Everything Under: A Novel Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Daisy Johnson

  Dedication

  Title Page

  One: Beyond the Black Stump

  Two: Things Go Missing in the Night

  Three: The Weather Here Is Bad

  Four: Knock Knock Wolf

  Five: The Dead Man Moving in the Forest

  Six: Formed of Debris

  Seven: The Bonak

  Eight: Beginnings

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.

  A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.

  Daisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.

  About the Author

  Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A.M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.

  ALSO BY DAISY JOHNSON

  Fen

  For my grandmothers, Christine and Cedar

  One

  Beyond the Black Stump

  The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bed-side lamp, certain everything we’ve built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognise us but we will always recognise them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you.

  The Cottage

  It is hard, even now, to know where to start. For you memory is not a line but a series of baffling circles, drawing in and then receding. At times I come close to violence. If you were the woman you were sixteen years ago I think I could do it: beat the truth clean out of you. Now it is not possible. You are too old to beat anything out of. The memories flash like broken wine glasses in the dark and then are gone.

  There is a degeneration at work. You forget where you have left your shoes when they are on your feet. You look at me five or six times a day and ask who I am or tell me to get out, get out. You want to know how you got here, in my house. I tell you over and over. You forget your name or where the bathroom is. I start keeping clean underwear in the kitchen drawer with the cutlery. When I open the fridge my laptop is in there; the phone, the television remote. You shout for me in the middle of the night and when I come running you ask what I’m doing there. You are not Gretel, you say. My daughter Gretel was wild and beautiful. You are not her.

  Some mornings you know exactly who we both are. You get out as many kitchen implements as you can fit on the counter and cook great breakfast feasts, four cloves of garlic in everything, as much cheese as possible. You order me around my own kitchen, tell me to do the washing-up or clean the windows, for god’s sake. The decay comes, on these days, slowly. You forget a pan on the stove and burn the pancakes, the sink overflows onto the floor, a word becomes trapped in your mouth and you hack at it, trying and failing to spit it out. I run the bath for you and we go hand in hand up the stairs. These are small moments of peace, almost unbearable.

  If I really cared about you I would put you in a home for your own good. Floral curtains, meals at the same time every day, others of your kind. Old people are a species all of their own. If I really still loved you I would have left you where you were, not carted you here, where the days are so short they are barely worth talking about and where we endlessly, excavate, exhume what should remain buried.

  Occasionally we find those old words sneaking back in and we are undone by them. It’s as if nothing has ever changed, as if time doesn’t mean a jot. We have gone back and I am thirteen years old and you are my awful, wonderful, terrifying mother. We live on a boat on the river and we have words that no one else does. We have a whole language all our own. You tell me that you can hear the water effing along; I answer that we are far from any river but that I sometimes hear it too. You tell me you need me to leave, you need some sheesh time. I tell you that you are a harpiedoodle and you grow enraged or laugh so hard you cry.

  One night I wake and you are screaming and screaming. I skid along the corridor, knock your door open, put on the light. You are sitting up in the narrow spare bed with the sheets pulled to your chin and your mouth open, weeping.

  What is it? What’s wrong?

  You look at me. The Bonak is here, you say, and for a moment – because it is night and I am only just awake – I feel a rise of sickening panic. I shake it away. Open the wardrobe and show you the empty inside; help you out of bed so we can crouch together and look beneath, stand at the window and peer out into the black.

  There’s nothing there. You have to sleep now.

  It’s here, you say. The Bonak is here.

  Most of the time you sit stonily in the armchair regarding me. You have a bad case of eczema on your hands that was never there before and you scratch it with your teeth bared. I try to make you comfortable, but – and I remember this about you now – you find comfort an annoyance. You refuse the tea I bring you, won’t eat, barely drink. You swat me away when I approach with pillows. Leave it, you’re fussing, give it a rest. So I do. I sit at the small wooden table facing you in the armchair and I listen to you talk. You have an aggressive stamina that carries us through whole nights with barely a pause. Occasionally you’ll say, I’m going to the bathroom and rise out of your chair like a mourner from the side of a grave, your hands brushing invisible dust from the front of the trousers I lent you. I’m going now, you’ll say and approach the stairs with gravitas, turning back to glare at me as if to say that I cannot continue without you, it is not my story and I must wait until you have returned. Halfway up the stairs you tell me that a person has to own their mistakes, live with them. I open one of the notebooks I’ve bought and write down everything I can remember. Your words are almost peaceful on the page, somehow disarmed.

  I’ve been thinking about the trace of our memories, whether the trace stays the same or changes as we rewrite them over time. If they are stable as houses and cliffs or decay fast and are replaced, overlaid. Everything we remember is passed down, thought over, is never the way that it was in reality. It makes me fraught, restless. I will never really know what happened.

  When you are well enough I take you out to the fields. There were sheep here once but now there is only grass so thin the chalk shows through, lumpy hills rising from the ribs of the ground, a thin stream that burps out of the dirt and sidles down the slope. Every couple of days I declare exercise a cure and we march to the top of the hil
l, stand sweating and puffing at the top, and then cross down to the stream. Only then do you stop complaining. You crouch by the water and drop your hands into its cold rush until you touch the stony bottom. People, you tell me one day, who grow up around water are different to other people.

  What do you mean by that? I say. But you won’t answer or have forgotten you said anything to begin with. Still, the thought stays with me through the quiet night. That we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.

  You hit a bad mood. You sulk until it gets dark and then rattle through the house trying to find something to drink stronger than water. Where is it? you shout. Where is it? I do not tell you that I emptied the cupboards when I first found you on the river and brought you here and that you will have to do without. You flop into the armchair and glower. I make you toast, which you upend off the plate onto the floor. I find a pack of cards in one of the drawers and you look at me as if I’m mad.

  I don’t know, I say. What do you want?

  You get out of the chair and point at it. I can see your arms shaking with exhaustion or anger. It’s not always going to be my fucking turn, you say. I’ve told you enough. All of that stuff. All of that shit about me. You jab your splayed hand at the chair. It’s your turn.

  Fine. What do you want to know? I sit in the armchair. It’s burning with your leftover heat. You skulk near the wall, pulling at the sleeves of the waxed jacket you’ve taken to wearing inside.

  Tell me how you found me, you say.

  I put my head back, hold my hands so tightly together I can feel the blood booming. It is almost a relief to hear you asking.

  This is your story – some lies, some fabrications – and this is the story of the man who was not my father and of Marcus, who was, to begin with, Margot – again, hearsay, guesswork – and this story, finally, is – worst of all – mine. This beginning I lay claim to. This is how, a month ago, I found you.

  The Hunt

  It had been sixteen years since I last saw you, as I was getting on that bus. At the start of the summer the potholes in the track up to the cottage filled with frogspawn but it was nearly halfway through August and nothing much grew there any more. This place was a boat in another life. That month there were seams of damp around all the walls; in the sudden hill-winds the chimney coughed down bird’s nests, shards of eggshell, balls of owl pellet. The floor in the tiny kitchen had a slant that rolled a ball from one end to the other. None of the doors quite fitted. I was thirty-two years old and had been there for seven years. In Australia they spoke about being beyond the black stump. In America they called it in the backwoods or past the jerkwater. These were words which meant: I do not want anyone to find me. I understood that this was a trait I had got from you. I understood that you were always trying to bury yourself so deep even I wouldn’t unearth you. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I was an hour and a half from Oxford, where I worked, on the bus. No one but the postman knew I was here. I was protective of my solitude. I gave it space the way others gave space to their religion or politics; I owed nothing to either of those.

  For a living I updated dictionary entries. I had been working on break all week. There were index cards spread across the table and some on the floor. The word was tricky and defied simple definition. These were the ones I liked best. They were the same as an earworm, a song that became stuck in your head. Often I would find myself sliding them into sentences where they did not belong. To decipher a code. To break a note. To interrupt. I would work my way through the alphabet, and by the time I had reached the end it would have changed, shifted even a little. The memories I had of you were the same. When I was younger I went over and over them, trying to pick out details, specific colours or sounds. Except each time I revisited one it would be slightly different and I’d realise that I couldn’t tell what I’d made up and what had really happened. After that I stopped remembering and tried forgetting instead. I was always much more competent at that.

  Every few months I rang the hospitals, the morgues, the police stations and asked if anyone had seen you. Twice in the last sixteen years there had been a flurry of possibility: a raided boating community with a woman matching the description I gave; a couple of kids who said they saw a body in the woods but turned out to be lying. I no longer saw you on other women’s faces in the street, but ringing morgues had become a habit. Sometimes I thought that I kept doing it to make sure you were not coming back.

  That morning I’d been in the office. The air conditioning was turned up so high everyone was in jumpers and scarves, fingerless gloves. Lexicographers are a singular breed. Cold-blooded, slow-thinking, careful with our sentences. At my desk – shuffling index cards – I realised it had been nearly five months since I’d looked for you. The longest gap for a while. I took my phone into the bathroom and called the old places. I had adapted your physical description to allow for passing time. White female, mid-sixties, dark- to grey-haired, five feet one, twelve stone, birthmark on left shoulder, tattoo on ankle.

  I was wondering, he said in the last morgue I phoned, if we might get this call.

  You always seemed forceful, without end, deathless. I left work early. There were road works at the roundabouts and the bus took a long time to get out of the city. I had never looked much like you but in the reflection of the dirty window I saw you in the angles of my face. Closed my fists over the bar of the seat in front. That evening I would pack a bag, book a rental car, turn off the water. In the morning I would drive to identify your body.

  It was dark by the time I got home. I went to turn the light on in the kitchen and found myself afraid – in a way I had not been for years – in case you were standing there. I ran the tap over my hands until the water was steaming. You were shorter than I was, wide around the hips, feet so small you sometimes joked they’d been bound when you were a child. You did not cut your hair, and it was long and dark, coarse at the top. Now and then you’d have me plait it. Gretel, Gretel, you have fast fingers. You would laugh. I had not remembered that for a long time. What it felt like to touch your hair. Can you make a mermaid tail? No, not like that, try again. One more time.

  I tried to work. Break. To separate into pieces. To make or become inoperative. I would finally see you again at the morgue in the morning. Dread was a word that could be used also to describe flocks of birds taking off into the sky. The mass of birds rose up my throat, flooded out through my cracked jaw. I broke my own rule. There was a bottle of gin wedged between the fridge and the wall. I wrangled it out. Poured a treble into a glass. Raised the glass to you. Your voice talked inside my head, on and on. I couldn’t make out the words, only that it was you speaking; the sentences had your inflections, the words were simple and hard. I gritted my teeth around the edge of the glass. I closed my eyes. There was a loud clap and I felt the wind of it on my face. When I looked you were in the low doorway to the yard. You were wearing that old orange dress, pulled tight around your waist, your legs breaking out from the bottom. You were holding your hands out to me and they were full of mud. The river was connected to your left shoulder and widened out behind you. It was the way it was when we lived there: thick, nearly opaque. Except, on the kitchen tiles, I could see the shadows of creatures ducking and diving, swimming. I ran the tap again and held both hands under the hot water. When I looked back you had sidled closer, weed wrapped in the drags of black hair either side of your face, your old-cigarette smell filling the kitchen from top to bottom. I could feel you examining my life. Even in my imagination you were opinionated, critical. You peeled an egg, skinning the shell off the smooth white globe. You chased me with the hose until the ground was so sodden with mud that we fell, were coated as if bulbs just born. You looked at me out of the mouth of my kitchen with the river crashing behind you. What are you doing? you said. Is this where you’ve ended up? Just effing along.

  I put on my boots, a coat and hat and went out so fast I barely closed the doo
r behind me. There was a crust of light pollution and a sliver-moon. I walked so hard I had to stop after a bit, puffing. When I looked back there was a single square of light from the kitchen window of the cottage. A yellow socket in the hill. I couldn’t remember if I was the one who’d left it on.

  I’d always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all those years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left.

  The Hunt

  The rental car was red and the hospital seemed to be mostly a long corridor. I walked past entrances to gynaecology, respiratory health, private. It smelled of soup warmed up in the staff microwave, burned toast, bleach. The morgue was three floors down. I lingered outside, not wanting to go in. There was a board with advertisements for dog walkers, free hamster, new bike only £100. The air conditioning was broken, and when people got up from chairs they left sweat stains behind. The orderlies came and went with trolleys, plugged into headphones or talking on their mobiles. I rarely remembered faces or bodies. I thought of words you used to say: hooch, radiant, sludge. What had you smelled like? I put my wrist against my nose. You had been jealous, selfish with your time and space. Even after sixteen years of living without you, even going to see your body I was trying not to step on your toes. An orderly pushed a trolley in through the swing doors and they opened enough for me to see a triangle of the room beyond, the glare of fluorescents.