Hamlet’s ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ speech to Ophelia is a memorable moment in a play full of memorable moments. Before we analyse his speech, here’s a reminder of the relevant section of the play, which is found in Act 3 Scene 1, not long after Hamlet’s famous ‘To be, […]

In the evenings, at night, there were long, drunken, anonymous parties where Paul lost his friends in the crowd, intentionally lost them, because everybody swooned over him with his swimmer’s torso and his long lashes. Nights when people handed him glasses full of clear or cloudy liquids that sometimes plunged him into extraordinary slowness where everything flowed as if underwater and where gestures were never quite completed, where they barely got nine-tenths of the way through. Nights on rooftops or in basements or at mansions or in abandoned metro stations. Nights full of smoke. Nights when he lost sight of his friends then found them again, but sometimes it wasn’t them, sometimes it was just his face, just his own reflection caught here or there. Nights when people tried in vain to get him into bed. Nights when he was obsessed with sex because at that time Paul was under a curse or a spell, he just couldn’t get rid of his virginity, every time, the girl disappeared or he left or someone showed up or they had to go; but stranger still, even when he had sex, and whatever the definition one gave the act, whether it was ordinary or pornographic or legal or none of the above, even when he inserted his genitals into someone else’s, even when he came with an uncontrollable shudder and the deed had finally been done, he thought, finally! – the next day or a few days later, it was as if nothing had happened. He was a virgin again, and resigned to it. It was a nightmare for him.

He slept little but slept well. Wherever he was, at the university or at the café, in an unknown house or at home, most of the time, just a few feet away would be a screen with flickering images of murders and investigations or funerals and tears or collapses and escapes or questions and answers, or only questions. And he, impervious to all these tragedies, slept peacefully. But that was before Amelia Dehr. That was before the hotel.

There wasn’t much money. His father had been blunt: the classes were fine, the rest wasn’t. He took the first job that came his way, distractedly, without even realising what he was agreeing to; indifferent or inattentive, because what he cared about was beginning a new life. Security monitoring – or rather, simply monitoring – during the off-hours at the hotel. In the evening; at night. He got bored there. And he offset that boredom by watching the women. Watching them at a remove. He looked for them. Sometimes he found them, sometimes he lost them. In any case, it was a game he played without any of them knowing. This one leaving her room and immediately disappearing, vanishing. Only to reappear, somewhere he hadn’t expected, as if by magic, slipping from one small window to another, almost at random. There were nine cameras and just as many squares on the monitoring screen, Paul’s screen. He waited for surprises; he could only anticipate their trajectories to a certain degree, because that didn’t account for random stops, sudden about-faces. He stared at all those bodies walking around and thinking thoughts he couldn’t see on the screens. He couldn’t see what had been forgotten in the rooms, on the nightstands, in the bathrooms; and he had no hope of seeing any lingering afterthoughts. And every so often came one of Paul’s favourite moments: rare, unexpected, evasive embraces in the emergency stairwells. All he ever saw was a fire door slowly – lazily – closing. He couldn’t really say that he enjoyed his job, which he didn’t think of as a job so much as an accident – less than that in fact, an incident, nothing more: a casual thing. But he could say that he enjoyed watching women. That he enjoyed looking down at them, playing at (or so he told himself ) looking down on them – and only at the hotel, only at night, was that possible for him, specifically because of the cameras, aimed so sharply downward that he was positioned high up, like the sun, like some god. If the warmer air – the sighs they exhaled as they redid their make-up in the elevator’s infinite mirrors, the seismic heat their warm flesh exuded as they stood in these empty, thoroughly ventilated spaces – and these exhalations rising up, accumulating beneath the ceiling, could see, then that vapour’s gaze would be the gaze Paul now had. So dreamed Paul.

When the women weren’t going in and out much any more or he wasn’t watching them much any more, he tried to study. He liked university but more than that he liked being a student, it exhilarated him, as did the pride his father felt – which didn’t keep him from being, deep down, a bit jealous of Paul, just a bit, in those little crannies of his heart of which he himself was unaware – actively, insistently unaware, in total denial. He would rather cut off his arm than admit it, because he was a good man, as proud of his goodwill as he was of his son, and a good man doesn’t envy his only child. But, at the construction site, he sometimes thought of that university and spat in the drywall, and sometimes pissed in the drywall, as people have always done – general hygiene notwithstanding – to bind the components, to (this Paul knew, even if his father didn’t) alter the pH, the acidity, the stability; and to (this his father knew, even if Paul didn’t) leave something of oneself in someone else’s space, in walls that construction workers laboured to build with no hope of ever living there. To secretly, silently spit or piss on other people’s comfort.

Their origins were modest and they took nothing for granted, especially not university education; they lived, had lived, Paul thought, as if nothing under their feet was certain. As if they were on water – but that image didn’t occur to him then; he would only think it much later, after finally meeting Amelia Dehr.

He tried to study but needed to take in far more than just his architecture classes, which sectioned off various eras, areas, and approaches. He had cut off – or so he thought – all contact with his past, which he didn’t think of as a past so much as an incident, more than that, an accident. The first eighteen years of his life had given him a particular body, and this body had a particular relationship with space, with others. He sensed that he didn’t quite belong. At the outset, he had observed. And imitated. First the clothes, which he stole. Then the haircut, which he’d had to adopt a whole new language just to describe, to ask for. It was a challenge he had never faced before, as complex as an international expedition, the greatest of conquests. Finally, he mastered the delicate art of talking. But this drained him. Some nights in the dorms he stayed in his bedroom, in the dark. Listening to the noises in the hallway, and all the other students’ chatter made him seasick; and if someone knocked on his door, he wouldn’t answer, the idea that it might be a mistake horrifying him just as much as the idea that it might not. He was terrified that it would never end and, even though it never did quite fade away, not really, still it only lasted two weeks, maybe three, and then it didn’t matter any more. He was already feeling at home, or so he thought. He had closer friends than ever, whom he loved intensely, for whom he sometimes thought he would have given an arm, a kidney, even. But sometimes he forgot their names. Or their faces. At three or four in the morning he would realise that all he retained of this friend, this guy or girl, was just a blurry shape. And sometimes it was just his face, just his own reflection caught here or there. Maybe deep down some part of him still lived in darkness. And maybe, worse still, he had gone on to think of this darkness, in bleak terms – all the bleaker given that he was an eighteen-year-old man with a swimmer’s torso, with long lashes, who now had a new self – as real life.

 

Image © Rookuzz

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This is an extract from Night as It Falls, out now with Faber.

The post Night as It Falls appeared first on Granta.

Award-winning author Olga Grushin discusses what it meant to wade into a new genre and how she put her spin on the fairy tale retelling.

Olga Grushin was born in Moscow, spent her childhood in Prague, and moved to the United States at eighteen, becoming the first Russian citizen to receive an American college degree. She is the author of three previous novels. Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, earned her a place on Granta’s once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list, and was one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year. Both it and The Line were among The Washington Post’s Ten Best Books of the Year, and Forty Rooms was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Grushin has published short stories and nonfiction in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. She writes in English, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children.

In this post, Grushin discusses what it meant to wade into a new genre, how she put her spin on the fairy tale retelling, and more!

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Name: Olga Grushin
Literary agent: Warren Frazier at John Hawkins & Associates
Title: The Charmed Wife
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Release date: January 12, 2021
Genre: Literary, modern fantasy, fairy-tale retelling
Previous titles: The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006); The Line (2010); Forty Rooms (2016)
Elevator pitch for the book: After thirteen years of marriage, Cinderella wants her Prince Charming dead. This subversive exploration of our romantic expectations is set in a world where time and place, fantasy and reality interweave in surprising ways—and nothing is quite what it seems.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I loved fairy tales as a child—the more traditional, the better, all those princes, princesses, and happy couplings. Yet when I started reading them to my own daughter, she liked stories with tricksters and talking animals well enough, but she absolutely loathed any mention of princesses. “Stories with princesses are so boring,” she said. “They are really all the same story.”

At the same time, it so happened, I was going through a divorce. It was this confluence of my seven-year-old’s reaction and the end of my marriage that prompted me to take a closer look at the happily-ever-after tales we tell ourselves. Eventually, I knew that I wanted to write a book that would start as a predictable two-dimensional fantasy, with pastel-colored princesses, singing teapots, and waltzing mice, but would then grow in surprising, modern directions and arrive at a very different narrative in the end.

(A Word About Writing Princesses and Fairy Tales)

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? 

This is my fourth novel, and by now my overall approach has become more or less streamlined. It takes three to four years from the first glimmering of the idea to the finished volume that smells so delightfully of fresh ink: a year of gestation and research (or, if no actual research is required, reading “around the subject”); a year of intense daily writing to create the first draft; and one to two years devoted to revisions and the actual publishing process.

I always expect my initial idea to undergo countless changes in the planning stage—that is really what this stage is for. With every new novel, I start a thick notebook where, for months, I jot down themes, plot possibilities, personality sketches, useful facts, and so on. Then one day—and this day always comes without warning—I wake up and feel that I have accumulated enough material, so I read through the entire notebook and, out of the primordial flux of semi-thoughts and proto-characters, create an outline and begin to write. My outlines are never ironclad, though, but have plenty of breathing room to allow for organic changes that will inevitably happen in the actual writing stage.

With The Charmed Wife, I knew from the beginning that the figure of Cinderella would be at the heart of the story, and early on, I decided to weave in other familiar narratives as well, so Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Bluebeard, and many others began to find their way into my outline. Later still, the mouse theme emerged as its own subplot: I felt that I needed a sort of “downstairs” counterbalance of mouse wars and revolutions to the “upstairs” romance-obsessed life of the princess to cast her arc in a different light. But often, the precise connections between all these layers would occur to me only as I was writing, and I would get this satisfying sense of puzzle pieces locking into place. I think this feeling of the story pulling together and coming into final focus is one of my favorite things about writing novels.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title? 

I have published all my novels with the same publishing house, Putnam, but the editor who guided my first three books into life, the wonderful Marian Wood, retired a little while ago, and she passed away earlier this year—such a great loss in this year of losses. For this book, then, I have worked with an entirely new team. They are young, enthusiastic, and full of fresh ideas, and I am learning unexpected things. For example, I was always rather old-fashioned when it came to social media, but, at the gentle promptings of my new editor, Gabriella Mongelli, I took a timorous step into the realm of Twitter. I had believed myself intrinsically unsuited for it—the very thought of 280 characters seemed anathema to someone raised on Tolstoy’s War and Peace—yet now I am enjoying it thoroughly. This just goes to show that it is never too late to leave your comfort zone.

(Modern Myth Maker)

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book? 

This entire book was really a surprise. I grew up in Moscow, reading nineteenth-century Russian classics, and when, still as a teenager, I declared I would be a writer, I imagined myself writing only “serious,” weighty books. In the early years of my career, I did not see fantasy as a respectable genre at all. But if I have learned anything in my subsequent decades of reading and writing, it is that genre divisions are arbitrary and literature is literature wherever it is found. This book was a great departure from my earlier novels (mostly set in Soviet Russia and dealing with totalitarian regimes and oppressed artists, among other things), and it was tremendous fun to write—the most fun, in truth, I had with any novel. I loved stepping out into the no man’s land between genres, playing with fantasy and reality, bending conventions, breaking my own past rules. I had this constant sense of adventure while I was working on it. “Can I really do this? Can I really go there, say that? Yes, I can—because why not, and who is going to stop me?”

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

This is not at all a traditional fairy-tale retelling, and readers who pick it up looking for a child-friendly Disney-style fantasy may find it quite unsettling. But if they approach it with open minds and few preconceived notions, I hope they will be entertained. I wanted to write something whimsical, something fun (even if the fun is often dark). At the same time, even talking mice can be thought-provoking. If, upon finishing the book, my readers feel they have gained a surprising new perspective on traditional stories, I will be very happy.

If you could share one piece of advice with other authors, what would it be?

So much excellent advice is already out there. Live a full life. Read, read as much as you can, across all genres. Approach your writing not as sporadic visits from some flighty muse but as a daily grind. Budget your time. One thing I would stress especially: for a woman writer with a family, it is absolutely essential to carve out not only a “room of one’s own” in your home but also a “room of one’s own” in your mind—a place where you can go and forget, for a stretch, about children’s homework, dinner, and laundry, and devote yourself fully to the world you are creating. Without this intense concentration, without this full immersion, book-length projects cannot be sustained. Teach people who share your life to respect your work from day one.

In the middle of the night – the real night – Anne flung open the door. she was the kind of mother who refused to knock. A fan of borders but not boundaries.

They’ve dug up all the courgettes, she said.

The moles?

Much worse. Forget the moles.

Neither of us moved.

Come on – she flipped the lights – we’re being besieged. Get a shovel. Anya you can hold a torch.

Michael refused to be routed. I heard him insist Anne respect his sleep – she was more than intimidating enough to handle marauding boar.

Outside, we took in the destruction. Mounds of earth uprooted, shredded plants, craters, gougings and tracks disfiguring the lawn.

Monsters, she spat.

It’s not their fault, Luke said.

Whose is it then?

They were hunted to extinction then reintroduced. deliberately. By us.

I never introduced pigs to my garden.

They were here first, then we killed them off and got nostalgic for it.

Luke. I’m an animal person so spare me the sermon, please. But this – she gestured around. This is ridiculous. They go after dogs. They laid waste to Pem’s farm. Last time I heard one run along the decking I leant out the window and shot it. It was like a bomb going off. All the mud and dust. Took four of us to put it in Pem’s truck. Very good meat, so it was probably worth the carnage, in the end.

Luke stopped digging, closed his eyes and exhaled.

Your mum’s – she seems manic, I whispered. Do you think we – you – should make her lie down?

He mumbled something about going to get a glass of water but never came back. I finished our end of the trench alone.

 

After several hours digging, erecting fortifications using upturned chairs, I realised I was enjoying myself. I felt useful working alongside Anne, and it reminded me of my childhood, when anything could be reimagined into something new. shoes became firewood, sheets became windows, my brother’s skateboard became a water cart.

But the objects I gravitated toward aesthetically now, I realised as I positioned two dining chairs like coping stones, all had an underlying stability. The sculptural things I collected maybe did have emotional resonance then, in that I couldn’t imagine them transmuting into anything else.

Finally Anne surveyed the barricades. Seagulls called overhead and I followed her gaze to where the perimeter disappeared into the dawn mist and then the creek.

That should do it, she said. For now at least.

I crept back into bed beside Luke and admired the crescents of black dirt under my nails. I kissed the warm skin at the back of his neck. Then I remembered the poisoned trees.

 

Luke drank several cups of coffee at breakfast, rubbing his face and the back of his head. I was used to surviving on no sleep, but he needed at least eight hours to make any conversation. I loaded the dishwasher and pretended not to notice as Anne restacked everything.

I thought, she said slowly as she closed the machine, we’d take a walk to the church.

We put boots on and followed her and Michael along the road past the spar. Another new house had been built, its glass front loomed behind a row of white saplings, spectral as a mushroom. Like the others in their vicinity, it appeared to be empty.

Can’t understand why anyone would want to live under glass, she hissed. The few times I’ve actually seen someone in there, well, you can see everything. At night especially, I can see all its insides, like a jellyfish. There are more and more, they attract each other, these planning notices – she pointed to one pinned to the gate – like a swarm.

I imagined Anne standing outside the house in the dark. I agreed it was out of place.

 

We passed the disused garage, overgrown by weeds. Here Luke, an only child, had founded his own clubhouse after reading Lord of the Flies. Still his favourite book. And of course, as Anne was fond of pointing out, another Cornish author. There was still genitalia-themed graffiti in the basement and a shrivelled buoy hung from a steel joist to make a swing. On the upper level, where cars were repaired, there were stepped walls on three sides like a theatre, which must have lent gravity to meetings. Luke confessed they used to defecate in the long grass behind rather than return to the cottage where his mother remained in charge.

I followed Luke’s gaze toward it, it was clear he wanted to go inside.

Go on ahead, we’ll catch you up, he told his parents. I didn’t like going in there, but I liked it that Luke wanted to go in. It suggested a continued wish to escape his mother’s influence.

There was no glass in the window frames and it smelt of decay. Sometimes I seek that basement smell out precisely because I don’t like it. It’s still familiar. Cold concrete and earth.

 

In the graveyard, Anne took me through her thoughts on floral arrangements. I looked in Luke’s direction, wondering if he would mention the idea we’d come to the night his friends had interrogated us, of having a non-religious ceremony with Christopher as our celebrant. I knew the only gay men Anne had ever knowingly met were two Canadians. Rather than say the word she now referred to all gay people as being like the Canadian men.

Michael pointed out the usual headstone belonging to their family. I spotted a magpie dart away beyond it and looked for a second. On a similar walk, long ago, Anne had stopped abruptly before one and saluted him in the middle of the road. Not understanding, I’d reacted with nervous laughter. That Christmas she gave me A Pocket Guide to the Superstitions of the British Isles. They’re othering you, Christopher had said. Give her one for the Balkans next year.

 

The church was dismal. Michael disappeared and a few electric lights came on. I sensed Luke waiting for me to say something before he would. Then into the resonant silence, Michael’s voice:

Not much trade except funerals these days.

Luke appeared to be avoiding eye contact with me now and I panicked.

I love it here, I lied.

Wonderful, Anne said, that settles it then.

Going back, we took a longer route off-road. Gradually the path narrowed so that we walked in single file. I felt myself detaching, following Luke’s calves, letting them get further ahead until finally they were gone.

 

When I arrived back at the cottage, they were seated in a ring on the lawn which still bore the scars of the previous night. Luke was describing our holiday and the town of Sanary where many artists and writers had exiled themselves as Hitler rose to power.

Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, he trailed off.

Sybille Bedford, I continued.

Don’t know her, Anne said.

I said I would give her one of Bedford’s books. maybe Quicksands. I realised I did not want to share with them her impressions of Yugoslavia from Pleasures and Landscapes. Though much of it was admiring – the mountains, Venetian architecture, translucent water – I’d experienced the familiar contraction around my chest as I read her descriptions of the terrifying roads and wild children on the ferry crossing:

What one wonders about is the future. Will it be a graceless, stark new world?

And finally of her time in Sarajevo,

Nothing ever, perhaps, quite safe, quite clean, quite straight . . .

 

Bedford, I told them, lived out the Holocaust in Sanary, later California. I heard my words echo what I’d read about her, sounding fluent. I understood her ambivalence at having spent so much time reading in comfortable places.

 

Anne and Michael wanted to see my photos. Luke had told them I’d taken several hundred. This was true. he rarely recorded anything on his phone except runs and photographs of plants.

They admired my pictures of the villa, the pink oleander, the view of the bay, Luke’s kitesurfing technique, the harmonious blue of the water, tasteful market stalls, a fish we ate at the Hôtel de la Tour that had baked inside a white salt crust and was then exhumed for us at the table.

Doesn’t look as flashy as you’d expect, Anne said, approving.

If their family went to restaurants, she would instruct everyone to order the same thing, since that way it was more like being at home. It was one of the things I felt I offered Luke, permission to indulge his yuppie side – to go out and order whatever he wanted.

Luke said there were no gin palaces in the harbour, a section of which was occupied by traditional fishing boats. He said there were few tourists, other than French from the north, and it was, compared to the surrounding destinations British holidaymakers had heard of, unspoiled.

Then he told the Bedford anecdote I’d relayed to him, concerning the Huxleys’ arrival. Looking forward to the anonymity of a foreign place, maria and Aldous had pulled up at their new Belle Époque home to find VILLA HUXLEY painted in bold lettering by the well-meaning decorator on the front gate. I knew why this resonated for Luke, who was horrified by the idea of public spectacle. It was something we’d discussed with regard to the wedding, He wanted the minimum possible number of guests. I was fine with that. Relieved, actually. It was easier to describe a wedding as intimate than find the words to explain why no one from my family would be there.

Anne held out my phone. I felt her gaze linger on the ring as I took it back and felt hot as if I’d stolen it.

She offered around segments from a clementine which I declined, though not before Luke could remind her of my hang-up.

The excuse I usually gave was not a lie, exactly. I had been eating plums gathered from the base of my grand- mother’s tree as a child. I had accidentally picked up part of a bird, ripped open, the greasy remains now heaving with life. I had been horrified by the sticky mess, its texture in my hand, the apprehension of anarchy.

The sight of some fruit can affect me like an animal whose fur is rubbed against its growth. Perhaps reasonably, given the nature of his work, Luke found this fact exasperating. Even seedless grapes? he would ask in perplexity as I declined to follow him down certain supermarket aisles.

As a child I dreamt about exotic fruit I knew only from cartoons. Sometimes we got parcels with exciting things and we’d make them last for weeks. Other times we got biscuits from WW2 and we’d feel resentful of the kids on other streets. I wanted Coca-Cola so badly that I hate it now. The same thing happened when I finally tried tinned pineapple and choked on the wet, syrupy chunks. In my mind, the longed-for fruit had the texture of human flesh.

The smell is fine. Maybe I’ve been desensitised by synthetic fruit-scented things. I can even enjoy fruit flavours, as long as there is no remnant of the original texture there. But the thought of biting directly into a tomato or unmediated slice of orange makes me gag. The various sensations that combine in the average piece of fruit! Seed, liquid, flesh, skin . . .

 

In the afternoon Luke caught up on sleep, forgetting to take the meat for dinner out of the freezer as he’d promised Anne to do. I remembered too late, and had to massage it beside the fire while he slept and his mother was busy somewhere in the garden. I was still attempting to defrost it when she came in and saw me there, crouching. When he came down I was silently angry that he’d left me open to his mother’s suspicion of being a barbarian, and as we finally sat down to eat, much later than planned, we seemed to be engaged in another psychic war. I did not know why he was angry at me. I had saved the day. I remember hoping those vicissitudes in personality were chemical. A lighthouse whose beam disappeared only to come back.

Normal people argue, I said once, and then we had a very quiet argument in the garden centre, beside an LED Buddha fountain and a sign that read TRANQUIL OASIS. I felt such relief despite the humidity, the claustrophobia, the smell of rabbit hutch. His moods would shift abruptly, and at times I would find myself having crossed an obscure boundary into a strange place, a territory which only minutes ago had not been there.

The change could be even subtler. A shadow over the sun, a cold spot in water. swimming as a child, I remembered turning onto my back, putting trust in the sky, imagining I swam in that element instead.

Luke could be two people as distinct as these elements, just as he had two names in my phone. Real name to indicate company mobile and pet name for personal. Depending on which he called from, our conversation would be altered.

At first I hadn’t noticed the second person. I began to, soon after I moved in. Around the time things started to go wrong in the flat. The bath plug lost its suction. I couldn’t fill the bath with water unless I kept it running, and even then, it would only reach my hips. A shelf came off the wall. A chair back marked another with a groove. The tap – which Luke had never had a problem with before – now leaked, heavy and staccato through the night. A gas ring refused to ignite. Clicking over and over without producing a flame. These went on a list of things to be fixed, and everything else on a list to break.

 

After dinner we watched the news and the mood lifted. They liked working out the BBC’s more obscure visual puns. A story about pressure on primary school places was accompanied by seemingly unrelated footage of rowers, then canoes, and then the Queen’s barge moving down the Thames. The connection between these images and the news story remained a mystery until the reporter ended with the words: The race is on.

Ho ho, Michael said.

Luke held my foot under a cushion then took one of my hands. They were covered in soot after poking the fire to thaw the meat, my fingers stained purple from chopping red cabbage. I’d removed the ring to prepare the food – an absence he mutely noted as he examined them. I tipped my head back to indicate where I’d put it. Then the news came to Brexit and I felt the room contract.

His parents knew which way I’d voted, but we hadn’t directly talked about it since. They didn’t know I’d exchanged insults with strangers on the internet late into the night. The ‘real’ people, with whom I’d argue until confronted with my own unreality, my own irrelevance. it was not the specifics of opposing arguments that upset me, but that the things I held on to, which kept me from being sucked back into the past, were coming loose.

Because my aunt was not my mother, when I’d had disputes with her children, they felt she was biased toward me and I felt she was biased toward them. Her son Nikolaj was a compulsive liar who had a problem with authority, except where it gave him power. He hated me not only for being clever, despite the language disadvantage, but because I’d experienced things he had not. I didn’t understand then that he felt threatened. Not just by having to share his family with strangers, though that didn’t help, but because in comparison to mine his life story was a domestic drama. He’d take great pleasure in warping events with unnecessary lies so that our referee, his mother, would eventually wave us away: carry on for all I care, just stay out of my kitchen. My sister Daria left for university a few months after we arrived, and then I had no one to confirm what I’d seen or heard versus what he then said had happened.

Why did I want things to stay the same? Christopher, who’d spoiled his ballot, asked me. He has an anarchist streak but somehow ended up a lawyer. A human rights barrister, more accurately. Law was what his parents had wanted him to do, and perhaps because of his ability to stand outside or above any such man-made edifice, he was very good.

I didn’t have an answer for him. It was an emotion I couldn’t put into adequate words. I remember right before the referendum, another wedding, this time Luke’s non-Cornish cousin’s, on Michael’s side, I’d been seated next to a man I didn’t know. One of the groom’s parents’ friends. He didn’t know anyone, he claimed, which initially seemed the reason for our pairing. Then he said he was a poet, as well as a writer of thrillers for which he used a pseudonym. He pointed knowingly at my surname on the place card. He asked me about my parents, their ethnicity, and I said I was the child of a mixed marriage. in his capacity as a poet, he had travelled to the Balkans, and so for most of the reception, wanted to talk about the war.

I detected that tone I so often encountered then. As though such chaos could never occur within his island, whereas in the Balkans it was inevitable. Luke had later sympathised when I complained about my table, saying he understood how maddening it was – in the context of anthropogenic climate change. He called it the blind spot of any culture – the inability to conceive of its own destruction.

Occasionally I’d made attempts to engage the neighbour on my other side, an elderly relative of the bride’s. She’d blinked at me kindly and said it must be sad when your country no longer exists, then returned to pulverising her asparagus. The need for discretion removed, the poet began to list his top ten most harrowing sights. His lips were wet. He topped up my glass and said that history must not repeat itself. That though the EU was imperfect, like Yugoslavia, like any marriage in fact, British people valued what it represented. Membership, he mused as a server took our plates away, was probably my homeland’s only hope. We had better get a move on with integration.

A year on, if someone raised the subject in my presence I felt myself shut down. I couldn’t bear to meet people’s outrage or smirking faces, even their shock and grief. If it was mentioned at a party, whether or not I’d had anything to drink, I would simply walk away. Now I felt myself sliding into apathy.

 

On Sunday morning Luke kissed my shoulder tenderly then got up, pulled on his shorts and went running. I stayed in bed, the windows open, listening to the gentle call of a wood pigeon. The room flooded with light and a breeze came in off the creek. I’d had my first unbroken sleep in weeks and the combination of breeze, sunlight and memory foam gave me the sensation of gliding. Suddenly I heard the strains of what I took to be a recording of a piece of classical music. it began with tuning, but then, from its occasional repetitions, stops and starts, I understood that it was live.

I guessed a group of students were rehearsing, but I’d never seen any young people when I’d stayed before. My only explanation was that one of the elderly neighbours, or maybe the very rich one who poisoned trees, had convened a small orchestra, not for any reason other than enjoyment. something about this idea seemed incredible. Though I did very little in the way of making money – did very little generally – I found it hard to think in any other terms than productivity.

As the communal effort of several brass instruments sailed into the room, a feeling of contentment and security verging on euphoria coursed through me. I stretched my limbs toward the four corners of the bed and felt a desire that I’d forgotten. I wanted to have sex with Luke.

I remained in that position for several more minutes with my eyes closed, listening to what I guessed was a cello, letting it merge with the wind, the heat of my skin. I sensed this was a moment I could have only once. When it stopped I’d never know what the piece I’d been listening to was. I thought of its transience, of using it up, like precious water running.

The solo ended and the silence which followed sounded entirely different from the silence that had preceded it, as if it was now part of something else.

I didn’t know much about classical music and wondered if I should admit to this in order to ask Michael if he’d heard and could identify the piece for me. To risk being told it was something obvious.

He had extensive knowledge of all genres. The search function on iTunes had proved endlessly absorbing. He spent hours on these voyages of discovery, back and forth in time, through world music, thrash and electronica. he’d made Luke four CDs composed of songs with American cities in the title for no reason other than the search function made it possible. They had been good for long car journeys before we discovered true crime. Some were classics, others by obscure heavy metal groups we knew to skip past.

He had unofficially taken charge of wedding music and given us a list that included a Cornish folksong arranged by Holst. The lyrics describe a woman released from bedlam by her lover who has returned from being at sea. I wondered if Michael had recalled the part about it being the man’s parents who’d tried to keep her institutionalised.

I rolled over on the bed to the window, pulled myself onto my knees and crouched forward with my elbows on the sill to wait for him, watching the optimists sail past the mouth of the creek, remembering the time Luke had insisted on taking me sailing. They could not believe I’d never been before, until I got into the boat.

Now I heard Michael’s voice. He and Anne were standing below the window. I shot back, covering my chest. Thinking they must’ve heard me, I prepared to call out a greeting, but a prickling heat rose across my skin and I closed my mouth again.

I’ve looked. Nothing comes up. Nothing I can make sense of anyway. I really think it’s odd Luke’s never met them. I know he says they’re just not close but I’m beginning to think it’s more really.

Snip.

more than she’s let on you mean?

For a few moments I was paralysed.

. . . contribution . . .

. . . never . . .

. . . marquee . . .

Snip.

If that’s what he wants.

Snip snip.

. . . clever seating plan . . .

Sometimes I could hear whole sentences very clearly, other times only random words as they moved with secateurs along the trellis against the wall. They must’ve assumed we’d gone together – but would see when Luke came back he was alone. Given the open window, it would look like I’d been listening, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to pretend I hadn’t heard.

I put my hands over my ears, then pulled the covers over my head but could still detect certain words. I longed to close the window but forced myself to be still.

Savages,

If they come,

Children,

Communists,

Christmas,

I told you,

Stuck with it darling.

I pressed harder into the pillow. Trapped there, with my eyes closed, I could almost see the words as illuminated streaks firing through the window.

When Luke got back I said I had a headache and needed to stay in bed. I gave the kind of vague explanation – fine, tired – he always gave that drove me mad when I knew something else was wrong. I didn’t come down for lunch and saw Anne and Michael only to murmur bye and thanks as we put our bags into the car.

On the motorway I was silent, listening to the murder Luke put on – a woman who’d stabbed her fiancé in the heart with a steak knife – until we stopped for fuel. Luke bought food from Marks and Spencer which we ate across the dashboard. When we’d finished, I slotted the oily containers one inside the other, and asked if he still wanted to meet my family.

 

The above is an extract from Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Road.

The post Asylum Road appeared first on Granta.

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