Garden of Earthly Bodies Read online

  This edition first published in hardcover in 2022 by

  The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS

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  First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Oneworld Publications

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  Copyright © 2022 Sally Oliver

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932220

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-5935-2

  eISBN: 978-1-64700-568-9

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  PROLOGUE

  ‘Do you think this is a mistake?’

  Charlotte directed the question to her friend Nick.

  They were standing by the side of a hole in the ground, roughly two feet deep. It was acquiring more depth by the second as they watched five men shovel great mounds of earth. The men shared a somnolent expression, like their thoughts had reached some sort of impasse and had slowly shrunk in obedience to it. Yet there was a quiet intensity in their movements, a monomaniacal focus.

  Charlotte turned to Nick and saw that he was also transfixed by what they were doing. With some effort, he parted his lips.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can just say you’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘But we came all this way.’

  ‘I think you should say you’ve changed your mind,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘They’re not going to force you.’

  Six members of the research team had accompanied them to the forest, though the leader, Sarah Clarke, was the only person Charlotte had actually corresponded with over the last month. Her own emails had been frantic and slightly scrambled, alternating between acquiescence and apprehension. Sarah was a renowned neurobiologist who had written countless articles on psychiatric disorders and new methods of rehabilitation. Her words had been precise, measured, and they were often abstruse in a way that earned Charlotte’s automatic respect. Doctors had always had this effect on her. She knew she was being assessed by a mind much greater than her own, and she was vaguely excited by the idea that her thoughts – those missiles that fired without warning – would finally be defused. She longed for a quiet brain.

  The forest was lucid in the early morning light, the trees fixed in positions that appeared very human. Their crooked arms seemed schooled into stillness, with muscles that twitched before the sun arrived. Charlotte had known this strange tension of arrested motion. She had been here a month earlier and she hadn’t forgotten those hours.

  The momentum with which the men shovelled the soil was beginning to slow. The ground was gaining heat as the sun rose higher, leering at the newly disclosed earth.

  Sarah had been tapping on an iPad for a few minutes, and now she stared at Charlotte.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Her voice was calm and instructive. Charlotte stared at the earth.

  ‘I think so.’

  Sarah approached her slowly and then lowered her voice.

  ‘Do you remember what we talked about? That you need to—’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlotte said in a small voice.

  By this point, the men had all turned away and were standing in a uniform line with their backs to Charlotte. Perhaps they hadn’t intended to do so with such ceremony, but the effect was vaguely chilling.

  One of the men had a large bald head, the surface of which was very uneven, almost lumpy, towards the back of the neck. His skull was shaped in a similar way to—She shuddered, refusing to entertain the thought. She would trade everything to renounce that thought – its source too, if possible.

  Nick was still standing beside her and she felt reassured by his presence when she started to unbutton her blouse. She’d often freely changed from one outfit to another in front of him back in her bedroom and there had been no awkwardness. Without looking ahead, she slid her trousers down, then her knickers, the elastic grazing her legs.

  As she unhooked her bra, she sensed a new gravity in the atmosphere. She could detect the imminence of something malign, a force that gathered itself for sudden discharge. She couldn’t attribute it to any solid presence, at least not any conscious entity.

  Nick was staring at her with a questioning look. He appeared to mouth something but she couldn’t make out the words.

  She placed her clothes on a pile on the ground and felt it again, a reverberation that had seemed remote yet was now fully interred, having passed through her skin. Her spine began to bend and she was forced to curl her neck, as though to lean into the smallness of herself. An intimation of something vast and merciless pressed on her mind, pushing it down then letting it loose. It was like her head had been forced under water to marvel at the void below, then suddenly buoyed upwards at the last moment. In that second she could see all of her thoughts clearly like the overhanging sky.

  She took Nick’s hand. This was like the last time she’d been here, only now there was an urgency in the way her mind was behaving.

  ‘Now you’re going to lie down on the sheet, face down,’ Sarah said to her, ‘and you’re going to have this tube to breathe through.’ She picked up the transparent tube from the ground and held it carefully aloft, like a snake. ‘I’ll hand it to you when you’re lying down. Okay?’

  Charlotte slowly moved towards the hole and crouched by it, feeling her pubic hairs bristle between her thighs. The men were still facing the opposite way, staring towards the compact darkness of the trees. She thought it looked like she was about to do something indecent, which called for their frozen postures. She crept into the shallow plot and knelt on the tarpaulin sheet at the bottom, which was tough and crackled beneath her calves.

  ‘Take your time, Charlotte,’ Sarah said. She was standing close. ‘Take deep breaths first.’

  ‘Maybe this is a bad idea.’

  That was Nick. His voice was very distant.

  ‘Charlotte?’ Sarah said sharply.

  She was waiting for her to make a decision.

  Charlotte stared at the wall of earth in front of her. An elongated worm was wriggling furiously from the cracks, shocked at the way its world had suddenly shifted. Only minutes before it had spasmed through the darkness, trusting in the mercy of what pressed it and, simultaneously, gave way.

  A current of pain surged through Charlotte’s back and deposited itself at the base of her spine. She lowered herself on to the sheet and lay face down, shifting her head so that one side of her face was free. The sheet was rough on her stomach and her breasts were squashed in a way that made them hard and heavy. But at this point she could still believe that she was a tenable surface, the limit beyond which the world ticked over, without intruding.

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and braced herself for the first fall of earth.

  Nothing came.

  ‘You need to take the breathing tube, Charlotte.’

  Charlotte pulled herself up, shocked that she had almost forgotten. She took the end of the tube from Sarah and lowered it towards t
he sheet, tugging it bluntly to test that Sarah had a firm grip on her end. She found, at this critical stage, that her trust in authority was compromised by something, that it always would be, right at the moment she needed to relinquish control. For a second, the women stared intently at each other. Charlotte yanked the tube again, which prompted a smile from Sarah, one that seemed to insinuate this lapse of faith was foolish.

  When Charlotte was flat against the ground again, she inserted the tube into her mouth, taking care not to bite it. Her whole jaw was trembling. There were several heavy footfalls from on high and she felt a series of shadows blocking the sun, cooling her blood. They were all watching her. She flinched when someone leaned forward and placed a small cotton sheet over her head, tucking it in gently around her skull. She was surprised to feel a small lingering pressure beneath this person’s hands before they withdrew them. There was something tender, almost mournful, in the motion that caused her eyes to burn. For a few seconds her eyelids fought to shift the material, beating rapidly against it.

  ‘We’re going to distribute the earth evenly, Charlotte, so none of your joints are pressured,’ Sarah called to her. ‘Your neck will be stiff in this position but, remember,’ – her voice grew solemn – ‘if you want to get out of there, you have to make a sound through the tube and we’ll hear it straight away. We’ll not leave you longer than twenty minutes.’

  Nobody spoke. After a few seconds a block of earth hit Charlotte’s right buttock. It smashed against her skin and took her by surprise. Her heart was pounding against the sheet. She instinctively wanted to roll on to her back, but Sarah had been very clear that she must be facing down.

  More people were sending soil down now, the blocks colliding in mid-air and shattering over her skin. The pain returned, a hot prickling that started at the back of her neck and progressed to her tailbone. Though she knew she wouldn’t be trapped here forever, the sensation of staring towards an infinite mass was frightening. To stare towards safety would have soothed her instincts, knowing there were only a few metres between her and the open air. But to stare into the depth that threatened her, the world itself and its endless dimension, thrilled her with the knowledge of her frailty. She could feel her body growing taut as it lost its last remaining surface.

  As if on cue, her thoughts spiralled into chaos. They evolved at lightning speed and then, at once, began to regress and unwind, to return to their sources. An image of her mother’s hands blossomed in the dark, and she strove to clutch them. Her brain was being compressed, forced into a hot centre of awareness.

  As her world shrank to nothing, she breathed quickly, sucking the air through the tube, wishing she could expel her thoughts through it. Her ears were ringing with panic.

  Silence.

  Not silence but the stifling sound, one note, of eternity.

  Slowly, her thoughts began to change. Panic no longer stunted them. They seemed to migrate somewhere beyond panic, beyond anything that demanded an emotional response.

  There was a tremor across her back. Her mind flooded with darkness, and yet she could see her way. She was sliding, inch by inch, through the earth.

  Marianne found the first hair one morning after they made love. It was a solid black one attached to the bone of her spine.

  Richard only liked to penetrate her in the morning. He required the urgent collision of flesh on flesh, to chafe his body across the surface of another, one that hadn’t quite stirred from sleep, and unload himself into the darkness of something that wouldn’t follow him out of the door. Then he could throw the duvet back, unfurl himself and stretch towards the bathroom in a clean white arc.

  On the morning of his meeting with the director of the company, he buried himself a little deeper into Marianne than was necessary. She had always thought reticence was a fatal error in sex, and so she’d been honest about the parameters in which her pleasure lay. She said it was not necessary to fill her entirely, that she liked a space reserved for her imagination to do the rest. Beyond a certain point, she didn’t like him there. Beyond a certain boundary, the tip of him made her sting and she imagined he was pouring something else into her, deliberately crossing the line that divided her joy from his. She felt every sharp turn as he struggled to translate himself, to store this precious, unfiltered data inside of her before it was too late. It was this he eventually hated, that he communicated something to her without knowing what it was, having finally lost the capacity to censor himself.

  When it was done, she always wanted to sleep again, whereas he was fortified, recalibrated. She heard him banging the shower door and then the slow thud of his feet as he rotated under the jet of water. They hadn’t lived together very long, and yet, in some sense, she felt she could already predict every move of his body. Each small gesture contained an element of violence, as though sheer physical force would end his association with the past. She heard it now as he banged the soap down, clattering the little ceramic dish on the shelf of the shower.

  He couldn’t tolerate inertia. The queue for the tube, the waiting room of the doctors, any minor form of congestion or delay. She had once forced him to wait in line for an item she didn’t want in a shop he couldn’t bear, only to change her mind half an hour later once they were five seconds from the till. She’d wanted to see how much anger would amass. Though he said nothing, as was often the case, she had noticed a long yellow vein twitching at his temple. It was a feature she’d never seen before, and which she had evidently lured to the surface, like a worm that had been prodded and was trapped in an endless horrified recoil.

  His routine was brutally imposed and rigidly enforced, from the second he woke up to the second he set his alarm. There was rarely any part of him that relaxed, and she could still feel that residual tension on his side of the mattress as she spread her arm across it. His back had made a blunt indentation of itself, an imprint that suggested guardedness and suspense, even when his thoughts were loosely constructed. And yet, there were certain accidents of the body, minor ways it betrayed him.

  Sometimes, in his urgency to get ready, she’d hear him cut himself while shaving. The cry she heard from the bathroom was more than just an automatic response to pain. It sounded like the echo of an old grievance, suddenly recalled, leaking through his thoughts like warm blood. Then silence. He’d switch off the razor and she’d hear nothing for several minutes while he, presumably, stared in the mirror.

  Perhaps she was too sensitive. Lately she’d been seduced by the idea that every small disruption, every minor delay, was a subtext for something else.

  The morning light was beginning to filter through the gap Richard had made in the curtains. Marianne stretched, pushing her fist into the small of her back and arching her belly towards the ceiling. She glided her hand upwards to scratch the space between her shoulder blades. That was when she felt it. A thick hair, about the length of her thumbnail. The pore that held it seemed slightly swollen at the base, and she couldn’t stop running her finger over it. It shocked her because of its singularity, and because she was sure she would have discovered it long before it had reached this length.

  She got out of bed and moved to the dressing table mirror. She lifted up her T-shirt and stood with her back to the glass, searched for the hair again and twisted to look at it. Often when she felt a lump or a spot on her skin, it never looked as bad as it felt beneath her fingers, and she was often disappointed to exchange one sensory truth for another. But this was every bit as strange as she’d imagined it to be. When she pulled, she felt movement from somewhere far below the surface of her skin. She tugged it again but it was riveted to her back.

  When Richard appeared in their bedroom, muttering to himself with a towel around his waist, she lifted her T-shirt up again and revealed her back to him.

  ‘Look. Can you see that?’

  ‘What – oh yeah. Shit.’

  For a second, she hoped it would miraculously have disappeared.

  ‘Can you get it out?’ she said.
>
  He said nothing.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Do I need tweezers?’

  Marianne rooted through the drawer in her dresser and handed a pair to him without saying anything. This time, she arched her back so that her spine rode through the skin and the hair darted upwards. She sunk her head low and waited.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Richard said.

  ‘Just do it,’ Marianne said. ‘You won’t hurt me.’

  He paused, which made her seethe. The delay only served to ply her imagination with the idea of the pain long before it arrived, until it buzzed in her ears and her skin and she couldn’t possibly think of anything else.

  He pulled the hair sharply in their shared belief that the greater the force he applied to it, the swifter the turnover from pain to recovery. But the hair was trapped and she gasped. He pulled it again and she felt her skin stretching with it. What they saw on the surface must have been a tiny fraction of the whole, which made her worry.

  ‘I’m not doing it again,’ Richard said. She heard him place the tweezers on the dresser. ‘I’m going to be late. Can’t you shave it off?’

  ‘That doesn’t get the root out.’

  She sat back on the bed and watched him dress. His hair was still wet and she wished it would stay wet. When it came through the stiff circle of his collar, it was dark and complex before the hours wrought their changes. The nape of his neck stayed wet for longer, the sweat holding fast to that groove beneath his skull in between changes on the underground.

  ‘What does it mean?’ she said to the crease in his bottom before he pulled his boxers over it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why’s there a massive black hair on my back? It’s weird.’

  Richard smiled and buttoned his trousers.

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘It’s not a life-or-death situation, is it? It’s a hair. Just Google “women with hairy backs”.’ She heard the irony in his voice now. ‘I bet other women have had the same issue. You hear of women having hairs in the oddest places. At least you haven’t grown a beard.’