Fen by Daisy Johnson

Author:Daisy Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House

Silence now. Never mind. Never mind him. She picked up more work, worked the late shift because it paid better and because she liked emptying out the pub, turfing out the old ones who came every night and still bowed their heads thoughtfully at the sight of her stomach. Walking home the sky gave everything away and when it was pink she felt a toggle of fear, tried not to but couldn’t help remembering Ruben coming jogging back along the path because the sky was red and did she feel all right?

Strange how things she thought she’d never really listened to had got in anyway. She took daily note of what fell on the floor, of what was on the table when she went down, of the first person who came into the pub in the afternoon. She took fearful notice of the rabbits strung in the butcher’s window and, one night, when she wasn’t working and didn’t know what to do, she carved a compass onto the kitchen table, as wobbly and ugly as Ruben’s tattoo.

Some days it felt like a boat, that house, wet in all the corners and running in seams up to the ceiling, all the furniture bolted to the walls. Some days she felt there were waves, rip tides and countercurrents, tripping beneath the floorboards, rolling behind her when she wasn’t looking, upsetting the uneasy balance. Some days she felt there were sea creatures dredged up in there too, come back instead of him: shoals jittering over her legs at night, great breathing somethings disturbing the carpet line, shellfish washed up in the bath.

Soon the sky was red most mornings and the cat came down with something, sneezing often, throwing up anything she gave it. The sky was red most mornings and when she came downstairs it was like a storm had been taken out of a jar and let go in the house, everything from the table and the counters and the walls on the floor.

When she wasn’t working she read over his four letters. Angrier and angrier: for giving him anything let alone her time. Read them like there were clues shoved up behind the words or inking out from the full stops: a part of the message she had missed, where he told her he wouldn’t be coming back, that he wanted a baby about as much as she did and he was going to stay away. Except she knew really she wouldn’t find anything. He didn’t write the sort of words that could hide anything anywhere.

At night she couldn’t sleep for the whales that came breaching up through the house’s watery foundations, rent apart the floorboards to flip through, circled the bed in sharkish lines until that is what they were: sharks made from all the letters he’d used to describe them, right up to the tottering S that made up the apex of each fin.

It was harder being left behind. Because sometimes the sharks grew legs, moaning from the pain: white, thin limbs with bony ankles.

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