by Angela Meyer
Oh God, imagine … Imagine if he just rolled over on the grass and flung an arm over me. Does anyone’s life ever work out like that?
We hear the car rolling up the drive.
Bleddyn springs to his feet. ‘I’m starving,’ he says.
The woman is back, to feed us. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. I remain on the grass with William, then realise this might draw attention to him. I sit up carefully, keeping my eyes to the grass to fight a head spin, then I push William, in his cross-legged position, to a spot that won’t be as visible from the back door, hidden by a few plants. The game will be up if Bethea decides to do some gardening or walk down that way for some other reason, but I need him to charge so there isn’t much I can do.
‘Jeff!’ Bleddyn appears at the back door, excited. ‘She bought chocolate.’
I walk towards the house.
I’m not sure if it is memory or vision. Sitting on the floor by the bed and the bed is moving, squeaking. My mother is lying on her side with my father behind her. His hand is across her breast, coming from behind her. The lower part of her body is covered by a blanket. She reaches out her hand and gently touches my head.
This is a small room, with padded, wailing walls.
If I could be any creature it would be a falcon, just to see Scotland from above, and to soar.
I hope Mavis is well; I hope the dogs are too. I do think my father loved my mother – he wasn’t to know this would happen to me. But if only he had let me stay.
The porridge today is extra watery, and lacking salt. In Jeff’s time he pours oats from a small pouch and there are bits of dried berries and he adds milk and puts it in a magic machine and the porridge is ready. How could I invent such a thing?
I told Edward of some of the things I’ve seen and that was possibly a mistake, but then how will I get better if he cannot help me figure it out? A doctor must not look incredulous, but he struggles terribly with that. Most people do. They cannot imagine seeing the world the way another does; they cannot experience life outside their own head.
It is cruelly cold at night without the other bodies around me, and with just a scratchy blanket, as though I am being punished. I may have screamed last night; I may have screamed for a while.
If I am a lunatic, can’t a lunatic still have purpose? Or are they only ever a burden? Could not my imaginative life be incorporated into a way of living? Oh, but it would be a burden to others at the times when it takes over, when he takes over; when I see, confusedly, through his eyes.
I keep thinking about the anatomy book that Rebecca showed me. I press my hand to my abdomen and think of the womb beneath, and the intestines, and the bladder – how some emotions seem also to be felt in these organs, such as fear, and anticipation. I think about when a dog barks and its lower abdomen squeezes. I think about the busted body of a rabbit all ready for stewing up. My fingers twitch. I want to put my hands inside of animals.
Jeff is weak, in mind and body. He thinks he will die soon. He convinces himself that he wants to. But he clings to life, with a somersaulting seal-heart, with fresh beauty for his eyes, and Highland air in his lungs. For some reason I cannot hate him. Perhaps he truly is my invention; that would explain my response.
I tried to get up this morning. I got as far as the stairs and I looked down and they appeared like the drop of a cliff. It’s not so much an ache today as something pressing on my chest, and a sandiness in the eyes after staying up writing before a rough sleep. Have you ever thought about those words, ‘rough sleep’? You don’t have a soft sleep or a smooth sleep, but you can have a rough one. I am trying to recall why I kept waking, anxious.
Bethea has come in with porridge – far sweeter and superior to the muck Leonora is getting. I hope she can somehow share the taste from my receptors. Bethea is very quiet. I decide not to ask about Bleddyn.
I drift off again looking at a crack that meets wall to ceiling, so familiar to me now it has become an old friend. It is phallic in shape, long and curving up and over, but then I would notice that. When I wake I think, with panic, that William is sitting on the floor in the room. I can’t recall bringing him back in yesterday. So I hope it was Bleddyn who brought him, and that he has remained off the whole time.
But – the voices in my sleep. Was it not my own voice I heard?
No. Surely not. Bethea has respect for privacy.
But I must turn him on now and start to write down those early notes so I can then delete the memoirs with which they are intertwined. Once everything about Leonora is separate, I’ll find a way to send it off – maybe Bleddyn can help – and then I will delete the files and burn this too. This – I persist. Facing myself? Or some human urge, not yet stymied, for articulating one’s experience of the world, one’s surroundings? Some final attempt at understanding? Though I know that’s impossible.
At the moment I stand from the bed there comes a crack of lightning over the blue-black sea, seen through my small window. When the thunder follows, the glass in the window vibrates. I suddenly worry that Bleddyn is out there – for I can sense he isn’t in the house. I stand and stare out, but my breath keeps steaming up the glass, and I soon give up.
William. I move over to the door first and close it softly. Then I activate him.
He looks at me calmly.
I ask him to speak my notes back to me, slowly, with pauses, and with the volume down low. Luckily the storm will help to cover the sound. As William does so, I begin to write down Leonora’s story, by candlelight, being swept up and amazed by it again. My stomach rumbles and my hand cramps but I continue on for as long as I am able. When I am in too much pain, I shut William down (I am still not letting on to Bethea that he is functional), and add the notes to my most recent ones about Leonora, in the top drawer of the bedside table.
It is calmer now, and though I am hungry I lie back down. I’m hungry for a glance of Bleddyn, too, and I wonder if he’s been out somewhere during the storm, drenched like Heathcliff running from the Heights.
My hand has had a chance to rest. I don’t hear anyone stirring, in the quiet aftermath of the storm. There’s a leap of panic when I remember the voice. Did it not sound like it was me, talking downstairs? It’s coming through clearer, now, away from that immediate place of exhausted sick-waking, that red-eyed swirlspace. Could Bethea have done it, truly? Accessed the recordings? Because Leonora’s story intrigues her, no doubt. But she sure would have gotten more than she bargained for.
In fact, she may have sent Bleddyn away, if she knows all about Eric and me. Shame tendrils – up my chest, up to my cheeks. I can do nothing but lie back on the pillow and worry and wait. And if Bethea goes out today (oh, please) maybe I will get down the rest of Leonora’s story and then I can at least work out how and where to send what I have. If there is any conclusion, in the coming nights, I could send that off separately. I must make sure someone else owns it, not the pulp writer, not the woman in the sweaty knits. No.
Bethea has been gone for a day and a half. Has she left me to rot? Bleddyn is nowhere to be found. I have made slow trips downstairs and have now eaten all the oatcakes and scraped out the jam.
I have finally finished writing down Leonora’s story to date. To her madness, her isolation. I found an envelope, and enough stamps to wall the paper and send it across an ocean, but I don’t know how to get it to the post office, or who to send it to. What the fuck is my purpose? I am planning on burning the rest of this soon.
But Faye. Perhaps she should know, after all. So she doesn’t miss me too much once she hears I am dead.
Bethea is back. She comes straight up the stairs and with each footstep I feel more like a naughty kid who has wagged school. There are myriad things she might explode with.
‘I missed you,’ is weirdly what I say.
She tilts her head, and then frowns deeply, and then sits a plate of food in front of me. ‘Had some things tae take care of,’ she says. ‘My husband’s other life.’
‘Oh. You … could have warned me.’
‘I told ye.’
‘What?’
‘Ye were delirious that day.’
I don’t know whether to believe her.
‘Where’s Bleddyn?’ I ask.
She frowns again, and leaves the room and closes the door.
After days of eating barely a thing I am ravenous, and I wolf down the sausages and bread, and wash it all down with lukewarm, sugary tea.
I feel strange. I must have eaten too fast.
I have vomited on myself. I call and she doesn’t come. She is not my nurse, I suppose.
Oh, I feel terrible, the worst I have felt. Is this finally …?
Is Eric still alive? Will Leonora get back to the Highlands? Is Faye still out there, roaming? The envelope …
There was a delirium. She’d said, ‘It’s not right what you did to her.’
Not him, her.
This is … pain.
It is quiet upstairs, finally. She can no longer hear him spluttering, moaning, and choking. It will be a mess, she thinks. The body. No one ever knew he was here, except Bleddyn. She will tell him that Jeff has gone home to Australia.
That poor woman, searching for him. Would she go on and on? That was what life was, for some women – they tied themselves up with worry. It gave them purpose, while the man simply dreamed. And if there was any truth to those notes, the other woman, too, would now be free of him. It was so selfish of him to hold on for so long. Men do not know how to sacrifice themselves, she thinks. Only for other men, or for governments. Never for us. Though they might convince themselves they do. Just like Robert did.
She plods up the carpeted stairs, her hands out in front of her to catch a fall, as she always does. She can smell the sick at the top of the stairs, in the corridor. When she gets to the room she takes a deep breath, facing away, before looking in.
His torso is side-on but his legs are twisted to the front, quite unnaturally. The vomit is filled with blood. She steps around a pool of sick to get to the robot, sitting on the ground. She claps and the robot blinks its eyes open, looks at her.
‘Help me,’ she says.
It stands up and surveys the scene, expressionless.
I wake and all I can hear are birds. My chest rises and falls with quiet breaths. I cannot feel him; I have not dreamed of him.
I wake and I have dreamed of deer, of home.
I wake. The memories remain as though they are my memories, or vivid stories that I have been told and have imagined fully. They are still accompanied by emotion. But there are no new ones cropping up. Has he died? Have I killed him? The idea comes with a strange, mixed sensation of delight and loss. This room, in its isolating, plain horror, comes into full relief.
I wake again. I will request a session with Edward. I am convinced I can make him see I am well again. Well enough for now. I fear I won’t remain so if I’m made to stay here, staring at these walls.
She has landed back in Australia on a fiery day, but she carries the cold of Scotland in her bones.
Months later, a letter arrives. There is no return address on the envelope.
Dear Faye,
By the time you read this I will be gone.
I loved you, truly. But I also desired young men, or boys, barely on the verge of adulthood, arguably innocent. This is why I could not hold on to you. I am wrong. Don’t waste any more time having decent thoughts of me.
Everything I touch crumbles.
You hated my self-pitying moods.
But this is beyond that.
Please see enclosed.
J
His writing had been affected by the illness, she sees.
He is truly gone. But finally, here he is.
A woman emerges from a moss-green copse of trees. The rustle of her skirts in grass; birds rise in flushed dusk. The golden dog bounds to her. Home, here. The laird’s friendship and guilt made a clearing for her, a new life and emergence of practice. Her own dwelling on the property. Working with the animals – learning anatomy, their tunnels and clusters, with Mr Anderson’s help. Only so much you can learn from books. Only so much about people, too.
Entering the house, dark rise of stairs, and the laird and lady’s chambers. There had been a slow acknowledgement of her fit, something exploratory and kind. Their soft hands on her, the laird and his wife. Leonora’s hands the roughest, on her curves and in his curls. Afterwards, back to her hut and study and Duff curled in a sun-spot. Next to her, some rare caramel William gets from abroad.
And forgiving the father, because he did not know ways forward. And because Edinburgh did open a mind’s door towards this path of working with the animals. The path that feels right for her. He listens better now, too. She writes short notes to that city – the aunt, who after all did her best, and Miss Taylor, Mr Stewart, and Rebecca and Joan.
The laird’s little dog still barks sometimes, at her ghostly corners. It’s best, still, to stay away from the looking glass. Or one feels bound.
No, go to her own small garden and dig beneath the top layer of soil. Turn, turn. Brush back hair with dirt.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I would like to acknowledge the fact that I have used real places in this novel but completely invented residences, people and events, particularly in Chapeltown and Tomintoul. With Edinburgh, I have alluded to some historical events, such as the first women studying medicine at Edinburgh University, but my characters are not based on any of the real women – those incredible pioneers known as the ‘Edinburgh Seven’. The main texts I drew on for detail and inspiration in regards to the Leonora chapters were The Tales of the Braes of Glenlivet by Isobel Grant (compiled by Alasdair Roberts); Women of the Highlands by Katharine Stewart and A Year in Victorian Edinburgh by Lynne Wilson. I am deeply indebted to the authors of these works. A huge thanks must also go to the Tomintoul Museum, who let me take photos of pretty much every exhibit and also kindly answered my emails. Also very useful were the Surgeon’s Hall Museum, and The Scots Herbal: The Plant Lore of Scotland by Tess Darwin, and for general flavour, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Crowdie and Cream and Other Stories: Memoirs of Hebridean Childhood by Finlay J. Macdonald. Thank you very much to Tina and Norm, formerly of Cardhu, who hosted me, took me on that first drive on the road to Braemar where I experienced a form of falling in love (with a place), and for lending me some of the above books. For the Jeff chapters I’d like to acknowledge the inspiration of a man I saw give a gaga-eyed lecture on Caravaggio’s nudes, and also, for the general concept of the novel, Kathleen Taylor’s The Brain Supremacy: Notes from the Frontiers of Neuroscience. Thank you also to Angie and Dick and the retrievers in Bunchrew; to the laird, lady and child inhabitants of a tiny island micro-nation; and to the Fletchers, and Kate, on Jura, for so kindly letting me commune with Orwell. Slàinte, Scotland.
AND MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO:
Peter Bishop, for the advice you gave me in my early twenties (to abandon a work but keep writing), for your capacity to deeply engage with a work, for your constant enthusiasm in regards to this work but also your integrity towards writers and writing in general. To Martin Shaw, my wonderful agent, who loved and understood Spectre from the get-go, and who has also been a great long-time supporter of Australian writing. To Jane Curry, Eleanor Reader, Zoe Hale and the PBB/Ventura team for getting behind this novel in every way, and being so excited, communicative and organised. To Kate Goldsworthy, the most attentive, thorough and caring editor – you are wonderful. To Lee Kofman for your generosity and insight on my draft. To Donna Ward, thank you for being there through this, and for being such a champion of my work. To Sonja Meyer, my amazing sister, an early reader and forever invested in my success and fulfilment. To Mum and Dad, for forcing my work upon your local book club. If they thought the last one was weird … To Gerard Elson, for everything we’ve shared, and for being such an encouraging companion during the gathering of this, and for always engaging with and believing
in my work – DSL. To Josephine Rowe, for being a dear friend, a wonderful reader, and for sharing the Jura night sky with me. To my whisky buddies, the muses Top Gun and Ice Man, and best bud Cap, and to Lagavulin 16. To J, thank you for the poetry. To my Echo authors, who have taught me so much, and made my life far richer than I could have imagined. To my colleagues for embracing my double literary life. To Mallory, my faithful hound. And to the person with whom I can be my full self, Christopher Zavou.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angela Meyer’s writing has been widely published, including in Best Australian Stories, Island, The Big Issue, The Australian, The Lifted Brow and Killings. She has previously published a book of flash fiction, Captives (Inkerman & Blunt). She has worked in bookstores, as a book reviewer, in a whisky bar, and for the past few years has published a range of Australian authors for Echo Publishing, including award-winners and an international number one bestseller. She grew up in Northern NSW and lives in Melbourne. A Superior Spectre is her debut novel.
ABOUT PETER BISHOP BOOKS
The conversation between the writer and the individual reader can be the most intimate of conversations. But in a world of mass markets and celebrity, that intimacy can easily be lost amongst all the noise.
Peter Bishop Books is a specialty imprint curated by Peter Bishop and published by Ventura Press that creates an environment where a national – and international – conversation of writers and readers can thrive. An environment that nurtures and celebrates the intimacy, curiosity and adventure that will always be fundamental to both writing and reading.
