'HOSANNA BY THE BLACK SHARDS'
by Kathleen Kiirik Bryson

On a grey afternoon brindled with sunlight, we carry bag after bag over the threshold. At last it's all done, and the four of us drink coffee in the kitchen before Tony and Anna drive out for the evening in the same car Tony used to make roundtrips between Hackney and Islington, ferrying me and my many, many black plastic binliners.

Per's hands are gentle with my possessions as we unpack and begin to place my things around his room; as our lives begin to stitch together. I see that he has already cleared half his books away on the shelf for my books; split his closet space for my use. In the hall is another full plastic bag that is not for me to unpack but is full of Per's clothes to be given away to secondhand shops; it is the other half of his shrunken wardrobe, the missing clothes that have made room for my own.

Per leads me to the bathroom and shows me the notch in the toothbrush holder that is now my notch. His hands are tender on my toiletries as he fills the bathroom cabinet with the small jars and long thin flasks of cream and salve. The mirror of the cabinet faces me, so I see only his neck and that his fingers are careful. He takes me by the hand to the kitchen then, where we unload the knives. And the forks, which seem more dangerous than knives with four little daggers on the end of one simple instrument. They are called tines. That's the word for the fork prongs. Tines. Today I prefer the gullible spoons: it is easier to look at blunt and innocent things. The sound that we make when we deposit the cutlery in the communal silverware drawer is familiar, and then I remember that I've heard it before, muffled in my own pockets: the jingle of change.

And Change it is.

You've been here three weeks now; how are you finding it? says Anna, picking up a boiled potato with her fork and stripping it expertly with her butter-knife, Scandy-style.

I like it, I tell her.

On Anna's plate is a pile of peelings like limp brown tissue. A snake sheds its skin easily; a potato's is forced off. That's because we eat potatoes more often than snakes and layers are torn off before their time. All in good time, haste makes waste. Not. I imagine Anna skewering a snake on her fork, methodically stripping its skin with the butter-knife. But oops, there's another skin. Oops, there's another. How low can you go? Finally: not even a skeleton. There's a snake like an onion. Layers one to infinity removed. Ann merely stabs air.

Anna dips her bald potato into mustard and takes a bit just off the top, like a popsicle. You're quiet today. Is Per still asleep?

Yeah, he sleeps like a baby.

Anna snorts, but I don't know why. Maybe I know why. That afternoon I cried here in this kitchen and ate her pasta, begged her advice and then discounted it. But what was I supposed to do? Give in to a lifetime of paranoia because Anna curses wariness upon her friends? And these days, when it all feels sweet � sure, Anna, as if. But she holds herself apart from both Per and me now, and I know I will not have another chance to confide in her, and all to the smell of stinky gorgonzola, the smell of rosemary, of rain. The rain falleth on the rich and poor alike. It doesn't, of course, because the rich can always call taxis.

Anna, after her last bite, says: Do you miss Hackney at all? Isn't it better here closer to town?

It's great! I say.

But it's all that I say, and I miss the blackbird, and I miss Alex more than I would have guessed, Lily a little bit and Mike not at all, but look what I've gained after I left the wife and forty-nine children down in the kitchen in starving condition � Per, Islington, closer access to campus, the green sofa � then by golly I left, right, left, right. Now I must fill up my life in many ways because it's only too clear that idle hands are the devil's own work. Emails, laundry, lectures, student union fee, my electronic organiser (so 1998). Repeat repeat repeat. Yes. That's what I'll do. Think I do right, left, right, left. I think I do right.

My mind is full of the image of burning Baghdad because that's the backdrop for the politicians' words of blah blah blah. I want to run screaming down the streets because like in Catch-22 that is the only sane response or like my friend Y back in the states wear a sign pinned to the back of my jacket. Shame shame shame shame the shame of it, the shame of my country and nothing to do except rage. Fuck your shock-and-awe. I refuse to use your diseased lingo. And my guilt that I am not out screaming down every door in Hackney as Y is, battering at the doors of the American embassy with a sign that says blood-soaked shame, me with my pretty "Americans for Peace" sign and my lovely friends like Phil and Anna marching and laughing to keep ourselves warm and keep green shoots growing, this is important, I know it despite my guilt over my happiness, this is important because this is what they want to deny us, they want to kill love and hope just as Hussein killed it in Iraq and just as the US and the UK are killing it now.

That's when Per enters the kitchen.

Hi sweetheart, he says to me, and Lunch already? he says to Anna, You never stop munching, do you? Then he says something else in Norwegian to her.

Anna blinks, wipes a bit of mustard from the corner of her mouth and says only, in English, Can you proofread my second draft next week, Clem?

Yeah, why not?

Per folds me into a little waltz by the fridge: Because you'll be too busy having fun with me, that's why.

One-two-three, Whoops there's the fridge, one-two-three, Don't bang the table, one-two-three, Hey Anna, where ya goin'?

Per picks up her mustard-stained plate and puts it in the sink. She always leaves behind her washing-up, he confides.

He dances me over the linoleum again, more of a snappy foxtrot this time around.

Not bad, he says, not bad at all. And have you had breakfast yet? No? Lunch, neither? Good! � he claps his hands � Now, I always like to treat my lady guests to full room and board whether they're paying rent or not, so what'll it be?

Scrambled eggs?

Perfect!

He does a moonwalk to the cupboard purely to make me laugh, retrieves a skillet and then sets to work dicing and humming. Every now and then he turns and touches me somewhere � mouth, belly, hand on hair � and his hand is always hot, like it's been kept in a mitten.

I offer to help, but I crack the eggs all wrong and the shell gets in the yolk. And I'm stupid so I'm crying, I don't know why, and he says, Shh, it's okay, See, it's okay, It's just an egg, and he uses one of my new spoons to fish out the brown shell, same colour as Anna's potato skin � Now what's the matter with you � said with a kiss on the cheek. But his kiss on my cheek takes me seriously, and his warm hand on my waist is neither fast nor glib when he says again, It's just an egg and only breakfast.

We will eat the eggs scrambled with a little salt water, but we will not tell each other if there is any subtle change to the breakfast flavour. Sometimes it is a kindness to have tears ignored, especially when they could be from months ago, but have seeped out tardily; dripped out wrong due to quite bad timing.

God, thank you, that's a lovely breakfast! I beam across the table at him and he is beaming back.

After our late breakfast we hang around in his � our � room. I lie wrong way round on the new double bed he picked out last week from Argos, feet on pillows, and watch the way the light changes on my T-shirt and shorts when the sun breaks first through the clouds and then through the window-glass itself. Per is chuckling at my reversed pose as he goes through the papers by his desk and we listen to Love and Theft.

Whatcha looking for?

I'm trying to find my old notes on Abnormal Psych from last year.

Why?

I'm revising for an essay � he looks over, scrutinises me � You look very hot right now, do you know that?

I lift up my hips in a parody of sex and Per laughs at me again, but the real reason I'm doing it is to see the light patches shimmy from my crotch up to my thighs. I'm fucking the sun. Or giving birth to the Son. My only begotten Sun. Being lazy is great. But even nature's beauty can get boring, as anyone who's ever watched clouds well knows, and at last I turn my attention to Per and away from my own navel.

Hey, I say. Still haven't found them yet, huh?

He looks up and smiles: Hey. And no.

He is rifling through the old phone bills and student loan threats, movie tickets and ancient travelcards and play programmes, the same kind of stuff I have unpacked and unsorted boxes in the corner of the room. I don't envy him. His face is so serious and so cute as he flips through the documents and sighs and spills papers on the floor.

What's that?

What?

I nod to the pages on the floorboards, several stapled leaves of dark-blue ink on notebook paper, as I push myself up on one elbow to get a better look, because I might have found his notes for him.

But then I see that it's not his handwriting. No, and Per grabs for the letter and wads it in his hand before I can see whose handwriting it is, and then he's on his feet. And the light from the window is still shining like it was shining twenty seconds ago when everything was fine, when nothing had ticked over into whatever is making Per's face go red, redder than a blush, redder than the red ink I spray on newspapers, or than wine, or than blood. His face is a primary colour. His face might be the primary colour. It is a superlative physiological event, I tell you, for a man's face to burn from pale to scarlet in a mere twenty seconds. I am up on my knees and they are digging into the bedspread and the wall is covered with flowers and they might slough off onto the bedspread. I think the design probably does look a lot like the flowery wallpaper that Per used to have as a child; it probably looks really, really similar, I reckon.

Okay, what is it? I'm saying, trying to make my voice nice, but I'm feeling mean. No, I'm feeling blank; I'm feeling ghostly. No hands, no torso, no cunt, no legs � just a big disembodied head that is going to cough, or gag, or nothing, because it can't breathe.

This is what Clementine is thinking. Here is a shred of what Clementine thinks:

Lemme see it, say Clementine's lips.

No, say Per's lips. Per's feet are moving towards the door. Clem's feet are off the bed and on the ground and moving towards the door, too. Per's hand is tearing and crumpling the letter further, Clementine's hands are reaching for it; reaching for Per.

What is it, say Clementine's lips.

Nothing, say Per's lips, and Per's hand is on the door-grip and Per's body is out the door, and Clem's big head floats after him, fast, fast, like a heat-seeking missile, and Clem's hands and torso and cunt and feet move along in time to the head, and Per's body is running towards the bathroom and then suddenly it all clicks over again into me and my toes and feet and pussy and vertabrae and skull and fingers fuse together again and I'm there on his heels, nearly as fast as he is, right on the edge of the bathroom door. But he's inside and my re-assembled body is outside; but his right shoulder is braced against the door pushing me out and mine is braced against the other side of the door pushing me in; but he's stopping to tear the paper up further � I can hear the crinkle of the sounds � and I'm not stopping at all. I'm not stopping till I've pushed through into the bathroom with him and am scrambling to get the note that he's shredding into the toilet bowl. Look now, because the toilet is already flushing. My hand under the seat. My hand, grabbing one of the pieces of paper. Because when I get all the pieces of the puzzle, I know they'll fit together. They might be close. They might be far. When you wish upon a star.

I don't know what shade my face is, but Per's is still red, and his mouth still a deep hole screaming, and mixed in with his voice is my scream too � words like fuck and what and stop and stop mixed in with plain noise that's brutalised, high-pitched.

He's pressing the lid down on my hand, pressing my valuable fingers between lid and flippable hole, and then my whole arm, as I push my limb down further into the drip. At first I think it's an accident and then I realise it's not; he's doing it to force me to drop the scrap I'm holding on to like a Dacian prayer. He looks crazy like he'll never have his sense fished back. You're hurting me, I say, You've got to stop; you're hurting me � but he's not stopping and in fact his eyes have the glaze to them again and I know he's as good as blind to me; I recognise the dimness, but the only liquor in this room is the way anxiety has fermented into the sourest mash of all, you see, and added to the mix is the lactic acid in my left forearm, and I'm fighting him for the paper, fighting to bring it closer to my eyes. He keeps trying to flush the toilet, and this puts him at a slight disadvantage.

I see the blue ink, already leaking over the cheap notebook paper soaked in toilet water. I see the words I DON'T THINK WHAT YOU SAID but that's all I can read. My arm has the whole weight of the lid and Per's bulk on it and I'm in pain and I inform him of this and I can't hold on; I can only let go. And the toilet is flushing again, it's a roar that never stops, and Per has released his mass from the lid but my arm is still limp underneath it. The toilet swallows sodden paper down like so much other shit but Per and I are left above the surface, both sobbing over the porcelain. Then he's shaking and then I'm pulling my arm out and then I'm touching the curved red mark on my left arm with the fingers of my right hand.

Then I'm screaming again. Noise converts to intelligible language at last � What's wrong?

No!

Tell me!

No!

You have to tell me!

But Per just keeps shaking his head � his face violet, his eyes still with a film over them. I bet he's thinking about a drink right now. I know I am. A drink, sleep, a hammer to my skull, anything to block out the curdles in my gut that presuppose that this is all going to get much worse. But how could it? How could it get any worse? I know that I'm right, left, right, left.

Dylan's voice brays out from the bedroom: "I'm not sorry for nothin' I've done/ I'm glad I fought � I only wish we'd won" and then the tempo in my mind alone drags into one-two-three, whoops! One-two-three, whoops! Waltz me out of this mess, Per. I don't at all know where we are.

"When I left my home the sky split open wide/ I never wanted to go back there � I'd rather have died."

We might be close. We might be far. When we wish upon a star.

"You don't understand it � my feelings for you/ You'd be honest with me if only you knew."

I'm sorry, Per is saying, I'm so fucking sorry �

I rise to my feet. I see two faces in the room: His. And my bright own, in the mirror. The mirror will shatter now, and I will be on my knees in the midst of the shards, picking bits of stinging revelations and hosannas out of my own flesh, splinters that reflect me, myself and I, oneself and Clementine.

I know there's something wrong, I say, If only you would be honest with me.

I have made the fatal mistake of echoing the Dylan song, the way you subconsciously use words you overhear seconds before on television or when you steal them from passers-by. It will undermine the seriousness of my speech if he notes the reference, but I don't think he does. Hideous. Soon I will know terrible things. I want this moment of relative innocence to stretch a little longer, but I'm not allowing it to do so; I'm in the hallway with Per and I'm lifting him up by the neck like wonderwoman and shoving him against the wonderwall and it all feels dreamy horrible like wonderland, and I wonder when he'll say something, I wonder, I wonder.

My hand is on his throat, my knee nearly up to his balls.

Tell me!

Sandy � his eyes have come back to this dimension at last; they are real eyes � The letter is from Sandy.

My hand is loose on his neck and then drops to my side � What? I say. (Everything's so loose. Like jam.)

Yes, he says � he looks defeated but I promise you, I am not the victor here and nor is he � Yes, he says � he's panicking and sobbing now that we are the safe distance of three feet from each other � Yes, he says.

I'm whispering already: What about?

He shakes his head, but his eyes are still on mine; he's still with me, here in the present.

Sandy, I say to clarify, but my voice is gummy, just so unclear, The girl you had the affair with last summer. The one-night stand. She wrote to you? Ah Jesus, Per � she sent you an invitation and she wrote to you?

His eyes are still good. He is still my Per. He is still with me, and hasn't flown away.

But then why is he still sobbing, and why is he still panicking, and why is he saying Except it wasn't a one-night stand?

Now I'm the one whose eyes will glaze, with any luck. I am the one who wants to slip away via booze or amnesia. Hey, whatever it takes. I want to be back in any wonderland away from now, even the bad kind where he's crushing my arm under a toilet seat, because this will need to be a joke; that's how it will have to be sorted and classified and filed away later, when this is all done and dusted. My whole life needs to stop. Right. Now.

Except it wasn't a one-night stand, Per has said, and is saying, We met a year before that year.

No, you didn't, I say. (I don't believe him for even a second.)

After the lift, he says, When I stayed behind in Birmingham.

The elevator?

We slept together then � only once, Clem! Only once! � and she was so young, only twenty-one �

Stop talking, I say.

But he continues: And I felt guilty because she was so young, so when she emailed me I emailed her back, and when she sent me letters over the next year sometimes I'd write back to her �

Stop talking, I say, Please stop talking to me �

And then when I went up to Birmingham on the fishing trip we got together again, and that was when you first found out about it �

Please shut up �

� But it had already been going on a year then, and now it's been two years �

Shut up!

She's in love with me, says Per, but I don't want her to be.

Some of the last bit of this confession takes place downstairs on the green sofa with both of us half-hugging and still damp with toilet water, our arms touching but our swollen faces keeping a distance from each other. Why did this have to happen now between us, says Per, crying, possibly even harder than me � Right now, when things are going so well?

Let us examine our consciences, and consider where and in what company we have been this day.

AGAINST OUR NEIGHBOUR. � By rash judgements; hatred; jealousy; contempt; desire of revenge; quarrelling; passion, imprecations; injuries; detraction; raillery; false reports; damaging, either in goods or reputation; bad example; scandal; want of obedience, respect, charity or fidelity. (Pause and examine.)

I don't know when it hits me, the fact that I'm not crazy after all. It takes a few days to adjust to the idea that every suspicion I ever had has been confirmed and with my despair comes also jubilation: I was right! I was right! � and then the worse bit, that he is by any normal yardstick of behaviour a lying and boozy schmuck whose deceit was based on the fact that he tried to make me think I was seeing things and it�s creepy, I tell you, and creepy in a Gaslight kind of way, as well.

Moreover, during the next two weeks, several things become clear. Aside from Sandy, he slept with a Swiss girl that separated night of our European grand tour, when I was in Belgium. Which begs the question as to why Anna didn't tell me at the time. Secondly, Per did sleep with the Spanish girl on the beach; the pink nylon panties were hers and he kept them as a present bestowed on him by her. The fact that he laundered them at all makes it less understandably sordid. He was not interested in panty-sniffing, less of an aphrodisiac, more of a trophy. Ick. The third girl was a nameless sixteen-year-old he slept with last autumn around the time of our trip to Cornwall, when we were broken up, but "not sleeping with anyone else" and "trying to work things out". Now, that's just wrong. Per is trying to argue that Sandy aside, none of these other three admitted discretions took place when we were officially together. So while he lied about them, he wasn't cheating about them, if you see what he means. Still, when you add to these accounts laced together from green-sofa confessions the fact that he has been intermittently sleeping with Sandy for the last two years of the three years and a half we've been together � ooh, it gets kind of nasty. It makes me a little cynical. Bit by bit over the next fortnight, the revelations spill forth from his lips.

When he talks to me about it and takes my hand to check that I am ingesting his words, I find I am still numb.

How can I believe you now, I ask, How do I know you're not lying now? Don't you ever think "Now I'm cheating," or consider who you're hanging around with or whether the situation might develop?

I've told you everything, says Per, And I'm so sorry. Now it's different, because now I've told you everything. That's the difference.

But it's not different for me, I say, I thought you were telling the truth those other times as well.

I, Clementine, am suddenly ancient.

It will be okay, says Per assuredly, We will work things out this time. Now I've told you everything, and it feels completely different for me.

I look at his sneakers. The brand-name is Fly. There are little pictures of flies superimposed on the soles underneath the transparent plastic, like they're trapped in a clear sort of sap. Prehistoric and modern, like an old woman living a young girl's life.

Let us examine our consciences, and consider where and in what company we have been this day. AGAINST GOD. � By omission or negligence in the discharge of our religious duties; irreverence, wilful distractions or inattention in prayer; resistance to the Divine grace; oaths, murmurings; want of confidence and resignation. (Pause and examine.)

Woke up in the morning to the radio voice of George W. Bush, something I never want to experience again in my life. Think of poor Laura. Now it is war. Turncoat Claire Short ended up voting for war after all, thus proving to every citizen on this island that she has no moral convictions, no conscience, no sense of responsibility, no spine, no courage, no morals, no credibility, nothing nothing nothing, and she's so deluded that she thinks she's going to keep her job, when the truth is Tony Blair's going to replace her just as fast as he possibly can and indeed he is already head-hunting for her replacement for when she's been dropped like a hot but skinned POTATA. Oh, those Americans, they never could spell that one.

Things become less jellied in the second week, when I start to stare at objects with a particular clarity: the four knives on the end of each fork. Tines, 'tines, clementines. Yes. The lighter iris of Per's two eyeballs. Yes. The maggots for angling that Per keeps in a sealed case on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Yes.

We do not have sex. We wrap our bodies round each other in sleep, though, and these are the most intimate eight hours we spend together these days, and we're not even present for them; we drift off to neverlands and wonderworlds. It's the most common of amnesias, sleep, and it means neither of us has any recollection of bodily intimacy when we wake. Eight hours, forearm to midriff, fingers on tit, cock to asscheek, sometimes cunt to asscheek when we shift positions. Nothing. I don't remember a thing. If I do remember when I cheated, Clem, then I don't remember why.

I remember birds when I wake up early in these fleshly contortions: bloodsucking birds, blackbirds. Also blonde birds, dollybirds, sixteen-year-old birds, Swiss birds, Spanish birds in pink nylon panties. I am the seed-clump feeding them in the dark night of my dreams, you know. I have the bird's eye view. I am the cage that holds them; they're all a part of me now as well. The cage and the bird blur. No distinction. If you understand a liar, you forgive him, at least in part. That's how far it goes. That's what it comes down to. I am the hold of every foul spirit and the cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

Then Per wakes up.

Good morning, he says. He looks like he wants to try to kiss me, but I turn my head away towards the window. If he would just shut up, maybe I could hear them singing. He waits a moment and then he gets up silently, dressing quickly, and I realise that he can only fault me for being a bitch now, not crazy. He's lost that advantage. He's sorry now. You'll be sorry now.

*

Tenth Station: O Jesus, I am sorry for all the sins I have committed by sensuality. I promise, with Thy assistance, not to renew Thy shame and suffering, and to live henceforward in modesty and temperance.

*

Stare at the eye of the parrot while you
count slowly to twenty, then look immediately
at one spot in the empty bird cage. The faint, ghostly
image of the bird will appear in the cage.

A
Bird
In The
In the Bush

Read the words. Easy, isn't it? Then read
them again. Can you spot the deliberate mistake?

*

I am the bird. I am the cage. I am a million repetitions of definite articles. I repeat myself. Yes. I repeat my mistakes. Yes.