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smokingbootThis follows on from the small piece of creative writing I did some time ago and posted here. It is a continuation of that story, so I repeat the first part below.
Last night the doorbell rang. It was very late, far past midnight, and I walked down and opened the door to see a finger on the front door step. I bent down to take a closer look. It was clean cut and dry, no blood or decomposition. I looked up.
The night was clear, a pale full moon and stars everywhere. The craters on the moon’s surface shone at me and directly below, not far from where Church Lane joins the park footpath, stood a hedge I had not seen before. It sparkled slightly with what I first thought was dew - ‘So dawn will be soon,’ I told myself, - but dawn felt a long way away. I went to look at the hedge.
It was stiff with frost crystallised on the web of a spider, reflecting the light, intricate and symmetrical. I stepped back a little to notice that the whole hedge was a maze of jewels and sugar phantoms, irridescent webs of differing shapes and sizes, studded by the corpses of insects. Some webs were big enough to trap small birds and these did not shine, tiny bones and remnants of feather pinched between the wire and the wood.
I realised that the roots and twigs of the hedge were held together by myriads of webs, that the hedge had not grown at all but had somehow been placed there, built piece by piece by the spiders.
At this point I saw them moving in their multitudes through, around, over, beneath the hedge, so many of them patterned and checkered, many dull, many bright. It was then I noticed a pale plump spider on a branch very close to my face, and I jumped back. I had forgotten the finger until that moment.
The spider gestured elegantly down at the foot of the hedge which was full of old cans and fast food cartons, bits of bicycle, sweet wrappers and cigarettes, broken toys and lost dolls. I wondered if the finger was part of a lost doll, but I touched it, and it was real enough, though hard and dead. The spider looked at me apologetically.
‘We cannot help it,’ The spider said, ‘We do as our fathers did. They built this hedge.’
I wanted to say, ‘What fathers? Weren’t they eaten by your mothers? And if they built this hedge, why isn’t it here in the day?’ But the main question was the finger.
‘You must leave me alone, all of you.’ I said, not knowing if I meant it. What I meant was, you are not to steal bits of me or mine. The spider didn’t say anything, but I could tell it was thinking of the finger and I held it out to him. He reached up and took it between his two front legs. I noticed light patterns etched under his skin, between the blonde hairs on his back and belly and legs. I didn’t know if he was beautiful or ugly.
‘I could show you all of the hedge,’ said the spider, climbing towards me in an abrupt, decided manner, ‘If you want. I could ride on your shoulder.’ Too close to my face, I thought, though his voice was gentle, noble almost. A prince among spiders.
So I stood there while the moon shone and my breath mingled with the rising mist through the air, over the hedge and the fields and all the night world held together by cobwebs, spider gilt in frost and shadow.
I agreed, because I could think of nothing else to do. And I felt guilty about the finger. The finger, yes. Someone’s hand might be in the hedge, being used for, for, used for what? Being eaten, it would be eaten of course. So I should do something.
The Spider sat and waited with great patience. I looked over at him and said, ‘I will come with you,’ his eyes brightened almost alarmingly, ‘In return for the finger,’ I added. He seemed to give a little shrug, and without a word, handed back the finger. Too easy and I panicked. He had really wanted the finger, but it was more important to him that I entered his world. He looked at me, and if he thought I was inconsistent, he never let it show. Polite to the last.
Then he was on my shoulder, and I fought the urge to gag, to throw up or scream. Too close, way too close, and he moved too quickly and bit my ear. It felt warm and thick and moist, a tongue with a barb at its end, no spider then, no spider at all, but it caught me well, the barb hooking for a second from the base to the lobe, and I could smell my own blood and another scent, which I know very well, when I am not dreaming.
I fell, and he fell with me, beside me, heavy on the grass like a body, a weight of my own size, heavier. Larger.
When I tried to stand, the glitter of his eyes, all his eyes, filled my horizons. Beside him the hollows of the hedge shone like great caverns and corridors leading inward, the labyrinth awake for me, playing music. I could not go to them, though. My head was turned towards him, now huge in bulk with eyes unreadable even yet, though the stiffness moving along my spine, the heaviness in my arms and legs, the clench of my fingers and jaw told the story.
‘You will see the kingdom,’ he told me, ‘But you cannot enter dressed like that. And you will not kick.’ And he set to spinning, as I knew he would, while I lay on my back like a tin soldier fallen out of its box, facing the moon, mapping those grey seas in my head, unable to turn right or left.
The cold melted through my limbs as he wrapped them. I wondered when I would begin to feel the dissolution within. Would it be painful, turning to liquid? Suppose he began to devour me before? Suppose my arms snapped off with the frost and the poison? But he wrapped my body tenderly in silk from the core of him, warm and smooth on my skin. I presumed it was unbreakable, but it didn’t matter. Strong or weak, I could not command a single fibre of the silk or of myself. How could I have mistaken him so?
The work was soon finished. He did not cover my face as I expected. Eyes faced forward, I could barely see him but I could feel his breath on my hair as he daubed my hair with frost or dew or whatever he had to hand. I might be food for his table, a corpse apparent, but I was dying in the hands of an artist. He stopped to gaze at me for a moment, the light refracted in his eyes. Even the warmth of the silk, the stillness of my muscles couldn’t spare me the fear or the desire to look further. Do the torches of the fay shine so wild and wise? He wanted someone to breathe on the mirrors, to examine the gleam behind them, the light in the brilliant mind of a spider. ‘I would do it, if you hadn’t tied my hands so!’ I wanted to tell him. But I couldn’t move, and in any case, we both knew I would never have noticed had I not been bound.
And then we entered the hedge.
OK, I like that. This next part is very flawed. It needs one of two things to make it work (discounting the need for even more editing which will just have to wait) It needs the continuing story to make sense of it, which, though I can feel in my head, takes me ages to write down, or it needs the reader to be referred to the life of the artist Richard Dadd, specifically his paintings 'The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke,' 'Come unto these yellow sands,' and 'A Bacchanalian Feast,' from which his quote is directly lifted.
E suum cuique dunc dictum
Transupra et ecre sinistrum
Simile similibus addendum
Daemoni date debendum mmm
And therefore he carries on chopping wood. He knows he couldn’t have really heard the bride. She will be mute by now, a raindrop under glass, helpless and transparent. Instead he looks to his duties, eighteen-forty-three splintering every log with a brutal kiss. He smiles at her spirit of industry. She hates talk without work.
Still, he can hear the mortal or feel her calling; Come unto these yellow sands, and take hands…he suppresses the shudder, and tells himself, No, that is something else, something past and to come, and eighteen-forty-three flashes a smile at him.
They know he misses the brilliance of the hedge in summer, so the halls are festooned with mothwing mosaics and rich patterned shells. His hosts care for him as best they can; they dress him well, though he never lets them replace his frock coat. They furnish him with folded pairs of mouse ears to warm his hands, and if the carcass of the giver blows stiff on a nearby noose, still they have done their best according to their nature. Music echoes through the rags and tapestries of Winter, for him, all for him, though he barely hears it. He is grateful for these diversions away from endless intricacies of cobweb, but of the effort involved he knows little and cares less. He brushes the dust from a lacewing and writes his name on the faded scales with his finger.
Richard?
For one inconceivable minute, he thinks he hears the voice of the spider’s bride, desperate and human, and then almost laughs at himself. It is only The Beloved. Only the Beloved.
‘You are thinking of that mortal,’ the voice has the barest inflexion of displeasure, but Richard, who knows better than to ignore it, rubs his hands through his hair and adapts his face to the smiles of a courtier and a lover. She is neither fooled nor appeased.
‘She took a fairy gift.’
‘She did not know,’ Richard looks at his love, her face smooth and round and white as a plate, extraordinary bosom tapering to impossible waist. The pleats of her skirt accentuate her hips and thighs, her legs billow out at the calves, swooping down to ankles far too delicate to carry all that voluptuousness above it. Curve and curve and curve again, squeeze in, squeeze out, in and out, and the scent of maythorn which no good woman brings in the house, no woman, no woman is like this, he thinks, I paint you with your moon face, your doll eyes, and I don’t think you even know yourself. But you know me and that is all that matters.
And the thorns rustle in excitement, for who does not know of the Spider and his bride and the banquet to follow? A mortal. Richard knows it even before they tell him, the story whistling through the hollows of their boughs. Time out of mind they have dipped their tips through the skin of the passing world, the wrists and fingers, paws and whiskers, wings and shells of wayfarers under leaf and over stone, they suck up the stories of others through sapless cores until the branches shine slick and maroon. Now the shadow leaves applaud in gratitude, a fit audience for the Prince of Spiders.
‘I do not understand why you are attending,’ Says Richard, almost timidly.
‘I do not understand why you care.’ The Beloved replies. ‘I thought you had done with the mortal realm.’ Beyond the langourous sea of her voice, beyond the yellow sands, wait dark pebbles in places where mortals keep their eyes.
‘You want to rescue her.’
‘No. Not at all. I was just…aware…just…I thought she called…’
‘You wouldn’t hear her call if you weren’t listening.’
The lantern howls grow wilder, tiny berries rocking with halloween laughter, the gleam of the night season. They too are waiting.
‘She did know.’ The Beloved sit herself down, preening. ‘As you did.’ She smooths her hair and looks at herself in her mirror, ignoring him. ‘Soothe her anger,’ he thinks, and he makes himself look to the regular slow twitch of her petticoats beneath her fingers, hating himself for calculating in such a clever way, such a mortal way, the moods of the Beloved. He lets himself feel aroused and ashamed, knowing that she will be pleased.
‘For me, no,’ As the blood begins to move, ‘But you asked for nothing more than my soul, which was yours from the first time I saw you.’ Richard feels her smile though she continues to survey herself in the mirror, and his confidence swells enough to return to his point. ‘He will devour her without a moment’s poetry.’
‘That I do not believe,’ replies the Beloved, ‘Nothing he does lacks poetry. He says he intends to marry her in the old style.’
‘Then at the very least she’ll lose her hands!’ Too quick, too sharp, his agitation so obvious she looks away from her reflection directly at him, but he cannot help himself.
‘If I lost my hands, would you keep me?’
‘You are an artist.’
‘As she may be.’ Deep breath. ‘You are going because you’re afraid of him.’ Blow thunder and ruin and storm, hurl me from this deadly silence. Seek nothing from her eyes or lips where the lightning strikes and holds.
‘Dost thou forget from what a torment I did free thee?’
‘No,’
‘Thou dost! And thinkst it much to tread the ooze of the salt deep,
To run upon the sharp wind of the North
To do me business in the veins of the earth when it is baked with frost –‘
‘I do not, my lady,’
‘Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot the foul witch Sycorax …who…who…hast thou forgot her?’
‘No, my lady,’ I am not the one forgetting, thinks Richard, these words were never yours, you can’t even recall where they came from, because you, my fair one, my queen, can create nothing, which is why you keep me here.
He is shaking, astonished at his own anger. She loves him and once rescued him from, from, and yes, he has forgotten if the truth be known, the long ago, the real and ghastly dream, an image now only to be conjured with pain, effort he makes for her sake. Eyes closed, I will try to remember he thinks, a reminder, a small punitive measure, she must feel so hurt, and the sooner it is out of the way the sooner we return to the banquet. So. Repentance. Trying to remember the study, his father’s chair, father, father, eighteen-forty-three trembles in his hand, cognac and cigars and macassar oil, father’s chair. Opening his eyes to recall the deep green brocade of the wallpaper, the clock, the room. Opening his eyes to see her standing in the doorway. Sylvia. Sylvia.
Sycorax.
Sylvia’s mother had been sister to Richard’s own, and it was thought that their children would make good nursery companions. Sylvia however, had other ideas, and Richard remembered them all when she strode into the room as she had done long ago, her underlip pushed out in a particularly repugnant fashion. It was as well for those around her that she was ugly. Her capacity for cruelty with the help of redeeming features would have been immeasurable.
Little Sycorax. It was father’s joke name for Sylvia. Richard didn’t really understand it until Mrs Macready made her pupils learn speeches from the Tempest. Richard didn’t comprehend the play at all, (Full fathoms five thy father lies…) but he knew it was about fairies, and that Sylvia would never be the beautiful princess waiting on the edge of the sea.
Oh yes, Sylvia was ugly. The adults talked about it, though they tried to keep it out of her hearing. Richard, aged eight, was all eyes and ears and he heard everything. The grown-ups felt sorry for her, they didn’t know what would become of her when she grew up. To him, she didn’t even have the grace to look like a proper witch. She was a goblin, with her pushed in nose and stuck out lips, her hairy arms and the sheer lumpen size of her. That size boded ill for Richard. Sylvia was his senior by three years, and had a ready taste for tyranny far from the eyes of their governess. What had started as a predilection for pinching and name-calling turned into full-blooded slaps and kicks the moment the two were alone together.
Sylvia’s pet game was ‘Queen.’ She would hold Richard’s head down to her feet and make him kiss them. Then she would play at being Queen of the Imaginary Land of Sylvania, and Richard would play servants, undesired admirers, evil-doers and other miscreants within and around her court. He was not the only citizen of the wretched principality. Sylvania’s population totalled three: himself, one permanently defecting cat, and the doll.
Sylvia had many dolls. Under ribbons and bonnets they stared out from various corners of the nursery, all smiles and pouts, excepting one, and she, why she, oh poor Richard! That doll did not have golden ringlets, or big blue eyes or china hands. It was made of painted wood, the face round and curiously flat with black hair that fell to its waist. Though the doll was white, it had an alien almost oriental look to it, all slanted eyes and tiny lips. Most memorable of all, it was a thing of exaggerated curves. The neck was too long for the moon-like head above it, the waist and ankles absurdly narrow. The bosom and bustle were so excessive Richard dared not even regard them. The doll looked like everything he knew Sylvia wanted to be and she held it close, as though some of its magic might rub off on her. Richard wanted to hold the doll himself, to feel it and smell it and talk to it. But he never got the chance.
In all the endless games of Queen, he poured tea and made speeches to Sylvia, playing out stories she invented about being kidnapped or courted, stories in which she was always beloved and always won. At first he resisted and told Sylvia she was stupid. He inevitably lost the fights that ensued, so he grew sly. He would address his speeches of love, desire, and repentance to the doll, glancing sidelong at her face while kissing the goblin girl’s shoes. The doll never showed that she understood, but they both knew.
The day came when Richard was alone in the nursery, Sylvania’s queen having been forced to re-work her sums by the governess. His heart was pounding as he approached the doll. When he picked her up, he almost fainted at her whiteness, so still and smooth. Her eyes did not move like some of Sylvia’s other dolls. They were just painted on. But their gaze felt real and full of intention and he did not dare look at them. His next act was beyond explanation to himself or to anyone else. He pushed her skirts up and found himself staring at the doll’s extraordinary skittle-pin legs and then, still avoiding her face, he started to pull her petticoat down.
‘You!’ At the door, puffing up red and purple stood poor Sylvia, ugly as a witch in a book. She had tears in her eyes. He dropped the doll and stammered something lost in her rage as she hurtled forward and brought him crashing down under a rain of blows and bites. He tried to put his arms up over his face, but she grabbed his hair and yanked so hard his head jabbed backwards and she spat full on him. His legs gave under them both and they fell to the nursery floor, books and dolls, teacups and toys scattering as he tried to kick her, tried to hit her, but Sylvia gave him such a punch across the jaw he heard a crack and felt his head grow light while noises approached from the other room. ‘I’ll tell them,’ her eyes filled with fury, a storm on the sea, ‘ I’ll tell your papa. I’ll tell your mother.’ And he knew that this would be a terrible thing, but the taste of salt was on his lips, and a new scent surrounded him like the woods in the park. And she was there, her deathly face and smile, standing so powerful where once the witch had stood, a white hand stretched out towards him.
‘You can come with me if you like.’
Her eyes dark, dark. She is a fairy, Richard, beware. Come Unto These Yellow Sands. But if you do, you will never come back. Never come back.
Scrambling towards her. Such a smile, such a scent flooding the room, washing away all the world, no Sylvia, no Sycorax, only her and suddenly their legs were entangled, and he kissed her like a man kisses a woman, like father kissed mother, like Sylvia had wanted to be kissed, they kissed and they kissed as the room span and Mother gasped and Father roared and tried to separate them. But by then the hedge had grown wild over their bones, and they were free.
***
Smiling in the eyes of the Beloved, Richard is ready, she understands, so perfect is her love, and the time has come for the banquet.
Each man then has his own unlucky fate both here and beyond - like must be added to like, and ones due paid to the appointed spirit.]
mmm.
Richard straightens his collar and grasps eighteen-forty-three who for her own part is grinning with delight. She hates talk without work.
Last night the doorbell rang. It was very late, far past midnight, and I walked down and opened the door to see a finger on the front door step. I bent down to take a closer look. It was clean cut and dry, no blood or decomposition. I looked up.
The night was clear, a pale full moon and stars everywhere. The craters on the moon’s surface shone at me and directly below, not far from where Church Lane joins the park footpath, stood a hedge I had not seen before. It sparkled slightly with what I first thought was dew - ‘So dawn will be soon,’ I told myself, - but dawn felt a long way away. I went to look at the hedge.
It was stiff with frost crystallised on the web of a spider, reflecting the light, intricate and symmetrical. I stepped back a little to notice that the whole hedge was a maze of jewels and sugar phantoms, irridescent webs of differing shapes and sizes, studded by the corpses of insects. Some webs were big enough to trap small birds and these did not shine, tiny bones and remnants of feather pinched between the wire and the wood.
I realised that the roots and twigs of the hedge were held together by myriads of webs, that the hedge had not grown at all but had somehow been placed there, built piece by piece by the spiders.
At this point I saw them moving in their multitudes through, around, over, beneath the hedge, so many of them patterned and checkered, many dull, many bright. It was then I noticed a pale plump spider on a branch very close to my face, and I jumped back. I had forgotten the finger until that moment.
The spider gestured elegantly down at the foot of the hedge which was full of old cans and fast food cartons, bits of bicycle, sweet wrappers and cigarettes, broken toys and lost dolls. I wondered if the finger was part of a lost doll, but I touched it, and it was real enough, though hard and dead. The spider looked at me apologetically.
‘We cannot help it,’ The spider said, ‘We do as our fathers did. They built this hedge.’
I wanted to say, ‘What fathers? Weren’t they eaten by your mothers? And if they built this hedge, why isn’t it here in the day?’ But the main question was the finger.
‘You must leave me alone, all of you.’ I said, not knowing if I meant it. What I meant was, you are not to steal bits of me or mine. The spider didn’t say anything, but I could tell it was thinking of the finger and I held it out to him. He reached up and took it between his two front legs. I noticed light patterns etched under his skin, between the blonde hairs on his back and belly and legs. I didn’t know if he was beautiful or ugly.
‘I could show you all of the hedge,’ said the spider, climbing towards me in an abrupt, decided manner, ‘If you want. I could ride on your shoulder.’ Too close to my face, I thought, though his voice was gentle, noble almost. A prince among spiders.
So I stood there while the moon shone and my breath mingled with the rising mist through the air, over the hedge and the fields and all the night world held together by cobwebs, spider gilt in frost and shadow.
I agreed, because I could think of nothing else to do. And I felt guilty about the finger. The finger, yes. Someone’s hand might be in the hedge, being used for, for, used for what? Being eaten, it would be eaten of course. So I should do something.
The Spider sat and waited with great patience. I looked over at him and said, ‘I will come with you,’ his eyes brightened almost alarmingly, ‘In return for the finger,’ I added. He seemed to give a little shrug, and without a word, handed back the finger. Too easy and I panicked. He had really wanted the finger, but it was more important to him that I entered his world. He looked at me, and if he thought I was inconsistent, he never let it show. Polite to the last.
Then he was on my shoulder, and I fought the urge to gag, to throw up or scream. Too close, way too close, and he moved too quickly and bit my ear. It felt warm and thick and moist, a tongue with a barb at its end, no spider then, no spider at all, but it caught me well, the barb hooking for a second from the base to the lobe, and I could smell my own blood and another scent, which I know very well, when I am not dreaming.
I fell, and he fell with me, beside me, heavy on the grass like a body, a weight of my own size, heavier. Larger.
When I tried to stand, the glitter of his eyes, all his eyes, filled my horizons. Beside him the hollows of the hedge shone like great caverns and corridors leading inward, the labyrinth awake for me, playing music. I could not go to them, though. My head was turned towards him, now huge in bulk with eyes unreadable even yet, though the stiffness moving along my spine, the heaviness in my arms and legs, the clench of my fingers and jaw told the story.
‘You will see the kingdom,’ he told me, ‘But you cannot enter dressed like that. And you will not kick.’ And he set to spinning, as I knew he would, while I lay on my back like a tin soldier fallen out of its box, facing the moon, mapping those grey seas in my head, unable to turn right or left.
The cold melted through my limbs as he wrapped them. I wondered when I would begin to feel the dissolution within. Would it be painful, turning to liquid? Suppose he began to devour me before? Suppose my arms snapped off with the frost and the poison? But he wrapped my body tenderly in silk from the core of him, warm and smooth on my skin. I presumed it was unbreakable, but it didn’t matter. Strong or weak, I could not command a single fibre of the silk or of myself. How could I have mistaken him so?
The work was soon finished. He did not cover my face as I expected. Eyes faced forward, I could barely see him but I could feel his breath on my hair as he daubed my hair with frost or dew or whatever he had to hand. I might be food for his table, a corpse apparent, but I was dying in the hands of an artist. He stopped to gaze at me for a moment, the light refracted in his eyes. Even the warmth of the silk, the stillness of my muscles couldn’t spare me the fear or the desire to look further. Do the torches of the fay shine so wild and wise? He wanted someone to breathe on the mirrors, to examine the gleam behind them, the light in the brilliant mind of a spider. ‘I would do it, if you hadn’t tied my hands so!’ I wanted to tell him. But I couldn’t move, and in any case, we both knew I would never have noticed had I not been bound.
And then we entered the hedge.
OK, I like that. This next part is very flawed. It needs one of two things to make it work (discounting the need for even more editing which will just have to wait) It needs the continuing story to make sense of it, which, though I can feel in my head, takes me ages to write down, or it needs the reader to be referred to the life of the artist Richard Dadd, specifically his paintings 'The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke,' 'Come unto these yellow sands,' and 'A Bacchanalian Feast,' from which his quote is directly lifted.
E suum cuique dunc dictum
Transupra et ecre sinistrum
Simile similibus addendum
Daemoni date debendum mmm
And therefore he carries on chopping wood. He knows he couldn’t have really heard the bride. She will be mute by now, a raindrop under glass, helpless and transparent. Instead he looks to his duties, eighteen-forty-three splintering every log with a brutal kiss. He smiles at her spirit of industry. She hates talk without work.
Still, he can hear the mortal or feel her calling; Come unto these yellow sands, and take hands…he suppresses the shudder, and tells himself, No, that is something else, something past and to come, and eighteen-forty-three flashes a smile at him.
They know he misses the brilliance of the hedge in summer, so the halls are festooned with mothwing mosaics and rich patterned shells. His hosts care for him as best they can; they dress him well, though he never lets them replace his frock coat. They furnish him with folded pairs of mouse ears to warm his hands, and if the carcass of the giver blows stiff on a nearby noose, still they have done their best according to their nature. Music echoes through the rags and tapestries of Winter, for him, all for him, though he barely hears it. He is grateful for these diversions away from endless intricacies of cobweb, but of the effort involved he knows little and cares less. He brushes the dust from a lacewing and writes his name on the faded scales with his finger.
Richard?
For one inconceivable minute, he thinks he hears the voice of the spider’s bride, desperate and human, and then almost laughs at himself. It is only The Beloved. Only the Beloved.
‘You are thinking of that mortal,’ the voice has the barest inflexion of displeasure, but Richard, who knows better than to ignore it, rubs his hands through his hair and adapts his face to the smiles of a courtier and a lover. She is neither fooled nor appeased.
‘She took a fairy gift.’
‘She did not know,’ Richard looks at his love, her face smooth and round and white as a plate, extraordinary bosom tapering to impossible waist. The pleats of her skirt accentuate her hips and thighs, her legs billow out at the calves, swooping down to ankles far too delicate to carry all that voluptuousness above it. Curve and curve and curve again, squeeze in, squeeze out, in and out, and the scent of maythorn which no good woman brings in the house, no woman, no woman is like this, he thinks, I paint you with your moon face, your doll eyes, and I don’t think you even know yourself. But you know me and that is all that matters.
And the thorns rustle in excitement, for who does not know of the Spider and his bride and the banquet to follow? A mortal. Richard knows it even before they tell him, the story whistling through the hollows of their boughs. Time out of mind they have dipped their tips through the skin of the passing world, the wrists and fingers, paws and whiskers, wings and shells of wayfarers under leaf and over stone, they suck up the stories of others through sapless cores until the branches shine slick and maroon. Now the shadow leaves applaud in gratitude, a fit audience for the Prince of Spiders.
‘I do not understand why you are attending,’ Says Richard, almost timidly.
‘I do not understand why you care.’ The Beloved replies. ‘I thought you had done with the mortal realm.’ Beyond the langourous sea of her voice, beyond the yellow sands, wait dark pebbles in places where mortals keep their eyes.
‘You want to rescue her.’
‘No. Not at all. I was just…aware…just…I thought she called…’
‘You wouldn’t hear her call if you weren’t listening.’
The lantern howls grow wilder, tiny berries rocking with halloween laughter, the gleam of the night season. They too are waiting.
‘She did know.’ The Beloved sit herself down, preening. ‘As you did.’ She smooths her hair and looks at herself in her mirror, ignoring him. ‘Soothe her anger,’ he thinks, and he makes himself look to the regular slow twitch of her petticoats beneath her fingers, hating himself for calculating in such a clever way, such a mortal way, the moods of the Beloved. He lets himself feel aroused and ashamed, knowing that she will be pleased.
‘For me, no,’ As the blood begins to move, ‘But you asked for nothing more than my soul, which was yours from the first time I saw you.’ Richard feels her smile though she continues to survey herself in the mirror, and his confidence swells enough to return to his point. ‘He will devour her without a moment’s poetry.’
‘That I do not believe,’ replies the Beloved, ‘Nothing he does lacks poetry. He says he intends to marry her in the old style.’
‘Then at the very least she’ll lose her hands!’ Too quick, too sharp, his agitation so obvious she looks away from her reflection directly at him, but he cannot help himself.
‘If I lost my hands, would you keep me?’
‘You are an artist.’
‘As she may be.’ Deep breath. ‘You are going because you’re afraid of him.’ Blow thunder and ruin and storm, hurl me from this deadly silence. Seek nothing from her eyes or lips where the lightning strikes and holds.
‘Dost thou forget from what a torment I did free thee?’
‘No,’
‘Thou dost! And thinkst it much to tread the ooze of the salt deep,
To run upon the sharp wind of the North
To do me business in the veins of the earth when it is baked with frost –‘
‘I do not, my lady,’
‘Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot the foul witch Sycorax …who…who…hast thou forgot her?’
‘No, my lady,’ I am not the one forgetting, thinks Richard, these words were never yours, you can’t even recall where they came from, because you, my fair one, my queen, can create nothing, which is why you keep me here.
He is shaking, astonished at his own anger. She loves him and once rescued him from, from, and yes, he has forgotten if the truth be known, the long ago, the real and ghastly dream, an image now only to be conjured with pain, effort he makes for her sake. Eyes closed, I will try to remember he thinks, a reminder, a small punitive measure, she must feel so hurt, and the sooner it is out of the way the sooner we return to the banquet. So. Repentance. Trying to remember the study, his father’s chair, father, father, eighteen-forty-three trembles in his hand, cognac and cigars and macassar oil, father’s chair. Opening his eyes to recall the deep green brocade of the wallpaper, the clock, the room. Opening his eyes to see her standing in the doorway. Sylvia. Sylvia.
Sycorax.
Sylvia’s mother had been sister to Richard’s own, and it was thought that their children would make good nursery companions. Sylvia however, had other ideas, and Richard remembered them all when she strode into the room as she had done long ago, her underlip pushed out in a particularly repugnant fashion. It was as well for those around her that she was ugly. Her capacity for cruelty with the help of redeeming features would have been immeasurable.
Little Sycorax. It was father’s joke name for Sylvia. Richard didn’t really understand it until Mrs Macready made her pupils learn speeches from the Tempest. Richard didn’t comprehend the play at all, (Full fathoms five thy father lies…) but he knew it was about fairies, and that Sylvia would never be the beautiful princess waiting on the edge of the sea.
Oh yes, Sylvia was ugly. The adults talked about it, though they tried to keep it out of her hearing. Richard, aged eight, was all eyes and ears and he heard everything. The grown-ups felt sorry for her, they didn’t know what would become of her when she grew up. To him, she didn’t even have the grace to look like a proper witch. She was a goblin, with her pushed in nose and stuck out lips, her hairy arms and the sheer lumpen size of her. That size boded ill for Richard. Sylvia was his senior by three years, and had a ready taste for tyranny far from the eyes of their governess. What had started as a predilection for pinching and name-calling turned into full-blooded slaps and kicks the moment the two were alone together.
Sylvia’s pet game was ‘Queen.’ She would hold Richard’s head down to her feet and make him kiss them. Then she would play at being Queen of the Imaginary Land of Sylvania, and Richard would play servants, undesired admirers, evil-doers and other miscreants within and around her court. He was not the only citizen of the wretched principality. Sylvania’s population totalled three: himself, one permanently defecting cat, and the doll.
Sylvia had many dolls. Under ribbons and bonnets they stared out from various corners of the nursery, all smiles and pouts, excepting one, and she, why she, oh poor Richard! That doll did not have golden ringlets, or big blue eyes or china hands. It was made of painted wood, the face round and curiously flat with black hair that fell to its waist. Though the doll was white, it had an alien almost oriental look to it, all slanted eyes and tiny lips. Most memorable of all, it was a thing of exaggerated curves. The neck was too long for the moon-like head above it, the waist and ankles absurdly narrow. The bosom and bustle were so excessive Richard dared not even regard them. The doll looked like everything he knew Sylvia wanted to be and she held it close, as though some of its magic might rub off on her. Richard wanted to hold the doll himself, to feel it and smell it and talk to it. But he never got the chance.
In all the endless games of Queen, he poured tea and made speeches to Sylvia, playing out stories she invented about being kidnapped or courted, stories in which she was always beloved and always won. At first he resisted and told Sylvia she was stupid. He inevitably lost the fights that ensued, so he grew sly. He would address his speeches of love, desire, and repentance to the doll, glancing sidelong at her face while kissing the goblin girl’s shoes. The doll never showed that she understood, but they both knew.
The day came when Richard was alone in the nursery, Sylvania’s queen having been forced to re-work her sums by the governess. His heart was pounding as he approached the doll. When he picked her up, he almost fainted at her whiteness, so still and smooth. Her eyes did not move like some of Sylvia’s other dolls. They were just painted on. But their gaze felt real and full of intention and he did not dare look at them. His next act was beyond explanation to himself or to anyone else. He pushed her skirts up and found himself staring at the doll’s extraordinary skittle-pin legs and then, still avoiding her face, he started to pull her petticoat down.
‘You!’ At the door, puffing up red and purple stood poor Sylvia, ugly as a witch in a book. She had tears in her eyes. He dropped the doll and stammered something lost in her rage as she hurtled forward and brought him crashing down under a rain of blows and bites. He tried to put his arms up over his face, but she grabbed his hair and yanked so hard his head jabbed backwards and she spat full on him. His legs gave under them both and they fell to the nursery floor, books and dolls, teacups and toys scattering as he tried to kick her, tried to hit her, but Sylvia gave him such a punch across the jaw he heard a crack and felt his head grow light while noises approached from the other room. ‘I’ll tell them,’ her eyes filled with fury, a storm on the sea, ‘ I’ll tell your papa. I’ll tell your mother.’ And he knew that this would be a terrible thing, but the taste of salt was on his lips, and a new scent surrounded him like the woods in the park. And she was there, her deathly face and smile, standing so powerful where once the witch had stood, a white hand stretched out towards him.
‘You can come with me if you like.’
Her eyes dark, dark. She is a fairy, Richard, beware. Come Unto These Yellow Sands. But if you do, you will never come back. Never come back.
Scrambling towards her. Such a smile, such a scent flooding the room, washing away all the world, no Sylvia, no Sycorax, only her and suddenly their legs were entangled, and he kissed her like a man kisses a woman, like father kissed mother, like Sylvia had wanted to be kissed, they kissed and they kissed as the room span and Mother gasped and Father roared and tried to separate them. But by then the hedge had grown wild over their bones, and they were free.
***
Smiling in the eyes of the Beloved, Richard is ready, she understands, so perfect is her love, and the time has come for the banquet.
Each man then has his own unlucky fate both here and beyond - like must be added to like, and ones due paid to the appointed spirit.]
mmm.
Richard straightens his collar and grasps eighteen-forty-three who for her own part is grinning with delight. She hates talk without work.
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Still Excellent
Date: 2004-01-06 04:26 am (UTC)Re: Still Excellent
Date: 2004-01-07 02:46 am (UTC)There is a part III, but this is all very indulgent considering the amount of stuff I should be writing. Still, this draws my interest more than anything else right now.
See you very soon!