Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography

by Deborah Levy

  Her eye is as blue as meat,

  We stare into each other and then she cuts me out.

  She shuts her eye.

  The Banker taps her silicone fingernail on the window of her Cadillac. It is as if she wants to tap the irritation out of her self. She turns up the air conditioning, stops at the traffic lights, brushes her hair, glosses her lips, swallows vitamins, eats chocolate, checks her watch. The back seat is piled high with Gucci bags. As she boards the aeroplane to Heathrow, gold wedding ring glistening in the sun, she turns to me and says in transatlantic English, ‘Don’t pride your self on being a small bird perched on my shoulder, Lapinski. I am just about to enter a huge bird, to be carried through the clouds and home again. You are a still-born bird somewhere at the back of my head, a cold-war baby who wants to make peace when there is no peace to be had. Life is a nightmare, it’s more interesting like that. You are no great shakes. It’s my job to invent reality, not fiction. I invent the world. You just figure out ways of surviving in it. You are the dispossessed cringing somewhere on the corner of this earth. I am in its centre, a bright burning light, and you in the corner will be dazzled.’

  The air hostess offers her mineral water and prawn mousse. Down below, people get smaller and smaller as the engines roar and The Banker melts little dabs of orange shellfish on her tongue.

  While the hares at John F. Kennedy Airport race the plane on the runway, an old man in Piccadilly, London, screams in the middle of the road, hands stretched above his silver hair. A line of cars comes to a standstill; the people in them are secretly afraid to get out and move him on. They laugh nervously behind the wheel; his screams pulse through their hearts. The Innocents watch him. They know his name is Mac and that he is homeless too. When he has finished screaming they saunter into the road and help him to the pavement. Mac says, ‘Okay you bandits give the old shaman a smoke. See this white skin over my left eye? I’m screaming so as to break it . . . to get to the green underneath.’

  On the edge of the motorway, a woman who wears earrings made from seashells sits on a high stool by the stainless steel meatbelt. She remembers a dream in which great clumps of small eggs, like spawn, leak from her and are put on a slide in a laboratory. Her mother, sister and a nurse are present. The nurse tells her that the red eggs are normal, but there is a chance that the white eggs contain ‘abnormalities.’ The name on her medical file is Saint Martha.

  An aeroplane has just flown over. It even drowned the sound of the machines on the meatbelt, which is quite something because they hum within as well as outside me; we have become one body. I am doing the night shift and miss my friend The Poet who calls me Saint Martha (she says it’s a promotion) – she not been to work for three days now. I don’t know where she is but I suspect she is trying to do something impossible. The lights from the factory guide planes that fly over us. The Alsatians outside bark at them. Sometimes I wish they’d just crash into us and we’d all die very quickly in a pool of duty-free gin. When for that one moment I could no longer hear the sound of the machines I thought I had died, that my heart had stopped and I had become meat too, splattered over the walls and floor.

  I ached to be different from the women in my home town. But it’s hard to be enchanting and carefree and spiritual when you’re dead broke. I wanted either to take part in the world, to taste it, to dare search out joy and claim it, or not be here at all. I wanted there to be more to life than just surviving it. I wanted and I wanted. When I went to university, someone said, ‘Are you going to piss in the outside loo in silk knickers then?’

  I laughed when I was a student and first fell in love because I realized to be in love is to dream the other person instead of seeing them as they actually are –he was thrilling because he was a big bad boy from Barcelona and wore blood-red espadrilles even in the English rain. Some afternoons we would skip lectures and climb up on to the roof garden a friend had lent us with a bottle of wine, and fuck for hours; we talked about books, our lips wet with Rioja and each other. He said, ‘In Spain every man is the toreador/Christ: we like to conquer death and pierce our flesh.’ If I was brought up on chips and the Easter fair, he was brought up on paella and Mass. We made no plans for the future – we assumed our lives would be rich in ideas and events, that we would always be curious, searching, full of questions and sensations. We assumed this because we made each other feel beautiful and interesting; I never thought it possible, then, that ideas could be bashed into stupid blue meat, and people encouraged to eat them like fast-food burgers. I often wonder where he is now, what he is doing, and whether he still feels able to conquer death.

  When I visit my home town it’s like going back to the scene of some silent, unrecorded massacre. Newspapers full of obsolete tragedies flap around the gasworks like dying birds. Condoms cringe in gutters. Pregnant prostitutes stand on street corners. There are regular floods of cancers for the undertaker to get rich on; cancer is gold to him. Young unemployed men and women suicide themselves all the time; leave ragged notes hidden in secret places for someone who might have cared for them to find, testimonies to their punctured spirit and shame and sorrow. If all their testimonies were put together they would make a new Bible, its prophets dead in battered cars, garages, and the bottoms of cliffs. There is a war on. Everyone is separated and afraid. It is as if we have been robbed of a language to describe the bewildered brokenness we inhabit. Best to leave and learn another language.

  Last year I took my first ever holiday in Europe. I did not find myself in some golden paradise – but on an industrial beach, blue and pink corrugated iron shacks on the shore. Little fires and local people frying sardines. Dogs asleep on the sand. Football posts. Gulls with filthy wings swooping down for sewage and bread. High-rise flats. Patches of grass. A goat. The sad thing is I felt perfectly at home. I bought some candles from a holy shop with handmade roses climbing down the sides. A woman was begging as if her hand was made that way. On the last day, I took a bus to the nearest big city. Ate pork and cockles in cafés that smelt of drains. Drank lots of little cups of coffee with sweet almond cake, smoked strange cigarettes in red packets. Next to the big international shops, traders had set up barrows heaped with nuts, cheap glass, earrings made from shells (I’m wearing them now) and flowers, so many flowers, sold by gypsies from the country. Organ grinders, church bells, chestnut sellers, chocolates filled with liqueurs distilled in Gothic monasteries, taxis, trams, piazzas, boulevards, tables and chairs out on the pavements in the sun and tourists taking photographs of everything. Men kissing each other, twice on the cheek, holding each other as they talked. Mothers and daughters with blossom in their buttonholes. They reminded me of a woman at home, with blue lips because she had a bad heart, who pinned a flower from her garden on to my heart. Once I went to a café with a huge clock on the wall; its hands kept swinging out of time with real time, so the waiters had to climb up the ladder to put it right. I went to art galleries full of the work of modernists and I went to bookshops to look for native poets in translation. My hair started to curl when it had always been straight. I read newspapers in the marble foyers of grand hotels and when I got bored, slipped into churches to see the frescos, listen to the service, watch people cross themselves in a trance. Among the elaborate gold leaf on the walls, one painting shocked – a priest standing against a cold snow sky and, stretched across the sky, a thin icy spiked line of barbed wire, the expression in his eyes chilled, as if at the moment the artist caught him he had lost his faith and was filled with unspeakable fear. I gazed at statues, touched them, sat under them reading maps, my fingers sticky with watermelon, legs tanned. I met a scientist and she took me home to meet her family, as if she regarded me as an important person who was worth getting to know. I played with her children, drank her wine, talked for hours about where I was from – she was trying to put me together, understand what sort of world I came from, but I didn’t want her to understand because then I’d have to live in the world she was trying to put together. I want
ed to live somewhere else.

  That aeroplane has frayed my nerves. And they are not too good at the moment. I wake up coughing and my bronchitis seems to be eternal. These days the most innocent of things can have a myriad fearful associations for me. Perhaps it was not a good idea to be promoted from Martha to Saint Martha, even though I know The Poet was joking. Did the saints feel psychically assaulted and scared, like I do? I feel there is something leaking from me, I think it is hope, that I need to save myself but I don’t know how to. The lights are beginning to dim which means the night shift is nearly over. It is as if we women working on the meatbelt are returning to each other after a long separation and are startled by the distance we have travelled. Once, when I was watching The Poet work opposite me, for one mad and possibly saintly moment I thought she looked like a Messiah with no cross to hang on. The job of The Poet, like the Messiah, is essentially to prepare the imagination of the people to receive metaphors of all kinds. I have a feeling that right now she is trying to turn herself into a fish. She loves a good joke.

  7.15 Swab taken from specimen.

  7.30 Specimen runs and falls over on occasions.

  8.30 Specimen stands and falls over on occasions.

  8.40 Specimen shows evidence of distress.

  The llama’s breath rises and falls. Like the dollar thinks Freddie. He wants to hold her. Bury his face in her fur. He sticks his hand through the cage bars but he cannot reach her. She seems to be sleeping and shivering at the same time. An aeroplane flies over the zoo and the animals become restless. The sky is scarred with a thick white line. The chief gorilla smooths the scar on his own chest with hands that are not so different from the hands of the old zoo keeper who rolls oranges into his cage every evening. The animals call to each other, ears alert, they murmur, scratch themselves, bellow out into the thick night of the city. It is as if the passing of this winged beast is an omen for some terrible happening in the future. The bird cages are full of fallen feathers; in a corner the Marabou stork hides her head under her wing. The white-tailed mongoose eats without tasting what it is he’s eating. Toads croak. The cats lick invisible wounds with long sideways sweeping movements of their tongues. The elephants plaster mud on their skin, roll about in the dust and rub themselves against the wall of their compound. Their ears flap and spread, grey circles of time imprinted on their mud-soaked flesh, just as the hearts of trees have circles of time marked within themselves. The elephants dimly remember moonlit nights drifting through the bush stripping bark; tonight time seems to have stopped and the wind is hot.

  In the city, three Cabinet ministers in navy serge suits, cufflinks and well-polished brogues dump their briefcases on a hotel bed and pour themselves large gin and tonics. They raise their glasses and sing

  ‘England here

  England there

  England every fucking where.’

  Outside, on the high street, people put bits of plastic into a brick wall and in return get money. They carry their personal number around with them, in their sleep, during meals, love play, in swimming baths and offices. The computer in the wall is hot, like the forehead of a person with a fever, burning into the bricks and mortar of Europe.

  09.00 Specimen shows evidence of discharge from eyes.

  09.30 Specimen refuses to stand up.

  10.30 Specimen still shows evidence of distress.

  The llama’s eyes have turned into a lake. She rolls on to her belly. Freddie thinks he can see her tail flicker, as if she is diving into her self. He touches his forehead for no reason at all. She looks like a fish with fur. Her belly is silvery grey. Freddie realizes he has been looking up into the sky which seems to be a great fathomless pool of inky water, and on the rippleless surface he can see the reflection of the llama’s thoughts. At this moment she is a salmon, still and silent as the beginning of the world.

  A woman with green wispy hair bends and bows over the black keys of her piano like a small tender willow. It is she who plays only those notes forbidden by the Catholic Church in the days of the Inquisition, who scents herself with Chinese cedar and twenty-five oils that are not for the timid, whose ribs stick out like needles, whose music spreads itself over all bedsit London, music that is full of questions, discord and joyful contradictions. The Anorexic Anarchist.

  She says, ‘No no no, Lapinski . . . I will not let you be an autocrat. I will break the pattern of your summoning which I hear through my little diseased cherry tree that refuses to blossom in this time of the accountant, prison warder, soldier, in this time when our common land is used to store nuclear icons, and battery chickens become golden nuggets in boxes that destroy the air we breathe. In this time when pigs become lumps of sorrow soaked in preservatives and people register their personal decay in solitary massacres . . . yes I will break the pattern of your summoning. I will sow the seeds of chaos and disorder about your shoes, both left and right. I have a cake baking in the oven, can you smell the vanilla? Come here. Closer than that. I am going to transform you, but not before I have had a bath to cleanse me from all the television screens that go on at night.’ Her bones crack against the white porcelain of the bath. ‘I am an antibody fighting fighting fighting . . . Come closer, Lapinski, you will be Marie Antoinette.’

  I am Marie Antoinette. My bouffant of white cottonwool hair is tangled with barbed wire and birds; soldiers shoot out of my curls. I am standing outside a blue bank in the high street, a great hooped dress swirling about my hips. My lips red as glacé cherries. Two men who call themselves aides stand on either side of me. They wear mirrored sunglasses and one of them looks a little like Freddie; a white worm wriggles on his shoulderpad. Who’s your worm dancing for?’ a woman carrying a violin asks him, and then takes a bite of her apple where she hopes no worms lurk. A huge cake stands on a silver trolley in front of me, iced with a map of the world. I have a metre ruler in my hand and as people go by I ask them if they would like a piece of cake. If they say yes, I put their portion of the world on to a banking slip one of the aides passes to me, with EAT CAKE in the little boxes where it says ACCOUNT NUMBER. The Anorexic Anarchist plays the trombone behind me, sometimes stopping to wheeze the concertina hung on leather straps around her neck, or to nibble sunflower seeds which are the only thing that keep her alive.

  When the world is eaten, we take the soldiers out of my hair and bury them under a spindly sapling trying to grow in a crack in the pavement. A little boy makes a wreath out of his milkshake carton. Two lovers kiss on the grave, a small city-dance of leather and suede. I think of my father and mother and how they made love on the marble slab of a war memorial – perhaps it is the shame of the same species murdering each other so often that demands an affirmation of life, murdering each other in the heart, lung, arm, head, thigh, groin.

  We are in a rowing boat. I am rowing. The Anorexic Anarchist rubs Nivea into her sparrow arms. The sun is warm and gentle. She closes her eyes, lids delicate, transparent, slivers of tiny veins. With her eyes shut she looks like a leaf. She trails her fingers in the lake. ‘Contentment, Lapinski, is going to meet someone you love on a full stomach. Happiness is going to meet someone you love on an empty stomach.’

  She invites me to her home. On the floor is a clay bowl and inside it her lunch – two glistening spinach leaves. Her room smells of the wax candles she burns by the dozen while playing the piano. And of bread. It is in her bread that she creates the most beautiful anarchy. She puts everything into it, beer, rice, lentils, cumin, rye, yoghurt, depending on what she wants the bread to do to whoever eats it. It is the coming together, the convergence of everything she yearns for in the world. She makes bread that is full of ingredients she is attracted to but she wants to be empty. She is trying to make the world less of something by making herself less of something as she oils her emaciated legs and arms, and she is teaching herself how to walk a tightrope. The rope is just six inches above the floor and her feet grip it as she shuffles across, arms flapping on either side. On the fifth step she stops, stra
ightens up and points to the two spinach leaves. ‘Eat your spinach, Lapinski.’ She walks another step, it seems to take a hundred years. ‘I have this little thing I do, Lapinski, when I put food on a fork, it can never touch my lips.’ She smiles. ‘I have walked the tightrope all my life. Now I’m trying to learn how to get to the other side.’

  On the meatbelt blood is being spilled. Someone has been injured. The blades of the machines are still whirring. Seashells scatter across the floor. Someone’s left hand is no longer attached to their wrist. The light is very bright. Women pick up the shells and put them in the pockets of their overalls. They do not know whether they are awake or asleep. Monster burgers slide down the belt, unattended as makeshift bandages are stripped from clothing and women haul themselves back from places of their own making – back to this scene, this room where the very real smell of blood is soaking into the paisley print of someone’s headscarf, wrapped around the wrist of the injured woman known as Saint Martha, but mostly called Marth. The meat creates its own dimensions, patterns, becomes itself – a herd of beasts. The smell of blood mingling with perfumes dabbed on the temple and pulse points, and the ghostly fragrance of scents that have been imagined only five minutes before, the skin of a lover, the creases of a child, cardamon in a curry. Two bewildered women hold the shells to their ears – the sea sounds poisoned, slow and heavy as if she pulls towards the moon but cannot get back again. The women feel dizzy with the light, time has stopped, so much human blood trickling into the meat that was once four legs, a head, two eyes, a tail. They wander about pressing emergency buttons that do not work because they make no sound and the floor manager is out to lunch.