Leila is a writer from London, who has always been fascinated by transforming. This story is part of a working collection of metamorphoses, bodily and psychological, that her characters experience. Against the backdrop of contemporary life –sex, social media, and an increasingly divided political space–transformation often becomes about escape.
Email: leilalevygale@gmail.com
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From Up Here
Fergus has not been on a date in a while.
He is thirty-two and feels that this is an age when he is expected to choose between things. The first option (the one preferred by his mother) is begging his ex-girlfriend, Elsa, to get back together with him. They both come from Devon, and met in the private school his parents sent him to in order to meet women like Elsa, who is long legged and wears jodhpurs to nights out in clubs. She has silvery blonde hair and a mouth that is constantly open, so that the glinting edges of her teeth can always be seen, resting on the veined bottom of her lip. This means she always looks breathless, as if constantly intrigued by everything you’re about to say, which is probably why Fergus fancied her in the first place.
When he masturbates, he imagines Elsa’s thin but muscular body contorting on top of him, usually after she has played tennis with her suspiciously handsome tennis coach, Pablo (Pablo, who talked to Fergus as if he were a child and forced him to ‘try his hand’ at tennis so he could laugh sympathetically when the ball reverberated against the limp net). In these moments, when Fergus climaxes, picturing Elsa’s mouth fallen ajar as she orgasms – her gleaming pink gums suggesting health, opulence, Deliciously Ella granola – another image always appears, in the white noise between his hand and the panting sounds he makes with his mouth: the net, sagging down onto the tarmac of a tennis court. Pablo, Spanish, his white teeth laughing at Fergus. Mocking his damp blue bed and the squalid walls of his apartment. The damp penis in his hand. The fake fireplace which stares at him through plastered eyes across the room.
The other option, of course, is that Fergus becomes a bachelor. This is why he puts on cologne tonight, which smells of deodorant and the inside of his office job. The woman he is meeting, Clare, matched with him on Bumble, and seems the opposite of Elsa. She only has two photos, both incongruous from the other, and a stern look on her face which he can’t help but connote to intellectualism, interesting ideas about modernity, and having her own car. He gets on the 43 bus to meet Clare at a bar slash café they agreed on in Angel. Whilst the bus crawls through lines of traffic, he goes through a list of subjects which are equally safe but interesting to talk about. Ex-partners: tempting, but perilous. Too much space for Clare to suspect he is not over his last love, which is true, but something he can adamantly and successfully feign isn’t. Work: easy for him, he occupies the interim state of the work-world which is neither too corporate to make women think of purple couches in NatWest, nor too unstable to make them resistant to coming home with him for fear he sleeps on a stiffened futon, corners curled like a dead slug.
None of these things come up on the date.
Clare is small, with a feline look, less to do with her features and more to do with her eyes, bright and settling on things as delicately as moths. She looks at Fergus up and down when he enters the room before beckoning him over as if, had he been incredibly ugly, she would have just as easily shooed him away. He asks her how she is and she says she is doing well, that the air is very crisp tonight, but somehow says it so that this statement about the weather doesn’t seem boring but infused with an intangible electricity. Ordering red wine, they decide that they want bread with a spread whose name they both can’t remember (tapenade), and so make each other laugh by referring to it as napertard until an impassive waiter corrects them and they exclaim overexcitedly.
Clare is restless, and tells him that around this time of night, she becomes overcome with an impalpable energy. This statement means he moves closer to her, sliding his hand up the jagged diamond pattern of her tights. She goes still, and when he looks at her she has arched one eyebrow comically, saying, really, you can’t think that would be my closing line, so that he flushes underneath his Benetton blue collar and she throws back her head and laughs. Somehow, they progress past this moment, and he notices, when she moves into the dimming light of the overhead lamp, a copper crest of hair above her top lip, gilding her cupids bow as a line of furze would the descending edge of a cliff. At some point in the evening, when she tells him his face reminds her of good Peter, the main character in her learning-to-read books as a child, he reaches out to touch it. Clare closes her eyes. He is utterly struck by her expression of unselfconscious pleasure. Fergus begins to feel that Clare is entirely certain of something, which he himself has been slow to realise: she is in total and inimitable control. It becomes, over the next two hours, his pleasure to watch as her eyes dart from object to object less and less frequently, until finally they rest only on him, her attention entire, her gaze as resolute and sharp as water, viewed from the side of a glass.
Together they arrive at her house, a small and modestly furnished apartment in Chapel Market. She leads him into her bedroom. He is immediately struck by how different it is to Elsa’s, carelessly thrown together and entirely impersonable apart from some black and white prints blu-tacked to the walls. As a display of personal taste they too are vague and unreachable. Almost immediately, Clare discards her clothes on the floor, revealing a compact body whose surface is littered with freckles the colour of terracotta. Fergus takes off his trousers, and the intimation of his belt has left red welts across his pelvic bone; when they go to each other, the bed is silent underneath their bodies, and without the background noise all Fergus can hear is Clare’s breath, scorched against the side of his face. Her hands solidly grasp his shoulders, which means it is impossible for Fergus to rise above himself, to slip into that milky space where nothing is declared. As does her silence, which instead of evocating detachment, makes him listen carefully. When Fergus groans, it reverberates against the featureless walls.
After it’s over, he places an arm around her shoulders, wanting to feel the warmth of her body, but she has gone back to being fitful. Attached to her room is a balcony, with art deco doors that are partially open, letting in a stealthy wind. Clare keeps looking over at the doors, and Fergus is confused by the wistful expression on her face. Underneath his arm, it feels like something beneath her skin is burning up. The hair rising on her forearms so it prickles hysterically against his own. When he tries to hold her gaze with his, her pupils dilate, pushing against the whites of her eyes as if to escape all constriction, enough resolve to smash through Perspex glass.
Do you feel alright? he asks, and she gets up from the bed, pulling her legs through some black trousers he hadn’t noticed were folded on the floor. Following this is a black shirt, and as she bends down to lace her shoes he sits up, clutching at the sheets like a baby at his swaddling.
What’s going on? Do you want me to leave?
Clare stops moving. Standing at the end of the bed, her eyes survey him, the hair tucked behind her ears revealing the methodical geometry of her bone structure. The door clatters against the frame, and as if this were a demand, she walks toward it, wrenching them open so that the entire night can enter the room. Vistas of stars gather erratically behind gossamer wisps of clouds, and Fergus’ nipples harden. Glancing behind her shoulder, her face is blanched, amorphous, irregular.
Then she jumps off the balcony.
Fergus yells. The sound is excruciating.
Outside, silence. The moon has crossed into the glass and hectors him, pulling at his face. Clare’s room remains the same. Fergus takes a moment to get up, and when he does the only thing he can think of is that if he’s going to scrape the remains of his one-night-stand body up off the floor, he needs to be wearing his clothes. Plaid shirt, on. Legs through trousers, ankle getting caught in the hem. His mind is curdling, stomach doubling in on itself like the wet centre point of bad ham. Once he’s in his boots, he walks over to the door and steps out onto the balcony.
Clare is standing, below. The balcony is at least thirty feet from the roof she has landed on. It is the roof of a line of houses opposite this apartment block, houses which themselves are tall, red brick Victorian work. There is no possibility that she could have survived this fall. Yet, Fergus thinks, not only has she survived, she is standing.
He places two fingers on the trembling vein of his temple. He feels his eyes start to close; unseeing, unmoving.
Don’t let go of my hand, says Clare. She is beside him.
Fergus turns. Why?
Somehow his hand is in hers, and her grip is violent.
Then they’ve fallen forward, and Fergus doesn’t even have time to scream before he feels something loose and crunchy under his feet. He looks up, and there is an ash sapling, the tops of its branches an arm’s length away. It’s discarding its purple-red leaves on this roof, the colour of flayed organs.
Clare points ahead. Rows of houses, spreading outward in straight lines that dwindle to a point when they reach a vague outline of a crater. Aviation lighting blinks a warning red in the sky.
We’ll go across. Then North, to the river.
Fergus stares at her outline, at the hand which interlinks his, warm with pulsing human blood. He allows himself to think that he is dreaming, that he will wake up in the crux of her armpit, crusted in the sweat of sleep. He imagines the palpitations of her posterior muscles as they make morning love.
She runs a hand along the sleeve of his shirt, smoothing the hastily buttoned cuffs. Your clothes are too bright. It means we’ll have to go faster than usual.
As they walk to the edge of the roof, Fergus is wondering about the terms of lucid dreams. He is in control. He is in a subconscious crevasse of his mind. But then Clare is looking at him, amused, as if she knows what he is thinking, and before he can say anything to stop her she has leapt, vertiginously, into the air.
Fergus feels his body, smoothed into an arc by the slap of wind. His eyes are shut. His nose streams, and he thinks about the little life that he has had, the terrible waste, but they land feet first, atop the roof of the house opposite, and Clare is running, brandishing his arm like a sceptre. The rows of houses that line this street block provide long stretches of ground, yet Clare covers them in moments. Littering their path are obstacles she nimbly negotiates. Chimneys, rising up out of the dark, stern and immutable, puffing shallow gasps of smoke. Loose tiles, which Clare seems to be the most concerned with. When they have reached the end of Carnegie Street, she stops to kick at the eaves of the last house.
Slate tiles, she mutters, then turns to look at him. That’s how you know we’re in the moneyed bit. Her face is obsidian, lit up from within, she is more beautiful then she was at the restaurant. She pulls him through the air, the difference between this block and the next easily ten metres. This time, Fergus opens his eyes, which blear from the force of it. The image will stay with him for the rest of his life: Clare, poised upward, as if being pulled by a taut wire that descends from the clouds. Her chin, jutted low and forward to counter the ascension, a lethal observe. Transfusing, passing herself between space as easily as if someone were waiting to receive her.
Clerkenwell, Farringdon, Blackfriars. Buildings made of marble, slippery as ice underneath their feet. Fergus hears a piano playing, then the hunched figure of a woman, smoking a joint out of her skylight. Before they are seen, Clare has crouched low, sidling along the entablature of a building whose funnel plumes with the reek of yeast. As Fergus looks back, he sees the pub he went to only the other evening, to down dank shots of sambuca with a work colleague called Ned. He recalls, with a nauseous jolt, the spew of anise sicked up on the side of this pavement, and then Clare propels forward and real life is deposited behind them. North Kensington: a church, heady coffered ceiling supported by pilasters, glimpses of a mezzanine glowing richly through the glass dome. A long leap from this to a high rise, 23 stories and the ground beneath them shifting as if alive, alert to intruders perched on the planes of its head. Someone screams Cunt from the nineteenth floor and they have reached the river. Slick, black. Every building, tower, and street lit up around it, a metropolis’ chiaroscuro. Clare stops, and an undivided silence sweeps up toward them. If they were to slip, it would be into the underarm of the wet fleet, gently turning its nose toward Reading. Fergus trembles, he feels cut open. Clare is watching him. Her mouth is curled, amused. Before he can speak, there is a thumping sound on the ground behind him and a pair of hands reach out to squeeze Clare’s shoulders.
Don’t you know by now that this is my spot? The woman is tall, taller than Fergus, a black hat pulled down low over deeply set eyes. Clare laughs.
Something tells me you can’t piss on the territory of the Thames, Vita.
Stepping toward her, they hug, and Vita glances over at Fergus. She is disinterested, there are other things on her mind, but her eyebrows have drawn together quickly.
Not another one. You just don’t give a fuck, do you?
We were quick. But I didn’t expect tonight to have so much traffic.
Clare is motioning to something across the river, and when Vita makes a sound of exclamation, Fergus clumsily follows their gaze.
He can’t see at first. The buildings are obscured, dim. Then, slipping from behind a canopy, something irks at the normal order of things. Once he has seen one, he can see them everywhere. Bestial figures, creeping at feral pace. They shroud against the sky. They leap, roof to roof, lightly and darkly as bats.
Better steer clear. Hanna shoots her eyes in the direction of Fergus. Looks like we’re making friends.
Then she’s gone, one second standing on the parapet beside Fergus and the next, crouched on the concrete strip of the BFI. He dimly wonders what films they will be playing tomorrow, whether Clare would want to see one, and then her hand is guiding him backward on the small of his spine, and she is saying Time to go, I think. What’s your address?
When they land on the roof of Fergus’ apartment, the sun is coming up behind the clouds. A bird chirrups from the street below, one mangled leg dragging behind as it pecks at a slice of salmon poking pinkly out of the bin.
Three doors down, Fergus can hear his neighbour, crippled with insomnia, skipping through radio channels until he lands on an early morning slot dedicated to classical guitar. The world hangs around him, and Fergus liquidly observes, unable to join it in the same way again.
When will I see you?
He takes Clare’s face in his hands, holding it tightly, forcing her to look. Her features remain impassive, her eyes wild and departed. They remain like this for a few moments, and then slowly, his hands drop to his sides.
*
He awakes to the sound of knocking on his door.
The time is 1pm, and there is the smell of something smoky, Petrolane twisted into the nubbins of his sheets. He sits up, rubbing the side of his face with his hand; the faint beginnings of blood blisters are dotted around his knuckles.
The knocking starts again, this time more impatient, and he scrabbles up and onto the landing. It must be Clare.
Careening down the stairs, Fergus winces at the pain, spreading up his legs and through his arms. It takes him a moment to get to the door. When he pulls it, his hand slips from the doorknob multiple times, flabby and viscous.
It’s Elsa.
She stands there, taking in the full sight of him, her gloved hand still raised in a belligerent O.
God, you look terrible.
Brushing past, she unbuttons her coat and throws it over the banister, revealing the cultivated lines of a jasmine-coloured suit. As she smooths down the fabric over her thighs, the luminant edges of her French pedicure glow eerily in the light of the stairwell. Turning, she appraises him; the metallic grey of his under eyes, the tangled hair hatched against his temples. Do we have company? Her eyes are narrowed, citrine. She is ready for a fight. Shoulder blades pulled back. Fine lines of her collarbones mottled with red.
Just me. Fergus smiles, walking past her in the direction of the kitchen.
Fergus. Have you even looked at your phone?
He turns on the kettle. Elsa’s voice, high-pitched and annoying, drifts loosely behind him. Running through his mind are images of streets, flat and fuzzy.
He pulls two teabags from the jumbo pack he bought from Aldi.
Builders?
…Clare’s profile, stern and absorbed. The smell of beer and coal.
Elsa makes a tssk sound with her tongue. Don’t tell me I drove all the way from fucking Streatham for you to have forgotten what we arranged.
He flexes his hand, where the bruise of Clare’s fingers is now darkening to a plum purple. Gently, he traces over them with the pad of his thumb. Elsa. Let’s not fight. There are bigger things than us, you know. The world is offering itself up. It’s wonderful. He looks past her shoulder, as if at something in the distance. More strange than you could possibly imagine.
What? Elsa stares at him, her long neck so white it looks almost amniotic.
I’m talking about perspective. He places his thumb and forefinger close together.
Remembering we’re only this small. Minute, to some people. So tiny that we don’t have to worry. He takes the milk out of the fridge, wiping absentmindedly at the cream which clusters at the edge of the blue tab.
I don’t need the things you need to make yourself happy.
Elsa stands very still. The pupils of her eyes narrow, quartered into reptilian stripes. Things?
Fergus nods. He passes her the mug which she used to drink out of when she lived here, viciously grinding arabica with a mortar and pestle. Elsa puts out a hand to take it, smooth and slow. Your clothes, your hair, your nails, all those little gifts you give to yourself. Yoga classes to help ‘Women-in-Business’, wine evenings at silly private clubs. He taps his fingers against the side of his glass, smiling at her kindly. Brandishing an AmEx card to fill the emptiness. Flicking at the spine of a burr stuck to his trousers, Fergus contemplates calling up Clare. He wonders where she is. Who she’s looking down upon. Glancing up at Elsa, he is vaguely reminded why he got an erection the first day they sat together in History of Art. Her hair rests, in relaxed tresses, wispy soft against her skin.
Do you remember what we spoke about, over text?
Fergus shrugs. We said we were going to talk things through.
A little laugh escapes Elsa’s lips. She leans back, shaking her head. The bakelite buttons on her blazer gleam. I told you to put all of my stuff in a box, so I could pick it up. You haven’t seemed to be able to find time to do it, so I thought I would help with the labour. A sick fly loops deliriously in the space behind her head. She is regarding him with a confusingly cheerful smile. You’ve never really been here, have you? Even when you fuck. You’re not interested by anything. You’re not even interested by your own orgasm. You know your mother once said, ‘Fergus is my son, and I love him. But he shapeshifts.’ Yawning, her mouth is sweetly pink.
She was all teary eyed and confessional. Probably because she thinks you’re God. Probably because you think you’re God, and so everyone around you thinks you are too.
Unfurling languidly, Elsa wanders toward the kitchen door. But really Fergus, you are totally and utterly empty. That’s one thing your mother got wrong. You don’t care enough about people to become what they want you to. You just change shape, because it’s more comfortable for you that way, and you get to avoid all the little thorns that come with feeling for people. From having any sort of traction with anyone. She laughs. You’re fucking neat.
Fergus watches from the counter as Elsa picks up her coat, stopping to smooth down the lifted edge of the carpet in the corridor with her heel.
The superglue’s dried, she says, twinkling. Then she opens the door, and it closes behind her.
Fergus is still for a moment. The clock over the sink, blank apart from two silver hands, makes its regular noise. Elsa’s tea, undrunk, rests on the island. Its shoddy pattern of zinnias will never be enjoyed by him.
He thinks for a moment of the silky hollows in Elsa’s neck. Her smell, gamey and sensual. He reaches into his pocket, sliding his phone onto the palm of his hand. With one finger, he types in his passcode, navigating the home screen until he reaches the cheerful interface of Bumble. Tapping on Clare’s icon, he types out a message:
Do you want to meet tonight?
Sending it, he exhales. In his head, he is striding across the surface of the world, his old life compressed and crystalline beneath him.
*
Three days later, it is 10 o’clock at night, and Clare has still not replied.
Fergus sits on the edge of his bed, twisting a tissue back and forth between his fingers until it’s soft and pulpy. He looks out of his window, at the ligatured scraps of clouds closing over the moon. Whenever his phone buzzes, he jerks his head down to check his inbox. He has burnt the features of Clare’s face into his mind staring at her profile icon. The arteries of memory are already fracturing, and the thought makes his heart feel loose and sloppy. Stifling a scream of frustration, he throws the phone face down on his duvet, walking to the window. His forehead is damp, gammy against the glass. Gazing out over the houses, he searches desperately for fleeting figures carving paths through the air. Sometimes, he swears he sees one, and leans out to get a closer look; then the shape re-emerges as the banal stump of a telegraph pole. His head feels fuzzy, like the congealed film on top of sour milk. He hasn’t been able to sleep for 72 hours, and swears that something is eating the follicles of his skin, burning invisibly underneath the blue veined surface of his forearms. Now, he recalls the similar sting of Clare’s flesh, her breasts pressed against his chest hard and infirm, and moans softly, pinching at the thin skin of his thigh to try and jolt himself back into sanity. He settles down on his windowsill, stretching out his legs so that his feet can rest against the opposite wall.
He has thought, in the last few days, about the imprint of Clare’s hand on his. Rather than the mark of her desire to protect him, perhaps it is a transference. A stamp of approval. A fox, black gums quivering in the light of the streetlamp, cocks his head up as if waiting for something. Fergus leans forward to look at it, tssks gently. Swinging his legs around, he slides his feet out of the window so they dangle, knocking against each other in the frozen air. Down below is the copper brown roof of the nursery. It’s not so far, seeing as Fergus’ apartment block is only three floors, squat and suburban. Ten feet or so below, it looks firm, newly renovated with oil-based paint. Above him, something clicks and he looks up, bracing for a flutter of ash tapped from the upstairs balcony. It’s just a piece of lead piping, come loose from the wall. As it skitters, a gust of wind blows the mulchy scent of frosted debris up from the communal garden.
The sky is lucid now, still and alert, as if waiting for something. Out ahead, he can see the tips of high rises, flattened heads wagging in the wind. Fergus imagines himself inside them, wearing a crisp grey suit and typing on sleek Apple software.
He imagines being on top of them, too.
Gently, he leans forward. His back is now pressed against the outside pane of glass; hands clenched tightly to the sill, fingers tipped with white. He remembers it, the gut-punch of the fall. But then, from up here, he doesn’t feel scared.
He lets go.