Athena (21 page)

I asked her why she kept such a terrible thing. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch with the photograph in her lap, running a blindman’s fingertips over it. I took it from her. The once-glossy surface, cross-hatched with a fine craquelure, had the flaky, filmed-over texture of a dead fish’s eye.

‘Are you shocked?’ she said, peering at me intently; when she looked at me like that I understood how it would feel to be a mirror. Her gaze shifted and settled on the space between us. What did she know? The penumbra of pain, the crimson colour of it, its quivering echo. She did not know the thing itself, the real thing, the flash and shudder and sudden heat, the body’s speechless astonishment. I handed her back the photograph. It struck me that we were both naked. All that was needed was an apple and a serpent. Light from the window gave her skin a leaden lustre.

‘Tell me about that man you knew,’ she said. ‘The one that killed the woman.’

She was so still she seemed not even to breathe.

‘You know nothing,’ I said.

She nodded; her breasts trembled. She found her cigarettes and lit one with a hand that shook. She resumed her cross-legged perch on the end of the couch and gave herself a sort of hug. A flake of ash tumbled softly into her lap.

‘Then tell me,’ she said, not looking at me.

I told her: midsummer sun, the birds in the trees, the silent house, that painted stare, then blood and stench and cries. When I had recounted everything we made love, immediately, without preliminaries, going at each other like – like I don’t know what. ‘
Hit me
,’ she cried,
‘hit me!’
And afterwards in the silence of the startled room she cradled my head in the hollow of her shoulder and rocked me with absent-minded tenderness.

‘I went to No. 23 the other day after you were gone,’ she said. I knew that dreamily thoughtful tone. I waited, my heart starting up its club-footed limp. ‘I went to see Rosie,’ she said. ‘Remember Rosie? There was this fellow there who wanted two women at the same time. He must have been a sailor or something, he said he hadn’t had it for months. He was huge. Black hair, these very black eyes, and an earring.’

I moved away from her and lay with my back propped
against the curved head of the couch and my hands resting limply on my bare thighs. A soft grey shadow was folded under the corner of the ceiling nearest the window. Dust or something fell on the element of the electric fire and there was a brief crackle and then a dry hot smell.

‘Did you open your legs for him?’ I said. I knew my lines.

‘No,’ she said, ‘my bum. I lay with my face in Rosie’s lap and held the cheeks of my bum apart for him and let him stick it into me as far as it would go. It was beautiful. I was coming until I thought I would go mad. While he was doing it to me he was kissing Rosie and licking her face and making her say filthy things about me. And then when he was ready again I sucked him off while Rosie was eating me. What do you think of that?’

I could feel her watching me, her little-girl’s gloating, greedy eye. This was her version of the lash.

‘Did you let him beat you?’

‘I asked him to,’ she said, ‘I begged him to. While he was doing me and Rosie he was too busy but afterwards he got his belt and gave me a real walloping while Rosie held me down.’

I reached out gropingly and took one of her feet in my hand and held it tightly. I might have been one huge raw rotten stump of tooth.

‘And did you scream?’

‘I howled,’ she said. ‘And then I howled for more.’

‘And there was more.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me.’

‘No.’

We sat and listened to the faint, harsh sound of our breathing. I shivered, feeling a familiar blank of misery settle on my heart. It was an intimation of the future I was feeling, I suppose, the actual future with its actual anguish, lying in wait for me, like a black-eyed sailor with his belaying-pin.
I am not good at this kind of suffering, this ashen ache in the heart, I am not brave enough or cold enough; I want something ordinary, the brute comfort of not thinking, of not being always, always … I don’t know. I looked at the photograph of the execution where she had dropped it on the floor; amongst that drab crowd the condemned man was the most alive although he was already dying. A. squirmed along the couch, keeping her eyes averted, and lay against me with her knees drawn up and her fists clenched under her chin and her thin arms pressed to her chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, a sort of sigh, her breath a little weight against my neck. ‘I’m sorry.’

We parted hurriedly on those occasions, not looking at each other, like shamefaced strangers who had been forced for a time into unwilling intimacy and now were released. I would stop on the doorstep, dazed by light, or the look of people in the street, the world’s shoddy thereness. Or perhaps it was just the sense of my suddenly recovered self that shocked me. As I set off through the streets I would skulk along, wrapped up in my misery and formless dismay, a faltering Mr Hyde in whom the effects of the potion have begun to wear off. Then all my terrors would start up in riotous cacophony.

Aunt Corky said there were people watching the flat. She had rallied in the unseasonably vernal weather. The brassy wig was combed and readjusted, the scarlet insect painted afresh but crooked as ever on her mouth. In the afternoons she would get herself out of bed, a slow and intricate operation, and sit in her rusty silk tea-gown at the big window in the front room watching the people passing by down in the street and the cars vying for parking spaces like bad-tempered seals. When she tired of the human spectacle she would turn her eyes to the sky and study the slow parade of clouds the colour of smoke and ice passing above the rooftops. Surprising how quickly I had got used to her
presence. Her smell – her out-of-bed smell, compounded of face powder, musty clothes, and something slightly rancid – would meet me when I came in the door, like someone else’s friendly old pet dog. I would loiter briefly in the porch, clearing my throat and stamping my feet, in order to alert her to my arrival. Often in the early days I was too precipitate and would come upon her lost in a reverie from which she would emerge with a start and a little mouse-cry, blinking rapidly and making shapeless mouths. Sometimes even after I had noisily announced my arrival I would enter the room and find her peering up at me wildly with her head cocked and one eyebrow lifted and a terrified surmise in her eye, not recognising me, this impudently confident intruder. I think half the time she imagined the flat was her home and that I was the temporary guest. She talked endlessly when I was there (and when I was not there, too, for all I know); now and then I would find myself halting in my tracks and shaking my head like a horse tormented by flies, ready to hit her if she said one word more. She would stop abruptly then and we would stare at each other in consternation and a sort of violent bafflement. ‘I am telling you,’ she would declare, her voice quivering with reproach, ‘they are down there in the street, every day, watching.’ With what a show of outraged frustration she would turn from me then, fierce as any film goddess, swivelling at the waist and tightening her mouth at the side and lifting one clenched and trembling fist a little way and letting it fall again impotently to the arm of her chair. I would have to apologise then, half angry and half rueful, and she would give her shoulders a shake and toss her gilt curls and fish about blindly for her cigarettes.

As it turned out, she was right; we were being watched. I do not know at what stage my incredulity changed to suspicion and suspicion to alarm. The year was darkening. The Vampire was still about his fell business and another mutilated corpse had been discovered, folded into a dustbin
in a carpark behind a church. The city was full of rumour and fearful speculation, clutching itself in happy terror. There was talk of satanism and ritual abuse. In this atmosphere the imagination was hardly to be trusted, yet the signs that I was being stalked were unmistakable: the car parked by the convent gates with its engine running that pulled out hurriedly and roared away when I approached; the eye suddenly fixed on me through a gap in a crowd of lunchtime office workers hurrying by on the other side of the street; the figure behind me in the hooded duffle-coat turning on his heel a second before I turned; and all the time that celebrated tingling sensation between the shoulder-blades. I was I think more interested than frightened. I assumed it must be Inspector Hackett’s men keeping an eye on me. Then one morning I arrived home still shivery with the afterglow of an early tryst with A. and found the Da’s big mauve motor car double-parked outside the front door. Young Popeye was at the wheel. I stopped, but he would not turn his eyes and went on staring frowningly before him through the windscreen, professional etiquette forbidding any sign of recognition, I suppose. He was growing a small and not very successful moustache of an unconvinced reddish tint, which he fingered now with angry self-consciousness as I leaned down and peered at him through the side window. I let myself into the house and mounted the stairs eagerly. I pictured Aunt Corky bound and gagged with a knife to her throat and one of the Da’s heavies sitting with a haunch propped on the arm of the couch and swivelling a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. Cautiously I opened the door of the flat – how it can set the teeth on edge, the feel of a key crunching into a lock – and put in my head and listened, and heard voices, or a voice, at least: Aunt Corky, spilling invented beans, no doubt.

She was sitting by the fire in her best dress – you should have seen Aunt Corky’s best dress – balancing a teacup and
saucer on her knee. Facing her, in the other armchair, the Da sat, arrayed in a somewhat tatty, full-length mink coat and a dark-blue felt toque with a black veil (another one!) that looked like a spider-web stuck with tiny flies. He was wearing lumpy, cocoa-coloured stockings – who makes them any more? – and county shoes with a sensible heel. A large handbag of patent leather rested against the leg of his chair. Tea-things were set out on a low table between them. A half-hearted coal fire flickered palely in the grate. ‘Ah!’ said Aunt Corky brightly. ‘Here he is now.’

I came forward hesitantly, feeling an ingratiating smile spreading across my face like treacle. What would be the rules of comportment here?

‘I was just passing,’ the Da said and did that cracked laugh of his, making a sound like that of something sharp and brittle being snapped, and his veil trembled. Dressed up like this he bore a disconcerting resemblance to my mother in her prime.

‘I believe you’re working together,’ Aunt Corky said and gave me a smile of teasing admonishment, shaking her head, every inch the
grande dame
; she turned back to the Da. ‘He never tells me anything, of course.’

The Da regarded me calmly.

‘Is Cyril still out there?’ he said. ‘The son,’ he told Aunt Corky; ‘he’s a good lad but inclined to be forgetful.’

‘Oh, don’t I know!’ Aunt Corky said and cocked her head at me again. ‘Will you take off your coat,’ she said, ‘and join us?’

I drew up a chair and sat down. I kept my coat on.

Cyril.

The Da took a draught of tea. He was having trouble with his veil.

‘He was to blow the horn when you arrived,’ he said. ‘Did he not see you, or what?’

I shrugged, and said he must not have noticed me; I felt
suddenly protective toward young Popeye, now that I knew his real name, and had seen that moustache.

There was a silence. A coal in the fire whistled briefly. The Da stared before him with a bilious expression, pondering the undependability of the young, no doubt. Really, it was uncanny how much he reminded me of my mother, God rest her fierce soul; something in the stolid way he sat, with feet apart and planted firmly on the rug, was her to the life.

Aunt Corky’s attention had wandered; now she gave a little start and looked about her guiltily.

‘We were discussing art,’ she said. ‘Those pictures.’ She smiled dreamily with eyes turned upward and sighed. ‘How I would love to see them!’

The Da winked at me and with mock gruffness said, ‘Why don’t you take your auntie down to that room and let her have a look?’ He turned to Aunt Corky. ‘They’re all the same,’ he said, ‘no regard.’ He put down his cup and heaved himself from the chair with a grunt and walked to the window, stately, imperious and cross. ‘Look at him,’ he said disgustedly, glaring down into the street. ‘The pimply little get.’

While his back was turned I looked at Aunt Corky with an eyebrow arched but she only gazed at me out of those hazed-over eyes and smiled serenely. Her head, I noted, had developed a distinct tremor. I had a vision of her dying and the Da and me carrying her downstairs to the ambulance, I at the head and the Da, his hat raked at a comical angle and his veil awry, clutching her feet and walking backwards and shouting for Cyril.

The Da came back and resumed his seat, arranging his skirts deftly about his big, square knees. His fur coat fell open to reveal a black velvet dress with bald patches. He eyed me genially.

‘Have you seen our friend at all?’ he said. ‘Mr Morden.’ I
shook my head. He nodded. ‘They seek him here, they seek him there,’ he said.

I considered for a moment and then asked him if he realised that the police were on to him. He only beamed, lifting his veil to get a better look at me.

‘You don’t say!’ he said. ‘Well now.’

I mentioned Hackett’s name.

‘I know him!’ he cried happily, slapping his knee. ‘I know him well. A decent man.’

‘He asked me about the pictures,’ I said.

His shoulders shook. ‘Of course he did!’ he said, as if this were the best of news.

Aunt Corky had been following these exchanges like a spectator at a tennis match. Now she said, ‘A headache for the police, I am sure, such valuable things.’ We looked at her. ‘Guarding them,’ she said. ‘And then there would be the question of insurance. I remember dear Baron Thyssen saying to me …’

The Da was watching her brightly, with keen attention, like Prince the dog.

‘Oh, we don’t need that,’ he said, ‘the Guards, or insurance, any of that. No, no. We can look after our own things by ourselves.’ He turned to me again. ‘That right, Mr M.?’ M for Marsyas, slung upside-down between two bent laurels with his innards on show and blood and gleet dripping out of his hair. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I had a dream about you last night.’ He lifted a finger and circled it slowly in the air above his head. ‘I see things in my dreams. You were in a little room with your books. You weren’t happy. Then you were outside and this fellow came along and offered you a job. He knew you were a man he could trust.’