Fragile Animals, page 14
The pain in my belly stopped twisting and instead turned stiff like a rock. In fact, all of my organs had turned to rocks. I waited, pinned to the ground by their heaviness, for Her reaction.
‘I know. It’s none of her business. The fucking nerve. She asked me if I wanted to know what Noelle had said. She told me it was terribly illicit. I told her of course I didn’t want to hear what she said. Whatever was said in confession is between Noelle and God, it’s of no interest to me and should be of no interest to Janine fucking Beattie. What was she trying to imply? And why was he telling her that? Over a polite cup of tea? Did they go out together? It’s inappropriate, totally inappropriate! But now her true cards. The woman is vile. She’s a Bitch.’
I was stunned in a way that my body couldn’t handle. Beneath the table I gagged with forced silence and held the thin liquid in my mouth. Bitter acid. I swallowed the sick back deep when I was sure She hadn’t heard me. Evil petrified burp. Rapid thoughts of eternal damnation.
Her conversation trailed into an exchange of reactions and validations. No more details were shared and that was probably just as well. Eventually She put down the phone and left to do other things. Yet I remained there quiet as dust.
I recognised that Her words could be perceived as protective. On the surface, She sounded like She was trying to defend my invaded privacy from the predator that was Janine Beattie. But, being made of mostly of Her, I knew better. It wasn’t someone crossing me that was inappropriate, it was someone crossing Her. Encroaching on Her position as favourite disciple that She worked so hard to maintain. Though She tried hard to make it appear so, Her tone was not a maternal one, far from it – it was envy. It was defensive. She was jealous.
I crawled out from under the table before the afternoon sky curdled into night and went up to my room. I lay on my bed accepting that I would not sleep. The sea rushed on with its business, disinterested in the triviality of my wounds.
This all happened before the DVD player, and from here I began to consider what it meant to be a Bitch. A dark drop plunged through the clear water of my body and spread in tendrils until all of me was murky. I got up and stared in the mirror at my pale sickly face and wondered what could be inherited and what could not. What parts of Her had I just not yet discovered, hidden in a tangle below my surface. My hand in Her undoing seemed unavoidable even then.
All the Time
We are sitting on the step at the back door of Baywood, staring into the 4pm gloom of the bushes. Miss Fraser is inside, yelling at a crossword. Moses produces a pack of tobacco from nowhere and reveals two sleek rollies, deftly formed by taxidermist’s hands. The last cigarette I touched was the one I threw off the side of the ferry when my life slid across the water to Bute, so I feel a kind of tense relief when he opens the pack and offers me one.
‘Where have you been keeping that?’ I ask.
‘In my drawer,’ he replies.
I narrow my eyes because no he didn’t, but also because he could have been sharing all this time. Then again I guess I could have bought some, but it’s much easier to smoke around amongst friends. That way the transgression gets split, makes Jesus cry half as much.
We light our cigarettes off a kitchen match that smells like gunpowder the moment the flame strikes. The breeze is beginning to pick up and so as we exhale, we are washed in smoke.
‘Do you ever worry about Him?’ I ask.
I feel like Moses knows what I’m asking because various muscles in his face twitch just so. He still says, ‘Who?’
‘Him. You know. Big Him.’ I gesture upwards and fidget the burnt match against my thumb. ‘You’re an abomination, no?’
Moses shrugs. ‘He either isn’t real or doesn’t care.’
‘I’ve heard others say the opposite.’
‘Well, what’s he going to do about it? And why? It isn’t my fault that I’m like this. By your own logic he made me this way and so why should I go around feeling bad about it?’
I draw. Inhale once, twice. Release. ‘He could damn you to hell. Torture you. Wait until you die and then commit you to an eternity of flame.’
‘Who says I’m going to die?’
I snort. The nicotine makes my shoulders feel dizzy with gratitude. The conversation makes one part of me laugh and another take cover in the close space of my windpipe. ‘Careful. He’ll hear you.’
‘Let him.’
I shake my head. There are no white feathers on the lawn, sprouting with the grass. Nor any sign of blood or body. Does a dead swan really look like an angel? What would it have done to me had I seen it? Fallen over it and felt the wet feathers of death? And do angels really snap their necks against windows in houses with no vampires present? Who knows. I am offered no imagery other than that which my consciousness conjures. Other than the ghost that lives in the window, time has already turned its tide.
Moses kisses his cigarette, held between forefinger and thumb. ‘What could I do then? For salvation? It’s been a long time since anyone tried to save me.’
‘I’m not trying to save you,’ I say, though what else could be my motive? ‘You could repent?’
‘No.’
‘Say grace before meals?’
‘Who’s got the time when they’re hungry?’
‘It doesn’t scare you? Going around, saying the things you say?’
Moses turns to me. ‘I thought you were agnostic?’
‘You heard that?’
He leaves his cigarette in his mouth, chews on the filter while at the end the ash grows long. He makes no move to tap it and the embers fall into his lap. ‘Have you ever considered the idea that there are too many organised religions for Christianity to be logically the right one?’
‘But it might be.’ All my limbs are pressed together, thighs against thighs, arms against abdomen, hands moving from my lap to the quickly dwindling cigarette in my mouth. I try not to suck with desperation.
‘I think the real question here is – are you scared?’ Moses finishes his. He wrinkles up the stub and throws it into the garden.
I take a long desperate draw and close my eyes as my lungs pollute. I cup the dead butt in the nest of my palm and wish for it to suddenly regenerate. My body only wants to be honest.
‘All the time.’
Lovers
The winds blow hard on Scalpsie Bay, ricocheting like bullets down the alleyway between Bute and the Isle of Arran. They roar in our ears and shove us over and over, testing to see if we will give, if we will stay or crumble or open our arms and be claimed in flight like baby birds. The sea spray bursts up to kiss us and nips us with her tiny teeth. My nose goes numb from her needle touch. Moses is holding my hand.
We scavenge the ragged edges of the tumultuous water for seals. We have been sent here in earnest by Miss Fraser who wanted, after all the dread of the morning, for us to see something alive. She made us climb into the back of her baby pink Mini Cooper so she could drive here, pegging it down the winding roads at an alarming speed but otherwise driving neatly and without mistake. I liked the vibrational rumble of the engine and felt sad to have to get out without her. I tried to convince her to come with us but she said our dinner simply will not cook itself. A casserole requires labour and love.
We stepped onto the sand and shells cracked beneath our feet. The bay has only one curve and we’ve been walking up and down it. The water writhes like an animal though there are no dark heads bobbing out on the sway. The estuary is backed into a corner, every surface break a gasp for breath, every wave a terrible thrashing. It is in between these breaths that Moses and I speak. Doing what we intended and unspinning lovers, tit for tat. Bite for malnourished bite.
Brice, whose name meant Speckled but whose face was pockmarked and chapped from the hand soap he used to wash it. His kisses were wet and his hands were clinical and he wanted to film me gaping my ass.
Lorraine, who was calm and measured and gave Moses well-paced methodical head in which she did extra-ordinary things with her teeth. He met her at a garden centre, where she worked mixing organic soil. To him this seemed indicative of the immense tranquillity of her nature.
Andy, who was the middle-aged model at a life drawing class I attended for a month. He modelled wide indiscreet poses but always closed his eyes which I thought made him look quite gentle. He came up to me one evening after one long and very pelvic pose and told me he liked the way I drew his cock. Our main activities together were comparing his cock-size to various vegetables and walking around unbearable art museums.
Kim, who Moses met while doing acid at a festival in Doune. She was wearing a crotchet rainbow bra and nothing beneath it despite the Scottish summer. Her nipples pushed through the thick knit like bullets, sometimes poking between the holes of the weave. They had sex in her tent while the world turned to fractals. She forgot what he’d told her before they started tripping and kept insisting that he was a mermaid.
Gregory, who was a fan of my poems and came to all my readings and smelled consistently of vinegar. He liked me too much in a weepy way I couldn’t handle so I lied and told him I was asexual.
Mable, who was kind and sexy and smart and funny and who loved all the things he loves and whose vagina was powerful from daily Kegels, but who carried an epi-pen for a violent nut allergy and in the end was not worth having to give up peanut butter.
Oscar, who had a sweet dog and a nice family and a steady set of friends and who fucking gave me ringworm.
Daffodil, who Moses can remember no real things about other than her name.
Terrence, that sneery guy who kept topping up my drink at this one party, then bent me over the toilet once I couldn’t say my own name.
Then he tells me about Emilia. His jugular girl.
‘The one who ran the cinema,’ he says.
‘The one across your neck.’
And the one he left the crow for. Moses slows to tell the story and the wind bows a little to listen.
He talks about Emilia’s intelligence, her humour, her twice pierced ears and the almost translucent blonde of her hair, ‘pale as petals’. The way that, when they walked down a road together, they looked as though they’d been drawn to match; like night and day. Sibling-like in their thin differences, yet sharply, inscrutably lovers.
He was a touch softer, he said, but the distinction was little more than a smirk.
‘Emilia never smirked. She drank her coffee black as her humour. She kept spirits in her handbag and her handshake hurt.’
Every man describes his ‘one love’ this way.
‘I was watching a film in the cinema where she worked and she was in the seat beside me, scowling at the screen. I found out later that she was supervising the film, making sure the new projectionist was doing his job and apparently he wasn’t. The film was something pretentious and fussy with subtitles, at the time I just thought she was pulling faces because she really hated the movie. Her scoffing endeared me to her. I thought: why is this woman so angry?
‘Then she accidentally drank from my lemonade cup instead of her own – so she opened the top and spiked it to make it up for me. She was drinking dark rum that tasted of liquorice. Once the film ended she told me she’d poured too fast and that I now owed her a drink. Everything she did had charm. Or at least, I found her charming.’
Emilia’s whole life was a commitment to the cinema. She liked big, she liked intense, she liked romantic. She took Moses to parties, black tie events, raves in tunnels in the city, rooftops, fucking at 3am, 5am, 12 noon, screaming debates over the newspaper, traipsing up hills in the middle of the night to smoke weed and point at stars and declare their big grand nothings. He said it was like being a teenager, the misdirection of it all, the sheer preoccupation.
‘She worked almost all of the time, manager as she was. But when she wasn’t working, she chose to be with me. Before me she went to bars. Then I became her habit.’
‘Before you she had a life. Then what made you lose interest?’
Moses blows out his lips. ‘I didn’t lose interest. I proposed.’
The sadness in his voice gets fleecy, easily scattered by the wind. The grip of our held hands doesn’t change, so warm and stable and steady. He pours out his heart while his coarse skin tells me: don’t worry, I know I’m here with you today. Without thinking, I squeeze Moses’s palm, overcome by an urge to clutch. Moses squeezes back, but harder, and for a moment I feel that I live inside this body. Inside all of it. My skin, my blood, my bones, my mangled spirit.
I imagine what he might have proposed with: something hardy, garnets or saltwater pearls, or maybe just a band, Emilia herself taking role as the diamond. Is Moses even able to wear silver?
He goes on.
‘I spooked her, I think. I’ve had a lot of time in my life to mull over what I want, and I think it scared her that she was what I wanted. She assumed we would be fleeting. As soon as I told her my secret she considered me a disposable intensity. A great fuck, a weird experience, a few years of life. Not a boyfriend, not a partner. And truthfully, I understand why. Would I marry me, given my lifestyle of blood and cruelty, my inability to taste sunshine, my cells so stagnant in their ageing? In some ways, love is not what I’m designed for, unless it’s crucial, immense, and temporary. So I never felt angry when she quit her job and left town. Just broken-hearted because her presence made me feel mortal. All I long to know now is whether she kept my crow. He was the finest piece I ever made and very, very handsome.’
‘How long ago was that again?’ I ask quietly. Moses speaks plainly but his words are full of tragedy that my mood quickly leeches and absorbs.
‘Five years,’ he says, then lets my hand fall, arms stretching against the blow of the wind. Without his touch I feel imbalanced, wondering why no one has ever loved me like that. I shove my hands into my armpits, suddenly feeling the ice of November. Absolutely certain I will soon get sick. There’s only so much time a body can spend shivering before it stops rattling the illness away. For now, I revel in my vibrations and the numbing marble chatter of my teeth.
Moses keeps talking about Emilia but without his hand in mine it’s hard to listen. The cold and numb dull my attention. There are two black posts sticking out of the estuary water like lovers who intend to drown together. Eventually, Moses’ mouth stops mapping Emelia. Runs still on the topic of her playful antagonism, the way she looked when she thought he wasn’t watching, washing dishes or brushing her soft hair. The sky is doing that 4pm thing by which I mean it is gaining weight and sinking. It is November when night always comes again.
‘What is your enormous thing?’ Moses asks me, as we make our way to the bus stop.
Of course, immediately I see Her, smacking through my mind like the reel of a snuff film. The opalite woman who I cannot be forced to physically talk about though Her claws press deep into my brain. I especially cannot mention Her to Moses. My mind scrambles, latches to something else, the darkest bruise I’m willing to press.
‘I was eighteen and Lorne was twenty-two. It was the night after our launch, and we were both drunk. Drunk on the knowledge that we could say something should exist and then it would – also drunk on cheap headache gin. I bought the bottle for us.’
Moses and I are sitting at the bus stop. No bus seems to be coming and the sky is a deep and bitter navy, reprising up to pale daffodil at the last light on the horizon. The stop is sheltered and feels almost cave-like in the way it holds us, shields us from the weather. I am lulled into honesty by the pittering sound of thick rain.
‘I guess I was still thrilled at my new-found ability to show someone a glimpse of my ID and be handed what I want.’
Moses nods and takes my hand again.
I clasp him. ‘I bought the gin from this little shop in Crail from which I used to buy strawberry laces. The person behind the counter was part of our old congregation and that made it all the more delicious, so I bought us a pack of cigarettes too. It was the pack that started me smoking actually.’
‘Tell me more about your congregation,’ Moses purrs in a deep and growling tone.
I laugh once. ‘Ha. Absolutely not!’
He squeezes my hand. ‘Well. God loves a trier.’
Smiling, I press forward with my story, quaking inside and trying to give myself room to open the box slowly. I have never spoken this tale to anyone and was wondering if I ever would. Now I see what Moses meant about this trip, our meeting, being an opportunity. Is this the perfect confession? One I can abandon to rot on this island and never speak of, never think of again? God, it would be nice to never think again. The words are already leaving my mouth.
‘Lorne and I were smoking and drinking and carrying on. Eventually we got cold or we ran out of cigarettes, so we made our way to lie on the floorboards. Lorne was living in our house at the time, sleeping in our spare room, but his camp bed couldn’t fit both of us without collapsing. Instead, we started doing this thing where we would shove a pillow up by the pedals of my dad’s old organ. It had a big bed sheet over it so that when you lay your head underneath, it was like you were in a cave. Perfectly private. No place ever felt safer.’
Moses murmurs. Mm-mm. The warmth in his eyes is smooth and more ambered than honey. I feel safe right now as well. I try to melt into Moses every time I feel myself tensing.
‘We were lying close, but not too close I didn’t think. I had no concept of what too close was really. In the few years he lived with us, Lorne and I had become so familiar, it was hard to make distinctions of intensity. He touched me casually and regularly, leaning into a joke or batting me when I irritated him, and it was amazing how easily I grew accustomed to him. No one in my family was very touchy, so by that point I really craved it.’
