“What would you like?” she asked him.
“Within reason, of course,” came Astrid’s voice from behind her.
As he looked up at Gertrude, the air seemed to warp suddenly, to shudder. At first he didn’t realise what it was. Then he saw it. A single hair had fallen from beneath her hood. A single hair had come loose and floated downwards through the air between them. It had fallen past his face, too close for him to focus on, and landed on the gold fabric of the tablecloth, just inches from his right elbow. He could see it lying there, about the length of a finger, with a slight curve to it. It was red.
Gertrude seemed quite oblivious to what had happened. “Tell me what you’d like,” she was saying, breathing wine fumes over him, “what you’d like for a reward. . . .”
“You could let me go,” he said.
She turned away. “No. That’s not an option.”
“Within reason,” Astrid reminded him, crushing out her cigarette.
He looked down at the red hair again—a give-away, a clue, a piece of evidence. How long had he spent imprisoned in this room? Five days? Six? He was beginning to lose count. He had been taken on a Monday afternoon. Could it be Saturday already? His eyes shifted to his body, which he no longer felt as if he owned. He could almost see the weakness spreading through him. His body was his only clock, he realised, and he had no way of measuring time except in terms of wastage, atrophy, decay. Disgust collected like a kind of bile in his throat.
“There must be something you would like,” Gertrude was saying.
His lungs had filled with dust. He could hardly breathe.
“I need to move,” he said. “I need some air.”
•
He thought he sensed tension as the women walked into the room the next morning, the tension that follows an argument that has yet to be resolved. He had the feeling that there might have been some disagreement over the granting of his request. There was a certain stiffness in their body language. He saw hips and elbows. Thumbs. Watching them arrange themselves in front of him, he realised that this was a sequence he could have choreographed. What kind of music would he have chosen for a piece like this? Would it have been full of jarring dissonance, in keeping with the mood, or would it have flowed sweetly, providing an ironic counterpoint?
Once both his hands and feet were shackled, the women helped him to stand up. Maude slipped a hood over his head. It was the same hood that he had worn the night before; he could smell meat on it, and wine, and smoke. The women led him towards the door. He must have looked like a man being taken to the scaffold.
“So this is my reward,” he said.
He felt unaccountably light and skittish; he could not resist making jokes, but there was no reaction from any of the women.
They passed out of the white room and into the passageway. The toilet, he knew, would be on the left, and there would be a second door ahead of him, about fifteen feet away, but that was where his knowledge ended. He could see nothing, of course, and anything he might have heard was drowned by the sound his chains made as he moved. His sense of smell was complicated by the hood. He had to try and ignore what was left over from the banquet. He had to filter all that out. Smell beyond it, somehow. Through the second door they went and out into what felt like a larger space. A landing, perhaps. This was new ground now.
They turned to the left, took a dozen steps, then turned to the right and stopped. There are stairs here, one of the women told him. He reached out cautiously with one foot, as if testing the temperature of water. The air that brushed against his bare forearms was cool, reminding him of the air in a cellar. He thought he could smell plaster, a smell he usually associated with new buildings, but the staircase was wide and steep, which led him to believe that he was in an old house. Though there were women on either side of him, he found it easiest to climb down sideways, like somebody on skis. He reached the bottom of one flight, and then embarked upon another, one of the women holding him by the upper arm as a precaution.
At last they reached ground level. The surface beneath his feet was no longer carpeted. Tile, he guessed. Or concrete. Down one step, along, down another step, along again. One of the women turned a key in a lock and pushed at the door, which seemed to resist her for a moment, then they walked out into the air. . . .
Even through the hood his first breath was exhilarating. He had forgotten air could be so intricate. He could smell the wind and rain in it, and earth, dark earth, and the bitter milk that leaked from the stems of plants. He could also smell the mildewed panes of a glass-house and the rusting screws on the handle of a watering-can. Then the warm, slightly gritty smell of a red-brick wall. Beyond that, he could smell the city, faintly, but in all its richness and variety: bicycle tyres, canal water, pickled herrings, a tram’s electric cables, spilled beer in the entrance to a bar—and, in the distance, at the very limit of his sense of smell, the pungent salty spray that lifted off the North Sea as it hurled itself repeatedly against the land. He stood outside the door and breathed. Just breathed.
“Nice garden,” he said after a while.
He was only guessing, of course, but the stillness of the women told him that he had guessed correctly. Beneath his hood he smiled. He felt so sharp all of a sudden. He felt humorous. Though he was bound and chained, though he had three people to contend with, strangers, it seemed to him that he was master of the situation.
He shook his head. “You know, I think you might have made a mistake.”
The stillness deepened. It was almost as if the women were no longer there, as if he was talking to himself. At the same time, though, he could sense the glances arrowing between them.
“You should never have let me out of that room.” He took another draught of air, took it to the bottom of his lungs. “You were too nice,” he said. “Too kind.” He gave that last word a sardonic twist. “I mean, it’s such a risk. . . .”
He shuffled forwards. No one restrained him. No one spoke. He found that he was standing on grass. He loved the spongy quality it had, the way it gave slightly beneath him. He could feel its dampness through the thin soles of his shoes. All of a sudden, from somewhere to his right, came the wincing of a train’s brakes. Two streets away. Maybe three.
“First of all,” he said, “you didn’t gag me. I could start shouting. I could draw attention to myself. And, who knows, somebody might come—”
“So, are you going to shout?”
This was Astrid’s voice, dispassionate but menacing. He ignored her.
“Or somebody might see me,” and he lifted his head, looked upwards, “from an upstairs window—and what would they see? Three women in black cloaks and a man wearing a hood. All standing in a garden on a Sunday morning. Now that’s not exactly normal, is it, even for Holland—”
“It isn’t Sunday,” Gertrude said.
Once again, he ignored the interruption.
“And then,” he went on, “and this is more serious, perhaps, you’re giving me the chance to gather information. . . .”
He could no longer hear the train. Instead, in the distance, a church bell started tolling. What did she mean, it wasn’t Sunday? Of course it was Sunday.
“Yes,” he said. “Little details. Sense data.” He nodded to himself. “It all helps me to put a picture together. Of where I am. Of who I’m dealing with.”
He looked round at the women, even though he didn’t know exactly where they were. He felt elated, slightly giddy. It was probably the sudden influx of oxygen into his body after days of stale, recycled air.
“Take me to a donkey,” he said. “I bet I could pin a tail on it.”
“A donkey?” Astrid said. “What donkey?”
He laughed at her.
“If I was you I’d never have allowed me out. Fresh air indeed!” He snorted in derision. “Who needs fresh air? But, of course. I forgot”—he would have slapped his forehead, but his hands weren’t free—“You love me. You’d do anything for me.” He was laughing again.
“You think my work’s wonderful.”
A woman took him by the arm. She just held him, though; she didn’t try to move him.
“You see, you had a really good set-up,” he explained, “but now you’ve gone and undermined it. You’ve introduced an element that’s volatile. Do you understand that word? I don’t know what it is in Dutch. Something ugly, I expect.”
Chuckling to himself, he shook his head.
“Yes,” he said, “while I was in that room, everything was under control. Now, though. . . .”
He released the thought into their minds like a virus, hoping it would take root and spread, weakening their confidence, their resolution.
“It’s time to go back in,” Gertrude said.
Your hair is red, he thought. I’ve seen it.
He felt a hand push him in the small of the back, push him towards the door. He detected a brusqueness in the gesture, a sense of irritation, and he was glad that he had finally got under the women’s skin.
“I don’t think you’ve been listening,” he said, “not properly. I don’t think you’ve really taken in what I’ve been saying.”
He allowed himself to be led through the door and back along the passageway. As he placed his right foot on the bottom step, about to begin the climb back to the room, he heard a ringing sound somewhere behind him.
“That’s the phone, isn’t it?” he said.
There was no reaction from the women, no response.
“Don’t you think you should answer that?” he said. “It might be someone important.”
•
Perhaps he shouldn’t have talked so much. Something irrepressible had taken possession of him, though; all of a sudden he had been flooded with adrenaline—and this despite the handcuffs and the hood. . . . The women thought they were doing him a favour by letting him out of the room for a few minutes. They thought they were rewarding him. Well, the whole thing was absurd. He had tired of their arrogance, their condescension. He had wanted to make them feel stupid. Careless. And if his reading of their silence in the garden was correct, then it was possible he had succeeded. Would there be reprisals? He couldn’t tell. Probably it would have been wiser to hold his tongue. Probably he should have stood there like some dumb animal and breathed the air.
He stared bleakly at the skylight, a square of blotchy white and grey. It was dismal weather. But still, those moments he had spent outside—the smell of rain-soaked grass, the touch of the raw spring breeze on the back of his hands—had cruelly reminded him of everything he had lost. He thought of Brigitte, and the pain was oddly sharp, abdominal. He thought of how little sex they’d had recently, and that saddened him, though he knew it happened to other couples too, especially when they were working hard and always tired. He remembered how it had been at the beginning, on their first holiday together, in Elba. They had stayed in a small, family-run hotel in the back-streets of Portoferrio. Their room had a high ceiling and a milky, pale-green marble floor. There was an old-fashioned double bed, with a metal headboard and a counterpane made of a satiny pink material. Above the bed was a painting of a gypsy woman with her white blouse pulled down off her shoulders and her chin raised in defiance. Brigitte said the place reminded her of her mad spinster Aunt Cecile’s apartment in Marseille. He watched her unfasten the dark-green shutters and lean on the windowsill, looking out over the town, the strong, slender muscles showing in the back of her calves. . . . Later, while they were making love, a gap had opened in the middle of the bed. It wasn’t a double bed at all, he realised, but two single beds that had been pushed together. The china lamp on the bedside table swayed, then disappeared from view. Amazingly, it didn’t break. A woman’s voice downstairs kept shouting, Mario? Ma-rio? Afterwards, they found themselves between the two beds, on the floor, the counterpane still underneath them. They could have been lying in a hammock. Twenty to eight on a June evening, the clatter of knives and forks in the restaurant below, the waspy rasp of a passing motorino, and Brigitte murmuring, Where am I?
Of course she knew, really. But the sex had been so abandoned, so all-consuming, that they had, for a short time at least, been lost to themselves. When they returned, they returned to a room they didn’t recognise, a town they didn’t know, which was a shock because they had worked so hard that year, rehearsing, performing, rehearsing again, there had been time for nothing else, and now, suddenly, they were away somewhere, alone together, and their removal, that fact in itself, was almost impossible to believe, a cause for wonder. She lay beneath him on the counterpane, her hands reaching above her head, as if in surrender, the palms facing upwards, the fingers curled. He could see the shadowy hollows under her arms, which she always shaved, and her pointed, almost nonexistent breasts, with nipples that were so sensitive that he could sometimes make her come just by touching them. Her body, though slight, concealed huge energy, an energy she would summon in performance. There had been a night in São Paulo once when he had watched her from the wings of the theatre, and his heart had lifted inside his chest and then stayed there, as if suspended, because she was doing things that he had never imagined she might do, not the steps so much, though they were faultless, but the feeling that informed the steps, and, at the end, bouquets flew out of the darkness in their dozens, the stage was ankle-deep in flowers suddenly, flowers he had never seen before and could not have named. . . . When she walked into the wings towards him, the look of amazement and disbelief must still have been on his face because she said, I know, I don’t know what it was—j’avais des ailes. And then she laughed and said, I was flying, and he held her in his arms and felt her body against his, the muscles taut, heat bursting through her skin, and then someone behind him shouted, There are drinks at the ambassador’s, everybody—drinks at the ambassador’s. . . .
Where am I? he thought.
A white room, somewhere in the Netherlands.
Lying there, chained to the floor, he could taste a metallic substance in his mouth. His gums were bleeding again. When the women cleaned his teeth, they brushed too hard—or in a way he wasn’t used to, perhaps. That morning, for the first time in his life, he had noticed a thick streak of bright-red in his saliva, and it had shaken him, as if he had been forced to confront his own weakness, his mortality. . . .
The next few hours were difficult, his mood careering wildly from nostalgia to despair. They’re two quite different places, but the journey from one to the other, it’s a journey that takes no time at all.
•
Later that day the door opened and a woman entered. She closed the door behind her, then leaned against it. She was on her own. From where he lay, in the middle of the room, he couldn’t tell which one of them it was; she was standing in deep shadow, and she was wearing the usual black hood and cloak. He was slightly apprehensive about the way the women might react to his behaviour in the garden. He decided that it might be best to try and ingratiate himself.
“I’m sorry about what happened this morning,” he said. “I got carried away. Being outside, even for a few minutes—you forget what it’s like. . . .”
Slowly the woman eased herself away from the door and out into the room. The uncertainty, the awkwardness. He thought he recognised her now, if only by a process of elimination. It was Maude.
“In any case,” he said, “I just wanted to apologise.”
She kneeled on the mat beside him, as she had done many times, her head averted, her hands laid, palms down, on her thighs. In that moment he found that he could imagine her as a child. She had been unwanted, unloved. Perhaps she had even been beaten. It would explain the way she moved, as if she was trying not to take up any space. It would also explain her voice, which, though monotonous, had a curiously indignant ring to it, almost a kind of reverberation, reminding him of the sound geese make. It was the voice of somebody who had never been allowed to express herself, or had never dared.
She put one hand on his left ankle and ran it along the side of his foot until she reached the toes.
“A dancer’s foot. . . .” The tips of her fingers lingered on the places where his skin had hardened, where his bones had changed shape. “It’s good when what a person does, it leaves marks on their body,” she said. “The hands of a gardener, for instance. . . .” She touched a white scar on his ankle. “What happened here?”
“A calcium spur,” he said. “The calcium builds up and forms a kind of spike on the bone. I had to have an operation to cut it out. It’s common for dancers.”
She took a breath. “I’m not going to do anything bad to you.” Her eyes shifted behind the two holes in her hood.
He wanted to talk to her, to have a normal conversation, but he couldn’t think of a good place to begin.
“I would like to lie next to you,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t mind.” He kept his voice gentle.
“I have to be naked,” she said.
She pushed her cloak back from her legs to reveal a pair of black work-boots. The toes were scuffed, and the tread on the soles had almost worn to nothing. As she untied the laces she began to hum in that tuneless way she had, which he now understood to be a sign of nervousness. Not wanting to embarrass her, he looked away. He felt he could have predicted those boots that she was wearing. They fitted the image he now had of her, of someone who was both stubborn and neglected.
“My body is not exciting to you,” she said.
He turned to her again. Her thighs were heavy and dimpled, and her ample belly folded in on itself. She had the solid, rounded shoulders of a swimmer—though he couldn’t really see her swimming—and small, oddly delicate breasts that seemed as if they must belong to someone else. Her body showed you all the colours and textures flesh could be. A painter would have loved it.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t want to—I don’t want anything.” She paused. “I’m not like the others.”
The Book of Revelation Page 6