no no, no, I seemed to be saying. I was the child now, my body curled and soft in my nightdress, my feet soles up, moist under the warmth of the covers. I clenched my teeth. A tantrum.
Please shut up. Get out. Single syllables were all that could get through, mangled, barely complete.
I just want to help you, he was saying, somewhere in the room. He was off the bed now. I could feel him, tall and oppressive, by the bookshelves or the dressing table. A shifting space, a ghost.
Help me? Help me?
The sensation – gathering needles, an eviscerating sting – was almost overwhelming. But I was still within it: it had not taken me over. Not yet. I heard him exhale, walk towards the door. I thought of a surfer on the biggest wave in the world, staying upright against a mountain of water. That is how I could be, surely. Not getting carried away.
But when he left, I felt it rush through every part of my body. I threw myself on the closed door as though it was his chest, hitting the wood again and again until my hands ached. I expected Jake to come back upstairs, but I heard nothing. I expected that I would pass out on the floor, but at some point I must have crawled back into bed, and fallen asleep.
~
Sometimes, as a child, I would get the book out just to look at the harpies, to trace the way the wings grew out of their backs, easy extensions of their shoulders, lifting into the air.
I wanted to know why their faces were like that: sunken, creased by hate. I wanted to ask my mother more questions, but the words dried in my mouth, sat sour under my tongue, unspoken.
~
10
The rest of the weekend passed in a haze of routine. I was struck by how easy it was to barely speak to Jake, let alone touch him. Sunday was slow, its minutes thick and draining, the children grumpy and unsettled by its end. But by Monday something had changed. We were quicker in our movements, it seemed, as though the backing track of our lives had been moved up tempo, into some other realm, a fast-forward reality.
The memory of Saturday night was still strong, raising my stomach as I spooned coffee into a glass jug, infusing the grounds with its flavour. I poured hot water from the kettle, seeing again the way Jake had looked at me, for a second, as though he had never seen me before. In that moment, we were strangers again. We had not slept beside each other, over and over, thousands of times. He had not watched me give birth to his children.
The Jake of Saturday was, it seemed, an entirely different man to the one who sat at the kitchen table in the Monday sun, his hair filled with light, flattened on one side from the sofa bed. He was making silly faces at the boys, getting Ted to eat an extra three bites of cereal. Paddy found him hilarious, was howling, rocking back and forth on his chair until Jake switched to serious mode, told him to stop rocking, to sit up straight.
I had always observed this as a kind of wonder: the way Jake knew how to pretend to be normal in front of the children. It was something my parents never managed; every dispute was aired completely openly, as though they had never been told that this was bad for children. As I grew up, I used to wonder whether, in fact, they had some liberal idea that children should be exposed to everything, for the strengthening of their minds or souls. Later on, I realized that there was no theory or plan at all: that was just the way they were.
There were some similarities between then and now, some taste of the past in the air. I remembered how energetic my parents often were, after an argument. How our house seemed to be on its own trajectory, moving more quickly than the rest of the planet, making me wonder how we were all still attached to the ground.
I’d always suspected that, after they made up, the arguments disappeared from their minds, dissolved as though they’d never taken place. But for me, the fights came back constantly: under doorways, through the paper of books I read, a weakening smell. To be around their aggression was one thing, but to not be around it was worse: jumping at noises, forever having strange fears, of fairground rides, loud building work, dogs.
Today, for us, there was no routine farewell, no kiss goodbye. Even Jake, the expert in normality, couldn’t manage it. He waved instead, while turning around, no eye contact. From the door, I watched him take off with the boys, his hand wrapped around the school bags they refused to carry, his voice marshalling them to cross the road. He was wearing a thick coat, a knitted hat. Under his coat, a good jumper his mother had given him. Under that, a cotton shirt: off-white, blue stripes. Under that, I knew, was the scratch: even paler now, peach-coloured, the skin already beginning to close over it, to regrow.
Jake would have known the proper terms for the healing: he could name it exactly. He had a scientific mind, was a biologist by profession; he studied bees, would bring home the tiniest fragments of his work, facts dangled on sticks, things I could understand. Apparently, he told me once, the name Queen Bee is misleading: she doesn’t control the hive, her sole function is to serve as the reproducer. But over this, she has almost perfect control.
~
At school, the teachers asked why I always drew her: the woman with wings, her hair long, her belly distended. Is she a bird, they asked me? Is she a witch? I shook my head, refused to tell them anything.
I never shared her with my friends, never named her in our games. I kept her inside me, at the edges of my vision, moving in and out of sight.
~
11
After they left, I felt my mind fall, its scattered attentions sinking into the watchfulness of empty rooms. It was in this house that I first started working from home, as in living from home, relocating my entire existence to these rented walls. I had lived in this town for most of my life – only leaving to go to university in its similarly privileged twin – and had never managed to own a piece of it. But here, in this house, I belonged, if only for a fixed term. Wasn’t life temporary, anyway, I asked myself; wasn’t permanence a fantasy? But I couldn’t help but want it: a mirage of safety, the pretence that four walls could keep your life, could hold you present on the earth.
We were, in our earlier years, cavalier about owning a house, or too poor, or too afraid – depending on which story we told – until it was no longer possible. Jake’s career progression had been modest, mine had been in reverse, and meanwhile the prices in our area had risen quickly, silently, like mould along the inside of a neglected jar. The only people who could buy here now were bankers, corporate lawyers, high-level employees of multinational pharmaceutical companies, people whose values seemed somehow at odds with their aesthetics, their Edwardian stained glass, wooden bookshelves filled with books from their days at university.
In these houses, most of the women stayed at home; their husbands were busy enough that they wanted a housekeeper, a nanny, a constant, hovering presence. The woman – the wife – could be all of these things, and she could keep her hand in, she could join the PTA.
I don’t know why I thought I was any different; I was surely the same, with less money. Today, as on every other work day, I was writing copy: a manual for an industrial gluing device. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer, imagined I would write something more meaningful than the sentence I had perfected today: To avoid accidents lay the cables so that they will not cause any risk of stumbling. But perhaps I could never have written anything as useful as this, anything that would prevent a death.
Pre-children,
