by Tanith Lee
In the chair was a young man—a boy—he looked about twenty. He was focussing somewhere ahead, or not focussing, it was a sort of blind look, but somehow there was no doubt he could see, or that he could think. The eyes are frequently the big give-away when something has gone physically wrong. His eyes were clear, large, utterly contained, containing like two cool cisterns. I didn’t even see the colour of them, the construction and the content struck me so forcibly. Rather than an un-seeing look, it was a seeing-through—to something, somewhere else. He had fair hair, a lot of it, and shining. The skin of his face had the sort of marvellous pale texture most men shave off when they rip the first razorblade through their stubble and the second upper dermis goes with it forever. He was slim, and if he had been standing, would have been tall. He had a rug over his knees like a geriatric. But his legs were long. You see I’ve described him as analytically as I can, both his appearance and my reply to it. What it comes to is, he was beautiful. I fell in love with him, not in the carnal sense, but aesthetically, artistically. Dramatically. The fact that a woman was wheeling him about, helplessly, into a situation of women’s underwear, made him also pathetic in the terms of pathos. He preserved a remote dignity even through this. Or not really; he was simply far away, not here at all.
The woman herself was just a woman. Stoutish, fawnish. I couldn’t take her in. She was saying to Jill: “should have been ready. I don’t know why you don’t deliver any more like you used to.”
And Jill was saying: “I’m sorry, maa-dum, we don’t deliver things like this.”
It was the sort of utterly futile conversation, redolent of dull sullen frustration on both sides, so common at shop counters everywhere. I wondered if Jill had noticed the young man, but she didn’t seem to have done. She usually reacted swiftly to anything youngish and male and platitudinously in trousers, but presumably only when trousers included locomotive limbs inside them.
“Well, I can’t stop,” said the woman. She had a vague indeterminate Ship Bay accent, flat as the sands. “I really thought it would be ready by now.”
“I’m sorry, maa-dum.”
“I can’t keep coming in. I haven’t the time.”
Jill stood and looked at her.
I felt blood swarm through my heart and head, which meant I was about to enter the arena, cease my purely observational role.
“Perhaps we could take the lady’s name and phone number,” I said, walking over to the counter. “We could call her when her purchase arrives.”
Jill glowered at me. This offer was a last resort, generally employed to placate only when a customer produced a carving knife.
I found a paper bag and a pen and waited. When the woman didn’t speak, I looked up. I was in first gear, unbalanced, and working hard to disguise it. So I still didn’t see her, just a shape where her face was, the shadowy gleam of metal extending away from her hands, the more shattering gleam of his gilded bronze hair. (Did she wash it for him? Maybe he had simply broken his ankle or his knee. Maybe he was no longer there.)
I strove in vain towards the muddy aura of the woman. And she wouldn’t meet me.
“If you’d just let me have your name,” I said brightly, trying to enunciate like Olivier, which I do at my most desperate.
“There’s no phone,” she said. She could have been detailing a universal human condition.
“Well... “ I was offhand “...your address. We could probably drop you a card or something.”
Jill made a noise, but couldn’t summon the energy to tell us such a thing was never done. (Yes, he was still there. Perfectly still; perfect, still, a glimpse of long fingers lying on the rug.)
“Besmouth,” said the woman, grudging me.
It was a silly name. It sounded like an antacid stomach preparation. What was he called, then? Billy Besmouth? Bonny Billy Besmouth, born broken, bundled baby-like, bumped bodily by brassieres—
“I’m sorry?” She’d told me the address and I’d missed it. No I hadn’t, I’d written it down.
“19, Sea View Terrace, The Rise.”
“Oh yes. Just checking. Thank you.”
The woman seemed to guess suddenly it was all a charade. She eased the brake off the chair and wheeled it abruptly away from us.
“What did you do that for?” said Jill. “We don’t send cards. What d’you think we aar?”
I refrained from telling her, I asked instead what the woman had ordered. Jill showed me the book, it was one of a batlike collection of nylon-fur dressing gowns, in cherry red.
At four-thirty, ten women and a male frillies-freak came in. By five-forty, when I left the store, I should have forgotten about Bonny Billy Besmouth, the wheelchair, the vellum skin, the eyes.
That evening I walked along the sands. It was autumn, getting chilly, but the afterglow lingered, and the sky above the town was made of green porcelain. The sea came in, scalloped, darkening, and streaked by the neons off the pier, till whooping untrustworthy voices along the shore drove me back to the promenade. When I was a kid, you could have strolled safely all night by the water. Or does it only seem that way? Once, when I was eight, I walked straight into the sea, and had to be dragged out, screaming at the scald of salt in my sinuses. I never managed to swim. It was as if I expected to know how without ever learning, as a fish does, and when I failed, gave up in despair.
You could see The Rise from the promenade, a humped back flung up from the south side of the bay, with its terraced streets clinging on to it. He was up there somewhere. Not somewhere: 19, Sea View. Banal. I could walk it in half an hour. I went home and ate banal sausages, and watched banal TV.
On Saturday a box of furry bat-gowns came in, and one of them was cherry red.
“Look at this,” I said to Jill.
She looked, as if into an open grave.
“Yes. Orrful.”
“Don’t you remember?”
Jill didn’t remember.
Angela, who ran the department, was hung over from the night before, and was, besides, waiting for her extramarital relationship to call her. I showed her the dressing gown and she winced.
“If she’s not on the phone, she’s had it.”
“I could drop it in to her,” I lied ably. “I’m going to meet someone up on The Rise, at the pub. It isn’t any trouble to me, and she has a crippled son.”
“Poor cow,” said Angela. She was touched by pity. Angela always struck me as a kind of Chaucerian character—fun-loving, warm-hearted, raucously glamorous. She was, besides, making almost as much a mess of her life as I was of mine, with a head start on me of about ten years.
She organised everything, and the department did me the great favour of allowing me to became its errand-person. I suppose if the goods had been wild-silk erotica I might not have been allowed to take them from the building at all. But who was going to steal a bat-gown?
“You aar stew-pid,” said Jill, “You should never volunteer to do anything like that. They’ll have you at it all the time now.”
At half past six, for Saturday was the store’s late closing, I took the carrier and went out into the night, with my heart beating in slow hard concussions. I didn’t know why, or properly what I was doing. The air smelled alcoholically of sea and frost.
I got on the yellow bus that went through The Rise.
I left the bus near the pub, whose broad lights followed me away down the slanting street. I imagined varieties of normal people in it, drinking gins and beer and low-calorie cola. Behind the windows of the houses, I imagined dinners, TV, arguments. It had started to rain. What was I doing here? What did I anticipate? (He opened the door, leaning on a crutch, last summer’s tennis racket tucked predictably under the other arm. I stood beside his chair, brushing the incense smoke from him, in a long queue at Lourdes.) I thought about his unspeaking far-awayness. Maybe he wasn’t crippled, but autistic. I could have been wrong about those strange containing eyes. Anyway, she’d just look at me, grab the bag, shut the door. She had paid for t
he garment months ago, when she ordered it. I just had to give her the goods, collect her receipt. Afterwards, I’d go home, or at least to the place where I lived. I wouldn’t even see him. And then what? Nothing.
Sea View curved right around the bottom of The Rise. Behind its railing, the cliff lurched forward into the night and tumbled on the sea. Number 19 was the farthest house down, the last in the terrace. An odd curly little alley ran off to the side of it, leading along the downslope of the cliff and out of sight, probably to the beach. The sound of the tide, coupled with the rain, was savage, close and immensely wet.
I pushed through the gate and walked up the short path. A dim illumination came from the glass panels of the door. There was no bell, just a knocker. I knocked, and waited like the traveller in the poem. Like him, it didn’t seem I was going to get an answer. An even more wretched end to my escapade than I had foreseen. I hadn’t considered the possibility of absence. Somehow I’d got the notion Mrs. Besmouth-Antacid seldom went out. It must be difficult, with him the way he was, whichever way that happened to be. So, why did I want to get caught up in it?
A minute more, and I turned with a feeling of letdown and relief. I was halfway along the path when the front door opened.
“Hi you,” she said.
At this uninviting salute, I looked back. I didn’t recognise her, because I hadn’t properly been able to see her on the previous occasion. A fizz of fawn hair, outlined by the inner light, stood round her head like a martyr’s crown. She was clad in a fiery apron.
“Mrs. Besmouth?” I went towards her, extending the carrier bag like meat offered to a wild dog.
“Besmouth, that’s right. What is it?” She didn’t know me at all.
I said the name of the store, a password, but she only blinked.
“You came in about your dressing gown, but it hadn’t arrived. It came today. I’ve got it here.”
She looked at the bag.
“All right,” she said. “What’s the delivery charge?”
“No charge. I just thought I’d drop it in to you.”
She went on looking at the bag. The rain went on falling.
“You live round here?” she demanded.
“No. The other end of the bay, actually.”
“Long way for you to come,” she said accusingly.
“Well... I had to come up to The Rise tonight. And it seemed a shame, the way you came in and just missed the delivery. Here, do take it, or the rain may get in the bag.”
She extended her hand and took the carrier.
“It was kind of you,” she said. Her voice was full of dislike because I’d forced her into a show of gratitude. “People don’t usually bother nowadays.”
“No, I know. But you said you hadn’t got time to keep coming back, and I could see that, with—with your son...”
“Son,” she interrupted. “So you know he’s my son, do you?”
I felt hot with embarrassed fear.
“Well, whoever—”
“Haven’t you got an umbrella?” she said.
“Er— no—”
“You’re soaked,” she said. I smiled foolishly, and her dislike reached its climax. “You’d better come in a minute.”
“Oh no, really that isn’t—”
She stood aside in the doorway, and I slunk past her into the hall. The door banged to.
I experienced instant claustrophobia and a yearning to run, but it was too late now. The glow was murky, there was a faintly musty smell, not stale exactly, more like the odour of a long closed box.
“This way.”
We went by the stairs and a shut door, into a small back room, which in turn opened on a kitchen. There was a smokeless-coal fire burning in an old brown fireplace. The curtains were drawn, even at the kitchen windows, which I could see through the doorway. A clock ticked, setting the scene as inexorably as in a radio play. It reminded me of my grandmother’s house years before, except that in my grandmother’s house you couldn’t hear the sea. And then it came to me that I couldn’t pick it up here, either. Maybe some freak meander of the cliff blocked off the sound, as it failed to in the street.
I’d been looking for the wheelchair and, not seeing it, had relaxed into an awful scared boredom. Then I registered the high-backed dark red chair, set facing the fire. I couldn’t see him, and he was totally silent, yet I knew at once the chair was full of him. A type of electric charge went off under my heart. I felt quite horrible, as if I’d screamed with laughter at a funeral.
“Take your coat off,” said Mrs. Besmouth. I protested feebly, trying not to gaze at the red chair. But she was used to managing those who could not help themselves, and she pulled the garment from me. “Sit down by the fire. I’m making a pot of tea.”
I wondered why she was doing it, including me, offering her hospitality. She didn’t want to, at least, I didn’t think she did. Maybe she was lonely. There appeared to be no Mr. Besmouth. Those unmistakable spoors of the suburban male were everywhere absent.
To sit on the settee by the fire, I had to go round the chair. As I did so, he came into view. He was just as I recalled, even his position was unaltered. His hands rested loosely and beautifully on his knees. He watched the fire, or something beyond the fire. He was dressed neatly, as he had been in the shop. I wondered if she dressed him in these universal faded jeans, the dark pullover. Nondescript. The fire streamed down his hair and beaded the ends of his lashes.
“Hallo,” I said. I wanted to touch his shoulder quietly, but did not dare.
Immediately I spoke, she called from her kitchen: “It’s no good talking to him. Just leave him be, he’ll be all right.”
Admonished and intimidated, I sat down. The heavy anger was slow in coming. Whatever was wrong with him, this couldn’t be the answer. My back to the kitchen, my feet still in their plastic boots which let water, I sat and looked at him.
I hadn’t made a mistake. He really was amazing. How could she have mothered anything like this? The looks must have been on the father’s side. And where had the illness come from? And what was it? Could I ask her, in front of him?
He was so far away, not here in this room at all. But where was he? He didn’t look—oh God what word would do? —deficient. Leonardo da Vinci, staring through the face of one of his own half-finished, exquisite, lunar madonnas, staring through at some truth he was still seeking.... that was the look. Not vacant. Not.... missing—
She came through with her pot of tea, the cups and sugar and milk.
“This is very kind of you,” I said.
She grunted. She poured the tea in a cup and gave it to me. She had put sugar in, without asking me, and I don’t take sugar. The tea became a strange, alien, sickly brew, drunk for ritual. She poured tea into a mug, sugared it, and took it to the chair. I watched, breathing through my mouth. What would happen?
She took up his hand briskly, and introduced the mug into it. I saw his long fingers grip the handle. His face did not change. With a remote gliding gesture, he brought the mug to his lips. He drank. We both, she and I, looked on, as if at the first man, drinking.
“That’s right,” she said.
She fetched her own cup and sat on the settee beside me. I didn’t like to be so close to her, and yet, we were now placed together, like an audience, before the profile of the red chair, and the young man.
I wanted to question her, ask a hundred things. His name, his age. If we could get him to speak. If he was receiving any treatment, and for what, exactly. How I wanted to know that. It burned in me, my heart hammered, I was braised in racing waves of adrenalin.
But I asked her nothing like that.
You could not ask her these things, or I couldn’t. And he was there, perhaps understanding, the ultimate constraint.
“It’s very cosy here,” I said. She grunted. “But I keep wondering why you can’t hear the sea. Surely—”
“Yes,” she said, “I don’t get much time to go into the town centre. What with one thing an
d another.”
That came over as weird. She belonged to the category of person who would do just that—skip an idea that had no interest for her and pass straight on to something that did. And yet, what was it? She’d been a fraction too fast. But I was well out of my depth, and had been from the start.
“Surely,” I said, “couldn’t the council provide some sort of assistance—a home-help—”
“Don’t want anything like that.”
“But you’d be entitled—”
“I’m entitled to my peace and quiet.”
“Well, yes—”
“Daniel” she said sharply, “drink your tea. Drink it. It’ll get cold.”
I jumped internally again, and again violently. She’d said his name. Not alliterative after all. Daniel...! She’d also demonstrated he could hear, and respond to a direct order, for he was raising the mug again, drinking again.
“Now,” she said to me, “if you’ve finished your tea, I’ll have to ask you to go. I’ve his bath to see to, you understand.”
I sat petrified, blurting some sort of apology. My brief brush with the bizarre was over and done. I tried not to visualise, irresistibly, his slim, pale, probably flawless male body, naked in water. He would be utterly helpless, passive, and it frightened me.
I got up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, it was good of you to bring the dressing gown.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes, and had not been able to do so at any time.
I wanted at least to say his name, before I went away. But I couldn’t get it to my lips, my tongue wouldn’t form it.
I was out of the room, in my coat, the door was opening. The rain had stopped. There wasn’t even an excuse to linger. I stepped on to the path.
“Oh, well. Goodbye, Mrs. Besmouth.”