The figure of Vincent Grayling turned around and stared at him with his white negative eyes. Martin had the feeling that he was about to say something. He thought he heard something like a croak of anguish. But then the record in his study abruptly came to an end, and Vincent Grayling vanished, and all Martin could hear was hissss-clikkk! hissss-clikkk! hissss-clikkk!
Shivering with shock, he climbed down the staircase, clinging to the balustrade. He looked down at Serena and it was clear that she was dead. Her bare feet were ten inches clear of the floor below her. She was wearing a bib of blood on the front of her nightdress and her pale blue eyes were staring at nothing at all.
He found Sylvia lying in a cardboard box full of spare electrical plugs and adaptors. Her eyes were open too, and she, too, was staring at nothing at all.
It was not until three weeks after the funerals that Martin found the strength to go back into his study and take the ‘Child’ record off the turntable. He sat at his desk, holding it in both hands, and his overwhelming urge was to bend it backward and forward until it snapped in half.
But he needed to understand why an apparition of Vincent Grayling had appeared that evening, and why he had seemed to believe that Sylvia was Vera. Surely Vera had lived until she was six years old. She hadn’t been a baby.
He took out Vincent Grayling’s notebook again and started to read. Gradually, as he deciphered the scrawly purple handwriting, he began to realize what had happened, and why Vincent Grayling was a greater neuroscientist than any of his colleagues had been prepared to believe. Greater even than Marks or Cytowic or Patterson or Heidel.
Vincent Grayling had found out how to stimulate his own senses through sound – so that different noises could lead him to see, hear, touch and taste things that didn’t actually exist. When somebody said ‘blue’, he could not only taste ink in his mouth, he could see and touch a bottle of ink, and even spill it, even though to any other observer it would make no mark. He had not only been able to see Vera when he played sounds that stimulated his senses into thinking of Vera, he had been able to hold her and kiss her and talk to her. To him, but to him only, she became real.
Because in fact Vera had not survived until she was six years old. Vera had died in her crib when she was only three weeks old.
‘I cannot begin to describe the grief of losing her so soon, my little darling. I thought of her constantly, of what she could have done, of what she could have been, of what a happy life she could have led. I saw her dancing through fields full of daisies. I saw her sitting at her desk, her tongue protruding, carefully copying the letters of the alphabet, her blonde her shining in the light through the classroom window.
‘That was when I decided that I would use synaesthesia to bring her back to me, and at least allow me to witness the life that was taken away for her, if nobody else.’
Martin sat back. The following pages were filled with Vincent Grayling’s acoustic formulae, and how he had tuned various instruments and artefacts to produce the evocative sounds that would stimulate his senses into bringing his Vera back to him.
He succeeded. The notebooks that followed were full of descriptions of how he had been able to produce a virtual Vera who could grow, and learn to dress herself, and dance, and even have conver-sations with him.
The blow had come in January 1937, when Vincent Grayling had been driving into Cambridge one icy morning and crashed his Dodge Business Coupe into the rear of a garbage truck. He had suffered no serious physical injuries but he had struck his head on the steering wheel and been concussed, and when he had recovered from his concussion he had found that his synaesthetic sensitivity had been severely impaired.
He could no longer stimulate his senses to recreate Vera – or at least not as fully as he had been able to before the accident. He could glimpse her running through the trees, and he could hear her laughing, but that was all.
He tried for twenty years to bring her back the way she was. ‘I need to hold her in my arms, if only once, if only for a moment,’ But his sensory perception was damaged for ever, and on December 12, 1957, in despair, he locked his study door and prepared to take his own life.
What he had failed to realize was that he had left himself on his records, his own longing, his own grief, all immortalized in vinyl. Just as Vincent Grayling had been able to bring Vera back to life, Martin’s senses had been stimulated into bringing Vincent Grayling back to life.
Martin stayed in the house on Oliver Road for the next five years. He wrote numerous papers on various forms of synaesthesia, such as grapheme synaesthesia, in which letters and numbers appear to some people to have colours; and chromesthesia, in which music and other noises can produce the effect of waves, spots or even fireworks; and lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, in which words have distinctive tastes, like honey, or rust, or green.
However, he kept his most advanced research to himself – his continuation of the work that had been started by Vincent Grayling. He hated Vincent Grayling with a dark, bitter rage that would never diminish as long as he lived, but his records and notebooks were the only way in which he could back up something of what had been taken away from him.
He was writing up the results of his latest acoustic experiment when there was a tapping at his study door.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
A blonde-haired girl of five years old came into the room, wearing a pink knitted sweater and red OshKosh dungarees. Her hair was tied up with two red ribbons.
‘Dadd-ee,’ she said coyly, ‘can we go out to the park, and have a slide on my sledge?’
Martin pushed his chair back and the little girl climbed on to his knee. ‘Not today, sweetheart,’ he told her. ‘The roads are real icy, and we don’t want history repeating itself.’
‘What does that mean?’
Martin shook his head. ‘You really don’t want to know, believe me.’
At that moment, a voice called from downstairs, ‘Sylvia? Are you bothering Daddy again?’
‘No, Mommy!’ the little girl called back. Then she turned to Martin and said, ‘I’m not bothering you, am I, Daddy?’
‘No, of course you’re not. Not at all.’
She frowned at him seriously and touched his left cheek with her fingertip.
‘If I’m not bothering you, then why are you crying?’
BEHOLDER
‘Once upon a time in a faraway land, a princess was born who was so beautiful that nobody was allowed to look at her for fear they would be so jealous that they would try to harm her.
‘She was so beautiful, in fact, that nobody could paint her portrait because the paints would burst into flames as soon as they were applied to the canvas, and no mirrors could be hung in the palace because they would shatter into a thousand pieces if she were to look into them.
‘The beautiful princess had many servants, but they were all blinded before they were allowed into her presence by having their eyes spooned out of their sockets.’
Mummy had read Fiona that story so many times that Fiona knew every word of it by heart, and her lips used to move in silent accompaniment whenever Mummy read it. She loved it, because it made sense of her life. She would sit cross-legged on the end of her bed with the windows open, her eyes closed, feeling the sun on her face and listening to the chirruping of sparrows in the garden below. The garden into which she was never allowed to go further than the patio, in case one of the neighbours saw her, and were so envious of her beauty that they climbed over the fence and tried to disfigure her, or even kill her.
Mummy closed the book. It wasn’t a proper printed book, but an exercise book with a purple marbled cover and the story of the beautiful princess had been written by hand. Fiona thought that Mummy was beautiful, although she knew that she herself was even more beautiful. At least Mummy could go out and meet other people, without them shouting at her or chasing her down the street or throwing acid in her face, which Fiona knew would happen to her, if she ventured beyond the front door.
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br /> It was a warm morning in the middle of May, and Mummy came into Fiona’s room and said, ‘Why don’t you take Rapunzel into the garden, Fee-fee? I have to go to the shops and it’s such a nice day.’
Rapunzel was Fiona’s doll, which Mummy had made for her. Rapunzel had a completely blank face, with no eyes or nose or mouth, but she had very long fair hair, like Rapunzel in the fairy story, who had been locked up in a tower by an evil enchantress. When she had first given Rapunzel to her, Fiona had asked why she didn’t have a face, and Mummy had said, ‘You don’t need a beautiful face to be beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
‘Who’s The Beholder?’ Fiona asked her.
‘Anyone who looks at you. Anyone at all. They’re all beholders.’
Mummy called out, ‘Bye, darling, won’t be long!’ and Fiona heard her close the front door behind her.
Fiona picked up Rapunzel from her pillow, where she had been lying between Paddington Bear and Barbie. She went downstairs and out through the kitchen door, on to the York stone patio. The sun had moved around behind the horse-chestnut trees at the end of the garden, so the patio was in shadow now, but the stone was still warm. There was a low wall around it, with steps in the middle that led down to the lawn, and on either side of the steps stood two square pillars, with geraniums growing in them. Fiona thought that they looked like the towers of a fairy-tale castle, so she always knelt down and perched Rapunzel on top of one of them, amongst the geranium stems.
A breeze was rustling through the trees, as if they were whispering to each other, and she could hear the children next door laughing as they ran around their garden. Fiona sometimes wondered what it would be like if she hadn’t been born so beautiful, and could play with them. She knew that the boy was called Robin and the girl was called Caroline, because she had heard them calling out to each other, but that was all. She had never seen them, even from her bedroom window, but she imagined that they were probably quite plain. Ugly, even.
‘Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!’ she repeated, in a creaky voice that was supposed to sound like the evil enchantress. In the story, there had been no door in the tower where Rapunzel was imprisoned, and no steps that led up to her room, so the only way in which the evil enchantress had been able to visit her was by climbing up Rapunzel’s twenty-foot tresses.
Fiona took the hairgrips out of Rapunzel’s silky blonde braid and hung it down the side of the pillar. Then she started to make her fingers crawl up it, spider-like, to represent the evil enchantress. But her fingers were less than halfway up to the top when a yellow tennis-ball came flying over the fence from the next-door garden, and bounced in the middle of the lawn.
She heard Caroline saying, ‘Now look what you’ve done, stupid! You’ll have to go round and get it back!’
But then Robin said, ‘There’s somebody there … that girl we never see. I heard her.’
Fiona stopped her fingers from climbing Rapunzel’s hair. She knelt up very straight, listening. She could hear Robin approaching the fence, and then he called out, ‘Hey! Can you throw our ball back, please?’
Fiona stayed where she was, hardly daring to breathe. She knew that she couldn’t go down the steps and on to the lawn to pick up the tennis ball because then Robin and Caroline would be able to see her, and realize how beautiful she was. Before she knew it they would be clambering over the fence with kitchen knives or broken bottles or bleach or who could guess what, to ruin her face.
Very, very carefully she stood up, lifting Rapunzel out of her flowery tower. Then she tiptoed backward toward the open kitchen door.
‘Hey! Can you hear me?’ Robin shouted. ‘Can we have our ball back, please?’
‘There’s nobody there,’ said Caroline, impatiently.
‘Yes, there is, I heard her. All she has to do is throw it back.’
‘She’s probably gone inside. You’ll have to go round and knock on the door.’
Just as Fiona was stepping back into the kitchen and closing the door behind her, she heard Robin shouting out one more time, ‘Ex-cuse me! Deaf ears! Can you throw our ball back?’
Fiona locked the kitchen door and went through to the hallway. Over the front door there was a semicircular stained-glass window, so that the hallway was lit up with green and red and yellow light, like a small chapel.
‘Mummy!’ she cried out. ‘Mummy, are you back yet?’
Silence. Fiona held Rapunzel tighter. ‘Mummy?’
At that moment, the doorbell rang, one of those jangly rings that left a salty taste in Fiona’s mouth. It must be the boy from next door, Robin, wanting his tennis ball back. What if she opened the door and he saw how beautiful she was and attacked her? She stood in the hallway for a moment, clutching Rapunzel, not knowing what she should do, but then he rang the doorbell again and she ran quickly and quietly upstairs.
‘Mummy!’
She stood on the landing outside Mummy’s bedroom. The doorbell rang again and she was so frightened that she wet herself, a little bit.
‘Mummy!’
‘I can hear you!’ said Robin. ‘I know you’re in there! We only want our ball back!’
Mummy always locked her bedroom door when she went out, but all the same Fiona pulled down the handle, and to her relief, it opened. Mummy must have come home and perhaps she had gone to the toilet and hadn’t heard her.
‘Mummy?’ she said, stepping cautiously into her bedroom. There was still no reply. Mummy wasn’t here, in the bedroom, and the door of her en-suite bathroom was open. She wasn’t in there, either.
Fiona made her way around the bed, with its pink satin quilt and its array of lacy cushions. On the left-hand nightstand stood a gilt-framed photograph of Daddy, with his hair receding, but smiling all the same. Daddy had died when Fiona was only nine months old, although Mummy never said why he had passed away so young. There was a smell of talcum powder in the room, mingled with that distinctive dustiness of people who live on their own.
The doorbell rang yet again, but in Mummy’s bedroom Fiona didn’t feel afraid any more. She touched the quilt, which felt so cool and silky, and she went to the window and looked out, and saw the street outside, with its neat front gardens and cars parked in everybody’s driveway. She felt like Rapunzel in her tower – not imprisoned by an evil enchantress, but by the beauty with which she had been blessed as an accident of birth. She was sure that one day a handsome prince would come to rescue her, just like the prince in Rapunzel.
In the story, the prince had tumbled from the top of the tower into the thicket of thorn bushes that surrounded it, and both of his eyeballs had been pierced, so that he had been blinded. Perhaps Rapunzel had been too beautiful for anybody to look at, too.
She went over to Mummy’s built-in closet. Even with the doors closed, it smelled of Mummy’s perfume and Mummy’s clothes. Mummy had never let her look in her closet before, at all of her lovely clothes. She was sure, however, that Mummy wouldn’t be cross if she had a quick peek. She needn’t even tell her.
She turned the little key and opened the right-hand closet door. Hanging neatly inside were Mummy’s dresses, in order of colour, and Mummy’s skirts, and on the shelves were all of Mummy’s jumpers and cardigans, neatly folded. On the floor of the closet were Mummy’s shoes, her sandals and her court shoes and the high heels she never seemed to wear these days.
Then Fiona opened the left-hand door. Immediately she gasped in shock, and jumped back, almost stumbling over. Standing in front of her was a girl, wearing exactly the same pink gingham dress as Fiona, and with her blonde hair tied up with two pink ribbons, exactly the same as Fiona’s hair.
This girl, however, had a hideously distorted face, with a bulging forehead and eyes as wide apart as a flatfish. Her nose was not much more than a small knot of flesh with two holes in it, and her mouth was dragged down as if she were moaning.
Fiona was about to demand what this monstrous girl was doing, hiding in Mummy’s closet. But when the girl raised he
r hand in exactly the same way that Fiona was raising her hand, Fiona began to realize, with a growing sense of horror, who she actually was. On the back of the left-hand door there was a mirror, and the girl with the hideously distorted face was her.
She touched the surface of the mirror, and the girl with the hid-eously distorted face did the same, so that their fingertips met.
‘But I’m beautiful,’ she whispered, and the girl with the hideously distorted face whispered it, too. ‘I’m so beautiful that nobody can look at me, because they’ll be too jealous.
‘I’m beautiful.’
It was then, however, that everything started to make sense. The reason why she could never go out, and meet other people. The things Mummy said to her. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. She hadn’t really understood what that meant, but now she did. She was beautiful. She was very, very beautiful. But too many beholders had looked at her, and every one of them had stolen a little bit of her beauty away.
Her beauty was still there, but now it was inside their eyes. Somehow she had to find a way of getting it back.
She took one more long look at herself and then she closed the closet doors and locked them. Her heart was beating very fast and she was breathing quickly, too, as if she had waded chest-high into an icy-cold swimming pool.
What could she do to get her beauty back? Mummy always kept her protected, inside the house, in case any more beholders saw her, and made her look even more hideously distorted than she was already. But had Mummy ever tried to confront those beholders, and demand that they return her daughter’s looks? Perhaps she didn’t know who the beholders were, or if she did, perhaps she was afraid to ask them. Anybody who would deliberately steal a young girl’s beauty would probably be very selfish and vicious.
Fiona went downstairs, and as she did so the front door opened and Mummy came in, carrying a bag of shopping.
‘Why aren’t you out in the garden?’ Mummy asked her. ‘It’s so lovely out there.’
Figures of Fear Page 22
