The Mark

SO I AM beginning to feel the benefit of Stephen’s care, his breath over my shoulder, the fact that he is clean. The white walls make the rooms look bigger and more deliberate. They have opened up the angles, made sense of the corners; they comfort me in the dark.

I look at his hair on the pillow, every shaft a miracle, every shaft still rooted to his head. Stephen dreams about his former life and his dreams are real. While he sleeps, he rolls through his death spasms one at a time. ‘Like labour pains,’ he says, ‘but going the other way.’ It is true that they are getting slower and further apart. Even so, it is hard to sleep as he reverses through a convulsion one pulse at a time, until his throat clears with a click.

As for my desire for him, it has left my crotch, eased through my body, surfaced to the skin and been exhaled, less a need than a breath, less a breath than a small bell, ringing in the silence. Maybe I am happy. Then I realise that whatever he is feeding me, it’s two weeks since I have been to the toilet and I kind of miss it.

On Saturday morning he runs my bath, as usual, and the water, as usual, doesn’t just slosh around; it whispers and ripples, sets pockets of light shimmering on the ceiling. A bird is singing on the clothesline, the water is singing in the pipes. There is no ring forming on the enamel. I can see the picture of myself, with lilies on the floor and on the windowsill, my shoulders rising out of the lion-footed antique where Mrs O’Dwyer had washed and looked at her body and found it good enough. Why not?

So I look at myself and everything seems changed under the broken angle of the water—paler, new. My front no longer breaks the surface to look at me like a quiet brown frog. My nipples have faded and there is something wrong with my stomach. For one thing, it doesn’t seem appropriate to call it a stomach anymore. It is a smooth white belly with obscure functions and an iridescent perfect glow. Smug, that’s one word for it.

The water plashes sweetly as I step out of the bath and make my way to the mirror, which is misted over in an opalescent grey. I wipe away the condensation, which is not a wetness but a fine web, a veil between me and the glass.

For a moment, I do nothing, because of the slight, rising shock. I pick up my nice ordinary toothbrush and brush my teeth in a humdrum kind of way. Hum goes my throat. Hum hum hum, and I have the usual conversation between the brush and my teeth and my eyes in the mirror, in which I play all the parts. So I rinse and ‘Tap Tap’ goes the brush on the side of the sink and it is the sound of a man on his way to my bed, a good man, though my body remembers him in its own way, and I have my usual regret that he is gone and smile at the time I hit him because I thought he was the alarm-clock—violently, or so he said.

By which time I have no excuses left so I step back and lift my eyes to the mirror. O Jerusalem! The white breasts, uncomfortably high, the long, pubescent slope of the belly and my hands and wrists, my feet and ankles too slender to be much use anymore, with a sea-shell edge of pink where the bones protrude, a filigree of blue beneath the skin and a watery green and amber, an undersea shaft of light, hitting the iris of my eye.

I don’t mind my body going, I said to myself, it’s my sanity I miss. So I broke the mirror for a start, its silver shards turning to glass again. I needed all the bad luck I could get. When I called Stephen something in my tone of voice actually brought him for a change.

He opened the door and the steam rushed out at him in wisps, curled and wrapped itself around his head. He saw me and blushed a heavenly rose.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘So you should be,’ I shouted as he closed the door. When I pulled it open his back was turned to the room. I said ‘I want my body back. I want my hands back and my cellulite and my stupid-looking feet.’ It surprised me as I said it, but I missed the lines and the markings and the moles ticking away like timebombs. I missed my mother’s knees and my Granny’s hammer toes. I missed the subcutaneous ridges and drifts and all the mongrel contours mapping the history of this poor body and what it has been through—which is not yet enough.

A thought occurs to me and, while his back is still turned, I check between my legs and find that something ineffably floral has happened down there, something to which you could apply the word ‘petal’. And when I straighten up again, my eyes more than ever sea-changed, Stephen has turned around and is watching me.

Which is when he touches me. I would call it a seduction, but who knows where a seduction starts and where it ends? Stephen raised his hand and brought it palm down in a benediction on my breast, which is the other word I was looking for.

It was like a seduction, in that the journey of his hand to my breast was unbearably slow, a mathematical uncertainty, that could never arrive, that is still arriving. It was like a seduction, in that the moment is still unravelling in my head. It may however, have been a simple hinging of the elbow, a failure of the joint. It may have been a memory in his hand that had nothing to do with his head, or his heart. It may have been a theological question. Why should we not touch? I looked at his eyes which were closed. I looked at his body which was surprisingly naked. Perhaps I groaned.

At least somebody groaned and it was the sound of everything giving way. I was just about to let slip the dogs in my gut, the bells and horns, the clamour and carnage, the Victoria Cross, the mourning, the ticker tape parade in my head, when I looked at Stephen’s hand, now shyly tucked under my breast and I noticed that my nipple was gone.

I had never been wildly attached to the nipple. I always suspected it of some shocking subversion, the bizarre egress my mother happily called the ‘expressing’ of milk. If I wanted to express anything, I had always thought, I would do it in my own sweet way But there is no doubt that I wanted it back, now it wasn’t there.

‘Grace,’ he said and at the sound of his voice, which was rough and sad, I panicked. Which was lucky, because in my fright the slow motion of his hand bunched up and got stuck, a traffic jam in time.

So I had plenty of opportunity to consider the blind innocence of my left breast, its lopsided, sinister purity. I had plenty of ‘time’ to get annoyed at the unfairness of it all. Because although Stephen had no navel, being an angel and twice born, he still had two symmetrical nipples of his own, redundant, greedy, sharp enough to take your eye out, in a don’t-mind-me shade of pink. Though who is to say what you might get out of an angel?

I look at them as time leaks on, cheerfully set in twin whorls of hair, the right travelling clockwise, the left the other way. Hair has started to creep all over his body and is more red than gold so that the light hitting his thigh looks like a personal sunset. It flows in a line to the blank spot where his navel should be and spirals there, each hair chasing and overlapping the next like water trying to go down a plug-hole, before spilling over and falling like a frayed rope to the geometric perfection of his crotch, where it seems to be holding something up.

So I realise that whatever is happening through the empty door frame, it is not all one way. The knowledge that the hair on Stephen’s body is somehow my fault leaves me mute and glad. Because what could only be described as a hard-on of a celestial nature is craning nostalgically towards the blank space in the middle of his stomach, as though, without this marker on his body, it doesn’t know where to stop.

‘Sorry’ he says again. The sadness in his eyes is more human than I want to see and I know that however dangerous this is for me, he has more to lose. I would speak to him and call him back, but the hand has a will of its own. As I stand there in dreadful one-eyed asymmetry and time drips on, his hand moves in gathering sweeps down my body to a place I value more highly—and I am resolved that no matter what he did to my breast, he isn’t going to touch my belly button.

‘Is this all right?’ he says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘No it’s not all right.’

‘Yes.’

‘Stephen.’

‘It’s not all right?’

‘Stephen.’

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘No, it is.’

And his hand inches on to a little piece of my body’s infinity. ‘What’s a navel after all?’ I say to myself, ‘I mean what is it, after all. Between friends?’ but I feel a pang, because my belly button is very neat. It disappears into my stomach and you cannot see the end of it. It has a certain playground kudos and the old-fashioned smell of a midwife’s penny. I think of what it had been tied to—a dead piece of my mother and me they hadn’t bothered to bury.

‘It’s mine,’ I said.

‘Please?’ his eyes were beautiful.

‘Fuck off,’ I said.

‘It’s just a rope,’ said Stephen. ‘Just a piece of old rope.’

His eyes were back on the bridge again. I should have felt used, I suppose, but I just felt frightened for him. He was looking for death, but I did not want to give him mine.

‘Remember Amezyarak!’ I said. Which is just the thing you need to say when an angel drops the hand. It was lucky we were in the bathroom because his wings had caught fire.