Hamlet

by John Marsden

  “Good!” the king said. “Good! That’s what we like to hear. Everyone in agreement. That’s how it should be. Come on, now, drink up. No more speeches. Let’s adjourn to the billiards room.”

  Ophelia lay on the bed in her overheated room. In summer this room was a nightmare, but everyone envied her in winter.

  The room had been freshly painted white. Ophelia, helped by Hamlet and her brother, Laertes, had done the work herself. They were the world’s messiest painters. One bright afternoon Hamlet, with the daring smile she found so attractive, had flicked a string of white drops onto her white dress. Looking down and finding herself bespattered, she went to retaliate, but Laertes was there before her, defending his sister’s honor. He was older than Hamlet, and often dour, but a light kind of madness had seized Laertes that day, and the two boys, wielding their long paintbrushes as swords, fenced from one end of the room to the other, Ophelia laughing even as she begged them to stop. Hamlet had turned to her, smiled, and said, “I will, but only if you give me a —”

  She never found out how the sentence was going to end. Laertes stabbed Hamlet from behind with his brush, and so the battle resumed. They did not give up until the floor was slippery with the wet paint they had spilled. At last they agreed to a draw. Ophelia was left wondering what kind of forfeit Hamlet had been about to propose. Her instincts told her. And she would have given it, yes, gladly, would have pressed her lips to his, had it not been for Laertes’ presence. She had been sulky with her brother afterward, and he in turn had been overfriendly. As if he knew exactly what he had done.

  It took them days to get the paint off their bodies. A large rug now covered the spots on the floor.

  Lying on the bed and remembering, Ophelia smiled. What did she feel for Hamlet? she asked herself, not for the first time. What was it that caught and twitched within her at the thought of his eyes? Flickering in her mind was the image of a fish spinning through water, hooked but not taken, a naked silver body streaming wet.

  She ran her fingers up the inside of her right thigh and gave a little cry at the silver lines left on her skin. Her nightdress felt too hot, too heavy. She slipped it off and lay back, panting at the heat, the exertion, the thoughts. Her fingers touched there again. Why did being naked feel so good? What would Hamlet look like naked?

  She had seen him and Horatio a month or so back, the two boys shirtless, chopping wood in the kitchen yard behind the castle. They had grabbed the axes and sent the servants packing. She watched avidly from her window. Horatio had more muscle, but Hamlet was the prettier. They were competing to chop the logs in the fewest number of strokes. How the silver blades had flashed in the sun! How the chips had scattered! And how the drops of sweat shone as they flew through the air.

  As she gazed from behind her curtain, Ophelia had imagined them naked, tried to picture Hamlet naked and swinging that ax, had felt faint at the thought, had tried to stop her mind from dreaming such things, had finally been forced to drop the curtain back into place and rush from the room.

  These were the thoughts she was unable to express to anyone, even to her confessor.

  Lying there in the little room, Ophelia thought she would go mad. Sweat trickled from her armpits; she groaned and growled as she touched herself again, and again tried to push back the forbidden pictures that threatened to crowd all else from her mind.

  The interruption, when it came, was brutal and rude. It was her father, outside the door. Polonius sounded like the dull, dry voice of death. “What are you doing in there, Ophelia?”

  She struggled to find a voice. The sound that came from her throat was raspy. “Doing?”

  The handle rattled. “What are you doing? Open this door. I know what you’re doing. Open up, I say.”

  “Nothing. I’m doing nothing. I’m coming, I’m coming now.”

  At exactly the same time, Hamlet was perched on the highest point of the castle, a tower built to look out over the plains. If the armies of Norway came marching, Hamlet’s father had wanted to be sure of a good view.

  Behind him was the graveyard, the frozen river, the wastelands, and beyond them the meager village of Clennstein. But Hamlet stared at the plains. A low, heavy layer of dark clouds sat in the east, glooming the sky. He looked to the south. Down the valleys ran the conifers, straight lines pointing out of the creases and folds, pointing toward the distant bushy forest.

  But if the massed armies of northern Europe had at that moment been galloping in close order straight toward the castle, the young prince would not have seen them. His mind was a chaos of emotions. The infidelities of his mother, the treachery of his uncle, the distracting beauty of Ophelia, and, over it all, the shadow of his father.

  Even that shadow was split, fragmented like a humorless harlequin suit, into the towering figure of the powerful king, the severe patriarch, the occasionally kind father, and now the forbidding and ghastly ghost.

  Hamlet felt there was no room for himself. He had been crowded out of his own mind. He struggled to find something solid, something beautiful. He wanted to be a continent, not an archipelago. There were the two men, father and uncle, father and stepfather, king and king, man and man.

  Hamlet looked down. The tower was so high that as he looked at the ground it seemed to start moving, moving faster, accelerating. The young prince felt giddy. His stomach began to turn over. He looked away at the gullies again. He felt so small on the top of the tower, like a flea on a horse, a slight live thing on this tower of rock. He knew the wind could blow him away on a whim.

  The charge his father had laid on him: the king had come back from death to rule his son, so that once again nothing existed in Hamlet’s life but the decrees of the father, one man using the boy to attack and destroy another man. It was a mammoth fighting a mammoth, using the boy as the weapon.

  Hamlet trembled. For a moment he tasted the knowledge that he would not survive this. He felt his mind becoming paper, then torn-up paper, then burned paper, then ashes, and he sensed too the coming annihilation of his body.

  He slipped down from the tower, through the great courtyard, out of the castle, into the fields, running in circles. Against the rich green grass and the close horizon, the lowering clouds, pregnant with storm and snow, against the white windmill and the stone tower, Hamlet was all that moved. His white hair and white shirt held the eye; a line could be drawn between him and the windmill and the dark tower, the last two heavy and immovable, the other too light, too bright: nothing to hold it to the earth. He slipped in the mud and rolled down the hill but was up again as he spun, flitting, flying. He was alive and hopeless.

  In her room Ophelia sat on her bed, waiting for something to happen. The door was open. Her father had demanded that it stay open. Polonius made many demands. There were rules for everything. Be careful of boys. Don’t lend money. Don’t borrow money. Keep away from Hamlet. Dress modestly. Don’t speak out, stay in the background, don’t gossip. Don’t believe Hamlet when he flirts with you.

  Polonius was so much older than the fathers of her friends. He wanted to control everything she did. She felt as closely watched as a valuable broodmare coming into season.

  She wandered down the corridor. This was the oldest wing of the castle, and the tiles on the floor were chipped and worn. Once they had been bright and lively, but now they were dull, grimy even. Nothing seemed to be cleaned properly anymore. The servants were getting so slovenly.

  Ophelia heard the soft voice of Reynaldo, an effete young man who had tutored Laertes at his university in Heidelberg. But it seemed Polonius was doing most of the talking. They were in her father’s drawing room. No doubt Polonius had Reynaldo balled up in the corner of the stiff leather couch, the way he liked to do when he wanted to control someone. Ophelia had huddled into that corner many times as Polonius sat inches from her, croaking urgent admonitions into her sullen ears.

  She stopped for a moment, then drifted closer. The voices played together, one winding in and out of the other. Polo
nius’s harsh monologues contrasted with Reynaldo’s gentle tones. They were whispering like conspirators. She heard her father say, “The way to do it is to get to know his friends a little.”

  “His friends?” Reynaldo asked.

  “Yes, yes, of course, it’s the best way. You get to know them, then you bring his name into the conversation one day.”

  “Mention his name, yes?”

  “Very casually, mind you. ‘Oh, you probably know Laertes,’ that kind of thing.”

  “Yes. Just mention that I tutored him last year. And I’m interested in how he’s doing.”

  “Exactly. You could say that you’re a friend of the family, then you lead them on.”

  “Lead them on?”

  “You say something like, ‘He’s a bit wild, isn’t he? Smoking, drinking, that kind of thing?’”

  “I see. Just a little prompt. That’s clever.”

  “And then if they say, ‘Oh, yes, you should have seen Laertes the other day. Lucky his father doesn’t find out what he gets up to, and so on and so on,’ why then, you write to me. At once. Most urgently.”

  In the cold corridor Ophelia trembled and drew her wrap closer around her. Her hair, a kind of transparent white, like icicles, flowed around her face, making her look even colder.

  “And is it just smoking and drinking? Are they the things you’re worried about? Because you know how boys are at university. . . . Of course they get up to a bit of mischief. There’s no great harm in some of the things they . . . especially when they first arrive. They can be a bit naughty, away from home for the first time, but it doesn’t always . . .”

  “Oh no. Not just smoking and drinking. No, indeed. Cheating in his exams. Drugs. Promiscuity.”

  “Promiscuity?”

  “Yes! Is he picking up girls, playing with them, you know the sort of thing. They’re all sex-mad at that age. I know what they’re like. Those boys, with their hormones going crazy, wanting to press their bodies into the girls, it’s all they think of. Touching them. Feeling them. And worse. They can’t control themselves. They get the girl naked, and before you know it . . . they can’t help themselves. They’re diseased with lust. Whores. Is he whoring around? I’ll stake money that he is. They’ll know him at the whorehouses; depend on it.”

  “Sir, really, I’m not sure. . . . I think you’re being harsh on your son. I think his basic character is good.”

  “Good character, rubbish. If you knew his mother . . . The two of them are stamped with her mark. Oh yes, I know what to look for. I’m always having to talk to Ophelia about her behavior. She’s ripening, you know. You can tell . . . the way she cavorts with the prince. He may be a prince, but that doesn’t make him immune from the sex drive. In fact I think he’s oversexed. Oh yes. I know the type . . .”

  Ophelia fled. Her hair streamed behind her. She ran to the end of the corridor, then back again, then the same, then again, backward and forward, a desperate, trapped thing, panting and wild-eyed. She ran into her cell and went straight to the window, gripping the frame and staring down into the courtyard. Oh, she could fly, she could soar from the sill and be a white bird, and everyone down there would look up and wonder, drop their swords and their pots and their mops and call out to one another and to her, “Ophelia, is it you? Ophelia? Oh, see, see the beautiful Ophelia! She flies!”

  She heard a voice behind her, a hoarse, light whisper. She thought she heard the word “flying.” She turned fast, ready to kick and bite if she had to.

  It was Hamlet. He looked as wild and confused as she felt. He stared at her with huge eyes, as if he had expected to find someone else in the room. His mouth was open, he was gasping for breath, and his chest shook. Was he having an asthma attack? But asthma did not explain the state of his clothes. His jacket was open and his shirt half torn off. She saw his smooth brown skin and a dark nipple. His jeans were smeared with grass stains and his boots bruised with mud, black mud, almost purple in places.

  “M-my lord . . .” she stammered. He snarled at her, showing his teeth. “What is it?” she said, afraid of her father. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Hamlet stood there, panting. He seemed to be calming down. He took a step closer. She did not back away. He studied her face with the greatest intentness. It was as though he wanted to memorize her appearance. He continued down her body, to her breasts. Now it was Ophelia’s turn to breathe hard. She felt a pressure there, then a warmth. She felt the pressure most strongly in her nipples, as if his hands were resting on them. She blushed and was almost relieved when his gaze moved farther down.

  “My lord . . .” she murmured. She knew she should move, but she couldn’t. She wished he would say something but was scared at what he might say.

  In the long, dark corridor that led to the basement, at the appointed time, Hamlet met Ophelia. She wore white, like a frail bride who could be borne away on a breeze. He wore black jeans and a black shirt. They quivered to see each other. Ophelia could have turned back, back through the door, back into the girls’ courtyard. The light from that place fell behind her, and the door was still closing.

  Hamlet could have returned to the cellar where he had stored his toys, the relics of his past.

  The thoughts flitted out of their minds again, like tiny, fast moths. They continued walking and met, and began an elaborate dance. Ophelia clasped her arms to her thin body and revolved around him. He turned with her as his arms moved in a dance of their own. She spoke first, her voice low and husky: “Are you all right? Why do you haunt these dark places?”

  “Why not? There’s nothing above the ground. Is there?”

  This was so much in accord with her own thoughts that it frightened her. She did not want her fears confirmed. “Is this all there is, then? I wanted more,” she said.

  “It’s hard when you are a bird who lives underground.”

  “Birds can’t live underground.”

  “No, they can’t.”

  She stood still then and so did he.

  “Can we live? Can we live at all?” she asked. Her voice echoed, bouncing off the brick-lined walls.

  “Yes, it comes down to that. And to what comes after.”

  “To what?” She didn’t understand him.

  “Why, whether we are to live or not to live. To dance or to die. To breathe the painful air, or to sleep.”

  “To sleep?”

  “To stand in the shallows with a sword to fight the surf, or to let the waves wash you away.” He took her by the elbow and leaned closer to her ear and whispered into it. “To be or not to be.”

  She was frightened and pulled away and could not listen to him.

  “To stay under here forever?” she asked. Her voice was tinny and thin, almost disdainful. Fear was corrupting her.

  “It would be easy,” he said. For a moment he sounded almost bored. “So easy to do it. It’s what happens afterward, that’s the thing.”

  She put her hands to her ears and tried to say “Stop it,” but could not.

  “If it was my father, if he told the truth, if he twists in fire, if he the murdered one twists in fire, what’s there for the one who murders himself? No sleep for him, I think, no peace, not for a long time. Torment for him, I think.”

  The tunnel felt colder and colder to Ophelia. She tried to concentrate on Hamlet’s twin thoughts, the references to his father, the references to death. His voice went on, soft, in the darkness.

  “Why would anyone put up with it all? The cruelty, the injustice, the frustration, the pangs, and the pain. The love that’s not returned. After all, the ticket to that undiscovered country is cheap enough. A bare knife will get you there. Surely we’d all fly to it at once if we thought we could have perfect peace there, protected forever.”

  Hamlet walked away a dozen paces and turned to face Ophelia again. Looking straight at her, he said, “It’s the same with everything. I don’t pick up the knife because I think about it too much and the thinking paralyzes my arm. Action is hot, and th
ought is cold. Action is courage, and reflection is cowardly. Picking up the knife has the colors of truth. As soon as I hesitate, the scene takes on a sickly hue.”

  “My father told me to keep away from you. That you are not to be trusted.”

  She wanted to see him hot. She wanted him to talk about her. What he felt. What he wanted. The future for them. An expression came to his face, but it went again before she could see what it was. The darkness made it difficult. The darkness and the distance and the dance.

  Hamlet shrugged. “Why, then, you had better go. Do what your father tells you.”

  “But I don’t want to.”

  Suddenly with a great roar he ran toward her. She thought he was going to run her down. But he went straight past and, fifty meters down the corridor, turned left. She heard his boots clattering up the staircase, and then the noise was gone and the silence in the corridor became complete.

  Hamlet’s mental map had changed year by year. As he and Horatio had reached ten, eleven, twelve, the map increased in size, at the same time as it incorporated new landmarks. Now it extended to the farmlands, the forest, the villages. And within the castle it was no longer defined by his mother’s suite of rooms, or the corner of the kitchen where the kind cook kept biscuits, or the sheltered courtyard where his nurse had taken him to play.

  When he moved bedrooms at fourteen, the tower room became the center of his map, and three important lines ran from it. One went down the staircase with the shiny handrail, which he slid down every day, then down a narrow, darker set of steps that led to a small back door. This gave the quickest exit from the castle.

  The second line wound its way to the southern wing, where old Polonius lived with his faithful son, Laertes, and his feckless daughter, Ophelia.

  The third was the line of routine, the daily route of breakfast room, schoolroom, dueling hall, dining hall, art room, a route that most days the young prince followed with little thought.