Nicola Griffith - Stay

I said nothing.

“It’s cold out here. Aud? Are you coming inside?”

I shook my head.

Lying naked and cold beneath the perfect, whispering dark, I imagined I could feel the curve of the earth under my back, that I circled the whole planet, so that my soles touched the top of my head and I blended with the dirt.

Dirt. Skin of the world, amalgam of eroded mineral and all things animal and vegetable, from tiny aphid to redwood giant. A burial ground or refuge; home for animal and insect, seed and spore. A place to rest, to hide, to grow secretly in the dark. A floor on which to stand. Alive and dead at the same time, fecund and rotten. Worm excrement. When dirt is disturbed, it becomes unpredictable: perhaps when turned and tilled it grows fertile and lush; perhaps erosion sets in and the whole turns to sand. Some soil is never meant to be turned; it’s best left frozen and hard-packed. Sometimes it can be hard to tell until you try.

The blood and tears on my cheeks and chest and shoulders had tightened as they dried, my skin grown thick with cold. My throat hurt. There was no difference in light levels when I opened and closed my eyes. Perhaps I was already dead. Perhaps I had never really been alive, and if I lay here without moving, my bones would fall into dust and be blown away with a hiss by the wind. Perhaps that had been true, once, before I met Julia, with her soft skin and bright eyes, her warm hands that reached right through my layers of permafrost. And now I had torn and beaten a man to the brink of death when I had been in no danger, when there had been no need. Every other time, even after she died, I had had no choice: it had been strike or die. Every other time I had come back to myself feeling washed in brilliance and huge with life, like a god, untouchable. Now I felt soiled and outcast, like oxygen once floating free above the atmosphere and now trapped in the ocean and bound in dirt; like the peptides that had skimmed through space only to fall to earth and be harnessed to carbon dioxide and form life; like Lucifer—

“A little grandiose, even for you.”

I sat up and smacked my face into an unseen branch. “Julia?”

“Who else. Is that more tears, or are you bleeding again?”

The stuff running down my cheek was too warm and thick to be tears. I scrubbed it away impatiently and looked around, but it was so dark I could see nothing, not even the branch. “Where have you been?”

She ignored that. “Where are your clothes?” Judging from her voice, she was sitting on the ground by my knees.

I touched my throat. “I don’t remember.”

“Naked in the woods, at night, in late October. Do you remember how to get back?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Oh, Aud.” She sounded sad. “Don’t do this to yourself. Karp was a monster. You said so yourself.”

“He didn’t deserve to die.”

“Does anybody? Besides, you don’t know for sure that he is dead. And even if he is, he wouldn’t be the first.”

“This is different.”

“How?”

I didn’t answer.

“Let me ask you something else, then. Think about Geordie Karp for a moment: smart, well-connected, cold, and manipulative. Forget the borderline thing for a moment. Who did he remind you of? And Aud”—she moved closer, until her voice was a caress—“please, get yourself back to the trailer and get warm.” And she was gone.

Forget the borderline thing? I didn’t understand. I did understand the last part: get yourself back to the trailer and get warm. And she’d said please. I sighed.

I tried to get to my hands and knees but my left knee wouldn’t work. I felt it; there was no obvious cut. Bruised, maybe. Hard to tell because my hands were so cold. What time was it? I couldn’t remember how long I’d been here, which direction I’d come from. No point trying to find the clothes now. No point trying to walk back to the clearing in total darkness. More blood ran down my chin and smeared stickily under my hand. I felt about me, patting. Not enough leaves. I rolled onto my belly, pulled myself forward a yard or so, and waved my hands to and fro, feeling for the branch. In woods this thick, a branch should not be so low to the ground.

Who did he remind you of?

I dragged myself another yard. There. Thick and sturdy, and growing upwards, from a point somewhere ahead of me. A fallen tree, with a small drift of dry leaves. I rolled onto my side, swept the leaves up around me. They’d keep me warm enough until dawn.

Who did he remind you of?

My knee began to ache. I must have twisted it somehow, earlier. I couldn’t remember. Too stubborn to go mad, Dornan had said. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been wrong. My feet hurt, too, but I didn’t want to reach through the leaves to feel them and disturb the warming air pockets.

Then there was nothing to do but wait for dawn, nothing to do but sit still before Julia’s question.

It took two hours to cover what should have taken fifteen minutes, and well after the sun had risen I limped into the clearing, leaning heavily on a broken branch, sick, tired, and empty. I hobbled to the fire pit and lowered myself slowly onto the log. There was no sign of Tammy, and I didn’t have the energy to call out. The rental Neon glowed zealous green in the early morning light.

“Aud!”

I was too tired to look up.

“Aud?” Somehow she was in front of me, kneeling on the grass, the way Julia had when Dornan was here, not that long ago, but oh, in what seemed like another lifetime… She was saying something else, about my clothes, but I didn’t pay attention, until she put her hand on my calf, gently, and I flinched.

“I said, is this your blood?”

It was spattered on my chest, smeared on my stomach and thighs and neck, on my hands and feet. How had it got on my feet?

“Aud? Is it your blood?”

“This time.”

“Can you walk to the car?”

I finally lifted my head and stared at her.

“I’ll drive you into Asheville. You need to see a doctor.”

I started to shake my head and the world slipped sideways.

“Whoa!” Strong arm around my shoulders. Her fingers brushed my bare breast and shifted instantly.

I looked at the grass until it stopped moving. “It’s nothing. Cuts and bruises. I can do it, clean it up.”

A long pause, then: “Can you stand?”

My knee was about twice its usual size and I’d lost some blood, but I’d been hurt much worse than this in the past and still managed. Today, for some reason, I just couldn’t seem to move.

“Okay.” Her grip around my shoulders shifted to my waist. “I’m going to haul and you can lean on your stick, branch, whatever. On the count of three. One, two, three.”

I tried, then, but it was as though someone had stolen the marrow from my bones and filled them with lead, heavy and soft, and I managed only an inch or two before I sank back on the log. How odd to be so helpless.

“Fuck,” Tammy said under her breath. Then, more loudly, “I guess we’ll just try again.” She got behind me this time, put both arms round my waist, face pressed against my bare back. Her hair tickled. “Okay. And this time you’re going to make it. On three. One, two, three.”

I rose slowly on one leg and hovered for a moment, knee bent, precarious as a kite deciding whether to catch the wind, then I was up, clutching my branch with one hand, the other arm over Tammy’s bowed shoulders.

“All right! Right leg first, okay, good. Now the left leg, I’ll take your weight.” Her voice was muffled: her cheek was crushed under my left breast. “Left leg, no, left leg. Good, good. Right leg. Okay. Let’s just stand here for a second and catch our breath. No, Jesus, Aud, don’t you give up. You have to help me. I’m—It’s not far. You have to help.”