Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  She sits and her black coat turns white with snow. The night that surrounds her turns white as her brain is deprived of oxygen; she has stopped troubling to breathe. She has entered a waking REM state in which she will live out whatever time is left to her.

  Bearing this in mind, she takes a match from the box and places it between her molars on the right side of her mouth and then takes another and attempts to light it. It is wet and should not light, but it goes alight regardless – phosphorus is a marvellous element, particularly in a dream. It can be induced to do anything, light-bringer, and no slight dampness will put it off, but it is not hot, or at least not hot enough. She cups it in her hands and attempts to receive warmth from it sufficient to save her life. It dwindles even as the matchstick blackens. She crunches down hard and lets the bitterness of the other match head slick in the back of her mouth. She lets the saliva carry it across the back of her tongue, down her throat, and grinds the rest in splinters. She fills her mouth, her sinuses, her oesophagus with the flavour of phosphorous, and pricks iron blood from her ears, from the Eustachian tube, where the splinters pierce.

  She takes two more matches since the first two didn’t warm her and the one she lights she takes to warm her lips and before her eyes it becomes a sparkler. Iron filings are spooned into the flame of a Bunsen burner, the appearance of molten metal, all the light of it but none of the heat, sparks hitting her lips, hitting her cheeks, but even these bear no heat. The burning is restricted to the metal from which the sparks jump, and which scars the fingers if one grabs it, leaves white lines in the black dirt, and which should be discarded directly onto the wet ground once it has burned out, or handled with gloves, although not wool or cotton, the fibres of which will catch.

  As it dies it blurs, and the third match, once lit, it is a Christmas tree, blurred and haloed, around which gifts are traditionally left for children to discover in the morning with the cheerful lie that there is a man who will provide presents in the expectation of absolutely nothing. Perhaps sherry, perhaps a mince pie. Carrots for his reindeer. He will not bear down on you amidst the wrapping paper and scrape your neck with his stubble and hurriedly rearrange his dressing gown at the sound of creaking footsteps on the stairs. He will not take on the appearance of someone who expects a little favour, to say thank you on this festive morning, and you’ve done it before so you know what to do.

  And you are grateful, although not to him, that there is a Father Christmas. The proof is in the brilliant toys he leaves and not in the taste left of sherry.

  God knows it’s possible to ignore those things, isn’t it?

  Become someone for whom those things did not happen. Thank God for that transformation.

  The match flame transforms again, into a shape prompted by the dissolution into formlessness of a Christmas tree, its colour remaining, its dimensions, the proportions one might recognise when the glasses are removed, but not the tree anymore. It’s not Christmas anymore, even as you reach for it. It is that bleak night time between Christmas Day and Boxing Day where the effort that has been made to act proper in front of relatives has been relieved once they are gone, or asleep, and that relief has to be experienced somehow in the bear, and the bare, and the new teddy bear, and in the bearing down.

  She sleeps through it, dies through it, lying in the snow. Cheek to the pillow, head amongst the matchboxes, hair amongst the matches, splinters in the corner of her mouth, slivers in the jaw, shiverless in the cold.

  When she wakes it is to another world entirely, another place, another self, a wall of blackness, but warm in the absence of snow. She dances her limbs free of stiffness and comes to a wall of hanging silk, white again, but the whiteness acceptable now. She parts the silk sheets like ghosts, running open-armed into them, dissolving them in her eagerness.

  She falls into a toy shop and she is herself the size of a toy, so that a ball is huge to her, and boxed dolls are approximately equal to her in height. They are terribly severe, at this scale, very stern of face and proud of their beauty in a way which excludes the possibility that she possesses any of her own. This arrogance is acceptable when it is worn by someone twelve inches high and made of porcelain, but in a full-sized being who, she presumes, is of the same existential order she is, it is a little intimidating. It is enervating, and to make it worse there are two of them (and who knows how many more in the store room) and they can affirm their own beauty to each other at her expense, leaving her without anyone to affirm her in opposition to them.

  Regardless, they are beautiful, and this world is beautiful, and perhaps a small place, cowed, in a world like this would be a beautiful thing to have.

  Their dresses are white silk, hemmed in black.

  There is a ballerina here, also, skewered through the coccyx on a spike, dancing around her impalement as if it were not there, as if it had never happened. The burning and tearing are borne in good spirits, which is possible, thank God, for her, since otherwise a wound of that kind would be fatal. It may even be that this wounding is the thing that allows her to be the beautiful thing that she is, because can a girl spin endlessly and dance so committedly a single dance to a single tune for all her days if she doesn’t bear that wound? Would an unwounded girl have the discipline over the self that the bearing of such wounds requires necessary to ignore the pain that occupations such as ‘ballerina’ demand of the child?

  It is just an idea, one of many that runs through the mind of a frozen match girl as she dies and her soul finds ways to make sense of the bitter little life she has been given.

  And here is the spinning bear.

  And here is the policeman, reborn as a jack-in-the-box.

  And here is another doll, beautiful again, barely applying powder to her cheeks, the rotation of her shoulder scarcely enough to bring the powder puff in contact with the wooden skin. When she combs her hair there are only three teeth to the comb and her hair is a single undifferentiated mass which would not accept a comb, or a brush. Her ministrations to herself have the desired effect, though, for she is undoubtedly beautiful, though the girl wonders if she could save herself the effort and still remain as beautiful.

  There is a spinning top, erratic and persistent, striped and coloured when still, but flickering and indistinct once put into motion. The speed at which it rotates is barely comprehensible; there is no landmark that the eye can find, no spot on which eyes can fixate. If there is, it is beyond the discrimination of the eyes of a dead girl – instead everything is a drunken blur distilled into a single object.

  If one attempts to grab it, it races off in an unpredictable direction at the merest touch of a fingertip. No doubt someone of enormous acuity of vision could see enough to pick out the angles of the objects that interfere with the spinning and, with rough calculations made on the back of a beer mat, could determine where it would go next, but there is no such person in this world. Nor is there any calculus, nor vectors, nor science. There are only the vague incoherencies that mark the longings of a young girl. It is enough for her that this thing exists in whatever state it exists in, and whether it sublimates between one state and a higher state is a matter for her God, and it is yet to be determined who that God is, or what his intentions are.

  She stares at the spinning top, imagines the ballerina spinning, then the carousel, then the ball and bear. Into this shop window, this Santa’s grotto, comes a train, comes Father Christmas and his sleigh, comes a wall of skulls and a wooden duck. It is a parade of grotesques which are also neither one thing nor another; they are both childish and fevered, bearing the marks of her innocence and also a febrile anxiety that all is not what it seems. There is the pernicious edge that all pleasurable things take on in the understanding that they may be the outliers of experiences that will tend to be much worse. They are merely introductions, first acts for crimes against the person. In short, they are bait to which the girl is drawn in the hope that she will reach a hand out for them. Then her wrist will be grabbed and, when their functi
on is fulfilled, they will be withdrawn, only to be returned post factum as a means of denying there was ever anything terrible committed – see, the world is a wonderful place after all, just the place for children, and if these pretty things exist nothing can be as bad as you are making out can it? And stop your crying, I’m not all bad. And stop your crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about, you ungrateful little so-and-so, you’re ruining Christmas.

  Then there is the drumming and drilling of soldiers – wooden little men who are utterly incapable of atrocities by virtue of their size, and hence are the perfect presents for children. They contain both the idea of death and murder, but also the shininess of brass and miniaturisation, so that the child can feel herself both a part of a world in which these things are done, in her name, for her good, but also be in control of those things. Then later, after the lights are out, or when under the threat of an invading army, those things that happen will be seen to be in the normal run of things. This understanding will induce in her a confused paralysis that may be misconstrued as acquiescence, even when the perpetrators know that it is not.

  Drumming and drilling and bayonets, fusiliers rigidly addressing themselves to their flutes, the music of battle, too high-pitched to evoke fear, but laying the tracks in the mind, in the self, in the behaviours that will eventually allow an army, friendly or unfriendly, to reap the benefit as they move in across France and she is confined to her bed, strapped down in the absence of her guardians.

  These soldiers circle like a carousel, too quickly to distinguish one from the other, like the blocks of colour on a spinning top, too quickly for the eyes, and they present arms to whom we also cannot see, because these soldiers block our line of sight, or perhaps it is the fog of war. She cannot tell to whom these soldiers answer – Napoleon, probably, or to Alexander of Macedon. Or to someone else who is only a name in a book, but by virtue of the typesetter troubling to arrange the letters in such a way that they spell out his name he is enshrined in the history of all things that happen and will happen.

  He is someone worthy of having arms addressed to him.

  They wear the conical hats of dunces, but inverted in shape and colour, perched so the point must exist somewhere within the frontal lobe, lobotomising these men so that they will be able to do the things Napoleon asks of them without question. The tip of the hat embeds where the facility for ethical action was once located. It lodges where the understanding that we must answer, first and foremost to those around us and use our own discretion in matters of violence is. We should not simply do that which our betters order us to do, but these helmets are proof against that fact, that collection of neurons. You can see in their blank expressions that this is the case, and so who knows what these soldiers will do when ordered – absolutely anything.

  And here is a bear drinking sherry on Christmas day after Mother has retired with a migraine.

  And here is a rabbit emerging from a hat.

  And here is an individual soldier, this one with a floppy cap and brass buttons carrying a curved sword. Is he different then, this one? His cap is impossible to use as a lobotomiser, his sword has succumbed to some influence that reduces its straightness, some eastern element perhaps. If the orient and occident are so opposite, as the war suggests they must be, is this influence away from the absence of empathy and towards love? Not too much to render him impotent, but enough to curve his sword?

  Now he offers her his hand, touches her hand, and certainly he does not ask permission, but neither does he grab her by the wrist and pull. Nor is this initial touch merely the prelude to violence; he seems to offer her the choice – would you like to come with me? And as a soldier this choice-offering is already significant. If he wished to make use of her, he need only do so.

  No trickery is required.

  Unless he is of that class of men who can only receive pleasure in the knowledge that psychological pain is suffered by the partner in the activity. Such men offer something good, only to snatch it away. They promise respite, only to go at it harder, hammer and tongs, with glee in their eye and spittle on their lower lip where the hair grows.

  Not this soldier though, and when she allows the touch there is the spontaneous generation of triangular hills, formless sheep, and hunger where previously there had been only the spiritual functions remaining to the dead girl. Hunger is a kind of hope to her, a hope that the death and passage into a realm where earthly matters are irrelevant is not irreversible. Instead, here is the need for food, which only a live girl feels. Here are sweetmeats, and wine and roast turkey, and all the things that soldiers feast on after battle and that are provided for the common weal on feast days. Here are crackers and party hats and thimbles, and jokes that raise only weak smiles and groans, but which nonetheless distract people from the satisfaction of their unholy desires at least long enough for some minor sense of relief to settle in the bones of children, even if this works against them in the end, when it is all overturned again.

  And, indeed, here comes an end to the fun before it is even begun. A spoilsport makes himself appear in the shop, amongst the toys. He is raven-limp, washboard-chested, diamond-legged, helmeted, skull-bearing, and the knife she has taken in order to carve for herself turkey, or ham, or a piece of pudding, this he objects to.

  —Put down the knife.

  He says this and then:

  —I am death.

  And we see where this has been going all along, and should we be surprised?

  It may well be that the reverie at the end of life takes the desires of the victim as its theme, but which god would control it if not Death?

  Should the living God control it? Of course not.

  God’s remit, if he can be said to claim one, is life, eternal and fleeting, and the monitoring of the events of it. Death he delegates to a secondary figure, and of course it would be he that oversaw the air-starved delusions suffered by dying children as they freeze. The movement of events will be towards his introduction. The story of the dream mimics that of life itself. All events lead, some more and some less causally, towards the end point at which life ends.

  And so it proves, since feathered Death leers close now to the girl, unhindered by the soldier, of whom Death has no fear. Death has seen him on the battlefield and knows him and understands that this soldier cannot bring death to Death, unless it only be the death of others. In this he is a colleague, a compatriot, a partisan for Death’s cause, which is to bring an end to all things.

  All toys die, all carousels cease, soldiers are killed in action, and they go into the sky and dwell there for eternity, and it is to the sky that the spoilsport chases the girl, the soldier vouchsafing for her, despite that being a promise he is ill-equipped to keep.

  They take horses, one for the two of them, and one for the spoilsport. Here the two (the lovers?) will always be at a disadvantage against the spoilsport: they are burdened by each other, by the sense of attachment and of love, where he need only think of himself, and the execution of his work. Death’s unburdened horse is not handicapped by the weight of their togetherness, and Death loves his horse and cossets it, whereas the lovers are too concerned with the safety of each other to pay the horse the attention it deserves. They already impose on its good nature by both riding on its single back. Death can afford to let the horse run at its leisure, but the lovers must spur the horse forward if they hope to escape, to force it to run past its inbuilt tolerances and against its specifications. Thus, in love, there is a cruelty that is not present in the spiteless prosecution of the death wish, which may only be seen to be cruel from a distance, the picture close to being one of indifference at worst.

  There is no practical way for a horse to remain in the clouds, let alone for it to be ridden there – the horse is naturally a creature of the plains and is not, by any stretch of taxonomical law, a bird or flying mammal, unless it be a mythological creature such as a Pegasus, or the winged ox of St Luke, or the winged bull of Gilgamesh, or a harpy, or some o
ther fictional invention. So the presence of these horses in the skies can only be a function of oxygen deprivation, yet there they are, for this girl. The water vapour that obscures one’s vision through the glass in the windows of a shop or bar is here sufficient to facilitate an attempt to escape the inevitability of death: it becomes solid clouds.

  The fact remains, though, that all games must cease. There is in the universe an inbuilt tendency for spoilsports to end a child’s games, and force them back to the world that is, rather than the one they might wish for.

  Yet that is not to say she should not fight for her wishes. This the soldier does on her behalf, that being within the skill set of his profession. Though it might seem contradictory for him to raise his sword against Death, for whom he has always been a faithful servant, he does so in his love for the girl.

  Impromptu that love seems, and so utterly selfless it can only be the fancy of a child whose experience of men has always been that they are utterly selfish and indifferent to her pleasure or suffering. It is not entirely convincing, even to the girl, and perhaps that is why she falls, suddenly sensing the phantastic provenance of his actions, and the scenario he is reacting to. It is enough to distract her anyway from the very difficult business of remaining on a horse that flies through the clouds. Its gait is no doubt affected by the lack of solid footing. It tires. It has been ill-treated. It is, perhaps, not the easiest creature to ride.

  She falls. Even in a world like this there can only be one outcome of a fall from this height, or what purpose is there of being high, if it does not entail death for one who comes suddenly from high to low and meets the ground?

  Once dead, Death gathers her up, and to be doubly dead like this – dead in the snow and dead in one’s own experience of the processes of death, is to be dead indeed, since there is no place to go except on to the realm of the dead. If she were hoping for an Egyptian afterlife, or an Assyrian afterlife, or a Greek afterlife, as the iconography of her reverie might suggest, she does not find it. Instead there is a green hill far away without a city wall, where our dear child is represented to us by a crucifix.