Lucia's Masks Page 26

  He is staggered when she tells him of her erotic encounter with the plague doctor. He experiences as well, another emotion he cannot quite define. It resembles, but is not quite, dismay. Under the curtain of chaste moonlight, he moves closer to her on his hands and knees. He wants to comfort her, to tell her how negligible her perceived fault is. But he understands how huge she feels her disgrace to be, and he will not belittle her judgement on herself, however disproportionately harsh it may seem to him.

  “I did not love him,” she says. “Without love, it would have been a soiled and brutish act.”

  She buries her face in her hands. He draws her head toward his naked chest where his wounds are deepest. He strokes her hair. He is surprised when she lifts her face and touches her lips to his.

  “Repentire,” she says. “Can you say this word to me? Can we say it to each other with our bodies?”

  For a moment, he is uncertain of her meaning.

  “And is there love here?” he asks her. “Are you sure of this?”

  “Yes.”

  They come together more slowly and quietly than he has ever joined with a woman before. It strikes him that their lovemaking has some chaste quality in common with the moonlight.

  As they make their way together in silence back to the camp-fire, he thinks: I am transformed. And not just because she has removed the nail from my breast and unburdened my thought. I am, he recognizes in astonishment, a man who dwells in love. I had not known before that love is a dwelling-place.

  At daybreak, he forges ahead to break trail. He feels he is moving through some new element; that there is a different quality to the light, purged of haze, absolutely crystalline. What cinematic image would he use, he wonders, to convey this unaccustomed brightness in his blood and brain? The swift realization comes that it would be a close-up of Lucia’s hands, loosening and then braiding her long hair, strand over strand. He recalls ancient tales about the strength of maidens’ hair; how it could secure a ship to its anchor, or save a man from drowning.

  As he forces his way through a dense wall of evergreen shrub, he sees a sight to gladden the heart of any pilgrim. Set on the plain below a range of mauve hills, seven tents of silk tremble in their confines and drink down the colours of the rising sun. He rubs his eyes. When he looks again, they are still there: the burnished tents of dawn that affirm he has been shriven.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bird Girl Sees Eros at Work

  WHEN BIRD GIRL FIRST GLIMPSES THE line of tents, she stops and stares in disbelief. They look sublime, like solidified tongues of flame that burn, yet do no harm. The great ball of rising sun stains their flimsy cloth in colours that Lola loved: the apricot, persimmon, plum, and burgundy of the sheaths and strapless gowns she had put on to inflame her many lovers.

  Passionate, yoni-obsessed Lola would have clapped her hands in delight at the sight of this dazzling array of delta shapes. She would have made some suggestive remark about thrusting points and vaginas, then wriggled her skinny hips and let loose one of her raucous laughs. Candace would have plugged her ears. Bird Girl misses Lola keenly. She misses her sense of fun and life force, and the way she got up Candace’s nose. Lola loved the richly spiced drink of her memories. She loved to laugh. She loved Bird Girl. Bird Girl found herself wishing Lola hadn’t. The fact is she feels unworthy of the enormous gift Lola made her. She sucked the poison into herself to give me back my life. Bird Girl reminds herself of this several times a day.

  In the first days of her convalescence, Lola’s death put such blackness inside Bird Girl that she could no longer see things in their rightful wholeness. The entire world looked dull and flat to her, even the faces and bodies of her travelling companions, and most certainly her own body. She felt that her powers to renew herself had all drained away through the gaping hole in her breast. The wound throbbed and pulled and made her set her teeth together. Hot pincers gripped her nerves, not just where the hole was, but throughout her chest and arms. Lucia tended her with balms and kindness. Bird Girl tried to tell Lucia her grief, but could not find words equal to the deadening ache of Lola’s absence.

  “Try to accept her gift with grace,” Lucia told her.

  Later Bird Girl thought that if she had brought a book of poetry with her, she might have found some grace and comfort there, some fitting lines to recite for Lola as a tribute. She tried to call to mind poems that had given her great pleasure: works tight and sleek that nevertheless held immensities. But nothing came.

  All Bird Girl could hear was her mother’s voice on the afternoon of their final searing encounter. Every word Epona hurled at her that day was ugly: slut, tart, degenerate. And because Bird Girl felt so unworthy of what Lola had done for her, she started to believe her mother had been right. She was an ungrateful little whore. She was dirt. Hadn’t she called her mother “a maimed dyke?” When she remembered that, the wound in her breast pulled so hard, the tears ran down her face. Bird Girl’s mother had no left breast. It had been cut off to stop the cancer killing her. What an appallingly wicked thing to say to one’s mother, even if Epona had called her “a disgusting little tramp” and worse.

  It all happened the day her mother destroyed one of her most cherished books. She came home to find the ancient, treasured paperback in shreds on the floor of her room in the Armoury. When she saw what Epona had done (and she knew it could be no one else) she felt invaded, plundered and bereft. At first, she could not speak at all. It was as if, through the book’s destruction, her mother had robbed her of language altogether. If she had owned a pet and her mother had slit its belly open and dismembered it, Bird Girl did not think she could have hurt her more.

  As Epona saw it, she was saving her daughter from infection. She was helping Bird Girl to keep her heart and mind and body free of taint. Bird Girl was free to read all the “improving” texts she wanted. That meant works on the dialectics of sexuality and histories of ancient matriarchal civilizations. The Armoury also had a plenitude of manuals on bike mechanics, the arts of self-defence, and weaponry use and maintenance. What Epona absolutely forbade were works of the imagination. “You’ll rot your mind, my girl.” She meant that literally. Bird Girl’s mother had no patience with metaphors.

  Epona was wary of all forms of art. She saw them as trickery, a kind of despicable window dressing to obscure society’s multifarious evils. “Facts, my girl. We have to face up to and confront the facts.” She would aim her index finger at Bird Girl’s forehead. “You have to keep your brain-box clean. If you gum it up with this make-believe rubbish, you won’t stay sharp enough to survive. Don’t ever forget,” Epona would punch the air, a gesture aimed at the evil world outside the Armoury, “don’t ever forget what we’re up against.”

  She meant the “pestilential City” that was The New Amazons’ battleground, and the hydra-headed sex trade which was their particular target. As she grew older, Bird Girl gradually perceived how her mother’s rigid ideology had killed off her natural affections. Epona would never let herself succumb to the power of melody in music, or in the written word. And she seemed to have nullified in herself that urgent curiosity, which was for Bird Girl a driving force in reading stories. What happens next? How will the character you care most about get out of this terrible fix?

  Epona did not care, as Bird Girl knew to her cost, about unexpected plot twists or the suspense that can set the pulse racing — like the bone-chilling thrill when David Balfour mounts the stone stair in utter darkness in the spooky House of Shaws, sets down his foot, and discovers only a chill and windy void. In that instant, it dawns on the reader, as it does on David, that his clay-faced Uncle Ebenezer has sent him up this stair — not to bed — but to death. And with David, Bird Girl always groped her way down again “with a wonderful anger” in her heart that matched his own.

  He was Bird Girl’s first great literary love and the first character whose skin she slipped inside so perfectly, she was able to look at the world through his eyes. She too stared in
awe at the wild and treacherous Moor of Rannoch, and at the handsome face of Alan Breck, Highland Jacobite and inveterate gambler. She admired David’s self-possession and astute self-assessment, his honesty and articulate powers of description. She was jubilant as she ran with David and Alan through the heather, outwitting the Redcoats. She stood frozen, as did her cherished boy hero, when Alan urged him to leap over a thunderous river. “I bent low on my knees and flung myself forth,” David said, “with that kind of anger of despair that has sometimes stood me in stead of courage.”

  When she first read that passage, Bird Girl thought these were the wisest and most useful words she had ever come across. She memorized them. In fact, she could probably have recited the entire book she read it so often and so hungrily. She was happy there, in the thick of David’s adventures, as happy, she thought, as she had ever been in her life. It was Laura-ofthe-Gashed-Cheek who gave Bird Girl Kidnapped on her ninth birthday. Bird Girl saw that her mother was not too pleased, but she let her keep the book. Doubtless Epona had given the text a quick scan to make sure the content was salutary. What she saw was an old-fashioned children’s adventure story she judged to be harmless.

  But in the years to come, Epona would systematically censor or destroy books in her daughter’s possession she considered to be corrupting filth. In the beginning, Bird Girl did ardently try to appreciate her mother’s point of view. She gathered words she thought best described Epona’s character. She would hug this little collection of adjectives to herself in bed at night, trying to get closer to her mother. So she rhymed off to herself: sturdy, resolute, adamantine, unswerving, fearless, mettlesome, incorruptible. As she grew older, and the gulf between mother and daughter became evermore apparent, she added other, radically qualifying words to this list: rigid, unsubtle, unbending, philistine, puritanical.

  It was the unbending Puritan in Epona who wrenched Colette’s The Vagabond from under her daughter’s mattress, opened it, saw the words, “voluptuous body,” and deliberately cracked the book’s spine so that it broke in two halves. Epona then shredded the pages, spotted with age and smelling of damp, which had managed to endure more than ninety years in a world now absolutely hostile to books.

  Bird Girl still feels sick and furious whenever she thinks about this desecration. What her mother did that day was barbaric. Bird Girl had paid dearly for that little book with her own blood. That was the price demanded by the black marketeer who set up his street stall one day, and disappeared the next. He was a remarkably tall man, and as thin and straight as the stem of a wine glass. He wore a battered fedora pulled low on his brow. He had a sensual mouth and hands so huge and restless that at first she thought she might have to secure The Vagabond with some slickly delivered sexual favours. But he wanted blood.

  He had observed how keen she was. It was the only book on his table, cleverly camouflaged by a heap of gauzy scarves. So Bird Girl’s first glimpse of Colette’s powdered face, with those penetrating eyes blazing like lanterns, was through the filmy mesh of swathes of Prussian blue and magenta. She checked first to make sure there were no EYE officials hanging about, then picked the book up, riffled through its tender pages, and saw phrases that made her quiver with desire to possess this story whole. She knew at once that she would adore the heroine, Renée Néré, who chose to perform half-naked on the music hall stages of France rather than marry a wealthy man who adored her.

  She had to read more — right away. “Can I look at this behind your stall?” she asked.

  He frowned and rubbed his nose, before beckoning Bird Girl behind his display of jumbled oddments and tawdry treasures. She sat on an upturned wooden box, obscured by the open door of his van, reading greedily here and there of how Renée chafed at the idea of a rose-smothered domesticity. What Renée wanted above all was to be amongst “the wanderers, the lords of the earth.”

  It was at that moment that the idea of taking to the road first struck Bird Girl. In Renée Néré, she immediately recognized an alter ego. Renée was besotted with looking, and with possessing the marvels of the earth through her eyes: rippling fields of gold and crimson, the sapphire sea, the silvery wings of white owls. Bird Girl knew she would probably never see a white owl, except perhaps stuffed, in a glass case. Yet sitting behind that junk stall, her whole self seemed to quicken in answer to a ghostly call. She did not know why it had never struck her before that writing was what she wanted most to do herself. But the realization came in that instant, prompted by the probing eyes of Colette’s portrait on the book cover, and by her heroine’s urgent need to look so intently at the world. “Blood,” the stall man in the battered hat whispered to her. She could hear he was getting impatient. “Two vials for the book. If you’re clean.” This meant Bird Girl had to show him the encoded card the EYE made everyone carry, registering your blood type, genetic weaknesses, and viral load, if any.

  She produced her card and he studied it closely. What if his syringe was recycled? She wanted the book badly, but she didn’t want to risk death for it. She was lucky. He was well-equipped. From the back of his van he brought out a brand-new syringe in its sealed paper packet, straight from the manufacturer. The vials he removed from a leather case looked equally pristine. The blood business was apparently quite a productive sideline for him, but Bird Girl chose not to speculate about where hers might end up.

  “Good colour,” he said, as they both watched the dark-red fluid slide inside the tube. Bird Girl clenched her fist and thought of Renée Néré. When they were done, the stall keeper even offered her a clump of sterilized cotton to press against the puncture.

  He shook her hand at the conclusion of their transaction, which surprised her. “Enjoy it, kid,” he said. “These little bird books are precious few these days.”

  At first Bird Girl thought he had read the book himself and was referring to the passage about the twilit silvery owl. Then she saw he was tapping the little orange ellipse at the base of the book’s spine. Inside the ellipse was the outline of a white-bodied bird, with stumpy rigid black wings and webbed feet. Its tiny black-and-white head pointed upward and to the left, so that one got the impression it was regarding something quizzically, at a distance. A questioning, solid, assertive little bird, with its stiff wings and wide-planted feet.

  Bird Girl must have looked quizzical herself. “Penguin,” explained the stall-owner. “Penguin paperbacks. Used to be millions of them. Good literature affordable to the masses. Gone now, most of them. Burned. Ploughed under. Shredded. Doomed. Like the bird, when you think of it.”

  “What happened to the bird?” she asked.

  “Waddlers. Didn’t fly. Antarctica. Ice melted. Too hot. Expired.”

  She wondered then if he spoke in those terse, truncated phrases because English wasn’t his birth language. It struck her that perhaps his speech patterns had come to resemble the bric-a-brac on his table: a miscellany of objects, all of which could slip easily into a pocket.

  She never saw him again. But she often thought of his odd, eloquent elegy for book and bird.

  “Filthy self-indulgence,” was how Epona described The Vagabond, the day she found it hidden under Bird Girl’s mattress. Such a delicate little book to meet with such a destructive force. What a pathetic sight Bird Girl must have looked: on her knees, attempting to patch together countless fragments of old paper. As she saw it, her mother had mutilated a woman of warm and abundant charms, with an amazing gift for luscious imagery and astringent insights. In fact, Bird Girl regarded Renée as almost a sacred being, her personal Prometheus. She had put a fire in Bird Girl’s head that made her want to wander the world, and to write about what she saw. Rest in peace, Renée Néré, whispered Bird Girl, as she gave up the futile task. She sat on her floor, and cried so much a wet patch spread across her lap.

  She did not hear her mother come into the room; there was only her startled awareness of Epona’s sleek, high-polished black boots, the right foot tapping. When she was a child, the sight of that tapping foot
could turn her stomach. Bird Girl could not recall exactly when she had stopped fearing her mother’s anger. On the other hand, she could never entirely let go of the awe her mother inspired in her. But this time, not even awe could hold her back. Bird Girl sprang to her feet and let her fury speak.

  She hated having to remember the details. Sometimes when she pictured them facing each other — Epona with her shingled hair and body encased in black leather, her daughter in the mint julep see-through mini-dress with her zebra leggings — it seemed a pair of blind and questing primordial beings was speaking through them. Two of the ancient Titans perhaps, loose and restless in the universe and seeking a likely host, found it in the sore wound opened between the leader of The New Amazons and her only child.

  The words that came out of their mouths were coarse and brutal and cursed, as they were cursed by speaking them.

  “Trash,” Epona said, as she ground the tender fragments of The Vagabond with her boot heel. “Trash that inspires you to dress like a slut.”

  She touched Bird Girl in a way she never had before, with absolute contempt, her fingernail flicking up the hem of her daughter’s dress, and catching briefly on the close-knit fabric of her tights. Her mother might as well have spat in her face.

  And so it began: their final battle made of words: mutilating words that left a wreckage so total no forgiveness or atonement was possible.

  “Slut,” her mother called her, “Degenerate. Disgrace.”

  “Freak,” Bird Girl called her mother. “Heartless. Maimed dyke.”

  Such cruelty issued from their mouths, and who or what directed them? What abandoned tutelary spirit, maddened by long neglect? It was not that Bird Girl was trying to evade responsibility for the scurrilous words she consciously formed and spoke. Yet on that grim afternoon she and her mother had hardened into extremes of what they were, and all that lay between them was ripe for death.