Our Darling Jessica

A boy was killed down at the docks today. Crushed beneath a crane. A woman tells me about it as I pour hazelnut syrup into her latte. “Jesus Christ…” I say, then, “That’ll be one pound fifty.”
As I take the money I wonder what colour his eyes were. I hope Brett hasn’t heard.

I meet Ula after work. There's a market in town and we are trying to find interesting bits of material for Jessica.
"Maybe he hasn't heard?" she says hopefully. I don't answer and just keep looking, because it doesn't matter. If he hasn't heard yet, he will.
There’s a piece with different coloured hands all over it and we can’t work out whether it’s really funny or just cruel. We end up choosing half a meter each of grey cord and black velvet instead. I always try to buy textured bits for Jessica.
“Will that cover her?” Ula asks, and I wrap it around my hand to check.

Ula sips her tea and scans the newspaper. She looks up and sees that I’ve finished wrapping and takes the pen from me. Giggling, she writes Our Darling Jessica in lavish curly writing, then goes back to her paper. After a couple of minutes she says, “How old do you think you’ll be when your heart beats for the billionth time?”
I make a ridiculous guess and she tuts, reads the answer. “You’ll be thirty two.”

When I lie with my head on Brett’s chest, his heart beats so strong and fast that it worries me. He has a theory about it, of course. He says we are all designated a certain amount of heartbeats and when they run out, so do we. He’s convinced he will die young, but he’s an artist – and a romantic. “Who wants to imagine themselves going on and on?” He asks me.

As for Jessica, she was created on September the twelfth, 2001. We’d watched the footage of the two towers collapsing again and again. Felt the tension grow in the town over night.
Nobody wanted to do the things they hated. Death reminded us that we had choices. I bought a camera with the money I was supposed to be paying into my account. Ula went to see her family in Spain. And Brett didn’t to work.
Except that he did. His body had set its alarm clock even though he hadn’t, and fed up of lying awake, he went in.
At stupid o’clock in the morning he put his filthy, oily work clothes on and headed down to the docks.

It was Dave who asked Brett to have a look. He’s the only other person who saw: Pink fingers investigating cogs before the sudden shrieking of man and machinery as power surges back through the circuit. Chipped bone and blood. Patties of flesh flung out, more bone and skin dragged in.
It was Dave that finally stopped pulling at the mangled arm and hit the emergency stop button.
And it was him I found in the hospital waiting room. He looked up, sobbing like an enormous child, then grabbed onto the collar of my shirt and held tight, his big face pressed into my neck.
He still comes round to dinner sometimes, but he’s a different man around us now, like a dog waiting to be kicked or forgiven.

The worst thing, Brett said, was the smell. Worse than the pain even, worse than having his own ruined fingers all over his clothes and face. Smelling the unmatchable stench of singed bone and flesh and knowing it was his.
“Can you smell it?” He kept asking me as I cradled his head in my shoulder when we got home. I just shook my head, still trying not to be disgusted by the void where his hand was supposed to be.

Whenever we walk in the cold he tells me his left hand aches and I tell him that’s impossible.

Any work he does now gets the tag Outsider Art. In reviews he is Disabled Artist Brett Roman. In fact, his work has flourished since the accident, at least it sells more anyway.
People are intrigued by the way that he works. They come into his studio to watch. He must be so dedicated, they say. They don’t know that he’s ambidextrous.
“If only I’d been crippled earlier,” he laughs, “it would’ve saved me a decade of depression.”

We call the handvoid Jessica and swaddle her in different materials. Brett still gets scared in the night sometimes. He’ll be having one of those nightmares where he thinks he’s woken up but he hasn’t. Then he realises that he has.
Or cruelly, the other way round. He’ll dream that he has two hands and that the accident was a nightmare. He’ll wake up and feel immediately for his left hand and relieved to find it’s still there he’ll go back to sleep, clasping it to him. Except he hasn’t woken up yet. It’s all just some twisted creation of his own mind, some perverse wish-fulfilment antithesis. And he wakes to find himself clutching onto the smooth nub of his arm.

I take him the pieces of material that we chose and wrap the new velvet one around Jessica nonchalantly, pretending as hard as I can that it doesn’t bother me. I start to put the cord one round too because it’s freezing outside, but he tells me to leave it off.
“I want to feel it ache,” he says.