‘Youknow.’
‘I don’t know that at all.’
He squeezes his wrists. The prickles. ‘You do. Because you’re here.’ He drags his eyes up to meet mine. ‘If you really believed I was a monster you would have ignored my letter or gone straightto the police. But you didn’t.’ His voice grows steadier, more confident. ‘You came to meet me because youdon’tbelieve it.’
I think a hundred things. He is a fine dissector of motives. The ruthless beauty of his logic. But also, that his obsession with this particular version of us blinds him to the delicate science of our relationship, causes him, always, to underestimate the only variable beyond his control: me. He’s never seen I have the power to hurt him. That I might want to. That I’m doing it now.
‘And I’m here too. Isn’t that proof?’
‘Proof?’
‘I’m not like them. If I was what you’re accusing me of, why would I be here, why would I come back to you?’ He is rubbing his wrists now, raising ugly bracelets of hives. ‘I’ll go anywhere with you, I’ll listen to whatever you want to say, I’ll work this through with you until you realise.’
‘Realise what?’ My heart is beating very fast, a sick crush of rage and fear and hope.
‘It was real,’ he says. ‘What we had was real.’
From: Kit McDermott
10:48
I’ve just pulled everything out of your wardrobe. Wrenched your skirts off hangers, your silk work shirts, pulled down your blazers. I must have been very loud because Cass has come in three times to check on me, do I want to go to the park, do I need a drink, should I get some rest? I can’t tell her I am searching for your secrets. That I am going to find all the things you’ve hidden.
26
Sheets
Then
After that moment on the field, he doesn’t take me with him again, he leaves before I wake up. I don’t see him in the evenings; he returns when I am in bed. Late at night, I hear him cooking in the kitchen downstairs, the flicker of gas, the slide of the skillet. In the morning, there’s a small pot of vitamins on the table, a fresh fruit smoothie in the fridge, a Tupperware with that evening’s dinner in it with a message on Natural History Museum notepad paper laid on top:Tuesday – chicken with spinach.I throw out the vitamins, pour the smoothie down the drain, eat no more than a few bites.
There is something wrong with me, a defect in my genetics, if a scientist cut me open, they’d see the flaw in my double helix.There,they’ll say,this is why. I try out my own brand of electrotherapy, I tell myself,He is your mother’s husband, he is your stepfather, I say it many times a day, quickly, slowly, out loud. Sometimes, I add, ‘dead’;He isyour dead mother’s husband, as if Mama is watching me from heaven, disgusted. On those days, I feel very bad, like aswamp has pooled at the deepest part of myself, I am waterlogged with algae, dead bracken, decaying rushes. Even that doesn’t work. My mind drifts back to the thicket of thyme. How big his arm was. How warm.
I obsess about the length of time his skin pressed against mine, perform mathematical calculations. Instinctively, I believe we spent an entire minute there, sixty whole, perfect seconds but when I test my hypothesis by timing the words he said to me (It’s impossible, this cannot be what you want) it’s pushing no more than four seconds, ten if I add in pauses, looks, butterflies, and then I am frightened it is just my desperation rushing in to make up the extra fifty seconds. I need it to have been longer than ten seconds. Because it means it wasn’t just me.
The days become impossible. I can survive the mornings, I eat a bowl of cereal, keep up my schoolwork. When lunch time draws near, I make myself a sandwich, alert for the tread of his footsteps on the path; each day, there is an inextinguishable flicker that today is different, today he will come and take me to the field. He doesn’t. The next hour, minute, second gapes wide and open ahead of me until his absence in the cottage is so strong, I have to break it. After three days of resisting, I give myself free rein: I go through his things.
My afternoon schedule becomes this: I search the study first and then his room. He has turned the twin room between us into a study, he asked the cottage owner if he could replace the beds with tables. The owner, who has an antique store in Falmouth, has brought in two long trestle tables stained with turpentine and paint on which Daniel has arranged a lamp and his butterfly things. Some of this I recognise from the field – glassineenvelopes, tweezers, identity stickers – some, I don’t. Jars with white foam at the bottom. Packets of pins. Foam boards. Strips of tracing paper. There is an unlabelled bottle of liquid, the first time I flicked open the lid, it burnt the back of my throat, like nail polish remover only stronger. Beyond that, there is very little of interest. He has taken anything of fascination with him; the Blues, like him, are absent. In the corner of the room, two nets of different sizes rest against the wall. I wave them madly like he told me not to do, hoping he’ll materialise and tell me about compound eyes.
But the study is just a prelude to his bedroom. It is always tidy, he doesn’t leave clothes over the chair; his dove-grey shirts are hanging in the wardrobe, his loafers set straight at the bottom of the wardrobe. His bed is made, the sheets tucked in under the mattress, the quilt folded at the end of the bed, just as it was when we arrived. Still, there are traces of him here more intimate than anywhere else. Creases on the pillow. Sheets holding his musk.
In the beginning, it is enough just to check nothing has changed from the day before, occasionally, I might bring his pillow to my nose, imagine myself back in the thyme. But as it becomes clear that his absence is less of a mistake than a decision, a weight descends over the cottage, inside me. I start getting into his bed. I pretend that the sheets, warmed by the afternoon sun, are really warmed by his body, I pull them over my face, let my breath lift them up and down, I wind them between my legs. One time, I remember a game Mama taught me, ‘horsey’, she’d called it, we’d lie on our backs on her bed and kick up our legs,There’s a ditch, jump, a broken bridge, jump, our abdomens sore with laughter. I do it on his bed once, flail my legs like a newborn colt,but there is something wrong with playing games here, childish games I played with Mama. I don’t do it again.
Afterwards, I never make his bed. Sometimes, I leave the nest of where I was as it is, other times, I throw the sheets on the floor, the quilt. I want him to say something to me, to wake me up with angry knocks, to push into my small, dark room, say, ‘This needs to stop, you’ve gone too far.’ He doesn’t. Each afternoon, the room is spotless again. I feel like I’m going mad. Perhaps I was never in his room. Perhaps heletsme mess it up, he understands it is a necessary outlet for the terrible unrequitedness of my want. The thought infuriates me. I turn out drawers. Pull clothes from the wardrobe. Throw his loafers against the wall.
At night, if I wake up, I don’t let myself go back to sleep, I force myself up. Things are clearer when I am half awake, acts that in the morning seem crazy, are suddenly vital in the dark. I grow bold. I pull back my sheets, walk down the corridor, push the door to his room open.
He sleeps with abandon, his arms flung out above him. He doesn’t wear a T-shirt; his chest is bare. I hover my hand over the velvet fan of his lashes, the ridge of his Adam’s apple, feel his breath against my palm. I want to peel him like an orange. Release the secrets within.
27
Doorway
Now
‘It’s going to rain,’ he says, when we’re outside the university.
He’s right. Clouds gather beyond buildings, thunder tremors through the air. But I don’t care. I can’t sit across from him anymore, staring at his shoulder blades beneath his shirt, the wide spread of his hands. Even with him scratching like a dog, he’s still magnetic. I pull up the hood of my parka.