Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  Maurice Gee

  * * *

  PROWLERS

  Contents

  Prowlers

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin Random House

  by the same author

  PLUMB

  MEG

  SOLE SURVIVOR

  THANKS M

  1

  I do not like her. She’s beautiful without any contrivance and I don’t trust nature to that degree. Nasty things lie under surfaces. That’s the sum of my wisdom learned through lenses – my lifetime of squinting through bits of glass. Tup said magnification banished fear. So it seemed to me for many years. Now I know it shows empty places, endless recession, and how can we hope to travel there? We’re trapped at the intersection of two planes (is and ought, there’s two good names), we’re buried at a crossroads with the stake of our limitations through our heart. An evolutionary dead-end, my opinion. Said as much to that girl, but she was kind, gave me a verbal pat and a smile like a sticky sweet. She’s blue of eye, a Lotte Ogier eye, and pink of cheek, and honey-tongued, and oh so patient with this smelly dodderer, myself; but whispers, ‘Shit!’ under her breath when her tape plays up.

  I don’t like that. Don’t like her. I wish she’d leave me alone and stop this infernal scrape scrape with her questions. It gets her nowhere with me that she’s grand-daughter of my sister Kitty, and this job, all she can get with her fine degree! keeps her from drawing unemployment benefit. I don’t care if she starves. I don’t care if she goes on the streets. That won’t bother a girl so free with faecal expletives.

  Calm down. Read your pulse. Is it still there? Do I still have a pint or two of blood? See the yellow dent the biro leaves in the ball of my thumb. It’s beyond my resources now to plump that bit of flesh out.

  Beauty lies under surfaces. There’s a contradiction. So soon? It does not matter. Contradictions are beautiful. Tensions are beautiful. And beauty is inadmissible! So, all my life, to the very end, I kick the feet from under myself, and pick myself up. What fun it is knocking these bits of skin off. The blood flows, see?

  Start again. I do not like her; like you not, Kate Adams, your plumped-out lip and bright kind eye and snake-hissed lavatory word. The skin peeling on your arms – don’t you know the dangers? Your moving breasts. That’s too much cheek. Put on a brassière, you slut, before you come questing here again.

  Questing is a good word. It’s inadmissible. Confusion is a good word. Extraordinary to be confused after a life so full of magnifications and clarity. And mysteries penetrated. And governing principles understood. Kitty used to infuriate me by saying of Lotte Ogier, piano teacher – a Meissen shepherdess, pink, befrilled, a weeping German monster, greedy, cruel – that her eyes were so blue and clean she must take them out at night and wash them in a basin of cold water. Bile rose in my throat to hear her say it, a bitter taste came on my tongue, and pulses made a flutter in my temples. I cried, ‘You can’t take out eyes, you’re being mad,’ and I got my new anatomy chart and showed Kitty the human eye in horizontal section, a structure I had understood, and made my property, and showed her how it was continuous, from sclerotic and cornea and crystalline lens to the optic nerve which carried the impressions to the brain, and it was mad, mad, to talk of washing it in basins of water. The thing would be dead then, you could never put it back. Kitty defended herself. She had not been talking of optic nerves but Lotte Ogier, a different matter. You couldn’t cut her down the middle and make a chart of her (‘Oh yes you can’ – and I flipped pages), and eyes, after all, were things you looked at, not just with, and they could have meanings of all sorts. And she quoted some line about ‘speaking eyes’, which made me screech, ‘Eyes can’t speak’; and then we grinned, for we had moved into self-caricature, a saving place; and Kitty looked at my chart then, for she had wide interests, and understood the eye in a trice, though she let me explain, and marvelled at the good sense of it all. That pleased me immensely, for it was my good sense. Yet Lotte Ogier’s clean blue eyes always made me tremble after that.

  Kate Adams has that eye. Washed and bright. She’s a thing of lovely surfaces. How complete the young are, you never think of bits when faced with them. Organs, blood, bowel – that Burma road – murky secretions by the kidney-bowl; none of that. They seem all joints and surfaces and their parts are teeth and hair, no parts at all, but continuous. Yet this one peels. Is she starting to come apart, as I come apart? The last thing I want is to pity her. Admiration, dislike, interest, lust, fear, as I watch from my multiple eyes. Pity with all this? I’m glad she’s gone, reduced to neuronic shifts in my brain.

  I take my handkerchief (it crackles like paper, and how that made her twist her nose) and wipe the sore grooves that run from my clown’s mouth down to my jawbone – which I consider now turning into the jawbone of an ass and hacking at friends and enemies with. She did not kiss me there but on the forehead. My mother used to kiss me on the lips, full on the lips, and Kitty too, and even Dad. We were a kissing family and must have put armies of germs about. But Kate has taken my germs, no doubt at all, from the chair she sat in, from my fingers’ touch, and touch of my mind. Minds, the boy Noel screeches, cannot touch, but I tell him to shut his gob, he’s had his say. Kate stowed her tape-recorder in her ethnic bag – embroidered sugar-sack it looked to me – pecked me at the hairline, ran prophylactic finger on her mouth, and off she swayed. She’ll edit this weekend and bring her transcript round to me next week. It’s all lies. I gave her a batch of sterile slides, but touched her with my mind, its many parts, and will see if we can get a culture there.

  I’ve flown apart. There are bits of me floating off as I spin and spin. Can I persuade them back by being still?

  Here they come, the asteroids, the basalt moons.

  2

  I don’t want them. Start again. The girl upset me. I’m not like this, not a mad old man. I’m Noel Papps. I’m dux of Jessop College. I’m Pettigrew Scholar. Here I come, I’m Dr Papps, I’m head of Soil Science. I, alone, discover what is wrong with the Plowden Hills, why they won’t grow, and I, Noel Papps, repair that error (Whose? I ask the bishop). I put in what they haven’t got; and look at me now, I’m Director of the Lomax Institute, I’m Sir Noel.

  Have I reached the end? Is that all? One paragraph and a joke? My God, is this my entry? Where are the days? They were brimful. They burst like crates of apples. They ran off down the lawn like apples spilled, I have not the hands to grab them all. Where are they gone, lying in the long grass, lying in the hydrangeas. Slaters crawl in brown caves pecked by birds. I crush cider-flesh with my feet, walking by.

  Piffle! Rot! I’m not Kitty. This is her stuff. Get yourself out of my head now, Kit. Go on. Minds can’t touch. I know my days, they’re marked on calendars, eighty years. Not one is lost, not one lasts a moment longer than I allow it to. I’m in control and all those forces outside law – fear, grief, desire, comedy, ambition, hatred, love – are cellular in me and know their place and wait until I stain them to their lawful show; and that’s no boast. Amazement and clear sight go hand in hand.

  So what shall I choose, where am I now? Shall I be with Tup Ogier in the playground, leading him to where a praying mantis eats a fly? It’s a blue one, iridescent, oil-sheeny, and its buzz half-hearted and its legs giving life away as hooked arms hold it dinner-wise and jaws chomp its head. ‘A beauty,’ Tup breathes. ‘God-horse in some places, Papps. Lovely creature, eh?’ The mantis eats the fly’s head like an apple, stopping only to munch a leg like a celery stick. ‘See how its jaws work. Mandibles. They’re lateral, not horizontal like ours.’ He has his little glass out from its hinged leather case and lets me look. I see yellow jaws that work unhurriedly in time with the crunch of fly tissue. ‘The strength there, Papps. If he was as big as us he c
ould chew iron bars.’ ‘She,’ I say, looking at her abdomen; and he pats me and says, ‘Good boy. Look, here’s pudding.’ The mantis eats unborn maggots from the fly’s abdomen. They wriggle, tiny grubs, but there’s nowhere to go. Untimely ripped, my father would say; born into the monster’s iron jaws.

  If mantises could burp this mantis would. Her lovely arms wipe her lovely mouth. There’s not a fly-scrap left, and she’s cross-eyed, she’s blotto, and will fall off her twig if she doesn’t watch out.

  ‘A bird should come along and eat her now.’

  ‘Ha! Good boy.’

  That was the first lens I looked through, Tup Ogier’s magnifying glass, which he called ‘my truth-teller’. ‘No more superstition, Papps, when you look through this.’ ‘No, sir,’ I said, not understanding. Years later, he gave the glass to me, and I joked, ‘She tells the truth but she can’t prophesy.’ He stroked her with the ball of his thumb. ‘She does enough. The end of fear, Noel. Look after her.’ I took her – let’s say it – home and dropped it in a drawer; and it lies there now, with a litter of specimens I’ll never classify – marble from the valleys and granite from the hills I play the game of name and number with; or would if I had the interest; and gold, a tiny nugget, and a splinter of black basalt speckled with olivine.

  Tup’s glass and all her kind tell me nothing now.

  3

  When he gave you his attention you couldn’t tell which eye it was that saw. Which eye must you fix yours on, like a man? One was always out of line and though it wasn’t that you chose it always came to fix on you and make you blink, and the other was the one over your shoulder. Tup, the least shifty of men, shifted them. Yet I believe that’s impossible. Impossible, too, that it was the outward sign of an inner flaw, his maculation, for moral health made a running fire on his skin. He wore a ragged ear, but that was no flaw, that was a prop – mauled by a wildcat in Peru, bitten by a Burmese pirate in the China Seas. His teeth were under pressure from each other, they jutted or lay back like head-stones in an old cemetery. With all this, an energetic springing of coarse hair, pads of it on cheeks and wrists and fingerbacks; horse-lips, ape-man jaw, yeti-feet; and you had a man of ugliness so majestic that children new at his school had been known to hide their faces at the sight of him. ‘Imagine having to kiss him,’ little Irene Lomax breathed. Tup was a walking contradiction, and a lesson for me in deeps and surfaces.

  He took the four of us – a Blyton four, said clever Kate, not an hour ago, and was miffed at having to explain – into the little lab he’d made in a storeroom at school and gave us a lesson in blowpipe analysis. The occasion comes spinning back to my centre. Beauties of shape and significance make me a little breathless as I set it down to study it; and speculations threaten me about chance and fate. None of that. I will not fall down that hole.

  We were Kitty and Noel Papps, Irene Lomax, Phil Dockery, and Phil and I had helped capture Edgar Le Grice, the Jessop fire-raiser. Our story appeared in the Daily Times alongside news of the landings in the Dardanelles. I’d better get us down in our right balance. Algebraic symbols would help, Kitty as x, Phil as y, and so on, and then I could compare and bind together, and display us in our proper magnitudes; and Tup and Le Grice could come in; others too, Lotte Ogier (a subtraction from Lotte Reinbold), and the Gasman, Les Dockery, a negative number, and a dozen others, and I might end up with an axiom. Instead I have these powers that won’t obey, and a sense that individual being rests on lawlessness. So I’ll enter the maze without that help, and the only cotton thread I’ll hold is me.

  Noel Papps was a boy just turned thirteen. An ugly fellow – like this sick baboon, old Sir Noel. He gave an impression of sootiness, sooty eyebrows, sooty hair, and dark blood in his cheeks; and a rubber face, lips you could stretch and let fly back, an ill-formed nose, a squashed potato, and eyes very dark, smart-alec eyes that signalled the boy’s anxieties too well. He asked himself how he would get on, having, so to speak, no exterior. He declared what was inside without moderation, desperately. He was clever. Like fat boys he must be a character, and he was part way to it when things happened in Jessop that made him something else.

  That’s Noel Papps, a bit of him. Or is it marks on paper? One begins with an axiom, one doesn’t end. Begins with a truth self-evident. Say Noel Papps and leave it there. What’s the place of all this attribution? Sooty. Ill-formed. That stands already, doesn’t it, in Papps? Smart alec though. That is better. That somehow changes the rules. It prods the thing into a jerky step. We advance some way into the dark with that. I could have some interest in this game. There’s a buzzing in my ears. I could become a devotee. There are things I’ll never see again, not now; shadowy forms I’ll never reach. But smart alec – yes. And desperation. Progress like that makes one ambitious.

  Let’s get on.

  If I hadn’t been a scientist I would have been an actor. I made up my mind that’s what I’d be. I practised stretching my face, I practised snarling. I laughed, heh! heh! heh! and I did murders. Sometimes at the bathroom mirror I’d try Robin Hood, but I was a clever boy, as I’ve said, and I wasted only a moment before inflating into Friar Tuck. I was very good as the Sheriff of Nottingham too. My eyebrows came down to hide my eyes and my teeth grew points. When I played the Kaiser in our school’s patriotic pageant I had a face all ready to use.

  Kitty was Britannia. She sat on a throne and held a trident, just like the lady on the penny. Irene was Gallant Little Belgium. ‘Britannia, Britannia, oh pity our distress…’ And Phil Dockery, the Port Rat, barefoot boy, flea-bag Phil in his ragged pants, was New Zealand. That came about from my cleverness. I was chosen for New Zealand, and being hero tempted me, and the rifle and uniform, but not as much as the spiked Hun helmet and the moustache. ‘I tear this poppy Belgium from her stem!’ I knew my part. There was something else though, and sometimes it increases me and sometimes diminishes. Although it’s a fact I can’t focus on it, which is upsetting. I’ll put down this: I was sorry for Phil. We were not friends, but Mrs Beattie had marked him down as Hun, and I saw what he would lose. So I pointed out how tall he was. She stood us back to back and even without shoes he had an inch on me.

  ‘New Zealand should be tallest, Mrs Beattie. I can do the Hun. You watch.’ I stretched my rubber face and lunged so fierce at Irene that she screeched, and I made as if to twist her head from her neck. Mrs Beattie, fat and silly – silly in behaviour, fat in her mind, but clever in a number of pin-pricking ways – recognized me; saw the centre of strength that would hold up the shaky structure she assembled, and was left with Phil Dockery as New Zealand. Turning this grubby Port Rat into our soldier boy brought her cruelty out. She tweaked his ear and tugged his greasy hair, and wiped his germs from her fingertips with a folded handkerchief. ‘Whait cliffs, Dockery, whait, not whoit. You sound like a navvy from Liverpool.’ How all the goody-good girls, in their pinafores and pink ears, laughed. Irene laughed, though she would have to stand by him and have his arm around her in the end. The bolder girls pretended they had seen fleas jumping over.

  I fought with Phil Dockery in a corner of the school grounds. Crazy with insult, he tried to twist my head from my shoulders. But I was rubber, I changed shape, he could not hold me. I stayed alive until Tup Ogier came and broke us in half as though breaking an apple, and marched us by our necks off to his room to tan our hides. But there he only let his strap roll out like an ant-eater’s tongue and rolled it up again and put it away and spread a chart of the human brain on his table and showed us where the evil passions lived. He told us the brain was a flower, see how it opened like a rose – the cerebellum – but down here in the stem a worm was eating, here in the medulla oblongata, the reptile brain. That’s where Phil and I had been, splashing with the crocodiles in the swamp. I thought that was unfair. Phil had been trying to kill me but I had only been trying to stay alive. I didn’t protest though, because the chart had taken my breath away and I had no time for unimportant things. Tup strikes again. Every time he aimed at m
e he scored a bull’s-eye.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘sir’ – and I could smell a strong sweet scent – it penetrated me. Life was a series of shocks and recognitions. I had perhaps a dozen steps to make, and this was one; and when Tup rolled the chart up and sent me away, keeping Phil back to swab iodine on his knee, where my loose toe-cap had razored him, I felt as if I had been given a taste of some new food and its flavour lingered in my mouth and penetrated my cerebellum. In lunch-hours I sneaked inside and opened Tup’s drawer and studied the chart; played games with it, sailed down this river and that, explored the hemispheres like continents and found scaly birds and man-eating fish; but came always back to names and outlines, for the real adventure started there – in control. That was the thing I smelled like a rose.

  And I sneaked up to the belfry and spent my time with Miss Montez, stroking her, poking my fingers in her apertures. She had lovely fingers, she had lovely toes, and a pelvis like a gravy-boat. Beautiful joints – Tup rubbed them with mutton fat – and a curve in thigh and forearm no woman with flesh on her has ever equalled, not for me. The measured knitting on her skull could not have been done better with a machine. Her eyeholes had a symmetry and balance that made me want to weigh and measure them. She was yellow. Tup told me later she was probably a man.

  Phil and I carried her down for a lesson. She was wired to a wooden frame and Tup moved her arms and legs with a set of levers at the back. ‘Children, say hello to Miss Montez. She’s my good friend of many years. I met her first on a river steamer in Brazil. A Portuguese lady, a soprano at the Manaos opera. She threw herself into the river for hopeless love of an Italian tenor – ’ and so on, aimed at the girls. The piranhas ate her – ‘look, you can see the marks of their teeth on her bones’ – and the tenor sang an aria that made everyone cry. Then Tup bought her from the captain for seven shillings.