Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography

by Deborah Levy

  ‘And I was lost,’ her daughter suddenly says.

  ‘She bloody well was. But not as lost as her mother. They put this needle in my arse like I’m some kind of rhino . . . there was so much sleeping sickness in that injection I slept for three days. And then early one morning there’s someone tapping my cheeks and I try to wake up . . . it’s the tea trolley woman. She’s got my clothes in a plastic bag and she’s saying, ‘Get out of here. Get dressed and run for your life out of this hospital.’ And I see her eyes, they wake me up, I see too much in her bloody eyes, I see my own mother in her eyes and I get dressed and run for my life.’

  ‘And I was lost,’ her daughter says again.

  ‘But I found you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hides her eyes again.

  ‘So nothing’s all right. Except I’m telling you this tale in the sunshine drinking a beer, and not in a nightie in Ward Two.’ She points to a bus revving its engine. ‘That’s yours.’

  Now she is rolling through mountains and red dust oases, beer and blood in her mouth, waving to the woman and her daughter. The fat man stretches out his arms and shouts, ‘If you want my body you can have it!’ The shape of the letters L and M cut into the sky, as if on a convict’s cheek. L for lire, loony, Levi’s, love. M for massacre, mint, molotov. J.K. spreads her hands over her lungs, palms warm and still, as if one part of the body can be sick and another heal it. She looks again at the scrap of paper. Pensione Omray. The bus shudders and stops. People get on carrying parcels wrapped in newspaper and string. Across the road an old woman thins out her tomato plants. On and on, from the North of the island to the South, herds of white goats and urban bunker developments, on past beaches of black sand, allotments growing tomatoes, solitary cafés, abandoned petrol stations and beat-up cars on the edge of crumbling cliffs.

  Canaries twitter in small iron cages. Their master and tormentor, Omray, sweeps the floors of his pensione. Cigarette in his mouth, plastic sandals on his feet, he hums an old Elvis tune, soiled newspaper tucked into the pocket of his grey trousers. The jacket hangs over a chair at reception. He stands his broom against the wall and J.K. follows him to the chair, which he formally sits on, stares at her, lights another cigarette, asks for her passport which he flicks through, yellow fingernails tracing the outline of visas and the outline of her chin in the small photograph. His fingers move from Warsaw to her cheekbones, across Washington to her lips, eyes travelling over her luggage, especially the 1936 Corona in the pillowcase. Tired from his interrogation, he leans back in his chair and says, ‘E-d-m-o-n-t-o-n.’ The canaries beat their wings against the bars of their cages. ‘When I am in England, I live on the edge of London. Dog’s arse E-d-m-o-n-t-o-n. I prefer to live on the edge of life.’

  He asks for some cash, counts it, locks it in a little steel box which he puts into a drawer, locks the drawer, and slowly, slowly, a smile parts his lips. ‘Love me Tender, Love me True.’ His keys jangle as he shows her a room with a little desk, an iron bed with a picture of a white horse above it. ‘Chinese,’ he says, and points to the shower which he walks lazily towards, swishing a plastic curtain around it with a magnificent gesture: proud host, Omray, penned by a bus driver in italic ink, brought into being one Sunday morning at the crossroads. She has journeyed to him and his canaries who scream through the walls, and he, one hand tucked into the top of his trousers, screams back until they fall silent, sighs, smiles, reaches deep into his pocket and gives her a small yellow feather. ‘Souvenir,’ he says and closes the door very quietly, as if nervous he will awake the distressed birds.

  J.K. wades into the thrash of the waves, deeper and deeper until she is floating with the gulls, looking out at the European couples walking the coastline. A sudden gust of wind blows white sand into their faces. For a moment, disorientated, the Europeans walk in zigzags across the dunes, displaced and dizzy, fists in their eyes.

  A group of elderly Germans sits at a café, chairs arranged in a circle around the table, laughing and slapping their thighs. The oldest man of all, huge paunch hanging over his trousers, suddenly begins to choke, coughing and spluttering until water streams from his pale blue eyes and his steely spectacles fall to the ground. The more he chokes the more his friends laugh, clinking brandies and pointing to him, until, just as it seems he is going to breathe his last, he spits out, inch by inch, a long silver chain, pulling it from his throat with fat hands, mouth opening wider and wider as he pulls out a round silver watch. His wife claps her hands and roars, ‘That was a good one! Better than the one you did in Munich,’ and orders more brandies from the bewildered waiter. One of the men turns to J.K. and shouts, ‘Why are you here?’ The man who has just choked up the watch says, ‘She’s here to make her dreams come true.’

  J.K. turns away from their pink smiling faces, her own face suddenly damp with tears. Why am I here? An Englishman sitting opposite her peels a boiled egg. He slams his eyelids down, blond lashes fluttering in some private excitement of his own.

  As my body gets weaker, the things I most think about are pain and money. Perhaps my other body thinks about beauty and grace and how to measure value, but this one, my sweet, still has the same sort of fears people had in the Iron Age. Fear of the dark and certain kinds of animals. Things lurking under the sea, under my bed, inside my skin.

  ‘In Beijing,’ says the Englishman, ‘the government had all the dogs shot.’ He chews his egg slowly. ‘I once shot my dog. She was called Ogre and I hated the way she looked at me. Too much. It was too much.’ His teeth are flecked with egg yolk and he wipes his mouth on an old copy of the Daily Mail.

  The sun is gentle, the ocean emerald, and somewhere windmills, a reddening creeper, a small garden with table and chair outside overlooking the sea. J.K. wants to sit there. Very badly. But she is not invited. She wants her own table and chair and garden and she hasn’t got one. Insurmountable obstacles seem to deny her the possibility of ever claiming them. What does she have to do to get them? Why have some people got them and not her? To have a home is to have a biography. A narrative to refer to in years to come. There is a house in the garden. Turquoise paint peels off the front door which is half open. Sunlight pours through. It is self-possessed, inhabits itself to the stranger’s eye with a particular kind of grace, has its own logic and order. Maps of the mind sprawl out and beyond the table and chairs standing in the small garden, spill into imagined scenarios of all kinds, but at this moment J.K. wants them to be part of her map. She wants to be able to point and say: these are the stones I dragged up and planted things between, these are the feathers and shells and cooking pots I collected, this is where I have placed them, this is the room I like most to sleep in, these are the paintings Ebele made for me.

  How can she make the things she most wants happen? Not in dreams or sculpture or literature, but in bricks and mortar, with soil and seeds and water, in parliament, in the minds and hearts of other people? Who is the citizen sitting with her on those chairs in that garden? What does it mean to be named a citizen? This citizen is prone to violence and that citizen is prone to barbecues in Hertfordshire. This citizen has spent all her historical time surviving, getting wrecked in clubs, murder in her heart, cocaine up her nose, she rises from the eternal, dreary, fetishized flames of her own anger and says to that citizen, SO COME ON then, tell me about tolerance, moderation, your neighbourhood, your schools, tact, good manners, tell me about your Gods AND all the wars you fought in. I’ll tell you about my neighbourhood, schools, taxis, clothes, ecstasy, drag queens, any number of sad corrugated sunsets AND all the wars I fought in. Tell me about this world and how to be well inside it?

  Today Gregory says there are worlds floating in his bloodstream. Sometimes they make him feel beautiful and delirious.

  The arrogance of metaphor when facts save people’s lives. The succour of metaphor when facts inadequately describe people’s lives. The bravado of T, who wore crazy jewels and made sweet wine from berries growing on the banks of railway lines. Abandoned wi
th her small daughter in a high-rise in Bethnal Green, but growing her up good with fruit and books. And C whose twin sister suicided herself whilst swimming in a river one tearful summer. How she decided not to come up again, to put her head under and disappear, and C forever hallucinating her sister in a yellow dress, drinking coffee, eating bread, saying stupid things like Continental Blend and Yardley – as if the century had taken away her language and all she had left were brand names to describe herself. Her breasts dark circles under the yellow dress as they hoiked her out of the river, eternally hoiking women out of ponds and lakes and oceans. She just wades in and goes under, all furtive and furious in useless protest, hoiked up by some geezer in wellies, leaving her sister to mourn and hate her.

  And M who never travelled anywhere, except to the liquor store and back and back again and back and back again, who wrote poems and sent them to her, terse with the fear of humiliation, literary references and cryptic asides. How is it that M, alone and broke, drinking away her intelligence in front of the television, imagines her constituency to be professorial gents in corduroy with Anglo-Saxon beards and wives who sacrificed their lives to nurture the sensitive interpretive twitches of their literary husbands – and she, M, describing her life in language that doesn’t fit her, that is to say, adopting the puns, tone and form of those whose lives are cosier than her own: a regular salary, children grown up by someone else – never read the world but a dab hand at sonnets, sonatas, Elizabethan musical instruments and logical reasoned argument.

  Mega-star! Mega-star! The Englishman who shot his dog shuffles through the market, chanting, a small jar of Nescafé under his arm. A turkey escapes from its cage and runs towards him, gobbling leaves and flapping its wings against his flip-flops. He kicks it away, making turkey noises in his throat, grabbing feathers and sticking them into his hair. COME ON COME ON COME ON. It runs back to him. YALALALALAYALALALALAYALALA. The only sound that can be heard above his warcry and the writhing turkey are the words THE ALLIED FORCES.

  Hurrah! I’ve got pneumonia. I’ve been blitzed! I’m a goner! I’m all technology and biology! Half alive, half dead. I’m God. A machine measures my heartbeats. Five drips poke into my body. My mother sent me some tartan socks and a peculiar card saying that when I was born she couldn’t decide whether to call me Klaus or Gregory. This coincided with an old friend changing his name from Eric to Gus. When people suddenly out of the blue change their name, I always think they’ve been visited by strange men in space ships. Out of the blue. Where is the blue? The blue is somewhere. Where are you?

  What cultural violence made M’s poems so boring? Why did she need the approval of a canon that would never invite her bad-tempered brilliance, politics, poverty and ungainly female form to their dinner table?

  Does M exist?

  What proof does she have?

  When did she become a person?

  When did she cease to become a person?

  What kind of language is going to (re)create her?

  In troubled dreams the white ‘Chinese’ horse on her hotel wall gallops across J.K.’s stomach and tells her in strange whispers that he will return. His breath is warm and wet, sometimes he speaks in Mandarin, sometimes in Spanish, and he does return, this time to say in strange hieroglyphics made from ice: we return to homelands and find they are a hallucination. We return to our mothers and fathers and find they are not the people we thought they were. We return to our street and find it has been re-named. We return to our cities and find they have been rebuilt. We return to our lovers and find they are elsewhere even when they lie in our bed. We return to our people and find they have been massacred and we were not there to defend them. The redemptive homeland, she is a joker, she runs away bells ringing on her toes, you chase her at your peril because she will appear disguised as something else and you will be chasing her all your life, watching her fickle back turn corners. What are you returning to, J.K.? What is your name, what are your voices, and most importantly, what are your actions? What use is the heart turned inwards? That is a lonely home, it knows each crack in the ceiling and every stain on the carpet. It must gallop outwards into the wilderness and perhaps even die there. Come out to play J.K.

  She wakes to find Omray standing above her bed, cigarette glowing in the dark and canaries screaming in the corridor. ‘I’ve bought you some more souvenirs,’ he says, and drops a handful of yellow feathers on to her belly. She packs her bags, slams a roll of pesetas into his sleepy grabbing hands and walks out to the bus drivers’ bar for churro and cortado, three bags, one Smith Corona 1936 typewriter in a pillowcase, and the breathy syllables of the horse tattooed on her face.

  A prostitute with bruised elbows sits on a high stool drinking warm milk, a yellow plastic flower about to fall from her thin black hair. She has let her shoes drop to the floor and her ankles nudge each other as she avoids the eye of one particular bus driver who drinks half a pint of lager nearby. J.K. sits next to her, bags by her feet. The prostitute glances at the pillowcase and then at J.K., who smiles as the patron brings her a plate heaped with churro and a small coffee. She likes mornings. The beaches are empty, streets are being cleaned, and people have not yet summoned their meanest selves to pull them through the day. She last ate churro with a lover two years ago in Southern Spain. He dipped the sausage-like thing into hot chocolate and said, ‘I love the blue rhinestones in your ears, by the way.’ Usually a man of few words, an occasional joke and wry smile, observing her laughter but keeping his own inside him, that morning he talked and talked. Had she seen this and had she read that and what about hiring bicycles and heading off to a village famous for its honey and how brown her legs were getting and how much he liked the cool of marble floors and why did she cry that day in Lisbon and how he painted with coffee as a child in Argentina because his family were poor and could not afford to buy him paint and how his first wife died in a car crash leaving their ten-year-old daughter unable to sleep at night for fear of waking up and no one being alive and how she speaks French, German and Spanish and says she wants justice in three languages, how he planted English yellow flowers, what are they called, daffodils, in two old kettles and, eventually – I love you J.K. – the words spoken for the first time, up to now always avoided, loud and brave over a plate of churro, and J.K., blue rhinestones in her ears, silent, receiving the words and not returning them. She bends down and picks up the yellow plastic flower that has fallen from the prostitute’s hair that reminds her of those yellow flowers planted with love so long ago in two old kettles. Gracias, the prostitute says, and the pinball machine in the corner whirs in the black pools of her eyes.

  Stretched out on a sand dune high above the sea, cheek pressed into the sand, J.K. watches the sun slip bloodily into the purple ocean, radio tuned for news and the sky darkening as hours slip by. Strange voices leak through as she stares out across the horizon, shivering in a thin dress under the stars:

  ISRAEL, THE ALLIANCE, SAUDI ARABIA, 2,000 SORTIES, 5,000 CIVILIAN DEATHS, DENYING THE ENEMY AN INFRASTRUCTURE, LIMBS OF WOUNDED CHILDREN AMPUTATED IN CANDLELIGHT, ROCKEYE CLUSTER BOMBS, NEEDLE-SHARP FRAGMENTS

  Here, it is night. Cafés by the sea are busy. Hostile fatigued waiters carry trays laden with ice creams and beer and escalopes to bronzed men and women. Local fishermen, shoulders tense, stand against walls flicking worry beads, shuffling sandalled feet, smoking cigarettes, eyes on the ground, listening to the radio. Still and bowed. There are not enough fish in the ocean for that gut appetite. Tonight the Europeans are hungry, they want to be filled up. Fists bigger than local chickens, they complain about hire car firms in between mouthfuls . . . ALLIED FORCES, WE ARE THE ONLY NATION ON THIS EARTH . . . and J.K., lonesome cheek pressed in the dark, watches their shadowy arms lift glasses and forks like giant ghosts from a world that is too familiar. It is possible, though, that it is she who is the ghost, invisible, disenfranchised, the fragile daughter of colonial wars, one brown hand poking through the belly of Western Europe, the other wrapped aroun
d a bottle of malt whisky.

  J.K. on a sand dune lit by stars and light from fishing boats on the tremendous ocean.

  One winter she ran away to the flat marshland of South East England and lay on the pebble beach in the rain, sea lashing, just lying there for two whole days and nights. Three months later, feeling better, she unpacked her bag full of maps, any maps, ancient maps of China, maps drawn in 1310 by the Byzantine monk Maximos Planudes in response to the writings of astronomer Ptolemy, ink etchings of maps impressed on small clay tablets from Babylonia in 500BC where the universe floats on the sea in the form of a disc. Manuscripts which divided the earth into seven parts of the body: backbone, diaphragm, legs, feet, throat, rectum, head and face. She studied how the vocabulary of form changed with conquest, how the geography of speech and desire have all known invasions, plunderings, struggles and disguises. There in that marshland so bleak she could only look at it in parts, the horizon a long white scar, she thought about the instruments of early science used for surveying, measuring and mapping the world. The lenses, microscopes and telescopes that helped the subject get nearer or further away from her object of study, that led her through unknown worlds to the theatre of the galaxies. The further her mind wandered, the more curious she became about inscribing experience and information: if maps correspond to reality as seen at a particular time, what happens if she observes a number of realities at the same time? The word ‘perhaps’, which could be a route to possible worlds, but used in a certain way becomes the route to a single conclusion. Unlike the word ‘if’, which implies the discovery of possible universes, by making them.