Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

by Angela Carter

  It was a strange, suspended time. The city had never looked more beautiful but I did not know, then, that it seemed to me beautiful only because it was doomed and I was the innocent slave of bourgeois aesthetics, that always sees an elegiac charm in decay. I remember velvet nights spiked with menace and the beautiful showers of sparks when an amateur incendiarist ignited a police station. My house was always full of the shimmering sound of the trees in the square moving in the wind, so that it seemed the sea was rushing through the corridors, the rooms.

  I was living on the fourth floor although I had such vertigo that the sight of an abyss, however insignificant, excited in me, almost intolerably, the desire to plunge. I was quite helpless before the attraction of gravity. I was overwhelmed. I became powerless. Therefore to live on the fourth floor meant that every day began with a small triumph of will over instinct. I wanted to jump; but I must not jump. Pallor, shallow breathing, a prickle of cold sweat—I exhibited all the symptoms of panic, as I did when I met X. That was like finding myself on the edge of an abyss but the vertigo that I felt then came from a sense of recognition. This abyss was that of my own emptiness; I plunged instantly, for my innocence was so perfect that I saw in this submission the height of sophistication.

  It was as lovely a summer as those that precede wars. The West Indian lady who ran the neighbourhood launderette always wore a small felt hat with a veil, as if she were determined to keep up the appearances even in the most extreme circumstances. She pushed the dirt around the floor with a sodden mop and, when her tasks were finished, she would sit on a chair and read her well-thumbed Bible aloud to herself in that ineffable, querulous lilt, like the voice of a reproachful bird. Sometimes she would exclaim over the things she found in the book; when I looked over her shoulder, once, while she was crying: HOSANNA I saw she was reading the Apocalypse.

  The squatters consecrated the house next door. All night long, while we fixed up our explosive devices in the basement, they chanted: BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS.

  I would not have believed Lenin was right when he said there was no place for orgy in the revolution, even if I had read Lenin. What we were about in bed seemed to be activity that could in itself overturn the world. X’s lycanthropic eyes glowed in the dark like fuses. I found most pleasure of all in the delicious dread that seized me when he clung too close. I wanted to be the Madonna of the Barricades; I would have shot anybody you told me to but only if they did not get hurt. I felt I needed to understand nothing beyond my own sensations. I felt, as primitives do, that ceremonials such as the ones we made could revivify dead earth. Your kisses along my arms were like tracer bullets. I am lost. I flow. Your flesh defines me. I become your creation. I am your fleshly reflection.

  (“Libido and false consciousness characterised sexual relations during the last crisis of Capital,” says the commissar.)

  A man constructs his own fate out of his sense of the world. You engaged in conspiracies because you believed the humblest objects were engaged in a conspiracy against you. Your conviction was contagious; it impressed me. “Even the strawberries smell of blood, this summer,” you remarked with anticipatory relish. I found you more and more often at the window, practising indifference.

  You described the state of permanent revolution to me. It sounded like a series of beautiful explosions. Volcano after volcano would erupt under their own internal stresses in an endless reduplication of ecstasy. When the bed creaked beneath us, it sounded like the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde performed with vehemence by a military band. The grand design of glorious convulsions you depicted was so beautiful I wept; but we would begin, you said, in small ways, we would begin with a single shooting. You made assassination sound as enticing as pornography. A, B and C were suspicious of me since you abandoned the basement for my bed. Now we were all gripped in the same obsession, they treated me more politely. Folie à deux, à trois, à quatre. We were living on the crater of a volcano and felt the earth move beneath us. What stirring times! What seismographic rimes!

  (“The bourgeoisie turned politics into an aspect of romanticism,” says the commissar. “If it was only an art form, how could it threaten them?”) The city unravelled like knitting as the transport workers’ strikes imposed vast distances between its various sections but we never went beyond walking distance of our house so the strikes did not affect us.

  Our house was tall and narrow. Worn steps led down to the area. Our landlord lived in the front room on the ground floor. He crouched in front of his television set making what sense he could out of the random flickering that was all his eyes registered, poor old thing, with his stick and his cats. He had a sink and a gas ring and a little cupboard where he kept his cats’ fish. He boiled up their dinners twice a week and stored their food in a plastic washing-up bowl when it was cooked. The house stank of stale fish; we had to burn incense all the time to cancel out the smell. He spread his table with clean newspapers and set out the fish for his cats in separate saucers. They all jumped up to eat. There was a soup plate full of water which although it was refreshed each day, always managed to drown a fly or two by lunchtime, and a saucer of milk that had turned into junket by the six o’clock news. His three-legged chairs were balanced on piles of old newspapers and upholstered with cast-off garments. Cats of all colours sat upon the sideboard amongst the empty brown ale bottles, the open cans of condensed milk, the stopped clock, the yellowing circulars, the football coupons, the curded milk bottles, the plaster Alsatian dog with one ear chipped. There he sat, a king of his kingdom, thumping upon the floor when the conspirators in the basement went bang! by accident.

  Once a week, in turn, we visited him to pay our rents for we were determined to be scrupulous and, if you must have a landlord at all, it’s best if he’s purblind. It was like paying tribute to a holy statue. Age had drawn his yellow, freckled skin so tight across his skull his head shone like polished bone and his eyes had faded to the innocent blue of baby ribbon—wandering, rheumy eyes, gummed at the corners. His bony fingers clutched the handle of his stick with a certain balked ferocity.

  He was afraid of us, I suppose, and so he pretended to be fierce. In the pub, they said he kept roll upon roll of banknotes stored in Old Holborn tins tucked away here and there amongst the clutter. He ingested his rents like a sponge but he suspected nothing although the cats did and threshed their tails when we went into his room. Sometimes they spat. The ginger one once scratched you.

  A middle-aged transvestite lived on the first floor but he was too immersed in his aberration to pay us much attention. He ventured out for little walks around the square in the dusk that tenderly veiled his eccentricity, tottering on his five-inch heels, spiking the ground before him in the manner of a climber with the point of his long, furled umbrella. He wore a black gaberdine two-piece with a pencil skirt for these expeditions and slung a fox-fur round his neck. The mask hung over his left shoulder and kept a good lookout behind with its little beady eyes. Above him, a slack-witted unmarried mother pigged it with her brood. She did the old man’s shopping for him, when she remembered, but he only wanted the fish, twice a week, a can or two of beans and the occasional bottle of brown ale.

  A perpetual twilight dominated that house, with its characteristic odours of stale cooking, phantom bacon, lavatories and the cats who pissed in the hall. The bulbs on the stairways were always blown. It was an old, dark house; it was a cave. We saw visions on the walls. It was a slum. It was a citadel. That was the time of the freelance assassins; our cell was self-sufficient and took no orders nor cognisance of any other cell in the cancerous growth of the deathwardly inclining city. You had the plausibility of a Nechaev; a plot, a murder became your sole preoccupation.

  You arbitrarily selected a member of the cabinet. We consulted the I Ching, we threw the coins. The oracle seemed to be propitious, although, as always, its tone was guarded. We drew lots. Inexorably, the marked card found you. In the full consciousness of a young man about to become an assassin, y
ou made love to me like the storming of the Bastille. But then I found you’d somewhere encountered an obstacle to indifference for now you were crying, though, when I asked why you were crying, you hit me.

  Our neighbours were chanting so loudly they might have been chanting in the same room and I had no curtains at the window so the glaring, yellow light balefully illuminated your unhappy face, but I was too much under your spell to guess why you were crying. Hadn’t everything been decided? Tomorrow we would go and murder the politician. I would ring the doorbell and then you would fire the gun. I could not understand why you were crying, you had so successfully impressed me with the model simplicity of the plan, so that I was sure we were in the right. I went to sleep again, sulking because I had been hit. The monotonous, droning chant—BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS—lulled me to sleep.

  What an awakening!—there was so much blood on your shirt. You spilled the banknotes over me. They were in tight little blue rolls that bounced off my body, unfurling as they fell to the floor. Such a lot of money! I blinked in the violet dawn, astounded at the extravagance of your hysteria. You sobbed and babbled and hurled the furniture to the ground, smashed cups, overturned the wastepaper basket. I made you tea and slyly stoked up the mug with sleeping pills. I choked it down you and got you into the bed I had vacated for I could never lie in the same bed with you, now. I stayed with you until I was certain you were sleeping and locked the door behind you.

  A, B and C had finished the night’s work and were frying eggs and bread on their gas ring. A’s girl lay on the mattress under her belly which was the size and shape of a dirigible, round enough, big enough to rise up into the air and carry her away with it from this vale of tears, over the rainbow, to a happy land far, far away. I told them what you had said to me, that you killed him for practice. We had intended to be such philosophic assassins! But what were your existential credentials when you murdered the landlord? Was it the dress rehearsal for an assassination or the audition of an assassin?

  The old man lay on the floor in his rank pyjamas. His debilitated, senescent tool dangled out of his yellowed fly. The cats milled about him, mewing ravenously. There was blood on their whiskers and on their inquisitive paws. X had smashed in the old man’s skull and he’d tumbled off the bed in his death agony. In spite of his age and weakness, he had put up a struggle; we could see the signs of it all over the room. The bedclothes were disordered and his little night-table had been knocked over. The chamber-pot it contained had fallen out on its side, spilling its contents on the floor. Then X must have gone through every cupboard and drawer in the room to find the fabled tobacco tins of money. We looked at the evidence in silence though all the time the neighbours went on wailing very loudly. We could hear them downstairs, even here, on the ground floor. The cats pressed against us, yowling, and I thought I had better feed the cats because I did not want them to practise necrophagy upon the landlord. I opened the food cupboard and took out their fish. I spread the table and laid out their meal as if nothing had happened. They all jumped up and tucked in, purring as they swallowed their dinners.

  We had not let A’s girl into the room because of her condition. Now, from behind the lace curtain, we saw her, with her shawl flung carelessly round her shoulders, pursuing her burden as it stumbled away down the street. A said: “She’s broken—she’s gone for the police.” I rushed out of the house and ran after her. I soon caught up with her; she was too fat to run fast. She wept. She said how much she always disliked X; that he had cold eyes. Then she fainted. A came and helped me carry her back to the basement. Shortly after that, she went into labour. The neighbours continued to chant: BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS, BABY JESUS. While I held A’s girl’s frightened, hot, sticky hand and A heated water, B and C took some rope, went to my attic and tied X up. They said he was too surprised to struggle when they woke him. He must have felt it was the revolt of the toys.

  Then a police car drew up outside and we shrank into ourselves, we were so scared. Poor Susie moaned and tore at the mattress on which she lay. But the police had come for our neighbours. The transvestite had complained about the noise and we watched from the area steps as the police took an axe to the boards that were nailed over the front door and entered it. A little while later, they came out again, half leading, half carrying the dazed and shaking occupants, who were all as white as sheets, tranced, emaciated, their eyes staring as still they mumbled their orisons, too limp and listless to protest.

  I sterilised my scissors in the gas jet and A held his wailing son in his arms after I cut the cord. But, however pleased A was to be a father, he insisted on a fair trial for X. Perhaps, even then, B and C didn’t quite trust me; I’d been a rich girl. But X confessed everything to us all quite freely.

  We tried him in the attic. We left Susie downstairs nursing her baby. We untied X’s legs and let him sit down on a chair but we did not untie his arms. He confessed as follows; he seemed agonisingly torn between humiliation and self-justification.

  “I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure of myself. I kept thinking, what if I blow it? If I blow the whole thing, hadn’t been able to pull the trigger, and just stood there in the doorway staring vacantly at him. What if I can’t kill when I want to kill and am in the right to kill? What if I were paralysed? What if I’d spent so long looking at people through the sights of the rifle and holding back from shooting that I could never shoot? Fear I’d be weak shook me.

  “What good did the landlord do to anyone? Sitting in his room, sucking in his rents. Nobody loves him. He’s significant to nobody. He’s hardly alive at all, he can’t talk, hardly, he’s almost blind, squatting like a toad on all that money.

  “I was in a frenzy, I prayed. Yes, I did. The fear I’d fail threw me into a frenzy. I prayed and the answer came. I left her sleeping and took the gun and went to his room. He didn’t wake up when I went in but the cats all woke and stretched themselves and jumped off the chairs and the sideboard and the bed and came towards me, mewing; it was a tide of fur with eyes and mouths in it. He woke up when he heard the cats and began to mew, too. ‘Who’s there, pussies, what’s the matter, pussies?’ I had nothing against him when I went into the room—nothing. It was only an exercise in self-control.

  “But I began to hate him when I saw how helpless he was. When I saw how easy it would be to kill him, nothing to it, then I began to hate him. I raised the rifle and looked at him through the sights. The sights changed the way I saw him. Through the sights of the rifle, now I saw he was not human, not even an old wreck of humanity. He was only an object to be extinguished. He asked some menacing person he could not see if that person had come for his money. When I realised that person was I, I thought that I might just as well take his money, while I was there, since he offered it to me. But I said nothing and my hands were shaking. He told me not to kill him. That was how he reminded me I could kill him, if I wanted to. Up till then, I had not wanted to but when he called me his murderer, I became so. He sealed his own fate. It was his own fault, what happened.

  “Next door they were chanting away like mad things. He rolled about on his filthy bed clutching his head with his hands as if his hands would protect it. His pyjamas burst open and the old flesh spilled on the sheets. I felt nauseated to see his old flesh. My fingers tightened on the trigger. The cats screamed and pressed against my legs. The ginger one scratched me. They reared up on their hind legs and snarled, I could have sworn they were attacking me. How disgusting the old bed-bug was, now he was at my mercy! But just as I was about to shoot, I thought: what a noise the gun will make. It will be much louder than the chanting, even. The noise will wake Sister Boy. Sister Boy will wake and throw his negligee around his shoulders and come and see what is the matter. The woman upstairs will wake, or her kids will wake. They’ll all come down, even the four-year-old, wiping the sleep out of his eyes. I thought of a holocaust—mow them all down. But I was too self-restrained.

  “I lowered the gun. He was fumbling in his little night-t
able, where he keeps his pisspot. The night-table rocked, he was fumbling so. Out jumped the pisspot and crashed on the ground. All the cats puffed out their fur, stuck up their backs and hissed and shrank away from me, because the crash of the pisspot startled them, but he was rummaging for his savings in the night-table and found one little tin. He shook the banknotes all over the floor, they were rolled up in the tin like curling papers, they fell in the spilled piss and the cats pounced on them and began to pat them this way and that way with their paws. He scooped up some banknotes in his fists and shoved them towards me. He said: ‘Take it, it’s all I’ve got.’ But I knew he had lots of other old tobacco tins full of money, doesn’t everybody say so? When he tried to buy me off so cheaply, I lost all mercy and bludgeoned him about the head with the butt of the rifle until he stopped moving.”

  He looked at us as though he was certain we understood everything perfectly. I closed my eyes; I had the sensation of falling. Yet, when I opened my eyes, the abyss remained; I stood only upon its brink. Now my eyes were open, perception, lucidity became my new profession. At the conclusion of his story, X began to cry like a child, as though he were to be pitied, and then I felt most afraid of him, in case I began to pity him. While we watched him snivelling, we grew older. He cried like a baby and we became his parents. We must decide what would be best for him. Now I was his mother, they his father and we saw our common responsibility as his cause in the random nature of his effect.

  “It must be worst for you,” A said to me, because I’d been the lover of this person; but the same terror gripped us all, for our complicity with him was over once he had acted only for himself and by himself and now we could stand apart from him and, in judging him, judge ourselves.