He threw the shell away and rolled down his trouser. He pulled his shoe back on. He sat for a while, breathing heavily.
Then something occurred to him. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He withdrew some tablets. Three types: little whites, little blues and some brighter, brasher capsules, all neat and curtailed in their foil and plastic. He chose randomly. The white ones. He took six, chewed, swallowed, without wincing.
When he returned the packets to his pocket Ronny discovered something else there. Monica’s letter. He pulled it out. He felt so alone. He was alone. Jim had abandoned him. He opened it.
Dear Ronny, he read. Dear Ronny. He blinked a few times, gulped, then read on.
♦
In a dream The Head had told her exactly what to do. Every detail. The Head was very interested in Ronny. He felt a connection, an empathy. The Head was convinced that Ronny had entered Lily’s life for very specific reasons, although he didn’t specify what these might be exactly. Specifications weren’t really his strong point.
Lily sat on the bus trying to make sense of it, but not trying particularly hard. She didn’t like making sense of things. It wasn’t an especially helpful process, making sense. It wasn’t one of her regular indulgences. But what she did decide, finally, was that a burial of some kind was necessary. A ceremony. Something formal. A gesture.
And tied up, linked, entwined in the burial process would be the death of something else (something raging, foetid, unspe-cific), or the birth, or the rebirth, an awakening. Something.
Sometimes Lily wished she’d been raised a Catholic. Then she wouldn’t have needed to improvise so much. Things would’ve been so much more formal and lucid and constrained. In the well-worn form, the predictable angles of confession, forgiveness, catharsis.
Ronny had said…what was it? She couldn’t remember. She stared out of the window. Was this an A road or a motorway? How big was London? Was it easily navigable?
What Ronny had in fact said was that devils and demons were created simply as a means for primitive people to express their feelings – overwhelming feelings, engulfing feelings – of anger and guilt and panic. That was all. Easy.
Ronny had said these words but Lily hadn’t understood what he’d meant by them exactly. Was it a denial? Was it ridicule? Was it all just lies? What she did understand, though, was that Ronny was more than just a pretty face. More. More. More. He was a missionary. He was an emissary. He was downright fucking edible.
A burial. That was it. What was needed. A burial followed by a wake a wake awake.
She licked her lips.
♦
It was a long, straight road and they saw each other approaching from far, far away. Like two prize-fighters, all hips and holster and spur-twinkling stagger. Except that Ronny alone staggered – it was his habitual gait – and if Sara was ready to draw, to burst, to explode, it was merely an illusion, an aftertaste of the morning’s fireworks.
She was finding herself. Even here, step after step on this long, straight road. Even here. But it was a curious journey. Hard on the feet. Tricky terrain.
They drew adjacent to one another. Ronny was in his own world. He seemed colourless. He barely noticed her.
“Ronny.”
“What?”
His voice was almost fractious. She could’ve been anybody.
“It’s me. Sara. Remember?”
“Yes.”
He nodded but he hardly glanced at her. Then he walked on.
“Where are you going?”
She called after him.
“Nowhere.”
He kept on walking, hoping she’d forget about him if he held his breath. He held it. It worked.
Sara stood still and smiled to herself. She had the camera slung around her neck. It bumped against her breasts. Was she invisible? Was she truly invisible? Was everything too late now? She shook her head and walked onwards.
♦
Ronny located the farm with ease. On the final leg of his walk he was accompanied by a strange group of companions. The boar. Each small pack trotted together in unison along the perimeter of their individual enclosures. They followed Ronny in relays. He was their skinny baton, and they all kept perfect time with him.
But Ronny didn’t focus on the boar. He was focused elsewhere. Somewhere hot, somewhere scalding and dense and deep inside. The front door of the farmhouse was locked but the back door wasn’t. He pushed it open. The kitchen smelled of coffee and of cabbage. He inspected the taps, the sink, the table, the crockery – a pale blue colour, standing jauntily on an old dresser, spotless.
He’d never had a proper home. Was this a proper home? He breathed it all in. The hallway. The stairway. He inspected the walls as he climbed the stairs, searching out residue from Lily’s previous misadventure.
He drifted from room to room. First, Sara’s bedroom. It was plain and powdery and vaguely mussed. The cupboard doors were open, and inside her clothes were hung on old metal hangers like a threadbare assemblage of frustrated sighs. He fingered the assorted fabrics. He looked down at the shoes. A hat-box on the top shelf, and, in the corner, under dense plastic, a long white dress. A wedding dress. He lifted the dress from the cupboard. He pulled off the plastic. Net and dust and old yellowy silk fell from his clumsy fingers and frothed on to the carpet.
He caught sight of himself in the dresser. He got a shock. He stared grimly, as though he almost didn’t recognize his reflection, but it was the actual possibility of recognition that bothered him. He looked down at the dress again. He unfastened the zip. He used both hands. He pulled it wide, to its fullest extent, so that the dress lay open, like a fine cocoon, like a silk sleeping bag. He stepped into it, and pulled it on, over his clothes. He zipped it up again. It was big on him. He turned around slowly and then inspected himself in the mirror. He smiled, because now he was truly unrecognizable. He lifted his skirts with a swish and left the room.
Lily’s bedroom. Books. Magazines. The bed unmade. A set of drawers. He yanked open the top one. Underwear. He closed it. The second one: T-shirts, jumpers, socks. The third. In the third drawer he discovered a selection of small animal pelts. Stiff. Some of them quite old. A vole. Two rabbits. A weasel. A bat – dried up – even a cat pelt. A small collection of pellets, deposited, he presumed, by an owl or something, containing, in crushed up perplexity, little bones and bits of skin and gristle and other stuff. He could’ve sworn he saw a jaw. A tiny jaw. A mouse’s jaw. He marvelled then withdrew.
Also, some pieces of wire. Two knives. Both sharp. He tested them on his thumb, lovingly, kept hold of the sharpest, lifted his skirts and slipped it into his pocket, then put the other back. He continued inspecting. A lipstick (somewhat incongruous, he frowned) and feathers. Mainly pigeon and hen feathers but also some which were smaller and brighter.
Ronny pushed the drawer shut. He mopped at his face with his skirts. His face felt hot. Dust from the skirts made him feel like sneezing. He wheezed and then vacated. Connie’s room. On the bed, a suitcase. He walked straight over to it, feeling like he was inside some kind of tunnel. With so much focus, so much magnification that it almost made him topple. This was the moment. He knew it. Something told him. The moment.
Ronny opened the suitcase. Clothes, cosmetics. An extra pair of sandals. But tucked into a corner, wrapped up in a ribbon, just as Lily had described them, the letters.
“Where have you been?” he asked, out loud, quite matter of factly. Then shoved in his hands – like a surgeon attending a routine caesarean – grasped hold of the letters and delivered them.
♦
Jim couldn’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming. There was no precise moment when he entered consciousness.
Just hotness. Confusion. He didn’t even know that his eyes were open. But they were open. He was looking into the face of a girl. She was sleeping. It was all so calm. He was not thinking. Just staring, blankly.
A little face. Its brow puckered. He stared at the brow and the pu
cker. He wished the pucker would go. He imagined it gone. And no sooner had he imagined it than it went. His eyes slid down her nose and landed on her lips, which were neat and dry. He stared at her lips.
A thought entered his head. It said: You could do anything.
He considered the thought. Anything? What did that mean?
I know that I am evil, he told the thought, but I will do no harm here.
There. His heart lifted.
He circled his eyes around her face. Her chin, her cheeks, her brows, her crown. He circled, lime and time again. A mental massage. And as he circled – he was sure of it – her face relaxed, and relaxed, and all the sadness in it departed.
Her breathing grew deeper, then deeper still. The corners of her lips lifted. She was smiling, pretty much. Then she stopped breathing, just for a moment, and finally her eyes opened. She was staring into his face. He did not blink. He expected to see fear in her eyes, but there was nothing there but blue.
“I was dreaming of my father,” she said, her voice riddled with a dozy amazement, “he was standing over me, touching my face. And all the hurt was drawn right out of me. Pulled out in one go, like a bee sting yanked free by tweezers.”
Jim continued to stare, without blinking, stifling everything in his chest, his face; deadening, ignoring what she’d said entirely, determined to feel nothing and, he told himself, succeeding.
“Hello? Are you awake?”
She leaned closer, frowning. “Or are you sleeping?”
He felt her breath on his face.
“Are you sleeping?” she asked again, “with your eyes wide open? Am I in your dreams? Do you see me?”
Connie’imagined herself lost deep inside Jim’s head. This thought tickled her, somehow. She didn’t dare wake him then, so she withdrew, very softly, a mere thought, a twinkle, a Tinkerbell, an Ariel; floating and golden and embossed. Beatific.
♦
Ronny,
Whose fault is this? Is it my fault? Louis trapped me in a corner and started telling me about how animals had no fear of man before he made them fear him. In the Americas, he said, when people first landed on the Pacific islands, and in New Zealand too…In New Zealand. I don’t know. Hang on. Let me get my facts straight. Should I brush up on my geography?
Screw the facts, anyway. Here’s the gist: there were over sixty types of flightless bird at one time. In the world. Some were up to half a ton in weight. But because they lived in parts of the globe unexplored by man, they had never actually seen him before – this scrappy, fragile, two-legged creature – and so they had no reason to fear him.
They walked among the sweet, pink sailors when they landed, those sailors who were feeling the hard earth under their toes for the first time in so long, yes, they walked among them without apprehension, all peacefulness and openness. Welcoming. And the sailors, barely believing their luck, seeing these gentle creatures so real and trusting among them, raised their clubs and brought them down hard. Harder still. Killed them. Ate them. Extinguished them.
No scruples, Louis said. No bloody scruples.
And now there are no longer sixty types of flightless bird, some up to half a ton in weight. No. Now there are none. They are all gone.
You come from that place, Louis screamed, and there’s no point in denying it. You can’t arrive in these jungles and behave like nothing has happened. History. You can’t come here and act like you aren’t the thing you are. You exist on the back of all this slaughter. You are its product. You are its prize, its very reason.
So that was his basic point, Ronny. I am a success simply because I’m alive. I come from that stock, Louis said, the stock which survived all the wars and the plagues and the hardships. I am a success because I exist. My body is the product of all those previous equations. If life was a sum, my scrappy white torso – this sad, pale shell, this wracked thing – would be the answer to it.
Imagine!
That’s such a responsibility, Ronny, don’t you think?
But naturally I didn’t take it all lying down. (Although I was in my bunk. He keeps waking me and making me talk. In the night. Late. In the morning, early.)
I didn’t take it prone because it made no real sense. I said, “It’s really not like that, Louis. It’s a fluke. You got your logic wrong. You got your sums wrong. You’re doing it back to front. The fact that I exist doesn’t mean anything. My existence is a question, not an answer. It’s a joke, a mystery, a shot in the dark.”
“You can’t be one of them,” Louis sneered, “no matter how hard you try. You stick out. This whole environment is disgusted by you. By your white face and your thin arms, your long hair, your broken nails…”
♦
A jangling. Ronny looked up. He closed the letter, gathered all the others into a bundle, rose from the bed and walked towards it.
The phone was ringing in the hallway. It rang and rang.
“Hello?”
It was in his hand and he was speaking.
“Hello?” he repeated.
“James?”
A voice, surprised. Off-balance.
Ronny paused, then answered.
“No. Ronny. It’s Ronny.”
Another pause.
“It’s me. It’s Nathan. Where are you?”
“Nathan? Oh…”
Ronny began smiling. “Uh…Is it about the watch?”
“The watch?” Nathan echoed. Another pause.
“No. I’m sorry. I’m confused…In fact…in fact I was actually hoping to speak to Constance. To Connie.”
“Right.” Ronny’s voice became hollow.
“Is she there?”
“No. She’s with Jim.”
“But…”
Almost panic. Confusion. Ronny ignored it and pulled at the zip on the wedding dress with his free hand.
“I can’t really speak right now,” he said softly. He was aching.
“Ronny?”
Then he smiled.
“You know…” his voice was so gentle “…I somehow thought you’d rung for me.”
“Ronny?”
“But I was wrong to think that. I was wrong.”
He hung up.
∨ Wide Open ∧
Thirty-Four
“Tell me again how you found it.”
Luke was so pleased to have the camera back. Once it was gone he’d started to labour under the misapprehension that its absence symbolized something.
“I don’t know. I just happened across it.”
Sara was a poor liar. And the excitement of what might yet occur was bubbling up within her.
“Inside the hide?”
“Underneath. But I’m certain it didn’t come to any harm.”
He was inspecting it. “It looks just fine.” He paused, frowning.
“What?”
“The film’s been used. I didn’t take any shots myself, at least I don’t remember taking any…”
“Will you develop them?”
Sara was biting her lip.
“Uh. I don’t know…”
“Maybe you should.”
Luke stared into Sara’s face. It was so full of activity. It was burgeoning. It was beautiful.
“You want me to?”
“Yes. It’s exciting, don’t you think?”
“But it’ll take a while.”
“Take as long as you want.”
Sara sat down on Luke’s sofa and wrapped her arms around herself.
♦
Lily felt like some kind of flimsy vapour walking among all these city folk, these brightly coloured, purposeful, brusque, shoving, thumping, pumping people. She became suddenly aware of her own slightness. She knew where she wanted to go but nothing seemed to want to take her there. She had ten pounds to spend. A ticket inspector told her to buy a One-Day Travelcard. Two zones. She did as he’d instructed, but suspiciously.
Finally, she found her way to Baker Street. Her cheek kept bleeding. Her blood was like water. No substance. No text
ure. She held her shirt cuff against her cheek. The cotton was already tight with plasma. Then she followed the signs to the Lost Property Office.
She’d arrived, finally. But it was late. Almost one. And the bus back left in only an hour. She pushed the door open and walked in. There were too many people. Two women and a man behind counters, and others, like herself, waiting for service. She nearly panicked but then she remembered how Ronny had specified that the person he’d dealt with was male, not female, so she avoided the queue and instead walked straight on over to the man in the payment cubicle.
Someone in the queue called out to her and then a woman on the counter told her that she needed to go around the other way if she wanted serving. But Lily, her one wrist jammed against her cheek, pushed her other hand flat down on to the counter and stared intently into the man’s eyes.
“I’ve come for Ronny,” she said, above all the confusion and disgruntlement, “about the beast.”
The man seemed confounded. “This is a payment cubicle,” he said. “To make a claim you’ll have to fill in a form and then see one of my colleagues.”
He pointed and then paused. “Are you hurt?”
“No. No. Like I said, I’ve come for Ronny.”
But his name seemed to spur no sense of recognition. None whatsoever.
♦
Nathan had requested sick leave. He was feeling sick. It was almost a fever. Everything opening wide, inside him. That’s what he’d said.
“Sounds like flu,” they’d responded, “you’d better take a week.”
He’d collected his coat and was preparing to go. He was in the toilet, staring at his reflection, straightening his collar, when a colleague entered.
“Don’t come near me,” Nathan croaked, hoping to create an atmosphere of legitimacy, “I might be infectious.”
The colleague smiled. “No more infectious,” he said, “than this crazy girl who was just at my counter, dripping blood and ranting on about The Beast.”
“What?”
Nathan chuckled.
“But The Beast wasn’t actually hers, you understand. It belonged to her friend, Ronny. It was Ronny’s beast. He’d wrapped it up in a cardboard box and then dropped it off here for safekeeping…”
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