She murmured something. “Look,” he said, “it’s a work of art.”

  So she looked, since she would be going home, and would now have to attend to the thing herself.

  The wound was livid and ridged and ran the length of her white front, from under the ribs to the hidden places underneath her. Where she had been soft and flat, she was all plumpings and hollows, like an old cushion. And where her navel had been, like a button caught in a seam at an angle, was an asymmetric whorl with a little sill of skin. Ines thought of her lost navel, of the umbilical cord that had been a part of her and of her mother. Her face creased into sorrow; her eyes were hot with tears. The anaesthetist misinterpreted them, and assured her that it would all look much less angry and lumpy after a month or two, and if it did not, it could be easily dealt with by a good plastic surgeon. Ines thanked him, and closed her eyes. There was no one to see her, she said, it didn’t matter what she looked like. The anaesthetist, who had chosen his profession because he didn’t like people’s feelings, and preferred silence to speech, offered her what she wanted, a painkiller. She drifted into gathered cloud as he closed the door.

  * * *

  —

  Their flat, now her flat, was on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house in a narrow city square. The stairs were steep. The taxi driver who brought her home left her, with her bag, on the doorstep. She toiled slowly upwards, resting her bag on the stairs, clinging to the banisters, aware of every bone in knee and ankle and wrist, and also of the paradox of pain in the gut and the strange numb casing of the surface skin. There was no need to hurry. She had time, and more time.

  Inside the flat, she found herself preoccupied with time and dust. She had been a good cook—she thought of herself in the past tense—and had made delicious little meals for her mother and herself, light pea soups, sole with mushrooms, vanilla soufflés. Now she could make neither cooking nor eating last long enough to be interesting. She nibbled at cheese and crusts like a frugal mouse, and could not stay seated at her table but paced her room. The life had gone out of the furnishings and objects. The polish was dulled and she left it like that: she made her bed with one crumpled pull. She had a sense that the dust was thickening on everything.

  She did what work she had to do, conscientiously. The problem was, that there was not enough of it. She worked as a part-time researcher for a major etymological dictionary, and in the past had been assiduous and inventive in suggesting new entries, new problems. Now, she answered those queries which were sent to her, and they did not at all fill up the huge cavern of space and time in which she floated and sank. She got up, and dressed herself carefully, as though she was “going out to work.” She knew she must not let herself go, that was what she must not do. Then she walked about in the spinning dust and came to a standstill and stared out of the window, for minutes that seemed like hours, and hours that seemed like minutes. She liked to see the dark spread in the square, because then bedtime was not far away.

  The day came when the dressings could, should, be dispensed with. She had been avoiding her body, simply wiping her face and under her arms with a damp face cloth. She decided to have a bath. Their bath was old and deep and narrow, with imposing brass taps and a heavy coil of shower hosing. There was a wide wooden bath-rack across it, which still held, she saw now, private things of her mother’s—a loofah, a sponge, a pumice stone. Her mother had never needed help in the bathroom. She had made fragrant steam from rosewater in a blue bottle, she had used baby talc, scented with witch-hazel. For some reason these things had escaped the postmortem clearance. Ines thought of clearing them now, and then thought, what does it matter? She ran a deep lukewarm bath. The old plumbing clanked and shuddered. She hung her dressing gown—grey flannel—on the door, and very carefully, feeling a little giddy, clutching the rim, climbed into the bath and let her bruised flesh down into the water.

  The warmth was nice. A few tense sinews relaxed. Time went into one of its slow phases. She sat and stared at the things on the rack. Loofah, sponge, pumice. A fibrous tube, a soft mess of holes, a shaped grey stone. She considered the differences between the three, all essentially solids with holes in. The loofah was stringy and matted, the sponge was branching and vacuous, the pumice was riddled with needle holes. She stared, feeling that she and they were weightless, floating and swelling in her giddiness. Biscuit-coloured, bleached khaki, shadow-grey. Colourless colours, shapeless shapes. She picked up the sponge, and squeezed cooling water over her bust, studying the random forms of droplets and tricklings. She did not like the sponge’s touch; it was clammy and fleshy. The loofah and the sponge were the dried-out bodies, the skeletons, of living things. She picked up the pumice, a light stone tear, shaped to the palm of a hand, felt its paradoxical lightness, and dropped it into the water, where it floated. She did not know how long she sat there. The water cooled. She made a decision, to throw away the sponge. When she lifted herself, awkwardly, through the surface film, the pumice chinked against her flesh. It was an odd little sound, like a knock on metal. She put the pumice back on the rack, and touched her puckered wound with nervy fingers. Supposing something should be left in there? A clamp, a forceps, a needle? Not exactly looking she explored her reconstructed navel with a fingertip. She felt the absence of sensation and a certain glossy hardness where the healing was going on. She tapped, very softly, with her fingernail. She was not sure whether it was, or was not, a chink.

  The next thing she noticed was a spangling of what seemed like glinting red dust, or ground glass, in the folds of her dressing gown and her discarded underwear. It was a dull red, like dried blood, which does not have a sheen. It increased in quantity, rather than diminished, once she had noticed it. She observed tiny conical heaps of it, by skirting boards, on the corners of Persian rugs—conical heaps, slightly depressed, like anthill castings or miniaturised volcanoes. At the same time she noticed that her underwear appeared to be catching threads, here and there, on the rough, numb expanse of the healing scars. She felt a kind of horror and shame in looking at herself spread with lumps and an artificial navel. As the phenomenon grew more pronounced, she explored the area tentatively with her fingertips, over the cotton of her knickers. Her stomach was without sensation. Her fingers felt whorls and ridges, even sharp edges. They disturbed the glassy dust, which came away with the cloth, and shone in its creases. Each day the bumps and sharpness, far from calming, became more pronounced. One evening, in the unlit twilight, she finally found the nerve to undress, and tuck in her chin to stare down at herself. What she saw was a raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a nebula in the heavens. It was the colour—or a colour—of raw flesh, like an open whip wound or knife slash. It trembled, because she was trembling, but it was cold to the touch, cold and hard as glass or stone. From the star-arms the red dust wafted like glamour. She covered herself hastily, as though what was not seen might disappear.

  The next day, it felt bigger. The day after, she looked again, in the half-light, and saw that the blemish was spreading. It had pushed out ruddy veins into the tired white flesh, threading sponge with crystal. It winked. It was many reds, from ochre to scarlet, from garnet to cinnabar. She was half-tempted to insert a fingernail under the veins and chip them off, and she could not.

  She thought of it as “the blemish.” She thought more and more about it, even when it was covered and out of sight. It extended itself—not evenly, but in fits and starts, around her waist, like a shingly girdle pushing down long fibrous fingers towards her groin, thrusting out cysts and gritty coruscations towards her pubic hair. There were puckered weals where flesh met what appeared to be stone. What was stone, what else was it?

  One day she found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. These she tried to prise away, and failed. They were attached deep within; they could be felt to be stirring stony roots under the skin surface, pulling the muscles. Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh, making her clothes crackle and rustle. Slowly, slowly, day by quick day, her torso was wrapped in a stony encrustation, like a corselet. She could feel that under the stones her compressed inwards were still fluid and soft, responsive to pain and pressure.

  She was surprised at the fatalism with which she resigned herself to taking horrified glances at her transformation. It was as though, much of the time, her thoughts and feelings had slowed to stone-speed, nerveless and stolid. There were, increasingly, days when a new curiosity jostled the horror. One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels, and she thought of jewels before she thought of pustules. They glittered as she moved. She saw that her stony casing was not static—points of rock salt and milky quartz thrust through glassy sheets of basalt, bubbles of sinter formed like tears between layers of hornblende. She learned the names of some of the stones when curiosity got the better of passive fear. The flat, a dictionary-maker’s flat, was furnished with encyclopaedias of all sorts. She sat in the evening lamplight and read the lovely words: pyrolusite, ignimbrite, omphacite, uvarovite, glaucophane, schist, shale, gneiss, tuff.

  Her inner thighs now chinked together when she moved. The first apparition of the stony crust outside her clothing was strange and beautiful. She observed its beginnings in the mirror one morning, brushing her hair—a necklace of veiled swellings above her collarbone which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids, and became opal—fire opal, black opal, geyserite, and hydrophane, full of watery light. She found herself preening at herself in her mirror. She wondered, fatalistically and drowsily, whether when she was all stone, she would cease to breathe, see, and move. For the moment she had grown no more than a carapace. Her joints obeyed her, light went from retina to brain, her budded tongue tasted food that she still ate.

  She dismissed, with no real hesitation, the idea of consulting the surgeon, or any other doctor. Her slowing mind had become trenchant, and she saw clearly that she would be an object of horror and fascination, to be shut away and experimented on. It was of course, theoretically, possible that she was greatly deluded, that the winking gemstones and heaped flakes of her new crust were feverish sparks of her anaesthetised brain and grieving spirit. But she didn’t think so—she refuted herself as Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley, by tapping on stone and hearing the scrape and chink of stone responding. No, what was happening was, it appeared, a unique transformation. She assumed it would end with the petrifaction of her vital functions. A moment would come when she wouldn’t be able to see, or move, or feed herself (which might not matter). Her mother had not had to face death—she had told herself it was not yet, not for just now, not round the next corner. She herself was about to observe its approach in a new fantastic form. She thought of recording the transformations, the metamorphic folds, the ooze, the conchoidal fractures. Then when “they” found her, “they” would have a record of how she had become what she was. She would observe, unflinching.

  But she continually put off the writing, partly because she preferred standing to sitting at a desk, and partly because she could not fix the process in her mind clearly enough to make words of it. She stood in the light of the window morning and evening, and read the stony words in the geological handbooks. She stood by the mirror in the bathroom and tried to identify the components of her crust. They changed, she was almost sure, minute by minute. She had found a description of the pumice stone—“a pale grey frothy volcanic glass, part of a pyroclastic flow made of very hot particles; flattened pumice fragments are known as fiamme.” She imagined her lungs full of vesicles like the frothy stone, becoming stone. She found traces of hot flows down her own flanks, over her own thighs. She went into her mother’s bedroom, where there was a cheval glass, the only full-length mirror in the house.

  At the end of a day’s staring she would see a new shimmer of labradorite, six inches long and diamond-shaped, arrived imperceptibly almost between her buttocks where her gaze had not rested.

  She saw dikes of dolerites, in graduated sills, now invading her inner arms. But it took weeks of patient watching before, by dint of glancing in rapid saccades, she surprised a bubble of rosy barite crystals, breaking through a vein of fluorspar, and opening into the form known as a desert rose, bunched with the ore flowers of blue john. Her metamorphosis obeyed no known laws of physics or chemistry: ultramafic black rocks and ghostly Iceland spar formed in succession, and clung together.

  After some time, she noticed that her patient and stoical expectation of final inertia was not being fulfilled. As she grew stonier, she felt a desire to move, to be out of doors. She stood in the window and observed the weather. She found she wanted to go out, both on bright days, and even more in storms. One dark Sunday, when the midday sky was thick and grey as granite, when sullen thunder rumbled and the odd flash of lightning made human stomachs queasy, Ines was overcome with a need to be out in the weather. She put on wide trousers and a tunic, and over them a shapeless hooded raincoat. She pushed her knobby feet into fur boots, and her clay-pale hands, with their veins of azurmalachite, into sheepskin mittens, and set out down the stairs and into the street.

  She had wondered how her tendons and musculature would function. She thought she could feel the roll of polished stone in stony cup as she moved her pelvis and hips, raised her knees, and swung her rigid arms. There was a delicious smoothness to these motions, a surprise after the accommodations she was used to making with the crumbling calcium of arthritic joints. She strode along, aimlessly at first, trying to get away from people. She noticed that her sense of smell had changed, and was sharper. She could smell the rain in the thick cloud blanket. She could smell the carbon in the car exhausts and the rainbow-coloured minerals in puddles of petrol. These scents were pleasurable. She came to the remains of a street market, and was assailed by the stink of organic decay, deliquescent fruit mush, rotting cabbage, old burned oil on greasy newspapers and mashed fishbones. She strode past all this, retching a little, feeling acid bile churning in a stomach sac made by now of what?

  She came to a park—a tamed, urban park, with rose beds and rubbish bins, doggy lavatories and a concrete fountain. She could hear the water on the cement with a new intricate music. The smell of a rain squall blew away the wafting warmth of dog shit. She put up her face and pulled off her hood. Her cheeks were beginning to sprout silicone flakes and dendrite fibres, but she only looked, she thought, like a lumpy old woman. There were droplets of alabaster and peridot clustering in her grey hair like the eggs of some mythic stony louse, but they could not yet be seen, except from close. She shook her hair free and turned her face up to the branches and the clouds as the rain began. Big drops splashed on her sharp nose; she licked them from stiffening lips between crystalline teeth, with a still-flexible tongue tip, and tasted skywater, mineral and delicious. She stood there and let the thick streams of water run over her body and down inside her flimsy garments, streaking her carnelian nipples and adamantine wrists. The lightning came in sheets of metal sheen. The thunder crashed in the sky and the surface of the woman crackled and creaked in sympathy.

  She thought, I need to find a place where I should stand, when I am completely solid, I should find a place outside, in the weather.

  * * *

  —

  When would she be, so to speak, dead? When her plump flesh heart stopped pumping the blue blood along the veins and arteries of her shifting shape? When the grey and clammy matter of her brain became limestone or graphite? When her brainstem became a column of rutilated quartz? When her eyes became—what? She inclined to the belief that her watching eyes would be the last thing, even though fine threads on her nostrils still conveyed the scent of brass or coal to the primitive lobes at the base of the brain. The phrase came into her head: Those are pearls that were his eyes. A song of grief made fantastic by a sea change. Would her eyes cloud over and become pearls? Pearls were interesting. They were a substance where the organic met the inorganic, like moss agate. Pearls were stones secreted by a living shellfish, perfected inside the mother-of-pearl of its skeleton to protect its soft inward flesh from an irritant. She went to her mother’s jewel box, in search of a long string of freshwater pearls she had given her for her seventieth birthday. There they lay and glimmered; she took them out and wound them round her sparkling neck, streaked already with jet, opal, and jacinth zircon.

  She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she had started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence. But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative. There were whole ranges of rocks and stones which, like pearls, were formed from things which had once been living. Not only coal and fossils, petrified woods and biohermal limestones—oolitic and pisolitic limestones, formed round dead shells—but chalk itself, which was mainly made up of microorganisms, or cherts and flints, massive bedded forms made up of the skeletons of Radiolaria and diatoms. These were themselves once living stones—living marine organisms that spun and twirled around skeletons made of opal.

  The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens cling to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles; phyllite is leafy green. The earth itself is made in part of bones, shells, and diatoms. Ines was returning to it in a form quite different from her mother’s fiery ash and bonemeal. She preferred the parts of her body that were now volcanic glasses, not bony chalk. Chabazite, from the Greek for hailstones, obsidian, which, like analcime and garnet, has the perfect icositetarahedral shape.