Blue Cut Out Woman

Catherine, a woman once happy is married to Crispin, a schoolteacher.  Their children, Bessy and Jake go to the local primary where Crispin works.  He drives them in and drives them home and in the hours between Catherine shops, cleans, cooks and wanders about the house they bought together when they first married.  Built of grey stone it sits isolated on a Devonshire hillside exposed to the wind and sun.  It was its prettiness that charmed them, Crispin said he could see potential and Catherine imagined herself in long skirts pulling potatoes from the vegetable patch she planned to make until the ground turned out to be too stony for her to dig, and twelve years later the kitchen hasn’t been knocked through either and still faces the wrong way.  Crispin, it turned out, doesn’t like change, or builders or mess.  Catherine spends most of her time in there, standing at the Aga, opening and closing the tired Formica cupboards and chopping vegetables at the pine table.  There is never enough light.  All she can see from the window is a dirty bit of terrace, weeds, a sodden plastic sandpit in the shape of a turtle and a crumbling stone wall that is slowly failing to hold up the rest of the garden. 

The flagstone hall has beautiful views.  When she stands at the coat rack she can see the magnificent fall and rise of rich green land, the fields and woodland that stretch for miles and miles draped in the changing seasons.  Bessy and Jake’s rooms are bright and south facing too, they’re filled with soft toys and Lego.  Catherine and Crispin’s has a walk-in wardrobe and ensuite bathroom, the carpets are light beige, the walls magnolia and she leaves the lights on when Crispin’s not there.  The guest room has books on the side table that Catherine changes occasionally.  She keeps the room clean and tidy, the bed made up.  Crispin sleeps in it when he’s not talking to her. 

It’s Monday evening.  The kids are in bed.  Catherine watches Crispin eat.  The groundswell of her unhappiness pushes her appetite out of reach.  “Can we talk?”  She’s been trying to talk for years.  His record player blasts Dvorjak.  She tries again, she says what she’s never said before.  “Crispin, I’m dying inside, this marriage is killing me, I’m beginning to feel unwell.”  When he doesn’t reply she says, “Can I turn it down?”

He looks up from his risotto, “Are you saying you’re ill?” 

“No.  I -” but she can’t finish her sentence.  She’s trapped by her own admission, twisted by him into a sentence she’s heard before. 

“You know your history.  If you’re feeling unwell we should talk about it.”  He looks at her with his fork halted in mid-air.

She knows her history.  In and out of psychiatric wards since she was twenty-one.  Sectioned three times, episodes that left her trussed in a foreign bed and dribbling custard onto plastic tablecloths.  She knows his friends think it was good of him to take her on, that his mother can’t forgive her.  Before they were married his father warned him that she was a land mine propped on the nursery floor and she worried the same but Crispin said he’d take care of her, pushed her gently down his belly, groaned and said he loved her.  The sex was fun.  He said he’d never met anyone like her, and she’s been sane and upright for longer than it’s taken him to stop caring.  She’s not unwell, she’s unhappy.  She stares at him across the parmesan.  If she talks he’ll make her see a doctor, the doctor will give her pills and Crispin will make her take them. 

She stopped taking her medication to get pregnant.  She’s had one relapse but that was after confiding to Crispin that she’d hidden in the cupboard under the stairs to stop herself from doing something she’d regret.  He’d said she wasn’t safe, he’d sent the kids to his mother’s and she’d gone to pieces and spent a month in Mercury Ward, trussed and dribbling for her confession.  No one had thought it was because she’d been up all night breastfeeding, that she was tired and alone, that she was frightened by her own exhaustion.  She’d got the kids back and taken her meds until she hadn’t been able to stand it anymore.  They’d blotted out the landscape, they’d made death impossible but had done the same for life.   She threw them away nearly six years ago and has worked hard at being well, she doesn’t talk about her mental health with her therapist anymore, she talks about the health of her marriage. 

“I don’t think that’s it.”  She tries hard to keep her voice steady.

“Then what is it?” he pierces some lettuce.

She pushes her plate away.  “You’re not listening to me.”

He carries on eating.  “If you’ve got a problem we should talk about it.” 

The record ends.  The slip of the needle scratches through their silence.  She can’t afford to leave him, she can’t leave the children, she can’t escape.  In bed that night he wants to have sex.  She says, “Can’t we get counselling?”  He sleeps in the guest room. 

The next morning he takes the children to school.  She tidies the playroom, changes the beds and loads the dishwasher.  By quarter to twelve there’s nothing left to do.  She ate a sandwich half an hour ago and has already wiped the crumbs off the board and tidied the plate and knife, the cheese and salad away.  She stands at the sink idly running a cloth over the clean surface, her eyes on the crumbling wall, the sodden, sandpit, the weeds.   She doesn’t know why he stays with her.  He doesn’t love her anymore, he doesn’t even like her. After the sex ran out he said she should make more effort.  He knows he could take the children.  He has all the money and all the power, her medical records, his mother’s backing.  His parents treat her like she’s ruining his life. 

She hangs the j-cloth over the tap and goes into the sitting room.  She married him for safety, she knows that now.  She’d needed gentleness, to be loved, not to be hated; she’d thought having someone to catch her would wipe out the fear of falling but she only had to hide her thoughts from her mother before.  Now she has to pretend to be fine all the time.  Her gut says her weakness gives him power, her mother says he’s a hero. 

The sofa faces the hearth.  In the long midday emptiness she sits on the cream upholstery and wonders if he’s right.  Maybe it is her.  Maybe she’ll never be better.  Above the fireplace hangs a Matisse print she’s had since university.  Crispin hates it but it was the only thing she wouldn’t budge on.  It’s hung in every place she’s lived, above her bed when she was a student and on the sitting room wall in the flat where he first came to take her out.  A blue cut out woman, faceless and thick limbed, soft and rounded against a white background that shows her outline clearly.  There are no fuzzy edges or hard to decipher moments of form to space.  No muddle.  It’s hanging slightly crooked.  Her blue cut out woman has been with her through every episode - she’s stared at it from bed and sofa, her brain a mash of sedatives and anti-anxiety pills, her body listless.  She’s cleaned the glass when she’s felt better, wiped cloths around the frame, straightened it.  Her illness isn’t Crispin’s fault.  She was wild at school and difficult at home, her first episode was kicked off by smoking pot according to her mother and stress according to her doctor who’d sent her to the Priory and prescribed lithium.  By the time she met Crispin she’d been a resident at the white stucco building in Richmond three times.  But she’s been well.  She gets up to straighten it.  She’s been well and he’s stopped caring.  He treats her like he wants her to stay mad so that he can stay shiny.  Golden boy.  That’s what she calls him to her friends.  Boy who can do no wrong. 

As she gently grips the frame she feels heat coming from the wall.  She lets go of the picture and runs her hands in a wide arc.  Nothing until she reaches a spot above the lintel.  She presses her palm against it, her hand sideways, her thumb on the wood, her little finger against the frame.  It’s hot, a hot spot.  Her hand covers it perfectly.  She puts her cheek to it.  Definitely warm, like the aga when Crispin turns it down in summer.

That evening while the kids do their homework and Crispin is in his study, in between cooking dinner and falling over boots, she touches it again. 

At dinner she says, or is about to, there’s a hot spot on the wall but he’s still angry from the night before and they eat lamb cutlets without talking.  When he goes to bed she touches the wall again.  The next morning as his car disappears from sight she touches it a third time.  It’s gone.  She runs her hands across the paintwork then tilts the bottom of the picture and slides her palm beneath.  There.  She feels it.  She lifts the picture off its hook, leans it against the sofa, gets a pencil, draws a trace of the heat’s outline and puts the picture back.  Over the rest of the week she marks its journey.  She means to tell Crispin but his anger has turned into sulking.  He bullies her with his silence, he’s sweet with the kids, laughing and helping with homework but if she speaks he ignores her completely.  She used to try to coax him out of it but she’s learnt not to.  It makes him sulk longer. 

By Saturday she can smell burning.  This is nothing to do with feelings.  “I’m sure I can smell something.  Cris?  Can you smell something?” 

He ignores her, his feet on the coffee table, the newspaper open.

“Burning.  Can’t you smell it?  I think there might be some kind of electrical fault.”

“Where?”  He doesn’t look up. 

“Here.  Come and feel.  There’s heat in the wall.”  It’s moved all week, circling and settling beneath the picture. 

He doesn’t move.  “Call an electrician.”

But she’s already taken the print off the wall and beneath is revealed the pattern of her week, interlinking lead outlines like a homicidal map of her brain.

He says, “What the hell is that?”

“I’ve been marking it.”

He throws the paper down and stands beside her, their bodies almost touching.  “You’ve drawn all over the paintwork.”

“Can’t you feel it?”  She runs her hand over the wall but she can’t either. 

While she sits in the kitchen icing cup cakes with the children he shuts the study door.  She knows he’s ringing his mother.  She tells the children to be quiet so she can hear the familiar wave of wits-end-pauses through the wall.  When he comes out he takes a cup cake, makes the children smile and doesn’t look at her. 

On Sunday she avoids the sitting room.

On Monday she cries all day.  She forgets to bake the bread, the stew is tasteless and she burns the crumble.  When Crispin gets home he throws it in the bin.  “I’m sending the kids to mother’s.  You need to get help.”  His mother turns up an hour later.  The children are driven away.

In the hallway, flagstones cold beneath her knees she begs him, “Please listen.  I’m not mad.  I felt it.  It’s moved all week,” but through the window she sees her doctor draw up and behind him, an ambulance.  They ask if she’ll go willingly. 

That evening, Crispin eats pizza in front of the TV then goes to bed.  In the early hours of dawn the fire that has smouldered amongst the insulation of the house, showing up in traces beneath the blue cut out woman, ignites.  The house burns to the ground taking Crispin with it.

Catherine lies on the grass in the wild and beautiful garden of her new home.  Her children play around her.  She rests her hands beneath her head and takes in the deep blue sky.