Mistification

by Kaaron Warren

  Marvo smiled. "No, I don't mind them at all, but Andra doesn't like them inside the house. She waits for the new moon and sweeps them out. Shoo shoo!" he said, mimicking Andra's cautious actions.

  "Well, now, here's the thing. A spider in the tea cup means fulfilment. Your fulfilment." She winked at him. "And there's indications we are talking about sex."

  Marvo reddened. Andra and he had not yet made love. He was barely aware it was required of him; he had not received any education in that area. People either had sex or they didn't. He couldn't figure out how they moved from not making love to making love. He saw rare indication of the mid-ground.

  They left the party early, a rarity. He thought carefully about things the woman had said, things she desired, and he was pale, his hair greasy, his skin spongy to the touch.

  Andra looked at him and laughed.

  "You need a bath, " she said, feigning disgust, but her eyes glittered, her fingers twitched, ready to clean, scrub and stroke.

  "I wanted to see if the dog knew I was dirty."

  He immersed himself in the water; its steam seared the dirt off him. As he settled onto the warm enamel, the bathroom door opened and Andra entered.

  "I'm taking your action as a signal," she said. "You've always been meticulous before, barely a shred of filth. Now you come home like a man without access to water. Is it a scrub-down you're after? Are you leaving me to be the seductress?"

  Marvo nodded. He felt nine years old, as she took his hand and climbed naked into the bath, he felt nine years old and holding his first magic trick. What he held was mysterious, unknown, but excited him in a part of his belly he could not identify. He was old enough to feel fear, unlike a teenager who cares little for restraint.

  Andra washed him and dried him and laid him on the bed. She said, "Do what your body feels. Don't think, don't be scared."

  He felt overwhelmed, incapable, out of control. The magic of it, the total giving and forgetting, scared him. He forgot the room he grew up in; he did not think about turning a rabbit blue. He was horrified by the duality of it; all his life he had been alone, because his grandmother had never stirred him to emotion. It was too much, the closeness, the two people becoming one. Too much to bear.

  Marvo knew he would never make love to another woman. Andra had enchanted him.

  When Andra woke up in the morning, he was gone. She was angry at this because it had been his idea, after all. Then she cried, because she feared he wouldn't come back. Then she knew he would, and she settled into a quiet life to wait until he did.

  Marvo walked and travelled, seeking stories like they were drugs. He avoided touching people; each contact reminded him of Andra, her marvellous skin, how he had forgotten everything when they made love. He made use of his escape, though, looking for stories, seeking Doctor Reid. He did not want to die. He wanted to live forever.

  Marvo had the ability of travel. He wandered all his life, place to place, leaving nothing, but always taking something, changing a bit. Every experience moulded him. He had three passports, three different names, because sometimes he liked to travel to two places at once, and it could get confusing. With the three passports, no one was under pressure to understand something alien to them. He was thoughtful that way.

  He met a woman in a nightclub on his travels. His obvious disinterest in her body made her gabble. She loved to talk, but usually had to be quiet if she wanted people to like her. Marvo listened; she was in heaven.

  The Redneck Quads

  There was a family who lived next door called the Tanners. They were all very pale, because they stayed inside a lot. Their mother said they had to all stay inside because she would know where they were then.

  There were four Tanner kids, and they were all born at the same time. They were called the quads. They spent the whole day at school together, didn't play with anyone else, so we all started to hate them.

  They all had these tight necklaces of red beads, boys and girls. We used to laugh at that. Someone started calling them rednecks, and we thought that was funny as well.

  They ended up doing better than any of us, really well in school and now they're all doctors. The Tanner Clinic, it's called. I found out years later that those red necklaces were good luck charms, they were red rowan berries. I've made some for my daughter, who I had when I sixteen, and I'm hoping she will have more luck than I did.

  #

  Marvo gave her daughter the ability to study, and not to be disturbed by her mother's past.

  Marvo stayed on a farm in the country. While he was there, the farmer buried his horse alone, bearing great anger.

  The Night Horse

  Tradition killed my horse, and a gun. She has always been a restless girl, a night horse. Don't know where it came from, but she'd potter about in the night, have a bite to eat, snuffling here and there. Sometimes if it was a lovely night, she'd neigh.

  Sadly, she neighed during the night of the birth of the Oster child. It wouldn't matter to most people, but the Osters were old-fashioned. It was a breech birth, they tell me. Baby born feet first. Doctors there, ambulances, although the Osters don't believe in that.

  He came to see me, next day, Mr Oster. He said his wife was on the verge. She may not live. I was sorry for him; all they had was each other, and the baby now. He said, "You should be sorry, it's your fault."

  My horse neighed in the night, you see. An omen of death. I said, "My horse didn't cause anything."

  He said, "As may be," and left.

  I thought, No more neighbourly chats with that one, then I heard a shot. He had killed my horse.

  "That's the death," he said. He wasn't sorry for it. He was proud of his clever thinking. I found myself wishing his wife would die, to prove him wrong, but of course I didn't want that.

  #

  "What about the wife? The child?" Marvo asked.

  "Oh, they were fine. They left him when the boy was six." Marvo gave the man a new horse, a day horse.

  Marvo discovered the way people drift, and are willing to talk as they wait for transport. He went to the airport, closed his eyes, smelt many things. He could smell Andra's perfume at the duty-free shop, and he spent an hour there, picturing her face, falling in love.

  "I love the sound of an aeroplane," said a man sitting alone at the airport. "I love the smell of the airport, the sight of streets of runways. These are my comforts. But I cannot climb aboard. The plane is the womb of my mother, and my mother is dead. I cannot climb back into a dead womb."

  The Smell of the Airport

  My mother was never a strong woman. She tried to eat well, did not drink, took medicine for her poor heart. She wore a stone of jacinth next to her heart, in the hope that would strengthen it, and, under hypnosis, I once remembered that stone, sharp and dull, like the overcast sky when the sun goes down. This is the closest I have to an early memory.

  She was never strong. She could not stay up talking for hours, something my father loved to do. She would go to bed and he would sit up, other women there to talk to him. He loved my mother exclusively, though. He has never recovered from her death.

  She hated him, I think. He found it easy to be strong, he could dance and build, without his heart beating SOS against his breast. He could enjoy food, yell, he could drink.

  When she fell pregnant with me, there was jubilation and terror. It was hard to imagine her surviving the process of giving birth, and at the eight-month stage, somebody decided she would be safer in another country's National Maternity Hospital, closer to her family. She was packed onto a plane to get there in time.

  My mother hated and feared planes. She always believed she would die on one. Every time she heard of a crash she would establish that, given a set of complicated circumstances, she could have been on that plane. She could have been a victim.

  She was bundled onto the plane, and it was not an easy flight. My father was there to comfort her, but there were plenty of scares for him too, as the plane dipped and pocketed.
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  The plane fell some feet, with the captain saying it's OK, there's nothing to worry about. But my mother was shocked. She began to give birth to me.

  The attendants had learnt about it at flight school, and they were marvellous, according to my father. As good as any medical team. I was born fifty thousand feet up.

  #

  "And your mother?"

  "She was killed by a drunk driver when I was twelve."

  Marvo gave the man a hatred of airports as well, so he did not ever enter them again. But as the man ran out to escape the place, he tripped and bit through his tongue.

  Marvo felt responsible for the accident, so took him by taxi to the hospital. He used to watch a show on TV where there were always lots of babies to be carried, cuddled, operated on. It was a hospital show, full of people and stories.

  A man sat in the foyer of the hospital, a placard held above his head saying, "Hospital Kills."

  Marvo dropped his charge off and asked the man who the hospital had killed.

  "My sister wasn't sick a day in her life until this happened. It must have been that man she married. He made her sick; his presence made her sick. He made me sick. I suppose he cared about her, loved her. He seems upset enough now. The first time she got taken to hospital, she didn't want to go.

  " 'I've never been, I don't need to go,' she said, barely able to speak through the pain.

  "But she went, and the hospital found nothing wrong. How they didn't I don't know. A woman in agony (a girl really. She was only twenty-three) and they say, 'Nothing.' Two days later, she was back. Same pains, same result. We all went to the hospital that time, kicked up a fuss about them finding nothing, but they made her go home.

  "The third time she had to go to hospital, two days later, she was dead on arrival. Now they find a brain tumour."

  "Operable?" asked Marvo. He liked to know the details.

  "Yes. They could have saved my little sister." Marvo was mildly pleased with the story, and he changed the sister's condition to inoperable. The man felt better, "There was nothing they could do," he said, "we did all we could."

  There were plenty of stories at the hospital, and Marvo discovered they were all different, something which had not been clear without sound on TV. They were all about sickness, death, failure, but there were infinite versions.

  He needed stories; stories and stories and stories. He practised his magic all day but he listened all night. He had slept with Andra to keep her comforted, but he'd found her becoming part of his flesh; they'd wake at the same time and she'd smiled at him. He couldn't bear to breathe her air. It suffocated him, made his eyes water with love for her.

  He thought of love as a mist he couldn't control, so he went out to find a job, to get away, spend more hours in the cold, hard normal world.

  He went to the unemployment office and found stories there that made him realise nothing was normal.

  Marvo heard this story from a man who has lost his job. The company fired him for gross negligence; he was drunk and pissed on a client's head. Marvo knew all this, yet he believed the man when he said, "Those bastards. The worst thing they did to me was giving me a feeling of guilt, like I was the worst sinner.

  "I spent all the next day, with a hangover, in church. I prayed, I lit candles, I prayed that everything would be all right, that everyone else was as drunk as I was and wouldn't remember."

  "It's very difficult to change the past," said Marvo. He didn't usually interrupt stories but felt this man needed to know. "Far easier to change the future."

  "I thought God could do anything," the man said, not hearing him. "I went and prayed. I was so sure everything would be OK I rolled up for work, like nothing had happened.

  "They all stared at me like I was a murderer. I got to my office and all my things were in boxes, all packed up with To Be Collected on them. They wouldn't even send my stuff to me. It was very hurtful.

  "I picked up my boxes – only two, five years there and I only collected two boxes of personal belongings. I took my painting off the wall, the painting which had caused so much comment and made them think I was an art lover, something special."

  The Painting

  This painting was of a beautiful old perfume bottle, painted as it appeared to the painter, already old. It stood on a small dark table against a dark burgundy background. Only a light glowing around the bottle distinguished it. It was tall and thin, its label mottled, unreadable. It was hard to identify its era. The Venetian glass makers in the twelfth century were expert bottle makers, and clear glass bottles began to appear in the sixteenth century. Liquid perfume was found from the seventeenth century. Painted bottles, as opposed to paper labels, were collectables from the mid-seventeenth century. Labels, perhaps, appeared from the mid 1800s.

  The aristocracy in Henry VIII's time created their own scents, a tradition still upheld. They called the perfumes after themselves; today, perfumes are named for the designer or for a part of their character they wish to be known by. Louis XIII created "Nerdi", an orange blossom scent, after a duchess he admired. Eau de cologne, name unchanged today, took its name from Cologne, in Germany.

  The bottle in the painting is half-full; some poor woman considered its contents too precious to use, and now she is long dead, and the perfume stale.

  It was a strange, dull picture to have in my office, but it helped me keep in touch with relativity. It was a memento mori, telling me each time I saw it that life is short, life lasts less than a bottle of perfume. People would see it and say it gave them the creeps for some reason, and I'd say, "Funny you should say that. Because the word 'perfume' actually means 'from smoke' because it was originally created from sweet gums and woods and used in sacrifice, to cover up the smell of burning flesh."

  The painter was aware of that, I believe. That's why he gave the picture such a sheen of ill-feeling. Though it could have been his nature; I believe he committed suicide not long after the completion of this picture.

  #

  For this story, Marvo gave the teller a paintbrush. "You can use anything as paint," Marvo said. "Please, continue with the story of your dismissal."

  "I got into my car and drove to the pub. I tried to think of someone to call, to drink with me, but there was no one. I stayed there a long time, trying to figure what had happened, and I realised what it was. It was one bloody thing. God didn't listen. It was bullshit, and all my life I'd believed it.

  "I bought a bottle; it was brown and I drank it. Then I went to my brother's place. He was at work of course, the bastard. I broke into his place and pinched his rifle.

  "Then I went to the church where I'd prayed all day, wasted my day. There was the priest at the front, the liar. They all look the same, they are the same, they belt you for writing the wrong way.

  "I sat close to the front and he nodded to me as if I belonged. I let him carry on for a while, muttering and gobbling and the small congregation muttering with him.

  "I coughed and he looked me in the eyes. Then I shot him."

  Marvo stared at the man. He saw the blackness. He saw his future, a stage, a rifle, an apostate.

  The unemployed man was only there to find a haven. He had escaped from custody and was hiding in all the places they would not look.

  Marvo gave another trick to this man. He gave him a magic key to open any lock.

  Marvo investigated the story of the perfume bottle and discovered its unfortunate history.

  Its label had once said "Capture" and it did not have just one owner, as the man had thought – it had many, many owners. It was said to be made of the rarest rose and the glands of an extinct creature. Each woman only needed to wear a drop of perfume once in their lives and the spell was made. Marvo followed a trail of suicides and accidents, each owner leaving no message as to the magic in the bottle. Marvo found the bottle, still with a few drops left in it, in the home of a man who had died of a heart attack. He stole the bottle, leaving in its place a bottle of modern perfume, an insipid, saf
e scent.

  He kept the perfume hidden from Andra; it would be his own little secret.

  There was a girl at the job office, too. She wore mirrored sunglasses and a broad skirt, covered with tiny, dark mirrors.

  "To see the future," she said. She gazed down. "All black," she said. To dispel the evil eye, too, Marvo knew from Andra. She told a story.

  Mirror in the Toilets

  There was a man, very healthy, and everything to live for. He had a wife who loved him and allowed him every freedom. He had two children, girls with his wife's beauty and intelligence to match. His job was stable; a government job from which he could not be removed, and which he found satisfying. Life was good for this man.