Hunger

I am the tongue that falls from the open mouth. I am the devil at the dinner table. Peel back her skin and you will find me. 

–

I didn’t think I’d end up here. Thirty-two. Overworked. Unmarried. A constant disappointment to my community. I spent most of my life doing what I thought was the right thing. Look where it got me.

In school, my teachers were surprised when I got the highest marks in the year. I was the girl who was too shy to speak, and most of them did not know me. When I got a place at medical school, half of them congratulated Ashwini, the only other brown girl in my year, instead of me. 

Even when I started work as a doctor, it was easier just to keep my head down and do what was expected of me. Truthfully, I don’t remember the last time I felt happy. I don’t remember the last time I felt anything. 

I do. In the darkness my senses sharpen.

There was a time when I thought that being a doctor was my purpose. Running when the crash bleep went off, delivering a baby from a half-dead girl who had barely made it past the front doors of the hospital. The blood oozed out when it shouldn’t have, not like a hose how I’d imagined it, but slow, like the growth of a shadow when the sun sets. On the cold linoleum, we collapsed in a puddle of placenta and wept.

After a while, it all started to meld into one. London was getting too much. Every weekend, when I had dinner with my parents, I’d see the look of quiet anticipation on my father’s face when he’d ask me if I’d met anyone this week. My answer was always the same.

Men don’t see me. Especially the white ones. They push past me in a rush to get to the tube, they let doors swing shut as I try to enter behind them, they see through me to the lighter, thinner girl at the bar beside me.

The brown men are different. They look at me like they own me, like they have a right to my time and my body. They look through my skin and see the fleshy uterus beneath – just eager to fill the space.

The truth is, I’m not even sure I like men. 

I like how they taste. The fragility and desperation sweetens the meat. How I long to feed again.

“Anjali is engaged and she’s only twenty-one. I’m getting old. When will you give your mother and I a grandchild?” 

One week it was Anjali, the next it was Rohan. If he is such a model child, then how, father, do you explain how his wife is only two months married and nine months pregnant?

It was getting too much. So, when I saw the advertisement for a GP with a special interest in obstetrics in Ullapool, I sent in an application right away. It was a big move, and a demotion, but I just had to get away.

Why did you bring us here? Away from the flesh and the fumes of London. I am hungry. I am weak. You are the only dark one here. People stare. I thought you wanted to be invisible?

I am invisible. 

Even more so here, in this sleepy village where everyone knew everyone and no one ever left. People averted their eyes when they saw me. My neighbours may have smiled when they passed me in the street, but they never invited me over for tea. 

I started work the day after I moved.

I was to work directly under the practice’s only GP, Dr Max Miller. He looked young for his age, with dark hair and darker eyes. He liked open water swimming, and his body, with its lean muscles, told the story of his battle with the unforgiving Scottish weather. His wife, Alice, had hair like fudge and ran the local shop. I had never met her, but I knew I hated her. 

“Why did you want to be a doctor?” 

Max was leaning against the doorframe of my clinic room. It was before eight in the morning, and I thought I was alone. Max had a towel slung over his shoulders, and his wet hair dripped onto his forehead. I thought about him wading through the ice-cold water, flinching as the waves splashed against his chest. 

No one had ever asked me that before. Everyone always assumed I had no choice in my career path, that all brown daughters and sons must become doctors or lawyers or engineers. I realised I didn’t have any neat, heartwarming story about my path to here. I told him the truth.

“I saw a picture of a doctor in a careers pamphlet when I was twelve and thought she looked so happy.”

Max laughed. It was a high, girlish sort of laugh.

“That’s a stupid reason.”

–

After that morning, Max and I became close.

He would invite me into his clinic room for lunch every day. One weekend, he insisted that I try my hand out at fly fishing. I was terrible. But when he grasped my frozen fingers between his, and rubbed them together for warmth, I felt something stir inside me. 

Max didn’t have to work particularly hard for his job. That was probably why it didn’t take him long to start asking more of me than what was expected from a junior. I would spend hours writing up his clinic letters and tending to his reports. I knew I should complain, but I kept my head down, like I was used to.

Life is kind to him and not to us. People fall over themselves to open doors for him. Wait till he sees what lurks behind this one.

On one of our lunches together, when oil from a chip butty dripped onto prescription charts, he began to talk to me about his wife. He told me how she was far too occupied with her job, and now that she’d had the baby, she no longer paid him any attention. 

A tale as old as time.

“He does this to all the girls he hires.” The practice nurse, a tight-lipped white lady in her fifties, told me when she saw me carrying his towel into the practice one day.

Just do it already! I am tired of waiting. You say you are above it now, but I was there that summer after high school. You spent every night dreaming about what that rockstar might taste like, sweaty and exhilarated, after a show. You could have unhinged your jaw and swallowed him whole. Instead, you went home empty. Do you not want what you push so far down?

One evening, Max told me to join him after work. It was an order, not a question. We were to meet the partners from a neighbouring town’s practice, to discuss how to roll out preventive care to the harder-to-reach hamlets. Dress nice and don’t be late, he’d said. I wondered what would happen if I refused. 

We went to the only restaurant in town, a tacky Italian place, with red and white checked tablecloths and cheap posters hanging on the walls. In the dim light of the fake candles, Max looked like the leading man in a film.

The partners came and went, but Max asked me to stay on. The red wine I had forgotten how to drink warmed my blood and made my fingers loose. One of my hands, out of my control, reached forwards and wiped a smear of truffle sauce from his shirt. I could feel the hard, warm muscle of his chest under my touch.  

A group of tourists came in and sat at a table near ours, their eyes flicking over to him first, and then to me. The thought that a passer-by giving us a casual glance might think we were a couple made me shiver.

“Does your family mind that you moved so far away?”

I shook my head. “I like the freedom of being by myself.”

We stayed and talked until the restaurant closed. I felt the press of his hand against my lower back as he guided me out of the restaurant. I tripped on one of the cobbled stones of the high street, nearly falling. 

“You don’t get out much, do you?” Max smiled with his teeth. He was in search of his prey. 

So am I. I feed on those who feed on you.

Our breaths jumbled and crystallised in the clean night air. There was no one around but us.

“It’s getting late. I should get back.”

Max shook his head. “Let me take you home.” 

He knows you live alone. 

I declined twice, but he was not used to hearing no. Eventually I conceded and let him accompany me.

It came out of nowhere. The rain. As we walked and then ran to my front door, the icy sheets slid down my back and rubbed my face, taking my eyeliner with it. He asked to come in for a moment to dry himself off, so I let him in. 

Hack down the kashful and come and collect your prize. Wade through the marshland for your winnings. Mark your name in the mud and make it yours. 

Max peeled off his soaking wet shirt and dropped it in the middle of the living room. The water seeped slowly out, darkening the carpet. 

His large frame dwarfed the furniture in the flat. He stood out, shiny and polished, amongst the old, worn items that belonged to the landlady who made me promise that I wouldn’t cook anything “too ethnic”.

“I think you know where this is going.” He took a step towards me. “I think this,” he waved his hands at me, “is all an act.”

My gaze was drawn south, past his stomach, to his trousers. He followed my line of sight.

I began to shiver. I hadn’t let things get this far since-

Thinking about it? One blow will split the fruit in two. The sky is turning red. And I am so hungry.

—

At 9.15 AM, I hear the phone ring. It’s the receptionist from the practice. “Max didn’t turn up for work this morning. His first patient is already here. Can you fill in for him instead?”