How Much the Heart Can Hold: the perfect alternative Valentine's gift

by Carys Bray, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Bernardine Evaristo, Grace McCleen, Donal Ryan

Genres: Anthologies; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A brilliant collection of seven original stories inspired by different concepts of love, by seven award-winning authors. Love is not a singular concept. In this collection, seven award-winning authors explore seven concepts of love: from philautia (self-love) to agape (love for humanity) and from storge (a natural affection for family) to mania (a frenzied, obsessive love): La Douleur Exquise (the pain of unrequited love) 'Before It Disappears' by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (c) 2016 Pragma (enduring love) 'One More Thing Coming Undone' by D. W. Wilson (c) 2016 Philautia (love for oneself) 'White Wine' by Nikesh Shukla (c) 2016 Mania (obsessive love) 'Magdala, Who Slips Sometimes' by Donal Ryan (c) 2016 Storge (familial love) 'Codas' by Carys Bray (c) 2016 Eros (erotic love) 'The Love Story' by Grace McCleen (c) 2016 Agape (love for humanity) 'The Human World' by Bernardine Evaristo (c) 2016 Seven authors; seven short stories; seven flashes of love. The publication of How Much the Heart Can Hold is heralded by a Sceptre short story competition. The winning story, based on a concept of love, will be published in the paperback edition.

Release date: November 3, 2016

Publisher: Sceptre

Print pages: 160

Sample

Richard swirls shampoo into Joy’s scalp. His hands emerge netted in hair. It has only just grown back and is already coming out. Ever since leaving the hospital, she has returned to her strictures of starvation. He wonders if she remembers their honeymoon five years ago. They’d shared this same cottage, this same bath, and her hair had hung to her soft hips.

Naked, Joy’s body seems like a mechanical device. It is something about the way her veins are wired in green and blue. Each pivot of her bones is visible. Richard runs the sponge over the grill of her ribs. He can’t see her expression, but she doesn’t pull away. For the moment she is allowing him to do this small thing for her.

Steam pours up from the hot water. The air is thick with it. Richard begins to feel woozy. This excess of heat cannot be good for Joy. He stands, and undoes the latch on the small window. Outside, the rain mizzles and mumbles. Wind snatches the frame, pulling the window open. Too cold. Too hot. Where is just right?

The cottage in the Highlands is a last resort. He tries not to think of it as a hospice, but the hospital says the treatment isn’t taking. Her doctors have shrugged and abdicated from the loop of remission and relapse.

‘Do you remember when I lifted you over the threshold?’ He is speaking to the top of her head. She does not look up. They married at twenty-four, the first of their friends. He would not have guessed that at thirty-one he would have to carry her all the way from the car. ‘And then you wanted to lift me? I didn’t believe you could do it. But you did.’ She’d wrapped herself around his knees and lifted his feet two inches from the ground, but Remember, he is trying to say, remember you used to be strong.

Richard leaves the window open, and sinks back down around his wife.

Joy leans backwards, tilting her face upwards and whispers; ‘I saw a unicorn, on the roadside.’

Quips and fears tangle in Richard’s throat. He knows that her refusal to eat is its own insanity, but he is not prepared for unicorns. The wind shifts and sweeps inside through the open window, wafting the steam back in. Pine needles pelt them. Gold and brown slivers. Evergreens are not always green it seems. She closes her eyes as pine-pins flick her face. Does she too feel them like tiny fingernails? They catch in her hair and float across the bathtub. One bobs against the freckle on her knee and others stick to the peaks of her hipbones. She twists her head, skin contorting around bone, and opens her mouth. In the centre of her tongue is one of the needles. She lisps, careful not to let her tongue curl, removing all the angles of her speech. Each s softened to a soupy th, each r to a digestible w.

‘If I thwallow i- will I gwow a twee inthide o- me?’

Richard thinks that if she swallows it, it would be the first thing in forty-eight hours. He replies, ‘A forest.’

Her mouth curves up as if to smile, but then swerves away from the expression. She spits the needle into the water. It hangs suspended in yellow saliva. Joy turns away. These past weeks, there have been many moments when she seemed on the cusp of forgetting her fury, but she always remembers.

Submerged in bathwater, Joy’s feet look close to normal. The rippling liquid disguises the jagged bones. Under a regime of force-feeding, the nails have grown back short and pink. You could develop a fetish just from looking so long, but he has learned to take these tiny pleasures. He wonders if this is punishment for the fact that when he met her, he enjoyed how small she was, how she could be hoisted, rigged, lifted and dropped, how her body on his was an easy weight, how when they fucked, she seemed deliciously snappable. And now she is. The doctors said her bones are brittle. Lack of calcium was ageing her skeleton. As if impaired cardiac function and the risk of seizures were not enough, her very structure is failing. He presses his face against her neck, careful not to crush her. In the steam, he can’t smell her, only the choke of lavender. If he doesn’t fix this, he will lose even his wife’s smell.

Richard carries her out of the bath and into bed. It is warm but he bundles Joy under two comforters. He likes to see her wrapped in this simulacrum of flesh. He sits on the edge of the bed until Joy’s eyes slide shut. He reaches into his suitcase, where he had hidden a pot of honey and a brush inside a pair of white athletic socks. He moves slowly, tiptoeing back. Joy mumbles. Her face is so lovely in the half-light. He should be disgusted by her. At this stage of starvation, women aren’t supposed to be beautiful. But she is exquisite.

His ex-girlfriend said he picked flawed women to distract himself from his own inadequacies – but ex-girlfriends always become psychologists. Still, it can’t entirely be his fault could it?

Somewhere in there is a brain that has chosen to leave him gram by gram. She has to bear some responsibility. He doesn’t want her to leave. He has never wanted that. He wants to shout. But he has shouted. Her mother has shouted in English and Shanghainese and a terrifying blend of the two, from which even Richard cowered. Shouting has not worked, and now it would only wake her.

The tiny jar of honey is stuck. His hand tenses. He bites his lip. The air bursts from his nostrils in stiff grunts. He forces himself to breathe silently. Finally the honey creaks open. He dips the brush inside. The golden meniscus resists, and then gives way. He eases the brush between her sunken lips. The face is stiff. The nostrils inflate. They are scabbed where the feeding tube used to go. The side of the nose is brown and clotted. He moves slowly, but carefully. He doesn’t want to risk tickling her. The honey is a new idea and it was actually Joy who accidentally gave him the key. She wouldn’t even taste the organic peaches that he’d bought from Waitrose. He’d put one in her favourite blue bowl, so the gold of the peach and the indigo glaze sang to one another. One of the things he’s loved about her was how she’d cared about making each thing just right. But she’d refused to even put one slice of perfect peach on her tongue. Apparently, the mouth itself digests. Invisible enzymes pull sugars straight into the blood stream.

His brush becomes more confident. His movements speed. He strokes honey onto her lower lip, her gums, her teeth. It probably isn’t good for her enamel but teeth only matter if you use them. The brush kisses her mouth again and again, and the last light of the day puddles in her honey-painted lips.

He wants her, but Joy is unfuckable. Her body cannot be jangled. It cannot be grasped. And even if it could, she is dry inside, or so he assumes. Hair loss there too, the curtains will soon match the carpet, both gone.

In the silent kitchen, Richard unbuckles his pants. Tomorrow, he will try again to save his wife. But he needs a moment to give in – to relax into desire. On his laptop, he pulls up Japanese comics. He has lost all his taste for videos, amateur or professional. Relishing the curve of fleshy thighs reminds him of what Joy doesn’t have. So instead, he turns to these line drawings of women. They lack even colour.

Inky women never eat or drink. They weigh nothing at all. Tonight’s girls have blank eyes. He thinks it signifies that pleasure has rolled their irises back in their heads. To Richard, they have the stare of Grecian statues: Blind Justice and her Sisters.

It isn’t fair that even the porn is judging him. He made a mistake, yes, but cheating is normal. It is. Everyone cheats. Everyone.

He is a private client lawyer, he should know. His work is all prenuptials, trusts that give money without giving power, and of course wills. There’s nothing like a last will and testament to show the dirty laundry. There are mistresses all over London, and little bastards in the most elite preparatory schools. It didn’t even mean anything. It was just a drunk fuck with a colleague. How was he to know the woman who’d so eagerly lapped at his lips would feel the need to confess to her husband – a reckless moralist who decided Richard’s wife deserved to know. And now, Joy is leaving him.

He would undo it if he could. He would. But the punishment is too vast. Illustrated semen spills over the inked lips of the girl, and all Richard can think of is hospital gruel pouring over Joy’s mouth as he and the nurse beg and beg her to just swallow. The way it dripped down her neck. With a tissue, he wipes his tears first and then his dick.

He will fix this. Somehow.

Joy finds that time has gotten unreliable. It shows up and then vanishes. Long moments of white light. Conversations skip forwards like damaged cassettes. She expects that soon time will fall off the spool and tumble around her in long, brown ribbons. But what will that mean? She has no idea. She’s cold. She’s always cold. The air feels wet. This is a strange bed. Not the hospital bed. Slowly, she moves her hand to her face. Her face still hurts, but it is free. The tube is gone. It hurt, oh god it hurt, and as she thinks hurt, pain smashes her face. She shakes off the ghost tubes. Scotland, she is in Scotland. It smells of wet stone. It smells of old wood. There is a sticky sweetness in her mouth, but she does not trust her tongue any more.

Out the window, the pines cut the sky. Joy grew up in Canary Wharf and she thought the countryside would be mute. Instead, each noise is underlined by the quiet around it. A car on the road. Birds talking. Something heavy on gravel. Hooves. She is sure they are hooves. She can’t explain why she thinks this, but her heart clops.

Joy moves her head to the sound. The window is small. It has to be hooves, what else would beat out that steady clink? Outside is dark; she fumbles for the lamp. And then there is a reflected lamp hanging in the glass of the window. But then she sees it. The animal is right below the window. It takes her a moment to understand scale. It is too big to be a sheep, or a goat, the flanks too smooth. The head turns and it is yes, a horse. Pale ears, twitching, black eyes. But then the shape, long and pointed. The horn is grey as a chicken bone. Unicorn. She was wishing when she told Richard she’d seen a unicorn. It was only a white smudge in the trees that had made her think unicorn. This animal is so close that its flanks must be pressing against the side of the house. Maybe this is what happens when time falls off the loop. The creature is bigger than the Kia Richard hired.

For a minute, she thinks of calling out to her husband, as she once did when she saw something beautiful or alarming – a double-rainbow or a spider, or just a sale on the kind of juice he liked. But she doesn’t do that now.

She woke up and it was all a dream, Joy had a teacher who failed you if you wrote that in one of your stories. She wondered what the teacher would have done if you’d written, She woke up and it was all a dream and she remembered there was nothing worthwhile in this hamster wheel of life. That people would keep asking her what was so terrible and all she’d be able to say was all of this. All, all, all of this.

She watches and tries to remember what she knows about unicorns. On her eleventh birthday, the glass unicorn arrived in the mail, addressed to her. Her father sent it. She’d asked for a new watch, the kind with a gummy strap that came in colours like cotton candy, marzipan and lemon drop. All the other girls had one. After unwrapping the unicorn, Joy refused to eat her cake. The unicorn was childish and stupid. How old did her father think she was? Her mother, growing frustrated, shouted, ‘If you don’t want it, give it to your sister.’

An overdose of disappointment and fury had kept her awake all night. In the morning, she was allowed to stay home sick. Bored of daytime talk shows, she’d snuck into her sister’s room. The unicorn stood at the head of a herd of plastic ponies. Joy held its flank up to her eye. The world viewed through the glassy haunches was blurred and beautiful, as the world is when seen through tears. She pressed the horn into the plush nub of her little finger. It was sharp as a spinning needle. The glass magnified the weft of her fingerprints. She pinched a hoof in her left hand, the body in her right. She let the smashability, crushability, powderability thrum between her fingers.

She let it live. Only once more did she think to smash it. Fifteen-year-old Joy was grounded for cutting. At night, her mum locked the kitchen knives in her own b. . .