Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  When she came to, she felt both abject and on the edge of shame. She thought at first she had urinated in her sleep. That must be why she had an uncomfortable sensation of warmth between her legs. Oddly, her legs were wide-stretched. She realized she must be lying on her face, which was a way she never slept.

  “Agnes?” Whose voice was this? She knew she ought to recognize it, but could not place it. Did it belong to someone in her long-ago past, or might it come from the future?

  “Agnes?”

  “Pinto.” As she spoke his name, the world around her solidified. She grasped that she was clinging to his huge back; or rather that he had been carrying her, for her arms were flung far forward over his chest. Her head lay in the crook of his neck. She could feel his hair against her cheek, close-cropped but with a nap like velvet, and was disturbed by this intimate proximity.

  “Let me go,” she told him sharply. He released her and she slid down his back gracelessly because her legs had gone numb. The ground was cold and hard. A slip of moon emerged from a grey tatter of cloud. They were in the forest, she saw. She had a moment of blessed ignorance before the agonizing remembrance returned.

  “I had to get you away, Agnes.”

  She was frozen in shock, not even half-hearing him. One picture alone filled her brain, from which she winced away. Campbell had been decapitated. She could not understand why her fingers hurt so much; then she looked down and saw it was because she was clawing at the earth into which the frost had already begun its work.

  “I had to get you away,” he repeated. “If we got caught, we would lose our scholarships. We’re not like the others, Agnes. We can’t afford to take that risk . . .”

  “Stop it!” she screamed. She tried to stand but her legs were still beset by pins and needles. So instead she knelt and clutched at his leg.

  “Tell me. Is it true? Did it really happen? Is Campbell . . .?”

  He bent down and sat awkwardly on his haunches. He tried to cup her face with his hands. She shook him off.

  “Tell me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It did happen. He must have run into a wire stretched across the road. God, Agnes. Don’t think about it now. It’s too horrible to think of now. We have to get you back safely. Don’t you see?”

  “No. No. No.” She was rocking back and forth on the ground, and biting on her own hand. Pinto took the hand from her mouth and held it between his.

  “Hush, Agnes. Hush. There is nothing we can do for him now. Nothing.”

  “It’s my fault,” she whispered hoarsely. “Because when I first saw him I thought of the satyr mourning the dead nymph. I saw his face in a painting about death. And now he’s dead.”

  She was aware how unlike herself she sounded; her voice was shriller and tinny, like a piece of clockwork that has been too tightly wound.

  “I showed him the picture once.”

  “Stop now, Agnes, You have to pull yourself together.”

  She shook her head. How heavy it felt. His head lay beside the road in its helmet. Was it still there?

  “He told me,” she began to laugh, but the sound was cracked and forced. “He told me he thought he looked more like the dog. ‘What’s the dog’s name?’ he asked.

  “Laelaps, I told him. He thought that was funny. He kept saying the name over and over. And then . . .” She broke off. “I love him. I loved him.”

  “I know,” Pinto replied. “I know that, Agnes.”

  She could bear it no longer. The sound that came out of her mouth was curdled; a noise neither human nor animal. All too soon it became a howl she could not control.

  TWELVE

  The Wire

  BACK AT THE ARK, SHE sat shaking at the kitchen table. Her throat was raw from sobbing.

  “I need a drink,” she told Pinto. “I mean spirits, whisky or gin.” She had in fact tasted whisky only once and gin never. But wasn’t whisky what characters in novels and films downed in copious quantities to dull their pain; to get “plastered”? That was exactly what she wanted, to plaster the picture over thickly so that she did not see the decapitation happening again and again.

  “Why?” she kept asking. “Why him? He was so beautiful. You must have some alcohol in the house, Pinto. Don’t you? Oh, please.”

  “Alcohol won’t help, Agnes. Believe me. You don’t want to go there.”

  He looked so sorrowful. His eyes welled up as he hovered over her. She realized then how selfish she was being: that Pinto too had lost a beloved friend. And then there was Kit. Agnes flashed back to Kit running, her mouth stuck open in a blare like a siren’s, her hair streaming like his blood in the night. A picture came, fading even as she shrank from it, of Kit reaching the bike and then flinging herself on the earth beside Campbell’s head.

  No, she thought. I did not see that. I did not see her kiss his lips and cradle his severed head in her arms. I am making this up. This is too ghoulish. I am going mad. How can I bear the loss of him? It should have been me. Her mind slips sideways then. She sees freshly guillotined heads tumbling one after another into waiting baskets. Each head is perfect, noble, the hair delicately perfumed. Each one leaves behind a body with a bright necklace of blood. And above that necklace, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  She felt sick. She had no ballast because her heart and substance had been scooped out. What was the point of anything? If life was this meaningless and random, what was the point of going on at all?

  “Why, Pinto?” She was crying again, helpless to stop. “Why should we even bother to make an effort?”

  His large head swayed like a tolling bell. “Do you mean the Ark’s work?”

  “Everything.” It was difficult for her to speak, the tears were coming so thickly.

  “Oh, Agnes.” He sighed and sat in the creaking wooden chair beside her. Tentatively, he patted her balled hand with its clutched wad of tissue. “It was a ghastly thing to happen.” He stopped a moment and frowned. “It’s fate,” he continued. “It’s rotten what life throws at some of us. But it’s inscrutable.”

  She sees Fate then crouching in the shadowy slot between the wall and the stove. At first it is about the size of a toad, a slimy black blotch. But even as she looks, it elongates, and rears up cobra-like. She yelps, puts up her hand to fend it off.

  “Agnes, dear, what is it?” He put his arms about her shoulders, just barely touching her. His solicitous tone helped banish the frightful vision.

  “I thought I saw . . . I’m sorry.” She did not deserve his patient kindness. Was it just her own self-absorption she saw squatting there, ugly and voracious?

  “What about the others?” she asked in a surge of panic. “What do you think happened to Zebra and Minnie, and Perdita and Pablo?”

  “I’m sure they’re all right, Agnes. Someone would have called the police. We’ll all need to support each other through this. And that means being strong. We both need to sleep, Agnes. We need to be calm and resolute and clear-minded to get through this. And sleep’s the foundation for all that. I’m not trying to be patronizing,” he added.

  She nodded. Yes. How concerned and yet rational he was. Like a good parent.

  He insisted she sleep in his bed, assuring her he would be fine on the floor wrapped in his duvet. She was grateful. She did not think she could bear to go into the little guest bedroom where Campbell had first made love to her. Pinto brought her a herbal tranquillizer and a glass of water. She swallowed the little brown tablet dutifully, lay down without undressing and pulled up the covers. It was only then she became aware of the various parts of her body that hurt. In her shoulder and her right hip, where the stun gun had hit her, there was a stinging sensation as if her skin had been scored with nettles. The bruising around her ribcage made a dullish band of pain whenever she took a breath. Not that it mattered, of course. She would willingly hurt a thousand times more if only it would bring him back to life.

  Pinto breathed deeply and deliberately, cocooned in his duvet. He was so close to the
bed she could reach out and clutch his hand for comfort if she wished. By the rhythm, she guessed he was meditating, using some long-practised discipline to subdue the pain. She tried to make her breathing consonant with his.

  As the little pill began to work its natural soporific in her bloodstream, the rhythmic sound of his breath transformed into something innocent and sustaining, like a rocking cradle guided by a loving hand. Despite all that had happened, she slept free of soiled and clotted dreams.

  The instant she woke, she remembered. The pain was at first a dagger point in her brain; then a terrible numbness came. She pinched the flesh on the back of her left hand hard and registered little or no sensation. Nothing made any sense. It was an accident. Pinto said. It was fate. She didn’t care about that. All that mattered was that Campbell was dead. And that shouldn’t be, and it hurt and it hurt.

  She tried to sit up but dizziness and nausea pulled her back down. She tried again, more slowly this time, and managed to sit more or less erect with her back against the wall. From this perspective, she could see that Pinto had gone, his duvet folded neatly in four on the room’s only chair. As she manoeuvered her legs over the edge of the bed and put her feet as solidly on the floor as she could, her eye was caught by the framed photograph on Pinto’s bedside table. A lovely red dog smiled at the camera. This visible animal joy helped to steady her.

  In the bathroom she splashed water on her face, avoiding her reflection in the mirror, principally because she did not want to see how her head sat seamlessly atop her neck. Campbell’s two severed parts were likely laid out now in a morgue. Surely they would have kept him together and not stored his head somewhere apart from his body? This ghoulish notion made her sway violently and she had to clutch the sides of the sink.

  She had to grip hard too on the worn banister as she made her way gingerly downstairs. It occurred to her she had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, which might explain some of her vertigo and weakness. But the idea of food was abominable, and besides, she did not want to impose any longer on Pinto, who had been so tolerant of her self-indulgent show of grief. She must pull herself together and get back to the dorm. There she could shut the door of her room and cry as freely as she needed to.

  Afterwards, she would find out how the others were. Had everyone got home all right? She was terrified they might have ended up in jail. And what if they saw her and Pinto as cowardly defectors?

  She heard a murmur of voices from the living room and approached quietly. How hushed the house was, as though it had turned into a funeral parlour while they slept. Her steps were so slow; she felt weighed down and yet truncated somehow, as if she were missing some vital body part.

  What she saw when she reached the living room door overturned her resolution to leave immediately. Seated on the couch, his knees drawn up to his chin, was a man she knew rationally must be Zebra. But this person looked about thirty years older, his face livid and drawn, almost haggard. Swathes of bandage wound around the top of his skull were coming loose and lengths of white gauze spilled down his neck and over his collarbone. His striped shirt gaped open, exposing a pale thin chest, where each rib pressed a bluish stain upon the skin.

  She was reminded of the paintings she had seen of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead, his funeral cerements still clinging to his face and body. She’d always suspected Lazarus would have preferred to remain dead and have the miracle undone. Would he not always have carried a taint of the grave and an indelible memory of the encroaching worms?

  She thought then of Campbell’s perfect body as it would be worked upon, once laid deep in dank earth, and she shuddered, then reprimanded herself. She must absolutely never think of his physical decay, only concentrate on his enduring flawless spirit.

  She willed herself to enter the living room. As she came closer, she saw Zebra’s lips were moving. He was speaking so quietly that Pinto, who occupied the armchair next to him, was bent almost double straining to hear.

  “Agnes,” Pinto said softly. Was there a hint of relief in his voice?

  Zebra shifted abruptly, flinging out his arms and legs; then he fell back helplessly against the cushions.

  “Sorry,” he said to her. “Haven’t slept.” He rubbed at his eyelids with his index fingers, making them look redder and sorer.

  Poor Zebra. She was reluctant to press him about his night’s trials; whether he was beaten by the guards while she and Pinto were stumbling through the woods; or had been jailed.

  “Are you badly hurt?” she asked, touching her own head at the spot where his was bandaged.

  Zebra looked at her blankly. “Me? No. I got some stitches. At the hospital . . .” He trailed off and looked away again.

  “Come and sit down, Agnes,” Pinto urged her. He patted the arm of the loveseat with its shrieking orange and yellow sunbursts.

  She hesitated. On one hand, she simply wanted to flee. On the other, she intuited there was some peculiar geometry of grief to be satisfied here, as if they must all three at this particular time be together in the same room, yet keep a prescribed distance from each other. She grasped that although they were all staggering under a common loss, they each inhabited a distinct grief. Zebra, it struck her, had known Campbell many years longer than either she or Pinto.

  “I had to call Leonore, his mother,” Zebra told them. “I couldn’t let her hear it from the police.”

  He lapsed into a silence, which boomed throughout the room.

  Agnes was shaken as she pictured this unknown woman who had given birth to Campbell. To lose such a son: what could it be but unendurable? She would feel driven to rend her own flesh, to rip herself open where she had carried him. Why does she have such thoughts?

  “She didn’t say a word,” Zebra said, staring straight ahead. “I could hear her breath on the phone getting shorter and raw somehow. She must have put the phone down because in a moment I heard her screaming and screaming in the background. Her husband picked up the phone. He yelled at me. Leonore was still screaming in the background. I told him everything I hadn’t told her. I only told her he’d been killed on his bike. He wants to keep this out of the papers. He’s coming. Did I say that? Campbell’s step-father, Clement Semple, is coming to claim the body. He said he’ll look after everything.” Zebra made a mirthless little sound Agnes wished she had not heard. “But he can’t, can he?” he said. “He can’t fix anything, can he? Can he? Can he?”

  She was disconcerted when Zebra began to pummel at his upper thighs, as if experimenting with how much he could hurt himself.

  “Stop it, Zebra!” She reached out to restrain him.

  Pinto made a sign to deter her.

  “Zeke,” Pinto said. “Take it easy on yourself. That won’t help.”

  “Fuck off, Pinto. At least I’m feeling it. I haven’t removed myself to some higher fucking plane.”

  Her breath was a hot, gritty substance in her throat as she strained for words to neutralize the malign atmosphere that now tainted the room. Then something so inconceivable happened, she was left incapable of speech or clear thought. Pinto drew himself up erect, his face rigid and almost hideous, stripped as it was of his normally benign expression. He glared at Zeke, raised his right hand, turned it so that his palm faced the wall, then brought it down axe-hard on the particleboard table in front of his chair.

  Under the force of the blow, the table top snapped in half. Pinto kicked the two pieces against the wall as he got up, his massive chest heaving. He stared down at Zeke, who regarded him open-mouthed.

  “Is that what you think, Zeke? You really believe I don’t feel it?”

  Agnes felt sick again. Was this enraged person really Pinto? Her hands were shaking. She had no idea what to say to either man. Pinto pushed past her, almost knocking her over. She felt weak, and thoroughly disoriented, as if the known world were cracking open everywhere, spilling out horrors. She looked at Zebra, who was shaking his head so slowly back and forth it verged on a pantomime gesture: “I never saw h
im like that before. Never. I think it’s all too much to take in, you know? I’m going to go and lie down. You don’t mind, do you, Agnes?”

  He did not wait for her answer but stumbled from the room, swaying from side to side like a drunk. She listened as he made his way laboriously up the stairs in case he fell. It was a meagre but welcome relief when she heard him open his bedroom door, go in and shut it behind him.

  She sat calming herself enough for the walk back to the dorm. She would do this purely mechanically, one step and then another and another. She would try not to think or to remember anything too vividly. That would be dangerous. She could do these things once she too had closed herself in, just as Pinto and Zebra had done.

  She was about to leave, but instead took the stairs at a determined lope to find Pinto. She stood, cowed again, in silence outside his door.

  Just as she raised her hand to knock, she heard the sound she imagined a wounded, ravenous animal might make in a desperate search for food, half-snuffling, half-sobbing. She had never heard anything like it before. She went back downstairs and left the house as quietly as she could, and all the way back to the dorm it was the strange noise coming from Pinto’s room that filled her head. By some perverse magic, this inarticulate voicing of his pain became the lifeline to which she held fast as she made her way through the horrific, shard-like glare, as sun speared snow on this unreal morning. She clutched at that remembered ragged rope of sound, and it kept her mechanical steps steady so that her cutting thoughts did not bring her to her knees in the public street.

  Poor Pinto, poor Pinto. She pictured him crawling on the floor, pressing his broad face into the wood, making those awful noises. She too would have to embrace the pain soon enough once she was alone and private. She knew its demands would be wolfish and implacable.

  Although many on campus knew about the strung wire and how Campbell had died, the details never reached the press. The local paper devoted barely a square centimetre to what it described as a fatal motorcycle accident involving a university student. There was no mention of the wire, the protest or the animal laboratory, and certainly not of the decapitation.