GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019/20

HONOR GAVIN
‘Home Death’

SHE WAS LOOKING FOR THE RIGHT FRAME. She had tried to indicate to the shop assistant the sort of size it was that she wanted, but the shop assistant had only smiled and asked her for specific measurements, which she didn’t have. She probably should have taken measurements before leaving her apartment – that would have been helpful – but in her excitement and hurry she hadn’t, so here she was, trying, for the second time, to describe the dimensions of the frame she wanted – or no, required – by means of the distance between her hands. Her hands were neat and tidy. Clean beneath the fingernails. Neither grubby nor overly manicured, just nice. She noticed this herself as she tried, again, to indicate the size.

“About this wide,” she said. The shop assistant nodded.

“And about this high,” she said. The shop assistant briefly frowned.

It was funny, this exchange, because there was no need for the shop assistant to know what it was that she wished to frame. The shop assistant had no reason to ask whether it was a print or a photograph and if it was a photograph then whether it was personal – perhaps one she had herself taken, or one in which she featured – or something she had acquired. Or found. Had she gone to a professional framer, a shop dedicated to the business of framing as opposed to this high street hardware store, then it would have been different. Then her choice would have been more obviously aesthetic, and she would have had to reveal what it was she wished to frame, even leave it with them for a while, which she didn’t want. That would have left own character subject to scrutiny and judgment, instead of the other way round.

That would have ruined the game.

The shop assistant tilted his head considerately in just the way she imagined that he had been trained to tilt his head – considerately – then walked a little away down the aisle. The shop assistant was called Dom. She had gathered this information from his namebadge, which she had noticed whilst maneuvering her hands. Dom was short for “Dominic,” she assumed. Her own name was redundant. Her own name had not passed through her head once since she had entered the shop, which was unremittingly lit by fluorescent lighting strips and which was now grimacing – that was a favourite word of hers, grimacing, and she used it whenever she could – with store muzak. Or no, it was pop music. But she did not recognize the song. It occurred to her that it was possible, especially were she to pay with cash as opposed to a card, that she would leave this bleached grimace of a shop much as she had entered it, anonymously and unremarked. Unremarked, that was, apart from one inconsequential exchange with a shop assistant called Dom.

“Oh Dominic,” she imagined Dom’s girlfriend gasping, when he was inside her and she was faking an orgasm.

“Oh Dom.”

Dom came happily back with a frame densely packaged in plastic wrapping, and held it out for her to observe. It looked about right, from what she could tell.

“That looks about right,” she said, nodding.

“Thanks,” she added, and, though she knew it, she did not say Dom’s name. Then she smiled. Dom smiled back at her in the way many men smiled at her. It was more of a wince than a smile. It was the smile men smiled at her when they had gathered her indifference to them, but were not yet convinced of it. Sometimes she wondered whether she was herself convinced of it, her indifference to men, whether it was general or particular, complete or incremental, physical or intellectual. She tried to think, for a moment, about how Dom would fare in the game, but though she did her best to turn her mind through the possibilities, his potential or hypothetical responses, on the basis of which she would have to make her decision regarding the photograph for which she had now found, with Dom’s help, a frame – she just didn’t care. 

She smiled again in Dom’s direction, then walked towards the cash registers. Dom moved off to another customer, a man who was searching for a new set of taps to install in his bathroom. Taps were Dom’s favourite part of the job. Dom knew all about taps. That anyway was what she imagined as, on her way out of the shop, she stole a look back at the two men solemnly chatting, the right frame now hers, bagged, and on its way home.  

*

It was a silly game really. There was nothing much to it. It was just something that had occurred to her once while somebody else was talking, and she couldn’t remember exactly when or where. The monochrome photograph of the dead woman’s legs had lain unframed in her apartment for some months before the idea for the game had come. The photograph was one of a number in a book. For some months the book had sat atop a pile on her kitchen table, beneath which stood a single stool and above which dangled a hanging plant that her landlord, not her, had installed. Many a time while sipping coffee in the morning she had slid the book in which the photograph featured from off the top of the pile, flipped through, had a look. It was a funny way to start the day, maybe, but comforting. It settled her mind, which otherwise was always rushing off in this or that direction or else becoming stuck on a single thought, some worry about something she had said to somebody and how they might have interpreted it, whether what she had said might have made somebody hate her, whether she had given something away about herself that was not, necessarily, true. Looking at the photograph calmed her. Cut the thoughts off.

The photograph was one of a series of bodies in a morgue. Fresh bodies, she presumed. Or freshish. Newly dead, and not yet decayed. From the first time that she had happened upon the book in the gallery shop – she had been visiting the gallery for a different exhibition, the subject of which she had since forgot – it had been the photograph of the dead legs that had caught, and held, her attention. She wasn’t entirely sure why. All that could be seen in it were two anonymous legs, mildly splayed and gently tapered. The photograph was portrait orientated and the feet were at the top. The knees were a little knocky, maybe, but otherwise the flesh of the legs appeared to her soft. Not soft as in decomposed – not the kind of soft her father’s compost heap had gone, or would go – just soft to the touch. Pressure resistant, but not much, or not for long. Upon the feet was a pair of slippers, which she took to be silver. They were slippers, definitely, but the photograph was monochrome so of their colour, she couldn’t be sure. Were they slippers? On the opposite page was a caption that called the photograph “Home Death,” and it was that suggestion of domesticity, she thought, that had made her assume that the shoes were slippers, but then slippers could sometimes be shoes.

Sometimes she would look at the legs and wonder if the body was a woman’s at all. The slippers, their silveriness, were what had caused her to think of the legs as belonging to a woman, but otherwise it was an inference for which she had no evidence, and therefore a questionable inference, if even really an inference. When she had this thought she put down her coffee cup – actually a mug, one an ex had unwittingly bequeathed her when they had broken up – and considered the possibility that it was this undecidability – that was another of her favourite words, but she tried not to use it too much – that had drawn her to the photograph. It was, she thought, this aspect she had identified with. The body in the photograph was a woman in the same sense she was, which was ambivalently, if at all. To be sure, others, such as for example Dom, the shop assistant she would soon meet in the high street hardware store, more often than not took her for a woman, but as far as she was concerned “she” attached to her in the same way “she” attached to the legs of the dead body in the photograph. And it was the arbitrariness of that attachment that had attached her, in turn, to the photograph – to “Home Death.”

The body in the photograph wasn’t even whole. After all, who knew whether there was anything remaining above the waist, whether there was a neck or a head, whether there were arms and hands? Who knew whether the legs were anywhere actually joined? The bottom border of the photograph crossed the thighs at just the point were the flesh of each thigh neared the flesh of the other. The question of what was between the legs was beyond the photograph’s scope, but only just. Was that also what had drawn her to it? Sometimes these questions occurred to her. But sometimes she just looked at the photograph. Sometimes she pushed her palm hard down upon the glossy paper on which it was printed and remarked how her forefinger was approximately the same size and width of the legs, when looked at like that.  

During the months that the photograph had sat unframed in her apartment, unseparated from its place in the book, she had not stopped to think about the life the legs had lived. Nor had she thought, or not much, about how the legs had come to be dead. She had just looked at the picture, observed, again and again, the slight wonk of the legs, their skew-whiff peace. Then she had started thinking of the photograph – clearly picturing it in her head – at various points in the day, when she was waiting for a bus or sat in a business meeting, silently grimacing, or when she was absently scrolling through other photographs on her phone and asking herself what people would think of her were she to post such and such a picture on the Internet. Then one day when she was on her way to meet an older woman with whom she had recently been chatting online, she had had the idea for the game. Had it been then? Or had it been when she had been out drinking with a man she had no interest in and who, because he knew she had no interest in him, had begun to tell her of his conquests with that odd camaraderie men often presumed of her? Had it been then?

To be honest, she didn’t really care.

*

It really was a stupid game. She thought this once again to herself as she unwrapped the frame from its packaging, without having taken off her coat and without having paused for a snack. She was impatient. She noticed this herself on account of how much she was rushing, ripping up the wrapping with her hands rather than strategically cutting it. Now that she had the frame she wanted to get everything ready as fast as possible. It was stupid, but nevertheless, she wanted to get on with playing the game – with actually playing it with somebody, as opposed to just in her head, as for example she had done, or attempted to do, in Dom’s case.

Poor Dom.

She tore the plastic wrapping off and removed the cardboarded corners. A sizable bin stood a few paces away from her, but she chose not to use it. She chose, instead, to let the plastic wrapping accumulate in a buffeting heap by her feet in her kitchen, which wasn’t so much a kitchen as the corner of the four-walled room that formed her apartment. It was a studio. Her apartment. It was costly for what it was, but from where she lived she could walk to work, and she was, she considered, lazy. In some ways. Maybe she was just easily bored. She was melancholic, definitely, but long ago she had come to the view that being so was better, less prone to upset, than possessing a positive disposition. Those she knew who were so inclined seemed to her to have to work so hard – the knocks came, and they had to find some way of triumphing, or else of not seeming to be knocked, and what was more it seemed to her that such people as these – she knew quite a lot – were constantly having to find things to keep themselves busy with, activities, pastimes, fads. Hobbies, of which she herself had few.

Maybe one.

None, unless she counted the game.

She lifted the glass from the backing, and placed and arranged the book in the frame. The photograph would fit. She would have to trim it down a little, skim off some of the vertical sides, but that was OK. That could be done. There was enough edge before the legs started, and even then the edge was just the metal container in which the body was stored. She tried to think of the precise word for the container, and also the word for where, in the morgue, individual bodies were kept, but neither word came. She went to the drawer and took out a pair of kitchen scissors, which were grubby, could have done with a wash. She thought that to herself as she began, carefully and with stealth, to trim the vertical sides of the photograph down. She concentrated quite hard. Then, when the picture was in position and the little clips on the back of the frame afixed each at a neat distance to one another, it occurred to her that she had nothing with which to hang the framed photograph on the wall.

She sat down, sighed. Got up again. Opened the fridge and lifted the lid from a tub of margarine, dipped her finger in the cool soft yellow within, licked her finger, sat down, and again sighed.

It occurred to her that her finger had passed through the margarine much as a finger might pass through decomposing flesh.

Oh come on.

In her head it was a crucial element of the game, a critical aspect of its functioning, that “Home Death” be hung. That it be framed was crucial too – it couldn’t really be hung if it weren’t framed – but the hanging was of foremost significance, she thought, because only if the photograph was hung could it then be taken down. Only if it were hung could she intentionally take it down, or not take it down, depending upon her decision regarding whomever was visiting her in her apartment, whomever she was playing the game with. And also she just had to ask herself what sort of person she would be were she to fudge and muddy her own rules. Were she to acquiesce to the photograph resting up against the wall, then, she would never have taken it down. Then, she would have just turned it around, or snuck it from view. Everything depended on the possibility of the photograph being taken down, and therefore on the necessity of it being hung.

She looked wildly around the room, vaguely hopeful that something, some implement or tool, would turn up out of the blue and make it possible for her to hang the framed photograph now.

She was impatient. She didn’t want to wait.

She wanted to get on with playing the game.

*

Two weeks passed, and she still had not gotten around to hanging “Home Death” in its frame. Work had been busy and stressful, in the evenings she had capitulated to various television series – she liked true crime, of course she did – while weekends had been mostly devoted to a developing relationship with the older woman she had met online. Relationship wasn’t really the right word. It definitely wasn’t one of her favourite words, but nevertheless, she liked Pat a lot, probably because Pat liked sex a lot, like her. Pat lived in the suburbs and it was when she was on her way there by bus – she always went to Pat’s, Pat never came to hers – that she refined the rules for the game. She still had not actually played the game, because the photograph of the dead legs, though now framed, was still unhung. She hadn’t gotten round to buying a hammer and nail. She noted this again to herself as the bus bumped down the road. Then she noncommittally nodded at a boy on a bike who had thrown his arm up to wave at the bus.

Then her head turned again to the rules of the game.

The game was to be played under the following circumstances and according to the following codes.

She would become aware that somebody was coming to visit her. Or not necessarily visiting her. It would be enough just to know that somebody was coming round to her apartment. As soon as she knew of somebody coming – as soon as she became aware of a future visitor – the game effectively began.

She would have to prepare for the visitation by making a decision about whether to take “Home Death” down from its hypothetical position on the wall, or leave it hanging up. She would have to make this decision on the basis of her estimation of who was visiting her, her thoughts about their character, what they would make of the photograph and how they might interpret her decision to have it framed and hung on her wall – what they would begin to think of her were they to see it there, brazenly hung on her apartment wall.

Of course, she knew that her decision would say as much about herself as about her visitor. That was a part of a game. In each case, the decision she made would help her realize something about the nature of her relationship with the visitor, what aspects of herself she felt she could trust them with, whether she was interested in leaving the photograph up even if she thought it would discomfort them, what it meant if her inclination was to take the photograph down even if she thought the visitor would think nothing of it, or might even admire it.   

She was aware the game had snags. Were she to make the decision to take the framed photograph down, for example, she would never be able to establish how a particular visitor might have responded had she left the photograph up. It was entirely within the realms of possibility that a visitor might come by her apartment and not notice the photograph even if it was there, hanging on the wall. Some people were not very observant, after all. Some visitors might not stay very long. Some might look at the photograph and assume the legs were not dead, just asleep. But at the same time, these snags were sort of the point. It was exactly this aspect of the game – its catches and conundra and gaps – that she was deep in thought about when, having disembarked the bus, she found herself stood at Pat’s door, and then inside Pat’s roomy house, and then sat on the edge of Pat’s bed having had sex, a bottle of beer now in her hand.

“What are you thinking?” asked Pat.

“Nothing much,” she answered back. And then because she didn’t mean to be rude, and because she quite liked Pat, because she liked having sex with Pat, she moved her bottle-less hand along the softening flesh of Pat’s thighs and asked Pat to tell her the story about the woman who had left her lover alone when her lover had threatened to commit suicide. Pat was good at telling stories, and this was amongst her best. The story was set in New York in the 50s which, perhaps because she couldn’t help but picture the 50s in monochrome, made her think, again, of “Home Death.” The woman’s lover had sat on the edge of a bed and threatened to swallow a number of pills. The woman told her lover to do whatever she wanted to do, then went off to eat hamburgers and get drunk. Then the woman went on holiday, still not knowing whether her lover had done it, or not.

After Pat had finished telling the story, she got off the bed and showered.

Not longer after that she left, without having asked Pat if she could borrow a hammer and nail.

*

A month or so passed, and it was a while since she had seen Pat. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Pat. It was just that she didn’t particularly like the journey to the suburbs and the fuss Pat made over Pat’s cats, and also she was now sleeping with somebody else, a woman who was younger than her and who had once told her that she thought about cadavers a lot. 

“Have you ever seen a dead body in the flesh?” she had asked, and when she thought back, now, to having asked that, she felt embarrassed by the question’s obvious crudity, its somewhat clichéd nonchalance.

Somewhat was probably her least favourite word.

“No,” the younger woman had replied. “Have you?”

She had never seen a dead body in the flesh. She had known people who had died, but the caskets had not been open when she went to their funerals and nor had she ever had to formally identify a corpse. Perhaps this trivialised her interest in “Home Death” – perhaps it made her seem infantile. Silly. Perhaps if she had ever actually seen a dead body, she would never have thought of the game.

She sat down on the stool by her breakfast table, momentarily defeated by a feeling of guilt. But of what was she guilty? Nothing in particular, she thought, and that was why she couldn’t shrug off the guilt. She had seen plenty of dead bodies on television, of course. She was watching a great deal of television by then, everything and anything except gameshows, perhaps because she herself had something of a gameshow mentality and watching them felt too “close”. And there were plenty other programmes to watch. At the moment she was watching a series about an American couple who were really Soviet sleeper agents, deeply embedded spies whose cover was just the fact they were an ordinary American couple with a house in the suburbs and two children, one of whom was a difficult teenager. A complete brat. In one scene the couple was tasked, after dinner, with vanishing a body that a person they were on the verge of recruiting to their cause had, accidentally, killed. They did the washing up, went to the hotel were the death had occurred, cracked the bones of the cadaver’s legs until the body could be folded up into a suitcase of regular size. While they were cracking the bones they asked the person they were recruiting to help, which he did, and then one of the couple – the wife, she thought – stood back and took a photograph of the man the couple were recruiting, cracking the bones himself.

The taking of the photograph was, she observed, the true moment of recruitment, its consummation – nothing was said to this effect in the scene itself, but it was clear from the look the three of them shared. What constituted the recruitment was not the photograph, however, but just the fact of its existence, which wasn’t the same thing as its content. Not quite.

Sometimes, without knowing why exactly, she replayed this scene in her head when she was trying to sleep. Sometimes she literally replayed it, and then went to sleep. Once she spoke of it to the younger woman she was now fucking, who was called Trish.

“Would you like me to play dead for you?” Trish asked. 

“No,” she said, though she had liked it when Pat had done that. 

“Home Death” remained framed but unhung. When Trish came to visit her in her apartment, as Pat had never done, she made sure to tuck the photograph away beneath her bed. Then she changed her mind, and put it in the airing cupboard. Then she changed her mind one more time, and hid the photograph amongst some cardboard boxes she had used when moving in, and which she hadn’t yet gotten round to taking out.

She still considered the game unplayed.

*

More months passed, and she was no longer going into work. But she was meticulous about phoning in sick each day that she was off, and sent an email to colleagues outlining everything that needed to be done in her absence, and everything that could be left. She resented herself for doing this – for effectively manicuring her own vanishing, as it were – but couldn’t help herself. She had had episodes such as this before, days and weeks and sometimes more when the thought of seeing another living human being disgusted her to her core, whatever that was. Trish sent a crescendo of sexy then anxious then panicked texts, but each went unanswered, untouched. Pat called her out of the blue one night, but though she thought it might do her good to have sex with Pat, perhaps because Pat knew she liked, sometimes, to be dominated back, fucked in the ass and spanked, instead of the other way round, she couldn’t bring herself to answer the call.

“I just have to see it through,” she thought, while watering her plant.

Her fingernails were grubby with compost, and overly long. It was because they were overlong that they had gotten grubby with compost, she thought. 

Her plant wasn’t even hers.

*

All that was left to eat in her fridge was the tub of margarine, its cool soft yellow studded with holes.

*

Her plant began to struggle, then die. 

“I thought I had watered it,” she thought.

*

She watched television a lot.  

*

And then before she knew it, she was back at work. “Home Death” remained framed but unhung, and she forgot about it, after a while. She forgot about the game too, until one day when she was out drinking with somebody who may or may not have been speaking when she first had had the idea, the game came to her again. Was it then? Or was it when she was out jogging one time by the side of the reeking canal, having taken up jogging as a hobby, her only one? Or was it when she was on the bus to Pat’s, with whom she had resumed an affair while also sleeping with Trish, who turned up at her apartment one day with a plastic bag, and inside it, a hammer and nails.

“What are those for?” she asked.

“To fix your door,” said Trish. “Have you not noticed the hinge is loose?”

*

“In the end the question is whether I never played the game,” she said  

(it didn’t really matter when or where or to whom)

  “or whether I only ever played it with myself, whether I was both contestant, and host.”