Free Fen by Daisy Johnson Page A

her stomach in case of an involuntary syllable, a slipped-out sentence. Asleep he looked as if he were an animal, something quiet and wondering, something beautifully thoughtless. She bent to wake him the way she always used to, a slipped tongue in his ear, but, at his eyes flickering, she panicked, dropped the cup of tea, clapped a hand across his mouth to silence whatever might be coming.
    She saw the look in his eyes: reproachful, angry. Tried to kiss it away, wiping the hot tea off him with her hands and mouth, felt only that look trained on her while she did.
    The house was now perpetually twilight; all the curtains drawn so nobody would see what had come back to them. She and Harrow spent days on the sofa, pen and paperbetween them, writing long notes to one another, legs tangled beneath the blanket. Once he wrote: Tell me about the particles . Slipped a hand beneath the edge of her dressing gown. Wrote: How does this feel ? What does this feel like?
    She could hear – pretended not to and watched him doing the same – Sarah hacking something up in the bathroom.
    Most days were not like that. I’m trapped . He wrote: I’m going fucking mad . She ordered him television box sets; ordered him a running machine which he stood and watched her putting together and then refused to use; ordered him books and exotic food and audio tapes.
    Let me go out , he wrote, sat across the kitchen table from her. I’ll wear a hood. Just for an hour. Just for a moment. Nobody will notice . She shook her head.
    She sat and watched him wolfing, restless, about the sitting room. The floor was covered in the spread of half-finished jigsaws, half-played games of Monopoly and Cluedo. Now and then a television programme would be turned on but it only ever lasted a moment before the channel was changed. She watched him doing press-ups on the sitting-room floor or pulling himself up by the lintel of a door and, though she had seen this before, he seemed to do it with a new ease, barely breaking a sweat.
    It took another month for the words he wrote to become infected too. Sarah was making a concerted effort to spendtime with him, though more and more she looked as if she were emptying out of her body, thinning away to nothing. Nora would leave them alone in the kitchen, listen to the strange tick-over of their conversation: the scratch of Harrow’s pen on the paper, the slow answers Sarah gave. (Harrow asked things on the page he would never have asked, or thought to ask, when he was verbal.) She listened to the pauses between his questions and Sarah’s answers. At one point she could hear him writing for a long time, the fast sound of the words. She could hear it still as she made three cups of tea, carried them in on a tray. There were red blisters coming up on Sarah’s arms, on her chest and face. Harrow had not noticed, was writing and writing with a sort of furious intent, nose almost touching the page. Nora tore it away from him and, for a second, he wrote on the table, the letters etched in.
    She put Sarah to bed and then went round the house finding all the scattered pages of his words and pushed them into the bin bag. She tried not to see them, those dense, tight little letters against the sick white of the paper; but by the time she was done, she’d caught sight of enough half-words that she had to rest against the corridor wall, breathing hard.
    She took the pages out into the garden. Crossed the back field and balled them up and set fire to them. She stood there till it was done. Stood and wondered if the ashwould destroy the crop when it grew. The cold air burnt the rash the pages had raised on her arms and chest.
    It doesn’t matter, she told him when she went back in. He was still sat at the kitchen table. She picked up the pen and put it in the bin, watched his eyes following her. It doesn’t matter. She pressed her nose against the solid bone of his face.
    Doesn’t it?
    She bent double. Straightened with difficulty to