‘Badger’ by Sarah Maria Griffin
When your fist made contact with his nose and you felt it move beneath your knuckles, it was the biggest you’d ever been. It was the most right you’d ever done, the split second in which you became heroic – the moment in which you became legendary. You became a story to tell the grandchildren. Splitting bone and the protection of your sister was all that mattered, just then, in the dark outside the house, him hammered and screaming dark effigies of her name after trying to get her to open her window, now shut to him, indefinitely, after what he did.
Stupid boys and their greedy hands and their shallow threats would know better now – word would spread of what you did to him, how ugly you made him.
How you smashed his iPhone off the ground, told him that’s what he gets, that’s what he gets. The pieces of it shone in the night, sharp and cruel and money right there on the footpath. His nose a crumpled mess, his mouth drooling bright scarlet remorse. His pathetic skin matching his inside, at last, kneeling there, picking up pieces of his phone off the ground. Shards of expensive glass in his terrible fingers. You waited until he was done, waited until he got into his banger of a Toyota and drove away, the roar of his engine against the night still somehow pathetic. You and your sister haven’t talked about it just yet.
*
This porch is wooden. It is old painted new: a schlocky turquoise now over the pine. It is where you and your sister sat in cool summers fighting over a sticky Gameboy that was only held together because of half a roll of Sellotape. It was always angled at ninety degrees or so, to help the light hit the screen just right so the pair of you could collect golden coins in LCD landscapes together.
This porch is where you end up every summer you spend at home, trying to rekindle closeness, drinking cans, talking shite. Trying. She is blonde this year, it suits her.
The noise is newer than the paint, for sure. The noise hadn’t been there last time you’d been home. The noise is fresh.
When the two of you were smaller you’d place tinny three quid head phones
into plastic cups and hope they’d act as a speaker for the only tapes you had and the summer would get Cole Porter tender. Why there were so many Cole Porter tapes around nobody knew, but you both knew they sometimes had two part songs and you’d De-Lovely to each other in the afternoon before the notes got too high or too low. The Walkman whirred old technology in the backdrop of the violins and serenades but you could sing over it then easy. The drone though, the new noise, that’s harder to ignore.
It’s usually summers that you’re back rather than the grim cold of winter, the anxiety of Christmas. You swooping back over the nest you grew too big for, your wingspan an inconvenience. Your sister’s wings are not that big just yet – she still fits perfectly here. You’re jealous, but you don’t say anything. Especially not now, not this minute, sitting out in the garden, eating an orange Sparkler ice-pop from the freezer that might have been there since last summer, or the summer before. It’s too nice for anything serious just now. You are listening to her pick scales on the fat old guitar she’s been learning to play.
Your mouth tastes of old ice and almost-orange. She’s getting really good, but you don’t say anything about that either. Her voice sounds older than she is and you wonder is that learned, is that what Cole Porter did – or did the boy just turn her more adult this year, has she grown Amazonian inside the body of a girl. Perhaps her voice sounds so huge because inside she is huge, because she has had to be, lately.
The noise from under the porch is what you’ve mostly talked about since you got back. It is an easy topic, rather than mundane catching up or heavy questions like Why did he think he could come here or Do you know how much it’s going to cost his family to fix his teeth or Do they ever think about me anymore?
The noise under the porch was the first thing she told you about when you walked in the door from the airport, reeking of air conditioning, dry throated and teary-eyed with the gladness of being home. You dropped your bags and went to stand in the garden with her, your parents rolling their eyes, and you went, ‘Yeah man, that is some unholy noise coming from down there.’
In the morning at the kettle she in her dressing gown said ‘Jesus Christ I can hear it from in here!’ and in the night after you got in from the pub you knocked on her bedroom door and whispered through the crack, ‘Babes, I can hear it from my room, too!’ Your parents insist that it’ll go away in its own time and will not entertain conversation about it. Your sister keeps trying to bring it up, at dinner, at breakfast – but they just roll their eyes.
It’s nothing, they insist.
It’s everything, she replies.
As you washed his blood off your knuckles and your own from your mouth – you bit your tongue, he didn’t have a chance to fight back – over the bathroom sink you could hear it still. The fucking noise of it. Even then, what you would have done for a moment of quiet.
It is louder than it was even yesterday and when your sister stops playing and goes, ‘I don’t think I can take it anymore,’ you think she’s about to bring up the lad but she doesn’t, she goes, ‘I have to see what’s down there.’ Her phone lies innocuously beside her, and chimes with a text message. That is the fourth time it’s done that since you’ve been out here and she hasn’t touched it. The light of the screen is so powerful that you can read it from here despite the glare of the sun – his name is four bad letters and anger is a strange thing, how quiet you can keep it, but how loud it feels in your gut, in your hands. You don’t say anything. She ignores the phone, says, ‘I think I’m going to go down and look.’
‘No,’ you say, ‘I’ll do it.’
You wonder will she check her messages while you are gone.
You get up and walk down the couple of steps to the grass, where the deck is raised a little, where there’s a gap. You never thought much about going under the gap as a kid, seemed impossible then. Now it opens wide like a chasm, like c’mon down, don’t you want to see? Your knees click as you lean, your hands are on the earth where the grass stops and under the house begins. Your sister is still strumming. The droning sound from under the house is different now that you’re close to it, now that your face is right there, the darkness grazing your nose.
You begin to crawl forward, ducking your head low under the beams, your palms already beginning to tear against the grit. Your sisters swinging legs are behind you, to the left. You are not in the garden anymore, you are under the house. It smells like damp and concrete, like the week the deck was built is trapped under there, like the dust never really settled. The noise is texture now, against your eyes and ears. You hate it. You look around, neck craned, head scraping against the wood above you – you want to find the source of this terrible thing that has infected your home so you can stop it, so you can quell it –
You want to find the source until your eyes register it. At first you think it is a badger – four-legged, with a snout, kind of – but it is when you look for details there in the under house dark that you see it is all bees. Bees and broken glass on four legs with a hanging jaw, dripping something that smells sweet against the dust – honey, you think, it must be. The droning comes from every inch of it, a blur of black and gold and sharp. It opens a jaw and closes it again. It blinks. It is a terrible mess and the noise makes so much sense now, such awful sense. You think for a moment about taking a picture of it, shining a light on it from your phone, capturing even its image – but you don’t do it. You think for a moment maybe you could punch it from here, maybe your fist, the fresh legend of it still strong, could maybe destroy this thing. It makes you feel sick but good, kind of. The noise is all over your body now.
You begin to back away. You cannot land your fist in the center of its terrible face, in the midst of the bees, the glass, the honey. You cannot just wrench its phone from its hands and shatter it on the pavement. There is nothing you can do to change things, maybe the noise will always be there. Maybe it will leave when it wants to, maybe it will find some other home to pollute with sound. You know this now. This lives under the house and that is just where it lives. It told you this, with its closeness. You back away, your hands dragging against the ground, useless now.
You do not turn your back on it, instead just slowly retreat into the light again. You can feel pebbles making their way under your skin on your palms, your nylons are torn for sure at the knees. You scrape your back against the lip of the decking as you come back out. You could have been there for an hour, a year, just looking at it. You miss it, in a strange way, almost immediately, but are glad you never have to be that near to it again.
The garden smells alive and clean. The sunset has coloured the sky pastel and girlish and great. Your sister is looking at you expectantly and you stand up, dust yourself off.
‘Your tights!’ she exclaims. Decimated cheap nylon. You wave it off.
‘What was it?’ she asks, not strumming the guitar anymore, just holding it, her long fingers around its neck. Her phone chimes.
‘Nothing we can do anything about,’ you say, ‘just leave it.’
‘Is it a wasps’ nest?’
‘I think so,’ you say, lying, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
‘Mam and Dad think it’ll go away in its own time.’
‘They’re right.’
Her phone chimes again. Suddenly, without warning, she picks it up and throws it, hard, down on the little brick path. It audibly cracks.
You laugh. She laughs. The droning doesn’t stop. Later, you wash the earth off your hands and open the bathroom window to hear it better. Over the rush of the water, it is almost music.
From issue #2: spring/summer 2016
About the Author
Sarah Maria Griffin is a writer from Dublin. Her nonfiction collection of essays, Not Lost, was published by New Island in 2013. Her novel Spare and Found Parts (2016) was published by Green Willow Books in the US and by Titan Books in the UK. Her second novel Other Words for Smoke will be published in April 2019. She tweets @griffski.
