Athena Page 17

  It was she who first spotted Barbarossa. He was living in a cardboard box in the doorway of a cutler’s shop in Fawn Street, a fat, ginger-bearded fellow in a knitted tricolour cap, that must have been left over from some football match, and an old brown coat tied about the middle with a bit of rope. We studied his habits. By day he would store his box down a lane beside the knife shop and pack up his stuff in plastic bags and set off on his rounds. Amongst the gear he carried with him was a mysterious contraption, a loose bundle of socketed metal pipes of varying thicknesses, like the dismantled parts of a racing bicycle or a chimney sweep’s brushes, which he guarded with especial circumspection. Rack our brains though we might we could not think what use the thing could be to him, and though we came up with some ingenious possibilities we rejected them all. Obviously it was precious, though, and despite the considerable transportation problems it posed for him he lugged it everywhere, with the care and reverence of a court official bearing the fasces in solemn procession. His belongings were too much for him to carry all together and so he had devised a remarkable method of conveyance. He would take the pipes and three of his six or seven bulging plastic bags and shuffle forward hurriedly for fifteen yards or so and set down the bags in a doorway or propped against a drainpipe; then, still carrying the precious pipes, he would retrace his steps and fetch the remaining bags and bring them forward and set them down along with the others. There would follow then a brief respite, during which he would check the plastic bags for wear and tear, or rearrange the bundle of pipes, or just stand gazing off, thinking who knows what thoughts, combing stubby fingers through his tangled beard, before setting off again. Of all our derelicts – by the end we had assembled a fine collection of them, wriggling on their pins – Barbarossa was A.’s favourite. She declared she would have liked to have had him for a dad. I make no comment.

  One afternoon we found ourselves, I don’t know how, in a little square or courtyard somewhere near the cathedral – we could see the bell-tower above us, massive, crazy and unreal – and when we stopped and looked about, something took hold in me, a feeling of unfocused dread, as if without knowing it we had crossed invisible barriers into a forbidden zone. The day was grey and still. A few last leaves tinkled on the soot-black boughs of a spindly, theatrical-looking tree standing in a wire cage. There was no one about but us. Windows in the backs of tall houses looked down on us blankly. I had the sense of some vast presence, vigilant and malign. I wanted to leave, to get away from that place, but A. absently detached her arm from mine and stepped away from me and stood in silence, almost smiling, with her face lifted, listening, somehow, and waiting. Thus the daughter of Minos must have stood at the mouth of the maze, feeling the presence of her terrible brother and smelling the stink of blood and dung. (But if I am Theseus, how is it that I am the one who is left weeping on this desolate shore?) Nothing happened, though, and no one came, and presently she let me take her hand and lead her away, like a sleepwalker. Someday I must see if I can pick up the thread and follow it into the heart of that labyrinth again.

  Often in the middle of these outings we would turn without a word and hurry back to the room, swinging along together like a couple in a three-legged race, and there throw off our clothes and fall on the couch as if to devour each other. I hit her, of course; not hard, but hard enough, as we had known I would, eventually. At first she lay silent under these tender beatings, her face buried in the pillow, writhing slowly with her limbs flung out. Afterwards she would have me fetch her the hand-mirror from my work-table so that she could examine her shoulders and hips and the backs of her flanks, touching the bruises that in an hour would have turned from pink to muddy mauve, and running a fingertip along the flame-coloured weals that my belt had left on her. At those times I never knew what she was thinking. (Did I ever?) Perhaps she was not thinking anything at all.

  And I, what did I think, what feel? At first bemusement, hesitancy and a sort of frightful exultation at being allowed such licence. I was like the volunteer blinking in the spotlight with the magician’s gold watch and mallet in his hands; what if I broke something (‘Go ahead, hit it!’) and the trick did not work and it stayed broken? From some things there is no going back – who should know that better than I? So I slapped at her gingerly, teeth bared wincingly and my heart in my mouth, until she became exasperated and thrust her rump at me impatiently like an urgent cat. I grew bolder; I remember the first time I drew a gasp from her. I saw myself towering over her like a maddened monster out of Goya, hirsute and bloody and irresistible, Morrow the Merciless. It was ridiculous, of course, and yet not ridiculous at all. I was monster and at the same time man. She would thrash under my blows with her face screwed up and fiercely biting her own arm and I would not stop, no, I would not stop. And all the time something was falling away from me, the accretion of years, flakes of it shaking free and falling with each stylised blow that I struck. Afterwards I kissed the marks the tethers had left on her wrists and ankles and wrapped her gently in the old grey rug and sat on the floor with my head close to hers and watched over her while she lay with her eyes closed, sleeping sometimes, her breath on my cheek, her hand twitching in mine like something dying. How wan and used and lost she looked after these bouts of passion and pain, with her matted eyelashes and her damp hair smeared on her forehead and her poor lips bruised and swollen, a pale, glistening new creature I hardly recognised, as if she had just broken open the chrysalis and were resting a moment before the ordeal of unfolding herself into this new life I had given her. I? Yes: I. Who else was there, to make her come alive?

  The whip was our sin, our secret. We never spoke of it, never mentioned it at all, for that would have been to tamper with the magic. And it was magic, more wand than whip, working transfigurations of the flesh. She did not look at me when I was wielding it, but shut her eyes and rolled her head from side to side, slack-mouthed in ecstasy like Bernini’s St Theresa, or stared off steadily into the plush torture chamber of her fantasies. She was a devotee of pain; nothing was as real to her as suffering. She had a photograph, torn from some book, that she kept in her purse and showed me one day, taken by a French anthropologist sometime at the turn of the century, of a criminal being put to death by the ordeal of a thousand cuts in a public square in Peking. The poor wretch, barefoot, in skullcap and black pyjama pants, was lashed to a stake in the midst of a mildly curious crowd who seemed merely to have paused for a moment in passing to have a look at this free treat before going on about their busy business. There were two executioners, wiry little fellows with pigtails, also in black, also wearing skullcaps. They must have been taking the job in turns, for one of them was having a stretch, with a hand pressed to the small of his back, while his fellow was leaning forward cutting a good-sized gouge into the flesh of the condemned man’s left side just under the ribcage with a small, curved knife. The whole scene had a mundane if slightly festive, milling look to it, as if it were a minor holiday and the execution a familiar and not very interesting part of the day’s entertainments. What was most striking was the victim’s expression. His face was lifted and inclined a little to one side in an attitude at once thoughtful and passionate, the eyes cast upward so that a line of white was visible under the pupils; the tying of his hands had forced his shoulders back and his knobbled, scrawny chest stuck out. He might have been about to deliver himself of a stirring address or burst out in ecstatic song. Yes, ecstasy, that’s it, that’s what his stance suggested, the ecstasy of one lost in contemplation of a transcendent reality far more real than the one in which his sufferings were taking place. One leg of his loose trousers was hitched up where the executioner – the one with the crick in his back, no doubt – had been at work on the calf and the soft place at the back of the knee; a rivulet of black blood extended in a zigzag from his narrow, shapely foot and disappeared among the feet of the crowd.

  I asked her why she kept such a terrible thing. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch with the photograph in her lap, ru
nning a blindman’s fingertips over it. I took it from her. The once-glossy surface, cross-hatched with a fine craquelure, had the flaky, filmed-over texture of a dead fish’s eye.

  ‘Are you shocked?’ she said, peering at me intently; when she looked at me like that I understood how it would feel to be a mirror. Her gaze shifted and settled on the space between us. What did she know? The penumbra of pain, the crimson colour of it, its quivering echo. She did not know the thing itself, the real thing, the flash and shudder and sudden heat, the body’s speechless astonishment. I handed her back the photograph. It struck me that we were both naked. All that was needed was an apple and a serpent. Light from the window gave her skin a leaden lustre.

  ‘Tell me about that man you knew,’ she said. ‘The one that killed the woman.’

  She was so still she seemed not even to breathe.

  ‘You know nothing,’ I said.

  She nodded; her breasts trembled. She found her cigarettes and lit one with a hand that shook. She resumed her cross-legged perch on the end of the couch and gave herself a sort of hug. A flake of ash tumbled softly into her lap.

  ‘Then tell me,’ she said, not looking at me.

  I told her: midsummer sun, the birds in the trees, the silent house, that painted stare, then blood and stench and cries. When I had recounted everything we made love, immediately, without preliminaries, going at each other like – like I don’t know what. ‘Hit me,’ she cried, ‘hit me!’ And afterwards in the silence of the startled room she cradled my head in the hollow of her shoulder and rocked me with absent-minded tenderness.

  ‘I went to No. 23 the other day after you were gone,’ she said. I knew that dreamily thoughtful tone. I waited, my heart starting up its club-footed limp. ‘I went to see Rosie,’ she said. ‘Remember Rosie? There was this fellow there who wanted two women at the same time. He must have been a sailor or something, he said he hadn’t had it for months. He was huge. Black hair, these very black eyes, and an earring.’

  I moved away from her and lay with my back propped against the curved head of the couch and my hands resting limply on my bare thighs. A soft grey shadow was folded under the corner of the ceiling nearest the window. Dust or something fell on the element of the electric fire and there was a brief crackle and then a dry hot smell.

  ‘Did you open your legs for him?’ I said. I knew my lines.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘my bum. I lay with my face in Rosie’s lap and held the cheeks of my bum apart for him and let him stick it into me as far as it would go. It was beautiful. I was coming until I thought I would go mad. While he was doing it to me he was kissing Rosie and licking her face and making her say filthy things about me. And then when he was ready again I sucked him off while Rosie was eating me. What do you think of that?’

  I could feel her watching me, her little-girl’s gloating, greedy eye. This was her version of the lash.

  ‘Did you let him beat you?’

  ‘I asked him to,’ she said, ‘I begged him to. While he was doing me and Rosie he was too busy but afterwards he got his belt and gave me a real walloping while Rosie held me down.’

  I reached out gropingly and took one of her feet in my hand and held it tightly. I might have been one huge raw rotten stump of tooth.

  ‘And did you scream?’

  ‘I howled,’ she said. ‘And then I howled for more.’

  ‘And there was more.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No.’

  We sat and listened to the faint, harsh sound of our breathing. I shivered, feeling a familiar blank of misery settle on my heart. It was an intimation of the future I was feeling, I suppose, the actual future with its actual anguish, lying in wait for me, like a black-eyed sailor with his belaying-pin. I am not good at this kind of suffering, this ashen ache in the heart, I am not brave enough or cold enough; I want something ordinary, the brute comfort of not thinking, of not being always, always … I don’t know. I looked at the photograph of the execution where she had dropped it on the floor; amongst that drab crowd the condemned man was the most alive although he was already dying. A. squirmed along the couch, keeping her eyes averted, and lay against me with her knees drawn up and her fists clenched under her chin and her thin arms pressed to her chest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, a sort of sigh, her breath a little weight against my neck. ‘I’m sorry.’

  We parted hurriedly on those occasions, not looking at each other, like shamefaced strangers who had been forced for a time into unwilling intimacy and now were released. I would stop on the doorstep, dazed by light, or the look of people in the street, the world’s shoddy thereness. Or perhaps it was just the sense of my suddenly recovered self that shocked me. As I set off through the streets I would skulk along, wrapped up in my misery and formless dismay, a faltering Mr Hyde in whom the effects of the potion have begun to wear off. Then all my terrors would start up in riotous cacophony.

  Aunt Corky said there were people watching the flat. She had rallied in the unseasonably vernal weather. The brassy wig was combed and readjusted, the scarlet insect painted afresh but crooked as ever on her mouth. In the afternoons she would get herself out of bed, a slow and intricate operation, and sit in her rusty silk tea-gown at the big window in the front room watching the people passing by down in the street and the cars vying for parking spaces like bad-tempered seals. When she tired of the human spectacle she would turn her eyes to the sky and study the slow parade of clouds the colour of smoke and ice passing above the rooftops. Surprising how quickly I had got used to her presence. Her smell – her out-of-bed smell, compounded of face powder, musty clothes, and something slightly rancid – would meet me when I came in the door, like someone else’s friendly old pet dog. I would loiter briefly in the porch, clearing my throat and stamping my feet, in order to alert her to my arrival. Often in the early days I was too precipitate and would come upon her lost in a reverie from which she would emerge with a start and a little mouse-cry, blinking rapidly and making shapeless mouths. Sometimes even after I had noisily announced my arrival I would enter the room and find her peering up at me wildly with her head cocked and one eyebrow lifted and a terrified surmise in her eye, not recognising me, this impudently confident intruder. I think half the time she imagined the flat was her home and that I was the temporary guest. She talked endlessly when I was there (and when I was not there, too, for all I know); now and then I would find myself halting in my tracks and shaking my head like a horse tormented by flies, ready to hit her if she said one word more. She would stop abruptly then and we would stare at each other in consternation and a sort of violent bafflement. ‘I am telling you,’ she would declare, her voice quivering with reproach, ‘they are down there in the street, every day, watching.’ With what a show of outraged frustration she would turn from me then, fierce as any film goddess, swivelling at the waist and tightening her mouth at the side and lifting one clenched and trembling fist a little way and letting it fall again impotently to the arm of her chair. I would have to apologise then, half angry and half rueful, and she would give her shoulders a shake and toss her gilt curls and fish about blindly for her cigarettes.

  As it turned out, she was right; we were being watched. I do not know at what stage my incredulity changed to suspicion and suspicion to alarm. The year was darkening. The Vampire was still about his fell business and another mutilated corpse had been discovered, folded into a dustbin in a carpark behind a church. The city was full of rumour and fearful speculation, clutching itself in happy terror. There was talk of satanism and ritual abuse. In this atmosphere the imagination was hardly to be trusted, yet the signs that I was being stalked were unmistakable: the car parked by the convent gates with its engine running that pulled out hurriedly and roared away when I approached; the eye suddenly fixed on me through a gap in a crowd of lunchtime office workers hurrying by on the other side of the street; the figure behind me in the hooded duffle-coat turning on his heel a second before
I turned; and all the time that celebrated tingling sensation between the shoulder-blades. I was I think more interested than frightened. I assumed it must be Inspector Hackett’s men keeping an eye on me. Then one morning I arrived home still shivery with the afterglow of an early tryst with A. and found the Da’s big mauve motor car double-parked outside the front door. Young Popeye was at the wheel. I stopped, but he would not turn his eyes and went on staring frowningly before him through the windscreen, professional etiquette forbidding any sign of recognition, I suppose. He was growing a small and not very successful moustache of an unconvinced reddish tint, which he fingered now with angry self-consciousness as I leaned down and peered at him through the side window. I let myself into the house and mounted the stairs eagerly. I pictured Aunt Corky bound and gagged with a knife to her throat and one of the Da’s heavies sitting with a haunch propped on the arm of the couch and swivelling a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. Cautiously I opened the door of the flat – how it can set the teeth on edge, the feel of a key crunching into a lock – and put in my head and listened, and heard voices, or a voice, at least: Aunt Corky, spilling invented beans, no doubt.

  She was sitting by the fire in her best dress – you should have seen Aunt Corky’s best dress – balancing a teacup and saucer on her knee. Facing her, in the other armchair, the Da sat, arrayed in a somewhat tatty, full-length mink coat and a dark-blue felt toque with a black veil (another one!) that looked like a spider-web stuck with tiny flies. He was wearing lumpy, cocoa-coloured stockings – who makes them any more? – and county shoes with a sensible heel. A large handbag of patent leather rested against the leg of his chair. Tea-things were set out on a low table between them. A half-hearted coal fire flickered palely in the grate. ‘Ah!’ said Aunt Corky brightly. ‘Here he is now.’