The white walls, the dark night. In here, out there. These demarcations amplified her solitude. She sat at her desk. She stared at the screen. Nothing happened. She lifted her hands to the keyboard, she lowered them. She took another sip of wine. And another. As a journalist, she’d never been wordless; the stories had been outside her, all around her. In a sense, they still were: the dozens of notebooks she’d retained, now stacked on the desk and under it. She could pull any one open and know the story, Goma, Addis Ababa, Lokchoggio, Mogadishu. And more than the story: the dust, the light, how a cockerel always crowed at dawn and there was always a lone dog barking in the night, woof woof woof, like a satellite pinging in hope of a response. She used to put a dirty pair of underwear on the very top of her suitcase so light-fingered baggage handlers wouldn’t pilfer. She could bargain with taxi drivers in French, Swahili, Amharic and Arabic. She knew smells. Jasmine on the trellis outside a hotel window in Kinshasa, wild grass after a thunderstorm in the Serengeti, the different smells of smoke—wood, garbage, bodies. The notebooks were stained: wine, beer, grease, mud.
“What are you writing?” Michael asked when she’d first established herself in a corner of the living room in London. Because there had been offers. At first. Articles, the odd book review. But there just wasn’t sustained work, freelance or otherwise, the newspaper world was going-going or gone, journalists were like whalers and chimney sweeps. Bloggers had taken over. An agent, a friend of Michael’s, had urged her to consider a memoir, “Lynsey Addario, but with more sex and drugs.” She wondered how this person knew about the sex and drugs. Perhaps she’d been infamous.
“Write,” Sam had said. “You have to write.”
As if she were tunneling, a prisoner digging with a spoon. As if there were a direction, a place the words would take her. Rather than mere habit: the prisoner tries to escape because he is a prisoner, it’s what prisoners do.
She sat, her ass turning to cement in the hard wooden chair in the white house in the dark hills. She preferred discomfort while writing, it kept her leery.
At last, she pushed herself back from the desk and stood. The back of her legs had gone to sleep, her hips ached. She stretched and wandered into the bathroom, climbed up on the toilet to check her phone. There was only a text from Michael: “We need to talk.” Oh, they would talk. Who would have the kids on the weekend, who would keep the house, how would they divide his money.
Leaning back against the tank, Kay felt the coolness of the porcelain through her dress. She wasn’t looking, merely gazing when she noticed an incongruity in the beadboard paneling below the towel cupboard. She peered. Indeed, there was a vertical seam in the wood. She got up off the toilet, crossed the bathroom, and knelt on the floor: a door, about three feet high and the same across.
It was impossible to pry the door open with her fingers, so she scouted around for a tool and selected a nail file. She ran the blade up, discerned two hinges on the left side. On the right, a little inside latch that gently popped.
The space was small, more like a cubby. It was empty. Kay stared into the dark. Why was the latch on the inside? It made no sense unless someone was locking themselves in. And did that somehow make more sense?
Crouching down, she edged herself in. She felt like a child. Perhaps this was just the compression of space, making her smaller and at ground level where adults seldom dwelt. Surprisingly, she could sit up, almost comfortably, even though her legs were bent, either cross-legged or loosely folded. It wasn’t as claustrophobic as it first appeared. She shut the door, and the darkness was almost complete.
She could hear her breath, she had tremendous awareness of her body in the dark, her proprioception heightened, the boundary of her skin, the bones of her face and hands. She felt oddly calm, insulated.
It was impossible to track time in such dark, but she felt she’d sat quietly, meditatively, for a dozen minutes before she became aware of the sensitivity of her fingertips. Her hands were on the floor, and she could feel the grain of the wood, the precise ridges—and this despite the heavy surface lacquer. Slowly, she traced her fingers out to the walls of her enclosure, and up, across the surprisingly rough texture of the paint. The tiniest globlet rose like a mountain from the plain to her touch. The intimacy was almost sensual—as the tightly focused attention to the detail of a lover’s back or neck.
She traced the edges and corners of the enclosure, in front of her, around her, and down. And here she discovered a divot in the wallboard. Twisting her body to reach behind her, she found, further along, a hole, big enough for her finger. She stuck her finger in, wiggling the tip on the other side. Leaning in, she tried to see. She sucked her finger, wetting it thoroughly, then stuck it back in the hole. She felt the air, the space beyond. She withdrew her finger, and sat quiet and still, safe and unknown. She was soft-edged darkness, blurred around the edges like a charcoal drawing.
The moment she cracked open the door, the bathroom light leapt in at an accusatory angle. As she began to unpack herself, she saw it: scratchy strands of writing just over her left shoulder on the wall.
DIRTY SQUEAL SQUEAL
DIRTY PIG SLIT YOU OPEN
She touched the words lightly, as one might hieroglyphics, or perhaps, braille. They weren’t carved in or painted on. The writer had used indelible black marker. There was nothing to be gained by her touch, except to confirm the existence of the words. She couldn’t feel with her skin what was between them, inside them. That required another sense altogether.
Sitting back on her heels, she considered: who. Frank, Maria, the boys? She considered: why. A joke, an angry child, an adult. A man. She tried to think objectively. The awkward handwriting looked childish, but might not necessarily be that of a child; it was difficult to write evenly at such an angle. The words were aggressive. SLIT YOU OPEN sounded like a rape. And it was something men did, they slit open women, children. A woman, on the other hand, would have written with more self-hate: SLIT ME OPEN I’M A DIRTY PIG.
Frank, she thought. Frank. And Frank is, perhaps, not well in the head. Frank is, perhaps, in a mental hospital or at a treatment center. Which, perhaps, accounts for Alice’s reticence.
Carefully, Kay closed the door. She moved the laundry basket in front of it, because, God knows, Tom and Freya wouldn’t go anywhere near it. The laundry basket emitted an impermeable force field, repelling children and their clothes, so they were forced to leave them all over the floor instead.
*
At dawn, a doe and her two fawns grazed in the field beyond the lawn. Kay paused in her making of breakfast, the soft-boiled egg Tom wanted, the toast severed of crusts for Freya. She admired the doe’s grace, the absolute precision of her movements, her ceaseless vigilance. Her entire reason for being alive was her children.
Dirty pig, squeal squeal. The words skittered into Kay’s brain. They were like spiders, she could feel them, up there, above her, in that odd little cupboard. They were too near the children, they might escape, crawl out. Kay felt a swipe of panic. Absurd.
The fawns leaped and twisted and bucked, they charged and nuzzled, then stopped and aggressively jabbed their mother’s udder with their damp muzzles, even though they didn’t need her milk anymore. Sometimes, the doe stepped forward to discourage them and they shimmied away from her in the damp grass, leaping in the silken warmth. They knew nothing of winter, they did not even suspect.
Kay went up the stairs, the narrow, steep stairs almost like a ladder. At the top, she peered into the bathroom; the laundry basket was as she’d left it, the secret cupboard completely hidden.
What would Michael say, had he seen it? Dismissed it? “People are strange,” he would have said. “That shouldn’t surprise you.”
But why these particular words? This malevolent haiku—rather than a banal scrawl of “The Patriots suck” or a cursory rendering of a vagina or penis. It was a code, it meant something more than its words. And why the cupboard, the secret recess, locking from the inside?
She moved on past the bathroom door, the floorboards creaking underfoot.
Sun edged around the heavy cotton curtains in the bedroom, illuminating her children as they slept in a froth of white sheets and stuffed animals. Kay stood over them, loving them. Now was the time to love them, when they would not shy away, when the wrong thing would not be said and the juice would not be spilled and the story did not need to be written. They were hers in such moments, completely. She touched Freya’s blond head, Tom’s smooth back. “Wake up, my darlings, wakey wakey.” Tom turned instinctively toward her, curling his body around her thigh like a snake seeking a warm rock.