Closure (9 page)

4.
   Sic. No London trains call at both Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe. Probably means Stafford and Crewe.

5.
   Sic. Fact check: there is no McDonalds between Manchester Piccadilly and Oldham Street.

6.
   Sic. See Note 5. No Spar All Night Kiosk either.

7.
   Sic. Miasma is an unpleasant smell. Prob. means ether.

8.
   Repetition: Inshallah means God willing.

9.
   I am not paid enough to untangle the confusion of tenses in this paragraph.

10.
 Sic. Perhaps a reference to the Greek God Hypnos (male). No reference in antiquity to him ever arriving in a gold chariot, whether sprayed, dipped or painted.

11.
 Jamaican patois. Yet later narrator says he is of African heritage?

12.
 If he slept like a horse, perhaps saddlebag is better here than a flight bag? He has after all stepped off a train, not a plane.

13.
 Only reference I can find to Windrushers is to a UK gliding club. Were they blown off course? I suggest cut or rephrase.

14.
 Maths is not this writer's strong point I suspect. So far seven people “at or around” bus stop including himself, not six, as stated earlier.

15.
 Is this a Northern expression? It reads as slightly sexual, or is that just me? Suggest rephrase or omit.

16.
 The tenses are all over the place in this paragraph. Again.

17.
 Good advice for this writer. Every so often someone at a call centre speaks sense.

18.
 Infelicitous?

19.
 Should either describe the dress or not. Brackets become annoying. Dress as described is a logical impossibility.

20.
 Sic. It was Oldham Rd a couple of paragraphs earlier. Fact check: no London Rd in Manchester leads to or from Oldham.

21.
 Darts player. Died 2012. Fact check: his nickname was “Jocky”. Can find no reference to him being “the prince of the flighted arrow”.

22.
 Sic. Thucydides was Greek; need I say more? The entire reference is a load of cobblers, containing as many errors as you can shake a stick at.

23.
 No local newspaper articles cover this accident and I can find no official crime report on it.

24.
 Finished? Thank God!

LEONE ROSS
THE MÜLLERIAN EMINENCE

The Müllerian ducts end in an epithelial [membranous tissue] elevation, [called] the Müllerian eminence… in the male [foetus] the Müllerian ducts atrophy, but traces … are represented by the testes… In the female [foetus] the Müllerian ducts… undergo further development. The portions which lie in the genital core fuse to form the uterus and vagina… The hymen represents the remains of the Müllerian eminence.

In adult women, the Müllerian eminence has no function.

—
Anatomy of the Human Body
, Henry Gray, 1918

Charu Deol lived in the large cold city for five months and four days before he found the hymen, wedged between a wall and a filing cabinet in the small law office where he cleaned on Thursday nights. The building was an old government-protected church, but the local people only worshipped on the weekend, so the rector rented the empty rooms. If Charu Deol had been a half-inch to the right, he might have missed the hymen, but the sunshine coming through the stained glass window in streams of red, blue and green illuminated the corner where it lay.

Charu Deol thought it strange that a building could be protected. There were people playing music on the trains for money, and two nights ago, he'd seen a man wailing for cold in the street. He thought the government of such a fine, big city might make sure people were protected first.

Still, he'd known several buildings that acted like people, including his father's summer house, with its white walls and sweating ceiling and its tendency to dance and creak when his parents argued. They'd argued a great deal, mostly because his mother worked there as a maid and complained that the walls were conspiring with his father's wife. Charu Deol was also aware of a certain nihilism in the character of the room where he now lived – the eaves and floor crumbling at an ever-increasing and truculent rate. When he ate the reheated fish and chips with curry sauce that his landlady left him in the evenings before work, he could hear the room complaining loudly.

The hymen didn't look anything like the small and fleshy curtain he might have imagined, not that he'd ever thought about such a thing. At first it didn't occur to him that he'd found a sample of that much-prized remnant of gestational development, the existence – or lack thereof – which had caused so much pain and misery for millennia. He hardly knew what a hymen was, having only ever laid down with one woman in his life: the supple fifty-something maid who worked for his mother.

Away from his father's summer house, his mother had her own maid, because what else did you work for, after all? She had offered warm and sausagey arms, the sweet breath of a much younger woman, and a kind of delighted amusement at his nakedness. After he'd expelled himself inside her – something that took longer than he'd foreseen, distracted as he was by the impending return of his mother – she'd not let him up, but gripped his buttocks in her hands, pressing her entire pelvis into him and pistoning her hips with great purpose and breathlessness.

He was left quite sore and with the discouraging suspicion that she'd used him as one might a firm cushion, the curved end of a table, the water jetting out of a spigot, or any other thing that facilitated frottage. Afterwards, she treated him exactly as before: as if he was a vase she had to clean under and never quite found a place for.

He used the side of his broom to pull the soft, tiny crescent-shaped thing toward him; then, bent double, he touched the hymen with his forefinger.

First, he realised it was a hymen. Next, that the hymen had lived inside a twenty-seven-year old woman, for twenty-seven years. When she was twenty-four, her boyfriend returned home, bad tempered from a quarrel with his boss. When she asked him what was wrong one time too many, the boyfriend – who prior to that moment had washed dishes and protected her from the rain and gone with her to see band concerts and helped her home when she was drunk, and collapsed laughing with her on the sofa – grabbed her arm and squeezed it as tight as he could, causing a sharp pain in her shoulder and her heart. When she said, “You're hurting me,” like the women in movies and books, he squeezed all the tighter and looked happy doing it, and the little flesh crescent inside her slid through her labia and down the leg of her jeans and onto their kitchen floor. The boyfriend swept it up the next day. The bin bag burst in the apartment rubbish dispenser; the hymen got stuck to the edge of someone's yellow skirts and this little pink crescent was pulled along the cold and windy city streets.

Now it was gently pulsating in Charu Deol's horrified hand.

The knowledge inside the hymen did not manifest in good and tidy order, like a narrative on a TV screen. It was more, thought Charu Deol, like being a djinn or a soul snake, slipping inside the twenty-seven-year-old woman's skin and looking out through her eyes. He had the discomforting feeling that her body was a bad fit, and stifling, like a hot-water bottle around his thinner, browner self, baggy at the elbows and around the nose. He knew the woman was still with her boyfriend and that she had thought about what she'd do if he ever squeezed her arm again. Charu Deol knew they pretended that the arm-squeeze and the not-stopping was a nothing, or a small thing, instead of the cruel thing it was, and that the hair on her arm where the boyfriend gripped her was like a singed patch of grass that never grew again.

Charu Deol sat down on the floor of the law-office church and saw that his hands were shaking. The hymen felt like thin silk between his fingers. What was he to
do
with it? To discard it was like throwing out a prayer book or a sacred chalice. Before he knew what he was doing, he took a new dusting cloth from his cart, carefully wrapped it around the hymen and placed it in his pocket.

When he got home, he stole a small, plastic bag from his landlady's kitchen – the kind she packed with naan and Worcestershire sauce – and tied it up with a plastic-covered piece of wire for work. She would be angry when she discovered his theft, so he left a pound coin on the floor, to the left of the refrigerator, as if he'd dropped it.

She'd put the coin in her pocket without asking if it belonged to him.

Alone in his room, he unwrapped the tiny, silken, throbbing thing and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He was assaulted with the woman's story again: the squeeze, the disbelief, the lurking, tiny fear. This was why, when the boyfriend slapped the backs of friends or laughed too loud, a small part of the twenty-seven-year-old woman winced and moved away.

Charu Deol placed the hymen inside the plastic bag and sealed it, setting it on the nightstand where he could see it.

He was a witness, and that was important.

He couldn't sleep, conscious of the lumpy mattress, the large cupboard that took up most of his boxroom, the smell of the thin blue blankets his landlady stole from the old people's home where she worked. No one wants them, she said, no one has any use for them. He didn't know why she stole them; all she did was stack them in the cupboard.

He thought of his father, a man who had never held him or, as far as he knew, been proud of him at all.

He got up and slipped the plastic bag in between the ninth and tenth blue blanket. Before he did so, he examined it one more time. In the dim light, the hymen looked like a beautiful eye: brown and dark and soft and wet, its worn edges like eyelashes, an expression he couldn't fathom at its centre.

Charu Deol took long walks. That was what big-city people did. He went to a small and well-manicured park during the hours he should have been sleeping. He bent his head near the small park pond and dipped his long cracked toes in the water until someone stared and he realised he was up to his ankles at the cold, dank lip. He watched a man teach his two girls cricket with a tennis racket. He watched an orange-helmeted man run down the path, holding his son's scooter, laughing and calling,
Use your brakes!
He thought about city people soaking in baths and whether they noticed the scum floating to the surface like bad tea, and about the landlady asking him if he'd like her bath water after she got out and how he'd stammered, No thank you. That's the way you do it here, she said, and her face reminded him of his mother's when his father's wife went out to get sweet biscuits at the end of a meal – his mother's long, dignified neck.

A woman walked past with a shrill voice and a plaid shirt and a friend eating grapes, while he dried his cold feet on the grass. When they were gone, he saw the small, iridescent thing by his big toe and wanted to ignore it, or to decide it was a lost earring. He closed his eyes. But he could not leave it there, forsaking his new knowledge, as if he had no responsibility.

Charu Deol lay on the grass, curled around the hymen, and played nudge-chase with it, like a cat with half-dead prey, snatching at the air above it, using his thin sleeve to push it around under the soft edges of the setting sun. This shrill-voiced woman's hymen was not as soft or simple as the brown eye that lay between the ninth and tenth blue blankets in his room. This one was round, with seven holes in its centre, reminding him of the way thin, raw bread dough broke when you dragged it across a hot stove; but he'd never seen dough encrusted with stars. This hymen glittered so ferociously against the wet grass, he thought it might leave him and soar into the sky where it belonged.

He touched it, expecting it to burn him.

The woman with the shrill voice had been raped twice before her tenth birthday, each time by her father, who smelled expensive then, and still did now. It was not the pain the woman remembered, but the shuddering of her father's body and the way he closed his eyes, as if he could see the burning face of God. She had never had an orgasm because she couldn't bear that same shuddering inside of her; if it broke free, it might kill all the flowers that ever were. Charu Deol knew all this and also that the shrill-voiced woman sometimes wondered why no more than twice? Was it because her father had stopped loving her?

Charu Deol shivered on the grass. After a while, he picked up the silver-star hymen and put it into the plastic bag in his coat pocket because part of him had known another would come. He watched the geese until a park attendant nudged him with a broom. What's up, chappie, he said. He was an older man, with the dark chin of an uncle.

What do you do when evil comes, asked Charu Deol.

The attendant took out a pack of mentholated cigarettes. He sat down next to Charu Deol and smoked two while watching the geese. I don't know, said the park attendant. But I think you have to be rational and careful about these things.

Charu Deol took the plastic bag out of his coat pocket and showed it to him.

I think you're very emotional, said the park attendant, and bared his teeth. He didn't seem to see the bag. Chin up, laddie, he said.

Charu Deol sat on his lumpy bed that night and examined the bagged and beautiful hymens. Surely, he thought, they belonged to virgins. But neither of these violated women were pure. Was this a strange sickness of city women that no one had thought to tell him? Certainly he hadn't known city women before, with so many ideas and so many of them about him. More than once, he'd found himself feeling sorry for them, even the ones who looked at him strangely on the 453 bus and moved their purses to the left when they saw him.

His Tuesday job was for a company that made industrial bleach. He liked it best there. Despite the smell of ammonia, his cart shone and the teeth of his lady boss also shone and she looked into his face, not through the back of his head – and laughed loudly when he told her about the cracks in every one of his landlady's china cups.

Is your country very beautiful, Charu?

He thought it very familiar of her to address him so. He could see she was made of the same stuff as his mother's maid, very different from the finer skin of his father. She lifted the hair off her neck, which was something he thought she should only do with a man she knew well. Nevertheless, he nodded politely and the boss lady left and he went to the large unisex toilet and scrubbed yellow and brown stains out of the bowls, his rubber gloves rolled all the way up his wrists and forearms.

When he backed out of the stall and turned around, there were three hymens on the floor. One of them was like a piece of thunder singing a dark song and rolling back and forth – the hymen of a woman in her fifties who got something called a good backhander when she talked too much, and a pinch on the waist when her opinions sounded more clever than her husband's. The second reminded him of a teardrop. When he lifted it to his face, it filled him with memories of a woman whose husband once ironed the inside of her left thigh like a shirt. The third one slipped him inside the skin of a woman who had a happy life except for the time she'd walked home from school and a stranger crept up behind her, put his hand up her skirt and clutched her vulva.

Charu Deol was so startled by the sudden feeling of invasion that he dropped the hymen in the soap dish and had to fish it out again. Two more hung from the rolling towels, like wind chimes, twins: one raped, one not, but he knew the untouched sister stayed with the violated twin because she wished it had been her instead. He clutched the sink; he couldn't see his reflection because there was a spray of crystalline hymens across the mirror, each smaller than the last. He bent closer and realised it was only one after all, exploded across the glass like a sneeze. The woman it belonged to had clouted her best friend's fiancée when he'd tried to hold her down. He hit her so hard in return he made her deaf in one ear. She had never told her best friend, but she didn't go to her house anymore and that had caused problems between them. The blood from her ear had tinged the hymen spray a shy blush-pink.

Charu Deol set about gathering them all.

He thought them safe, slipped between the blue blankets, until Friday. Friday was his landlady's cleaning day; till then he was expected to keep his own room clean, and did so. But he came home to find her shining his floors with a coconut husk and changing the sheets on his bed, her fat, brown back unexpectedly familiar. The blue blankets were stacked on the floor, one plastic bag peeping out from a crevice. He was so frightened she might have thrown them away, or hurt them, that before he knew it he was speaking in his father's baritone, demanding she respect his privacy, please and thank you, and if she couldn't, she could find someone
else
to pay her every Sunday for this shithole. It was a city word and he felt powerful saying it to her.