Songs From Spider Street (7 page)

The one eye is exactly the same as she remembers it. The rest is a ruin.
She turns away from the one small mirror that she still keeps in the apartment.
For how much longer it will remain in one piece she cannot say.

Three weeks
used to be so short a time, but now it is eternity mixed with forever and
plastered over with endless millennia.

Just 21 days
since it happened; since the surgeons first laid their hands and their cold,
uncaring steel on her. Twenty-one short, endless days since she had suffered
the loss of her future and her husband.

A face lost
forever to the cruel kiss of hot tarmac; a love abandoned forever to the
cleansing fervour of the flames. The same squealing song of death and despair
replays in her head every day that she continues to go on living.

The
apartment, though large, is far too small for a prison. The sickness of
hospital air still clings to her. It is something that she cannot wash out no
matter how hard she tries. It will always be with her through the years of pain
ahead, the endless days of rebuilding and remodelling. But she wants her own
face back - not one that can be bought off the shelf. Their cost is too high.

But she knows
a place where she can find her face.

The door creaks in painful protest as she puts her weight against it.
Swollen in the damp of last winter, it is reluctant to let her enter the place
of her salvation. The old attic room was the last domain of her grandmother,
the hideaway where she used to spend her days muttering over her memories of
old Europe, recapturing beauty and love in a fine-spun web of evocations.

Grandmother
would understand my quest, she thinks. She’d know this was the right thing.

She brushes
the heavy dust from her spider-kissed hair, searching for the tell-tale glint
in the close, gloomy space. A hint of her grandmother’s perfume still lingers
in odd corners, even after all these years.

Moving past
the never-opened trunks, the treasures from another world now sunk beneath a
sea of years, she spies the tell-tale shape. She coughs through a shroud of
dust as she pulls back the heavy cloth from the objects she has been seeking.

A
constellation of light breaks over her as the sunlight dashes for freedom after
being trapped on the bright, hungry surface of the glass for a single moment.
It reminds her of the jewels of glass strewn across the road and embedded in
her soft flesh, leaving a souvenir sketch-map of scars.

Her hands
grope forward to lift the first of them. She smiles back at herself from the
moving mirror, from the happy preparations for her 18th birthday; the day after
she had felt a man inside her for the first time, she remembers. She watches
the girl’s slow, contented movements and chokes back her bitterness. No man
would want her now.

There are a
half dozen of them. Clean and perfect and shining in the weak sunlight that
filters in despite her best efforts to exclude it. Mirrors, but not mirrors.

A gift from
her grandmother. Living portraits: how absurd. She had laughed at the time but
the wise witch woman was right, after all. “You may need them some day. You
may,” she had said and patted her grand-daughter’s head indulgently. “Keep them
safe.” And they were safe.

There, her
faces; all of them. Her youth, her pain, her loves - all trapped within the
glass, swimming silently through the paradise of her past.

The smiles,
the shining eyes, the sighs, the lustrous hair. They are all there in front of
her. They belong to her because they ARE her. They will be hers again.

The pain cuts
short her rare attempt to smile.

In rage and
impatience she hefts the weighty objects above her head, hurling them at the
floor. They strike the edge of an upturned table and explode into a multitude
of sharp, bright shards. She feels one chip the hard scarred skin of her face;
it draws no blood from the thick armour.

The dusty
floor is covered with precious gems; so painfully precious. A million chill
splinters of mirror, each containing a fragment of her face, a memory of her
real self, from the time when she could live in the world instead of shutting
it outside herself.

Tiny pieces
of herself stare up from the floor, captured inside their waiting worlds. Now
her work can begin.

She begins.
She weaves and fashions, creates and contours, all the while muttering a psalm
of profound thanks to her skilled ancestors. She thanks the gods that she
learned her grandmother’s lessons well, despite – perhaps, because of – her
mother’s very vocal disapproval.

After many
hours the work is done, her magic concluded, and she lifts the thing to cover
the remains of her face. She sighs with deep pleasure, contented with her
handiwork and exultant at the return of hope.

She finds a
small hand-mirror of her grandmother’s, just an ordinary mirror, and gazes at
herself, admiring her masterpiece. A mirror maze melded into a mask that will
allow her to become whole once more. Her glamour recaptured in the face of a
thousand pieces.

Now she can face
the world once more.

The low heavens brush her shoulders with expectant, misty rain as she
steps out into the thick air. Even at this quiet hour, the street is alive with
passing figures.

She pulls her
coat round her, touches her miraculous mask one last time and walks down the
last few steps. She begins walking, going nowhere.

Expectantly,
she turns her face to the passing pedestrians. Pieces of faces move and jostle
on the shining surface. They are all her but yet none can agree with another on
where it should sit, who it should smile at or glance playfully towards.
Expressions melt into each other, struggling to re-form and create a meaning in
their moods, becoming grotesque.

So good to be
among people again. She can feel the strength of their company, their lives,
flowing into her as she moves into the press of the crowd. A feeling very like
her memory of happiness begins to invade her marred soul. The crowd is a
comfort, a support, a touchstone of normality. A way back to who she was. A way
to be who she is.

A familiar
face appears, bobbing among the crowd’s myriad mouths, eyes and noses. Dora.
She was one of the very few who visited her in hospital. One of the very few
that had stayed a friend to her. Think how this true friend would delight at
seeing her whole again, able to smile like everybody else. She presses further
into the crowd, shouting to her. Head turned away, Dora doesn’t hear but rushes
on, intent on her mundane errand.

She must
speak to her. This would mean so much to both of them, another bond of lasting
friendship and another entrance to the world she had thought gone forever.

There just
ahead, Dora crosses the road, waving to someone on the other side. She shouts
again, following her. Surely Dora is close enough to hear now. But her voice is
drowned by the screeching of a car’s tyres as it pulls up sharply.

The heavy
machine barely touches her, merely knocking her leg. The man’s voice, ugly and
harsh, is more of a shock as she lurches slightly to one side.

The mask,
jolted by her unsteadiness, slips from her face. She attempts to halt its
descent but its weight makes it too fast to catch. Striking the floor, the
marvel she had moulded shatters into smithereens, the tiny fragments lost
forever as they slide swiftly across the hard paving.

Screams pour
from her endlessly as she stumbles forward. On her knees, she sifts through the
shattered shards of her face; a face she will never be able to rebuild. From
one silver sliver an eye, a bright blue perfect eye, returns her gaze, unaware
of its fate.

Her sobs
choke her, lungs heaving painfully for a breath that will not come. Her friend
hears at last and turns to see her as she wants no-one to see her ever again.

She lifts her
head and looks to the sky, the last light of the day fading swiftly from it.
She wishes more than anything that she could escape up into the air, be lifted
far above the winding pathways of her hell.

The phantoms
called people, those who had plagued her all her life, boil at the edge of her vision
as her face and mind evaporate up into the high skies.

Rie and I met at a social event organised by our company and we knew of
each other’s desire immediately.

In our haste
to discover each other, we fled to the nearest place available to make love in
this overcrowded city. Hastily and, we thought at the time, unwisely, we found
ourselves in a nearby capsule hotel.

The 5,000 Yen
cost of the room, and a sizeable bribe for the man behind the desk to forget he’d
seen Rie, proved to be a very small price to pay for entry to paradise.

Both
wonderfully supple and eager, Rie proved to be the perfect companion for
lovemaking in such a small space.

Our room –
barely three feet by three feet by six – seemed dauntingly cramped at first;
particularly as, unlike most hotels of this type, there was a small door rather
than just a curtain at the entrance of the room.

But Rie’s
flexibility proved to be a revelation. The positions that we attained that
first night were both surprising and various. Our mutual joy arrived quickly
but our desire was not easily sated; we got very little sleep that night.

We were
married within a few months but found our sexual congress in the marital bed
lacked flavour. We returned to our capsule hotel and rediscovered the heights
to which our passion could climb. After that, we returned to the hotel
regularly, often twice in a week.

Our limbs
twisted into unorthodox positions that would daunt the fittest gymnast, but our
desire for each other seemed to put the impossible well within our reach.

Ecstasy was
easily attainable within our love box and, every time I released myself into
Rie, it seemed to eradicate our lives outside that confined space. The
restraints of married life, of my position as a salaryman, and of the capsule
itself, dissolved into an ocean of love. Anything was possible for us.

It would have
been a particular delight to have detailed our daring positions, recording them
in our own capsule hotel Kama Sutra to share our joy with all, but discretion
dictates that the manual should remain unwritten.

We have been keeping our appointment with love for over 15 years now. It
is something that has perhaps gone on for too long.

Rie suffered
terrible back pain following the loss of our baby six years ago. The problems
following the dislocation of my hip during a road accident last year have not
faded. Our bodies are no longer as young and as supple as they once were.

For over an
hour now, Rie has not spoken. Condensation and sweat have made the narrow
mattress sodden and my beloved has begun to grow cold beneath me. Try as I
might, I cannot untangle my limbs from hers.

We last made
love at 2.30 a.m. – just after the last of the drunken salarymen retired to his
room. It is now 3.50 a.m.: I have grown soft and am no longer inside Rie.

I have only
enough mobility to tap feebly on the door with my left elbow. My other limbs
are locked tightly in Rie’s love embrace. I cannot draw sufficient breath,
doubled over as I am, to be able to call for assistance.

Checking out
time is not until 9 a.m. It is possible that we will remain undiscovered until
then. I cannot see how they will be able to extricate us even then; I imagine
that several of our limbs will have to be broken.

I do not know
which is worse; to be discovered like this, knowing the great dishonour it will
bring upon us and our families, or to know that our wonderful love box will
become our coffin.

Through the
tiny window I can see the lights of a tower crane at a nearby building site.
They waver as I struggle for breath, fighting back the urge to vomit, and my
tears splash onto a patch of semen that has dried on the beautifully smooth
skin of Rie’s back.

They moved into the flat just two months after the wedding. Mike would
never really think of it as
their
flat; Jen’s father – rich old bastard
that he was – had ‘given’ it to them as a wedding present. Which meant, as far
as Mike was concerned, that he would always be there with them, checking and
judging.

There was
virtually no furniture, beyond the essentials like a bed, when they moved in.
Nothing comfortable or familiar and certainly nothing that would induce him to
feel ‘at home’. Jen had announced that she wanted to furnish it in her own way
and, as she was the one with taste and breeding and money, Mike just went along
with it.

Money seemed
to drip from every orifice of Jen’s family, whereas his humble job as a very
junior reporter for a downmarket daily newspaper couldn’t keep his new wife in
the style to which she’d become accustomed. Mike knew her something-in-the-city
father saw him as nothing but a big zero and the old man took every opportunity
to underline that fact ‘subtly’.

He’d wanted
to honeymoon somewhere nice and warm, somewhere sunny, but Jen – ice maiden to
her sub-zero core – had insisted they spend time at some trendy ice hotel in
the Arctic Circle. Only the sight of her naked body, open before him, had
introduced any heat into the occasion. At least that was one place that he and
Jen really were compatible – in bed; a mere 14 fucks and they’d decided
marriage was the right thing for them, much to the consternation of Jen’s
family.

They’d met at
a friend’s party. He didn’t know how she’d come to be at such a ramshackle
affair and he didn’t care, being drawn to her slightly otherworldly prettiness
and her smart way of dressing. “You’re perfect,” she’d told him at the end of
the night and, for a short while, he was prepared to believe it; because she’d
said it.

All his
friends thought of them as an odd couple, he knew, but he just felt lucky to
have found someone like Jen; so cool, sophisticated and sexy. Someone who was
interested in him.

Of course
there was a downside. There always was. He didn’t like the flat that much but
he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, was he?

Worst of all
for him was the fact that it didn’t have any outside windows, except for one
small one in the kitchen, the light coming from huge skylights instead. But the
converted warehouse was spacious, at least, with enough room for both Jen’s art
school ideas and his own clutter.

On Saturdays, Mike was expected to accompany Jen on her ‘expeditions’ to
town to seek out the latest chic accessory or ornament from exclusive little
shops and tucked-away art galleries.

This was
obviously the way she was used to living her life. But she confessed she’d
never had the chance to ‘spread her wings at home’. Well, thought Mike, you
certainly seem to be flapping your feathers about
now
.

One
particularly chilly day in February they found themselves outside a former
butcher’s shop that was now an expensive furniture shop. There was some sort of
poetic irony in that, he thought.

They had been
standing there for a few minutes before Jen spoke. “What do you think?” she
asked, extending an elegantly-gloved finger towards the display window.

He stared
through the glass at the object Jen was indicating. It was a collection of odd
angles and colours that seemed to float in space, not meeting or connecting in
any significant way. Yet she’d referred to it earlier as a chair. Mike felt his
back aching in sympathy with any poor sod who would be expected to sit in it.

Then it
dawned on him. He’d been brought along on this expedition to approve of it, to
admire Jen’s excellent taste and to compliment her on her knowledge of modern
design. And he’d be the poor sod who had to sit in that ‘chair’.

“It looks uncomfortable,”
was all he could think of to say in protest.

Jen scowled,
her composure dented for once. “I think you’ll find it wonderfully comfortable,
actually. It’s a Mika Pentinnen chair – he’s one of the
best
young
designers in Europe.”

“Good for him.”

Jen snorted
softly and headed for the entrance, credit card appearing magically in her hand
as she did so. “You’ve just got no idea, have you?”

Mike felt
defeated.

Slowly their spacious living room began to fill with what Mike regarded
as clutter. Expensive, up-to-the-minute must-have clutter. But still clutter.

He often
found himself carefully negotiating small table-top sculptures or oddly-poised
angular lamps to make his way to the firm leather armchair that sat in the
middle of the room. Jen smiled patronisingly at him when he flopped down into
it after a hard day’s hack work; she obviously thought of it as his chair.
Maybe that’s why it had been placed facing the large screen TV, the floor space
around it left uncluttered.

One evening
she slid into his lap, pressed her breasts against him and kissed him on the
mouth. “You do like what I’m doing to the place don’t you, angel?” she purred.
Mike tried his best to maintain a passive expression and made a non-committal
noise that could have been interpreted as ‘yes’ if the wind was in the right
direction.

“Good. You do
look so at home here, “ she breathed in his ear.

He knew she
had good taste and connections in the art world, mainly through her brother,
and he did like some of the things she chose, but he just didn’t want to live
with them. He wanted a home, not a gallery. But how could he let her know that?

One day he arrived home to find a large part of one corner taken up with
a huge grey stone object. It was a featureless rectangle, smooth and
uninteresting.

He dropped
his coat on a chair and stood taking in the sheer ugliness, the brutal uncaring
weight, of the object before him.

Jen appeared
from the bedroom. “Hi, Mike. Do you like it?”

Mike snorted.
Surely she was joking, trying to push him to the limit, to see how much he
would take before ordering a skip and asking his brother to help him empty the
flat of the crap she’d accumulated in the past months.

He turned to
look at her. She smiled, her mouth pulling down slightly in one corner in that
way that he used to find so sweet. He tried to keep his voice as calm and
non-committal as his elevated blood pressure would allow: “What is it?”

Jen laughed
her brittle crystal laugh. “It’s a sculpture. By Massimo Chia. Isn’t it wonderful
and primitive? It only cost me three grand; Tim helped me get it cheap because
he knows the artist.”

“But it’s
huge!” Mike protested, making a mental note to have Jen’s brain-dead brother
hunted down and killed as soon as he could scrape together the fee.

She walked
over to the object slowly and looked it up and down. “But, hun, don’t you see?
It’s an investment, too. It’s perfect. You’ll get used to it in time.”

Mike sighed
heavily and trotted off to the fridge, hoping there was still some beer left
and praying that the floor could take the weight of the monstrosity that his
lovely rich little wife had just inserted forcibly into his life.

Jen often read last thing at night, her designer glasses perched
elegantly on her pretty little nose, while Mike buried his face in the pillow
and tried to sleep.

One morning
she’d left early to meet one of her old school friends at an auction. God knows
what monstrosity she’d bring back with her, thought Mike. Passing her side of
the bed, he leaned over and picked up the book she’d read last night from her
bedside.

He looked at
the cover: ‘Magical Sigils in Three Dimensions’. The title meant nothing to him
and the few abstract squiggles on the cover did nothing to explain it. The
blurb on the back didn’t make much sense to Mike either. God knows what they
taught her in art college, he thought, but she’s not giving it up easily.

Mike shook
his head and went to clean his teeth.

That evening, as he still sat in his work clothes, brain fried from
another day of scribbling tabloid tedium, he noticed that Jen was acting oddly.

She’d taken
to standing in one corner of the flat, her blue eyes staring levelly in his
direction, occasionally adjusting her position, with a satisfied little smile
on her face.

When he asked
her what she was doing, she just said she was admiring the room layout. Mike
sighed, reached for the TV remote and tried to find something normal to watch.

Sleepless one night, he wandered into the living room seeking God knows
what that eluded him. Not sleep but its equivalent somehow, somewhere.

Everything
was drained of colour in the little illumination seeping down from the
skylights. He was unwilling to undertake the hazardous journey across the
living space to the light switches, for fear of overturning a couple of
thousand pounds’ worth of ornament or knick-knack and hating himself for it.

Instead he
stood trying to remember which of the strangely shaped objects in the room was
a light. Eventually his clouded mind gave up the struggle and he reasoned that
a hot bath might help him sleep.

Just as he
turned towards the bathroom, he became aware of something emanating from the
corner of the room. It wasn’t a light or a sound exactly but closer to a
feeling.

Mike rubbed
his eyes in an effort to invigorate his insomnia-dulled senses. Whatever it was
came from the corner where that hideous thing stood.

He turned
away from it, hoping for some reprieve from the indeterminate throbbing or
whispering or scuttling that he felt in his head. Not a sound, no, but something
very like it; yet unlike anything he’d ever known before. The longer it
continued, the more he was certain it had something to do with the block-shaped
sculpture.

Suddenly he
felt a rush of fear. It was in his home. It was something unknown, that he felt
threatened by and it was in his home. He felt very cold.

Mike forced
his feet to take him back to bed, his breathing tight as his heart hammered
away inside him and his head filled up with the vibration. He crawled between
the ridges of the sheets, ice floes in his personal Antarctica, and lay beside
Jen with the material pulled close up about him, praying for it all to stop.

He didn’t
remember falling asleep but when he woke next morning, he was in no doubt that
it hadn’t been a dream. He felt exhausted and unable to tell Jen anything, in
case she thought he was losing his mind, or was inventing scare stories about
one of her beloved works of art.

He trudged
out to the bus at the usual time, heavy and sluggish, and dozed in his seat,
dreaming of a woman he used to know but had lost.

Several times over the next week, the sensation occurred again. It was
accompanied by a gripping fear inside him. Once, while he was in the bath, he
plunged his head under the water in an effort to escape, to block the sensation,
but it had no effect.

One morning
at breakfast Jen suddenly stopped eating and looked at him. There was an
expression on her face as if she had suddenly divined what was happening. Mike
quickly got up to make himself some more coffee.

He was sure there
was a smile on her face, even though he didn’t dare to turn and look at her.

Every day he seemed to grow more tired. Energy became just a memory and
not a state of being related to events or activities. He struggled to think and
laboured over the keys of his computer.

One day he
felt so drained that he limped over to the News Editor’s desk and complained he
was too ill to work. The man, whose wavy grey hair always reminded Mike of
waves breaking on an oily beach, looked at him sceptically.

“What’s wrong
with you, then?” he groaned.

Mike had no
idea what he looked like but he felt pale. “I just feel so weak,” he muttered.

His boss
snorted once. “Aye, you make me weak, too. Go on then, get home,” he said,
jabbing his thumb at the door.

The streets
were crowded with grey figures whose faces seemed too alive for comfort. Livid
mouths, working quickly around words or simply hanging vacantly open, sat below
eyes as white and bright as a new sun. Mike’s head ached and burned. Finally,
somehow, he managed to make it to his front door and negotiated the complicated
business of putting the key in the lock and turning it. It only took him an
hour or two to take the few steps he needed to get inside.

Exhausted, he
leaned on the door post for a moment before trudging the two more steps into
the living room. Too tired to go all the way in, he flung his coat over the
back of a nearby sofa and rubbed his eyes.

After a few
moments of blackness, he opened his eyes and felt as if he had been slapped in
the face. Somehow, by accident, he must have stood in exactly the same spot
that Jen had when she was ‘admiring the layout’.

What Mike saw
was a design made up of every piece of furniture and every single ornament in
the room. They had all been positioned precisely to make up a pattern, as
surely as if they had been drawn on a piece of paper.

In front of
him was a huge circle spanning the entire width of the room; the corner of an
ornament lined up perfectly with the arc of a lampstand, which stood in neat
alignment with the edge of a painting, which in turn formed part of a pattern
with the wall hanging Jen had bought last week, and so on, throughout the width
and height of the room.

Only after a
few more moments did another pattern emerge, inside the circle. The chair he usually
sat in, his chair, the only comfortable one in the place, sat at the apex of a
cone. And this cone in turn faced the great stone lump that had sat in the
corner of the room for the past month.