by John Grant
So a little later, when I can not stand the sound of it any longer, I go and I knock on her door and I ask her if she is all right, and she opens the door and puts her arms round me and the hair on my chest gets wet for a few minutes as her shoulders jump and shake under my hands and it is then that I remember I have not got any clothes on and peel her off me for long enough to go and get into my jeans.
When I go back she is sitting on her bed with her face in her hands but she is a lot calmer now, so the tears do not erupt the way they were earlier. I sit down beside her and I put an arm around her shoulders and just squeeze her against me, feeling the slippery cloth of her nightdress on the inside of my elbow and still wondering what I should do.
When she stops crying at last she begins to talk, and I let her because the words are just the same as the tears, things she has to get out of her before she can feel all right again. What she tells me makes me glad I did not like Snakeface.
She and him have known each other for quite a while, it seems. A couple of years ago, she says, she moved in to live with him. It was her first love and all that, and she thought it was for life but it was only for three weeks because that is how long it took for him to knock her around a second time and for her broken eyes to open to how long life can be. We all make our own messes, but some of us make them for other people, too, and now she had discovered Snakeface was in the latter category. Rapid exit of the Queen of China to pastures new – or at least to this tidy little flat. Since then she has been living on her own and working in the Grapes, and every few weeks he appears to fuck up her life a little more and get some money from her, and tonight is the first time she has decided not to give him any. And now she is terrified because when they let him out in a few hours or a few weeks he is going to come and cut her open, she knows it.
All this time I just sit and listen but then she says that she wants me to stay beside her for what is left of the night, and for once I do not reach for my flies but instead climb in under the covers and pull her in beside me and rest her head on my arm and in the moonlight I watch her hair on the pillow and her face melt and change as she falls asleep. She becomes something else from the person she was when she was awake; older, it looks like a lot older but it does not bother me, and the shape of her cheekbones does not seem to be a human shape any more, if you know what I mean. It is a trick that the pale light can play when clouds pass across the front of the bright full moon, I guess. And I lie there for a while wondering why it is I am in bed with a woman and not unhappy about the fact that we have not screwed, and then I fall asleep too because a few moments later the room is full of yellow and it is the middle of the morning.
~
I put some water and four eggs in a pan and work out which is the right knob on the cooker to turn while she gets to work with the toaster. She is in a dressing-gown with blue flowers on it and I am still in my jeans, which feel dirty on my thighs. As she squats down in front of a cupboard with her hair all ruffled from the sleeping I look at her and see again how pretty she is and I tell her so.
She says a thankyou very formally and smiles at me. So the Queen knows how to smile as well. It is not the empty thing she uses in the Grapes because her whole face changes and I see her smiling with her eyes as well. I ask her her name and she tells me it is Syor, and I say that Syor is a nice name and I have not heard it before but if it is OK with her I would like to carry on calling her the Queen, and she asks me why and I tell her what Hump said about her face cracking up if she smiled, and I am just beginning to realize this is not maybe too tactful when I see that she is laughing, so that is all right. And I say that her face has not cracked up and she punches me on the shoulder.
"It seems funny that we did not, you know, make it last night," I say, because it seems I know her well enough to say it.
"It could have been fun," she says so casually I can not believe my ears. She puts a stainless-steel spoon carefully beside each egg-cup. They're white egg-cups with pictures of Peter Rabbit on them.
"It is not too late," I say.
She just shakes her head, but she does not look angry at all, so we eat our toast and eggs and talk about other things, and then things get less happy because the subject of what to do about Snakeface comes up. I say that it is a Sunday, it is her day off and I have got nothing else to do anyway, so if she likes I will stick around with her. She looks reluctant so I quickly say that we could go out together, maybe down to the beach, and she relaxes again and we finish eating and get dressed.
She picks up the red plastic telephone and calls the fuzz and asks about Snakeface, only she calls him Martin something, and as she listens I see the angles of her body become more rounded and when she puts the phone down she comes across to me and kisses me hard on the lips for a second or less before she tells me that it seems a guy with a tattoo of a snake on his face has been a bit too free with his razor a couple of times before and so the fuzz are truly delighted to have got their hands on him at last and it could be a long time until he sees the light of day again.
And so we go down to the beach and eat ice-cream and build a sandcastle.
~
I see a lot of the Queen these days, and so I do not see much of Hump and the others and, no, I never did get my fiver back. When I am with her I feel I can talk about anything I want to, and she says the same about me, even those times when she seems to be somewhere else completely. It can not go on forever, of course, because one of these days they are going to let Snakeface out again, and it will not take him long to find another razor, and by then we had better be living somewhere different, but that is the future and I do not like to think about the future. Sometimes we kiss and some nights I sleep on the couch in her flat, and maybe one day we will be lovers, but at the moment she is just the best friend I ever had and life is gentle and I feel like I am a whole lot older than I was then.
Imogen
At the very last she retreated to the cave.
She felt as if this were a new birth, more real to her than any memories of childhood. It was here that she had discovered her brothers, here that she had discovered the love she felt for her father despite his harshness, and here that she had discovered herself for what she was.
Imogen. Daughter of Cymbeline. Wife of Posthumus Leonatus, the man her father had first adopted and then, because of the illicit marriage, banished. All had for a time been reunited and reconciled, but Posthumus and Cymbeline had never known the truth of it all.
The cave was cold, and water ran from its walls. She gathered long grasses and made out of them a bed on which she lay each night listening to the Welsh wind swirl around the mountain, reminding her of her age. As the grasses rotted, the bed became more comfortable, but at last they began to stink, so she threw them out of the cave and gathered more. Winter was coming, and soon she would have to find some other form of bedding.
In the daytimes she often looked at her hands, seeing the liver-spots and the creases. She had never intended to live this long.
She had never intended to do most of the things she had done during her life.
Each day Imogen lit a fire, sparking flints over dry leaves and then adding kindling and finally dead branches foraged yesterday. After warming herself by the blaze she went naked to the stream that emerged further down the mountainside and washed both her body and her clothes. She ran from the stream on her old, old legs back to the fire, using its heat to dry first her flesh and then her frayed garb.
The days were all alike, except that some were windier and colder than others. After a time, she began to forget they were passing, her only knowledge being that the sun was lower and whiter in the sky than it had been, so that the cold season was nearly upon her.
Sometimes she forgot her name, believing herself to be called Fidele and believing herself to be a man. Then she would feel her breasts or discover that she lacked a penis and remember that, yes, once upon a time she had posed as a man. Pisanio had persuaded her to do this, and it had
been as a man that she had become the page of Belarius and then the slave of the Roman general called Lucius ...
Then came the snows. She had been wise enough to store leaves and wood at the back of the cave, and these gave her warmth for several days. With the last of her fuel, she dried out more wood, but it was becoming increasingly hard to find any amid the deep drifts. She stopped bathing herself: there was no one else here to be offended by the smell of an old woman growing older.
The thick layer of snow made it harder to find food as well. Most of the time she subsisted on vegetables stolen from the scanty fields of the farmers who tried to make a living on the rocky soil further down the valley. Sometimes she took a sheep, running after it and clapping her hands until the terrified animal fled from her into the cave, where she could capture it and cut its throat. Those were good times, when she had meat to eat; when the carcass began to decay she could throw the remains onto her fire, so that everything sizzled and spat and filled the cave with a cooking smell that seemed to fill her belly even if she had eaten nothing. She felt she should do something with the wool – perhaps add it to her bed – but always much of it was bloodstained after her clumsy execution of the beast.
Once she found a dead hare, which she skinned and gutted and cooked. The taste was a delight after weeks of turnips and occasional mutton, but the following day found her too ill to move except as far as the cave-mouth, where she uncontrollably and simultaneously vomited and shat and piddled, blemishing the snow.
Once she had been a king's daughter. No, she was still a king's daughter – nothing could take that away from her – but she was also the humblest of any savage in all the land that her father ruled.
~
What she recollected most about the war was the noise.
The Romans, believing themselves invincible, had sent an army into her father's land, imagining it to be an easy conquest. But the Romans had been defeated, largely because of the bravery and cleverness of those whom Cymbeline had banished: the lord Belarius and Imogen's husband Posthumus. Her father, believing Posthumus to be a Roman and Imogen to be the servant of one, had come close to having her and her husband executed out of hand. It was the discovery that he had almost slain his own daughter that had given him a wisdom he had never before possessed.
But Imogen rarely let her mind rest long on that. The war brought noise. It brought screams and the clash of metal on hide, and the particular sort of noise that is one's own fear.
~
Looking out of the cave-mouth she could see nothing but whiteness interspersed by a few skeletal trees. She hugged her arms around herself, trying to stop shivering. The wind was a constant scream, and sometimes it swung around to batter her chest. There was enough fuel in the cave for her to have a fire today, she thought, but not enough for tomorrow. She couldn't bring herself to leave the cave to look for more wood. The cold was great enough that the half-sheep she still had would remain edible for days.
Then she saw the wolf.
The wolf was very large and very black – looking even blacker against the snow. It was sitting about one hundred yards down the slope from her and watching her.
So this was to be the end of it – the final sentence on the scroll of the things she had done.
Dying would be a pleasure. Anything would be better than the life – not life, just existence – that she was leading in the cave. She made a small bow and fluttered her hand in a beckoning movement to the wolf.
It raised itself, stretched its hind legs and then its fore legs, rolled over a couple of times in the snow, shook its head and came up towards her.
At last I can die, she thought.
The wolf was moving more quickly through the snow now. She lowered the top of her tunic to make her throat a more attractive target for the beast's attack.
But the wolf merely took her hand very gently in its jaws and led her back into the cave. After some incomprehension it was able to persuade her to sit down by the embers of yesterday's fire, then it fetched fresh wood from the pile she had built up.
The wolf smelled of excrement and old sweat and many other things, but it also smelled of friendship. The animal would not approach the fire closely, instead dropping branches by Imogen's side so she could toss the wood onto the flames. Each time the animal did this she ran her hands through the coarse hair on its head; once she tried to pull its muzzle towards her face, but this seemed to frighten it and it ran away from her and out of the cave-mouth. Later, however, it returned: shuffling with its hind legs, it presented to Imogen several branches and half a rabbit, then watched her use the former to cook the latter. Her half-sheep could wait. She had been given a gift.
"You have a name," she said later to the wolf.
The wolf was snoring loudly, half-wrapped around the fire but not too near to it. She could see that it was not an "it" but a "he."
"You have a name that is very appropriate, and even if it weren't I'd give it to you anyway." She reached forward a hand and laid it on the flank of the wolf. "You're called Cymbeline."
As soon as she said the name she wished she hadn't.
Her father. What he had done to her.
And what in the end she had done to him.
It was too late to change her mind, because, by her act of naming, the wolf had been defined; it had been given its position not only in her world but in the world as a whole.
Despite the heat of the fire, she shivered.
Then, after a while, she began to cease regretting her impulse. Her father had been an old wolf, defending himself through rage against the young wolves among the pack that surrounded him – the Catevellauni pack. He had been unable to understand that age must make way for youth, and even more unable to understand when one of the bitches he had sired, Imogen herself, had disobeyed him – had, as he saw it, rebelled against his gods-given primacy, his natural entitlement to command each and every member of the pack.
For some reason, she trusted the wolf. Had it wanted to kill her, it would have done so by now. She lay down beside it, curling her body around its back, holding it as close against her as she had ever held a lover. Soon she slipped into sleep, and dreamed dreams that made no sense, although her father was there, and Posthumus was there, and Iachimo was there, and Lucius and Belarius too.
~
In the morning she awoke to find the fire dead and the wolf gone, but her dreams continued, and now they were sorting themselves out into rationality. She wished that all of her life had been a dream, because a nightmare could be forgotten within days and the acts one performed in it were guiltless, being unreal. True memories were different: they were inescapable.
Outside the cave she could see the tracks of the wolf in the snow, and she followed them. They took her through the frozen air to the stream, where the wolf was waiting for her, its breath steaming even more than her own.
With a stone she hacked through the ice so that the animal could drink. After it had finished it watched her as she cupped her trembling hands and put water to her lips. She wasn't able to drink much. The dreams were still lingering, as if she were enduring two realities at once.
Pisanio – loyal Pisanio, servant to both her husband and herself – is saying: "Your husband wants you dead."
"But why?" says Imogen, horrified.
"Because of your adultery with the Italian scoundrel Iachimo. Iachimo told Posthumus about it. He gave him evidence." The servant looks shamefaced, as if this is something that should never be mentioned. He also looks a little frightened: should she wish to, she could have him killed, although he knows her as a merciful woman. "He took your bracelet. He says you have a mole on your left breast, which I know to be true. Posthumus has sent me a letter from Italy telling me of all this, and has instructed me to kill you for your infidelity."
"Iachimo? He tried to seduce me but he failed. My heart is true to Posthumus."
Pisanio shrugs. "I believe you." It is clear that he is lying, but she doesn't feel any anger tow
ards him.
They are in the Great Hall of her father's house. It is early in the morning. Wind whips through the room, making the hangings flap against the walls as if they were alive. She feels that the hangings are listening to their conversation.
"Does my husband believe more in Iachimo than he does in me?"
"It seems so, yes."
"Then," she says, looking at the hem of her blue skirt, "it seems that I have very little to live for. Kill me, Pisanio. I'd rather be dead than doubted."
The servant, daring, touches her hand. "I won't kill you, lady."
"I've asked you to. I have ordered it."
"I disobey your order."
She looks into his eyes, and sees the compassion there. She sees that the man is devoted to her, and will never raise a hand to harm her, however much she asks him to. For a moment she is angry with him, but then she relents.
"Lady Imogen," he says, "I cannot see you die. I will not let you die."
"You're more arrogant than you are permitted to be," she says, not meaning the words. She moves to the unglazed window of her father's house and stares out over the woodlands below. The tops of the pine trees are moving like hands in the wind. She smells the stench of the farm animals directly beneath her: it is a good stench, reminding her of life.
Pisanio is once again beside her.
"If I decline to kill you, at Posthumus's order, someone else will – and likely kill me as well because of my disobedience."
She draws a deep breath. "Then kill me," she says with a shrug. The matter is not important to her. "He has told you to. I have told you to. If you have the affection for me that I just saw in your eyes, Pisanio, put an end to my life."
Once, among the pine needles in the forest down the slope, she and Posthumus made impetuous love, yipping with pain as the dead brown-gray needles stabbed into their bodies. At the time the pain had almost added to their pleasure, because it was shared between them, a secret thing. Now she wonders if the thrust of a dagger into her chest would hurt any more than the pine needles did. Tears come to her eyes. Posthumus's accusation – that she has betrayed him – is in itself an act of betrayal.
