IF WALLS COULD TALK

1751

"If walls could talk," she says softly, her voice a half-whisper, fractured from some deep recess of her heart. It is one of those loamy afternoons, where the sun feels like a soapy brush, sinking dust-filled and tangerine-tangled around the curls of people's hair. She looks out of the window - checking, again, with some sort of pent up, jack-rabbit fear tessellating through her, taut in her collarbones and shoulder lines. Then she turns back to her lover.

"If this wall could talk," her lover replies, stretching her long arms to reach round and nestle comfortably - gently, tenderly - on the small of the other woman's back, "it would be bloody chatty."

She laughs - she, the lady of this house, Eden - and lets her head fall into the soft-skinned juncture of her handmaid's clavicle, as if trying to find herself there, almost as if she could search, press, and find some unbidden and promised love beneath the weathered dermis.

I, as the wall, who has watched and quietly observed their encounters over the last year, know that she would find exactly that. The only thing separating Eden's forehead from the irrevocable, undeniable Eden that lives underneath Portia's skin, is the tight structured bone. Portia could cut and she would bleed Eden - and vice versa.

Portia looks at me now as Eden sways in her arms, almost as if she knows what I can see. But I cannot talk, and it is perhaps better this way. I have watched these women in the tenderest hours of the night and the early promises of the morning, and I have seen their love. I would not talk. I swear it.

"Love," Eden pulls Portia's chin down. "You're tense."

Portia smiles faintly, shakes her head. "You had me thinking about the wall."

"You'll keep our secret, won't you, wall?" Eden laughs lightly, turns, presses her back and the rear of her head against the column of Portia's neck. "You won't tell."

I won't tell.

Portia leans down, presses a soft kiss to the top of Lady Eden's head. The sweetest of things. Barely there - yet undeniably there, as palpable as breathing and a rivulet vein. I avert my eyes. It is polite, I think.

1862

It is late evening, and the new owner of this house - a young man, a boy if nothing else, has stormed in, hands clenched into infinity, his knuckles white bright against the deep olive of his skin.

"Goddamnit!" He shouts. Kicks the wall. Tosses the globe that I know has sat there since Eden and Portia many years before. (I cannot think what has happened to them. It hurts.)

Guillermo De León, a ripe, unsure thing, as fragile and curious as buds in springtime, continues to smash up the drawing room. My room. He hurls one of the books - Tennyson, luckily one I'm not particularly fond of - against me.

Ouch.

"Merdia." Guillermo presses his head against the condensed window. "¡Los cojones! ¡Tu puta madre!"

The door to the right of me clicks. Guillermo starts, his forehead clammy from the damp glass. Another boy walks in - I know this one, too. Karl. Such a dreadfully boring name.

"Hello." Karl says.

Guillermo is clearly not interested in small talk (except he really, really is, he could talk for days months and years to Karl, this, even I, as a wall, know), so he folds his arms like making a cage around his own rotten bruised pear of a heart, and says, "What do you want?"

Karl frowns, and then, bites. "Nothing. I was just walking through. Is that an issue, sir?"

"No," Guillermo shrugs. "I was sitting in here."

"And attacking it, clearly."

Guillermo flushes near purple. "Had some. Feelings. Do not concern yourself about it."

"Ah, feelings," Karl flutters his hands. "What a menace to the smooth-brained capacities of a one Guillermo De León."

"¡Cierra la boca!" He snaps. Not very noble of you, Guillermo, I think.

Karl barks a laugh, it is scraping and somewhat cruel but I know, I know still Guillermo wants to taste it, hold it on his tongue like a wad of chewing tobacco, bitter to every last bit of matter and crumb until he's sick with it. "I get the sense you're upset, Memo. Wanna talk about it? Wanna-" he leans forward, and I can smell the cigarettes "- talk to your dear old friend?"

"So we're friends now?"

Karl looks annoyed. "Yes. We've always been friends."

"Friends? After - after that?"

Interesting.

"You're not gonna let that go, eh?" Karl twists his lip.

If walls could talk, I think, I'd tell them to get over themselves.

"Let it go? It happened, like, a week ago." And I have not thought of anything since, I know everything in Guillermo wants to say. In fact, he wants to scream it, wants to turn to the wide mouth of the quarry cliff and yell I KISSED KARL HARDINGTON AND IT WAS FUCKING AMAZING AND THEN HE REALISED IT WAS ME HE WAS KISSING. I AM NOT GOOD ENOUGH I HAVE NEVER BEEN GOOD ENOUGH ALL I WANTED WAS CLOSENESS LIKE TRYING TO HEAL OVER OLD WOUNDS, BUT IT'S COMPLETELY OKAY BECAUSE WE'RE FRIENDS.

I am, as walls go, very perceptive.

"I don't know what you want me to say," Karl shrugs. I watch his mouth twist. If I had a heart, it would ache. "It was a mistake?"

Things slow down, a bit, then. Guillermo cracks his neck and swallows his pride like vomit in his mouth and looks up to the ceiling because something in his eye is itching. "A mistake?" His voice wobbles.

If I had a heart, it would break.

"Yeah, Memo. A mistake. I shouldn't have kissed you."

Guillermo's voice is cracking. "I- I kissed you."

"Semantics," Karl shrugs. He is spiteful, I think. Spiteful and in love. "It doesn't matter. Look, I'm not going to tell anyone, I promise. So you can stop, just stop, looking for me to ask that I forget that Guillermo De León himself likes abominables and kissing them. I won't tell."

Guillermo wrinkles his nose. He looks sick. "What? You think that's what this is?"

Karl laughs hollow. He spreads his arms. All very Christ-like. "What else is it?"

"You ended the kiss. You kicked me out. Don't - don't you dare act like I'm the one who hates the other half in this friendship, Hardington."

We're on surnames.

"I'm not going to tell anyone."

"Tell anyone what?" Guillermo looks dizzy with shouting, he wants to rip the open window off and toss it into the fields below like trying to skim stones, except he does not want the smooth grey back of a pebble, he wants to use Karl's shoulder blades for divining light and throw them into the water and wash all of it away; wants to punch Karl until his teeth fall out and then put them back in because he's sorry, he is sorry; he's so angry it makes him feel fuzzy at the edges because nothing is ever simple, and all he wants to do is kiss Karl. Or skim him along the water. Take out his ribs like cherry pits and toss them up in the air together. Play catch. Tag.

He's sick. He's genuinely going insane. I can see it.

Karl sighs, puts his head in his hands, tugs on his hair, releasing a coil. "I'm not going to tell anyone that you're a homosexual, Guillermo - if you are, or, like, I'm your joke, or something." He smiles, unfriendly. "Unless you just. You know. Just."

"Just what? Just what, Karl?"

"God."

"Just what, Karl? Finish the sentence."

Karl ignores him, and turns his back, rifles in his pocket deep for a cigarette, lights it. I can hear as Guillermo's heart jackknifes down his chest and into his feet as though he's a tree struck by lightning.

"Karl. Finish. That. Sentence. Please."

Karl's eyes turn to meet him, flashing. "Kissed me for the sake of it. Thought it was funny. Kiss the commoner - ha, it's like, pin the tail on the donkey, but for homosexuals and the noblemen that screw them."

"Vete a la mierda." Guillermo spits.

"Yeah, you wanted to." Karl uses wanted in air quotes.

Karl is a bad guy. Fact.

"I'm attracted to men, Karl. I’m a - whatever you call it. Sorry if that's such a strange concept to fucking grasp, Jesus, maybe if you payed more attention to your god-damn surroundings instead of moping inside your own tortured brain for one fucking second you'd have noticed that."

"Recent development, then? Just figured things out?" Karl takes a long drag, and laughs on the exhale. Guillermo hates him. God, he wants to kiss him. Bite his teeth. Unskin him like a plum. "Seems like you're having a crisis, here, De León, and you just. God, you definitely just came to me because you only know one fucking homosexual and thought yeah, I'm sure he'd be down for that, because who wouldn't? Who wouldn't be down for some of Guillermo De León, right? Because it's not like I could tell anyone is it, without being killed. Damn you."

Guillermo is a good guy. Fact. I watch all this silently.

"¡Dios mío! I wanted to kiss you. You think this is about you? You think you're the first man I've been with? You think you're the first man I wanted to kiss? This is what I'm saying, you're. Oy. You, Karl, are a selfish coward. You're a coward."

Karl does nothing but bare teeth in response.

"Are you so- merdia, you're such a damn victim, aren't you, Hardington, Christ, can you not comprehend in your small estúpido mind maybe I just wanted to kiss you?"

"You want me?" Karl mocks. "Romantically? You want to - what was it? Sleep with me?"

“Te odio desde el fondo de mi corazón.”

I hate you from the bottom of my heart.

Liar, I think.

Guillermo wants to fall apart under Karl's tongue like a razor blade is trapped under there. Fact a la damn fact.

"You keep saying that, Guillermo, but I'm not seeing any action here."

So Guillermo pitches forward and slams his lips into Karl like a crash car test, it is frenzied and messy and they grapple with one another as if they are fighting, and, in their own way, they are, Guillermo wants to carve out a bloody place for himself there inside Karl's mouth like a butcher, wants to scar them both with it, and then Karl is half-laughing half-seething as he pushes himself back, all the way into Guillermo's chest. Their noses knock together and their teeth clash, it is almost painful, actually, this wrestling for space between them, and then Karl sticks his hands roughly against the plastered wall - not me, thank God - and Guillermo tips his throat back to the sky like an animal and laughs.

"Something funny?" Karl murmurs against Guillermo's jaw, his neck, the dip where his clavicle meets his shoulder, and Guillermo just laughs harder, he shoves Karl back and grabs his head, locking his fingers in, pushing down like whiplash to the soft vulnerability under Karl's ears, and then they stumble and eventually break apart, panting, furious.

"If walls could talk," Karl scoffs. I look away, politely.

1914

"I'd have helped you."

They are sopping wet, just rushed in from the rainstorm.

"No, Emily, you wouldn't have."

"I would." Her eyes begin to shine. "We could've run away together."

Jon sighs. "No, baby."

"You killed him. If they find that out they'll kill you. Don't. Go. Back."

If I had eyes, they would've widened.

"Lower your voice!" He hisses. "I have to go back - they'll know I did it if I don't. Don't you fucking get that, Emily? I'm goddamn dead either way."

"I'll kill all of them for you, Jon, don't go back." Tears start to spill.

"It's going to rain again," Jon says, turning away, jimmying a cigarette out of his pocket and putting it between his lips. He doesn't light it.

"No it's not," Emily retorts, slamming the barely open window down. "You're changing the subject."

Jon grunts. Stares at the floor. "I'm sorry."

"Would you do it again?" Emily says, facing him. "Would you kill him again?"

Emily makes him feel like a young fresh thing or else an open nerve inside a cracked tooth, sensation equals pain, Jon fiddles with the filter on his cigarette before finally lighting it.

"Of course I would," he says, looking up. Earnest. Honest. Far too honest, in fact. "I'd kill a hundred men for you, Em, but it doesn't mean I can get away with it."

"Run away with me," she says quietly. "We can go to Asia, where the war hasn't touched."

I cannot tell what is rain and what is tears.

"And leave all this?" Jon gestures to the room - to, incidentally, me. "What kind of life would that be?"

The floor is sodden with the runoff from their clothes.

"I'd live any way if I was with you," she murmurs, and I want to cry for her. She is so young, and fragile. And they are both killers. This I know.

And you wall, I think - what would you do for love?

"You don't want this life, Emily. You're being stupid."

"The hell is that supposed to mean, Jon?" Emily folds her arms over her chest with a defiant look cracking refraction across her pretty features.

She's got a rather fetching scar spidering up her cheek which Jon remembers running his fingers down as if trying to memorise a map, as if he was some untrained foolish cartographer nestling deep and home struck inside the crevices of mountains, altitude lines, remembers the way the white flash of teeth underneath the red ribbon had terrified him in the dark corner of Emily's bedroom after their posting and he found what that man had done to her.

As a wall, I know a lot. Jon had killed him for what he'd done, and he'd done it well, and he'd made it look like an accident. And he'd done it for her. This I know, because I know everything.

"It means," Jon narrows his eyes, "that you don't know anything about how this works. I told you to leave it to me."

"Screw you," she spits, and grins like an animal with a chunk of meat stuck in its front teeth, dripping plasma and shredded fur down the white hot spike of a fang. She is vicious; unstoppable. "You're so easy to rile up. Jon. You're insane about the smallest shit. What is wrong with you?"

"What- what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?" Jon stops bracing the wall and turns to Emily frontal, looking down at her. Emily stares up. She is testing him, and he cannot even see it. "You're the fucking one who's got such a violent issue that you can't even kill someone like a normal person. You've got to make it about your bleeding freaking heart and how the world's done you so wrong."

"Kill someone like a normal person?" Emily spits, untrapping her lip on the F and biting the end of her tongue; something like string infinitesimal pulls the front of her eyebrows down into a frown, hurt and angry and derisive. Something mean and nasty I do not get to glimpse on either of them a lot.

"You're pathetic. You suck the life out of me when you do this, Emily.”

She breathes heavily into the silence. Looks at me.

I'm not involved, I want to say, but that is because I know exactly how this ends.

“I have tried to love you and you make it so hard. You suck the god damn life out of me."

"Leave me, then."

Jon turns away. Swallows sick in his mouth. Clenches and then unclenches his jaw as if chewing this rotten little thing between them.

"Do I scare you, Jon? Do these damaged goods scare you?"

"There you go again." Jon throws his hand up. "God. The world does not despise you because you're you, Emily. It despises you because you're awful." Jon puts his finger to the centre of Emily's chest and says, brokenly. "You're awful. I'm - I'm trying to be good to you. To be nice to you."

"Well, aren't you a doll," Emily sneers.

"No. You're just so obsessed with your own misery you'd rather ruin something - something good, because then you don't have to confront the truth that you don't know who you are. You don't know who you are, and so you think if you keep - if you keep being nasty, if you keep pushing me away, then you can forget that you nearly died."

Emily flinches. Jon has her by the throat, and he wants to stop, but he has not tasted blood in so long, and he hates Emily in this moment, viscerally hates her.

She is not a good person. This, I know.

"You almost died, Em. You were dead. I watched you, and you were dead." He puts a hand on Emily's chest like searching for a wild heartbeat, out of joint, discordant, unseated in its nestled home. "Dead. And now, you're terrified, because you almost died there all alone with no one but me to comfort you, and so you think you can keep being awful and horrible you can forget how scared you were."

"Screw you." Emily's voice shakes. "He did that. He killed me."

Jon knows he has gone too far, and it hurts, because Emily makes him feel like a scared boy again, lost and clawing and waiting for his skinned knees to heal over. Emily is like a scab that keeps getting picked off.

"No, screw you. You're just a scared kid, Em, and you - you can't take that out on me. You died."

"Damn you," Emily snarls.

They stay like that for a moment. They lick their fury on their tongues like communion bread, and their rage at one another, at the world, at the knowledge of what the other tastes like and feels like pressed into each crooked corner of themselves, feels so thick and galvanic that neither of them can breathe properly.

And then Emily lurches upwards and Jon lets her, and then Jon kisses her on the mouth, because she died and he tried to save her, and he loves her. It tastes like rain and blood and promises. It is too hard, too much. Their teeth clash, their hands fight for space, Emily's head knocks against the front of the window ("Ouch," "Sorry," and a "Shut up, come here,"). They are like something fleeing the half-baked insignificant world outside, hiding from the rain in the warm crook of their chests. I watch all this and I am undeniably, wholly sad.

"I'm sorry," she gasps against Jon's lips, and he thinks, this is it, he genuinely can not do or think or see anything else other than the insatiable need to live inside the feeling of Emily biting the corner of his mouth and biting the top of his cheek, trailing down to his chin, fastening her teeth and scraping them there.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it." Jon promises. "You're alive. I saved you."

"Yes, you did," Emily mumbles against the underside of Jon's jaw. "Don't lie to me. You meant it. Don't lie to me, Jon," and so Jon doesn't lie, he just kisses Emily back. He just kisses her back in the dust and the dirt of my room, as if they are something wasted, something abandoned by the roadside, they're a rotten hedgehog with tyre tracks down its back or trash tossed out of someone's moving window, whatever, because Emily is kissing Jon and it feels like fighting.

It is Jon who pulls away this time. "Shit." He breathes, and Emily looks up at him, eyes wide and unblinking. "I didn't mean it."

"You meant it."

"God, yeah. I meant it." He dips to kiss Emily again, and their hair is sodden and dripping in skeins of curls around their faces, rainwater like homecoming or else the great and whole vast beyond trickles from their noses and makes their hands slip along the rock face of one another's biceps, shoulders, collarbones. It is as if they are checking themselves for cracks. Finding anything to fill.

I know he knows that she is not really there at all.

"What?" Emily says.

"You're beautiful," Jon shrugs, and Emily laughs, bitter and half-wrong and still she means it. Infectious. Jon's lips quirk up in a smile and he shrugs. "You are. You're really beautiful."

Emily rolls her eyes. Clenches and unclenches her hand. "Shut up."

"You're beautiful, Emily."

"Is that why you hate me?"

"I don't hate you." Jon blinks.

"Liar."

"I don't hate you. Do you hate me?"

"Yes." Emily turns to him.

"But you like me, too. Don't you?"

"Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yeah. Jesus wept, yeah."

"Good."

"Good?" Jon bubbles. "I can't keep doing this."

"Doing what."

"This, Emily. I just. I like you," he says helplessly, and in that moment he abandons all pretence of ignorance, abandons all semblance or hope of trying to cover his tracks, the rain in his mouth tastes like you-wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve-Jon-Carton and it-is-a-picked-unspooling-thread-like-the-holes-of-a-well-worn jumper. "I like you. I told you it was going to rain."

Emily smiles, squints. Looks up. Pushes her sopping bangs from her forehead. "You were right."

"I know."

"I like you too."

Something in Jon trembles and cracks. He swears it's so loud Emily can hear it. I definitely heard it.

"Liar."

"Yeah." Emily smiles and shrugs. "I like you too."

She is not there.

Yet they sit for the next hour in silence.

"I'm sorry, Jon," she says, and he does not look up, because he knows that she died two years ago in the room next door. Something great and young and unmoored is blooming in his chest.

"Promise you won't tell anyone I'm crazy?" He says to me through tears. His Emily. She was never there.

I won't tell. I say. If this wall could talk, it would be silent.