Um Jafaar

 

When Amar arrives Um Jafaar is blending kerosene lamp-black with water to make ink. She adds liquid a little at a time. First, she makes a black paste, then, gradually, thins it to the consistency of milk. She puts the cloth-wrapped parcels he’s brought her on the table and sits down to examine his forearms. Her fingers trace his skin’s crisp pattern: cross-hatched lines like illustrated wounds. After sterilising a needle in the lamp’s flame, she uses it to drag the ink across his skin. She pierces the new pattern into his flesh and he squirms as if it’s his first time.

After Amar has gone, Um Jafaar stares at the cloth packages for a long time, but does not open them. The lamplight gleams around her on tiled ceramic walls and the glazed smiles of photos hanging since before the war; her granddaughters smiling in the thin shade of date palms, tribal dots tattooed between their eyes; her sons sitting beside each other, faces shadowed; the sun setting between their heads. She thinks of them, one alive, one dead, and the smell of decaying flesh that won’t leave her house.

The following morning she leaves the girls with her brother’s wife and goes to Najaf. On the bus she holds the cloth packages in her lap beneath her black abaya. They are heavy as metal but have lost their tinny clean smell. An old woman and a young boy sit opposite her. The boy has a single dot tattooed on the tip of his nose to bring long life, and two dots on either side above his mouth. The ink is still rough and scabbed. After several hours the rising sun blurs the horizon in every direction, cooking the air inside the bus. By the time they approach the city all the flies seem to have congregated around Um Jafaar’s ankles.

Shaheed is buried in the dirt floor of a bombed-out factory. Its shattered industrial facade hides the dead from the street. His headstone is a concrete paving slab stuck upright in the dirt with a name and a prayer in Arabic. Um Jafaar settles herself on her knees at the foot of his grave and talks to him as she brings her parcels out from the depths of her abaya. She opens them to the sky. ‘Here, this is from those who killed you. I take revenge.’ In the smaller parcels are an eyeball and two teeth. She digs them into the coarse gravel earth of her son’s grave. She reminds him of what she has already brought: fingers, ears, noses, the lump from a throat.

The larger parcel holds a man’s hand. Around its wrist are angular ink markings to protect a once-broken bone. The tattoo looks like a badly healed wound. She examines the ink under the midday sun. Recognising her own design, she hears a child’s name in her head, sees the eyes of a young boy, bristling, his blood rising up through inked skin.

First published in In The Red Magazine

The Crabman and the Fishwife

Every day Archie was the same, anytime Irene told him to do something his knuckles and teeth would clench. Stubborn old bastard. It was usually over him taking off his trousers at the back door. I don’t want my house reeking like a crab creel, she’d tell him. He faced away from her as he stood on the step and peeled off his sodden jeans one leg at a time. Cast outside, rough and crusted by a layer of salt, the denims would hold their memory of his shape, a knee, a calf, the bulge of his groin. Irene looked on with a hand on the worktop and a fist on her hip as he stumbled by her sideways on pale stubby legs; she always took it as an opportunity to check his underwear for pee stains. She could hardly believe how a grown man could make such a mess in his pants or how long he tried to keep them on for, soiled to a second skin. He was the same about washing his hands; he wanted them filthy, fingertips black. It was as if he liked to wallow in the flavour of his own filth and fluids.

The day that everything changed Archie arrived home holding his hands curled close to his chest, his face stuck in surprise; eyes out on stalks. The first thing Irene noticed was how pathetic he looked. She was instantly repulsed. Then she noticed the blood, he was covered in it. She was hardly surprised, she’d become used to her husband’s clumsiness, his wake of disorder. He was covered in scars, bait hook holes in his neck and ears and torn fingers from banding lobster claws. There was a curved scar on the left side of his back just under the ribs, from the time he backed onto a knife Irene was chopping carrots with. Glaikit fool. He didn’t just make a mess of himself, he smashed crockery, dropped food everywhere and as for his aim… well. Archie was all thumbs, no fingers.

She sat him down on the step and wrapped each hand in a tea towel. Then she pulled off his wellies and his coarse, stinking jeans, leaving them outside before bringing him into the house bare-legged. His pants were in a right state, worse than usual. She told him he needed to go to the hospital in Oban, but he just shook his head and stared, empty-eyed, mute. He never could face up to anything. Soft old bugger. Irene cleaned and bandaged his hands as best she could before heading down to the slip by the house. Archie never berthed at the pier in Scalasaig with the rest of the island’s fishermen. He couldn’t even enjoy the company of his own kind. He was that type of loner.

There, she found in and around the engine all eight of Archie’s fingers. They were cold and lifeless, the skin as hard as the nails. One was just a little stub bent to the side. It reminded Irene of Archie’s penis, his little pinkie prick. She smiled as she threw it overboard followed by the rest, one after the other. The gulls gathered and fought over her husband’s flesh. She saved his ring finger till last; a black-headed gull caught it as it hit the water and flew off with a glint of gold in its beak.

Back at the house, she told him she couldn’t find his fingers, said the birds got there before her. Staring out at the sea, his eyes flashing, reflecting the slow beam of the lighthouse, he let out a slow sigh and pulled his shorn hands, bandaged to mittens, close to his chest.

 

After a few days that felt like a week she took his bandages off to stop him chewing on them. She had tried telling him to stop it, telling him he looked like an imbecile, an eedyit, but he just kept chewing, kept staring with blank unseeing eyes. Beneath the white fabric she found that her husband’s knuckles had healed into thick pumice-grey scabs that were overgrowing the wounds themselves and spreading up the backs and calloused palms of his hands.

Each day his wounds claimed another part of Archie. His wrists and forearms followed his hands; swallowed under smooth welts. His fleshiness was slowly cast beneath hardness. At least it wasn’t as unsightly as him sitting there, chewing on his dressings like some decrepit cretin. She watched him half expecting him to move or twitch and stop his usual moody charade. He had never done crabbit right. They did argue, or rather Irene would shout. He would scuttle out the house and sit mending creels at the back of the garden where the grass faded to pebble shore. He always ran away, always to the sea. If she followed him, still screaming, he kept walking and headed out in the fishing boat. She said he never buried his head in the sand; always his whole body. All that time at sea, just Archie and the waves, had made him simple she said, a shell of the man she married. He told her that was her problem – she only saw the surface, never the depths. His moods never lasted though, he always cracked first. He couldn’t keep it up. Well, that and a lot of other things.  He didn’t look it, but Irene knew her husband was soft.

 

Archie’s welts spread further each day. First up his arms making them stiff like old lobster claws, the joints fused, elbows set at angles. His fingerless hands did not quite meet in front of his chest, palms and thumbs open, solidified in two lopsided forks. Two days after his arms were engulfed to the shoulder, the left and the right welts joined seamlessly in the middle of his chest and back forming one big shellac rash that spread downwards, encasing his torso in a solid Romanesque breast-plate.

Irene wasn’t used to having her husband in the house, in her house. He seemed to suck up space, demanding attention like a bad smell. He hadn’t spoken or acknowledged her or even really moved at all since she told him about the fingers and she felt a slight pang of guilt. Maybe she should have brought them back; maybe they could have been sewn back on? Maybe she should have forced him to go to the hospital? She could have made him go. She got her own way with Archie every time. Something had stopped her pushing it though, somehow at the time it served him right.

As she was considering this an acrid smell assaulted her nose. Her guilt was short lived: he had pissed himself again. Archie’s urine always had a strange salty tang, Irene put it down to his job, his proximity to the sea. She noticed it going to the bathroom after him and washing his underwear, sometimes his bed sheets.

The last time they had been in the same bed was one of their anniversaries. He lay on top of her, sweating. She was waiting for him to catch his breath, to get back on his side. At first she thought it was sweat seeping between her thighs until the smell caught her throat and threw her into a rage. ‘Why don’t you just shit on me too?’ She screamed and pushed him onto his back. He lay in a spreading puddle and watched his wife’s naked hips and arse wobble into the hall for the last time.

 

Archie pissed himself roughly three times a day until his waist, hips and buttocks were devoured by shades of grey. His genitals receded to a Ken doll bulge; his orifices sealed. It took four whole days, the pale pinkish skin disappearing like a slipping stocking, before he lost his legs and feet. Head and face were last to go, solidifying like a leaden hood being drawn up from the back of his neck until all that remained were two watery eyes staring out from a sombre mask. Unwilling to close, even to blink, his veined whites, blue irises and black pupils faded to a steely grisaille.

For weeks Archie sat statuesque encased in the opalescence of polished oyster shell. Irene had stripped him of his clothes. He looked like a piece of modern art solidified in front of her. When she stood directly in front of him he looked frozen as if ready to leap into the air and wrap his hands, what was left of them, around her throat. Yet no matter where she stood, he never seemed to look at her, he was always looking away. She spent ages walking around him considering what to do, considering the practicalities of disposing of a spouse who is encased in shell. He looked heavy, immovable. If she broke him into bits with a sledge hammer, would this still count as mutilation? Would he be solid all the way through or would his insides still be soft?

 

Soft. He remembered being soft, or did he? Was it softness he remembered or just a lack of definition, the numbing complexity of softness? Archie was unsure. He felt another existence, that other world just out of his reach. If he could explain it, he’d liken it to being underwater: things felt fluid, unclear – his mind like a silted sea. Images once seen with a different set of eyes flash untranslatable in his mind. Blood spattered shellfish. Severed digits. Fingerless palms. Bleeding machinery.

Since they glazed over like marbles, his eyes had been useless, he was in darkness. A new picture was forming of his surroundings though, informed not through reflections of light but through smell and taste. He was experiencing a host of new sensations. He began to feel everything, changes in air temperature to mere fractions of degrees, the dust rippling in Irene’s wake, he tasted his chair with his hardened buttocks, its fibres and dyes, the biscuit crumbs, the tea stains, the urine from when he pissed himself a couple of minutes before his genitals started sealing into a sexless lump. Through his shell he smelt cigarette ash and smoke, and the sea outside, kelp rotting on the shore. The carpet was a dusty tasting aura spreading out beneath his feet. He felt each footstep made by his wife as she paced the floor. She tasted of smoke and sweat, of nicotine and meaty brine. She was soft and porous, seeping fluids and heat as she passed him by. He was aware of her exterior and what it concealed, that hardness inside and the hot flay of her tongue. When she came close he felt her breath and the malice of words he could no longer understand. He felt her seethe in front of him, a boiling brink that he mentally scrabbled sideways to avoid.

There was something quite freeing for Archie about his new form though. He felt hard, buff and, strangely, not totally cut off, not desensitised. He was surrounded by thin sensation, wispy flavours and scents that licked his shell with no definite contact. He longed for something of substance though, something he could sink into and be enveloped by. He fantasised of sinking low and deep and being swallowed by an unconditional, simple security, a liquid shroud to cover every surface, his back, his belly, and fill the crevice of each joint with a salty safeness.

Slowly he became aware of muscles, of his own muscles, stretching, flexing. He felt his arms and their power, the strong clench of his fists. He could feel legs and legs and legs and legs – more than just his own. He was robust, solid like the hull of a boat. He felt masculine, armoured, fierce and for the first time, defined. He was comfortable in his shell in a way he never knew of his skin. Archie was formed, the wide curve of his back, its serrated piecrust edges. He knew the scoop of his forearms, the points of his feet and his slow mechanical movements. Simple. He became familiar with himself, experienced his compactness and was intimate with his denseness.

With all his new sensation, his new awareness, he knew he was locked inside himself. Inside the husk of who he once was. He felt its casing surround him, could tap it with his inner shell. He had to get out. Archie found his strength, he felt it pushing against his shell in rushes, in waves. It was time for them to break, for him to escape. Time for him to… Crack.

 

Crunch. Irene never had claw-crackers. She fumbled on her plate with a nutcracker and a black-tipped claw sounding a satisfying crack. All that time living with a lobsterman and she had never tasted lobster, all those years married to a crabman and the closest thing she’d had to it was the crabsticks from the Co-op in Oban. He’d told her a creelman can’t afford to eat crab, never mind lobster.

It surprised her that the flesh inside didn’t completely fill the shell, not tightly, there was a hollow space around the meat. Instead of the butch muscles of the claw arms she found the inner meat loose and flaccid, the tips of each claw tapering to a thin wobbling point. She ripped the flesh out with her hands making sure she got every bit, savouring the taste of every morsel of meat. It was moist and sweet and delicate. She emptied both claws and all eight legs one after the other. Snapping a leg segment with her hands she got hit in the face by a fishy squirt of juices that dribbled down her cheek. She ate it hot and could still hear the squeal it made in the pot ringing in her ears. She took it out after the noise had fallen from piercing to a long slow sigh and then faded to the simple bubble of boiling water.

After the legs she moved on to the crab’s body.  She turned it onto its back and with her fingers around the piecrust edges and her thumbs between where the legs used to be she pushed the belly plate off with a flick of her wrists. Inside was a mess of brown and yellow and a lot of empty space, like something was missing. She licked a scoop of brown body meat off her finger; it was thick and pasty and spread like a layer of fishy putty in her mouth. She wasn’t keen on the aftertaste, the way it lingered like Archie, a stain on her tongue. She gave the rest a miss. In front of her was a midden of guts, orange, brown, yellow, and fragments of shell scattered on the plate like shale: dismembered claw tips, hairy bits of leg and so many knees, small and tight like fused knuckles. She could see little greyish organs and the hard internal shell of the crabs sack. The carapace was opened, exposed and empty.

She picked up the plate and walked out the back door picking Archie’s jeans up from the gloomy dusk of the step on her way. They were wet with rain from weeks outside. The grass’s wet swish under her feet turned to the crunching of pebbles then shale. When she reached the slip the boat was gone. The coxswain of the Oban Lifeboat had called that morning. They’d found it wrecked on black rocks near Port Uisken on the Ross of Mull. He told her there was no one aboard. Irene had sounded surprised. She was surprised. She thought it might run aground at the lighthouse, Dubh Artach, or carried on out west and slipped off the horizon into the Atlantic’s endless green sways.

Irene threw the denims in first. They hit the water with a dull slap then hung on the tide as it took them out to sea. In the dim sweep of the lighthouse they looked like they were swimming the breaststroke, each leg swaying separately on the waves. Next she tipped the plate of shell fragments and crab offal into the water. The shards of legs and claw sunk slowly disappearing into the green murk. The carapace floated on its back, bobbing west into the Atlantic. The current must have pulled Archie’s boat back inland, into the firth and would do the same with his shell if it didn’t sink first. It didn’t matter. Boat or no boat Archie was lost at sea.

 

First Published in Sushirexia: 32 Stories About Hunger, Freight Press, May 2010