Joy

I was smoking on the fire escape when I heard the neighbour come up after me. The Neighbour: that’s the way I thought of her, the title capitalised and official in a way I never felt like her given name really was. That, I told myself, was why I could never remember it. Why, though I often received mail by mistake under ‘Alison Trent’, I never knew who it was for until I noticed the flat number and went out to put the envelope through the door, which I always did quickly so that she wouldn’t come out and want to chat to me the way she always did.

I didn’t do talking anymore, by then, if I ever had to begin with. I kept my hood up over my headphones in the street to keep the insurance salesmen and the preachers with their squashed pamphlets and loudspeakers from calling out to me to buy into their god, whichever of them it was. I’d leave texts, emails, and phone calls unanswered until someone threatened to come up to the flat to knock.

I didn’t have friends, and if it looked like someone was angling to instate themselves as one out of pity or some bewildering interest in my person I’d make myself so consistently unavailable that they’d give up and drift away, a bitter relief.

I talked to my dog, June, when I’d had her, but she had died weeks ago and had been buried by night on a bit of land surrounding the apartment block. I knew one day I’d have to dig her up again before some hapless worker tasked with doing up the place came across her, but I didn’t care; I wanted her close to me, couldn’t stand the idea of her being cremated, all the lovely pieces of her tossed at the wind like the horrible game of some child deity of death.

When I looked out of my apartment window I could see where I’d buried her. I liked the idea of having her down there, by the tree she’d sniffed and the benches she’d pissed on and the grass she’d rolled in till her coat came up green. She’d kept on rolling out there until pancreatic cancer made her elderly before she was ever old; the day I had her put to sleep I fed her a burger from the van that was always parked up across the road, watched her bolt down white bread and fatty dripping meat with mascara running from my eyes all the way down to my chin, women with pushchairs and shopping bags scurrying by as though me crying was some symptom of disease.

I knew how it felt to be one of those leafleters or missionaries in town, then, breaking the societal law of doing a private thing out in the street. And I thought, ‘fuck all of them’, as though I was any better than they were, swearing under my breath as I saw The Neighbour coming up after me along the twisting steps of the fire escape, shiny eyed and out of breath the way she always seemed to be even if she’d been home all day, though she rarely was.

There was always a Pilates class or a coffee run to do, a women’s meet up in the park or drinks at one of the little bars I’d walk past that were all lit up in pink lighting with faux flowers on the walls to take pictures on. Always nieces and nephews to visit, open mic nights where The Neighbour would read out optimistic verses to enthused applause; I’d hear about it all whenever she’d collar me to come into the flat, done out in grey and white except for the sunflowers she had on the centre table, a fresh bouquet each time the old ones died.

“A nice pop of colour,” she’d say, and then the stories would come, everything she’d done from daybreak to dusk and after that while I’d sit scruffy and monosyllabic on the crushed velvet couch, out of place.On the days I escaped The Neighbour I’d hear her through the wall on the phone to one of an endlessly spawning clan of associates, telling them what she couldn’t tell me. There would be romcoms and reality television and Kylie or ABBA on the speaker, the demanding cries of her squat grey cat Dave if she hadn’t fed him quick enough for his liking, and I’d sit in my own flat listening to it all, seething and resentful, though I knew that if I knocked on her door and asked she’d turn the volume down and slip a ‘SORRY’ note under the door, punctuated with a string of emphatic Xs. Kiss-kiss-kiss.

Even the sight of The Neighbour irritated me, slim and energetic in her rotation of pastel leisurewear and jeans, box dyed hair blue-black nearly to her waist when it was down, white teeth like the walls of coastal houses, tanned skin the even colour of sand. Her wide blue eyes were always looking into mine somehow, though I’d try to fix my gaze on the light fittings or some mark on the skirting board so I didn’t encourage her. Then there was her voice, as well, a tuneless sing-song, the broad vowels I heard in my own voice and winced at— everything in her angered me for some formless reason, but when she was out or when she’d gone to bed and the flat next door was quiet I found myself depressed, and that was another annoyance. This sadness I couldn’t understand.

I was one of those miserable people my mother had hated. “Put your face straight,” she’d snap when I was little; it’s what I tried to do when The Neighbour came trotting up the fire escape steps. Put my face straight. God knows if I did it or not.

“You shouldn’t come up,” I said. “I’m smoking. You’ve got asthma.”

This, too, I’d learned from The Neighbour’s happy tirades, had seen her huff enthusiastically on her inhaler after a hearty morning of exercise or after laughing too hard at some unfunny thing I’d said that she took that way, somehow. I expected her to beam at me, now, pleased that I’d remembered this about her, but her face didn’t change, fixed in that same expression of wet-eyed intensity she’d had when she’d first glimpsed me cupping my hand over the cigarette to keep it from being put out in the rain.

The Neighbour’s mouth was hanging open, and she kept licking at it like an anxious dog, spit falling down through the grating beneath her. Drugs, I would have said, only she wasn’t the type— pill fuelled nights as a teenager, waking up dehydrated in someone’s field had been an end to that, something to look back on and shudder over, and say ‘God, what were we like?’

So I knew that she was sober, sober and scrambling up those steps on her hands and knees like a child pretending to be an animal. Something not right in the head.

“Fucking hell,” I said in alarm; the only way down the fire escape was past The Neighbour, and I didn’t want to touch her even with my clothes.

She was ill, I decided, mentally, most likely, or having contracted some disease from her cat or one of the other assorted creatures she was always stopping to stroke outside the flats. I could see the sweat soaking through the arms of her blue zip up jacket, and there were tears in her eyes, though hers wasn’t the sort of crying I did, ugly and angry and pitiful. Her tears were loving, joyous, those of an apostle bearing witness to a miracle, and that’s when I knew for sure she’d lost it; there wasn’t anything worth looking at that way, just me in an old coat with holes in the pockets, and beyond that the grim sky, a hoary nothingness.

I stubbed out my cigarette against the side of the fire escape and dropped it.

“Alright,” I said as The Neighbour pulled herself up onto her feet via the railing. “What’s happened? What’s going on?”

There was a smell coming off her, I noticed, like the primal, pungent stink of the tiger house at a zoo, bleeding through her Pink Sugar perfume. Not a sick smell, I thought, but the stink of something violent and alive. The Neighbour caught up a handful of my coat in one fist, and as she swayed into me the smell struck me like an uppercut. I reeled, and she held me upright with her little bony hand.

“I love you,” said The Neighbour. “I want you with me all the time.”

“Hold on,” I said, somewhere between astonishment and alarm; I pushed at The Neighbour’s shoulder, realising as I did so that it was the first time I’d ever chosen to touch her outright, and that I didn’t know how I felt about it.

The look in The Neighbour’s eyes then was like the pouring of a slick, dark wax over me, a sensuous and fevered heat. She leaned in and bit my cheek close to the jaw, those strip-whitened teeth splitting the flesh under the tips, her warm spittle and her breath boiling my neck. I was too shocked to do anything but let her push me up against the back of the fire escape, setting the whole contraption rattling as she ripped at me, her hands on my chest going under my coat, oddly gentle as she wound a spool of flesh free and swallowed it, her narrow lower jaw and flat breasts dark with a long runner of blood.

Only when The Neighbour fell aside, breathing heavily, did any kind of sense flood back to me, and then I was shoving down those thin steps and back into the apartment building without thinking to look at The Neighbour or confront her, who I was sure couldn’t be spoken to or reasoned within this uncharacteristic fit of passion. Stemming my bloody wound with my coat sleeve I stumbled to the door of my flat and felt for the key in my pocket one handed, swearing and shivering and jerking about in terror that The Neighbour would come down and try to bite me again.

Once I’d gotten into the room I looked at myself in the mirror on the wall above the shoe rack.

“Christ,” I muttered. “What has she done?”

I’d need a plastic surgeon to fix the hole in my face, which would otherwise heal into a lump of scar, another reason never to leave the flat against my will, though surely I couldn’t still live there next to her, The Neighbour, who’d looked down the fire escape after me before I’d turned away with torn flesh in her smiling mouth, wanting to follow. I couldn’t live near that, I told myself, though maybe I wouldn’t live at all.

There was heat in the wound she’d given me, the burn of an obvious infection. I tried my best to wash and treat it myself, cursing and moaning at the mess, but not willing, somehow, to take myself to a doctor. I couldn’t bear to leave the flat, the thought of the suffocating noise of humanity striking me like another shot of pain through the face.

I started to shake, not with cold but a nauseous heat. I went from the bed to the sofa under the thinnest sheet I could find, wanting suddenly to sleep, too wired with shock and pain and discomfort to settle. I kept thinking I should call the police or disease control or some other kind of authority to do something about The Neighbour. Call the family I hadn’t spoken to since I’d stopped visiting them all years ago for some kind of support, but that, too, felt impossible, the sight of my phone where I’d left it charging at the other end of room inspiring another hot rush of sickness I gave up to the toilet bowl as my questionable offering: “Hello God, it’s me again— this time I wasn’t drinking, I swear.”

After an hour or so of going from bathroom to bed I settled to stand with my head hanging out of the apartment window, taking thick gulps of wet air until my hair was sodden with rain and I had to change the dressing on my cheek again, all the tape sodden and losing its adhesive, the bandages like the bits of wet toilet paper we’d throw at the girl’s bathroom ceiling at school when we were kids.

I couldn’t hear The Neighbour next door; I imagined she’d gone out, staggering off to sting whoever she liked with her white teeth. Would she always be like that now, I wondered, or would she get over it? Would I? Why did I care?

The Neighbour went round and round my head as I lay down in the curtain-drawn dark, a cassette tape spinning and spinning on a ribbon that wouldn’t wear out. What had she felt when she’d bitten me? I knew what I’d seen in her eyes, a jittering mad holy joy, like the preachers who would spit at their microphones and stalk up and down shop fronts trying to reach into the hearts of apathetic workers on their lunch breaks or the college kids slyly filming on their phones.

I didn’t know if The Neighbour remembered who I was in that moment, for she couldn’t love me, couldn’t see anything in me, unshaven and barely washed, roots grown three inches from the scalp, and living in a flat so thick with unwashed crockery that I’d started eating on paper plates rather than hacking at the mess. Even before I’d lost my June there wasn’t much in me to love— the Neighbour had attacked me because I was there; she would have professed undying ardour to the caretaker if he’d been the first person she’d come across, the poor man, knocking his bucket and black bags of rubbish down as she’d gnawed his narrow face away out of love.

I tossed and fussed in my bed until a weird sleep came over me, the kind I’d had when I was small and afraid of my own bedroom even with two lamps and a plug-in nightlight on, the kind where you jolt up from strange dreams and go back into them so quickly you don’t know if you’re awake or not. I kept seeing The Neighbour, her mouth like a boiling volcanic cave that sucked at my face until I burned all over with her.

In those dreams I remembered her name.

It was dark when I truly woke up; I didn’t look at the time, didn’t even think to search for a clock, only stood up, swaying and humid with illness from my mattress, my thoughts buzzing in vehicular motion back and forth and around each other. I didn’t feel scared anymore, didn’t even feel the pain in my cheek anymore.

Instead there was this burning energy all through me, having me jitter like an addict, pacing and scratching at my arms and trying to work out what it was I needed to do to get this feeling out of me. Though I wasn’t sad in any way I kept thinking of June, how she ate all her birthday cakes in three bites every year, how her ears had smelled and her rough paw pads had felt and how I wanted her out of the ground and with me again, not necessarily as she was when she was alive, just as herself in whatever way that might be.

I thought and thought of her, and then I went to look for the spade I’d buried June with and went out of the apartment and down the elevator, still sweaty and mad haired in yesterday’s clothes, not much caring if I saw anyone else on the way, or if they saw me. All I cared about then was June, seeing in my mind’s eye exactly where I’d buried her, knowing how to find that patch of grass exactly like all the others in the drab apartment green.

I shoved out of the main exit and went to that place in the dark, which in any case was partially lit by a quarter moon like a child’s lost tooth hanging over me. There was no one else about at that time, though I think I would have dug even if there had. I stuck the head of the spade into the earth and pulled it out in fat lumps, barely feeling the strain in my arms or in my back as I worked, wired with my insane purpose, never once pausing to think about why I was doing it or how I’d feel seeing what June was now, far more horrible and pitiful than her still corpse had been when I’d put her in the ground.

I don’t know how long I worked; hours, maybe, piling up dirt next to me so high that I could smell it, see the worms and insects I’d woken up hurry away from me to work themselves back underground. Then the spade struck the hardness of bone and there she was, my June, only a partial skeleton, not yet having been in the dirt long enough to rot all the way. There was meat, still, on her flanks and her belly, meat that crawled with beetles and stank enough to make my eyes stream, though I was crying already, part of her left still that I could hold in my hands.

Clearly the bite in my face, the illness and infection had driven me as mad as The Neighbour was, only I didn’t feel it; all that I was thinking and feeling made absolute sense to me, more than anything had in years. I was on my knees and reaching my hands out and into the dead flesh on June’s filthy bones and shoving it into my mouth before I’d even finalised the decision or wondered what it would do to me to eat it.

Though the meat tasted foul even in the thick of that madness my lips ran with hungry saliva; my gut bellowed for it, needing more of June than was left of her. I chewed and chewed and swallowed and reached down to rip another shred of her to eat, feeling with each mouthful that I’d grown closer to her, like she loved me as much as I loved her. I felt it with the certainty of knowing, wept and laughed with the relief of having June back with me, sobbed with grains of decaying meat spilling from my mouth into the grave again.

There was peace in the sensation of love, serenity I’d only read about in books, or seen in the face of The Neighbour as she pottered about her comfortable flat. It didn’t matter to me then that June was dead and I was lonely; that loneliness was gone, filled up by her within me, as though that was and had always been the way to keep her after death. I had simply not known.

I lay down on the ground, overwhelmed by the very existence of happiness, thinking that I hadn’t felt it in so long that it seemed new and novel and awe-inspiring. Like I’d discovered a new sensation, tapped into a vein of something that could only be found through maiming. Sickness.

I knew how The Neighbour had felt, then, when she’d come to me, why she had looked at me with longing. It had never occurred to me before that she’d felt this way about me all this time, that whatever unseen bite she’d contracted had only brought it to the fore. But then I wouldn’t have wanted The Neighbour to feel it, discomforted by the familiarity of love; now, slowly, I began to feel close to her, too, somehow went to sleep again there in the dirt and damp grass with her face in my thoughts, beautiful and ordinary and kind.

When I opened my eyes again I saw that the sun had risen, had been over me for some time, the grey of the previous afternoon driven off by a white peal of light. The sight of it struck me with the same insane joy I’d felt with dead June in my arms, in my mouth and then inside me; I dragged myself up from the ground, staring at the white stamp of the sun until it stuck to my vision like wadded gum, lighting the black behind my eyelids each time I blinked. I held that light with me as long as I could, its novelty another pleasure.

Then I noticed that there were people rushing out of the apartment building into the gardens and through them into the road beyond, some gazing with rapture at the stranger of the sun, others hugging each other or falling into animated conversation, all of them smiling like I was, all of them wounded, and stinking of blood.

No one stared at my filthy clothes or the strings of dog flesh still on my face. No one pointed or tried to stop me as I wandered through the crowd into the street. Instead I felt hands pat my back or arms as though I knew all these people, all of us comrades through shared experience, each of us having been bitten by someone else and in this opened up to the sudden beauty of the world.

I walked my fellow men into the city, watching the change in the populace as it happened: school children latching on to one another’s throats, holding each other through the fear and the fever until love washed it away, men and women holding their lovers’ fighting bodies down in the gutter until they bled. A man gnawing the back of his young daughter’s head, chewing through her long hair to get at the scalp he must have remembered holding, so bald and fragile, in his palm when she was born, the girl kicking and shouting as onlookers cooed and whispered comfort to her and to the others that fought their awakening.

There were fights on either side of me, shop windows smashed, fires eating at the terraced roofs, shots from policemen’s guns, punches thrown and knife blades swung in terrified rejection of what the already bitten were offering. There were bodies underfoot that I stepped over, unable to feel sad long enough to grieve that they hadn’t given this new way a chance, people sobbing and shrieking and trying desperately to reason with one another.

Some ran, those that fled caught hold of by those with heart enough even to love a stranger; they, I thought, were the best of us. I had family that couldn’t even find it in them to be affectionate with their own— here was something to learn from, the generosity and empathy and gentleness of wanting to pass on this germ of love and get nothing back in return, which I had longed for all my life.

I went in a methodical circle around the city, the many walking with me like an organised parade, all of us wanting to be together, watching one another see and feel the gorgeous chaos of everything, to touch and look into one another’s faces and experience joy. I’d never thought so many people beautiful before.

Eventually I got on the path back to the apartment block— half fell all the way, really, picking myself up from the floor every few steps, laughing with a hysterical mirth that caught amongst the people around me, sounding almost the same as their screams. Sometimes a passer-by would help me up from the ground, or I’d help them, and we’d grip each other momentarily, alight with the idea that we both knew what the other was feeling. That we’d never known how possible it was to love.

A man was singing beautifully from a window above the newsagents; a mother was weeping over the child whose arm she’d eaten down to the bone even as that same infant looked up at her adoring, a strip of its mother’s ear in its mouth like a sweet. Couples all over kissed and murmured together, draped on benches or on sodden grass without a care for the mud.

There was no fear of looking into a stranger’s eye by accident any longer; we were all staring at each other in wonder, wading through the blood in the road to touch one another’s hands or faces before moving on, never to see one another again. How I got home in the end I don’t know, but after an hour or so of walking the block came into view again, daylight hitting its head on the uppermost brick. It, too, was beautiful, this eyesore, something to love.

I went in through the lobby, my shoes sticking to carpet soaked through with blood. It was better that way, should have been red to begin with; I’d never noticed what a beautiful colour it was.

I didn’t go up to my room, after all, stumbling like a soldier with a belly wound right past it to The Neighbour’s door which I struck at with damp fists, ignoring the bell. Its resident came out to me so quickly that it was like she’d been waiting directly behind the door for me to come to her; she’d showered since I’d met her on the stairwell, her black hair like the frayed arms of some alien plant down her back, the white towel wrapped around her like some stupid anachronism in a period film, impossibly ordinary.

Only her staring eyes, still blown with hunger, and the flesh still stuck between The Neighbour’s teeth told me she recognised the mania in me, remembered what she had done to me. That she had wanted me. Still did.

I saw, then, that the divine hunger that had rolled through the city and into her through a loved one’s bite had settled, accepted by her like the process of perspiration or the painful need to piss, an unpleasant thing that was natural to us all and necessary for us to live. For we hadn’t been living, any of us, before the fever, the two of us least of all; we hadn’t touched each other, somehow, though we’d hugged when June had died, and on birthdays and Christmas, or she had hugged me, at least.

All the people that had ever kissed and fucked and held each other, sobbing, through the bleeding sores of grief in the world— none of them had really touched each other.

None of them had loved.

“Alison,” I said; I was standing with my arm up against the doorframe, then, stinking of dog hair and rotten flesh and turned over soil and my own reeking nature.

“Alison,” I said, and though she was clean except for her teeth I could smell the primitive stench of her that I now knew was love.

Her eyes shone with it, ran over with avidity. She put her left hand up to my drooling mouth and let me sink my teeth into the web between her thumb and forefinger, knowing what I wanted, unafraid. I felt blood and the frayed ends of flesh touch the pan of my mouth and pulled her greedily against me, aware of her body hot and thrusting under the white towel, seeing up close for the first time her flaws in the down on her lip and the stretch marks on her small breasts and the scars faded and flat on her forearms and wanting to lick them till they bled.

“Mandy,” said Alison, and as I kissed her open wound almost to the bone she took me into the flat and shut us both behind the door, and everything I loved was in that room, and inside me.