Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

Transformation is a membrane-fragile magic, easily disturbed by a breath.

Nobody, at the beginning, believes they will debase themselves for love. Nobody believes in anything else but joy.

Are you sure there is nothing else, the priest asked me once in frustration, and I wish I could have said yes, I wish I could have done so much more when there was more to be done, I wish I had been able to tell him I have sinned and sinned and sinned and will do it again, gladly, until there is no redemption left.

I think you were horrified at the idea that he was enough for you, that it was what you needed all along. That a good man was the solution to whatever plagued you, so your mother was right, and the nuns and the matrons, the procession of humourless bitches traipsing through your life with all that dry advice and no magic.

I know the formula for all of these films, it’s always the same, he explained. There’s a comfort in that, don’t you think? His voice was low, flat, like a hypnotist’s. Perhaps you should read a book instead, I told him. If you’re so bored by all of this.

I think about the tracking of poisons or dyes in the body, Violet, how the colour blooms through the veins, how the pathways all light up. I try to understand what I was to you but it’s all tangled up. How trite it was, in the end, you playing at transcendence like it would save you from the little domesticities of your lot, the things you felt beneath you, the things that were only for women like me.

I picture you sometimes as a set of Russian dolls, each layer revealing nothing except a tiny, weaker version of yourself, at the end only hollowness.

It’s risky to let myself become so drunk, it lets in that strange and searching light, the possibilities of what I remember opening up in a way I know could destroy me, and yet increasingly I want to look towards it, that light, to see the shape of what has happened and what could have happened up ahead of me on the road, just out of reach.

You’re the one I wanted all along, he said again though I hadn’t asked him to, an improvisation I could accept, by then I was in an instinctive state, absorbed in the white light of it, I didn’t even need you any more. This is what I reach through sex, these days—forgetting you through inhabiting you, something approaching obliteration.

Down by the lake, the sound of the festival distant from two fields away, I leaned against a tree and cried without really knowing why. Though it was too dark to see, I felt surreptitious movements of bodies around me, the sound of my misery driving them away in panic, and I wanted to tell them to stay, stay—lie down in the churned-up earth, do what you want, none of it means anything.

I hated her for that, actually, and I silently begged her to say more things like that, to give me fewer reasons to love her, to stoke my scorn until it burned me out of helplessness, I already knew that nothing else would do it.

I can’t tell if we are at the point where a good love turns bad, if we already passed it, or if it is up ahead for them still at this point. I don’t know really where love begins, though I’ve been trying to pin it down, and I know even less where it ends.

There is a waitress with yellow hair who reminds him of me, a country girl—woman really, older than she first seems—and he asks her what time her shift finishes, and he’s there waiting. They walk through the night. He folds her over like paper in a dark alley. The sweet bad smell of the bins nearby. She says yes, she says no, she says nothing. Her heart spills out redly onto her blouse, her blouse remains immaculate white. He marries her, he never sees her again, there’s a small moon-faced child with his shock of dark hair, he leaves nothing behind, and he can’t do any of this if he’s in a grave, though I can’t imagine him dead, and I think they would have told me if there was a grave, if he were wrapped in loam, the beautiful bones of his hands bare and no longer grasping, no longer around your throat or mine.

I tried not to think about what I was doing. I might be afraid of being forgotten, but at the same time I do not want to leave any proof behind. I live lightly in my little room.

Nobody knows where I am, he said, returning to the camera. Nobody saw me come in, nobody but you knows I’m here, these photos will be the only proof. And each of us would tell it differently, I imagine, if not immediately then in the future. Click. That’s why I like my camera. It’s objective. It provides me with a clear record, but even so, nobody will really know what went on inside this room except us, they’ll only be able to infer that you sat on a bed with the light falling prettily like that, and even my memory of it will be different, I imagine, after some time has passed. Click. Maybe I will forget this on purpose, or maybe I will remember it for the rest of my days. It’s hard to tell what an image will come to mean, what a person will mean, when you are still seeing it for the first time, and some things you always see as if for the first time.

I memorized him there, making my own image of the two of us alone in the daylight, the long brown expanse of his limbs, suddenly white at the ankle, at mid-thigh. Not a step-by-step archiving, the way I used to with you, Violet—obsessive remembering driven by the fear of forgetting, the fear of missing some crucial clue—but holding one moment lightly, like this, with the curtains moving. One frame, bordered by dark. I already knew that I would never see him again.

We don’t want to seem ugly to ourselves and even less so to those we care for, but I do believe there is an involuntary intimacy in doing the worst possible thing to somebody you love, the exquisite, weightless feeling of pulling out one of the little pins in my stomach and sliding it carefully back in.

I stood in the shop, full of desire sticky and red as berries boiled down in the pan, terrified she might be sick, and greedy at the thought too.

He went into the bedroom, I followed him in, I put my hands on his back to feel warm skin through the cloth. Please, I asked him again. Our shadows danced around each other on the wall, I was almost chasing him around the room.

Could it have really been that way? I still want to believe that it could. Colour bursting behind your eyes when you finally dared to close them. The smell of his skin filling the room. When you came there was a clean break in your thoughts, a pure white zone of light, as if you had been beheaded. You had been looking for this feeling your whole life. You knew already that it would leave you. I wonder if you are looking for it still.

What I am trying to tell you, I think, is that I have been the most myself in these moments of shame, drawn inexorably down into myself, everything in my body in alignment. What I am trying to tell you is that when you finally get your face into the dirt, it can feel like a relief. I know it wasn’t like that for you. Shame was another dress you tried on, discarded, lavish in your waste, a curiosity to be played at. It meant nothing to you. I didn’t understand that for a long time, but I know it now, here, in my little room by the sea where the truth comes to me in waves, as the pieces fall with determination into place.

In the hotel room I took off my dress, examined how the little-worn girdle from years ago tugged me in at the middle, examined the long piece of flesh that was my body, and I felt hope, and I felt contempt, and mainly I felt grief at the waste of all the years, how much my body could have been touched, and yet how rarely it was touched. Perhaps the years should have preserved me like a thing in a museum, but bodies don’t work like that; if a body isn’t touched it falters faster, the yearning is visible at the surface, much as you might try to hide it.

I was humiliated, but I wasn’t dead yet.

She hit me again, much more forcefully, and again I recoiled and clenched and bit down on the bedding, and again I waited for transformation. I waited for my skin to fall from me in ribbons and for somebody else to be revealed, but there was only more pain, deeper but somehow even more unremarkable than before, and this time there was also grief that the pain revealed nothing to me, that perhaps there was nothing to be revealed at all.

They bore you towards the river, hands clutching around your limbs. The men with the nets were too far away to stop them. Did you fight, Violet, or did you go limp? What did you see there, waiting for you in the water? Perhaps the river would boil, perhaps you would shrink into a bird and fly away, perhaps you were as curious as anyone to know what would come next. Perhaps it was a relief. The mystery of the world laid out for you in vivid colour, one last time.

I knew it in the cinema when he told me that an image was just a moment. Sometimes I think he might have been right after all. That without proof, without anything to touch or hold on to, forgetting will happen one day like waking up from a dream, only traces left, puzzling even to myself.

I think about how desire grows in the spaces around the known, where things are at their most and least real, where the terror of all the possibilities fracturing out through our lives is suspended, momentarily, so we can look them in the eye for once, and isn’t that what we are searching for when we debase ourselves for love, one moment of certainty in this strange and beautiful world.

Eat of it and be transformed. Everything is shot through with colour. If you are going to see, you might as well see clearly. There will always be someone to make an account of your tragedy, even if it is just yourself in the end, recording, noting, the crimes against your person, the various ways you have been done or undone.