Three Moments of an Explosion (18 page)

“Did you dream last night?” Mel said.

“Probably.” Joanna was driving. Sun dappled the car.

“Did you hear anything?”

“You know me,” Joanna said. She imitated stupefied snoring. “Why?”

“I was a bit noisy,” Mel said.

“Going for your dawn row? So impressed!”

“Thought even you might’ve been defeated, between me and the cock-a-doodle-doing,” Mel said after a moment.

“Kikeriki,” said Joanna. Mel frowned at her. “German,” said Joanna. “For cock-a-doodle-do. Don’t look at me like that, you know I sprechen sie.”

“I’m just marveling at your specialist historian’s vocabulary,” said Mel. “Got any other farmyard animals?”

“Grunz,” said Joanna slowly. “I’m pretty sure that’s oink.” She glanced at Mel and whistled. “Look out, Deutschland.”

“That’s right,” Mel said. “Meet Camden Town. I was going to bring my book. Have you seen it?”

“Did you leave it in the boat?”

They visited a town that was pretty enough. It had a famous clock. It was celebrated for its bakers. Joanna and Mel looked at facades. They shared embarrassed smiles with other tourists.

“You alright?” said Joanna.

In the window of a general store was a sign for a magazine, from the headline of which protruded a re-curved German “S” like a sea-monster’s neck. “I’m sleep-deprived,” Mel said. “Maybe I need some sugar, flour, and Germanic jam in pastry form. Butter, bitte? Maybe you could help me with that?” She slipped an arm briefly around Joanna’s waist.

“Why yes,” Joanna said. “Yes I can.”

Joanna looked at her watch as she led them toward the cake shop. Mel said, “It’s lovely here.”

“Really?” Joanna said.

“Look at that restaurant. We could knock around a few hours, have something to eat.” Joanna hesitated and Mel said, “No, you’re right. It’s time to go. You have stuff to do.”

And nothing settled on Mel when she turned the car down their drive and they came back to the house. Nothing overtook her. It was still light. She listened but could hear only the woods. She watched the lake and eventually smiled at Joanna, whose attention was the only one she felt on her. They sat together in the living room, Joanna reading while Mel wrote emails. For hours, all evening, nothing came down.

That night the cockerel crowed again.

Mel opened her eyes. She stared at the ceiling. Joanna slept. Mel heard strong wind. She heard that crazed farmyard bird announce dawn hours and hours too early.

They kept the curtains open to wake to daylight, so Mel saw the lake the moment she stood. She was still for a long time. At last she walked naked to the window. She watched the shadows of trees swaying, quick black clouds, the dark land and water. And the cockerel crowed again, and now it was the only sound, and it was urgent, and closer.

Mel touched the glass. She saw gathering wind in the motions of leaves, like a rainless storm. Something approaching. A rush of air that seemed to carry the cockerel’s excited crow with it. No one was waking. No one anywhere around the lake was turning on their lights. The windowpane vibrated. Wake up, Mel thought. Wake up wake up.

A bird whispered much too close. Right up in her ear. Mel stopped breathing and it clucked. The wind slammed into the window and Mel staggered and there was the crowing again right there and this time a hiss and a snarl too. Mel retched in a sudden sump-stench. The air in the room was moist. As she straightened, holding the windowsill, she heard a liquid sound. She turned.

Something was on the floor.

A darkness. A gross misshape.

Something huge and wrong and wet. It blocked her way.

Mel’s throat closed. The new thing in the room dripped.

A nightmare calf born without limbs or head or eyes but full of tumors. A mound of leather in pooling water. It was a bag, a sack full of bad presents, of coal or earth or blood clots or ruined roots. Mel shook with her own heartbeat. The sack streamed.

Mel’s legs gave way. Way beyond the nightmare thing Joanna dreamed as if in another country.

The black sack moved.

It shoved from within with a sucking sound, a slurping. It lurched heavily toward her, spattering the floorboards.

A fitful dark groping, hauling her way. Its weight and spasming motion shook the room. It strained as if to split.

The thing had voices. A cluck, a hiss, a predator’s growl. It slopped closer still and Mel heard a woman.

Mel heard a woman vomit old water. She heard it spatter on the inside of the skin. The sack convulsed in mud that should not have been brought up. Kikeriki, whispered the rooster inside the bag with its throat full of lake.

Mel crawled back to the wall and pushed with her legs as if they might drive her into it. The thing came with a scratch of claws, pushed through its own hide into the floor. It whispered. It pinioned her with its notice. Its cold enveloped her. Mel felt a terrible lack. Cluck cluck the sack went and hiss and growl and nein and it came and it was close and it reached for her, so close she could see its wounds, crisscross sutures tautening as the leather stretched, as if the sack would burst.

She screamed.

Joanna screamed. Was there with Mel holding her and begging her to stop, whispering to her. Crouching in the glare of the lamp where there was no sack, no thing, where there was no wetness any more.

“What happened, what happened?” Joanna kept saying. “You’re OK, you’re OK.”

“Something was here.” Mel ran her fingers over the dry floor. “Oh God. Something missing.” She put her hands to her mouth when that came out of it because she didn’t know what she meant.

“I didn’t see anything,” Joanna said. “I didn’t hear anything. What happened?”

“It was
here,
it was in the
room,
” Mel sobbed. “Oh my God—”

“Breathe, breathe, breathe,” Joanna said. “What did—” She stopped. She looked at Mel and put her arms around her again. “What did you dream?”

When Mel was able to stand, she went from room to room turning on every light. Joanna followed her, trying to take hold of her. “Please,” she said. “You have to talk to me, Mel, please.”

“We have to
go,
we have to go
now
.” Mel pulled open the front door and shied at the dark outside. She slammed it closed again and put her back to it. “We have to go
now
.”

“Stop.
Mel
. Stop shouting. Tell me what’s going on.”

Mel stared at Joanna. Her eyes widened. She was breathing too fast. She tried but she could say nothing. She ran upstairs again. She began to shove clothes into her bag.

“Dear God, Jo, it was right here. Stop
looking
at me like that!” Joanna stood in the doorway holding out her arms, her mouth open. Mel stopped and caught her breath. She closed her eyes and swallowed and tried again to say what she had seen. She tried to say it and the words refused. Stopped in her mouth. “Jo … We have to get the fuck out of here.”

“Mel you’re shaking, you’re sick …”

“I’m not sick.”
There were seconds of silence. “What did I
dream
? You think that’s what happened? You think I’m
crazy,
Jo? Do you? We have to go
now
.”

“Help me understand then,” Joanna said.

They stared at each other. Mel saw Joanna’s horrified concern and the anger she was battening down. She understood, slowly, that Joanna would not come with her.

Her eyes widened. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “you can’t. You can’t
stay
. There was something
here
—”

The women stared at each other.

“Mel, if you keep screaming like this I’m calling a doctor.”

“I’m not sick,” Mel said. Her heart was slowing at last, but when she spoke her voice still shook. “There’s something. We have to go. And if you won’t come right now and if you won’t take me to the airport I’ll go myself. And I’ll dump the fucking car when I get there.”

They drove through the dawn. Mel huddled in the passenger seat with her head in her hands. She kept looking up at Joanna in disbelief. Joanna watched the road. Her face was anguished and hard.

“Mel, you’re scaring me—”

“You
should
be scared!”

Neither of them spoke for a long time. When they approached the airport Joanna shouted, “This is
insane
. Tell me what
happened
.”

Mel tried. She swallowed. “There’s something
there,
” was all she could say.

“Can you hear yourself? I know you’ve had a shock but can you
hear
yourself?”

“You
know,
” Mel shouted. “Look at you, you know there’s something. You’re fucking pretending—”

“You think this was all cheap?” Mel stared at Joanna and did not flinch. “What exactly is this, Mel? What’s this about? Talk to me.”

“Please,” Mel said at last.

There were more seconds of silence. Then Mel got out of the car quickly and walked away. Joanna did not follow. She opened her own door but stayed behind the wheel. “Don’t,” she said once, not loud. She watched Mel disappear into the terminal.

Jo clenched her hands as if she would do something. She pulled out her phone but did not dial and she swore and hit her dashboard several times. She sat in the car in the car-park a long time.

TALK?
Mel texted Joanna.
AM BACK
. London was under thick English clouds.

Ever since she had sat down in the plane’s flat fluorescent light, it had been hard for Mel even to think about what she had seen in the room. Her sense of it was scattered. Black plastic bags spilled like larvae from a rubble of dustbins. She crossed the city alone.

PLEASE
, she texted.
FEEL SICK. SORRY
. She stopped and called Joanna, leaning against the wood of a closed shop on a Peckham street. It was not closed for the day but forever. Mel listened to the clicks of foreign connections until Joanna answered.

“I thought you were out. I was going to leave a message.”

“I might still go out,” Joanna said. “You can leave a message if you prefer. What do you want?”

“To know you’re OK.”

“You can hear.”

“Please, Jo, please don’t be angry. Please come back. I’m sorry I freaked out. I was really scared, Jo. I still am.”

“OK.”

“I’m begging you,” Mel said. She raised her voice in the loudness of London. “Are you there?” She thought of her words coming out of the phone in the house in the trees, echoing by the lake. Birds might hear. “Do you just think I’m a crazy person? Jo?”

“I don’t know what to think, Mel.”

“I’m not crazy,” Mel said, but Joanna had rung off.

Mel knew what she had seen but it thinned in her head. The city flattened the memory and confused her.

“Why did you come back?” her friends said when she called them looking for someone to be with, when she met them in pubs or cafés or went to their flats. She spent the night of her return in a crowded room full of people. “Why did you come back?” they asked and she shrugged. She told some that she and Joanna had argued. To a few she said that the house by the lake had felt bad.

“Jo.”

“Are you drunk?” Joanna spoke carefully down the line. “Jesus, Mel. What is it, two in the morning?”

“I haven’t spoken to you for so long.” Mel heard the fear in her own voice.

“A day and a half.”

“Are you alright? Is everything OK? What’s going on?”

“I’m tired, Mel. Sleep it off, will you?” Joanna hung up. And though Joanna’s disdain had been audible, and though she was whispering for confused seconds to an empty line, Mel felt better. Relief.

Should I go back? Mel’s thought shocked her. She shook her head so hard it ached. She remembered the dark thing in the room. She was drunk and uncertain and the memory made her stomach spasm.

She called again the next morning, hungover, determined to have a proper conversation. Joanna did not answer. Mel tried from her landline, which would not display her number on Joanna’s phone, but got no response.

What if I was confused? Mel thought. Could she really be thinking such a thing?

She took hours walking from where she lived to where she had grown up, in the north of the city, to be out in the light. She tried Jo again the next day, and the call was answered by a soft-voiced German man. In courteous, slow English, he asked Mel who she was and how she knew the owner of this telephone.

“Who the fuck are you?” she said.

“I am police.”

The boat had been drifting, empty, aimless, across the lake. A neighbor had come to the house. Perhaps the same man Mel had seen from the boat, standing on a jetty. The officer in the Saxony police explained it to her. She imagined the man knocking at the door of the house. Would you like some help getting your boat back? he had come to say in his good English. I think you have forgotten to tie it up.

“But she is not here,” the policeman said. “So this man calls us.”

The car was in the drive. There was food in the fridge. The door was unlocked. Joanna’s computer, the officer said, was on the kitchen table, sleeping. The boat had continued its silent random journey until the man took his own skiff out and snared it.

One oar was missing, another lay across the seats. A thumb’s height of water slopped in the boat’s bottom. In it was one of Joanna’s slippers.

Mel could not stop imagining Joanna, her arms up, fingers splayed, a pianist paused between movements. Head nodding with the currents that must hold her, eight meters below the surface of the lake.

Maybe she went for a long walk, Mel thought. Got lost. Mel sobbed in a bleak, drawn-out way. Maybe she met someone new and shacked up with them. Went into the woods to do some writing. Writing by hand. But what Mel thought was that Joanna had been noticed. Was now circling in the dark water like a mindless ballerina.

Whenever she called, the police were gentle with her. Your friend got disoriented. It was a beautiful evening. She was enjoying the water. She leaned out too far. It is an awful thing. “I have to come out,” she said.

The last thing Joanna saw as she looked up, Mel thought, would have been the moonlit outline of the boat above her. The last thing Joanna saw when she looked down Mel wanted desperately not to consider.