by Ann
‘You hate me so you won’t give me what I need!
‘You won’t give me what I need and I’m dying!
‘I’m dying! I’m dying!
‘I’M DYING!’
She was interrupted by coughing. I said, ‘A. R.–’ and she screamed again, her whole body bending convulsively, the cords in her neck standing out. Her scream was choked by phlegm and she beat herself with her fists; then wrapping her arms in her wet skirt through another bout of coughing, she said in gasps:
‘I couldn’t get into your house to use the bathroom, so I had to shit in my pants.
‘I had to stay out in the rain; I got cold.
‘All I can get is from you and you won’t give it.’
‘Then tell me what you need!’ I said, and A. R. raised her horrid little face to mine, a picture of venomous, uncontrolled misery, of sheer, demanding starvation.
‘You,’ she whispered.
So that was it. I thought of the pleading cats, whose open mouths (Dependency! Dependency!) reveal needle teeth which can rip off your thumb; I imagined the Little Dirty Girl sinking her teeth into my chest if I so much as touched her. Not touched for bathing or combing or putting on shoelaces, you understand, but for touching only. I saw – I don’t know what: her skin ash-grey, the bones of her little skull coming through her skin worse and worse every moment – and I knew she would kill me if she didn’t get what she wanted, though she was suffering far worse than I was and was more innocent – a demon child is still a child, with a child’s needs, after all. I got down on one knee, so as to be nearer her size, and saying only, ‘My back – be careful of my back,’ held out my arms so that the terror of the ages could walk into them. She was truly grey now, her bones very prominent. She was starving to death. She was dying. She gave the cough of a cadaver breathing its last, a phlegmy wheeze with a dreadful rattle in it, and then the Little Dirty Girl walked right into my arms.
And began to cry. I felt her crying right up from her belly. She was cold and stinky and extremely dirty and afflicted with the most surprising hiccough. I rocked her back and forth and mumbled I don’t know what, but what I meant was that I thought she was fine, that all of her was fine: her shit, her piss, her sweat, her tears, her scabby knees, the snot on her face, her cough, her dirty panties, her bruises, her desperation, her anger, her whims – all of her was wonderful, I loved all of her, and I would do my best to take good care of her, all of her, forever and forever and then a day.
She bawled. She howled. She pinched me hard. She yelled, ‘Why did it take you so long!’ She fussed violently over her panties and said she had been humiliated, though it turned out, when I got her to the bathroom, that she was making an awfully big fuss over a very little brown stain. I put the panties to soak in the kitchen sink and the Little Dirty Girl likewise in a hot tub with vast mounds of rose-scented bubble bath which turned up from somewhere, though I knew perfectly well I hadn’t bought any in years. We had a shrieky, tickly, soapy, toe-grabby sort of a bath, a very wet one during which I got soaked. (I told her about my back and she was careful.) We sang to the loofah. We threw water at the bathroom tiles. We lost the soap. We came out warm in a huge towel (I’d swear mine aren’t that big) and screamed gaily again, to exercise our lungs, from which the last bit of cough had disappeared. We said, ‘Oh, floof! there goes the soap.’ We speculated loudly (and at length) on the possible subjective emotional life of the porcelain sink, American variety, and (rather to my surprise) sang snatches of The Messiah as follows:
Every malted
Shall be exalted!
And:
Behold and see
Behold and see
If there were e’er pajama
Like to this pajama!
And so on.
My last memory of the evening is of tucking the Little Dirty Girl into one side of my bed (in my pajamas, which had to be rolled up and pinned even to stay on her) and then climbing into the other side myself. The bed was wider than usual, I suppose. She said sleepily, ‘Can I stay?’ and I (also sleepily) ‘Forever.’
But in the morning she was gone.
Her clothes lasted a little longer, which worried me, as I had visions of A. R. committing flashery around and about the neighborhood, but in a few days they too had faded into mist or the elemental particles of time or whatever ghosts and ghost-clothes are made of. The last thing I saw of hers was a shoe with a new heel (oh yes, I had gotten them fixed) which rolled out from under the couch and lasted a whole day before it became – I forget what, the shadow of one of the ornamental tea-cups on the mantel, I think.
And so there was no more five-year-old A. R. beating on the door and demanding to be let in on rainy nights. But that’s not the end of the story.
As you know, I’ve never gotten along with my mother. I’ve always supposed that neither of us knew why. In my childhood she had vague, long-drawn-out symptoms which I associated with early menopause (I was a late baby); then she put me through school, which was a strain on her librarian’s budget and a strain on my sense of independence and my sense of guilt, and always there was her timidity, her fears of everything under the sun, her terrified, preoccupied air of always being somewhere else, and what I can only call her furtiveness, the feeling I’ve always had of some secret life going on in her which I could never ask about or share. Add to this my father’s death somewhere in pre-history (I was two) and then that ghastly behavior psychologists call The Game of Happy Families – I mean the perpetual, absolute insistence on How Happy We All Were that even aunts, uncles, and cousins rushed to heap on my already bitter and most unhappy shoulders, and you’ll have some idea of what’s been going on for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years.
Well, this is the woman who came to visit a few weeks later. I wanted to dodge her. I had been dodging academic committees and students and proper bedtimes; why couldn’t I dodge my mother? So I decided that this time I would be openly angry (I’d been doing that in school, too).
Only there was nothing to be angry about, this time.
Maybe it was the weather. It was one of those clear, still times we sometimes have in October: warm, the leaves not down yet, that in-and-out sunshine coming through the clouds, and the northern sun so low that the masses of orange pyracantha berries on people’s brick walls and the walls themselves, or anything that color, flame indescribably. My mother got in from the airport in a taxi (I still can’t drive far) and we walked about a bit, and then I took her to Kent and Hallby’s downtown, that expensive, old-fashioned place that’s all mirrors and sawdust floors and old-fashioned white tablecloths and waiters (also waitresses now) with floor-length aprons. It was very self-indulgent of me. But she had been so much better – or I had been – it doesn’t matter. She was seventy and if she wanted to be fussy and furtive and act like a thin, old guinea hen with secret despatches from the C.I.A. (I’ve called her worse things) I felt she had the right. Besides, that was no worse than my flogging myself through five women’s work and endless depressions, beating the old plough horse day after day for weeks and months and years – no, for decades – until her back broke and she foundered and went down and all I could do was curse at her helplessly and beat her the more.
All this came to me in Kent and Hallby’s. Luckily my mother squeaked as we sat down. There’s a reason; if you sit at a corner table in Kent and Hallby’s and see your face where the mirrored walls come together – well, it’s complicated, but briefly, you can see yourself (for the only time in your life) as you look to other people. An ordinary mirror reverses the right and left sides of your face but this odd arrangement re-reflects them so they’re back in place. People are shocked when they see themselves; I had planned to warn her.
She said, bewildered, ‘What’s that?’ But rather intrigued too, I think. Picture a small, thin, white-haired, extremely prim ex-librarian, worn to her fine bones but still ready to take alarm and run away at a moment’s notice; that’s my mother. I explained about the mirrors and the
n I said:
‘People don’t really know what they look like. It’s only an idea people have that you’d recognize yourself if you saw yourself across the room. Any more than we can hear our own voices; you know, it’s because longer frequencies travel so much better through the bones of your head than they can through the air; that’s why a tape recording of your voice sounds higher than–’
I stopped. Something was going to happen. A hurricane was going to smash Kent and Hallby’s flat. I had spent almost a whole day with my mother, walking around my neighborhood, showing her the University, showing her my house, and nothing in particular had happened; why should anything happen now?
She said, looking me straight in the eye, ‘You’ve changed.’
I waited.
She said, ‘I’m afraid that we – you and I were not – are not – a happy family.’
I said nothing. I would have, a year ago. It occurred to me that I might, for years, have confused my mother’s primness with my mother’s self-control. She went on. She said:
‘When you were five, I had cancer.’
I said, ‘What? You had what?’
‘Cancer,’ said my mother calmly, in a voice still as low and decorous as if she had been discussing her new beige handbag or Kent and Hallby’s long, fancy menu (which lay open on the table between us). ‘I kept it from you. I didn’t want to burden you.’
Burden.
‘I’ve often wondered–’ she went on, a little flustered; ‘they say now – but of course no one thought that way then.’ She went on, more formally, ‘It takes years to know if it has spread or will come back, even now, and the doctors knew very little then. I was all right eventually, of course, but by that time you were almost grown up and had become a very capable and self-sufficient little girl. And then later on you were so successful.’
She added, ‘You didn’t seem to want me.’
Want her! Of course not. What would you feel about a mother who disappeared like that? Would you trust her? Would you accept anything from her? All those years of terror and secrecy; maybe she’d thought she was being punished by having cancer. Maybe she’d thought she was going to die. Too scared to give anything and everyone being loudly secretive and then being faced with a daughter who wouldn’t be questioned, wouldn’t be kissed, wouldn’t be touched, who kept her room immaculate, who didn’t want her mother and made no bones about it, and who kept her fury and betrayal and her misery to herself, and her schoolwork excellent. I could say only the silliest thing, right out of the movies:
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
She said simply, ‘Why not?’
I wish I could go on to describe a scene of intense and affectionate reconciliation between my mother and myself, but that did not happen – quite. She put her hand on the table and I took it, feeling I don’t know what; for a moment she squeezed my hand and smiled. I got up then and she stood too, and we embraced, not at all as I had embraced the Little Dirty Girl, though with the same pain at heart, but awkwardly and only for a moment, as such things really happen. I said to myself: Not yet. Not so fast. Not right now, wondering if we looked – in Kent and Hallby’s mirrors – the way we really were. We were both embarrassed, I think, but that too was all right. We sat down: Soon. Sometime. Not quite yet.
The dinner was nice. The next day I took her for breakfast to the restaurant that goes around and gives you a view of the whole city and then to the public market and then on a ferry. We had a pleasant, affectionate quiet two days and then she went back East.
We’ve been writing each other lately – for the fist time in years more than the obligatory birthday and holiday cards and a few remarks about the weather – and she sent me old family photographs, talked about being a widow, and being misdiagnosed for years (that’s what it seems now) and about all sorts of old things: my father, my being in the school play in second grade, going to summer camp, getting moths to sit on her finger, all sorts of things.
And the Little Dirty Girl? Enclosed is her photograph. We were passing a photographer’s studio near the University the other day and she was seized with a passionate fancy to have her picture taken (I suspect the Tarot cards and the live owl in the window had something to do with it), so in we went. She clamors for a lot lately and I try to provide it: flattens her nose against a bakery window and we argue about whether she’ll settle for a currant bun instead of a donut, wants to stay up late and read and sing to herself so we do, screams for parties so we find them, and at parties impels me toward people I would probably not have noticed or (if I had) liked a year ago. She’s a surprisingly generous and good little soul and I’d be lost without her, so it’s turned out all right in the end. Besides, one ignores her at one’s peril. I try not to.
Mind you, she has taken some odd, good things out of my life. Little boys seldom walk with me now. And I’ve perfected – though regretfully – a more emphatic method of kitty-booting which they seem to understand; at least one of them turned to me yesterday with a look of disgust that said clearer than words: ‘Good Heavens, how you’ve degenerated! Don’t you know there’s nothing in life more important than taking care of Me?’
About the picture: you may think it odd. You may even think it’s not her. (You’re wrong.) The pitch-ball eyes and thin face are there, all right, but what about the bags under her eyes, the deep, downward lines about her mouth, the strange color of her short-cut hair (it’s grey)? What about her astonishing air of being so much older, so much more intellectual, so much more professional, so much more – well, competent – than any Little Dirty Girl could possibly be?
Well, faces change when forty-odd years fall into the developing fluid.
And you have always said that you wanted, that you must have, that you commanded, that you begged, and so on and so on in your interminable, circumlocutory style, that the one thing you desired most in the world was a photograph, a photograph, your kingdom for a photograph – of me.
The New Rays
M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison (1945–) is an award-winning English writer best-known for the quasi-fantastical Viriconium Sequence of stories and novels. His most recent works have been in a science fictional mode, with Light (2002) managing to be contemporary, futuristic, and deeply weird. Harrison is known as a consummate short story writer for his ability to wed the supernatural or the suggestion of the supernatural with deep psychological portraits of flawed people. ‘The New Rays’ (1982) fuses weird science with Harrison’s usual devotion to place and character. His work has influenced many writers, including Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Clive Barker (all included in this anthology).
When I first arrived here it was after a hideous journey. We were ten hours on the train, which stopped and started constantly at provincial stations and empty sidings. It was packed with young conscripted soldiers shouting and singing or else staring desperately out of the windows as if they wished they had the courage to jump. We got one cup of coffee at a halt in the Midlands. In the confusion of getting back into our seats I took out the little gilt traveling clock which W.B. had given me the first time I was ill, and somehow lost it. A young boy pushing his way down the carriage helped us look for it. For a moment he seemed to forget where he was; then he looked round suddenly and lurched off. I was inconsolable. Two nights in succession I had dreamed the name of a street, Agar Grove.
We arrived late in the afternoon, just in time to watch the city dissolve into black rain, water and darkness. During the night I woke up and had to go down the corridor to the lavatory. The hotel was cold and squalid at that hour. There was a gas leak. When I looked out of a window some men were digging up the street. It was still raining.
The next morning I had my preliminary visit to Dr. Alexandre in Camden Town. I was reluctant to leave the hotel, and delayed by pretending I had lost my money along with the clock. ‘Perhaps the young soldier stole it. Anyway we can’t afford the taxi fare.’ Then I went to the wrong address and banged on th
e door until W.B. lost his temper and we had one of our typical quarrels in the road. I told him that the journey had confused me: but really I was frightened that Dr. Alexandre would prove unsympathetic. In the end he drove off in the taxi, shouting, ‘I wash my hands of you. It was you who wanted to come here.’ I went immediately to the right house and stood on the doorstep, not wanting to go in. After I rang the bell I could hear scampering and laughter inside, followed by a faint drumming sound as if a machine had been switched on and off.
Dr. Alexandre had a beautiful crippled girl who answered the door and acted as interpreter. Through her he told me that he could effect a complete cure. I didn’t believe that for a moment. Everything seemed suddenly useless and shabby – although the clinic itself, with its odd maroon décor and chromium lamps, seemed nice.
To get rid of this depression I had a cup of coffee at the corner, then went to a picture gallery for the rest of the morning. In one or two small rooms at the back they had an exhibition of new artists. I was particularly struck by a picture of a woman of my own age. The background was a buff-colored wall with two trees in front of it, completely flat trees which looked as if they had been pasted on to the wall. Behind this, from a ledge or balcony, two more flat trees emerged. They were all lifeless and stunted. In front of them a youngish woman was sitting listlessly, her sullen unfocused stare the same color as the wall, her throat swollen with goiter. Everything was flat except her throat, which had a massive, sculptural quality.
When I got back to the hotel W.B. had gone, leaving a note which said, ‘I know you are frightened but you have to have some thought for other people. Write to me when you have settled in.’
I can describe Dr. Alexandre quite easily. I have the feeling that he can help people but also the feeling that he is an unscrupulous impostor. He is the kind of man who wears a dark suit. His eyes are blue and demanding, quite unintelligent in the wrong light. He is frightened that soon he will be repatriated or interned. He has a soothing voice but one which, you sense, could easily say: ‘I cannot have you here disturbing the other patients if you do not give me your full cooperation. We are in this together. You must cooperate with me fully and then we will make good progress together against your disease.’ When the lame girl translates for him she unconsciously mimics his fussy gestures.
