Episode

The rat lay on its side, its fur plastered to the dead, greying skin of its body, bedraggled in the rain. Long dead and beginning to decay, an obscene bloom of blood on its chest marked where its heart had once been. Blood had leaked through broken skin to leave a mark like a carnation, grabbing the attention and reminding anyone who saw it that once this carcass had contained life.

She passed it, walking in the constant drizzle of a Manchester afternoon, and wanted to pause; wanted to look at this pathetic creature; felt sorry for it, even. She slowed as she went past.

The sense of falling backwards, of leaning back on her heels and waiting for the world to stop spinning, left her and everything became silent. She walked past the dead rat in a silent world where she was the only thing that moved; once past, the world rushed back into motion with all the sounds of cars tyres against wet roads and footsteps hurrying along pavements to accompany it.

The grey matted body made her think of the soldier whose remains had been dug up by archaeologists in Ypres. Boy soldiers blown to pieces at the side of the road in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bodies that couldn’t decay. ‘How do you bring such bodies home?’ she asked herself. She could understand the repackaging of a bunch of bones from ninety years ago, but how do you scrape together the remains of someone spattered across a roadway in a dusty, desert land?

Her car was almost the same maroon as the blood that blossomed on the dead rat’s chest. She unlocked it and got behind the wheel. Leaning back on her heels, she waited once more for the world to stop spinning.

“Have you stopped taking your medication?” he had asked her.

Muted by the lack of sleep and the over-indulgence in alcohol, she had set her jaw and refused to answer. She had not stopped taking her medication, and he had no right to ask.

She sat in her car, tilted back on her heels, and thought about his body spattered across a tarmac roadway. She wondered if she would flinch, were his body to spatter against her face.

Once, long ago, in a different place, she had heard the wail of a woman whose face bore the traces of her husband’s flesh and blood and bone. It was almost a different world. She kept it hidden behind a triptych; folding wooden screen, unpainted and unvarnished; she kept it hidden, buried.

She saw a group of women, as she drove home along Plymouth Grove. They were sitting, three of them together, on the pavement; backs to the wall, one of them was smoking; all three wore the fluorescent yellow vests and white hard hats of workers on a building site. The one who smoked had the cigarette in one hand, wrist angled, cocked almost, as though the cigarette should have been in a holder and the woman in a cocktail dress. Sucking on her cancer stick, she said something through the exhaled smoke from her lungs that made the other two laugh.

All that in the brief moment it took to drive past them.

“It puts me in a different place,” he had said, “reading your words like that.”

At a round steel table on a side street near the Town Hall, her chin was in her hand, her elbow on the table, two fingers lay across her lips as though she ought to have been smoking. She had looked past his right ear at nothing.

It was funny, it seemed to her, that he could string a sentence like that together and yet it still meant nothing to her. She presumed he meant to flatter, or to congratulate, or to admire. Something along those lines.

“There’s something about them,” he had said. “Something that makes my head swim.”

“Like you’re leaning back on your heels, trying not to fall, waiting for the world to stop spinning?” she had said to the nothing past his right ear.

“Yes!” he had said, his face brightening with the thrill of being understood. “That’s it exactly!”

“Funny,” she had said.

She saw a white dog running crazily along the patch of rough ground that ran parallel to her route home. He was crazed by the rain and the speed of the traffic, running to keep up with the cars as they made their way home. He had kept up with her for a time, his pink tongue flapping at the side of his open mouth. Gulping in air as he ran, he looked as though he was laughing. A carnival mask on a carnival dog, laughing as he raced against the traffic.

In the supermarket, as she bought organic and collected green points on her clubcard, she smiled at the memory of the dog and thought that she might write something when she got home.

A letter waiting, still stuck in the letterbox like a tongue poking out at her, told her that, with just a few more miles, she could soon be on her way to Vienna. If she didn’t collect more miles, she would stand still.

She was already standing still, and Vienna didn’t appeal, so she tore the letter in two and put it into the wastepaper basket underneath the coffee table.

A letter in an envelope lying fatly and A5 on the floor of the porch invited her to take out a new credit card. She could transfer any outstanding balance on her existing card. The shiny paper, the printed signature, the perky tone, all went into the wastepaper basket.

As the paper fell from her hand, she saw the signature again, briefly. Briefly, she wondered whether people really did write like that; why they didn’t buy a better pen. Scrawled, then digitised and printed with a blackness that didn’t seem real, the signature passed out of sight, joining the other crumpled and torn sheets in the bin.

Red wine leaking from a bottle; that was what the stain on the dead rat’s chest was like. A bloom of claret just beneath the mortified skin. She had wanted to touch it; to press against the claret stain; to see if the flesh was rigid in death, or whether the blood beneath it kept it soft.

The colour of the rat’s skin was the colour of pork chops when they’re cold and unwanted on your dinner plate. Deathly grey and ashen, but still with that hint of pink to let you know that this was once alive.

She closed her eyes and shook the image of the dead rat from her mind.

Behind her, the front door opened again.

“You’re home,” he said.

He closed the door and removed his coat, hanging it with the others on the rail by the door, the coat hangers jangling against the tubular metal that supported them.

She walked away from him, into the kitchen.

Standing at the sink, looking out onto the garden, she allowed him to follow her in there and sit down at the table.

“How was your day?” he asked, removing a shoe and rubbing at the sole of his foot.

His socks were grey. She knew without looking.

“I saw a dead rat on the way home,” she said. She couldn’t look at him while he was rubbing his foot, filling the air around it with the damp warmth it brought from the inside of his shoe.

He removed his other shoe and placed the two shoes neatly side by side at the back of his chair. She heard the twist of his body, the gentle scrape of the chair legs against the floor, the tick of the shoe heels making contact with the lino.

“How was your day?” she said.

He could have told her anything as she moved from the sink to the fridge and began to prepare dinner. Her head was heavy and her eyes wanted to close.

She stopped. Her head came up and she stared at the wall in front of her. She frowned slightly. How could he think she had stopped taking her medication?

She turned to look at him. He stopped what he was saying.

“What?” he asked, his raised eyebrows and round eyes taking up the opposite position to the frown on her face.

She stared at him for a moment, then returned to chopping the onions.

“Do you think it’s cold?” she said.

“Cold?” he replied. She imagined that his eyebrows were higher and his eyes even rounder. “No, I don’t think it’s cold. Why? Do you?”

“I do,” she said. “I think it’s cold.” She chopped onions, then turned slightly towards him, holding the knife towards him. “I feel cold,” she said, with all the emphasis on the verb.

“I feel fine,” he said.

He got up from the table, loosening his tie, unbuttoning his shirt at the collar. He walked through to the living room. She heard him checking the thermostat. It was summer. The heating wasn’t switched on. Checking the thermostat would do no good. She almost told him, but instead chopped harder. The knife blade now bit against the firm bulk of a carrot. The carrot crunched as she cut it, slicing it into circles. The orange, carotene-filled slices looked bright against the white of the chopping board.

The knife in her hand was too obvious.

He came back into the kitchen; opened a bottle of wine. He poured the ruby liquid into two glasses and brought one over to her. He kissed the back of her neck as he leaned across the back of her to put the glass down on the surface to her right.

She thought his lips would freeze to her skin, so arctic did the inside of her body feel, but they just brushed against it and were gone.

Leaning back on her heels, she thought she would fall backwards forever.

“This is wrong,” she said.

“What is?” he said. His voice was muffled and she knew he was turned away from her. She could smell the newsprint from the paper he was now reading; sharp and acrid, inky and disturbing, she could feel the words on the page rising up and floating into her through her nostrils.

“This,” she said, waving the knife around in front of her, indicating the chopped onions, the sliced carrots, the peppers waiting to be chopped.

“What?” he said again, his back still to her, the inky words still rising.

She thought of the rat again; its cold grey body and the bloom of blood. Her hand felt warm with the memory and she closed her eyes to enjoy it.

“Shit,” she heard him say. “Shit. Emmie, what have you done?”

She opened her eyes. She smiled. She looked at where her left hand had wrapped itself around the blade of the knife.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s okay. Look.”

She took her hand from the blade and lifted it up to him. Blood dripped from the cut that lay across the crease of her palm. He grabbed a towel from the rail by the door and brought it to her. He wrapped it around her hand, binding it tightly, trying to staunch the flow of blood.

She was still holding the knife in her right hand.

The knife was too obvious.

A bloom of blood beneath the skin where the heart would have been. A bloom of blood beneath the skin, beneath a shirt. Too obvious.

“I saw a white dog,” she said. “It was running. I thought I might write about it.”

“Yes?” he said, still concentrating on binding up her hand. “How does that feel?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said, not registering what he meant, the knife still in her other hand. “It feels fine.”

“Did it go in deep?” he asked the doctor.

The doctor was dressing her hand. He had taken off the towel and was dressing her hand in gauze and a bandage.

“Not too deep,” the doctor said. “No nerve damage. No need for stitches. It’ll just be tender for a few days, and she’ll need to not use her hand, let it heal.”

The doctor turned to her. “If you use your hand, it will crack open the tissue where it is healing and prolong the process.”

“Can I have painkillers?” she asked.

The doctor looked surprised.

“Are you in pain?” he said.

“No. Not really,” she replied. “I’d like some, though.”

“Well, if you feel any pain, paracetamol should help to relieve it.”

“I had codeine once,” she said. “I liked that.”

The doctor took her husband outside the curtain and she listened to them holding a murmured conversation.

He came back in without the doctor. The doctor had gone away, moved on to the next patient.

“You’re all done,” he said. “We can go home.”

“The knife was too obvious,” she said, as he helped her up off the bed.

“I can walk,” she told him, as he took her arm.

“Such a shame that he couldn’t give me codeine,” she said, as they set off back home in his dark blue car.

On the by-pass, as he accelerated up the hill, she opened the passenger door.

“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to look at her and at the road simultaneously; trying to lean across her and to steer at the same time.

“Looking,” she said. “Looking at the road.”

A car horn blared and headlights rushed past them as he veered onto the wrong side of the road.

She closed the door.

“You should concentrate,” she said. “How much wine did you drink?”

“You’re mad,” he said, getting the car back under control, regulating his breathing, trying to be calm.

“Undoubtedly,” she replied. “But you’re stuck with me.”

She smiled.

“I told you the knife was too obvious.”

© J R Hargreaves July 2007

Tea

He traced the bones at her neck; her collar bones. Clavicles. That was the biological term for them. He traced his fingers along their rigid straightness.

She did not react.

His finger rested in the suprasternal notch. He pressed down, lightly at first, then harder. He could feel no definite pulse from her; only his own.

“You’re healthy,” he said.

She continued to read.

“Your blood pressure is fine.”

She turned the page of her newspaper. “Good,” she said.

He flattened his hand against her breastbone. The neckline of her sweater left part of her chest bare, to a point, and his hand revelled in the warmth of her flesh and the firmness of her sternum.

She was more beautiful than anyone deserved to be.

He thought about what the poet had said. About beauty being an ecstasy and not a wish.

She was more beautiful than could be borne.

He removed his hand. She did not move, did not speak, did not pay him the slightest bit of attention. He sat away from her, turning his body so that he was square on with the edges of the sofa; his back firm against the cushion behind it; his knees hard against the edge of the seat; his arms parallel to the sofa’s arms.

He was like an old toy soldier, with its articulated joints positioned so that it seemed to be sitting.

The silence in the room was broken only by the sound of their breathing and the rustle of the pages as she turned them. He was bored. He was restless. He was a coil of nervous energy that had no knowledge of how to expend itself.

She sat, ancient and beautiful, like a posed figure in an oil painting, all sages and browns and yellows and pinks. Her bright gold hair glimmered in the sunlight that shifted across the window. Leaded lights. Mullioned.

He rolled the word mullioned around his head, imagining the feel of it in his mouth.

Her hair had been fixed in a Marcel wave a couple of days ago. He could still smell, faintly, the chemicals applied to that bright golden head to force the shafts to bend against their will.

He looked at her legs. Her stockings were pale, her ankles neat; her shoes were the same sage as her blouse and neatly fastened with a strap and a button. Her narrow skirt stopped just below her knee, constricting her legs so that she had to fold them neatly. Even if she hadn’t been trained to do so from being young, her skirt created its own demands.

Terrance entered the room, carrying the things for tea.

“Lord, Terrance, is it that time already?”

He sprang from the sofa, glad of something to do.

Terrance merely glanced at him before continuing to set out the tea tray on the table.

“Thank you, Terrance,” she said, still engrossed in her newspaper.

“Ma’am. Sir.” The servant left the room with a stiff bow to each of them.

“Do pour me a cup, there’s a dear,” she said without lifting her gaze from the pages open before her.

“What’s so fascinating?” he asked, splashing milk into a teacup and then pouring tea in afterwards.

She did not respond. He felt peeved and, knowing that she did not take sugar, he dropped two lumps into her cup. Without bothering to stir, he carried the cup over to where she sat and placed it on the small table to her left.

He reseated himself beside her, on her right.

She looked up briefly. She looked at him as though she vaguely remembered him from somewhere.

“Are you not having one?” she asked.

The callousness of her indifference was beautiful. He felt intoxicated. He shook his head.

“Odd boy,” she said, turning back to her paper.

He crossed his leg away from her. He tried to convince himself that the view through the window across the lawn was an interesting one, when in fact all that it contained was a stretch of lawn and a mildly diverting rose bush in the centre.

He rested his chin in his hand, his elbow propped against the arm of the sofa. He drummed his fingers gently against his jaw.

“You’re singing,” she said. “Do stop, there’s a good boy.”

“Was I?” he said, turning to face her again. Of course, she was still buried in the news, so he turned away again.

“I wonder what it is that holds her attention so,” he said to the room in general. He was confident that she was not paying the slightest attention to him.

He was right.

He returned to his previous pose; head propped, jaw strummed, eyes scanning the garden for something to entertain his restless mind.

“Oh, won’t you come and play tennis?” he exploded, leaping up from his seat and standing in front of her.

She reached a hand out languidly to her teacup and continued to read in silence.

He paced about in front of her.

“We’re wasting the day, sitting in here. It’s glorious outside.”

“Did you put sugar in this?” she asked, replacing the cup on the table.

The poet was wrong, he decided as he ceased his pacing and looked down on her lovely form, so elegant on the sofa. Beauty wasn’t a lively heart full of fire and soul. Beauty was her. Cold and silent and indifferent to his very existence. A pale pink mouth. A pale white hand.

He flung himself onto his knees before her, gripping her about her knees.

“Yes!” he exclaimed. “I put sugar in it, yes! Now say you’ll play tennis. Leave all this senseless reading behind. Tennis! Tennis is the thing!”

She raised one lovely eyebrow, a spark of amusement flashing in, and then out, of her clear blue eyes.

“I don’t have my racquet,” she said, placing a cool hand against his cheek. He turned his face so that his mouth was cupped in her palm, and he kissed that lovely palm.

“You’re such a sweetheart,” she said. “My brother will be back from town in a few minutes.” She restored her gaze to the pages of the newspaper. “I’m sure that he’ll knock a few balls about with you.”

He picked himself up from his kneeling position and slumped back onto the sofa.

“You’re like a sulky puppy,” she said, then yawned.

She picked up her teacup and held it out to him, still without looking.

“Pour me another one,” she said. “There’s a dear.”

He ignored the hovering vessel to his left; the cup that was anchored in time and space only by the fingers of her right hand holding the handle so nonchalantly.

“No,” he said. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. His legs were outstretched in front of him. The line of his spine created an empty space between his body and the angle of the sofa. He fixed himself in position with his shoulders and his behind.

Still the teacup hovered, an irritating fly in his peripheral vision.

He was just about to swat it away, and damn the consequences, when her brother strode into the room.

“Hello, chaps!” he called out, making his way straight to the tea tray and cutting himself a thick slice of fruit cake. “How long have you been here, Willows?”

“Dorrie, pour me a fresh cup of tea, dear. This one’s cold and has sugar in it.”

Her brother crossed the room to where she was holding the teacup out to him.

He winked at his friend.

“Willows, you cad, did you put sugar in my sister’s tea?”

He didn’t expect an answer so didn’t wait for one. Willows didn’t offer one, either.

Dorrie took a fresh cup from the tray and filled it with tea for his sister.

“There you go,” he said, carrying it over to her.

“You’re a gent,” she said, accepting the proffered gift as all well-bred young women do; with indifference and cynicism.

“Tuppy here wants to play tennis,” she said.

“I say,” Dorrie exclaimed with a grin. “Willows, have you been trying to court my sister, you old ram?”

Willows maintained his effortful slouch and didn’t speak. His shoulders were beginning to ache, and the tilt of his chin meant that his larynx was beginning to feel uncomfortably compressed.

“You oughtn’t to sit like that, old chap,” Dorrie said, perching himself on his sister’s arm of the sofa. “It’ll do you a mischief. Stop you talking.”

His sister laughed.

“He’s been practising his medical ways on me,” she said.

“Is that so?” her brother replied, fitting the fingers of his right hand into the waves of her hair and squeezing them together.

Willows was consumed by a wave of envy.

Dorrie got up suddenly. “I don’t think I like you practising your medical ways on ma soeur,” he told his friend, walking away from him, his hands tucked into the pockets of his waistcoat. “That’s not quite why I invited you down this weekend.”

He turned on his heel and stood firm across the room from Willows.

“For god’s sake,” Willows exploded, as best he could given his physical position on the sofa. “All I did was press my bloody forefinger against her suprasternal notch.”

“And your hand against my breastbone,” she chipped in.

Willows considered that beauty perhaps was an ecstasy.

“Sternum is the medical term,” he said.

Dorrie laughed. His sister joined in. Willows found it in himself to smile. He was calmer now; now that his pent up attraction had somehow been acknowledged and dismissed. He sat up properly on the sofa.

Dorrie’s sister smiled at him. Her eyes were like sapphires and Willows thought, if he looked long enough and hard enough, he might be able to see to the bottom of them.

“Are you not having tea?” Dorrie asked him, standing once more at the tea tray and pouring a steady stream of golden brown liquid into a cup.

“No,” said Willows, “I’m not.”

They were still gazing at each other, she and he, behind her brother’s turned back.

She broke away first, an intuitive split second before her brother turned around to face the room again.

“Tennis, then?” Dorrie said, beaming down on his poor unrequited friend before raising his teacup to his lips.

“Why not?” Willows replied, leaping once more from the sofa.

As her brother replaced his cup on the tea tray, Willows saw the shadow of a smile curve her lips.

He remembered the feel of his hand against her breast bone.

Dorrie was standing in the doorway, waiting for him.

“Come on then, old chap, before the day’s gone.”

An ecstasy and a wish, then, he told himself. A mouth and a lively heart full of fire and soul.

He followed her brother from the room. Her eyes watched his back.

© J R Hargreaves July 2007