[2] Hunt that beast through every city

Johnny’s world … where has it started? I don’t know where they took him, only that they all left with him before I could hold him. I open the window a crack to let her soul out, then search the walls for mirrors. I see one screwed to the wall, I cover it with my coat. I thought the two of us were immortal together, that to the point we knew how to love each other, we couldn’t die. Emma would tell me, a lot, that love would kill her in the end, and I’d say, ‘You’re not from Budapest, no …’ And she’d laugh and laugh, don’t ask me why. It was a private joke of hers that I stumbled against years ago, and she’d laugh and laugh. Where’s the humour in Budapest? Okay, plenty, but I was never clear what was funny about Budapest to her. Someone that angry about most things at all times, and mostly at herself, all you could do was make her laugh, somehow, and I never questioned what worked. There’s no sense being sad when you can be angry, we always knew that together. And if you can laugh when you’re angry, even better. From the window, I look down into the hospital’s carriage yard. Our child is riding onto this earth on an enraged wind. The trees buckle, glass clouds slice the sky. Will part of her soul stay attached to him in all of that? It’s Christmas Eve, three nights after the darkest one. Across the city down there, coloured lights will be sparking as they soar, the air so cold you have to sip. While up here in the asylum woods, a wind is pouring from the eastern plain, a fist in the city’s gut, a street-clearing wind turning the stonework into galloping horses, the snow into virgin stone. I swallow tears to stop their burning. I shiver at the keening window. Imagine Death hovering in that.

I see a horse pulling a cart stopped in the yard, and two attendants in hooded blanket coats carrying out a corpse in a winding sheet, snow streaming up from their boot tops. So two are lost tonight. A Franciscan told me as a lad once that no one dies alone, that every soul waits another soul’s company for the journey. Every star is a word, and the space between is thoughts, but I can’t hear the language in this. The light in the room blasts away all shadows. I look for the switch and can’t find it. It’s best to paint without shadows, but to draw? I’d brought all my kit, the twelve-pound sheets, the graphites and chalks, charcoals and dry sponge. That was my plan for the birth, to draw everything I saw. And I’d started to, before the day went bad, and the night went worse.

I lift away her sheet without touching her. Her breasts have sagged to either side, swollen and tiny both, the nipples gone chalky as her skin. Her hair feels stiff, I don’t touch it again. She used to talk with her hair, actually. Toy with it, toss it, tie it differently eight times a day, always free-flowing and never the same except for that shocking colour, burnt strawberry – a colour that existed only in her nature. Now some of it has covered her left cheek, a strand or two tangled between her lips, and there I leave it. She was always beautiful, but the kind that’s about expressed motion. Her face elastic, her eyes quick, her feelings shifting every surface, her mood’s body a reed in the wind or an oak in the clearing. I sit on the high deep windowsill, tablet tucked into right elbow. I’ve drawn the dead before, but this woman … I loved her, do you know? We loved each other. We were both so sure that we never said it much, or we said it in ways no one else would have heard, with touches no one else could have felt. Those stitches … those cannibals … arched over her belly, one bootlace bow to each end of the last wound the world could make in her, the thread thick as package twine. Her belly swollen and flat at once and unsettled from the long tug they pulled to get Johnny out. Her limbs fragile as sticks, all weight no light. She’s lost the pins that once held her together, she looks disorganized. I’m bored, she’s saying, but I don’t care that I’m bored. Death – so what? Look, Paul. Do what you do. Life’s been hard before, so say goodbye your own way. Love her memory. There must be a way to do that as much.

Her stitches are leaking – that shouldn’t be. Those butchers could have shown more care. I take out the purple chalk. Purple, her favourite colour. She used to wear it because she knew she shouldn’t, with tones like hers. She’d wear black to birthday parties, yellow to funerals, checks and plaids to the theatre, vertical stripes to bring out her leaning tower of skin and bones, that was her. She knew how to dress – she was a clothes modeller when we met, at the Flöge sisters – but she only dressed to please or stun some people, when she cared enough – about me, or her grandfather. (How will I tell him? What will he tell me?) I put down the purple and pick up the green. Now the blood is dripping. Focken doctors – I would have done a better job myself. I’m going to berate them later, for her memory’s sake, so that I’ll be able to remember for us both that I did. But before I start practising the words for that, she blinks.

I blink back, who would not. The body is a pagan temple whose mysteries I no longer worship. But when I look again, her eyelids have fluttered half-open, her lips are parted, and the next breath is hers, not mine. To a choking sigh, one finger shifts towards her wound.

‘Paul?’

‘Yes, dear?’ What else can you say?

Hair stirs, chin dips, eyes two sparks in slow time, one to each corner. Mouth twists in horror and contempt. How do you imagine that? Horror and contempt …

‘What did you do to me, Paul?’

‘Nothing, Emma.’

‘Yes you did. I thought I was having a baby. Where is it?’

‘I’ll get a doctor.’

‘Oh no, not one of them again …’

Too late – then I’m out the door. The next one she sees, she’s going to win that fight, and neither of us will want to miss it, whatever happens next.