And then she enacted an age-old decadent ritual. A generous measure of the absinthe was poured into each slightly-dirty glass, and then with an elegant curve of her arm she let the water drop from the jug in an almost infinitely slow but steady trickle. The green liquid turned cloudy, opalescent in one glass, and then in the other.
‘You can pour it over sugar,’ she explained. ‘Gerald did have a specially perforated spoon but it’s lost.’
She held the glass up for Lucian and he marvelled at the eddies of swirling liquid as the reaction finished and in the light of the red-draped room the drink looked like jade. He sipped it appreciatively but decided that it was horrible, like aniseed or liquorice. He dutifully took another small sip and decided that perhaps it was not entirely unpalatable.
‘There’re lots of rituals associated with absinthe,’ she continued her lecture.
‘Can’t you set light to it?’
‘Only if you’re a complete idiot and want to lose the alcohol.’
‘Which rituals do you prefer?’
‘I only drink it when I’m already drunk. And I pour it in a proportion of 4:1. And it’s best drunk in bed.’
‘Why in bed?’
‘Because it affects my ability to stand up, and if I collapse I’ll be more comfortable if I happen to be lying in bed already.
He dutifully followed her upstairs.
‘Gerald introduced me to it,’ she said as they moved quietly through the house, glasses in hand. He had to drink it because Baudelaire did. I came to love it because Ernest Dowson drank it.’
She lay on the bed in the dark room and talked of the decadents of the 1890s.
‘But there’re more important things,’ Lucian said, embarrassed by his pomposity. He sat on the bed with her.
‘Like me cutting myself?’
‘I’d be concerned at anyone cutting themselves.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not entirely,’ he considered. ‘I’ve come to care about you.’
‘Do you love me?’
He hesitated long enough for Miranda to think:
‘You care for me,’ she conceded. ‘But how much. What’s between us?’
‘Gerald?’ he asked, not sure if he was being clever.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t like him, and I can’t see what you liked in him. Loved in him,’ he corrected.
‘And that’s important to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well that’s okay. I never really loved him. He was a bore. He is a bore; especially at the moment.’
Lucian looked into Miranda’s face. It was lit by the borrowed gleam of the bulb on the landing:
‘What do you feel for me?’
‘Not love,’ she admitted immediately.
He was not sure whether he was relieved or hurt.
‘Would you like to make love to me?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but not now.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Get into bed. We’ll finish our drinks and try to get some sleep.’
He walked around to the far side of the room and sat down on the bed with his back to her. As he undid the belt of his trousers he felt the bed move as she got up off it. She walked to the wardrobe and he could see her, out of the corner of his eye, slip off her dress and hang it up. He couldn’t help but be excited by her white, lovely body in her black underwear. He didn’t know whether he should be watching, or how many of his clothes he should remove. She had asked if he wanted to make love, which seemed to give him more freedom, but he didn’t turn around as she walked to the door and switched off the light in the hall. He took off the rest of his clothes and slipped inside the crumpled mess of sheets after her.
She lay still next to him and they both finished their absinthes in silence. She took his glass and put it with hers on the bedside table. He did not move, and hardly breathed. She changed position once and then a minute later he heard her breathing slow down and become deeper. There was a sound in the walls and he wondered if there were rats, or at least mice. She had fallen asleep in minutes, but it took him longer to drift into unconsciousness. She was warm next to him and he was excited but dared not move.
***
There was a scream the next morning. It woke Lucian, but he had been so heavily asleep that he was not sure whether to trust his senses. He had become conscious so quickly that he could remember what he had been dreaming about with startling clarity: Miranda was lying in water; she was covered with leaves and weed, her clothes hanging about her unmoving form, heavy, taking her shape and making her look fragile and skinny. The colouring of his dream was corrupt, like her skin in the portrait. He could see not only the black blood of her cuts, but the slight colour of bruise just under the white surface of her skin. And her eyes, he had dreamed, were open and slightly bloodshot, not with red but with violet.
He remembered the picture and the scream made sense. As he guessed it would, his head hurt once again from the alcohol of the night before. He took the dressing gown from the hook on the back of her door. According to a little bedside clock it was twenty to ten already.
It was still dark in the house for none of the heavy curtains had been opened from the night before. Through the ironwork of the banister there was a dim glow from downstairs. More vague sounds came up to him and he was loathe to investigate.
He quietly descended the stairs, identifying the noise as a sobbing that would not have been out of place in an amateur melodrama. It was a sound that made him think again before investigating. Then there was a distant but distinctive ‘shit!’ that had to have been from Miranda. As he got to the bottom the swearing came again.
From the hall he could see her in the conservatory. He could see a white face and dark-rimmed eyes as she stood before the painting, staring fixedly at it. She did not react at all to his appearance. He walked in and around the canvas and was surprised to see that it had been worked on once more since earlier that morning. The red hair was even brighter; more unreal. The skin had the bruised hue of his dream.
Miranda stood engrossed. He leant against a bleached wicker chair that creaked and she jumped almost a foot into the air. She stared at him without recognition, petrified. Immediately she collected herself:
‘You gave me a fright.’
‘Sorry,’ he grinned and then nodded in the direction of the canvas; ‘The great artist really has returned then?’
‘I haven’t heard him. And I haven’t slept.’
‘I did, but not well.’
‘Great!’ she was annoyed, her eyes returning to the canvas. ‘So he can creep in and out of here and us not know.’
‘It appears so.
Lucian peered at the portrait and was disconcerted to find that there was a touch of blue to the lips. And there was more of decay and corruption than there had been the previous night. The line, the way that the figure had been drawn was not quite perfect, but the strangeness seemed to have a purpose. When he looked closely the colour of the skin also had a faintly bruised pallor of purple and yellow which made it even more disconcerting.
He then looked at her black eye. The small scab on the side of her head was healing but the eye was noticeably bruised. She noticed him staring and he turned away and walked to the windows and looked out into the Monday morning. Great drapes of mist hung about the downs and lay over the town below. The trees appeared dark and dripping out of the mist like huge bathers that had been out swimming all night. He peered through them to where the town should be and felt guilty that he was not a part of it.
They ate breakfast with few words between them. Lucian was feeling a little better having taken a couple of pills that Miranda had given him for his hangover. He remarked that he liked Miranda’s dress, a tatty black creation of old silk.
‘Gerald bought it for me. It’s meant to’ve belonged to Queen Victoria.’
‘Really?’
‘Probably not, no,’ she replied without humour.
An awkward silen
ce followed breakfast, and she left the room so that afterwards he washed up alone. He waited a while before going up to her room to find his clothes. Miranda was in the bathroom so he dressed and waited for her to finish. He laid on her bed but she seemed to be taking a very long time and he could hear nothing.
He decided to give her twenty minutes by the bedside clock and when that painfully long period was over he went to the door and knocked quietly. She did not answer.
‘Miranda, are you alright?’ he asked.
There was still no answer, and now he listened. A sharp intake of breath was audible from inside, and instantly he knew what she was doing.
He stood back from the door and considered breaking it down. Could he do it if he put all my weight against it? Would he go flying inside if the lock was weak? Then he remembered that he had not even tried the handle.
He opened the door and saw Miranda leaning over the bath. She had her dress pulled down to her waist and she was cutting herself. Lucian was unable to move. There was so much blood that he couldn’t see at first what she was using to cut herself.
He moved around behind her, leant over and grasped her hands, pulling the left hand holding the blade away from her bleeding right arm. She cried and dropped what he saw to be a part of his own razor. She moved around on her knees, pulling herself from his grasp easily as his hands were greasy with her blood. She looked angry and in terror he hugged her to himself, not looking at her face but keeping her arms apart.
She was so heavy to drag upright, and when he looked around for something to stop her bleeding could see only a towel. He reasoned that it would be too absorbent to staunch the flow of blood. He tried to pull her after him back into the hall, but her reaction was to stay where she was. He pulled harder, violently this time, angry, and she almost fell after him. She was crying but he managed to half-drag her into the bedroom and pulled the sheet from the unmade bed. He had an idea that he would tear it into strips for bandages but he couldn’t rip it with his hands. Miranda sat on the bed and stared at him, and whimpered, the blood continuing to pour down the skinny arms that she held out before her.
Lucian grabbed a pair of scissors from a chair and a few quick cuts enabled the sheet to rip into a number of long lengths of bandage. Her arms were still out towards him and he wildly and inefficiently bound them tightly with the sheet. The material darkened almost immediately so he added more and she moaned that he was hurting her.
‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ he told her, ineffectually pulling her dress back up.
‘No,’ she pleaded and tried to grab him but her arms could not bend properly.
‘I’m sorry for being so stupid. I’m sorry, sorry,’ she shouted after him as he backed out onto the landing. ‘Don’t phone. They’re not deep cuts. I can’t cut that deep. I never cut that deep.’
‘You might’ve cut an artery,’ he stood his ground, ready to bound down the stairs to where he could see the phone. She stood up from the bed, pathetically bedraggled, her arms bound in bloodied rags.
‘I don’t need an ambulance. I just need someone to tell me I didn’t kill Gerald and that everything is alright, and that I’m not evil.’
He hoped she was right about the cuts, but he was not sure that she didn’t need the help of someone who knew what they were doing. He was relying on the fact that he had seen the old cuts and scars and she had obviously done this before. He had never imagined so much blood . . .
Lucian walked back into her and she allowed him to hold her close, and when he pulled away to look into her face she looked at him imploringly, with swollen eyes. Her lips pouted pathetically and he kissed them, more passionately than he had meant to, but she did not respond. It seemed darker in her room than it had done before.
‘Your shirt is covered in blood,’ she pointed out, laughing nervously through her tears.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said generously.
‘You’ve got to untie some of these bandages,’ she snivelled, shaking her head. ‘My arms ache. I think you’ve cut off the circulation.’
He was horrified to see that her hands were turning black as he held them. He fumbled with the knots he had made, but some had to be snipped off with the scissors. He laughed nervously and she started to laugh hysterically.
‘You’re a complete mess,’ he told her.
‘Thanks for the sympathy.’
‘These cuts’ll start bleeding again if I take off all the bandages.’
‘I told you, they’re not deep. Just don’t tie them so tight.’
They both calmed down in the several minutes it took to bandage her properly. When he had finished she lay down on the bed and he lay next to her.
‘Oh Miranda, when will you understand how much I love you?’
‘I know, I know,’ she said, burying her face into his neck. ‘And I’ve taken advantage of your kindness, your love. But what I need from you is your support.’
‘Anything.’
‘Then just lay here with me and tell me that everything will be alright.’
‘Everything will be alright,’ he assured her, as she had asked him to do. ‘I love you Miranda. And I want to help you.’
‘I know. But I don’t love you,’ she admitted quietly. ‘And you don’t really love me.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘I can. You feel pity, and lust.’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘It’s honest.’
‘And you know all about honesty?’
‘I do feel something for you,’ she admitted quietly. ‘Perhaps something special did happen here between us.’
‘I’m not going to deceive myself.’
‘You don’t have to. We didn’t need to have sex,’ she said, but he was not sure whether she was being patronising. ‘Sex is nothing in itself; it can only confirm something else, other feelings, good or bad.’
He turned away from her but she lay against him. In the quiet he became aware of the rain once more on the window pane. Quietly she recited:
‘Nous aurons des lits pleins d’odeurs legeres,
Des divans profonds comme des Lucianbeaux,
Et d’etranges fleurs sur des etageres,
Ecloses pour nous sous des cieux plus beaux.’
‘What was that?’ he asked her.
‘Baudelaire.’ She translated for him:
‘We shall have beds full of gay perfumes,
Divans as deep as graves,
And wondrous flowers displayed on shelves,
Blooming for us beneath more lovely skies.’
He wanted to turn to her, to kiss her, but could not move. Again she recited:
‘ ‘L’un t’eMiranda avec son ardeur,
L’autre en toi met son deuil, Nature!
Ce qui dit a l’un: Sepulture!
Dit a l’autre: Vie et splendeur!’ ‘
‘One man lights you with his love?’ he attempted.
‘One man illuminates you with his ardour,
Another sets in you his sorrow, O Nature.
What spells the Grave to one,
Spells life and splendour to the other.’
‘Everything will be alright, won’t it?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said with as much gravity as he could muster. ‘But you must stop cutting yourself,’ he said, sounding stupid to himself, and happy that she could not see his face. She did not immediately reply and he wondered if she was asleep.
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘It must be possible to get help?’
‘That’s only if I want help.’
‘But you can’t want to cut yourself?’
‘There’re worse things I could do.’
‘But the pain?’
‘It’s not the pain, I told you before.’
‘But in the long run,’ he floundered.
‘You can’t always think of the next day. You can’t always think of tomorrow, because it never comes. People save and invest and die before they can realise anyt
hing that they thought they were working towards.’
‘But that’s not the point. No matter how you explain or justify it, it still hurts.’
‘Not always.’
From where he lay he had his back to the window. It became even darker and the rain came harder.
‘What did Gerald think of you cutting yourself?’
He felt her body go taught.
‘I don’t want to talk about Gerald,’ she said.
‘But I still don’t understand.’
‘Good, don’t try. I don’t want you hurt.’
‘Oh Miranda.’
‘But what is it that you want from me?’
‘I don’t know. In the past I’ve always wanted some sort of commitment,’ he admitted.
‘And what if I tell you that I don’t?’
‘That it means nothing to you?’ he finished for her.
‘No, it means nothing to me, not really.’
A few seconds later she added dejectedly:
‘That isn’t true. Not really.’
‘I’m going away very soon anyway.’
‘You should.’
They lay still for a long time. Again he was not sure whether Miranda was awake all the time. He was not particularly tired but did finally succumb to a fitful and uncertain sleep. He was unable to remember much detail when he did wake but he knew he had dreamed of darkness and vague, huge shapes flailing slowly in an unimaginable distance. These dreams were broken when he occasionally returned to consciousness, but then he would fall asleep again and return to them. When he finally awoke it was slowly, so slowly that he continued to imagine that he was down on a distant sea-bed. He had been down so far below that the sun never reached him, and the only light was the phosphorescence of the debris that had fallen so slowly down from such a great height, and over such a great time. The pressure of all the water was immense.
On waking he found himself thrashing around; drowning. Unable to breathe, he was wound up in the bedclothes, and Miranda was lying in his arms, half on him. He woke her up as he moved and she whined and cried at her wounds. It took a few moments before he appreciated that she had continued to bleed and that the blood had dried between the two of them and the sheets. He calmed her by holding her tight and promising to move as carefully as he could. Somehow they got up together and extricated themselves from the sheets. Her arm had been down his side and was fused to him with dried blood. He pulled his own shirt off and helped her out and into the bathroom. She sat on the side of the bath as he ran water and used the towel to sponge the material that had stuck to her arms. Slowly it came away, and only a few of the cuts bled badly. She told him where to find some proper dressings in the airing cupboard and she allowed him to bathe her cuts and bind them up. Not one word then passed between them until this was done. Then he knelt down in front of her and took her hands.
Bloody Baudelaire Page 6
