by Paula Guran
“I’m going up to the next landing,” she said, “And if that fatbellied bum doesn’t march straight down to the street, he’ll never get another pix of me except spitting in his lousy beer.”
Papa Munsch came out of the darkroom. He was white. He didn’t look at me as he went out. He never looked at her pictures in front of me again.
That was Papa Munsch. Now it’s me I’m telling about. I talked about the subject with her, I hinted, eventually I made my pass. She lifted my hand off her as if it were a damp rag.
“Nix, baby,” she said. “This is working time.”
“But afterward . . . ” I pressed.
“The rules still hold.”
And I got what I think was the fifth smile.
It’s hard to believe, but she never budged an inch from that crazy line. I mustn’t make a pass at her in the office, because our work was very important and she loved it and there mustn’t be any distractions. And I couldn’t see her anywhere else, because if I tried to, I’d never snap another picture of her—and all this with more money coming in all the time and me never so stupid as to think my photography had anything to do with it.
Of course I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t made more passes. But they always got the wet-rag treatment and there weren’t any more smiles.
I changed. I went sort of crazy and light-headed—only sometimes I felt my head was going to burst. And I started to talk to her all the time. About myself.
It was like being in a constant delirium that never interfered with business. I didn’t pay attention to the dizzy feeling. It seemed natural.
I’d walk around and for a moment the reflector would look like a sheet of white-hot steel, or the shadows would seem like armies of moths, or the camera would be a big black coal car. But the next instant they’d come all right again.
I think sometimes I was scared to death of her. She’d seem the strangest, horriblest person in the world. But other times . . .
And I talked. It didn’t matter what I was doing—lighting her, posing her, fussing with props, snapping my pix—or where she was—on the platform, behind the screen, relaxing with a magazine—I kept up a steady gab.
I told her everything I knew about myself. I told her about my first girl. I told her about my brother Bob’s bicycle. I told her about running away on a freight and the licking Pa gave me when I came home. I told her about shipping to South America and the blue sky at night. I told her about Betty. I told her about my mother dying of cancer. I told her about being beaten up in a fight in an alley behind a bar. I told her about Mildred. I told her about the first picture I ever sold. I told her how Chicago looked from a sailboat. I told her about the longest drunk I was ever on. I told her about Marsh-Mason. I told her about Gwen. I told her about how I met Papa Munsch. I told her about hunting her. I told her about how I felt now.
She never paid the slightest attention to what I said. I couldn’t even tell if she heard me.
It was when we were getting our first nibble from national advertisers that I decided to follow her when she went home.
Wait, I can place it better than that. Something you’ll remember from the out-of-town papers—those maybe-murders I mentioned. I think there were six.
I say “maybe” because the police could never be sure they weren’t heart attacks. But there’s bound to be suspicion when heart attacks happen to people whose hearts have been okay, and always at night when they’re alone and away from home and there’s a question of what they were doing.
The six deaths created one of those “mystery poisoner” scares. And afterward there was a feeling that they hadn’t really stopped, but were being continued in a less suspicious way.
That’s one of the things that scares me now.
But at that time my only feeling was relief that I’d decided to follow her.
I made her work until dark one afternoon. I didn’t need any excuses, we were snowed under with orders. I waited until the street door slammed, then I ran down. I was wearing rubber-soled shoes. I’d slipped on a dark coat she’d never seen me in, and a dark hat.
I stood in the doorway until I spotted her. She was walking by Ardleigh Park toward the heart of town. It was one of those warm fall nights. I followed her on the other side of the street. My idea for tonight was just to find out where she lived. That would give me a hold on her.
She stopped in front of a display window of Everly’s department store, standing back from the glow. She stood there looking in.
I remembered we’d done a big photograph of her for Everly’s, to make a flat model for a lingerie display. That was what she was looking at.
At the time it seemed all right to me that she should adore herself, if that was what she was doing.
When people passed she’d turn away a little or drift back farther into the shadows.
Then a man came by alone. I couldn’t see his face very well, but he looked middle-aged. He stopped and stood looking in the window.
She came out of the shadows and stepped up beside him. How would you boys feel if you were looking at a poster of the Girl and suddenly she was there beside you, her arm linked with yours?
This fellow’s reaction showed plain as day. A crazy dream had come to life for him.
They talked for a moment. Then he waved a taxi to the curb. They got in and drove off.
I got drunk that night. It was almost as if she’d known I was following her and had picked that way to hurt me. Maybe she had. Maybe this was the finish.
But the next morning she turned up at the usual time and I was back in the delirium, only now with some new angles added.
That night when I followed her she picked a spot under a street lamp, opposite one of the Munsch Girl billboards.
Now it frightens me to think of her lurking that way.
After about twenty minutes a convertible slowed down going past her, backed up, swung in to the curb.
I was closer this time. I got a good look at the fellow’s face. He was a little younger, about my age.
Next morning the same face looked up at me from the front page of the paper. The convertible had been found parked on a side street. He had been in it. As in the other maybe-murders, the cause of death was uncertain. All kinds of thoughts were spinning in my head that day, but there were only two things I knew for sure. That I’d got the first real offer from a national advertiser, and that I was going to take the Girl’s arm and walk down the stairs with her when we quit work.
She didn’t seem surprised. “You know what you’re doing?” she said.
“I know.”
She smiled. “I was wondering when you’d get around to it.”
I began to feel good. I was kissing everything good-bye, but I had my arm around hers.
It was another of those warm fall evenings. We cut across into Ardleigh Park. It was dark there, but all around the sky was a sallow pink from the advertising signs.
We walked for a long time in the park. She didn’t say anything and she didn’t look at me, but I could see her lips twitching and after a while her hand tightened on my arm.
We stopped. We’d been walking across the grass. She dropped down and pulled me after her. She put her hands on my shoulders. I was looking down at her face. It was the faintest sallow pink from the glow in the sky. The hungry eyes were dark smudges.
I was fumbling with her blouse. She took my hand away, not like she had in the studio. “I don’t want that,” she said.
First I’ll tell you what I did afterward. Then I’ll tell you why I did it. Then I’ll tell you what she said.
What I did was run away. I don’t remember all of that because I was dizzy, and the pink sky was swinging against the dark trees. But after a while I staggered into the lights of the street. The next day I closed up the studio. The telephone was ringing when I locked the door and there were unopened letters on the floor. I never saw the Girl again in the flesh, if that’s the right word.
I did it because I didn’t w
ant to die. I didn’t want the life drawn out of me. There are vampires and vampires, and the ones that suck blood aren’t the worst. If it hadn’t been for the warning of those dizzy flashes, and Papa Munsch and the face in the morning paper, I’d have gone the way the others did. But I realized what I was up against while there was still time to tear myself away. I realized that wherever she came from, whatever shaped her, she’s the quintessence of the horror behind the bright billboard. She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything for and never really get. She’s the being that takes everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn toward her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl.
And this is what she said, “I want you. I want your high spots. I want everything that’s made you happy and everything that’s hurt you bad. I want your first girl. I want that shiny bicycle. I want that licking. I want that pinhole camera. I want Betty’s legs. I want the blue sky filled with stars. I want your mother’s death. I want your blood on the cobblestones. I want Mildred’s mouth. I want the first picture you sold. I want the lights of Chicago. I want the gin. I want Gwen’s hands. I want your wanting me. I want your life. Feed me, baby, feed me.”
If he hadn’t written, she thinks she might have faded away. Winked out. But even with the salvation of his inadvertent invitation, there is still something missing, something she needs to give her a sense of being replete . . .
The Light that Passes Through You
Conrad Williams
I was on my way to work when Louise appeared, seeming to peel away from the gray cement walls of the block of flats opposite. She drifted into my arms. I could feel her bones, thin and febrile, poking through the shredded leather of her jacket. As I drew her inside, I noticed it was a jacket I’d given her, five years ago—the last time I’d seen her. She made sticky, glottal noises into the crook of my arm as I led her upstairs. Her hair was matted with dog shit; her mouth pinched and blue.
“What are you on?” I asked, but the question could have been directed at myself. I should have been taking her to hospital. She didn’t answer.
I sat her down in the hallway while I ran a bath. My face dissolved in the mirror.
“Can you . . . ?” Clearly, she couldn’t, so I undressed her myself, trying to keep my eyes off the breasts I’d once caressed. Unbidden, a memory of me rubbing olive oil into them on a hot beach somewhere made my cheeks burn. “Let’s get you into this bath. Come on, Louise.” She’d lost weight. The skin around her navel was purpuric and slightly raised, like that of an orange. I hoped her condition was due to vitamin deficiency and exhaustion. I wished I hadn’t written to her.
She revived a little when the suds enveloped her. She found some kind of focus, frowning as I, no doubt, looped in and out of view. Her slight overbite rested upon her bottom lip: something I’d once found irresistible. Now she just looked afraid.
“It’s been like—” she began, and coughed a thick clot of mucus on to her chin, “—like I’ve been drowning. All this time. Just as I thought I was leaving, going out like a candle, you rescued me.” She collapsed slowly into the water; her ribs, for a moment, seemed like huge denuded fingers pressing against the flesh from inside, trying to punch their way out.
There was nothing particularly unusual about our relationship to warrant my attempt to contact her. At the time, I was nineteen, she eighteen. We said we loved each other. Although we had no money and still lived with our parents, we believed we were independent, different from anyone else because we were intelligent; we were mature about sex.
We were stupid. We were children.
We holidayed in Wales one summer, borrowing a caravan that belonged to a friend of my father’s. We buried each other in the sand and lost sleep, fucking with impunity. It was exciting, hearing her approach an orgasm without fear of a parent barging in on us. She missed a period.
I wanted to go with her on the day she aborted. I’d traveled to Stockport with her to make the appointment, sitting in a waiting room trying to avoid the female faces around me, watching faded vehicles slew across wet, wasted dual carriageways which reached into the dun fog over Manchester. Louise’s mother went with her when the time came because she paid for the operation. The private clinic was picketed by pro-lifers that day. Louise told me they pleaded with her to reconsider, that they would help to bring up the baby. It fluttered in her womb. Ink blot eye. Fingernails.
When I saw Louise again, she’d gained something which made me nervous for a while, something which shone dully in her eyes as if the surgeons had implanted some strange, ancient wisdom at the time of termination. We talked about it and grew very close; smiles and kisses drew a frosting over the bad area, like icing decorates the mold in a cake. I suppose we believed we were richer for the experience. Louise became clinging; I thought it was love. I never believed that we would be together forever but she didn’t doubt it, as if this trauma provided a bond we must never break. Sometimes I’d lie awake at night feeling like the carcass of a sheep; she, a dark scavenger of emotions, burrowing ever deeper into the heart of me. That I felt guilty for entertaining such thoughts shouldn’t have brought me comfort but it did.
It was like laying down a bundle of kindling when I tucked her into my bed. I left a window open and glanced at London’s center. It seemed strange that I would be working in that glut of noise down there while she slept, a Rapunzel in her tower. I left a note with my number by the bed, in case she should wake up. I had to lean over and smell her mouth.
On the Northern Line, I tried to spot other faces which bore the same kind of expression as Louise. A fusion of vulnerability and assuredness. The look of someone who knows they will he protected and cared for. I couldn’t find anything like it here. Maybe it was London which prescribed a countenance of stone; to progress here, you oughtn’t allow any emotion to slip.
It was a photograph that did it. A black-and-white shot of Louise staring out of my bedroom window, one breast free of a voluminous cardigan, her body painted white with morning sunshine. She wore a sleepy, gluttonous expression: We’d just made love. I’d placed some crumpled cellophane over the lens to soften her image. When the picture fell out of a book, I wondered what she was doing now. It pained me to think that the partners we felt so deeply for can be allowed to drift out of our lives. We were both five years older than the time it had ended. Old enough, responsible enough to face each other on a new footing and be friends . . .
. . . Ha.
I thought about her all day. I even tried calling her but all I got was my Duo plus: “Hi, this is Sean, all calls gratefully received, except those from Jeffrey Archer or Noel Edmonds . . . ”
“Lou? Are you there? Pick up the phone.”
I left the office as early as I could and caught the tube back to Belsize Park, having to wait an agonizing time at Camden for the Edgware connection, which was late due to I don’t fucking know— litter on the line, driver claustrophobia, lack of application.
She was still in bed when I got back. I heated a bowl of celery soup in the microwave and fed it to her, remembering too late that she despised celery. And what else? Beetroot? She didn’t seem to mind now though, her belly grateful for anything to mop up the misery in which it was dissolving. The early February sky shuttered out the light in gray grades across my wall; she became more beautiful as darkness mired her features.
She sat up against the headboard, the duvet slipping away from her body. She didn’t attempt to cover herself. I gave her a T-shirt.
“What happened?” I asked, lighting a candle—she wouldn’t have appreciated the harshness of a bare bulb.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like I described earlier. I feel as if I’ve been gnawed away from the inside. For a while, I thought it was cancer.”
I bit down on my suggestion that it still migh
t be; the candle’s uncertain light sucked the gaunt angles of her face and shoulders into chiaroscuro.
“Lie with me,” she said.
My sleep was fitful; I was expecting her to murmur something that would shape the formless panic I was barely managing to fasten inside. I lay awake listening to horses clatter lazily up Primrose Hill Road at five a.m., trying to delve for conversations we’d had, or pregnant pauses stuffed with meaning. All I could remember was the sound of her crying.
I nipped outside at around seven, when she was stirring, to the baker’s for croissants. I picked up a pot of jam and the newspaper, a pint of milk and headed back to the flat. Only gone ten minutes, it was some surprise to find her showered and dressed, lying on the bed and listening to one of my Radiohead albums. “We’ll go out after brekkie,” she said. ”You can show me around Camden.”
“How are you feeling?” I asked, unwrapping the croissants and offering her a knife.
“Better.” She broke off a corner of bread and chewed it, dipping her next bit into the virgin surface of the jam, getting crumbs in there. That was something that pissed me off no end when we were together. It didn’t bother me now. Maturity, I suppose. She looked at me slyly, as if she were testing me; I ignored it.
“It’s good to see you, Louise,” I said. “Really.”
“It was a beautiful letter. How could I not answer it?”
“I didn’t necessarily expect to see you on my doorstep . . . you know, a letter, a phone call or something, to let me know how you were.”
“It was an invocation, Sean.”
“A what?”
“I said, it was an invitation. You called to me, I was on the brink. Your timing was immaculate.” She raised an eyebrow. “It always was.”
Camden was pinned down under a grimy, stifling sky. Drawing breath was like sucking exhaust fumes through a burning electric blanket. She leaned against me as we threaded through its unfriendly streets, funneled into passageways and alleys pumping with sound and people.