It’s not just words or thoughts that have changed. Sex has changed, it’s charged now, dangerous, just another way he rages against me and I must prove my surrender. There are no more hours spent in bed, no more evenings where we explore each other’s bodies. Now, when he comes back to the cottage, he doesn’t take me against the wall. He pushes me down on all fours and takes me silently from behind before going straight up to the study, the wet trail of him trickling down my thighs. Sometimes, I don’t care, my want for him is keener now he is the only person I see every day. Other times, I stare at the knots of the paisley rug and wonder how it is possible for him to enter me without seeing me.
Evenings are dedicated to his work. There’s a problem with the Blues. ‘The population is much smaller than we thought it would be,’ he says, barely looking up when I ask him how it’s going. ‘I thought I was preventing the extinction of a species. But I’m not. All I’m doing is tracking their disappearance.’ I try to seduce him, I wear my shortest shorts, my thinnest T-shirts before pushing open the door of the study. The sight of him sitting at that trestle table sends me back to that first night, it is enough for me to bridge the strangeness that has descended between us. But not for him. He doesn’t turn round. I trail kisses up his neck, push my hand under his T-shirt. He holds my hand still. ‘Not now, Lolly.’ When I hear him say my name like that, flat, I want to die.
He comes closest to being mine again in the middle of the night. Prising open the sleepy curl of my body, he runs his hands over me like he used to, he whispers,You’re rare, astonishing, I’m so in love with you, my little botanist, and in those seconds, half awake, half dreaming, I try and make myself believe everything is fine, everything is the same.
But it isn’t. There is none of that mastery I loved, that control, that unshakeable belief in the alchemy of us. He says he can never lose me, he’d die if he lost me, that there’s only ever been and will only ever be me. He begs me to tell him that he is enough, he makes me swear I don’t think of anyone else, that I don’t love anyone else. I do. I say all the right things, I repeat his words back to him,You’re rare, astonishing, I am so in love with you, there is only you, how could there be anyone else?But no matter what I say, I cannot deliver him from the rising tide of his own doubts. He is drowning.
From: Kit McDermott
12:03
Perhaps you haven’t been hiding things. Perhaps I’ve shut my eyes to the flares you sent up, the signal fires you built, put my hands over my ears to block out the sound of sirens because all I’ve ever really wanted is you. But now you’ve gone, now I’ve lost you, now you’re probably not reading anything I’m writing to you, I can finally bear to admit it: there were moments when I thought something was wrong.
45
OtherRoom
Now
Hawk House looks like an ivy-clad medieval hunting lodge; its arched doorway, decorated with metal studs and black iron bolts, looks like it’s missing a moat. I hated it when I first saw it, how foreboding it looked, so different to the simplicity of the woodcutter’s cottage, the pine forest, the field of Blues. But appearances are deceiving: the cottage was dangerous; Hawk House, safe. Now, I see the heavy wooden door and remember me and Jennie flying out of it after we finished our exams, the giant teddy bear Lisa won at the local fair, Mrs Hannington brimming with the news that I’d been elected head girl. Good things, so many good things after the unspeakable.
A pair of girls comes out, before the door shuts, I glimpse the entrance hall where Lisa convinced us to have a midnight roller-skating party and, behind it, the polished oak staircase leading up to the dorms. The first room I stayed in with the other girls was on the first floor. I step back, nearly tread on Daniel, because now I think of it, that first room had a view out to this gravel, this avenue of limes. There, on the sill, is a jewellery box, a bottle of perfume, deodorant. Mine was lined with pine cones, maple leaves, conkers. Behind, is a cherry oak wardrobe, I can’t believe they still have those. I always hung my uniform up, no clothes slipping off the hangers, no sports bags or lacrosse sticks pooling at the bottom. Neat. Just like Mama. Just like Daniel.
Then, I want to find the other room, the room before that dorm. I follow the building round to the right, treading on the freshly planted begonias, the sweet peas, trying to avoid the open windows of the common room, I don’t want to scare the girls. ‘What are they doing?’ I imagine them whispering to each other as they glance up from their breaktime apples and biscuits.
‘Call security,’ I want to say to them. When Millie is older, I will tell her instinct is the greatest sense she’ll possess, if you trust nothing else, trust in that. Kit and I were once on the tube with a young woman in her twenties, blonde dreadlocks, a boho skirt, she talked to herself, loudly, ‘I’m going the wrong way.’ Everyone was staring at her. Then, she wrenched down the red bar of the emergency alarm. The driver stopped the tube. The carriage erupted with boos, hisses, even Kit shook his head. But I felt insanely jealous. She sounded the alarm for something so small when I had never sounded it. Now, all I am is scene, catastrophe, emergency.
The room I am searching for is at the far side of Hawk House, part of the housemistresses’ quarters. Until I moved into the dorm with the other girls, I didn’t realise it wasn’t a bedroom at all. It was Mrs Hannington’s study.
I search for something to stand on. Under the ledge is an overturned bucket. I brush off rainwater, rotting leaves and then,I climb on, press my face to the window. The walls have been repainted, the curtains are cream instead of floral and there is no trundle bed, just a bookcase and a desk, a small armchair. Still, it is terrifyingly familiar. Eighteen years later and the light falls the same way, softly illuminating the wood panels, pooling on the desk.
Daniel comes behind me, the gravel stills. He watches me watch a room where only my memory is moving. ‘Okay, you need to tell me what’s going on.’
What did I expect coming back here? Not this. Not the feeling of growing backwards, getting smaller, younger, forgotten details flying back. I see the long crack on the left wall that my bed was pressed against – I used to chase it with my thumb, thinking what a huge mistake I’d made, thinking I should have stayed with Daniel. I hear Mrs Hannington read to me, she was my English Lit teacher, she wanted to catch me up because I was behind on my Brontë, my Shakespeare. ‘My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand,’ she’d read, and I’d think of the lips of this elegantly dressed man standing behind me. Even after. Even after.
I shouldn’t have come. I could have pretended for the rest of my life that I made it up. But that’s gone now.
Daniel’s voice is unbearably gentle. ‘What happened?’
I let go of the ledge, brush flaked paint off my hands. My voice is a dulled version of itself. ‘We have an appointment.’
46
Birds &Bees
Then
The first time it happens, it’s late Sunday morning. I reach for him, the rich brown of his hair, the weight of his calf. He’s not there. The bed beside me is empty.
I slide my legs out of the covers, walk to the bathroom, stare at my reflection. Every morning, I look more strange, more unfamiliar to myself. These nightly disturbances have taken a toll; yesterday, I woke up to him pushing my T-shirt up and pressing his forehead against my stomach. ‘I can’t lose you, Lolly,’ he whispered into my navel, ‘I couldn’t bear it.’ My eyes are enormous, my lips, pulpy. I bring the back of my hand to them, wince. They feel so tender.
I reach between my thighs. Pain dawns there, I lift my right leg up, balance it against the top of the bath. The insides are raw from his stubble, two bruises the exact shape of his fingers bloom, and then the imprint of him on my skin seems to collide with the sound of a bottle opening, the sharp scent of ethyl acetate floating in from the study, where he is killing butterflies.
I throw up in the toilet bowl.
He is behind me quickly, his hand is on my back, stroking big, comforting circles. ‘Are you okay?’
I shake my head.