Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies Read online

  Stomach

  Cloaked in my most quiet disguise, with my many eyes, I watch them.

  Hollow,

  hidden,

  smug as a god.

  There will be family here. Friends new and old. Preserved. Untold. There will be half-drawn thoughts and dream-props and fragments of people she has passed in shops and they are all currently following the Smell of Starts to Stomach, where her instinct brews and wafts its stench.

  Of course, it’s hard to get a real sense of anyone yet with so much quaking-gallop-humdrum noise. The horns. Flags. All the vanilla treacle chocolate cheesecake tart sponge but

  I will do my best.

  It might take them a while to acclimatize. I want to tell them to pinch their smudged noses, feel the pressure in their blotched ears swell and burst, let their eyes adjust to the colour of fight, the fragment vernacular of breath and nerve and strips of limb, arteriole streams cuts ducts pipes and dreams.

  (I don’t)

  I want to tease them; tell them to take it in, take their time, take it from me;

  the hours are elastic here; they taunt, flex, bend and fold.

  (I don’t)

  I want to shout and sing and scream fierce as a stinging salt wind;

  Welcome! Benvenuti! Herzlich Willkommen! Bienvenue!

  Leave your coats at the door, hats on the stands, shoes in the hall.

  My God, you are all lucky to be here!

  Morning

  Lia woke up next to a large black hole. The ink from the ballpoint had leaked slowly through the night into her sheets. She peeled out of bed and stood to stare at herself in the full-length mirror. Looking back was a paper person covered in print; she had rolled on her notebook, pressed her arm in it, her face.

  Down at breakfast Iris announced,

  When we grow up we should get matching tattoos.

  Iris was in the habit of using ‘we’ a lot.

  You think?

  Yes.

  On our elbows, just like that.

  She pointed to a half-scrubbed ‘surv’ ‘ive’.

  Lia twisted her arm round to inspect it further. Her elbows were dry, and the ink had buried itself into deep patterned lines.

  It would probably be quite hard to tattoo an elbow.

  Well, on yours yes because it’s so scaly and saggy.

  Lia wanted to laugh but found that she couldn’t.

  Iris knew she’d been cruel. She’d tried to be funny, but it had come out cruel. She felt overwhelmingly annoyed with herself. It was always so hard to come back from, so hard to warm the cool atmosphere that came rippling through the kitchen after one of her careless comments.

  She dipped her head down and kissed Lia’s elbow.

  It’s my favourite elbow ever, she said, very quietly, and Lia wished she hadn’t, for the only thing that made her stomach ache more than the ease of Iris’s brutality was her stunning self-awareness. At twelve years old, she was, perhaps, the wisest person

  Lia had ever known.

  Go and brush your teeth, she said, only her voice crumbled a little at the brush, so that she sounded very feeble. It had never come naturally to her. Motherhood. This act of pulling days out from one’s sleeve. But she tried, most mornings, to find little delights where her own mother had failed to look. To never let Iris feel the joyless tedium of it all the way she had when she was young.

  Lia listened to the sound of Iris’s purple planet socks sliding down the stairs. Her shuffling along the floorboards, searching for shoes. Perhaps she had simply been harder to love, with her strangeness, her secrecy, that early quiet rage. Perhaps, Lia thought, as Harry came in humming the first flat notes of what sounded like ‘Singing in the Rain’, and as Iris squeezed her feet into her shoes without loosening the laces, the blame could be broken and shared equally between herself, her mother, her father and the Lord God Himself, and there would come a time when she would stop finding crumbs of old questions all over their mornings.

  Did you guys know, Iris said suddenly, very seriously, that one and a half acres of forest are cut down every single second? She examined the top row of her teeth in the mirror and shot Harry a sideways glance, as if to ask – and what are you going to do about it?

  The Parish

  Lia’s father had been a graceful, amicable man, who kept his faith close always; he wrapped it about his body tightly so that it never snagged or frayed, tripped or slipped.

  Lia’s mother’s faith had a life of its own. It was huge, inscrutable. It entered rooms before she did, often announcing her arrival, and then obstructing everyone else from moving about.

  People often said to Lia that growing up in such a religious family must have been a comfort.

  This was not the case.

  The vicarage was neither picturesque nor romantic, but rather a small, boxy house built in the early fifties to replace the previous building that had become dilapidated beyond repair. There was no trace of its old bones left, except for a few slabs of chalky limestone that mapped out a near-perfect square at the very bottom of the garden, marking the end of their domain and the start of the rest of the world. To Lia, the ruins were a fortress; the only place at home where she felt truly at peace, a small slice that was hers and hers alone. Everything else belonged to God. She never felt Him there, in the combed barley fields or the huge patchwork valleys that blanketed the land before them. But the absence of a thing will loom larger than its presence, and she felt His lack so personally, she began to wonder if there was something within her that repelled Him the way the rosemary kept the rabbits away, or the cinnamon sticks on the windowsill seemed to get rid of the ants.

  Anne was watching a large ant crawl down the edge of the kitchen sink, its plump body slick and shiny as black cherry skin. At least they had stopped coming in masses. This was manageable, she thought, as she turned the cold tap and swilled the insect down the drain with her fingers.

  Lia was crouched in her fortress at the end of the garden and Anne examined her daughter’s posture for a while, wondering how long it would take for her scalp to burn. Not long, she thought, under the strength of this maddening sun. Her scalp would burn, and then it would peel, and it would be a lesson.

  An unusual warmth had settled over the day, softening the crisp midsummer edges, and Anne could not stand it. It was the sort of weather that got into her sinuses, crawled beneath her lids, made her certain the effort of finding her daughter a hat and going to place it on her head to prevent the inevitable burning was not worth a minute of sneezing. The hat would probably come right off anyway. And she would regret, as she always did, even trying. Peter was rustling around the kitchen in his cassock, looking for his reading glasses. Lia chewed the end of her pen furiously, adjusting herself slightly before hunching back over whatever strange new drawing she was working on today.

  The evangelical in Anne had always recoiled at ‘The Arts’, for they had no obvious place in the useful, pious life. But Lia had something. It was not simply an ability to accurately depict the world, to replicate the exact gradient of a crow’s beak or the detailed creases of a hand, held out. There’s real flair there, one of Lia’s teachers had told her, a year or so ago, when Anne had been parked outside the school. The woman had rested her bony elbows on the car window ledge and Anne had stared hard at the chip shop sign in her ridiculous circular spectacles, the bent reflection of children queuing with their mothers on the other side of the street. She can capture the very essence of a thing, whilst… imbuing it with a… startling newness.

  The teacher was new there. New and young and pretentious, for what nonsense this was, Anne had thought, but smiled as politely as she could nevertheless, and started the car, so as to let the intrusive woman know she had heard quite enough. Lia came out, holding a painting of a single egg in the middle of a large blue bowl. There was no essence; no startling newness. Just an egg in a bowl. And no one, thought Anne, with any sense, kept their eggs in bowls in the first place. Except for the French, perhaps.

  See you tomorrow, Amelia. The teacher had smiled and walked away, smart and smug in her shoulder-padded jacket.

  What’s that, then? Anne had asked, glancing in the rear mirror as they neared home.

  Quiet, Lia had said.

  What?

  The title. I’ve called it – Quiet.

  And Anne had straightened her spine in the driver’s seat, unnerved by the odd little child in the back of the car, pretending that she couldn’t see how the solitary egg in the bowl was, indeed, a very quiet-looking thing after all, as the tyres ground loudly against the gravel of their driveway.

  A year later, Lia’s projects were nothing short of disturbing. She muttered quietly to herself and seemed always to be scrutinizing their life from afar, leaning against the last of the limestone – looking for things to disbelieve.

  Lia glanced behind her shoulder. There was her mother, hovering ghost-like by the kitchen window. She wished she would leave her alone. With nothing much else to do over the long summer months she had built up quite a collection; paintings of Peter and his clergy as huge ravens huddling around a kitchen table, their black feathered wings tucked tightly between their robes; sketches of Anne as a dove or a very fat grey pigeon, depending on how well they were getting on that week. Every piece began the same, as soft pencil scribbles in the bible margins.

  Lia had never much liked the Bible. Except the bits about

  famine and death and

  seas of blood,

  sacrifice,

  burning sulphur rain,

  devils dressed up in wild disguises,

  locusts cloaked in women’s hair.

  She had discovered the darker pockets of the holy book far too young, alone at night, and had quickly developed an appetite for the urg
ent, parched feeling that would build up in her body when it was faced with something terrible,

  but it could not look away.

  These gruesome images had soon planted themselves in her dreams, dreams that she would present proudly the next morning at the kitchen table.

  Anne would go very white and say things like, It’s the devil, Amelia, trying to get in.

  Get in where? Lia would ask.

  Peter would hide quietly behind his paper. Lia would sip her milk. Anne would scowl very hard at the space between the window and the sink.

  Lia came to believe it was at the devil himself.

  An ashy yellow breeze slid along the base of her neck. She knew better, now, than to share anything with Anne at all. She shivered and examined her work. This one had taken her a week to complete. It featured Peter’s congregation in the process of pinning Lia’s own little body up above the church altar, like the pigs she saw hanging by their hind legs in the back of the village butcher’s, the pink cheeks of her bottom exposed, fleshy arms dangling above her blood-flushed face. Mid-slaughter – her meat looked no different to the pigs. Except for the fact of her having no tail. She was sure it was one of her best.

  Yes, Lia thought, holding the page out in front of her, the skin around her cuticles still white from the pressure and precision. It was finished. She was pleased. As she got to her feet, she felt briefly weighted by the familiar disappointment of having finished a thing, her body suddenly heavier, the garden a little duller. Anne had disappeared from the window. In her place, only the blotched navy shadows of the bushes and Lia’s own reflection, rooted to the centre of her ruins, looking like a giant who’d just outgrown its house, the walls having crumbled around her.

  Anne found the pig picture later that afternoon. Amelia, she screamed, as if she were the one being wrenched up by her ankles, hung upside-down to dry.

  When Lia entered the kitchen, the devil was in his usual spot,

  swinging on the window latch with a tea towel.

  Making a mockery, Anne was mumbling, a mockery of our life. Peter came into the room and peered down at the scene, his nostrils flared so that Lia could see the turquoise of his nose bone. And then he began to chuckle, and Anne turned to him in surprise, and Lia looked so suddenly pleased with herself, for conceiving the clever scene, for having made him laugh, as smug as the teacher in the shoulder-padded jacket, that Anne felt a fury flickering up through her body faster than light, a spasm of it in her fingers. Without thinking, she clipped Lia clean across the cheek, just hard enough to subtract a little chuffed colour from her face.

  Peter shifted uncomfortably, as if he were overhearing an argument taking place loudly in another room. He moved softly towards the sliced tomatoes on the counter, contemplating them, for a second, before walking out the kitchen door.

  A terrible silence opened its palms before them. Lia’s cheek stung.

  I do not want it to be like this between us. You just make it –

  so hard.

  Hit her back! In the space between the window and the sink, the devil was tipping a tin of cinnamon into his red mouth, chanting, spraying spices. Spit on her, kick her, bite her, scream at her!

  Anne watched a quiet rage flooding Lia’s face, like a tide coming in too quickly, dragging her out into its depths.

  That evening, they knelt by the foot of Lia’s bed and prayed together, palms pressed tightly together, the thick weave of the carpet patterning bare knees. Anne spoke unusually softly in her bible tongue:

  Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

  Lia closed her eyes and pictured a huge black door with peeling paint and a brass knocker. She felt her whole body reaching out towards the door, all the will she could muster inside her fist as she knocked away, knuckles aching, begging the Lord to open, her scalp still warm from the midsummer sun.

  The Chorus

  A blight has fallen on the fruitful blossoms of the land!

  The sound of voices begins to bounce off strings of muscle, making strange music.

  Look, they sing, look at how it’s changed! How it’s staled, butchered, blackened.

  It’s like wandering through your favourite painting

  to find the scene abstracted

  or like waking up on the page of a familiar fable,

  quite stripped of moral maxim.

  I drink up as much final quiet as I can, and wait for one or two or three to take charge;

  for the leads of her life to knead their way out from the landscape’s sprouting masses.

  Colour

  Iris’s favourite colour from ages five to six had been pink. She had liked it so much that she had insisted she only eat pink foods, drink pink drinks. She wanted her insides to turn a bright shocking fuchsia and Lia had said, Well for that I prescribe beetroot.

  Iris remembered staring at her shit in the toilet bowl after two weeks of beetroot, feeling superhuman.

  But pink was just a phase. Just a gesture of something or somewhere Iris wanted to get to. She moved through and out of it a little wiser, a little more sensitive to the causality of colour and consumption.

  And now, at her best age yet, it was Yellow.

  Lia liked this phase more. It felt grown-up. Bold. She drew Yellow often as the fluid intangible thing that it was, sometimes a blot of gold light, a sharp buttercup tongue, a smudge of a small girl hiding in a streetlamp. All the codes around the house became yellow; the Wi-Fi, the house alarm. Lia would lace out yellow word-talks at night, discuss its pigment-science and etymology;

  She derives from the proto-Indo-European root ‘ghel’,

  ‘to shine’ –

  the mother of some magnificent words such as:

  Glance

  Gloaming

  Glitch

  Gloat

  Glee

  Gall

  Glisten

  Cloris

  Chloroform

  Melancholy

  It’s back, Lia said, one pocketless Sunday to a patchy wall while the two of them were painting Iris’s room yellow. She felt so cowardly; so gutless, so sorry. Iris nodded solemnly.

  I thought so.

  She leant her head lightly against Lia’s arm for a moment, before reaching down to dip her finger in the yellow paint. She stretched her arm up, marked her mother’s forehead like a blessing, and then did the same to herself. Lia smiled sadly, and they both continued to paint with their matching triangle forehead tattoos and their individual rollers pushing, coating, sponging harder with every stroke as if they could erase all the facts and start again.

  Once they were done they stepped back and stared at their work.

  It’s so garish and satisfying, Lia said. Iris grinned and wiped away strands of sweaty hair stuck to the sides of her face.

  What colour would you be?

  I don’t know. Maybe a brown. Or a purple-grey.

  Iris looked up to the ceiling and laughed one of her wide-open golden laughs and said, No no no, you’re just saying that because you’re old. Old people can be bright too.

  That night in bed, still marked with her yellow blessing, Lia said, She’s amazing.

  Harry said, Yeah. She’s all right.

  He smiled widely and pressed his palm to his wife’s cheek. She kissed his wrist and said, I don’t want to die. He took a heavy breath. It smelt of earth. Every Sunday Harry would fall asleep with stains of their garden still on his hands. It is important not to put gloves on, he would say, it is important to feel the soil, let the dirt get under your fingernails, you need to hear through tips of skin what it is the world wants.

  Lia enjoyed the sight of him labouring over their tiny slice of land.

  Harry pressed his lips to her neck and then her earlobe and tried not to scream.

  It was the first time either of them had ever mentioned death out loud. That crawling, colourless word. It seemed to move between them like a changeling; unfamiliar, restless, new.

  Lia lay awake with her eyes closed. Feeling death’s breath on her face, his probing chubby fingers playing with her eyelashes, she listed off yellow things to keep afloat: