FORTY-SIX
Yesterday I took Leo in his stroller and went for a walk in the park. It was one of those spring days that come before the season really turns, the sky a deep unearthly blue, the sun bright but not yet warm. The little paper mobiles I tied on the hood of his carriage had been untied and refixed to the stroller with neat, careful knots, and this made me want to cry for a moment. Instead I tapped them to make them spin, and Leo reached up his hands with perfect aim to pat them.
I thought of taking him to Abbot’s Park, where Johnny died. Or I could have taken him to Queens, where Ellaway mauled him, or Spiritus Sanctus, where Seligmann killed Nate. I could have taken him on a whole pilgrimage. I didn’t. I walked with him through Kings, heading for the open spaces, and in the vernal light, the grass was golden under my feet.
It’s cooler today, as I walk with him again. The year isn’t ready to be warm yet. I wheel him quietly, watching from above as his small fingers curl around his jacket sleeves. The wheels of his stroller rattle just a little, and I think about taking him to another park, but it’s too cold for grass today, and I feel like a change. Leo is getting big enough to push against his straps, and he arches his back, kicking his legs out stiff, feeling too grown-up to be strapped in a stroller. I try singing to him, beginning with something soothing: “Care is heavy, therefore sleep you. You are care, and care must keep you…” He cranes his neck up at me, and says, “Bb.” When I lean down and start dancing with him, he smiles, and pulls against my hands, wanting to lead. Maybe he’ll be a dancer someday, I tell him, and I lean down and give him a kiss, then stand up and carry on pushing him. He bounces a little in his seat, dancing alone.
I remember, suddenly and clearly, how much I loved music when I was a child, the few lessons squeezed in between studying catching and curfew law, how carefully I practiced the piano at home, knowing I’d be left alone as long as I was practicing, free to enjoy myself, listening to the music I was making. There’s a music shop only a few streets away. I pass it on my way to work, the days when I walk. Years ago, I forbade myself to stare into the windows, wishing for things I couldn’t afford. I think I’d like to go there now. Maybe I’ll buy Leo some maracas, something he can shake, so he can make a fine noise and let everyone know he’s there. I remember how good that feels.
I have to back through the shop door to get both of us inside, but once we’re in, the air is warmer, soft like dust, only the shop itself is very clean. White piano keys gleam, trumpets and flutes sit immaculate on their stands. There are some small percussion instruments, easy things to shake about, and I take down some Mexican-looking things, bright colored with carvings on the handle, and offer them to Leo. He reaches out and grasps one, holds it, admiring it. It’s only when I close my hand around his and rattle this new toy that he realizes its use, and sets about swinging it from side to side, happy. He doesn’t make much noise with it, he hasn’t figured out quite how to make the beans rattle yet, but he’ll get there.
Not wanting to deprive him of his new plaything, I take the other shaker to the register and pay for it while leaving him to enjoy the one he has. It’s cheap, I won’t have to forgo anything to afford it, and it occurs to me then that I’m a little richer than I used to be. The pay raise has come through, some more money every month. I wondered for a while whether to take it. In the end, I decided I would, I’d take the money and try to work well enough to justify my pay. I’m still in the habit of living cheaply, though. It means I actually have some spare money.
Leo looks curiously at the pianos as I wheel him back toward the door, and I stop, consider. I’ve thrown away a lot of my possessions, and I have a little extra cash. I’d always thought I couldn’t fit in or afford a piano; I’d given up on playing. I’ll still never run to a concert grand, but there are some electric keyboards here, quite cheap, quite small. I’d always refused to try them before, because I know they don’t compare to real ones, but all the same, maybe something small would be better than nothing.
To Leo’s delight, I unstrap him from his stroller and set him on my lap as I sit down on a stool before one of the small keyboards. He reaches out, strokes the keys with a cautious hand, and I lay my hand over his. We press the key together. Leo grins and gives a little squeak of delight at this new sound, stretches out for another note. He hits a deep bass, and I reach around him, play a little arpeggio. My fingers aren’t as awkward as I’d expected. I’ve grown since I last tried this, the octaves are easier to span.
We play together for a while, before Leo gets bored and wriggles. I set him down in his stroller, give him the shakers, and let him knock them against his lap. I stretch my hands, reach out from note to note.
To begin with, I play simply. Scales, up and down. Major for a while, then minor. It comes back easier than I anticipated. The keys sink under my fingers, a little too resilient, but the tone is pleasant, and I find I can remember some of the pieces I used to know. Music drifts around me.
The clerk passes me, smiles. I relax back on the stool, playing better. I make mistakes and carry on, and Leo sits beside me, happy and absorbed with his toy, as I run my hands up and down the keyboard. It’s an old skill, and I’m out of the habit, but I sit and play for a long time.
Light shines in through the windows, a shaft of it falling clear on the floor in front of me. Specks of dust drift and glimmer in it, slow and bright, like a snowfall of stars. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve been exceptionally lucky in the people around me, and I owe a lot of thanks. To my indefatigable agent, Sophie Hicks, and all at Ed Victor Ltd., Philippa Harrison, and all at Random House, especially Betsy Mitchell, Dan Franklin, and Ellah Allfrey: it’s a privilege working with you. To my family, for their support, moral, financial, and emotional, much love; to my friends, for their encouragement, willingness to let me pick their brains, and just brightening up my life, thanks all around, especially: Ana-Marie and Ben England for being great friends, as well as lending me the use of their flat, cat, and expertise technical, medical, and musical; Louisa Chrisman, for medical expertise again—any errors remaining or liberties taken in the book are my fault rather than theirs; Dharminder Kang, for liking it and for a mouse pad I’m still using; Paddy McBain for his tolerant advice; Melody Bridges, Rich Cole and Rachel Flowerday, for being sweet when I was worried; and my housemates and other friends, for putting up with my moods and being happy for me when it came through. For historical pointers that were a great help, thanks to Malcolm Gaskill and Bill Ellis. Three people in particular deserve special thanks: Joel Jessup, my generous and egregiously talented friend, who inspired me with the original idea; Peggy Vance, mentor and top pal, without whose endless backup I don’t know where I’d be; and Gareth Thomas, my dearest, whose love, kindness, and sense of humor saw me through the final push and beyond.
A CONVERSATION WITH
KIT WHITFIELD
Q: Your novel seems to draw a comparison between barebacks and the members of any other minority group—those of another race, religion, economic level, or sexual orientation, for example. Did you write this book with a message in mind?
Kit Whitfield: I didn’t start it with a message in mind. To me, the important things are the story and the effect it has on readers while they’re reading it. My aim was just to write about people and how it feels to be a person in a particular situation. If you do that with enough sincerity, hopefully some kind of morality or principle grows out of the story organically, but I find if you build the story around a message, it comes out clunky and forced, which won’t do the message much of a service. I also wouldn’t want to think it was seen just as a “message” book. If you boil a novel down to a message, it’s usually something fairly straightforward like “prejudice is bad,” which, if you’re writing a book about someone who’s discriminated against, ought to be your starting point rather than your conclusion. You can hardly write a book about a disliked minority without taking some ki
nd of standpoint on the issue, but I’d rather think that the book gave people the experience of being in a particular situation than that it was lecturing them about it.
Q: How did you put yourself in Lola’s place as you were writing Benighted? Do you consider yourself a member of a minority group?
KW: Well, I put myself in all my characters’ places when I write them. Lola’s no angel, but she was a good character to write; she has very strong feelings that are not always reasonable, which makes for interesting interactions with other characters. I see her as a woman who by nature is nicer than life has led her to be, but her experiences have exacerbated all her faults; whether or not people actually like her always interests me. There’s an expression I encountered recently that rather amused me: “Don’t call the badger a bishop.” It comes from the days when sportsmen would “bait” badgers by setting a pack of dogs on them—it means that just because someone is harried on all sides, it doesn’t make them more virtuous than anyone else. Myself, I’d say that the chip on her shoulder is part of the sadness of her life: trauma and depression aren’t cute or romantic and don’t always present themselves in endearing ways—which of course can cause more depression if it drives people away. But that’s just my own opinion, and as long as she entertains, readers are free to think what they like of her.
As far as being a minority myself, I’m a heterosexual Caucasian woman, all of which are majorities where I live—though women can be treated like a minority by a few idiots. My parents come from different countries, England and Ireland, so I know what it’s like to be exposed to different cultures and politics (and in the case of those two places, countries whose interests are historically opposed). I don’t believe you have to write what you know, though; that way lies semi-autobiography, which I want no truck with in my own writing. People used to say to me, If you want to write, why don’t you travel around the world, get arrested, and spend some time canning sardines, or something like that, but I think that’s silly. I’ve never experienced being a bareback, but I’ve experienced loneliness and frustration and resentment because I’m a human being. It’s not about what you’ve literally experienced yourself: fiction isn’t journalism. It’s about how closely you pay attention to what you do experience.
I’m hoping not to offend anyone who suffers from discrimination by making incorrect presumptions, but I think writing from imaginative projection rather than personal experience can give a kind of purity to the story: it won’t have the specific trappings of one minority or another, so it becomes more about minority status in general. I was very pleased to discover that when people started reading the book, they tended to see their own experiences in it—one person who’s gay saw homophobia, for example, whereas another person who’s a different race from their partner got very interested in the Lola-Paul relationship. But more broadly, anyone who’s ever been sad knows that there are times when you can feel like a minority of one.
Q: You never use the word werewolf in the book. Why is that?
KW: There are too many associations with it. It used to mean something fearful and diabolical; now it mostly means an actor with yak hair glued to his face. The word is firmly linked with pulpy horror movies, and while I’ve had a great deal of fun watching them, it wasn’t the effect I wanted to create. The point about the lycanthropic people in my book is that they’re people rather than monsters; Lola is used to them, they’re part of her life, and if you use a monster-movie word like werewolf, you’re making them into something alien. It’s the same reason I talk about their “feet” rather than their “paws,” or say “a man” rather than “a male”; I want the readers to remain as aware as Lola is that this is part of society that we’re witnessing. I’m a big admirer of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, which is written in a made-up slang called nadsat: the narrator commits some terrible crimes, but he describes them in his own language, which makes you, if not sympathize with him, at least see things the way he does.
Q: How did you come to choose a werewolf society as the centerpiece for your book? Why werewolves over vampires, for instance, when vampire novels are so popular today?
KW: First, because there’s enough vampire stuff out there already. Second, and more important, my aim was to write a book about Lola and the world she lives in, rather than to write a book about supernatural beasties, and if it had been about vampires, it wouldn’t have worked. The vampire has a massive tradition, and there are some vampire stories I’ve enjoyed, but I didn’t feel I could have written much of a story about it myself—it just didn’t catch my imagination in the same way.
Q: Are the stories you tell about the witch trials true?
KW: Yes, though obviously I’m fictionalizing for my own convenience, and I’m only an amateur historian—it’s always possible I’ve swallowed a few stories that proper scholars would know to be apocryphal. People did get tried and executed for “being werewolves” in the Middle Ages. It was a smaller subsection of those being tried for witchcraft: you could be accused of asking Satan to turn you into an animal. It was an odd set of beliefs, because it mixed two different schools of thought. The notion of the werewolf—or were-crocodile or were-leopard, if that was the dominant predator in your area that kept eating your flocks and menacing your family—goes back pretty much as far as culture can be traced. The witch trials, on the other hand, had a lot of intellectual theory attached to them: prosecutors began by going after heretics, then moved on to “witches,” so it was a theological issue, and many of the top minds of the day went into the church. For these people, it was heresy to believe humans could actually be turned into animals: it went against the notion that only God could work miracles and was a big no-no. But there were all these folk beliefs, villagers seeing wolves and stories going around. Folk tales are particularly prone to crop up when societies are frightened—and the Middle Ages suffered wars, plagues, famines, and, in the areas where more werewolf trials happened, depredation by actual wolves, not to mention the fear of cannibalism when everyone was starving.
Of course, if the theologians and jurists had been reasonable, they would have said to themselves, This is a folk belief, it’s a way of expressing fear of wild animals and fear that those around you can’t be trusted. But they were already on the hunt for witches, so they twisted their powerful brains into some extraordinary logical knots, and came up with the conclusion that Satan could induce the illusion in everyone present that someone had turned into a wolf, but they hadn’t actually transformed. Which was no excuse: to the stake you go for even trying it, heretic. It’s one of the most frightening things about the Inquisition, to see just how intelligent the minds that bent themselves to this nonsense really were. Even at the time, there were some sensible people who spoke out against it; there are always sensible people, just like there are always crazy ones, but the right side doesn’t always win.
Something that you don’t see much discussed in horror movies nowadays, though, is that many of the famous “werewolves” of the day were what we would call serial killers. To take a famous example: if you do an Internet search, you can find a historical pamphlet on one of the most notorious “werewolves” of his day, crisply entitled “A True Discourse, Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter.” It was written in 1590, and it’s basically a miniature true-crime book about a man who had been recently and gruesomely executed. According to the story, Peter Stubbe (sometimes spelled “Stumpf,” “Stube,” or “Stumpp”) sorcerously summoned the Devil, and when the Devil asked him what he wanted, he said he wanted to be able to hurt people in the form of an animal, being a cruel man more interested in sadism than profit. The Devil thought this was a great idea and gave him a wolf belt—a “girdle” that allowed him to turn into a huge predator—and with this as a disguise, he raped and murdered for twenty-five years before he was finally caught. Now, this story comes from his confession, which was given on the rack; if the trial account is to be believed, he wasn’t actually racked but subject
ed to the traditional first stage—which was to be strapped to it (the rack being generally understood as the most horrific torture device of a bloody-minded age)—and told that they’d start turning the handle and dislocating his limbs if he didn’t fess up. Not unnaturally, he confessed. So obviously, it’s perfectly possible that the real Peter Stubbe was an innocent victim who was tormented into confirming false accusations—he also confessed to molesting his daughter, so they burned her as an accomplice, which shouldn’t exactly raise your opinion of his executioners, besides which, the rack was often a last resort, so it’s possible he was tortured beforehand as well—but the accounts of what he supposedly did read rather like the story of a prolific serial killer, only with the wolf girdle thrown in. You get rapists and murderers in every age; whether Stubbe was one or not, lycanthropy was a way of thinking about them. In modern horror stories, the thing that directors usually take most interest in is the fact of someone’s transformation and how they cope with it; in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the point was that they killed people after they’d transformed. We still have stories of serial killers—I’d say Hannibal Lecter is more of a descendant of Peter Stubbe than, for example, David Kessler of An American Werewolf in London. And we take as much interest in them as people used to do in witches.
Q: Is your DORLA (Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity) a metaphor for the witch hunters of earlier times?
KW: No. It’s posited as a descendant of them, but the Inquisition is a long way in the past. It’s passed into the position where we use it as a metaphor, rather than use metaphors for it. The “Satanic Panic” in 1980s America, for example, got compared to the witch hunts—accurately, as far as I can tell from my research. There’s a terrible tendency in people to decide that this or that group is the enemy, then believe all sorts of evils about them that they’d never consider if they actually knew the people they’re so frightened of, and it’s something we’ll never get too civilized to fall prey to. The medieval witch hunts are over, the time for making metaphors for them is gone. What we need to do is look back into the past, see how horrifically wrong the witch hunters were, and then remind ourselves that the people in that era considered themselves just as modern and clever as we do—and then take a close look at what we’re doing.
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