by Polly Hall
“Poochie! Virgil! Come here this minute.” Penny was after him like a shot, her arms outstretched.
But Virgil had reached the swoodle and stood growling in front of its glass case. He pawed at the glass and the swan’s heads nodded in unison. I was reminded of Valentine’s Day when you had presented it to me in your workshop; they’d been bobbing in rhythm back then, too.
“He’s not normally like this,” Penny stooped to pick him up but he turned on her and snarled. “That’s enough,” she said firmly and held his muzzle with one hand and lifted him with the other, teetering on her heels and sweeping out of the lounge. I followed her and shut the door.
“Apologies for that intrusion. I don’t know what’s got into him. Don’t forget to tell Henry I need him.” And she was gone, but her scent remained in the house for ages afterwards. I had to open the windows before it gave me another of my headaches.
Penny was one of those people who seemed to rule the village in a matriarchal capacity. She had power from knowing almost everyone’s business before they even knew it. She was a voracious committee member: Women’s Guild, the Flower Arranging Club, Harvest Festival Committee, Crafting for Couples, Baking for Beginners, Book Group—you name it, she was in it or on it, or had been at some time in the past. I admired her boundless energy but also wondered when she stopped to consider the purpose of all her involvements. She just loved being busy. You did, too. Why did you have to be busy together?
The rain started pattering again. I could still hear the ghost of Parker whimpering from the curls of his fur patched onto the swoodle. Now I knew I was not the only one to sense something unnatural and sinister in those stuffed creatures. The echoes of Virgil snarling and pawing at the case compelled me to act. I needed to help them, or I’d never get any peace.
Back in the lounge I faced the swoodle and lifted off the lid of the case. When I reached forward to touch the fur, I felt the familiar pulsing at my temples and breathed deeply, hoping it would subside. The heart shape had been sewn so neatly there was hardly a seam but I probed my fingers to the edge where it met the feathers and pulled at the soft, white dog fur. It resisted and the swoodle’s whole frame shifted, the swan’s heads rocked together as if kissing. I eased my other hand into the case to steady it by holding one of the swan’s necks and continued to increase my pressure and tighten my grip on the poodle fur. I needed to remove that part and return it to Parker’s original taxidermied body—which was now stationed somewhere in Penny’s house. Only I had no idea how I could get it there unnoticed. The thought of removing the fur was all I could put into action at that stage.
Your stitching was strong, I’ll admit that, and you had used some strong adhesive to fix it to the mount. I looked around the room, trying to scan for a sharp tool or some scissors. My nails were not strong enough to pull it free; your hold was that powerful. I found an old letter opener among the litter of newspapers and envelopes on the coffee table and jabbed it under the fur to lever it up and away from the mount. A corner came free as the stitches gave a little so I could see the thread. I picked at it with my fingers and even tried to lean in and bite through the thread like a seamstress or a dressmaker might. But I couldn’t fit my head and arms into the case. I know this sounds crazy and you must be wondering why I would go to such extremes instead of just telling you how it was affecting me, but the truth was I wanted to beat this. I wanted to prove to myself that it was all in my head and if I removed the fur, and it still affected me, I would know it was not your creations that were the problem. I would need to face facts and ask for help.
As I tugged and strained to remove the fur, I realized I could not do it without damaging your artwork, so I sat back, a little breathless from my exertions. What was I doing, destroying something you had taken time and effort to create? A loving gift, a unique creation. For me. I had no right to destroy something just because I felt it was existentially wrong. I had planted the seeds when I insisted you branch out like Felix. Who was I to change my mind and expect you to change yours, too? You were my one constant in this changeable world, and I needed to hang on to you. Everything else seemed to crumble or disappear. I smoothed Parker’s fur back over the swoodle’s body and re-positioned it in its case, replaced the lid and walked away.
I reluctantly told you about Penny’s visit. “You’re far too busy to get involved,” I said, knowing that you had a backlog of work to complete. It seemed to be never-ending, especially since the exhibition. I wasn’t complaining. It was good money, but we seemed to be letting it take over our lives. I sometimes wished I’d never said anything to you, never given you the idea to tinker with your tried and tested methods. You were not inundated before, but you had a steady flow of trophies to mount for your regulars who’d been out hunting. The freezers were bursting full of specimens waiting to be dissected and mounted.
In summer, the Levels are a moveable feast, eat or be eaten, where close up the cruel survival of the fittest reigns above and below the water line. Is there a more natural way to live? Those creatures knew the order of life; they had their place within it and acceptance was key in the instinctive flow and order of prey and predator. It was the old story of bird and worm, pike and stickleback, otter and trout. You knew which one would capture the other in its jaws. I wasn’t so sure. The hunters brought you deer heads to stuff and mount. I will remind you, the deer seemed to say, of what you have taken, yet I will outlive you.
I had let my hair grow wild under my armpits and on my legs. My ankles and calves were scratched from walking along the hedgerows, and my feet were stained and hardened by the mud. You still indulged in my body the way you always had, filling every part of me with every part of you. Whatever the time of day or night, you would satiate your desire in short, sharp bursts of passion. But instead of feeling liberated, I felt empty and hungry most of the time.
We were driving home and stopped at the traffic lights in town. Three magpies hopped by the side of the road, pica pica, flashing their metallic blue-black wings, like men dressed up in evening suits. “We live and die,” they said. “You are not meant to enter our world.” That was when I vomited into my hands and you had to pull over so I could slop it onto the verge. You handed me tissues to mop up the splatters. Everything seemed bright and hysterical after that. I could hear the voices much more clearly then. The crabbit and swoodle had missed me, I could tell by their excited tones. I was the only one to listen to them after all.
“Perhaps it was something you ate,” you said as you prepared me a bedtime drink.
Perhaps it was, but I knew the only way to fix these symptoms was to release those souls. I waited for you to go to bed and I took a pair of sharp scissors and a knife to cut Parker’s fur from the swoodle. It became my mission to release those damned souls. Was there another path I could’ve taken? Was I left with any other choice?
On the days I used to watch you work, I admired you stitch the skin of a roebuck onto its mount—a measured piercing with the point of your needle and a long withdrawal of thread high up in the air like a seamstress darning clothes. You gave it an affirmative tug to tighten the pieces of hide together in an invisible seam where the fur tufted up and concealed the join. All the while, you intently gazed at your creation, concentrating on the detail, turning it this way and that, observing its form and dimensions. You resurrected it so it would be recognized as in the wild. A miracle.
The blackbird, robin and woodpigeon were starting up the morning chorus. A song thrush joined in and the volume grew. Each day our alarm call rang out from the trees and hedgerows, a wake-up siren. The cockerel’s long call cut across the morning like a butter knife.
My parents have been dead for more years than the years they knew me. When I add up the time in numbers it clarifies how slippery it is; how the minutes, hours, days, months, and years are like soap on our skin, easily washed away. In all that time, my memories are worn thin like a threadbare blanket. Some are so lacy that they have become see-through and
unreliable. A strand of visual here, a cord of conversation there, like cobwebs revealed by the morning dew.
But it shifts and floats away like the memory itself. It is personal. Senses are in the moment; you might be able to capture the essence of a perfume, its smell or taste, like one of those scratch-and-sniff stickers I used to collect and attach to my tin pencil case. But they still smelled fake; they were a poor replica of the original. I even had a sticker that was supposed to smell of gravy, colored brown, a spilled gravy stain, but all it smelt like was furry paper and yesterday’s rubbish. The strawberry sticker smelt too sweet, a synthetic red drawing of a strawberry with a spiky green hull. Even in their gaudy reality, these were just ghosts of smells. But you can’t properly express scent in drawings or in sculpture. You can’t act it out or deliver it on a stage. You can’t replicate it in pictures or in visual form. It is only implied on the faces of the perceiver. You can describe it and speak about it: acrid smoke, tarry, choking, black and billowing, dense and putrid, strong and sweet or meaty like a piece of barbequed pork.
But a memory of what you have witnessed can never be undone. It is etched onto your mind in a way that transports you back to when it happened. It can creep up like a stalker and shoot you back to that moment.
The day my parents died is still in vivid technicolor, a piece of moving art. Rhett’s green t-shirt and black shorts, my pink dress with the white polka dots, Mother and Father’s blue car, the fireman’s yellow helmet. All these things could have been in one of my story books or re-drawn in outline in a coloring book for me to fill in with chunky wax crayons; the pink line like someone tried to strike a giant match down my leg; the dark red of the blood on the dog’s jaw as he lay on his side in the green grass.
I watched as you inserted the glass eyes on to the mount.
“You need the correct eye, or the rest just won’t look right at all,” you said. “An alligator has thin vertical pupils, like a downward slit; a deer has a large black horizontal pupil—he is the prey, ever-cautious of his predator, so he needs to see around his body.” You swiveled the eye left and right. “The eyes of the predators are branded with a round pupil so they can focus directly on their target. The wrong eye could mean the wrong creature.”
I knew what you meant. Rhett had a phase of wearing fashion contact lenses to make his eyes look like those of a cat; they were like emeralds with an elongated pupil. It made him look like a lagoon creature. Did he think by changing his appearance he could alter the way he viewed the world?
Glass eyes were never meant to be functional. But doesn’t it make you wonder how difficult to preserve are the parts we most value? The outer parts—the skin, fur, feathers, claws, teeth and bones—were what you worked with, discarding the rest. Yet the skeletons were not used, just the skulls of stags sometimes boiled in peroxide to clean the flesh away to display impressive antlers.
I thought of the relics I had seen in an old Greek church once: the finger of a saint, complete with gnarled fingernail, positioned on a velvet cushion in a glass case so visitors and worshippers could parade past and gaze upon it. It had been removed from its owner, long dead, but even so, those pilgrims still sought tangible proof. They needed to see the miracle with their own eyes.
You turned the glass eye around in your fingers and polished it with a small cloth so it gleamed. I half expected you to roll it on its edge across the floor like a boy playing marbles and recalled a school friend saying how she opened the drawer in her grandfather’s bureau while looking for chocolate, and his glass eye rolled toward her. I always wondered if her grandfather had placed it there on purpose to teach her a lesson or just stored it in a space where he knew it would not be lost. The eye would slip and move about his eye socket, she said, and sometimes he would not even know that his own eye had turned the wrong way; instead of facing the world, the fake pupil observed the inside of his head. The white of the glass stared at her like a zombie.
The eyes you used were fixed in place, concave, yet they looked as if they might blink or flicker with consciousness at any moment. You stood back, and the creature was complete. It had been born again and opened its new eyes to a new world. A world where nothing was as it seemed. But its destiny would outlive us. Some exhibits housed in museum collections were older than the lifespan of humans or animals. They were immortal, and their afterlives were played out by their longevity and the shuffling spectators that viewed them. A celebrity gorilla who lived most of his life at a zoo was preserved and stationed in a nearby museum, now a static resident of another institution. There were specimens collected by the Victorian explorers who extensively shot, trapped and skinned endless species for research and curiosity. Stately homes adorned their walls with rhino and elk, bears and beavers. Objects were made out of animal hides and bones and horns. It was a ransacking that allowed species to live ironically past their extinction.
I faced the mirror on the antique dressing table in our bedroom and studied my face. When I first met you, I was slim, not thin, but now I was actually bony. My cheeks had sunk and, although I wasn’t old, I could see the beginnings of gravity taking its toll. There were dark rings under my eyes, from the headaches I guessed, and my eyebrows had grown thick where I had not plucked them for many months. My hair was wild and long but not unclean. It stretched down past my waist. When I was about twelve, I left my hair to grow and grow until I could sit on it, stretching it taut between the back of my head and my bottom like a frozen waterfall.
My eyelashes were pale but long and, as I leaned in closer to the mirror, I realized how hairy my face actually was. On my cheeks and lips a fine furry down like that of a baby animal was growing. Just inside my lips was a slightly paler color, a fleshy pink that matched the color to the entrance of my vagina. The pores on my nose reminded me of the skin of a pear. And lines on my forehead I had not noticed before had appeared like the ridges left on sand by the moving tide. It was more pronounced when I lifted my eyes in puzzlement.
I studied my eyes and thought of the glass ones you handled. Mine were shiny, as if they could conjure up a tear and let it drip down my cheek with no effort. There were tiny bloodshot capillaries, more so in my left than my right eye, and it added to my tired look. My pupils contracted and expanded as I moved closer to the mirror, like a camera’s aperture controlling the light.
Around the rim of my iris was a dark black that complemented the hazel. It reminded me of oak trees when they are felled, not only in concentric circles but in the lines radiating out from the center as if reaching for something unspoken, something unseen. I realized as I studied myself so intently, that I was holding my breath.
“Scarlett?” Your gruff voice from downstairs tore the hazy veil that surrounded me. I went to find you. “Scarlett?”
“What is it?” I called as I came down the stairs.
You held something small and square between finger and thumb. A piece of animal hide pressed flat. Giraffe markings.
“You tell me.” There was a hint of accusation in your tone.
“Henry? Why are you so mad?”
You thrust the furry square toward me and I took it. I knew immediately what it was. I saw that flamboyant pyrographed name on the back and choked back my reply.
“How?—I mean? Why are you giving me this?”
“You’ve been with him, haven’t you?”
“I—I don’t know—” Your rage met me head on.
“Answer me, Scarlett!”
“I met him at the exhibition. That’s all.” The sweet scent of patchouli. His breath like a cool breeze on my neck. His fingers brushing against mine as he passed me his business card. I could be your Rhett, y’know.
“So, he’s not pestering you?”
“Henry, why are you so jealous?” Cherries dangling before my welcoming lips.
“I don’t want you having anything to do with that—man!”
You had no need to be angry with me. I had already decided. I was devoted to you and you only. You pul
led me close and buried your face in my hair, breathing heavily and clutching me so I thought I’d never be released.
“You are mine, Scarlett.” You softened a little as I tried to remain still in your embrace, afraid that any movement would break the spell, and me, in half.
I had forgotten about putting Felix’s card in the pocket of your coat. We had been so busy when we returned that I didn’t think to retrieve it. But I was startled by your reaction. Perhaps I had been talking in my sleep. Felix’s presence was as potent as the creatures, always in the back of my mind.
Later that evening, we sat outside until the sun had sunk low behind the hedge and midges were biting my ankles. That was a rare balmy evening in a summer of showers and lower-than-average temperatures. I can’t remember when I last bared my arms and legs outside. I wanted to curl up on the sofa with you beneath me, my man-sized cushion, so we retired to the lounge and fell asleep together, my head resting on your chest, listening to the thud-thud of your heartbeat.
I closed my eyes to dream but all I saw were colors dancing on a knife edge and Felix winking at me.
Christmas Day—Today
Around 2 p.m.
All I ever need is here and now. I have you, and you have me. It is as if the land has weaved a magic spell and kept us bound together.
Some mistletoe berries drop to the floor like fallen kisses. The holly and ivy weave their healing shapes around the hearth, protecting us from demons and ghosts.
The clock strikes two and I become more aware of how empty this house is. We have no guests. Penny has not even phoned. No one has. The fire dies down while you doze after our Christmas lunch. Then I remember the flooded village is empty too. But still no sign of Rhett? It is past lunchtime and I vaguely remember him saying he would join me this year for Christmas.
