“I read your treatise on the white ant,” she burst out.
The rudiments of happiness that had been growing on his face during their conversation were snuffed out.
“Oh,” he said, the sound draining.
She knew why. The papers had been full of it. The stealing of his wisdom by an eminent European intellectual.
“Surely all that miserable business with the despicable Maeterlinck is over and settled?”
“Far from it.”
“But everybody knows that he stole your work,” she insisted.
“In this country, yes. But abroad nobody has ever heard of Afrikaans except the Dutch and British, and they know it only as an enemy tongue. Nobody cares about obscure dilettantes choosing to speak and be published in the language of African stockmen. No, far better to trust in the much-awarded poet communicating in a civilized voice.”
“But, Oom—”
“Just Eugène, please, we are now both too old for nursery names,” he interrupted and for the first time she heard vinegar in his voice and some of it had been splashed her way. “I am tired of the whole business, he can have the fame. He can finish my book if he likes. I have lost interest in the spite of grown men. And the ants can take care of themselves.”
The iron in his voice was sinking in a desperate well. She put her hand on his arm in the gentle, hesitant way that he had always offered his to her. She felt the muscles harden under the slightness of her touch. Draw back. It was not against her. It was against all that had spurned and refuted his offered wisdom and the wisdom of the ants.
The servants moved meaninglessly across the room, their motion rearranging the tension of their dilemma, dislocating the awkwardness. Marais cleared his throat and rubbed his arm, and Cyrena sat back in her chair.
“Do you remember when you first tried to help me see?” she said in a tone of voice that surprised them both. Marais accepted the change in direction and used it to shrug some of the greyness from his eyes.
“Yes, we used hypnosis.”
She perked up at his description of their joint adventure and carried the brightness of it like a vanguard into the changing tide of their next conversation.
“I think it helped me understand for many years, in a way that I can never explain.”
“Really, I am surprised,” he said regaining his place in the celebration of their company.
She watched the change in him and closed the circle around them in the prospect of a similar future.
“Do you think that we might try it again tomorrow?”
He seemed confused for a moment. “You mean hypnotism?”
“Yes, but this time I would like you to ask me about blindness.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The hunched man-thing bent backwards to look up. An act that its anatomy was never designed to do, having no neck to flex, its head and face growing directly out of its upper chest. He and his tribe of the anthropophagi had been distracted from their task by the droning of the stiff red-and-white metal bird streaming high in the clouds, far above the treetops. They had been hiding in the undergrowth that fringed the great pool near one of the hearts of the forest. They had been watching three figures that floated to the surface and came ashore. They watched very carefully because something was wrong here. They had the appearance of humans and the sweetness of their meat was a great allure. But they did not smell like them. Only the one that the other two dragged out of the water onto the warm mud had a faint whiff of ammonia, fat, musk, and salt that so marked the man species. The others that had brown shiny skin smelt like nothing they had ever known before. The strangeness of it warned them of bad danger. The bird moved away and the yellow tribe peered back at the trio. The brown ones were holding the other between them. One sucked at his face while the other probed his anus. Both hammered and punched his chest. Some kind of mating act easily recognised in all species. This one looked much simpler than the complex entanglements of the anthropophagi. There was a one-in-three chance of being savaged or infected hideously in their procedures, and sometimes dying from blood poisoning caused by their sexual clusters becoming knotted and turning septic. These hazards in breeding functioned as a unique form of natural selection and stopped the Vorrh from being overrun by the constantly hungry and famously ferocious predators. The most human of the trio started coughing violently and the yellow tribe sank back away from the noise. The brown ones stopped their manipulations and started to talk to the other one.
“Ishmael, Ishmael, talk to me, talk to me,” said Seth.
“Come on, little one, awake,” said Aklia.
Ishmael rolled away from them. He had a terrible pallor: a white-grey that gleamed unhealthily in the dappled light. There were minor lacerations and bruises all over his face and some bleeding under his clothing. The socket of his lost eye had turned black around the paste that Aklia had smeared there, and his original eye appeared shrunken and wild. He was not responding to their voices because he could not hear them. In their hurry to resuscitate him, they had only removed the paste from the nose and mouth. His ears remained blocked. He stumbled over onto all fours, trying to find the balance that he’d had knocked out of him somewhere in the underwater tunnel. As he panted like a maimed animal, the anthropophagi came closer, their hunger and the sweetness of human flesh testing their fear of the strange other two. There were nine of them, armed with wooden blades and long barbed spears. The one that smelt good was obviously too weak to fight at all. The strength and ability of the brown ones was unknown. Gradually their aching stomachs and saliva won, and the three that were hiding behind Aklia attacked, running with their spears and blades at her slim Bakelite body. She heard them before they had moved a pace, turning to catch the spear, while the others snapped against her hardness. Four more were charging at Seth, while the other two were creeping up on the prone Ishmael. A terrible noise screamed through the Vorrh and they saw that their weapons had no effect. They instantly turned and ran into the deeper undergrowth. It was far too late for the three within reach of the Kin. Aklia had put her hand through the first one’s face, grabbing out a soggy handful from inside while kicking out at the second and sending it squealing in a broken ball. Both of the Kin had made a high, hissing warble, which carried deep into the trees and had sent the remaining yellow pack running and crashing through the foliage. Seth had plucked the third attacker out of the air, snapped it, and thrown it towards those that had dared to touch Ishmael. They fled before it hit the ground. Aklia stamped the noise out of the one that she had kicked and suddenly the clearing became very quiet. The birds, animals, and insects were speechless, having nothing to say about what they had just heard. The Kin walked over to Ishmael, who was now trying to sit up. Having ascertained his well-being they both walked to the water’s edge, where they calmly washed the sticky acrid blood from each other’s perfect dark lustrous bodies. For a moment it looked like Eden again; then all the silent creatures burst into song, as if having something wonderful to say.
* * *
—
On the other side of the great forest, Modesta stopped in her tracks as a great tidal wave of sound rolled through the trees. It was as if her ears had become unblocked and every living creature’s voice had sharpened into a new and profound clarity. She stood marvelling at it, bathing in its momentum that seemed to be coming for her. Something in her face gave way and opened; she put her hand on it and it felt like a wound or the shape of a scream, but it was filled with warmth and tasted like nothing she had ever experienced before. Her lungs expanded and shrank in a fast pulse that aligned its rhythm to her heart. Her terror of malady or damage was puffed out. She was laughing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In London, winter arrived with an unnecessary vengeance. Siberian iciness blew into the streets of Whitechapel, where the populace hid from its biting and relentless cold.
Snow had fallen ov
er the compacted layers of solid ice that the wind polished black across every street. The only movement in the thick grey sky came from the smoke that poured upwards from the spikes of chimneys. Nobody in their right mind was on the streets. Hector Schumann looked down on it from his eyrie on the fourth floor.
He was restless and needed a change of scene. He had not been out for days. Solli’s boys had brought him food and drink, including an astonishing bottle of brandy that he knew could not be purchased legally. Well, at least on this side of the city. The violent leader of this pack of petty criminals seemed to have a soft spot for him, thank God! Without Solli’s help he would have been beaten and sent back to Germany, or worse. Hector had never met a Jew like this panther of a man, and a strange paternal attachment was beginning to form inside him. He had all he needed and yet a very virulent species of London cabin fever was causing him to become irritatingly distressed. He knew that walking outside was hazardous and that the hard slippery cobblestones would threaten his frail old bones, but it did not matter. He needed to walk, to think. It was midafternoon when the sun began to dim, and he stoked his continual fire and found an excuse there, the ashes having built up to a hillock in the last few days. He shovelled them into the empty scuttle and put it by the door, while he bustled into his overcoat, scarf, gloves, and hat.
The stairs outside were partially open to the elements; each landing had a metal-fenced veranda that received the bitter winds with stoic determination, like the prow of an icebreaking ship. The moment he opened the door onto it, the cold shrivelled his nose hairs and picked at his watering eyes. This is a mistake, he thought, as he cautiously tested the first stone stair, gripping the metal banister with the fortitude of an Eiger mountaineer. The steps were miraculously free of ice and he made his way down gingerly. On the second bend he saw the shadow on the red over-buffed step of his neighbour below: his guard dog, the indomitable Mrs. Fishburn. She was there, her door partially open, her nose or ear or both cocked against the crack, awaiting his arrival. There had been times when he had found her vigilance reassuring. The knowledge that she heard every step he made above her gave him a distasteful but necessary security to his frailty, which paradoxically seemed to be getting less and less each month. But today was not one of them. He wanted to hurry past to confront the fearful street before his resolve slipped and his cosy nest called him back up the flights of grey angular rock.
“Professor,” she whispered as he reached the traverse of her landing. “Professor, come here.”
He followed her command and came to the crack in the door. Her clawlike mittened hand shot out and grabbed his lapel and pulled him quickly through the crevice. To his horror she was in her nightclothes, which mercifully had been augmented by a threadbare man’s overcoat, several pairs of stout woollen socks, and what looked like a tea cosy with tartan earflaps dragged down onto the metal infestation of her becurlered head. A cigarette burned in her other hand.
“Quick, quick, come in,” she said, shutting the door behind him. She pulled him farther into the flat and stopped in the middle of her “parlour.”
“Listen,” she demanded.
To whom or what he was unsure. But he adopted the necessary stance of attention to placate the old harridan. After a few moments of soundless tension he looked at her, trying to find some clue as to what he was supposed to hear. She saw the look and responded.
“I am having trouble with me downstairs,” she whispered, her mean eyes darting downwards, then stabbing back up to find his comprehension.
Hector’s understanding of English had improved vastly. Even cockney was now in his reach, mixed with rich sticky layers of Yiddish. But best of all he now understood the innuendo that glued all London speech together. It had been Betty Fishburn and Solli Diamond who had given him master classes in this concealed art. The enforced conversations with the former had often centred on health and illness, she being some kind of expert on ailments and “troubles,” particularly of the female variety. So that now as her eye darted down again, he dreaded the disclosure of “troubles downstairs” that he knew was about to arrive.
“Yes,” he said feebly through his scarf, into which he had retreated, tortoise-like.
“It started last night an gawn right throw-a now,” she whispered. She still held his hand. “Sometimes you can feel the vibrations of it.”
He reached under the scarf knowing what was coming next, his hand being drawn towards the “trouble.” This was too much to bear and he started to feel queasy, like a man on a precipice on the end of a thinning rope. To his horror she got down on the floor on her hands and knees, dragging him down behind her.
“You can feel it better down ’ere,” she whispered through an exhalation of cigarette smoke.
“Mrs. Fishburn, please, I don’t think that—”
“Listen,” she said, and put her ear to the floor. She dragged the scrawny carpet farther away so that he too could listen to the floorboards.
Relieved that the subject of his enforced attention was not the troubled lower anatomy of Mrs. Fishburn’s aging body but the flat below, he undertook the new task with some relish, and after he had settled and adjusted his ear, he did indeed hear a sound from beneath. The rooms on the second floor had been empty for years. Only a malign and unspecified rumour occupied their supposedly hollow interior. But now there was something moving down there: a kind of resonant, hollow thump, irregular and unpredictable like somebody moving in the dark and bumping into things. The other sound was stranger. Impossible to identify.
“There, hear that?” she whispered.
“Yes.” He nodded, then found the description he so needed. “It sounds like the fluttering of a mechanical bird.”
“A what?” Mrs. Fishburn half whispered, half squawked.
The sharp, diligent, animal-like mind that she possessed was not of the speculative variety and lacked imagination outside of her own anguished internal motions. This was not the time to engage in the marvels of automata, so he simplified the matter.
“Sounds like clockwork,” he said.
She pressed her head harder against the floor and then agreed by nodding, darting her eyes to him, and jabbing him in the ribs with her bony finger. Then the sound stopped.
They stayed there for another ten minutes until they both started to groan with the aches in their prone bodies. There were no more sounds, and they got up and moved into her kitchen for hot reviving tea; she instantly lit another cigarette.
“What’s going on down there? No one’s ever been there all the time I’ve been ’ere,” she muttered over her hot cup, the steam and smoke gaily mingling and adding agitation to her pale, expressionless face.
“I don’t know, perhaps just new tenants?”
She looked at him with total disdain. “No one will ever live down there,” she said.
So empathetic was her statement that he dared not ask any more. But it did not stop her whispering things. “Some say that Jack the Ripper lived down there!” She noisily sipped at the cup. “Or it might have been one of his victims.”
* * *
—
Over the years stories often turn themselves inside out, so that truth and fantasy get to try on each other’s clothing. And passersby only glimpse the confusions. Nobody seemed to know or care for the fact that those rooms were used by the famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge, let alone that he had been raped by an African woman, who had taken his seed and cameras and carried them back to the dark continent. Whether Mrs. Fishburn would find this worse or better than the Whitechapel murders will never be known.
* * *
—
Hector mildly nodded.
“Somtink horrible it was,” she said before sinking into noiseless mutters and quiet tutting. So they just sat for a while in her tiny kitchen, holding the emptying cups until she brought hers suddenly down on the clinking saucer. �
�We should go look.”
It had never occurred to him that she would have taken it any further, so as they crept down the cold stairs he began to have grave misgivings.
“Should we not wait till morning?” he asked hopefully.
She was behind him, one hand gripping the iron banister, the other her iron poker. Their breath plumed enthusiastically in the freezing air.
“No, we have to do this now. I’ll never get a wink of sleep until I know.”
They turned the corner of the flight and saw the door below. He looked at her again for a sign of doubt but found only steely determination. She was quite a sight and he knew that most would flee an attack from her. Even some of Solli’s men would shudder and run from the vision that crept behind him on the darkening stairs. By the time they reached the door she was ready for anything, any foe.
The door was firmly closed. She nodded and he tried to push it open, but the three locks inside held it shut. She pushed him aside and rapped loudly on the heavily painted wood with her sturdy poker. The sound inside was hollow and lonely.
“Come out, I knows you’re there,” she bellowed and held the poker aloft.
Hector took a step back so that she could get a good swing at whoever opened the door, if they dared. Nothing moved and no sound came from within. After a long while her arm grew tired and they both realised that nothing was going to happen. She started to turn away, then suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, her body stiffening and her eyes staring at the door. Hector felt his hackles start to rise, as did his painstakingly woven hair, her genuine terror having affected him instantly. The poker fell from her hand and clattered against the bitter cold of the resounding stone stairs.
The Cloven Page 14
