by Sean Wallace
She shushed him at the bedroom door, refused to turn the lights on in the bedroom, pleading her reputation among her neighbors. They smuggled themselves beneath rough sheets, Frank’s lips smudging against her shoulder blades. Her long swathes of brown hair trailed over his face. He lost himself in her. Her flesh became one with his, their separate skins dissolving into a single passionate whole.
He woke blinking, his head strangely clear. His mornings in Manchester were usually painful, befuddled things, full of shuffling and excuses. But the alcohol seemed to have left him quietly this morning. Pale light blinked at him through the curtains.
Noise from another room made him turn his head to the door. There was the smell of bacon and the sound of fat spitting and popping. Next to him there was a space in the bed, the covers pulled back. He was glad, he found. He didn’t want to simply slink away from this one, with his boots in one hand and scraps of his pride in the other. There had been a kindness in Anna the previous night. Something other than desperation had pushed him between her legs. He smiled at the sound of plates clinking. Breakfast would be good.
The door cracked open and her head appeared. Her brown hair was wet and hung down her back. She wore a thick long robe, from which her naked calves protruded.
“Oh, you’re awake, pet. Hope I didn’t wake you.”
Frank shook his head, sleepy and bearish.
“You like sugar in your tea?”
Again he shook his head.
“Sweet enough, eh?”
He grinned.
“Well, I’ll let you wake up a bit.” She winked at him and ducked back into the kitchen.
Frank smiled and stretched and thought about what else might be served with breakfast.
When Anna returned, she was laden with a tray of eggs, bacon, sausage, fried bread, tomatoes and mushrooms.
“Didn’t know what you liked, pet,” she said, “so I made a little of everything.”
She sat on a chair next to the bed and Frank propped himself up among her pillows. They both pulled forkfuls of the food from a heaped plate and ate hungrily. From time to time Frank would glance from her legs – crossed in ladylike fashion – to her square-jawed face. She had large brown eyes, like his own.
Frank wanted to say something but he didn’t know what. All he knew was war and war was for between times such as these.
“Nice eggs,” he managed.
“Ah, pet, that’s sweet of you,” Anna said, “but they’re nothing special.”
Deflected, Frank again contemplated the plate, and then the window.
“Looks like we might get us some decent weather today.”
She stopped eating and laid a hand over his. “It’s OK, pet,” she said. “I understand.”
“Understand what?”
“It’s hard out there on the front. Fills you up. You don’t have to say nothing if you don’t want to.”
“But . . .” Frank hesitated, fork poised in mid-air, a piece of bacon hanging from it, uncertain whether to go up or down. “I’d like to talk.” He felt the clumsiness of his words but in their conversation the night before there had been the promise of hope to come, and Frank wished upon wish to recapture that emotion.
Anna smiled.
“How do you know about the way it is for us?” Frank asked.
Anna’s smile faltered around her eyes. “I lost my fella that way. While back now.”
Frank squeezed her hand. “That’s hard.”
Anna squeezed his hand back. “Oh I bet you lost a lot more than me down there. Number of friends . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head.
“I don’t really have any friends,” he said and he hadn’t realized it until he said it. The numbness kept him too cold for friends. It was something he’d done to himself.
Anna looked at him and her eyes filled with tears. Frank couldn’t tell why. He pushed the tray aside and she came to him, her tears warm on his neck. He stroked her and stroking led to kissing and kissing led to the robe falling away again and then his hands were moving down the nape of her neck, down her spine and her curves and down.
Frank suddenly pulled his hands away with a yell and pushed Anna away. She stumbled from the bed.
His hand had struck some unexpected obstacle at the base of her spine, circular, warm, and furry. She stood in a pool of light that had slipped between the curtains, naked, afraid, exposed. Wrapped around her knees was a long, thick, black cat’s tail.
“What the fuck’s that?” Frank shouted and pointed. He backed away from her, across the bed, pulling the sheets with him.
“It’s nothing, pet.”
“You’re . . . You’re . . .” Frank gasped and fumbled for words. “You’re one of them.”
“I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.” She mounted the denials one upon the other as if quantity would add to the weight of conviction.
Frank fell off the back of the bed and into a pile of his own clothes. He scrabbled around for a weapon and came upright holding one of his army boots. He stood, massive and shadowy before her. He eclipsed her.
“I thought you knew, pet. After last night . . . You knew.”
“You made me do it in the dark!”
“But you felt it. How could you not have felt it?”
Frank wracked the smear of memories: impressions of flesh and shadow and laughter. Had he known? Had he felt it? His brow curled in on itself, digging trenches in his forehead as deep as the ones from which he killed. He could see again the eyes of the man he’d killed in York. That was what you did, what he did: kill the Deformed. He raised the large, steel-capped boot above his head.
“I’m not one of them,” she cried. “I’m not! I hate them! They took my man. I was young. It was a mistake. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
The boot hung in the air, moving neither up nor down, suspended in the turmoil of Frank’s confusion. In his mind’s eye he could see Pam again, her mouth moving, but he could no longer hear her words.
“It was all the rage, pet,” Anna said. “Everyone was doing it. I didn’t know better. No one told me.”
“Why didn’t you get rid of it?”
“By the time I knew I should, I couldn’t, pet. They’d have killed me if they found out. You know they would.”
He did. He would have killed her.
“You won’t do for me, will you?” she said. “You won’t shop me to no one. Will you?”
She looked at him, the same expression on her face as the man lying on the alley floor, Frank’s fist coming down. And although he knew history should repeat itself he couldn’t quite bring himself to do the deed. Slowly, he lowered the boot. After all, what difference did his actions make?
“No,” he said.
“Thank you, pet.” And she flung her arms around his thick waist. He didn’t hug her back but he didn’t push her away. After that she let him get dressed in silence and showed him to the door.
“Which regiment are you with?” she asked as he stood on the threshold, half in the house, half outside. He told her, but he didn’t know why. On his way back to the front, he wasn’t sure he knew his reasons for any of it.
It is not known exactly who it was who first underwent animalistic augmentation for purely cosmetic reasons, but the most famous of these early attention-grabbers was the vaudeville actor Cecil Cormorant.
Mr Cormorant had a functional pair of his namesake’s wings sutured to his back. While this stunt (and clever advertising) drew enormous crowds to Mr Cormorant’s act and made a craze of augmentation amongst a certain sector of the population, it also incensed those who opposed animalistic “deformation” (as they dubbed it). This latter group stated that Mr Cormorant’s emulation of the angelic form, a claim he firmly denied, was blasphemy at the most extreme level.
Lord Simon, believing his own hyperbole and convinced of his own importance, wrote a page-long letter to The Times decrying Mr Cormorant’s actions. The next day, an equally pompous letter from Lord Percy appeared defending the ent
ertainer.
If you ever peruse the letters you will find a great deal of clever phraseology and very little sense, surrounded by reams of editorials praising either one position or the other, without regard for the merit of the arguments. Sensationalism for the sake of the sensational. Tragically, the popular imagination was captured and divided and, a month after his operation, Mr Cormorant was set upon by a lynch mob as he left his theater one evening, strung up by the neck and set on fire.
* * *
After several days back at the front, Frank received a letter from Anna. He hid it at first, terrified to open it. Talking with her had allowed his life at the front to spill into his days in Manchester, and now Manchester threatened to invade the front. The neat separation that held his life in check was being assaulted, the terror of the war threatening to come back to him.
As he gripped his rifle, mud choking his nostrils, and squeezed round after round into the advancing horde, he wondered if the other men would find the letter. Had she mentioned her . . . mistake? Captured love letters were shared with glee. He knew what would happen if the other men found out about Anna.
But also, he wondered, as the bodies fell and the cannons’ roar took a little more of his hearing, how was she doing? How did she feel? After his night with her, he had become increasingly aware of a loneliness at the core of his being, from which all the divisions in his soul spread. He recognized its mirror in Anna.
One night, certain that his fellows were asleep, he could stand it no longer and opened the envelope. Her handwriting was large and awkward, as, at first, were her sentiments – wishing him well, hoping he did not mind her writing, enquiring after his health – but, as the letter progressed, her hand became more confident, her thoughts easier. She had an eye for humor and the absurd in the everyday, the contradictions that define and are denied by people, and Frank smiled as he read on. She did not mention her tail.
The next night Frank scrounged some paper and a pen and replied. He was dissatisfied with the result – an awkward mash of thoughts and some of the more repeatable jokes he’d heard – but he sent it anyway. Two days later he got a reply.
Soon enough the other boys noticed the flurry of letters traveling back and forth – as much by the improvement in Frank’s demeanor as by his increased need for paper and blotters – and the ribbing about his girl began. He clung to his stoic reputation and gave away as little as he could. Meanwhile, in the letters, he opened himself, poured himself out onto the page. Thoughts, fears, hopes and misgiving he’d never known he had took shape on the pages before him – confused but his own:
“Sometimes I feel I made the wrong decision. But it wasn’t a decision really, just what I had to do, so maybe it’s just the world that’s wrong. But how can I be wrong, if I’m doing what those better than me are telling me I should be doing? How can the whole world be wrong? So it’s got to be me. So I try to change: I do what I’m told, I do the right things, say them too, bit still it all feels wrong.”
And instead of laughing, Anna echoed his confusion, tried to understand it, tried to match it to the world she knew, the world that called her sin irredeemable.
He hungered for her letters. They agreed that, the next time he was offered a weekend, they would meet.
He had almost forgotten about her tail until she was naked before him. She was thoughtful though, keeping it curled away during their lovemaking, and he kept his hands on her neck and shoulders.
For most of the weekend they did not speak of it. They simply lay in bed, or ate, or walked along streets and held hands. While they were out, she would wrap the tail around her waist where it curled unobtrusively, but when they returned to her house she would insist on “giving it air”, twirling it back and forth and complaining of cramp. Frank watched these displays half sickened, half affectionate. She caught him staring.
“Do you want to touch it, pet?” she asked him.
Frank stared at his hands. “No.”
She stepped towards him and put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s OK, pet.”
“What . . .” He hesitated. “What does it feel like?”
She ran it through her hands. “Like a cat’s tail, that’s all.”
“No.” Frank shook his head. “To you. What’s it like?”
“What’s it like to have arms?”
Frank stared at her blankly and she laughed.
“It feels like having arms. I don’t think about it. It’s just another part of me.”
“Do you . . .” He rubbed his head. His questions sounded stupid before he even articulated them, but she stroked his brow and he asked her anyway. “Are you glad you got it?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I wish I could be rid of it. I was young. Now I have to carry my folly with me, like a man who’s tattooed on his arm the name of a girl who left him in the end.” She looked away before he could read her expression and pushed a hand through his hair. Then she asked, abruptly, “How old are you, Frank?”
“Eighteen,” he said, “and a half.”
“Lordy, but you are young, pet.”
“How old are you?” he said, slightly riled.
“Oh, put your pride away, pet. I don’t think any less of you. And it’s rude to ask a lady her age.”
“Oh.” Frank reddened.
“But I’m twenty-seven, so at least I’m not old enough to be your mam.”
“Thank God,” Frank muttered.
Anna bust a gut at that, rocking back and forth, laughing, her tail waving back and forth. They ended up kissing on her couch. Afterwards he lay with his head in her lap while she stroked his hair.
“There are a lot of us that made mistakes,” she said then, almost absent-mindedly. “Who got something put on before we knew it wasn’t right in the Lord’s eye, and found out too late to get it taken off. Lots of people. You’ll see them if you look carefully: the man who never takes off his gloves, the woman whose dress bulges all wrong, who never picks up the hem of her skirt, even through the puddles. They just thought it was a bit of fun, or that it would make life a little bit easier. There’s still places you can get it done, for kids rebelling, for the curious or the trapped. They’re not Deformed, not really. They’re just the ones the speeches don’t leave room for.”
Soon they went to the bedroom, and after that Frank fell asleep. In the middle of the night, though, he awoke. Anna lay next to him, unaware of his open eyes. She had her tail out of the sheets and was stroking it softly in the moonlight, a rapt expression on her face. Frank said nothing. For a moment he was afraid that she had lied to him, that she was not ashamed of her tail. But then her beauty and his tired eyes made him dismiss the thought.
In men who had as much wisdom as intelligence, Cecil Cormorant’s death would have marked the point at which hard lines were softened and a compromise was reached. Not our two bastions of Britain. And, taking their cue from these two, the British populace enacted many a copycat and revenge killing. Within two months of Mr Cormorant’s death, the Prime Minister, power slipping from between his fingers, declared a state of National Emergency.
As the violence in the capital grew and the attempts upon their lives mounted, Lords Simon and Percy retreated to their ivory towers, located in York and Essex respectively. Their physical separation split the country. Lord Simon’s supporters flocked north, Lord Percy’s south. Those that did not move of their own accord were driven to.
The absence of a rhetorical middle ground was now reflected on Britain’s soil. Our two celebrated extremists had brought civil war to our green and pleasant land.
Frank was back in the mud again, back among the troops, the cannons dropping shells around them. But now he was the corporal leading the new boys to their first taste of horror. He knew what was to come, what would happen to them, but still he urged them forward, shouting the same slogans the corporals had shouted at him. They came barking out of him, second nature now. But he lingered back as the boys pushed forward, and, although he felt a twinge
of guilt, he could not quite force himself to lead the charge. He approximated the way he had been taught a corporal should act as best he could, but his hand kept fingering the unopened letter in his breast pocket and his feet would not move.
A battle suit staggered across the land to the right of his men, the barrels of its guns spinning wildly, spent shell cases peppering the air. Frank cursed the pilot for bringing the clanking machine so damn close to him, and started to move away, pushing through his men. Anna’s letter felt heavy in his pocket.
Abruptly, the suit lurched sideways and its boiler let out a whistling howl. A jet of flame burst from a pin-sized hole. The bullet could have come from either side. Then everything was collapsing inwards and Frank could see the pilot, tiny and fragile at the suit’s heart, futilely clawing at leather straps, and then the man was enveloped in a cloud of steam that would burn the muscles from his bones.
The explosion was barely audible in the noise of battle. Frank slammed to the ground as the shock wave hit them. Shrapnel scythed through the air leaving dismembered limbs in its path. Frank felt metal breathe past his face. In front of him, a young man, the top of his head sheared neatly off, tumbled to the ground and Frank stared at the exposed contents of his skull as they spread onto the churned earth.
Frank felt his guts heave and the world fade to blacks and whites. He saw the scattered bodies, heard the screams. And he knew that he had failed. He had failed to keep Manchester and Anna from his war. He had been so concerned about his own safety, about keeping his body and soul together for Anna to hold, that he had failed to order his men to move away from the battle suit with him. He had failed them, failed his duty.
Later, after he had made it to his feet and organized what retreat he could, Frank lay in his cot and tried to read Anna’s letter, but guilt blurred her words into one shrieking accusation that he had endangered himself, had almost failed her. But how could he live up to both his commitments?
“Bad one?” Sam Coals, a fellow corporal leaned down from the adjacent bunk.