Heroes and Villains (16 page)

Apart from these stray contacts, she defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel. This third thing, this erotic beast, was eyeless, formless and equipped with one single mouth. It was amphibious and swam in black, brackish waters, subsisting only upon night and silence; she closed her eyes in case she glimpsed it by moonlight and there were no words of endearment in common, anyway, nor any reason to use them. The beast had teeth and claws. It was sometimes an instrument solely of vengefulness, though often its own impetus carried it beyond this function. When it separated out to themselves, again, they woke to the mutual distrust of the morning.

In daylight or firelight, she saw him in two dimensions, flat and effectless. When he came riding across the meadow on his black horse, soaked with rain or spattered with mud or blood, returning from the hunt; or waiting for the evening meal in the kitchen with his brothers, playing the game with bones and quarrelling sullenly about the fall of the pieces; or, occasionally, domestic, cradling furry Jen on his knee when she went to sleep there, as she sometimes did – all these activities
were no more than sporadic tableaux vivants or random poses with no thread of continuity to hold them together.

On the wall outside the Doctor’s room was written up:
OUR NEEDS BEAR NO RELATION TO OUR DESIRES
. He let it stay there for several weeks.

‘But how can one tell which is which,’ Marianne asked herself and thought no more about the slogan.

Marianne sat white and silent on the broken chair in the kitchen and sometimes sounds of organ music flitted around like baroque spooks and sometimes they did not. One evening, Jewel broke every pot on the old dresser in an outburst of rage. He hurled the antique crockery around the room; his brothers fled, helter-skelter, giggling with fear, but Marianne did not bother to move from her seat. He threw a soup tureen at her; it missed, of course, since neither it nor he were real. It crashed into the fire. He also began to attack the slaughtered carcasses with remarkable ferocity and, another evening, silently approached her during the butchery hour and daubed her face with his bloody hands, an action she construed immediately and immediately despised, as if he were helplessly trying to prove his autonomy to her when she knew all the time he vanished like a phantom at daybreak, or earlier, at the moment when her body ceased to define his outlines.

Sometimes, when it rained, rain drove across the room and soaked them to the skin. On windy nights, the room tossed like a cork upon stormy breakers of air. Every morning, a little more of the roof had fallen in, until they would soon be as cruelly exposed as babies on a mountain side and, each night, the spiral staircase grew a little more treacherous. Once she trod on a toad on her way to bed and broke its back.

Meanwhile, the tribe prepared to raise camp and move on. They made repairs to their carts and shod the horses. Jewel had inherited an affinity for horses from his mother’s side, the Lees, but all the brothers looked very beautiful among the horses and Marianne inspected these sights as if she were looking at colour illustrations in an ingenious book. So at all times she maintained a triumphant loneliness in this strange place where she found herself.

She lived in this disintegrated state for some time, until, prone under his weight, she heard him growl into her throat: ‘Conceive, you bitch,
conceive’ and was shocked into the most lucid wakefulness, so their connexion seemed all at once grotesque and brutal and the spurt of seed a terrible violation of her privacy. She never once, had thought the fish of night might achieve a concrete symbol, a child inside her; if she had ever idly considered it, she would have hoped their breeds were so far apart a cross would not have been possible. She desperately looked for him but could not see him for it was another night without a moon. So she had to speak to him at last.

‘Why?’

He was silent so long she began to wonder if she had actually spoken aloud.

‘Dynastically,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a patriarchal system. I need a son, don’t I, to dig my grave when I’m gone. A son to ensure my status.’

‘Give me another reason.’

‘Politically. To maintain my status.’

‘I suppose these are both good reasons, given the initial situation, but I think there is a less abstract one.’

‘Revenge,’ he explained. ‘Shoving a little me up you, a little me all furred, plaited and bristling with knives. Then I should have some status in relation to myself.’

‘By submitting me to the most irretrievable humiliation. By making me give birth to monsters?’

‘What, like the sleep of reason?’

‘You’re very sophisticated,’ she complained.

‘I do the best I can,’ he returned politely.

She turned on her side and listened to the sounds of the night, nothing more than a small wind with a few drops of rain on it.

‘And I saved your life, as well,’ she said reproachfully.

‘I shall give you another one.’

A flurry of rain pattered against the glass of the window and down on the hard leaves of the holly bush. Only the thinnest corroded shell of brick and slate protected them from the cold summer’s night and the black deeps of sky. Rain blew into her face and settled on her cheeks. The idea of pleasure died now she realized pleasure was ancillary to procreation. When he reached out for her, she twisted away, disgusted.

‘Go to sleep, then,’ he snarled.

But now the room was full of faces floating bodiless on darkness like cream on milk, faces of diseased children shrieking raucously from warped mouths that she was their mother. The bed became hateful to her and the moisture seeping between her thighs some vile, powerful witch ointment which would send its victim mad. What was left of the roof would shortly cave in and bury them for ever in the infernal pit of their embraces; she choked on the stale air as if already buried alive. In fear and trembling, she slithered from the covers on to the floor, suddenly determined to be gone. Jewel was asleep, so far as she could tell. She dressed herself quickly in her Barbarian clothes, the only ones she had, now, trousers, a woollen shirt embroidered with daisies and little chips of mirror and a jacket of grey squirrel fur fastened at the throat with a diamanté brooch scavenged from some grave. She made her way to the door by touch and feel; underfoot was rubble and holly leaves. Jewel was not asleep.

‘It’s raining. You can’t go now.’

‘I can and will.’

‘You might be incubating my child already. It’s some time since I’ve been doing you.’

‘The Professors know cures for that particular malady.’

‘Take a knife. To protect yourself.’

‘I’m not particularly afraid.’

‘Not so much for the wild beasts. I only ever saw a lion once, in a wood. It lay across the carcass of a cow, beside the place where a train crashed, ooh, years ago, when they still had them. All the doors of this train were hanging down like the wings of a dead insect with ever so many wings and the lion had a bloody mouth. Also, gum seeped from its eyes. It was the colour of bracken and it got on with its dinner without minding me.’

‘You are trying to appeal to my romanticism,’ she said angrily. ‘I’m not a child, to be taken in with pretty stories.’

‘The wild beasts won’t jump you but, on the other hand, the ruins are full of such horrors as lepers, madmen, hermits, men with heads of apes or single eyes in the middle of their foreheads, to say nothing of roving bands of Out People –’

‘Goodbye,’ she said crisply for, after all, he was her husband and deserved the formality of a farewell. But he did not say goodbye to her, even though she was his wife. Descending from the rickety tower, she sightlessly followed the inward spiral of the staircase and the only clue she had to guide her were her five fingers against the clammy surfaces of the walls. She inched her way gingerly, slithering on steps that had never before seemed so steep, so uncertain or so curded with slime, and the wind blew in fitful gusts, shaking the stones. The sickly air of the long corridor above the chapel struck surprisingly warm when at last she gained it. She made her way along this corridor and reached the landing where the chapel was; and Donally was waiting for her in the dark.

She was so angry with herself for not having guessed he would be waiting for her that she could not speak. She could see nothing of him at all but he closed his hand around her wrists and she was trapped.

‘We’ll have to hobble you, like the horses,’ he said.

He drew her into his room. His books were put away in innumerable packing-cases and his jars and instruments were packed in grass in several large baskets but the eternal saucepan still bubbled on the brazier and four candles were alight on the altar. Chained to the staple in the wall, the child slept with only a torn blanket between his bare, narrow sides and the stone-flagged floor. Fresh weals of a beating marked his back.

‘He’s promising to be a good boy,’ said Donally in a brooding voice. ‘So he can sleep indoors, tonight, for we’ll all be on the road tomorrow.’

How cool, sweet and pastel-tinted were the voices of the Professors; while the voices that grated daily on her nerves were edged with steel and ungrammatical. His voice was so gentle and familiar she was almost inclined to trust him until she saw the bloody chain with which he had beaten his son lying on the floor. He had been repairing his lurid cloak and the feathered garment was spread across the altar and shimmered in the candlelight. He offered her a drink from a leather flask. She refused.

‘You’ll excuse me if I continue my work. There won’t be time for it, during the travelling.’

He put the flask down beside him and seated himself cross-legged on the altar; he began to ply his needle in the many coloured feathers.
She wondered if he would swoop down on wings to catch her if she made a dash for the door. He inquired in intimate tones:

‘Does he misuse you?’

‘How do you mean?’ she asked carefully.

He batted his eyelids. His plucked brows were like sideways parentheses.

‘Vile practices and unspeakable things, for instance,’ he hedged.

‘Such as what?’ she asked, this time rudely.

‘Fellatio and so on.’

‘Would you consider that misuse?’

He opened his eyes wide as if surprised at her naïvety.

‘Oh, yes, indeed; a vile practice and only to be discreetly mentioned in a language safely dead. The Romans were here and gone, of course, and, after them, Uther, when there were also wolves in the forests and even a lion or two if one can sort out fact from fiction, always a difficult task. And the milk-white unicorn, a heavily symbolic and extravagantly horned beast who could only be captured by a young virgin, which always proved the worst for it. Poor Jewel, in the same plight; though not, of course, milk white. It is going backwards, time is going backwards and coiling up; who let the spring go, I wonder, so that history wound back on itself ?’

The melancholy whimsy of Professors gathered together over their after-dinner, home-brewed blackberry brandy when they would discuss apocalypses, utopias and so on. Marianne suppressed a yawn but, all the same, she felt at home. She went closer to the altar and watched the giant tailor repair his skin.

‘God died, of course. Quite early. Do you think we should resurrect him, do you think we need him in this hypothetical landscape of ruin and forest in which we might or might not exist?’

‘Do you desire the role yourself ?’

‘I prefer to remain anonymous, I’d rather choose to be the holy spirit. But I’ve often thought of grooming Jewel for some kind of mythopoeic role. If he never made the final rung of full-scale divinity, I’m sure he could easily acquire the kind of semi-legendary status that King Arthur had.’ He began to laugh. ‘He could be the Messiah of the Yahoos.’

He laughed so much he almost knocked over his bottle; he caught it just in time, drank again and again offered it to her.

‘Come on, young lady. You might as well learn oblivion from their odious aqua vita now as later.’

‘I don’t plan to stay long enough.’

‘What, you’d leave your husband to the melancholy pleasures of auto-fellatio? If you stay, I’ll teach you necromancy.’

He was exceedingly drunk, no doubt passing most of the hours of darkness consuming their crude spirit to ease the pain. When she realized this, Marianne felt a certain exhilaration. Fallacious clouds of unreason rose from the saucepan in a green steam which also seemed to contain hallucinogenic properties since the skeleton in the recess occasionally twitched as if rattling his bones and the waxen Mary behind the altar swelled and diminished by fits and starts. But she could deduce methodologically that the Doctor’s real though parti-coloured beard was dark at the roots on the red side and thus needed a fresh application of dye.

‘Necromancy doesn’t work,’ she said.

‘Nobody need ever know,’ he whispered cunningly.

‘Why did you run away from the Professors? Did they turn you out for doing something disgusting?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I came of my own free will.’

‘Give me another aphorism, I feel the need for comfort.’

He thought for a while; then he said: ‘The world becomes a dream and the dream, a world.’

‘I hardly ever dream at all,’ she said sadly. ‘Jewel was angry with me when I told him, as if I was cheating.’

‘I am trying to invent him as I go along but I am experiencing certain difficulties,’ complained Donally. ‘He won’t keep still long enough. Creation from the void is more difficult than it would seem.’

Marianne saw the door open soundlessly. Jewel put his fingers to his lips to show her to keep quiet; he was carrying a knife between his teeth in order to have both his hands free. She was so angry he had followed her that she said at once: ‘You’ve another visitor, give him some brandy.’

Jewel took away the knife and spat.

‘And I’d meant to stab him, too,’ he said with faint regret. He was
hastily dressed and bare-footed but had taken the time to sling a mass of amulets around his neck. He shut the door behind him and lurked in the doorway with a beautiful, treacherous smile on his face.