Honey(84)

Before it reaches the end Yrsa pauses and then deletes the video, the Dell cranking and whirring at the effort. She’s thought about it since the funeral, killing Kitty, drowning that pretty little head. She looks again at the photo of them. But she can’t kill Kitty. Doing that would not only be irresponsible, but it would feel like defeating some point. A point, however, she is now unsure of.

Lying back, she thinks of Richardson, Hugh, Mack, Henry. The beating, choking, pushing, poisoning, she’s got away with all of it. Not even Jesus Christ has stopped her. She sits up. Perhaps she’s been wrong: subjection is not in the spectacle of the violence, is not about the act as and when it happens, it’s about the getting away with it. Or, as Hartman calls it, the terror of the mundane. Perhaps she’s been focusing on the wrong thing and that, yes, it’s unfortunate that Felix didn’t do it, but this is beside the point. For her to truly replicate, and therefore subvert the grammar of violence, she must repeat the act. Repeat and repeat. Getting up from the bed, she sits at her desk and returns to her methodology document. New paragraph.





XIX


Forty-two days after the killing, the high starts. Yrsa’s body wakes her early in the morning, too rapt with energy for sleep. The trees drop orange. Same lectures, different students, heavier workloads, and none of it touches her. She eats sugar on waking, swims twice the number of lengths, starts running. She goes down to London more, stays out later, drinks. Ida comments on it. Isiah comments on it. She asks him to try different things. “Are you sure you want me to say that to you?” “Are you sure you want me to do that to you?” She completes a chapter of her PhD in days, smokes, reads faster.



* * *





That man there with a taste for young girls and a deleted internet history, how would you do it? Him, there, who says women can’t say no, go on, how would you?



* * *





Isiah’s body is sweaty against her, it’s 4 a.m. and they’re still dancing. The drum and bass are heavy and she’s taken molly. She focuses in on the grip of his hands around her waist, bites his neck and feels the effect. Someone comes up behind and grabs her, Isiah pushes the guy back. Yrsa laughs. They’re all ripe for the killing.



* * *





Him, there, with the nice-guy eyes and nice-guy smile and let-me-help-you-home act. Tell me, how would you?



* * *





“They were dancing and singing when the patrollers invaded the dance and started beating people” (Hartman, 1997).



* * *





She checks Felix’s Facebook like a compulsion, remembering more things. Dates spent wandering Westfields and up Portobello. Pretending to be adults, drinking wine in Soho. Sitting on his bed and testing each other on their exam material. Every time a memory arises she closes her eyes and, starting at its edges, erases it clean from her mind. It wasn’t her in the flat that day. She didn’t do it.



* * *





“The patrollers beat him to death” (Hartman, 1997).



* * *





Running by the river, she stops to look up—have you ever noticed how fantastically expansive the sky is, one infinite mass of opportunity and— her mother calls.



* * *





“Are you dying?”

“No, why would I be dying?” Candice takes her shoes off, she doesn’t believe in shoes on carpets; Yrsa keeps hers on, showing her mother into her room.

“You’ve never come and visited me in Cambridge like this.”

“Well, I’m not dying.”

“Is Dad dying?”

“No one’s dying.”

Her mother looks out of place against Yrsa’s single bed and poster-hung walls.

“Can I have a cup of tea?” Candice asks, removing her coat.

“I’ve only got English Breakfast.”

“That’s fine.”

“Sugar?”

“No sugar.”

Yrsa doesn’t want to leave her mother alone. When she arrived, she tried to take her to a café, but Candice said that they needed somewhere private. “You can sit on the bed,” Yrsa says as she leaves the room.

She puts a spoonful of sugar into her mother’s tea and, when she returns to her room Candice is standing by her desk, her coat folded over her arm.

“Are these the John Lewis sheets?” she asks, looking at the stone-colored linen.

“Yes,” Yrsa hands her the mug.

“They’re nice. We need more sheets at home.”

Yrsa sits on her bed. There’s rain against the window.

“You don’t have many pictures,” her mother says, looking at the walls.

“I’ve loads.”

“Family photos, I mean.” And Candice reaches over to switch on the red-shade lamp. The day is gray cast. “Ida’s not in?”

“No. Why are you here?”

Candice, still holding her coat, sips her tea, looks at her daughter. “Why did you and Felix break up?”

“Why do you care now?”