M/F

by Anthony Burgess

  The doorbell rang. In the best tradition of sensational fiction she and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. Clichés of action have to wear old gloves. I mouthed: Who? She gestured: Only one way to find out. I mouthed, with a violent headshake: Ignore it. Her eyes told me to look at the front window, to which my back was turned. Someone peering in through the lace curtains. I saw who it was. I began to conceive a sort of wry admiration for destructive providence. I said:

  – I’ll go.

  – Is it –?

  – It is. She must have cancelled her appointment.

  Aderyn the Bird Queen strode right in on my opening. I got in first with:

  – Fucking quick he was then, mam. Everything all right then, is it?

  The reddened eye had turned into a dangerous weapon. She saw the fly’s banquet in the kitchen, then Catherine at the sittingroom door.

  – Chwaer, she said bitterly. Where is my son? What have you done with him?

  – You going fucking mad, mam? I cried. Here’s your son. Is something wrong with both your fucking eyes, then?

  I could not think that Llew, in such an emergency, would have quenched the obscene word. My danger, after all, was much as his had been in the bedroom upstairs.

  His mother seemed to push Catherine into the livingroom. I kept talking.

  – Told you I was going to get a book, didn’t I? Well, here it is, man, mam. They hadn’t got it in the shop but she was in the shop and she said I could borrow –

  She turned on me with deep incisiveness.

  – Followed you. Followed you as far as this street. The man in the drinking place opposite knew you from your photograph.

  I noticed that she had in her hand an open passport, her thumb keeping it open. I was clearheaded enough to want to try to read it, but with a kind of sob she snapped it shut and stowed it violently in her handbag. I said:

  – That’s right, my photo. My fucking photo. Me. Why do you keep saying I’m not me, then?

  – Where is he? What have you –

  – I want that passport, mam. I’m leaving, I’m getting out, I’m a big boy now.

  – You and your sister and a piece of rotten meat for the journey? No more tricks, whoever you are. If Llew’s in on this trick I’ll kill him. But I’ll kill you first, whoever you are.

  In a mad way I was enjoying this. Despite the danger of innocence in a naughty world there is something comforting about the knowledge of one’s innocence. It is the comfort of knowing that there must after all be a protective God (different from the cunning providence that was playing this destructive game); otherwise there would be no point in anybody being innocent. It is exhilarating to have an irrefutable proof, however discardable it may be later, that a good God exists. Vitally integral, pure of scelerities, no exigency of Moorish jacules –

  – Sit down, mam, I said, sitting down. I see I have to tell you the truth. But if I’ve been lying remember it’s your fucking fault. Scared I’ve been of you, see.

  Catherine sat, but the Bird Queen remained standing. She was, I saw for the first time, not unlike a stork. She clutched her bag between index and pollex, her keelless sternum heaving, a nictitating membrane coming down over her sick eye. I said:

  – Birds, birds. Sick of living with birds. Well, she and me are going off together, mam. A new life away from birds. I’ll get a job, I’ll work for her. You’ve always stood in my way as far as that goes, mam. A man can’t live all his life as a fucking servant to birds.

  Aderyn the Bird Queen sat down; her pygostyle engaged a hard wooden bottom. She said, quieter than before:

  – Not true. You know I always wanted –

  – Some nice little thing of your own choosing you could like boss and lady over. Another unpaid servant. To stop your darling sonny bonny whoring and to bring you breakfast in bed.

  Catherine was impressed but frightened: Llew was alive again. That sonny bunny surely must convince the mother, on whose face a kind of agitated oil or sweat was spreading thinly, an uropygial secretion. I followed up with:

  – Selfish you are, mam. Live for your art you do. Your son wants something like of his own to live for.

  Aderyn’s response was to make moaning noises in her syrinx and then to add to the noise with a kind of dry weeping. Catherine and I looked at each other and I, fool that I was being young, gave her a sort of parodic Neapolitan tenor amorous leer. She winced in quiet horror. She was perhaps after all not a bad girl, though ugly. She had perhaps after all, though now cured, known suffering. Aderyn said to me:

  – I don’t know her. I don’t know anything about her.

  To Catherine:

  – I don’t know you, see. I know nothing about you, see. Terrible shock this is. So quick everything happens.

  – Oh, I improvised, we’ve known each other a long time, without you knowing, mam. Afford to travel she can. An heiress. She came here because we’re here, I’m here. Rented this house.

  – Don’t know her parents, don’t know anything.

  It was time for Catherine to speak. She said:

  – I have no parents. I’m with with a sort of governess. Miss Emmett.

  – Governess, yes, that was the word, governess. But sister too, sister.

  – And quite right too, I said, to say sister. These people here on this island respect only mothers and sisters and wives. I couldn’t say wife, could I? A man best protects his his his girl by calling her his sister. That’s in the fucking Bible in the Song of Solomon, man, mam.

  I put in that final flourish to mitigate what had been too Mileslike. Aderyn ignored it as, as I could tell now, she would ignore my other obscenities, or my other uses of the same obscenity, or my same obscenity put always to the same use and employed, almost literally for me, ad nauseam. English was evidently not her first language; its foulnesses were hypothetical ones. But for me it was monstrous that such speech should be a device of safety. She siad to Catherine:

  – What’s your name, geneth? Want to be his wife do you, is that it then?

  – Catherine Faber, I said. And she does, yes she does, she does, mam. Going off together we are, as soon as we’re let out of this crappy kip, see.

  – Let her speak for herself, bachgen.

  – I must go and see how Miss Emmett is, Catherine said, getting up. She was less than halfway to the door when Aderyn said:

  – Stay, girl.

  She stayed.

  – What is the matter with this Miss Hammered, then? Ill, is she?

  – She had a bit of a heart attack, I said. She’s resting.

  – Know all about it, is it, boy bach? Not much good as a governess any more, I’d say. Sit, girl.

  Catherine hesitated.

  – Eistedd, geneth!

  Catherine responded as to a powerful cantrip. Aderyn got up professionally as to address an audience. She said:

  – The world’s changing, I see that, see it every day. And as you get old you don’t change with it except in your body perhaps and then always for the worst. What the young want the young must have, that we’re told in the newspapers and on the teledu. Life being perhaps short in the future for us all but most specially for the young. I’ve had my life and it was not always a good one. My marriage was not happy except for my son here, you, bachgen, and perhaps I was too selfish in my work and my talent. I was given the great anrheg of power over living things, meaning birds. Birds, girl. The fowls of the air, as in the Bible. Girl I was myself, no more, when I first showed the power, teaching my auntie’s budgie so well that they made a gramophone record of it – Georgie Porgie and Little Tommy Tucker and such rhymes, as if a bird was no better than a snotnosed plentyn whining for loshins. Well, what my birds say now is better, university lecturer he was that gave me on paper what he said was right for an Adult Repertoire as he called it, and Professor Burong and his connections came in nicely there. And now, geneth, heiress as you are if what he says is true, you will no doubt be despising me for being part of a circus show, and if you a
re educated, which you will be if you are what he says, you will despise me also for bringing down what could have served Great Learning to the level of spit and pennies and brass bands and taffysucking gawpers. If you will say the word prostitute I will not say no. For Professor Burong said, when I was but a girl feeder in the Aviary, that the gift I had was better than all learning and should be put to the service of The Science of Living Things as he called it. But I had my son, who is sitting by you now and says he loves you, and I was sick of watching each punt and swllt and never able to afford a good present for my dear mab on his birthday at Nadolig. And so when I met this circus man I was filled with the glory of lights and crowds. So I went with him into that world, taking you, bachgen, for, you may know it now on this day of change, the man you called father till he died was not your father.

  – I sometimes, I improvised, thought it was like that, mam.

  – Yes yes. It is not important. It is your own life that is important. And sometimes I think of my proud birds, both the hunters and the talkers, which is the division of men as well as birds, I think of them as brought low and degraded. But if I opened their cages and said Go, fly away, it would be only to me they would fly, for they know no different. But my own mab is not a bird and he can be free, and now the cage is open. So then there shall be a marriage, and with my blessing too.

  I got up at once on that, mainly to eclipse Catherine’s visible sick palpitations, and tried to embrace Llew’s mother with:

  – Diolch, mam, wonderful, I knew you’d like see it was best for all of us, and now we’ll get off this crappy island soon as they’ll let us and go to the States and get married and get a home ready for you and –

  But she hadn’t finished. She resisted my grateful arms and said:

  – But it has to be now. No more putting off since they tell us time is so short for us all and specially the young. Today is Saturday and tomorrow there’s no performance, so we shall have the ceremony tonight so all can drink to you and rest tomorrow.

  – To to –

  – Tonight, yes. After the second show. I was brought up Calvinistic Methodist and you, bach, were brought up nothing. Your religion, geneth, I don’t know. But now they tell us all is one and the Pope himself will go to capel, so Pongo, that is Father Costello, will do it tonight and gladly. We must prepare. A white dress you have, girl, surely, and Llew has a good suit. We must tell the refreshments people.

  Catherine was on her feet now, looking manically (but it could be taken for delight) for an egress not just from the room or the house but from this whole spacetime capsule that throbbed in the continuum of sense. Aderyn said:

  – Love and gratitude and joy you should both be showing now. In each other’s arms you should be in bliss. But the shock of joy can sometimes look like the shock of disaster.

  I grabbed Catherine and hid her collapsed face in my shoulder. She shook and shook. I nodded at the tricky Arranger of Things, disguised in a ceiling corner as a spider.

  – There, Aderyn said tragically, is happy I am.

  16

  – I mean, regard this as theatre, as a mere extension of circus. Brothers and sisters have acted lovers before. There were Beth and Bob Greenhaulgh who did Romeo and Juliet at the Princes Theatre in Manchester, England, in, oh, about 1933. Connie Chatterley and the gamekeeper Mellors, in the stage version of Lawrence’s dying sermon, were acted by Gilbert Zimmerman and his sister Florence. And they actually went through the motions, naked too, flowers wreathing genitals and all. That, of course, was much later than 1933.

  – Oh God God, what a mess you’ve landed us in.

  – Soon – maybe tomorrow, perhaps even tonight – we’ll be able to make our separate getaways, if you can lend me some money that is. The police can’t afford not to lose face by not producing – after a decent interval which is supposed to cover hidden skill and diligence – a ringleader of some sort. They’re probably deciding, perhaps with the President himself, who it ought to be. The Minister of Education maybe, breaking down and confessing, a big trial, a general purge, the President glowing in new glory. And the Minister of Education, being a freethinker or freemason, will be proved to have rigged the exploded miracle, having put the true one to silence.

  – You’ve made a hell of a hell of a –

  – That’s unjust, and you know it.

  I had taken some money from under the owl and then crossed the road to the Yo Ho Me Lads for a bottle of Feileadhbeag (pronounced Filibeg), a Scotch whisky distilled in Port of Spain, and I was drinking this. It made me elated and talkative.

  – But what does it mean, what does it prove?

  – Or it may, of course, be the only possible candidate – our candidate. Mean? Prove? Oh, tonight’s affair. It’s naïve, really. Nobody would dream of marrying his own sister. If I marry you, you’re not my sister. Ergo I’m her son Llew. And as Llew I’ll leave her, with my bride. And then everything will be saved, including honour. They can’t force consummation, though they’ll probably get near it.

  – Consumm consumm –

  – I can act it out, but can you? You’d better drink more of this. It’s better to be giggly than the way you are now.

  The way she was was haggard and tremulous, the fat body shaking like, I presumed though I hadn’t of course bought any, her favourite Jellif, the fat face wearing haggardness as a fat foot wears a thin shoe. I went on talking:

  – The situation, as far as I’m concerned, is what you might term an interesting one. In two days in a strange country I’ve acquired a mother in the form of a Welsh-speaking Bird Queen who scared me –

  – She scares me too.

  – Maybe, but you haven’t seen those damned swooping hawks of hers. One false move and down they’ll come. They go for the eyes.

  – Oh God God God.

  – Act. Drink more whisky. To continue, I’ve spent some hours in prison, I’ve discovered the works of an unknown superlative artist in a garden shed, and I’ve been shot at by a riddling lionfaced expert on Bishop Berkeley.

  – Oh God, it tastes awful.

  – Think of the awfulness of the taste, then, and not of any other awfulness. Most interesting of all, I’m due tonight to be married by a circus clown to my own sister – whom I first heard of last Sunday and met in the flesh for the first time yesterday – and I have the problem of burying in this garden the corpse of a young man who is, was rather, my double. The only time for doing it is what the world would call my wedding night. Work that fucking out, see, man.

  – You’re horrible.

  – Maybe, but I’ll save you from those bloody beaks.

  – And then there’s her. There’s the problem of her. She just won’t wake up.

  She meant, of course, Miss Emmett. Catherine and I sat in Miss Emmett’s room, on either side of her bed. It was a beautifully clean little room but curiously decorated with framed reproductions of neither commemorative nor aesthetic value. There was a photograph of very ordinary beechleaves with what looked like mould growing on them. There was what looked like a Soviet poster of the Second World War, showing workers and soldiers marching arm in arm under a great star, and for some reason the soldiers had bigger heads than the workers. There was a crude drawing in water colour of goldfish in a bowl, but this seemed an original not a reproduction – by Catherine, by long-dead me? There was what seemed to be an architect’s drawing of a projected boxlike factory. There was an advertisement for plastic furniture, lovingly framed as if it were precious art. Seeing none of these, Miss Emmett slept deeply and, I thought, healthily. Would she wake cured of the shock that made her say yes yes yes? It was safer for her to be asleep, of course. But what if she awoke while Catherine and I were out and ran off healthily but dementedly to the police about something she had become convinced she had done last night? I had to get that damned corpse buried, but not now while the sun raged and people sat, this being Saturday afternoon, in adjacent gardens.

  – What shall we do with her? Catherine as
ked.

  – I’m being altogether serious when I say that we ought to wake her up in order to give her something to make her sleep again.

  – Oh, you’re horrible and impossible.

  How clever, or how foolish, was the Bird Queen? If she was convinced I was an impostor, then her leaving me alone with Catherine till the evening was a fair stroke of nastiness. She knew, and I knew, and I’d patiently laboured at making Catherine know, that any attempt of ours at hiding in the town or getting locked up by the police for some contrived misdemeanour, would be proof of my imposture, meaning my or our or some accomplice’s at best kidnapping, at worst liquidation, of her son. We were supposed to be in hell in the livingroom, Catherine and I, looking at each other in horror when not at the wallclock (a cuckoo one, incidentally, whose bird had been put to silence and entombed behind his little double door), while the flies blew the cold beef on the kitchen table. If, on the other hand, she thought I was really Llew and this (but how improbable that had to be) was the girl I loved, then she was merely kindly leaving an engaged couple to kiss and cuddle and moon about sunnier delights to come while – having skipped the doctor and, little as she liked to drive, driven herself back – she told the good news to Mr Dunkel and the circus company, including her birds.

  Catherine said she was hungry and went down to the kitchen while I drank more Feileadhbeag and neared the end of my small supply of Sinjantin. She came up again with the red box of sugar lumps, and I thought for a moment she intended to bring Miss Emmett round by forcing some into her mouth – a way reserved, surely, for bringing diabetics back to the world’s doubtful sweetness from the coma of disturbed chemistry. This still looked like healthy sleep induced by aspirin. But Catherine meant the sugar for herself. She crunched and crunched and said:

  – And that meat down there is horrible. Full of sort of heaving white things. Ugh.

  – Why didn’t you throw it out?

  – Nothing to do with me. You bought it, you cooked it, you ate it.

  – You ate some of it.