by Alex Pheby
Giorgio puts his hands in his pockets and walks on.
If there are hedgerows either side of the road, you hear animals long before you see them: cows and sheep. Birds have to be sought for – they are almost invisible through the tangle of twigs and branches even if the leaf cover has died off. Horses are tall enough to peer at you, but horses are rare round here. There are other walkers, but there is a pact that ensures that few words are ever spoken – an identification of the time of day – and that even those can be replaced with a nod. He is alone.
Except for the gnat.
He is wearing a wax jacket since thunderstorms are predicted as soon as the day cools, and he hates carrying things. His shirt is soaked down the back and under the arms, but he is stubborn and several glasses worse for wear. He suspects, though he doesn’t know it, that the gnat is somewhere on his jacket, in a fold. Where the collar is, there are places that are dark, shadowed and cool. It is probably in there. He runs his fingers around, but a gnat is wise to this. It watches for objects that come within its range of vision and launches when it recognises one, landing again once the object has disappeared.
These tiny creatures live at a faster pace than he does. He is slow and lumbering, a great moving mountain to this agile speck. If it sees his hand coming it is at the pace of a glacier carving out a valley, or the shifting of the tectonic plates – easy to avoid, no bother to it at all. Giorgio is cleverer though, and if he puts his mind to it he could trap it, with luck: scare it with one hand, slap it with the other, and have an end to it. But putting his mind to it is precisely what he does not want to do. It is hard to ignore something when one has to think of it. There will come a time when he has to do what he is avoiding – when he finds the gnat on the back of his hand, for example, biting at his skin – but this is not the time.
On hot days like this, when a thunderstorm is predicted, there is a build-up of pressure in the air. He is susceptible to it, feels it as a headache, as an encroaching irritability, and these are effects that too much or too little wine has on him, too. If he notices these symptoms he will look for external justifications, since he does not like to think of himself as sensitive, or drinking too much, and these justifications will either be to do with the weather or the tension induced by not thinking of things he does not wish to think of. If he puts these feelings to the back of his mind they will build, like the electric charge builds in a thunderstorm, and when he sees Lillian later these feelings will find an outlet. As electric charge builds in a cloud the chances of lightning approach one hundred percent, and as his tension builds the same can be said. He’ll snap at some arbitrary flash point, and she will wonder what she has done.
She won’t have done anything.
The problem is this gnat.
The hedges are too high for him to see what is in the field behind them, but he imagines there is a horse in the field. He overheard, coming downstairs into a room where they were listening to the radio and drinking, other women describing Lillian as horsey. What they meant by this was that she has a long face, big teeth, and a tuft of dry hair for a fringe. There was some talk of her having whiskers like a horse does around its mouth, but even they admitted this was unfair. He doesn’t like to think of his lover as a horse, so he forgets what they said, but now when he sees a horse he can’t help but look for her face in its features. When he sees her, if he has seen a horse in the recent past, he can’t help seeing the features of a horse overlaid onto hers. This sounds comic, but he finds it infuriating – he is angry at the women who put the idea in his head, he is angry at himself for thinking it, and he is angry at her for looking like a horse, despite the fact that he had never noticed before.
If there is a horse in the field beyond the hedgerow this would undo whatever good work he had done in not thinking about how she looks like a horse, but now even the presence of a hedgerow over which a horse might look is edging horse thoughts into his mind.
As the humidity grows, the clouds precipitate out of nothing and the promised storm gathers above him. And always the gnat, hovering and unavoidable.
What is it that a gnat needs? What will it be satisfied by? Only his blood, clearly. It will drain him dry if it can. Its appetite for him is endless, as if it has no resources of its own to rely on and can only exist if it is within his presence. It can only breathe if it breathes his breath, can only find pleasure if it is through him. Why can’t it understand that he has his own life to lead now, independent of it, and that it is its constant presence at the periphery of things that is putting the mockers on everything? It is such a strain to have it constantly in the background, its needs to be understood, its behaviours to be dealt with, their shared history to be the defining condition of his life when he wishes to make something new of everything, to get out from under the yoke. If it doesn’t have a place in this new world, that is very unfortunate, but it is unavoidable. A man cannot be accompanied by his sister everywhere he goes. He is his own person and eventually the ties have to be cut. He knows it’s hard, but that’s no reason to make everything so difficult. A gnat can suck the blood of any host, and there is no shortage of hosts for it to buzz around. It should know that better than anyone.
Who knows, it might prefer someone else in the end.
The road leads down into the town, and there Lillian will be waiting, expecting him to have arrived earlier than he is going to. She will not be pleased to find he’s been drinking, or that he hasn’t broached the very important issue he was supposed to have broached with his father, and that he is going to have to return to town before the week is up. She will not be pleased with any of this, and it seems as if a constant state of notbeing-pleased is her usual mood nowadays. So unlike the way she used to be. Perhaps this is the way of things with older women: once the excitement has worn off they become motherly, and a man has to spend all his time engaged in the occupation of pleasing her and doing what he is told and playing second fiddle to another man. Yes, this works quite well – her husband is the father, she is the mother, and he is the son who must do what he is told. Quite the stable.
He is just like the old sots, walking at a drunken snail’s pace to avoid a bollocking. But what’s the alternative? He could go home. Confess everything? That would certainly be one way to release the pressure. The storm will inevitably break and why not let it break there, in the place where so many storms have broken that thunder and lightning are the expected weather? The broken barometer in the hall always points to stormy. This is surely preferable to beating a married woman because she looks like a horse, and he has a headache, and she thinks she has the upper hand, and at some point you have to show these women who is boss. There is no arguing with the back of a hand, or a fist to the guts since you can’t bruise her horsey face since the husband would see and we can’t have that.
Would he do that?
Why not? This is the prevailing orthodoxy in matters of this kind, so much so that a woman who is not beaten considers her lover effeminate, and providing he does not make too much of a meal of it, and saves it for special occasions, it can be an aphrodisiac, particularly if he handles the apologies well.
But the gnat. There is always the gnat. It flies so unpredictably that there is no telling what effect an early return and stories of affairs with older married women, known to them all, will have. There will be bloodsucking, that much is certain, but affectionate or angry? When the storm has died down, what will be the aftermath?
He has been standing halfway down the hill for five minutes, easily, and while the sky isn’t lowering it is no longer as bright as it was. If he wishes to take the train back he will need to do it soon, since the service is infrequent. Otherwise he’ll end up sleeping in a hayloft.
Perhaps this will be one of the days when Lillian will surprise him with an easy cheerfulness that will wash him free of all sin. That is possible. She is not predictable herself, this woman, and she has a complicated life of which he has no real understanding: the husband, the bu
siness affairs, the friends; they are all unknowns to him. What’s to say that these unknowns haven’t combined to put her in a wonderful mood, and she will simply smile and rush him off to bed, as she often has done? Who is he to question her motives at times like this? One should never look a gift horse in the mouth.
This thought almost makes him laugh, but more it accentuates his headache, which is building as the clouds darken, by degrees, and he turns to face back up the hill.
No one likes to backtrack – it shows weakness. There is an exhaustion inherent in going over old ground, but if he carries on into town and then decides to return he’ll have even more backtracking to do, and probably in the rain. Can he let the weather decide? Test the wind direction with a wet finger and follow it? To walk to an uncertain fate with the wind at one’s back, there is a romantic aura to that, while struggling against the oncoming…
When did he become so ridiculous? Women, they drive you insane! If this was sport he’d do what had to be done. When he has the ball he knows in which direction to run it to the touch line, and he does it without thinking. There are rules. Who knows what rules women set for men, in their heads? This is the source of all his problems, the reluctance of women to make themselves clear, though they know clearly enough when something has been done wrong.
For heaven’s sake… He goes down into the town, walking with quick urgent strides, setting the church tower in his sights and making for it, manfully, having a mission and executing it. In his head, behind the determination to get where he is going, he knows that he can veer off at the last. He can find a place to drink, get someone to drive him to the station. So he has not really taken a decision, but this is something he does not admit and will not admit until he sees the door of the cottage she has rented for them. In the meantime, he feels better to be doing something.
Since he is distracted, the gnat makes its way over the wax jacket from the elbow where it has been lodged in a crease. The breadth of his shoulders is a walk in itself for something so small. The swells of the hillsides through which its host walks have been tilted vertically, and the land ripples like a sheet on an unmade bed.
When it reaches the collar it meets the wisp of curls that grows where the barber’s blade ends, and there is a deep and shadowed canyon formed between the neck and the jacket. Down there, in secret, it can feed. It pierces the skin, raising a welt, but in private, since the spike it inserts is anaesthetising. It is only when this wears off that he will feel anything, and only then if he is not engaged in activities that distract him. If Lillian pulls him in by the hand, smiling, barely letting the door open, since, as he finds out, she is entirely naked behind there, he will not notice a gnat’s itch until he has scratched an itch of a different sort, upstairs on the bed. The bedroom has a faintly old-fashioned quality about it even as it attempts to be neutral and modern – there is still a white enamel jug there, and a white enamel basin in which that jug rattles as they wrestle together on the bed. The gnat makes its way from his neck down the hill range of his spine, the tickling of its feet against the small fine hairs of his back so slight that it is impossible for him to notice it.
At intervals it inserts its proboscis, if it has one, into his skin, in spite now, since it is full of blood. When he is in the bath later, leaning back into Lillian, both of them facing the taps, she will run a finger over the welts in turn, joining the dots into an image made from histamine response. She will comment on them, and whatever sense that he had made the right decision, here on the hill, will be undermined by this bringing to his attention of things he was hoping to ignore.
Regardless of what happens this afternoon, the whole mess is coming to an end, if he has anything to do with it. It is all too complicated, and he will find a way to reduce that complication.
For some men, all they want is peace, for things to progress in a logical fashion without too much thought. They hate rousing themselves against endless crises. There are ways for men to find peace for themselves in their choice of women, of where they live, of their profession. He has control over these things and he’ll damn well exercise it, since what is the alternative? He has seen what it is like to live under the rule of women, and while he feels the temptation to live his life like his parents lived theirs, he has seen what it does to people. He is determined it will not do it to him.
Domestic life is like a war, factions struggling for victory, innocents sacrificed to the greater good. Daily battles, territory won and ceded. Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles. Lovers. Even animals. It is a war he has determined to win and there are always casualties in war: boys, girls, soldiers, animals, dancing girls.
My colleague stepped back, placed his lamp on the floor in front of him, and made one slow inhalation. This done, he buttoned his jacket, and returned to the other room, where the rope was still hanging. He shouted up through the gap that one of the guides should return to the camp at a run and fetch Mr Pfeffer, the gentleman who had made our travel arrangements out from England and on whom we had come to rely for the various practicalities of the expedition.
I was grateful to my colleague for this – whatever else, he was meticulous and calm in a crisis. I listened to him as he tried to make himself understood in shouts, first in English, then in French, and then in his very basic Arabic, and there was a comedy in this that undercut the pain in my stomach. While I listened I let my eyes rest on a shebti statuette three or four inches high that had been placed near the sarcophagus. I don’t know why – I have a daughter and I thought it might make a good gift? – I slipped it into my pocket. It was of a soldier or bodyguard – someone who might protect the corpse in her journey through the dangerous hinterlands of the underworld.
‘I smite her for her mother, so that she bewails her. I smite her for her consorts’
Over the heart is bound a green stone amulet in the form of the resurrecting scarab beetle. Onto this amulet is carved the name of the deceased.
THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
LES ATELIERS DU VIEUX COLOMBIER, PARIS, SUMMER 1927 (CONT.)
Up close these toys were odd in the vagueness of their detail. The single daub of the ballerina’s hair, which from a distance barely drew the attention, was, up close and reached for, stroked, so hard and uniform, so raised like the meniscus that forms on liquid in a tube, that it was difficult to read as hair at all. Similarly the eyes: lacking whites, lacking irises, two huge and dilated pupils that stared. And so the bear. So sparsely grown was its fur that it seemed rugose and mangy like an old street dog, matted about the eyes. Only the ball was as perfect at this scale as it was from the other side, geometrical objects having the property of scaling without loss of definition.
The girl’s own hands, too. The fingers were fused, the nails forming one line of black across the fingertips, the thumb flush to the palm and unmoveable. Across the knuckles the hand folded in exactly the same way, right and left, as if perpetually sheltering a small flame. Where her arms met her dress there was a divide as her flesh ended and she became gingham. So, also, midway up the thigh, where her legs emerged from her white bloomers. Her shoes were perfect – glossy black with a brass button on each, a heel carved on the sole, and ankle socks. If her feet were cold now they didn’t feel it – there was nothing to feel but a steady calm contentedness, and on her face was a simple line in red that matched her cheeks.
The soldiers: they were gruff and correct in their orderliness, confident in their platoon, sure of their duties, unflappable, indefatigable. The bear, even in the indignity of his clowning, exuded a perfect at-one-ness with the world.
On the other side of the window the snow fell; it was visible in the colour and tone of the light that came through the panes, one row of them only, the nearest, while the others disappeared into a darkness the weak light couldn’t illuminate. On the ground, the snow would gather, certainly, and on whatever lay there, but that was hardly of any concern to her. Hardly any at all.
In one corner was a box, and o
n that was a latch so made that one would need to slide the bottom of a hook aside to allow the lid to come off. Should such things be of interest to a doll? Why not? What else, in fact, would be of any interest if not a painted box like that? To a doll like she was?
To the extent that she could move she did, tentatively and drunkenly as though she was suspended by strings and her puppeteer was inexperienced. Anatomy should have dictated that she remain still. She had no bones, no muscles, nothing, but movement was possible nonetheless. The clack of the porcelain shoes made music on the wooden window sill, and so did her hands. On all fours she climbed down until she found herself amongst the things of the shop. She crossed the train tracks, warily stepped over chains of coloured paper. She left a wake through the desiccated coconut that made the snow in this world. Any hunter worth their salt could have followed her, but she didn’t care. She made her way to a box which filled her attention so completely that, as she neared it, the soldiers coming to arms went entirely unnoticed.
Her hands were not made for fine discrimination in action, but the freeing of the clasp was achievable nonetheless. It was stiff and wanted to return to the locked position, and it slipped back to the beginning. With both hands it was easier. After a few attempts she brought the clasp around and left it hovering, suspended above the lock, balanced at the point to either side of which it would fall.
She moved to find some purchase, set her shoulders, and made to open the box, but there was no effort required. At her slightest touch the lid sprang up and back, and in the dark space it seemed to leave, a figure appeared, emerging at speed, almost instantaneous, gesturing with both arms high and a look of hilarious surprise on its face. It flopped forward, as if its back was broken.