The Kick Inside

Illustrated by Samantha Fulton.

More and more these days I’m struggling to concentrate — the lack of sleep, maybe, or the lack of food. I thought I was watching the daily Covid address to the nation, the usual suspects rehashing their old lines, yammering on about the virus. But now the man on the right is talking about ‘semantics’. I try to empty my head to let the words percolate, rising like clear warm bubbles in blown glass, before they wriggle up to the surface and burst on me, hotly, a host of hidden meanings.

The truth is, I’m thinking about a Facebook post I saw this morning — a girl I went to school with saying something about how Boris is doing a marvellous job holding the country together through all this. But it seems to me, when this is all over, we’ll find that most of the holding together has been done in a quiet way: in houses and hospitals, by ordinary people trying to go about their lives with some semblance of normality. The trouble is, we’ve all been forced behind walls so we couldn’t see it. Seeing would require something like an act of faith. Three men in suits stare back at me from inside the screen.

I haven’t washed this jumper (a navy blue acrylic cowl neck knit) in over a fortnight, and as I slip the folds of its roomy neck over my nose and mouth, the pleasant fusty smell, like freshly upturned earth, sends a mild shudder across my brain like the quick rippling reel of feet along a centipede’s lithe spine. I want to curl up contentedly in that familiar scent, feeling sleepy and mothered. It’s strange, because lately most smells make me sick. As I sink my head further into the jumper — submerged up to my eyes now — I see beneath the pale domes of my breasts the baby bump starting to swell my midriff. Guilty and secretive, I remove my head from its knitted cavern. I’m around four months pregnant, as far as I can make out.

“Why don’t you talk? What are you thinking? Why don’t you ever tell me what you’re thinking?”

The usual recriminations. He’s standing in the doorway to the living room, his back to the kitchen, bearing down on me with a face like a big white question mark. His body blocks the doorframe like a static TV picture, a bad signal garbling sound.

He persists: “What do you think?”

“I think we’re fucked,” I say.

***

Turning away from her and walking back into the kitchen, he hurls his half-empty cup of tea through the open back door and watches it smash against the brick wall at the bottom of the yard, the brown liquid ballooning momentarily in mid-air before hitting the paved concrete floor amid a shower of ceramic shards. Somehow he’d imagined this scene differently, expected to feel some kind of release on watching the mug break. Instead, this unspectacular little mess confronts him with his own overreaction: the hammed up, ham-fisted domesticity of it all. What had she said? Only what she was thinking. And hadn’t he asked for it?

“Happy now?”

She stands in the kitchen now, propped up against the fridge. In that singsong voice of hers the words sound eerie and issued from nowhere.

He sighs like the long collapse of a hot air balloon and fetches the dustpan and brush from a kitchen cupboard. She could swear he’s blushing as he bumbles about the yard and she wishes she could take back her words because this shamefaced sulkiness of his reminds her that she must love him most when he least deserves it.

She persists: “It’s a good job it was just a cup and not something valuable. Just don’t go hoying toilet roll out the back door, okay?”

She loves him very much.

***

She’s always been sharp like that. It came with the territory, I suppose, working behind bar in that grotty old pub. It was only ever meant to be a part-time thing, just to earn herself enough to live on while she did her PhD. But when I’d watch her dealing out her acerbic words to each leering old man, expertly playing on each one’s vanity just long enough before cutting him down to size, I wondered if this might be the job she was born to do.

That was where we met, at the pub where she worked. I’d come in after work one day to sit and drink in the special kind of solitude to be had in a busy pub, when everyone else is so wrapped up in their own conversations that, if you do register on their consciousness, it’s only in a dim, anonymous way, like the chairs or the bad local artwork on the walls. I liked drinking alone in pubs. It gave me time to write. The air smelled sourly of alcohol and fried meat and fires long gone out.

This time — the first time we met — I must have fallen asleep at my table. It was closing time, and she’d been sent over to put that tongue of hers to good use and kick me out – or at least that was the plan. But, as she would later tell me, when she approached my table, she noticed the leggy sprawl of black ink words staining the off-white bar napkins and stopped short. I’d been writing a villanelle.

Now she sits perched, bird-like, on the edge of the sofa, as if about to make a move. She stares at the TV screen and her pebble-grey eyes look glossy and much too big for her head. She hardly eats these days, complains everything makes her want to throw up. I wonder sometimes if she’s trying to efface herself, if this is her way of dealing with a crisis so far beyond her control. Her hands are clasped tightly in her lap and from here I can make out unmistakably the immaculate ridge of bone jutting out at her wrist.

These days, catching a glimpse of one of her wrists is practically scandalous (I reach out for a plum from the fruit bowl and sink my teeth into the sunshine-yellow flesh, incisors skimming the stone at its centre, its juice running rivulets down my chin). We haven’t had sex in three months; I haven’t seen her naked in the last two months. Whenever she gets changed, she takes a bundle of clothes with her to the bathroom and locks herself in, private and virginal and oh-so pure. Every night she lies facing the wall, her back turned to me. At my touch, her quiet weeping is the loudest sound to be heard.

She stands up now and walks, as though uncertain of her footing, in my direction. Her unwashed hair is twisted in a demure little knot at the nape of her neck and she wears that scratty old jumper, and for all this, I want nothing more than to be with her. I approach from behind, stalking this strange wild thing, and twine my arms around her. And with my face against hers, resting in the crook of her neck, my hand laid flat against her stomach, I feel a small, resolute kick launched at me from under her jumper.