Salt Slow Page 4

  ‘When I retell it,’ she said, ‘I have to remind myself that what I did wasn’t unnatural. No more than taking a pill to fall asleep is unnatural – sometimes we just need that little push.’

  The noise from her front lawn could be heard inside the house, the chants picked up on the reporter’s microphone – protesters singing about the injustice done to a defenceless Sleep. Even so, she seemed singularly unbothered. As the interview drew to a close, she tilted her head towards the window and the sunlight hit her in a way which illuminated her face, the spaces beneath her eyes fresh as rising dough, gloriously well rested.

  ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ my brother said, once the news had moved on to another story. ‘Not a nice thought, but makes you think.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could kill them,’ I replied. No one had known until now, it seemed, because no one had really tried. ‘It doesn’t seem right though, does it?’

  Leonie’s piece was published anonymously and she brought the magazine around at midnight on the day it came out. The story was sandwiched between several others; the man who had stolen another man’s Sleep, the woman who had packed her Sleep into the back of a car, driven it out to the country and left it there. Leonie’s piece, I thought, sat oddly amongst these stories of frayed nerves and hard exhaustion. In the midst of all these haunted people, she sat alone, without a ghost yet longing for one, her writing like a clasp of fingers around empty air. I reread the piece while she made me tea, the gentle clatter of her in the other room a pleasant presence, just as the restlessness of the night had become a comforting familiarity. City noise, the wriggle of wakeful shoulders, Leonie breaking a cup and cursing to herself next door.

  When she came back, she was white, red-lipped from biting at herself. My Sleep came after her, holding the pieces of the mug she had broken, which it ferried to the coffee table and placed there before moving to the corner of the room. Leonie passed me a cup of tea and came to sit beside me, eyeing the magazine in my hands.

  ‘I hate it,’ she said, ‘I wish I hadn’t written it.’ Her voice curled up around its edges the way paper does when you set it alight at the sides. I looked at her dumbly for a moment, sipped my tea on a reflex and immediately burned my tongue.

  ‘But it’s good writing,’ I said after a long pause, wondering from her face whether she might be about to cry. ‘What do you hate about it?’

  ‘I hate that I had to write it,’ she replied, harshly. ‘I hate how tired it makes me to read.’

  In the corner, my Sleep twitched its head to the side. An odd motion, as though trying to get water out of its ears. I looked at Leonie and thought about the weight at her shoulders, picturing the sensation of sleeping, the fall and clean absence of thought. After we’d finished our tea, I asked her to lie down on the sofa with me. She looked at me strangely but didn’t object. We positioned ourselves as comfortably as possible, Leonie slipping up into the crook of my arms. I pictured sleep – the old stillness and the blacks of my own closed eyes. In the corner, my Sleep shifted itself, turning its head into its own shoulder, then the crook of its elbow, as if to inhale a smell.

  ‘I should have my mouthguard,’ Leonie murmured vaguely, though I only shushed her, saying after a moment that I’d wake her if she started spitting teeth.

  I held her for a long time and, after the night had passed, woke up to find that I had truly slept. The corner of my room was empty, as was the space before me on the sofa. Leonie had gone, leaving behind the magazine but taking with her my Sleep. For a long time, I chose not to sit up, remaining instead where I was at full length on the sofa, registering as if in pieces the solidity of my body. A little later, I would rise and go about my business, noting when I did the old sensation of refreshment, a certain lifting from the tops of my shoulders and from the spaces beneath my eyes. It was morning, the air refreshed and gentle as if from dreamless sleep.

  The Collectables

  We burned what we could of Simon Phillips in a pit at the end of the garden. Jenny held her hands over the flames – a bonfire of the final boyfriend: photographs with eyes scratched out, a note he had written on a napkin, the grisly confetti of toenail clippings she had pulled from the bathroom bin. The pads of her fingers were mottled yellow, barbecue-black under the nails. Miriam dragged her away at last and smoothed her palms with aloe vera, talking a circle of taut affirmations – you’ll feel better – he wishes – doesn’t know what it is he’s lost.

  This was the last of them, the final dramatic gesture. Miriam and I had lost our boyfriends already and contributed to the seeing-off of Jenny’s with a corresponding vigour. When the neighbours called to complain about the smell, Miriam told them with great dignity that we were purging ourselves of evil spirits.

  ‘Well I’m sorry that you’ve had to close your windows, Mrs Adams, but that’s the price one pays for catharsis.’ She held the phone slightly away from herself, as ever unwilling to touch the earpiece for fear of infection. Someone had once told Miriam that she looked like Princess Anne and this throwaway comment had come, over time, to form the basis of her whole personality. She wore green velvet loafers year-round, pinned her hair in the shape of a pumpkin, spoke like her molars were made of glass. After hanging up, she sat for a moment in silence, twisting each of her rings halfway round her fingers so the gemstones faced inwards. Catching me looking, she shrugged and held her hands out – two palmfuls of diamonds, as though she had clawed them out of the earth.

  In the drifting dusk, we picked through the debris of the fire with cereal spoons; burned husks of photo paper, the plastic-coated lace of a tennis shoe which had failed to catch alight. The failing sunlight illuminated twists of ash and charred pieces of the newspaper we had used as kindling. I pulled a shred out with my fingers and read aloud the two lines of text which had not been scorched beyond comprehension. It was from the page which ran the personals ads, a drab little reverie of a sentence, ending in a smear where the phone number should have been.

  ‘Professional Woman, mid-forties, seeks Prince Charming for Fairytale Endings/Heroic Rescues/Castles in the Air. Please call Linda on—’

  ‘Keep dreaming, Linda,’ Jenny snorted, kicking a heel over the ashpit of her ex-boyfriend, who by now would be in St Austell with the girl he had dumped her for.

  +

  ‘There is a level of insult I cannot overlook,’ Miriam announced, ‘in the way that men behave towards women.’

  We were sitting on the front steps of the house, drinking Cherry Cokes in the hot September twilight. The cigarette which we were passing back and forth had started with Jenny, but was now smudged with three separate shades of lipstick – red for Miriam, tangerine for Jenny, frosted brown for me. Across the street, Mr Cline from number eleven was hacking at the bushes his wife had carefully cultivated, a dense and elaborate display of power topiary which, thanks to his ministrations, was now vandalised beyond repair. Two doors down, a muster of pre-teen boys were playing Chinese chequers on the pavement, the young mum from number seven dragging her pram precariously down into the road in order to pass them by.

  ‘I mean look at that.’ Miriam gestured with index and ring fingers clenched together ‘Don’t even move to let her pass. Men.’

  ‘Those aren’t men,’ I replied, squinting towards the boys and noting their acne-dusted shoulders, the way one of them had sprouted far taller than the others and had to bend almost in half to play their game.

  ‘True,’ said Miriam, equably, ‘but if you stuck them all together they’d probably add up to one.’

  This was some days after the bonfire. In the dead end of that week, Jenny had taken to poltergeisting round the house in her bedsocks, cluttering surfaces with cups of cold tea and crumby saucers, snivelling and watching the phone. Simon had finally called on Wednesday night, sloppy on sangria and wanting to know why Jenny had sent him a shoebox of ashes in the post. Miriam had been the one to answer and throughout the brief conversation had stood with one hand extended, forcibly hol
ding Jenny away from the phone. On hanging up, she had wiped her ear distractedly with her monogrammed handkerchief, complaining that she could practically feel him spitting through the receiver.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ she had said, when Jenny had made signs of starting to snivel again, before ordering me away to the corner shop to buy Cokes and a box of peanut brittle with the money from the swear jar in the hall.

  +

  Until recently, I had been seeing a man called Stephen Connolly, who had been a good kisser and appalling in all other aspects. The realisation had come upon me only in stages, for I liked kissing well enough to ignore for a while the books he read and the way he spoke about women, the fact that his chin was feeble and his back pocked from waxing hair away. The reality of the situation became clear eventually, but even then, it was somehow him who left me. I was tricky, he said, I asked too much of him, the things I talked about sometimes drove him mad.

  That’s the problem with kissing. In theory, when someone’s good at it, you should be able to keep kissing forever. But of course, forever is too long to do anything without getting bored.

  +

  We were a household of incomplete ideas, of brisk, abortive grasping. We had fallen together by way of a house share; a hierarchy grown from the blank of our random assignation. Miriam, tautly matriarchal, cooked key meals, labelled shelves for private use and studied Gainsborough with biros stored behind her ears. Jenny, wan and fanciful, hacking her way through a thesis on Urban Gothic in the Fin de Siècle, occupied the box room and papered its walls with collaged images of insects and garden pests. I existed somewhere between, storing reference books on the landing, pursuing studies in social realist literature, eating endless toast. We spent our days working on our Ph.D.s, our nights watching films on the floor of the living room, bare-legged and digging splinters from our feet with tweezers, drinking iced tea from a melamine jug. We talked about men unkindly and too often, our aggravation with the topic at large belied by the frequency with which we returned to it. The nights around that time were balmy through slices of open window, clouded with the smell of charcoal barbecues before the meat goes on to cook. We would argue in desultory fashion over which movie to watch, knowing as always that we would end up watching Jenny’s choices, if only for a quiet life.

  On Fridays, Miriam would order us pizzas, businesslike with the hated telephone in hand as we yelled the same jokes we yelled every week.

  ‘I’m ordering now – what does everyone want?’

  ‘Cheese and Tomato, please. Or Margherita if they have it.’

  ‘Cheese and Tomato is Margherita. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. What are you having?’

  ‘Ham and Pineapple.’

  ‘That’s no help.’

  ‘Well, what toppings do you feel like?’

  ‘The flesh of righteous men.’

  ‘I’ll get you a Meat Feast.’

  It was always the same man who delivered our pizzas – in his twenties, green-eyed as a cat at night. Since the first visit, he had appeared singularly unfazed by the way we answered the door all together, handing over our food with a smile and a mimed tug of an imaginary cap.

  ‘You ladies have a wild night,’ he would say and saunter away before we could tip him.

  Back in the living room, Jenny would simper over his green eyes and Miriam over his manners until the pizzas grew cold and had to be microwaved. We had been in this town for what felt like for ever, and in all that time, only the man who delivered our pizza had managed to never once let us down.

  +

  Three magpies on a washing line – a good or bad augury, depending on the rhyme you chose. Drinking coffee in the garden that Thursday, I listened to the funeral bells from the church three streets away. It was early still, a sore-boned morning, gentle dew-fall after rain. My throat ached from arguing down the phone with Stephen over the jacket he claimed I had stolen as an act of retaliation after we split. My ears still rang with the memory of his voice, its dogged enervation.

  ‘It’s for the guy from the admissions office at the university.’ Miriam in white cotton shorts, coming to sit beside me and tilting her head to indicate the bells. ‘The one with the cowlick. He stepped in front of a bus on Monday.’ She shrugged and took a sip of my coffee. ‘So they tell me. It’s a shame.’

  We sat together until the funeral bells faded, preparatory to a second burst of rain. Back inside, we found Jenny making pancakes the way Simon had liked them – brown with almond butter on the insides and slightly burnt at the rim. Miriam took the skillet from her wordlessly and tipped the pancakes into the sink, her white shorts stained black and gritty from the garden steps.

  We drank through the day, bottles of yellow wine which made us hectic and shrill, our neighbours hammering on the walls to protest against our too-loud music. By the evening, we were headachey and red about the eyelids, Jenny wailing that she hadn’t done a stitch of work all day.

  ‘Well for God’s sake,’ sighed Miriam, prickling with alcohol, ‘we were only drinking to keep you company.’

  I was the one to suggest the walk, if only to prevent an argument. We wandered down through the town, barefoot and weaving, curtains twitching around us in the close-walled streets. We ended up at the church, its bells now silent, peering down into the cemetery to spot the fresh-dug afternoon grave.

  ‘What a waste,’ Jenny murmured when we told her about the admissions guy, scrolling through her phone to find a photograph she had once taken at a faculty party – a crop of the bottom half of his head. ‘He had such lovely teeth.’

  +

  Jenny loved the classic Universal horror films – Dracula with Bela Lugosi, The Invisible Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Coming back from the church that night, she put on Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, rewinding twice through the opening scene with its grim graveyard, its coffin dredged up from the mud.

  We were all, by this point, halfway into the next day’s hangover, furred to the back teeth with instant coffee, flat out like dogs on the floor.

  ‘Think of the man we could have if we only took the best bits,’ I remember Jenny saying at some point, nodding at the monstrous man being woven together onscreen. ‘Stephen’s kiss, Simon’s torso, Matthew’s—’ She stopped and looked at Miriam enquiringly, though Miriam only snorted softly and told Jenny not to talk over the film.

  Matthew was a lecturer at the university who had given Miriam a diamond ring the previous winter and then asked for it back in June. This had been around the point that all three of us had started falling behind on our theses, although why it affected Jenny and me as much as it did Miriam would be difficult to say.

  +

  We had a small cellar in our house which had been used as a makeshift shelter during the Second World War. It was here that Jenny first drew the outline on dressmaker’s paper – the long body of a man in black marker which she laid out on the floor like the scene of a crime. She had been drinking fairly solidly all week; a thin dribble of spirits which started with Irish coffee in the mornings and continued through to makeshift cocktails the moment the clock struck six. Simon called fairly frequently now, though when he did Miriam only told him to get on with things with his new girlfriend and for God’s sake stop bothering us. I made slow progress on my thesis during this time, traipsing to the library and back in my open-toed sandals, stewing in the gardens in the late afternoons. I was there the day Jenny came out in pyjamas and wandered down to the ashpit at the end of the lawn. For a moment, I watched her scratch chicken-like through the remnants of our bonfire, before suddenly she bent and then straightened, pulling something out of the dirt.

  On her way back up the lawn, she held her palms out to me, the way Miriam had showcased her handfuls of diamonds. Only in this case, the cupped palms held not precious stones but a charred collection of fingernails – the chalky half-moon cuttings Jenny had wrenched from the bin to set fire to after Simon first walked out.

 
; +

  The scavenge became Jenny’s little joke – coming home with strands of hair yanked from men at the supermarket, fallen eyelashes she had found in the creases of library books and collected on pieces of folded tape. In the afternoons, when Miriam and I were submerged in our reference books, Jenny would haul her plunder down to the cellar and arrange lines of nails and fringes of hair around her line-drawn paper doll, tacking them down with Pritt Stick and Elmer’s washable glue.

  ‘Occupational therapy,’ she said one afternoon when I asked her what she thought she was doing with a pocketful of skin-peppered dust from a university windowsill. ‘Something to do every day, one day at a time. Kind of like being in AA.’

  ‘Not that you would know,’ Miriam replied, gesturing to the beer bottle in Jenny’s free hand.

  The sun sharded through the open window, amber in the thunder-smelling midday and filling Jenny’s face with momentary electricity, as though she had been set alight at the neck.

  For the most part, we left her to it, poring over our books with increasing distraction as the temperature rose and the telephone rang more and more often. Simon had a bee in his bonnet about something – insisted on talking to Jenny, though every time he rang Miriam answered and never allowed him enough time to explain.

  ‘Maybe if we just let him speak to her,’ I ventured to Miriam one morning, the two of us on the back steps, drinking tea in our dressing gowns. ‘You let me speak to Stephen after I stole his jacket. And even Matthew stopped calling to ask for his ring back once you had a word with him yourself.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ Miriam replied, curd-yellow at the eyelids, ‘You’d never mistake Stephen’s voice for a homing call.’ Back inside, we found Jenny just coming in, though it was nearly eight o’clock. She smiled at us both, pulling her hand from the front pocket of her dungarees to show us what looked very much like the flicked-off head of a scab.