Everything Under: A Novel Read online

  You had a condom in your bag and you took it out and showed it to me. Put the wrapper between your teeth and ripped it open. Looked around for something to use, had nothing but the knife you’d been eating your dinner with. The knife did a bad job. I could see a couple of the waiters together by the till watching us. A woman on a table next to ours was staring openly, her fork halfway to her mouth. You seemed oblivious to their gaze. The knife ripped through the rubber.

  You get the idea, you said when you were done. You looked for somewhere to put the condom, slid it beneath your plate.

  After we’d left the restaurant you took me to a bar with a square dance floor and mirrors on all of the walls, no lock on the bathroom. You told the man behind the bar that I had never had a cocktail and ordered us a row. I didn’t drink any because I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to find our way back. I stood at one of the tall, wobbly tables. It was sticky. You danced, yelled that I was a prude, switched your hips back and forth, threw your hands up and opened them out as if there was something falling from above you. When you came back over you were damp and smiling.

  This dress is so tight, you said. I helped you undo it at the neck. You sighed and rubbed your arms. I need to tell you about Marcus.

  I shook my head, yelled over you, told you I didn’t want to hear. Whatever it was you were going to say, I didn’t want to know.

  Are you sure? You seemed suddenly sober, wrapping your rough hands over mine on the table, tapping the side of my face with your fingers. I now wonder if you would have stayed if I’d let you tell me what you needed to tell. I don’t know if this is true.

  I think, you said as if I wasn’t there, that I should have known from the beginning. You spoke about what you’d seen in the water, about bodies in the river and metal traps. You spoke about the Bonak. We made it, you kept saying, don’t you understand we made it what it was. I put both hands over my ears until your voice was lost in the hum of music.

  At the bus I got on first. When I turned back you were standing on the pavement and when the driver asked if you were coming you said no. Through the eclipsing doors of that bus: your upturned forehead, the powder on your face claggy as limestone, the lipstick barely even on your mouth any more. Your face thinning moon-like until the doors had drawn closed.

  For a while after that I just hung around at the stable, and I think they let me because they knew you had gone and I had nowhere else to go. It was one of the mothers – their carefully made-up, concerned faces – who told on me. I was in the system for a while – that’s what the other girls I lived with called it – passed around different houses, different foster homes, similar faces. I don’t remember much. They asked me about you. More than once. They asked if I had other relatives, anyone who could look after me until I turned eighteen. I said no. They asked if I knew where you were. I said you were dead.

  I was in the last foster home until I was old enough to leave. The school I was sent to was ragged, a thousand pupils or more, scaffolding where before there had been a sports hall, dirt instead of a field. A lot of the kids lived in caravans down by the train tracks. I didn’t like it and tried to escape at every opportunity. One time I got as far as the river before they caught me. I don’t remember what I thought I would do when I got back to the pine-forested place on the river where I’d lived with you. I don’t think I had a plan. I think it was only muscle memory that kept me trying to get back there.

  It was language – our language – that tripped me up at school. I told one of the teachers I needed sheesh time, shouted at a boy that he was a harpiedoodle. Over all those years you had never told me you were creating a different language, applicable only to that time, to us. You had never warned me. After a while the other students started noticing I spoke with words they didn’t know. They mimicked them back at me, getting the sounds wrong, shouting them down corridors or in class. They started calling me the foreigner or the make-up – as in she doesn’t want to speak English, she’s too good for English she’s going to make it up.

  I hacked those words that you had given me out, erased them. Lost them over the years so that now – looking back – they feel as foreign in my mouth as they must have done to those other children.

  You’re like a wild child, one of the girls at school said. Her name was Fran. You’re like one of those children kept in cellars. You’re like one of those children chained to their potties in cellars and not even taught how to talk.

  I stole Fran’s careful stash of eyeshadow and necklaces, buried it. I fought with the bigger boys until they bled or we both did. I still remembered then, I think, most of what it had been like to live on the river, and the knowledge of this was strung inside me and along my arms like blinking eyes.

  Those were the years of trying to find you. At the weekends I’d catch the bus to places I thought you might have gone. Trawl around asking after you. I had the photo I have now and I’d show it to everyone I met. I’d say, She’s short, shorter than us; she’s got grey hair and grey eyes. It was hard not to see you everywhere. Out of the windows of moving buses, down supermarket aisles, at tables in cafes or pubs, in cars at traffic lights. I saw you walking or running, sitting, talking, laughing with your head tipped forward against your chest. I chased women down the street but they were never you. You had gone without a trace. You were a ghost in my brain, in my stomach. I began to wonder if you had ever really existed at all.

  A couple of the girls hung around me, and I think it was because I looked like I was swimming the wrong way up the river and they wanted to see what would happen. Rosie liked to sit next to me in maths and occasionally she’d tell me things: how she’d pierced her own ear; how her sister had nearly set the ping-pong table on fire, where she was going on holiday. She liked to talk about the maths teacher, who was attractive only because he was younger than all the others. She called him shy and listed the things she’d like to do to him after school. Looking back I think maybe she sat next to me because telling me wasn’t the same as telling one of the other girls. It was like teaching someone to talk or read. I had never heard the words she used before. I didn’t know the language she was talking in. Even now they feel like words only half-translated: fuck, shag, bang, snog, french.

  There was a school trip to the Lake District. There were bunk beds, a climbing wall and a pool where we practised capsizing our kayaks and where I started having panic attacks, nose filled with water, the shadows of legs marching towards me, like I was drowning in the river all over again. We also practised kissing. Rosie was there and another girl who I did not know well. We did it before dinner, on the bunk beds or out behind the swimming pool. They had cucumber-tasting mouths. We judged one another harshly: too much tongue, don’t wriggle about like that. They had kissed boys before but it was new to me. I thought about it all of the time. Kissing was, I understood, not even the final act. It was a passage leading to somewhere. I thought about you in the restaurant that time, holding the condom. I thought about it so much that sometimes I found myself almost blinded, not hearing anything anyone was saying.

  Somewhere in the kissing I started seeing Marcus, emerging out of the centre of their chests like he’d been waiting in there all along. There was something hectic about the feel of it, almost hysterical. The mouths of the other girls were cold, but the Marcus that came out of them was heated through like a brand. Sometimes I’d look down at their hands on my legs and they would be so like his that I’d feel fraught with panic. With my eyes closed anyone could be him. I wanted to ask you if that was something you saw when you kissed people.

  After a while it was not good any more. He was there, curled, waiting, eyes closed, barely alive. I’d feel his breath a second behind their own, hear the tick of his anxious tongue against the roof of my mouth. There was something sick inside him, a moss coating his lungs and stomach, filling his veins. It was something from the river. I understood that. When I thought about it I could see movement through glass, a cursory lick of colour. I didn’t kn
ow what it was, only that it wasn’t something I wanted to see more of. I couldn’t stand the thought of him pressing out of other people’s mouths, pushing his fingers through the brace of their knuckles, worming from their throats. I couldn’t stand it and I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to have sex with a boy, open my eyes and see Marcus looking out of his face. When I told the other girls I didn’t want to kiss any more they only shrugged. We’re not lesbians, they said.

  The Cottage

  After I found you on the river and brought you back to the house there is a dream I start having. I am in the basement of the dictionary office where I work. It’s windowless and lit only by wide, bowl lights that hang a little too low from the dirty, panelled ceiling. There are metal filing cabinets in rows. Ten or more are filled with words spelled backwards, another ten with words that have, over time, fallen out of use. There are old handprints on the walls, ancient dusty footprints on the floor, a light on in the tiny bathroom cubicle, though no one answers when I knock. Out of interest I look in the B cabinet, flipping through the yellow cards, but it is not there. Bonak. Of course it’s not; it’s not even a real word. It doesn’t even exist.

  I go down the corridor to the lift. I know I am dreaming because in reality it was refurbished a long time before I started working there, but here it is old, with a cage door that I press into the side and worn red velvet walls. It moves slowly, clanking through the levels. We reach the office floor. There are no phones allowed on desks, and the receiver in one of the two phone booths in the corner is swinging from its hook. I pick it up thinking I will hear your voice, but there is not even a dial tone.

  The coffee machine in the kitchen is warm to the touch; the fridge – which I swing open – is full of carefully labelled Tupperware. ARUNDHATI, DO NOT EAT. NAT 13/4/2017. BENJI. On the walls of the corridor are posters for silence. I move into the warren of cubicles. Most of the computers are on, the tidy desks lined with different-coloured citation cards, the trays for incoming and outcoming messages full. I walk towards my desk, but when I get there someone else’s things are on it. A red apple with tidy teeth marks, a jar of greenish pickled eggs, an encyclopedia with pages folded down. When I sit in the chair it is uncomfortable, set at a height for a shorter person. I look on the computer for signs of who has stolen my desk. There are emails but they are signed off only, always, with an S. There is a noise somewhere in the office. I stand and look over the tops of the cubicles. The automatic lights at the other end have come on, and – as I watch – go off again. I sit back down and start to read the definitions that are laid out. Some of the words are so crossed out I can read only parts. The sound of the river at night. A moment of alone time. Near the bottom of the pile one word is written clearly. Bonak: what we are afraid of. Even in a dream seeing it written down drops the bottom of my stomach out. I close my hand over the top of it.

  There is the sound of an object falling onto the carpeted floor. I stand and move out into the main corridor between wall and cubicles. The carpet ahead is rucked up as if someone had caught it with the side of their shoe. I push it down flat. Above my head the panelling of the ceiling starts to rattle, shifting out of place to reveal the mess of pipes and wires beyond. I see swift movement. A panel ahead crashes to the floor. More start to fall, breaking as they do or bouncing off desks and spinning away. With them comes water, not clean, filtered, office water but rank with weeds, torn nets emptying out threshing fish which drown on the carpet. The water falls from the ceiling. There is the sound of something shuttling about above my head, fast, rattling the glass in the windows. I hear it falling to the ground behind me. I do not turn. I listen to it moving across the floor. I know what you are, I think. Except when I wake up I’ve forgotten again.

  The morning after I first have the dream I find you at the table wearing my dressing gown and slippers, eating oranges and hard-boiled eggs, leaving the shells in neat little piles. You’ve brushed your hair and it lies flat against your head like a swimming cap. You spit a pip into your hand and tell me I was shouting in the night and was this going to be a regular occurrence? Because if it was perhaps I could get a hotel somewhere and let you sleep in peace?

  There are, between us, decades of bad feeling, a swamp of miscommunication, missed birthdays, the whole of my twenties, a cut-away breast I was not there to witness going. I think of bringing my hand down across your face the way you occasionally did at the stable. Not hard but with feeling.

  You peel me an egg. There’s something I remembered, you say.

  The front of your dressing gown has edged up and I can see the mouthing scar line where your left breast used to be.

  I eat the egg. What did you remember? Something about the winter with Marcus?

  You wave your hands impatiently and then wipe them across your mouth. No, no.

  OK, what then?

  You narrow your eyes at me. You look like someone I have kidnapped from the wild, your dirty fingernails and seal-like hair. I sit and wait. You seem to have more words than you know what to do with. Than I know what to do with. They spill out of you.

  Sarah

  It begins – I understand now – with you. This – where I wasn’t expecting or looking for it – is the story of you and the man who could have been my father.

  You were thirty-one. The year was 1978 or thereabouts. Though you did not know it, a spacecraft had set out for Saturn. It would discover that if a body of water big enough could be found then the planet would float in it. The length of a day on Saturn was short, barely ten hours. In the Oxford English Dictionary the words cold-call and gridlock were listed for the first time. The doctor at the surgery you worked at as a receptionist said – flirting, stealing a segment of the orange you’d brought for lunch – that you had child-bearing hips. You simpered, bore the insult. You understood what he meant was that you were not thin. You were small, barely reached his shoulder, but you were not thin. You had a body that could hold up; a bottom that could balance the weight of a rucksack on it and a pair of thighs that were the size of some girls’ backs. It was a body – you’d learned – that bred a type of confusion easily turned to your advantage. At school there had been the sporty boys who tasted of sweat and grass stains; the science boys with their fingers and fringes singed; the tall boys and the short ones, the skinny ones and the ones with flesh going spare. Your twenties were – from what you could understand of them – made for men. Mostly they were older. Men who populated the same bars as you did; men who stood in line for taxis, men who carried shopping bags, or paused to tie their laces before getting on to trains, before opening doors for you. Men who liked espressos, steak tartare, white chocolate macaroons; men who enjoyed subtitled films, who wrote in the margins of books then gave them to you to read after you’d had sex in their city flats or cabins in the woods or country houses with corridors like throats leading to doors you walked in and out of. Men who liked thin-strapped bras, who liked black cotton underwear, who liked bedposts and phone boxes and swimming pools.

  By the time you met Charlie you were old enough that he was the end of a long list. There had been a bad break-up with a professor who sometimes came into the cafe you worked in. A regally greying professor who, each time you were finished, would sit on the side of the bed and weep. Told you as he was leaving for the last time that he wouldn’t come again because you looked like his daughter. Turned at the door and said – face washed clean and mean with tears – that he thought his daughter might be a slut the way you were. That was that. You’d sworn off them. All the different sorts of them: men in suits and ties, men in scrubs and red underwear and socks with days of the week on. Older men in particular who thought you owed them something, a slice of the youth they had wasted.

  You got the job at the doctor’s because it had seemed – the white walls and ceiling, the carpets stained with age in the corners, the hoover you had to run around every morning and evening, the blue paper sheets tha
t covered the ripped-leather examining tables – a place entirely lacking in lust. Even the doctor – so your type you’d felt your heart sink when he came sashaying in that first day – stealing your bits of orange and offering you snifters from his secret gin supply did nothing to your resolve. Perhaps, you thought, the thirties were the celibate years. A decade at least. The flat you rented had yellow floral wallpaper and other people’s stains on the mattress. This was the life of a spinster. You bought Chinese takeaway from the shop underneath your flat, ate it on a bench across the road watching the cars going past. You organised and reorganised the stationery drawer at the surgery: the red loops of masking tape, the staples spilling out of your hands, the teeth of the hole punch pressing down perfect circles.

  One morning – already half-mad with boredom – you took a different route to the surgery, slipping down the narrow track beside the bridge, skidding in your heels, walking along the towpath that ran next to the canal. There were ducks in the oily water and boats with rusty doors and flowerpots on their roofs. Halfway down there was a green barge with a man sitting on the back, his legs up, a cup of coffee cooling on the deck next to him. His hands were busily whittling, though you could not see at what. Later you would think of that moment. The boat pulled in close to the weedy, muddied side; long legs bracing his skinny body; the rattle of the train passing on the bridge overhead so that for a moment you could barely hear yourself thinking about him, thinking about him so hard you should have known it would come to no good. You didn’t understand what it was about him. He was too skinny and not nearly keen enough. Still. You caught yourself – early morning and evenings too – taking the longer route along the canal. Slower each time you walked past, until one day you stopped and he was looking at you.