II
The hands were soft and quiet. They patted Ada’s back, her shoulders and nape. The unflinching Ada eventually eluded them and turned around. There stood a middle aged woman in a mauve dress, a waterwoman, judging by her dry features and tanned skin. ‘Will you come with me, girl?’ Ada tucked her arm under the woman’s. ‘I saw you alone on the path; I thought maybe you too were coming.’
Ada nodded. They walked in silence along the towpath, in a thickening wood the light of the sun reluctantly pierced. The woman strode behind Ada whose body was, under the effect of a dazzling fear, slowly filling with a black and thick liquid. Splitting her bones and guts, fear, though, was turning again into secret pleasure—this was when the woman reached out and touched her cheek, which she did a few times with incredulous awe.
Beyond the woods there was a broad field of undefined use, sheltered from the traffic and noise of the main road by a battlement of reeds. Animals had lived there, one could tell from the dried-up tracks. A huge shed, white walls adorned with wild, gaudy stories from the city, stood between the old towpath and the river’s bank. Never in her life had Ada walked so far from home. The irregular rumour of the traffic did nothing to slow the shrieking of her heart. ‘Ah, let us stop,’ said the woman in a low moan. Quick and silent, she overtook Ada. Her arms closed on the girl and she added, with averted eyes: ‘This is our church.’ Why be afraid? wondered Ada. I have already died a hundred times. Shivering, eyes dancing in their sockets, she followed the woman into the shed. It was not dark under the iron roof. The dry light of a few naked bulbs hanging from the beams fell on the grey floor. Folding chairs, a dozen of them, were arranged in a circle; in the middle there was the flat, dull lid of a closed trap. ‘We are not late,’ said the woman, although most of the chairs were already taken. Were they all of them water people, those patient believers in the woman’s church? One of them, a man carrying a bunch of lilies, had a faintly familiar face. They both sat with the others, and the silent congregation kept on waiting. Fear abandoned Ada as she peered at their half-hidden, brooding faces. They were from the city. The man with the lilies she had seen several times in front of the school—the father of a pupil, a teacher maybe. A young woman holding a toy guitar on her lap was, Ada knew for sure, a clerk at her parents’ bank. The man with the lilies was sobbing without restraint, tears darkening his grey-blue shirt. Later on, he tucked the bunch of lilies under the chair and set his glittering eyes onto Ada.
***
Did Ada sleep, her head on the woman’s shoulder—did she dream, a rare occurrence under her parents’ roof? Short black flames sprang under her skin; the pirates were back at their evil doings, turning against the girl the ardour of her own blood. Now the trap had been opened and a rumour of subdued hope throbbed around the gathered expectants. The woman in the mauve dress stood up and so the others. The woman slowly lowered her hands on Ada’s shoulders, made her turn and marched her towards the trap. Ada, flesh still burning under her skin, went down the steep stairs of a hidden ladder, stumbled and fell on her knees next to a wide basin, filled up to the rim by a chalky water where swam loose debris. Ada felt nauseous. The underground room smelled of rotten flesh. The expectants squatted round the basin. Did it slip under their skin as well, this shivering scent of corruption, buzzing with myriads of flesh-eating gnats? She dared not look at them and ducked down, elbows close against her hips. Were they praying? A mumble went round and round the basin. Faces blackened with unrest; fingers were bitten, hair pulled by twisted hands. Bodies rocked slowly; heads thudded against the wet stone of the basin. Ada, eyes closed, heard names and sobs. Then the woman nudged her and showed her the basin. What should one see there? What lifeless fragment of muscle and bone, what orphaned eye, what awful memory of past happiness? Ada cried and caught some tears in the fold of her sleeve. Those were clear tears she shed without great sorrow while the convulsed expectants were looking at her. The man threw the lilies in the basin. Flies gathered on the dank rim.
***
Ceaselessly crying Ada went back by the towpath. The woman in the mauve dress had seen her to the door of the shed; she had stroked her cheek with her left hand, the fingers of which she had then licked with a sigh. Do my tears smell, then, and of what, and of what? The woman, still silent, had vanished through the trap. Alone in the shed Ada had seen one of the walls gaping and giving birth to a wheel of colours which spun and gave a faint whistling sound. A like wheel the pirates of yore would have embedded in the ceiling of her room, so that she could rest and rejoice a while before the onslaught. Oh cruel deserters, traitors! Her tears did not wash the smell away. Night came and in her bedroom she could almost see the odour slithering on the floor, the stale reek of the holy basin. Seated on the edge of the bed, Ada waited for it to wreck anew her entrails and blacken them to the bone. Wherever I go now the living will hate me and shun me in their daily doings. And although the house had been shut up for the night, she got dressed, went down the hall and out into Cross Lane. On her return from the Ouse no one had questioned her; she had had dinner with her brothers and had watched a film with her mother, during which they had both fallen asleep. Her father had woken them and had carried his daughter to her room. But I have lied all the same and disobeyed, and am walking on a path they forbid. Kind they, tender they. And yet she went to the end of the lane, her stride all the stronger since the lights from the streetlamps did not leave a corner of shadow on the pavement. Ada was perfectly alone and never turned around to make sure of it. From behind the trees which edged the lane, soon to turn into the towpath, sparkled other streetlamps. Crossing the weedy field where thorns scratched her ankles till they bled, she heard the boatmen’s dogs growling, and saw the walls of their shabby houses. Night had travelled down to her limbs and now she could hardly feel them; the path was so dim that she had to lift her lifeless hands and grope at the bushes. Between the houses and the marina, she let herself be bullied by darkness. It knocked her breasts and bit her nose and tried to rip her belly open. Don’t, don’t! Shreds of her body were swallowed by the night, leaving gaping holes where she could have lodged her fist. Night at last left her panting on the bank of the Ouse. Ripples of water were gleaming in between the barges. Not a single light at the barges’ windows, not a single waterman asleep on the deck, not a single siren paddling in the muddy Ouse. The bruised Ada went down a small ladder aboard the Blue Star—or so the name was painted—which was as empty as the others, as empty as the watermen’s houses. She sat on the edge of the deck and left her legs dangling, and gave vent to vague, choking regrets. Deserters, deserters all! Then came a weariness, the like of which she never had experienced. Her blood felt thin and dull. Who will come, who will love me? A tingling layer of pain descended on her skin. Her flesh-eating pirates had gone forever and with them sweet memories of pain, burning suns, charred limbs—her own, she knew, she remembered . . . and then no more—on the shore, offered to the sea gods. She stumbled back to the path, looked at her arms and legs, and touched her face in the grey darkness—intact and whole. It was a bitter track which took her through the woods and into the open fields, next to the motorway. There stood, in a faint orange mist reflecting the lights of the road, the faithful church—the church of mourning parents, Ada now knew.
I will open the hatch and step down the ladder.
And descend, if I may,
In forgetful waters.
I have grown out of life.
I
LOST GIRLS
THE OPENING
THEY had arrived at the beach after losing themselves among the dunes, which at this time of year were white with flowers. Little scuttling animals caused runs of sand down the slopes. The radio for a long time had taken over from conversation; it broadcast incomprehensible songs that eventually put to sleep infant and dog alike. A few yards before the beach, on the edge of the road, three youths, very warmly clad, were staring, hands on their knees, at the two young women who climbed down from the mobile home and st
retched themselves. They kept silent, however, eyelids lowered over pupils contracted to pinpoints by the excess of light.
‘Okay with you here?’
Mag’s glance took in the dizzying sparkle of the sea, the gravel of the parking area down in the cutting where the road ended, the grey wall of the café, and lastly the stupid smiles of the kids sitting on the sand. At first, seeing them in the distance, she had thought them older and vaguely menacing; but they were just three high school pupils playing truant. There were two girls with blue eyes, heavily made up, and a boy who very conscientiously stubbed out his cigarette on the edge of the road before disposing of it in a bottle of beer that was still half full.
‘English, do you think?’ said one of the two girls with a chuckle. ‘Anglaises, hein? English?’
Leaning back against the camper Mag let the warmth flow down from her forehead to her breasts under her shirt. Em woke up the baby. The dog barked. The metal of the mobile home vibrated to an unfamiliar kind of music. And the sea? Yes, every wave of the nearby sea caused a tremor in the air and the solid bodies.
They spent the day on the beach, the child in the shadow of a large sun-shield, and the dog beside her, asleep most of the time, but waking in starts to go and paddle in the warm pools. The three kids came back in the afternoon dressed for the beach. Mag did not see them arrive, having gone for a walk round the muddy harbour. The beach was vast; neither to the north nor to the south could any end be seen. But it was interrupted by streams from the land and large black posts, and Mag thought she could also make out skiffs or small fishing boats drawn up a mile or two to the south.
The harbour at midday was even more deserted than the beach. Little birds similar to sandpipers were running over the seaweed seeking a meagre livelihood. Mag also saw a larger wading bird with a black body and red wings that was drawing out of the sludge an endless worm. At her approach this bird flew off with a cry so plaintive that Mag, thinking of the child, felt a pang of sympathy for it.
***
They had come from England, spending several days on the journey and sleeping every night beside the road; they avoided the towns, rather from preference than from necessity. There was a skylight in the roof of the mobile home, and from the upper bunk, where Mag slept, you could see a sky streaked with magnified stars—when stars were visible. They fed themselves on tinned foods, packet soup and condensed milk, the baby as well as the women. There had been stars and comets the last night before the beach, and aeroplanes flying so low and frequently that Mag realised at last that the stopping place they had chosen was two fields from a landing strip. Em and the baby slept uninterruptedly but Mag, in order to subdue her body’s reluctance to sleep, was obliged to have recourse to hypnotic games with her mobile telephone. She fell asleep eventually when the last aeroplanes had passed, serpentine after-images gleaming under her eyelids.
Then came the sunken road with hedges which nearly met above the camper, and trees whose branches plucked at it.
‘Odd country,’ said Em; Mag was driving, and taking care not to scrape the sides.
‘What’s that?’
They found a frequency which broadcast only music, then lost it, and in time came to ignore the crackling, preferring it, perhaps, to the silence that filled the cabin once the radio was reduced to silence.
With this haywire radio we will go to the end of the world.
***
The smell of the mud was going to her head. Seaweed was rotting there and lengths of rope, along with crabs by the thousand, mussels and other shells scooped clean by the birds. Mag kept to the edge, one foot on the seaweed, the other on the sand, which was already burning hot. Dwarfish horses grazed peacefully in the field at the end of the harbour. Mag slept for fifteen minutes, or maybe thirty, in the shadow of the animals’ shelter, an erection of corrugated iron. She was woken by a sound like whinnying, but the horses had all disappeared.
She went back to the beach with the idea that a bird larger than the rest had flown over the harbour and was going to return and strip them, the two of them, of what they held most dear, the infant and the dog. Or perhaps of something else which she could not bring herself to name. Rounding the dunes she saw the white and blue parasol; the dog ran to meet her. Em, beneath the parasol, was giving the baby milk. It was just after four o’clock; in her absence the beach had come to life. A pick-up spilt out some fifteen excited school kids; scuba-divers passed in black wet-suits, tridents in hand. Then families with huge dogs that made Sparks retreat in terror to the pole of the sunshade. Sparks was a charcoal grey mongrel, still young, lazy and a joker. The over made-up girls who had formed the committee of welcome had a watch dog of their own too, a wolf-dog of unnatural darkness which paced to and fro before the sun-shield, growling while they sunned themselves at a distance of ten or twenty yards from Em and Mag. Of the boy there was now no sign. Then Em went to splash herself, the baby in her arms The wolf-dog dug in the sand. One of the girls, red from the sun, gave it a sharp smack on the back.
‘Don’t be afraid, it’s gentle. Faut pas avoir peur. T'as peur?
‘No, I’m not afraid.’
‘I’m not afraid’—that was a lie.
‘What’s he called, your dog? Quel nom?’
***
In the evening clouds appeared on the horizon and changed slowly to orange and then to blazing red. Glory showered down on the high sea. Em and Mag bathed the child in the wash-basin of the camper van. The tide had come in so fast that the beach now seemed black with people. Men, women, children were packed between the water’s edge and the dunes. Here and there fires were lit. Em did not want to picnic on the beach; she felt tired. They went for a sandwich at the little café by the parking space, the sleepy infant lying against Mag’s shoulder, the dog on its leash. From the café all they could hear was the singing getting louder, and fireworks that fizzled and then exploded.
‘There’s a lot of people on the beach,’ ventured Em when the waitress brought their order.
‘It’s Saturday,’ the woman replied. ‘And, specially when it’s a fine afternoon, people come to spend the evening. They have fun.’
She too was speaking slowly, taking care to be understood.
‘And you?’
‘Oh, when I was younger, yes. Now I take the car and go home. We shut for the night.’
The woman lived in the village three or four miles away.
***
It was like a safe haven in this café, swimming in the odour of coffee and fried fish. Mag would have gladly slept between the tables. At ten o’clock the woman shrugged her shoulders and began to stack the chairs. The sky had clouded over again when they returned to the camper. A band of green above the sea marked the end of the day. We should go and see the sun rise on the other side of the country. It’s possible if we start now. Em had brushed her teeth without saying anything; Mag had heard her crying. Now Em was sleeping, the baby on her bosom, as often happened of late, and Mag did not have the courage to start up the engine again, though it would probably have woken no one but the dog.
***
Mag switched on the little television fixed above the hand-basin, which served also as sink, and watched without making any sense of what was necessarily a silent film. A very small man in a white shirt was sleeping under a porch. His sleeves and his neck shone in the darkness, and his suddenly startled eyes. A second miniscule personage approached him from behind, a weapon in his hand, a club, a bludgeon that he brought down on the other’s skull. A gigantic eye dripping dark tears invaded the screen. Mag went out of the camper without switching off the channel or locking the door This moist eye had given her a desire to go and see the sea. She fancied for a fleeting moment that it would watch over Em and the baby.
The dog had followed her. It trotted close to her, its tail lowered, and she had not the heart to order it back into the camper. Two other motor homes were docked beside the road, and in one of them at least people were still awake. A head with short hair
passed in front of one of the illuminated windows. Mag and the dog avoided the opening that led downwards, and climbed up through the dunes to look at the sea from above and count the fires.
Darkscapes Page 4