There is only so much we can do to save those we love.
This was how she found her father. Hanging. The week she was to leave with Peter. Hanging. From the hook where the ceiling fan had been. And now a cruel breeze blew in and he swayed in the raveling and unraveling of the hemp rope. Round. And round. Like a lazy Christmas ornament. And down one leg, and pooling on the floor, his reluctance. Yellow. And in the heat, putrid, rank with him. His life. His loss. And she didn’t cry. Didn’t seem shocked. Knew. Always knew. It was more a matter of when. And how.
She sat on the floor beneath him. Felt his toe brush her cheek with every turn. Turn by turn. His big toe. Spiced with his urine. And the uncut toenail, rough on her face. Sharp enough to cut. Cut a small line. Line linking her to him. Him held only by that line falling. Falling from the ceiling in hemp. Hemp becoming flesh. Flesh the fluid of him, leaking. Leaking down his leg. Leg ending in the toe. Toe brushing her cheek with a cut. Cut the line. Cut the line. Line. The rope. Rope-saw-rough voices. Voices calling. Falling heavy in the dust around her. Her sitting on the floor. Floor where his crumpled body was laid on the hard of concrete. Concrete falling away into the soft of loam and he falling. Falling into Abigail. Abigail, her, sitting on the floor. Losing him. Him losing her. Her. She. She the reason for him doing this. This love. Love calling to love.
She sitting on the floor. Floor patterned by the footprints of those voices who cut him down. Down from the line. She dipped her finger in the pool of him and brought it to her lips. The salt of him. The sum of him. There is no way to leave anything behind. She soaked her hands in him. Brought them wet and shiny in the sunlight to her face. Smeared. But water is just that. Nothing left behind but the prickle of his evaporation and the faint fragrance of loss. Loss: She knew this. Knew this. Knew this.
This wasn’t grief. Grief wasn’t the measure. Joy, joy, joy. Shameless. Shameful. Abandoned. Released. She rolled in it. It coated her in liquid and dust. There was no line. Just this wet muddy smudge of him, and the spent form of her.
And she laughed.
What is light?
The blinding of the Thames River Police strobing night and water. Bubbles of light riding the face of dark as the London Eye turned slowly. The people enclosed in the glass jar flickering against the background of light. Imagined laughter, like shadows, shouted across water.
In the scene there was nothing of her reflected. Nothing of her desire. And for this she was grateful because she was no more than a lonely self in dialogue with the dead. To see herself reflected would be to see the dead. Returned. Returning. When the dead do it, it is only despair. And revenge.
When she lit the cigarette.
It was more.
For the light of the match.
She inhaled. She thought:
This is a dark place.
Peter and Mary fought that night. The night Abigail arrived. The shouting had woken her. She crept out of bed, tiptoeing across the creaking floorboards to stand at the threshold of the door leading into the living room. Down a hallway she could see bedrooms, and at the end, Peter and Mary’s. The door was open and she watched them. They stood facing each other like actors in a paused movie. Abigail was caught in a bubble of time and silence, waiting, until: there it was again, the sound that woke her. It was like dry wood cracking, but not loud. It sounded like bones in a knuckle delivering an open backhanded slap. It was the sound of derision, for the softness of flesh, of the heart. That was the weight of the sound. Abigail flinched, her own knuckles clenching tight like a promise bound up in the hardness of bone. Mary didn’t move. Just sobbed. Abigail couldn’t imagine why Mary would let Peter hit her and not fight back. She was unsure what to do, but knew she had to do something.
They seemed to be arguing about her. From what she could gather, Mary did not want her there, which she found strange as they were really close. Another crack. Peter’s second backhand across Mary’s face decided it for her. She flew at him, gouging a deep furrow under his eye. He shouted and kicked wildly. One of the kicks caught her in the stomach. Knocking her clear across the room. He snarled at her and stomped off. Mary sobbed as Abigail cradled her, her breath shallow from the hate in her stomach.
“You should not have done that,” Mary kept repeating. “Shouldn’t have.”
A few days after her arrival, Peter took Abigail shopping. The shopping center was bigger than anything she had ever seen, at least in one building. The only thing bigger was the open-air market back home. She rode the escalators with trepidation. And Peter laughed at her. Called her a bush woman. Secretly taking pleasure in her delight at the window displays, and the racks and racks of clothing, and the soft carpets, and the bright lights, and the polite assistants.
If she noticed the disapproving looks the older women gave Peter as he bought her tight, revealing clothes made for women much older, she didn’t show it. Finally, he took her to the makeup counter of a store.
“Show her how to make up,” he told the assistant.“Show her, and then tell me what to buy.”
The assistant, herself no more than twenty, looked confused.
“But sir,” she said. “She looks too young.”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “Make her look older than a fourteen-year-old.”
Shrugging, the assistant did her work. Showing Abigail how to define her cheek bones with blusher. Brush the kohl-like mascara through her eyelashes. Deepen the dark of her eyebrows. Lift her lips from her face. Abigail leaned back as far as she could without falling out of the high stool. When she was done, both the assistant and Peter stared. Abigail was beautiful. And older.
“She knows how to use it, right?” Peter asked as he paid. The assistant nodded.
Abigail stared at her mother in the mirror.
She smiled.
Later, over a milkshake at McDonald’s, lured into safety by Peter’s generosity, she asked, “What happened to all of the other kids you took back? I haven’t met any.”
He smiled, “You’ll find out soon.”
That night, Peter burst into her bedroom. Late. Abigail started up as though a nightmare was following her into the waking world. Two men stood in the doorway. The hall light fuzzed them into dark-haloed shapes. From the feral breathing and almost soundless smirk she could tell that one of the shapes was Peter. The other was a mystery to her.
“Peter?” she ventured, pushing the bedclothes aside and making to get up. But it was the other figure that approached her.
“Hello,” the voice husked.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“You don’t need to know that,” the man said.
He was now standing in front of her. Menacing. She tried to retreat under the bedclothes. He pulled them away. She scuttled back but he grabbed her and pushed his weight onto her. She fought him. Shouting. The sound caught deep in her throat. Calling for Mary. The man was like an incubus. The weight of his lust crushing her. The more she fought the heavier he got.
“Yes,” he grunted. “Fight.”
“Mary!” she screamed, finally finding her voice.
Mary appeared at the door. Tears washed foundation from her face in brown streaks. They locked eyes: Mary’s pleading with her as she stepped back, gently closing the door behind her. Peter smiled triumphantly; turning to the man, he said:
“Fuck her. Fuck her hard.”
The weight on top of her stirred excitedly. She closed her eyes and brought her knee up and all the fight went out of him. The man squealed and fell off.
“What! What the fuck!” Peter shouted. He made to slap her, but she caught his hand and bit deep, drawing blood. He yelled and then stepped back. Abigail was standing on the bed, eyes wild, the makeup she had been too excited to take off, smudged. The man on the floor was groaning. Peter helped him up. They retreated. She could hear muffled shouts, doors slamming, and a car starting up. She gave into her trembling and crumpled into the bed, sobbing. She didn’t hear the door open. Only felt Peter grab her from behind, forcing her face into the pillow. He handcuffed her. Arms behind her back. Slipped a harness with a ball into her mouth and over her head, chipping her teeth in the process. Grabbing her by the hair, he dragged her out of the bedroom.
“You want to bite like a dog? I’ll treat you like a dog.”
Abigail struggled as he half-pushed her down the hall and out into the backyard. Mary followed. Crying. Saying his name over. Softly.
“Peter. Peter.”
“Shut up or you’ll join her!” he screamed, rounding on her. But she was too far gone into whatever trance she was in and just kept repeating, “Peter. Peter.”
The ground was cold and wet with dew and frost and Abigail’s nightgown was streaked, dirty, by the time he stopped in front of the empty doghouse. He handcuffed her to the chain lying in front of it. She pulled against it. It was firmly embedded in the ground.
“This is what we do to dogs,” he said.
He spat at her and she flinched away. He turned to go, then stopped. Pulling his penis out, he peed all over her. Laughing as she thrashed about.
“That’s my dirty dog,” he said. “Dirty dog.”
And this is how she was made.
Filth. Hunger. And drinking from the plate of rancid water. Bent forward like a dog. Arms behind her back. Kneeling. Into the mud. And the food. Tossed out leftovers. And the cold. And the numbing of limbs that was an even deeper cold.
Without hands, she rooted around her skin with her nose. Feeling for the brandings, for the limits of herself. And then the urge came, and she held it away, held it away. Until she let go, she couldn’t feel the warmth wash down the frozen limits of her skin.
Without hands, she bit at the itches from blood vessels dying in the cold. From the intimacy of dirt. Bending. Rooting. Biting. Her shame was complete.
And Peter came every day. Twice a day. At dawn. At dusk. To feed and water her. With rotting food. Rancid water. Sometimes his piss. By the tenth day she no longer cared. Couldn’t tell the difference.
And when Peter was out. At work. The angel came. Sometimes it wore the face of Mary’s dead daughter. Sometimes Mary’s. Told her stories. How Peter had beaten the girl. Just months old. Because she wasn’t a boy. Beaten Mary. Until that night. When he threw her down the stairs. She fell on the baby she was holding. How the child died. Accidental, the coroner ruled.
And she wept as Mary warmed her limbs in the electric blanket. How Abigail would follow the red line in the snow. The electric cord becoming the umbilical for a new birth. A divine birth. And Mary’s tears would melt the snow. And Abigail would nod and whisper: I know. I know. I know.
And the sound of the words was a hoarse rasp. Formless.
And Mary would echo: I know. I know. I know.
And the sound was a woman crying in the snow.
Wrapping her guilt in an electric blanket. Wrapped around a girl slowly becoming a dog.
It was all grace.
Jumping down from the sphinx’s back, Abigail picked up the contents of her handbag and stuffed them back in. She paused over the book that lay where it had fallen open and she read:
A human being alone is a thing more sad than any lostanimal and nothing destroys the soul like aloneness.
She traced the words with the tip of her finger, stopping where the rain had smudged the phrase,
the soul like,
spreading the ink into an angel’s wings. She shut the book and opened it again at random. This was an old game she had played with the Bible as a child. To follow the guidance of whatever passage revealed itself.
Fragments
opened at the flyleaf, to Derek’s inscription.
Gentle Abigail, This book will show you that even thoughyou come from a dark continent place, you can escape your fate.Derek.
Fifteen days, passing in the silence of snow.
And she no longer fought when Peter mounted her.
Wrote his shame and anger in her. Until. The slime of it threatened to obliterate the tattoos that made her.
Abigail.
One night.
Unable to stand it anymore, she screamed. Invoking the spirit of Abigail.
And with her teeth tore off Peter’s penis.
In the ensuing.
There was no panic. Just the angel unlocking her cuffs. And Peter bleeding. Reddening the snow on this dark and rebellious night. Peter dying.
“Go,” the angel said.
“Go,” Mary said.
Abigail ran out, half-naked, the severed penis clutched in her hand. Though the streets were crowded, only a few people noticed this gorgon with bloody mouth and hands, and the grisly prize she held up like a torch as she ran.
Time bled into the cracks on the pavement until a passing police car picked her up.
From across the water.
It seemed like an endless train was coming, clattering over the rails of Charing Cross Bridge. Sex. That was what trains and tunnels reminded Abigail of. And lust.
She thought of the Igbo name for train. There wasn’t one. Or maybe she had just forgotten. She had forgotten so much, lost so much. Derek once asked her what the Igbo word for horizon was.
“I can’t remember,” she said, wondering how without a name she could describe its curve and keep from falling off the edge of the world. These are the places where desire collects, she thought, lighting another cigarette. She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. She held it there long after she was done. It smelled good. Smelled of Derek. In that moment she felt him rush into her. Following closely after, the voice of an aunt who once told her she left her husband because of how he smelled.