WOUNDING Page 8
‘Careful! That wasn’t cheap, that.’ The older man picks the coat up from the tiled floor and slaps out non-existent dust and grime as if the coat were choking and he were dislodging an obstruction from its throat.
‘Too many cooks! No harm done. Come on Jess, Patch, see what I’ve got.’ The older woman hands the children two large bags of jelly sweets in carnival colours. Far too bright for nature, they are reminiscent of the colours medieval artists painted their visions of heaven and hell. Hyper real, godly, nothing as prosaic as nature would be good enough for the children. In fact children must be shielded from reality at all times. To Cora, standing at the kitchen door, her offspring’s sugary desire is obscene.
‘There you are! We wondered where you’d got to.’
‘Hello Dad, Mum. You alright? Not before dinner you two, put the sweets away now.’ She makes a small stand, in front of them all. She is, after all, the mother, the authority.
‘Ah! Don’t be a spoilsport, Cora. They don’t get to see us very often, do they? Let them have a little treat.’
The husband looks over the heads of his parents-in-law at Cora, his eyes widening in warning. A marital semaphore, that guides and protects, he then winks at her, signalling that he is ON HER SIDE. She obeys and lets the subject drop. She must accept a higher authority. She must keep the peace.
‘Come on, let’s go through to the sitting room, we can get comfortable till dinner’s ready. What can I get you to drink?’ He manages them, as he manages all people, with ease. She envies him this. They all follow her husband into the room. He switches off the television. The children know better than to moan, having already been briefed on the etiquette of having visitors, even if those visitors were Grandma and Granddad. The older couple sit together on the sofa. Pulling the children onto their laps, they barely glance at the other two adults in the room.
‘Same as always. I’ll have a scotch and water please. Mary, you’ll have your usual?’ The woman looks up from her game with Jessica and nods. ‘And a wine for Mary please.’
Cora turns from the room with her husband.
‘I’ll check on dinner.’
When Cora comes back into the room the tableau has changed. Someone has drawn the curtains closed and the children are now sitting on the floor, sweets by their side, opening boxes, more new toys. The adults each nurse a glass in their right hand. There’s music playing in the background, something unknown to her. Her mother is watching the children tearing at the packaging around their new plastic treasure, their little fingers curved like hooks, resembling utensils, not sensitive flesh. Her father leans towards her husband, speaking only to him; they both laugh, her husband turning the laugh in her direction. He winks at her. Everything that happens, happens between words. Her father stands and walks towards her, stepping over the cardboard mess surrounding the children and puts his arm around her. ‘Got a hug for your old man?’
‘Of course!’ She steps into his mass and leans her head against his shoulder. He is proud of me. Proud of her. Good husband, good children, house, job, car. Tick, tick, tick. All complete, a satisfactory result. He feels reassured. She steps back, out of him. We can’t belong together anymore, Daddy. The children and husband have come between us, they separate us with their demands. She looks at his face, in close up it disintegrates, fragments and becomes unrecognisable. If only the eye had the sophistication of a camera lens, eternally disinterested. A large raised mole, flesh-coloured, grows in the corner of his nose. His eyes droop underneath long eyebrows. His mouth is moist and exposed. He looks back at her, and reassembles as she watches. He is her father again. Her protector.
‘Dinner’s ready.’
They are kind and good. A contract of flesh and thought exists in the gathering of atoms, the accumulation that makes up this family. They try. They try to love and manage it. They take their shapes because of the spaces that interrupt. They are good humans, suppressing all that is animal. They are good. But Cora is a beast, fragile and violent. Compulsive.
‘We’re all animals. Nothing more, nothing less.’
‘Cora! You’re a strange girl! What an interruption!’ They all laugh. What a joke! What wit she has. Even the children join in, chuckling at what they don’t understand, learning the script, repeating it over and over. Mummy is so very funny!
They sit around the table in the kitchen. She sits at the head, closest to the oven. A large blue casserole dish is in the centre of the table, filled with beef stew and dumplings. Because I am human, I am rotten. If I didn’t intervene, just remained animal I would succeed. Cora is human, she thinks, she is thinking, she has thoughts. The body succeeds. Stop thinking. She hands a large metal spoon to her mother.
‘Why don’t you serve us all.’ Her mother takes the spoon, and stands up.
‘So, I meant to say as well, that they are really good people. I’m looking forward to working with them.’ Cora’s husband hands his plate to his mother-in-law who fills it.
‘Come on, pass me your plates. Let’s eat.’ Cora’s mother turns to her. ‘This smells delicious, Darling. Really good.’
‘Will you earn a percentage from the deal? What’s your reward for all the work?’ The older man leans forward on his elbows, his hands folded into a large fist.
‘John, pass me your plate, please dear.’ He passes his wife his plate. She fills it with the slop of meat and vegetables. Cooked for so long the ingredients have begun to lose form. Already the process of assimilation is beginning. Rendered to pure matter. Excrement is holy.
‘Thanks, love.’ He loves his wife, his daughter, her husband and children. This is a statement of fact. It just is, no thought, nor critique. He begins to eat. ‘Very good. Almost as good as your mother’s!’
They laugh. They are in no hurry. They eat. Her husband pours more wine. The children chatter and laugh together. The adults pay them all due attention. Cora watches. They have never been hungry. They are privileged children. Fed regularly and with diligent consideration of nutrients and trans fats, cholesterol and salt. Perhaps fierce mother-love is ignited when your children are starving? When they cling to you, bug-eyed, bellies distended and hollow. Maybe then love abounds. The scrape and shriek of metal on china punctuates the conversation as they eat every morsel on their plates. They will want more, they always want more. Their teeth clack and grind as they chew the fibres of the meat. The mouths curl and pose. Eating and speaking. The jaws gyrate in the skull. The mouths hunger and hunger. Their bellies are crammed with meat.
‘What are you doing for Cora’s birthday?’ Mary looks towards her son-in-law. Her glass in hand, empty.
‘Not sure are we?’ he glances towards Cora but his eyes miss her, avoid her. ‘I wanted to take her away somewhere. Perhaps a spa or something. Lots of pampering and lazing around. Both of us could do with a rest. A weekend break with nothing to do but eat and be fussed over, you know, a massage and all that. But Cora doesn’t like that sort of thing, do you?’
‘No, she never has, have you, dear? Never been a proper girl. Never been one for make-up and manicures. Difficult to buy for really, can’t just get her a bottle of perfume or a facial for a gift.’
‘Not like her mother! You can’t go wrong buying you a vat of face cream and a shop full of dresses. Isn’t that right?’ He chuckles, he is right, always right.
‘Well you should do something special. Not just let it go. You need to celebrate.’ Mary reaches for the wine bottle and fills her glass. ‘I’ve no idea what we’ll get you, Cora.’
‘I don’t want a gift. Honestly, I’m not bothered by birthdays. It hardly seems to matter. Seems silly to spend all that money.’ The children are quiet, listening to the strange conversation that lingers in air like smoke.
‘Hard to believe you’re my daughter sometimes!’ the older woman laughs ‘How you came from my body I can’t imagine! You’ve said that before, haven’t you John?’
‘Let’s get mummy a guinea pig! We could all love that.’ Patrick grins at his ingenuity.
‘Yes! Please mummy, please?’ Jessica bounces on her chair.
‘No, that’s not a good idea,’ Cora says; her hands tingle and prickle.
‘Oh, why not?’ her father asks before picking at a piece of meat stuck between his teeth.
Cora looks at her husband, he shrugs his shoulders, smiling. It’s her decision.
‘Because it’s too much responsibility for kids, that’s why.’
‘Mummy had a rabbit, Kids. Didn’t you, Cora?’
‘Yes, mum. I did. Don’t you remember what happened?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It died, mum. I forgot to feed it. You went in the shed and found it, remember? Dead in its hutch.’
‘No, that’s not what happened. Is it?’ The woman looks at her husband who shakes his head. The children are silent, watching the adults. Jessica chews on the ends of her hair, splitting the strands. Patrick rubs at his ear. Cora looks down at her hands.
She is once again separated from her flesh – the only thing that can be touched- she is distanced from herself. In her bra, tucked safely away are her perfect new bruises. But they’ve stopped throbbing; the source of the joy is exhausted and needs stoking up. Her husband gets up from the table and begins to gather up the plates, the knives and forks. The meal is over, the children tired and full. The atmospheric pressure is huge, crushing.
‘Shall we go and read a story before bedtime?’ Mary stands, her weight evenly distributed over her two feet. Just as her love is evenly distributed between the children. She carries her bulky load well, and never lets its tip to one side. She takes the children by the hand and leads them out of the door towards the stairs. All happily wrapped up in clichés. ‘Better say goodnight to Mummy. Go and give her a kiss.’ They walk over and put their arms around Cora. Patrick’s head level with her chest. She holds them, pressing them as hard as she can against herself. Wanting to feel them. It is as if she is holding a container full of mercury, hazardous and difficult to control, requiring a firm hand. She is untouched by the small declarations of hands and compressed lips. Love is a violence that wreaks havoc on the health. It demands a dark sacrifice. The children wriggle against her pressure.
‘Mummy you’re hurting me.’ She releases them, immediately. They are entirely safe.
Sitting alone, the sofa’s soft cushions an affront to her body’s secret demand, she takes off her shoes. Her head tips back. Upstairs she can hear the muffled sounds of a song being sung and the repeated ‘Night, Nights’ from the children. Her mother putting them to bed. Lullabies and story telling, the intricate skill of sending them off to sleep. It can’t be taught, it is innate; it is everything Cora lacks. Her husband and father are still in the kitchen, cleaning up and talking. They are comfortable in this house. They are aware of the limits of their position, the responsibilities and rewards. The pleasure that is available to them. They are humans that think and remember. She is only instinct. That is the problem. The urge to hurt and its recurrence. On/off, on/off, on/off. Dead again. There is no respite from her mortality. This dead skin draped over a dead body. She allows her hands to lapse into useless lumps on her knees. The memory of being alive again, earlier in the day, disturbs her corpse. She was resurrected, and then dead again.
Mary enters the room, smiling and perfumed. Well turned out, she’s a woman who prizes cleanliness and self-respect. She was never a beauty, but ensured that she was a wife her husband could be proud of. Hair and make-up immaculate before she left the house, dressed always in smart clothing, nothing brash, nothing showy. The house comfortable, the child – they weren’t blessed with the joy of a large family – Cora, always well-mannered, polite and clean. She never bought ready-made meals, always shopped carefully to stretch the household budget. She is capable, with the capacity to contain a family’s worth of spite and disappointments locked safely away inside her. It’ll all be buried with her, securely disposed of out of harm’s way.
She sits next to Cora on the sofa, sinking into the lenient cushions. ‘Well, that’s them off to bed.’
‘Yes. You’re so good with them. They love having you here.’
‘It’s easy with such lovely little ones. They’re absolute darlings.’
‘Yes. I suppose it is. I’m lucky. Was I easy to look after when I was a child?’ Cora shifts and turns her body so that she can look at her mother.
‘Oh, you were no trouble. No trouble at all. I just wish you’d had a brother or sister. Still, it wasn’t meant to be, we were lucky to have you at least.’ Mary raises her hand to her face, and pushes a grey curl back from her forehead.
‘Did you ever wish things had been different? That you’d stayed single maybe? Had a career instead of marrying Dad?’ Cora begins to pick at the skin around her fingernails, tearing at the flesh.
‘No, not really. I feel very grateful for my blessings.’ Mary takes a deep breath.
‘Really? You’ve never wondered what life would be like if you’d made different choices? If you’d not married, not had me?’
Mary looks at her. Cora feels her eyes testing, searching for signs of health, of decay, of sickness. ‘No, I don’t ever think that. If I thought like that it would be like wishing you dead, like murdering you with my own hands. It’s a terrible thing to even think of.’ She sighs, her body lifting then drooping with the breath.
The house shakes a little as a car speeds past. ‘Don’t pick your nails, dear. I thought you’d outgrown that habit.’ She pats Cora’s hand.
Cora wants her mother to reach out and caress her head, to feel the cool pressure of the fingers. She remembers the touch of her mother’s hand better than she remembers anything else about Mary. She reaches forward and takes her mother’s hand, stroking it, and laying her own out next to it. Side by side, the two hands flattened out for examination.
‘They’re so different. I always thought my hands would be like yours.’
‘No! Yours are lovely and elegant, not like my little paws.’
‘I’d always recognise your hands, they never seem to change, no matter what. Funny you call them paws, when our hands are what separate us from animals, if you think about it. Having hands to use tools is what makes us human.’
‘Well, I don’t know, what about monkeys? Don’t they have hands? I always thought mine looked like those little squirrel paws. You should make the most of your pretty ones, paint your nails or something nice like that.’
She takes her hand from her daughter and lays it in her lap as if it is an object removed from her body. It is just after eight o’clock. Cora places her own hand on the sofa. She wants to rearrange her body, place it in a different posture, but doesn’t want to disturb her mother. Her body, a body once carried inside her mother’s, now revolts against her, constructing a mutiny. They sit together, in a space that seems to shrink around them, closing in and dividing them from the rest of the house. Mary stands, pushing at the sofa and shifting forwards to hoist herself up. ‘I’ll see what the men are up to, shall I?’
Cora nods, she is an amateur, unable to think of the right thing to say or do. ‘Shall I bring you a drink? A tea perhaps and some biscuits?’ Cora can’t think of any other answer except to say yes, as she has always done to her mother’s offers of food and drink. She’ll let herself be fattened like a Christmas pig.
She looks out of the window at the street. Outside is an invitation. The evening beckons to her, out in the street, all that light; from the yellow bulbs in the houses, from television shows that pulse beams of colour, the downcast glow of the streetlamp, so much light that the stars fade and are just rumours of a presence. People hurry in
and hurry out of their homes. Cora sits as still as she can, as any kind of movement would be an acceptance of the kind invite. And then what would happen? Just about anything that she could imagine. But with all the limits imposed by reality. There would be no remaking of a life, no clean cut, no clean sweep, only dirt and shame. What sort of a mother leaves her children? What sort of a person just runs away from their family? What sort of a mother gives birth? What kindness is that, birthing a thing only for it to die? Mary enters the room carrying a plate of carefully arranged chocolate biscuits and a cup of tea and the light turns. The invitation is declined.
You were always so jealous and insecure. It was quite flattering. I liked it at first. I liked that you loved me enough to care about my past. It was a good feeling, you being spiky and possessive. You wanted to know all the gory details about Lucy and the other women I’d been with. As if me telling you the truth would dispel your fears. I guess it’s like how I torture myself now with images of you being intimate with someone else. Someone else’s hands on your body. I’ve never felt like this before. In the beginning when you were jealous and scared, I was completely comfortable and at ease. I trusted you and I trusted our love for one another. That you had loved before didn’t matter, if anything it was reassuring that you had a past, that you’d been with other men. It meant you’d satisfied your curiosity, and I suppose I felt lucky that you’d chosen me, that out of all those others, it was me you wanted. But now, fuck; I’m terrified you’re seeing someone else. Everything has changed. I’m not confident about us, or your feelings for me anymore. Now I’m jealous.
In the beginning it was you with the green-eyed monster. Nothing I said seemed to console you. No matter that it was you I wanted to marry, you I wanted to be with, you just fixated on my past. You compared yourself all the time, your body, your sexual technique. You asked strange questions that had the odd effect of making me think about the very thing you didn’t want me to think about... You’d ask what her body was like and so I’d picture her in order to describe her to you and reassure you. It seemed perverse to me, for you to insist on discussing her in a way that made her wholly present to me, when I was quite happy to forget her, to leave her in my past. It began to wear on me eventually. I got tired of the insecurity. It was all so long ago.