“It’s because everyone’s so fucking old. No one comes in here if they’re younger than sixty. Everyone looks at you because you’re fresh and different. I even move differently to them. They’re weighted down whereas I’m free as a bird. Free and light.” He waggled his fingers at either side of his head like fledgling wings. “It’s like I’m immortal.”
It felt like a long time before Art’s stomach began audibly rumbling and he tired of drinking. He didn’t finish his last beer and instead proclaimed that we needed to “go on the hunt for sustenance.”
Arm in arm we stumbled to the car and I helped him fall into the back seat. He didn’t even try to sit up, and instead curled on the pew, his hands covering his face. I could see the soles of his brogues hadn’t fared well with the chemicals on the lawn. I’d have to make sure he didn’t touch them while on the back seat, and I’d check both our shoes for boot-rot when we got back.
He lay silent for the whole three-hour journey home. From the front I couldn’t see if he was asleep or thinking, but either way he was mentally far, far away from the car. I didn’t mind, and my thoughts flocked around my own head for a while. I thought about tomorrow, when Art would wake up with a sore head and worse, and likely not be able to write at all.
The thought made me smile.
After all, if it was all about perspective I had plenty of time, didn’t I? Whatever sickness might be thrown my way I’d beat it. I had a backup. I had ten backups, a hundred backups. And I had all the help I could ever need to use that time well.
It took a while to get Art out of the back seat and through the front door. With each step he gathered himself, until he flopped down on the sofa with a high-pitched giggle. He grabbed my arm, his eyes wide and white.
“Norah – it’s all going well, isn’t it? You’ll always be here for me? No matter what happens?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “It’s all fine.”
He patted me on the wrist, all doe-eyes and honesty. “Well be a dear, and get this old flake a slice of toast or, what do you call it, a Cornish pasty? If I must go without food a moment longer I may faint where I am lain. Oh, the hunger.”
I kissed him on the forehead and left to forage for something filling. I called back to him, “I’ll just be a minute. Your mini-me needs vitamins too.”
I grabbed a tin of jellied feed and jogged up the stairs to the landing. Once I’d sorted Nut out and made sure Art had something to eat, maybe I’d coax him to the bedroom. Sit with our feet touching again. He didn’t like the fingers through the toes, but I’d find another gesture, another caress he did like. Despite the state of him, spending more time with him had opened me up to Art in a way I’d forgotten since the house had settled. Hopefully he too felt warm towards my touch.
I stuck my head through the hatch entrance and scanned the room for Nut. I couldn’t make much out, the bulb in the lamp would soon need replacing. I heaved myself up through the trapdoor and stepped through the baby gate, still creaking with that slow wail. Nut’s cardboard box was empty, as was the fruit crate, and though I couldn’t see her right away I knew she was here, as if a sixth sense told me so.
And then I spotted her. Silent. Still. Flat on her side as if captured in a snapshot of a hare, running.
PART 2
11
We were never supposed to name her, you know. Nut. They told us this when they made her.
Names lend significance to things, meaning more to the giver than to the receiver. To me, I’m just “me”, but to everyone else I’m a foreign body with a face and a feel. They say my name and hear its song. And you can’t shake it. You might strive against it your whole life, shortening it or changing it completely. Or you might love your name. You might have hated it in childhood but as an adult you embrace it in its weirdness or hide within its insipidness. A name can conjure anonymity, too.
It’s the same with animals. I don’t know if they named each other in the wild; I doubt it. It’d be smell or markings that set them apart. But when we give an animal a name and repeat it to them day in and day out, we’re giving them something to respond to. They might not understand “identity” as we do but when you call their name and they come running, they must know that they’re needed, and they’re needed by you. They run to you, in love or in servitude, it doesn’t matter, and it’s never obvious which it might be.
But what about us? What happens to us when we decide on a special name?
It was me that chose the name Nut, and I named her after the way she’d curl around and into herself, cut with ripples through her fur like a walnut. It started off as a bit of a joke, a code name for her between Art and I, but it stuck. It became a far less clinical name for us to use with the curtains drawn. Even when she stretched out to near half a metre long, she still looked to me like a Nut. Maybe I’d have felt different about her collapse if she hadn’t had a name at all.
On finding Nut cold and still, Art had bolted back downstairs on Bambi-legs to call Easton Grove’s emergency number while I’d stayed with her, trying frantically to remember my training; check her airways, listen for a heartbeat, feel
