The Body Read online

  "I don't want any part of what you're doing," Isla told her.

  "Think it through," Lara said, "because I'm taking the body and you're the only one who can come with me."

  "What will you do with the others?" Isla asked.

  *

  Lara continued up the stairs and ran the hot water for her bath. Further down the hall, her sisters brooded in darkness, waiting, she suspected, for her to come to her senses.

  "Let them wait," she said out loud. "Let them wait forever."

  Her words hung in the humid air, however, and turned on her. In the space between the water pouring from the spout and striking the water in the tub, between the removal of one garment and the next, between her first step into the water and her second, she knew that her sisters could outwait her if they so decided. Residing in the furniture, they would outlive her. When the body was old and decrepit, they would still be there, abiding in an abyss of resentment that would make today's anger look like nothing more than a puddle.

  When the body eventually died, Lara would find herself back in the stool, back in the room, back in the family. In the end, there was no escaping family, no matter how far or fast her physical body travelled.

  "We'll see," she said, submerging, and she considered how much of herself she would trade to have peace of mind.

  *

  "Dinner was wonderful," Lara said, thinking that Hilda would have enjoyed it too. She couldn't help thinking of the others when they were so close and she was having so much sensory pleasure. It was lonely in the room, without taste and touch, with only the sound of Katja's pendulum and the occasional creak and crack to disturb the dust.

  Roger was modest about the meal he'd prepared, but she could tell that he was as pleased with it as he was with her reaction. He had smiled at her through every bite and every swallow and had jumped at the chance to talk about the spices he had used.

  "Who would have thought that two such disparate flavours would work so well together," he had said through a mouth full of food, pointing his fork at her for emphasis. "The proof is in the eating, eh?"

  "Where did you learn to cook like this?" she had said, only half-hearing herself, knowing that this was the manner of question he longed to be asked.

  "I've had to live on my wits since I was a very young man," he began. "Fortunately for me that has never been a problem. Leaving home at fifteen, I never looked back, no matter how hard it got. I was homeless for a time, did I tell you that?"

  "No, you didn't tell me that."

  "Well, let me tell you this. When you're hungry for a long time, you get used to the ache in the pit of your stomach. Soon, the ache is in the pit of you, and then you get used to that as well. You just ache. All the time. The next time you eat, you remember that that pain started with hunger. I missed eating, having something to chew on. I had some funny ideas about stealing chickens, I can tell you. I never acted on it, but given time who knows. Funny things happen to the mind when you want something that badly. Your mind turns and turns like a wheel and one day, if you're not careful, it can run you right over. Do you mind me talking like this?"

  "No," she said. "I like it when you talk." And then - cleverly, she thought - she added: "That's why I married you," and he liked that, but announcing the words she knew it wasn't true. She'd married him because he'd asked and because nobody would have expected her to say yes and because her sisters would hate it. Her marriage had been an unpremeditated act of rebellion.

  In bed that evening, she thought of them again, wondering if they could hear her and whether at any moment they might penetrate her mind and make their anger known to her in some fashion worse than the dark pressure emanating from their room.

  She kept her dressing gown on, but underneath that she was naked, like Roger. He laid gentle kisses between her breasts, then planted them on her flat belly, warm and wet. He kept moving, down, down, and she squirmed.

  "Oh, Roger," she said.

  She didn't ask him to stop this time, partly for fear of speaking aloud in this strangest of silences and partly because she didn't want to disappoint him. He'd been waiting patiently to make love to her; she didn't have the heart to tell him that this was not the place for their first time.

  She flinched when his tongue explored between her legs, but she forced herself to lie as still as possible. Her eyes latched onto the network of beams that were all that kept the ceiling from falling down upon them and she concentrated on them with all her might as though she were at risk of falling apart too.

  His mouth was warm against her and she grimaced against the alien sensations that began to roll through her.

  "Can he be enjoying that?" she thought. "Is this what other people do or is he a pervert?"

  "You don't have to," she said.

  "Quiet," he ejected from beneath the covers.

  Although he was touching her in the most intimate of places with the most sensitive of body parts, she felt very far from him, as if he were making love to another woman and Lara was watching, trying not to intrude. She bit her lip against the response from her body and wondered how long she could hold out before withdrawing from him.

  He was touching her breasts next, massaging them with his soft, office-boy hands.

  With her sigh, she gave up. Her resistance was destroyed and, at once, revealed to be a nonsense. This was beautiful and it was happening to her and she deserved this. She'd gone against everyone and had married him. He was touching her breasts and stroking her body and she had a right to enjoy it. Since he was her husband, there was no reason why this shouldn't happen every day, or as often as he wished to pleasure her. She sank into the bed and into herself.

  "Something's happening," she whispered. "Something's happening."

  She pushed her fingers through her hair and she saw Roger's eyes widen. He obviously loved the way that looked.

  No longer worried that she could be heard, she delighted in their union, pushing the back of her head into the pillow and moaning as the feeling of Roger's love swept through her, destroying matchstick cities. Suddenly the sensation was too ferocious, bending her in two, and she pushed him away, which he didn't take badly. He merely resurfaced and lay on top of her. He was pushing himself inside her, much more easily than during their holiday away, and then he began taking his pleasure.

  She was driftwood, rocked, slapped and buffeted by him. She'd been something once, but it didn't matter to her now.

  She gazed up at him as his muscles tensed and he growled in her ear and, just like that, it seemed to be over, with him sighing wetly into her neck, their bodies clammy with sweat.

  She glanced across the room, but of course there was nobody in the doorway. She had the body. She had Roger. There was nobody else with free movement in the house. She felt as though there was nobody else in the world.

  Eventually, Roger lifted himself from her and dropped onto the mattress beside her.

  "Are you still cold?" he asked.

  At first, she misunderstood him and was about to ask if he'd not enjoyed himself. She only took his true meaning when he wrapped her fluffy, white dressing gown around her. He snaked one arm around her waist and closed his eyes.

  Cocooned with him beneath the covers, she felt like a very young woman embarking on an adventure, when in truth she was an old woman embarking on an adventure. She'd been considered ancient by children when she'd entered the stool for the first time, and that might have been ten years ago. It could have been ten years to the day for all she knew. Her bonding with Roger would have made a welcome celebration, but more than that, it marked the time to move on.

  In recent years, the stool had been a refuge and a beacon for her, a safe place in which to hide from the world when its demands became too great and her inability to fit in became too demoralising. Now she had no desire to ever enter the stool again. It would always exist in her mind, however, threatening her with its confines, unless she destroyed it. It seemed necessary to rid herself of everything that was holdi
ng her back, whether tangible or not.

  The thought of physically destroying the stool gave her a delicious flutter in her belly. She imagined throwing it from a window. Its legs snapped off - pine-coloured wood splinters spiralling through the air at odd angles.

  She imagined watching it burn. The wood cracked and spat at her and she watched it all coolly. For some reason, in her imagination she was smoking a cigarette and she was flicking the ash into the fireplace. It was a way of saying goodbye, perhaps. Goodbye, good riddance and don't come back.

  Knowing the room intimately, she was able to reach the door without making a single floorboard creak. She slid into the hall and gently pulled the door shut behind her.

  What she had to do couldn't wait until morning. It couldn't wait another breath.

  *

  "What do you want?" Katja said.

  "I've only come for my stool," Lara said, crossing the dark room and approaching the far side of the bed.

  "You mean that you've changed your mind?" said Sylvia hopefully.

  "At last!"

  "No," Lara said, cutting them off quickly.

  "Pity," intoned Hilda.

  "Yes, shame," said Olga. "Shame on you."

  "So what do you want with the stool?"

  It was where she'd left it, beside the bed, about an inch or two from where Sylvia's white bedspread hung. The sight of it was paralysing, although there was nothing exceptional about its appearance, only its function. Its previous function. It was French, made of walnut and fabricated by hand according to the certificate that had now been lost. The hand-carved, cabriole legs were dark with wear, particularly in the crannies of the scroll feet, which gave it some character at least.

  The top of the stool had been upholstered in cream fabric and featured a pattern that was familiar in the house, with echoes visible on Isla's frame, Sylvia's bedspread and elsewhere, a great flowering monstrosity that was nonetheless restrained compared to other examples around the house.

  She stood before the stool now with her fingers twitching.

  She could feel the others pressing against her, searching for the meaning of her entrance.

  Before they could talk again, she went to the stool, but her hands stuttered out of fear that by touching it she'd be unwittingly and unwillingly transferred into its body, leaving Sarah - and thus her future - crumpled on the floor, an empty vessel ready to be filled by whoever was nearest, fastest or strongest among them.

  "Scared," someone whispered.

  "Go on, you big scaredy-cat. I dare you."

  Lara touched one side of her stool with her left hand and, after some time composing herself, grabbed the other side with her free hand. The half-expected electric shock, paralysation and transference did not take place, and so she lifted the object with both hands, carrying it like someone else's baby that had just been sick, before thinking that even this was too sentimental, and carrying it by one leg instead.

  Sylvia gasped.

  Olga grumbled and the doors clattered gently against each other. It was a melancholic rattle rather than a sound of warning.

  Everything was changing.

  Everything was changing so fast.

  Lara thought of herself in the future, when she was far from this room, and the stool was in pieces and she could finally be whole.

  "You'll destroy yourself," Imelda announced quietly.

  "No," Lara replied, expecting something like this. "I won't."

  "You'll die if you destroy your stool," Imelda went on in a matter-of-fact fashion. "And then there'll be one less person to share with. So go ahead."

  "You're wrong," Lara said.

  "We'll see, won't we?"

  "Yes," Lara said. "You will."

  Before she got to the door, Olga said.

  "We heard you. You and him."

  "We're in love," Lara protested. "I tried to tell you."

  Katja laughed and asked: "What do you know about love?"

  "More than you ever will," Lara said, "because who could love you?"

  Another gasp.

  "Disgusting," said Olga.

  "Disgusting," agreed Hilda. "And you call yourself our sister?"

  "No," said Lara. "Not anymore."

  "Then may you rot in hell," Hilda said, "and may your body wither and die and rot around your pathetic, slimy soul. I hope the body twists around you and ties itself up like a knot and strangles the life out of you. I hope you drown in your own blood and scream. May you get hit by a bus as you cross the road and when you're lying dying in the street a magpie is going to land on the tarmac and eat your eyes."

  "Hilda!" Sylvia said. "That's enough."

  "Die Lara," Hilda said, sounding as though she'd finally finished with a wheeze, but then she went on, reinvigorated by having finally found her voice in this matter. "Die. We're all going to live forever, because we're smart and we stick together, but you're going to die, sooner or later, preferably sooner, and when you do I'm going to laugh the loudest. The last thing you hear as you die and pass from this world into the next, will be me, laughing."

  She cackled illustrate her point, as shrill as the garden gate.

  "Are you finished?" Anna asked.

  "Your lust for power has eaten away at you leaving you unsound, unclean, unworthy."

  "She's just getting started," said Katja happily.

  "I'm just getting started," agreed Hilda.

  "She deserves it," said Petra suddenly, tinkling the cups.

  Lara was open-mouthed, with one hand on her stool and the other reaching for the door, but she didn't take that opportunity to leave, because Petra continued:

  "Why attack all of us? What did I ever do to you?"

  "I'm not attacking anyone."

  "What do you call taking the body?" Katja said.

  "You were going to take it from me," Lara reminded them. "I had to do something."

  "Yes, but not this."

  "So it's our fault now?"

  "No," Lara said uncertainly, and then said: "Well, yes."

  "Fuck you!"

  "Olga, come on," Anna said. "That's a bit strong. Even for you."

  "And fuck you too. Strumpet!"

  "What did you call me? I'm not even angry, Olga, I just don't know what you're talking about any more."

  "None of us should be defending her," Katja said. "And we shouldn't be arguing among ourselves. We've got to stick together. Now more than ever."

  "One day," Hilda said. "I'm going to get you. I don't know how yet, but I'll turn my mind to it. It's amazing what time can do. You know that we have nothing here, aside from each other and time. So one by one, we're going to come for you. I want you to know that every time you look at the husband you chose for us, it could be the last time you do so. Every time he kisses your neck and squeezes your waist and opens your door, I could be turning up at your door. At any moment, I could be watching through your eyes. Whispering in your ear. Unravelling everything you think is you, piece by bloody piece."

  "Jesus, Hilda," Anna said. "Nobody's destroying anybody."

  "Well, that's not for you to decide," said Jocanta.

  "I agree," Katja said. "I'm going to make your mind a bloody misery, Lara. Total destruction."

  "You don't get to take the body and have us do and say nothing, Lara," said Sylvia, finding strength in numbers. "We may be trapped in here, but we're not powerless."

  "We won't let you rest," said Jocanta.

  "Have you all finished?" asked Imelda.

  Silence.

  "We can still sort this out peaceably," she said. Her voice was sweet and as invasive as one of her scents. "We'll talk sensibly in the morning, when he's gone."

  "He's not going anywhere," Lara said.

  "Oh, get rid of him!" Hilda said. "Or I swear to God, I'll get rid of you. I held my tongue tonight, but the two of you will not rest in this house again."

  "Don't say that," Sylvia hissed. "She'll run."

  "I'm not running," Lara said, announcing this as mu
ch to herself as to the others.

  "Good," said Imelda peaceably.

  "And not one of you will destroy me."

  "That's the spirit."

  "Because I'm going to destroy you first."

  No longer so afraid of the stool, since she had touched it and nothing had happened, Lara almost wielded it as if it were a club and a standard all at once.

  Olga and Hilda laughed.

  "I'm going to burn you," Lara told them. "I'm going to chop you into pieces and then I'm going to throw you into the fireplace and send you up the chimney as smoke and ash."

  "You filthy-mouthed cunt!"

  "Stupid little girl."

  "Crazy fucking bitch!"

  Lara moved close to Hilda, an act of defiance.

  "I'm going to take Roger's keys and scratch a great big line along your top."

  "You wouldn't dare."

  "Consider it done."

  Katja tittered at the exchange and so Lara turned to her next.

  "I'd smash your glass," she said, "if it wasn't already broken. I'll have to settle for ripping your pendulum out."

  The laughter stopped.

  It would be like pulling a tongue from a great mechanical mouth. It wouldn't come easily, but that was what was so delicious about it.

  Sylvia was trembling, which would have been imperceptible to anyone aside from someone trying to sleep on it or one of the sisters.

  "I'm only going to set fire to you; don't worry," Lara said. "With those sheets and that mattress, you'll burn the best."

  "The whole house would go up!" Sylvia said.

  The look in Lara's eyes suggested that she'd taken that as a dare, not as a warning.

  "You'd lose everything," Sylvia added, but Lara was already walking away.

  Olga was silent as Lara eyed up the massive wardrobe doors.

  "I'm going to bend your doors back," she said thoughtfully, visualising how this might happen and imagining the sounds. "I'm going to bend them back and then put all my weight on them until the hinges snap like twigs."

  "Fuck you!"

  "Petra, you're always so quiet, so reserved, but whenever you speak, it's to deliver another knife into my back. You've never been a friend. For that, I'm going to sweep the cups and saucers onto the floor. They're too small to be any use and none of us has ever liked them. Then I'll put something more fitting on you, like a dead toad, or something like that and I'll glue it on so you can't accidentally knock it off. I can do it now if you want to get it out of the way."