Before the rooster crows

The latch clicked home with a metallic clunk that rippled through the door, into Martha’s fingers and up her arm, shrugging something free around her shoulder blades and returning her, in shattered pieces, to herself. She stood, spine sagging and cheekbones slipping into jowls, and listened for a silence ruined by her own breathing. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself, standing under the electric light, surrounded by the shit she had chosen to prettify plaster and concrete and the tawdry necessity of a hallway from which she was expected to come and go and come and go and come and go in pursuit of some sort of life worth living, and a shrinking nausea slithered through her gut. She slipped off her shoes, dropped her bag to the floor, and went through to the kitchen. Another day down.

It’s amazing how a person can tend to the minutiae of maintaining life, even when we’re not entirely certain we want it. It only takes a sliver of doubt and we will eat enough, drink enough, breathe enough to cling on, instinct besting rumination by a decreasing margin. Until it doesn’t. Martha made herself pasta, sprinkled cheese on top, and ate a slightly too soft apple to make up for the lack of tomato sauce. She brushed her teeth, and head pounding, remembering she had had nothing to drink since breakfast, opened a carton of orange juice, washing down painkillers and grimacing at the flavour. Then, she turned on the TV, flooding the room with that instant approximation of life in all its sound and colour, and climbed into bed, tucking the thinning pelt of her bead-eyed childhood rabbit under her chin while she texted goodnight to her sister. She had promised her they would talk. She felt bad about that.

*

Martha was drifting when the knock came, queasily caressing memories like jewels on a crown of thorns. With drowsy compliance, automatic pilot did what automatic pilot does, and by the time she recognised what she was doing, she was already questioning why she recognised the woman at her door. Average height, average build, average hair, eyes, clothes, the woman was anyone, and yet a sufficient spark of recognition flared behind Martha’s squinting eyes that she stepped aside and the woman entered.

“I’m so sorry to come like this” she said, her voice tremulous and tight, “I had nowhere else to go.”

Martha stared at her guest. She grasped for anchor points in reality, feeling the tug of sleep disorientating her, leaving her off-guard and unsure in her own living room. “No. Of course. Sit down?”

The woman crumpled onto the sofa, holding her coat in a ball clutched to her stomach. Martha could see now that she’d been crying, but still, she couldn’t place her. “I don’t want to be a burden, I’m so sorry.” She started to cry again, covering her eyes with her fingers while Martha watched her lips quiver. She felt a flare of compassion for this woman, an instinct to help, even as she wished she would leave again, and take that twinge of caring with her.

“What’s happened?” she asked. “Can I call someone?”

“It was my fault, I never should have…. I can be fussy, you know? Of course you know. I don’t know how to do stuff. I’m surprised he…” Barely perceptibly, the woman squared her shoulders little, lifted her chin. “But I still shouldn’t have to put up with… I mean, it’s just that I’ve had nowhere to go and then I thought maybe….”

But she was cut-off, by the sharp rap of knuckles against the door. Again, Martha stood facing the visitor on the step before she had questioned the wisdom of throwing open her locks. The woman before her could have been a sister to the first. Younger, yes, as drab as her predecessor and similarly dressed for obscurity, but more hollow eyed, more tight jawed. Martha wondered whether she was to be relieved of the wounded interloper sat on her sofa and gestured for the newcomer to enter. Once in the living room though, the second woman behaved as if the first wasn’t even there, offering no greeting, but curling into an armchair without removing her coat.

“Are you…?”

“I’m stopping.”

“Stopping?” Martha looked to the first woman, seeking clarification, but something fell into place in her brain, and suddenly she recognised the crawling skin of withdrawal in the restless fingers, the gnawing sickness in the folded body, felt the echo in her own body and, disgusted, turned her face away. “Here?”

A third time, a noise came at the door. The urgency to flee Martha felt in the pit of her stomach sent her scurrying to answer, to feel the night air on her face, to leave, to find help, to hide. But in her way stood a girl, hood raised to shield her face, sleeves pulled down over fisted hands, blood crusting on her knuckles. Martha didn’t move. The girl though, spindle thin and pale as mist, pushed past the older woman without looking up, and Martha, filled abruptly with anger and frank loathing, turned to see the bedroom door shutting.

Martha turned, shouting after her, “You can’t just….” But suddenly she was unsure what she wanted to deny, except all of it. The pathetic wretch weeping on her sofa, the filthy addict in her chair, the weak good-for-nothing girl probably bleeding into her bed, she wanted to deny it all, the whole repulsive, festered, hopeless thing. “You can’t… You can’t…”

A wave of nausea undulated from her belly through every cell of her body, and Martha closed her eyes against it, resisting. When she opened them she saw a child, wide eyed and wary, watching her from the dark beyond the porch light. Martha stared. She watched as slight limbs coalesced from the gloom and shadows pulled and twisted themselves into fraying plaits and tendrils of hair framing a face she had long forgotten. The child waited, wet tear tracks catching the streetlights on smooth, softly curved cheeks, and when Martha touched her fingers to the rougher skin of her own cheek she felt there the moist remnant of her own pain.

“What do you want?” Though she had meant to sound kind, Martha’s words were curt and her voice cold.

The child said nothing but Martha felt the plea in her gaze, saw the need in her waifish frailty. Somewhere behind her breast bone, somewhere deeper than her spine, deeper than the floor beneath her, she felt that need begin to throb, and to swell within her, an old wound, purulent still, and plastered over again, and again, and again, with a thousand different tinctures and soporifics, ignored and untended and seeping poison into arteries and arterioles, into every muscle movement and every decision and every word she had spoken in all the years since she had waited, alone in the dark, to be held, to be seen, to be loved. To be saved. And even as she remembered trying to spread her weight across the eggshell crust of her mother’s benevolence, or tiptoe through her uncle’s jagged ego, as she remembered the belt that sliced into her skin and how the words got into the cuts and infected the flesh and bones that propelled her through every moment since, even as she felt that fear and bewilderment and wide-eyed search for comfort in a brutal world, she felt too the rising flush of pity and contempt for the child waiting for her in the dark, bruised, bare arms clutching a soft pink rabbit to her chest.

It’s amazing how a person can attend to survival at the cost of the life we believed was synonymous with it. It only takes a few words, said often enough, by the right person at the right time, for survival and life to quietly split apart and go their separate ways. Martha stepped over the threshold, and walked barefoot into the night. Approaching the child, she raised her arms, stretching them towards the girl like a harbour for her small body to lay into and rest while the storm did its worst. She knelt, bringing the two of them into line, and without hesitation, placed her hands around the narrow neck. Neither Martha nor the child balked as she started to squeeze, thumbs pressing into the dip between small collarbones, fingers overlapping across the delicate line of vertebrae. The child did not struggle or cry out, and though Martha could feel the racing pulse of a heartbeat, feel it begin to slow, felt it stop, she could not say whether that heart was hers, or the child’s.

*

The door gave way with a splintering crack, but Martha heard nothing. They found her, curled in her bed, a ragged rabbit in her hands and tears still wet on her cheeks. “After all she’s been through” said her sister, and “I hate that she died alone.” Her husband nodded. “She was always so strong!” And, disbelieving, they waited for a redemption they did not know how to grant.