Leah tipped boiling water into the thin china cup, swilled
it round with an uncertain hand and flushed it into the stainless steel mouth
of the sink. She proceeded to make a cup of tea mechanically, as if almost unconscious
- her pale hands moving listlessly, hardly permeating the silence to which she had grown
accustomed, as if in respect to an almost physical presence.
Even when she turned on the television, she kept the volume
low, almost muffled – as if anxious of disturbing some paper-fine equilibrium.
She stood observing the flickering picture, feeling the cup burn into her skin
with its crass lips. On the screen, the plastic lacquered mouth of the
News-presenter trilled over the state of the ‘pandemic’, lists of figures, the
arterial ends of typed accounts from desperate eyewitnesses crippled in some
country or another.
Leah struggled to push the tea to the back of her throat,
feeling the indelicate sweetness of the cardboard-boxed milk stick to her
tongue, mocking her like a sacrament. Perhaps there was something holy in being alive, she sometimes thought. She
attempted to pride herself in that she had kept eating, kept drinking – the
news said it was apparently important to maintain ones immune system as well.
She had meticulously researched the nature of the pandemic on the computer – albeit
frantically - her hands often greasy and senseless over the bulbous back of the
mouse. It was a necessity, she told
herself, to be prepared.
It was the same message relayed to everyone.
However, this did not stop the university lectures from
continuing, did not stop the Dean making this familial tracks down the cobbled roads to the chapel – where the
stained glass glistened a dewy green with a
kind of mocking resilience. Or so people told Leah. She communicated largely
by telephone, for she hardly saw anyone these days and could not bear the
greasy seals and spattered lines of handwritten letters sent by some relative
or another. She burned them as they fell in the porch, dropped dead in their
elusive metaphor.
She told herself she felt no guilt, she told Edward this too
– Edward who as her roommate remained curiously passive and allowed her strange
qualms to accumulate. Sometimes he would begin to reprimand her, although the
intensity of her gaze told him that such was futile and he would soon stop. For
the hours she would sit open-mouthed at various electronic sources of
information, he would bring her tea she would not drink, her lips only tumbling
open to tell him more about this ‘plague’, how she had personified it.
He could smell her fear and it incensed him.
Yet Leah told herself only the opposite, whistled to herself
shrilly as if to block any other thought as she
let the contents of the kettle gutter out into a basin of her worn-once
clothes, reflecting the raw red of a dress. She convinced herself that she felt
vaguely relaxed, watching the scrubbed-pink of her hands dart about their
menial tasks almost automatically, watching the clothes clot like organs – an
awful externalisation of her feeling
body. In the background noises of the television mixed with the morning congregation of birdlife upon the
cliffs, she half heartedly listened to a debate about oil prices and wondered
why it mattered.
Edward smoked a cigarette as he strolled up behind her,
letting the ash scatter, almost with the weight of raindrops, against the
floor.
“Stop it!” She hissed instinctively, turning around to the
guilty upturn of his mouth, her hands dripping with the sheen of soap which
coloured the skin beneath “You know what the news says about ash – clean it up,
clean it up!”
He hated how she spoke about the televised news as some kind
of divine authority – it seemed to infiltrate her life – even as he pressed his
head to the pillow in the opposite room at night, he could still hear the monotonous
mumble of some newsreader of another shaping their mouth to a politically
correct and personality-drained cue. Her mouth pressed itself into the whole of
a shapeless scowl as he stood there languorously, blocking her path to the
television, nursing the cigarette between a
gentle pressure of his teeth.
He knew what would happen, he had seen it so many times before
– her eyes would flicker and colour as if refracting the intensity of all those
charts, those graphs, statistics and numbers she so often surveyed – he could
see it now as he looked emptily upon the scraped-clean crockery of a frugal and
overly cautious meal.
Her tone changed and she gazed at herself before facing him
imploringly.
“My hands look greasy,” There was an emphasis of the imperative
to her tone which seemed designed to make him reply in the affirmative “They do
look greasy. That’s the first stage you know, the news says, overly-great skin
is – “
Her painted red lips looked like a widening incision in her
pale, pale face.
She mumbled disconsolately as she had so many times before,
attempting to scrub away the imagined residue into the sink. Oh, he had seen
her many times declaring that she was infected, rocking back and forth on her
haunches with a rhythm she had convinced herself was a declaration of sickness,
she screamed out her knowledge of its incubation period to him, how her hands would
be next to inflame. She knew everything.
Perhaps it came as a hot quick comfort to her, suddenly,
surely, as she fell against the sink and felt the pressure against her chest, the
darkness she envisaged, perhaps she felt correct in something for once in her
life – even though Edward’s eyes stared back at her as she laughed and shrieked
and giggled until her head was stilled upon the cold tiles.
The knife of a diseased humanity was finally pulled from her
side. Edward left a note next to her stating that she had suffered so much more
when she was living.
Even the police struggled to know the truth of the matter
when they arrived some days later. An ex-corporal with uneasy foot put a
cautionary bullet straight through the television believing it to be the noise
of suspicious breathing, and even the visiting doctor felt almost chilled to
watch how the little glass shards still reflected the precision of the dead
girls face as she lay some metres away.
History had been written, thick and horrible, in her
bloodstream.
It had been a very intimate death.
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