Shroud (12 page)

The first time that she knew her mind was unfixably wrong was on a winter Sunday afternoon when she was six, or seven. She had been ill for as long as she could remember, but because she was so young she had not yet realised that she would not get better, only worse. That Sunday her father and her mother had taken her in the car for a drive by the sea. She had said she would not go and her father had laughed and said he knew she only wanted to stay by herself in the house so she could drink whisky and smoke cigarettes. His teasing was a kind of violence. He was in one of his smiling rages because it was Sunday and there would be no theatre performance that night and he would have to stay at home and be bored. They travelled up the coast road, taking the scenic route, as her father sourly said. He did not like to drive and so her mother drove. Along the way they stopped at places but did not get out of the car. In the front her parents sat gazing bleakly out across the sea to the islands lying humped in a grey, salt mist, while in the back she knelt on the seat and looked through the rear window at the cars going past on the road. In many of the cars there were children like her, morose, pale faces floating in the windows, glowering at her. In the silence at her back she could feel the deepening desperation of the adults. Her mother smoked without cease, lighting each new cigarette from the stub of the old one. Open the window, for God's sake, her father said. When they came to the end of the coast road her mother turned the car around and her father muttered something and the argument began. They argued in an undertone so that she should not hear; the vehemence with which they fought was all the more awful for being muffled. The short day was ending, and the undersides of the low clouds in the windscreen were tinged a shade of furnace pink. See, her father said to her in a false voice, his stage voice, breaking off for a moment from the argument and pointing, it is the colour of a coke fire! And he laughed his laugh. She turned her eyes from the louring sky and looked out to the left at the sea that came up to the grassy edge of the road. Long, undulant waves were washing slowly in, wave upon thick wave, unbreaking wrinkles, mud-coloured. She felt her flesh shrink, as a snail would shrink from being touched. A vast weight, the weight of the world itself, was pressing against her, so that she could not breathe. It was as if something frightful had happened and this was its aftermath, this scorched sky, these turbid, relentless waves, the savage murmuring in the front seat. And she was alone; that, above all. The hawser had fallen away, the prow had turned toward the open sea, and she knew that now she would never come back. Her father, sensing her distress, perhaps, touched a fingertip to her mother's shoulder to silence her and turned around in his seat and smiled frowningly and said her name, as if he were not sure that it was still she who was sitting there, his little girl so changed in an instant. That was the first time she had smelled the almond smell. Then the car was stopped at the side of the road with one wheel mounted on the verge and the doors open, and she was slumped sideways on the seat with her head leaning out and the air cool on her brow and warm stuff bubbling between her lips, and her father was kneeling before her peering anxiously into her face, asking her something. Behind him the night, a bank of brownish darkness, was coming in across the sea, and high up there were the tiny lights of an aeroplane, now ruby, now emerald. Suddenly an enormous seagull flashed past, very close, falling diagonally through the brumous air on stiff, extended wings, and for a second she thought its icy eye had fixed on her, in warning.

Her father. She saw him often when he was not there, a ghost of the living man. For instance while Vander was busy goughing and grunting at her that second time, mouth fixed wetly like a sea creature to her shoulder, Daddy had opened the door of the room and walked in, speaking. He was barefoot, and was wearing an old pair of faded blue baggy trousers of the kind that he always wore when he was on holiday. He was young, far younger than she could ever have known him, and sun-tanned, and smiling in that fierce way, showing his fine, sharp teeth, that he always did when he could not find sufficient reason to be angry. His chest was bare, and he had a white hand-towel draped around his neck. He had been shaving, there still remained a moustache and goatee of lather that gave him the look, in negative, as it were, of a dashing Elizabethan villain of the kind he so often played. He was talking to someone in a farther room, her mother, she supposed, telling her something, a joke, or a story that he had just remembered, sketching abstract diagrams on the air with the razor as he spoke, in that way that he had, always animated, always dominating, cutting and carving and moulding the world. The razor was tiny, she noticed; he must have forgotten his own and borrowed this one from her mother. Perhaps it was the razor he was talking about, perhaps it had reminded him of something that had happened on one of his tours abroad; it amused him to tell her mother of his adventures, teasing her, trying to make her jealous with talk of eager actresses and stage-door propositions. The light behind him was a glare of azure and gold, and there was a slash of purple shadow there, and a parrot-green something, a palm leaf, perhaps, that kept moving to and fro in an odd, jerking, agitated way. What caught all her attention, though, was the bead of blood, the size of a ladybird, on his lip, where he must have cut himself with the razor, without noticing. She had always been fascinated by her father's mouth; she liked to watch it moving while he spoke, liked to be kissed by it, those dry, warm lips, the upper one, where the blood was now, shaped exactly like the stylised seabirds she used to draw in her picture book as a child. She liked to feel the prickle of tiny bristles on his chin, liked to smell his laughing breath. He had stopped speaking now, and waited, listening, with a slack smile, his head lifted at an angle and his eyes bright, those lips a little parted, the bleb of blood seeping pinkly into the soap moustache. When no response came to the story or the joke he had been telling, because her mother, if it was her mother, had stopped listening, or had fallen asleep, the light went out slowly in his face, and the smile turned to a vacant frown, and, feeling the smart at last, he dabbed a finger to his lip, and looked at the blood and seemed puzzled, as if he did not know what it was, or how it had come to be there, on his finger, on his lip.

Body: that was a word she did not like, the sound of it, the bubbled
b,
the
d's
soft thud, the nasal, whining
y
.Vander at the end had spoken something in her ear, a hoarse grunt, ugly and urgent. He could break her in his arms, crush the life out of her. She supposed she should be afraid of him. He had sucked at her breast like a child, his eyes closed and his face almost smiling.

She shivered in her thin dress; the night was turning chill at last. So silent, all around, as if the entire building were submerged in the dark deeps of a silent sea. She imagined the other people staying here, dozens of them, hundreds, maybe, all laid out in their beds like so many warm corpses, asleep, dreaming, or tossing and muttering, perhaps, or perhaps sleepless, like her, as some of them must be, surely. She pictured the couples amorously clasped in each other's arms, or lying at opposite edges of the bed, rigid with wordless fury, as so often she had seen her parents, after another of their fights. There might be someone about to die at this very moment, or someone giving birth, it was not impossible, nothing is impossible. All over the world at any instant people are dying or being born, crying out in passion or in pain. Terrifying to think of, terrifying. When she was a child she would lie awake listening to the life of the house around her winding down. Her father would come in late, after a performance, she would hear him below in the kitchen rattling the crockery, or trawling across the radio stations, the volume turned loud, making a great din, for a silent house worried him, or so he said. She would track him in her mind as he prowled from room to room, switching on all the lights, pouring himself a drink, listening to a snatch of music and abruptly turning it off: she could never hear the screech of a needle across a vinyl record without thinking of her father. Or he would talk out loud to himself, or to a phantom audience, practising dialogue, trying it at different speeds and different rhythms, or, if the play was bad, making fun of the lines, declaiming them in a booming bass voice that made her grin into the dark even though she could not make out the words, only their lugubrious cadences. He would sing, too, tunelessly; he knew only silly things, songs from when he was young, or jingles from the radio. Sometimes her mother, annoyed to be woken, or perhaps feeling sorry for him, would get out of bed and go down in her night-gown and sit with him, but never for long. For all that he said about hating silence and solitude, secretly he preferred to be alone. "Oh, Cass Cass Cassy, I'm a solitary boy," he would croon, striking a tragic pose with hands clutched to his heart. Always, last thing, he would open her door an inch or two and look in, and always she would pretend to be asleep, she was not sure why. At other times she liked to have his company, especially after she had suffered a seizure, when they would sit together, at the kitchen table, or in front of the television set with the sound turned down, not saying anything, just being together. But there were times too when she would feel shy of him, or it would be more than shyness, it would be almost revulsion, and more even than that, something for which there was no word. When he had gone on to his and her mother's room and was getting into bed she would hear the bedsprings creak, and the funny, fluting sigh he always heaved; then there would be an interval, and then she would feel a change in the atmosphere, a sort of loosening, or lapsing, that signified his consciousness slipping out of gear, and she would be left to set out on her journey into the night alone.

From far off now she heard a church bell mark the hour, a dark and leaden tolling. Three o'clock. How long had she been sitting here, on this couch? Time always became elastic after one of her attacks. And it was an attack she had suffered in Vander's arms, when her father had appeared to her, holding the razor. Probably Vander would flatter himself that it was he who had brought her to this pitch of passion, as she shook and writhed under him, her head thrown back and her teeth bared and those shaming, constricted little squeals she could not suppress coming up out of her throat. The paroxysm as always lasted no more than seconds, and when the worst of it was over she had drifted into the usual brief doze or daze, curled on her side with the joint of her thumb pressed to her front teeth, shivering a little now and then, shuddering, like a dog that has been dragged out of the sea. Vander was lying on his back beside her, asleep already, mouth jutting open and his lizard's eyelids fluttering. She knew she would not sleep. She lay motionless for a long time, afraid she might wake him, smelling the ammonia smell of their love-making, hearing the hiss and liquid rattlings of the ineffective air-conditioner that squatted behind a grille under the window. Then came the hollow sensation that was the thing she dreaded most; it was as if a huge hand had thrust itself into her irresistibly and scooped out her insides, leaving her an empty cage of bone and flaccid skin. Once she had seen Granny Cleave do that to a chicken, disembowel the bird like that, pushing her fist through the slack hole underneath and with a quick turn of her wrist bringing out the guts intact in their parcel of opalescent membrane. The old woman had shown her the glistening eggs, pale as pearls, that had been growing in the bird, a string of them, increasing in size from a gelatinous speck to one that was almost fully formed.

Smell of almonds, always the smell of almonds. Then her father in slow motion lifting her from the floor and folding her in his arms. There there. Mr. Mandelbaum has been paying a visit.
Mandel:
almond. So strange, how things strike echoes everywhere. As if…

The old porter appeared again out of the shadows, bearing a bucket and mop. He seemed not at all surprised to find her still here. He gave her his sweetly sad, apologetic smile. He held the mop and bucket with an air of pained fastidiousness, as if, although he had brought them, he did not quite know what they were, or what their exact use might be. She stood up, wincing as she felt her thighs peeling away from the tacky leather of the couch. Her dress at the back was damp; she hoped she had not left a sticky patch where she had been sitting. The porter said something to her, and although she did not catch what he said she smiled and nodded anyway, as if she had understood. As she was going up the stairs she paused and looked back; he was mopping the marble floor beside the pond, in long, unhurried strokes, still with that air of reluctance and vague puzzlement; he had not even taken off his jacket for the task.

She listened outside the door of the room but could hear no sound. For a moment she was convinced that the door was locked, that Vander had got up and locked it against her, had locked her out of her own room and gone back to sleep, and that she would not be able to wake him, or that if she did he would not let her in, and she would be left here, barefoot, in her stained dress, a shivering spectacle for the other guests to see when they began to get up and go down to breakfast. They would think she was drunk and had lost her key. They would think she was a whore that a dissatisfied client had thrown out of his room. Her hands had begun to shake. To her surprise but not relief, although she did not know why not relief, the doorknob turned suavely under her trembling touch. She stepped inside quickly. The bedside lamp was still burning but the bed was empty. Had he got up and gone away to his own room? Perhaps he had left altogether, had gone to his room and packed his bags and checked out. But no, she had been in the lobby all this time, so how could he have gone without her seeing him? Perhaps he had dodged out by a back way, leaving her to deal with the hotel people, leaving her to pay the bill, or bills, his own as well as hers, that she had no money to pay. But no, his clothes were still there in a heap at the foot of the bed where he had shed them, his shirt and trousers, his expensive shoes, that ugly tie. The bathroom door, white and blank, had a look of sullen admonition. She pulled off her dress and rolled it into a ball and stuffed it in the recesses of her bag. At that moment Vander came out of the bathroom. She straightened quickly, pressing a slip against her nakedness. He was naked too; he had been in the shower, drops of water glinted in the tangled bush below his belly, and the long, jagged scar on the inside of his thigh glared redly. He looked her up and down, lips pursed, one eyebrow cocked. Quickly she put on the slip, a blouse, skirt, sandals. He watched her, leaning against the door jamb, coldly smiling. "Going out?" he asked. She did not answer. He was just like any other, all supercilious bravado after the act, a little boy who has stolen a treat and is unsure he will not be punished for it, but not sorry, either. He stood there, displaying himself to her, daring her to turn aside from the sight of that gnarled leg, that crazily skewed dead eye, and all that sagging flesh, the pot belly and the shrunken acorn below and its bag suspended by an attenuated string of yellowed skin like a head of garlic on its stalk. But yes, why had she put on these clothes, where did she think she might be going? It was still the middle of the night. She had dressed only in order to be dressed; it was not the sight of his naked flesh that had made her flinch, but the consciousness of her own; not shame, but simply the being conscious. He had sat down on the side of the bed and was smiling up at her slyly, sidewise. "Venus in fig leaves," he said, writing it with a fingertip on the air, as if it were the title under a picture. He had read her mind; people always seemed to be able to read her mind. Perhaps the voices that spoke in her head spoke in theirs, too, telling them what she was thinking. Now he was buttoning his shirt and saying well, why not, yes, they should go out for a stroll. She looked up at the black shard of night showing between the curtains at the window. "For me it is still afternoon," he said. He showed her the face of his watch and for some reason laughed. "Pacific time." The watch was an ancient piece, perhaps an antique, with a scratched case and a crimson second hand in a little dial of its own; it was too small for him, a lady's watch; she did not know why it should, but it made her think of railway sidings, with abandoned carriages, their windows greyed over with grime, and poppies nodding in misty sunshine among the stones between the tracks. All right, she said, they would go for a walk. How flat and neutral and slowed down everything had become. Hard to think now of what had been happening between them on that bed only a few hours before. What had struck her, as always, was the discontinuity afterwards, the inap-propriateness of everything that followed. When she was younger she had thought that in time she would surely learn to make the smooth transition between that frantic concumbence and its upright, throat-clearing, eye-avoiding aftermath, just as, when she was a child in dance class, she had been taught to rise more or less gracefully from a squatting position on to the quivering tips of her toes. But this bigger trick she had never learned, and there was no one to teach it to her. Vander was leaning far out over his stiff leg, tying his shoelace, with awkward effort. She looked down at his fumbling hands and bent big head with its fright of silver hair that was all tangled and knotted at the nape and saw herself stepping forward and touching him with her hand. She blinked. She had not moved.