Fragile Animals, page 23
When I hobble out of the bathroom, this time unaided, she has collected a cardigan for me from her own wardrobe. It is woollen and covered in flamingos.
‘Did you make this at your club?’ I ask her.
‘I did.’ She winks. ‘At the stitch n’ bitch.’
‘It’s lovely. Great craftsmanship.’
I sit at the kitchen table while Miss Fraser stirs the porridge on the hob. It is 1pm but she says if she goes ahead and feeds me lunch, my body will know it was cheated out of breakfast.
‘It doesn’t matter what time you wake up, Noelle. You have to have all three meals. Even if one of those meals is just a slice of cucumber and a Bloody Mary. God, should have seen me at twenty-three!’ She pats her waistline and chats to me constantly as she cooks. I can’t think of anything to say but she has conversation enough for the both of us and she’s good at it, too.
When the porridge is made, she picks up her seasoning. A little white shaker of salt. I interject before the grains can fall.
‘Why not? Minerals are good for you.’
‘Please. I don’t want it. I won’t eat it.’
She hesitates with the salt shaker poised over the steaming pan, then sets it down, turns to the fridge, and collects a squat jar of raspberry jam. Each of our bowls get a dollop. When I stir mine into the porridge, it turns the oats as pink as the flamingos that cover me. Miss Fraser eats quickly and scrapes up every morsel in her bowl, then waits with a small note of impatience for me to do the same. I’m having a hard time swallowing, each mouthful writhing against my wound, but with effort I force it back. She takes my bowl from in front of me and dumps it in the sink. Hands on hips, she turns to the window.
‘I think we’ll go for a walk.’
I roll my aching shoulders and wince. ‘Actually, I thought maybe I would take a nap.’
‘You can’t take the blues to bed, Noelle. They’ll just sleep with you.’
‘I’m in a lot of pain.’
She goes to one of her drawers and takes a pill packet from the mess inside. ‘You can have a paracetamol.’ She pops one out and sets it on the table.
‘Can I have two? The single dose is for children.’
She looks at me pointedly. No. I do as I’m told.
Outside the snow has fallen thick but the sky is a jubilant blue. The air is pure as fresh milk, lit by the white light of the sun. Miss Fraser lent me a hat and so the cold doesn’t bite too hard. Sharp teeth blunted by the density of wool. The hat isn’t pink but shockingly green patterned with white Christmas snowflakes. Handmade but possibly for a child. When she handed it to me I looked at her quizzically.
‘It’s not mine,’ Miss Fraser said, offering nothing else.
The sun on my face works to loosen the pain in my muscles. This must be what it does to the ice as well, melting thick knives of shock-hard water, freeing it to seep through the ground and soil. When all of this snow thaws and melts the grass will come out green as ever. Any excess will bloat the ground and send up the worms for the birds to eat.
We walk slowly to accommodate my aches and Miss Fraser sets our path. She does not deviate from one that has already been stepped out by passers-by. Footsteps carving an empty river through the bed of the snow. Where they were passing from or to, I do not know. Maybe people here like to stroll, yet all this time I’ve rarely seen anyone doing so. I search in futility for larger prints, dark marks that may have belonged to Moses, but of course there is nothing. The snow in the driveway when we stepped outside was unmarked. A detective might conclude he was still in the house. But from the stinging pain in my neck, how poorly I am able to form a fist, I’m inclined to believe otherwise. Maybe he popped his body all at once, transformed into a bat and flew away.
He wouldn’t have liked this weather anyhow. Much too conspicuous for the wearer of a dark black coat.
The trees look handsome dressed in white coupled with the pride of the hills. Their massive forms seem milder somehow, with coarse faces obscured by snow. Docile. Even the animals seem aware of the lowered threat of the land. A rabbit bobs across a field, brown fur sinking up to its belly with every struggling jump. A buzzard flies high in the widening sky, swooping back and forth without aim. They don’t see each other. I am glad. I am glad also that Miss Fraser walks us further inland, rather than toward the coast. She’s unusually silent, walking a few paces in front of me.
It occurs to me that her part in all this is strange. She ignored the violence of my neck. I saw it in the bathroom and it’s grim, unignorably grim. Bruised beyond recognition, the worst kind of purple, the wound too dark, too crusted, too congealed with blood to make out the actual punctures. Not that I looked too hard. Mirrors, you know. Stronger than the urge to inspect is my urge to recoil. Miss Fraser looked at my pain and called it a broken heart. She made no question hauling my inoperable body out of bed. Just did it. Fit it into the realm of what she understood.
I wonder fleetingly if she has housed women like me before; if this week were really the first time she’d met Moses. He was there before I arrived and otherwise his coming here was never discussed. Perhaps she knows him, helps to accommodate his appetite like a friend or a keeper. She did not interrupt us last night, though the sounds I remember making distress me even now. Beneath the collar of my coat I look like I have been strangled and yet she stood humming outside the bathroom door. Perhaps she has been having her own dark and private thoughts all along. Though I don’t want to ruin her. I like her. She is a tiring but bizarrely astute old woman. As we walk along the road, I think I’d be okay if people thought we were related.
‘Look,’ she says suddenly, voice quieter than I have ever heard her.
I follow the line of her mitten to the road in front of us, where two swans are crossing with their overgrown children. Two gleaming white parents lead four gangly grey adolescents through the fluff of the snow. Their strut is awkward as they print crowns into the path. The parents don’t look back at their brood to see if they’re following, but they are. The kids are wobblier in their gate, beaks more distracted by the winter that has descended around them, but not one of them wanders off. They follow white tail feathers with trust.
One grey child at the end struggles to keep pace. It reaches out and pulls the tufty feathers of its brother, perhaps asking him to wait. Instead, those feathers come loose and fall to the ground like a downy breadcrumb trail, so light they do not dent the snow. The child reaches, tugs again and finally his brother turns. He snaps his powerful beak at his runt sibling’s neck. The bird falls behind a few paces further, its large rubbery feet slapping desperate against the ground. I think of the ghost in the window and my eyes sting again. Heartache is how I imagine grief feels. No one in my life has ever died (at least no one I actually love) – if they had maybe I would know better how to cope with this.
‘I asked him to leave,’ Miss Fraser says finally. Her lips are flat and her eyes are cold. She turns from the swans. ‘Come on.’
Later I lie on the floorboards in Moses’ now empty bedroom. I am jealous briefly of the swans, of birds in general. Roaming their simple world of air, ground and sea. They pay us no mind. Nor do they acknowledge their obvious frailty. How easily feathers such as theirs could stain. The unnatural angle of their necks. Yet they move without hurry, selfish, fragile animals. The taste of sugar sticks tar-like in my mouth as I nurse the smallest possible sips of cough medicine. I gave in and finally stole it from Miss Fraser’s medicine cabinet. Each drop is held under my tongue and moved slowly around my mouth, across my gums, before swallowing. It clings to my teeth like rotten moss. When I got back to Baywood I took Moses’ bedroom, as well as my own, completely apart searching for the taxidermy I was certain Moses must have left me before he was removed. A token in exchange for my flesh. But there was none. I went straight for the purple bottle. It was gritty when I turned the cap and I thought briefly of expiration dates, wondering if time made something like this more or less poisonous. There is a knock.
‘Are you okay?’ Miss Fraser asks from behind the bedroom door.
I breathe in sharply to make myself say it. ‘I’m fine.’
She goes away.
On the floorboards, I think deliberately of Moses’ humour, his tall body, his consistent interest in my mindless stories. How he never questioned them or looked too closely for their route back to me – of which he would have found there really was none, everything I say is a panic, a spindling, a grasp. How refreshing that was after the cruel honesty of Lorne. I think of Moses’ hands, zoom in on the microscopic cells in my brain that hold their memory. There they clench and unclench in a perverted ballet dance, calloused fingertips like dance shoes doing arabesque after arabesque. Every stitch they make, every sick pirouette, convinces me how to feel. I let the fantasy of heartbreak eclipse all the other pains that beg to be felt in this moment. I teach myself to cry while murmuring his name.
Moses. Moses. Moses…
I only know the first.
Judgement Day
It was one hour bc. In the kitchen Dad sat spreading margarine on bread. He smiled mildly at me in greeting. I took a seat opposite him and was able to offer a grimace in return. I looked tired and that was normal and that helped. He gave me the slice of bread he had been buttering for himself and I murmured my thanks. I felt no great pangs of guilt about taking it. It was obvious it was not only my mother’s pasty face I had inherited. There was a carelessness in me, too. I’d made a decision: we were going do things the brutal way. I swallowed back my bread and drank two quick cups of tea.
Actually, I’d be lying if I said I felt no guilt. Hard smacks of it came like waves the night before and gave me drowning dreams. As I looked over the things I had prepared, faint nonsense tunes travelled up through the house from where Dad sat fiddling with the piano, going over hymns for church the next day. Even sitting in the darkness, I could so easily picture his nimble fingers on the keys, his feet working the pedals. The idle corner of his mouth bouncing as he figured out each intricate refrain.
At this point I was fifteen. Every time she bought a lighter for her secret cigarettes, I would take it and store it in my room. She began to hide the lighter in increasingly obscure places, like a game of chicken we both refused to call. I took the papers to the bottom of the garden to the rocky patch where we had once buried Goliath and burned them one by one. No one would question what I was doing; the boundaries in our house by then had grown taut as barbed wire. What I could have done was burn them all save one and take that one to my father. Tell him what I had planned to do. Maybe he would want to be in on it and we would become accomplices. More likely he would want me to spare us all the humiliation. It wasn’t within my religion to do that. Instead I opened myself up for one more chance at salvation. I joined her in the living room where she was reading a hulking anthology about painter, Egon Schiele. He drew women in harsh pencil lines with grubby scribbles for genitalia. Around her, on the walls, the ocean swayed, the Blessed rose to heaven, the Damned descended to hell. As I entered the paint began to churn. I settled on our uneasy leather sofa, tucking my legs up casually beneath me and asked her: ‘What are you reading?’
She looked at me and raised her eyebrows, then lifted the cover of the book so I could see the title, Impressionism and Egon Schiele. She snapped it shut and set the book on the end table beside her. She looked at me expectantly.
‘He was mentored by Klimt,’ I said. ‘We studied him in art class.’
She smiled slightly and nodded. My mother had no time for Klimt and his dreamy expressions of colour, but she liked when I paid attention to art and knew things like this, who came from who and why lines travelled the way they did. She didn’t like to talk about her own parents.
‘The way Schiele painted women is different,’ I said, ‘because they’re always the focal point and always in charge of their bodies. Which I guess was huge after the submission we’d seen from the impressionism movement.’ I was a dog turning tricks, not knowing the meaning of what I was doing but desperate for reward. ‘But then he also made children model nude, so…’
My mother’s lip quirked with wry humour.
‘How’s school?’ I asked ironically and she snorted. She was more willing to concede now I had shown I could behave.
‘How is school?’ She asked, and I nodded.
‘It’s fine. I’m doing fine in class.’ By fine I meant my marks were disappointing, but I knew she wasn’t interested in that, too busy fucking her priest to really pay me much notice – yet I’d been paying attention. It was a gamble she would be interested in what I was about to say. Yet I knew his name would act like bait and her jaws would act of their own accord.
‘There’s actually a bit of a scandal going on at the moment concerning Alistair.’ I spoke carefully, slowly. She didn’t care about my trivial adolescent drama, but Alistair was just a step away from him. I had to make myself appear adult, like whoever was on the end of her muttered phone calls, which by now had been going on for years. She’d gotten comfortable. I’d learned so much listening to her slow, smooth deceits through the crack beneath the kitchen door (my father believed I was plagued by loose earrings) that I could easily play her partner in conversation. I was someone who could relay information without it swaying into gossip; an equal; a bitch. I drew my shoulders back and tilted my head just so.
‘A scandal?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. I was hoping I could get your perspective on it?’
She nodded and turned, facing me cross-legged on the couch. She didn’t do things in halves. She was going to listen, think and respond and do all three with purpose. It was one of the slight things I couldn’t help but admire about her. When she offered herself to you, she did so generously, in a way that affirmed you to speak. I squared myself in the same way so we were sitting exactly parallel.
‘You know Jacob? The McEwan’s son? He’s two years younger than me in school. His father’s the one with the ugly sneeze and his mother lisps. They’re all very blonde.’
‘I know them,’ She said. ‘They go to our church.’
‘Right,’ I said, swallowing. ‘Well, I’ve noticed they’ve stopped coming to mass. They haven’t been in about five months, but they haven’t moved away because Jacob’s still at school. He seems... upset. I think it might be related to something to do with Alistair.’
I nodded to myself. Took a deep breath and tried not to let it shudder. She was reticent to all tiny inflections like that. But she wouldn’t respond until I’d said whatever it was that I’d set out to say. I closed my eyes and braced myself.
‘There’s a rumour going around school that Jacob and Alistair are lovers. That they’re… gay together. And I suppose I was wondering what you thought about that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean – well – do you think it’s wrong?’ I stared down at the sofa cushion, which was an obvious tell. I was seeking reassurance from the ripples of red velvet for something that could not be assured. In my stomach a dark sense of demonic fear opened up like a portal. It struck me that hell is the truest horror. I couldn’t let her look at my face.
‘Why do you want to know if I think it’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Father McBride thinks it’s wrong. Mr McEwan told him about it, and I heard that after he found out, Father hit Alistair across the face with the backs of his knuckles. Alistair was off school for nearly two weeks – I suppose to cover the bruise.’
‘You heard or you saw?’
‘I heard – obviously I didn’t see.’
She blinked. Her face didn’t move much but somehow the blink still withered me. The portal opened a little wider and a plague of locusts flew out.
‘Not everything you hear is true, Noelle.’
She said this slowly as if I were a particularly dense child and not someone she had been discussing art history with a moment prior. In one sentence she cut a whole decade off of me like rotten wood. The splitters embedded themselves into my skin. The portal spat out ash and sickness.
‘I know that. Still. Don’t you think that–’
‘Donald wouldn’t hit his son.’
The portal puckered tight like a constipated arsehole. Every muscle in my body went tight. Not in recoil but aggression. I would have loved then to break the fifth commandment. To reach out and fucking slap her. Donald.
‘He might,’ I choked.
‘You wanted my perspective?’
‘Yes but–’
‘It’s a rumour and a cruel one at that. Not to mention sacrilegious to speak of Father this way. I won’t tell him you asked me about it.’
Her face relaxed. A threat. She was still forcing me into the rotten stench of the confession box, reconciliation with Donald once a month. For the last three months, I’d told him I was sinless. Now grasping the red velvet cushion in stress and rage, I reminded myself that I expected this manoeuvre and forced myself to let go of the pillow and shrug. ‘That isn’t what I wanted your thoughts on.’
‘Then what?’
I swallowed and pushed into her gaze. ‘I know – for a fact – that Father McBride hates gay people–’
‘Father is a holy man. He doesn’t hate anyone.’
‘Let me finish,’ I snapped back. She closed her mouth. ‘He does. I know this already and you won’t convince me otherwise. Father McBride doesn’t want a gay son. He thinks that being gay is a sin. He thinks you can’t be gay and Catholic. He thinks his own son should burn. I want to know what you think.’
She leaned back as if noticing me for the first time. How far I’d strayed from her hand, yet how like her I’d really become. I didn’t care anymore about the implications of my question. I didn’t care about the obvious weight that hung upon her answer. I didn’t care that the heat of my breath had likely confirmed to her that I knew, had known for years, what she was doing with Father McBride, that those drafts didn’t get lost but stolen. By the underestimated daughter whom she thought was smart, but obviously not smart enough. I was sharper than she gave me credit for, and I had backed her, for the first time, into an inescapable corner. Sick rush.
