Butterfly Fish

Scene

A baby with a white tongue sat in the middle of traffic. Naked, it crawled after an orange balloon fashioned into a dog. I watched the dog bounce, carried by a steady breeze, running my tongue over my dry mouth. The baby continued to edge forward as the traffic swirled. And the sky was so big and bright I had to somehow adjust my settings. I stood at the flickering traffic lights feeling jittery, anxiously waiting for somebody to scoop up the baby who so far hadn’t cried. I waited for the artificial dog to bark. It didn’t. A rising panic grew inside me. My left hand lay slack against my slick with sweat thigh. My right hand trembled. Everybody around seemed oblivious. A man in a Hawaiian shirt nibbled on a Mars bar, a ginger-haired woman pushing shopping bags in a pram that had seen better days laughed into her mobile phone, a lollipop lady sat crying on a bench beside the DLR station. The faulty traffic light only flashed wait. People crossed over regardless, drawing expletives from drivers who popped extra large heads out of dust covered windows before leaning back in to awkward embraces with their steering wheels.

A milk float with no driver appeared off the roundabout. It paused beside the station, empty bottles of milk jostling. The lollipop lady jumped in still crying as she drove away. The baby was closer now. I caught a glimpse of its wide smiling face as it moved determinedly towards an empty packet of Skittles lingering on the curb. A sharp pain exploded in my chest. Sweat popped on my forehead. A feeling of familiarity crept in. I opened my mouth to call out but only growly guttural barks emerged. Distressed, I scanned the scene for the orange dog. I leapt at the curb to grab the baby but it was drooling into the Skittles packet at the back of the milk float, snaking through the bottles.

On the way home, I looked up at the same big sky wondering where I’d seen the baby before. Wondering if it would change its mode of travel and attach itself to the white vapour trail of the plane overhead, taking comfort in the distance of its heavy noise. The taut pain continued to spread through my body. My hand felt sticky and a stinging sensation registered. I pulled it out of my pocket watching the blood trickle. Unwittingly, I’d cut it on the gnarly cover of a sardine can left inside it. At the front door, I fished out a stone the size of a one pence coin and swallowed it. Seventy-two hours of insomnia and counting, a no-man’s land where the gutted earth harboured versions of me growing, injured. Wild eyed.

Glass Feet Stoned

It was just after 8pm when I arrived at Mervyn’s office. He was just leaving. He pulled the door closed, wine-coloured briefcase in hand, and then rotated his head to the right as I approached, as if he’d picked up a warning in the air I’d be coming. Black suit, red tie, polished black shoes, looking smart, a man you could trust. He smiled a genuine smile but I could see worry behind it.

“Princess, still don’t know how to return people’s phone calls.”

“You haven’t been honest with me Mervyn.”

He stood still for a moment, gathering himself. As he blew air through his lips his chest rose and fell like a balloon beginning to deflate.

“Okay, let’s go to mine where we can talk.”

“No.”

“Come on it’s me; you telling me you can’t come to my house now?”

We walked to a Caribbean restaurant a couple of streets down. All the way I said nothing, waiting. He brought out his chequered handkerchief to pat his forehead.

Other than a couple at the bar area the restaurant was virtually empty and smelled of spices. It had wooden floors, dim lights and colourful paintings. Reggae music played low and soft like a lover’s stroke. You could see out onto the street from where we sat. Mervyn’s gaze loitered a little too long on the outside scene. He may have sensed what was coming, maybe not the exact nature of it, but he knew I meant business. Neither of us wanted to eat. He ordered vodka, I ordered water.

Tell me what happened.

He supressed an agitated sigh.

You know what your mother was like Joy.

No, tell me.

She was vicious that evening, she said things, accused me.

Of what?

Of seeing another woman.

Were you?

No, I’m a man who flirts a lot; I can’t help it I’m wired that way. Why did you keep it from me?

Your mother thought it best you didn’t know about us.

And this had been going on for?

Years.

Even while your wife was alive?

Yes.

I stayed absolutely still for a minute because I needed to.

So?

I went out, took a walk around to cool off man, I came back the basement door was open and there she was. It was so strange to see her dead, I swear I never touched her; I loved her. You saw the medical examiner’s report.

You left her there.

I don’t know where my head was at. I panicked. To find her like that, it was a shock, too much.

He looked me dead in the eye then. I wanted to tell you.

No, no, no, no, no. I stopped him. All at once I felt faint and sick. He was showing who he really was to me. The way he’d always been there, in the background and his boys, always there too. How could I not have seen it? I realised the night I found my mother dead I never called the ambulance. Mervyn had. After the screaming dial tone and the voice that replaced it zapped down the line and his trembling fingers hung up the receiver, he hit the ground, running away from us, my mother reduced to a dirty dead secret. I’ll never ask by how much time I missed him.

I left him there at the cliff edge, to untangle the knot stretching back many years.

Then there she was, wearing the purple scarf from Mervyn’s. Why in death was my mother Queen becoming real again? My glass feet broke repeatedly on the pavement. Heartbeats were gunshots fired in my chest. She was high up above, a fevered angel sleepwalking on the wings of planes.

Peter Lowon Journal Entry, July 1964

Now that it is two years since General Akhatar has been pronounced the new minister of defence under military rule, and I am a General in my own right, my marriage has become a shell. I wanted it all, but it is never as you expect it to be. Still, I cannot bring myself to tell Felicia the one thing she wants to know. Instead, I have picked seedless fights over the years. If she cooks I tell her the eba is too hard, that her soup tastes flat. I shout her down over the dining room table on days she attempts to sit with me the way a good wife does. And wish aloud she’d cease breathing instead of asking me endless questions while she watches in horror. One night she came home late smelling of beer after running around with some of these Lagos women. I called her a prostitute and threw her out, while Queenie slept soundly. After her staying with a friend for three days, I demanded she come home, accused her of abandoning her duties as a wife and mother and of attempting to embarrass me. I have become another type of man in my own home and I don’t know how to stop being him.

Felicia and I sleep in separate bedrooms. I have never experienced a lonelier feeling than the sound of her footsteps heading towards her bedroom, where the only comfort that awaits her is an empty bed. I am punishing both of us; I wonder why she stays. I kept my promise and she has a clothing boutique in Lagos where through my connections some high profile clients flock. She spends her days there, running it with her cousin’s help. Felicia and I will not have any more children; I have resigned myself to it, despite always wanting more. Queenie deserves a brother and sister; she has asked me about it many times. I always give her the same answer, ‘When the time is right.’ Knowing that time will never come.

His name is Ben Okafor. He is a journalist with The Nigerian Trumpet, a parasite whose big shot father owns the paper amongst other ventures. I first received a call from him some weeks ago. He told me he wanted to do a lifestyle profile on generals in the military, a series that would run over a few weeks.

Initially I said no. No warning bells went off. For a while I heard nothing, and then more phone calls, he became persistent, falling just short of harassment. It was after the call from his father, a friend of the President that I agreed to see him, sweeping aside my worry. I met him on neutral ground, in an eatery with the smell of meat pies and baked bread in the air. The place had fewer people than chairs, and the walls were a pale yellow as though they had turned sickly from all the stale conversations. It was deliberately low key.

Okafor was younger than I expected, an Ibo in his mid-to-late twenties. He was a very handsome man, 6’2in tall with a practiced braggadocio and an air of wealth. I hated him on sight. He had on cream pressed linen trousers, brown sandals with his toes peeking out and a multi coloured shirt. Tucked in his shirt pocket was a pair of dark sunglasses; a cigarette dangled from his mouth. He waved me over on arrival, his lean, sculpted face breaking into a smile, pumping my hand warmly as though I was a long lost friend, his features drawn into a kind of welcome. He had a neat trick of smiling without any warmth appearing only to have moved his lips. Okafor jumped from one comment to another as though they were hot coals, touching on traffic on the way in, why I’d chosen this particular place to meet, offering me a cigarette then smiling ruefully and asking if a woman had anything to do with my decision after informing him I’d quit years ago. He had a dynamic energy, even doing simple things like patting his shirt pocket for his wallet before fishing it out from a green satchel that slumped against the leg of his chair. I tried to steady my shaky hands under the table, tried to control the heat spreading through my bloodstream. I felt naked, vulnerable. Why had I agreed to do this? This was a bad idea. I should never have folded under the pressure. I drummed my fingers on the table, nerves jangling. I must admit I embraced the small relief when Okafor stood abruptly to grab two malt drinks from the fridge at the side, before handing it to the woman at the counter who opened them with a gleaming silver opener.

For a moment, I pictured Okafor holding that opener, scraping my insides with it. He set our drinks down, folded his rangy body in the seat opposite me. The questions came quickly. What made a man like me join the army since I did not strike him as the army type? Why had I had such a quick progression up the ranks? How come everybody he spoke to about me divulged the same things? Good, fair, proud hardworking family man. Nothing to the contrary, as though I’d carefully presented the same image to everyone? I smiled when he said this. Inside I thought, don’t let this parasite see you crack! Stay calm Peter, stay calm. I adjusted myself, pulled my body upright, something I find myself doing in an uncomfortable situation. Okafor had grabbed a worn, small writing pad and a broken pen that had seen better days. “Sir I’m interested in true portrayals,” he said. “Fair ones, despite what assumptions you may have about me being a spoiled, rich boy. This is not play for me. I am not amusing myself till the next thing comes along.”

I gave him some carefully rehearsed responses, trying to read his expressions as he scribbled away. I told him that the structure and discipline of the army had appealed to me from adolescence, the idea of a shared experience, camaraderie, protecting your country. All lies of course. I had nothing but my own self interest in mind but you cannot deliver this kernel of truth to a stranger without true context which cannot be conveyed in a mere interview to a journalist of all people! I was ambitious I said. I made the right connections, wanted to do well. After all, I had a family to provide for. Okafor tapped his pen on the pad, looking up. “You know, I like you Mr Lowon but I’m still trying not to hold it against you that you’ve been so difficult regarding this interview. Do you have something to hide?” He leaned forward when he said this, holding my gaze, searching it. I took a sip from my Supermalt, welcoming the coolness of the liquid, hoping it would dampen the rising heat inside me. That sly bastard Okafor actually smiled at that point, a slow, loaded smile. I pointed out that if I’d had anything to conceal, I would never have agreed to the interview. I was a very busy man after all, a General in demand, advising on all kinds of military matters. A newspaper interview was hardly at the top of my list of priorities. Okafor continued to dig, restless in his seat, throwing a leg out, sinking back then springing forward when some small detail caught his attention, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. Then he asked me if I had any regrets? Hah! Did this man take me for a fool? Asking me to walk into a potential land mine. I confessed I wasn’t always the best son, that my father and I had had a tricky relationship, full of tenseness and misunderstanding. He hadn’t been an openly affectionate father, in fact he was awkward expressing emotions. I never knew if he loved me but he was happy I joined the army, pleased about the discipline it instilled in me.

Okafor then says he’d like to tell me a story.

“Of course” I respond, happy to take a break, to pause and gather my thoughts, to drink more Supermalt.

Some months back, Okafor was at a party, a good one as parties go. Nice looking women, plenty of people, the usual. But there was this man in bad shape with a damaged leg, most people were ignoring him but Okafor went to help. The man rambled while Okafor held his arm, taking him outside for some air. He asked what Okafor did for a living. Okafor told him. Then the man said he had unbelievable stories to tell.

Doom twisted inside me as Okafor continued with his tale. The man said he used to be in the army, his name was Emmanuel. He talked about his friends Peter Lowon, Obi and the General. He revealed things, secrets some very powerful people want to stop coming out.

I felt my top lip trembling, I hadn’t heard from Emmanuel for almost a year when he suddenly stopped asking me for money. Okafor informed me that Emmanuel had died four weeks earlier, he had been in serious trouble, owed some dangerous people a lot of money. His girlfriend called the police after finding him in their apartment with a bullet wound in his head. At first I couldn’t move, Okafor’s voice seemed to be fading and I was busy chastising myself for my arrogance, my presumptions.

All these months Ben Okafor had been sitting, waiting on this golden egg to hatch.

“That night sir, did you know the soldier you killed had been General Akhatar’s lover?”

I shook my head. The seductive Ben Okafor was scribbling almost furiously. Then, he paused and studied me. He didn’t explain why he believed the ramblings of a drunken man. I felt my cheeks swelling with denials. I knew this day would come, all these years of quiet fear, of waiting, of regret. I swallowed my protests, knowing if they were released, they would die on the tips of impatient, surrounding knives.

Who

In my living room I watched Anon drown old pictures in her blue river. Images I didn’t recognise, unfurling against the wet mouth of a tide; shots of a woman tying her wrapper running down a dusty road, a man cowering before a gulf in his floor, dead babies in the womb turning. Then footsteps outside caught my interest. I looked through the window, spotted Mrs Harris throwing away a large, black bin bag. The dented shapes in it spoke. The green wheelie bin squeaked as the bag landed. She looked different. Her long, lace black dress with a bulbous skirt spun as she moved, its hem whispering against her ankles. Slouchy, burgundy boots, round wire-rimmed spectacles and a black beret topped off the outfit. Her hair cascaded like a silvery waterfall down her back.

I grabbed my camera from the side table and snapped away. She stood still for a few moments, staring at something out of the frame. She sighed and my curtains trembled as though her breath had blown them. The wheelie bins were then adjusted till they were level. For a brief moment, I felt guilty watching her pale hands on the handles. She was only doing an ordinary task on an ordinary day. Mrs Harris threw her shoulders back and went inside. She emerged a few minutes later holding a long, wooden cane. Its handle curved in the shape of an umbrella’s. Her back was hunched, head bent. Her walk altered by a slight limp; her face bore a pained expression. I watched till she was out of my line of vision and Anon had eased her grip on my chest.

In the evening, a light shower of rain fell as I made my way down from the local DVD rental shop. It was after 8pm. Traffic had eased and cars drove by bearing shrunken snapshots in their side mirrors. I’d rented The Big Lebowski. I loved the idea of an ordinary character landing in an extraordinary situation. The rain began to fall more heavily and I counted some of its disciples. I tugged my coat hood over my head. Mrs Harris was standing at the traffic lights across the road, face illuminated by its flickering colours. Gone were the pained expression and her walking stick. She’d also changed clothes. Instead she now wore flowery red trousers, grey plimsolls and a dark, blue raincoat. Her hair was tamed in a loose bun and she clutched a white, plastic bag straining with the weight it carried. I waited for her to cross the lights and reach my side of the road. As she approached, she whistled, wet tendrils of hair stuck to the side of her face.

“My fellow water baby! How is the world according to Joy?” she enquired, smiling.

“Erm ok,” I answered, resisting the urge to launch into full confessional mode. “I’m ordering takeaway and having a night of film watching. What have you been up to?”

She held her bag up as we quickened the pace. “Costume shopping!” A bus sped past splashing us.

“For a costume party? I’ve never been to one. What’s the outfit?”

“Can’t tell you, it’s a surprise! You’ve never been to a costume party? Quite the experience my dear! You’ll have to come, cancel whatever you’re doing this Saturday.”

“I don’t have a costume though.”

She fished her key out as we drew closer to our patch of houses. “Try the old vintage store on the high street, a veritable treasure trove! If you get stuck I’d be happy to lend you something.”

“Thanks but-,” my expression wrinkled. As if she’d guessed my response she warned, “I won’t have no for an answer, have some fun for a change.”

God! I thought, she must see me as a miserable human being. It dawned on me that for some strange reason, what she thought of me mattered. I had no idea how that had happened. Despite my best efforts the small bag of DVD rentals was damp. I held it tighter. “Okay but don’t abandon me there. I hate it when someone invites you to a party and then ignores you for most of it.”

“The worst that can happen is you’ll be forced to interact with other people.” She chuckled, shaking her head. “Even mad butterflies are social creatures!” She winked, hand fluttering to the side of her right leg.

“Are you ok?” I reached to steady her as she rubbed.

“It’s fine, an old accident. It troubles me occasionally dear that’s all.”

I noticed a loose thread at the wrist of the white jumper peeking beneath her raincoat, imagined secrets clinging to frayed wrists.

“Here,” I offered, “I’ll take that.” I grabbed her bag. We’d arrived at her doorstep and she stuck the key in the lock. “Come in and take some macaroni cheese away with you.” I trailed behind her respectfully wiping my shoes on the mat with “home” printed across it. She flicked the lights on. “It’s an old family recipe, you can have it for lunch tomorrow. Tell me what you think!”

In the living room I looked up at the light. A tiny Anon sat in the bulb. She pointed to the side table where a copy of the day’s Evening Standard was flicked open to the property section. Doodles of forlorn looking stick men in various stages of distress sat in the margins. Drawn in red ink, they seemed to be calling to each other across the page. In the top, right corner, a smudged coffee stain was a canon ball rolling towards them. I glanced up and Anon had gone. The bulb flickered, as though she left her laughter to tangle with the light. Mrs Harris emerged, carrying a brown oven dish bearing tin foil as a makeshift cover. “Here, tuck into that tomorrow. You’ll sleep like a newborn.” The light continued to sputter. “I’ll have to change that,” she added, bending to untie the laces of her plimsolls. Heat from the bowl spread through my fingers and the smell of macaroni beneath a melted, golden cheese topping made my stomach rumble. I raised a hand by way of goodbye but back turned, Mrs Harris was already heading to her kitchen, whistling that odd, unrecognisable tune.

Later that night, I woke with vague strains of the tune running through my head. The sound of light rain hitting the windowpanes was comforting. I noticed the light in Mrs Harris’s garden was on illuminating the drops of rain on my window. Looking out I watched discreetly as she dug a hole then buried a multi-coloured cloth bag. I wondered what secret had to be hidden inside damp soil. Perhaps only Buddy the Buddha knew, watching bearing mouthfuls of water. After she wandered in, I made myself a mug of hot chocolate, unsettled by my growing fascination with her. And by Anon’s greed, not only invading my space but also creeping into Mrs Harris’s too. Outside, the street lamps cowered as a gust of wind howled.

Faces

In the week of the costume party I photographed Mrs Harris in several guises. Anon told me to do it. She danced around the room wearing the brass head, whispering instructions, waving arms the weight of silk. Each morning, I listened for the sound of Mrs Harris’s front door clicking open. Camera poised on the table, I’d lunge forward fully aware of the small window of time and take pictures. I shot the woman I knew in warm, earthy tones. I captured her face reassembling itself. I shot her dressed out of character in a dull, brown tweed skirt suit, hair restrained in a severe bun. On another occasion, she looked demure and sorrowful, swathed in an ill-fitting knee length black dress. As if she was attending a funeral. Only the hat she wore would raise eyebrows, it was a Phillip Treacy inspired, peacock-shaped number dotted with bits of gold in its netting. Another time she wore a red kilt, a short black tux jacket and sturdy, black heels. In that instance, I ran down to intercept her, pretending to be on my way to the shop.

“Hey, you look colourful today, off somewhere nice?” I enquired, slightly self conscious of still being in my pyjamas.

She bowed dramatically. “Thank you dear. I’m spending some time with my brother. He’s taking me on a surprise afternoon outing.”

Casually I said, “Oh, this must be the brother you mentioned briefly. I always see you as an only child for some reason.”

“It depends how you define the term brother,” she muttered. A leaflet distributor clutching a stash of flyers hurried past.

“Your leg seems better,” I noted. “Niggling injuries are horrible.”

“It comes and goes dear! Lots of people manage with terrible afflictions, things you couldn’t imagine. If ever I start to pity myself, I think of the Elephant Man.”

“Oh, ok.” I waved her off. “Have a good time.”

“See you on the other side.” She said breezily, hurrying on.

On the night of the party, Mrs Harris and I got ready at my house, listening to The Smiths blaring from the radio. We smoked spliffs and I felt high on camaraderie and possibilities. Our faces were painted like skulls, with drawn-on extended crooked smiles that were sinister no matter the angle of light. We wore “his” and “hers” skeleton costumes with me in androgynous mode and Mrs Harris encased in a corseted dress. Long, black capes floated from our backs. Our heads were decorated in crowns of dead flowers, made from rose petals, geraniums and old wires.

In the streets we encountered bursts of traffic. People swelled in and out of pubs, cramped restaurants and Weatherspoons! Mrs Harris took a swig from the small bottle of Captain Morgan rum tucked inside the pocket of her cape then tugged me along. “The guy throwing this party, Otto, got most of his front teeth knocked out from a gambling debt. Try not to stare when you meet him.” She advised. I nodded as we weaved our way past curious glances. We crossed a bridge that reeked of piss and alcohol, where a homeless guy holding a stick appeared like the gatekeeper and asked for my cape. We walked on. The distant, neon lights inside us threatened to become embodied.

Eventually, we reached a moody looking Victorian house with a shabby hedge. A few red bricks were stacked in the corner of the sidewalk. Music boomed and silhouettes jostled in the hazy gaze of the windows. We rang the bell. After a short wait Otto answered dressed as a pirate, sporting a patch over one eye. His exposed eye twinkling was the colour of a dark blue sapphire. “Greetings!” he announced with flourish, throwing his arms open.

We were ushered in, our coats taken and swallowed into the warmth. Mrs Harris introduced us as we weaved through the packed hallway. It was difficult not to stare at the row of missing front teeth in Otto’s mouth. It made his smile look dubious. Already high, I wanted to ask how much money he’d owed and whether the heavy handlers kept the teeth. The atmosphere felt tunnel-like. Oddly shaped rooms wound off in different directions and high ceilings drew close, and then receded. Alcohol and ash permeated conversations. Bodies in costumes were mutated rats bouncing under low lights.

In the kitchen, a makeshift bar constituting several bottles stacked on the countertop beckoned. A woman sang a deep-throated blues as Mrs Harris made me a gin and tonic.

“How was the outing with your brother?” I asked, shouting over the noise.

She leaned closer, handed me a full glass. “What?”

“Your brother!”

“Oh! It was anti-climatic.” Her brow furrowed in irritation. I swallowed a gulp of drink. Too much gin and not enough tonic. “How so?”

“He took me to some pretentious play in Convent Garden. The kind of thing you’d see scraping the bottom of the barrel at the Edinburgh Festival. We argued over money, my inheritance to be precise, which he still won’t give me.” She grabbed cubes of ice from a bucket and threw them in her glass so aggressively, whisky sloshed down the side. I leaned back into the counter. “How is that possible? Is he your blood brother?”

“No, my father remarried you see. The woman already had a child, Bryn. To make matters worse, my father legally adopted him. I wasn’t the easiest of children. Anyway, when he died, he instructed my share of the inheritance to be given to me at Bryn’s discretion. And of course, he hasn’t, claiming I’m mad and irresponsible.”

“But that’s not fair!” I offered, genuinely annoyed on her behalf.

“You don’t know the half of it!” she announced, shouting in my ear. “Bryn inherited the estate. After everything my father and I went through in that house, he and his mother just waltzed in and took it. It was as if my father rewarded them for being his new beginning.”

The track changed. David Bowie was signalling to Major Tom.

“You know what was awful?” she continued. “When I got admitted to the mental hospital, Bryn sent me a letter with a hundred pounds enclosed. He said he was disappointed by my circumstances and here was some money to spend wisely. Spend wisely! As though I was an idiot.” She sipped from her glass, shook her head frustrated. “So you see my dear, you’re not the only one that has to wrestle with the burden of an inheritance. I’m not talking about just money and objects. I mean things people like you and I see clearly that others may not. Sometimes, I think I inherited a different destiny simply because my mother walked out.” She gripped my arm tightly. Her eyes glowed ominously.

Later in the evening, Mrs Harris and I decided to separate and mingle. After several extra drinks for Dutch courage, I relaxed more. I’d had no intentions of launching myself sober into random conversations with strangers yet I chatted amiably with a pope smoking a spliff by the piano in the cherry-coloured living room. I danced with a Charlie Chaplin who reeked of beer. In the kitchen, I watched Mr T and Darth Vader arm wrestle. On the stairs, two bumblebees kissed passionately. I felt light and floated amongst bodies whose lines were blurring, only to emerge slumped over tables, languishing on cramped sofas and pushed up against each other in doorways. My feet began to hurt so I took my ankle length, black boots off. I dropped them amidst the pile of shoes in the hallway.

When my energy began to dwindle, I expected somebody to slot coins in my back so my eyes could shine brighter. But nobody did and the whites of my eyes continued to fill with the hand drawn movements of the night. More alcohol was shoved my way.

Hey! Have a Corona.

Want another Vodka and orange?

You’re a lightweight; try some of this!

At some point, I wandered slack-jawed into the garden. Smatterings of people had gathered and I noticed Mrs Harris and Otto the Pirate by the swings. They appeared to be arguing but I wasn’t close enough to hear what was being said. I felt a sharp twinge in my foot, looked down and a bit of broken glass was covered in my blood. I made my way indoors into the bathroom, where I spent some time washing a bloody, grimace from my foot.

My shoes went missing. A waifish, blonde dressed as Veronica Lake loaned me white slippers. “Cinderella you shall go home! Imagine if you could never leave the party.” She mused. “Imagine if this was all there was, just this party and the characters in it, twenty four hours a day, for the rest of your life.”

“Just imagine,” I slurred.

After her exit, I scanned the bodies milling to and fro but couldn’t see Mrs Harris. I sat against a wall in the hallway nodding off, head jerking up intermittently. Then from nowhere, through a smoky cloud I caught a glimpse of a familiar dress, a skeleton’s pattern on the bodice. My eyes adjusted, took in the crown of dead flowers askew on a pile of wiry, black hair. A breath left my chest like a one winged bird. It was Anon dressed in Mrs Harris’s costume, face painted skeleton white. She flew up the stairs, the traces of another life clinging to the hem of her skirt. I uncurled my body, followed her. In my inebriated state I was slower, tripping a few times. I squeezed past bodies on the carpeted stairs. By the time I reached the roof, the music had shrunk to a hum. Anon stood on the edge and was about to leap off.

“No, don’t!” I urged, rushing forward. Then she vanished. Cold sweat popped on my brow. I looked down, realising I was steps away from flying to my death.

On my way back down, dice spun on the ceilings. I rummaged in the cupboard beneath the stairs, grabbed my coat and flung it on. Anon waited by a street lamp, it was after three am and the cold air nipped my skin. She picked up the pace while I trailed behind. We dashed past satellite dishes transmitting pictures of other life to sleeping TV sets. She whistled the tune Mrs Harris had been whistling the other day. That strange, melancholy song was water seeping into our movements. I kept blinking it away. It made my nerves jangle. The borrowed slippers rapped against the ground and my feet were freezing. Somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that Anon was wearing my missing boots. And somehow it made sense. She led me home. In my frosted window, Anon waited to wear limbs that ambled towards her from the four corners. I stood outside watching. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets, felt a folded flyer for a show called Eat. I fished it out, a storm was gathering in the mouth of the afro-haired woman featured, spawning creases on the shiny sheaf of paper. I tucked it back into my pocket where a broken key ring languished; I fingered the break in the key ring.

Light Spinning

I stuffed some clothes in the washing machine, including the skeleton costume. I watched its turns, the previous night calling to it, spinning too, a watery eye pressed against the glass. Later, I swept cobwebs from my head, knowing they’d reappear on Anon’s open palms. That evening I rapped on Mrs Harris’s door, still upset by her disappearance at the party. She opened the door puffing on a cigarette, wearing a robe bearing a flamingo print. She smelled of smoke and something sweet and exotic like jasmine.

“Ahh, Ronnie Wood,” she exclaimed, peering at me as if seeing me in a new light.

I smiled uncertainly. She shut the door firmly, kicked aside a pizza leaflet that slipped from the mail flap. “You were a party animal last night, good to see you having fun.”

“About that,” I tucked my pyjama top in my jeans properly. “It wasn’t nice for you to leave me like that. I came home on my own.”

In the living room she paused, looking at me with a baffled expression. “What are you talking about? We arrived home together dearie. I walked you to your door.”

“No you didn’t!” I answered, in a tone sharper than I’d intended.

“I did. You were so drunk you didn’t even know where you’d left your shoes. One second.” She began rummaging through a green glass ornament shaped like a pearl on the mantelpiece. It sounded like whispering sweet wrappers followed by the sound of coins clashing. I wiped a perspiring hand on the back of my left buttock, feeling the thin leaf of the Iranian playing card she’d given me in hospital. I’d taken to carrying it as a good luck charm, unable to forget its burst of brightly coloured possibilities in a glum ward.

“Aha! Here it is,” Mrs Harris uttered triumphantly, clutching an object that looked suspiciously familiar. A round, metallic ring poked between two fingers as she handed it over. It was my super eagle, my broken key ring with the green, white, green blocks of colour. The Nigerian flag encased in plastic. I was nauseous and gulped it down.

“You dropped it last night on the way home. I know it’s just a damaged key ring but I thought you’d miss it for some reason,” she explained, laughter lines crinkling at the corners of her mouth.

I fingered the break in the plastic, the same action from the night before. It was one of the handfuls of lucid moments I thought I’d had on my way back home. Now I wasn’t even certain I’d had that. I didn’t feel the tear until it hit my lip, until I tasted a salty sorrow with a swipe of my tongue. I wanted to tell her about how I’d begun to grow trees in silences. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. My tongue tightened from the burden of balancing half formed things.

I smiled ruefully. “Butterflies.”

“Indeed, never underestimate them. Come on, I’ll show you something,” she said.

The stairs creaked as we walked up. I spotted a coppery, watermark on the ceiling. It traced our movements all the way. And the exotic, sweet floral scent intensified the further we went. Mrs Harris began to hum that strange, haunting tune again.

“What is that song?” I asked, side-stepping a dustpan and brush. “You were whistling it the other day.”

“It’s an old Romany song about two lovers who died together promising to meet in the after life.”

I felt a weird sensation in my left arm, as if the hairs were needles holding half threads in them.

“My mother used to sing it to me as a child,” she continued, nudging the loft door open. “For some reason, it always stayed with me.”

“Odd song to sing to a child.”

“Yes it was but like I said, she was a little crazy.”

In the loft we were greeted by three candles flickering on the windowsill and the coppery watermark had retreated. It was a good-sized space containing a warm, wooden floor, a slanted ceiling and orange walls. A short bookcase sat tucked away in one corner and old record sleeves of obscure artists leaned lazily against it. In the centre stood a headless dress form, flanked by slouched bin bags spilling clothes. I ran my hand over its naked, smooth body, imagining the strewn clothes were trains of thought. “Where did you get it?” Under the low lighting it was a piece of art.

“Oh many years ago now.” She stood to the right studying it as if picturing that first instance. “I got it in Edinburgh from a shop that sold sewing machines. One day, they had it for sale in their display window. I’m always struck by things that are out of place, it felt right so I bought it.” She took a drag from her shrinking cigarette.

“It seems…” I struggled to find the right words without sounding judgemental.

“Old fashioned?” she offered, eyes sparkling.

“Yes! Old fashioned.”

“That’s because it is dear.” She shrugged resignedly.

I searched her features. “Do you use it often?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why?” I was genuinely interested; to me it lengthened the process of getting ready.

She rolled her eyes as though I was an idiot. “Because it’s fun to play dress up, no matter how old you get dear,” she remarked.

In my mind’s eye, I saw her working in the attic surrounded by twin dress forms, beneath a bulb lit by an orange echo, drawing her features onto heads for her army, dressing them up, sending them out into the corners of the city. And they bore mouths melted by candlelight, shrouded in the smog of God’s breath.

I left Mrs Harris’s with the same strange sensation in my left arm. As if the two were connected, I plucked the playing card from my back pocket. Sure enough, the spear-wielding figure had changed clothes.

At night I didn’t sleep till late. I sketched pictures of Mrs Harris in her different guises. Later, I watched the drawings for changes in their expressions, revelations in the lines of their bodies. But all they did was lead me back to the same blank space.

Periodic Elements

Mercury Hg 80 = Mrs Harris

It was a ridiculous hour of the day, maybe 2 or 3am. Mrs Harris stood amidst squares of flattened cardboard in her sitting room that would become temporary homes for things that have no business growing roots. She lifted them, her things, like dumbbells, as if expecting resistance. The black rectangular radio sat listening, her sounds slipping through its speakers. She could smell the mustard from the half eaten sandwich that rested on the arm of her sofa. A creature of the night, she was at room temperature when she left to go next door. She lifted the key from the potted plant underneath Joy’s window; of course it turned the lock open.

Hydrogen H₁ = Joy

In sleep she followed a thought because it had something to show her. At first, it was pure, singular. She was a grown woman with her little girl voice, being thrown up in the air and caught. She could not see by whom. They were brown hands and arms locking over her middle. Each time she was thrown, glowing, meandering triangles approached her from either side before slipping over her feet and upwards. This happened many times until eventually she turned gold in colour. She heated up, boiling till it became unbearable. Her head exploded against the black backdrop revealing a red mist. The brass head was rolling at her feet, grinning again. Then she was headless, she had no choice, she picked it up. It was a scorching helmet in her hands. She paced through the red mist feeling no sense of belonging and floated above other elements.

Carbon C6 = Queen

She was a child waking up to find her father gone. Later, her mother would make moi moi she’d pick at. They’d sit across from each other at the big, empty glass table and try not to tremble. In a child’s way, she would blame herself and her mother for a long time.

Then:

She was clutching the brass head and a diary.

These memories became: Padding for her coffin

Fertiliser for the soil

Clothing to wear dead

She was a nucleus curling and unfurling its distended, wet eye.

The breath on a window with nobody there, a subtle repositioning of slippers, photographs, mugs. Whispers tickling the spine of a maple tree leaning to the side. Everywhere, the dead were among the living.

Peter Lowon Journal entry July 1964

I left Okafor having confessed nothing with the mouth but everything with the body. The panic in my pupils, the sweat across my top lip, the attempt to keep my limbs still; I was dead weight in a chair. I walked away upright, down the seven steps out. I felt his eyes bore into my back.

Everything seemed worse after that. The hot air outside that smelled of sun-stroked bodies, meat pies, roasted corn. Ripe failure. The women milling about with loaded baskets on their heads and worn, heavy expressions looked at me in judgement. I stuttered and tripped over a crushed, green, soft drink can.

To avoid having any witnesses I had asked the driver not to come, so I opened the black Mercedes driver-side door. The heat hit me all at once. If a man could sit in a car and while away his life I would have done it. I sat inside for the longest time watching my hands shake at the wheel. Listening as the noises of cars, chatter, music and life were drowned out by a splintered cry that came from beyond me. I thought of calling my father, my mother, rubbing the possibility as though it was a colourless marble. They would find out soon enough, but I did not want to tell them, knowing that if I did, there would be nothing but disappointment to follow.

I spent the afternoon driving around aimlessly. Early evening, I stopped by a street vendor not too far from Festac to pick up Queenie’s favourite snacks; perm dodo and suya. I got there early knowing soon queues would form.

I nodded watching the vendor’s fast hands chop onions, season and salt the partially cooked strips of meat. He hummed to himself; the only dent on his perfect black skin was a pock mark between his eyes. His eyes were red, as if from worry, maybe they were always that way and I was noticing for the first time. His nose was broken and his white vest had spots of food. I felt an unexpected kindred connection. He moved his wiry, agile body effortlessly. I said “You’re here every evening?”

“Three evenings a week, I do other things too sir.” He answered laughing; as though being underestimated was a common mistake people made.

I asked him what kind of other things? He chuckled, telling me he was a survivor.

To my surprise, I started talking. That was how I came up with the second part of my plan, plotting with a stranger, a street vendor I had never had a proper conversation with before.

I rang General Akhatar when I got home, but he was away in Abuja and not due back till the following afternoon. Heaviness slowed me down. Sitting in my big, white house with its servant quarters I felt like a poor man. Then I was angry. Angry at myself for doing a terrible thing you cannot erase, angry at meritocracy and the way it infected your system as a young man, angry happiness eluded me. No matter what I did, it danced away because of one night. One mistake. Something else nagged, making me furious. I couldn’t remember who had introduced me to the General, how we had met. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself reaching back into that moment, grabbing it like a rolled up piece of paper, then tossing it away.

I knew Felicia would be due home from the shop, her car tyres whispering as she eased in through the tall, black gates.

I found Queenie on her bed, awake, looking young and wise all at once. She stood to attention, laughing in her bright pyjamas after noticing the plate of suya and dodo in my hands. She told me she had known I bought suya, that mummy would be angry if she caught us with food upstairs. We traded secretive smiles before eating. Just for an instant, I nearly folded; a father sharing dinner with his child is a beautiful, uncomplicated thing. Not on this occasion. The smell of onions in suya hung in the air; our hands were greased and peppered from the meat, a last supper for two fraudulent disciples.

That night I could not sleep. I sat up in my double bed picking holes through the time line of my life with a toothpick. I heard Felicia’s steps approach my room. I knew they were hers, soft, as though she was walking through sand. They have always been that way. I knew she stood there listening, her eardrums prickled to detect every sound, sensing something, a feeling things would change again. She was breathing through the door and through a war only couples fought, bruised but still human. Now we wanted to show each other our bruises and say look what you have done. Can you see it there? Here? There? Okay, make it go away, do magic.

Now I stood on the other side, my fingers splayed against the door, listening like her. Wanting. I was a mystery to my wife; one day she had opened her eyes and not recognised me. We stayed that way for a while, listening to our breaths warming a wooden door, knowing each other through body movements we couldn’t see. I remembered then how she used to burn herself by candle light, poring over old books that horded unfulfilled dreams. I wondered whether what I’d done to our marriage felt like a massive burn chafing against her clothes when she moved. Then, the handle turned, neither of us knowing which one had opened the door.

She

Stood

There.

Looking like the mother of unborn children, like the girl who deserved so much more than some shack of a shop. I picked her up, and did something I missed doing. I drew shapes on her body; half moons on her buttocks, in the lined crevices of her shoulder blades, tiny snail-shaped creatures of regret pulsing down the line of her back. A paper fan I coloured purple with the heat from my finger over her labia. I tongued the sweat at the base of her spine into a whirlpool, left hand prints on her thighs, and made murals for her out of her skin. I made love to my wife, the shaking of the bed sounded better than any music. The sweet sticky scent of her would be trapped in my nostrils for the entirety of my earthly life; the walls between us fell down. Her body curled around me. I swam inside her repeatedly, attempting to halve her in two: one to leave behind, one to take away.

In the morning, I reluctantly received a call from Ben Okafor.

He informed me that a source had revealed General Akhatar has been killed in a coup d’etat along with the President on their trip back from Abuja. It was lead by my old friend Obi Ekebe and did I have any comments?

My blood chilled. I replaced the receiver. Okafor would go ahead and write the expose in the Trumpet. If I stayed, I was a dead man either way. Finished. Obi and I had been friends once. We had trained together, killed together.

But by the following evening, I planned to be unrecognisable as a common street beggar, a new man with a fresh passport hidden in my inside pocket.

Intermission

An insistent knock sounded on the door. I opened it to find two uniformed policemen, one with a gut, the other trim and ginger-haired. Their expressions were unreadable. My bad news radar went off.

I said, “Yes?”

“I’m Sergeant Molden,” said the shorter of the two. “This is Sergeant Murdoch.” He indicated to his flame haired partner. “May we come in?”

I stepped back to make room for their entrance in my narrow hallway. Molden spoke first in a choppy fashion, each word seeming to stand alone. “Do you know the whereabouts of your neighbour, the elderly lady?”

“Mrs Harris?”

“Whatever she calls herself,” Murdoch piped in. “Nobody actually knows her real name.”

“I haven’t seen her for days. Why? What’s happened?” Fear fluttered my hand to my throat.

“She’s disappeared; we need to ask her some questions.”

“I don’t understand. Is she in trouble?”

Molden rearranged his impatient expression and explained slowly, “It’s urgent that we speak to her. If you hear anything, contact us. Have any of your things gone missing?” he asked.

Still shocked, on instinct I didn’t mention the incident with the brass head.

“No.” We were all standing in my living room, spare pieces of a chess game.

“And you’re sure you have no idea where she is or could be?” Murdoch asked.

“No, of course not, she was my neighbour not my mother.”

“We won’t keep you.” Molden turned to the door “We’ll be talking to more people on this street at some point, it’s a serious matter. If you do hear or see anything please let us know.” He held a card out to me I looked at in horror before taking it as if he’d handed me rabies. From behind my curtains I watched them get into a blue Ford car and drive off.

Really! I walked back to the centre of the room as though on stilts. Mad butterflies, I thought back to our conversation at the park. A mad butterfly had told me something true after all. She was an escape artist. I couldn’t help myself; I collapsed to the floor laughing. Several days later, I picked up a free City Lights newspaper from the train. There was a small feature on Mrs Harris. Wanted for benefit fraud, she had been assuming the identities of dead people for years. Stealing thousands from taxpayers, she had successfully been giving the police nationwide the slip for decades.

My theory was, fucked up people can’t help being drawn to other fucked up people, sometimes unwittingly. She was duplicitous, I knew this. BUT.

Those people were already dead. What was the real harm, other than conning a system that screwed you anyway? If you could and got away with it, wouldn’t you? In my warped way I was a little envious of her ruses, and her balls.

Later, I squeezed through her white unlocked kitchen window. Except for the sofa (there before she came), the fridge, the bed, the wardrobe, chests of drawers and washing machine, everything was gone. Even Buddy the Buddha, was no longer there to keep watch in the garden for only half the time. The kitchen felt barren without her collection of herbs mixing together, scenting the air with an unidentifiable perfume. They’d flown the coop with her. I ran my fingers over the black, scratched counter tops. She was real to me. I thought of her sitting at my hospital bed, sipping green ginger wine together on the rooftop, and eating the best breakfast I could remember for a long time. I thought of her saving my life. And my heart bloomed for her, whoever she was. Pangs of loss arrived, sudden, hard.

Days later I found her postcard in my vest drawer. It had a blue lit up question mark positioned over a man’s head. It read:

Well, the jig is up butterfly, I expect the boys in blue will be round asking questions. One day, I’ll tell you all about it. And… I really am Scottish. Until that time, do the right thing xxx.

She could be anywhere. “Do the right thing.”

Who’d have thought?

Inside her, Houdini chuckled.

Boat

In the dream, my head smacked repeatedly against the curved underside of a boat back at those same traffic lights where the baby had wandered, illuminated by the opening of another day and the acrid smell of smoke in the air. I felt the tug of a current inside me but there was no water holding the boat, only glass everywhere and traffic lights winking. The chatter of voices filled with concern and curiosity. Cheated of water the boat didn’t move, but interrupted the flow of traffic. The wound on my head stung. Blood oozed down the side of my face. Dry mouthed and nauseous, my head lolled. Through the thick, neon-coloured haze a slender, elegant figure reached out to me, grabbing my arm. Anon. She dragged me, my skin freshly stung, through ground filled with blood stained glass, glinting like jewels. Because of my position at floor level, a pigeon appeared to stumble away from the wound on my head. Undeterred, Anon dragged me to another road, only to shove me into light speed traffic. Decorated in broken glass, I fell to the ground, swallowed by engine noise, calling out freakishly in pigeon language to Anon who’d led me to the boat in the first place. I only owned half of the betrayal I tasted.

Chorus

At the medical centre, the woman in the painting of a dense forest had moved. Last time, she’d taken shelter beneath a hollow tree. This time, she was waist deep in the lake, searching for something as the painted strokes rippled. Hung on the off-yellow wall behind the reception desk, my eyes automatically went there each visit.

The receptionist named Carol, a slender auburn haired woman with overly plucked eyebrows, was talking on the phone at the back, while a photocopying machine churned out documents. She spotted me hovering, placed her hand over the receiver angling her head. “Hi Joy, you signed in for me?” I nodded, fished out a squeezed piece of paper from my back pocket. “This isn’t helping.” I said loudly. “I’m still not getting enough sleep.” On the wall the white clock above a cluster of certificates ticked sharply. A fly in the clock skimmed the glass before landing on the nine. I paced the small reception area, hearing its wings flutter.

“Okay, take a seat. The doctor will be with you in a bit; I’ll let him know you’re here.” Carol went back to talking into her static. The area smelt of pine, the floors gleamed and intermittently, the sliding entry glass doors delivered health care professionals bearing ID’s in rectangular, blue plastic holders jangling around their necks. I sat back listening to voices filtering through from the Saratoga Room behind me. I took a quick peek. In the centre wooden chairs were arranged in a circle, a few people loitered. One man with earphones rocked his head gently back and forth. Another was drawing at a table decorated with fresh, ivory-hued gardenias where a marred heart floated between stems. I tapped my foot absentmindedly; watching silhouettes on the floor morph, listening to the crackle of the voices buzzed into reception, resenting my punishment for attempting to kill myself only once. Only once. Once. One time.

I looked up. The woman in the painting was underwater. My breath thinned. Plastic fish made of old photo ID’s swam towards her from the bottom.

Dr Krull’s room was royal blue. I wondered if that was deliberate, to keep the likes of me calm, royal blue to smooth frayed edges. On opposite sides but not too far away from each other were two plush brown leather chairs. In the left corner, a silent water machine. A wide wooden desk was filled with a stack of books and files. Almost mockingly beside the files was a sun-drenched picture of the Dr and his wife on a colourful street somewhere exotic. India maybe. They were an attractive, well-adjusted couple in a removable frame. I fidgeted in my seat while I watched Dr Krull’s handsome face wrinkle as he studied his notes. He looked Thai, perhaps Malaysian. His angular face and glinting eyes never seemed overly ruffled but his mouth always appeared to have more to say, twisting sardonically or curving down. We looked at each other across the gape of space between us, the battle line drawn using a chalky stone I could taste on my tongue.

Dr: How are you doing with the Sertraline tablets I prescribed?

In my mind’s eye, I saw the tablets dancing down a fat neck of toilet water, or melting in a sink full of bleach, taking their numbness down a plughole better equipped to manage the sluggish silhouettes, unable to cry out quickly their tongues having been weighed down my chemical solutions.

I nodded emphatically: Yes, I’m still taking them but I don’t know if they’re actually helping.

Dr: You have to give these medications time to properly take effect. Take them consistently. Tell me about your routine before leaving the house.

I willed my legs still, stopped the knees from knocking together. A couple of doors down the circle would have more people by now. Soon, they’d be confessing to practical strangers, taking their heads off like lids on sloppy jars, waiting to see things spill.

I watched the Dr’s face being kind, patient.

I check the kitchen cupboards, the wardrobe, make sure the windows are locked… About six or seven times, sometimes more if I’m feeling really anxious.

Dr: How long does it take you to leave the house? Why the cupboards and your wardrobe? What do you think you’ll find there? He kept his expression neutral, tone pleasant, pen poised over the notes in his lap. Outside, a car tore off into the distance. Lights changed around the city, indicating when to wait, stop, go. Amber, red, green. But when should a person be green, amber and red? Which organs could I swap for lights that helped you navigate through the dark? Where would I leave my organs? On a zebra crossing, a bridge or a kerb? The fly from the reception clock had left number nine. Tentatively I said: I, my hearing… It’s changing.

Dr: Changing how? A slight note of irritation had crept into his voice.

Why are you a burden Joy? A female voice declared sweetly. Don’t be such a burden!

Dr Krull uncrossed legs clad in black corduroys.

My hands clasped and unclasped: It feels… sharper. I can hear isolated sounds, details from quiet conversations, keys buried in someone’s bag, that sort of thing.

Dr patiently responded: The human body is a wondrous gift. All kinds of amazing, unexplainable things happen. I understand it might have slightly upset your equilibrium but it doesn’t sound like too much to worry about. Tell me, have you ever been deaf?

I leaned back into my chair: Deaf? I repeated as if he’d just spoken to me in a foreign language. My left hand trembled on my thigh.

Dr: Why do you check the cupboards, wardrobe and locks that amount of time? Is there something you’re afraid of?

Irritably I said: I don’t know. I thought: Shouldn’t you have the answer to that? You’re asking me things I already ask myself.

The room felt warmer, claustrophobic, the space between us had shrunk. In the hallway, wheels squealed against the floor. Lunch. Ready and waiting for those in the circle; crisp salads, light Cornish pasties, thickly crusted steak pies, chickpea curry and warm, crumbly apple pies. All that sharing gave you an appetite.

I continued slowly: I get anxious.

Carefully, I selected my words: I live alone and I don’t want anything to have… access.

Dr Krull: I find it interesting that you said anything not anyone.

I shrugged my shoulders: Same thing. Sometimes I get this feeling of doom. This horrible, choky feeling and I can’t breathe. My head hurts just thinking about it. I haven’t been sleeping properly.

Dr Krull: Do you still swallow stones?

Yes I answered, internally cursing my deviancy. Sometimes. I thought I saw a flicker of pity on the Dr’s face but it was a fleeting nano second of change.

I know what you’re going to say, I stated, patting myself on the back for being ahead of the curve. Yes, her voice said. It’s so pathetic you can predict questions about your own dysfunction. Congratulations, have the rest of your life to decipher your miserable existence.

I like the taste of stones Dr. I like that you can measure their entirety with your tongue; they’re definable. It pushes that choked up feeling in my throat down, right down to the bottom.

Dr Krull: Tell me about the first time you swallowed a stone, your earliest memory.

I don’t remember.

Dr Krull: You don’t remember or you don’t want to remember?

I held his gaze steady, like one of my stones in its fragmented bottom.

I don’t remember.

Dr Krull pressed pause on his tape recorder before exiting the room to get me a higher dosage of the sleeping pills he’d given me last time. I squirmed slightly beneath the gaze of his attractive wife from her compact picture frame. I set the picture face down on his desk. He’d left his blazer slung over the chair, seat still warm with his body’s imprint. I glanced around the room suspiciously, checking for signs of a hidden camera and confessions becoming thumbprints on its lens. They wouldn’t film without your consent, Doctor/patient confidentiality and all that. The lining of his jacket felt smooth and expensive. An image of him licking his wife’s nipples with his silk-lined tongue flashed into my head. I rummaged inside the jacket, keeping my ears open. I fished out a wallet containing £50 and a folded bank statement. I took a £20 note, ripped the first page of the bank statement with his address on and stuffed both in my back pocket. Carefully, I arranged the jacket exactly as I’d met it.

Anon appeared in the Dr’s chair, curled her long legs beneath her.

Take something else she said. Do it before he comes back. Her voice was strong and assured. The weight of her tongue inside my head pulled me up again. Her hand slipped into his jacket, opened the wallet. Before I knew it, I’d taken a Visa credit card, a tingle hummed along my spine. My handprints fed the hungry, small gold rectangle in the corner of the card in my pocket. A ripple from the river of the painting in reception carried them away, floating on the shimmering surface. The card was still lodged in my jeans pocket.

When the Dr returned, I was getting rid of evidence. A thin line of sweat ran into my right eye, stinging a little. The dripping water fountain made small echoes in the room, now buzzing with a spark of electricity. As I struggled to breathe, Anon’s face reassembled.

Dr Krull entered the room clutching a small paper bag bearing the green pharmaceutical logo. He looked concerned catching me taking deep breaths leaning forward in my seat. I didn’t say anything except panic attack and continued gulping air until he took the medicines out of the bag and handed it over for me to inhale. I didn’t say a word. I knew these people like neatly packaged neuroses; messy spillage meant messy consequences, the numbness of zombie land and blood in the sky. We sat that way for several minutes while he helped me steady my breathing and I tried to control sudden movements, paranoid his credit card would fall from my pocket.

Dr Krull upped the dosage of the Sertraline pills that ran into white skies and left outlines looking like small, smudged spaceships if you kept them on paper in sunlight.

I left the centre to a chorus of jangling cutlery. A stringy haired woman in reception repeatedly spun her polka dot umbrella till it clattered to the floor. Outside, the wind blew. I bought a tuna and cucumber salad sandwich from Greggs, topped up my electricity using Dr Krull’s newish looking £20 note. At home, Anon the long-limbed woman was waiting on the bedroom window ledge, stroking some animal whose lines would fade by morning. I cried into my jar of slow dwindling stones, feeling my chest heave, thinking of my mother and all the lessons she would never learn from me.

Semi Circle

The heat in Rangi’s bathroom felt temporary. I was bent over the tub, inhaling and exhaling almost silently, feeling his tongue moistening the dip in my back, his laughter quiet against my skin in some secret trade off. Bloody ribbons from between my legs disintegrated in lukewarm water as the speed of the fly’s wings increased, circling around the small artificial sun that was the light bulb. A trickle edged down my left thigh, more bloody ribbons. I didn’t have to look down to know my nipples were reacting in their familiar way, one inverted and the other distended. As if they couldn’t agree on how transparent they should be about their pleasure.

Poised behind me, Rangi’s muscles tensed and relaxed, his golden frame coiled. He nudged me forward so my hands were splayed on the wall in front for support. I was trying to hold on to the thoughts scurrying in my head when he bit my left bottom cheek before tracing the teeth marks with his tongue. I released a sound that was part whimper and part sigh. The small house I’d drawn on the cabinet mirror had lost its roof and no longer harboured the sounds I made. Sounds that now belonged to small creatures with sink plugholes for mouths.

Curled above our small liquid country, bathed in 60-watt light, he bent me over the tub more, holding my head under water. I opened my eyes; they stung as he slid in and out of me quickly. There was a rush of blood to my head while he moved, expanding me. In my mind’s eye, his member was covered in blood, its sly slit developing a taste for it. My mouth tried to hold the bend in his long penis in mirrors without steam. He moved in and out at a frenzied pace, I knew I couldn’t stay under for that much longer. Either I’d pass out or die but he held fast, slippery grip on my rubber band waist. My body went limp. My head sank further into the water, like a female flamingo mating. The 60-watt light bulb flickered.

We were gulls on a sunken bed, chasing wounds disguised as bread. Flapping our stained grey wings beneath a curved, wet ceiling, waiting for paint to fall on us; for its strong fresh scent to fill our noses while we fucked, for the sheet that hung off the bed to become white water carrying our old scenes, wet and ready to fill the doorways of their birth. I knew the gulls would go blind from the artificial light, mouths lined with tobacco when they broke their necks against the ceiling, tricked into thinking it was a sky line. Mauve paint crumbled into the whites of our eyes, a train rumbling in the distance inadvertently became a burial ground for half-formed things. Our previous wet scenes found their way into the dead gulls, waiting for the sound of the next train to warn them of their travelling funeral ground. The 60-watt bulb flickered.

We were mannequins that had abandoned the window display filling up with stones, trickling in from every angle. As the sound of roughly shaped stones rose, panic in our chests deepened. We communicated using expressions from the human versions of ourselves. We mimicked their body movements mirrored in glass. Panic in the mannequins waned. A sunken bed stained with come in the distance beckoned. Stones falling rang in their chests. Then their injuries came from climbing fences, stumbling in the dark, from wear and tear. The light flickered again. I felt my body being lifted from the tub, vaguely registering the squeaky sound the bath made as he hauled up my wet frame, hands beneath my armpits. My eyes stung from opening them in soapy water. Blood between my legs left a trail on the aqua coloured linoleum floor. He sat me up gingerly, the scent of period blood lingered in the air. He patted my cheek firmly. I blinked. His face swam.

He inched closer, voice deep and full of wry humour he said, “How was it?”

“Fucking great,” I murmured, spent, as if having a near death sexual escapade was ticked of my to do list. He was striking in the light, tall and wiry. Locks grazed his shoulders; the deep, golden skin he’d inherited from his Maori father glowed. Slightly slanted dark brown eyes crinkled easily and seemed to watch you even when he wasn’t looking in your direction.

We sat on the balcony in our underwear, smoking spliffs to quieten the roar inside, listening to dog howls ricocheting through the night air. I didn’t ask about the wispy lock of brown hair in the bathroom cabinet that didn’t belong to me, or the blue false nail studded with blinking white stones breathing beneath the bed. I didn’t ask about why his tongue tasted of alcohol in the morning sometimes. He closed his bloodshot eyes, took a pull from the spliff, as if he was silently communicating with the red dog snapping in the distance, making it’s way towards us. He turned towards me, New Zealand accent thick. “Do you know what happened to the gold lady’s ring in my bottom drawer?” I held my hand out, he passed the spliff. I took a draw, watching smoke curling in the sudden tension. “Never seen it.” My silent fury had escaped from the confines of the false nail. The red dog bearing bloodshot eyes paused to eat it. The bed sheet wrapped around me slipped beneath my inverted breast, already turning in the carnage of items on the bedroom floor.

In that weird, smoggy state between being half asleep and awake, I watched Anon from my comfortable position on the double bed. Rangi lay curled in the opposite direction, lilac sheet tangled between us and one leg half-flung over the duvet. He breathed rhythmically, chest rising and falling, making small sounds that were an odd combination of snoring and whistling. Anon stood by the stash of record sleeves, old albums of Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye and The Shangri-Las and began rummaging through clothes strewn on the floor, lifting empty glasses of wine and the small atlas on the drawer to collect a torn, wrinkled piece of paper she stashed in my bag.

Rangi adjusted himself, making the mattress groan. Her hand stilled over his black smartphone, eyes daring me to make a sound. Sweat began to pop on my brow and the room became hazy. Rangi turned again, back muscles exposed. How could he sleep through this? She stood then in the light angling from the balcony, arms outstretched. I sat up, my heart beats loud, her accented voice in the space between them. Something in the air changed. Outside, two cats mating screamed. The water pipes whistled.

I stood up, hypnotised, longing for my rough stones and the reassuring swell in my throat from swallowing. Maybe she hadn’t been looking for something. Maybe she’d been leaving something behind. We swapped mouths. Then she was holding the baby from the road, its yellow Skittles packet dropped to the floor silently. She began to feed it Rangi’s missing ring. It smiled happily. The ribbons from the tub became bloody baby footprints on the hardwood floor. I listened for Rangi through the din threatening to swallow me. I knew the day after; he’d wear his animal mask to prowl after me in the dark. I stumbled around, longing for his sly-eyed penis to split me in two, for his semen to be a rushing river chasing oddly shaped stones.

Incision

A mouse’s red head spun the day I met Rangi. Coincidentally, on my way out, the dead mouse lay just beyond my thick, brown welcome mat. It was mid movement, body arched, fearful final expression frozen. I swept it up quickly; holding my nose, already mummifying, a chalky residue coated its frame. I imagined its tiny head spinning in the afterlife, sneering at its previous attempts at living. I wondered about the versions of me doing the same thing, raising their heads above margins and shaking in disappointment, changing their expressions in slanted, translucent ceilings, watching small men made of debris limp away into the distance.

All morning I’d had a sick feeling of dread in my stomach and a bitter taste in my mouth I’d tried to wash down with two cups of peppermint tea and an out-of-date croissant. I’d padded around the flat, shutting windows against whistling that snuck in, then opening the windows again to release them. I’d have to talk to the centre about these medications they had me on that made me feel like a stranger in my own body, made me forget things.

I was sure of it. No, I wasn’t sure of it, it wasn’t the medications. It was me. I was the problem. Medications were there to help. Why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I see it was for my own good? Why did I always have to ruin things with negativity?

Six o’clock that morning I’d sat up in bed listening to a scuttling in the ceiling, t-shirt damp from cold sweat, I shivered, willing myself to change. The scuttling continued. Maybe it had been the mouse trying to escape the death that awaited it in muted afternoon light. As my doppelgangers angled their bodies over a darkening skyline, the mouse’s last expression reassembled in their stomachs.

Each borough had a local paper or magazine. Since my mother died, now and again, I’d scan the births, deaths and marriages sections, pen in hand jotting down names that caught my interest. Photography work was slow and it was another risky income stream. Suitably dressed in a black, knee length dress, green-eyed lizard brooch pinned to my breast, low kitten heels and twists curbed into a neat bun, netted navy hat perched on my head, I arrived at the service at St Mathew’s church in Bow fifteen minutes late.

The wrought iron gates creaked loudly. Amongst the crackling, golden leaves on the short grey flight of steps, a crumpled twenty pound note jumped. A red line drawn over the queen’s mouth was the inky ripple leaves curled into before shooting off in different directions. I grabbed the twenty, stuffing it inside the sleek leather bag on my shoulder. Tall, dark wooden doors were flung open and the hymn being sung was loud enough to muffle the sound of my heels clicking. A statue of Mary in the hallway stood before a painting of the last supper. Mary had no tongue. In the painting, her moist, pink tongue was on a platter, darting with the weight of things it had to say. I kissed Mary on her cold forehead, watched her hands change colour from grey to brown. Suddenly it was my mother standing before a last supper, arms outstretched, past scenes crumbling on her fingers into dust trying to communicate with no tongue.

I spotted the cloakroom at the far end of the hallway. Through the glass the jackets were neatly hung, sleeves lined up against each other as if they were an army of lockstepping men, while the bodies of the dead turned in red wine. The priest intoned in Latin. An adrenaline rush hit my limbs at high speed. I never knew what to expect in these situations. Anything could happen. The important thing was to act as naturally as possible and to get the business end taken care of quickly.

I entered the cloakroom, took my jacket off, keeping one eye on the entrance. I rummaged through the pockets of coats dangling an invitingly short distance away. The beauty of it was, people left all kinds of things in their coats; jewellery, old photos, condoms. Once, I’d found torn lace panties.

The priest spoke again, his voice a calm, soothing accompaniment to the pilfering happening in the cloakroom. Anon continued to instruct me quietly and my sweaty fingers became assured in those foreign pockets. I stuffed cash, credit cards, a watch and a red ruby stoned ring into my bag. Somebody in the service dropped a coin; I heard its slow roll on the smooth marble floor.

I buckled my bag shut, left the cloakroom closing the door gently behind me.

The service was half full, I wandered in quietly, coiled tension in my back slowly dissipating. A grey haired, middle-aged lady at the front nodded at me. I nodded back solemnly fingering the new found silence of the coin I’d scooped on my way in. The wooden pews were deep, still holding the prayers and confessions of sinners long gone. Sunlight glimmering through the scene on the stained glass window behind the pulpit gave it an ethereal glow. From the window Jesus had lost his strides in the sound of a truck pulling up on a nearby street. I heard the key turning in its stiff lock, the quiet purring of the engine cooling down.

Miss Argyle, whoever she was had friends in death. One woman in the pew to my left wiped tears from her eyes, another clutched her handbag so tightly, her knuckles strained against the skin. Somebody at the pulpit was giving an impassioned dedication. On the walls the carvings of saints leaned forward, burial soil softening in their mouths. From the bright window Jesus armed with an orange tongue would have to borrow legs from somebody he’d once forgiven.

I sensed him before I saw him. Something in the air changed, a shift I couldn’t quite identify. My neck became warm. My skin tingled. The smell of an earthy-scented aftershave filled my nostrils. I adjusted in my seat as the pew behind me creaked from somebody leaning back. Curious, I turned to see a lean, exotic looking man tucking a slither of silver Rizla paper into his pocket. His locked, wavy hair was tied back. He had on black jeans and a dark tweed jacket that had seen better days but was oddly stylish. His broad nostrils flared. He placed one long finger over his lips, pointed forward, indicating for me to mind my business. Liquid light brown eyes twinkled in amusement. In that moment, he seemed changeable. As if he could inch forward and his bull’s head would sprout over the subdued din or his crow hand would cover my breast and flick against its inverted nipple.

As the service rolled on, the tightness in my chest returned, an angular rip that was haemorrhaging. And suddenly I was back at my mother’s funeral, amongst a cluster of mourners looking for all intents and purposes a little relieved they weren’t the ones being lowered into the ground. Mervyn had wiped his tears away while people’s condolences swirled in my head, sentences that broke and re emerged as small wasp-like creatures, fluttering their wings between rapid eye movement. I’m so sorry. This is unexpected. How will you cope?

A woman’s coat flapped against slender legs encased in black tights. The white hyena in the sky bore down ready to swallow the scent whole so I gave it the wasps in my head. People looked into the rectangular chasm in the ground, as if their own eyes would mirror back the change of season. I spilled soil on the casket. It popped open. My mother sat up at the far right end of the silky ivory interior, picking the hem of her skirt, threads dangling out of the casket. I crawled towards her, stretching my hand at her face as it blurred and redefined itself. There’s no room for two here. She said that in a dry, accented tone that flooded me with familiarity. I pressed my head against her chest, listening to the sound of taps running, of warm bath water spilling. The casket was damp; I began to feel around for a leak.

Then I patted my body down for leakage.

Then I was swept into Mervyn’s arms.

Then I was silently screaming, holding onto the shuddering of his shoulders, pressing my fingers against distorted shards of light.

At the party afterwards, held in a separate room that boasted large stained glass windows and an ornate mural ceiling I watched the man hiding the sliver of silver from the corner of my eye. He moved easily, interacting with other mourners. Kids ran in and out, small mountains of food dwindled. People talked about the dead woman as if she’d never made a mistake. Maybe they did this subconsciously, affected by being in God’s house. How did you know Abbie? The inevitable question cropped up repeatedly. I made stories up on the spot, wondering how I’d ever explain to Dr Krull the strange comfort I got from attending the funerals of others, telling myself most people wouldn’t realise they’d been robbed until they’d driven off and arrived at their next destination. The fleshy bodies turning in red wine began to lose their heads. I kept my eye on the exit in case I needed to bolt. Stones rolled in my bag for comfort and as part of an escape plan.

He finally approached me carrying an empty beverage bottle. The air between us was thick with promise. When he spoke it was like being knocked over unexpectedly, a kick in the gut, a rush of warmth flooded my skin.

“I didn’t know her,” he murmured unapologetically. “The dead woman” he continued, smiling at the bewildered expression on my face.

I raised my shoulders to release tension. “Oh, why would you attend the funeral of somebody you don’t know? It’s deceitful,” I said. He looked me in the eye knowingly, an unsettling tight expression on his face. “I followed you in here. You walk like a woman I once knew in Haiti. I’m sorry for your loss,” he offered, just a hint of mockery in his voice.

“Thank you,” I answered, surprised by the pangs of sorrow I felt.

He rummaged inside his jacket, fished out something. “You dropped this by the way.” He handed me the £20 from the steps. The Queen’s silent expression had subtly darkened. “Hey! I put that in my bag.”

“Ah, you’re not the only one with tricks. Come on, there’s an interesting crypt space downstairs. I’ll show you, don’t make a scene.”

He was so close I could smell the alcohol on his breath.

The crypt was cool but his hands were warm. He propped me up against a disused bar, slipped a finger inside me, promising to mark my underwear with cigarette burns. He pressed the bottle mouth against my back. The woman whose walk I’d inherited sat at the bottom in smoke form, curling into our breaths. Tires screeched away, stones rustled, bite marks on my shoulder formed a raging map of teeth indentations. The bodies in red wine swam after their floating, drunken privates. Sweat pooled between my breasts. I liked the metallic taste of his zipper in my mouth, the fury of his fingers sliding in and out of me frenetically, his changeable face buried in the damp, gnarly thatch of hair between my legs. His mouth sucked greedily on the arches of my feet. His hands tightened on my throat, saints on the church walls orgasmed in unison. My tongue came undone

Down

In

The

Crypt.

Chesapeake

At night the beach was pretty much deserted. Faces from the rocks slipped into the sly sea line while the waters thrashed as if a second moon would appear. Rain soaked and wind blown, I watched Rangi’s lone, lean frame angling into the foamy depths. He changed with each dive and stroke, beneath the knowing gazes of underwater creatures. I leaned into the wind from my view between two rough-hewn peaks, breeze dented, scowling chip paper in one hand; greasy fat chip in the other. Shots of vinegar created sour warmth in my mouth. Above a smattering of gulls chorused loudly.

I was joyous having left behind London and the brass head beneath my bed, the fascination it held and the sick feeling it produced in my stomach. I thought of my grandfather’s diary, facing the things I’d inherited breathing between the lines of a bound leather book.

The wind began to howl. My inappropriate plimsolls were soaked. Typical of me to wear the wrong footwear, you can’t even get that right. I shivered. The salty sea air felt good, I was slowing down my demons, given them a different oxygen. The faces in the night water waited patiently for limbs. Rangi stood, water undulating around him, motioning for me to join him. “Come on!” he yelled. “Stop being an observer!” he taunted. A weird rush of intensity filled my body, even in the distance between us, the air was electric. I shook my head, scared he’d notice something we both didn’t want to see rise to the surface of water. I leaned forward to get a closer view, certain his body had encountered haphazard bits of life underwater; a plane’s wing, a diver’s mask, the moon’s silver-limbed doppelganger.

Don’t be an observer. I wasn’t. There I was running off with a stranger to get to know myself, convinced the limestones in my pocket had left damp stains. They glimmered in those small openings, moist and full of slow promise. If I got really anxious, I could always nibble on them. Rangi called out to me in a language I didn’t recognise, water dancing with his shark mouth. I rubbed my tender neck, blinking against the tide and the memory of him trying to strangle me in his sleep the night before. I stilled my body, a statue amidst black rocks, listening to the heartbeat galloping towards my chest.

In the cosy room of the seaside B&B, the hand on my throat tightened. The earth-toned red room swam. The TV showing an old episode of The Twilight Zone flickered. I clutched at his wrist, struggling for air. My eyes watered, body wriggled, head smacked against the double bed’s rustic headboard. The voice over from The Twilight Zone spoke. You can never know what will happen during those quiet moments of night we take for granted. I tried to speak but he was squeezing hard, face twisted unrecognizably. Greyish white television light bathed us. I kicked wildly, digging my nails into his wrist before the pressure finally eased. I flung my body sideways, grabbing the glass of cold water beside the reading lamp, throwing it in his face.

“What the fuck?” he mumbled, wiping the wetness off his face, sitting up immediately. “Are you crazy? What did you do that for?” His New Zealand accent was even thicker during moments of irritation.

“You were strangling me!” I screamed. My voice sounded paper thin despite the volume. My eyes stung. I spluttered, relieved to be able to breathe again, stumbling from the damp bed as credits rolled on the TV screen. In the bathroom, I ran the cold tap, splashed water on my face and neck, trying to ease the burning sensation in my throat. I heard him knocking about in the other room. The portable fridge door opening made a whoosh sound. Cold air. I sat on the toilet seat trembling, touching the marks forming on my throat, waiting for bruises to come and transform under his bloodshot gaze.

I looked up, silent as his frame filled the doorway. “I’m sorry,” he said, holding a small bowl of ice. He wrapped some cubes in a white cloth, pressed them against my neck. “I didn’t mean to get that way.” His touch was gentle. The same broad hand and tapered fingers were capable of being both tender and destructive. He placed a hand on my shoulder. His handsome face was feral yet apologetic in the bright light. “You’re alright aren’t you?”

“You thought I was someone else!” I accused, still frazzled, nerves shot.

The television was now off.

“No, I didn’t know it was happening,” he answered, mouth a grim line. His shoulders were tight. He let out a slow breath as if releasing an internal pressure.

“Death doesn’t have to be frightening; it’s just a transition into another phase,” he said. It was such an odd comment; I shook my head in disbelief.

“Fuck you!” I exclaimed. “And you might want to be fully awake before you start giving lessons.”

He leaned closer, face inches from mine, and smiled sardonically. His golden eyes gleamed. “Watch your mouth.”

“How can you be so relaxed after what happened?” I asked. “What if I hadn’t been able to wake you?”

“What do you want from me?” he roared. “You want a written fucking apology? You want to hold this over my head is that it?” He walked out, flinging the door open.

I stretched my legs out on the floor, confused by his reaction, trying to ignore the roaring in my head, the clammy feeling on my neck. The pale floor glistened, I tried to stand slowly but my legs buckled. The sentence in my throat was a breathy wheeze.

I began to crawl on the floor. Fear came thick and fast. I couldn’t breathe. Panic attack. I felt around the floor for something, anything to steady me. Rangi appeared in the doorway again, calmly whistling. I hated myself for my weakness, for showing vulnerability too early. I knew I was crawling into the whites of his eyes, disappearing. He watched me struggling on the floor, coolly mouthed “fuck you.” Then everything went grainy black.

When I came to, it was still cold, hard floor beneath me. Rangi held a pillow and there was an intense concentration on his face as he brought it down. The burning in my throat persisted; it felt like sandpaper. The room was hazy, smudged. I couldn’t make out the lines of objects surrounding me. I sat up awkwardly.

“Steady,” he instructed. “It’s okay; I was just going to make you more comfortable. I didn’t want to move you yet.”

“What happened? “I asked, vaguely aware of the weakness of my limbs. He stroked a damp twist off my forehead, pressed a kiss there. “You fainted. Has that happened before?”

“No, not that I can remember,” I answered, confused by his concern and unpredictability. The sleeping blue flame inside him singed my fingers. Somehow I was grateful, it made me feel alive. He carried me out of the bathroom, took my gaze away from the ceiling. After attempting to strangle me, he fucked me gently on the damp, sunken bed.

We left in slanted, heavy rain, hurtling down tight, twisted roads in an older black Mazda I was certain wasn’t even his. Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside played on the radio. I placed my feet on the dashboard. It was hard to see through the thunderous showers but I spotted her at the top of the curve ahead, Anon, running towards us, clutching something round. My heart sank. Did you think I wouldn’t come? she asked.

Suddenly the car swerved, as if Rangi had seen her too. “Be alert,” he ordered, squeezing my shoulder. That odd intensity he had magnified. I didn’t know what he meant. Was it an opening for me to confess what I saw? Or tell him what I was feeling? I turned to look behind me. Anon sat in the back seat, wet from rain, you let me in she said. She was holding a paperweight; a chunk had been taken out of it. An image of me broken, crawling on the bathroom floor turned slowly inside it. I realised she’d been there all along, not pushed out by different oxygen.

She’d been there, in the sneaky half smile of the woman serving at the chip shop, in the hands of the B&B owner, whose fingers lingered overly familiar on my skin as one blue iris became brown. She’d been there at the beach, rising to the surface of rough waters. My feet cramped on the dashboard. Rangi’s nose began to bleed.

“That happens sometimes,” he said, grabbing a tissue from the glove compartment, wiping his face, then tilting his head back, one hand on the wheel. Blood trickled from his nostrils, seeping into the paperweight scene.

By now the bruised ceiling of our room at the B&B had washed up on the shore. The gulls from the beach had followed our departure too, each sporting one blue and one brown iris. They flapped their wings violently, screaming down the sharp bends, trailing in exhaust pipe smoke.

Keyholes

It was summer when I discovered keyholes spinning in the ether, hiding figures made of dark matter that let me catch a finger in their mouths. I was seven. Nighttime in our household found me tiptoeing down red softly carpeted stairs to spy on my mother, the memory of the school day’s activities sticky on my skin. I’d worn a dead blue oleander flower in my cornrows to school and the fed up expression on my class tutor Mrs Phillips face had been worth it. For God’s sake Joy, take that thing off your head! It’s morbid.

The week before that, I’d re-enacted the birth of Christ for classmates during break time, focusing particularly on the birth scene, complete with tinfoil Jesus and ketchup blood on my thighs, huffing and puffing and crying out, the way I’d seen a woman do on TV. Mrs Phillips had been furious, barging through the circle gathered, glasses steamed up, chest rising and falling rapidly as if it would detach from her body. Her creased, knee length grey dress was fit to burst and her thin features were pinched.

What on earth? What is going on here? She zeroed in on me; lips curled back looking like she was ready to fling me into an advert for starving African children, never to see another English dawn. And my tinfoil Jesus would accompany me by a murky, half-hearted lake, counting flies hovering over our distended stomachs.

This attention seeking has got to stop! My audience of co-conspirators sniggered, scattering like marbles, they slunk off to entertain themselves in other ways, swapping their canoodling expressions for innocent ones. Honestly, I don’t know what your mother exposes you to Mrs Phillips continued, shoving aside the small coats I’d used as straw and the paint splattered plate that acted as my moon.

You said you liked creative interpretation, I piped up defensively.

I know what I said, she spat, hauling me up. You look absolutely ridiculous.

I swiped a blob of ketchup from my thigh and licked it, thinking of hot dogs. The tinfoil Jesus and I were dragged into Mrs Phillips office.

Later, in afternoon art class I sucked on strawberry bonbons. Streams of sunlight fed the artificial plant life cut-outs stuck on the classroom windowsills, forming a surrounding jungle. The smell of wet paintbrushes and chalk hung in the air.

Draw pictures of your family on an adventure, anywhere you like. Mrs Phillips instructed in her typical, grim faced manner. Sadness crept into my fingers as I drew on the scratched wooden desk harbouring hangmen in its corners, that seem to be plotting to meet each other in the middle to converse in a language only unhappy children could interpret.

Everybody else’s family had a roundness to them; father, mother, brothers and sisters, smiling by the Eiffel tower, eating pink candy-floss at the fair, on the carousel ride laughing. Mine seemed uneven, filled with absences I tried to measure using hands that hadn’t grown wide enough to do so. Strangely loaded sentences my mother never bothered to explain lingered in my strokes. You come from me she’d say. And your father has powers beyond imagination. I considered drawing my mother sleeping in the afternoons, for hours sometimes, or the secretive, quiet conversations she had at nights to somebody at the other end of the phone. But they’d ask me why and I didn’t have any answers. Lead-drawn fathers from other children’s pictures surrounded me, their sympathetic expressions faint. The classmates took turns holding my dead oleander, breathing thin breaths into it in hope of a resurrection. Mrs Phillips stood over my shoulder peering at my drawing; a picture of my mother and I wearing duck heads in a rippling pond, surrounded by broken bits of bread and large footprints in the sky.

What a curious image, she commented. Whose footprints are those?

My father’s, I said.

And who is your father? She asked. I’ve never met him.

God, I answered seriously, punctuating the response with a flick of my paintbrush.

Orange paint splattered onto Mrs Phillips’s frumpy, grey dress. She pursed her lips. An uncomfortable silence followed.

I stood by the slightly open door that hot summer night, peeping through the tiny crack. A man sat on our deep mauve sofa. His brown torso had a light sheen, its own exotic animal in the lowly lit room. I pictured it falling at my feet, waiting for a spell from my hands by the edge of the doorway. I couldn’t see his face; I’d have to adjust my position to do that. If I leaned too far forward, they’d spot me and I’d be banished upstairs, told off for spying. I was rooted to the spot, listening to my mother’s laughter. I rarely heard it sound that way. It was softer, breathy, more feminine somehow. She sat on the man’s thighs, her upper body naked, a silky red camisole pooled at her waist. Her breasts jutted forward. She cooed as the man’s large hand stroked her thigh before disappearing between her legs. Aware I was watching something I wasn’t supposed to be seeing, I bit my lip anxiously, careful not to move and make the floorboards creak. I knew adults sometimes did those things to each other, I’d seen snippets on TV before my mother flicked the channel over.

She began to move into his hand, gyrating, head thrown back. Her mouth was slack and distorted as if would overheat and fall into the ashtray on the table, orange embers flickering in the glass. The man chuckled, a low rumbling sound. He moved down her body like some large, brown skinned python. He placed his head between her legs, obscured under the camisole. He unbuckled his leather belt.

I turned away then, weighing the secrets of the door. I slunk up the stairs carefully; head filled with this new knowledge that seemed adult and mysterious somehow. Back in my room, I peeled back the rumpled duvet, crawled into bed listening to the fan blades turning. I stayed awake for a bit, thinking of brown torsos in slim cracks waiting to be identified.

The fan blades sliced through scenes I imagined belonged to the man downstairs, who was making my mother groan like some foreign entity, exposing a side of herself mothers kept hidden from their daughters, tucked beneath their darting, moist tongues. On the dresser beside me, a paper plane I’d made from old comic book pages was half off the wooden surface, with only the sound of the blades and my breathing to propel it skywards. I pretended me and the man downstairs were co-pilots on foot. Wherever we went, the plane followed; dented by a fox’s paw from a night time rummage, damp from skimming its reflection in the pond at the local park, marked by frustrated fingers trying to fly it in the trails of real planes, whose destinations we chased till they vanished from sight.

I conjured up bits of a life for this man. Maybe he got lonely sometimes and he and my mother entangled their half-naked bodies till they rediscovered themselves in each other’s eyes. Maybe he was a butcher who gutted animals that dangled off ceiling hooks and pleaded for the insides they’d lost. Who couldn’t get the blood off his hands no matter how many times he washed them in scalding hot water or sat in public fountains.

I saw him pushing me on my yellow BMX bike, comic book plane caught in the wheel, its tip damp from saliva and all the things he couldn’t say to me yet. I rode the bike to school, ringing its silver bell to announce the arrival of something waiting in the wings, misshapen from being in the dark too long. Eventually, I waved goodbye to the bike trail disappearing on the concrete. I looked over my shoulder. The man from the dark pressed his face between the gates. In the distance of the school hall, I continued ringing the bell. I couldn’t see his face but I could hear him, crying the tears I’d lent him. Prompted by the cold, the lines of the grey bicycle disappeared into the hole in my chest. The paper plane stumbled, attempting to take off from one last, large male footprint.

The next morning, a package arrived for my mother in a thick, brown envelope lined with bubble wrap. I watched her from the balcony upstairs, flanked by secrets from the previous night, knocking one foot lightly against the over-filled laundry basket. She ran her fingers over the package at first, appearing hesitant to discover it’s contents. Then she tore it open slowly, a sad expression on her face. A slash of midnight blue appeared. She smiled wistfully, maybe recalling a memory, clutched it to her chest, staring at the letterbox as it noisily swung closed. The dress looked expertly cut. Held up to the light spilling from the glass on the door, it shimmered like a silken sea, whispering against her fingers.

“Mummy who got you a gift?” I bounded down the stairs a couple at a time, a habit I had whenever I got excited. “Can I see?”

“It’s nothing,” she said dismissively, folding the dress, her happy expression fading into the silken sea. “Just something I ordered from the catalogue. I’m going to order those dungarees you liked soon. Change that t-shirt, it has hair oil on it.”

“Can I see your dress on?” I asked. “It looks nice.”

“Later baby, I have to take care of a few things first. Please change that shirt!” she hollered before disappearing into the sitting room, the package tucked under her arm.

Later, I watched her try on the dress in her bedroom. It fit perfectly. We both stood inside our reflections before the finger printed mirror. Then I left her perched on the edge of the bed, unzipping. Her fingers skimmed the pulse on her neck as if contemplating throwing it to her mirror image. We didn’t talk about the half naked man whose deep laughter rumbled in the cracks of our house. I didn’t confide I’d told my teacher God was my father. And that he left ink footprints on creaky wooden floors and pale paper skies and could fly a model plane left-handed while the engine noise sputtered in his chest. We didn’t talk about the silence at our backs rising, catching secrets in its colourless, shapeless trap. We avoided discussing the white pills she took at night sometimes. To help make mummy sleep she’d said. We skirted around the debris in our beds, shoes, and the most random of places and the signs of her secret life; ticket stubs to a show, lace underwear, wine corks rolling off the glass table into the echoes of something passing.

The week Mrs Phillips sent a concerned letter about me home; I bought an orange yoyo using money I’d won from a dare. It had a long white string, flashed bits of red light unexpectedly, like a torch. A quirk I liked. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit at the top of the stairs flicking my yoyo, watching God creep into our photographs on the hallway walls, telling my mother lies, draping his arm around us lovingly, illuminated by the silent yoyo light.

Fallow

In the following weeks, the gulls from Chesapeake made random appearances. One repeatedly smacked its beak against the jar of stones on the kitchen countertop till a crack like a small scar appeared in the glass. Another having lost its head in the doorways of the flat continued scuttling headless through rooms, in search of rising ripples. One more dangled from the living room ceiling, its white convex chest swelling and sinking as the sounds of traffic spilled from its beak; tires screeching, the bleep of lights turning green, the low grumble of an engine overheating. I knew it was Anon behind it all. She was building an army, showing me she could command whatever she wanted. She was preparing them for something, laughing mockingly as panic rose inside me. I knew something dark and sinister was breathing in the flat, her hands embedded inside it, her ventriloquist doll.

Sometimes, I stuck my head out of the bedroom window to breathe another air, escape the din, or I’d turned the radio up loudly to have the false company of others, hoping to lose her in some frequency I’d attracted turning the knobs or that she’d be sucked into the static, reduced to tiny grains sparking malevolently in an electric blue kingdom somewhere. But she began to talk through the radio, interrupting heated debates and news items: You are nothing. Nothing good will ever happen in your life. You ruin everything. Why do you even exist? The gulls became more twisted. One sported a mangled neck. The gull from the ceiling came down, the left side of its breast gone, only darkness spun there when they gathered at my feet. They listened to her talking on the radio, growing in stature from my misery.

It was after one am. The sound of the tap dripping in the kitchen seeped into my brain. Outside, a can tumbled on the road; tires left tracks in the mouths of the odd person wandering in the cold. Green light of the 7/11 shop sign across the street coloured my vision. I lay sprawled on my bedroom floor, clutching the neck of a bottle of rum. Anon had her arms around me, her mouth orange in the light. Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. My right eye throbbed. A small, rum sky in the bottle threatened to shatter the glass. Anon’s mouth kept moving silently. My limbs were too heavy to find the words she’d left imprinted on my skin, already dissipating in the feverish sweat on my forehead. I watched her moist, pink tongue moving in the dark, wondering about all the things it had collected.

I stood in the corner of my own peripheral vision, listening to footsteps crunching on branches scattered on a trail, the demented cry of a panicked bird in the sky, what sounded like a shovel sinking into the ground. A hole expanded, the earthy smell of recently damp soil lingered, mocking laughter rose, faint, accented voices waned. There was the rustle of clothes, a man grunting and the pain in his limbs becoming mine. Anon’s mouth was a burning sun. The tap’s steady drip had slowed to a stutter. I shut my right eye to rest it. The left continued to flicker above small things coming over the horizon. Somebody had taken the time to dig a hole for me somewhere, a deep hole wide and big enough to store all my tattered belongings.

All you have to do is fall. Anon instructed. Let go. It will be better for you.

Her hand tightened on my wrist. I sat in the hole, one glazed eye watching the bottle and the drunken gulls orbiting above.

Rangi and I spent the next few weeks in our own bubble, having debauched sex and numbing our bodies to the things we couldn’t talk about. We slipped into a routine of sorts. Some evenings, I’d turn up at his door with weed or skunk from a dealer I knew who sold drugs out of his ice cream van, sucking red ice-lollies during transactions. I knew the weed probably made me more paranoid but I couldn’t do without it for long spells. Once, I thought I was trapped in Rangi’s chest while we fucked on the staircase.

Another time, we did it on the small veranda off the bedroom. I was so high; I was convinced we’d fallen over the bars, tumbled down onto the kerb naked. Only I didn’t feel the drop or landing, just my hands in the turnings of silver alloy wheels, exhaust pipe smoke spilled from my mouth as I came, head lolling between road markings. Rangi liked to drink but if he was an alcoholic he was a functional one. There were bottles stashed everywhere in his flat, as if he didn’t want to have to go all the way to the kitchen if he started craving. Seductive bottles of gin, vodka, rum and wine were kept in the bottom tray of the bookshelf in the hallway, a bedroom drawer, the floor of his wardrobe. I’d sit in his minimal, faux black marble kitchen, blowing smoke into the air while he cooked. I was convinced he might have been slipping something into the meals he prepared but didn’t care enough to ask him.

His fast hands fascinated me, chopping meat or delicately deboning fish as though it were an art, fish eyes gleaming between us on the countertops. A shrunken spliff in the corner of my mouth, I felt comfortable watching him butcher things, the blade thumping loudly on the chopping board. Sometimes, he bought whole chickens, gutting their insides himself, their heads spinning in the blade. He’d dump their intestines inside jars of water, a secret smile on his face before depositing them in the fridge. He told me that once as a boy he’d gutted a pig; its last cries had haunted him through the following winter. Once or twice, he’d heard his parents repeating those cries at the dinner table and saw the pig trying to rear its head in their faces.

Now and again we ventured out. He took me to a screening of Harmony Korrine’s Mr Lonely in a dinky little pub slash cinema in Bow called The Hovel. The bar was upstairs and the cinema downstairs. It was properly kitschy. The confectionary seemed to have been doused in beer, cigarettes and stale confessions. The lighting was subdued. A scrawny, pockmarked ticket attendant with grey eyes and sallow skin handed us our tickets with sweating hands. The toilet seat had collapsed and it didn’t always flush. There was one small screening room with red velvet seats that snapped shut when you stood up. The din from the bar seemed contained yet uncomfortably close. As if people would fall through the ceiling and land in the aisles, mid conversation about their dog’s broken leg, the stubborn child they had or how the jukebox’s selection of songs was pretty limited.

Rangi and I held hands and ate sweet popcorn together. The movie, about professional impersonators who created their own world unlocked something in me. Loneliness was inescapable. Rangi liked the alcoholic priest who convinced nuns to jump out of planes. Spellbound, I watched the nuns riding bicycles in the sky, habits flapping as they spun. If only it were possible to be that free. If only I could be someone else so I wouldn’t have to live inside my head. I cried silently. A man began to talk rudely on his mobile. Rangi left our row. He smacked the man on the head, took the mobile phone and smashed it beneath his boot heel. Technology doesn’t have to fry your fucking brain he said to the startled man. When he returned, a pulse in his jaw ticked. In the shapeless dark I blinked up at him through my tears. The man, several rows behind us, muttered in disbelief but stayed seated.

Circles

Rangi and I began to hit funerals together. He’d pull up in that temperamental black Mazda with the faulty heating fan dressed in black, hands casually at the wheel. In keeping with my dysfunctional tendencies, I thought it was encouraging we had that level of honesty between us. He didn’t lecture me about the dangers of what I was doing or make me feel like a bad person. He was unique in that way, most people would have been very judgemental. Instead he said, “Too many people are concerned about how others perceive them. We should all be more in tune with our desires and not care so much.”

“By doing whatever we want whenever we want?” I asked, side-eyeing him curiously.

He shook his head. “When you live on the edge you experience life that much more. Elements of danger and instability make things more intense, more interesting. Too much routine and not enough freedom is what kills everybody slowly. Your unusual habits are… honest in their duplicity because at least you’re making choices.”

I had a feeling if I’d said I wanted to rob banks at gunpoint, he’d have let me do it, with no empathy for the distress other people would encounter. But banks were too risky and they didn’t have the appeal of funerals. For one, there would be no sadness in the air, only fear. No carrying the weight of other people’s losses, trying them on for size. I knew that despair, sometimes small or all encompassing. Funerals were manageable. Some days I felt inclined to steal and other days I didn’t. There were times I stood on the periphery, scanning small crowds for my mother’s face while Rangi sat in the car at a discreet distance, drinking under the glare of daylight.

On other occasions, he’d come into the services with me. We’d act like a couple that knew the deceased. I was astonished by his ability to blend in so quickly, his knack for making you feel both uneasy and comfortable. He imitated the physical expressions of other mourners beautifully, portraying a forlorn figure amongst the gatherings of mourners. Wielding a sad expression and slumped shoulders, he’d thread his way through pale gravestones.

People like Rangi and I, operated on a different frequency. When things got tricky, our signal was three rings to my mobile, which would vibrate silently in my handbag. I knew he enjoyed it. I wondered why he was drawn to death and whether it was for the same reasons I was. One day, we passed time in the car, a bottle of Jack Daniels between us, the engine running. He was calm hearing about my failed suicide attempt. Brushing several unruly twists away from my forehead, he said, “If more people saw death as a way of being reborn, they’d be less scared. This part of existence… it’s fleeting, miniscule. Don’t you feel the call of other planes inside? Don’t you feel their distances shrinking?” A Sainsbury’s delivery van came by; huge and white, it was purring beside us for a bit. Before I lost my courage in the jangle of its contents, I answered. “I think somebody wants something from me, to do me harm maybe. But I don’t know what it is they want,” I said, leaning into his bright-eyed gaze.

One evening, after another funeral raid we sat in a Rubik’s cube shaped bar made of glass. We watched small shadows form over our hands and the edges of the night rising in the tumblers we drank from. I saw myself naked in the gleam of his eyes, then naked on Dr Krull’s table, my medical notes spilling from my mouth onto the floor. Rangi was on form, wanting me to know all about him.

The son of an Irish mother and Maori father, Rangi had pretty much had every job you could imagine. In New Zealand, he’d worked as a trawlerman for a while, part of a crew on a twenty-one-metre twin rigger hauling tuna, snapper, salmon and all kinds of fish, hands perpetually slick with fish entrails. Sometimes working against a backdrop of forty foot swells, endless rain and gale force winds with the hazardous sea thrashing, curling and threatening to carry the men into cold, volatile currents.

“Those were rough, good times battling the elements with those men. Imagine the tough conditions, bloody fish scales, hauling heavy nets up. We made some great catches. Not everything you catch surrenders immediately.” He ran a finger over the pulse on my wrist, the far away expression on his face made me certain he wasn’t talking about fish.

During his early twenties, he’d travelled through South America; Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Columbia, taking odd jobs to get by. In Buenos Aires, he worked as a farmhand for a woman who prophesised about a red sky coming to kill them all and slept with a long rifle in her bed as though it were a lover.

“She was right about something coming,” Rangi explained, running a hand over his jaw before knocking back a shot of whisky. “Thieves broke in one night, they shot most of the livestock, killed her with her own gun. Coincidentally, I was away from the farm that night. A woman I’d been seeing had wanted to go dancing. It was funny, while we were out, I could taste blood in my mouth but I thought it was one of my nosebleeds coming. I didn’t understand until I got back to the farm the next day and saw the carnage.”

In Mexico, he supplemented bar work as a nude model. One particular painter named Javier had requested him often. Sometimes they drank together afterwards, listening to old Mexican records.

“So there are nude paintings of you floating around.” I smiled at this notion. “Do you think he was in love with you?”

He watched me from hooded eyes. “Why do you ask that?”

“I don’t know, just a feeling. You said he painted you naked sometimes.”

“Maybe he was. He was good to me.” He nodded at the barman, setting his glass on the countertop for another shot. I drew my own conclusions.

In Montreal, he worked nightshifts at a factory producing mannequins. His sleep became so badly affected; he started seeing body parts of other staff coming round the conveyor belt and the mannequins walking around with bits of dawn in their eyes.

“You drift in and out of a lot of people’s lives don’t you?” I asked, trying to shake away the feeling of unease, the coldness in my bones.

“Maybe they drift in and out of mine,” he said.

In London, he worked in a butcher’s shop, coming home smelling of raw meat. Sometimes, he supplemented that income cabbing, shepherding people at all hours of the night. We looked out at the city, the traffic, the flow of people scurrying in different directions. The buildings were hazy, their lines distorted. I could see Rangi climbing into distances before leaping ahead in a change of clothes.

On the drive back home, I swallowed the stone floating in my minds eye. It sank to the bottom of my stomach, doing nothing to temper the nausea I felt. I slid down in my seat. The partially rolled down window had light spots of rain. Windscreen wipers flattened small shapes of water. The purple collar of my dress was stiff, ready to corner stray creatures of night. The streets were peppered with lights. Saviours and sinners spun in close proximity. Hands became other instruments in cold pockets.

We stopped on a bridge by the river for air. A fox was taking orders from something unseen. Rangi lit a cigarette, took a draw and began to pace the small area we’d resigned ourselves to. An empty bottle of Australian Pinot Grigio rolled nearby. My hands trembled, suddenly accosted by a memory; my mother running barefoot across a bridge, crying about inheritance being inescapable, fleeing down metallic stairs. My small frame rooted to a spot at the edge. I’m reminded of hovering above the river with metallic corners, afterwards searching for answers in my mother’s expressions, before the water inherited them forever, of chasing the changes, the timeline of when it all begun.

Tracks

I woke up on the train tracks not remembering the walk up. Everything seemed to be in slow motion; the stream of night commuters, the last train announcement ringing in my ears, a crushing weight on my right arm so painful my eyes watered. Half stars blended into the mocking glints of the tracks. The train wheel against my arm was unbearable. I lay there clenching and unclenching my left fist, grunting, reducing to small parts mice would scurry over. Faces swam. Voices came from a distance. Broken, silver light danced above like shrapnel flying. I’m not sure how much time passed between coming round and finally being lifted but a slow pained breath left me and the shrapnel had begun to reassemble in my body as a siren wept.

“What’s happening?” I asked the faces blending into one, my voice faint, hoarse.

“There’s been an accident but you’re alright now dear,” a kindly, male voice said. His slim hands moved like quick sparrows. I vaguely registered his green uniform.

“I can’t feel my arm anymore!” I said, desperately attempting to grab his elbow with my left hand, clutching the moments before the accident I couldn’t remember. Fragments had attached themselves to the announcement sign, the boot imprint of an ambulance man, a baby tugging its mother’s white collar.

I spotted Anon in the crowd holding the brass head as I was wheeled away. She looked calm. One wheel from the bed squeaked as she moved her mouth. I felt myself slipping into the dark, away from the weight of her judgement. The blurring of those lost moments before the accident became the unlikely half children of the stars.

During the ride to the hospital, the sound of tires on the road was oddly comforting. My eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting overhead. For a moment, I thought it was a scene from a movie maybe. That the van would flatten into a stage, the players disappearing into their corners. But the pain in my right shoulder indicated otherwise. Blood on my shirt had smudged. The lower part of my arm hung on tenuously, joined at the elbow. Light-headed, the van shook. Its ceiling became a bright, foreign sky. A drumbeat rattled the doors, faster and faster. Red earth bearing footprints with water covered the floor. Blue petals fell gently. A woman crying interrupted my thoughts, loudly at first, and then quietly, followed by the sound of a shovel in the soil and the soft murmurings of a man. I ran towards that sound, reaching the moments before the accident but I couldn’t remember. I ran in slip roads going nowhere, began to scream so loudly, my throat hurt. The van screeched to a halt.

My numb arm dangled in blind spots.

I came round again in the hospital bed aware I’d lost time. I felt sick and slow, the same feelings you got following an adventure ride, knowing that the angle of flight had reassembled things inside you. Most of my right arm was gone, hacked off by surgeons. I no longer had a right hand. The right hand I stole with, masturbated with, and caught a butterfly fish from a pool with. They’d had to amputate. It must have been pinned beneath that train wheel for longer than I realised.

I knew Anon was partially responsible for the state I’d found myself in but why did I deserve this? Hadn’t I suffered enough? Why had I inherited one punishment after another? I thought of calling Rangi or Mrs Harris but I’d left my mobile on the kitchen counter. I was in a world of strangers, listening through stethoscopes tapping against a God’s chest. Nurses’ smiles wavered as they lied to patients out of kindness. This was a country I came from. I knew the language of the damned. Through the rage, helplessness and despair, I spoke it to the ceiling.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, wrung my hand in the light bedcovering listening to an internal clock ticking. I cried when a silhouette from the ceiling leapt into black train tracks. Doctors and nurses came and went; cut-outs travelling on ripples. They hovered by my bed checking the stump. Pain medications with names I could not pronounce slipped down my throat. The withered old man in the next bay coughed out his insides, arms outstretched as if to retrieve them.

Pangs of jealousy shot through me. I’d been envying other people’s movements, the fullness of them, their lack of concern that they could one day be taken away. Even a simple action like coughing involved the arms. I worried about the road ahead, learning to use my left hand. Who would be there when I landed awkwardly, couldn’t put an item of clothing on properly or dropped things? I felt truly alone. The nurses changed my bedding, smiled patiently. “Is there anything you need? Anybody you want to call?” I looked beyond them, holding the gaze of my old body, trying to stop it from betraying me.

Once I’d seen a busker outside Angel tube station. He’d held his guitar like a lover. There was light in his eyes as he stroked the strings, voice cracking with emotion. He seemed rich with the complexities and shades of a human being collecting pennies. I’d envied his ability to connect with people so effortlessly. One day, I wanted to hold a lover the way he held his instrument, to know the notes they had within, to lose my fingers finding them. Now I grappled with the knowledge my embrace would be clumsy, unsettling and perhaps unknowable.

At night I dreamt of my missing arm. I longed for it, deep pangs that ricocheted through my body. What had the hospital done with it? What kind of instrument did they use to chop it off? I pictured Doctors wielding small axes beneath the sleeves of their white coats, trying not to drop it into their strides. Was my arm in a freezer somewhere? With limbs from other bodies, long lost to the echoes of their previous lives or buried in the soil, travelling through the undergrowth towards a fragmented new earth. Under instructions from the land, it could conjure the rest of me for a new, less troubled existence. I saw my arm in the ambulance siren, catching old scenes of me able-bodied. I saw it on empty café seats, in window displays between mannequins. I saw it on routes lined with broken signs. I felt ugly. One day I’d make love beneath a low watt bulb. This was the inheritance my mother never warned me about. My arm floated in the sea of aftermaths, between murky objects that needed to be reclaimed. I shook in the bed, my absent hand wet from touching the sea.

Dr Krull came to visit. He sat at the end of the bed looking unsure, holding a paperweight of a woman standing reaching for snow, then sitting down as the season changed.

“I know you like these,” he said, placing it on the cheap looking set of drawers beside the bed. He cleared his throat unbuttoning his green suede jacket.

“I wasn’t sure what to bring or whether to bring anything at all. It’s difficult in a situation like this.” I liked him all the more for not bringing flowers.

Funny, despite the pain and discomfort I was in, I was conscious of how I looked. No matter the circumstances, women always wanted to look their best in front of an attractive man.

“The hospital called me,” he said. “They found my credit and debit card in your possessions.”

“I’m sorry,” I croaked pathetically. I wanted to say I didn’t know what I was doing but that would have been a lie. Can’t you see I’m being punished enough?

“It’s okay,” he replied. “The important thing is that you’re alright. We’ll have to talk about it at some point though. You’re very lucky to be alive. Do you remember what happened?”

I looked up at the faint shadows on the ceiling crossing white space. “I don’t remember the moments before it happened. I think I was sleepwalking.”

Thoughts of Rangi’s elegant butcher’s hands cutting, slicing, and choking during sex, of the purple sheet slipping down his hips, the exposure of skin, the feeling of coming up for air after being choked and how my arms flailing felt familiar.

Dr Krull brought his chair closer. His hair was ruffled, giving him a more boyish look.

“Try to remember,” he urged. “Don’t you think it’s odd that your mother’s been dead for months but we haven’t talked about her? It’s important you remember.”

I remained silent and dry mouthed, wreckage in an uncomfortable, adjustable bed.

Dr Krull continued to speak in his calm, measured way. Half of him morphed into the debris of my life.

Seeds

Mervyn came to the hospital, cut a weary and forlorn figure at my bedside. His grey, pinstriped suit was rumpled. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His large hands trembled as he held my face, pressed a kiss on my forehead, smelling of alcohol mixed with aftershave.

“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” he offered attempting to steady his succession of facial expressions: concern, pity and guilt. I looked away; I couldn’t bear the pitiful looks thrown my way.

“How did this happen?” he asked.

“They didn’t tell you?” I croaked, clutching the soft bedding in my sweaty palm. The skin of a day old banana on the dresser was now partially black with spots of new darkness crawling upwards. There was a beauty in the way things decayed, nature taking its course. “They said I sleepwalked right onto the train tracks.” I thought for a while. “Why would I do that? What’s wrong with me?”

“Oh God!” he answered, pacing back and forth. “I could throttle your mother. You’ve forgotten you did that as a child for a bit, right after-”

“Right after what?” I hoisted my body up slowly, sinking into the pillows.

“It’s nothing, it can wait.” His eyes glistened; shoulders sagged in some kind of small relief. For a while, we occupied positions at either end of a silence. Weakened from medication and the bleakness of my future, I lay there wrapped in blackening banana skin trying to hold onto a bomb.

When the nurses came to administer my afternoon meds, I willed myself to disappear under the bed, dragging my body on the floor towards the sound of wheels. Blood seeped through my bandages and into the nearest corners. The patient in the bed next to me had changed. I fell asleep to the feel of my camera in my hands. The lens whirred filling up with water, my hand caught in a flash mimicking fast moonlight. I thought about Mervyn and the anxiety he’d displayed. He was keeping something from me. I knew it. Why did it feel like everybody in my life had something to hide? Why would I have blocked out the memory of sleepwalking as a child when that was connected to losing my arm?

Then there was Anon holding the brass head from the ambulance bed. Where had she been going with it? Questions swirled in my head. The sound of stones infiltrated the lens; running water pulled the camera down. The stones rumbled in the slipstream. I tried to hold the boxy camera steady but couldn’t. It flashed uncontrollably, blindingly, hiding those earlier images of the night in some grainy purgatory.

Days passed. A bright green apple replaced the black banana on my dresser. A small patch of brown, crinkly skin like a pockmark had began to spread on its otherwise pristine surface. I waited for the slow erosion to come. The routine continued. My bed sheets were newly changed: crisp and white. I listened to the daughter of a patient read her To Kill a Mockingbird. Her wrinkly, spotted arm trembled in delight. I was at my wit’s end between the boredom and the pain. I woke up wanting to go back to sleep and went to sleep not wanting to wake up.

By the time Rangi arrived, the small TV set borrowed from another ward had begun to flicker and he looked as if he’d stepped right out of the black and white movie wearing clothes from the wrong era. There was a weight on my lids, a hovering shape I’d turned into. It was dark, past visiting hours. I didn’t ask how he’d slipped in. Instead, I lifted my body up awkwardly, slowly. Still tasting sleep in my mouth. My left arm ached from lying on it for too long. I could hear the hum of the fridge tucked behind the ward reception and stray heartbeats in stethoscopes tapping against glass mouths.

I wanted to tell him I’d been waiting, that sometimes I could taste him in the small hours before dawn. Pain in my head had created a path littered with shattered reflections. My brain had landed on black tracks, then separated into frantic, blue-eyed gulls on plumped, white pillows, scraped with thin, sharp instruments. Sickness and excitement rose in my stomach as he approached. The air between us crackled with haphazard electricity. I recognised the distance in his eyes, watermarks from rain leaping off rough surfaces. I stretched my hand out to know it again, to rub my fingers in its spotted areas. My body throbbed. Then, he was beside me. How was it possible I could hear stones rolling down an echo, Anon’s heartbeats between clock hands, small versions of her breathing against the hemlines of nurses’ uniforms, yet Rangi’s feet barely made a sound? He drew the curtains around us carefully, leaving a tiny crack. His breath on my face was warm and alcoholic. Red scratches on his right cheek were rough. I pressed my mouth on them. His hands flew to my neck, holding it tenderly. I cried into silent footsteps as he undid his zipper urgently. And those creatures of dawn, carrying gutted spaces we drank from surrounded us like quiet grenades waiting for the pull of our fingers.

He was heavy against me afterwards. He hoisted himself up, careful not to make too much noise. My nostrils were clogged with his smell of faint cologne, weed and sweat. The taste of sweat lingered longest in my mouth. He sat down gingerly, took my hand, releasing a slow breath as though tension had left his body.

“What happened to your face?” I asked. Footsteps in the hallway petered off, made me more alert.

Rangi rubbed his face, threw a worried look my way. “You don’t remember this?” He pointed at the scratches, fixed me with an intense, loaded gaze.

I shook my head, closed my eyes. Tiny nuclei of colour slid beneath my lids, split then disappeared.

His eyes went to my stump. “I’m sorry Joy. That night… we argued. You weren’t yourself. You were wild. I’ve never seen you that way. You hit me with that ornament, that brass head your mother left you.”

My eyes flew open. “No, I’m sorry. Of the two of us, I think you got the better deal.” A slight resentment slipped into my tone.

A throbbing in my head began to spread, till I felt like a big, pathetic ball of nerves and anxiety. “What are you saying?” I asked, my voice tiny in the dark.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he rubbed a finger up and down the back of my hand slowly.

Outside, fireworks cracked and popped in the night skyline. Somehow, Rangi had slipped one into my hold. Bits of sky attached to it were gaps we could fall into. It sparkled against my fingers. And between his gestures of consolation, I wondered why he came to the hospital already smelling of sex and why this only registered with me later. I waited for the firework to go off, toppling the dangling ceiling above our heads.

The nurses became interchangeable, bearing half smiles as winter set in. They brought cups of tea, terrible, tasteless sandwiches and no hope of my life ever going back to what it was. When they washed me, I avoided looking in the mirror. I couldn’t bear to see my bandaged stump, still covered to protect the skin. Sometimes I saw it uncovered, leave my body; roll around near the plughole on the grey floor. Once Anon wore it in the mirror. I spotted her through the steam in the glass crying, her moist, pink tongue heavy with some knowledge. She knew something and she wouldn’t tell me. Flecks of gold spun in her dark eyes. Her crying became so loud I felt my heart stop. Rivulets on the mirror watered her stump that cruelly grew whole again before my eyes.

An image flickered in my mind’s eye. Anon and I were walking on the darkened train platform, the sound of an approaching train surrounding us. Two pigeons at the far end of the platform were losing their colouring to a sky she’d already built. She pointed to a gap. I edged forward into a heat so palpable, my skin burned. The tracks became hot soil beneath my feet. I was caught in a procession of some sort. Men dressed in traditional African clothing were dragging a bound man and woman through a trail. Stray branches snapped. I tasted a metallic flavour in somebody’s shortness of breath. Sweat slicked trembling hands, a rope dug into skin. Short glimpses of light between trees were blinding. Suddenly, the sound stopped. As if I’d gone temporarily deaf. I imagine pressing an ear against a surface of water must be like this; faint, traceable, individual murmurings but you cannot make sense of the whole.

The train wheel, black and heavy burst through the water onto flesh and bone, crushing it. The pain was so deep, so agonizing I would know it forever. I screamed, falling from the wheelchair onto the wet, shower floor. The nurse scrambled to her knees. I cried into the plughole, into the train tracks. Anon turned up the noise in the steamed mirror and the surfaces of water we shared.

Home

On the day of my release, I woke up to discover the man three beds down had died in his sleep. All evidence of him had been removed, only the crease in the silence indicated he was gone. I felt guilty sleeping through a death like that but he must have passed quietly, without any fanfare. It was a cold and surprisingly bright morning. Sunlight streamed through the small window. From the bed, I saw people milling about outside, facing the start of their working day. I was nauseous with dread and anticipation. The last time I’d been out in the world, my life had been different.

I sat up in bed cursing things I’d taken for granted in the past. Even the dark had been a constant companion. My body had adapted to it’s modes of infiltration; it’s silencing of stones in the jar on my kitchen desktop, it’s power to hold my limbs hostage on those heavy days I could barely crawl out of bed. The dark treated Anon like a prodigal daughter, allowing her to spring in pockets around me, carrying bits of a puzzle that disintegrated whenever I reached for them. I missed the movements my body used to make without a careful thought but how was I to know what was to come? Now, I was an injured woman wandering through a collection of battlefields, feeling the softening skin of rotten fruit in my fingers. Frustrated, my eyes swam.

The Doctors took ages making their rounds so I didn’t get discharged till after midday. I left one rotten pear and a leaking blue biro on the dresser as gifts for the next patient. A white napkin I’d fashioned into a plane was hidden under the pillow, already touching the edges of another life. The nurses had given me fresh clothes to wear; new cotton underwear, a pair of black jeans a size too big, a grey t-shirt and a snoopy sweatshirt, its long right sleeve dangling pathetically. As if it was waiting for my right arm to come back through the human traffic surrounding us.

The Doctor, a severe looking auburn haired man with a dented nose had informed me that due to my “history” they’d assign a health worker to my case to check up on me every now and again, help me adjust to living with my disability.

“Just for some support,” he added diplomatically. “So you can transition back to living on your own with these changes. It can be… emotionally overwhelming at first,” he said, smiling distantly, tapping his pen against the clipboard, mentally already onto the next patient. I sat there picking lint from my new jeans, blinking up at him as if he were a mirage in the wrong setting. Soon enough, one of us would shrink into a slithering of light.

“You’ve prescribed more sleeping pills?” I asked, weary of the constant cycle of medications.

He nodded patiently. “Yes, to help you in the meantime. Your body needs rest. If you’d been consistently taking the pills you were originally given, you may not have had that unfortunate incident I’m afraid.”

“But what about finding out why I’ve been sleepwalking?”

He sighed audibly, rocked back on his heels. There could be all sorts of reasons. Dr Krull knows your history. He can advise you best.”

I stuffed coins slick with sweat in my pocket. “What do I do if I lose time again?” Panic seeped into my voice.

“Take the pills Joy,” he instructed patronizingly, as if I was a small child who couldn’t quite grasp the obvious.

Dr Krull knows your history. I imagined the ink pen he held scratching one pale, blue iris out, a stethoscope strangling his neck and the struggle to breathe making him take some other form. The paper plane beneath the pillow sprouted an extra wing.

I sat in the compact, white, waiting area downstairs by the sliding doors. Tiny wax women bearing injuries hitched rides on the wheels of ambulance beds, headed towards death or reinvention. Only a handful of people were sitting down, in varying stages of illness. My left hand was jittery. I caught the tail end of a conversation a rail thin blonde was having at the phone box. She puffed on a cigarette in between gesticulating wildly. Smoke curled around the outline of a scorpion tattoo on her exposed midriff while a haggard man in a worn, black leather jacket with thinning, dark hair rushed by holding a bouquet of daffodils. I pictured the recipient, a wife or lover sitting on an uncomfortable bed eating the petals.

Then that image was replaced by one of a brown-skinned woman swimming in a river, kicking hard against a tide. The blue petal in her mouth floated like a rootless tongue. My chest tightened. My mouth became dry. The man was a fleeting thing who’d brought an unlikely passenger through the sliding doors. He jangled a set of keys nervously in his pocket. I pressed my ears against the sound, still gripped by the knowledge that unsettling things could slip into moments of weakness and holes in your day. A trickle of blue water ran down the middle of my vision, bookmarking the two worlds.

An ambulance van pulled up outside by the kerb. The doors slid open. An empty bottle of rum rolled towards heels clicking. The sharp clicking heels trapped a crinkled Trebor mint wrapper, a five pence coin with the Queen’s head spinning, a torn multi-coloured woven bracelet. My mother had made a bracelet like that for me once, weaving the material between her fingers expertly, and humming.

The cracked ambulance siren was silent. Its doors smacked open and closed. Inside the ambulance were future scenes waiting to find their way into my life; trying to tie my laces one handed, cracking eggs on a shiny black desktop, watching the yolks slide down to the floor, becoming small chickens clucking erratically. I saw myself lying on the ground by the open freezer door, a cold mist on my face. I cried over the ache and loss of my arm. My body shuddered. I reached into the freezer pulling out yellow fish whose mouths kept moving after they spat out the same brass key, before melting into bright water in my hand.

The woman with the clicking heels showed her face, gaunt and knowing in the gap. A hospital ID hung from her neck. She squinted, scribbling notes in a pad. She knew she couldn’t help me. I was a lost cause. She took a deep breath, released the wind from her mouth, scattering the scenes inside the ambulance. They fell into each other, changing to some unlikely animal. Yellow chickens became yolks again, I smacked a brass key repeatedly against the desktop, and fish carried untied shoelaces in their mouths. My mother’s bracelet fluttered at the edge just as the siren came on, wailing in my ears.

I felt a hand on my shoulder; its broad, firm grip was familiar. “Hey, have you been waiting long?” Mervyn asked, face full of concern. He helped me up. The man in the chair opposite coughed into his chequered handkerchief. I managed a half smile that felt more like a grimace. “Thanks for coming,” I answered, trying to wrestle the sinking feeling in my stomach, the panic I was feeling at the thought of being out in the world again.

“No problem. You knew I’d come. Anything for you, you know that. I’m just happy you reached out to me. We haven’t seen each other much since Queenie died.”

He blew a breath out slowly, as if trying to compose himself. Damp spots had spread on the collar of his crisp, blue shirt. Maybe he didn’t know how to comfort me, what to say. Sometimes, people struggled in these situations. I almost told him I didn’t know what I needed to hear. And Queenie? What would she say seeing me like this? It was partly her fault for inconveniently dying and leaving me alone. Anger bloomed in my chest, followed by sharp, painful pangs of longing.

“I brought you here once as a kid you know. You’d stopped breathing. Your mother was beside herself, hysterical. I’d never seen her that way.” He rubbed his face, grappling with the memory. “When you finally came round, it was as if… You’d been somewhere. You were a strange child, otherworldly at times.”

We crossed the stretch of gleaming, pale aisle, leaving behind groaning lift doors and the constant patter of footsteps. He’d parked his black Mercedes Kompressor right near the entrance. I slid in carefully. It smelled of mint and leather. He turned the engine and radio on; set the car into gear before expertly moving off. The bulldog on the dashboard began to nod at the panic and fear growing inside me; Anon caught the bulldog’s head during two pit stops. Tears ran down my cheeks. I rolled the window down partially, leaned against it to feel the cold air on my face and the city shrinking beneath the fingers of my lost arm.

Queenie 1980’s: Born

The hole came attached to the baby’s ankle, just after it was born. At first it was barely the weight of a breath. Then it became dense and unknowable despite the irony of the baby who arrived into the world howling at the pale, blue ceiling, blinking frequently as though adjusting to her new setting, clenching and unclenching a demanding fist, being named Joy.

Motherhood Na wah oh! Queenie thought lying in the hospital bed, drenched in sweat and bone tired. I don suffer for this child she muttered, the comment barely passed her lips. The Doctor and nurse smiled at each other. After cleaning the baby up, the flaxen haired, pudgy-faced nurse handed her over wrapped in a light cotton blanket.

“Oh she’s a beauty!” the nurse remarked, glancing at Queenie for a reaction. Queenie gave a wobbly smile. “Thank you. I thank God for this blessing.” She felt as though she was on the edge of the moment, floating beyond the emotional connection the situation called for. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she be overwhelmed with the depth of feeling other mothers’ spoke of? Instead she was relieved. Soon she’d be able to fit into her clothes again, hold down food. Her morning sickness had been morning, afternoon and evening sickness. She’d found herself embarrassingly vomiting into a bin on the street, throwing up on a bus, darting into pubs as quickly as her unsteady legs could carry her; vomiting so much it seemed she’d lost organs in the process. They surrounded her while her head bobbed above putrid, urine stained toilet bowls. She checked they were hers by the weight of a lung in her hand, a heart circling the bowl, its ventricles flooded by flushing water as she rocked back on her knees cursing.

The baby was at her breast. Queenie felt nothing except pangs of hunger and a doom she couldn’t explain. She wanted to ask the nurse why the baby’s shadow was in the doorway. The small mass in her arms screamed. She knew the nurse wouldn’t be able to tell her. She closed her eyes, a gauzy haze descended. Her lids flicked open. The shadow was at her breast, sucking greedily on a large brown nipple. She looked into Joy’s knowing brown eyes, her irises orbited darkly. Queenie sighed, sinking into the hole. The ceiling fan spun between prior scenes of the birth.

Queenie didn’t call him to see the baby those first few days. She’d refused to tell him her due date in response to feeling like an afterthought in his neat, well-organised life. I don walka into this situation well well! Queenie thought, chiding herself.

She missed the smell of him, that warm, earthy scent that had a hint of exoticness. She missed the feeling he gave her, the softness of her malleable body beneath his broad, steady hands. Sometimes, she pictured an atlas of their times together rising from his shoulders, that he held that world in his hands during quiet moments. It had been difficult giving birth alone, panicked and half out of her mind.

She’d been in the supermarket when her water broke, clutching a bottle of vegetable oil that fell, missing her feet by an inch. She’d called out, heart racing, mouth dry. The realization she’d be giving birth alone sank into her caving body. Somebody grabbed her arms from behind, pulling her up. She saw him then, in his other life, sitting at a wooden dining table, holding cutlery, covered in birth water.

At the nurse’s station, Queenie held the black phone receiver, the dial tone a new heartbeat. Life-sized worker bees; the nurses flitted to and fro in all directions. And the faint jangle of medical instruments, footsteps and fast instructions seemed like some unlikely symphony a Doctor had concocted. What had she been thinking keeping this baby? How was she going to cope? You should have thought of that, she mumbled internally. Tears ran down her cheeks. The faint ache in her grew. She took a slow breath and looked around, trying to still her trembling body. An eggshell coloured desk sat in the centre, stacked with notes. Next to a watch a silver stethoscope borrowed breaths from a concave chest in the distance, trapping an international calling card, the zip from a polka dot dress, a brass head bearing the memory of a father’s touch, the blueprint of a baby from the blue. A swear jar with the note fu**! was perched in the middle. Queenie resisted the urge to pick up the jar and walk the sterile aisles rattling coins, until the delicate knot of her loose hospital gown came undone.

Earlier, she’d torn the name band from her wrist. She looked up at the whiteboard mounted on the wall, transfixed by the names and hospital numbers scrawled in barely legible orange handwriting, waiting for something to be revealed to her. She felt scared, lonely and miserable. Part of the baby’s blueprint had found its way into her throat, scrunching into a ball. Her eyes swam. She spotted a nurse flying towards her, face pinched. “You left your baby on the bed! You can’t do that. What if she rolled over and fell to the floor? Oh dear, you must be very tired.” The nurse remarked, searching her face worriedly. Queenie looked through the nurse, her mouth curving up in a half smile, half grimace.

Two days later Ella came to pick her up, dressed in a blue dungarees and tortoiseshell glasses. She hopped out of her long suffering Peugeot and half-embraced Queenie, stroking Joy, who was cooing in her mother’s arms. The blistering wind whipped Ella’s bright red quiff, back and forth like an exotic bird.

“Get in!” she ordered, gently kissing Joy on the forehead. “Before we catch our deaths!” She yanked the back passenger door open. Queenie piled in, comforted by the smell of baked goods. A squashed, empty Danish packet lay on the floor by her feet. Ella flicked the engine on. She’d parked in the small, disabled section. She stole a quick glance around, checking the parking attendant hadn’t spotted her.

“She’s gorgeous Queenie! Can’t tell who she looks like yet though.” This she threw over her shoulder, turning the radio on before reversing out of the parking lot.

Queenie adjusted the blanket around Joy as The Rolling Stone’s All Night Long blared from the radio. The car sputtered over the roundabout and into a narrow road. At the lights, a man holding his daughter’s hand bent his head, talking with a patient expression. It triggered the memory of being pushed on a swing by her father all those years ago; the scorching heat, the rhythm of the swing, how she’d nearly slid off a few times, almost falling into her shadow.

She remembered her father in his creased linen outfit, lying to her about being able to control the weather. She remembered how happy she felt because her father was Houdini, could create new weather and told her his brass head set in motion things that couldn’t be revealed in the day. He was a magician who’d disappeared. You woke up one day and he was gone, leaving belongings distorting in the dark. The void left had been so big, she and her mother took turns hurtling their bodies in, filling the spare rooms in the house with all their bad landings.

Joy stretched her tiny hand, reaching for her mother’s breast. Her expression was delicate; Queenie felt the weight of responsibility. What would she learn from a mother who’d already made so many mistakes?

What can I offer you but the disappointment that’s found a home in me?

How can I ever look you in the eye and tell you the truth? She said silently.

The streets shrank and passed in the rear-view mirror. A purple kite above a field became a pigeon chasing its beak. A dog barking leaped into a Ferris wheel of blue sky. An old swing worked its way into the traffic, knocking against bumpers. The girl from the swing wrote something illegible on windscreens, knowing that the man who could make weather will come for her. Queenie saw her baby on the spinning rooftops of terraced houses, crawling down towards cold slip roads. She called out but the baby didn’t turn around. She shuddered in her seat as car horns sounded, one hand under her sleepy-eyed child, the other clinging to an old, frayed swing rope. A wave of nausea hit her. Ella steered the car into a busy roundabout, flanked by a shopping centre and a cinema. Cars zipping by were God’s toys on one of his playgrounds.

Ella changed the radio station, drummed her fingers on the dashboard before hitting the gas. “You should tell him you know. Why isn’t he here?” She nudged her glasses up her nose. A gesture Queenie knew meant she was ready to argue with you.

“Where is it written that he has to know? Lots of women manage on their own.” Queenie rubbed Joy’s head; the car ride seemed to have settled her. She was sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the world and all its cruelties.

“Yes, I know but it’s not ideal is it?” Ella asked. “And you shouldn’t be one of them. You haven’t worked in the shop for months. That’s fine but as far as I know, you don’t have a lot of savings. How are you going to live? He should be able to give you some financial support at least, no matter his circumstances. This wasn’t an immaculate conception!”

“No, this was a mistake!” Queenie said, suddenly weary of it all.

“What? How can you say that?” Ella spat, a red flush crawling up her neck. “You know I can’t have children. I’d give anything to have your-to be in your position. Please don’t talk like that around her; babies are sensitive creatures. They can sense things.”

“Spare me please,” Queenie said tersely. “I’m not one of your charity cases. You have no clue so please shut up!”

The car became quiet, the atmosphere tense. The engine ran on fuel and the argument they’d just had. Ella’s knuckles whitened at the wheel. The flush on her face was a half formed silent island. She flew across another set of lights, throwing a furious glance Queenie’s way. God’s playground and cruelties were connected. Queenie knew this for a fact. The memory of it had been clawing at her for months.

They zipped down the flyover, their silence a patchy sky spilling into the side mirrors. Queenie saw her silhouette in blind spots, clinging to tires, dragged across the streets.

She didn’t know what it meant or what anything meant anymore. She sank back in the seat, rocking her baby. The smell of her own smoke slowly filled her lungs.

Queenie 1980s: Dice Eyes

Queenie sat listening in the tight hallway, trembling against a cold radiator. It was freezing but she hadn’t been able to afford to heat the flat properly for weeks.

All they had was the portable electric heater whirring in the living room, melting the lids of pens and burning a small, brown cave into Joy’s bib. Dice eyes in the ceiling spun. They’d followed her from sleep, grainy and constantly adjusting to the surfaces in the flat, watching the sluggishness that had taken over her limbs since the hospital. She’d tried to get rid of them, running cold water on her eyes at full blast till they stung and the tap began to hiss from the pressure, ready to uproot into her head and flood the very thing she’d been trying to submerge.

She slid down as the knocks became heavier, more insistent. Cold sweat trickled on her back. The door rattled. His large frame loomed in the bubbled glass. The silver post slot flapped. His mouth there floated in some separate ether.

“Queenie! I just want to talk. I’m worried about you,” he said, the last bits of patience dwindling in his voice. He waited a few moments, then kicked the door repeatedly.

“Open this fucking door! Open it or I swear I’ll break it down, you hear me?” He growled, “I’ll tear this rahtid place apart. Let me see her. You can’t stop me from seeing her!”

Queenie slid further down until she felt like nothing. Shame washed over her. She ran a nervous hand over her matted hair. Oh God, he’ll kill me, she thought. He’ll finish me if he knows. He can’t know.

Her heartbeat tripled. Unopened mail beneath her feet grew bold, becoming flattened white tongues curling up, straining to talk.

In the kitchen, the table was stacked with empty cans of food, parts of a memory spilled from each one, cutting themselves on sharp edges.

“I’m having tea with the Queen!” she yelled, “She’s expecting me at The Ritz.”

He’d moved out of sight. Somehow increasing the pressure he was applying to her head. He was travelling through the bubbled glass door, watered by the angles of light she’d lost along the way. She looked into the living room. Joy crawled past the bright throw on the floor, towards the plugs. He began to kick the door again, till a small gap appeared. It rattled in the frame some more. She felt the hinges weakening beneath her sweaty fingertips. Joy began to scream, a twisted-faced angry scream that went on and on.

Queenie had found her father on a harsh blustery day. She stumbled upon him. Years later, she’d rake over each aspect, agonizingly unpicking the series of sequences. Each moment was a red brick, one shakily stacked on top of the other. Had an element been missing, the bricks would have toppled and Queenie may never have found him at all. It was a Sunday. She’d been wandering through Petticoat Lane Market, amidst the packed throngs in the centre, which splintered off into various side roads where more stalls awaited, selling everything from leather coats, knock off Singer sewing machines, board games and wigs on white mannequin heads sporting cling film mouths. The din was loud and seductive. Every couple of strides a different smell accosted you; prawns sizzling in huge black woks, hot dogs and burgers smothered in chunks of fried onions and ketchup, fried rice sprinkled with cashew nuts. Clothes for every size and shape fluttered and swayed on breakable hangers. A wind chime rang over the door of a record shop.

At exactly 2.15pm, Queenie’s right shoe caught in a groove on the road. She went flying, grazing her elbow. The contents of her handbag spilled. Had the dog’s head from the costume stall not landed at the feet of one of the flock of orange-robed monks ahead, had her lipstick not rolled to the feet of that same monk, had the man on the motorbike not appeared from nowhere, revving his engine and rudely cutting across the monks, causing their cluster to fracture and that particular monk to accidentally crack her lipstick beneath his sole, Queenie would never have stood abruptly and awkwardly to try to save it. She would never have knocked into the stall selling maps and atlases. She would never have noticed the heavy black boots under the stall with bits of cement and paint on them.

He sat before a building site. Construction workers trailed in and out. Sawdust and white residue covered their winter skin. Her heart began to race and her mouth ran dry. Thoughts sped up and jumbled in her head. All these years later and she’d never forgotten his face. It was him, she was sure of it. He was older of course; his handsome features more lived in, weathered. Tight curls beneath his yellow hard hat were greying at the temples. She rubbed her leg. A tingling sensation made her arms tremble. How ordinary he seemed! Smoke from the hissing wok at the next stall shrouded him, as if he would change guise by the time it curled away. How plain he looked holding a steaming cup of coffee. How ironic to find him loitering behind maps and atlases, the sly curls of smoke ready to make him disappear into an atlas. Blue plastic sheeting covering the stall flapped in his face. As though part of it would morph into a carrier pigeon reporting to the wandering God blowing silences into the city.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice still heavily accented.

He set the mug of hot black liquid down on the pavement.

Queenie nodded, watching the slow look of horror on his face, a flicker of recognition as his dark brown eyes darted sideways quickly. She knew she was moving forward but couldn’t feel her legs. “Papa that is you? Peter? Peter Lowon? It’s me, Queenie.” She grabbed his arm despite herself. Thoughts in her head were bent arrows flying into other openings. Their angles of flight had caught him off guard. His left hand shook in her grasp, some small creature made of nerves and instinct. He snatched it away. “Nnno, that cannot be. I’m sorry, I don’t have a daughter.” He shook his head, turning away, unable to meet her gaze.

“It’s me, Felicia’s daughter! Your daughter, you remember. I know you remember! All these years and not one word. You remember Felicia, your wife?”

He stopped in his tracks. That look of horror appeared again. Queenie was the spitting image of her mother. “Where have you been?” she asked, her voice cracking and rising simultaneously, as if it didn’t know whether to do one or the other. She halved into two, overwhelmed, she didn’t feel the Singer sewing needle sinking into her tongue, stitching a blueprint of invisible threads. His shoulders stiffened. The wind puffed his orange jacket. His expression of shame contorted. Men on the site behind them leaned in and out of impossible angles, Lego people in the dangerous house. The hot liquid he set down had spilled, leaving a small trail of coffee for the motorcycle man to rev his engine through. The sounds of hammers and drills rang from the site.

Queenie looked up at the rusted bars of scaffolding she was suddenly balancing on with a drill going into her head, the churnings of her organs catching bits of air from holes in her body. Instruments of rubble winged their way into the vast, grey sky. The wandering God began to try the hard hats of men who’d disintegrated into sawdust, knocking his head repeatedly against the window. Her weatherman faced her. His body shook. And just above the din he muttered, “Forgive me.”

He’d scribbled an address down for her near Liverpool Street he’d said, the road right after the petrol station that had the man without legs in the sign grinning maniacally, the faulty pump and the car wash at the back.

“Please excuse my living circumstances. I never wanted you to find me this way,” he’d said.

It was strange hearing the formality in his voice before the setting of a building site. Her father, the great Peter Lowon she’d built up in her mind for years was an ordinary man after all, who seemed vulnerable and ashamed ready to collapse under the weight of it all, bits of him lost in the very rubble he’d created with his own hands.

“How have you been?” He asked, such a simple question. Standing there amongst the swirling human traffic, fingers numbing from the cold, Queenie wanted to tell him her answer was a rumbling earthquake, moss over her insides. At the back of her mind, she knew she needed to gather the contents of her bag from whatever corners they’d landed. She was shocked, angry and sad. The crumpled paper he’d handed her turned between them like a bolt. She looked at the neat, slanted handwriting for some inkling of how he’d been and who he’d become. Her mouth opened to speak but all at once the paper was burning another entry into her. And all at once, its contents of ink bomb and blood wrestled to call her body home.

The house he lived in was a shared address. When he answered the door that evening she couldn’t hear a thing from the other occupants. There was only the light from a kitchen down the hallway beckoning and inside the sound of the fridge groaning. He wore a stained white vest and rocked unsteadily in the doorway, reeking of alcohol. His eyes were bloodshot. “Come up,” he slurred. He saluted comically, stepped aside to let her in. Queenie brought a blast of cold air in, rubbing her hands uncertainly. “I can come back,” she said, slowly becoming aware of a tension she couldn’t yet identify.

“No, no, no. Not this time Felicia,” he said, already stepping on the bare staircase to lead the way. A single black and white poster of Laurel and Hardy hung on the wall, curling up at the edge. It was only after passing those same heavy, black work boots caked in cement at the foot of the stairs, it dawned on her he’d called her by her mother’s name. In the bedroom, the walls were unpainted, clothes were piled on a single rickety chair and the cheap looking double bed was unmade. An empty bottle of gin rolled into a corner. A dilapidated wardrobe sat miserably in the far left end.

It smelled of sweat and decay. He shut the door behind them. Queenie sat on the bed; her eyes darted around the room. He sat beside her and grabbed her arms as if the moment he had been waiting for had finally arrived. “I need to tell you something. I need you to listen to me Felicia. I killed a man, years ago in the army. I helped kill an innocent man. You don’t know the things I’ve seen… done.”

Queenie stood, unclenching her fist. “What? I don’t want to hear this! I’m not Felicia. Tell me why you abandoned me all these years. Why can’t you give me an answer?”

“Why can’t you comfort me?” he roared. “You’re my wife. Why couldn’t you ever comfort me?”

Queenie never saw that first blow coming. It knocked her clean off her feet. Fist connected with bone resulting in a crunching sound. Blood spurted from her nose. Her head rang as she landed on the bed. She was vaguely aware of falling into the red mist of his eyes. Years later, she would block these details out; the feeling of being above herself watching the whole scene unfold as though it were someone else, one hand squeezing her throat, pinning her down, the other moving roughly between her legs. Rapid words like bullets. “You’re my wife, shut up. Shut up.” The bed creaked in a heart-crushing rhythm; hot breath marked her skin, his other face floated in the mirror and then, ultimately, the terrible weight of him, body twitching, emptying into her own.

He cried pathetically afterwards, clinging to the hemline of her skirt as she crawled out on all fours, her face throbbing and swelling, the footsteps of her childhood self, running over some thinly shingled roof, chasing a swing in a storm.

Outside her eyes stung. She walked along the street, the ache in her head worse than a migraine. She passed the petrol station. The man without legs from the sign was balancing on a gin bottle repeatedly rolling into corners. For a moment, she considered stopping at the station, sticking a nozzle in her mouth, filling her insides with petrol before setting herself alight. Instead she walked on. Earlier scenes became part of the edges of the night. She tried to still her trembling body as she stumbled into the fractured face from the mirror.

Two months later, she took a pregnancy test. The line was strong. She cried into it. And the monks from the market throng danced around watery blue lines wearing dog heads, hiding lips smeared in crushed red lipstick.

Session

Dr Krull had a new paperweight on his desk. This time the woman from the reception painting was inside, catching small organs amidst snow. I shook it, watching the snow swirl, smelling pine in the air. His desk was clear except for two files. He was dressed in his usual attire of corduroy pants, on this occasion, nut brown teamed with a blue pinstriped shirt. Casually, he uncrossed his legs. “I’m glad you came today Joy. I know it’s been a tough period for you but it’s important we continue with our sessions.”

I set the paperweight down, still somewhat embarrassed that he had to see me this way, battered and somehow incomplete.

“Why do I have to keep coming here? It’s…” I struggled before finding the right words, “humiliating. I’m not getting better from any of this! All you people do is medicate me and send me home.” My voice raised a couple of octaves, I adjusted in my seat, noticing the photograph on the desk of him and his wife was gone. A part of me was happy at the idea of somebody as together as Dr Krull potentially having marital problems. This was wrong but I didn’t care.

Coolly he said, “I get that you’re angry and that’s okay. You have a lot to be upset about. That’s why we have this space so we can talk about things. Medication alone isn’t enough. We need a combined approach to help get you better.”

“You just want to keep tabs on me!” I spat. “So you can use it against me. Somebody else already watches everything I do.”

He took a sip from a cup of tea on the small table between us before setting it down.

“Tell me who’s watching. Is it a threatening presence, a friendly presence? You can trust me Joy.”

Anon appeared on the arm of his chair, there was a hole in her stomach and the sound of water sliding down a drain. I closed my eyes, blinking the image away, sensing the bulbs of sweat on my skin.

“Why? So you can section me?”

“Nobody’s going to section you. How is your arm?” he asked, adjusting his glasses, the flecks of gold in his eyes seemed more prominent.

“My stump you mean? Sometimes the ache for that arm is so bad, it becomes physical. When it does, I stick my stump in the freezer to numb it.”

He digested my response quietly for several moments. “Joy I’d like to try something and I want you to trust me okay? I want you to close your eyes and relax. Can you do that for me?”

I nodded warily, sinking back into my chair. I shut my eyes, listening to the rhythm of my breathing for several minutes, allowing my limbs to loosen.

Dr Krull’s voice was warm and reassuring. “I want you to take me to your earliest memory of swallowing stones. Take me to the space. Where are you?”

“I’m in a bathroom with a blue floor the colour of the sea.” I murmured.

“Tell me what’s in the room.” His voice, seeming to be coming from some distance was an anchor.

“There’s a purple towel on the rack with mud on it, a jar of pebbles on the floor. The tap’s running.”

“What else? What can you hear?” His tone was gentle yet firm.

“Um… uh, the television downstairs. The bathroom door is open. I can hear a New York accent. It’s… Tom and Jerry I think.”

“Go on,” he urged. “You’re doing well. What else is in that bathroom?”

“The tap is on full blast in the sink. There’s an empty bottle of medication beside the tap, white pills in the sink. I can smell something strong, like… a cleaning product. Bleach! It’s overpowering.”

“Who’s in the room with you?”

“My mother. She’s-…”

“Good. What is she doing?” he asked.

My breaths were coming rapidly. The chair became a vehicle transporting me to the past, a long buried memory. My mouth went dry. “She’s sitting on the toilet seat, crying and watching me in the bath, mumbling something. Sorry, sorry she’s saying. She gets up, walks towards me. There’s a brightly coloured woven bracelet on her left wrist. I’m-…”

“Go on. Keep showing me what’s in the room. Remember, you’re alright. Nothing can happen to you now,” Dr Krull encouraged patiently. “Stay relaxed. Carry on. Now what’s she doing?”

My body began to shake. “I’m singing in the bath. My eyes are closed. I open them. She’s standing over me. She’s pushing my shoulders down. She’s shoving my head under water. Her hands are holding my head down. I can’t breathe! I can feel the water up my nose, my arms flailing. My legs are kicking but she’s strong. Oh God, I can’t breathe. I can’t scream. Everything’s shrinking, becoming tiny, like I’m falling through static. I can’t hear the water anymore. I can’t hear anything. Something, somebody pulls her off me, my body is slack, I try to lift my legs but I fall from the bath. I don’t feel the landing. The pebbles are scattered all over the floor, rolling into my eyes. How could I know they would follow me into the future?”

A choking feeling spreads in my throat. Dr Krull stood up. Sound was coming back slowly.

He took a few paces then said. “Why do you think your mother tried to kill you? Why do you think you buried this memory for so long?”

I opened my eyes. Tears ran down my cheeks. “I don’t know. I don’t know!” I roared, “Maybe she didn’t love me. She was always… melancholy. Maybe that was my fault somehow.”

He sat on the edge of his desk. “No. It wasn’t your fault. It’s never the child’s fault.” His mouth was a grim line. For once, his neutral expressions had vanished.

My body continued to tremble. Something had uprooted from my gut and was making its way towards the centre, causing splinters of pain like nails being hammered to my chest. I stood abruptly, knocking the paperweight. And the woman from the painting lay sideways in the snow, arms outstretched, reaching for something beyond her confinement.

In the days that followed, bits of a memory came back to me, a fog lifting from scenes I’d buried. The night I lost my arm Rangi and I had argued. I’d gone into his car to borrow a torch. The boiler had been playing up; making unhealthy chugging noises and the hot water ran cold. I remembered walking to the car, tucked behind a hearse with the words MH and Sons emblazoned on the side in peeling gold lettering. The cold air made me shiver. My slippers snapped against the pavement and the dewy shoots of grass sprang up randomly. I was rummaging in the glove compartment when I found them, the photographs, hidden behind a folded map of the Andes.

I spread the pictures on the driver’s seat. My eyes stung. Winter chill from my lips became smog in the corners of the pictures. Straight away I knew these women were prostitutes, working girls shot in cars. I could tell from the bleakness in their gazes, secret half smiles lifting the corners of their mouths, a tiny black skirt riding upwards to meet a bought silence. These were women photographed in different cities around the world, a pair of naked pale breasts jutting, bathed in moonlight, long white beads encased in stockings, full buttocks against the wheel, bruises on an elegant neck angled defiantly away from the lens. Windscreen wipers in their mouths punctuated the language of the multi-limbed invisible thing sharing their strides, secret things that exited through the corners of frames, holding streetlight, smoke and other instruments of the night. The women were different races, dark haired, dark-eyed. I searched for the common thread. Their faces blurred, becoming one broken headlight. I carried their tears on my tongue, bits of a ceiling crumbled into their frozen movements.

I headed back inside. Cold, dead air followed. The door was on latch. Anger rushed through my veins like molten lava. I remembered screaming, flinging the brass head at him, missing by inches. Then his hands were at my throat, squeezing.

“Shut up!” he snapped. “Shut up or I’ll finish you.” His eyes were raging, twisted.

I don’t know you, I thought. I only know what you wanted to show me.

I clawed at his face, scratching.

“You bitch!” he yelled, flinging me off him. And it was as if falling from a great height. The air left my body. Panic came. He began to kick me repeatedly on the stomach, grunting in the process. A carton of orange juice toppled, spilling over a slipper, which had broken during the scuffle. I’d have to get a new pair. He snarled above me, landing a backhand that knocked me sideways. I held my stomach, cowering by the table leg. The pain was agonizing, as though he’d kicked each organ in my stomach individually.

“What are you going to do about it?” he taunted. “What the fuck can you do?” He watched me struggling to move my body forward. Blood trickled into the hundred silences in my mouth. He searched my face, looking for the pig’s features he thought were rearing up again, the snout winging its way into the gap. His right arm twitched at his side. A shooting pain cracked my head open. He left me struggling to breathe, footsteps fading away. The panic was overwhelming. I lay there, thinking maybe he had been the smoking gun in the farm owner’s bed in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the painter in Mexico paid for his love in currencies other than cash. Maybe the pig he’d killed as a boy continued to have human guises. I tasted its blood on my tongue. I thought of Rangi the drifter, the shaman, the night in those photographs of red light women, stealing moments from them; a ring, a lock of hair, a last rite. I imagined him leaving those items in a passenger seat, the pig’s snout turning between them. I passed out. When I came to, Anon stood above me, touching my skin with cold hands, leading me outside.

I caught up with Mervyn in Harlesden at a community project he volunteered for on Wednesday evenings. A former sports centre, the faded brown building looked abandoned except for the orbs of light morphing into shapes behind the smoggy windows. It hosted pop-up comic book fairs, knitting workshops, treasure hunting days and music gigs. He was playing chess in the small sports hall when I arrived. Cross-legged, he moved a piece three squares up to the centre poker faced; he glanced at his opponent, a spotty kid stroking his chin dramatically. Reggae music played softly in the background, Peter Tosh crooning defiantly. At the far corner, a couple of kids were kicking soft a yellow ball over a damaged badminton net grazing the ground. A cluster of teenage girls wearing brightly coloured leotards was hoola hooping, throwing their bodies into the swing of the hoops. I didn’t know why I’d run from the station but I felt wired. My chest was burning and my heartbeat quickened expectantly.

“I need to talk to you,” I said by way of greeting. Squeals from the other end interrupted my train of thought. A bunch of other teenagers trudged in carrying chocolates from a vending machine somewhere in the building that spat out multi-flavoured delights at the jangle of coins.

Mervyn unfolded his legs, half-smiled at the boy apologetically. “Give me a moment yeah? Joy this is Delroy, our reigning chess champ and mathematical problem solver.” He laughed heartily but a fleeting look of worry crossed his face. I nodded at the kid, whose retro high top fade made me think of De La Soul and sleeper summer anthems. Mervyn grabbed his Queen. “I’m superstitious about leaving her unattended,” he joked, pocketing it then leading the way.

The building was a maze; hubs sprang up from every corner. In the hallway, we passed a series of spaces including a snooker room and a storage area. Unpainted walls added to the rustic feel. We followed the low lit route right to the end and out into the garden area, where misty eyed gargoyle statues wearing comic expressions dotted the green, stirring their tails in any bits of conversation that filtered through. The air between us crackled. He stood only a few feet from me but I could feel the tension in his large frame.

“Tell me the truth,” I said urgently. “Are you ashamed of me?” My voice cracked a little, I berated myself internally, trying to hold back tears.

“What?” The hand rummaging in his pocket stilled. “Why would you ever think that?” Car horns sounded in the distance, leaves blew across the green. I stepped closer, watching his face for the tiniest flicker of betrayal. “Because you’ve been lying to me for years! You were using my mother and when you knocked her up, you continued to live your double life without any responsibility. God! I feel sick; your sons are my friends. Don’t they suspect you’re not who you say you are?”

The Queen was out in the open again, turning in his hand, small and pale in the moonlight. His face etched in pain, he rubbed his baldhead wearily. “It wasn’t like that Joy. I loved your mother. She was a troubled, complex woman but I loved her. I knew this day would come and I’ve dreaded it. It’s just like her to leave me to deal with this.”

“Why are you trying to absolve yourself of any responsibility?” I cried, holding the sadness between us, the pangs of rejection I felt.

“I’m not your father. I wish I was, Lord knows I do but I’m not.” It was said so quietly I almost missed it. This was how a ten-foot truck could hit you without sound or warning. I was close enough to see his watery eyes, the regret there. I peeled the dented truck bender off my body, raised it above our heads. “You’re lying!” I accused, pointing a shaky finger. “Otherwise why stay around us all these years? It never made sense to me before but now it does. The secret phone calls, those pictures I found, gifts I wasn’t meant to see. That was all you.”

He threw his arms up, the red tie he wore fluttered. “I admit it, I’m not perfect. We don’t always stay in love with the same people. I loved my wife. I had a responsibility to the boys. I thought about leaving her but I couldn’t in the end. Your mother and I were friends at first. I- by the time we became lovers, it seemed best to keep things as they were.”

“How convenient for you.” I spat, walking back and forth between two gargoyles.

“Tell me who he is. I have a right to know. I know you know something.”

He looked down to the ground, the sadness in his face so palpable even the gargoyles concrete expressions may have changed slightly. “Your mother was raped. Your grandfather is your father. She went to see him and… I don’t think he was himself.”

“That’s not true!” I replied but horror was building inside me. That feeling of seeing something awful and being unable to look away. Pain shot through my stump, the taste of nausea filled my mouth. I ran to the side, vomiting into a hedge. Suddenly, certain things made sense; my mother sleeping in the afternoons, her emotional distance from me sometimes, the lies she told to save us from the truth.

Tears ran down Mervyn’s cheeks. His eyes filled again as he turned the chess Queen in his hand. His chest swelled as though a river of sadness would split it open and carry us both away. I trembled watching the look of despair on his face, the pain there. I felt sick seeing Anon appear between the gargoyles, reaching into their mouths to skim her hands over the secrets they knew. Something inside me seemed to be realigning, travelling somehow. A searing pain shot through my head, then my chest. The gargoyles turned their heads, hissing into the dark.

Mervyn placed one hand on my shoulder, gently raised me up.

A part of me was dying from the shame, another crumbling from the weight of it.

I couldn’t look him in the eye. I felt like nothing, a tiny speck under a shoe.

“Leave me alone,” I mumbled, pulling away. I couldn’t thank him for saving my life, for stopping my mother from drowning me. I stumbled through the hallway, deformed again in the light, blinded by tears. Bath water ran down the walls, its sloshing sound slipping through the plughole, filling my chest.

Outside my legs buckled in the night. I left the pale chess Queen crying in Mervyn’s pocket and the gargoyles holding bits of a battered chessboard chased the small openings on me, widening in the cold air.

Echo, Belly and the Rubik’s Cube

When I arrived at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos I couldn’t bring myself to call Mervyn yet. I knew we needed to talk but I was still hurt and confused about being a hidden thing. Peter Lowon’s diary sat in my handbag. Outside, the driver of a yellow taxicab between mouthfuls of pineapple slices informed me the drive to Benin was long. I thought of my mother Queen. I imagined she took Peter Lowon’s diary and the brass head all the way from Africa to London, her only connections to the father whose footsteps she trailed as a little girl. I imagined she read the diary from cover to cover many times, knew it like the back of her hand; that when she passed her first school exams, she ran home to it and heaved bittersweet breaths of success over its pages. That she studied his scrawl and doodles, imitated them. And after she kissed the first boy who whispered chewing gum flavoured nothings in her ear and turned out to be completely useless, she weighed it in her hands and eyed it with resentment. He cursed her by leaving her that legacy. It was the curse of the broken-hearted, the way that only a father can.

Weirdly, I remembered it then: the black and white photograph from the diary. I fished it out, held it at the corner and stared at the faces, the creases. It hit me, I recognised him. Peter Lowon was the man from the café scene that trespassed regularly in my head, the one where I always struggled to hear what was said, the man who was both father and grandfather to me. He was out there, somewhere. I had met him once before. It was a memory after all, a fallen snowflake becoming a tear.

Peter Lowon Journal Entry July 1964

Dear Queenie,

I am a killer. I am a coward. I am your father.

If you find this, then you know I have gone. I was brought to this place and feared this day. The day you know what I have done. Please keep this diary, here are honest pieces of me I can offer you, hold them up to the light. I want to apologise for bringing shame on my family. I cannot make amends; I can only say that sometimes people do desperate things, terrible things. I ask for forgiveness. Queenie there are no good or bad people don’t let anyone tell you this, these lines are blurred daily. The bad we often see in others, we recognise in ourselves, bouncing off our own hand made mirrors. We are all flawed people trying to make our way. Should you choose to find me one day, I am out there waiting.

Tell your mother I’ve always loved her and I’m sorry for being the man she suspected I was. There is no blade to cut my weakness away, no shot to numb the darkness out. Would you believe me if I told you I am a prisoner of myself? I wish so much more for you. Queenie, you are me and I am you. This is the one thing I see with so much clarity; through you I was born twice. One day you will have your own child, and you will know a joy no words can describe, no mathematical equation can depict. It is pure, purer than water, purer than air, injections of life into the blood. And you will make mistakes too! Queenie I am in pain, the kind of pain that makes you run inside to bleed on your carpet privately. I worry that one day you will forget what I look like. I worry you will see me in the faces of strangers. See the black and white picture inside this journal? I am the one on the left laughing. In case you find yourself forgetting: THE ONE ON THE LEFT. Please keep it with you.

With you I laughed. I worry about other things too: that your mother will grow old hating me, that she will count her grey hairs and hold me responsible for each one. I worry you may marry a man like me, that life will beat the importance of knowing yourself out of you. I fear your anger and emptiness within you long after you have stopped calling for me. I have cheated you and myself.

I no longer have the strength to be mad because it has been sapped by a tree sprouting roots somewhere. Wherever I am I will be running from myself. Imagine no day without night, night without the day; there is no end to this. It is an empty well running through the homes of underground creatures we never see, a tunnel through the chests of farmers toiling the land, it is the hidden void where our dreams pile up like dead bodies. It leads back to me. As for the brass head, please get rid of it. Give it to a beggar man to sell, throw it in a river or gutter. I should never have brought it into my house; if you keep it you will bear the burden of the cursed and pay in a currency not found on earth.

Today is so ordinary Queenie. You are playing by the outside tap, counting coins for your bank by the white sugar cube wall. It is the worst day of my life. It is the last time I will see you throw your arms up so trustingly to me, or hold a terrible crayon colour drawing that I will say is perfect because it is. Or attempt to measure your laugh, something that cannot be done. You cannot tell that tomorrow your world will be different. Right now the mayguard is lazily swatting flies from his face, no longer pretending to do his job. The house girl is peeling yams in the kitchen. Aunty Eunice is hanging clothes on the washing line, a yellow vein shot through the sky, which is throbbing, swelling with lost years to come. Your mother is standing at my shoulder. Life carries on, Queenie. When you have ceased asking questions and my name has turned to dust in your mouth know that:

I am the father whose feet you danced on, I am a million broken stars at your fingertips, I am the night sky’s discarded brother, I am a blanket made of rain. I am the conscience searching for your footsteps; I am the Harmattan wind whispering secrets that will fall into the foamy hem of the sea and wash up on the beaches of other countries as rough pebbles and hollow seashells.

I am beating.

I am

I-

Benin

My guide Nosa didn’t talk much but when he did, he made it count. He seemed to be casually efficient with everything; expressions, explanations, even arguments. Illustrated by his curt dismissal of a driver he’d cut across earlier in traffic, swatting the irate man away like a mosquito. It was sweltering; the heat made my skin clammy and my white, cotton blouse clung to me. Anon and I sat side by side in the back seat, restless from the hot material, woozy due to the occasional jostling and headiness of being in Africa. Our palms grazed ancestor’s heartbeats.

Dust swirled into the scenes around us; the long stretch of granite strip twisting like a concrete snake in the heat, its offshoots holding items of luggage for passengers yet to collect them. Bike riders swerved in between vehicles, car horns blared loudly as the traffic continued to build. Buses and vans blocked each other off in the rising din. In the car side mirrors, barefoot children sporting adult mouths sold bottled water, groundnuts, plantain crisps, and bread. Mothers carrying babies tied to their backs listened to their adult tongues pressed against the hollows of their spines. We passed the odd huge billboard now and again.

The brass head was stashed on the floor between my legs, at the bottom of a black bag, the rustling of a British Airways tag its only companion. I watched Nosa’s hands on the wheel, the lines of scarring across his knuckles and chest. A young girl chasing our car tried to sell me stones I’d already swallowed, rough and warm, they turned in her hand. When she shoved them in her pocket, they became new beginnings falling against humps in the road.

Nosa adjusted the rear-view mirror, throwing a quick glance my way. “Are you alright? We can stop if you need to be sick.”

“No, let’s keep going. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, even if we get there by evening. Carry on,” I instructed. Anon sat quietly, scrawling the name Adesua in the dust on the window. The flying plastic man Nosa had tied to the rear-view mirror spoke to us in our mother tongue.

Nosa’s long, elegant fingers gripped the wheel as if it was an instrument. His dimples deepened as he waved over a heavy set, big bosomed woman he knew. He bought a calling card from her. She thanked him, popping her gum, flirting and calling him a gentleman. We stopped for gas. I watched him from sly lids filling up our black Vauxhall Cavalier that had seen better days; his lean, handsome face broke into the contained expressions I was getting used to. He mopped his forehead with a white handkerchief, tucked it into his pocket, whistling as he angled the pump deep into the petrol slot.

“Do you think we could stop by a 7-Eleven at some point?” I asked, blocking the light hitting me with a hand over my eyes, acutely aware my English accent sounded even stronger in these surroundings. He laughed, features transformed in amusement.

“This isn’t London. We don’t have 7-Elevens and shops every twenty minutes. Why can’t you get what you need here?”

“They don’t have what I need here,” I replied, fidgeting in my seat, refusing to confide that the warning pains of my period had hit my stomach that I was worried I’d bleed on his seats.

Instead, I asked, “How did you get those scars on your chest?”

“Oh that,” he said nonchalantly. “Armed robbers cut me there and in my stomach on this route one night, left me for dead.”

I wanted to ask what an Economics major was doing hauling passengers back and forth over a route that had nearly killed him but I didn’t. Instead, I watched the map Anon drew on the window fading a little, as the day got darker.

Clay

It was her dead babies that led Filo out of the palace. She’d been feeding the chickens on the grounds when she stopped midway, yellow grains spilling from her palms into the mouths of her children, who’d gathered around her in a semi circle. The chickens went silent. Her babies began to cluck. Filo understood their new language. This was what Kalu the medicine man had promised her. Watch for your children, they will come back to you. They will lead you to your future, he professed, laughing in the rainwater that fell over their naked bodies.

Kalu had been her secret companion since the day she’d found him in that clearing in the forest, half-starved and clutching a handful of white bones to his chest. After she nursed him back to full health, they continued to meet away from the watchful eyes of the palace and planned the unravelling of the Oba, the king who had cheated them both. It was Kalu that helped her call the spirits of the previous kings. And it was Kalu who told her what was deemed to be her weakness was actually her greatest strength. Nobody would suspect the mad wife of setting the wheels in motion, of turning them with a sure finger. Filo sent her babies to cause the very thing her Oba had mocked her for.

At night she slept in her quarters rubbing her stomach, watching it grow, pregnant with the silent silhouettes of her children. She called to them, clucking her tongue and chasing their lost features in the night air. She and Kalu built their likenesses from clay, painting their mouths blood red, giving them white bones to hold as they were dispatched all over the palace, a quiet, invisible army dogging the Oba’s footsteps, toying with his perception, shattering in his vision.

That bright day at the palace, her babies came back to her, glorious in the light, speaking the tongue she’d taught them. They ate from her hands, led her past the swirling activities, past the guards they’d left temporarily blind and into the waiting arms of the day, touching the promises of the future.

And so the small procession of dead babies continued to cluck on the long, dusty trails they followed, telling Filo about the parts they’d played in the fall of a kingdom, changing into their chicken guises when Kalu’s whistles became warning winds.

Benin

“How far are we now?” I asked, pushing snapping branches away from my face.

My armpits were damp and the ache in my stomach had only intensified over the lengthy walk we’d had across seemingly acres of, rough, sprawling terrain. Two jagged people the Gods had carved in a hurry, crossing dense, wild forests that threatened to swallow us. We’d left the car parked on a thirsty, empty stretch of road. The small plastic man Nosa jokingly named Baba dangled from the rear-view mirror knocking against his reflection after I’d spun him one last time. A faulty water pump by our parking spot had given me nothing but hot air.

“Nearly there.” Nosa answered, talking through a stick of sugar cane. His long strides ate up the ground. He carried a shovel in his left hand as if it weighed nothing. The thwack thwack of the cutlass in his right hand cut a path for us. “The ground’s changing, this is royal land,” he said, slowing down a little for me to catch up.

The black bag slung over my shoulder bobbed against my side. Since the accident, most people either acted awkwardly or didn’t quite know where to look. Not Nosa though. “What happened to you, lion fighting?” he’d commented that first time I’d met him playing cards outside the Western Union stand by the bus depot. And somehow his lack of concern at offending me was refreshing.

Nightfall arrived. A flock of birds shaped like a plane’s wing flew ahead, calling out to their two-legged relatives. I knew when we got there because the air changed. It was thicker somehow. Dead kings had drained all the water pumps, which hissed in the heat. Nosa fished a torch from his pocket. Anon began to lead the way. She guided us to the gutted terracotta palace, glimmering in the night. The hairs on my neck stood to attention. We passed through old ghosts wandering the grounds, touching walls that resurrected under our curious fingers. Anon took us past the palace walls, past its chattering rooftops, waiting to tumble into the vast sky. We trudged deep into the dark, into a clearing in a hidden forest. Anon began to dance and cry over the land, her feet softening the soil. I knew then that she was dancing over her grave.

I fell to my knees, digging beneath her footsteps. Nosa had lost his sugarcane stick to a lonely ghost who was using it as an instrument, playing a melancholy tune into the lost kingdom. He followed suit, sinking the shovel into the ground. My hand grew bolder in the soil. We dug until my fingers ached and the past scenes from the palace became tiny broken objects in my peripheral vision. We buried the brass head deep in the ground. When we came up for air, Anon had stopped crying and was offering her limbs to the torchlight.

For the first few weeks, I slept like a baby. I felt human again. I’d gotten a one-way ticket so took my time rambling about. Sometimes in the early afternoon, I’d walk up to the local bus depot; weave my way between the vans and street vendors brandishing magician’s tongues, darting around in every direction, unwittingly chasing the journeys of hands at the wheel. I’d catch a bus to one of several bustling markets. There, I’d barter with sellers to buy material and small wooden figurines I didn’t need. I’d stand at the edges listening to the din, pidgin in the punishing heat, sandals covered in dust, waiting for my mother’s tongue to migrate into the noise, bending in the light; moist with all the half-truths she’d told me.

I learned how to make goat pepper soup from Mama Carol who ran the boarding house I was staying at, a ramshackle white building where clusters of mosquitoes shaped like small countries sang on the netted, peeling green door before dying mid-conversation. I attempted to make the soup one day, but the goat’s head pressed its mouth into the gap, telling me the stones in Africa tasted different. Sometimes, on his way back from a run, Nosa would stop by. We’d sit out in the breeze drinking palm wine, discussing the house he wanted to build and how he found himself visiting the scene of his near-death, collecting his organs again and again as if they were passengers. We’d watch the scrawny local dog chasing its tail in front of other houses, before dragging random things to the side of the road.

I accidentally got a job helping the local tailor. It started when I sought advice about making items from the materials I’d bought. She let me use her back room. I began making curious things; small market scenes, interactions of people I’d spotted in the day, headless creatures stumbling towards a sun. It became a kind of therapy, producing objects in the hot back room with the fan blowing on my skin. And the yellow and black butterfly fish swam in the window as though it would survive in any surface. News spread. In town, people started to call me the one armed wonder.

London seemed a world away.

On the last day of my first month, I phoned Mervyn from a call centre. I told him that sometimes, when the electricity stopped, I traced the things I’d built to the sound of the generator, that those small figures with unfinished stories carried them into the dust. He didn’t laugh. Instead he said I’m glad you called, you’re like a daughter to me. I’m happy you’re okay. Call again sometime. Let me know when you’re ready to come home.

In the evening, I tucked a leather bound book under my arm, dragged a small stool out to the front of the boarding house. I got comfortable cutting old newspaper clippings; drinking cold bitter lemon and watching car headlights become spotlights for things in the dark.

At first I thought it was a trick of the light when I spotted it but the scrawny street dog stood on its hind legs barking, and then retreated back in alarm. It appeared in a trail of exhaust pipe smoke from a black jeep groaning past. A clay baby stumbled in the middle of the road, clucking then mumbling about the kingdom, clucking then spilling yellow grains out of its mouth, holding the blue flame from my kerosene lantern.

Its gaze was fixed in the distance, at the sprawling, dense lands beyond, where the terracotta kingdom once glimmered. It’s small chest rose and fell as we shared the night’s heartbeat. Transfixed, my eyes followed it all the way down to the end of the street, till it disappeared from my vision, shattering in the white. I waited for it’s clucking once again but the small chasm in the air closed and the crickets wanted to be heard.

I rocked back on my heels, listening for the dog on the tin roof next door to make it’s way back to the blue flame. I thought of Anon losing her limbs, her mouth now silent in my hand. On the plot of land tucked behind the boarding house, right arms grew in soft soil, rising amidst yams, cassava, bitter leaf, waiting to bend in the afternoon light, catching fragments of their various lives. I listened for the ripple a butterfly fish made in glass. I held my father’s diary, stroked the warm leather. Grappling with his legacy, I opened the pages and sat under water, waiting to begin again.

THE END