The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night Read online

  I look around me. The kitchen floor is covered with feathers. There’s a bloody handprint on the freezer door.

  You can’t say that’s not exciting.

  I grab the disinfectant.

  It’s dark outside and every house on the street is glowing like a planet. Every house, that is, apart from the Drurys’ at number 143. Their semi-detached is a black hole. I’m not one for gossip but last month I heard they’d opted for a joint heart replacement, after it emerged that Mrs Drury had been somewhat unfaithful. They thought it would be romantic to go under the knife together, and wake up with two new hearts. French Angelfish hearts, to be precise. They’d picked them out together, genetically modified to beat as one. I gather a fistful of feathers. Love doesn’t work like that. Love needs the dominant one to take the lead. Couples have tried to have their hearts replaced simultaneously before, even lying side by side on an operating table, falling asleep while holding hands, but they’ve all woken up and looked at each other and not known who it is they are looking at. Their hearts simply not in it anymore. I haven’t seen the Drurys in weeks, though I spied their daughter packing her car with suitcases at the crack of dawn on Tuesday. She’s one of those awful New Age newbie arsehole who have made a pact to focus on their own well-being. To never settle down with anyone, lest they get their hearts smashed to pieces. They blame the older generations for turning the world into a loveless place. They say they can make it on their own, that they don’t need other halves. They wear badges that say things like ‘No Love, No Problems.’

  As though life can be that simple.

  Not that it’s safe having a youthful, perfect heart, anyway. Wandering the streets all shiny and new. We’ve all heard the rumours about small, remote villages that have been ransacked overnight by groups of expert thieves. Whole pockets of civilisation that have had their hearts wrenched out of their chests to sell on the black market. Some say that these villagers keep on living. Wandering, listless. Unable to love. Unable to die. Homes of heartless quiet. The closest we get here is jealous lovers turning to murder. But that’s nothing new. Then there are the swingers: couples who want to swap hearts with other couples. Just for fun. But why bother to go out and find someone else, when you can mould what you already have?

  I hang up my rubber gloves and stroke the heart case.

  The swan heart purrs.

  Cora’s still sleeping in the next room. Her head wound is healing nicely, her chest a gaping hole with a pump firmly attached. I still need to unpack her open suitcase, though most of the garments are strewn across the carpet like human feathers. Like the times we’d hastily undress and fling our clothes across the floor.

  What animals we were back then. Biting each other’s lips.

  How vicious. How unpredictable.

  I inject Cora with a fresh dose of anaesthetic, tuck her in, kiss her forehead, and tell her another story.

  Once upon a time, a girl’s father married a witch.

  The witch turned her six brothers into swans, and they flew away.

  Worried she would also be turned into a swan, the young girl packed her suitcase and hid in the deep forest, where the sunlight rarely visited, and there were many eyes looking out at her from the bodies of trees.

  There, one of the swan brothers found her. Flapping his wings, he told his sister that she had the power to save them because her heart was so good. He said, if she sewed six tunics made of flowers, they would put them on and turn back into humans. He said it was a secret spell, and she wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone until the tunics were finished. He said, if she did, the spell wouldn’t work.

  So the girl collected as many flowers as she could and began to sew.

  She sewed sitting in a tree so the wolves couldn’t get her.

  But the world is a dark place, full of many kinds of wolves.

  A group of men, out hunting, found the strange girl sewing flowers and asked her what she was doing. She couldn’t speak, so she smiled, but that wasn’t enough. She threw them her bracelet, which they caught, but that wasn’t enough either. So, she took off her clothes and dropped them to the floor, in the hope they would see her good heart shining out of her chest.

  Then they smiled back, and climbed up the tree, and decided to take her home.

  She was taken to the young king of a neighbouring realm. He looked at this silent girl with her good heart, and bought her immediately.

  She married him without speaking a word.

  The king’s mother was angry about the marriage, because no woman was good enough for her only son.

  For the next few years, this new queen continued to sew flower tunics without speaking. But the task was taking a long time because her mother-in-law destroyed every tunic out of spite, and she could only sew during the spring and summer months, for during the autumn all the flowers died.

  ‘That silent girl is full of secrets,’ the mother-in-law muttered. ‘My heart is stronger than hers will ever be.’

  When the silent queen gave birth to a child, the mother-in-law stole it and ordered that it be killed and baked in a pie. She smeared blood on the queen’s mouth and told her son that his bride had eaten their daughter.

  ‘Did you do it?’ he asked his wife.

  She shook her head but said nothing.

  Crying, she went back to sewing tunics made of flowers, and the mother-in-law kept burning them, one by one.

  When the silent queen gave birth to her second child, the same thing happened. The mother-in-law smeared blood across the queen’s mouth and ordered the baby be killed.

  ‘Did you do it?’ the king asked.

  The queen shook her head but said nothing at all.

  ‘Her silent heart is a trap,’ the king’s mother whispered to her son. ‘My heart is better. Time to burn her so she finds her words. Time to burn her until she shouts and screams.’

  The morning the queen was to be burned, she walked down to the courtyard. She’d been up all night sewing as fast as she could for, several weeks earlier, she’d found a secret place to hide the tunics. This time they hadn’t been destroyed, and now she had enough. She carried five tunics made of flowers and a sixth nearly complete but with one sleeve missing. As the fire was lit, she threw the tunics into the air and six swans appeared on the horizon. They swooped down and pulled on the tunics and immediately turned back into her brothers. The sixth still had a swan arm attached to his human body, which he flexed and admired in the light of the sun.

  With the spell broken, the mute queen was able to speak. She told her husband how his mother had murdered their children. How she’d chopped them into pieces and baked them into pies. The king clasped his chest and declared his mother a witch. They tied her to a tree and burned her at the stake. Her skin melted in the heat, and her blood began to boil but her heart was so cold that the fire couldn’t touch it.

  The king pulled his mother’s heart from the flames and put it in a jar.

  He placed it on the mantelpiece where it shone blue in the dark.

  Then the swan boys danced, and the silent girl sang, and the king wondered at the strangeness of the world.

  I keep Cora’s hearts in the basement.

  They hang, suspended, in vases of alcohol.

  Her original heart is on the far left, vaguely purple.

  Then the wolf heart, glistening silver.

  The deer heart, turning blue.

  The fox heart, shrinking slowly.

  And her most recent, the bear heart, growling quietly to itself.

  Is it terribly clichéd to think of this as a room filled with love? Failed love, obviously, but love nevertheless. I like to come here when I need reminding that everything can be fixed. That the world just needs medicine, and people can change. People do change. I’ve seen it. I’ve made it happen.

  It’s not unusual to keep hearts. Royals once demanded their hearts be buried apart from their bodies, and butchers and cooks were hired to cut them free. When Henry I died in Normandy after eati
ng poisonous eels, his heart was sewn into the hide of a bull and taken back to England. The rest of him was left in France to rot under the ground.

  Home is where the heart is.

  I found Cora ten years ago. We both had articles published in the same journal. Hers was on the history of fairy tales, mine on the poetry of the Romantics. In my essay, I’d touched on the death of Percy Shelley. How, when he was cremated, his friend Edward Trelawny had reached in and pulled his heart out from the flames. His wife, Mary Shelley, took him to court and fought hard to get the heart back. She won and she kept it in her writing desk until the day she died.

  And people wonder where Frankenstein comes from.

  That evening, as Cora listened to me, not saying a word, I could see her good heart shining out through her chest. Thundering and garbling like some underwater train. Vines sneaking up to block out the world and her homemade floral dress glowing amber in the dark.

  In the Middle Ages, people believed that a heart contained a person’s soul. That all of their beliefs, thoughts, feelings and memories lived inside there, as though written inside a book. God was thought to have a copy of everyone’s hearts, with records of how good or bad they were scribbled inside. Sometimes, he would write on these records, and this writing would transmit to the replicas in human bodies on earth. There are legends of saints who were said to have images drawn on their organs by divine power. Touched by the hand of God.

  So, when we say we are ‘turning over a new leaf’, we are referring to the book of our heart. It means we are starting over. Making fresh starts. New hearts.

  This swan heart will be Cora’s fifth heart in ten years.

  Her fourth in the last two.

  The fox heart made her nocturnal.

  The deer heart made her flee.

  The bear heart made her possessive.

  The wolf heart gave her rage.

  The swan heart clamours in its case.

  I head back upstairs. The house feels like it’s breathing. This is home. This is home. This is home.

  My mother’s heart sits on the mantelpiece. Baby blue, encased in glass.

  Next to it, my wedding present to Cora. A replica of a French tapestry from 1400, called ‘The Offering of the Heart’. It shows a man giving his pulsing heart to a woman as a symbol of his devotion.

  Love as an art form.

  In 1956, Erich Fromm wrote a book called The Art of Loving. In it, he argued that the active character of true love requires four basic elements: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.

  Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever … Love isn’t something natural … It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.

  Cora said my mother loved me an unhealthy amount. Whilst the world was running out of love, my mother was trying to hoard it. She clung to me so desperately, Cora deemed it unnatural. For that is what love is. She told me I’d better deal with it or else she’d leave forever.

  So I did.

  I admit it felt strange, holding a pillow over my mother’s face like that. How, when I carved her open to extract her overflowing heart, her body was still twitching. How I used five bottles of washing-up liquid to get the blood off the kitchen floor. How I burned her body in the back yard, and sprinkled her ashes on the orange trees.

  When I came home, carrying my mother’s heart, Cora screamed.

  She claimed she’d never meant for me to go that far.

  She yelled she’d only meant that I should talk to her.

  She cried that just the thought of what I’d done made her sick.

  That’s the first time she tried to leave.

  Despite Cora’s protests, all her academic research into fairy tales had shown that, for love to flourish, parents needed to die. And as I grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her back inside the house, I reminded her of that very fact and spat: ‘Aren’t all of us just trying to find our happily ever after?’

  Hundreds of years ago, when French kings and queens died, their hearts were mummified in silver urns and hidden in various cathedrals across the city of Paris. During the French Revolution, these were stolen by revolutionaries, and some hearts were sold in secret to artists. They liquidised them, mixed them with myrrh and created a highly sought-after paint called ‘mummy brown’.

  They say a mother’s love is truly unconditional.

  If these factory-created animal hearts keep failing, perhaps I can put my mother’s heart inside Cora.

  Perhaps that is the answer.

  I take the swan heart out of its case and place it on top of Cora’s cold skin.

  It twitches, as though trying to get back to me.

  It’s wondering where I am.

  Hearts are babies. Beating, blind, vulnerable babies.

  I scoop the heart back up and it shudders with pleasure. I throw it from palm to palm and watch it switch between panic and joy. Then I stroke it, and hold it close, and it curls up to go to sleep.

  When this heart cannot survive without me, when it consistently whimpers and diminishes if away from my side, that is when I will place it inside Cora.

  And Cora will come back to me, wide-eyed and so deeply in love that she won’t know how to function properly. She’ll need me. Really, truly need me. No shouting, no packing her bags, no trying to run away from a man she says she can no longer stand.

  She will love me.

  I will make her love me.

  The timer in the kitchen pings.

  Long ago, there was a giant in Norway who kept his heart outside of his body so that he could live forever. But keeping his heart somewhere else had its down side, too. He turned men to stone in rage, for they could love and he could not, and he locked a princess inside his house to stop her marrying the sons of kings.

  One day, a prince, whose six brothers had already been turned to stone by the giant, entered the giant’s house and found the princess there. She told him they would have to find the giant’s heart and destroy it so she could be released. The giant said it was buried under the floor, but that was a lie. He said it was in the cupboard, but that was a lie, too. Finally, the giant laughed and said he kept his heart on a faraway island, inside a warm egg, in the nest of a swan.

  The prince went in search of this faraway island, and at last found the giant’s heart, inside an egg, in the nest of a swan. He squeezed the egg and the giant cried out in pain, clutching his chest. He sank to his knees and asked for forgiveness. The prince gleefully demanded he release all his stone victims and the princess, first. The giant did so, so scared was he for the fate of his heart. The men became human, the princess was free, and the giant wept, believing he was saved.

  But then the prince smirked and crushed the giant’s heart anyway. Because hearts are meant to be crushed, and you cannot hide them anywhere for love, nor money. Especially not love.

  I stroke Cora’s cheek, her new heart dripping in my hand.

  The prince married the princess, and they loved each other. Until the love ran out.

  Then they fought, and they cried and they filled themselves with hatred.

  Thank goodness we no longer live in a world like that.

  Jacob

  Dear Miss Winter,

  My name is Jacob Quinn.

  If I am home from school in time, I watch you do the weather forecast on the six o’clock news. Most of the time you predict the weather correctly. My mum says that the world is an unpredictable place, so you must be very good at your job. Well done. I hope they pay you well.

  I also hope you don’t mind me writing to you. This letter is not about the weather (sorry), but you seem like a very friendly person and I have some questions I need to ask. There are two reasons I think you might be good at answering these questions. 1. Because you are good at understanding the weather and so I think you might be good at understanding people. And 2. because of your name (more on that later, please keep reading).

/>   I am writing to you about my sister. She is called Catherine and she does philosophy at university. She moved out last year but still visits during the holidays. When she comes home, she spends a lot of her time asking questions when people ask her things. Dad calls this answering back, but Cath says we shouldn’t blindly accept things. She says that if our answers aren’t questions then we’re not thinking hard enough and we’re not pushing ourselves to our limits. But she also says that limits don’t exist so I’m not really sure what she’s looking for. It’s like going to the corner shop to buy some Smarties, then picking them out of the packet one by one, hoping to find a silver one. It’s like Cath knows there isn’t going to be a silver Smartie but she’s still asking ‘where is it?’ and ‘can it exist?’ and telling us we should be asking those questions, too. I don’t know. I don’t really understand philosophy. My dad calls it stupid, which is one of the reasons I am writing this letter to you and not to him.

  Anyway. I am sidetracking. Cath’s point was that questions are good things. Like water, and the colour yellow, and strawberry fruit gums. Cath says that questions make us expand as people, which makes me think we’re all like elastic bands, and that does something funny to my stomach.

  Something else that does funny things to my stomach is that Cath is changing and I am worried about her. She says I shouldn’t call her Cath any more, because that isn’t her name. She decided to change it, so that she could be someone new. She went down to the council (which is where we send money so that the country works properly) and she signed her name away and put it in a drawer along with her baby teeth.

  Now, she’s called Anna.

  Like that old film Anna and the King. There was also a person in the Bible called Anna who prophesied about Jesus. Cath-Anna says that didn’t have anything to do with her decision-making, because she isn’t religious. She just likes the name. There’s a girl in my class at school called Anna. I asked her if she knew that Anna was a lady in the Bible but she shook her head and told me she’s Jewish and she didn’t think it was the same. Names are strange things, Miss Winter, sharing them doesn’t make you the same at all. I find this odd when I think about it hard. Maybe we should all have numbers instead because Mum says that those are infinite.