M/F

by Anthony Burgess

  It wasn’t all that tough. I tore into it with ferocity, spooning bottled mustard-and-horseradish on at intervals. I was trying to eat everybody and thus get them out of the way: my father, Llew, Kitty Kee, myself.

  – I don’t think I’ll have any more, dear, nicely as you’ve cooked it. I’ll just make myself a cup of tea, I think.

  – This wine’s not tough, you know.

  – Strong, isn’t it? Nice though, very nice. It’ll make me sleep perhaps. I haven’t been sleeping too well lately.

  – Don’t you ever have proper meals?

  – Well, you know how it is, dear boy. It’s always an encouragement just to have little snacks, you know, when there’s nowhere proper to do your eating. I didn’t like the idea of turning one of the bedrooms into a diningroom. A bedroom’s a bedroom, all said and done.

  – Why didn’t you get a bigger house?

  – Well, this one’s sort of in the family in a way. My cousin bought it for letting.

  I opened my mouth at her.

  – It’s very illmannered to show what you’re eating. It turns my stomach, dear.

  – Cousin?

  – He was in the Colonial Service, not very high up but he got a knighthood when he retired. He thought rents might help his pension a little. Jim Pismire. His liver got very bad.

  – Sir James –

  – That’s right. How ever did you know?

  – But, good God, it was he who – What’s in this house? What’s upstairs?

  – Only bedrooms.

  – But, damn it, this is the place, this must be the –

  – Finish your dinner, dear.

  I was on my feet, the still-hot oven burning my calves. I had the key in my hand.

  – That’s not the key to this house, Miss Emmett said. It’s a Yale lock. Really, Miles, I wonder sometimes if you’re all there. But I shouldn’t say that, knowing your poor father. What I mean to say is that this is no museum, is it? I have some little ornaments, as you know, but nothing for anybody to come and see. Now sit down and finish your dinner.

  I groaned, sitting down. I poured more wine for us both. I had not dared previously entertain the fear that Sib Legeru’s work had mouldered back to its basic physical elements through neglect and then gone to the incinerators or the sea like the rest of the detritus of the world. The wine steadied my throat as I said:

  – When you took this house over was there anything in it?

  – Nothing, dear, except spiders, these big tropical ones. One, I remember, carried eggs on her back. There’s an outhouse in the garden, of course, and that’s where they seem to have put the old rubbish that was here before.

  The wine had flushed her. She began to waver a bar or so of You will be my summer queen.

  – What sort of old rubbish?

  – It’s locked up, but you can just about see through the window, all cobwebby. Rubbish, the usual sort of thing. It’s not nice to have dirty things even in the garden, the garden properly speaking being part of what you pay rent for, but the bushes have grown all round the shed so you can’t really see it. American red-currant and laurel. And lots of weeds. Out of sight out of mind. Goodness, this wine is strong. And now where do you think you’re going?

  – To have a look at this shed.

  She laughed vinously.

  – You will have your own way, always did, would. It’s dark now. You won’t see much. And you can’t get in, can you?

  I held up the key fiercely.

  – This’ll fit. It’s got to fit. Is there a torch or lamp or candle anywhere?

  – Well, have it your own way. There are candles in that cupboard there, but don’t start setting anything on fire.

  I opened the cupboard and found a bag of raisins, two empty sauce bottles, a packet of icing sugar, a tube of dragées and a paper packet of candles. I said:

  – Don’t wait up for me. This may take some time.

  – Silly boy.

  The way to the garden was, I had seen, a narrow passage by the side of the house, separated from the next house and its mirror-image passage by a rickety creosoted fence. There was only the front door to get out by, and, passing the living-room open door, I saw Catherine with her dental bridge in her hand, licking with delicacy an adherence of chewed bread. The television movie said: He’s the worm in the big apple, and a clarinet arabesque followed by a soft drumthud illustrated this. Catherine heard me and said:

  – You leaving us?

  – I’ll be back.

  – We go to bed early here.

  I fixed the catch on the front door Yale lock so that I would not shut myself out, then I felt my way towards the shed, trembling. The garden had been totally neglected. My feet crunched on broken glass and squelched on a small dead animal body as I fought between bushes and branches. There was not much moon. I took out my local matches and struck several before I could light one of the candles. The foliage kept the wind off. I could hardly get the key into the lock of the warped door, I was dithering so much. But it fitted. This shed, then, all its paint eaten away by the salt wind, housed the immortal remains of Sib Legeru. It was for me a moment so solemn that I wanted to retch. The door groaned an arabesque, opening, and there I was, inside.

  How, to use a fictional cliché, can I describe what I saw? I lighted all my candles and planted them in their own wax on every utilitarian surface I could find – the narrow windowsill, a mineral-water crate, a couple of dried-out paintcans I upturned. Then I looked around voluptuously, though somewhat disturbed by a stink of decay whose provenance I could not place. There were canvases leaning against the walls, gnawed and dusty. There were a couple of teachests full of large filthy manila envelopes, springback manuscript folders, loose and unprotected sheets of scrawled foolscap. I stretched, like one waking to a long summer day of arranged pleasures, and then began to look at the canvases. I raged with anger and cried aloud Bastards as I saw the defilement of soil and mildew, but then I ignored the accidents and became absorbed in the essences. Tomorrow I would bring daylight to the works and a closely examining eye; tonight was for a generalized awe and a gloat over multiplicity.

  The pictures, which were all oils, were not notable for good draughtsmanship – a prerequisite for surrealism, and surrealistic was what a crude taxonomy would term them. But instead of the juxtaposition of disparates or cauchemar attributions (a trombone on fire; a water closet in a lunar desert), there was a consistent attempt at the representation of metamorphoses unbound by the restrictions of the sciences. Thus, a wrapped loaf reproduced itself like a living thing by the process of extending itself in space, trying to hold its offspring of miniature wrapped loaves with wax paper wings, while their solidity deliquesced into blood that glistened in the candlelight as though newly shed. It was freedom, it was imagination untrammelled even by unconscious laws of dissociation. What I took to be a companion picture showed blood turning itself into a subtle attenuation of golden filaments that became white pudding. Then the raw canvas showed through before a naked thigh strove to become a glass jar in a coruscation of noisy firework colour that settled into the delicate pink, green and white of the segment of a human arm. These were large paintings, about three feet by two. Smaller ones showed similar acts of daring that soothed my soul by their disdain of what the world calls meaning. An open first folio (recognizable from a crude reproduction of the Droeshout portrait) walked a sea that was all buttons, sleeves and tabbysilk lining, but the whole composition was shining black framed in strings of crimson. I saw clearly how that old surrealism really truckled to the world of cause and effect: a trombone proclaimed, by being burnt, that it could not be. Here was the ultimate liberation of the spirit.

  I dipped into a large typewritten work of fiction, its folios damp and mottled and smelling of old apples. Soon I did more than dip: I read in complete absorption, standing. The story was of a man due to give a radio talk. Sitting in the studio, waiting for the red light, he feels a need to go to the toilet. In the toilet a grea
t fly emerges from the flushing water and addresses him in a language he recognizes as Canaanite. It glows in a kind of numinous gold and leads him through the ceiling to a room in which there is a robed congregation of Shiites. Mirza Mohammed Ali strives to make himself heard over loudspeakered music from The Pirates of Penzance which modules to the mindless clatter of an adding machine. The man sees that the fly has changed to a middleaged American named George, who leads him to an arena where a popcorn-eating audience roots for two youths fighting a huge engulfing python. Leaves fall from the air, the snake becomes a dead tree trunk, the boys shrink into sleeping infants and then expand into blonde Viking women over whom a man in green silently laments: he is their brother and he has killed them before learning their identity. The sky and the forest that has replaced the arena erupt into laughter and a procession of Roman revellers with cups, wineskins and garlands dances through to baroque music. George has turned into a bronze statue. The man follows the revellers through a doorway. He finds himself in a booklined study, alone with a bearded scholar who speaks Latin at him at length, at the same time slicing shive after shive of pink talking meat. Each piece of meat is transformed into a place or a person – an Iberian landscape full of redcoats and artillery smoke, a gamecourt, King Arthur III, the Sultan of China’s daughter, the outer wall of a feudal castle with a blind lady balancing on it, the Crimean coast, Cabourg in Normandy, Hödur with the mistletoe sword.

  This was all in the first chapter. I would have read on to the end of the candles (the book must have been about as long as War and Peace) if a spider had not startled me by unwinding from the roof beam on to the back of my neck. It was a reminder: now was only for dipping, sampling. I sought shorter things, poems. Like this:

  London Figaro infra pound

  Threejoint dackdiddy Solomon

  Delay delay thou Gabriel hound

  Mucklewrath IHS brilliging on

  Ants alley jackalent Meckerbound

  Skysent stone threw sinkiss black

  And caged Cardinal Mabinogion

  Though M is NN copied slack

  A freehand onestroke perfect round

  Took that bony face aback!

  Almost a nursery rhyme, kid’s stuff. But I read freer things while the candles gently obeyed the laws of geometric and chemical dissolution but moved towards their own wax abstractions.

  13

  I was reading the fourth canto of an epic poem rather in the style of Blake’s prophetic books, full of gauzy giants quick to change to and from moods and coffeepots. It was, I thought, very exciting. The candles were nearly wicks in wet wax. I should, to be sensible, have taken the work, or some other work, up to the attic to read in bed and comfort. But this, I reminded myself, was the night of the preliminary survey, and I could hardly transfer the entire œuvre up from here. Really it was physical inertia complementing intellectual excitement and making me tolerate the stench which the fumes of Sinjantin did little to mitigate, as well as the pain my thin haunches took from the empty mineral-water crate I sat on. I paid little attention to the noise of drunken men leaving the tavern, though I wondered for a second if Aspinwall, frustrated and paralytic, was the lump I heard hit the pavement before the banging of a door. This noise was more real, the denunciation by Laman of Rosh:

  Forecap, neigh, sprue, drench of scallions

  In asaph and kentigern, your abaces fall, your log

  Stalk in a clone of bartlets –

  I seemed actually to hear the whimper of Rosh and the breathy timbre of Laman’s voice. Amazing. The sound rose from the page as from some miracle of electronic contrivance, but it continued when the canto came to an end, with Laman cantering off on a mortise into an empyrean that was a clause and opoponax. I raised my head. The noise was coming from the house.

  Noise in the house. Trouble. Burglars. Police. Miss Emmett fighting back but her weapon wrenched away and clattering, while she whimpered, to the floor. I fell stiffly out of the shed, angry at this intrusion of the boring violent world. I saw light shining raw from the uncurtained back windows of three storeys. The noise came from above ground level. I stumbled over glass and brambles towards the front of the house, noting an empty street, no police-car. The door would not yield: the catch had been released. The sittingroom window was a sash one and the lower light was down to the limit. But the frame was old and swollen, and the two elements of the metal fastening had grown apart, never more to engage properly. I pressed my palms on the sash and forced it up an inch, then I got my claws under and sent the whole light whistling up. I climbed into the dark sittingroom, which smelt of sweat and vanilla. The television set, after its long heat, was crackling in its contracting wooden casing. Light from out there. I went on to the corridor and saw Miss Emmett asleep, still fully dressed, on her chair at the kitchen table. That would be the wine. She, then, was safe. It was Catherine who was in trouble. I could hear her from upstairs, being in trouble, and the voice of the male she was in trouble with. If it was really trouble. That specialist in the interior of the island might, for all I knew, have prescribed nightly fights with men, followed by yieldings. It seemed improbable, though.

  I ran up to the first landing – bathroom, empty bedroom, Miss Emmett’s presumably, their doors open, landing light blazing. I ran up again and came to the source of the noise. The door was closed but not locked. I opened, and new emotions enriched, then replaced, those already proceeding in Catherine’s room. The room, if I may be permitted to describe it briefly, expressed Catherine well enough. Its décor followed trends at third or fourth hand, since she was out of touch with the direct influences that animated her volatile agegroup. On one wall was Che Guevara and a poster advertising a corrida in Algeciras, September 1968. On another was W. C. Fields, a dead, child-hating, drink-loving, bulb-nosed American comedian of the thirties, who became briefly a youth fad perhaps because of his cussedness (he would never learn the lines of his scripts, for instance) and the weary corniness of his wisecracks. There was also Humphrey Bogart, an ugly but, I always had to concede, curiously attractive tough-part film actor with a slight lisp. There was a big pop-art poster whose crude yellows and blues were an obscenity and whose design was as flaccid as a two-year-old’s penis – concentric circles, lower-case Gothic letters exhibited as asemiological artefacts in a kind of illiterate glee. There was the inevitable recordplayer with discs and sleeves scattered – Punishings from the Rods, The Dea Dea Tease, Nekro and the Philiacs and so on. Dirty underlinen was everywhere on the floor. There was a powerful reek of shoes and stockings, also of ancient snacks which had been over-zested with tomato ketchup. The chest of drawers had something like a dozen and a half empty soft-drink bottles arranged perversely neatly on its surface; most of the drawers were halfopen, with bunches of creased apparel thrusting out and the two cups of a brassière dangling down (the fastener probably caught in the wool of a nearly fully endrawered sweater) like miniature windsocks. The rear or garden window was, in fact, open an inch or two at the bottom, admitting sufficient breeze to justify the fancy.

  The bed was a single divan, with the heavy shaped embroidered cover (of bright and fussy design – red leaves, green pagodas, orange parrots), that made it a piece of day furniture, thrust to the floor unfolded. On the bed was Catherine in a not over-clean nightdress that had been concertinaed into a sort of cummerbund by, I saw now, that male who was her assailant rather than her lover. Her big dancing bubs were exposed, and the male was kissing the one after the other in a brisk rhythm that made him look as if he were doing a head ballet to, say, the slow movement of Haydn’s Clock Symphony. She let him do this because her hands were wholly occupied in fighting off the lower attempt at engagement. She was weak, though, for some reason. Perhaps the fight had been going on longer than I thought. The male was fully dressed, but his fly was open, as if he were in a urinal and not a boudoir. One hand attempted to guide the penetration, which had not been achieved, the other – cynically, in view of the Haydn ballet – tried to keep Catherine
subdued with odd fisted belts on the face or body. It was, of course, Llew.

  Catherine was the first to see me, and the sight of the exact duplicate of her ravisher, standing there at the door in a brief posture of undoubted satisfaction, gave her energy for new screams. Satisfaction was perhaps inevitable, because she was being punished for daring to be my unpleasant and unsavoury sister, though this was not the mode of punishment I would myself have considered apt for insolence of that sort. When I saw that it was Llew, my first attempts to explain to myself how he had managed to get here and do what he was doing were held back, like the beginning of a queue, by a portly commissionaire who gave precedence to an awed acceptance of the appropriateness of Llew as minister of either pain or pleasure to my sister. They were, and The Severed Head or some other group could make a song out of that for them, complete with sneering intonation and tortured vowels, in a way meant for each other. The queue was still not allowed to start moving in, for the first awe was followed by another, of a very high mystical or metaphysical order. My father had been undoubtedly mad. He had been granted a mad vision. He had envisioned his daughter set upon sexually by someone of my appearance, and he had mistaken that person for myself. Madness, like great art, marched through the scrub of space and time and lopped it all down as it went with a mental parang. Like, I nearly thought, Sib Legeru, but I stopped the thought in time, space.

  It was up to one of these two to say something to me, but it was up to Llew first to feel ashamed and stow his weapon and creep away hangdog from the bed, tail indeed between his legs. Things never happen as propriety or even probability dictates. Llew recognized me without surprise, with a nod of satisfaction rather at my being here and providing the true explanation (which was true) of how he himself was able to be here, and at the timely entrance of one who really had to want to be a buddy, despite previous disavowals, and give a buddy’s help. He said: