Innocent Monsters

by Doherty, Barbara

  “This place is wonderful,” she told him. “It’s so peaceful.”

  “I told you I like peace and quiet.”

  William opened the door and turned the lights on as they walked in, a wall lamp for each of the four white walls of the wide entry hall, completely empty apart from a stone staircase leading to the upper floor and a cactus standing tall in a corner with spiky skinny branches raised up to the ceiling. He led her through an arch opening onto the wall opposite them and switched the light on.

  “I’m going to wear something a bit more comfortable. Make yourself at home, I won’t be a minute.”

  Jessica stood alone on the curved doorway to the sitting room, this also completely white and really quite bare apart from a plain cream sofa, a couple of armchairs arranged around an oak coffee table matching the wooden floors, a wide screen TV and a large bookshelf. His ivory piano stood in front of four sliding glass doors opening onto complete darkness, probably a terrace. Next to them another narrow arch. Arches, arches, more arches.

  Jessica took a step forward inside the room: a massive marble crucifix rested against the corner of the room on her left, an immaculate suffering Jesus hung from it, his blank eyes staring at nothing. It was so tall Jessica’s head only reached his ribs. It was amazing, tall, magnificent and weird. She stretched her hand and started tracing his nose, his lips, the curls of his white hair, the hollows of his white cheeks, then William walked in wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, a packet of cigarettes in his hand.

  “Jessica meet Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ meet Jessica. Can I get you anything to drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Her hand was still on the cross when he sat himself on the sofa. He took a cigarette from the packet and lit it looking at her sideways.

  “I wouldn’t get too close if I were you, it’s in a precarious position for now. I still have to figure out a way to fix it to the wall, it’s a lot heavier than I thought it would be.” Jessica turned to look at him bemused, quizzing him with her stare. “I told you, I’m not into religion, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’d have to agree, most people would think this is quite a monument for someone who doesn’t believe in God.

  “I bought it because I like the way it looks. It’s not a monument, it’s a joke. I thought it’d be funny for someone like me to keep a cross that big in the sitting room.”

  “Someone like me?” Jessica walked to him, sat between his legs on the sofa so she could lay with her back on his chest, her legs outstretched. “What’s someone like me supposed to mean?”

  “Someone who doesn’t believe in anything, like me. A cross is supposed to be a symbol, it’s supposed to mean something and it doesn’t mean anything to me. I find that funny.” He smoked, thought for a second, suddenly afraid he had offended her. “...You don’t believe in all that God stuff, do you?”

  “Maybe not God, no. I suppose it’s just become difficult to accept that this is it, that there’s absolutely nothing at all after death. I’m not sure that loosely believing in afterlife necessarily means believing in God.”

  “I tell you what I believe. Afterlife doesn’t exist. God doesn’t exist. Any of them, from any religion. It’s all bullshit. How many genocides and crimes have been initiated through history in God’s name? How many supposedly God-fearing-men commit all kinds of cruelty day in and day out? Against men, against women, their own family, innocents, children... Would these monsters really exist if there was a God? Don’t even get me started an all the rest... Disabilities, diseases, hunger, poverty, natural disasters? What kind of a God would this have to be?”

  Jessica turned to face him moving between his legs. “Come down. I’m with you on this. I told you, I’m not religious.”

  But his eyes were lost in something she couldn’t see and she held his head between her hands, caressed his face.

  “I wanted to believe when I was a kid,” he murmured. “For a while I forced myself to believe because I wanted someone to help me and I didn’t know anyone who could. So I prayed, I forced myself to believe and I prayed.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “I prayed God to take my father away.”

  “So did I. And then he left.”

  William said noting. There were many words he could have added, many unpleasant thoughts were crowding his mind but they were all born out of the resentment he felt, not towards Jessica directly, but towards the fact that she had managed to escape her father’s misery a lot sooner than he had.

  “I hated him... I wanted him to disappear forever,” she said after a long pause, her head on his chest, looking away from him. “And, I know it’s strange, but I think I loved him at the same time. Sometimes I think I only wanted his affections because I was nothing to him. People always long for what they can’t have the most, don’t they? He didn’t care about any of us. Drinking was pretty much the only thing my father put any effort in. And beating the shit out of us, he used to do that pretty well, I’ll give him that.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Me, my mother, my sister... Whoever was in the way. Mother more, because she used to be around him more.” Always trying to talk to him, always trying to talk sense into him. She would never give up, stupid woman. “I have very few memories of her without a bruise somewhere on her body... I grew up thinking it was normal, and when I was old enough to understand it’s wasn’t, I had to accept it was her normality. Doesn’t make for confident human beings growing up with a role model who gets treated like a door mat everyday and protests very little. It took her a long time to remember what normal should have really been.”

  Jessica was thirteen the day she came back from school to find an ambulance in front of her house. Stuart Lynch had been abusing his family for seventeen years then, without anybody ever taking any notice of what he was doing. Everybody knew and nobody ever spoke. Neighbours would buy him drinks at the local bar when he could already barely speak and then turn up the volume of the TV at night when all they could hear was a woman and children cry or scream.

  Then one day she found the ambulance parked in front of her house.

  Jessica laughed bitterly. “Ever noticed how some people remember to fight for their life when they’re about to lose the only life they’ve got? My father almost killed her that time. She was in hospital for more than a month. If the police never went to see her while she was in there, I’m still not sure she would have pressed charges against him. He went to jail for eight months and we never saw him again. He disappeared.”

  “You were lucky,” he said, and in his voice she heard bitterness and didn’t like it.

  “Aren’t you? You’re here now, that’s all that should matter.”

  It should have been, yes, but it wasn’t. He lived, his father, he lived in his head, with him, even though he hadn’t seen him for years, even though he had run away from him, even though he was probably already dead, he still saw him everyday, in his own features, in every old man holding a kid’s hand, in the sun, in the clouds above him, in everything that should have made him forget.

  But he was here now, with her, his surrogate sister. It’s all that should matter. He lay still beneath her, felt her head pressing on his chest, one of her hands around his neck, the other one on his shoulder. She was so light. So real.

  He smiled. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad I’m here.” Glad to be with him, with someone so tragically close to her, someone who shared her past and now her present. Glad to be with him, in his house, talking to him, talking about things she had never shared with any man before, with anybody else at all.

  She lifted her head from his chest again to look at him and watched him suck on his cigarette. He shifted underneath her trying to straig
hten up and behind him she noticed another arch, a dark room beyond it.

  “I’m sorry, I have to ask. What exactly is so wrong with ordinary doors, William? I don’t really get it.” He laughed, throwing his head backwards. “No, I’m serious. What is it with you and arches?”

  “They make me feel safe ‘cause they can’t be locked.”

  “For most people that’s a good reason to feel unsafe.”

  “Yes, well, you must have noticed I am slightly different.” She was staring at him with a strange grin on her lips. He couldn’t tell if she thought he was joking. “You must think I’m mad.” She laughed without speaking a word and he kissed her forehead, then extinguished his cigarette in the glass ashtray on the coffee table. “You hungry yet?”

  “Mhm... Changing the subject, are we? Yes, I could eat.”

  Jessica moved off him and he stood up heading for the kitchen to inspect the fridge. “It’s gonna have to be either pizza or a takeout. There’s not much else in the fridge.” He shouted towards the sofa.

  “Pizza sounds perfect. Any movies on?”

  William walked back in the sitting room. “Pizza and a movie. Now there’s something I haven’t done in a long time.”

  “Stick with me kid. I’ll show you how to have a good time.”

  He grabbed the remote control from the coffee table and switched the television on. “You mind having a look? I’ll organise the pizza. How about a beer?”

  She took the remote from him beaming. “This evening just gets better and better.”

  “Don’t get too excited. I forgot to mention I have some work to finish, I’m sorry. You don’t mind do you? We’ll eat first.”

  “No, I don’t really mind. I would like to see where you work anyway.”

  “What do you mean? My office?” A fleeting expression on his face made her wish she’d never said anything, but then he smiled at her briefly before disappearing into the kitchen. “Yeah, well. Let’s eat first.”

  They spent the next couple of hours snuggled on the sofa like teenagers on a school night, eating pizza with their hands out of the same plate, watching mindless television instead of the movie they could not find searching the channels. They both felt strangely content, comfortable with the silence between them, grateful of the chance to forget themselves and everything else that existed outside this moment in time. Then William cleared away the plate and the empty beer bottles.

  “I wish I could sit here with you all night, believe me.”

  “Like I said, don’t worry about it. I don’t mind.”

  “You still want to come have a look?”

  “If you don’t mind. I’d love that.” Jessica was already switching off the television.

  William took her hand and they walked up the stone staircase in the hallway, through the first door on the landing. All Jessica saw at first was a drawing table, a large window and shelves, all filled with books and magazines, and as she followed him in she found a portion of the wall opposite the desk completely covered with photographs, details of a body, arms, hands, eyes, all black and white, all of the same person, the same girl she had seen as a drawing in his bedroom that first day she had been to see his apartment. Her skin looked smooth and pale, her stomach completely flat, her breasts tiny on a skinny chest and a mature, sad look in her eyes. She looked so much like... She so much resembled...

  Me... She looks like me...

  William lifted his head for a second, casually switching on a large desk lamp. “I always seem to fall for the same kind of women.”

  “A girlfriend?” She asked without really wanting to hear the answer.

  “Guess you could call her that.” There was something wrong about all those pictures, something Jessica couldn’t put her finger on. It wasn’t just the jealousy she was trying to ignore and it wasn’t how wrong it seemed for him to keep so many pictures of a past girlfriend right across the desk he sat at most days. She turned her back to the wall and tried to concentrate on him, already busy with a pencil on a large piece of paper, on his drawings, on the sketches pinned to the cork board behind him; a pumped up monster with a huge mouth and sharp teeth, scribbles, magazine clippings and photographs, scenery, people, buildings, racing cars and Elysa’s face on the cover of a few comic magazines.

  “Wow! You’re more popular than I thought!”

  “Elysa is. Not me.”

  “You know what I mean. I thought you only did the newspaper strip. You didn’t tell me about this.” She was pointing at the cover of a Japanese comic book, Elysa holding her dog’s leash seductively trough her fingers.

  “It’s grown. A lot. Elysa pays for a lot of things.”

  Jessica traced her big dark eyes with a fingertip, consciously avoiding turning around. “So what’s the story?”

  “She’s twelve years old, she lives on the streets of New York. She has a dog that after an accidental LSD’s dose sometimes has visions of the future, and she’s got special powers, one of which is detecting when people are lying to her.” William spoke without lifting his eyes from the drawing table. “I know, it’s in no way straightforward, but really is just about youth and the struggle of being authentic... If that makes any sense. She was born as a comic strip then people got attached and wanted to see more. I started writing and drawing stories about three years ago. Five of them were only published in Japan, so don’t feel too bad if you never heard about Gospel.”

  “So what do you know, you are kind of a writer after all.” Jessica moved closer to him to kiss his neck. “We’ve got a lot more in common than I thought.”

  “That’s why I chose you,” he whispered.

  She giggled. Didn’t take him seriously.

  Jessica followed his pencil moving on the piece of paper trying to ignore the girl staring at her from the wall, but she wondered about her name, about how long they had been together, whether she was really as young as she looked and the reason they had left each other. Why did he still keep her photographs on the wall? And she kept trying to follow his pencil moving on the piece of paper, tried to keep the thoughts at bay.

  She would have loved to stay here with him, curled up next to his legs while he worked, but the girl was here too and Jessica found she couldn’t stay. So she stroked William’s face tenderly without saying a word, walked out and returned downstairs before he could ask her to stay a few more minutes.

  In the sitting room, Jessica decided to have a look through the bookshelves. There weren’t as many books as there were collections of comics and DVDs, a few VHS tapes, some without a cover or a title, but most of the books he did have she owned herself, perhaps bought them in the same bookshop, on the same day. The Andersen’s hardback she had given him for Christmas sat sandwiched between Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides. She guessed in William’s world this particular arrangement made perfect sense.

  Jessica pulled out one of the comics and went to sit on the floor with her back against the sofa. Unexpectedly, all the writing was in Japanese, all the female characters well endowed with wasp-like waists, shiny hair and gigantic eyes. Was this what oriental men considered perfect, provocative? Was this William’s idea of erotic? His own drawings had much more realistic proportions, much less sexual, innocent but not straightforward.

  She looked through the pages in silence for a while, not really intending to take anything in, then closed her eyes for what she meant to be a few minutes, and fell asleep.

  The house was still and Jesus was a giant ghost nailed to his cross.

  7 January 2001

  WHEN JESSICA woke up again she wasn’t by the sofa anymore, but alone on his king- sized bed, still completely dressed under the duvet.

  The bedroom was large and gloomy, the windows covered by thick curtains, but she could see the morning sun peeping through the ope
n door. The space was pretty much empty apart from a bulky antique-looking wardrobe, a couple of bedside tables and a large trunk lurking in a corner like a sleeping animal. Several melted candles sat on the mantelpiece of the fireplace at the foot of the bed.

  William was downstairs in the kitchen, sliding bread slices in the toaster. The round oak table in the middle of the room was already set for two: two large white cups, two knives, two spoons, two glasses, a jug of orange juice, a pot of coffee, milk, jam, butter and a large bowl of fruit. Wide french doors opened on a sunny but bare balcony. It was a bright morning, the kitchen walls so white it hurt his eyes.

  He had just started the toaster when Jessica walked in; even first thing in the morning, unkempt and unwashed, she was beautiful, her eyes bright, a limpid green.

  She had been holding onto him all night, clinging to him in her sleep while he stroked her, touched her, and looking at her now, so naturally beautiful, made him feel like taking her back to bed.

  “Good morning,” he nodded.

  She stood behind him, held her arms around his waist. “I have a vague recollection of being in your arms at some point during the night. Thanks for taking me to bed.” She kissed the nape of his head. “How on earth did you manage to carry me upstairs?”

  “I am stronger than you think.”

  “Obviously. But you still should have woken me up instead of risking breaking your back.”

  “I hate to break this to you, but you’re not as heavy as you think.”

  “Are you calling me skinny?”

  He turned around, kissed her. “I wouldn’t dare. You’re perfect. Now sit down.”

  William took the plate of toast to the table. “You must have been really tired to fall asleep on the floor like that. Either that or you don’t find those comics as interesting as I do.”

  “I was just tired. But I do struggle with the comics. Please don’t be offended, but I can’t really see the pleasure in collecting them.”