First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (6 page)

I walked north towards the main shopping area of the City. Everything was new to me: dingy warehouses with small windows thick with soot; railway loading yards, their rails shining among thickets of dead weeds; narrow back alleys where discarded newspapers and wrappers were
whirled along by the cold wind. The main streets, most of which ran parallel to the river, were themselves rivers of noisy traffic and unyielding pedestrians. The stores didn’t interest me much—one clothing store after another, shoe shops and pharmacies interrupted occasionally by the marble entrances of banks and churches. Only the cinemas attracted me; their exotic foreign names and colourful billboards were like exits from an overcrowded grey hell.

On that day and all the other days I lived at the Hochmagandie, I’d go out for dinner and then take a walk. I’d buy some rolls at a bakery for my other meals and go back to the hotel around six. To get to the stairway, I had to pass the bar. The only customers I ever saw in it were women. They’d be sitting alone at the little round tables, or on the high stools at the bar, smoking, looking at themselves in the mirror behind the gantry with its pyramids of bottles. Sometimes, one or other of those women would catch my eye through the mirror before I could look away. Their lips were shockingly red in their pale faces; their mascara didn’t hide the glitter in their eyes.

On my second night in my room, I ate my rolls and went to bed around nine o’clock. I’d been asleep for quite a while when a sound woke me. It gave me a fright, for I couldn’t remember where I was. Voices were coming from behind the locked door that separated my room from next door. One of the voices was a woman’s, the other was a masculine rumble. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, so I got up and tiptoed over to the connecting door.

Light was shining through a wide crack in the lower panel. I quietly knelt down and put my eye to it.

“Get on with it,” the man was saying.

I could see him, or at least the lower part of him. He was
sitting on a wooden chair right in front of the door. He was wearing dark trousers, and beneath them I could see black shoes, and black socks with a repeated pattern—a pair of intertwined yellow snakes wrapped round an anchor.

The owner of the other voice was standing at the bed, facing the man. She was far enough away from the crack in the door for me to get a good look at her. She seemed to be one of the bar-women. Her lips were glistening red; her eyes were black slits. She wore a tight black dress.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

There was a rustling, and the man leaned forward and blocked the view for a moment. When he pulled back, I saw her counting some banknotes then stuffing them into the pocket of a coat that lay on the bed. She sat down on the bed facing him and began to take off her shoes, slowly, elaborately. She slowly pulled her dress up, unhooked her stockings and rolled them off. Her legs were thin and very white.

I watched this, exactly as the man on the chair must have been watching.

She stood up and unfastened the buttons of her dress. Those slits of eyes never left the man on the chair. Her tongue wet her lips. She let the dress fall to the floor. She took off her underclothes in the same deliberate way, all the time looking at him. My throat was becoming dry.

She stood there at last, a thin woman with thin legs. Her ribs were prominent, the way my mother’s were in her sickness. This woman’s breasts dangled loosely, and she had those silvery streaks across her belly.

“Now?” she said.

“Come over and let’s get down to business,” said the man.

He rose out of his chair and moved towards the right so that I couldn’t see him any longer. She followed him.

The only things in my sight now were the spars of the
wooden chair and, further away, the bed and the clothing lying on the floor.

I couldn’t see the man and the woman, but I could hear them. He’d give instructions (“Move this way,” “Good,” “Lift your leg a little,” “Put your hand here”). She spoke infrequently (“Like this?” “Ouch!” “How much longer?”).

This went on for the longest time, perhaps a half-hour. And during it I was crouched by the door, breathing quietly, listening.

Then I heard him give one last order.

“Now,” he said. “Stand under the light.” And a moment later. “Good, good, good.” And again. “Good, good, good.”

Now he walked back into my view again, and this time was far enough away from the crack that I was able to have a good look at him. He wasn’t undressed, as I’d expected. He hadn’t even taken his jacket off. He was a big, soft-looking man with fair hair and pale blue eyes. He was carrying an open wooden box about the size of a briefcase. He set it down on the bed, folded the lid over and snapped it shut. He sat on the bed and looked over in the direction he’d come from.

“Yes, very good,” he said. “You’d better clean yourself up now.”

“Are you finished?” I heard her ask.

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve done very well.”

After a minute, I heard the sound of the shower where their washroom backed onto mine. Soon the water was turned off, and the woman appeared again, drying herself with one of the thin hotel towels. Her back was to me, dripping with water. She quickly put on her clothes.

“My hair’s a mess,” she said. “I need to put on some make-up.” She went back to the washroom again, and was there for a few minutes.

Then they both left the room. I heard them open their
door, the room lights were switched off, and their footsteps creaked along the spongy corridor.

I went back to bed.

I was puzzled by the strange ritual I’d seen. Like all the boys of Stroven, I’d spied on lovers who’d gone up into the moors for privacy. And I’d heard all the schoolboy talk on the mysteries of sex. So I tried to imagine what must have gone on next door, out of my sight. I thought about it and thought about it till, exhausted, I fell asleep.

I’
D BEEN IN THE
Hochmagandie five days. On the fifth evening, I returned to the hotel after my walk. I was passing the front desk when the clerk called to me.

“A message,” he said, handing me an envelope. I noticed he’d changed his nose-cone—tonight it was a brown leather one. “Been enjoying the sights?” He was leering at me.

I never knew what to say to him, so I just went on upstairs. In my room, I tore the envelope open and read the note inside.

I was thrilled. I packed my suitcase and read for a while, then went to bed and fell asleep in spite of my excitement.

I don’t know what time it was, perhaps around midnight, that I heard voices in the next room and saw light coming through the crack in the connecting door. The nights had been uneventful since that second night.

I was suddenly wide awake. I got up and quietly took up my viewing position.

The man with the snakes on his socks was again sitting in the chair. But the woman in front of him wasn’t the same woman. This time, in fact, she wasn’t a woman at all. She was a girl who seemed to me not much older than myself, in spite of the camouflage of lipstick and thick mascara. She might easily have been one of the girls in my class at Stroven made up for the annual school play.

But she was much more self-possessed than any of those schoolgirls in Stroven. She began taking off her clothes, as the man in the chair instructed. She looked unblinkingly at him as she slowly unveiled a slight, hairless body with a chest as flat as mine.

The ritual began as before. The man took her out of my sight and for a while I could see nothing, only hear his voice telling her what to do. But this time, after just a minute, she came back and stood by the bed; then he appeared, and put his wooden box on the bed too.

He opened it up and took out of it something shaped like a disc. He rummaged in the case and brought out a handful of little tubes. Then he took out a brush and I understood what he was doing.

He began to paint her. Not on a canvas, but putting the paint on the girl herself. She was his model and his canvas. He began by rapidly covering all of her body in a white undercoat. Those suggestive commands I’d heard from the other night now lost their mystery.

“Turn your hip this way a little,” he’d say to her; or, “Open your legs a bit more.”

Soon she was entirely covered in white paint. She looked very frightening to me, an alien creature with green eyes, brown hair and pink mouth.

But he had barely begun. Now he began painting on top of the white base. He was standing in front of her, blocking my view, so I could only catch a glimpse of a blur of colours. He seemed to paint with great speed and confidence. He’d cock his head and ponder from time to time, but mainly he went at it without pausing.

After about a half-hour, he stopped.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s have a look at you.”

He moved to one side, and I had a clear view of her.

I almost fell backwards. The girl had been transformed into a huge reptile. Her body was a mass of greens and blues and frills and warts. Her eyes were slits inside great fringed circular lids. She was the most repulsive thing I had ever seen.

“Perfect!” I heard him say. There was a long pause. Then, “Perfect,” he said again.

When I’d got over my first sensation of revulsion, I could see how someone might indeed find her beautiful, she was so colourful and gleaming, as though she’d just slid out of a pond. As though the human features had been the artificial ones, and the man had uncovered the truth beneath.

“Anything else you want me to do?” she asked. A speaking reptile.

“No. You can clean yourself now,” he said.

She disappeared in the direction of the shower and he bent over his box. The pipes bumped for a while, and when she came back into my sight again, she was drying herself with a towel. The paint was all gone, and so were the mascara and lipstick. Her hair was slicked back and she looked even younger than before. She put on her
clothes, money was exchanged, and soon the room was empty and dark.

I went back to bed and soon fell asleep. I dreamt I was in Stroven and that I was bathing a giant lizard. All its colours were coming off on the washcloth, and as they came off, I saw that it was my mother’s body underneath. The sight of it aroused me. That woke me up, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying. I was shocked at how a dream had contaminated her memory. Weary and empty, I fell asleep again and slept till my dreams were shattered by the horns of tugboats announcing the beginning of the day’s work along the river. And the end of my stay at the Hochmagandie Hotel.

T
HE
SS C
UMNOCK LAY
on the south bank of the river with its bows headed towards the sea. I’d walked past a number of dingy cargo ships on my way along the waterfront, and the
Cumnock
was as dingy as any of the others. It was shaped like a book-end, with a long, bare deck, then the wheelhouse and living quarters jutting up at the back. The wind grabbed the dirty wraiths from its smokestack and carried them ashore to melt into the city smog. The ship’s hull, which from fifty yards away had at least seemed solid and seaworthy, was in fact very rusty. The plates around the bows were pocked and dented as though the ship had been tossed around by a giant dog.

The quiet rumble of the engines made the gangway tremble as I climbed aboard. An elderly sailor who didn’t seem at all interested in me led me down a companionway to my cabin. It was narrow and musty, with a low bunk and a caged bulb in the ceiling. The small porthole looked out onto warehouses and sooty tenements. The enamel paint on the walls and ceiling was chipped and peeling.

As he left, the sailor mumbled that I was to keep out of the way during departure; so I stayed in the cabin and watched what was going on from my porthole. For a long time, there wasn’t much to see. But around noon, the sound of the engine deepened. The gangway was hauled
aboard and stevedores on the dock cast off the lines. Trembling and rumbling, the ship slowly ripped away from her berth.

Some of the stevedores on the dock stood watching, and I waved to them; but if they saw a boy waving through a porthole from the stern quarters, they didn’t wave back. After a moment, they turned and headed towards one of the warehouses.

No one else, so far as I could tell, paid any attention as the
Cumnock
slowly nosed its way down the river. The dock itself soon slipped out of sight, then the warehouses along the front, the tall cranes, the shipyards, the clutter of the City. It was hard to see much beyond that, for in spite of the wind, the day had become quite foggy; so much so that the
Cumnock
began sounding its horn, making the hull shudder. Sometimes a passing tugboat or another ship on the river wailed an answer.