Her stomach was tight and hard as wood ash, collected in lumps and ridges, so she would never be able to bend over and slip a strap through the buckle of her shoe again, she would always have to retrieve a dropped item by bringing her upright body down on bent legs, blind to whatever was underneath her. Her pubic hair was mostly gone, just a few strands remained below a bald patch, so she looked like a little girl. He could see the slit line of her against a stripped membrane. Her left breast was made smaller than the right by the acid, which had swept through fatty tissue with abandon, and the nipple there looked like a piece of misshapen rock, chipped glass. The tattooed eyes on her torso had been erased in places, in others they had washed together in bizarre, nondescript patches of concentrated dye. Green from the largest ruptured iris on her abdomen had collected above her appendix, and it seemed in comparison a beautiful emerald seam against the strip-mined earth of the rest of her. No. She was like a fresco with a jar of paint stripper knocked over her. She had run, dried and hardened. Several of the eyes on her arms, legs and back had survived, but otherwise she was as streaky as an abstract painting. She put a hand up to his face and moved his tears away with the heel of her palm. She gave him those moments before she spoke, she had probably not in any case known how to prepare him verbally for the sight. Nothing she could have said would have cleared the way.
— So. The doctors can move skin around on your body now. From here to here, they cut it off and put it back on. This is called a skin graft, they can only just do this thing. Mostly it still doesn’t work. It is amazing that they can do that, I think.
Cy took a chestful of air and nodded, his diaphragm shuddering. He put his hands on his hips and tried to breathe calmly through gritted teeth, he felt as if he had been running fast for the last few minutes. But he did not look away from her. And then she reminded him of something. Her voice with its different, unlocated accent and the dark white and grey body with its patches of green — she was like a thing which he had encountered only twice as a boy from the train window as he rode to his Aunt Doris’s house, and he had thought it haunting and raw even then. It was the rock pavements of the Yorkshire moors where the earth’s bone surfaced in bands and petrified rivers against the swaying grass and the living ground. She was now in part dead, like the stone of the moors, while regions of her still grew, and her tone was the dirge-like song of the wind.
A man in front of them on the other side of the street whistled in their direction and crossed over to get a more intimate view of the nude woman.
— Turn around girly-girl, let’s see your better side.
Grace obliged him, turning around inanimately like a gigot on a spit, and the man stopped coming and took his eyes off her. He adjusted his collar and hurried away.
Cy took the boards of the booth down quickly, his hands shaking as he stacked them, and they both stepped into the small enclosure. He offered her a seat and she shook her head.
— It takes too long. Up and down. Not worth it any more. But, I’m finding ways.
He sat down on the stool. He had to sit. He had to remember to breathe, to tell his lungs to operate. He was now in a direct line with her midriff, the region of the worst damage. There was amazing detail to the scarring. The hospital gauze had left cross-hatching on the plateaus of skin. There were peaks like miniature mountain ranges, black gullies. Those wounds! She had always said it would be about body, hadn’t she, that the battleground had been chosen by others and a war would be fought there, and won or lost? Hers had been the site of an almighty uprising, on a territory mapped out and claimed by an administration that had every intention of preserving empire and dictating the law of the land to its colony. So all she could do was find a way to overwhelm the government with quick wits, a trick of the light in battle using shields and mirrors and superb body armour, blinding them for long enough to disable their forces and vanquish them. And for a time the victory flags had flown across her body. How must that have felt for her, he wondered. Like a full brass plate and a cheer from the crowd? Like Liberty’s fiery torch? And he had known what she was up against all along, hadn’t he, him with his booth walls drowning under images of sex and stylized female bodies? Yes, he had known.
Grace had been outnumbered by the men of history, she had neither the political strength nor the support of her own people, but she had found a way to win her freedom, and for a time she had celebrated the identity of her body as her own sovereign state. And now the land had been razed again, it was desolate, death-soil. But her eyes, those dark, solemn, prolific eyes still glimmered and said her mind had not lost that spirit of rebellion and never would. She was gathering the last few insurgents, the hardiest survivors in their caves and forest hideaways, and they were forming a pact of defiance, they were stockpiling arms. The revolt was far from over. She’d damn herself. She’d go to the gallows bloody and brutalized but unbroken if she had to.
He knew the only pity and consolation she would accept, the only tears she would stand for, were his. He could see that in her face, the finite sympathy and tolerance for him. Her flag-maker. Her ally. The man who rewrote her body’s history. The man who loved her. She gestured to herself.
— They moved skin from my leg to here above my ribs. They said it would die or continue to live, but either way it would protect the inside. It was not cosmetic, they tried a few things. I signed forms saying they could. I don’t know how they did this, Electric Michelangelo. It is a miracle. I had to stay covered until it was healed enough for the air — even the air can bring infection to you — or I would have come sooner. They want me to put a liniment on that will make it hard, with some kind of metal in it, but I can’t reach so well. You must stop this face now. I need your help. Here. You can do this for me.
She took a tube of cream from the pocket of her dress and held it out to him.
— I don’t want to hurt you. It looks so … painful.
— No. I can’t feel it any more, sometimes an itch, but mostly it’s like this …
She took his hand in hers and placed their two first fingers together like the steeple of a church, while the rest intertwined to make its roof. Then she made him slide his other fingers up and down the joined steeple. It was the dead-finger trick that the boys of his school had once done to make each other squeamish, the sensation was of a lifeless body part and now it seemed doubly awful. He took the cream from her, put a small amount into his palm and smoothed it as best he could over the rocky patches at the top of her legs. The skin was less absorbent than slate. Skin was supposed to drink in moisture and hers would not take a sip. She put her hand in his hair, stroked it while he anointed her. He felt his eyes begin to brim again and he pulled her towards him gently and began to kiss her stomach, her hips, the ruined abdomen and breasts, his mouth soft and damp on her, her body tough as granite until his tongue found the safer, softer channel of skin inside her. He felt her hand close in his hair and pull on it gently, mooring them closer together. She whispered a word to him, twice, which defied any liguistic pronunciation he had mastered, but he knew it was an affirmation of some kind. Kedvesem. Kedvesem. For a few moments he felt her body swaying exquisitely against him, like the lip of a wave breaking at his mouth. Her breathing became husked within her chest, constricted then ameliorated from the errata of her respiratory condition, and her head fell back. Her rhythm was overcome by a series of small jolts, electrical currents, as if her body had been shocked, her life being taken or given back by a connection of energy, and then she was still.