Athena Read online

  Father Fanning came to visit, in his green suit and sandals, with his startled crest of young man’s white hair standing up like a question mark (Tintin! – of course, that’s who he reminded me of). Aunt Corky was not pleased to see him; her enthusiasm for God and godly things had not lasted long. She listened in silence, impatiently, blowing streamers of smoke past his head, as he spoke in his earnest and friendly way of the weather and the Lord’s goodness; he might have been a tiresome stranger she had met on holiday and been polite to and who now had tastelessly turned up expecting to renew a seaside intimacy. After a little while he became discouraged and departed sadly. At the front door he tried to tell me again how good I was and in the guise of giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder I propelled him firmly into the street and shut the door on him.

  And so Aunt Corky became another strand in the thick, polished, frightening rope into which my life was being woven. In the mornings I would wake with a knot of anxiety behind my breastbone, and for a minute or two I would lie stiff and staring as my mind strove laboriously to unpick this ganglion of hard-laid hemp. My days were a kind of breathless straining on tiptoe as I swung at the end of my fear between, on one side, Inspector Hackett and all he represented, and, on the other, Morden and the Da. Fear, yes, and something more than fear, a sense of there being another interpretation altogether of the things I thought I knew, of there being another world entirely, coterminous with this one, where another, wiser I grappled undaunted with terrible facts that this I could only guess at. And always there was the suspicion that for certain others I was a figure of fun, the one in the blindfold turning helplessly with outstretched arms in the midst of the capering crowd. Morden was at once evasive and scandalously blunt. ‘I hear the cops are on to us,’ he said to me one day with a shark’s downturned grin. I stared at him, making a different kind of fishmouth. I had met him on Ormond Street sauntering through the morning crowds with the wings of his coat billowing and his crimson silk tie blowing back over his shoulder. I would often encounter him like this, going nowhere, relaxed and bored and faintly dangerous-looking, with a dead expression in his eyes. On such occasions he would drift to a stop and squint upwards at a corner of the roof of some distant building and begin to speak in a vague, distracted tone, as if we were already in the middle of a not very interesting conversation.

  ‘Cops?’ I said; it came out as a sort of frightened quack.

  We walked down Rue Street. It was a blustery, brown day.

  ‘Yes,’ Morden said easily, ‘Francie tells me you were accosted by a detective.’ He glanced at me sideways with a bland expression. ‘Fond of the boys in blue, are you?’

  We came to the house and he looked on as I got out the key and opened the door. I had a sense of silent derision. Dealing with Morden was like trying to get a grip on a big, soft, greased, unmanageable weight that had been dropped unceremoniously into my arms. He stood with his head cocked to one side and waited, considering me. The door stood open, the hall held its breath. He grinned.

  ‘I hear you met the Da, too,’ he said. He grasped me by the arm and gave it an eager shake. ‘Tell us,’ he said, ‘what was he dressed as?’

  I told him glumly and he laughed, a brief, loud shout.

  ‘A priest?’ he cried. Behind him an eddy of wind lifted dust and bits of paper on the pavement and swirled them in a spiral. ‘What a character!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He skinned a man alive one time, you know, and tanned the skin and sent it to the fellow’s wife. In a parcel, through the post. True as God, he did.’ He stepped past me and crossed the hall and started up the stairs. He halted with a hand on the banister rail and turned to me again. ‘Don’t mind the Da,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘Don’t mind him at all.’ He went on up, humming, then stopped a second time and leaned over the rail and grinned down at me. ‘Cops and robbers,’ he said, ‘that’s all it is, the whole thing.’ He liked that. He laughed again and trudged on and laughing disappeared around a bend of the stairs. ‘Cops and robbers, I’m telling you!’

  So you see how it was. Oh yes, as I have said, I was afraid, of course, but my fear was of that hot, fluttery variety that half the time feels like nothing more than a keen sense of anticipation. Something in me, a snickering goblin crouched and expectant, always wants the worst to happen. I remember once seeing in a newsreel report of some catastrophic flood somewhere an emaciated chap clad in turban and loincloth bobbing along on the torrent in a tin bathtub with his arms folded and grinning serenely at the camera. That’s me, with my knees in my chest, helplessly being borne downstream in a trance of happy terror as the shattered tree-trunks and bloated bodies go swirling past. If the paintings were genuine they were stolen and I could go to jail for dealing with them. Simple as that. It was not prison, though, that I feared most, but the thought of losing you. (No, that’s not true, why do I say such things – the prospect of prison filled me with boiling panic, at the very notion of it I had to sit down with a hand to my heart until I got my breath back.)

  I have never been good at games, I mean the serious ones. I believe you really wanted to teach me how to play, I believe you did. There were times when I would catch you looking at me in a certain stilled, speculative way, with a smile that was hardly a smile, your head tilted and one eyebrow flexed, and I think now they were the moments when you might have taken pity on me and led me to the couch and sat me down and said, All right now, listen, this is what is really going on … But no, that is not how you would have done it. You would have blurted it out and laughed, wide-eyed, with a hand over your mouth, and only later, if at all, would I have realised the full significance of what it was you had told me. I never understood you. I walked around you, stroking my chin and frowning, as if you were a problem in perspective, a puzzle-picture such as the Dutch miniaturists used to do, which would only yield up its secret when viewed from a particular, unique angle. Was I very ridiculous? I say again, I don’t care about any of the rest of it, having been cheated and made a fool of and put in danger of going back to jail; all that matters is what you thought of me, think of me. (Think of me!)

  She it was who devised the games, she was mistress of the revels. I followed after her in my lumbering, anxious way, trailing my stick and pig’s bladder, desperate to keep up. She was the initiator. She it was, for instance, who bought the fitting for the spyhole. It was the day that the third body was found, strung up by the heels on the park railings with throat cut so deeply the head was almost severed (the papers by now had found a name for the killer: the Vampire). When she came into the room, shaking rain-pearls from the hem of her black coat, I could feel her excitement – when she was like that the air around her seemed to crepitate as if an electric current were passing through it. She dropped her coat and handbag on the floor and plumped down on the couch and held out her upturned fist, smiling with her lips pressed shut, brimming and gleeful. My heart. ‘Look,’ she said, and slowly uncurled her fingers. I took the little brass barrel from her and peered at it in happy bafflement. ‘Look through it,’ she said impatiently, ‘it’s like a fish’s eye.’ I laughed. ‘How will we fit it?’ I said. She snatched the gadget from me and scanned the room through it, one eye screwed shut and a sharp little canine bared. ‘With a drill,’ she said. ‘How do you think?’

  I am not much of a handyman. She sat at my table smoking and watched me at work, offering facetious suggestions and snickering. After a long and bad-tempered search in the basement I had found a twist drill, an antique, spindly affair suggestive of the primitive days of surgery, and with this implement I bored a hole in the false wall, at knee level, as she directed. I asked no question; that was the first rule in all our games. When I had screwed the brass lens into place she went outside and knelt to test it. (By the way, what of that gap in the plaster through which I am supposed to have had my first glimpse of her? Must have been fixed.) She came back scowling. ‘You’ve put it in the wrong way round,’ she said. ‘It’s for looking in, not out!’ She sighed. ‘You’
re useless,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

  She had it all worked out. This is how went. If we had an arrangement to meet at twelve o’clock, say, I was to come at eleven thirty and, without making a sound, kneel down at the spyhole and watch her for half an hour; then, at noon, I was to creep back out to the stairs and come tramping down the corridor as if I had just arrived. Sometimes, however, I was not to come early, and not to use the spyhole; nor was I to tell her which were the times I had been there unseen by her and which when I had not. In this way she would never know for certain if she was being spied on during the half hour before my arrival or if she was playing out her little charades for no one’s benefit. I did as I was bidden, of course. What strange, shameful excitement there was in tiptoeing along the corridor – sometimes I went the entire distance on hands and knees – and putting my eye to that thrillingly cool glass stud and seeing the room beyond, radiant with silky light, resolve itself into a cup of swooping curves at the centre of which A. sat, a bulbous idol with pin-head and tiny feet and enormous hands folded in her swollen lap. This is how I always found her, sitting motionless and agaze, like tiny Alice waiting for the magic potion to take effect. Then slowly she would begin to stir, with odd, spasmic jerks and twitches. She would take a deep breath, drawing back her shoulders and lifting her head, carefully keeping her glance from straying in the direction of the spyhole; her movements were at once stiff and graceful, and touched with a strange, unhuman pathos, like those of a skilfully manipulated marionette. She would rise and take a step toward the window, extending one hand in a sweeping gesture, as if she were welcoming a grand guest; she would smile and nod, or hold her head to one side in an attitude of deep attention, and sometimes she would even move her lips in soundless speech, with exaggerated effect, like the heroine in a silent film. Then she would resume her seat on the couch with her invisible guest beside her and go through the motions of serving tea, handing him (there was no doubt as to this phantom’s gender) his cup with a lingering smile and then demurely dropping her gaze and taking her lower lip delicately between her teeth and biting it until it turned white. Always the tableau began with these elaborate politenesses; gradually, however, as I shifted heavily from one knee to the other and blinked my watering eye, an atmosphere of menace would develop; she would frown, and shrink back and shake her head, pressing splayed fingers to her throat and lifting one knee. In the end, overwhelmed, her clothes undone, she would fall back slack-mouthed with breasts exposed and one arm outflung and a leg bared along its glimmering length to the vague dark hollow of her lap, and I would suddenly hear myself breathing. She would rest for a moment then, displayed there, her fingers idly playing with a strand of hair at the nape of her neck, and as the cathedral bell began to toll the noonday angelus I would get up stiffly and steal out to the landing and, composing myself as best I could (how the heart can hammer!), walk down the corridor again coughing and humming and breezily enter the room, by which time she would be sitting primly with knees pressed tightly together and her hands folded, looking up at me with a faint, shy, lascivious smile.

  I wonder now if she devised all her scenarios beforehand or did she make them up as she went along? I was impressed always by how well she seemed to know what it was she wanted. Everything was at her direction, the words, the gestures, the positions, all the complex ceremonials of this liturgy of the flesh. Tie my hands. Make me kneel. Blindfold me. Now walk me to the window. How softly she stepped, like a sleepwalker, barefoot, with one of her own stockings bound tightly over her eyes, as I, half miserable and half excited, guided her across the room and stopped before the blank wall.

  ‘Is this the window?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are there people in the street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they looking at me?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The wall was pitted and scarred and there was the shadow of a dried-up water-stain shaped like a map of North America. Her hot little hand trembled in mine. Now, I told her, now they had seen her. And so powerful was the aura of her excitement that the scene began to materialise before me on the wall: the street and the stopped cars and the silent people staring up in the luminous grey light of the November day. She squeezed my hand; I knew what she wanted. Like a child being good she held up her arms and I bent and gathered her slip at the hem and lifted it slowly over her head, hearing the soft lisp of the silk as it grazed her skin. Now she was naked. The white wall reflected a faint effulgence on her breasts, her belly. She shivered.

  ‘Have they really seen me?’

  ‘Yes, they’ve seen you. They’re looking at you.’

  A sigh.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘They’re just pointing and looking. And some of them are laughing.’

  A caught breath.

  ‘Who? Who’s laughing?’

  ‘Two men. Two workmen, in their workclothes. They’re pointing at you and laughing.’

  She shivered again and gave a low gasp. I tried to take her in my arms but she stood rigid. Her greyed skin was cold.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ she said softly. ‘Why are you doing this?’ And she sighed. And afterwards, when we were lying together slimed and sweating on the couch, she undid the stocking from her eyes and ran it thoughtfully through her fingers and said in the most matter-of-fact way, ‘Next time, really take me to the window.’

  She desired to be seen, she said, to be a spectacle, to have her most intimate secrets purloined and betrayed. Yet I ask myself now if they really were her secrets that she offered up on the altar of our passion or just variations invented for this or that occasion. One morning when I arrived at the house she was in the bathroom. I tapped on the door but she did not hear me, or did not choose to hear me. When I opened the door and slipped inside she was sitting on the side of the bath with a cracked mirror propped before her on the handbasin, cleaning her face with a pad of cotton wool. She did not look at me, only went still for a moment and drew in her lips to cut off the beginnings of a smile. She was wearing a loose shirt and her hair was wrapped in a towel. Her face without make-up was blurred, a clay-white, hieratic mask. I said not a word but stood with my hands behind me pressed to the door and held my breath and watched her. Steam swayed in the whitish light from the frosted window and there was the sharp tang of some unguent that made me think of my mother. A. finished with her face and stood up and unwrapped the towel and began vigorously to dry her hair, pausing now and then and shaking her head sideways as if to clear something from her ear. Our eyes met by accident in the mirror and immediately her gaze went blank and slid away from mine. Then, running her fingers through her still-damp hair, she hitched up her shirt and sat down on the lavatory and perched there for a minute, intent and still, her grey eyes fixed on emptiness, like an animal pausing on a forest track to drop its mark. A spasm of effort crossed her face and she was done. She wiped herself twice, briskly, and stood up. The cistern wheezed and gave its cataclysmic gasp. Her smell came to me, acrid and spicy and warm, and my stomach heaved languidly. She turned on the geyser then and glanced at me over her shoulder and said, ‘Have you any matches?’ I wanted to ask her if she always wiped herself with her left hand or was even that faked, too, but I did not have the heart.