Fen (11 page)

The stealings carried on. Often he tried so hard not to take anything; curled at the back of the wardrobe, hands pressed over his ears.

But soon I did not remember my name or the names of food or the sense of things. I have memories now I didn't have for ten years. The sight of someone running, I think it is my sister, over a wet field; my father shovelling knuckles of coal into a fire. I had a boyfriend once. I only remembered that the other day.

Towards the end I would hear him crying in the night. He couldn't, he would say, turn bricks into skin, skin into bricks. He did bring home roadkill. Left them sitting for days at a time. As if thinking it was only patience he needed to bring them alive again. When it rained he would stand out in front of the house with his hands held up. Like this. Standing there until it stopped. I was never certain whether he thought he was the one to do that.

I forgot ever giving birth to him; thought maybe I had found him. I forgot the way he was when he was a baby, seeming almost human. I forgot the speed with which he grew, burning through skins. I forgot the way I would sometimes wake and he'd be watching me sleep. The way, the more I forgot to eat, he fed me. He knew how to make the things I liked.

And then, one day, there was a man in my house and I did not know who he was. I was afraid of him. You would have been afraid of him too. I got a knife from the kitchen and I think maybe, if I could, I would have killed him. He looked at me and understood he had taken everything he could and then he left.

*  *  *

I listen to the radio. I know about him working the hospitals, opening incubators and lifting out the babies too small to breathe on their own. I get all the local newspapers and each hospital is closer. Some days I check the locks on the doors three or four times. No, I do not know why he is coming back. Only that he is.

It is getting dark out. Do you see? Perhaps you have been here longer than you meant. Maybe you should go.

He sent postcards. In the beginning he sent one a week. In the postcards he used the language he thought he was supposed to. He spoke often about the End of Days. He stopped giving dates when the dates came and went. Near the start he stuck to some of the cults and communes. Those countryside tribes of deep believers living off what scrawny potatoes they could grow; great broods of children. His handwriting was bad and, besides, I was having to learn language anew, picking up stray words. But later, when I'd regained enough to understand, he wrote that it was nice to find someone who believed in him and I knew he was saying that I'd failed in that regard.

I don't think he stayed with any of them long.

After a while he must have got far enough away that I could have all my words again. I began looking at objects and then knowing what they were, replacing the gaps with knowledge. Plant pot, fridge, door. I moved around the house; I went to the shop, picked
things up and named them: tin of tomatoes, bottle of milk.

The memories were slower to come. Some of them never came back. But that is to be expected – we all lose memories over time, no? None of us remembers everything. But some of my memories did return, and some of them he gave back to me. Wrote them on postcards:
Do you remember
and I'd realise that, again, I did. He gave me the things he thought were important. He left out anything he was embarrassed about. He was always, as a child, filled with huge bouts of embarrassment, shocking his face full of blood – I remembered that. But I wanted to ask him what happened when I first kissed someone, who it was and how it had gone. This was a thing he would never tell me and I would never ask.

That's when he started sending the photos. In each one he looks like a different person. As if no single body is strong enough to hold him. He wears his hair the way he thinks he is supposed to: long and loose. In the last photo there was a stripe of white, almost a burn, in his fringe.

I wonder often how he would have been if his father were a man. If I am being truthful I do not think of much else. Maybe he would be here now, would have got a job working at the pub or in a shop somewhere. There would be a woman or a man he loved; he would come round and cook me beef stew and dumplings the way I like it
and I would enjoy his visits. He would not think he could bring back the dead.

I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no.

 

 

 

WELL, IT WAS
done, it was through, it was finished with. The fox sat on its haunches on the floor of the hall and looked up at her. There was a moment, less than that, when she thought she would break it between the ribs or at the neckline. The words she'd given it, his words, would come out easy, as easy as making a baby from clay, easy as swimming to the sea when you had fins rather than legs.

The creature, rusted across the chest, put its head on one side and cracked its mouth an inch or so, panted. She waited for what it would say. A farewell or thank-you or promise of return.

Open the door, the fox said, and though she hesitated she did: then stood and watched until it was gone.

THERE WAS A
time she had more than one brother.

He would come to her smelling of the nights he'd grown accustomed to. He would come to her smelling of everything he could get his hands on to drink. Come to her smelling of bonfires and cold sleep. Come to her lit through with a sort of sadness or bruised with unthinking rage. Come to her cut up and proud. She'd wake to the sound of him falling through her window, rising up, grinning hard.

What have you done?

Well, he'd angered in the pub at something mis-said or overheard, winked the culprit – it didn't much matter who – out into the car park, fought them to bleeding on the gravel. But he didn't ever want to talk about that. Instead he'd come to her with a story burning so hot in his mouth he couldn't help but tell it: the house that fell in love with a girl, the girl that starved into a fish. He'd come to her drunk enough to sleep at the foot of her bed the way a cat would, her awake and listening all night to make sure he breathed on through.

So Arch was a different creature than her though they'd come from the same place. She was threaded through with cynicism, taut with anti-belief. He grew still and nervous at the chattering of birds on trees or chimney stacks; worried himself sleepless the summer the cows in the field behind the house milked blood; believed that
snakes didn't die only began anew every time they shed their skin.

When the three of them were children Arch almost had her persuaded that nothing was as it seemed. All of them in the long bath and his soggy face near to her ear.

I saw something flying that shouldn't be able to fly. I saw something with skin on the inside. I saw a dog with a personface.

That's bollocks, Marco said. He was on the other side of her, emptying all the shampoo and conditioner bottles into the water. He dug his hands under and upped out a great eruption of foam.

She was younger than them and a girl. They would not fight in front of her. But later she'd find one of them with a bruise the size of their own hand though that was not where it came from. Later she'd catch Arch washing red from his clothes, the colour seeping to clear.

It's tomato juice, he'd tell her if he was hurt enough to fail at imagining. Or he'd say he'd caught something trying to get in the house and he'd stopped it.

Even then, the only thing the boys shared, twelve years old and she not quite eleven, was that they never understood the fear of violence other people had.

And everything anybody said about twins was a lie. They said twins could tell what each other were thinking across the room; could live in one pronoun happily enough and were connected with invisible, pliable bones. Well, if Arch and Marco were tied together they were trying
mightily hard to break apart. And if they knew what the other was thinking it was only because they'd beaten it out of them earlier that day.

When tired, their mother said they should have been separated at birth, should have been fostered out to the bears or ferrets because that is where they really belonged. They could feud then, she would say, in the forest where they wouldn't hurt anybody with their aggressions. They could forge wars with animals on each side and flint as weapons and they would not miss anybody: they would forget there ever had been anybody to miss.

Matilda always wanted to say: but they would miss her. They would come back to visit her; bring her the animals too timid to fight their wars; bring her whatever presents the forest gave up. She wanted to tell her mother that sometimes she dreamt of Arch in the forest. There were dead rabbits and birds swinging from the cuffs of his trousers, his face slicked with war marks of black mud, his hands blue and cut from shucking the oysters which had started to grow in the canals at his bidding.

By the time they were teenagers, her friends at school fancied one or the other of them. They were two years above her and wore their scars as if they were medals. She tried to answer her friends' questions fairly. She told them that Marco was a steady guy: could do crosswords pretty well, knew how to cook fish and chips and not much else, played the cello because he'd heard Jacqueline du Pré on the radio and told their mother – he was ten
years old but already a bit of an arsehole – that he was pretty certain he could do the end bit better. By nine he knew all the swear words there were to know and used them eloquently.

She told them Arch could outrun a beat-up car; could stand on his head longer than anybody would believe and liked old films with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in them. She didn't tell them that he could hunt an animal clear across the flats or hear a rabbit before it heard itself.

She didn't tell them the only time Marco and Arch wouldn't fight was when they went out hunting the foxes. She kept that to herself. The sight of them tramping off across the back field, walking far enough apart you could think it an accident they went in the same direction. The sight of them coming back an hour or more later, mud on their hands and faces and all over their clothes. Marco would shower straight away and she'd listen to the sound of Arch taking two steps at a time on the way to her room. He'd come in looking smug, lie on the floor at the foot of the bed so as not to dirty her sheets.

Did you have fun? she'd ask. She wanted more than anything for him to tell her about the hunt, about picking up tracks from soil and bent branches. He never would.

I heard a new story, he'd say instead.

There had been incidents with the fen foxes. Horses and sheep attacked; something bad up at one of the farms which started a cull big enough you couldn't hear the sound of them at night for a while. They'd dropped poison
into the fox earths, tried to gas them out. They were different from the foxes you got in the cities, those wry, narrow-hipped creatures, caught in alleys, scrounging the bins behind takeaways, eating mice and complacent squirrels. Fen foxes were a bigger, wiser, more knowing stuff of a being. They'd got used to living well and good off fat rabbits and muntjac deer. They were too big for their boots.

There wasn't anything special about either of them except they thought they didn't belong there. But didn't everybody, she'd say while her friends leant back and watched the mudded thighs of the boys playing football on the school field, didn't everybody want to bloody leave?

A couple of times she set one or other of them up. Stood against the door frame of Arch's room, watching him get ready.

Why you wearing that?

She looks like the sort who likes blue.

Well, she isn't.

He worked his fingers through his hair. He wore his T-shirt the way she'd seen James Dean wear his in those films, high at the arms and hips. It fitted him the way it was supposed to. In fact he looked, she thought, entirely the way men did in those old films: hair back and up from his forehead, cigarettes in his tight jean pockets. He didn't belong anywhere real. Certainly not there.

You're wearing too much aftershave.

S'all right, Mattie, I'll take you on a date soon.

He would come home late enough he had to take the drainpipe. She lay listening for him. Was awake when he knuckled on her window. Let him wait. She'd never done it, hadn't lost it; but she knew what the smell underneath the booze was.

He tumbled in, bruised his lip, rose laughing loud enough to show he didn't care.

Cat got your tongue, Mattie?

That was the way he was, she thought, cold from the open window, looking at him lick blood off his fingers: everybody had to know how much he didn't give a shit.

The next day she caught enough to know what had happened (in the field, muddy, lasted about a minute) before her friends saw her listening and shut up fast. Nobody wanted to hear how their brother had given it up.