Burntcoat

by Sarah Hall

  Erik opened doors, was meticulously considerate. The courtesy I thought at first might relate to having a sister began to seem like a gentle form of pity. I was the orphan, the outlier, no matter how successful I’d become. Over beer, when his courage was up, he asked, was it an interesting childhood? The question was unintentionally prejudiced.

  Very, I said. We lived sort of at the edge.

  There was no point in undoing the tie, the fear of the unknown.

  My sister is a little competitive, he said. She’s used to being the boss. I don’t think she likes the idea of a famous big sister.

  Well, I’m clearly not that.

  He shrugged.

  She’s smart. She knows who not to go up against.

  I walked him to his hotel, and he hugged me to his chest. His cologne was resinous, agar, faint and lost on his large frame. He seemed full of emotion and relief.

  Edith, it was so good to finally meet you.

  Afterwards, I saw Karolina in her club – an old-fashioned townhouse with a starred restaurant below. She ordered champagne as if it were an occasion: I was an infrequent guest there, had always felt uneasy, like a stray mongrel. It was still hard for me to be with people, and I found myself caring far less whether I conveyed it. The club had kept going, illegally, during confinement. The penalty was huge, but some politically connected members had saved it from being closed down.

  Did you come here? I asked Karolina.

  Absolutely not. It was idiotic. I did not leave the house once.

  There were one or two celebrities at other tables, and an industry patron – minister for the arts – who wanted to speak with me. The introduction was brief; we’d met previously, before his party’s election to office. Sir Philip had the decency to ask for the table to be cleared of champagne glasses. The commission was broached and I was asked to create a national memorial. For the million who had died, and, he did not say it directly, those who still would. It was beginning to be understood that the disease was incurable and the population was divided – those who’d escaped and had since been vaccinated, and those for whom it was too late. He knew, if I would pardon the intrusion into my personal life, that I had experienced AG3. I stared at his suit, at the tie of inordinately beautiful olive silk. It’s in such moments we realise how minimal our experiences are, how slight our qualification to represent. No budget was discussed. There was no mention of contingency. Nothing was being put out to tender. I shook Sir Philip’s hand, thanked him for the esteem with which he regarded my work.

  Take a while to think about it, Karolina said, after he left. They will wait.

  That’s not sensible.

  I told Karolina what I’d been doing that day, described my new brother, the incongruity. It was a good story, a confession of sorts. She was intrigued by the development.

  Is he similar at all? What does he do?

  Banking. I think I confused him.

  I’m certain you did.

  Her hair was set in its neat French braid, grey woven in thoroughly. Across her throat was the trickle of fine gold chain and hollow orb she always wore. She chastised the man at the next table for taking out his phone. She was growing undeniable with age and softening towards those in her keep. No one was unchanged.

  I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, the background talk and music, and asked if we could walk to a park or the gardens next to the agency, a quiet space. The streets of the capital were as they had always been, thronging with bodies, frenetic, a lottery of faces. I put on the coloured glasses and light filtered through lilac, the spectrum moderated. The buildings relaxed against each other. A trick of control, to calm stress, but sometimes it seemed to work.

  Karolina took my arm, wove me between pedestrians and buses, and talked as we walked.

  I’ve known several men who have attempted a family, failed dreadfully, then repeated it with more success. A teacher, my music teacher actually, she was a very beautiful tragic person, once said to me, the job of a woman is to improve a man for the next woman.

  That’s depressing, I said. What about the previous one?

  She learns too, of course. If she’s wise, she chooses herself next time. Do you think it’s true?

  Yes, maybe. What happened to your teacher?

  Oh, I disappointed her. I stopped singing.

  We sat in the private garden. It was warm; the cherry tree in the middle of the lawn was flowering. The meeting with my brother had left me disconcerted. I’d felt somehow returned to the margin while his sense of belonging had been reinforced.

  What did you think of my mother? I asked Karolina. I know she was represented by Alexander Saul, I know you liked her work, but you talked to her?

  I did. I met her here, at a party.

  Did you like her?

  She regarded me for a moment with a gambler’s dead eye, decided to lay a card.

  We had an argument. About children. She called me a bitch for suggesting she should have left the baby at home in order to circulate.

  What? I was there?

  Yes, in a sling. You were extremely loud. Your napkin needed changing. I’d just joined Saul and babies were not supposed to be on the agenda.

  Karolina laughed, delighted.

  It was the way she said it, almost compassionately, as if she were helping me. ‘Is there really any need to be a bitch to another woman?’

  That’s like something she might have said after the surgery.

  Is it? It seemed a very natural question. And important, don’t you think? I’ve thought about it a lot. How would you have answered, Edith?

  I don’t really understand the concept.

  Of a bitch?

  Of a woman.

  Karolina laughed again.

  Yes, she said. Just to warn you, if you accept Sir Philip’s offer, you may well end up on the honours list.

  I don’t think I can do it.

  Of course not. But who can?

  Karolina had invited me to stay with her, but I took the sleeper train home, dozed in the big seat as it ran at reduced speed through night-lit towns, faster in the liminal spaces between. I disembarked with the other northern exiles and walked back to Burntcoat along the river, in the early, alkaline light.

  The orange tree is full of white flowers – this room is filled with the smell. After the fall I got myself up, packed soil back around the roots and dragged the pot close to the bed. I sat by the window, slept, then looked at the river, imagining a structure built above the water, diving or rising seamlessly. I ate a few almonds to keep the nausea away – a trick I learnt from Subhadassi – and tried to sketch for a while. My drafting is very bad; I can’t make my hand cooperate and concentrating is getting harder.

  The self-pity has passed, or at least it’s put away. I have to rest continually now, which is itself a commitment, exertion of sorts.

  The tree’s scent is so insistent. Halit emerges from it as if through a doorway, walking up the iron steps of the fire escape, a wing tip brushing the wall. If I turn round, his image will be beautiful, or he will appear terrifying, foul and dark as my heart. The messenger comes as I am – that’s what is written in Scriptures. I read them afterwards, curious, and disappointed. The solipsism of humans, even in imagining our end. The clues we give ourselves that we are self-made, while disowning our maker, our chaos and art.

  Halit, pushing me to the ground, or me pulling him down. Afterwards we lie with our mess, our fragrance. And the citrus blossom is cologne to receive you, as you follow him – the lip of a great vortex, the true abstract, finally arriving for me.

  In the studio, in the nova piece, I’ve described both you and he, and a coital woman, her arms reaching up, ecstatic, complicit. She’s prehistoric oak, tannicly preserved, unearthed from the wetlands in the east. She has a lover with two faces behind her. One is impossible, scorched and tarred, made of rotoring blades that will funnel the wind and rain towards its twin, hastening first his decay, then hers. The other is the face of a man I loved
briefly, for ever. Forms joined and hollow, containing no soul except air. I can’t imagine it’s what they want. It cannot possibly comfort, or reparate.

  There’s no title, and I could not bring myself to sign the plinth. My name is engraved on one of the steps of the memorial ascent, along with all the other surnames – Sean’s idea. Always the stonemason. He’s arriving tomorrow to collect the piece. He has keys to the yard and outer door. I won’t be needed.

  I remember this tiredness, the sheer weight of it. I’m beginning to feel chilled, by every small movement. I’ll keep the stove going while I can. I know what to expect, at which point to stop it. Before the acute stage, when I’m turned inside out and can’t swallow. Before the fever robs all sense. There’s a jug of water beside the bed, boxes of pills. Is that cowardice? I’m just trying to proceed without suffering and distress, execute a choice. I’m trying not to look away, to accept my form tending towards its new state, carbon matter, microbes, the flesh expanding and shrinking, beginning to decay.

  But you want to test my mettle. You want me to confront it with no defence. Like that small child who walked into the hospital room alone, to see the unutterable, riven mark left by your near miss. They say you’re not here, that I should think of you impersonally, or not at all. I know what you are.

  These open sections of air don’t disappear any more. The room keeps destructing, letting me see behind – that infinite, unlit substance. The sound in my ears is like screaming in the falling car. And I remember exactly my dying dream, your face and the force of its maw, being eviscerated by it, every fibre in me resisting, holding on.

  I won’t win, won’t survive.

  But my mind tightens its grip. My body can’t help fighting, can’t change its instinct – cells crawling along the blood’s hot walls to save it. Once, when Naomi was gone all day, I swam to the bottom of the biggest pool, under the waterfall, where everything was blind silt and the stasis was like the cold muscle of space. There was no surface, no air, and the panic was atomic, brought me back up with such explosive power.

  I want to sit with Naomi again.

  I want to say to Shun, yes, of course, I’m the wood in the fire. I’ve experienced, altered in nature. I am burnt, damaged, more resilient. A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held.

  Acknowledgements

  I am extremely grateful to The Royal Literary Fund and The Society of Authors’ Contingency Fund for supporting grants in 2019 and 2020.

  Thanks to the following editors and readers for enduring feverish versions of this novel: Alex Bowler, Kate Nintzel, Tracy Bohan, Peter Hobbs, Jennifer Custer, Jin Auh and Dr Richard Thwaites. Thanks to Silvia Crompton for copy-editing.

  I greatly appreciate the guidance with scientific, cultural and artistic research from the following people: Sarah Munro, Director at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Polly Roy OBE, Professor of Virology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; Imogen Cloët, Russ Coleman, Hamit Sert, Ayumi White, Damon Galgut, Lenny Benterman, Jonathan Hall and Lila Azam Zanganeh.

  My heartfelt thanks to the following extraordinary women for their support during this extraordinary year: Chloe Manka, Johanna Forster, Morgan Pickard, Louise Cole, Kelly Smith, Rowan Pelling, Jane Kotapish, Fiona Renkin, Joanna Härmä, Rebecca Watts, Naomi Wood, Sarah Perry, Julie de Ruiter, and Lila and Imogen again.

  Love and gratitude to my dad, who was always there, and to my darling Loy, so full of joy, courage and kindness.

  About the Author

  Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of five novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently the only author to be four times shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.

  By the Same Author

  haweswater

  the electric michelangelo

  the carhullan army

  how to paint a dead man

  the beautiful indifference

  the wolf border

  madame zero

  sudden traveller

  as co-editor

  sex and death

  Copyright

  First published in 2021

  by Faber & Faber Limited

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in the UK in 2021

  All rights reserved

  © Sarah Hall 2021

  Design by Jo Walker

  Jacket photo © Stephen Tasker

  The right of Sarah Hall to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  The poem ‘Keep the Change’ by Cemal Süreya, translated into English by Hamit Sert and Sarah Hall. Reproduced by permission of the estate of the author through Can Publishing

  ISBN 978–0–571–32933–5