I leant back against the wall, my hands spread across the paint and listening for the reassuring heartbeat-like thump-thumpthump-thump of her feet. Perhaps if I pressed my ear to the paint the house would tell me, whisper to me what happened to our little life.
“You don’t think,” Art blurted, “that when you came in just now you let her out?”
No, no, I’d have felt her. That round, voluptuous body would have knocked me to the side if she’d passed by. Nut was not a creature to slink. By now she stood thigh-high, her back the width of a coffee table.
“Norah, did you leave the door open?”
Was this me? My fault? My head. My head.
“I’m not stupid,” I croaked. But still – I glanced at the front door. She could just be on the other side of it, sitting to be let back in, but if she was there it meant it was my negligence, not Art’s. If I looked, I’d be admitting it.
Art reached for his cardigan and snatched the keys from the side-table. While Art went into practical mode, I clung to the bannister with both hands like an old coat.
Losing Nut meant we’d lose everything. We’d have violated our contract with Easton Grove. There’d be no replacements. Everything we had would be meaningless, and everything connecting Art and I would disintegrate. And worst of all – the most plunging feeling deep inside my gut – was that Nut would be alone and suffering without me, thrust into a selfish world she wasn’t made for.
All my fault.
But just as Art stuck the key in the door, there was a thump on the landing. Art flipped his head around, and I followed his eyes to see Nut gambolling down the stairs as if greeting us home. I fell hard on my knees and buried my face into her fleshy middle, the full and hot roundness of her belly overwhelming my face, my hands, my chest.
Behind me Art thumped his elbow against the wall and let out one long breath. “Thank fuck. Where the hell was she?”
I didn’t care and pushed myself under her skin, breathing in her hot musk. Art reached down and pushed the heel of his hand hard across her spine and she flexed against it, grunting with each bump. I sat back into Art’s legs, between my two lifelines, finally able to think.
“No.” Art stepped around me and started up the stairs. Looking up I saw that the door to his study was ajar. It had been closed before, it was always closed whether Art was in there or not. We hadn’t checked the room for Nut because there’s no way she could have got in there.
Art pushed the door open gently and stepped inside. Still holding Nut, I called up to him. “What is it?” The house responded with silence.
“Art?” I pulled myself to my feet and followed him, clicking my fingers at Nut for her to stay by my ankles. Art was standing in the middle of the study staring at the floor. At first, I couldn’t see what he was looking at and the room looked very much like it always does, a jumble of ideas and chaos. Stained mugs and plates with dried-out crumbs were stacked along the windowsill, and the surface of his desk was so full of papers and notebooks that there wasn’t an inch of wood visible. In its own way, the study was the whole house, condensed into one room. A world, poured into a womb.
“Look.” Art pointed at the floor. I stood beside him and followed his gaze to a hip-high mountain of books. This pile wasn’t a random stack like the others; the books had been stacked horizontally, the angle of each adjacent book just so that the wall of the structure curved around. Between each row of closed hardbacks there were stuffed paperbacks or pages of foolscap. The more I looked at it I couldn’t see how I’d assumed it was just another of Art’s hoards. It was an igloo, complete with a small opening at the front.
“She did this,” Art whispered.
“No.” I knelt at the foot of the mountain. “How?”
Art remained stuck to his spot. His face was grey, his lips cracked. “I’ve dreamed of a fort like this. It’s made up of all my favourite places to go. It’s a good dream.”
Nut hadn’t followed us in, and was sitting in the doorway, her tail swishing proudly behind her. Peering into the igloo’s chamber I could see a nest, made of torn-up paper. But it didn’t feel right to stick my arm in. It would be intrusive. Art didn’t seem to think so, and kneeling in front of the hole thrust his arm inside. After a few seconds of fumbling he sat back up, clutching what looked like wet ribbons, ragged and bright. They were paper streamers, half-chewed and torn, and flaking with red and blue and brown, drifting from them like dirty snow.
Art leaned further into the den, sweeping his arm across the floor to gather the shreds. He started to move pieces around as if assembling a jigsaw, but an infuriating second-hand jigsaw that you discover to be missing half the pieces after you’ve committed to it.
As the pieces shifted it began to dawn on me exactly what it was that Nut had dragged back to her cave. All of Art’s paintings of me from my birthday, clawed apart and half-consumed by our first-born.
15
Shocks, jolt.
Though the walls are the same, our clothes are the same, we eat the same food, we speak in the same subtle accent we’re deaf to – the world is a different place. Colours and abrupt sounds shock like a defibrillator, just as we think our hearts are settling. New fears lurk around every corner, the stick ever-raised to
