Paradise Rot Page 6

  … full and succulent.

  I turned to Carral, but next to me I found only an empty brown kitchen chair. She must have gone to bed.

  When I look back, I can remember the sound of Carral brushing her teeth, flushing the toilet, shuffling upstairs to the mezzanine while I read Pym’s napkin. I remember the sound of a creaking bed and a deep sigh from the other side of the plasterboard. All this returned to me later, as though my senses were slurred, facing Pym by that kitchen table. Because in that moment she was gone, all at once.

  Pym and I sit facing each other like two Cheshire cats in the moonlight. He grabs the whisky glass, empties it in one gulp. A drop hangs on his lower lip, a pendulous pearl that remains in place as he smiles.

  ‘You’re such weird girls.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Carral looked kind of sick.’

  ‘She was just drunk.’

  ‘And you’re a weird one. Cold and pale, like a pearl.’

  ‘You made that up,’ I say and get up to signal that he should leave, but instead I walk around the table, stretch out my hand and for a moment I study it in the light, as if my movement surprises me. The hand looks pale, almost transparent.

  Then I put my hand on his head, letting my nails trace the comb marks in his hair, all the way to the reddishblond tips by his neck, his shoulders. I bend over and stick my tongue in his ear, tickling the little hairs on his earlobe, let it slide around his jaw to his chin, follow it up towards his mouth and start sucking his lower lip. It’s warm. Then I let go and keep sliding, my lips stroking his day-old stubble. His whole body has warmed at contact and his muscles flex. And for every bit of him I lick and kiss, he shrinks a little before me, as if I’m rubbing him out with my lips, as if his face is disappearing into mine and only the skin remains, white and shiny like the empty sundial in front of City Hall.

  Seasnails

  THE BREWERY STANK of cigarette smoke, whisky breath and last night’s sweat. I stood by the sink and closed my eyes, felt my head burning and tried to imagine that it was the memories of Pym’s body catching fire, that he crumpled like paper and withered into a little lump. When I opened my eyes again the air was just as heavy and the memories just as strong. The tap water tasted thick and salty. I imagined the sink filling up with starfish and shells.

  ‘So, what happened between Pym and Jo?’ Carral was standing behind me, a glass in her hand. I hadn’t heard her approach.

  ‘Good morning to you, too.’

  She smiled and prodded my arm.

  ‘Come on. Admit it. You like him.’

  I pulled away from her and went to the fridge, firmly opened the door and took out a carton of apple juice.

  ‘No, I don’t think I do like him.’

  Carral tilted her head. ‘But he liked you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He was writing for you, and then …’

  I poured the juice in a glass and took a big gulp to wash away the salty flavour. The juice tasted faintly of fermentation.

  ‘Did you see what he wrote though? It was pretty weird, and he’s pretty weird,’ I said and wondered if she could see what had happened reflected on me. My body felt see-through, like a jellyfish.

  ‘You were a little harsh,’ she continued.

  ‘And you were sloshed,’ I said. ‘Pym thought you were ill.’

  I took another sip, and the taste brought to mind the rotting apples in the compost. Carral stared back at me and followed the juice sinking down my clear jellyfish throat.

  ‘Come on, I was just drunk,’ she said, but for a while she looked thoughtful, and the next time she spoke she sounded hesitant. ‘I don’t remember anything from after we sat at the table.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said.

  In a way, that was true. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened after Carral had gone to bed. I remembered Pym’s body, the taste of his skin, and my head chanting this is it Johanna, it’s happening, but nothing else. My body wasn’t sore, like I’d read it should be after you have sex for the first time. Everything felt like normal between my legs, no pain. I couldn’t find any trace of his body in me, didn’t smell anything unfamiliar when I put my fingers under my trousers lining and smelt them afterwards.

  Carral and I spent the rest of the morning on the mezzanine in silence. She seemed calmer and healthier than she’d been in days, dipping pieces of bread into a soft-boiled egg and drinking milk from a large glass. Her skin was dry and smooth again, her nipples as usual hidden behind layers of cotton. No more words were exchanged about the Pym episode, but the previous evening was still stuck between us. I looked up frequently and would catch her watching me, and we’d study each other’s faces for a brief moment before returning to our books.

  Afternoon came. Carral read Moon Lips and sucked her index finger. I tried to read Introductory Mycology, but kept just staring at the opening pages. It listed fungi parts, reeling them off almost like a nursery rhyme, and while I read the new words I imagined Pym’s build: Fruit bodies (forearms), hyphae (freckles), mycelium (chest hair), chitin (the firm bulge pushing against me under his jeans), but I couldn’t get any further. When I tried to remember what Pym looked like naked, what his dick looked like, all I could think of was a passage from Moon Lips:

  She touched his member for the first time. It was silky-soft and stiff at the same time.

  The words had been branded into my mind, surrogates for the memory of Pym I couldn’t access, a memory that might amount to nothing. And around me the brewery smelled of whisky, sour sweat and Pym’s freckled salami skin. The salty taste from the tap water lingered in my throat. It was as if the whole brewery, its walls and pipes, were trying to convince me it had in fact happened when my body wasn’t persuasive.

  Next to me Carral was trying to separate the pages of Moon Lips. She must have got to the part with the stain. Once she’d slid a knife between the pages and they came apart, she turned the page and sighed softly. The article in front of me displayed colourful images of thick mushroom stems and caps, but I couldn’t read at all anymore, just sat and listened to her breath, guessing how far she’d got. I didn’t notice her moving until her face almost touched mine.

  ‘I think that’s him,’ she said. ‘Should we open?’

  Someone had knocked on the door.

  ‘Did I come too quickly?’ Pym asked. ‘I mean, too early, I mean …’

  He’d showered and dressed. His breath still smelled faintly of whisky, an odour partly concealed by an overpowering aftershave. His biceps were hidden under a checked shirt. I felt my mouth dry up, my tongue shrink.

  ‘Right now is …’ I said, but I couldn’t continue, and next to me Carral said teasingly:

  ‘Back for more?’ Then she smiled and continued: ‘Just kidding. Of course! Nice to see you. By the way, you have to help us remember last night, because I can’t remember anything, and Jo isn’t telling.’

  Pym hesitated.

  ‘We were just drunk,’ I said. My voice was hoarse.

  ‘Yes, that was it, I guess,’ he said with a tentative smile. ‘I don’t know if I have a better version.’

  I stared intensely at the ground, but I knew he was looking at me. I could feel his eyes glide over my cheeks, neck and chest. I crossed my arms to cover my breasts.

  We went in before him. He sat politely on a kitchen chair and pushed his hair away from his face. My skin felt see-through again.

  ‘I brought this,’ he said and got out a rolled-up notebook from his pocket, putting it on the table. His fingers had left shining grease stains on the cover.

  ‘Is this your novel?’ Carral asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s not that long. It’s just a short book. It takes a long time to write verse.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Do you want to read it?’ he asked and looked over at me, then at the book. His whisky breath intensified, became sweeter, more detailed. He thrust his fleshy sword into her tight warm sheath – the passage from Moon Lips sang inside my
head.

  ‘I don’t know …’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ Carral said.

  ‘It’s kind of about you two. Or people like you.’

  I looked at the notebook, and it made me sick, just like those vague, waving memories from last night made me sick. My jaw tensed.

  ‘Do I create the world?’ I asked.

  Pym smiled gently, shrugged. ‘It’s kind of feminist at least.’

  I got up.

  ‘You should probably leave then, so we can read.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  He looked a little hurt. A muscle contraction throbbed in one of his wrists, under his skin like a little caged animal, and when he got up from the kitchen chair he looked shrunken. I picked up the book, pulled my fingers across the cover. It was a lot bigger in my hands than in his. The paper was faintly yellowed.

  ‘Thanks, then,’ I said without looking up, and when I eventually did look up, I was alone in the kitchen. Carral was back on the mezzanine with Moon Lips. Later I got the sense that more had been said before they left, as if something had dissolved and disappeared before it reached me.

  Outside the day was paper-white and dry. I walked down the street, stepped over the asphalt under lampposts that were blind in the daylight. At the top of the winding silo stairway, I stood by a shattered window looking over at the brewery roof. Inside on the kitchen table Pym’s notebook lay, still unopened, and I thought about it as I leant over the empty window frame and spat a warm white glob down onto the street. That was Pym I just spat out, I thought, and that idea helped a little. I kept spitting, trying to form a little puddle on the concrete below. The drops hit the ground with faint splats, and I could hear them humming: ‘Pym … Pym … Pym …’ Afterwards I walked to the brewery and looked at Carral, still reading Moon Lips on the mezzanine. Her head was so close to the book that the paper grazed her nose when she turned the page. I could see a faint damp stain on one of her breasts.

  When I went to get ready for bed that night I’d got my period. I sat on the toilet staring at thick blood clots dripping down into the bowl from my crotch. The blood was old, like it usually is on the first day of my period, and the drops had coagulated into little sticky black lumps. It has always frightened me that I can’t stop the blood. It just drips and drips from me to a rhythm I can’t control, and now, too, every drip was wrapped in an echo from the porcelain, from the plasterboard, from the firm concrete walls. They whispered to me – Jo … Jo … Jo … Jo … – as if I was leaking into the room and dissolving, flowing from my own bloody crotch like black juice from a rotten apple core.

  Prune Skin

  I WOKE UP on the rough floorboards of the mezzanine, having rolled off the mattress. Perhaps the fall woke me. Possibly, I’d lain there some time. I seemed to recall a thump and creak as my body hit the floor, but perhaps these sense impressions were something I’d dreamed up. The sound formed a long, dark and winding stairway of resonance that I fell down. Fragments of the dream I had woken from gleamed around me. The hum from the fridge downstairs sounded like onrushing waves.

  When I lay back on the mattress and closed my eyes, my dream seemed clearer to me. I had been looking over the mezzanine wall and down into the kitchen, but it wasn’t a kitchen, it was a foggy, beautiful forest with pine trees and blueberry bushes. Between the trees a group of sweaty male workers had been draining thick, smoking fluid from the tree trunks into wooden barrels. It must have been beer. The smell was heady, and the steam had filled the whole room and made my skin moist and sticky. Suddenly the workers had all turned toward me; they all had Pym’s face. They started to sing. Their voices sounded like the rush of a waterfall. The song stuck to the inside of my throat, as if it really was liquid, as if I was a beer barrel.

  ‘Jo,’ they sang, ‘Jo, Jo, Jo …’

  ‘Jo?’ something whispered in the dark.

  I must have fallen asleep again. Half of me was wet. The skin down one side was warm and damp.

  ‘Carral?’ I whispered.

  She was behind me on the mattress, this time close to me and naked, and I could feel her crying. I turned around, fumbled in the dark, found her head and stroked her hair. Her scalp was wet.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Her upper body undulated with sobs.

  First I thought I was soaked in sweat, but when I woke up properly I recognised the sharp, bitter smell of urine. A thin, warm stream trickled against my thigh from Carral’s body.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said and sat upright. My top and pants were dripping wet; my duvet warm, wet and heavy.

  ‘I can’t …’ Carral whispered. I felt the stream on my thigh become more powerful, as if she had given up trying to hold it in. The liquid trickled in between my legs. ‘Can’t … hold it …’

  I began to adjust to the light; her contours became clearer. Beads of sweat were glimmering on her forehead, on her throat, neck, hip-bones. Small poppy seeds.

  ‘I’m sorry I came up here. I was so scared … and so weak.’

  ‘It’ll be OK. Do you have a fever?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Her voice was a whimper.

  ‘It’s fine. Let’s go get changed. We’ll have a shower and sleep in the living room.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, but remained unmoving on the mattress. I felt her nod slowly with her face in the pillow.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No … I’m just so tired.’

  ‘Should we wait a bit?’

  ‘Yeah. Till I can get up.’ She started to sob again.

  So I lay there for a while as the pee soaked into my mattress, the smell of urine intensifying. I continued to stroke Carral’s body, first her cheek, puffy and wet, and then her hand. Then I was braver, stroking her naked back, letting my fingers walk her ribs like rungs on a ladder up to her throat. Where everything on Pym’s body bulged, as if something under his skin was always trying to tear its way out, Carral’s skin was the pristine surface of water. She let me stroke her, lying completely still.

  Later I moved close to her side again. Our bodies dried-up like a crystal fist.

  ‘Jo? Could you tell me something nice?’ Carral asked after a while. Her voice was shaky.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything … A story from Norway or something.’

  ‘I’ll try. I’ll tell you about the toughest girl in my primary school class. Do you wanna hear about her?’

  ‘That sounds nice.’

  ‘She was called Emma,’ I said, ‘and one time I visited hers, she asked me if I dared get into bed with her naked.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Seven, maybe? I was in year one. We didn’t start school till we were seven in Norway when I was little. Anyway, I said I’d do it, I wanted her to think I was as tough as she was.’

  ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘A little. We undressed and lay down on her bed. And then Emma said that we could get pregnant.’

  ‘By lying there like that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Carral chuckled softly.

  ‘Did you believe her?’

  ‘No. I knew about sex, but she sounded dead sure. And, in a way, the toughest girl is always right. So I got scared, and I put my clothes back on.’

  ‘Did you get pregnant?’ Carral wasn’t whispering anymore. I could feel her chest moving against my back in shallow laughter.

  ‘Not that I know.’

  When we got up and put all the wet things in the washer, my skin was cold and sticky, like fish skin. Even after showering I smelled faintly of urine. On the sofa cushions, a fidgety Carral in my arms, I wondered why I’d been so scared in Emma’s bed back in year one. I thought about how later that same night I had sat by the dinner table with all my clothes on, even my coat. Still I’d felt see-through. I’d imagined that I could feel something growing in my belly, something that wouldn’t become a proper foetus, but something much worse: a blackened, dead, and rotten fruit.
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  The Honey Mushroom

  THAT WAS HOW WINTER came to Aybourne: rotting seaweed dried and crumbled to frozen yarn-lumps down by the beach. From the window spot on the mezzanine I saw the car park empty and fill, then empty and fill up again, and the passengers waiting at the tram stop wore thicker coats and more layers. The high street in town was decked with fairy lights shaped like snow crystals. But the snow didn’t come, like in Norway and, from where I sat, the window frame seemed more and more like the frame around an old faded photograph: the grass outside yellowish brown, the tree trunks grey and the sky white. Even the laundry on the clothes-horse lost its colours. Once I was certain I’d seen Pym down on the road, but each time he turned toward me his face looked washed out and empty.

  As winter settled in outside, we were set upon by summer inside the brewery, as if the walls separated not only the inside from the outside, but divided two different climates. On the floor grass grew along the furring. Yellow moss patches grew from the cracks in the cement. White spiders spun shining fur around the beams and, because of a spreading layer of greenish-white mould, the breadcrumbs on the kitchen counter grew into a little carpet. I tried to trim the tufts and wash away the crawling maggots, but Carral cuddled up against me, took the washcloth and the scissors from my hands, and shook her head.

  ‘That’ll just make it worse,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell the landlord, they can hire people from a cleaning company. That’s how we do it here.’

  But nothing was done, and Carral seemed fine about it. She no longer thought the insects were gross. She let an ant crawl over her hand in peace while reading Moon Lips, and she didn’t move when one of the white spiders crawled over the hollow of her neck. She just sat there with an index finger on her lips, reading. The next time I looked up from my book and over at her, the spider was gone and her mouth half-open.

  I kept going to lectures, and every time I left, it felt like I crossed a threshold between dream and reality, sleep and wakefulness. Outside was cold and clear, and returning to the flat at night was like entering a vast warm cocoon. Carral seldom left anymore. Increasingly she had become part of the damp brewery heat. Her temporary job at Sachs & Sachs had ended, and she had not found a new one yet.