A Superior Spectre

by Angela Meyer

  Bethea pats my leg again. ‘Well, just thought ye should know.’

  ‘Thanks, Bethea,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll come by again.’

  I nod. There is complicity between us. I don’t want to infect anyone else, but I can see she is alone, her husband dead, and she is beyond caring about my choices. She will never ask more than she thinks I could answer. I don’t really deserve to have this. Someone.

  ‘You know, we used to just put up twigs and sprigs,’ says my aunt, taking in the colourful streamers, picture cards and flowers in Miss Taylor’s home. In the corner is a fragrant fir tree, bedecked with sweets, candles and fruit, much larger than the crooked tree Ailie recently bought and decorated. This living room is of substantial size, uncluttered, all in shades of brown. My green dress matches the tree and is suddenly festive.

  I clutch my hands between my knees, sitting on a russet-coloured lounge. My knees have been shaking all morning. My whole body is in tremors. It is warm in the room. I can’t shake the visions. I can’t close my eyes. It is getting so much worse. The woman with short hair is coming up frequently. And then there was a wild animal, hunting me down. The feeling of persecution when I awoke was palpable. I felt the floor of my room covered with knives. I didn’t want to get up.

  Edith came to help me do my hair and I saw her through a haze of fear. She remarked that I might be sick.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I managed to say. And on the tip of my tongue were other words that made no sense at all. Everybody’s talkin’… In a foreign accent.

  Edith has drawn my hair into a tight red clip and now I am bothered by one strand that is pulled too tightly and stings. I work at it with one shaking finger and see Ailie look at me with a worried expression. I try to smile. I am craving the sweets on the table. It is that time in the month where sweet flavours seem like they will create a soft lining for both my belly and my thoughts.

  At supper, Oskar is across from me at the table. I look, he looks away; he looks, I feel his eyes. He sips and looks over the edge of his glass. I cannot think of what to say. He reaches for something and his chest shifts under his shirt. His neck elongates, white and ridged with tongue-holds.

  ‘Eros.’ The word slips off my tongue. Luckily, right at that moment someone has pulled a cracker and lollies spray across the tablecloth. I have no control over myself.

  Dr Fallow is here. I can’t tell him. I think about what the asylums must be like. Somehow I do have an image of them, though I have never seen one. Padded walls, a spot of blood on a pillow. Women with wild hair and cracked lips.

  Edward, I see wolves.

  Edward, I see a man in my looking glass.

  Edward, I see the water.

  Edward, I am starting to speak the words he hears.

  Edward, I know a new word: ‘fuck’.

  I did try to start writing it all down. But I felt so ashamed of the strange words. What if someone found it? Ailie or Edith? But I can’t go on keeping it in.

  Oskar reaches across the table with a cracker for me to pull. I notice his long, thin fingers. I pull hard on it and the sweets shower in his direction, which means I have the larger half. He scoops them up and puts them in my palm. His fingertips linger and he looks into my eyes, but then he swallows and draws away.

  With the food sitting heavy in our stomachs we crowd around the piano. Ailie stands back a little. I know she envies Miss Taylor her piano. It is yet another symbol of Miss Taylor sitting slightly above her, in ways that matter to my aunt.

  We had learnt many of the carols at school and in church, and I sing them now softly, not wanting to be heard above other voices. My favourite has always been ‘Away in a Manger’, because I love the image of the baby Jesus surrounded by sleeping animals. The heat and smell and peace of them.

  I need to relieve myself and so I leave the room during ‘Silent Night’ and pull on my cloak to go out to the privy. The air outside is grey, cold and crisp, and seems to hold Mr Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. I hear the crunch of a footstep behind me, before I open the door to the reeking privy. I spin. It is Oskar.

  ‘Sometimes it’s good to get away from the noise,’ he says.

  His coat is slipped over his frame like a glove. A swell of desire rushes from my groin to my head and I feel dizzy. I try to grip the privy door but my hand doesn’t quite reach it and then he is here and he catches me in his thin, strong arms. I smell his skin, the candied fruit on his breath. Our mouths come together immediately, opening wide, drawing one another’s breath. I press my chest to his, move my arms to circle him. I can’t think of anything but the skin beneath his clothes, and the organs beyond that. His blood, beating. There is no place for us to go but the stinking privy. Eyes all around us, from the tenements. We have no option but to pull apart.

  When we do, and the cold air hits my face like a slap, rationality returns. We cannot do this, or it will create some external evidence of my madness. A woman who has burst from her corset, from the cage of her bones. That’s what it feels like, like I am uncontained and spreading out.

  I press a hand to his chest, half pushing him back, half just to feel the warmth. The look in his eyes I suspect matches mine – wild.

  And so I picked up this twenty-year-old from a McDonald’s carpark in the western suburbs. It was dark. He stared ahead at the road, chewing on his lip. My tongue was paralysed.

  ‘Where will we go?’ he asked, and when he looked at me his eyes were childlike, a little frightened, and that both repulsed me and turned me on. I wanted to let him out of the car and I wanted to make him come.

  ‘Got any beer?’ he asked when we were inside my flat. He stood in the kitchen with hands hanging by his sides from out of his hoodie. He had on jeans and those kind of canvas sneakers that smell after a while. A boy’s shoes. I handed him a Coopers Dark and then looked at him properly. He returned the gaze and smirked at me while necking the beer. Less shy, now. He set down the bottle and went straight for my belt. I wondered if we would kiss at all. Maybe he wasn’t into it. I didn’t want to force my mouth on his if he didn’t want me to.

  He pulled out my cock, which was already hard, and nodded. ‘Nice,’ he said.

  I rubbed the front of his jeans. He pulled off his hoodie and shirt and I felt a rush of lust and something more complex. Memory, perhaps. It hit me like sudden nausea. I moved my hand up to stroke his collarbone.

  ‘Suck my cock,’ he said. So bold. He pulled it out of his jeans himself.

  I led him by the forearm toward the lounge in the next room. I sat him down and knelt in front, took him in my mouth gladly. He began to say things: ‘Oh yeah, suck it, spit on it.’ How could he know what he wanted, at his age? I was envious. But also, there was something lost in that moment. I became aware of the orangey lamplight, the sound of my own mouth. Why was it a turn-off that he wasn’t innocent? Such a beautiful youth – skin video-game white, perfect nipples, a line of soft blond hair down his front. But he’d done this many times before.

  Still, he got me off easily, after he came in my mouth.

  ‘You’re super quiet, man,’ he said to me afterwards.

  ‘Mmm.’ I nodded.

  And then he thanked me and left. And I sort of napped on the lounge and woke, as usual, thinking of Eric. And with guilt coursing through me, to my fingertips, even though the lover had been of age. Maybe it was guilt about wanting him – and the experience – to be more than it was? Anyway, I still thought about it a lot when I masturbated, afterwards. The smell of his sweat and cheap deodorant. But not long after that I met Faye, and felt joy and love and subsequently pushed a lot of things down, deep down, but never deep enough.

  You get the point.

  Yesterday I sat watching for otters again, spasming with coughs, and I thought: I could just go over the cliff. It’s small, but the water is cold and will probably kill me. I could put rocks in my coat pocket, like Virginia Woolf. I wonder if Faye has moved on from here, or if she’s staying in
Gairloch. It’s as though she can smell my stink: my foetid, dying breaths.

  The anatomy book lies open on a stretched-out neck, flesh peeled back, and I see that we are made of clusters and tunnels. Rebecca has added colours to the illustration: reds, pinks, blues. I resist putting my hand to my cheek to check everything within me is contained. Her face is near mine as she explains tendons and vessels, stretches of pink clinging to bone, that move now as I nod. Her eyes are wide and I can now see the back of them, all the spidery red. The vulnerable sockets.

  ‘These colours,’ I say, ‘you know them from …’

  ‘From the cadavers,’ she says matter-of-factly.

  A clock gives a chunky tick-tock. Joan is stretched out reading on the lounge behind us, one leg crossed over the other. Rebecca smells of something earthily floral, like a stem or stalk. They live with Rebecca’s uncle and this is the old town, closer to Surgeons’ Hall. A close space, in the middle floors. The uncle is away mostly, they tell me, but no one is supposed to know that. Rebecca shows me around. There are only two bedrooms. Theirs is dishevelled and musty, with one bed. It has a dresser and a quite-empty bookshelf. Clothing draped across chairs. The dresser is overcrowded: powders and nervine pills, Reid’s Essence of Coffee, scraps of paper and a half-tapped inkwell. They do not mention the mess. It makes me scratchy, brings something up: my mother’s face turned away in a dark room. But this is lively mess, busy mess, mess I couldn’t hope to accumulate.

  Rebecca keeps turning the pages – some images coloured, some as they were. She teaches, explains, but without pause. It’s a lot to take in, this exposure to my workings. And nothing to explain that. The brain looks only like a lump – it could be in the sky or underground, a cloud or vegetable. Rebecca has given it no colour. Maybe he doesn’t even live there; maybe he’s caught in my chest or my elbow.

  ‘You need a break.’ Rebecca smiles. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Joan moves to the bedroom and closes the door, without a word. Rebecca brings out the tea tray. She frowns at Joan’s absence, but says nothing about it. I see I cannot come any closer to her as a friend – not without upsetting a more established equilibrium. So here is someone else with whom I cannot share my burden.

  ‘May I ask what began your interest in the medical?’ I ask.

  She takes a sip and sits the cup down. ‘All my siblings died before the age of seven.’

  ‘Oh …’

  ‘Four of them.’

  I cannot imagine having and then losing a family around you. I only had one loss that could compare.

  ‘And I never could stop asking why, and wondering if more could have been done. And being the one who somehow lived, it seemed I had to have a purpose.’ She sips again, looks intently at me. ‘To just get married, I couldn’t see that for myself.’

  ‘I have such admiration for your determination.’

  ‘Don’t. It doesn’t really feel like a choice.’

  It feels like more of a choice, or at least a resistance to other options, than what has happened in my life.

  Rebecca looks toward the closed door briefly, where Joan is, and even though she turns back to me and shrugs, she can’t hide her worry. I have to go. I can feel the visions pressing, anyway, on the spidery red behind my eyeballs. I need to be alone with them. But I hope some of Rebecca’s determination has been absorbed. I know where I want to be, at least – I have only to work against the wishes of others, and this encroaching presence.

  Madness needs privacy. If I could only work out the words to this song in my head. But I am always sitting with Ailie. I have to turn away from her to the window and make the sounds with my mouth. She caught me rounding my lips at dinner. She said perhaps I should talk to Dr Fallow. But then she frowned and said maybe not, that it would be better for me to talk to him when I am feeling well. Because it would ruin my prospects with him, I suppose (though I see they are not there anyway, as much as Ailie wants to think they are). But I am getting desperate for a cure. And maybe Edward would have that.

  William will be in Edinburgh in the early new year. I anticipate seeing him so much. I hope he brings with him the smell of the Highlands, of the air and heather and his retriever. I will get as close as I can, and just inhale. I will beg him to take me back there. Although now, might these visions follow me and taint the one place I feel at home? I must find out how to leave them behind – leave Edinburgh, leave the man in the looking glass. Nothing would keep me here if I were able to leave, not even the irresistible draw of Oskar. Perhaps I need to go elsewhere, to Australia – it is the place that springs to mind – and drop him off. That is impossible. How will I get there and also find my way back?

  Ailie and I are now in the middle of reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Well, I am, and she pretends to know where we are up to. It is difficult for me to read about freedom and tyranny without relating these words to my own situation. Mill’s number one basic liberty is a freedom of thought and emotion. The individual being sovereign over his own body and mind. But what if your thoughts are being suppressed, not just from the outside, but from some inner tyrant also?

  And I think that Ailie wants me to know this text in order to feel ‘at liberty’ to pursue a life she perceives as being better than the one I had, one of a higher standing, but isn’t that, too, suppressing the thoughts and emotions I have? It is the opposite of liberty; it is to put myself, potentially, in the hands of another tyrant. I feel I am pressing at walls all around.

  A note has come from Oskar and Edward Fallow, inviting me for tea. Me alone. Ailie is unsure about letting me go without her, without a chaperone. I don’t think it is because she is worried about me being alone with men; I think it is because she is worried about their impression of me at this time. I have been taking the laudanum regularly. It doesn’t calm the visions but it softens my daytime reflections of them, the way they haunt my eyes, ears, tongue. It helps me appear functional. But this is not a way to live. Sometimes I do wish the perfect suitor would come along, whether I like him or not, because then it will be over with; I will be able to accept my fate. And if I cannot go home then what else is possible? But then, Miss Taylor. Rebecca and Joan. But one needs education, money. And to be happy in the city.

  And to not be speaking in tongues.

  Ailie and I arrive at the middle floor of a large grey building, on a wider street than ours in the new town. She had insisted on at least seeing me to the door. When we ring the bell she looks stricken, cannot decide if she should greet the men. ‘Would it be ruder to leave or stay?’ she mumbles to herself. ‘I don’t want them to think they have to invite me in,’ she says, and rushes quickly away, her skirts brushing the stairs.

  A petite maid with brown deer-like eyes answers the door. ‘Mr Fallow is expecting you.’

  The apartment is much larger that Aunt Ailie’s, and also Mr Stewart’s and Miss Taylor’s. The floor is bone-coloured, cold-looking. I follow the maid into the lounge, where there are deerskin rugs, an unusual white stone fireplace, and armchairs also coated in animal furs. Near to the heat, the rugs and the chairs give off a smell that makes me think of Jesus in the manger.

  Oskar rises from an armchair as though he hadn’t heard me come in. When he takes my hand his slim fingers are cold, and shaking a little. As though he’s just come in from outside.

  ‘I’m afraid Edward was called away again,’ he says.

  ‘Oh.’ I cannot look into his eyes. I smooth down the front of my dress.

  ‘Virginia will bring some cheeses, and tea. Please, sit,’ he says, as he sits himself across from me, leaning back and placing one lavender pantalooned leg atop the other. He wears a vest the same off-white as the floor. The light colours of his clothing make the pink stand out on his cheeks, which dimple when he smiles. A lock of hair has fallen in front of his eyes.

  I am so afraid of what I might do or say. Despite his high collar I can see the frantic pulse at his neck.

  ‘Thank you for inv
iting me,’ I say. The words seem to bounce around the sparse, strange room, before being absorbed into the furs.

  I resist the urge to rub my face against the animal throw that is behind me on the seat.

  Virginia wheels in a trolley and then takes off an ivory platter and places it on the low table between me and Oskar. The product of an animal served on the bones of another. I don’t know much about hunting – a man’s sport – but I do feel strange about ornamented death, instead of killing to sustain life, as with food.

  ‘Did you stalk any of these animals yourself?’ I ask Oskar, as Virginia pours steaming tea into white cups.

  Oskar uncrosses his legs and leans forward. ‘Only this one,’ he says, pointing at a deerskin on the floor.

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  ‘It’s just something my family does.’

  His eyes roam over my face. His lavender pantaloons hug him while he is sitting. They look soft – doeskin, perhaps. His legs are like a deer’s, too, long and bony. I sip my hot tea, washing down the excess of saliva in my mouth. He leans forward again, slices a piece of soft cheese and adds it to a piece of fruited bread. He seems to think for a moment, then rises, still chewing, and goes out of the room.

  He returns quickly, the maid following him with a small bag. She bows lightly to me and then leaves the room, moving towards the front door. It opens and closes.

  ‘I’ve sent her on an errand,’ he says, and a devilish smile breaks across his face.

  I don’t know what to do with my lips or my breath; they are twisted like the beak of a crossbill. I take some cheese and bread and let my mind focus on the flavour. The bread is a little dry and catches in my throat.

  Oskar stands, sits again, then stands purposefully and comes over to my chair. ‘Do you like the cheese?’ he asks. There is a tremor in his voice.

  I stand. My back is cold off the pelt. The fire is to the front of me, behind Oskar.