by David Mark
MR FARKAS
Mr Farkas lives in a big brown house at the end of Fournier Street in Spitalfields, London. Were he to open the shutters and lean out of the window in the attic room, he would be able to see the Ten Bells pub and the shadows cast by the great dirty iceberg of Christchurch. He would hear the carillon and call of the bells. Were he to strain his ears he would perhaps hear the occasional word drifting up from the street guides who lead tours around this historic neighbourhood. Some of the experts believe that Jack the Ripper lived here. Modern profiling techniques have been applied to the locations of his victims and this street, where working girls used to ply their trade and drink their gin, is at the very centre of the kill zone.
Mr Farkas does not care about the Ripper. He does not understand the fascination. He takes no notice of the crowds who gather near his front door and who wonder how a property on such a sought-after street could have been allowed to fall into such disrepair. There was a time when he would have been tempted to open the shutters and pour cold water on the guides in their frock coats and top hats and to listen to the squeals of the tourists who keep taking pictures of his front door. But Mr Farkas does not have the strength any more. He has not leaned out of the window of the attic room for a long time. He has dizzy spells and does not like the feeling of insubstantiality that overcomes him when he looks down from a height. He imagines himself torn away on the breeze like a shirt snatched from a washing line. Or worse – toppling forward and plummeting to the road beneath. He can see it perfectly. Can imagine himself coming apart like a bag of dropped offal and exploding all over the pavement. Mr Farkas does not like the idea of such destruction. His flesh matters little to him, but the thought of his blood being so ill-used is a horrifying one.
Mr Farkas is a thin, reedy sort of man. His greying hair is thick and neatly parted and covers his ears on both sides, as was the style when he attended university. He has a large nose that does little to draw attention away from his bushy, impressive moustache. He is very pale. His fingers look like candles on a birthday cake and his lips are the sickly grey of soggy paper. There is a sheen of sweat upon his skin.
Mr Farkas is sitting in one of the rooms on the second floor of the house. He does not remember entering it. He is accustomed to these moments of returning to himself without recollection of where he has been. He is an educated man. A respected academic. It is true that these moments of disassociation, of disconnection, are becoming more frequent, but he tells himself he has been under a great deal of pressure recently. He does not sleep well. He eats infrequently. He is cold much of the time, despite the perspiration on his brow. Lately he has made the decision to stop taking his tablets.
Mr Farkas blinks, slowly. He takes stock of the environment in which he finds himself unexpectedly situated. He is in the room that his wife used to use when she dabbled in art. It faces out on to the street instead of into the enclosed back garden and the light from the streetlamp casts a lurid yellow glow through the open shutters. It mingles with the blue light that shines from the laptop computer by his feet. He is sitting down in a leather armchair. It is plum-coloured but appears a deep shade of ox blood in this light. The rest of the room is largely bare. A stack of books are piled in a ruined pyramid in the corner and an easel with a broken leg leans against the shutters. A paintbrush sticks through the canvas, skewering the eye of the vaguely female face that smiles dazedly out from the smears of paint.
Mr Farkas examines himself. He is dressed in his finery. Grey-black, high-waisted trousers in brushed cotton. High-collared white dress shirt and waistcoat in herringbone tweed. He wears a blood-red cravat at his collar. He is draped in a soft blue smoking jacket, embroidered with turquoise threads. There is a patch worn smooth on the velvet of the collar and he finds himself stroking it as he casts his eyes around him. He is dressed as she likes. He is her creation. Her anachronism. Her old-fashioned Daddy.
Mr Farkas thinks of Beatrix.
Of his cica.
His blood.
Mr Farkas rarely allows himself to speak in his native Hungarian. His English is almost without accent and the academic textbooks that he has written are regularly praised for their precision and mastery of language. Through training and willpower he has ensured that his thoughts invariably arrive in his head in his adopted language. He only allows himself this one indulgence – this one word from his childhood. He calls his child his cica. His kitten. It suits her. She is soft and languid and seems to purr when he strokes her hair. She is playful and inquisitive and has the same piercing eyes as her father. She is the blood of his blood. She is made of the same things as he is.
Mr Farkas stares at a patch of damp on the patterned wallpaper of the chimney breast. The paper was expensive. Game birds and exotic fruits upon a rich blue background. It seems to shimmer in the peculiar light. Mr Farkas stares. After a time it becomes a face, the way clouds become dragons and flames form into dancers. It is a round, well-fed face. Dark, deep-set eyes and a slack mouth, as if the jawbone has been dislocated and improperly set. The face has a dark widow’s peak which disappears into some form of flamboyant periwig, and the throat is bisected by a disk with ruffled edges. It becomes clearer the more he looks. Becomes more precise. More real. Soon Mr Farkas is unsure whether he is looking at the pattern in the damp, or whether it is looking at him. It is no longer a part of the picture. The alchemist is standing in front of him. Heeled shoes and breeches. Stockings to the knee. A dark, formal coat over a blood-red waistcoat. He is considering Mr Farkas critically, as though mentally disassembling him into his component parts. He moves, and Mr Farkas thinks of magic lantern shows from his childhood. The alchemist moves fluidly; a gracefulness made up of flickering images, all minutely different from the last. It is as if the alchemist is disappearing and reforming too fast for the eye to process. Mr Farkas finds it unsettling. The alchemist’s presence always precedes a terrible headache and nausea. The doctor has urged him to be alert for any such symptoms. He has allayed the doctor’s fears. Told them that he is not experiencing any hallucinations, painful cranial pressure or hearing the soft, sibilant voices that have undone him at different times of his life. He is only half lying. Mr Farkas does not believe he sees hallucinations. He knows the alchemist is here. He is simply the only one who can see him.
A creeping feeling of disquiet inches over Mr Farkas. He is overcome by a sensation of having done something shameful. It is a feeling he can only liken to waking from a dream having committed adultery. He feels grubby, despite his fine clothes. He feels as though he has dressed in splendid garments while still unwashed and caked in filth. He does not like it. He feels himself shuddering and becomes aware of a chemical taste in his mouth. He does not remember taking any medication but he cannot say for certain that he has not. He knows himself to be an occasional slave to his pleasures. He has been known to sip from his cache of illicit prizes from time to time. One entire room of his house is given over to the oddities that he has collected over the past thirty years. He has a love for medical paraphernalia. Mr Farkas regrets that he did not train to become a doctor. Were he given his chance again, he would train as a surgeon. Instead, he has made a living as an expert in the history of medical advancement and is one of the world’s leading authorities on antique medical equipment. His home contains artefacts worth almost as much as the property itself. He has been known to help himself to the occasional sample from his private museum of curiosities. He has routinely dropped laudanum on to his tongue from an original pipette manufactured in Belgium in the 1840s. The dealer from whom he purchased the item claimed that it had briefly been owned by Lewis Carroll, though he had been unable to verify the claim. The provenance does not matter to Mr Farkas. He cares little for Carroll. The laudanum helps Mr Farkas see. It helps him find the right mental frequency, tuning him in to the voice, the vision, that has provided him with such comfort these many months. Were it not for the chemicals, Mr Farkas is unsure whether he and the alchemist would have found ea
ch other. And without the alchemist, Mr Farkas would never have understood what was required of him. He would have continued to think of life and death as distinct states. He would have thought his bloodline dammed. Instead, something approximating his offspring continues to breathe. And that pleases Mr Farkas and the alchemist very much.
For a time, a young research fellow used to help Mr Farkas with his experiments. She compiled a thick folder of the documents and scribblings that they had pored over together. She had drawn exquisite anatomical specimens and her neat handwriting had turned Mr Farkas’s scrawled notes into something close to art. Mr Farkas had been touched by the gesture and his rare, awkward smile had made the girl grin in a way that made him uncomfortable. It made him wonder if his wife had been right when she told him that it was folly to invite her into their home. Folly to encourage her burgeoning obsession with the professor who had been appointed to oversee her PhD. He had dismissed his wife’s fears. Told her that he had tutored thousands of students and that it would take somebody extraordinary to turn his head. He did not want her for anything other than her willingness to do as he asked. It was her approval that he liked most – the way she condoned what must be done in the name of advancement.
The documents within the young student’s scrapbook have long since been ripped into scraps. The home which used to mean so much to Mr Farkas and his family is now a broken-down mass of shadows, damp and fallen brick. The garden is overgrown and most of the rooms are empty. Mr Farkas will eventually make things right with the property but for now he has other concerns. He must make things right with his daughter. He must make things right with his blood.
Mr Farkas breathes in and catches the whiff of it. That tang of iron and vinegar.
A memory surfaces.
Beatrix.
Angry conversations about platelets and blood counts and urgings that he should prepare himself for the worst.
He screws up his face as if biting down on the memory. The picture bursts and his mind floods with the juice of other remembrances. Exertions. Recent undertakings that left his chest heaving and his skin coated in mud, sweat and blood. He cannot quite recall how Beatrix had evaded him when she sleepwalked away from her bed in the cellar but it had been a hard job to find her and bring her home. He seems to recall having to hurt somebody but he is not sure whether the memory is real or something he has read. He fancies that it is the work of imagination. He knows he is not a violent man.
Soon, Mr Farkas will walk downstairs and into the kitchen. He will pull up the heavy door in the floor and descend into the specially adapted cellar room beneath. He will sit by his daughter’s bedside and he will read her one of her favourite stories. These moments are precious to him and he knows what they mean to her. They distract them both from feeling too negatively about the future. He cannot deny that she is getting sicker. Her face looks pale and ragged, no matter how hard he tries to apply lipstick and rouge to her greying features.
Mr Farkas would suffer far more in these moments of despondency were it not for the alchemist. He has reached out through the centuries and spoken to Mr Farkas. He has given him instruction on what can be done. What must be done.
Tomorrow he will give Beatrix her medicine. He will attach a rubber tube to the goose-feather quills that puncture her veins. He will bleed her into a gleaming silver cup. He will fill her full of the refrigerated blood that he guards as if it were treasure. And then he will lay his head upon her chest and listen to her heart beat, hard and true, with a blood that he will never allow to die.
Mr Farkas casts an eye on the computer screen. She will be talking to him soon. The girl with the blue hair and the large breasts and the understanding of what goes on beneath the skin. He enjoys her. She has spirit. Her understanding is rudimentary but he would like to talk with her some day. He believes that she may be crucial in raising awareness of the alchemist’s work. He has sent her several messages on the discussion forum on her website, urging her to consider turning her attentions to the forgotten master. Perhaps she will do so tonight.
The thought causes a frisson of excitement to course through Mr Farkas’s veins. He slides towards the computer. Opens up the document he is working on. It is a short article for an academic magazine detailing the life of a seventeenth-century anatomist and surgeon. He is satisfied with the article but is not yet ready to send it. His work requires a conclusion. He fancies that when Beatrix sits up and holds him and stares out through new eyes, he will glimpse at once an end, and a new beginning.
LOTTIE
‘Do I have lipstick on my teeth?’ asks Lottie, pulling a face at Christine. The gurn is extravagant and more than a little manic.
‘No, you’re fine. Pearly white.’
‘My sort of fine or a general fine?’ asks Lottie, concerned. ‘The sort of “fine” I say when it’s really not very fine at all, or a general kind of “hey, that’s damn fine”?’
‘Could you stop looking at me like that please? You look like a chimpanzee on a rollercoaster. I’m a bit out of my depth …’
Lottie looks as though she is going to push for more and then takes pity on her friend. Christine is socially awkward and always seems to be doing battle with a surfeit of saliva. She is at her happiest labelling exhibits at the pathology museum and writing long and impenetrable blogs with titles like The Death of Death and Is Cremation a Feminist Issue? She has a lot of followers on social media but has never used her own image to promote her output. She prefers to hang back in the shadows. Lottie presumes that she lives with her parents and that her bedroom is all black potion bottles, Edgar Allan Poe stories and Buffy the Vampire Slayer posters.
‘Nothing up my nose?’
‘Lottie, I don’t want to look up your nose.’
‘Why? Is there something up it?’
‘This was never in the job description!’
Lottie laughs and starts blowing raspberries to make her lips look fuller for the camera. Christine mimics her, but while Lottie looks cheeky and sweet, Christine seems to be doing an impression of a motorboat. Lottie looks away. She sometimes wonders if she has befriended a version of herself from an alternate reality. Lottie was just as shy as Christine during her school days in Reading and if it were not for a conscious decision to embrace her own uniqueness, she could have easily become a timid and introverted adult. She knows what it is like to be the victim of endless dead arms and Chinese burns and has fished her exercise books out of so many toilets and rubbish bins that she has never got out of the habit of doing duplicate copies of her homework. But at 15 she decided that it was better to be different than to blend in, and spent her birthday money on the kind of black boots that figure in a certain kind of person’s darkest fantasies. She started wearing white foundation and thick black eyelashes and eyebrows. Started dyeing her hair a deep purple-black. Started wearing chokers and little purple corsets over tight black skirts. Half a lifetime later she is Dr Lottie. She’s the darling of the Death Salon, the Queen of the Coffin Club. She’s a well-respected pathologist and an excellent curator of the necro-museum she personally established, and she is a recognizable figurehead for the whole sub-culture of morbid anatomy. Her regular webisodes on her own YouTube channel have got huge viewing figures and the work on mainstream TV is picking up. She could easily be dining at The Ivy or quaffing champagne at a gallery opening right now, but she feels more at home in the Jolly Bonnet. There is something comforting about the place. It feels a little like a wrinkle in time – as though she could constantly open the door to another era. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear that a regular had been killed by Jack the Ripper or that the guy who drinks Guinness and wears Crocs has lost his house in a Luftwaffe raid.
‘Could you hold it for me please?’ asks Lottie, handing her phone to Sheamus. They are sitting at the circular table in the snug. Christine has eaten three packets of crisps and Sheamus has switched to water in case he is too sleepy to play on his Xbox when he gets back to his flat.
‘Jus
t a trailer, is it?’ asks Christine, softly.
‘Agent says that’s what I should be doing more of,’ says Lottie. ‘Little bursts. Gifs. A few seconds of this or that. It’s about staying in the consciousness of your followers, which is a sentence I never thought I would say.’
‘But they must be people with an interest in anatomy and death,’ says Sheamus, confused. ‘And that’s not something you can just whiz through …’
‘A lot of the viewers just want to see an example of mad stuff that’s been removed from rectums,’ shrugs Lottie. ‘Others tune in for something a bit more in-depth, which sounds crude, though I don’t know why. Some people really do want to know about the history of the profession and some of the stories from around the world. People waking up in body bags. Ninety-year-old smokers with magnificent lungs. Bullets found inside the bodies of people who have no idea when they got shot. The weird stuff. They love all that.’
‘And you,’ says Christine, almost too quietly to be heard. ‘They like you.’
‘Well, I suppose,’ says Lottie, wishing she had a stock response to such praise. ‘I’m cheaper than porn, I suppose. But this is just me. And if it helps get people interested in the craft then it’s no bad thing.’
Christine pulls a face. For a moment she looks like a rabbit about to burst into tears. ‘Do we want more people in the craft? I mean, my numbers of followers are going up. There are more and more people coming to the Death Salon meetings. I mean, it’s meant to be an alternative lifestyle …’ Christine trails off, seemingly appalled with herself for having spoken. Lottie pats her arm. She understands the feeling. She used to be part of an exclusive club. Now everybody seems to be worshipping Day of the Dead masks and doing interesting things with human remains.