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
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
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
She was already standing still, and
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
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