Read Online Drowned Sprat and Other Stories by Stephanie Johnson - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephanie Johnson
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can scarcely remember. As quickly as conception, that confident leap to existence. That happens all too fast. I amaze myself. Even among this heat and misery, with no money of my own, I’ve held on to my resolve not to tell you. Not until we are at home. We will visit my parents in Armagh, and my angry, always angry sister in Belfast. Perhaps she is still in Belfast. Perhaps she is in another country, her red hair stinging the air in hotter streets. She talked once of going to Australia, where her eldritch voice would captivate, and her anger calcify into white turds of boredom. In my experience angry women are the most bored of anyone when they give up. If it were to happen to me, that calm, I would float in it like seaweed in a pool, different cool lengths of me fingering different depths, and too pliant for even the sea to enjoy manipulating me.
Your hand on my stomach is so heavy I can hardly breathe. It’s as if you already know I am inhabited and would press it out, a pulpy mass on the sheets.
Ah, my lovely — you have seen the stupidity of the situation. I saw it flash through those lilac depths, a tiny silver fish. You are onto something.
You are wanting to take coals to Newcastle, as the English say. This is sillier. Place us in the same fireplace and one of us would refuse to burn. We would never burn together.
Your father was a fighter. I could’ve talked with him, hey? After the silence, the sizing up. You know what they will say afterwards — only an Arab could’ve done that. The paradox is that they won’t know what I’ve really done. They will know I have killed you, and others besides, but they won’t know why. Your death to me is a tool, for them an instrument they scarcely know the use of. But I will make myself clear, and will not be regarded as a fanatic. Perhaps we will lower them all to a crouch, inches away from falling to their knees.
You are out of bed, looking for your clothes, complaining once again of how filthy you are. You don’t know what filth is.
I know you are looking at me. I know what you are thinking, but I have turned my back. I have never known a man with such resistance in his eyes. If it wasn’t for the warmth of your hands, the beautiful things you say in a language all lips, the shift in your voice when you speak of the future — I wouldn’t believe you love me.
I close the bathroom door. I don’t know you well enough to piss in front of you.
I must move quickly to check your bag, make sure everything is in place. We will leave for the airport in fifteen minutes.
In the bathroom you — what? Surprised there is still no blood? Do you think I haven’t noticed you haven’t bled, not for eight weeks or more?
My shirt is damp from yesterday’s sweat. My skin is crawling.
No matter where you are in the world you continue to do some things in the way you always have. I brush my hair in long lopes, from my scalp an orange slide to my waist. As a schoolgirl in front of the kitchen mirror I brushed my hair like this to catch the light. Now I do it to remind me of
who I am. It reminds me of more than a dim reflection.
Once we were on a cliff top. The wind blew my hair into your face. You said my hair was a simoon, hot and laden with dust, a gust of Arabia in the salt air. You caught it and held it against your lips.
The walls of this room are pitted grey, made of something that used to be shiny. I dig the brush into my scalp and leave it there. I will have a pitted head. And my heart is pitted already, the bomb site of the soul.
At home my grandmother will talk to me of souls. She will talk of her immortality, then clasp my hand and tell me she is afraid of dying.
The Irish are so afraid of death, having been at close quarters to it at its most violent for so many centuries. Its familiarity has bred terror. If only it had bred contempt, then perhaps the fighting would have stopped. Contempt is a narrower emotion than fear and eventually gives
Your hand on my stomach is so heavy I can hardly breathe. It’s as if you already know I am inhabited and would press it out, a pulpy mass on the sheets.
Ah, my lovely — you have seen the stupidity of the situation. I saw it flash through those lilac depths, a tiny silver fish. You are onto something.
You are wanting to take coals to Newcastle, as the English say. This is sillier. Place us in the same fireplace and one of us would refuse to burn. We would never burn together.
Your father was a fighter. I could’ve talked with him, hey? After the silence, the sizing up. You know what they will say afterwards — only an Arab could’ve done that. The paradox is that they won’t know what I’ve really done. They will know I have killed you, and others besides, but they won’t know why. Your death to me is a tool, for them an instrument they scarcely know the use of. But I will make myself clear, and will not be regarded as a fanatic. Perhaps we will lower them all to a crouch, inches away from falling to their knees.
You are out of bed, looking for your clothes, complaining once again of how filthy you are. You don’t know what filth is.
I know you are looking at me. I know what you are thinking, but I have turned my back. I have never known a man with such resistance in his eyes. If it wasn’t for the warmth of your hands, the beautiful things you say in a language all lips, the shift in your voice when you speak of the future — I wouldn’t believe you love me.
I close the bathroom door. I don’t know you well enough to piss in front of you.
I must move quickly to check your bag, make sure everything is in place. We will leave for the airport in fifteen minutes.
In the bathroom you — what? Surprised there is still no blood? Do you think I haven’t noticed you haven’t bled, not for eight weeks or more?
My shirt is damp from yesterday’s sweat. My skin is crawling.
No matter where you are in the world you continue to do some things in the way you always have. I brush my hair in long lopes, from my scalp an orange slide to my waist. As a schoolgirl in front of the kitchen mirror I brushed my hair like this to catch the light. Now I do it to remind me of
who I am. It reminds me of more than a dim reflection.
Once we were on a cliff top. The wind blew my hair into your face. You said my hair was a simoon, hot and laden with dust, a gust of Arabia in the salt air. You caught it and held it against your lips.
The walls of this room are pitted grey, made of something that used to be shiny. I dig the brush into my scalp and leave it there. I will have a pitted head. And my heart is pitted already, the bomb site of the soul.
At home my grandmother will talk to me of souls. She will talk of her immortality, then clasp my hand and tell me she is afraid of dying.
The Irish are so afraid of death, having been at close quarters to it at its most violent for so many centuries. Its familiarity has bred terror. If only it had bred contempt, then perhaps the fighting would have stopped. Contempt is a narrower emotion than fear and eventually gives
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