The Taxidermist's Lover

by Polly Hall

  The woman rummaged in her large floppy bag for a hand-held fan; she switched it on and moved it about in front of her face as if she was scanning with a mini searchlight. “I love your work, Mr. Felix. Could I have your autograph, please?”

  He looked sideways to check who else was lurking to attract his attention, then pulled out his own pen from the breast pocket of his jacket (a quill pen with a biro nib), and scribbled his name on the curled-up postcard she held in her free hand. She kept it within her grasp as if it were a valuable heirloom. Then, when he finished signing, she clutched it to her chest as if she’d been anointed by a holy man. “Thank you so much,” she huffed, still circling her fan with the other hand, and disappeared into the crowd like an embarrassed schoolgirl.

  I needed air, but all those animals were vying for my attention in their mortal struggle against suffocation. They knew when I sensed them; their ears twitched or their hackles rose. I felt their souls trying to make sense of their misassembled body parts in some sort of cohesive way. I felt better, almost free, if I kept moving rather than standing still, so I prepared to escape from Felix, but he blocked my way.

  “So, you are a fan of taxidermy?” He smiled revealing his perfect teeth. I flinched as he reached toward my neck as you so often did. He slowly ran the back of his hand over the mink stole I had draped over my shoulder, lightly skimming my breast.

  “I’m hot,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, you are.”

  We stared at each other a moment longer and I felt sure he was leaning in to kiss me when a woman wearing a dress that revealed ample but artificial cleavage tapped him on the shoulder. Her symmetrical rounded bosoms were engineered by another form of surgical art. Her dress was the sort of red that oozed confidence.

  “Duty calls,” Felix sighed and winked at me. I know I shouldn’t really be telling you this now, but it was that wink that totally transformed how I saw him. To me it said he knew he was riding on some bubble and even though every cell in my body hated him for usurping your rightful place in the taxidermy world, I couldn’t help but smile back at him.

  He slipped me what at first I thought was a piece of giraffe hide, but it was his business card. His details were stylishly pyrographed onto the smooth tanned leather—his name, mobile number and website. I wanted to sniff the skin.

  But that would have looked like I was kissing it, so I slipped it in the pocket of your coat that I had draped over my arm.

  Copies of his latest book Wolpertinger Dreams were stacked up on a table near the stage, waiting for his flamboyant signature. Curiosity overtook me. What if we could use him to further your career—network a little, do a bit of schmoozing with the loveys? Not that you needed to ride on some false kudos devised by a—what did you call him—a cockadoodle dandyfucker?

  I reached the front of the book-signing table and stroked the fur stole around my neck. The softness seemed to calm me. It seemed pure and peaceful among the hashed-up hybrid creatures.

  “We meet again, so soon.” His cheeky wink hooked me as he took my book and turned the pages ready to sign. “Who would you like this dedicated to?”

  “Scarlett,” I said.

  His pen hovered over the page for a moment. Then he wrote my name and did an elaborate illegible scrawl of his own.

  “Miss Scarlett? I could be your Rhett, y’know.”

  “You could,” I replied before I knew what I had said. “But I’m Mrs. Scarlett Pepper actually.”

  “Is that so?” His twinkle dulled for a split second.

  “Yes, Henry Pepper is my husband,” I said.

  “Interesting,” he said, and nodded his head, slowly raising his eyebrows. “He is a very lucky man.”

  Although you had both chosen the same profession, he was so unlike you. He was glamorous, stylish, modern. I admit I fantasized about our names combined: Felix De Souza and Scarlett Pepper. But it was a recipe not fit for the same plate, like too many strong flavors vying for the top note.

  The woman in red appeared and leaned over him in a way that reminded me of Penny fawning over you, but this woman was young and beautiful. She gestured to her watch and looked up at the long snake of queue forming behind me. Felix waved her away impatiently and rolled his eyes at me as if to say he was so in demand, what could he do? The customer behind me was already pushing two copies of Wolpertinger Dreams toward his erect pen.

  I slipped away and heard a cackle from the corner of the room and saw a crowd of young girls laughing at a particularly phallic snake sculpture gripped by a disembodied hand, painted lurid pink. I wanted to scream; there were too many people around me now.

  I knew if I didn’t get outside, the creatures would hound me. Their souls would launch upon me like locusts devouring a field clean of its crop. The pestering sound of creatures wanting their souls to be freed grew louder and louder. Was no one else aware of it? How did they expect me to help them when they were already dead and unanimated? Just because I could hear them didn’t mean I knew how to help them be free.

  I hadn’t drunk enough water all day, and the combination of dehydration and the heat from all those living bodies seemed to tire me out. I felt like a mermaid that had been on land too long. I looked at my hands, all shriveled up and dried out between the webs of my fingers, scaly like a bird’s feet. A chicken or crow, I thought. I could feel the pulsing in my head and looked around for some reprieve, but everywhere I tried to focus I saw the eyes of the exhibits on me. There was the croco-bird looming down, swaying slightly on his metal harness from the ceiling; the wolpertinger was leering with cold eyes; the two headed doe-fish pleaded with me to rip it apart and return its body parts to the river or fields. I wasn’t sure what reality was anymore. This world or the next. Both placed demands on me of equal magnitude. My failing physical body surged with guilt; my fragile fractured mind was attacked by their lingering presence. I needed to get away.

  Every way I turned, people pressed against me, nudging and muttering, shooting me odd looks, their breath vinegary near my nostrils, a woman’s hair flicking my face, a shriek, a backpack swung and bashed against my arm, the hot dense mumble of the swarming crowd, no way out, no direct route to the exit, no direction, heart thumping, shallow breaths, limbs like stone, animal eyes staring at me, pleading with me to rip them free, my ears thick with pulsing blood, nausea washing upwards to my throat, sweat trickling down my spine as the crowd swarmed, bustled, heaved like an undercurrent, spinning, tripping, stumbling. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe. Where were you? What was happening to me? I was falling. Falling. Darkness.

  “Scarlett?” A voice greeted me in the dark.

  Rhett? Felix?

  “Scarlett? What happened?”

  I forced my heavy eyelids to open and you were there looming over me, smoothing your hand across my brow like a concerned parent. A semi-circle of legs was around me but you waved everyone away with your arm.

  “Let’s go home,” you said, lifting me effortlessly to carry me away from the madness like a rag doll over your shoulder. I raised my weary head to see Felix watching your back as you parted the crowd like a beast crashing through the jungle.

  In the following days we did not speak about the exhibition, but I could not forget the way you looked at Felix and the way he looked at you. Those endearments that once drew me to you, like the way you chewed the edge of your moustache, seemed to irritate me and enflame me, but sometimes just a look from you evoked a sexual pull that I couldn’t control. The way I would devour my food with my hands like a wild thing seemed to arouse you too. All these emotions surfaced, I am sure, because of that meeting with Felix. My mood swings seemed to fuel them all the more. How much further could I push you until you broke? That was a reason to loathe myself, over and over again.

  I felt that you had been overlooked, so I was resentful of Felix’s seemingly easy path to recognition while you slogged away with such determination and precision. It was self-inflicted loneliness. Pride was always your
biggest enemy. But there was a synergy between his artwork and your own. I noticed it even then. I didn’t question it, though, because I was infatuated with you. Please believe me, my darling Peppercorn, I can tell you only the truth.

  I never told you, but later that month I visited Felix. He said I had good boundaries, but I don’t believe I managed them at all well. His behaviour was outrageous, touching me on my lower back, steering me to his sofa, trying to feed me fresh cherries by dangling them near my lips. I wanted to devour them, but his incessant questioning about your work made me suspicious. He reminded me of a leech, I guess, drinking on its host’s blood, until gorged, it fell off, and slept. I saw a look on his face when we parted that repelled me; it was a look of weakness. When he closed the door, I wiped away the residue of his goodbye kiss that he had planted on both my cheeks.

  I stomped away from his door treading on the snails crossing the wet path. Each footstep finding a sticky, filled shell that exploded ceremoniously between my shoe and the paving slabs. The soft innards bubbled up through the cracked, broken shards like foaming mouths of saliva. Felix said I was his muse. But all I ever wanted was to be your muse. Was I attracted to Felix or his creations?

  Nevertheless, as this was happening, I could not help but notice the birds were procreating in the hedgerows and my urgency to create also fired up the will to be close to you; you were my steady one, my fortress and safety net. You were my generous, attentive, self-assured, confident husband. Yet there we were after the exhibition, bickering, picking at faults with each other. Our moods, responses, attitudes, manners—all were scrutinized, both of us finding it impossible to reflect or accept one another for who we truly were.

  Doesn’t every life have major cracks in it? Some are easy to plaster over depending on who’s looking; some are just too obvious to be concealed by superficiality. I tried to mask my true feelings so I didn’t affect your creative flow. Did you notice me reassuring you when all I wanted to do was explore the gold deep within my shadow? You said I went too deep, as if this were a bad, harmful thing to do. Yet you were the one tinkering with the dark side. I judged you in an attempt to deflect from my own failings, and then I hated myself, over and over again. I even asked those pestering creatures for some clarification on what I should do. But they just confused me all the more, adding to my feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing. Felix made no effort unless it profited him in some way. What did he want with me? He pretended to be attracted to me, but I knew he didn’t understand me.

  Did you?

  One night I woke you as I clawed frantically at the covers. I told you I had dreamt of riding a bicycle, gripping handles which seemed too loose and unsteady. The handles detached and floated in mid-air like some cartoon sketch. I told you I was traveling too fast down a steep concrete slope and knew the brakes would not work. And the moment I woke was the moment I grabbed at the covers as if breaking my fall.

  This was a lie. What I really dreamt was this:

  I was a crocodile caught in a trap set by you. My hind quarters were being crushed by jaws of gold, and every movement I made to escape the pain and restriction bound me ever more tightly to the spot. So I clawed at the ground in front of me to drag myself free, only to find my feet could not grip. They were soft, floppy paws that would not react to my brain’s commands. I could not break free. I started crying out of frustration. I was going nowhere.

  Among these darker days I found my mood and energy lift as the clouds cleared and the temperature rose. I felt angry and resentful for even suggesting you should change the way you work, and part of me knows you only did it for me, not yourself. I know you said you were tired of the usual deer and game birds unceremoniously presented to you, but that was what you were good at. You could make a dead creature come alive. The rest was my idea.

  One day, when a bird flew at the window, I thought at first it was an accident, a misjudgment due to the heavy mist, but the third and fourth time was not something I could ignore. It was a hawk trying to break the glass. I was not used to such violence and it froze me for a moment, shocked by the recognition that something usually so silent and elusive should be in the foreground vying for my attention. If that’s what its intention was. I assume so, as I was the only one there to witness it. I remember thinking, It is anger, not fear, that drives the bird toward the glass with such ferocity. I felt it the way I heard the essence of creature’s moods infiltrating my head. It was a physical sensation starting with the pulsing at my temples.

  “What do you want?” I shouted at it, worried it would kill itself or break the window. For a moment it actually stopped, alighted on a nearby branch, and looked at me, panting heavily, its feathers fluffed up and its beak open. “Why are you hurting yourself?”

  But it flew off and left me asking my reflection the same questions. I had no answers either. I did not recognize my own image. My hair had grown long and wild, way past my shoulders. I looked so thin that my eye sockets seemed to sink further into my skull. And my cheeks were sharp like carved ice.

  Christmas Day—Today

  After lunch

  Eggnog flavored with bourbon, you say, to satiate our need for warmth. Gardens, hills, fields, trees enshrouded with un-melted snow. The Big Freeze they keep saying, after the Big Flood. They tempt us with temperatures such as one degree centigrade, a tropical figure. Not the minus-fifteen that it has been. Rail, road and air stand still. Passengers wanting to reach their families are stuck fast, in limbo, advised to stay indoors, not to travel.

  The milky liquid in my cup cools, and a skin forms on its surface.

  A rabbit fur hat, wrapping paper, crackers, holly and ivy, a log fire, music to sidetrack our frozen minds. A dull, grey, uncertain block of a day hangs around us. Did I believe that I had any control over my destiny? Like a hidden relic in a junk shop, I feel undiscovered. Am I your treasure? Do you intend to show me off like an exhibit?

  June

  It was pretty obvious that he’d turn up around June. Glastonbury Festival drew the crowds, and Rhett was a seasoned festival goer. He’d like to think he was a free spirit, but really, he was just no good at settling in one place. But I guess even wanderers have to settle somewhere eventually. You knew I was Rhett’s only family.

  He stood with his backpack resting on his feet—his worldly possessions in a beat-up, dirty bag. He had grown a gingery beard that didn’t match his thin face; it was too bristly and unevenly spread. It looked pubic. But he was my brother and I loved him.

  “Forgot how fucking dreary this country is!” These were his first words as I walked up to greet him at the coach station. A scrawny woman was draped over him like an unsavory rash. Both of them badly needed to wash their hair. A stale smell wafted off them like the insoles of a well-worn pair of trainers.

  “This is Andreea,” he pronounced it Andraaaya as if she were made of liquid. Andreea did one of those smiles that seemed restricted to her jaw. She revealed boxy, uneven teeth. There was a hardness about her even though she was painfully thin. Thinner than me. “She’s from Romania.” Romaaneea.

  Why did he do that? He picked up girls as if they were offered to him as part of a universal buffet. His girlfriends always had the same worn, aimless look. Rhett was not handsome, but I’d say he had striking features, like myself. He was better looking as a child, with strawberry blonde hair and fresh ruddy cheeks from running about a lot. He smoked too much, but had taken a liking to hot yoga, which made his frame wiry and lithe. I couldn’t get used to his beard so kept trying to touch it to see if it was just stuck on like a bad collage. Andreea—Andraaaya—didn’t say much but kept sucking the ends of her hair in a way that made me feel queasy.

  “I take it you’re going to the festival?” I felt the warmth from his body, his gangly arm wrapped around my waist as we walked to the car. It had been ages since we’d spent any time together. For all his faults, I loved having him near.

  “Yeah, we’ve got volunteer passes,” he said, “which means free
tickets to the festival for a few shifts, holding the space in the dome of transcendental masters.”

  “The what?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he grinned at me. “Have you got any grub, sis? We’re starving.”

  He couldn’t believe where I lived. The last time I saw him, he’d crashed on the sofa at my studio. It must’ve been just before he left for Spain, and shortly after dumping some other girl by text. I don’t remember her name, but she kept phoning him incessantly, weeping and howling like a banshee. I think she was French. Anyway, he said that was why he’d ditched his old number. He thought he had let me know his new one. All that mattered was that we were back together. I just wish he hadn’t brought anyone with him; there was never much chance to talk about old times when someone was lingering.

  “Landed on your feet here, sis,” he said, as he saw the expanse of garden on our drive up toward the house, your workshop nestled beneath the trees. He was always quite impressed by size, even though he pretended he liked to live a simple life with only a backpack to store his belongings.

  As he entered the lounge, Rhett saw the crabbit and the swoodle among the later creations that had spilled over from your workshop to our home. We’d not had much chance to sort them after the exhibition, and you liked to keep them on display so they didn’t go musty. I knew I had to do something about them sooner rather than later; the house looked like a natural history museum of specimens discarded by evolution. They looked like the rejects from The Island of Dr. Moreau, stitched-together legs and bodies from disparate species. Having them in such close proximity was affecting my physical health too. I was finding it difficult to breathe most days.