by Ann
‘Comfort us now & in the hour of our deaths.’
When I woke it was with an unbearable pang of nostalgia. Boarding the train at Stockport that morning I heard a woman say distinctly, ‘The coast, they claim, is a must at this time of year,’ and I knew I was lost. Since then I have kept a little notebook. The television advertisements are full of clues. One shows a tiger running in slow motion across a heartbreaking landscape of sand dunes; another, for banking services, a horse splashing through shallows. I record them all.
Like Lucas I have ransacked the atlases and encyclopedias, finding nothing. Unlike him I have visited the great seaports: London, Glasgow, Liverpool. By Southampton Water I sat down and wept; the wind was full of the sound of foreign voices, the scent of foreign fruit; I was dizzy with expectation. But no great fleet is gathering. Nothing can be seen of the great preparations which haunted Lucas and which now haunt me. In the governmental buildings near St. James’s Park, they look blankly at you if you mention Egnaro; in the offices of the Geographical Society they can tell you nothing. And yet somewhere they are gutting the records of old expeditions; repairing ancient maps; cross-examining old sailors who – three days battered by ice and gales in 1942 under the Southern Cross, hunted by some lean German raider – saw, or only thought they saw, a smudge of land on a heaving horizon, a ripple of white ice cliffs out from which may flow that current of warm, fresh, mysterious water…
I am able to see myself quite clearly on these useless journeys, these errands run on behalf of my own imagination: but I cannot stop: and I understand now why Lucas had such difficulty in describing his condition. It is like inhabiting two worlds at once.
As I take my first hesitant steps away from the seashore, setting out through the shattered limestone hinterlands into the deep interior of the mystery, I begin to feel a need for reassurance – for an exchange of maps and notes – for some dialogue with those who have made the journey before me. Yesterday, on an impulse, I went back to the Lucky Lotus, that staging post or coaling port on the way to Egnaro. I suppose I had known all along that I would find him there when I needed him. He was sitting at his table in the alcove, putting bits of sweet and sour pork into his mouth while he read the paper folded alongside his plate.
‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking about you.’ And when I had ordered my food he began talking about himself.
He had been to America, he said, since getting his affairs in order. If he was a bit fatter, that was why. New partners – he didn’t want to be specific at this stage – had paid off most of his old debts, and he was ready to start a new business. America had opened his eyes. ‘Fast food,’ he said. ‘That’s where the real money is. Hamburgers. Bloody hell, you should see the way they do it over there!’ It was like a production line. You took the customers’ money, passed them through the system as quickly as possible, and ejected them at the other end. ‘They hardly have time to get the muck down them before they’re out on the street again and the next lot are coming in!’ It was wonderful. ‘Fast food, that’s where it is.’
I watched him eat his rice pudding and custard, smacking his lips appreciatively, nodding and winking at the waitresses. I noticed that he had replaced his old leather briefcase with a brand new plastic one. He used the word ‘secret’ constantly. ‘The secret’s in the condiments,’ he would say: ‘Give them onion relish and they’ll eat anything.’ And: ‘In and out fast, that’s the secret.’ He had a second liqueur; he seemed quite willing to stay and talk. He asked me if I would like to get in on the ground floor of fast food with him, and I said I would. He didn’t turn the conversation to old times, and I suspected he would have resisted me if I had. I sat listening to his new dreams, watching the hands of the clock.
‘Well,’ he said eventually. ‘Time to push off I suppose.’
I still had not brought myself to ask. I knew now how he had felt every time he took out The Castles of the Kings and offered it to some puzzled traveling salesman. I watched the waitresses surround him – twittering ‘Costa’ costa’ costa”, like little drab birds – as he got up to go, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. He paid the bill with a credit card. We walked along Deansgate and down Peter Street towards the cab rank outside the Midland Hotel. As we passed the shop, with its mended window and brand new Halfords’ sign, I managed to say:
‘By the way. All that “Egnaro” stuff–’
For a moment he looked puzzled. Then he laughed. ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,’ he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ve finished with all that. I can’t think why I made so much fuss. It’s nothing at all when you know, is it?’
I knew then that if I reached out I would touch some transparent membrane which had grown up between us to protect the secret. I nodded hopelessly. ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Good.’ I arranged to meet him again soon. I arranged to meet his backers. I walked away, and later caught my train. I shan’t see him again. Old maps are useless. I confess to you now as Lucas confessed to me under the coats in the Lucky Lotus last February – out of fear, out of puzzlement, out of loneliness.
Wherever I am I think about it: whatever I do is tainted by it: but if you were to ask me what Egnaro is I could give you no answer. In my most despairing moments I believe that the human race exists solely to give it expression. No one, I suspect, can have any clear understanding of it. All events are its signature: none are. It does not exist: yet it is quite real. The secret is meaningless before you know it: and, judging by what has happened to Lucas, worthless when you do. If Egnaro is the substrate of mystery which underlies all daily life, then the reciprocal of this is also true, and it is the exact dead point of ordinariness which lies beneath every mystery.
The Little Dirty Girl
Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) was an important American writer, academic, and critic whose ground-breaking dystopian novel The Female Man (1975) and influential nonfiction tract How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) have unfortunately overshadowed a body of short fiction as various and rich as that of Angela Carter or Shirley Jackson. Russ wrote both science fiction and fantasy, with a number of stories coming from a horror or weird fiction slant. Collections include The Zanzibar Cat (1983), (Extra) Ordinary People (1985) and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987). ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (1982), like previous stories by Margaret Irwin and Robert Aickman, has an essential clarity yet abiding weirdness not usually found in supernatural tales of this type.
Dear_____,
Do you like cats? I never asked you. There are all sorts of cats: elegant, sinuous cats, clunky, heavy-breathing cats, skinny, desperate cats, meatloaf-shaped cats, waddling, dumb cats, big slobs of cats who step heavily and groan whenever they try to fit themselves (and they never do fit) under something or in between something or past something.
I’m allergic to all of them. You’d think they’d know it. But as I take my therapeutic walks around the neighborhood (still aching and effortful after ten months, though when questioned, my doctor replies, with the blank, baffled innocence of those Martian children so abstractedly brilliant they’ve never learned to communicate about merely human matters with anyone, that my back will get better) cats venture from alleyways, slip out from under parked cars, bound up cellars steps, prick up their ears and flash out of gardens, all lifting up their little faces, wreathing themselves around my feet, crying Dependency! Dependency! and showing their elegantly needly little teeth, which they never use save in yearning appeal to my goodness. They have perfect confidence in me. If I try to startle them by hissing, making loud noises, or clapping my hands sharply, they merely stare in interested fashion and scratch themselves with their hind legs: how nice. I’ve perfected a method of lifting kitties on the toe of my shoe and giving them a short ride through the air (this is supposed to be alarming); they merely come running back for more.
And the children! I don’t dislike children. Yes I do. No I don’t, but I feel horribly awkward with th
em. So of course I keep meeting them on my walks this summer: alabaster little boys with angelic fair hair and sky-colored eyes (this section of Seattle is Scandinavian and the Northwest gets very little sun) come up to me and volunteer such compelling information as:
‘I’m going to my friend’s house.’
‘I’m going to the store.’
‘My name is Markie.’
‘I wasn’t really scared of that big dog; I was just startled.’
‘People leave a lot of broken glass around here.’
The littler ones confide; the bigger ones warn of the world’s dangers: dogs, cuts, blackberry bushes that might’ve been sprayed. One came up to me once – what do they see in a tall, shuffling, professional, intellectual woman of forty? – and said, after a moment’s thought:
‘Do you like frogs?’
What could I do? I said yes, so a shirt-pocket that jumped and said rivit was opened to disclose Mervyn, an exquisite little being the color of wet, mottled sea-sand, all webbed feet and amber eyes, who was then transferred to my palm where he sat and blinked. Mervyn was a toad, actually; he’s barely an inch long and can be found all over Seattle, usually upside down under a rock. I’m sure he (or she) is the Beloved Toad and Todkins and Todlekrancz Virginia Woolf used in her letters to Emma Vaughan.
And the girls? O they don’t approach tall, middle-aged women. Little girls are told not to talk to strangers. And the little girls of Seattle (at least in my neighborhood) are as obedient and feminine as any in the world; to the jeans and tee-shirts of Liberation they (or more likely their parents) add hair-ribbons, baby-sized pocket-books, fancy pins, pink shoes, even toe polish.
The liveliest of them I ever saw was a little person of five, coasting downhill in a red wagon, her cheeks pink with excitement, one ponytail of yellow hair undone, her white tee-shirt askew, who gave a decorous little squeak of joy at the sheer speed of it. I saw and smiled; pink-cheeks saw and shrieked again, more loudly and confidently this time, then looked away, embarrassed, jumped quickly out of her wagon, and hauled it energetically up the hill.
Except for the very littlest, how neat, how clean, how carefully dressed they are! with long, straight hair that the older ones (I know this) still iron under waxed paper.
The Little Dirty Girl was different.
She came up to me in the supermarket. I’ve hired someone to do most of my shopping, as I can’t carry much, but I’d gone in for some little thing, as I often do. It’s a relief to get off the hard bed and away from the standing desk or the abbreviated kitchen stools I’ve scattered around the house (one foot up and one foot down); in fact it’s simply such a relief –
Well, the Little Dirty Girl was dirty; she was the dirtiest eight-year-old I’ve ever seen. Her black hair was a long tangle. Her shoes were down-at-heel, the laces broken, her white (or rather grey) socks belling limply out over her ankles. Her nose was running. Her pink dress, so ancient that it showed her knees, was limp and wrinkled and the knees themselves had been recently skinned. She look as if she had slid halfway down Volunteer Park’s steepest dirtiest hill on her panties and then rolled end-over-end the rest of the way. Besides all this, there were snot-and-tear-marks on her face (which was reddened and sallow and looked as if she’d been crying) and she looked – well, what can I say? Neglected. Not poor, though someone had dressed her rather eccentrically, not physically unhealthy or underfed, but messy, left alone, ignored, kicked out, bedraggled, like a cat caught in a thunderstorm.
She looked (as I said) tear-stained, and yet came up to my shopping cart with perfect composure and kept me calm company for a minute or so. Then she pointed to a box of Milky Way candy bars on a shelf above my head, saying ‘I like those,’ in a deep, gravelly voice that suggested a bad cold.
I ignored the hint. No, that’s wrong, it wasn’t a hint; it was merely a social, adult remark, self-contained and perfectly emotionless, as if she had long ago given up expecting that telling anyone she wanted something would result in getting it. Since my illness I have developed a fascination with the sheer, elastic wealth of children’s bodies, the exhaustless, energetic health they don’t know they have and which I so acutely and utterly miss, but I wasn’t for an instant tempted to feel this way about the Little Dirty Girl. She had been through too much. She had Resources. If she showed no fear of me, it wasn’t because she trusted me but because she trusted nothing. She had no expectations and no hopes. Nonetheless she attached herself to me and my shopping cart and accompanied me down two more aisles, and there seemed to be hope in that. So I made the opening, social, adult remark:
‘What’s your name?’
‘A. R.’ Those are the initials on my handbag. I looked at her sharply but she stared levelly back, unembarrassed, self-contained, unexpressive.
‘I don’t believe that,’ I said finally.
‘I could tell you lots of things you wouldn’t believe,’ said the Little Dirty Girl.
She followed me up to the cashier and as I was putting out my small packages one by one by one, I saw her lay out on the counter a Milky Way bar and a nickel, the latter fetched from somewhere in that short-skirted, cap-sleeved dress. The cashier, a middle-aged woman, looked at me and I back at her, I laid out two dimes next to the nickel. She really did want it! As I was going into the logistics of How Many Short Trips from the Cart to the Car and How Many Long Ones from the Car to the Kitchen, the Little Dirty Girl spoke: ‘I can carry that.’ (Gravelly and solemn.)
She added hoarsely, ‘I bet I live near you.’
‘Well, I bet you don’t,’ I said.
She didn’t answer, but followed me to the parking lot, one proprietary hand on the cart, and when I unlocked my car door, she darted past me and started carrying packages from the cart to the front seat. I can’t move fast enough to escape these children. She sat there calmly as I got in. Then she said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand:
‘I’ll help you take your stuff out when you get home.’
Now I know that sort of needy offer and I don’t like it. Here was a Little Dirty Girl offering to help me, and smelling in close quarters as if she hadn’t changed her underwear for days: demandingness, neediness, more annoyance. Then she said in her flat, crow’s voice: ‘I’ll do it and go away. I won’t bother you.’
Well, what can you do? My heart misgave me. I started the car and we drove the five minutes to my house in silence, whereupon she grabbed all the packages at once (to be useful) and some slipped back on the car seat; I think this embarrassed her. But she got my things up the stairs to the porch in only two trips and put them on the unpainted porch rocker, from where I could pick them up one by one, and there we stood.
Why speechless? Was it honesty? I wanted to thank her, to act decent, to make that sallow face smile. I wanted to tell her to go away, that I wouldn’t let her in, that I’d lock the door. But all I could think of to say was, ‘What’s your name really?’ and the wild thing said stubbornly, ‘A. R.’ and when I said, ‘No, really,’ she cried ‘A. R.!’ and facing me with her eyes screwed up, shouted something unintelligible, passionate and resentful, and was off up the street. I saw her small figure turning down one of the cross-streets that meets mine at the top of the hill. Seattle is grey and against the massed storm clouds to the north her pink dress stood out vividly. She was going to get rained on. Of course.
I turned to unlock my front door and a chunky, slow, old cat, a black-and-white tom called Williamson who lives two houses down, came stiffly out from behind an azalea bush, looked slit-eyed (bored) about him, noticed me (his pupils dilated with instant interest) and bounded across the parking strip to my feet. Williamson is a banker-cat, not really portly or dignified but simply too lazy and unwieldy to bother about anything much. Either something scares him and he huffs under the nearest car or he scrounges. Like all kitties he bumbled around my ankles, making steam-engine noises. I never feed him. I don’t pet him or talk to him. I even try not to look at him. I shoved him aside with one foot and op
ened the front door; Williamson backed off, raised his fat, jowled face and began the old cry: Mrawr! Mrawr! I booted him ungently off the porch before he could trot into my house with me, and as he slowly prepared to attack the steps (he never quite makes it) locked myself in. And the Little Dirty Girl’s last words came suddenly clear:
I’ll be back.
Another cat. There are too many in this story but I can’t help it. The Little Dirty Girl was trying to coax the neighbor’s superbly elegant half-Siamese out from under my car a few days later, an animal tiger-marked on paws and tail and as haughty-and-mysterious-looking as all cats are supposed to be, though it’s really only the long Siamese body and small head. Ma’amselle (her name) still occasionally leaps on to my dining room windowsill and stares in (the people who lived here before me used to feed her). I was coming back from a walk, the Little Dirty Girl was on her knees, and Ma’amselle was under the car; when the Little Dirty Girl saw me she stood up, and Ma’amselle flashed Egyptianly through the laurel hedge and was gone. Someone had washed the Little Dirty Girl’s pink dress (though a few days back, I’m afraid) and made a half-hearted attempt to braid her hair: there were barrettes and elastic somewhere in the tangle. Her cold seemed better. When it rains in August our summer can change very suddenly to early fall, and this was a chilly day; the Little Dirty Girl had nothing but her mud-puddle-marked dress between her thin skin and the Seattle air. Her cold seemed better, though, and her cheeks were pink with stooping. She said, in the voice of a little girl this time and not a raven, ‘She had blue eyes.’
‘She’s Siamese,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’