Darkness, I

by Lee, Tanith

  ‘But you might not know,’ said Rachaela.

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rachaela said. ‘This family is believed to be immune to most things. I only ever had ‘flu twice in my life. Never badly. And one filling in one tooth when I was a child. We have babies like... shelling peas, practically.’ She wondered why she had said this to Lix.

  Lix said, ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘No, I’m completely callous. Just a coward.’

  ‘I’m sorry. About your house.’

  ‘Well, never mind.’

  Lix lay in the bath, up to her small breasts in warm water. Her body had a properly subaqueous look, like a painting by Waterhouse.

  She had not been in a bath, an actual bath, for—well, it did not count.

  They had had two bathrooms in that other house. Ron’s house. One was Greg’s, always a mess. The cleaning woman used to complain, but never much. Greg was so young and handsome. So full of that cliché, life. And any way, in the new house, there had been three bathrooms.

  Ron was a sweet man, a bit dull, going very bald, getting a little tummy. But it made no difference. Lix might go to bed and fantasize, as Ron made love to her, that it was Sean Connery, but really she understood it was Ron, and she did not mind. No, she was secretly glad. For though Sean Connery was so wonderful, so apparently marvellous, she did not know him. And everything she knew of Ron—suited her.

  They had married when she was sixteen and he twenty. They had known, from the first. Was it love? Or was it knowledge. It kept them, any way, very close. And Greg, the product of their love at its youthful fieriest, was a testament to the souls of them both.

  She had been happy. Not riotously, not in vast sweeping passionate outcry. It had been so very ordinary. Just to wake up and to be. To fall asleep with. To rest in.

  And why not for ever. Or, at least, until they were old.

  There was no monetary fear either. How lucky they were. Their son at college, a designer with a future before him. And they, safe in Ron’s safe business world. So safe they could afford the larger, prettier house with three bathrooms and six bedrooms they had gone to look at that evening.

  They had had dinner in a country pub, and Ron was so sensible. He had only one glass of white wine. She and Greg had not had to abstain and they had drunk two bottles between them, and some Cointreau afterwards. Celebration. Greg was planning on a flat in town, and to come down to them at weekends. He had taken the micky out of it, liking it—a weekend in the country. He had said he would hunt foxes, shoot them—with his camera of course, no other way.

  Foxes.

  They drove back very late, and coming into London how empty and futile the city had looked, frozen in the orange static of its awful lights. Drunks and beggars. A wreck. So glad they would be leaving.

  They were somewhere near Hyde Park, driving briskly but not too fast, and it was about one a.m. by then, somehow, and Greg said to Ron, ‘Go on, Dad, just listen to it.’ And Ron said, ‘All right. All right.’ Laughing. And Lix, who lay half asleep in the back of the soft, warm burring car, listened too. It was Greg’s tape. Killing Joke: Love like Blood. Ron did listen. Then he said, ‘Yes, it’s not bad. No, it’s good.’ And she had thought, Does he really like it or is he being wise? But she quite liked it herself, and Ron had an open mind, a catholic taste.

  And just then the fox ran across the road. The country fox, over the wide street of inner London.

  The surface was probably wet. They had giggled, chasing through the light rain earlier.

  Ron swung the wheel. He would rather die than hurt an animal.

  Then the world turned round like a top. And then the world turned right over.

  She did not know what happened, had never properly diagnosed. But presumably their seatbelts, the seatbelts of her husband and son in the front seats of the car, had held them fast, but not quite fast enough. And she, unsecured, her door giving way, had flown out as if on wings, thrown clear, to land hard, stunned, on a peculiar nothingness that was the pavement.

  When she opened her eyes, all of ten or twenty seconds later, the car was burning, with Ron and Greg unconscious inside, securely held by their belts, and the horn, which any way had gone into Ron’s chest, sounding dully, and, strangest of all, the music still playing. Love like Blood. Until the tape melted.

  In the end, and that must have been fifty seconds after, Lix got up and tried to go round the car to see if they too had been thrown out, but she knew they had not. And they had not.

  To be honest, she could see the shapes of them, inside, all lit by fire. Which in the frozen light was not realistic. Too flat. The shadows all wrong.

  Somewhere a dog barked, miles away.

  The city seemed otherwise totally deserted.

  Lix walked slowly away. She was covered in smuts and sealing scabs.

  She walked for an hour, until she found herself at the embankment, and there, because she felt ill, she sat down. And there she slept, or died. And in the first sere glow of morning, a young policeman shook her harshly and told her to move on.

  And there she was, awake, reborn. There she was for the rest of her life.

  Lix turned a little in her bath that did not count. Someone was at the door, maybe Vinegar Tom, but she had locked it.

  That beautiful black-haired woman Camillo said was his niece.

  Was it a fact she too had lost her lover and her child?

  Rachaela leaned in the doorway of the main room, watching Camillo, and the fokken man who was drinking from his third bottle, and now and then glaring round the room at perhaps invisible entities, cursing them.

  Faintly too she could hear the cats in the cupboard, irritatedly scratching and worriedly meowing. It would not do.

  Then she heard the meowing again, much closer. She looked down. Jacob had appeared. He must have been secreted somewhere in the house.

  Now he sauntered directly past her—she did not put down the new glass of wine in time to grab him. She should have dropped it.

  Camillo half turned, but it was the fokken man who heaved up on to his knees.

  ‘Fokken vermin,’ he said, ‘fokken, fokken.’

  And he made a lunge, his black, broken nails intent for Jacob’s white hide.

  Jacob sprang aside, and the man reared up, was on his feet. He aimed a wide swinging kick.

  Rachaela’s heart hit her throat. She started forward and the glass after all fell. But Jacob was away again, up on the big table with the bowl of bananas.

  The cat ran nimbly, and leapt free as the fokken man thudded into the table.

  ‘Stop it!’ Rachaela cried. Ineffectual, of course.

  The tramp crashed his arm upon the banana bowl, picked it up, threw it straight at one of the windows. The bowl but not the window shattered. He turned with a roar. ‘Fokken! Fokken!’ he shrieked. His eyes were red. Rachaela wished she had kept the glass—she might have cut him in the face. Torn between a wish to attack her and the other wish to damage the cat, he reeled from one side to the other.

  Then Camillo came scuttling. A true scuttle, like some sort of crab. Camillo was smiling.

  He whipped his white head forward, with the weight of his thin iron body behind it, and Rachaela heard the incredible crack of skull lammed on skull.

  Camillo pranced back. The tramp went over with a deep lost glottal groan and lay under the table legs, making a snoring noise.

  ‘He’ll choke,’ said Rachaela.

  ‘Let’s hope so. Here, cat, cat,’ said Camillo. And reached on to a chair back, where Jacob had flown, and pulled him lightly off, pawfuls of ripped material coming out in Jacob’s frightened, furious hooked claws.

  Rachaela took the cat. He was not pleased, and lashed her with his tail, bruising smacks.

  ‘All right,’ Rachaela said.

  She carried Jacob from the room, directly to the front door. Grasping him cruelly, she undid the door and marched out to the nearer of the two Rolls. The ch
auffeur, who stood beside it in the cold dusk, promptly opened the car for her. She cast Jacob, howling, inside. ‘Close it, please. There are two more to come.’

  She had difficulty only with Juliet, who scratched her and screamed, but when they were all, Jacob, Juliet and Jelka, in the back of the car, loose, amid the tumble of fox-fur and rabbit, the door was shut, and she said to the chauffeur, ‘You’ll drive me back to London. To the house on the common. Do you know where I mean?’ The man said, ‘Yes, madame.’

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  It did not surprise her particularly when Camillo began to assist her as she gathered up Althene’s lighter treasures, the skulls, and all Anna’s toys from the room upstairs. Even Lix came in, her grubby clothes back in place over the bathed body, and began to point out things Rachaela might need to stuff into the weekend bag.

  Had it all been a plan simply to get rid of her? The other tramp in the bedroom slept through everything. His fag was out. The bedroom was full of stink.

  She did not really know what she took, what she did. She took Althene’s lingerie, in crushed handfuls, stuffing it in the bag. There were a few things in the cellar, but perhaps they would never find their way into that.

  Lix carried the bags of skulls and clothes downstairs.

  Pug had wandered blandly into the hall in search of more wine. “E’s out,’ he said, jerking his thumb back at the fokken man on the floor.

  ‘Beachy Head,’ said Camillo. ‘In the car boot. Yes.’

  They all helped Rachaela, Pug too, to get the bags into the first Rolls without allowing the cats to escape.

  When the Rolls had been driven away, Camillo poured three small gin and tonics, for Pug, Lix and himself.

  ‘Beachy Head,’ he said again, raising his glass to the snoring fokken man.

  Chapter Forty

  Alchemical: A sea-journey by night.

  She had been startled at the size of the ship, like a white wedding-cake on the darkness, festooned with lights.

  It looked sound and indestructible, and inside it was luxurious, full of cafés and shops, lifts and carpeted stairs, which last, once it had parted from the shore, pushed against her with only the slightest intimation of external side-to-side movement.

  The ocean was calm. The night vast. From an outer deck, she viewed it all, feeling she should, for she had never travelled in this way before. She had not wanted to fly.

  A narrow moon hung low. The stars were bright. And the black sea.

  She must not call the ship a boat, or it. It was she. Feminine. It was the fish that had swallowed her up, and she would try to sleep inside the fish. In the morning she would come forth, out of the belly of the fish, reborn.

  She did not avail herself of the restaurants, but went straight to the first-class cabin. As she lay on the sea green bed, someone knocked.

  There was no room service to the cabin. But, of course...

  They had brought her a chicken salad and warm fresh bread, a baked potato, dark amber juice, and two bottles of white Grenache. There was coffee too in a silver pot.

  Gone for ever, those first Scarabae days, when she had had to ask in vain for coffee.

  She ate and drank on the gently rocking bed. The rhythm was pleasant. It would help her to sleep, like the wine, of which she drank only three glasses.

  After she had showered and cleaned her teeth, she got naked into the smooth white sheets, and lay in the dark, under a fleeting yet perpetual glimmer cast upon the ceiling.

  I am Rachaela. My name.

  But I am more than that.

  It passed before her eyes, her whole life, as perhaps was proper, since in a way she had given herself over to drowning. The stunted beginning. The contact with the Scarabae. The first house above the ocean. Adamus. And then the travail. Ruth. Ruth’s own fearsome life that came and went like that burning wind of the eastern desert, the khamsin—

  And so Althene. And so Anna. Who passed like snow.

  Lying there, it was Anna Rachaela tried to picture. Not Althene, her lover-husband-wife, that she was travelling now to find in turn. Althene was known to her. It was Anna she sought.

  The whiteness of her, the flax of hair with its silver flush of roots growing from the moon-quartz of her skin. Her dark lashes. The little mark on her breast.

  But Anna was gone. It was as if Anna had now died, just as Ruth died, in the woods, or at the moment when Malach abandoned her.

  Anna was no more.

  That made it easier, really. It was Althene who she wanted.

  The decision had been simple. She had not even made it, it had merely come to be. When she packed her bag and the skulls—and for some curious comfort, the toys—then, she had known. As Rachaela sat in the back of the Rolls Royce, with Juliet growling on her lap, Jacob burrowing in her side, and Jelka, abruptly alert, her paws up on the window frame, staring out like a hyperactive child, then Rachaela had felt clear as glass. She could see through herself to what she was and what she wanted.

  Had that ever happened before?

  They reached the Scarabae house in darkness, but coloured windows were burning, like a welcome.

  Cheta let her in, and then almost instantly there they all were, Miranda looking about twenty in the lamplight, and Sasha looking elderly, and Eric somewhere between. (Tray-Terentia was not present.) Michael served them an ample cold supper—Scarabae greed—and she told them what Camillo had told her, as if she had never heard of it before, that Althene’s mother was mad, and since she had not heard from Althene at all, she, Rachaela, meant to go after her.

  None of them contradicted.

  Eric said it would be arranged.

  And, by the following morning, it had been.

  Lying in that unmoving earth-bound bed, in the room that had been hers once before, she did consider that she might be wrong, and Camillo only, solely, malicious. Althene might have passed on from the woman called Sofie, who was her mother. Althene might be anywhere at all.

  Eric, perhaps with this in mind, had told her she would not be ‘alone’ in Amsterdam. Other Scarabae, apparently, would assist her. Not Malach. Malach was absent. But someone. Some people.

  In the morning, the dove window of the room lightened and Cheta came with greedy breakfast, and later Miranda, who sat on the bed, playing with Jelka and her two black and white siblings. Miranda explained that the sea crossing had been arranged for that night.

  ‘You’re looking very well,’ Rachaela said to Miranda.

  Miranda smiled, as a woman would behind a fan. ‘Yes, I am.’

  She had been ancient, once. Like Sasha, now. Grey, webby, with long discoloured teeth. Rachaela said, ‘Do they fall out?’ She meant the teeth. It was an ugly, tactless, earnest question.

  Miranda understood. ‘Yes. Rather horrid. They break, you see. But then the new one comes. Like a child. But I don’t leave the old ones for the tooth fairy. They’re not pretty enough.’

  The three cats played wildly. Only Juliet and Jacob were sulkily ensconced downstairs, where a fire burned, and several dishes of fish had been temptingly set out.

  ‘Thank you for telling me. I wondered. What about the rest of it?’

  ‘The rest of it?’

  ‘I mean, you grow younger. Does—everything happen as it did?’

  Again, the invisible lace fan and the smile. ‘Oh, yes. Naturally.’

  ‘Is it natural?’ Rachaela waited, then said, ‘Will it all happen to me, Miranda? Does it—frighten you?’

  Miranda laughed, and Jelka and the other two sprang on to the bed again, chirruping for total attention.

  ‘What did you call them?’

  ‘They don’t have names. They are the Cats.’

  They don’t have names. They are the family.

  They are the Scarabae. Genus not title.

  The car that took her to the ship was just a limousine.

  Only Eric and Miranda said goodbye, Sasha was knitting, apparently, in her room. She was a little tired today. Was Sasha
due to die, that other thing the Scarabae did? It tugged at Rachaela’s emotions; she remembered Sasha and Anna embracing that day at the house, when Sasha had fainted, and then produced the shawl. The shawl had come home with Anna’s toys, had had to, it was wrapped about two small brown bears to keep them warm.

  She meant to hold them, the family, but somehow it did not happen. Well. She would be coming back.

  Rachaela turned on her side.

  To lie above the sea was to lie in the womb.

  She had felt this gentle motion before, in the blood-heart-cave of her own mother. That was the essence of the lullaby. For that was a night-sea journey too.

  Chapter Forty-One

  They had sailed on 1st April, an unlucky day. There had been no choice. The cargo was probably wood and wines and cloth. But then, they had not been sure of that. Bribed, the ship went out. The passage would be a long one, but the land journey had also been onerous. It was as if they had been travelling for years.

  Not liking the light, they had kept inside the ship by day. The women shared one of the cabins, the men, the other. It was makeshift. They had expected nothing else.

  The sailors especially did not care for the idea of so many women on board. Even a single female could make the sea angry. The sea became angry on the fifteenth day. The sky was green and the water white.

  She began, the ship, to roll, to heave.

  That was the day Camillo got away from them. The day too that Stephan’s child started to move in the womb of Sasha.

  Vain hope, that it would not be until they reached shore, that rough English shore they had been promised. The violence of the sea. Inevitable. And it was more than a month too early.

  They had tied her to the bunk, they had had to, to keep her secure.

  As the spasms of the sea came, lifting everything, Sasha kept quiet. At her own spasms, the turmoil of the churning child, she did not cry out.

  She looked young, in the way Anna and Miriam and Livia did, about twenty-five or twenty-eight. Sasha’s long black hair lay coiled along the pillow in a plait. Grusha had seen to this, and now set wet cloths on the panting woman’s forehead. Of them all, only Anna, and Sasha, were calm. The others were nervous, distraught.