They share far too much history, it reaches too far back. Together and apart. He gets out of the car and takes her hand. The two other sisters keep wandering, while she has ground to a halt there, with her dead man, ground to a halt in front of the car.
It’s kind of you to take us here. It’s kind of you to . . . be here.
He looks at her, the way you look at something broken.
A broken face.
We share no history, I don’t know you. That is what he thinks. That is what he says.
She says she doesn’t understand what he means.
She wants that cohesion, the cohesion of language and what is.
But there is none. The agreement isn’t there.
An abandoned house collapses, an abandoned tree topples in the woods, without a sound.
A broken landscape, lifeless expanses, the dead themselves, stone walls under snow. Maybe that’s how it is. I’m not sure I understand what you mean, she repeats.
THE RAM LIES twitching, a pounding heart in the grass. It forced its way through the electric fencing because she forgot to give them water. The chain-link fence of before is gone, no longer cutting up the world in its steely rectangles. They sit in the tall grass at the hedgerow, and stare across the field. The sheep, the way they used to poke their heads through the metal eyes, ear tags or horns contriving to get them stuck, a head wrenching back, ear tag in the wire, the image of an ear torn in two. Now the fencing is electric, a current directed through four taut wires, a regular current, the tautness of the wires, a staff for musical notation running through the landscape here. And still the sheep strive for the grass on the other side, and still they may get stuck, become entangled.
Frightened animal eyes; the tremble of the beast, blue-tongued, mouth agape. I can hardly look.
Does she know what harm she has caused. Do you know what you’ve done. Can’t you see.
All is silent. As yet no one has spoiled the stillness of the scene with questions. And it will never be the same. She is not breathing. It is Sunday and they are all dressed up as themselves. Their mother whips cream for the cake, there is a sense of expectation, the house has been dusted. The piano—dusted. The heaps in the living room, the piles of letters from the bank, the catalogues and receipts, the empty envelopes ripped open at the seams, all shuffled and patted together, corners aligned.
Seen through her mother’s eyes: proud, upright towers of documents.
On the sideboard.
On the telephone table.
Order. Order, that is about opportunity, and a joy at what is to come. What is to come and what might come. A dizzying privilege, a naïve expectation as to what is about to happen.
But then perhaps it is anything but naïve. Perhaps it’s never getting any better than this. Not so much about the joy of expectation as having trust in the world, that feeling of excitement in the stomach, leaps ahead in the mind, physically going on into the future. When the body goes on.
And then the damper on it all, that all of a sudden everything is in spite; a celebration held in spite. Harvest festival—when everyone knows it’s not just bringing hard work to a pleasant conclusion, but also the start of a winter’s slog. The cold. Shoulders grinding. Thoughts grinding, pulverizing more important thoughts, the disintegration of it all, feathers and dust descending like snow, or in November as rain. Descending to the feet of nature, descending upon life.
Perhaps she will not come here ever again, if she is forced to choose then I don’t want to be here. They can come to my book launch, read the reviews and settle for that; or they can avoid the launch, not bother to read the book, and settle for that. Buy a postcard, or nothing. Send it, or not.
Not.
Never read even a page, but conjure it up in the imagination, unreading, unseeing.
I sit at the table, and the tall jug of hot chocolate is passed around for the second time; or else I stand out in the stable with the sheep wedged between my knees, holding a cloth to its ear. The ear has become infected and weeps. The flies can’t be kept away. I bend down without loosening my grip on the animal, dip the cloth in the bucket of soapsuds. The bleating of a sheep can be this loud, an alarm that could almost dislodge the swallow’s nest below the roof. Crumbling flakes of mud fall gently on my head, the image of a heart in the grass, the ram at my hand, the heart in the field. I write a letter to my mother, a last will and testament in reverse, all that is not mine, and all that is my own, something that is hers. A body I cannot possess any longer. I miss you, I write at the bottom, then cross it out again. And yet that is what I do, miss someone. It could be her, someone I know.
HE IS OUTSIDE himself the whole time. Standing now among the black-currant bushes, eating until he can eat no more. Until his eyes resemble the dark berries. She is transparent, he is a recurring dream of solidity. Someone has to touch her and think: here is a body. Here is proper flesh.
But all she does is drift.
She is the dust drifting in the stable, in every shaft of light, she is the trace of some insects in the dust that has settled, or she is out of sight upon worm-eaten rafters, the bark of weathered fence-posts, in the frost that covers the benches by the lake. She wants to be vulnerable:
give me wounds.
And then the cat’s cracked paw pads, everything there is, bleeding. That, hand me that.
WE WALK THROUGH the city on our way home from the restaurant, looking in at the cafés, where the light is soft as upon the lakes. People, appearing in light, extinguished in darkness, in the depths of the rooms, up front. A thin man’s cigarette dissects the darkness in two. He loiters there on the street corner, the way that can only be done on a street corner. The roads run on ahead and are home before us. I feel younger than ever before, as if I’ve seen everything and forgotten it all again, now finally having reached a place from which to start. Why have I never been here before, I wonder. You say the city is full of life tonight, I was thinking the exact opposite, at the moment you spoke—that the city was full of death tonight. A kind of beauty in that, in our meeting there, back to back; when you can’t get any farther away from each other, you encounter each other again. I am a wall that goes right through you, and your body is distressed by how heavy it’s getting.
HER MOTHER FILLS the room with her humming. She waters the plants, her hands pass over all things, invoking them—as things. It’s like she wants to make herself heard above everything her daughter has done, to make sure all is not ruined. By the sadness of her being so. I am indebted; this is what she sees, the eyes of her older sister, she understands that she is indebted now and must repay what is owed, forever. And she must care for their mother when she gets old. Old and bedridden. When she no longer can feed herself.
She is malevolent decoration, that’s what it feels like. Saddled with a love so mad, inhuman almost, that she can only disappoint. It’s a matter of time, and then it will be so—only disappointment remaining, and a sense of having loved a child that never existed. And the reproaches will return, there will be a list:
The ram.
The cancellation, that trip to Copenhagen with her mother’s sister. That never was.
The necklace.
Various items of porcelain.
The book.
How could you do such a thing.
The illness.
The illness of disappointment.
THE