Lucia's Masks Read online

  Like Candace, I am concerned that Bird Girl’s relationship with Lola is becoming unhealthy. She hardly ever leaves the old woman’s bedside. Bird Girl’s complexion has lost its natural colour and she eats as sparingly these days as does the old lady. Whenever I go into their room to offer to sit with Lola in her stead, Bird Girl looks startled as if I have just roused her from a heavy dream. She always refuses my offer of help. I sense she is anxious for me to go so that she can be alone with Lola and her own thoughts.

  I am perplexed and distressed too, at how Bird Girl and the Outpacer seem now deliberately to avoid each other. Whenever she does come down the stairs, either to get food or go outside to the privy, they do not speak to each other, not even to extend the barest greeting. If by chance the Outpacer happens to be sleeping when she comes down, she sends little furtive looks his way.

  I am sure something has happened to make them uncomfortable with one another, but have no idea what it might be. I believe the Outpacer takes the fulfillment of his penance too gravely to have made sexual advances to her. And surely she would tell me if he had done so?

  Chapter Eight

  Bird Girl Spies a Rat

  BIRD GIRL WAS AT ONCE ASTONISHED and thrilled when she glimpsed the Outpacer’s naked face in those few seconds his hood slipped to his shoulders. She felt a burst of heat between her legs as well. There was no point denying he had that effect on her. She could think of more vulgar terms for describing his power, but in her new life as wanderer she was trying to eschew vulgarity. She liked the word “eschew.” It sounded like an intellectual sneeze.

  She recognized his face from the sky-screens right away: those thick, black, pointed eyebrows, and the lean, chiselled face that declared “I am a beautiful predator.” He was gorgeous, without doubt. The old girl was right enough: a boo-ti-full man indeed.

  Somehow his wicked magnetism had emanated right off the sky-screens. How did he do it? Was it his smile, so sensually inviting, and the gleaming eyeteeth just pointed enough to make your flesh quiver? Or the dark-blue eyes with their virtually hypnotic power? When Bird Girl’s mother taught her the litany of all that’s wrong with the male of the species, the Outpacer’s type was high on the list. Born seducer. Cunning corrupter.

  Barefaced, he had certainly succeeded in arousing poor old Lola on her brass bed, with her dollops of rouge the colour of canned tomatoes, black-ringed eyes and red slash of a mouth. A totally botched attempt to make herself attractive. Or was it a fright mask the old lady had intended, to scare off death? But what of the gauzy blouse that revealed her withered tits? In fact, Bird Girl was grateful that Lola had exposed her two sorry old dugs because a ludicrous fear had seized her when she first saw the old lady wailing on the bed. There was a moment when she really was afraid this person might be her mother, her flesh fallen away and prematurely aged as a result of some evil injection concocted by one of The New Amazons’ countless enemies.

  But logic prevailed and quieted Bird Girl’s spinning brain. Epona had only one breast and this ancient woman had two. So relieved was Bird Girl that she kissed the old lady tenderly on the brow. “Lola,” she heard the old woman whisper. “My name is Lola.

  “I like the look of you, little chick,” Lola confided. “You’ll stay a while, won’t you?”

  Bird Girl was willing. How long had it been since anyone had extended her such spontaneous trust? The old woman needed company and a ready ear, and these were things Bird Girl was able to give.

  Besides, the old lady’s warnings made her laugh.

  “You’re a pretty one, little chick. Don’t fall for a rogue.

  “Always carry a rubber, little chick.” How many centuries had it been, Bird Girl wondered, since people called condoms rubbers? And were they really made of rubber in Lola’s day? Bird Girl knew Lola was right, of course, despite her antiquated vocabulary. Forsake the condom and embrace death.

  Well before her decision to leave the City, Bird Girl had begun to question whether satisfying the sexual urge was worth the risk. There were more STDs around these days than she could count on her fingers and toes. Her admittedly scattered book learning confirmed her suspicion that sexual intercourse had always been one of the most dangerous human pursuits. In the eighteenth century, they had cures for syphilis and gonorrhea that were every bit as bad as the disease. Sip on a little mercury, my dears, and you’ll get rid of those nasty chancres. Never mind that you’ll destroy your brain and lungs in the process.

  Was it ever safe to fuck without protection? And if there was such a time, was it paradise? Bird Girl often wondered if she had indulged in sex far too young, driven as much by the need to escape Epona’s puritanical grip as by physical desire and curiosity. But no matter how frequently she did it, her sexual experiments always fell far short of her expectations. She often felt an excited pleasure, yes, and much less often had orgasms that totally engulfed her. A glut, a feast, a spiced drink from a jewelled goblet. And then? — A complete evaporation of the least remembered residue of the spice, the feast, the glut. Gone, and worse than gone. She was sometimes left with a taste on her tongue so bitter, she wanted to spit. And not because of self-disgust. Just massive disappointment.

  Over her years as a sex trader, she had had plenty of opportunities to analyze what it was she did want from the carnal act. She wanted to bed someone, do the full physical, sensual gamut, including all the panting and stickiness, and rise up transfigured. She wanted to stand up and feel herself remade, as if in the act of bedding she had grown wings. She could almost see them, although admittedly her idea of wings was all based on images from books. She had never seen an actual bird in flight, or a real live bird of any kind. Nor did she imagine wings like angels’, for as she understood it, angels had no sex organs. She found this idea disconcerting.

  Her wings would be wide and weightless, with a proper fretwork of bones that glided together like a folded fan when at rest. They would be tinged the flawless blue of the sky in a healthy world, a blue she glimpsed one morning when she was harvesting potatoes with the Diggers.

  And hadn’t that dream of a transcendent winged love at least partly inspired her Bird Girl name? This silly, fluffy appellation was far more than just a ploy to put potential predators off their guard. The name was born of a genuine deep-down wish: to rush out through the letter “o” in “love” like a full-throated songbird on its way to paradise.

  “Call me Bird Girl,” she had told her new companions of the forest. She always felt a bit guilty about using such a derivative opening. But who would know these days, even as “Call me Bird Girl” spills off her lips, that she had thieved the basic phrase from poor old suffering Herman Melville? Who now has the stamina to read right through a book of more than six hundred pages about a mad man’s obsession with a white whale?

  She did. And the reading did not require patience. Only time. The kind of time that had a proper weight, or gravitas. Time with a stretch through space that allows for transformation. So that you look out through eyes other than your own. They used to call this astounding process “imagination” — yet another human gift, as far as she could see, that had got buried in the City’s general slag-heap.

  She told the others she left the City to look for her mother. In fact, Bird Girl honestly believes she is far more likely to find Epona if she does not deliberately seek her out. Her mother might just turn up, roaring into the forest one night on her bike with the whole gang in train. Then again, she might be dead.

  Her father, as she’d never tired of telling people, was a test tube. “Well, actually,” she would continue, with her practised ingénue smile, “he was the sperm inside a test tube that my mother and her cohorts stole from a eugenics laboratory. They decanted the semen carefully into a turkey baster . . . and so forth.” Here she would lower her eyelids delicately, “Out of my mother’s body I came.”

  My father was a test tube. She loves the subtle undertones in that statement. The phallic shape. The immaculate hygiene. The cool
ly clinical use of the male seed. But most of all, the wonderful naïvety of it. My father was a test tube. Spoken with a lisp, this was classic Bird Girl stuff. Poor, twittering little fool, people thought.

  Yes, Bird Girl was one of her best guises ever. This cute little persona had helped get her out of a lot of scrapes. In the City, it seemed every second person was either a pimp or a sexual predator, men and women both. And there she was, looking on good days as if she was about twelve and a half. Fluffy cap of white-blond hair, rosebud lips, button nose, big blue eyes (fortunately not the least bit protuberant), small-boned body. She knew she looked new-hatched and crushable. She reinforced this image with vapid Bird Girl chatter. Adorable, feather-brained Bird Girl.

  So that in her danger-filled City days they were all unprepared — the lust-filled older men with their horny wandering hands; the younger ones who smiled from behind hooded lids, their eye beams probing through to her nakedness (they might want her for themselves, or they might be pimping, or both) and worst, the white slavers — when she kneed them sharply in their nasty nuts, or delivered a wicked karate chop that left them groaning. Or gouged out their eyeballs with her thumbs. She had been forced to do that once and it made for a nasty sight. There’d been no pleasure in it. She cannot at all comprehend the pull of sadism for some people. But if her life depended on it (and what is rape, after all, but a living murder?) she would blind the buggers if she had to.

  She still worried he would come after her — the man whose eye she’d removed. His name was Grimoire and he was a totally disgusting human being: one of the most sadistic minions ever to work for the sex slavers, who in turn worked for the EYE. So she’d felt no remorse at all for what she’d done. If she hadn’t half-blinded him, he would have raped her, then chained her to a wall until she was submissive enough to be shipped off into bondage, heaven only knows where.

  She heard he’d had the empty socket implanted with a carnelian — a white stone with red-orange streaks — and that he apparently relished the fact it made him look more sinister and of course unforgettable. But Bird Girl didn’t buy this. He must hate her for what she had done and want to kill her — probably slowly, by infinitesimal degrees. And so she was always on guard, maintaining the mental and physical exercises that would keep her fighting acumen sharp.

  It was her mother and her gang who taught Bird Girl these skills and imbued her with a certain ruthlessness. Give no succour. She could parrot this by the time she was four, and understood well enough what it meant. At that age, she would always watch from an upper window of the warehouse whenever The New Amazons set off on one of their raids, so that she could send them her best secret wishes. What she saw from her lookout was a phalanx of superbly fit women, straddling their motorbikes with a graceful confidence. Their proud backs bore the decal of the archetypal Amazon, holding her spear aloft. As they gunned the engines and proceeded up the alley-way, Bird Girl would focus hungrily on her mother’s profile. The artificial lemony light from the window briefly illuminated Epona’s shingled hair, and brushed over her broad, flat cheekbones, the hook of her strong nose. The way the light fell made a kind of cross on her mother’s face, so that it looked as if she was wearing a visor.

  As a child, whenever she heard the roar of their bikes in the distance, she thought her god-like mother and her cohorts were making thunder. They unfurled their invisible banners. They wielded their invisible swords. In reality, The New Amazons exacted vengeance with the slimmest stilettos and honed razor blades. They always left their mark, which was one reason they were so feared. Because pimps, child torturers, pornographers, and wife beaters are often physically vain men. They do not like the idea of having their precious skin slashed by several muscular and militant lesbians. They do not want to be stripped naked in front of twenty jeering women. Or have their noses slit.

  Bird Girl’s mother and her gang were legendary in the city. The most evil of men — even those with their own small armies — instinctively clutched their crotches when anyone mentioned The New Amazons.

  It still hurt Bird Girl terribly that she and her mother had become so estranged. She tried to tell herself that perhaps it was inevitable. Her mother, after all, had no way of knowing all the traits that lay waiting in the semen she stole, other than a likely brilliant brain and basic good looks. She had not minded her daughter’s smallness or her fine bones. But other qualities emerged she could not bear.

  Epona was no fool. She knew that raising her daughter in a militant lesbian community was no guarantee for her child’s ultimate sexuality. There was a world outside the warehouse that was their communal home and Armoury, and that world was sodden with sex of the hetero variety. In raising her daughter, Epona was therefore up against all the visible and invisible propaganda this new Dark Age could muster.

  From her pubescence on, Bird Girl’s mother kept the warnings coming thick and fast. Epona wanted desperately to keep her daughter in the fold, but it would have gone against her principles to confine her physically. So she turned on her own propaganda guns. And of all her mother’s moralizing missiles, Bird Girl still regarded “The House of the Rising Sun” folly as the pièce de résistance. Epona would get Laura-of-the-Gashed-Cheek to sing her the old song. Laura had a voice like dark velvet that has been rent with a pair of shears. Her rendition of the old ballad would send the ghost of that poor girl in the Louisiana brothel running up and down Bird Girl’s spine. As Laura sang, Bird Girl could see the girl from that old whore house evermore clearly. She had hair that covered her face like a veil, and her skin was flushed and a little damp from the New Orleans heat. Her breasts were little buds; her thighs were narrow and smooth as glass.

  “Ruin,” Epona would intone in the excruciating hush that followed on Laura’s last note. She would slice the air vertically with her forefinger, in a gesture suggesting both evisceration and doom.

  “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl,” Epona would growl, while Laura nodded her head solemnly.

  “She’s going back to wear that ball and chain.” At this point, Epona would do her own pantomime walk across the floor, dragging her left foot.

  “Ruin,” she repeated. “Doom. Disease. Slavery. An early death.”

  Such was her mother’s propaganda. Even early on, Bird Girl had judged it excessive. But as she grew older, and ventured more and more into the streets, she experienced exactly what her mother foretold: the compelling lure of corruption.

  “It may be something perverse written in our DNA,” her mother conjectured, “or the noxious fumes of that. ” Epona would jut her strong jaw toward the world outside the warehouse. What she meant was the thriving sex trade of the City. But there were times she could not bring herself to speak those words.

  “It is young girls’ foolishness,” her mother warned, “to think the fallen woman is romantic. To yearn to be corrupted. As if that was the road to bliss,” she snorted. Epona was a consummate snorter.

  Of course, Bird Girl had listened to her mother. She always listened to her mother. But not even her deepest, fiercest daughterly love and attention could hold off the fascination of the House of the Rising Sun and all it symbolized. The idea of that wicked, steaming brothel in New Orleans had conjured up an equally wicked and steaming lover in her pre-adolescent imagination. Snuff out the candles, draw back the crimson curtain that makes a canopy round the bed. The face that emerges from the carmine darkness, the hot breath that assaults your face and naked waiting body, is His — the one who will undo the hard knot of your virginity.

  Bird Girl had thought about Him constantly in terms she now realized were ludicrous, lurid and clichéd. He had the searing passion, and the bag of tricks (by which she meant superb technique) to induct her into a world whose delights defied description. Her blood would sing of wild horses and of the sea. She would be utterly ravished and become in consequence the most beautiful person on earth.

  This was the lure of the House Where Young Girls Are Ruined, and the magnetic pull of that
temptation was just too strong. Bird Girl had to test it out for herself. And so she made the symbolic break to start freeing herself from the Armoury. She dropped her virgin status at age thirteen, only too willingly. Her lover had seemed remarkably mature to her at the time. He was twenty and good-looking. He had the kind of hot, falsely worshipful eyes that stripped a girl slowly where she stood. It was a look, as Bird Girl was now well aware, that pumps a young girl’s self-esteem, and gives her an illusion of power she is sorely disabused of soon enough.

  As for sore . . . well, yes indeed she was. She was surprised how much it hurt. She had found precious little sensuous pleasure in the deed once her partner finished stroking and licking her and got down to the actual penetration. Despite plentiful lubricants and a smooth-as-silk condom, it burned terribly when he thrust inside her. At that moment, she seriously doubted the wisdom of her decision. More power to The New Amazons, she thought, if they were smart enough to avoid this kind of pain.

  Epona never found out about that first sexual liaison. But by that time, she was already in a fury about Bird Girl’s wardrobe. “You look like a cheap whore,” was the least vitriolic of her comments. What she meant was that her daughter’s skirts were too short. The New Amazons did not wear anything but slacks, made of durable cloth or leather. Epona scorned the very idea of skirts.

  “You’re pandering to their filthy desires dressed like that,” she warned her daughter. Bird Girl merely shrugged.

  The last time she saw her mother, Bird Girl had on a flimsy see-through dress the colour of mint julep. Later she burned the dress in a foolish attempt to destroy her memories of that day, particularly the vicious things she had said. Those unconscionable words had precipitated the end between them as surely as if she had fired a bullet into Epona’s remaining breast. She would never forget the look on her mother’s face, gone granite-hard with hatred. Epona did not speak; only pointed to the Armoury door, which she then barred. When Bird Girl tried to return she found they had not only changed the locks, but also the password. Not one among The New Amazons would open up and let her in.