After the Audition

STEPHEN IS EXHAUSTED. He has a fever and I put him to bed. The heat coming off him is physical. The sheet stays a few millimetres off his skin and will not be smoothed down. I blame the canteen food and he does not bother to disagree. His sweat smells. He asks me to take the lilies out of the room.

He asks me to take the mirror out of the room. He asks me have I ever looked closely at a wall after you take a mirror down—how blind it looks and how knowing.

My poor sick angel. It makes a change, to look after him instead of the other way round. I hold his hand, because that is what you do when someone is sick. Or is it? All I can see is the radiant madness of his skin as he sweats into the dusk. It seems that I do not have a gift for illness. I practised on animals when I was small, and they all died.

My father hated pets so we saved up for hamsters and brought them home as if by accident; hamsters, mice, anything small or furry or happy. Though they never really looked happy in our house, it has to be said. It was not all my fault. Phil was quite cold towards them and full of scientific curiosity. When the first cat died, leaving us a bagful of kittens, Phil said she died of a hole. I thought he put it there himself.

There was also a broken-winged sparrow who shat all over our hands. We didn’t mind that either and put it in a cardboard box.

‘No,’ we said, ‘don’t you touch him’, as we picked him up, ‘he’s sick.’ Then the sparrow died.

Some of the hamsters started going insane, just like people might. We put sherry in their drinking water to calm them down, but they just kept on mounting and biting their brothers and sisters, their daughters, nephews, grannies, cousins, their own front legs—and the drink had nothing to do with it. I didn’t know that sex had anything to do with it either. I dropped the small ones down my shirt for fun. They ran around in there like my breasts might, or like the hands that would feel them. I didn’t know they were mad. A few more corpses every morning and then the whole lot disappeared. We were used to it, in a way.

Then my mother went into hospital, just like having a baby. Who looked after us? I cannot remember. It must have been my father, tying shoelaces, combing hair, buying things with instructions on the packet. He might have bought us lemonade. Surely I should remember fish fingers and lemonade and wearing the same clothes all week? Surely I should remember him dumping us in the bath, three at a time and drying us with the wrong towel, how many children at a time, rasping us with the biggest roughest towel until we shrieked.

It was not a baby. It was benign.

My mother did not believe in frightening girls, she thought it would give them menstrual cramps when their own time came. Still, we knew about the wrong thing in her tummy. It must have been the neighbours whispering over cups of tea with the door shut. The size of a ping pong ball. The size of an apple. The size of a fist. There was a whole shop in there, the size of a piece of fruit. There was a whole cathedral in there, the size of your head. Wide shot, close up, wide shot, close.

What I remember is not so much the size but the hair. That is what they whispered. It sweated as it grew and put out hairs. Those are the easy ones to catch. You know they are harmless if they grow hair and maybe a tooth (maybe a smile). Of course it made sense.

I knew where she got it. I knew what had put the hairy thing in her tummy. It was not my father at all, but the thing on his head. This was why it hurt her. Why it was not a baby. We were right to be afraid.

Stephen says ‘Tell me something good for a change. I am tired of all this.’

‘Like what?’

‘Something to rest my mind on.’

‘Give me my body back. You can rest on that.’

‘I am tired of all this,’ he says. ‘I didn’t exactly ask for this.’

It seems that I am set to lose him, one way or the other. I am filled with the shame that happens with strangers, as if I had shown him something, but he had not noticed. As if I had shown him something and he did not care. What sort of an angel was he anyhow?

‘Am I so bad?’ I say.

‘Am I so bad?’ he says.

‘Stop that,’ I say.

‘Stop that’, and he turns his back to me, hefting the sheet over with him and bringing it too far, so that a line of piqued flesh lies exposed, sunk into the mattress.

I sit there as the sun sets. It moves through a tear in the cloud and shadows lash out from the roots of the furniture, making things look old and tenacious. Stephen’s hair flares gold in the light and sets a faint hum of colour around his shadow on the pillow. I do not mind him having a halo. I just hate the way it comes and goes.

Tell me something good, he says. And because I am helpless I tell him of the day I learnt about clouds, sitting with my father on a hill in the woods where you could see out and not be seen, watching the light and dark chase each other across the countryside. My father looked at the sky and I looked up with him and saw how high the clouds were off the ground and how much higher the sun. I looked at the ground and back at the clouds and realised all at once about angles and light, about wind and distance. I realised that things did not have to touch the ground in order to throw a shadow.

I pointed at the dark patches running across the ground, said ‘Look, it’s the clouds’, and laughed. I remember my father looking back at me in the sad, amazed way parents have when they realise the distance between the world and their child.

‘Did you never see that before?’ he said. As though my seeing it made all the difference.

‘Hunph,’ says Stephen.

‘Not good enough?’

‘Fine,’ he says.

Stephen’s wings shift under the sheet like stumps. I am so distressed I cannot speak or move away. I sit by the bed as the dusk closes in, then clears again into night. And when the moon comes to the window, I watch the reflection of the glass on the wall, until it goes.