She woke, shivering in her chair, and shook her head.—
“No,” she whispered. “Never Felix.”
One room over, Lilith Mabley met her husband in her dreams.
They sat, the two of them, as they had sat so many times before, on the stone stoop of their cottage, Mount’s Bay spread out before them in the mist. He draped his hand over her shoulders and if there was a briny scent about him, Clare’s mother didn’t mind, for she had so much to tell him, and he to tell her. . . .
Davie Rowe was in a place where everyone was more disfigured than he was, their faces swollen until they seemed more like children’s drawings come to life than humans. But it was also a place of miracles—a grotto, hidden away under the granite cliffs near the village.
The sea pounded outside, but inside, the water was as still as a sheet of glass and glowed with phosphorus. Beside a mirror set into the stone above the ledge that ran along the far side of the grotto, there was a candle that gave off more light than a candle should. One by one, in an orderly queue, the people approached it for their share of the miracle.
For in its light, their disfigurements fell away and their inner selves were revealed. That monstrous child, now an angel. That man suffering from neurofibromatosis, now as handsome as a matinee idol. That woman with her deformed facial bones and the grey tumors that spread like a blight across her features, now a beauty. . . .
And finally it was his turn.
He trembled with eagerness as he approached, legs barely sturdy enough to support his massive frame. But the weakness didn’t matter, because it was finally his turn.
His turn to bathe in the candle’s light and then look into the burnished mirror with its brass frame, only to find that his true self—
(No! he howled.)
—was even more monstrous than the face he presently turned towards the world.
He woke on the sofa in Clare’s study and sat up, tangled in blankets and hyperventilating, disoriented by his surroundings until he remembered where he was and how he’d come to be here.
He’d rescued Clare. He’d proved he was really a good person, just like Bogart and Eastwood and the hundred other cinema idols whose exploits filled his waking thoughts.
(Never mind the two hundred quid, hey, Davie?)
He would have done it anyway.
(Of course you would have. But only so you’d have a chance to get into her knickers. . . . )
It wasn’t like that.
(And a fine bloody pair the two of you will make—the cripple and the freak. . . . )
He shook his head. It wasn’t like that at all.
(A cripple and a freak. . . . )
She’s not a cripple.
(And you’re not a freak, are you, Davie boy? Not bloody much, you aren’t. When was the last time someone looked you in the face without gagging?)
Clare. She—
(Is a bloody cripple.)
Davie shook his head again, trying to shake the voice out from between his ears.
(When was the last time you didn’t have to pay for it, Davie boy? Do you think Cary Grant had to pay for it, then? Or does Redford?)
“Stop,” he whispered.
(And even then you can see it in their eyes: For all your money, they still wished you’d put a bag on your head. . . . )
Davie rocked back and forth on the sofa, moaning softly, refusing to listen to any more. When the dawn came, smudging grey across the eastern skies, he stole out of the house and away to home, but the voice followed him.
He couldn’t escape it.
It was always there in his head.
Sometimes it was just harder to ignore.
Down Raginnis Hill, in the village proper, the Gaffer lay sleeping in his house on Duck Street.
His dream took him out past the protective arms of Mousehole harbour in a rowboat. He sat in the stern with Adeline—sweet, gentle Addie, her arm nestled comfortably into the crook of his arm from where it should never have strayed—while their son Paul rowed them out past Shag Rock and St. Clement’s Isle, his back bent easily to the task, that familiar smile of his that lit his whole face, beaming and shining.
On the island, hidden at first by the rocks, the Gaffer’s old mate Billy sat up from where he’d been reading and waved to them as they went by, his book tucked under his arm. The oddest thing was that Dunthorn wasn’t the young man now that the Gaffer remembered from old photos and his memories, but rather he appeared as he would have had he lived to this day.
“Billy!” the Gaffer cried.
“Did a proper job ‘mazing you, didn’t I just?” Billy called back. “Thought I was dead, did you?”
The Gaffer turned in his seat. “Wait a bit, Paul,” he said.
But Paul kept rowing and the island fell away, Billy still waving on its rocky shore.
“Don’t fuss so,” Addie told the Gaffer. “Now tell me, how’s it been with our Janey?”
“Our Janey . . . ?”
Anxiety rode high and wild through the Gaffer until he looked into Addie’s gently smiling face, and then the turmoil washed away and he settled back in his seat.
“Our Janey’s a musician now,” he began, smiling to see how Paul leaned forward to catch every word as well.
Janey Little’s dream was of neither her grandmother nor her father, but it did involve a member of her immediate family—the forgotten lost soul that was her mother.
Janey found herself walking at night through an enormous city that she’d never been in before, but she immediately recognized it as New York when the thoroughfare she was on dropped her into the mad hubbub bustle of Times Square. Neon screamed, passersby pushed her aside in ever-increasing numbers; she was offered drugs, sex, to be bought, to be sold, all in the space of a half-dozen moments. Her senses were assaulted with the hurly-burly and felt like they were going to overload until she finally found a quieter side street to duck into.
There she stood, leaning against the dirty wall, the stink of garbage and urine making her stomach queasy, the end of the street still spitting its noise and confusion at her. But at least it was quieter. She pushed off the wall and moved farther down the street, starting when something stirred in a nest of newspapers near her feet. Light from a window above fell down on the dirty face that looked up at her. Through the grime, looking past the multiple layers of filthy clothes and the greasy hair, she realized with a shock that this was her mother, lying there, looking up at her.
“Didsha never shink I wandud chew come hum?” her mother asked.
Her voice was thick and alien, muffled from the night’s drinking and her missing teeth.
“I mished muh baby. . . .”
The grubby fingers reached for her—skeletal, like a bird’s claws—and Janey backed away.
“Pleash. . . .”
Guilt reared up in Janey, but she continued to back away from the woman. Her mother staggered to her feet. As she stood and stumbled after Janey, hanging on to the wall to keep her balance, urine leaked down one leg. Unheeding of it, she continued after Janey who turned tail and ran back the way she’d come.
She was pushed back and forth between the angry pedestrians until sheer desperation brought her out of sleep and gasping for air. She sat up in bed, shivering from the chill as her damp body met the cool night air, and tried to slow her breathing. She looked down at Felix who was moving back and forth, caught in his own dream. She started to reach for him—to comfort, to be comforted—but then a final memory from her own nightmare rose up in her mind, staying her hand.
It was her mother’s voice, clear and sober, that had followed her out of the grey reaches of sleep.
“Forgive me,” she’d said, just as Janey was waking.
Her final words had been . . .
Forgive me.
With a kind of sick uneasiness, Janey realized that she never thought of the woman—couldn’t even remember her. Could barely put the word “mother” to her.
> The woman had abandoned them; it was like she was dead. But what if she’d realized that it was all a mistake? What if years ago she realized the mistake she’d made, and regretted it, but by then it was too late?
Forgive me.
Hadn’t Janey made her own mistakes in the past? Mistakes that seemed just as final, decisions made in the heat of the moment that could almost never be recalled?
She looked down at Felix, still stirring restlessly beside her in the bed.
Forgive me.
She shook her head. It was just a dream, that was all. A bad dream.
Forgive me.
She owed her mother nothing. Her mother owed her nothing.
Forgive me.
Tears welled in her eyes as she shook her head again, but neither helped to dislodge the memory of the New York City bag lady from her dream. Nor did it quiet the echoing refrain of her voice that whispered on and on through Janey’s mind.
Forgive me.
“I don’t know if I want to,” Janey said.
Forgive me.
“I don’t know if I even can. . . .”
Felix Gavin had been hanged.
He didn’t know what his crime had been, nor who had judged him, but they had put the noose around his neck and he’d dropped the long drop, his neck broken, his limbs twitching, and now he was dead. Still in his body, but it was no longer his to command. He was a passenger now, on a trip that went to nowhere. He merely swung back and forth in the rain, hanging from the makeshift gallows—a huge old tree on a crossroads.
He became aware of a woman approaching him through the rain, cloaked and hooded against the weather. Holding a knife in her teeth, she hoisted her skirts and climbed the oak. When she could reach the rope, she cut him down and he fell into the mud, but he didn’t feel the impact.
His nerve ends were all dead. He was dead. A ghost, jailed in its own corpse, dispassionately observing what became of the shell he’d worn while still alive.
Death wasn’t what the church had taught him it would be, but he was used to being lied to by figures of authority. The world he’d left with his death was full of lies. But he discovered that one thing he’d heard about hangings was true: You did get a hard-on when the rope hit its limit and your neck was broken—a finger to the world, as it were. A final “Screw you all.”
How he knew this to be true was that after the woman had stripped his clothes off, she hoisted her skirts again and rode him there in the mud and rain, drawing his last inadvertent statement to the world deep inside herself, closing her warmth around its dead, cold length.
This was wrong, Felix thought. It was sick. Perverted.
She began to make small noises in the back of her throat and moved faster, moaning and twitching, which struck Felix—in his curious dispassionate state—as odd. So far as he could see this brutal bouncing up and down held about the same amount of excitement as butter being churned.
But then what did he know? He was dead. While she—
Her hood fell back as she arched her back. If Felix had had a throat at that moment, his breath would have caught in it.
She . . .
That dark hair . . .
Those familiar features . . .
She shuddered as she reached her climax, her entire body shaking and trembling. She lay down across his chest, still holding him inside her, and brushed his cold cheek with her lips.
Physically, he felt nothing. But in his heart, in the spirit that lived on, he could feel something dying.
“I’ll do anything for you,” she said. “Anything it takes to make you mine.”
She bit at his lip, hands cupped on either side of his face, then slipped her tongue into his mouth.
No, he wanted to shout at her. But he had no voice. Could feel nothing.
“And if I can’t have you when you’re alive . . .”
She ground her hips against his.
No, he cried soundlessly again. This is wrong.
He struggled to be heard, to move the dead limbs that had once been his, to push her from him.
“. . . then I’ll have you when you’re dead.”
She pushed up, hands against his chest, and began to move up and down once more.
This time when Felix fought to be heard—
—he woke instead.
He felt flushed and cold, all at once. A headache whined like a dentist’s drill behind his eyes. The contents of his stomach roiled acidly around and he knew he was going to throw up, but he still couldn’t move.
That was because he was dead. . . .
But he could feel his body again, the sheets against his skin, someone in bed beside him. So he wasn’t dead. He just couldn’t move. All he could do was open his eyes and stare at a shadowed ceiling that seemed vaguely familiar and make a kind of strangled noise.
“N-nuh . . .”
The bedsprings gave as that someone in bed with him shifted position. He tried to turn his head to see who it was, but even that simple motion was denied him. Vomit came burning up his throat.
I’m going to choke on my own puke, he thought. I’m going to—
But whoever it was who was beside him lifted, then turned his head. He had a momentary glimpse of Janey’s worried features above him before his body hurled up the contents of his stomach into the wastepaper basket that she had brought up from the side of the bed.
He heaved until his stomach was empty, then heaved some more, a rancid taste in his throat, his chest hurting. But finally it was over. Finally, he could lay his head weakly on the pillow and take small shallow breaths that didn’t make his chest ache. But he still felt queasy. The dentist’s drill was still whining inside his head.
He tried to concentrate on Janey, on what she was saying, but for a long time all he could hear was just the wordless soothing sound of her voice as she brought him water to rinse his mouth and wiped his face with a damp cloth.
He tried to understand what he was doing back here—for now he could recognize the bedroom as the one he’d been staying in at the Gaffer’s house—and why Janey was taking care of him.
The last thing he remembered . . .
He was a hanged man, being cut down from an oak tree and then—
No. That had been a dream.
The last thing that he could remember was . . .
But that, too, seemed to involve a woman sitting astride him, his hardness drawn deep inside her. . . .
Another dream.
The last real thing he could remember, he decided, was the Gaffer and Janey sending him off. Playing music by the old quarry—a duet with the tide. The storm. Lena. Drinking tea. . . .
“Felix, can you hear me?”
Finally something Janey said registered.
He tried to speak, then settled for nodding his head.
“You’re going to be all right,” she said. “You were drugged, by that woman—”
Lena. The tea. So that much was real. But drugged? She’d drugged him?
“H-h-how . . . ?” he managed.
“I came and got you. Oh, Felix. . . .”
A flickering image came into his mind. A naked woman. Riding him. Not in the rain and mud. But in a bed. . . .
A dream?
“Can you remember what happened to you?”
The whine in his head grew sharper. He squinted, tried to push past the pain to where his memories lay tangled up with dreams, to sort through which were real, and which were not. But he couldn’t get past the pain.
“N-nuh . . .” he tried. “Nuh . . . ing. . . .”
Janey bent down and wrapped her arms around him.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t give you a chance to explain,” she said. “I’m an awful person sometimes.”
No, he wanted to tell her, but it only came out, “N-nuh . . .”
“I love you, Felix.”
“Luuv . . . too. . . .”
She gave him a squeeze. He could see the tears in her eyes. His own visio
n blurred. As she started to draw away, he tried to move his hand to stop her, but couldn’t.
Don’t go, he wanted to say. Don’t leave.
“Nuh . . . nah . . .” was all he could say.
But she understood and lay down beside him once more. The whining ache in his head wound into a dart that sped deep into the back of his mind and he followed it down, leaving Janey to hold his sleeping body until she finally fell asleep again herself.
Felix didn’t dream again. But Janey. . . .
This time her dreams took her into a more familiar setting.
She found herself standing at the bottom of the stairs in the Gaffer’s house, looking across the room to where William Dunthorn’s The Little Country lay on the Gaffer’s favorite chair. It remained there as the Gaffer had left it earlier, its leather covers sealing in the magic of its words, the light behind the chair spilling a soft halo of light upon it as though the chair were a stage, the book a thespian.
And as though Janey’s presence had signaled the opening of the curtains for the first act, the book’s bindings made a faint crackling sound and the cover flipped open. The pages rustled as if they were being turned, one by one, ruffled as though by the breath of a wind, or an invisible hand flipping through them.
She took a step forward, then paused as music rose up around her—a wash of mysterious notes that played a tune both familiar and strange. It spoke of hidden places, secrets long lost that waited to be found. Her fingers twitched at her sides, searching for the fingerboard or air holes of an instrument that wasn’t at hand.
The pages stopped moving as the music grew stronger. Figurines on the mantel, picture frames on the wall, and glasses and dinnerware in the kitchen cupboards trembled, then clattered as deep bass resonances echoed through the small house. She could feel the floor trembling underfoot, and swayed slightly, moving in time to the curious rhythm.
She took another step forward, then a third, pausing again when she saw something moving on top of the book.
The Little Country Page 28