The Lobster
Winner of the Cúirt New Writing Prize 2020
The lobster is russet-red and alive. I can feel its body clink against its small container. My palm is placed flat against the glass. The lobster is clumsy. It is panicked.
Beat Beat goes my heart.
I am intimidated by my birthday. I wake up and imagine I hear the popping of a thousand red balloons. But I hear nothing because I am temporarily deaf. I don’t know why and I can’t remember when I stopped hearing. Somewhere in the blur of last week I noticed I was absentmindedly watching the shapes of mouths contort. They looked like rosebuds being blown about in the wind. It dawned on me, after a while, that my bus was too quiet. I could see a baby in the corner, its lips stretched wide. The windows of the bus were misted. I tapped the glass. I heard nothing.
My room has a white ceiling. It is a very plain detail to notice so early in the morning. I glance around my room, my eyes automatically noting all the other white squares: my notebook, a pale shadow on my wardrobe door, a pattern on my duvet.
My legs push me up. I press my soft square big toes into my carpet. There is a novel lying open on my desk. I remember when words used to daze and beautify me. This is my childhood bedroom. The wallpaper is thin and patterned with delicate grey waves, crested at the top, curled. I take a moment to tilt my head from side to side. The mirror stares at me coolly. My heart is quiet and red.
I tiptoe to my kitchen. Everything is clean. Ordered. The cutlery all lies neatly in separate compartments; knives, forks, spoons. Two condolence cards and a bill lie on the counter. The bill is addressed to a name that has disappeared into the ether, where all names go when they are no longer attached to a particular face.
I busy myself with breakfast. I boil water in a pot and place four eggs inside. They knock into one another and the sight of their jostling among the rivulets of bubbles makes my conscience flutter. I don’t want them to bruise each other. I am irrational. I take a ladle and retrieve them. I place them all securely in delicate cups. The water continues to boil until the surface is hysterical with bubbles.
I reach for a knife and slice off the top of one egg. It is severely undercooked. The bulbous yolk stares at me like an eye. I take a knife and poke it. It bobs. I press down harder with my knife and the yellow overflows and drips down the china cup.
It is my birthday. I appreciate the sight of yellow. The colour provides me with a certain companionship. But it is only a colour. There is only so much friendliness that can be eked out from a spoiled egg. Even if it is a large egg. A large organic egg. The kitchen cupboards are four pale squares above a laminated tile floor. The floor is clammy as if it too sweats. The cleanliness and order of the kitchen is not mine. It bears the echo of someone else’s care.
I shrug on a large jacket, speckled with dirt and march out of the front door. The wind caresses me, roughly and suddenly I can hear. The volume of the world is turned up high. Seagulls fling cries to one another as they circle a harbour front. Their cries contain a trace of agony or melodrama or perhaps they feel peaceful, getting buffeted around. I draw up my hood so that my hair doesn’t get damp. The waves rollick together like small children learning to wrestle for the first time. Boats get tossed back and forth, innocent bystanders in the vivid embrace of blue.
The fishmonger’s is located next to the second hand bookshop. The bell rings, alerting my sinuses that they are about to be assaulted by the stench of fish. The lighting is dim within the shop. An old woman greets me from behind the counter.
‘The sea looks good today,’ she says.
‘The sea is too beautiful. I’ll take this creature.’ I gesture towards a small glass cage.
I’ll take this creature.
I’ll take this creature.
I know this creature.
I glance at my gesturing hand. The skin around my knuckles is crinkled and rough from a recent burn. If I were to judge my age by the skin of my hand I would consider myself born in the same generation as the stooped woman. I wonder if my hand will ever look young again. It is prematurely weathered. The nails of the old woman are painted a dark maroon. She looks in the direction my hand points to. She looks at the four lobsters. They are ocean-fresh.
I tuck the lobster cage securely under my arm on my walk back. I stare at the sea inquisitively as though there are faces under the waves. Or more specifically, her face, repeated infinitely, not too far below the surface. The contours of her eyes bare resemblance to mine and yet they also resemble the sea which means that they are nobody’s eyes anymore. Sea salt is so thick in the air it is almost edible.
I place the lobster cage on the table and nudge an under-boiled egg towards it. I can’t tell if the lobster registers my offering. There is a minute blur of red as it approaches the slim steel bars. I have a turn of heart. I take the egg away and shake my head.
‘I’m going to eat you.’
It shuffles about some more, gauging its new surroundings, the new scents in the air. I tilt my head. I’m not sure if lobsters can smell. All I’m certain of is the pain that will bloom if one of its thick pincers finds purchase on my skin. I briefly consider if this hurt would be enjoyable but I decide that pain cannot be romanticised when its creator is a lobster, if at all. It twitches, alien-like. I shake my head. The spilled yolk has begun to harden into golden globules on the table. The pale cupboards have become abstract squares now that my focus has tightened on the lobster. Its inelegance scares me. Its eyes, which are black beads, see right through me.
‘Wait here.’
I go to my bedroom and curl up and nap. My sheets feel cool, a winter’s sun filters through my window. I dream of scuttling. When I wake up, my brain destroys all evidence of the dream. I touch my fingers together and fashion claws with my hands. I close my left claw around a portion of my stomach and pinch. When I take my hand away, the skin is blushed. I don’t remember undressing before my nap but I have awoken naked. The sun is partially obscured by a cloud. I hear a crash from the kitchen.
My heart skips and a name forms itself on my lips before dissolving. I push back my duvet and run down the stairs and then I’m in the kitchen, feeling alive for the first time in weeks, naked, with a lobster on the floor.
Its cage has fallen off the table. The lock has sprung. Its tough shell seems to absorb sunlight, causing the rest of the kitchen to fall into shadow. The creature and I remain rooted and then the lobster is scuttling towards me and I am leaping onto a chair and then onto the table, my foot knocking over an empty fruit bowl.
The lobster is about to desert the kitchen but I scream, piercingly, for a long, stretched out moment. The lobster pauses. I throw the fruit bowl at the door and it scuttles backward, underneath the table.
I stride over the table-top to a rack of pots hanging above the stove. I grab the largest, the metal of its handle cutting into my palm as I leap down and crawl under the table and slam it over the body of the lobster. I place a palm on top of the pan so that the lobster cannot move and then I lie there, on my front, on the cold kitchen tiles. Panting.
My breath begins to slow. Goose pimples cover my skin.
‘I bought you. You’re mine.’
It’s dark.
My shell aches.
I’ve never felt so crimson.
‘You’re mine.’
I shuffle the pan forward and out from under the table. I place two heavy cooking books on top and stand. I climb the stairs and enter the room that now belongs to no one. I pick up a dark rouge lipstick. I press its soft wax all about the skin of my face, until my expression is pure scarlet.
I scuttle downstairs. I stare at the pan of water on the stove. It is cool now, no more froth and bubbles. In the washing machine there is a collection of damp towels. I pull out two. I weave them around my hands and arms. I take away the cookery books. I lift the pan from the lobster’s confined body. I pick up the lobster. I hold it away from me. I watch it writhe in a confusion of red and pincers. I want to kiss it but I am wise. I don’t let it near my face or my lips. I run upstairs. I panic slightly. I don’t know which room to enter. My bedroom? The other, empty bedroom? I settle on the bathroom.
I place the lobster on the cold enamel of the bath. I quickly drop in the plug and twist the tap. A lukewarm trickle emerges.
‘There,’ I say. ‘There.’
I fall asleep on the bathmat. Birthdays are tiring. I dream of sand, golden and infinite. When I awaken, the lobster is gone. All the doors in the house are unlocked and all the windows are gaping. I shiver. The scent of sea salt invades this domestic sphere, overpowering the chemical air freshener (cinnamon and peach).
There is an echo somewhere. It is the echo of the lobster leaving. Curtains flutter in the wind.
I draw on a coat and some boots. The fishmonger’s is nearly closing.
‘Hello.’ I say. The bell. The scent of fish assaulting me. ‘I’m here to buy a lobster.’
I dream of the sea.
Cavernous blue.
My mouth opens to engulf the blue.
My skin is shell-like, russet red.
Brigitte de Valk 