The Divorce

"That which is whole, torn asunder,

That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe."

Tortoise Shout, D. H. Lawrence









Music:
Coat of Many Colours- Dolly Parton (live performance recording)
Embraceable You- Miles/Bird
The Lonely One in Autumn from Das von der Erde- Mahler
O Come, O Come Emmanuel/In the Bleak Midwinter (Holst)- Choir of Kings College, Cambridge (Carols from Kings, 2011, 2012)
He Can Only Hold Her- Amy Winehouse

Content Warning:
Sex references, dark and disturbing humour, strong language, content some listeners may find offensive

Transcript

 The Divorce

I

Though no longer united under the same roof, they were a very happily family. Eric Poole, an agricultural man from birth, kept a farm, and occupied the beautiful single-floor homestead at its centre. Layla Burnt, three-years free of her ex-husband’s watery surname, resided in a two-story apartment building, only a short walk from the sea. They had two children, Archie, and Jasmine. Archie was fifteen, Jasmine nineteen. Although it was not likely to be a permanent state of affairs, Jasmine had left home, “left homes” as she sometimes wryly quipped at social functions, and was studying medicine. Ever since the slow demise of her paternal grandmother, with whom she had been close, from lung cancer (and its further metastasis), oncology had chosen her for a fierce devotee.

            The reason or reasons for the divorce (more likely the latter), who had asked for it, who had been its most adamant pursuer, the ultimate distribution of assets, had all been kept secret from Archie and Jasmine, and remained so. They were not incurious about the precise nature of their parents’ separation, about the exact manner in which their parents’ marriage had failed and the reasons for its failing, but the divorce had dominated their lives for so long, Layla’s and Eric’s included, that they all felt little else besides an overwhelming relief at having finally wriggled out from beneath its sombre shadow, and being able to continue, if a little shaken and bruised and wizened, upon the path of life.

            For a while, heightened by puberty’s onset, Archie had blamed his mother for the divorce, and had acted out at school. His entangled frustrations had rendered him restless and aggressive, and he had been sent to an educational psychologist, in the hope that she might help him disentangle and identify and manage them. He developed an agonised crush on the therapist, and sometimes visibly sweated doing everything he could to avoid discussing it, in his sessions with her. Whenever he was asked about the woman, he just could not keep a secret of his blatant attraction to her. For this overwhelm of desire that he felt for his therapist, he also blamed his mother. 

Though he didn’t manage to seduce and procreate with his forty-seven-year-old, married educational psychologist, their partnership wasn’t a total waste of time. Archie was able to discover and articulate with her help that he was projecting an image of cold and rejecting womankind onto his mother, imagining the divorce to be a result of his mother’s rejection of his father. Enflamed by his own coming to sexual consciousness, his fears about his future with the other sex were causing him to feel antagonised by his mother, and lash out at her, as well as everyone else. He listened to this plenary of his afflictions stiff with rage, but found, when the therapist was finished speaking, that her diagnoses softened him, and he melted into a monsoon of tears. He blubbered in her arms, sobbed into her ample breasts, wholly engulfed in the soft and sensual fortress of her empathy. Up close, her fragrance was heavenly! Then she withdrew. Not long after this, they stopped seeing one another. The marriage was over. He was cured.

Jasmine had taken her mother’s side. But her noisy curiosity far outweighed any emotional support of which she was capable. She cross-examined her mother furiously for whatever fault, misdeed, infidelity and with whom, her father must have perpetrated in order to drive her away, and leave her no choice other than to end the marriage. But Jasmine never found out anything concrete.  

Archie had the sense that, though he was still a child, his childhood was over. He grew to consider his own sexual awakening a kind of assault upon the blissful unknowing of childhood, and the divorce a kind of warning. He felt almost as though he were a robot, whose master controls lay in the hands of some senior agent of humanity’s female half, by whom he had been reprogrammed. He spent strange afternoons, some of them horny, some of them in despair, ruefully gazing upon photographs of his family before the divorce had hacked them all in half: all four of them, undivorced, standing in front of a mountain cairn, grinning; all four of them, undivorced, standing on the beach in front of an abandoned game of quick cricket, one of them holding the string of a fruitlessly-slumped blue kite, grinning; all four of them, undivorced, sitting at a restaurant table, grinning. Who, Archi wondered, in the case of each one of those pictures, had been holding the camera?

That was all over now. Archie was less confused and upset, Jasmine less irate with the tortures of her own curiosity, and Layla and Eric were, both, quite content, quite content apart. During the divorce, the children sometimes heard raised voices in the night, softened by the walls that separated them from the source. But their parents certainly never admitted to any unamicable aspect of their disunion. They, at last, lived at different addresses, and had different last names, and different friends and pastimes. The family home, the farmhouse, had been in Eric’s family for generations and so there was really no question that he would remain its occupier. His claim on its attractive finish, its apricot glow, its fireplaces and heirlooms, its very oaken timbers and ochre panelling, was not disputed by Layla. Nor had she the desire to participate, any longer, in the upkeep of the farm, its pigs, chickens, sheep, its pastures, its crops. She missed eating the animals, though, with the kohlrabi and beans from the vegetable garden. Eric had a way with chicken, with a chicken. That she couldn’t deny.

Layla secured an attractive place on Church Street (Number Sixteen). The church that had originally given the street its name had been replaced by a giant bouncy-castle replica, a bouncy-church, but besides the juvenile cacophony for which it was responsible, she had no complaints, and enjoyed a few quirky friendships with curious, local characters. There was a mime and contortionist, whom everyone called Slim. He made himself up, religiously, every morning: perfectly white, blanched cheeks, dye-black slicked hair, the reddest lips, and loud, clownish costumes. With a haunted face, he walked very slowly up and down the length of the street: he made a habitual spectacle of his deft, impossible slowness. Sometimes he dressed in rags and a battered old stovepipe hat, and played his dulcimer. He would seat himself on an upturned bin, a can of corrugated iron, with his instrument on his knee, and fill the air with twinkling, his lithe and skinny fingers dancing, brightly, on the strings. There was an eccentric old hermit woman, an excommunicated nun, who made strange and beautiful models and toys and pieces of art from the driftwood, and the salt-kissed debris, and the shells, and all the other spoils, whether naturally-occurring or manmade, that collected on the shore, and which she appreciatively collected for her own schemes. Whatever she forged from the greenish shingle and the wet clay, she composed into attractive exhibits, and tried to sell, knocking door to door on Church Street and beyond.

In the early days after the divorce, Layla had been depressed, and lethargic. She had resumed smoking cigarettes and filled the interior with smoke, and the smoke’s lingering smell. Then she had sought psychoactive help, and still continued to take the antidepressant she had been prescribed. For a while, once the black cloud over her seemed to have moved on, she even dated, sporadically, making absolutely no secret of her “need for male attention”, even soliciting Archie for his opinions on her shoes, and her perfume, and her cleavage, and her dress. (She only had two dresses, one in lilac, one in blue with white frills). There had been one fully sexual encounter, noisy with the frenzy of her new freedom and its immense emotional complexity, which Archie had heeded, as if engaged in coital research, through the wall. But after a while, Layla began to appreciate single life, and hungered for less of everything as she grew to cherish her life’s quietness. It was amazing to her quite how simple and quiet, a quiet simple life could be. There was one short-lived exception to this singledom: she bought a big, colourful fish in a tank, Hieronymus, which she tendered as a kind of surrogate spouse. Unfortunately, Hieronymus quickly passed away from some mysterious and traumatic ailment. Archie discovered him in the morning, deceased and sorry, and woke his mother with his own frightful screams. Hieronymus lay, detaching, stagnating in a putrid, egg-coloured soup of himself. That was the sticky, malodourous end of Hieronymus. Layla considered, for her second attempt at companionship, a bird of paradise. But, upon visiting the aviary, she found that she identified far too much with those beautiful birds in the iron captivity of their cages.    

The blue bowl of the sea lay massive and misted beyond the bay. The murmur and shush of the waves made their constant and tender hiss. Sometimes Layla opened all the windows in the house, just to listen to their effusion, just to feel the sea’s peace drift indoors. Sometimes, fogs rolled in from the water, and the sky, the sea-line, the houses the opposite side of the street, the very arm in front of you were all obscured in maritime miasma. 

By day, Layla was a children’s home manager. 

The farmhouse, and Layla’s Church Street residence, were not close to one another. Indeed, they seemed to Archie a world apart. At fifteen, he could make the journey from school to either one of them alone. Though in radius their nearness differed wildly, in terms of duration of journey, they were almost perfectly equidistant from the school. The farm was only a twenty-minute walk away, while Church Street was only twenty-minutes away by bus. Archie spent Tuesday evening to Friday morning at his mum’s, and Friday evening to Tuesday morning at his dad’s: the heart of the week at his mother’s house, the long weekend at his father’s. He had never had any quarrel with this perfectly equitable division of access, and neither had his parents. Jasmine’s living arrangements were taken care of in connection with her course of medical higher education, in a very different part of the country. But whenever she returned home, to her homes, for a reading week, or a holiday, she abided by the pattern’s opposite and so hardly saw her brother at all. It was as though they, too, had divorced.    

One Tuesday afternoon, Archie set off for his mother’s place, straight after lunch. He had a doctor’s note excusing him from afternoon games on account of chronic constipation. It was not edifying to share the frank, if almost illegibly-penned note with the Head of Physical Education, whose grim, grizzled face, upon perusing it, lit up with a smile, and reddened with the tightness of a suppressed laugh. His stomach swollen with his bowels’ torpor, Archie arrived early to Church Street. The ecclesiastical bouncy-castle, in the shade of the deconsecrated churchyard’s generous, tall trees, was wobbling with activity. The sea glistened. 

That morning, Archie had been promptly dropped off at school by his father, who had assured him he had a busy day ahead. The goodbye had been quick, curt, and shorn of its usual poignancy. Now, Archie made his way, earlier than usual down Church Street, to number sixteen. Slim was white-faced and slow-walking. Archie made eye contact with him, and Slim acknowledged his presence with the blow of a kiss.

Archie let himself in to his mother’s house with his own set of keys. She would still be at work, Archie knew, and he was gratified by the opportunity the empty house offered him. He found that the educational psychologist from early in the divorce still dominated his thoughts a great deal, and any opportunity to masturbate over her memory he normally seized with great enthusiasm. It was the smell, it was all in the smell: the perfume of the embrace, the least note could remind him of it, leave him obsessing over it. The invitation was wholly olfactory. He recollected how the invisible bodiless-ness of scent had been so much more wonderful to him than the tangibility of flesh and arm and breast.  His preoccupation with her, with the enormous and entrapping and fragrant and bosomy hug she had placed him in, with the journey that his tears had made from his own optic ducts down into her large, large breasts, was often so intense that he feared he might literally develop a brain tumour if he did not relieve himself. 

Before attending to that need, he made himself a sandwich in the kitchen, and ate it, with a glass of milk. Red Leicester and piccalilli. It was delicious. But with startling punctuality, his lazy digestive tract began to complain, and he had to lie down and curl up. His stomach emitted a dull, unpleasant ache, a protest. It was then that he heard footsteps. They immediately surprised him. So, his mother was at home.

“Mummy!” Archie cried out, wasting no time in petitioning for her services, for her strange magic, which he had no doubt would heal his tummy ache.  

For a whole five minutes the footsteps had been still and silent. From the room in which their owner had been seated, not even the most miniscule indication of a presence in the house had reached Archie. The footsteps exited the upstairs room, and moved across the landing to the top of the stairs. The footsteps came closer, pulled by the sound of Archie’s voice to its source. The footsteps steadily loudened as they descended the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, they stopped. 

“Mummy…are you coming?” Archie cried. 

He peered over the top of the sofa, arching his back as he did so. Standing there, half-obscured, at the bottom of the stairs, there was a figure.

“Mummy?” Archie questioned. The question that he had put to the gloom seemed to linger in the air, reuttered by some imagined resonance. A second later Archie remembered to feel fear. The question as to the figure’s identity reminded him to fear it. He felt fear so rarely, not since he was far smaller, and so he sometimes responded belatedly to its triggers. It could be his mummy. But, for some reason, he wasn’t convinced that it was. Why did the figure not come forward, from the obscurity, from the shadows of the half-light, and reveal itself…?

“Mummy…?” Archie questioned again, but more meekly, with fear.

The figure was about his mother’s height. Slightly taller? It had on an attractive dress.

“Do you have a date, mummy?” Archie said.

The figure made a low grunt. It didn’t sound like mummy. Then the figure began to move slowly forward into the light, divulging itself from the darkness. 

Archie gasped and grasped his cheeks in his hands. His mouth gaped: his right hand held his right cheek, his left his left. For all its theatricality, it was an involuntary, organic motion. The face of the figure caused him to do it. Or rather, it was the mismatch, the imbalance and incongruity of body and face together, that so filled him with revulsion. It was the uncanny. In the advancing figure, he beheld the uncanny at its most impolite, its most unadorned and shocking. All of it comforted him, all of it was a home, to which his thoughts regularly came: he recognised the face. Beneath its incongruous accoutrements, he recognised the native frame and build of the figure. He recognised the blue dress with white frills. He recognised the high-heels. And he recognised the hair: a wig that, despite its small discrepancies, resembled his mother’s hair.

But though he recognised it all and cherished all these elements in their individual components, in their weird array he was filled with terror, a crawling disgust.

“Who are you?” Archie timorously enquired. And then, more timidly, he begged to know where his mother was.

The figure sat down at the end of the settee where Archie lay, diagonal. Archie’s gaze adhesively followed the figure as it walked towards him and took its seat by his feet. The figure reached out a hand and placed it on Archie’s tummy. The palm softly tapped the stomach a few times.

“There there,” the figure said, in a hoarse whisper.

“Those are mummy’s clothes,” Archie said, lost.   

“Yes. I am your mother,” the figure said. “And these are my clothes”. It was a man’s voice, modulated to a husky parody of the feminine. It was not an unfamiliar voice.

Through an open downstairs window, Archie listened to the sea-hiss. From within the foam walls of the bouncy-church, the cries of children at play were forcefully flung. The afternoon light was its own effusing melancholy.

“Come to me,” the figure said.

“What do you want?” Archie quivered.

Archie feared this figure. Whoever it was, this house did not belong to it. And yet he couldn’t muster the authority to expel it. Looking into the figure’s eyes, studying its complexion, he suddenly recognised who it was, and could not believe his delay in doing so.

“Dad?” he questioned. 

It was indeed Archie’s father beside him, dressed in his mother’s clothes. All his facial hair, a considerable amount that he had hardly ever been without, had been shaved off, as close as he or any man had ever shaved. From his head hung a black wig that roughly, imperfectly recalled Layla’s hair.

“What are you doing in mum’s house…why are you wearing her clothes?” Archie gibbered.

“I am your mum. This is my house,” Archie’s father said. “Come here to me…”

Archie loved his father, but not under his current conditions of presentation. 

Archie stammered: “I’m not…I’m confused…I’m…” He tried to admit that he was repelled. But he was unable to do so, unable to spurn his father, unable to retard his show of affection. Archie wanted to tell him that he didn’t smell like mummy, that he had no breasts, wanted to say: if you’re my mummy then where are your breasts…but he couldn’t. It was, somehow, too damning.

In a blind, foggy acceptance, he fell forward into his father’s flat bosom. He detected dying and citric notes of his mother’s perfume.

“I love you, sweetheart,” his dad said, in his assumed high voice. 

Archie’s forehead was lined, with worry and effort. Then, without delay, those shameful words slipped, agonized, from his mouth: 

“I love you mummy.” Without being summoned, the words slipped out of him. He had thought it would be difficult to say those words to anyone other than his mummy. But without realising how something aided the words’ passage, even beckoned them forth, from his lips to his father’s ears.     

II

It was an unusual arrangement. But as with all of the changes and unfamiliarities and sadnesses that had come about on the other side of the divorce and with which he had been forced to contend, Archie learnt to cope. After a while, he was able to move his bowels again. As long as he could do that, he didn’t much mind what his parents did. 

            He quickly conquered his revulsion, and made what mental readjustments he had to make hastily. His father wanted to be his mother, and he accepted it. His father now was his mother: he was able to accept it. 

            And Archie didn’t lose a father, though it seemed as though he had. In fact, at the bizarre beginning of this phase of their family life, it seemed to him as though he had lost both his father and his mother. The whereabouts of his real mother unknown, his real father in a state of obscene masquerade: he considered them both at two different sorts of remove, lost to two quite disparate obscurities. But as the week wore on, and this new mother wrested dominance over the old one, barged its way into his psyche pushing out the original occupant, Archie’s mental hold on his old mother diminished entirely. And the world was as accepting of that woman’s erasure as her son was. In fact, nobody regarded it as such, an erasure, a missing persons case. They hardly seemed to notice that it had occurred. At the children’s home the next day, when new Layla Burnt entered the old one’s office, nobody batted an eyelid, not even her secretary, upon gingerly advancing with her boss’s coffee and finding a male imitation in her place. In parodical impersonation, her image remained alive, or, at any rate, as alive as anyone desired it. Friday came quickly around, and though it wasn’t the same father who had dropped Archie off at school that strange and significant Tuesday morning, a father was waiting to receive him, in the old farmhouse.

            Friday evening, Archie went straight from school, with a packed bag, to his father’s house. He keenly walked the familiar upward route. The path carried him up the hilly estate, to precincts where the houses began to thin, and all amenities and buildings to grow sparser. He enjoyed the quiet, and the gradual feeling of seclusion to this wilder territory the deeper he penetrated it. Compared with the dim hubbub of the district below, individual sounds were loud and brazen in the quiet: even his own footfalls had a muffled magic about them in this place. Something Archie couldn’t identify freed a great screech, avian and exasperated. 

            The house was a bungalow, but capacious. Multiple corridors ran this way and that, and rendered the house a little labyrinthine. Anything it might have possessed in height it made up for in square feet. The house was surrounded in lawn, the front side bare except for a birdbath, the back busy with vegetable garden and a few fruit trees. The lawn perimeter of the property was marked out by a low black fence. The fence had a section missing where a gravel path cut through, and lay like a carpet unrolled in welcome from the front door. The path ran right up to the threshold of the house, able to deliver its approaching callers within, and allowing them to be spied long before they ever entered. Archie marched up this path, to the green front door, as he had done many times before. At his approach, two drinking magpies tumbled down from the birdbath’s scarab-coloured rim, and leapt away into flight. Shadowed in the porch, Archie sought his front-door key in his blazer pockets, but found the door to the house already open. The door opened of its own accord, with a creak. He became immediately aware of music: the thin and feeble warble of the record player. 

He went inside and removed his shoes, whose undersides were dirty. He hung up his blazer and unburdened his throat of his tightly-tied tie, undoing the top two buttons of his shirt. 

“Dad,” Archie called out, to the gloom.

The music was melancholy. Jazz. It made Archie think of rain. The straying loneliness of the muted trumpet, the tearful twinkling of the piano, and the tender, regular thud of the string bass. Mingling with the hiss of the needle on the aged vinyl, the hiss of the brushed cymbal was a gentle constancy. This was a dad-like state of affairs, Archie thought, to discover the house full of recorded music, the interior warm with its glow. His mother hated all music, especially jazz; his father’s musical tastes were catholic, and they included, even privileged jazz.

Archie edged forward into the dimness. The world would soon be in half-light. The house, within, was mostly unlit. But, moving slowly forward, following the music to its source, which Archie correctly suspected was the living room, he gradually became aware of a low influx of light, which called to him. Archie had already prepared himself for what he knew he would find. Reclining into the back of his father’s armchair, Archie’s new father was languidly seated, his right leg crossed over his left. Archie’s mother never sat like that. Archie’s new father was of smaller stature to the one whose place he now occupied. Fake facial hair amassed on the pale face in imitative array. The beard and moustache were a little redder than those of the one whose image they aped. The eyes were lidded in relaxation. Archie recognised his mother immediately beneath her disguise. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint how or articulate why, but he knew. She wore his father’s clothes, the big green jumper, shirtsleeves beneath, braced beige trousers, wellingtons up to the knee. She stirred at the sound of her son’s footsteps, and she greeted him with a gauche impression of her ex-husband:

“He-llo,” she said, half-hiccupping in the middle of her greeting, though it was only brief. 

Archie glumly hung his head.

“Hello, dad,” he said, with resignation.

His new dad seemed thrilled at the absence of protest, and she grinned contentedly. Again, the false words came out with a strange ring of truth, lubricated to smoothness in their exit by some regime of practice Archie did not know he had undertaken. Amicably, she said:

“Let’s order Chinese.”

Archie’s dad, his prior dad, didn’t like cooking for just himself and his son, and especially not on Friday nights. Despite his (in most ways) Luddite character, he took a great, odd pleasure in the whole ritual of ordering food using the internet. Archie’s mum, his old mum, hated ordering take-away, Chinese take-away in particular.

III

Things did not change for a while. Archie knew that the figures with whom he shared respective houses were other than what they said they were: the one whom he called “dad” was really his mum, and the one whom he called “mum” was really his dad. But he got perfectly used to it after a while. He felt he should care more, but found that he didn’t. He was used to obeying their wishes. And despite their oddity this time, they came with no discomfort or menace. 

There was no hint of acknowledgment that it was a deception or a disguise, a masquerade or a scheme, prank or play: “mum” and “dad” both believed that nothing had changed, that they both had always been as they now appeared. And it made no difference to the world that one was pretending to be the other. The world went right on turning, oblivious to the fact that Eric was pretending to be Layla, and Layla Eric. The only exception was the old nun on Church Street. She had liked Layla, and often knocked on her door, even if she had nothing to sell. The person she discovered when she next knocked was certainly not Layla, and she was repelled by him. For a start, he didn’t know the old woman, though the original Layla did: this was just one example of a number of simple yet unnerving discrepancies between old and new Layla. As a further example, when Archie made an allusion to Hieronymus, all his new mother was able to do was throw up his hands and say: “Who the fuck’s Hieronymus ?!” 

            Then, after a while, Archie’s parents exchanged more than clothes, identities at their most superficial. Their swap went deeper. New Eric began taking testosterone to deepen her voice, and give her facial hair. And new Layla began taking oestrogen to feminise his appearance with new breasts, and anti-androgens to impede all that perpetuated his maleness. New Eric went into the menopause and required a hysterectomy, while, beneath the outer calm of his wife’s apparel, old Eric endured great turmoil. Through weeks, the bundle of his sex sat stuffed into the light and silken crotch of one after another of his wife’s numerous underwear items. Under the new course of treatment, his sexual function and desire for sex, together, withdrew like a dark and wounded creature back into its hole, or a snail into its shell. Like a retiring snake, the natural articles of his sex shrivelled, and became nothing but casings around a stale genital emptiness, shorn of all intention. In dimension: almost half their previous size. He swelled with the water retention caused by his wife’s antidepressants. 

            On one isolated occasion, the exchange of identities having been so far negotiated almost entirely amicably as far as Archie could tell, Archie listened, from his bedroom in his mother’s Church Street house, to a row, conducted over the telephone, in the kitchen downstairs. He heard only his new mother’s words of course, as New Layla screamed into the receiver in his altered, feminised voice, and New Eric wailed right back at him in her modified, masculinised voice. The topic of row was whether or not it was necessary for New Layla to have his genitals surgically removed, an expensive procedure. They eventually decided against it, mutually.       

            The academic summer drew to a close, and the holidays flooded life with their sad freedom. With the expiry of Jasmine’s property lease, she came quickly home from university. She was weary with disappointment over the recent ending of what had been her first serious relationship. She was existentially wounded and full of bitterness at the weakness of the male sex. Though she kept it to herself at first, after a while she found it impossible to keep her plight secret, and she sobbed, on the settee, into her mother’s new breasts, articulately cursing male mankind. New Layla stroked his daughter’s hair and consoled her. Then he pretended to get his period, and asked her for a tampon. She stole upstairs, quickly, and, with great alacrity, returned with one in her hand. She asked him did he know how to deploy it. He answered that he did.      

            But, despite the differences, despite the strange and accepted lie at the heart of their family, such as it was, little changed. Still Jasmine stayed at her mother’s house Friday evening to Tuesday morning, her father’s Tuesday evening to Friday morning, and Archie the opposite. Then, with startling suddenness, for the very first time since the divorce, for the very first time since the low roof of the farmhouse had ceased to unite them, the instant absolutely without precedent, Archie found that he missed his sister. He would like to see more of her. He missed her presence in the house, in the houses, the aura she brought with her, her loud brooding-ness, the unique clatter of her steps when she walked, her way of sitting when she sat. She even had a smell. Not a distinct odour, or fragrance: outside, it could not be discerned, but within the walls of either of their parents’ houses, her skin, or her hair, or something about her person, simply made to Archie, a nasally noticeable announcement: …Sister, little more than a fragrant whisper: Sister. He experienced so little of it now…but something reminded him of it, and he was able to revisit it, perfectly preserved, in his memory, in his pheromonal consciousness: the smell of his sister. His parents were now, each of them, a confusing bouquet of aroma, not exactly unpleasant, but disquieting, uncanny with unfamiliar mixtures whose known notes became sickly as they commingled with others they had never before touched. Strawberries and pepper, strawberries and pepper, Archie reminded himself, a nervous little inner refrain: sometimes the most contrasting subjects can find, in one another, friends. As it happened, he approved of and enjoyed strawberries and pepper. But the smell of his mother’s dress, the material, the washing powder, the fabric softener, the lingering memory of armpit, of spinal sweat, the whole woven ensemble, mixed with whatever it was his father faintly emitted, did not gratify him. He had an acutely attuned sense of smell, Archie.

            “I’d like to see more of Jasmine,” Archie told his new mother.

            New mother’s knife came to a halt. It had been intent upon an onion. The onion lay, on the chopping board, divided into two peeled hemispheres. One hemisphere was untouched, one was under the knife. The hemisphere under the knife had been sliced along its length. Archie’s mother was now cutting the scored onion-half along its shorter side, into little cubes.

            “What?” mother said, in a grunt, laying down the knife. His eyes were red and moist with the onion’s mutilation, his makeup was running.

            “I want to see more of my sister,” Archie answered, as if to remind his new mother of how precisely he was related to Jasmine.

            “Go on…” new Layla said.

            “We always alternate, me here, her at dad’s…why can’t me and her stay together, go back and forth as one…”

            “Go back and forth as one…?” Archie’s mother echoed, disapprovingly. His voice was very feminine these days, but not without a strain, a slight exasperated huskiness.

            “Yes, I think it would be nice. I’ve been missing her, recently. I feel like I’ve seen so little of her these last years.”

            Archie’s eyes began to cry. The air was tearfully, potently infused with onion. 

            “Are you pretending to cry?” Archie’s mother said. Hoisted to its new octave, his hatred sounded strange. His own eyes were gleaming.

            “No…it’s the onion…same as you,” Archie protested, indicating to the shining streaks on his mother’s face, where the downward courses of his tears had dried, and smudged his make-up.

            “These tears are real, Archie,” Archie’s mother said.

            Archie was confused: “You’ve been cutting an onion. Onions make people cry.” Then Archie remembered that Layla was just about immune to onions, while, in his father’s case, preparing them would make him would weep profusely. A further discrepancy!

            “We try so hard, Archie. So hard we try and still you are not satisfied.”

            Through an open window, Slim’s dulcimer drifted in: a delicate, twangling strain.

            Archie began to feel cross. He demanded so little, had quietly borne the troubles and disappointments of the divorce for all its duration. Only now did he request one tiny alteration to proceedings. In anger, he muttered: “Onions never made mum cry”. 

            “What did you say?” Archie’s mother snapped.

            “Nothing,” Archie sulked.

            “No, you said something, what did you say?” It was uncanny, how clinical the current mother’s ear for the tones and tempi of the former one. The voice was well able to reproduce them. Were its owner’s original timbre not still subtly stored within it, Archie would have been able to believe that the voice belonged to a woman: but it did not sound like Layla’s, old Layla’s. Not at all.   

            “You said onions never made your mother cry, didn’t you? How dare you say that. How dare you point that out! How dare you draw attention to such a discrepancy! How dare you feel so little shame!” Archie’s mother picked up the knife with which he had been cutting the onion, and emphasised his words, stabbing the air with the knife, the blade pointing in his son’s directon: “I’ve got something to tell you, Archie. Change. Change should occur within. Change is work you do within, on yourself. The world shouldn’t change, the world won’t change. Make change within yourself and it won’t seem so bad that the world doesn’t much change. Make the change in you, do not expect the world to change. Look at how me your mum…” he mis-spoke and the moment landed heavily, chillingly on the kitchen, onion-redolent and tear-jerking. “I mean…me and your dad…look at how much we’ve changed. Look at what we’ve sacrificed. Do you have any idea of the changes going on down below, for both of us, the changes that our occurring in our bodies, the changes to our very being which we have quietly borne, the pain we’ve borne for you…for this family….are you not happy, Archie? Are you not happy with what we’ve given you and your…”

            “…Yes, yes I am, “ Archie interrupted. “…but I want to make a small change to the arrangement…why can’t we change the arrangement, just a little, so I can be with my sister…” 

            “Change the arrangement! Change the arrangement! No, no no, no no no, we cannot possibly change the arrangement…”

            “Why not!”

            “Because too much has been sacrificed in order to keep the arrangement the same. We’ve suffered to preserve the arrangement.”

            Archie rarely argued with his mother, neither the old one nor the new. He wanted to say so many things, he wanted to say that he didn’t like the arrangement anymore, that he thought his family rotten to core with dishonesty, that they were hardly a family at all anymore. He did say something, but something altogether different, that he had neither desired nor purposed to say: 

            “You look ridiculous.” 

Archie couldn’t believe that he had said it at first, thinking himself incapable of such a statement. He confirmed his ability with a repetition, louder: “You look ridiculous.” And he went on: “You look ridiculous in that dress, your tits look ridiculous, and your wig looks ridiculous…and…” Together, the twinned forces of misery and onion made him cry: tears of misery and tears of onion commingled and shone on his cheeks. “…and you don’t smell like mummy”.

IV

The summer came to an end. Jasmine returned to university, for her third year. But by the beginning of that autumn, as the shadows began to lengthen and the leaves to fall, a new vitality, a new expectancy and brightness was in the air. Love.

            On Tinder, two new applicants found one another: a woman called Layla discovered a man called Eric. They texted, back and forth for a while, testing one another’s waters. And it didn’t take long before they agreed to meet one another, at a nice little pub on Church Street. By the time darkness fell, the bouncy-church was silent and unmoving: all the children were gone.

            They felt that they had known one another for a whole lifetime. They felt like two refugees, annexed and displaced from a previous life, a previous life in which they had been married or in love or both. Finding one another again, united under the roof of that velvet-coloured pub, the glow of love burned like a flame in both their eyes. With great care and understanding, they negotiated the considerable new challenges now posed by intimacy. How they effected congress was no-body’s business but theirs. 

            They lost interest in their children. Though this was the first period of extended time they had spent in one another’s company since the divorce, it seemed to Archie that his mother and father were further away from one another than they had ever been. And Archie felt further away from them than he had ever been. He faced them: they were strangers, the people he had known unreachable. Often, through the darkening months, so beautiful at first in their red and golden going, and then so bleak and black in their cold and their brief days, Archie would come home to an empty Church Street house. (He hardly went to his father’s house at all anymore, and no-one made him). His parents no longer seemed interested in enforcing the arrangement. 

Near the beginning of the year’s final month, Archie saw Slim trying to withdraw money at a cashpoint. He was in his stovepipe hat, but he was uncharacteristically characterless. The hat was just to keep out the cold. Looking very frail and ill, he stabbed disconsolately, like a phantom, at the cashpoint buttons. Not much later in that same month, word got around that Slim had hanged himself. And a few days before Christmas news broke also of the old nun’s death.

            Archie’s sixteenth birthday went unnoticed and uncelebrated. For the first time in his life, he felt very alone, and very hopeless. He saw no difference between the wintry world and himself. His soul was part of that winter, and he was unsheltered from it. He cried out for embrace, for some encompassing embrace, some protecting envelopment… a sister, a mother, an educational therapist…there was nothing between him and the winter, no-one to keep him warm.

            But, within the bleakness, he discovered a flame of hope. He realised that he could turn his solitude into freedom, his neglect into self-sufficiency. He felt himself inherit his life into his own hands, and guarded it with a fierce sense of responsibility.

            He decided that he needed a sexual partner, and made the destruction of his virginity an avid personal mission. The world was withering and dying around him, but he’d fill it with life, with the creative might of the passions.

            It seemed to him that the spell of his family, the divorce, had held him back from his own discovery of self. He tried alcohol and liked it. The town filled with the red and green of Christmastide, the chaste and holy hush of those dark streets shining, as they expectantly awaited the coming of Christ, and re-enacted God’s becoming a baby for the salvation of all mankind. While long-expected Jesus approached like a missile, all that lay on Archie’s mind was his own penis, what possible strategy he might employ to put it to the use for which it was bequeathed to him, how he would ever convince a respectable young maiden to have anything to do with that inconstantly predictable, pink-brown stalk of flesh he had abused countless times to the memory of his educational psychologist. As to her, he was finished with her, he was over her, it was a further mental divorce he had, at last, undertaken, away from her insistent powers.

            His penis would give him no peace. All the girls in his class at school were unavailable or unattractive to him. Regardless, he knew that it had to go somewhere. At a Christmas eve party, he found fresh hope. The older sister of one of his male friends was nineteen. Her name was Jackie. It was surprising to him, and disconcerting at first, how little he knew about talking to women, how deficient his strategies of escalation, his artistry of advance. He immediately found her exquisitely beautiful. 

“What’s your name?” he shrilled, delighted to discover her. 

“Jackie…” she said, polite but not reciprocating Archie’s delight.

“Really…” immediately he started panicking. He was confident but silence terrified him, could so easily derail him. “My…sister’s name…starts with a J.” He winced and carried on, saying: “Archie. You’re Lochlan’s sister, right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still in sixth-form?” 

She looked not much older than him, young for her age. He was surprised when she said she was at university.

“And how old are you, may I ask…?” he enquired, tentatively.

“I’m nineteen,” she answered cooly.

“Really!” he cried, realising with feckless elation that she was the same age as his sister. “My sister’s nineteen.” The lager was animating his thoughts, speeding them up, and he felt that between thinking and talking he had hardly any time at all. He admonished himself, in his head, for his unconsidered utterances: stop fucking comparing her to your fucking sister, drop the sister material entirely. He studied her features, the expression in which they hung. She didn’t look like Jasmine. Her hanging coal-black hair was entirely a thing apart, and, she was taller than Jasmine.

The conversation settled, and the breathless briskness of the initial encounter soon subsided. He found himself able to speak to her less impulsively, and the conversation developed with greater steadiness, though his eye still twinkled with esteem. That unstudied, unexamined, instinctive esteem that can only glimmer in eyes seeing someone for the first time.    

But as their conversation went on and deepened, it began to seem to him that all he had in the bank of experience was his family. He began to feel it very strongly, that that was all that he was. A son of two divorced parents, a brother to a sister he hardly saw anymore. He began to feel very sad. In trying to deafen himself to its inner appeal, in suppressing it as it welled up, the sadness grew more intense. It began to leak from his eyes, and he caught the salt on his tongue. It began to clutch at his voice, and make it crack.

“What’s the matter?” Jackie said. “Are you okay?”

It seemed that she cared about him. He looked strangely beautiful as he cried, his tears gave to his ordinary face a Christly radiance. She opened her arms for an embrace and she embraced him, cradling his head against her shoulder. He scarcely thought of her breasts. 

He felt only the feeling; he couldn’t put into words the source of his discomfort. The grievance was too profound, too nebulous to be named. 

            “My parents…” he said, trailing off, “…are…getting back together”.

            There was a mysterious silence, and a beautiful look of recognition in her eyes.

            “That’s…that’s good, isn’t it?” she said. But she asked the question like she already understood, like she already understood the discord between what he said, and how he felt.

            “No…no, it’s not good. It’s not good at all. It’s terrible,” Archie groaned, and he cried some more.

            “You know, my parents are divorced…” Jackie said.

            Archie quieted, and looked up at her, struck. “They are?”

            “Yes.”

            He couldn’t help himself. He knew he had no right to kiss her but how could he not. A fellow child of divorce! This fooled him, was apt to fool him into believing they were meant to fall in love, they were meant to be together, that the universe willed their union. He kissed her and she let him. She even kissed him back. A sound of wonder rose gently in the room, and the music quietened. They withdrew from one another’s lips.

            “It’s snowing!” a voice cried.

            And all the young people in that young room bustled outside into the streets. In some strange way, they seemed glad that some reason other than smoking had drawn them into the chill of the night air. Snow fell, quiet and mystic, from the dark heavens.

            It snowed and snowed. Through the tense quiet of the world, Archie walked and walked. It was a hinterland, loveless, forlorn. But not Archie. As he moved through it, he was full of a brightness, and the future called to him with a kind of joyfulness. The night was prickly, wakeful with restlessness, with disturbing dreams.

            At last, he began to near the bungalow, squat and dark at the centre of his father’s farm. From their pens, the animals bayed, abandoned and hungry. In places, redundant contraptions grimly sat, hoes rusted. As he came nearer, as he began on the gravel path, unrolled from the threshold in welcome like a ribbon of moonlight on the purple lawn, he began to see that the lights were on in the bungalow. The windows were curtained, and didn’t allow the escape of much light. 

“He can only hold her for so long,

The lights are on, but no-one’s home”.

Amy Winehouse. Her voice crooned its contralto assertions in his inner ear. He had a memory of listening to that song in the car. His parents in the front, he in the back with his sister, both of them quite little. He turned from them to Jackie, from one world to another. She burned, shimmered like an effigy in his consciousness. An angel: he had only so recently parted from her. 

Not knowing why he had come, brought to it, he supposed, by some dull thud of hope, by some feeble pang of trust in the guiltlessness, the guileless and familial enchantment of Christmas, he entered the house. His house. He didn’t remove his shoes. Snow and mud-slush followed his footsteps into the house. One footfall, another, another, and they left a wake on the wooden floor. 

“Hello…” he called out. He was amazed at the loneliness of his own voice. As soon as he closed the door behind him, he recognised a familiar aroma. Mince pies. The mincemeat, the dusted pastry, the brandy butter. He brushed a layer of snowfall from his hair, those flakes that had landed most recently. Most had already melted into his scalp.  

Someone was in the house. 

“Hello?” he questioned again.

A voice rang out: “Hello!” 

It was his sister.

Archie left behind the hallway, and turned into the living room. He ran his fingers through the wateriness of his hair. His hair rose up in ruffles, and stuck. And there they all were: four stockings, each red with a cream trim, hanging from the mantlepiece. And Jasmine was there, in her father’s armchair, drinking a glass of brandy. Together, on the nearest sofa, his mother and father were also there, silent, motionless. They looked languid, though they were propped up. On each of their faces was a look of disapproving emptiness.

Warily, Archie approached his mother and father. He peered at their faces, and saw only an aghast cavity in each of their complexions. They were as still as stuffed animals. The only illumination in the room came from candles, as they shed their low and nocturnal light. On the walls, shadows shimmered, shivered. Each of their eyes, those belonging to Layla Burnt, those belonging to Eric Poole, were dead-seeming, shadowed, corpselike. Around the face-shaped circumference of their faces, there were strange pins.

“What’s wrong with them?” Archie questioned, timidly facing their blankness.

Jasmine smiled a strange smile. 

“I switched their faces around,” she said. Three kidney dishes sat on a small coffee table. Two were full of liquid blood, coarsened by its exposure to the air and the forces of coagulation within its composition. In the third, a rag fully red with all the blood it had absorbed lay wrapped up around a scalpel, filthy with its work. 

On the one unoccupied settee, directly facing the armchair into which his sister reclined and softly rocked, Archie sat down. Seated, he explored the living-room spectacle with his eyes. For some reason, his eyes were drawn to his parents’ hands. They were holding one another’s hands, his mother’s left lay in his father’s right. Because they were deeper than all modifications, plainer and realer than all deceptions, Archie knew who each one was by their hands. For some reason he didn’t understand, from some delighting inexplicability about the static vision before him, he was moved, and found great beauty in those joined hands, though their owners had on the wrong clothes, the wrong faces. Though they were dead, there was great power in their mutual clasp, some sense of a holding on, of a clinging to a life’s last leavings, and a final hope.

“Their hands…” he uttered vaguely, in a voice little more than a squeak. 

His sister didn’t reply, or even acknowledge what he said. Archie looked back at her:    

“I’ve really missed you,” he said.

“I’ve missed you too,” she answered. 

Re-united with his family under the very beamed roof beneath which he had been raised, Archie smiled. The wind howled. The snow snowed in the windows, a pale and indefinite copiousness in the dark world. He couldn’t deny the warmth within the house, the safety. He couldn’t deny the pleasures of family, what it was to have one. In the watchful sweetness of his sister’s gaze, in the vacant and dismayed stare of those masks, those masks that his parents had become upon one another’s faces, he knew, as he sat in that warm room, in the small hours of Christmas morning, that he was lucky, that he was going to be alright. He’d tasted love, and he basked in the half-light of its mystery.