True Things About Me

I feel empty sometimes





AFTER I’D BATHED my cuts I put some make-up on. My face in the mirror didn’t recognise me. She had different eyes from the eyes I’d always thought I’d had. Her hair was thinner and flatter than mine. She had a disappointed mouth. Then I couldn’t get warm, couldn’t stay in the house. She lived there, not me. I walked into town. I’d forgotten how long it took. Grit and old wrappers spun around in the wind. People were doing busy things in the main street, going in and out of shops. I wondered what they could find to do. I bumped into Alison. She said she was on her lunch hour, and told me she’d heard a rumour that I’d been sacked. We went into a sandwich shop. She bought me something to eat and drink. I couldn’t chew anything.

Alison held both my hands. What’s happened to your face? He’s done this to you, hasn’t he? This is all completely out of hand, she said, her eyes filling with tears. I felt so sorry for her, but I couldn’t speak. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I can guess anyway. Listen to me, she said. You must come and stay with us. Tom won’t mind you staying in the spare room. You know how good he is in a crisis. I told her I had to go home. I could have screamed, there in the café, as I thought about the empty red box upside down on the wet patio slabs. But why, she said, why do have you to? I don’t understand you. I should probably go to the police. It looks as if you won’t do anything to protect yourself. Why must you go back to him again? I just do, I said. It’s hard to explain. I got up from the table. You haven’t eaten anything, she said, and started to cry. Please don’t, I said. I felt as if I were looking down at her from somewhere shifting and precarious. I know what to do now, I said. Again, what the hell does that mean? she said.

I caught the bus home. As I walked down the garden path I could see the front door was ajar. I pushed through, and walked down the hall. The house had a hollow feeling. Cold air rushed through the rooms. I went into the lounge. All that was left was the TV table and the pee-stained easy chair. A glass vase lay on its belly in the fireplace. Some news papers lifted and fell with the sound of someone shuffling around in old slippers. I perched on the edge of the chair and looked into the dining room. The table was gone. One chair stood in the middle of the room.

I made an effort to climb the stairs. Only the bed remained in my room. The contents of the chest of drawers and my wardrobe had been dumped in the corner. There was a note stuck to the headboard with chewing gum. It said: Have run into some aggro. Needed to create cash fast. Furniture all crap anyway. See you. I got into bed, and pulled the fusty covers over me. I thought I should sleep while I waited.





I dream, baby





I COULD HEAR a snuffly sound. Then I became aware of something warm resting against my side. There was a small, breathing shape under the covers. I was afraid to lift the duvet, but it had to be done. Slowly, slowly I half sat up, and moved the cover down. It was a new-born baby, wrapped snugly in a cotton sheet. Only its face was visible. The baby’s mouth was pale, slightly lavender. The colour of a flower kept in the shade too long. I put my face near enough to touch her lips. Her breath was like the breath of a rose that has no scent, just the aroma of itself around it.

I kissed the baby on her lips, letting my mouth rest on hers. I wanted to get inside the sweetness, the unknowingness of her as she slept. I did not disturb her. It seemed to me she was already fading, dissolving into the bedclothes. There was a dull light in the room, but around the baby grew a glowy aura. I thought it must be pure love. I knew she wasn’t real, but I kissed her again. Her nose was cold. I had to get up to pee so I left her there in the bed. When I got back she was gone. The bed was chilly. There was no nest-like shape where she might have been. No discarded sheet.

There was nothing to do. My house was full of broken, useless stuff. He had taken everything of any worth. I climbed back into bed, and wrapped the duvet round myself. I hoped, before I fell asleep, that I would dream about the baby again. I wanted to see her sweet face. I shut my eyes, and felt my body relax and my head expand until it was big enough for me to crawl inside. I stand up in a room where two people are waiting for me. I’m to look after their child. It’s no bigger than a sewing needle. We trust you, they say, and wave goodbye.

Now I walk through crowds of people with the pin-child cupped in my hands. We are in a fairground. Music blows across my face. The baby is uncomfortable. She makes a little mewing sound, so I put her in a blue saucer that has a garland of painted marigolds round the edge. I think she will be safe sitting in the saucer that way. There is a sideshow. Two people are eating fire on sticks, the flames like flickering candyfloss. People jostle the hand that carries the saucer.

Now the baby is floating in a pool of milk. Lie back, my own darling, I say. I hold the saucer up at eye-level. The naked baby is happy. Pink and white. She’s smiling with her minuscule lips, her eyes are dots of light. I know she trusts me. The marigolds enfold her.

Soon everyone has to run. Something bad is moving across the sky. It eats the clouds and stars, sucks in the sun whole, as if it were a tinned peach. An invisible mouth that makes a high frequency sound only dogs can hear. The baby in my saucer is frightened; she is getting sloshed around in her milk, and holds onto the edges of the saucer to brace herself. Her knuckles are white blobs, her cries like a kitten’s at the bottom of a deep well. Her eyes flash neon sparks.

Now the thing in the sky makes a deep roaring, like something from before the world began. Like a sound God makes when he’s angry. The deep roaring makes the trees explode. Boiling stones spurt jets of scalding liquid. The ground is juddering, is not where you expect it to be, not where you felt it last.

I put the saucer down on the singed grass. I don’t care about the baby. The saucer tips a little. The baby’s pink body is splayed like a maimed starfish. She is splattered with milk, and quiet now. I run away. All around people are burning, trees are on fire, stars fall with the sound of smashing chandeliers. I run through it all, until I find a cave with a narrow entrance. It smells of mushrooms inside, perhaps snakes, but I fall through dense, writhing leaves and hide.

When there is no more noise outside I remember the baby. My responsibility. My own darling. I think of her shining face, smaller than a shirt button. Her bubbly crown of white hair. Her opaque feet, the mother of pearl nails on her almost boneless toes. How could I have abandoned her? I run out of the cave to search for her. As I run I pull out handfuls of my hair. I bite my lips until they bleed.

Then I find the smashed blue saucer, and sink down beside it. I scrabble in the bruised grass. Nothing. I pick up the broken china, and see fine, white hairs curling, fragments of marigolds. I sob dryly. How could I have been so selfish? So heartless? I sense the parents standing over me. I can feel them smile. They are waiting for me to give them back their beloved baby. I hold up the fragments of china. I have nothing to say. The dream is over. I crawl back to my own room and wake up.

The street outside was quiet. I had that feeling again, beyond lonely, way beyond empty and sad, and I imagined all the sleeping couples wound about each other under their duvets, in their identical bedrooms, up and down the road, up and down the town, duplicated all over the world. I thought of Alison and Tom in their warm bed. Was there anyone else like me? I wondered. Was there anyone so useless, so feckless, they couldn’t even look after a dream baby, a non-baby who is actually a sewing needle in a stupid dream?


I lay in my grubby sheets, shiny-eyed, utterly calm. I placed my hands on my belly, and tried to communicate a message to the tiny thing in there. I didn’t make any promises. It was early, maybe five o’clock, and I could hear seagulls screaming. They were in their usual frenzy about the worms, fat with moisture, that loop the surface of my lawn.





I innovate with soft furnishings





HE’D TAKEN THE kettle so I boiled some water in a tiny saucepan, and found a tea bag. I picked up the phone to ring Alison, and then changed my mind. I sat on the floor in the empty lounge listening to a fly repeatedly banging into the windowpane. The sound seemed to sum up a lot of things. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I couldn’t imagine ever talking again. I just sat, all through the morning and the afternoon. As the evening progressed lights in the houses opposite started to come on in sequences that might have been a code for something.

By the time most of the lights had gone out again I was feeling stiff and cold. I made another drink, and held the cup until it got cool. I heard him come in. He was drunk as I guessed he would be. He fell twice as he climbed the stairs, and slurringly swore. I listened to him pee for a long time like a horse, and heard the floorboards creak in my room, then the sound of him falling on the bed. I went on waiting until he had been snoring rhythmically for some time. The last light went out in the house opposite. Eventually the lacey silhouettes of trees became visible on the hill behind the houses. The beautiful, open face of the moon sent its pure beam straight into my head as I sat. I lay down and bathed my whole body in light. I could feel it doing something to me, changing me. Encasing my inch-long baby like a benevolent forcefield.

I climbed the stairs. Each time he snored on an inward breath I set my foot flat on another stair. In the bedroom the faint orange glow from a street light bathed everything. The air was thick and warm. He was lying on his back, his trousers open, both arms resting above his head. I called him three times, each time louder. He didn’t stir. His lips were dark red, sucking and blowing. They were the only things moving in the room. I kicked the bed leg, leaned and bounced the bed with my hands. He didn’t wake.

I kneeled on the floor beside the bed. My head felt weightless, as if it had been scoured clean by crystals, the inside full of moonbeams. I thought my eyes must glow like lamps from the intense light behind them. I gazed round the room. It felt unfamiliar. I concentrated on the bare wall on the other side of the bed. I allowed my mind to open. On the wall I could see images shaping up. There I was, looking backwards, descending a flight of dirty concrete steps to a dark place. There I was, stuffing ragged, dripping fragments of meat into my mouth. Then I’m slamming my head against a rough wall, then screaming on a huge, swaying bridge, then lying naked and bleeding, surrounded by a crowd. The images whirled across the wall, faster and faster; me blindfolded, me tied up, me crouched on the wet ground, dribbling. And always, me crying. God, how much I cried.

I wiped my eyes on the bed sheet, and stood up. I knew now what my plan was. I pulled the pillow he was half lying on out from under his head. I could see the whites of his eyes glittering in thin crescents. I held the pillow in both my hands, and pushed it down firmly over his mouth and nose. The snoring stopped immediately. I counted up to a hundred slowly, holding the pillow down hard. He didn’t struggle, his chest stopped rising and falling. My arms trembled, and my nose was running.

Then I lifted the pillow, and looked at him. Nothing happened. I put my ear next to his mouth, and waited. I could smell his sweat. My hair fell across his face. I reared back as he took a huge gulp of air, and grunted several times. His eyes were slanted sideways. Before he could turn them to look at me I pushed the pillow down onto his face again. This time his legs described slow circles, and he thrashed his arms a little, as if he were trying to run underwater. He was making a horrible noise, a wordless, low bellowing. I had to climb up over his jerking legs, onto the bed and get between them, all the time holding the pillow down as hard as I could. I pressed with my full weight, and still I felt his shoulders rising, but the terrible sounds stopped. I lowered myself until I had my arms crossed on the pillow, and I pushed and pushed until his shoulders sank back and were still.

I sat back, panting. Nothing happened, so I waited, trying to gulp in air silently. I held my hair out of my face, and put my cheek next to his mouth, but I couldn’t tell if he was still alive. Then I remembered something I’d seen on a hospital programme, so I leaped off the bed, and ran to the bathroom. In the cabinet I found a safety pin. Then I was standing outside the bedroom. What if he was poised, waiting to jump on me? Somehow I walked back in. There he was, stretched out on the bed. His crotch was wet. I stood by his feet, and undid the safety pin. Then I watched him carefully as I jabbed his instep with the sharp point. I screamed once as I saw his lips move. Nothing else happened, so I stabbed him again. This time his foot recoiled. It seemed to me that his chest rose and fell.

I inched my way up to his head with the pillow clutched in my fists. His hair was dark, and his jaw crooked. I was so exhausted I had become as thin as a piece of paper, my arms useless as straws, but I knew that didn’t matter; I had to see through my simple plan. So I pressed the pillow down again, and counted up to five hundred. Five hundred beautiful beats. The first five hundred seconds of my new life. Finally I lifted the pillow, and dropped it on the floor. I kneeled down beside him, and jabbed with the pin all the way from his big toe to his ankle; tiny hard jabs. I told him I was sorry, but I didn’t mean it. I kissed his contorted lips. Even then I thought he might grab me, and start everything all over again. But nothing happened. So I left him in the bedroom.





Acknowledgements





MANY THANKS TO my clever editor Ailah Ahmed for her invaluable help, to Jamie Byng and to all the other talented people at Canongate who have looked after me and my book so beautifully.

Likewise to my lovely agent, Cathryn Summerhayes.

Thanks also to my writing group, Edgeworks: Ruth Smith, Liz Porter, Norman Schwenk, Claire Syder and Jane Blank, for being there so helpfully, once a month.

Thanks to the Academi of Wales for the bursary I received to begin this project.

Thanks to Richard Lewis Davies for his advice and support.

Acknowledgements are due to New Welsh Review, who published an extract.

Thanks to my children and long-suffering friends who have been so patient while I banged on about my book.

I am grateful to my sister Victoria.

And lastly, for his unstinting support, know-how and all-round wonderfulness, I am indebted to Norman.