the girl with a stone Heart

chapter 3

Their flat, now her flat, was on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house in a narrow city square. The stairs were steep. The taxi-driver who brought her home left her, with her bag, on the doorstep. She toiled slowly upward. There was no need to hurry. She had time, and more time.

She had been a good cook—she thought of herself now in the past tense—and had made delicious little meals for her mother and herself, light pea soups, sole with mushrooms, vanilla soufflés. Now she nibbled at cheese and crusts like a frugal mouse. The life had gone out of the furnishings. The polish was dulled and she left it like that: she made her bed with one crumpled pull.

She stared out of the window, for minutes that seemed like hours, and hours that seemed like minutes. She liked to see the dark spread through the square, because it meant that bedtime was not far away.

The day came when the dressings could, should, be dispensed with. She had been avoiding her body, simply wiping her face and under her arms with a damp facecloth. She decided to have a bath. Their bathtub was old and deep and narrow, with imposing brass taps and a heavy coil of shower-hosing. There was a wide wooden bath rack across it, which still held, she saw now, her mother’s private things—a loofah, a sponge, a pumice stone.

The warmth of the water was nice. A few tense sinews relaxed. Time went into one of its slow phases. She sat and stared at the things on the rack. Loofah, sponge, pumice. A fibrous tube, a soft mess of holes, a shaped gray stone. She considered the differences between the three, all essentially solids with holes in them. The loofah was stringy and matted, the sponge was branching and vacuous, the pumice was riddled with needle holes. Biscuit-colored, bleached khaki, shadow gray. Colorless colors, shapeless shapes. The loofah and the sponge were the dried-out bodies, the skeletons, of living things. She picked up the pumice, a light stone teardrop, shaped to the palm of a hand. She felt its paradoxical lightness, then dropped it into the water, where it floated. She did not know how long she sat there. The water cooled. When she lifted herself, awkwardly, through the surface film, the pumice chinked against her flesh. It was an odd little sound, like a knock on metal. She put the pumice back on the rack, and touched her puckered wound with nervy fingers. Supposing something had been left in there? A clamp, a forceps, a needle? Not exactly looking, she explored her reconstructed navel with a fingertip. She felt a certain glossy hardness where the healing was going on.