Fen (15 page)

She wanted to tell him the truth. A gift he'd not asked for or wanted but one she would give to him all the same. The truth was she wanted to go to the city and sit beneath the burners with hands cold enough she would induce him, eventually, to take her fingers into his mouth. Only this was not a possibility. She was limbed to the ground. To that place, this town. Like a root. Planted in.

She caught the waiter's eye. Went to the bathroom in the absence between one glass and another. The joints between her fingers were sore from the actions of the night so far: holding her wine glass, bending around the menu. She held them beneath the tap's flow. Wet her face and neck. Felt cracked and parched; dredged up and left too long in the midday. Dried herself on the hand towel – left a smudge of colour – reapplied the powder.

At the table she broke one of the rolls, filled its centre with oil and ate. When she was younger she would watch people through the windows of restaurants or on park benches. The shapes their mouths made, the fence posts of teeth around a sandwich, the length of fork gulleting in. Coming out clean. She would never wake with a hunger or eat to fill a hole inside her. But she'd taught herself the pleasure of it: eating.

She could learn new things, but she was unchanging. She was unchanging and, though she knew everybody felt that way, everybody else was not. Most days, at the hospital, she'd place her hands on their oddities: a distended abdomen, the outcrop of bone from a break. The great rocks of flesh rolled in towards her; the smoker's concrete lungs, the young girl's teeth eroded away. The strain of organs against skin. She could stand the bulimic, the obese, the iron deficient, the alcoholic and drug users. The woman who'd unsighted herself with a clothes pin. The overzealous father: two cigarette burns against his boy's arm. But when they left – the ease with which they went from place to place shook and hurt her. They did not think of boundaries, of lines. Didn't need to. She did not allow herself to watch them going, loaded clumsily into cars, limping towards the bus stop, emptied out of wheelchairs.

She drank her glass to the halfway mark and ordered soup for her starter. The waiter asked if she wanted the other plate and cutlery cleared away.

He's often late. Don't worry.

The man at the next table was talking, not eating much. She imagined him running along the canal in the morning, thinking – while he ran – of the marks the running made, the answering pressure of wine and too much red meat.

Her starter came. She thought about what she would say when he arrived. She thought he still would. She
would stand to meet him, let him kiss her on the cheek, let him say his apologies. He would be dressed in a suit; his tie off and the top few buttons of his shirt undone. He would ask what she was drinking and order her another and then order himself something different. He would look at her across the table, maybe compliment her on her dress or say something about the way she looked very like her photo and that was a good thing. She would let him say those things.

They could talk about films, yes, and books, maybe, and travel and wine. He would hold her wrist often across the table. She would move her legs across his calves. An accident.

What they were really talking about was, firstly, how much they didn't care about the food or the wine or the way they'd dressed themselves. What they were really talking about, secondly, was the way they wanted it to go when they were done with the meal. What they were really talking about, thirdly, was whether they could bear to set something rolling between them that might never end.

She smiled at the waiter and he came over.

I might as well order. It will serve him right.

Do you know what you would like?

What do you think will make him most jealous?

He flicked open the menu and held it so they could look.

He'll regret it if he walks in and sees you eating that.

He will. He can eat when we get home.

And another glass?

Yes. Please.

She wondered what her mother would have done in her situation. She did not think she would have left. Maybe when she was younger, fleeing, but not later. Later, older, she would have sat and drunk and eaten her food at her own pace. Perhaps her mother was one of those women you saw eating alone anyway, papers in front of her and more often holding a pen than a fork. She wanted to say it to someone. Sometimes she wanted to lean across the table and take them either side of the face with her hands and tell them she cared nothing at all about their views on politics or religion. She didn't care what they thought of any of it. She wanted to explain to them that she had a secret; that they could never even imagine the secret she had and that it made everything they said meaningless. There were times she wanted to say it so badly it would howl out if she opened her mouth.

She knew, because she'd practised, where she would begin: my mother wanted a baby more than she wanted anything else.

He would ask her out of politeness to tell him more. He would owe her that much. She would tell him because he was late. She imagined holding the fort at parents' evenings and violin recitals. He'll be here soon. He's on his way.

The duck came. Splayed and pink. She cut straight down into it and ate the first piece.

She would tell him there was always a way she imagined it. The way it was at the beginning. Her mother trying everything she could. The gathering needles, the phone calls to the doctor, the books. Her mother would not adopt. Other women could shear themselves open for a child with nothing of them inside; she would not. Wikipedia open and her mother drunk enough to follow the mythic commands. Her mother would remember only shards of what she'd done that night: head-standing against the wall till she fell, washing her hands and face in vinegar, writing prayers or promises (remembering only fragments of words: please, girl, never) and burning the paper till it flew. At the hospital they cut the swallowed stones out of her mother's gut, asked what she meant by it. She would not tell them. Only took the pebbles home in her pockets, smooth enough to skim.

She laid her knife and fork down. She worded in her mind the message she would send to him. Not when she got home but the next day, after her shift. Not seeming angry or even much disappointed; only with the meaning of what he'd missed buried behind the words.

No – he would come. She would order pudding, a coffee. He would come while she was finishing. She would not look up for a moment though she would know he was there. He would know that she knew.

Let me pay. An apology, he would say. And, though she did not ever allow anyone to pay for a meal outright, she would let him. And maybe she would punish him a little. He was not the one. Maybe she would tell him that.

What one?

She would shrug. You are not right.

Because I'm late?

She would shrug again.

He would put her coat around her shoulders. They would both listen to her heels on the floor as they left. In his car he would lay out his excuses. And she would remain only lukewarm, would say: my mother had distractions like you.

Is that so?

Yes.

She thought on them sometimes. The distractions her mother must have allowed herself. Running tracks deep into the fields in the mornings, going early to work and leaving late, taking cases home with her and spreading them on the low, dark-wooded coffee table. At weekends she would not sleep in late or watch films in the evenings. It was important there were no gaps for thinking or spare moments for thoughts to slip in.

All the same there must have been times the thoughts came in anyway, butting up before she could ward them off. She supposed it was mostly when her mother let the men come: another lawyer at her firm, a man younger than her she met on the train, the husband of a woman
she once knew. Waking up after it was done and looking down at them and them being almost like something she'd given birth to. And then the thought was there. Whether she wanted to or not.

But she settled down enough to have you. Didn't she? he would say.

He'd put the radio on and then turn it off again. She'd take her shoes off and leave them in the footwell.

Yes. She had me.

The decision must have taken in her mother like a seed settled in. She had imagined it enough times she was certain there was no other way it could have happened. Her mother wore a hood, went far out enough from any roads that it was lighting up by the time she got back, hands and cheeks cracking with mud lines. She filled two buckets and the washing basin from the sink.

Fen mud was not like the mud forced to yield crops in other places. Darker than that and wetter and the first child formed on the kitchen table was something of the same, a hunched figure leaking away. She made two of them. Slapping heads onto shoulders, rolling legs thin, fixing bulbous hands into place. Their heads were heavy blocks, features done quickly in the last seconds before she gave up, ears lopsided, eyes slitted with the end of her key, mouths a studious line.

If the man asked her then, busy hands, barely listening, about the years between conception and that night in his car she would not tell him. The surgeries and the
word-finding and the days she could not remember because she'd cut them out from her thinking. Watching strangers' mouths to see how to shape words; trying on names from books in the library until one fit. And earlier than that. He could ask but she would not tell him about being more field than human.

She thought little about the other clay child, destroyed then and there, her mother's weight bearing down onto its head. Not what her mother wanted – something barely human at all.

That's a nice story. He would move her hand to his belt buckle.

The waiter came and took her plate away.

How was it?

Very good. Thank you.

Great. Would you like anything else?

Remind me of the puddings.

He went through them. She was tired – she was how she imagined tiredness must feel. She put her hands, not thinking of the waiter standing there, to her stomach and tried to feel the weight of the food.

All right, just the bill I think.

She paid. Put her shoes back on. Went to the bathroom and wet her face and hands again.

At the door, putting her coat on, she recognised him. She thought maybe he would not see her.

*  *  *

On hot days she heard the internal crackings of her baked insides, felt the make-up run from her clay skin. Sometimes at night she woke imagining the death of her half-formed twin, the way hands, limbs, face, ears, torso, turned back to only mud before she could crawl away. Sometimes at night she remembered the trail of herself she left behind on the walls and floors of that house. She would not tell you if you asked.

Once she went to a bookshop to buy
Madame Bovary
and saw something curling the woman's mouth as she served her: shock or disbelief. A knowing.

Once she'd got on a train going away from that place. She should have known better. Her mouth mudded thick as road tar, skin began dusting away. Shifting, she struck the nub of her finger against the window and saw the carefully shaped nail crack off. The skin beneath was the same dark as the earth. She looked out at the flats, the washes, the threat of braided rivers.

The ground gave its message easy enough. She could leave but the lack would crumble her away the further she got. They would sweep her out of the train carriage at the final stop. Think nothing on it.

Emma. He was standing at the door, looking at her. He said her name the way she thought he might. The loosening at the end. I'm so sorry.

They went out into the street. He holding his jacket, cheeks a little flushed like a boy's. She could smell the
earth, rough and thick from a day's rainfall. They stood awkwardly in the dimness of a closed shopfront. She knew the way his hands would feel in her hair. She readied the words in her mouth.

ON WEDNESDAY SHE
left the washing-up in its piles in the sink. Went out to the field. The men's backs were to her, arms folded over ribs, looking at the horses. Joe Lloyd the vet wasn't there. That was how she knew they weren't looking at the injuries: the shaved areas where Joe had stitched the skin closed, the sores around legs and hocks, jagged stripes across bellies.

The bay, one of them said.

Not that one.

Which?

The old one, next to the grey.

He turned, looked at her. She flattened her stomach against the fence, lowered her chin.

On Thursday they brought the hooks down from town, drove them into the walls of the old arena. She felt she was listening to it all afternoon. Peeling the potatoes,
plucking the chicken bare – trying not to do it to that low-strung beat or look out the window every time they came out to drag in another bag. There were more hooks than there were foxes in the county. The first time there'd only been one and now there were more, but could there really be that many?

By Friday she'd fed them for every meal, the men who'd come from the villages to help, and though she was tired enough to sleep at the table she couldn't sleep at night. The two of them would not talk about it, but she knew he could not sleep either, knew by the way he flipped back and forth. He said single words that she tried to crease into sentences, though it creased to morning before they formed.

She heard enough in the loose swing of the kitchen door to know they would wait for the weekend to finish, wait for Sunday to go through itself, and then they would put the horse in the arena away from the rest.

She knew also from remembering the first time. The way there was a building-up of something nervous and snapping until that night when there was no way they could wait any longer. That time it was a dog, a stray dragged into the barn by its scruff. She never saw the animal, only heard the sounds it made and then the silence, but she'd crept down and looked out the kitchen window and seen the rays of light pitching into the black mouth-hole of the barn and the blurred shapes of the men leaning
on car bonnets. She had seen the guns spark off above the trucks but the passage of the bullets into the barn was lost and she had only imagined the cleaving of the air.