Significance

by Jo Mazelis

  But then she had been shocked, shaken, probably concussed and unable to think straight.

  He took his hand from her throat at last.

  Good, she had been wise to just allow it, to neither struggle nor pretend desire.

  But now he was unbuttoning her dress. Or trying to rather, as one-handed, the row of tiny seed buttons was almost impossible to undo. He was painstaking however.

  When he had managed to unbutton three, he stopped and smiled at her. A stupid dreamy lunatic grin.

  Marilyn attempted a responding smile, but her mouth (she could feel the various small muscles and tendons quiver and twitch with the effort) only drew itself down at the corners in a hideous grimace.

  He loosened his grip on her wrist and relaxed the pressure on her other arm, then as if he were adjusting a shop mannequin he jerked both her arms above her head and somehow gathered both her wrists in one hand and held them there. He shifted position so that one knee was holding her wrists in place while his other knee was on her thighs. His groin was thus aimed at her face The back of her left hand was pressed hard into the stone path. Marilyn could feel several small sharp objects, stones or pieces of broken glass, digging painfully into her skin, but he wasn’t really hurting her. Not since the initial body blow anyway.

  She was doing the right thing then. No noise, no taut bucking or desperate wriggling to escape, no pretence of any pleasure.

  He probably hated women. Hated them and also feared them, except as now when he had all the power.

  He was not hurting her now.

  He was smiling. She had pleased him. Perhaps he had noticed the tears and they had made him smile.

  No, he was not hurting her.

  His knee and lower leg were pressed, bony and hard across her thighs, the weight of his body was concentrated there and also into her crushed, crossed wrists above her head.

  He tried another button. This one a few inches down from her breastbone. The stupid row of stupid little buttons – details she had loved about this dress – thirty or more tiny pearl-coloured buttons that nestled tight in their minute button holes. When dressing or undressing she only ever undid the top four before she lifted the loose-fitting dress easily on or off her head.

  He fiddled and tugged at this stubborn button, pressing down hard with his fingers at one point in order to free it.

  She could say, ‘let me’, but what French she had once possessed had flown and scattered, as if her mind had expunged all superfluous knowledge in order to concentrate on only this – this pitiless moment in hell.

  No, he wasn’t hurting her. He had pinioned her. Her hands and legs were trapped. She would be bruised, badly bruised, but she would heal.

  Except he was hurting her by making her an accomplice to her own rape. This was the sort of hurt which would lodge itself inside her marrow. Tears, broken bones, puncture wounds might heal, but this silence, this giving in, giving it up, giving it away would hurt forever.

  This button, every button, would take a lifetime to undo. He was onto the fifth or sixth now. The sun would rise before he was done. Her fingers were growing numb and cold, the circulation cut off by his weight. Her legs too, jammed flat out with his kneeling weight across her thighs so that it was impossible to do anything other than wiggle her ankles.

  The painstaking work on the damn buttons. She wished he would hurry, hurry. Get on with it. Undo the buttons quickly. Rape her more efficiently so they could be done with it.

  Her thoughts now became perverse. The question of why, having so violently hurt her at first, he would then so slowly and delicately, without ripping her dress, attempt to undo the buttons seemed absurd. Perhaps he did not want to rape her at all, perhaps his thing was buttons!

  She almost laughed, though it came out a painful half sob, half grunt.

  He looked at her face suspiciously, enquiringly, as if he had only just remembered she was there. As if she were a dog that suddenly answered her master back.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, surprised to hear how her voice had acquired a dry rasping croak.

  He frowned, his face growing dark. Marilyn looked away quickly and as she did, he suddenly tore at the dress, ripped it hard and violently so that she felt the fabric burn at her shoulder and underarm.

  She cried out in fear and pain. But even then it wasn’t a scream, not the deliberate alarm call of distress, only a response.

  But it was enough. Something had changed.

  He was still for a moment, breathing more heavily than before. She knew he was staring at her, considering what he might do.

  She began to tremble uncontrollably, to spasmodically twitch and jerk as if she were in the throes of an epileptic fit. She wanted to say something – to find some words that could reach him, make him see her. But she was shuddering, her teeth chattering, every nerve quivering. I should tell him about the baby, she thought.

  She saw the shadow of something fly across the field of yellow light just beyond his head, then she saw no more.

  Pastoral

  Vincent and Katherine had stayed in the playground long after the others had gone – some sloping off to the café with the pinball machine and the one-armed bandit – others to go home because they had to or even wanted to. Vincent had rolled a spliff (he’d cadged a bit of Moroccan from his brother Dennis) which he shared with Katherine as they sat on the slowly moving roundabout. The night turned around them, the thin sliver of moon rotated on its axis, the warm wind caressed their skin.

  Summer nights, the sort that seem endless, this one giddy, but in the sweetest possible way. Giddy with the spinning of the ride and their heads arched upward to share a whirling vision of the sky, and the richly perfumed scent of the hashish, sucked at, then held in the lungs and breathed out leaving that light-headed, skin-tingling dreamy aimlessness in its wake. And there was another source of new sensation too; Vincent had taken a long toke on the spliff and offered Katherine his mouth, sealing his lips over hers and breathing the smoke into her mouth. Not a kiss, but a prelude to it, an excuse.

  Their first time alone together and they’d had to wait so long for everyone else to go. Some of the boys stubbornly nagging Vincent to join them at the café, too stupid to see that he had better things to do right then. And Katherine’s best friend, Juliette, hovering by her side, reminding her of the recent murder, telling her to take care, to not walk home alone. Vincent saying, ‘It’s cool, chill, she’s with me.’

  Then Katherine had lain back on the wooden floor of the ride and Vincent had pushed it hard to set it spinning, then leapt on board and lain down beside her so that their heads lolled together and their feet (his especially) dangled off the edge of the roundabout.

  They had talked about the moon and the stars. Stupid nonsense talk about aliens, werewolves, vampires. Meteors that, hurtling through space, might hit the earth, wipe out the human race just like the one that had destroyed the dinosaurs.

  ‘What about the animals?’ Katherine has said.

  ‘All kaput,’ Vincent said.

  ‘God, really all of them?’

  ‘Yep. Oh, except maybe cockroaches.’

  ‘Yuk.’

  ‘Oh, and me and you.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. This place,’ he waved his hand airily. ‘This is the one place where anyone can survive.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? How come?’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’ He raised himself on one elbow in order to look at her face.

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ she said slowly. ‘When’s it going to happen?’

  Vincent made a show of looking at his wrist as if there was a watch there. ‘Five minutes?’

  ‘Oh. No time to get my cat then?’

  ‘No, but there’s time for this,’ he whispered and lowered his face to hers to kiss her quickly on the mouth.

  ‘What if we don’t survive?’ she said and boldly put her hand on his neck, pulling him to her for her first (last) real kiss.

  The roundabout slowed down, it
s faint creaking and rumbling stopped. The silence was punctuated by the high-pitched calls of bats. An owl hooted. Katherine and Vincent’s mouths made wet noises. They wrapped their arms around each other, intertwined their legs. He did not try to touch her breasts or wriggle his hands inside her clothing (though those thoughts occurred to him) but just kissed her and was kissed.

  Scraps of thin pale cloud drifted across the moon. He breathed in the apple-fresh scent of her hair. Opened his eyes once or twice to find hers shut, her lashes thick and dark, her eyebrows raised slightly in what must be pleasure. Then a new sound could be faintly heard. It was distant, but getting closer and louder.

  The sound of someone running, of footsteps falling hard and rapidly and the loud, laboured breathing of someone or something exerting itself. The noise coming fast along the worn, hard earth that made a rough path from the lower gate, up through the trees towards the play area and the roundabout.

  Vincent heard it first. He lifted his head.

  ‘Hey,’ Katherine said, blinking with surprise.

  ‘Shh … listen.’

  They stayed where they were, prone, but with heads lifted as they strained their ears and eyes to seek out the source of the noise in the darkness.

  Then they saw it, a fleeting shadow amongst the solid vertical blacks of the tree trunks. It lurched from side to side, growing larger, noisier, more defined, more distinctly human as it cleared the trees and emerged into the weak yellow light. A tall figure running with the loping, almost stumbling wildness of exhaustion, or panic.

  He was not heading for them but running in a diagonal direction that cut past the swings just fifteen feet away. He did not see the two figures lying side by side on the running board of the stationary roundabout. Or showed no sign of having seen them anyway.

  Just beyond the swings he stopped momentarily. Bent over, hands on knees, his breathing wheezy, like an old leaky bellows, recovering himself. His face in profile, glimmering white with a sheen of greasy-looking sweat, mouth hanging open, a dewdrop of snot glinting under his long nose catching the light.

  Then he arched his back, heaving himself erect once more, pinched his nostrils, then cast off the droplets of moisture from his fingers with a sharp flick of his hand. Wiped the same hand on his trousers, then with the other hand drew his coat sleeve over his face, over his forehead and damp hair. Catching his breath, straightening his jacket, the waistband of his jeans, inhaling deeply through his nose, then out through his mouth, lips pursed as if he might be whistling. Then with a quick look from side to side, he walked towards the open gate, passed through it and sauntered off down the street at an easy pace.

  Katherine and Vincent watched his retreating back.

  ‘Creepy,’ Katherine said and involuntarily shivered.

  Vincent gathered her in closer to his body, rubbed her arm rapidly to make her warmer, ‘You cold?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’m okay,’ she said, ‘it was just him.’

  ‘Bruno?’

  ‘Yeah, he gives me the creeps. He followed me and Juliette all the way home one night last summer. We kept telling him to get lost, but he wouldn’t listen. Ugh, he’s too old to be hanging around the park with us.’

  ‘Too ugly, too.’

  ‘Just too weird.’ Katherine shivered again.

  ‘Don’t worry about him, you’re with me now,’ Vincent said and squeezed her, drawing his shoulders up in a happy, comforting shrug.

  Katherine grinned. He kissed the tip of her nose.

  ‘What time is it?’

  She freed her arm and looked at her watch, tilting it so that the dim light illuminated the face.

  ‘Ten thirty-seven. Shit! Better go soon.’

  ‘Five minutes,’ he said, then kissed her as if to plead his case. ‘Five minutes? Then I’ll walk you home?’

  She nodded, then craned her neck to look in the direction Bruno had gone. Through the trees by the fence she thought she saw a movement, a shadowy black shape that might be him returning, but as she looked more closely she saw it was only the effects of a sudden gust of wind. Wind as warm as breath, gently lifting the tree’s broad leaves, then setting them down again.

  Part Five

  AFTER

  Our world has no more events, no more history, no more structure. It is full of signs signifying nothing.

  Charles Penwarden, Artscribe International, March/April 1989

  When these early people became conscious of their mortality, they created some sort of counter-narrative that enabled them to come to terms with it.

  Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth.

  The Angel’s Share

  Scott was led out of the interview room and back down the green-tinged corridor to the reception area. The beautiful woman detective was waiting there. She nodded enigmatically at him, her face betraying little. She was holding a clear plastic sack which seemed to contain certain familiar objects which he at first didn’t quite recognise as his own; the charcoal-grey canvas belt with the pewter-coloured buckle that doubled as a bottle opener, the car keys, his wallet and cell phone, the loose change; Euros and Canadian loonies, dimes and nickels. His navy jacket, his watch.

  He looked from the bag to the woman’s face. It was like a mask, the dark hair in sleek curtains neatly drawn back, the skin pale – though it wasn’t as pale as Marilyn’s – it was only the mahogany hair that made it seem so. And she had circles under her eyes, shadows where the skin was thin enough to show the veins and arteries, the hollow eye sockets in her skull.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked in English, knowing she could understand the language better than she’d at first let on.

  ‘You’re free to go.’

  ‘To go?’

  He should have felt relief, but there was nothing inside him. He took the bag from her and saw, lying uppermost, an alien object, a playing card, creased and torn at one corner; the ace of hearts.

  ‘This isn’t mine,’ he said and at last she showed some emotion, frowning and shaking her head as she read the label attached to the bag.

  ‘These are your belongings.’

  ‘Not this,’ Scott said and he pulled out the playing card and laid it face up on the reception desk.

  She glanced at it, then shrugged. ‘A small mistake. Now, as I said, you’re free to go.’

  He felt his anger rising.

  ‘Free to go? Free to go! What the ff…’ He held the last word back, a habit he’d acquired in formal situations. At work, with his parents, his brother, with Marilyn too, who thought the word ugly and cheap, the sign of a limited vocabulary and lack of imagination.

  He took a step closer to the policewoman. She did not flinch.

  ‘You are free to go,’ she said again. Then in a gentler pleading tone, added, ‘Your wife will be waiting for you.’

  He felt his body sag. Marilyn. He was tired.

  He sat on one of the benches and threaded the belt into the waistband of his trousers, shrugged on his jacket. He found that he was shaking his head as he did it. Shaking his head in disbelief and breathing noisily through his nose. He put his watch on, distributed his wallet, phone and loose change to various pockets in his trousers and jacket, just as he would in the morning before leaving for work. But he did it self-consciously now, as if he were somehow putting on a disguise.

  He stood up, patting his pockets and adjusting the collar of his jacket, while searching his mind for something he should do or say.

  The woman was still standing near the reception desk with an elbow resting lightly on it. In her hand was the playing card, which she turned from its face to its back by twirling it in her fingertips, all the while staring at it fixedly.

  He turned away, pushed open the exit door and walked slowly across the small parking area out front. He quickened his pace, his long legs taking enormous strides, then like an unlikely bird, a swan or heron, once he had picked up enough speed he spontaneously exploded into a run. And when he reached the house he (surprisingly as there sh
ould have been other things on his mind) congratulated himself on his undiminished capacity to sprint over a longish distance without tiring.

  The front door had been left on the latch and lights were on in the living room and the kitchen. Quietly he pushed open the first door and took a few paces forward so that he could see over the back of the couch. He expected to find her there asleep, but she wasn’t there. He tried the kitchen and she wasn’t there either. For once she’d actually gone up to bed instead of waiting up for him. For once she’d been sensible.

  He got a glass from the cabinet and opened the bottle of whisky Marilyn had bought in the duty-free as she did every year. A gift for the Clements. Oh well. He poured out a measure and added equal parts of water from the tap. He sipped it slowly, aware of its curative warmth.

  He did not sit down – he had spent far too long sitting on hard seats – but leaned against the counter, trying to absorb and dispel all that happened that day and in the days before.

  Surveying the room, he noticed that Marilyn had left her notebook lying open near the window by the sink. That was unlike her, she tended to always have it to hand, along with a pen. He’d take it up with him when he went to bed, put it where she usually kept it on the bedside table. He pictured himself doing this, saw in the dimly lit room of his imagination, her hair tumbling over the pillow, bleached of its vivid colour in the dark.

  If she woke he’d touch her sleep-warm cheek, tell her how much he loved her, needed her. Ask her, did she know how much he loved her? Did he tell her that enough?

  He sensed that he had been punished for his indiscretion with the young woman who’d followed him. There had been no need for him to act the way he had, it would have been easy enough to be kind to her while also explaining in no uncertain terms that he was married and loved his wife. But then he had also been ashamed because of Aaron. His whole life had been blighted in one way or another by Aaron. And he had been attracted to the blonde girl, flattered and confused by the whole situation.

  Now he had been punished.

  Punished too, for whatever terrible thing it was he had done or tried to do or dreamed of doing, once long ago, to his pathetically vulnerable sibling.