The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  'One page a day is the best I can manage,' she cautioned him.

  'I'll take what I can get.'

  She pulled the notebook from her jacket pocket, flipped Princess Whatsername over and immediately began to read aloud:

  Confession of Thos. Peirson, in the Year of Our Lord 1788

  In the full and certain Knowledge that my Time is nigh, for my good Wife has even now closed the door on Doctor Cubitt & weeps in the room below, I write these words. In my fifty years of Life I have been a Whaler and latterly an Oil Merchant; to my family I have given such comforts as have been allow'd me, and to God I have given what I could in thanks. All who know me, know me as a man who means harm to no one.

  Yet, as I prepare to meet my Maker, there is but one memory He sets afore me; one dreddeful scene He bids me live again. My hands, though cold now with Fever, do seem to grow warm, from the flesh of her neck—my beloved Mary. Such a slender neck it was, without flaw, fitting inside my big hands like a coil of anchor rope.

  I meant, at first, no more than to strangle her—to put such marks upon her throat as could not be mistaken. Despoiled tho' she was, I was loath to despoil her more; I would do only so much as would spare her the wrath of the townsfolk, and secure her repose among the Blessed. So, I resolved only to strangle her. But

  She looked up at him.

  'But?' he prompted.

  'That's it, so far. A page-and-a-bit.'

  Mack tilted his head back, narrowed his eyes in concentration.

  'Maybe he thought she was a vampire,' he suggested after a minute. 'Maybe he strangled her while she was sleeping, thinking she was going to sprout fangs when the sun came up.'

  'I don't think so,' sighed Siân.

  'Well, Whitby is the town of Dracula, isn't it?'

  'Not in 1788,' she said, restraining herself from a more fulsome put-down.

  'I know damn well when the novel was written,' he growled. 'But maybe Bram Stoker was—what's the word?—inspired by how everybody in Whitby was vampire-mad.'

  'I don't think so. I think the people of Whitby were worried about their menfolk drowning in the North Sea, not about Transylvanian bloodsuckers running around in black capes.'

  'They were pretty superstitious, though, weren't they, these eighteenth-century Yorkshire people?'

  'I wasn't alive then, believe it or not. But I think we can be pretty sure our man Thomas Peirson, if he strangled someone, wasn't doing it because of a story that hadn't been written yet by a novelist who wasn't even born here.'

  Mack's eyes went a bit glazed as something came back to him. 'My dad showed me Count Dracula's grave once, in Saint Mary's churchyard. I must have been six.'

  'Naughty man. Were you scared?'

  'Bloody terrified; I had nightmares for days. I adored it, though. Nothing more thrilling than fear, is there?'

  She looked down uneasily. 'I don't know about that.'

  'OK, maybe one thing,' he conceded. His voice was soft, deep, good-humoured; the tint of bawdiness in it was unmistakable.

  'Tell you what,' said Siân, blushing. 'Why don't you show me the grave?'

  The East Cliff churchyard may have been the final earthly resting place for hundreds of humans, but for Hadrian this grassy expanse of headland was heaven. He dashed across the green, leaping over tombstones as if they were sporting hurdles provided especially for him, rather like those handsome black receptacles on the seashore embossed dog waste. With such a huge playground to explore, he was quite content to let his master and mistress get on with whatever they were here for.

  'I don't know if I can find it, after so many years,' said Mack, shielding his eyes under the visor of his massive right hand.

  'Put yourself back in that little boy's shoes,' she suggested.

  He laughed, and lifted up one size twelve foot. 'You've got to be joking.'

  They both, at exactly the same time, recalled the moment when she'd lifted her prosthetic leg for him on the hundred and ninety-nine steps. The moment when the scales fell from his eyes, and she knew with perfect certainty that he was imagining her body and wondering how he'd feel about it if it were stretched out naked beside him.

  He reached out to her, cupped her shoulder in his palm.

  'Look, it's all right,' he said.

  She walked ahead of him, face turned away.

  'Lots and lots of these graves are empty, did you know that?' she declared, in a brisk, informative tone. 'Sailors would be lost at sea, and the families would have a funeral, put up a headstone…'

  'Ah, historical fakery again…'

  'Not at all. It preserves a different kind of history—the reality of the loved ones' grief.'

  He hummed dubiously. 'I'm not a grief kinda guy, Siân. Bury the dead, get on with living, that's my motto.'

  She shivered without knowing why. She couldn't remember if he'd ever spoken her name before today. The way he voiced it, exhaled it at leisure over his tongue, 'Siân' sounded like a noise of satisfaction.

  They wandered around for another five minutes or so, but failed to find the unmarked grave Mack's father had told him was Dracula's. What they did find was something Siân had read about in a book: an adjacent pair of gravestones—one oval and flat to the ground, the other a tiny upright miniature—which countless generations of children had been assured marked the graves of Humpty Dumpty and Tom Thumb.

  'My dad never told me that,' said Mack.

  'Well there you are: another black mark against him.'

  They went to fetch Hadrian, who was merrily digging up clods of earth all over the place. Siân glanced at the weathered tombstones as she walked, reading the odd name here and there if it was still legible. Sea spray and the wind of centuries had erased the finer details, and she wasn't in the mood to study the stones closely, as she was getting peckish. But suddenly she did a double take and stumbled backwards.

  'It's our man!' she cried. 'Mack! It's our man!'

  He bounded to her side—he and Hadrian both. Standing somewhat skew-whiff on the ground before them was a tall headstone clearly inscribed THOMAS PEIRSON, WHALER AND OIL MERCHANT. According to the remainder of the text, he was the husband of Catherine, father of Anne and Illegible. He died, as he'd anticipated in his confession, in 1788, but there was no hint of him having done anything to warrant remorse. Not so much as a 'God have mercy on his soul.'

  The discovery of Peirson's headstone galvanised Mack, sending him sniffing around the other graves, squinting at the inscriptions. It was as if it hadn't occurred to him before now that his treasure-in-a-bottle was something more than a bizarre relic—that it was still intimately connected with the world at large.

  'I wonder if his victim's here, too?' he was muttering, as he moved from grave to grave. 'Mary … Mary … If only she'd had a more unusual first name…' He bent down to peer at an epitaph, reciting the bits he considered interesting.

  '"… in the thirty-fourth year of her age…" No cause of death listed, though … Shame…'

  There was something about his attitude that Siân found provocative.

  'Well, Dr. Magnus, this is a churchyard, not a hospital mortuary. These headstones are commemorations, they're not here to satisfy your curiosity.'

  'What do you mean, my curiosity?' he retorted, stung. 'Of the two of us, who's digging up dead bodies, poking around in people's bones?'

  Siân turned on her heel and began to walk away. How instinctively, how helplessly they argued with each other! The last person she'd argued with so much, she ended up declaring her undying love to—not to mention following him to a war zone and shielding him from the impact of an oncoming car. There was no hope for her; she was doomed.

  'Let's not make a big thing of this,' he said, catching up to her. 'Can I take you out to lunch?'

  She tried to say no, but Hadrian was at her side now, rubbing his downy snout against her skirt as she walked, snuffling in anticipation of her touch. She allowed her hand to fall into his mane, felt his skull arching against her palm. Her s
tomach rumbled.

  'We could have a cup of tea at The Mission,' she said. 'They let dogs in there.'

  'The Mission?'

  'The Whitby Mission and Seafarer's Centre. They run a coffee shop.'

  'Don't be silly—I'll drop Hadrian off at home and take you to a proper restaurant.'

  Determined not to argue, she said, 'OK, then: Indian.'

  But his brow wrinkled into a frown. 'Let me think…'

  'What's wrong with Indian?'

  'I'd rather something more … um … unusual.'

  She took a deep breath as they began to descend the hundred and ninety-nine steps.

  'From a historical point of view,' she said, trying to convince herself she wasn't arguing but only making an interesting observation, 'you surely can't get much more unusual than Punjabi food in a Northumbrian fishing town.'

  'You know what I mean,' he said. 'The small-town Indian restaurant … it's so … provincial.'

  'Well, we're in a province, for goodness' sake!' she snapped. 'We're not in London now.'

  'Wow,' he said. 'You're the only person I know who says "for goodness' sake," even when she looks ready to clock me one.'

  'So? Does that make me cute?'

  'Yes, it makes you cute. And by the way, you're dressed very nicely today. You're looking fantastic.'

  Siân felt herself colouring from the hairline down. As his compliment sank in, so did the realisation that, God help her, she really had dressed and groomed herself with unusual care this morning. Her skirt, tights, and boots were classy coordinates and, as her blush travelled further down her body, she was reminded that the neckline of the top she'd chosen was, for the first time in years, low enough to show off her collarbones.

  'Uh … look,' she said, only a few steps shy of Church Street, 'I've just realised: I don't have time to go to a restaurant. I'm supposed to be back at work in five minutes.'

  He stared at her, mouth open, clearly and sincerely disappointed.

  'This evening, then.'

  She thought fast; there was a tightness in her throat, like hands pressing on her neck. 'I'm going to be working on the next page of your confession this evening,' she said breathlessly.

  For a few moments they stood there, eye to eye. Then he smiled, dropped his gaze down to his shoes in good-humoured defeat, and let her go.

  'Another time,' he said, as he stepped onto the cobbled street and motioned Hadrian to accompany him into the town. Hadrian looked around once at Siân, then trotted to join his foster carer in a fast-flowing stream of tourists, native Northumbrians, and less adorable dogs.

  In Siân's dream next morning, there was, for a change, no knife. The man was cradling her in his arms, both his hands safely accounted for, one supporting her back, the other stroking her hair. It wasn't what you'd call a happy dream, though: her hair felt wet, slick with a shampoo-like substance which she realised after a while was her own blood. In fact, she was covered in it, and so was he.

  'I will carry you up the hundred and ninety-nine steps,' he was crooning to her, in a broken voice. His eyes were almost incandescent with love and grief, and there were droplets of blood twinkling on his eyebrows. He looked like Magnus, except he wasn't. 'I will carry you up the hundred and ninety-nine steps,' he kept promising.

  She tried to speak, to reassure him she understood why he had done what he had done, but her windpipe blew blood bubbles, and her tongue was growing stiff.

  No particular climactic event woke her, only thirst and a pressing need to go to the loo. She'd drunk half a bottle of wine last night, to kill the pain in her 'innermost parts', and it seemed to have done the trick: her headache was so bad she wasn't aware of the lump in her thigh at all.

  Her hair felt tacky, and smelled of alcohol; she washed it in the bathroom sink, half expecting the water to run crimson. The veins in her temples went whumpa whumpa whumpa as she rinsed the shampoo out and groped for a towel. Only then did it occur to her that she may have been sozzled when she was working on the confession.

  The second page was still lying on the table, pressed flat under a rectangle of transparent plastic. She examined the wrinkled leaf of paper and the curlicues of ink closely, anxiously. As far as she could tell, there was no damage that hadn't already been done before she came along.

  Next she consulted the little Star Wars notebook in which she'd jotted the transcript. It was perfectly lucid—neater, if anything, than her handwriting tended to be when she was stone-cold sober.

  She wandered back to the bathroom to dry and style her hair.

  At lunchtime, in the same West Side café where she'd made herself sick on pancake, Sián read aloud from her little notebook while Mack listened intently. He leaned very close to her, his cheek almost brushing her shoulder, but then it was quite noisy in the café, as the staff and other customers were watching American soap operas on an elevated TV.

  'So, I resolved only to strangle her, she declaimed, while third-rate actors spat fake bile at each other overhead.

  But, God help me, my thumbes became weak, & made no mark upon her flesh, or none that did not fade straightway afterward. These same hands, which have slashed deep into the hide of a Whale, which have lifted barrels heavier than a man; these hands which, even in my latter years of feebleness, could cleave a log in twain with a single ax blow—these hands could not put upon her pale and tender neck the bruises that would save her. I fancied I could hear her voice, already condemn'd to inhabit the wilds of Perdition, crying to me, imploring me to act afore the alarum be raised, and she be found, naked and ripe for Damnation. Nothing, only I, stood betwixt her helpless soul and the worst of Fates. I did but pause to cover her with a blanket, then hurried to fetch my knife

  Siân put the notepad down, lifted her coffee cup to her lips.

  'Wow,' said Mack, grinning broadly. 'Talk about coitus interruptus…'

  She sipped the hot brew, troubled by her inability to judge the aptness—or offensiveness—of this remark. Seen in one light, it was a flash of wit only a prude would object to (and after all, he was a doctor), but in another light, it was gruesomely, outrageously off. From one light to another she veered, and the moment passed, and she was silent. With Patrick, too, she'd become unable to stop her morality dispersing into his.

  'You know what we should do?' he said, stabbing his fork into a wodge of chocolate cake. 'We should sell this story to the press.'

  We? she thought, before replying: 'The press? What press? The Whitby Gazette?' Only a few minutes before, he'd been leafing through the café's free papers, chortling, in his smug London way, at local place names like Fryup, and inventing preposterous news stories for the Gazette, such as an outbreak of psittacosis amongst homing pigeons. 'Chief Inspector Beaver is investigating claims that the deadly bacterium was purchased from an unscrupulous doctor,' he'd intoned, poker-faced, 'by Mister Ee-Bah-Goom of the Whitby Flying Club, as part of a cunning plan to employ germ warfare against his rivals.' She'd laughed despite herself.

  'You do think small, don't you?' he gently disparaged her now. 'I'm thinking of a big colour feature in one of the major national supplements—the Sunday Times, maybe, or the Telegraph.'

  She was pricked to anger by his condescension; she felt that, after all she'd seen at Patrick's side, she wasn't a total innocent in the big bad world of newspapers.

  'Do you think they care? Look at the way they've ignored our dig at the abbey! To get a major newspaper interested nowadays, you virtually have to dig up King Arthur's round table, or a previously unknown play by Shakespeare.'

  'Not at all. This is murder. Murder sells.'

  She knew he was right, but felt compelled to keep arguing anyway. The thought of her beautiful eighteenth-century manuscript, which she was so lovingly unpeeling from itself, being splashed across the pages of a throwaway Sunday supplement, made her sick.

  'It's a very, very out-of-date murder,' she said, hoping a cynical, jocular tone would score with him. 'Way past its use-by date.'

&nbs
p; He laughed, and leaned across the table, staring straight into her eyes.

  'Murder never goes off,' he said, and, leaning farther still, he kissed her on the cheek, right near the edge of her lips.

  Siân closed her eyes, praying for guidance as to how to respond. Slapping his face would be so frightfully old-fashioned, and besides, she was afraid of him, and also, it might spoil her only chance of happiness before the cancer decided that her time was up.

  'Hadrian will be getting lonely,' she said. 'You'd better go and rescue him.'

  ***

  That afternoon, Sián left the dig early, telling Nina she thought she might be coming down with flu.

  Nina scrutinised her face and said, 'Yes, you don't look well at all,' which was rather discouraging, since the flu story was a lie. In reality, the lump in Sián's thigh was so painful she could barely work, and she was hoping that if she stopped kneeling at her appointed excavation and putting so much pressure on her stump hour after hour, the pain might ease off.

  'I'm getting a sore throat myself,' said Nina. 'Let's hope it's not the Black Death, eh?'

  Sián walked stiffly back into town. Her whole pelvis was aching: a subtle network of pain radiating, it seemed, from the lump inwards. A kernel of malignancy haloed with roots and tendrils, like a potato left too long in a cupboard, silently mutating in the dark. Fibrosis. Metastasis. Dissemination. Words only a doctor should be intimately familiar with.

  On her way to the White Horse and Griffin, she bought a bottle of brandy, a box of painkillers and, as an afterthought, a king-size block of chocolate. In the privacy of her hotel room, she consumed some of each, at regular intervals, while working on the next page of Thomas Peirson's secret testament.

  'OK,' said Mack the following day, leaning forward expectantly. 'Carry on where we left off, yes?'