The man with the black dog had been standing against one of the walls, playing a mournful saxophone pitted with green warts of verdigris. The girl had listened to his music from the other side of the cavern, wishing to respect the aunt’s fears, even in a dream.
She had felt a prod in the ribs, and found the pram woman behind her. The beggar woman gave a snort that could have been a sneeze or a laugh or something of both and scratched at wiry, fried-looking hair, asking, ‘You think you have come so far to obey the forbidding of a frightened aunt?’
The girl knew that she was dreaming, and that the woman and even the saxophone man knew everything she knew because they were all shapes worn by her own mind.
‘Dreams are passages,’ the old woman had gone on in the manner of one confiding a vital secret. ‘The right dreamer can travel anywhere in them.’
‘Can I go to the ocean?’ the girl had asked. Without warning the cavern plunged into darkness and the dream broke.
After D’lo had cleared the remnants of grapefruit, croissants and coffee, the aunt suggested they dress and go to hear a string trio in the afternoon as a treat. In the evening they had been invited to supper. She hoped the girl would choose one of her stylish new dresses, but obedient to her mother’s desire, she donned the white dress that had been sent. When the aunt saw her in it, she felt the blood rise to her cheeks, for far from making the girl look too young, the dress was so soft and pale and sinuous that it caressed and outlined every muscle and curve, giving the impression of nudity.
It might have been made for just such an unearthly transformation as had occurred in the night, the aunt thought with renewed unease.
The girl noticed the fullness of her lips and the heaviness of her eyes in the hall mirror as they left, and wondered if it meant that the bleeding that she had been warned of was about to begin. Certainly her body felt heavy with some fluid that undulated and lapped inside her. She was not afraid, although when her mother had spoken of it, she had made it clear that girls were expected to fear the blood, and what it heralded: womanhood and all of the pains of heart and soul and body that flesh was heir to. She had wondered if she would be afraid, for she knew she experienced the world differently from the woman and man who were her mother and father, and also from the other people she had encountered.
The thought came to her like a whisper that the raggedy people who prowled the dank metro corridors experienced the world differently too.
In the taxi that brought them to the theatre, the aunt gave her three small, beautifully wrapped packages. The first contained an antique bible with a leather cover and a tiny metal lock, which must be ornamental, for why would one lock a bible? The second held a slender silver torch attached to a key ring which the aunt suggested she use to locate the keyhole in the front door at night, since there was no external light. The last parcel contained a set of exquisite pearl combs which the girl was persuaded to push into her dark locks. It occurred to the aunt that, clad thus, the girl looked like a bride.
It was very hot outside, the culmination of a string of hot days, and a record for the month. They arrived at the concert hall early and stood outside to wait, for there was no air-conditioning in the foyer. The facades opposite looked bleached, and the asphalt gave off a hot black smell. Women around them stood wilting in expensive gowns, while their escorts fanned florid faces. The leaves of a caged tree hung motionless as the sky grew ever more mercilessly and perfectly blue. God might have had eyes that colour when he expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, the aunt thought dizzily, feeling her blood vibrate under her skin and hoping she would not faint.
She decided they should walk a little to escape the press. Around the corner, they came unexpectedly to a church and the aunt led the girl inside. The coolness beyond the arched stone doorway was so profound that she could have wept for the relief of it. They sat in the very last pew until the glimmering stars that had begun to wink before the aunt’s eyes had faded. Then she glanced sideways at the girl and wondered if she had not been drawn into the church for a reason. The girl had a dangerously potent look. The aunt uttered a silent prayer that she should be safe, while the girl sat immobile beside her. Of course she was a heathen, her sister having abandoned their religion, but in the eyes of the church it was better to be a heathen than a member of another church. The latter went to hell, while heathens and unbaptised babies went to the grey eternity of limbo.
The aunt didn’t believe in limbo anymore. Not exactly. But she didn’t disbelieve either. Her mind was not shaped for such decision-making. She had a nostalgic affection for the innocent rites of her childhood faith, and in old age would be able to draw her religion tightly back around her like a beloved shawl.
The girl liked the cold smell of the church, the cool tobacco-dark shadows striping pictures of dim, tortured saints and the faint humming of the stone under her feet. She liked the little banks of candles and the font of water and the smell of wood polish on the pews.
Finally the aunt touched her and motioned that they should go. If God existed, and the girl was in some sort of danger, perhaps He would see fit to intervene. The aunt could do no more.
The performance they had come to see was merely competent and afterwards the aunt said it was a shame but one could never be sure with violinists. Excellence was as likely as mediocrity. But it was a pity.
Neither had the girl enjoyed the performance, finding the music too consciously intricate. The violin had sounded to her like something begging to be free. She had a sudden profound longing to hear the disordered cadences of the waves and the yearning grew until it hurt the bones in her chest to keep it in. It was the first time in her life that she had consciously desired anything and she wondered if wanting was something that came with the bleeding.
Outside it was hotter than ever and the sun still shone, although it was now early evening.
The aunt wished she had arranged a taxi so they could go immediately and directly to her friend’s apartment. With the crowd swelling around them, there was no chance of hailing one, so they walked, searching for a telephone. The aunt’s eyes watered at the brightness of the sun and she flinched when sunlight flashed off an opening window and stabbed into her eyes.
The girl was thinking that the heat was a trapped beast prowling the streets with its great, wet, red tongue hanging out, gasping in the exhausted air. If someone did not let it out soon, it would go mad and tear everything to pieces.
At last they saw a passing taxi and the aunt hailed it gratefully. To her irritation, when they arrived at her friend’s home, he announced that it was too hot to stay in. He had organised for them to eat in a nearby café, but at least they were borne there in a car with air-conditioning. The friend was very like the aunt in his plump pinkness, although he was somewhat sharper in mind and manner. His eyes were a beautiful transparent aqua that reminded the girl of the sea on certain days when an unexpected beam of light penetrated a dark sky, and they settled on her avidly.
‘You did not say she was beautiful,’ he said.
The aunt was almost suffocated with all the replies she might have made, from the inappropriateness of giving impressionable young girls such notions, to the strangeness of the fact that she had not been beautiful until this morning. Fortunately a waiter chose that moment to lay a starched napkin in her lap, preventing any response.
‘This terrible heat,’ she said, when he had departed with their orders.
But her friend ignored the warning tone. Or perhaps he did not notice it, for he was still studying the girl. ‘It is interesting to think that with lips a little less full and eyes a tiny bit closer together, you would not be beautiful at all,’ he said. ‘Such a thin line between ugliness and beauty.’
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ the aunt said firmly. But her friend gave a laugh.
‘Yes, and inner beauty is more important than outer fairness. I know all of that and of course it’s true, but my dear, the child is exquisite, and her life will be
shaped by that because, regardless of what people say, humans revere beauty. Something in us is thrilled by it. Aren’t you thrilled by her?’
The aunt glanced involuntarily at the girl and thought that she was more frightened by her impossible radiance, which surely had grown since the morning.
‘We who are not and never have been beautiful must be a little envious as well,’ the friend went on. ‘Few are pure enough to simply worship at the altar of beauty. For the rest of us, there is some cruelty in our makeup that makes us want to shred and smash it even as we adore it. Which is why it is dangerous to be too beautiful.’
The aunt made a business of buttering a roll for herself and offered one to the girl, but her friend would not be diverted. ‘You were very pretty and your sister was what one would call handsome,’ he said pensively. ‘But this girl surpasses all of those lesser forms. Is your father very beautiful?’ he asked her directly.
The girl thought a little and then said composedly, ‘He is very clever and when he is thinking about his work, he is sometimes beautiful.’
He laughed aloud in delight. ‘What a sophisticate! My dear, you must be so pleased.’
This to the aunt who did not know what she was supposed to be pleased about. A certain vexation began to show in the wrinkles rimming her eyes. ‘How is your salad, dear?’ she asked the girl determinedly.
Over dessert, the friend clutched at his chest and made a strangled noise. The aunt knew he had a heart condition and cried out for the waiter to summon the friend’s driver. She did not call an ambulance, knowing that he thought them vulgar, and in any case they were notoriously slow. Waiting, she massaged her friend’s wrists and temples and was sorry to have been angry with him. After all, it was true that the girl had by now become almost unbearably exquisite. She noticed that two storm clouds shaped like long-fingered hands were reaching out towards one another, closing the blue sky in a black grip. She had never seen such a thing and, fearing it was an ill omen for her friend, she thrust some notes into the girl’s hand and bade her catch a taxi home.
‘I may be some time,’ she said, climbing into the black car after the friend. Only as the car pulled away and she glanced back, did the aunt see that the dark hands were clasping directly behind the girl, as if the sky itself would pray for her, or crush her. It was too late to stop the car, and she would have been a fool to do so, for of course it was an absurd fancy.
She turned with relief to wipe the brow of her ailing friend.
The girl watched the car until it was out of sight, then she looked around for a taxi. There was none to be seen and the waiter had gone back into the restaurant. She decided to walk until she saw one, since there was no need for haste. No one was expecting her. She walked three blocks, then five. Thirsty, she stopped to have an orange pressé in an outdoor café. Nearby were two young men talking and smoking; one was half lying on his seat and the other was staring into the froth of his beer. An older woman in a red dress batted at the grey ribbons of their smoke winding around her.
The girl felt no desire to talk to anyone. She thought she could find her way back to her aunt’s apartment if she only had the river to guide her. She enquired of the waiter, who pointed the way, and set off, trying to imagine how it would be to marry one of the young men in the restaurant and let him hold her. She found it impossible to contemplate. Yet if one did not join with a man, what else was there? The sort of life her aunt led, with its overstuffed cushions, restaurants, the theatre with friends. Neither appealed, but what else was there? Her body seemed to ache, as if it understood its purpose better than she did, and yet all the uses to which it might be put felt wrong. In that moment her longing for the sound and scent of the sea returned with such intensity she felt nauseous and she wished that one could be taken as easily into the arms of the sea as the arms of a man.
Thunder grumbled and she looked up to find the sky filled with surly cloud. A storm had been brewing overhead and she had not noticed. Oddly, the heat had grown more fierce, as though compressed by the dense cloud cover. Thunder rumbled again and even as she remembered the beggar woman’s soup, soured by the storm, she saw the open mouth of a metro station at the end of a long narrow street. As she drew closer, she could smell the black skin of the river that glimmered darkly beyond it. There was no illumination at the entrance to the metro, but a light glowed from somewhere deeper down. She entered the station and heard the hum of the escalators. She used the sound to guide her to them and descended. The light increased until she could see the advertisements in their slanted billboards. There were no other people going down or up, and the girl supposed she had chanced on a still moment between the surges of the crowd, for it was still quite early. The aunt’s warnings about going into the metro when there were too few people rose in her mind and then faded like one of the unintelligible posters.
The escalator was longer than those she had been on before and she wondered if this particular tunnel was some sort of natural fissure that had been incorporated into the metro web. She thought of Persephone, who had made a bargain to live six months of each year beneath the earth, and wondered how she had felt as she travelled downwards, knowing she would not see the sky or the sun for another six months, and that this was the price she paid for tasting forbidden fruit. Without warning, the metro wind blew and the girl breathed in the briny coolness of it, wondering if it were possible that a dark ocean lay at the heart of the world.
Finally she reached the bottom, and there in an archway stood the man with the greenish-gold saxophone. She was startled to see him, but no doubt he moved about between the stations. He played a long note that strove upwards at the end, then he laid his instrument in its open case, pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and a lighter from his pocket. The flame gave his features a reddish cast as he lit it and took a deep breath, eyes half closed.
As she passed him by, some impulse made the girl fish for a coin to throw into his case. Only then did his eyes open a slit and rest momentarily on her. They were the dull sheeny colour of his saxophone. The platform beyond the arch was empty and she thought of the disused stations her aunt had mentioned. Then a man in a sleeveless singlet stepped through another of the arches. He came towards her brandishing a deformed arm that ended at the wrist and the girl wondered if he wanted money. She had a few coins in her pocket, but the man did not hold out his hand.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘Salvation . . .’ the man said so softly she might have misheard, but he withdrew back into the shadows before she could ask him to repeat himself.
The aunt had said many troubled souls gravitated to the metro at night, trying to evade the police who would come to herd them out. One could imagine they might know the maze beneath the city better than the police, and when all of the metro doors to the outside were secured, they would creep out of their hiding places, knowing that they need fear no one except others like themselves.
She thought of the beggar woman with the pram, wondering if the enormous pot of soup had been intended to feed the metro dwellers. She seemed to see her for a moment, wheeling her pram along the platform, a gypsy woman shuffling alongside her in disintegrating slippers, clutching a baby to her chest. The old woman glanced straight at the girl with a level, questioning look which seemed to ask, ‘What are you searching for?’
The girl closed her eyes and when she opened them, there was no sign of the two women or the baby, but sitting at the edge of the platform was the black dog that she had seen before with the saxophone man. The dog turned its head to watch her approach, and gave its black tail a single flick that might or might not have been a welcome.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked it softly, not smiling.
The metro wind gusted again and this time it smelled of the storm which must be breaking in the city overhead. The girl’s hair flew forward in twin black flags and she turned her face in time to watch a train punch from the tunnel and howl past the platform. The girl glimpsed the driv
er looking out, his mouth opened in an O of surprise. Then she turned back to the dog, but it had gone. Before she could make anything of this, the metro train had passed without stopping, taking all of the light with it and leaving the girl standing in inky blackness. She did not move, thinking the lights would come back on, but the dark remained, settling like a dust cloth thrown over a couch.
Reaching into her pocket, the girl found the key ring with its slender torch which the aunt had given her. A narrow pencil beam of light sliced the blackness. It was too thin to be useful in such massive darkness. Without knowing why, she turned it on herself, saw the hem of her birthday dress, its winking beads and pale sequins, and wondered if Persephone had been forced to dwell six months in total darkness, or had been allowed a candle.
Turning the light away from her again, she played the narrow beam carefully back and forth to find the archway that would lead her to the escalator. She could no longer hear its asthmatic hum but it might have gone off when the lights went out. She must have gone further along the platform than she had realised, for she could not find the archway openings. She was about to turn when the light illuminated a ghostly white sign. She walked towards it, hearing how her footsteps echoed. There was an illegible word written on it, but the arrow beneath directed her clearly and authoritatively onward. Thinking there must be another part of the platform or perhaps steps that would bring her outside, she set off more briskly. The way narrowed suddenly, and seeing the graffitied wall on one side and the drop to the rails on the other, she understood that she was making her way along one of the narrow ledges that ran inside the metro tunnels.