Three Moments of an Explosion (43 page)

There he was in a triangular space, hunched to fit. Maggie looked carefully at the picture on her phone. She climbed the stairs and checked on Mack as he was sleeping. She heard the tapping of Sim’s keyboard from his room. She opened the trapdoor to the attic and ascended into a filthy dark space.

It was cramped with boxes. She could see things their previous flatmate had left, a few of her own and Ricardo’s bits and pieces. Sim’s.

Maggie looked at the picture again. It was this attic. Sim had explored here. She covered her mouth with a shaking hand. Sim counted this a place of spoils.

Sim had his party. The kitchen was full of people, most of whom Maggie knew. A few of those she didn’t she thought she recognized from the pictures of Sim’s explorations. “Oy,” she said, and pushed the fridge door closed. She stood in front of the silverware.

“Heirloom, Mags?” someone said, and pointed at the engraving.

“Why couldn’t it be one of
my
heirlooms?” said Ricardo.

“You’re too common. Mags is a fallen aristo.”

“I wish,” said Maggie.

“Present from Sim,” said Ricardo.

“He got it at a junk shop,” a man called Tom said. He saw Maggie’s expression. “What? He told me he bought it at a junk shop. He said was thinking about drawing something on it. Doing a Chapmans.” He ran his fingers over the frame.

What Sim had sung to Mack was true: one of the windows in the picture was open. The water-spotting in the lower right corner was worse than Maggie remembered.

She took the picture from the wall.

“Nobody’s going full Chapman in my kitchen,” she said.

Sim was sitting on the stairs drinking a beer. “I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “I’ve decided I sort of hate this picture. I’m going to put it in your room.”

She recoiled at his expression.

“Give.” He held out his hand.

“It’s fine, I’ll just—”

“Give.” He stood and climbed to his room, the picture in his hand.

Maggie thought,
Fuck you.

Church bells sounded beyond the tire emporium. When Maggie woke, Ricardo was already up. Mack was in his high chair. He shook his cup at her.

“He’s a grumpy little sod this morning,” Ricardo said. He stroked Mack’s head and Mack rocked back and screwed up his face. He stared at the wall and Maggie realized with a feeling as if she had drunk very cold water that he was staring at a black-framed picture, that it was back on the wall.

She stood so quickly that she spilled her coffee. Mack bawled and Ricardo looked at her in alarm.

But the frame did not contain the engraving. In its place was another reproduction of a vintage advertisement, brought from elsewhere in the house. A long-gone toothpaste. Girls sitting in a diner, beaming with shining teeth. Sim had written
Sorry
on a piece of paper and tucked it into the frame.

“Yeah,” said Ricardo. “I was going to say. I don’t know what that’s about.”

“We had an argument,” she said.

She took Sim a coffee. When he didn’t answer she opened the door. He was not in the room. The engraving was on his desk. He had started to add to it: a pencil outline of the rabbit figure from his animations stood on the lawn, looking quizzically at the house. Sim had lightly shaded in its body, against the moonlight and the glimmer of the house.

Light slanted in through clouds and washed the image out. She did not think it was a very good piece of work. The original, or Sim’s altered version.

Sim made supper, silently.

“What’s up?” Maggie said.

“Shitty day,” he said.

“
Sugary
day, eh?” said Ricardo. He held Mack.

“Oh. Sorry.” He looked at Ricardo with dislike. “I can’t get this stuff I’m working on right.” The fish fell apart on his fork and he tutted and glanced at the new picture. “I will, though,” Sim said.

“Doubt it,” Ricardo said when Sim had gone. He showed Maggie the animation.

The rabbit had been fiddled with. “Look,” said Maggie. Sim had scanned in the country house from the engraving, turned it into a fussy digital version. The rabbit crept smoothly across the lawn toward it on all fours, wearing a cross on its back. “I guess it’s supposed to be scary,” she said.

At its edges, where it crossed the original image, the rabbit brought out the darkness beyond it.

Mack began to cry.

“Well, it’s scaring someone,” Maggie said.

But Mack was not looking at the computer. He was looking at the picture on the wall.

Maggie did too. The green and red of the girls’ skirts, the crisp blue of the server’s uniform, with its trim. The chocolate. The whites of the girls’ teeth.

Mack kept crying. There was water-staining at the bottom right of the picture.

Maggie took it down and removed the ad from the thin plain frame. Its varnish was chipped, showing dark old wood beneath. She could see chisel marks where it had been shaped.

She put it on the top of the stairs. “Where’s the clip-frame?” she said to Ricardo. “The one this was in before?”

When she followed Ricardo to bed, the frame was gone from the stairs.

There was a week of rain. Sim was out most days. At night Maggie heard him working in his room, long late hours.

She was startled when, one morning, he sought her out.

“I’m sorry I’ve been a miserable git,” he said. “I’ve been fucked with work and just feeling crap, you know? Anyway, sorry.”

“No worries,” she said. “How’s it going?”

“I’m tired. But it’s OK, actually.” Sim sounded surprised but sincere. He smiled. “It’s started going well. Really well. I think I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. Been nose-to-grindstoning.”

“Good.”

“I’ve been doing some comics too.”

“Cool, I remember you did that in uni.”

He showed her. To her it looked like lackluster work, pen-and-ink of his inevitable rabbit figure in various pop-surreal situations.

“Cool,” she said.

“I know it looks a bit flat like this,” he said, “but when you present it right …”

“He seems really excited by it,” she said to Ricardo. “I don’t see it myself, but if it’s going to make him easier to be around, I’m all for it.”

“You don’t see it? I think he’s got a lot better.”

He showed her the website again. The rabbit. The garish landscape. There was the digitized house. The colors, the designs, the story lines, were more or less as they had been, but there was a new confidence. Where before there had been hesitation disguised as hip mannerism, now there was a frightening fluidity. It was easy to see that the objects that inhabited this boisterous landscape had agendas.

“Jesus,” Maggie said.

The rabbit crept across the lawn again. It climbed into a window. It crept out, holding a motionless human child. It stole away.

“See?” said Ricardo. “Not just better but genuinely scary.”

“Stop,” Maggie said. She put her hands in front of the screen.

Maggie took Mack in her arms. She stood outside Sim’s room. She had heard him leave but she waited and listened and when she was certain he was gone she bit her lip and entered.

Sim had propped the frame, its glass removed, on the edge of his desk against the wall.

His laptop was open, its screen dark. There were pictures and pages of writing all over the desk. Images of grotesque adventures, as absurd and sometimes as pathetic as they were horrifying, which she assumed was the intent. Scraps of writing, overworked poems in cramped penmanship. They were pushed by wide margins into the center of their pieces of paper.

Maggie examined them. Around every one, at the papers’ edges, were scratches. Lines where something had been pressed.

The frame was precisely the same dimensions as these marks. Sim had been holding it onto the paper. He had been writing and drawing through it, within it.

Mack fussed. Maggie looked through the frame, at the wallpaper, the four blue trees it contained.

On the wall the blue trees were mid-writhe as if they were dancing, as if the wind was stroking them. The trees within the frame, identical trees, curled slyly, gathering for something.

She phoned Ricardo. “Where are you? When are you coming home?”

“What’s up?” Ricardo said.

“Can you come home? Just come back, please.”

She saw on her phone that Sim had re-cut his urban videos. A new narrative, a new succession of images. The same characters she had seen many times, cutting across the city in ways that were not allowed. Familiar shots of Sim edited so now he was an operative on some bad mission.

The way it was cut, the explorers glanced, repeatedly, in shot after shot, at the corner of the screen. The lower right. As if at something welling up.

“No,” Maggie said. She turned Mack away from the window. Twilight was starting and the railway tracks were shining.

She touched the track pad on Sim’s laptop. In the light of its screen saver she saw two buds of Blu Tack on the base of the screen. Something had been pressed into them. She picked up the frame and ran her fingers around its interior, the channel cut just behind a little overhang of the wood, where the art would sit. The frame’s corners fit in the marks in the putty. Its dark sides contained the center of the screen.

Within the frame, the screen saver’s shapes involuted in terrible ways, like sea animals bursting. Sim had propped it against his screen and made his new work inside the frame.

Mack began to cry and Maggie rocked him till she could put him to bed. She took the frame downstairs. She held it out as if it was dirty and set it on the nearest shelf. She wiped her hand and called Ricardo again.

“Whoever made this, it’s not right. Sim won’t even tell us where it’s from. It was never the
picture
that was fucked.”

“OK,” he said. “OK, what are you telling me?”

Maggie looked through the empty wood at the books behind it. Framed by it.

Pride and Prejudice,
that spite on those slave bones. One of Mack’s favorites,
Goodnight Moon
. The universe closing on a sick void.

She took the frame to the kitchen and held it up in front of the toothpaste advertisement again.

Three girls with white teeth. They wanted to do something bad. The one in the middle with gusto and without remorse. The one on the right would hit a woman with a brick. The last, in a bright zigzag jumper, would put spikes in strangers’ shoes and fly through the night over her small town with her teeth dripping spit. She would cut down all the trees. The girls would bring the counterman rings from the fingers of those they drowned and he would put poison in the Coca-Cola.

Mack had started crying again. Maggie heard Ricardo’s voice. She still held the phone to her ear, she realized, and he had been shouting.

She tried to answer several times. “You need to come home,” she managed at last to whisper. “Mack’s in his cot and he’s waiting for you.”

She broke the connection over Ricardo’s shouts and she heard Mack crying but she fled the house. She had to take the frame as far away as she could, to keep her son safe. To keep the girls safe. Maggie ran.

There was still a little light. The canal was a few streets away. She ran past pubs, past drinkers who glanced up and watched her sprint.

When she heard footsteps behind her she was not surprised.

She turned through the yellow lights of off-licenses and newsagents. “You alright, love?” someone shouted. She ran and Sim ran behind her. He would catch her. He knew where she was going. She turned onto a darker, quieter street that rose over a railway tunnel in the lights of residential blocks. He would catch her before she reached the water.

Maggie got to the crest of the hill and could not run any more. She turned and Sim was not running any more either. He was walking toward her, the last of the sunset behind him.

He held up his hands. He looked at her through the rectangle he made with his fingers. He came slowly closer. She watched his face through his hands.

Maggie slammed the frame against the bricks of the bridge. Sim screamed.

She swung it as hard as she could and with a great crack it snapped into two pieces. She pulled them apart and held each in one hand and flailed them again and broke them more, along their imperfectly glued joins.

The frame broke into pieces and Sim howled.

Maggie threw the broken wood over the wall. It scattered onto the tracks a long way below and on slants of trash, to become pieces among many pieces, with the plastic, the detergent bottles, the glass, to be bleached by the sun.

“No no no!” shouted Sim. “What did you
do
? My
work
 …” He stared over the edge of the bridge. He looked at her in grief and fury and there was no one there to come between them.

He ran to her and smacked her in the face and she reeled and turned back to face him, holding her cheek.

“You brought that into my house,” she said, and her voice was almost steady. “I have a
child
.”

“Hey!” someone shouted from an overlooking window. “I’ve called the cops, mate!”

“Stay out of my house,” she said. She staggered up to him and spat and said, “It helped your
work
? You should be on your knees thanking me for saving you from whatever that shit was. Stay the fuck out of my house.”

He stared at her and she thought he would hit her again but for a long time he didn’t move.

A police car turned whooping up the street. Officers took him and he did not fight them. They came to her and took care of her. They drove the streets until they found Ricardo, desperate, Mack in his arms, phoning, shouting, trying to find her.

“I thought he might try to explain,” Ricardo said. “Try to talk to us. Through the police. Send a message.”

“Explain what?” Maggie said. They cleared the last of Sim’s belongings from the house.

“Are you worried?” Ricardo said.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “No. Fuck him.”

The charge was Actual Bodily Harm. They had been astonished that he was not remanded, but the police had explained that they had no grounds to hold him. He had to report to them regularly. They saw him all the time, they were keeping an eye.