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“Did the Ministry provide the flute?” he asked the back of my head. “Yes. I told them it might be grounding for you.” “Oh. Thank you. You—knew I played the flute?” “A couple of extant letters from you and referring to you mention it.” “Did you read the letters that mentioned my mania for arson and my lurid history of backstreet goose-wrestling?”
He took some comfort from the phrase “fresh air,” at least, once we’d stepped out onto the heath. He was far more impressed by germ theory than he had been by electricity. By the time we’d crossed the first of the early-morning dog walkers, I was enthusiastically describing the cause of tooth cavities, with hand motions. “I don’t think it’s very polite of you to say there are germs in my mouth.” “There are germs in everyone’s mouths.” “Speak for yourself.” “There’ll be germs on your shoes and under your nails. It’s just how the world works. An aseptic environment is. Well. It’s a dead one.” “I
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“When will I meet the other expats?” “Soon—” “Am I to be idle for this entire year? You do still have a naval service?” “We expected you would need more time to adjust—” “Is the sea still wet? Can one still float ships upon it?”
He reminds me of Lieutenant Irving.” “How so?” “Soft-spoken, shy, awash in a grand quantity of private torment.”
Never tell a workplace or a lover anything that might cause them to terminate your relationship until you’re ready to leave.
An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.
Yes, tomorrow Gore will go out hunting again. One thing God has granted him is an excellent aim. He is very good at killing things. Things, sometimes people. He pulls a trigger and knows himself loved.
It didn’t take us long to dash up against another issue with acclimatization, which was that the expats didn’t make sense to each other either. Nineteen-sixteen was as incomprehensible to Sixteen-forty-five as I was. Everyone was paddling in their own era-locked pool of loneliness.
He got on. He moved about a meter. He fell off. “Ow. Will you mount yours and give a demonstration of how this is supposed to work, please?” I swung my leg over my bike. Since living with Graham, I’d started wearing skirts with hemlines that fell below the knee, so this was a performance. “Very unladylike.” “Don’t worry, my womb is firmly strapped in.” He flushed from his forehead to his throat, but continued, in his usual mild voice, “And would Artemis be so kind as to demonstrate the driving of her team?” I pushed off and sailed down the incline. I didn’t even need to pedal. Warm wind tugged
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Graham blew smoke out through his nose reflectively. “I see,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s fair to call him ‘grim,’ though you wouldn’t be the first to say it. He was a severe disciplinarian, it’s true. Held grudges. But he was a very lonely person. Romantic, too, which made his loneliness worse.”
Arthur was happy and flushed. He was one of those unusual extroverts who have all the attributes of an introvert, save that they like being around other people. He had a gift for gentleness too, one of the rarest virtues in any gender and especially in the kind of man Arthur was supposed to be.
This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.
Navy-blue nights wrapped the glum and shortening days like a bandage. Fine capillaries of winter threaded through the autumn air.
Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions every day. A twelve-second delay, a slip of the tongue, and suddenly your life is on a new road.
You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up.
It was full dark and starting to rain by the time I was about two miles from the house. Thunder sounded. The big cutlery cupboard in the sky had fallen off the wall.
My sister maintained that her work was a sort of reclamation, a space-taking practice in protest of a childhood spent in squeezed spaces. That all she was telling was the truth, as if the Truth was a sort of purifier that turned mud and plasma into clean water by judicious application. I didn’t know who read her writing, other than people who already agreed with her. To me, it felt like she’d chosen to hang a target around our necks. I didn’t understand how anyone could find power in a show of vulnerability. Power was influence, was money, was the person holding the gun.
The frost turned sloppy. Cold gray days drove down on the city. Between the sullen rain and the cloy of the street-slung cobwebs, I felt as if I was forever in a spit-filled, cavity-bogged mouth.
Later that afternoon, he came in from whatever errand he had been on and handed me a small plastic bottle. “What’s this?” “Vitamin D tablets. I think you should take them.” “Oh. Thanks.” “You’re welcome. You should dress now. It’s three o’clock.” “Give it a few more hours and I’ll be appropriately dressed for bedtime.”
He considered me, his expression as mild and unreadable as ever. If I’d had space for despair, my desire for him and his cool lack of desire would have triggered—like blood following a cut—despair, but I was at capacity and couldn’t feel worse. I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank, and he went upstairs to practice the flute with studied, A major good humor.
I slept deeply and briefly, a plunge pool of REM.
As with every time I experienced clement weather, I was overcome with the sense that my troubles and pains had been put on hold, and would resume after an interval break in which I could, spiritually speaking, use the bathroom and get a drink and generally fix myself.
This is what the road to hell is like, I thought. Not paved with good intentions, but tarmacked and screaming with vehicles driven by people who don’t know and don’t care that Arthur is dead.
She broke off, her lips shaking. She rolled her eyes upward quickly but she could no more have shoveled a waterfall than she could have stopped that tear falling.
I have never taken sides, never leaped wholeheartedly into one scale or the other; nor do I realize disappointments, provided they are severe, until the occasion is long past. Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.
Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.
