Touch (12 page)

Jenny could smell dust on the window ledge, sour as powdered acid. Sun burned through the glass and across her face. The cactus plants were arid. Lifeless. There were dead bluebottles on the windowsill and the grain of the wood was bleached white through its cracked varnish.

Dust turned in the light like tiny splinters of glass. But behind her the room was cold and dark; a shadow was falling across her shoulder. In the little garden outside, a row of daffodils was dying back into the soil. Traffic passed on the road. Incessant. Opposite her house an identical terrace of houses stared back. Occasionally a young starling would flurry out from one of the gutters and stand, squawking for food. Their cries came faintly through the traffic, raw with hunger and life. Their plumage was glossy with a hundred shades of the refracted sun.

 
Jenny was thirty-four years old. She put the book she had been reading flat across her knees, smoothing out the fine cotton of her dress. Egyptian cotton with a thin blue stripe. On a day like this she should be outside. She could almost hear her mother saying it. Almost. It filled her with dread: the thought of the town, the people.

The postman passed, late today, lopsided with his bag of letters. None of them were for her. Yesterday a letter had come for her mother. Jenny had opened it and found that it was from a credit company offering a cheap loan. She'd thrown it away, imagining her mother's scorn. Thirty-four years old. It had passed so quickly. She'd been waiting for something to begin; now it was never going to. Not here in the house where she'd been born, where both her parents had died, where the days stretched out, holding her, waiting for her. She could have done anything with her life her mother had told her. Anything.

Jenny stood up, careful to avoid the mirror that hung in an oak frame over the fireplace. Her face still hurt, stiff as a mask, parts of it nerveless. The backs of her hands looked like melted plastic. She saw the flames again, blossoming among the haberdashery, replayed like an old film. She smelled the smoke, white and acrid, scalding her lungs. She'd dreamed it all, over and over again. The bell ringing, her bloody tampon in the toilet bowl. Then emerging, amazed, into the inferno of the shop. Someone had left the fire doors open and the flames were sucking more and more air into the room.

It had been a quiet morning, a few shoppers picking aim-lessly through the heaps of cloth. That was how the dream started, with those ghostly figures drifting silently through the store. Jenny saw their faces looking at her and then looking away, suddenly, as if they had just remembered something. But they couldn't all be remembering something. She was a plain Jane. Her mother had said that. She couldn't afford to look twice at a decent man. Not that there were any. And none had looked at her. In her dream the handle of the fire escape was painted red and she was dragging herself towards it, on fire, but feeling no pain. The metal bar seemed to glow, incandescent, and all around her bolts of lace exploded into flames.

 
Jenny walked stiffly into the small kitchen where she switched on the electric kettle. In the back garden she could see a pair of magpies quarrelling near their nest in the laburnum tree. Beyond that, across a few remaining fields, the houses of the new estate tilted their red-tiled roofs at the sun. A greenfinch landed on the bag of nuts she'd hung up. It was plump with good health, its heavy bill snatching at the food. The kettle clicked off and Jenny put a tea bag into the special cup with its plastic nozzle. She still couldn't open her mouth wide enough to drink from a normal cup. Light glanced off the roofs of the new houses, hurting her eyes. She closed them, feeling the lids tighten. That had been the first job, the surgeon had said. He had held her fingers where they stuck out from the white gauze. His hands had been cool, like porcelain, or the touch of water. The first job. As if they were renovating a house, or retouching an old master.

Thirty-four years old. She could have done anything, even if she was a plain Jane. Walking back into the front room she eased herself back into the leather armchair. Into the sun. The dead bluebottles gleamed, burnished by the light like exquisite gunmetal brooches. From the mantelpiece the photograph of her parents faced her. Their honeymoon, on the front at Skegness, the Ford Prefect parked in front of them. Their hair was tousled by the wind and they looked breathless. Younger than she was now. Jenny thought of that: there they were and here she was. Their only child unfore-seen, their whole marriage before them, uncharted. She cradled the cup in her hands, afraid of the heat, of spilling the liquid onto herself – her arms, thighs, breasts.

For months she'd been terrified of anything hot. The pain would be unbearable. She had tablets for that, but sometimes it wasn't the pain itself, it was having the pain. Having to have it. Every day was a struggle with disbelief. But then she only had to look down at her seared skin to believe. She needed time. The doctor had said that. He had told her to look in the mirror every morning and say her own name. She'd wanted to laugh, would have laughed if she could have moved her face. Jenny didn't want to look at that maimed somebody else, the creature that looked at her from misshapen eyes. The fire had burned her face away. It had burned away her sins like a mythical fire. The surgeons would rebuild her. She'd be like a phoenix, one doctor had said. A new woman would rise from the flames. In time. Lots and lots of time. But outside, in the streets, in the town, life was happening for everybody else. And it was happening now.

 
Jenny took up the book again and allowed her fingers to stray across its pages. It was a world atlas, open at Norway. She looked at a group of islands off the northernmost coast. Langøy, Moskenstraumen, Austvågøy, Hinnøy, Senja. Her index finger traced the narrow passage of the Sørøysundet and then moved eastwards to Hammerfest. She whispered the names to herself. They sounded so beautiful, like the words of a hymn or psalm. Like the Song of Solomon.
Behold, thou art
fair my love: behold thou art fair; thou hast dove's eyes
. And then that other part about the beloved.
He shall lie all night between
my breasts
. She'd found those passages at Sunday school when she was a teenager and they had puzzled her. She who couldn't afford to look twice at a decent man.
Dove's eyes
. Her own eyes stung with the light. The lids felt like shutters jammed with grit.

She looked down at the map again. Hammerfest. One day she'd travel. Eighteen years she'd been at the shop. First in household fittings, then soft furnishings, then as a supervisor in haberdashery. There would be some money. Compensation. Mr Evans had said so, standing awkwardly by her bed in his dark suit. Jenny let her hand fall into the Norwegian sea. Into steep fjords, snow-capped mountain peaks, ice floes moving out to the ocean. The Gulf of Bothnia rippled under her hand as the book sagged. She'd hardly touched the cup of tea. She didn't want it now. The sun made her tired. Her eyelids began to lock shut.

When she awoke almost two hours had passed. Two hours. The sky had filled with fine grey clouds, lit at their edges by a hidden sun. She half expected to hear her mother calling her to work. Up every morning at six and calling to her in that shrill, reproachful voice. Every second spent in the warm sheets after that was a sin. Sometimes she would lie for an extra three, or even five, minutes, tempting the voice to call again, savouring the feeling, touching her body where it lay drowsily awake. Wondering if a man would ever touch her. Whether a man would ever want to. A man she could not afford to look at twice because she was a plain Jane. One day she would be like a bundle of myrrh, with dove's eyes. Her beloved would lie between her breasts. She'd touched them, feeling the soft swelling, the nipple. She'd felt beautiful then. Beautiful. Downstairs she would hear her mother raking the fire, chinking the teacups. Then it was out of bed, her feet pattering on the cold lino, dressing hurriedly for the ride into town, the long day at the store.

They had asked her what she remembered about the fire. Jenny had said:
The pigeons
. Through the smoke and at all the windows their wings had been a tumult, seeming to fan the flames. Often she'd sat in the town square, feeding them crumbs from her sandwiches, repelled by their eyes, by their deformed, toeless feet. Then they had gathered for revenge as she struggled towards the doors where fire was gulping and sucking at the air. Then Jenny had dreamed about them; how they had flocked into the room, mobbing her with smoking claws and wings, their beaks tearing at her. Clawing at the backs of her hands as she held them in front of her face.

 
Jenny rose from the chair, groggy with sleep, stiff from sitting too long in one position. The grafts on her hands and face were soft. She was afraid that they might suddenly slough away. Sun broke through the clouds, casting the shadows of cactus plants across the faded wood of the sill. Jenny caught sight of someone watching her in the mirror. Someone whose face was not a face. A bus halted outside to pick up passengers, its engine panting. She moved sideways behind the curtains. She couldn't help it.

When the bus had pulled away Jenny sat down again, tracing her fingers in the dust of the windowsill. She'd never wanted to die. Not when she lay immobile and the pain had been at its worst. Not when she drifted in morphine dreams through hospital nights. Not even when she'd seen the look on the faces of the nurses and doctors when they changed her dressings. She wanted to live. But she'd wanted her mother to die in those last days. Cancer of the spleen the doctors had said. Then secondaries in her liver and lymph glands. It was before the fire. She'd gone yellow, withering up like a husk. Jenny had wanted her to die; had, at the very end, wanted that shallow, rasping breath to stop forever. She told the Macmillan nurse who clucked her tongue as if there was always hope. If wishing that was a sin then she'd paid for it. Her transgressions had been burned away.

One day she'd be renewed, like a beautiful bird rising to heaven, like a lark singing high above her old life, which had gone for ever. She could be herself then. Dove's eyes. The windows of the soul. People would not move away from her as they did now. They would behold her. Her love would lie between her breasts. She would look in the mirror and see herself radiant as the clouds that floated now above the town.

 
Jenny's short sleep had tired her. She was exhausted all the time now. The doctors had told her to sleep whenever she had the need. She still felt guilty, having the need, escaping into the sheets, expecting her mother's reproach at any moment. Jenny pulled herself upstairs and undressed in the back bedroom, away from the noise of traffic. It plagued the front room where her parents had slept. Once this window had looked out over open fields with grazing cows. In the mornings the milk wagon had clattered down the lane with its empty churns. They were Friesians or Holsteins, the cows. Black and white. Now they were gone and the fields were built over. The roofs of the new houses glowed like a kiln in the sun. She watched shadows sweep the tiles, then she climbed between the sheets. The cotton flowed over her like a liquid, almost icy in its coolness.

For a long time she lay there, thinking. Her thoughts were unfocused. Images came, shadows of thoughts, never staying long enough, never distilling into words that could hold them. She fell gradually to sleep. Forgetting.

 
When Jenny awoke it was dark outside. The faint glow of lights from the housing estate across the fields tinted the curtains. She turned over in bed and lay on her back. The grafts tightened across her thighs. It was impossible to forget. Impossible. She put a hand to her face in the darkness. This was who she was. She lay there for a long time, watching the play of shadow and light on the ceiling as cars turned their headlamps against the house from far-away roads.

When she rose and went to the window, the touch of air was cool against her body through the nightdress. The garden was dark, the laburnum tree almost invisible except for its faintly luminous blossom. Poisonous in every part, her father had said. Street lamps burned on the new estate. She knew this view by heart. She closed the curtains against it. It would be a long time before she could sleep again. Her clothes lay over the back of a chair. Jenny took them and began to dress.

The steps down into the garden were short but steep. The terrace had been built on a ridge of the old river valley. The brook she'd played in as a child had been culverted to make room for the estate. There it was, hidden, the water flowing underground, flowing towards the sea through pure darkness. Under the houses. Under the lives being lived in them. Strange to think of that. Jenny slipped off her shoes and let her feet move over the grass on the small square of lawn. It was too long, the grass. A neighbour's son cut it for her every other week. She gave him a few pounds for doing it. He couldn't look at her. Paul. A nice boy. Dark hair and blues eyes and a quick way with things like the lawnmower and the machine that cut back the weeds with little whips.

On the lawn the grass was damp. Tiny globules of dew were forming across it like seed pearls. She loved the feel of its moisture against her skin. The air was warm outside, warmer than in the house where there was no fire, no heating switched on. The sky was overcast, heavy with cloud; it might rain at any minute. The garden was laden with scent from the lilac trees. Jenny's father had planted them. Near the little garden shed. When she peered through them, its windows were misty with cobwebs. Inside, it was still neatly laid out with his tools. Just as he had left them.

Jenny inhaled the scent. She was being etherised, her head growing light, a floating sensation wafting her away. Like thistledown. Or the spores of dandelions. 
A bundle of myrrh is
 
my well beloved unto me
. She put out a hand and cradled the hanging blossoms, feeling the waxy petals under her fingers. She touched the flowers to her lips. 
By night on my bed I sought
 
him whom my soul loveth: I sought him but I found him not
.