The Body Lies Read online

  They walked in wet and dark and he could feel the dark song off her, the breath of her body beside his one arm through the other under the umbrella. He could talk to her. He knew that she understood him in a way that nobody understood him and it meant so much at last to be known. They walked together press of arm against arm and nothing needed to be said about what they meant to each other, they knew it in their bones in their flesh

  He had to wait and not be seen. He waited in the side shadows watched the girl skip to her car and consider herself in the rear-view mirror the sheen of lipgloss and the shine of seventeen and the world golden, not a hint not an edge not a glimpse of darkness under that shine and that good to watch good to touch good to your fingerprints all over dull that shine a bit but it is not a way to be known.

  She opened the door for him a door onto darkness and knowing.

  Be quiet, she said.

  And he came into the little house, and she gestured him through to the sitting room and she moved in towards him and she said, Be quiet.

  All these weeks and months there has been a ticker-tape feed, tapping away, reeling out of his unconscious to pile up all around him tangling his feet tangling his thoughts with darkness and the body that she keeps beneath those buttoned to the chin clothes, and he has never slept with a woman who has had a child and can you know by the body, by the skin, the breasts, the feel of her inside her. He knows the reluctance she must signal this cant happen this cant happen because husband child career but under that is the truth of bodies and desire and she knows that its inevitable that it was bound to happen. She says this cant happen. But it can it does.

  His hands cold on her hot skin and then she was underneath him on the sofa her skirt rucked up, there were silvery lines tracing her belly and her thighs. She turned her face aside, and she closed her eyes. He watched her being fucked, her breath shallow and her eyelashes dark against her skin and underneath her eyes the skin purplish and bruised and she didn’t say a word and her breath came faster and he was coming he came and he was there, present in that moment for just that moment when he came maybe that was all but it was a moment in which he was in himself and he felt more and other than he had thought that he would feel.

  Afterwards he touched her face kissed her and she was quiet.

  And that was the thing that needed to be done and he had done it and nothing needed to be said and for a moment just this brief moment he was glad and he was there.

  Back to the village through the dark and rain, the houses dark only the street lamps lit and here and there Christmas lights tangled through the trees, and then up the drive. He disturbed the dogs and set them barking.

  The problem with them all is how they make themselves available so open so dismissible. Meryl grubby-tired and tugging-at-his-sleeve, Karen half-sober half-hungover couldn’t-give-a-fuck. Tim just a tagalong bubble of stink and need and self-disgust. He sent them on their way took himself to the billiards room and watched himself drink rum and knock the balls around till he heard Margie bustling round the kitchen, and then he took himself up to bed and lay down and didn’t sleep. He can’t think of anything but her about how she made him feel. He wants her to read what he has written. He wants to watch her face as the words slip inside her head and wash his colours through it he wants to make her see make her taste and make her feel make her feel.

  * * *

  —

  I slammed out of my office and ran to the loo. I managed to lock myself in before being sick. I heaved and heaved till nothing more came up.

  Fuck.

  I wiped my mouth. I looked at my watch. The MA class started in twenty minutes.

  The piece had come in as an email attachment—would he have shared it with anybody else? Christ, had he submitted to the MA group folder on the website? Twenty minutes and we’d be, what, all in that room together, discussing the literary merits of that piece, whether he’d captured the reality of that night, whether he’d really nailed the experience of nailing me?

  Leaning on the cubicle wall, I spun back through what I’d just read. The verifiable facts down to the chip in my front tooth, which my tongue now ran over involuntarily, back and forth. I thought how what he’d written would fit so snugly with his classmates’ memories of that night. And that the headline fact about him as a writer, the one rule of his work, was that he was the guy who Only Wrote The Truth.

  I crept back to my office. I clicked the document shut and peered at the email itself. He’d written no subject line, and there was no one cc’d in. I clicked my way through to the MA group page on Moodle. Posted there was the cluster of files I’d already looked at—the new work from the other students—and that was it. Nothing from Nicholas.

  I let a breath go; I hadn’t realised I’d been holding it.

  I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes.

  As far as I could tell, it was just me and him. But he could have bcc’d many others in and I wouldn’t know yet. And he could have just emailed it separately to who knows how many people. And he could still post it somewhere online, and start flinging out links like handfuls of gravel.

  He wants her to read what he has written. He wants to watch her face as the words slip inside her head and wash his colours through it he wants to make her see make her taste and make her feel make her feel.

  I am not her, I wanted to tell someone, but there was no one I could tell. I am not his idea of me. I found gum in my drawer. I unpeeled a pellet, crunched it. Mint to wash away the bile.

  I hated myself for having texted him. I hated myself for not fighting harder. If I’d struggled till he’d given up, or hit me, I wouldn’t be dealing with this now.

  I glanced at my watch. Five minutes.

  As I got my teaching materials together, I had this vision of myself just running away—thundering down the stairs and racing along the walkways dodging students and colleagues and Scaife’s noodly hands and sprinting out across the grass and then into the woods and just keeping on running, sliding down the embankment of the M6 and dodging the cars and scrambling up the other side, and just running—but instead I was walking down the corridor, and then I’d reached the seminar room door, and this was it. I could hear them in there, not the words so much as the fact of communication, the phatic start-of-term easy back-and-forth of it, how was your Christmas, New Year, all that stuff.

  I turned the handle, leaned on the door and went in.

  Faces turned to look at me. Hello, hello, hi there, hi, how are we all, yes thank you very nice.

  No Nicholas.

  An empty chair where he usually sat. Though he could breeze in at any moment.

  Meryl ducked to rummage in her bag. Steven and Richard were leaning back side by side, blue chambray and green-and-red plaid shirts respectively, chairs balanced on back legs. I resisted the urge to tell them to stop tipping their chairs. Karen was wearing an apple-green jersey dress, and her hair had been recently hennaed. I noticed her pendant—was it a Christmas present? She held it up for me to look at a piece of thistledown captured in a sphere of resin. I turned it between my fingertips, and considered the delicate pale fronds caught there; something between a spider and a snowflake, but uneasily beautiful. “Lovely.”

  I arranged my notes and the students’ work on the table. My hands were steady. I took a breath. I appeared to be coping.

  “Anyone seen Nicholas?”

  A conventional, quiet murmur: not lately, no. In fact, not since the end of last term. Tim volunteered that they’d had plans to meet up, hang out, over the vacation, but that it hadn’t happened, didn’t quite know why. I was relieved by the normality of it all. And I felt a pang for Tim too, after what Nicholas had written about him. A bubble of stink and need and self-disgust.

  “We’ll just give him a few more minutes, shall we?”

  I asked Tim if we could see some of the work he’d been tell
ing me about at his tutorial. He’d get it to me next week no bother, he said, but without the earlier ebullience. He seemed a bit deflated.

  I thumbed through my notes. We waited till five past the hour. It was an act of extreme endurance on my part.

  “Well, maybe we should just get started.”

  I looked up and over my glasses, and caught Meryl’s eye: she was staring right at me. Her jaw worked; she looked away.

  “He’ll turn up,” Steven said.

  “I daresay,” I said. “He can’t have disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  Meryl, eyes now fixed on the printouts on the tabletop, said something.

  “What’s that, Meryl?”

  She shook her head.

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  “Don’t follow you.” I could feel my cheeks getting hot.

  “You remember his story, last term?” she asked. “What he wrote about wanting to fall up into the sky?”

  All her rising inflections, all those upward tilts of words, like pins, needles, poking in.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s to be taken literally.”

  “You don’t?” She stared back at me.

  “It’s not physically possible, for one thing.”

  She just stared at me. “Yeah, but where is he? You know he only writes what happens. If he writes it, then it’s true.”

  My skin crept up into gooseflesh. I said, “That’s what he says. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe him.”

  She shrugged: “He wrote that he wanted to disappear, and now he’s disappeared. So there’s that.”

  I sent him an email.

  Hi there

  Term started back this week—we just had our first class. I wondered if you had perhaps lost track? I received your work. We need to have a separate discussion about this, alongside submission guidelines and content. So please do make an appointment to come and see me.

  I can be reached at this email, or drop in to my office hours.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Every time my phone pinged I scrambled to check, but it was never Nicholas. I had to make myself take breaks from refreshing my email. Wait ten minutes. Wait half an hour. Give him a chance. I’d gone from dreading a message from him to being desperate for one. Days passed. Weeks.

  “…And I haven’t heard a peep.”

  “You shouldn’t let it worry you,” Patrick said. “He is a grown-up.”

  We were waiting for the kettle to boil. I was aware of the line of my waistband, my toes inside my boots, the brush of hair against the back of my neck, the press of bra clasp into my spine. I felt irredeemably unkempt, shabby and disgusting. I was even wearing lipstick today and I still felt grubby and gross. I hated the feel of myself, my presentness, the way I had to keep dragging myself along with me.

  “I am worried though.”

  “I get that. You’re nice. You care. But you can’t make yourself personally responsible for every single student. There are too many of them. If you get this involved every time, you’ll end up sectioned yourself.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You did the right thing contacting Student Services last term; send them an update about this absence, and then leave them to it. They’re the experts.”

  Except I hadn’t called Student Services. He hadn’t wanted to talk. He’d wanted to write: he said writing helped. I’d accepted that; I’d empathised, I thought I fucking understood.

  “I suppose so.”

  “So he’ll either intercalate—” Off my baffled look: “That’s suspend his studies for a while—or he’ll drop out completely, or—and this is what my money’s on—he’ll turn up next week with a skier’s tan and a half-arsed apology.”

  “I hope so.” But I didn’t know that I really did.

  “Look. Here’s the thing.”

  The kettle clicked off, and he busied himself with making coffee.

  “The thing is, the way you’re being pushed,” he said, “the rate you’re having to go at, if you’re not careful you’re going to burn out.” He flared his fingers, electricity shorting: “Fsst.”

  “There is no other rate,” I said. “This is where I’m at, this is what I’m stuck with.”

  “You can take a break, surely. You could take a day. An evening. Relax.”

  I shrugged.

  “I know, babysitter, all that stuff,” he said. “I get it, honestly. But I really think you have to make an effort.”

  “Make an effort to relax?”

  “Yep. I’m afraid you really do have to work much harder at not working quite so hard.”

  “You’re right. I’m dreadfully lazy about being lazy.”

  “Time to turn over a new leaf. A few of us are headed out on Sunday for a drink. You should come.”

  “Ah no,” I said. “It’s half-term, so Mark’s coming up, my husband and I…”

  “Even better. Bring him along.”

  That actually sounded good. That sounded like the kind of thing that people do.

  “The Sun, on Church Street. Six. It won’t go late; work in the morning and all that.”

  “Good.”

  “And stop fretting over this kid. Leave it to the professionals.”

  I smiled, I lied: “You’re right, of course. I will.”

  I sent Nicholas a further email:

  I just wanted to check in with you as you have missed a third MA session.

  I’ll be in my office at the usual Office Hours sessions (4–6 on a Wednesday); please do call to see me. If you can’t make it then, drop me a line and we’ll make an appointment for you at a more convenient time. As things stand, you do risk falling behind; I don’t want this to become an issue for you.

  OFFICE HOURS. 4–6. WEDNESDAYS.

  The idea is that this is the designated period in which students can pop in and see you. The reality is that they knock on your door whenever it suits them, office hour or no, so that normal working hours can be shattered into pieces and whole office hours sail by without a single visitor.

  I tackled Admissions to keep myself occupied. Or at least I tried to. The software kept glitching, refusing to open documents and deleting my notes and occasionally just freezing solid. I winced at extracts from a novel about body modification; got wrapped up in an awkward romance set during the Mass Observation project in which it seemed that a character out of a Richard Curtis romcom had landed right in the middle of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; there was an outline of a five-part fantasy epic which promised quests for lost talismans (talismen?) and some excellent and specifically Irish dragons. There was a prodigious writing sample of that one. I don’t know if it was the making-difficult by the gnarly software, or the fact that they were just different from the stories that I was currently dealing with, or the fact that they were taking me away from the present moment in which Nicholas might, indeed I had to hope would, appear; but these stories were just so wantable; I was fascinated by the transformation of the young person’s body, wanted to know whether it would turn out to be caterpillar to butterfly or something more ambiguous, whether they lost or found themself along the way; I wanted Angry Young Men and Issues and nostalgia and yearning. I wanted Irish dragons, for Christ’s sake; I wanted swarms of them. I was done with the truth and all its lies; I wanted fiction, I wanted to be beguiled, to be transported.

  A knock on the door. A young woman, one of my undergraduates. “Sorry, sorry,” she said. “I made you jump.”

  I waved her in.

  Her eyes were red and she clutched a balled-up tissue. The family dog had just died—they’d had her all the time she’d been growing up—and she wanted to go home for the funeral. I gave her my sympathies and permission, and she no
dded and mumbled her thanks, and left.

  I checked my emails. Round robins and diktats from Faculty and minutes of meetings and a thing forwarded by Michael Lynch via Toronto suggesting that it would be really great if a Creative Writing staff member could join the Summer Programme teaching team: passing this on to my new colleague (Hi there! Hope it’s all going brilliantly!) as I’m out of the country. Take care. X

  A soft tap. I swung round.

  Another young woman, this one ghostly and shattered. She sank into the seat and told me about the deadlines that were rushing at her like a herd of bulls. I sat on my hands, nodded. She asked for an essay extension. I sanctioned the extension, told her to get a couple of early nights. She nodded. She’d try. But she had an extra shift at Oscar’s that night.

  She trudged off, and I went back to work. And the motion-sensor lights, in the corridor, went out. I sat there in my own solitary pool of light from the computer as the world grew dark around me.

  And then the lights blinked on again out there, the quiet series of clinks they make, and then a hum. And then a shape obscured the light, and the door opened.

  “Tim!”

  “Hey.”

  “Come in. How are you?”

  Not great, by the looks of it. Pasty, heavy, his hair lank and hanging down over his eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Hi.”

  He brought the rest of his ungainly self into the office, slumped into a chair. He had finally got a diagnosis, he told me, and that was something of a relief. He hadn’t seen it coming, but then he never did. He’d been good up to the start of the academic year, and then he’d been too good; he could feel it happening but the fact is he liked that bit, the high. When you feel like you can do anything, be anything, when anything seems possible. Then these last few weeks he’d started to slide, started feeling it all slipping, started feeling really bad. He could hardly drag himself out of bed, couldn’t face eating for days and then for days eating nothing but junk. His mum had figured something was wrong and come up and dragged him to the doctor.