I stood up and said, ‘I am Maryam and I am here to avenge my father’s death.’ Her mouth fell open but she didn’t scream like the others. I reached into my pocket. Hind raised her fan and arms as if to protect herself. The dagger was too light, something was wrong. I raised it, and because it was too light my hand jerked forward. Hind lowered her arms and sighed. I looked at my hand, but instead of a dagger, I was holding a feather. It was as if sunset had come because I couldn’t see very well and the cry that came from me didn’t sound like my voice. I dropped the feather and ran.
I ran from Gobir, leaving my bag, my shells, even my brother’s turban. I cried and kept running. Around me the light was purple and sleepy. I kept running until I reached a forest. I leaned against a tree and vomited, which made my head throb more. Why did my dagger turn into a feather? How could it, when Hind was the one to blame? I heard someone calling my name. It sounded like Bello, but I wasn’t sure. I started running again and now it was completely dark. Now the bats came out and the owls. My feet caught on something and I tripped. I fell face forward. There was a pain in my foot, but it was good to lie on the ground. I was ashamed that I had got so close to Hind, heard her confess, and then, just like a weak girl, done nothing. I pressed my face into the dark sand.
I saw my father in his room at home, and knew I was dreaming. But still I felt relieved that he was standing up, tall, smiling, looking only at me. This was what my mother had prayed for – that my father would visit one of us in a dream. And he had chosen me. I wanted to tell him how sad I’d been, but I was so happy to see him. Here he was young in his new world. He was comfortable and laughing. I could hug him and we could sit on the rug in his room and, like in old times, I would ask him one question after another. ‘Why did the dagger turn into a feather?’
‘Because of your amulet,’ he said.
‘My amulet protected Hind?’
‘No,’ he laughed, ‘it protected you from the consequences of hurting her. Besides it was my dagger, and a Shehu’s dagger mustn’t be used for revenge.’
I sat very quiet, knowing this was a dream and I shouldn’t wake up. I must make it last as long as I could. He said, ‘Why did you go to look at Ibra after he died?’
‘Because I wanted to see the face of someone who was going to Hell. But he looked ordinary, just like anyone else.’
‘And when you went looking for Hind,’ he asked, ‘what did you want to see?’
‘Evil,’ I said, ‘I wanted to see the face of evil, and I saw a beautiful girl.’
He paused and then said, ‘You will always want to know and learn. This is a good thing. But it is an eye for an eye and a life for a life and my death has already been matched by another’s.’
‘This is what Bello said. But it is not fair. Hind – how could she! She must be punished.’
‘She would have been, if my friends had questioned Ibra instead of silencing him for ever.’
‘They were angry,’ I said, defending them. No one had ever criticised them, and now he, of all people, was!
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘is anger a good thing?’
‘No, because it does not let us see clearly.’
He smiled, and his voice became gentle again. ‘I don’t want you to be angry Maryam. When we are born, our day of death is already decided and nothing can change it. Every day we live, we are walking towards it. Listen good!’
My foot hurt, but I made myself listen good. He went on, ‘If it wasn’t Hind and Ibra, it would have been someone or something else. I am well and happy and I want you to be happy for me.’
I woke up in my room. My mother was looking over me. She smiled and kissed me. My foot was wrapped in a bandage. It hurt when I tried to move it. ‘You broke your toe,’ my mother said, ‘don’t worry, it will heal. Bello found you near the stream and carried you all the way here. He had been following you all along to keep an eye on you.’
She would start to like him after this. She would agree that he was the best husband for me, the only one who would embrace me without crushing me, who would encircle me without stopping me. Now she wanted me to drink warm milk with honey. Now she wanted me to speak. I told her how I went to Gobir and how I saw Hind. I told her how I did not, after all, avenge my father’s death, and how I dreamed of him. How well he looked in my dream, and all the things that he said.
HOW THINGS DISAPPEAR
* * *
ANNA JAMES
SHE WAS NINETEEN WHEN she started to disappear, although there had been signs when she was a child.
When she was six her parents took her to hospital, sure that her fingers had not formed properly, only to find they were entirely as expected by the time they reached the waiting room. When she was eight one of her teachers thought, just for a moment, that they had seen her freckles flicker on and off. She herself once thought she caught a glimpse of the colour in her irises fading away, but these things were only in the corner of someone’s eye or just as she turned away from the mirror.
When she was fifteen she was convinced, temporarily, that her ribs were vanishing. She was sitting in an exam hall full of copy-and-paste rows of wooden desks and chairs, and copy-and-paste rows of students who were scared or confident or distracted or brave-faced. Just as the invigilator told them to turn over their papers she absent-mindedly scratched her side to discover a gap where her eleventh rib should have been. She dug her fingers deep between her tenth and twelfth without them meeting bone. She tried straightening her back, then curving it over, but however she sat, her eleventh rib proved elusive. Explore the way Bertha Rochester is presented to the reader in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. By the time the answer was written, the rib was back, and she assumed she had been mistaken that it ever went away.
‘How did it go?’ her parents asked her over dinner. ‘Was it a question you’d practised before?’
‘Near enough,’ she said distractedly, thinking about how she didn’t really know what ribs were for when it came down to it. She had a vague feeling that maybe they were for protection, but she couldn’t remember if they were keeping something in or out, stopping something collapsing or holding something together. ‘It was about Bertha.’
Her mother winced.
‘Tricky,’ her father said. ‘She’s so open to interpretation. What was the exact question?’
‘What are ribcages for?’ she asked.
Her parents paused, confused.
‘I mean generally, not in Jane Eyre.’
‘Oh, suddenly she’s interested in biology, when she’s already decided not to take any sciences next year,’ her mother said, and, as usual, it wasn’t clear whether she was joking. ‘Do you know though, if you get the right results in the summer, maybe the school would let you pick up a science as an extra AS Level,’ her mother mused, mainly to herself.
‘Did you know,’ her father said, ‘that people used to think that men had one less rib than women because of the story of Adam and Eve?’
Maybe that’s why men were so angry at women, she thought. Maybe that’s why they invented corsets, to remind women to be grateful for the rib they had been permitted to keep. Later that night she counted the ribs that laddered down both sides of her chest and found all twenty-four. But for many months the eleventh rib on her left itched from the inside, like a reverse phantom limb, constantly reminding her that it had once thought about leaving.
During her first year of university the nerves inside her splintered, and she realised she should have been taking the disappearing more seriously. It was not until the world took so much of her without asking permission that she wondered if she ought to have protected herself better.
There had been a peg on the bathroom wall that she felt digging into the nape of her neck, and the blunt physical pain took her mind away from the far more complicated pain that was happening elsewhere. They had both been in fancy dress, and her brain had paused to wonder whether his sultan costume was maybe slightly racist. There was a fraction of a second where she n
early laughed that this thought had surfaced, considering the circumstances, but instead she vomited. It was a rich purple colour from the blackcurrant squash that had been mixed with the vodka they were drinking. It was only then that he registered any feeling of disgust, and years later it is still the stab of the peg in the back of her neck, and the repulsion on his face that lingers in her memory. That, and the blood; having to apologise to her housemate whose spare sheet she’d borrowed to fashion into a toga for the night, blaming an early period for the mess. After she’d been sick, the man looked as if he might vomit too, for a second, and as he left, he grabbed a towel and threw it at her. She felt the nerves inside her calcify and shatter where the towel hit her skin. She was given a reputation as a messy drunk, and laughed along any time someone brought that night up. And because the words had not been there when she first needed them, they became buried deep inside her, tangled up somewhere near her liver, which soaked them up before it too started to disappear.
For a long time her outer shell remained sturdy, and only the things inside shimmered into nothingness. She found she was able to register what was happening as if staring at a stranger, and she saw herself as though through a window of air distorted in the heat. There were times when she seized at things or people around her and tried to dig in a foundation, but the roots she set down found only dried mud that crumbled beneath her.
She found herself sitting at a top table in a white dress, a man next to her with a glass raised as people she thought she knew brayed and clinked their glasses in her direction. The light refracted through hundreds of champagne flutes, making her squint, and she flinched again and again as the glasses squeaked and smashed and the voices laughed and cheered and she looked at her hands and realised she could see the veins and the bones and the tendons as if she were looking through tissue paper. Another man stood up and talked about her, and another, and the loveliness of her and her bridesmaids were praised while she turned her hands over and over, fascinated by the blood and the mess inside. The man next to her never commented on her translucent skin, and so she thought he must not mind, but she later realised that he had never noticed.
She found that most people did not like to be reminded that they were made of the same tangle of blue and red that she was displaying. She felt like a patient smoking outside a hospital, attached to a drip, trying to ignore the resentful glances of the apparently healthy walking past. It was men in particular who recoiled from her. Children tended to react with curiosity, having not yet learned the appropriate response to such seemingly unapologetic messiness. With women it was often pity, feeling bad for her that she lacked the required discipline to keep the right things covered, although occasionally there were women who mentioned, so casually, that they thought her veins were lovely things, and did she want to see theirs? Men, on the whole, did not like seeing a woman so obviously made out of the same stuff as them, especially a woman who seemed to insist on displaying it so spitefully. They could see right through her, they said, and knew exactly what she was doing. It occurred to her that the world did not want to know that she bled, but still it wanted her blood.
Her heart did not vanish all at once, and so she did not really notice it happening. When she realised how much of it was missing, and tried to gather up all the jagged shards, she found it had shattered so finely that she could not remember what it looked like whole. A friend offered her a needle, in exchange for borrowing some thread, but the stitches were messy and made as many holes as they healed.
When she was a little older there was a child who did not belong to her but whose small hand took hers in the tea-and-coffee aisle at the supermarket.
‘I’m so sorry,’ a woman said, running up to her and reclaiming the sticky fingers. ‘You know what they’re like.’
‘Do I?’ she said, not meaning to sound as accusatory as she did. She knew the assumption was friendly, but it stuck in her like a fine needle, the entry wound not even visible.
‘None of your own?’ the woman blustered, disconcerted. ‘Oh, but look how young you are. You’ve got plenty of time yet.’
The child started to shriek, mummy, mummy, and for a second she thought she saw the other woman’s collarbone flutter in and out of existence.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked, and the bone reasserted itself hard and sharp in the woman’s skin.
Then there was a man who could not stop touching her gossamer skin, and so she showed him all the other things that had disappeared. He offered to take care of the parts that were still clinging on, and she thought maybe giving them to someone else might help, and she let him root around inside her.
He wanted to talk about her skin a lot, and when she told him about her shattered nerves, he liked to talk about that even more. He liked to hear all the details of how each thing had disappeared, and to promise he’d protect her, although she wasn’t sure that was what she was asking for. And then later, although she’d already said she didn’t really want to, he pawed at her breasts and she watched as they melted beneath his hand that seemed giant and monstrous where it was once tender.
Quite abruptly she realised she should probably claim back the parts of her she had entrusted to him, but he said he couldn’t remember being given them, and if she had, he couldn’t remember where he had put them, and what could you expect if you gave someone else the responsibility for the things that hold you together.
She did sense other people who were disappearing, but more often than not they weren’t real. So, she stitched together the words of other people, in different times and places and worlds, and she made for herself a net that was full of holes, but that held when she tentatively first tried to walk on it. She searched libraries and bookshops for stories of other people who had vanished, and made self-help guides out of novels and poems. Once she had tested her weight on other people’s words, she cautiously began to run the threads of her own in between them, weaving them tightly in together. The result was still messy, but it finally started to catch things before they escaped entirely. And so, slowly, she began to try to find the things that had disappeared.
Then there was a man, and when he looked at her she felt the black-and-white etching of her heart flicker into neon, and the scars that joined the broken pieces together pulse and glint. She opened her chest and took out her heart, the bright and precious thing she had rebuilt with bloodied aching hands. She disconnected the veins and the arteries with a careless tug, and it sat in her palm, and she shrugged as if to say, Well what else is there to do? She put it in his hand, gestured towards his chest, at a spot where she thought maybe it could stay for a while. His hand was too tight for a second, and it was as if it was around her throat instead, but then his fingers brushed her skin, each touch like oil in a hot pan. She wondered if his fingers would press too hard on the fault lines and send her heart crumbling again to dust. But then the light caught it in just the right way, and there was a moment that passed too quickly where she thought she could see stars within, ones that would never have been visible if no cracks had ever been made. Not gently, although not without care, he pushed her heart back inside her own chest. He linked back up the parts he did not know the names of, and clicked her ribcage back into place around it. He put his hand on her cheek and it left a bloody mark there that was almost in the shape of a star.
THE WILDFLOWERS
* * *
DOROTHY KOOMSON
Saturday, 9.05 a.m.
THE BRAYING AT MY front door is enough to upset everyone down this street, not just my block of flats. I wrap my dressing gown around myself and hurry towards the front door. There’d better be an emergency for someone to be making this much noise on such an idyllic Saturday morning – before it began, I’d been about to open all the windows in the flat to let in the sea air.
‘You!’ she snarls when she sees me. ‘You!’
Before I can say anything, she raises the object in her hand – a large kitchen knife.
‘I told you to sta
y away from my son. Now look what you’ve done.’
I should slam the door in her face, run for the phone, and call the police. I can’t though, I’m frozen; petrified at what is happening and who is doing this.
‘Get inside,’ she hisses at me.
The blade seems to glint, and I seem to have forgotten how to move. I half expect a neighbour to come out of their flat to see what all the fuss is, but now she’s being quieter – speaking in hushed, vicious tones, and no longer hammering – no one is going to come.
‘Get. Inside,’ she repeats and waves the knife for good measure. This time my body remembers how to move and takes a step back and lets in the woman holding a very large knife.
Twelve years ago
I ducked into this small art gallery in the centre of London to escape the rain. It was tipping it down outside, tapping belligerently on the skylights, rapping persistently at the doors and windows.
But I was grateful to the rain, because I had found the most beautiful canvas of wildflowers. A riotous explosion of colours, shapes, lines, paint splatters; all vibrant, alive, so very real … And looking at it took me to a field of flowers that grew unfettered, untamed, free.
‘Hey,’ a male voice said as he came to stand beside me.
I glanced at him and then returned to the painting. ‘Hello,’ I replied.
‘It’s my mother’s birthday and I was thinking of buying this for her.’ He sounded posh, but he was at least ten years younger than me, probably around the twenty-five mark. ‘You’re a woman, do you think she’d like it?’
I glanced around the gallery and clocked at least three other women more likely to be near his mother’s age who he could have asked, but instead he chose me. I turned to face him. ‘There are better chat-up lines, you know,’ I told him.