Outside of his tormenting thoughts, Candace is undoubtedly one of his sorest trials to date. Her smugness seems to permeate her entire being so that even her retroussé nose (which in another woman he might have found charming), strikes him as repugnant. He notices that Lucia looks on glassy-eyed as Candace, now apparently fully recovered, hugs herself and hops about in a parody of childish delight. “Clean socks,” she sings. “Are there socks, Lucia?
“Oh, how wonderful! A house! A house! We can be a real community in our own house.”
Harry launches a cannonade of coughs so harsh, Chandelier puts his fingers in his ears. Candace glares at him; then turns to the others: “Are we all ready, then?”
Lucia and Bird Girl exchange a look in which the Outpacer reads a much-tried forbearance.
“Are you well enough to travel?” Bird Girl asks Candace.
“Oh, yes. I am quite recovered. And much more than that. I am re-energized. A house. Abandoned, you said, Lucia? A house in which we can settle, let our tensions diffuse. Purify ourselves.”
“Drop you down a cistern, perhaps.” The Outpacer is close enough to make out Harry’s muttered comment. Behind him, he hears Lucia’s smothered laugh. He turns to see her bend from the waist to gather up her shawl; watches as she smoothes out the crushed bundle, folds the material corner to corner; then stretches it with her arms fully extended so that from the eyes down, her face and upper body are veiled by a triangle of black silk. Its deep fringe brushes her knees. Then a flick, a twist of black in the air, and the shawl settles again on her shoulders.
“The heat in the field is fierce,” she warns them. “We must all keep our heads covered.”
Harry tugs from his pocket the tubular toque that looks as if it might once have been a sock. Bird Girl pulls a man’s ancient fedora rakishly over one eye. Candace puts on her hat of woven straw, with its clump of garish plastic cherries. Lucia sleeks down her head scarf and draws it tightly over her brow. Chandelier’s headpiece is a battered plastic mixing bowl. What a marvel, the Outpacer thinks, to see this dull object transformed, once set upon the boy’s pliant curls. Immediately it becomes the delicately moulded helmet of a young warrior god.
So they set off, with their heads protected, and their naked hands either thrust in their pockets or tucked up inside long sleeves.
Lucia takes the lead, followed by Bird Girl; then Chandelier with Old Harry, then Candace, and the Outpacer in the rear.
Once they leave the cover of the forest, it is as the Lady Forager warned: a heat so fiery, it would surely split open the flesh of an exposed infant. Even swathed in his burlap cowl, he cannot rid himself of the image of sizzling meat. Long afterwards, when he thinks of that fateful crossing of the field, it is the picture of a blazing hot grill that comes to him, and six bodies squirming on its murderous surface.
He silently curses again his smothering disguise as the sweat streams down his face and chest. His eyes sting. He sometimes stumbles blindly. When he can see clearly, it is Candace’s ample backside that fills his gaze. The plump cheeks straining against striped fabric remind him of the inflated beach toys of his childhood. He recognizes at once how cheap and vicious is this projection and forces himself to examine the real roots of his own gnawing and growing unease. How can he properly protect these five beings when he can barely see? It was one thing to shadow them, to circle them silently at night, brandishing his torch at the odd scavenger mutt that crept up to their camp. It is quite another to be constantly in their company. It weighs on him so oppressively, this awareness of all their various frailties and of his own shortcomings as their champion.
Is it this vulnerability that feeds his concern they are being followed? He will catch some disconcerting rustle, or snap of twig behind him, and turn and see nothing. But the prickle at the back of his neck persists, as does the gluey sensation of unknown eyes watching their every move. There is no one there, he assures himself as he turns yet again, the damned hood always slightly obscuring his peripheral vision.
Someone shouts. He nearly collides with Candace who has stopped in her tracks.
“Oh, how darling!” he hears her gush.
Candace is jumping up and down, waving her straw hat in the air. “Our house! Our house!” she exclaims. She hops from one foot to the other.
“Hush!” This from Lucia, who raises her left arm in warning. He sees the forager’s hand close on the handle of her knife. Automatically he manoeuvres his arm inside the bell of his gown to grasp his own dagger.
How inept our preparations are, he thinks. It is all merely gesture. We could not even make a decent show of force: three women, an aged man, an adolescent boy, and I. Without the cover of darkness I have neither stealth nor cunning. And I am boiling, blinded by this damn disguise. He wipes the sweat from his brow and studies the stone house. It is a dull, squat affair. No entrancing wooden gables here. He thinks the stone face looks clammy. He feels a chill in his spine, and then in his hands and feet.
He glances at Candace. Her eyes are round and glowing, her face flushed. She stands on tiptoe. Her fingers twitch. He reads her body’s agitation as a naked wish to launch herself into the waiting house, and crown herself chief organizer. She will hold little morning colloquies or pep talks, try to thrust them all into roles she has elaborated in her ever-busy brain. The idea is so unbearable he almost groans aloud.
And if the group elects to stay? How can he maintain his duty as protective watcher on the boundary of this exposed, putrid farmyard? He is getting ahead of himself, he realizes. Who could tell what the group might yet choose to do?
“I’ll go in first,” Lucia calls back. He nods his assent, but moves quickly to follow in close behind her.
“It looks just the same,” she tells him as they stand together inside the front door.
Indeed, it could look no worse. His spirit recoils at the putrid smell and chaotic mess of the place. Every surface offends his sensibility: the coarse upholstery, the synthetic lace curtains, the flung hay bales.
The others seem captivated, though. They crowd inside, heedless of danger. He sees Lucia’s black eyes widen in alarm. Her arm jerks forward. For a second only, he thinks she may grab his hand. Instead, she draws her knife from its sheath. “We must check upstairs,” she whispers.
“I will go first,” he says. “Stay close behind me.”
A tawdry schoolboy thought flits through his overheated brain: Oh, yes, to precede this lovely woman upstairs, usher her into a bedroom where he might gaze upon her nakedness, spread her muscular legs apart, and trace on the tender flesh of her inner thighs invisible messages of his desire. Until her back arcs in answer, and her dark eyes implore. First, he would use his tongue, entering and withdrawing from her dark, luxuriant nest in a rhythm she cannot anticipate. So that she would writhe and twist away from him in such a frenzy, he must hold her down with his hands on her shoulders. And her passionate shudders would reverberate through his arms. Oh, what pleasure he would give her. He is erect again, lost anew to this wonderland of lust for Lucia who is just behind him on the wooden stair. I must stop this, he urges himself. I must pull myself together. Who was it used to tell him that? It is not an expression he has thought of for many years.
As he mounts the last step before the landing, with its two closed doors, one straight ahead and one to his left, he freezes. For he is sure he has heard something. What? A deep intake of breath? And not from Lucia, but ahead, from behind one of the doors.
He starts to ask, “Did you hear that?” when he is silenced by an abrupt wail, a shrill, animal cry that seems to signal either impending death, or the basest possible despair. He turns to Lucia. “Cat?” she whispers.
“Perhaps.” He smiles bravely even though she cannot see his face. He glances down and sees that the others have gathered at the bottom of the stair. From their widened eyes and opened mouths, he reads their fear. He knows he must make a move.
Only Harry appears unperturbed. He looks up, one hand on his stick
, the other stroking the boy’s cheek. Chandelier’s face has turned the colour of sour milk.
The wail pollutes the air again, a curdled, strangled sound. The Outpacer grabs the door handle, pulls, then pushes. The door is apparently locked. Dagger gripped firmly in his right hand, he heaves at the door’s central panel, using his left shoulder as a battering ram. There is a metallic snap, and a shudder of the wooden frame as the door gives way.
The wailing is unbroken now, a human siren so shrill he can hardly bear it. The siren’s source is, if anything, more horrific than the sound, and he stands for a moment hypnotized by what he sees.
The creature on a narrow bed wails through an open mouth ringed with carmine. Its cheeks are daubed with a ghastly mauve pigment; the eyes so thickly outlined with kohl, it is impossible to see their true colour. This coarsely painted being is wizened, as fleshless and apparently brittle as a twig. As she wails (for it is a “she,” he can see her shrunken dugs beneath a transparent blouse of gauzy stuff), her body writhes. Her gaunt arms are spread wide, and her fingers are laced through the tubular bars of the metal bedstead.
The old woman writhes and wails and the metal bed shakes. And still he stands frozen as if her grotesqueness has literally petrified him. She is a gargoyle, a fright, a nightmare come to life. Feel pity, he tells himself. He plumbs what he believes are his emotions and hits only revulsion.
Her feet twitch, making him all the more aware of their transparent spotted skin. Her skirt is calico, with a flounce at the hem. He has seen such skirts on the young whores in the Pleasure Zone; and such blouses too. You can pinch their nipples through the filmy gauze as you pass by, and those pleasure girls will smile at you alluringly. For a second, he wonders if this painted abomination on the bed is a chimera sprung from his own brain, intent on self-punishment. Is this what his lecherous past has conjured up? If so, he can imagine no more harrowing spectacle than the one before him.
The old woman is screaming now. The smudged eyes are fixed on him. He sees Lucia move to the bedside, softly touch the withered, gaudy face, and unpluck the crone’s fingers, one by one, from their rigid grip on the bedstead. Lucia sits on the bed, stroking the old woman’s hand. Her long ebony braid falls over her shoulder. The old woman reaches out, her gaunt hand trembling, to touch the glossy plait. Her gesture is so tentative, so civilized, that the Outpacer is encouraged to move closer to the bed.
The transformation is immediate. The crone is once again a gargoyle, her mouth a dark hole spouting curses at him. “Dirty, filthy priest-man. Keep away, you bugger. Burn in your own hell, nasty monk-man! I know what you’re thinking and hatching under your robe.”
She knows, he thinks; and so the idea comes again that this decrepit woman is a necessary aspect of his penance. Snarling, pathetic yet terrifying, like a skeleton rouged and dressed up for a dance, she is another ordeal he must undergo.
She lurches forward. Her long, sharp nails flash near his face. He fears for his eyes. As he jerks his head away from her assault, the hood of his robe falls backward. For the first time in many weeks, the Outpacer stands with his naked face exposed to another being. The crone is able to view his face in those few seconds before he can rearrange the folds of the shadowy hood over his eyes. Lucia does not see him because she is directly behind the old woman, arms gripped round her waist, attempting to pull her back down to the bed.
But someone else has seen him. He is aware, even as he tugs the hood back into place, that there is another person in the room. Not Candace, he implores whatever beneficent forces might still visit the world. Please, not Candace.
He turns to see Bird Girl standing just inside the bedroom door. She stares directly into the dark well of his hood. He knows that from now on she will see the actual features it hides. Bird Girl runs the tip of her tongue over the length of her upper lip. He has no time to ponder what this gesture might mean because the old woman is babbling, making little clucking sounds. Her cracked tones have softened, and it takes him some seconds to recognize this is her attempt at seduction. She is crooning to him, the honeyed words of some bed chamber of a century ago. “Boo-ti-ful man. Such a handsome man. Like a god, my dah-ling. Come lay your head between my breasts.”
He steps back in disgust. His deepest wish is to flee. He ought to have stayed stock-still because his symbolic retreat sends the old woman into a frenzy. She wrenches herself from Lucia’s circling arms, and reaches out to him, rising on her haunches.
“I know tricks to make you quake in pleasure, handsome man.” He cringes inside his monk’s habit as she raises her hips toward him. “I am the reincarnation of Lola Montez,” she exclaims, “lover of kings and great composers. I have the secret knowledge of the courtesan.”
She wriggles her hips under her flounced skirt, then draws up her knees.
Afterwards he tells himself that he ought to have anticipated her next move. He should at least have had the sense to turn his head away, and so spare himself the unwanted vision he will never be able to expunge from memory.
But this ancient woman wriggling obscenely on her metal bed exerts her own iron compulsions. He cannot look away. She is too horrific. She is her own vulgar carnival, and like a child, he must stand and gawp. So that when she flings up her skirt, exposing her spindly thighs and her bald pudendum, he must look. What he feels above all is a scalding shame — for her, for himself, and for the state of the world. At first, he does not fully understand how the world comes into it, and why this incident strikes him as so much more than it was: an old woman who has gone mad and forsaken her dignity.
In a right and proper world, this kind of unseemly behaviour would not occur. Aged women would sit with their knees decently covered, in long, warm skirts. They would hide the mystery between their legs and sometimes speak of the one in their breasts, telling stories droll and wise. A right and proper world — what does he know of such a world? He was born in a time in which the sun was already an enemy, when all birds — with the exception of tortured battery hens — were extinct, and all fish were hermaphrodites. Did the old girl eat too many poisoned fish, he wonders. Or sniff the wrong air of the wrong sky at the wrong moment? There are so many ways to be imperilled in this worst of all possible times.
Then something wondrous happens.
He hears an intake of breath, but whose? This is followed by a silence that seems somehow musical, and a subtle shift in the quality of the light. He has the notion that both space and time have been purified. For a moment the box-like bedroom is transformed into the green-gold pasture of some long-ago poem, a place where one obeys a beautiful compulsion to dance, or to make up a song of praise. It is a kind of dance that he witnesses, and he is filled with wonder at the way its simple gestures open another world inside this place they are.
There is only this: two young women gracefully attendant on an elderly one, both of them intent on restoring her dignity. Bird Girl stands on one side of the bed, Lucia on the other. Together, as if choreographed by an unseen hand and mind, they cover up the old woman’s nakedness. Drawing the cloth of her skirt gently over her knees, they tuck it under her feet.
Why does this scene move him so? He watches as Bird Girl and Lucia stroke the old woman’s hair and temples. Apparently soothed by their touch, she lies down again, her head on the pillow. Her eyes close.
With her face in repose the kohl-rimmed eyes and carmine-stained mouth are softened. This is no longer farce, he thinks, but tragedy. For a moment, he sees the pale, withered visage with its crudely daubed colours as a grieving mask. And beneath the glaze of grief is something else — a contradictory surging vitality, and absurdly, yes, hope. It is as if things have for the moment tumbled back into place. The plot of the tale is back on course, which is why the room seems to him to have burst its bounds and to float upon a sea of light.
The crystalline spell is shattered by a voice that could only belong to Candace.
“Ugh!” she says.
“What a fright!” she exclaims.
“It stinks in here,” she says.
“There’s always a fly in the ointment,” she tells them.
Who has let this donkey into the cathedral, he wonders. He has no idea how this image has entered his head for outside of the vintage films he watched as a young man, he has never seen either a cathedral or a donkey.
“Someone should put her out of her misery,” the donkey says.
“Well, she can hardly have much longer to go, can she?” it brays.
A quick glance at Lucia’s and Bird Girl’s faces confirms that he has indeed heard what he thought. They look as stunned as he feels.
He is amazed at himself when he raises his hand as if to strike Candace. Although he does not actually follow through, the gesture nakedly reveals how ragged is his fury.
Candace glares at him. He stands before her, face covered, unnerved by his own loss of control and by the image that now fills his mind. He sees himself upending the noxious Candace and paddling her fleshy buttocks with the sole of his rubber sandal. What he wants desperately is to humiliate and hurt her. He takes small comfort from the fact that this imagined scenario causes him not the least sexual thrill. Nevertheless he is frightened of his own rage, and beset by guilt. For has Candace not merely spoken aloud thoughts that have already passed through his own brain?
“I need air,” he announces.
And so he leaves them all on the second floor of the stone house, for Harry and Chandelier are now also on the landing just outside the old woman’s door. He leaves them but of course does not abandon them. He is their sworn Protector. They are his fate.
He seeks a temporary refuge from the human donkey and her unholy pragmatism in the property’s wooden outbuilding. The wood is so old it has developed long fissures through which he can peer and maintain his watch. He decides that at some point during the night, he will go back inside the house and sleep in a chair with his feet against the door.
Lucia's Masks Page 12