Little Fingers! (21 page)

I will watch
Henry from now on. Maybe I can use this Sally, plant some seeds,
see what grows.

I stand back.
“Thank you,” I say. “Best of luck.”

“
My
pleasure,” he responds automatically, and I can believe it
is.

* *
*

I don't know
what you think of the Tarot, Inspector, but I am fascinated by it.
There is rarely a day that goes by without my consulting it to help
me challenge and reflect upon my assumptions.

Some people
find the Tarot sinister and evil, a direct conversation with the
devil. Funnily enough, Old Nick has been coming up a lot for me
recently.

Even if you
can get over your revulsion for pagan, non-Christian rituals, you
probably consider it less than a science. I do too, although I am
beginning to wonder.

For something
to be pure science, according to Karl Popper, the theory and the
practice must be capable of reliably predicting defined outcomes.
These outcomes must be stated in the negative - the null
hypothesis. Which raises the question for me that, if when playing
the Tarot, its predictions regularly refute the null hypothesis,
should it be considered a science at least some of the
time?

Certain cards
turn up repeatedly over a period of days, and then I hardly ever
see them again for months. I had a run of Death cards back in
Hanburgh. Death does not necessarily mean death, most experts are
agreed. It is more likely to be metaphorical, the death of the old
self and the re-birth of the new. However, if you have any friends,
relatives or enemies who are decidedly creaky, who
knows?

For me, the
question is not whether the Tarot cards accurately predict events,
because only in hindsight does their meaning become clear (that
would be a tough call for Karl Popper's theory - the cards
uncannily predicting an outcome that you only know has been
predicted once the outcome is known), more whether the same card
appearing ten times out of thirteen defies the laws of chance and
probability. I would have thought so.

Not only has
Death turned up in an improbably high number of spreads at a time
when there were several murders taking place, but I have drawn the
Lovers unreasonably often too.

The Lovers
card does not necessarily mean love any more than Death means
physical death. It is more about choices that are available to you
and that you must address. You will face dilemmas and you must
choose between life-altering courses of action.

Nevertheless
it is notable that it started appearing the moment I fell in love
with Mary. Could it be that the Tarot has recognised me for the
clueless interpreter of its sophisticated and nuanced
pronouncements that I undoubtedly am? Is it speaking to me in words
of one syllable, images where I need only to focus on the most
literal of meanings? If I had got the Tower, the scary one, which
is always depicted as crumbling, I would have fled Hanburgh, I can
tell you.

The bit that
spooks me out a little is that when I first started reading the
Tarot (because my mother did) I just saw it as a harmless and
informative deck of cards. Nowadays it comes with voices, similar
to your (or your neighbour's) thinking voice, except more fuzzy and
echoed. I pick up the cards and people are whispering to me. Am I
going mad, or am I entering another spiritual realm?

Anyway, the
Tarot has given me the all-clear now for the next few days, so I am
hoping that Mary and I will indeed be happy at last in Granada,
where we are headed. We need a break, a chance to rekindle what we
had on a sustainable basis.

As I drive
this Toyota Celica rather too fast down the motorway in a yearning
to be settled, I am inevitably drawn back to the memory of my
accident in the Alps, and then to Mary exploring the fading scars
on my body. She was fascinated by them. She worried at first that I
would be affronted to be asked about them, that we would even split
up irrevocably if she even alluded to them. Her anxiety troubled
me. Then she started to run her fore-finger along them, hovering a
micron above them, teasing my nerves without touching the raised
skin. Her gesture introduced the first line of questioning she was
reluctant to voice.

“
What
happened?”

I am not at
ease in my skin. I like sitting in a lotus position against Mary so
that our pubic hairs prick each other, I enjoy the sensations of
nakedness, but I am continuously apprehensive. I once felt overly
delicate, I now feel bloated, as if bursting out of my frame, not
just my skin. I am lumpen, a seat where the stuffing is beginning
to protrude through the seams, where the structure is in danger of
collapse. I sometimes visualise standing up quickly, and my entire
body splits, then collapses. I am a miracle of surgery, and I am
not at all convinced that the technology will hold out until
tomorrow. You hear stories about people having cosmetic surgery
that comes unstitched, and the left side of their face droops to
their chin, and their breasts to the floor. I am every inch tacked
together. What could happen to me?

It is
impossible to relax with these physical anxieties. I agreed to my
remorseless campaign of surgery because Dr. Eckardt persuaded me
that my shattered body was no longer suitable to the sustaining of
my everyday lifestyle, that I would be in a wheelchair until I
died, fit for sympathy and pity, maybe antipathy, but never an
equal human being again. After he had finished with me, I would
have a new body, a refreshingly new existence. I could be what I
had always wanted to be. I did not have to revert to the person I
was. I could select my alternative. I could even adopt a Marilyn
Monroe voice if I wished. I might become a prototypical Eckardt
monster, but I could be sculpted into an object of great beauty, of
adoration, of yearning. The expression the good doctor constantly
used was that I would transform “from a chrysalis into a
butterfly.” It was a motivational phrase. He showed me in the
mirror my chrysalis, my mummified body bandaged prostate head to
foot, then he projected onto the wall pictures of beautiful women,
women he had created, and whose ranks I could join. Women were his
passion, his compulsion. He could make every woman stunning and
alluring. Men, for him, were big, smelly, hairy things with
deformed appendages and under-wiped bottoms. I would be
magnificent. Would I choose my new life, my new power, my
re-birth?

As you might
guess, I delayed for quite a while. I had all the time left to me
in this life to consider my options. I could not move. I could not
breathe unaided. I could stare at a ceiling, and at the tops of the
walls, and at the upper rim of the window frame. I could cough to
clear my lungs, on each occasion flooded with a drowning
desperation that I would never again become unblocked enough to
breathe my way to survival. I could not feel any part of my body,
except when I tried to move, and pain sawed through me like a
jagged bolt of lightning. I wanted to ease my position all the time
and, despite the agony, I often did, but there was no body attached
to the pain, only vengeful electricity directly sheeting through my
brain.

It was not
what I would ever have devised for myself. It was not what I had
ever dreamed of. You are lying there shattered to pieces, a garbage
bag of leftovers from the Sunday chicken roast, and a crazed
visionary appears, imbued with the compulsion to render you into
his perfection, and you think “It has to be better than this. I
believe this madman's obsession. I believe he can do it. I believe
I will be able to walk and talk and function as a pneumatic human
being again. I shall be alluring and seductive. That cannot be bad
- a bit askew, yet not bad. If I submit myself to his godlikeness,
I will be his artefact, his sculpture. I have no say in what he
will create holistically of me, beyond an input into the selection
of my spare parts. I will be an innovation, his moulded creation,
reflective of his skills and his passions of the time. I will be
Michelangelo's David with human flesh or, more exactly, Athene,
goddess of war and love. I will have to adapt to that, however I
have to admit that it will be a fitting me.”

Once I had
Athene as an image in my mind, I could not exorcise it. It was like
viewing a house I could absolutely see myself living in. Dr.
Eckardt could make me Athene. I had convinced myself beyond his
evangelism.

So this is
what I became. I look at myself in the mirror and, if I am
distracted by other thoughts, I sometimes jump, even scream. Who is
that? She is so beautiful, but who is she? Then my mind eases
itself back into that body, and I recognise it as being
me.

I am
beautiful. I know that I am stunningly beautiful. And that is not
all good. People try to exploit me ceaselessly, to flirt with me,
to crucify me. I always get a reaction. I walk into a room and I am
a provocation to enslavement or hatred. It is that instant, that
programmed. Dr. Eckardt never explained this to me. I doubt he even
cared. He is an artist of the human frame who creates his
masterpiece, and leaves it to live its own life. I am a photograph
in his slideshow, an exhibit of his collection. I have a right to
no other feelings than to be determined to profit from his
indulgent wizardry.

What Dr.
Eckardt would never understand except perhaps in his dotage is that
I am a human being with a mind. We all are. And however
extraordinary our outward appearance, we are encased in alien
bodies. We cannot explain them as our own bodies distorted by
helpful prostheses. All his work is completed using only real flesh
and blood. There is nothing mechanical, nothing inhuman. And yet
the whole assemblage is inhuman. I am me, and this body is not. I
am inhabiting a carcass, and will do so until I cease to
be.

This is what I
think in my lonely moments surrounded by Mary - that she is not
loving a real person, only a revenant; that at any moment the
threads that drew me together could split, and that I could fall as
a random pile of head, torso, organs and limbs onto the floor, like
a scene from a human rights atrocity dug up from its grave. I
realise that this is ridiculous, and that the stitches are long
gone, and that my body has long been inextricably fused together.
It is nevertheless how I feel. I cannot suppress my unsolicited
thoughts, nor can I assimilate them.

“
I love your
body,” Mary preens. “It is perfect.” She touches me intimately.
“And it is all mine, to do with what I please.”

“
Your body is
really perfect,” I reply, emphasising the “really”.

“
Only if I
had liposuction. I am past any ability or discipline to lose weight
of my own accord. And I cannot entertain the idea of my surplus fat
being turned into bars of soap.” She winces, then
laughs.

* *
*

I am climbing
a garden wall. Dr. Berringer locked their garden gate before going
on holiday.

Despite the
reassurances, I am not convinced that this is a clever thing to be
doing when Inspector Frampton could leap out on me at any time and
try legally and enforceably to chat me up in the creepy confines of
police station again. Any figure scaling their wall is visible for
miles around thanks to the streetlights that abut the Berringer's
house, like fully paid-for security.

Anyway, I am
over and into the shadows of the garden, an exquisitely kept garden
I have to say as best I can see it in the moonlight (if I want to
visit it during the day, it is enrolled into the National Gardens
Scheme, and so opened to the public twice a year). In this case, I
doubt that the garden is holding any secrets I would benefit from
knowing, although if the trees could talk as loquaciously as the
Tarot cards…………

I have asked
myself for days how I can get into the house, and it wasn't until
somebody (well Claudia actually) mentioned that George comes here
every night at 10:00 to water the plants and check that everything
is OK (no burglars like me) that I recognised a solution. If George
does not lock the door behind him, I am in with a chance, I
thought. George is due now. It is chiming ten from the church
tower, and here indeed he is, bumbling along with his thick-set
glasses and shuffling gait like a Peter Sellers character. He
rattles the key in the back door for a full thirty seconds, and he
is in the house. Fortunately, he turns the lights on for every room
he visits so I have a visible trace of where he is. He is on his
way upstairs. There must be a cupboard I can hide in somewhere in
the kitchen (lock the door as you go out, George).

There is. A
nice big broom cupboard. Surely a male of George's age and
professional persuasion would never look in there.

George is
coming back downstairs again, humming. “I can't get no,
da-da-da-da…….”, not what I would have expected. I await his
rendition of the Sex Pistols' “God save the Queen.”

He has gone. I
leave it a couple of minutes anyway. Silence. I creep out of the
broom cupboard, and manage not to knock over the mop. They always
make an unnatural din as they hit a floor. I have no idea of the
topography of the house, so I will need to follow my
nose.

I creep around
the corner into what I assume could be the sitting room and, Bam!,
I walk straight into somebody.

We both draw
breath. One of us screams momentarily, and stops.