Kitabı oku: «I Am Heathcliff», sayfa 3

When they had gone I buried what was left of you in the open field with my hands, and for three days and nights after, in the new room, in that unfamiliar place miles from here, where I remain but can never return to, I lay with you in the belly of the earth and imagined we both had never been born.

Now, though I am older, and each day the universe is a mighty stranger, I occasionally glimpse you sometimes at the borders of vision. You appear for a moment then evaporate.¹

I first saw you trotting along at the top of the cornfield as the sun rose. I could not speak because you were beautiful, and afterwards I went and walked. I thought there must be some sign you had been, some proof of your presence. But there was none.

You left no trace and nor did you wait. You went on ahead and I followed as best I could, grasping a knowledge available for a certain time only.

You went into the woods where the thorn trees grew thickly. Into the woods and out of my sight.

A BIRD, HALF-EATEN
NIKESH SHUKLA

I LOOP THE WRAP over my thumb and across the back of my hand. It goes over my hand three times, tight, and then around my wrist, three times, tight. There’s a ritual to this. I bring the wrap up from my wrist in between my little and ring finger and then back down to my wrist. Up again, between ring and middle, and back down. Up again, between middle and index, and then back down. Each time, the wrap forms an X across the back of my hand. I loop it between thumb and index and then across the palm of my hand, to lock it in. I wrap the remainder of the cloth around my wrist and then Velcro it closed. I flex my hand, open and closed. It feels tight, taut, tethered.

I repeat the ritual with my weaker hand. This one always feels looser. I love watching people perform this ritual quietly, meditatively, with ease, in changing rooms and on YouTube videos. I look at my own fingers, shuddering slightly under the wrap, and clench my fist.

When I have wrapped both my hands, I pick up my gloves and take three shallow sips of water, heading to the thin sweaty alcove of heavy bags. I’m the only one in here. I come when it’s quiet so I can concentrate.

When the bell rings, I hold my fists up over my face and I drop my chin. I am hunched, and standing with my feet a shoulder apart.

The bell ring is a short sharp electronic burst, like when you’re called forward at the bank. I always choose the bag in the middle. It’s milk-chocolate brown with a silver strip of gaffer tape that acts as a waistband around its middle. It’s the heaviest bag here.

For the first three minutes, I punch quickly and lightly, jab-cross, repeatedly. First at your nose. Then at your stomach. Jab-cross nose, jab-cross stomach, jab-cross nose, jab-cross stomach. I try to maintain a consistent speed so that I’m working my arms, ensuring that the muscle memory is kicking in. I don’t want to fling my arms out at you uncontrolled. I want my body to be seasoned to swivel from the hips, the turn of the foot, so that the power is coming from my entire body, and my arms are giving me the necessary distance from you, and my fists can carry the full force of my core.

The first time I got punched, I was intervening in a theft. Some guy was pulling on my friend Rachna’s bag, which she had slung over her shoulder, while I was oblivious, trying to hail a cab. I heard her shouting, ‘You can’t do that, you can’t do that,’ and turned around. The guy was pulling the bag so forcefully that their heads were nearly colliding. It was over her shoulder, securely, so she’d need to take it off for him. He wrenched her so close as she was shouting, I saw her accidentally bite his nose. I ran towards her and pulled on the bag myself. The bag-snatcher let go, and for a pregnant second, I saw something in his eyes that wasn’t aggression or frustration or anything – it was powerlessness.

He punched me on my nose. And he ran off.

I don’t bruise very easily, but I felt the imprint of his knuckles on my face for days.

It was the first time I’d been punched.

I’d been in scraps before, but the thing about scraps in the boys’ school I went to, they were all about grabbing each other by the shirt on the shoulders and pulling, like a strange undressing wrestle.

When the bell rings, I take off my left glove. The knuckles on this hand always throb after each round. I practise the swivel in my hips. One of the trainers has told me I’m too stiff, I need to relax into my shots. Keep my knuckles on top. Every movement is still alien to me. You watch the way fights are choreographed in films, and each punch is syncopated to a stirring score, each movement, every duck and weave, is a seamless piece of a dance. Here in this gym, the walls drip with the splatter of several people’s sweat. Here in this gym, the old hi-fi that still has cassette decks spits out Ed Sheeran or whoever is big on Radio 1 at that time. Here in this gym, the most balletic of boxers are the ones under eighteen. Here in this gym, you see interlopers like me. We who need this bag to represent something to us. Each sound is like tapping a sofa – flat, undramatic, clunky. Usually, the bag is a manifestation of ourselves. The implication, when we shadow-box, is that we look at ourselves in the mirror, because the first person you have to defeat in the ring is yourself. You box yourself in the mirror. You visualise your face on the bag.

Most people are here because they never defeated that person in the full-length mirror. You can tell, we’re the ones whose eyes never leave our reflections as we move around the gym.

The bag, you are never allowed to let drop, not if you want to be quick.

I put my glove back on.

When the bell rings, I launch at the bag with power this time. I jab, jab firmly, then follow it up with a powerful cross, a pow to the centre of your face. Immediately I duck and arch my entire body in a semicircular movement to the left. As I rise, I meet the side of the bag with a left hook. My left hooks are telegraphed from miles away. It’s as if I need the duck and weave, and the big powering up of the arm to act as my inner force. I need those movements to make my hook an effective one.

When we eventually fight though, you’ll see it coming from miles away and step out of it, and I’ll drop my guard and you can strike everywhere.

You and I train at different times. I’ve chosen my hours to coincide with when I think you’ll be at work. My lifestyle allows me to be here at unsociable hours, when the club first opens. All the while, you’re at work.

I wonder if you think about me as much as I think about you.

I vary the combo this time and follow the left hook up with a right hook. The bag is swinging about on the chain wildly.

I saw you in the city centre last week. It was the first time I’d seen you in your normal clothes, not your boxing gear, and it shook me. Not that you looked like a regular person. More that you being a regular person made it harder for me to visualise your face on this bag. You wore a white shirt. Polyester. I could see through to the outline of a vest. You wore grey trousers, and worn black shoes. You had one hand in your pocket, and the other held your phone to your ear. You were listening intently and looking up at the sky as you paced. You didn’t see me. I stopped and waited for you to notice me. But you didn’t. When I saw you had breezed on past me, I turned and followed you. I wanted to see where you went when you weren’t at the gym. Who you were in your real life. I got twenty steps before I realised I was exhibiting problematic behaviour. And I only realised I was exhibiting problematic behaviour because I walked into the path of a bike as I crossed the road behind you. The cyclist swore at me – unnecessarily probably – but it was enough to shake me.

What did I observe in those twenty steps?

That you walked with confidence.

That you had to look upwards in order to concentrate.

That your entire body seemed relaxed. You looked like you belonged in that body, you owned that skin, no one had ever given you a reason to doubt yourself.

It made me angry. That you were seemingly at one with yourself.

I told the cyclist to go fuck himself, and turned around, returning to my office, to my desk. I stared at a half-drunk mug of coffee and picked it up. The cold of the handle against my fingertips as I gripped it tightly was a comfort. My colleague Chloe passed my desk and looked at me quizzically. I put the mug down and smiled at her, banging at the space bar on my laptop to wake it up.

‘You OK?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I replied, quietly, and with enough finality to show her that she was not to enquire any further.

The second time I was punched, I was on a train coming home from London. It was late and I was drunk. I played a film on my laptop and pointed myself at it while I ate chicken strips, dipping each one deep into a small carton of barbecue sauce. I was too drunk to concentrate on the film, but it was action-packed enough to catch my attention occasionally. When I finished my McDonalds, I shoved all the detritus into the paper bag and shoved it under my seat in an effort to pretend the entire shameful transaction never happened.

The barbecue sauce must have slipped out of the bag because I felt a shuffle in the seat behind me turn into a shouting man.

‘There’s shit on my shoe,’ he bellowed to the empty carriage.

I looked up at him. He was greying, wearing a blue raincoat of the kind that only businessmen with no imagination seem to purchase, and clutching a can of Fosters.

I looked down at his shoe. He wore black dress shoes. I could see a speck of burgundy on the right one. Presumably some of my barbecue sauce.

‘Sorry boss,’ I muttered and offered him a napkin.

He launched himself at me with his fists. He punched me twice in the face before I could react. In launching himself at me, he lost his balance and fell on me. I was so shocked. I sat there flinching and cowering, waiting till he regained his balance and stood up.

I cried.

I could feel his knuckles embedded in my cheek. I could feel the slime of his neck sweat by my mouth. I turned back to the laptop and carried on watching my film. As if nothing had happened. He straightened himself up and apologised, before picking up his bag and disappearing down the train.

I sat there, rooted to the spot till my station arrived. I ran off the train, down the steps, and up the other side to the exit. I ran out of the barriers and I ran to the taxi rank. I jumped into a car. As the car pulled away from the station, I saw him emerge, eating a chocolate bar and staring at his phone as if he had not a care in the world.

I didn’t tell my wife I’d been assaulted. I don’t bruise, and so apart from my cheek being tender to touch, there was no sign of the impact of his fists on me. I got off the train in fear. I hurried to the ticket barriers. I prayed for a short queue for taxis. I couldn’t rationalise the casualness of the assault. I couldn’t bring myself to comprehend the escalation from a dab of barbecue sauce to a full-blown attack. All I knew was that I was attacked, and ultimately that it was my fault for being careless with my rubbish and for not reporting the unnecessary reaction sooner.

The day I signed up to the boxing gym, my wife asked me what had brought on the sudden interest in the sport.

‘I just want to protect myself,’ I said.

‘Then take up self-defence,’ she replied. ‘I’d love to do that too.’

I couldn’t explain to her that boxing would help me take up room. Boxing would give me space to occupy unapologetically, and no one would think twice about hitting me. I would have the confidence to dodge, to take a punch, and if required, hit back.

My first class, a technique one, was when it started.

I felt out of place the entire time. People had brought their own equipment. I was lost. I couldn’t skip. I took some gloves from a bin next to the toilets. The communal gloves stank of the sweat of many people. I was dripping with sweat myself, from ten minutes of skipping uselessly and shadow-boxing self-consciously. I put the gloves on without wraps and flexed my fingers. It stank.

You were my partner. The first thing you told me was that you’re a Southpaw. I didn’t know what that meant until I was unexpectedly hit repeatedly. You leaned in, and, due to your height and reach, you were able to deliver shots I couldn’t block with my elbows. Also, you were happy to use force. We’d been instructed only to tap each other while we were learning the techniques. That didn’t deter you from hitting, hard. And asking me to hit you back hard.

‘It’s OK, harder,’ you kept telling me.

The sensation of being hit when it’s part of the game, the sport, it was confusing. It hurt. It also niggled at something else in me. Why was I not learning self-defence? Maybe my wife was right. Instead, I’m learning to hit but also be hit.

I observed you everywhere around the gym. You took up space. From the way you left your wraps in a heap on the floor after a session, through to hogging the middle of the gym when you skipped, through to the way you winked at everyone.

And after a while I wanted to take that space away from you.

The moment came at the end of our second technique class. I’d tried to avoid partnering up with you, but you sought me out.

‘I like to train with the new guys,’ you told me between rounds. ‘See whether you’re tough enough to stay or you’ll just stop coming cos you like box-fit but not boxing. Which are you?’

Why does it matter so much? I said, in my head. ‘Dunno,’ I mumbled aloud.

The instructor shouted out another combination before I could muster up the courage to say it out loud.

Before I could drop my chin and put my fists up, you jabbed twice, pushing me back, and gave me a left hook that caught me on the ear.

It caught me by such surprise that I dropped to the floor.

The instructor rushed over.

‘You OK?’ he asked. He looked up at the room. ‘You better defend those shots or you’ll be dropping as well,’ he bellowed to the rest of the class.

You took your glove off and gripped me under my arm, pulling me up.

‘Hit me,’ you said. ‘Hit me.’

So I hit you. As hard as I could. You were that space on the heavy bag we aimed for, pretending it was a nose. You were ready, and used your left glove to bat my shot away as hard as you could.

‘Hit me,’ you repeated.

I repeated my movement. You did the same parry, this time harder.

‘Hit … me,’ you said, slower, quieter.

This time, I was slower, and I tried a shot, but you ducked and pushed me back.

‘I said hit me,’ you said, laughing.

I unVelcroed a glove and put it in my armpit. I undid the other. I looked at you and shook my head.

‘Box-fit’s on Tuesdays,’ you said. ‘See you then. Fly away bird, fly away. Before I eat you. There are lions here, and we’re hungry.’

I cycled home, raging, turning over and over in my head the perfect argument with you, the perfect shots, the perfect retaliation. At home, my wife asked me how the class was, and I shrugged. ‘It was OK,’ I said. I didn’t want her to know I felt humiliated because she was right. I didn’t have the stomach to fight. Only the desire for self-preservation.

What was it about you that made me obsess over your words? There was something, a gauntlet, a challenge.

As I worked the bags by myself on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I noticed you in the sparring club. Here the more amateur-level boxers gathered, to spar with the one or two pros training for matches. I worked the bags, quietly in the corner. I wondered if you noticed me. You waited your turn like everyone else, but were never chosen to spar.

Different strands of different pecking orders, I wondered. You were nobody here, so you were somebody there.

One day you saw me, and I flinched. I was between rounds, peeking out of the corridor of heavy bags at you. You smiled and flapped your arms like a bird, giggling to yourself. People turned to see who you were gesturing at, and all they saw was me, the chubby person, trying to get in shape. Someone shook their head at you, which made you drop your grin.

You kept looking at me, and gestured to the ring.

The day we spar, I leave work early for a meeting that doesn’t exist. I go for a run around the harbourside, and then a jog to the gym. Outside, I wrap myself.

I loop the wrap over my thumb and then immediately across the back of my hand. It goes over my hand three times, tight, and then around my wrist, three times, tight. There’s a ritual to this. I bring the wrap up from my wrist in between my little and ring finger, and then back down to my wrist. Up again, between ring and middle, and back down. Up again, between middle and index, and then back down. Each time, the wrap forms an X across the back of my hand. I loop it between thumb and index and then across the palm of my hand, to lock it in. I wrap the remainder of the cloth around my wrist, and then Velcro it shut. I flex my hand, open and closed.

You’re in the changing room when I enter. You’re talking on the phone, to a colleague about something to do with your work. I look you directly in the eye, the entire time I’m in the changing room. You barely notice me till I walk into the gym.

I face you in the room, both in our corners. Everyone has left except people coming in for a class. We’re nobodies in the ecosystem of this gym.

I stare into your eyes. I’ve obsessed about every second of this fight. I know how to dodge your arms. I know how to move backwards quickly. I have worked out every scenario in my head.

You made me do this. Maybe this was your plan all along. You flap wings at me. The bell rings. I drop my chin, hold up my fists, and breathe.

THICKER THAN BLOOD
ERIN KELLY
August

‘IS THAT THE BRAND-NEW iPad?’ Heath was up to his shoulders in the hot tub, one dry arm resting on the side, finger on a screen that was tiled with images of Cat. He had his back to Izzy, but could tell by her tone that she would be twisting the hem of whatever ridiculous garment she was wearing. ‘It’s just, if you drop it in the water, that’s the third one this year.’

‘I paid for it,’ he said through a rigid jaw, ‘and if I do drop it, which I won’t, I’ll pay for a new one.’

‘It’s just, it’s the waste?’

Heath reached for another bottle, the eye tattoo winking with the flex of his bicep, and uncapped it with his teeth. Four beers down and it was still too early to tell whether drinking would make him relax around Izzy or stoke his irritation with her. Either way, he was too busy to be interrupted: on the Instagram phase of his nightly cycle through Cat’s social media accounts. He’d already done Twitter and Facebook, and after Instagram, would have to work his way through what he thought of as the associated accounts, the people she called her friends, and the ‘man’ she called her husband. The associated accounts were in some ways more revealing than Cat’s own, as a friend might catch her dropping her guard, exposing the misery behind her heavily filtered life. When it happened, he could go to her. She could only pretend for so long, even to herself, to be totally jazzed about this life Ed had given her, this life of farmers’ markets, group holidays in Provençal gîtes, charity fundraisers, and strawberries and cream at Centre Court, and fucking golfing holidays.

It was a low-activity evening: Cat had liked a couple of things but hadn’t posted herself. If he was lucky he’d only have to go through the cycle once and he’d be done in under two hours.

‘Oh, why d’you have to—’ began Izzy, but the tablet pinged with a notification, and this time Heath snatched it away from her outstretched hand. A new post, a touching attempt at an arty selfie. She was in the garden, aureole around silhouette on the back wall of the Grange, the tumbling violet moor an invitation, an unmade bed laid out behind her. Heath felt the usual sick stirring deep under his belly. He shifted position, hiding himself under the bubbles in case Izzy thought it was for her, then returned to his study of Cat. Why had she kept her face in shadow? Had she been crying? Tears made most women ugly, but when Cat cried her face bloomed pink and white.

Izzy stopped mouth-breathing on the back of Heath’s neck and appeared in front of him. Christ, she was all done up for seduction. Her hair described the barrel of a curling tong, and she was dressed in an awful chiffon kimono thing she called cruise wear. It was supposed to be floaty and seductive, but it was covered in sequins and getting close to her felt like pressing up against a rose bush.

Another ping. Ed had just made his annual Instagram post. Heath was on it in seconds. It seemed that Ed was doing a life-drawing class in the Scottish borders as part of a stag weekend. The charcoal sketch was crap and the woman they were drawing wasn’t even attractive.

It meant, though, that Cat was on her own at the Grange for the first time in ages. He could be there in forty minutes. Pulse hammering, he got out of the tub just as Izzy sank into the bubbles.

‘You can have it to yerself,’ he said, heaving himself over the edge. He dried himself roughly on a towel, pulled on a tracksuit, took a bottle of Laurent Perrier from the drinks fridge, wrapped it in a towel, and threw it into his sports bag.

‘Where are you going? It’s nearly nine o’clock.’

‘Gym,’ he said. Izzy looked at the green bottles lined up on the edge of the hot tub, but she had learned, at last, not to challenge him.

His feet found their path in the divots and tufts they’d walked for as long as he could remember. He could’ve run the route from the Heights to the Grange in ten minutes, but he didn’t want the champagne to fizz, and anyway, he needed to clear his head and think about how he would say it. Below and to the west was the first estate he’d ever built, shoebox houses whose tiny gardens were mocked by the moor. In front of him, the dipping midsummer sun made a thin gold thread on the horizon. A single dazzling bead shone through a hole in the rocky crag that marked the midpoint between her house and his. He’d kissed her for the first time at the foot of those rocks, when they were both fourteen, kissed her, and that was as far as it had gone, the wanting getting worse over the years, and the conversation grinding in ever-decreasing circles. It had taken him years to realise they were all excuses.

‘Foster siblings still count,’ she’d said at first.

‘Don’t be daft. There’s no law against it.’

‘In the eyes of society, though.’ Since when did she care about society? Though they’d been raised under the same roof, she was not his sister; he was her possessor, not her protector, and they both knew it. Whatever they had, it was something thicker than blood.

Then, as they got older: ‘It would destroy our friendship, Heath, can’t you see that?’

‘Let it!’ he’d roared. ‘Let it … smash this misshapen thing and put it back together a new way, the right way.’

Her head had gone into her hands. ‘Will you listen to yourself? Smashing, misshapen. You’re so bloody intense. It was all right when we were kids, but you can’t want to carry on like this for ever.’

It was all he did want. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t wanted it, from the inseparability of their childhood to the present physical ache for her that was so constant he wore it like an extra body part.

‘I mean, come on,’ she’d laughed. ‘Can you honestly see us pushing a trolley around Waitrose together, going to parents’ evening?’

‘Waitrose?’ This was coming out of nowhere.

‘I suppose not. The rate you’re going, we’ll be lucky to afford Morrisons.’

He’d been horrified. ‘This is about money?’ She knew he was struggling, but he’d never thought it mattered to her. To his shame, tears pricked his eyes and made a stone in his throat. He turned his face away.

‘No. Or – not only. It’s about – a kind of life I want.’

‘A life you think you want.’

She’d rolled her eyes. ‘This is exactly what I’m talking about! You don’t know me as well as you think you do.’

‘I know you better than you know yourself.’

But it had niggled at him for months afterwards, and because she seemed to believe that she meant it, he’d gone off to prove himself, starting as a labourer and going in with a mate, flipping properties from Salford to Harrogate. He’d worked on himself, too: got strong and lean. And while he was watching the money stack up, picturing her face the day he walked back into Cat’s life, Ed had stepped in, all breeding and family money and red chinos – and she’d fallen for it. The image of them together, of Ed’s hands on Cat’s skin, was a film Heath couldn’t stop watching even when he closed his eyes. The sick knot of desire inside him, deep and low, tightened like the balling of a fist.

Heath approached the Grange from the back, took their old path along the side of the house, stopping at the window where he and Cat had spied on Ed and Izzy a lifetime ago, taken the piss out of their wooden toys and their side partings. How had they gone from that to this? He leaned against the stone lintel and closed his eyes, not against the memory, but the present. His longing was so powerful that he could almost smell her.

He opened his eyes to see Cat on the other side of the glass, looking past him, out onto the moor. He took a beat to savour how she looked when she didn’t know she was being watched. Her hair was a mess of waves, she wasn’t wearing any make-up, and she looked closer to her girlhood self than Heath had seen in years. She’d lost weight for her wedding and never put it back on, fallen in with that crowd of skeletal ladies who didn’t lunch, all blow-dries and nails. But there was a blown-rose blowsiness to her tonight, and some meat on her bones again, and her name slipped out before he could announce himself.

‘Cat,’ he breathed. She screamed and leaped away from the window. ‘It’s only me. I’m sorry, I thought it’d be a good surprise.’

He’d expected her to push up the sash and put her arms around him, but instead she glanced over her shoulder, held a hand up in conciliation to someone behind her.

‘It’s all right, Ed,’ she said, throwing up the sash window. Heath felt winded. What about Scotland?

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ said Ed. Even in his fury, Heath had room for a pulse of satisfaction that he’d been Ed’s first guess. He liked the idea of being at the forefront of Ed’s mind, wandering around in there with mud on his boots.

‘For God’s sake, Heath.’ Ed was still in the same outfit from the Instagram photo, and Heath had the feeling he’d somehow been tricked into visiting the Grange. ‘What is it with you and windows?’ There was something in Ed’s tone Heath hadn’t heard before. Usually he at least managed to feign civility for Cat’s benefit, but now a trembling dimple in one cheek suggested he was trying not to laugh at him.

His fingertips tingled. Something was very wrong.

‘What’re you doing here, Heath?’ said Cat.

The truth – that he had come here to claim her – sounded ridiculous now, even in its diluted version: ‘I had to see you, that’s all.’

She looked – was that pity?

‘All right!’ said Ed. ‘I’ve put up with your Jeremy Kyle crap out of politeness, but enough’s enough. You can’t just keep turning up here. I won’t have you upsetting Cat in her condition.’

In her condition. Cat’s glow: Ed’s newfound confidence. Heath went very cold, then very hot. She had the grace to drop her eyes, at least. ‘Due in February,’ she said. ‘Don’t look like that. I want you to be happy for me.’

But he had dropped his sports bag in the shrubbery. He was back at the Heights in nine minutes, a personal best. Izzy was still awake, after making her own raid on the drinks fridge, so he took her to bed for the first time in months. It was simple mechanics, drainage and release: it had to go somewhere, and Izzy was so grateful she cried.