Read by Caroline O'Mahoney (fourth story in podcast, here)
Her heart is in the middle of the dining table next to the potatoes. It is pumping away against the tabletop. No one seems to notice. The white tablecloth is beginning to stain; a ring of yellow plasma is seeping beneath the tableware, the central red mark deepening into a dark, sticky burgundy that resembles port-wine gravy.
The thudding pumps have a cloying sound that marks the passing of beat to beat, moment to moment, keeping her silent.
Her husband’s family are catching up, ignoring, not seeing the heart. They began drinking when she was putting the children to bed. They are no longer sober.
‘Wonderful, convivial hosts. So congenial,’ her father-in-law remarks, warming his glass of wine in the palm of his hand before taking a deep swig. She wonders which one of them is Judas. Though it is her heart there, bleeding and bumping against the edge of the serving dish, she has no illusions of herself being cast as the Jesus figure. Who would that be?
‘You keep saying that,’ her mother-in-law says. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘Well, they were. Very convivial.’
She wonders if the repetition is patronising, or a way of trying to convince himself. Perhaps he is the preacher.
‘Until you ruined it and left under a black cloud,’ her mother-in-law adds, nudging her husband with her elbow, encouraging him to continue. She helps herself to more potatoes, the serving spoon millimetres from the unseen heart.
‘I stand by what I said,’ her father-in-law adds.
‘He’s only sorry to have caused upset,’ her mother-in-law says. ‘More potatoes?’ Her husband nods as his mother heaps another three potatoes onto his plate, the serving spoon passing over the heart with each journey. It feels strange to look at something that is so intimately hers, as an object, just there in amongst the rest of the dinner, inches from the carving knife. Perhaps the scene is more Frieda Kahlo than early Renaissance.
‘She needed to hear it,’ her father-in-law takes up the tale again. ‘She’s a crackpot and it’s only getting worse.’ He pauses to lift a carefully loaded fork into his mouth, a little gravy escaping onto his lip, the low table lighting catching it like a droplet of dew in the rising sunlight so that it hangs, glistening, full to the point of falling. She can’t help but think of the bloody maw of a hunting dog, the jewelled remnants of their catch thick with drool and the scene takes on yet one more painterly aspect. A monk’s dining room perhaps. Their table laden. Their bodies’ obscene with gluttony and power.
‘You’ve met her.’ Her mother-in-law aims the conversation at her, cutting into the extra potatoes on her plate, their thin skins peeling away under a sheen of butter the same yellow as the plasma. How her mother-in-law stays thin is a mystery. ‘She used to be his secretary,’ she continues. ‘Made him move into a gated community miles from the tennis club.’
‘Believes, I mean, it’s ridiculous, but the woman believes she can communicate with the dead.’ Her father-in-law gesticulates with his wine glass and sends a reflected beam of light bouncing towards her, the wine rolling slowly about the glass with viscous gravity. He looks to her glass. ‘More wine?’
She shakes her head, holds her hand over the half-full glass. She’s not sure she can speak. Her heart is beating less regularly now and when it does its movements are erratic. It jumps high enough to tumble onto a plate, to leap into a serving dish. There is carrot and parsnip mash and purple sprouting broccoli alongside those buttery potatoes. It could land anywhere. She watches it, her hand pressed up against her chest. One moment, things had seemed normal and the next it’s as if she’s developed a severe astigmatism. The word takes her back to the last supper image, to bleeding hearts and hands. To the altar where Abraham bound Isaac. Why hadn’t she felt it coming out of her body? But there it is, the arteries and pulmonary vein like hollow, boneless arms, slapping their way towards the beef.
Her father-in-law chews on some gristle, pulls it from his mouth and places it on the side of his plate.
‘It shouldn’t be encouraged. She needed to be told the truth,’ he says.
‘It’s one thing offering comfort to a few desperate, bereaved, people,’ her mother-in-law chips in, ‘but to say, out of the blue – and she did, just come out with it – that you have a message from a dead person, to someone who’s not even asked. It’s outrageous. Actually,’ she smiles, ‘I think it’s damn rude.’
‘Too right,’ her father-in-law adds.
‘Who did she say she had a message from?’ her husband speaks for the first time. Her heart appears to be slapping closer to his side of the table.
‘My father,’ her father-in-law says. He takes a deep breath and suddenly slams his fist hard on the table. ‘She needs to understand solid fact. Science. A table is a table. The dead are dead. It’s poisonous. All this metaphysical nonsense.’
No one asks what the message was.
‘Not hungry?’ her mother-in-law asks. She smiles weakly back. No. She really isn’t. She watches her heart. There on the table. She watches her father-in-law raise his hand once more, anticipates the noise of flesh hitting solid wood, winces a little. But the sound doesn’t come. His fist falls right through the table to the firm muscle of his thigh. He looks down, pushes his chair back a little as if this was what he had always intended, to plant a fist on his leg to emphasise his point. Did they not see? His fist had gone through the table as if it weren’t there. Schoom, straight through, the rushing sound like a beat of air from a fan. She presses her hand in closer to her throat. She can’t get any air.
‘Are you alright?’ her mother-in-law asks. ‘You’re not worried about the children? I haven’t heard a peep since they went up to bed.’
Her father-in-law looks up. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a believer in all this mumbo jumbo,’ he says.
No. She shakes her head.
‘Are you choking? Is there something stuck in your throat?’
She keeps shaking her head. She can’t breathe. She can’t…
Her husband gets up from his chair, walks behind her and slaps her hard on the back; the air rushes in. She takes a deep breath and everyone smiles, settles back down to their meal. She moves her chair closer to the table.
‘Thank you. I’m fine, really,’ she says. ‘It’s delicious.’ And she forces herself to cut into the slice of beef weeping into the carrot and parsnip mash. She shoves the meat between her teeth and chews. The flesh refuses to pull apart in her mouth. Its juices slip down her throat, but its texture hardens. She takes a large sip of wine and feels the meat pushing past her larynx until it lingers, lodged somewhere in her oesophagus.
Her heart is still beating on the table. The slap appears to have settled it, though where it has settled is a surprise. It now sits on her husband’s plate.
‘So to finish the story,’ her father-in-law says, ‘I told her never to mention such poppycock to me again and, well, they didn’t say another word. Quite literally. I left a day early. They’d provided me with a wonderful meal. We’d had a fabulous day at the club. But I was no longer welcome. I don’t know if we’ll speak again. It was most confounding.’ He looks genuinely puzzled. ‘How could I say nothing? You can’t let ideas like that take root.’ He pauses a moment and looks directly up at her. ‘It’s like all that attachment parenting rubbish. She’ll just fall further down the rabbit hole and take him with her. You have to nip these things in the bud.’ He holds her gaze.
‘But now you’ve fallen out,’ she says, before she can stop herself. She shouldn’t have spoken. A few moments ago she wouldn't have been able to speak.
Her father-in-law holds his knife and fork paused above his plate and frowns. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We have.’
‘Such an odd woman,’ her mother-in-law says.
‘It all began so well,’ her father-in-law adds. ‘They were so convivial.’
Her mother-in-law puts another two potatoes on her plate. ‘Though I don’t know who else would put up with him. He isn’t exactly easy, especially now he’s started forgetting things.’ She glances quickly up at her husband who frowns as he carves another mouthful.
Something is out of line. She looks up at her mother-in-law who is lifting her hand to her throat, her expression pained. She reaches for her glass of wine, her face wincing as she swallows and then, suddenly, quite unannounced, blood begins to seep through the horizontal blue and white stripes of her organic, brushed cotton T-shirt. She pushes her chair back a little and coughs slightly as if simply dislodging a piece of potato stuck in her throat, but following the blood, the fibres of her T-shirt unfurl outwards, stitching neatly unravelling.
As the material unweaves from her mother-in-law’s chest, she sees a heavy metal zip beneath. Sticky and shiny with the lustre from the elegant overhead table lights, the dark, coarse zip slowly begins to open. She looks around the table but, as before, no one is paying attention.
As the zip unclasps, tooth by tooth, her mother-in-law’s heart can clearly be seen pulsing out like a tongue pushing its way through greedy lips. And then, as the last tooth is pulled apart, the heart slips out of her mother-in-law’s chest and flops onto her plate sounding like a wet slap and knocking the cutlery away with a distinct chink. Is that how her heart came out? She lifts her fingers, trying to feel the jagged teeth of a zip.
No one looks up. Her mother-in-law puts her glass back on the table. ‘A funny kettle of fish. That’s what my mother would have called her,’ she says and picks up her cutlery. Her father-in-law nods at the return to form.
As her mother-in-law calmly cuts into her own beating heart, smiling towards her son, he pushes the prongs of his fork into the heart on his own plate. She feels the stab. She watches him lift his knife and pierce the outer fatty tissue that spools out around her heart in buttery tendrils. She feels the serrated edge of the knife cutting deeper, severing the flailing arteries and pulmonary vein that are trying so hard to escape.
There is blood everywhere. It could be a scene from a shoot out or a chainsaw massacre, pieces of flesh and blood raining down, pasting culpability all around. Their faces are scarlet Jackson Pollocks. And still the metal chinks against the chinaware, peristalsis moves food and wine down into eager guts.
She licks her lips. She would probably have been called funny too, not funny ha-ha but funny odd. She smiles at her mother-in-law, who smiles back, sucking one of her own tiny, writhing purple capillaries from her fork and trapping it with her teeth.
Kind, perhaps, they might say, all that zealous attention she gives the children. But odd. Definitely unconventional and lucky, very lucky to have married their son who turns towards her, as if he’s heard her thought, and reaching at an awkward diagonal, squeezes her knee under the table, totally unaware of the blood dribbling down from the table cloth and soaking into the pale blue of his crisply pressed shirt.
‘Well, this is lovely, isn’t it?’ he says, the words forming around half-chewed pieces of her. ‘So good to see you both.’
(c) Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone, 2022
Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone is an author, teacher and Creative Writing PhD student. Her novel Home is pretty creepy and ghosts do appear in her work-in-progress about Gertrude Bell. She has a book blog, teaches on the Novel Studio at City University and also likes to write soundwalks. Find out more at lattin-rawstrone.com
Caroline O’Mahoney trained at The Oxford School of Drama. Credits include: The Taming of the Shrew (Open Bar Theatre), Sydney Isn’t Shooting Yet (Theatre 503), Jeff Wayne’s ‘The War of the Worlds’: The Immersive Experience (Layered Reality), A Magical Christmas (Kiddiewinks), Macbeth (Player’s Theatre Co) & Wait Till The End (The PappyShow). Twitter: @ comahoney
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