SHIVER/SUGAR

Jess Richards

I’d be so different if I could choose how to be seen. I might choose to be eccentric and wear a red cowboy hat or a blouse with a hundred buttons from waist to neck. Or, I could choose to shroud myself head to foot in black and keep myself pale as a nun. But the reality is that I buy my gods from the railings of identical outfits all along the high street and want nothing to be striking about me at all.  

Goods, not gods. I’ll get the hang of how to talk to this app soon. 

To strangers, I’m probably sly-seeming, always selecting the quietest times to slip in and out of the library to borrow talking books. But no matter what I wear or how I behave, I’m always seen. Though I play talking books to get me to sleep, night after night I have the same dream of longing. A dream of being exactly the same as everyone else in this city. I wake crying, sometimes.  

Wishing for invisibility. Wishing for easy things to not seem so impossible.

But today is Sunday and I don’t have to go outside at all. I’m sitting here in the front room on my own talking into this voice-to-text recognition app and watching words appearing on the screen. I’m trying to ‘tell my story as if to a friend’ as recommended by the self-help talking book but I have to speak slowly or the words appear on the screen wrong and I can’t edit them.  

I guess we all tell our deepest stories to someone we only imagine. And I’m telling my story to you, this invisible you… Right now I see you as a friend who’s helping me talk. You’re any age, any weight, any race, but you’re definitely the same height, emotional depth, and gender as me. You’re interested and clever and your own life has made you wise. I trust you to hear me and understand, even when my words come out oddly. I’m already half in love with you even though I’ve made you up.

So, I’ve got to focus on talking slowly and the right way to say it. To tell my story once, truthfully, so I can forget… no. That’s not the right word. Evict. Evict. Evict. That’s it. Evict from myself what happened to me. And now I’m imagining your eyes as you’re reading this. I like you so much, just from seeing the focussed expression on your face. I like you for liking me. Don’t worry – I really am about to tell you the whole story of it all and not keep putting it off till l8r. L8r. L8r.

Oh, just ignore it and keep going.  

First, I’ll tell you the main thing you’d notice about me if you were sitting next to me at this table where I’ve got the laptop plugged in and a red rose in a vase looms over me as if it’s grown ears and is listening for its job. 

I’ve got no hands.  

And that’s the first thing people see. Sometimes it’s all people see. They ignore my bright red hair and freckles. They ignore my lazy eye. They ignore the smile lines around my eyes and the dimples in my cheeks. They ignore my expressive lips and flexible tongue. They see my metal stamps. That’s not what I said. Try again – there are stumps at the ends of my arms, made of boned wrists. They see my stumps.

In every place I go to, strangers scan my body for other parts that might be missing, and their eyes always return to my wrists. I could dangle glittering paper hearts from my long sleeves but no one would even notice them. No matter what a stranger says, their chat about the weather or a cut smile and remark about my nice winter coat, that’s not really what they’re thinking about.  

Cut smile isn’t cut smile. I mean cut. Cut. Curt. Curt, that’s it. Maybe voice recognition recognises something in the tone of voice, as well as what each word is supposed to mean. Smiles can be cutting when they’re not sincere. 

Sad as it is, we all talk high-minded about eyes and beauty and beholders but when I talk to anyone, it’s not even about what I look like. It’s about how my appearance makes them feel. They hide their palms in clenches or bury their fingers in pockets and don’t even notice they’re doing it. It’s human nature – seeing what other people have lost makes us more protective of what we’ve still got. People who like my face and might have considered asking me out on a date, must think twice. After all, what kind of lover could I possibly be without hands? Old people and children are the most direct, though. They ask me straight out how my hands came to be missing. And I always lie and watch the shock on their faces though they’d be more shocked if I told them what really happened. I can’t bear upsetting old people or chickens. No, children. Old people or chickens get easily upset and that’s the sad truth of it.  

I’ve told everyone who’s ever asked that when I was fourteen, my hands were silvered, no. Severed severe severed in an accident. Miles from anywhere, on a farm, playing too near slicing machinery. A fall that landed me under a combined. No, columbine. No, combine harvester if they push for details.  

There are two reasons I’ve never told the real story – I don’t want my father arrested and I don’t want to distress whoever I tell the story to. I don’t want to hurt them with my hurt. I’ve made your face too real in my mind so I might have to unimagine you as I tell the true story, so I don’t imagine your shock. If you were real, and I was your unhounded. No, un. Handed. Un. Handed lover, I would have more empathy for you than I do for myself.  I would kiss you and kiss you and kiss you.

Before I disappear your face from my mind, I’ve got a few questions. What are you doing with your own hands now? Have a good look at them if you like. What would you do without them? I bet you’re thinking of all the things you couldn’t do, though my question was about what you still could. I’m determined in life, as I’ve had to be – I left home young and my foster parents and the social worker and doctor pushed me to manage better, but I wouldn’t laugh… wrong word again but that’s an odd one… I mean wear prosthetics. How could anyone laugh prosthetics?  

The straps made me want to scream. 

These days, I’m employed by an agency and advertisers pay to use my voice when it’s right for a contract. I talk into a microphone, selling this, speaking up some bigness about that. It’s scripted so I barely notice the words. You can find God on the shelves in the supermarket and the Devil in someone else’s opinion. Ooh, it does capitals when I make the words sound important. But yes, my work skill is all in my voice. A lovely tone, I’m told I’ve got. A deep husky one or light and playful. It’s a Sing and a Song of a voice – I use it to sell some company or some bright object or a cleaver promise. Clever.

But I’m not selling anything now. This is me. Confession. Verbal story.  

You’ve got such a gentle smile that I’m blanking you out now, so I can say what I have to say. I can imagine your kind eyes looking through mine at these emerging words. I’ll tell this story just once. I’ll talk it as if to a good friend. 

Let it be gone from me.  

This is almost a spell. 

I’m closing my eyes so I’m back there. I won’t be able to change the words any more so I’ll have to trust the app has learned how to write my voice by now. 

I am two and Mother has gone away. I am three four and five, and there are no photographs of her. And though I go to the letterbox and check it still works, if she ever sends me letters, my father must throw them away. But whatever caused her to go – if it is the hits and thumps at home, the bumps I hear talk of down in the village or if that is tall tales and gossip, I can’t find out for sure. 

Father brings me up in the Farmhouse, paying me little more heed than the dog he pats the forelocks of and then shuts in the outhouse each night so he’ll not heat fill the pantry. There is a wide barn that once must have had horses in it, as there are Straps, saddles and switches hanging from hooks on the walls. He’s filled the stalls with monkey shapes and they take all his time, as they are often needing birthing or shearing, feeding and watering. And outside these routines, they take still more of his time by breaking through fences and getting themselves troubled in the woods and ditches. 

I say he pays me no heed, but that’s not quite the truth. He glances at my hands whenever I am near him. When I talk, he barely listens or answers. He doesn’t look at my face. He watches my fingers. 

His housekeeper is the one who looks after me. I say, housekeeper, but she’s never been just that. He used to pay her at first, I’m sure. He is never mean with money and that must be how it started.  

But now I am seven, she is coming round and helping out for nothing, ‘for the goodness of helping,’ she says.  

Kara, her name is, and she is as calm as my father has Tempests, and she makes order when he makes masks, and I am a naughty kitten. She gives me something to play with when she needs to get the floors cleaned or the washing hung out or the dinner made. It is her who brushes my hair and gets me to school. It is her who spoons eggy stew into mouth when my teeth hurt. 

I am ten. Kara has moved in and the small room in the attic is for her to sleep in. She watches my father all the time, even when he doesn’t know. 

Perhaps she is deep sick in love with him. It might be that. In school, the teacher talk about Kara is that she was a simple village girl who got bored with school very young, but grew to become a clever young woman. Her parents don’t know what to do with her now she’s seventeen and with no exams or job skills. Their cottage is small. She is at our house all the time, helping out without ever being told what to do. I’m glad she sleeps here. She is the one thing that can calm my father down when he has Devil-turns.  

She calms him by singing. The bathroom is the only room in the farmhouse that has a door lock so she chooses to always sing to him from there. Must be as afraid of him as I. She goes locked up in there and sings a lullaby, loud is she loud. The echo is wild – I hear it from under my bed or in the back of a wardrobe, wherever I hide myself, even while he’s roaring or smashing or flailing when the devil-turn takes hold of him and spins him. In the background, there is always her voice… 

‘Little cat, look up at the moon, before it blinks itself out.’ 

I am eleven and think maybe Kara is singing for me. Though we’re hiding separately, her voice is there. My father’s cursing in the kitchen. Smash. Bump. Shout. Her voice runs like taps. It calms him, now he’s quietened enough to hear it. A final crash, and he’s quiet long. There is only the sound of the lullaby. I’m waiting for Kara’s song to end. 

A door creaks. Her footsteps. The devil-turn is over and she’s going downstairs to him. She’ll make sure he’s all right. She’ll put him back together.  

I let myself feel ice and sugar. 

After each of his turns, when my shivers are over, I go and see what shipwreck he’s in. 

Once, he is face-down on the pantry floor surrounded by broken wine bottles. Kara, in thick old boots, cleans smashed glass away. She walks round him as he lies there and groans in his lost underground. She uses a broom, then dustpan and brush, then map, then cloth. 

I love her strength.

Twice, he is in the corner of the kitchen by the stove, being rocked like a baby as he shakes in Kara’s islands, staring at a hill of plates, cabbages and cookery books he’s thrown on the tilted floor. 

Thrice, he is swimming on his double bed, trousers bunch his knees and his bare bum is showing. He’s holding my mother’s wedding dress to his face, murmuring into the rips he’s torn into it. 

Kara leans in the doorway. When I arrive to linger with her, she takes my hand and leads me shore away. 

That third time the wedding dress devil-turn happens. Kara leads me down to the kitchen. While she boils milk for me, she pours herself a brandy. 

This is the only time I’ve ever seen angels in her eyes. They flash as she says to me, ‘I’m here for you. And I’ll stay here till you’re grown enough to take him on.’ I want to ask what he means to her, but for now I’m wondering what he was doing to my mother’s wedding dress.  

Kara asks me if I want to hear a story about a wicked stepmother. 

I tell her I am fifteen next week, ask her for brandy and she pours me one. 

Hot stings in mouth, I say, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ 

Without blinking, she replies, ‘He says to me that the devil borrows him for a while. Now that could be psychosis or it could be religion or it could be superstition or it could be the truth. Either way, he’s often got an erection when he’s devil, and whether you’re his lover or housekeeper, daughter or wife, it’s best to keep clear of it.’  

‘Are you here because you love him, or me?’

She looks away. 

When I’m sixteen Kara’s mother is ill and has been taken to town for the hospital. Kara has to go back to the village and help her father. 

She kisses me when she leaves. ‘I’ll be only gone a week maybe two.’ Soft lips to my brow, she tells me ‘Take care of you first, and him later. You know how to hide, so hide well.’ 

But I miss her and need her so I don’t take care of anything. 

The first night Kara doesn’t sleep in our house is the night my father cuts my hands off with the axe he uses to chop wood. After he’s done so, he binds the stumps with belts and straps my arms to bedposts so they’re raised enough to stop bleeding.  

I go into black. 

The second night Kara doesn’t sleep in our house is the night he climbs into my bed and cries onto the stumps he’s left me with. He holds me tight around my waist and sobs about how much he misses my mother. He says he is unsolved without her and I had her hands, her exact same hands. He tells me how much it always hurt him to see them. He spoons fish soup into my mouth and watches my throat for the clench to check it still swallows. 

The third night Kara doesn’t sleep in our house is the night he sits on the edge of my bed. I can no longer feel my strapped arms and my dreams overlap waking. He unstraps my arms and sews my skin closed over wounds so they’ll never play again. He is careful as he bondages tight. My eyes blood and his blonde hair looks like a crown with the broad lightbulb shining. He calls me by my mother’s name.  

‘Maria,’ he says. ‘Forgive me, Maria.’ 

He loves me. The smell of him stays salt. I am confused by who or what he is. This is not the same devil who woke me in a rage three nights ago with an axe in his hands. This is not the same devil who bound my wrists with his belt and demanded – hold them flat to the floor. This is not the same devil who told me that if he didn’t remove my hands, the devil inside him would take his own soul. It was my hands or his soul. He said he belonged to the devil and a daughter belonged to a father, and as his child, I was to do what he wanted. 

On this third night without Kara, I talk to myself in short remembering words: ‘This is my father.’ And he collapses beside me in weeps and sugars. He speaks softly to me and strokes the air where my hands used to be. I dream him covered in white feathers with the word remorse written on each one. And because he has heart me, and because he cries himself into me, I numb my own heart and can’t cry. He is no longer a devil. He is no longer wearing a golden-hair crown. He is nurse and surgeon.  

But I’ve been tricked and the next night, he is the devil when he touches me in one way, he is god when he touches me in another. When I show fear, he changes into a small boy.  

He falls asleep beside me. I no longer know who he is to me, or who I am to him. In the morning I slip out of bed before he is awake.  

I open the front door by turning the handle with my teeth. 

As I walk away from our home, I have become a severe woman. But as his severed daughter I wish no harm to come to him. 

I am silvered. Can’t touch a thing unless I use my feet or my mouth.

The flavours of everything are unexpected. 

Now I’ve said all this, I can open my eyes. Though I’ve not seen my father since then, I did see Kara for a short time. The day I left home, I waited till dark and then sought her out in the village. Her room was on the ground floor and I could tell it from the black feathers in the vase on the windowsill. They seemed like the kind of thing she’d like to look on.  

I tapped her window with my chin.  

She opened the curtains, took one look at me and closed them again. She came outside with a warm coat and slung it around my shoulders. Silently, she loved me through the streets, that should have been led, but perhaps love works better. Out of the village, along a track, we slipped into the woods. 

Her face was pale as she gripped my elbows and examined my gauze-bondaged wrists under moonlight. She knew he’d done it. She wanted to go to the police, but I said they’d been my hands, and he was my father. I’d had no choice about my hands, but I could choose what to do about him. 

Shaking her head, she murmured about punishment and injustice and wickedness.  

I met her eyes with mine and made her promise not to tell a soul. 

She said, ‘Loyalty should be earned.’ 

I shook my head and said, ‘He’s all I’ve got. And I’m all he’s got.’ 

She said, ‘If you don’t want him punished for this, you’ll have to leave.’  

I shook my head again. 

She continued, ‘If one person in the village sees you, they’ll know what he’s done. But you’re not yet strong enough to travel.’ 

She loved me to a derelict house in the woods, and left me there in a room with broken windows and torn curtains. While she was gone, I listened to bonding owls and the sounds of the wind in oak branches as I realised how weak my body was. Outside, claws scratched bark with sense scents of soil and dried blood. In cold darkness, my mind was strange. Strong enough to know I wasn’t afraid of any spirit or devil that might be found in the woods. I was strong enough to know I was afraid of people, and what they could do to each other In The Name of The Devil, or In The Name of Justice. 

When Kara returned, she brought bedding, matches, bread and two pints of milk, a bag of chicken wings and three boiled eggs. She also bought sanitary towels, toilet paper, soap and antiseptic.  

That night she lay down under the duvet with me, and with her arms around my shoulders we shared the same pillow. She sung me to sleep. 

‘Little cat, look up at the moon, before it blinks itself out. 

It’s made of silver and flute song, but can punch through clouds. 

There’s brightness in your eyes if you smile when you bite. 

But with me you’re safe: I won’t hurt you tonight.’ 

Those words didn’t come out right but I like them better. 

Kara came back at dust the next night and the next dusk night and the next dust night. The song kept changing till I didn’t remember what her words originally were. But her arms were gentle, and though my bloods didn’t come for a month, when I finally bled I went days without washing. Kara told me I stank and should cleanse myself in the river. But to me, it was the scent of blood that finally made me feel clean. 

Kara told me that my father had been in the village, asking if anyone had seen me. She said, ‘He’s watching me too often, and people are talking. I’ll be followed here soon. No one minds their own business for long. Are you ready to leave?’ 

I wasn’t ready, but I thought of my father locked up in some prison cell bashing the devil out of his head. I imagined his golden hair matted round the wounds he’d give himself. His blood trickling down whitewashed wills. Wills. Walls. Walls. 

I nodded. ‘I’m ready.’ 

Kara replied, ‘I’ll get you to the nearest train station. Then you travel onwards, as far as you can go on the money I’ll give you. Don’t ever speak of where you’ve come from. Tell strangers you’re under sixteen, and say that you’ve lost all your memories when they ask about your hands. If they mention social services or fostering, say yes, and yes again. Strangers can be kind. But look closely at their eyes to be sure of this.’  

I asked her to come with me and my eyes hilled with tears. She told me her mother was dying but it might take a while. She told me that when her mother was dead, her father would need someone to look after him.  

She said that if her own father managed fine, she might go back to the Farmhouse and take care of mine. 

I asked her to come with me again. 

She told me that she only liked looking after people who couldn’t take care of themselves. Only the weak.  

She told me, ‘It’s easier for me to care, than to love.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Yes.’

We didn’t speak after she said this. Her eyes were cold, though I might have imagined this. In that moment I was afraid of her strength.  

Over time, I’ve learned how to take care of myself. I have a home now. A job. But this is the first time I’ve spoken the whole story. The talking book claims to teach me how to self-help myself, in language for emperor meant and courage meat, or plait attitudes I’m meant to recite until they’re no longer clichés. Perhaps it’s the telling of the story that helps, not necessarily having a witness. But I do like the idea of this invisible you, and I can clearly imagine your kind eyes reading my words, moving from left to right, making sense of my memories translated into language. 

I can imagine my lips kissing yours, and us always touching like that. The stroke of your forearm on mine. My thigh between yours. Your smells and flavours. Your eyelashes brushing my cheek.

I’ve just re-read the section I spoke with my eyes closed. If I look for the words that are wrong, it doesn’t hurt me to read what it really says. There are so many words out of place or missing. But there’s some truth in them. Heart is sometimes hurt and hurt is sometimes heart. Severe is sometimes severed. Shivers are occasionally sugar, and bandages can be bondage.  

If you’ve read these words all the way to the end, you are now my best friend because you know my true story better than anyone else in this whole whirl. One day you might even be my lover. You might dress us both in eccentric outfits made of dark feathers, of delicate velvets and nets and furs. You might touch your mouth to my ear as you murmur, ‘I don’t see the absence of your hands, I see you.’  

This is a spill. 

A spell.