The Knife

A coruscating short story.

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.

By the time he came to the table today, Anna had already prepared his meat, having glazed her thigh strips with brown sugar, and she served them on the sourdough bread she had baked at dawn, with a small pat of beans. She hadn’t enjoyed cooking like this for years, their family meals having simplified over the years so that if you squinted at the plate it looked like a soft handful of Lego, green, brown, yellow. The rapture she felt now watching him eat took her close to tears. Between her finger and thumb she stroked the velveteen polyester of her dressing gown, and moderated her breathing so as not to frighten Robbie.

In certain lights, like this one, when the March sun trickled across the table, she could see him as he used to be, choking with laughter when tickled under his arms, hiding behind her legs in shops, a glad pink bag of biscuits and emotion. Sometimes now she would creep into Robbie’s room at night, picking her way through the dark ripe air to kneel by his sleeping body and let his breaths warm her. At lunchtime he went to the park with someone and their brother to play football, so Anna packed him a sandwich, having slowly cooked some calf meat in butter then blended it to a soft paste.

In Robbie’s absence, she tended her wounds. It was unusual for Anna to touch herself in this way, with such grand tenderness, and catching her reflection in the TV she felt suddenly mortified. Her hand hovered above her thigh like the wrong end of a magnet, unable. There were so many things she should have been doing instead, a series of digital alarms faintly sounding, and yet she was bleeding still so she persisted, gently bathing the skin. She learned how to stitch her body back together on YouTube, a video with a gentle panpiped soundtrack – it offered the holistic and hygienic reassurance of wellness, and she succumbed a little more to the task with each sharp scratch. Paracetamolled she was lying on the sofa an hour later, stroking her gown and body in loving ways when an email alerted her to an issue with the formatting of tomorrow’s presentation. When Robbie came home, asking for squash, she was hunched grimly over her laptop, and directed him towards the kitchen. By the time she had finished her work the room was dark, and she followed the delicate sound of metal down the hallway, to where Robbie stood, a little flushed.

Anna’s brow furrowed. Something was different. The room smelled faintly of rhubarb, and the surfaces were clear and shining. ‘I cleaned the kitchen,’ Robbie said slowly, each word weighted and doughy. In order to stop herself crying, she found herself singing. The sound rose from the very darkest pits of her belly, rose from the fibroids, the scar tissue, the meat, and it floated up as a low rich sound which arrived at the back of her tongue like a hymn. Robbie laughed a little awkwardly, as the song sang itself, something like ABBA, something like a nursery rhyme, eventually finding its tune – the lullaby Anna used to rock Robbie to sleep with, in the chair, in the old room.

She put her hands on his shoulders, and as she sang they danced, roughly at first, but soon waltzing smoothly around and around the kitchen, the green lino bouncing under Anna’s socks. The knife was drying beside the sink, flashing reflections of her spinning blue gown and the pinkness of his long child arms. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sang, resting her cheek on his head. He’d be taller than her soon. ‘What for?’ he asked, his voice muffled by her shoulder. She gestured towards this kitchen, this world, life. With his right hand he absentmindedly stroked the bandage on her arm.

The office was open-plan, hot-desks, flexible space, for agile working and staff wellbeing and these words written proudly on signs in blue. They led to a culture of labelling – in the mini fridge Anna had written ‘BREASTMILK’ brightly on her carton to avoid more thefts. She was enjoying a new sort of clarity here, at work, the hum of her little pains and the fizzing lights, the sense that her parenting was spot-lit, finally, and she found she was happy to discuss it.

On the phone, Anna primly detailed to the teacher the nutritional wealth of her son’s lunches, with their tupperware of sliced apple (Vitamin C), sticks of cheddar (dairy), crackers (carbohydrates), and for protein, thumb. He also had a Twix. ‘And it wasn’t just any thumb,’ she said with measured disdain, ‘It was his mother’s.’ The teacher, whose name Anna believed was Sue or Tricia, paused, unsure of where to step. The landline crackled, and Anna pictured her in the dim brown staffroom with its glass mugs and closed windows. The women sat together for a moment in their puddled silence, waiting. ‘Why?’ the teacher said eventually, in a voice that creaked with effort.

Anna softened. She took another sip of water. ‘Sue,’ she said (‘Tricia,’ the teacher replied but it didn’t matter), ‘Do you have children?’ The silence meant no, of course, so, fast and low – behind her the marketing team were filing into a budget meeting as if arriving at a party – she explained quickly what it was to be a mother, what it was to have a son, what it was, the sensual horror of sacrifice, of purpose, what it was to feed a boy. ‘I’m sorry,’ interrupted Tricia, ‘you’ll have to speak up, the line is bad.’ Anna sighed, and after a pause flatly replied, ‘I found a magic knife.’