What a joy! To copy Damaris’ diary, to type out words no longer my own, leaves me feeling calm. My whole being throbs sweetly. Every now and then I pause to gaze around the attic, at my skylight, which gives off a white luminousness, and then at the piles of papers, of which Damaris’ diary is just one among many, barely distinguishable from my other objects. And yet those papers, which until recently I have thought of as just another kind of object, decaying in the moist air, like the rest, seem to take on an enormous importance. They seem to emit a special kind of radiance. I can think of nothing better than to take them in my hands, spread them out on my desk and rifle their precious contents – not so much because of what they say, but because they contain thousands of words to transcribe.
We got our clothes back. We dressed without speaking. On the way home, she was quiet again, but not self-conscious at all this time. No, self-absorbed, dreamy. This made me angry. When we got into the cottage, I felt like punishing her. I brought her into the front room. Evie, I said. What you did in that bush. She smiled. You hurt me, I said. I sat on the edge of the couch. I slipped off my knickers and pulled up my dress. I lay back and opened my legs. You need to soothe me, I said. And she kneeled down before me, and I took her head in my hands and I guided her mouth to my cunt.
Later this evening. She’s a terrible cook. She thinks adding lots of cream to the dish (a mixture of chicken, red wine and orange juice) will improve it. It hasn’t. But it could have been my being in the kitchen. She seemed clumsy. Horribly shy. My glance was caustic to her. When she poured in the cream, she dropped the tub and it went everywhere. I got up and took her hand and licked it off. Then in between her fingers, slowly.
When you are drunk and you fall it doesn’t hurt, not until the drink’s worn off. Then you feel tender and offended at gravity. You feel more mortal than you did before. And so it was with this salt air, and Evie, I think. It made her drunk. And drunk on that she’d touched me all over in the branches and only now was she starting to really feel me. With my creamy lips, my creamy tongue, I kissed her. I knew from this great feeling she gave off of … What was it? Relief? Gratitude? I knew then that no one had touched her like that before. I could feel how much she was feeling. And the more she felt, the more I realized I had never felt anything like that myself, starting so young and so casually. And that no matter how good it was with someone, it always felt rehearsed. I’d never had my touch received like this before. And to be felt like that was to feel like that myself – too much. I broke off, told her the colour of the food looked wrong, I didn’t want to eat it, and went up to bed, and locked my door.
23 June
The salt-air and too much fucking.
What day is this anyway?
24 June
Our last night. Too full up on each other to touch. We fall on talk as something new. We talk about the island. I said how this would be a bleak place in winter. Exposed to wild winds with the great heaps of slate piled everywhere grey and unforgiving with no sun to pick out the metallic sheen. The wind would be wild, wouldn’t it? She sounded almost envious. You would like that? When we walk inland, in the quieter places, I feel anxious, she said. About seeing people? (We had seen that same guy with his dog that afternoon.) No, she said. The quiet. I thought you worshipped quiet. In others, I envy it. But quiet for me is torture. Why? I can hear myself. Your thoughts, you mean? The sound of me. I like it best by the sea or in the wind, where I can’t hear myself. Most people feel anxious when they can’t hear themselves. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’ Then I told her about D’s brother. He heard voices. It was bad in the wind or by the sea. Noises outside turned to voices inside. He goes mad with the sound of other people in his head. And you go mad with the sound of yourself!
Evie told me about the castrati then. Those boys who had their balls cut off to keep their voices sweet and high. When they sang they did not sound like boys, and they did not sound like women. It was an eerie sound, Evie said. The practice had been banned by the Vatican in the nineteenth century, but she had heard a recording, made during the earliest days of recording technology, when the last castrato was still alive and singing in the Sistine Chapel. A moment in time, she said, when the sound could be captured for ever. What were her words? Beautiful synchronicity. But think! (she clapped a hand over her mouth). Think of all the sounds we will never hear! And what about the sounds that are facing extinction, she said. Sounds that future generations will never hear!
Like certain rare songbirds, I said. Or the din of yourself.
The castrati! I have not thought of the castrati in decades. There was a period in my teenage years, before I met Damaris, when I thought about almost nothing else. One day in Edinburgh, in a charity shop, I came across a recording of Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, who died in … I forget the year, I will have to consult the Encyclopaedia. What do I recall of Alessandro’s entry, read all those years ago, after I returned from the charity shop? That as a child he had a beautiful singing voice (needless to say). That at the age of nine he was placed in a warm bath, drugged with opium and castrated. That he sang in the Sistine Chapel choir. That he was the only castrati to have made a recording. As soon as I returned from the charity shop – this, shortly after I left boarding school – I went to my room and listened to the recording of his voice. I became obsessed by Alessandro Moreschi, as well as by the strange race of which he was a last member: emasculated giants whose voices did not change with puberty, but whose limbs and ribcages, lacking testosterone, developed abnormally: long and heavy for the limbs; thick-boned and swollen for the ribcages. By the time Alessandro reached maturity, I read, his chest was cavernous, his lungs enormously powerful, and he could sustain a high c, no, d for over a minute. More than this I cannot recall. Once again I am forced to consult my Encyclopaedia. That is something I have often found myself doing, while writing this history. It has never been easy. The set is in constant use, although not the use for which it is intended. The volumes of my Encyclopaedia are not so much repositories of information as elements of furniture, since they comprise the legs of my desk, four pillars supporting the wardrobe door. Let me (briefly) describe the Encyclopaedia. Bound in blue leather, each volume measures approximately ten by seven inches. The pages are yellowed and in places eaten away by the moths and damp. Pasted on the inside front cover of Volume 1 is an advert cut from a magazine.
WHEN IN DOUBT – ‘LOOK IT UP’ IN The Encyclopaedia Britannica, THE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, 32 volumes, 31,150 pages, 48,000,000 words of text. Printed on thin, but strong opaque India paper. A COMPLETE and MODERN exposition of THOUGHT, LEARNING and ACHIEVEMENT, a vivid representation of the WORLD’S PROGRESS, embodying everything that can possibly interest or concern a civilized people, all reduced to an A B C simplicity of arrangement.
So much for the Encyclopaedia. Let me describe how I constructed my desk. Having decided to use the wardrobe door as a surface, I searched for the volumes of the Encyclopaedia, which were scattered about the attic, mixed in with other books. When the set was complete (except for Volume 13, which I could not find), I arranged it into alpha-numerical order. Then I made four pillars out of the volumes: Volumes 1 to 8 for the front-left leg of my desk; 9 to 16 the back-left; 17 to 24 the back-right (replacing the missing volume with a book of similar thickness); Volumes 25 to 32 formed the front-right leg. Now the pillars were in place, I placed the wardrobe door on them.
That is how I constructed my desk. The problem was that now, whenever I wanted to consult the Encyclopaedia, I had to take my desk apart! Let me demonstrate the difficulty. Say, as now, I wish to read about Alessandro Moreschi, I must carry out the following steps:
– Take the computer off my desk and hold it in my hands
– Kneel down before the legs of my desk
– By the light of the computer locate the relevant leg (in this instance the back-right) and, within that leg, the relevant volume (MEDAL–MUMPS)
– Place my computer on the floor with the scr
een facing the relevant leg
– Stand up, remove the various items that have accumulated on my desk – cups, pencils, rubber bands, books, the tape recorder, Damaris’ diary, paperclips, keys, a hair slide, a lamp, a vase, some stones – and place them on the floor
– Lift the wardrobe door and lean it against the attic wall
– Take the topmost volume of the relevant leg (Vol. 24, back-right) and place it on the floor
– Take the next volume (23) and place it on top of the first (24)
– Repeat the process with the succeeding volumes (22 on 23, 21, on 22, and so on), until the volume I wish to consult (18) is exposed
– Take that volume and, by the light of the computer, locate and read the relevant entry (MORESCHI, Alessandro)
– Enough!
26 June
Oxford. A golden crust, hot from the oven. Me and Evie wander the city, hot and golden ourselves. My skin, her hair (lemon juice, like I told her) in love, why not, and, in a week’s time, with nothing to do for the rest of the summer. She’s coming to London with me. She follows me everywhere. She came to our show last night. He was not surprised to see her. He made a bitchy comment. A chick this time? Too quietly for her to hear. But then, this afternoon, she mentions it. Comes to meet me after rehearsal and we go down to the river. Lying on the grass, my head on her belly as usual. She has a horror of lying on mine, sensitive as she is to the sound of me. Her fingers twining the roots of my hair, as though her fingers themselves were trying to take root in my scalp. Lightly she says, So the last one was a boy? I say, Yeah he was, the boy in the play. Or the chick now. She said he was handsome and what was it like with a boy. Told her me and Jack would show her sometime. I asked if she was jealous (seems that’s always a rhetorical question). No, she says, just curious. I ask if she gets jealous when I’m on stage. What with everyone watching me. She said, No. Then she gives me this big speech, not really looking at me. About how when I’m miming, the audience, strangers to her, to me, to each other, all of them, and her, are looking at me. She says, We forget ourselves. We forget ourselves, and one another. Only you exist. And you? she says, You are oblivious to everyone except yourself. I imagine you to be moving in a different element, a heavy silence, the kind one might experience after a loud and sudden explosion, in the seconds before one’s ears begin to ring. Or some such scat. Then, to herself, Hiroshima after the bomb, what were the first sounds made after that? She went on. She couldn’t say she was jealous at these times cos I was trapped. Trapped in my own silence, or my illusion of it, up there on the stage, with everyone looking at me. She said that at those times she felt nothing but pity for me. For me! That made me angry and I pulled her fingers out of my hair so roughly it hurt, and still hurts. Can’t say exactly why I was angry, but as I write now, I think perhaps it was fear, fear that she was right. Fear of the loneliness that gets me sometimes. I went apeshit on her. Pity for me? You pity me? Look at yourself! You’re trying to dress like me, you follow my hairstyling advice, you’ve started to put on make-up now to make yourself more attractive to me, but you look like a monkey in a wedding dress! You know nothing about life, modern or otherwise, you don’t know what’s hip, you’ve got no sense of humour, no idea how to speak to people, how to behave, how to move or even how to fucking fuck for fuck’s sake! And YOU pity ME?
Here was the silence after the loud explosion. She sat staring at her hands with her pebbly eyes wide open, shining with tears that she would not allow herself to shed. I had no idea, she says. If I am so … pitiful (electric blue mascara now starting to run), why are you … with me?
I thought about the poor swallow and wondered why anyone loved anyone. Because I realized then that I loved her. I was in love with her. I just wanted to take the poor lost freak in my arms and kiss her and that is what I did and as I did I said, Why Evie Steppman, can’t you see, it’s because I pity you. She made a good job of trying to laugh then. Later that night, after we’d fucked she said, puzzled, No sense of humour? How could you say that? I am always laughing. Yeah, Evie, but at things no one else can dig.
27 June
Today we went to Botley cemetery to visit Evie’s mother’s grave. She has never been before. Her mother was from Oxford, she told me this morning when she announced the trip. I invited myself along. To protect you from your sentimental excesses, I said. She told me I was rude but she said it like it was a compliment. The chapel was one of these buildings that look like a toy-sized building built to human scale. It was squared off by cherry trees. After we had found the gravestone I left Evie crouching by it and wandered the grounds. As I did I felt as though I were looking for something, but wasn’t quite sure what until I came across the grave of a woman named Virginie, born in the same year as me. I realized then that I was looking for some sign of myself. Damaris X. Born 1950–Died 5 Minutes Ago. All this time I was breathing in the ashes of the dead, since the crematorium next door was in use. Those great ostrich plumes of smoke seemed extravagantly Art Nouveau and gave me an idea. I ran back to where Evie was kneeling, tugging up weeds, dandelions which looked rather pretty, I thought. So now a flowerbed, as well as a deathbed (and to the French, Piss-in-Bed). Oh Evie, you are a sentimental old boot, I said, pulling her up to her feet, just how she was pulling up the weeds, How can you cry for a mother you never knew! I never knew my parents. Do you see me weep for them? No. They should weep for the loss of me. Besides, it’s too hot for manual labour today. I know somewhere lovely and cool.
And that is how we came to visit the Pitt Rivers museum. To be wandering in that dusty Victorian half-gloom on a hot summer’s day – what a treat! We walked around together until I got impatient cos she lingered too long by each case. Me, I was keen to see as much as I could, moving on quickly from whatever didn’t interest me. Stayed until the guard announced the museum was closing and we were reunited outside. On the walk back to the boarding house, through the long slants of light and the lengthening shadows, I counted off all the things I had seen. Let me try to remember:
A cabinet of benevolent charms entitled, Sympathetic Magic.
A cabinet of objects occurring in nature which had been collected because they look like something else in nature (a seed pod which looked like a snake; a rock which looked like a monkey’s head, etc.).
A cabinet called Treatment of Dead Enemies, which included a skull that looked like it had sharpened pencils sticking out of its nose.
A huge, swishy-looking Hawaiian ceremonial cape in a striking black, yellow and red pattern that looked as though it were made of fur, but when you looked closer you realized it was made up of feathers, thousands and thousands of hummingbirds’ feathers.
A charm with a label written in tiny, tiny writing which stated matter-of-factly how/where it should be displayed (I forget) its particular powers (I forget), and its ingredients, some of which I remember. They included:
Earth from the grave of a man who has killed a tiger.
Earth from the grave of a woman who has died in childbirth (except I misread the label and saw, at first, Earth from the grave of a man who has killed a tiger that has died in childbirth).
A letter in some ancient Eastern pictographic language on a very long strip of palm leaf that looked like silvery skin which had been rolled into a tight neat coil.
A display on the West African communication system based on the exchange of those tiny cowrie shells that look like Sugar Puffs. A single shell sent to someone conveyed the message: I consider you less than nothing and have no wish to ever see you.
A foetus in a jar. It must have been about four months old. Its little ears had been pierced and it was wearing a necklace.
An odd-looking fifteen-year-old girl with thick glasses shouting, ‘Paula! I’ve found the shrunken heads!’
The shrunken heads. Like withered apples.
And you, Evie? What did you see? Just the Benin Bronzes. But that’s where I left you! What’s so interesting about them? I asked her, annoyed. Just a load o
f bronze masks. Look, I said as we passed a couple of beautiful young guys with perfectly symmetrical golden features, See their faces in the sun! They make more beautiful bronzed masks. E shakes her arm out of mine and tells me I don’t understand, more sad than angry.
28 June
E didn’t turn up to meet me after rehearsals today. After waiting fifteen minutes, I went back to the boarding house, but she was not there. I waited there until it was time to leave for the show but she didn’t turn up. After the show I waited backstage for her. She didn’t come. When I got back to the boarding house she was there in her bed, asleep. I got into my bed, and turned my back to her. I left the room in the morning and when I got back after rehearsals she was still there, in bed. I asked if she was ill and she said no. She hasn’t said a word more all afternoon. I’m in bed now, writing this. I’m due to leave for the theatre in twenty minutes and she’s still here. I don’t know where she was yesterday, or what she did. A moment ago I put my face close to hers, to see if she really was sleeping. I saw a small tear, like a bead, lodged in the corner of her eye.
The Echo Chamber Page 28