The school called Anna at half-past 12 on Monday and asked why she’d put a thumb in her son’s packed lunch. ‘Hang on,’ she said, ‘Let me just take you somewhere quieter.’
Fine rain was needling the windows, the sky a sharp grey – miles below her bodies hurried with free newspapers covering their hair, and cars patiently queued at the lights. She strode purposefully across the office towards the breakout pod, which her colleague had renamed the ‘breakdown pod’ after the second round of redundancies, and sat straight backed on the edge of the hemp-coloured sofa, wincing slightly. Sipping a bottle of water, she raised the phone to her ear. She still held the handset at an angle because of the bandage, but the pain had subsided thanks to painkillers, and now she felt only a pleasant, righteous throb.
The weekend had started loudly, with Robbie angry about his blue T-shirt with the numbers on and where was his other sock. Anna rose from bed and padded towards the washing machine with a pile of clothes and made Robbie scrambled eggs while the short cycle ran. He stared at the plate with a kind of bafflement. No bacon? He looked up at Anna in her fleece dressing gown, a gown so soft its synthetic fur sometimes provoked in her a meditative hum, and she gasped at the pain she saw.
No bacon? His brow was furrowed, his head leaning to the side. She thought quickly: could she pop to Sainsburys? She could not – the car was at the garage. Would he like some cereal? He would not, no. She stroked her sleeve. Robbie looked down again at his eggs, hardening now, and listlessly separated them with the edge of his fork, the sound of old flesh. Anna watched as it made the slow silver journey to his mouth, absent of bacon, of care, of hope. ‘STOP’, she said.
By the toaster she kept her very sharpest knife. It was unusual to find a decent knife in a charity shop, not least one that came sealed, boxed and documented, with a printed letter in a language Anna believed to be Hebrew, but this knife had served her well. The letter was long gone and the box was now being used for felt-tips, but she used the knife every day, cutting tomatoes for salad and the crusts off sandwiches. It always gave her a feeling, or three or four feelings: power, of competency, the knowledge that, if it came to it, she could run out into the woods behind IKEA and slay a small deer for their tea, stripping its skin perhaps for a blanket. It pulsed pleasingly in her hand.
With one elbow on the counter she pushed aside her dressing gown, revealing her thigh beneath the hem of an oversized T-shirt, and very quickly, she sliced off a fine strip. Did it hurt? She wouldn’t call this pain – there was a sting, yes, but the primary feeling was one of elation. An image came to her of riding the rollercoaster that summer at Alton Towers – why had she only just realised that the pleasure of a fairground came from learning how it felt to die?
The pan was already sizzling with a little butter when she dropped in the thinly sliced flesh. It vibrated gently, the smell of dirty hands. A red line wrote itself towards her shin. She added salt, and then, with a tea towel pressed between her legs, slid the plate to her son. He ate it wordlessly, and when the plate was clean, he smiled. Of course Anna had seen him smile before. She just – she couldn’t exactly remember when. Not this month, certainly. This fiscal year? It was hard to recall, as was the rush she got from seeing his small teeth, from seeing his eyes like that. She leaned, suddenly faint with joy, against the table.
At lunchtime she cut off her ear lobes and made Robbie nuggets. For dinner she slow-cooked her knee. The knife seemed to get sharper. It rained on Sunday, which was always a problem. Robbie became furious in bad weather. He would sit on his computer shouting at people in America about their mothers and weaponry, occasionally calling down for a snack, which Anna would place carefully beside him – a peanut butter sandwich perhaps, some cucumber batons. She would collect them again untouched at evening time. He would stand at dusk by the sink eating salad bowls of cereal, and sometimes she would put her hand on his arm and he would let her.
