Notes 20 print by Notes Magazine

NOTES on worship and sacrifice

Twentieth Issue 27.10.14

Contents This issue contains Notes loosely themed around worship and sacrifice. The second part of Sarah Caulfield’s short story (continued from issue 19) explores the sacrifices made in war, whilst Isobel Cockerell’s story references a very different kind of killing. Worship and death are combined in ‘The Anna Principle’ by Mathilde Sergent which is centered around a funeral - whilst Savannah Adeniyan presents us with very a nonreligious form of worship.We hope this issue provides inspiration for future works and further discussion. M and window Charcoal on paper Not a victory march Red can fly The Ledge Autoportrait as a martyr A Statement from the Prosecution Drain green tea with you (i see the sun on you) Orbit The Anna Principle *With Dry Eyes and Clear Lungs

cover 3 4 10 11 16 18 20 21 22 24 30

Arthur Thompson Gabriella Morris Sarah Caulfield Victor Roy Isobel Cockerell Alexander Pytka Arthur Thompson Phillip Babcock Henry St Leger-Davey Savannah Adeniyan Mathilde Sergent Amy Clark

* this piece contains references to sexual assault

to submit or to subscribe: http://notespublication.com http://www.facebook.com/notespublication © Notes (Cambridge). All works are © the individual author. ISSN 2051 - 4204

ot a victory march ...continued from issue 19:

Jonathan and Andrion; twenty-one and twenty-one; 1945 onwards They sit amongst the Santa Marias on their breaks and talk. The cache, tucked away beneath Nuremberg Castle, makes Jonathan think of the cave of the Forty Thieves; glistening gilt frames, jewel-blue paint slavishly bright and so many watching eyes flattened onto canvas. He finds Andrion watching an American general’s men ask too many questions in their Texan accents, grinning. “They’re not here for the paintings?” Andrion shakes his head. “Here for some German occult. Well, not technically German. The Sword of Destiny. Stabbed Christ in the side and promises victory to him who wields it.” He sounds like he’s trying not to laugh. “It’s the Twentieth Century, though,” Jonathan bleats, because he can’t think of much else to say. Andrion shrugs and says nothing. “Japan hasn’t surrendered yet,” Jonathan says. “They will.” “You sound very sure.” “They will,” Andrion repeats. He glances at him. “And then we’ll find someone new to hate,” Jonathan says bleakly, whilst above, St. Sebastian stares down, eyes soft and tortured, body skewered with arrows. Andrion doesn’t say anything. They go back to cataloguing.

Rachel; twenty seven; 1967 onwards Rachel left someone behind. That’s the thing they don’t tell you, you know; that this, all of this, is a perpetual state of leaving. You shed nicknames and skin cells and childhood; you wash kohl and blood from your face and watch it spiral rose-coloured into the sink; your bones regenerate afresh, wounds pucker into scars. And then one day, you walk out the apartment for the last time, turn the key then let it fall, nothing but loss and the remnants of your life scattered about with a surprisingly cruel randomness. She left someone behind; someone who drove her to the airbase, their words dried up inadequate and the radio jangling out and when she turned back to wave the car was kicking up skeletal dust motes. She left someone behind, but hey, who didn’t? * “I’m dying, I’m dying,” she chants, gasping, poor little gutted fish plucked out, caught in napalm. Her skin is hanging off in portions like orange peel. Rachel gathers her into her arms whilst a translator, eyes insectoid with horror, tries to find a car he can start, water he can give, anything, anything. “I’m dying,” she whimpers, huddling in the crook of Rachel’s arm, “I’m dying.” “It’s okay, baby,” Rachel shushes her, desperate, two girls stripped down to their marrow in Vietnam, “It’s okay, baby. It’s going to be okay.” The other woman hears the drone of planes overhead, begins screaming again. Rachel closes her eyes, soothes a jumble of nonsense words into the girl’s ear, shield against the crescendo. Tries not to think of the papers a photograph of this would sell. It’s four hours to the closest allied hospital. She doesn’t make two. They wrap her in an American army blanket and take her home, Rachel rigid in the driving seat, the translator bitching and chain-smoking through this new, fresh wound.

“What are you even doing here, woman like you?” She glances at herself in the rearview mirror; small fragment of eyes, forehead, bridge of the nose caked in dust and oil. “I’m driving, I’m driving,” Rachel says, and keeps her hungry eyes staring starving on the road, the tires jumbling higgedly-piggedly over the bodies. The smell leaks in through the joints of the vehicle. Rachel pulls a scarf over her mouth whilst the translator gags in her rearview, breathes in the taste of cotton. She’s driving, she’s driving. Oscar; sixteen; 1914 onwards They talk about the war now like a passing delirium, an epidemic, well, you know he had a very hard war. Oscar McQuillen has had two ignored gallery exhibitions, a job teaching still life to bored schoolgirls, and an offer to draw comic strips in memoriam of the dead’s glorious sacrifice. He’d never turned down anything so fast in his life. “Burning money, you are, that’s what you’re doing,” says Arthur, who also lived out the war and now lives out his days in a Socialist printing press, moving from boarding house to boarding house as news of the latest Irish scare breaks loud enough that the landlord can give him notice. Oscar shrugs and throws the letter in the fire, watches the handwriting curl in on itself like a dying spider. “I’m not drawing the war,” he tells Arthur, who laughs outright. “You never bloody said that during the bloody thing.” Oscar ignores him, goes to the sink, scrubs at his nails. Little flecks of cadmium yellow are whisked down the drain. “The classes cover the rent.” “Your old sketchbook,” Arthur asks, the glint of his eyes accusatory as he

leans over the table, “Where’d it go?” Silence. “Where’d it go, Oscar?” “Burned it,” Oscar replies, keeping his eyes and mouth downturned, keeping his back to the room. There’s a low, sarcastic laugh, blackness crackling underneath, the hidden lining torn out. “Liar,” Arthur accuses flatly. There is the scrape of his chair as he stands. Oscar doesn’t look up. * He did try to burn it. He held it over the grate, aloft like some strange Biblical sacrifice, his own personal mass slaughter, his own personal war crime, let go. A breath, a tease of flame at the brim, and he was already scrambling to drag it out, coward caught and branded red. He told people he’d grabbed the boiling kettle bare-handed, by accident, and laughed along with them, lips tight. * He applies for a Royal Academy scholarship. Doesn’t get it. Applies twice, three times, before getting the message that the world ended in 1914, Eton and mill-boy alike and together, but some doors will stay closed. Alice married and not him. He sees men on the Tube shake down to their bones at loud noise, memory secreted guilty and furtive. People are beginning to forget. People are beginning to try. Some Labour upstart gives some minor newspaper a quote on his paintings and suddenly he’s cosmopolitan, urban, an unwitting commentator on society. A war artist for our times, if he wants it. Lest we run too readily into uniform.

Jonathan and Andrion; twenty-one and twenty-one; 1945 onwards Andrion pauses in the midst of the great gaping chasm, his own still life surrounded by hundreds of unfathomable eyes. He sees sober Dutchmen and bright oil-slick of flowers, Cleopatra and Mary Magdalene and thousands of constellations in the sky. He’s spent years being inconspicuous and feels invisible in comparison, as though these two-dimension people are more real than he is. He knows how to be a shadow and how to be a ghost. He’s not sure how to stop. Jonathan stares at his ceiling and wrestles with God. He craves answers. In Nuremberg’s streets, sad-eyed orphans scuttle away from him to wherever they huddle at night, and he feels sorry for them, feels spiteful towards them, feels like he doesn’t know who makes the better victim. They still have dawn conversations, brought on by insomnia and the strange emptiness they see reflected in each other. When the bombs stop falling, it’s supposed to end and it doesn’t feel like it has. They still put on uniform to pack up paintings and send them out into the world, to where they were once loved. One day, Jonathan tells himself, he’ll visit the Musee D’Orsay. It sounds like a fine place. And one day, Andrion tells himself, he’ll be able to walk through the galleries and not echo with the memory of his grandfather’s voice. The voice from from the days before men dragged him away, leaving Andrion to return to empty, ravaged rooms and no note. Here, it will say, do you see the brushstrokes and the colours? Do you see the detail? Both wonder what’s supposed to happen next. Rachel; twenty seven; 1967 onwards A Buddhist monk pours gasoline on his skin and burns it off on a busy intersection street. Passers-by scream, policeman throw themselves to the ground, but he sits, lotus-legged in his own oil-black silence. A young man, with a rage he has no outlet for, is given a gun and told there’s something worth dying for, that there are monsters in his country and he can be salva-

tion. A shop clerk in Illnois sits in his supermarket, doodling tanks in the margins, his draft card burning a hole in his pocket. His friends feign being theologists, being broken, being queer: being, in essence, not fit for service in America’s mighty army of free and brave. In My Lai, Charlie Company opens fire and catch the women in the back. And in Washington D.C., an administration huddles, whilst outside the chant is slowly growing voice, hey, hey, L.B.J, how many kids did you kill today. His house, once white, seems increasingly made of We know what they say about those in glass houses. Grenades are louder than stones. The boy with the gun now faces a firing squad; screams, drops, falls. The click of the camera, the whirr of the focus, rictus expression frozen for posterity. This’ll sell some papers in the morning. It makes the front page. The boy with the gun is still dead, but the shot now echoes across the shocked, civilised, Westernised world. Oscar; sixteen; 1914 onwards It is midnight in the cheap flat, bare feet on moonlight and the gurgle of the drainpipes, the sound of the newlyweds’ newest fight scraping through the walls. Freckled hands dip brush into turpentine, twist the tube so the colour spurts out arterial. Oscar stands in front of a fresh canvas, delves into the angry, pulsating corner of his mind where the dead lie and call for him, the portion of him left embedded in a trench somewhere in Europe, and begins to paint. He isn’t an artist. But he’s going to be.

Sarah Caulf ield 9

ed Can Fly

Orange wilts to the hardened soil, touching change to another change. What had already turned and transformed, room now for the travails of winter to return to a former state a different shade a generation of a cycle and familiar. Or to hold a hardened soil and bring forth to a new light, and to take the seed of orange, and slowly watch strange grow towards the sky. In mystery and surprise perhaps the brightest red can fly.

Victor Roy 10

he Ledge

I returned to London in the early spring of last year, leaving slushy Boston for the grey rain of Regent’s Park, lurid green spikes poking up from the dull earth. The air was quiet at that time of year, but for the hurried freezing footsteps clipping along the sidewalks, and the pathetic sunlight barely coming through the leafless plane trees. My apartment in Russell Square waited for me, damp and unheated, as I shuddered through the door with my cases to continue with my strange, solitary English life. I did feel very much alone at that time. I generally met with no one but for my insipid professors and the few distant acquaintances I had. During those early days I thought much of my sturdy, jolly family back in the States. It must be said I was somewhat underwhelmed by the University itself. I had been installed there by Harvard to conduct my research. Its best feature were the grand steps where students ate their lunches on warm days, the kind of days which seemed like a distant impossibility as winter held us fast. No one seemed to quite know what College life was really like. Our hours and days were punctuated by the beep of the electric library barriers as they opened in the morning, and the whoosh of the exit gates at night. We shared little else in our experience. One often heard snatches of Mandarin or Arabic, or occasionally English spoken with European accents in varying degrees of thickness. Hardly ever the clipped Queens’ or a warm American drawl. Except, of course, my own as I ordered my coffee each morning. I had found my lodgings through the University. I had a small attic bedroom in a townhouse in Russell Square, which I shared with around ten other students. I didn’t encounter them much. They were mostly Chinese and studying Engineering or Biochemistry, and my Medieval English PhD was met with blank, perplexed stares. So during the day when I wasn’t at the library I kept mostly to myself and my work, looking out over the park when my eyes grew tired of the words on the page. Often I would fail to look

up for hours, disappearing into my books and unable to re-emerge until the London sky was inky orange and the trees no longer visible. It was then, late at night, that I would creep downstairs to the dark kitchenette to fix myself something to eat, before crawling in to bed. It was after one of these early-hours sandwich runs that I arose later than usual, on a freezing cold March morning – in fact it was nearly lunchtime. I woke to the sound of a bird singing. It was, I realised, the first birdsong I’d heard in months, the first I’d ever heard in England. Perhaps I felt then that spring had come. The sound lifted my heart. It was an endearing sort of noise: ‘peep-peep, peep-peep, peep-peep’, the chirrup of a blackbird or robin, perhaps. I settled down to my work, the window cracked open to let in a little fresh air, and to hear the bird better. The chirping persisted in its adorable way for much of the afternoon. ‘Peep-peep, peep-peep, peep-peep’. Gradually, and to my own consternation, it began to annoy me. The sound was really quite persistent, and without respite, and by the end of the afternoon I tormented by the fact that it was getting on my nerves. Why hadn’t the damn thing flown away? Why did it insist on disrupting me in such a steadily infuriating manner? I scolded myself at the townie I had become, driven to distraction by the innocent songs of nature. It felt ridiculous to leave the warm sanctuary of my bedroom for the musty chills of the library, simply on account of a bird, and besides I was too stubborn and indolent to consider doing so. I wrenched open the window and peered out. I couldn’t see anything, but noticed, upon hearing the sound properly, how shrill and unmusical it really was. I craned my neck to peer at the next door roof and located the source of the racket. It was in fact a fledgling pigeon, about the size of my fist, covered in grey, sooty feathers, and half impaled on the spikes of the ledge. It was screeching and chirping implacably. I was instantly revolted that I had been listening to this terrible noise of death all morning. I paced about my room for a time, distracted and horrified and unsure what to do. The bird was well out of my reach, well along the ledge beneath the window of the next house. I considered climbing out and shuffling along but the ledge was too narrow and precarious, and besides, the University had installed an anti-suicide catch so the thing wouldn’t open all the way. I couldn’t bear it.

At length I left the room, and retreated, shaken, to a café around the corner where I attempted to read. The weather, which had begun bright and fine, had descended steadily into heavy, intermittent showers. I couldn’t erase the blood-tarred feathers, the terrible yellow throat, and the filthy barbs from my mind’s eye. I did not find respite, and the tea-time rush in the café was not helping, the screech of steam frothing up the milk and the crash of umbrellas as people tumbled in from the wet, dragging buggies and chattering into mobile phones. Plagued by my conscience and forced off my large table by the steely gaze of a pair of mothers, brandishing their already chocolatesmeared brood, I slunk away from the café and found myself guiltily returning home. The rain had claimed the daylight, and it was getting dark earlier than usual. Perhaps it was dead by now. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to deal with it. I got upstairs and entered my room furtively. I stood still in the dim semi-darkness, listening. The roar of rush hour traffic; the splash of taxis through puddles, the whine of buses. And through it all…the pitying call of the dying animal. It was still there. I turned around and ran back out, down the stairs and into the street, pavements slick with rain. The house next door was divided into apartments, and I rang the top buzzer, jabbing it with my thumb over and over, insistent, deranged. At last a voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Yes? Hello?’ Clipped, British. I lost my nerve slightly. ‘Oh, uh, yes. Hello there. It’s your neighbor here – I live at number 26? May I come up for a moment?’ ‘What is it?’ Wary. Cold. ‘Its – well, its about the bird? Outside your window? Have you heard it?’ There was a long, crackly pause. Then the door buzzed open. ‘Flat 6.’ ‘Thanks.’ I raced into the warm, bright hallway, up the carpeted stairs. When I reached the top, she was waiting there, leaning against the doorway. I stopped short, panting a little. There was something unnerving in the way she stood, the clothes she was wearing. She looked around fifty, or perhaps sixty, her hair in a rather severe bob, lines around her mouth and traces of dark lipstick. Her face was grey, with red rimmed eyes, and tired. She was dressed entirely in black. ‘Everett,’ I said, after a slightly breathless pause, shaking her hand. Gnarled fingers, heavy rings. She did not offer her name. ‘I live—’

‘Yes, yes, at the student flats next door.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, faltering. She held the door half open, standing there stiffly, waiting for me to speak. ‘It’s just – there’s a bird. Outside your window. A pigeon, a baby. Have you heard it? Have you, uh, seen it?’ Steely gaze, passive. ‘It’s, well. It’s making a lot of noise,’ I finished lamely, not wanting to delve into the terrible detail. ‘Right.’ She said. ‘I just wondered – whether it might be kinder to …’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Well, to kill it. You know, dispatch of it.’ Nervous laughter. She did not smile. ‘Come in.’ she said, sighing, after a still pause. She held the door open wider to reveal a rather elegantly furnished penthouse apartment. Dark leather, wooden floors. Low lighting. On the mahogany table there were foil trays of sandwiches, and mini quiches covered in saran wrap. A dark fruit cake, half-eaten. A large bunch of lilies on the sideboard. A packet of cigarettes and a silver lighter. The woman took a cigarette and lit it, without looking at me. ‘I heard the bird this morning,’ she began, staring out of the dripping window pane. ‘I saw it too. I’m afraid I…I haven’t had time to do anything about it just now. I wouldn’t really know what to do about it anyway.’ ‘Do you live here alone?’ I asked, eyeing the huge tray of leftover sandwiches. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose I do, these days. Listen, it’s been a difficult time. I really can’t bear to look at the poor thing just now. Would you mind – dealing with it?’ ‘Of course, of course!’ I blustered. ‘That’s what I came here to do! I’ve been driven to distraction by the noise, you see.’ ‘I see.’ I turned to look at her. She was crying silently, her shaking fingers drawing the cigarette to her lips. There was something strange about her tears. Her face was so impassive as she cried, a mask, utterly emotionless. Only the tears betrayed her otherwise stony countenance. It was just a bird, I wondered. ‘Listen, its just a pigeon! I’ll deal with it and then I’ll be out of your hair.’ I was rather at a loss, paralyzed by her tears. ‘Oh, its not the bird. Well it is, sort of. My husband died last week. His

funeral was today.’ ‘I’m – I’m so sorry for your loss.’ ‘They gave me the sandwiches to take home. His family.’ Her voice was flat. ‘I see.’ ‘It’s just a man.’ ‘Pardon me?’ She shook her head, smiling strangely. ‘Was he unwell, your husband, if you don’t mind my asking?’ ‘Oh no. He was drunk.’ She looked at me a long time. ‘Hit his head. Stupid accident really. Rotten luck. No-one’s fault.’ Cool stare. I was intrigued, but she didn’t elaborate, and I wasn’t going to push it. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’ll deal with the bird and leave you in peace. I am so sorry to invade your privacy at a time like this.’ The long ‘eye’ sound in my American tabloid pronunciation of ‘privacy’ hung limply in the still English air. She held her gaze, unblinking. There was a certain frosty grace to her strange brand of grief. Amid the silence she lit another cigarette. How had her husband died? I wondered at the detail. I wondered at the silence of the place, at the sandwiches, so many left over for one rake-thin woman to consume. The rest of her life ahead of her, alone in this dim, elegant flat. I was caught up in the grey of her face, the grey of the tobacco smoke, the grey dark outside. We stood there for a time, watching each other, caught in the stillness of a home after a wake. Two people grinding away at life on the top floor of two adjacent houses in a busy London square, meeting in the quiet of a March afternoon. The city about us roared and screeched and splattered, and the strange, intense woman remained standing there, alone in the world, with no one to share her suffering but a maimed pigeon, screeching on the ledge outside.

Isobel Cockerell 15

Autoportrait as I enter - I I asked everyone to arrive dressed all in black - I I am pulling a train of blood behind me, that flows out from my ass and starts from my kidneys - t I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need high heels because I I wear a necklace of strangle marks - w

Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve asked what I want to dr Anything but w

Alexander P 16

ait as a martyr: er - I am the hostess. k - I myself am dressed all in white. ws ys - the stones growl as they gnash one another. use Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m already higher than God. s - where the present balding king of France is trying to suffocate me. to drink even before I sit down. ut water I reply.

r Pytka 17

Statement from the Prosecution

Some people enjoy imposing certain restrictions on themselves. Namely, dietary regimens, cosmetic upkeep, exercise routines, and/or medication schedules. I have seen it many times. Mrs. Wrexham, however, was somewhat of an exception. Her self-imposed restriction was different. Its purpose a little less obvious. As a British expatriate living in America –New York City to be exact—she did well to integrate herself into local culture. She bought bagels for breakfast. She read the New York Times in crowded parks. She even referred to streets as ‘blocks’—acknowledging the ingenuity of our grid pattern urban planning. Wives of her husband’s colleagues have gone so far as to say that she was an open-minded person (considering her age and social standing). Unlike most self-imposed restrictionists, Mrs. Wrexham kept her boundary secret, a taciturn demarcation, which she only spoke openly about to her husband (around Christmastime), the housekeeper, or when intoxicated. At the check-in desk, Aden lodged the 450 ml bottle of green Fairy soap in his suitcase. It fit perfectly between his shampoo bottle and leather dress shoes. The barely-clothed-baby trademark on the bottle seemed contradictory to Britain’s paedophilia paranoia, but this would not faze his mother. Though the cap was red and the bottle white, he knew the liquid inside was green. He made sure of it the night before, waking up with a start in his hotel bed, suddenly recalling that she had specifically asked for green Fairy soap. Not red. Not yellow. His mother must have green. That was a moment of panic, pure panic, before he flung himself out of bed to check the colour, because he knew that, with such an early morning flight out of Heathrow, there’d be no way for him to stop off at a shop to correct his critical error. Aden told me he’d never been so happy to see dishwashing liquid. Unlike his father, Aden is technically only half American and, until seven months ago, had never been to England. His father insisted there were better vacation destinations. Naturally Mrs Wrexham was ecstatic to hear that her son’s first business trip would take him ‘back’ to London. She made her request immediately. On the spot. No hesitation. When Aden laughed, she

informed him, with allegedly raised eyebrows, as if she had not kept it at all a secret, that, why yes! their china had always been washed exclusively with green Fairy soap. The cleanest colour! Red was for blood and yellow for piss! (She was quoted as saying ‘urine’). Although Aden found his mother’s request a bit eccentric, a relic of her past, (Mrs Wrexham sacrificed her career as a painter to move to America, something for which Aden felt guilty), he figured this environmentally un-friendly habit (she normally had the soap flown in) was merely a nostalgic nod to her bygone bohemian days. Because, honestly, who washes dishes by hand these days? Little did he know. Thank you, your honour.

Arthur Thompson

Phillip Babcock 20

reen tea with you (i see the sun on you)

backlit, standalone, you get a glimpse of the afterlife in every word i donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite manage to fit into conversation this earthly accidental silence keeping my eyes open long enough to get a glimpse of the afterlife in

Henry St Leger-Davey 21

rbit

The girl on the stage is a dancer and she is your god. Night after night, city after city you have devoted yourself to the idol that is her body. Again and again. You don’t tire at all. She awakes something primitive in you, something that should be dead and cold and buried. Drumming. Sweat and sex and primal emotions. A turning in your gut. The room is dark and black and filled with the luminescence of body paint and a thousand souls wishing for the rhythm-induced freedom to never end. You think the girl has noticed you but you are not sure. Then you do not care. You did not come to be seen but to see. You do not care if she never learns your name. Later. Outside during the night-time; flies orbiting lamplights. You are walking, lost in this foreign street and district and city when the footsteps come running up behind you. You think you are going to be robbed and you are ready to die but it is only the dancer-girl. She is laughing and flashing a set of off-white teeth and she tells you that she knows you. The writer, new and young and already famous. She tells you that she can’t remember your name. You tell her that nobody remembers your name. Before your adrenaline disappears you invite her for a drink even though you have lost your wallet and you never knew your way. She only laughs again and agrees and hands you the wallet you left in the front row of the audience and drags you down the street. Stale chips and fish with their eyes still in. She tells you her name even though you have it written into your memory. Elise. She does not ask for yours and when you point it out she insists on calling you by your surname. Caulfield. Lights flicker on and off. Illumination and shadow. You don’t think you are making a very good impression but when she tells you that there is vinegar on your nose she is smiling.

Walking through a park and miles away from your motel room. The place is dark and empty and deserted and you think of graveyards. She is walking along the stone surround of the fountain, never going to fall, and she asks you why she has seen you at every one of her shows. Almost every one, you correct her. She asks you not to beat around the bush and you tell her that you are a fiction writer and every word you write is an untruth by nature and the only thing that is true is that she is your god and you love her. And she kisses you and when you act surprised she asks what type of friend did you think she wanted to be, anyway.

Savannah Adeniyan

he Anna Principle

It is hard to believe that mothers will ever die. Take Sadie, for example: she didn’t believe it until this very morning, and even now she can’t help the foreboding creeping down her neck that her mother might swoop in at any moment, irritatedly flicking her satiny veil. There is a disturbing wealth of similarities, Sadie has found, between the organization of a funeral and that of a wedding. There is need to accommodate for the whims of a crowd which does not stop for anything, which will eat, drink, riot; and though this reception will be as tastefully luxurious as each one of her mother’s weddings, and there won’t be any neighbors bringing over saran-wrapped pies and other homely delicacies to stuff the stomachs of the grieving, it is still a hassle. Looking back on it, Sadie’s whole life halted to a standstill on the heels of that death —and yet it’s not as if she hadn’t seen the whole inelegant length of it, her mother’s pinched mouth when she sat Sadie down at the breakfast table one holiday they were all reunited and told her about the disease. So it’s not shock, exactly; more an unwillingness to believe in statistically improbable things. After all her mother has always made it through, has clawed her way up, pulled ten models out of thin air during that disaster at 2004 Paris Fashion Week —why shouldn’t she defy death as well? This week, this morning even, it would have been surprising to get news from her, even though it was Sadie’s birthday: Grace is always somewhere, Thailand, Bora Bora, Rome; is, when it comes right down to it, a busy woman with no time for sentimentality. It was only in the haze of midmorning, halfway through her glass of orange juice, that Sadie remembered: my mother is dead. So now she is here: her best friend came to fetch her with swollen eyes and her beau du jour as accessories and hugged her with liquid unconcern; then they drove to the cemetery. The family has a vault —who doesn’t?—: it is where they are now, the austere engraved stone proving that prestigious names outlast death. For all the good it does them, Sadie thinks.

It is hard to believe that mothers will ever die, but here she is, and her mother is dead. Sadie looks around the buzzing church filled with faces she only vaguely recognizes, and thinks of ancient mourners. Would Grace have liked that? No; she would have found distasteful those women with their long hair and ripped clothes, tearing at their breast with animal screams. And she would have seen the futility of it: she liked to fight a worthwhile adversary, but what challenge is there in knowing you’re bound to lose? So maybe this is better, the waxen vanity of a made-up, bejeweled crowd; of tiny champagne flutes passed around; of Heather wearing the last Prada fashion, a vibrant orange gown no one reproaches her for. It stares Sadie in the face, as though to say: what do you know of making a mother proud? But she knew, Sadie remembers; she knew, and she defected, somewhat, as much as she could stomach, she chose not to try to fill an unnatural mold. There will never be a day when she forgets she is not who her mother wanted her to be, but she has made her peace with it —and isn’t it hilarious, that she had to touch peace when her mother was on her deathbed? (She won’t tell you about it, but she also remembers this: four furtive, shameful trips to the hospital to see her mother more diminished that Sadie had ever seen her, sharing between them the humiliation of Grace being so weak. She remembers helping her mother pack her bags. There had been one moment, just a few seconds, where she had wanted to yell out, how can you talk about dying with dignity; do you not understand that it is still dying?) Sadie is twenty-seven and not a girl anymore, not a girl for a long time; she’s been above crying for her mother since she was nineteen, and she’s not going to start again now. She will ignore the whispers and listen to the eulogy, and she will climb on stage and deliver her Bible quotes, words trying to weigh if her mother had a charitable enough soul to get into heaven. “Tibi dabo claves regni caelorum,” says the priest to close the ceremony: to you I will give the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Careful, thinks Sadie; you don’t know what she might do with it. The refurbishing might not be to your taste. —

When Heather’s grandmother dies it’s something else entirely; in fact it seems oddly like a vacation. Grace would have disliked her own funeral and Heather thinks Sadie might have done that on purpose, out of spite; Grace’s new husband would have objected if he weren’t a sobbing, blubbering mess. But for Katia’s funeral they all fly out to Martha’s Vineyard and are welcomed by the soft white sun and greenery in droves, hanging feather-light over their heads. Hymns are sung in the church and it’s all very tasteful but no one feels forced to wear all black except Sadie, still grieving for someone else. In the darkness of Heather’s bedroom she had said that for fifteen unbroken years she had never gone to a funeral. Heather had thought that Grace was shielding her from it, but she would have considered it a welcome lesson; so maybe it was just that no one had died. Jane holds her when the coffin is lowered into the ground; Heather burrows her face in her mother’s shoulder to hide that she isn’t crying. Jane isn’t, either: her bust is still, breath steady and alive in her ribcage, regulating the rhythm of Heather’s heartbeat. Heather watches her brother’s red eyes from over Jane’s shoulders, and —would I like that, holding onto someone’s hand white-knuckled, that wrenched-open expression, the relief of forgetting? Who knows. “Honey,” says Jane, two fingers in the crook of Heather’s elbow, as though trying to take her pulse. “Are you—” “I’m going back to Brazil after this,” says Heather. If there is one thing her mother understands that Sadie doesn’t it must be this: that life is not made only of partings, that leaving throws the door open for return, that there is going ahead and not only away. Jane only sighs; then, with a small, distracted smile, “Why don’t you have a glass of champagne, darling?” Heather grabs one from a tray before she can even think about it. Jane touches her cheek. She doesn’t quite look old, but Heather is her daughter and knows the lines around her eyes, the strings that can soften her mouth just as they can turn it to steel. “My mother didn’t love me,” Jane says. “She wanted to; she wished she had. But it’s not always easy, you know? Loving your daughter. Do you remem-

ber Gracie’s funeral?” Grace would have killed Jane for calling her that, Heather thinks. She nods. “Of course you’re going to leave. And you’ll come back, like I did. Maybe you’ll do better than me out there.” Before she drifts away she says, “We’re having beautiful weather, aren’t we?” Heather spies Sadie near the drinks table, rigid and regal; and she sees everyone and everything, and does not move, keeps still under the sun, soaking it in. Perhaps this is what she does best, this placid immobility before flight, storing away memories in snapshots: the pale flush rising up Sadie’s throat, her mother’s sleeve, threaded with lace, her brother’s kind eyes, the priest’s Bible that he tucks away underneath his cassock. In normal circumstances, Heather would probably wade back into the crowd and make her bets; as it is she walks away, towards the sea. She sits in the white sand, knees tucked to her chest. The wind brushes against her skin; she breathes in the absence of grief. “Hello,” says John, appearing at her side with two glasses of Moët-Chandon. Heather looks up, and it takes two blinks for her to remember who he is. She takes the glass. “Hello.” She doesn’t know why he is here, and she doesn’t really care. She pats the sand next to her, to invite him to sit. “Your brother—” he offers, gesturing awkwardly with his hand. He laughs. “’Invited me here’ would sound weird, right?” Heather shrugs. “You know your way with words better than I do, I guess.” He sneaks a glance at her, surreptitiously checking if she’s going to topple over and start to cry. Heather fights the urge to roll her eyes. The sun is paling over John’s shoulder, hemorrhaging color as the sky darkens. “I’ve seen your books at Barnes&Nobles,” she says then, just to stir him out of his investigation. He jokes, sheepish, “You go to Barnes&Nobles?”

She laughs at that. He was always simple, made her laugh. His sheets itched. “Okay,” she says, “Google told me.” “Yeah.” He’s smiling, just the corner of his mouth quirked. Wouldn’t want to laugh at a funeral—not like her. “You read any of them?” Heather shakes her head no. “Are they interesting?” “I can’t really answer that, can I? For what it’s worth, if I didn’t think they were interesting I probably wouldn’t have written them.” Debatable, Heather thinks, and not worth much besides: the things people do for money and fame are well-documented. But she likes John, and unlike Sadie she is generous, magnanimous, forgiving. Most of the time anyway. “What have you been doing?” she asks without looking at him, her attempt at small talk. He shrugs. “Does traveling count?” “Sadie would say no.” “What’s your verdict?” Of course traveling counts; what else is there? Does he really think she hasn’t noticed all his books are about running away? “Look,” she says in lieu of answering, and he follows her finger, the brokenmirror splash of light on the small rippling waves. The sea is like an immense kaleidoscope and Heather feels overwhelmed, remembers watching the New York skyline with him and being too overwhelmed for it to be the power of cliché. “Look.” John opens his mouth to say something; she can feel it, the intake of breath, and she could lean over and kiss him and ruin him, easy as pie. But tomorrow she is leaving —heartbreaking can wait. She might not turn into her mother after all. And— “Yeah,” he says finally, the mercy of simple words for once, and lets

himself fall back into the sand. She falls besides him; thinks about running to get Sadie and Jane, tell them that there are many directions in which to escape still, right and left and ahead, swimming to exertion in the endless stretch of blue. “Listen,” says John, and Heather wants to, she does, but her eyes are closing, and she’s asleep. — There are many defining moments in Heather’s life, romantic-comedy moments documented by rows and rows of scrapbooks, candid after candid of her glossed cupid-bow mouth open to say something people are too busy looking at her to hear. But there is something to be said for death and sleep and the blue of the sea melting into the blue of the sky, and for plane rides and partings, for waking up in the sand with in her mouth the shreds of a dream about light; for Jane leaning against the doorjamb, shoulders pale and slight in her silk wrap; for Sadie, lips barely trembling but startlingly purple, kissing her cheek at the airport. “I’ll be back,” she says, sure as ever, and Sadie only smiles, a wry twist of lips that means maybe and we’ll see about that —and then— Heather Jackson turns twenty-eight in Brazil with a gorgeous boyfriend and a house that looks over the sea. In the morning, after lazing around in bed with Sadie on the phone —the girls are planning a party for her tonight with all the socialites from the city—, she goes to the bathroom, waits while she washes her face. The little plus etches itself slowly on the plastic, taking its time. She squints at the sun outside, then walks out onto the terrace, thighs still bare, as unselfconscious as ever; lays down in the hammock and looks up. The sky is aquamarine. Heather thinks, I could do with the world having being made only of sky and ocean, and nothing else in between. She takes her phone out and calls her mother.

Mathilde Sergent 29

ith Dry Eyes and Clear Lungs when i was fifteen i had two secrets: the first wasn’t secret for long, i realised it whilst sitting on a doorstep with a cigarette in my hand, wondering why i didn’t dream about boys the way everyone else seemed to, and the words tasted like sugar on my tongue and i loved sharing the sweetness with everyone i could reach. the second was given to me whilst my eyes were beer heavy, and even the mouth closing in on mine and the insistent fingers against my skin couldn’t keep them open. and in the morning i sat on the sofa with two silent witnesses and i realised that this wasn’t a secret i knew how to share. this secret hid in my mouth, eroding my molars until my gums were bleeding, it crawled into my head at night and squeezed my tear ducts dry.

it was those words that lodged in my throat for two years and no matter how hard i coughed i couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t shake them loose. (do you know how hard it is to breathe through a word you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bring yourself to say?) but someone once told me that whiskey cures a sore throat, and in a way they were right, because it took half a bottle before i could drag in enough air to dislodge the words and spit them into the bottom of my glass, before i could let myself breathe again.

Amy Clark