Lucia's Masks (20 page)

If Lola fell and injured her skull, it would be the end. Just as Bird Girl assumes it would be the end if someone dropped a baby on its fragile bulb of a head.

She does not like to dwell on how vulnerable human flesh and bone are, particularly at the beginning and end of life. This line of thought too often leads her to the conclusion that human beings must be a mistake. Or worse, that the human species is a deliberate joke perpetrated millennium after millennium by some hard-eyed soak in the sky, swilling down his ambrosia and having a good old belly laugh as he pulls human beings’ strings and another one falls on its head, or rams a stiletto into a neighbour’s kidney. Or...

Enough, Bird Girl, she tells herself. “Oh, that way madness lies,” as King Lear said.

She must lift up her mind, and concentrate on the tiny pulsing light inside her she thinks must be her soul. Bird Girl does not doubt that Lola has a soul. And she is always delighted to witness the old woman’s transporting joy as she meanders through the most cherished scenes from her past. Lola’s memories (or are they imaginings?) are often just highly vivid, disconnected fragments that nevertheless tantalize Bird Girl by their brightness and illogic.

She has come to see that Lola fixes her flitting memories by focusing on what she wore. “I had on my apricot sheath,” she will say. “When he slipped it over my head, there was a rustle of silk.

“The sound was like new leaves turning in the wind.

“He told me I looked as if I bathed in moonlight.

“He told me the word for ‘brightness’ in his language put together the signs for ‘moon’ and ‘sun.’” (Bird Girl relishes this mysterious allusion, which Lola often repeats. It seems so unlikely that one of Lola’s lovers was Chinese or Japanese. And if Lola had travelled so widely and been so adored, how had she ended up in this remote stone farmhouse?)

“His hands were delicate as doves, his body as lean and supple a lion’s.” (The image of the dove-like hands makes Bird Girl shiver in delight. She thinks “dove” is a lovely word, like the slip of a satiny tongue round one’s nipple.)

Sometimes Lola gets a bit more graphic. As in: “I wore my emerald-green ball gown. It was midsummer. Two beautiful young men came to me and waited upon me all night. Like moths to my green flame, he told me afterwards.

“They walked me to the riverside, where he was waiting and watching, in a rowboat just off the shore. He watched as they stripped me under a great spreading tree. And oh, I was willing, for them to do it, and for him to watch.

“Such pleasure to be had from two soft young mouths, two strong pairs of hands, and a single watcher offshore. Oh, the moans I sent out from under that spreading tree as I came and I came and I came.

“How often, he asked me afterward when we lay in bed together, how often did you orgasm? I was exploding in the little boat, he told me, exploding as I watched you with the two young men.”

Bird Girl almost comes to orgasm spontaneously herself, listening to Lola and thinking of the two mouths, the four hands, and most especially, the exceptional, liberal-minded watcher.

Candace barges in on them.

“Ugh!” Candace says. “It’s unfortunate when they get to this stage. Their wandering often turns foul-mouthed.

“You don’t have to sacrifice yourself this way, you know,” Candace says. She lays a moist hand on Bird Girl’s shoulder.

“I admire your charity,” Candace simpers, with extravagant insincerity. “I really do. But you must weigh your priorities.”

Bird Girl turns to face her; puts on her very best round-eyed, innocent gaze. “Pardon?”

“We need you downstairs,” Candace confides. “The group needs you.

“The dynamics are faltering,” Candace adds; then immediately corrects herself: “Our centre needs strengthening.”

Lola begins to wheeze, and then to cough, generating much flying spittle. Bird Girl knows this is a ploy, even if Candace doesn’t.

“She doesn’t have long to go from the sound of her chest,” Candace remarks.

Lola rolls her eyes, and begins to make rude spluttering sounds, like eruptive farts. This is more than Candace can take.

“We’ll hold a little airing session this evening,” she says on her way out the door. “I’ll call you when we’re about to start, if you haven’t already joined us.” She bestows on Bird Girl one of her most painfully artificial smiles.

Bird Girl grimaces, amazed anew at how blind Candace is to her own manipulations. In the group’s five days in the stone house, they have all, with the exception of fretting Candace, found ways to occupy their time. Bird Girl tends and listens to Lola; Old Harry huddles together with Chandelier, telling the boy tales of his past and drawing diagrams of some kind in the dirt just outside the front door; Lucia prepares their meals, and works at a ball of clay she must have found somewhere.

The Outpacer, around whom Bird Girl now feels a bit uncomfortable, is often busy splitting wood in the barn — to keep fit, she presumes. Only Candace is at loose ends.

Bird Girl takes this to mean that Candace has few inner resources, other than revising her tedious theories of group dynamics and cohesion exercises.

Lola lets out a great sigh. “Is that one gone?”

“Yes, for now.”

“Where was I?” Lola asks. “What was I wearing, little chick?”

“An emerald gown. There was a man watching you from a row boat.”

“Oh yes.” Lola is silent a moment. Bird Girl finds herself wishing she might one day experience the bliss written on the old woman’s face.

Oh my dove
, Lola recites in apparent rapture,
thou art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs.

“He was the finest,” she continues. “He told me pleasure was a great wheel. It did not matter where you got on or off, so long as you ran no one over.

“His left hand is under my neck, and his right hand doth embrace me.”

Could there be such a man, Bird Girl wonders, watching from his Pleasure Wheel in a state of supreme arousal, while his beloved frolicked with other men? This sounded not at all like grubby voyeurism — of which she’d seen quite enough in her sex trade years — but exalted adoration.

He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love
, Lola says, her little face aglow. Bird Girl longs to know the source of these images. She has never been lucky enough to get her hands on many books of poetry, but she knows the genuine article when she hears it. She honestly believes she has an instinct for poetry, just as she has for smelling out books. Is this something gifted to her through her genes? Was her test-tube father a poet? She guesses that poetry has much in common with spells, and the old idea of working magic. Concentrated power, musical, sometimes resistant as a hard-shelled nut to your understanding. But with reading and rereading and mulling over, the meaning springs out at you and insight floods your brain at the speed of light. You feel a delicious pleasure then and it’s as if you’re floating.

She longs to know where Lola plucked the line about the banqueting house and the banner. She wants to know its provenance (another word she is fond of because it sounds like an intellectuals’ palace.) It is not likely a word Lola would know. And Bird Girl’s instinct tells her it is best to let Lola ramble and not to press her with questions, even if her own greedy curiosity makes her squirm.

She intervenes only when Lola is in her worst fits of incoherence, when she moans piteously or cries out as if she has cut herself on a barbed memory. In these distressed states, Lola can become quite literally blind to the present. She will emerge from the dark of her confusion only with the help of touch as Bird Girl strokes her hand, or caresses her cheek.

“You’re a regular blessing, little chick,” Lola will say, when she has shaken off whatever bad spell possessed her.

“A regular blessing,” Bird Girl muses wryly to herself, was certainly not what her mother used to call her. As Lola sleeps, Bird Girl strives to push away punishing thoughts of her final confrontation with Epona. She is sure she still carries the damned words she uttered like razors buried in her flesh. Will her remorse always haunt her, a doleful presence she cannot shake off? Like the pitiable Raskolnikov, his soul racked in Russia’s endless White Nights. Of course, she had committed no physical murder. But words can murder, can they not? Words can murder love.

Mother, she thinks, please forgive me my murderous words.

She hears a cry from somewhere outside that carries a searing anguish. Her first thought is Lucia, and a cold sluice of fear numbs her flesh.

She runs to the window. At first she sees only two of them. Then they seem to multiply so that a mass of dirty-grey fur appears to writhe upon the sparse grass. Within seconds she can make out details she would far rather not see — their huge size, and the flash of their long teeth in prodding snouts, the slit eyes adapted to sewer life, and the wire-like whiskers that pierce the air.

She pinches the flesh of her forearm. Maybe these disgusting creatures are part of a waking dream, or an ugly projection of the guilt she feels about her mother. She pinches herself hard enough to make her eyes water; blinks away the tears. When she opens her eyes, they are all still there — the Rat-Men she had always assumed were apocryphal. For years, she had dismissed the rumours as just the residue of people’s nightmares, sprung from an instinctive unease about the monstrosities cloning might produce. Who does not fear waking one morning to find a seething, fetid rat on the pillow? And what worse chimera could there be than a man-sized rat, with human hands, legs, and arms?

These things ought not to exist, and just looking at them makes Bird Girl feel sick and despairing. For the first time in her young life, she sees the future of humankind as irretrievably damned. She pushes her closed fist against her lips as the monsters swarm closer to the house. She can smell them now. There is a taint of sulphur.

The thoughts that go through her head are these:
How do I save myself? How do I protect Lola?

Later she will wish she had not put herself first, and that she had run downstairs to warn the others before the monsters stormed the house. But in these last moments she has left, she is obsessed with their pitiably few options for escape. Meanwhile, Lola sleeps her blissful sleep as if sated from bouts of robustly satisfying love-making. Very soon Bird Girl will have to rouse the old woman. And then what? Obviously exiting the window with Lola in tow is out of the question unless she wants to reduce the old woman to a literal bag of bones.

Bird Girl sees no choice but to stand her ground, make a weapon of her body, and fell as many Rat-Men as she can when they force in the door. She always has the advantage of surprise. No one expects the iron in her fists; the kicks that can rupture a man’s spleen or break three ribs at once.

She begins to smell her own fear — never a pleasant scent — and sets about channelling her adrenalin rush. She paces from the door to the window, judging her distance, looking for possible impediments to the scythe her body must soon become.

She sees that the Rat-Men have now clustered together. She counts four snouts, four strong wide backs, four sets of shoulders that look as if they could easily repel the blow of an iron bar. She hates the fact that she cannot stop staring at them; that they exert their own perverse fascination.

As she peers down, hiding herself from view as best she can, one of the Rat-Men lifts his arm to scratch at the back of his neck. The skin of his hand is a deep olive and fully human.

Here is a most diabolic combination, she thinks, as she watches human fingers prodding matted rat’s fur, slick with sewer slime. Then she sees something extremely odd, a visual illusion she initially attributes to her own agitated state. It looks as if the fur at which the Rat-Man scratches is lifting. Suddenly the whole monstrous head falls away. What Bird Girl sees next astonishes her as much as would a veritable miracle.

A god, from whose hand dangles a huge rat’s mask looks up at her in the window where she stands in full view now, gap-mouthed in amazement.

The man smiling up at her belongs in one of the Italian Renaissance paintings she’s seen in books. A muscular young Mars maybe, or Mercury, the messenger with the winged sandals and the caduceus wand that works wonders.

“You have to leave,” the god-man shouts up at her. “There’s a cloud of nerve gas drifting your way.

“We are doctors,” he tells her. “Trust us, please. There is little time.”

He points west. Bird Girl sees a fist-shaped orange mass grow larger even as she watches.

“How long have we got?” she asks, trying to work out how she can get Lola safely and speedily down the stairs, let alone out of the house and away.

“Less than an hour,” he says firmly. “You must head north. How many are you?”

“Seven,” she tells him. “We are seven.”

“We have masks,” he says, taking from his rat’s pocket a filmy transparent disk. “You must put these on immediately if the air starts to take on an orange or yellow tinge.

“Don’t risk coming back here” he warns, with a sternness that makes clear how grave their situation is. “The gas will permeate the ground around the house.

“There is a complication,” he adds in a rush, “a meteorological complication. But I want to explain this to everyone at once. Are your companions all here?” he asks urgently.

She nods, although actually she is not at all sure where they are. Then she closes her eyes for a moment to try to absorb the full weight of his warnings, and to make the shuddering orange fist in the sky disappear, however briefly. It is ludicrous, she knows. But there are still times she indulges in the childish wish that she can obliterate the degenerate and besmirched things of the world simply by shutting her eyes.

When she opens them again, the Rat-Men have gone. She hears Candace’s shrill squeal that tells her the doctors in their nightmare garb have entered the house.

Lola wakes with a panicked cry. “What was that?” she asks Bird Girl, who goes to her immediately and takes her hand.

“He’s not back, is he?” Her frail spotted hand grips Bird Girl’s so tightly, the young woman has to make an effort not to wince.