Lucia's Masks (19 page)

Of course, Bird Girl had listened to her mother. She always listened to her mother. But not even her deepest, fiercest daughterly love and attention could hold off the fascination of the House of the Rising Sun and all it symbolized. The idea of that wicked, steaming brothel in New Orleans had conjured up an equally wicked and steaming lover in her pre-adolescent imagination.
Snuff out the candles
,
draw back the crimson curtain that makes a canopy round the bed
. The face that emerges from the carmine darkness, the hot breath that assaults your face and naked waiting body, is His — the one who will undo the hard knot of your virginity.

Bird Girl had thought about Him constantly in terms she now realized were ludicrous, lurid and clichéd. He had the searing passion, and the bag of tricks (by which she meant superb technique) to induct her into a world whose delights defied description. Her blood would sing of wild horses and of the sea. She would be utterly ravished and become in consequence the most beautiful person on earth.

This was the lure of the House Where Young Girls Are Ruined, and the magnetic pull of that temptation was just too strong. Bird Girl had to test it out for herself. And so she made the symbolic break to start freeing herself from the Armoury. She dropped her virgin status at age thirteen, only too willingly. Her lover had seemed remarkably mature to her at the time. He was twenty and good-looking. He had the kind of hot, falsely worshipful eyes that stripped a girl slowly where she stood. It was a look, as Bird Girl was now well aware, that pumps a young girl’s self-esteem, and gives her an illusion of power she is sorely disabused of soon enough.

As for sore . . . well, yes indeed she was. She was surprised how much it hurt. She had found precious little sensuous pleasure in the deed once her partner finished stroking and licking her and got down to the actual penetration. Despite plentiful lubricants and a smooth-as-silk condom, it burned terribly when he thrust inside her. At that moment, she seriously doubted the wisdom of her decision. More power to The New Amazons, she thought, if they were smart enough to avoid this kind of pain.

Epona never found out about that first sexual liaison. But by that time, she was already in a fury about Bird Girl’s wardrobe. “You look like a cheap whore,” was the least vitriolic of her comments. What she meant was that her daughter’s skirts were too short. The New Amazons did not wear anything but slacks, made of durable cloth or leather. Epona scorned the very idea of skirts.

“You’re pandering to their filthy desires dressed like that,” she warned her daughter. Bird Girl merely shrugged.

The last time she saw her mother, Bird Girl had on a flimsy see-through dress the colour of mint julep. Later she burned the dress in a foolish attempt to destroy her memories of that day, particularly the vicious things she had said. Those unconscionable words had precipitated the end between them as surely as if she had fired a bullet into Epona’s remaining breast. She would never forget the look on her mother’s face, gone granite-hard with hatred. Epona did not speak; only pointed to the Armoury door, which she then barred. When Bird Girl tried to return she found they had not only changed the locks, but also the password. Not one among The New Amazons would open up and let her in.

“Your mother’s disowned you, kid.” Bird Girl heard this from Mary Magnificat, whom she met by chance one night in the City’s dockyard area. Mary was a wrestler. She had the strength of three men, but had always been kind to The New Amazons’ only child. Mary had tried to give her money that night, which Bird Girl proudly refused.

“You shouldn’t have called her a . . . ,” Mary said bluntly. Bird Girl had plugged her ears with her fingers. As a wrestler, Mary had never had to cultivate much subtlety.

After that encounter, Bird Girl had leapt into the thick of the City’s darkest places, testing her cunning in its labyrinths, where far worse threats than the Minotaur lurked. She became the thing that would most appall her mother: a highly selective and expensive sex trader. She told herself it was a business where she could hone her wits and her instinct for survival, and where she might, on occasion, meet cultivated individuals who would tell her some of the things she so longed to know about the world. Some of her clients, oh, glory of glories, might even give her books as payment or part payment.

Bird Girl was always on the lookout for books. By which she meant real books — literature. The contents of the City’s libraries had all been burned when she was still a baby, but she knew you could find books if you were assiduous, and had a nose for them. She had found treasure troves stuffed under the floor boards of derelict houses. She had once yanked a copy of Dante’s
Inferno
from the mouth of a dog. It was well gnawed but still quite readable. In refuse dumps she had uncovered books from which she had to pluck the maggots one by one; books smeared with muck and maybe even shit. If you want to read these days, Bird Girl always told herself, you can’t afford to be fastidious.

One day, after sobbing over Cordelia’s death scene in
King Lear
, she found the courage to go back to the Armoury and seek a reconciliation with her mother. Awaiting her was the scene she had always dreaded. Something large and lethal had gouged through the Armoury’s outer steel door. The inner door had been wrenched from its massive hinges. It lay flat on the concrete floor and because it was so completely out of place, she did not at first recognize what it was. She succumbed for a moment to the wrenching delusion that the door was a vast pit dug for the dumping of her mother’s corpse.

Her legs were rubber; her stomach acid. Something hard and nasty stuck in her throat. She flung herself to her knees and was sick. She was aware of an ominous thunder gathering in the room, and of a slick wetness gathering at the back of her neck, in the crooks of her elbows, and behind her knees. It took her some seconds to realize that the thunder was the pounding of the blood in her head. She could remember thinking, because she has the kind of mind that never stops seeing things in words, that only one letter separated “dead” from “dread.”

Even on her knees, rocking herself in anguish, she clung to the idea that The New Amazons had staged this assault on the Armoury themselves as one of their clever moves to disorient the hydra-headed enemy. There were rust stains on the concrete floor that might have been blood.

Bird Girl had made herself creep up the metal spiral staircase. Her legs trembled at every step. She could not recall ever before having to hang on to the handrail. Chilled and hot by turns, she forced herself upward and into every room on the two vast upper floors. There was some broken glass and more rusty stains on the floors, but absolutely nothing else. The Armoury had been stripped. Not a bike part, not a bed sheet, not a single sanitary tampon was left.

And that emptiness gave her hope. She believed, as she believes still, that The New Amazons had moved all their belongings out gradually so as not to attract notice; staged the raid on the Armoury doors themselves, and decamped. She clung to that belief, not least because she could not bear to think of the tortures the enemy would have inflicted on her mother and her warriors. She wished The New Amazons safe. She wished them well. She wished, with her heart’s blood, that she had not uttered those poisonous final words to her mother.

It was then she decided to leave the City. She sensed Epona was out there somewhere beyond its confines, roaming free. Bird Girl was also convinced that once on the road, she might find somewhere a whole library still intact, in some sleepy town or village as yet untouched by the decay. She knew she would smell the library if she came close. It would smell as she imagines the sea smells, briny and sharp and full of promise.

In the absence of books, Bird Girl now strove to read the world; or rather, what was left of the world. Before joining up with Lucia and the others, she had dug potatoes for a while with the bunch of grimy, good-hearted folk who call themselves the Diggers. And so she had learned how to study and to read potatoes, and to dream away, with the cold clay soil freezing her fingers and wrists. She had seen a picture once in an old yellow-covered magazine of an Australian Aborigine. His naked body was completely covered in dried clay decorated with the most intricate spirals of colour, twining and twining, heading for some miraculous nub of power.

She had felt like him while she worked in the potato field. She had imagined herself to be long and lean and potent, simultaneously new-made and ancient, with the cold clay caking her arms.

The shapes of the potatoes were miracles in themselves. Some had a proboscis. Some had the huge flowing breasts and buttocks of the figurines people secreted thousands of years ago in caves. Yes, she had enjoyed her time with the Diggers. But there was one man among them who looked at her with such obvious lust, she grew more and more uncomfortable. One night she woke with his fetid breath on her face and had no choice but to knee him in the testicles. After that, she had gone on the move again until one lucky day, she met Lucia.

When Bird Girl first washed Lola (with the softest washcloth she could find, for the old lady winced when anything at all rough touched her skin), she wondered if the old girl had ever had to fend off a man with a well-aimed knee or her pointed nails. Or were all of Lola’s sexual experiences pleasing, or even ecstatic? Did the old lady actually have the many lovers she boasted of? Was she ever really a seductress or courtesan?

Cleansed of its patches of lurid colour, the old woman’s face was leadenly pallid, small as a child’s, and so cross-hatched with lines Bird Girl could not imagine Lola young. It bothered her that she could not do so, as if this failure was somehow a betrayal of the old lady’s growing attachment to her.

Initially, Bird Girl was extremely disappointed not to find the least scrap of reading material in the stone house. Then she realized that Lola’s life was probably itself a book. She found herself wanting to make up a life story for the old woman but always managed to resist the impulse. Why did she stop? Because to impose an imagined story on Lola seemed disrespectful? Or because this urge reminded her uncomfortably of the machinations of the EYE? There was a rumour the EYE had machines that could suck your brain cells dry of all you ever were, and rewire your neurons so that another being walked about in your skin.

What an abomination! To be emptied and then filled, as if your essence was just stuffing for a sausage.

No, Bird Girl reasoned with herself. Her wish to make up a rambunctious past for Lola — even a happy, rambunctious past — in no way resembled the horrific manipulations of the EYE. The truth was she wanted to protect Lola from harm, the way she imagined some women had a natural urge to protect a baby, although Bird Girl had never actually held a baby, or even seen many. None of The New Amazons pursued the artificial pregnancy route in the time Bird Girl was with them. Not at least, with any success. Growing up as the only child in the Armoury accounted in part, she supposed, for her self-confidence. In a sense, she had had ten mothers. There were more than ten in the cohort, of course, but quite a few of The New Amazons merely tolerated her presence or remained stolidly indifferent to her. And why not? Bird Girl had no illusions about every woman having a soul-deep need to nurture something small and helpless, and often — or so she understood — wet and stinky.

Lola doesn’t smell, whatever Candace might think. Does Candace think? Now, there was a question and not as cruel as it might appear on the surface.

As far as Bird Girl can see, Candace is a kind of puppet of her own making. Candace has apparently swallowed a line, an entire life-choreography in fact, and now simply jerks herself about to it. What amazes Bird Girl above all is that Candace seems quite oblivious to this, just as she seems unaware they all find her cheery homilies and intrusiveness so irritating. It is only Harry who habitually gives voice to that irritation, which endears him to Bird Girl all the more.

She likes to savour the irony of the situation: that while Candace simpers and chatters and thinks up insipid ways to bind them as a group, it is their shared contempt for her clumsy efforts that bring the five of them closer.

One had to feel sorry for her. Well, one didn’t have to, but Bird Girl does. In fact, what she feels for Candace (apart from endless annoyance and sometimes fury), is pity rather than sympathy. And pity can exude some pretty nasty miasmas: condescension, smug superiority, noxious self-regard. All deeply flawed and dangerous.

Would Candace ever see how artificial her own devices were? And a cruel question — does Candace have eyes under those blinkers? And an even crueller one — is Candace bright enough to be truly introspective? With all her gabble about synergy and accommodation (sugary mental group gropes, Bird Girl always thinks), Candace is apparently incapable of empathy.

Had Candace ever read a good book? For what better way was there to learn how to look out of the eyes of people absolutely unlike you: pig-headed old kings or guileless young women like Miranda in her brave new world, or even murderers, whether they committed their frightful deed by accident or by design? As many beings as there were good novels and plays and poems.

Based on Candace’s callous and despicable remarks about Lola, Bird Girl surmises she had never even tried to imagine herself inside the withered, spotted skin of a frail and elderly human being.

Well, as an imaginative act, it took courage. No doubt about it. Bird Girl finds Lola’s fragility both oppressing and terrifying. She dreamt that Lola got up from the bed and danced: a bungled pirouette and some faltering kicks of her bony, old limbs. No, “limbs” was too robust a word for those twig-like, vein-scored appendages of Lola’s. But a more accurate description, like “skin-covered bones” would sound disrespectful, if not doom-laden.

The most frightening part of her dream was when the dreaded thing happened and Lola fell. In the dream, Bird Girl felt the crack in her own bones, and Lola’s sharp little cry seemed to issue from her own throat. Bird Girl woke, with a dry mouth and a racing heart, in fear of the bone-grinding pain that had beset her poor crumpled Lola. In the final dream image, seared on the back of her eye-lids before she woke, she saw Lola lying absolutely motionless on the wooden floor, curled in on herself like an embryo in a womb.