by Jo Mazelis
So now this sudden noise, followed by another is ignored by Sarah, until suddenly there is something, someone standing directly on the path in front of her five or six feet away.
A man. Tall, dressed in black, a heavy coarse overcoat, black trousers, black shoes, a white cotton shirt closed up to the collar, with no tie. A chin that’s stained blue-black red with stubble and shaving rash. Lips narrow and pale drawn in a fleshless line. Black eyes in shadowed pits. Cheeks hollow under sharp bones, gaunt and unforgiving.
Sarah makes to go around him. He sidesteps to block her way.
She tries again, this time he raises each of his arms as if in anticipation of catching her.
‘Sarah,’ he said in a low whisper.
Her own name had never held such terror before. She spun out of reach so that all his hand caught was the trailing sash of the halter neck dress. She felt the bow at her nape unravelling swiftly and silkily, let out a scream and shot a hand up to stop the dress from falling.
‘Sarah!’ he said again.
She ducked underneath his grasping arms and turned sharply to her left and began to run down the steeply inclined hill. She ran wildly, tripped in places; picked herself up, fell again.
Cut, scratched, ripped, battered, dirtied, swiped by the low branches of spiteful scrubs, bruised by sudden protruding rocks. She came to a level piece of land where the trees were thinner, the undergrowth denser and her running was more controlled. Beyond one set of low bushes, at what looked like the end of the tall pines, she saw a patch of unbroken sky. She raced for it; kicked through, thrashing her arms against the knot of vegetation, gritting her teeth, snarling with the effort then, triumph! She breaks through, pops out of the twisted tangle like a newborn. Out into nothing but air with no hands to catch her, and she is flying, falling, legs and arms comically pedalling as she goes.
Her finest hour.
And no stunt double, not even a straw-filled sack with a dummy’s bewigged head to crack on the river rocks below.
‘Stupid bloody bitch,’ said Morgana, staring down the steep hill in the direction Sarah had fled. ‘I knew she’d ruin everything, the stupid cow!’
She signalled to the film crew with a hand slicing at her throat. Cut.
Then turned to the other actor, noticing with disdain the powdery black shadows painted around his eyes.
‘Romantic rubbish,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Stupid bloody bullshit.’
Catrin caught up with them.
‘Where’s Sarah?’
Morgana shrugged.
‘Was that what you wanted?’ the man asked.
‘Kind of,’ said Catrin.
Then she looked off in the direction Sarah had run. ‘Sarah?’ she called. Then louder, her hands cupped around her mouth to project her voice further.
‘Sa-rah!’
No answer came. Catrin sat down on the carpet of pine needles that covered the hillside. She sighed deeply. Images floated in her mind’s eye; the running woman, the woman searching amongst the scattered rags, the one of her sprawled at the bottom of the meadow with the ruined cottage in the distance. The perfect stillness of everything except for a few windblown strands of hair.
All of it better than she could have hoped for. And completed now by this absence. This beautiful haunting question mark.
PRAYER, 1969
A school is not a church, she thought as she pushed open the doors to the entrance foyer with its high ceiling and promise of echoes. One is pure. The other is… She could not quite finish her train of thought. It was jagged, full of barbs and snares that trailed in a filthy stream. Concentrate, she told herself, rise above it. Pray.
The doors to the assembly hall were on her right, to her left was the long corridor lined with the classrooms on the first floor. Ahead of her was the staircase leading up to more classrooms and the door leading to the staff area and offices. The latter she always imagined as a sort of archipelago of rationality and order. The headmaster’s office was here, as was the deputy headmistress’s, and the supply office and Gestetner machine, as well as the staff common room; smoke-filled from morning to night.
She breathed in deeply; the air here smelt good, cleansed of the accumulating odours of the previous day; the mince and onion smell of the school dinners, or on other days the heavy, clinging scent of fish and frying fat, the chlorine from the swimming pool, the stink of malodorous feet and armpits and groins from the changing rooms, the sharp purple chemical smell that wafted from the duplication machine. And each pupil’s individual scent too, cheap perfume, or Pears soap, pine or apple shampoo, or Brylcreem or mint toothpaste, or more rarely those heady and unmistakable smells which came from the effluvia of young bodies; menstrual blood, vomit, sweat, urine, shit, semen.
A part of her wanted to turn around and head back through the glass doors, across the car park, past the iron gates, on down through street after street of identical council houses, all the way down the hill until she reached the road that followed the river. On one side of the river was a hill that had been bare of life since the early industrial revolution, no trees grew on it, or shrubs, or wild flowers, only low growing mosses and scrub grass survived. On the opposite bank, spreading out over the flat expanse of the valley were old and new industrial warehouses, factories and work plants. Pipes jutted out over the river, disgorging waste products of a disturbingly vivid range of rainbow hues directly into the river. Here was a plastic factory where many of her charges would begin their working lives. Might they one day, she used to wonder, stand on their production line as they fitted the millionth plastic handle to the millionth plastic bucket, nourish themselves with lines of literature first heard from her lips in her classroom?
As I was young and easy, water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, hubble bubble and a host of golden daffodils and do you remember an inn, Miranda?
The deputy head and Mr Roberts were pushing through the glass doors, laughing and talking loudly, she heard a trace of their conversation. ‘And I said to her “if I wear that mackintosh to the club they’ll mistake me for Harold Wilson”.’
She started up the stairs to her left, one hand gripping the red plastic strip that covered the metal rail. The two men did not notice her, either that or they ignored her.
Over the stairs was a reproduction of a Picasso painting from his Blue Period. A blind and emaciated musician hunched over a guitar. It was yet another declaration of the school’s modernity that at first sight had uplifted her. Now she found that she had seen so many children stream past it, never looking up, never acknowledging the picture, that she found herself loathing it.
She hurried down the corridor and unlocked her classroom, sat behind her desk at the front of the class and stared at the rows of desks and chairs before her.
It was in her mind to get a sheet of the school’s headed notepaper from the supply in her desk, uncap her fountain pen and write a letter of resignation.
‘Dear Sir, It is with regret that I find myself unable to continue in my post as a teacher in this great carbuncle of a school. I find I have grown to hate every single one of my pupils (an emotion I daresay they share with and towards me). Furthermore I hate every other member of staff from the lowliest – that obnoxious dinner lady, Mrs Cox who must surely have been concocted straight out of one of Charles Dickens’ books with her dripping nose and boils and quaint phrases, to the highest, namely that obsequious and pompous and self-serving little twerp the deputy head. Another distressing development is that I have also grown to hate my subject: literature itself, I hate Walter de la Mare and Dylan bloody Thomas, and George Orwell and Coleridge. I despise Chaucer and want to piss on Shakespeare’s grave. I’d strangle any living poet given half the chance. Send me Philip Larkin or WH Auden or Ted crowface Hughes and I’ll soon stop them squawking and scribbling, I’ll cut the fucking green fuse that feeds the fucking flower!’
She had a rich supply of vile language, those o
ld Anglo Saxon words describing the body or its functions, but none had ever passed her lips. Not ever. They had swarmed in her mind at moments like these like a vast array of monstrous creatures, a slug with razor-sharp teeth, a wasp with claws that gripped its victims as he stung and stung again, an eel, a rat, a spider, a side-scuttling crab.
What was it her father had always said of people who swore or blasphemed – that it showed a lack of both imagination and vocabulary? As usual the memory of her father took on an almost tangible form and he often seemed to stand behind her just out of sight, always watching, always judging her.
The day after her father’s funeral she’d gone to London with Tony Labruzzo to see a production of ‘Look Back in Anger’ and afterward they had stayed in a shabby Paddington hotel. What an accumulation of sins that had been! Tony was Italian and Catholic, they were unmarried, had watched a play her father would have called disgusting, eaten a Chinese meal in Soho, drunk beer in a public house called The Cambridge, then smuggled a bottle of cheap Spanish wine into their room where Tony had prised the cork from the bottle with a pen knife.
The wine was like vinegar, but she’d sloshed it into the tooth mug, forced herself to swallow it.
Was it courage she’d sought that night or oblivion? She’d wanted to be drunk enough to allow Tony to seduce her. To take her. To fuck her. Weren’t Italian men like that? All beasts, as her father put it. According to her father and his friends the entire male population of the world from Asia to Africa, from Tokyo to Tierra del Fuego; every Eskimo and Aborigine and Chinaman and Jew and wild Red Indian was just boiling over with lust for a white woman like her.
Not Tony though. When she woke the next morning she had only fleeting memories of what happened the night before, herself trying to dance a striptease and stumbling. Then when they were in bed, Tony pushing her away, saying, ‘Not like this’. Then another flash, herself on her knees throwing up into the toilet bowl. Him saying, ‘I don’t know you.’
In the morning her mouth was dry and her head throbbed, there were particles of vomit in her hair, she stank.
She was alone in the bed, alone in the room, in the hotel, in London, in the world. There was a towel underneath her head, another at the foot of the bed. She wrapped herself up in the larger one and hurried to the bathroom where she locked herself in. She drank noisily from the tap and splashed water on her face. Turned on the bath to find only lukewarm water sputtered forth. She was certain he had left without her. He had probably left last night and got the mail train back to Wales. It was only what she deserved.
But just as her thoughts took even darker turns towards the idea of never returning to Wales, or worse, to suicide, she saw that on the shelf beside the sink Tony had left his toilet bag. She unzipped it, initially in search of toothpaste. Her own toiletries had not yet been unpacked; another sign of how drunk she had been, how utterly unlike herself.
He must have been in such a hurry that he forgot his wash things. There was his safety razor, his stick of shaving soap, his toothbrush case, a tube of Gibbs SR toothpaste, Old Spice aftershave with its picture of an old-fashioned sailing ship. There was a leather case that must contain a manicure set. His hands, his nails in particular were always immaculate, just as her father’s always were. Easy enough if you weren’t a manual labourer. She squeezed a line of the toothpaste onto her finger and rubbed it on her teeth, swished water round her mouth, spat and repeated the process until the worst of the taste and smell had gone. Replacing the tube, her eye was caught by a small leather box in his wash bag. It was small and square and burgundy coloured. She immediately knew it was a ring case and a new one at that. She stared at it certain that she was imagining it but knowing she would have to reach for it, open it and see whatever was inside it.
She was Pandora. She was Gretel breaking off a piece of the witch’s gingerbread house, she was Persephone eating pomegranate seeds, she was Sleeping Beauty reaching with the tip of her finger to touch the needle that brings death, she was Alice falling endlessly.
She pressed the small gilt catch and the lid sprang up. Inside, nestled on its velvet perch was an engagement ring, a narrow band of gold with a decent sized single diamond. She snapped the case shut again, zipped up the wash bag, caught sight of her expression in the clouded mirror, saw not herself but Medusa, her mouth open in horror, her eyes registering terror.
She climbed into the bath and washed herself viciously, dipping her head under the water, loosening half digested rice, meat and carrots from her knotted hair with her fingers.
When she was done she pulled the plug and as a last punishment she poured jug after jug of cold water over her head, down her back, her belly, her legs. Then naked and shivering she rinsed out the bath and poked the last fragments of last night’s happiness down the plughole, off-white, orange and brown.
With one towel on her head and another wound around her body barely covering her, she opened the bathroom door and took at least four steps into the room before she saw Tony.
He was sitting in the Lloyd Loom chair by the window reading The Daily Sketch.
‘Tony!’ she said.
Not looking at her, he said, ‘I got you some Alka Seltzer. I daresay you need some.’
‘Thank you.’ She felt compelled to take some immediately. She took the small tin, the tooth mug and bending awkwardly, collected her clothes from the floor where she must have scattered them the night before.
In the bathroom she dressed quickly, then briskly rubbed her hair, before filling the mug with water and adding the salts; drinking some, gagging, then drinking some more.
It crossed her mind to look at the ring again. The diamond had been larger than the one in her mother’s engagement ring, but then her mother’s had been one of three.
A sharp rap sounded at the door. Tony called out, ‘We’ve got to leave in fifteen minutes if we’re to catch the twelve o’clock train.’
He held her elbow as she climbed onto the train and lifted her overnight bag into the luggage rack for her. The compartment they were in was full, there was a man in a pinstriped suit and bowler hat, another older man with a waxed moustache, plus-fours and a copy of Wisden’s, a pale young woman with two children who were obviously not her own, and a young soldier dressed in khaki. The last of these got out at Swindon, leaving her and Tony alone. He had spent the entire journey engrossed in first The Sketch, then The Times and finally a copy of Reader’s Digest left behind on one of the seats.
She stared at him, willing him to look at her.
He frowned and chewed the end of his pencil, she moved to sit beside him. He was Testing His Word Power by filling in the magazine’s regular vocabulary quiz.
‘Ah, “eremite,” she read from the page, ‘that’s a hermit isn’t it? Or is it D. an educated person?’
It was the last but one question on the page and he had already circled the other answers, but now instead of acknowledging her, he closed the magazine and put it aside.
‘Tony?’ she said.
He closed his eyes, leaving her to gaze at his beautiful face and wonder when he might forgive her.
When they reached Swansea, he once again lifted her bag from the luggage rack and took her hand as she stepped down from the train, but then he set off down the platform at a brisk pace. She hurried to keep up with him, almost running at one point until at last she had to stop. Catching her breath, she watched as the distance between them grew until he passed the barriers and, without a backward glance, went out of sight.
She never saw him again, which as time went by, she considered a sort of mercy. Never again would his eyes pass coldly through her, never again would she confront the man who represented an entirely different life for her; one with marriage and children and a modest home. She began to imagine that none of it had been real, there had never been a Tony, no giddy walk through the narrow streets of Chinatown, no vulgar kissing on the rattling Central Line, no engagement ring hidden in a rubberised wash bag.
And
now just as she was beginning to think of herself as a creature who was hermetically sealed off from the physical body; a mind which experienced all of life through reading and thought alone; now when her maturity should signal to men not sexuality but respect; now she had been assaulted; touched by the vile, intrusive, no doubt filthy fingers of the roughest, most common, most despicable man she had ever had the misfortune to set her eyes on.
She glanced at her watch, half an hour had slipped away and she had neither fled the school, nor written a letter of resignation, nor prepared the first lesson. From her briefcase she snatched the poetry book she’d bought three years before. A gift for that self that hides within this disappointed woman; this husk, she thought bitterly.
She will read one of these verses by Sylvia Plath to Class 3C. These poems of the night, of death and darkness and spite. Flicking through she sees word after word of taboo – bastard, eunuchs, schizophrenic, crap and puke, fatso, a lecher’s kiss, breast and womb, masturbating.
She turns the page and in the nick of time finds one poem that is sterile and opaque enough for her to mask her despair. She hurries to the office, makes copies and is back behind her desk, giddy and trembling as her blood sugar levels plummet.
And now the children are here, flowing into the veins of the school like the vibrii of cholera, pressing at the classroom door, bodiless heads behind the square of glass, gaping dully.
The bell rings. The day begins.
WORD MADE FLESH
Sleepless I am. ’Tis as if the moon’s broad face was leaning over me whispering softly, ‘Wake up, Molly! Come on Molly Finnegan, you’ve work to do.’ Then I must get up, slipping my feet into a pair of the old man’s socks, wrapping a soft warm shawl around my shoulders.