Three Moments of an Explosion Read online

  At the edge of the water, where the jetty touched the earth, Mel heard the rooster again. She waited. No lights appeared.

  She walked onto the planks, over the water. At the end the boat waited for her so Mel climbed in. This’ll be the time I rowed on a moonlit lake, she thought. She pulled, surrounded by nothing, and after a few minutes of hard strokes she let the boat drift in the dark. She put her arms around her knees and listened to all the ripples.

  A fat fish somewhere flicked a tail. Mel looked over her shoulder. The boat was drifting into a patch of quivering water, dimpled as if with cellulite. Mel watched the stars’ reflections. She put her hand in the cold lake. There was a swell. She flexed her fingers.

  The cockerel crowed. Mel jerked up and held her breath. The cockerel called again, much closer, more raucous, as if it had found something.

  And then very fast and rushing Mel felt a surge from below. In the water beneath her hand something was rising.

  She cried out and snatched back her arm and as she did the bird screamed right by her. She shook and splashed and the boat rocked on the black water. Mel gripped the wood and turned her head in panic but could see nothing in the dark.

  The rooster didn’t sound again. Mel huddled shivering while the boat calmed, while the sky lightened, as still as she could be. Her heart slowed. When adrenaline had ebbed from her enough that she no longer shook, she took hold of the oars with cold hands and rowed back to the lakeside house, where Joanna was just awake.

  “Did you dream last night?” Mel said.

  “Probably.” Joanna was driving. Sun dappled the car.

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “You know me,” Joanna said. She imitated stupefied snoring. “Why?”

  “I was a bit noisy,” Mel said.

  “Going for your dawn row? So impressed!”

  “Thought even you might’ve been defeated, between me and the cock-a-doodle-doing,” Mel said after a moment.

  “Kikeriki,” said Joanna. Mel frowned at her. “German,” said Joanna. “For cock-a-doodle-do. Don’t look at me like that, you know I sprechen sie.”

  “I’m just marveling at your specialist historian’s vocabulary,” said Mel. “Got any other farmyard animals?”

  “Grunz,” said Joanna slowly. “I’m pretty sure that’s oink.” She glanced at Mel and whistled. “Look out, Deutschland.”

  “That’s right,” Mel said. “Meet Camden Town. I was going to bring my book. Have you seen it?”

  “Did you leave it in the boat?”

  They visited a town that was pretty enough. It had a famous clock. It was celebrated for its bakers. Joanna and Mel looked at facades. They shared embarrassed smiles with other tourists.

  “You alright?” said Joanna.

  In the window of a general store was a sign for a magazine, from the headline of which protruded a re-curved German “S” like a sea-monster’s neck. “I’m sleep-deprived,” Mel said. “Maybe I need some sugar, flour, and Germanic jam in pastry form. Butter, bitte? Maybe you could help me with that?” She slipped an arm briefly around Joanna’s waist.

  “Why yes,” Joanna said. “Yes I can.”

  Joanna looked at her watch as she led them toward the cake shop. Mel said, “It’s lovely here.”

  “Really?” Joanna said.

  “Look at that restaurant. We could knock around a few hours, have something to eat.” Joanna hesitated and Mel said, “No, you’re right. It’s time to go. You have stuff to do.”

  And nothing settled on Mel when she turned the car down their drive and they came back to the house. Nothing overtook her. It was still light. She listened but could hear only the woods. She watched the lake and eventually smiled at Joanna, whose attention was the only one she felt on her. They sat together in the living room, Joanna reading while Mel wrote emails. For hours, all evening, nothing came down.

  That night the cockerel crowed again.

  Mel opened her eyes. She stared at the ceiling. Joanna slept. Mel heard strong wind. She heard that crazed farmyard bird announce dawn hours and hours too early.

  They kept the curtains open to wake to daylight, so Mel saw the lake the moment she stood. She was still for a long time. At last she walked naked to the window. She watched the shadows of trees swaying, quick black clouds, the dark land and water. And the cockerel crowed again, and now it was the only sound, and it was urgent, and closer.

  Mel touched the glass. She saw gathering wind in the motions of leaves, like a rainless storm. Something approaching. A rush of air that seemed to carry the cockerel’s excited crow with it. No one was waking. No one anywhere around the lake was turning on their lights. The windowpane vibrated. Wake up, Mel thought. Wake up wake up.

  A bird whispered much too close. Right up in her ear. Mel stopped breathing and it clucked. The wind slammed into the window and Mel staggered and there was the crowing again right there and this time a hiss and a snarl too. Mel retched in a sudden sump-stench. The air in the room was moist. As she straightened, holding the windowsill, she heard a liquid sound. She turned.

  Something was on the floor.

  A darkness. A gross misshape.

  Something huge and wrong and wet. It blocked her way.

  Mel’s throat closed. The new thing in the room dripped.

  A nightmare calf born without limbs or head or eyes but full of tumors. A mound of leather in pooling water. It was a bag, a sack full of bad presents, of coal or earth or blood clots or ruined roots. Mel shook with her own heartbeat. The sack streamed.

  Mel’s legs gave way. Way beyond the nightmare thing Joanna dreamed as if in another country.

  The black sack moved.

  It shoved from within with a sucking sound, a slurping. It lurched heavily toward her, spattering the floorboards.

  A fitful dark groping, hauling her way. Its weight and spasming motion shook the room. It strained as if to split.

  The thing had voices. A cluck, a hiss, a predator’s growl. It slopped closer still and Mel heard a woman.

  Mel heard a woman vomit old water. She heard it spatter on the inside of the skin. The sack convulsed in mud that should not have been brought up. Kikeriki, whispered the rooster inside the bag with its throat full of lake.

  Mel crawled back to the wall and pushed with her legs as if they might drive her into it. The thing came with a scratch of claws, pushed through its own hide into the floor. It whispered. It pinioned her with its notice. Its cold enveloped her. Mel felt a terrible lack. Cluck cluck the sack went and hiss and growl and nein and it came and it was close and it reached for her, so close she could see its wounds, crisscross sutures tautening as the leather stretched, as if the sack would burst.

  She screamed.

  Joanna screamed. Was there with Mel holding her and begging her to stop, whispering to her. Crouching in the glare of the lamp where there was no sack, no thing, where there was no wetness any more.

  “What happened, what happened?” Joanna kept saying. “You’re OK, you’re OK.”

  “Something was here.” Mel ran her fingers over the dry floor. “Oh God. Something missing.” She put her hands to her mouth when that came out of it because she didn’t know what she meant.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Joanna said. “I didn’t hear anything. What happened?”

  “It was here, it was in the room,” Mel sobbed. “Oh my God—”

  “Breathe, breathe, breathe,” Joanna said. “What did—” She stopped. She looked at Mel and put her arms around her again. “What did you dream?”

  When Mel was able to stand, she went from room to room turning on every light. Joanna followed her, trying to take hold of her. “Please,” she said. “You have to talk to me, Mel, please.”

  “We have to go, we have to go now.” Mel pulled open the front door and shied at the dark outside. She slammed it closed again and put her back to it. “We have to go now.”

  “Stop. Mel. Stop shouting. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Mel stare
d at Joanna. Her eyes widened. She was breathing too fast. She tried but she could say nothing. She ran upstairs again. She began to shove clothes into her bag.

  “Dear God, Jo, it was right here. Stop looking at me like that!” Joanna stood in the doorway holding out her arms, her mouth open. Mel stopped and caught her breath. She closed her eyes and swallowed and tried again to say what she had seen. She tried to say it and the words refused. Stopped in her mouth. “Jo … We have to get the fuck out of here.”

  “Mel you’re shaking, you’re sick …”

  “I’m not sick.” There were seconds of silence. “What did I dream? You think that’s what happened? You think I’m crazy, Jo? Do you? We have to go now.”

  “Help me understand then,” Joanna said.

  They stared at each other. Mel saw Joanna’s horrified concern and the anger she was battening down. She understood, slowly, that Joanna would not come with her.

  Her eyes widened. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “you can’t. You can’t stay. There was something here—”

  The women stared at each other.

  “Mel, if you keep screaming like this I’m calling a doctor.”

  “I’m not sick,” Mel said. Her heart was slowing at last, but when she spoke her voice still shook. “There’s something. We have to go. And if you won’t come right now and if you won’t take me to the airport I’ll go myself. And I’ll dump the fucking car when I get there.”

  They drove through the dawn. Mel huddled in the passenger seat with her head in her hands. She kept looking up at Joanna in disbelief. Joanna watched the road. Her face was anguished and hard.

  “Mel, you’re scaring me—”

  “You should be scared!”

  Neither of them spoke for a long time. When they approached the airport Joanna shouted, “This is insane. Tell me what happened.”

  Mel tried. She swallowed. “There’s something there,” was all she could say.

  “Can you hear yourself? I know you’ve had a shock but can you hear yourself?”

  “You know,” Mel shouted. “Look at you, you know there’s something. You’re fucking pretending—”

  “You think this was all cheap?” Mel stared at Joanna and did not flinch. “What exactly is this, Mel? What’s this about? Talk to me.”

  “Please,” Mel said at last.

  There were more seconds of silence. Then Mel got out of the car quickly and walked away. Joanna did not follow. She opened her own door but stayed behind the wheel. “Don’t,” she said once, not loud. She watched Mel disappear into the terminal.

  Jo clenched her hands as if she would do something. She pulled out her phone but did not dial and she swore and hit her dashboard several times. She sat in the car in the car-park a long time.

  TALK? Mel texted Joanna. AM BACK. London was under thick English clouds.

  Ever since she had sat down in the plane’s flat fluorescent light, it had been hard for Mel even to think about what she had seen in the room. Her sense of it was scattered. Black plastic bags spilled like larvae from a rubble of dustbins. She crossed the city alone.

  PLEASE, she texted. FEEL SICK. SORRY. She stopped and called Joanna, leaning against the wood of a closed shop on a Peckham street. It was not closed for the day but forever. Mel listened to the clicks of foreign connections until Joanna answered.

  “I thought you were out. I was going to leave a message.”

  “I might still go out,” Joanna said. “You can leave a message if you prefer. What do you want?”

  “To know you’re OK.”

  “You can hear.”

  “Please, Jo, please don’t be angry. Please come back. I’m sorry I freaked out. I was really scared, Jo. I still am.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m begging you,” Mel said. She raised her voice in the loudness of London. “Are you there?” She thought of her words coming out of the phone in the house in the trees, echoing by the lake. Birds might hear. “Do you just think I’m a crazy person? Jo?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Mel.”

  “I’m not crazy,” Mel said, but Joanna had rung off.

  Mel knew what she had seen but it thinned in her head. The city flattened the memory and confused her.

  “Why did you come back?” her friends said when she called them looking for someone to be with, when she met them in pubs or cafés or went to their flats. She spent the night of her return in a crowded room full of people. “Why did you come back?” they asked and she shrugged. She told some that she and Joanna had argued. To a few she said that the house by the lake had felt bad.

  “Jo.”

  “Are you drunk?” Joanna spoke carefully down the line. “Jesus, Mel. What is it, two in the morning?”

  “I haven’t spoken to you for so long.” Mel heard the fear in her own voice.

  “A day and a half.”

  “Are you alright? Is everything OK? What’s going on?”

  “I’m tired, Mel. Sleep it off, will you?” Joanna hung up. And though Joanna’s disdain had been audible, and though she was whispering for confused seconds to an empty line, Mel felt better. Relief.

  Should I go back? Mel’s thought shocked her. She shook her head so hard it ached. She remembered the dark thing in the room. She was drunk and uncertain and the memory made her stomach spasm.

  She called again the next morning, hungover, determined to have a proper conversation. Joanna did not answer. Mel tried from her landline, which would not display her number on Joanna’s phone, but got no response.

  What if I was confused? Mel thought. Could she really be thinking such a thing?

  She took hours walking from where she lived to where she had grown up, in the north of the city, to be out in the light. She tried Jo again the next day, and the call was answered by a soft-voiced German man. In courteous, slow English, he asked Mel who she was and how she knew the owner of this telephone.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she said.

  “I am police.”

  The boat had been drifting, empty, aimless, across the lake. A neighbor had come to the house. Perhaps the same man Mel had seen from the boat, standing on a jetty. The officer in the Saxony police explained it to her. She imagined the man knocking at the door of the house. Would you like some help getting your boat back? he had come to say in his good English. I think you have forgotten to tie it up.

  “But she is not here,” the policeman said. “So this man calls us.”

  The car was in the drive. There was food in the fridge. The door was unlocked. Joanna’s computer, the officer said, was on the kitchen table, sleeping. The boat had continued its silent random journey until the man took his own skiff out and snared it.

  One oar was missing, another lay across the seats. A thumb’s height of water slopped in the boat’s bottom. In it was one of Joanna’s slippers.

  Mel could not stop imagining Joanna, her arms up, fingers splayed, a pianist paused between movements. Head nodding with the currents that must hold her, eight meters below the surface of the lake.

  Maybe she went for a long walk, Mel thought. Got lost. Mel sobbed in a bleak, drawn-out way. Maybe she met someone new and shacked up with them. Went into the woods to do some writing. Writing by hand. But what Mel thought was that Joanna had been noticed. Was now circling in the dark water like a mindless ballerina.

  Whenever she called, the police were gentle with her. Your friend got disoriented. It was a beautiful evening. She was enjoying the water. She leaned out too far. It is an awful thing. “I have to come out,” she said.

  The last thing Joanna saw as she looked up, Mel thought, would have been the moonlit outline of the boat above her. The last thing Joanna saw when she looked down Mel wanted desperately not to consider.

  “What did we do wrong?” It was night. Mel surrounded herself with the city’s lights. She spoke her questions out loud. She looked at pictures of the lake. She whispered to the black bushes in the park where she trespassed. “What did Jo do? Nothing. She
did nothing.”

  When they first met, Mel skim-read bits of Joanna’s work. She had done so again that day, hunting the essays for intimations or clues, a logic according to which Joanna might have been taken. There was nothing in the exposition. Nothing of the hills or the lake, nothing to put Mel in mind of what she had seen.

  “What did she do?”

  Now Mel’s phone lit her face from below like a cold campfire. She thumb-typed Dresden, cockerel, lake into a search engine. She scrolled quickly through fairy tales and travel advice. She brushed curious insects from the phone’s face. She typed Germany and, without letting herself hesitate, spirits and water. What did she do? she thought. Why punish her, for fucking what? Mel typed drowned. There were words for which she could not bring herself to search. She wrote Joanna’s name and looked at the picture on her department website, Joanna short-haired and trying not to smile, what she and Mel had called her nerd-queen look. Mel typed drowned and cockerel and Saxony and sack and the phone glowed and pulled up an abstract from a history journal, and sitting on the cold ground with her back to a London tree, Mel found the poena cullei.

  This punishment, she read in the dark.

  Joanna had given Mel her academic passwords, encouraged her to think about that PhD. Mel used them at last. She shook her head and chased links. Jo, I told you I’m no good at this. This punishment, she slowly read. She mouthed the Latin of Justinian. She whispered glosses and translations.

  A novel penalty for a most odious crime. Parricide. She looked it up. neque gladio, she read.

  neque gladio neque ignibus neque ulli alii solemni poenae subiugetur, sed insutus culeo cum cane et gallo gallinaceo et vipera et simia

  This is not execution by the sword or by fire, or any ordinary form of punishment, but the criminal is sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape

  Mel stopped. She put her hand to her mouth. She had to look trembling up at the black sky for a long time.

  sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and in this dismal prison is thrown into the sea or a river, according to the nature of the locality, in order that even before death he may begin to be deprived of the enjoyment of the elements, the air being denied him while alive, and interment in the earth when dead.