Behold

by Barker, Clive

  With a room to herself, and an endless supply of paper, she began to write her memoirs again, from the beginning.

  It was late summer, and the nights were getting chilly. Sometimes, to warm herself, she would lie on the floor (she’d asked them to remove the bed) and will her body to ripple like the surface of a lake. Her body, without sex, became a mystery to her again; and she realized for the first time that physical love had been an exploration of that most intimate, and yet most unknown region of her being: her flesh. She had understood herself best embracing someone else: seen her own substance clearly only when another’s lips were laid on it, adoring and gentle. She thought of Vassi again; and the lake, at the thought of him, was roused as if by a tempest. Her breasts shook into curling mountains, her belly ran with extraordinary tides, currents crossed and recrossed her flickering face, lapping at her mouth and leaving their mark like waves on sand. As she was fluid in his memory, so as she remembered him, she liquified.

  She thought of the few times she had been at peace in her life; and physical love, discharging ambition and vanity, had always preceded those fragile moments. There were other ways presumably; but her experience had been limited. Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts. But she’d not found it like that at all. She’d found her life full of hurts, but almost empty of ways to salve them.

  She left off writing her memoirs when she reached her ninth year. She despaired of telling her story from that point on, with the first realization of oncoming puberty. She burned the papers on a bonfire she lit in the middle of her room the day that Pettifer arrived.

  My God, she thought, this can’t be power.

  Pettifer looked sick; as physically changed as a friend she’d lost to cancer. One month seemingly healthy, the next sucked up from the inside, self-devoured. He looked like a husk of a man: his skin gray and mottled. Only his eyes glittered, and those like the eyes of a mad dog.

  He was dressed immaculately, as though for a wedding.

  “J.”

  “Titus.”

  He looked her up and down. “Are you well?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “They give you everything you ask for?”

  “Perfect hosts.”

  “You haven’t resisted.”

  “Resisted?”

  “Being here. Locked up. I was prepared, after Lyndon, for another slaughter of the innocents.”

  “Lyndon was not innocent, Titus. These people are. You didn’t tell them.”

  “I didn’t deem it necessary. May I close the door?”

  He was her captor: but he came like an emissary to the camp of a greater power. She liked the way he was with her, cowed but elated. He closed the door, and locked it.

  “I love you, J. And I fear you. In fact, I think I love you because I fear you. Is that a sickness?”

  “I would have thought so.”

  “Yes, so would I.”

  “Why did you take such a time to come?”

  “I had to put my affairs in order. Otherwise there would have been chaos. When I was gone.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  He looked into her, the muscles of his face ruffled by anticipation. “I hope so.”

  “Where to?”

  Still she didn’t guess what had brought him to the house, his affairs neatened, his wife unknowingly asked forgiveness of as she slept, all channels of escape closed, all contradictions laid to rest.

  Still she didn’t guess he’d come to die.

  “I’m reduced by you, J. Reduced to nothing. And there is nowhere for me to go. Do you follow?”

  “No.”

  “I cannot live without you,” he said. The cliché was unpardonable. Could he not have found a better way to say it? She almost laughed, it was so trite.

  But he hadn’t finished.

  “—and I certainly can’t live with you.” Abruptly, the tone changed. “Because you revolt me, woman, your whole being disgusts me.”

  “So?” she asked, softly.

  “So . . . ” He was tender again and she began to understand. “ . . . kill me.”

  It was grotesque. The glittering eyes were steady on her.

  “It’s what I want,” he said. “Believe me, it’s all I want in the world. Kill me, however you please. I’ll go without resistance, without complaint.”

  She remembered the old joke. Masochist to Sadist: Hurt me! For God’s sake, hurt me! Sadist to Masochist: No.

  “And if I refuse?” she said.

  “You can’t refuse. I’m loathsome.”

  “But I don’t hate you, Titus.”

  “You should. I’m weak. I’m useless to you. I taught you nothing.”

  “You taught me a great deal. I can control myself now.”

  “Lyndon’s death was controlled, was it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “It looked a little excessive to me.”

  “He got everything he deserved.”

  “Give me what I deserve, then, in my turn. I’ve locked you up.

  I’ve rejected you when you needed me. Punish me for it.”

  “I survived.”

  “J.!”

  Even in this extremity he couldn’t call her by her full name.

  “Please to God. Please to God. I need only this one thing from you. Do it out of whatever motive you have in you. Compassion, or contempt, or love. But do it, please do it.”

  “No,” she said.

  He crossed the room suddenly, and slapped her, very hard. “Lyndon said you were a whore. He was right; you are. Gutter slut, nothing better.”

  He walked away, turned, walked back, hit her again, faster, harder, and again, six or seven times, backward and forward.

  Then he stopped, panting.

  “You want money?” Bargains now. Blows, then bargains.

  She was seeing him twisted through tears of shock, which she was unable to prevent.

  “Do you want money?” he said again.

  “What do you think?”

  He didn’t hear her sarcasm, and began to scatter notes around her feet, dozens and dozens of them, like offerings around the Statue of the Virgin.

  “Anything you want,” he said, “Jacqueline.”

  In her belly she felt something close to pain as the urge to kill him found birth, but she resisted it. It was playing into his hands, becoming the instrument of his will: powerless. Usage again; that’s all she ever got. She had been bred like a cow, to give a certain supply. Of care to husbands, of milk to babies, of death to old men. And, like a cow, she was expected to be compliant with every demand made of her, whenever the call came. Well, not this time.

  She went to the door. “Where are you going?” She reached for the key.

  “Your death is your own business, not mine,” she said.

  He ran at her before she could unlock the door, and the blow—in its force, in its malice—was totally unexpected.

  “Bitch!” he shrieked, a hail of blows coming fast upon the first. In her stomach, the thing that wanted to kill grew a little larger.

  He had his fingers tangled in her hair, and pulled her back into the room, shouting obscenities at her, an endless stream of them, as though he’d opened a dam full of sewer-water on her. This was just another way for him to get what he wanted, she told herself, if you succumb to this you’ve lost: he’s just manipulating you. Still the words came: the same dirty words that had been thrown at generations of unsubmissive women. Whore; heretic; cunt; bitch; monster.

  Yes, she was that.

  Yes, she thought: monster I am.

  The thought made it easy. She turned. He knew what she intended even before she looked at him. He dropped his hands from her head. Her anger was already in her throat coming out of her—crossing the air between them.

  Monster he calls me: monster I am.

  I do this for myself, not for him. Never for him. For myself!

  He gasped as he
r will touched him, and the glittering eyes stopped glittering for a moment, the will to die became the will to survive, all too late of course, and he roared. She heard answering shouts, steps, threats on the stairs. They would be in the room in a matter of moments.

  “You are an animal,” she said.

  “No,” he said, certain even now that his place was in command.

  “You don’t exist,” she said, advancing on him. “They’ll never find the part that was Titus. Titus is gone. The rest is just—”

  The pain was terrible. It stopped even a voice coming out from him. Or was that her again, changing his throat, his palate, his very head? She was unlocking the plates of his skull, and reorganizing him. No, he wanted to say, this isn’t the subtle ritual I had planned. I wanted to die folded into you, I wanted to go with my mouth clamped to yours, cooling in you as I died. This is not the way I want it.

  No. No. No.

  They were at the door, the men who’d kept her here, beating on it. She had no fear of them, of course, except that they might spoil her handiwork before the final touches were added to it.

  Someone was hurling himself at the door now. Wood splintered: the door was flung open. The two men were both armed. They pointed their weapons at her, steady-handed.

  “Mr. Pettifer?” said the younger man. In the corner of the room, under the table, Pettifer’s eyes shone.

  “Mr. Pettifer?” he said again, forgetting the woman.

  Pettifer shook his snouted head. Don’t come any closer, please, he thought.

  The man crouched down and stared under the table at the disgusting beast that was squatting there; bloody from its transformation, but alive. She had killed his nerves: he felt no pain. He just survived, his hands knotted into paws, his legs scooped up around his back, knees broken so he had the look of a four-legged crab, his brain exposed, his eyes lidless, lower jaw broken and swept up over his top jaw like a bulldog, ears torn off, spine snapped, humanity bewitched into another state

  “You are an animal,” she’d said. It wasn’t a bad facsimile of beasthood. The man with the gun gagged as he recognized fragments of his master. He stood up, greasy-chinned, and glanced around at the woman.

  Jacqueline shrugged.

  “You did this?” Awe mingled with the revulsion. She nodded.

  “Come, Titus,” she said, clicking her fingers. The beast shook its head, sobbing.

  “Come, Titus,” she said more forcefully, and Titus Pettifer waddled out of his hiding place, leaving a trail like a punctured meat-sack. The man fired at Pettifer’s remains out of sheer instinct. Anything, anything at all to prevent this disgusting creature from approaching him.

  Titus stumbled two steps back on his bloody paws, shook himself as if to dislodge the death in him, and failing, died.

  “Content?” she asked.

  The gunman looked up from the execution. Was the power talking to him? No; Jacqueline was staring at Pettifer’s corpse, asking the question of him.

  Content?

  The gunman dropped his weapon. The other man did the same. “How did this happen?” asked the man at the door. A simple question: a child’s question.

  “He asked,” said Jacqueline. “It was all I could give him.” The gunman nodded, and fell to his knees.

  VASSI’S TESTIMONY (FINAL PART)

  Chance has played a worryingly large part in my romance with Jacqueline Ess. Sometimes it’s seemed I’ve been subject to every tide that passes through the world, spun around by the merest flick of accident’s wrist. Other times I’ve had the suspicion that she was masterminding my life, as she was the lives of a hundred others, a thousand others, arranging every fluke meeting, choreographing my victories and my defeats, escorting me, blindly, toward this last encounter.

  I found her without knowing I’d found her, that was the irony of it. I’d traced her first to a house in Surrey, a house that had a year previous seen the murder of one Titus Pettifer, a billionaire shot by one of his own bodyguards. In the upstairs room, where the murder had taken place, all was serenity. If she had been there, they had removed any sign. But the house, now in virtual ruin, was prey to all manner of graffiti; and on the stained plaster wall of that room someone had scrawled a woman. She was obscenely over-endowed, her gaping sex blazing with what looked like lightning. And at her feet there was a creature of indeterminate species. Perhaps a crab, perhaps a dog, perhaps even a man. Whatever it was it had no power over itself. It sat in the light of her agonizing presence and counted itself amongst the fortunate. Looking at that wizened creature, with its eyes turned up to gaze on the burning Madonna, I knew the picture was a portrait of Jacqueline.

  I don’t know how long I stood looking at the graffiti, but I was interrupted by a man who looked to be in a worse condition than me. A beard that had never been trimmed or washed, a frame so wasted I wondered how he managed to stand upright, and a smell that would not have shamed a skunk.

  I never knew his name: but he was, he told me, the maker of the picture on the wall. It was easy to believe that. His desperation, his hunger, his confusion were all marks of a man who had seen Jacqueline.

  If I was rough in my interrogation of him I’m sure he forgave me. It was an unburdening for him, to tell everything he’d seen the day that Pettifer had been killed, and know that I believed it all. He told me his fellow bodyguard, the man who had fired the shots that had killed Pettifer, had committed suicide in prison.

  His life, he said, was meaningless. She had destroyed it. I gave him what reassurances I could; that she meant no harm, and that he needn’t fear that she would come for him. When I told him that, he cried, more, I think, out of loss than relief.

  Finally I asked him if he knew where Jacqueline was now. I’d left that question to the end, though it had been the most pressing inquiry, because I suppose I didn’t dare hope he’d know. But my God, he did. She had not left the house immediately after the shooting of Pettifer. She had sat down with this man, and talked to him quietly about his children, his tailor, his car. She’d asked him what his mother had been like, and he’d told her his mother had been a prostitute. Had she been happy? Jacqueline had asked. He’d said he didn’t know. Did she ever cry, she’d asked. He’d said he never saw her laugh or cry in his life. And she’d nodded, and thanked him.

  Later, before his suicide, the other gunman had told him Jacqueline had gone to Amsterdam. This he knew for a fact, from a man called Koos. And so the circle begins to close, yes?

  I was in Amsterdam seven weeks, without finding a single clue to her whereabouts, until yesterday evening. Seven weeks of celibacy, which is unusual for me. Listless with frustration I went down to the red-light district, to find a woman. They sit there you know, in the windows, like mannequins, beside pink-fringed lamps. Some have miniature dogs on their laps; some read. Most just stare out at the street, as if mesmerized.

  There were no faces there that interested me. They all seemed joyless, lightless, too much unlike her. Yet I couldn’t leave. I was like a fat boy in a sweet shop, too nauseated to buy, too gluttonous to go.

  Toward the middle of the night, I was spoken to out of the crowd by a young man who, on closer inspection, was not young at all, but heavily made up. He had no eyebrows, just pencil marks drawn onto his shiny skin. A cluster of gold earrings in his left ear, a half-eaten peach in his white-gloved hand, open sandals, lacquered toenails. He took hold of my sleeve, proprietorially.

  I must have sneered at his sickening appearance, but he didn’t seem at all upset by my contempt. You look like a man of discernment, he said. I looked nothing of the kind: you must be mistaken, I said. No, he replied, I am not mistaken. You are Oliver Vassi.

  My first thought, absurdly, was that he intended to kill me. I tried to pull away; his grip on my cuff was relentless.

  You want a woman, he said. Did I hesitate enough for him to know I meant yes, though I said no? I have a woman like no other, he went on, she’s a miracle. I know you’ll want to meet her in the flesh.
What made me know it was Jacqueline he was talking about?

  Perhaps the fact that he had known me from out of the crowd, as though she was up at a window somewhere, ordering her admirers to be brought to her like a diner ordering lobster from a tank. Perhaps too the way his eyes shone at me, meeting mine without fear because fear, like rapture, he felt only in the presence of one creature on God’s cruel earth. Could I not also see myself reflected in his perilous look? He knew Jacqueline, I had no doubt of it.

  He knew I was hooked, because once I hesitated he turned away from me with a mincing shrug, as if to say: you missed your chance. Where is she? I said, seizing his twig-thin arm. He cocked his head down the street and I followed him, suddenly as witless as an idiot, out of the throng. The road emptied as we walked; the red lights gave way to gloom, and then to darkness. If I asked him where we were going once I asked him a dozen times; he chose not to answer, until we reached a narrow door in a narrow house down some razor-thin street. We’re here, he announced, as though the hovel were the Palace of Versailles.

  Up two flights in the otherwise empty house there was a room with a black door. He pressed me to it. It was locked.

  “See,” he invited, “she’s inside.”

  “It’s locked,” I replied. My heart was fit to burst: she was near, for certain, I knew she was near.

  “See,” he said again, and pointed to a tiny hole in the panel of the door. I devoured the light through it, pushing my eye toward her through the tiny hole.

  The squalid interior was empty, except for a mattress and Jacqueline. She lay spread-eagled, her wrists and ankles bound to rough posts set in the bare floor at the four corners of the mattress.

  “Who did this?” I demanded, not taking my eye from her nakedness.

  “She asks,” he replied. “It is her desire. She asks.”

  She had heard my voice; she cranked up her head with some difficulty and stared directly at the door. When she looked at me all the hairs rose on my head, I swear it, in welcome, and swayed at her command.