I let myself into the house, and before the door has closed behind me, the tapping of Jack’s typing fingers has stopped. ‘How was your evening?’
‘I can’t hear you,’ I say, walking straight past the study and down the hall to my bedroom.
On the bed is a fresh folded towel and a bar of chocolate. He’s put my clean laundry in a small pile next to it, with my socks bundled together in pairs. I push it all off to the side and get into bed. The sweet, soapy smell of the rough cotton is comforting, and my body sinks further into the lumpy mattress. I stare at the ceiling and then do what Vlad advised: I open up and let all the feelings in.
It is as if the boxes I have used to compartmentalise have been tipped over, the contents strewn across the lobes of my brain. The first thing that comes to me is a client, an old Italian gentleman who smelled of hazelnuts, whose cheeks I had to fill with cotton wool because he lost his teeth in the ocean. I let the tide of the memory rush in, and then out. The next is a young woman who needed to be re-broken to be put back into a human shape. She was reassembled like a puzzle underneath her new clothes. In public her husband mourned her by hanging his head and crying, but privately he lost it, sitting under her bier and refusing to move. More and more memories come. Children mourning parents. Grandparents mourning grandchildren. All the people killed by cars. Cancers. Bad hearts. The sheer amount of fucking suicides. The heat of the cremation chamber. Pouring ashes through funnels and into urns. The bodies that hold secrets, like the young women with the linea nigra—the dark line down the stomach that denotes a pregnancy—but no child marked on their file. The people who cut swift patterns into the top of their arms, their upper legs—all the patterns that are left for us to find.
More memories come, but this time they are of the living. The people whose names I can’t remember, whose faces I deleted. All the people with whom I became the two-headed thing, who didn’t know what it meant, and who might’ve said no if they did. The different beds and bedsheets, the different smells of spit and sweat. The puckered balls and the nonsense tattoos. All the fucking talking. The endless talking, the how-are-you-doing-fine-thanks-and-yourself-yeah-goods.
The number of faces I have touched, both living and dead. My mother, whose face was touched for the last time by unfamiliar hands. Swirls of feelings, hot and bright, bounce between my spine and skin.
I pick up my phone and call Simon. He answers straight away.
‘I want to tell you that I am glad I wasn’t there, but I’m also sorry. I am both those things. And I’m sorry you had to deal with Vincent on your own, and I hope Hugh and Carmen are there for you …’
‘Well, an apology from you is a pretty big deal.’
‘I am sorry—but like I said, I’m also glad.’
‘Well, thanks for calling. When you get back we can scatter her ashes. Carmen helped pick out an urn she thought you would like. I’ve put her ashes in the bungalow. She’s waiting for you here.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, feeling the tension in my face ease.
That night I dream about my mother. She’s on her knees beside me, carving into my chest with a knife. She brushes away blood with the back of her hand, knife to the sky. Good job, she says to me, as I begin to float on all the blood. I have missed her voice. She cuts me open, chest to pelvis. She laughs, then throws her knife into the sea of blood around us, and stares at my insides. You need to drink more water, she says. She touches the soft red arteries, the shellac wash of connecting fascia, and the deep-down flesh that is velvety brown. She rips my lungs apart like bread, and then grabs my heart, pulling at it until it comes out with a wet and watery snap. It feels like an itchy pressure, like a thick cough that won’t shift. She weighs my heart, tossing it between each hand, before flicking it into the choppy waves behind her, then shrinking down and curling up inside me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I wake up to gentle knocking at my door, and before I have time to respond Jack opens it, juggling a cup of coffee and a half-eaten mandarin on a saucer. He has his laptop folded under one arm and over his shoulders he has draped a yak shawl, which slides onto the floor as he hands me the coffee.
‘Sleep well?’
‘Not really. I let all the feelings in and it felt like absolute shit.’
‘Yes, me too. I wish we could liquefy Alain de Botton and suck him up through a straw, so we know how to deal with nights like that.’
He walks around to the other side of the bed and sits down, propping one of the pillows against the headboard to support his lower back.
‘I want to get your opinion on something.’
He opens the laptop and expands a web page full of Zimbabwean Shona sculptures. He drags a magnifying icon over a stone carving of two lovers entwined.
‘What do you think?’
‘Do you need something like that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he says. ‘For the mantel in the study.’
‘I thought you were a minimalist now?’
‘Nothing can make me deny my spiritual right to beauty, Lia.’
I look at the sculpture and imagine it nestled between the pieces of smooth driftwood, the giant conch shell and all the chunks of rutilated quartz. I think Jack buys things like this in a bid to weigh himself down. I need it all,
