A Superior Spectre

by Angela Meyer

  But Hamlet is mad, and it has sometimes kept me awake at night, the idea of my alignment with him. When I read those words he says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that the world is a ‘foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’, I am equally resistant to, and understanding of, the idea. The world is such in that it is filled with monstrous ideas, people, places; and yet it is not, because there are red deer and lambs and orange skies and the pressure of fingertips through the material at my elbow. The foul and pestilent world now seems closer, in Edinburgh.

  Ailie and her company get slowly drunker. I, too, have had more wine than I am used to. I am hot in my cheeks and chest. And then, as though someone had flicked a switch, Ailie’s eyes begin to droop.

  ‘Here she goes,’ says Mr Stewart. ‘Edith?’

  Edith enters, and sees immediately what she is to do. The guests stand simultaneously. Each takes my hand, in turn, to say goodbye. I hold myself upright, and politely give my best wishes.

  Mr Stewart lingers half in the doorway. ‘Constance – Miss Taylor – would hae kept her awake,’ he says obliquely. He kisses me on the hand, and I laugh. ‘Ye’ve got life in ye, girl,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ I say forwardly. I’m not so sure why I can be bold with him. It may be to do with his age and experience. It may be that here, in Edinburgh, I fear losing myself and so I become larger, fuller, in some sort of defiance. He edges backwards to the stairwell and I close the door.

  I go to my room. The apartment goes black. The sky outside glows grey from fog-shrouded streetlamps. I sit in bed but am anxious about going to sleep. It seems that sleep is a doorway to pestilent vapours that then sit heavy about me in the day. I remove my dress, and unclasp my corset. Edith is inconsistent in her help. The air is cool and I rub my hands along my own skin. I long for the feel of earth and grass, in the warm months after rain, when it smells so pungent. And then I see water. Is it the ocean? I close my eyes, conjuring it further, the way Hamlet lets in his madness. There are small boats, bobbing. It is clear as a memory. But I have not seen the ocean, nor a body of water like this.

  There is something happening to me.

  Iam a lazy, lolling seal in the morning. Blue, deep underwater when Edith wakes me. She says it is quite late and Ailie has asked after me. Her forehead is tight.

  ‘I’m sorry, Edith.’

  She sighs and leaves the room.

  Thunder sounds outside. My limbs feel heavy. And my breasts feel heavy. So here we are at the start again. This heaviness is often the first sign. I suppose I could attribute my mood to this, also. There is both a languor and an alertness that comes: a weight, but a jumpiness. Sounds cut deeper, and yes, I have startled at shadows previously. I’ll put my recent experiences, the frustration and the shock of the mirror, down to this time before the bleeding, then.

  I breakfast with Ailie, who is pleased with how the gathering went, and again does not seem to realise (or want to admit) that she fell asleep. She imagines the conversations went on into the night. Her stubborn imagining strikes me as arrogant. I suppose we all have these elements of our perception that are a little awry.

  This coffee is rich and viscous on my tongue. Ailie takes it black and so I do too. These kippers in butter, this toast – I must have another helping.

  ‘Where your mother and I are from,’ Ailie says, ‘it was fish, always.’ In the west of Scotland, on the coast. The mention of my mother makes my heart pound. I want to tell Ailie I can picture the water clearly, though that still seems absurd. ‘Good for the skin.’

  Ailie’s accent has been downscaled because she married an Englishman, but I remember my mother’s being rich as gloaming light.

  ‘Tonight we will attend a lecture at the Surgeons’ Hall,’ Ailie says. She tells me that it will be educational for me. I cannot picture what it will be like.

  And the day yawns out ahead of us. My fingers twitch, thinking of chores. Surely I will grow fat, without enough to do, and with these long drawn-out meals. One continues to pick at the food because it is still there, and because the servings are plentiful.

  The butter has dripped from the fork right down to my fingers.

  As a child I was what adults and other children called a ‘sore loser’. When a game had finished I could not politely help pack up the paper money and the red plastic houses; I could not put fifty-two playing cards into a neat pile. It took all my strength not to swipe my arm across the game board, sending the die hurtling at my opponent’s smug face. After the game I would be quiet and sullen, digging my fist into the chocolate box, often taking myself away altogether from the room, though that would follow with taunts at my back. I am an only child, like Leonora. So my playmates and competitors were cousins or the children of my parents’ friends. Children who grew up to be people so different from me, but whose lives I knew so much about because of the pictures that came up in my feed of fat babies and plain partners. There was a twitch in me when I saw those pictures, similar to the compulsion that made me want to sweep the game board. I’m not stupid; I know that people create a gloss on their lives with what they publicly share, that the setbacks and secrets, the urinary tract infections, visitors who overstay their welcome, children you don’t love enough, clandestine kisses and feelings of inadequacy at not having learnt another language are all lingering in the background, but still. I guess I shared more photos and videos when I was with Faye than at any other time. She shared more: pictures of me with a strained, wry expression, holding a glass of something. Or my face in mock surprise or delight, with an ironic thumbs-up or pointing to my meal, a building, or a sign.

  If you took a photo of me now I would look both old and like that sulking child.

  I was also obsessed with ghost stories. My parents had this book of uncanny tales. Besides these it contained black and white photographs of eerie children in stairwells and hallways, and there was a particularly haunting image of one charred foot left over from a spontaneously combusted woman: a curled shoe like that of the Wicked Witch of the East. Ghosts held the answers to a realm beyond that I sometimes suspected was an actual, physical dimension, and at other times understood as a layering within one’s own mind: that you created the ghosts from your unconscious. It made them no less frightening. Now I am a part of my own ghost story. I am the ghost, even before death. I straddle realms. Someone might find me soon, maybe just my foot, and my William sitting beside me, looking as melancholy as a robot can. I am departed but living on in the mind of a young woman.

  Sometimes I am so close to death, and simultaneously close to the feelings of my past – of being the loser at the end of the game, overtaken by red rage – that it seems inevitable to go on with the visits, no matter the consequences. I still seek solace and need stimulation in this isolated environment. I am fascinated by Leonora’s new circumstances and seeing a darker side of her – the misdirected rage at her aunt, in her grief and confusion. I understand that sort of rage, that cloud, and the way it positions itself to break upon the person closest to you.

  Then I come to, as I did as a child after that post-game fug of injustice, sneaking back into the lounge room, drawn by the smell of tacos or the sounds of cartoons, feeling remorse for my behaviour. Remorse is such a common and constant companion, though, that at times it fails to be potent. My remorse has crusted over the years. But sometimes I do pick at the scab and the wound pains again, for a little while. And philosophically I explain my behaviour away – the trips with the tab, I mean – by telling myself that everyone is fucked anyway, now or later. May as well take the ship down with me. If that is what I’m doing.

  Affecting Leonora may only be a slight tear in the sail, rather than a complete capsizing.

  You see the cycles I go through.

  If death came sooner – though that makes my heart race – it would be a blanket.

  I should have been a person who fought and died in a war, but maybe in some accidental way, such as from stepping on a landmine. Not heroic. Or I should have bee
n electrocuted as a child, or drowned in the pool. Even Faye would have been better off.

  It is windy again. I can’t really feel, today, what the temperature is. I heard knocking last night, on the door – constant. Or was it simply the wind, having loosed some fragment? Or was it my robot, gaining sentience and banging his pretty head repeatedly against the wall? Was it Leonora’s ghost? I drifted in and out of sleep and it seemed to go on. I did feel afraid but I liked the feeling, as when I was a child: the goosebumps, the way your hairs raise and your vision becomes sharper.

  In Elizabethan drama, a ghost would appear to some purpose, like Hamlet’s father, for example. But I cannot speak to Leonora or control my effect on her. She sees Melbourne, she sees this place, she sees my past, she sees my eyes in the mirror. I am an infection.

  Ailie and I join the throng bustling into the anatomical theatre for Dr Young’s talk. Ailie has her hand firmly gripped around my elbow, under the velvet shawl. I feel overdressed, in comparison to the browns and greys of other men and women, but Ailie has said that we must assert our place.

  ‘We will not heckle nor jibe,’ she tells me beforehand, as though those are things I’d imagined doing.

  The wooden stalls are in the round, and in the centre is a table, plus a standing board covered with papers, and a skeleton. I’ve only ever seen human skeletons in books. This one is off-white, with blackness in its creases. It makes me aware of the space between my ribs and pelvis, all muscle, organs and fat, a vulnerable space. I know the names of parts of the body from Mr Anderson, our talks and the books he leant me, and from slicing open animals. I realise, as we find a place to stand in the full auditorium, near the back as Ailie insists, that I would very much like to see a human body splayed and open. The thought shocks me. And what I had thought was a table, I now realise, is in fact bed-like, where they must indeed give lectures on other parts of the anatomy. What does a baby look like, for example, still curled within its mother? Is all the flesh inside the human abdomen varying shades of pink, or are there other colours? You would say all tongues are pink, for example, but then Duff, a cairn terrier, has a purple tongue. Maybe the liver of a human is green or brown.

  ‘You see around the top tier there,’ Ailie says, pointing to a row of thin young men across from us, with variations in their facial hair, ‘they are trainee surgeons.’ Two women are among them, one in a dishevelled olive dress, leaning in to talk to one of the young men.

  ‘What about the women?’ I ask.

  ‘Sweethearts, I suppose,’ says Ailie, shrugging. ‘It would be nice if we could get you introduced to that crowd.’ I know she means for romantic prospects but I look over at them and feel something more like envy at the fact they get to come here regularly and see all parts of the body exposed, and perhaps even to talk about what is inside the skull, and the connection between that and the limbs, the hair, the stomach. If I could understand the body at this level, I could …

  Are these the thoughts that blossomed in the minds of the men across from me? That began them on their journey? A woman is not encouraged to wonder about veins and sinews, though. We are the ones to carry life, to feel how it works, but we are not supposed to think upon it.

  Dr Young, a grey-bearded man in narrow stripes, begins his lecture on dental health. He first talks about brushing teeth, which Ailie tells me is information for the lower classes, who need reminding.

  He moves on. ‘It’s now known,’ he says, ‘that sweets cause unfortunate decay in the teeth, the holes that only until fairly recently were attributed to tiny worms.’

  Though Ailie says nothing, I imagine that this particular problem is more for the upper classes, those who can afford food beyond reasons of sustenance.

  ‘So moderate your intake of those Edinburgh Rocks!’

  A young woman in the third row whines her dissent, and the hall erupts into laughter. She flushes deep red.

  For toothache he recommends oil of clove applied directly to the tooth, but if it gets worse the patient may need an extraction. Sometimes a tooth can be transplanted, and the root takes better if the tooth is fresh. There are a few murmurs at this statement. In other words, Ailie whispers, he means a fresh tooth from a misfortunate and not from a cadaver. I recall the intense pain of my own extractions in the past, those back-most teeth taken one at a time over a series of months: the hollow ache up the whole side of my skull and the metallic taste of blood. A girl from my schoolhouse died just a few weeks after her first extraction, having not applied the salt water thoroughly enough afterwards, an infection setting into her blood.

  When Dr Young moves to the skull, to demonstrate crowding, a woman in the front row clutches her own mouth and faints dramatically, falling onto the man beside her. The crowd is raucous as she’s carried out. Dr Young wipes his brow with his handkerchief. I can see that these public lectures are more than just informative; they are an event and a spectacle. Ailie seems jolly with the drama, clutching her hands together, her bird-like cheeks blotched and shining. The doctor soon calms the crowd enough to go on with his talk, but by now much of the top row across from us has slipped out, perhaps realising they are too advanced for this particular show. The din has overwhelmed me slightly and I close my eyes for a moment and note the smell of sweat, and something sharp and lemony beneath.

  I jump when Ailie takes my hand. ‘We can go,’ she says.

  As we are walking away, in the dark, there is a faint ache in my jaw, as if the lecturer’s words were seeds, planted in the mind to sprout within the body.

  I sit in a rickety chair with a blanket across my legs on a crisp cold morning. The water is still and revealing of a topsy-turvy world. A bird has a mate it cannot meet; boats rub the bottom of other boats; sails point skyward and to the underworld. My tooth aches. Pain radiates up the side of my jaw, to the hair that is turning more sand than sunset, shot through with hard greys. I wanted to suffer, didn’t I? The toothache pips the pain in my limbs and stomach. I need oil of clove. I can’t send the andserv; someone might steal him from me. I need to go myself. But some days I can barely walk, my ankles are panniers of fluid and my calves cramp up. I’m pretty sure I’ll need the tooth out. But I fear a dentist will see how ill I am, will tell someone.

  The knocking came again; was it day or night? Was I feverish or was it the landlady, or Faye? Faye knocking, the way she did one night on the door of my apartment. That night I heard her knock, curse herself drunkenly, walk away, come back, walk away, come back and knock again, calling my name. Telling me it wasn’t fair. Telling me we loved each other. I didn’t go to the door. She could do better. Did she ever get what she deserved? Last I knew she was single. She’d had some flings, going by her feed; nothing serious. She is forty now. She wanted a child. She doesn’t have much time. Nature is cruel to women.

  I realise … a lot of the time men don’t see that women tuck their passions up under the breast. I suppose that’s what they’ve been taught to do. And then we’re surprised when their passions tumble forth as bonfires from their tongues, their eyes, their hands, their cunts. When it happens we protest and cower. Maybe we try to take over, take control of the situation, tuck their emotions back up where they are safe (where we are safe from them).

  The ache takes over one side of my head; the nerves of my jaw are molten, are the palm of a hand cupping my cheek and digging in talons. My right eye socket feels dry and red and has the ache behind it. I rest the back of my head. Was she feeling my toothache, or did she give me one? Does it go both ways? I never wanted to be a woman but I have often wanted my balls to shrivel and fall off like overripe nectarines. In a bad period I once, deep in the night, held a knife to my cock. But then I drank more whisky and fell asleep, went to work the next day, dry-mouthed. Sometimes colleagues would say things like ‘I didn’t sleep much last night’, and I wondered if they’d been up holding a knife to some part of themselves. Metaphorically, I was probably right. But that’s pessimistic, too. They could have been up all night fucki
ng their fantasy partner, and I was the only one sleepless from staring myself down.

  This water is so clear I can lean over and see myself. I am already Narcissus, in love with the image of my suffering, fixed in place and soon to drown.

  The motor of a small boat can be heard behind the outcrop at the edge of the island to my right. As it comes around I see it’s driven by my landlord, Bethea. I have been too indulgent, taking the air. She will surely stop and talk to me now. I will send you inside, William. I will tell her it is just a cold.

  Father’s letter is brief, like the last one. He never was much of a writer. The frost has finally turned to snow, he says. I see the cottage and the warm fire, he and Penuel cosy, and Duff having taken to her. I see it as a beacon beyond this city: forests, mountains, lochs, fields of barley, the Tom A Voan Wood. In my mind I knock and knock on their door, shivering violently. Duff barks behind it. William laughs down from his estate, his new wife on his arm.

  I should only be happy for them all.

  Ailie says she is pleased I am putting on weight, but my arms begin to stick in places, more limited in my clothes. The weight makes me look healthier, while I continue to drown. This mood has gone on beyond the bleeding, into the period where I normally feel lighter. Walking helps; I wish Ailie liked a turn outdoors more often. I know it is too cold, but I like the way the wind rushes down the street and pulls out your neat hair with icy fingers. Last week we took a turn despite a low fog, and had to jump out of the way as a riderless horse bolted towards us. For a moment I looked into its eyes before it whinnied and bared its teeth. We read about it in the Evening Courant. Luckily nobody had been hurt.

  Ailie has put the claret at the back of the cupboard. She says she is too tempted by it in the colder months. She still falls asleep after – or even during – a meal, and often when I am reading to her. Sometimes I have several hours with myself in candlelight. I read until late because sleep brings visions too vivid. I hear Edith shuffling around in her crawl-space. I found out she lives in a small room behind the bookcase. She must be a night owl, too. I’ve also heard her leave the house late and come back even later – to meet someone perhaps. I’m sure it is dangerous but it is good she has a life outside service. Uselessness does not suit me, and too much use probably does not suit her. I would like to talk to her more, but she has not indicated an interest or comfort with it.