— as to make men show themselves deserving of her deference, and
so to escape being murdered, past repair!’
(‘By “m urdered” she means “ravished”, ’ Francis m urm ured in my
ear.
‘Well, of course she does!’ I returned, in some amazement: nor can
I yet fathom the reason for his senseless interjection.)
‘Then, too,’ (Clarinda addressed both Anne and Bellamode) ‘you
speak of your gaining a husband as though it were a matter of course!
The woman’s only sphere is the domestic, indeed; yet, be they never
so pleasing and harmonious, I pity such young women as do not have
a fortune, for — ’
The nineteenth-century Dorothea abruptly left the sofa, tossing her
curls and pouting her lips. ‘Why, I should be ashamed to look at a husband, unless I could bring him dowry enough — there! And I declare that this lady’ (indicating Bellamode) ‘is right, positively, and men are
dissembling horrid monsters (though I’m sure I don’t know what they
can have to dissemble, or anything about it) — there!
And, goodness, I shall be any hundred of times more dutiful and
adoring and unselfish, good gracious! than dollish, ridiculous wretches!’
Here she positively stamped her foot at Clarinda, who so greatly outshone, for beauty, every other creature. And a lady doesn’t “woman”
other ladies — boo!
And, oh, dear,’ Dorothea burst forth suddenly, ‘I am so absolutely
ill today!’ She actually dissolved into tears, only to wipe them bravely
away, and appeal to the room: ‘Oh, if you only knew, though, the
downright, earnest little thing I am! And how I mean to cherish every
single aspidistra and muffin-tray and loo-table, and have the house
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Yvonne Rousseau
keeping keys always under my eye — no one shall ever call me an un satisfactory wife!’ She went off into half-hysterics.
Evadne’s body stirred uneasily. ‘I knew a man once — ah, what the
heck.’ She began pacing about the room, almost ungracefully: ‘Cap-
parids, capparids; haven’t we got any capparids?’ Next moment she
froze, her face masked with tobacco-smoke (at some time she had lit
what seemed a very small cigar): ‘The street is like a great river:’
(broodingly) ‘One can walk it, and be nourished by it, and forget one’s
dreams and the sea.’
I stared aghast, as she turned to pitch her cigar through the
window; her intellect appeared utterly alienated! She turned to the
room again, warmly laughing, and holding all eyes with her incendiary hair: ‘I guess I’m just a neurotic, really . . . or a woman.’ Her jaw slackened slightly, her fingers caressing her furs, fastening on her
diamond bracelet. ‘I guess that what I really need is a good man — or
so.’ She frowned, curled herself up on the window-sill, and began to
lisp a baby’s song, wrenching the pearls from her necklace, one by one,
and tossing them after the butterflies.
Francis made another abrupt movement, and Bellamode’s
rejoinder was quite inaudible to me, though I saw her lips moving
animatedly.
‘Yes, but they are fictional.’ Francis’s querulous m uttering was
apparently directed to himself. ‘I may have been misleading myself;
perhaps it’s only an artistic evolution, an artistic perversion. Perhaps
Nature doesn’t imitate Art; perhaps we’re little changed, no m atter
how we’re seen or see ourselves . . . ’
So he maundered on; and as he lapsed further into his preoccupation, my own natural good sense reasserted itself. Francis, and his talk of computers and fictional characters, ceased to impose upon me; I
looked into the other room and saw Clarinda, set among four women,
one of whom was undoubtedly mad, while the others were no fit companions for her. Clearly, it was my duty to offer her my protection.
‘I’ll see your master,’ I informed Francis: ‘The gentleman of the
house.’
His insane response was delivered in a preoccupied tone: ‘I’m my
own mistress, M r Lockwood.’
No immediate chance of applying to a better class of person! I’d act
alone, then. I was out of the room, and had unbolted the right door,
before Francis could come up with me, crying, ‘Don’t be a fool,
Lockwood!’ I easily put him aside, stepped through, and smartly
closed the door between us.
M r Lockwood’s narrative
73
‘Why, Elmer!’ exclaimed Evadne: ‘I thought you were the filming
crew!’ — Bellamode put up the oval mask she held in her hand: ‘Lard,
it’s M r Bangwell!’ cried she; and Dorothea tittered and tossed her curls
and dimpled: ‘M r Dominickel, I declare!’ At the same instant, Anne
came forward frankly: ‘Welcome, Antonio!’ —* Clarinda blushed
divinely: ‘Why, it is M r Cantworthy,’ said she.
Never was poor gentleman in so undeserved a predicament! Each
of the women instantly suspected her lover of falsehood: Anne wept
most piteously, and sank down as if her heart were broken; Clarinda
gave me a flaming glance, and turned to Anne’s assistance. ‘So, M r
Bangwell,’ Bellamode hissed — but her anger, like Dorothea’s, seemed
to hover between her sisters and myself. Evadne approached, wrested
the book from my nerveless grasp, and began deliberately to rip it up,
page by page, her gentle eyes fixed enigmatically upon my face. And
never had I felt Clarinda more desirable than at this moment, when
she seemed unattainable! I moved towards her, to explain.
‘My true name is Lockwood, Clarinda,’ I began. Her eyes lightened.
‘You have been disguised? You are really Lord Lockwood?’ she
breathed, wholly enchanted.
But alas! I had demonstrated a preference! No longer able to confide in the superiority of their own charms, Bellamode, Dorothea and Evadne furiously resented the slight: I saw that Evadne dropped the
book, and was swinging her remaining pearls like a riding-whip —
then Dorothea fell upon me, pummeling, while the frantic Bellamode
turned towards Clarinda.
Buffeted — ludicrously overborne — I distractedly beheld a new
movement in the looking-glass: Francis was darting into the room —
the same costume, the same haggard eye — but his mouth and nose
were masked or muzzled, with nightmare grotesquerie. To and fro he
sprang, always assuming a Harlequin attitude; but instead of
Harlequin’s magic bat, Francis brandished a glittering canister. Gusts
of sweetness came fuming out of it, like gusts of air puffing from the
nozzle of a bellows.
My senses were swimming — cloyed with sweetness; the women
around me swayed; I was sinking to the floor, in a swoon.
I awoke — to my joy, I awoke from the entire nightmare! Here I am,
in the familiar study; feeling the bruises, from yesterday’s experiences
at W uthering Heights, more vividly than I might have hoped; but
alive, and sane. The clock is at the stroke of four, as I complete my
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Yvonne Rousseau
account of this extraordinary nightmare; the house is in silence and
now, in spite of aching laziness of head and limbs, I too must summon
courage to go to my rest. But alas! I find myself the
prey of odd sensations — even terrors — that seem to presage worse than the mere obstinate cold I was prognosticating for myself. The fire has long died
down, and yet — to me — the room seems still perversely warm; and
my imagination returns with sickly disquiet to an odd symmetry in
my dream — just upon waking — a trundling sound again, hastily
fading in the distance. Absurd as it is, I have the fantastic dread that
when I open the door, my candle will light me, not along the corridor
to my bedroom, but into one of those nightmare rooms again. And,
oh, my wearisome wonderings, all devoted to the enigmatic words I
saw upon the tongs, in my final attempt at mending the fire — ‘Made
in Taiwan’! Never mind. My good housekeeper shall explain them to
me, tomorrow.
Glass Reptile Breakout
©
RUSSELL BLACKFORD
On this hot Saturday night, past midnight on this delirious Sunday
morning. Bianca knew nothing of the forces which energised her
dancing at the Searoom — except that they were holy and not
perilous.
The main band was playing, the miracle band —Glass Reptile
Breakout was playing, and the big high room in St Kilda’s labyrinthine Season Hotel was all noise and smoke, clothing white or the colours of the sea, tight and supple or free and loose, and on the
half-naked young people the stigmata of fashion: shaven heads
plumed or finned with implants, bare arms bright with feathers or
glistening scales, soft dorsal sails, fins or spines (the latest fad) that
flattened or bristled, depending on what you wore over them —
though the drastic implants of a flick-dancer would seldom settle
under any clothing.
Bianca’s heart was set: she yearned to be a flick-dancer. She could
dance so slowly or so fast, free and wild in her roe tribe skirt,
glittermesh strips catching the light at waist, wrists, ankles. She
practised for hours in her darkened kiddy flat behind her parents’
home in M ount Waverley, practised until she had the control.
Didn’t she look right, almost? All her hair had gone for plumes.
H er father had grudgingly paid for the fin she’d had sewn into her
sleek olive back, knowing that if he didn’t Bianca would find someone else who would: there were always men after the roe at the Searoom willing to pay with favours. Bending her arm at an
75
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Russell Blackford
awkward angle, she sent her fingertips along her spine where the
translucent orange fin was grafted. The sutured lines of flesh
edging the cultured implant were still swollen and sore; she winced,
waiting for the next song.
Bianca hated bum ping into people because it jarred and hurt her
back; dancing, though, she hardly noticed. She’d already had one
BioFeed-music miracle, the time she went out too soon after a line
of unfashionable scales had been removed from her ankle. Even
before that she’d known she was a latent. She’d never heard people’s
thoughts— that was just make-up stuff—but sometimes she met
other latents at venues like this and said the strangest things to
them, or they did to her . . . And it turned out to make sense.
She believed in miracles, and though she knew she shouldn’t
have come dancing until her back was completely healed, she
trustingly awaited one.
Lachlan Alderson, QC, blinked as he dabbed with a small chamois
cloth at the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses; the smoke in the
Searoom left him bleary and owlish. One question remained for
Alderson to face, too jagged, too ramified to hustle into plain
words, much less the urbane diction of the courtroom or the bland
assurances of a government paper. To his considerable pain and
embarrassment, it was the question of Satan.
The secular attitude of his attractive companion was no option
for Alderson. To D r Loerne, the rock miracles-were a m atter of
enhanced trypsin activity. She saw them, he knew, through the
lenses of a reductive science: as the eerie by-product of participation mystique focused by the expectations brought on by the first miracles. Those, in turn, had been merely the result of an un foreseen resonance between EEG-coupled musicians, the enhanced field-effects of their non-vocal music, and an audience of half-hypnotised young dancers.
True, perhaps, but not the whole truth. It was impossible for
Alderson to disregard the spiritual dimension. He was a rational
man, yes, and he liked to consider himself a sophisticated one; he
was also, by choice and conviction and the recognition of his
brothers, an elder of his church and a defender of its doctrine. The
Assembly of Christ based its teachings in Scripture, taught that the
Great Tribulation was at hand and with it the man of sin working
Satan’s deed with all powers and signs and lying wonders. Despite
Glass Reptile Breakout
11
the inhibitions of intellectual pride, Alderson found himself
increasingly driven to take Saint Paul’s prophecies literally.
On the smoke-filled stage, four spindly musicians pranced like
the demons of a medieval morality play. Body-scales decorated
their lean arms. Smoke drifted across the parquet dance floor; to
Alderson, it seemed to stink of brimstone. Their headgear flashed
like goats’ horns catching coal-glare. It would not have surprised
him to sight, amid the tangled wires of their EEG equipment, a
cloven hoof.
Dr Loerne was fond of explaining that the miracles had precisely
the same cause as the healings at the Ganges, at Lourdes, at charismatic revivals. Alderson shivered, thinking of that ingenuous, inadvertent blasphemy. Gabby was wrong-—the difference in
ambience could not have been more sinister.
A teenage girl screamed. Alderson had a confused impression of
plump naked flesh, bizarrely modified in the m anner of these
sharks and roe. H er finned back, her head of pink ostrich-plume
implants shook in the soup of noise and the yellow smoke eddying
under the dull lights. Alderson stolidly lit a non-cancer filter and
tactfully averted his eyes from the girl’s brown, elated, snub-nosed
face.
Suspended from the high ceiling on the far side of the room, a
flick-dancer in a perspex cage cavorted with his knife. The young
girl screamed again, falling to her bare knees, legs apart. In supplication? None of Alderson’s visits to these venues had given him understanding of how these people thought, any more than his
studies of case law and jurisprudence. A high-slit garment, more
like a long white lap-lap than a skirt, fell across her tanned thighs. A
return to tribalism. She wore little else.
The music ended. The human sounds roared on.
Alderson leaned, unobtrusively, he hoped, against a plaster wall.
Beside him, Dr Gabby Loerne perched handsomely on a broad
window sill, her neat slim ankles crossed above the floor. She
clapped enthusiastically and loudly. No young roe, she was dressed
in a more sedate version of current fashion: green glitter-mesh
tights and blouse. A small cluster of green scales jewelled her cheek.
In front of them, the girl’s torso flailed from side to side. She was
/> still on her knees, leaning back now on her heels, her body the
shouting tongue of a kinetic language, as if she disported herself in
a choreography of prayer before some voyeuristic deity. Again she
screamed her delight, perhaps an invitation to that deity to join her
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Russell Blackford
in accord.
Lachlan Alderson had to lean closer to Gabby to make himself
heard above the general applause. ‘Doesn’t any of this disturb you?’
At twenty-eight James Baker could pass muster at the Searoom;
but he felt, despite protective coloration, conspicuously old. Most
of the dancers were half his age. He sidled rangily among them,
cold-eyed and lean, to all appearances an ageing shark after little
roe, his bony lantern-jawed face embellished with glittering ice-
blue scales, each the size of a fingernail. U nder his loose jerkin of
silvery glittermesh, he carried no firearm, and he missed the comforting weight — but he would not need it tonight.
Baker kept watch on a couple across the thick-aired room, not
getting close enough to draw their attention. They were even older,
though the woman did not look her age. The serious-looking man,
Alderson, spoke earnestly to his fashionable companion. Both were
in their mid-thirties. The hidden thing they had in common with
Baker was this: all three had shown the talent to reach positions of
great responsibility while still comparatively young.
The room was almost opaque with smoke from the stage and
from the filters that people here insisted on smoking frenetically.
Faces came and went behind the wisps of smoke, navigational
buoys looming from sea-fog, as quickly lost behind its veils.
Lachlan Alderson’s m anner was older than his face, and he was
prematurely grey, white at the temples. His wire-rimmed glasses
added to the enthusiastically serious look. Baker caught himself; he
was staring at the lawyer. Tracking Loerne and Alderson here was
counter-productive if they became aware of him. His assignment
required absolute discretion.
Baker averted his gaze and worked his way towards the bar. His
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 10