Night fell and, running much behind or much ahead of schedule, a bus came to take them home. Even from far down the street they could see that all the lights in the house were on, as if to make up for the people who weren’t in it.
Minutes later, across the threshold, Mum was beside herself with rage; the house ricocheted with female shrieks as Scott stood listening half-way up the stairs.
Don’t hit her, he kept thinking. She’s got the family curse – the same thing you’re so scared you’ll get.
In the end, the daughter’s voice began to prevail over the mother’s.
‘Ring her!’ Christine shouted over and over. ‘Why don’t you just ring her?’
Eventually Mum calmed down enough to telephone Mrs Fuller, the dialled numbers beeping softly upstairs in Christine’s empty room, too, on the endlessly quarrel-provoking extension. Scott tiptoed up to it, lifted the handset, listened to one mother reassuring another that Christine and her brother had indeed visited the Art Gallery. For how long? Oh, for hours. Wonderful to see in such young people. So nice to know that not all of them are hanging around the streets, going to crass American movies and getting into trouble with the Wrong Sort.
Scott heard Christine’s receiver click off as their mother hung up downstairs. The house remained silent. Everything would be all right now. Scott walked across to his own room and there, at last, behind his own closed door, he extracted the crumpled, damp and torn magazine from his trousers. It was Busty Babes. He opened it, flicked through. It was full of pubic hair, pale-orange vaginas, women holding their breasts in their hands: everything he had always wanted. But he was so tired tonight, so full of emotions he couldn’t digest, and not all of them his. Tomorrow; tomorrow he would examine these women properly; he would choose which of their bodies was for him, and he would show them what he was made of. Tonight, he just wasn’t ready.
He ran a bath and washed himself with loving care, playing submarines time after time so that the thick, creamy lather sealed up the surface above his body. Afterwards he dried his tender, wrinkled flesh with the softest towel he could find, and dusted himself with talcum powder. Then he got into bed and watched Thunderbirds 1 and 3 circling his lampshade in the moonlight. The magazine was hidden under his bed: a little bomb waiting to go off.
‘Goodnight, Scotty,’ whispered Christine in his doorway a few minutes later, but he had already left her, gone to the land of wet dreams.
Nina’s Hand
THE LAST NIGHT they slept together, Nina’s right hand nestled under her pillow, as if seeking to stroke her face. A heavy sleeper nowadays, Nina barely moved from lights-off to alarm, and her hand had learned to live with this, smothered under a claustrophobic wad of warm polyester. In the morning, Nina lifted her head from the pillow and her hand slid into the light, a small, perfect clutch of pale roseate fingers.
Nina’s hand was put to work immediately, gliding through the air like a trained bird, switching off the bedside alarm clock, rubbing the sleep out of Nina’s eyes. Every morning these same first impressions: the minutely corrugated plastic of the alarm clock’s button, the damp acquiescence of Nina’s closed eyes and the textured thrill of sleep crystals skidding along the forefinger. Nina’s hand was glad to be used, to answer the call. A long, idle night had been meekly endured: active subservience now was a leap into freedom.
Sometimes the nights were just too long, and Nina’s hand would slip out from under the pillow while Nina slept, and wander around inside the bedclothes. There was the pleasure of settling on a part of the bedsheet which was cool and distant, the intrigue of finding vagrant breadcrumbs, the frisson of tasting the dark empty air outside the covers. Once in a while Nina’s hand would visit other parts of Nina’s sleeping body, parts that seemed, in one way or another, neglected during the daytime, and Nina’s hand would ask them, with a hesitant touch of fingers, if there was anything it could do.
Nina’s hand didn’t wander so much lately, not since Nina had been working at the factory and sleeping more heavily than usual. The tedium of eight hours under the pillow was preferable to a repeat of what had happened recently when, loitering below the waist, Nina’s hand had been squashed without warning beneath a collapse of thigh. The slow extinguishing of sensation that followed – an ambiguous hint to begin with, a terrifying fact by morning – must be what death was like.
The rewards for lying motionless all night were not glamorous, but they were plentiful. Routine challenges, to be sure: the throwing aside of the bedclothes, the grasping of the water glass, conveying it through space at a gently increasing tilt towards Nina’s lips, a minor miracle of articulation beyond the scope of Nina’s poor arithmetic to express. Then there was the launch from the bed, when a deceptively gentle flex of Nina’s hand on the edge of the mattress tossed her entire body forward to land, erect and swaying like a lifebuoy, on the bedroom surface.
Nina spoke, or made some sort of sulky murmur of complaint, not directed at her hand, or at any other living thing, for she lived alone now. The protest used the language of sexual activity, but had nothing to do with all that, really. It had something to do with Nina’s feelings about going to the factory.
Nina’s hand led Nina into the bathroom, guided her on to the toilet, wiped her afterwards. Once upon a time a bath would have been run, and Nina’s hand would have performed elaborate tricks with taps, shampoo bottles and soap. Slick with white lather, Nina’s hand would slide and slalom at great speed over the entire surface of Nina’s body. But since Nina had been working at the factory, there was no time for baths anymore.
Nina’s feelings were often a mystery to her hand. The hand meant well, but got stuck on questions like why tears could be wiped anywhere, but urine only in a tiny mirrored room. Moreover, the causes of Nina’s emotions often had no tangible connection with anything her hand had grasped; there was a world of things beyond the physical which seemed able to enter Nina freely, before her hand could throw itself up to greet or repel them.
Confronted by these supernatural enigmas, the hand’s function was clear: maintain Nina’s hold on the real world.
The act of dressing Nina was the first time each morning when Nina’s hand was reminded that there was, in fact, another hand. Nina called it her left hand, and it lived on the dark side of her body: an identical twin of the right one, except for its eerie reversal of fingers. Nina’s hand had a policy of working efficiently and cheerfully with this other hand whenever the task demanded it, and indeed some of their collaborations had the precision and panache of choreography, but in truth their mutual resemblance was an unsettling rather than a reassuring thing, as if each was flexing itself to supplant the other. Yet Nina’s right hand sensed it had the edge on its sinister offsider, and whenever possible it performed tasks alone. In short, there was no love lost between them, and on the rare occasions when one hand was told to clasp the other without a practical reason, they sat limp and awkward in Nina’s lap.
When there was something that needed doing, however, they could toil in perfect complement, like estranged twin sisters reunited in the workplace, who never spoke but remembered the intimacy of the womb. Just now, the two hands were pulling on Nina’s clothing together, diving down and hauling up like simultaneously launched acrobats. Nina was not difficult to dress; she was thin, she lacked curves, and she always chose the simplest attire. Clasping Nina’s bra, the hands’ fingers touched, an awkward clash of blunted nails, but a few moments later their collaboration was over and they were independent again, the right hand reverting to a peripheral awareness of its sibling’s existence.
The hand’s affinity with Nina herself was more complex still. There was no simple answer to crude questions like Who made the decisions? Who gave the orders, and who followed? The relationship between Nina and her hand was like the fur on a cat’s back: prickly and undignified when disturbed, but smoothing instantly and automatically, because it was genetically programmed to be unruffled. There were times when Nina commanded her
hand to lift the lid of a scalding pot or grasp a rose by its thorny stem, and the hand’s protests flailed unheard in the vacuum between thought and action. However, there were other times when Nina would stumble in a lurching bus and find that her hand had already clasped a metal stanchion, or when Nina would become aware of an itch and find her hand already on the spot, digging for it. They had an understanding too nearly infallible to be undermined by the odd cut or scalded finger; they were, in fact, almost a single, indivisible organism.
Taking charge now, Nina’s hand led Nina to a mirror, combed her hair there, drew black lines around the edges of Nina’s eyes. There were vague dark rings under Nina’s eyes already, but these were evidently not decisive enough, and the extra ones Nina’s hand drew were precise. Once upon a time, there had been a great many more cosmetic rituals than this to perform in front of the mirror, involving cotton buds, pigmy pots, wee phalluses of crimson wax, and minuscule brushes. Now, however, it was the black lines only. And why not? Nina’s dwindling concern about her appearance made sense to the hand, which considered its own outward form almost never.
Nina’s hand had started life as a tiny, pudgy thing, helpless as a beached starfish.
In time, it had grown into an impetuous little paw which smeared chocolate over Nina’s cheeks, stacked coloured blocks, lifted floes of soapsuds from the bathwater it was swimming in, and, on the occasion of Nina’s first visit to the seaside, even got to hold a real beached starfish between sandy fingers.
Adolescence had brought self-consciousness and sexual experiment: the squeamish thrill, for example, of having one’s fingernails lovingly painted by the sinister sister hand, knowing that one must do exactly the same in return once the cold, translucent liquid had ceased to be wet.
Adolescence outgrown, Nina’s hand had evolved into an unpretentious creature, smooth and slender still, but toughened by thirty-six years of use, unobtrusively callused, delicately wrinkled. In rare moments when Nina’s hand made contact with a hand of a young person (Nina had no children and, now that her husband was gone, no prospect of having any) Nina’s hand was shocked to find itself gross and hard by comparison. Alone against Nina’s cheek or under her pillow, however, its faith in its own compactness was restored.
There were many things that Nina’s hand had disliked intensely when younger: particular tasks, temperatures, textures. Nowadays, it could handle them all. In the preparation of breakfast, for example, Nina’s hand was required to touch raw beef and other clammy meats, and to hover in a miasma of frying oil as these squalid substances cooked. Nina’s natural appetite was slow to rouse in the mornings and she had always inclined towards a vegetarian diet, but these leanings were not accommodated by her new job, which demanded she be fully fuelled for action from the moment of arriving and not weaken or hunger for at least three hours. The impossibility of achieving this feat of endurance on a cup of tea and a few spoonfuls of avocado had revolutionised Nina’s breakfast regime: instead of the gentle spreading of cottage cheese over fragile crackers, the deft excision of grapefruit segments, Nina’s hand must hold a grease-spattered eggslice and turn some sizzling slab of protein over and over – a beefburger, perhaps, or sausages, or a ham omelette. Egg by itself had proved unequal to the challenge: only meat lasted the distance, as if the factory refused to be fobbed off with a mere ovum when it could demand flesh.
Feeding Nina was a little like factory work in itself, a repetitious conveyance of food to the mouth until time ran out, with just this one reward at the end: the wiping of Nina’s lips, a complex motion for the hand to perform, a graceful corkscrewing-while-sliding manoeuvre which might have to be repeated in reverse, like a seal writhing contentedly on a lubricated shore.
Nina’s hand thrived on little opportunities like this, which, admittedly, were growing fewer the longer Nina worked at the factory. There was no toothbrush to be deployed lately, no floss to fiddle with; when the eating was finished with, Nina would immediately leave for work.
Though taken outside each day in all weathers, Nina’s hand understood little of the wider world beyond Nina’s body. Confronted with the universe, it preferred to nuzzle into Nina’s pocket or wrap itself around her throat protectively. It half knew that the street along which Nina hurried now was connected to other streets, a whole grid of streets which added up to something vast called a city. The bus which Nina ran to catch was similarly somehow a part of the other vehicles, collectively a body called traffic. The buildings flashing by, if one drove past them long enough, were supposed to coalesce into so-called suburbs, each with its own name and character. But awareness of such things was almost impossible for Nina’s hand to hold on to for very long; the world naturally receded and was far away, a visual hum of scenery. Was it shameful to take more interest in the studded ceiling of the bus than in the sky above? More shameful still to lose interest in the ceiling when there was the more immediate thrill of coins nestling restlessly in one’s palm? The feel of these cool, silvery slices of metal, exciting a prickle of sweat from the skin as they turned their faces over in preparation for being accepted as offerings, was far more compelling than any expanse of untouchable vacuity. Perhaps that’s what Nina meant when she said (to worried friends suggesting she give up her job) that everything comes down to money.
It was money that Nina went to the factory to get, though there was never any money to be seen there, only gherkins and occasionally sauerkraut. Still Nina returned daily, and here she was again, laying her hand on the cast-iron gate, pushing it open with a groan of effort and begrudging.
Narrowly inside the long, squat building’s entrance stood a machine whose knack was to bite numbers into big cardboard tickets. The first task of Nina’s hand, upon entering, was to fetch Nina’s ticket out of a slit, insert it into a slot, and wait for the sensation of the machine’s bite to buzz the fingers. The potential for playfulness was there, but not the permission: insertion must be once only, and quick. Then there was an apron to be put on over Nina’s clothes, a green rectangle of damp cloth with Nina’s name written on it by some other hand.
The factory’s insides were harshly lit and humid, like a giant concrete fishtank newly emptied of water, still wet, heated by a monstrous thermostat. The air had given up much of its oxygen to make room for steam and vinegar vapour. The work began without prelude or preparation: Nina took her place among a line of other bodies at a waist-high trough, inside which a flat rubbery spine moved empty glass jars vibrating along its surface. Behind and above the trough were wooden crates of gherkins, fixed at an angle so that the glistening green cargo was constantly spilling forwards. From these crates, Nina’s hand and the hands of the other women must select appropriately sized gherkins to fill the jars: a snug fit only was allowed. A few big fat ones were best to begin with, tossed into the jars almost carelessly, some smaller thin ones to wedge in the spaces, then a couple of stubby or runty ones to finish. The left hand might do some of the selecting, make some of the clumsier insertions, but the right hand must do the real filling; this was precision work.
The speed at which the belt moved, however, was such that no single hand, nor even single pair of hands, could fill all the jars, nor even all of any one of the jars: that was why there were dozens of pairs of hands lined up against the trough. Nina’s hand would engage with whatever jar was going past at any given moment, and add what appeared to be needed. Depending on Nina’s shifting position in the line, sometimes the jar was almost full and her hand would top it up, sometimes half full and Nina’s hand would find the correct cucumbers for the puzzle and squeak them into place, sometimes empty, ready for the fat ones.
When the jars were all full, borne along beyond the reach of the women, a different clutch of hands, male hands, ushered the jars into a steam-hazed machine from which they eventually emerged with lids clamped on, cooked in a fluid of dill, vinegar and water. The factory’s layout was in fact a kind of pinched loop, like an electric element or an intra-uterine coil, with the jars de
scribing a slow arc from the start of the conveyor belt, past the women, turning quite sharply into the main processor, and emerging to trundle along another slowly arcing trough, complementary to the first in the opposite direction, towards the exit. If the female hands filling the jars should overreach the crates, they would come into view of a whole line of other female hands, like mirror images, fetching the hot jars off the trough, checking them for peculiarities, stacking them in cardboard boxes. In the loop’s centre, between the two arcs of conveyor, was nothing; nothing but three pylons holding the factory up.
The noise was louder than ignorable, legally below deafening, its clanks and thuds and hisses disguised by an aural fog of synthetic music from an industrial-strength radio. Occasionally a woman sang along to one of the tunes if it struck her as sufficiently symbolic of some event in her life. Nina never sang. Singing, fortunately, was not compulsory. Nor was speaking, and Nina never spoke, except when spoken to. Alone in the toilet, she sometimes wept, beating her fists against her bared knees. The weeping seldom lasted very long, and each time the same farcical thing happened with Nina’s hand: it would be rashly sent up to wipe Nina’s eyes, then hastily rinsed under the icy water of the toilet sink to wash off the vinegar; then Nina’s hand, heavy with pity and condescension, would wipe Nina’s eyes again.
Nina’s hand didn’t hate the factory the way Nina did, though it would have probably preferred to be employed almost anywhere else. The work was wearying – and yet it had, over time, made Nina’s hand stronger, and strength was an attribute Nina’s hand was secretly pleased to have. Brawny male hands had always seemed awesome in comparison to itself, but until recently it had assumed that the power to wrench wheels off cars or lift a woman off the floor must issue from that intriguingly ugly, arborous musculature. Now, however, Nina’s hand possessed something of that strength itself, with no significant change to its trim appearance. Crushing empty food tins or punching a dent in the kitchen wall gave it the satisfaction of an interior potential greater than the exterior might suggest.