Things We Say in the Dark Page 9

  Sarah hears the front door click shut and counts to a hundred. She goes out into the shadows and she finds the thing she wants. She fights it. And she fucks it. And she eats it.

  I’m still in Iceland. I know I’m over halfway through this book now, and I’m really dragging it out, but I have a good reason. This will be my last retreat for a long time. There’s a baby coming, and I won’t be able to bugger off to the beautiful frozen north to spend weeks and weeks alone any more, at least not for a few years.

  When the baby comes, I don’t know how I will find a balance between my work – that swooping, strange, isolated place where ideas come from – and the everyday, slouchy, cosy, boring, sometimes claustrophobic necessities of home.

  Already I worry that, at the times when I inevitably have to choose home over work, I will resent it. I worry that I won’t be able to – won’t want to – make space for this child, despite how desperately I want it. What if I get everything I want, and I don’t want it any more?

  Good Good Good, Nice Nice Nice

  Sabrina leans over the net-cage and dips her long-handled scoop into the water. Carefully. Very carefully. The sharks are long gone, but still. The pods somersault in the water, tumbling oily, black as a winter night. Most are still too small but a few are skull-size, fat as puppies.

  Mermaid’s purses, they used to call them, back when Sabrina was small, back when they were just useless high-tide flotsam, though her mother insisted on calling them devil’s purses, to Sabrina’s annoyance. Sabrina never uses old-fashioned words like that at the farm; she’s from the town, she’s not a bumpkin. It’s strange to think that the mermaid’s purses used to wash up on the shore here; Sabrina never knew that there were sharks in the water. Then again, there are lots of things in the sea that we don’t know about.

  She shifts her grip on the scoop, keeps birling the pods, searching for the biggest. There’s one ready, she knows it. The seawater splits, pulses, and there it is: swollen huge, not ink-black like the others but pink-grey, flesh visible where the collagen stretches taut. Sabrina hunkers on the edge of the net-cage and eases the pod into the belly of the scoop, lifting it out of the water. Her arm muscles shudder.

  She should ring the bell, she knows; get someone else out here to help. Harvesting is a two-person job. But though the war’s been over for two years they’re still deep in the clean-up there, meaning they’re still short of workers here. It’s not ideal, but when is it ever? She braces the scoop with one hand and reaches for the harvesting kit with the other.

  Squatting, she tips the pod into her lap and finds the scalpel. She breathes deep, slows her heart, gives her hands over to routine. She slips the edge of the scalpel into the rubbery edge of the pod and feels it split. The insides squirm. She waits for calm and cuts further. The pod splits, births the pink wriggle into her lap. She checks its nose and mouth – clear – its genitalia – male – his toes and fingers – ten of each. He is wailing now, perfectly. He is doing everything perfectly. All of him flawless, more perfect than a real baby could ever be. There is nothing wrong with him, now or ever. His tiny tongue. His pink gums. His curled toes. He is screaming so hard his whole body shakes.

  ‘Hush,’ says Sabrina, ‘hush, you, my wee one,’ and she scoops up seawater to rinse off the rubbery flecks still stuck to his skin, then dries him with a towel and swaddles him in a knitted blanket. She doesn’t like to touch the empty pod, black and rubbery like a pair of abandoned galoshes; she wants to leave it there on the walkway, but the birds will come for it, and they must be kept away from the net-cages at all costs. She glances around and kicks the empty pod back into the water.

  Sabrina realises she’s been humming a lullaby and the baby has stopped crying. His tiny fists clench. She rubs the blanket over his limbs to warm them as she walks. She carries him in the crook of her arm, her careful steps on the rain-damp walkway, into the main farm building. The baby will be warmed, tested, named, assigned. Some day he will be a soldier, but first he can be a child. She closes the door behind her.

  Outside, from shore to horizon, the net-cages stretch, hundreds of them, containing thousands of pods. Inside each one is a baby, growing, waiting.

  All the way home Sabrina can feel the weight of the thing in her pocket. She’s sure that people will know, will see it pulling her coat askew. Well, so what if they can see? It could be a purse of coins. It could be a make-up case. It could be a brick. She keeps a tight hold of the bus’s metal rail. The town unspools past the window. The red-roofed houses, all different heights, foundations subsiding, higgledy-piggledy like a mouth of uneven teeth. The spindly stretch of the pier with the spinning carousel at its end, fairy lights strung from posts, bringing down constellations for strolling lovers. The painted-out street signs and shop names, the raised arm of the church steeple. And around it all the encircling sea, black as tar under the evening sky.

  She rings the bell for her stop, nods a thanks to the bus driver. She pauses on the garden path, her hand on the gatepost. Even from out here she can hear Jamie’s cries. She’s become so attuned to them in the past ten months, she can interpret them like language. The screams are stuttering, gaspy; he’s nearing the end of a jag. He cries and cries and cries and the only time he stops is when he cries himself into exhaustion. Then he’s silent and unconscious, but it can’t be called sleep. Her hand clenches on the gatepost. She makes herself let go, and when she turns the doorknob she can’t feel it, her hand trembling numb.

  ‘I’m home!’ she calls, pointlessly, as everything is Jamie’s snuffling cries and her mother’s soothing murmur. From the radio in the kitchen, the low-high-low toot of horns, a tsh-tsh cymbal, the steady foot-tap of the drum. She turns up the volume, switches on the hob, tips in soup for two.

  ‘I’m making supper,’ she calls through, and there’s no pause in her mother’s lullabies, the soothe of her words so familiar to Sabrina from her own childhood. She hadn’t thought it was anything special at the time, but now she’d give anything for Jamie to have a childhood like that. Floured hands shaping loaves. Thumbnail-sewing daisy-chain stems. Dooking for apples at Halloween. Even for a month. A day. A moment without pain. She would give him everything, but she can’t give him anything at all.

  Soon Jamie will scream himself unconscious and the soup will get eaten and Jamie will wake up screaming and Sabrina will hold him all night, every way she can think, trying everything even though she’s tried it all a hundred times.

  She shouldn’t give him a spoon of whisky. She really shouldn’t. But he won’t take her milk, he won’t take her comfort. What else does she have to give him? Her gaze slides to her coat, hung by the door. She drags it back and stirs the soup.

  It’s a sleepless night. After a teaspoon of whisky Jamie drifts – not asleep, but not quite awake, blessedly silent. Along with the whisky Sabrina feeds him the tiny kidney she stole from the organ net-cage, praying that he won’t choke on it. She holds her breath as he arches his back and struggles, mewling, but it slips down. He lies quietly in her arms, and for that moment she is at rest too. Perhaps for a moment she even falls asleep. At least, she dreams. She sees the kidney grafting itself into Jamie’s tiny insides, the purplish mass of it absorbing the red-raw damage in him. Of course it was the kidney all along. How silly that none of the doctors figured that out. Of course a mother knows what’s best for her child.

  A few hours later, Jamie wakes screaming. Sabrina coddles him, bounces him, makes soothing sounds to tamp down her despair. She should have known the kidney wouldn’t work. The ear didn’t work. The eye didn’t work. The spleen and the liver and the snipped length of intestine didn’t work. The problem isn’t that he’s missing these things; and even if he were, swallowing them wouldn’t help. Once, weeks ago now, she spent a few heart-thump minutes touching the kitchen knives, choosing which would be best, but then Jamie woke crying for her and she slammed the drawer and never thought of doing that again.

  When the sun comes through the window S
abrina’s mother comes through the door. Sabrina hands Jamie over in a brief moment of quiet. He’s awake but not screaming. His face blood-red, his eyes swollen almost shut, his tiny fists shaking. He looks shocked, confused, like he can’t quite believe that the world would betray him this way. He’s never known what it’s like to not be in pain, and no one can tell Sabrina why. Something in her baby is broken, and she does not know how to fix it.

  In the staffroom Sabrina rubs her eyes and drains her second cup of tea. One sugar isn’t enough, but Teresa is there and she doesn’t want to add any more. It’s not easy to come by, the same as just about everything else these days. Nothing comes easily; nothing can be wasted.

  Teresa sneers as she drinks her tea. The tea isn’t the problem, although it tastes of sawdust and the milk is powdered. Teresa doesn’t like working at the farm. She thinks it’s unnatural, raising these shark-babies as if they’re human babies. Teresa is an idiot. They are human babies, can’t she see that? Realer than real. There’s not a bit of shark to them. Just because they’re grown in the pods. Teresa has three sharp-smiled boys of her own, each taller than the doorway though the oldest is barely twenty. If there’s a bit of the shark to anyone around here, it’s Teresa’s oldest.

  Sabrina is proud to work at the farm. She was proud when it was a salmon farm, but that’s nothing compared to how she feels now. When the farm first switched over, she’d tried to learn about every aspect. Her job is just the harvesting, but she wanted to know all of it, how every stage works. That was before Jamie, right enough; now she has no space in her head for anything outside him.

  The story goes that a child, some ragamuffin beachcomber, split open a mermaid’s purse with his toy penknife, then ran home squawking when a cluster of human teeth tumbled out onto the sand. Perfect, they were: ready to be transplanted into any raw gum. And they took, and they held. You’d never even know. For a while they just took the teeth as they were given, but there were so few, and no real system for finding them.

  That scarcity makes sense now that we know you don’t get something from nothing; the teeth didn’t just appear, did they? Remnants of shipwrecked sailors, maybe, or people murdered and dumped at sea, or natural deaths whose families were too destitute to buy a burial plot. What mattered is that some teeth went in, and some teeth came back out – and they were perfect, better than the ones our own bodies grow. The same for kidneys, lungs, ovaries.

  Ah, and who made the sharks that made the parts? Who put them there in the waters around the Scottish coast? Well, best not to ask. Sabrina’s mother used to caution against looking gift horses in the mouth. A war hangover, the best of a bad situation. The folk of the town always were good at that.

  But what will they do if another war comes? Sabrina feels sick to think of these perfect babies shipping off in subs and battleships, off to die so she can live. Are they really less real than she is? Than Teresa? Than Jamie?

  The memory of predawn screams makes Sabrina’s headache flare. She’s let her third cup of tea get cold. It doesn’t matter; it didn’t have sugar in anyway. She tips it in the sink and goes out to the net-cages.

  Jamie screams all night. Sabrina holds him tight to her body, his siren mouth right by her ear, shushing and soothing him for so long that her lips go numb.

  The next day, Teresa is off sick. Sabrina covers for her in the nursery. The oldest baby there is only weeks old, as they don’t stay there long. Plenty of women are keen to take them on as their own. So many sons and husbands lost to the war, so many empty homes and hearts. So far the babies all live in this town; it’s not a secret project, exactly, but it’s not openly discussed. They just let the babies get a little older, grow into children and then adults, just to check that everything is working well. Perhaps one day there will be a farm like this in every coastal town. Sabrina’s heart drops at that thought, which makes no sense. She shakes her head at herself – such ridiculousness! She must be tired. This farm, the babies: all of it, nothing short of a miracle.

  It’s quiet in the nursery. Sabrina warms bottles and launders socks to the sounds of the babies’ quick clear breathing, the shuffle of their kicking feet, the occasional giggle and gurgle. Should babies be able to giggle at a few days old? She doesn’t think she has ever heard Jamie giggle. Perhaps he never will. Grief chokes her, and she turns back to the bottles before the babies see.

  When the bottles are ready, she starts the first feeding. She scoops the baby into her arms, nestles him into the crook. He blinks his baby-blues at her and smiles and grasps her thumb. Can babies smile at that age? Can they grip that hard? All of a sudden she remembers Teresa, her tight lips as she makes her tea, her steady frown.

  Sabrina nudges the bottle’s nipple to the baby’s mouth. He takes it right away, tiny mouth suckling, tiny throat gulping. He reaches up his hands and holds the bottle, takes the weight of it – but that’s ridiculous; he hasn’t, he can’t.

  Sabrina releases the weight of the bottle slightly and it drops, of course it does, and the milk all tips to the base and the baby is sucking at nothing. She tips it back and he keeps drinking, his tiny hands waving, reaching instinctively for the bottle that he most definitely can’t hold. Sabrina settles into the feeding chair, nestling the baby into her, relaxing in. Those early days and nights with Jamie: perhaps this is what it was meant to be like. The warm weight of the tiny animal, the snuffly breathing, the shared contentment.

  Something is wrong. Sabrina sits up. She checks the bottle, the breathing. The baby’s eyes are bright. The baby’s lungs are clear. The baby is feeding fine. But still, she knows that there is something wrong. She thinks she understands now why Teresa says the things that she says.

  She looks down at the baby, his trusting gaze, the perfection of him.

  Teresa is an idiot. They’re not sharks. They’re babies, just like any other babies, but better.

  If they look like babies and act like babies and grow like babies, then what else are they?

  On the bus home, her pockets are empty. She tries to imagine what Jamie’s giggle would sound like, but she can’t.

  Jamie screams all night. Sabrina knows she must have slept at some point in the ten months since he was born. She must have, or she would be dead. But it’s hard to remember what it was like.

  She spoons a little whisky into his screeching maw and that helps a little. She wants to hate him. It would be easier. But she loves him completely. She would give him any part of her body if she thought it would help. She would scoop out her eyes, scissor off her toes, burn off her breasts, smile and coo at him as she bled to death if it would stop his pain.

  But she sees now that it’s not what’s inside Jamie that is wrong. It’s what Jamie was inside of. It was her. She was never meant to be a mother. All she can give him now is a better start; another mother.

  Sabrina goes out in the night. Her arms are heavy with their burden. The sleeping town unspools past her as she walks, and then she runs.

  She stands at the edge of the net-cage with her baby in her arms. His stuttering cries are so high her eardrums ache. His fists are the softest things she’s ever felt. They clench and unclench along with her heart.

  At her feet, an empty mermaid’s purse is open, waiting. The water boils with dozens of perfect babies waiting to be born.

  This part of Iceland is quiet, but it’s not completely empty. It’s not like it’s just a huge iceberg and then me.

  There’s the cabin where I sleep and eat. There’s the window-lined studio where I write. There’s a road where the odd car passes. There’s a field with horses in it. There’s a shop and an outdoor swimming pool. There are houses. There are people, sometimes, though rarely, and when I do see them I can’t say much as I don’t speak a single word of Icelandic, to the point that I can barely pronounce the name of the town, and I feel stupid about it, about being an ignorant monolingual English speaker.

  My favourite thing here is the outdoor pool. Every evening I swim. A hundred laps, slow
and steady, pacing my breath. By the time I get out my legs are shaking, my head spinning. I don’t feel quite myself. I feel like I’m in a dream world. Like anything could happen.

  The Only Time I Think of You is All the Time

  It was hard for Brigitte to get to me at first. She’d push against the barrier for hours, getting more and more frustrated at me for not being able to see her or hear her. When she finally appeared to me, waking me in the night, she’d have been talking for so long with no one listening that the words had turned to slush and mutter. Before Brigitte, I woke calmly, to the morning sun or birdsong or the natural end of my dreams. Now it’s a sudden fall awake, her hands gripping my shoulders, her face right up close to mine. Her constant tumble of words, an avalanche of scree, falling out in a low mumble, steady as earth.

  I know how Brigitte died. She drowned. I don’t know if it was an accident, or she did it to herself, or someone else did it to her. But I know she drowned because she was underwater for so long that her eyes turned milky, and they still look like that now. In our afterlives we’ll all look the way we did at the moment of death, I guess. It’s strange to see her in water; I feel like I should try to save her from it, keep her dry and breathing, though it’s far too late for that. It’s hard to remember now what baths used to be like. The book, the bubbles, the fizzing glass: it’s like something I saw in a film once. Now Brigitte climbs in after me and chatters in my ear. Once I lost patience and tried to hold her under, just for a moment of silence. But she just laughed at me and then there was a hell of a mess with the water on the floor and I’m the only one who can clean it up, after all.