Dark Dance

by Lee, Tanith

  She sat in the flat in the silence that was not Ruth’s silence.

  Ruth had never been as late as this. Where could she be? Some burger bar, the Pizza Eater?

  At ten thirty-five, Rachaela switched on the main light and walked behind the screen into Ruth’s area.

  Everything looked at first glance the same.

  Rachaela examined the area carefully.

  The bed was made, Ruth’s way, lumpy under the dark-blue coverlet. The old bear Emma had given her sat in his corner, accorded dignity, but no longer attention. The books piled up in cranky stairways. On the wall, the painted mirror and the pictures.

  The green paperweight and the blue glass cat were missing from the chest-top.

  Rachaela walked into the area and squeezed up to the chest. She opened drawers. Comb and brush were not there. The vampire make-up was gone. The blue jumper and the scarlet blouse were gone. Some pants and socks, tights, the second bra, the new packet of sanitary pads.

  In the bathroom Ruth’s toothbrush and her little stick of deodorant were missing.

  Rachaela came out and sat down.

  What did she feel? As once before, nothing.

  She was not astounded. Of course she had known what Ruth would do. Just as the man, the Scarabae agent, had known what she would do eventually. He had only to offer himself and wait.

  Rachaela had turned on Ruth, not just the habitual cold shoulder, but with a firework of dislike and alienation. And Ruth had packed her satchel quietly in the night, gone out and gone to him. And he would have taken her, or directed her. To the Scarabae.

  What should she do?

  Nothing. There was nothing to do.

  Ruth was no more. The twelve years of idiocy were over.

  After four days, Rachaela cleaned the flat.

  She dusted behind the books, dusted the books, scoured the cooker and did out the kitchen cupboards. She emptied the Lucozade, Pepsi and Sprite down the drain. When she reached Ruth’s area, she moved the screen out into the room and took off the shawls, flowers and bells. She stripped the bed and put Ruth’s treasures, carefully wrapping the glass, her books and the bear into two cardboard boxes from the supermarket, and stowed them in the bottom of the wardrobe. Ruth might send for her things. Ruth’s clothes, which she would soon have grown out of, she put into bags for Oxfam. The Scarabae would have to clothe Ruth from now on.

  Rachaela did not like the screen, but as with Ruth’s bed it was too large to dispose of easily. She folded it and stood it in the corner behind the music centre. The bed itself she redraped in its midnight cover, and added a couple of red-and-blue cushions.

  The denuded chest she pushed against a wall.

  The room looked much bigger, airier. It was possible to see into all its parts freely.

  She did not look for the man. He would be gone by now.

  On the sixth day, she walked up to Lyle and Robbins and inquired after work, but they had no vacancies. The Pizza Eater looked over-staffed, and the girls and boys seemed extremely young and noisy. There were no advertisements for staff. She would have to look at the local papers.

  On the seventeenth day a letter came from the school. Rachaela put it aside, Rachaela sat in her chair, listening to music.

  It was going to be a lot cheaper, without Ruth. Maybe she could coast for a little while.

  Outside were the familiar roofs and flats, the chimneys and aerials. In the distance the park was transparently, avidly green.

  It began to be hot, and the smells of petrol, geraniums and baked pavements filled the flat from the open windows.

  After the twenty-seventh day, Rachaela dreamed of Ruth at the house of the Scarabae.

  She seemed to be wearing Anna’s evening dress, long and black and trailing on the floor, winking with spangles. Her long hair fluttered behind her as she moved about. The Scarabae clasped their hands, pleased.

  Ruth was in the garden. There were red and white roses. Uncle Camillo popped up from behind a bush. He rode the rocking-horse, which moved over the lawn without effort.

  He handed Ruth a letter.

  Rachaela could only read the words Come to me.

  She walked into the house. It was night, and only the ruby lamp burned in the hall. The door to the tower was ajar.

  As she stood there, Adamus came out of the tower.

  She had forgotten or erased his face, and so she saw it through a blur, but his body was naked, exactly as she had remembered it, golden-white, muscular and slender, the black mass at the groin and out of it the penis rising dark amber-red. His black hair fell around him. ‘It’s you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. You mustn’t,’ she said quickly, wringing her hands in a strange melodramatic gesture.

  ‘But I must.’

  ‘Adamus—she’s only a child.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Eleven years old,’ Rachaela pleaded.

  ‘A woman.’

  And out of the dark Ruth stole in, enveloped in her long, black glittering gown.

  She wore her make-up, but impeccably, the black eyelids blended and subtle, the red-Upstick lips softened. Her hair was like his.

  She was not a child. She had begun to menstruate, she had high full breasts.

  She moved towards him as though Rachaela were not there. She put her thin white hand into his.

  Adamus stooped and kissed Ruth’s scarlet mouth.

  He leaned and picked her up, and carried her across his body, up into the breathing unlit tower.

  Rachaela followed them.

  They came into the upper room.

  A fire glowed on the hearth. By its light Rachaela saw Adamus lie Ruth on her back on top of the piano. Somehow he climbed up after her. He kneeled above Ruth and undid the black dress slowly.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Ruth. She giggled, as she had done when she was a child with Emma.

  Adamus bowed to Ruth’s perfect breasts and mouthed and tongued them. Ruth held his head to her body. He parted her thighs and travelled down her, skin and material, and thrust the dress away, and began his second kiss.

  Flames leaped in Rachaela. She longed to scream. She was invisible and unbearable, a ghost.

  Ruth groaned. She pulled on Adamus. He left her ebony mound, stroking it with his fingers. He put the burning phallus there, and drove it in.

  Ruth shrieked.

  ‘You hurt me,’ said Ruth, ‘hurt me again.’

  Unable to move, Rachaela watched them rise and fall together, their bodies mounted on a black wild horse of pleasure, galloping.

  Ruth screamed. She screamed and kicked and caged him in her long white legs.

  Rachaela spasmed in long aching waves and woke in the bed in the flat, staring into darkness.

  It was not possible.

  Father and grandfather. He could not.

  But why should anything stop him?

  Rachaela’s day was over, she had served her purpose. Now Ruth might be the year queen.

  Continuance. The mad people treasured it, and Adamus was their instrument.

  Don’t be a fool If it must, let it happen.

  She tried to remember his face, but as in the dream it had grown blurred and distant.

  Rachaela sat up and switched on the light. Outside some drunks were shouting in the street. She was glad of them.

  She got out of bed and went to make tea. That had been Emma’s remedy for everything. Tea or a drop of sherry.

  What would Emma have made of this?

  ‘You can’t let them get hold of her, Rachaela. From what you say, they’re terrible people. Crazy, awful. Your own child. You have to get her back out of their clutches.’

  ‘Yes, Emma,’ Rachaela said.

  The boiling water splashed into the mug, and the drunks sang on the street in rejoicing.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Driver number three was quite confident. ‘Pitchley. I know Pitchley. Where the new estate is. It’ll cost a bit.’

  .‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s
OK then. Jump in.’

  Seeing the line of taxis at the station in Porlea she had not been optimistic, but time had narrowed the spaces of the countryside. The territory of the Scarabae had been breached.

  She recollected the way, even backwards and in the early summer greenness. She recognized the broad motorway, churches and pubs.

  Only the normality was unnerving.

  She did not recognize the village.

  A small supermarket had been built, there was a post office and a greengrocer, a new bold pub with a rainbow sign The Carpenters. Up on the hill the new estate, chocolate brown, with gabled roofs, satellite dishes, wheels of washing and model cherry trees in gardens. Somewhere in the middle lay the depression of grey stone houses. The derelict fields had gone to lawns.

  ‘Here you are,’ said the driver. ‘Where do you want me to drop you?’

  ‘At the top of the hill.’

  ‘The estate.’

  He drove her almost on to the drive of the last brown doll’s house.

  She paid him and got out. She watched him drive away.

  The crows had gone. Where did crows go to?

  It was all so different. But it was still the place. The starting point for the long walk over the heath to the house.

  Her bag was light now, only packed with the bare essentials.

  She had better be careful of the road. There might be more traffic.

  Rachaela was correct in this assumption. Three cars went by her in her first half-hour on the road.

  The sun westered as she passed the gutted farm that had now been pulled down. She saw where the crows had gone. There was a delegation here. She remembered the rook or crow sitting in the hedge the night she had come away for ever. For ever, after all, had not been so long.

  The heath, when she came up on it, was alive with colours. Brown and gold among the green, purple flowers, the gorse in sunny clumps. Birds flew and circled, calling.

  It was right it should look different, coming back. In her memory it was too bleak, too desolate, and that had given it an added power.

  She was moving now towards the sea. She felt it, like a void before her.

  After she had walked for another half hour she was tired to the bone. She sat down on a rock. The sky was thickening. Would the daylight last? She must not rest too long.

  Such parts as these Ruth had drawn, and peopled them with dragons.

  A gull cried spitefully in the sky.

  Presently she got up and went on. She did not have the stamina of years ago, but she would have to make it. She did not want to be marooned on the heath when darkness came. Not now.

  The sound was like her tiredness at first, a long thrumming in the ear. Then she knew it for what it was. The rock jutted through the thin pelt of flowers and grass, and all at once the horizon concertinaed. She was looking out into the vault of air above the sea.

  She came to it and stood and looked down into the dragon’s mouth. The waves clashed along the bastions of the cliffs. She might have been here yesterday.

  Darkness seeped up from the earth.

  The sun was setting as she walked by the brink of the ocean.

  Like a mirage she saw the blackness of the pines, and all at once, the house, small in the distance like a toy. Flawless. Its banks and slopes. One blazing emerald window.

  She stopped in wonder. In wonder at herself. For she had come back.

  After sunset the doors would be opened. It was the right time as she came around to the front of the house. She paused again to see its silhouette against the dimming sky. The stars were there, slightly altered, for it was a different season and a later year. She saw the tower. She felt a strange sinking in her stomach. No, she must remember, the peculiarity of the house had also to do with her perception. She must, this time, be rational.

  The doors gave, just as before. As before she entered into the huge open hall or lobby, with its chessboard floor of russet-and-black marble. It was as wide as she recalled, rationality did not make it smaller, And there the shadows massed, the crouching bears that might be anything, and through the high windows dropped the occluded violet-yellow dregs of light.

  The red lamp was burning on the mahogany table, catching above the chandelier with its drops of blood.

  The smell of the house was the same. A church of damp and incense, old woods and musty closets, polish, oil, and sweet decay.

  This time she did not turn to shut the door.

  She glanced at the tower in the shadow, and dismissed it.

  No one to greet her, now.

  That was proper. She was superfluous and perhaps not welcome.

  Could she find her way in the dark?

  She walked to the stairs. The nymph guarded the newel post, holding up her blind light. A new spider had woven from her shoulder to her upraised arm, a film-set touch that was too apposite. Rachaela put her foot on the red Persian carpet and started up, out of the scarlet ambience of the lamp.

  Twenty-two steps.

  On the landing a soft light shone into the dark from the corridor, as in memory. The second lamp was lit, as it had been then. She recollected it falling on the face and sightless seeing eyes of Michael, the first of the Scarabae household she had ever beheld.

  She entered the lit passage and there was the window in the elbow of it, dark now as then, a crowd of pictures on the walls, paintings beneath paintings.

  And there the door.

  How familiar it was. As known to her as the door of the flat.

  Would this room be locked?

  The doorknob turned easily, and the door opened on the blue-and-green room.

  It shocked her, for it was just the same, as if memory had now been lifted from her head and unfolded in front of her. The green fireplace, with the black clock with angels, the dressing-table and figured mirror, the four-poster bed. The covers of the bed had been drawn back a little, the action of an hotel, to show the clean pillowcases and the white sheet.

  There was no fire on the summer hearth. A fire screen of embroidered blue roses stood there. Mrs Mantini would have had an eye for that.

  Rachaela tossed her bag on to the bed.

  Her radio stood where she had left it, on the table.

  She lifted it up and saw that long ago the batteries had leaked and burnt the wood.

  She crossed to the wardrobe and opened it and saw her abandoned clothes hanging in a neat row. A faintly powdery smell hung with them, but they were not moth-eaten, would still fit her despite twelve years and the bearing of a child.

  The night window loomed at the room’s back. Its picture was quite evident to her, even in blackness, the leaded tree and standing figures, the apples and the unicorn.

  Rachaela left the room and walked into the bathroom. Mrs Mantini would have been busy here, too. Indeed the whole house would have been a paradise to Mrs Mantini.

  There were fresh soaps and clean towels.

  Rachaela had been expected.

  Why? They would think her maternal instinct outraged at the extraction of her child? Burning hot with zeal, the anguished mother rushing after. For what did they know of her half-hearted attempts at abortion, the years’ endurance. Had Ruth described anything of Rachaela’s brand of motherhood?

  Rachaela took the oatmeal-coloured dress out of the wardrobe and hung it up. There was no doubt it would fit her.

  She went back into the bathroom and ran a bath.

  As she lay in the water, she heard the soft brisk heels of a female Scarabae pass along the corridor outside. Unice? Miriam?

  The sound was so usual to her. Perhaps she had missed it in the flat, these passagings. Only the loud bad music below and the arguments on the landing.

  She thought: I am a few walls’, stairways’, rooms’ distance from him.

  Until now she had hardly thought of Adamus. He had formed her life, as for the last twelve years she had lived it, formed her every day by the acts of one extraordinary night. Through the years she had sometimes half dreamed of
it. She had never permitted herself to conjure it up. And over it had meshed a concrete slab, which now the lever of the house was painfully and irresistibly easing up, She had known she must face Adamus, or the idea of Adamus, if she came back.

  He was her reason, after all; Adamus with Ruth.

  She got out of the bath and towelled herself dry. Going into the bedroom again she put on the oatmeal dress which might have been bought yesterday for fit. Its faded quality did not displease her, or the soft odour of destruction. She must camouflage and arm herself.

  She powdered her face in her mirror and reaffirmed the dark pencil around her eyes.

  Would Camillo leave her another gift-wrapped mouse?

  But when she opened the door, nothing and no one was outside. Only the burning lamp conveyed the half-life of the house.

  Did the Scarabae still dine, or had customs changed?

  She would have to see.

  Rachaela walked into the corridor and along to the landing, and descending the stairs she saw the lamps were lit in the drawing room as on that first night years before.

  In the drawing room Michael and Maria stood like cut-out figures in their dark servile clothes.

  ‘Michael, Maria,’ she said.

  They gave her stiff little bows, what she would have expected.

  Michael said, ‘Miss Rachaela, please go straight through into the dining room.’

  ‘I’d like a drink first, Michael.’

  ‘Miss Anna told me to ask you to go straight in.’

  Rachaela shrugged. Something twisted in her belly, a phantom Ruth-baby.

  She went towards the second door, and Michael hurried ahead to open it for her.

  She walked into the dining room, and stopped, not surprised, perturbed only by what she had suddenly anticipated.

  For they were all there, as on the memorable occasions in the past.

  Their known, nearly identical faces, slid by in a wave of tawdry dinner jackets, sequined old lace. Could she still name them? Yes. Alice, Peter, Jack, Livia... Not Camillo, never Camillo. She saw and registered all this in parenthesis. For at the table’s head sat the most bizarre Scarabae of all. In an exactly similar perhaps resewn dress of dark green voile and net, a necklace that was a heart of green cut-glass, and jade ear pendants, her black hair flowing from tortoiseshell combs, her face smoothly powdered, lids black, lips crimson: Ruth.