Fen (4 page)

When it was done Salma lay and thought the house must feel the way she did; that nothing had ever happened this way and nothing ever would again. She was certain she could feel the pressure of it in her hands, a brilliant pulse in her belly.

Weeks went by. She had bite marks on her neck and on her knuckles and on her feet and around each nipple. She saw Margot most days. Hours were swallowed whole,
gulleted smooth. Any time Margot was not there she spent in the bath; water hot enough to burn her clean, windows clammed shut around her.

You'll rot away if you stay in there, her father shouted through the door, banging on the wood.

She did not care. Every sound was the sound of Margot's bare feet, shoes tucked into the waistband of her trousers or held in her teeth, monkeying up the drainpipe.

Sometimes they talked about Hargrave films or lay and listened to the soundtracks or argued with strangers on fan sites. Mostly they took each other's clothes off. Margot said – a line Salma was certain was stolen – that it was a form of worshipping. And, yes, there was something church-like in the risen struts of Margot's body, the flesh in between. Something, even, in the slow act of it, secretive enough perhaps it was a thing you would only ever talk about in a confessional.

Salma had read books where couples kissed, spoke in platitudes or come-ons; something about to happen, hinted at. Beyond that there was always only a white space on the page. A gap between paragraphs. She had thought often about what went on there. On the other side, when the letters appeared once more, couples smoked or drank tea or dressed one another or themselves. If there was a book to be written about Margot it should be blank; it would be those sex spaces between lines, sucked clean of words.

*  *  *

Salma wanted, more and more, to tell someone about Margot. Something had happened and it changed the way the fields looked and the way she moved at school. She imagined, on the fen, the flood water was starting to rise back across the flats so it could hear her confess. She felt the heavy words pressing at her mouth – at the till in shops when asked if she needed a bag; at school when Ms Hasin asked them to run round the field. She wanted, one of those girls – even them – to stop her in the corridor and ask if she was ‘seeing someone', if there was anyone she thought about more times a day than she thought about herself. She wanted one of them to push her against a locker or trip her going in or out a room and for her to rise up and tell them with pride about the girl she loved. To go up to her father's study and push the door open and stand triumphant.

She had to tell someone. The words scalded her insides. In the end there was only the house. She jammed her mouth close to cracks in the walls or pressed her lips at the openings of taps and whispered about the shape of Margot's feet or the sound of her rings as she washed her hands.

In response? Only silence. But in the morning she would wake with bruises shaped like curtain hooks, half-blind from the detonation of a light bulb into a tiny, pained sun. She would find wall chips in the lasagne, pick shards of glass from the soles of her feet in the morning,
walk into suddenly closed doors, trip on the raised ridge of a step. It was a jealous answer.

This is what Margot did to you. At night the house felt it worst: the pipes in the walls gurning, the oven burning through and through the dark, the heat of everything else: radiators and kettles and the airing cupboard. It had seen her going silently, balanced, up the stairs, seen skin coming from beneath clothes.

The house did not love the way a dog would love, unthinking, beating back up after a cuff to the nose; or the way a child did, through lack of choice and necessity. It loved her darkly and greatly and with a huge, gut-swallowing want that killed the hive of wasps that were building hard in the wall and cut the electricity for odd, silent hours: Salma's father humming tunelessly in the attic, torch in hand, fiddling with the fuse box. When the lights came back on, the radio and television and washing machine jerking into action, he raised his hands in mute applause, but it was not him who had done it.

The house did not have the human complication to worry that its love spun often into hate. Or to think that the shape of Margot beneath the blankets, or the rise of mosquito bites as if they were curses on her skin, was not her speaking back, not words or a signal, only an oblivious living.

Margot saw the house's love before Salma did.

Look, she said – look the bloody hell at this.

She yanked Salma's hand away from the book she was holding and pressed it, palm down, against the wall. They were in the attic; the wallpaper bellying down. Margot held her to the spot until Salma cried out and then let go. When she looked at her hand, the palm was red from the heat of the wall. She stepped back, out of reach, her hand wedged beneath her armpit.

Look. Margot was up close to the wall, fingers pressing until the heat became too much and then withdrawing. Returning with insistence, withdrawing.

Come on, Salma said, let's go downstairs.

What do you think it is? Margot dropped her hands and approached the spot with her mouth, tongue out to taste the heat flicker on the air.

Come on, Salma said.

Margot didn't reply.

That night Salma pulled the tool box out from under the sink and laid everything out on the kitchen table for the house to see. She carried the hammer down into the basement and set to against the soft walls. Fell asleep in a cloud of dust, dreamt of power tools. Woke up knowing there was no telling the house; it was not listening.

Pleading with Margot was something you built in layers, worked up with cups of tea and cake and fast-moving hands. She was nervous enough she burnt the bread she
was toasting, put milk in Margot's earl grey, cried. Margot went into the sitting room with that hip-sway which told you she was going alone and didn't want to be followed. Salma wanted to tell her she would follow her everywhere, that she was so sick with Margot there was no room inside her for anything else.

She started again: made tea in the pot Margot said was retro, cut slices of cake thin, the way Margot liked them. She prepared her face outside the sitting-room door, went in backwards. Turned with the tray held out: surprise. The music was still on, loud enough to shake the mugs, but Margot was not there. She left the tray on the floor and went looking. In the attic, throwing aside the lumped duvet with a rush of hope. Tracked through the halls, listening. The house moaned a long, low note that Salma felt in her feet and in her teeth.

Margot's clothes were in a pile outside the bathroom door. In Hargrave films cowboy hats were left on door handles and this felt the same: a warning wink. She kicked them aside, walked in. She had never seen Margot naked from a distance before, the body out of tone: the sharp odd protrusions of hard pressing out from soft.

Margot did not look up. Her hands were moving, stroking away at the walls, at herself. The ceiling brushed the back of Salma's head as it pulsed; the walls were soft as egg whites. Margot's mouth was open like a claw. The wall ate up the window with the sound of a bubble
breaking; shrank the sink into itself, caught handfuls of Salma's hair and pulled them tight as bungee ropes. Margot's left arm was swallowed to the elbow in something that once was wall and now was loose, flabby. With a dry gasp her legs vanished to the knee. Her right arm was taken at the shoulder. Salma was pushed backwards by the sucking walls, the force of them grubbing forward, filling Margot's mouth. Edged over stomach and breast and neck until Margot was gone.

It was done. The walls shrank back, the sink hardened, the window snapped open onto cold air.

You have to eat, her father said, you have to sleep, you have to get off that sofa and have a bath.

She could not see the logic in this. She dreamt up breakings: foundations gorged under the heft of yellow diggers, walls pulled from each side until torn, doors splintered under fallen pianos. She wished she could not see it: Margot's handprints rising on the skin of the doors; her voice coming from the open oven door, emerging from the taps. The house was filled to the rafters with the smell of what had happened. Her father popped all the windows and bought air fresheners for all the rooms but the smell stayed: rock salt.

Salma brought home boys she found in the pub, in through the attic window, pushing them backwards onto the floor. The house shifted around her like a wound. When the boys orgasmed she lifted her head to hear the
sound the house made; a quick exhalation, dust rising in pillows. The house showed its displeasure: her feet bloody, the sound of the boys falling with a whoomph from the drainpipe. The television turned itself on at night and surfed till it found the films Margot had talked and talked about.

NEVER SEEN A
man naked before. Clothes coming apart until – there he was.

Isabel thought she would remember him whole: standing afterwards at the window checking his messages or standing at the base of the bed looking down at her. Instead she kept only bits of him: the slick of snail trail, the dry skin on his thighs and upper arms, the rake of spine vanishing at its base.

What was it like? Shields asked her.

Dunno.

What?

I don't know.

Shields looked as though she didn't believe her. Shields had never seen a man without his get-together on.

But what was
it
like?

Isabel knew what Shields was asking. The bulge of it ribbing out the front of his trousers, the eyeing length of it in flat propulsion against his belly. The probing of it at her thigh line and after when it was leached up and he handed it away out of view.

You know, she said. You know.

Though Shields didn't and she felt nasty for not giving her something to take away. Not even something about the hotel. The blonde kid throwing up in the lobby so no one noticed her going in, taking the stairs. How all the corridors looked much of a muchness and none of the room numbers joined together so she ended up wandering a good distance in the wrong direction. Something about the light in the room when he opened the door; stale light. The window didn't open enough to take even an elbow and with the smell of cigarette butts it needed to.

If there had been a way not to, she probably wouldn't have taken off anything when he told her to. Though on the train she'd wanted it and at family parties when he was the only person she wasn't related to – taking her aside to tell her about Russian literature – she'd wanted it even more. Wanted it bad enough to make all the right motions in the right order and find herself there: down to her pants in a Holiday Inn, return train ticket in her purse to make sure she didn't stay. He called her Fizzy Izzy the way he always did and she, playing the part, grimaced to make him laugh.

Well, you did it, anyway, Shields said, swinging herself down off the car bonnet.

What?

You got rid of it. Didn't you?

Virginity was a half-starved dog you were looking after, wanted to give away as quickly as possible so you could forget it ever existed. The girls at school: whose was worse, whose lasted longest, where it happened, when.

Helena's story. That older college boy, tattoos like handcuffs round his wrists and the bar cutting his eyebrow silver, hanging outside the gate after school, putting his hands up Helena's shirt out where all the parents could see. Helena said she was holding out, said he didn't want it bad enough yet. It was the lingo of sales and stocks; what was the best deal, when was the right time to sell it all.

Isabel saw it in full colour: the shape of the boy's arms as he lifted the garage door, the skirt short enough for Helena to save till then, the bike he wheeled out to her. It was, Helena said – approaching the punchline with eyebrow cocked – a boy's bike. A fucking racing boy's bike, high enough he had to hold the drop handlebars while she climbed on.

What do I do at traffic lights? she said, legs wavering, clutching his shoulder.

His eyes were the colour of skylines, his shrug nonchalant enough to shudder feeling up her thighs, along her belly.

Don't stop, he said.

She set out ahead of him, down the road, skirt snickering high enough to thigh her plan of action to Mrs Waiting's net curtains: she'd lead him out along the canal towpath and down, find a good hedge, be waiting like some knowing nymph when he caught up.

She heard him running behind her, wheeling the bike to gather speed. There was the rattle of the cards fixed to his spokes. She lowered her shoulder to take the turning onto the towpath. The ground pitted deep; the hole she saw ducking beneath her handlebars, the wheel turning as it went in and her pitching forward and down onto the bar between her legs.

So I lost it, Helena said, shook her head with wry impatience at the forecast of everything; of life and what it surely would bring. Virginity lost against the bar of a bike.

Isabel thought often about the traffic lights, imagining Helena and the boy skidding through the reds; not yarring sounds of fear or triumph, but silent in concentration. Even in a hotel room with cigarette-smelling sheets, even with a man twenty years her senior and the only person her father ever got drunk with, even with no condom, she'd thought it would be like riding red lights.

Mrs Williams had not held onto the end of the bunting and now half of it was in the pool, beginning to sink. The other end was cording up into the rafters. Kitty was
sat on the stone steps, holding her swimming cap. When Mrs Williams waved at her she went and put her toes over the edge, drafted her body skywards and then arrowed down.

She came up with the bunting wrapped round one fist and towed it to the far end. Tied onto the rafters it hung, dark with water, dripping a little.

Go wait with the others, Kitty Moore. Mrs William shouted as if there was another Kitty there.

She went into the locker room. The swim team were sat around, not doing much, some of them in underwear or fully clothed and wearing their caps. Kitty was cold: turned the shower on and ran it till hot. The walls of the shower room were slick as always, seams of mould running lengthwise down the corners, clogs of hair in the shallow yellow guttering.