M. Harrison: Empty Space

He jumped in surprise. His face had a raw appearance, as if he lived up on the Downs somewhere in the constant blustery wind. His arms were stringy and tough. ‘I don’t know what you think,’ he said, ‘but I’ve come to do some work for a woman who lives here.’ He stared expectantly, then, when Marnie failed to reply, offered ‘She’s an older woman. She’s lived here years. She does her shopping down in Wyndlesham.’ He made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. ‘Some people like her, some don’t. She’s got some work she needs doing.’

‘What kind of work?’

It wasn’t much, the boy said: it was just some painting.

‘I don’t live far,’ he said. ‘She said if I called, I could do the work she needed.’

‘There’s no work here. No one wants any work done here.’

The boy tried to take this in; for him, Marnie could see, the meaning of it lay fully in the words, divorced from body language or tone of voice. ‘She does her shopping down in Wyndlesham,’ he said, as if this explained anything. ‘She likes a pint of Harvey’s.’ He wiped his left forearm across his face. His dog barked suddenly, a small but sharply cut sound that went across the garden like the cry of some less well-known animal. ‘This new bitch of mine,’ the boy told Marnie, ‘I got her from them down the estate. Some say she’s dangerous, but I know she’s not.’ Forelegs braced, its little bristly face sniffing the air, the dog appeared too small, too willing, to be a danger to anyone. Every so often it would gaze up at Marnie or the boy, seeking confirmation of the things it saw. Yes, Marnie wanted to explain: this is grass. It’s a lawn. And that’s a tree, with a pigeon in it. And that, which used to be my dad’s Russian-looking summerhouse, that’s a pile of wood: quite right. This morning my mum died. It was just like her to die without any clothes on, half in and half out of a Russian summerhouse, and be found by firemen. You can tell a lot about her from that. I don’t know, she thought suddenly, what Enny Mae’s going to say.

‘You don’t need worry about this bitch,’ the boy said. ‘She wouldn’t harm a child.’

‘What kind of dog is it?’

The boy gave her a sly look. ‘A working dog,’ he said. ‘An older woman lives here, her name is Anna. She said she had some work she wanted done.’

‘There’s no work,’ Marnie said. ‘I don’t know who you are, but whatever you thought you’d get from her it isn’t here.’

She added: ‘No one lives here now but me.’

The boy blinked. ‘She’s supposed to live round here somewhere,’ he said; then, accepting the situation suddenly, lunged away across the lawn. His shoulders were hunched, his torso compressed and tense, but his stride had a loose, loping quality; the upper and lower halves of him, it seemed, had little experience of each other. The terrier followed, yapping and gambolling, nibbing at his heels for attention. Up at the house, he stopped and fumbled with the side-gate latch. ‘If I did the work, I wouldn’t have to go to the toilet here,’ he promised. ‘I’d go in the village.’ Marnie, completely unable to interpret this plea, felt that they were misunderstanding one another to a degree that could only be her fault. She likes a pint of Harvey’s . Where her mother had met the boy, or how, she preferred not to think.

‘Wait!’ she called. ‘Wait a moment.’

If he wanted work, he might as well deal with the mess Anna had made of the bathroom. He looked strong enough.

The next day, waking in the startled recognition that she had dreamed one of Anna Waterman’s dreams, Dr Helen Alpert threw a single worn item of Mulberry soft luggage into the rear seat of the Citroën, cancelled her appointments for the near future and closed the consulting room. By four that afternoon, having used up almost a fortnight’s fuel coupons, she was in Studland on the Dorset coast. There, despite the sea wind, the smell of salt, the herring gulls sideslipping in and out of the turbulent air above Great Harry rocks, she found that the dream wouldn’t be shaken off.

In it, all her belongings had gone missing from an old-fashioned writing bureau she was using, while, crammed into its hidden drawers and on to its complicated little shelves, she found items the thief had left in return. These stale wrapped sandwiches and bits of half-eaten fruit made her as anxious as she was disgusted. She was afraid he might come back at any moment. The place itself was shabby, half-exterior — the ground floor, possibly the only floor, of a gutted house still in use during some long, slow crisis, some failure of human or political confidence. The doorways had no doors. The windows, though intact, were uncurtained. It was always raining. Damp had got into the furniture — mainly cheap veneered cabinets and shelves from which the varnish had been bleached by sunlight and use — and the walls were covered with fibrous, scaly-looking, ring-shaped blemishes. Looking up at the wall beside a doorway, Helen saw that a slightly more than life-sized vulva had emerged from it like a crop of fungus. It wasn’t quite the right colours. The labia had yellow and brown tones, and the startling rigidity of a wooden model. A body was attached, but less of that had emerged from the wall. It was still emerging, in fact, in very slow motion. She felt that it might take years to come through. And while the vulva clearly belonged to an adult, the body was much younger. It still had the fat little belly and undeveloped ribcage of a child. The vulva presented in the same vertical plane as the wall, but the body and the face were somehow foreshortened and leaning back from it at a wrong angle for the anatomy to work. At all points it was seamless with the wall. She couldn’t see much of the face, but it was smiling. In the dream, Helen began to make a shrieking sound, full of the most appalling sense of grief and horror. She could hear herself but she couldn’t stop.

It was so clearly all of a piece, she thought: the loss or substitution of her possessions, the decayed building open to the elements but still usable, the body emerging seamlessly from the wall in very slow motion. On waking she had experienced spatial confusion; remained dissociated well into the morning. Even now, staring out across the titanium-coloured water of Studland Bay, where a small white boat was chewing its way towards the grey horizon, she felt as if she hadn’t quite re-entered herself. She felt as if, down inside, vital parts of her had separated. She felt that something had broken in her personality — had broken, perhaps, some long time before — but that she would never be able to understand what.

Later, in the hotel restaurant, she listened to a mid-level pharma executive telling his friends about a recent trip to Peru. Really, she thought, he was less entertaining them than issuing a set of instructions. He had chosen a KLM flight, he was careful to emphasise, because it allowed him to do some diving en route: they might want to go more directly. When they arrived, there were certain things they should on no account pay for. As for the ruins, well, the visibility had been bad, but ‘as their apology to us’ for not being able to provide the expected view, the natives had cooked him and his girlfriend a special meal. ‘They didn’t charge us for that, obviously.’ Dr Alpert stared at him in open dislike until he noticed her, then forced him to look away. His name, as far as she could tell, was Dominic. At forty, Dominic still sounded like an MBA undergraduate pretending to be his own father. He seemed like a throwback to another age; so did his friends, with their Boden casual wear and pleasant, affirmative manners. So, she thought, did she. She always kept a pair of boots in the Citroën: she would spend a day or two walking the Downs — to Corfe certainly, perhaps even as far the Purbeck Hills and Lulworth Cove. She would walk until she felt better. First she would separate Dominic the pharma from his friends, take him upstairs, and fuck him carefully to a tearful overnight understanding of the life they all led now.