WHEN ANNABEL FOUND she remained alive, she did not know, at first, how to reconcile herself to it until she hit upon the device of believing herself invisible as long as she wore the skull ring, though she constantly wondered why, if this were so, so many people seemed to be able to see her. This question absorbed her completely and she did not rest in her mind until she found an answer which satisfied her.
‘How do you see me?’ she asked Buzz. He picked at his lower lip with his fingernail for a while and then replied: ‘In fits and starts.’
‘That’s not good enough,’ she said ominously and relapsed into speculation.
‘Mrs Collins still refuses to see you,’ another sister told Lee, whose home was now unbearable for the tap dripped Annabel’s tears and the very sofa seemed re-upholstered with her anguish. At last Buzz led him by the hand to an interview with Annabel’s psychiatrist for by now Lee was unable to negotiate the city on his own and could not see where he was going. To compound his distress, he had been drinking heavily during the past fortnight and afterwards he could remember nothing between leaving his house and arriving as if miraculously translated into the warm interior of a cosy hospital with hardly a movement at all on his own part. Buzz abandoned his brother in a room full of faded chintz and old magazines where he waited forty minutes, staring vacantly at an empty wall; intermittently he saw the face of his mother as it had looked after she had been dipped in the petrifying well of madness. Then a nurse came and showed him up a linoleum staircase which shone as if it had been gilded and Lee felt sure it reached almost as high up to heaven as Jacob’s ladder although he turned off, as instructed, at the first landing and entered the whitest of offices. Here, he found a young woman seated behind an impressive desk. She was dressed entirely in black and lavishly hung about with hair of metallic yellow. Her eyes were concealed behind tinted glasses and her voice was as if smoked also, dark-toned and husky.
‘Mr Collins?’
‘Well, yes and no,’ replied Lee who always spoke the truth. A look of curiosity passed across her face. She gestured him to sit down.
‘A regulation chair of tubular steel,’ observed Lee and slithered from it to the ground. Where he lay, he saw how the walls of the room converged upon him from all four corners and crawled for refuge under the desk itself, where he found himself confronted by the woman’s high, brown boots in such an unnatural perspective that the feet were enormous and the uppers soared above him like mill chimneys. The boots were so beautifully polished they appeared irradiated from within.
‘A kind of expressionist effect,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
‘Everything is subtly out of alignment. Shadows fall awry and light no longer issues from expected sources.’
‘Do you go to the cinema often?’
‘Now and then. It stops us all from having to talk to one another though she never follows the story, she only looks at the pictures.’
Since she wore no stockings, the grain of skin appeared to simulate the leather; he stroked her knee and, meeting with no response either in the negative or the affirmative, he explored the outer thigh and then the inner thigh until at last his fingers sank into the hot, wet, hairy cleft itself. At the moment of intimate contact, he experienced a sudden, violent explosion inside his head and instantly re-lived the night of the catastrophe in its entirety.
When the debris cleared, he found himself sprawling on the floor at the other side of the room. He did not know whether the psychiatrist had kicked him away; if he had jackknifed backwards of his own accord; or whether the whole encounter had taken place only inside his head. He raised himself to his feet and sidled back towards the desk. She sat exactly as she had done before, with her hands laid flat down before her on top of the desk and her face inscrutable.
‘Why do you hide your eyes?’
‘Photophobia,’ she replied. ‘Please sit down, Mr Collins.’
Lee did so. He shook his head to try and clear it.
‘Here . . . did I touch you up just now?’
The woman laughed and laughed. ‘What can you have been using?’
‘What?’
‘What drug? What drug have you been using?’
‘Ethyl alcohol.’
‘Besides that.’
‘He forces a fistful down me in the morning and another fistful at night. They’re very colourful.’
‘What are?’
‘The pills.’
‘He?’ enquired the woman.
‘My brother.’
‘Your brother’s visits cause some distraction in the ward. A schizophrenic immediately identified him with St John the Baptist.’
‘Our mum thought he was the Anti-Christ. She’s mad, too.’
‘Is that so?’ said the woman with a glimmer of interest.
‘Yes, but she went mad on purpose.’ Arbitrarily he decided to give her his dazzling smile.
‘Do that again!’ she said instantly. Lee put up his hands to his face, startled and ashamed.
‘How would you describe your relations with your wife? Are they good or bad?’
‘Neither good nor bad. They exist. She’s been ill before.’
‘Ill?’
‘Mad, then,’ said Lee. Tears fell down his cheeks.
‘Such mercurial changes of mood!’ observed the woman. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘Photophobia.’
She switched the light off so that shadows of approaching dusk filled the room.
‘She had a breakdown before I met her. I don’t know much about it. I think she tried to kill herself then, too.’
‘Do you think you know much about your wife?’
‘She’s a silly cow.’
‘Do you think you understand her?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you think she refuses to see you?’
‘She’s mad.’
‘Apart from that.’
‘She believes in keeping herself to herself.’
‘Try again.’
‘Didn’t she tell you why?’
‘She doesn’t say much. She only plays with the ring on her finger and sometimes she smiles.’
‘Her wedding ring, is it?’
‘No, not her wedding ring. She ate her wedding ring.’
‘Ate it?’ repeated Lee incredulously.
‘When nobody was looking, yes.’
‘Then how do you know she really ate it, if nobody was looking.’
‘She told me she ate it with a good deal of conviction. And it was nowhere to be seen. And she smiled; rather a smug smile, I thought.’
‘She must have seen me at it, then.’
‘At what?’
‘I was on the balcony, knocking off this chick, wasn’t I.’
‘The night of the suicide attempt?’
Lee nodded.
‘Apart from that, was it a normal evening?’
‘There was a party.’
‘During which you copulated upon a balcony.’
There followed a silence. After a while, she asked him: ‘Do you love your wife?’
‘Is there a kind of litmus paper you could dip into my heart and test such a thing objectively?’
‘So you feel no affection for your wife.’
‘Don’t be facile,’ said Lee, irritated.
‘Why were you having intercourse with this young woman on this balcony?’
‘I was drunk.’
‘I would have assumed you were drunk,’ she said with some asperity. ‘But did you act on the spur of the moment or was she an old friend?’
The room seemed so dark to Lee he could hardly make out the colour of the woman’s hair though he could see perfectly well that, outside the window, the sky was still light.
‘I’d been sleeping with Carolyn, her name is Carolyn – I’d been sleeping with Carolyn for some little time owing to thinking it would ease the strain.’
‘Did your relations with this girl alter your behaviour to your wife?’
‘Oh,
yes. I was much nicer to her.’
‘I see,’ said the woman in a satisfied voice, as though she had expected him to say this. ‘Do you feel guilty?’
‘Rather guilty,’ said Lee and gave her his dazzling smile, secure she could not see it because it was so dark. Then they were silent again until Lee said, as if to himself:
‘Sometimes she hardly seems alive at all, at the best of times. Annabel, she’s like a shadow that sits and remembers and probably the things it remembers never happened.’
‘It . . .’ said the woman reflectively. ‘How odd you should refer to your wife as “it”.’
‘I was referring to the shadow of my wife.’
‘I see,’ she said and made a note on her pad. ‘What is the nature of both your relationships with your brother?’
‘Complex.’
‘Your brother does not seem to be entirely normal,’ she said gently.
‘In our milieu, that’s something of a compliment, you bourgeois cow.’
‘Has it come to personal abuse already?’ she enquired pleasantly.
‘Abuse or violence, take your choice. But if you took your boots off, I’d kiss your insteps with pleasure.’
‘I’m sure you would,’ she replied in a comfortable voice. ‘Your brother seems to take your wife’s fantasies for granted, as if they were real.’
‘Maybe.’
‘How do you yourself regard your wife’s fantasies?’
‘I dunno. What a question. I don’t know from one minute to the next what it is that exists for her, it’s like a flicker book.’
‘Does your wife want children?’
‘Sweet Jesus!’ said Lee, aghast.
‘Have you ever discussed having children with her?’
‘No. No, I’ve hardly thought about it beyond the odd scare now and then. Why do you ask? Would you think it was normal?’
‘In many circles,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve started to cry again, I can hear you.’
‘I told you, I have bad eyes.’
‘But the lights are all out. How can your photophobia affect you? You have no excuse for tears except sentimentality.’
‘Then turn the lights on again, save me my face.’
She did so. She was more black and gold than ever, like a holy image in a very white case and her veiled regard, half-hidden by smoked glass, gave her face an oracular ambiguity so that her blunt-lipped mouth, which might have brought forth snakes, issued slow words with a pregnant weight although now she produced a mere banality.
‘Perhaps Annabel should get a job and try to make friends of her own outside the environment imposed on her by yourself and your brother.’
‘What’s that again?’ gasped Lee, stunned; he had been anticipating something portentous.
She said: ‘I don’t think your brother is a suitable person to live in the same house as such an unbalanced girl as Annabel. Indeed, it is probably very bad for them both.’
‘Dear God, do I have to choose between them?’
‘There is a condition of shared or, rather, mutually stimulated psychotic disorder known as “folie à deux”. Your brother and your wife would appear excellent candidates for it. Will you please stop crying. You are beginning to embarrass me.’
‘I told you, I can’t help it. Here, have I really got to cope with her on my own?’
She shrugged enigmatically.
‘What’s wrong with my brother?’ he demanded truculently.
She threw back her golden head and laughed for a long time until Lee reluctantly began to laugh also for he knew very well what she meant.
‘Listen,’ he said through his laughter. ‘I feel very bad at the moment and I’ll tell you why, if you can’t guess. I’ve a brother who tried to kill me and a wife who tried to kill herself and I was searching, you know? For the causal link and so I found myself.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I’m the plus, aren’t I?’
‘The plus?’
‘One plus one equals two but first we must define the nature of “plus”. They have a world which they have made so they can understand it and it includes me at the centre; somehow I am essential to it, so that it can go on. But I don’t know anything about it or what I’m supposed to do except be bland and indefinable, like the Holy Spirit, and see the rent gets paid and the bloody gas bill and so forth.’
‘It’s a hermetic world, the three of you. Will it really admit nobody else?’
‘I tried, didn’t I. And look what happened then.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m not concerned with your brother, he isn’t a patient of mine. My, but you really are crying.’
‘I am the Spartan boy but no fox under my jacket, only my heart, eating itself out.’
‘How self-indulgent you are!’
‘It’s not so much that. It’s more that I’ve lost my capacity for detachment. I lost it on that memorable night. And I used to be so proud of it, as well, joking about her nightmares and so on.’
With that, he gave her the evil, twisted grin he had always kept only for his own amusement in the past and saw how it offended her so much she immediately ceased to be his friend. Whatever sexual or sympathetic undercurrent in this parody of an interview that had contrived to maintain it for so long now vanished. She became brisk and officious. She was clearly about to send him away with an implicit reprimand.
‘Think of it this way. There is a sick girl who needs care and can turn only to you. Dry your eyes and look out of the window.’
He saw a green park where lay a lake surrounded by weeping willows whose leafless branches trailed in the motionless water. Dusk was falling but slow figures well muffled against the cold still interminably walked these melancholy grounds and Lee thought he had never seen so many people all together who seemed, each one, so entirely alone. Annabel sat on a bench beside the lake, gazing at its surface which was as black as if of some impermeable substance and not liquid at all. Around her, the silent crowd came and went, absorbed in a multitude of reflections. Since Annabel wore the skull ring on her finger, she could see but not be seen. No flicker of the nerves of her face indicated she watched him approach but suddenly she drew the ring off and threw it away. The waters closed over it and concentric ripples spread out without a sound over the place where it sank. Never before had she felt the extent of her powers until that moment, when she resolved to be visible all the time and was rewarded by seeing him drawn towards her whether he willed it or not, as if she were a magnetic stone.
‘I love you,’ she said.
She spoke in sweet, fallacious music like the song of a mechanical nightingale and now she seemed to him a ghostly woman, white as a winding-sheet and shrouded in hair. The darkening light seemed to pass straight through her almost dissolving edges and when she stretched out her hands towards him they looked like dried flowers, nothing but veins and transparency, and he could see the bones of her fingers through them. The sky was serene and no wind nor flight of any bird moved in the leafless branches of the trees or stirred the still air of winter.
Lee took Annabel in his arms and she buried her face in his breast but he could not forbear to look behind him, towards the hospital buildings. Silhouetted against a bright window, the psychiatrist watched them through her dark glasses. The light behind her illuminated her flamboyant hair so she seemed all of a piece with the brightness itself and as she raised her arm either in a kind of blessing or, more likely, to draw the blinds as if dismissing all her patients for the night, she seemed to Lee like some kind of inexorable angel, directing him to where his duty lay.
‘Do right because it is right,’ said Lee.
Lazzaro Spallanzani observed division in bacteria; his bladder is preserved in the museum at Pavia, in Italy. Pursuing his biological studies, Spallanzani cut off the legs of a male toad in the midst of its copulation but the dying animal did not relax the blind grasp to which nature drove it. Spallanzani therefore concluded: ‘The persistence of the toad is due less to his obtusenes
s of feeling than to the vehemence of his passion.’
Like Spallanzani’s toad, Lee was not insensitive to his situation but the stern puritanical fervour of his childhood condemned him, now, to abandon himself to the proliferating fantasies of the pale girl whose arms clasped as tight around his neck as if she were drowning. He might have guessed her history would be brief and tragic for she had always worn the blind face of those who will die young and so do not need to see much of life; but the moral imperative, to love her, proved stronger than his perceptions and his natural desire for happiness persuaded him, at first, that his intuitive forebodings were unjustified.
Besides, he was full of guilt.
NOW LEE KNEW they would not let Annabel come home until his brother was expelled from the household, he saw Buzz as if he had never known him. He watched the variously obsessed figure intently. It continued to go busily about the absurd tasks it set itself as if they were perfectly natural. It sharpened its knives; it splashed in its acids; it snipped, stitched and dyed its commedia dell’arte rags; it rolled its joints with a pompous ritual worthy of a sacrament; it squatted for hours on the floor in those hollow, interminable silences with which it passed its excess wastes of useless time, and Lee saw all this as the motions of an unfamiliar object. He marvelled that he could have endured its aberrations so long and began to harden against the thing he saw. Until this time, he had scarcely differentiated between his brother and himself; Buzz was a necessary attribute, an inevitable condition of life. But now the circumstances were altered. Annabel freshly defined Lee as having no life beyond that of a necessary attribute of herself alone, and, in this new arrangement, Lee knew his brother for an interloper who might do harm. So now a cancer lodged at the core of his heart, where Buzz had been. Besides, he found the pictures which Buzz had taken of Annabel in the bathroom, before he called the ambulance.