Salt Slow Page 5
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We ordered pizzas as usual on the Friday. The delivery man brought them to our door well under the forty-minute-guarantee time, smiling at each of us in turn as if sharing something pleasurably private. His eyes were as green as ever – the colour of wine bottles emptied down sinks.
‘You ladies have a wild night,’ he said, like he always did, and Jenny wriggled with delight.
The phone started ringing shortly afterwards, but for once even Miriam ignored it. We watched movies until well past midnight and I must have drifted off because the next thing I knew it was dark and Jenny had apparently gone out and come back again. I didn’t ask her where she’d been or even move to let her know I was awake, but even so, there she was creeping in with mud-crusted elbows and a bottom-jawful of straight white teeth in one hand.
The scavenge became less of a game after that – Jenny coming home at odd hours smelling like dirt and cold stone, black tote bags which took on curious shapes when thrown over her shoulder. I encountered Mr Cline in the street one Thursday morning, complaining loudly that his hedge clippers and spade had gone missing. Two days later, I came across both in the hall cupboard, curiously pristine as though recently washed. I told Miriam it might be best if we avoided the subject of dating for a while, though as Miriam pointed out, almost any topic of conversation was enough to set Jenny off on the subject of The Perfect Man, these days.
Simon had begun to call daily, so most of the time now Miriam just let the phone ring. He was sorry, she told me in confidence, his new girlfriend wasn’t what he’d hoped, he wanted Jenny back. That day, it had been announced in the local paper that a young athlete, an Olympic sprinting hopeful born barely six streets away, had died of an untimely heart attack and would shortly be brought back home to be buried. Jenny had spent the morning in a reverie about men with good legs, mentioning several times how disappointing Simon’s had been the few times he had agreed to do it with his trousers all the way off.
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‘I think we’ve taken our eyes off the ball a little,’ Miriam said to me seriously. The collection of fingers on the kitchen table came not from one hand but several, though all seemed to be at similarly early stages of decay. She had gone into Jenny’s bag and found them, counting them out for me like paper money, and now stood uneasily as a sound reached us – Jenny’s footsteps on the cellar stairs.
‘There they are,’ Jenny said, coming into the kitchen as calmly as though seeking her house keys. ‘I knew I didn’t just have thumbs.’
She collected them together, a bouquet of severed fingers, tall and blue-tinted towards the tips. A rogue image swam through me – Jenny coming back from her first date with Simon, the slender handful of daffodils he had given her and the way she had held them upright all the way home. As if on cue, the phone started ringing and Jenny glanced towards it impatiently. ‘I don’t know why he bothers. Now these,’ she held three fingers towards us as though inviting us to pick a card, ‘are from a concert pianist. They buried him last week. Incredibly limber-looking, don’t you think? Whereas these,’ three more, squarer around the nail and knuckle, ‘well these I just chanced upon. I like to imagine this guy was good with his hands, whoever he was. What a collection, anyway. Don’t you think?’
‘Jenny, you’re going to fall behind on your thesis.’ It was all I could think to say, although later that day, when she showed us what she had been doing in the cellar – the scavenged skin and bones and severed features all arranged just-so on her strip of card – I understood that she hadn’t so much fallen behind as changed subjects altogether.
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It was a Saturday when she finally spoke to him, just back from a funeral and holding her tote bag protectively along the bottom as though concerned it might split. She sat down on the arm of the sofa, receiver in hand, legs crossed and expression absent. From the kitchen door, Miriam and I could hear the bleed of Simon’s voice from the receiver, the way he rattled on in increasingly desperate fashion as Jenny answered him only in yeses and nos.
‘It’s no good,’ she said finally, waving her hand in Miriam’s direction and signing a request for a cup of tea. ‘There’s nothing else I really want from you, nothing you can say. You’ve just given me the time to realise I can do better than you. That I can call the shots myself.’
She nodded along with the voice on the phone for a moment, readjusting her bag on her shoulder slightly as she did so, a shape curiously resembling an ear faintly visible through its canvas side.
‘Look,’ she said at length, ‘you were wonderful on paper. You’re just not the sum of your parts.’
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Jenny ordered pizza alone while Miriam and I were at the library, one Friday afternoon in summer rain. The delivery man came to the door as normal – green eyes like church windows – tipping his imaginary cap to her and asking how come we’d only ordered one pizza this time.
She gave no clear answer, only smiling benignly and asking whether he didn’t want to step in out of the rain. There would be lightning, she said, not good weather to be out in. Why not bring the pizza through, she said, I’ve got something to show you, something that’ll make your pretty green eyes pop right out of your head.
Formerly Feral
When the woman who lived across the street from us adopted a wolf and brought it to live with her, people were not as surprised as you might imagine. People had been doing stranger things in our neighbourhood for years. My Father, the novelist, took great pleasure in telling stories about the neighbours – how Ms Brenninkmeijer lived with a man fifty years her junior who had only knocked on her door in the first place to deliver a parcel, how Mr Wintergarten was widely suspected of poisoning local dogs and leaving them, taxidermied, on doorsteps for their owners to find. My Father said a town was only as interesting as its bad apples and only as safe as its lunatics. When my sister and I were younger, he would point to all the houses on our street, counting on his fingers and explaining that by the law of averages, at least two of our neighbours were likely to commit murder. Have perhaps already done so, he would add, when our reactions were not satisfactorily extreme. In the divorce, my Mother cited the impossibility of living with a man whose approach to life was so ineradicably ghoulish. In return, my Father cited my Mother’s treatment of life as though it were someone unpleasant she was stuck sitting next to on the bus.
When our parents divorced, my sister went to live with my Mother – a hard cleaving that I, aged twelve, felt far more acutely than the divorce itself. In the months directly following her departure, my sister sent me letters on my Mother’s headed paper, brand new and with the maiden name loudly reinstated – From the desk of Allison Weyland – Allison Stromare no more! My sister wrote in postcard couplets (Sun is shining – wish you were here), offering negligible detail beyond the doodles of herself she always included; little thumb-smudged cartoon sisters generally engaged in some strenuous activity – putting together a bookcase, walking a dog, performing jumping jacks. I kept these letters bulldog-clipped together in the space between my bed and the wall and reorganised them frequently, trying to create a coherent flipbook out of all the little figures in the corners of pages, throwing balls in the air and hula-hooping and dancing and building model trains.
My Father’s house was a strange place once partially deserted; yawn of space, hand held insufficiently over the mouth. My Father took to writing in the kitchen where before he had retreated to his study, started leaving his shoes wherever he removed them and cooking heavy dishes which disregarded my allergies. I developed a habit of eating on my own to avoid his bloody meats and creole jambalayas. I smuggled sleeves of water crackers to my room and ate them smeared with peanut butter, stole dates and bits of cake from the untended larder and siphoned inches of cognac into mugs which I stacked on the floor and allowed to grow rancid with fruit flies. Occasionally, my Father would ask me how school was going, how I intended to spend the weekend, but for the most part we coexisted in a kind of conciliatory
silence. Without my Mother, I became negligent with washing, wore my shirts untucked. I experimented with the make-up she had left behind in bottom drawers of her dressing-table – daubed my eyelids the colour of tangerines.
About six weeks after the divorce was finalised, the woman who lived across the street came around to express her condolences, bringing on one arm a fruit basket, which would later turn out to contain only pomegranates, and on the other arm the wolf. My Father invited them in for coffee and ten months later, he and the woman from across the road were married. She and the wolf came to live with us, putting her house up for sale.
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Advice on keeping wolves as pets can be found in publications put forth by various animal-rights organisations – the tone is seldom wholly encouraging. In The Ethical Pet Owner’s Handbook, it is noted that wolves require far more exercise than dogs, are more liable to develop territorial and pack behaviours and can seldom be trusted to behave gently around children and smaller animals. The Conservationist’s Guide to Wolves and Wolf Behaviours states, rather more baldly, that keeping wolves as pets or working animals is effectively asking for trouble: Captive wolves retain the instincts of their ancestors and will only display these tendencies more openly as they approach sexual maturity. It took ten thousand years of selective breeding to get dogs to do what we want. Wolves have spent the same amount of time living wild. You do the maths. (The Conservationist’s Guide is admittedly more upfront with its agenda than The Ethical Pet Owner.)
Of course, my Father’s new wife was not keeping her wolf as a pet or a working animal, but rather as a daughter, which rendered much of the reading I did around the time of the wedding unnecessary. The day they moved in, she dressed the wolf in a blue pinafore dress she described as its special occasions outfit and presented me with a copy, in my size, which my Father suggested I change into before helping with the unpacking.
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The wolf was named Helen, having been named after both Helen of Troy and St Helen of Constantinople, who reputedly discovered the true cross in Golgotha in ad 337. She was dust-coloured, slavered more or less constantly, which wasn’t attractive, and had the other unfortunate habits of defecating in the corner of the kitchen and gnawing on table legs. In the early days of his second marriage, my Father took great pleasure in citing all of the literary precedents for her presence in our lives, although he owned that from Romulus and Remus to Mowgli, the more usual setup involved wolves adopting humans, not the other way around.
My Father’s marriage upset the equilibrium – loosened the surety of my grip. My Stepmother, as I was requested to address her, unlocked windows, plugged mouseholes with wire mesh and foam insulation. The house opened around her the way you crack a chest cavity, the ribs of it, the unnatural gape. My Father and I had rarely felt the need to disturb things but my Stepmother moved in a sort of permanent sweep, gathering up my Father’s shoes and papers and the glasses in my bedroom and scuttling them safely away. She was industrious, as I wrote to my sister: she keeps things in the air. She fed Helen three times a day with the kind of bottle you would give to a two-year-old child and read to her from history books she had brought with her from across the street. Sounds exotic – best of luck, my sister wrote, accompanied by a sketch of herself flying a kite with a tail of plaited ribbons. An inked-in sky, a navy afternoon.
My Stepmother took over the washing of my clothes, which I found I resented and combated by leaving dirty garments in places she couldn’t reach like the top of the wardrobe or draped across the ceiling fan. I re-wore clothes until they came to smell like skin and itched unpleasantly, let my wrists and fingernails grow dark. What little dominion I had I maintained by making as much mess as possible. I balled up paper and threw it about without first having written on it, stacked up poltergeist towers of books. I stamped down the bin in my room until it burst with cotton wool, plucked hairs and soiled tissues, hung crusty skirts and blouses on the backs of chairs like sails. Every afternoon at three, my Stepmother came around with a brush and hoover to blast away this overflow, collecting and dispersing great menageries of garbage: dead violets, blunted lipsticks, forks and plastic beakers, nail clippings, earrings, half-eaten tins of peaches left to rot in my bed. That she did this with alarmingly good grace did not escape my notice, though my response to this was only to try harder, smearing jam from strawberry doughnuts on my bedroom windowpanes. Little savage, my Father said, in a tone that implied only anthropological interest, making a neat note in one of the books in which he stored ideas for future novels. Admittedly, I really ought to have outgrown this kind of behaviour. In a letter written lengthways on yellow legal paper, my sister wished me happy thirteenth birthday: you’re a grown girl now – for god’s sake try to behave.
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The wolf was a novelty at first. On Saturdays, my Stepmother washed her in a large green basin which she kept beneath the sink in the kitchen and brought out with great ceremony, filling it first with hot water, then with cold water, then with a drop of vanilla essence and heavy lilac cream. I liked to watch this ritual sitting up at the kitchen table, peeling apples whose cores I would later spirit away and bury in my bedroom carpet until it smelled like sweat and stale sugar. My Stepmother washed Helen with a brush and pumice stone, mumbling Judy Collins lyrics and tutting whenever the wolf slipped out of her grasp and bit her. The biting was a frequent occurrence – the wolf was, after all, a wolf. By the time she had finished her scrubbing, my Stepmother would usually be bleeding gently into the bathwater and berating Helen for her attitude.
I had read in The Conservationist’s Guide that the enforcement of unnatural doglike behaviours in domesticated wolves can cause distress and even trauma: pet wolves, or what you might call wolfdogs, are liable to develop depressive and antisocial patterns when forced into systems of subservience that run counter to their instincts. Of course, Helen was not treated like a dog, and her behaviour seemed roughly to correspond with her perceived status in the household. Petted, rather than pet, I wrote to my sister, referring to the way the wolf was strapped into a booster seat at mealtimes and fed apple sauce and gravy before my food was served. Her wardrobe was extensive and varied – my Stepmother had a particular fondness for dressing her in Tenniel bibs and dresses, pie-crust collars, yellow hats and lacy cotton boots. Her attitude was in some regards august, toothsome, more graceful than my own. She bit and scratched with impunity but seldom seemed unsettled or much inclined to escape.
One afternoon, as my Stepmother was just coming to the end of her bathing ritual, the telephone rang in the hallway. She had bound the wolf up in a towel the way she usually did and now passed this bundle to me without first asking, hurrying out of the kitchen before I had a chance to object. I dropped the apple I had been coring, its streamer of peel uncoiling as it span away across the kitchen floor and disappeared beneath the fridge. Momentarily thrown, I adjusted the unexpected weight in my arms, abruptly aware of a smell which I had come to consider a general fact of the kitchen but which was, in fact, the wolf herself. The smell was fierce, a stifling of something thick and fleshy, dark meat beneath a slop of bluebell soap. Feral smell, I thought, before adjusting my vocabulary – formerly feral. My nostrils stung and I tipped my head away, squinting slightly as the trussed-up wolf wriggled up to face me, thick strings of dark saliva at her chin. For a moment, we blinked at each other – damp fur, a smell more like a temperature, straight slant of eyes unlike my own. She leant towards me, sniffed and briefly licked my teeth. In the hallway, I could hear my Stepmother talking loudly on the telephone. The wolf seemed to note this too, flicked her tail beneath the towel as though impatient and fastened lazy jaws around my chin.
The apple mouldered for seven weeks before my Stepmother found it, soft and hollowed out by ants which spilled from the dustpan she had thrust beneath the fridge in exploration, running up her wrists and biting at the skin beneath her sleeves.
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At school, I told people my Stepmother had a daugh
ter and no one questioned me because, for the most part, no one listened. I wasn’t easy at school, grime beneath my collar. Even before the divorce I had been a poor scholar, slow with mental maths and too sloppy to be trusted with a fountain pen. Classmates picked apart my walk, my ugly tennis shoes, the fact my Father wrote purportedly ‘dirty books’. Boys with names like Callum and Jeremy made boorish jokes about my smelly clothing and the knots in my hair that resembled fists. Pull her head back, dirty girls like it that way. I spent a lot of time getting into fights, skinning my knuckles, the backs of my legs. Girls put chewing gum on my chair, pinched my sides when we clustered in the gym for assembly, sitting cross-legged and knee to knee. My sister, before she left, had been better with situations like this, had happily turned her nose up at people who laughed at her, never getting into fights. Try harder, she wrote, a dark dribble of words around a stick figure sitting upright at a cartoon desk, don’t be such a beast.
I was fourteen when the wolf began to escape the house, walking the ten minutes between home and school to wait across the road from the netball courts until I emerged at four o’clock. The first time it happened, I only realised she was there because of the small crowd that had formed around her. A boy from the class below me had apparently tried to pet her and had immediately dissolved into hysterics when she bit him on the arm. By the time I arrived, his Mother had already broken up the tussle, leaping from the front seat of a stone-coloured Volvo to drag him away, still in tears and with a wad of tissues held to his wrist. Helen, apparently deaf to the uproar, perked up when she caught sight of me. She was clothed only simply, a small black cap and aproned pinafore that made her resemble nothing so much as a waitress at a casual restaurant. I held one hand out towards her and she pushed her snout between my fingers, licking at my dirty nails. The crowd around me pulsed – a mumbled curiosity. It was a Friday, a long time since her Saturday bath. I pressed my face into the protruding bones of her back and breathed her in. A smell like offal, like bone marrow beneath her dress. I elbowed my way through the crowd and she came with me, calm and slavering only lightly. We walked home together and I told her inconsequential things about my day.