by Ananda Devi
Wanda distanced herself, refusing to imagine that she might end up among these people even as her children were taken away by the state.
Standing in front of Mary’s house, she wondered if she was capable of resisting. How many years had Cub spent looking after himself? How many years ago had she stopped asking him where he was going or even caring? How many years now had Jasmine gone out in her skimpy outfits despite her scolding? She thought about the handbag Cub had brought her, and she smiled. Cub had always been her favorite. Her confidant, her comrade. Ever since his father had left he had been the man of the house. A small werewolf of sorts, as hard as brass, as malleable as iron. Handsome from the day he was born, with his velvety skin and his blossoming lips. His kissable lips, his caressable skin.
Wanda shut her eyes and wanted to slap herself. That’s my son, she thought, did I just think about him like … like he was a man? A man to love and keep? All the women around her looked at Cub that way. Nobody saw him as a child. Some men were like that, she thought, virile to the core. But I’m his mother.
She looked at Mary’s house and asked herself at last: What was Mary doing with Cub? Why had she asked him to live with her? What did she want of him? They hadn’t come out for several days. The idea of her magnificent son in the bed of an old hag as pale as a ghost filled her with rage.
She went to knock at the door again when she realized she might need some witnesses if she wanted to get her son back. It wouldn’t be hard. In her part of the world, it was easy to rouse up some people. And to convince the authorities that an old white woman was abusing a young black boy—or at least to make sure they didn’t take such an accusation lightly. The papers were just waiting for the chance to expose abuse ignored by the authorities. The law was on her side. And all the rights of a mother, a woman, a poor person, a black person.
Wanda raised her fist at the house.
“I’m not letting you steal my son, you shit!” she shouted.
A few passersby glanced at her mistrustfully and steered clear of her path. Others looked away, rendering her invisible.
And so they all came together on Portobello Road, in front of Mary’s house.
The members of the gang Cub had belonged to. The Brixton social services. The police constables Wanda had told about Cub’s disappearance. The members of Cub’s family and their neighbors filled with righteous indignation: no longer simmering in indifference.
Indifference. Everyone around Wanda had been shrouded in indifference for so long. They were all fighting so hard to live that none of them had any time for compassion. But as soon as they had to gather together in indignation and vengeance, they were ready. This made them feel alive. This gave them purpose, an outlet for the impotent rage accumulated in their core. Their homes, their work, their families, their lives had all been stolen. Their gods had been stolen. Brixton had been invaded by property developers who had chopped up their city and who were building invisible walls around them, barriers separating them from the rich, ghettoizing them in the most dangerous neighborhoods. Most of the families were stuck between the gangs and the rich. Today, they would bring down the walls.
In front of Mary’s house a group gathered, then a horde. Most of them had dark skin, but here and there were lighter complexions, the worried faces of officials and the more impassive ones of the police. A social worker knocked at the door. Knocked again for a while. Tried to call Mary’s number. She turned to Wanda to ask if she wanted to wait a bit longer, but it was too late.
A boy broke away from the crowd with a bat and shattered the glass pane in Mary’s front door. Another threw a rock through the window. A cloud of dust rose up. Wanda let out a scream. They all pressed toward the house.
In the crook of her arm a curly-haired head rested.
No part of him was angular. Nor of her, growing thinner and frailer by the minute, emptying herself the better to welcome him.
Cub slept. His head lay in the junction of Mary’s arm, in the groove of the elbow, his cheek rubbing against the softness of the skin there. He was laboriously making his way back from his journey through blood: the world was new. When he awoke again, it seemed reasonable for him to stay beside this woman, to seek the protection of her body, the only one that didn’t threaten him like the men who had followed him, who had … The nearness had become more terrifying, more somber. Mary watched him dreaming, leaned over him, soaked up his dreams. She leaned a little closer and their lips touched. She would say something every so often, even if he would never understand the sounds of her throat and stomach entering him, bringing him to her, binding him to her.
This boy adrift in her arms, this boy who had lost massive amounts of blood, this boy she had taken in, protected, saved, this boy had become hers as soon as she had given him a second life. His body wasn’t cold, it pulsed, oh so gently, so painfully, he shuddered, shook, quaked, he would have gone under but she held him back, held in his blood, pressed her hand flat to hold in everything, so not a drop could escape, and she called him back. Come back, come back. Beads of sweat like shimmering marbles on her brown skin. They seemed to follow one another, then touch one another, bunch together and meld together to form a liquid furrow down her throat, her collar. The faint heartbeat slowed. He relaxed.
This is why I decided not to leave the house anymore, she told him, or you, the cold would break your body, we’ll stay here, nice and warm, and we’ll have everything we need, you and me both, Cub. After all, it’s what this city wanted, everyone’s stopped caring about each other, everyone’s keeping to themselves, losing themselves in their secret forests, this city only counts its defeated, it tallies them up and strings them on a necklace around its throat, and I want to fight to the bitter end, to be the very last of its trophies, but for how much longer, I don’t know.
And this was how they found the two of them as they broke into Mary’s bedroom, into a darkness darker than the darkest dark, into the belly of the beast nesting out of everyone’s sight, a nest of bloody sheets and dust and shit, reeking of a beast that looked at them with reddened eyes, they would say that afterward, they would testify to the fact that there was no human creature there of flesh and blood, but rather some other thing, they all saw it, and above the bed there was a hole with maggots falling out, and an eye watching them, laughing, and at the center of the nest of sheets and dust and shit was a small, dark, shattered body, naked and swelling, touched by rot already, a small body over which hunched a ferocious, otherworldly creature with fiery eyes.
They would tell their grandchildren about the sight of desolation and danger. It would be a moment of intensity in their lives—as if they didn’t have enough already. Many of them, moreover, would not survive the winter. Those who came through it would remember that something had happened that year, a revelation, a shift, a rupture in the world’s languid face. The riots, they said, began there: in this scene with a red-eyed creature devouring the boy of legendary beauty.
Wanda understood only one thing in this moment: her child, her little Cub, her little fierce, sleeping animal, was there, below this apparition enveloping him as if he were about to hatch and become something else, deliver out of his body another self, a smoother and handsomer one, but the truth was that her Cub, her baby, wasn’t asleep, he was dead, he had long been dead, he had been stolen from her alive and dead by this thing that purported to be a person, that claimed to be a harmless old lady.
Does God in heaven still exist when there are such terrors, such witches come from nowhere, such hellish figures? The old woman looked at Wanda with her red eyes and pointed at her, cackling: “I’m the one who protected him and saved him, I’m the one who loved him and gave birth to him. He belongs to me because you could not bring him back to life!”
Fury rumbled in the people who heard her and who surrounded Wanda. The social worker cut in: “Madam, we’re here to take the child. Can you explain how he died? Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
“Who’s saying h
e’s dead?” Mary asked. “Jeremiah isn’t dead. I saved him from the skinheads attacking him and I took care of him. He’s only alive thanks to me and thanks to Howard, the dead beggar in the attic.”
Wanda came closer to Cub and saw the gray of his skin, the streaks of his blood, the black of his gangrene, the foul smell rising from the exposed guts in his torso. And she was sure she could see maggots not raining down but in fact breeding within her son’s belly.
“She killed my son,” Wanda declared.
The men beside her all turned toward Mary. She didn’t see the menace in their eyes. She pushed Wanda back and covered Cub with her body.
“He’s alive,” she said, “and he’s mine.”
She did not feel the blows that landed on her body. Afterward, they would make their way to the other houses on Portobello Road, even that of Nari, who wouldn’t have a Parsi funeral on a tower of silence, but who would see, in their eyes, the ever-circling vultures.
Mary found herself on the Serpentine’s icy curve, on one of these small islands dotting the lake’s bend as it angled toward the edge of Hyde Park. The place had a magnificent sadness in winter. A sadness that swept a revived body up in its arms but no longer recognized it. The edges of the sky leaned over her. Its breath, frozen in the cold, ran through her body with a crackling rush. Amid the island’s disheveled trees, a few thin storks shivered. The water reflected the sky, which reflected the water. The inverted island seemed far more real. The island was like the country. Always far more real in her own dreams.
Mary sat at the water’s edge. She was wearing a white cotton dress, crumpled and creased from sitting down. Her legs were bare and far too white. Her feet, too, were bare. She wasn’t cold. She inhaled, her eyes closed.
The scent of old algae, she thought to herself. Of a lost lagoon. Places like this spoke to her of legends. Do you hear the castles sinking beneath the water?
Everything seemed older, the lichen licking the stones there where the waves splashed as they broke, the marks of old tides, the hoary trees contorted painfully by the winds, the mournful gaze of the low hills covered in rubbish. She entered the space as if into open arms, she only had to inhale to take in the history, the stories, the memories, the moments, the countless pasts, the tales, the legends that men had tried to relegate to uselessness, without ever quite succeeding, because their animalistic sighs kept on warming her neck.
Mary plunged her feet into the water and breathed in. She leaned back to look at the underside of the weeping willow overhanging her. Apple-green, chicken-green, heart-green, she thought, and then stem-green. She giggled.
Cub had joined her. She stood up. Her feet crushed the few blades of close-cut grass, her body unfurled as she raised her arms up. Her oddly angled shoulder blades were ready to spread out, to stretch out. What was next? Would she take flight, leaving Cub behind? He could have slept and died in his neighborhood, in front of his mother, in solitude or in violence. The cold had already seeped into his bones. He could have died down there, and slept.
For the moment he was there, beside her, watching her extend her wings.
Taste the air, she said. She seemed to hear its invisible jingling in her hand. Like salt dissolving with a sizzling whisper.
You’ve taken a step out of this world.
They stayed the whole day on the island. At sunset, they saw the shadows of boats carrying the shadows of rowers gliding silently over the water. This was not the indolent happiness of hot summer nights. This was a dazed, disjointed pavane in which the Sunday rowers and boatmen pressed toward nowhere.
For Cub, this was like a small triumph: he had never believed in these families, in their games. When he was a teenager, a thread had snapped. The children so adored when they were born were no longer beloved. Each one hid behind resentment: the sneering parents and the broken children. In the parks, children over ten were never with their parents. When they were older they were sentenced to prowling on the edges of decomposed family units.
The small boats went by, one after another. The families, the couples, the teenagers discovered new relationships that were just as ephemeral, that would break apart the families already headed toward rupture. In winter’s gloomy reflections, generations disappeared behind other generations. This time, the Serpentine wouldn’t circle back on itself. Once they had passed the enclosed space that preserved memories of laughter, the boats dissolved with their cargo, never to return. This unusual sadness gave Cub the feeling that he wouldn’t have any more summers. A permanent winter was now swallowing him up. It was the final season of the park, of the city, of this island within an island. It was the final season of all.
Cub began to cry, because he had come to understand that, despite his jealousy, or perhaps because of it, he clung to these families as if to a secret hope and wanted to give them a sad farewell.
Seven heavens claim the sky. Emptiness has levels. Likewise solitude, which is the emptiest of heaven and earth, the emptiness of man, in whom it stirs and breathes.
—EDMOND JABÈS, Of Solitude as the Space of Writing, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
And now that he knew, he could see his own slowly decomposing body in Mary’s bedroom, liquefied by the dampness of this airless space. He saw what he had become. He saw the primal, primary ugliness of his flesh now that the fiber of life had abandoned him. That’s what we’ve been carrying within ourselves all this time, he thought. We who had been so alive had been headed this way. This perfect disintegration that leaves no room for dignity, for beauty. A shapeless, sticky, sickening mass. He looked at himself and he was no longer sure whether he was here or there, the putrefying body or the wandering spirit now detached from everything; maybe he was just a fillip of energy floating up from this body that, orphaned, would soon dissipate in the air with nothing to make it stay, or even return. Return to what, anyway? There was nothing here to tempt him now.
He sees the heavier cold coming from the east, about to catch them in its grip. Immense clouds laden with snow and ice are approaching. The lilac sky readies itself, closes up, becomes mirrorlike. Nobody can see it yet, but all this has been forecast. The clouds will stop here, right here, over the silent, sleeping city, and soon they will unleash their storm. They will catch the people sure of clement weather by surprise. Everything will come undone. As usual, some will say. But this will not be as usual. This polar chill will not be like any other. It will be borne by the cold in so many hearts, by the children killed on a street corner or on a set of stairs, by women trapped within their walls of incomprehension, by a lack of freedom—oh, that word, that warm always-denied word—and the chill that will come from deep below to join the one descending from above will freeze the weather, ice and snow will fix everything where it is, a permanent and perennial immobility that will be beautiful, too. A white-and-blue hand will close on London and, slowly, crush it.
In the distance, he senses, although he cannot see, the massive bulks of King’s Cross St Pancras. He hears the groans of stone and alabaster and human dust. He sees their immense black spaces, the shadows that flash beneath the crossbeams, beneath the vaults. He senses that the beginning and the end will be there. And now the roofs of the two interlocked train stations open partway. The cold arrives, an impossibly large, noisome slap. The wind heralds it. The clouds swirl in a rush as in a horror film. They are black, and the day is shuttered. Lower down, on the street, people look up and stare dumbly at the arctic winter descending upon them. They raise their arms to protect themselves, then they run in search of shelter. The dampness becomes iciness, forming a slippery film over the surfaces. The hurried footsteps slip and stumble. The houses are shaken as if by a seismic sigh. Joints crack.
Above the train station, winged forms take to the air. Cub watches them; he is unquestionably the only one to see them. He knows that these are the creatures that attacked him, skinheads that could sometimes take on a semihuman form but which were in fact creatures from beyond the grave, come to dig their ha
teful claws into human flesh, come to inject their hateful venom into human souls. They take on gargoyles’ masks, they shriek as they scatter across the city, their droppings are gigantic hailstones, they assault and stun and end up sucking dry all the life, all the warmth that remains in petrified bodies. To believe that these are the screams of the wind would be no more reassuring.
The streets are covered, one by one, in the white dust. On Oxford Street, the huge stores are blinded, their glass fronts latticed by the brutal frost. The holiday lights burst one by one. The red buses skid and come to a halt as they block the roads. The sharp, gilded, red notes that Cub had heard shatter.
A beggar is found dead from the cold, his lips stuck to his flute from which wan melodies still escape. The people flee this desolate sight, but no part of town is spared. In Regent’s Park, immense curtains of ice hang from the trees, forming a labyrinth that nobody dares to enter. Within, sounds are frozen in place by the crystal, then refracted into infinity. The small lakes disappear within the surrounding white. The Thames begins to flow more and more slowly, with more and more difficulty, until millions of small branches knit together beneath its surface and stop its progress. Some storks land there, astounded as they walk on the waves. They seem to be trampling inverted humans underfoot. On the banks, a couple in love die in their ecstasy, their half-naked bodies turning blue at the peak of orgasm. It will be impossible to separate them. They will be buried together with what will have been captured for the first time on their unmoving faces as the purest expression of the magnificent pain of love.