First Steps

TW:

Alice had been formal on the subject: there was no question of them buying anywhere even within an hour's drive of their old place. Edgar had wheedled and grimaced and negotiated at work, but had been forced to accept reality. Either he consented to yank out the roots sown by five generations of his family and move to the other side of the country – which might as well have been another planet, in his heart – or he could wave goodbye to the gorgeous, mesmerising and compassionate woman just as life was running a wetted finger around the rim of her crystal and did not intend to stop until she shattered.

Edgar sat in the office he had jerry-rigged from the haphazard contents of various boxes in the vast space of their new house, § with bright dust and rattling with the echo of a thousand mysterious sounds. He had more or less become used to the hammer-head clang of bubbles roiling their way through the heating pipes, but he could not concentrate on his report. The empty screen on his laptop stared him down silently. His head was stuffed with the report's contents but he could not squeeze them out through his fingers. He kept glancing at the open door to his left, from which the constant scratching sound seemed to be coming. No matter how many times he jerked his head to the left, there was nothing there. He sank his elbows into the surface of the desk and pressed his knuckles into his forehead until he could feel the bone. He smirked at the idea of beating the memories out of his head, punching them down like harvested grapes until only their skins remained and their juice had drained off through some purifying grate at the base of his skull.

Alice was upstairs, asleep. She had not spent a whole lot of time out of bed since they moved to the colonial house on a sprawling plot studded with briars and nettles. The country air would be good for her, according to the doctors. Edgar still felt that she had been mummified in some sort of impenetrable varnish that rendered her deaf to his words and cold to his touches. They had not been intimate since it happened and Edgar understood that she would need time to heal, but, in his mind, that process boiled down to torn skin knitting itself back together instead of a deafening internal howling being extinguished.

His peripheral vision caught the bounce of two heels running out of sight in the next room. Their visceral colour tugged his attention to the left but disappeared as soon as he could focus. He went to get up from his chair, but swayed at the nauseous combination of cold-water heaviness in the pit of his stomach and feverish lightness in his temples. Slumping back into his chair, he uncorked his sports water bottle and took a generous slug. Water and coffee and deadlines would moor his thoughts back against reality and smudge out all this feedback noise at the edge of his perception. The heels ran past the doorway again, and he heard what he thought sounded like muffled laughter.

The office seemed to be shrinking in the heat and threatening to crush him with its walls. He kicked his chair back and strode into the next room, determined to act like a breeze of solid flesh that would chase out these jagged fractures of dreams. He thought back to Alice in the hospital, curled up facing the wall, and how she had already laid the first bricks of her immurement from the world. He had even got into the hospital bed behind her and held her with his arm around her waist, not saying anything, not asking anything, just anticipating any hand that might reach out from her heart towards him. For a good hour, there was only silence, and then she reached up to grab his hand and sobbed voicelessly in a slow shiver that shaved the warmth off his soul.

The next room was empty. Edgar trod to and fro across the herringbone parquet that was pitted and milky with age and took great, expansive breaths, stamping his presence on the space. This was his house now: he had poured more than a lifetime's worth of money into it and he was adamant that it would resemble him, shelter him and nourish him. That it would nourish them. Alice's dream had been to own an expansive red-brick loft that was an achingly trendy arranged marriage between industrial and modern, with visible steel ribs painted black and an entire wall worth of windows; any thoughts of staying in the city, with its noise and its urgency and its constant pestering, had currently been put on hold. They might be back in five years, if everything went well. Edgar turned back from looking at the wrinkles in the wallpaper on the far wall just in time to see a pair of heels run out of the room and up the stairs.

It had rained torrentially on the day they buried Oscar. Neither of them had particularly cared about looking sodden; it was not as if there had been a flourish of cameras ready to capture the occasion. The rain also had the blessing of drowning out the preacher's empty words, which would have brought no comfort even if they had been heard. Oscar had not been sculpted for this world, but the both of them already knew that as they had cradled his gnarled, dented self between them and held him until the last drops of fight drained out. Ashes to ashes; dust that would burrow into the warmest folds of their hearts like sand and would never let them forget.

Edgar actually thrashed himself out of breath as he ran up the stairs to the third floor of the house. His head clanged with the echoes of assertions like Whoever or whatever you are, you will not touch her. When he finally planted his two feet on the landing at the entrance to the loft, he had to lean against the banister and gulp for breath for a few seconds. The attic was bathed in a dark, densely woven silence that it took his eyes a few moments to penetrate. The movements of air in front of his face gradually took shape until he saw a figure step out from the shadows in front of him. Its gait was unsteady, crippled by its rocker-bottom feet, and the dim light seemed to stumble over the features of its face.

His first reaction was the feeling that something large and industrial had cored him, like an apple, and left him dripping and empty. He collapsed against the wall and instinctively hauled himself to his feet again, terrified of having to look at the figure before him at face height. The deep and twisted furrows that ran across its face were still burned into his memory from when they had closed the immaculate, tiny coffin and held each other to stop each other falling. This figure of Oscar stood in front of Edgar and parted its lips in an attempt to laugh, but the choked gargling sound that came out soon gave way to a torrent of blood that splashed over the child's naked body and pooled on the floor around them. The strangled attempt at a laugh never stopped, nor did the joyful twinkle in the baby's eyes, and Edgar knew then that it did not matter how many times they moved house: there would always be the sound of footsteps from the other room.