The Maggot People (2 page)

“Engineering, that's a good subject,” his father had once advised Michael when the question of his education came up. “An engineer is never out of work.” How uncanny that, in the end, a group of plotting engineers got together, built a train, laid some tracks by his house and maliciously finished him off one evening just as the poor man was looking forward to his cup of tea.

After Michael had gone back to Provence, the electrics in the house started playing up and he worried he'd have to find the money to rewire the place. His bedroom became a particular problem. In its earlier days, the house had been used as a residence for seminarians—young virginal men preparing for ordination, narrowly preferred in those times to a life of digging the sod. He often saw a ghostly figure at night, floating across the room to fiddle with his bedroom ceiling light. As a result, Michael had to change the lightbulb every few days. It irritated him. Was he not entitled to live in a house that had been the legal property of his grandmother, a respectable French woman who had bought the house fair and square at a church auction? Nowadays it was little more than an emanation of humidity and mold. Surely the spirits should be happy that someone was willing to live there at all?

The ghost problem got pervasive enough for Michael to seek advice about it. He went to Alain, the retired village priest, a tiny stooped man with poetical eyes and silvered temples. His grandmother had once been very fond of him; she used to sweep his church for him and polish the candlesticks.

Alain nodded knowingly and tapped the side of his nostril, then whipped out a bunch of dried herbs, set fire to them, and spent the morning walking round Michael's house, waving the smoke about whilst intoning prayers.

“That should do it,” he said, reposing in one of grandmother's toxic armchairs. “It's nothing to worry about.”

“Well, I am worried about it. I seem to be having terrible luck.”

“It's not about luck,” said Alain. “This spirit is angry with you for not being a Catholic and for soiling the house with your disrespect. I take it you're abusing yourself?”

“I don't really see what business of his it is,” said Michael. “People don't choose their religion. Some are born in Salt Lake City and they can't do anything about it.”

Alain did not understand Michael's comment and put it down to the young man's confusion. Gently he put his knobbly hand on Michael's sleeve and said, with a sage nod, as if what he was about to suggest was in some way revolutionary:

“You're an orphan now, my boy. What you need is to get married… to a nice girl… who does not have the Devil in her eyes.”

After Alain had gone, Michael went to the kitchen, a sort of studio and storage area for junk. He sat there sipping his morning coffee, whilst staring at the big canvas of the mountain, trying to assess how he could improve it. Seized by a notion, he painted a small figure in one of the windows: a woman leaning out, hanging up a garment on a clothesline. As soon as she was there—a tiny black smudge in a corner—he felt she had acquired a life of her own. But who was she? What was she doing in that city among the tiered rooftops? And did she have the Devil in her eyes?

Somehow he felt he might prefer her if she did.

2
.

Waking up in the old house had a certain ceremoniousness to it. He lay there listening, feeling himself enclosed as if in a tomb, the shutters excluding every bit of light; yet by the distracted sound of birds idly twittering under the tiles or the whoosh and scrape of incoming swifts, he knew it was morning.

Eventually he got up and, after stepping into a pair of threadbare slippers, dragged himself across the rough stone floor to the window. Opening the shutters was one of the great perks of Provence. The sky, always blue and pristine, surprised him every morning. There was something marvelous about existing on the inside of this bright, oxygenated bell.

In the street he heard mothers scolding their children, also the slamming of pots in kitchens and mouthwatering smells of meat or shellfish being cooked in oil and garlic. When he saw the vivid sky overhead, he had a sense of life happening around him—his place in it more or less that of the alien or automaton, concerned with drinking his coffee, lighting his cigarette, munching his dry bread and cheese and then shuffling off to expel his bodily waste.

There was a measure of humiliation to the whole thing, he thought to himself, sitting there on the cracked seat beneath the sputtering cistern. “I am not an animal, but all I ever seem to do is eat, drink, and shit.”

Whilst indulging in his usual self-flagellation, he saw a large seagull landing on the roof opposite. Flat-footed, it made its way to a crack in the tiles, stuck its beak inside and pulled out a fluffy nestling, then tipped its head back and tossed the little flapping thing down its gullet. All round its head, swifts were darting, screaming, performing aerial displays, zigzagging between chimney pots and clotheslines—fully engaged in the pressing duty of procreation. Very well, they seemed to be saying, we have lost one but we can make another. It was a good Catholic view.

Downstairs in the kitchen, the dripping tap nagged at the piles of crockery left from last night. He had an espresso with plenty of sugar and added his empty coffee cup to the greasy mound in the sink.

After showering under a tepid, limp spout of water that emerged with a vibrating humming sound, like an aged diesel engine, Michael dressed and went out to have breakfast. He stopped in front of the painting and cast another beady eye on the woman in the window.

Possibly because his mind was already on the subject, he was more receptive when he saw the girl crossing the square. A primitive mechanism was set off in his brain. He knew he was powerless to resist because he was the mechanism, he actually heard it groaning into life and felt the emergence of the foolish love cliché, like a cuckoo springing out of its clock.

He stood, one arm extended as if he were a blind man trying to stop himself crashing into a wall.

The girl had also stopped and was facing him with a complex frown on her face.

Between them, in the village square, there was a good deal of bustle. Parents drove their herds of infants across the concrete with much cracking of their whips and loud cries. A group of Chilean immigrants had set up market stalls in a corner, hawking the meat grinders, flour sifters, rolling pins and other historical artifacts that they filched from dying widows and sold to tourists. Chinese merchants were also piling up their defective wares.

Michael was surprised when she steered her steps towards him, threading her way through the busy square until she stood in front of him. He brought his arm down—it seemed the right thing to do.

“I noticed you were watching me,” she said,

“Was I?”

“I was just wondering why?” said the girl, and as she spoke he noticed one of her side incisors jutting out. There was something owlish about it, like a tiny beak; he half-expected seeing a mouse tail hanging out, the remnants of her last meal.

“I don't know. I noticed you, that's all,” he said awkwardly.

“Well, if you're sure.”

She turned round and started walking away at a good pace. With her back turned, he had an excellent opportunity to look at her some more. She was wearing espadrilles and a dark strapless dress that showed off her smooth limbs.

She stopped at one of the non-Chilean, non-Chinese stalls to buy eggplants and grapes and pack them into her cloth bag.

Within a matter of hours, the locals were aware of the presence of a tourist who must have rented somewhere to stay near-by—yet another of these puzzling individuals carrying plenty of money and wandering about in search of something. No one knew who she was, nor did it particularly matter; although, in a village, such things are considered important.

Michael began to keep tabs on her, though more carefully, to avoid detection. Next time they spoke, he felt, it had to be more purposeful and not so foolish.

She crossed the square every morning at nine o'clock precisely and this suited him perfectly. It gave him time for ablutions and coffee. Sometimes he followed her and sometimes watched her in the distance.

A few times he saw her sitting motionless and amphibious in the sun, a pair of oversize sunglasses obscuring most of her face.

When he learned where she was staying, it made perfect sense: a scruffy bungalow by the beach with a fence of old car doors, prickly pear trees, and rusting bed frames lashed together with wire. The place had been abandoned for years and lay shuttered and steeped in silence, its overgrown garden populated by stray cats drawn by the fish she put out for them and left to go putrid in the sun. Burgeoning fig trees pressed against the walls, plunging the front entrance in welcome shade. He never saw anyone sitting on the rusty cast-iron chairs by the table on the patio.

In the drive was a beaten-up Ford Transit with Spanish plates. He assumed it had to be hers.

Many times he followed her to the edge of the dunes, then stopped and watched her scaling the sandy mounds, the cloth bag slung over her shoulder. He always stopped in the shadow at the edge of the trees and let her merge with the yellows and browns of the blowing sands.

She never looked back.

3
.

One day he found himself sitting on the beach just below her house. The cicadas were scraping monotonously. He was stupefied; he'd been there an hour or more when the gate screeched and he saw her coming in a very straight line towards him, stopping at a distance of about ten paces.

With her hands on her hips, she called out in a flustered voice: “I know you like me, but why do you have to follow me all the time?”

It was a fair question. He stood up and said, defensively: “I'm only sitting on the beach. I think I'm entitled to sit here. It's not your beach, is it?”

“Every morning I wake up, I open the door and I see you sitting right there. Or I go to the village. And what do I see?” She moved a little closer. “I see you, I see your face; your big eyes watching me.”

Michael felt caught out; he had to come up with something convincing. “I think I'm just bored. I'm not from here; I'm from England. People here don't like me. They think I'm just a foreigner… and I am a foreigner.”

She laughed and the sound of her voice carried across the sands, reaching the ears of the other bathers who seemed to accept Michael's presence more readily now that a lovely owl-faced girl was laughing with him.

She tilted her head and judged him, which made him feel much better. No one had judged him in a long time, at least no one with warm eyes. “So you're following me and you admit it. Don't you have anything better to do with your time?”

“Being busy is overrated. People who know what they're doing don't do a bloody thing.”

“Even something nice like having an ice cream?”

“That's different.”

Her name was Ariel; her hand was cool and dry. They went back to the house, where a big Alsatian was sitting very neatly on the porch with its paws together.

“Give me ten minutes,” she said.

“Does he bite?”

“Only if you bite him first.”

She went inside and closed the door.

The dog gave him a heartbroken look and sighed deeply. Michael sat down on the step and muttered under his breath: “I know how you feel.”

From somewhere—maybe inside his head or carried by the wind?—he heard the dog's reply: “Go home, never speak to her again, she doesn't belong to herself, she's property. I'm property, too. Do you understand?” Then, with another sigh, the dog added: “Oh Lord, how could he understand?”

When he looked at the Alsatian, it was sitting there in what broadly speaking he would describe as a doglike manner, its long pink tongue on its massive teeth.

Ariel came back wearing a short camouflage-print dress that showed her softly muscular legs and well-formed hips—her skin was like an almond kernel under the husk, polished and smooth.

They walked down a sun-dappled path under Mediterranean pines and Michael tried to recompose himself.

Ariel didn't waste time. “So you're bored, are you? That's such a waste; don't you have family here? A wife? Girlfriend?”

“No. My folks passed away. I only came here because my grandmother left me her house.”

“So you decided to live here, in this little shriveled anus. Correct me if I'm wrong, but just because someone leaves you a house doesn't mean you have to live in it. Right?”

He laughed, slightly forced. “I don't really
live
here…”

“Sorry, but you do, you know.”

What about you? What are you doing here, he thought to himself. How did you end up here?

Ariel glanced at him. “I'm convalescing. That's what I'm doing here.”

“You've been unwell?”

She nodded. “I had a breakdown, I lost the will to get up in the mornings. Have you ever had that? One day I just decided to die. I lay there like a lump for a month without moving. I didn't eat for two whole months. I was on hunger strike. Just the odd mouthful of water.”

“Hunger strike against what?” He tried to smile: “You're not being serious, are you?”

“So I made myself get up,” she said, ignoring his question. “I drove down here and found this house. I thought I'd get some sea air and straighten myself out.”

“This is the last place I'd come if I wanted to straighten myself out.”

“Places don't straighten people out. It's the other way round,” said Ariel.

He did not quite understand what she meant. There was a rush of excitement bubbling through him, the mere thought that all this might soon be
his
. Soon he would touch that overwhelming presence: woman, like a valley with green slopes and a stream flowing through the center. When he looked at her, she seemed less excited about it all: she wore a sort of peeved expression as if life was an inconvenience to her.