by Lee, Tanith
But she was not crying, shedding no tears, sloughed of everything.
They would burn him. His slim man’s body, the clever hands, the face of bones, the rope of black hair. Fire in his eyes for sure.
She would need to look at his skull, after the fire, before the sea claimed it. She wanted to know. Only his skull could tell her.
They were on the beach. Adamus lay among the driftwood and the logs. Michael and Carlo hauled the piano over the rocks towards his body.
Rachaela woke.
It was the middle of the night. The cars were quiet. She almost heard the mechanism of the church clock turning silently over towards morning. It rang only for noon and midnight.
She fumbled after her watch and by a dim non-light through the window read off four o’clock.
Why had she dreamed Adamus was dead?
Because she feared him. His death would be an apt solution.
She had felt something terrible in the dream, not grief or loss. Worse than those.
She composed herself to sleep again and lay until it was seven-thirty and the green rat light came creeping to the window.
Rachaela shopped pedantically. She bought a beige sweater, a packet of new cotton panties, tights, a paperback book. She bought a large black bag to put everything into. She would have to buy clothes, books, a radio, in London. When she was settled. There were some funds left. She would find another job. Anything would do.
As the days in the town had passed, even so few, the urgent city had grown remote. When and if.
She had to get there first.
The day listed by, toppling slowly from hour to hour. She ate another salad at the snack bar, which was cheap, and later walked out and sat by the river. The afternoon was clear. There were ducks on the water, she had not noticed them before. Bread for the ducks and the warm hand holding hers. It was almost a memory, invented and out of time.
She came across a cinema and went to see the film. It was meant to be funny, and sometimes the old-age pensioners in the front rows laughed querulously. How unlike the Scarabae they were—how much younger. Cracked and bent, warped and wounded. Pitiful. The Scarabae were not pitiful. Not even Sylvian on his pyre.
Rachaela left before the film ended.
The church clock and her watch gave evidence it was five o’clock. Thursday was almost done with. She braced herself with the idea of Friday now. She felt a little sick when she thought of it. A tearing of the strong cord. A scissors-cut. When the train pulled out the parting would occur. How would she feel then. My prison. Gone to earth.
In the evening Rachaela carefully packed the new black bag with the sparse items of her getaway. Then she went out again and ate a watery spaghetti bolognese at the café. The wine was like vinegar and did not help her to eat, but it made her quite tipsy for half an hour, during which half-hour all the recent events became funny. This passed into depression in time for bed.
She tried to read the paperback but real life was omnipresent and she could not suspend her personal consciousness.
Did Adamus know she was gone? Had they told him? How had he reacted? Probably with relief. It was all a ritual, something the house coerced him into doing. Those singeing moments before the fire—had she imagined that as his intent, or was this the ritual too? How could she think of him as a father—he had never been one. He was a stranger, and the phantasm of her daydreams. It was her fault. She had provoked it. If it had happened.
She slept and dreamed of Sylvian under the sea, full fathom five, with fish swimming in and out of his eyes. The dream was peaceful.
She woke up and saw the sense of what they had done. He was dead. What they did to his body did not matter. And anyway they had cremated him. Very hygienic and modern. After all she was running away not from the burning on the beach, or from the man and what had been about to happen with the man, but only from the constriction of the house. Running actually from security. Her clothes and radio and books left behind. Like a six-year-old leaving home.
It was Friday.
She had paid her bill yesterday evening. Now she had only to rise and dress and go.
She did not want breakfast, her stomach churning. She drank some water, which tasted of chemicals, visited the uneasy bathroom, and was ready.
At a quarter past seven she went out into the street.
The morning was rainy again, the streets shining like wet sealskin, a streetlamp or two still bewilderedly alight in the dark day. The cars sloshed and splashed up and down as usual. The shops were blank. People began to emerge like agitated rabbits, going early to work, and lighted buses streamed into the streets.
She knew the way. She crossed the dappled river with confidence and climbed into the skirl of streets above. She mistook a turning, but only once, then came to Wagon Street. It was ten past eight. Surely the only connection of the week to Fleasham would not leave so prematurely? She had not judged the time properly. She hastened into the station building.
Thank God there were people on the platform, on both platforms indeed, standing as if for execution in bowed resignation among the dripping umbrellas, soggy papers.
In the ticket office was a man.
‘What time is the Fleasham train?’
He looked at her, frowned. ‘Which?’
‘Fleasham. It only runs today. The connection to Poorly. I want to get to London.’
‘Oh that’s Bleasham you want.’ The man produced a Bible and consulted it.
It might run at six o’clock tonight for all she knew. Never mind. She could wait.
‘That’s at ten forty-five am.’
Rachaela smiled. ‘Then I haven’t missed it.’
The man laughed confidingly. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking you have. It goes on a Tuesday morning, not a Friday. It’s the Fletchers Junction that runs today.’
‘Is there any other way,’ she said, ‘I can get to Poorly?’
‘Not by train. And there’s no London connection at Poorly until Tuesday. Tuesday or Thursday. Eleven-fifteen.’
The day she had asked the policeman. That had been Tuesday. And he had told her Friday.
Her circumstances struck her like a weight of bricks.
She had nowhere to go and four more days to wait.
Well, she would have to wait them. What else could she do.
She did not thank the beaming man, radiant with his bad news. He would say to his mates, ‘Some bloody woman here wanted the Bleasham for Poorly, and she’s expecting it to run to suit her on the Friday. I told her. Nothing till next week.’
She would find another bed-and-breakfast hotel; not, not the same one. A waste of valuable cash, but there. And she would waste away the days, the horrible noisy Friday, Saturday, the deadly church-bell Sunday, and on Monday it would only be one more day. If what this one had told her were actually true.
Outside the station a hot pulse of fear came over her. It was not fear of the house of the Scarabae, or of their pursuit. It was a fear of the town. Its streets and people, the cars, another institutional room overlooking drains and glaucoma window-nets.
Don’t be a fool It’s all right.
But it was not. She had had enough. The world seemed in a plot to mar her escape. As once before.
Rachaela had gone into a café and tried to eat some toast, drink some coffee. She had managed the coffee. Then she had to look for another, a different hotel. She was not successful, and gradually her road led her back into the cobbled street before the cathedral-church.
She stood and looked up at the gargoyles.
It was easy to picture the men working on the church, clad in medieval garments, on scaffolding. The making of the devils and demons, the grotesques, the foreman’s face used as a model, or the local old woman supposed to be a witch.
Looking up made her giddy, the gargoyles swung out, ready to leap down on her.
The thought came that she might go into the church and sit down, out of the street and the way of the crowd, without the need to eat
anything, pretend anything.
Rachaela carried her two bags in under the carven porch, through the wooden door.
Inside, at once familiarity swept over her, oppression, an undeniable sense of relief.
It was the coloured windows. A great dim space filled by polished wood, a stone floor, and light trapped in cages of red and viridian and indigo blue, then scattered in pieces over everything. Even the smell of incense was not unfitting, like the powdery smell of the house.
Rachaela made her way to a pew and sat down. The whole interior softly murmured like a shell, or as a shell was meant to.
There seemed no one else in the church, not even visitors to peer at the organ and the choir, squint at the windows.
No one even praying.
There were embroidered cushions for the knees.
Rachaela had an urge to kneel down and pray. For what? She remembered school prayers, for which she was increasingly too late, Our Father which art in Heaven, the propitiation of a bad-tempered and jealous deity called always compassionate and with a need for praise worse than an insecure adolescent’s.
Was there any God? Logically not. No one to lean on then. No one to understand or to be implored. She was on her own as usual.
Rachaela leaned, instead, achingly on the pew. Her whole body seemed to have been racked, her back and neck were stiff, her head held red-hot wires that wound and bound.
Four days. Oh God, nonexistent father, four days.
She watched the scarlet sunlight break through a cloud beyond the window. The pictures were not insane here. Christ changed water into wine and infants were set afloat not drowned in the reeds. And the lion would lie down with the lamb.
There was a leopard in the church.
It moved so quietly, kept so still between steps she had not known. She had been lulled.
But now it came towards her and she scented it, not knowing what scent betrayed it, heard it, hearing nothing.
She did not turn her head.
Through the blue reflection of the Virgin, the leopard’s shadow passed and put out the light.
He was here.
Of course, where but here would he wait for her, away from the sun, under the shadows. Where she must come eventually. Or had he known to the moment, her hand on the door, her body slumped upon the wooden pew.
She turned after all, and saw Adamus standing above her.
Chapter Eight
Once when she was about five she had been separated from her mother in a department store. Someone had eventually taken her through the bustling, towering giant world of the shop to where her mother waited. The impression lingered that her mother had not come to find her, and that her mother had not been pleased to have her returned, for Rachaela was instantly slapped.
‘How did you know,’ she said, ‘I’d come here?’
‘You like old buildings. Sanctuary.’
‘How long have you been searching for me?’
‘Not long.’
‘And in the daylight too,’ she said archly.
He wore a black leather coat, too young for him if he had looked his age. But he did not. He wore no sunglasses. They would be in his pocket, ready for the day. Glad of the overcast? But the sun had come out now.
‘I don’t like the light,’ he said. ‘I can cope with it.’
‘And it was imperative that you found me.’
‘You were lost.’
His words fitted so exactly her own approximation of her state.
‘No I wasn’t lost,’ she said. ‘I meant to get to London.’
‘That’s rather complicated from here, I seem to recall.’
‘One train a week and they told me the wrong day. Or I’d have been gone.’
‘Then I should have had to wait until you came back.’
‘I would never have come near you.’
‘You think not.’
‘I know not. You can’t make me go back with you. If you touch me I’ll start to scream.’
‘That would be noisy.’
‘I mean it, Adamus.’
‘How medieval that sounds in your mouth. Interesting. Anna only makes it sound Victorian.’
‘I won’t play any more games. I’m going to a hotel. I’ll catch the train on—when it comes.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you want.’
‘So you’ve chased after me for nothing.’
‘Except the pleasure of seeing you again.’
He sat down beside her in the pew. His blackness shut off the blue window, the blessing hands of the Virgin. It would.
She should edge along to the pew’s other end and get out, but she was excruciatingly tired. She had nowhere to go. He would follow her. Walk up and down at her side, perhaps politely take her arm. How much grey sunlight could he really stand? She could only rely on that, his wearying before she did. And she suspected he would not weary.
‘You must let me go,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘You’ve no right to try to stop me. I’ll go to the police if I have to.’ She thought of the helpful policeman who had told her the wrong day for the train.
‘I’m not going to drag you away,’ he said, ‘kicking and screaming, by the hair. If I hurt you, it would be in other ways.’
The inside of her body pulsed and moved, leaving the outside a thin cold integument, stranded.
‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk to me.’
He sat in silence, calm, every aspect larger, towering, almost as in the uncontrolled moments in the upper room. Not quite.
She said, ‘I really am going to leave. Do you hear me.’
‘I’m allowed to speak?’
‘I can’t stop you.’
‘No, you can’t really. If you leave, you leave. Where are you staying?’
‘As if I’d tell you.’
‘You’ve checked out of one hotel and have yet to find another.’
‘You—were following me?’
‘No, Rachaela. It’s obvious, isn’t it? You checked out, or even ran away without paying your bill for all I know, in order to take the train. But the train didn’t materialize. And here you are sitting in the church with two bags.’
‘If you come after me I’ll do something to prevent you.’
‘That might be entertaining. It’s all right. I won’t come after you. I’ll sit here and let you get away. I’ll stay an hour, you look as if you can only move at a crawl.’
‘Another game. Hide your eyes, and then try to find me. You won’t.’
‘I won’t try. After all, I need only find out the day of the proper train and waylay you again on the platform.’
‘Do it. See what happens.’
‘Nothing would happen. I’d kiss your cheek and you’d wave me goodbye through the window. Brief Encounter.’
Rachaela tried to slow her breathing. She was desperately excited. She wanted to strike at him.
‘You’re saying then that when I walk out of the church I’m on my own.’
‘Completely.’
‘Free of the Scarabae.’
‘No, you’ll never be free of the Scarabae. You’re one of us. That goes with you. And that will bring you back.’
‘Live in that hope.’
‘I know from my own self. I got away. I came back. You’re already tainted. It’s too late.’
‘So you think I’d prefer to be walled up in that mausoleum—that grave of a house.’
‘What is so preferable to it?’
Before she could circumnavigate, the whole of her future jolted before her. The trains, the city, her search for some grubbing, nasty ill-paid job, a room somewhere, the noise of neighbours, the teeming streets, the overt viciousness of the capital. She saw too the length of days, the black-bullet chambers of the nights. She saw her aloneness, now loneliness, and she saw the vista of age, which she had never contemplated before. She was shiftless, had made no provision. She had lived as if awaiting rescue, her mother’s money, the arrival of the Sc
arabae.
‘It will be my life.’
‘It’s yours, wherever you are.’
This was fundamentally a fact.
She would have to get up and leave the church. The longer she stayed here the more power he had over her. It wove like a web.
But she was so tired and her heart beat so quickly. She did not want to go. She was glad he was here, his strength beside her on the bench, keeping her safe with his darkness from the blue sanctity of the Virgin.
The red window was a dark rose. The sun had gone in again.
‘How did you come to the town?’ she asked, to prevaricate.
‘I hired a car. How else? Do you think I’d walk all the way, like poor Carlo?’
‘How did you call the car?’
‘That was Carlo. Or Cheta. Someone in the village I imagine gave them use of a phone.’
‘The car didn’t come to the house.’
‘As you know, the road doesn’t go so far.’
‘Why did you come and not the others?’
‘I’m the young one, remember. And I’m the nearest to you in blood.’
‘In blood,’ she said. ‘The blood of the tribe.’
‘Your blood and mine are different.’
‘How?’ she said again.
There was a long interval. She felt him gather himself like a beast on the powerful springs of its limbs. He said at last, ‘Come back and see.’
She said, ‘You want to sleep with me. That’s what it is. You say I’m your daughter, you believe it, but you want to fuck me.’
From the corner of her eye she saw his face turning towards her. As if moved by a key, her own head turned until she confronted him. His face was like a blow. She could hardly breathe.
‘Yes, I want to fuck you. Come back and be fucked by me.’
‘Now you’re speaking the truth, you bastard.’
‘Now I’m speaking the truth. What’s the problem? The family will be thrilled. They’ll revel in it. It’s happened over and over, mother with son, father with daughter. Brother and sister. Two thirds of them are inbreedings of one kind or another, several twice over. A charming little intimate orgy has been going on for centuries. Secret pleasures of the house. And what other values hold you back? The criterion of the church, of morality and the world? It’s nothing to you. Come to me and let me give you what you want.’
