Eliza Clark, the best-selling author of Boy Parts and Penance, is back with her first collection of short stories. She's Always Hungry, out 7th November 2024, is stuffed full of troubling and surreal tales that explore desperation and desire, all with one common theme: a hunger for something out of reach. Read on for an extract from 'The Company Man', which follows a woman living under a new identity, who is being pursued by a mysterious man...
The dream starts like this: I am wading through knee-deep snow. Everything below the knee is numb, my flesh like sponge around the bone. It is night. My skin is as blue as my dress. The snow, too, is blue and studded with crystals and glittering in the moonlight. I fall. I push on. My destination is the red tent some way ahead of me. Wind carries its music to my ears. I had this dream for years before I made it to the tent. Every night I got a few yards closer. Even now, there will be nights when I die in the snow.
Tonight, I reach the tasselled flap of the tent. I smell straw and smoke and animal shit. I pull it back — and I wake up to the sound of my alarm ringing. My pillow wet with drool. My heart thudding. There is no rest for the wicked, so I leave my bed. I brush my teeth until my gums bleed. I spit pink foam into the sink. I comb my hair. It is bobbed and black and anonymous. I put in contact lenses. I apply moisturiser and soft, professional makeup. As the day goes on, the makeup will gather in and crack around these new lines in my forehead. Worry lines. No joyful crow’s feet or marionette lines; below the brow my skin is as smooth and taut as a mask. I put on clothes that are drab and cheap. I take the bus to the job my father arranged for me. I work for the party because my father is a party man.
At my job, I will organise other people’s meetings, and I will order the office supplies and I will attend meetings and write minutes. And I will receive a hang-up call, as I do every day, and it will send a cold chill down my spine. I do; it does. The office accountant looks over to me when the phone rings. ‘Your ghost caller, Dora?’ she asks. I nod. ‘We’ll have to call the phone company.’
‘Yes, it’s probably a problem down our end,’ I reply – because there’s no reason Dora should be receiving strange hang-up calls. But Martina might get them – there are plenty of reasons someone would want to harass Martina on the phone. Shortly after the hang-up call, a man I have never seen comes into the office. I feel the same cold, paranoid fear I do when the phone rings and no one is at the other end. Though the man looks completely normal. But it is normal for a telephone to ring, isn’t it? I ask if I can help him – he nods. ‘I’m from the water company,’ he says. ‘I think I have a meeting here today.’
I check the calendars I keep for the party officials. As I scan the calendars, I look up at the man. He is older than me by at least a decade. Clean-shaven and neatly dressed, he rocks on his heels. He is of average height. I find him unobtrusively handsome and a little too thin. ‘Hold on,’ I say. I flip through the calendar of the most relevant official. ‘Oh. It’s the same day next month.’ I show him the calendar. The man closes his eyes, squeezing them shut tightly, as if the news pains him. His eyes are nice. A bright hazel. The colours of a park as they are now in autumn. ‘We can’t fit you in today – I would if I could.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry to have bothered you. I’ll be back on the correct day.’
I watch him walk away. When I go out for lunch, I bump into him in the park. It is getting too cold and wet to eat outside, but I like to watch the ducks splashing around in the pond as I eat. The ducklings I’d watched over spring and summer are gone now, either indistinguishable from the adults or dead. I eat a cold potato salad from a plastic tub. My fingers sting around the fork – going red and white in the bitter wind. The man from the water company is watching the ducks, too. It seems to take a moment for him to notice me. ‘Hello,’ he says. I wave because my mouth is full. ‘I’m delaying going back to the office. They won’t be happy with me.’
‘Tell them he’s sick and you had to reschedule,’ I say. ‘It’s true, you know. He’s not even here today. I’m sorry I didn’t say so earlier – but you left quickly.'
‘Oh,’ says the man. ‘That’s a relief. I suppose I should get back.’ I wave again. He begins to walk away from me, then turns on the spot. ‘My office is just over there,’ he says, pointing at the water company building. ‘Maybe I’ll see you here again?’
‘You probably will, yes,’ I reply. He leaves without giving me his name.
At home, I eat soup I made the previous day. I watch the nightly broadcast – tonight, a ballet and the news. The news says that all is well. The country is stable. Our distant war proceeds with minimal casualties. The economy flourishes. The people are healthy and beautiful and prosperous. The television turns itself off when the broadcast is complete. I make a tea and I read a book and I think about the man from the water company. My father calls me late in the evening while my mother is in bed. He speaks to me in a low voice, as if I were his mistress and not his daughter.
‘How was work today, Marti?’ he asks. My own name sounds foreign to my ear. I am Dora now. It is only to Papa and my probation officer that I remain Martina. My father is sort of like a second probation officer – he doesn’t really want to know about my day, he just wants to hear that I’m sober and out of trouble. ‘Fine, Papa,’ I say. I give him a short run through of the day – I don’t mention the man from the water company. ‘Good,’ he says. He doesn’t tell me anything about his day and avoids answering me when I ask about my mother. The book I have to read isn’t very good, so I go to bed and have the dream again.
This is what happens when I make it to the tent: I push through the flap – I am always expecting a circus, but instead, I enter a cabaret. A dimly lit, lushly decorated space with strings of lights and thick rolls of red fabric hanging from the ceiling. The walls and ceiling are red as well; the light takes on a warm quality. There are tables where blurry, indistinct, richly costumed spectators drink and eat and laugh. They all wear masks – feathered, long- beaked – and they all look at me as I pass them. I am looking for the stage. The master of ceremonies, the musicians and the dancers beckon me towards it. The emcee points up to a huge cage, suspended by a chain from the ceiling. When the cage rattles I wake up.
I dress. I commute. I work. At lunch, I go to the park hoping to see the man from the water company. He is there, drinking soup from a thermal flask. ‘Oh, hello,’ he says. ‘I didn’t get your name yesterday.’
I say Dora, because that is the name on my passport and the name I use at work. I hardly ever slip up and call myself Martina. I always answer to Dora. ‘Lev,’ he replies.
‘Did you get in trouble, yesterday?’
‘No. I’m glad he really was sick. I’m a terrible liar,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t even lie about homework at school. People are always telling me I overshare. I’m just candid by nature, I suppose.’ He looks at me and blinks – I could swear he’d gone a little pink, were he not already pink with the cold. ‘Sorry – excuse me.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say. I’m charmed by him. Whether this is because Lev is charming, or because my standards are low, I am not sure. Most of the men I speak to are small-time party officials who are my father’s age. And Martina was easy to impress. Martina used to bat her eyelashes at anyone who paid her any mind. Dora’s a little more conservative than that – so I smile, hoping to look girlish and coy.
I want Lev to tell me that he came to the park in the hope he would see me. I will tell him then that I’d hoped to see him. I hope he will ask me out. I try not to look at him like a dog begging for scraps at the dinner table. His eyes are even brighter in the daylight. They’re heavily lashed; his nose is hooked and striking, and his lips are shapely – neither full nor thin. If my dreams didn’t lead me through the snow into that tent, I’m sure they would lead me to a man who looked like this.
‘In the spirit of being too candid,’ he says, clearing his throat and fastening the lid back on his thermos. ‘I was hoping to see you again. I usually eat lunch at my desk.’ I say 'Oh,' playing innocent and dumb. If I were to say oh in a tone too knowing or flirtatious, I would surely put him off. ‘Are you married?’ he asks. I shake my head.
‘I was. He passed away,’ I tell him. Miss Martina Kirsch might be unmarried at 31 but Mrs Dora Novak (née Kirsch) was tragically widowed four years ago, and came to the capital to restart her life. How upset Dora is about the death of her fictional husband depends on the audience and my mood. To the people at the office – I am still too distressed by my loss to discuss it. Dora’s husband (who I must remember is named Tomas) was a saint who died suddenly, shockingly, of an undiagnosed heart defect. The cause of death and the name are always the same – but if I speak to a man, alone, one may find Tomas becoming cold, and cruel. One may find me ambivalent, looking for company.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I lost my wife as well. Years ago now, but...' He trails off. I give him an understanding smile. Dora knows what this is like. ‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’ I smile and nod, looking down at the floor. A performance. We exchange home phone numbers – Lev says that he will call me. He will tell me the time and the place.
Tonight, the broadcast is a recording of a classic play – one that makes me cry, because it is about a pair of doomed lovers. I imagine Lev and myself in the main characters’ places. The news says once again that everything is fine. My father does not call. I read an old women’s magazine with lists of tips: ‘How to fool him with your make-up’; ‘How to impress on the first date’. I feel young, and silly. I fall asleep reading about the ways I can highlight my body’s best features without looking loose.
In tonight’s version of the dream, I do not want to go to the tent. I don’t want to see who is on stage, or what is in the cage. I stand in the snow and freeze to death.
Eliza Clark's She's Always Hungry is out 7th November 2024
