The river ran through the town walled in by embankments. Crispin let it take him. He knew where a car had crashed through the railing years ago. His mother had taken him along in his pushchair to see the extraordinary sight of it lying belly-up in the water with all its dirty black workings exposed – the first time he could remember that he’d ever been out of the house after dark. He’d cried when he saw it because it reminded him of the time he’d put his tortoise on the coffee table to feed it and the silly armoured thing had walked off the edge and cracked its shell on the tiles and had to be stuck together again with glue. It wasn’t until years later that his mother had said to him, taunting, ‘You going on about that tortoise when there was a woman drowned there right in front of you!’ He hadn’t had a clue. Anyway, he wasn’t going to forget where the wreck was and he was ready to kick like mad to avoid being scraped over its jagged metal. Otherwise he waited. He kept his strength for when the river broadened and he could splash ashore and run full pelt back to wherever it was Psyche had been taken.
They met him as he came panting up the incline towards the bridge. Three boys, his friends. They said, ‘They locked her in the pump-room with Mackeson.’ Crispin tried to push past them but they held him by his arms. ‘It’s been half an hour,’ they said. ‘No point trying to save her now. You’ll get slaughtered.’ He was frantic. He struggled, but he was exhausted. His clothes were sopping wet and the blood thundered so behind his forehead he couldn’t really grasp what they were saying. The biggest one hugged him, and he sobbed.
Mackeson appeared at the other end of the bridge, walking up the steps from the towpath, holding onto the green-painted wrought-iron railing and hauling himself up. He looked at them, looked quickly away and shuffled off. Crispin writhed out of his friends’ grip and went after him, and the other boys let him go. Mackeson was his cousin, after all.
Crispin grabbed Mackeson’s donkey jacket and tried to turn him round to get a look at his face, but Mackeson didn’t slow down. He pressed on, hands in pockets. Crispin let go and dashed ahead and got in his way so that their eyes met. Mackeson didn’t look like a triumphant violator of young women. He was flushed and snotty and mumbling. Suddenly he dragged Crispin down a side street, and rammed him up against a wall, and said, ‘You’ve got to go to her.’
Crispin was furious. He said, ‘What have you done?’
Mackeson said, ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t. They gave me a torch so I could see her. They said to do it but she just lay there looking at me. I don’t like girls looking at me. You know her. Just go down there. Get her out of there. I left the gate open.’
‘She’ll think I knew. She’ll think I took her there on purpose.’
‘Go on,’ said Mackeson.
Crispin went. He ran along the towpath, his feet silent in canvas shoes. He saw the other boys coming out of the tunnel and walking off the other way. He plastered himself to the wall until they were gone. He went slowly into the blackness. He brought out his lighter and by its tiny gleam he found the barred gate across the round entranceway like the mouth of a cave, and he pushed against it and was in.
He groped around until he felt the warm smoothness of Psyche’s hair. He gasped and flinched back. She said very calmly, ‘Which one are you?’ He didn’t answer. He knelt down, She was sitting on a kind of bench. She said, ‘Poor Mackeson. Why do you bully him so?’ Crispin laid his head on her lap. Still he didn’t dare speak. He couldn’t bear that she should ever know that it was him, that she should ever know that he was there, even though it really hadn’t been his fault at all.
She put her hand very lightly on his head. She knew him by his curls. She smiled in the dark. His clothes were sopping wet. She didn’t know how it had all happened, but she knew she didn’t need to be afraid of him.
She kept her hand on his head and gradually he stilled like a nervous animal soothed by stroking.
She said, ‘I’m going to leave now. Don’t follow me. I’m going to walk home through the middle of town. I’ll come back tomorrow after supper.’ She stood up and hit her head on the vaulted ceiling and said drat, and found her way to the gate, and took the key, with a scraping and a jangling, so no one could lock it again, and walked away toward the dim glimmer of daylight where the tunnel came out under the bridge. Crispin heard the firm even sound her low-heeled shoes made on the paving stones.
When she got home her mother said, ‘There’s a damp patch on your good skirt. The flowers must have been dripping.’ Psyche had stopped in the square and bought a bunch of chrysanthemums for her parents because it was their wedding anniversary. She was such a thoughtful daughter.
They met again in that lightless chamber the following evening, and the one after that, and the one after that, and so on through most of the winter. No one disturbed them. The other boys didn’t come back. They didn’t want to think about their prank. It hadn’t been any fun, with Mackeson getting the wind up like that, and now when they saw Psyche they tried to kid themselves that she might have forgotten all about it. As though that was likely. As though a person’s getting dragged off into the underworld and all-but-raped was a common occurrence.
Psyche hadn’t forgotten, and never would, but she wasn’t frightened and she wasn’t angry. She was a bit surprised it had happened to her, because she had noticed, from nursery school upward, that the victims of bullying had something pregnable about them. Their personalities had cracks in them, into which an ill-intentioned person could insert a pointed stick. She didn’t think she was like that. But then, she reflected, she had changed that afternoon. When she leant against the low wall along the riverbank while Crispin kept babbling on, telling her stories and watching her sideways to check whether he was making her laugh, she had felt herself changing. Perhaps that was why.
The other thing that surprised her was that – and she truly believed this, incredible as it seemed – Crispin didn’t know that she knew that it was he who came evening after evening, and took her in his arms in the cave.
The cave was cosy now. It was dry as could be. When Psyche came, the day after the outrage, the hard stone bench, which was really a kind of storage space for firewood, was hard no longer. Someone – Crispin obviously – had brought quilts and cushions. And another day there was a blanket to cover them and a little later there was a fur rug, which must have been real fur because at one end of it there was a tail, and at the other a snarling muzzle, with teeth, which lay beside their heads like a benevolent guard-dog, protecting their privacy as they ran their hands over each other’s smooth skin in the pitch-darkness, and ran their tongues around the inside of each other’s soft mouths.
Crispin never spoke, because he fancied himself unknown. Psyche spoke unguardedly, as she had never spoken before. She told her silent and invisible friend about pleasure, and self-abandonment, and the reckless luxury of mindlessness. He listened, and felt, naturally enough, rather smug, for was it not he who was conferring on her all this bliss? And vice versa, of course, but he preferred to think of himself as the conferrer, and that suited Psyche too, because all day every day she was considerate and responsible, and it was a treat for her to feel greedy in the darkness of the cave where she could grind her teeth as the moment of ecstasy approached and screw up her eyes and generally conduct herself in a way which would have been positively unseemly had there been anyone there who could see.
One day she said, ‘I wonder where you got this tiger-skin, or whatever it is?’ Another day she said, ‘It’s wonderful how you change the pillowcases and bring flowers so this place always smells fresh.’ Another day she said, ‘Dried apricots! How is it you always choose my favourite things? It’s as though our minds speak to each other without words.’ And on each occasion Crispin was puzzled. He hadn’t brought any pillowcases or bearskins or candied fruit. Surely it must have been Psyche who did so. He didn’t quite get what game she was playing, but he curled himself into her back and crossed his hands over
her breasts and blew, gently, gently, on the back of her neck until she was sighing and turning towards him and lacing her long clever fingers in his give-away curly hair. Sometimes in the absolute darkness they lost their sense of direction, and it was as though up and down were no longer opposite, and in the apricot-perfumed globe that was their pleasure-dome they flew, cartwheeling together as warm and safe and contentedly sightless as unborn baby twins.
‘She seems different somehow,’ said Psyche’s mother.
‘I wonder where she goes after supper,’ said her father, and the two of them looked at each other as though they shared a naughty secret. But actually they hadn’t a clue what was happening to Psyche. When she came in, in good time for supper (she didn’t cook – she did the drying up afterwards), they said things about the sunset (lurid) or the upcoming election (worrying) or Granny (you can’t blame her, poor old thing). Sometimes one of them said, ‘Do you still see anything of Jemima?’ – Jemima had a very eligible brother. Or they said, ‘Jerry’s mother says he and all his mates go to the ice-rink all the time – it’s quite a craze.’ Or they said, ‘I expect there’s a lot of extra work to be done at the library for this centenary thing.’ Or they said, ‘You know, Precious, you can always invite your friends back here for supper. Any time you like. Really.’
Psyche smiled and said yes, or gosh, or not really, and once she’d finished the putting-away she’d pick up her coat and say, ‘I won’t be late.’ And she wasn’t late, not very, but when she came in and took her shoes off, so as not to disturb them or track mud up the stair carpet, a breeze stirred through the house, warm and vivacious and redolent of new-sprung grass.
One day Psyche met Mackeson in the street. It was, after all, a very small town. He was aghast. He tried to make himself inconspicuous, but that was never going to work. He had given up shaving. By the smell of it, he’d given up washing too. The little children ran behind him shouting. They called him Monsterson. Psyche didn’t hesitate. She went up to him and held out her hand so resolutely that he had to take it. She said, ‘I know you never meant me any harm. You’re their slave, aren’t you, slave to those other boys. They use you as though you were a big frightening dog.’
The boys had wanted Mackeson to fall for her in his usual gross and lustful way. That hadn’t happened. He had recoiled as a horse might jib if asked to mount a swan. But when she was kind to him he was immediately her swain. He wanted to give her whatever he could. All he had to offer was a piece of information. He said, ‘You know it’s Crispin who meets you in the pump-room every night, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know.’
Then he said, ‘But do you know the other thing about Crispin?’
Psyche was curious. There were many things to be said about Crispin, about how fragile he seemed, and how strong, about how his deep voice seemed older than the boyish mouth it issued from (how she wished he would speak to her), about those curls, and yes, she knew now that the hairs on his thighs grew like tight little springs as well. She wondered which thing it was that Mackeson wanted to tell her about. She felt she needed all the information she could get because she realised that her pretending not to recognise Crispin, that had seemed at first like a game, had become a trap, and sooner or later – probably very soon – it would close on them. It would be embarrassing. Neither of them would be able to explain the deceptions they’d been practising. Crispin would feel humiliated or betrayed. She said, ‘No, I don’t. Tell me.’
Then Mackeson went down on one knee. He actually did. He wasn’t offering her a ring, or wedlock. He had to kneel because he was so tall, and he wanted to whisper. The words slid clammily into Psyche’s ear.
They surprised her profoundly. She said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
He said, ‘I can’t help that. It’s true.’
‘I’ll ask him,’ she said.
‘He’ll be upset. He’ll guess I told you. Please don’t.’
‘Sometimes,’ she said slowly, ‘he falls asleep after we’ve … I could look at him then.’
And so it all fell out as it always does in this story. The boy who was all made of love, whose whole identity was made up of his loveliness, his lovability, his lovingness, was exposed to the scrutiny of an enquiring and appraising mind. It wasn’t a drop of heated oil that Psyche let drop onto her sleeping lover’s white shoulder; it was the still smouldering tip of the match she had struck to pry into his nature. He woke. He fled.
Sometimes the story continues. Sometimes Psyche is punished by Love for her lack of trust, but, after many trials, she is found fit to be reunited with the curly-haired conferrer of bliss. But this time I don’t think that is going to happen. I think Psyche will marry the chief librarian, with whom she has a lot in common. Her career will prosper. She’ll be promoted over his head and, being an unambitious man, he’ll not resent it. Her parents will tell each other how pleased they are that she’s settled down, but they’ll remember those nights when a perfumed breeze filled their decent terraced house with voluptuous promises and – separately, secretly – each of them will grieve for what their sensible girl has lost.
And Mackeson will always be Psyche’s devoted follower. And she will recommend a dentist for him, and he will recover his self-respect in her service, and he will lose his shifty look and eventually his physical splendour will be unveiled so strikingly that she will take to meeting him, when the librarian is working late, in the pump-room down the tunnel beneath the bridge. They will couple in darkness, which Mackeson prefers, because the way women look at him upsets him, but Psyche will always derive satisfaction from watching his superb figure moving around the town and knowing he is hers.
Crispin – well I can’t say exactly what happens to Crispin, but wherever he chooses to lie down there will always be clean pillowcases, and the furry pelt of a wild animal, and the scent of apricots, and usually some girl.
PASIPHAE
Minos paid his people on a Friday, late afternoon, just like any other employer. His business was different from most, though. His crew weren’t knocking off for the weekend. They were getting started. He liked them to be flush when they were selling. He wanted them to have that swagger, to be the people other people liked to be around. The other unusual thing was that every week Minos offered to play them double or quits for their pay. It wasn’t compulsory. Lots of the women refused and he let it go. Paid them straight. Cash in hand. The men, though, they liked it, especially the young ones.
He received them on the mezzanine of a café that used to be a dance-hall. Downstairs there were racks of records, proper records, vinyl, alongside the counter where the kids ordered their cakes and bacon sarnies. Above, Minos sat enthroned. Leather wing-backed chair. A room, kind of, with a door and three walls, but also more of a landing, with one side nothing but a railing over which you could lean, if you chose, and spit into the teacups of those below.
Minos sat back where he couldn’t be seen, but everyone in the building knew when he was there. People coming in one at a time, and going straight up. He smoked, and the café owner let him, however much the others downstairs complained. He’d have his dice-box there ready, next to the cow’s-hoof ashtray. The beaker was made of green leather. The dice were big, with rounded edges and corners so that they looked like they’d been carved out of tallow.
‘Double or quits?’ he’d say.
‘You’re on,’ would say the foot-soldier. A bit of nerves, a bit of bravado.
Minos would let him make the first throw. There was no suggestion that he cheated, ever. Over all, or over a couple of months, say, Minos’s gains and losses would balance out, the way the rules of mathematics and of probability decreed that they should. What he was robbing the men of wasn’t money. It was the sense that they were entitled to their pay.
Afterwards he’d give the worker a slip of paper, red spot or black on it, and the guy would pass through the frosted glass door by the to
ilets and down the rusted steps of the fire-escape to the yard where Dee-Dee – his chair and table sheltered by a sheet of corrugated plastic – would check the spot’s colour and pay out, or not, accordingly, with his brothers watching from the car.
Dee-Dee’s accounting was meticulous. There were of course deductions to be made to cover the cost of next week’s merch. Credit was available for those whom the dice hadn’t favoured. The terms weren’t that easy but he was managing a business here, wasn’t he, not a fucking benevolent society. Dee-Dee was a small man, but his brothers (with whom he may or may not have actually shared parents) were not.
The Minoans ruled the west end of the town. That’s where the amusement arcades were, and a pink concrete palace set into the side of the cliff, where bands still played summer weekends, and a clock tower with its black-and-silver face.
All along the sweep of the bay, at street level, ran the promenade, its corrugated cement surface speckled with gum-gobs and stained with grease from a summer’s worth of chips. Eight broad steps led to the beach, where young women came at the end of their shifts and spread out their towels and crossed their arms to clutch the sides of their dresses, and pulled them over their heads, revealing their almost-bare bodies with a conjuror’s flourish. They brought magazines with them, and headphones, and they lay flat on their backs, their bellies concave between the blades of their hip-bones, their voices a muted twittering. One or two of them had babies with them, and they fidgeted ceaselessly, moving the little scraps out of the sun, or straightening their hats, or rubbing lotion into their sausage-link arms.
Men leant on the railing above, looking out to sea apparently but their eyes dropping always, compelled as though by gravity itself. They were lonely and they were lustful. That’s normal, isn’t it? They didn’t talk to each other about it, but they were all engaged in one absorbing game. The game of who-would-you-rather, what-about-blondie-there, how-would-our-babies-look.
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