It wasn’t long before I was more daring and took on more dogs, taking them for longer walks farther from their homes. One day I walked Ryley and a gaggle of other small dogs all the way back to my flat and set them loose inside. I sat on the couch and ate McDonald’s and fed them all one french fry each, two for Ryley. I wrestled and laughed with them on the floor. I rubbed Ryley’s belly.
“Please kill me—is that what you’re saying?Please kill me, George, please kill me now!”
“Does he have to do that on the rug?” my boyfriend asked.
“It’s fine, bichons don’t shed.”
“It’s not the shedding I’m worried about. Don’t they only roll around on their backs when they’ve got shit on their fur and they’re trying to rub it off on something?”
He never played with the dogs. He resolutely withdrew himself from any glee I was faking my way into feeling. No, I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life, but I didn’t think I had to broadcast unhappiness for that to be clear. I wasn’t going to be miserable. But my mind was vulnerable then and his obvious displeasure imprinted itself to devastating effect, beginning a self-policing inside me, when for every twee doggo-world charade I tried on, I would counter it with an invisible, deep hatred and anger, which I kept unfocused and vague to avoid confrontation. The onlyproblem was I misdirected the negative energy so far out into the universe that it could only circle back into my own orbit and darken my own light. Self-hatred.
“I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this,” I said, militantly carefree for my own sanity.
“I can’t believe it either,” my boyfriend said with a tone that stung through time itself.
I realized I had reverted to that same earnestness with Simon and Wulfric. Defense mechanism or not, I had sworn to God in front of them, I had contemplated what that really meant—only to be rebutted with cruelty, sarcasm, and theft at the hand of, well, at the hand of the lord himself. I felt my mind slipping just like it had before. I was so wayward and naive. I had convinced myself I was going to escape and been swatted down so easily. Of course I had fallen in with Simon and Wulfric—we were of the same crude, rudimentary mind, gutter slaves with enough pipe dreams to trick ourselves into keeping going. The lord of the manor had spoken two different languages before he stopped on crude, glottal-clogged English when speaking to me. His words and sentence structures had been difficult to understand and he had had to dumb himself down for my sake. I was more than two steps below him; that was my place.
I was a prisoner. I was a servant. And maybe that’s what I had always been: exploitable by my own stupid trust in the world’s sheen, in the mere idea of authority no matter who wielded it. I was one who could be swatted, that was all it took and all that was needed, not worth the effort to convince or sway.
I didn’t know whether to gnash my teeth and beat on the wall or just sit there resigned to my own filth and eventual doom. The lord of the manor would give the order to dispose of me for good after the party and that would be it.
Once again I let the silences of the world carry me away—only this time they were smothered with a noise I had rarely heard thus far: merriment. This is all a joke, you see, this cell you’re in, this tattered cloth, your dumbass mind. I listened to rushing waters flowing, of wine or beer or whatever they drank here. Cutlery clattered—I hadn’t used cutlery in three months. And I heard—again a first here—the most cauterizing decibel of alien sounds: music. Someone was playing a guitar, or probably not a guitar but a lute or something, and it sounded beautiful, withering, vibrating through the air to my cell like pornography pouring into my ear canal. I hated it. I hated them, whoever they were. It was the loudest party I had ever heard, like the house itself was mashing its woody gums on me, suckling silliness, spilling out into the yard, drunks vomiting, shrieks and dances, and the horses shifting around, snorting, flasks clinking together, songs, and in the midst of all that, a sliding lock, a chain moving, barrier lifted, door opening. My heart lit one feeble last time.
Wulfric appeared in the darkened doorway, straddling the current of noise, barely able to keep himself upright. He held a pair of keys.
“Let’s go party boy,” he said, slurring his words.
“Wulfric. Thank you. You have no idea. Thank you, thank you,” I repeated over and over as he unlocked and unbound my hands from the shackles and chains. I stood up, immediately grateful and ready to go, snapped out of it. “I won’t forget this, Ipromise.” Word was bond to these people, even though I had lost him the collar and he had nothing to gain. Maybe it helped that he was drunk. I smiled and laughed and rubbed my sore wrists. I had worked myself up into such a frenzy.
“No,” he said, slapping his hand on my shoulder to steady himself. “We’re staying right here, you and me. We’re gonna dance. Come on. We’re. Dancing.” Drunk or not, his aim was squarely stable, and before I had a second to react, his fist smashed against my skull. Warmth rang out—the pain wasn’t a quick sharpness, more like a woolen blanket thrown over me, and I fell to the ground, tangled up in myself, double-visioned. Wulfric was immediately on top of me, kicking me in the stomach, cursing me with words and phrases I could only assume translated in one way or another to motherfucker.
“Happy now, you Danish piece of shit?” He pummeled me. “Fucking scum.”
I held up my hands like a drowning victim. My spine felt wobbly, like it was about to come undone as I tried to worm myself away and I hobbled onto my knees. Wulfric grabbed me by my tunic and threw me out of the cell. I crumbled against the wall in the narrow hallway. I crawled, he grabbed again. I yelled but gargled blood. I felt myself fading into the pillowy warmth. I felt nothing. I felt no more pummeling. It was as if I had left my body and was watching my beating from the side, but that couldn’t be right, because the other man I saw was fighting back, the other man wasn’t me.
Simon threw a drunken, bloodied Wulfric into the cell and slammed the door. He turned to me.
“Get up,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
And he was right, I could. I stood slowly and before I thought I was fully upright, we were running. We were outside. His arm was around me. The wetness escaping me cooled in the night air, moon reflecting in it, inner warmth fading rapidly. We ran past drunks and revelers, the caravan was gone, there were no more horses. I mumbled something about it, slurring my speech. Slipping on this or that. I was fading. We were in darkness. Black trees folded over us and grew darker. Slippery slipping. I could no longer see, hear, or feel. Slipped away. I was gone.
I woke up to a fully blue morning, everything either pure white or pure blue, no gray to ease the contrast. Blue leaves were wet and shivering. White sky was brisk and all-seeing. My breath emitted a weak curl of fog that barely obscured the figure seated next to me.
“Simon,” I said. The whisp blew away and revealed his face as it turned to me. He had been waiting. He smiled but it was an inverted smile, hesitant, more like a grimace. It was daybreak, but barely. Less time had passed than I thought. I tried sitting up and felt immense pain all over.
“Careful,” he said.
I stayed on my back. I lifted my head and looked under the neck of my tunic. I was bruised everywhere. My limbs all seemed to move as they should, but there was a sharp pain in my chest. I felt my ribs, unsure what to be feeling for—they felt normal, incredibly painful in places, but not broken. I was shocked at how skinny I had become, my ribs just sitting there, wrapped inpaperlike skin. One, two, three, four, five I counted them. The heaviest part of my body was my head, which I struggled to keep held up, scenery blurring. Blues and whites.
We were in the middle of a dense forest, huddled together under two twisting trees. There was no trail anywhere that I could see, just shrubs and wet, wet woodland so wet it seemed to only be raining under the trees, water cascading down stairways of branches. I asked where we were and Simon said Deptford, but he said it likeDeep-ford, which made sense to me only much later when I realized we hadfordedthedeepRiver Ravensbourne to get to where we were. That was why we were wet. We had swum across it, Simon pulling me along against his chest.
“Thank you,” I said. I felt embarrassed for being unable to defend myself against Wulfric’s blows and passing out. Simon was no bigger than me, formed of slender, utilitarian muscles fit for his daily grunt tasks, nothing more. I was slightly taller than him and even though I was malnourished from the past three months, my body still had pockets of vanity muscles strapped to it—those archer’s shoulders—serving no real purpose than to look attractive to a demographic that was centuries away. Simon had forded a small river with all that in tow.
He shrugged off my gratitude and was awkward and coy in his own way. He gazed off into the trees. His dark curls dripped with water.
