Darkness, I

by Lee, Tanith

  Along the desert of grey cement, the bashes stood, leaned, the tents of the fallen. Scaffolding and poles and tarpaulins nicked from building sites, bakers’ trays once warm with new bread, now cold. Tin drums, old dustbins. And the cardboard boxes, marked Electrolux, Cape grapes, dog food.

  Here and there a fire burning. A dog, who had perhaps never eaten dog food, scratching, getting ready for the day’s ham and egging.

  Against the black undersides of buildings as indifferent as cliffs, others lay, or sat up now, in sleeping bags, combing the hair out of their eyes with yellow fingers.

  Not far off, the liquid-metal river with its embankments of sphynxes and obelisks. All around the city of steel and stone, under which lay crypts, plague pits, seventeenth-century Roman baths, and temples to Mithras, investor of light.

  Light limped up the winter day.

  And heads raised to the smell of food as the American woman, who always came on Monday mornings, rain or shine, moved down the line of bashes, boxes and bags.

  The American brought a trolley, and on it cooked-sausages in soft rolls, cartons of juice, apple pies (an irony?), bananas, thermoses of coffee to pour into little plastic cups.

  She was herself about seventy, slim and neat in her dark grey coat and hair, with a lined, powdered, pretty and grieving face. Her name was Adoreen, she had told the ones who asked. She looked sadder than they, for she had not accepted their lot.

  ‘Here you are, honey,’ she said. She had, still, despite four decades in London, a soft New York accent. ‘Take this too. You don’t like apple, honey? Well, I have a strawberry one here.’

  And the voices, rusty with pavement-found tabs and Carlsberg dregs from bins, rusty with the frost of the twenty degrees Fahrenheit of the past night, thanked her, fawned on her, or were indifferent as the cliffs to this angel of the morning.

  ‘God bless yer, darlin’.’

  ‘Yeah. Ta.’

  ‘Hnph.’

  Adoreen went on around the curve of the emplacement, down to the dim tunnel formed by Eastern House and the Thurlough Centre.

  ‘Hi, honey. How are you today?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Lix, sitting up in her sleeping bag, blue eyes sharp as broken blue glass.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Adoreen, delivering the goodies. Lix took them. No need to comb back this hair, for Lix’s hair was cut short to a quarter inch; she did it regularly in the public lavatory with the mirror, using her little scissors, which she had also once stuck in an attacker’s hand.

  Lix bit into the apple pie.

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Adoreen. And she went to the man lying about five feet away in his blanket. He did not stir.

  Lix said, ‘I think he’s dead.’

  ‘Oh lord,’ said Adoreen. Her sweet face fell with utter distress. She withdrew her gentle hand from him.

  Lix went on eating as Adoreen leaned over the dead man, mummified hard by cold as if to a pale black stick. The police car would cruise by later, and find him. Nothing more to do.

  Adoreen went on with her trolley, turning the edge of Eastern House, out into grim daylight.

  Lix swallowed the last crumbs and licked her lips. She drank the juice from the carton, warming alternate hands on the plastic cup of coffee.

  The dead man lying near stayed quiet.

  Then a shadow fell across the other opening of the tunnel. Pigs already? No. Lix sat carefully still. Three old men, old dossers, were coming along the narrow way. She recognized one of them, Two Hats. He was drinking from a bottle of facial cleanser, doubtless thieved, treating it like a fine old brandy. The other one at the back Lix had seen here and there, begging on the pavements, smoking down by the river.

  The one at the front was wrong.

  He was younger. About forty-five, forty-eight. That could mean perhaps he was in his thirties. The wrongness was not that.

  He wore a belted coat, stiff with muck. Like the others, his skin had the wooden look, like a carved mask, ingrained by filth and weather. Black eyes pierced it, toq solid, too wet and bright.

  He too had cut his hair short, but in jagged cockatoo tufts. The hair was white.

  They came near now, loomed over Lix with the familiar stink of old unwashed clothes, smoke and spillages, the sour fried-egg smell of human dirt.

  ‘Look, a deader,’ said Two Hats. He cackled. Crouching down he prized open the corpse’s mouth. ‘I want his teeth.’ He took them, wiped them on his sleeve, and slipped them in a pocket.

  Above Lix, the white-haired man said, ‘And I want his eye.’

  Two Hats cackled again.

  Lix sat still. From the corner of vision, she saw the younger man bend over the body and pop an eye out of its socket. It gleamed fiercely and cleanly. It was real glass.

  ‘That’s nice, that is,’ said Two Hats.

  He and the other one riffled through the corpse’s blanket and pockets, discovering things, discarding them.

  Lix finished her coffee. There might be trouble, and she must put it inside her, where they could not get at it.

  The man with white hair was staring down at her.

  He said suddenly, ‘And what about your eyes?’

  Lix slid out of her bag and stood up on it.

  But he only said, ‘They’re very blue, aren’t they?’

  She said, ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘And you don’t speak like the others,’ he said. ‘I heard you talking to the American. A nice middle-class accent.’

  Lix ducked, and gathered up her bag and the mildewed cushion she kept under her head. She stuffed them into the duffel bag.

  Abruptly he giggled. It was a high, thin soprano noise. It reminded her of a demented horse, a sort of... nightmare.

  She took her duffel bag and slung it on, and walked off. He followed.

  They walked out, shoulder to shoulder, on to the busy pavement, where office workers were rushing now to get to their valuable sought-after dull jobs, up stairs into halls of computers, wracked by migraine and RSI.

  Lix slipped away, but the man kept with her.

  Her would-be suitors were not usually so adept. The other two were following now as well, sharing the cleanser.

  At the corner was the old public lavatory. Lix went sideways, into the Ladies.

  Antique protocol would probably stay him now.

  Presumably it did. He did not go after her.

  But half an hour later, when she came out, there he still was, sitting by a flight of office steps, holding out his hand now and then to the oblivious passing pedestrian traffic.

  The other two men were on the other side of the steps. They had been joined by Janice, with her mongrel dish-mop dog.

  Along the pavement patrolled the sandwich-board man. The placards ran from his chin and the base of his skull, turning him to a sort of house of cards. Between his lips an always unlighted fag. The words on his boards, carefully inscribed, read: THE END IS NIGH. He passed solemnly.

  Lix walked after him, acknowledging only Janice.

  Her pursuer did not bother now, why should he?

  The short day evaporated slowly.

  On the street time was meaningless, only dawn and dusk caught attention, and the encroachment of neon night.

  In the alleys a homeless boy of sixteen was stabbed, and from this place they ebbed away.

  The ones with dogs did better. Women peered down and said, ‘Please feed the dog, won’t you?’ Fifty pence, a fiver.

  Like a warning, they were. What you could come to. It was easy. Lose your job, lose your house, lose your family. The gates to Hell stand open night and day...

  In the evening the soup kitchens garnered them in. Clad in marigold yellow the tribe of Hare Krishna brought them hot spicy food, and a lone lawyer in a suit went up and down with rolls and juice and tea.

  The ancient river pulled them too, its tidal rhythm, more life than death.

  Along the bleak ribbed mud, under the arches of the Smokie, they lit bonfire
s, blobs of orange light sewn on the lower dark.

  He came to her fire, where she was sitting with the others, in the dark night.

  Sparks went up, and he said, ‘I want to fuck you.’

  ‘So what,’ said Lix.

  Like an elderly man, sitting beside her, he said, ‘How old do you think I am?’

  She said nothing. She sat looking into the flexible flames.

  Janice said, ‘You’re only thirty, darlin’. Look, me dog likes ‘im.’

  And the white-haired man fondled the dish-mop dog who, that day, had brought Janice ten pounds.

  The man did not stink. Smelled of nothing but mud and cold and night. The river, as if he had been in it.

  Lix stole half a glance at him. It was as though he made her do it, for she did not care.

  ‘I’m old,’ he said to Lix. Behind him, Two Hats and the other one were ambling up. She recalled the second man’s name, Vinegar Tom, for he carried his favourite drink, a bottle of turned white wine.

  Lix watched the fire.

  Ashy dug the white-haired one in the ribs. ‘Camillo, you see them corks floating in the water? Know why?’

  White-Hair-Camillo-said, ‘No.’

  They passed their box. It was a bucket filled with red and white wine, Heineken, Pepsi, and a quarter bottle of White Satin gin found in a litter bin.

  In went the plastic cups. They drank, Lix and Camillo too.

  Ashy said, ‘Them corks is from the bottles of the drowned. I seen it once. Young girl she was. She comes from Vauxhall Bridge and down. Long black hair to her arse, face like a shop-window doll. In this tight black dress halfway up her bum, and high-heeled boots. And she had this bottle of Margorks—’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Camillo.

  ‘I seen.’

  ‘And I bet,’ said Camillo, ‘she knows how to pronounce it—’ But Lix took no notice.

  Ashy said, ‘She wades out, and the tide’s coming in. She gets in the water like a bath. And she lies on it, floating, drinking the wine. And when she’s drunk it all, she sinks under. She’s gone. And the bottle’s floating now, and the cork. I seen her after she was dead,’ said Ashy. ‘The chem-i-call polloo-shun in the water’s washed all the dye out of her hair. Her hair was only mousy brown. And her skin was green.’

  ‘Ophelia,’ said Camillo, ‘with Margaux.’

  ‘But no willow,’ said Lix. She did not know why she had responded to him. But she had. He said, ‘She’s dead then.’ But Lix would not speak to him.

  Janice said, ‘I could go to me sister, but it’s her hubby. He won’t leave me alone.’

  They mused in silence a while, and the cold stood like steel rods up through the air of night, up as high as the street-lamps on the bridges. There civilization went on, buses, and people in true clothes. But for how much longer?

  Vinegar Tom burped.

  Camillo said, ‘Come over there with me, Blue-eyes.’

  Lix said, ‘All right, if you must.’ She got up. But Camillo only laughed. The high-pitched horse giggle. She sat down. He said, ‘How old am I? Am I twelve? Am I three hundred?’

  She drank from the box and said, ‘Love like Blood.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Camillo. ‘I know that song.’

  ‘My son was playing it,’ she said.

  That was all.

  The tide pushed against the muddy shore, and away up in the air things hooted, shouted and growled.

  Two Hats said, ‘There’s an old shell near here, under the arches. Like a big metal egg. I seed it coming down. It’ll go off one day. Germans dropped it. Bang.’

  They gazed into the fire. Fire was eternal. There had always been fires. The world would end in fire, maybe. (The end is nigh?)

  Camillo put his arm about Lix. She let him. He put his white head on her shoulder. He said, ‘You’re like my mother, Blue-eyes.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Perhaps there had been other rooms like it, once. Or were there still? A strange room, having nothing plain. Full of images, objects, and painted companions.

  On the walls were stripes of tall green reeds, in places cupped by lotuses,,white and pink and pigeon blue. Through the reeds stalked heron, ibis. Above, on blueness, flew kingfishers checkered black and white. There were fowlers in the reeds, ochre men casting nets, and tawny cats crouched to retrieve the shot birds bowmen would bring down.

  Above all, was the sun. The sun was formed of real gold, old, scratched to softness, still dully shining. And inset on its face a black-kohled eye.

  The ceiling of the room was dark blue, and in parts the heads of the papyrus reeds had spread out across it.

  The floor was veined red stone, polished and scratched like the sun.

  Inside a box of half-transparent whitish curtains, that the lamplight turned to cool yellow, a bed stood on gold cat’s feet. It sloped a little, the head with its coiled crimson bolster some four or five inches higher than the foot. (She had slept balancing on a hillside.)

  Before the bed was a golden footstool, cat clawed. The bed and the stool were covered with blood red silky stuff.

  To one side stood a table that was shaped altogether like a long cat, this one black but with golden eyes and ears. Mirrors were set on the table, boxes and bottles of milky green glass, and creamy alabaster. The lamps on their tall stands were also alabaster, and burned with a filmy rich glow, now topaz, now red.

  It was mostly, almost, authentic. The raised, round marble bath even, although a faucet—a golden crocodile—opened into it. The mirrors were wrong, of course. In such an apartment they would not have had looking-glass. It had not been invented yet.

  The styles were also mixed. Possibly that jar was Greek, that comb—Roman? And the warmth too was contrived... while behind that painted door, where the painted handmaiden stood in her golden earrings, was an ornate lavatory, like the easement of some great Eastern lord. But modern. With a modern means to flush, cabinets of modern paper and soap, a wash-basin that had not a crocodile but dolphins.

  The meal had not been Egyptian, either, neither ancient nor contemporary, so far as it was feasible to tell. Although there were concessions, black figs and green grapes on a silver dish. Otherwise it was a breast of chicken, lean, and pale in taste, with a garnish of beans and rice. There was also a bottle of mineral water with a name she did not recognize. The goblet was lop-sided, of dark, flawed olive glass. Roman—or contrived to resemble a Roman goblet.

  Probably most of it was contrivance, for very little was actually antique. Made only years, or decades, before. Although the painted walls seemed older, faded in spots, minutely cracked, and here and there some miniscule bald area or refurbishment that did not quite match the rest.

  There was a faint sound too in the room, an electric humming, which was nearly hypnotic. It ran all through this place. The noise of a generator.

  In the end she would be used to it. Not hear it any more. How long would this take? And then, how long would she remain?

  Anna stood still in the white dress they had brought her, the two women. The dress was like a sleeveless garment of classical Homeric Greece—yet its drapery and folds were prearranged. It had—she had laughed on seeing it—a zipper.

  When the smaller second plane had landed, ladybird-red in the ice waste, she and the little boy had been conducted outside by their guardian or guard.

  The woman had said, before, that they were at the “tip of the world”. Here surely was World’s End.

  The whiteness went away on all sides, as it had at the other stop, and yet this whiteness was more final, more absolute. There was no far vista of half-frozen sea, no castled icebergs drifting on its glass.

  The sky was bright, opalescent, greenish blue, like no other sky Anna had seen.

  The little boy said, ‘It’s summer, isn’t it. The sun never goes down.’

  ‘Almost right,’ said the man.

  Then something dark appeared on the white, not as if coming out of the distance, but more as if it had mer
ged into being on touching the green crystal air.

  In fact the air was like a freezing wall.

  ‘Put on your face mask,’ the man said, ‘Miss Anna.’

  He too had known her name.

  But she was utterly powerless now.

  They were going to the child’s uncle’s mansion, Uncle Kay, as if in a fairy tale. The Snow Queen, it seemed, had been subdued by Kay after all, and now he had inherited everything. Was there an Auntie Gerda? Did Hans Andersen preside?

  The darkness was a sled, pulled by a running huffing furry wave of dogs. They were like black and white faced wolves, absurdly pretty and savage together. The sled stopped. The dogs wagged their tails.

  Andrew, the child, ran forward, toting his llama, calling, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’

  The man stayed him.

  ‘Best not. They may bite.’

  But then the rider of the sled, dressed as they were for the cold, faceless (unlike the dogs), in mask and hood, threw off an anchor into the snow to hold the team, and jumped down. He said to the little boy, ‘It’s all right. You can meet the leader.’ And he conducted Andrew to the foremost panda-coloured wolf, and the wolf permitted Andrew to caress his handsome, dangerous head.

  ‘They are half wolf,’ said the man from the plane. ‘It gives their nice nature.’

  The dog weighed about a hundred pounds. He rubbed against the child’s hand. Then Anna too went to the dog and touched through her glove his lush barrel of fur and oil and vital meat.

  They were put in the sled, and the man from the plane sat with them.

  The other man drew back the anchor and turned the dogs, some of whom had urinated into the ice, causing it to steam. The urine smelled of fish, even through the face mask.

  The sled started away.

  ‘Is it far?’ asked the child.

  ‘Not far.’

  But it was.

  Or was it only that it seemed far because the journey was apparently changeless?

  The crystalline sky, the white rush of ice and snow. No landmarks. Nothing.

  This was not the end of the world, but another planet.

  At last—but when?—a sort of night fell. It was preceded by a turquoise sunset, when a blue sun seemed to sink away. And after this the sky was still like crystal, but now navy blue, with some banks of luminous clouds visible in it.