Angelica Lost and Found (10 page)

‘His mother the mare …’ He lingered over the words. ‘How long ago was this?’

‘I don’t know what kind of time we’re talking about.’

‘What I mean is, did he make you pregnant?’

‘Not in any way that ends up in the maternity ward.’

‘What other kind of pregnant is there?’

‘Mental, Clancy. All in the mind.’

‘Leave any marks on you? I’d think his talons … unless they were all in the mind too.’

‘There were some scratch marks but they’ve faded by now so I can’t show you any evidence. Do you not believe me?’

A pause while Clancy Bushmilled himself again and I went on to my second boilermaker. The light through the window was very golden, and otherwise full of memories forgotten and remembered and there came to mind a Latin phrase from a book by Mircea Eliade, ‘
in illo tempore
’, ‘in that time’.

‘I believe you, Ange – it’s just that I don’t know how to get my head around this other reality. I keep seeing you naked on all fours and him on top of you …’ He trailed off into silence and he was blushing.

‘Does it excite you?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Me too.’

Nobody said anything for a moment while the tourist influx murmured and drank its drinks. Then we looked at each other, nodded, and went upstairs.

When we had our clothes off Clancy blushed again and I read his mind.

I got down on all fours and said softly, ‘Here I am. Take me.’

Afterwards, lying in his arms, I saw that he was crying.

‘What is it, Clance?’ I said, and kissed him.

‘I can’t describe it exactly,’ he said. ‘There’s a great sadness come over me, what a little short thing it is to be alive and so strange. Maybe it’s just the whisky.’

‘No, it’s the sense of loss, something lost so far back we can’t remember it.’

‘Were you thinking of Volatore while we were doing it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it better with him? Did it give you that thing that was lost so far back?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Clance. It was what it was.’

‘And you’re hugging the memory to yourself, not to lose the goodness of it, yes?’

‘Please, Clancy!’

‘What happened after he climbed off you? Did you fly away together?’ His face as he said that was not the face of anyone I wanted to be with and I felt thoroughly ashamed, as I had known all along I would be.

‘That’s as far as this conversation goes,’ I said.

I got dressed while he watched me in a dirty-minded way, and left.

‘Come back soon,’ he called to my departing back. ‘You can be on top next time.’

Chapter 18

The Eight O’Clock to Katerini

There is a jukebox in my head. Coloured lights, bubbles going round into vanishment and reappearing to go round again. I have no choice in what songs are played. Sometimes a lissom cheerleader inserts the coins, sometimes a tattooed truck driver; the mystic arm rises and descends with the silent disc which then blossoms into song and I dance or cry or shake my head accordingly.

This time it is a woman in black who feeds the Wurlitzer. The mystic arm rises, descends, and an empty railway station arises in the November evening around Agnes Baltsa as she sings in her native Greek ‘
“
To treno fevgi stis okto
”
 ’, ‘The train leaves at eight’. The woman in black remembers, will never forget the eight o’clock to Katerini and a lost love. This is not Baltsa wearing the borrowed language of Bizet; here, giving her whole heart to this little story in the tongue she was born into, she sings me the empty platform, the gathering November night and the departure of love and I cry accordingly.

Chapter 19

A Little Way on the Tin Globe

I phoned my partner Olivia to tell her that I’d not be at the gallery that day, and I went to the overlook at Fort Point to sit and think about things. The sky was blue, the sunlight danced on the water, ships and boats came and went. Round and round in my mind went this time, that time, all time.
In illo tempore
. My childhood. Telling the bees. My grandmother told me about that. Her husband had joined the International Brigade in 1936 and went off to the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes when she and I were alone and she’d had too much to drink she’d talk about that time.

‘He said it was something he had to do,’ she said. ‘I told him there were things he had to do right here, like fix the hole in the roof of the barn. He did it and then he went off to fight fascism.’

She was a good-looking old woman in a plough-that-broke-the-plains kind of way but her face became almost girlish as she called up the past.

‘Those days seem a long way back,’ she said. ‘The images were brighter, the smells and flavours stronger than now: the taste of honey in the comb, the smell of it and the feel of the wax on my tongue, the stickiness all around my mouth and on my fingers. Sweet, like the golden time that passes; the pink apple blossoms drifting down on the hives in the summer orchard.

‘Before he left he told me to tell the bees. “Be very careful to say that I’ve just gone away for a while but I’m not dead. If they think I’m dead they’ll leave our hives and swarm somewhere else.”

‘
“You’re very superstitious all of a sudden,” I said to him.

‘
“Traditions matter,” he said, “and bees are very serious people.”

‘We had a tin globe on the desk where we did the accounts,’ said my grandmother. ‘On it Spain was only a little way from North America but on the real globe it was a world away from Bakersfield where we lived then. I tried to imagine that war but I couldn’t, it was a whole different reality.’ Her face looked so young!

‘I told the bees and they stayed with us until the summer of 1938. I saw them swarm away out of the orchard and I cried a lot but we heard nothing until a year later when one of his comrades sent us a letter saying that my man had died at a place called Teruel. I couldn’t find it on the globe but it was in the big atlas.

‘There was a plaster bust of Lenin on top of the grandfather clock in the front room. I was dusting it when we got the letter and I knocked it on to the floor where it smashed into smithereens. “Well,” I said, “I guess it was your time to go.”
 
’

Why does her story come to me so vividly now? Back when she told it I had never heard of a hippogriff. What’s the connection? Then it rises like a golden carp glimmering. The bees. They existed in their time and space in our orchard but they partook of that other time and space where men with bolt-action rifles were saving the world. Telling the bees was folklore but it worked with real bees.

Two kinds of reality – it happens.

Chapter 20

Home Thoughts from Aloft

I began to dream of Volatore. Always we were flying in a greyness. Not like fog but the absence of everything. I felt the heat of his body between my bare legs and the rhythmic tensing of his great wing muscles but there was no sound. I looked for a rift in the silence and the greyness through which I might see the world but there was none.

I said, ‘I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.’

No answer and the silence woke me up.

It was true enough that we weren’t getting anywhere but I could feel that the connection between us was unbroken. And Volatore was still flying, I was sure of that. Lost perhaps and lonely but still flying. Think of me, Volatore! Think of your Angelica!

Chapter 21

In Loco Wyatt Earpis

With the stress of two realities, one of which was not officially allowed to non-crazies, my head was badly in need of reorganisation. I didn’t think I was crazy but I wasn’t too sure of my sanity. I had abandoned Professor Beard and I was with a new psychotherapist, recommended by Olivia, Dr Levy. He was short, bald, wore very thick glasses and a Wyatt Earp moustache.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s the problem?’

‘I seem to be living in two kinds of reality,’ I said. ‘Two kinds of time. Do you know what a hippogriff is?’

‘Yes, it’s an imaginary animal.’

‘Well, I have a kind of relationship with one.’

‘Sexual?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you dream about him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing in the dream?’

‘Sitting on his back while we fly through a greyness.’

‘To where?’

‘Nowhere, I told him that we weren’t getting anywhere.’

‘Is your father alive?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him for a long time and I don’t know where he is.’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘This hippogriff may very well be a displacement of sexual longings for your father. Have you read my comparative study of the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults?’

He took a book with that title off his desk and thrust it into my hands. On the back cover was a large photograph of him dressed more or less like Wyatt Earp.

‘No,’ I said. ‘What have the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults to do with me?’

‘Imaginative displacement and believing that wishing will make it so.’

He looked at his watch, wrote a prescription and gave it to me.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘It’s a placebo, extra-strength. Take two with water as required.’

‘But a placebo’s all in the mind. The word is the Latin for “I shall please”. If you think it’ll work, it will.’

‘There you go. Get my secretary to book a session for you for next week.’

Is there a placebo effect, I wondered, for ‘Everything is OK’? So if you think it is, it is? I tried it but I didn’t really think it was and it wasn’t.

Chapter 22

Volatore’s Ghost Dance

What? Where? No, how? How is this that I am … what? A ghost? A revenant? I was Volatore, yes? So what am I now? The ghost of myself? No, this is really too much! To be the ghost of an imaginary self ! If indeed I am a ghost I am not one of those who clanks his chains, no! I dance with rage!

Chapter 23

Isaiah’s Ghost Dance

Dr Levy had compared my ‘imaginative displacement’ to the Ghost Dance of the Southwest Indians. My curiosity was piqued but instead of reading his book I went to Google, which took me to the massacre at Wounded Knee. I cry easily, and I wept as I read the words and images on my computer screen. To this small excitation of phosphors have the Sioux warriors of the plains come at last!

I was still at the office computer when I saw two figures at the gallery doors. By their in-your-face humble posture I recognised them as Jehovah’s Witnesses and went to meet them. One was a young woman, the other a middle-aged man. The woman was modestly frumped-up but she was pretty in a way that made me think her name might have been Tiffany or Amber before she went into the witnessing business. The man had painfully sincere horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair.

‘Hello,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Ruth and this is my father Jonathan.’

‘How do you do,’ I said.

We shook hands.

‘We’ve been going around,’ said Ruthany, ‘asking folks how they feel about the world today. Would you say you feel optimistic about it?’

‘Definitely pessimistic,’ I said.

‘Many people tell us that,’ she assured me without placing a hand on my arm, ‘and Scripture gives us an answer in Isaiah, Chapter 65, Verse 17.’ Her fast-draw Bible appeared open in her hands before my reply had cleared the holster.

I read, ‘For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.’