The Body Read online

  “There was no need to discuss it,” said Imelda in a firm, patronising tone. “As we've all told you, we have the range of the entire United Kindgom for our freedom should we choose. To travel further wouldn't be fair on those left behind in this room. We don't cross the water."

  They shuffled in agreement.

  "Surely you're smart enough to understand that,” Imelda said sympathetically.

  “But what's the difference whether I'm in London or Cornwall or France or Spain, as long as I'm back by the end of the month?”

  “What's the difference?” Imelda said and Lara thought that Imelda was acting out indignance too far now, feigning outrage, but the others were lapping it up and she'd walked right into it. Imelda was all about how things appeared, not how things were. Nothing was ever quite what it seemed with her. Whether or not the others knew that, they did as she told them.

  “Get back in your stool," Imelda suggested, "and ask 'what's the difference?'”

  “I will,” said Lara. “When my final week is up. In the meantime, I just think I should be able to choose where I go by myself, not by committee.”

  “My week, my time,” mimicked Katja in a schoolyard voice, pendulum swinging. "My week! My time!"

  "She's getting too attached,” noted Jocanta and half a dozen more rose petals fell onto her back.

  “This is exactly what we were talking about before she came in,” said Sylvia.

  “Perhaps,” mused Hilda, who was sitting at her feet. They were all talking as though Lara wasn't in the room. “Perhaps you're right.”

  “I'm not getting too attached,” Lara said. If anything, she was feeling increasingly detached, as if she might lose consciousness and float up to the ceiling to hang with the cobwebs that threatened them all instead of returning to the stool as they seemed to be implying she should.

  She didn't dare glance at the stool.

  She knew it intimately, for it was her item, her receptacle when it was someone else's turn on the body. It was solid and squat and always positioned in the same place beside Sylvia, so an imaginary person could get out of bed and descend via the stool before pushing her feet into slippers and standing before Imelda in preparation for the day ahead. This room was so genteel, but nobody would stay in it ever again. Nobody would be stupid enough to walk in here, feel the inexplicable atmosphere and try spending the night.

  Rather than acknowledging the stool in which she was bound for eleven months of every year, she sought signs of new reactions to the ideas she'd been repeating. The others, however, had become impenetrable. Her words had rebounded off them and now fluttered like swallows trapped indoors, doomed to die without dignity and to be swept into corners.

  “We may as well tell her,” Katja said. She couldn't or wouldn't mask the excitement in her voice.

  Opposite, as she might remain forever, Imelda sighed in exasperation, but Lara could tell that she was secretly pleased by Katja's indiscretion.

  “Tell her,” agreed Olga. Her bass voice made Lara shiver.

  “Tell me what?” Lara said, trying to sound like she didn't care.

  “We did agree on something,” mumbled Sylvia. Not even a creak of the mattress.

  “What did you agree to?” Lara asked, addressing them all at once although she was staring at Imelda, which was not easy to do, because she was fifty percent glass and mirror and reflective brass trimmings.

  “We voted,” said Hilda.

  “We did vote,” Katja concurred, as if this were the end of a discussion, not the beginning.

  “Yes. We all came to the same conclusion in the end.”

  “Voted on what?” Lara shouted.

  “Listen to that,” someone whispered.

  "Temper temper."

  "What's got into her? We're just in time."

  "Who does she think she is?"

  “We're right to do this.”

  "That's settled it."

  “We think,” said Imelda, “that a month is too long for one person to have the body.”

  Lara's throat tightened so much that she was unable to breathe, let alone speak, which allowed Imelda to continue.

  “Having the body for an entire month,” Imelda orated, “means that everybody else must wait a year for their turn.”

  “Not quite a year,” came Petra's tremulous voice from the mantlepiece for the first time this evening.

  “Oh, good enough,” said Katja, silencing her.

  “So what have you all decided?” Lara asked brightly, terrified. “Since you've all been so busily agreeing on things while I've been away.”

  “If you'd been here more often to air the room as usual, we could have told you,” snapped Olga.

  “Like you'd have done that,” sneered Anna.

  “A week!” Katja blurted.

  "What?" said Lara.

  “We'll each have the body for a week,” explained Imelda, “every eleven weeks.”

  “Four times a year.”

  “We share more often.”

  “We share the seasons.”

  "See more of the world."

  Just not all of it, thought Lara, but she let it go and kept her counsel. Bigger things were happening.

  Lara had never minded the wait for the body. In fact, she'd found the habitual cocooning in the stool necessary because the outside world overwhelmed her. Inside the stool, in her mind, she was safe. She was always happy as long as she wasn't alone in the waiting.

  She appreciated that a quicker turnaround might be considered better for most of them, particularly Katja who suffered interminable bouts of depression during which she would allow her pendulum to stop and would refuse to chime or otherwise would routinely jam her cogs, making the sound of bells launched into a meat grinder.

  It was reasonable to think that the prospect of sharing more often might reduce some of the tension in the room.

  Maybe Isla would even agree to come back up from the hallway downstairs and join them.

  She wondered if Isla had been invited to vote on this, or whether there had even been a vote.

  Although there were obvious benefits, she sensed that there was something wrong, something dirty about it.

  “Okay then,” Lara said. "That works even better for me, under the current circumstances. I'm for it."

  The air in the room wound itself into ropes, which the others pulled taut. They were glaring at her, because she was consenting to something that had already been decided. She was speaking to them the way Imelda did, but only Imelda was allowed to do that.

  Imelda lowered her voice and spoke slowly with an air of menace.

  “Well done for making it easy,” she said. "It's the right thing to do."

  "It's the right thing."

  "It's right."

  “So whose next?” asked Sylvia brightly, though they all knew the order as intimately as they knew the order of hours, of unneeded mealtimes, of the months and the seasons.

  “I'm next!” announced Katja.

  “Oh shut up,” said Olga. “Every time you say that you're next.”

  “I missed my turn,” said Katja.

  “No, you didn't,” said Anna, rocking with agitation.

  “Just shut up, Katja. Shut. Up. Shut. Up.”

  “It's me,” said Imelda. “I'm next.”

  What a surprise.

  “Time for you to get back in the stool, Lara,” said Hilda.

  The words shocked her, and she felt as if she were under attack. It was true that she was surrounded. She hardly dared to move and suddenly felt corpse-cold all over.

  “In the stool,” demanded Olga.

  “It's Imelda's week now.”

  “I haven't had my full month,” Lara explained.

  Somebody made a 'pfff' sound.

  “It's not fair to do this during my turn,” Lara said urgently.

  “It has to be someone,” said Hilda.

  “No,” said Lara. “It didn't. You could wait a week.”

  “Step aside and get in yo
ur stool. You're wasting Imelda's time now. It's her turn.”

  “It's not fair to cut into my time like this,” Lara said.

  “I'm sorry,” said Imelda, “but it is my turn now. We all agreed.”

  “Look at her," someone whispered. "She can't let go.”

  “She's attached.”

  “And she thinks she's in love!”

  Though nobody moved, Lara felt as if the air in the room were constricting her, darkening, reaching. She was swamped by a wave of repulsion.

  “Get away from me!” Lara said, appalled, realising that Imelda really was reaching for her. “Get out of my head.”

  “But it's not your head, is it? It's our head.”

  "And we're taking it back. It's Imelda's turn."

  “Come on. Step aside for Imelda.”

  They were enraged and indignant and gleeful about it all. They were like children.

  “No!” said Lara, almost to herself, and then again: "No!" This time they gasped. “I have one more week. I intend to use it. And I don't think I'm in love. I am in love!”

  Unheeded, Tanya shhd them, wanting to hear what Lara had to say, wanting to know what it felt like to feel 'in love,' even if it were a mistake.

  “Not only that,” Lara said, and she produced a silver ring from her pocket. She slipped it onto her finger. “Oh my God!”

  “Look at that rock!”

  "She's engaged! She's got us engaged!"

  “I'm married,” Lara said.

  Anna rocked back and forth with mischevious delight. Everybody else was either staring at the ring, envious or in disbelief, otherwise they were glowering at Lara. Every one of them was too shocked to respond. Even Imelda, who had such a way with words, was speechless, so Lara's was the next voice they heard.

  “I'm going away with my husband,” she said. “On honeymoon. I'm leaving tonight and I'll be back in a week. Then it will be Imelda's turn if that's what you all want.”

  Though she was afraid of them, having the body gave her an innate sense of superiority. Day by day she had become more confident and the last fortnight had been so extraordinary, so filled with adventure and love, that she felt as though she was now capable of anything and she didn't want that to stop being true, so no matter how scary it got she persisted, proving that she was more assertive and more powerful than she'd ever imagined with every passing second.

  Even so, she felt as though she might be sick when she opened her mouth to say:

  “The passport, ladies. Tell me where to find it or I'll just order a new one.”

  There were more noises of discontent, though discontent didn't describe the terror the noises caused very deep inside Lara. It was quite a thing to stand up to all ten of them, Isla her only true friend among them being number eleven on the ground floor.

  "You can't order a new one," Imelda said. "It's been flagged at the passport office. I imagine you remember that, otherwise you'd have done it already."

  "I do remember you saying that," said Lara, "and I don't believe you. Now tell me where the passport is, because if I have to order a new one that could take a few days and I might be late back for your turn. And you only have a week from now on."

  Gasps.

  “When it's my turn,” Katja spat, "I'll divorce him!"

  “Shut up, Katja.”

  "That's not helping."

  “She's not really married.”

  “Didn't you see the size of that diamond? That's not engaged, that's married.”

  "Imelda will sort it out when she gets the body. Right, Imelda?"

  Despite everything, despite herself, Lara felt sorry for them. They were all so afraid. Almost as afraid as she was.

  For a moment, she wondered how she would have reacted if she had been in the stool while Imelda or Katja demanded the passport to leave the country. She liked to think that she would have supported their desire to extend their freedom, something that would benefit all of them over time, but realistically she knew that it would have made her feel nervous. She didn't trust them any more than they evidently trusted her, and the power of the group was seductive. Having been in the world again for three weeks now, she remembered that feeling of physical and psychic unity as a distant thing, but she knew that when they were all together on a subject, they really were all together; that accompanying feeling of acceptance could be even more desirable than the independence of the body.

  She admitted that the return of the passport would be a risk. Olga, Hilda, Petra – they would never use the passport. Anna, however, would be on the first flight to Venice as soon as she left the house, but she would return, with stories and gifts. It was Imelda and Katja who would be most risk to them all from the reintroduction of the passport. Isla, whose turn was immediately after Imelda and Katja often complained about the state of it when she received it and demanded that the order be changed, but the order was always deemed sacred, for the sake of argument, and so she routinely endured a week of abstinence, unable to keep even liquids down for the first 24 hours, and then she spent the remaining weeks fighting the terrifying, mind-altering urge to smoke.

  She had been vociferous in her complaints, but the others had shouted her down. Ultimately she had insisted on being hung downstairs.

  After today, Lara wondered, would she end up joining her?

  Sometimes, she reminded herself, you have to take risks. She'd lived more in the last week than she had in the last ten years. Taking risks had done that for her. Being impulsive, so unlike her, had changed her life. And, admittedly, everyone else's too. So what?

  She not only needed the passport but she'd earned it, by not asking for anything else of the others, ever, not even to be polished once every few months while the others took turns in the body. She'd earned it. It was hers. It was as much hers as everyone else's.

  “You're right, Lara,” said Imelda.

  Three voices at once blurted: “What?” and Lara's voice was among them.

  “You can have the passport,” Imelda said, speaking for all of them again. Nobody disagreed out loud. “You should have it. I think you deserve it."

  "Well, thank you, Imelda."

  "As you so rightly said, I know where the passport is. It didn't just go missing. I put it somewhere."

  "Imelda!" Lara said, her legs weakening now with relief. Her eyes were filling with tears. "Thank you!"

  "Come closer,” Imelda said impatiently, "and I'll tell you where it is. Then you can run along and get it."

  Lara was pleased to be taken seriously finally, but it was disorientating. She didn't know quite how to respond, like the first time she heard herself referred to as a woman rather than as a girl. Most of the others had existed impatiently for such moments, but Lara had enjoyed being girlish. People had sometimes said that she was a wise old soul and yet had pinched her cheeks and she'd reddened, happy, safe, enjoying her ability to exceed the expectations of those around her. Out in the world, people saw her as a girl turning into a fine young woman.

  In the house, they knew that she was really a woman in her fifties; still young compared to most of the others, but old enough to have no excuse for being so naive. Imelda was well into triple figures. Silvia and Jocanta were getting there too. The combined ages of this family could crush any hope of Lara tricking them into doing or thinking anything. Her naivety, however, could be a weapon and it seemed that she had wielded it to good effect today.

  “Over here,” said Imelda. “Come closer.”

  Returning to this house had always had the effect of infantilising her, but right now, crossing the room in her plain black dress that no-one would have known was a wedding dress unless she'd told them and with her diamond ring, hours old, on her finger, she was emerging as Lara the woman, powerful, even in their eyes.

  "Closer," snapped Imelda. "Come on. Let me tell you where to go."

  Tanya yelled: “No!” but it was too late. A large, glass perfume bottle flew from the table with a snapping sound like released elastic. There was a
thunk as the bottle struck Lara's cheekbone and sent her staggering back across the room. Her head whipped back as if punched while the bottle spiralled up into the air and then cracked on the floor.

  She put her ringed hand to her face and stumbled, accidentally crushing the bottle under the heel of one pretty shoe. Before she could speak, another bottle launched from the collection of multi-coloured, glass missiles on top of the dresser. Another. Then another.

  Lara threw her hands up and ducked. A bottle in the shape of a woman whipped through the edge of her hair, then smashed into Katja's glass. The front shattered with a terrifying crash followed by prolonged tinkling, leaving the pendulum exposed and humming with the impact.

  “You utter fucking cunting bitch!” yelled Katja.

  One of Imelda's drawer's shot out and the necklaces and bracelets and pearls inside rattled and hissed like snakes. The whole dressing table began to shake and then made an awful scraping sound as it moved towards Lara.

  Olga's door began to rattle then too, as if something mindless trapped inside had discovered the door but found it locked.

  Hilda raised her lid a few inches and then let it slam shut like a massive, toothless mouth. Again. Again.

  Sylvia's sheets began to flutter as though they were hanging on the line.

  All around Lara, whose cheek now felt like it was on fire, the room came alive with panic, each object inspired into frenzied motion by the others.

  Imelda, normally so calm, at least on the surface, had not done anything like this for several years. The last time something like this had happened, she had banished on of them in a manner that made Isla's self-imposed isolation in the downstairs hallway luxurious by comparison.

  Tanya's doors flew open and a dozen paperbacks toppled out as she yelled for Imelda to stop. Anna was rocking so hard that she was now in the corner, spinning through 180 degrees, slamming into the wall, punctuating the chaos like a raging heartbeat.

  Another bottle struck Lara, her knee this time, with a dull thud that belied how hard it had been projected. She yelped and limped towards the door even as another bottle exploded against it.

  Behind her, Petra's little tea cups were tumbling from her shelf and cracking like egg shells.