Read Scissors, Paper, Stone Online
Authors: Elizabeth Day
Scissors, Paper, Stone
Praise for
Scissors, Paper, Stone
‘Elizabeth Day’s observations of a certain sort of middle-class life […] are altogether brilliant … Moreover, the self-restraint of the plot is as impressive as that of the characterisation: when the cause of the family’s unhappiness is finally revealed, it is all the more unpleasant for being so utterly unexpected’
Spectator
‘[A] tense, sensitive exploration of a mother and daughter's fractured relationship and the man between them’
Marie Claire
‘Deftly unpicks a daughter’s troubled relationship with her mother after her father has lapsed into a coma’
Observer
‘[
Scissors, Paper, Stone
] has the page-turning compulsion of a thriller combined with the horror of discovering exactly what happens when human behaviour skids from normal to disturbing’
Belfast Telegraph Morning
‘Rips along convincingly … Day reveals the horrible truth behind this ostensibly ordinary family. At this point Day's brilliance as a writer starts delivering a real punch … thoroughly believable’
New Zealand Herald
‘Clever and well-written’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Elizabeth Day has written an absorbing and moving novel in which she has managed to convey the chronic damage that a father, wife and daughter may do to one another. Her writing is both delicate and direct, not an easy combination to effect, but she has pulled it off’ Elizabeth Jane Howard
'A daring, absorbing and beautifully-written story of damage and betrayal, this is an exhilarating and deeply affecting first novel’
Jennie Rooney, author of
Inside the Whale
Scissors, Paper, Stone
Elizabeth Day
To Kamal
And to my parents,
for being nothing like Anne and Charles
Contents
At first he does not realise he is bleeding. He wakes in a state of numbness, with no memory of where he is. It takes him several minutes to notice the glutinous dark-red liquid but, even then, he cannot work out where it is coming from. It trickles past his nose with a slow insistence and gathers in a small pool at the tip of his finger. It smells of uncooked meat.
He can make no sense of his position. He appears to be lying on hard grey flagstones, his face parallel with the serrated metal surface of a manhole cover. His left cheek is pressed painfully against the pavement and he cannot open one eye. The other eye, sticky and blurred, is focusing on a blackened blob of chewing gum, trodden into the ground a few inches from his nose.
He rolls his eye around frantically in its socket, straining to see as much as possible. Out of one corner, he can make out the bridge of his nose. An arm is spread out underneath his head, disjointed and bent out of shape. He wonders briefly whose arm it is and then he works out with a jolt that it must be his and a sickness rises up inside him.
He finds that he cannot move. It is not that he feels any pain, simply that any physical exertion is impossible. Something is loose and rattling in his mouth. He presses at it with the tip of his swollen tongue and thinks it must be a tooth.
A voice that he does not recognise, male and throaty, is speaking. After a few seconds, he notices that the words make sense.
‘All right mate, all right, just keep still. The ambulance will be here soon.’
That is when he realises he must be bleeding. Instantly, he feels a desperate surge of white-hot panic. His one eye starts to weep, silently, and the tears drip down from the corner of his eyelid to the tip of his nose and on to the pavement, where they mix in with the blood, thinning it to a watery consistency. He tries to speak but no sound emerges. His mind is filling with infinite questions, each one expanding to fill the space like a sea anenome unfurling underwater.
What is happening?
Where am I?
What am I doing here?
He feels himself at the brink of something, as if he is about to fall a very long distance. He is overwhelmingly tired and his eyelid starts to droop, obscuring his field of vision even more. From the squinted sliver of sight that remains, he sees the rounded edge of a black leather boot. The boot is battered and laced and has a thick rubber sole and it is coming towards him and now it is treading into the redness that seems to be covering a larger area of pavement than before. As the boot moves away, he notices that it leaves an imprint on the ground, a stencilled trail of wet blood.
He can make out snippets of a conversation that is taking place above his head.
‘Yeah, he was knocked off his bike, poor sod.’
‘Christ. Was he wearing a helmet?’
‘Don’t think so. Driver didn’t even stop.’
‘Where’s the ambulance?’
‘On its way.’
His eyelid is pressing down, and despite telling himself that he must stay awake, that it is important to remain alert, he is powerless to stop it. Soon, he is enveloped by a throbbing darkness, a beating tide of black that crashes against the bones of his skull. He hears the sirens and, just before he allows himself to fall into nothingness, he has one startlingly clear vision of his daughter. She is twelve years old and lying in bed with the flu and he has made her buttered toast and she is too hot so she has drawn back the bedsheets.
The last thing he sees before his mind collapses is the precise curve of the pale flesh of her kneecap and he is saturated by love.
It was a curious thing, but when she was told that her husband was almost dead, her first thought was not for him but for the beef casserole. She had been in the process of boiling up a stock when the doorbell rang, tearing up parsley stalks and rummaging blindly in the cupboard for an elusive box of bay leaves. She answered the door while still wearing her apron and her hands were slightly damp as she unlocked the safety chain. A speck of indeterminate green foliage had attached itself to the cuff of her floral printed blouse. She was attempting to swat it away when she became aware of the uniformed officers on her doorstep.
There were two of them – a white man and a pretty Asian woman, standing shoulder to shoulder underneath the porch awning as though their primary purpose was to advertise the police force’s ethnically diverse recruiting practice. Anne braced herself to receive a fistful of glossy leaflets and a promotional plastic keyring, but then she noticed that neither of them was smiling.
‘Mrs Redfern?’ the man said, and the silver numbers on his epaulettes glinted in the mid-morning light.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s about your husband.’ He had flabby pink cheeks and small, round eyes and a kindness that hung loosely around his lips. He looked as though he should be outdoors, building dry-stone walls and eating thick ham sandwiches. Anne felt a twinge of sympathy for him, for how difficult he was finding it to enunciate the words. There was a short pause that Anne realised she was expected to fill.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident.’
She felt a coolness seep into her bones but she stood straight-backed in the doorway and did not move. The policeman looked relieved that she was not breaking down. The pretty Asian woman reached out to touch her arm. Anne became aware of the pressure of her hand and although she usually disliked the tactile presumption of strangers, she found it oddly comforting.
The man was talking, telling her something about Charles being knocked off his bicycle and being taken to hospital and the fact that he was unconscious: still alive, but only just.
Only just. She found herself thinking how strange it was that two small words could encapsulate so much.
Then the woman was talking about cups of tea and lifts to the hospital and is-there-anyone-you-could-call and Anne found that she was not thinking of Charles, of what state he might be in or of how worried she should be, but that instead her mind was filled with the perfectly clear image of four unpeeled carrots that she had left draining in a colander in the sink.
She told the police officers that she would drive herself to hospital.
‘Are you sure?’ the man asked, eyebrows pushed together in furrowed concern.
She nodded and added a smile for good measure.
‘Perhaps you’d like us to come inside and sit with you for a bit?’ said the woman, her eyes darting beyond Anne’s shoulder into the hallway.
‘No, honestly, I’ll be fine,’ Anne said firmly. ‘Thank you,’ and she started to close the door before they could say anything else. The casserole. She had to finish the casserole.
As she walked back through to the kitchen, she passed the ugly dark wooden hat-stand at the foot of the staircase. Charles had brought it home with him one evening several years ago, with no explanation. When she asked where it was from, he replied coldly that a colleague had wanted to get rid of it. She had known, by the tone of his voice, not to push the point any further.
The hat-stand struck Anne as a particularly useless piece of clutter, but it had taken up permanent residence in the hallway, casting grotesque shadows over the tiles like a stunted tree, its branches gnarled and misshapen into arthritic wooden fingers.
She had grown used to it and normally never gave it a second glance. But this time she noticed that Charles’s cycling helmet was still hanging on one of the lower hooks. She winced. A sudden vision of his bloodied skull, squashed and bruised like overripe red fruit, rose unbidden in her mind. She pushed the thought back under and returned to the chopping board.
For twenty minutes, Anne peeled carrots and diced potatoes and roughly sliced the marbled red beef that was springy and cool to the touch. When she lifted away the polythene bag in which the butcher had wrapped the meat, it left a trickle of bloodied water on the metallic indentations of the sink. Anne shuddered when she noticed, wiping it away briskly with a cloth.
She slid all the ingredients into a big saucepan, angling the chopping board at its lip and pushing the vegetables into the simmering stock with the back of the knife. She left it to boil and then she took off her apron and went upstairs and brushed her hair, tucking it neatly behind her ears. She unbuttoned the floral blouse and changed into a loose-fitting V-neck scented with the ferric freshness of fabric conditioner.
She was conscious of the fact that she was behaving oddly and she wondered for a moment whether she might be suffering from shock. But Anne did not feel shocked. She felt – what exactly? She felt cocooned, un-tethered from actuality. She felt vaguely anxious, but there was an underlying sense that nothing was quite happening as it should. It was not so much unreal as hyper-real, as if she had just been made aware of each tiny dot of colour that made up every solid object she looked at. It felt like the pins and needles sensation she got in the tips of her fingers after she warmed her cold hands against a hot radiator, only then becoming aware of the completeness of her physical presence.
The smell of the casserole wafted up from the kitchen, steamed and earthy. Anne walked downstairs, taking her time, placing each foot carefully in front of the other. She was conscious of the need for extreme caution because, whatever happened when she got to the hospital, she would need somehow to deal with it and she wanted to stretch out this small scrap of leftover time as long as she could. This, now, here: this was still the time before, the space that existed prior to knowledge. She had no idea yet what would be required of her or how badly Charles was hurt.