Free Sex and Death by Sarah Hall

marking out the territory of self. It reminded her of the way she’d felt at eighteen, when she’d triumphantly lost her virginity and it had not mattered one iota who the man was; even at that young age she had understood he was nothing more than a placeholder, a significant zero. This had taken her by surprise, her ability to use somebody else’s body to make manifest a transformation in her own. She had used him to become a woman, stepped over his naked body to go out to the dark swimming pool at midnight, caught up in her own act of courage and power.
    In the early hours of the morning on the day of her operation, Selene breastfed her baby beneath the lamp in the study while reading about the first hint of rot in Sylvia and Ted’s honeymoon paradise. She gets food poisoning, he thinks she is overreacting and goes cold. The stone man made soup. The burning woman drank it. They go for a walk at full moon, unspeaking and sullen. Years later, Sylvia writes a poem about a pair of rapturous lovers who see in the shining surface of their dining table the reflections of their doubles, unhappy, estranged.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  He lifts an arm to bring her close, but she
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Shies from his touch: his is an iron mood.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Seeing her freeze, he turns his face away.
    The colorectal nurse had told her to fast for twenty-four hours beforehand, and by the time Selene was rolled into the operating theatre at noon, she was already floating away into the upper reaches of the room on the drug of high hunger. She felt very calm. The doctors and nurses gathered above her. She looked into their eyes, the only part of their faces left uncovered. Their eyes looked back, kind, apelike.
    A bright spotlight on an adjustable base was switched on but angled tactfully at the wall. Selene knew in a few moments it would be shone directly at her nether regions. The anaesthetic hadn’t even been tapped into the vein on her hand and she’d started to laugh.
    â€˜Count down from ten for me, please,’ one of the masked faces said, and she realised it was her specialist, the one with a newborn daughter named Matilda. She hadn’t recognised his eyes.
    â€˜Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .’
    Selene was trying very hard to stay conscious. She had important things to process, she felt, things she wasn’t sure she’d recall when she surfaced. In her follow-up appointment with a different midwife – Agatha nowhere to be seen – she’d lied on every depression scale question and been told she was in perfect mental health. Once upon a time she’d broken up with a lover, slapped a $20 note on the bar top and stormed out in righteous fury, all because he’d said he didn’t ever want to be at the business end of a woman’s birth, in case it put him off her forever. Imagine if that man, now a stranger to her, could see her like this! She pitied him his youthful greenness in the ways of the body, for not yet knowing that the flesh is designed to disappoint, that even his own would in due time put off everyone in his life, even – especially – himself.
    Her husband’s lustful eyes gazing down at her now, his mouth and nose covered by the pale blue mask, his hair covered by the surgeon’s cap. He was lifting the edge of her hospital gown, and in his eyes was no memory of the other things he’d seen of her, the other things he knew. Was she more than the animal sum of her parts? Whittled down to portals, spirit-like? With him, she could be neither and both. She would use him to fix herself, and once more pretend to be whole.

THE POSTCARD
    Wells Tower
    â€˜Let me save you a few bucks on your therapy tab,’ said Cora Jakes. ‘You