Steel bars kept him out of my hair.
We met in the street. For the first time, I mean. Our first meeting was like a scene from an old Cricklewood film. Corny, really, when I think back on it.
She’d been out shopping and was carrying home a stack of boxes that blocked her view. I’d just been to buy the most absorbent newspaper I could find, and was waiting to cross the road, when I saw the boxes wobbling towards me.
A trolleybus turned the nearby corner and clanged its bell loudly. Rushing to get out of the way and finding her shoe caught in the track, she tilted forward, tipping herself and her tower of boxes onto the pavement at my feet.
At once she pulled herself together and began to apologise, scrabbling at the topmost package which was feebly tied with string and now had a large blue hole in it. Two small, winged creatures were struggling free from it, unpicking the knots and wriggling to be free. Peserichens, I realised.
“Let me give you some hands with that,” I’d said, kneeling to help her. Two were all I’d needed after all and soon the package was back together again, after a fashion.
I gallantly said I’d get her shoe for her.
Glancing to my right to ensure no trolleybus was near, I stepped out onto the road to retrieve her delicate tricorn shoe. It was stuck in the groove of the rail and I had to tug at it to get it free. It had been cut almost in two by the vehicle’s steel wheels; the soft leather sliced through, the satin torn and dirty with two of the delicate bone buttons missing.
I held it in my hand and gasped with a suppressed erotic delight when I realised how tiny her feet must be.
My suggestion that we take tea at a nearby cafe that I knew was as much for my benefit as for hers. She leaned on me and hopped the short distance to the establishment, a tower of parcels balanced delicately in front of us.
Once inside, I tossed my aftercoat over hers in a display of open erotic bravado. She merely smiled and lowered her eyes as we took our seats.
After some self-deprecating comments about how much she had bought today, our tea arrived and we began to talk. Meanwhile, one of her parcels began to move across the table as her Peserichens sought freedom. A questing hoof poked through the paper at one side while the edge of a wing appeared just under the flap at the top of the parcel. I intercepted the mobile package and was given a sharp nip for my troubles.
This both amused and appalled her and I allowed her to bandage my hand with her handkerchief, despite the lack of blood or any obvious injury. By the time we were on our second pot of tea, she was chatting away openly about quite private things: I remembered to smile often and feign interest.
It was only when she mentioned a husband and noticed the perturbed look on my face that things took a turn for the worse.
She began to weep quietly while speaking about him, her small dark eyes filling with tears. Because of the nature of his crime she was not allowed to visit him and his letters had become infrequent, their contents confused.
I reached across and placed my hand reassuringly on her arm, all the while harbouring thoughts of her slumped across my bed in exhaustion following the successful completion of my erotic ministrations.
As the afternoon light began to fade, I called her a cab and reassured her that she had found a friend. I promised to keep in touch.
Yes, it should have been in black-and-white but it was mainly in subtle shades of dust and smiles and loneliness.
By now there were armed men on the streets. It was impossible, and unwise, to determine which faction they represented but always best to appear happy at their presence, whenever they were nearby.
During our third meeting, at a little restaurant overlooking the submersible station, I suggested that she get out of the city as soon as she could. She immediately told me of her parents’ old house in a village some miles away, near the frost forest. It had been empty for the past three years and she confessed she never visited it as often as she felt she should. It seemed ideal.
I said I would accompany her, for her own safety, and that we should leave the next day.
To escape the best of the violence, we waited until dusk and travelled in my cousin’s borrowed armoured car (an ex-Colonial Services model with five skis).
We played palliative music through the two external loudspeakers in order to placate any armed gangs we might encounter and, even though we had used the more roundabout and less well used roads, we reached the house shortly after midnight.
It was agreed that I should stay overnight in a spare room and return to the city the next day.
The house rambled pleasantly into two wings. I noticed that she placed me in a room that was in a separate wing to where she herself slept.
After a breakfast of whatever was left in the cupboards and some very old-tasting tea, she showed me around. Besides the living and sleeping quarters, mainly furnished in an uncomfortable style 30 years out of date, there was a large wine cellar with a good stock. Her father, an engineer of some sort, had also ingeniously supplied the house with a food cellar that was cooled entirely by a stream flowing down from the frost forest.
There, below the house, were two large open pits. One contained frozen fish while the other was filled with neatly cut joints of meat.
“So you see, we’d never starve,” she giggled. I smiled and nodded.
I soon remembered that I had to get back to the city. I suggested, however, that I should return to stay at the house that evening, for her protection.
She smiled, lowered her head and I heard a whispered ‘Thank you’.
The journey to and from the city was becoming increasingly hazardous. When I arrived the fighting was just two streets from my apartment. I gathered some clothes, a handful of entertaining books and some money, and sped back to her as fast as I could.
We spent our time lying in the field behind her house and letting the sky fall into our open eyes, harvesting clouds with our gaze. It had always been one of my favourite pastimes since childhood and I was pleased to introduce her to it.
At night when I was sure she was asleep, I would surreptitiously move my few belongings to a room that was nearer to hers. By doing this one room at a time, I hoped to avoid any suspicion on her part.
Photographs of her husband were everywhere and he was her constant topic of conversation. I began to find it wearing. The only time she relaxed this rule was when we were in the field, gazing upwards together.
In a time of intellectual and spiritual pestilences, the soul plague was the worst. It stole your most intimate moments and printed them up as someone else’s novel, distributing it free on the street corners of the dirtier, angrier parts of your home town.
Flights of Peserichens, broken free or released by panicking owners, migrated east. Meat prices rose as vegetarians abandoned their principles and sought greater amounts of protein per meal. The prison population soared into the millions.
Within days there were reports of riots, fires and mass prison breaks. I realised that her husband might be affected or even freed, though I prayed he had been one of the many casualties that the hand-coloured news boards were reporting.
Yet it was some time before I realised that my darkest wishes had been granted. It was a hot summer day and we had gone to harvest clouds once more.
The field was dotted with daisies, standing out like white punctuation marks on a page-long green paragraph.
We had lain side by side for some minutes when a movement caught my eye. I raised my head slightly and, away in the trees at the field’s edge, I saw a face float before the leaves, wispily and wistfully.
Although I had never seen him alive, I realised it must be her husband from the photographs. He must have died in the prison riots after all. Now our love was a haunted love; a more romantic affair than ever before.
My body partly blocked her view of the trees and she evidently hadn’t noticed anything. I resolved to say nothing and to carry on our love affair with an even greater intensity. After all, what har
m could the shade of a weak man possibly cause us?
“How many clouds have you harvested?” she asked me softly.
I lay back down and looked straight up into a pure, cloudless, blue sky. “Oooh, lots,” I lied and she laughed.
The clouds twisted slowly above us, reforming themselves constantly in the midst of their delightful airborne recreation. I fancied that our breaths would somehow rise up to become a part of them; or perhaps form a mingled cloud of their own, ascending to glide between the drifting white islands, searching out its own place.
The higher clouds would sometimes race past, while those closer to the ground went by more slowly, like fallen blossoms turning slowly as they were swept downstream.
On the hottest days of all, I would watch as the clouds came down to touch her nose and float around her ears, while her face held an expression as if she were floating up to their domain. I delighted in her delight and thought myself so lucky to have met her.
In the midst of our reverie, I would often feel the desire to tell her of my feelings. Of how I could happily tear her beautiful clothes from her, releasing her from their constraints, and watch her roll among the grass and flowers before descending on her to press home my love.
But courage always failed me and I was reduced each time to my solitary sordid fantasies of twisted, sweat-stained sheets. Sometimes, in my most desolate daylight dreams, she would be bleeding.
Finally, one golden sunlit day, I took my courage in my hands and suggested to her that I move my things into the room adjacent to hers. To be nearer her and to assure her of my constant attention.
She seemed shocked, her dark eyes filling with something approaching fear. “Oh no, I don’t think that would be right. My husband would …”
I forgot myself in that moment and shouted at her: “He’s dead. Forget him!” The look in her eyes told me immediately that sharing this near-certainty with her had been an unfortunate error. She seemed to visibly shrink into the grass, wanting to escape from both me and the truth.
The clouds began to race above our heads as she turned her eyes from me.
She avoided me now. In the house I would sometimes be caught unawares by her fish eyes staring at me through the banisters. I came to expect that every door I passed would suddenly creak closed a few more inches.
I tried to ignore the fact that she had turned against me for daring to speak the truth that she had tried to ignore. Perhaps she thought me unkind to tear away any shred of hope that she had clung to.
I concentrated on the day-to-day tasks of household management in a time of crisis. Some of the furniture would have to be broken up for fuel soon, for instance; given its lack of comfort, this would be a particular pleasure for me.
I began to help myself liberally to the contents of the wine cellar. And when the bottle had finally won the battle between thinking and drinking, I was no longer able to help in any meaningful way. In one of my more intoxicated moments, I resolved that I would return to the city in the next few days, leaving her to her fate.
She continued to cook for me, meals being left in the kitchen while she ate in another part of the house. I felt like I was being sent into exile.
In a last gesture of apology before I departed, I decided to re-stock the kitchen cold box for her. I descended to the cellar, knowing that fish was her favourite food.
Removing the hooked pole from the wall, I began to delve into the shiny and mottled mass of fish in the chilled pit. Several of them had become stuck together and in some places the ice was quite thick.
My breath formed clouds before my face as I hacked at the frozen mass with the pole. Finally it cracked and I was able to move several blocks of fish-filled ice aside. I hoped she would be grateful that I had performed this final task for her: this was no work for a woman.
I heaved one last mass of ice aside, preparatory to removing it from the pit ready for thawing. There, previously hidden by the shining mass, I was met by an unexpected and horrifying sight.
There, in his tomb of ice and silvery scales and dead eyes, was her husband. Or at least, what was left of her husband. From the look of him, he had not died easily.
Obviously he had never been imprisoned as she had told me. His only prison had been the ice.
Could the woman I loved really be a liar and a murderess? If so, why had she played this game of deception with me and then brought me to the one place where I might unmask her?
I gave way to feelings of betrayal and bitterness. And there was the fearful prospect that I might be next.
I left her in that field, blue and broken, and went off to seek my own sort of oblivion. Perhaps the clouds would take her now.
Back in the city, the provisional government had imposed order, supported by large gangs of armed, black-clad youths loitering on nearly every corner. Things were beginning to return to normal – the revolution had been thwarted and the spate of plagues and soul sicknesses was on the wane – and I felt it wise to bury myself once more in one corner of a large accountants’ office.
My job was to count beans, by the sackful, and I held a reasonably respected position. I was told by my boss that my role was a small but vital part of the working of the country’s economy; he said he was glad to welcome me back after the recent unrest. He conveniently ignored the fact that my hands now shook so appallingly that my pages were spattered with random ink spots.
The shops were, mercifully, beginning to fill with goods again and drink was easy to come by. Too easy, perhaps.
Sometimes I could almost believe that I had forgotten her.
But my constant childhood companions had not. I was being judged by those who knew me best. And found wanting.
The days ahead are dark. Now the clouds are gathering.
THE CONDITION
I wanted to draw the world, so I went to my window but I could only see a part of it. So I turned my pencil into a rocket and rode it all the way to the top of my disappointment. If you go to your window and look up, you can just see me, twinkling up there from time to time; geo-stationary.
The man sits in a chair. He cannot move and he is swathed in bandages. From what he can tell they cover him from head to toe. They cover even his eyes, with only a few cracks allowing him a partial view of his surroundings. The light is very low but he can tell he is seated in a room with bare walls and few features.
He doesn’t know if he is ill, or has been in an accident, or if he is supposed to remember the details of either. He feels blank; his insides hollow, his mind unformed. He has no memory of colours or tastes or sensations other than those that surround him at this very moment; and he has no names to help him store them away in their proper boxes. If he cannot do this, he feels, then what is outside him might as well be as empty as what is inside him; even nothing must have a name.
Islands of memory seem to shimmer on the imaginary horizon in his head, far from where he is stranded. Unreachable and isolated. Is that where I should be, he asks himself? Is that where I can find out the answers?
The bandages itch and chafe and he wonders again why he is wearing them. Is he ill, infected? Wounded or burnt? He doesn’t feel any pain, only irritation, but maybe that’s because he is nearing recovery now. Perhaps his stay here is nearly at an end. Nobody has come near him since he awoke, but he thinks he may be in a hospital of some sort. Or perhaps a lazaret for those in a state of quarantine.
The palms of his hands itch but when he tries to lift his arms he finds that they are restrained at the wrists. His ankles are the same. So he might be a prisoner. Why else would anyone secure another person’s arms like this? Maybe he would harm himself or others if they did not restrain him. So he might be in an asylum? Hospital, prison or asylum, he does not know which would be the worst of them.
If he could free himself he’d scratch like a monkey, though monkeys have more dignity. Monkeys, yes. He remembers monkeys but doesn’t know if he’s ever seen one. He wonders where they live and who created them. He imag
ines a green place where they might live, well-watered and with open skies.
A tree. He remembers something about a tree; he recalls what a tree is. There was something special about this tree, something on the tip of his brain. After several minutes failing to recollect what was unique about it, he gives up, groaning with frustration. His mind seems to be a ruin, with only vague ideas left standing on top of each other here and there.
Maybe he is dead, after all, and in a process of disintegration, decay. But he knows he wouldn’t feel any discomfort if he was; he can’t explain how he knows, but he does. Or maybe he is living a cancelled life, merely waiting to be recycled or re-assigned. That seems much more likely, he thinks.
Perhaps he has woken like this before, if there has been a before. Maybe he goes through this same tormented cycle over and over again. But he has no way of knowing, and that seems worse to him than having to repeat the same thing over and over and over.
There seems to be something moving in his bandages; tiny things making only the very feeblest of movements but they are still unmistakably there. He feels a slight revulsion at the thought that he is harbouring vermin. Perhaps he was wrong about being hospitalised; would a hospital allow vermin to thrive on the bodies of its patients? No, he has been abandoned, he now knows. He is nowhere. And no one.
Light. There is light at least. He can tell through the tiny chinks in the bandages over his eyes. The texture of the light has changed since he awoke. He has no way of knowing how long that has been; maybe days, maybe only hours. If days, then it must mean there are no nights here, wherever here is, the small window high in the far wall remaining constantly bright. No darkness, only light.
He knows his reasoning over this can’t be right, something inside him reveals at least that, but it seems to make sense to him. There could be other reasons for the constant light but he cannot think what they might be.
Songs From Spider Street Page 9