Elly #2
She’s hovering over Ethan’s flat in the New Town. She descends so that she can see inside his window, into the living room where she’s spent so many evenings sitting with him, trying to convince herself she liked her life. He is on the phone. He is smiling.
Elly’s mouth starts to pool with saliva. There is something wicked pulsing with her every heartbeat, charging up her bones, making her wings ache with longing.
“What are you going to do about it?” Haina asks, in a voice like a prayer.
Elly lets herself picture it. Ethan’s supple body beneath her powerful claws, ripping the arms from the torso, shredding the meat of his thighs.
She could smash his head against the wall, watch it open in all its spectacular colours.
She almost cries out with the pleasure of it, with the heady sensation of her hex having fulfilled its need.
Elly’s eyes snap open. “No,” she gasps, gripping onto the arms of the armchair. “Please, not that.”
It takes a long time for Haina’s face to come into focus again, for Elly to recognise the expression on her face for what it is. Fury.
“Please not that?” she spits back at Elly. “After how he treated you?”
“He’s my husband,” Elly says. She doesn’t know why this is the only thing she can think whenever she feels like she needs to defend Ethan. It feels like the truest thing. Sometimes it feels like the only true thing.
Haina’s eyes are dark. They burn. “Think about it, Elly,” she says, and her voice is lower now, steadier, which is somehow even worse than her anger. “What do you think this is all for? Why do you think we’re here?”
Elly can’t answer that. She can still feel it: how the earth had unrolled beneath her when she was airborne, how good it felt, how strong she’d been.
The body she’s in now is so weak in comparison.
It’s a liability, so aching and frail and encumbered.
She can still feel it on her tongue and in her fingertips and stretching across the taut skin of her collarbone: how much she’d wanted to show herself to Ethan.
Look at me now, she’d wanted to scream in his face. Look at what I can do to you.
* * *
As darkness falls, the guests take their seats outside for the Equinox feast. Festoon lights have been hung between the trees and lanterns swing from branches, casting the garden in hazy light.
The table has been piled high with food, jugs of dark wine set next to mismatched glasses, wildflowers spilling over the lips of vases.
The night is cool but not cold, and the harvest moon glows orange when it appears from behind the clouds, watching them all.
All of it together has an effect on the mood of the house – Elly feels the other guests loosen, relax.
They eat and eat until their stomachs strain.
After dinner, the French doors to the back of the parlour are thrown wide so the music from the record player can reach them.
The guests disperse from the table to lounge on the grass, to chase each other around the garden, yipping at each other’s heels, howling and biting necks when they find each other.
The red sisters have found a skipping rope and each hold an end as the other women take their turn to jump.
They swing the rope in perfect unison, hooting with laughter whenever anyone’s legs get whipped.
Elly isn’t surprised to see Siobhan and Theo hunched together over a camera, talking.
Siobhan points at the table, the moon, the empty wine glasses, and Theo nods without looking at her, aiming the camera this way and that.
At one point, Haina approaches them and speaks only to Siobhan.
Siobhan’s expression – it’s so similar to the way Lakshmi had looked at Haina, the night she died. Almost like devotion, almost like love.
Elly finds Margot sitting alone on the grass, twirling one curl around her fingers. She sits down beside her, and Margot smiles weakly, taking Elly’s arm in hers. “Hi, Little Mouse.”
“Is everything okay?”
Margot shrugs, sniffling a little.
“Are you still worried about the filmmakers?”
Margot considers this for a second, then shakes her head. “Nothing I can do about it.” Then, she places both of her hands on Elly’s rounded belly. “I had a baby, too,” she whispers.
Elly remembers seeing Margot’s silvery C-section scar one night while they were getting changed. She had made herself look away. “You did?”
“I wasn’t supposed to.” The look in Margot’s eye is detached.
She takes her hands from Elly’s stomach, looks up at the moon.
“Everybody told me not to. But I had a baby and she had hair the colour of coal and skin like cream. Her skin was the softest thing I ever felt. I gave her away. I think that’s where I went wrong.
I gave her away.” The words hang in the air, which is smoky from a small campfire some of the guests have started nearby.
Elly shifts a little closer to Margot. “Maybe it was the right thing. At the time.”
Margot starts to tap her thighs against her palm, only gently, and Elly doesn’t stop her. “The right thing,” she says on a soft outbreath. “I think doing the right thing split me straight down the middle, let the dark in. Sometimes I don’t want to be here at all. I just want to be with my baby.”
They don’t speak for a long time. Eventually, Elly takes one of Margot’s hands in hers and presses it to her lips.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. Margot sniffs and shakes her head, as if she can shake away whatever images are crowding there, making her eye cloudy and dark.
She looks so young, too young for the life she must have led to end up here.
They watch the guests around the campfire.
Some of them are taking turns jumping over the flames, their eyes wild and glazed with wine, while the others look on, clapping.
In the flickering light, it takes Elly a while to realise that they’ve taken their hex forms, or something close to them.
Their faces are their own, but their naked bodies are covered with feathers that flare across their exposed midriffs, breasts, strong thighs.
“They’re hexing,” Elly says. There’s a strange feeling in the pit of her belly – an aching, a pull.
Margot makes a little noise in the back of her throat. “Not usually supposed to, not like this. But Haina won’t mind tonight.”
Elly searches for Haina and Siobhan but can’t find them anywhere in the gardens. From where she’s sitting, she can see that the light in Haina’s study is on.
It’s getting late, already close to midnight, and some of the guests are retreating inside.
Only a few are left scattered around the table: Keiko, starting to clear up the used dishes and glasses; Grace, smoking, her chair turned so she can face the treeline and the woods beyond.
Then there’s Theo, sitting next to a visibly drunk Janine.
Her face is wet with tears, and her body drapes against his.
She looks up at him with eyes wide and searching, as if he might be able to hold all her sadness for her.
She hasn’t stopped crying since she found out about Lakshmi, but there’s an edge to her tonight, a hunger in the way her hands cling to Theo’s T-shirt.
Elly wonders how Theo must feel in this house full of women – how he feels when the intensity of their desire is turned on him.
Does he feel like a king, or like prey? Theo turns and catches Elly’s eye, and she looks away.
* * *
That night, Elly dreams of flying. She dreams of the swoop and glide.
She circles high above the house, and when she comes to land, it’s next to Lakshmi’s grave.
In the dream, she digs down deep into the earth and finds no body.
Then she’s in the forest, winding through the thickness of the canopy.
In the dream, her belly is aching. It is rounded and swollen and distended.
She hops across the forest floor to find a place to hide, a quiet place where the predators won’t smell her.
There’s a huge pressure on her furred abdomen, and she pushes and squeezes and channels her life force into it.
She looks down to see that her baby is a round, smooth egg.
When she wakes the next day, it’s with dirt under her fingernails and leaves in her hair. Margot sits next to her on the bed and picks them out one by one, tender, monkey-like. “You went wandering, Little Mouse,” she says softly. “It’s a good sign.”
Over the next week, Elly does three more interviews with Theo.
Sometimes, Siobhan is there, too, an intense and meticulous presence behind the lens, constantly interrupting to change the track of the conversation or adjust the angle of the camera.
Most of the time though, Siobhan is with Haina, and it’s just her and Theo.
He lets the camera run. He lets her talk and talk.