Fen (10 page)

Soon the sky was red most mornings and the cat came down with something, sneezing often, throwing up anything she gave it. The sky was red most mornings and when she came downstairs it was like a storm had been taken out of a jar and let go in the house, everything from the table and the counters and the walls on the floor.

When she wasn't working she read over his four letters. Angrier and angrier: for giving him anything let alone her time. Read them like there were clues shoved up behind the words or inking out from the full stops: a part of the message she had missed, where he told her he wouldn't be coming back, that he wanted a baby about as much as she did and he was going to stay away. Except she knew really she wouldn't find anything. He didn't write the sort of words that could hide anything anywhere.

At night she couldn't sleep for the whales that came breaching up through the house's watery foundations, rent apart the floorboards to flip through, circled the bed in sharkish lines until that is what they were: sharks made from all the letters he'd used to describe them, right up to the tottering S that made up the apex of each fin.

It was harder being left behind. Because sometimes the sharks grew legs, moaning from the pain: white, thin
limbs with bony ankles. They climbed onto the bed and lay down next to her until there were so many there wasn't room and then they piled on top. They wanted to tell her how hard it was to have what they had: grey, waterproof bodies you had to keep moving otherwise you'd die, and legs like supermodels. They were always off balance and she pitied them until she couldn't breathe.

She started going to the pub even when she wasn't working. Took the four letters and read them leaning on the counter with the chair pushed back to accommodate the jut of her. Once she looked around and saw herself for what she'd become: a local like the rest of them, all balled up inside themselves, all in their usual seats.

At the weekends and on Friday nights the pub was full up, full right up. There were bodies on either side of her and foam on the countertop and sometimes she went round and helped even if she wasn't getting paid for her time.

Once she turned to the sight of an arm bearing the inked shape of a compass, felt a wrench and looked up. They didn't get sailors there often. They didn't often get anybody who hadn't been born there. It was far enough from anything and everything. He was older than Ruben, looking wryly up at her like he knew she'd seen the dash of someone else reflected on him. She stayed close by him through the night, saw the ends and starts of
conversations swimming up and then receding into the loud. Boat words she knew from Ruben caught at her like hooks.

You been long? he said later, lowering his chin at her stomach. The pub was emptying out.

Eight months. Maybe a bit more.

He drew air into his cheeks but did not let the whistle out. He had an accent she did not know. Not a fen one anyway. Maybe not an English one.

Getting there. Aren't you.

She did not answer. When she came back he was gone, drink only half finished.

She wiped the beer slicks and laid the letter flat, bending her head to read it.

One morning she woke and the sky was red enough it came glazed through the curtains. She felt sick through to her bones. A great, seasick nausea. Off kilter. Went
down the steps one at a time, one hand on the wall. Something had happened. Sometimes it was easy to know. The hot sunrise was at her temples and filling her mouth.

The albatross was on top of the kitchen table, one foot on either side of the carved compass. Behind it the window was broken through, pushed in with the frame bent down. The great span of its wings was open, measuring space. The light picked it out through the broken window and it looked like a mistake nobody was ever meant to see. She remembered the words Ruben had used when he wrote about them: the hazed shapes cutting through without moving, the coming of them as if called. It was stone heavy, head hanging down, wings straining at the chest. She could see the breath shifting, the stir of it.

She stepped down and onto something broken, hissed, felt the skin open. The bird on her table shook itself up, returned its wings against its ribcage, balanced up on its huge, flattened feet.

She wanted to say to it: I know why you're here; I know why you've come. I wished it away, I know I did. I wished you here.

She imagined, one hand going to her belly, Ruben, wherever he was – under the sea or islanded up somewhere or just out sailing and tanning and peeling oranges with his clever fingers. She saw him sitting up and knowing, though he'd never known anything in his life, what she'd called up. Well, he would be praying. That was what he did.

She took another step forward and the bird gave her eye contact as if that was all it needed for everything to be as it should be. That was a sort of prayer in itself, she thought, bringing a hand up.

THERE IS NOTHING
much to eat but there is tea if you would like some.

Near the beginning people came all the time. There was a journalist who sat where you are sitting now. It was winter. He said his car had broken down outside town though we both knew that was a lie. I thought you looked a little like him out the window but I see now I was wrong. Are you one of the followers? They come sometimes too.

There are times I hear about my son. You have to know what you are looking for and I've been looking long enough to know. Someone in the North drawing crowds, saying they can hold their breath for hours; someone along the coast hunting hospitals, breaking into rooms.

Do you want to see the photos of him? There are some from when he was older; ones he sent to me. Do you
want to see the room he slept in? People normally want to see that. No? I can tell you about him anyway. It's been a while since anyone visited.

He came big; came with a slick of dark hair almost to his shoulders and a set of fine white teeth that bit onto my finger. It was the summer the fields flooded and stayed that way so long all the trees rotted to pulp. I took him to meet my friends and they all held him and bounced him on their knees. He was a quiet baby. He made little fuss. We passed him round the table in the pub. I almost forgot, then – watching him move from hand to hand – what he was.

The first time it happened he was still small. A little twisted shape of skin and bone, narrow wrists balancing big, heavy hands. He was useless, wrenching from side to side on his back, legs pedalling like a beetle. I was not afraid of him then. He was sickly, caught colds, had a cough all the time. I kept the house warm and we stayed mostly here, in the kitchen. I filled the sink with warm water, held him. He liked it there.

To begin with I didn't understand. There was an ache. Here. Across my belly. I don't remember what the first thing to go was. Only that it was a single word, a city I'd been thinking of perhaps, or my mother's maiden name. He made a sound. A gurgle, I thought. Though it was a word. He was excited by it, thrashing in my hands. I tried to say the word back to him but there was nothing there. An absence.

That first week I lost things fast. Single words, whole memories, sentences I'd once said to someone. He took what I said or was thinking. At the start I wrote lists of all the words I wanted to keep, tested myself on questions when he was asleep.
What is the name of the town you live in? How old are you?
Those are the ones he took first. The ones I needed most.

I left him in the bedroom with the sides of the cot locked. It did not make any difference what room he was in. Doors and walls and locks had no power.

I thought of treating him the way they would hundreds of years ago. Leaving him out where the cold or the foxes would get him. But that was not a thing possible to do.

He grew fast with his takings. Faster than I could have imagined. His hair was longer than mine. I plaited it, tied it in a tight knot on top of his head. When he slept he tore it loose and lay beneath it. His toenails were claws. I cut them warily, watching his face while he watched me do it. He looked like me. More and more. The colour of his eyes, the shape of his face, his shoulders.

He was barely a year old though after the first few stealings he'd crawled and soon after that I caught him walking, stumbling from one piece of furniture to the next, clinging on. Turning his big smile towards me.

Do you remember – he would say after that. I would shake my head. He talked about days I was certain had
been mine, people I thought I must have known. In the shop he would run ahead, stalking around the aisles. Look, he would say, pointing at someone I did not remember. Look. And people would stare.

Do you want something to eat or drink? You don't look comfortable. It is cold, I know. I have not been to the shop but there might be tea or something in the cupboards. You're free to look. You can stay until it gets dark. You don't talk much.

Some people came to the house once. They wore stiff green coats and woollen hats though it was a hot summer. I knew I made them nervous because I looked like him; I walked and talked the way he did. I did not want to let them in but beneath their coats they were bunched with muscle, thick at the neck and shoulder. Their bodies were heavy devotion. They wanted only caffeine-free – I did not have it – they would not drink the beer I gave them.

They sat on the edge of the sofa, tipped forwards onto the shined toes of their shoes. When I moved my hands or face I could see them wince; I looked like a mistake who'd stolen his shape. I wanted to tell them that was not the way it was.

What can you tell us about him?

I got out the photos I keep in the drawer. He did not like them to be taken, most were of the back of his head or the flat of his hand raised in protest. There were scabs on his knees, his nose broken from when he fell off his
bike. They were not interested in that; did not want to see him that way.

Tell us about the things he did, they said and I knew what they wanted me to say. One got out a notebook and balanced it on the huge bridge of his knee, held the pen in his fist.

What did he do to the heating?

They tilted further forward.

He didn't do anything to the heating.

What about when you had meat, one said. He stood, legs splayed.

Nothing happened when we had meat, I said.

Maybe, the one with the notebook said, you didn't notice when the meat was better than you first thought, more free range.

An easy mistake, said the other.

I would give them nothing. They got desperate. They asked if he ever saved roadkill.

Maybe he fixed your washing machine or television when it broke.

They didn't break, I said.

People came over the years, though they quickly learnt I was no good for it. Some mornings there were threats: soft, stinking packages pushed through the letter box, broken windows. They wrote things on the Internet I will not repeat. They came less and less. I was no good as a mythmaker. Never have been.

*  *  *

Yes, you can come closer if you want. Sit here, by the lamp. Are you someone who knew him? Maybe you could tell me about him. I would like to hear about the way he was when he was older, whether he was a good person.

One day he came home from school talking about William Jeff's father who was a pilot and had a good car.

Who is my dad? he asked.

It was the one thing I had managed to keep from him, the one memory I kept sufficiently locked up he could not take it.

I moved my hands, miming anything I could think of. Distracted him with photos of astronauts and doctors.

But his question had sent me back to that night in the cornfield. A smell or the sound of husks breaking underfoot; the soft pop of pomegranate seeds between fingers; an arm thrust forward, the skin puckered, the nub of something breaking through: a feather. Then it was gone, the memory. I loved him more then. When I did not remember his conception.

It was too late, though I tried another story on him – a fiction, but no more one than anything else. I spent a month building the story, making it a memory. When I woke in the mornings I would lie in bed and think about it until I believed in it.

When I was younger, I told him, I met a boy. We messed around in the back of his father's car; took our
clothes off out by the estuary where we thought no one could see. We had some plans. They were small and simple to carry out. We bought a house in the town we grew up in. He gave me that jug over there as a gift. It was often filled with flowers. The year we knew that you were growing in me, we found there was something, also, that grew in him. I remember the funeral very well.

You don't seem to like that story. Well, what would you have told him when he asked about his father?

It was no good. He understood now where he'd come from. He'd taken the memory of it from me. He changed after that. At night I listened to him foraging through the house. He was taller than me. All body. He had long hands. He looked as if he were made – I always thought this – of scaffolding, rafters. He drew on all the walls and floor. Mostly it was drawings of what he could see. He drew the fridge with the door open and then closed, drew light bulbs hanging from the ceilings of rooms and growing from floors; plug sockets and extension cords. He drew them as if they were creatures in a forest. He drew them more than he ever drew me. I came only as an afterthought: a tiny, out-of-proportion figure in the corners of rooms or emerging from piles of cables.