Night comes. Keiko goes down to see if the creature is dead. It is not. Lying in a corner of the box it trembles when Keiko touches it, yet appears to have grown bigger. Returning to her bedroom Keiko feels fear. The new-found gaze of the beast, limpid and black, sticks to her heels, and climbs back up her leg to the damp nest from which it emerged.
Her sister is asleep, her right hand over her breast. Very softly she snores; from time to times her lips sketch a mimic sucking. Keiko looks at her as she sleeps. Terror so grips her muscles that she is without power to move. For a moment she imagines that she is no more than a skin stretched over a huge, formless, palpitating amoeba. The skin bursts; Keiko returns to protozoan disorder. Neither in the next few days nor in those that follow does Keiko tell her sister of this creature so unexpectedly come into the world. The box is hidden in a cupboard off the hall which her sister, Keiko thinks, will never open. Nor does she speak to anyone else of this unnatural birth. The desire is not lacking—but the words?
The first day, having left the house without so much as visiting her beast in its infancy (‘If only it would die!’) Keiko is gripped at midday by a nameless panic. Her sister will have found the animal, she will have taken it to the vet, the apparition will have been registered officially. ‘But this little monster,’ says Keiko grasping her hair in both hands, ‘this blood-sucking witchling wants our skin.’
Her sister has done no such thing. Returning at lunch time in a state of collapse Keiko takes her beast from its box. It has gained strength. Its fur, softer now, is growing out light red. It has no teeth as yet; nor, so far as Keiko can tell, has it any inclination to cry.
Keiko returns to the garden. The sky is uncertain. The creature, probably, is puling and twisting in the darkness of the cupboard, far from the woman who gave it birth. Keiko likewise is restless. She would like to go to bed, to sleep—no, she goes out again to work. In the street she stops, a dart planted under her heart. What is the beast doing in the dark? What is in its mind? How is it nourishing itself? Has it perhaps crept back unobserved to its nest, and is it devouring Keiko from within?
II
The second night of her strange calamity Keiko falls asleep numb with fear. Her sister is away in Yokohama till the end of the week. In the hall close to the cupboard where the creature is living out its agony there hangs a smell of sweat turning to gangrene. But Keiko, terrified of finding the creature more vigorous, provided now with claws and teeth, will not open the door. She cooks spaghetti, sits up late watching television, allows a dark languor to turn her bowels to water; then goes out, vacillating, into the garden, breathes the air, puts off the moment of going to bed. The moment comes all the same. And Keiko wakes up in the middle of the night, a weight on her chest, in her mouth a taste of tainted food. By the light of her bedside lamp she sees on the skin of her ankles and calves the marks, hardly darker than the surface of her skin, of the greedy lips of the creature now launched at last upon the world.
She gets out of bed, rigid from head to foot. The animal is not in her bedroom. It has escaped out of the cupboard, that is all, that is as much strength as it has acquired. Keiko searches for it all through the house, cupboards, attic, under the furniture, and in the little garden. The beast has returned, Keiko prays, suddenly furious, to its foul beginnings. Through the hour that follows, seated in the chair she often leaves leaning against the wall of the house, she listens to the thunder of the motorway and the stray sounds of the neighbourhood. Two or three houses away a raucous discussion breaks out between students; somewhere else they are trying to start a car; a small dog yaps. Keiko recalls how her elder brother (he has been in the north for two years) went out into the garden to sleep under just a blanket. ‘It was a starry sky,’ thinks Keiko, ‘a night that no one could fear.’ Vain memories; the fear returns even though the sky is clear and the garden small and without hiding-places. Keiko sees passing shadows denser than they should be. Going back into the drawing room she seats herself before her mother’s shrine and addresses to her a useless prayer. What can she, dead as she is, do against this beast that is now on the loose? Keiko looks at its scratches on her legs; no, the beast is not in the land of the dead.
Perhaps it has been run over by a car, or perhaps, this is her secret hope, it has drowned in the sewers. Her sister is back from Yokohama. The marks fade away. Keiko spends a night at the Hotel Vukuran in a red bedroom with her lover, who is a divorcé living in Kamakura. But although he strokes the underside of her breasts and works upon her tenderly, Keiko bites her lips and weeps tears of misery when his back is turned. The passage of the beast has seared what for the time being she calls her inner parts. From the window of the room nothing can be seen except one of the walls surrounding the commercial centre, and to the right of it, the end of a neon sign which Keiko deciphers and reconstructs as ‘Tobacco Baruder’. ‘The beast knows, it smells the fire,’ thinks Keiko, squeezing her legs, ‘it knows where to find me.’ The question keeps recurring: has the creature come back to rest in the girl’s womb? Is it not consuming her in an evil feast, inch by inch?
‘I have hurt you,’ whispers the man, seeing Keiko arched up, with her veins standing out. ‘It’s not that at all’, Keiko would have liked to say, shrugging her shoulders and breathing slowly to calm the frantic beating of her heart. She stays silent. The man, not without uneasiness, takes her in his arms again. She suffers less this second time. The man, as is their usual custom, goes off to take the early train, leaving her asleep. At about seven o’clock, before going to work, she spends a long time washing her pubis and the lips of her vagina. She strives with the aid of a mirror to see what has been scorched. Nothing. Then the creature, whether it has ventured to creep back into Keiko or is leading a half-wild existence in the marginal areas about the town, falls slowly into oblivion.
III
Comes November. Keiko returns home one evening by Meguro, along the river which laps coldly against its enclosing walls. She looks at the movement of the water under the trees. Her fear returns, she could not say why. The river flows unbroken. She halts on the bridge, and her eyes sweep round in search of what can have awakened a fresh alarm. She enters the supermarket at the station to buy octopus and instant noodles; then takes the metro with her anxiety unabated, though it is still broad daylight. Her sister being again in Yokohama the house is empty and dark. Keiko switches on a light in every room and mortise-locks the door, something she ordinarily does not think to do. For the last four months she has been carrying a child of which the man from Kamakura is the father. She learnt this only this morning; he does not yet know. In point of fact she asks herself with an increasing melancholy if she has to tell him. Not that she is afraid he will cease to love her; rather, she thinks as she enters the garden, it is of the child that she is afraid. What will it be? At the bottom of the garden, which is bordered by three gloomy cedars, the darkness, into which she stares unthinkingly, causes her to tremble. She is now swimming in a sea of anguish which tosses and batters her. The darkness of the night is streaked with threatening lights. Waiting in shadow, more and more distinct, is a creature with the form of a fox—a vixen, rather, for its limbs are slender and its muzzle delicate. And this animal, the moist smell of which comes now to Keiko’s nostrils, growls and whimpers, and in the middle of its inarticulate cry pronounces with horrible distinctness the word ‘Mother’. Keiko puts out her hand towards the beast, motions angrily to drive it away. The word is repeated. She bolts into the house, slides shut the glass door and slams down the catch. The beast approaches. Keiko can see only the depths of its eyes shining with a yellow-orange light on the other side of the glass. She draws the curtain and sits with her face towards the animal she can no longer see. It scratches at the door and whines; then ‘Mother’ in a voice that is thick and inhuman.
Seated in the middle of the room Keiko hears the slightest sounds of the vixen. Her thumb and index finger at her throat count the beats of her heart, the pace of which subsides as the beast
grows calmer and withdraws. But that is not for long. It returns to rub against the fastening of the window, against the walls and shrubs; it barks. She ought to leave the house, but an insurmountable weariness has seized Keiko. She gets as far as the front door, which gives onto a small flagged courtyard; but at the moment when her fingers touch the door handle she knows that the beast is waiting for her, plaintive and ubiquitous.
She puts her hands flat on the door. ‘What do you want?’ she asks. ‘Mother,’ comes back the voice. ‘Never,’ replies Keiko, choking with horror and fury.
At the door into the garden on the other side of the house there are the same sounds, the same exchanges. ‘The night is multiplying the monsters around my house. I’ll wait for morning; then they’ll have disappeared.’
She goes upstairs to bed, her knees like cotton. She recalls for the first time without the veil of self-deception the day the beast was born. It is not so late. She calls her lover (he is on a business trip to Tomakomai) to talk to him about that child that is on its way; but there is no reply and she puts down the receiver without leaving a message—her broken voice, she is afraid, will betray her. She lies on the bed fully dressed, she unbuttons her shirt, she places both hands on her belly and her fingers discover again this object which more resembles something invertebrate than an embryo, an amorphous mass with languid movements floating in her bowels. She falls asleep in the familiar hollow of that jellyfish to which the darkness gives gigantic proportions; she returns to consciousness aching. The beast to which she gave birth in the past summer, now large and pale, is stationed at her threshold. It comes forward. Keiko backs off and falls to her knees, lips compressed. The beast has become the size of a wolf. Its hair is long, its limbs are powerful. It circles round Keiko and nudges her with its paws and muzzle, but without biting or scratching. Twice it forces its huge groin between its mother’s thighs, which it could have opened wide with a single snap of its teeth. As it does this it pants and grunts with pleasure. Keiko tries to rise to her feet. The giant vixen reseats her with a heavy blow of its back leg.
Presently the body of the girl is in the stomach of the beast, and her spirit flutters briefly between the separated pieces. The vixen leaves the house and stalks through the streets under the cover of the night. Sounds travel through its fur, skin and intestines, which the scattered parts of Keiko would still be able to hear: sounds of car-engines, of asphalt brushed by wheels, of human voices, but also of the puissant heart-beats of the animal, the creaking of its bones as it trots in the ditch beside the road. Then fallen leaves, the smell of decaying undergrowth, earth scraped by the monster. What had been Keiko succeeds at last in dissolving itself in the recesses of the gigantic beast, which, wearied by its running is now gone to rest in a hole in the forest. Winter is on its way. It will sleep and, alone of its species, bring forth young at the return of the spring.
I
LOST GIRLS
THE OLD TOWPATH
for Blandine Longre
I
ADA’S parents forbade her to follow the path which went from the city to the motorway and which crossed some makeshift marinas along the River Ouse, where moored only unlawful boats. On those boats dwelt fearsome, silent watermen, their mangy dogs and sullen wives. Girls had drowned there, body and soul. And when they had survived they had married down the towpath, a fate probably worse than death. They would skinny-dip at night in the brownish Ouse and offer their breasts to evil boatmen, who’d knock them down and bite them and make them bleed and moan—thought Ada. For there were children on the verminous bank: born of flesh, certainly, not of the muddy Ouse.
A weedy road begat the path, a weedy road that marked the end of the city; at night there roamed more rabbits than cats. The watermen would go after both—deftly stoning them for their flesh and fur, which they’d offer, amongst other spoils, at local jumble sales. The child Ada had lived first near the city walls and knew nothing of the waste land. Then a third sibling came—there was already a younger brother—and they all moved into a small house on Cross Lane. From Ada’s room one could see the city and the spires and the dark buildings of the main station. The unseen river ran on the left. Ada often dreamt of a swollen Ouse flooding the basement and the street; Red Cross barges would feed lost families.
Cross Lane was a rambling thoroughfare joining Great Southern Road and a gravelled lane that led to the city. Because of the traffic, young children were not allowed to play on its pavements and favoured the gardens, an intricate patchwork of smaller and bigger nations without common rules. Ada and her brothers would go to the Fishers but not to the Barnleys, who eventually moved out and were replaced by the childless Perkinses. Late at night, in summer, the languid Mrs Perkins would chain-smoke at the rear end of her garden and for hours chat on the phone with a man—her lover, said Juliet Fisher. The girls, hidden in the bushes of Juliet’s garden would linger in the warm, pungent vapours of Mrs Perkins's cigarettes, and listen to her uneasy banter. The Fishers moved as well—little Ada was devastated by the loss of Juliet: then came the Burnsides. He was never there; she, a harried, pallid Chinese woman, spent the whole day chasing her two fat toddlers. Ada ceased mourning Juliet and befriended the Sommerville twins. They lived in a big house not far from Great Southern Road. Ada then reached twelve and her body grew: a bad surprise, an undesired change. She was banned after this from the gardens—or rather she left in brooding exile. Games and chats would bore her; she locked herself in her room, in the basement—there was a playroom, a ping-pong table, crates and broken bicycles. She would lie on the floor and let bandits take hold of her porous mind. They would come at night, plunderers and killers that they were. Fires and earthquakes followed in their wake. The desirable floods she had designed in her early days had turned into dire streams; familiar corpses were flung at the foot of her bed. Half-sleeping, she saw their bloated faces and could even tell their names. Ada herself suffered a thousand defilements at the hands of the invaders. They would sit on her breast, break her bones and grasp at her eyes with blackened fingers. At night, before they came, she would sob and bite her own flesh—and wait. There were black and yellow marks on her arms but no one in the house ever saw them—she would wear long sleeves and dab her skin with ink and Mercurochrome. No one knew about her turmoils, which she slowly turned into painful ecstasies. The bandits who came and skinned her alive every night, the pirates who threw in the reddened river the disfigured bodies of her parents and siblings were more dear to her now than their hapless victims. She’d scratched her thighs raw to put them on her scent. The best blood they had was when she’d menstruated and painted her lips and cheeks in proud disgust.
***
The pirates lit huge suns on her bedroom ceiling and, laughing, fed on the dismembered Ada. Her orphaned soul turning into a grey-white owl, she fluttered around the stars and saw herself lying on the black, sharp rocks of a tropical shore—skinned by the avid seamen, roasted on the heated stone, swallowed muscle by muscle. The cannibals would leave her eyes for the end and banquet on her tongue and cheeks. Having been eaten alive a hundred times, Ada grew sick of the secret pirates. For nights and nights she struggled to expel from her room the innumerable guests she had so recklessly invited. She did not get her flesh back, though, or so she thought. Sea vultures and skuas had cleaned her melancholy bones when the assassins had left. In secret wonder she spied on her parents and siblings: why could not they see through her? I’m dead, I’m clean, I’m fleshless. She had been taught the art of lying, possibly her only ability, in the gardens, years ago: wiser girls had seen to that. When she eventually left her infamous bedroom, she tried and feigned to be alive. And soon she followed, although it was still forbidden, the path which led to the River Ouse and then, more or less, the track of the old towpath. One of the older girls was her cover. ‘I’m off to see Jenny’, would say the transparent Ada, throwing her parents off the scent. She would leave through the gate at the rear of the garden, as was her wont the summer before�
�a season dead and buried under heaps of Adas, boiled and quartered by their cruel friends. Jenny was a willing accomplice. She needed young Ada’s company to cycle along Cross Lane, till they reached the gravelled track which led to the city’s flowered battlements. At the crossroads Jenny met up almost every day with her first lover, a boy from Wellington Crescent. To begin with, Ada would sit nearby and watch them kissing till they were sweaty and dishevelled, eyes and teeth glinting. They dared not go any further. The flesh of their arms was throbbing. By the end of the summer Ada could not take their passionate giggling any more, nor the sight of their hungry tongues flashing from their lips, licking, mating, gloating. Thus she deserted the pair one afternoon, an undue rage distorting the beatings of her dead heart. Or was it really dead then? She knew better, she thought, and did not marvel at the amount of blood it now spluttered through arteries and veins. The path went along the high wall of an invisible estate—the mayor’s daughter’s, some said. Thugs had covered it with skulls and swastikas in smudged black paint. Ada, swallowing her childish tears, found an empty beer bottle and broke it against the wall. The gritty sound awoke her to clearer feelings. What came after was a wide open field of thick flowerless weeds with pale grey-green leaves, carved and powdered as by a fastidious hand. She did not walk through the field, fearing its multitude of thorns. Down the field, there stood two grim square houses, the watermen’s quarters. From the weeds shot up a large velvety dog, its tail between its legs, which neither growled nor barked. There was not a waterman in sight: all gone on the river on some errand, thought the disappointed Ada. The dog stopped a few yards from her, sat and leered at her, its chops curled up, panting in the manner of her vanished pirates. She walked past it, her body taut, her lips sealed, her hands tucked deep in the pockets of her skirt. I’m not afraid. The dog when she looked back was licking its soft hairless belly. Ada entered the shadows between the two shacks, lined with plastic bags, broken toys and tins, things the boatmen fished from the Ouse and sold together with rabbits’ skins. Further on, Ada reached the old towpath. On the other side, the bank was steep; two red cows languidly brushed off the flies. The path plunged into low, livid copses—the dusty shadow of the city ebbing with each step—and the boughs which gently scratched Ada’s head grew greener and brighter. The river was running nearby, solemn sparkles gleaming on its brown, oily surface. Ada saw a barge coming upstream; stricken by a sudden fear, she leapt behind a dark shrub. But on the deck of the barge which slowly went by her, there was not a living waterman, not a child, not even a dog. A small mast bore three red triangles fluttering merrily in the wake of the ship. The pirates are hiding, she thought; two hands seized her by the waist.
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