‘What can she do to us now?’ cried the rocks. ‘We were once girls who talked of men and hoped for love, but she noticed our beauty and she struck us into this shape. She can do us no more harm, and so, Leto, accept us, as your resting place, a temporary mooring.’
‘The goddess can do nothing to me,’ said the wilderness. ‘I shall spite her, and receive you and your offspring. I don’t begrudge you their brightness, their juiciness. You have brought me a memory of sap, from long ago.’
After the clandestine closeness of the last months inside her, her own hot, tight secret, their new separateness from her gave her a sense of deep exile, of estrangement from her own self.
That girl, that boy, those babies. They were dazzling her: silver flashes in her eyes, gold mischief in his.
Setting the boy down in his cotton wrap on the ground, she lifted the scrap of tunic the little girl was wound in, to look at her body; it was smeary and wrinkled, the limbs very thin and purplish-red, with dark down streaked here and there. She bent her head to the infant body again and gently plied her tongue over the parts that still seemed caked in the dried fluids of the albumen sac. Leto felt her daughter squirm with pleasure in response, and all of a sudden, the baby flexed her limbs, her legs and arms working together in a quick, surprisingly gymnastic movement. As she did so, she opened her eyes: the silvery flash again, a moonbow against the newborn’s slate black iris, with its blueish bloom.
She’d pushed hard: a grainy blue egg. Huge relief from a load followed, as after a bout of constipation.
Now she was drifting into sleep, but fitfully. The small fists of the baby, kneading at her breast, woke her; the boy beside her was mewling, too small to wail more loudly than a kitten. She sat up, bundling her scraps of clothing under them to support their small bodies, and arranged them in her lap. They were only mites, but she was too weak to bear their weight in her arms while they fed. Her breasts were hard from the milk, and the infants’ tiny hard gums closed on her flow, clamped tightly as seashells to rock as the tide rises.
And she was rank as a hyena now; she must find water. Water, food, shelter, but water, above all.
2
Protest in the Museum
The catalogue entry for National Museum of Albion, Accession Number G: Skipwith 673.1841, reads as follows:
‘Cartonnage, gilded and painted, high relief, glass eyes and braided wig. Mummified body inside wrapped in coffering style of weave. Linen, papyrus, horsehair, glass, ?human remains, c. 425–475 CE. Found in sarcophagus with sphinxes rampant at four corners, lotus flowers in bas-relief on sides, lid with scene of Bacchic frenzy? Nativity scene? Alabaster. Extensive damage to exterior carving. Probably from a Greek workshop in ?Alexandria, c. 250–275 CE. [G: Skipwith 674.1841]
‘Mummy: 157.5 × 52 × 48 cm (5′2″ × 1′10 ½″ × 1′7″); sarcophagus: 192 × 109 × 86.5 (6′3″ × 3′7″ × 2′10″).
‘Found in niche 153 of columbarium 7, south-west passage, Lycania, by Sir Giles Skipwith, 26 April 1841.’
Room XIX lay off the main display of classical sculpture, and did not lead on to another major section of the Museum’s collections, so it was never as crowded as those high-vaulted rooms where the centrepieces numbered among them original Wonders of the World, and even that Grecian urn, on which the passions of pursuit are stilled and the rule of metamorphosis overturned. Just before the doorway of Room XIX, two maenads were thrashing in ecstasy, tearing a doe limb from limb, their frenzy defying the chill inertia of the Parian marble from which they had been carved. Like demon guardians of the threshold, they scared off visitors to the chamber. Besides, having reached this point in the museum, the visitor would have already walked the length of several ancient civilisations, surveyed carvings on wide entablatures and solid mausolea, and gazed long on giant gods of basalt with smashed noses, and curious creatures of pink granite, endowed with special powers in certain vital areas – book-keeping, midwifery, floods and famine. Listening to the Museum’s Acoustiguide, even the keenest might be sated by chronicles of the blood sports of dead kings and thirsty from contact with deserts that had yielded up treasures from their dry and stony wastes. Moreover, Room XIX was positioned at right angles to the new café, where coffee was offered in various pungent combinations of froth and bitterness, with twists of sugar in designer papers and free-to-sprinkle nutmeg, chocolate or cinnamon from casters on the cutlery counter.
So it came as a surprise when the number of visitors to Room XIX began to grow.
The room did not have its own dedicated guard; he or she perambulated from the more frequented adjacent rooms to supervise it, now and then. So it was Pilar, one of the cleaners on the early morning shift, who noticed the change, though she did not feel it necessary at first to report that dustballs were collecting in the corners. This was a familiar sign, instantly legible to her and the troop of women trundling round their laden carts of mops and brooms and bin liners, that human traffic had increased; after a blockbuster show had drawn its daily record-breaking attendance, the crowds would have left behind them – especially in winter when they were wrapped up in woollens and tweeds – a tideline of hair and flakes of skin and lint, making a slut’s wool, a mortal rime of leavings, which the cleaners would sweep up as best they could. They weren’t allowed to damp it down, because such a procedure would affect the humidity and temperature controls, and they did not use vacuum cleaners but gave the floors a weekly polish with powered revolving brushes that seemed to whirl their handlers about the rooms like dodgems. A fair amount of the human spoor escaped trapping. But Pilar also found, a few days after the dustballs began to gather, offerings of flowers and even a photograph and a message or two tucked under the laminated label on the wall (‘Anonymous Female, known as “Helen”, c. 425–475 CE; Sarcophagus, c. 250–275 CE’), as well as fastened – with hairgrips and chewing gum and other means – to the cords around the sarcophagus and its inmate.
Pilar told one of her fellow cleaners in their canteen afterwards, ‘Like prayer,’ she said. ‘In my country, that’s what we do when a child is sick . . .’ She took out a snapshot from the pocket of her overalls, with a message on ruled paper torn from a notepad in big letters.
Her team worker, Eileen, who was nearer home in Enoch than Pilar and could read besides, did so: ‘HOMELESS LADY YOU KIND GIV ME WERK.’ The photograph showed a woman, shadowed by a headscarf.
‘Looks religious, mind,’ Eileen commented. ‘I don’t see eye to eye with that stuff, not since what the holy fathers did to my Timmy . . .’ She accepted another scrap from Pilar, and read: ‘“Dear Lady of Scattered People, please find me shelter.” That’s more like it.’
Pilar’s eyes flickered at the words. She handed Eileen another message, this time densely inked in a fluent, tightly controlled script.
Eileen turned it around. ‘It’s in one of those back-to-front languages.’ And she chuckled.
One of the guards, overhearing the two cleaning ladies, came up. He suggested reporting the rise in visitors and their peculiar offerings.
But the gearing of security at the National Museum is very precise and deeply considered, and changes are undertaken with caution. So by the time something was being done, much more than the appointment of a single guard to Room XIX was needed. A rota of the most experienced wardens was appointed to the task of guarding the sarcophagus, which stood free on a dais, and the mummy, which was positioned upright in a glass case beside it. A double cordon to keep the queue orderly was arranged, extending from Skipwith 673 to the maenads and beyond them into the next room, and a notice was put up: ‘Please do not touch the exhibits. Even the lightest fingermark can damage works of art.’
In spite of the wardens’ new vigilance, someone had managed to deface this sign, and ‘LADY’ was written in large capitals over ‘the exhibits’, while other words had been struck out and ‘our holy mother’ inserted so that the notice now read, ‘Please do not touch the lady. Even the lightest mark can damage our holy mother�
�.
Someone had also added, in lime green highlighter, the word ASYLUM. And the fingermarks on the glass case began to need extra supplies of cleaning spray each morning.
‘Helen’, as the cartonnage mask of Skipwith 673 had come to be called, was attracting so much public attention to the hitherto neglected Room XIX of the National Museum because she was specially featured on the new CD-ROM issued by the Museum’s Department of Outreach: Events and Marketing. The software itself was on sale for a sum far too large for most schools, even after the government’s special funds for computer learning, but much of the material it contained could be accessed on the Museum’s website at natmus.enoch.uk. which schoolchildren were encouraged to visit.
There, the first item under ‘The Ancient World’, ‘Helen’ appeared, revolving slowly to the softly spoken question, enunciated by a fluent, pleasing voice well known from money-spinning privatisation campaigns of public utilities on the telly:
‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topmost towers of Ilium?’
The full trapezoid head, with a thin gold fillet lightly laid on heavy braids, came to a standstill on the screen, facing forward as the camera approached closer, until the caramel-coloured glass eyes in the gilded and painted face seemed to flicker with light and the vermilion lips to be poised to part. A gold bead necklace encircled the woman’s neck; a small tubular capsule of silver was attached by a brooch to lie across to her breast.
‘No,’ another voice picked up, purposely contemporary, even chilled out, in style. ‘But Helen might well have looked like this beautiful woman, who died aged around twenty-eight years old and was buried in a family grave in ancient Lycania.’
The picture flipped over, and a view of an archaeological site replaced ‘Helen’: not the usual sun-baked boneyard of stony ruins, but the rim of dark wet walls poking through reeds and grasses, as if a hulk lay rotting there. A red arrow floated over the image, and pointed to a position; then, like a smart bomb nosing out its target, the camera dipped under ground, travelled bumpily down a dark passage in the earth and entered a chamber, then rose up into a runnelled, subterranean cavern, where dozens of empty dark ledges were piled one above the other. The arrow reappeared, danced over the image, and pointed again.
‘Here lay Helen, in her alabaster tomb, miraculously sealed from light and air and water, for over a millennium, until the Victorian archaeologist, Sir Giles Skipwith, saved her from historical neglect and the ravages of wind and weather.’
‘Helen’ now reappeared full-length, and began to spin slowly in space. The first voice resumed the commentary, as it now took a scientific turn, itself spinning details of CAT scans and carbon dating and other technical analyses that had been performed on the mummy. As it enumerated them, Helen gradually shed her bandages. Or at least the mummy did. First centrifugal diagrams of bones and blood vessels and nervature radiated from the body and vanished off the edge of the screen, then, as these disincarnate Helens were expelled, she gradually began to cohere in living colour and move towards the viewer. She was dressed in ‘a simple linen shift’ and her face was ‘high cheek-boned, full-lipped, her complexion dark and her real hair, under the elaborate wig, was found to be scanty . . . The cause of death was acute vitamin deficiency, probably caused by a succession of failed harvests in the harsh area and by successive childbearing.’
The realised portrait, computer-generated from the data pulled from the effigy by tomography, ‘the same methods used today to diagnose tumours’, hung on the screen as if in space. It did not look like a photograph of a person. For one thing, the colours were discordant and artificial, forged on the palette of digitalised imagery; for another, ‘Helen’ was semi-transparent, spectral. But she loomed nonetheless, as if three-dimensional and viewed in the round, and her face, lingering in close up, looked as if it belonged to someone who was there, mute, but breathing.
An advertising company, newly appointed to represent the National Museum at a time of controversy over admission charges, elitism, and relevance, viewed the CD-ROM and then chose this picture of ‘Helen’ to give the venerable institution a new image. In order to promote thousands of national treasures stewarded by the Museum, ‘Helen’ floated into households nationwide on the envelopes of a million cold mailings; she appeared on the monitors of computers in schools, universities, cybercafés and on domestic PCs with e-mail. And the numbers of visitors to Room XIX began to grow to see for themselves the ‘Anonymous Female, c. 425–475 CE’.
So the day that the customary queue formed at the Museum doors before opening time and, on reaching Room XIX, found that G. Skipwith 673.1841 was not there, and that a handwritten notice pinned beside the identifying label informed the public that it had been removed for exhibition abroad, there was widespread frustration, and, in pockets, anger.
On the first day, this took the form of a stunned, mournful drifting around the vacated rostrum where the tomb and the glass case had stood; then one woman in a salwar kameez placed her votive offering beside it just the same, and with a little girl, around five years old, who unlike her was wearing jeans and a fleecy zipped-up jacket, squatted down on the floor.
‘You can’t sit there,’ said the guard. The visitor scrambled to her feet, pulling her daughter with her.
‘Why not?’ A young man pushed his way to her side and taking her by the shoulders pressed the woman down on to the Museum parquet again. He turned to the guard. ‘Why has Helen been taken away? Why was there no prior warning? Where is she now?’ Kim McQuy dropped down on to the floor. ‘I want to see someone. Some of us have taken time off work to come and visit her, some of us have travelled far, we’ve paid our admission and we want to see what we came to see.’ His tone wasn’t aggressive, but authoritative; he had a way of hitting certain words with an edgy emphasis that their meaning didn’t altogether warrant. The effect was more threatening than he intended, and a general murmur of relief that someone had taken charge greeted his words. Several others in the queue sat down, too; the floor space was filling up.
The two guards retreated to a corner, and, turning their backs on the gathering, began to push buttons on their walkie-talkies and mutter.
Kim McQuy sprang to his feet: ‘That’s right,’ he called out. ‘You tell them we’re waiting. We’re here and we want some action round here.’
Everyone laughed, but it was a chilly, frightened shiver of a sound.
A young woman, with bleached hair, a nose-ring and a stud in her eyebrow, peered closer at the temporary notice of removal by the label. ‘It’s signed by H – something Fernly.’ She spelled out the first name: ‘H-O-R-T-E-N-S-E’.
More guards came running into the room.
‘Hang on,’ called one of them. ‘You can’t just sit down like that. This is a museum. There is seating elsewhere if you want to sit. You’ve got to circulate.’
The protestors shifted, but no one rose.
‘If you won’t come willingly, we’ll have to use force.’ This guard, clearly a veteran of TV police dramas, caused general mutterings, still a little frightened in temper.
‘I’m warning you,’ he continued. ‘I’ll have you arrested.’
One or two of the visitors responded uneasily and sidled out. The guard nodded approval.
‘Let’s get this Dr Fernly,’ one of the sitters-in whispered.
‘Doctor Fernly! Doctor Fernly!’ The chant went up. ‘We want Helen back, we want Our Lady back!’ The rhythm of their shouts grew more rapid as the voices gathered in unison, accompanied to beating on their bags and other possessions: ‘Helen, Helen. Bring her back! Bring her back!’
The Museum director, informed of the trouble in Room XIX, looked at the surveillance screens in the security room, saw a gaggle of women, children and youths of what appeared to be various nationalities, and decided to come down in person. He was a new appointment, with a background in international trade fairs, and he prided himself on his social skills and person man
agement. He told his staff to keep calm, to chat nicely with the demonstrators.
‘No panic. I want no one to panic. This is a flash in the pan. Still, just imagine you’re in a hostage scenario,’ he said. ‘Win their trust. Softly softly – that’s the way to defuse the situation.’
So there were no more threats or hard language, though some of the guards, returning to their posts in other rooms, were highly indignant, and told journalists off the record that nothing like it had ever happened in the Museum before and would never have been allowed under the old director. ‘He would have had them all out by the ears, no messing.’
The television teams who requested permission to film were not allowed in; as there was a general rule against the use of cameras and camcorders, this did not prove difficult to enforce – on the first and second days.
From the core of the early morning that first day, many left to go back to work, Kim McQuy among them; school was starting again the following week and he had to attend the meeting about the cuts to the music programme versus the library. But the general numbers in Room XIX did not dwindle.
On the third day, the press department issued a short statement about ‘Helen’, and this move made it impossible for them to continue to refuse access to the media, who were soon greatly swelling the crowd in front of the empty dais in Room XIX.
The press release was left in a dispenser at the entrance, near the maenads in their frenzy. It was soon emptied, and photocopies had to be made to replenish it.
The Leto Bundle Page 2
