Cycle

By Anna Taylor

Dressings

At home, Edie had worked in fashion illustration — for newspapers, mainly; occasional magazines; Butterick sewing patterns. But George had been offered the job — this opportunity — at the Museum here, and before they'd actually agreed on it, his face had beamed an unashamed optimism at her. She wouldn't have to work while they were there, he had said. A chance to travel — possibly the only one they would get. He was like a door-to-door salesman, persistent, indefatigable, but as the hours wore on, the heat of desperation began to accumulate beneath the shine of his irises. She said yes eventually — she had said yes to the man selling Japanese steel kitchen knives, too.
     ‘What the hell,’ she said to George, ‘let's go,’ and he had run his palms through his hair, taken her hand in his, the sudden humidity of it making a wheel of heat roll through her own body, sweat prickling under her arms.

The house overlooks a square of sea, the branches of a tree in front of the window breaking the view into pieces. Edie does the dishes, wiping the stainless steel bench in long straight strokes. The radio burbles in the background — indefinable sounds, like animals chattering at the zoo. She strips the bed, soaks the sheets first in cold water, and then in a product that is, ironically, intended for nappies. George's razor and shaving brush and little dish of soap are strewn across the bathroom counter, and as she does every morning, she gathers them up and puts them away.
     There is the familiar tug of pain in her pelvis, her head feeling too light, wobbly, like an oversized flower bud on its long stalk. For two days every month through all of her adolescence, all of her adulthood, she has felt like this, but it offends her now; an intrusion. She boils the kettle for her hot water bottle, lies on the couch.
     Her heart continues with its steady work, though perhaps it has moved a little overnight — her chest contracts at this thought — since the thud of it is in the left side of her head now too. She closes her eyes. Thinks of the colour blue.

Trying for a baby had at first felt exhilarating. Edie had been entranced, watching George walk across the room towards bed at night, or away from it in the morning, by the swing of his testicles, the fullness of them, carrying their utterly important cargo.
She cupped them in her hand, imagining the microscopic movement beneath those wrinkled folds of skin; little bags just teeming with possibilities. George, with his thin frame, impossibly large big toe, and rounded belly, was housing a whole country of children in there. She smiled at him all the time, charmed even by the way he scratched the thumb-nail sized rash on his middle finger, sometimes all through the night.
     But with each month came blood — the following month, blood again.
     ‘I'm worried,’ Edie said to George, but he shook his head at her.
     ‘Don't even go there yet,’ he said.
     Nine months of trying. Was that even long? And whose idea was it, to try to have a baby here, anyway? It seems daft to her now, to expect that of her body — a body which, for all she knows, thinks it is hanging upside down, still believes it is night even in the glow of the midday sun. But expect it, they had, and her body's refusal to comply — refusal is what it seems like to Edie — makes it feel like something to overcome; a problem to be solved. Two months ago she bought a thermometer, got the photocopied temperature charts from her doctor. In the mornings she lies in bed, holding the thermometer in her mouth, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

The doctor said: try to have sex at least three times a week. Try to time it right, she said. There is a shimmer of anxiety in the corners of the bedroom. It as if there is a loud-speaker announcement, every time she and George move towards each other — Is there a job to be done here, folks? They close their eyes to the enormity of it, try to breathe.
     Sometimes Edie feels that George is shunting her across the bed with the slow, deliberate motion of an earth-moving machine. Afterwards, she lies with her hips on a pillow, aware of the plight of George's swimmers, wanting to make it easier for them — thinking: at least this way they don't have to travel uphill.

Friday

Isaac misses an appointment with a specialist, and even though the forgetting seems mostly accidental, there is a part of him that knows he never wanted to go anyway.      A contact of his father's has given him some work storyboarding for a production company. He is drawing a frame showing a woman flinging her body into the path of a bus, when he looks up and sees the time, realises that he was meant to be at the surgery, half an hour before. A surge of panic passes briefly through his torso, but there's no way he could get there now, even if sprinting was an option for him — so he finds the number, dials it, apologises, makes another time. For a while after that, he sits and stares at the black-ink face of the woman he has just drawn — her maniacal grin (it's a comedy, after all) — and imagines all the other expressions her face could wear in that moment. Her body, a bus, the astonishing simplicity of that decision just to launch herself out onto the road.

George

The queue at the lunch bar curls around the edge of the door, but George joins it anyway. He jingles the keys in his pocket while he waits. There are little savouries in the display oven on the counter, a flourish of mashed potato topping the pastry shell of each one. They look cute, but inedible, somehow. He thinks of Edie's sandwiches: exotic seeming, with chopped walnuts dotting the cheese and pickle; the bloom of a nasturtium flower appearing, flattened between the bread and something green and spicy, possibly its leaf. At first he'd eaten her food cautiously, biting into it with hesitant teeth, as if there might be something sharp in there, hidden amongst the layers of food.
     ‘There's a flower in my sandwich,’ he had said, the first time he discovered the edge of a petal.
     ‘You're the flower in my sandwich,’ she said, without even turning to look at him, and his heart had soared.
     His mother's sandwiches had always been the same: ham, mustard, a smooth coating of margarine.

Edie's body lotion smells of orange peel, and mint, the veins on her neck a brilliant blue; her hair pulled off her face in a tangle of a ponytail. When he is away from her, these are the sorts of things he thinks of — his chest stirring with a kind of elation at the thought of driving home and opening the front door, calling her name. But these days whenever she appears in front of him she seems diminished, all her edges somehow folding in on themselves, like an origami bird. He puts his arms out to her, but inside he feels that he is fumbling through his body, searching for it: that longing for her that he still manages to evoke when she isn't in the room.

Heat

Isaac is riding home, on a flat stretch of road, when it comes upon him — the feeling that the underside of his skin is being consumed by fire. He slows the wheeling of his legs, hoping that it's just a momentary thing — that the heat will move through him, then away — but as if on cue, the flush of numbness rises up his throat, and he knows that he has to get himself flat, immediately.
     He is on a side street, a pedestrian zigzag leading to a lower level of road at its end — but he can't see anyone, anywhere. He moves rapidly — arching his leg away from the bicycle seat, letting the frame clatter to the concrete.
     The fist of his heart opens and closes erratically; a smudge of black appearing in front of his left eye.
     He gets down on his side just in time for the roar that's building in his body to reach his head. His skin is drenched — t-shirt clinging to his chest. He must be glistening like a fish. He feels himself fall, or rise, the boom of the ocean between his ears.
     ‘Jesus,’ he says.

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