Mooncranker's Gift

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘The sun has been catching you,’ Mrs Pritchett said suddenly. ‘You are quite burnt. You will start peeling if you are not careful.’

  ‘I don’t usually,’ Miranda said.

  ‘I have some stuff that I could let you have. Splendid stuff. Sun-tan oil, you know, but a special preparation. I’ll bring it for you, when we get down.’ With an effort she withdrew her eyes from her companion’s face and looked down at her guidebook. ‘This was the temple to Apollo,’ she said. ‘Same period as the theatre, second century A.D. Or rather, no, it was extensively rebuilt in the second century.’

  At this moment they heard a plangent nasal American voice behind them, saying, ‘Excuse me, ladies.’ Both Mrs Pritchett and Miranda turned inwards to see where this totally unexpected voice was coming from. They were in time to see a young man with short hair and a white tee shirt clamber up on to the level and begin walking rather unsteadily towards them. He was smiling broadly.

  ‘Excuse me, ladies,’ Lusk said again then paused, daunted by this sudden eminence, the nearness of the two ladies, and the difference in their faces, both however curiously at variance with his expectations, the older one severe, the younger solicitous or perhaps alarmed. He kept up his smile, his mind a blank, breathing spirituous breaths towards them.

  ‘There was something I wanted to ask you,’ he said. Mrs Pritchett caught the odour of whisky. She regarded him a moment or two longer, the wide meaningless smile, the bruised, discoloured face. Something in her own face changed.

  ‘Kindly go away,’ she said, with impeccable modulation.

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ Lusk said. ‘You ladies are British aren’t you? Do you know London?’

  ‘No, not very well,’ Miranda said.

  ‘Not very well?’ Lusk repeated, in surprised tones.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Mrs Pritchett said. She turned her back on Lusk and regarded once more the temple of Apollo. After hesitating a moment Miranda did the same.

  ‘Can a girl walk out, you know, alone, in the streets of London after dark?’ Lusk said, addressing their backs. ‘That is what I wanted to ask you. Because in Athens –’

  ‘So it is presumably much older than that,’ Mrs Pritchett said in clear tones. The theatre, I mean. It was probably damaged in the earthquake.’

  ‘Earthquake?’ Lusk said. ‘They can in Athens. Hey I’m talking to you.’

  ‘They would have been able to see everything,’ Miranda said, in a voice not quite her own. ‘The audience. Sitting up there in the theatre they would have been able to see their homes, wouldn’t they? Everything they cared about.’

  ‘They would not be molested,’ Lusk said, ‘on the darkest of nights. What do you think of that? I’m asking you a question.’

  He leaned forward and tapped Miranda on the shoulder. Mrs Pritchett saw the girl flinch. At once she turned on her heel intending to administer a blistering reproof but the sight of his face enraged her suddenly, with its inane smile, stretching now with a sort of complacency because she had turned to him. This drunken, immature face became in that moment expressive of all hateful male attributes, vain, vulgarly predatory, the reason too for Miranda’s disappointing vagueness and unresponsiveness, caused she felt sure by some man not much different from this. No words could be wounding enough. She paused for a choked moment, then drove her clenched fist with all the force and fury at her disposal into the young man’s face, feeling her gemmed knuckles strike and jar on the cheekbone. The power behind this blow was considerable. The tremendous joy and release of its delivery was something she was destined never to forget.

  Lusk took two steps backward, which brought him near the edge of the level on which they were standing. The smile was still on his face, though terribly shrunken. Some words he uttered, of remonstrance presumably, but they were incomprehensible to Mrs Pritchett who was in any case beyond the reach of words, her mind full of the desire to inflict further damage on the young man – that first blow had by no means satisfied her, though it had been a revelation in its way. Steadying herself and planting her feet more firmly she struck again, with the same fist – her left hand keeping the place in the guidebook – and yet again, misjudging the distance this time and almost overbalancing, uttering several harsh sobbing sounds, aware that Miranda was talking on her right in frightened tones but unable to make any words out, the young man stumbling backwards in retreat and not smiling now but making, possibly because he could not fully believe what was happening, no real attempt to protect himself, certainly none to retaliate. Nor any sort of sound.

  With horror and glee Mrs Pritchett observed that the young man’s upper lip was split and that blood from this wound was spread all round his mouth as though he had been eating something messy. Higher up on the cheekbone too he was cut. Her breath came in gasps, mixed with vituperative expressions which she had not known her vocabulary contained. Her fury was dying now, but with the persistence of personages in a nightmare the young man’s messy mouth again formed a smile, reassuring perhaps in intention, and he took a step forward, raising his arms as if to take Mrs Pritchett in some kind of restraining grip. At this, with a muffled screaming note strangely sustained, like mourning, she launched herself upon him and with her nails scored parallel gashes down the side of his face. For a moment the bloody face was turned upward, the mouth open as though for some vociferous appeal, then he had stumbled away, out of reach, off the platform of grass, and gone plunging and leaping downward over the shrub-covered slope, careering at breakneck speed over piles of rubble, spurs of rock, clumps of thorn, to vanish from sight behind the ruined walls of the Roman baths, though the crashes of his violent career could still be heard.

  The two women stood side by side not looking at each other, while the silence settled round Lusk’s flight. Mrs Pritchett was quivering internally, though whether in distress or exhilaration she didn’t know. The guidebook was still in her left hand, her finger painfully nipped inside it, marking the place. The discomfort to this finger recalled her slowly to their purpose on the hillside. She glanced at Miranda whose face was lowered, concealed by the sweeps of hair that had swung forward over her brows, and then at the sky, surprised suddenly by its remoteness, the distant formations of cloud. Surely the sky had been quite clear when they had set out. There was a change, a hush over everything.

  ‘The cheek of it,’ Mrs Pritchett said. ‘Did you ever see such cheek? I think it jolly well served him right, don’t you?’

  Miranda looked up. ‘He didn’t mean any harm,’ she said. ‘He got himself into a situation.’ Her face was white, and she avoided looking at Mrs Pritchett, who now saw that their expedition was irretrievably ruined.

  ‘We’d better go down,’ she said, remembering for solace her promise to give Miranda the sun-tan lotion. They began in silence to retrace their steps.

  · · ·

  Feeling himself bemonstered, aware of blood running on his face, the taste of blood in his mouth, Lusk went headlong and at phenomenally accelerating speed down the steep and treacherously uneven slope, his legs following frantically a body that fought for balance. Horror at what had happened to him mingled with his fear of injury. Sobs built up in his throat without his panting breath being able to utter them. He rushed down the hillside, arms working wildly, panic increasing with his speed, leaping boulders, plunging through thorn, making darting last-minute detours round hollows and holes, startling birds and sheep in his frenzied passage. He did not feel cuts, bruises, lacerations. His whole being was centred on staying upright. Blind to everything but this he went crashing downwards.

  ‘Now then,’ Plopl said loudly. He looked across the sunlit clearing at Pamela’s white body supine on the rock. It seemed remote, unattainable, like some dream of impossible felicity. A sense of being trapped in this self-imposed series of actions settled heavily on him. ‘Get ready,’ he called. His left hand hovered over the delayed-action lever. With the other he applied distasteful last-minute friction to himself. ‘Go!’ he shouted, to alert
Pamela. He pressed the setting lever and release catch and set off with lumbering speed across the clearing, still stroking himself clumsily as he went. He heard the mechanism whirring behind him. Pamela’s white legs loomed before him. He was almost there, reaching forward. ‘Legs apart!’ he shouted. Suddenly, from the undergrowth immediately beyond the rock, he heard a series of crashing sounds and a moment later a figure horrifically bloody came bounding through the bushes, seemed to fly across the intervening space with arms extended like wings, narrowly avoided the rock on which Pamela was lying, stumbled, recovered, caught Plopl a glancing blow which, in his awkward half-crouching position, threw him off balance, so that he fell heavily and painfully, winding himself.

  Plopl lay for some moments on his side, face contorted, struggling to recover his breath. He was aware of a sharp pain along his left side, where he had grazed his tender flank on the rock. The camera had stopped whirring. There was absolute silence in the clearing. After a few moments Plopl sat up, looked dazedly around him. There was nobody in the clearing at all. Pamela too had risen to a sitting position. Across the intervening space they regarded each other in silence. Then Pamela’s face broke slowly into a smile.

  How difficult, Mooncranker thought, toilsome and perplexing, to discover the source of all this water, to trace it back, through the fantastic diversity of its routes, the ditches, channels, spreading pools, the grooves and runnels it had worn for itself in the rock, a whole interlocking mesh of watercourses, follow it to the point where it first seethed up, discharged from some age-old heartburn of the earth. Perhaps impossible. Difficult now to distinguish the natural from the artificial among these streams. Whatever peoples had lived here – Seljuk, Roman, Lydian, Phrygian, Greek – had made attempts to contain the water, conduct it in definite channels, probably to feed their baths. There was evidence, here and there, of earthenware pipes and gutters. Most of these now were dry – the water had taken different paths, fashioned its own contrivances.

  He negotiated an area soft and yielding underfoot, where the water had seeped and spread, saturating the ground. Circling this area, which he felt to be rather fearsome, he followed the line of the wall for some distance, disturbed by this anarchic behaviour of the water, multifarious, untrammelled, ungirdled, this chaotic squirming of living and dead water-courses, with their continuous unlocalizable sounds of trickle and gush, nowhere any form or pattern, nothing for the mind to grasp.

  He stopped again after some minutes and stood looking down at a deep channel some two feet in width, with vertical banks between which the water flowed dark green and slow. Possibly because it ran slower or had been above ground longer, this water was cooler apparently, emitted at least no steam – he could see the surface clearly, dark green in colour, but this would be due to the green bed of the ditch no doubt; and opaque, strangely cold-looking. He knelt and immersed his hand to the wrist: the water was tepid. He remained thus for some time, staring down. Nothing at all growing, he suddenly realized, at the sides of the ditch or on the banks or anywhere around. Not even weeds. Nothing but a sort of thin, light green moss on the stones, and that was probably chemical, some sort of deposit. Over the whole hillside nothing much growing. Was it this that was troubling me, this incongruity? Water everywhere, the hillside running with it, clamorous and steamy with it, feverish veins of water, and yet no trees, no bushes of any size, nothing but sage-green shrub.

  He rose to his feet. With a feeling of surprise he saw larks high in the sky and became aware of their song. The line of figures was still there, moving slowly across the horizon. He registered these impressions with a curious intensity, an overmastering sense of time and patience and blight. Something was seeking to enter his mind, invade his being, something as pervasive and incessant as the water sounds or the song of the birds, taking him over, absorbing his heart beat, the pulse of his life, into a wider, older continuity, which no apparent contradictions could give pause to. For a very brief time Mooncranker heard nothing, saw nothing. Then he was himself again, separate, intensely alone. Miranda’s face came into his mind as it had been the morning she had left him, and he experienced a complex blend of vindictiveness and desire. He began to descend.

  2

  ‘No, no, no,’ exclaimed Mrs Pritchett in her well-bred, strangled contralto, holding up one hand in humorous protest; a capable hand, broad-palmed, fingers slightly spatulate; the knuckles somewhat scraped-looking after her fracas earlier that morning, though she had in the interim rubbed them with her special handcream. She always took care of her hands. Hands show our age like almost nothing else, she was fond of saying, hands and throat. In her other one now was a bottle of glinting liquid, amber in the light, ripe fig colour in the shelter of her creamed, creased palm.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘I insist.’ Full of business on the threshold of Miranda’s cabin, this kindly bustle disguising a certain languorous disturbance within, experienced since the brilliant idea had come to her, of not simply lending the bottle to Miranda as she had promised, but volunteering her own fingers to rub it well in with. ‘You don’t know, you don’t know, how positively lethal this sun can be.’ Inside the room now, like her own in every outward respect, yet what a change was effected by an alien hairbrush, for example. Odours of talcum powder and lemon balm. Miranda – backing somewhat awkwardly in the narrow confines of the cabin, obliged for the moment to play hostess. Mrs Pritchett took her in with a series of smiling glances: hair carelessly pinned up, exposing the soft, rather long neck; full underlip curving in a faint embarrassed smile; the belted waist of her cream and brown cotton dress.

  ‘Take the word of an old campaigner,’ Mrs Pritchett said playfully, holding up in deprecation of any further protest the bottle of sun-tan oil ruddy and glinting in the light that shafted down on to it from the high square window. ‘Ambre Solaire’,she said, in an archly exaggerated accent. She controlled her breathing, concealed her interior disarray from her young friend, turning and closing the cabin door slowly and carefully. When she looked round again Miranda was standing against the bed, still awkwardly smiling.

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ she said.

  ‘No bother at all, my dear,’ Mrs Pritchett said, with a sort of domineering jocularity, and she nodded her head at Miranda. ‘This will do the trick.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much. Are you in a hurry for it?’

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘Well, I thought, if you were, I could bring it back as soon as I’ve finished with it.’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Mrs Pritchett said firmly, ‘You need someone to rub it well in. You can’t reach your own back, now can you?’ She paused for a moment. ‘It is medicinal too,’ she said, ‘you see. It tones you up. But it must be rubbed in well, that is essential. It must get into the pores.’

  Roguishly, finger and thumb poised delicately over the bottle, she paused, smiling at Miranda. Then with the same playful delicacy she nipped the white cone-shaped top and tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t turn and it still wouldn’t when she tried harder. Meanwhile, Miranda, realizing that Mrs Pritchett intended to do this service for her, wondered if her bra was very grubby and watched with some concern the other’s increasingly violent efforts to remove the bottle top. Smile gone, a pallor of exertion at the temples, Mrs Pritchett was holding the bottle in a convulsive grip against her tummy, and twisting.

  ‘The blasted top won’t come off,’ she muttered.

  ‘Shall I have a try?’ offered Miranda, but Mrs Pritchett yanked the blouse out of her skirt to help her get a grip and with a great effort managed to unscrew the top at last.

  ‘Finalmente,’ she said, panting. ‘The threads had got crossed somehow.’ She summoned a smile. ‘These things are sent to try us,’ she said. But to Miranda, this open-mouthed, audibly breathing woman, blouse hanging unheeded, savagely out of skirt band, was alarming, bringing back to her mind the whirlwind attacker on the hilltop, those breathless vituperations, that upturned bleeding face. She rea
lized that she was afraid of Mrs Pritchett …

  ‘Just unbutton your dress and slip it over your shoulders,’ Mrs Pritchett said, advancing on Miranda, holding the bottle as if it were a syringe. ‘I think that would be the best way. Oh, I see, there’s a zip there, is there, well in that case dear I should just take it off altogether, yes, that’s right. My goodness, just look at you, you would certainly have had blisters. You are like a lobster on your shoulders and back. Didn’t you feel it at the time?’

  ‘Not really.’ Miranda was sitting on the bed in her bra and pants with her back to Mrs Pritchett. She shivered involuntarily at the first touch of the cool oil along her shoulders and Mrs Pritchett’s velvety yet imperious fingertips stroking firmly from the tops of the shoulder-blades outwards.

  ‘No, it’s the water,’ Mrs Pritchett said. ‘You don’t notice at the time how hot the sun is. Even as late in the year as this.’ She raised the bottle, tilted it, and poured a drop or two of the thick fluid into the downy declivity between Miranda’s shoulder-blades, immediately below the girl’s nape. Both hands flat, fingers slightly splayed, she moved her palms with a firm pressure outwards over the squarish, unexpectedly compact and athletic shoulders – the girl was much more robust than she seemed when clothed; perhaps it was her posture that was deceptive, or the burdened-seeming neck – rested a moment there, then down, with oily adhesiveness, down the outsides of the forearms to the elbows.

  ‘It has to be rubbed well in,’ Mrs Pritchett said, rather thickly.

  Miranda felt a warm tingling sensation across her back where Mrs Pritchett’s fingers were plying. It was a healing-burning sort of feeling, by no means unpleasant. However, sitting there so awkwardly, her back chastely towards the other lady, her legs over the side of the bed, hands in her lap, she had only her own vertical posture to resist the pressure of Mrs Pritchett’s palms, nothing at all to hold on to. Consequently, after the first few passes, she was hard put to it to maintain herself upright. This was partly because, as it seemed to her, Mrs Pritchett was increasing the pressure from moment to moment. Miranda sensed an urgency in those hands and set it down to Mrs Pritchett’s healing fervour, though with less than complete conviction. In any case, whatever it was, it was now pushing her forward each time, driving her to perform an apparent obeisance towards the window, the source of light. Up she felt the slippery soft hands go, slowly outwards to the shoulder, nudging her forward to her periodic reverence, slipping down the arms, bringing her upright again.