by Tanith Lee
“I bin in Wales,” he told me grimly, as if it was my fault.
I said nothing.
He shook his greasy scabby locks at me. He had the faint remnant of a black left eye.
“I bin there and I come back and she ain’t around. She told this old cow wot lives in the shed there that she’s going to see you. An’ then she din come back. Just like Sy.”
I said nothing.
And now the uniformed side-kick spoke up.
“We understand,” he said, “she come here.”
“Do you,” I said. “Well she didn’t.”
“She’s fuckin’ lying!” judged Bruvva.
Uniform scratched his crotch, not menacing just cooty.
He concentrated while he did this, a combined expression of anger at the itch and enjoyment of the scratch making him go very nearly wall-eyed. Then: “We need to come in.” He added, surprisingly, “Madam.”
Nonplussed, what could I do? I said, “No, I don’t want that,” and I was already trying to shut the door—which I’d only opened because otherwise they could have smashed it down, and still could—and Bruvva caught the door and wrenched it from me, crashing it back against the wall.
He next charged directly past me, making a growling sound, and the other one pelted after him.
I thought, very clearly, and actually in words, I must run now. Leave everything—just get out…
But I couldn’t make myself. I couldn’t do it. So instead I turned and followed them into my main room through the door in the hall.
The smell was already appalling there. Having breathed in a mote or two of fresh air from the autumn-winter street, I nearly choked on the effluvia.
What more would they need? This in itself was proof enough that I was culpable, but the pair of them stood there in the room, with its boarded or walled-off windows and only a drizzle of illumination spilled in from the outer hall. And they weren’t gagging. Not even turning anything over, or examining all the bits of furniture for clues.
I said firmly, “Look, I don’t like this. I’ve only just got back myself from my sister’s, just about ten minutes before you turned up. I’ve been away over a week. Are you saying your brother’s girlfriend has got into my flat while I wasn’t here? Is that it?”
They went on staying crowded together in front of the fireplace with the electric fire that ‘sometimes’ works. The place reeked and they didn’t even cough. They looked now, both of them, like uneasy guests at some uptight stranger’s tea party, all big feet and thumbs and not knowing how to behave.
But Bruvva said, “What’s in there?” And pointed at the closed bedroom door.
“My bedroom. Where I sleep. I haven’t been in there yet.”
“Is it locked?” asked Uniform, in a puzzled way. But another flea intervened, this one in his short thick hair. Scritch-scratch. Same reaction, wall-eyed.
“No,” I said. “You realise this is an assault, and invasion of privacy?”
Neither of them moved. Either towards the bedroom with dead Micki sitting and rotting in the chair, or to leave the house. It seemed to me they might just stay there, planted by the fire that wasn’t on, and waiting for the vicar’s cucumber sandwiches so they could drop them on the Aubussin carpet from sheer awkward loutishness.
But then Bruvva went rolling off and clouted at the bedroom door, so it simply sprang inwards.
The bedroom was pitch black. That sheen I had seen on it which came from her, either putrescence or phosphorous, had gone out. No light at all. And the stink…
I felt myself shrivel in it, as if never before in my life had I ever encountered such an aroma, as in fact I had not; it had never stayed that immediate when matured.
What I must do, plainly, was wait for Bruvva’s outcry, and then I too must rush forward, and shriek and say who had done that—who—who—when I had been away—done it in my innocent absence, to wicked Micki who must have broken in with a wickeder third person, who then killed her.
Bruvva went forward into the room. Inside, he got out an old petrol lighter from far-gone days, and flicked it, and it lit. A tiny lemon flame.
From out in the other room I, and presumably Uniform, watched through the doorway as the flame skittered over the fetid bedroom darkness like an evil butterfly.
Eventually, “Anything?” Uniform called.
At which the butterfly was flicked back into its own dimension and Bruvva slunk out, wearing a worse-than-ever gloomy and aggrieved look.
At me he glowered. Yes, it was all my fault; Wales, life, what was in the bedroom, the history of the downfall of the world. And so to me he angrily announced, “Fuckin’ shit. Nuffin in there. Nofuckinfing at all.”
Rod:
60
“Pink for a girl,” he used to say. My father. “And blue for a boy.” That was his several dark blue suits then, and the ice-blue or turquoise ties—coloured like certain modern bottles of liqueur or Tequila. But I never saw my mother wear pink; or Isabel, my sister. At least, since I don’t remember them at all well, I don’t believe I did.
But Uncle George was wearing his usual tired if not graceless or unhygienic garments, and Vanessa too, her general attire and polished-pewter bob of hair.
Need I relate, I was lost for words. George filled the gap.
“Come in, Roderick. Have some wine. I have a very drinkable Pinot Noire 2001. She, of course,” he indicated the glowering Vanessa, “has just destroyed my last bottle of Glen Fayle. Can you smell the fair spilled Usquebaugh, dear boy? Delicious even in demise.”
“You drink far too much, George,” said Vanessa, in just the tone she employed to tell me that sort of thing. “Alcohol…”
“Alcohol, you silly old bat, is the solace of my days. Get back to your salad-making, you whore of Babylon, and shake your silver hair on it. Best part of the meal. You can kill a man by feeding him hair,” he added mildly to me. “Did you know, dear chap?”
I shook my head. Vanessa had spun on her heel and gone into the kitchen.
“Yes. Cut lots up and stuff it in the stuffing. Either he’ll choke on it or, if it gets down, it blocks up the lower intestine. Dead in agony inside the month. In India, I believe they used to use chopped up tiger whiskers. More painful and far quicker. Perhaps less fun.”
I had pulled myself partly together.
“George,” I said, “what in God’s name are you doing here?”
“Oh that.” He drew me into a space not unlike, although not completely, a replica of my own flat across the landing. There were two largish rooms, and one of these seemed to be his. I saw the wine-red curtains, and the narrow bed, and all around the music-centres and vinyl-record-players, piles of books and CDs, if only one drinks-cabinet, crowded by a battalion of red wines, bottles of gin and whisky. I couldn’t smell the spilled smashed bottle, but I had heard it destroyed, had I not; it had been one of my reasons for venturing across. A tall narrow fridge freezer lurked in one corner. “Can’t leave it in the kitchen, you see,” said George. “I and she share the kitchen. Please note, the fridge is padlocked. As is the cabinet when I hit the hay.” They were. “I miss the Chinese Palace,” he added. “Anywhere decent around here?”
“George, listen. Why are you here and not in Lewisham? Why is she here?”
“Ah, well,” he said. He sank into the single armchair and put his feet upon a little stool. The wine bottle was to hand and he filled his glass. “Loss of income, Roderick. Straightened circumstances in bad financial times. The predatory crunch of bankers chewing on our bones. Lost everything. Fled with a man with a van. I remembered, you see, you’d told me this was a cheap area, as indeed it is.”
I stared at him. “And Vanessa?”
“Same thing. Home repossessed. They’d have had the lot, so she grabbed what she could and parked herself on me. The other room, you understand.”
“But…” stupidly I blurted, “…you two don’t get on.”
“No.” George smiled and sipped his refreshed wine. “Q
uite stimulating, silly old bitch. Too young for me, of course, or too old. Not sure which. I like the young girls to look at, sixteen, seventeen. And the ancient hags for a night out. Feel like a kept man, then. Not like you, dear lad. You at thirty-nine, going on ninety-nine. I’m old as a listed building by now, but inside young as a lamb. A teenagéd, that’s me, accent acute, angled left to right and upwards: Teenagéd.”
In the kitchen, Vanessa banged metal things, perhaps forks, on china plates. I pictured the cold meats and frosty green salads.
“Any take-away places hereabouts?” asked Uncle George, with an appealing youthful greed.
61
As I’ve mentioned, I had a guardian after my father’s sudden death. He was no relative. Someone appointed by a court, I imagine.
His subsequent horror and bemusement were spectacular. And next I was cast in a new mould very strange to me, and I had to visit an endless (it seemed) stream—no, a river—of people who’d ‘wanted to help me’.
I recall less my confusion and disbelief, which soon enough transmuted into a complete amazement, than the dreadful interviews I had to undergo.
In awful over-bright little rooms, or more awful darker ones, smells of damp or nail varnish-scented new paint, window-frames full of cloistered courtyards beyond. Everyone was determined to assist me.
At almost fourteen, I realised fairly swiftly what they were on about. And after that I learned to speak and then to listen, and so to seem to come to an enlightenment which, frankly, I never felt, and do not feel now. Not even now do I fully, I think, grasp what all the fuss was about.
Most of all I came to see that after each interview, all rather, in their intense ways, resembling the debriefing of a prisoner of war, (or, sometimes, his harsh interrogation), I felt much, much better. I myself was aware this was solely because said interview was finished. I was free for the rest of the day or, as things ‘improved’, the week, the month, the year. And my knowledge of the liberation to come made me tell them all how much better I felt. Although, wisely, I never expanded to explain it was the escapes from my ‘helpers’ that lightened my heart.
In that way, rather rapidly perhaps, given the situation, I progressed out of their remit.
At least, by then, I knew what was, and what was not. What I was—and was not.
Did I ever blame my parents? My sister? I think I never blamed them, and I know I don’t blame them now. Did they destroy my life? I doubt it. It was life itself that destroyed their lives. Smashing them like special whisky bottles in trains and planes, while I, little bastard, lived on.
62
I began my awareness, and began to grow up, (to the age of thirteen-going-on-fourteen), as a girl. Yes, the little girl to whom pink is allocated. In my case, I often wore it, too. Pink. I’ll assume it suited me, back then.
They had wanted daughters, and the first elder daughter was female. Isabel. Then I arrived. What should they do? They discussed it, I expect, or maybe they didn’t, how can I know? But it was decreed that their male boy baby was to be brought up, from the first, as a female.
So I was taught all the usual girl things then current, encouraged to play unroughly, given dolls, pretty clothes, advised on softness and sweetness, I must conclude. My hair was long and had bows, which I can just remember. My name was Rosalind.
Now, I must make this clear. I never saw either my mother or sister, let alone my father, unclothed. Not even in a one-piece bathing costume. And obviously, as a small child, my voice was not of any particular gender. I had, inevitably, a penis, but since the bathroom and lavatory, (of which there were several), were private places, with what was I supposed to compare my own equipment?
However, as I grew up, certain anomalies—it must go almost without saying—intruded. This though was after the tragic deaths of my mother and Isabel. Normally I would have gone to my mother, I suppose, when, at the age of ten, I saw the picture of a naked man in a grown-up book of Renaissance art. And recognised the vital piece. My father was at home at this time, and I went straight to him.
“Oh, Rosalind, dear,” he said, “sometimes girls and women have these too. And sometimes, of course, some men do not.”
To me this made immediate and unproblematic sense. I did not know anything, aside from the act of urination, for which the penis was constructed. By then I was, as well, here and there, noting the shape of the female bosom. I mentioned this. My father assured me they were, none of them, real. They did not grow. “Most ladies have them made, do you see, Rosalind? They are then attached, painlessly, to the body by a cosmetic process. The usual age for this is sixteen, but some girls prefer to acquire them before that date. Most foreign girls, I must say, seem to do that.” He gazed into space as he said this. Looking back I suspect he had, then, a very young foreign mistress. “But you’re far too young, my love, to worry about such things.”
I assured him I did not want them especially, was just curious.
“Of course you are.” He gave me a hug and we ate some chocolate.
I must stress here, there was never anything abusively sexual involved in any of my experience with my father. Even my later interrogators, who at times had seemed determined to discover that there was, at last drew this same conclusion.
I was my father’s daughter. He loved me, if rather absently, as my mother and sister realistically must have seemed to. He told me I was his consolation for their loss.
My voice began to break when I was about twelve. Probably I was rather dilatory in that. But concerned once more I sought his advice. I remember so clearly he played me a record—vinyl—of a most wonderful contralto. I forget her name, I regret to say. But my father said that this unevenness of my vocal chords also happened with some young women. It boded well, since I might end up with a wonderful singing voice, like the one just heard from the lady on the record.
I believed every word. Why wouldn’t I? And I had been educated by then, for some time, by—I must deduce—very carefully chosen private tutors. We had no TV. The outer world was over the hills beyond the farmhouse’s verdant boundaries.
What did I lack? Nothing. Was I happy? In my own unambitious way, I was.
Eight or so years, five to thirteen, with few cares. Comfortable in myself. A happy young woman, a girl growing gracefully up.
Were there no sexual feelings? A few. But they never involved persons, or even images. They were serpentine tremors that rippled through my spine and groin, that made my woman’s penis rise up, and if I caressed it, it would explode with joy. That was all. It was enough. No one had told me yet I had been cheated, if even I had been.
And then my bloody fool of a father crashed his plane on the beak of Norway. And the guardian arrived, and seeing me in my rose-pink dress, from which I spoke, I surmise, in the voice of an adolescent boy, froze like a stalagmite.
His tirade, and the adjoining congress of interrogators, can be pictured easily enough, I imagine.
Off came the clothes to their cries of rage and fear, all for me, but knifing me through. Off came the veneer of almost fourteen straightforward and smiling years.
On went the straight jacket of maleness. On went the shackles of learning, all over again, what not, and what to do, to want, to hate.
What would my father have said to me, I wonder, when I began to need to shave my face? “Oh, Rosalind. Some women do have to depilate. We’ll get you something. It’s a nuisance for you, but a sign of physical strength, too.”
And what if, at sixteen, instead of hankering for false, cosmetically-added breasts, I had somehow seen some wonderful young girl, strayed onto the land round the house, and fallen, as they used to say, in love-desire?
“Oh, Rosalind. That can happen, you know. But for now, my dear girl, you should control yourself. You’re too young to be sure what you want. Too, too young.”
63
There had been, to begin with, no further noise, after I’d left the pair of them to their cold supper. Then, about 11 a.m. I caught a fain
t wafting hum of Bach. George apparently was playing one of his CDs. It didn’t sound particularly loud to me, but then I began to hear a much louder sound. Vanessa seemed to be shouting again. Perhaps George’s music had disturbed her. I had always gathered she went to bed quite early. George’s response to her presumed complaint was to up the volume. And then again. My flat too was soon roaring with Bach, though in the bedroom, with the door shut, the torrent lessened. I wondered what the landlady thought. But I suspected she wasn’t even there at the moment, which might account for the terrible rat stink’s not having been treated.
I slept anyway. Waking around 4 a.m., all was peaceful. And it was Saturday, too, I could lie in.
But I was troubled, of course I was. At a distance these two relatives—both, I had to admit, slightly bonkers—were tolerable. But as next-door neighbours the future didn’t look too bright.
I dozed uneasily and finally got up at six thirty, before the sun. Drinking my coffee I watched the solar disk rise in fact, over the street. How odd everything looked, I thought, in the dawn, the trees mostly bare, and frost pasted on the north and west side of roofs. Not a sign of life anywhere. Years before there would have been milk-carts drawn by horses, and Steptoe and Son rag-and-bone men, also with horse-and-cart. Kids might be out playing in the middle of the road, since cars were relatively few; you could go half an hour or more without anybody driving through a side street. But now, less than a contemporary scene, it looked only deserted. As if everyone had died or gone away in the night.
This notion made me uncomfortable, even now, after the former events of George’s and Vanessa’s disappearances were explained. I was almost relieved when, at 8 a.m. the phone rang.
Relief soon gave in to dismay. It was Forrel. He had, he said, come down on the train from London, hadn’t slept all night. Could he come round at once and see me. He was in a ‘State’, he told me, with a threateningly grim self-importance.