At first, she could not help smiling the easy smile which, if all went well on her own terms, might become her natural expression but Buzz did not speak and did not lie down beside her and, eager as she was to touch him, she grew uneasy. She knew no way to break the sudden constraint between them except by speaking herself and she did not know what to say nor what he might reply. Buzz kept as far away from the bed as the constricted space would allow and his heavy lids drooped down over his eyes with foreboding for, now he had indulged his spite against his brother, he was left to face the consequences of it alone.
If jealousy or, rather, resentment of Lee had primarily moved him, his revenge would still be incomplete unless he recreated the maddening acts his inward eye had witnessed so atrociously as he lay beyond the thin wall, sweating at the sound of their voices. He always saw her only in relation to his brother; his interest in her was based on the knowledge he could utilize her both to defend himself against Lee and also to attack him through her after, first of all, she had usurped Buzz in his own home and his brother’s affections and then turned him out of both. Now it came to the testing, he would have sworn their shared games and mutual secrets were only so many exercises in manoeuvres although, at the time, he had cultivated them for their own sake, to pass the time; and if, incidentally, he estranged her from her husband and his brother from himself, that served to pass the time, also, in a way that suited his taste for dark corners and circuitous routes. But he only decided to hate his brother when Lee refused to live with him any more, and now, after a few months’ passionate imaginings, he believed himself moved only by hatred. He had forgotten or never realized that Annabel had credited him with the attributes of a saviour and had she told him so as she lay on his bed things might have turned out better; or else, far worse.
As it was, he faltered between her real self on the bed and her many shadows on the wall, determined to have her but thwarted by his inability to feel as intensely in situations that were actual as he did in the supercharged events of his imagination. Life rarely rose to the demands he made on it. He tried to stimulate himself with memories of past sexual dreams and encounters and found himself as if rummaging in a forbidden cupboard of grotesqueries until he found a memory of Annabel prone on a tiled floor with her blood welling out through the silk pores of her embroidered shawl while, as he still believed, Lee lay in some other woman’s bed. This idea alone filled him with desire.
He had often seen her naked but he had never handled her cold breasts nor touched sufficient of her skin to discover how closely its texture, that of chilled rice paper, corresponded to its colour. Nor had he known she would fling out her arms in an attitude of subjugation or death and lie so unnaturally still. The more he caressed her, the stiffer and colder she seemed to grow as if her huge, grey eyes divined in his the true reflection of the perverse origins of his desire and so she made her body act out the role he had devised although she believed that all she wanted for herself would be to surrender to simple, voluptuous actuality. She wanted this desperately. So they began a duel of mismatched expectancies in which Annabel was bound to be the worst hurt for her hopes had been literally infinite while his, true to his nature, existed only in the two dimensions and glaring colours of melodrama.
But he had not bargained for his own horror which increased with every moment of her passivity and the excitement which contained within it such a high degree of dread. He turned over her limp hand and, seeing the faint, white scars on her wrist, found he could manage to kiss her only to discover her lips were made of ice and her tongue burned like freezing metal. His mother who assured her small, dark son with the infernal conviction of the insane that he was the fruit of all the evil in the world had given him many fears about the physicality of women; all the nightmares that had ever visited him rushed back into his head at once and he flinched back from Annabel’s mouth, which numbed him.
‘Open your legs,’ he said. ‘Let me look.’
She did as he asked her, faintly wondering, as she had once been with Lee, and already confronted with a great divergence between her desires and her actuality. Buzz crouched between her feet and scrutinized as much as he could see of her perilous interior to find out if all was in order and there were no concealed fangs or guillotines inside her to ruin him. Although he found no visual evidence, he remained too suspicious of her body to wish to meet her eyes so he caught hold of her shoulders and roughly pushed her down on her face. She was astonished; she felt herself handled as unceremoniously as a fish on a slab, reduced only to anonymous flesh, and she could do nothing to help herself for she knew she had connived in her own undoing. He thrust at her from behind and it was all over in a few seconds; he came as soon as he clumsily pushed his way into her and instantly withdrew, in a convulsive movement like a gigantic wince.
She cowered in his rancid bed. He mumbled something she did not understand and pulled the sheet up over her, to hide her, but when his hand accidentally touched her hair, he jumped back. They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy had savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and had failed but Annabel suffered the worst for she had been trying to convince herself she was alive.
She cowered in his rancid bed and whispered: ‘I want to go home,’ for the only solace she could envisage was to pretend this bitterest of disappointments was itself a dream and that, when it grew light, Buzz’s dark, strange body would revert to the familiar shape of her husband for she had often pretended the one was the other, anyway. Buzz covered his face with his hands and allowed her to dress herself and wander off alone through the dark streets, a fragile, flimsy thing whose body had betrayed both their imaginations.
As she came into the kitchen, Lee was burning his three precious photographs by holding a match to the tip of each; he watched while the blue flame blackened the picture and then he dropped each withered scrap into the sink and turned the tap so that the ashes were washed down the drain. She took a cup from the dresser, went past him to fill it with water, and drank. Torn between jealousy and suppressed murderous rage, Lee was in an evil mood and quite prepared to eschew compassion; he saw only that she was in a state where it might be possible to injure her and at once struck out.
‘But what did he do to you? What did he actually do? Did he ask you to lift up his tail and kiss his asshole?’
She shook her head dumbly and Lee doubled up with unpleasant laughter.
‘When he was living with my aunt, it was the summer she died, he brought this young chick back and took her up to his room and I was getting the old lady her Benger’s food in the kitchen and there was this crash, this terrible crash, like someone falling downstairs, and the kitchen door burst open, didn’t it. And this chick fell right through it, she was stark naked and she was clutching her knickers in her hand and she said: “If he thinks I’m going to do that, he’s very much mistaken.”’
‘I would have done anything for him, if he had let me,’ said Annabel gravely. Lee saw she did not understand he was jeering at her and opened his mouth to make a more direct and brutal attack; then he shrugged and said nothing for clearly she would pay him no attention. He grew less vindictive when he saw how dazed and spiritless she was and would have tried to comfort her if he had known how and had he ever before been able to succeed in comforting her.
She rinsed out her cup and put it upside down on the draining board. She went into the bedroom, walking extremely carefully, for she was about to play her last hand and must concentrate very hard on repressing her panic; she had decided to seduce him.
Avoiding his eyes, she took off her clothes, hurried and quickly hid herself on the far side of the bed so that he would suspect nothing. He thought
she was unconsciously instructing him that now her body was out of bounds and, as he undressed more slowly, he said to himself: ‘It’s probably all over between her and me, she’ll probably never let me screw her again.’ And this was a great relief for the notion he might by chance encounter even so much as a stray limb of hers under the covers that night filled him with disgust. He stretched out bitterly in the dark beside her, resigned to emptiness, only to discover she had been cunningly lying in wait for him all the time.
She flung herself upon him in a startling rush. She glued herself to his mouth, breast and belly, moaning and sobbing. He thrashed this way and that to shake her off but she clung too desperately to be shifted and the dark splintered in Lee’s head as, apparently beside herself, she twisted against him in a sinister frenzy, speaking his name relentlessly in a hot, dry voice he had never heard from her before. In the folklore of Haiti, there exist female demons named diablesses who are so avid for pleasure they seduce the living only to abandon them at the end of the lascivious night among the white graves of a cemetery. So, in the dark, a changeling Annabel attacked Lee with gross, morbid passion and such a barrage of teeth and nails he struck her on the side of the head to stop her inflicting any more damage. She howled with surprise and affront and, continuing to howl, tumbled down on him in a stinging shower of disordered hair.
‘I wish you were dead,’ said Lee. She stopped howling and murmured indistinguishable sounds as she lavished kisses on his throat and shoulders, until soon he caught her fever, turned her on to her back and penetrated her. First, she twitched a little, and muttered; and then she wound her arms around him with bizarre, conciliatory tenderness, pressing her small breasts against the green name she had inscribed upon his bosom and begging him to stop, for now she was afraid he might take her too far, would take her to a place where she might lose herself.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t go on, I don’t think I can bear it, not now. Not tonight, I was mistaken when I wanted it.’
‘Oh no, my love,’ said Lee, intent on the unforgivable. ‘This time you’ll get what’s coming to you, you will.’
Nevertheless, it proved a mutual rape. She expelled her breath in a wavering sigh and seemed to fall limply away from him but, as soon as he began to move inside her, her response was immediate and, it seemed, out of her control. She cried out in a lonely voice and bit and tore at him so savagely he wondered if he would survive the night for he had never known a more tempestuous performance from anyone and, in the dark, she could have been a stranger. He had never been superstitious in his life before but, after it was over, he turned on the light to look at her, for her behaviour had no place in the order of things.
It was his Annabel, still, although she was as bruised and bleeding as himself. She was his Annabel, compounded of memory, so he stroked her hair remorsefully and pressed his burning eyes against her cool skin; yet he had truly wished her dead, for then he would no longer have to care about her.
‘I’m afraid I’ve invested all my emotional capital in you,’ he said. ‘And that’s all I can say, though God help the small investor when the revolution comes. Though I wouldn’t say I was a small investor. So I suppose it would be even worse.’
She did not hear one word and when his eyes met hers, he was struck by their curious expression, one of perplexity mingled with assessment. He knew she must be thinking of his brother and guessed she had been deceiving him all the time although he did not know why.
In his late adolescence, at a party, on a pile of coats on somebody else’s bed, he held a girl in his arms and kissed her while Buzz copulated with her, glancing up at him from time to time as if for approval. When Buzz wandered off afterwards he and the girl made love with the enthusiasm of transgressors. He had forgotten her face and never knew her name; he remembered only that something like that had taken place and the circumstances and the residual traces of his brother on the nameless girl’s body had given him a peculiar satisfaction. It was an adventure similar to many others at that time when nothing he had done was unnatural, and it had never entered his head for years, not until now, when it seemed he would never again sleep with his wife without his brother’s invisible company.
‘Once,’ said Annabel, ‘I came home and found you and Buzz together on the floor, curled up in each other’s arms like happy puppies.’
‘We’ve always been like cowboys and Indians to each other, we must have been fighting.’ But Lee was discomfited to find she could reflect and enlarge upon his thoughts. She paid no attention to him. She invented her own connections between the past and the present.
‘He didn’t even take his clothes off,’ said Annabel who had no sense of the ridiculous.
‘He’s got few, if any, refinements. Don’t blame me for his incapacities. He’s always been funny with girls, I told you.’
‘Then how did he get gonorrhoea in North Africa, that time?’
‘I hate to think,’ said Lee. ‘Though there aren’t too many ways of getting the clap that I know of. But he couldn’t even put his finger inside a sea anemone at one time, for fear of engulfment.’
‘Whyever should he want to put his finger in a sea anemone?’ she marvelled and lay beside him in a miserable silence for a long while, till he thought she might be sleeping and reached out to turn off the light. At that, she threw her arm over him and pinned him down again.
‘Lee . . . tell me . . .’
‘What is it now?’ he asked uneasily.
‘Is that what it’s supposed to be like?’
‘No,’ said Lee in order to hurt her if he could. ‘That’s what it’s usually like, with normal women.’
Her smile faded, her eyes dilated with woe and she drew back.
‘Then Buzz could have made it properly with me if you had been there,’ she said with exquisite dismay and took her pale web of flesh away from him to the farthest edge of the bed. His eyes became so painful he could not see her any more but could make out only an indistinct mass of brown hair which could have been shaved from an unknown head and dumped on the pillow. The hair began to shudder like a nest of incipient snakes.
‘It’s no good!’ exclaimed Lee and fell from the bed. Though the distance to the floor was no more than two or three feet, he seemed to fall into a bottomless pit and was surprised to hit the floorboards so soon. He dragged down the bedside lamp with him by the flex and left everything behind him plunged in darkness.
Stirred by the odorous breezes of the night, the undergrowth in the park rustled a little as if each bush contained a pair of somnolent lovers and the air smelled sweetly of crushed grass. The summer moon distilled almost too honeyed a light for moonlight and Lee, who would have preferred a storm with thunderbolts, stumbled angrily into this sweet quiescence and, on the crest of a hill, lost all impetus for renewed flight although, when he was a child, he got as far as Southampton in the pursuit of liberty. He collapsed on a bench in the white shadow of the Gothic tower and buried his head in his hands. He felt nothing but the absence of feeling which is despair.
After a while, he heard a faint, shifting patter of footsteps on gravel and then, behind him, the sound of moist, noisy, loud and intimate breathing like the shameless breathing of a bad-mannered child. The breathing was interspersed with small giggles. Lee ignored whatever hovered behind him until, smitten with the urge to perform an infant’s trick, it clapped its hands over Lee’s eyes. Lee grasped the bony wrist and wrenched it until the sinews cracked. The intruder yelped and Lee, turning to look at him, saw a young boy with wild eyes and floating hair, clearly another mad person who might have been the crazed inhabitant of the Gothic pinnacle which, appropriately enough, served as the backdrop for their balked encounter. Lee let the boy go and he tenderly rubbed his bruises, casting reproachful glances at Lee from time to time although his giggling changed to a soft, wordless whine as he edged coyly round the bench and gingerly sat himself down. The sight of his thin face reminded Lee how, when he collected Annabel, a boy on the hospit
al porch questioned him about the tarot pack.
‘I see you fled the Fool’s Tower, then,’ said Lee who guessed the boy was adding to his troubles by the use of some sort of hallucinogen. The boy nodded vigorously and tried to reply but an incoherent babble of sounds came out of his mouth and he made no sense at all. A sharp spasm of distress shook him from head to toe and he shielded his working face with an arm in a ripped shirtsleeve.
‘Do you want a cigarette?’
The boy blindly stretched out his hand. Lee gave him the remainder of the packet and also a box of matches. The boy pocketed them without looking at them.
‘Do you need any money?’
The boy nodded. Lee found he had two pound notes and about fifteen shillings in change. The boy accepted the money without thanks or enthusiasm. Lee wondered what he could give him and remembered his wedding ring. This time, the boy displayed a brief flicker of curiosity when he saw the gold band on his palm. Lee spoke in a leaden, didactic, schoolteacher’s voice.
‘Me and my wife have fallen into the habit of performing symbolic actions with our wedding rings. She ate hers.’
The boy raised his shaggy head and stared at him. By the light of the moon, he must have seen the huge, scarlet-pricked, purplish, diabolical bite on Lee’s neck for he raised his eyebrows, leaned forward and touched it delicately and enquiringly with his fingertips. He giggled again, this time with a faint note of interrogation. He smelled horribly of mud and excrement.
‘She carried on the metaphor by trying to eat me alive,’ said Lee. ‘I got away just in time.’
Dear God, he thought, I’m starting to dramatize myself. The boy shrugged. He made several thwarted attempts to speak but could produce no sensible sounds of any kind and at last wept unrestrainedly until his scratched, scabbed face was blubbered with tears and snot. Lee thought he must somehow have hired the boy to act out his ugly grief for him, like a professional mourner, now he himself had grown so cold and mechanical, lulled by the strange narcotic of a steady, quiet anguish. He had nothing with which to dry the boy’s eyes, either, and so he must wait until the mysterious spring of tears dried up. The boy bobbed about on the bench in an uncoordinated fashion until he let out a wind-bell tinkle of pitiful since joyless laughter, sprang up and darted off the way he had come.
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