Heroes and Villains (20 page)

Either from pride or spite, Precious had not yet lost consciousness.

‘Then whose fault is it, you bastard?’ he said.

With his last remaining strength, he spat in Jewel’s face, staggered
from his embrace and tumbled down in a faint. Jewel stood dazed and vacant, running with sweat, while Mrs Green came with water and cloths to attend to Precious. She conspicuously ignored her eldest, who put his hand against the tree, to support himself, and then clutched the trunk quite insanely, almost with desire; Marianne would have liked to touch him but, on the other hand, he disgusted her. Murmuring, the crowd dispersed for justice had been done upon the honey thief and there was no more entertainment that night. Donally began to sort through a basketful of green herbs and whistle a mathematical baroque tune. The light was so thick and delicious looking it could have been eaten with a spoon for the evening was as unnaturally warm and sweet as fresh jam.

Unnoticed, Marianne wandered away through the barrier of carts drawn up in a defensive circle. The horses grazed peacefully and did not look up as she passed. Her shoes were so worn they were as good as useless so she took them off and threw them away; the cool grass curled round her feet like loving tongues as she wandered downhill, through a tangle of weeds mixed with wild grains, until the encampment was only the marks of fires in the sky and she was alone. She found a thicket of hazels and, beyond it, a stream choked with reeds.

She sat on the bank and paddled her hand in the standing water. The setting sun beamed red darts through the brown stems of hazel and dyed the still stream with henna. The hazels were covered with nuts. She listened to the soft plop of water through her fingers. She was moist with sweat and had scarcely taken off her clothes for weeks, had slept, walked, ridden, attended a burial, killed a man/not-man and gone to a public execution of justice in the same shirt and trousers; it was a wonder she was not yet overwhelmed with lice, though she often trapped a flea. She put her burning cheek flat down against the cool face of the water and, when she raised her head, the half-witted boy was squatting on the bank beside her, as if they had made a secret assignation for this place but had forgotten to mention it to one another. Some trick of the amber light turned his bare shoulders a healthier colour than usual. He picked his nose with the finger that wore Jewel’s ruby ring, if it were a real ruby and not glass. She saw the mark of his collar round his neck.

‘Why does your father keep you chained up so much?’ she asked him.

‘He’s afraid of me because I have better fits than he does,’ said the boy. ‘Watch me.’

He rolled his eyes, foamed at the mouth and threshed about on the grass so vigorously she was afraid he would hurt himself.

‘Stop it,’ she said firmly. He shuddered to a standstill and fixed her with white, astonished eyes. His foam-flecked tongue lolled over his pale, cracked, swollen lips.

‘Of course, you’re Jewel’s woman, aren’t you,’ he said as though this explained everything.

‘I’m his wife,’ she said.

‘Same thing.’

‘No, it isn’t. There’s no choice in being a wife. It is entirely out of one’s hands.’

He wagged his dirty brown head; he did not understand her.

‘It’s the same thing,’ he insisted.

‘No.’

‘’Tis.’

‘No.’

‘’Tis! ’Tis! ’Tis!’ Again he rolled over and over shouting ‘’Tis!’ in a cracked, imperious voice until Marianne said firmly: ‘You’re making a fool of yourself.’

He started up, gazing at her with something like wonder because she stopped him.

‘What do you mean?’

He was panting. The serpents on his breast writhed in and out and curled round the old bruises on his ribs. He raised his hands and hid behind them, squinting through his fingers at her; his movements were sinuous but erratic, if he had known how to be graceful it would have been delightful to watch him. He rocked back and forth on his heels until, without the shadow of a warning, he jumped on her. He was weightless as a hollow-boned bird or an insect that carries its structure on its outside without a cargo within. She could have pushed him away maybe with one finger, even have thrown him into the stream had she wished to defend herself but she realized this was the first opportunity
she had had to betray her husband and instantly she took advantage of it.

The gaunt, crazy, shameless child rolled her among the roots for a while as he probed underneath her clothes with fingers amazingly long and delicate but, it would seem, moved more by curiosity than desire and she wondered if he were too young to do it so she unbuttoned her shirt and rubbed his wet mouth against her breasts for him. The tips of her breasts were so tender she whined under her breath and he became very excited. He began to mutter incomprehensible snatches of his father’s prayers and maxims and she roughly seized hold of him and crushed him inside her with her hand for she had not sufficient patience to rely on instinct. He made two or three huge thrusts and came with such a terrible cry it seemed the loss of his virginity caused him as much anguish or, at least, consternation as the loss of her own had done. He slid weakly out of her, shivering, but she retained him in her arms and kissed the tangles of his hair. She was unsatisfied but full of pleasure because she had done something irreparable, though she was not yet quite sure what it was. So they lay there for a while in the inexpressible stillness and sombre colours of evening. He touched her without sensible contact for his frail body gave out no warmth.

‘Did you know you’re in the family way,’ he said in a voice like a thread of glass.

She saw the ghost of a crescent moon floating in the coppery sky over a red down, between the hazel twigs. Donally’s child was never to be believed even when he stubbornly insisted:

‘Here, Jewel’s put a kid up you.’

He licked the swollen nipple of her right breast softly and laughed to himself. He had another question.

‘Does he do you often?’

‘I’ve never seen his face, in bed with him; perhaps it was never him at all, perhaps something else.’

Because of this, it occurred to her to raise his head so she could scrutinize his own face. It was soft and formless, a fat, drooping mouth and the huge, lost eyes of a child in a wood menaced by the nightingale. Now the sun was down, he was as white as if it ordinarily forbore to touch him. There was a long scratch down his cheek. He shook himself
free and lay down on top of her again. He ran his tongue along the downy groove between her breasts.

‘Does he know?’

‘Does he know what?’

‘That you’re going to have a baby.’

‘How do you know, yourself?’

‘I think you are,’ he said. ‘Am I your friend?’

A wind shifted the reeds and he shivered again. He quite forgot the question he had just asked her and remarked accusingly:

‘I’m cold.’

She was caught in a storm of warmth of heart; she wanted to fold him into her, where it was warm and nobody could harm him, poor, lucid, mindless child of chaos now sucking her as if he expected to find milk. She stroked his scarred sides and thought: ‘Is he right, am I pregnant? I might be, I never thought about it, not till the last night in the old house, I never bothered to watch for the signs.’ These signs were cessation of menstruation; morning sickness; indigestion; constipation. She laughed, because all these things seemed so undignified and he raised those huge, wondering eyes of palest grey. She was suddenly unnerved for these eyes might not reflect a lack of mind at all but an intelligence which, though extreme, ran along a parallel course which did not abut on her own and, maybe, on nobody else’s.

‘Go away, now, and leave me alone.’

He nodded obediently and stood up.

‘Here, you silly –’

She sat upright and fastened his ragged trousers for him. He curled his fingers in her short hair and sang a phrase from one of his father’s tunes. As if answering him, a bird trilled out from a neighbouring tree; perhaps it was a nightingale for the Doctor’s son stopped singing at once, aghast.

‘But what name will you give it?’

‘Give what?’

‘Jewel’s kid.’

‘Modo or Mahu,’ she improvised.

‘You can’t catch me,’ he said. ‘You’re joking. You don’t believe me, do you?’

In the perfect innocence of his lambent regard, she experienced utter conviction and, with it, a desolating sorrow. Half unconsciously, she drew her shirt over her breasts again in order to hide them from him.

‘I do believe you,’ she said.

He scratched an insect bite on his upper arm, gave her a slack smile which showed he had decided to become an idiot again and slipped away through the thicket like a pale fish. Marianne lay down on the grass, aching with sorrow. After a while, she took off her clothes and immersed herself in the stream. There was an unexpectedly strong tug of current; she half wanted to let it take her away with it, down to a river, down the wide river perhaps to arrive, drowned and dead, long before the tribe at the unknown sea. But instead she washed herself carefully again and again, sluicing the cold water between her thighs to wash away every trace of the boy’s casual visitation until the light began to fade and the water turn black. She dried herself on her clothes and put them on again. They stuck to her wetly and she was chilled through, though the evening was still warm.

The brothers had eaten and now lounged around their private fire. Johnny was cleaning a rifle, as if trapped in a vignette of Barbarian life, and Precious was nowhere to be seen, probably sleeping in a tent. Mrs Green sat on an upturned bucket with the child Jen wedged between her knees, going through her hair with a fine comb. Jewel lay on his face and Marianne was all at once convinced he was dead and she had helped to kill him, that his heart had stopped at perhaps the precise moment when the boy had launched himself on to her belly. Jewel was a dead pile of rags, bone and hair and she flung herself down beside him in a state of the wildest confusion, for the idea that he was dead was all at once unbearable.

‘Wherever have you been, dear?’ asked Mrs Green, trapping a flea and crushing it between the nails of her forefinger and thumb. ‘Hush up,’ she admonished Jen, who was squealing to have her hair tugged so.

Marianne could make no answer because she was so sure Jewel was dead.

‘She’s been sending signals to the Professors,’ suggested Johnny, briefly levelling the rifle at her and showing his teeth.

‘She’s been bewitching the horses,’ said Bendigo. It was a perilous kind of joking. At any moment, they might turn against her.

‘Don’t go on at her, poor thing, she looks worn out.’

Jewel’s hand of ravisher, murderer and grave-digger acquired a form of life and grasped her elbow. She could have wept with relief but found she had temporarily forgotten how to cry.

‘She’s been swimming, she’s all wet. Here, why are you so wet?’

‘I fell into a stream.’

He was also washed clean. She saw his face in the transfiguring firelight and felt a sharp, extreme, prolonged pain as though the lines of his forehead, nose and jaw were being traced upon her flesh with the point of a knife.

‘Are you ill?’

She shook her head.

‘Want something to eat?’

She shook her head.

‘Best get you some dry clothes, then, or you’ll catch your death.’

She crawled against his side and lay there.

‘She’s showing you affection!’ exclaimed Bendigo derisively.

‘She’s like a little rag doll, she’s all limp,’ said Jewel curiously. He picked up her arm and dropped it; she allowed her arm to fall uselessly on the ground. He said to her softly: ‘What’s the matter, love, what’s the matter with you?’

‘You’ve given me an endearment,’ she said. ‘Why did you give me an endearment, what have I done wrong?’

She tried to climb into his jacket and vanish. Mrs Green slapped Jen’s bottom.

‘You run along, our Jen. I’ll just go and see to the Professor girl –’

‘No,’ said Jewel. ‘I’ll look after her. She’s in a funny mood.’

She tagged along behind him, vacantly biting her fingernails. He took her to the cart where their possessions were packed, scared away a clutch of children who were playing hide and seek among the boxes and bundles and found her a blanket. He undressed her, wrapped her up in the rug, sat her on the tailboard of the cart and seated himself beside her, as if waiting for her to explain. There was still enough light for her to see the close, smooth texture of the skin beneath his
necklace and she ducked forward and kissed the base of his throat again and again, small, sipping kisses as if she were trying to drink him down.

‘What do you want?’

‘I went for a walk and I met the boy.’

‘What, the half-wit? Did he go through you, then?’

She nodded and continued to kiss the hollow of his throat. He laughed, perhaps with genuine amusement.

‘Well, what happened, did he get you worked up and then couldn’t finish you off, is that it? Is that why you start making up to me with such unexpected affection, is that it?’

He continued to laugh in a way that made her wonder if he were not perhaps within a hair’s breadth of killing her; she shook her head.

‘What is it, then, did he hurt you?’

She shook her head again. He sighed and remarked casually: ‘I’ll say this for you, you aren’t half good at getting yourself raped.’

She hit his face and he immediately struck her such a violent blow on the side of the head that she fell to the ground and lay there, half-stunned.

‘You ever hit me again and I’ll beat you to a bloody pulp,’ he said pleasantly, took out his knife and began to pare his fingernails.

When she got her breath back, she said: ‘I hate you. Next time you hit me, I’ll take your knife and stab you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said; since he was right, she crept back to his feet, ashamed.

‘He says I’m pregnant.’ The dark shapes of the carts and the gleams of firelight reeled about her and the sky with its first few stars now swung over and now under her. She caught hold of his hand and covered it with helpless kisses, bruising her lips against the rings.