M/F

by Anthony Burgess

  I climbed up and down Indovinella Street but found no tobacconist. I went into a tavern called the Yo Ho Me Lads to ask for information, and, while I stood waiting at the deserted counter, I heard a voice call Hey out of the darkness. I turned and probed the empty gloom for its source.

  – Hey.

  I radared on to a dim shape and went up to it: the drunken host perhaps. But it was one of those two faggots, Aspinwall, bald, fleshy, ill-coordinated and trembling with drink. As I grew used to the dark, I saw the label of a bottle on his table clear and give off its name: Azzopardi’s White Cane Rum. Aspinwall, as he spoke, breathed out a powerful sweetness:

  – Didn’t take him long, did it, the bastard?

  – Who? Gone off, has he? Your boyfriend in the holy shirt?

  – Interior. Into the interior, as the bastard called it. A great poet there, he says. Pilgrimage to great poet. Have drink.

  – Not on an empty stomach. What great poet?

  – Have breakfast, then. Lunch, brunch. Any goddam thing. Hey, you in there, he called to a curtain. More corned beef sandwiches and a raw onion and plenty of mustard.

  – I don’t suppose they have Dijon here, I said, sitting down.

  – That’s not the name. Some goddam British poet with one of these pantiwaist names, like Vere de Vere or Marjorie Banks or Sir Marmaduke Upyourass.

  – He’s missed the miracle, then. He could have dipped his precious Godshirt into the precious blood.

  – That goddam Godshirt as you call it near did for us on that run. Bad medicine, religion on board.

  – I though it was me who was supposed to be the Jonah.

  – There you are – Jonah. Religious. And there was that other one I never thought to hear mentioned again. Specially in bitch of bad weather like that. Though not your fault altogether, I guess. Bad medicine that man.

  He drank down a large tot, good medicine, an act of exorcism.

  – Oh, I said, remembering. You mean Meister Eckhart?

  – Meister Shyster. Jack Eckhart was the biggest two-timing bastard that ever picked teeth in comfort watching orphans starve. He drove me out, defiled dry land, the fink and rat. Stole two big money ideas, both mine, pocketed kill money for them, the doubledealing rattler.

  – What’s kill money?

  – Money a firm pays for an idea it wants dead. Like everlasting match, would have killed Kruger, Kruger bought it buried it. What you call that animal that goes backward and forward, head at each end?

  – Amphisbaena. A kind of lizard. It doesn’t exist.

  – Got a name, eh? And doesn’t exist. This thing did exist. Refrigerator with two doors. I made it.

  He waited for me to show some emotion. I showed none but said:

  – I thought you did dress-designing.

  He moved his hands in impatience, saying:

  – Dresses only machines, for Christ sakes. You dumb like the rest, but that shyster Eckhart not dumb, oh no. You not know why two doors? Because things get left at the back of a regular icebox. You put beer in, right? Take beer out, empty space, put more beer in. Keep taking from the front. You never done that?

  – I’ve never had a refrigerator.

  – You kids, you kids, all same these days. Pot and heroin, too much hair.

  To my surprise, a man in shirtsleeves brought sandwiches with a raw onion and a daub of mustard made with vinegar. He was a small wellformed octoroon, perhaps quadroon, with a lot of hair that caused him to look reproachfully at Aspinwall. I said to him:

  – I’m looking for this museum. Sib Legeru. Near here. A key in a tobacconist’s shop.

  He shook his hair in regret and went off still shaking it. The quest was proving difficult. I took a sandwich while Aspinwall said:

  – So with doors front and rear that doesn’t happen, right? No frozen crap left at the back. A good idea or else the bastards wouldn’t have paid to kill it. Conservative bastards. Know what the other idea was?

  – No.

  – Go on. Guess. Guess.

  – Look, surely you mean that the doors would be at the sides. At the back you have to have the works – that grill thing and the leads and so on.

  – You kids. Got no icebox but know all about it. Go on, guess.

  – A nondrip oilcan. A frame to take the weight of a very heavy copulator.

  – He could always get underneath.

  – It might be his partner that was the very heavy one.

  – I don’t go much for that, not now. You come with me and you won’t be in any danger. Funny you should say that about a nondrip can, though.

  – What do you mean, come with you? When are you leaving?

  – Tomorrow at sunrise, I guess. One or two things being done to the craft. Get a real overhaul on one of the keys. That storm was a bitch. No, about that drip.

  – You’re sailing for Florida? You’re not waiting for Godshirt, then?

  – Screw that phoney with his phoney poetry. Confucius or some other guy said that the last drop always goes into a guy’s pants. Rots the material, as you’ll know. This is where the dress-designing comes in. Detachable sponge insert, shaped to crotch of pants, catches drips. Anything preserve ervative like that they just don’t want to know about. Dedic dedic dedicated to to what do you call it.

  – Destruction? Consumption? Obsolescence?

  – I guess that’s what it is.

  – I can sleep on board tonight?

  – I guess that’s what it is.

  He had finished the bottle of rum with no assistance from me, who had merely eaten an onion and sandwiches. I dipped the last corner of crust in the mustard, swallowed it, then coughed. My body shook: I was never well.

  – What it is, I guess.

  He was dazedly, I could see, wondering what to drink next. It was not yet noon and a long day’s solitary boozing lay ahead of him. Well, anyway, my getting away from here, soon too, seemed taken care of. I didn’t like Aspinwall, but he was a good sailor. He seemed more tolerable without the holyshirted poetaster. Anyway, any port in a storm. That, I realized, was not really an apt proverb. Various riddles buzzed in my head, but I could ignore them now. I was moderately content. It was cool and dark here. In a short while I would continue my search for Sib Legeru. The golden mean oblong of the doorway let in golden sun that, like a swimming bath, one was not urgently concerned with replunging into for the next minute or so. Then that doorway let in something else: a very familiar shape, severely corseted. Miss Emmett fisted the bar with vigour and called:

  – Manuel! Manuel!

  She looked into the gloom but saw nobody she knew, nothing she wanted. The only thing she wanted, as I saw when Manuel, the haired man, appeared, was a packet of ten Honeydew cigarettes. She hadn’t changed. Scissors dangled at her waist. She would go back, wherever she lived or stayed, to overboiling eggs and crunching sugarlumps. I, slow as ever, began to realize what she was doing here on this remote island of Castita.

  11

  The embarrassment of my sister and myself, meeting each other for the first time with no particular desire to meet each other, was eased by the news of a failed attempt on the life of the President.

  Her name was Catherine, a very ordinary name suggesting stone saints. Miss Emmett called her Kitty and sometimes, horrible, Kitty Kee. I said:

  – Well.

  The television newsreader, a bald young man with a blowup of shocked Castitan faces behind him, gabbled:

  -… while His Excellency was paying homage. The bullet lodged in the statue itself, shattering the plaster and disclosing the simple mechanism by which the hoax was being perpetrated. An inquiry is being initiated into what His Grace the Archbishop has described as the most flagrant act of blasphemy ever to desecrate the sacred edifice. His Excellency the President expressed himself to be more shocked by this evidence of a sinister and cynical plot to throw doubt on a fundamental feature of the religious life of a devout Christian community than by the mercifully and, he might say, miraculously frustr
ated attempt on the life of the democratically elected…

  Miss Emmett switched the set off. She said:

  – We don’t want to hear all that. Not now. Not at a moment like this.

  – There must be some very complicated emotions going around, I said.

  – Yes, said Catherine, complicated.

  Kitty Kee, indeed. She was a fat girl of seventeen, perhaps fed by Miss Emmett only on hardboiled eggs and sugar. Constipated, perhaps; her complexion was blotchy. I searched her face for signs of myself. The eyes, certainly. Not the nose, far too bulbous. Miss Emmett said:

  – And to think we shouldn’t be here. We would have been on our way to France –

  – Kingston, London, Paris, Nice, Catherine said with the pride of the young traveller. I’m to go to a school in Nice.

  – Don’t interrupt, Kitty Kee. We got this cable from the lawyers telling us to get off earlier than we intended. It’s as though they knew there was going to be trouble here.

  – Why the delay then? I asked.

  – Oh, we had such a terrible storm, real tropical, and the aeroplanes weren’t leaving. And now we’re all packed and ready to go just when you get here. Providence, or somebody.

  – Well, I said. I looked round the sittingroom of their rented house, which gave out no sign of anybody’s character. Marmetone floor with a couple of dirty goatskin rugs. One easy chair, on which Miss Emmett sat, the colour of overcooked saffron cake. Two Windsor chairs, I on one, Catherine on the other. Her skirt was short in the fashion of the time, showing her fat mottled legs almost up to the crotch. This is a young girl, I told myself. What of physical do you feel for her? I felt nothing except indifference tinged with the salt of revulsion. I was glad of that, but also I had expected it.

  – Tomorrow? I asked.

  – By the midday flight, Catherine said. We spent the night in Kingston. I’ve never been in Kingston.

  – Not a nice town, Miss Emmett said. The natives sing rude songs and bang on old oildrums.

  – You’ve been around, I said to her. It’s been a long time since we –

  – And you never wrote. You never wrote one little letter to say what you were doing and how you were getting on.

  – I’ve never been much of a one for writing. For that matter, I didn’t know where to write to.

  – It’s all been very mysterious, Catherine said. The fierce light smote her unkindly from two windows – the street one, directly looking on to the Yo Ho Me Lads, and the one facing, which showed a dead orange tree. Comedones, a small boil-scar on her fat chin, a dusting of scurf on the shoulders of a dress which was unwisely mauve and had a greasemark or two at bib level. My sister. Miss Emmett, despite her age, looked far more wholesome. Perhaps there had always been massive doses of protein in her diet, ingested in what the doctor had told her were pills for the faints or flushes. Her lined face seemed set in a pose of firm content, as if she had won the battle of life. She was not unsmart in her seablue cotton dress patterned with flights of guillemots, her cord belt from which shining scissors dangled. I had always taken the scissors for granted, a badge of office which became by sheer chance an instrument for cutting cupboard paper or snipping parcels open. Why did she wear them?

  – Wear them?

  – A scissors is this, not them, you ignorant boy.

  Why did that disturb me? Ah yes: a trousers, a ballocks. Had she always used that dual singular? A death of plurality for some reason this morning.

  – A scissors is always hard to find even in a wellrun house. It gets lost. You forget what drawer it’s in. And a good scissors will always frighten somebody who comes to the door. It is not, as you should know in your newfound cleverness, what they call an offensive weapon. In America they tried to say it was because it was threatened to be used as such. But any woman is entitled to her scissors.

  – In America?

  – In Seattle, Catherine said. Miss Emmett didn’t like the look of a man who kept coming every day trying to sell something.

  – It was hair-straighteners, Kitty Kee. I asked him if we looked like the sort of people who needed hair-straighteners.

  – She said she’d stick the scissors in his face if he kept on pestering. So he complained to the police.

  – You were in America when I was in America? What were you doing in Seattle?

  – My father, our father I should say –

  – Let’s not talk about your father, Miss Emmett said in a kind of liturgical tone I divined she must have used many times before. The dead are dead, and there’s nothing to be gained by resurrecting them. Like poor old Rufa the Fifth you dug up in the garden when we were in Rotorua.

  – You certainly have been around. Where’s Rotorua?

  – N.Z., said Catherine. Rather a nice place, full of trees and sort of heaving all the time. And lots of geyzers pronounced gyzers.

  – Above the southern snows. Why so much travel? Didn’t you want to settle down anywhere?

  – My, our – It’s all right, Miss Emmett, I’ve gotten over it.

  – Got, not gotten. Try to speak English English, Kitty.

  – I mean, why here of all places?

  – You’re here of all places, Catherine said. The reason you give is a pretty odd sort of reason. We came here because I was ill – it’s all right, Miss Emmett, I’ve gotten got over it – and the climate’s supposed to be good and there’s a man here who – I suppose I ought to say there was a man here. He was no longer in practice but he took me as a favour. Now he’s given it up and just writes poetry. There’s a book of his – see –

  There was one of these folding extensible Indian bookstands by the window, unextended, one carved zoomorph sideflap fallen in – in dejection one might fancifully say – at the fewness of the books. She seemed to gesture at something thin and white.

  – That must be where the Godboy went, the scribbler in the holy shirt.

  – You do say mad things.

  – You knew all about me, I said. And I knew nothing of you.

  – But, of course, Miss Emmett –

  – Miss Emmett must have known about you when she was with me. Didn’t you know, Miss Emmett?

  – Nothing, Miss Emmett said. It was a great surprise when your father turned up with her in Christchurch.

  – N.Z.?

  – That’s right. I was with my niece and her husband. He works, worked I should say, with the Butler Collection, whatever that was. I saw a picture of this Butler – a sneering looking old man with a beard.

  – And yet, I said with a bitterness that I recognized was totally insincere, a posture expected, he never wanted to see me at all after my mother, our mother –

  – It was all a very sad business, Miss Emmett said, and I think we ought not to talk about it. I think I’ll go and make a cup of tea. I want a cigarette, and I feel unclean if I smoke without a cup of tea. It’s like eating a boiled egg without bread and butter.

  She went out, very upright. At once Catherine reactivated the television set, as if shy with me without a chaperone. She said:

  – I can talk about it now. Miss Emmett doesn’t believe in psychotherapy. A bit too modern for her, I guess, suppose. Our father – oh, that sounds so mocking but what else can you call him? – he may have turned against you but he was all over me. Very loving, then one day he became too loving. He’d been away on business a long time and he said he’d missed his little girl. I was frightened. When she found out Miss Emmett went for him with the scissors.

  – Oh no.

  I saw the bald newsreader distractedly. It was the same bulletin as before:

  –… than by the merciful and, he might say, miraculously frustrated attempt on the life of the democratically elected leader of a free…

  – I got over being frightened, and then I started doing puzzles all the time. Crossword puzzles, quite hard ones, and always getting them right. And then they knew I was ill. This doctor in San Francisco said the best man was – That seems to have shaken you, you
look really shaken. I’m sorry, I forget that it shakes people. It doesn’t shake me any more, you see.

  The newsreader was saying:

  – suspect more than one person is involved. The police are engaged on the rounding up of suspects. Roadblocks have been set up outside the capital. During the period of the emergency no exit permits will be issued. Grencijta International Airport is being closed to outgoing traffic until further notice…

  – But they can’t do that, Catherine cried. Oh, how stupid they all are with their stupid politics.

  – Stupid? Who? How?

  I hadn’t been listening to the news. I was, as she had said, shaken. How then am I able to set down verbatim the words spoken on the news? The same words, or something like them, were spoken later on the news. I listened attentively to that news. There is an explanation for everything.

  – Miss Emmett! Do you hear what they’ve done, Miss Emmett?

  – Look, I said urgently. Were you given any information by anybody about the precise nature of the relationship between our father and mother?

  – Oh, they were happy. That’s why he became so deranged when she –

  – What’s all the shouting about?

  Miss Emmett had come in, chewing on a sugarlump: votf orver fyouting avouk?

  – They won’t let anybody leave. It’s because of this stupid shooting at the stupid President.

  – Ah, Miss Emmett said. So they knew, you see, when they sent us that cable. They knew there’d be trouble. The Americans are not stupid. They have their spy organizations. The C.U.A. and F.B.I. and U.S.I.S.