Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

“Mr. Fox. You’re not going to change, are you?”

“I don’t think I will, no.” His tone was light but measured.

“For example — you’re working on something at the moment, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me what it is.”

He looked at her, considering. “You really want to know?”

“I really want to know.”

“Well. It’s about a man who works hard as an accountant all day and likes to go out driving late at night, to. . to relieve his stress. And one night he’s driving so fast he doesn’t see a woman who’s trying to hitchhike from the side of the lane, and he knocks her down. But he keeps going because he’s afraid he killed her and would be arrested and go to jail and all sorts of unpleasantness like that. The next night he stays at home. But the night after that he goes driving again, and, well, he more or less deliberately knocks someone down. Over six months he makes a real career of it, knocking down pedestrians, mainly hookers. . It really relieves his tensions—”

“Stop,” Mary said brusquely.

“But I haven’t even told you the best part yet.”

“You’ll always refuse to see — or refuse to admit that what you’re doing is building a world—”

He smiled slightly, and she amended her words: “What you’re doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, ‘Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,’ and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You’re explaining things that can’t be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day’s scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because ‘nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman’; it was because of this, it was because of that. It’s obscene to make such things reasonable.”

He shrugged. “These are our circumstances. I’m just trying to make sense of them,” he said.

Mary was silent.

“Everyone dies.” He smiled crookedly. “I doubt it’s ever a pleasant experience. So does it really matter how it happens?”

“Yes!” She put a hand on his arm, trying to pass her shock through his skin. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been wasting your time,” Mr. Fox said softly. The darkness in the garden absorbed the blue-black mane of his hair and made it look as if the sides of his face and the top of his head had been chiselled away.

He asked her: “Do you want to stop playing?”

Mary began to answer him, but the guests arrived, in pairs. Three couples in all, and each brought wine, even though their hosts had plenty waiting. A blonde woman named Greta was very huffy with Mr. Fox, refused to surrender her cheek for a greeting kiss but somehow made a joke of it. Her husband, a sleek blond man with a strong jaw, touched Mrs. Fox’s arm as he kissed her hello. The blond man’s accent had the slightest hint of the foreign to it, and everyone called him by his surname: Pizarsky. Even his wife called him that. Pizarsky. . Mary recognised the name. Her eyes widened.

Pizarsky looked at Mrs. Fox often throughout the evening, and each time he looked it was for a moment longer than was casual. His gaze was hesitant. Almost meek.

Nobody seemed to notice this but Mary, who saw it all from her place outside the window, her heels grinding into the flowerbed. Should Mr. Fox fear this Pizarsky, as a rival? The man was so quiet that it was impossible to tell. The other husbands vied endlessly for the most outrageous comment of the evening, planned a forthcoming fishing trip in great detail, and addressed Mrs. Fox with elaborate compliments on the food. Mrs. Fox, pale-faced, accepted their tributes without a single guilty blush. She displayed her wedding ring for five minutes or so, then kept her hand beneath the tabletop. She and the other women spoke of ascending and descending skirt hems, and how difficult it was to hit upon the right length. Their eyes danced with the satisfaction of secret society members talking in code. They interrupted one another. “Do you remember. .” they said. “Do you remember when. .”

After dinner, the six of them moved to the drawing room. Mr. Fox had a dab of sauce at the corner of his mouth — Mrs. Fox removed it with a swift, affectionate gesture and the corner of a very white napkin. Mr. Fox kissed Mrs. Fox’s hand. When the teasing started up he mildly remarked that he thought a man might kiss his wife in his own drawing room on a Sunday evening if he felt like it. The others laughed hysterically. They’d started out sipping genteelly from glasses, but as they got drunker the drinking grew more lavish, and was done straight from bottles. They played charades, very badly, and were unable to establish who had won.

To Mary it looked like a great deal of fun.

There was a death on the plane back to London. It was the woman beside me. I didn’t know it could happen like that. I mean, I knew, but I didn’t believe it.

We pushed our seats back at the same time, our eyes met, and we laughed. We’d both ordered vegetarian meals. “I hate this food,” she said. “But I like getting it before everyone else.” Her name was Yelena. She was from the Ukraine, she told me, and I reminded her of her younger daughter. She was fifty-something, I think. Late fifties. Her fuzzy brown hair, her round, shiny eyes. She reminded me of a duckling, a greying duckling. I’d only just met her, but I liked her. I don’t know. We talked about New York. She’d been visiting her eldest daughter, a journalist for a fashion magazine. “You don’t know how far she’s come,” she said. What else. . She showed me a group photo of her eldest daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandson. They looked happy and wealthy, suntanned in winter. I told her that I’d just been visiting my mother. “Good daughter,” she praised. I shook my head. “Only child.” She asked me what my mother does, and I said she’s a yoga teacher. I almost always lie about my mother. This woman, Yelena, started watching a sitcom and giggling, so I put on my noise-cancelling headphones and drank three-quarters of a bottle of cough syrup. I like it because it wears off faster than sleeping pills. I licked my lips. My stomach felt full; it seemed to sigh. When I looked out of the window sleep came down over it, steadily building black, softening my neck so that my head lolled, gathering me up in its vapour so that I drifted above the cramped angle of my seat. At some point my neighbour began to drum a fist upon my arm, then she began to groan and gripped my wrist; I shrank away and turned my face deeper into the flight cushion. I was dreaming.

I dimly recall hearing a beeping sound, and another noise, like a toy rattle being shaken. But they might have been in the dream. I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get. I say this as if I’ve lived too long. I’m twenty-two.

I woke as they were taking her away. Everyone was talking — everyone, in every seat. I felt their voices through my back and in my hair. There was still daylight in the cabin, but the overhead lights were on. Two male flight attendants carried Yelena away down the aisle, wrapped in blankets. And a balding man with a stethoscope walked behind them. I kept my head very still and just took my time to look and listen, without saying anything. Yelena’s arm kept trailing; her palm touched the floor, and the attendant who had the upper half of her kept catching her arm but couldn’t keep it aloft. Not to worry, said the flight attendants, and the man with the stethoscope said something similar with every step. They were taking her through to first class, which was almost empty, something Yelena and I had complained to each other about at the beginning of the flight. Someone asked if Yelena was dead. The flight attendant said something about her having been “taken ill.” But you’ve covered her face, someone else said. A beige silk scarf had been laid in a floppy triangle over Yelena’s eyes, mouth, and nose. Someone behind me started praying, in Latin, and rattling beads. People kept looking at me, and at the empty seat beside me. There was Yelena’s handbag, beneath the seat in front of us. Her tray, with the remains of her meal on it, had been hastily pushed on top of my own tray. Her seat was still warm. The sitcom was still running on the little screen. I kept listening to what was being said: I heard the words “cardiac arrest.” I should look after Yelena’s handbag. When would they come back for it? Should I take it up to the front. .