Does it look different? Zoe asked, tilting her head.
Tom stopped in the hallway outside the bedroom and glanced back. Does what look different? he asked.
Zoe shrugged her right shoulder, rolled it forward, rolled it back. My arm, she said. This arm.
She waggled the fingers of her hand. The fingers felt different. The elbow felt different. She rubbed the elbow with the cup of her palm, the palm of her other hand, which felt no different, so far as she could tell.
Delayed by this whimsy, caught on the landing walking one way and turning the other, Tom flushed with annoyance. He always flushed when he was annoyed: he couldn’t hide it. And he looked tired. He wasn’t sleeping well. Neither was Zoe. No one was sleeping well, and no one could hide it. Why would it look different? Tom asked, very patiently.
No reason, Zoe said.
I had a dream, she didn’t say, then for a moment thought she might have said it.
Got to go, said Tom.
Bye, said Zoe.
She looked in the mirror. She heard the front door slam shut downstairs. You had to slam it shut to shut it. It was a heavy door and the wood was warped with moisture. It was always worse in the winter. She didn’t think he was angry, but the windows in the bedroom rattled in their frames.
We should fix the door, she said.
She studied her face in the mirror, then looked at her arms. She waggled her fingers, the fingers of her left hand. She pursed her lips.
She had dreamt that her left arm was slightly longer than her right.
She wasn’t sure that it wasn’t.
Now Zoe was looking out the window; she had been looking out the window for some time.
She was supposed to be out there, she knew, on the other side of the window, looking for work. But she did not want to go out, nor look for work. The glass of the window might have thickened and clouded and wrapped itself around her. In spite of her protestations she understood that in the long run their situation was not tenable. He would want to know she had been looking for work, out there, or in here, on her laptop, which she had grown to hate, its glowing screen, which she hated, its noises, its notifications, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she worried about it. Most of the time, Zoe only ever worried about distant possibilities: the prospect of dementia in later life, the heat death of the universe. Tom was the sort of person who considered work a moral good. She had only ever seen it as a means to an end. Tom always had to keep busy so as to ward off anxiety. He would work through illness. Redundant, unwell, Zoe had let go of such things. She had been forced to let go. But her redundancy money had dwindled with alarming speed. She was supposed to have put most of it away. Zoe had not put most of it away; and nor had she told him this.
She liked looking out the window, at people walking from A to B, cleaning their cars, talking to other people on their doorsteps, walking their dogs, ensconced in their own lives, though she would duck if one of them happened to glance in her direction. Sometimes she would go to one of the cafes on the High Street. There were a lot of cafes now. The area was getting trendy.
That afternoon, Zoe fell asleep on the sofa. She had meant to lie down for a minute, but sleep had closed over her like so much quicksand. Three hours later, the rude slamming of the warped front door woke her up. In that transition from deep sleep to wakefulness she felt as though she had been deprived of something, that something vital had been taken from her, but alongside the thing, whatever it was, that had been taken, so had gone any understanding of it, of the thing, any name or concept that might have illuminated, even if only partially, its nature. It was not the sort of thought Zoe could explain to Tom: how often she felt quite inexplicably bereft, her eyes filling with tears without apparent cause. Rubbing her eyes, Zoe saw him looking down at her, thinking. What was he thinking?
Asleep on the sofa Zoe had dreamed the same dream.
She had dreamt that her left arm was slightly longer than her right.
I had it again, she said.
What’s that? he asked.
The dream, she said.
Really, he said, turning away.
You’re always turning away, Zoe thought but did not say. When I think of you I think of you turning away. She wondered where it had come from, this distance between them. It was not a new thing, but at the same time it wasn’t all that old. It was hard to tell. One day Zoe had simply realised that it was there, had inserted itself into the spaces between them; perhaps it had retroactively inserted itself into their recent past. But there must have been a time before it was there, then the time after its insertion, or accretion, but scrolling through the pictures on her phone she could point at no date at which this might have happened. Did this mean that it had always been there, the distance, and she just none the wiser?
It’s definitely longer, Zoe said, holding her hands out before her as if she were about to dive, daintily, into a pool of still water, arms straight, elbows locked, one arm very slightly longer than the other.
Look, she said. I think it’s grown again.
Have you thought about dinner? he asked her.
Not really, Zoe answered, frowning down at her hand, the hand of her left arm, remembering dinner.
Over the following week, the process established itself, grew definite, became predictable. Each time she slept she dreamt that her left arm had grown by some small percentage. But each percentage of growth stood upon the growth established to date. Two per cent on Wednesday was therefore more than two percent on Tuesday, and the small advances, daily accrued, sometimes as much five per cent, or seven, thus came to seem quite drastic. Often she would find herself standing in front of the three-quarter length mirror. She could more than feel it now: she could see it. The left arm was perceptibly longer than her right. Perceptibly longer, that was, to her: Tom would have nothing to do with it.
Are you okay? he asked, that Saturday, a day of low air pressure, grey undifferentiated cloud low in the sky, a grey lid on the world. The low pressure played havoc with Zoe’s ears, which had begun to ring and, in ringing, hurt, a high-pitched hurting that made her scowl and wince. All day it felt as though it would rain but it did not rain. It felt as though the earth needed rain but the sky could not give it. Zoe found she could not get out of bed.
You could at least answer my question, Tom said. He sounded tired, she thought distantly. He sounded very tired.
I’m okay, she said.
I think you should talk to someone, he said.
I’m talking to you, Zoe said.
Are you? he asked.
Eventually, she knew, Tom would no longer be able to deny it: the elongation of her arm would prove too conspicuous. As that moment neared, she found her attitude changing. No longer did she wish for him to see it too, to understand it: now a terrible furtiveness had come over her. She did her best to hide it. She ceased to mention it. She made an effort to get up and about. This took a tremendous amount of energy, and each evening she would crash into bed early, 9pm, 8pm, wiped out entirely from a day of pretending, but her efforts in that direction did not prove fruitless. He ceased to question her. His own mood began to brighten, just a little. And her own mood brightened too, just a little, with a little borrowed light.
Do I love you? she wondered, looking at him through the kitchen door. He was at the counter, slicing aubergine with an enormous and terrifying knife he had bought off the Internet. I thought that I loved you.
All day, every day, Zoe could feel a tingling in her arm.
He knew how she loved aubergine.
In her efforts to convince Tom that all was well, Zoe began to go outside again; and in going outside again she began to overcome her fear of going outside. In pretending she felt well, she began to feel a little better. But only a little. Her new excursions brought a new problem: how to conceal the arm from others. Hiding it from Tom had been easy, because Tom had not wanted to know: but strangers would notice: they could smell difference, weakness, something amiss. Zoe could feel their eyes on her, and the twitching of their nostrils. The arm was now too long for her coat. It wasn’t the weather for coats but she had taken to wearing one everywhere, a long black and not inexpensive coat she had bought for Tom years before but which he had seldom worn, and raising her elbow slightly, tried to retract the unnaturally long bony pale thin wrist back into the cuff. But, two weeks into this thing, Zoe had noticed something else: it was no longer just the arm that was growing every time she fell asleep and dreamt that her arm had grown, if ever it had been, but her fingers too, her fingertips, and her palm to boot. The hand was growing proportionately—or at least proportionate to her arm, for the rest of her body remained the rough size it had attained by her late teens, give or take a few pounds. The difficulty in concealing the elongating arm, her left arm, began to increase as the length of the arm increased, day by day, night by night. At last it became easier to tuck the cuff of the coat into the pocket of the coat and keep the arm free of the sleeve, wrapped around her torso inside the coat like the belt of some weird dressing gown. But this, Zoe felt, made her look as though she were behaving surreptitiously—and to what end? One could only behave surreptitiously toward some disreputable end; and, as she walked through town, stopping in cafes, swiping through the job ads on the screens in the Job Centre+, which included such roles as children’s entertainer and exotic dancer, roles that might, Zoe thought darkly, benefit from her new endowment, a thought that had made her giggle as she had swiped on to new and less interesting ads, she began to sense a new disapproval growing in the eyes of the strangers she passed.
But Zoe had also discovered new possibilities, new skills unlocked by the unexpected development of the limb. She could, for example, reach far around her boyfriend, as they watched some interminable comedy on the BBC, and tap him on his shoulder, before quickly withdrawing the arm, which in spite of its length possessed a peculiar dexterity, as if the thin appendage was all fast-twitch muscle fibre, like the calves of a sprinter or a cat, and then enjoy his bewilderment as he turned in the direction of the tap. Of course she had to do this surreptitiously: but Zoe’s talents of surreptitiousness had also increased.
She began to delight in this: in confounding and confusing strangers, in making various kinds of mischief as the inspiration took her. Babies she would allow to see the limb at work, and wide-eyed and knowing no better they would babble and beam quite delightedly. And she no longer needed to ask Tom to reach something down from the higher shelves. As her funds ran low, Zoe turned her new gift towards the end of theft, lifting items here and there from the outside displays of green grocers, flower shops, Smiths and Marks & Spencer, inside supermarkets and off-licenses, to not insignificant gain. Her coat, Tom’s old coat, several sizes too big for Zoe, for Tom was the average height for a man and she was small, even for a woman, proved usefully capacious. After the first few times she was surprised to observe her own lack of remorse, because until recently she had always been a conscientious person, or so she had thought—perhaps she had been wrong: she must have been wrong. Either way, transformed, she found she felt now as if the categories of innocence and guilt had simply ceased to apply. What did theft or crime mean to the creature she could feel herself becoming? Was that creature even a creature?
This delight continued for perhaps a week, but by the twelfth week of her transformation the continued elongation had begun to present significant difficulties. No longer was it a simple matter to conceal the arm, from Tom, from her neighbours. Zoe had, without explanation, begun to sleep on the roll-out futon in the spare room, the box room, from which she had worked at a small desk before a round of redundancies had swept through her old company like a scythe.
But why? Tom had asked, bereft.
Because I need my sleep, she had said.
But sleep, Zoe knew, was exactly what she did not need: because every time she slept she dreamt the same dream, and every time she awoke from that dream she awoke to the same peculiar reality. Her arm, she thought, was getting out of hand.
So, in the spare room, pretending to sleep, she did not sleep. Unsleeping, she took to sneaking out at night once her boyfriend had nodded off and the little house fallen quiet except for all the noises of little houses in the night: rocks in the chimney, subsidence, the slow implacable work of entropy. She walked the streets of her neighbourhood in an effort to keep herself awake. Perhaps, Zoe thought, if she exhausted herself sufficiently, she might lack the energy to dream, but this did not prove to be the case. Those nightly peregrinations soon incorporated bus journeys back and forth across the city and across the stretch of coast on which the city lay.
Alone in the house, she examined her arm in the mirror. Had it grown? She had not slept in a week. She knew the danger in this, but set against the danger of dreams counted it less dangerous by far. Zoe knew that lack of sleep could drive you mad: but what did madness mean now, to her? Madness and sanity belonged to the same sphere as guilt and innocence, a world of concepts from which events had ejected her.
This can’t go on, said Tom, on the first warm day in several weeks. They were sitting in camping chairs in their little yard. It had been his idea. She was wearing her coat.
What can’t go on? Zoe replied.
For God’s sake! he exclaimed. This is ridiculous! Could you—for God’s sake, could you just take your arm out from under there? What even—
Words visibly failed him—his lips appeared to glitch, then his body deflate. The camping chair creaked beneath him. His eyes filled with tears.
It’s comfortable, she said. I’m sorry, she told him.
I’m going to call the doctor, he said, looking up, blinking rapidly.
No, she replied.
Yes, he replied.
No you are not, she said, sitting up. The cuff of her coat, which she had taken to wearing indoors, fell out of her pocket.
Tom rubbed his face with both hands. He stood abruptly. He turned to leave the yard, to walk back indoors along the side return; then, in turning, turned back. Then back again. With his back towards her, he said again, in a wounded whisper: This cannot go on.
Only now did Zoe recognise the true danger that Tom presented. She stood and, standing, quietly unzipped the coat. The fingers of her left hand, gripping the flesh of her midriff, began to loosen their grip. The arm, wrapped thrice around her body like a boa constrictor, began slowly to unwind.
Zoe realised that Tom was sobbing.
With her left hand she reached out to touch him on the shoulder. With her left hand she began to stroke his neck. He raised his right hand to touch it. He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it. Then he turned to her, and she saw the horror bloom in his eyes as his jaw fell slack and his body tensed.
Free of the coat, she slipped her long thin fingers round and round Tom’s neck. He began to choke and, as he choked, Zoe lifted him up, and up, and up.
