The weight of loss, p.20
The Weight of Loss, page 20
‘Which room do you fancy?’ Richard asked Marianne.
‘Either,’ she said.
When it came to discussing the price, Richard’s negotiation skills were admirable. His voice was delicate but had an unbreakable quality. He gave the impression you would be securely placed in the world if you were in his favour. Marianne watched the agent battle with the desire to please Richard, to thrive under a different set of conditions, one which contradicted his position. But Richard’s attention was a powerful inducement to transformation; it was irresistibly involving. The agent finally relented, his skin fired up and blotchy.
It was settled and Marianne was elated. When they left the flat, which was now theirs, they walked through the park together, and she was drawn to him in a way that made her panic slightly. Drawn by the manner in which he delivered himself to the world at large, fully formed, as though he’d never been a child. His feet turned slightly outwards as he walked and she liked this too. She could have liked anything about him. If he had told her, in that same cold, elegantly vital way, that he was a murderer, she would still have liked him, and her guilt for liking him would only forge a deeper connection. She knew dimly that she was behaving like all the idiot girls she’d ever known through high school, college, university, and it wasn’t that she didn’t care about it – she would always care enough to hate herself for this – but she wanted to indulge it. She believed in some way that she deserved to be excited and if she required someone else to deliver that feeling, then so be it.
Living with Richard was not really like living with anybody in those first few months. Marianne soon learned that she would hardly see him; he worked long hours and went to the gym after work until he was sure there was no energy left to spare. At the weekend, he saw his mother and spent hours at the hospital. He went shopping for her too. Then he would go running and always come back sweating and shaking, his veins pulsing through his temple.
He treated time like it was his adversary; the seconds swallowed him up if he didn’t load himself into them quickly and brutally. It struck her that he probably dreaded stagnation and fought it off with an instinctive violence. If his thoughts slackened, he simply closed them off by heading out for another run or a swim or a cycle, purging his mind of that recurring impulse to wander. He motored through every day as though he was afraid of losing it, of the day outrunning him. His indefatigable life was disturbing to Marianne and she was beginning to tire of being a witness to it. She was also lonely, for she arrived home from work to a flat that was ghostly in its immaculate state. Richard was scrupulously tidy and she was almost afraid to cook anything for fear of leaving behind a trace of herself that she hadn’t realised was there.
When she was alone those week nights, Marianne felt a hard lump forming in her throat. She had wished for solitude so many times, even while she lived with Rosalie and Dylan, and now that she had it, she had no use for it. She changed into her pyjamas as soon as she was home and remained in her bedroom, not daring to venture to the kitchen for fear she’d meet Richard if he returned home early. She stared at everything for a long period of time, dreading to lift her eyes away from a single point of reference for she was afraid of slipping through the gap between things. The lump in her throat was heavy. She wasn’t weary of anything, quite the opposite. She sat in a state of unbearable tension, waiting for something to happen and willing it to.
It was at some point during this time that she began to feel a dull ache in the wall of her body. The pain travelled down from the top of her spine and she winced when it finally arrived in the small of her back. She took painkillers, but they never seemed to do anything. It was like an electrical current shooting through her blood in a single taut line, causing the hairs on her skin to rise. She would go for a long walk to exercise it off but there was now a stiffness in her body that gripped her and wouldn’t relent its hold. The ache was also in her head. At the end of the day, she saw the trembling outlines of objects, as though a dark heat was suffusing everything. She thought of her brain like a large, hot lump of coal, glowing red as it simmered. Sleep, as always, was out of the question – her brain was too hot for it. She wondered whether to see a doctor but was too idle, in some sense too disheartened, to do it.
She spoke to her mother on the phone, who passed it on to her father and finally Marie. They all wanted to know when she would come home to visit. Marie’s need of her was urgent and Marianne sensed it in the way she feigned indifference at the beginning of the conversation, then grew hostile when Marianne fielded questions about her return. It wasn’t that she didn’t miss them. She craved them. And her craving was unhealthy, a return to a former weakness. She wanted to be embraced by all of them, to disappear inside that fatal intimacy until there was nothing left of herself. She worshipped them deeply in the silence of her new home. While she was physically removed, she was divorced from the impulse to cling to them.
Those lonely evenings were purgatory. She had to wait for the tension to subside, and to do this, she had to avoid thinking seriously about anything. She watched action films without emotional content, read Closer and Heat magazines – much to her shame – to soak up inane gossip about actresses and pop stars. She listened to podcasts about serial killers. She created a Twitter account and deleted it three days later. She developed an almost fascist interest in personal hygiene, shaving every hair on her body apart from the ones on her head until she was agonised that she’d have to wait for a few days to do it again.
She listened to some of the songs her father had loaded on to her iPod, bringing them up on YouTube so the sound filled her bedroom and blotted out the silence. She had fallen in love with a track by Caravan called ‘Nine Feet Underground’. It had the quick, breathless energy of jazz and the operatic scope of something classical. The guitar had an echoey quality, like an owl mewing. The sound found its way through her skin and resonated with her darkness until it was gone.
She didn’t hear Richard open her bedroom door one night as she sat at her desk. She had just begun to play the track again and was staring out of the window behind her desk at the moon hovering over the lamppost on the other side of the street, creamy and slightly grey. She was used to seeing her reflection from the glare of the screen; the shadowed muscles of her cheeks were barbaric in the light. She was shocked when she saw another shape emerge in the reflection, just to the side of her head. She turned round.
He was different. She couldn’t place the change, but she knew one had occurred. He leaned in her doorway, not quite daring to come in.
‘That sounds nice,’ he said, indicating the sound coming from her laptop.
She said nothing and watched him, wondering what he wanted.
Without saying a word, he wandered towards her window to stand beside her. His movements were more fluid, less punctual. Although there was still a cold, abstracted quality in his face, something she was suddenly tired of seeing. She wished she knew how to make him laugh. The organ tripped into a lovely part of the song, hurtling forward and rising without losing its intricacy. It was sad without being joyless, conveying a melancholy that was relieved by the lightness of its form, its restless, soaring notes. The pitched wail of electric guitar answered the lusty breath of a saxophone. She looked up at Richard. He looked down at her as though she’d demanded, silently, to be seen. He looked quite angry for a moment. Then he leaned over and kissed her, prising her mouth apart.
They both moved quickly, as though they didn’t have much time before the impulse was lost. She was afraid of losing her clothes as she hadn’t been naked in front of anybody for a long time. She realised, however, that he was fixated on her face. In spite of her nudity, his eyes remained on hers and wouldn’t leave them. She was glad of it. And then it frightened her. He willed her into doing things she wouldn’t normally do simply by watching her. He watched her into the bed. He watched her spread herself and lift her thighs apart until she felt the air in her crotch. He moved towards her with that same serious expression, his head gliding towards hers as he travelled along her body without touching it.
When he dipped inside her, he did so quickly, without prefacing himself. A single concentrated stab. She had almost forgotten how vulgar the practice was, unbidden and extreme. As he moved back, he breathed out heavily. Then he came slicing in and squeezed his eyes shut. She began to watch him more carefully than he watched her, until he was not seeing her at all; when he opened his eyes again, they were dull and empty. He was watching nothing. He dived into a muscular darkness and chafed himself against her. The bones of her knees hovered in suspense. He whittled himself down to a single slice, moving back and forth like a saw through the branch of a tree.
She had thought he might be a heartless lover, cold and imperious. In fact, he made her feel like the heartless one. And she began to enjoy it, to push her thighs around him so he was compressed, forced to expand inside. He groaned. The mechanical grace of his body and face was gone. He had become raw. The sounds he made behind the wall of his mouth – he could never bring himself to open it – echoed a barely realised despair that crept through his blood and then hers too, so that she was implicated in the swooning, suffering aspect of it all and was held responsible for helping him find the end of it.
Marianne now knew she had the power to bring him to this state. She wondered whether he would hate her for it.
Richard stopped going to the gym after work and brought home bags of food from Waitrose. He cooked for Marianne and was surprisingly inventive in the kitchen, serving dishes she hadn’t tried before. He used ingredients she’d only heard of since moving to London, such as kimchi, quinoa and jackfruit. When she admitted she’d never eaten avocado before he was genuinely stumped. He ate it with almost everything.
When she asked him why he never ate much meat, he told her it didn’t agree with him. ‘For ethical reasons?’ she asked. He declined to answer, and she never worked it out. She couldn’t help thinking his diet – so rich in superfoods and antioxidants, so low in fat, salt and sugar – was another part of his ongoing campaign to punish himself in some way, to deprive himself of things he believed he was too evolved and cerebral to indulge in. Sometimes she wondered whether he was malnourished. His skin had a faint grey tinge some evenings when he came home from work, and his body was hollow in the middle so that his shoulders looked too far apart. She was relieved he had stopped going to the gym so much.
He was a martyr to something, of that she was sure. There was a black spot in the recess of his mind, something Marianne knew without being told that she was not to inquire about. It seemed to migrate to the forefront of his consciousness sometimes, which was when he grew silent and walled her off. He never spoke about his mother, his childhood or his previous girlfriends. These were topics that were strictly out of bounds. With everything else, he was painstakingly articulate, supplying Marianne with the kind of detail that she would seize upon in the moment and guard with miserly interest for the future.
He talked about his father, who died eight years ago of a heart attack. If a wry little aphorism emerged in conversation, Marianne soon learned to attribute it to Richard’s father rather than him. His father’s advice had often been about making irreversible decisions quickly, or severing ties with ‘futile friends’, people who carried negative energy or were unfortunate in life. The universe was an inhospitable place but one could only take their own measure of pain; one couldn’t be held accountable for saving anybody else from theirs. This latter advice ensured Richard would never be held back by somebody else; but it required a ruthless, quick-fire evaluation of another’s character. If he came into contact with self-pitying types, he was careful not to affiliate himself with them. It was a trait that Marianne didn’t believe was native to his character.
She knew she had made her own ruthless judgements of people, but she had been mistaken about almost all of them in some way or another. Life was too long and too brief to maintain any opinion of anyone in an absolute sense. The seconds erode all thought from the inside until the passion that informed it – that someone is cruel or kind, ridiculous or remarkable – is no longer there. And everyone changed so quickly, Marianne knew, leaving behind their former skins with the seconds that informed the next one. No external judgement or interior development of character was ever perfectly synchronised.
Richard was never the same person from day to day, so Marianne was never quite sure which edition of him would emerge from the shower or step through the door after work. She considered his shower the beginning of his consciousness, the moment it reconfigured itself. They slept in her room now, and when he pulled himself out of their bed, he did so with a terrible sadness. She sensed it in the way he sat on the edge of the mattress briefly and dipped his head towards his chest, his hands clutching each other in the space between his legs. He always sniffed very loudly when he was ready to move, snapping his head back up and slapping his thighs so the skin shook beneath. She once asked him to stay with her another five minutes. He turned back and she saw that same sharp edge to his vacancy, something territorial, as though that silence was his alone. She was not even supposed to acknowledge it. She was certainly not supposed to fill it for him.
Sometimes he came home witty and licentious, banging cupboard doors open and shaking his hips when he cooked or leaned over the kitchen island to read a book. Other days, he came home silent and reproachful, not of her but of some generalised evil. She knew he worked very hard and that he was eager to please without ever seeming so, but some days he was not sufficiently rewarded. And briefly, without ever fully giving into it, he lost his complacency and the secret pains taken to keep it. He gave into simpler desires. He watched South Park late at night downstairs, without laughing. He scrolled through Reddit for hours, his sullen features cast into shadow by the glare of the screen. Marianne would try to make conversation with him, and while he was never uncivil, she found his answers desultory, as though he had plucked them at random from his subconscious.
Marianne found herself booking a train home when she felt her loneliness creeping back. She did it in the early hours of the morning while Richard lay sleeping beside her, her laptop balanced on the duvet. She had an urge to leave him for a week, perhaps longer, just to see whether her absence would prompt anything different to emerge in him. She was genuinely curious to see how he would be without her.
She didn’t tell her family that she was coming to visit in a fortnight. Something stalled her from doing so. Perhaps it was a desire to see them when they weren’t prepared to be seen. She considered the plan vaguely cruel – it was rather like an ambush – but she wanted to see them as authentically as possible, to go back to her home for the first time without feeling in any way bound to it, even to the atmosphere within its walls.
When she told Richard she was visiting her family, he said something that surprised her.
‘You’ve been very secretive about them.’
It hadn’t occurred to her that Richard would notice her reticence. She had remained very careful about which details she wanted to impart to him. She hadn’t mentioned Marie’s illness or her mother’s depression. And she never wanted to discuss her father; some prohibitive impulse came out of nowhere and forbade her from giving him away. She guarded him fanatically, frightened of letting him slip into conversation. She didn’t know why she did this. She was not ashamed of him. She wondered whether it was because she knew there was something easily broken and quietly borne in her father’s nature, something melancholy without the drama of despair, and she wanted to keep his essence safe from scrutiny. She could only conclude that she didn’t trust Richard enough to share her father with him.
She took the train to Lancaster on a Monday morning, grabbing a coffee from the cafe at Preston between changes. What she was doing felt traitorous. It had seemed an affectionate thing to do at one point but now she wondered whether they needed to be ready for her, whether she was asking too much of them by forcing herself into their lives again just when they might have begun to accept that she was gone. She burned her mouth on her coffee, searching the departure screen on her platform. When she saw her train was delayed by three minutes, her heart dropped. She was suddenly anxious to be home as soon as possible, and though she’d been away for months, each minute she had to wait now seemed so much harder to bear.
She got the bus from the station, feeling too idle and impatient to walk with her suitcase all the way to Chancellor’s Wharf. When she arrived, it was midday, and she wondered who would be home at this time. She rummaged in her bag for her key and, as she walked down the lane, her suitcase bouncing off the uneven path, she realised she didn’t have it. Marie was watching her from her own bedroom window when she walked up to the house. Marianne noticed something wasn’t right about her straight away, a physical change she wasn’t quick enough to identify, for Marie’s face wasn’t very close to the glass and she moved it back entirely once she caught sight of her. Marianne walked to the door and waited, trusting Marie had gone downstairs to let her in.
When Marie opened the door, Marianne saw the change at once. All her hair was gone.
‘Fuck,’ Marianne said.
Marie stood frowning at her, her hand still on the handle of the door. Her head was entirely different without the hair. Her scalp was slightly grey where the roots hadn’t yet emerged, and her ears were very sharp. Her features were magnified to an alarming degree. She had the look of one whose thoughts raced forward until they were irretrievable.
‘Fucking hell,’ Marianne said.
‘You just going to stand there and swear?’ said Marie.
‘Is that from the chemo?’
Marie looked murderous.
‘No. I did it.’
‘Sorry. But – why?’
She shrugged and said nothing.
‘Aren’t you pleased I’m here?’ Marianne said.
‘You didn’t say you were coming.’
