A Superior Spectre

by Angela Meyer

  She lowers it slowly. ‘Is that who was askin’ about ye?’

  ‘She’s not my wife anymore.’

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘I didn’t quite get to the paperwork.’

  Bethea frowns deeply. ‘I dinnae think I want to know.’

  ‘You don’t need to.’

  She looks for a moment as though she will ask more. But then she brings the book back up close to her face. She must need glasses.

  ‘How did he die?’ I ask. Her husband, I mean.

  She sighs. ‘An accident.’

  I don’t push her. I look up at the bookshelf behind her. It’s mostly pulpy crime, romances, historical fiction. I take up my well-thumbed copy of Kafka’s stories, sitting on the table beside me. It’s only been a few days but this is my chair already. I sit here most of the day, read, despair, dream, remember, think about taking up the shillelagh and walking. Want the air. But mostly don’t. Want to die, but don’t die. Don’t want to die, either. Thank Bethea in my mind, but then am repulsed by her kindness, and her mouth noises. Her bad cooking. I should just not eat. Her wool gives off a reek of trapped smoke and something greener.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asks, snapping me from my thoughts, but not lowering the book or looking at me. ‘To want to be so far awae.’

  ‘I just want peace,’ I say. ‘I have a right to it.’

  ‘Do ye?’ She still is not looking at me.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘Doesn’t your wife?’

  If I had the energy to get angry. I mean, why now? Is she feeling some sisterhood-like complicity with a woman she’s never met?

  ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ I say, moving to stand, pain shooting through my abdomen.

  ‘I don’t, I’m sorry,’ she says, lowering the book again, her pale moon of a face remaining tight.

  I cough and pain shoots again through my abdomen, and lower, and then wetness spreads beneath me in the chair. I call out with shock and pain.

  ‘What is it?’ She rises.

  ‘I’ve shit myself,’ I say.

  ‘Poor bairn,’ she says, chuckling. She throws her book down and goes to get a towel. I sit alone in the shameful sticky stink, spot a rabbit shooting by out the window.

  I’ve been both afraid and ashamed, in the days since we saw William. But I have also been mostly free of the visions, as though the telling did open and release them, like steam. I have been able to finish my meals, and can sit up in the evenings and read to Ailie without tiring too quickly. My aunt has been out a lot, since that day, though hasn’t told me much about what she is doing. She leaves me sitting and staring out the window at the grey city, Edith tidying around me. I hope I will see William again, and that he will not tell my father. Or perhaps that would be good – that my father would then send for me, see that Edinburgh is not treating me well. That it is driving me mad.

  Today the sun glints off the windows on the building opposite, across the alleyway. I could almost like the place.

  I have a line in my head from Cosmos: ‘It is an inherent attribute of the human mind to experience fear, and not hope or joy, at the aspect of that which is unexpected and extraordinary.’ Humboldt is talking about comets, ‘stars with fiery streaming hair’. I would embrace this unknown if I could, but I do not even have a word for it. Nor do I know if it is natural. If it turns out to be as fleeting as a shooting star then I will be grateful.

  I hear Ailie on the stairs – that neat footstep could only be hers – and then the door is unlocked and opens. I smile at her but she looks stricken, guilty.

  ‘What’s wrong, Aunt?’ I ask.

  She leaves the door open and I hear other feet on the stairs – men’s feet, boots.

  ‘Now, Leonora, the laird and I had a word, and I just didn’t know what to do. I spoke with Dr Fallow, and he thinks …’

  I close my ears. My body is on alert, full of flicking tails. I see the open door and I run towards it. There are two men on the stairs in white. I push past them and they grab for me when Ailie shouts. I don’t have on any shoes, or a coat, but I run out into the cold, bright street, knocking into a man so his hat tumbles onto the footpath. I look to the left and right, and run in the direction of the old town. The feet are now coming after me.

  On Princes Street four well-dressed people are crowded around a velocipede, viewing it like an exotic creature. I push past them and mount it, pulling my skirts up. They exclaim; one even laughs. And then I am off. On the footpath there are too many people. I move onto the road, but it is bumpy and reverberates painfully in my groin and lower back. I push on. I weave between two cabs, and a horse shies and whinnies. Faces are a blur, noise rises and falls but mainly I hear my own panting breath. The focus and movement of my limbs clears my head. I don’t know where I am going or what I will do when I get there.

  I have been fast and those who were chasing me – both the men in white and the tall man who must own the velocipede – have fallen away. I dismount and run the bike, my stockinged feet aching with the cold, up the Royal Mile, dodging the legs of beggars and trying not to look into children’s faces. I cannot be confronted by that at this moment. Here is the druggist, and near it the entrance to that underground chamber. I lean the velocipede against the shop window and immediately urchins surround it. I enter, the bell tinkling. The man who last served me, and whom I saw cloaked in that underground room, is already serving a customer. I wring my hands and pace, but he does not look at me. Will he let me hide out in that chamber?

  He is taking a long time with the hunched-over woman. I cough behind her, and they both turn. The agitation must be showing on my face because he says ‘excuse me’ to the woman and comes over, with a puzzled expression, perhaps unsure where he has seen me before.

  ‘May I hide in your … underground?’ I ask.

  He looks around at the woman, frowning. I feel I’ve kept my voice low.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It is there for a specific purpose.’

  ‘I need to commune,’ I lie. ‘I need to access the visions.’ As I say this, I shiver. I don’t want to access them. But down in that darkness, what if they do take over again? And how long can I stay there, anyway? Even if he lets me down there I have no money, no other clothes, no hat, not even any shoes. He and his wife, and their community, are strangers. They have no obligation to look after me.

  Oh, I trusted William to be a friend. Perhaps I should have trusted someone else, like Miss Taylor or Mr Stewart. Or would they have told Ailie, too? No matter what, I might have ended up here, ragged and alone in the old town, bare feet on the floor just like when I was a child.

  ‘You must wait, Lass,’ the man says, turning back towards his customer.

  ‘I cannot; they are in pursuit.’

  ‘They?’

  Now I realise how that might have sounded.

  ‘People are not understanding of my gift,’ I say, my eyes pleading.

  He puts up his hand to say: just wait.

  One of the children outside has managed to mount the velocipede, and three others are pushing him away from the window, laughing. But as it clears a cab pulls up at some speed, sleek black horse bucking at the halt. They have spotted the velocipede. My stomach clenches like the claw of a hawk.

  ‘Sir!’ I exclaim. He is handing the woman a brown paper bag. Is there an entrance within this room to the underground? I push past the woman and run behind the counter through the door that is flipped up. I remember the druggist emerging from somewhere beneath the counter last time I came in. The two men in white burst through the front door. The druggist and his customer exclaim. There – the trapdoor. I lift it and take the stone stairs, slip, slide down painfully on my behind. There is a lamp lit in this first small room that looks like a living area. I hope it will connect to the greater structure. I hear snoring from the bedroom – his wife must be taking an afternoon dot. I don’t go that way, then, but into a dark hallway. It smells of moss. At the end of it
is a wooden door and I push, hearing the men clomping down the stairs behind me. I am winded and sore from my fall, and tears are beginning to choke my chest. I must go on, I must go on. The door gives and I see nothing but black. I run forward, my hand trailing a cold wall. A sob escapes and echoes around me. They are close now, I can hear their breaths.

  ‘Miss Duncan!’ one man calls angrily.

  Soon the wall falls off at my right, and I think I am in the main chamber. I walk forward. Perhaps I can hug myself against a wall and stay completely quiet. Perhaps there will be more openings.

  They are right at my back; I feel one man’s hand swipe out and disturb the air; I feel it as a whisper on my neck. They are being quieter now, too, realising they will have to find me in the dark. I am at an advantage now, without my shoes. But my feet are completely numb. I ache all over. I try to breathe as quietly as possible, and try to remember the way to that small cell.

  And then light – the druggist with a lamp, the two men backlit silhouettes. I gasp and turn and trip on a chair. I am on the icy floor. And then their hands are on me, dragging me up, gripping hard at my arms and waist, as though I will wriggle free like a cat that hates to be held. I thrash my head back and forth.

  No. No. This can’t be happening. Please let me go, let me go home. I will be well, then.

  ‘Come with us now,’ one of the men says, gently.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I say.

  ‘Everything will be all right.’

  I know that they are lying.

  Waking is coming to the edge of a moor in the fog, seeing ghostly dots of candlelight and heading towards them; seeing brighter lights further in the distance, unnatural.

  Taller buildings than in Edinburgh. Moving machines that make the noise of thunderclaps. So waking is like heading into another dream. There are small arched windows atop long rectangular windows in the ward. Light. So, morning. The other bodies mumble and shift. The ward has been warmed by thousands of dank hot breaths in the night. What is this quintessence of dust? So this is madness – jagged thought; words and images familiar and conjured. Father made it clear in his letter that he knew of everything that had happened. Yet he knows nothing. He thought that it could be I wasn’t ready for the city – but between the lines of his letter is the question of men, of William and Oskar; that I wasn’t ready to meet them, that my mind is having trouble processing what the body comprehended. He blames me, but he also expresses guilt, for the first time, about sending me to the city. I should have known, is his most mysterious line.

  Father, I feel that no matter what choices were made, by me or you, this otherness might have descended. This double behind my eyes, with its illustrations and wants. It frightens me, raises the hairs on my neck. Maybe I can still run away from it, find a crevice within my own mind. Or maybe I can confront it, draw it out. Are those the methods they help you with here? The physicians and the nurses and attendants? So far I have only experienced deep, drugged sleeps, which cannot be my cure. Maybe it works for the ones who seem to have snakes for bones, who mutter-mutter-mutter while jolt-shuffling and lashing limbs out. I close my eyes again. I hear a song. It clangs in my head like a wooden wheel sliding off a large stone. I see a bard with hair the colour of a robin’s flush, and winter skin. I cannot tell if this bard is man or woman. Maybe it doesn’t matter, in the place where the other lives.

  My body is unmoving under a rough blanket, my nightdress patterned with small stars. They let us keep our own clothes, which Dr Fallow – who is a consulting physician, here – says is better than at some asylums. I sit my hands atop my groin, for warmth. I close my eyes again. There is William in the fog, calling for Roo. But no, the closer I get to him I see there is something missing in his eyes. It is a waterhorse, come to lure me. Or I am the waterhorse. My feet are caught ankle-deep in the bog. The heather grows up around me. A railway is being set upon me. We are all sinking in the bog. One day they will find our bones. A man-woman with red hair will find our bones, and sing about us.

  Some people would have walked in here and seen the ancient claw-footed bath, peat stains like patches on a cow, and had a fit of ecstasy. That little wooden slatted mat, the ceramic jug with which to wash your hair and your dirty neck, lathering up with heather-scented soap, pouring it out too hot and then soaking too long until your skin puckers with memories of chlorinated green hair, musk sticks, sunscreen, Mum’s voice, Yes dear I can see you I’m looking.

  But I don’t like to sit and soak in my own filth. To watch the scales and dust turn the water oily. Though you couldn’t really tell if it changed colour, here, because of that brown water that tastes citric and sweet, like lime cordial. (Maybe there are so many nutrients in the water they are prolonging my life.) But I have no choice about the bath, when I get around to washing. There is no shower. There are some tubes hanging on the back of the door that I presume could make it into a sort of sit-down shower, but that still means sitting on your slippery crack, feeling the grit of your filth beneath you. These tubes hung in the same place in the other bathroom, too. I wonder if they’re an innovation of Bethea’s, or whether they’re something all Scottish bathers have. And that tub in the kitchen sink, instead of just filling the sink itself. Baffling. But where I grew up the sinks were small, double, and stainless steel. And we used scourer-sponges, not a rag and a brush. How do these differences evolve? If a Scot moved to Australia would they take up the shower and the scourer-sponge? Or seek out bath tubes and sink-tubs?

  I have too much time to consider insignificant matters.

  There’s no point, when there will be no decisions in my future like: sponge or rag? And yet, it keeps my mind from flapping about on other useless considerations, such as why did I put her through all that; such as have I altered history.

  So I haven’t bathed much, though I should. Getting in and out, too. Creak with a side of groan. Leonora likes a bath. More than me, anyway. She – I – am small and dove-pale, soft as breath. Sometimes when she is alone she runs her hands over her body, not even down there, but across her own arms and chest, her thighs, and she experiences a surge of comforting endorphins, as though that feminine casing, those tiny fine hairs and the sensitive cups behind elbow and knee – as though it is enough just to have that. And I am enclosed, gloved-up inside her, a sensate voyeur. So many things I wish I’d known before.

  In Edinburgh baths are necessary to soak off the soot but in the Highlands she was happy with, or made do with, a splash from a bucket or jug of fire-heated water. And not every day even then, as it went.

  I am in the bathroom now because I found a brochure on ticks in a folder and I can’t stop checking myself – pulling down my socks, taking off my pants, being faced with my pale blue sagging underwear, and patting my underarms. Do they go into your crack, in your earhole? Why do I even care? Lyme disease might just help speed up this process. It’s something about how small and insidious they are, though. The way they burrow, like a negative thought.

  Some days he stays away. I am not lying on a bed in a dank room, high up, with pain in my muscles and an ache in my groin. There is no mechanical man standing over me. I am not beating my shins with my fists. I am not hungry. Is there a woman? With long grey hair? Is she crazy too? I don’t want her to be there. I don’t want to be helpless. I should have died.

  If he did die, the air would stop rippling ahead of me. He cannot stand that the wife has sought him. The shame is in him like a sickness. I hunker down over myself. This other woman, she touches my shoulder, but I feel grotesque. Is that him or me? Is she a nurse? The images are of boys, naked, slim, and with no hair on their chests. Their penises stand up. Their eyes are black seals’ eyes, wet.

  It would be late winter now, in the braes. Oh, to be back by spring, or in summer when the dragonflies and damselflies are numerous, in lace-winged bright emeralds. The peat will have dried. The chickens will be pink from ash. Mr Anderson misses me, perhaps. William misses his mother, still. I miss the sun and the gras
s. I miss space. I miss the colour blue. I miss time alone. I miss Duff.

  An attendant held a mirror up for me yesterday and I saw myself in my eyes. Those moments when he is weak flood me with hope.

  Dr Fallow is visiting. Usually I see Dr Lock, who sees all the patients in the acute ward, and administers treatment. Edward does not normally see patients in private; his role is more academic – implementing asylum-wide practices, recording the effects.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ he asks me, in this wood-panelled office. His chair seems larger and higher than mine; he spreads across it, arms out like the wings of a bat.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I say.

  ‘How are the visions?’

  I still feel embarrassed that he knows, and something like anger rises as well, because no matter how I try to explain the visions words never accurately represent them.

  ‘Honestly, they have calmed.’

  ‘Well, that is good news.’

  ‘Who is that?’ I ask, pointing up at a portrait of a man with two amused chins and a black dog under thumb, a book in his other hand – the word Lunaticks on it.

  ‘Oh,’ says Edward, ‘that is a man to admire – Dr Battie. If it wasn’t for him you might still be being bled and purged, or chained to a bedpost.’

  ‘A woman was chained to a bedpost just yesterday.’

  Edward’s hands come in from his elbows; his fingers steeple. ‘Only while sedation took effect. It used to be a hysteric was chained up for days, thrashing about. Most inhumane.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Edward leans forward and sips from a cup of steaming tea on his desk. I drink in the smell. We aren’t allowed it, as it is considered a stimulant.

  ‘How is my aunt?’ I ask.

  ‘Quite upset. She feels she failed you. But otherwise she is well.’ And still grieving for poor old Charlie. I should have asked her more about him. I was so caught up in controlling my thoughts, what I felt. And my anger over her not having been there for my mother.