Read by Elizabeth Bower
She is Lillia, addicted to ice, hungry for its tip-tap-toe coldness, stuffing ice-cubes in her mouth, getting high from their ice-cold sweetness. It is summer, when the rank heat of the sun pushes down on the earth that so it must gasp for breath. Closing the curtains Lillia speaks on the phone to a man whose hearty tones are too warm. Afterwards, she runs herself an ice bath.
Two days later as requested, an industrial freezer arrives, long and white like a snow-covered plateau. The men who install it wear a thin film of sweat, skin browned by summer rays. Lillia does not offer tea or coffee, but sets out glasses of water in which cubes clink pure notes. One of the men takes a gulp, then sets it back on the counter looking at the unplugged kettle. But Lilla is already climbing the stairs. Sliding between the white sheets of her bed, a tray of ice-cubes next to her, she is held tight in the gleam of an arctic landscape. She becomes polar bear, shaggy pelt of a coat protecting her as she searches for plump seals in ice-pools. Eventually she turns into the form most precious, her cheekbones etched from sharp slivers of ice, her Giacommeti-thin body crackling with ice-secrets. She is buzzing with glacial tenderness. There is a knock on the door. Downstairs, they are packing up.
“Hot isn’t it love? Still, the freezer should keep your food cool. Big enough for a catering business. Lucky you've got the space, not many have.” Lillia detects grievance. She signs a form and as they leave she gazes at the men through a crack in the blinds of her living room window. Three brown faces tilted towards the sun, matches flaring, acrid smoke pluming from their mouths.
Lillia orders a batch of frozen goods to be delivered to her door. When they arrive, she lifts the heavy lid of her new freezer and carpets the white floor with peas, carrots, burgers. She gnaws that week, tongue curling on snags of flavour in hard, ice-encased edges. Still the heat does not break. The world outside her home is heavy with humans crawling through a hot web of roads and pubs and restaurants. When Lillia opens her curtains, air shimmers in the glazed horizon. She knows soon the earth will explode under the relentless glare of the photosphere. Nothing will be left. She puts an ear to her freezer's belly, soothed by the low-pitched vibration of an arctic heart-beat tick-tocking a million times a second. She stares into its snowy sides, rimmed with ice like a protective pelt. The air that rises is cool and forceful. It is ice that is clear, that is white and bursting with light.
When the sun has been banished into the pit of the earth she breathes more easily. But she cannot sleep. Night after night the sheets wind around her tossing and turning body. Finally, under the cool gaze of the moon, she descends through the house. Lillia longs for a landscape of ice-secrets, longs to be stranded, come home, lie down upon velvet snow, mossy and soft. And ice is an excellent preserver. Lifting the lid of the freezer Lillia lets her white sheet fall to the floor. Like Jonah and the whale, she is now inside her freezer's belly. Settling herself among the frozen peas and spinach, chopped carrots and burgers, Lillia closes her eyes and sleeps.
Lillia in the Whale by Rebecca Swirsky was read by Elizabeth Bower at the Liars' League Fire & Ice event at The Wheatsheaf in London on Tuesday 8 December 2009.
Rebecca Swirsky did an MA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Her stories have appeared in Matter magazine (the annual publication of the Sheffield Hallam English Department) and, now, at Liars’ League.
Elizabeth Bower graduated from Warwick University and trained at Mountview. She has played Shakespeare's Juliet and Lady Macbeth on stage and recently appeared in the BBC4 film Micro Men and as series regular, Melody Bell in BBC1 drama, Doctors. She narrates children’s adventures for BBC7 and for Short Story Radio. Elizabeth is delighted to be reading with the Liars’ League.
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