Sarah Hall - The Beautiful Indifference - Stories

She had on heeled shoes from being in the city, from being with her lover, from moving among the public as if she was someone else. And the striped dress. What would they say about her attire, if they found her in the bracken? Perhaps they would say she had prepared. She sat in the car. She could still smell his wet hair, remember the feeling of its damp warmth between her fingers. Remembering their exchanges was like engaging in them again. The memories and the acts were almost the same. Whenever he came inside her it stung. Towards the end of their time together he would gauge how sore she was. He knew the difference between pleasure and discomfort, though the two were so closely aligned. She had brought him so close. And yet so much was unspeakable.

The hills were around her. She took up her purse, opened the car door and stepped into them. It was like opening a book.

One morning, not long after you’ve moved into the new house, you’re out in the garden and you notice that the ground is littered with insects. They lie here and there, like dark smuts between the tawny southern pebbles, leggy and fine-winged. There are dozens and dozens of dead bees. You were attending to something on the ground, a weed perhaps or a blown sweet wrapper, bending over to pick it up, and now, scanning the earth, you can see the creatures strewn all about. Stiff, fossil-looking things. Black-capped, like aristocrats at a funeral, their antennae folded, with mortuary formality, across their eyes. Around their bodies are bands of gold. Some of the bees have their back sections missing. Some are lying in two equal pieces. Some are perfectly whole, as if having landed from flight in a timely fashion, just at the end of their lifespan. You kneel. You examine the creatures. Up above you, the hedgerow towers. The people in the house next door can’t see in. This tiny London garden is a secret cemetery. You are the only mourner.

It is fair to say that since arriving in the city you’ve been noticing details. You’ve been gathering them up, storing them away. You’re a receptacle for information. This is a new disposition for you — this vacancy. Always before you felt full, heavy with what had made you and who you were. You wonder if it’s a prerequisite for living in the metropolis, the scraping out of past existence to make way for a new, enormously complicated one. You are a recent settler. You’ve come down from the far north. You’ve left behind the yellow moors and drenched fields. You’ve left the people who know you, who have reared you, inured you.

It’s not work-related, this move; not a new job, that which beckons most rural emigrants. You’ve come away from your old home for another reason, a reason you imagine to be prosaic, here in this cauldron of life. You’ve come to forget, to move on. And with this move, some lurid internal part of you has unzipped your flesh and stepped outside. A red, essential thing. You felt it go. It happened as you were getting off the train in Euston station, standing on the platform and reaching back into the carriage to collect your suitcase. There was a sudden internal event, like cramp or a stroke, like waters breaking. Something rose up inside your chest. It split you open. It tugged itself through the walls of muscle, slid to the floor and moved off into the crowd. What’s left now is a loose pink sack of human being, bearing your name and your forgettable history. A skin bag with a few organs and some blood slung in; viscera, which cooperate only to the extent they must, in order to keep you alive. In truth, it’s a relief. This downgrading of self. This degeneration. You don’t ache or feel hunger or long for anything. You don’t mind going without that prime red aspect. You have been granted mercy.

You shuffle around on your knees in the garden, place your hands down and lean forwards. There they are — the bees. They are strangely composed. They seem to have collected in groups, selected communal places in which to expire. You pick one up by a crooked leg and place it in the palm of your hand. A dry bristle. Teasel. Half-burnt paper. What is it that has killed them? Is it something to do with infected hives? Mites in their throats or pesticide? Is this the beginning of the holocaust that will lead to the death of grass and cattle, the collapse of the pollinated food chain?

You’re lucky to have the garden, of course. You’re lucky to be where you are now. It could all have been very different. A bedsit in Hackney: depositless and rank. A doorbell rung, suitcase in hand, the rationale that your one retaliatory indiscretion months ago may have resulted in meaningful fondness of some kind. The man in the doorway looking at you, trying to remember, and his girlfriend calling from the kitchen, Honey, who’s there? You’ve landed softly in the hardest of all cities, with only a few possessions, just what you could carry, and a freshly gutted body. Your oldest school friend took you in, her flatmate moving out just when you needed a room. You paid two months’ rent up front, though she said you could owe her. You didn’t flinch over the price.

She’s another northerner, this friend, from the same soaked valley but one village over. You’ve kept in touch with her since school, to some degree or another, depending on each of your situations year in, year out. In school you were good friends. You would go out in the local town at weekends. She was pretty but never as lucky with boys. Once the two of you got drunk and kissed but it was a moment so unreal you’ve never talked about it; you might even have invented it. She did well in school. She’s a professional now and her dialect’s been rounded off, softened at the edges. She works in the publishing industry, marshals authors from one event to another, puts up with egos and tantrums.

You visited her a few times prior to moving, though it was hard getting away from the farm — you had to use Christmas shopping as an excuse — and you blew off steam down here. You always liked visiting the city. You liked the throngs of people, the anonymity, the lattices of wires and trains, the energy. While down here you complained about the pettiness and insulation of the Borders, said you wished you’d left when you’d had the chance. You can still come down , she told you. People do it all the time . You shared fond memories of school and fell walking, old men’s pubs in the villages, lost boyfriends, the ones you lost your virginities to. You filled her in on local gossip, what such-and-such was doing, who such-and-such was screwing. You cried, and, wordlessly, she comforted you. She came to your wedding, ten years ago. She saw the whole thing, the overturned table and the broken glass. She knows about the circumstances of your moving here, but only as much as you’ve conveyed. She’ll not ask more. She’ll wait for you to broach the subject. She’s from the north.

After the great heathered fells, the watery expanses and the lowlands of your home county, this garden seems tiny, condensed. There’s a bench, on which you are now sitting with a dead bee in your hand. The bench is being molested by untrimmed bushes, buddleia, you think, though you’re not good at recognising such plants. A Mexican pot-bellied stove sits up at the top end by the kitchen window. There’s a bird table. Plant pots. These things belong to your friend, who has been in the city for almost twelve years, long enough to make it her home, long enough to acquire possessions and a good social circle. She has secateurs, a trowel, packets of broom and violet seed. She tends the garden to relax after work. But her hours are long, she often has to go out in the evening, to festivals and launches; she is away much of the time. You have the place to yourself, which is good, in a way. You’ve been out into this cultivated pocket of nature quite a few times. Mornings, to catch the hazy sun as it breaks free of the rooftops. You’re not yet working, though soon you will have to find a job. You’ve had glasses of wine out here at the weekend, with your housemate: she’s keen to give you company when she can. It’s then she tries to tell you it’ll be all right, her propositions brief and unassailable. You always nod. Yes, it’s for the best. Yes, there’ll be others. Yes, you are in your prime . You’ve been out here at night when you can’t sleep — the bed still feels strange, sleeping alone still feels strange — or to cool down, London’s summer being more humid than you’d expected. And you’ve also come out to investigate the nocturnal barking and rummaging, the eerie yowling, noises that seem out of place in this urban setting but to which you are attuned. The moon in the city is vast and unwhite.