The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales

by Angela Slatter

  Any road, it’s obvious. He will cover his disdain for my mother, at least while his master is around; he will not bother with me, for I am a child, and a whore’s child at that. Who will care if I complain?

  We are led to a dining room and a sumptuous table set with more food than three people have any hope of getting through. Perhaps there are more servants in this house and they will benefit, or maybe it will go to the church and the priest will give it to his flock. Or the priest and his fat housekeeper will gorge themselves silly before they go off to bed and sin against their god, the priest burying his busy prick between her rosy thighs like a spade in damp soil.

  I was born a cynic.

  Above the fireplace hangs a portrait. The woman is large-boned, with a heavy jaw and thick lips. Her hair is pulled back severely, defying the frivolity of her silver-pink ball dress. She holds a Chinese fan in masculine hands, seemingly caught in the moment just before she breaks it in a cold rage. I don’t think I would like her.

  “That’s my mother, little one.” Davide has caught the direction of my gaze. “It was painted during her season in Paris, before she married my father.”

  I nod dutifully and turn my attention back to the plate in front of me.

  My mother and Davide talk and I drowse over my meal. I slip sideways in the high, over-stuffed chair and press my head against my mother’s breasts. Her hand is tender if a little distracted, then Davide hoists me like a doll; he is a big man, a bear who’s been shaved and taught to walk upright. His smile is strange and his eyes are yellow. He smells like ambergris.

  He tucks me into a large bed on the second floor. My mother has stripped away my navy school uniform but has neglected to slip the white nightgown over my head. She turns away and folds the uniform as her lover pulls the thick linen sheet up to cover me. His huge hands skim my flat chest; I cannot tell if it’s deliberate or not. He rubs a palm over my cheeks then dips his thick thumb in my mouth quickly, before my mother turns around.

  I am a child. I am tired. I am afraid and removed from all the anchors of my normal life. My mother would not believe me. Something in his face tells me there’s no intent there, merely a kind of cruel curiosity to see if whore’s blood runs through my veins too. He has shown no interest in me before. Perhaps I passed his test; I did not react.

  My mother’s lips are soft on my forehead as she whispers goodnight. Davide is at the door before she pulls back and stands to survey me a moment, smiling. My mother loves me, this I know, but I do not know if she loves me best.

  Keys. So many keys.

  I’m sitting at a battered table in the kitchen. An old woman, who could do with a wash, smiles as I eat the porridge she prepared for me.

  I don’t like porridge but I’m a polite child when it comes to food. I spoon the gruel into my mouth and distract myself by counting the keys hanging on a myriad of hooks on the kitchen wall. If I’m good, I hope she’ll let me have some of the fresh bread she’s just pulled from the oven. I will have it smothered with the yellowest of butters and the reddest of the jams that sit on the far end of the table. I can almost convince myself that the porridge is worth it.

  My mother and Davide have not yet risen. Or perhaps they have risen and gone out for the day. Perhaps there are stables and they have gone riding. Does my mother know how to ride something other than a man?

  The keys catch my attention again. Some are very old, dark, others new, brassy and shiny. This is therefore a house of many doors—otherwise, why all these keys? Maybe there are rooms no one goes into anymore and the keys languish here, forgotten and unused. There is one empty hook and I wonder on it. Is the room locked, a sealed space, its key lost? Or is the key kept elsewhere, hidden, and the room a sacred place guarded from casual intrusion?

  I finish my porridge and cook lets me have some bread and jam. I eat until I feel sick—bitter in the knowledge that if I hadn’t eaten the porridge I would have been able to eat more bread. Next time, I’ll refuse the gruel.

  Cook shoos me out of the kitchen. As I pass the keys my eyes slip over the empty space, my fingers twitching as if curling around a key that is not there.

  The library is huge.

  I love the smell, the perfume of ink and paper. A book sits in my lap; it is small but so am I. I curl in the corner of an old armchair and carefully turn the pages. The lives of saints glow under my tiny fingers, their faces beatific despite the torments their bodies are suffering, caught eternally in pain on the paper. All the saints here are women.

  I found the tome on the desk in front of the arched window. It looks well-thumbed, the pages falling open as willingly as a whore’s legs. It has an embroidered cover, fine white linen with religious icons running rampant across it, crucifixes, praying hands, angels’ wings. I wonder if it’s Davide’s mother who fondles this book, her hands touching the faces, envying them their beauty, their pain, their martyrdom. My mother would not understand. She is beautiful but she is no martyr. Nor a saint.

  It is late and I wonder where she is. I have not seen her or Davide all day. The butler would not answer me when I asked him at lunch. The cook gave me pitying looks. I retreated to the library. My mother will know to find me here.

  I must have fallen asleep.

  I am still nestled in the armchair but the book has fallen from my lap. Its spine has split and the pages are askew. I want to hide it but I know its owner will come looking.

  I bend and collect the pages. Under the leaves of parchment lies a key, quite small, heart-shaped at the end, black with age. I think perhaps it lived in the spine of the book but now I have destroyed its home. I slip it into the pocket of my pinafore and finish gathering the scattered folios.

  It’s dark outside once again.

  I make my way to the dining room, damaged book in hand. Davide sits alone at the laden table. I approach and settle the book next to him.

  “I’m sorry, Davide. I dropped it and the spine—it broke,” I say in a small voice. His great head turns and yellow eyes look at me as if they have to try hard to focus. There’s a scratch on his neck, just above the collar of his shirt and a smear of blood on his ear as if he’s washed carelessly. I don’t step back.

  “Things break, little one. It can be fixed. Books can be fixed.” He picks the thing up and turns it over; his hand moves across the cover the same way they have moved across my mother’s skin.

  “Where’s my mother?”

  His eyes focus on me at last, sharp. “Sleeping, Lily. She’s very tired.”

  “Oh.”

  He reaches out and twines his fingers in my hair, like my mother does. “You’re not afraid, are you? What a strange child you are.”

  I don’t answer him and he continues.

  “Would you like to stay here? You and your mother?”

  “I’m sure your mother would not be happy with us as houseguests, Davide.”

  “Mother won’t know, little pearl.” He echoes my mother’s name for me. “But this could be the perfect place for you both. You would be lovely additions to my collection.”

  I try to step back but he still holds my curls in his great paw. I cannot pull away without losing a hank of hair. His eyes darken and I think I see the bear inside, not so deep now, but near the surface―he is no longer nouvours but something dangerous, something that looks kind but will swat me aside without thinking, something that will shred me like a kitten between a dog’s teeth. He leans toward me, his breath rank as raw meat.

  “How will you grow, little pearl? Will you be like her?” The fingers of his other hand catch at the hem of my skirt, flicking it up as scornfully as a breeze, but they go no further. “Will you be like her? A whore? Shall I wait for you to grow, little pearl? Will you replace your mother for me?”

  I pull away, heedless of the pain, and he lets me go, laughing.

  I do not know this man. This man who beds my mother. This man who pays for my schooling. This man who brings me books to read. This man who scares me half to death. This m
an who pushes back his chair and begins to rise.

  I run.

  The door is black. The bars of iron across it are rusted in places.

  The pattern on its lock echoes the heart shape of the key sitting heavily in my pocket. I put my eye to the keyhole.

  The light is dim inside and I cannot make out much. There is white, there is red, there is black. If I cannot find my mother, I will hide here until daylight.

  To my surprise the key turns easily. The lock is well-oiled, often-used. Someone comes here a lot. Perhaps it is Davide’s mother. I push the door hard.

  Things hang on the walls and lie on the floor at the edges of the room. Bones scattered like pearls in the dim light of the brazier. At the end of the room is a bed, a four-poster draped with sheer curtains. Something lies white and glimmering there. I tiptoe through the bones as if they are daisies in the garden of my convent school. I must not disturb them or the nuns will be angry.

  The drapes stick to my hand as if the fabric has sweated in the heat of the room. My mother lies on the soiled coverlet. She is white with red stripes across her skin. One side of her face is swollen and her lips are the purple-black of dried blood.

  I think she is dead. I reach out and struggle with the cords that bind her wrists to the bed. Then those at her ankles. It’s not right that she be like this: splayed and displayed without her consent, without her will. She wouldn’t want to look like one of those saints; there is no beauty in her pain. Whoever imagined the saints took their pleasure thus surely had not seen them like this.

  My hand hovers over her face. I want to touch her skin, to know if it’s warm or cold, to see if there is breath left in her, but I am pulled away.

  “Little whore.” The voice is old, brittle as a cinder, and breathes the words as if they bring joy. I struggle, my hair blinding me. I am thrown across the room and land in a pile of bones. A rib pierces my side and I cry out.

  “Whore’s daughter,” comes the voice again and I brush the hair out of my eyes.

  A woman looks down at me, eager as a hunting dog.

  Her dress was once fine, black silk crepe with severe pintucks stitched by slavish fingers, but now it’s dusty and dirty, encrusted with something that may once have been liquid but now makes the fabric as stiff as a corpse. At her breast hangs a heavy wooden penitent’s cross, plain, the figure of Christ rubbed featureless by devout caresses. She leers down at me.

  “Too curious, little whore, just like that one.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “My son tries to keep them from me, but they always find their way here, they all come to be cleansed. Does your blood run as quickly as theirs, I wonder?”

  Hers is the face from the dining room portrait, with its disapproving glare. Her hands are the ones that lovingly caressed the book of saints, longingly consuming their agony. She comes for me with surprising speed.

  My hand closes on the broken rib that drips with my blood. As she leans down, hands reaching for me, I jam it into her eye.

  She screams, jerks, then I hear a wet thud as a second blow falls and she slumps forward. I scramble out of the way of her falling bulk. Another bone protrudes from her back.

  My mother stands behind her and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

  A shadow falls across the doorway and Davide enters, his step hesitant. He seems unwilling to meet my mother’s eyes. When he does, he whimpers. I watch her face and she is terrible as an army with banners. She is naked and bloodied, yet there is something about her that will not be quenched. He did not save her from this danger and he will not be forgiven.

  When Davide sees his mother, his cry is painfully loud. Mother and I limp from the room, leaving him to gather up her body, a reversed pieta.

  The door closes slowly behind us and my mother, with only a moment’s hesitation, turns the heart-shaped key in the lock.

  * * *

  The Living Book

  “Sophia,” says my father, “I need something to read. Come here.”

  I present myself dutifully, and he peels back my shirt so as to expose the shifting, changing lines of printed word.

  Here I stand: Sophia, the Living Book.

  I was born in Byzantium. Or made. Yes, rather made. And father is not Father, but Maker, a bookbinder of extraordinary talent. He made me for the Emperor Constantine, who loved me for many years, in many ways, until his religion got the better of him.

  Perhaps he read inappropriate words in my face when he made love to me, or on my back when he took me that way. Inescapable words that made him think what he did was sinful rather than joyous. I find it hard, still, to hide what I am thinking; some days I have to concentrate on some innocuous tale or I’ll be in ever so much trouble.

  I lived in the palace with all the other treasures Constantine collected. My rooms were sumptuous, glorious spaces hung with silks and gold. I had servants to do my whim—mutes, who could not read, and so could tell no one of what they saw or whom they served. I was a strange princess, Constantine’s greatest, most beloved secret.

  One day, though, he decided his precious things should be displayed, that his people and visitors should be impressed and awed by his wealth, so he might prove himself the greatest of rulers through sheer weight of possessions. Thus the Parade of Great Treasures was born, short-lived abortion of a thing it was.

  They placed me in the lead chariot so I might be first among the treasures, and naked so that the Emperor’s subjects would see all the glory of the written word. I had never been out among people, I was overwhelmed, words tore across my skin like mad ants, so that I seemed blackened by the crawling serifs. The crowds lining the streets panicked, rioted with fear, stampeded. Thousands were killed. It’s one of those events that was written out of history―but it lives on in me. If I think of it, or Father asks for it, the tale appears on me, on the leaves of my flesh, never forgotten. History I keep pristine; but with the fabula I play.

  When calm was finally restored and the dead had been buried, Constantine retired with his pet priest, the Patriarch, to contemplate how his pride had brought about the disaster. I, being female, not quite human, a receptacle of truth and lies, was no favourite of the dried up old priest. He had been in the emperor’s ear for years, trying to convince him that I was intrinsically wicked. He finally succeeded, his pleas lent weight by the piles of corpses Constantine had inadvertently caused.

  He couldn’t destroy me, Constantine, because I was too wondrous, too strange, too much loved. For a while he gave me to his concubine but she tired of me soon enough—her liking was for traditional tales, stories that were static, their endings known and predictable. I changed my stories just to annoy her.

  Finally, though, it was exile. Moved from tower to tower, castle to castle, from Nicosia to Alexandria, from Paris to Prague, shuffled and shifted like a volume on a shelf and always in the care of Father. What his extended span cost him in other people’s lives I have often wondered. I wonder, too, what I am to him. Am I just a thing he made, evidence of his genius? Would he, like the great sculptor, Praxitiles, simply put his mark on me? Am I merely something to bear the words Libanius made me?

  Does he love me at all? Am I a source of pride but not affection? These are the things that prick at me. He does not answer these questions―never has, so I stopped asking after the first hundred years. But these thoughts fester. I’m not an ordinary book; I record what I see, learn, experience and process. I feel.

  We’ve been in New York for almost one hundred years, in this strangest of all strange places. A bizarre and overwhelming mix of too many influences and cultures and people living on top of each other. I used to go out at night but it’s too dangerous now, and in today’s world I cannot afford to be found.

  In the early years I could go to the dim, dark clubs; no one really noticed me or if they did, they simply thought me tattooed. I liked Elaine’s―at its height, I loved to go there and mingle with the great writers of the day. I wanted to say Here I am, word made flesh! But I
didn’t, of course, I didn’t; that would have angered Father and his punishments are worse than anything. Centuries ago I realised that he wouldn’t burn me no matter how many times he threatened it; what sacrilege to destroy such a wonder! But he knows other ways to hurt and harm, so I am wary of aggravating him.

  I told one man though; I liked Hemingway, big burly man with his booming voice, his beautiful written words, and his tiny prick. I knew his secret and he knew mine. I was a fascination to him, a place for him to worship even though the rest of his life was godless. When Father found I’d spoken the truth of what I was, he locked me in the library (how apt a prison!). He flew to Spain; and then Hemingway was gone.

  This latest tower is a venerable penthouse, in a neighbourhood of money so old it creaks. Neighbours politely ignore each other, believing that other people’s business is precisely that. Sometimes they speak though—I hear them when sound travels up the elevator shafts, and the ventilation shafts, or when I press my ear tightly to the wall—of the handsome old man, and his daughter kept inside by her rare skin condition.

  The rooms are large, airy. Mine I keep much as it was in Byzantium. Oh, very few of the fittings are original, time has turned those to dust, but I recreate my first world as well as I can. There are wall hangings and draperies that I love, and the jewellery given to me by the Emperor lives in velvet-lined caskets. I made Father find me proper Turkish carpets for my floors. Two walls are lined with books. For some years I would sit very close to them, thinking they would tell me their secrets in a voice only I could hear; but no, they are dumb siblings, giving up their stories only when their covers are cracked open, and eyes and brain practise their peculiar exchange with the paper.