Fen (2 page)

Mum lent me her blusher, Katy said, and I could see it, triangular arches on her cheeks. On her neck, the line of foundation was firm. The lids of her eyes darkened with eyeliner, smudging at the corners.

Katy sat in the front of the car and talked and talked. I could see Mum's head nodding up and down. We pulled up outside the house.

I don't want to, I said. Katy and Mum turned round and looked at me and Mum said: what do you mean? And Katy said: nothing.

When we got out Mum leant down and put her face close to mine, pushing the end of her chin and mouth against my cheek, leaving a smear of lip salve.

You OK, Suze? Something wrong?

I looked at Katy. She was on the grass leading up to the house. There was music coming from the open windows and she was dancing.

I looked at Mum and shook my head. Waved at the sound of the car moving away across the loose gravel.

When I went inside I tried to ignore Katy. My friends were there and we sat and watched everyone else. Some of the girls were draping themselves over chairs, lounging with intent. We knew what they were doing: arranging their bodies so their legs were at the best angle, so their faces offered the most flattering side. We would do it too if we had the courage. There were boys at the party, some of whom were at the sixth form college and had car keys
and hair on their chins. Mostly the girls didn't talk to them, only turned in their direction as if they were magnets.

In the corner of the room Harris's older brother was holding sway with a beer in one hand and a roll-up cigarette in the other and Katy sat on the arm of his chair. Harris's brother hadn't been to university; worked the mechanics his father owned, had tan lines cut around the edges of his clothes and didn't say much of anything.

I could feel my friends ignoring Katy for my sake and I ignored her too but eventually there was nowhere to look. And eventually she was on his lap.

His hand's up her top, someone said. I didn't need them to tell me.

Later when Katy took Harris's brother into the bedroom and closed the door behind them I knew the whole room was timing their absence. Some people shifted closer, laughing and drinking, trying to hear. My friends and I played fuck, marry, kill; theoretical five minutes in heaven, imaginary spin the bottle. There was a story people always told about a girl who used to go to our school and, they said: lost her virginity to a bike. We marked the outfits round the room out of ten, judged the older boys with what we considered harsh critical notes, talked about our crushes.

Look, one of them said.

Harris's brother opened the door to the bedroom and came forward. He was carrying something in his arms, a
blanket or length of piping. Except when he put it down next to me, the head on my lap, it was Katy.

Where are her clothes? There was something in his face I wanted to draw out and strangle. He held onto her hand and then dropped it.

Where are her clothes? I said. I started to take my jumper off, struggling with the arms. A lot of the girls in the room were laughing but I could see one picking up a coat from a bundle and hurrying over.

I looked down at her. Her spine was now a great, solid ridge, rising from the mottled skin of her back; the webbing between her fingers had grown almost past the knuckles and was thickening. Her face had changed too, her nose flattening out, nostrils thinning to lines.

I woke, in the night, on the pull-out hospital bed. Mum was next to me; Dad was asleep on the chair. Katy put her hand around the drip in her arm, tugged it free. We walked along the corridors. With each step Katy made a panting sound. In the bathroom she stood under the shower with her eyes open, her mouth parted to catch the cold water, lip it up. She was, she said, dry as a bone. She stood there until a nurse found us; me curled beneath the sink, watching her.

You'll kill yourself, the doctor said. Katy blew bubbles from the side of her mouth.

In the day they force-fed her. At night we walked along the looping corridors, circling and circling. In the
bathroom I listened to the sound of her, coming out red knuckled to stand under the shower, drinking gallons of water so her stomach swelled, mountain-like, out of her ribs.

Her skin was dry like paper, the hair on her head falling out in handfuls. She couldn't walk any more, only hauled herself across the floor, belly down. She could not hear when anybody spoke to her: watched mouths, shook her head. When Mum and Dad weren't there I held up signs for her to read, moving closer and closer until they were a hand's width from her face, and still she squinted, shook her head. Why won't you eat something? I wrote, and she held the paper to her nose, tried to eye each letter at a time, sucked her thick bottom lip into her mouth and then let it go with a pop.

We were in the hospital a week. I sat in the corner of Katy's room and watched how everybody tried not to see what was happening. Though it was clear. It was clearer than ever. Her hands were not fingered now, only heavy unwieldy paddles she used – angrier every day – to knock over trays of food, dislodge her IV.

They kept giving her oxygen. I wanted to tell them it wouldn't work, it was no good. She was drowning in air. At night I brought her bowls of water, lowered her face in, watched the bubbles, saw how she came up just about smiling.

Nights. She rolled out of bed, flopped her way down the corridor on her belly, searching for something. I followed her at a distance. They took to tying her to the bed, straps around her middle, her forehead, her ankles. She ignored our parents, looked blindly for me. I knew what she was asking.

They knew there was nothing they could do for her. We took her home. A nurse would come every day to feed and clean her.

Katy locked herself in the bathroom and would not come out. Sitting on the floor by the door I heard the sound of her in the bath, the water sloshing out, the slap of flesh on plastic, the sound of the shampoo and conditioner bottles falling to the floor. When Mum broke down the door we stood and looked at her but only I would stay, sat on the floor, patting messages through the surface of the water, pushing her under so she could breathe.

The ambulance is on its way, Mum shouted up the stairs. Katy rolled her head to look at me, moving her long body in the water. I wet a towel, lifted her free, carried her out through the back garden, under the hedge and into the field. Her face next to mine, the thrash of her excited stomach against my side, the flapping of gills shuttering on the side of her neck.

I carried her as far as the school field. Paused at the stile to rest. The canal ran deep there, was mired over
with weeds and nettles. I lay her on the ground, jerked her free from the towel, pushed her sideways into the water. She did not roll her white belly to message me goodbye or send a final ripple.

Only ducked deep and was gone.

WHEN WE WERE
younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin. We did not care for their words, their mouths moving on the television, the sound of them out of radios, the echo chamber of them from telephones and computers. We did not care for their thoughts; they could think on philosophy and literature and science if they wanted, they could grow opinions inside them if they wanted. We did not care for their creed or religion or type; for the choices they made and the ones they missed. We cared only for what they wanted so much it ruined them. Men could pretend they were otherwise, could enact the illusion of self-control, but we knew the running stress of their minds.

We left Paris one morning knowing we would never go back. English was the language of breaking and bending
and it would suit our mouths better. None of us would ever fall in love in English. We would be safe from that.

Moving did not suit us; we were out of sync, out of time with ourselves. We rented a big, wrecked house out by the canal. Tampons swelled the drainage system; our palms were crisscrossed with promise scars barely healed before the next one. We promised we would never let it happen again. What had happened in Paris. None of us would let our food ruin our lives. The old walls of the house grew stained, dark swells of rustish wash across the sagging ceilings.

Greta came back most nights mournful; she'd been hunting roadkill. Arabella grew purposeful with unease, raided the butchers and spent the long days cooking up a storm of meat pies, of roasted birds inside birds and thick, heavy, unidentified stews. I was swept along by their disorientation, found myself lying in wait for the large, unafraid mice that populated the kitchen, found myself obsessed with daytime television, endless hours watching old quiz shows or the shopping channel.

We settled. Eventually. Greta, dancing the way she used to, bare feet tapping along the corridors, said it was a stupendous house, a house that knew how to feel. I laid down mouse traps and culled whole colonies in a day. We ate the leftovers of Arabella's cooking obsession in one long, sluggish evening and then emptied everything in the fridge into the bin. There was nothing in there we needed more than what we would have.

Arabella invested in a pair of wellington boots, put on one of the mouldy raincoats we'd found in a cupboard and went out on a reconnaissance mission. Came back talking, without pause, on seed-planting schedules and wind direction. She'd been, she said, in the local pub and she'd met men there who she thought would taste like the earth, like potatoes buried until they were done, like roots and tree bark. English men never really said what they were thinking: all that pressure inside, fermenting. We could imagine it easily enough.

She held out her hand, told us to taste it, told us she'd been able to smell their salt-of-the-earth insides across the barren winter fields. We sucked until we could: fen dirt heavy enough to grow new life in it.

Later Arabella broke into seriousness: we would have to be careful, pick carefully. We'd have to share. She changed the Bob Dylan record with her long white toes.

We shaved all the hair off our legs and underarms, plucked until we were smooth, coating the white bathtub in drag lines of dark; moisturised until we shone white and slick through the dim; painted crimson ‘yes' markers on our mouths.

We looked the way hunters must do. We looked the way we'd looked in Paris, half-glimpsed shards and shadows of skin, the meaningful line of stocking or bra.

This isn't going to work, Greta said, pulling at her hair.

We raided the backs of the wardrobes; hunted in the dressing-up boxes we'd saved for bored days, snuck out
to pillage washing lines. Regrouped and stood silently at the sight of ourselves: jodhpurs and polo necks and gilets.

Greta said, dreamily, that we looked like child catchers.

Arabella said we looked fierce.

She got the money and we pushed into boots and wellingtons at the door and went out, Greta trailing behind to catch her fingers on the blackberry bushes and kick at the frozen puddles. At the door to the pub Arabella turned to look at us for one final check: wiping her thumb at the blood Greta had used to darken her lips, straightening my carefully knotted scarf, mussing her hair with both hands. The Fox and Hound. We went in. Lined up at the bar. Listened to the quiet that spread the way a spool unravelled.

Arabella leant over on both elbows and smiled the way she did and said we would really quite like three gin and tonics if that was all right.

We were hungry but we took our time. Greta liked the school kids, drunk already, though it was barely eight o'clock, and rowdy on it. She bought them drinks because they were too young to do it themselves, laughed at their under-the-table shot taking. We heard her telling them that drinking would only ever get better, that they would spend their lives lying to their doctor about the number of pints they consumed. They looked at her as if she were a thing summoned up, formed from everything they'd never even known they wanted.

Arabella liked the old men in their corners or sat at the bar alone, talking in strange, weathered code to the barman about different ales. She liked the veined alcoholism of them, the implicit watching. She knew enough about the World Cup to get by.

It didn't matter who they liked. The one we would take had raw hands from the cold and narrow, glass-covered eyes. I knew before I went to him the sort of girl he'd want, one shy enough to look as though she shouldn't be there, one quiet enough to look as though she had something to hide. He did not respond in much more than monosyllables to my questions. I liked the dull return of his voice, the way he looked at his glass rather than at my face. He was, he said, a vet. When he was drunker he would tell me it was a bad time to be someone who cared about animals. He told me about the foxes being gassed in their earths. I told him everything has to die somewhere.

I finished my drink and he bought me another, bought one for himself, did not clink the glass I held up, only held his up too: a salute. He spoke about animals as if I knew them too and remembered them well. He worried about the land, thought he would move on when he had half a chance. Less than half.

It's not the way it used to be, he said.

When it was flooded? I said, half joking, and he looked at me as if this were a thing you could not mention, were not allowed to mention.

He was not married, had no children, was on his own the way someone was when they knew no different. I did not ask his name.

We left together. He said he was too drunk to drive and I said I was walking anyway. On the long, straight, dark road I sucked his bottom lip into my mouth and he made a startled sound as if someone had broken something sharp into him. At the onset of headlights coming over the flats I pulled him to the hedge line, forced the gasp from him again. He was afraid of me though not for the reason he should have been. When I took out one breast, he would not touch it, only stood a safe distance and looked until we carried on.

At the house I saw it as he must have done and wondered if he knew what was coming. It smelt of feathers and iron kettles. I took him to the kitchen. There were broken wine glasses on the table; our discarded clothes were in piles. The fur hat on the draining board looked sentinel, only dozing. I made him a whisky and water strong enough he puffed his cheeks out, shook his head.