I moved forward and laid my hand on Gwendoline’s tail, searching the area that could be described as her lap. There, just like the dip of fabric in the skirts of the girls in the photographs that I kept, was a sort of empty pouch or sac of scaled skin. Yes, it was just as if the tail had been a skirt wrapped tightly around two legs. What was required of me now was an act of merciless cruelty, of violence even, that made me think of this ritual as a sacrifice in the most literal sense. All the while watching Gwendoline’s face, as scarily serene as a Madonna, I punctured the layer of skin that sat like a mermaid’s purse in her lap, and tugged the blade vigorously downwards, as if gutting a fish. When the incision was large enough I worked my left hand inside and felt the salty warmth, letting my blood mix with hers.
She had flinched and gasped when the knife first entered her, but then her eyes moistened and narrowed until they were almost closed, and a dreamy, animal expression settled on her features as her head weaved eerily from side to side. She was sweating now, like a woman in childbirth, delirious, and it was a strange irresistible voice that called to me now, an urgent whisper that came from deep within, frightening me and stoking flames within me, dragging me down like an undertow.
‘Kiss me!’ she hissed.
I was drawn towards her by the command as by bonds of steel. We kissed violently, furiously, as if we could force our faces together. Her lips and tongue sent shocking bolts of rending pain to my heart, such as I knew I could never experience alone, the shattering frantic pain of love that I had envied so bitterly all my life, the pain that tasted of sweet jealousy, jealous of myself at a moment that could not be repeated, jealous of all the excess passion of Gwendoline’s being that was too much for me and washed over me because I was unable to experience it all. My hand brushed the velvet softness of primeval tissues and membranes and all I could think was that this was Gwendoline, this was Gwendoline, this was really Gwendoline.
I closed my eyes as she writhed like a serpent. Something in that writhing disturbed me. She was changing shape in my arms, shrinking and growing in different places. Her lips were stretching, widening, and her salty tongue was almost choking me. I opened my eyes again to witness the transformation that had taken place. Something sunk deep down inside me, like an inhuman wail, and that dismal sinking and that alien screaming, like a trail of red, seemed to streak downwards from every cell in my body, down to my very core, turning everything to water within, and then shrivelling away. It was a voice wailing ‘no’ as a soul descended forever into the flames of hell.
The water of the pool was clouded by masses of blood, as was to be expected, and through this thick haze of crimson, I could see that Gwendoline now had legs. Indeed, my hand was no longer inserted in the gash in a tail, but covered a very human cunt. However, Gwendoline was not more human, but less. From her waist up, she had metamorphosed into the grotesque monster that was the matching top half of the tail that had vanished. She was a hangyojin. Her tail had been weirdly beautiful to me, but there was nothing beautiful about the fishy demon that embraced me now, its eyes and mouth cold and wide, drooping with an undersea gloom and melancholy. This hunched, misshapen thing was nothing other to me than the boiling eruption into physical form of pure agony.
I pulled away from the embrace of those suckered limbs, my heart breaking at the inarticulate sadness in those eyes, and at those vestiges which were female, reminding that this was still Gwendoline. In a panic I ran from the attic down to the front door and out into the night, to wander in a rain falling like an ache upon my naked body, reminding me somehow that everything returns to this anonymous aloneness, this nothing, haunted by memories of something. I had been cheated even of the sweet dignity of pure sadness, pure tragedy, by the grotesqueness of that transformation. I wept like a child at the bitter unfairness of it. I believe I even gnashed my teeth. It should have been poetic sorrow, but instead it was horror, disgust, anguish. I had to run away from her, a hideous croaking monster. I had abandoned her.
One question haunts me. Did she know what was going to happen? If she did, why did she go through with it? Was it a sort of passive aggression? Revenge? Rejection? A means of escape? Was I really so far from her all along that I never imagined she might have reasons to do something so desperate? I do not know the answer to any of these questions. Perhaps she had been as shocked as myself by what had occurred. But when I miss her now, as I always do, I wonder exactly who or what it is that I miss. I cannot begin to pinpoint her. She is now as empty and mysterious as those deceptively shallow green eyes of hers that I could never see past.
I had to go back to the cottage. I had no choice. When I returned the demon thing had gone, and the emptiness of the rooms was as horrible as her presence would have been. I thought of the old exit to the undersea mine she had told me about. Maybe that was where she had gone. In theory I could find it. It was near. But it might as well have been beyond the furthest star in the sky. It is still painfully near.
For a long time I stared at the wooden floorboards as my tears warped and whitened my vision. The days became swollen, transformed by my wracking sobs as her body had been swollen and transformed into that knotted and lumpy thing. The anguish has twisted my life and nothing can untwist it. But do not think I am without consolation, alone and broken as I am. Do not think my life lacks all satisfaction. A circle is complete. A pattern has been made clear. I have my story now. It is the story of the ultimate consummation of denial.
Far-Off Things
Childhood, legendry, love—all these things share one thing in common, a sense of misty, uncrossable distance. And that distance is also the depth of our longing for them; and that distance is an old song crafted from sadness. The song has always been old; its age and its sadness are one.
Poets, philosophers, sages—since words have been at their disposal they have devoted those words to one of the three above. But is it not strange that love—for that is the word in question—which has no sure existence in this world at all, should be the object of so much elegy and debate?
Sometimes, swollen with sighs, I would add words of my own to this debate. My words would be thus: that true love is another world that has existence only in the lover’s solitary heart. Upon contact with the harsh air of this, our world, it dies away. And to illustrate my words I would retell a tale of childhood—perhaps in some form known to some already—and one that belongs to the no-time of legend.
Both the latitude and the age, as befits a tale of legendry, were isolated from all maps and history. We can say that the town was in the north, and by that understand that its streets were grey and cold, that these events took place in the olden days, and by that understand that barefoot children in threadbare clothes played hopscotch and whipped hoops through those streets. And amongst those children was one child who could not play such games.
The boy had not spoken a word since his birth, though his hearing was sharp enough. That in itself would not have forbidden him from playing with the other children. There was simply something wrong with the boy. It seemed he could not bear to look another human being in the eye, as if he were afraid of what they might see in his own. And so people were just as uncomfortable with him as he was with them, until he acquired the title of idiot and everyone felt much relieved. As an idiot he could have his place in the town, and even if he was not respected exactly, he was ignored.
So while other children chanted their skipping rhymes he would sneak from one dank, crumbling alley to the next as if he wished himself invisible. Indeed, all around seemed to abet his invisibility, so that to a stranger his exaggerated stealth must have looked comic and pathetic.
Out past the last alley, the last brick wall and all the unspoken mourning that is reared with stone and clay, the town gave way to meadows and hills crowned with copses. At this boundary the boy would suddenly run, bursting with a mixture of excitement and release.
The open fields, the sky pupilled by clouds slow with peace and wonder: these were the boy
’s schoolroom. Life to him was as unfenced as they. He did not count the years, nor did he reckon how he should act or what he should feel according to how many had passed. He foraged for pine-cones and chestnuts amid leaves. Where the water stilled and swelled at the bend in the stream, he lay flat and reached out to tickle the bellies of trout. He found out the nests of all the birds and watched the progress of their eggs and their fledgling young. In the vine-crowded tower of the broken old lime-kiln he waited for bats to waken or to come home.
To the boy these things were familiar. They were his very own treasures. But enfolded in the valleys between these hills the boy had also found out something that was to him strange and enticing. Wilder than the ragged hills around, to the boy at least, were the farmhouse and the people who lived there. When the tide of evening drew in he would pause amid the long grasses of the meadow that looked down upon the house, and gaze at the yellow windows. He heard with distinctness sounds from the kitchen, and from without the barking of dogs and the restless clucking of hens.
Perhaps he would not have paused so long in the evening, listening for the different voices from within, if it were not for something he sometimes saw during the day. Her name was Leah. She was the daughter of the house and old enough to work around the farm. The boy would catch a glimpse of her now and then, on lucky days, when she sat on a stool in the barn to milk the cows. Without knowing why, the boy made this one division in his life, between the time before he had ever seen her and the time since. And yet he did not question his own fascination, and indeed, hardly thought about the girl except when he was near the farmhouse and remembered her again, as if afresh, like an animal curious at a scent it did not understand.
Time passed and the boy could now hardly remember his life before he knew of the girl. When she failed to appear in the barn for a few days he felt downcast and was unable to enjoy his usual solitary play. Suddenly, all he could think of was when he would next catch sight of her. The boy was quick-eared and heard much that was not meant for him. He knew the girl’s name already and soon he learnt from a few words caught here and there that she had fallen ill. It seemed her illness was of a kind from which few recovered.
Now, when the boy passed near the farmhouse, the place seemed desolate. He was sure that even the sounds from within had become sad and subdued. As he stood and looked down from the upper meadow the thought struck him with peculiar sharpness that he might never see the girl again. The world that had begun with the first sight of her, and had grown almost to be the whole of his memory, might soon be gone. He felt as much urgency as helplessness, and beyond these two vying emotions a sadness as if he had only just woken to the sober, nagging loneliness of himself. It seemed appropriate that autumn was deepening towards winter, and that a frost was in the air.
Short was the light, and long the dark, so that it is better to talk of the passing nights than of days, though they did not seem to pass. They were the same night swallowing one brief day after another. The night did not pass, and for the boy, it seemed, time no longer flowed. It was a well of darkness. He passed by the farmhouse no more and no less often than before. Without hope there was nothing else he could do than this. But if we cannot separate the nights to say, ‘one night’, we must say instead, ‘at the bottom of the well of darkness’ the boy found the girl again.
Unable to bear the weight of his hopelessness any longer, the boy slipped out of his house deep in the night. By now used to his magic cloak of invisibility, half his own make-believe and half the world’s blindness, the boy crept through sleeping streets and out of the town. With all the world lost in dreams around him he realised this is what he should have done before. The boy was fond of secrets. They were to him the most precious things in the world, and in this unexchangable currency he had long ago acquired riches. Who can say but that there was some deep link between his love of secrets and his muteness. As the wide night took him in its soughing embrace he knew that he was seeking the most precious secret of all. The girl’s fate had been decided, and when one’s fate is decided one is already moving and breathing in another world. The boy had to get close to that house, if only to hear her sleeping breath or to know that she was there dreaming with the night’s vast and single dream.
As soon as he cleared the line of trees at the top of the meadow he heard an eerie, shivering sound, clear on the frosty air, that was not the cry of any animal. He moved a little further, like a cautious fox. Leah was leaning from her open casement in the upper storey of the house, sobbing and trying to stifle her sobs lest she wake her tired family. As the moon gave to the clouds that fogged it a mystical effulgence, so it seemed to the boy that Leah’s sobs lent the night a wondrous beauty. It was then that the mystery of love was disclosed to him, by Leah and the night, breathless and complete. Love was hidden from the world in the shape of this child, to be revealed only to the eyes of another child. And the child whose eyes they were was one untutored in the uses the world has for things. He did not know there should be a use for or an object to anything. So this love simply was, and there was nothing for him to do but gaze and admire. It seemed that night had somehow planted the seeds of its own blossoming love back in that first sight of Leah, and now the night was recounting that love’s history so that what at the time seemed only glimpses and moments, the slightest of ephemera, were now shown as scenes in a story timeless and inevitable.
It is an irony worth noting that of all the love songs and poems that ever were, none of them succeed in recording any sense or impression of what the beautiful being who inspired them was like. All that is recorded is the feeling of love itself. And yet for the author of the song or poem there was only one person who it could be meant for. Why is that person always lost? They become nothing more than an anonymous ‘you’.
The face that love had assumed this time was Leah’s, and Leah’s was its name. The boy was keenly affected by her uniqueness. It was all part of the secret now his. In all the history of the world there would only be one Leah, and since she was already not long for this world, it seemed that all of time and creation had rejected a beauty too great for it. Only the boy was there to see it. He saw it in the treacly dimple of her cheek, the jutting of one of her teeth, the way her hair seemed to melt into wisps, making the slightness of her whole frame something gossamer that might disappear in too bright a light. He saw these things, and he also numbered among the privileged few in all the starry span of time to know her voice. Oh, most indescribable of all things, the human voice! In hers he sensed a gentleness and shy intelligence that must understand him, and yet which could only be too good for him. The boy could not imagine that such beauty could ever touch something so lowly as himself. Nor could he imagine that it could possibly spurn him, since his love was that beauty’s mirror. All that he could do was try and grasp the elusive thing called Leah in the deer-like movements of her body and as it trembled in her voice. He saw her uniqueness as a colour, the rarest ethereal blue, bordering on turquoise. His memories of her were full of this colour and serene. But when he saw her now her voice was wracked with tears and that beauty was a naked, devastating thing. If the blue of his memories was like the flashing limpidity to be seen sometimes in a peaceful stream, then that colour was transformed now into the frothing, violent white where the stream meets the rapids.
Leah was transfixed by the dissolution of her unique existence. She brimmed and overflowed with tears for the passing world that was her self. Often, as she leant out of her window and into the night, her cheeks were soaked with tears. The boy had crept closer each night, and soon he was even able to see her tears glisten in the moonlight, trickle to the edge of her chin, and finally fall through the empty air to the ground below. Night after night, how many tears had fallen on that patch of earth next to the door?
The boy could think of nothing more sacred than those tears. So, when Leah had utterly exhausted herself with crying and withdrawn into the muffled darkness of her room, he crept right down to beneath he
r windowsill and looked for any trace of them. They had melted the frost a little, and the earth had drunk them up. This was what the boy found the first time. The second and third time he saw something else. Tiny shoots seemed to be pushing themselves up through the hard earth and into the unwelcoming autumn air. They grew with astonishing speed, until, in a week or so, they were recognisable as a kind of cowslip.
But there had never been cowslips like these before. They thrived in the raw cold of the year’s end, and the lace of their flowers was a silvery colour, like Leah’s tears in the moonlight. When the wind blew the flowers shook and their petals quivered like soap bubbles about to burst. When all was dark and silent, and even Leah had exhausted her tears and closed her window, the boy drew close to examine the flowers. When he saw their beauty at close hand, and smelt their fragrance, he was sure he knew what seeds they were grown from. To think that Leah’s teardrops contained such life!
Leah herself must have been blinded by her tears, till all the world blurred and ran and the stars were drowning in the sky. She did not seem to see the flowers till they had grown a little over waist height. She had been weeping almost silently when her attention seemed to be caught by her own falling teardrops, as if there might be some consolation in watching her own sorrow fall through the empty space, detached from her, like rain. Then she saw the flowers where her teardrops fell and the night was made intimate with her little gasp of wonder. She appeared to forget her sadness as she gazed. She must have been strangely moved by the strength of such fragile-looking flowers, blooming effortlessly amidst the icy bleakness of the season.
‘If only I could live as long as one of those,’ she said to herself, ‘I would be happy.’
As he watched, the boy’s eyes followed Leah’s down to the flowers. As if both of them had forgotten her words they saw only the pearly wonder of the flowers. And while their eyes were drawn downwards, Leah’s words went up, up like a prayer, into the night where no human eyes were now turned. Up into the cold air of the dreaming night. Deep in the valley it seemed that from one horizon to the other was the whole world, but up in the night air all the places people called ‘here’ and thought were all the world looked small and became only ‘there’. The sky stretched out vaster than any landscape below it. The stars and the webbed effulgence of the moon shed a cold, marmoreal light upon the clouds below, as if they were ruins and the clouds were the desert dunes they stood in. But the skyscape was not empty. In the vapours of the clouds, stirring in the deepest pools of night’s blackness, throwing out an arm in the midst of their slumber, or muttering words that make sense only in dreams, were all the demons, bugbears and gooligars that look down upon our world and make sure that no part of existence goes by unwitnessed. They are the far-off things for whom dreaming and waking are one. All things happen under the same sky, and because of the far-off, grey and shapeless things that dwell there, the unseen background to all that passes in the world, in a sense all things are far-off, one thing from another.
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