The Beautiful Indifference (16 page)

Authors: Sarah Hall

BOOK: The Beautiful Indifference

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The situation became worrying. Playgroup was a minefield. Nobody could really tell who you were talking about: yourself or Danny. The subjects of your speech were often confused, and you and your brother babbled privately together, making up names for spiders, stomachaches, and rain. You did not make friends with the other children at first; instead the two of you played hoops and balls together and swapped beakers of milk; there was a system of cup colors to be observed. There was talk of educational retardation, developmental limitation, which shocked your mum and dad. There were visits from the health care worker, District Nurse Lane. You remember her rigid triangle skirt and her bleached cuticles. She wondered about this inseparability, this doublespeak. She wondered if, rather than being delightful, it was abnormal to possess a psychological satellite. She wondered how healthy the relationship really was between Danny and you.

Enter Dr Dixon, at the paediatric clinic in town. Because you seemed to be the one in charge, because the sibling unity was too powerful, you were going to have special lessons with him, to help you ‘be more comfortable.’ The building had a brass bell, and an old wooden revolving door wheelchairs couldn’t fit through: the first time you went you watched a girl with callipered legs being lifted up and carried through. It looked as if she were being fed into a giant grinder, and when it was your turn you had to be cajoled and encouraged into the blades. The carpet inside was made of tiny blue plastic threads. After you’d walked across it there was enough static to make a little jolt of electricity crack from your fingertip when you touched the table. There were anti-smoking posters with cloud-skulls floating above people holding cigarettes. Dr Dixon kept a tank of stick insects in his reception for the kids to look at. Sometimes they shed, leaving their skins behind on the aquarium trees where they dried and curled like thin spun toffee. It made you feel queasy to see the brown husks hanging off the forks of bark.

The doctor smelled of pencil shavings and peppermints. He spoke very slowly, very deliberately. His teeth looked white and strong. For a while you thought he was a dentist, but he never asked you to open wide. Instead he held you gently by the shoulders and asked impossible questions.
What do you think is the best way to answer this question, Sue? If I took away your mother and father, and then I took away your brother, Danny, what would you be called?
The last proposition always made you furious, and you scowled yourself into a headache. He asked you to paint pictures of your family.
Who do you see here, here, and here?
You were encouraged to play by yourself each day, without Dan, without dolls or books. It seemed particularly unkind to your brother, who looked crestfallen whenever your mum said it was time for you to go upstairs for ‘special hour.’ Only once did Danny come to the clinic. The two of you were put in an observation room and left alone. You endured six months of Dr Dixon. It felt like years. Then the whole thing was over. Only later, when you were a teenager and you asked about those memories, it was described, apologetically, as treatment. Now you can’t pass by the old sandstone clinic at the top end of your hometown without hearing that man’s relentless nasal parroting.
Say I do, Sue, say I do, Sue
.

But it worked, you suppose. You learned to communicate normally, like the rest of the psychically circumscribed automatons of the world. You looked at yourself in the mirror Dr Dixon gave you to hold. You repeated the words until they stuck.
Me, me, me. I, I, I
. You wound back into yourself, like the reversing spool on your mum’s sewing machine. You were cured.

Now here you are again, dislocated, remote, spilling your essence out into the void.

You’ve been thinking about this. You’ve been wondering if you are really so different from everyone else in the massive, grinding city where you live. You look at the variety of faces opposite you on the bus; listen to the conversations. Everyone seems to be in crisis.
You just want to get out of the financial mess
, a man in a grey suit says to his black-suited colleague. An oily teenager yells into his mobile phone:
You cant help feeling like a bastard for wanting her to get rid of the thing. She was the one who forgot to take the fucking pill!
An Asian woman with a nose piercing softly confides in her friend:
You get sick to death of his moods. You want to kill him. You really do
.

Nowadays, people often don’t say
I
, as if they don’t want to be involved in the desperate act of being. No one is contented dwelling inside their existence anymore. No one is secure. Identity can be chosen. You can be whoever you want to be, which means you should consider all the options before selecting yourself. People are aware of the heart, slopping about like a piece of lively meat inside the chest, as if it isn’t snug, as if it hasn’t been fitted right. They are constantly told that a better incarnation lies just over the horizon; all it would take to be joined with that preferable vision is beauty, money, weight loss, fashion, confidence, talent, surgery, cosmetics, gymnasiums, a cordless drill, a new microwave, more sex.

The ruthless calibration of consumerism. For if this is all you’ve got, this single chance, this brief, blemished simian posing opposite you in the mirror, then hadn’t it better be refined, hadn’t it better be romanticised? The self is no longer made to measure. ‘I’ is simply the wrong size. If only that better, happier edition could be purchased and possessed. But it ghosts around out there, tantalising, beautiful, erstwhile. Meanwhile London is filled with laterals, crowding onto trains and buses, talking different languages, avoiding free newspapers. They tug at their exteriors, wrestle with their features, and recast themselves into conversations. They are trapped inside the dull, deficient hides that Nature has unhelpfully allocated.

You are not yearning for improvement. You don’t want to be reborn from a womb of material idealism. You don’t wish to emerge, perfect and bright, out of the modern western chrysalis. You are not interested in living magnificently and utterly, certain that in this life you have triumphed. All you want is to be yourself again, because the identity that was once yours has vanished. Though a familiar face is reflected in the mirror, its anima is missing.
You
are absent.

There’s no real mystery of course, no complicated reason. The nub, the crux, the heart of the matter is this: Danny died a month and a half ago. You’ve lived six weeks, fourteen days, and several minutes longer than he.

Other Works

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The Electric Michelangelo

Daughters of the North

How to Paint a Dead Man

Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

Cover illustration © V&A Images, London / Art Resource, NY

“Butcher’s Perfume” was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award 2010. The story was published by Comma Press and recorded by BBC Radio 4 in association with the Award in 2010. “Bees” was first published in
Underwords: The Hidden City
by Maia Press in 2005. “She Murdered Mortal He” was first published in the October 2011 edition of
Granta
. “The Nightlong River” was first published under the title “Mink” by www.pulp.net in 2006. “Vuotjärvi” was long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011 and was first published in 2011 as an e-book by Fast Fiction for Kindle.

“Speirin” from
The Tree House
by Kathleen Jamie reproduced by permission of Pan Macmillan, London. Copyright © Kathleen Jamie, 2004.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Faber and Faber Ltd.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpt from
How to Paint a Dead Man
copyright © 2009 by Sarah Hall.

THE BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE
. Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Hall. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hall, Sarah, 1974–

Beautiful indifference : stories / Sarah Hall.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-220845-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper)—

EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062208460

I. Title.

PR6108.A49B43 2012

823'.92—dc23 2012027416

13 14 15 16 17
RRD
10 9 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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