by Deborah Levy
‘I don’t dream. I fuck and hit the pillow and sleep as if I’ve died. Under my bathrobe I am covered in bruises. My lovers and I trace each other’s scars with fingers that touch the keyboard and make a volcano anywhere in the world we want to destroy, we like to abuse and use each other, it keeps us on our toes. I hate them and they hate me, this is our liberation. Yesterday I dug my nails into the flesh of a young dealer from Berlin, he came in the back seat of his Golf GTI, sperm and cocaine all over his seat covers, testimony to our wild afternoon in the maze of an underground car park, impaled on each other in fumes and brief ecstasy – yes, we have planes to catch and our pilots are waiting for us. Last week I fucked a computer millionaire, a high-flying technical whizzo; he programmed me and I flew until we both crashed into the leather of his swivel chair, screaming. We are exhausted, wide awake, berserk, invincible. And we, Lapinski, have won the moral freedom to wound. We dabble our bodies and minds and energy and money in the soils and lakes and seas and mountains of the world. We own the world.’
The bottle of sweet sherry bobs up and down on the water near where The Innocents are sharing a packet of crisps. She spreads her long white fingernails, fingers taut so they look like claws. They watch a Mercedes speed past them, and at that moment the girl thinks she can see twenty red parrots, wings on fire, fly into the sun, and the boy thinks he can see a rhino poke its horn through the moon.
The Banker pulls into a petrol station. She is electric, possessed. The taste of the salmon is still in her mouth; she spits, opens a Diet Pepsi, eats chocolate, smokes a cigarette, gargles with the Pepsi. She says, ‘Fuckwit fuckwit fuckwit . . .’ Her dress sticks to her body; she seems to be sweating and shivering at the same time. The garage attendant rubs his eyes. With her American Express card she buys a hundred gallons of petrol, which she demands be loaded into her car, the boot, the back and front seat, and on the roof. He does this for her in a daze. She crashes the car into a wall, buckling the front of the Mercedes, starts it again, her hands covered in blood and glass from the shattered windscreen. This time she crashes past the barrier in the zoo car park.
When my hand got mashed in the meat machine, all I remember is the panic in the women’s eyes as they bent over me. And then the Alsatians began to bark. Dizzy and dripping I thought perhaps I am a late-twentieth-century saint after all? Saint Martha of the Frozen Hamburger. What is described as an Industrial Accident is my left hand guillotined somewhere below the wrist and minced with British beef. This means a whole batch of hamburgers will consist of me. Customers will buy my flesh in a sesame bun with pickle. They will sit in buses and not even know that we have all started to eat each other.
I am not in pain. My arm is in plaster. My friends take it in turn to brush my hair. Every time my father sees me his eyes fill and he has to leave the room. I used to paint my fingernails orange – they looked like a shoal of tropical fish. I am losing parts of my self. Literally. If you have hands you might as well do something intelligent or gentle with them. When I was a girl I liked to hold the baby frogs that jumped from the pond on to my wrist, but I never kissed one to turn it into a prince and I never made a wish in case my wish did not come true. I wish I had made a wish. That is my wish.
The jagged lifeline I stared at so often in the palm of my hand is gone, so I will have to invent a tale without it. I predict a wonderful future for us all. You will meet the love of your life on a bridge in July, your children will be healthy and happy and never have to beg on trains in January, there will always be enough rain to water the crops in August, bees will never become extinct in April, libraries will be open twenty-four hours in May, no one will drill for oil under your house in November and everyone will be educated in February. That leaves March, June, September, October, December for other stuff to happen.
A rope is being strung from two telegraph poles above the zoo. First it is slack and then it gets tighter. Two ladders sway against the hour before dawn. The Anorexic Anarchist looks down. She is starving and her lips are parched. She tests the rope with her toe. The Banker opens the boot of her car. She carries two of the petrol cans into the zoo, runs back to the car, takes out another two, does this again and again until they are spread out like metal corpses on the turf; the spikes of her heels sink into the mud but she does not take them off, she just keeps running to the car and back again, the beating of her heart a small earthquake that shakes early-morning London. The llama and Freddie sleep on. When Freddie wakes up he sees The Banker in her charcoal silk and stilettos carrying petrol cans and piercing them with a car aeriel. Her hands are bleeding. He rubs his eyes.
The monkeys begin to shriek, gathering their children, calling out to other animals, burying their heads under their arms, nuzzling and nudging against each other; the gibbons make loud whooping calls that echo through the city, into nightclubs and cinemas and traffic jams; the call is 65 million years old, it slithers under the foundations of buildings and rests there, it is answered in the dense forests of the gibbons’ origin, it breaks the windows of the local police station.
Twenty policemen put on their boots, jump into a van, and head for a well-known pub where they think ‘the trouble’ comes from; they want to smash the sound with truncheons. The van smells of frightened animals, fists, rubber, uniforms and peppermints. The Banker disappears into the aquarium trailing blood from her cut hands, into the aviary and reptile house. Freddie discovers he has an erection as he watches her pour petrol through the bars of cages, splash it through every gap she can find, he watches her run for what seems like miles, in circles and zigzags, a silver streak of fury and sweat and . . . roses . . . and a will whose pulse beats harder than the elephants’ stamping feet as they lift up their trunks (at the same time the policemen lift up their truncheons) and bellow (just as three young boys hit in the stomach bellow), ears spread out to the sky. The panda who has fathered twins in Madrid and Washington spits out bamboo, thumps his own belly and tries to die. He watches the giraffe become a tower of flames and collapse into itself, ankles broken, tongue hanging out, the seven bones of its neck bowing down, one by one, curving into the earth. The folds of the elephants’ skin crumple as the rings of time within it burn; some roll on their backs in the mud to put out the flames; one sits in a pool of water. The lion sees the strange sight of fire over water and roars into the dream he once had, under the acacia tree. As the flames grow and animals butt their heads against walls and bars and each other, the zoo becomes a museum of murmuring lit up by a thousand eyes, and in them Freddie can see himself; he is so aroused he can hardly stand up. Birds spread their wings of fire and try to fly but there is nowhere to fly to; they die in a ball of flames in mid-air, colliding into each other, scattering feathers and seeds. The rhinoceros from Java also attempts to fly; he digs his horn into the earth so that his body is in the air for one miraculous second until the horn breaks and he becomes a putrid hulk, a smouldering monster pointing its broken ivory stub at an invisible moon. The Banker’s fingers are hot and articulate, her eyes water but she does not fumble or flinch or lose her balance; she sets fire to the litter bins as if she has been rehearsing for this all her life. She looks around her. There is nothing left of the chief gorilla except his liver which lies burning on the floor of the cage like some joke sacrifice to a wayward god. The one kangaroo that manages to jump out of her allotment runs straight into the litter bin where she falls, whimpering amongst soft drink cans and chocolate wrappers. Many of the animals are unconscious from the smell of petrol and burning flesh alone. In the aquarium the tanks shatter and fish who took so many years to fly (unlike the heavy ostrich who tried to take off in one moment of panic and broke its wings) by developing the habit of jumping to enlarge their fins, now jump straight into the flames. The eels, which when old and sexually mature grow darker, the small fish hibernating at the bottom of the tanks, all fall into the fire, a cluster of tiny scaly stars; the sting-rays spew out poison and writhe in flames that burn purple and black, the silvery-brown spott
ed piranha sizzles in its own oil, the fish with eggs in their mouths drop them into the flames. Outside, the last of the elephants rolls on his back, legs in the air.
The llama desperately tries to turn herself into water. She becomes earth, sawdust, stones, but this is not enough to put out the fire inside The Banker; her desire is to destroy and it is hard to break desire. No matter how hard she tries, the llama cannot do it.
She becomes The Poet. Her black boots are covered in ash, her hair singed. She watches the leopards standing on their hind legs clawing at the sky, absorbs the image and tries to reshape it. She changes herself into contempt, remorse, love – and finally salt.
Freddie stares at The Banker. She is vomiting over her stilettos. He stands up and walks through the flames towards her. As the smell of burning flesh fills his lungs and makes him retch, he spits on his little finger, moistens the blisters on The Banker’s lips, and presses his tongue into the burning furnace of her mouth.
I can smell burning. I’m glad my flat is insured. The sky is on fire. I dreamt I was on fire and fell from the sky into the sea. As the water filled my ears, a voice said ‘You are the Dirty Young Man of Europe,’ and then I realized I was shitting in the sea, it was pouring out of me, gallons of it, and I was screaming ‘SAVE ME,’ the sea turning brown and I was drowning in my own shit. And then a blue marbled whale swam towards me, came to save me, but as it came closer it began to flounder in the stuff coming out of me. I prefer swimming pools. At least you know what’s on the bottom.
Duke is cringing under the chair, whimpering. He did this once before under the bed of a lady I was having my way with and it turned out he could smell a dead budgie – I saw it tucked into a shoe when I dragged him out. I like it better in the car – we’ve fucked through three massacres together, rain, the wipers going backwards, doner kebab and a thousand cigarettes afterwards to set me up for the day to come and the days after that. The sky is thick with smoke. Hitler didn’t get us out – Duke and I are staying put.
Tomorrow is always another day because you can always buy something. To date I own a car phone, microwave, video, calculator that is also a diary/radio, tea maker that is also a radio, bicycle machine, vacuum to get rid of the hairs in my car, shower radio, cassette player that is also a clock/television/radio, compact disc player and recently I bought myself another Ansaphone which is also a clock and a photocopier. When I made the message to leave to callers I got Duke to bark three times by standing on his tail. Days, weeks go by and there are often no messages on the machine – I thought it would change my life, that it would be full of people trying to contact me. Wanting things is like being tortured. You’re open to suggestion and your resistance is low. So the torturer beats you senseless and says, ‘You need gold taps on your bath don’t you?’ and you say yes. And then he says, ‘What you really need is a Cornish pasty up your arse, isn’t that right?’ and you say yes yes I need a Cornish pastry up my arse. I am more needy than I’ve ever been. Am I the torturer or the tortured?
In sleep I find myself in the belly of that blue marbled whale frolicking in the sea . . . and then the whale heaves, begins to vomit me up . . . thrashes about until I am thrown out of the centre of its belly. For ever.
The anorexic anarchist walks above the flames of The Banker’s boredom on her tightrope. A black cat with a pearl collar sits on her shoulder staring at her sister lioness burn below. She takes three steps, her bare feet as slow and as sure as a tortoise; she pauses and breathes deeply; the heat is almost unbearable. Thick coils of smoke circle her head like a halo. On the seventh step she balances herself with her arms, fingers outstretched, dripping with sweat, and says
derangement is the subversion of order
i am deranged
i am starving
i have taken the pain of the world into my self
i have not walked on water but i have walked above fire
She loses her balance, stumbles, adjusts herself with flailing smoke-blackened arms. Her palms are blistered. She takes another three steps, her green hair blowing in the putrid wind.
The Poet stands in her black boots on a mound of ash. Her belly heaves. She staggers out on to the city streets, blinking away the fur in her eyes, itching from the ash that has fallen on discarded washing machines and broken chairs in the gutter, walks for hours in zigzags through the middle of roads and down alleys, she walks and walks, comes to what looks like a bridge of black bone, trips over the sprawled legs of a boy and a girl. The Innocents are sleeping under a blanket that has absorbed the smell of dying animals, their heads resting on a white DIAL A PIZZA BOX. The girl clutches a smaller white box to her breast and in it, neatly arranged, are the ten white fake fingernails, the boy nuzzling into her neck, spiked hair sticky with tea leaves: he is dreaming of Jerusalem, which he pronounces Jar-oos’a-lam, where he finds wild sage growing in the cracks of the wailing wall; he wants to find water to boil and brew the sage to give to the girl who is murmuring softly, sometimes drowned by the trains, ‘No babies . . . I don’t want babies . . . no babies.’
Freddie withdraws his tongue from The Banker’s mouth. He says, ‘I find your fire sexy, Miss.’ Their shoes are sticky with vomit. ‘Why do you find me sexy, son of a bitch?’ She slaps his face and neck and ears. ‘Why Why Why?’ Freddie catches her hands – which are tearing the skin on his face – with his own hands, and squeezes them until the knuckles go white.
‘Because I too want to act on my worst desires, to love my wickedness. I have fought this tendency in myself but now I want to give up the good fight. I want to glory in the truth of my worst nightmares. I want to live on adrenalin and deceit, to pluck the feathers off niceness, to drip scalding wax on my old utopian visions, to stick my fingers up at newly-weds . . . at rosy optimism . . . I want to fuck you in the flames. If the world is your playground I want to play with you; teach me to play. I will be your disciple. I want you to be my teacher, to scold and whip and kiss and suckle me. I want you to offer me a dangerous future. You are the woman I have yearned for all my life. I have found you and do not fear our difference. I have found the hidden jagged edges of myself in you, found forbidden desire in you, found my meanest self in you, in your womanly form . . . and I want you.’
The Banker screws up her eyes, watches the flames throw shadows over the golden contours of his body.’ Come here then. Fuck this top goddess in the flames and I will be your chairwoman.’ She lifts up her torn silk dress and tells him how she wants him to move.
‘I am the first transsexual who’s performed her own operation. I am a man-woman, and you, Freddie . . . I see you have been feminized . . . learnt the language of women I despise. I killed that woman in myself long ago. Drowned it in my husband’s semen, drowned my disgusting neediness in the silicone heart of a machine better than my body. I pay no attention to the moon of blood and backache. I stopped all that long ago. I am totally in control. I have no appetite for love. None at all. I am love’s arsonist, burnt it out of myself, where it was is now a smouldering field full of stubble. I am beautiful and brutal, soft and hard; a myth in a technological age. I have mistressed that age and become its master with my womanly contours, hairless skin, perfect breasts and tears. I woo seduce confuse and legislate . . . SUSTAIN IT BADBOY OR I’LL BREAK YOUR LEGS WITH MY WILL . . . HARDER HARDER HARDER . . . Inside my womanly structure I can achieve what no man can even hope for. I am witch, mother, sister, mistress, maiden, whore, nun, princess. I am raping you with archetypes you yourself invented . . . listen to the peacocks howl like hyenas, who would have thought it of such a pretty bird . . . COME COME YOU BASTARD COME!’
She pulls down her dress and asks Freddie to brush her hair. He walks behind her, tenderly untangling knots, smoothing, caressing, stroking. She smiles. He puts on his trousers, limp and breathless and happy. Her breath, which smells of petroleum, is his wind of liberation. He feels abused, soiled, burnt, ecstatic.
She says, ‘Breakfast. Croissants, coffee, orange juice, newspapers. I�
�ll pay.’ He takes her arm and they walk through the flames to the car park. She drives him to her favourite café where a waiter guides them to The Banker’s private table, under an arch of stone. They can hear fire engines, police sirens, the babble of journalists, the flashlights of photographers.
‘So you see,’ says The Banker, dipping her croissant into her cappuccino, crumbs on her glossed lips, she pauses while nostalgic Muzak from a war-time movie washes gently over the walls and little baskets of warm bread rolls. ‘We will inherit the earth.’ She watches the waiter slice oranges and put them in the juice extractor. ‘How many pigs have you got in your mouth then?’ She smiles at Freddie who blinks and bites into his bacon sandwich.
‘Yes, Lapinski,’ says The Poet, waving her hand in the direction of the café with arches and domes and a striped canopy, ‘they will die stuffed and empty and we will die half full.’ Tonight, the moths that circle the light of my lamp like a wreath have wings that are singed at the tips. My cat Krupskaya seems to be dizzy. The pearls on her collar have melted and every time she tries to walk she falls down. When I tickle her under the chin she begins to wash her ears and prance about like a tsarina with a hangover. The Poet requests another cup of tea and a Jammie Dodger, a biscuit she is partial to way before and after the acceptable age to like Jammie Dodgers, those ages being seven and seventy. She is not particularly grateful which is a relief because being grateful can be quite tiring.
