Love

by Angela Carter

  Once the process of dissociation began, it quickly gathered impetus. He felt a sharp distaste at the close physical contact which had been bred of their extreme intimacy. If, at first, he believed he felt a new distaste rather than a positive revulsion, he could no longer drink from a cup Buzz had used unless he rinsed it out and the casual embraces they had always exchanged so thoughtlessly became intolerable for him. Their affection dissipated with extraordinary speed for, had they not been brothers, they would have had little in common and they could not maintain between them an uncommitted state of mutual forbearance without the sustenance of love. Buzz was helpless, incredulous and a little fearful as he perceived the growth of Lee’s aversion and strove to protect himself from pain by jeers, by coldness and by the pretence of disdain. He schooled himself in dislike and waited for the blow to fall.

  Lee expected a display of panic and violence when he told Buzz he would have to leave the flat but Buzz, well prepared, showed no anger or surprise. He continued to sit before the fire in perfect silence, drumming his fingers on his knee, while Lee wondered nervously what the unguessable response might be. But, when it came, it was scrupulously cool.

  ‘Going straight?’ asked Buzz in a normal voice, though with a touch of contempt.

  Lee shrugged. They did not look at one another. Time passed. Coals fell in the grate. It was night-time.

  ‘Where shall I live?’ said Buzz.

  ‘We’ll find somewhere for you easily,’ said Lee with false cheerfulness.

  ‘When shall I move out?’

  ‘As soon as you can find a place.’

  ‘And will you let me come to see you, now and then?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Lee, touched and embarrassed. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Sure,’ repeated Buzz equivocally. He recommenced drumming his fingers and Lee’s embarrassment and distress grew with every moment that passed for, if he could brave out his brother’s wildest passions, this unaccountable quiet nonplussed him and he feared it might be the prelude to some absolutely unexpected act against which he had no defence. Downstairs, another occupant of the house began to run a bath and the sound of running water drifted upstairs.

  ‘Lee . . . who shall I talk to?’

  ‘It’s not that you talk to me, much.’

  ‘But you’re always there. And she, there’s always Annabel to talk to.’

  ‘I’m not divorcing you, for God’s sake. We’ll still be here, both of us.’

  ‘You’ll ask me to dinner once a month, perhaps, will you?’

  Lee realized his brother’s attack was cunningly directed at his sentimentality and began to lose his temper. The fantastic room became abhorrent and the dark figure who sat on the carpet took on the aspect of a giant, hairy toad squatting upon his life and choking him, since this obscure being was a more fitting inhabitant of the room than himself. Yet the room belonged to Annabel; she had painted her ambivalent garden on the walls and installed Lee in the midst of it whether he matched her colours or not. Lee broke out in confused fury.

  ‘She’s mine.’

  ‘Is she?’ said Buzz in sardonic enquiry, turning his hard, brown gaze upon his brother. At this precise moment in time, Lee ceased to love him. The few remaining bonds snapped altogether and at once as they knelt before the fire and bickered about the girl who, like a Victorian heroine, had come between them. Yet Lee still had not the faintest idea what he could do with her once he got her to himself or how he might make some reparation to her, in order to relieve his guilt. He might, perhaps, clean out her room and throw her things away for he half believed her some malleable substance on whom the one who rescued her from her phantoms could impose whatever form he pleased.

  Since he was racked with pity for her, he chose to try to rescue her for fear of what she might become if she were left to herself or to the unscrupulous mercies of another, for he did not know she had plans of her own and would finally choose to attempt to save herself.

  ‘Mine,’ repeated Lee and, rising, swept the mantelpiece clear of all its assorted rubbish with a sweep of his arm. The rubbish fell down around the fireplace; the skull of the horse shattered in shards of bone and the pottery Prince Albert snapped in two at the waist. Buzz continued to look at him with those opaque eyes which were, in no sense, the mirrors of his soul. He offensively took out and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Turning me out of our home,’ he said. ‘What would our auntie think?’

  Lee’s heart contracted and he would have lashed out if Buzz had not been his brother.

  ‘No point in consulting the dead,’ he said with an attempt at calm.

  Buzz threw his cigarette into the fire and kicked the coals with his booted foot. As he rose, he towered above Lee. His coat of long-haired fur took on the appearance of scalps, his hair shook out like that of a brave and his endless, emaciated shadow flickered across the ceiling as if the shadow of his influence dominated the room. His appearance was so fearful that Lee braced himself for the shock of impact or even the cut of a knife but he received only a mouthful of empty threats, as he would have expected in the old days before he lost his detachment.

  ‘Do anything to her like you did last time and I’ll get you, I really will.’

  ‘You’re too bloody inefficient,’ snarled Lee, freshly infuriated at this dramatic flourish, but Buzz was out through the door before the shaft struck home and when Lee came back from work next day, he found not one of his brother’s possessions remained in the flat. Every last rag and scrap of paper was gone and he had not left a note of acrimonious farewell or the gift of his new address which might have hinted at the possibility of a reconciliation. Only a few blotches on the floor showed he had ever lived there. His dark room echoed to Lee’s footsteps with a hollow sound.

  He took a suitcase for her things to the psychiatric hospital and, now he was in full possession of his faculties, the building struck him by the witty irrelevance of its grandeur to its purpose. One approached it through wrought-iron gates; a double drive swept round on each side of a defunct fountain in the form of a triton who raised up a scallop shell to spill no water any more, only a stain of rust into the marble basin below. On either side of the building stretched pleasant lawns and formal beds of standard rose trees on which a few withered blooms still languished. He saw the lake where he had found Annabel was not a lake at all, only a lily pond in the shape of a tear. All served as a decorative prelude to a harmonious Palladian mansion whose present use was indicated only by a discreet notice board, half hidden in a privet hedge. A young boy in a long dressing gown and several mufflers who lurked on the porch glared mutinously at Lee as he ascended the wide, gleaming, marble steps to the front door.

  ‘This house was built in the Age of Reason but now it has become a Fool’s Tower,’ said the boy. ‘Are you familiar with the tarot pack?’

  Lee with his suitcase was so intimidated by the mansion that he felt like a travelling salesman and could only smile and nod ingratiatingly for he was eloping with the duke’s daughter; but when she saw him, she grasped his hand with a strangely passionate pressure and suddenly kissed him. He scanned her face for signs of change but her pale, haunted composure was that of the morning he first woke to see her. He glanced down at her bare hands.

  ‘I’ll buy you a new ring,’ he said.

  ‘One with a moonstone?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he replied, with a sense of foreboding.

  ‘I’d rather spend the money on something else,’ she said with the air of a child with a secret plan.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘First of all, on a taxi.’

  He did not hear her instructions to the driver and found himself unexpectedly in the dockland among mean, steep, cramped streets and low, dark shops. Annabel’s features grew unusually animated; she glanced at him from time to time with a repressed, anticipatory glee. From the window, Lee saw a gaunt figure emerge from a doorway folded in the wings of a black cape like Poe’s raven named Nevermore but the taxi turned a corner and Bu
zz, if Buzz it were, was gone. The taxi deposited them on a main thoroughfare by a shop window above which a sign read: ARTIST IN FLESH.

  The window was full of coloured photographs demonstrating the full range of the art of the tattooist. Men turned into artificial peacocks displayed chests where ramped ferocious lions, tigers or voluptuous houris in all the coloured inks which issued from the needle. One man had the head of Christ crowned with thorns in the centre of his bosom and another was striped all over like a zebra. Some had flowers, memorial crosses and the words: MOTHER R.I.P. A young girl coyly raised her skirt to show a flock of butterflies tattooed along her thigh. In the centre of the window hung a very large photograph of a man upon whose entire back was described a writhing dragon in reds and blues; and every scale and fang of the beast, each flame it blew from its nostrils, was punctured into the skin for good and all unless he were unpeeled like an orange or pared like an apple. Lee experienced a sympathetic crawling of the flesh; sure, now, of her purpose, he glanced in astonishment at Annabel, who smiled seraphically and pushed at the shop door.

  Lee did not know whether this ordeal was a piece of retribution or a rite of passage; nevertheless, he underwent it. The tattooist wore a prim, white, surgical coat and cleansed the ritual of a little barbarism by his care for hygiene, although the clinical asepsis of his shop and the gross attention he paid to the points and sterility of his needles affronted Lee, who could have wished for more atrocious pain, torrents of blood and an ultimate, festering wound to compensate Annabel in full for the skill with which she had devised this baroque humiliation, if she had intended to humiliate him; and, try as he might, he could think of no other reason for the exercise.

  Shirtless in an enamel cubicle, he let them write her name indelibly in Gothic script and circle it with a heart so now he wore his heart on the outside, laid bare for all to see. A man in the window had a sacred heart on his left breast and Lee was now equipped with a new heart, also, as if the old one had been cut out, hand-coloured, pressed flat and reconsecrated entirely to Annabel, no longer his own to do with as he pleased. His new, visible heart was drawn in rosy red but, for her name, she chose the colour green. The needle attacked him like an electric bee and he stung and sweated beneath it, biting his lower lip, while she watched the artist plying his tool with intense concentration, her colourless mouth ajar and the tip of her tongue protruding between her teeth. When Lee put his shirt back on, she made him pay and smiled once again, far more radiant than she had been as a bride. Weak and sick, Lee went out with her into the morning and she took his hand in hers, her long, narrow hand which was always nervously moist and unnaturally warm.

  ‘You’ll never deceive me again,’ she said with pale conviction. ‘What other girl would make love to you now?’

  Lee realized he had credited her with more emotional sophistication than she possessed. She believed only that she had signed him; the mark was no more than a certificate of possession which gave him the status of any other object in her collection. She had not intended to humiliate him and was hardly capable of devising a revenge which required a knowledge of human feeling to perfect it. Nevertheless, he had been humiliated, even if it were no concern of hers. In wet weather, the tattoo seemed to throb and burn him; in dry weather, it itched intolerably and he was always nervously conscious of her name under his left nipple, shuddering as it did at every beat of his heart. Annabel was very pleased with the effect. Perhaps, he thought, it was a bad-conduct medal.

  So they began their life alone together in the knowledge she had won a major victory over him and Lee could no longer pretend that he had rescued her. She sustained her conviction of supremacy so strongly, if in perfect silence, that soon he began to act as if he had indeed been utterly vanquished and let go all the acquaintances he had managed to keep. He ceased to visit anywhere outside the flat and spent all his free time with her. He became as silent and decorative as the statue with which she had always compared him while their home rotted around them, suffused with purgatorial gloom.

  She never mentioned Buzz’s name and he never came to see them. Lee sometimes thought he would never see his brother again for as long as he lived. He had no desire to see his brother but a visit from him would have proved that the past had existed. And now he had no other evidence that his life could once have been other than the way he lived now. His family photographs were not objective evidence that the beings in them had ever moved in a real, accessible dimension. His guilt had devised its own punishment. He acknowledged that she was far cleverer than he and began to fear her a little for he could not alter her at all, although she could change him in any way she pleased.

  And now Annabel had docketed him securely amongst her things, she began subtly to evacuate herself from the room which had been her whole world, leaving Lee marooned there in miserable isolation.

  Now she had two rooms, her unseen world extended its physical boundaries, though it seemed she no longer needed to populate it with as many real objects as before, perhaps because she had impressed her sorrow so deeply on the essential wood and brick of the place she knew for certain nobody could ever be happy there again. She no longer exchanged confidences with the figures on the walls. She did not bother to buy any more furniture or even to fill up the mantelpiece with bunches of leaves and berries from the park stuck into the necks of milk bottles. She lay in bed for hours while Lee was at work, sometimes drawing her pet apocalyptic beasts in her sketchbook but, more and more, merely gazing into space, absorbed in thought. The window remained boarded up and the room was always dark and shady.

  Some days she did not get up at all and, if she did, she did not bother to dress or wash but lounged around all day in her nightdress, the very image of mad Ophelia, her disordered hair often caked with watercolour or gobbed with breakfast egg. But now she knew who mad people were and how they behaved, she became a little self-conscious and sometimes she looked like a blurred imitation of her former self. She did not take the drugs which had been prescribed for her and flushed them down the lavatory to conceal this omission from Lee. She kept none of her after-care appointments with the psychiatrist, but took good care to dress herself neatly on certain days of the week, as if she were going to the hospital, and Lee believed her.

  Accustomed as he was to dealing with the sick, Lee fed her and cared for her, although, in herself, she seemed much the same as she had always been. Besides, he had few patterns of normal behaviour with which to compare and contrast her ways.

  One day, she roused herself sufficiently to go downstairs and put his alarm clock in the dustbin. She said that the tick irritated her. After that, there was no more means of telling the time except for Lee’s wristwatch, so he was often late for work, although the days he passed at the school were scarcely different from the nights he passed at home. Both were barren. He felt as though all his vitality had drained out through the perforations of the needle. Each morning on the stairs, he passed the blonde girl, Joanne, and the swift, fascinated distaste in her glance instantly defined him as a debauched, shameless and abandoned person. Her look made Lee nervous and a little wistful. But she never missed crossing his path on the staircase and he was always aware of her precociously slumberous gaze fixed on his face when he gave her form their weekly lessons on current affairs and political institutions.

  Seated at the round table in the bleak middle of a Sunday afternoon, he marked a pile of fifth-form essays on the British Constitution and found, written in a round, childish hand, only the following words on one sheet of paper: ‘They say this is a free country but I am not free in any way so stuff your free country.’ It was difficult to mark Joanne’s essay or to guess at the impulse which prompted it, though he thought she would not have submitted it to any other member of the staff. He scrawled ‘amplify’ at the bottom in red but she did not do so; it seemed the written word was not Joanne’s medium. She had a name for waywardness but Lee paid no attention to staffroom gossip though he noticed in class she was always biting
her nails and her nails were brown with nicotine.

  An unhappy adolescent will clutch at any straw. Joanne, who was dissatisfied, incorporated her schoolteacher in her own illusory web where, quite unknown to himself and entirely without his consent, he led a busy, active life of high adventure and almost continuous sexual intercourse. She had never received much real affection. Her mother was dead and her father an alcoholic. When she was a small child, she found a wounded pigeon beside the railway line. Its breast and leg were hurt. She nursed it until it grew better and exercised it by allowing it to fly round and round her room. At first, as it learned once more how to fly, it blundered about from mantelpiece to chest of drawers like a raw beginner, bungling every movement, but soon it gained confidence and swooped around beneath the ceiling with the heavy grace of pigeons. It slept in the bottom of her wardrobe. One night it escaped from her room and fluttered downstairs into the kitchen where it sat on the plate rack of the gas stove, cooing, until the sound irritated her father, who kicked it to death.

  She was an enthusiastic competitor in minor beauty contests out of a poignant, though unconscious, desire to be publicly acknowledged a pretty girl, yet she had a certain optimism and thought she might easily satisfy her desires as soon as she was sure what they were.

  Lee sank more deeply into a melancholy so alien to his nature it never occurred to him he might be unhappy for he associated unhappiness with a positive state, with scarcely tolerable grief or furious sorrow authenticated by a death or a disaster, not with this unmotivated absence of pleasure that dulled the colours of the approaching spring and took the dimensions from the things around him so everything was reduced to flat, ineffectual shapes. He raised his arm and no shadow fell for Annabel had taken out his heart, his household god, squashed it thin as paper and pinned it back on the exterior, bright, pretty but inanimate.