by Stella Duffy
He is the avant guard. He has saved me.
The child begins to whimper and she holds it to her breast and kisses the blood red lips of the other and feeds the child and drinks from the man and is grateful, very grateful, not to have to choose ever again.
Ladies’ Fingers
SHE POINTS AT me again. The finger is swollen at both joints. She lies in the bed, cannot move or speak. Points. Just her left hand, heavy with an unfulfilled engagement ring. Points from me to the bed. Smooth bed, cool bed, pillow-decked and silent. This room used to be a whole, now it is the lesser sum of many parts. I cross the room, twelve halting steps, drawn and unwilling, I pull back the fine sheet, lift and lay her out. Each limb placed beside the others, all of them in the correct place, still joined, but as useless as if I had severed them singly in the night. As if I would sever them singly in the night.
I take her to the toilet, she shits, pisses, farts. I wipe her like a baby but nothing like a baby she is old and her skin smells. Smells of age and decay. Particular smells. I think some part of her likes these smells. She would call them human scents, real, truthful. If she could speak beyond a croak for air. She points to the window. I gladly let in cool night, take it inside me in thick sips, welcome the smell of wet vegetation from the unloved garden. And immediately she points again. More insistent this time, bony finger grown thinner and longer. I understand (because I am very understanding) and close the window, close the heavy curtain, worn and dusty velvet, fully lined, from before the war. She is calm again, holds the pointing finger at her side, inadequate lungs shiver her thin frame beneath the sheets, she slips into a place near sleep. I sit and wait. Watching for the hand to raise, the finger to point from me to whatever she wants. Age and stupidity and too much fun and three strokes have done this. Reducing her to an old woman with spittle at the corner of her mouth and a nicotine-stained finger.
I dip her into the bath, testing the water first, it is warm and swirls around her, flowing into the crevices left by wrinkled years. The skin folds mark out lines a skilled surgeon might cut along. If she would let them in, let them look at her, let them try. She will not let them in. She believes in time taking its true course. She believes in suffering and in pain. Hers and mine. Her dry dying skin flakes off into the water, she lies in her water, pisses into it, cannot stop herself, does not try. Lies there in her own dead cells and piss. I soap her body, hold her just firm enough, just gentle enough. I am surprisingly considerate for one so angry. Her body teaches me its needs.
In the middle of the night I wake to her pointing. To the finger, ring grown tight around the base, forcing her flesh out and angry dark red against the old gold, rolling in the bed in frustration and impotent fury at my rest. The finger is angry with me. I was meant to be watching. This scene is all for me. I have slept in the old cane chair again and stand, gently sliding muscles against tendon and bone. I stretch my limbs, almost unconscious of her seething jealousy at my abundant mobility. Almost. But as she calms her rage enough to watch me through watery eyes, I choose to stretch just that little more, push my bones against the limits of their skin barriers, to scratch my arse with just that slightly louder sigh of satisfaction. It is better while she sleeps. Easier to study the failing body, easier to sneak in just a little night air. She tries a croaking of saliva in the back of her throat, but in her anger becomes confused and grows silent again while she tries to remember whether to inhale or swallow what is in her decaying mouth. I want her to shut up. I want to shut her up. I want to shut her in. Leave this tight room, walk out into the world. Return to the street with yellow lamplight and cold wind and the possibility of rain to wash every piece of her out of my head.
Instead I stand. Stretch. Walk. My movements are as deliberate as her pointing finger. She points at the book. I pick it up, sit closer to the burning light, turn the dry page. In fifty six minutes she is asleep again and my throat is hoarse. I pick up her water glass, wipe her dark lipstick stain from the edge and sip. The water is warm and smells of her kiss, I gag but force it down. I return to my chair and the list of remembrances. A beach at sunset. A full fridge, every item neatly labelled. Running to catch a bus. Lying awake in a daylight bed and feeling the charge of could-be desire as it lies beside me. Freesias stolen from a neighbour’s garden. Cold toast, dry, crisp. A burning hot shower raining down my back, counting each knuckled vertebra as it falls, quickly turning the tap to cold just for the effect it has on my nipples. I think of my sex then and my hand steals to me. From outside my clothes I stroke myself, against the line of this skirt, these stockings, against the grain I stroke myself, come close to me again, my eyelids begin their wanting flutter and I half focus on the bed. She is watching. I start up, a five year old caught stealing sweets, and run to slap her face. She still smiles, straining thin muscles to curve her desiccated lips into a half moon, rictus smile with the pointing finger curling towards me, sniffs appreciatively and then gaping grins once more. I hit her again. My slapping hand is as much my own as her pointing finger, as ill controlled. She tries to laugh but it comes out in a thin gurgle, catching on her windpipe and throttling her. Laughter choking her laugh.
I should sit her up, help her to breathe, she points at me, she is not laughing now, she is fighting for her breath, fighting me for her breath. Still pointing, the ring heavy, dragging her hand down to the counterpane, the stains dark, the nail overgrown, twisted and yellowing. Her lips are blue. There is no other blue in this room. How interesting I should note the lack of blue. Then. Now. She points again, at the window, the night, the cool wet air, points from me to herself. Again. Bloody pointing finger. I understand, how could I not? But I do not answer. I stand above her wriggling body, watching the spasms jolt around her tired organs. This will not do her any good, she will bruise inside, a brittle egg carton holding cracked goods. There there little heart, hush sweet liver, come now my darling kidney. And then, quite suddenly, the only thing moving is the finger on the end of her hand. She gasps. It is the widest she has opened her mouth in three months. I see her rotting molars. Her involuntary diaphragm snaps itself back again and again, forcing her gaping mouth to suck and gasp, she flares her nostrils, straining to drag in the air she has insisted I shut out. It is no good. The blue stretches from lips to face to eyes, heavenly blue now, and empty.
I breath then myself. I had not known I was holding my breath, waiting, anticipating. With twelve slow steps I return to my chair. Sit, rest, sleep. Easily and full. This is the first good night’s sleep I have had in many months. I am so tired.
It is weeks over. The earth starts to settle over her clean and catalogued body. The morning after I wrenched the curtains from their poles and now I keep the windows open to let in the night until the chill is damp and heavy in the centre of the room. After I had cleaned her, labelled her insides, they took her away in a narrow coffin, lined like the curtains with thin red silk. They dug a deep hole, laid her down and smothered the body, the only gasping against black loam. It was all done. She was all done.
Now, even her finger is still. I know. I kept it. Sitting in the bottom of my carryall. Ring still heavy on the finger, stains still yellow. In the quiet of my wide-windowed night I open the box and take out the pointing finger. I point at things in the room and laugh. It is not so fierce. It is just a finger. Pointing at just a liver. Just a kidney. Just a heart. Just the finger of my lover. The woman I adored. She who I loved and caressed and cared for and hated and allowed to die. The woman who surrendered to her own inner decay. She who schooled me in the individuality of body parts. Who taught me to see a hundred shining units in one composite flesh. I hold her pointing finger. And in a soft box of palest cotton wool the nail still grows, yellow, curled. It points to my heart. And I wait in the night, sit patient in my chair, until the moment it pierces me. Soon.
Un bon repas doit commencer par la faim …
THE JOURNEY FROM London to Paris is easy. Too easy. I need more time, to think, prepare, get ready. Security, su
pposed to be so important now, these days, ways, places, is lax to the point of ease. I love it, welcome the apparent ease. I believe in fate, in those big red buses lined up to knock us over, in your number being up, the calling in of one’s very own pleasure boat. I do not believe that taking off our shoes at airports will save us. I show my ticket and my passport, walk through to the train, and get off at the Gare du Nord. Too easy. Too fast.
Less than three hours after leaving London I walk straight into a picket line. It seems the French staff are less fond of the lax security than I. Or perhaps they just don’t like the non-essential immigrants they say Eurostar is employing. I accept the badly-copied leaflet thrust into my hand and put it in my pocket. Bienvenue en France.
I can’t face the metro. Not yet, this early, it is not yet mid-morning. In real life I would choose to be asleep, safe in bed – not always achieved, but it would be my choice. I like my metro in the afternoon and evening, a warm ride that promises a drink at the other end, a meal maybe, lights. In the morning it is too full of workers and students, those interminable French students, segueing from lycee to university with no change of clothes between. Ten years of the same manners, same behaviour day in day out, week after week of congregating in loud groups on footpaths where they smoke and laugh, and then suddenly they’re in the world and somehow those ugly duck student girls are born again as impossibly elegant Parisiennes, fine and tidy and so very boring in their classic outfits. French and Italian women, groomed to identical perfection and not an original outfit among them. So much more interesting naked. Round the picket line, out into the street. Road works, illegal taxi drivers offering their insane prices to American tourists just in from London (theatre), Paris (art), Rome (Pope). The Grand Tour as dictated by the History Channel.
I cross the street in front of the station, head down, heading toward the river. There is something about traversing a map from north to south that feels like going downhill, even without the gentle slope from here to the water. Where I’m headed it certainly feels like going downhill. I don’t want to look at this city, not now. I see gutters running with water, Paris prides itself on clean streets, on washing every morning, a whore’s lick of running cold to sluice out the detritus. Two young women with their hands held out, sit at the edge of businessmen’s feet, rattling coins in McDonalds cups. I try to pass but their insistence holds me, I say I don’t speak French, they beg again in English. I insist I don’t speak that either, they offer German, Italian and Spanish. I have no more words in which to plead either ignorance or parsimony, I scavenge in three pockets before giving them a dollar. It’s my only defence against their European polyglossary.
Still too early. Still too soon.
Paris is small. The centre of Paris I mean. Like every other city with a stage-set centre, there are all those very many suburbs, the ones Gigi never saw, where cars burn and mothers weep and it is not heaven accepting gratitude for little girls. It is not heaven I am thanking now. I continue my walking meditation, past innumerable Vietnamese restaurants, and countless small patisseries where pains au chocolat and croissants dry slowly on the plates of high glass counters, and bars serve beers to Antipodean travellers who really cannot believe this city and call home to tell loved ones readying for bed about the pleasures of a beer in a café at ten in the morning. That glass Pyramid can wait, this is art, this is the life.
It is a life. Another one.
There are no secrets. This isn’t that kind of story. Nothing to work out. I can explain everything, will explain everything. But not yet. There are things to do and it must be done in order and the thing is, the thing is, we always had lunch first. She and I. She said it was proper, correct. That French thing, their reverence for food, an attitude the rest of the world outwardly respect and secretly despise. It’s just food for God’s sake, why must they make such a fuss? The linen the glass the crockery the menu the waiters with their insistence on pouring and placing and setting and getting it all right. Pattern, form, nothing deviating, nothing turning away, nothing new. Like the groomed women and the elegant men and the clean, clipped lap dogs. Nothing to surprise. So perhaps more than a reverence for just food, a reverence for reverence, reverence for form. Female form, polite form, good form, true to form. Formidable. Hah. Polyglot that.
(So strange. I can walk down the street, give money to a beggar, I can make a play on word form. I am able to buy a train ticket, sit in a bar, order wine and slowly drink the glass as if nothing has happened, as if life just goes on. Even when I know how very abruptly it can stop.)
So. Lunch. Dinner. From the Old French disner, original meaning: breakfast, then lunch, now dinner. Because any attempt to dine, at whatever time of day, will of course, break the fast that has gone before, whatever time period that fast encapsulated, night, morning or afternoon. Whenever I broke my fast with her, for her, she insisted we dine first.
Some time ago I spent a weekend with friends in London. At their apartment, their flat, my London friends talk about words. The English are very good at discussing words, it lessens their power, words as landmines, easily triggered, makes them read-able, understandable. Stable. My friends discussed lunch or dinner, dinner or tea. If the difference were a north/south divide or a class construct. In London they talk about north and south of the river, here it is left and right. The faux-bohemian sinister and the smooth, the neat, the adroit. I prefer north and south, it’s harder to get lost. Apparently they’ve found her. Marie-Claude. Found her body. It’s why I’m here.
When I tear my eyes from the gutters and the beggars and the street corners designed to frame a new picture with every stone edge, I look to high chimneys. I am not keen to see shop doors and windows, avenues and vistas, not yet. There is something I need to see first. One thing. I can manage right up and far down, to the far sides, I have the opposite of tunnel vision. There is graffiti, very high, on tall chimneys and cracked walls where one building has been leaning too long on another. This is not what they mean when they talk about a proper view, a scene in every Parisian glance, but it’s diverting enough. I am eager to be diverted. I take a left turn and a right one and another left, still closer to the river, nearer the water, but a narrow road uphill now, heading east, there are more people on the street, or less space for them to walk, they touch me sometimes, their clothes, coats, swinging arms. I do not want to be touched, not like this anyway, not dressed, covered, hidden. It will all be open soon.
These side streets, those to the left and the right, east and west, are not as pretty as the views the tourists adore. She and I sat together once, in the restaurant, and listened to an old Australian couple discuss the difference between London and Paris. The woman said Paris was so much prettier, the French had done very well not to put the ugly modern beside the old beautiful. Her husband agreed. And then he said, in a tone calculated to reach the walls of stone, that the French had capitulated during the war. That is why their city was not bombed, why Paris was prettier than London. Though he agreed, the weather was better too, which helped no end. The afternoon progressed, the Australian man drank more wine, and he went on to eat every course the waiters placed before him. I cannot begin to think how much of the waiters’ saliva he must also have enjoyed.
The street I find myself in now is not that pretty. It is poor and messy. Here they sell kebabs and Turkish slippers and cigarettes, and the bread in these shops was not freshly baked on the premises first thing this morning, and the fruit has not been raised lovingly in a farmer’s field with only sunshine and rain to help it on its way, there are no artisans here. But this is Paris too, regardless of how few tourists see these sights. Marie-Claude showed me these streets, brought me here to explain that there were worlds where no-one cared if the Pyramid was appropriate or not, that the walls around Rodin’s garden were too high for locals to climb, that even one euro for a good, fresh, warm croissant is too much for too many. She insisted she knew these streets well and they knew her and that what I read as amused tolera
nce in the faces of the half-strangers she greeted was friendship and acceptance to her. It may well have been. She is not here now for me to compare the look in her eyes against theirs and I do not have the courage to lock eyes with these men. These shopkeepers are all men. I have thought about this many times. Where are the women shopkeepers? Can they really all be at home with so many children and so much housework and such a lot to do that they do not want to run their own family business, stand alongside their loved one, work hand in hand? Or perhaps they not have the skill to sell all this stuff? These lighters and batteries that will die in a day. These shoes made by God knows how many small children in how many village factories. Perhaps it is simply that women are better with fruit and vegetables, the items that were once, more recently, living. Maybe this is why the women run market stalls while their husbands and sons and fathers run shops. Or perhaps the women are afraid of bricks and mortar, always ready to pick up their goods and run.
She did not like to run, Marie-Claude, said it made her too hot, sticky. Sticky was not good. Cool and calm and smooth and tidy and groomed and perfect. These things were good, right, correct. To be that way, held in, neat, arranged, arrayed, that was appropriate, proper. Propre. Which is clean. And it is also own, as in one’s own. Thing, possession, person. One word, two meanings. So many ambiguous words. Yes. No. The things that can be read into any phrase. And accent makes a difference of course, culture, upbringing. We often fail to understand those we grew up with, our brothers and sisters, mistaking their yes for no, truth for lies, despair for hope. How much harder to understand total strangers, when they stand at shop doors, form a picket line, love you, leave you, cheat, lie, misbehave.