Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  “You wrote about it.”

  “Two sets of words, one doorway. I thought I dreamed it. But Africanus said the words weren’t for me, that I could pass through the gate and never mind the black and gold, I wasn’t the one they were for.” He looks tired. I think he must be very old, if age means anything to him, but I think it does, it must. Even for the dead.

  He stands up from the chair then, and I can see black robes like a judge’s, or a shroud. They rustle as they touch the ground.

  “I was never a very good lover,” he continued, “too busy with books when I was young, never had quite the temperament for it. I wrote books on the subject, certainly, but when it came to that gate, he said it wasn’t for me, the good or the bad, the well of grace or the prison of love. I don’t think he meant to be cruel. Meant to help me, actually, to make it easier.”

  “Did it?”

  “I’m here now, aren’t I? Not lonely, exactly. It’s a kind of curse, I think, though Lord knows what I did to deserve it.”

  “I don’t think we ever really deserve the things that happen to us,” I say. “They just happen.” I’m surprised to find that there are tears on my face. Geoffrey notices, he stops pacing, comes to the side of the bed.

  “You don’t need to be afraid.” He takes my hand, and I can feel the parchment toughness of his skin, brittle, like it had been soaked in lye and stretched over his knuckles.

  “I do.” I sniff, hate myself for it. “It’s not enough, all these books, they don’t mean anything. They don’t tell me anything anymore.”

  “I know,” he says. “That’s the way of it. Always. For all the ones who came before you.”

  He stands, and I cling to his hand a little longer, because I can already see him starting to fade around the edges, like smudged ink, and I don’t want him to go just yet. I’m not ready to see him go. I want him to tell me things, I have so many questions, but I clutch that hand and think, He’s just a tired old man, and he’s not allowed to go home, after all these years, he is so far from home. I feel sad, and I let go of his hand, let him drift away. But before he does, he kisses me on the forehead, and his breath is sweet and warm.

  “Be well, my darling. Live well, die well, love well.”

  And then he is gone.

  I lie in Stephen’s bed, feel its strange give beneath me, the lumps I don’t recognize, and I let myself cry gently. Then I pull away the sheets, meaning to get up, to find my bra and panties. Stephen murmurs something, and his arm snakes around me. I let him cling to me for a moment, remembering his hands on my breasts, earlier that night. I feel sad, sadness has soaked into every pore of me, like all that ale spilt onto the floor of the pub.

  Stephen had been thorough, earlier, almost mechanical about the whole thing, but in a way that showed very much that he knew what he was doing, and I wasn’t the first girl to end up in his bed.

  The heat of him lying against me is both delicious and oppressive. I want to kiss him, feel a little less hollow inside.

  His hands had been everywhere, and now, I run my own hands against my breasts. I feel the lumps there, just beginning, and am glad he hadn’t found them. I am tired of the things people say to me when they find out.

  I wait, breathe in the night air, warm and whispering with smells from the street. I want to be out there, not in here, and I move to collect my things, and I feel the arm slip away into the warm space I left in the mattress.

  It is then I stop, something catching my eye, glinting, from around the doorframe. There are words written in letters of black and gold, old words.

  “Through me men go into that blissful place.” And then: “Through me men go unto the mortal strokes of the spear.”

  The breath catches in my lungs, and buzzes around like a fly, a trapped bird, until I let it out in one long stream.

  “You knew, didn’t you, you old bastard?” I whisper.

  I am naked, but the air is warm around me, and I go to the door. I think about what he—the old ghost— had said about the well of grace, and the doorway not being for him. I think about Stephen. In the morning, he might wonder where I have gone. No, he had his interview, would be off on the train to St. Andrew’s tomorrow, he had said that. He wouldn’t wonder at all, would probably be happier.

  I don’t know which place I want to go to, the blissful one or that other, the words of gold or the words of black. And then I remember, they’re both really the same place, there’s only one door, even if there are two sets of writing.

  I step through.

  [ tailbone ]

  THIS FEELING OF FLYING

  Meanwhile:

  You awake afraid—terrified even—to the feeling of the plane bucking around you, your head pressed against the window and your immediate view a stomach-clenching shot of thin cloud cover and the thousands-foot drop to a patchwork of green and yellow farmland below. It takes a moment for your nerves to calm, for the adrenaline pumping into your system to fade. You are a thinker, Elspeth loved you for your brains first, but at this moment you are tired. Sleep drags at the edges of your vision: sleep, a palpable weight, a dark bag dropped over your eyes, tightened at the throat. You do not quite remember where you are, what the stretch of land underneath you might have been. Your body is trained to a different time zone, but that has been left behind ages ago.

  “Sometimes it feels as if the world is catching closer around us,” a voice murmurs from beside you, strangely accented. “The entire world pressing so close, so close. It is as, yes, two fingertips touching that have been long apart.”

  You do not recognize the voice, do not remember the grizzled man it belongs to: skin like olive wood, layers of colours, light and dark, pressed together in the folds of his wrinkles; hair black shot through with silver, joints a collection of unrolled dice, things you might play knucklebones with.

  “Shush now, pouli, it will pass, do not trouble him.” A younger one, cut from the same cloth as the first, but broad-shouldered, young in a way you don’t feel. “I’m sorry, he does not like to fly.”

  You nod. You don’t like to fly either. The Valium buzz is like a neural hypnotic and every part of you is singing, but you can feel the crash coming, maybe it’s already there. You try to stretch your legs but your knees crowd against the tray table in front of you.

  “It is hardest for the old men,” the guy says, and you wonder if maybe he is talking about you. Your hair has just the beginnings of grey, but who is he, really, to judge? The young have a different way of counting age.

  “Sure,” you say, “of course, it is.” But you don’t quite know what you’re talking about. He flashes you a smile, the young one—the old one is holding his head like he’s nursing a hangover, and you think to yourself, It must be hard for him, for all the old men.

  The young one winks, and there is something strange about it. He stretches generously, unbuckles himself from the seat. He places both hands—his delicate fingers with black wiry hair—over the old one’s gnarled tree-root hands. He kisses the old man affectionately on the head.

  You find yourself wanting to look away, but the close proximity makes this little piece of human drama uncomfortably close. You don’t want to watch. You watch anyway. The old man looks up, for a moment, and there is something terribly sad in his eyes. The young man makes his way down the aisle, body pantherine in slim-cut jeans, a plain white t-shirt that showed off the solid muscles beneath. You leaf through a brochure on cheap watches, garden furniture, deluxe pet carriers. Who buys this stuff, you wonder—who needs it?

  Your eyes flick up, and he is whispering into the ear of an airline stewardess—the generically well-turned-out type—and you see his hand touch lightly against the small of her back, see her shiver as if something warm and sweet runs down her spine, see her eyes follow him behind the first-class curtain, see her trail after a moment later, tentative, excited.

  “My son is too young, I cannot watch him but feel myself age,” the old
man mumbles, lips looking as if they long for a cigarette, something to smoke. You put away the brochure. “He had two mothers, that is the problem, he likes the insides of women so much. Fah,”—you think he might spit but he doesn’t—“two mothers is too many for any boy to grow up properly and now he is half-woman himself, no beard, hairless all the way down I swear, like a little girl.”

  You are used to the rants of old men on planes, young men, the ones who have so much bulk they spill over onto the seats beside them, full of noise and boisterous good cheer and general ungraciousness; the children screaming as their ears grow full and painful, fit to burst. One boy had told you—mischievous, bored, rebellious, and undeserving of the look of disdain he wore—that he didn’t need the plane to fly, that he could step outside into the wide-open air and his spread wings would take him higher than any fucking plane, higher than God. You asked him why he paid for a ticket. The boy had shrugged, scratched at his shoulder, and turned away, bored already with the conversation.

  “I fear for him, all those women. He moves too easily, he doesn’t fear women the way he should. A woman can hurt you in so many ways.”

  You find yourself nodding at that, thinking about your wife, Elspeth, and how much she hates it when you leave. You tell her it is for business, you tell her that you have responsibilities, and sometimes she smiles and sometimes she turns away but you can always tell how hurt she is. Her hurt is its own knife, but you go anyway, whenever they offer, wherever they offer, because as much as the knife cuts, you hate to be in one place for too long. You are afraid of what will happen if you stay on the ground.

  The airline stewardess is slipping out between the curtain to the first-class cabin, a dreamy look on her face, knees drunk. The young man appears behind her, a dark shadow, the two almost the same shape, one the silhouette of the other. He is smiling. You turn to the old man.

  “Where are you going?” Your first words. The old man looks up, startled.

  “I go to the new land, the land of promise.” The old man pauses, lips forming around the phantom cigarette, breathing. “The land will not keep its promises. The land is sick. The people are sick. Nothing works properly anymore, the universe is broken, it broke with the towers, when they burned.” Another pause, and then an intense look. You flick your gaze away, sorry you have engaged. “Do you know, do you see it?”

  Eyes to the window. You stare at the wing of the plane, the perfect geometric shape; you imagine the boy in the air beside it, wonder if his arms would be so smooth, so perfect, or if he would plummet like a stone. Your face so close to the glass, the space is not so much—the distance between sitting, safe, here, listening to an old man ramble and the sudden drop. No more than a handspan of inches. There is a kind of magic to it, that the plane should remain in motion at all.

  “I see it,” you say, and you do, you really do. The universe has cracked like an egg and out has flown these magic birds, these things unbound by gravity. “Do not leave the plane, do not ever leave it.”

  “Ah,” the old man says, “you do see it then, you are wise, more so than my boy who loves chaos and broken things and magic that does not work the way you intend it.”

  You awake to a distant chime. The air is stale, breathed too many times by too many people. You can feel the time now not by your own circadian rhythms but by the murmur of restlessness in the people around you, legs that were once still now kick ferociously against seatbacks, feet twitch in the aisles.

  There is a woman beside you when you wake and she is the most beautiful woman in the world. You do not wonder about the old man and his son. You may have left them several countries back. “Do not get off the plane,” you told the old one, but you know now that no one gets off the plane. The plane is always in motion. It does not land.

  But you do not think about this. You do not think about Elspeth at home, waiting for you, her fingers clutching a dress whose hem she has made threadbare with pulling and plucking and mending. You do not think about anything except for the beautiful woman next to you. Beautiful women have their own way about them, and you have not sat beside many on the flight; they tend to travel in pairs, in packs, protected, loved. Tickets for two, headed to exotic locations where the sun sleeps for half the time as the rest of the world. But she is alone.

  You find yourself looking at her slantwise, slyly out of the corner of your eye—you are clever, after all. But then your gaze is drawn out the window, the flashing light on the tip of the wing and darkness all around. Slantwise, you look again, but find she is looking outside, straining a little in her seat.

  A thrill of delight. You look at her looking out the window, meet her eyes as they slide back, half-guilty at being caught out.

  And then she smiles, just once, and you think you might try speaking. There is an intimacy to planes, and you are allowed to speak, if you are seated together. “Do you see the world out there?” you say, playfully. “I do not remember it. Tell me what it is like.”

  The woman looks surprised, and she knits her perfect ivory brow and she looks at you with her perfect blue eyes, and then she smiles—a second time!—as if no one has spoken to her in a very long time. “There is no world out there,” she says. “It has already come undone.”

  “I thought as much,” you say. You like the way it feels to have her perfect blue eyes on you as you imagine all men do, and so it makes you foolish. “How will it be made again?”

  “From the darkness,” she answers. “From the pieces that do not fit together.”

  You are feeling giddy now, and your legs twitch—you have ridden in the plane for many hours and the blood has pooled beneath your knees and something tugs at your synapses. But she is there, and that brings a mad calmness to you. You love her almost immediately, find it impossible not to. She is not like Elspeth. You know that she must understand planes and flights and the fear of staying in one place. She is here, isn’t she? You are faithful to Elspeth and you have never cheated, not on any of the trips. Travel is not made for that kind of escape. But she is beautiful and you are falling, and you can see that she can see this happening to you. She smiles sadly. A third time.

  “Do not look at me like that, anasa mou,” she whispers.

  “You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” you find yourself saying, because it is true and she is seated next to you so you are allowed to speak to her. Your hands and your voice and every part of you tremble.

  “Have you not been told? A beautiful woman ruins many things.”

  “You make the world come alive,” you breathe. “There was no world until you were in it, and we are all kept aloft by your will alone, you are magic, fire, the doing up of everything.”

  “I am a broken tower,” she whispers, and her perfect blue eyes close. She touches your wrist, just once, but you feel every bone in your body jump, steel filaments when a magnet passes, reorienting.

  “Tell me,” you beg, because you can, because the magic of the airport, of the ticketing offices, of the blind fate of the universe has seated her next to you. And because the laws of airports and ticketing offices and blind fate have done this, she answers you.

  “I grew up by the sea, I remember when the waters of the world were everything, and there was no dry land to be found. My mother told me that when my father came to her, he was a swan and he was beautiful. Her eyes would go shallow with the love of him, and her mouth would make an expression I do not know but some men might call it love, but it was not that, love is not that look. She would comb my hair, and she would sing, and sometimes her face went like that until she was no longer looking at me—through me—but, fingers running through my hair over and over again, I would wonder about him.

  “One day when I was young, I came across a swan by a lake, and I called to it and it came awkwardly, for birds are not meant to walk on the land, but I was afraid of the water. And its neck danced like a snake and its body was a kettle balanced on tiny legs, and the circles around its
eyes were dark. It laid its head in my lap, and I stroked the fine feathers of it, and I thought that perhaps what I was feeling might be love. And we lay there, the swan and I, until I tugged away the child-skirts my mother dressed me in, and I felt the feathers on my thighs, and I wondered if it was how my mother had felt.

  “Does it matter so very much to be beautiful?” She pauses and her voice is the most beautiful voice in the world so you are sad to hear it end, although you have understood very little of what she says, not really, for you are not in love, you are transfixed.

  “I would cradle you in my arms,” you whisper, and you don’t know why or what you are saying, and you have never felt like this before. It is not the way you love your wife. It is like madness. “I would crack the world for you.”

  “There is no true love in the world, and that is the thing I know, anasa mou, that we might lie together and I might stroke your hair, but then there shall be the fire, the devastation, and you shall hate me for my love.”

  “I would swallow the moon,” you whisper. “I would make of my bones a house for you to live in.”

  “When I returned home, I watched myself in the mirror as I brushed my hair, and I waited to grow pregnant but I never did, and my eyes were never like my mother’s. It was not love.”

  “I would make you ugly to be mine so that others would not look on you,” you whisper. “I would cut off the ears of your enemies.”

  “And so I am here because the world is drifting faster apart and I am filled with so many holes now, so many absences, pieces that fit together badly like the swan with his kettle-body and his slender neck. I will fly and fly until the world rebounds and we are all drawn more and more tightly together, like a flock of starlings, and the pieces of me are one, a thing beyond love, beyond attraction, a thing whole and at rest.”

  She touches your wrist once again, and you grow silent, as if there is a radio inside your head that someone has just switched off. You feel as if you have been trapped in amber, that time has frozen you in a single moment, but then it releases, you are through it, and the people around you are twitching, yawning, stretching. A tray filled with peanuts and crackers trundles past you. The woman next to you is beautiful, but you have seen beautiful women before, and you somehow wish you were sitting somewhere else. Beautiful women make you uncomfortable, they make you feel older than you are, unlovely, vaguely ashamed.