Mistification (Angry Robot)

by Kaaron Warren

  #

  Marvo gave the jeweller some precious jewels.

  He gave Andra the ring while they ate a good, cheap meal in a purple-painted Italian restaurant. She said, "You know Doctor Reid said you would never put a ring on my finger."

  "As she walked away, I laughed until I coughed, and coughed until I cried, cried until I was shaking, fitful," Marvo said.

  Andra said, "I clipped her hair while she was asleep to make her go away. I didn't wait for the first quarter of the waxing moon, when the strength would not be sapped."

  Marvo felt great strength coming from the moon; its light, and its pull on the earth. He met people in his travels who agreed, and he found new lore wherever he went. He met an old woman with aches and pains, she told him that, when he got to that stage of his life, he should only treat or cut his corns when the moon was in the third or fourth quarter. Marvo, never a pain or an illness in his life, nonetheless listened and took note. He might be able to help another one day.

  Marvo let Andra think this was the magic which rid them of Doctor Reid's probing, and they ordered a large dessert, more wine, to celebrate the woman leaving. When they returned home they sat together and watched TV. They watched the launch of a new programme called May Day.

  "Let me tell you about the magic of May," the announcer said in a soft, subtle voice. "Let me tell you this.

  'The fair maid who the first of May

  Goes to the fields at the break of day

  And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree

  Will ever after handsome be.'"

  He spoke over images of flowers, the sun, beauty. And he went on like that for a long time. Then, finally, he got to the point: "This is May Dew, the wonderful product. It takes away the guesswork about how you will look each day; you will always look the same!

  "Only you will know your true face.

  "This is a natural method of beauty, coming from the ancient days, when to wash your face in the May dew meant you were beautiful all year round.

  "There is a new range of products: May Dew (wrinkle cream), May Queen (perfume), May Pole (deodorant stick,) May Tree (mascara), May Day (moisturiser and sunscreen) and May Fly (hair spray).

  "May Dew is proud to sponsor this exciting new programme. Sit back and enjoy the year 1677. Next week, enjoy an hour about the year 1489."

  Andra helped a lot of women to beauty. She was angry that a commercial company was making a chemical which may or may not work, out of a natural product which did.

  Lady's mantle she used, and wild tansy soaked in buttermilk for nine days. Both effective in the restoration of the complexion, but none so much as May Dew.

  Marvo and Andra watched, and were led to believe the night before Mary married William of Orange, she opened up a bottle of dew collected in May, to preserve her beauty all year round.

  Galileo, his microscope perfected these forty years, dropped dew into his eyes, his poor, sore eyes.

  Mr van Leeuwenhoek, strange man, worked with dogs, ignoring his itchy skin allergy. He moistened his skin with dew and continued his dog sperm observations.

  Edmund Halley, his comet still far away, observed Venus across the sun. His work was almost finished when his father's goitre demanded all his attention. He, a scientist, performed an unscientific act. In May, he rose before the sunrise and went to a man's grave. He passed his hand from the head to the foot of the grave. Three times. He touched the liquid to the throat of his father, touching the growth. The goitre ceased to be a problem. However Halley was never the same. Secret reports say that, in his haste to leave the cemetery, he walked over the graves of unchristened children buried outside the consecrated ground. He contracted grave-scab; his limbs shook, his breast was heavy, his skin burned him. People believed this fatal disease could only be cured by wearing a sark made thus:

  1. Collect the lint grown in a field which is manured from a farmyard heap which has not been disturbed for forty years.

  2. Let it be spun by Habbitrot, the queen of spinsters.

  3. Let it be bleached by an honest bleacher in an honest miller's dam.

  4. Let it be sewn by an honest tailor.

  5. Once the garment is donned, the cure will be instant.

  But how can this be?

  1. Once you touch the manure heap it has been disturbed.

  2. There is no agreement as to who is the queen of the spinsters.

  3. There is no honest bleacher. There is no honest miller.

  4. There is no honest tailor. There is no honest man or woman.

  5. Perhaps the cure for grave-scab is to keep away from the graves. Stay away from the dead!

  Andra and Marvo laughed at the desperate propaganda of the programme. They couldn't imagine people buying May Dew products because of it.

  But they were to be surprised. It was the most successful product launch in many years, and Marvo began to think about the nature of the lies told, the magic of them. He sensed truth behind the fantasy, and he tracked down the advertising agency running the programme, found the creative talent (not the salesperson, the front one, show-off, "look what I achieved" person in a suit) and went to see him.

  They recognised each other instantly, talked for hours under the guise of business.

  "Yours is the stronger mist," said the advertising man. "Mine is less subtle. My magic says a cigarette is cool. A beer is masculine. Girls who use tampons enjoy life. Chocolate is good for your social life. A sunset is beautiful, clear indication of the sanctity of our earth. I can invent anything I like, make it real. The ploughman's lunch5 , that chopping board of rustic cheeses, meat and pickles that sends you back in time, back when cars did not exist, women wore skirts, men worked the field and got dirty for a living? Re-invented mid-twentieth century as a gimmick to get people back into pubs.

  "And there's a sweet little cartoon on air, 'Lovely Funny'? You wouldn't have seen it."

  But Marvo had. He spent many early hours of morning, watching TV with the sound turned low.

  "What do you think came first, the show or the dolls, Tshirts, doll houses? They make a fucking fortune, thinking up some pile of merchandise, then creating a show to create the need. Kids love it, the mist is thick, everyone is happy."6

  The advertising man showed Marvo some of his best work. There was an aftershave – "For the man you are", the jeans – "To take you to your wildest place", the coffee, of which "Every mouthful is heaven".

  Other workers began looking in at Marvo and the advertising man, wondering at the noise they were making, the laughter.

  "I'll go," said Marvo. They were sorry to part; they knew they could not see each other again. Both recognised the magic of loneliness.

  Marvo got Andra to watch Lovely Funny the next day. After the show (which she hated) they saw an interview with the favourite children's band, FEG. It was pronounced Eff Eee Gee, not Feg. It stood for whatever – no one was saying. They were very popular with the youngsters. They sang songs close to nursery rhymes. They had pleasing rhyme and sounds and strong rhythm.

  Marvo, alerted to the manipulation of children, scrawled down some of the lines.

  "Mary had a little lamby

  Then she met a deer called Bambi

  Bambi said, 'Where'd y'get your socks?'

  Mary said, 'Got 'em from the Fox.'"

  Fox's Sox was a chain store of footwear. Marvo knew it was very successful.

  "Old Mother Hubbard,

  Looked in the cupboard

  And found that her life was there

  She went to the shop

  Bought a Good Pop

  Then went and dyed her hair."

  "Yum, Good Pops," said Andra. Her craving for the toffee on a stick would not go away until she bought one later in the day. Magic.

  The children kept time by clapping their hands or rocking back and forth, back and forth.

  This band had great influence over the children who demanded from their parents anything mentioned. The magic of selling products by association
.

  Marvo was fascinated by the use of words to convince. Words have a magic of their own. "It's poetry," he said.

  "I write poetry sometimes," Andra said. She was shy about it. No one had read it before. Marvo made her sit next to him and read aloud.

  My Box is Packed

  Once more, my box is packed,

  my suitcase filled,

  my home stored so easily.

  Not as easily as in the past, though.

  I have been here for longer,

  gathered more,

  which I cannot bear to throw away.

  Once more, I leave in the dawn,

  they watch for me at night.

  That's why I have to leave.

  I cannot do my job,

  sitting in a room

  fearful of discovery.

  I leave with the dawn,

  printing a symbol

  on my door

  with wine,

  invisible but powerful.

  They will not enter until

  I am safely away.

  When will I find my people again?

  #

  Marvo's eyes filled with tears. "Those words are beautiful. You read them so well, I can imagine it really happened."

  Andra wasn't sure how to take the compliment. He told her she had a great imagination; she wasn't sure whether to tell him it was a true story.

  He left her sitting cross-legged amongst her papers deciding what to read him next.

  "Don't want to hear more? I don't blame you."

  "I do, Andra. It's good. Then I want to show you this." He handed her his precious note. "My grandmother gave me this before she died. It's to be passed on, to my kids if I have any. Like on TV, where the old man is dying in bed. But it's a mean note; it doesn't sing. Maybe you can find a sweeter way to speak to the generations who'll follow."

  Andra piled up her poems and returned them to the shoebox where she kept them hidden. She said, "I'm really not all that good."

  "You have beautiful words," Marvo said, but he didn't want to read the poems she written. He wanted her to re-write his own story.

  She agreed to do it because she had such love for him, and the way he spoke made her think that perhaps his future was hers, that the child who received the paper would be hers. This gave her a feeling of place; for the first time her future was settled, she could see the end of it and it was comforting.

  She worked for many days on the words but she couldn't change them. She could not change a single ancient word, and she told Marvo that. "There is nothing more to say than what is said. It's a harsh message but your task is hard." She took his hand, trying to imagine what it would be to hold the mist in those hands, to be able to drop it, help people forget. "You've inherited a lonely task. I think I know what that's like." She had magic too, the magic to heal. "Tell me about your ancestors. Were they all magicians?"

  It was difficult for Marvo to explain. "I can't discuss my family tree and its branches. All I have is a trunk. I had my mother, who had her mother, who had her father, who had his father, who had his father, who had his mother, who had her mother, who had her mother, who had her mother, who had her mother who had her father. We are a single parent, single child family."

  "How is that possible?"

  "I believe partners are discarded after birth. I have no instruction for that."

  At this stage Andra felt the first real fear of her life. Would he discard her if they had a child together? Did he even consider her worthy of bearing his children?

  He would not be questioned further.

  "It's interesting you should say that about your family tree," said Andra. "Because I have nothing to trace either. I was a foundling, as they used to call them."

  "Not a changeling?"

  "Not a changeling, and I've got the caul to prove it," said Andra. "That would have protected me, had any fairy parent ever wanted me. But I was as unpopular with the fairies as I was with the humans. When someone finally picked me from the orphanage in Rumania, they didn't keep me for long. I had to go back and wait for the next foster family."

  This was Andra's fantasy. Instability, excitement and change. Nothing ever changed in her life; nothing she did seemed to affect anybody in the family.

  "If I had been a changeling I would have been placed in a loving family. As a foundling, I was passed from hand to hand and bed to bed."

  "Did your families have sex with you?" asked Marvo.

  "You surely don't find that exciting?" said Andra, close to disgust. "There's nothing exciting about that."

  "I'm not excited. I want to know about you, what formed you."

  "I was mostly formed in a house at the end of a long, dusty road. The postman came once a day when I was a child, to deliver and collect, but he got tired of carrying the large boxes my foster father sent all over the world. The boxes were both heavy and unwieldy, and my father would follow him up the driveway, then watch him walk up the road, shouting if one box tilted or banged another.

  "'Those are golden eggs you've carrying there. Treat them with respect. I pay my bloody taxes, I deserve a service which won't send me broke. Careful there. Don't get lazy, now.' The postman got sick of it after a while when I was a child and Dad got a notice to say he had to collect his own parcels. I was always curious as to why the postman didn't ask what was inside. I suppose he must have looked himself."

  "I'll find the story out," said Marvo. "I'll find out why he never asked what was inside. So what was inside?"

  "Orchids," said Andra, "rare, fleshy orchids. He was one of the world's major suppliers.

  "They were his only interest after my foster mother went away when I was a child. She told me to look after him and went packing. She left me some dresses and books and told me to watch out for myself. She said she couldn't bear the town any longer. I didn't understand her hatred. They all loved her.

  "So I was alone with him. Mostly, he was engrossed with his flowers, and I learnt a lot about creation and manipulation, watching his plans coming to fruition, his clever hands at work. There is a power in hands which is not always used." She had watched hands hit and caress. "Strangely, a felon who is hanged is considered to have healing powers beyond that of the greatest doctor; the touch of his hand could cure many things. And the touch of a suicide's hand on a sore will heal it."

  "'Isn't it magic?' my foster father would say as he brought those flowers to life. 'Bloody magic.'

  "I already knew magic. I knew about clippings and charms, and they already thought I was weird at school, so I used spells to make my life happier.

  "One magic I found at the end of the garden. There was a burnt grass circle, perfectly round, and if I sat in the centre of it I heard voices, which told me secrets and tricks and how to make my foster father happy."

  "How did you make him happy?" asked Marvo.

  "Be nice to him. Washed his feet for him and cooked. He looked after me too and never in that way. He was kind unless he was in a bad mood."

  "Was he often in a bad mood?"

  "Not often. He was very angry with me when he heard about my school teacher, though.

  "I haven't told you the true source of my magic. I'm not sure you will accept the teachings of a simple school teacher from the suburbs, but from there, I learnt my trade.

  "After classes, I would stay back and learn the art of magic; spells and potions, transference, homoeopathic and theurgic. She warned me to use my knowledge quietly; however, at the Sunday school my parents insisted I attend, I spoke up about the use of pond creatures in the healing of affairs of the heart. I did not understand the peril I placed my beloved teacher in. I spoke happily of lessons spent stripped naked, quiet in front of the fire, and of the sacrifices made on the kitchen bench. The teacher was removed from the school immediately. She was jailed not long after and she died in a cell away from nature.

  "My parents were quite dull and terrified that my experience with my teacher would ruin me forever. It did, of course, my reputat
ion was ruined in the town. They never left, though. They stuck it out."

  "Would you like me to find that teacher as well as the postman?"

  "I know that she died. I went to her funeral. They prayed over her but I made a spell to ensure she didn't walk again. That was one of her fears, that she would rise from the dead."

  "Just the postman, then." Marvo wanted to track down the postman to verify this part of Andra's life. It turned out to be very difficult because the man had never existed.

  Marvo became used to Andra's inventions. He would not tell his own truth. Their history would be their own secret place. Marvo did not mention Andra's mother. The drunk, mistyeyed woman who hated him. He could see the bitterness, the stubbornness, in the woman, that she would have needed to stay in a town her daughter was unhappy in. When her grandmother died, Andra was alone.