Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference: Stories

Darling, he had said to her, you should just let yourself feel something. If he makes you happy, be happy.

She stepped back from the window and looked at herself in the mirror again. The neckline of the dress was quite high. It gave the impression of thickening her collarbones. In the wardrobe hung another dress, belted and with an Edwardian-style bathing stripe, which he had seen before and liked very much. It was more fun, less chic. She reached behind and unfastened the one she was wearing. It drifted over her hips to the floor. She gathered it up and held it at waist height, paralysed for a moment by indecision, by aesthetics. Then she stepped back into it.

She sat on the bed. The book she was reading, or rather the book she had been carrying around for two weeks but not managing to read, was on the side table. She opened it and tried to get through a paragraph or two, but the words floated, the conceptual environment failed. She knew the author reasonably well; they had once shared the same publisher. Usually this motivated her to finish a novel — if only for the sake of etiquette. Often she discarded books. Whenever she made this confession people were astonished. It had come up again at her event last night. A woman on the front row had been appalled during the closing session.

How do we get our children to read more? All they do is play violent video games!

Why should they read? I don’t. Given the choice I’d much rather do something else. Including blow things up.

You’re joking? You can’t really be serious?

Can’t I? Why not?

Silence. Murmurs in the crowd. She was not adopting the correct role of advocate.

In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms.

She shut the book. The cover was photographic, part of a female figure, a headless torso and limbs, though the novel itself was about the Second World War. The image was stock, meaningless. Give me a man, she thought. Give me the long cleft in his back. She had a popular science magazine in her bag too, which she had begun to buy in the last few months. But she had already finished the most appealing article about new-generation prosthetics. Soldiers coming home maimed were going to benefit hugely from new bioengineering techniques, according to the piece. The devices were becoming lighter, more flexible, intuitive of the brain’s synaptic messages. It was as close to restoration as possible.

It was five thirty. The last she’d heard he had made it to King’s Cross but he’d not texted since then to say which train he would be on. They arrived from London at twenty past the hour. The hotel was a ten-minute walk from the station; he had the address and the room number. Either he would be here soon, within a few minutes, or he would be another hour. She’d been primed the whole afternoon and now she felt fraught. She was unsure about the blue dress with its high neckline. She was unsure how it would affect the sex. Her mind felt white, empty of intellectual conversation. She could recall none of the finer points of the article in the magazine, though the subject, the idea of psychology and kinetics, had seemed fascinating. The noise outside was intensifying. Heels striking the pavement. Gales of singing. The thump of music from a pub.

She stood from the bed and looked at herself in the mirror. Her skin was luminous and secretive. She stared. After a minute or so her appearance became unstructured, a collection of shapes and colours. There had been no plan, not for any of this. Perhaps she had planned nothing in her life. And yet here she was, in this room, in this form. Speculatively, side by side in a crowd, she and her lover could be the same age. They had enough in common, and there was enough difference to make the relationship interesting. In practice there was no problem. But perhaps there was a flaw to the whole thing she hadn’t seen, or was refusing to see, or which had not yet manifested. Children? Her friends now assumed what her position was.

She put her fingertips to her groin and felt along the ligaments and the gristle at the top of her thighs. The nodes were like unopened buds. She reached behind and unzipped the dress and it slid over her hips to the floor. She felt again, without the fabric barrier. Her body was full of unknowable cartilage, knuckled and furled material. Sometimes, when they lay together, his hands would unconsciously map her contours, pressing the organs and tissues. Or he would find her pulse in alternative places — the vees between her finger bones, the main arteries. He did not seem to realise he was doing this.

She was refastening the dress when the door lock clucked and released and he came into the room.

Hi.

Oh, hi.

He dropped his battered shoulder bag on the floor and came to her and kissed her.

Sorry I’m late.

Don’t worry. I’ve had a good afternoon.

This is a nice hotel.

He greeted her again, softly, then stepped back. He removed his jacket and dropped it onto the bed. He did not look tired from the night shift. He never did. His hair had been cut very short — there were lines along his scalp where the direction of growth altered. The last time she had seen him it had been long and curling around his ears, on the verge of being unkempt, but very attractive. The smell of his wet hair was one of her strongest memories now. Like the feeling of deep humiliation for injuring the junior-school pet rabbit. Like the unhealing gash on her mother’s cheek where hospital orderlies had caught her with a metal instrument while wheeling her to the morgue. Bracken burning on the moors.

Excuse me a moment.

He went into the bathroom and there was a trickle of water. In the time she had known him his politeness had never waned. Neither had her enjoyment of it. She glanced at her reflection. The eyes looked dark, shuttered by mascara. The smudged red mouth looked incapable of speech. Something inexact had hold of her. She tried to recall exactly how the nerves at the end of the amputated arm sent signals into the receptors of the bionic limb. How the brain was fluent in the language of electricity.

The shock of the real, she said.

The tap turned off and he came out of the bathroom drying his hands on a towel. He tossed the towel onto the bed, next to his jacket.

Sorry, I didn’t hear you. What did you say?

I said, it’s strange, each time I see you again. You look different. Altered. You’re not like I remember. I have to get used to you.

He smiled. There had always been such invitation between them, always permission. He knew it. And her friends were disquieted.

You too.

Laughter through the open window. A police siren.

It’s a little crazy out there.

The weather?

No. After the races.

How was your event? Did they buy books?

Yes. It was fine.

They were at each other’s mouths a moment later. She was almost too small for the way he handled her. He liked the blue dress, he told her, it was beautiful, and the stitching, two or three inconsequential stitches, broke, as he lifted it over her head.

They went out and found a restaurant with courtyard dining and took a table. There was no chill in the air. They did not wear jackets, and the other diners, in their shoulder straps and short sleeves, seemed convinced that summer had arrived too. They ordered a bottle of wine. To begin with she was chatty and unlike her earlier indeterminate self. He laughed at her jokes. He asked what she was working on. She spoke briefly about the research and handed the subject to him. He had changed rotation with in the last week and was now on the psychiatry ward. It wasn’t yet very stimulating.