‘Isn’t there a light or a torch?’
‘Your eyes will get used to it.’
‘Are you coming down there with me?’
‘No. You’re the one she wants.’
‘Who?’
Suddenly she pushes me, then bangs the trap-door down so that I only just have time to duck before I lose my balance and plunge down the slimy steps, falling blindly, too frightened to scream. For a second I remember that dream I had just after Abbie was born, of falling down steps like these. But in that dream I hugged my baby. Now I’m alone. I’m going to die alone, I think as I fall. Damp tentacles or hands brush my face in the dark. They stop my fall and I find myself sitting on the sandy floor of a cave.
‘Come closer.’
I follow the voice in the dark. It could be a man or a woman, young or old.
‘You can look at me now. I am where immortality ends, the source of nightmares and the end of hope. Not as pretty as you, am I?’
I gaze up at the tiny, shrivelled figure crouching in a cage suspended just above my head. If not for the voice I wouldn’t have known it was human at all.
‘Who are you?’
‘That’s not the question. If you ask the wrong question you get the wrong answer. You won’t be allowed back for another fifty years.’ The indeterminate voice sounds weary. Blasts of foul breath drive me back a few paces.
‘I’m only allowed one question?’ I’ve never felt so stupid in my life. I ache all over from my fall as I struggle to think of a question so subtle and clever that it will help Abbie and myself. All around me in the darkness I can hear the silent laughter of the malevolent oracle and the unseen creatures whose hands reached out to me.
‘If you have nothing to say …’
‘But I do! What will happen to my daughter?’
I can see between the bars of the cage now, into the charred face and dark eyes that close as the oracle breathes deeply and words pour out, something between a song and a chant, ‘Child of darkness, child of light, born to lead you through the night. Born to riches, strong in pain. She will see when you are blind, she will leave you far behind, but when you need her she will come. The world will kick her then adore, the heights are reached through the drabbest door. The spider waits for ever more.’
Silence. I turn and stumble away, desperate to leave the cave that stinks of ancient breath and decay. The hands pull me upstairs.
Feelings
Jenny screams, shouts, hisses at me, her face distorted with hatred. I suppose she is still a comely woman – she must be, as my contracts are infallible – but she is no longer beautiful to me. We can’t bear to touch each other. I feel the vicious waves of her loathing as soon as I enter this house. I have stayed away as much as possible this year, fomenting the chaos in the ex-Soviet Union. But there is no longer any joy in spreading arms, drugs and misery. They proliferate without any help from me. I shall not travel any more.
Where are You? Have You abandoned this sad and foolish planet and found a better one to play with? I sit here in my laboratory like Job, although I lack his patience. I desire to reason with You, to ask what I must do now. From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it … No, I shall not travel any more, for I have found hell here. I didn’t realize it would hurt so much. When men want to belittle women they say they are mere domestic creatures, unconcerned with ideas and politics and the wider world. I understand now that men turn to the impersonal for light relief because it is so much simpler than the treacherous quicksands of their own emotions. Who invented love? It certainly wasn’t me. It was Your idea, and so You must accept some responsibility for the resulting carnage. At least You must listen to my problems. But I keep forgetting. You’re not there any more.
I can no longer see the next century spread out before me like a chessboard, I have no idea what will happen next, and, worst of all, I’m frightened. Since New York I’ve been unable to fly and can only disappear with great difficulty. I sleep badly and have troubling dreams about losing Jenny and the child. I used to regard the little girl with a healthy detachment, but now I lie awake wondering where she came from. It is just possible that the universal laws I naïvely believed in were overturned years ago and Abbie is a part of myself. Certainly, it feels like it. Jenny accuses me of terrible things, yet I’ve never wanted to hurt either of them. When I try to speak to her rationally, anger and pain come spitting out of my mouth. These feelings of rage do tend to be fatal. Not to me, of course, but at such moments I have no control over my powers. I am wounded, afflicted, haunted by memories.
At our first meeting her face is almost hidden by a dirty straw hat with a sad red feather that droops over one of her enormous dark eyes. The heavy dark waves of her wonderful hair are pinned and twisted under the grubby hat to reveal her slender neck. Her complexion shows the murky traces of poverty and her nose is too big, she is the least pretty of the girls who have trailed up to my office this week to offer themselves to me. A breath upon the bubbles of their tawdry dreams is all it takes to make them dissolve with love, as they call it.
But Jenny is the only one who is alive for me now. As for the others, I can’t remember a name, a breast or a sweaty corset. This isn’t memory but the strange phenomenon of simultaneous time I discovered long ago. Most time disappears as soon as it has happened, dull moments drifting on the ocean of immortal tedium, but my first meeting with Jenny is still happening. She and I are trapped together here. Perhaps this is the moment when my degradation into humanity begins.
An adenoidal cockney voice, ‘I want to be like Marie Lloyd.’
‘Nobody is like her. That’s why she’s a great performer.’ I smile at the hubris of this spotty brat. Right from the beginning she makes me laugh.
She sings, pathetically flat, winking awkwardly and trying to look suggestive:
Every little movement has a meaning of its own,
Every little movement tells a tale.
When she walks in dainty hobbles
At the back round here, there’s a kind of wibble wobble
And she glides like this.
Then the Johnnies follow in her trail …
It’s a lovely melody, which she murders. At the end I’m laughing, and she grins back at me toothily. I can see that the Johnnies really will follow her trail, and I’m inclined to join them. It’s nearly a century since I’ve laughed spontaneously: that fat little whore in Leipzig, who balanced a wine glass on her naked buttocks and later married a count. This girl has a crude vitality, a spark I could blow into flames of desirability, queues of Johnnies.
First, she has to learn how to walk, speak, dance, sing, dress, undress, flirt, tantalize, fuck. She tells me she’s eighteen, but I can see she’s younger. So she has time to learn, and I certainly have time, too much time, to teach her. Having decided to live in London I’m already bored, by the weather and the prim hypocrisies and the lukewarm audiences that yawn at my magnificent conjuring tricks. It might entertain me to create a star out of such unpromising material. Even if she fails, she’ll warm my bed for a few months – and she’s young enough to be worth corrupting. Besides, I need money, and nothing is as lucrative as young female flesh. I have an overdraft at the Fizz, and my shabby wardrobe needs renewing.
Justifying myself? Certainly not. My affair with Jenny started in a mood of irreproachable cynicism.
I must know what’s in her mind and her heart now. So, with a great deal of puffing and straining, I make myself invisible, stand in the shadows of my laboratory and wait for her to come in. I know she will; she never could resist snooping. I hear her come back from leaving Abbie at school. She calls my name and runs upstairs, pauses outside my laboratory, opens the door and stands looking furtive and nervous. I stare into her pale, oval face, into her huge dark eyes, the face that is as much mine as if it was a painting I bought eighty years ago.
As Jenny walks over to my desk I make one of the drawers slide open. Inside, she discovers presents she has
given me, together with all her letters, neatly arranged. There’s a photograph of her, semi-nude, posed in front of a night sky; a fountain pen made of gold and enamel; a Florentine leather box and a pair of gold cufflinks. In their coffin drawer the objects look forlorn, I want to remind her of the feebleness of her gifts compared with what I have given her.
I’m curious to see whether she will read her old letters. She doesn’t. Out of embarrassment? The earliest ones are so passionate and so misspelt. How they amused me.
Then I make a second drawer slide open and show her a shabby green leather notebook with 1912 engraved on its cover, the year we met. Of course, she can’t resist that, and sits down on the floor to browse through it.
October 12
If these are feelings, I suppose I must record them. The world is my laboratory and London the test tube I have decided to concentrate on for the twentieth century. This girl is only a speck under my microscope, of no conceivable interest or importance. An earwig, one of millions.
Her seduction should have been over months ago, and she should have been dispatched with the others. When she is here I see her faults so clearly. Only her faults, as usual: ignorance, presumption, greed. Her lovely ivory face is flawed, she has spots on her forehead, her letters are abysmal, she has the moral sense of a marshmallow, and there is no good reason to waste all this time on her.
Yet, when she leaves my room there is a vacuum. I go to the hearth rug her soft body has warmed and sniff it: cheap lavender perfume and sweat. I pluck a long black hair that has been pulled out during our erotic games, stare at it as if it could explain her appeal, go to the window just in time to see her disappearing into the fog and worry that she will be run over by an omnibus. I repeat my parting words to her – see you next week – as if they had some mysterious significance. My dreams are haunted by her eyes and voice.
This is not rational behaviour. Perhaps I’ve lived among them for too long and have lost my immunity. Tonight as I stood alone in my fire-lit room I noticed a bat-like flapping on the wall. I have a shadow! I turned to face it, this dark emanation, proof that I am leaving some kind of trail in their world. We danced, my limbs stretching across the walls and ceiling. I ran to the mirror over the mantelpiece to see if I had acquired a reflection, too. But its silver was still empty.
Yet I feel less, not more, substantial. The general lack of faith in me is very demoralizing and will soon be accelerated by the inevitable war. Even the prospect of Europe in flames and millions dead can’t cheer me up. I feel I have lost my identity. I’m in danger of becoming a has-been, like those loud-mouthed Greek immortals who have sulked for the last two millennia.
My powers are diminished. I’m reduced to performing conjuring tricks in suburban music halls. The Great Pantoffsky, indeed. My infatuation with Jenny is part of this general decline. It doesn’t take much to impress a fifteen-year-old girl with no education. I don’t feel needed any more – except by her. All these generals and politicians are rushing towards Armageddon without any prompting from me. In these last years of so-called peace, morals are so decadent that there’s very little I can teach anyone.
Of course, I ought to be glad of a rest. These months with Jenny are a charming interlude, a reward for thousands of years of exhausting malice. The eyes of the world are no longer on me, and this should be a release. But it isn’t. This morning, for instance, I couldn’t decide what to wear. I don’t spend much time in front of my mirror, since I have no reflection, but I’ve always had a flair for fashion, which, after all, I invented. But I really have no idea what is expected of me now. Eventually I put on my faded green velvet smoking jacket, as threadbare as modern faith, a schoolgirl’s idea of glamour.
Jenny is a tuppenny muse, a doll the age has tossed my way. My abnormal response to her is evidence that I’ve been surrounded for too long by intellectuals, neurasthenics and weaklings. What I see in this girl is a kind of health and strength. At moments I experience a strange delusion that she is more than she seems, some lost fragment of myself, a reminder of that time long ago when men and women mingled blood and minds and bodies, before the fatuous line was drawn between them. Soon the sexes will unite again, but long before that happens this girl who disturbs me now will wither and die and be forgotten, leaving me alone in my immortality …
I want Jenny to feel sorry for me, but I’m too much of a showman to continue on the same note for long. The green leather notebook slips out of her grasp and falls back into the drawer, which shuts with a bang. She struggles to open it again, pulling and tugging at the drawer. One of the other drawers slides open, and a brown leather diary is offered to her: 1994, the devastating present. She knows it is some kind of trick, but, of course, she can’t resist it as it floats into her hands and opens itself at today’s date:
She’s going to leave me, and I don’t know what to do. We can’t talk any more. She hates me and I hate myself.
Dearest Jenny
You’re reading this, aren’t you? Please don’t go. I want to live in this house with you and the child, to see the millennium out with you. I thought you were my creation, but now it seems I need you more than you need me. You must realize that you can’t really leave; you’ll have to come back again. Stay here with me, Jenny, we won’t quarrel any more. I’ll give you more money and entertain you and surprise you …
With a cry of rage she throws my diary on the floor and leaves the room.
Later, when I’m at work in my laboratory and visible again, Jenny comes to the door. ‘I just wondered if you’re going to be around for Abbie’s birthday next week. We’re having a party.’
‘When?’
‘Next Wednesday. June the twenty-third. A date that might be engraved on your heart, if you had one.’
‘Don’t start reproaching me. You’re not so badly off, sitting on your arse here in luxury.’
‘I didn’t come here to quarrel, Leo. I just want to know if you’re coming to Abbie’s party.’
‘Do I have to tell you now?’
‘She wants to know. It’s important to her. She loves you.’
‘I’m glad somebody does.’
‘Leo, you’re so touchy. I just want to know …’
‘I’ll try to be around. I can’t possibly say. It’s a week away.’
‘Why can’t you? What are you doing that’s so important? What matters more than your daughter’s birthday?’
‘I thought we agreed not to cross-examine each other.’
‘I’m going to bed. There’s no point in talking to you any more. I don’t know why I’m planning a party for her. I must be crazy.’
‘What are you talking about?’
But she has gone, and I have no idea what’s going on behind that face I have invested so much in.
Leaving
This conversation with you jangles my raw nerves and ends in bitter rage. I go to bed but can’t sleep. I’m frightened that dream about the shadowy figures will come again or that an accident will happen to Abbie. Get up and go down to her room, where she sleeps peacefully. If love be not in the house, there is nothing – Ezra Pound farmed out his children. My child is here and must be loved. I’m tempted to stay in her room, in her bed, to guard her, but my tossing and turning will only disturb her. On the stairs, on the way back to my bedroom, I see strange lights coming from your laboratory. More of your tricks? Your door isn’t locked, so I go in.
The small white room, which has always seemed so dull and sterile, is flickering with dark-red light. On the desk, where your computer stood when I was here an hour ago, is a fiery pit where charred bodies writhe. The back wall, with its maps and charts, has disappeared, and I see a corridor echoing with agonized screams and groans. You are disappearing down it. As you become more distant, you expand until your vast shadow fills the room and the night sky beyond. Gigantic, monstrous, inflicting pain with every step.
After a few seconds the room tilts and rocks and becomes an office again, neutral and safe, except for
the computer, which suddenly turns itself on and spits at me viciously.
I flee upstairs to my room, but it isn’t mine any more. This isn’t my house. I’ve glimpsed the reality beyond reality, the Leo I’m not supposed to see at all – the destroyer, the breaker of wings, the poisoner of the will to live. I go back to bed, switch off the light, try to shut my eyes again and go back to sleep. Then I sit up and switch the light back on, terrified of what might be here in the darkness with me. The four walls of my room are an illusion, hiding the brutal architecture of another universe.
At three I go down to Abbie’s room, watch over her and stroke her forehead. By the time the summer dawn washes the city I know I can’t spend another night in this house. It’s against me now; I can feel its spite. At seven thirty I put on my shabbiest jeans and an old sweater, get Abbie up as usual and prepare breakfast.
I know it’s the last meal we’ll eat in this kitchen, but I don’t say anything to her. We walk together up the hill, passing other brightly dressed children with lunch-boxes who converge on her colourful, geometric school, which looks as if it might have been built out of a child’s construction kit. The morning is radiant, and I see it with epiphanic clarity: the children’s energetic faces, the luxuriant gardens and tree-lined streets, the London I’ve always wanted to give her. My eyes fill with tears as Abbie runs off happily to join her friends. The last morning of her childhood.
I fill in the forms the social worker gave me. I don’t think of what I’m losing but of the dangers I’m saving Abbie from. To be poor for a while seems a small price to pay for her life. I need to disappear, to tell a few lies. To be accepted as being ‘emergency homeless’ I have to prove that I have been battered.
In a deserted corner of Holland Park I run at a tree and feel a strange pleasure as my right eye and cheek make contact with the rough bark. Again and again I slam the face that was your masterpiece into the tree, charging at my destruction with the same energy I once poured into my self-preservation. When I can taste blood I take out my pocket mirror and examine my useful ugliness.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 21