New Animal by Ella Baxter (speed reading book .TXT) 📕

the mirror, feeling grief come up from the base of my spine to the middle of my forehead, right between my eyebrows. I search my reflection for her face, but I can’t see it. I turn away, and switch the light off.

Jack has closed off parts of the house and now lives in only a few of the rooms. I’ve always felt as if the house deflates when Simon and I aren’t here to fill it up with wet bathers and eating. It must be hard to be a father of distant children. To have been there at the birth as their mother is stitched back together, and to be holding a baby so small you don’t know where they begin and the afterbirth ends. I like to imagine Jack weeping at the profoundness of fatherhood when I was born, but I suspect the main feeling that lurched inside him would have been a desire to get dangerously drunk. And when we all came home from the hospital, Simon in his Batman cape and me still mottled pink, I believe he felt a bit breathless. Like his family were taking up too much room. Like he was slowly and effortlessly being pushed into the outer, to look in on our happy house, on our warm bed, on our shared meal. And I bet he wondered if he was right in the head, to be jealous of his own kids. Having a wife and children didn’t suit him, but neither did divorce. He was equally devastated by both, and I bet if you pushed him to remember a time when he wasn’t destroyed by anything, he would stand in front of you with his hands on his hips looking at the ground for a long time, just thinking.

I kick off my shoes near the bed and walk barefoot over the ancient carpet all the way back to the kitchen. In the corridor, the house creaks around me like the hull of a ship.

As I approach the kitchen, I can hear various preparations taking place. Jack moves self-consciously around the space: fingers hovering above the knife rack as he agonises over the correct blade; spending several minutes over the choice of two chopping boards from the stack near the toaster. He slices a red onion into thin semicircles, leaning back from the knife and squinting as if doing it for the first time. He puts the knife down and moves into the pantry, grabs a box of taco shells and places it on the bench. He picks up the knife and then puts it down again as if remembering something. He crosses to the radio on the windowsill and searches through the stations until jazz fills the house, and then he’s back at the chopping board, slicing again.

‘Don’t be surprised if the birds wake you up in the morning,’ he says. ‘A flock of lorikeets think they own the golden cane palm next to your room.’

‘If it’s bad I could always sleep in the back bedroom.’

He scrunches up his nose and shakes his head. ‘No, I wouldn’t: there’s a rat living in your aunt’s old dance costumes—I can hear it slipping around in the lycra.’

I sit on a bar stool and watch as he moves between the stovetop and the sink. On the drying rack there are three dishes turned upside down. One coffee mug, a small plate and a pot. He probably wakes up each morning and has one piece of toast and coffee from that plate and cup, before cycling them through the washing and drying process again. I wonder if he eats out of the pot, staring through the double glass doors, until the sky becomes so dark that he is reflected back to himself, enclosed and alone in his big, old home. My grief transfers to him.

‘I liked the picture of the nest that you sent me.’

‘Wasn’t sure if you got it.’

He opens a drawer, pulls out some bone-handled knives and forks and passes them to me. I move to the table and set it, then sit facing the large window looking out to the Derwent, waiting for food to appear.

‘Did you read that article in yesterday’s paper?’ he asks.

‘No, I was working.’

I slide the biscuit tin that sits in the middle of the dining table towards me.

‘It was about how, when you die, scientists can freeze your head. Cryogenics or something …’ He trails off.

‘What about it?’ I ask.

‘Well, they can defrost you in the future and cure you,’ he explains. ‘And this expert was saying that people often think cryogenics is removing the head, that’s the way it’s talked about, but actually’—he turns to face me—‘they remove the body.’ He swishes a spatula through the air while looking at me intently, as if wanting me to engage with this conversation on a level I’m not quite sure I’m getting.

I take a cream biscuit out of the tin and bite into it, tasting the stale sweet orange.

‘The head is the important part, not the body,’ he repeats in awe.

I chew through the thick paste and brush crumbs from my lap while Jack watches me, waiting for a response. I reach for another powdery biscuit.

‘So your head gets cured and then that’s your existence?’ I say. ‘Just being a head in a jar? I would hate it.’

He turns back to cooking, and I wonder if all my thoughts and feelings would be able to move around if they only had the space of a skull to exist in. I need the length of my whole body.

I put the lid back on the biscuit tin and push it away. Enough. Under the table I grasp a roll of fat around my midsection. I poke it. I squeeze.

‘We spend all our time fussing about these things.’ He looks down at himself and laughs. ‘People pay to get massages, and run themselves ragged at the gym, and sit in front of computers for hours every day. It’s like looking after a