by Polly Hall
You know how I love you, my darling, but I must be free.
The sweet burn of fire reaches the skin of my back. It catches my new tail and sizzles and curls as the horse hairs are eaten up, turning the white to black. My skin is peeling back to reveal the metal body shape upon which you have mounted my skin. My wings are alight. I see flaming angels fall from the sky. You flap at my body to try and extinguish me with your jacket like a maddened ringmaster. But Rhett appears and bulldozes you from behind. He is smaller than you, but fast, and knocks you to the ground. Before you can scramble up, he is trying to lift me. I am lighter now than when I was living, stuffed with wood wool. My body is no longer my own, stitched together over wires that you have fashioned so perfectly to match my body shape. Out through the flames we go, Rhett holding me over his shoulder, as if I am a precious mannequin being transported to a designer store.
You are coughing and crawling behind us, but Rhett moves quickly. He reaches the door and carries me outside into the wintery abyss. Surrounding us is a lake of ice with the ragged gash where Rhett has powered a heavy motorboat through the thinner patches. He drops my smoldering body into the boat and jumps in. The mists are set around us; it has become dark quickly. In the distance, Christmas lights dance in the air.
Rhett is fumbling with his phone. “Police,” he shouts. “He’s killed my sister . . .
“No, I said police . . . and fire brigade . . .
“Yes—a fire . . .
“. . . the house with the moat . . . flood . . .
“What? No, I don’t have the fucking postcode . . .
“God knows who else he’s killed . . .
“Yes of course I’m in imminent danger . . .
“Look—she’s definitely dead—just send someone—he’s dangerous . . .”
“Come on, come on.” Rhett is now swearing at the boat, pumping the throttle, but the cold has stalled it and the water has started to harden like icing on a cake. He hits the motor with the palm of his hand and swears again, a strangled cry coming out of his mouth. “Why is this happening?”
I want to hold him. I want to caress my twin brother. But I’m an immobile beast, the bride of Frankenstein’s monster. He shifts my stiff legs, covered in the soiled silk of my wedding dress, and tries again to start the motor, but it merely judders. The fire has affected me. I feel untethered, lighter, but not yet free enough to float away from my body. Something draws me back. It is you.
When I said I found something in your workshop, you knew what it was, didn’t you? The end of your finger. You had kept it as a token, preserved in a jar of formaldehyde, hidden behind all your other jars. A slice of it attached to my own expired body completed our connection. You gave a dead part of yourself to me upon my death, and my part of the bargain would be to live with you for eternity. I saw those labels too, in your workshop, attached to the swan’s wings and the horse’s tail—For Scarlett! X—in your bold, sweeping handwriting, the aptly tied luggage labels dangling from them as if they were destined for someplace faraway. You always knew where we were headed, and, I suppose, so did I. It was the “X” that touched me most, as if you were actually writing a gift tag and sealing it with a kiss.
Rhett gives up on the boat and hauls me back out and onto his shoulders. He is grunting and puffing in the cold night air. There is a loud bang as the door slams against the frame and you appear. The sound of the operator still squeaks from Rhett’s phone, “Hello? Hello? Can you tell me what’s happening now?”
“Stop there, Rhett,” you say. A regal steadiness oozes from you. Rhett continues to stumble toward where the driveway once was, now covered with a long sheet of ice, toward the silhouette of low hills in the far distance.
“I said stop!” There is something in the tone of your voice that makes Rhett turn and he sees your shotgun pointed level with his chest. Dark clouds of smoke billow from the doorway, and I hear the hiss of the fire as it takes hold of the fabric of the house. The creatures must all be burned by now, their souls freed from the stitched terror of their afterlives. I am envious of them as they rise above me. A Chinese water deer leaps away up into the night sky like a magical Christmas reindeer. All the parts that have been consumed by the fire are free. Yet they soar and swoop around me before dissipating into the night sky. I watch them go and feel like weeping with joy. My half-life is clinging to this sorry state, a charred body with grey smoky wings, and a blackened tail clinging like some frayed piece of cotton from my behind.
“Turn her loose,” you say. I catch the slur in your voice as you gesture with your gun.
Rhett stares. I am still on his shoulders but feel the pull toward you. Even now I want you. I know what I have become. What you have made me. But I want you; I want you in all your glorious madness. Rhett lowers me to the ground. One of my wings angles awkwardly from my back. He stands up straight, looking down at my stiffened body, his brow furrowed, a streak of smoky ash across his cheek, like a boy playing at cowboys and Indians.
“Come on, then, if you’re going to shoot me. Want to stuff me as well, do you?”
“You don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand! You’ve killed her, you’ve killed my sister and done this to her. All this freaky stuff—” He rips at the half-detached wing and tears it from my back, launching it into the night toward the moat.
“No!” You watch a wing bounce away like a crashed kite.
“She’s dead, you bastard. Look—” Rhett gestures at my flaccid, hollow body, pale and broken on the lawn, and reaches for the other wing. He tugs sharply at it so white feathers strip off and start floating like snowflakes across the frost-hardened mud of the lawn.
“She’s not dead.” You walk slowly toward me. “My Scarlett can never die. Can’t you see? I’ve kept her alive. I found her in bed . . . the cold, pneumonia . . . It was too late but I had to try. Don’t you see? She can never die. Not like this. I couldn’t bear it. I love her more than life itself. You must believe me. I would never harm her.” All this comes out in a garbled impassioned plea.
Rhett shakes his head and looks at you while scrunching up his nose in that way he does when things don’t go his way. But you are right, my darling. I am not dead. You have kept me alive with your magical hands.
There is a light coming out of the fog and a pulsing, vibrating sound that hammers the air in thick waves. The sound echoes around the house, bouncing off the walls. You look up toward it, so does Rhett, and he takes his chance to attract attention by waving his hands over his head. You put your gun down as he runs after the helicopter waving at the beam of light as if it might lift him up to the heavens.
Then you are kneeling by my side. I sense your mortal earthiness as you effortlessly lift me and caress me. Won’t you join me, my love? I am slipping away from this limbo world. The fire has touched me, and I yearn to be released. You lift me so I am sitting on your lap and you cradle me in your arms.
The light is getting closer and swoops around us, picking up the smoke rising from the house, the flames licking like orange ribbons from the windows. Then the light finds us and the pulsing hum is above us. The waves of air push at us, and you lift me up and walk toward the ice.
“Stay where you are!” A loud, tinny tannoy echoes from the light in the sky. The helicopter hovers and tries to catch us in its beam, but you keep moving steadily, striding toward the expanse of ice that begins where the bottom of our drive ends.
“Keep away from the ice. Move away from the ice.”
But you keep walking. Me in your arms. The helicopter circles and catches us again in its spotlight.
“Bring her back,” Rhett is shouting at you above the noise of the helicopter. He aims at your back and fires a shot from your gun. You are blown flat onto your face, and my body tumbles from your arms. I search for your soul in the darkness which weaves its winnowy fingers around my wreckage. My own twin has shot you, laid you out cold on this Christmas night. We lie together. Shall we die together?
<
br /> Rhett peels me from beneath your heavy body, swearing and spitting and sinking to his knees.
“Scarlett,” he whispers, “my sweet sister—what have you become?”
If I had a heart it might beat faster at his soft words, but it is you who I yearn for with every cell of my remaining skin.
Rhett looks to the sky as if the answers may fall upon him. Is this retribution, an eye for an eye? Rhett kicks at your boots as you lie still. I want to kick him. He drags me with him like a child possessive of a toy. He is skirting round the edges of the lawn away from the climbing flames that spit and churn from the burning house. We are heading back toward the boat, the warmth of his breath making patterns in the cold air. Then he lurches backwards, tugged from behind. You have risen again. Your arm compresses Rhett’s windpipe as you hook it under his chin.
“Thought you’d got me, eh lad?” you rasp in his ear, saliva dripping from your bottom lip. He tries to unhook your arm, but you are stronger. “Knocked me off my feet there. Not a bad shot, eh?”
“How?—Why?” Rhett splutters as he struggles to break free.
He tries to hit your head from behind, but in a single movement you crush his arms against his chest as if you are hugging him. His feet kick toward your shins, but you wrap your leg around him and push him easily to the ground. He lies there rubbing his neck, looking up at your towering bulk.
“I don’t want to fight you,” you say. “I just want to be with Scarlett. Can’t you just leave us alone?” I sense the fire in your eyes as you lock your gaze upon him.
Rhett is rubbing his neck and looking up at your shining, demonic face as if you have transformed into one of the creatures he has burned.
“B—but I shot you. How did you . . . ?”
“Corn.” You grin to reveal blood on your teeth.
“What? You are totally insane.”
But I knew what you were talking about. The cartridges were filled with corn for the wassailing all those months ago at Penny’s. How time flies. And here we are, fighting in the muck and flame of Yuletide armed with grains of corn. Rhett leaps up and tries to punch you, but in a reflex movement you backhand him and he falls to the ground without a whimper.
You lift me tenderly, nuzzling your face into the charred remains of my neck, and walk steadily toward the dip where the running water normally meets the road. A loud crack signals a weakness. Then another, as the ice takes our full combined weight. You stumble and slide but manage somehow to stay upright. All around us, the frozen landscape seems to speak to us.
You step further onto the ice. The helicopter moves off swiftly and arcs back round to catch us in its spotlight. You stand still and raise your head to the heavens. The ice can no longer hold us both, and you crash through, feet first. I feel you gasp as we are sucked under by the cruel fingers of icy water. You hardly fight it. Yet your final breath feels like a hurricane to me.
Your body grows heavy with liquid. I am still entwined around you; my head resting on your shoulder, my wedding dress draped like a fabric anchor around your legs.
And we sink as only lovers can.
Twilight
“Scarlett. My favorite name.”
Earth. Air. Water. Fire. Ice.
Death and rebirth in magnificent cycles.
A promise made. The power of intent.
“Will you stay with me—ever after?”
“Always, my darling Peppercorn, always.”
Acknowledgments
There were many people who encouraged me to write this book or nodded enthusiastically when I told them what I was writing, so I would like to thank the following:
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The MA Creative Writing cohort who offered feedback and constructive criticism throughout the early stages.
Lucy English, my MA manuscript tutor, who guided me through the dark, dirty scenes and told me to write a book I didn’t want my mother to read! (Sorry mum!)
For putting up with my madness as I wrote the first draft, Rich Gregory.
For gently championing my writing from way back, Genista Lewes.
Thanks to Mr. Henry Royston Wensley, for being my writing buddy and mentor. I will always be your No. 1 Fan!
To everyone in the Somerset Writers Group, especially Dixie Darch, for your inspiration, laughter, fun and the most delicious home cooked delights (fuel for writers!).
To Mr. Rose, who showed me a cabinet full of false eyes, among other treasures, in his fascinating taxidermy workshop.
To Dave Webber for showing me the Somerset countryside through your eyes.
To Dorothy (Dee) Pochon for generous support and encouragement to be myself and live my life.
Many thanks to the Art Bank Café in Shepton Mallet for welcoming me into your quirky love nest of arty delights, feeding me cake and listening to my stories.
To all my friendsI am blessed to have you in my life.
Thank you, Mum, Dad and Stu for your unconditional love.
And most of all thanks to the team at CamCat Publishing, especially my editor, Helga Schier, for making this such an exciting and enjoyable process. Thank you for making my dreams come true.
For Further Discussion
What do you think of hybrid taxidermy?
Give the story an alternate ending.
Create a playlist of songs to complement the book.
If you were making a movie of The Taxidermist’s Lover who would you cast?
Why do you think the author includes references to Gone With The Wind, Thunderbirds and other popular culture?
About the Author
Polly Hall has been published in various anthologies and won competitions for her poetry and flash fiction. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. A longstanding member of a Somerset writers’ group, she also teaches creative writing workshops. The Taxidermist’s Lover is her debut novel.
She lives next to a cider factory with her cat, Vishnu. You can find out more about her writing projects at www.pollyhall.co.uk or @PollyHallWriter.
Author Q&A
Q. How did you get the idea for The Taxidermist’s Lover?
A. There used to be a museum of curiosities, at Jamaica Inn in Cornwall, featuring Walter Potter’s taxidermy. The stuffed animals were dressed in clothes and portrayed in anthropomorphic scenes such as a kittens’ wedding, rats smoking and gambling, and thousands of other animals and birds in tableaux form. Sadly, the collection got split up and sold off in 2003 but I remember visiting as a child on our family holidays to Cornwall. Most of it was really bad taxidermy but the bizarre creations really appealed to me. There are some fantastic taxidermy artists out there who I greatly admire: Polly Morgan, Kate Clark, Iris Schieferstein, to name a few.
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Q. Water and fire feature heavily in the book. Is this intentional?
A. Yes. I guess this relates to transformation, and the elements of water and fire represent this so beautifully. Water can destroy or cleanse, fire can destroy and cleanse. Taxidermy, love, water, fire are all ways to transform one thing to another.
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Q. Why did you choose to write about taxidermy?
A. Taxidermy is fascinating and provokes a strong response—you either like it or hate it. Preservation of animal skin has been around for centuries. The word taxidermy comes from the Greek taxis (to arrange) and dermes (skin). It has evolved as an art form for traditional cultural objects and during the height of its popularity in the Victorian era to display wealth and prowess by modeling animals in their natural habitat; effectively domesticating the wilderness was the height of fashion. The advancement of taxidermy continued to include some of the most famous exhibits in museums, depicting a lifelike representation of the animal. Popularity waned in the mid-20th century but has reignited as an art form that not only employs trophy specimens but hybrid taxidermy, where different species and synthetic elements are combined to create new creatures. Humans’ preoccupation with death plays a part in the fascination too.
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Q. How does the place you write about influence the characters?
A. I chose to set The Taxidermist’s Lover on the Somerset Levels because it is a place I know well and I never tire of its natural beauty. The moor is made up of wetlands and peat marshes, an area of biodiversity and conservation.
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There is a sleepy ethereal quality here which comes from the moorland’s relationship with water; it shifts like the tides or the cycles of the moon or the seasons. Although, the flood in the book is fictional, it is based on real events in living memory when many areas of Somerset were affected by the rising flood waters. Living alongside the tidal rivers and estuaries of South West England involves a constant monitoring and evaluation of the changes in environment. I think this clearly indicates the fragile and oftentimes devastating inter-relationship between man and nature.
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The county of Somerset, in England, is also known as the Land of The Dead and has many mythical and spiritual connections, so it corresponds with the dramatic irony of taxidermy representing life through dead things. Because the book covers the whole year from January to December, I wanted to represent all seasons through the experiences of Scarlett, the narrator, who is immersed in the changing landscape.