Something Special, Something Rare (11 page)

In the light of the fire she builds, the horses look like they're preparing for an end of show parade, dancing at the end of their ropes. Below his forelock, Boney the white gelding's face looks rosy, as if his cheekbones have been rouged. Big horse yawns seize the girl. She hopes the fire will last until morning.

The mosquito when it comes towards the skin of the girl's arm comes tentatively at first, then more surely. I can feel the wings, she marvels. Like a small mouth blowing. Like a little breeze.

She watches the mosquito's beak tapping, then experiences a small sting. Gradually the abdomen of the insect fills with blood. When the girl sneezes in response, she feels every particle of moisture as it lands on her body and the mosquito flies off, only half full. If the stockman was alive the girl would have to hide that she's no longer the extraordinary black girl from the coast that mosquitoes won't touch. Now, like any other girl, the mosquitoes form in a spiral above her head. Now she just watches.

The unknown animal hops across the night without moving, formed of stars. The girl waits for morning which seems longer away than ever before. On the caps of her elbows, on the edges of her ears and toes, the welts of the mosquitoes are already rising and beginning to itch. More mosquitoes arrive. When she chucks the bible into the fire she is sad all over again. One day, she'd thought, like a perfect leap on old Boney over a fallen tree, their separation would be severed. Now all the possible moments have passed. Now the bible burns like a grey fan; the colour plate of Jesus in the Lily of the Fields going into ashes; red coals taking away all those little words in the way of ants taking eggs.

THE MOVIE PEOPLE

FIONA McFARLANE

When the movie people left, the town grew sad. An air of disaster lingered in the stunned streets – of cuckoldry, or grief. There was something shameful to it, like defeated virtue, and also something confidential, because people were so in need of consolation they turned to each other with all their private burdens of ecstasy and despair. There was at that time a run of extraordinary weather – as if the blank blue sky, the unshaded sun and the minor, pleasurable breeze had all been arranged by the movie people. The weather lasted for the duration of the filming and then began to turn, so that within a few weeks of the close of production, a stiff, mineral wind had swept television aerials from roofs and disorganised the fragile root systems of more recently imported shrubbery.

My main sense of this time is as a period of collective mourning in which the townspeople began to wear the clothes they had adopted as film extras and meet disconsolately on street corners to re-enact their past happiness. I didn't participate. I was happy the movie people had left. I was overjoyed, in fact, to see no more trucks in the streets, no more catering vans in the supermarket parking lot, no more microphones and boom lights standing in frail forests on corners or outside the town hall. The main street of town had been closed to traffic for the filming, and now the townspeople were reluctant to open it again. It's a broad street, lined with trees and old-fashioned gas lights (subtly electrified) and those slim, prudish, Victorian storefronts that huddle graciously together like people in church, and as I rode down the street on my scooter on those windy days after the movie people left, it struck me as looking more than ever like the picturesque period town, frozen in the nineteenth century, that brought the movie to us in the first place.

I rode my scooter to the disgust of women in crinolines with their hair braided and looped; men in waistcoats and top hats: citizens of some elderly republic that had been given an unexpected opportunity to sun itself in the wan light of the twenty-first century. I knew these people as butchers, plumbers, city commuters, waterers of thirsty lawns, walkers of imbecile dogs, washers of cars, postmen, and all the women who had ever taught me in school. They were so bereft that they stayed in the street all day. They eddied and flocked. Up the street, and then down again, as if they were following the same deep and certain instinct that drives herring through the North Sea. They consulted fob watches and pressed handkerchiefs to their sorrowful breasts. The wind blew out their hooped skirts and rolled the last of the plastic recycling bins down the street and out into the country-side, where they nestled lifelessly together in the scrub.

I rode my scooter to the home of my wife's parents. She was sheltering there, my wife – Alice – because the movie people had left. She loved them, see. Not her parents – that tranquil couple of bleached invertebrates – but the director, the key grip, the costume ladies, the hairdressers, the boom operators, most particularly the star. The whole town loved the star. Even I succumbed to it, just a little – to the risky and unpredictable feeling we all had in the weeks he was among us, that he might at any moment emerge from a dimly bulbed doorway or unfold his long legs from a rooftop. We'd never seen anyone so beautiful. He shone with a strange, interior, asexual light; and his head seemed to hang in mid-air, as if there was no body to attach it to – nothing so substantial. Looking at him was like entering a familiar room in which you see everything all at once; and at the same time, nothing.

I rode to my wife and said, ‘Alice, darling, he's left now, they've all left, so can you please come home and love me forever; entangle your limbs in mine on the couch while watching television; comb your eyebrows in the bathroom mirror when I'm trying to shave; go running with me in the gorgeous mornings; and dance guiltily, ecstatically with me to bad disco music in the kitchen?'

But Alice, who now wore the costume of a sexy, spinsterly librarian, trim with repressed desire and lit, at her throat, by Edwardian lace, only sat on her parents' chaise longue embroidering silken roses with inconsolable fingers. Her parents sat nearby; her father, that placid old sinner, was now dressed as a country parson with a monocle in his crooked eye, and her mother peered out at me from the battered piano, which until recently had been nothing but a prop for picture frames. Now my mother-in-law played it with a watchful plink and plunk, with maternal suspicion tinkling over the expanse of her oatmeal-coloured face, and a frill of veil in her ornamental hair.

Other times I visited, the door was opened by a sour maid who informed me that my wife was not at home.

‘Is she not at home?' I asked, ‘Or is she not
at home
?'

The maid, with a grim, polite smile, shut the door in my face.

The mood of the town improved with the success of the movie. A special preview was held just for us, in the town hall; we sat in the municipal pews and called out the names of everyone as they appeared on screen in a long and lustful litany. Each name we invoked brought laughter and teasing, but really we were all overcome with a kind of bashful pride, as if finally the world had reached a solicitous hand into our innermost beings and, liking what it found there, held us up for emulation and respect. We were so distracted that, afterwards, nobody was sure what had actually happened in the movie. A forbidden love, generally – something greenish and unrequited – one of those glacial
fin-de-siëcle
stories in which the tiniest gestures provoke terrible consequences about which no one in polite company speaks.

At the premiere party, the townspeople danced the gavotte and the quadrille; they waltzed among potted palms with a slow, bucolic concentration; and they feasted on tremulous dishes of jellies and aspic. All throughout that strange, orchidaceous, combustible room, women fainted into arms and onto sofas, and a tiny orchestra of men with Civil War whiskers played endlessly into the night as Alice – my Alice – danced time and double time and time and again with the star, who appeared to have flown in especially for the occasion. Her parents nodded and smiled and accepted the nods and smiles of other doting gentry, and Alice flew over the carpets, her face alight.

I demanded of everyone I met: ‘Who does he think he is? Just because he's famous, he can dance all night with another man's wife?'

Unlike that decorous crowd, I was insensible of my own dignity. Finally, the man who used to service my scooter (dressed now in the handsome uniform of an English corporal, which made of his red belly a regimental drum) drew me aside and told me that the man Alice was dancing with wasn't famous at all; he was, in fact, Edward Smith-Jones, a man of the law, and selected from among the population as the star's stand-in. Apparently it was obvious to everyone that the entire scene in the stables featured this man and not the star, who was nervous around horses, especially during thunderstorms. So there he danced, lordly Eddy, with another man's wife and another man's haircut, and I watched his hand rest on her supple back and my heart was filled with hatred for the movie people.

When I asked Alice for a waltz she told me, with a demure shake of her head, that her card was full.

I lost my job when my graphic-design firm was asked to move elsewhere. Certain other sectors of the citizenry, too, were politely dissuaded; the Greek fruit shop became a dapper greengrocer's, manned by a portly ex-IT consultant with Irish cheeks and a handlebar moustache. He stood jovially among his gleaming bronze scales, measuring out damsons and quinces. Unless they were willing to wear their hair in long ropes, the town's Chinese population was encouraged to stay off the main street between the hours of eight-thirty and six, and preferably to remain invisible on weekends. The gym was forced to close for lack of customers, and the Video Ezy. The tourists came in excitable herds, transported from the nearest town in traps and buggies. They mistook me for another tourist, and I was comfortable walking in among them, watching as my wife strolled in the botanical gardens, her face in parasol twilight; a brass band playing in the rotunda; a British flag afloat above the trumpets; nannies sitting with their neat ankles crossed on benches as children toddled close to duck ponds. Alice walked with her Edward, and her parents followed close behind. She tilted her head this way and that. In the movie she had been one of those extras who almost has a speaking part; the kind they focus on to gauge the reaction of a comely crowd.

When I heard they were engaged, Alice and Mr Smith-Jones, I retired my scooter. I took a job at a printing press, and the tedious hours of setting type gave me finicky time to think things over. On the day of their wedding, I dressed in costume. In the movie I play the role of a man about town; you can see me in the lower right at 20:16, loafing with friends on a street corner while gauzy women flutter behind us, in and out of seedy cottages. Yes, right there – I'm the one watching the dog.

I walked to the church among apple carts and small sooty boys, and there was a yellow quality to the air, a kind of residual loveliness, as if the sun had gone down hours before but stayed for some time just below the horizon. The church doors swung open before me, revealing soft pale heads among bridal flowers. The parson – my father-in-law – trembled on the moment when I should speak or forever hold my peace. I spoke. Eddy and I met in the aisle; he swung and I dodged and I swung. Alice shook in her slim white dress, and roses fell from her hands. I floored Eddy; he pulled me down. We rolled on that ecclesiastical carpet, up and over and around and down, while flustered ushers danced around the edges of our combat. Ed would be on the verge of springing up, a lawyerly Lazarus, but I clawed him back down; I, on my knees, would be making my way altar-ward, only to find him wedded to my foot. The organ began to play. The congregation piped in alarm. An elderly woman keened among her millinery. Finally we exhausted ourselves, and it was me – me! – Alice came to comfort. I knew she would recognise my supplicant heart. Edward was banished, and loped away into the high noon of heartbreak. Her counterfeit father was ready to join them in mock matrimony, and so with a merry shake of his worldly head, he re-joined us instead. The sun set, and the moon rose. We ate ices at the reception, and great silver fish surrounded by lemons, and that night, as she withdrew her slender foot from a slender slipper, my wife shuddered with a virginal blush and laid her head upon the pillow.

There followed a happy time of croquet and boating expeditions; then Alice went through her suffragette period, which I pretended to disapprove of. Things are more settled now. We read Darwin together, without telling her parents, and she's discovered Marx. We take walks in the country, where my naturalist wife sends me scrambling into trees for birds' nests. Things aren't what they used to be, but there are consolations: a certain elegance to the way she stands at open windows, and longer, darker nights now that the town has switched from electricity to gas. But I've noticed in her lately a strange inability to see the resemblances between things: a tennis ball (she plays modestly, in white dresses) is nothing like the sun; a glass of water, she says, has no relation to the ocean; if I comment on the similarity between her neck and a swan's, she turns away. In fact she dislikes the similarity of things even without recognising their likeness, and can't bear, for example, to see a brown short-haired dog on brown short-haired grass.

The rest of the town is like this too. They have a horror of seeing photographs of themselves, even the hoary daguerreotypes they love so much. They've removed all the mirrors from their houses, and the paintings of jaded horses on hillsides, and the china that depicts, in blue and white, the far-flung tale of luckless lovers. It's as if they're allergic to the very idea of reproduction; or at the very least, don't wish to be reminded of it. What a singular world they all live in, in which no thing has any relation to another!

They no longer mention the movie. They no longer watch movies. They expect to live forever. They've taken up laudanum. They seem happy, however – timeless and happy. I watch them all, a little wistfully, in my fraudulent frock coat. Meanwhile, the trees shake out their leaves in the wind, and in the evening my wife walks through the spent garden. Her face is like a flag that says –
surrender.