I am thinking now of the time you were staying with us, two or three months after we got back from the pearl-fishing trip I told you about. Ruth came to visit for a day and night—to visit Nicolas, that is, because I hardly knew her then. She was one of his friends originally, from childhood, and I find it easy to forget this fact now that we have our own decades of friendship between us. You must have been staying with us for three weeks or more and in my memory these were happy times. It was a rogue, hot May day and we were all in the garden, sitting around the old wrought-iron table and chairs that we inherited in the move.
I am sure at first you didn’t want to be there for Ruth’s visit, but obeyed when we insisted you stay—and I mean obeyed, because you sat with all the subservience of a tethered dog. But I could see that you liked Ruth instantly, and I knew why. She is capable and one of life’s doers—dark, large, deep-voiced, lovely; she is lovely still. She can wear big brash jewellery with finesse and she will never ask how you feel, or ask you to account for yourself. Not a human being but a human doing, Nicolas used to call her. In the weeks prior to that, since your arrival, you had deflected all my questions. Where have you been? What are your plans? Have you been happy? You had said only, ‘None of it matters, all you need to do is tell me when you want me to leave.’ (To which I replied, ‘I never want you to leave.’ I repeated it so many times, was so relieved to have your company in the loneliness of motherhood, that you did my bidding and stayed; have I only myself to blame?) But my point is that Ruth was exactly the kind of person who would remove any burden of explanation or justification and simply accept your existence in the garden as a fact amongst any number of other facts that were neither here nor there to her.
When you discovered that she could sing you came to life; there was no mistaking the moment you became interested in something—the image I have is of accelerated footage of a fern opening, where something inward becomes outward and unstooped and ready. I remember that she sang the Solemn Vespers so strikingly that the neighbour came to watch, and we were never to forget it because that neighbour, Christina, didn’t again manage to have a conversation with us without mentioning it. Ruth’s voice wasn’t trained, but it was churchy, rich and capable of almost anything. Each time she got to the end of a song you would pick whatever flower or weed was growing in the bed next to you and toss it towards her with a ‘Brava!’, an ‘Encore!’ You went to her and put your fingertips on her throat to feel her vocal cords vibrate while she sang, and when she finished you did something that I imagine must have been extraordinary to her at the time, you kissed her on the lips. She mentioned it once recently and I pretended I couldn’t remember the occasion at all.
I think we all went to the table then and poured drinks. Having witnessed that kiss, Nicolas sat back, impressed and threatened. There: that one-sided smile I liked so much, which was the containment of a pleasure that compressed not quite invisibly in his mid-chest, and rose far enough to twitch his Adam’s apple as a horse-flank twitches under a fly. Meanwhile he leant back a touch more and linked his hands in his lap so that his masculinity could defend itself. He did this combination of half smile and retreat whenever he saw something in womankind he liked and couldn’t control, and because he did it only with respect to women and nothing else it made me see in him, by turn, something I liked and could not control. He then said, more assertively than usual, ‘You sing, Butterfly.’
‘I can’t sing, I’m flat as a pancake.’
‘That can be remedied.’
‘It can?’
‘Of course.’
‘People can be divided into two categories,’ you said. ‘Those who think everything is fixable and those who think everything is breakable. You are the former and I’m the latter.’
Nicolas smiled; I had the impression that he was satisfied to have been noticed and judged by you, regardless of the judgement.
‘Let’s try,’ he said.
‘Try to fix me?’
‘Come on,’ he shrugged. ‘It can’t hurt.’
To my surprise you stood. ‘Very well, I’m yours.’
The two of you had coexisted politely those previous weeks with little to say to one another, and with a paranoid awareness of the other’s space. I do clearly remember that phase of courteous sidestepping because I remember being touched by it—how, with me, you were vivid and quick and caustic, and yet how with Nicolas you and he both became awkward. You in particular seemed to have all the confidence pulled from you: you bent your head more, which made you long-necked and grebelike and apparently meek; you were always glancing up from the floor. You were not coquettish, I wouldn’t want to suggest that any of this was planned on your part. I think you were genuinely pinned by a social ineptness I’ve seen in you before, with the others at school, say. Yet you stood, and said—not just to Nicolas, but to Ruth—‘I’m yours’ and you waited without mockery for them to make of you what you knew couldn’t be made.
They straightened you. Ruth put her fingertips on your shoulders. ‘Draw them back,’ she said, and then, ‘More.’ She tucked her fingertips lightly under your chin and asked you to look to the horizon. She asked you to breathe with her. ‘You can’t sing well if you can’t breathe well,’ she told you.
‘I can’t sing well regardless,’ you said, but you were not frustrated or impatient. Nicolas lifted your arms and let them drop, uncurled your fingers from their fists. He put one of the plucked flowers between your teeth, so you could not protest. I remember that Teddy found this funny and let out his thrilled cackle, and I see you standing there winking at him, thin and upright in the cut-off shorts we had made from my old jeans because the weather had turned hot. Long, pale legs patterned at the back with chair swirls, toes clutching at the grass. You had even forsaken your shawl and were wearing a long-sleeved cheesecloth shirt. Ruth sang a note and asked you to match it; yours was flat. At the next attempt it was a semi-tone higher, but still flat. There would be a return to breathing and a general re-elevating of your posture—chin up, shoulders back, chest open—as though this would rally the note from a higher place.
I knew, as did you, that it wouldn’t. We had sung together enough in the past to know that the cause was hopeless, and hopeless because you didn’t care to be in tune; just as you had said, you were not a person who believed things could or even should be fixed. They were as they were. But how could Nicolas or Ruth know this about you? To them, you were a painting that needed restoring, which implies that they thought you had come from a perfect state of harmony and could go back to it. Foolish assumption, this one we make about beauty, to assume that it must have come from perfection. Sometimes, to use your word, it’s the result of pure randomised chancery, some happy irreversible spillage.
Between Nicolas and Ruth it was agreed that posture was your problem. Probably you would be a lovely singer if only you were not one of life’s slouchers. I remember you looking at me with a collusive smile when they started straightening your back and asking you to envisage a plumb line through your core, and your vertebrae stacked like a ladder. You called: Do not let us grow crooked! You were then forced through some lessons in comportment, and you complied, walking up and down our long, narrow garden with an ashtray on your head whilst smoking. You would raise your arm and flick the ash around the vicinity of your crown. I don’t put this compliance down to your good nature particularly because, though I think your nature is many things, it is not good. I know you will be the first to agree. I put it down to this neutrality I talked about before. People want things from you because you interest and confound them—so, unbothered by any sense of self-preservation, or any sense of self at all, you offer what you have without analysis, expectation or defence. You deal yourself up, they play you.
That said, I think you were amused by that afternoon. I have often admired how careless you are with yourself. You walked up and down the garden with an ashtray on your head, then an empty glass, then a full glass; you ended up with ash and gin in your hair,
you let Teddy blow the ash out. When you sat you resumed your wiry slouch with your foot up on the table, your ochre-tipped fingers tapping your knee and your beauty unknown and uninteresting to you.
‘You see, I’m not good at anything,’ you said, more with victory than self-pity.
‘Oh, come now,’ Nicolas replied.
Ruth leant across and put her fingers on your throat, reciprocating what you had done to her earlier. ‘You’d have a very good voice with training. But if you don’t stop smoking, God knows what will happen to it.’
‘Whatever it is,’ you said, ‘it won’t be half as bad as what’ll happen to my will to live if I do.’
Nicolas gestured in the direction of the house. ‘Not true that you’re good at nothing.’ And then to Ruth, ‘She takes good photographs, there’s one in there, if you want to see it.’
How hypocritical we can be; he spared you his previously stated view on the subject, his view that your still life was sordid, and then trite and obvious. And you spared him your knowledge that he was sparing you. ‘Oh, come now,’ you said simply.
‘I think you don’t believe in yourself enough.’
‘Oh, I believe in myself, I believe in almost nothing else, that’s my problem.’ And then, to Ruth, ‘But you are good at things, I can tell. Let me see, you’re a sculptor, or a lawyer.’
‘A paediatrician.’
‘Exactly,’ you said, and a genuine pleasure lit your face before you became suddenly inward—not sullen, but removed. I knew you had disliked Nicolas’ attempt at consolation and congratulation. You wanted to be obliterated, you wanted us to agree that you amounted to nothing, that you, your self, was eclipsed by your own fumbling, vulgar ineptitude. You would have been delighted to know that Nicolas had used the word sordid—you are delighted to know that, and as you read it off the page I bet a small thrill goes through you at this opportunity to take yourself and your sordidness out of the range of good people and cease to exist. And this is what I mean when I talk about your desire for others to be happy, just as you were glad to find that Ruth had a good voice and a vocation and was, as far as you had decided, happy. Ruth’s self was big enough to make yours redundant.
Soon after that you went to your room and stayed there until the next day. What I am guessing you don’t know is that later, when I went up to you, I found you lying on your bed still in the shorts and shirt, but with your shawl over your legs. Your left sleeve was rolled up above the elbow and that arm lay soft side up on the bed in surrender. I could see clearly the puncture from a needle. Your head was thrown back and your face unnervingly placid. At first I thought you were dead, but when I felt for a pulse it was firm and regular, if anything too insistent. There was no syringe, tourniquet or folded pocket of powder, but it would have been consistent with your sense of manners to put those back in the drawer or in your suitcase or under the bed, or wherever you kept them.
You were not asleep, but you had little idea of where you were. You knew somebody was in the room but I’m sure you didn’t know who, or which room. ‘Oh, to be a sick child and be in Ruth’s hands,’ you murmured with a smile. ‘Doesn’t she make you feel comforted somehow?’
‘Sshhh,’ I whispered deep into the well of your ear.
‘Do you think the name Butterfly becomes me?’ you asked from some blind depth. ‘Do you find me especially becoming? No, you see, Teddy was mistaken. Me, I prefer Fly. Like John Clare in his poem to a butterfly. To see thee, Fly, warm me once more to sing. Ha! He takes her down a peg and owns her. You, Fly. Otherwise she’ll get above herself and flitter off to another poem, I think you know what I mean. Please, if you will, call me Fly. It is better. My feet are dirty, my feet are covered in shit.’
I pressed my hand on your head. ‘Sleep, Fly.’
Do you know, I always thought that perhaps Teddy wasn’t so wrong when he named you Butterfly, but that was a vague thought that I had out of motherly generosity. And yet just now I realised (I have just been standing at the window, thinking about it) how mistaken Teddy wasn’t, as if he saw something true that had always been there. That name actually was becoming, was unironic. Butterfly: settling on nothing, at the windowpane basking or trying to get out, batting at the light as if baffled by this lovely form that is (so it thinks) some fragile decoration of its ugliness. Do you know what I thought when you were lying there that evening? Instead of being angry that you had brought drugs into our house, I felt an unexpected sense of gratitude towards the needle that had given something back to you. Ah, I thought, so this is what is making you look so well! So bright-eyed and flushed with life. And I am certain you felt that exact gratitude when you guided the needle to the vein. For once you were not dealing yourself out, but were being dealt to. Nicolas said one time, when we were talking about your addiction, that you were a coward for escaping yourself, but I think that the opposite is at least worth arguing—that you were reclaiming yourself.
You looked so strong, well and calm, and I didn’t want the drug to ease off and drop you back to a slouch. Do not let us grow crooked, say the Vedas. We that kneel and pray again and again. I moved the shawl to cover your shoulders. We are all looking for miracles and small mercies, I mean this. Who are we to decide on another’s behalf what is miraculous, what is merciful?
That shawl of yours struck terror into the hearts of young men. You, aged twenty-one, would sit amongst the handful of young people from the village, around a limp fire in the woods or amidst a pile of beer bottles in a field or at the bottom of someone’s garden, and you would hardly speak. Just smoke, and play along at cards if the rest of us played. At that time you were in a phase of wearing Petras’ clothes, simply because, you said, you had grown into them and he had grown out of them. His brown and blue cords, his drainpipe jeans, his boots. You had not really grown into them, they were all too big for you. And always you wore your shawl, like a blanket laid neatly over an unmade bed. Through this complex crocheted honeycomb, this thick, soft network of deflection and obfuscation, sometimes, sometimes, sightings of your bare arms or inklings of female shape. But instantly lost again to the greater shapelessness that was your too-big shawl, this flocking of wool around your birchlike frame. As if, almost, you were giving shelter to the shawl and not the reverse.
You can tell I have thought about this—how you looked, how you were to those boys (although I couldn’t even name any of them now; they don’t warrant remembering). I have thought about it probably too much. The honeycomb, the flocking, et cetera. I have wrestled with ways of explaining you. They tried to draw you out, those boys, but you were undrawable. They thought that your thick cloak of hair was an encouraging, wholesome sign, as if it were flagging up welcoming semaphore. Yes, you were formidable and silent and strange, and yet your flushed skin—your soft hair—serene in the firelight—like warm wax—you were a Mary, a mother, no, a girl, a maiden, a kindly creature, a possibility. I know what they saw. I think of it like this: a herd of wild horses stampeding across a plain throws up a plume of dust, and through this plume the horses’ ferocious and muscular beauty is gentle, almost romantic, the stuff of pleasing paintings in living rooms. You plumed like so; your beauty was so fierce it kicked up its own haze, something dulcet, like a myth. Those boys squinted at you with a giddy sort of look while they tried to work out how to approach you, and tried to balance risk against reward.
You accepted their cigarettes without thanks; you handed out your own without regret; you won or lost at cards with equal indifference. Gradually they became suspicious of you. I say gradually—it was a short time thinking about it, a summer and an autumn, and that was the end of our tentative spell as extroverts. It was ’72, the year that Petras left home for Lithuania, which of course was the real, if unofficial, reason you wore his clothes—because you missed him; or, more rightly, appropriated him—because, seven years his junior, you had finally come of age by growing, almost, into his jeans, by becoming worthy of him, I suppose you could say. Not his equal, but at least wor
thy.
So the boys began to mock you; you were a dyke, a whore, you were filthy. Of course, we always insult what we do not understand, especially if it has rejected us. When the moon sails out, you quoted, from Lorca, and I misremember and misquote, the waters spill over the earth and our hearts are little islands in the infinite. Poetry was your only response to anything they did or said and you used it as wastefully as somebody emptying a cartridge into grey sky. The poems would leave local indents of silence, like hammer marks on metal. The others might laugh, they might miss a beat and then carry on talking as if you were not there, and you might carry on quoting poetry as if they were a paying audience, or otherwise, likewise, not there.
Then one evening in August or September, in the Morda woods, the matter of what was underneath your shawl was raised and became pressing. ‘What do you think is under there?’ you said with your own languid brand of scorn. You were kneeling by a crude small fire pit that had been dug earlier in the summer, to which we often returned, or anyway if you were not kneeling then—if you were sitting on the ground—you came to your knees fast when you felt the questions strengthen. They beset you with their curiosity. They asked and then demanded and then asked again, and all you said was, ‘What do you think is under there?’
They jumped on you all at once—three or four of them—to wrest your shawl from you. It was not easy, you bent yourself double, your chest pinned to your knees. Finding no way in, they pulled back at your shoulders and tried to hoist your body up, but you had wrapped your arms under your legs and made yourself unopenable. They pulled your head back by your hair, and when they realised that they could get no further without real violence, the kind of violence that would be shameful towards a woman, they instead tried to tug the shawl upwards over your head—not straightforward, because the shawl too was pinned by your body, which had locked itself down.
I stood up, but as I came towards you to help, you turned your face to me and shook your head: left and then right, a short, firm no. I will always remember that. It was an affirmation of all that seemed to define our friendship—the way we asked each other to be left to our own fates; people intervene when they think the other person has no fate, or only a weak one that can be changed—just as those boys supposed with you. You have never purposefully interfered with my fate, nor I with yours. And I knew that by sitting back down as I did I was not neglecting you, but affirming your autonomy, your control, and that at some point in this battle for your shawl you would win; I wasn’t sure what you would do to win, but I knew you would.
Dear Thief: A Novel Page 13