Flesh Wounds

FLESH WOUNDS

A short story by Anjali Paul
c. Copyright by Anjali Paul

***

"You wont even know it's happened," the nurse said maternally. Yde lay
on the narrow stretcher of a bed, naked under the backless white
sterilised shift, watching her as she prepared the anaesthetic.

"Yes I will," she thought.

"Breathe in." The nurse held the mask over her face. Yde lay curled,
foetus position, a dull ache in her stomach. "When am I going
in?"

The nurse laughed, crinkling the skin around her vacant eyes. "You've
been in," she said. "It's all over. I told you, didn't I?"

The slow pain was reassuring. Yde squirmed slightly. The two thick pads
between her legs were reassuring. There was a warm red hole in her
where life had been.
She was free.
She slept.
That was Friday.

***

On Saturday Simon came to see her. He had brought her some oranges. He
put them awkwardly on the table across her bed, square and steel as a
re-enforced cage, which hemmed her into the clinical sheets. "How are
you?" He asked stiltedly.
"Fine." She felt fine.

"They say you could come out today but I think you should stay here
until tomorrow. Rest a bit. We can afford it."

The oranges blandly punctuated the pause.
"There's no food in the house." He shuffled his feet. There was nowhere
to sit down. Yde closed her eyes.

"I'll go shopping tomorrow ," she said, wishing he would go.
"I'll come and get you tomorrow, then," he said.
"It's all right, I'll get the train."

"Are you sure?" He tried not to feel relieved.

"Sure. It'll give me a chance to go shopping on the way home."
"All right." He bent to kiss her cheek. "Marion wondered if you might
need a hand."
"Nice of her."
"She said she might come round tonight. To help clear the place up
before you get back."
"Good."

Yde squirmed at the thought of sweet, submissive Marion. Everyone's
friend. So gentle. So kind. Why was she the only one who didn't trust
Marion?
Simon looked at Yde. She seemed to be sleeping. He left.

Outside the clinic he exhaled. Bright drops of water clung quivering to
the underside of iron railings, and the roofs of distant houses bubbled
behind a narrow stream of smoke. He stretched his arms into the autumn
air and shook off the tension of the meeting.

It was odd how difficult he found it to define Yde in his memory.

He had just seen her, yet he could not visualise her face. There were
no familiar pegs on which to hang her personality anymore: he could not
say that Yde was like this, or thought that, or had such and such
idiosyncrasy. She was a blur in his mind wrapped in a name.

Sometimes when he talked to her, staring out of the one window of their
room neatly defining a pale sunset ( he found it hard to look at her
now, look into her eyes), she seemed to fade out, become the shape of a
woman with a hazy edge and darkness at the core of it. He tried to
remember conversations that they had had, but he could never recall
what she had said or done, it was as though her words and actions had
faded with her, melted into those evenings and the darkening walls of
their room.

Marion was waiting for him on the doorstep of the house. "I knew you
wouldn't be long," she said. "How is she?" He did not answer. She shot
him an understanding look from beneath her eyelashes, and smiled up at
him as he unlocked the door and led the way up the stairs.

The room smelt musty and unused. It was fairly large: a double bed in
an alcove, a small sofa and two armchairs encircling a low table and a
gas fire, a kitchen unit against one wall. It always smelt unused,
however long anyone stayed in it.

Simon hung his coat behind the door and drifted to the window. The
night crept closer on its long gaunt limbs, ignoring the cold stares of
the streetlights set under their steel frowns.

Marion knelt to light the gas fire. He turned to face her, and started
talking, not caring whether she understood or not. It was enough that
she was there.

"We were up at this place called the Blue Lake in the summer," he said
slowly, his eyes on the carpet. "I don't remember where it is. In North
Wales near Harlech I think." He shivered. "I wish it wasn't so cold.
Here I mean. Not there. It was lovely there. Really warm. Had its
drawbacks. Long lines of tourists. Swarms of them. We climbed up to one
of the caves. It was blocked up. There was a painting of this animal,
sort of like a fawn with horns. Like nothing on earth. I asked Yde if
she felt anything strange, and she looked at me with those slant eyes
of hers as if she was a complete cabbage and shrugged. I don't know why
I bother with her sometimes. I knew what that animal was. I mean I
don't know its name, I'd never seen anything like it before. But I
knew. It struck a chord somehow. I was standing there with chills
running up and down my spine, and then out of the corner of my eye I
saw it. The animal. Running past me. I turned around but there was
nothing there. I wanted to tell Yde but she'd fallen over in her usual
clumsy way. At first I was irritated with her, then suddenly I felt so
frightened I couldn't move. I think I blacked out. I must have done.
Though when I came to, I was still standing. We climbed down after
that. And the tourists were swarming all over the lake like insects
over a giant square sapphire. The thing with Yde is that she's really
insensitive. I don't think she felt a thing." He shivered again.
"It's cold in here."
"Come over by the fire," Marion said softly. He knelt down beside her.
"That's when she got pregnant," he said, his face sombre and lit red by
the small fire. "I don't understand why. Its as though she did it
deliberately. She knew we couldn't afford... it wasn't in the plan.
We'd discussed it so many times. We had a lot of fights. Well, not
really fights... silent arguments. I'd try and make her see sense and
she'd look at me with those eyes... of course she saw sense in the
end... only now I can't seem to reach her... I don't even want to, half
the time... ."

"She's a strange one, Yde," Marion whispered. " I never know what she
really feels."

"It's as though she's behind a smoke screen most of the time, and you
don't know what's really there behind all the smoke... do you remember
that time we all went down to Brighton and she -"
"Was she with us?" Marion looked up in surprise. " I thought she stayed
at home that day."

"No, she was there." Simon stopped, puzzled. Yde had been with them,
hadn't she? Hadn't she? His memory of that day wavered, including her,
excluding her. He shook his head, confused.

Their words sank into the silence. Simon polished his small round
glasses. His eyes gleamed wetly; his hair gave off the same damp
glow.

Marion stared at his body. Clammy, boneless, and white as a filleted
fish. His hand touched hers, began to caress her fingers. Why not? A
thrill ran through her, she mistook it for desire: it was a longing for
change. Someone new. Why not? They were friends. That was how it should
be, or so everyone said. Sex was supposed to be better with someone
that you knew and liked. She wondered if she liked Simon. She must do.
They had been friends for so long.

She stayed his hand, took off his glasses. They removed their clothes
methodically, embraced clumsily. She guided his hand between her
thighs, and dissolved into her latest fantasy...

She opened her eyes and waited for Simon to finish heaving and gasping.
She felt cool and clear-headed and relaxed.

It had been quite good.

She arose and drew the curtains. Simon lay face down on the
floor.
"Marion.
She stood with her back to him. His voice was edged with guilt.
"Marion... . Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have... . I was -"

She breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. It would always be a secret,
her own; she would draw it from her memory and finger it quietly on
rainy afternoons spent gossiping with Yde; her own concealed
weapon.

It had been so easy.

Simon stood up, stared at her. She turned her head to smile at him
sideways.
"I know," she said. And their relationship was as it had always
been.
They began to clean the flat.

***

Sunday the wind sang low and desolate through the canyons of the city.
Strips of polythene whirled and sparkled in the springing rain.

Yde coasted through the glowing scraps of garbage windblown along
the
pavement. She was light on her feet today.

She smiled at the passing cars. Windscreens winked back. Rhythms of a
hundred different songs leapt from shining radios and fought in the air
above her head.

"Oh yeah," she thought, "Oh yeah." Her blood flowed to the beat of the
people scudding past. She stopped outside the supermarket, sighed, and
walked in.

Yellow light poured over rows of food and washing up liquids. Ten
different types. Each more effective than the other. Like women in the
'Arabian Nights.' Seven sisters, each more beautiful than the
other.

The tinned music flowed over her like melting ice-cream. She bought
beans, sweet corn, eggs, milk, sausages. She stood in front of the
fruit section ; rows of red and green apples, invitingly
polished.

"Can I help you?" The shop girl had nails as seductive as the apples;
her eyes held infinite weariness. Confused, Yde bought a pound of
oranges. While she stammered and looked for her change, the girl tapped
her nails on the counter in time to the thick, sweet music.

She walked out through the long narrow corridors of shelves piled high
with tins and plastic bags and cardboard cartons.

Outside, time and the shopping bags hung heavy on her hands.

She stood at the bus stop behind four other people, waiting for a
number three bus.

The child sat in a car blurred by the rain. The door was half-open. His
eyes stared inward, his head to one side, one finger tracing patterns
of raindrops on the fogged window.

Yde pulled her coat around her, shook back her wet hair. Tightened her
grip on the carrier bags.

His mouth was full and soft and red, half-open. His face was knowing,
ageless and innocent. Rain ran down her neck. She stood and stared at
his face. At his eyes which knew everything and knew more. Watching the
rain, entranced.

The child drew the elongated twisted ecstatic form of a horned fawn on
the glass. His eyes slid to Yde's, held them, slid inward again. One
corner of his mouth curved in a sweet, indifferent smile.

She recognised the animal. It was the one that had knocked her over at
the Blue Lake in Harlech. No-one else had seen it. It had come rushing
out of the cave like a torrent of hide and hoof and when she picked
herself up off the ground, she had lacerations on her legs.
"Flesh wounds," Simon had said dismissively, not really looking at
them.
Yes, it does, she had thought, as the clean line of his jaw sliced into
her heart. Doesn't it just.

The animal etched on the car window dissolved, melted into the water
flowing along the high street; flocks of garbage clawed its liquidated
back.

Yde stood, stillness entwined in her hair, her breath.

A car door slammed. The child shivered, looked up, laughed, pointed to
Yde. Laughed.

A knife twisted in her throat, another in her stomach. She turned and
ran through the shattered silence, through the rain like glue, away
from the joyous, the innocent sound.

She thought she heard a car door slam.

***

Monday was misty. Wisps of thickened air clung to Yde, drifting. Her
face gazed up at her from a rainbow ringed puddle. Her eyes, vacuous in
the dim water, spread outwards. Yde dissolved. Yde de-ceased.

Ceased to be.

The eyes of a fawn slanted through seven colours at the sky. The shell
of a young woman sat on a park bench, under Yde who was riding the
bird's song, riding the dog's bark.

The world heaved and writhed and swung around its still centre which
was the shell of Yde on a rough wet bench sitting on a small square of
grass set in a city somewhere...

Marion watched her from the other side of the small park. Yde looked
up, directly at her, and Marion looked into eyes that were not Yde's. A
gaze from the black unseeing eyes of an animal of chaos seared into
her, pierced her terrified mind like a needle through a living
beetle.

Yde's eyes dropped. She had not seen anything.

Marion turned and scuttled away. The animal had seen into her depths,
seen everything that she had never shown. As she scurried through the
crowds of Monday mourning people, she moved as though her skin was made
of glass, as though even the most incurious strangers could see her
innermost desires and hear her unspoken thoughts.

***

Tuesday on the tube, Yde stared at the night shaded eyes of the people
around her and wondered about everyone she had ever met and wondered if
to the unseeing strangers around her she seemed fairly normal, fairly
conventional, unreflective in her uniform khaki trousers, uniform soft
leather boots, uniform spiked hair, fitting well into her niche in the
8.30 to 9.30 rush hour, worried about her body odour and wondering
about her life.

Yde Mahoney wrapped in softbrown skin lightly dusted with goldbrown
hair, nestling in genuine cotton, wrapped up and glossed with other
people's images of her, felt that under this smooth presentable package
there was a hole at the centre of her, inside which something new was
growing where the foetus had been; chaos, anarchy.

Yde the slick city reporter was excreted from Blackfriars underground
station at nine am, along with hundreds of other commuters.

She walked past the newspaper stands. She walked past the tramps who
crouched in the pre-historic position of death outside the hot air vent
in Whitefriars Street. She said hello to Frank Xerox, the
carbon-hearted London correspondent of an obscure overseas magazine. He
was smugly scurrying somewhere as usual, clicking and whirring in his
oiled black shoes.

All day in the gummy newsroom she sifted scraps of gossip, cooked them
till they were hot enough, and shaped them deftly to fit double columns
on neat rectangular pages.

Lunchtime, she sat amongst the stale news on the dusty table eating her
extra healthy wholefood sandwich and stared out of the window at
pinstriped men and women performing hieroglyphic dances like bees
through the drab polluted afternoon air that hung over Fleet
Street.

The chaos in her belly stirred, began to coagulate. She sensed
something growing there again. A small coil of darkness, slowly
unfurling. Suddenly things ceased to make sense. The people, the
traffic, the streetlights. Even the pavements. She shook her head. She
glanced at a headline she had carefully crafted in the morning. She
could not read it. She shook her head once more, and the random black
marks formed themselves into familiar words again.

***

Wednesday morning Simon asked her
"Aren't you going to work today?"
He was already dressed. Yde turned onto her side in bed and groaned.
Simon clicked his tongue in exasperation and put the kettle on. "Want
some tea?"
"Thanks."
Yde sat up and rubbed her eyes. Even the dim morning light was too
bright.
"Are you ill?" Simon did not look at her. He never did. The sudden
realisation did not disturb her.
"I'm turning into someone else," she said.
"Anyone I know?"
"No."
Simon handed her the tea, his eyes averted.

The chaos inside her was solidifying; out of chaos comes... order.
Death makes room for life. She opened her mouth to say she did not know
what, when she noticed how Simon was standing, his back towards her,
his body held rigid by rage.

"I don't know what's wrong with you," he said "And I don't think I care
anymore." He turned around, stopped, stared.

"Where-?"

He did not seem to see her.

"Are you all right?" she said.

He did not seem to hear her. He shuddered, blinked. He thought he saw
the form of a horned fawn appear out of nowhere and flash past him, he
turned his head but there was nothing there. Fear and anger fought
inside him. Anger won.
"Stupid bitch." He left, not even slamming the door.

"So that's it," Yde thought, not even surprised. She finished her tea
and got up. There was no need to dress. She no longer had anything to
hide. She decided to go to the park.

The streets were crowded. No-one seemed to see her. She bumped into a
woman who looked around, looked right through her, and walked on. "So
that's it," Yde thought, not quite knowing what it was. She saw her own
reflection shift and shudder into unrecognisable shapes in shop
windows.

So that was it.

Out of chaos is created... what? Slow city air caressed her invisible
skin as she walked into the park. Birth was a painful process. Each new
birth required a gestation period. She wondered how long hers would
be.

The wet wood of the park bench sensuously scraped her thighs. She saw
its whorls and knots through her translucent flesh; she was becoming
invisible even to herself.

A tramp shambled towards her, sat down beside her. She stared at him
sideways. His eyes were pale, his skin purple with cold. The smell of
alcohol hung about him.

"Hello," he said.
She said nothing.
"I've been there too, sort of."
"You can see me," she said, reflectively. Her fast fading body wavered,
then held its shape. She stretched in the weak sun, now
semi-transparent.
"Hazily."
"How?"
"I have very few pre-conceptions." He took a brown paper bag from one
pocket, a couple of straws from another, completed the puzzle, sucked,
and said
"I learned to peel the layers of reality as easily as others peel
onions."
"Peeling onions always made me cry," Yde said.

"Reality tends to have the same effect on me," the tramp said. "So what
happened to you?" he asked, after a while.

Yde thought.
"I stopped."
"Oh?"
"I stopped conforming to other people's expectations. I stopped
behaving as I was expected to. I... ."
She sighed.
"I just... stopped."

The tramp stretched his arms in front of him.
"That's never easy."
"What did you find under all those layers?" Yde asked.
"I never dared to strip away the last one," he said.
"Oh."

They sat companionably while he sucked at his paper straws. A woman
walked past, pushing a pram, with a small boy and an even smaller girl
trailing behind her.

The boy stopped, staring at Yde. He opened his mouth, puzzled. His
mother looked behind her, saw him lingering.
"Come on Jimmy."
The little girl ran to reach her mother. She pointed at the
tramp.
"He's not a human being," she said triumphantly, " He doesn't dress
like one."
The woman laughed, then saw that the boy had not moved
"Hurry up." She almost screamed it out. The boy hesitated, then ran to
his mother.

Yde turned to the tramp.
"Why didn't you dare to peel away the last layer?" She asked.
"I was afraid... in case, in the end, I saw myself alone and undefined
by the gaze of another being," he answered wryly.

They sat, surrounded by the clean wet air, watching the young family
dawdling around the park.

"The boy saw me," Yde said.
"He wont be able to soon," the tramp sighed.

The baby in the pram began to cry. The young woman wished that he would
shut up. She glanced behind her nervously, at the tramp sitting alone
on the park bench, gesticulating as if he was talking to
somebody.

And you could never understand what they were saying. She walked
faster, so that the children had to skip, then run, to catch up with
her. Horrible. It was disgusting that London was so full of lunatics
like that. Something ought to be done about it.

***
The End

c. Copyright by Anjali Paul