‘The Mute Swans of New York’ by Cathy Thomas

Someone else will enjoy this more, you said. I’m not really enjoying this.

Geese and children crying across the riverbank. The summer heat was round at its belly, the long days filled with expectation as the evenings toed in. I waited in bars, pubs, parties for you. That June I could wake myself up with my own breathing.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation keeps talking about the mute swans, I said, for something to say. They’re too territorial and the ducks and geese don’t like them. They’re like the ostriches of the bird world, the outsiders. And the swans make all these noises in mating season that the New Yorkers don’t like. I wonder how they’re going to cull them?

Those are geese, you said, pointing at the geese. Not swans.

I knew you weren’t listening, not properly, because you were tugging at the bread on your sandwich and picking the crust out of your teeth. Something had slipped into the flat ridge between your gum and your smooth white canine. I was surprised that you’d suggested a picnic in the first place, when we both knew the conversation our so-called friendship was shying away from. A picnic was the quaintest, the quietest of insults. You were hungry, perhaps, but I was hollowed out.

You said you didn’t think us going to New York together would be a good idea.

I wasn’t trying to get you to go on holiday, I deterred. The sentence didn’t sound so false until I’d spoken it aloud. My cheeks reddened at the rejection offered by your unwillingness to understand, and then again at the lengthy rejection you so unnecessarily outlined.

You said you felt that the one time we’d had sex had sort of exhausted anything we might have had together. There was a studied hesitation in your tone as if you hadn’t rehearsed it, but the bluntness of your decision showed you clearly had. My practised words now felt too petty to put to you. I wouldn’t have minded half so much had I not fallen off the bed halfway through because I was sightless drunk and you sober, eyes red tired from watching porn before I crawled to your room. You’ll be alright, you said afterwards, but can I have my t-shirt back? Except without the question mark.

You were going at your sandwich again. I would eventually learn how to look away from your face like people looking away from bad news, but as I couldn’t find anything to say, all I could do was watch. You had a healthy appetite. The patch of hair you always missed shaving on your neck prickled as you chewed. It struck me whether you deliberately avoided it because of the Brazil nut of a mole underneath. After three years of friendship and half a night of mishandling I was surprised I’d never noticed it before. I wanted to tell you how you should have it looked at, how I wouldn’t take you to a city in hot sunshine, not specifically because it might turn into a melanoma although it was certainly a factor that I would now consider.

I hadn’t finished my panini when you stood up but you had and that was that. You brushed the crumbs from your crotch and held out your hand to help me up off the grass. I didn’t take it. I folded the remaining half of my lunch in its foil wrapper, mozzarella sweating slightly at the sides, only to throw it in the bin on the walk home. Some things were worth keeping, some were not.

As a twelve-year-old, I had collected my first stained knickers in a bedside cabinet that smelt of gloss paint. The memory of it was itself bin-worthy, repellent, as I had been repelled by the indignity of womanhood at the time. I grew panicked by the shame of not knowing whether to throw them out or if that would only incur discovery, the whole world now evidently one of embarrassing possibilities that had to be shared to be solved. Inevitably my mother was furious, disgusted, and so was I at the years that would follow.

Her Sunday night phone calls rang with repeat disappointment. You might have thought that she’d actually held affection for romance and wifehood, the way she sighed and asked after well-mannered boys that clearly didn’t want me. She had high hopes for my social advancement despite my lack of good looks. She claimed to have an instinct for understanding romance. I didn’t call her out on it. Lying fitted her like a bad coat and well she knew it.

I was glad not to have to go straight home to her for the holidays, as a college friend had asked me to stay with him and his parents in the countryside. Come for the weekend, Anthony had said, my mother and father will be there but they love having guests. There’ll be a group of us going. He added that you’d be going, wanting to be sure whether I would mind. No, of course not, I lied, a hand pressed flat across my stomach. I hadn’t come on in nearly two months but was too afraid to take a test in case a father was revealed in your resentful face. I would rather chance fate than book a termination. I said brightly that I didn’t mind seeing you.

The deceit that a change of scenery can sow. Two hours’ drive and the warmth felt real again, all friends together and you laughing at my jokes from the passenger seat as we passed fields, garages, heritage signs. Through the drive, our friend’s house sloped away from the garden behind an orchard. There were swans on the lawn. A pool lying uncovered, ready. A house so different from the one my mum had saved for that it wasn’t clear which door we were meant to use. The porch is just for wellies, Anthony said when I reached for the handle. Of course. Poor old porch, welcoming and without purpose.

Hellos and house tours and drinks were followed by chicken with artichokes and lemons. Couscous, Sancerre. Forkfuls and conversations that I couldn’t quite catch. Anthony’s parents were dutiful hosts in their pleasantries, careful to avoid the topic of school when it came to my turn. I drank too much and vomited up olives before dessert, running the tap to mask the retching. You talked at ease and at length, the audience entirely yours across the polished dining table. I took to asking questions rather than answering them. The wine thickened my tongue until all I could do was eye you up like Anthony’s ageing mother.

Cape Verde, the Maldives, Gibraltar, they had all been. My mum had taken me to Corfu one year but the sand scorched our toes and I was too young for siestas. It was the only place we could afford after Dad left and his absence weighed like bad weather. No, I have no holidays planned for the summer, I said when asked. You looked at me as if afraid that words about streets and sidewalks and swans and yellow taxis would follow. Fortunately for you, I was drunk, as I always was and had been that time, and I could think of no way of embarrassing you that wouldn’t embarrass me further.

Dinner over with, we women did the washing up while you men made a bonfire. The sky was too light, the air too hot, but they had plans of us toasting the moon with sloe gin. What wankers, I said to Anthony’s mother, who flinched at the word as if I’d dropped a plate. I did drop a plate then, Blue Denmark fracturing over my sandals on the expensive slate tiles, clumsiness being another of the signs of pregnancy I had been reading up on.

You’d better have some water, she said. I wanted to drink what the boys were drinking in the hope of expelling the swelling panic that lined my womb. The sickness grasped my stomach as I swallowed the soft glassful. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been drinking at all. But attention was unwanted in this house, an unpolished accent and lack of anecdotes already jarring, and the wine had been a welcome relief. Even inebriation was a sign of the wrong school education. I should never have come. The bonfire swayed under the lowering sky as the others had their fun outside and I choked back the water.

Anthony’s mother’s cheeks were flushed from the sink and the vodka tonic in her hand. Being generous is easier if you’re wealthy. It would have been easier to have had a mother if she was carefree and honey-tanned like this. My mum would have had us switch all the lights off in the dining room by now, the hallways in our home always dark and unheated with the prudence learnt through divorce.

I was in love at your age, she said with a creaseless smile. There’s nothing like being a young woman, men the way they are. You’ll have children next and wonder where they all went. The children? I asked. The men, she said. Men and husbands aren’t the same thing.

I set the empty glass on the granite worktop and excused myself. I went to bed with the curtains open so I could see your fireside silhouette as I went to sleep. Broad shoulders and schoolboy hair cropped like Rupert Brooke on the frontispiece of my final year exam text. You weren’t fashionable, just rich. You were all laughing. It couldn’t have been at me but it may as well have been, the sting I felt at not knowing the joke. I considered pulling on my clothes again to rejoin the group but then a lengthy absence from the party would be harder to explain than an early night. I waited up for you, late, long past the fire went black, but you didn’t come.

At three o’clock, when the stairs stopped creaking and you were away somewhere in this wide house in your bed, I felt the cramps come on. The alternative future was about to leave me as sharply as you did these days when you saw me alone in a room. All those visions of struggling single motherhood stolen from me, swapped in my empty arms for relief and shock. There would be nothing between us now, the only longstanding reminder of that one night the contempt I felt towards you.

The pain worsened with the panic. Anthony’s sister’s bedroom showed twenty years’ of loving parents and things not needed. Binbags of teenage clothes, a doll’s house, Noah’s Ark without the animals. She came home for Christmas every year, Anthony said, they all did. There were four children smiling, sitting dutifully still in photos along the walls. Redheaded and blue-eyed and fortunate, his sister took pride of place in every icon. But she wasn’t real, not like the rest of us, I knew, because there were no tampons in the bedside cabinet or anywhere else in sight. Her kind was too perfect for periods.

Quietly, alarmed by the good guest duvet set and my presumption that this wouldn’t happen, I ransacked the room. I emptied every drawer in turn onto the bed, careful to make no sound and to replace every item exactly as I found it. The fear of being accused of thievery was unshakeable in a house that smelt so strongly of old wood and old money. Nail varnish remover, tweezers, earrings greened with dried skin. Socks unopened in packets of five and a school blouse signed by girls now successful in city careers and marriages. The volume of stuff was so suffocating that the sense of loss stiffened in my chest.

I would have cried if I thought I wouldn’t laugh at myself. You certainly would have laughed at me, behind my back if not here with my hands full of a stranger’s unwanted things. You all would have. What are you crying for, you would have said if I’d crept into your room with the softest of knocks. Because you can’t find any Tampax?

I packed away the last of Anthony’s sister’s teenage trinkets and slowed across the landing to the bathroom. The light over the sink buzzed louder than I’d expected so I rushed my stock-check of the family cabinets, but they offered only beta blockers and eardrops and anti-dandruff shampoo. I reluctantly returned to bed with a wad of toilet paper and a repeated explanation of how I would tell Anthony’s mother what had happened, if it did happen. The bed was cold as I returned to it, my skin shivering with anxiety on the cotton sheets.

Staying in someone else’s bed and wanting to wake up the next day back in my own was a sense I had never been able to shake. As a child I had hated sleepovers, but my parents getting divorced meant not saying ‘no’ when I was invited. I felt sick when I had to stay up late, and always worried I’d be punished for fidgeting when I woke up long before everyone else. But you were already awake when I woke up that one morning after our one night together, uneasy in the dark, arms by your sides and duvet pushed back as if the heat from the bed would hurt you. We stayed like that till five o’clock, daybreak crying at the curtains like it had had a bad dream, neither of us wanting to admit the way you had broken our friendship with such physical force.

Because it’s not really friendship when you can fuck someone like that, is what I should have said. But instead I peeled off your t-shirt and folded it up and left it on the end of the bed like a house guest you had lent a towel to. I said thank you when I left. You didn’t say sorry.

I lay on my side in Anthony’s sister’s bed, a towel underneath my legs and tissue piled between them. The hours gritted and the cramps worsened and although it was over now I couldn’t go home yet.

Did you sleep well, Anthony’s mother said. You missed the bonfire, you said when I came downstairs to the kitchen. Bloody Marys for breakfast and everyone glowing pleased with themselves for having such a nice time together. Grapefruit juice and smoked salmon, sign-on bonuses and salary increases; the table was unpalatable and impenetrable. People offered me titbits as if I were a puppy wanting to play with the adults. It was easier to listen if I simply didn’t. The swans were preening noisily on the lawn and I had to remember to keep re-crossing my legs and shifting my skirt to make sure nothing would stain the cushion on the kitchen chair.

I don’t know how they plan to kill the city swans, I said. I wonder if killing white creatures is more satisfying?

It was rude perhaps, the deliberation with which I smacked the conversation. I punched the perturbed silence again as if I was making calm, topical comments. Why had I worried about saying the wrong thing all weekend when it could be so enjoyable? I wasn’t one of theirs and could see, now, I did not want to be. I spoke of pistols and poison and the need for thick plastic sheeting to cover the parks and playgrounds from the blood and the bird shit. The feathers, the long limp necks. And the noise, of course, noisy as the mute swans were, and the incinerators normally reserved for hospital waste. Perhaps they would have a big bonfire and burn the lot of them.

When talk smilingly, stiltedly resumed, it was of motorway routes and evening plans. We would have the car ready to leave just after lunch. Bags packed, beds stripped. Time for a dip and a game of tennis. I helped Anthony’s mother with the plates as before, her inquisitive tone now gone and her subjects of summer weddings and landscaping suitably sealed off from any intrusion I might make. She closed the kitchen window as the swans wailed outside.

At least swimming meant not having to talk to anyone. I dipped a crooked toe beneath the skim of the pool, the cold a shock on my unsummered skin. I imagined what it would be like to watch Anthony’s sister swimming, freckled like precious metal and hair like copperplate handwriting flowing behind her.

It only took one length for me to get out of breath but you were sitting on the side where I needed to stop. You were looking at me and for one sunburning moment I wondered if the sight of my near naked body had shocked you into feeling. Guilt, lust. A physical memory. Something at least. You had rarely looked me in the eyes lately and the satisfaction of having made you break whatever promise you had made with yourself made me flush in the cool water.

You were still staring as I hauled myself up on the side of the pool, grazing my ankles on the coarse paving stones. I felt remarkably light, sitting there, not wanting you and feeling thankful that there would be no reason now to want your attention again. Chlorine stippled my skin and dripped down my chest and legs. Then I saw what had caught your eye.

All that and the answer simply in the rusty slick on my thigh. The dismay smacked on your face when you saw it. You didn’t like the unprettiness of something so commonplace, but then I should have learnt that about you before. You’d had what you wanted but that didn’t mean you’d wanted me. You took what you got because that was what you had been brought up with.

You looked at me sharply, unashamedly, as if I should be embarrassed. I wasn’t. I smiled cleanly at you, for myself and the obvious muck of my freedom. You would have smiled too if you’d known your near miss. How lucky you are and you don’t even know it. How lucky you all are and you don’t even know it.

From issue #4: spring/summer 2017

About the Author
Cathy Thomas has had short stories published in The Stinging Fly and Litro as well as shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Royal Academy and Pin Drop Short Story Award. She was selected for the 2014/15 Jerwood and Arvon Mentoring Scheme as a playwright.