Some would say ‘Blood Rites’ is about cannibalism; I would say it’s about female friendship. Vowing to never let their food ruin their lives again, three young women move from Paris into an old house on the edge of the fen, where they start picking men from the local pub in order to eat them. This might strike you as somewhat morally questionable, except the narrator’s first person plural has already taken you into the mentality of the group: “When we were younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin.” The house where I lived in Newnham, with fifteen other women and the ghost of Sylvia Plath, was also old and on the edge of the fen. Like the house in ‘Blood Rites’, “it was a stupendous house, a house that knew how to feel.”
Published in Fen, Jonathan Cape, 2016
A Personal Anthology 