I am not alone in my desperation. Those long hours in the field, where we pretend to be what we are not, make him frantic. We are barely inside the cottage before he is dropping his nets, pushing the door shut, no time to go upstairs. His hands are in my hair, running over my body, he slides down my knickers, he says, ‘I’ve been thinking about this all day,’ before he sinks his mouth into my shoulder.
Later, we will do it again but slowly, the evenings are dedicated to it, the exploration of the other. While the sun is settingand the egrets come to roost, he says, ‘Lie down, let me look at you.’
The first time he said it to me, I was shy. This was all I’d wanted, ever since those Saturdays at the museum. But under his microscopic gaze, I pulled the sheet tight around me, he’d seen Mama for God’s sake, how could I possibly compare? I squeezed my eyes shut.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.
It took a while for me to voice how much I despised the long paleness of my skin, my dull hair, my browny-green eyes. I could only do it into the cotton of the pillow, so I didn’t witness his expression.
‘Let me see,’ he said, solemnly. I let him turn me round. He spread my hair over the pillow, circled my eyes with his thumb. ‘“Browny-green”? You can do better than that. After all, it was the botanists who named colour.’ By then, I was already lost to the way he was looking at me. ‘In the dark, they’re Vandyke brown. In shadow, they’re sap green. In the light . . .’ he tipped my chin so my eyes caught the last shafts of dusk. ‘Just what I thought. Burnt ochre with shards of sap green.’
I am discovered. Reborn.
It is not just my eyes he looks at; it is all of me. His looking is touch without touch. Insignificant parts of me, functional parts that I have never given much thought to – the back of my ear, the side of my ribs, my ankle – come alive, shivering up to meet him. Under his gaze, all my insecurities disappear; I don’t feel ugly. I am exactly what he says, deserving of experimentation, investigation, obsession. ‘You’re a spectacular collision of mutation and genetics,’ he says. ‘Utterly beautiful.’
But what I like more than anything is when it is my turn, when I, tender from his ministrations, push him back against the pillows, tell him to lie down, let me look. His body laid out beneath me makes me think of untrammelled snow; I am the first person to break its surface. I run my tongue over the ridges of his chest, cup his feet in my palms, press my cheek against the dampness of his thighs. When I feel the want in his hips, the click of his body inside mine, I wonder if there is a point when all the laws of science are broken, if in fact we learn all the laws just to break them.
He is teaching me to pin butterflies. He sets out a selection of pins, no. 2s, no. 3s, long and silver with brown, nylon heads. He passes me a Blue fresh from the killing jar. The wings are soft and pliable but the body between the forceps is biscuit-crisp. I resist the urge to squeeze it. Crumble it to dust.
‘Find the centre of the thorax, good. Now insert the pin. That’s it.’
I flinch at how the body gives, those lessons in butterfly anatomy Daniel gave me in the museum are imprinted on my mind so that as I push in the head of the pin, I cannot forget that I am piercing gut, gland, heart.
He hands me a Styrofoam board with a groove cut down its centre. I push the pin in until the wings are level with the sides of the board.
‘Okay, this is the tricky part,’ he says. ‘Do you want to do it or shall I?’
If I really wanted to be a lepidopterist, I would try it myself but I do not. There is something too animated, too visceral about butterflies, they seem too close to us to feel nothing when I amkilling them, splaying apart their wings, pinning them to boards. Besides, my interest is less in the lesson than its teacher. I hand him the forceps. ‘You do it.’
‘We’ll do it together.’
He stands behind me, the full warmth of his body against my back. He holds my fingers on the forceps as we gently separate the forewings and the hind and then, I’ve had enough, I am finished with learning. I put down the forceps, turn around.
‘My little botanist,’ he says, gently. ‘You’re not concentrating.’
I wind my arms round his neck.
‘You’ll never learn how to do it.’
I start unbuttoning his shirt. Recently, these butterfly lessons have started to lose their appeal, they bring back in technicolour the memory of him running from me through the thyme and my desperate weeks of solitude. Only his body can overpower how improbable this all feels. How knife edge.
From: Kit McDermott
09:18
I’ve just left the police station. I told the policewoman everything – the antidepressants, the sketchbooks, the lock on the greenhouse, the withdrawals. After I finished, she gave me this look – it was pity. Like poor mug, he never knew her at all, no wonder she left him, he’s fucking clueless.
She’s absolutely right. I have no idea what’s going on.
She asked me how I didn’t know you were withdrawing money. I told her I never dealt with our finances – our salaries went into the same account our bills came out of and therewas never a problem, why would I check the bank statements, do people still do that? Until now, I never thought what we were doing was unusual. Now, I wonder if you took over the finances to hide your withdrawals.
The policewoman said people who withdraw over long periods are making plans. She said people who use cash don’t want to be found.
You don’t want to be found?
The low point of that conversation: her asking me why I think you’ve been planning to run away. If I’ve ever hurt you. If I’ve ever hit you
Hit you? I’ve loved you since the day I laid eyes on you.