The Life and Loves of a She Devil (6 page)

M
ARY FISHER LIVES IN
the High Tower with my husband, Bobbo, and writes about the nature of love, and sees no reason why everyone should not be happy.

Why should she think about us? We are powerless, and poor, and have no importance. We are not even included in everyone.

I daresay Bobbo sometimes wakes in the night, and she asks what is the matter, and he says I am thinking about the children, and she says, better the way you did it, making a clean break, not seeing them, and he believes her, because Andy and Nicola are not the kind of children to tug anyone’s heart-strings, let alone someone whose hairy legs are entwined with Mary Fisher’s little silky ones.

And if he ever says, ‘I wonder how Ruth’s getting on,’ she will stop his mouth with a morsel of smoked salmon, a sip of champagne, and say, ‘Ruth will make her own way in the world. After all, she has the children. Poor me, I have none! All I have is you, Bobbo.’

My two children come and go, sucking sustenance, nuzzling away, but I have nothing to give them. How can I? She devils have dry dugs. It takes a little time to become wholly she devil. One feels positively exhausted at first, I can tell you. The roots of self-reproach and good behaviour tangle deep in the living flesh: you can’t ease them out gently; they have to be torn out, and they bring flesh with them.

Sometimes in the night I scream so loud I wake the neighbours. Nothing ever wakes the children.

In the end I sucked energy out of the earth. I went into the garden and turned the soil with a fork, and power moved into my toes and up my stubborn calves and rested in my she devil loins: an urge and an irritation. It said there must now be an end to waiting: the time for action had come.

C
ARVER LIVED IN A HUT DOWN
at the Eden Grove sports oval, where he was caretaker. He was over sixty, whiskery and wrinkled, but bright eyed. The skin of his arms was red and tough, but where it stretched over his belly it was white, thin and taut. The hut stood where the tennis courts and the running track met, and was where Carver was meant to keep mowers and rollers, and exercise his supervisory duties by day: but now he stayed there by night as well, lying on a foam rubber mattress under a dirty blanket, sometimes sleeping, more often not. He was an employee of the local authority — half a charity, half useful. He reported bee swarms and chased off children and courting couples.

Carver was reputed to have suffered brain damage when rescuing a child from drowning on some far-away beach. For this reason the ladies of Eden Grove, when presenting their petition to have him replaced, asked for his early retirement rather than immediate removal and formal disgrace. Wives and mothers had to pass the sports oval on the way to shops and school and had to hurry past, eyes averted. Sometimes Carver merely leered: sometimes he exposed himself. Though no one had actually seen this happen, everyone knew someone who had.

Carver watched Ruth coming down the road. He liked the flash of her dark eyes; he enjoyed her lumbering gait. She did not trit-trot, as did other wives and mothers, on little heels. Her shoes were flat, perhaps because her feet were too large to fit into anything elaborate. Carver knew well enough that one day she would come in for a cup of tea. He knew in advance who would be intimately associated with him, and that all he had to do — all anyone had to do — having recognised a future partner, was to wait. Love, he had always known, was nothing but foreknowledge of either happiness or pain.

Carver knew how to want, but not want too much; he knew how to hope, but not too fiercely; how to wait, but not for too long. Carver liked to drift along on the current of fate, with an easy turn here and an easy turn there, a casual twist of will and hope, a fish in the flowing stream of time.

‘Come in and have a cup of tea,’ he said, standing close to the tennis-court fence as she passed by. She came in.

Ruth drank her tea from a cracked mug. An iron wood-stove burned at the end of the hut, although it was summer. They sat close together in front of it, as though it were winter. Newspapers made a carpet on the floor. They sat so close they touched. She would have made two of him but it didn’t seem to matter. Her eyes glittered. He remarked upon it.

‘They glitter when I know what I want,’ she said.

‘What is it you want?’

It would be money or sex, he knew; they being the two most important things in life.

‘You,’ she said. His arm slid round her shoulder. His face descended into a series of skinny chins. Eyes heavy with age stared into hers. He understood a certain kind of woman, had entertained more than enough of them, in his time, in his shed at the end of the tennis courts. Good, suburban wives, neatly dressed and properly washed, seeking something beyond degradation so that it approached mysticism, trit-trotting into his shed. Men and women, in unsanctioned and temporary love, leaping and wriggling through the rivers of time. Nothing wrong there. This one was different: she had another reason. He did not understand it.

She had hairs sprouting from moles beneath her chin. Well, he had hairs which grew out of his nostrils. Her breasts were like cushions. He laid his old head upon them. She smiled. He had no worries about his sexual performance. Erections were a young man’s preoccupation; fingers and hands would do as well for her, if necessary. But when it came to it he trembled and wept, the invited guest barred at the door by his own guilt: kept in the cold when all was warm and soft inside.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Something’s wrong. Why did you come here?’

‘This was the first step,’ she said. ‘The breaking of the first rule.’

‘What rule’s that?’ He knew about rules. There was a noticeboard covered with them at every entrance to the oval. Carver found it difficult to read. Once he could; now he couldn’t.

‘Discrimination.’ She had a low laugh; he liked it, and did better.

Carver had a vision: Carver soared out the other side of tumultuous clouds, into space. Carver saw Ruth standing in the middle of a different universe, naked and honey-limbed, and around her danced new slow-rhythmed stars. He was mouthing away at her source, he understood; he was burying his head in flesh, and it was scented not with the natural juices of creation but with existence itself. He was not strong enough for it. He was made for the old world, not the new.

He was a poor old man; he trembled with love and lust; his eyes turned up, whitely, electrical discharges crackled through his brain, feebling it as they always had, from the beginning. Visions wear out old flesh. He was on his knees. He fell.

Ruth looked with amazement at the body on the floor. Carver was having a fit, and she was sorry, but could do little about it.

Ruth was pleased with herself. She and this writhing senior citizen had between them constructed a criss-cross base on which the new foundations of her life would stand, as upholstery stands upon its webbing. The webs were pain and pleasure, humiliation and exultation, transfiguration and degradation, properly accepted: the construction would take amazing weight, amazing strains. There were little gaps still, here and there, through which she might slip. She would have to be careful.

The foaming and the jerking stopped. Carver lay in the warmth of his excrement, quietly asleep. Ruth took the cigarettes from the open packet on the table, put them in her coat pocket, and left, and walked down towards the High Street for more peanut butter, some multi-point adaptors, and to order a taxi for the morning; a large plain woman in sensible shoes, holding a shopping basket, expected to be grateful for what she had.

W
ELL! WHO HAS MARY
Fisher slept with, in the High Tower? Probably not many. She is too fastidious. Certainly not the gardener, or his fingers would be greener, his pay packet larger.

Perhaps in the past a millionaire or two, or a publisher or so, to help her get by. They will have lain their greying, powerful heads next to hers, upon the pale goosedown pillows.

Garcia is a different matter. I think he does for her when the night is dark and lonely, or the creative flow dries up, and the sentences stumble and falter beneath her pen. Then I think he slides into her bed and into her. When I fell over the rug I saw understanding flash between the two of them, a joint complicity. Bobbo first, but Garcia next. Bobbo won’t like that.

I wish impotence upon Bobbo, and Garcia, and the gardener because he can’t keep even such a simple tree as a poplar growing straight and strong. Like master, like tree: perhaps there’s no need to wish it.

I wish thrush on Mary Fisher, just to be getting on with. Perhaps I can feed a Monilia brew into the central heating system, and puff it out everywhere, so that when she lies entwined with Bobbo on the long white sofa it’s all about, waiting. Let her suppurate; let her rot. I have experienced sex with only two men: Bobbo and Carver. I preferred Carver. Bobbo stole my strength from me, but I stole Carver’s.

I am frightened. I belong nowhere, neither to the ranks of the respectable nor the damned. Even whores, these days, must be beautiful. As a woman my physical match is an old, epileptic, half-witted man. And I accept it, and in the accepting have lost my place, my chair at the edge of the great ballroom where the million, million wallflowers sit, and have done since the beginning of time, watching and admiring, never joining the dance, never making claims, avoiding humiliation, but always hoping.

One day, we vaguely know, a knight in shining armour will gallop by, and see through to the beauty of the soul, and gather the damsel up and set a crown on her head, and she will be queen.

But there is no beauty in my soul, not now, and I have no place, so I must make my own, and since I cannot change the world, I will change myself.

I am invigorated. Self-knowledge and reason run through my veins: the cold slow blood of the she devil.

O
N SATURDAY MORNING RUTH
prepared a proper breakfast for Andy and Nicola. She used up all the eggs that should have lasted through until Thursday — the day that the fresh egg deliveries were made at the local shop — and all the bacon in the house. She found white sliced bread in the bottom of the freezer —since Bobbo’s departure its level had sunk lower and lower — and made toast. She put butter on the table instead of margarine and required the children to finish a whole half-pot of honey. They looked at her with wary eyes, and ate.

Ruth herself had lost her appetite. She drank fresh black coffee, made from beans scraped up from the furry ice that lined the bottom of the freezer.

She gave Harness a whole pound of butter to eat, and did not follow him through the house to see where he vomited. She imagined it would be beneath the double bed, where she so often lay alone. She had left the bedroom door open which normally, for fear of Harness and Mercy, she never did. She gave Mercy two complete tins of sardines, meant for human consumption.

She gave Richard the guinea pig nothing. He had chewed the chests of too many woollen jerseys into too many holes, and she could find no remnant of concern for him left in her. Why should Richard have treats, when she had none?

After breakfast Ruth left the dishes where they were and required the children to search the house for money. They looked under the edges of carpets and the crack where the cooker met the fridge, in the nutty sludge at the bottom of their toy-boxes and behind the books on their shelves, between the piles of child art at the top of cupboards and at the back of wardrobes and, of course, down the clefts of sofas and chairs. They found in all coins to the value of $6.23.

‘Now,’ said Ruth, ‘you will go to MacDonald’s and buy what you want: Big Macs, Super Macs, Slice O’Fish, Apple Pie, and as many milk shakes as you want, on condition that you return here at exactly eleven a.m. No earlier, no later.’

‘It’s not enough,’ said Nicola.

‘It’s all I have,’ said Ruth. ‘I have given you everything I have to give, remember that. And all I ever had was scraps and leavings.’

They did not understand nor care, and went off to MacDonald’s complaining.

The summer had been long and hot. Already the sun was well up, taking what little moisture the night had left. But there was a good breeze.

Ruth went through the house as a good housewife should in such weather, and opened all the windows. She went into the kitchen and poured a whole bottle of oil into the chip-frier, so that it brimmed, and lit a low gas flame beneath it. She estimated that it would take some twenty minutes for the oil to reach boiling point. She adjusted the kitchen curtains so that they hung as the architect had intended, cheek by jowl with the cooker. She plugged in all the electrical appliances in the house except the lamps, which might attract neighbourly attention using multi-point adaptors bought especially for this purpose. Dishwasher, washing machine, drier, air-extractor, air-conditioning, three television sets, four electronic games, two convection heaters, a hi-fi system, sewing machine, vacuum cleaner, blender, three electric blankets (one very old), and the steam iron. She set them all to maximum performance and turned on all the switches. The house roared, and presently a slight smell of burning rubber filled the air. Such sounds and smells were not unusual in Eden Grove on a Saturday morning; just rather more intense than normal, as they wafted over Nightbird Drive.

Ruth went back into the kitchen and turned on the gas in the oven, then knelt and pushed down the plunger which worked an electric spark. This plunger, if held down for at least some nine or ten seconds, heated to red-hot a metal flange, which then ignited the gas in the oven. It had always been an annoying device. This morning she held the plunger down for only eight seconds. Then she removed her finger and closed the oven door without checking that the flame had lit.

She went into Andy’s room. He had been drawing and there were some sixty sheets of paper on the floor, and some thirty felt-tipped pens, mostly without tops. She dragged his beanbag, filled with polystyrene foam, to a point just in front of the electric fire he loved to put on just before going to sleep on chilly nights. The walls were lined with posters and pennants.