The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  ACCLAIM FOR JULIA BLACKBURN’s

  The Leper’s Companions

  “One of the most trenchant treatments of voice and viewpoint in recent memory.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Blackburn’s fluid, lighter-than-air prose makes the journey irresistible. It has the vivid splendor of a Technicolor dream that can suddenly turn into nightmare.”

  —Newsday

  “The power of Blackburn’s book lives in her language.… Blackburn’s words, eminently edible, taste of the strange nourishment the best novels provide.”

  —Salon

  “The Leper’s Companions revels in Bosch-like imagery, creating a dreamscape where magic and rough realism bump convincingly against each other.… Invites comparisons to such twentieth-century fabulists as Italo Calvino and Jeanette Winterson.”

  —The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

  “Rich and vivid. The reader will experience another world.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  JULIA BLACKBURN

  The Leper’s Companions

  Julia Blackburn lives in Suffolk, England, with her husband and two children. She is the author of The Emperor’s Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert, which was shortlisted in Great Britain for the Waterstones/Esquire Nonfiction Award, and The Book of Color, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. All of these are available from Vintage Books.

  ALSO BY JULIA BLACKBURN

  The Emperor’s Last Island

  Daisy Bates in the Desert

  The Book of Color

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2000

  Copyright © 1999 by Julia Blackburn

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York in 1999.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint “Away Melancholy” by Stevie Smith from The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Blackburn, Julia.

  The leper’s companions / Julia Blackburn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82925-2

  I. Title.

  PR6052.L3413L4 1999

  823′.914—DC21

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  One day in the month of September, when the low autumn sun was casting long shadows across the grass, she lost someone she had loved. It does not matter who that person was or what sort of love it had been. The fact was that he had gone and she remained.

  She knew it would take at least two years to recover from the first shock of the loss; to disentangle her body from his body, her memories from his memories, her life from his life. What she wanted to do now was to bang the door shut on this present time by setting out on a journey to some distant country and staying there until the present had blurred and shifted and become indistinguishable from the past. But that was not possible. She had to stay where she was. She had to sit still and try to be patient, even though her mind was trapped like a wild thing in a cage, zigzagging backwards and forwards, desperate to find a means of escape.

  She was terribly afraid. All her old fears had stirred themselves and were lumbering towards her through the tunnels of the past. They crowded around her, the quick and the dead, the forgotten and the remembered. They walked with hard sharp feet across her scalp. They sat there in the shadows, watching her. They were cold and without mercy.

  She searched for images that might help her. She saw herself climbing up something like a stem; step by determined step her fingers clasped so tight that the bones showed white at the knuckles.

  She saw herself clinging to a raft. All the land that was ever in the world had disappeared. She could feel the sun on her back, the salt on her lips, the lurching of the waves beneath her body. She raised her head to look up and within the dazzle of light she could just see the thin line of the horizon where the water and the air merged together. That became her destination.

  She saw herself as a snake or a spider, or any other creature that becomes trapped within the confinement of its own skin and at a certain point needs to split through the outer casing and shuffle it off. She had once watched a snake during the final stage of this transformation. It was lying in the dappled shadow of a tree, as exhausted as a baby that had just been born. Its new skin was shiny and slippery with life while the old one was white and dry, paper-thin and empty. When she picked it up it rustled softly and she felt she was holding a ghost in her hands.

  She could imagine the shell of her own body like that: a shed skin with everything remembered on it, from the whirling pattern at the tip of each finger, to the ridge of bones down the back, the curve of the ear, the mouth, the nose. She could see it being lifted up by a gust of wind and carried away, and she felt a strange sense of relief when it had gone.

  There was a village not far from where she lived. It was close to the sea and when the tide was out the shallow water was pulled back to reveal a huge expanse of rippling sand. The place had such a quality of silence and emptiness to it that sometimes, especially at night, she could find quiet just by imagining herself there. She would walk in her mind across the sand, feeling its ridges under her bare feet and she would look at the sea and be comforted.

  At one end of the village was a very old church; a yew tree stood close to the entrance gate, wildflowers bloomed among the grass, the gravestones were pockmarked by lichen and the weather. A mermaid with sharp teeth and a lascivious smile was carved above the east door and a man with leaves in his hair leered down from a corner of the roof and vomited a stream of water from his open mouth when it was raining.

  The air inside the church was damp and cold even on a summer’s day and the light had a dim underwater quality to it. A fragment of the original stained glass had survived in one of the windows. It showed an angel with narrow seagull wings sprouting from his back and pointed feathers covering the nakedness of his body. His feet were bare with long toes and he was marooned on a little patch of black and white tiled floor with an expanse of plain glass all around him. The expression on his face was gentle and compassionate, and sometimes she would sit be
side him in her thoughts until their eyes met across the infinite space that divided them and she was comforted.

  And then one night in the month of February when the east wind was bitterly cold and she felt so sad she didn’t know what to do, she found herself going down the main street of the village. The ground beneath her feet was as hard as rock and deeply rutted by the wheels of carts. The houses on either side of her were small and battered; they reminded her of the nests of birds, as if something like a swallow could have made them from river silt and twigs. The church was newly built, the stones yellow and clean. Everything was different to how she had known it and yet she was shocked by the sense of intense familiarity that surrounded her, the sense of coming home.

  Following a path that led to the sea, she reached a rickety wooden hut and a few fishing boats. She accidentally trod on a pile of empty oyster shells and felt them splintering under her feet.

  A dog with pale eyes watched as she approached and that surprised her because she had somehow presumed there would be no life here, nothing apart from the shifting of wind and sunlight and the movement of the waves.

  She sat with her back to the hut and looked out across the shimmering expanse of sand and sea. “I have left one place and come to another,” she thought to herself. “I have stepped out of the time I was in and now I will be here for a while, until things change and pass.”

  2

  I was sitting with my back propped against a wooden hut and I was lost in thought, although if anyone had asked me what I was thinking about I would not have had an answer. I was drifting in the dark while all around me the sun was bright and the sky was blue and the air was filled with that yearning cry of seabirds which can so easily bring me close to tears.

  Far away on the glistening sand I saw the silhouetted figure of a man bending over something that lay heaped at his feet. It could have been part of a wrecked ship, the trunk of a tree, a bundle of sail. It could have been a fish or a seal or even a person drowned and washed ashore by the tide.

  I knew I could pull the whole image nearer to me just by concentrating on it and then I would understand what was happening, but for the moment I chose to leave it undisturbed. Even from this distance I could sense that the man was fascinated by the thing he had found, but afraid of it as well.

  I became aware of someone sitting next to me, his back also leaning against the hut. It was an old man busy mending the broken mesh of a fishing net and singing to himself in a soft monotone as he struggled with the task. His fingers were bunched together like the feet of dead birds and I could feel the tiredness in them, and the ache. I knew that in a few days he would be setting out alone in a boat and he would never return to this place, but for now he was here in the sunshine with the sound of his own voice echoing around his head.

  I got up and followed the path that led to the village. Mud as hard as stone and grass burnt yellow by the last frost. Nervous chickens scratching for food, a goat tethered to a post, a pig in a pen and a dog with pale eyes watching me. There were people here as well and I could recognize each one of their restless faces, although I could not necessarily put a name to them. Even the smiling mermaid carved above the church door and the man with a wide mouth through which the rainwater streamed were as familiar to me as the details of my own life.

  The first to move close was a young woman called Sally, the fisherman’s daughter. She had gap teeth, rough awkward hands, and a round moon face in which the shadows of her own uncertainty were clearly visible. She blushed easily and I could feel how the sudden heat swept across the surface of her skin, making her tremble with confusion.

  The shoemaker’s wife was next, with big breasts and softly curling hair, her body heavy with the weight of the baby she was carrying: an elbow pushing sharp against the inside of her womb, a head poised above the bone cup of the pelvis, ready for the slow fall. Only a few more days and the process of birth would begin. This was to be her last child.

  Her husband the shoemaker was there working at his bench, his shoulders hunched forward. He looked tired and the blindness which would make him feel cut off from the world was already closing in, tightening its grip. The priest was standing silently beside him, staring towards me but not seeing me. I recognized him as the angel from the church window, but then again as someone I had once known long ago.

  I walked on through the village. Walls were pulled back like curtains so that I could see inside the houses. In one there was a woman lying in the sour stink of a dark room while a mass of devils crawled over her naked body. Her husband was with her, and even though his face was turned from me I was suddenly afraid of him.

  In another room in another house a woman was sitting upright in bed while all her life walked before her eyes, fast and then slow, the years unfolding into each other as she watched them.

  There was the man who was old enough to remember the time when the Great Pestilence had come to the village. And there was the red-haired girl and the man with a red tongue, and all the others who lived here; a crowd of them jostling together.

  Which was when I saw the leper, or to be more precise, I heard him, since it was the beating of the wooden clapper that warned me of his approach. He was just passing the boundary stone close to the last house and was walking straight towards me. His body was draped in a long brown cloak and his face was shielded by a hood.

  The leper was the only one here who was a complete stranger to me. I knew nothing about where he had come from or where he was going. I had no idea of what he had looked like before he became ill or how badly he had been disfigured by the sickness. He walked past me without saying a word and was gone.

  I went back along the path that led to the wooden hut and the fishing boats. I had decided to see what it was that the man had found washed up by the tide.

  3

  The man was poised in indecision, staring at the thing which lay heaped at his feet. I saw then that it was not a human corpse, or the trunk of a tree, or a bundle of sail that he had found, but a mermaid. She was lying facedown, her body twisted into a loose curl, her hair matted with scraps of seaweed.

  The year was fourteen hundred and ten, and it was very early in the morning, with the sun pushing its way gently through a covering of mist that floated aimlessly over the land and the water.

  The man had never seen a mermaid before except for the one carved in stone above the east door of the church. She had very pointed teeth and a double tail like two soft and tapering legs, while this one had a single tail which could have belonged to a large halibut or a cod.

  The man stepped forward and squatted down beside her. The pattern of her interlinking scales glinted with an oily light. He stroked them along the direction in which they lay and they were wet and slippery, leaving a coating of slime on his palm. But when his hand moved over the pale skin of her back it was dry and cold and as rough as a cat’s tongue.

  He lifted a hank of dark hair, feeling its weight. Little translucent shrimps were tangled within its mesh and struggling to free themselves. A yellow crab scuttled around the curve of the waist and dropped out of sight.

  He hesitated for a moment, but then he took hold of the mermaid’s shoulders and rolled her over. The sand clung in patches on her body like the map of some forgotten country. Her nipples were as red as sea anemones. Her navel was deep and round. Her eyes were wide open and as blue as the sky could ever be. As he gazed at her, a lopsided smile drifted over her face.

  He had presumed that she was dead and with the shock of finding her alive he let out a cry and jumped to his feet. He turned and began to run as fast as he could over the ridges of muddy sand and towards the village.

  I watched as he trampled on the gray scrub of sea lavender and the low samphire bushes, their thin skins so easily broken. But he trod more carefully once he had reached the strip of pale stones littered with the sharp empty shells of clams and oysters, and with his heart thumping in his throat he was beside the fishing boats and the wooden hut battered ou
t of shape by the north wind.

  The old fisherman was sitting there just as before, his legs stretched out stiffly in front of him and his bones aching. He made no response when the young man tried to explain what the sea had thrown onto the land; he didn’t even raise his head to look at the speaker.

  The young man ran on again until he arrived at the first house of the village. The shoemaker’s wife was standing by the door, her arms cradling her huge belly.

  “There is a mermaid!” he said to her, but she was lost in thought and hardly heard him, although her baby lurched violently inside her womb as if shocked by the news. She remembered that later.

  The man went into the house and from a back room he fetched one of those narrow wooden spades that are used for digging lugworms. Then he returned the way he had come. He meant to bury the mermaid even if she was still alive and his task made him walk slowly now, with the solemnity of an executioner.

  He looked out across the expanse of sand shimmering like an ocean of calm water. He saw how a flock of gulls had settled in a noisy mass on the place where the mermaid was lying, and as he drew closer they lifted, screaming and turning into the air.

  But the mermaid had gone. Nothing remained of her except for a single lock of dark hair which resembled a ribbon of torn seaweed.

  Nevertheless the man dug a hole as deep as a grave: the salty water seeping into it, the sides crumbling away and seeming to melt like snow. And as he dug the surface brightness of the sand was replaced by greasy layers of black and gray mud smelling of age and decay.

  When the hole was ready he picked up the hair and dropped it in, covering it over quickly and stamping it down. He marked the place with a big black stone.

  That evening he sat with the old fisherman, drinking from a jug of beer and going over and over the story of what he had seen and what he had done. During the night his wife Sally shook him awake because she could hear the sound of a woman crying, desperate and inconsolable. On the following morning a cow died for no good reason and the shoemaker’s wife gave birth to a baby with the head of a monstrous fish which only lived for a few hours.