Sarah Hall - The Beautiful Indifference - Stories

These are the moments when you wonder whether coming to London was the right thing — these disturbed, sleepless moments. The north seems close, connected as it is by darkness and light, by bitter constellations. It’s been difficult to reconcile the permanence of this change. It’s been difficult to let go, to forget entirely. At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.

During the day you go into the city because it’s a place you’re supposed to go into, now that you’re a resident. You encourage yourself to learn bus routes, find groceries, independent cafes. You go to galleries and shopping districts. You share the pavement, walk with or against the crowd. Sirens. Traffic. Planes. There is such different choreography from that which you are used to, the slow machinery in the black fields, livestock cropping the tufts, your once vernacular scenery. You’ve some money and a credit card that has not been stopped. Soon you’ll find employment, probably quite menial; you’re not highly qualified, but for now you’re acquainting yourself with London, distancing yourself from the time before. It is a faceted city: ornate, sooty, modern. You aren’t afraid of it. You note things, place details on a cerebral shelf. You memorise noises, chimes, electrical thrums, the euphonic character of the place. And smells: the stale pavement, body odours, doorstep musk, green ponds. There are underground winds, motion sensations, beeps, commands. Your head has begun to fill with urban miscellanea, civic clutter, like keen junk.

But this waste of bees is unexpected. You’re interested in the particularity, the mystery. You stand up from the bench and drop the little carcass from your hand. You walk about the garden, your eyes cast down, wondering what kind of disease might have decimated their community. There were those terrible rains shortly after you first came, that swelled the Thames and the Victorian sewers past capacity, that bloated fish and sent them up, silver-bellied, to the surface of the brown surge. You don’t understand the natural calibration here, not in the way that you know fell ponies graze the uplands in summer and riverside in winter, sheep will remain hefted until struck off, and the swallows come back in April, feeding on the wing above bright streams. In the garden you tread around the bodies carefully, agriculturally. Then you go back inside the house.

The days pass; warm, sticky summer days. There are thunderstorms. The sky above London turns purple, then grey. Rain sluices from gutters and culverts, spills from eaves. The storms pass, the dark patches in the roads shrink. You go out on a few dates. These men are used to dating. You are not exotic. One night you go home with a man and you fuck him. Or, you let him fuck you. He does it hard so as not to lose his erection. Halfway through he withdraws and asks if he can take off the condom. You say no. Then you say yes. Two days later you come down with a bladder infection. You go to a clinic for antibiotics. It takes hours, by which time you are urinating blood. For a week or so you think about going back to the north. The regret passes. You sit outside in your shorts and a vest. The sun is strong, liquefying. You relax. The garden remains littered with bees. You never see them dying. You don’t see them tumbling from the sky, or twitching on the ground, pedalling upside down on their backs, their frail wings vibrating into stillness. They are simply corpses. All you witness is evidence of their extinction.

You go into the garden more frequently. You watch the ones that are alive, moving like Zeppelins in the air, scooping inside the flower heads. There are plenty. They seem oblivious to the bodies underneath. It is business as usual. When you are inside the house you pause at the bedroom window and look out, in case a clue might present itself. You go down to the library by the park to gather information about apiculture. You read about dangerous breeding techniques in America — the weakening of certain species. The almond industry, bees flown in on jumbo jets to pollinate. You read about particular kinds of beetles that burrow in under the eggs and attack juveniles. Bees are highly cooperative. Any sickness, any threat to the queen, is dealt with immediately. They will sacrifice themselves, clean out infected combs with their mouths, fly as far away as they can before dying. But you’ve looked over the garden hedges and fences along your street, even in the allotments nearby, and there are no hives.

You arrange interviews. You move your voting registry, put your name on a waiting list for a GP. You know you live in London now. You still feel empty. And you still wonder about that red thermal mass. All the anger and desperation and love that was furled up inside you, making you wild for the last few years. Where is it? Sometimes you think it can’t have gone far; must be roaming London, scorching and singeing the undergrowth as it moves. Or is it in your old home, back in the house that you shared, with its slippery courtyard and hay-smelling outbuildings? It could be curled up in front of the coal stove next to his dog, or staring out of the front door at the Scar as the authentic rain comes down, or bumping about in the passenger seat of the Land Rover, driving into town. You wonder about him, what he’s doing. If he’s managing. If he’s thriving. If he’s sorry. If he knows that he might still own your busted-out incendiary heart, and that you’re turning through this new life as uselessly as a shed tractor tyre.

As you get ready for your first interview you look at your face in the bathroom mirror. It’s lined along the brow, around the eyes, at the corners of your mouth. It’s the face of a person who has spent time outdoors, in all weathers. But you have always made an effort with make-up and you are attractive. Once you were considered very attractive. You were his prize. You aren’t old for this city, where youth stretches out into middle age, where people don’t commit or own mortgages or cars. You felt older in the countryside, comparatively. Old in your hometown, where women the same age had children already sitting exams or getting pregnant themselves. You have no children. You might have had children. You were at risk of having them young. But you didn’t want to, even though he did. He said it was the right thing to do. He imagined extra hands to help around the byres, a son to come to the pub with on Christmas Eve.

But something in you stalled. You resisted. You kept taking the pill, every day, 6 a.m. And you had one abortion, secretly. You took the tablets and wore an incontinence pad and slapped the paleness out of your face and went to the pens to help with the clipping. It wasn’t even about him, the decision, though you could have set it against his temper or his drinking, his heavy-lashed eyes that were cast over the rumps of other women, and his dirty nails that must have dug into them too. You just didn’t feel broody, didn’t feel the inclination, that ache in the space between your arms. You never saw through a full conversation about it either, you always made an excuse. The dogs needed feeding. You had an appointment in town. Talk about it later .

But you never said no when he wanted to. You maintained an active sex life, from the last year of school until that sore red ember began to glow. He liked you to unfasten his blue boiler suit and pull it down off him. He liked you on your knees, on the floor, liked to put his hands against the wardrobe and look in the mirror, at your head moving, at his length and the hard muscle in his stomach. You can remember the taste of him now, from years of practice — sour, salty. Yeah come on, swallow me. You’re a good bitch . You can remember the smell of silage and diesel in the farmyard, the feel of him butting behind you, increasingly minimal in his inquiry, complaining if you weren’t wet enough, pulling out and moving it into a tighter place. A bonny pair: that’s what they called you. Best match of the town. You knew what it meant, to be with him, to be his. You signed the contract.