‘I can’t dance at all.’
But Mick turned a deaf ear, whorls waxed against siren-calls. Grinning at her from far, from farther away, he receded. Over the river and into the woods. His Cheshire cat grin hung luminous. Couldn’t hear a word in his canary-feathered heaven.
‘You wrote those poems,’ Dody shouted over the roar of the music which swelled loud, louder, like the continuous roar of airplanes taking off from the runway across Boston Harbor. She taxied in for a close-up, the room blinking one, seen through the wrong end of a telescope. A red-haired boy bent over the piano, fingers cake-walking invisible. Chubb, sweating and flushed, lifted the horn and wailed, and Bamber, there too, flicked his bony chalk hand over and over the guitar.
‘Those words. You made them.’ But Mick, wrinkled and gone in his baggy checked pants, swung her out, and back, and caught her up again with Leonard nowhere. Nowhere at all. All the hours wasting. She, squandering hours like salt-shaker grains on the salt sea in her hunt. That one hunt.
Hamish’s face kindled before her like a sudden candle from the ring of faces that spun away, features blurred and smeared as warming wax. Hamish, watchful, guardian angeling, waited in attendance, coming no nearer. But the man in the black sweater had come near. His shoulders, hunching, closed out the room piece by piece by piece. Pink, luminous and ineffectual, the face of Hamish winked out behind the blackness of the worn, torn sweater.
‘Hello.’ His square chin was green and rough. ‘I’m out at the elbows.’ It was a beard of moss on his chin. Room and voices hushed in the first faint twirl of a rising wind. Air sallowed, the storm to come. Air sultry now. Leaves turning up white-bellied sides in the queer sulphur light. Flags of havoc. His poem said.
‘Patch the havoc.’ But the four winds rose, unbuckled, from the stone cave of the revolving world. Come thou, North. Come thou, South. East. West. And blow.
‘Not all their ceremony can patch the havoc.’
‘You like that?’
Wind smacked and bellowed in the steel girders of the world’s house. Perilous scaffold. If she walked very carefully. Knees gone jelly-weak. The room of the party hung in her eye like a death’s-door camera-shot; Mick beginning again to dance with the girl in green, Larson’s smile widening great as the grin on Humpty’s head. Knitting up the sleeve of circumstance. She moved. And moved into the small new room.
A door banged shut. People’s coats slumped in piles on the tables, cast-off sheaths and shells. Ghosts gone gallivanting. I chose this limb, this room.
‘Leonard.’
‘Brandy?’ Leonard plucked a fogged glass from the yellowing sink. Raw reddish liquid sloshed out of the bottle into the glass. Dody reached. Her hands came away drenched. Full of nothing.
‘Try again.’
Again. The glass rose and flew, executing first a perfect arc, an exquisite death-leap, onto the flat umber-ugly wall. A flower of winking sparks made sudden music, unpetalling then in a crystalline glissade. Leonard pushed back the wall with his left arm and set her in the space between his left arm and his face. Dody pitched her voice above the rising of the winds, but they rose higher in her ears. Then, bridging the gap, she stamped. Shut those four winds up in their goat-skin bags. Stamp. The floor resounded.
‘You’re all there,’ Leonard said. ‘Aren’t you.’
‘Listen. I’ve got this statue.’ Stone-lidded eyes crinkled above a smile. The smile millstoned around her neck. ‘I’ve got this statue to break.’
‘So?’
‘So there’s this stone angel. Only I’m not sure it’s an angel. This stone gargoyle maybe. A nasty thing with its tongue stuck out.’ Under floorboards tornadoes rumbled and muttered. ‘I’m crazy maybe.’ They stopped their circus to listen. ‘Can you do it?’
For answer, Leonard stamped. Stamped out the floor. Stamp, the walls went. Stamp, the ceiling flew to kingdom come. Stripping her red hairband off, he put it in his pocket. Green shadow, moss shadow, raked her mouth. And in the center of the maze, in the sanctum of the garden, a stone boy cracked, splintered, million-pieced.
‘When can I see you again?’ Fever-cured, she stood, foot set victorious on a dimpled stone arm. Mark that, my fallen gargoyle, my prince of pebbles.
‘I work in London.’
‘When?’
‘I’ve got obligations.’ The walls closed in, wood grains, glass grains, all in place. ‘In the next room.’ The four winds sounded retreat, defeat, hooing off down their tunnel in the world’s sea-girdled girth. O hollow, hollow. Hollow in the chambered stone.
Leonard bent to his last supper. She waited. Waited, sighting the whiteness of his cheek with its verdigris stain, moving by her mouth.
Teeth gouged. And held. Salt, warm salt, laving the tastebuds of her tongue. Teeth dug to meet. An ache started far off at their bone-root. Mark that, mark that. But he shook. Shook her bang against the solid-grained substance of the wall. Teeth shut on thin air. No word, but a black back turned, diminished, diminishing, through a sudden sprung-up doorway. Grains of wood molding, level floorboard grains, righted the world. The wrong world. Air flowed, filling the hollow his shape left. But nothing at all filled the hollow in her eye.
The half-open door thronged with snickers, with whispers. On the smokeburdened air of the party that fissured through the crack Hamish came, intent, behind a glistening pink rubber mask.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course I’m all right.’
‘I’ll get your coat. We’re going now.’ Hamish went away again. A small boy wearing glasses and a drab mustard-colored suit scuttled from a hole in the wall on his way to the lavatory. He ogled her, propped against the wall as she was, and she felt her hand, held to her mouth, jerking suddenly like a spastic’s.
‘Can I get you anything?’ A queer light flickered in his eye, the light people have when the blood of a street accident gathers, puddling prodigal on the pavement. How they came to stare. Curious arenas of eyes.
‘My pocketbook,’ Dody steadily said. ‘I left it behind the curtain on the first windowsill.’
The boy went out. Hamish appeared with her red coat, black gown dangling its rag of crepe. She shoved her arms in, obedient. But her face burned, unskinned, undone.
‘Is there a mirror?’
Hamish pointed. A blurred, cracked oblong of glass hung over the once-white sink that was yellowed with a hundred years of vomit and liquor stains. She leaned to the mirror and a worn, known face with vacant brown eyes and a seamed brown scar on the left cheek came swimming at her through the mist. There was no mouth on the face: the mouth-place was the same sallow color as the rest of the skin, defining its shape as a badly-botched piece of sculpture defines its shape, by shadows under the raised and swollen parts.
The boy stood beside her holding up a pocketbook of scratched brown leather. Dody took it. With a cartridge of red lipstick she followed the mouth-shape and made the color come back. Thank you, she smiled at the boy with her bright new red mouth.
‘Take care of me now,’ she told Hamish. ‘I have been rather lousy.’
‘You’re all right.’ But that was not what the others would say.
Hamish pushed the door open. Out into the room. No one stared: a ring of turned backs, averted faces. The piano notes still sauntered underneath the talk. The people were laughing very much now. Beside the piano Leonard hunched, holding a white handkerchief to his left cheek. Tall, pale, Dolores-Cheryl-Iris with the tiger-lily freckles willowed up to help him blot the blood. I did that, Dody informed the deaf air. But the obligation got in the way, smirking. Obligations. Soap-and-water would not wash off that ring of holes for a good week. Dody Ventura. Mark me, mark that.
Because of Hamish, protecting, not angry at all, she got to the doorway of the room with no stone thrown, not wanting to go, but going. Starting down the narrow angled stair, with Adele’s face, cupped by the shining blonde hair, coming up at her, open and frank and inviolable as a waterlily, that white-blondness, all pure, all f
olding purely within itself. Multi-manned, yet virginal, her mere appearance shaped a reprimand like the hushed presence of a nun. Oswald backed her up, and behind him marched the tall, gawky and depressive Atherton. Oswald, his receding Neanderthal head brushed straight across with slicked hair to hide the shiny retreating slope, peered at Dody through his tortoise-shell glasses.
‘Tell us something about bone-structure, Dody.’ She saw, clear in the yet unbreached light of minutes to come, the three of them, together, walking into the room brimming with her act, with versions and variations on the theme of her act which would have marked her by tomorrow like the browned scar on her cheek among all the colleges and all the town. Mothers would stop in Market Hill, pointing to their children: ‘There’s the girl who bit the boy. He died a day after.’ Hark, hark, the dogs do bark.
‘That was last week.’ Dody’s voice rasped hollow, as from the bottom of a weed-grown well. Adele kept smiling her sublime, altruistic smile. Because she knew already what she would find in the room; no grab-bag of star-sent circumstance, but her chosen friends, and Larson, her special friend. Who would tell her everything, and keep the story on the tongues, changing, switching its colors, like a chameleon over smeared and lurid territory.
Back to the wall, Dody let Adele, Oswald and Atherton move past her up the stair to the room she was leaving and to the red circle of teethmarks and Leonard’s obligation. Cold air struck, scything her shins. But no faces came to recognize Dody, nor fingers, censorious, to point her out. Blind storefronts and eyeless alley walls said: comfort ye, comfort ye. Black sky spaces spoke of the hugeness, the indifference of the universe. Greaning pricks of stars told her how little they cared.
Every time Dody wanted to say Leonard to a lamppost she would say Hamish, because Hamish was taking the lead, leading her away, safely, though damaged and with interior lesions, but safe, now, through the nameless streets. Somewhere, from the dark sanctuarial belly of Great St Mary’s, or from deep, deeper within the town, a clock bonged out. Bong.
Black streets, except for the thin string of lights at the main corners. Townfolks all abed. A game began, a game of hide-and-go-seek with nobody. Nobody. Hamish stationed her behind a car, advancing, alone, peering around corners, then returning to lead her after him. Then, before the next corner, Dody ducking again behind a car, feeling the metal fender like dry ice, magnet-gripping her skin. Hamish leaving her, again, walking off to look again, and then coming back and saying it was safe so far.
‘The proctors’, he said, ‘will be out after me.’
A damp mist rose and spired about their knees, blurring patches of the buildings and the bare trees, a mist blued to phosphor by the high, clear moon, dropping over a maple tree, a garden shed, here, there, its theatrical scrim of furred blue haze. After back alleys, after crossing the corner of Trumpington Street under the blackened scabrous walls of Pembroke College, a graveyard on the right, askew with stones, snow drifted white in patches and patches of dark where ground showed, they came to Silver Street. Boldly now they walked past the woodwork frame of the butcher shop with its surgical white venetian blind drawn on all the hanging heel-hooked pigs and the counters full of freckled pork sausages and red-purpled kidneys. At the gate of Queens’, locked for the night, five boys in black gowns were milling under the moon. One began to sing:
A-las my love you do me wrong
‘Wait.’ Hamish placed Dody in a corner outside the spiked gates. ‘Wait, and I’ll find out a good place to get you over.’
To cast me off dis-courteously
The five boys surrounded Dody. They had no features at all, only pale, translucent moons for face-shapes, so she would never know them again. And her face, too, felt to be a featureless moon. They could never recognize her in the light of day.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Are you all right?’
The voices whispered, batlike, about her face, her hands.
‘My, you smell nice.’
‘That perfume.’
‘May we kiss you.’
Their voices, gentle and light as paper streamers, fell, gentle, touching her, like leaves, like wings. Voices webwinged.
‘What are you doing here?’
Backed up against the barbed fence, staring at the white snow-field beyond the crescent of dark Queens’ buildings, and at the blued fen fog floating waist-high over the snow, Dody stood her ground. And the boys dropped back, because Hamish had come up. The boys began to climb, one by one, over the spiked fence. Dody counted. Three. Four. Five. Sheep-counting sleepward. Holding onto the metal railing, they went swinging themselves over the pointed black spikes into the grounds of Queens’, eft and drunken, reeling pussyfooted on the crusted snow.
‘Who are they?’
‘Just some late guys going into the court.’ The boys were all over now, and they went away across the arched wooden bridge over the narrow green river, the bridge that Newton had once put together without bolts.
‘We’re going over the wall,’ Hamish said. ‘They’ve found a good place. Only you mustn’t talk until we’re in.’
‘I can’t go over. Not with this tight skirt. I’ll get spikes through my hands.’
‘I’ll help you.’
‘But I’ll fall.’ Still, Dody pulled her tweed skirt up to her thighs, to the top of her nylon stockings, and put one foot up on the wall. Game, oh, game. She lifted her left leg over the spikes where they were lowest, but the black tips caught and pierced through her skirt. Hamish was helping, but she stuck there, one leg over the spikes, teetering. Would it hurt? Would she bleed at all? Because the spikes were going through her hands, and her hands were so cold she couldn’t feel them. And then Hamish was all at once on the inside of the fence, cupping his hands into a stirrup for her to step in, and without arguing it out or thinking, she simply stepped, pivoting herself over with her hands, and the spikes looked to be going right through them.
‘My hands,’ she began, ‘they’ll bleed …’.
‘Shh!’ Hamish put his hand over her mouth. He was looking around the inside of the crescent toward a dark doorway. The night stood still and the moon, far off and cold in its coat of borrowed light, made a round O mouth at her, Dody Ventura, coming into Queens’ court at three in the morning because there was nowhere else to go, because it was a station on the way. A place to get warm in, for she felt very cold. Wasted, wasting, her blood gone to redden the circle of teethmarks on Leonard’s cheek, and she, a bloodless husk, left drifting in limbo. Here with Hamish.
Dody followed Hamish down the side of the building, tracing her fingers along the rough-textured brick until they were at the doorway, with Hamish being furtive and quiet for no reason because there was no sound, only the great snow silence and the silence of the moon and the hundreds of Queens’ men breathing silent in their deep early morning sleep before the dawn. The first stair on the landing creaked, even though they had taken their shoes off. The next was quiet. And so the next.
A room all by itself. Hamish shut the ponderous oaken door behind them, and then the thin inner door, and lit a match. The big room jumped into Dody’s view, with its dark, shiny cracked-leather couch and thick rugs and a wallful of books.
‘Made it. I’m in a good entry.’
From behind the paneled wainscotting, a bed creaked. There sounded a stifled sigh.
‘What’s that? Rats?’
‘No rats. My roommate. He’s all right….’ Hamish vanished, and the room with him. Another match scritched, and the room came back. Hamish, squatting, turned on the gas jet for the fire. The hissing sound lighted with a soft whoosh, a blue flare, and the gas flames in their neat row behind the white asbestos lattice started shadows flickering behind the great couch and the heavy chairs.
‘I’m so cold.’ Dody sat on the rug, before the fire which made Hamish’s face yellowish, instead of pink, and his pale eyes dark. She rubbed her feet, putting her red shoes, which looked black, into the grate before the fire. The shoes were al
l wet inside, she could feel the dampness with her finger, but she could not feel the cold, only the numb hurt of her toes as she rubbed them, rubbing the blood back into them.
Then Hamish pushed her back on the rug, so her hair fell away from her face and wound among the tufts of the rug, for it was a deep rug, thick-piled, with the smell of shoeleather about it, and ancient tobacco. What I do, I do not do. In limbo one does not really burn. Hamish began kissing her mouth, and she felt him kiss her. Nothing stirred. Inert, she lay staring toward the high ceiling crossed by the dark wood beams, hearing the worms of the ages moving in them, riddling them with countless passages and little worm-size labyrinths, and Hamish let his weight down on top of her, so it was warm. Fallen into disuse, into desuetude, I shall not be. (It is simple, if not heroic, to endure.)
And then at last Hamish just lay there with his face in her neck, and she could feel his breathing quieten.
‘Please scold me.’ Dody heard her voice, strange and constricted in her chest, from lying on her back on the floor, from the sinus, from the whisky. I am sick of labeled statues. In a grey world no fires burn. Faces wear no names. No Leonards can be for no Leonards live: Leonard is no name.
‘What for?’ Hamish’s mouth moved against her neck, and she felt now again how unnaturally long her neck was, so that her head nodded far from her body, on a long stem, like the picture of Alice after eating the mushroom, with her head on its serpent neck above the leaves of the treetops. A pigeon flew up, scolding. Serpents, serpents. How to keep the eggs safe?
‘I am a bitch,’ Dody heard her voice announce from out of the doll-box in her chest, and she listened to it, wondering what absurd thing it would say next. ‘I am a slut,’ it said with no conviction.