Butterfly Fish (35 page)

“Okay, take a seat. The doctor will be with you in a bit; I'll let him know you're here.” Carol went back to talking into her static. The area smelt of pine, the floors gleamed and intermittently, the sliding entry glass doors delivered health care professionals bearing ID's in rectangular, blue plastic holders jangling around their necks. I sat back listening to voices filtering through from the Saratoga Room
behind me. I took a quick peek. In the centre wooden chairs were arranged in a circle, a few people loitered. One man with earphones rocked his head gently back and forth. Another was drawing at a table decorated with fresh, ivory-hued gardenias where a marred heart floated between stems. I tapped my foot absentmindedly; watching silhouettes on the floor morph, listening to the crackle of the voices buzzed into reception, resenting my punishment for attempting to kill myself only once. Only once. Once. One time.

I looked up. The woman in the painting was underwater. My breath thinned. Plastic fish made of old photo ID's swam towards her from the bottom.

Dr Krull's room was royal blue. I wondered if that was deliberate, to keep the likes of me calm, royal blue to smooth frayed edges. On opposite sides but not too far away from each other were two plush brown leather chairs. In the left corner, a silent water machine. A wide wooden desk was filled with a stack of books and files. Almost mockingly beside the files was a sun-drenched picture of the Dr and his wife on a colourful street somewhere exotic. India maybe. They were an attractive, well-adjusted couple in a removable frame. I fidgeted in my seat while I watched Dr Krull's handsome face wrinkle as he studied his notes. He looked Thai, perhaps Malaysian. His angular face and glinting eyes never seemed overly ruffled but his mouth always appeared to have more to say, twisting sardonically or curving down. We looked at each other across the gape of space between us, the battle line drawn using a chalky stone I could taste on my tongue.

Dr:
How are you doing with the Sertraline tablets I prescribed?

In my mind's eye, I saw the tablets dancing down a fat neck of toilet water, or melting in a sink full of bleach, taking their numbness down a plughole better equipped to manage the sluggish silhouettes, unable to cry out quickly their tongues having been weighed down my chemical solutions.

I nodded emphatically:
Yes, I'm still taking them but I don't know if they're actually helping.

Dr:
You have to give these medications time to properly take effect. Take them consistently. Tell me about your routine before leaving the house
.

I willed my legs still, stopped the knees from knocking together. A couple of doors down the circle would have more people by now. Soon, they'd be confessing to practical strangers, taking their heads off like lids on sloppy jars, waiting to see things spill.

I watched the Dr's face being kind, patient.

I check the kitchen cupboards, the wardrobe, make sure the windows are locked… About six or seven times, sometimes more if I'm feeling really anxious.

Dr:
How long does it take you to leave the house? Why the cupboards and your wardrobe? What do you think you'll find there?
He kept his expression neutral, tone pleasant, pen poised over the notes in his lap. Outside, a car tore off into the distance. Lights changed around the city, indicating when to wait, stop, go. Amber, red, green. But when should a person be green, amber and red? Which organs could I swap for lights that helped you navigate through the dark? Where would I leave my organs? On a zebra crossing, a bridge or a kerb? The fly from the reception clock had left number nine. Tentatively I said:
I, my hearing… It's changing
.

Dr:
Changing how?
A slight note of irritation had crept into his voice.

Why are you a burden Joy? A female voice declared sweetly. Don't be such a burden!

Dr Krull uncrossed legs clad in black corduroys.

My hands clasped and unclasped:
It feels… sharper. I can hear isolated sounds, details from quiet conversations, keys buried in someone's bag, that sort of thing
.

Dr patiently responded:
The human body is a wondrous gift. All kinds of amazing, unexplainable things happen. I understand it might have slightly upset your equilibrium but it doesn't sound like too much to worry about. Tell me, have you ever been deaf?

I leaned back into my chair
: Deaf?
I repeated as if he'd just spoken to me in a foreign language. My left hand trembled on my thigh.

Dr:
Why do you check the cupboards, wardrobe and locks that amount of time? Is there something you're afraid of?

Irritably I said:
I don't know. I thought: Shouldn't you have the answer to that? You're asking me things I already ask myself.

The room felt warmer, claustrophobic, the space between us had shrunk. In the hallway, wheels squealed against the floor. Lunch. Ready and waiting for those in the circle; crisp salads, light Cornish pasties, thickly crusted steak pies, chickpea curry and warm, crumbly apple pies. All that sharing gave you an appetite.

I continued slowly:
I get anxious
.

Carefully, I selected my words:
I live alone and I don't want anything to have
…
access
.

Dr Krull:
I find it interesting that you said anything not anyone
.

I shrugged my shoulders:
Same thing. Sometimes I get this feeling of doom. This horrible, choky feeling and I can't breathe. My head hurts just thinking about it. I haven't been sleeping properly
.

Dr Krull:
Do you still swallow stones?

Yes
I answered, internally cursing my deviancy.
Sometimes
. I thought I saw a flicker of pity on the Dr's face but it was a fleeting nano second of change.

I know what you're going to say
, I stated, patting myself on the back for being ahead of the curve.
Yes
, her voice said.
It's so pathetic you can predict questions about your own dysfunction
. Congratulations
, have the rest of your life to decipher your miserable existence.

I like the taste of stones Dr. I like that you can measure their entirety with your tongue; they're definable. It pushes that choked up feeling in my throat down, right down to the bottom.

Dr Krull:
Tell me about the first time you swallowed a stone, your earliest memory
.

I don't remember
.

Dr Krull:
You don't remember or you don't want to remember?

I held his gaze steady, like one of my stones in its fragmented bottom.

I don't remember
.

Dr Krull pressed pause on his tape recorder before exiting the room to get me a higher dosage of the sleeping pills he'd given me last time. I squirmed slightly beneath the gaze of his attractive wife from her compact picture frame. I set the picture face down on his desk. He'd left his blazer slung over the chair, seat still warm with his body's imprint. I glanced around the room suspiciously, checking for signs of a hidden camera and confessions becoming thumbprints on its lens. They wouldn't film without your consent, Doctor/patient confidentiality and all that. The lining of his jacket felt smooth and expensive. An image of him licking his wife's nipples with his silk-lined tongue flashed into my head. I rummaged inside the jacket, keeping my ears open. I fished out a wallet containing £50 and a folded bank statement. I took a £20 note, ripped the first page of the bank statement with his address on and stuffed both in my back pocket. Carefully, I arranged the jacket exactly as I'd met it.

Anon appeared in the Dr's chair, curled her long legs beneath her.

Take something else
she said.
Do it before he comes back
. Her voice was strong and assured. The weight of her tongue inside my head pulled me up again. Her hand slipped into his jacket, opened the wallet. Before I knew it, I'd taken a Visa credit card, a tingle hummed along my spine. My handprints fed the hungry, small gold rectangle in the corner of the card in my pocket. A ripple from the river of the painting in reception carried them away, floating on the shimmering surface. The card was still lodged in my jeans pocket.

When the Dr returned, I was getting rid of evidence. A thin line of sweat ran into my right eye, stinging a little. The dripping water fountain made small echoes in the room, now buzzing with a spark of electricity. As I struggled to breathe, Anon's face reassembled.

Dr Krull entered the room clutching a small paper bag bearing the green pharmaceutical logo. He looked concerned catching me taking deep breaths leaning forward in my seat. I didn't say anything except
panic attack
and continued gulping air until he took the medicines out of the bag and handed it over for me to inhale. I didn't say a word. I knew these people like neatly packaged neuroses; messy
spillage meant messy consequences, the numbness of zombie land and blood in the sky. We sat that way for several minutes while he helped me steady my breathing and I tried to control sudden movements, paranoid his credit card would fall from my pocket.

Dr Krull upped the dosage of the Sertraline pills that ran into white skies and left outlines looking like small, smudged spaceships if you kept them on paper in sunlight.

I left the centre to a chorus of jangling cutlery. A stringy haired woman in reception repeatedly spun her polka dot umbrella till it clattered to the floor. Outside, the wind blew. I bought a tuna and cucumber salad sandwich from Greggs, topped up my electricity using Dr Krull's newish looking £20 note. At home, Anon the long-limbed woman was waiting on the bedroom window ledge, stroking some animal whose lines would fade by morning. I cried into my jar of slow dwindling stones, feeling my chest heave, thinking of my mother and all the lessons she would never learn from me.

Semi Circle

The heat in Rangi's bathroom felt temporary. I was bent over the tub, inhaling and exhaling almost silently, feeling his tongue moistening the dip in my back, his laughter quiet against my skin in some secret trade off. Bloody ribbons from between my legs disintegrated in lukewarm water as the speed of the fly's wings increased, circling around the small artificial sun that was the light bulb. A trickle edged down my left thigh, more bloody ribbons. I didn't have to look down to know my nipples were reacting in their familiar way, one inverted and the other distended. As if they couldn't agree on how transparent they should be about their pleasure.

Poised behind me, Rangi's muscles tensed and relaxed, his golden frame coiled. He nudged me forward so my hands were splayed on the wall in front for support. I was trying to hold on to the thoughts scurrying in my head when he bit my left bottom cheek before tracing the teeth marks with his tongue. I released a sound that was part whimper and part sigh. The small house I'd drawn on the cabinet mirror had lost its roof and no longer harboured the sounds I made. Sounds that now belonged to small creatures with sink plugholes for mouths.

Curled above our small liquid country, bathed in 60-watt light, he bent me over the tub more, holding my head under water. I opened my eyes; they stung as he slid in and out of me quickly. There was
a rush of blood to my head while he moved, expanding me. In my mind's eye, his member was covered in blood, its sly slit developing a taste for it. My mouth tried to hold the bend in his long penis in mirrors without steam. He moved in and out at a frenzied pace, I knew I couldn't stay under for that much longer. Either I'd pass out or die but he held fast, slippery grip on my rubber band waist. My body went limp. My head sank further into the water, like a female flamingo mating. The 60-watt light bulb flickered.

We were gulls on a sunken bed, chasing wounds disguised as bread. Flapping our stained grey wings beneath a curved, wet ceiling, waiting for paint to fall on us; for its strong fresh scent to fill our noses while we fucked, for the sheet that hung off the bed to become white water carrying our old scenes, wet and ready to fill the doorways of their birth. I knew the gulls would go blind from the artificial light, mouths lined with tobacco when they broke their necks against the ceiling, tricked into thinking it was a sky line. Mauve paint crumbled into the whites of our eyes, a train rumbling in the distance inadvertently became a burial ground for half-formed things. Our previous wet scenes found their way into the dead gulls, waiting for the sound of the next train to warn them of their travelling funeral ground. The 60-watt bulb flickered.

We were mannequins that had abandoned the window display filling up with stones, trickling in from every angle. As the sound of roughly shaped stones rose, panic in our chests deepened. We communicated using expressions from the human versions of ourselves. We mimicked their body movements mirrored in glass. Panic in the mannequins waned. A sunken bed stained with come in the distance beckoned. Stones falling rang in their chests. Then their injuries came from climbing fences, stumbling in the dark, from wear and tear. The light flickered again. I felt my body being lifted from the tub, vaguely registering the squeaky sound the bath made as he hauled up my wet frame, hands beneath my armpits. My eyes stung from opening them in soapy water. Blood between my legs left a trail on the aqua coloured linoleum floor. He sat me up gingerly,
the scent of period blood lingered in the air. He patted my cheek firmly. I blinked. His face swam.