Paradise Rot Page 9

  Her hip-bone stuck to my thigh. I moved my leg, but as our bodies slipped apart, I heard her body make a sound, not a normal sound, a fantastical sound, something like the sound of a nail breaking, of a bone fracturing, or flesh being torn apart. I closed my eyes and imagined damp dark beads rolling from her finger flesh, out of her mouth, her hip socket, vulva.

  Carral continued: ‘Imagine if the world was like Pym’s book.’

  She was so close that her damp breath wet my earlobe as she spoke.

  ‘You mean your book, like what you wrote in the book.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In your book the tough girl would’ve been right,’ I said. ‘People would have grown together just by lying next to each other.’

  When I closed my eyes, I thought that we really were in Pym’s book, and asked Carral, ‘What happened with Pym that night?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jo. I don’t remember that much. Just that Pym came in with me, and that I read his book while he was there, and then he was gone, Jo, he wasn’t there, and I was awake, and it was day. And I felt so sick, as though I’d devoured him, and the book, and everything that happened.’

  ‘In your book you would’ve done.’

  I imagined Pym and Carral as I’d seen them through the plasterboard wall that night. I saw their naked bodies, Carral’s white skin and Pym’s red face. And now I could see things I couldn’t see then: Pym’s tongue dissolving and melting like cotton candy in Carral’s mouth. Carral’s body opening and devouring him, slipping over his body and covering it like a thick, soft dress. I saw this in my head with eyes closed and I saw it when I opened them, because on Carral’s skin I could see little freckles, Pym’s freckles, pushing back and forth,

  there, not there, there, not there.

  Her eyes were closed, and when she opened them she put her arms around me. I whispered to her, ‘Everything can come into me now,’ and she answered, ‘I’m coming.’

  I want to tell her that I’m scared, that this is too much, but instead I put my lips on hers like she put hers on his that night: I bite and suck them, chew and gnaw, suck Pym from her and into me, blow him back into her in big, clear bubbles where I can see our faces mirrored, Carral and Jo, two sets of lips sucking the same man in and out of each other’s mouths. Here lay two Siamese twins, bound together by a thick freckled masculine sinew. And when something pushes in between my labia I’m torn and I scream, blood trickles down my thigh like warm dark fruit juice. Whatever’s in there twists in all the way, crawls up to my black apple and bites, and that’s how we are bound together:

  Carral and Jo,

  Carral and Jo together:

  A black, dead and rotten fruit.

  Afterwards Carral rests on my shoulder blade, hipbone, femoral neck, backside of my knee. From the roof, from the walls, from all corners, I can hear the sap dripping with its silver-shimmer echo, and I think that it drips with us, for us, from us, and that I have to leave.

  Together we sleep like unicorns.

  Under the Sea

  THIS IS HOW I REMEMBER my last day at the brewery:

  I open the front door with my suitcase in my hand and I can’t find the world outside. No town, no view, no lights and no islands. No asphalt or concrete buildings, no dead trees. Nothing. No air. Only one thing exists: a foggy darkness so thick I think it’s a dark wall of water pushing against my hand, threatening to submerge me, as if the house is the cabin of an old ship sinking into the sea.

  Carral is awake. I’ve run a bath for her. She says, ‘Stay here a little longer. Just one night.’

  ‘OK, one night. But tomorrow I’ll be gone,’ I answer.

  ‘Are you sure you want to leave?’

  ‘I have to.’

  She cries, and sobs the same words again and again: ‘Little Jo. Stay with me.’

  Her voice follows me like a yellow beam of light when I cross the kitchen floor and up the stairs to the landing. The chandelier trembles, and the glass stalactites are dripping. I sit by the living room window and study my own mirror image. Glowing blue-white lips. Behind them I see the dimmed shadows of Aybourne’s streets and towers.

  I imagine the city under water: only a few church spires, silo pipes and the City Hall clock tower reach the surface. The roofs continue into the sea in broken lines, mirror images seen from below. On the other side of the brewery the mountainside disappears into the water’s surface, and the silo organ pipes gurgle, barely above the salt water. The ocean floor is covered in white, a layer of matte limestone made from billions of white spiders – no – bones and skeletons from forest animals and tenants – or is it beer foam?

  Inside the house there’s still air, but the walls are dark, soaked with water like a treasure chest. Water drips through the keyhole. And slowly, so slowly that I almost don’t notice, the sea covers the grass tufts on the floor like a glittering salt carpet and starts rising while it whispers:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes;

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  The same was whispered to me about Carral, about her skin, which will become apple peel, and about Pym, who melted into cotton candy on her lips.

  At the same time I imagine the tide ebbing and flowing over us, and the foamy waves breaking against the silo pipes. Through the night the words Carral wrote in Pym’s book fade in and out of my mind. The lines write and then erase themselves in front of me. I sit and listen to the waves. I brush away barnacles from the window. Maybe the sea is already within this house, as it covered all of Aybourne millions of years ago. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to breathe, and my body feels light, as though it’s floating. Maybe we have been living among ghosts all this time, the shipwrecked and the brewery workers. I never saw them, only Carral.

  Carral sleeps in the bathtub. Her eyes are closed, mouth open. Under her white skin I can still see Pym’s freckles and Pym’s cheekbones. Pym’s red eyes flicker behind her eyelids. Inside her mouth I see the honey fungus, like a rotting black tongue. She lifts a hand, grabs my jumper and pulls me down towards her, and I pull back. Tide, tide, don’t come here!

  Carral? I’ll finish your fairy tale. You forgot to mention the snake. In the story the apple poisons the snake, and Eve packs her books and moves out of paradise. The End.

  This is how it has to end, so I carefully pick the honey fungus out of her mouth. Then I bend over and put my lips on her lips:

  first I draw Pym out of her,

  the scene from the mezzanine,

  and the kiss in the bar

  I draw out the night by the kitchen table.

  Then I draw the nights in my bed out of her,

  Our legs twisting together,

  Eve and the apple,

  the story of the hardened girl:

  And then I blow,

  I fill her body with air until not a single trace of

  Pym, or me, remains.

  I’m leaving now, Carral.

  Then everything starts rushing around me, as if I’ve pulled a plug, as if all the saltwater is being drained out of the beer barrels, the bathtub, the house. Carral doesn’t open her eyes.

  I cross the bathroom floor and open the door. I stay standing there for a while. Then I go outside. When I walk down the street, it’s a struggle, as if I have roots in the house that are stretched long behind me, and no matter how far I go, no matter how many corners I turn on the way to Franziska’s flat-share by the beach, they are stuck. They stretch, get thinner and thinner until they are as fine as thread. Slowly but surely I imagine that the brewery crumbles and follows me, threading itself on my cord as though it’s a house built from small gleaming beads. The front door reaches me first, then the floor panels from the kitchen, the enamel from the bathtub and the steel covering from the taps, glass-splinters from the chandelier and the apple cores from
the compost. And Carral follows too. She crumbles in the bathtub. Tooth by tooth, nail by nail, bone by bone. And new beads grow, threading themselves on my roots. The beads appear from her mouth and eyes, her crotch, hip socket and fingertips.

  Epilogue

  I IMAGINE CARRAL behind me that day, while I pack clothes and books. She stands by the windowsill as if she is on a long quay. Her body is wrapped in faint white fog, blurring her silhouette. I barely remember her, and I imagine that she could be gone at any moment, swallowed by the fog, but she remains in the same position. Later, when I don’t hear from her and try in vain to find her name online or in phone books, I imagine that this is a moment I’ve duplicated again and again, like a scratched record, but right now the moment lasts so long I worry she’ll disappear. If she would just turn her head, blink, shift her weight from one leg to the other, but she doesn’t. The silk dress clings to her body in the wind. Everything is quiet, so quiet I later forget why we came here, why we are here.

  Only the wind moves her. And then she is gone.

  There,

  When I write this, I think that there are two versions of myself and just one managed to get out, first out of the brewery, then out of the town, out of the country, back to Norway. The other is still there, with the other ghosts in the house, shut in while the storm and the sea tears at the walls outside.

  I bend over this white sheet and pull her out, the one who is left in the brewery, pick her up from the bottom:

  Arms,

  swollen fingers,

  broken skull,

  burst lungs.

  Her face is white, covered in lime, algae skeletons, beer froth, and sea foam.

  I stroke her head, smooth and bare and shining: a glistening doorknob without a door.