A Superior Spectre

by Angela Meyer

  Well, that will come soon enough.

  Henry didn’t tell me why the tabs shouldn’t be taken more than three times. It seems there are many reasons. For the researchers to know this, though, I can’t have been the only one. There must be test subjects out there frequently visiting other eras when they fall asleep. And to what effect? On them, on their hosts, and on history? But I can’t let the world know what I’ve experienced without getting Henry in trouble, and without revealing that I’m still living. I guess I should let this record exist in some form after I’m gone, then?

  It is getting colder, damper. Leonora is already well into winter. It does feel strange to see her own seasons, months, racing ahead of me. As I’ve said, if I tripped back further – perhaps to Elizabethan times – in one journey I might be there for months but then wake in the present and it has only been a night. In 1200 I could be there for a year. With Leonora, I sleep a few hours and witness maybe a day and a half. And then time moves fairly quick in between trips as well. Between trips to 1200 you may miss two years. Time damps down.

  Is it day or night, William? I can’t hear the birds.

  Iam so cold.

  Ice under my fingernails, in the veins of my nose. Aunt Ailie’s whole body shudders next to me in the cab.

  ‘We are obliged,’ she says to herself. Meaning that as Mr Stewart last called upon her – the last few times, in fact – it is time she called on him. But this is one of the coldest evenings of winter, a frosty pre-snow blue cold. I worry about the cat. Does he have a fire to curl up next to? Or a warm body? I know animals can be resilient, and Scottish animals, in particular, are used to all kinds of weather. But if the cat has been domesticated, which he seems to be, he will prefer the indoors.

  I had a brief letter from home, from the new Mrs Duncan (I still cannot call her my stepmother). She tells me all is well, and that she and my father hope I am settled in. She tells me she saw a stoat with its winter coat, and she knew I’d appreciate that. But of course it just makes me ache for home. It is snowing there already, a white blanket settled over the heather. They mention nothing of having me for Christmas, or coming to visit me here. As though this move of mine were permanent. They are making me feel I cannot go home until I have something to show for my time here. A husband, no doubt. It makes me want to actively defy them. But how can I? To study one needs money, not to mention to be allowed. And a woman also would not be a candidate for apprenticeships in trades. It is the body that interests me. But I am not like Rebecca and Joan, not assured and independent. I never could be.

  I press my head against the window of the cab, and then retreat quickly. It is frosted cold.

  Mr Stewart lives in a tall tenement that faces Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat. In the dusk, the great mounds look imposing, with deep contrasts between the snow and the Seat’s craggy shadows. The clouded, setting sun pokes its rays, gloriously, through the ruins of St Anthony’s Chapel, glimpsed in the distance before we pull up in front of Mr Stewart’s residence.

  As we ascend several flights of stairs we hear music, children bawling; smell peat and beef and onions. The stairs are grooved in the middle from so many footsteps. Mr Stewart opens his door immediately, joyfully. ‘Come in!’

  There is a short entranceway and he gestures for us to go into a sitting room at the left. In the room, the tall windows are hung with thick red drapes, and on the floor is a large rug under several mismatched, worn armchairs covered in pillows. The fire is going and the room makes me feel immediately comfortable. I stretch my fingertips under my gloves, working the sensation back.

  ‘Sit, sit!’ he says.

  We move together to a larger lounge and he goes over to a sideboard to pour plum-coloured wine into glasses with thick, curled lips. He does not seem to have a maid. It’s a small place in a noisy, tall building but it has a unique view. I can’t tell whether he is well-off or not. He has the appearance of having ‘just enough’; it’s possible he has more but does not spend it on unnecessary items. Like new armchairs. Because these ones are certainly adequate.

  ‘What an absolute pleasure it is to see you again, my lovely,’ he says to me directly.

  My aunt sits up straight beside me, but I see in the corner of my eye she is smiling. Surely she does not intend … Mr Stewart has to be thirty years older than me.

  ‘A delight to see you, too, Mr Stewart,’ I say.

  ‘So what have you been doing, what have you discovered?’ he asks me.

  I tell him about the outing to the Gymnasium, and about the velocipedes, though I know Ailie doesn’t approve. We make polite small talk about Edinburgh, the news, the weather. I ask him how his novel is going.

  ‘Ah! It’s in the bag, my dear. I’m already at work on the next one: about a young man who discovers a land of strange giants, but finds a way to tunnel under the ocean to return home. Of course, along the way he meets many other strange creatures. And a girl in their clutches!’

  ‘It sounds amusing,’ I say.

  ‘It is rubbish,’ he says, ‘but these kinds of adventures are new to many people, and they like the surprise of them. People who haven’t read the myths, you know?’

  ‘You mean of the ancient world?’ asks Ailie.

  ‘Precisely.’ He smiles warmly.

  After our first drink, Mr Stewart serves a cold supper to us from items on the sideboard. He tells us it is too frosty in other parts of the apartment so we must eat in our lounge chairs. I try not to laugh at Ailie’s face when he says this. Because we have to hold the plates, we can only use one utensil – a fork. Mr Stewart has no trouble bringing chunks of meat to his mouth and biting them off. I try to follow suit but am aware of being caught between being enthusiastic in front of my host, and not appearing too greedy or messy in front of my aunt. I bring the fork to my lips and attempt to nibble, to take in small pieces. Sometimes strings of meat come off and slap at my chin on the way into my mouth. Once when this happens I catch Mr Stewart’s eye and he gives me a mischievous look. I smile back, even with a mouthful.

  He takes our plates and sits them on the sideboard, tops up our drinks.

  We continue to talk. He appears suddenly alarmed and leaps forward to catch Ailie’s drink before she spills it, as she drops off in her usual way, her head lolling on her neck.

  ‘Oh, here she goes,’ he says with a laugh. He gets the drink out of her hand in time and sets it on a low table. Then he sits a cushion under her head.

  The fire cracks and pops.

  We are as good as alone, and I feel all of my recent experiences rush up and sit behind my teeth. I don’t know if he’s the right person to tell.

  ‘Mr Stewart, when you are creating a character, do they take over you somewhat?’ I ask with some hesitation. ‘Do you think about them a lot?’

  He frowns, considering the question. I notice the way many individual hairs in his eyebrows flick up towards his hairline. ‘A lot of writers do, perhaps, but no, not me. When I sit down to write they just re-emerge, like friends coming around for tea. I don’t need to think about them in between. I know they’ll be there.’

  So perhaps he wouldn’t know what I am going through.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he says. ‘Do you have an interest in writing?’

  ‘Not particularly, but I read and I am interested in the process, I suppose.’

  ‘Some writers do say their characters haunt them. Think of Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein’s monster, a beast born of a dream.’

  I wrap my arms around myself.

  ‘Would you like more wine?’ he asks.

  I shouldn’t. I won’t. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘What is it that haunts you, young Leonora?’ he asks.

  My heart pounds. As he tops up my glass from the carafe, my face is level with his crotch.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he says, turning his back and placing the carafe on the sideboard. He sits again and looks at me. I don’t know if I like that he can
see something in me, but I am comfortable in this room, and a new environment makes me feel distant from my visions, which seem to be hovering, waiting, back at Ailie’s.

  ‘The idea of home,’ I say.

  ‘You mean the question of home?’ he asks.

  ‘No. The fact that I know where home is, but I cannot be there. So it haunts me.’

  He nods. ‘That’s … very sad,’ he says.

  The silence is awkward. I’ve said too much. ‘Is there something that haunts you?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh,’ he waves his hand, ‘the usual. A cliché. A woman. The one who got away.’

  Maybe none of us gets what we want. Does this become something you just accept, as you get older? Ailie wanted a child; Mr Stewart wanted love; I want to live in the Highlands – to have physical duties but to be free in my thoughts, to use my hands while my mind has time to draw connections between ideas.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say to Mr Stewart.

  ‘It happens, child. At least, for a writer, heartbreak is fuel.’

  ‘I suppose everything can be fuel,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, nothing is wasted,’ he says, perking up again. We both take a sip.

  ‘I should get my aunt home,’ I say, regretfully. The two of us do have a rapport. Perhaps he could still be the one to tell, though my heart races at the thought. Perhaps I would become a character in his next book – a haunted one.

  I gently shake Ailie until she wakes and convinces herself she’s been present the whole time, and we add all our layers of clothing before we head downstairs to our waiting cab.

  All that velvet. It meant I had a line from the Beach Boys’ song ‘Surf’s Up’ in my head: ‘hung velvet overtaken me / dim chandelier awaken me’. Eric was obsessed with the Beach Boys, I remember now. I haven’t been able to listen to that album for decades without feeling a deep melancholic tide come in like the spray hitting the rocks on this side of the island, where I am sitting, watching for otters. It’s sunny enough, today, but windy and rough. I’m watching for otters, for hours, because I need to see some life. The aloneness came upon me last night, oceanic. It’s something I’ve felt before, even when not alone. I wonder if some of us are just born with it – a genetic trait. That perceptivity to one’s minuscule, ever-solitary existence has a particular feeling, a weight: hung velvet.

  After two hours, and no otters, I vomit onto the ground beside this seat that was set up for spotting wildlife. A robin has been keeping me company, flitting curiously back and forth from some stalks and ferns. The nausea stirs again. But I told William to leave me for four hours. He is good at taking specific instructions. I’m sick of the sight of him, and all he cannot be. But I’m fond of him, too, with complete awareness that it is only due to what I can project upon him.

  Are these rantings, yet? Surely being alone so long, Lear on the heath, I will be mad soon. A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man. Do I wish for madness? It seems easier than being conscious, and going through the same cycles. Perhaps I’ve never been capable of feeling anything deeply enough for it to drive me crazy.

  Oh – that could be it.

  When Faye would fly into a rage and there I was, a mast, watching words whirl around me.

  Or maybe I only felt emotions when I was young. And they were strangled just like Humbert’s were when his first nymphet, his ‘Riviera love’, died suddenly. Only to be reawakened by Lolita.

  I never had another like Eric, and if I was searching I didn’t always know it. But Eric didn’t die. He sort of … took up drugs. Real nasty stuff, I heard. He had a feed but never posted, was just randomly tagged sometimes in photos, looking pale and straggly. And old. I never looked at them too long, and blocked him eventually. I didn’t want to see him like that. I really, really could not.

  The sun winks but then the wind bites. What is that? I think I finally see something! Or is it just another ripple in the water?

  Leonora would sit here too, wouldn’t she? How can I think that I am alone, when I have her? We’ve forged a connection, through time. I hate to admit it … but I’m glad it’s not broken. For her it isn’t pleasant. I wonder if she feels the way some people feel who have a close connection with what they think of as being God. Wouldn’t His presence sometimes be a burden?

  Yes, I definitely see an otter! No, two! Oh, this was worth it. A new sign of life for my dead eyes. The world hasn’t ended. Euphoric adrenaline. The grin hurts my cheeks. I run my hand through my hair, which is warm from the sun. In my fingers a huge chunk comes out. I let the strands spread into the wind like the ashes of a loved one.

  I wake in a panic, sweating but cold. How is she? I am worried. I miss her. This was an ordinary nightmare: a dog became wolf and its lips spread further and further back to reveal pink gums and yellow, sharp fangs. It snarled and sniffed. It knew I was there.

  Why don’t you come and take me already?

  I can’t possibly get up. My muscles are liquid as sweat. But there is that knocking. I want to tell William not to answer it, but my voice catches. It must be day. Light peeps around the blind on the small window. The cold damp fills my nostrils, a hint of fishbones.

  Eric is still often the first image to come to me when I wake. His face, his boy chest and elegant, translucent arms; the scent at his elbow crease. Him, and now, Leonora. And then Faye slides in afterwards. Longing and loss shift to shame, and there are all these other waves of everything and nothing – feelings I’m not sure there are words for. But they’ve been captured in songs and paintings. And in that scene in the film Midnight Cowboy when Jon Voight changes the channels on the TV, accompanied by that aching John Barry score. There’s that dog with the falsies in its mouth. Connected to the wolf in my dream. It’s horror.

  I told you there were no others like Eric, that is true. There were hardly any men at all. Before Faye I had a profile on an online dating site for a while. I didn’t receive many messages but I ignored most of them anyway, and trawled through the profiles of the youngest men on there – only if they had that particular look. Mainly dark-haired, thin, insolent but sweet – one flavour coated in its opposite. I was too terrified to message them. One day, out of the blue, I received a message from a twenty-year-old. His pictures were a little blurry, but he looked younger than his age. In one of them he had in earbuds and wore a hoodie. He had a piercing in his lower lip. He was immediately sexually forthright:

  Hey man

  You like young cock?

  I thought it might be a trap.

  Hi, I typed, what are you looking for?

  Can you send me some more pics? he asked.

  Why don’t you send me some? I wrote, and felt a stirring in my pants at the thought of it.

  I gave him the email address I mainly used for porn subscriptions. He sent me a couple of pics. In one he was fully clothed, standing by a messy bed, and he was smiling – he looked so young. In the other he had his shirt off in front of the mirror – paper white and thin.

  Your turn.

  Send me your cock.

  This was moving fast.

  I don’t know …

  He typed: Where do you live?

  I told him the suburb.

  I scrolled through my phone, trying to find a half-decent photo of myself. I was fit. I thought, maybe I should take one of my chest reflected in the mirror. My face had piqued his interest, God knows why, but he seemed to want more.

  Would he want to meet me, though? Or did he trawl for pics to fill some specific folder of unique porn – older guys, or maybe all kinds of guys, posing just for him? Because, though I felt shy about it, I wanted flesh, I wanted contact. Truth be told, I wanted romance. I wanted him to look at me the way Caravaggio’s Bacchus, or the boy with the basket of fruit, invites in the viewer.

  The pic sharing went on. He said he wouldn’t meet me unless he’d seen my cock. I asked him to share first. He sent me a photo. It was average sized and lightly curved, leaning up against his stomach with his hand on it, from a bed
of neatly trimmed pubic hair. I could see the tops of his slim thighs with a soft blond fur on them. Heat rushed through me. How had I even gotten this far? Why was he so interested? I pulled my erect cock out of my jeans in the bathroom and took a picture, before pulling it off easily over his image.

  Maybe this would be enough. But he did want to meet. Spent but suddenly brave, I said I’d pick him up in my car.

  Bethea is in the doorway to my room. A room that must stink of sweat, piss, vomit and mould. I try to sit up, worried. I can only raise my hand.

  ‘Dinnae worry ye’self,’ she says. And sits on the edge of the bed. ‘I just came to tell ye that somebody be askin’ about ye, in Gairloch.’

  ‘What?’ I manage to push myself up on my hand. Bethea reaches immediately in and arranges the pillows into a mound, so I can lean against them. I think suddenly of my mother. Have I robbed Mum of the chance to look after me? To put a wet washer on my forehead one last time? No, but if I’d stayed they’d have made me get the operations, one after another, dragging my worthless life out like a bad dance remix of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Everywhere’.

  ‘A woman,’ Bethea says. ‘I just heard her ask if anyone’d seen a man named Jeff, and she described ye. In the store there.’

  All the questions jammed in my mouth. What did the storekeeper say? What did she look like? Was it Faye? My mother? A tracker?

  ‘The storekeeper dinnae know anythin’,’ says Bethea.

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Like a bonnie pixie.’

  Faye.

  I moan, turn my head away from her. ‘She needs to go away.’ My face is wet.

  Bethea puts her hand on my leg. ‘Maybe she already has.’

  Faye knows me so well; she knew where to look. Probably I had mentioned going to the place of my ancestors, sometime in our life together. And she probably knows it is an easy place in which to disappear. What would this have cost her? So much money and time. Why can’t people let other people die? The ache is too much. I mustn’t let her find me.