For Emma
Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a . . . divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, Laugh of the Medusa
Bird-bodied, girl-faced things they are; abominable their droppings, their hands are talons, their faces haggard with hunger insatiable
VIRGIL, Aeneid
It is the last time. He lies down, a warm night, his shirt pulled up, his head turned away. It is the kind of evening that used to make me want to fly through the sky, the kind that makes you believe it will never get dark.
Neighbours are having barbeques: the smell of the meat – sweet and homely – moves across his face. Downstairs our children are in their beds, dreaming through the hours, their doors closed, the late light blocked by their curtains.
We have agreed on a small nick, his upper thigh, a place that will be behind jeans, under shirts. A place of thick flesh, solid bone, almost no hair. A smooth place, waiting.
Jake is not squeamish: he is like a man expecting a tattoo. His hair is getting long, curling over the nape of his neck. His eyes are closed: not screwed shut, just closed, like a skilful child pretending to be asleep.
•
They were colleagues, then friends, and at first I suspected nothing. There were long emails, glimpses appearing on his phone, apparitions. The virgin blue of his notification light in the darkness. Nights where we couldn’t watch TV, because she was calling. Nights I went to bed early, enjoyed the whole bed to myself.
If I went in there – to get something, or turn a light off – I heard his voice sounding different. Not romantic, or gentle, just on show. His outside voice, the one he used with postmen, salesmen, people from work. I thought that was a good sign.
•
I lift the razor up – I have sterilized it, carefully, watching YouTube instructions – and rest it against his skin. I press down, very gently, and then with slightly more force.
•
Jake’s skin was one of the first things I noticed when we met. It was like the skin of a young boy – he was a young boy – someone milk-fed, comfort-raised. Someone who wore large, voluminous boxer shorts. Who slept silently, on his side. Who had a blond head of curls, like an angel. Even his eyelashes were curly. Tears used to get caught in them when we argued. On his stomach, his skin was hairless and as soft as a woman’s. The first time we went to bed, I kissed it.
•
I confronted him once, late at night, in my pyjamas, leaning against the fridge.
Do you want to sleep with her? I asked him. I think it’s best if we’re just really clear about this.
He laughed. I wish you’d get to know her, he said. She’s— He paused, the silence standing in for dullness, advanced age, sour breath.
She’s married, he said, finally. He looked at me, almost kindly. We didn’t touch.
•
I lift the razor and a fairy-tale drop of blood escapes from under the silver. The colours are the brightest I have ever seen: stark and cartoon-like, white skin and sea-blue shirt and dark red, rolling and seeking. He doesn’t make a sound.
I
~
I wonder if people would believe me if I said I have never been a violent person. I have never held an animal’s neck warm in my elbow and cricked the life from it. I have never been one of those women who dreams of smothering her children when they are naughty, who catches the image tracking through her mind like a fast-moving train.
I have never forced myself on anyone, reached into their clothes and tried to milk love from a body. None of that.
Even as a child, I remember the seeping feeling that guilt had, when I tipped my finger over an insect, and another one, and another one. I watched the universe blink, from life to death, flash over as they said a nuclear bomb would. I saw what my finger could do, and I stopped it.
~
1
It happened on a Friday, the boys in their last rhythm of the week, me trying to stay steady for them, a ship in dock, something you could hardly see the end of. I picked them up from school, administering snacks, absorbing shreds of their days, the wrappers from their sweets. It was almost midwinter: the sun was setting as we walked home, dying down against the playing field at the back of our house. Birds flew away from us, crayoned lines across the colours.
Back then, I was always hearing flocks of geese over our roof, feeling as if I lived on a marsh instead of at the edge of a small, rich town. I would close my eyes and feel it: the green ooze of the earth’s water, rising through my skin.
~
If anyone ever finds out, I know what they will conclude: I am an awful person. I am an awful person, and they – the finder – are a good person. A kind, large-hearted, pleasant person. Attractive, with a nice smell. This person – this woman, perhaps – would never do the things that I have done. She would never even try.
~
2
The boys were happy that day; there were no dramas, no small children lying in the middle of the road.
When they were younger, I was constantly picking them up from the pavement, facing the possibility that I would be stuck on the journey for a minute more, an hour more. A week. The eldest, Paddy, never got over the birth of his brother, and when he was younger he raged daily, making it seem as though we would be stuck in that moment forever.
Just before I found out, I had started to feel that the children were creatures I’d released from a cage. They were suddenly free, agile beings, looping around me. Paddy, especially, had a new internal quiet that I had come to recognize as a self, thoughts that were beginning to form dense and mysterious places, whole worlds I would never know about.
That afternoon he was being kind to his little brother, his gentleness a relief like a blessing, Ted so keen at every moment to stay in his good light, the almost mystical clearness of it, like sunshine at the bottom of a swimming pool. They were collecting sticks, fir cones; Ted had rolled up the bottom of his school jumper, was placing them in the bunched material, his little fingers pink with cold.
Put your gloves on! After seven years the phrases had long become empty, but I still used them. It seemed odd, that I had to monitor the children’s discomfort, rather than simply accepting that they did not care, that they maybe even liked the sensation: flesh turned to ice, numb and tingling.
As we walked past the field, the sun was burning to death, so low that we could almost look right at it. Ted clung to me, and it was terrifying, when you thought about it: a ball of fire so close to our home.
The house had, in recent years, started to seem like a personal friend of mine, something close to a lover, a surface that had absorbed so many hours of my life, my being soaked into its walls like smoke. I could easily imagine it winking at us as we walked towards it, its windows so obviously eyes, the closed, discreet straightness of its back-door mouth. Even though I had been there all day, I looked forward to feeling it again: the calm, automated warmth of central heating, the steady presence of its walls.
When we got in, the sun’s orange light was moving to the house’s edges, up the curtains, ebbing away. The boys collapsed onto the sofa, their hands already seeking a remote. I was always liberal about television; I don’t know if I would have survived otherwise, without the children’s thoughts separated from my own, peeled away and placed in a box. When Ted was a baby and Paddy a toddler, I used to put it on for hours in the afternoon, the little jingles joining my heartbeat, becoming part of me. Even years later, when I heard the music of the programmes Paddy liked back then, it seemed sinister. You are a bad mother, sang the talking monkeys, the purple giraffes. You have fucked it aaaaaa-ll up.