A sharp knife was taken to the world. It cut through countries, oceans, sliced through cities and towns, villages, houses and places of work. It severed folk about their daily business, freezing them in cross-section, innards displayed like in text books or those charts on butcher shop walls. It separated partners, husbands and wives. In its wake everything paused.
The knife was to blame for her losing Michael, for Michael losing his mind. It was to blame for the disaster unfolding, having slipped its bonds. It was complicit in the unravelling of lives and minds, its sharpness such that few noticed the dislocation until it was too late and no way then to cross the divide. Bridges were useless, stitching that dissolved in the wound. Only a mating of parts, so precisely severed, could cure the ails of souls…
‘Oh, please.’
‘What? Something I said?’
‘More the way you said it.’
He couldn’t remember saying anything, scratching his head as if removing a caul.
‘You disappear up your own arse sometimes, you know?’
He knew.
‘It’s the happy pills,’ he told her.
‘There, you’re doing it again.’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘And stop apologizing!’ She was torturing him, the shame of it fleeting. She could control him, it was simple. ‘It doesn’t make it better.’
He shut his eyes and unfolded his arms. She stroked his chest and poked him till he smiled.
He was mouldable, she realized.
Losing him was careless. Finding him would be difficult, or easy. She had yet to really look, supposing he would just turn up.
Hadn’t he always?
But if he was where she suspected, in the freezer compartment, looking might not be appropriate.
Twenty Seven: The Four Humours