Salt Slow

by Julia Armfield

‘She would have liked you, I’m sure,’ my Mother tells me, as if it isn’t generally expected that people ought, at the very least, to tolerate their grandchildren.

I had found that people seemed to speak more freely in the night-time – a strange release of inhibitions that came with talking in the dark.

Sleeping gave me time off from myself – a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt.

That sometimes I lay down on my bed and imagined unconsciousness, lay on one arm and then another until they lost all feeling and I could at least enjoy the sensation of sleep in some small part of my body.

In the divorce, my Mother cited the impossibility of living with a man whose approach to life was so ineradicably ghoulish. In return, my Father cited my Mother’s treatment of life as though it were someone unpleasant she was stuck sitting next to on the bus.

Clouded with morning, his body is a curious jigsaw.

Mornings have been the hardest things to adapt to; company after three decades of waking up alone. She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at four p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.

In the fifteen minutes after he leaves, the relief of space falls flush against the greater relief of missing him.

The key, she has been taught by the books she reads, is to love a man slightly less than he loves you. That way you remain in some sense unreachable. An inch above the floor.

She had lain there confused, dead man in her bed. Had realised that there could be no way of loving sensibly if every morning started with the relief of finding him still alive.

No one, she is sure, is capable of loving all the time, without interruptions or reprieves. Occasionally, there will simply be days when he smells wrong, when she thinks she spots something different inside him, and then she will push him away when he tries to kiss her, wipe her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘Difficult,’ she had said, apparently to herself. ‘Trying to keep a man. Always safer not to look directly at them.’

In the evenings after our dates, I took to smearing my hands with lotion to force myself to wait before replying to her messages.

In the morning, I told the woman messaging me on the dating site that I couldn’t talk to her just yet; I was sweeping the bones of a girl I had loved off the kitchen floor.

The day they find the lobsters is a bitter one, curling up at its edges like the pages of a book dropped and hastily retrieved from water.

They had spent their time together watching movies and fucking and arguing about the movies they watched, which had turned out to be a thin but workable foundation on which to hang the best part of five years.

During the days, she went on long walks along the beach and tried to isolate a clear emotion for the accidental thing which had bled out of her as if aware of how unwanted it had been.

Her feet are growing webbed, although they don’t talk about that. Sometimes at night he takes his apple knife to the delicate membranes between her toes, but they don’t talk about that either.

When they had first fallen in love, she had kissed him with an intensity which imagined him already halfway out of the door.