by Adam Thorpe
‘There wasn’t a woman.’
‘There is in my version. It’s art. Listen, this is serious. When you danced on the walls of Lucca, it was very interesting. I want that way you danced, that precise way, in my show. Will you dance for me again? Because in my show,’ I went on, seeing him grow uncomfortable, ‘it’s the bog woman who dances like that, and she’s not a great dancer, it’s primitive, she has masculine movements, she’s very heavy and she’s all about fecundity and death and preservation. But I am going to have this danced by some brilliant classical dancer – a man, by the way – but he’s going to have some very precise movements to follow, I am going to key them all in very tightly. So what I have to do, Mark, is get you to dance this thing just the way you did on the battlements there and I will just write it all down, just everything you do, and maybe not change very much. It’s the bog dance. What do you think?’
‘We’re out to the beach today.’
‘All day?’
‘Hoping to.’
‘No one told me.’
Mark looked at me just for a second and then shrugged. I felt hurt, left out, as I did over the Florence trip. They didn’t want an old body around on the beach, showing its sagging flesh. Then it struck me that even in the sun it wouldn’t be quite warm enough to strip off on the beach. There would be a fresh breeze.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ll take you once we’ve done this thing. I’ll give you a lift to the beach.’
‘It has to be today, then?’
‘I’d prefer that. If we put it off to tomorrow it’ll rain or something and I want to do this outside. And then we’ll never get round to doing it. This is always happening to me. You have to seize the moment. Carpe diem. It’s to do with creativity, all that thing – obeying the flow.’
He nodded. He was in a curious, quiet mood. The others were fiddling about in the kitchen or getting dressed: they ate breakfast in their night clothes, all except for Mark. Jill appeared from the kitchen, stepping through the French windows with a sour look on her face. She threw some crumbs on the lawn.
‘Thanks for helping, Mark.’
‘I’m discussing art,’ he said, wobbling his head deliberately, his wet, almond eyes catching the sun shafting round the side of the wall as if it were spying on us.
I chose the field below the empty pool for the dance, mainly because it was out of sight of the house, hidden by trees. I explained to the others exactly what I was doing, and Jill and Lucy wanted to come along to watch and then go along later to the beach. It was a difficult moment, but I insisted that Mark needed to be alone, that they would disturb his equilibrium, make him self-conscious. Jill looked even sourer than usual, but Lucy concurred and they all went off in two cars around mid-morning.
It was certainly a beautiful day, with that russet Tuscan light playing over everything as if it were eternally so, as if there would never be a winter again or even a dry summer, as if maybe there never had been. It was a mythological light. This started me talking to Mark, as we made our way down to the field, about how each of us has a personal mythology. We each of us write our own myths, with their own gods and magic totems, made up of quite ordinary elements, such as a long-ago meal, or a cheap bracelet someone gave you when you were eleven.
‘It’s a continual narrative,’ I said, deliberately soothing his nerves by talking, because he seemed quite jittery. ‘We all have to construct our own narratives, give our chaos some shape and form, kind of contain the energies in the same way a river-bank does, a river that curves and wriggles, goes wider and thinner, has its own beginning and end. A river really has its own beautiful story to tell and that’s the essential river of life, Mark. Your mother, for instance –’
‘What the fuck about my mother?’
‘That’s interesting. That’s the first time I’ve heard you swear,’ I lied. ‘I respect that.’
‘Respect what?’
‘You not swearing and then you swearing. Fuck is good. Fuck is very good. I’ll keep off your mother, right now.’
He laughed, which was a relief. I felt I was disturbing his mask, getting somewhere beyond it. The grass was tall on the way down and he kept pointing out flowers, including orchids. There were a lot of different flowers I would never even have noticed. I felt my throat constrict like someone on their first date.
We found a spot where the grass was low and I sat myself down on a log, looking out for ants. There were small thistles in the field that Mark said were a few weeks earlier than in England. It was the balmy coastal air. So he kept his sandals on, but I insisted he take everything else off down to his underwear. He was very obedient. He expressed no dismay. He seemed in a trance, almost. I had expected resistance, but then I realised that at heart he was a small boy, it gave him this poignancy and vulnerability under the bluff exterior and the jokes; he was missing his mother.
He was wearing Y fronts which seemed on the frayed and loose side. His chest was hairless. He reminded me of the David of Donatello. Or of Tony Curtis in Spartacus.
I made notes. I told him to move just as he did on the walls of Lucca but he could not manage this at first. I’m very used to this with students, and I had him loosened up pretty soon and then he was doing his proper thing – he was moving with that weird, heavy effeminacy. It was very potent. The pale auburn light played on his flesh, his muscles moved under the skin, I felt incredibly happy. I felt lifted out of my own flesh, my own tiredness and age and mortality. I wanted to live with him. I wanted what was left of my life to be spent with him. And every week or so he would dance for me.
There he was in the field, almost naked, dancing for the gods and for the earth and, ultimately, for his mother.
It was a terrible shock to turn and see Jill standing on the slope behind me, looking down on us.
Mark saw her at the same time. Maybe I called out in surprise, or maybe she had only just appeared. It was an ugly moment.
I rose to my feet, trembling a little, clutching my notebook. I wanted to wipe her away at that second, erase her from the earth. A terrible admission. But the way she stood there with her arms folded, nodding slowly as if she knew it all, was so very negative. I would have had to raise my voice for her to hear, as she was right at the top of the slope, but the truth was I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Mark just stood there, limp, gleaming with sweat and breathing heavily. He must have been dancing for longer than I’d thought.
Then she went off.
I put my arm around his shoulder – it was very wet – and thanked him.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘I thought it was a ghost.’
He was trembling. He had danced himself into a trance state.
Realisation rose in me: Jill was the mother, conjured from the other world. The son would dance the Mother dance, in the guise of Freya. The mother would look precisely as Jill had looked, plain in her tight, modern dress and contact lenses, and dance something so minimal it would be almost motionless. Dance with her arms folded. With her arms folded! I was brilliant. The Germans would love it. And the Roundhouse –
‘She didn’t go to the beach,’ I said, interrupting myself. ‘That’s all.’
The little demon of the mother would be jealous of life, of the life principle. I told him to get dressed, squeezing his shoulder with my arm.
‘Mark, I feel like hugging you, you are so wonderful.’
‘Piece o’ cake.’
‘May I hug you?
‘No. I’m all sweat.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘On yer bike.’
‘Why?’
‘Let me get dressed, OK?’
‘OK, Mark.’
He was pulling on his shorts. It was barely warm enough for shorts.
‘I hope it was for the dance, and not just for thrills, mate.’
‘Thrills?’
‘What are you doing? What the fuck are you up to with your hand?’
‘I am relaxing your lower musc
le, Mark, that’s all. Touch is not –’
I’m not sure, looking back now so long after, whether he did hit me, in fact. He might have pushed me. It might have been a self-defensive thrust with his arm or elbow. At any rate, I fell over. I fell over pretty hard and put my hand onto a thistle. It was extremely painful; the fat head of the thistle took my weight and the prickles dug into my palm. I yelled.
Mark did not shout at me, or say anything at all. He finished dressing and then walked off. He looked back once. I got to my feet, nursing my hand and swearing. The pain came in bizarre pulses. Shock, I guess. I was both outside the pain and inside.
I had my dance, but nothing else. All that was left to me was the rest of my life, diminishing unto death. I saw no one for two days, keeping myself to myself, pretending to work hard in my half of the house. I heard them, but did not see them.
True, it rained fairly hard for those two days, as if we had broken the sunlight itself with the dance. The guttering dripped and everything flowed and trickled. I listened to music and read and ate simple meals of pasta, feeling close to despair. I hit my face on the side of a door, stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of a night, and in the morning I had a black eye. I was already bruising easily, by then.
Once, it sounded as if they were arguing, and I sat there alone in my dining room at Saul’s heavy oak table, wondering why humanity was so fallen and complicated.
Another time two of them – I don’t think more – were making love. I heard the sounds through the wall, which made me realise what a bad job Saul and Ivor had made of the division. Maybe it was Mark making Tamsin moan. There was a pause, then the girl’s moans would carry on until the next pause, as though they would never get there. It aroused me, anyway. I wrote a copulation scene into the choreography – something fairly savage, what François would have called ‘the hurtsome number’, which froze and then restarted to the rhythm of what I could hear. (It was cut, eventually.)
Lucy came round while I was having breakfast in the kitchen. Her eyes were red. She wanted to talk. I made her coffee. I’m good at making coffee.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘things are so awful.’
‘Things?’
‘The whole hols, they’ve gone completely pear-shaped. Mark said our dinner – the one Ollie and me cooked really carefully last night, that took about three hours – made him think of the “one time his Gramp cooked during the gastroenteritis epidemic of ’65”, ha ha, and went on about ’nanas for pudding again, and Ollie got really silent and tense because every time Mark says “nana” he wants to hit him, then there was an argument about wine consumption – who was paying for it and so on, and Jamie got drunk and so did Mark and somehow they got into this stupid sort of pretend fight and Mark said Jamie’s fist was like a bannock-cake, whatever that is, and Oliver tried to separate them and got a finger up his nose but nothing serious and then I said we should all cool off with a midnight swim and Mark said, “There’s no water. And that’s not a joke.” And Jamie said, “Eeh oop, by gum, we’re so fucking boring, us botanists –” trying to be northern, you know, and Tamsin said, really terribly serious, “I wish you’d all stop being so nasty to Mark.” You realise she’s not all that bright, she got one-and-a-half O levels in art or carpentry or something. And she added, “It’s not fair.” And there was this huge long silence when you could have heard a feather drop, let alone a pin. And then Jill said, “Yeah but I think Mark can handle it, Tamsin. If he can handle old queers fondling him, he can handle anything.” I’m sorry, Jack, but that’s what she said, in that fake prole voice of hers. I thought you ought to know.’
‘Queer is not a term of abuse,’ I said. ‘Old, maybe, is.’
‘Anyway, you’ll be pleased to hear that Mark told her to shut up. “Shut yer gob,” he said, like he does in the woods. And Jill burst into tears and ran out of the room. I said it was awful of Jill to be rude about you, Jack, and Jamie said it wasn’t surprising, you were obviously . . . and then Oliver asked Mark if it was true, had you, you know, with Mark . . . ?’
‘I never got past first base,’ I said, looking at her steadily.
‘Oh,’ she said. She started to redden. ‘I defended you,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just frightful gossip.’
‘Oh no. It’s like they said about the GIs. Oversexed and over here.’
‘I see.’
‘Lucy, don’t be all English and disapproving.’
‘I’m very open-minded, actually. You didn’t know me when I was a snow bunny. I screwed three instructors in the same week.’
‘Well, we are really loosening up today. That’s good.’
‘You can screw the bum off whoever you like, actually.’
‘Thank you. Who said that you meet your fate on the very path you took in order to avoid your fate? Prosper Merimée, maybe. No, it was La Fontaine.’
Lucy blinked. ‘Anyway, the point is, Jack, Mark said something really weird and irrelevant, after Jill had rushed out of the room, even considering he was so pissed. He said, looking at Tamsin: “I’m going to live in Ireland with Tamsin and work on the Irish bogs.”’
‘Really?’
‘What happened to your eye? Did Mark hit you?’
I laughed.
‘Jesus, no. I walked into a bar and said ouch.’
‘I’ve got Rescue Remedy—’
‘It’s OK. I bruise when I’m not even touched.’
‘Anyway, Jamie nearly pissed himself after Mark said this thing about Tamsin – which was better than hitting Mark. And Tamsin said, “What’s so funny, Jamie?” And there was another silence and then Mark said, “That got you all worried, didn’t it?”’
‘Mark, be careful,’ I said, as if he was in the air around us. ‘You’re going to break a lot of people’s hearts.’
‘You think so?’
‘I do.’
‘Not mine, I can tell you.’
‘Sure.’
‘Certainly not after he started going on about all the pubescent girls found preserved in Irish bogs. They’re mostly clothed, he said, with plaits of thick red hair that went on growing and really long nails. And after a while these pubescent girls crumble to dust in the normal air and that really they shouldn’t ever be exposed. It was just so weird. Incredibly creepy. In fact, Jack, I’m scared. He’s got really dark eyes. You know about his mother?’
‘He has very nice eyes. Almond-shaped, like on a Greek vase.’
‘You know about his mother?’ she repeated.
‘I don’t care about his mother. Because we’ll never know the truth of what happened.’
Lucy looked disappointed. I couldn’t stand her being in the house any more. I couldn’t stand the house any more, as a matter of fact. It was damp and cold after the rain. I rose to my feet and I said, ‘You know I’m leaving tomorrow?’
I should have been staying another week, officially. I wished I could leave today, but Paulo wasn’t due to call round until tomorrow. I would sort out the key and leave.
She shook her head. ‘That’s a shame. It’s been terrifically fun, having you around. We haven’t even noticed your age. You’re so wise. What’s wrong with your hand?’ she asked.
It was still red and swollen from the thistle, like a scarlet fever patch on the palm.
‘Oh, just the mark of Cain. An allergy to life.’
‘What’s happiness, in your opinion?’ she asked, at the door.
‘It’s feeling low and you’re walking along the city street when suddenly a lovely girl or a lovely boy, depending on your sexual proclivities, gives you a very nice and very personally directed smile because, way back, she or he did your hair one time. And he or she has remembered you.’
Lucy said, ‘Oh. I thought you’d say something deep and philosophical.’
‘I just did, Lucy.’
The dance was performed in Stuttgart and was a reasonable success, and then it toured for six months and is revived now and again in unexpected places: Vilnius; a deconsecrated ch
urch in Lincolnshire; high-school festivals in Canada smelling of sandwiches. Mark’s dance was performed by the company’s leading male, Emmanuel Angelich. He did his best, smeared in the Bog Woman’s terrifying darkness, masked and naked and clumping about, watched by Jean-Claude Wieck as the little demon of the mother with folded arms. But it was always like a parody, the Bog Woman dance that had possessed the son. I saw the golden field in Tuscany and felt the spring breeze on my cheek and smelt the sweetness of Mark’s body and wanted to weep each time I watched from the director’s box because my hand would start to hurt and I knew it was the darkness rising again, as it always did.
My mother died aged 102. The same year, 1994, that Mark stepped off a ledge backwards, admiring a flower in the Spanish Pyrenees. I do not know how high the ledge was, but it was high enough. Neither do I know the name of the flower.
I had not even said goodbye to Mark. He was out checking on the flora and fauna when I left. I sneaked away, closing the car door softly and keeping in first on the track until I’d left the house behind. Only Lucy was waving from the top window, although I’m sure everyone knew.
I stayed in California. Each time I went to the barber’s I would remember what I’d said to Lucy, until I no longer had enough hair to bother going to the barber’s with. I couldn’t stand the barber’s, actually: right from being a kid, back in Southgate, I couldn’t stand the prickle and itch of the cuttings down my neck. My mother would always stroke my bare neck and shoulders and back with a cool wet flannel, afterwards, while I craved to tell her that it was even worse at the bottom of my spine, under my belt. It was worse than ants. As a grown man I would always have to have a shower after and a change of shirt and even pants because it was still worse down there, the itch of the fallen hairs. So there was one advantage to growing very old.
When they restored Spartacus to its former glory, I went to see it alone, the light flickering over me in the front row. I sometimes believe that this is all I am, now: a cinemagoer, waiting there in the dim light for the final darkness to close over me after the crucifixion of the slaves.