TILL DEATH

Episode Eight

DAY 30

3:00 pm. Yesterday's ice has not thawed. The sun remains weak, the ground remains hard, and my wife remains crystal white and still against the glass of the sunroom. I have burned what more I can spare from the house. Papers. Books. Some furniture. Her clothes. A few more days hiding in here could see me perish. Luckily the same weather conditions that threaten to end me have also provided me with an opportunity. With her frozen still against the glass I have the chance to leave the house and collect more firewood from the store, so, in the early morning light, I do. I bluster out into the ice cold air in jeans and wool and make haste to the wheelbarrow that lies capsized on the hard grass. I right it, then pilot it toward the shed at the back of the house. The hinges shriek as the door flies open, disturbing dust and web. I take the dry timber first, bugs escaping my grip as I lift, then barrow the wood into the house, tipping it out where the barrow comes to a stop on the threadbare carpet. Next, I take the more of the things we stored in there, anything I anticipate I might one day need. Nails. Staples. Gauze. I raid boxes and shelves until the little wooden hut is almost bare. Bare but for black bags. Bags of dissembled furniture and an absent child's toys. I linger. One of the bags is torn. I see an edge of blue peek out. My finger goes to it. I know what this is. It's the corner of a train. The train we bought him for his second birthday. It's a wooden train, one of a set. The track interlocks. Together we would trail it around the lounge, pretending the coffee table was a bridge. There are two other trains too. One red. One yellow. Matching trees and houses fill these three bags. All coloured, bright and wooden. I grab the bags and make haste back to the house, then I shut the door and throw the toys on the pile with the rest of the firewood.

DAY 34

I wake into a new day and even before I open my eyes I know that something has changed. My foot hangs uncovered over the side of the bed. A few days ago the morning would have been so cold that even my sleeping self would have drawn that foot back under the relative safety of the duvet, but now it lolls bare in mild air. Has the freeze passed? I jump out of bed and press my hands against wet glass. The window proves me right with a bright but damp landscape. None of the crystalline beauty of the freeze remains, just bare trees and sodden earth in its place. Does this mean she's free? I bound downstairs without even dressing, and she's gone. Daubs of dark matter fingered onto the outside of the window are the only trace of her. I trace them with my finger, then I look down. On the other side of the glass, a shoe. Her right shoe. The foot still in it. The shin bone fractured and sharp protrudes from the dead grey flesh, wet with the same kind of gooey black tar on the window. A flash of metal glints in the sticky goo. I recall her living body. She broke that leg skiing one year. We were in Klosters. Efficient Swiss doctors fixed it with plates and pins, and that's what I can see now. Metal engineered into broken bone. The freezing and thawing must have left the bone there weakened. With only one good foot she will be impaired. Even more so than she was already. Still naked I shuttle about the house peering through the small windows, trying to catch a glimpse of her. I find her easily enough. She has made her way to the gable end of the house, above which I lay sleeping moments ago. I open the narrow window and peer down at her. She is crawling, and, as I suspected, she is missing a foot, and also the lower part of her leg. She knows I'm here though, just a few feet above her. She twists her head awkwardly to see me with wild eyes, then she tries to get to her feet. She can't, of course, so she falls, her head and shoulder striking the wall with a damaging wet thud, but she scrabbles at the stone, undeterred. The thawing ice has ripened her, leaving her flesh looking darker and looser. She claws the walls, the bones of her fingers becoming visible as she leaves smears of herself in the mortar. To see her fall apart like this is agony. "No!" I call out. "Stop it darling. Stop it," I implore. "Stay still. You're hurting yourself." I am stricken with new feeling, an insane mixture of fear and pity. Birds circle overhead, black like daggers in the sky. I know what fate becomes her out there. She is destined to degrade into the earth, to be picked apart by bird and worm. No. Not her. Not those eyes. Not those beautiful eyes that still burn with a strange ferocity in the half bruised fruit of her head. I know I must act. I know I must save her from that fate at least. I run to the sunroom, still naked but now sweating and fraught. I fling open the big window. "Come here!" I shout, though I know I needn't. She knows where I am without sight or sound of me, but for all my haste and for all her want she still moves at a glacial pace, dragging her carcase across the muddy ground until she is finally level with me. Her body is excited, I can tell. Goo bubbles and glugs up her throat and down her chin. She's horrifying, but with the window open I smell her fully for the first time, and her smell is more horrifying still. Dirty diesel, pilchards and sick. I have no time to revolt though because now here she is, and more motivated than ever, powering herself up with the low sill of the big open window. "Come on darling." I coax against all instinct, "That's it. You can do it. Come on. Come inside." She scrabbles in her own slick fluids, slipping and falling until she's in, thrashing dead and alive on the floor of our home. I back away from her as her arms wheel and her hands clench. I have to get the window closed, then get out of here and lock the door, but she's got the speed of the starving and is more able to fill the space than I anticipated. I take a breath, then I leap over her to slam the window shut but I land with a slip and fall in the juices she leaves in her wake. I slap the tiles with my bare backside, and now we're both on the floor, scrabbling, frantic and desperate. Before I know which way is up her boney hand is around my ankle. It feels clammy against my bare skin. It's so alien. Instinctively I kick out at her arm with my loose foot. It connects with her wrist and the joint shatters, leaving her wrist a stump and her detached hand still gripped around me. Horrified, I kick the dismembered hand from around my ankle, stand erect, then jump through the open window. Outside, I run through the mud, across the sharp gravel, then in through the front door, sliding with slick feet across the tiles of the kitchen until I get to the sunroom where I slam the door shut, just as she is getting to the threshold. I fall hard against the dense, reassuring wood, panting and naked, but grateful. I collect my breath while she scratches at the wood that separates us. Past is prologue. Everything is different. Everything the same. All that has gone before has served only to bring us back here, with each of us alone on either side of this familiar divide, but where we go from here I do not know.