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He’s twelve and doesn’t know who he is anymore when Mary tells him to think of Forthlin like an island.
Water will come where it’s supposed to, she says. The waves will rise, and the rivers will flood, and it’ll be a grand soft day, and all of the land and the islands and the sky will remain and life will go on, and he wonders if she knows. If she knows how aware he is of the permanence of that motion—the forward march of time. If she knows he’s been as aware of it as anything since the moment he sat in a church pew and thought of the meaning of forever.
He’s prone to fits. That’s what Mary calls them. Fits of fancy, only the fancy he knew existed stacked high in grocery store aisles—brightly colored tins too high up for him to reach, Mary holding him firmly by the hand and tugging him down the aisle, away, towards the dented things nearly expired that she said they could do something with if they only thought hard enough.
She thinks too much, Jim says. That’s the problem with him. He thinks too much about the wrong things, and not enough about the right ones. Do well in school. Tuck in your shirt. Wash those grass stains off your knees. It’s not proper for a lady to sit that way. It’s not right for her to roll around in the dirt with the boys.
He thinks too much. He thinks too much of the wrong things. He sees things in the picture shows. He sees things on stage. That’s all it is. She’ll grow out of it. She was like that, at his age. It’s a season. A season of change. A season of change that comes and does its work and lengthens limbs and swells with green and fruit and new life, and then it will leave and he won’t be able to think that way again, he won’t be able to be.
He thinks of rain when he sits at the dinner table in trousers too big for him, stolen from the floor of Mike’s room. He thinks when the plate shatters on the wall behind his head.
“James Jim McCartney!” Mary yells as she begins to stand, a sound punctuated by the slap of skin against skin as Jim backhands her. A thump. A weight hitting the floor.
Paul stares down at the table. The scuffed and pitted surface. A wedding present from your grandparents, Mary had told him time and time again, when Paul had groused as a child at being made to polish something so drab, working oil in canyons deeper than they were wide.
The spoon wiggles back and forth as the table quivers. Paul follows the wood grain with his eyes, looks to where Mike is perched across from him, eyes wide and unseeing like twin moons as he shakes apart.
“No daughter of mine will be prancing about in lad’s trousers!” Jim menaces, taking Paul by the arm and yanking him sideways from the table.
His chair tips over. His feet catch on the table leg, and he ends up halfway to his knees, dangling uselessly from the arm Jim lofts into the air.
His shoulder socket pops. The feeling in his arm tingles out to nothing.
“Mary,” He says. “Your name is Mary, like your mother. And you are my daughter. Do you hear me? You’re my daughter,” he says, and Paul nods, and he nods, because he knows, he knows, because his body will change, and then he’ll never stop knowing.
—
It rains, the day Mary dies. It rains, because it rains every day in the winter and the spring and the fall, and in October the sea-air blows mist from the waves, coating the city in a silvering blanket of salt-brine dew.
He sits on top of the kitchen counter, face pressed fogging to the glass. Stares out at the rain puddling in the yard as the sound of Jim crying drifts in from the sitting room.
He wears trousers, that day. He wears them because when Jim looks at him there’s nothing in his eyes. A dark pit like the one he augers up in his mind. The thing before he was born. The thing that will come after.
Time marches on like a maw, grinding what it can in its teeth. The cabinets empty. Dirt gathers in corners. Empty bottles pile up beneath the sink. Dirty laundry on the bathroom floor.
There’s hardly any compost, these days. Carrot tops go into the stew. Old potatoes with more eyes, even, than wrinkles. He drops the eggshells into the compost bucket, slips on Jim’s rubber boots, big enough on him the top flaps against his knees, dog-eared, as he walks out into the rain, and the world swallows itself in grumbling ardor.
Rain patters on the slate roof. Runs down the eaves and drops onto the pavement. It plops wetly down into the soil, spraying granules of silty mud. It waves the leaves in their branches. It rustles the grass in its masses.
He crosses the lawn, and the blades brush grey rubber, streaking brown strands, clinging wetly to what they can. He lifts the lid off the bin, water running down in sudden rivulets, and something pings off the ground.
He bends over. Rolls it back and forth between his fingers.
A cherry pit.
He stands under the rain. He holds it in his palm. The smooth surface pitted by the indent of childhood molars. He tips his face back towards the grey clouds. Closes his eyes.
Back in the house, he strips on the woven mat before the back door. Jim’s boots, and then his shirt, soaked through. Flat-chested, his nipples pert in the cold as he shivers.
There’s a sound in the kitchen—the lid falling back onto the pot of broth. Jim stands in front of the stove, staring at him. His eyes deep and empty and dark. He looks at Paul. He looks down to the pink flush of him, rosy from the cold. He looks down at his nipples, and he stares, and he is silent.
In Paul’s stomach, the empty pit of the nothing he’s eaten clenches. Draws into itself. Quivers.
Jim keeps looking.
His face is haggard—grey stubble from days without shaving. Crusts at the corner of his mouth. Red rimming his eyes. His lips are chapped. Bitten and bleeding, the way Mary was—
Well.
Jim’s tongue darts out. Wets over the skin. Bottom lip. Top. Paul folds his arms in front of himself. Doesn’t know why.
—
He hears Jim sometimes. At night. Their rooms just together, nothing between them but a thin layer of plaster.
He used to hear Mary, once. Too. He used to hear her, and he used to hear Jim, and the sounds they made together, and he’d thought they were hurting each other until he didn’t. Until he’d asked Mary and she’d told him.
It’s what you’ll do for your husband one day, she’d said, and Paul thought of open palms smearing with motion. Bruises dappled along a spine. The look on Mary’s face when he started in on her. The tight line of her once bloated mouth, ringed in bruises.
It’s not meant to feel good, darling, she told him. You’ll do it because you’ll have to, and it will be worth it in the end. Look what it got me. Flattening her hands on either side of his face. Kissing his forehead, and he hadn’t understood until years later, flipping through her medical textbooks—seeing the pink and red illustrations on the pages, the tingling like an itch on the inside of him starting between his legs.
It’s not supposed to feel good, she’d said, but Paul found out himself, hands going where they weren’t meant, how wrong she was. How right, after. Lying in bed, staring at the pruning pads of his fingers, wanting to hide under the covers and never come out again. Wanting to carve free the flesh of himself. Shape it into something different. Something that wouldn’t make his stomach toss like the waves on the ocean when he saw it. When he glimpsed the soft pink edges of it in the bathroom mirror.
It doesn’t sound like it doesn’t feel good, when Jim does it. Grunting through the walls, the rhythmic puff of his breathing, and the long, high-pitched sounds, melodic through the walls. A keen like a dying animal.
Mary, he says, Mary, oh— and Paul squeezes his eyes shut, pictures it even though he doesn’t want to—grey, wrinkling flesh, jiggling with motion, a hand cupping, moving up and down. Open-mouthed. Yellow, pipe-stained teeth, lips thinned with age, and hips bucking upward the way they had when Paul watched Ian do what other boys did—sat at the end of Ian’s bed with his hands cupped between his legs, squirming because he felt like he had to, like he should, like he would die without doing it.
He opens his eyes again. Turns on his side. Folds his pillow over his head, and it doesn’t matter. He still hears it. Mary’s name. His own.
—
He does the sweeping up. Jim lies on the couch in a stupor, bottles empty and scattered, and Pauld stays in the kitchen scrubbing what he can, shielded by the closed door. He washes dirt from the baseboards. Wears imprints into his knees and palms, scraping black from between grout lines.
In the corner of the room, picking fuzz out from beneath the baseboard with a butter knife, the metal catches, sticks there. He braces his feet against the wall and pulls, and pulls, until his arms tremble with effort and won’t pull anymore.
He lies on the tiles panting. He lies on the tiles with his legs spread, breeze tickling the space between his thighs.
He goes for the torch, and lying down again, presses his cheek to the tiles—peers beneath the wood until he finds it: smooth and pale and cratered, stuck in the side of the knife.
A cherry pit, and behind it, another, and another still.
—
Aunt Millie comes the day before the funeral, a garment bag over her arm. She takes Paul into his parents’ bedroom, because his own is too small for much of anything besides sleeping.
It’s musty, inside. A stale smell like a thousand stuffed up exhales. Unwashed skin, and sweat, and something he’s never smelled before, except that time in Ian’s bedroom, watching as he spilled over his own hand, the thing Paul hadn’t known what it was, until Ian told him.
Millie tells him to sit on the bed. The bed with its rumpled sheets. It’s creased wedding quilt. He doesn’t want to. She tells him to again and he does—gingerly. Gently, as if that will stop anything from rubbing off that might.
She pulls the black dress from the bag.
“Put this on,” she says, as she holds out the black lace thing. There’s a petticoat under it. A dreadful mass of crinoline poofing over the fold of her arm.
“No,” he says, and she takes him by the arm, the place five bruises purple in a ring like a bangle.
“Your mother is dead,” She says.
She doesn’t have to say anything more.
—
He picks at the hem of the dress. The place the crinoline catches on his stockings, poking and making his thighs itch.
Beside the coffin, Jim sways, red-eyed from the half bottle of drink he’d worked his way through that morning at the breakfast table, Mike and Paul sitting, eyes down, as they fiddled with the eggs Millie had made.
“You’ve had rotten luck there, Jim,” one of the men Paul recognizes from the cotton exchange reaches out to shake his hand, and Jim looks back, eyes glazed, unseeing. "She was a grand wife, Mary. Never let you go hungry, did she, Jim?"
Mutely, Jim shakes his head.
"No point crying, love,” another Aunt says—his mother’s sister, as she fusses with the self-cut strands of Paul’s hair. Paul’s face is dry. His eyes sting from the dryness of the air inside the chapel, boiler pushing coal-heated air through the vents in the floor, sucking greedily away at the moisture which beads on the window panes. “There's work to be done. She taught you how, didn’t she? The washing and the cooking, I mean. And what else? The ironing, do you know how to do that? And the budget—how to stretch it. She was good at that, your mother. Never got rid of anything. And your father—look in on him. He’s taking it badly, I fear.”
Beside him, his uncle claps Jim on the shoulder, who sways with the blow, stumbling a half step forward before his uncle rights him again.
"You'll not stay a widower long,” he says. “A looker like you. You’ll need help with that boy.”
“A man can't manage a house on his own,” his aunt says. "Make sure your da’ gets a hot meal. Don't let the washing pile up. Keep yourself busy, that's the thing."
An hour later, they put Mary in the earth. They lower her into her plot in the protestant cemetery, because she’s gone now. There’s nobody to argue with, Jim’s pastor had said when he’d come to make the arrangements, and nobody had the money for a Roman Catholic burial, or interest in the church’s thoughts on her marrying outside of it.
His uncle slips when throwing in the first shovelful of dirt—grass tearing free from the mud, he slides over the edge of the grave, landing with a thud on the coffin lid, swearing loudly. It takes four men to pull him out, and when he emerges, it’s mud-streaked, spitting mad, embarrassed and half-drunk, too, like Jim. He kicks the dirt pile, sends a cascade over the side, thudding down over the wood of Mary’s coffin. Spits onto the grass for good measure.
Besides the grave, Millie leans over him, hand on the back of his neck, fussing with the thick hairs there.
“You’ll grow it out now, won’t you? Your mother loved your hair long.”
In the car on the way home, Jim sits beside him, staring at him with flat, brown eyes. He’s sobered up some, during the service. Drank a little more with his brother, hidden away behind a pillar and trading a flask between them. Sobered up again at the grave side, staring long and hard down at the fresh earth as Mike and Paul shivered beside him, coat-less at Millie’s insistence.
They need to look proper, she’d said. Mike in his best suit, legs too long, Paul in the dress Millie had bought, and not a coat between them without patches on the elbows.
“You look like her,” Jim says, and beside him, a sodden pant leg pressed to Paul’s stockinged thigh, Mike shifting uncomfortably.
He’s been standing apart from Paul all day—Mike. Standing straight and tall and nodding and shaking hands and acting every part the grown-up lad. Not now, in the car. Not anymore. His arms loop around Paul’s own. His eyes red-rimmed as he leans his head against Paul’s shoulder. He doesn’t look at Jim. He sinks back into the car seat, hidden behind the shape of Paul’s shoulder, too broad for a bird. Bony and pale and chilled and not at all like their mother was.
“You should dress like a girl more often,” Jim goes on as Paul stares at the floor mat under their feet. The mud-stain patterns from the bottoms of a dozen other shoes. “You look pretty like that. Like a lass.”
Paul says nothing. Shifts, pulls the hem down where it’s ridden up beneath his ass.
“Do you hear me? You look good like that. You look like your mother.”
“Yes, Dad,” Paul says.
At home, Millie waits with a sack of groceries. Tells him what dinner to make. How to make it. He does the potatoes up the way Mary used to—rinses them in cool water that he saves for the stew. Starts to chopping before Millie gets him about the wrists, asks him in horror what he’s doing.
“The potatoes,” he says, confused, and she scoffs, tears the knife out of his hand, slicing the end of his pinky, and shouldering him out of the way. He puts the finger in his mouth, sucking. Tasting copper.
“Your Father’s wife is dead, lass. Think he deserves a bit better than peasant soup. You’ll not be greedy with my groceries,” she says, setting to peeling them into the sink. Paul watches as the peels drop down one by one, thick with potato meat, beading starch. They’d be good in the oven, still. Just them and a bit of leftover lard and some salt. Mary could never stand it when they wasted something. And now…there won’t be so much money as there used to.
He thinks of Jim’s going out, the pub. The empty bottles that have begun accumulating in the days since she died, the empty cabinets. The betting paper beneath the telephone in the hall.
“Don’t just stand there. Can’t you do anything?” Millie gripes, grabbing him by the wrist, tugging his fingers from his mouth.
“That’s a filthy habit, you know?” She says, throwing his wrist back down. “What man will want you like that? You look like a baby sucking your thumb. A husband doesn’t want a baby. He doesn’t want you weepy and useless. At your age—you should know how to do these things. You shouldn’t need my help in the kitchen. Isn’t there anything you can do?”
She turns, rustles through the bag on the counter as Paul stands, staring down at the blood which beads, cool, and drips its way down the side of his pinky.
Millie turns again, thrusts an egg into his hand, folds his fingers around it with her own, smearing blood.
“There, can you handle that? You’ve held an egg before, haven’t you?”
He looks at her. He looks at her permed hair, folded up carefully around her head. The powder at her hairline, the baby hairs that frizz out around the edges. The pearls around her neck, sinking between loose skin.
He holds the egg up in the air. Hurls it against the floor. It cracks, seeping yellow-orange over the tiles. Millie winds back her hand and slaps him—a quick sting across the face, forcing his head sideways, out towards the window.
It’s raining, outside. The way it rains every day. A drizzle more mist than not. The kind of rain that hangs, suspended in the air, waiting for someone to pass through it, to gather up every drop like picking something, picking cherries from the tree.
There are puddles forming outside. There are puddles which never dry, growing bigger with each passing day. Lakes in the center of the yard.
“You have to take care of your father,” she says, and her voice is hard. “You’re the woman of the house now, Mary. And if you don’t learn it, he’ll learn you.”
—
“Don’t tell your father,” Mary says, giggling as she sets him down on a blanket on a sun-soaked day. Her straw hat, stuffed with rags to keep it from falling over his eyes, sags in front of his vision, floppy-brimmed. He pushes it up again, pouting, as the sun bakes down, burning the skin of his ankles and heating the blanket until it stinks like damp wool.
“He’s a fruit fiend,” Mary whispers, reaching into the pocket on the front of her apron, “so this will stay between us.
Cupped in the palm of her hands—shining purple things, imperfect spheres with long green stems.
“What are they?” he asks, climbing onto his knees, peering down at them. They catch the sunlight—shimmer and shine like droplets of deep amber wine.
“They’re cherries, you daft thing,” Mary laughs. “You’ve had cherries before. The red ones—in the can. They look different, is all. Go on now, they don’t bite.”
In his mouth, the fruit bursts into rivulets of warm, sweet liquid, balming the back of his throat. He smiles before it’s half done, and when the cherry juice runs between his lips Mary dabs at it, rubs his mouth and chin clean on the sleeve of her dress.
She tells him to mind the stone and he does—rubs the flesh from it between his molars, rolls it around on his tongue.
“Wha’ do I do wiff it?” he asks, and she puckers her lips, forms a small ‘o’ before a damp pit connects with the flesh of his arm.
He shrieks as she laughs. Tries to spit back his own before it lands, impotently, on the blanket before her folded legs. They trade pits back and forth, cleaved from sun-warmed cherry flesh and cleaned on tongues
In the grass, they gather like bones—a pile of things excavated from within, and shimmer damp from saliva, soon to be spotted with curious ants, carrying away what their mouths could not.
We should hide them, Paul thinks, as the pile grows. We should put them somewhere before Jim comes home. Bury them in the damp earth.
Mary spits another pit into the soil, where it rolls, forested in the lawn. Smiles at him with juice-stained lips.
Inside, Mary lifts him to the sink. Bathes his hands and his face in cool water, sets him free to do what it is that six-year-olds do, and in the living room, beside Jim’s chair, Paul sees them, and the joy that sits thick in his stomach like mashed cherries curdles.
A white porcelain bowl with the ribbon of color on the fluted edge. And inside—cherries. Gleaming red. Long, slender stems.
—
They’ve not any money.
It’s too expensive to heat the other rooms, Jim tells him, as he bolts the metal cover over the coal vent in Paul’s bedroom. Leaves the one in Mike’s. Their silence learned, now, in matters such as these—Mike watching from his door at the end of the hall with eyes that dig against the blankness in Paul’s own.
That night, he wears two sweaters to bed. Wraps himself in the extra blanket from Mike’s room. The first November night ice creeps over the inside pane, rubbing the world out to hazy whiteness.
He kneels on the bed, breath puffing, staring at the place where the neighbors' roofline darkens the ice crystals to a dull, mauzy grey. There are trees, there—over the fence. A rare sight in a place such as this, where the gaping maw of metal machines scraped the landscape to a uniform flatness ideal for the construction of identical rows of brick houses, dotting the street like terra-cotta molars.
Behind him, the ghostly head of an apparition, too familiar to startle at. Tongue dry in his mouth, he swallows as the muscles in his thighs clench hard enough to cramp.
“Mike’s room is warm,” Paul says, watching the movement of his mouth, the black wink of it open and closed in the ice-frosted glass. “I can—I’ll go there. I know he won’t mind. There’s room enough for both of us—”
“Come here,” Jim says behind him, so close now his breath stirrs the hairs on the back of Paul’s neck. Puffs burst of moisture across skin to settle and lick at chill.
“I’m not cold,” Paul says, tenses too hard to shiver. “I’m alright.”
“It’s freezing,” Jim says, as he wraps an arm around Paul’s waist, pulls him backwards against his chest. “I’m cold. Warm your father up.”
In Jim’s bedroom, the air is warm enough to bring moisture to Paul’s eyes. Beneath the blanket Mary stitched together by hand, Jim’s not cold. His skin burns against Paul’s own. Sparks and freezes and thaws.
“You’re frozen,” he whispers against Paul’s hair, as a flat arm makes its way beneath the first sweater. Pokes through the holes of the second.
Lying there, he smells his mother. He smells his mother like something gone stale. Carbolic soap and beeswax and the stink of unwashed linens.
He can smell his father, too. Sweat and sour and acrid—the bitter smell of alcohol clinging like cologne to his skin.
“That’s it,” Jim says, sour breath puffing against his hair. “You’re a good girl.”
And his hand widens. His fingers splay as he pulls Paul against him. Pelvis to pelvis. Chest to breast. They flatten against Jim—his breasts. His nipples. And against him Jim sighs—an exhale like a moan.
And Paul feels it. A hand on the woolen fabric of his skirt. A hand working the hem up where it’s already bunched between his legs. His teeth chatter as he brings up knees together, but the hand follows, pressing them apart again. A warm weight settling between them.
And he feels it. He feels it between his legs. The space where his knickers stick out beneath the ridden-up hem of Mary’s skirts; the hardness. The warm, hot line of it as he begins to shake.
“Dad—” Paul tries, eyes watering, but Jim shushes him. Jim pets over the back of his head, tilts Paul’s head to the side and kisses him.
Paul pulls back. Tries. Jim’s fingers grip bone. He presses forward. Smashes Paul’s nose until he can’t breathe.
His mouth opens. Jim presses forward. Jim presses in.
—
He sits in the yard. He sits in the yard as the water rises. He sits in the yard as the water rises over his toes, laps over the back of his knickers.
It rains. And it rains, and it keeps raining, and beneath the grass mud sluices, dirt dissolving into paste, water flooding each minuscule hole in the earth: ant holes and worm holes and mole hills, filling them up until there is nothing left but flat, uniform mud.
Where do they go, when it rains? The bugs and the worms and the animals. Where do the ants go, when the world falls to pieces in cataclysmic eruptions, drops which fall like mortars, sky dark like the one Mary and Jim had met under, thick with German bombers and Spitfires and the thousand glittering eruptions stretching between them like tightropes.
Why hadn’t he wondered before?
He used to step on ants. He used to, when he was a child. Spent hours in the garden forcing them to march in a line, killing any who stepped outside of it, lining the trench with their bodies. He’d found pleasure in it. Something less acute than joy, and that made it worse, didn’t it? The passivity of the pleasure. The ease with which it left him, when he abandoned their bodies to go inside. Left them still in the throes of it: the marching and the dying and the carrying on.
Ants learned, after a while, he’d thought until he hadn’t. Pheremone trails, a pattern worn in the tapestry of those who came before. A long line, from birth to death. A line laid out before anything was anything.
The water rises. Half a millimeter. Another half.
It’s taking too long. It’s raining so slowly now that it’s hardly rising at all.
He lies on his back. He lies back in the frigid water as gooseflesh crawls like ants over his skin. He spreads his legs. He spreads his legs and feels mud flood him. Feels the mud seeking every millimeter of his body.
His hair stands on end. Mud fills his ears, and the world goes silent.
He hears his heartbeat. He hear his self. He hears his breath, and his blood pumping, and the roar of the empty space inside him.
He blinks up at the sky. Droplets of water shatter against his eyes, and he imagines the world in placid stillness. Imagines the flat, empty plane of a thing after everything has been scraped away.
He opens his mouth, tastes each drop on his tongue like cherries on a hot summer day.
—
Jim eats cherries. He sets them between age-thinned lips. Grips them there as he pulls the stems free with a snap.
Paul sits with Mike on the living room floor, passing him empty spools of thread and bottle caps. Stopping him when he bangs them together too loudly.
“A patient at the hospital brought them,” Mary says, and she polishes the piano. “His wife delivered a healthy baby boy.”
“A boy’s worth more than a few cherries,” Jim says, approving, as he slots another into his mouth.
The pits gather in his cheeks. The liquid beading, shimmering, at the corner of his mouth.
He makes a sound—an unhappy thing, and Mary rushes over, holds out her hand, and Jim spits the pits out, one by one, still cragged with cherry-flesh, into the hollow of her palm.
Mary leaves—steps around Mike and into the kitchen.
Paul looks at Jim. Watches as he feeds another cherry between his lips, and when Jim catches his watching he looks hurriedly away.
There are a few left, at the end of that night. A handful which shine and split and swell with their ripeness on the shelf high above the kitchen sink.
Paul watches them, and Mike watches them, and Mary watches them the next morning at breakfast, eating eggs and the heel of leftover bread.
That night, Jim’s salesmen friends come over, and they stand in the living room in their shoes, pressing mud into hand-scrubbed carpet, and one by one Jim drops the cherries into their glasses, laughing and boasting and bragging about fresh fruit and the war.
“Mary, come here!” he yells, and when Mary doesn’t, he turns to Paul, snapping his fingers.
“Polly,” he says, and takes Paul by the wrist. He takes Paul’s hand and opens it, holds it flat, and Jim’s friends spit their pits into his palm, and Paul holds them. Paul stares down at the saliva that pools beneath them.
He walks up the stairs. He walks into Jim’s bedroom, unzips the edge of his pillow and slides them inside. Wipes the saliva clean on the feathers. Shakes the pillow until the pits disappear inside.
—
“It’s involuntary,” Mary told him, the first time they’d done laundry together since he’d started to grow hair. She’d pulled his knickers out before he could grab at them. Found the dried, gummy white, which crusted over the gusset while Paul tried quietly to die. “It can happen because you see a lad you like, or just because of the weather. Did you see a lad you liked?” She teased, while mortification twisted itself in the muscles of his neck, making it impossible to move or swallow or say much of anything.
He blinked at her, owlish, while she went on, flipping the underwear inside out, holding them by the crotch.
“The first time your father held you it happened to him. That’s why he went home crying. He picked you up and everyone could see in his trousers how they didn’t sit quite right. It happens like that. It can happen when a lad is scared too, or after he dies. It’s perfectly natural,” she said, as she dipped Paul’s knickers into the soapy bowl, scraping his discharge free with her thumb, and Paul thought of himself as a baby. The ugly, squirming piece of red meat Jim has painted in his mind time and time again.
Looked at you and thought, what lad would have that? Jim laughed at the dinner table at his twelfth birthday, his aunts and the entire extended family crammed around the one table, sitting on chairs and old boxes and musicians' stools, whatever they could find.
Watching Mary scratch at his knickers the image of Jim in the hospital room twisted. Paul, fresh from the squeeze of his mother’s womb—the cold and the warm and the damp. The place where nothing bad happened. The place where nothing could.
And then: cold. Bright lights, burning through lids of eyes never opened, and waiting arms. Course, hairy things. A hard chest. Eyes blinking down at him. And he imagined feeling it. He imagined knowing, even as he couldn’t have, couldn’t so much as remember, as draw it to the places in his mind that paintings came from, and beautiful, mournful songs.
A worm burrowing out of flesh. A worm bursting through the flesh of Jim’s abdomen, the gap in the shirt he hadn’t bothered to button. And it dropped onto Paul. It fell onto his skin. And it wiggled. And it rooted. And it searched like a babe searching for a teat. And it found flesh damp from delivery, and flesh wrinkly from the only place it had known, and rolls of fat and loose skin of everything Paul would become.
And it burrowed. It burrowed between them. It burrowed within him. It found him. It knew.
Who he would one day be. Who he isn’t, still.
Mary dunked his underwear once again. Hung them to dry on the line above the wash basin, dripping on the counter where they made their meals, and Paul thought, and he remembered, and he wondered if she did. If she knew, truly, or believed the things she’d said.
It’s perfectly natural, She’d said. It happens all the time.
Jim, holding his baby for the first time. Jim, holding Paul.
—
He holds Jim’s underwear under the bathroom light, picked from the pile of soiled garments Jim had left there over the past few days. He’d picked the shirt off the top, dumped it into the bin. Then the socks. The trousers. Bent over to pick up the underwear and felt them crunch in his hand.
He’d held them for a moment. Held them in a ball in his hand as he struggled to think, to connect any kind of action to the uncontrollable clench of his muscles as his abdomen cramped. He breathes deeply. He breathes deeply, and thinks of Mary, thinks of Mary washing his and Mike’s diapers, wiping shit from the creases of their ass when she changed them.
His muscles loosen. Tighten again. He opens his hand, and like a flower the underwear unfurls, and there in the center he sees the clear streaks of it shining in the light, flaking white and ashy around where the fabric had bended, flaking dried liquid free.
Some of it falls. Some of it falls off the end of the trembling fabric, flaking onto the skin of his palm.
His face flames. His whole body hot as his throat clenches. He drops the underwear. He bends over the sink, breathing heavy through his nose. Turns the water on as hot as it will go, shoves his hand under until he can’t stand it anymore.
Behind him, on the floor, visible in the mirror, the underwear lies, crumpled. He closes his eyes. Breathes in through his nose, out again. Thinks of Mary. Thinks of Mary scraping his discharge free beneath his thumb. Thinks about how he has to be Mary now. How he has to take care of his father. How sometimes these things happen when people don’t want them to, how sometimes these things happen on their own.
He bends down. He picks up the underwear. Sets them in the bin, carries it downstairs to the sink, where he scrubs them clean. Rubs them against the soap and the washboard and feels the sticky lines rehydrating under his flesh. Drains the water out again. Starts in on the rest of the clothes.
That night, making dinner, he bites his thumbnail. He bites his thumbnail and tastes salt, the strange glob of something. Rolls is around on his tongue and wonders at it, what it is before he remembers, and a moment later he’s bent over the sink heaving, gripping the edge and gagging as long strings of sticky saliva run past his lips, dripping down in spongy lines to the sink bottom.
He’s still bent over, breathing heavily, when Jim walks in. Comes up behind him, lays one broad flat palm on his back. Slides it lower.
“Are you sick?” he asks, as Paul gags again.
Mutely, Paul shakes his head.
—
He finds cherry pits on the mantle. He pours the last dregs of milk and cherry pits clink out into the glass. In the pockets of his trousers, they gather like stones in a river snag. The toes of his shoes, like thorns.
“You think this is funny?” Jim yells, when he finds one melting in the center of an ice cube, weeping red juice into rum. “We don’t have money for you to be wasting on this shite!”
He throws the glass, and it shatters against the mantle, a cascade of clinking shards on the brickwork. Paul presses his back against the wall. Tries to make himself as small as possible as the ice cube spins, comes to a rest on the floor at Paul’s feet.
Weeping water, it melts, all Paul can look at as Jim stands, chair creaking protest on ruined springs.
A hand fists in the front of his shirt, tugging him forward, and shoving him back again, skull thunking against the wall as Jim yells.
“Where are you getting them?” Jim demands. “Buying them by the pit now? Wasting all our bleeding money on—on garbage? For some bloody joke? You take them back! You gather them all up and take them back wherever you got them from.”
He shoves Paul again, and he falls, hands and knees over the hearth, glass slicing into his palms. Through the knees of his trousers, blood dribbles, smearing over the stones, and Jim spits, globule splattering beside Paul’s hand.
“Pick them up,” Jim barks, “pick them all up.”
Paul does. He crawls through the glass, hands shaking so badly he drops the first pit, the second, red-smeared and weeping. He finds one between the stones. Another two beneath the fire logs, four more in the seam between the mantle and the carpet.
He gathers them up. He gathers them all up, takes them to the kitchen pouched in the hem of his shirt. Beneath the kitchen sink, he sorts through bottles, finds the largest he can—an empty rum bottle, and tips them inside.
They clatter to the bottom, blood dripping through the cracks between them. Settling like bones.
He fills one bottle that first week, the next, two. He hides them under his bed, and in the cold they clack, and they shiver, and they jostle against each other, and sometimes he sits in front of them. He sets them on the floor ringed by candles and he watches as they shift, and they move, and they pulse like beating, like pumping, and they throb.
He lays his hand on the glass. He flattens his hand there, and warmth radiates into him. Slides from his wrist to his arm to his shoulder to his chest.
He hugs them to him. He lays under the blankets with the bottles tucked against his chest as he tries cries, and no tears come. He presses his palms against his eyes.
They come away dry.
—
“I have to check,” Jim tells him. “I’m your father. Your mother would do this if she were here, but she’s not. So I have to check,” he says, as Paul sits across from him in the bathroom, cold porcelain of the toilet seat seeping through the fabric on his thighs.
He’d forgotten to lock the door, when he’d come in. He never used to lock it, but he does now, he always does. He locks every door wherever he goes. And Mike isn’t home today. Is home so rarely it’s like he doesn’t live there at all. An empty bed. One less mouth to feed.
“Take your shirt off,” Jim says, as Paul hugs himself. Folds his arms around himself.
“Dad—”
“Do as you’re told. What did I say? What do I always say?” he asks, and Paul’s fingers tremble on the buttons.
Children are seen and not heard.
It’s perfectly natural, She’d said. It happens all the time.
He goes too slow. It doesn’t matter. There’s enjoyment in unwrapping something, Mary had always said. Sitting in front of the tree, they’d known what they were getting—new trousers. New socks. She wrapped them anyway. Leftover butcher paper and newsprint because they liked to tear. Because they liked the sound it made.
Jim breathes heavily, when Paul’s shirt falls to the floor.
His arms come up. Cross over his chest. Jim takes him by the wrist, the one wringed in bruises. Tugs it back down.
“No bra yet?” Jim asks, licking his lips. Paul shakes his head.
“M—nobody. Nobody bought me one yet,” he says.
“Your mother has some. She had a few,” Jim says, as his eyes trail, the flat rise of Paul’s chest, hardly there but for the puffy mound in the center, the part that aches all the time like an infection burning beneath the skin.
He feels it sometimes, now—he feels it like a piece of metal beneath the skin. He’d been in the hospital as a boy. He’d gone holding the skin of his face together, pressing the sides back in with a towel where his teeth ached painfully in the dry air that spilled in from the hole. From the hole that formed—split under the knife of a lad Paul can’t remember, a time he can’t remember.
He’d woken up in the hospital after. He’d woken up after so sore he couldn’t speak without crying.
Don’t try, they’d told him. Don’t speak, don’t cry.
You’re lucky to be here. You’re lucky it’s such a small thing.
And weeks had passed, and months, and the stitches had come out, and the flesh had knit, and he’d talked again. One day he’d opened his mouth and spoken and it hadn’t hurt, and then a year passed, and another year, and he forgot about it. He packed it away somewhere with the other things that were for packing away. A space on a shelf for Mary’s mixing bowls. A spot on the floor for the old drum.
And one day he’d woken in his bed with an ache behind his nipples and he’d remembered. He remembered in the way of remembering a fairy tale. An old nursery rhyme. A thousand films.
The cold steel of an operating table. A scalpel slicing flesh.
He’d pressed against his chest and felt something. He followed the shape around his nipples, the edge of the hurting, felt the cold metal bulge of it. The oblong point that rose, pressing from the inside like a knife against the skin.
There was something inside him. There was something beneath his skin.
They’d left something inside him. They’d cut him open and put the wrong parts away, and he’d curled around it. His blood and sinew and marrow had grown around it like a tree around a burl, swelling with sickness and pus and ooze.
It moves now, under Jim’s eyes. It pulses when his hand reaches forward, and Paul pushes back, scrambles back, but there’s nowhere to go.
The frigid porcelain of the toilet back presses against his skin, and Jim’s fingertips come down. Pet the skin on the outside of his nipple.
The toilet lid shakes. The toilet lid clatters against the basin, scrapping loudly against their breathing.
“Dad—” Paul tries, but nothing comes out besides a choking sound. Jim flattens his palm. Presses hard to the mound not round enough to fill.
“You’re filling out,” he says. “You’re hardly—”
His face clouds. His hand stills. His eyes lopsided from drink.
“Fourteen, dad,” Paul says.
“Fourteen,” Jim replies.
He closes his hand. He brings his fingers together, and Paul yelps, as Jim’s fingers twist on his nipple. As Jim lowers his head and tastes.
—
He dresses in layers. He wears his brother’s undershirts under his school button-up under his sweater under Mary’s. He doesn’t eat anymore. He can’t eat anymore without vomiting.
He doesn’t bathe. It doesn’t matter.
He stands on the stoop outside the door. He stands on the stoop and watches the water rise, watches it lick at the bottom of the door.
Soon, it will spill inside. Soon, it will rise so high they won’t be able to leave at all. Across the yard, the street rises like an island. A shimmering line of pavement that stretches through a sputtering sea. A bus goes by—a double-story thing, spraying fans of water out like wings, soaking the mailbox and the trees and the fences and the hedges.
Waves come. Wakes shimmering as they rush towards him, lap over the edges of his feet, spill into his shoes.
He wonders at swimming. He wonders at having learned, when he had. He remembers drowning. He remembers crying in the tub as Mary poured water over his head, as soap stung in his eyes.
He knows men drown in Liverpool all the time. He knows they do it in less water than this. He knows they drink until they fall down and never stand up again.
He goes inside. He goes to the bottle beside Jim’s chair. Takes it back outside. He looks at the neck, the slender opening, and imagines Jim’s mouth wrapped around it. Imagines Jim’s mouth, the hot wet seal of it, the tongue, acrid and tour.
His stomach gurgles, and he slots the bottle against his lips, closes watering eyes and manages as many swallows as he can before it comes back up again, trailing acid over the edge of his lips, bent on his hands and knees as rum splashes down into the water below, swirled away by currents and eddies and layers of silty mud.
His own face stares back at him. Softer than it was. Less angular. Round and smooth and heart-shaped.
He brings his fist down. The Image shatters, comes back together. He brings his fist down again. He brings his fists down again and again and again. He screams as he does it. He screams until the folds of his throat tighten, clench around fragments like silk, like sand, like small pebbles of earth, and he falls back, gasping, coughing, tears streaming from his eyes.
He lies there. He lies there and looks at the sky. Droplets of water shatter against his eyes.
He turns his head and looks at the bottle.
He drinks until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore.
—
The boat rocks. The boat rocks back and forth. He lies on his back and watches the sky. Watches the sky lap like waves, and the boat tilts, and the boat rocks, and his body rocks too, and he opens his eyes.
He opens his eyes, and he stares at the ceiling in Forthlin. The ceiling of his parents’ room. The ceiling he’s stared at a thousand times before, flopped on his back and kicking his feet as he whined that his mother was taking too long getting dressed—pulling on her stockings, straightening the seam of them on the back of her calves.
She used to hold him here, in this bedroom. In this bed. She used to hold him to her breast when he’d had a bad dream. She used to hold him and rock him as he cried and Jim groused that she was ruining her, spoiling her until she got too soft to be of use to anyone.
Mary hadn’t listened to him. There were so few things she defied him in, but this was one. Precious moments stolen on the back of an elephant, something fantastical, strolling through fields of cotton candy and clouds. The path a bird would take. The path he would take, if he could fly.
He had always been sure the sky was like that: some hidden place better than anyone could imagine. Cotton candy clouds with long green fields at the center. Waterfalls that dropped off the edge of the world when it rained, rivers fat and swollen with milk and cream.
He’d forgotten about that—those dreams. He’d forgotten about the sky, and the cloud, and Mary holding him to her breast when he’d cried. He’d forgotten what this room once meant to him. What it meant to sleep curled beside them in his parents' bed.
His head pounds, his mouth dry like cotton, and something moves inside him. Something squirms sickly in his heart and makes its way down to space inside him—the opening of his thighs.
He gasps. He sucks in a breath and he feels it—the way he parts. The sickening, stretching burn of it
“What are you doing?” Paul whimpers, and between his legs Jim says nothing, but Paul can hear him. Paul can hear the desperate pant of his breathing, the rhythmic sound of the springs groaning, the rustling sound of Jim’s hand, moving over the shadow of a shape bursting from the confines of his underwear.
“Shhhh,” Jim says, as he twists his fingers, and a sound bursts from Paul, a sound he doesn’t know. Strangled. Animal.
He kicks. He kicks his leg, and Jim’s hand clamps down. Squeezes his ankle so hard he’s sure it will break.
“It’s alright,” Jim whispers, “shhh, it’s alright,: and Paul can't remember the last time Jim talked to him like that, the last time he’d cared to. “You’re so grown for your age. So much. It’s okay. It’s normal like this. Daddy will take care of you,” he says, and Paul closes his eyes. Squeezes them shut, and tries to think of something else, to be somewhere else.
It had worked before. It used to. Lying in class with his head on his arms and imagining himself high up in the sky like an airplane. He’d thought he would chase German planes. He’d asked the war to wait for him until he could. Imagined there was another girl just like him—another girl who looked like a boy. Who would put on her trousers and cut her hair short and sneak into the service without anyone knowing.
He would soar in the sky. He would shoot down German planes, and he would shoot down a plane and it would crash into Hitler as he stood outside gaping at the sky in wonder as he flipped and twirled and bombed.
He would land and Winston Churchill would shake his hand, and call her sir, and when it came out he wasn’t a boy at all it wouldn’t matter, and nobody would care. They’d knight him, and he would be a boy, and everyone would call him sir, and it wouldn’t matter anymore—what was between his legs, or under his blouse, and in time everyone would forget it entirely. What he’d once had. What he’d once been.
He’d wake up in the morning to a weight within his self. A weight like a vessel filled. And he’d look at himself in the mirror and he’d know, even without undressing. A broad chest. Slender hips. A heaviness like a puzzle piece slotting into place between his legs.
Jim's fingers move, and he can’t help the sound he makes, the sound like an animal on the side of the road, half severed by a lorry’s wheels.
Jim folds over him. He presses his mouth to his neck as his fingers crick inside her, as the weeping sticky head of that thing between his thighs kisses the naked flesh of Paul’s own.
He stiffens. He groans as his fingers catch dryly inside. Wet kisses Paul’s skin. Long lines of it sluicing down his hip. Wetting the bedding beneath him.
—
He lies in bed until Jim goes, and then longer still. He lies in bed until the sun rises. Until it begins to fall. There is nothing inside him but the imprint of something. The darkened wallpaper left behind by a frame that once was but is no longer. A weight that fills space where he once that been, pressing the shape he was once down into his mother’s mattress.
He lies there until by degrees the feeling returns. An itch between his legs. An ache in his abdomen.
He limps to the bathroom on legs that shake. He sits on the toilet with his head between his knees.
It burns when he pees. It aches and whimpers and starts up again inside him, a long mournful call like a dove.
Blood stains the paper when he wipes, and he stares at it for a long moment. Wonders at the color on the once-white sheet.
He limps to his bedroom. Shoves whatever he can into his schoolbag, opens the front door to a gush of water that spills over the lip, pooling in the entryway and running down the hall.
He steps over it. He steps into the water, wades through the front yard and rolls himself over the hedge.
He doesn’t know where he’s going. It doesn’t matter.
He wanders the street until his feet ache, and blisters burst on the sides of his toes. He wanders until the sun sets. He wanders until the street lights turn on, until the buses stop running, and it doesn’t matter.
Like terra-cotta teeth, the walls of the council estate erupt from the earth. No matter what street he winds, or what direction he goes, he ends up there, standing on the shores of that lake, and Forthlin stares back at him. Inverted. Protracted, and upside down. It shimmers in the water. It rises from itself, mirrored.
The door opens.
It asks him back in.
—
There’s something inside of him. There’s something that worms inside of him and won’t let go.
He thinks of Forthlin and it spins webs in his lungs. He thinks of a door that opens silently, the bed that lies beneath it, the stink and the musk and the coal-warm air and it inches it’s way up his throat, a dozen sticky legs pulling at his vocal folds, curls around his trachea.
He drops a fork and jumps out of his skin. The house settles in the cold night and his heart beats hard enough he goes deaf and mute.
—
Paul’s home late. He’s hardly ever home these days. A wade through muddy water with his boots held high above his head. A dash to his bicycle—hefting it out of the pond and onto the pavement.
He stands now in the kitchen doorway, dripping. Trousers trailing mud. Mike sits at the foot of the table, head down and silent, a bruise darkening his cheek. At the head, Jim looks at him. Jim stares through him.
“Where have you been?” Jim asks.
“Out with friends,” Paul says, stepping cautiously forward. A casualness, to it—showing back up after doing something wrong. Trying to get by without Mary seeing a black eye.
Only he’s not done anything, this time.
“We used to. It’s been a bit, is all,” he says, turning to the sink, he makes a show of washing his hands. Hair standing on the back of his neck as Jim stares.
“Those other boys—the ones you go around with. Ian and George. Do you let them fuck you?” Jim asks.
Paul drops the soap. It clatters in the bottom of the sink, knocking with the silverware he has yet to wash. The empty pan from the beans.
“What?” He asks, turning, pressed back against the sink. Mike is looking up down, face redder even than Paul’s. He looks back and forth between them, eyes wide, whites showing.
“Your cunt,” Jim says. “Do you let them fuck your cunt?”
“Dad!” Mike starts, mouth hanging open. Jim raises his hand, mimes a punch, and Mike flinches back, tucks his head down again.
“Quiet!” Jim yells. “I’m not talking to you!”
And then, he turns his attention on Paul. Paul, skewered still by the sink, trapped between the table and the wall.
“Answer the question!” Jim yells, and Paul can see now the tumbler on the table. The half-empty bottle on the floor beside the table leg.
In the sink, the silverware clatters, shivers against one another.
“No, dad!” Paul forces the words out even as inside he curls up, shrivels until small enough to blink out entirely. “They’re just friends!”
Jim’s mouth tightens into a line. He raises the glass. Takes a drink.
“I don’t believe you,” He says, and Paul doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing to say. “You’re disgusting,” Jim spits. “Get out of my sight.”
That night, Jim doesn’t come for him. That night, the door to his bedroom stays locked, and Paul spends the night curled beneath every blanket he owns, breath puffing out silver in front of him, staring at the gap beneath the door until the sun peeks pink and amber over the horizon.
And he thinks about what Jim said. He thinks about Ian and George. He thinks about sitting squirming in his knickers as he watched Ian’s fist moving up and down his length, the way he’d squeaked, startled, when Ian had finished. And he thinks about Mary. He thinks about everything she’d told him, about first times. About how special they were. About how whoever it was would have you, always. Would hold some piece of you like a hook pierced into the skin.
And he thinks about Ian. And he thinks about George. And he laughs. And he laughs so hard he has to grab his pillow, squish it over his face. He laughs so hard his stomach aches, and he gags, and he laughs until his head spins, until his body trembles, and he can’t laugh anymore.
—
He rides his bike through the runoff which gathers on the side of the road. Water sprays from the back tire, soaking cars and passerbys and fences in mud and silt and brackish, stinking liquid that stains the bottom of his skirt, making it cling wetly to his legs.
He turns the corner onto Upton Green. Throws his bike down in the mud, runs up the front steps and doesn’t bother knocking.
Louise screams when he bursts in—a quick apology before he’s bounding up the stairs to George’s room, throwing back the covers and grabbing him by the ankle as George screams.
“What the bloody hell is it?” he yells, kicking, as Paul pulls him from bed, a loud thump as George flops onto the floor.
“Have you done it before?” Paul demands, throwing himself down beside him, taking him by the wrists and pressing him back down when George tries to take a swing.
“Done what?” he demands, thrashing madly.
“With girls. Have you stuck it in?”
In an instant, George stops thrashing. He stills, blushing crimson, blinking up at Paul like a dead fish.
“Oh. Yes,” George lies, and Paul laughs madly. He lets go of George’s wrists, swings a leg over his hips, climbing on top of him.
“What are you doing?” George asks, face red, aflame. His mouth is open. His chest rising and falling, and Paul watches it—the way his stomach moves, his chest, and tries to feel something like what Mary felt for Jim. What Jim feels for him.
“I’m going to have sex with you,” Paul says, as George’s eyes go massive, and he starts writhing, bucking back and forth. Paul lies over him, tries to press him down, but George is too squirmy, and they struggle, wrestling one another, rolling back and forth across the carpet, legs bumping guitars and books and mounds of dirty clothes.
“No you’re not!” George yells, bringing his knee up into Paul’s groin.
Paul goes over, hitting the carpet with a thump. Curling into a ball, wrists between his legs, he struggles to breathe.
“Shite, sorry, but you’re a mad fucker, you know that?” George asks, crawling over to him, panting. “Did I hurt ye’?”
“Dunno George,” Paul gasps, “did ye drive your boney knee into my feckin’ cunt?”
“I’m not sorry!” George bursts, and Louise yells up the stairs—everything alright?—and George swears—yes mum!—turns back to Paul, hissing.
“We can’t just do it like that,” he whispers. “Right? There’s things that come after, ain’t there?”
“I thought you’d said you’d done it before?” Paul pouts, limp and sweaty against the carpet, groin aching.
“I have! I just—I were drunk, yeah? I don’t remember it.”
Paul rolls his eyes. He can’t imagine thirteen-year-old George doing much of anything, let alone drinking. Not after he’d spat out Harold’s beer at his last birthday party.
“I don’t believe you,” Paul says, and George’s lip curls back, a moment away from taking another swing before he thinks better of it.
“Bugger you then! I don’t care either way,” he says.
He turns his back on Paul. Angry enough the backs of his ears flush red. And Paul lies on the carpet and catches his breath. Lies on the carpet and thinks of Jim. The feel of his hand, cold and clammy on the skin of his breast. The taste of his mouth, the stale sour taste of alcohol twice swallowed.
He never did remember the beatings. The ones Jim gave Mary. The ones he gave Mike. He’d forgotten so many lesser things. The time those lads had pushed him to the street when he was just a little girl, cut his cheek open nearly to the ear. Couldn’t recall one detail of the walk home. The stitches, and the surgeries, and the court case that came after.
But he remembers Jim. He remembers each time Jim touches him. The feel of his body. The taste of his breath and his skin and the shape of him pressed against his knickers, the sound of his breathing when he had.
“I just—I want to do it,” Paul whispers, “with you.”
For a moment, George says nothing. But Paul can see the way his breathing stops. The way the red on the back of his ears darkens. He turns a little—looks at Paul out of the corner of his eye, suspicious. But Paul looks back—the wide, wet, earnest eyes that used to talk him and Mike out of all manner of trouble. Used to get them anything they wanted. Anything they thought they wanted.
Not now. Not anymore.
“We—we can,” George says, looking nervously down at this feet, twisting his fingers together. “It’s just—it ain’t supposed to be like that. Yer first time. I mean, it’s supposed to be something, isn’t it? We need to—we need to work up to it, is all. I mean,” and deep inside him, the place Paul was sure he could no longer feel, something breaks. Something shatters.
Mary had told him how important it was. Saving yourself for marriage. She’d told Paul she hadn’t known anything about it till her marriage bed. That she hadn't let another man see her, let alone touch her before then.
And the tears come. The tears come, and Paul can’t stop them, the first ones since long before they lowered the coffin into that cold earth. and George comes to him. George lies down beside him, pillows his cheek on his hands folded like a prayer and looks at him. Looks at him the way George always does. Writing songs, he used to say, before he’d gotten over Paul’s looks. Before Paul had punched him enough times for George to knock off with the muse shite.
“Let's wait till you feel better,” George says, and Paul shakes his head. Paul rolls around. Stares at the wall as his breath begins hitching, as the sobs come, because George doesn’t get it, he doesn’t understand, and none of it bloody matters.
Arms wrap around him, pale and thin and bony. Arms wrap around him from behind.
That night, the water rises. The water rises, and swells, and licks up the side of the house, laps gently against the brickwork like a thousand tongues.
He knows there’s no leaving now. He knows there’s no going.
He peels back the curtain on the front door. Watches the edge of the water tip back and forth against the glass—the thick cerulian line of it like smoke on the horizon, and he thinks of a hole. A hole he’d stood on the edge of. A hole filled with the damp of the earth.
It’s covered, now, isn’t it? It’s covered in water like a boat, and yet it doesn’t float. Not buried as it is. Pressed down by the feet of it, the pounds. The thousand fistfulls or dark, fertile soil.
For the first time since Mary died, it doesn’t rain. The sky is clear.
He climbs the drainpipe. He sits on the sun-heated slate on the roof of the house, knees pulled up to his chest, knickers peeking out from beneath the hem of Mary’s dress as the sun shines in a million glittering angles. On the distant streets he watches the cars come and go—lorries and police cars and saloons. Horns honk. Women cross the street, children's minuscule hands clutched tightly in their grasp.
Beneath him, the house shakes and trembles, billows like something waking up, and cherry pits float on the surface of it all, bobbing like lily pads, turning the water pink and frothy and red.
He looks at the landscape. He looks at the perfect flatness of it and imagines it how it was. How it used to be. He imagines the tapestry of its passing written like memory in a history book. He imagines a thousand images pulled from a hundred heads, played on a projector like a film reel.
Trees. And ponds. And growing things. Ducks and loons and deer and mice. He imagines eagles. He imagines squirrels stashing nuts for winter. He imagines the flowering of reeds and the way they brush each other, the glittering molecules of pollen on the wind. The seeds that will come. The cotton that did come, falling over the grasslands like snow.
And he looks down at the water. He looks down at the mass of it like a thousand rotting cherry pits and he thinks Mary was wrong. He thinks she was wrong.
It’s not an island—this house. It’s not something that exists, eternal, on its own. It’s not something with dirt and sand and mud tactile enough to sink your fingers into. It’s more like a boat. The rotting and rusting things that bob on the surface of the Mersey River, chained like dilapidated prisoners to the docks. It’s something that leaks. That falters. That rots and splinters and smokes and will, one day, drown. Will take on water. Will keep taking on water, faster than the bilge pumps can bail. And it will sink. It will drown. It will slip beneath the waves or be ground to rubble against the rocks.
It will die. It will end.
Against the slate, he curls. Pillows his face on his folded hands. He’d learned about caterpillars in school. Words given to the texture of a childhood spent wandering, wondering at the pods he’d found tucked under branches and logs and fenceposts and skeletons of abandoned metal. He’d learned now delicate they were through trial and error. How a poke with a stick could shatter the sides like spun sugar, spilling goo and pus and liquid like saliva in long sticky lines into the dirt.
He remembers the grief, he’d felt, when he’d found out what they were. He remembers how he’d cried into Mary’s skirts, how she’d laughed when she found out why.
At school they’d told him—a thing on its way to be something else. A worm long captive in a prison made from its own skin, and inside all it needed was a month. A handful of weeks. 30 days, and it would become. It would crack out of the prison of itself. It would spread its wings and fly off elsewhere. To be something else.
He doesn’t know how many he’d smashed, by the time he’d heard of it. He doesn’t know how many he killed, suspended in their state of unknowing, a sleep they would never wake up from, but now it’s all he can think about: chrysalises smashed beneath boots. Chrysalises ground beneath chainsaws. Crushed against the earth. Men moving forests. Men clearing the way.
And he thinks of rabbit warrens shredded by the teeth of plows. He thinks of birds' nests flattened by the treads of tanks and the tires of earthmovers. And he thinks of the ones crushed by the weight of themselves. He thinks of the ones that never open. The ones that hang for thirty days and end there. The ones that never do much of anything.
Some things never become what they should. Some things are never meant to.
In his mind, he sees himself, curled. He sees his limbs folded within the womb of the ocean. Floating in a clear sac of something like a jellyfish. He sees his body dissolve. He sees it start to reform the way it was always meant to. He sees the edges of himself stop away, and then—
It floats, and it bobs, and it lands of the shores of some distant island. Some place better than here, and on those shroes it festers. It rots. And it ends. Inside, he never opens his eyes. Never becomes.
He isn’t what he wanted to be. And it’s perfectly natural, Mary had said. It happens all the time. It’s happening right now.
He climbs down the drainpipe. He climbs down the drainpipe, and inside Jim is waiting for her, and he turns to leave, and behind him the place where the hallway had once been is covered over—a flat, featureless wall, and he doesn’t scream. She doesn’t run.
Jim comes to him. Jim wraps a hand around the back of her neck, and pulls her to bed, and Paul follows.
He follows him to bed, and he does nothing as Jim undresses her. He does nothing as he lowers his mouth to her nipples. As he takes flesh into his mouth that stands erect and distended and swollen and wrong.
He tells herself there is nothing inside her. He tells herself she has gone, and this new thing, this new self, takes it place. This thing that washed up on the beach and festered and rotted and continued as the thing it once was, the thing it will never be. He tells herself it is like sleeping. That it is like slipping beneath the waves.
It is not.
“I love you,” Jim tells her as he kisses her. “Mary,” he says, as he drags calloused fingers over the folds Paul had tried so long to ignore.
His body shakes. His body quivers and shimmers and trembles like the waves as he parts her thighs. As he strokes the velvet-soft skin of her inner legs.
Jim draws himself from his trousers. The length of him long and slender and red and damp. Mary rolls her head towards the ceiling. Watches the patterns there she has watched since he was a boy. He has watched since she was a girl kicking his feet in the pink gown his grandmother had sewn him for church on Sundays.
Jim presses against her. The thick head of him parts her folds, forces his way against skin that sticks, dry, to the length of that pressing.
He can’t stop the sound he makes. He can’t stop the pain that rolls in waves up his spine, crashes against the base of his skull, bursting behind his eyelids.
It’s too big for him, he thinks. It’s too large, and it’s not—
It’s not meant to feel good, darling, Mary told him. You’ll do it because you’ll have to, and it will be worth it in the end.
He presses her eyes shut. He bites on his knuckle until he tastes blood her blood.
Jim presses harder, swearing, and Paul wails, as the sharp snap of flesh gives way to the hot sink that fills him in one sudden push.
He gags. He twists to the side, gagging, bile spilling past her lips as Jim groans, sinking deeper.
His legs tremble. His legs shake violently on either side of him, and tears roll hot down her face. He tries to breathe. He tries, and he pants, and her head swims, and she can’t, he can’t—
Inside her, Jim begins moving.
He groans, as he does. Small sounds—that creak out of him like the creaking of an old boat. He moves his hips. He moves in and out, and sweat beads on his chest, sweat gathers in the grey hairs there, curls on the end and drops down onto her breasts, wets her nipples.
She moves under him. She pushes at his chest as the ache builds. She tries to get away as the hot line of something smears on the insides of her thighs. As the cool damp runs down the fat of her ass. She kicks against the blankets and her legs don’t move. Her hips don’t cooperate.
Above him, Jim chokes. Inside him, Jim shudders. Jim shudders, and inside she feels the way it changes—the stiffness of it that goes stiffer still as he moans and stutters.
Jim coughs. Damp smears against her face. He coughs, and a bead forms on his neck. A bulge in the flesh that works its way up Jim’s throat, blooming into his mouth.
He kisses her, and presses a cherry pit onto her tongue. He kisses her, and inside her his hips stutter, his hips press firm and stay there, and the warm spreads, the warmth blooms, and she chokes, she gags, and the cherry pits spill, and spill, and keep spilling.
He rolls off her. He sags, and he slides out of her with a damp noise she will always remember, and she turns, she rolls, and she gags cherry pits onto the ground.
Beneath her, blood and semen run in rivulets over the bands of Mary’s wedding quilt, staining it pink. Outside, the water rises. The rain continues, and the water laps against the side of the house, creeping up the brick and beading yellow and green on the walls.
Soon, it will break the windows. Soon, it will shatter the panes of glass, and it will come inside, and everything will be wet. Everything will be broken. Everything will be anointed.
And it will continue. It will end.