by Louis Armand
Something happened once, ten years ago, in a place I want to forget. A memory, an image, a sickness. Old paranoias. I tell myself she’s dead, but it sounds fake, as fake as when I tell myself she’s alive, that she’ll come back, that everything can still be the way it used to be. I close my eyes and open them again slowly, forcing myself to see only what’s there. A slab of ruined meat. I can feel Blake watching me.
“It’s not her,” my voice flat.
I stare at the corpse’s mouth while I repeat it – a black hole cropped out with teeth. “It’s not her.” Matted red hair. Eyes wide open, staring straight up – grey green, the corneas filmed over. Skin pale blue. But it isn’t Regen.
There are bruises across the dead girl’s breasts, her thighs. Crudely stitched autopsy incisions divide her abdomen. Crotch stubble. Abrasions on knees, shins, forearms. Supplicant. All of her fingernails are broken. Old rope burns wind around her wrists and neck like myrtle.
“How did you know?”
Without saying anything Blake pulls the sheet back over her. The gesture has an unnerving finality to it. I’m suddenly exhausted. The room seems much larger than it did before. There’s a vaguely disgusting smell in the air. I feel Blake’s hand on my arm and look up at him.
“Let’s go,” he says.
I look back at the crumpled green sheet – my hands, dead weights. I picture myself standing there like that. Inert. A thing.
Blake’s walking away, towards the double doors.
I stuff my hands inside my coat pockets and follow him out into the corridor. The stiff in the lab coat’s asleep on a chair. Somehow we retrace our steps through the labyrinth. Outside in the loading-bay the air burns my lungs. I’m sweating and cold at the same time, everything turning white, fog closing-in. I feel myself go down. The ground heaves, jerks upwards. Blake’s voice is far away. I can’t make out what he’s saying. Dark whispers. Suddenly he’s right in front of me, holding me by the lapels, backed against the wall. Something’s wrong with my face. I reach my hands up. They come away wet. I don’t know where we are. Then everything jolts back in time-delay.
“You hit me?”
“You passed out.”
“I feel like hell.”
“You look it.”
“You said that before.”
A grin pulls back from large yellowed teeth. He lights a cigarette, spits out a shred of tobacco. I wipe my face with a handkerchief. A clot of blood. Blake shakes his head and turns away.
“Think you can stay on your own two feet?”
“It was the air.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
3. ORIENT EXPRESS
For every action there’s supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction. Objects collide. Faces enlarge into proximity. Time burrows beneath the world leaving fault lines, tremors. Something inside us collapses, irrevocably. After so many years this is all there is. Night at our backs. The unwatched part of ourselves turns to nothing. It’s for this we seek absolution. Lord deliver us…
Blake’s head sways against the mist, the silhouettes of plain trees overarching the cemetery walls. A woman in a blue housecoat is raising the shutters in a stall selling red candles and funeral wreathes. She pays us no attention. The caretaker, in his fold-out chair, pares a cheese onto a piece of bread, a portable black radio at his feet – voices awash with static. I follow Blake under the metal archway, into the corner of the cemetery where the urns are kept in niches along the walls. Figures shift and huddle among the headstones, broken-off angels’ wings, headless seraphim.
Neither of us speaks. I can’t get the dead girl’s face out of my mind. A glitch in time. Regen, ten years ago, standing on a bridge. A fake fur coat and blotted mascara that made her eyes into bruises under the streetlights.
An overturned bench sticks up from the foliage like a beetle with its legs in the air. Name after unrecognisable name, leached out of granite and sandstone. The feeling of something glimpsed over death’s shoulder, shrivelled up, emotionless. Not knowing what keeps our obsessions alive. Those eyes.
We leave the cemetery by a side gate and head towards the freight yards. Back in the present Blake says something and I snap out of it. His voice like echoes under water, subliminal. Words back-masking their meanings. He’s forcing me to think like this. Does he realise? Cracked and broken relics of things kept hidden. In times gone by, the secret art of the resurrection men. Death and sex. Naked corpses brought to life.
“A couple of days ago,” he says, “they had a baby in there. Maybe a month old.” Our shoulders touch. He doesn’t flinch, gaze fixed inwards. “The mother was a junkie, gave the kid a shot to stop it from crying. You’ve never seen anything like it. Straight out of Zevio. They sent the mother up to Bohnice for electroshock. Figured she’d have to be crazy…”
I try to focus. Not this. Regen. The girl.
“Who is she?” I ask.
A long silence. Blake turns and looks at me, pondering.
“No-one knows,” he says finally.
“Someone knows.”
He shrugs, gazing straight ahead again, hands stuffed deep in coat pockets. The strip of road between the cemeteries seems colder, desolate. A tram wheezes past in the opposite direction, coming to a stop behind us.
“A couple of old guys snagged her with a fishing line down by Trója.”
Brown water churning below the weir. Mist over the river. Silhouettes above the riverbank, of people watching. A body, hauled out, naked in grey light – delivered from the waters like something being born.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“How’d you know?”
Blake glances back at me, the grey flesh around his eyes narrowing into slits.
“You’re curious.”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“Here,” he says, reaching into his coat and pulling out an envelope. It’s the same envelope he took from the stiff at the morgue. I give him a questioning look. “Something that might interest you.” I take it and turn it over in my hands. “Read it inside,” he says, nodding across the street. He tosses his butt on the ground, a dying note as it fizzes out.
*
Behind corrugated iron sidings, freight yards cloaked in grey. Voices and engine noises float through the haze. We pass a barred gateway. A flatbed truck off-loading beer kegs. Dull clang as the large cylinders impact on concrete. To one side an old green dining car, jacked up on cinder blocks behind the buffers. A neon sign on top of it says: orient express. A faint glow filters through windows tinted nicotine brown. I follow Blake up the steps.
The moment we get inside the smoke takes my breath away. It tastes decades old. Low, covered lamps stand on each of the tables, casting the whole place in weird chiaroscuro. There’s a couple by the door, old hatchet-faced types, in whispered conversation. A truck driver huddled in his coat, asleep, half-way down. We pick a table facing the yards and order brandy from a toothless blonde. When the drinks arrive we knock them back and order two more.
Inside the envelope are half-a-dozen typed pages. I spread them out on the table while Blake sits there staring at his glass. I can feel his intensity, waiting for my reaction. In front of me is a preliminary coroner’s report. Bribed it off the stiff at the morgue. I wonder why he’s doing this.
The report’s a routine inventory. I scan through it then read back over the parts that catch my eye: Unidentified female Caucasian. 16-20 years old, 162cm tall, 64kg, red hair, green eyes. The dead girl bore identifying scars on both wrists and neck. She was deemed healthy. There was no alcohol in her blood stream at the time of death. Her lungs and stomach contained quantities of river water. There’d been haemorrhaging of the inner ear. Water pressure. Abrasions to hands, arms, legs. Post-mortem injuries. No visible lacerations to the vagina, rectum or perineum. Test for residues or foreign fluids inside the body: inconclusive. Circumstances of death: indeterminate. Cause of death: asphyxia from drowning.
Images flash. Rope marks on ne
ck and wrists. Eyes wide open, staring. The river in grey winter daylight. Water churning beneath a weir. Barge or riverboat. A pair of fishermen dragging at something white in the water with a grappling hook.
“What do the cops say?”
Blake looks up from his drink.
“Treating it as suicide, is what I heard.”
“How do they know she wasn’t murdered?”
“Maybe they don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Impossible to tell, without evidence. Accident, murder, suicide – they all look the same.”
“How many people do you know who drowned themselves?”
“Personally?”
“It’s supposed to be…”
“Slow and agonizing.” He looks away. “Though maybe, in the cold. Hypothermia. Who knows. It’s not as uncommon as people think.”
I try to picture it. It’s night. Day. There’s fog. No-one to see. She’s standing there, on a bridge. Like Regen. Or else she’s running, trying to escape? And then. She falls? Is pushed? Jumps? She begins by holding her breath, struggling against the current. It’s freezing. Her body seizes up. A hand keeping her under? Turning her around? Disorientating her? Then something breaks. A spasm. She inhales. River water. What does it taste like? She vomits. An involuntary gasping for air. It goes on. Minutes pass. In the cold, it takes longer. Time slows down. Mind goes black, all reflex now. Nerves, muscle. Finally, it could take an hour for this, the brain suffocates. Dies.
I think: Something made her choose this. Then: Did she choose this?
I say: “She was naked when they found her?”
The muscle in Blake’s jaw stands out. Prognathous. He prods another cigarette between his lips and lights it. Smoke eddies around the lampshade. Outside, the workmen have finished shifting the kegs. The sound of the truck’s engine starting up.
“Does it matter?” Blake says. He looks straight at me. Showed me the dead girl for a reason. Didn’t he? Wanly smiling. Do we ever know what’s calculated? What isn’t? A cockroach scuttles across the windowsill. I glance after it and it’s gone.
“Suicides aren’t usually naked, are they?”
“Aren’t they?” A question answers a question. An echo.
I think: In the middle of winter?
He leans forward, the eye of his cigarette, thumb pressed to bottom lip. When he speaks, his mouth barely moves. He says, in a toneless voice:
“Would you like me to tell you a story?”
4. SLIP KNOT
Once upon a time, my mother would begin, and then tell us the story of Hänsel and Gretel. Each time the story would be different, only the ending was the same. Like some complicated form of revenge being patiently worked out. All possible scenarios, all avenues of escape. I was little Hans, Regen was Greta. That was when we were children. We used to play together. Regen’s family owned the vineyard behind our farm. In Autumn the grapes were harvested and made into wine. Burgundy, Saint Lawrence, Cabernet Franc. They used the old Sudeten word, herbsten. To harvest – to autumn. The dark grapes in the wine press. Yeast on the lees.
We’d always known each other, from before I can remember. Twins in a former life. Our families amazed us. Like characters in a story, they didn’t seem real. We watched them act out their pantomimes of self-accusation, disappointed that the evil witch was never pushed into the oven, the wicked stepmother hacked to pieces, the impotent father given his comeuppance. Seasons dragged on. In summer we swam in the river and ate blueberries. There was an old bathtub set out among the vines, we never knew why. We’d lie in it at night and hunt constellations. I smoked my first cigarette there, got drunk on young wine. It was a lifeboat on a deadened sea, a womb or the bottom of a grave. It was easy to dream there.
Then everything changed. It happened on the eve of my eleventh birthday. On a Sunday morning, waiting for my mother to drive us to church. As usual I was dawdling behind the house, lobbing plum stones at the trees in the orchard. There was something white hanging in one of the trees. It looked strange there. I went over to see what it was. Rotten plums burst underfoot. The ground was covered with them. Normally they’d have been collected in buckets, to make pudding, sauce, plum brandy. But normalcy went out the window that summer.
I remember the air around the trees thick with fruit fly. Bees swarmed from the hives at the foot of the orchard, a loud buzzing that came louder and louder the further I waded in. In the tree there was a bed sheet wound like a thick rope. A ladder rested against the trunk. On the ground beneath it was a pair of my mother’s shoes, covered in ants. I stared at them, trying to connect them to the stockinged feet that hung down between the branches.
And then we moved away, into town, where my grandfather owned a butcher’s. His father, too, had been a butcher. And his before him. Descended in a line unbroken from Cain.
After the move, I didn’t see Regen again for a long time. I tried not to think about my mother, her stories had all been lies. Sometimes, after school, I’d watch my granddad re-sharpen his knives after butchering a pig, blood dripping from the skirt of his apron. Or I’d hide out in the cool room and set the carcasses swinging in the dark, finding poetry in the jangling of meat hooks and the cadences of jostled meat.
On weekends, when the weather was fine, I’d ride my bike out past the shoe factory and the abattoir on the edge of town, testing the forbidden distance back. The rich tang of the cesspools behind the abattoir with mist rising off them in winter. A tang like rotting plums. In school, when we studied Newton’s law, it was the orchard I thought about. Things fall by force or gravity. The ripe plum-burst, the weight at the end of a damp bed sheet. Inertia. My mother had been a thin woman, dark-haired, constantly undergoing some form of malady. But she existed in the past like fiction.
Often I dreamt of my father, operating a machine with wheels and saw blades, and my mother like a pig’s carcass being fed to it on a conveyor belt. For years I had the same dream. It always ended when my mother woke up, just before the machine was supposed to cut her in half. She’d open her eyes and instead of my father, she’d see me. And instead of her, I’d see Regen.
But now when I recall my childhood, what I think about most is the blankness. I try to picture myself as one of those happy faces in photographs, but it doesn’t work. Happiness or pain, it’s the same thing, only the pain seems more real. Some people think paradise is not being able to feel anything at all. Anaesthesia. You die that way. An organism can’t exist without pain.
*
Cue four years later. Regen at a bus stop, tall, in a light blue dress. I almost didn’t recognise her. When she saw me, I don’t know why, but I half expected her to hit me. For never having come back. But she didn’t. We looked at each other without saying a word. There was something in her eyes time had intensified. Something fathomless and dark. I read the reflections there. Love and guilt. I was wrong. I didn’t know how wrong I was.
The bus left us out in the middle of the vineyards. Dusk reddened the hillsides, the air full of insects. We crossed the fields towards Regen’s house, down winding dirt paths, the trees along the river in silhouette. No-one was home. We took some wine and bread and lay out under the half-moon, in the old bathtub. We lay there naked. We whispered. We touched. The sky tilted on its axis.
I stared at my hands in the half-dark, combing the moonlight. Regen’s hair, her back to my chest. She was humming a tune, like a nursery rhyme, quiet and repetitious. Lips and mouth.
Something irrevocable had come undone. It just happened that way. Without awareness. Without premeditation. The years of silence. Regen’s pale body, her scent. The warm air.
“Once upon a time,” she said, “a very poor woodcutter lived in a tiny cottage in the forest with his two children, Hänsel and Gretel.”
Awkward laughter. Ghosts flitted between the vines.
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
“You don’t need to be.”
“Did you ever think how in
the story it’s always the step-mother who’s evil? Or the witch. And not the woodcutter. After all, they’re his children. He tricks them into going into the woods. He knows what’s going to happen to them. He knows it. But he pretends he doesn’t. He pretends it isn’t him who’s killing them.”
I felt drunk then, the air had turned cold. My hands looked too big in the moonlight. A flapping of wings.
“It’s like they’re his dirty secret,” she said. “Little Greta and little Hans.”
“Don’t.”
She turned and looked hard into my eyes.
“Don’t what?” she said. And then her head jerked away. Like an animal, sensing intrusion. A shadow moved. Lights in the trees. Somewhere in the distance, approaching, washing over us. The crunch of tyres on gravel. A car door slammed. Footsteps. I sat up and followed Regen’s gaze. A man was standing at the house gate, headlights casting strange shapes across the low stone walls. He seemed to be searching, stalking back and forth. And then he turned and stopped. I froze. I felt his eyes burning holes in the dark. Neither of us breathed. He was looking straight at us.
*
Before morning I hitchhiked back to town. It was further than I’d thought and almost no cars at that time of night. I walked through the pre-dawn until a flatbed delivering hay gave me a ride.
When I got home, he was waiting for me. I knew what was coming. He didn’t even look up, just told me in a low calm voice to go to the laundry. It was cold in there. He took his time. I heard him come up behind me, unlooping his belt. He took me by the hair and pushed my head down into the sink we did the bleaching in. Fumes burned my nose and mouth. I screwed my eyes shut and prayed, a dumb inarticulate prayer full of fear, thinking how I should’ve run away, how I should’ve stayed with Regen. And then he whipped me like there was no tomorrow.