He stood against the light: darkening the room, obscuring the view of the cherry trees on the lawn through the window. She stared at his wide shoulders, at his narrow hips. A fine figure of a man, as Ben would have called him. No child-bearer he. Made to remake the world, a body like that. If not the world, remaking minds would have to do.
"I think the best thing for you —"
What did he know, with his hips, with his shoulders? He was too much a man to understand anything of her.
"I think the best thing for you would be a course of sedatives —"
Now her eyes were on his waist.
"— and a holiday."
Her mind had focused now on the body beneath the veneer of his clothes. The muscle, bone and blood beneath the elastic skin. She pictured it from all sides, sizing it up, judging its powers of resistance, then closing on it. She thought: Be a woman.
Simply, as she thought that preposterous idea, it began to take shape. Not a fairy-tale transformation, unfortunately, his flesh resisted such magic. She willed his manly chest into making breasts of itself and it began to swell most fetchingly, until the skin burst and his sternum flew apart.
His pelvis, teased to breaking point, fractured at its centre; unbalanced, he toppled over on to his desk and from there stared up at her, his face yellow with shock. He licked his lips, over and over again, to find some wetness to talk with. His mouth was dry: his words were still-born. It was from between his legs that all the noise was coming; the splashing of his blood; the thud of his bowel on the carpet.
She screamed at the absurd monstrosity she had made, and withdrew to the far corner of the room, where she was sick in the pot of the rubber plant.
My God, she thought, this can't be murder. I didn't so much as touch him.
What Jacqueline had done that afternoon, she kept to herself. No sense in giving people sleepless nights, thinking about such peculiar talent.
The police were very kind. They produced any number of explanations for the sudden departure of Dr Blandish, though none quite described how his chest had erupted in that extraordinary fashion, making two handsome (if hairy) domes of his pectorals.
It was assumed that some unknown psychotic, strong in his insanity, had broken in, done the deed with hands, hammers and saws, and exited, locking the innocent Jacqueline Ess in an appalled silence no interrogation could hope to penetrate.
Person or persons unknown had clearly dispatched the doctor to where neither sedatives nor therapy could help him.
She almost forgot for a while. But as the months passed it came back to her by degrees, like a memory of a secret adultery. It teased her with its forbidden delights. She forgot the nausea, and remembered the power. She forgot sordidity, and remembered strength. She forgot the guilt that had seized her afterwards and longed, longed to do it again.
Only better.
"Jacqueline."
Is this my husband, she thought, actually calling me by my name? Usually it was Jackie, or Jack, or nothing at all.
"Jacqueline."
He was looking at her with those big baby blues of his, like the college-boy she'd loved at first sight. But his mouth was harder now, and his kisses tasted like stale bread.
"Jacqueline."
"Yes."
"I've got something I want to speak to you about."
A conversation? she thought, it must be a public holiday.
"I don't know how to tell you this."
"Try me," she suggested.
She knew that she could think his tongue into speaking if it pleased her. Make him tell her what she wanted to hear. Words of love, maybe, if she could remember what they sounded like. But what was the use of that? Better the truth.
"Darling, I've gone off the rails a bit."
"What do you mean?" she said.
Have you, you bastard, she thought.
"It was while you weren't quite yourself. You know, when things had more or less stopped between us. Separate rooms... you wanted separate rooms... and I just went bananas with frustration. I didn't want to upset you, so I didn't say anything. But it's no use me trying to live two lives."
"You can have an affair if you want to, Ben."
"It's not an affair, Jackie. I love her —"
He was preparing one of his speeches, she could see it gathering momentum behind his teeth. The justifications that became accusations, those excuses that always turned into assaults on her character. Once he got into full flow there'd be no stopping him. She didn't want to hear.
"— She's not like you at all, Jackie. She's frivolous in her way. I suppose you'd call her shallow."
It might be worth interrupting here, she thought, before he ties himself in his usual knots.
"She's not moody like you. You know, She's just a normal woman. I don't mean to say you're not normal: you can't help having depressions. But she's not so sensitive."
"There's no need, Ben —"
"No, damn it, I want it all off my chest."
On to me, she thought.
"You've never let me explain," he was saying. "You've always given me one of those damn looks of yours, as if you wished I'd —"
Die.
"— wished I'd shut up."
Shut up.
"You don't care how I feel!" He was shouting now. "Always in your own little world."
Shut up, she thought.
His mouth was open. She seemed to wish it closed, and with the thought his jaws snapped together, severing the very tip of his pink tongue. It fell from between his lips and lodged in a fold of his shirt.
Shut up, she thought again.
The two perfect regiments of his teeth ground down into each other, cracking and splitting, nerve, calcium and spit making a pinkish foam on his chin as his mouth collapsed inwards.
Shut up, she was still thinking as his startled baby blues sank back into his skull and his nose wormed its way into his brain.
He was not Ben any longer, he was a man with a red lizard's head, flattening, battening down upon itself, and, thank God, he was past speech-making once and for all.
Now she had the knack of it, she began to take pleasure in the changes she was willing upon him.
She flipped him head over heels on to the floor and began to compress his arms and legs, telescoping flesh and resistant bone into a smaller and yet smaller space. His clothes were folded inwards, and the tissue of his stomach was plucked from his neatly packaged entrails and stretched around his body to wrap him up. His fingers were poking from his shoulder-blades now, and his feet, still thrashing with fury, were tripped up in his gut. She turned him over one final time to pressure his spine into a foot-long column of muck, and that was about the end of it.
As she came out of her ecstasy she saw Ben sitting on the floor, shut up into a space about the size of one of his fine leather suitcases, while blood, bile and lymphatic fluid pulsed weakly from his hushed body.
My God, she thought, this can't be my husband. He's never been as tidy as that.
This time she didn't wait for help. This time she knew what she'd done (guessed, even, how she'd done it) and she accepted her crime for the too-rough justice it was.
She packed her bags and left the home.
I'm alive, she thought. For the first time in my whole, wretched life, I'm alive.
Vassi's Testimony (part one)
"To you who dream of sweet, strong women I leave this story. It is a promise, as surely as it is a confession, as surely as it's the last words of a lost man who wanted nothing but to love and be loved. I sit here trembling, waiting for the night, waiting for that whining pimp Koos to come to my door again, and take everything I own from me in exchange for the key to her room.