Stone Mattress (16 page)

In the dimness I read Pushkin, and Lord Byron, and the poetry of John Keats. I learned about blighted love, and defiance, and the sweetness of death. I found these thoughts comforting. My mother would bring me my potatoes and bread, and my cup of blood, and take away the chamber pot. Once she used to brush my hair, before it came out in handfuls; she’d been in the habit of hugging me and weeping; but she was past that now. She came and went as quickly as she could. However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.

At night I had the run of the house, and then the run of the yard, and after that the run of the forest. I no longer had to worry about getting in the way of other people and their futures. As for me, I had no future. I had only a present, a present that changed – it seemed to me – along with the moon. If it weren’t for the fits, and the hours of pain, and the twittering of the voices I couldn’t understand, I might have said I was happy.

My grandmother died, then my father. The cat became elderly. My mother sank further into despair. “My poor girl,” she would say, though I was no longer exactly a girl. “Who will take care of you when I’m gone?”

There was only one answer to that: it would have to be me. I began to explore the limits of my power. I found I had a great deal more of it when unseen than when seen, and most of all when partly seen. I frightened two children in the woods, on purpose: I showed them my pink teeth, my hairy face, my red
fingernails, I mewed at them, and they ran away screaming. Soon people avoided our end of the forest. I peered into a window at night and caused hysterics in a young woman. “A thing! I saw a thing!” she sobbed. I was a thing, then. I considered this. In what way is a thing not a person?

A stranger made an offer to buy our farm. My mother wanted to sell and move in with my sister and her gentry husband and her healthy, growing family, whose portraits had just been painted; she could no longer manage; but how could she leave me?

“Do it,” I told her. By now my voice was a sort of growl. “I’ll vacate my room. There’s a place I can stay.” She was grateful, poor soul. She had an attachment to me, as if to a hangnail, a wart: I was hers. But she was glad to be rid of me. She’d done enough duty for a lifetime.

During the packing up and the sale of our furniture I spent the days inside a hayrick. It was sufficient, but it would not do for winter. Once the new people had moved in, it was no trouble to get rid of them. I knew the house better than they did, its entrances, its exits. I could make my way around it in the dark. I became an apparition, then another one; I was a red-nailed hand touching a face in the moonlight; I was the sound of a rusted hinge that I made despite myself. They took to their heels, and branded our place as haunted. Then I had it to myself.

I lived on stolen potatoes dug by moonlight, on eggs filched from henhouses. Once in a while I’d purloin a hen – I’d drink the blood first. There were guard dogs, but though they howled at me, they never attacked: they didn’t know what I was. Inside our house, I tried a mirror. They say dead people can’t see their own reflections, and it was true; I could not see myself. I saw something, but that something was not myself: it looked nothing like the kind and pretty girl I knew myself to be, at heart.

But now things are coming to an end. I’ve become too visible.

This is how it happened.

I was picking blackberries in the dusk, at the verge where the meadow meets the trees, and I saw two people approaching, from opposite sides. One was a young man, the other a girl. His clothing was better than hers. He had shoes.

The two of them looked furtive. I knew that look – the glances over the shoulder, the stops and starts – as I was unusually furtive myself. I crouched in the brambles to watch. They clutched each other, they twined together, they fell to the ground. Mewing noises came from them, growls, little screams. Perhaps they were having fits, both of them at once. Perhaps they were – oh, at last! – beings like myself. I crept closer to see better. They did not look like me – they were not hairy, for instance, except on their heads, and I could tell this because they had shed most of their clothing – but then, it had taken me some time to grow into what I was. They must be in the preliminary stages, I thought. They know they are changing, they have sought out each other for the company, and to share their fits.

They appeared to derive pleasure from their flailings about, even if they occasionally bit each other. I knew how that could happen. What a consolation it would be to me if I, too, could join in! Through the years I had hardened myself to loneliness; now I found that hardness dissolving. Still, I was too timorous to approach them.

One evening the young man fell asleep. The girl covered him with his cast-off shirt and kissed him on the forehead. Then she walked carefully away.

I detached myself from the brambles and came softly towards him. There he was, asleep in an oval of crushed grass, as if laid out on a platter. I’m sorry to say I lost control. I laid my
red-nailed hands on him. I bit him on the neck. Was it lust or hunger? How could I tell the difference? He woke up, he saw my pink teeth, my yellow eyes; he saw my black dress fluttering; he saw me running away. He saw where.

He told the others in the village, and they began to speculate. They dug up my coffin and found it empty, and feared the worst. Now they’re marching towards this house, in the dusk, with long stakes, with torches. My sister is among them, and her husband, and the young man I kissed. I meant it to be a kiss.

What can I say to them, how can I explain myself? When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end. “I am a human being,” I could say. But what proof do I have of that? “I am a lusus naturae! Take me to the city! I should be studied!” No hope there. I’m afraid it’s bad news for the cat. Whatever they do to me, they’ll do to him as well.

I am of a forgiving temperament, I know they have the best of intentions at heart. I’ve put on my white burial dress, my white veil, as befits a virgin. One must have a sense of occasion. The twittering voices are very loud: it’s time for me to take flight. I’ll fall from the burning rooftop like a comet, I’ll blaze like a bonfire. They’ll have to say many charms over my ashes, to make sure I’m really dead this time. After a while I’ll become an upside-down saint; my finger bones will be sold as dark relics. I’ll be a legend, by then.

Perhaps in Heaven I’ll look like an angel. Or perhaps the angels will look like me. What a surprise that will be, for everyone else! It’s something to look forward to.

The next thing is that his car won’t start. It’s the fault of the freak cold snap, caused by the polar vortex – a term that’s already spawned a bunch of online jokes by stand-up comics about their wives’ vaginas.

Sam can relate to that. Before she finally cut him off, Gwyneth was in the habit of changing the bottom sheet to signal that at long last she was about to dole him out some thin-lipped, watery, begrudging sex on a pristine surface. Then she’d change the sheet again right afterwards to reinforce the message that he, Sam, was a germ-ridden, stain-creating, flea-bitten waste of her washing machine. She’d given up faking it – no more cardboard moaning – so the act would take place in eerie silence, enclosed in a pink, sickly sweet aura of fabric softener. It seeped into his pores, that smell. Under the circumstances he’s amazed that he was able to function at all, much less with alacrity. But he never ceases to surprise himself. Who knows what he’ll get up to next? Not him.

This is how the day begins. At breakfast, a disaster in itself, Gwyneth tells Sam their marriage is over. Sam drops his fork, then lifts it again to push aside the remains of his scrambled eggs. Gwyneth used to make the most delicate scrambled eggs, so he can only conclude that the scrambled eggs of this morning, tough as boots, are part of the eviction package. She no longer wishes to please him: quite the reverse. She could have waited until he’d had some coffee: she knows he can’t focus without his caffeine hit.

“Whoa, hold it a minute,” he says, but then he stops. It’s no use. This isn’t the opening move in a fracas, a plea for more attention, or an offer in a negotiation: Sam has undergone all three of these before and is familiar with the accessorized facial expressions. Gwyneth isn’t snarling or pouting or frowning: her gaze is glacial, her voice level. This is a proclamation.

Sam considers protesting: what’s he done that’s so major, so stinky, so rotten, so cancerously terminal? Nothing in the way of mislaid cash and illicit lipstick besmearing that he hasn’t done before. He could criticize her tone: why is she so crabby all of a sudden? He could attack her skewed values: what’s happened to her sense of fun, her love of life, her moral balance? Or he could preach: forgiveness is virtuous! Or he could wheedle: how can a kind, patient, warm-hearted woman like her whack a vulnerable, wounded guy like him with such a crude psychic bludgeon? Or he could promise reformation: What do I have to do, just tell me! He could beg for a second chance, but she’d surely reply that he’s used up all his second chances. He could tell her he loves her, but she’d say – as she’s been saying recently, with tedious predictability – that love isn’t just words, it’s actions.

She sits across the table from him girded for the combat she no doubt expects, her hair scraped severely off her forehead
and twisted at the back of her neck like a tourniquet, her rectilinear gold earrings and clanky necklace reinforcing the metallic harshness of her decree. Her face has been made up in preparation for this scene – lips the colour of dried blood, eyebrows a storm cloud black – and her arms are folded across her once-inviting breasts: no way in here, buddy. The worst is that, underneath the shell she’s enclosed herself in, she’s indifferent to him. Now that every kind of melodrama has been used up by both of them, he finally bores her. She’s counting the minutes, waiting for him to leave.

He gets up from the table. She could have had the decency to postpone the dropping of her writ until he’d dressed and shaved: a man in his five-day-old PJs is at a pitiful disadvantage.

“Where are you going?” she says. “We need to discuss the details.” He’s tempted to come out with something hurt and petulant: “Onto the street.” “As if you care!” “No longer any of your fucking business, is it?” But that would be a tactical error.

“We can do that later,” he says. “The legal crap. I need to pack.” If her thing is a bluff, this would be the moment; but no, she doesn’t stop him. She doesn’t even say, “Don’t be silly, Sam! I didn’t mean you had to leave right this minute! Sit down and have a coffee! We’re still friends!”

But they are not still friends, it appears. “Suit yourself,” she says with a level glare. So he’s forced to shamble ignominiously out of the kitchen in his sleeping gear printed with sheep jumping over a fence – her birthday gift of two years ago when she still thought he was cute and funny – and his downtrodden woolly slippers.