The Body Lies Read online

  “So long as it’s not fried chicken,” I said, “I don’t mind.”

  He handed me a glass of wine. I took the faintest sip and set it aside, and went to fill a glass at the sink instead.

  “Thirsty,” I said.

  He asked about work and I waved the topic away: I said it was all too boring and annoying, and I really wanted to think about something else. What’s going on at school? Mark recounted the tale of a controversial promotion to the Senior Management that had the staffroom in disarray. He could see the sense in it, thought the woman—Amy, did I remember Amy?—Oh yes, Amy; a little wince at the awkward memory—would do an excellent job, but he could see that it was upsetting for those she had just leapfrogged.

  I went back into the sitting room and sank down on the sofa. He gathered up takeaway menus and followed me, dropping down beside me. I rubbed at my arms. He handed me the menus, then reached down and scooped up my feet, so that they lay across his knees.

  * * *

  —

  Sammy woke round five and would not go back to sleep; he bounced and chattered and fizzed. Mark rolled over, muttered, had to leave for work in a few hours, so I dragged myself up out of bed. Pitch-black outside. I tried to mute the noise, but Sammy was so excited. It was an age, as far as he was concerned, since he’d last been here. And so I acknowledged all his rediscoveries, and tried to quieten the opening and shutting of doors, the heavy little feet on the hall floor. We had downstairs neighbours to think of, as well as Mark’s day at work, and so there was nothing to do with Sammy but put the telly on quietly, and sit on the sofa with him, and lean my head back and close my eyes, and let Ben and Holly take over for a little while.

  I must have dozed off; I woke to hear the sound of the shower and then Mark moving around in the bedroom. I had to break the skin on it; I had to squeeze the words out. I knew that whatever else happened, there would be some kind of absolution for me here, with Mark; that he would do his best for me, that he would be kind, because he was always kind. But he also had to go to work.

  “There’s a Christmas do on Friday, after school. Just drinks down the pub; you fancy it?”

  “What about a babysitter?”

  “You could call Esther? Or that old lady, Joyce?”

  “Jean.”

  “I’d do it but I’ve got—look, I gotta go.”

  And he was out the door and heading down the stairs. I lifted Sammy up to my hip and we waited at the front window to wave goodbye. The mildew had grown under the windowsill. Mark paused at the crossroads, glanced back, raised a hand. We waved back at him.

  There were presents to buy, and Christmas food. And everyday food too, because the fridge was more or less empty—there was just Mark’s signature collection of crumby margarine, mayonnaise, open tins, and the dry end of a lemon. I supposed I should get Sammy in his pushchair. Head up to the Triangle. Greengrocers, Iceland.

  Blue Anorak Man.

  I gave Sammy some breakfast. He spooned Weetabix into his gob. I stared out the back window. Next-door’s yard and plastic chairs and wheelie bins. The rain running down the pane, making clean lines through the city dirt. A gust of wind shook the double glazing.

  “We’ll stay in and make some biscuits, shall we, Sammy?” Though we’d have to pick the crumbs out of the margarine first.

  An upstairs neighbour slammed a door. Raised voices, footsteps back and forth above. A young couple, Mark had said; they’d moved in back in October. Seemed to row a lot. He worried about them. But what could you do?

  * * *

  —

  I told Mark that Esther had gone back to Madrid and Jean was booked up into the New Year. So Mark went to that work Christmas do without me, and I got Sammy to bed and drank a cup of night-time tea in front of a stupid film. Mark came home late and silly, and tried to tell me about some new scandal at work; he was very exercised and amused about it. I persuaded him to come to bed, and he responded enthusiastically, but when we got there he flopped a heavy arm around me, kissed my neck, then fell instantly asleep, and started to snore. I heaved his arm off me, took a blanket through to the sitting room, still couldn’t sleep. If I couldn’t sleep I may as well write: I got out my notebook but that took me back to Nicholas; what if I wrote what happened there, I wondered. What if I wrote that out of my system. I woke up in the morning curled up cold on the sofa with a stiff neck, notebook lying splayed face down on the floor.

  Over the long Christmas weekend, Mark drank a lot. I don’t know if it had always been this way, and had only become more apparent now because I didn’t want to drink at all, but it certainly seemed that drinking was his main leisure activity. Nothing scandalous, not a vodka on his cornflakes kind of thing, but of an evening he drank his way steadily through whatever alcohol was to hand until it was finished. When the Christmas stock of wine was gone—and I hardly touched a drop of it—and a Christmas gift of whiskey, he discovered a liking for the cheap Cointreau knockoff I had bought in Aldi for a dessert recipe, and when that was gone, he realised that the Co-Op was open again anyway, and bought more wine. Once or twice he commented on my not drinking and I said I just didn’t fancy it; I hadn’t been drinking during term and didn’t really feel like starting again now. He pulled a face and said I should really try to relax and enjoy myself a bit. We should enjoy ourselves together, while we could, since I’d be gone soon enough.

  I said that he was right. And I really did agree with him. But I did rather feel that drinking had the opposite effect to the one he suggested. If anything, it was distancing. It kept me at arm’s length. It also rendered a difficult conversation more or less impossible.

  Then I noticed that he was acting differently with his phone. Again, perhaps, it was only because my attitude to mine had changed. I’d stuck it on airplane mode and only checked it when Mark was out of the flat. Mark kept his in his pocket, and when it wasn’t in his pocket, it was left face down on the arm of the chair right by his hand. Sometimes it would ping and he would just ignore it for a while and then turn it over and casually glance at the screen. Sometimes he’d pick it up with superhero speed. Sometimes he’d scowl at it. And the thing is, it turns out he’s easier to read when he’s been drinking. It all gets a bit more caricatural, bigger.

  “Who’s that?” I’d ask.

  He’d harrumph and say, “Really annoying. Junk.” Or “Just Steve,” or “Mum. Gimme a minute, better get back to her.”

  And then he’d maybe answer the text, frowning, like it was all too much trouble. And I realised that I didn’t really believe any of it—neither what he said, nor his manner of saying it—but that I couldn’t bear to pick away at it right now to find out what was going on underneath.

  Sammy, though, was uncomplicatedly delightful. It was the first Christmas that he had really got, and he was just caught up in the magic of it, enraptured by the decorations and thrilled by the presents. He clearly felt it reflected well on him, all the bits and pieces he’d acquired, the cheap wooden train set and The Pop-Up Book of British Birds. He felt that he must be a very good boy indeed.

  On Boxing Day, I met up with my dad in the park. The morning was cold and blustery. Dad had a present for Sammy—a little Playmobil set. Sammy was delighted, got out the plastic little man from the box, and started off on adventures with him round the playground. I huddled on a chilly metal bench with Dad and watched the boy bobbing the little man up the handrails and sending him rattling down the slide.

  “Can we come see Mum sometime, d’you think?”

  Dad made a characteristic dad-face, the lines deepening from nose to lip. “I dunno, love. I would leave it. For a bit.”

  I blinked. I’d been leaving it for a bit for years now: she was a stubborn old bag, my mum. Just like me. She’d torched our mutual bridges; I was determined, though, to keep heaving boulders, dropping them in the water. One day there’d be stepping stones.
r />   “Tell her I love her,” I said. “Tell her I’d love to bring Sam round whenever she wants to see him. I can just leave him there for a while. I don’t have to stop there or anything.”

  “I will,” Dad said. “I’ll tell her that.”

  But his tone was I don’t know what good it’ll do.

  I kissed Dad, and he hefted up Sammy by the armpits for a hug and kiss, the little guy all hoicked-up parka and dangling little legs. Then Sammy and I and the new Playmobil guy went back to the damp little flat and the slow hours.

  * * *

  —

  On New Year’s Day, locked in the bathroom while Mark swilled wine in the sitting room, I flicked my phone off airplane mode. I scrolled down the midnight texts from old friends, smiled at the giddy crepuscular snaps; paused over a message from my sister in Berlin; she said she missed me, and I welled up a little over that. Maybe we could go, the three of us, a trip to Berlin…And there was another text from Nicholas.

  Happy New Year.

  It didn’t have quite the jump-scare of the first one, but still, it got to me. Those three conventional words. But what did he mean by it?

  I deleted the message, just as I had all the others. And, this time, I blocked the number.

  I ordered groceries online before we left London. On the mainline train we coloured in and played I Spy and wove our way to and from the on-board shop for tea and juice and biscuits, and I tried not to think of what went on in the tight-packed terraces, in that strange house by the edge of the woods, and in the cars and coaches and lorries that beetled up and down the M6. I tried not to look beyond the moment, Sam and me there, colouring in and chatting. Because what came next was a brick wall, and we were hurtling towards it, and I had no idea how to get through or over or past it.

  The cottage was cool and quiet. I took some calming breaths. The Asda van drew up as I was heaving my backpack off. Sammy ran back and forth to the kitchen with supplies and made the delivery man smile.

  Then I locked the door. I took our bags upstairs, and bundled up my bedspread and brought it down with me and threw it over the sofa, so that now it was covered in marled white cotton, and I didn’t have to look at the blue corduroy any more. If it had actually belonged to me, and not to the landlord, I’d have chucked it out.

  I lit the fire. We toasted crumpets. I sat with Sammy on the rug and there was too much space behind my back. I inched round so that I had my back against the wall. Even so, every creak and tap and drip, my head went up. I put Sammy to bed, round and round the garden, like a teddy bear, one step, two step…I went back downstairs to check the doors were locked. Then I made a cup of camomile tea and I went back up and closed the curtains and got into bed with some students’ work, and started reading and making notes. There was no reason to be afraid right now. I had been foolish and pathetic and that was why things had happened the way they had happened. But I was hyper-alert to the sounds of the house, to the creak of floorboards as they eased themselves out and the scratch of branches against the eaves in the wind. There was a lock on my bedroom door, and there was a key in the lock, and I was tempted to turn it. But if I locked myself in, I’d be locking Sammy out, and so I couldn’t lock my door.

  The beck, shrinking in the cold, leaves fragile growths of ice on rocks and banks. The ice is thin as paper, curved like fungus. The moon is full and bright. It casts stark shadows on the crusted snow.

  The discarded clothes are sculpted into hard folds, their colours bleached out by the blue-white moonlight. Boots tumbled, laces stripped, tongues frozen. In twisted singlet, tangled underwear, as though sweating through a summer night, the body lies. The skin is rimed with frost, and laced with shadow, as if this is a kind of kindness. As if this is a kind of grace.

  LENT

  It was like those times when you cut your hand washing up; you’re just getting on with what you have to do, thoughts freewheeling, not even paying attention; then you feel the slice of a tin lid or broken glass into your hand. And then you lift up your hand and there’s a clean line on your skin and then it wells blood, and then it’s streaming, and you realise what you’ve done. The thing itself was just being what it was: you hurt yourself on it.

  In Greggs, after dropping Sammy off: “Coffee please. Black. And a Belgian bun.”

  And there was post-Christmas Patrick with a Greggs bag in each hand, one oozing grease into the paper, the other one sticking to the iced bun inside. The usual greetings and then:

  “D’you want to hear my New Year’s Resolution?” he asked.

  “What’s that then?”

  He weighed the bags against each other in his hands, as in a pair of scales. “To have a more balanced diet.”

  I paid for my bun and coffee and then we walked together, crossing the main square.

  “Did you see the round robin about Simon?”

  “No.” I’d been avoiding email.

  “Still unwell, unfortunately. He’s been signed off for four months.”

  No respite for me then. “God.”

  “Heavy term ahead,” he commiserated. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I didn’t get any writing done this vacation.”

  “Too busy?”

  “Distracted. Just. Couldn’t focus.”

  “Well, you have a kid, so.”

  But exactly none of my problems were Sammy’s fault. I stopped halfway up the stone steps: “D’you know what, having a kid has never got in the way of my writing. Having no money has got in the way of my writing. Having a full-time job has got in the way of my writing. But the kid, no, never. He’s not a problem.”

  “No, course he isn’t. Sorry.”

  I opened my eyes wide so as not to let them drip and when that didn’t work I said, “Hold this, would you?” and he grabbed my coffee off me and I rifled for a tissue and dabbed under my eyes.

  “I’m just really tired.”

  “That didn’t look like tired to me.”

  I pocketed my tissue, took my coffee back, and we climbed on, heading out of the square together.

  “Is it possible that you’ve never seen really tired before?” I asked.

  He gave me a sceptical look, but decided not to push it. We walked past walls stuck with last term’s tattered fly-posters, past concrete planters full of bare earth and cigarette ends.

  “First year in the job is the worst,” he said.

  “Good.”

  “It’s all new, you’re on a steep learning curve, you have all these new lectures to write and new seminars to plan. But once you’re through it, it’s just repeat until retire.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  He shrugged. “That’s how some people do it.”

  “Right now, the only way I figure I can do everything I need to do is if I give up on sleep entirely.”

  He hesitated, and then he said, “I have this theory.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “I reckon there’s two types of people in the world.”

  “Everyone has that theory.”

  “Yeah, but bear with me. I reckon with one kind of person, you do them a favour and they’re not comfortable till they’ve reciprocated in some way, or thanked you properly—like, bought you a drink, or chocolates or something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The other kind, if you do them a favour they’ll decide that favours are just what you do. You become the person who does them favours, and they’ll keep on asking and asking, and you’ll keep on doing and doing, till you notice that they just don’t ever reciprocate, they don’t even properly thank you, and your goodwill is all used up. It’s not even that they take you for a mug; they just don’t recognise that you might have other things going on, that there might be other things you want to do other than favours for them.”

  “So what you’re saying is, some people are comple
te narcissists?”

  He laughed. “I guess. But the point is more, that you have to recognise what’s happening before it’s too late. Because it’s not just goodwill that gets used up.”

  We had reached the doors into the department; his voice, I realised, had been dropping as we got closer.

  “How do I look?” I turned my face to him for inspection. He didn’t say anything.

  “Panda eyes?” I asked.

  “You look lovely,” he said. He gave me a wonky smile. He said, “I hope your day gets better.”

  I peered at my face in my phone, touched away smudges. I felt a little better, for Patrick saying what he’d said; for noticing. I could trust him, I felt, not to tell anyone about tears on my first day back.

  The air in my office was stale, the wastepaper basket hadn’t been emptied. Last term’s apple cores were blue-green with mould.

  I unblocked Nicholas’s number. I sent a text. I told myself that it didn’t matter how I felt about it; we were where we were, and it had to be dealt with. And if it meant pretending things were okay, that what had happened was okay, then that was what I would do, because that was what needed to be done.

  Hey there, I wrote. Just back. U around?

  I was reconciled to it. Close it down and draw a line—because son, and husband, and job, and the need to get on with things.

  And then I lifted the wastepaper basket and took it down the corridor to the kitchen, and dumped last year’s rubbish in the bin.

  Chemistry

  He knows her.

  This is the difference no this is just one of the differences that marks him out from the others. He knows her he has read her book even none of the others bothered to read her book he knows her and he knows what she is like he knows what she is capable of, that darkness that sings out to his darkness in notes that no one else can hear. The snag of her chipped tooth is the edge she has to her, the rawness only he and she know