“His text book’s been accepted. They gave him an advance just on the first five chapters. They’re terribly impressed.”
“Look here, Thea, it’s over with you and Adrian.” He was pacing up and down now. “Why can’t you accept that? It’s finished, dead. Why d’you have to go on resurrecting things, creeping in underneath them and trying to prise them open when they’re all nailed up and rotting?”
I shifted the pillows a little, so that they were soft against my head. “He stayed for simply hours, Leo. Once he was here, I couldn’t get him out.”
“I don’t believe you. Adrian wouldn’t come here.”
“Oh yes, he would. He did. He often does, in fact. He comes up when you’re out.”
“You’re lying, Thea.” The back of his neck looked very thin and spiky, as if I could cut my fingers on it. “Adrian doesn’t want you. He’s married to Janet now. Perhaps you’d forgotten that.”
“Maybe he is,” I shouted. “Maybe he is! But he doesn’t fuck her any more. He can’t. She’s pregnant. Huge. Monstrous. He can’t even get near her. She squashes him in bed.”
“Stop that!”
“That’s why he came up here. He was dying for it. He’d hardly got in the door, when he …”
“Stop it, I said.” He was slumped against the desk now, elbows grovelling on the blotter, hands across his ears. “I don’t want to hear. I don’t even want you in here.”
“I did say ‘no’ at first, but he went on and on insisting. Then he undid my dress. I tried to stop him, Leo, but …”
“Get out!” Fists clenched now, grinding them against the wood, nails digging into palms, head down. At least it was safer than the tenderness.
“Actually, I didn’t want to stop him. Not by then. We both had all our clothes off and …”
“Get out, I said.” Leo had picked up an old Victorian paperweight made of heavy glass, one that Otto had given him a hundred years ago, with tiny scarlet peonies painted on it in dainty little clusters. He was rocking it backwards and forwards against the desk. The noise went through my head. Karma had woken now and slunk over to his feet.
“He kept whispering things, dirty things. He even brought you into it. He kept asking about — you know — what we did in bed and everything. He made me show him all your things. I knew you wouldn’t mind. He used your razor and your toothbrush. He even wore your dressing-gown. He seemed to want to sort of take you over. We did it in your bed. He forced me to. I was lying just like this and …”
“Get out of that bed, get out of it, get out of it …”
“It’s all right, Leo, there’s no need to be angry — I cleaned it up afterwards. It was quite a mess. Adrian thrashes around a lot and …”
Leo had jumped to his feet and was striding towards me. I could see his shadow stalking him along the wall.
“Then we did it standing up,” I whispered. There was no more need to shout. Leo’s shadow was almost breathing on me. It had lunged across my feet and was creeping up towards my breasts. The paperweight was still between its hands. “Adrian’s very good at that. He …”
Karma was snapping and lurching at Leo’s heels. His growl was like a low, crooning lullaby.
“He came three times,” I murmured. “He would have come again, but …”
I could see the paperweight plunging towards my face. I even had time to notice Leo’s yellow fingers gleaming through the glass. I opened my lips to tell him that I loved him, I desired him, and took the full force of twenty scarlet peonies in my mouth.
There was a sharp, sick, cracking sound, which must have come from outside in the street. It was nothing to do with me. Red petals were falling on the bed, like bright, crushed, mangled peonies. The pain was so bright, the room was heaving with it. A dog was howling somewhere, howling. Somebody else was crying. A dry, jagged, horrifying sound. It must be Leo crying, crying for my mouth. I hadn’t got a mouth. Only a smashed, pulped, purple flower. I groped out of bed and stumbled to the mirror, stared at the person in it, almost laughed. She had a dumb black hole where her two front teeth should have been. The others streamed with blood. Her fat stupid lips were split apart and swollen, purple around the edges, her nose was so wide, she must have had Negro blood.
Somebody else had once sat in that mirror — an elegant receptionist with cheekbones, an ambitious Mayfair girl with white well-mannered teeth, an Abbey National saver with her own eight-digit number and her little savings book. Leo had destroyed them, bashed them all to pieces, refused to let them share his room. And now he was standing powerless, almost paralysed, shoulders shaking like a ninny. Terrible things were happening to my face, swelling, scorching things, which only he could stop. But he had turned his back, shut his eyes. I needed mending, restoring, staking like a broken flower, and there he was, broken down himself. The room was tipping sideways, sliding on its back. Leo could have righted it with just one finger, but his hands were clinging on to each other for their own support. He was drowning, floundering, snivelling like a baby, cowering close to Karma, impotent, unmanned.
I lurched across the tipping floor to Karma and kicked him, first in the flank, and then again, across his dumb, gloating muzzle. Dark paws reared towards my face and I heard the growl trapped and rumbling in his throat. Leo had come between us. I hit out at Leo, punched him, kicked him, tore at him. It hurt my mouth so badly, I was almost sick again, but I wouldn’t have him cry, couldn’t bear him weak.
He was warding off my blows, trying not to hurt me. I hit out harder. Red petals were still streaming on the carpet. Karma was there behind me, double-barred steel jaw protecting his master. Leo hacked him off. There was a tangled mass of arms, paws, petals, fur. I dodged away. As I fell, I saw the jagged teeth of Leo’s cruel brass fender leaping for my forehead.
Chapter Eight
When I came to, I was lying on a sort of high white table with a red stain on the pillow, and a white nun was standing over me, sponging the ruins of my face. I didn’t have a body any more, only a deep purple pain somewhere where I should have had a mouth, and a huge throbbing lump on what had once been my forehead. I tried to feel my teeth. Most of the bottom ones were there. My tongue was thick and lumpy and seemed to be sticking to itself. I tried to pull it free.
“Leo …” I stuttered. It was difficult to speak. There was cotton wool stuffed above my gumline and something pulling on my lower lip. The nun smiled. Her own teeth were false, very white and thick like the stuff toilet-bowls are made of. I wondered if Mr Leatherstone could help me. I shut my eyes and tried to see his step-by-step instructions for repairing faces. All I could see was damsons. Something told me I’d been sick again.
I wondered where I was. It was difficult to see beyond the nun. She was bending over me, blotting out the view. She smelt of holiness and Dettol. She was so white, she hurt. I tried to turn away from her, to rest my eyes, but everywhere was white. White sheet, white screen, white ceiling. I picked up my own hand. White, pure white. White sick-bowl beside me on the white metal cabinet, white bandages, white walls. I closed my eyes. Purple now. White cream curdling purple damsons. I didn’t want to remember. Some terrible, unbelievable thing had happened. I was a headline now, a statistic, a disaster movie. Leo was a brute, a batterer, a … No. It was nothing to do with Leo. Things like that only happen to violent, low-grade people you read about in newspapers, and then stuff into a waste-bin or abandon on a train. I must have got it wrong. I didn’t really want to think about it. It hurt too much. I wanted just to crumple myself up into a ball and throw myself away. If I shut my eyes for long enough, perhaps I’d disappear. There was a deep black well behind my eyelids. Easy to drop into it, and sink down, down, down …
Why did they keep dragging me out again, poking me with sticks, flinging me down rope-ladders and fire escapes? I didn’t want to escape. It was too noisy and dazzling up there in the light. There were two nuns now and somebody else beside them. A man, I think, but still in that shining, blinding white. They were al
l peering down my well, and the nun with the teeth kept tapping my face and saying, “Mrs Morton, Mrs Morton”, over and over.
I shook my head. That was Adrian’s name. It had never sounded right joined on to Thea. “No,” I said. “Dead.”
The nun smiled. She looked so friendly, I tried to smile back, but it wasn’t possible. Whatever I’d used to smile before had now been confiscated. The man was rougher. He didn’t smile at all, just mauled my mouth about and said, “This won’t hurt.” He was right, in a way. There was so much pain, it had all become just a shape, a colour, something vague and muzzy happening to a part of me which wasn’t there. The nun kept passing him things, cruel, sharp-clawed instruments which only existed to inflict maximum damage on mouths. I wanted to forget my mouth, pretend I’d never had one, but there they were, turning it into the centre of the world. Soon, there wouldn’t be anything left outside it. The whole universe would shrink to one huge black hole, with them all teetering on the edge of it and peering in. I couldn’t even close it. They had propped it open, so that anyone could enter. Rude, clumsy people were clambering over my tongue, climbing up my teeth, knocking them with hammers, tugging at them with ropes. I tried to spit everybody out. I wanted to go to sleep. I’d no idea what time it was, but it felt achingly late, as if the night had gone on for about a hundred years, and was getting stained and crumpled round the edges. I could see a chink of tired black sky above the screen. There might never be a morning.
“Leave me alone,” I said. The words came out like one of those cramped and strangled noises spastics make. All the same, I think they must have heard me, because when I woke up again, there was no one there. Even the night had got fed up and crawled away.
I looked around. They had moved me somewhere different. I was lying in the centre of a small white room, very simple, like a cell; just a bed, a chair and a locker, a crucifix above my head and a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall beyond. A nun came in and drew the curtains and everything turned whiter. There was a white square yard of sky behind the window, with white clouds lurching by, and the last white sliver of a faded moon. I could see a tree, just the top part, chopped off by the window frame, with one brave brown leaf left on it.
“Good morning,” said the nun. “And how are we feeling?”
I wasn’t sure. The rest of my body was slowly sneaking back. I could feel my legs now, very quiet and heavy, making two white curves in the coverlet, and my hair damp and sticky on my shoulders. I lifted up my hands and stared at them. They looked much the same as normal which surprised me. Everything was hushed, except the pain in my mouth which screamed.
“OK, I think,” I said. I didn’t really have a voice, just bloody cotton wool. My head was throbbing underneath the lump. I think it was all the questions seething in it. What was I doing here? Why the nuns? How many teeth had I lost? I tried to break a question off and study it, but all the answers seemed dangerous and sharp-edged. They all led back to Leo and spinning, heaving, lurching things I didn’t want to think of. Safer, really, not to think at all. I was just a head on a pillow, two hands on a coverlet.
The nun helped me out of bed. It felt odd standing up. My legs weren’t really awake yet, and my head kept tipping upside down. She made me wash and pee and change my nightie and other boring things, which all hurt just because my mouth hurt. The pain was so fierce, it made the rest of my body feel grey and wet and soggy, like school cabbage. I was glad, really, to flop back into bed. The nun had re-made it and it was all crisp and white and snowy and smelt of dead Popes. She had brought tea and gruel on a tray. Eating seemed more or less impossible, like trying to squeeze a sack of set cement between stiff iron railings. My mouth was all puffed up, and one or two of my teeth were sharp and jagged round the edges and kept cutting into my lip.
“I’m not hungry,” I said. I never wanted to eat again, not after the aubergines.
The nun only smiled. She sat on my bed and eased a tiny plastic teaspoon between the corners of my lips. The gruel was warm and sloppy and tasted of blood. I forced down half a mouthful.
“Well done!” she said. The tea was in an infant’s feeding-cup with a long plastic spout, like a straw. The nun was so gentle with it, I managed to swallow quite a lot. She kept mopping up my face and saying “good girl”, which made me feel very small and special, like a baby. Then she gave me medicine, which must have been a pain-killer, because the pain started to whimper rather than shout, and soon everything blurred and fuzzed again.
Another nun took my tray and did something to the curtains. There must have been flocks of nuns. They all looked the same but different, like sheep, or angels. This latest one was small and frail and withered, like a skeleton leaf.
“Mr Rzevski will be phoning you at twelve,” she said. I frowned. I wasn’t sure who Mr Rzevski was. The only name I could remember was Mr Leatherstone’s and I knew he wouldn’t phone.
Whenever twelve was, it took a long time coming. There were long, droning noises from vacuum cleaners, and short, jangling ones from metal bowls banging against taps, and people kept looming up and dwindling away, as if I were looking through binoculars.
I had just dozed off, when they wheeled in the telephone. Leo had somehow crawled inside it and been made smaller and more compressed.
“Thea, are you … all right?” His voice sounded strange and ragged, as if it had been caught on barbed wire and ripped.
“Yes,” I said. I almost added “thanks”.
“Look, I’m terribly … I mean, I know I … Hell, Thea, I didn’t …”
He had never stuttered before. I longed to help him, calm him, finish the phrases for him, but my own voice was equally disabled. It came out at an angle, as if it were squeezing past a series of impediments.
“I’m all right,” I repeated. I stared at the lone brown leaf. It took courage to cling on like that, when all your fellows were a brown sludge on the path.
“I wondered … I mean, if there’s anything you want, anything I can …”
“No,” I lisped. “Nothing.” There wasn’t room for anything. The pain took up all the space.
There was a pause. I knew I should have filled it, but I felt too tired. Leo kept trying to say things. I wished he’d go away. I didn’t really want him to exist.
“Are you alone?” he whispered, suddenly.
I looked around. It was difficult to tell. The white nuns and the white curtains round the bed were sometimes indistinguishable.
“Yes,” I murmured. “I think so.” The Sacred Heart was gazing at me with blue, troubled eyes.
“Listen, darling,” Leo said. “You fell down the cellar steps. On to stone. Do you understand?”
“No,” I said. He never called me “darling”. It sounded dangerous.
“After dinner. You ate too much. Someone left the cellar door open and you didn’t see. You fell all the way down and landed on your face. You remember now, don’t you?”
“Wh … when did it happen?” I asked. I felt confused. I couldn’t even remember whether we had a cellar, and if we did, whether the floor was stone.
“Last night,” he prompted. “You weren’t well. You were upset over Janet’s baby and you missed your footing and fell.”
Janet’s baby. I could taste the gruel again, bloody, slimy, sour. I saw Janet falling, falling, down the cellar stairs, landing on her womb. “Yes,” I said slowly, “I understand. She fell downstairs.”
“On to stone,” he urged.
“On to stone,” I repeated. I tried to picture the house at Twickenham. Did it have a cellar? It wasn’t easy to picture anything. The pain-killers were fraying all the edges of my mind.
“They won’t let me see you until tomorrow,” he said. He sounded relieved, reprieved.
I shut my eyes. I was so tired, I couldn’t even hold the receiver. It dropped on to the bed and I heard the wreck of Leo’s voice whispering to the blankets.
“Yes, I understand,” I murmured. The Sacred Heart had gone to sleep as w
ell. “I do understand. She fell.”
I think I dozed through lunch, but I had scrambled egg for supper and pink blancmange. It took me an hour and a half to coax a quarter of it down. Strange I had once liked eating. It seemed such hard labour now.
I felt better, all the same. The fog in my head had cleared, and all the nuns were very quiet and peaceful, and I’d somehow learnt to cut myself off at the neck and live in the bottom bit. It was not only less painful, it also stopped all the fears and horrors which were seething in my mind. Like whether Leo loved me and how many teeth I’d save. Girls in their twenties don’t look good in dentures. The doctor had popped in just two hours ago, and droned on about loose teeth and lacerated gums and how I’d have to see the hospital dentist first thing in the morning. I hate dentists, so I didn’t listen after that; just crawled out of my head and took refuge lower down. I decided to live in my legs, or my neck, or my stomach — anywhere where it was still safe and quiet and whole.
Sister Ursula came in after supper, with a form. “Could you manage to fill this in for us?”
I nodded, I liked Sister Ursula. She was the big, bony one with the toilet-bowl teeth and the soft muslin voice which didn’t match the rest of her. I glanced at the form. It didn’t look as frightening as the Burton Bureau one. It was mainly boring things like place and date of birth and marital status. I didn’t write “divorced”. I hate the word. Where it said “Occupation”, I put receptionist. They also asked for your religion. Adrian always puts a dash. He said it looked pretentious to write “agnostic”, and I couldn’t spell it, anyway. Leo never filled in forms and I doubt if his many-branched brand of religion would have fitted into the two-inch space they provided. I longed to write Roman Catholic, but I was scared they’d find me out. Leo said you could tell a person’s class and religion by the merest glance at their teeth, their bookshelf and their medicine chest. I was fairly safe in those respects. I had no possessions with me, and my teeth were out of bounds.
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