You’ve gone into a shop to get out of the heat, so I follow. It’s a salvage place, full of reclaimed junk, the rooms deep in dust. The stuffiness feels eighteenth century; it’s arsenic, it’s lead. I trip over a brass witch’s cauldron and you snap at me, but I reason it’s the heat, nothing to do with my sister. I pick up a penknife, 1930s, open the blade and peer at the words: Richard’s Sheffield. There’s a lamppost logo. I can barely see it. I think there’s something wrong with my vision. My head still hurts. I walked into a cupboard. I told my sister about it, when I saw her staring at the bump. ‘What, again?’ she said, wide-eyed, but I’m one of those people who really does walk into cupboards.
You’ve picked up a book, you’re leafing through it. I scrabble around in a cardboard box and pull out a toy cannon, first world war vintage. I pop a biro down the barrel and pull back the lever, fire it, expecting it to go a foot or so and drop but it doesn’t, it shoots straight for you and gets you just behind the ear. I laugh, can’t help myself. You slam the book down on a Victorian bureau, the dust flies up and obscures you – this is how I love you, this is the only possible way, when you’re in a cloud of dust and look as if you’re from a different era, heroic, but the dust settles and you’re sick again and I despise the feeling.
I pick up a porcelain lid painted with boats on the Ning Po River, some are Chinese junks some paddle steamers, the sea is rough, the waves battle with the skies, clouds gather, the distant mountains are lilac, there are shadows in the sea from the boats and the nearer rocks. The lid could be from a pomade, or could have had something as prosaic as potted shrimp, I don’t know, I don’t know anything. That’s what you’ve taken to telling me.
I do know stuff. Look, there’s a Georgian tea bowl, slightly chipped. Birds flying, blue on white, so simple. The birds in pairs. I put it down carefully. It’s the sort of thing I break. I love it and then I break it. I’m safer with this envelope, full of counters, toy bank notes, a tiny embroidered bird on a scrap of silk.
I take the objects out and put them in order. I am planning carefully. The heat is seeping in from the outside, it’s no longer vicious, it’s something soft that needs nurturing. I will use it. I pick up the embroidered bird and stroke it against my cheek, feeling its gentleness.
You’re staring at a pile of white powder that you’ve tipped out of a small leather flask. I bet you’ll sniff it. Yes! You have! Go on, sneeze, you bastard. Blow half your brains out, then look me in the eye and tell me you’re not using any more. Tell me you didn’t spend last night next door when you claimed you’d missed the last train and booked into a Travelodge.
I’m sweaty now and it’s horrible. I want to get out of here. I feel unaccountably sad, because this is a lovely place, it could be full of things we could buy and take home and care for – and this has nothing to do with last night, all the lies. It’s the heat and that vision I had when the dust rose up. That was real.
God, it’s hot in here. I have a purple mark on my forearm from this morning when I suggested we took a little trip out, and you grew unaccountably furious. I’d disturbed you when you were writing something. I don’t know what it was, you hid it, you shouted at me – I lunged at you, tried to get hold of the piece of paper so you grabbed my arm and pulled me from the room, out through the French windows into the garden. The sun was blinding, you were too strong, I was fighting the whole universe, my parents, you, my sister, the teachers at school who always put me down and told me I was stupid, the doctors who didn’t know anything. Someone screamed and it might have been me but I’d switched off any control, I was fighting, biting, scratching, I thought you’d broken my arm, I hit you as hard as I could, I wanted to smash your face in, but you ducked and I missed, I always miss. You never do.
You threw my arm down, nearly wrenched it out of joint.
And then something odd happened. You moved and I was no longer blinded by the sun, and you were smiling. You said, ‘So where would you like to go?’ I didn’t answer. You kept smiling. A family of sparrows were chittering in the buddleia. A bumble bee made its way through a maze of Himalayan poppies. ‘How about we pop into town for coffee?’ you said, entirely reasonably, so I said, ‘That would be nice.’ You were still smiling. You ushered me back into the house. I felt the sun burning the back of my neck and I was happy to go. I don’t do heat very well.
I changed into a long-sleeved shirt. There would be a mark on my arm.
We left the house, and my sister was in her front garden, mowing the lawn.
‘Where are you two off to then?’ she said.
‘Just into town for a coffee,’ you said. ‘Fancy joining us?’
‘Can’t – dentist’s appointment,’ she said, as if it were true. I couldn’t bear to look at her.
We live in an old part of town. They’re Georgian houses, beautiful, with tiny attic rooms for the servants, little windows, and some people convert these attics into guest rooms. Ours are still original. They have fireplaces that look as if they’ve come out of dolls’ houses, and alcoves where you could just about fit in a bed, but if you were more than five feet tall it would be a squash, you’d need to have endured a childhood of malnourishment, be the a daughter of malnourished parents. You’d need to have known poverty and cruelty, to be dumbly grateful to have a ‘place’. Sometimes I go up into the attics and curl up and dream. You have no idea that I do this, that in my dreams I turn you into someone heroic who can rescue me.
We walk into town. The heat is unbearable. That strange smile of yours is fading and you’re starting to look more like yourself; unhappy. We try various coffee shops, but they’re too crowded. I watch the drops of perspiration on your forehead. I count them. Once the tenth drips into your eyes, you will snap. Seven, eight, nine…
That’s when you march me into the junk shop, and I’m not sure if either of us will ever come out.
I want to be on the Ning Po River. I want to be fishing beneath the lilac mountains, I want the sea to form perfect waves, that slap against the hull, I want to see silvery dolphins leap out of the sea in perfect arcs, shedding rainbows, I want the steamships to chug out of sight and never come back, I want to live in house made of bamboo and paper on the mountainside above the harbour, I want to embroider a tiny bird on a soft piece of silk, and hold it up against your cheek.
–Art by Joanna Jankowska