Ground floor flats mean easy access to the street. There is no lugging your shopping up flights of stairs, no lugging your bins down them. Large windows on ground floor flats let in a lot of light. You really feel in the middle of the action. Selling points.
He didn’t mention that ground floor flats with big windows mean that everyone can see in. When I’m standing brushing my teeth my eyes lock with passers-by, foam running down my chin, dressing gown gaping. I have to watch what I’m doing all the time; how I’m sitting, what I’m wearing, if my socks match. Wolf whistles pierce the quiet if my top is just a little too small or my shorts just a little too short for the comfort of my own home. Sit like a lady, I hear my mother say. I fix my skirt and cross my ankles. I make sure to angle my good side to the window as I pretend to watch Strictly.
We only ever went to Madame Tussauds once for Nina’s birthday. Mum thought the wax figures were gorgeous. She took photos with a disposable camera and never got them developed. I thought they were morbid. Nina was too young to appreciate it either way. On the car ride home, I told her stories about how they moved around at night once everyone had gone. I imitated how they moved with stiff elbows and locked jaws and unblinking eyes until she cried.
I never noticed the carpet when I first moved in. A carpet is a carpet. I never noticed it until it started moving. The maggots underneath rear their heads from the fraying holes like the Kraken. They throw themselves up from the holes and writhe beside my toes like beached whales. They make me break my waxwork character.
“Sorry, pal, can’t enter other households until the big man says so and he’s no saying so just yet,” the exterminator man explains to me on our third phone call. By “big man” I couldn’t tell if he was talking about Boris or his boss.
“There are maggots in my carpet,” I reply. “How is this not considered an emergency?” I keep my voice light, almost laughing. Men don’t like women with a temper.
It’s just not, he would reply. And then he would hang up.
Maggots don’t burst like I thought they would. I thought they would explode like a spot. One of the ones that pulses deep in the muscle of your face. One that you stroke your finger over all day, waiting patiently for the quiet of the bathroom. But they don’t. I roll them in between my fingers and their skin splits. Insides soft and velvety and gritty like a baked bean. Soon I stopped pressing them between pages of books and under the heel of my slipper, stopped guillotining them between my nails and flattening them with a back of a spoon. Their voices cried out for me to stop. So, I did. It’s always harder to kill something once it starts talking back.
The only phone call I get that night is from Faith. I ask her about school, and she asks if I know about the water cycle.
“So, the water we have now is the water the dinosaurs drank?” she asks.
“Yep,” I reply.
“So, it doesn’t just disappear?”
“Nothing ever really disappears, my girl.”
“But there are things that are invisible?”
“Yep,” I say again. This answer doesn’t seem to fill her. “Well, nothing is really ever invisible,” I continue. “You can see everything if you have a good enough microscope.”
“Like the virus?”
“Like the virus.”
There’s another pause as she thinks. This time I don’t speak. Children should learn to be okay with silence. People should learn not to just fill silences with the sound of their own voice.
“Night, Auntie Ellory.”
“Night, Faith. Be a good girl. Hopefully see you soon.”
She puts the phone down but doesn’t hang up. I listen to the sound of my sister’s life on the other end of the line. Footsteps and giggles and water splashing, the sounds of a six-year-old resisting her bedtime. Stories are read, kisses are given. I hear the front door close as Gregg gets in from work. Keys clatter onto the tiled top of the table in their hall. The table Mum brought back from Morocco as a housewarming present for them. Their big, lovely, new build filled with such lovely, antique things. Lovely Gregg with his lovely job. Nina always has such lovely taste, mum would say in the car ride back to the centre as if loveliness was hereditary. A recessive gene on her side. She always did say I was just like my father.
“Hello?”
I don’t say anything. The sun has gone down since Faith said goodbye, pride holds my tongue tight, letting the silence cast out in front of us like unbaited fishing wire. She hangs up. Nina always avoided the quiet. I turn the telly on, the volume up. I never liked it much either.
Oi! Not this again. We watch this every night!
The maggots poke their head up through the carpet. They roll their beady little eyes.
“Shhhhh,” I tell them.
Why has it always got to be re-runs?
They complain in unison. Their voices echo around my ears like a choir in the Sistine chapel.
“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t love it. We can watch something else after.”
I hear them all sighing and settling in their nests, soothed like a child with a bottle. Shimmying my legs out from the plastic skin of my tights, I lay my toes next to the fraying holes in the floor. They can come out and keep me company if they like. Pouring myself a large glass of red wine I turn my good side towards the window.
The sound of flapping nudges into my dreams and wakes me. It’s a soft flapping, like a flock of pigeons being disturbed or a helicopter touching down in a field of long grass. I lie for a while letting the quiet thrum lull me in and out of consciousness. I don’t bother to think about where it’s coming from. I am taken to a place before; the secluded corner of a sticky pub, men huffing their dry breath onto the sweep of my neck. Sheets and limbs tangled like mangroves, cold feet against my legs, their fingers twisted in my underwear. The warmth of my niece against my chest as she sits on my lap whispering her little worries into my ear and rubbing my hair between her fingers until it dreads.
The phone rings. I slip my dressing gown on over my bare shoulders. Over the scar on my back where I had that mole removed. I often think of that little piece of me in the bin somewhere, shrivelled and fuzzy and in amongst other chunks from people I’ll never meet, our bits like butcher’s offal.
I bought a new dressing gown recently because the other one had curry stains up the sleeve and a slitter of something else down the front. It made me embarrassed when I opened the curtains. My new one is silk. A light turquoise that I know makes my eyes pop. Builders stare down from scaffolding like Gods. I let the silk fall off one of my shoulders. Coyness is a modern sin.
“I can come in the next few days and deal with your infestation,” says a gruff voice on the other end of the line. “What times suit you?”
“What?”
“It’s the exterminator, I’m calling about your infestation.”
I hold my breath. The tip of my finger sticks through a hole in my pocket that I know wasn’t there yesterday. I keep my finger plugged in the hole as if it’s the only thing stopping me turning into a whirlpool, pulling wallpaper off the walls and clothes off the hangers in my wake. Or something more delicate. Like a lady. Perhaps if I take my finger from the hole I will simply collapse like a tent into the seams of the silk, leaving my dressing gown in a suggestive heap on the floor and a strange man talking on the other end of the line. I take my hand from my pocket and inspect the purpling noose of indented skin left around the tip.
“Hello? Can you hear me? Have the larvae turned yet?”
“I—” I steady my voice, “I actually think the problem has gone now.”
I compose myself, smiling as I speak. I hope that the upturned corners of my mouth change the sounds of the words as they leave my lips, so that they become reassuring and polite. The hair on my arms bristle.
“Well, I best just come give everything a wee spray to see it doesn’t come—”
“I really don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Hen, trust me—”
I hang up.
The larvae have turned. The man on the phone made it sound as though the maggots turning was like milk going off. The smell making your nose wrinkle at and then poured down the sink without a second thought. Into the drain, the pipes, the sewers and then filtered out to wherever. Probably ending up as the curdled scum that you avoid when paddling in the ocean.
The maggots float back and forth in the air as if they are trying to break the grip of gravity. Wings sprouting from their soft bodies; light orange and covered in fur, like the fine hair on the back of a baby’s neck, the type of hair you can only feel with your lips.
Who was that on the phone?
“No one,” I reply.
The moths don’t live in the carpet anymore but in my pockets and under my pillow. They sleep in the hollows of my collarbones and in the dimples in the bottom of my back. They whisper little worries into my ears and rub my hair between their wings until it floats above my cheekbones like it’s laced with helium.
They’ve started chewing at the soles of my new boots. The vintage leather jacket I wore religiously through my Kate Moss phase now nothing but the zips and buttons. The hole in my dressing gown pocket grows until it is useless and then they eat the rest too. The morning sun streams through little holes in the curtains onto my body like bright freckles. The type of freckle that you are told to have checked because they are moving and growing and changing shape. I open the curtains with nothing on but tatters of gossamer and skin. Catching people glancing in and then averting their eyes, their cheeks glowing red against the grey mornings. I smile back at them. Not even the Gods look down from their metal skeletons now.
I used to think Nina got too excited when Faith garbled made-up sounds, but I get it now. The moths surprise me. I read before that they prefer natural fibres. Wool and cotton over acrylic and polyester but like men, these moths don’t seem to mind what’s put in front of them. Fake tits or ones that swing low, ones that have nursed their sons for so long their nipples crack like peanut shells or ones that have been sliced open and hoiked up, dark scars adoring their chests like medals. Or armour. They both just take what they can get. The more they eat the less I have to. I’m so distracted by watching them gnaw the cloth until it’s nothing that the emptiness in my own stomach is pushed to the back of my mind. They grow and grow and grow, drifting in the air and making love in the carpet. Their little ones soon join the feast of everything I’ve ever owned. I lay things out for them each night like setting a dining table.
I learnt to fold napkins into birds when I worked the morning rush at The Eddison when I was fifteen. I lost my virginity to one of the chefs on top of the cold metal worksurface, under the fluorescent lights, drunk and laid out on the table like a cat for spaying. I can’t remember if he was the chef who would smack my ass with a tea towel every time I walked past. Their faces have since all morphed to one. I can’t remember his name, but he had fingers burnt so badly he could no longer feel heat. He would wave his hands over the gas cooker before sticking them up my shirt and between my legs during wedding receptions and wakes. That surprised me too; he was considerate if nothing else.
My t-shirts lie like an aviary. My underwear rolled to roses. I offer everything I have with both hands. Like I always have. Like my mother taught me. But still they want more. They turn the sofa into a shipwreck of bones, the springs in my mattress snagging my skin. Little drops of blood land on the sheets, they devour those too.
“Hi Ellory. It’s Nina, call me back when you get this.”
“Hi, me again. Haven’t heard from you in a while. Hope you’re doing okay. Give us a buzz when you get this.”
“Ellory. It’s mum. Why haven’t you been picking up the phone? Your sister’s worried sick. Call her when you get this.”
“Auntie Ellory, it’s Faith. Mummy said to call you. I don’t know what else to say. Oh, call us back. Byeee.”
“Elle. For God’s sake, this is getting ridiculous. Pick up the phone. Where are you? I know you’re in, there’s nowhere to be right now. I’ll call tomorrow, same time. Answer then, please.”
“End of messages,” the robotic voice of the answering machine echoes out.
Days roll into nights roll into day again. People try not to stare in at the woman with no curtains. She doesn’t have anything to cover her naked body. Everything has been digested. She lies on a bed of coiled metal or on the rough plywood that was once hidden under carpet. Her hair lies in jagged lengths around her shoulders and her ears.
“There’s nothing left,” she cries out. “Please, there’s nothing left.”
The phone stopped ringing days ago, tight wires chewed to fraying ribbons. The room echoes around her with no padding to absorb the shrillness of her voice, no softness to cushion the jutting humps of her spine. The moths land on her one by one. Their bodies feel like the breath of too many secrets.
I have nothing left. There’s nothing left to give you.
“So, the water evaporates into the clouds and then it rains into the ocean — and it just goes around and round in a big circle?”
“Yep,” the curtainless woman replied to her niece months before. “Just one big circle.”
“The water must be really tiny to go up into the sky.”
“So small you can hardly see it.”
“So small it becomes nothing?”
“Well, not nothing. It’s definitely still there.”
The woman with no curtains kneels on the ground under the weight of the beasts with wings. They flock to her face and arms and back and neck, covering her skin so that she is decent. She is pinned underneath the burring of wings and vibration of hungry kisses. Her face is pressed to the floor so that she is looking at the spot where the maggots first spoke to her.
Stop hurting us, they said then.
“You’re hurting me,” she screams now.
People pass the windows wrapped to their eyes in winter clothing. They no longer feel the urge to peer into windows that aren’t their own now that the boundaries of privacy are gone. People only ever want what they are forbidden to have. Men like women who tease.
The moths drink from her tears and feast on her skin until she is nothing. Well, not nothing. The woman with no curtains exists in a million tiny mouths, in the daintiest form. Finally, like a lady.
Hannah Lee has recently graduated from the University of Strathclyde receiving a Masters degree in Creative Writing with Distinction. Hannah hopes to be able to call herself an author in the future. Although she is previously unpublished, she is currently developing a collection of short stories based off of her family’s experience as being first generation Chinese immigrants in 1970s Scotland. She hopes to get this published in the near future.