Heroes and Villains (9 page)

The woman moved first one basket, then the other, to the side of a glum fire in a ruined fireplace which filled the room with a sour fog of smoke. There was no glass at all in these windows, only some rusting iron bars across them. Ghosts of clowns and rabbits in top hats were fading from the torn wallpaper; the room must have been a nursery at some former time. There were straw pallets, a metal pot and various items of clothing scattered over the floor.

‘Empty that!’ said Mrs Green sharply, pointing to a pail of excrement. She spoke too sharply; the woman muttered mutinously under her breath as she took the plashing pail outside on to the landing and pitched the contents over into the well of the hall. When she returned, she took two charms from the dozen or so upon her person and slipped them beneath the babies’ blankets.

‘The Doctor’s coming in later to say a prayer,’ she said. ‘But better to be safe than sorry.’

Mrs Green’s dress came down to her ankles. She held it up as she walked through the corridors since there was so much filth underfoot, ashes, pieces of fur, offal of beasts and so on. But the women made some sporadic attempts to keep the actual living quarters clean, though Marianne’s skin itched at the thought of vermin. The thin mattresses, stuffed with leaves, hay, straw or wool, must engender gigantic colonies of bugs; the flowing Barbarian coiffures, clogged at the roots with lice, now seemed wilfully perverse accessories and when she saw warrior garments hanging limply from nails hammered into the walls, she almost laughed to see the fragile shells of such poorly founded terror. The children suffered promiscuously from ringworm, skin diseases and weeping eye. Also rickets. She considered the possibility of deficiency diseases such as pellagra and beri-beri. When she thought of the noble savage in her father’s researches, her distaste was mixed with grief.

‘It’s all very different from what you’ve been accustomed to, dear,’ said Mrs Green, ducking beneath a washing-line in a corridor on which hung pieces of leather cured by a process utilizing dung of dog.

‘Yes,’ replied Marianne through pinched lips.

‘But then, you should see the way the Out People live, if living you call it. Huddled in holes in the ground, nursing their sores. They poison their arrows by dipping the heads in their sores, it’s well known.’

They visited every room in the fetid warren except the one where the Doctor lived, though, passing across his landing, Marianne was surprised to see a sign in red paint, written on the wall. This sign said:
BOREDOM IS THE HANDSOME SON OF PRIDE
. Since the Barbarians were illiterate, she supposed Donally must have scrawled it up exclusively for her own benefit. She very much wanted to visit Dr Donally but Mrs Green did not even suggest it. As the house filled with darkness, the hunters came home with the day’s meat.

They brought their catch into the kitchen. They slung carcass after carcass on to the table, where the stiff limbs stuck up straight into the air and the eyes glazed in the final stare of fear. The fire was lavishly stoked to give more light as the beasts were apportioned among the close kin groups and then skinning and butchering began. The brothers took the roles of sharers and dividers and the whole tribe seemed suddenly gathered in the room, quarrelling over the joints, demanding and protesting while the brothers roughly chopped the flesh with axes that first caught the firelight and flashed but soon grew dim and ruddy. The kitchen was transformed into an abattoir. Bones still curded with meat, antlers, tusks of pigs and rags of bloody pelts were cast to the ground in charnel heaps and the small children shrieked and danced around them in a frenzy of excitement.

The six brothers, all black as their common father, now grew red with the blood that dewed everything. All the eyes in every face around her reflected nothing and the faces themselves, deformed or leaden, blanched or ablaze, were riven by vile, twisted mouths from which issued harsh screeches or foul abuse, faces stained with blood or fire and then blotted out by shadow. Marianne’s bewildered senses reported only a whirling conflict of black and red. Then her senses themselves became so confused she seemed to smell the hot stench of red itself and hear the incomprehensible sound of black in the raised, tumultuous voices around her. Jewel, Johnny, Jacob, Bendigo, Blue and Precious. The weird litany of the brothers’ names repeated itself over and over again in her head. She did not know the name of the dead one and they seemed to have forgotten him already. They flung parcels of offal to the dogs. A dog raced away with a crimson set of lungs between its teeth, to consume them in the privacy of the privy. Marianne tried to creep
towards the open back door to escape into the silence and freshness of the night but Mrs Green saw her and trapped her firmly by the wrist and she had to wait until all was over, the food shared out, the crowd dispersed, the brothers sluicing themselves with water from the barrel and shaking themselves dry.

Mrs Green perched Marianne on a chair and left her there while she swilled down the floor. The brothers, half-naked, approached the fire, to warm themselves. They had the rolling walk of men more accustomed to horseback than solid ground. Two had abstract marks of blue tattooing on their cheeks, all had tattooing on their bodies, patterns of snakes, birds, suns and stars. One had a moustache and three others full beards. She could only count five and realized Jewel had vanished. She felt poorly protected.

The brothers eyed her circumspectly and she saw the youngest, Precious, furtively make the sign against the evil eye. Precious was brown, young and tender and she was sorry he was the most superstitious for he had pulled one of the malformed roses from the garden and stuck it behind his ear. They grouped about the fire, saying nothing. Trickles of bloody water ran down the room to Marianne’s feet; she tucked her feet beneath her as she balanced on the chair, one leg of which was broken.

Then that terrible howling she had heard before rose up outside, near at hand, an intense and anguished wail which swelled to an intolerable climax and died away again, foundering in hoarse sobs. Bendigo, or perhaps it was Blue, spat into the fire.

‘I wish Donally would come down and see to the kid,’ he said.

‘Is that a child crying?’ exclaimed Marianne, shocked into speech.

‘It’s the half-wit,’ said Precious indifferently. ‘It’s his kid, isn’t it. It’s the Doctor’s half-wit.’

‘The half-wit’s outside, see,’ said Mrs Green, now scouring the table with handfuls of grass. ‘He’s feeling it tonight, poor thing, the weather and all.’

The arc of wordless sound rose up once more, like a vile rainbow. Marianne sprang from the chair, darted past the congregation of brothers and looked out of the kitchen door.

Outside, it was still light enough to see a paved courtyard full of weeds, surrounded by tumble-down out-buildings. When she had seen
the boy of the forest chained to the wall in Donally’s room, she had thought he was a hallucination; now she saw him again, squatting on the paving stones at the end of his chain, which was fastened to a staple in the side of a shed. The boy rolled his eyes until they were all whites and howled at the darkening sky. Gnawed bones lay all round him. There was a dish of water before him and another, empty, marked ‘Dog’, in which he must receive his food. Rain splashed on his shoulders and down his thin chest, which showed a greenish pallor between the tattooings. He squatted, howled and then fell silent, picking at dirt between his toes. He was quite real.

‘He fouled his bedding, see,’ explained another brother mysteriously materialized beside her, watching so she did not go outside. ‘He fouled his bedding, he can’t live in with the Doctor, can he, not if he fouls his bedding. The Doctor is nothing if not fastidious.’

‘He’s got a constitution of iron, the half-wit,’ remarked another brother. On her other side, a brother so covered with hair she could only see his eyes. She glanced around; she was surrounded. She moved away from the door and they walked with her, so close she could smell them. They smelled of the grave. Mrs Green looked up anxiously from her cleaning. A bough fell in the fire; sparks spurted up.

The atmosphere in the devilish kitchen splintered and jagged. She tried to duck beneath a man’s arm to run to Mrs Green but he caught hold of her shoulders and Mrs Green did nothing except make a despairing gesture, although she had warned Jewel off Marianne before. Wild boys. Eyes like dead wood and grinning mouths equipped with the whitest teeth, everywhere Marianne looked she saw eyes like dead wood fixed on her face and cruel mouths. She glanced towards the inner door to ascertain perhaps another means of escape and there she saw the sixth, or the seventh, counting the one who was dead. He had entered silently and now leaned against the wall, almost hidden, watching also, cleaning his nails with the point of a knife and watching her.

‘Johnny …’ said Mrs Green in a sad, coaxing voice. ‘Jacob …’

Precious made the sign against the evil eye, again, but that was all. They stirred and rustled. They had laid aside their rifles but all were armed with knives and they appeared to hate her.

‘There are sick children in the house,’ offered Mrs Green pathetically,
as though this was sufficient reason to dissuade them from rape and possibly murder. Marianne saw Jewel throw back his head and laugh with apparently pure pleasure at the tone of this remark. As if his laughter were a signal, the three beside the fire began to move towards her and the man on her left, Johnny, or perhaps it was Jacob, deliberately put his hand beneath the opening of her embroidered shirt and felt her right breast. Firelight shadow monsters galloped along the walls. All gasped and came closer.

They directed her inexorably towards the table. Mrs Green wrung her hands and emitted small mews of distress but she, too, was ambivalent; she would be distressed but also perhaps obscurely satisfied at what would certainly take place. Marianne discovered she was not in the least frightened, only very angry indeed, and began to struggle and shout; at this the brothers laughed but did not cease to crowd in on her. So she closed her eyes and pretended she did not exist.

But this desperate device for self-protection proved unnecessary. Suddenly all laughter ceased and, silent, the men fell away from her. Mrs Green burst into screeches of relief and Marianne smelled a curiously sweet odour of lavender. She opened her eyes and saw the giant with the parti-coloured beard sitting on the edge of the table as if it were a throne, carrying one of the little lamps in his hand. The oil in this lamp smelled of lavender. The brothers had retreated to a corner in a cowed group.

‘They’re brave, grant them that,’ said the giant. ‘It’s a well-known fact that Professor women sprout sharp teeth in their private parts, to bite off the genitalia of young men.’

Jewel laughed once again, though nobody else did. He entered the circle of the Doctor’s light. His hair was now fastened into two stiff plaits and he looked very much like pictures of American Indians which Marianne had seen in her father’s books. In this context, his name was no more surprising than would have been Handsome Lake, Rain in the Face or He Who Puts Out and Kills. Like such Indians, his face revealed no emotion. Donally aimed a playful punch at his ribs.

‘And you, what would you have done had they fallen to it? Alleviated your boredom by applauding the spectacle?’

His voice was perfectly cultured, thin, high and soft. Presumably to
preserve his secrecy, he wore a pair of dark glasses with wire frames, one lens of which was cracked clean across. He had a thin, mean and cultured face. Marianne had grown up among such voices and faces. She said the first thing that came into her head.

‘Why don’t you take more care of your child?’

‘Because he has disgusting habits,’ replied the Doctor crisply. ‘He bites the hand that feeds and wallows in his own mire.’

She might have been at home, in her tower, discussing with visitors a dog that refused to be house-trained, except that speech revealed Donally filed his teeth to points. He extended his hand to her; it was a soft, white hand and the fingernails were carefully trimmed and manicured. After a moment, she extended her own hand and he shook it formally. He reached into an inner pocket beneath his handsome coat of gleaming black fur, took out a pigskin wallet and, from this, a card, which he offered her. It was a white visiting card on which was beautifully engraved, in Gothic script,
DR F. R. DONALLY, PH D.
After she read it, he took it back.

‘Marianne,’ he said warmly. He gestured round the room and company, smiling. ‘However, you must feel more like Miranda.’

‘You must have been a Professor of Literature, once,’ she said.

‘Well, here I am and here I stay,’ he replied pleasantly.

He seemed in a jovial mood and kept playfully touching the beautiful young man who stood beside him, now and then stroking his shoulders and head, attentions Jewel ignored. Marianne was almost relieved to encounter once again the kind of man with whom she was most familiar, and he seemed perfectly at home, sitting on the table waiting for his supper, even though they defined him as a shaman, or else he had decided so to define himself. She began to bite her fingernails; he clicked his tongue against his teeth.

‘Come, now, can’t have you with bitten fingernails, when you’re our little holy image, dear.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You heard him,’ said Jewel.

‘Our lady of the wilderness,’ amplified Donally with a delighted smile. ‘The virgin of the swamp.’

‘Just as well they didn’t rape me, then,’ she snapped.

‘Quite so,’ said Donally. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt. You’ll have to remain terrifying, you know; otherwise, what hope is there for you?’

Mrs Green was now preparing the evening meal, arranging a joint of pork to roast over the fire, and the other brothers, still silent and casting intermittent and malign regards towards the girl and her companions, settled down on the floor with a lamp in the middle of the circle. They began to play some game of chance with pieces of bones and argued in soft voices about the throws. The smell of roasting meat mingled with the other smells. A dog or two wandered around. Jewel kicked away one who sniffed at him. At the slightest movement, the trinkets with which he was covered made a small, jingling sound, so Marianne realized with her ears more than her eyes how still he ordinarily remained.