and ambient music at night, then diagnosed PTSD and suggested therapy. Victims of the virus were suffering all kinds of physical and psychological effects, he said. Dozens of aftercare programmes were being set up. I agreed to a referral. I spoke to a psychologist, then another.

  It’s as if there’s something there. The texture is different. There’s energy.

  It must be very frightening, Edith. Would you describe yourself as quite sensory? Are you affected by disharmonic noise and things like different material? Cotton wool or aluminium foil?

  Not really. Isn’t everyone?

  These were the symptoms of a paranoiac. But I wasn’t that.

  The layers were peeled back as I talked. It all made sense, the therapist said. The core of my childhood was pessimistic. To be robbed of a partner only reinforces the notion. In the past year, we had all seen diabolic things and felt the presence of death. The preoccupation was normal, and should be mindfully dealt with. I was encouraged to think I’d made you, that in my childhood you were the defining fear, the expectation – my perspective had been set by it, like a painting’s ghost pavement. Every day, I lived by that principle; absorbed the idea. To reduce fear, I was asked to draw your face, give you substance. As if the entire history of art hadn’t already failed.

  Once I felt stronger I began to work in small ways again, sketching, using the kiln, which was slower and less violent than the blowtorches. I finished the commission. It felt like work from another era, a reproduction of work by a different artist.

  I spoke with Karolina, told her, in part, what had happened. She’d left many concerned messages. She was used to long silences from me, months during which I would disappear into a project. The conversation was emotional and halting. She was uncustomarily flustered and I was unused to pastoral care. She could come, she said – that very day, if I needed her to. If I was not ready for visitors she could have anything sent, arrange private medical treatment, physiotherapy if I needed it.

  I’m all right, I told her. Getting better.

  Darling, I am so glad.

  Her voice broke. Several clients had died, and colleagues, her elderly mother in France, whom she had not had the chance to see or say goodbye to. Into the void, more and more names fell. I told her I was sorry and when I said it I saw Halit’s eyes, their pale fire extinguished.

  En avant toute. En avant toute.

  She steered to business, described the decimation of the arts.

  I suspect things will be quite difficult for some time. What shall I tell the trust?

  Tell them the piece is done. They can arrange transport.

  Some department of the government informed Halit’s family. I was thankful not to have that task. I did not apply to retrieve his remains; a body belongs to the mother who creates it. The other obligation was unavoidable. I boxed his possessions – the boots, old, polished, with new laces inserted, shirts that I carefully laundered and folded, his books and phone, his soft leather wallet. I did not know what they would want. I wrote a letter. The translation app scrambled the sentences and the sentiment became lost, so I wrote in English, hoped a member of the family might be able to decipher it. The letter was extremely painful. I described us as friends, not wanting to offend anyone.

  I was privileged to know Halit. He was a kind, gentle man of real integrity. He made me laugh. Through him my world …

  All of this was true, but underneath the respectful words the relationship was clear.

  I sent the box to the address Halit had given me. I kept the brass coffee grinder – the only real heirloom, perhaps, and an outright theft. I told myself he had no children, no genuine inheritors; we were much more than just lovers. If he had lived … Feeble justification. The truth was I could not let it go. I don’t use it, hardly ever, but I’ve kept it all these years on the same shelf. It stands elegantly in its Ottoman casing, glints dully like the key to a huge gate.

  I didn’t expect anyone to call. When the number came up with a code I did not recognise, I almost didn’t answer. There was a pause before a man began talking. His voice sounded set back from the microphone, as if the call was on speaker.

  Hello. Hello. Can I speak to Edith?

  The
accent was thick, his words unpractised. A few sentences learnt for the purpose of the call.

  Yes. Who is this, please?

  I am Deniz Öztürk.

  When I realised it was Halit’s father, I began to talk, too fast, nervously. He didn’t understand. Halit had told me about them, I said, stories from when he was a boy, the cherry tree in the garden, the earthquake. I heard rapid discussion, someone else speaking in the background, telling his father what I had said. He waited, then asked, or perhaps read out, his questions. Was I with Halit in the hospital? Did he talk of his family? Was there suffering? The last question with its fist inside the man’s heart. I was honest, and said what I could. I felt the air warp and pulse. You were beside me in the room, as an adult might stand next to a child who needs assistance, who might lie without meaning to. Yes, I was his girlfriend, not for very long, half a year. We were locked in together. The sickness was bad. I did what I could.

  It was disquieting, the sudden materialisation of Halit through others, those far more qualified and entitled. I heard the translation given, then I heard a woman cry out, her moan of anguish, unbridled weeping. Deniz Öztürk came back on the line. His voice was hoarse, the voice of a labourer, a folk musician, the bereaved.

  We want to say thank you, Edith.

  No, I said. No, I am not to be thanked.

  Yes, he insisted. Thank you.

  I fought back tears. I remembered what to say.

  Üzgünüm.

  There was a long silence; neither of us knew how to break the connection. I hung up.

  I took the canoe out on the river, paddled down to The Anchorman and held the garden rail. Kendra and Nick had both been ill, and Nick was being rehabilitated. They had lost their daughter. Three years and seven years – their markers for relapse. I would sit with Kendra in the hospice and hold her hand and think, when it is my turn I will not be in here.

  There was a yellow notice stuck to the door of the bar. The building lay dark and empty inside, looked culpable, as if it had been, all along, a crime scene of some kind. As if our need for society was dangerous.

  The second half of my life, everything since, has been downstream. I’ve made different choices, tried to make amends. I don’t drive. I don’t eat meat. I am careful not to waste. When I travelled, it was offset. I didn’t join any church, or the nova parties. I didn’t enlist in trials or pay premium insurance. I’ve taken care of myself, though not in order to prolong anything. There’s no reason why I should have been spared. Genetic coils, a biological oversight. Or imitation, acceptance; I was taught by an expert. Sometimes, though I’m encouraged not to, I think, it’s because you sensed in me a good partner, a millionth wife, who is loyal, who makes effigies in your honour, creates enough intrigue to see dawn break, and then another.

  I’ve let go of things – not in any spiritual sense, though I like those doctrines. We must learn loss, not as a beginner but as a ready player. There have been lovers since. Not many. One was my assistant and I can’t say I didn’t care for him. I could have been a mother – there are ways to protect the foetus, inhibitors. But I was already defined, betraying some cause each time I imagined a different passage. You were my only certainty.

  I sold Naomi’s archive. Her work came back into fashion; she was exhumed from the burial site of forgotten writers. Of course, she’d also produced a daughter of merit. They’ve reassessed her writing, the label of Gothic stripped off like cheap varnish. Karolina once said to me the term is used for women whose work the establishment enjoys but doesn’t respect. Men are the existentialists. There was increasing interest in her papers from American establishments, and in the end I accepted an offer.

  Naomi’s archive contains the huge hospital file, its reams of notes and progress reports, the scans and surgical remarks. An unworn medical helmet. Drafts of her books – first on Croxley, neat, organised, then the baking paper, torn off at the edges and strangely parchment-like. There are gnomic instructions to herself and rehabilitation worksheets, her teaching notes and payslips. Pictures I drew for her that she kept – the emotion guides and notes of complaint.

  I do not like curry in my beans, it gives me a hot tummy ache.

  You hurt my feelings when you did not say well done for remembering my lines in the nativity or clap.

  There’s a photograph of her and me on the fells, beside the lower pools. Her face is impassive, and I seem to be roaring. We look unkempt, rustic, like bush-dwellers. I can’t remember posing, or anyone taking the picture. Jonah would say, it’s spirit photography, one of us took the picture and later appeared in the absent spot.

  Not that I believe in that shit.

  Now the archive is studied by writers and by neurologists. Naomi’s cottage is used for residencies and has been connected to the national grid.

  Several documents I incinerated. The court papers, including my father’s custody statements, in which Naomi is depicted as a cold, hopeless mother, even before the haemorrhage. She did not breastfeed long enough, he said. She put me in a washing basket in the garden as a baby while she was writing, and a cat urinated on me and I caught toxoplasmosis. If I was left with her, I would be in danger, and irreparably damaged. I did not burn them to protect her. I did not do it to spare him. Between evidence and illusion, we are all located.

  A few years after the pandemic, a man called Erik contacted me to tell me our father had died. He was my half-brother, six years younger. He was sorry to inform me of the news. It was cancer, stage IV, very rapid; Adam had received excellent medical care. Erik apologised that I had not had the opportunity to visit or say goodbye. There was a photograph of his family in the letter, his partner and a child, Erik standing with his hands round their shoulders, and a handsome woman, in her fifties, all of them smiling and suntanned. I had been dimly aware of my relatives in Canada: siblings, nieces and nephews, a woman who, under a different alignment, could have been my stepmother. I tried to see in Erik aspects I recognised, the long nose, the fine eyebrows.

  We began emailing each other. He knew very little about his father’s first marriage and I did not go into detail. The stories he told did not correspond with the man I remembered. Adam had gone to another country and put on a different character, like a casual jacket. Halit had spoken about this too – the urge to migrate is the urge to escape and create, not recreate. I sensed in Erik’s letters some kind of investigation into himself, alongside the responsibility of rounding up a lost member of the herd. He was curious about me, though his sister Tabby was hesitant. She’d been their father’s favourite, Erik said – but she would come round eventually.

  He visited England on business and we arranged to meet. I took the train to the capital. Erik met me at the station; we shook hands, and he kept hold of mine.

  Oh my God, it’s so strange, it’s really great. Isn’t it?

  We spent an awkward but pleasant enough afternoon walking around the sites. His questions were straightforward, easy to answer, his cheerfulness of a different order. He wanted to talk about his father, the grief having entered a milder, reconciled stage. He didn’t want to unearth painful truths, just to reassure himself, and address the mysteries, confirm an ability to metabolise the difficult aspect.

  I took him into the foyer of the Honing Trust, showed him The Conundrum. I made a joke about foyer art being the death of an artist, but he didn’t understand.

  Oh, wow. This is beautiful, Edith. You’re very talented. He did talk a lot about your art.

  Did he?

  I’d love to know more about this, Erik said.

  It gave me quite a bit of trouble. Well, the wolf was cooperative.

  I described the processes, our native trees. The bird’s long, narrow beak was entering the throat as precisely as a surgical instrument, its head surrounded by teeth. The wolf’s claws were lying next to the crane’s foot, interlinking. It was unsettling, seeing the piece again. I wanted to leave and Erik misinterpreted.

  You’re very humble, Edith.
>
  I’m really not. Just like to move on.

  I must have seemed almost exactly what he suspected me to be: intense, unpacked, a person made from a radically different set of circumstances. He said as much.

  We are chalk and cheese. Is that the right expression? Dad used to say it.

  Yes, that’s right.

  There was a pause.

  I guess he didn’t always do such a good job.

  I glanced at him; he was looking at the installation.

  Did you forgive him?

  It’s not something I’ve thought much about.

  We talked for a while about reforestation in Canada, his daughter. He was generous.

  She looks like her mom, but now I see you there’s something too. Next time I should bring her and Kate. Or you could come visit us. In summer we have a place on the lake.

  I didn’t tell him I’d been to Canada several times. We talked of the virus, which was still at the fore of all conversations, like a gigantic astral event, a ruinous deity that had visited Earth. Canada had been less badly affected than other nations; there’d been space, better policies, of course.