The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales Read online

  The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales

  Winner of the Scott Prize

  Twenty tales of lust and loss. These stories feature clockwork hearts, lascivious queens, paper men, island circuses, and a flooded world. On the island of Skye, an antlered girl and a tiger-tailed boy resolve never to be friends – but can they resist their unique connection? In an alternative 19th-century Paris, a love triangle emerges between a man, a woman, and a coin-operated boy. A teenager deals with his sister’s death by escaping from their tiny Scottish island – but will she let him leave? In 1920s New Orleans, a young girl comes of age in her mother’s brothel. Some of these stories are radical retellings of classic tales, some are modern-day fables, but all explore substitutions for love.

  Praise for Kirsty Logan

  “A thrilling walk through a brilliant mind, full of unexpected connections and utterly original leaps across voice, structure, genre. Truly anarchic artistically but always true emotionally, and delivered with the skill of a virtuoso. Read it in one sitting for the thrill then read it again for the smarts.” —BIDISHA

  “Kirsty Logan is an exquisite writer who possesses the uncanny ability to make even the most mundane detail beautifully compelling. If you want to be captivated, if you want to be utterly taken, reach for this book and don’t let go.” —ROXANE GAY

  “(With The Rental Heart Kirsty Logan has formed) a hybrid of steam punk, retro romanticism and queer fiction – a Frankensteinian form that has a life of its own.” —EWAN MORRISON

  The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales

  KIRSTY LOGAN is an award-winning writer based in Scotland. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies all over the world, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, displayed in galleries, and translated into French, Japanese and Spanish. Kirsty has received fellowships from Hawthornden Castle and Brownsbank Cottage, and was the first writer-in-residence at West Dean College. She has previously worked as a bookseller, and is now a literary editor and freelance writer.

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  The Gracekeepers (Harvill Secker)

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Kirsty Logan, 2014

  The right of Kirsty Logan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2014

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978 1 84471 990 0 electronic

  to Mama Logan

  Acknowledgements

  ‘The Rental Heart’ first published in PANK #4.

  ‘Underskirts’ first published in Bridport Prize: The Winners 2010 (Redcliffe Press).

  ‘A Skulk of Saints’ first published as ‘Underlying’ in Algebra #2.

  ‘The Last 3,600 Seconds’ first published at circlet.com.

  ‘The Broken West’ first published in Gutter #7.

  ‘Bibliophagy’ first published at elimae.com.

  ‘Coin-Operated Boys’ first published at fantasybookreview.co.uk.

  ‘Una and Coll are not Friends’, ‘All the Better to Eat You With’, ‘The Light Eater’ and ‘Matryoshka’ all first broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

  ‘Sleeping Beauty’ first published as ‘Beauty’ at annalemma.com.

  ‘Witch’ first published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2011 (Cleis Press).

  ‘The Man From the Circus’ first published at sigriddaughter.com.

  ‘Feeding’ first published as ‘Feed’ in Sushirexia (Freight).

  ‘Origami’ first published in Let’s Pretend (Freight).

  ‘Tiger Palace’ first published in Diva.

  The Rental Heart

  The day after I met Grace – her pierced little mouth, her shitkicker boots, her hands as small as goosebumps writing numbers on my palm. The day after I met her, I went to the heart rental place.

  I hadn’t rented in years, and doubted they would have my preferred model. The window display was different, the hearts sleeker and shinier than I remembered. The first time I had rented it was considered high-tech to have the cogs tucked away; now they were as smooth and seamless as a stone. Some of the new hearts had extras I’d never seen, like timers and standby buttons and customised beating patterns.

  That made me think about Grace, her ear pressed to my sternum, listening to the morse code of her name, and my own heart started to creep up my throat, so I swallowed it down and went into the shop.

  An hour later I was chewing lunch and trying to read the instruction leaflet. They made it seem so complicated, but it wasn’t really. The hearts just clipped in, and as long as you remembered to close yourself up tightly, then they could tick away for years. Decades, probably. The problems come when the hearts get old and scratched: shreds of past loves get caught in the dents, and they’re tricky to rinse out. Even a wire brush won’t do it.

  But the man in the rental place had assured me that this one was factory-fresh, clean as a kitten’s tongue. Those heart rental guys always lied, but I could tell by the heart’s coppery sheen that it hadn’t been broken yet.

  I remembered perfectly well how to fit the heart, but I still read the leaflet to the end as a distraction. A way to not think about how Grace looked when she bit her lip, when she wrote the curls of her number. How she would look later tonight, when she. When we.

  It was very important that I fit the heart before that happened.

  Ten years ago, first heart. Jacob was as solid and golden as a tilled field, and our love was going to last forever, which at our age meant six months. Every time Jacob touched me, I felt my heart thud wetly against my lungs. When I watched him sleep, I felt it clawing up my oesophagus. Sometimes it was hard to speak from the wet weight of it sitting at the base of my tongue. I would just smile and wait for him to start talking again.

  The more I loved him, the heavier my heart felt, until I was walking around with my back bent and my knees cracking from the weight of it. When Jacob left, I felt my heart shatter like a shotgun pellet, shards lodging in my guts. I had to drink every night to wash the shards out. I had to.

  A year later I met Anna. She was dreadlocked, greeneyed, full of verbs. She smelled of rain and revolution. I fell.

  But the parts of me that I wanted to give to Anna were long gone. There was not enough left that was worth giving. The edges of my heart were jagged now, and I did not want to feel those rough edges climbing my throat. I did not love her enough to cough blood. I kept what was left of me close, tucked under the long soft coils of my intestines where Anna wouldn’t see.

  One night, still throbbing, Anna opened her chest. Her heart nestled, a perfect curl of clockwork.

  This is how, she said.

  I could hear its tick against the soft embrace of her lungs, and I bent close to her to smell its metallic sharpness. I wanted.

  The next day she took me
to the heart rental place. I spent a long time pressing my palms against the polished metal until I found one that felt warm against my skin. I made sure that the sharp edges of the cogs were tucked inwards, kept away from the just-healed rawness of my throat.

  Back at Anna’s, she unwrapped the plastic, fitted the heart, closed my chest, took me to bed. Later I watched her sleep and loved her with every cog of my heart.

  When Anna ran off with my best friend, I took the heart back to the rental place. Nothing choked or shattered or weighed me down. It looked just as sleekshiny as when I had first taken it out of the wrapping, and the rental guy gave me my full deposit back. I deleted Anna’s phone number and went out for dinner.

  The next year, when I met Will, I knew what to do. The heart this time was smaller, more compact, and it clipped into place easily. Technology moves fast.

  Will taught me about Boudicea, the golden section, musical intervals, Middle English. I soaked him up like I was cotton wool.

  Sometimes, pre-dawn, I would sneak into the bathroom and open myself to the mirror. The heart reflected Will back at me, secure in its mechanics. I would unclip it, watch it tick in my fist, then put it back before sliding into Will’s arms.

  On our first holiday, I beeped through the airport barriers. I showed my heart and was waved on. It wasn’t until the plane was taxiing that I realised Will had not beeped. I spent the whole flight wire-jawed with my paperback open to page one, unable to stop thinking about the contents of Will’s chest. We never mentioned it; I could not stand to think of his chest cavity all full of wet red flesh.

  When I left Will, I returned the heart again. I couldn’t sleep for the thought of his heart, shot into shards, sticking in his guts, scratching up his gullet.

  After that I rented hearts for Michael, and Rose, and Genevieve. They taught me about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and how to look after a sausage dog. They smelled of petrol and hair oil and sawdust and honeysuckle.

  Soon the heart rental guy started to greet me by name. He gave me a bulk discount and I got invited to his Christmas party. Soon I found that halfway between sleeping and waking, the glint of the rental guy’s gold incisor would flicker at the corners of my eyes. I wondered if he licked the hearts before renting them to me, so molecules of him would be caught down in some tiny hidden cog, merging into my insides.

  The glint of the rental guy in my dreams started to make me uncomfortable, so I switched to a new rental place. There were plenty to choose from, and I preferred the ones that didn’t gleam their teeth at me. They never gave me back my security deposits, but always kept their stares on the scratched glass counter when I returned the hearts. Their downturned eyes were more important than the shine of coins.

  As I got older, the hearts got smaller. After Genevieve I moved away for a while, to an island where I knew no one and nothing, not even the language. I lived alone. I did not need to rent a heart. My empty chest made it easy to breathe, and I filled my lungs with the sharp air of the sea. I stayed there for a year.

  Back in the city, back in the world. Among words and faces I knew. One night, many drinks, and Grace’s number scrawled tiny on my skin. The sleekshiny new heart.

  I swallowed the rest of my lunch and went home to fit the heart.

  Three years later, Autumn afternoon, curled on the couch with newsprint on my fingers and Grace’s dozing hair in my lap. A small notice in the corner of the page:

  Product recall: Heart Model #345-27J. Defective.

  I pressed my hand – the hand holding the dark length of Grace’s hair – against my chest. I hadn’t opened myself in years, trusting the tick of the heart. I’d kept it for so long that I knew I’d have lost my deposit, but I hadn’t wanted to return it, to lose the image of Grace coiled in the centre of it.

  I slid out from under Grace. She mumbled half awake, then quietened when I slipped a cushion in under the heat of her skull. I tiptoed into the bathroom and opened the rusted hinges of my chest.

  The heart was dusty and tarnished and utterly empty. In the centre of it was no picture of Grace, no strands of her hair, no shine of memories, no declarations. The rusting metal squealed when I pulled it out.

  Underskirts

  GIRL #1

  She found me with my hands around chickens, fingers stretched wide, thumbs over beaks. My skirt, mud-weighed, tugged at my ankles as I dipped low. Silly to curtsey while armed with birds, I knew, but it had to be done. If I’d let go they’d’ve flown at her, chuttering through her red hair. And what a sight that would’ve been! The lady, still horsed, with her legs one on either side and her skirt hitching up to show a handspan of stocking. And her horse as white as cuckoo flowers, with its little red haunch-spot not quite hidden by the bridle. I kept my thumbs tight over those dangerous beaks.

  So there I was, tangle-skirted and chicken-full, and I’ll never know what she saw in me then. Enough, any case, to offer coins to my father – bags full of glinting, enough to make his moustache disappear into the folds of his lips. For my mother, it was the title. Lady’s Maid. Fine fetters for the youngest of eight, last to leave. No word from my siblings for years, long gone as they were – the last we saw was the hellfire from their heels across the tops of the hills. And my betrothed, he of the thick knuckles and pale gold hair? The transparent boy who tumbled me across hay, who licked at my earlobes and stickied my palms? I forgot him within a day.

  I’ll never know what My Lady saw in me, but I know what I saw in her. She was a mirror. Mud-weighed and birdhanded as I was, she still knew me. She knew the things I had been thinking, down deep between my lacings, under the wooden heels of my shoes. The words I shaped with straw before kicking away: she knew them. We were tied as sisters, cousins, lovers. This link between us is a red silk ribbon, a fine silver chain, a length of daisies punched together. It’s the loveliest thing I ever saw.

  THE HOUSEKEEPER

  I’ll not be taking part in mistress’s activities, oh no. She brings the girls up to the house and that is as it is, but I’ll have none of it. She’s a fancy lady, no doubt. But even fancy ladies don’t need a dozen handmaids, and them changing every few weeks to a new crop of girls. It’s to the end that I can’t even remember their names, not a one, not a single one. Just a you there will suffice for that sort of girl, to my mind.

  Such harlotry in their little looks! Mouths round and red like quims, and their bodices low as anything. The mistress must pick out the stitches before she gives the girls the dresses, mark you. No proper dressmaker would make a lady look such a pinchcock.

  The first maid was fine enough – mistress did need help with her dressing and suchlike, and her red cheeks and brown hair looked regular enough to fit in at the house. For a while she tied mistress’s corsets and arranged mistress’s hair, and I kept firm out of their way. Plenty to keep me busy kitchen-side. But I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see what mistress was about. Tip-tapping through the back corridors where she’d no business to be, flipping up skirts and losing her rings inside girls. Mistress parading those wagtails thinking it was like to tempt me, thinking I was like to be kept feverish at nights with thinking of their ways, that I was like to be some dirty tom. And me with my eyes on the floor like I’m meant! They’ll go to the devil, the lot of them. I’ve got two eyes; how long can I pretend I don’t see?

  THE LADY

  Oh, how I have loved. My days are flaxen and holy with love. My nights are viscous, lucid, spilling over. My finger pads hum. The roots of my hair feel gold-dipped; the meat of my eyes is speckled with gold; gold dust blows across my cheeks. The girls, the girls, and their love. No need for sleep when their saliva is sustenance. Their sweet country cunts and their kiss.

  I find them, I whisper of my home, and they’re up on my horse before the daisies close. The look in their eyes is clean as dawn. Their fingers in my mouth taste of buttermilk. My castle is a mother, is a lover. Once upon a time, I
say, and they follow my hooves inside the walls, and I close the door up tight behind them.

  My enchantments keep them for a turn of the sun or a phase of the moon, and then they find the chink in the walls and slip out faster than smoke. I know they look back. I see the light glint off their eyes.

  Some do stay; one or two starbellied and honeyfed girls. I tuck them under my swan wing and tickle them close, close enough to share heat. They love love as I do. They see the straight line of my jaw along the length of their thighs and they see how it fits, the geometry of bodies. They have wondered for so long why nothing ever fits, why the knobs of their spines press hard on chairbacks and why they can’t lie parallel in bed, and then there I am. I know how to fill the gaps in a girl.

  THE DINNER GUEST

  She wanted us to know. She’s proud of it, I’m sure. The strumpet. The slippering little . . . but let me tell you. You will see.

  Two dozen guests for dinner and it was out with the partridge tongues and the songbird hearts in cages of ribs, along with wine sweet enough to pickle kittens. How the ladies cooed! Codswallop, I say. But the ladies like their food to sing.

  Three courses in and we were a maid down. I knew because she was a comely thing, applecheeked and applebreasted, with a glint in her eye like she well knew the parts of a man. I’d been devouring her charms between sips of the lamb-blood soup, and then – gone! For moments I frowned my way around the room, as surely even the most coddled maid would never dare abandon her post mid-meal. And then my eye’s wanderings noticed how the lady of the house shifted in her seat! No soup ever caused such moans from a throat, and yet the lady was purring like a pussycat. Seated opposite the lady, I had an artist’s perspective; full frontal, so to speak, perfect for observing that actress’s change in expression. Shifting my feet under the table, I knew the shape of a body; even through the soles of my shoes I could feel it was that applerumped maid. And the lady moaned, and the lady wriggled; and all the other ladies peered into their soup and began moaning around their spoons.