‘What are we supposed to be seeing?’ Her mother peered up at the sky and down at the tarmac, although she seemed to take in very little between the two. ‘I don’t know what you want me to look at.’
‘Wind down your windows,’ said Ellis. ‘Wind them right down, until there’s no window left, and stare properly.’
They did.
‘Now do you see all the different colours?’ Ellis pointed. ‘Do you see them all? Can’t you tell that everything isn’t just brown?’
Ellis’s mother put down her knitting and began to crease her eyes.
They lingered for a while in that lay-by, under the grey of a battlefield sky. They watched the moths flutter amongst the heather, and listened to the whisper of a breeze through the grass, before her father turned the key of the engine once more, and they started on the long journey home.
THE HOWLING GIRL
* * *
LAURIE PENNY
IN THE END, IT was the edge of panic in Jamie’s voice that decided her.
‘Hey, it’s good to talk to you. Really good. I’ve missed you, G.’ The number was unlisted, so for Grace the greeting was an ungloved fist, right up under the ribs, no warning. How many years had it been since he’d said her name like that? Her initial in his lovely long-ago-and-far-away mouth like that?
He had a problem, he said, something he was working through, and it would be wonderful if she could help out – but it would be better face-to-face. Would she come up?
Somewhere inside her a barricade started to dismantle. A white flag waved after months and years of siege. We’re starving in here. Let us come to terms.
Jamie laid it on thick. Unusually thick. The new place was so lovely, even in winter, so healing – the perfect place to write, or – was she still writing? Anyway, it was a nice place for a break, and they could talk in private. Could she make it?
Grace made a noise that gave what she hoped was a convincing impression of looking at her calendar and thinking it over. Jamie would absolutely pay the train fare, least he could do at short notice, he’d book it now, no problem at all – but could she come soon? Next weekend?
She could.
The cottage was a two-mile ride from the deserted station. She asked the taxi driver polite questions about his life, and didn’t really listen as he told her how old his kids were, how many years he’d been in the country, and what the weather would be like this time of year wherever it was that he was from. He asked her the same sort of questions about London, and she stared out at the rushing darkness, and contemplated lying about having a husband, having a child, or at least plans for one or the other. In the end she simply said that she was working too hard to think about those things. Concentrating on her career right now. Maybe some day.
‘London,’ said the driver, making a sympathetic clucking sound. ‘You young women can have a very bad time there.’
She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing, and eventually he turned on the radio.
She was going to see Jamie again, and he needed her. She couldn’t resist that. Not even after ten years, and he probably knew that well enough, she acknowledged to herself, as the taxi took knuckle-whitening turns through the blood-black tunnels of grasping trees that all country roads turn into at night.
The thing was, he really had sounded glad to hear her voice.
Later on, she would remember that, and wonder.
Jamie was waiting on the threshold. His hair doing that thing. His face doing that thing. Casual trousers low on his hips, and a cup of tea in one hand as he took her coat and gave her ‘the tour’.
‘The tour’ took quite a while. The house was old, old enough for a lot of people to have lived and died in it, refurbished with that soft, warm lighting everywhere, calm and quiet, like an upscale restaurant before the punters come in.
‘The tour’ was an excuse for Jamie to show off, which he did graciously, and also for them to talk, for the first time in a long time, about a lot of things that didn’t matter, like how it made sense that you weren’t allowed to just knock out a wall of a four-century-old cottage, no matter how much you wanted a kitchen island, or how much it cost to have original hardwood floors stripped, re-sanded, and painted – a lot, but you should have seen the carpets. The previous owners had been vandals, truly, people who put paisley on floors ought to be shot, and he was only ninety-nine per cent joking, he’d do it himself, he was ethical like that.
The cottage was warm – almost stuffy, all the windows were shut and locked, and Grace supposed it made sense. The wind stampeded over the moors outside, bitter, and the windows were all single-glazed, old-style, just thin glass between you and the terrible dark. Still, she remembered how much Jamie used to long for fresh air, when they’d lived together.
In the terrible one-room studio in Turnpike Lane – you couldn’t call it a bedsit these days, but that’s what it was, no turning-around room between the end of the bed and the oven – he used to creep up onto the windowsill, perch among the ashtrays, and sip down the dirty traffic-stinking air from the crack in the skylight. Sometimes he’d do it in the middle of the night, after they had fucked, before they fucked again, the streetlight making his skin luminous and alien, his flat white bum and the signature-line of his spine, as he turned to look at her like a drowning kid looks at a life raft.
She really had loved him.
It was important, Jamie was explaining now, to have simplicity, comfort, minimalism, if you were doing real creative work. Grace was waiting, just waiting, for him to use that Danish word that had been in all the lifestyle magazines, but of course he would never be that obvious. He simply led her into the living room, with its low, squashy sofa covered with sheepskins, its low-burning fire, the delicious rich scent of pine and cinnamon from some hidden, noiseless diffuser.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ she said, meaning it. ‘It feels so—’
‘—so safe, doesn’t it?’ Jamie liked to finish people’s sentences.
It was only after you really knew him that you discovered how special this ability really was: Jamie could finish your sentences without listening to a word you’d been saying. He had a natural ear for the rhythms of speech – it was part of what made him so good at what he did – he could predict people’s words. Most people are tragically predictable, she remembered him saying, more than once, wafting a spliff between slim fingers, conducting the conversation.
Jamie had what songwriters called a lean and hungry look – a boy who wanted so much from life. You wanted him, and more than that, you wanted to be the thing he wanted, even as he stared over your shoulder at the curve of his own future strutting by.
In the downstairs toilet, which Jamie referred to bizarrely as the half-bath – as if she were intending to buy the house – Grace checked herself in the mirror and decided she would do. People told her, approvingly, that she looked young for her age, and she worked out to videos, and she kept herself just a little bit hungry all the time, not being silly about it, not like she used to, but still, the regular empty noises inside were a growl of approval: tomorrow you will take up no more space than you do today.
And if sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night, groggy and half-animal with hunger, groping for carbs, that could be solved by stripping the kitchen of danger foods and keeping something around empty enough to stuff down until her stomach was soothed back to sleep, like one of those orphan animals on the manipulative reality shows, curled on a blanket that smelled almost like mother.
‘You look good,’ said James, when she came through to dinner, changed out of her travel clothes.
They talked about what they had both been ‘up to’, as if adulthood were a minor crime. She talked about her copywriting jobs, and he talked about his third novel and the TV deal, in a way that allowed them both to pretend that they were discussing similar lives, that she didn’t already know all of it. Mostly from her mother, for whom ‘successful writer’ far outweighed ‘soul-sucking mindfucker’.
r /> Mind you, there was a lot that her mother didn’t know.
Jamie sliced the woody stems off fat, stiff spears of asparagus, blackened them in butter until they wilted; cracked two huge, translucent duck eggs over the cast-iron pan, and fried them so that the edges frilled into doilies. There were slabs of thick dark rye bread slathered with some sort of delicious savoury stuff – wild mushroom spread, he explained, bought that morning from the farmers’ market. It was dank, musky, fantastic, like licking the armpit of Christ.
Grace ate the whole thing as neatly as possible. She could see Jamie watching her, deliberately saying nothing. He had always got on at her about her table manners. She ate like a pig, he used to say, not like a girl.
‘I just thought it would be great to reconnect. Talk about how stuff’s going. I know that – well, I know you weren’t happy with how things ended between us, and that made me unhappy.’
Grace heard the word sorry thundering in the negative space of the conversation.
He asked her how she was, repeatedly, in all sorts of ways. He asked how work was – fine – how her sister was – fine – whether she was still in touch with so-and-so, and how they were.
‘I’m really glad,’ he said, and again, he seemed to mean it, like a man who has just been told that the lump is nothing to worry about.
She put her fork down.
‘OK, what’s this actually about?’ she said, annoyed enough to forget that he had never liked that sort of question. ‘Are you in some sort of anonymous thing?’
‘Pardon?’
‘My mum’s ex-boyfriend was in some sort of junkies-anonymous cult. He had to call everyone he’d messed around and apologise. Then if they didn’t forgive him, he yelled at them. Seemed a bit dodgy. I wondered if this was one of those things.’
‘Ah. No. No, not really.’
‘It’s OK if it is.’
‘You know, I actually know a lot of people who’ve been helped by that programme. But no. This isn’t that. Why?’
‘You seemed to be circling around some sort of apology. Maybe. I don’t know.’
Jamie’s eyes narrowed – they really did, that was the weird thing, he was the only person she’d ever met who actually narrowed his eyes when he was angry, like he’d read it in a book and practised.
‘Apologise for what?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Forget it. Never mind.’
She remembered that she was alone in a remote place with a man who liked to choke people during sex and hated having to ask because it killed the mood.
She blinded her second egg with the edge of her fork.
‘It’s good,’ she said, letting the cold yolk clam over her tongue.
He laughed, low and sudden.
‘I suppose I did want to apologise. In a way.’
She raised both eyebrows, her mouth full of egg.
‘I don’t know what for, specifically. For being young and dumb, I suppose.’
‘We were both young,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘And we both could have behaved better.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s true,’ he nodded. ‘We both could. I suppose we both have things to apologise for.’
‘Well, then,’ she swallowed, ‘I apologise.’
He went to the toilet – the half-bath. While he was out of the room she wrapped the buttered toast in paper napkins to throw away later, somewhere Jamie wouldn’t notice.
The sheets in the spare room were cool and clean on Grace’s arms and legs, rough impersonal comfort, like she imagined the best sort of hospital bed would be, where you’re ill enough to need care that comes at the click of a button, but in no pain you can’t bear.
She woke up hungry. If she was honest, it happened more nights than it didn’t, always a couple of hours into a forgettable first dream.
A raw emptiness shook her awake with the branch of a dead tree battering on the thin window. A wordless wanting to cram herself with something thick, bread or cake or cock or love, all of it dangerous, nothing safe to hand.
The knocking continued, rapping the sleep from her, focusing the hunger. Maybe if she drank cold water, that might fill her, but it was never enough at night. It had to be sweet, or heavy, or both.
She sat up.
There were no trees on that side of the house. Something else was knocking.
Grace turned her head very carefully, and saw a dead girl outside the window.
Her hand was very thin and very white, cheap fabric stretched over sinew, and there was something about her face that seemed horribly familiar, even though it kept flickering in and out of focus. Dreaming, Grace was obviously still dreaming, and so there was no reason to be afraid. It didn’t feel at all real, and when things didn’t feel real, they felt safer.
The dead girl looked so cold out there.
There was something wrong about the way the light hit her: she looked overexposed, permanently caught in someone else’s snapshot with the flash on too high and the strange glowing rabbit-eyes. Could she even see?
She opened her mouth, and that was wrong, too, it opened much too slowly, a paper flap, and it was all black inside, and a terrible noise came out, something like an obsolete machine screaming.
That was enough.
Grace dragged the thin curtain across the window and lay back down, deciding she wasn’t hungry any more, because she was dreaming, and in a minute she’d be in another dream, the sort where you could eat as much as you wanted, chocolate cake and school-dinner food, chips and beans and bacon, all the dirty stodge you really wanted, and when you woke up you felt so guilty, so out of control, until you remembered it was OK, you’d dreamed it. Compared to that, dead girls in the garden weren’t so scary.
Grace used to think about death far more. Not in a frightening way – at least, it wasn’t frightening to Grace, although she learned not to talk about it too much.
But she would mention it, sometimes, often, to boys after they fucked her, because she found it excited them. The thought of her cold.
They would hold her close and stroke her face and look sad.
She didn’t actually want to die. There were some days when she felt it might be a lot less hassle just to conveniently and without much of a fuss suddenly be dead, but the truth was that she just wanted to be allowed to hold life lightly. That would have taken too much explaining, though, and poetic, intellectual boys were always far more interested in dead girls, or the idea of them, an idea of girls who went cold quietly and cleanly, without shitting the bed or screaming, because they were hollow inside to begin with.
The next day they went for a hike, even though she didn’t have the right shoes. She had brought big, worn-in biker boots, but you needed extra ankle support for hiking.
‘What’s the difference between walking and hiking?’ she asked, halfway up a hill, her breath serrated, her cheeks grated raw by the wind.
‘Hiking has more intent to it,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s more mindful.’ He stopped to let her catch up. ‘Also steeper,’ he conceded.
He had taken it up, he said, last year, to take his mind off the publicity.
Last year, Jamie had been shortlisted for three major literary prizes, and although he hadn’t won any of them, it was generally acknowledged that sooner or later it would be his ‘turn’. This time the gongs had gone to, respectively, a very young white woman who wrote a searing novel about sexual violence, a middle-aged black man who wrote a searing novel about the impact of the Dutch slave trade on eight generations of a fictional family that was nonetheless interpreted as autobiography by every critic, and a transgender Asian lesbian whose novel, a magical realist retelling of an Icelandic saga set in modern London where all the main characters were foxes and pigeons, was also universally described as ‘searing’.
Jamie, the underdog, was noted for his grace in defeat in every interview. There were lots of interviews. Critics suggested implicitly that his book might have swept the board of trophies if it weren’t for the general mood of polit
ical correctness lingering around like a ripe fart in a gentlemen’s club.
Photos of Jamie gallantly kissing the hand of the very young female author as she went to collect her award made the rounds, and if Grace recognised the look of confusion in her face, frozen in the moment of interruption on the way to her spotlight, she was probably being ungenerous.
But Jamie’s book was stunning, all the same.
It was about a young man who retreats to one bare room in despair at the state of the world, and who gradually transforms into a wild animal. Various lovers arrive and attempt to save him, and all of them end up mauled or eaten, until at last an enigmatic Russian waitress works out how to tame the creature. There was bestiality and body-horror and a dash of pop philosophy. The whole thing was disgusting and delicious, a book made by fermenting rotten things until they tasted intentional.
Grace savoured every page, cried at the end, and hated herself for it. She recognised the room in the book, the room where the creature was trapped. It was awfully like the room they’d had in Turnpike Lane all those years ago, when they’d been hungrier and younger, and had nothing to do but hurt each other. The dusting of mould on the walls. The stink of roll-ups soaking into everything. The books on every surface. The bloodstains.
She could understand why it hadn’t won the prizes – the other books had had more range, more human interest, and fewer gratuitous scenes of wolf-men having deep thoughts about Zizek while eating their own shit. But it was damn good, all the same. That was the annoying part. The problem wasn’t just that Jamie acted like he was a special boy with a special talent.
The problem was that he was right.
He was the sort of boy you followed up mountains in the wrong shoes.
She picked at a blister later in front of the fire.
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘Oh, I’m in London half the time – and usually when I’m here my assistant comes out. Or Julia. Honestly, I wish I could be here all the time.’
It was only the second time he’d mentioned his wife.