Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Where was I walking? To a flesh reclamation facility in which, for the first six months, I worked all night in a giant tub filled with bones that sported little tassels and fronds of meat still clinging to them. Many of the items in this ossery were becoming putrid, the marrow exploding from their ends as decay heated and expanded it. Some were like slimy rubber; others were brittle as desert flints. My job - since I lacked nose or mouth to be offended by its noisome smell - was to sort the material. It was delivered through a chute from a trunk in an undifferentiated mass, and the owner of this firm required me to place different kinds of bones into different kinds of processing machines.

  This was my work all through the night. My shift finished a little before dawn, and I would rinse myself in the cupboard-sized company shower and then set out back to my hostel. Here I would eat, sitting on my mattress. There was a hole in the wall of our room, large enough (you might think) for a rhino to step through, a ragged oval punched out of the bricks leaving stepped and crenellated edges, and through this I might greet the occupants of the room next door. The paint on such wall as remained was more blister than smoothness, like lime-green bubblewrap, except in those places where it had sheeted away entirely. The beams of the roof were visible above us. The floor of this room had been carpeted, but the four of us had agreed between us that it was too revolting - for it was damp, and patched, and crawling with tiny lice like vermicelli - so we had folded it and burnt it in the yard behind the house. This yard had, clearly, once been a car park, but was now empty except for the brick-shaped rectangles marked out in old paint on the pale concrete.

  The rent of this slum took up a portion of my income, including monies that I pooled with the others in my room to keep the pot of pap in the corner filled and cooked. A larger portion was spent on pharmocopies, and vitamins. But I can confirm what some other headless have reported, that the body adapts to the lack of pineal and pituitary organs with surprising success. It stores ingested hormone in the adipose tissue and releases it again - I am not certain how - in approximation to the sensitive action of the missing glands. Although, of course, hormones must still occasionally be replenished from an external source.

  Three

  To the people in this hostel I was Steelhand. I had good reasons to suspect that going about Cainon under my real name would result in trouble. Of course, since the police had my DNA on record, any simple streetside test would reveal my deception; but at no time was I stopped by any policeman. I was one of the law-abiding headless; working, paying my rent, contributing my mite to the taxman, never harassing, or embarrassing, or even passing one word with the headed who passed me on the streets unbidden. There was no reason for the police to bother me.

  But I was not marking time, of course. I was looking for Siuzan. Every spare minute of my time there was given to this task. It was the shape, the horizon, of my whole existence; for I needed to atone.

  I did not go to the library to check address records and other official documentation, since to be in the address records she would have needed to purchase a house or set up a business - and how could a shamed and headless woman have afforded that? She could not be in the voter records, for the headless were barred from voting. There were no official records of the headless population; or, if such records existed, they were not made available to the general public.

  I asked questions of whomsoever I might. I asked every headless man and woman I encountered whether they knew of her. I went from room to room in my hostel interrogating the occupants as gently as I might.

  I pursued this line without panic, or urgency. I considered how many times I had been close to death, and how often I had survived. When I considered these things it was easy to believe that I had been preserved by Providence or (although it approaches heresy to say it) by the All’God Himself, for some reason. What greater reason than to begin to make amends for Siuzan’s decapitation? To attempt the impossible atonement, but to attempt it nonetheless? That was my task as I understood it.

  Of course my enquiries were often misunderstood. Headless women - proportionately a much smaller group of people than headless men - lived with the shame of their specific crimes and also the shame of general association. Some of them took to harlotry to earn money. Perhaps it was easier for them than for other women, since they lacked that blazon at once of shame and of recognition, which is the face. But it was hard for me to move amongst these poor souls. With every enquiry I made I was sharply aware of the thoughts that would be crossing my interlocutor’s mind - that I was wished to seek her out for the pleasures of purchased sex. It would have been fruitless for me to have insisted how pure were my intentions, and indeed would only have rooted the contrary belief more firmly in their minds. So I said nothing.

  I asked in my hostel, and at my place of work. If ever I encountered a headless man or (rarely) woman at some other place, I asked them about Siuzan. I walked the city after my shift, simply looking.

  Nobody knew where she might be found. None of them had even heard of her. Indeed, after several weeks I began to believe that one of two things had occurred: either she had assumed a false name to mask her shame, or she had left the city at the first chance and gone far away from this place. I planned, I suppose, to travel back to Doué eventually and resume my search there; and after that to search the whole world if necessary. But first I needed to be sure I had searched Cainon thoroughly, and it is a large city, with many inhabitants.

  I took to roaming further through the city after my shift, exploring and questioning. I came upon the central police station, and at first I flinched away from it, avoiding it as if it possessed some malign talismanic power to hurt me. But I overcame this foolish fear of the place, and soon I was walking directly past the splendid façade, the ramp, the daffodil-coloured stones of the wall. Once I even saw Bonnard himself - the very Bonnard who had, through his cruelty and his sadistic desire to inflict the letter of the law, decapitated the woman I loved. He was strolling easily down the ramp in company with another man. I was strapped by a terror that he would somehow know me - grab me, bustle me up into the police station, lock me away, prevent me a second time from saving Siuzan - but of course he did not know me. We headless all look alike to the headed. Nor was it wholly rational of me to think of Bonnard as the one who had prevented me from helping Siuzan: I had, of course, done that to myself. But nevertheless he stood as a dreadful externalisation of the power to hurt innocence. It was as if a djinn, powerful and malign, had taken human form. A devil. I stopped in my tracks and stood like a statue, and he walked past me so close that I felt the stir of air in the wake of his passage. And then he went on, his voice alternating with his companion’s in conversation. I remembered that voice, with absolute precision. The mere sound of it was enough to make me tremble.

  I gathered myself, and walked to the corner of the station, where the buildings led away in a crescent towards a church.

  My mind was still shuffled and disordered by my close-encounter with Bonnard, and so for a moment I did not see her. But there she was. I saw her eventually; and perhaps it was, as I sometimes think, Providence that we were to meet again. The sunlight was pricking out a pattern of filigree lines on the cream brickwork behind her. She was standing in front of the gable end house of a row of houses. A dead root system of ivy adhered to the blank frontage long after the plant itself had died, a huge splash-pattern of dark brown like a sculpture of the nervous system. She was standing in front of this knit of colour, facing me. I knew it was her at once.

  You will want to know, perhaps, how I could be so sure that it was her, given that she had no face. You may even expect me to reply that I knew because love chimed in my heart, or that fate dictated it, or that providence recognised its crucial moment. But the truth is plainer: I had lived as one of the headless for a good while, and I had quickly learned to differentiate between people by noting all the myriad physical distinguishing features of the faceless body. There are a great many, certainly more m
arks of alterity than distinguish one face from another. Soon this process of recognising people by their torsos rather than their faces becomes second nature.

  I walked towards her, drawn in, you might say, by the miraculous gravity of her - of her simple existence, in that place at that time. I came within five yards of her before a grit of normality registered in my thoughts: I mean, the inappropriateness of marching directly up to a lone woman, standing on the streets, a woman moreover who had been raped, who had been decapitated rather than betray her rapist to death. It all came back. Everything and all the memory and it almost overwhelmed me.

  I stopped myself. I was uncertain what to do.

  She was wearing a blue shift, paler than her almost black meadhres. It was a unisex outfit, differing from a dozen others I had already seen that day only in one small detail: the twin collars through which poked her standard-issue epaulette eyes had both been braided with fine stitching, zigzagging tightly in a lip all about the hole like the fine shading of an artist. Perhaps this was her own work, and a very modest, and very affecting, beautification of her uniform it was.

  She squared up to me, registering the fact that I had walked so close to her.

  ‘Siuzan?’ I said. ‘Siuzan?’

  ‘Yes?’ She turned her body sharply, to bring me into clearer focus in her epaulette-eyes.

  ‘It is me,’ I said, feeling the foolishness of what I said as I said it, but wanting, before anything else, to reassure her.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ she asked.

  I stepped closer, absurdly protective of my pseudonymity, and lowered my voice. ‘Jon Cavala,’ I said. ‘I am Jon Cavala.’

  She barely flinched. ‘Jon,’ she said. There was no rancour in her voice.

  ‘Siuzan,’ I said. ‘It has been so long - two years. Perhaps it has been longer.’

  ‘Longer,’ she said.

  We stood, awkwardly, facing one another.

  ‘I have been looking for you,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ Her voice did not sound displeased, but nevertheless she added, ‘Why?’

  This question - the obvious one - nevertheless caught me unawares. I could have answered it, but not in a few words, and not without opening a larger discourse, love, which would have been premature at this first meeting. ‘I wanted to make certain you were well,’ I said weakly.

  ‘You wanted to make sure? What do you mean?’

  ‘After what happened, Siuzan,’ I said urgently. I did not understand why she was so calm. Perhaps I had been expecting her voice to break - perhaps, secretly, I had even dreamed of an obscenely public embrace - a declaration of love. But of course there was none of that. How misleading our fantasies are.

  ‘After what happened? You mean the beheading?’

  ‘I mean that, but also the - things before.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, that. All that. Yes.’ She straightened her spine. ‘I have been well. Life since the . . . since the loss of my head has been . . . less intolerable than I might have thought.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I feel a terrible responsibility,’ I said, ‘for the loss of your head.’ It was extraordinarily hard for me to get this sentence out. I am not sure why: for I had been planning it, or a version of it, for two years, or more. But even so simple a statement came as if wrenched from deep inside me.

  ‘But Jon,’ she said, stepping forward and reaching her hand up to touch my elbow, ‘it is not your responsibility!’ She spoke with warmth, and my memories of the old Siuzan, the way she had been before she lost her head, rushed through me.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I explained, trying to keep a grip on myself.

  ‘What don’t I understand, Jon?’

  ‘I know the sacrifice you made. I spoke to Bonnard . . .’ (at his name her hand dropped from my arm) ‘. . .which is to say, I did not so much talk to him. Rather he interrogated me. He told me that you refused to implicate your attacker.’

  ‘Jon,’ she said again. ‘There is no blame here. Everything was as the All’God wanted it.’

  ‘But to suffer as you have suffered!’ I cried, unable to contain myself any longer. ‘To be attacked, and then to sacrifice yourself rather than condemn your attacker . . .’ The words clogged up in my delivery, and I stopped. Had I possessed eyes I would have been crying.

  ‘There was no great hardship in the sacrifice. I am still alive, aren’t I? I have only lost a head.’

  ‘Siuzan,’ I said. And then I said it plainly: ‘Since it happened I have carried around inside me this thought: that it would have been no great sacrifice for me to take your place. That is what should have happened. I would have only lost a life, and you would have been saved.’

  ‘But your life is not yours to throw away,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘If the All’God has preserved your life, there must be some purpose to that preservation. Has the purpose of your life been fulfilled yet, Sieur Cavala?’

  ‘The purpose of my life,’ I said, hoping the words did not outrage her, ‘is to attempt atonement for your decapitation.’

  She was silent for a while. ‘I shall not rebuke you,’ she said eventually. ‘Although what you are saying implies a very great - intimacy between us. Only think, dear Jon, you are not responsible for what has happened to me.’

  Indeed she called me dear Jon. For three heart pulses I did not hear anything beyond those words.

  ‘I am responsible for myself. We are all responsible for ourselves,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ I said, abruptly.

  ‘I am looking for work,’ she said. ‘I am looking for somewhere to live. I am presently in a house that - or house is too grand a word. I share a room with three female headless, and they . . . or, rather, I am uncomfortable with their—’ She stopped in some confusion.

  ‘I understand,’ I said, quickly. ‘How could you be anything but outraged by their immorality?’

  ‘It is not that,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It is something else. I have always tried to live my life according to those words of the Bibliqu’rân, Judge not lest you be judged. And this is the danger I am in: for as long as I remain in that place, with those women working their carnal work and taking money for it, just so long do I risk falling into the habit of judgement. It is the serpent in my own soul that distresses me, not the work these women are doing. They are kind women, mostly.’

  I was very distressed to hear of her living in such a place, although her experience was common to many headless women. ‘You must leave that house,’ I urged her. ‘Come back with me now; I live in a house, it is a large house - there is a room shared by some headless women. They are virtuous women, as far as I can tell, and I can persuade them to accommodate you in their room.’

  She was quiet.

  ‘I appreciate,’ I said, ‘that this may seem an improper invitation. Please do not misunderstand me. You know me, I hope, even if only a little. You know that my intentions are only honourable. You need a place to live.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then come live amongst these decent women of my acquaintance.’ Finally she bowed her torso forward a little. ‘This is kind Sieur Cavala,’ she said. ‘Perhaps our meeting is more than mere chance!’

  ‘I hope so!’ I said, earnestly.

  Then she said, ‘You do not mind me calling you Sieur Cavala?’

  ‘I was priggish before,’ I said, ‘when first you met me. My experiences have taught me not to be so priggish.’