Everything Under: A Novel Page 4

  The first time you went on the boat it was not the way you imagined. He seemed sometimes not to notice you were there and you wondered if there were other women who came and sat while he moved around. You asked him for tea but when he said he only had whisky drank that instead. You found yourself studying his body. He had an economical look. He hitched often at the waistband of his trousers with both hands as if he’d had bulk he no longer possessed. He spoke in riddles, in codes and secrets. Laughed and laughed. He was whittling, he told you, a lure. A what? He would not explain. Mostly when you went he was cooking. You told him you couldn’t even make toast and he sucked the air into the back of his throat, nudged you into place, gave you a knife. He said everything tasted salty because of how much you cut yourself. He sharpened his knives on his belt. Everything was too spicy though you pretended it was not. In your room, when you touched yourself, you burned from your chilli-handed graspings. He taught you – on the long towpath with the rattle of the train – how to smoke.

  You stayed longer and longer. The water and electricity were turned off in your flat. The doctor’s office stopped ringing. He did not ask you to stay but most nights his body pressed you down into the mattress and so you did. You heard the rain on the roof of the boat; you heard the train rushing past, you heard the slow slugging of his pulse.

  In the days – stirring the great cauldrons of food he made or sunbathing and smoking on the roof – you would often hear something. What was it? Sitting up or putting down the wooden spoon. It was inside you, creaking like an old house moving in westerly winds or a boat lifted on a strong current. Something different from all the others; their beautiful bodies and quiet faces. Something about the shape of his heavy hands, his spine banking through the moss of his skin, the boat beneath him. He told you that he dreamed of going blind, of waking and being able to see nothing but night, of seeing a pin moving with speed towards his pupils. He loved you with all his might, he was different from the others. They were not, after all, the years of celibacy. Perhaps, though, the years of something else.

  There had been girls you’d grown up with who’d wanted babies so hard they could barely put it into words – a chemical ache. You had never been that way. You did not consider your body a carrier, an appendage to something else. There had been scares before, small worries, late periods. Except it had never come to anything, and this had only proved to you that you were not capable; you were not built to do it. Some machines were made for cutting or filling or forming something to shape and some were not. You did not have the mechanics for baby-making. More than that – the older you got the more you understood – you did not have the resolve. You were a runner, a giver-upper. It was a pattern laid out behind you like a reversed breadcrumb trail you could have followed – if you’d had the impulse – to prove that you were no one to be depended upon.

  Still. He sometimes spoke about the children he’d always dreamed of. You let him. He did not seem to notice your silence. He had wanted them since he was a boy who’d thought he could do better than his parents.

  One morning: his excited face, his grateful clever hands, you let him drop the pack of condoms into the canal. You sure? he said over and over. Are you sure? The truth was – his hands beneath the tight elastic of your underwear – that you thought nothing of it. He could want it as much he wanted. Nothing would come of it. You were certain of this. You were simply not built that way.

  The baby was there whether you had wished for it or not. And you still believing it was not possible until it was too late to do anything about it. You grew so fast it felt like something wolfing through you, stealing space. You could no longer move with ease through the boat; jump from barge to bank, open the heavy locks. You did not tell him that you had never wanted a child. You would do it, if for nothing else then for him. People did it all the time. People did it daily, thoughtlessly. Couples had babies because it was something made of the two of them. You would have a baby because it was made of a part of him.

  Two

  Things Go Missing in the Night

  The Cottage

  The house is different with you here. The scattered cups and periodic emptying of the fridge in the middle of the night. The way you think burrowing into my mind so that I find myself losing days, forgetting the ordering of weeks. The fights I try to avoid but which swim up out of you, last whole nights and end with you weeping in the bath. The obsessions that rush over you. The day you spend making vats of curry, your hands orange with turmeric; too bored or distracted by the time you’re finished to eat any of it. The day we spend up by the stream so that you can fish with your hands, crouched for hours in the low, sluggish water while you bend and grasp for fish I cannot see, do not think are there. You become obsessed, also, with thoughts of inevitability, unavoidability. There is a sense of doom about you, dragging your wretched hide around my house. I know, you keep saying, what will happen. And when I quiz you, angrier and angrier by the second, you say only that there is no escaping, that the way we will end up is coded into us from the moment we are born and that any decisions we make are only mirages, ghosts to convince us of free will. And I want to shout that you chose to leave me, no one made you do it, you cannot lie down behind your badly made decisions and call them fate or determinism or god. But sometimes I wonder if you are right and if all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions. I do not say this to you. I try not to listen when you speak, and I make you tea, and I sleep when you sleep like a mother with a newborn she does not quite yet know how to look after.

  I have been thinking about Marcus, and when I ask if you remember first meeting him you say who, and what are you talking about? Except I know from the look in your eyes and the way you sidle away that you do. A fragment has come back to me. I am uncertain what it means and when I recount it you become angry and a window is broken. The man who comes to fix it watches you as if you frighten him. You open and close your jaws with a snap and he jumps.

  I ate men like you for breakfast when I was her age, you say and point at me.

  I can barely hear what you are saying. The memory lays itself over the dirty house, your clawed hands, the new pane of glass, the man’s toolbox open on the table.

  I am thirteen years old and indebted to you and to words and to the tangle of bank and water and forest. I believe that nothing is set in stone, that I can change anything I want by catching river rats, frogs, rough grey squirrels, field mice, daddy long-legs, tadpoles. It is nearly the end of the winter that Marcus came – the last winter we were on the river – and I am belly down on the roof of our boat. There is a curl of mist that cuts the trunks off at their knees. The boat is not tied to the bank but in the middle of the river, the mooring ropes drawn tight towards the shore. I hold my head in the crook of my arm, and my breath fogs and then clears the glass in the circle of roof hatch. It is night and the only light is in the boat beneath me. You, I remember, had told me you needed a sheesh, asked me to sleep on the roof. Marcus had been in the boat with you.

  At times I am inside myself. I can taste the bark I’d skinned from a tree and chewed until it turned to pulp, can see the crescents of dirt under my fingernails. I look down through the roof hatch.

  At other times I am on the bank and I am the age I am with you in my house, bent-toed in my too-small boots, searching for signs of you: cigarette butts, bits of bread, burnt-out matches. From the ground I can only just make out my younger self, hunched forward on the roof, elbows sharding out to either side, intent on watching.

  Through the roof hatch something moves. It is double-headed, has more limbs than it must need, flings in and out of the dull pockets of candlelight. I cup my face in my hands, press my nose against the glass as hard as I can, hold my breath. Is it the Bonak?

  Each time I come close to understanding what I am seeing I find myself on the bank, tugging at the short hair behind my ears, whistling for a dog long gone, trying to
remember the words we need to tell this story.

  The man fixing the window says something under his breath and you chase him as far as his car, stand throwing stones as he roars down the track. There is a heat haze over the hills and when you come back to the house there are sweat loops under your arms, across your chest. You tell me you need lemonade. You need a cigarette. You need a deckchair. You need some fucking alone time. I am so frustrated by you. Your pig-headedness. You rile me. You piss me off. You do not belong here.

  I need to forget the person you were and instead record who you have become. You do not seem to feel pain. I watch you scald yourself on the kettle and continue as if nothing had happened. You are intensely sensitive to small noises or smells: complain about the wind in the chimney or the water in the pipes, refuse to go into a room after I’ve cooked. You speak with great, loud authority on anatomy and disease. I do not know if you are making it up or have gathered the knowledge across the years. You tell me I am iron deficient and probably have coeliac disease. You hold my hands and push at the cuticles, make noises I cannot interpret, pull the skin around my eyes down. There is nothing you won’t talk about, gain great pleasure from telling me about bowel movements, the colour of your urine, plucking chin hairs. The way you talk about sex is sweeping, generalised. Bodies seep together in your sentences so it is never clear if you are speaking about one event or multiple ones. When you are not talking about Charlie – the man on the boat – the men are sub-missive, cowed, at times afraid. There is one you speak about with slow regret. Younger, inexperienced, fumblingly nervous. A mistake from the start. Most of the others I think you tell me to be funny; their heads knocking against walls, their flaccidity or the speed with which they orgasm. If I laugh, even a little, you look pleased and take my hand or give me an orange from the fruit bowl.

  There is also further degeneration. You shout for me to come, come quickly. When I get there you are holding my big Oxford dictionary open in your hands, wielding it at me.

  I know that it’s a word, you shout. I know it is, I know it is.

  I try and calm you. You are fraught. You throw the book onto the table and it smashes a glass. You tear through the pages so that some are ripped.

  I know it is, I know it is.

  What? What is the word?

  You glare at me, your lips pulled back over the gums, your fingers ridged. The word you were looking for is egaratise and it means to disappear yourself, to step out of your past. I tell you there is no such word and show you the place in the dictionary to prove it. You seem frightened, follow me around the house, dogging my heels so that we both nearly fall.

  Small words bother you. Tap, screw, step, handle. You pronounce them wrong or speak as if they mean something else. Can you turn the handle on the bath to put more hot in? It’s too stiff for me. Mostly I pretend nothing has happened and you swim on, blithely. I think you do not notice until, one day, I see you in the kitchen, gripping the sink with both hands. You are saying the word parasitic over and over again. Now para-SIT-ic. Now PARA-sit-ic. Your left foot knocks out the beat on the floor. At first I do not understand what you are doing but after a moment I realise you are examining your use of the word for flaws, testing yourself for further loss.

  You know exactly what is happening to you. No one is as undone by your age as much as you are. All of your ignorance is only for me.

  Children are supposed to leave their parents. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. By the time you’re a parent you are supposed to have got over it, whatever it is that sets us rolling. Parents are not supposed to leave their children.

  I need to ask you something, I say. Do you think you would mind?

  Why would I mind? You shake your head. You seem to have forgotten any of your previous irritation.

  You might not remember.

  You don’t argue with me. You lean against me, companionable but careful. I can feel the gap where your breast had been.

  Do you remember, I say, the winter Marcus came?

  It’s summer now though.

  Yes. It was winter then. We were living on the river. Do you remember? I found you there a couple of days ago.

  You hummed a little, shook your head, tapped my knee. I forged on. We’d been living there my whole life. Just you and me. But one day a man came. A boy. And he stayed with us. Not for very long, a month at most. There was something in the river, I don’t know what. I think we tried to catch it.

  Did we?

  Yes.

  I don’t remember that.

  Do you remember anything?

  You shrug, dig in the pockets of the dressing gown, come up empty. You show me your hands, palms up. I press them down.

  Do you remember what happened to Marcus?

  You take my hand between yours and rub at it hard, blow into the gap so I feel your clammy breath on my skin. I feel the shock of you touching me. I used to – didn’t I? – wrap my arms around your legs and press my face into the curve of your knees. I used to bring you what I’d found in the forest or the water: current-shaped stones, dock leaves, snails that you cooked in garlic and butter. When I was young you held the hose high and we showered together out on the path, your hands working at the knots in my hair like they were puzzles you knew the answer to.

  You are suddenly, as if a switch has been pressed, very present. I can see from looking at you that you know everything, that you are full with all the years that have passed and what they’ve left.

  I should have known when he first came, you say. You angle your head. There was something about him. I think I told myself it was lust, a new sort of lust, consuming. There was something familiar about him, like I’d loved him before. I should have known.

  The River

  There are more beginnings than there are ends to contain them. Somewhere you and the father who is not my father are in a narrow bed, as yet unafraid, long limb to long limb, mouth to mouth as if one of you was dying already. Somewhere I am standing in the dictionary office listening to the phone ring in an empty morgue. Somewhere I am opening the door to the cottage on the hill and you are pushing past me, commenting on the beige wallpaper that has been here as long as I have, the mouldy cornices and lack of ashtrays. Couldn’t you even buy a bloody car? And somewhere Margot is walking. Here I fall back on imagination, possibility. I fit her words into my cheek and hope she will not mind if I make allowances, embellish. Somewhere she is walking and perhaps she hears me, the echo of repetition and thinks, That’s not right. Listen. Listen, this is how it went.

  There was a tent in Margot’s bag but she was too tired to use it. She crawled as far as she could into the bush. There was a slime of leaves, beer cans cut open, a white-filmed balloon that skidded under her bad leg. Through the hedge she could see the canal, lit by the oil-spill throw of street lights, the surprise exclamation of car headlights rising and then lowering over the bridge. She pulled the hood of her sleeping bag over her head. Towards the tail end of the night some people came and slept further down the path, beneath the bridge and she was woken by their calling to one another. In the first inch of waking she had forgotten. Then it came back to her. She could not sleep after that. There was a crease of frost on the ground and the sleeping bag was wet. She watched the dirty morning descend over the water.

  She emptied the bag Fiona had filled for her. It was not without compassion. A bar of chocolate, a bag of bread, some banknotes folded up, half a round of toilet roll and some tampons. The tent had not been used for a long time and was damp-smelling. Something her father had said came back to her though only partly; something about how achieving only the smallest thing was still an achievement. She tried to hear the sound of her body, churning, mechanical, still working despite everything. When she thought about what she was doing she was so afraid she could barely see. She pressed everything back into the bag, straightened, began to walk.

  She walked for two hours and then stopped. Dual carriage-ways passed noisily over the canal and away; old railwa
y tracks broke off mid-air; fields of what might have been crops were sunk beneath a scum of flood water. Occasionally – though less and less – she would swing about, start to head back the way she’d come. It seemed inconceivable to be walking away from home. Her hands stuttered at her pockets, at her thin hair, at her left leg, which was twisted. She closed her eyes, imagined the walls of her parents’ house rising around her like a ribcage, the familiar doors swinging closed.

  Four fishermen – their tent pegs left in the ground from the night before – were so insistent that she have one of the burgers they were cooking in a dirty frying pan that she squatted next to them, ate the undercooked meat with her hands. Took the second she was offered. They spoke slowly to one another. She barely listened. Not knowing what else to do she stayed with them until darkness was thick as a wall and the small circle of fire barely broke it. She could hear whatever lived in the canal moving through the brambles. She was unprepared for it, for all of it. She felt the cold tapping of fear again, drawn tight across her temples, over her chest. She pressed her fists into her ears until it retreated. Across the fire one of the fishermen studied her.

  Do you know, he said when he caught her eye, about the canal thief? It lives in the water and walks on the land.

  The other men laughed or hissed between their teeth. They had their rods by their sides like weapons. She could see the grease from the meat on their hands and faces. Their long limbs were cut off by darkness like amputees. One of them gestured to the bags beside him. She could see fish scales, a round button eye.

  Things go missing in the night, he said and shrugged. They laughed again, and she thought that they must be making up stories to try and scare her.

  As she walked away she heard them following her, and she crouched in the bushes and waited until they had trudged past and then, giving up, gone back the way they’d come, towards their fire. She did not know what they would do if they found her, only that it would be nothing good. She thought that if anything went missing in the night they must have been the ones to take it; their heavy pockets, what they buried beneath the bodies of the fish in the plastic bags. She heard their voices for a long time, and then they were cut off and there was only the sound of the water and the bushes; the scream of a fox or a hunting owl. In the dark she could not fit the tent poles into the right places and she gave up and lay in her sleeping bag again and tried to sleep but could not.