Free Fen by Daisy Johnson Page B

look at him. He looked back as if she were a creature he’d never seen before.
    They spent the rest of the day at the table devising a system of signs. They came up with hand motions for all the words he cared most about. When they were done he seemed changed, smiling at her. He pointed at himself with one finger, jabbed the finger into the O of his other fist, then pointed at her.
    She took off her clothes, laughed as he jerked his hands around, forming signs they hadn’t discovered yet, commenting. The impact of his language on her over the weeks was clear. She’d never been bony before but she almost was now, the press of ribs more bruise than anything else, the stretch of cheekbone. She took his clothes off, looked for a change on him. He was not loosening the way she’d thought he might. Instead he seemed bigger, stronger; the muscles defined on his chest. She was – no time to stop the feeling – afraid of him.The mass of him: his hands were the size of books flattened open.
    He could have stopped her; he could have done anything he wanted. He only watched with wide, brown eyes; let her ball a sock into his mouth, fasten his wrists to the chair with the handcuffs he’d bought her. She pressed her knees into either side of his body as if she could burrow on in if she tried hard enough. She wanted this to mean: nothing has changed. She wanted this to mean: there are signs for everything we can think of and it’s not a language anyone else needs to know.
    When she was done she pulled the sock out so she could press her mouth to his. Sat straight to look down at him and, when he smiled, felt the wordless expression rot into her insides, sharp explosions of pain in her mouth and on her hands and face and chest.
    She kicked backwards, pressed her knuckles eye-ways so she could not see him. On the floor she fell over the scattered remains of his livings: half-full teacups, board games he’d been playing against himself.
    I don’t want, he said –
    Beneath her foot a plate was broken.
    – to hurt you. Each word was an attack and before each word she could feel the thought of it – like an echo preceding its sound.
    In the corridor on the way to their room his words brought her down and she went on hands and knees. At the bedroom she pushed the door closed, put her weightagainst it and put her hands over her ears. She could hear the churn of his brain, the guttering end of half-formed thoughts. Most of them were roars that deafened everything else out of her.
    She stuffed the gap at the bottom of the door with T-shirts, played music loud. It did not matter. It did not matter that she could not hear if he spoke, that she’d burnt every fragment of his writing: his thoughts were loud enough to blister, to inch belly-ways and shard outwards.
    She’d explained to herself before and – though the words didn’t taste as good and fresh as they had that first time – did it again now: you could do anything. There was a coil of rope in the wardrobe. The handcuffs were still in the sitting room; she would have to do without. At the last moment, the click of his thoughts turning in her, she snapped two rungs off a chair, held them together: a wobbly cross. She would cover her bases. There were lines from the Qur’an she’d learnt once; stray phrases from the Torah and the Old Testament that she mouthed over, tried to hold onto.
    She closed her eyes and took the hallway blind, not touching the walls. There was the smell – though she had not noticed it before – of something turning bad. She could feel the dull pulse of his living, a sucking heat. Expected, every moment, to come upon a mass of muscle, a mouth poised open. In the bathroom she emptied the cabinet of sleeping pills.
    She could hear words from somewhere in the house, loud enough to be spoken though she knew they were not: a jumbled flow of thought syllables. There was blood in the sink when she coughed and a wrench in her arms when she moved.
    She knew the