Heroes and Villains (15 page)

‘I thought you’d sleep late,’ she said.

‘Wrong again,’ he retorted. ‘I was tormented by the nightmare. I habitually sweat beneath her till day-break, no matter what.’

‘What do you dream of?’

‘Fires and knives.’

‘I don’t dream at all,’ said Marianne truculently. ‘Or, if I do, I never remember them.’

‘Then aren’t you the lucky one. However, I daresay you’re lying.’

She moved uneasily under the absolute intensity of his gaze and at last admitted:

‘Well … when I was a little girl, I used to dream about the Barbarians and that used to disturb me, but never to the point of sweating and moaning. At least, not often. And then it was never out of fear.’

‘Sometimes I dream I am an invention of the Professors; they project their fears outside on us so they won’t stay in the villages, infecting them, and so, you understand, they can try to live peacefully there. On the nights I have these dreams, I have been known to wake the entire camp with my screams.’

The dawn came into the room by two routes, flooding through the ceiling and edging more timorously through the window. They lay upon the narrow mattress and, involuntarily, by a compulsion that had nothing to do with reason, will or conscious desire, she found she moved closer and closer to him. He was a curiously shaped, attractive stone; he was an object which drew her. She examined the holes pierced in his ears to contain earrings. She had read such cool words in the books in her father’s study and looked there at line diagrams of segmented forms stuck with arrows tipped with frozen words in dead languages; she had heard her father’s gentle voice speaking of happenings between men and women that, in spite of her affection, she could not associate with happenings between the hairless old man and her mother’s ghost; now she lay far away from his white tower with a beautiful stranger beside her and he stark naked.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘I was thinking about my father.’

As if he absorbed all the atmosphere, she found it difficult to breathe. Nothing she had yet seen or suffered of him could prevent her insensibly moving still closer; a bird flew down through the roof and perched on a branch above a string of pearls. It fluttered its wings and let out a little rippling run of song. She was filled with astonishment that the room contained the world or the world had become only the room; she put her arms around him and caressed him. Her movement startled the bird, it flew away. Searching for her complementary zones, he pushed the overwhelming folds of his foster-mother’s nightdress up around her waist. She pulled the nightdress over her head and threw it away, so she could be still closer to him or, rather, to the magic source of attraction constituted by his brown flesh. And, if anything else but this existed, then she was sure it was not real.

‘She’s given you her best nightdress; she always told me to lay her out in that.’

If, the night before, his face had been a construct of paint and shadow, now it was entirely bone again and she got no messages whatsoever from his eyes. Perhaps he was trying to make friends with her or perhaps he was trying to learn her. There was no pain this time. The mysterious glide of planes of flesh within her bore no relation to anything she had
heard, read or experienced. She never expected such extreme intimations of pleasure or despair. If he was surprised at her response, he kept it to himself but when he withdrew he remained lying across her, covering her, still fixing her with this same, assessing regard as though he were trying to see the web of tissue and muscle behind her eyes, or even more of her interior than that. As they lay clasped together in this fashion, the door opened and Mrs Green came in carrying a dish in her hands. She placed this dish on the box where the bowl of water stood and bent to gather Jewel’s scattered clothing from the floor.

‘I’m glad you’re getting on so well,’ she said, glancing at them. Her voice was warm with contentment. Marianne was disconcerted and turned her flushed face into the furs but Jewel appeared unmoved. He shifted slowly away from her, accepted a handful of rings from his foster-mother and slid them on his fingers, one on each finger, two on some. It was full morning and the room had become a dazzling bubble of sunshine and air. Mrs Green pointed to the dish.

‘I brought you some breakfast,’ she said. ‘I thought that would be nice. It’s, you know, all right.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Marianne, puzzled, surfacing from the covers.

Mrs Green set her hands on her hips. Her soft, white face took on as inscrutable an expression as any Barbarian born.

‘He came padding downstairs early in the morning, unlike him, and he gave me a little bottle of stuff and told me to feed it to the happy couple as he called them, so they would have many children, see. He must have thought I was soft, dear. I fed some of the stuff to the brown bitch’s puppy and it ran round in circles till it dropped down dead.’

When she heard this, Marianne felt so cold she thought the sun had gone in and she crept back into Jewel’s arms but Mrs Green and he burst out laughing.

‘He’s losing his subtlety, poor old sod,’ said Jewel. ‘He’s getting old.’

‘I suppose he’d have said the girl poisoned you.’

‘I daresay.’

While Marianne stared from one to the other, trying to discover the reason for their amusement, Mrs Green bent down and ripped the furs off them.

‘Look at him, isn’t he a lovely boy? If I was thirty years younger …’

‘Forty years,’ said Jewel. ‘Don’t let’s exaggerate.’

He pushed Marianne to one side, threw his arms round the old woman’s neck, drew her down to him and kissed her, laughing. Marianne watched them, leaning on her elbow, colder than ever; then she saw an extraordinary pattern on Jewel’s back, flickering through the black river of his hair, a pattern of as many colours as
Viperus berus
in his cage in Donally’s room. At first she thought this must be the symptom of some extraordinary disease, no doubt connected with his fits of coughing, and reached out to touch it but Jewel was collecting the porridge bowl and pushed her away again. He scooped up a little of the thin, grey, viscous substance with his fingers and said to Marianne: ‘Look at me carefully and, if I swell up and die, don’t eat anything but go to Johnny directly and tell him to look after you.’

‘Don’t tease her.’

Jewel ate, did not die and passed the food to her. She did not want to eat, she put the bowl down on the floor beside her.

‘Give us my shirt,’ he said to Mrs Green. ‘I’d better be up since I’ve lived to see another day.’

On her way to the door, Mrs Green threw him his shirt.

‘Is she going to stay with me today or what’s she going to do; we’ll have to find something for her to do.’

‘She’ll do what she wants.’

Mrs Green nodded and went out; the closing of the door dislodged a fresh piece of roof into the room and every bird in the world sang outside.

‘Don’t put your shirt on, yet – turn round. No, lie down again. On your face.’

He raised his eyebrows but obeyed her. She parted the black curtains of his mane and drew her hands incredulously down the ornamented length of his back. He wore the figure of a man on the right side, a woman on the left and, tattooed the length of his spine, a tree with a snake curled round and round the trunk. This elaborate design was executed in blue, red, black and green. The woman offered the man a red apple and more red apples grew among green leaves at the top of the tree, spreading across his shoulders, and the black roots of the tree
twisted and ended at the top of his buttocks. The figures were both stiff and lifelike; Eve wore a perfidious smile. The lines of colour were etched with obsessive precision on the shining, close-pored skin which rose and fell with Jewel’s breathing, so it seemed the snake’s forked tongue darted in and out and the leaves on the tree moved in a small wind, an effect the designer must have foreseen and allowed for.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Jewel. ‘I understand that’s very impressive.’

He put on his shirt and covered up the grotesque disfigurement, which fascinated her. Even their wedding breakfast of poisoned porridge was less remarkable to her than this close undergarment of colour.

‘You can never take all your clothes off,’ she said. ‘Or be properly by yourself, with Adam and Eve there all the time.’

‘Out of sight is out of mind,’ said Jewel. ‘I’ve never seen it, it being on my back. He called it his masterpiece, he did it when I was fifteen.’

‘Was it very painful?’

‘He took a fortnight and I was delirious most of the time but the needles didn’t poison my blood because Mrs Green looked after them. Though green, in fact, is the worst, green hurts most of all. You’ll notice what a lot of green there is in the picture.’

He got up and put on his trousers. Then his boots. The concealing shirt. Then sorted necklaces from the heap on the rug. He was putting his daytime self together.

‘He wanted to do the Last Judgement on my chest, but I didn’t want nothing I could see all the time, did I.’

‘Is he very fond of the Bible?’

‘When pressed, he’ll talk about the poetic truth of the legend of the Fall of Man.’

‘Why did you let him mutilate you so?’

‘Do you see it as a mutilation?’ He was engaged in plaiting his hair.

‘It’s hideous. It’s unnatural.’ But she was lying again; the tattoo seemed to her a perilous and irresistible landscape, a terra incognita or the back of the moon.

‘From time to time, he makes me take off my shirt for him and he prowls round admiring me, saying: “Ha, hum, what genius I had then.” I think he’d like to flay me and hang me up on the wall, I think he’d really like that. He might even make me up into a ceremonial robe and
wear me on special occasions. He tattooed some little girl all over with tiger stripes, once, and said she’d be the Tiger Lady. But she died, it was a failure.’

‘Why did you allow him to attack you with his needles?’

‘I didn’t have much choice. I was only a kid.’

‘I do not like it here,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘I do not like it at all.’

She sat up straight, formal and prim, with her hands around her knees and the furs in a shawl around her shoulders. He looked at her with something like nostalgia, as if she were an old photograph.

‘Poor kid,’ he said. ‘And there I was, afraid of you.’

‘Please will you go away and leave me alone, now,’ she said for he had taken on in her eyes the ghastly attraction of the deformed and she needed time for introspection on this account.

He gave her his vilest, snarling grin, paused as in thought and then returned to where she lay. He kissed her breasts and mouth for several minutes and left her alone, after that, accompanied only by her newly-awakened, raging and unsatisfied desire, another indignity heaped upon her she vengefully added to the score.

Donally had written on his wall:
MEMORY IS DEATH
. Marianne studied this for a long time, while the wall itself shivered from a furious assault on the baroque organ behind it which was undergoing a toccata fit to bring the house down. She thought of asking Donally to tattoo this slogan across her forehead, where Jewel could see it all the time, or else to tattoo:
MEMORY
on one of her breasts and:
DEATH
on the other. But she soon thought better of this plan when she remembered that Jewel had never learned to read.

The tribe no longer protected itself against Marianne with signs, for marriage had secularized her. She was still a stranger and hence fearful but now she was specifically Jewel’s responsibility and evidently they trusted him to control her dubious magics, keeping them knotted in a bag, perhaps, under his pillow, for now the children were content to ignore her and she could come and go about the camp as she pleased, creating no ripples about her. When she asked for a pony, they gave her a little, black and white dappled one like a toy horse in a nursery, with a coarse white mane. Sometimes she rode around in the edges of the wood but went no farther. Time passed and Jewel watched her from the corners of his eyes but still she did not load up her pony and ride away for, as soon as she and the young man found out how to annihilate one another, she was unable to think of anything else for long. Courting her own extinction as well as his, she discovered extraordinary powers as soon as the dark removed the dangerous evidence of Jewel’s face. Then their bed became a cold, black, silent world and its sole inhabitants were denied all other senses but those of touch, taste and smell.

But once she woke before him and was surprised to see his face quite reduced to gentleness. His hands had fallen upon her breasts as soft as snow in the abandonment of sleep and then, with fascinated horror, she revived the memory that these same hands which, a few hours previously, had temporarily altered her to a river of fire, also, a few years previously, had irrevocably murdered the flesh of her flesh. Jewel’s face seemed to whirl about in the tense hollow of her shoulder, scatter and come together again in shapes of perfect fear; but he opened his eyes and suddenly she saw herself reflected twice, so quickly she turned her head away, before she could make out the expression she herself wore.

Another time, she woke in the middle of the night because a night-jar, come to perch on the tree in the room, whirred extremely loudly. It was the time of the month when there was no moon. She felt her eyes had been put out and, as she groped for Jewel’s hand to prove she was not there all by herself, she encountered, by accident, his face. She touched a promontory of bone very lightly padded with flesh, which must be his cheekbone. She moved the whorled tips of her fingers lightly across this ridge and found a fringe as of grass, presumably an eye hooded under an eyelid. But she had no sense of real eyes or a real face under her fingers. All seemed a small landscape from which she received only the most abstract information and she soon identified this landscape with the blasted heart of the old city; this puzzled her a little but she refused to think about it for long.

Again, accidentally, afterwards, some other night, moving uneasily, she touched his face and found it was wet with tears. But he stayed still, sleeping or pretending to sleep, and she instantly repressed her curiosity.