Shade (30 page)

~

“All of the liners in the world, and the coal-steamers, all of the metal that could float, it seemed, had gathered in the harbour at Alexandria, and the Arab dhows with sails like curved knives flitted between them, laden almost to the waterline with whatever they could sell. I bought a melon from one of them and sliced it in four pieces as I walked down the gangplank, and the juice ran down my chin into my shirt. The sun dried it almost instantly. I threw the pieces to the dogs that scavenged on the dockside and made my way to the Medina, where the wattled covering between the walls of the narrow streets provided some shade. There were soldiers everywhere, most of them damaged in some way, and I enquired of the damaged ones about the hospitals and began a three-day trek through the converted schools and army barracks and whorehouses, among the beds that lined the sweating walls and the nurses’ starched white bonnets, looking for any word of George. I returned to the ship each night, to the hammock where I lay among a thousand others, tried to sleep and most of the time failed.

“Then on the third day I was walking through the souk and I saw a figure ahead of me through the mounds of slowly moving donkeys laden with every conceivable produce under the sun. Both arms were bandaged and there was a scarf of some kind wrapped over the head but the size and the gait, that loping walk, were unmistakably his. I called his name and he didn’t respond, he quickened his pace which told me that he’d heard, was trying to escape me, but there was no escaping in that crush. I saw him duck down a side-alley and followed him into a tiny street full of gold-beaters, tiny wizened men with hammers and sheets of the metal spreading out on blocks beside them. He turned left again, down a smaller alley, if that were possible, so narrow two people couldn’t walk it side by side. And the alley ended by a small open door with a clutch of beggars outside, all pock-marked, shrivelled limbs reaching to brush off my hands, limbs that were stumps without hands.

“ ‘Give them money,’ he said, without turning round, without removing that scarf, give them what you can, because they expect it. And follow me, if you want, into where I live now.’

“I emptied my pockets of coins and saw them scramble for them, scraping them on to begging bowls clutched between their teeth. He walked inside and I followed.

“He was in an indigent house, an almshouse of some kind, and I could see figures with deformities that grew, as we climbed the stairs, into shapes that were barely recognisable as human.

“ ‘Leprosy,’ he said, ‘and don’t ask me why I’m here, I’m here because only here it’s possible to think of myself as fortunate.’ He ducked into a tiny room with a barred window, hardly big enough to hold him; there was a mat on the floor and everywhere the smell of excrement. I bent and entered, and he removed the scarf, and I could see then the skin pulled like a chicken’s neck across what had been his face. I could see the skin of the hands like the discarded coat of a lizard, almost transparent, with the bones showing through.

“ ‘They tried to put me on a boat back to England with the others,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t go. I stayed on in the hospital till they needed the bed, and then I wandered the markets until I found my way here. Here I can be Touchstone, and envy no man’s happiness. But sometimes I think, Greg, if you don’t mind me saying, that maybe you should have left me by that burning bush. I could have died there, not happily, but dead would be better than this. And sometimes I think, no, I should be alive because at least alive I might see your sister Nina’s face again. But then if I saw her she would have to see me, and I can’t countenance that thought, and I go back to thinking you should have left me on that hill to burn with the bushes. All those bushes are dead now and so should I be. And I go through both thoughts, from one to the other, and then I go through that doorway and down the stairs, and I see that among these at least I am fortunate. And I think of something else which is a rare relief, a blessing of kinds, the only blessing I get these days. So I stay on here and think I might end my days here. What do you think, Greg?’”

~

There was light day and night in the Bush Studios, great arc-lamps of it, no escape from it and I could see hints of the memories of what I used to be in the sparks that crackled round those carbon rods, I could see the succubus that had left me somewhere in the dark behind those lamps, the wheeling dust and the black studio wall. I came to understand those primitive peoples who believed the camera ate the soul, and I wanted it to eat mine whole and entire, and give me back another one, an artificial one that could be eaten in turn by whoever came to view me of an afternoon in a darkened hall when the projector whirred and the image flickered on the white sheet that was the screen. I wanted it to take my set of memories, of the river, the house, the swing beneath the chestnut tree, of Gregory’s arrival with his twine-wrapped case, of George playing Touchstone behind the dead tomato plants, Janie thrusting out of the river water with the wet dress clinging to her tiny breasts, of the ghost that thrilled all four of us, Hester crushed to powder by the threshing machine, of the owl that hooted in Mabel Hatch’s barn and the pearl, most of all the pearl. And the camera took them gladly, drew them into its plane of vision and demanded other memories of me, memories that left me quite unburdened, like a marionette twirling in an artificial clock, free but for the mechanism that moved her, and quite, quite empty.

He would smoke his pipe behind the cranking camera, with his stick and his Norfolk jacket, and when the roll had ended would walk forwards and place his hand too low about my waist; in time I got used to that too. I got used to all sorts of things: to the carnal round a motion picture demanded, pulling my stockings back on in the dressing room while the lover of sorts dressed with his face to the wall, watching the way the silk curled round my thin knees and thinking, One more time, and I was wrong about that one too. I was far from home and would stay far from home, and if anything of me returned it would be that other version, the one the roll retained on its acetate. So there, Mozambique.

~

“I received your letter,” says Gregory, “and you told me how Nina had made her debut in moving pictures of all things. How you wondered was your brother dead or alive, and if alive he should know his father had died while piloting the
Kathleen Mavourneeen
in the September storms. His boat had gone down beyond the Lady’s Finger; he had misjudged the point of entry. The seas were so high, and the spray so obscured his vision, that he hadn’t seen the Maiden’s Tower to
get
his co-ordinates right. There was to be a funeral, and if George was still alive they would delay it until his return. And that letter did the trick.

“So I led him from that lazar house in Alexandria and brought him back once more into a kind of life, on to the last of the shipments returning home, from Salonika this time, the remains of the Tenth Division heading towards home leave and dispersal to another front. He wore an Arab djellabah with a hood and kept the scarf wrapped round his face, but the skin was growing again, returning him to some recognisable semblance of what he used to be. And on the boat there were so many like him that he came to feel at home, let the scarf fall, let his oddly touching visage be viewed by others, meet the sunlight on the long days steaming through the Mediterranean, round Gibraltar towards the Bay of Biscay.

“I received your last letter when we berthed, with the scrap of an announcement from the London
Times,
an advertisement for the Scala Cinematograph, announcing ten showings daily of the seven-reel motion picture entitled
Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Lady,
starring Adrian Penrose (Magician) and Nina Hardy. He kept the cutting in his damaged hand on the train journey to London. I walked with him from the train through the vast, windowed station interior, where the light pushed through stacks of smoke that seemed to have acquired the permanence of pillars, barely glimmering on the sea of khaki caps that shifted and jostled and pitched a head-height below him. And there, as the red-bricked sooty cathedral of St Pancras spread out before him, I realised he would never be right.

“ ‘Is this the city, London?’ he asked me.

“ ‘No, George,’ I said, ‘this is the station, St. Pancras. London is outside.’ And I took his hand with the scrap of yellowing newspaper advertising my sister’s cinematic debut and led him out of the turreted exit into the sprawling mayhem of King’s Cross, where he seemed to realise the word city didn’t have enough dimension for the vastness that he was encountering. He had seen the tops of smoking houses, acres and acres of them, on the journey from Dover, but as he would see a moving picture-book unravelling past the carriage window. This was real, this was moving, this was noisy, this pushed him out of its way, steamed, spewed smoke, this held more terror for him than the burning hillside in the Dardanelles. He pulled the scarf back over his face and told me he felt a pain like the drip of molten metal against his temple, he was unsure whether the roar was emanating from his own ear-drums or from the tempest of directionless life around him. He seemed to long for a hint of nature he could recognise, and stared through the railings at the sooted tufts of grass between the tracks below. He heard a starling twitter from a leafless plane tree and saw a policeman raise his hand beneath it, saw the traffic stop as if by magic, and saw the vast crowd begin to shuffle from his pavement to the one opposite. He followed, knowing nothing else to do, and I followed him. And then, above the slowly bobbing heads, through the window of a stalled omnibus, he glimpsed Nina’s face. Fixed to a curving wall, with the word HOLMES emblazoned on her forehead. I took his hand and led him towards her, revealing more and more as her image came clear of the omnibus. Eventually she loomed above us, the whole of her, bent into a half-loop around the curve of the building, the steps and the Italianate entrance of the Scala Cinematograph beneath her.

“I remember little of the performance, but I do remember George, sitting beside an Egyptian column, his face happily shrouded in darkness, staring at her face on the screen, flickering, appealing, leaning down towards him in an attitude of benediction.

“ ‘I can see her,’ I remember him saying, ‘and she can’t see me.’

But why now? Why now?
the caption said. A gentleman in a top coat and glistening hat twirled his stick, contemptuously, it seemed to George, because he asked me why didn’t he seem to like her.

“ ‘He is the villain, George,’ I said, ‘he’s not allowed to like her.’

“Then she was walking away, down a shadowy street. She turned a corner, walked into a fog and emerged by a river. It was a large river, George whispered to me, three times the size of the river at home. It had barges and sailing skiffs and a crescent moon in an unaccountably bright sky. Then she was there again, terrifyingly large, her eyes and mouth downcast, her face framed by a mass of black curls. She tumbled forwards towards us, so close that George reached out his hands to catch her. But his hands were singularly useless, as she was already in the river, floating towards one of the barges, the crescent moon reflected in the water beside her.

“ ‘Is she dead now, Greg?’ George asked me in a kind of storybook terror.

“ ‘No,’ I told him, ‘she’s not dead, George, it’s only an illusion.’

“And afterwards I walked him into the daylight again towards another train station, Euston, this time.

“ ‘I can see her then,’ he said, ‘and she need not see me.’

“ ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘any time this film plays you can see her and sit happy in the dark in the knowledge that she cannot see you.’

“ ‘But do they have such films at home, Greg?’ he asked me.

“ ‘They will,’ I assured him, ‘they most certainly will.’

“And I bought his ticket and led him through another cathedral of smoke and grime and placed him on the train and asked the khaki-clad squaddies beside him to make sure he made it with them through Liverpool to Dublin where I told them his sister Janie would be waiting. And the last I saw of him was as the train drew off, his large head turning backwards in the window, the steam obscuring it in progressive bursts, and the steam was kind to his damaged face, softening it into something like what it used to be.”

~

They had finished my make-up, a solid cake of white with a thin pencil of purple for my lips, they had brought me into the huge swathe of light the sun poured through that wall of glass when the camera whirred, and I was pushed into the miniature of Harley Street and the magician pulled me this way and I pulled myself that. And I realised I was always aware of the surrounding crowds; no matter how blinding the light, how loud the noise, I could have counted the observers without a second thought and spotted an intruder across a score of them. Eyes, that was what it was about, eyes: I was being watched, and a new pair of eyes had joined the familiars. I looked out for this new pair of eyes as I pulled away and was pulled back, as my hand went to my forehead and away again, and at last I saw the outline of the khaki cap against the bare brick studio wall.

I knew it was him, though demobbed officers often passed through—we were the fairground attraction, the mechanical wonder, an invitation to the Bush was prized by government ministers, for God’s sake. I knew it was him immediately though I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see anyone’s face, I was blinded by light as usual, and my grief and terror reached biblical proportions until the gathering was happy and the cranking arm on the camera box stopped.

I walked forwards then, in my costume of the last century, a ghost in everything but physique, and I passed the lights and my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom behind. I was told a costume change was needed by the wardrobe mistress, but I walked on by her to the thin figure in uniform, smoking by the studio door.

“Gregory,” I said, “it is you, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, “who else?”

And I ran and he caught me by the open door and twirled me and said, so familiar, so unnecessary that it seemed redundant, “What larks, sis.”