The First of Many

Thumb to the outside, her fist connects. She feels his nose collapse under the impact of her punch. Blood, bone and gristle merge and splinter. She tastes some of his blood on her lip at the same time as she registers the damage she has done. It thrills and sickens her. She is not angry; she just needed to do this. She needed to feel the aggression, bunching up through her arm and out through her clenched hand. Thumb to the outside, just as her brother had taught her.

He is stupefied with shock. His nose is pulpy, blood pouring from it in clots and globules, mixed with mucus. His nose is no longer the shape it used to be. She has smashed it with one blow. She never knew that she had it in her.

“Good aim,” he says, eventually. His voice sounds thick. Blood has run down from his nose into his mouth. Maybe it has gone down his airway to his throat as well.

She looks at him, and then contemplates her fist. There is the barest mark on it. Some pinkness around the knuckles, and traces of his blood, but nothing more than that. She looks at it as though it is a miracle.

“Was there any particular reason?” he asks her.

She shakes her head.

“That’s reassuring,” he says.

She is still looking at her fist as he walks past her to the bathroom. She hears the light click on and the sound of water running into the sink. Her fist is a miracle. All that power, and she never realised.

“I never even knew,” she says, to nobody other than herself.

He returns to the living room and stands in the doorway behind her. She turns to look at him. His eyes are puffy and bruises are starting to show, as though she has given him a pair of black eyes as well as a bloodied nose.

“I’d say it’s broken,” he tells her, as though she has pointed it out to him in conversation and he is agreeing.

She doesn’t move, just looks at him.

“I’ll make my own way to the hospital, then, shall I?”

She looks at him, mystified.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” she asks.

He laughs, derisively, then winces with pain at the air he snorted through his nose.

“I need to do something,” he says. “It’s not going to fix itself.”

She stares at him then looks back at her fist. It amazes her that something as simple as clenching her fist could produce something as satisfying as a broken nose. She hadn’t realised that she would actually feel the bone and cartilage give way. She hadn’t actually given any thought to the process at all. She had simply felt a sudden aggression that needed to be released, and her fist had formed and made contact. That was all.

She could do that to anyone.

He is in the hall, pulling on his coat. The car keys jangle as he picks them up from the key dish. She sits down, cross-legged, on the sofa and turns the tv on with the remote control. Noise fills the living room. The fake laughter of a sit-com. It makes her feel sick to hear people pretending to enjoy themselves.

“I’ll be back when I’m back then,” he says to her from the doorway.

She doesn’t even look at him. “Okay, see you later.” As though he is off to work, or off out to the pub to meet his mates.

His brow furrows in disbelief and then clears with resignation.

She lets the waves of tv idiocy wash over her and thinks of the ways in which she can use her new fist, its unleashed power. Previously, she has only ever battered with futility on pillows and cushions. Her hands were too well received by the soft plumpness of their stuffing. Now she knew what it felt like to be met with flesh and bone. The hardness slowly giving way to the force of her fist. The resistance and different sensations. The cracking sound, with its slight crunch.

She picks up the phone and dials for pizza. He will be gone for hours, and she is hungry. She orders for one, and waits.

The next day she wakes to find that she is alone in the bed. She stumbles, half asleep, across the laundry strewn bedroom floor and out into the hallway. She needs to use the bathroom, but decides she should check to see that he is home first.

The living room is in darkness, the curtains drawn. The sun is trying, weakly, to penetrate the thin weave of the fabric. She turns on the hall light, so that the living room can be seen, at least in part. He is dark and heavy on the sofa, curled in on himself, away from the door. She turns and heads for the bathroom.

Sitting on the toilet, feeling the warmth of her night’s urine leave her body, she wonders again at the power she discovered last night. She wipes, and smiles to herself, then washes her hands at the sink. She looks at herself in the mirror that hangs above the sink. She smiles at the person she sees there. She is someone different. Someone with new knowledge about herself.

She leaves the bathroom and goes into the kitchen. Filling the kettle, she hums to herself. As the kettle boils, she opens the fridge door and begins to take breakfast things from the fridge, setting them out on the kitchen work surface. She brews a pot of tea and puts bagels into the toaster.

She walks through to the dining area between the kitchen and living room. It is just a fold out table with fold out chairs, the ones that stow away inside the table’s centre legs. She folds out one leaf of the table and sets up two of the chairs.

He stirs on the sofa.

“Morning,” she says gently. “I’m making breakfast.”

“Umph,” he responds.

“How’s your nose?” she asks. She thinks she ought to, even though she doesn’t really care. She’s not even curious.

He sits up, groggy. She can see that he has some sort of plaster strip across the bridge of his nose. His eyes are both definitely black now. He stares across the living room at her. The flat is peaceful.

She moves to the curtains and draws them back. The mid-morning light streams into the living room, and he blinks, shielding his eyes until he is used to the sudden brightness.

She looks at him. “It looks nasty,” she says.

“It looks worse than it is, apparently,” he replies. “No serious damage. You just got a lucky strike.”

Lucky. She laughs to herself. Maybe out loud, because he looks at her sharply.

She walks back to the kitchen and pours out two mugs of tea from the pot, adding milk, then carrying them through to the dining table.

The bagels pop up from the toaster, and she flips them onto a large plate. She carries them through with two smaller plates, then returns to the kitchen one last time for butter and jam.

“Come and sit down,” she tells him. “I’ve made us some breakfast. Did you manage to eat anything last night?”

He gets up from the sofa and comes to sit with her at the table. “No,” he says, picking up a bagel and starting to butter it. “Funnily enough, I didn’t.”

She feels happy this morning, with her new found strength. The element of surprise. She will use it sparingly. No need to give him reason to expect it. She understands that most of its power lies in the fact that it is unexpected and unprovoked. She looks at the picture on the wall. A string of Christmas lights in silhouette on a stark white background, reaching out from a shaky shape like a Christmas tree, running towards her and just shy.

He is eating his bagel gingerly, and sipping intermittently on his hot tea. She looks at him and is suddenly filled with love for him. She waits for him to put his mug down, then places her hand over his.

“I love you,” she says.

He looks at her blankly for a moment, then smiles, his eyes softening. Forgiveness, she supposes. Not that she’s asked for it. Forgiveness can only be given to the repentant.

He doesn’t know that she has no regret.

She pats his hand and continues eating her breakfast. He sits and watches for a while, then she smiles at him, and he carries on with his.

I love you. Such simple words. All the hidden meanings they can contain. All the violence that waits behind them, anticipating the moment when it will be released.

This will be a good day, she knows. The first of many.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006