THE FACE: THERE ARE THIRTEEN BONES THAT FORM THE SKELETON OF THE FACE. FOR COMPLETENESS THE FRONTAL BONE SHOULD BE ADDED.
Of the visions that come to me waking and sleeping the most insistent is your face. Your face, mirror-smooth and mirror-clear. Your face under the moon, silvered with cool reflection, your face in its mystery, revealing me.
I cut out your face where it had caught in the ice on the pond, your face bigger than my body, your mouth filled with water. I held you against my chest on that snowy day, the outline of you jagged into my jacket. When I put my lips to your frozen cheek you burned me. The skin tore at the corner of my mouth, my mouth filled with blood. The closer I held you to me, the faster you melted away. I held you as Death will hold you. Death that slowly pulls down the skin’s heavy curtain to expose the bony cage behind.
The skin loosens, yellows like limestone, like limestone worn by time, shows up the marbling of veins. The pale translucency hardens and grows cold. The bones themselves yellow into tusks.
Your face gores me. I am run through. Into the holes I pack splinters of hope but hope does not heal me. Should I pad my eyes with forgetfulness, eyes grown thin through looking? Frontal bone, palatine bones, nasal bones, lacrimal bones, cheek bones, maxilla, vomer, inferior conchae, mandible.
Those are my shields, those are my blankets, those words don’t remind me of your face.
The Special Senses
HEARING AND THE EAR: THE AURICLE IS THE EXPANDED PORTION WHICH PROJECTS FROM THE SIDE OF THE HEAD. IT IS COMPOSED OF FIBRO-ELASTIC CARTILAGE COVERED WITH SKIN AND FINE HAIRS. IT IS DEEPLY GROOVED AND RIDGED. THE PROMINENT OUTER RIDGE IS KNOWN AS THE HELIX. THE LOBULE IS THE SOFT PLIABLE PART AT THE LOWER EXTREMITY.
Sound waves travel at about 335 metres a second. That’s about a fifth of a mile and Louise is perhaps two hundred miles away. If I shout now, she’ll hear me in seventeen minutes or so. I have to leave a margin of error for the unexpected. She may be swimming under water.
I call Louise from the doorstep because I know she can’t hear me. I keen in the fields to the moon. Animals in the zoo do the same, hoping that another of their kind will call back. The zoo at night is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from vivisecting eyes, the animals cry out, species separated from one another, knowing instinctively the map of belonging. They would choose predator and prey against this outlandish safety. Their ears, more powerful than those of their keepers, pick up sounds of cars and last-hour take-aways. They hear all the human noises of distress. What they don’t hear is the hum of the undergrowth or the crack of fire. The noises of kill. The river-roar booming against brief screams. They prick their ears till their ears are sharp points but the noises they seek are too far away.
I wish I could hear your voice again.
THE NOSE: THE SENSE OF SMELL IN HUMAN BEINGS IS GENERALLY LESS ACUTE THAN IN OTHER ANIMALS.
The smells of my lover’s body are still strong in my nostrils. The yeast smell of her sex. The rich fermenting undertow of rising bread. My lover is a kitchen cooking partridge. I shall visit her gamey low-roofed den and feed from her. Three days without washing and she is well-hung and high. Her skirts reel back from her body, her scent is a hoop about her thighs.
From beyond the front door my nose is twitching, I can smell her coming down the hall towards me. She is a perfumier of sandalwood and hops. I want to uncork her. I want to push my head against the open wall of her loins. She is firm and ripe, a dark compound of sweet cattle straw and Madonna of the Incense. She is frankincense and myrrh, bitter cousin smells of death and faith.
When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.
My lover is cocked and ready to fire. She has the scent of her prey on her. She consumes me when she comes in thin white smoke smelling of saltpetre. Shot against her all I want are the last wreaths of her desire that carry from the base of her to what doctors like to call the olfactory nerves.
TASTE: THERE ARE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL SENSATIONS OF TASTE: SWEET SOUR BITTER AND SALT.
My lover is an olive tree whose roots grow by the sea. Her fruit is pungent and green. It is my joy to get at the stone of her. The little stone of her hard by the tongue. Her thick-fleshed salt-veined swaddle stone.
Who eats an olive without first puncturing the swaddle? The waited moment when the teeth shoot a strong burst of clear juice that has in it the weight of the land, the vicissitudes of the weather, even the first name of the olive keeper.
The sun is in your mouth. The burst of an olive is breaking of a bright sky. The hot days when the rains come. Eat the day where the sand burned the soles of your feet before the thunderstorm brought up your skin in bubbles of rain.
Our private grove is heavy with fruit. I shall worm you to the stone, the rough swaddle stone.
THE EYE: THE EYE IS SITUATED IN THE ORBITAL CAVITY. IT IS ALMOST SPHERICAL IN SHAPE AND ABOUT ONE INCH IN DIAMETER.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Light is reflected into the eyes by whatever comes within the field of vision. I see colour when a wavelength of light is reflected by an object and all other wavelengths are absorbed. Every colour has a different wavelength; red light has the longest.
Is that why I seem to see it everywhere? I am living in a red bubble made up of Louise’s hair. It’s the sunset time of year but it’s not the dropping disc of light that holds me in the shadows of the yard. It’s the colour I crave, floodings of you running down the edges of the sky on to the brown earth on to the grey stone. On to me.
Sometimes I run into the sunset arms wide like a scarecrow, thinking I can jump off the side of the world into the fiery furnace and be burned up in you. I would like to wrap my body in the blazing streaks of bloodshot sky.
All other colours are absorbed. The dull tinges of the day never penetrate my blackened skull. I live in four blank walls like an anchorite. You were a brightly lit room and I shut the door. You were a coat of many colours wrestled into the dirt.
Do you see me in my blood-soaked world? Green-eyed girl, eyes wide apart like almonds, come in tongues of flame and restore my sight.
March. Elgin had promised to write to me in March.
I counted the days like someone under house arrest. It was bitter cold and the woods were filled with wild white daffodils. I tried to take comfort from the flowers, from the steady budding of the trees. This was new life, surely some of it would rub off on me?
The wine bar, otherwise known as ‘A Touch of Southern Comfort’, was staging a spring festival to attract back customers whose overdrafts still hadn’t recovered from the Christmas festival. For us who worked there, this meant dressing in lime-green body stockings with a simple crown of artificial crocuses about our heads. The drinks had a spring theme: March Hare Punch, Wild Oat Sling, Blue Tit. It didn’t matter what you ordered, the ingredients were the same apart from the liquor base. I mixed cheap cooking brandy, Japanese whisky, something that called itself gin and the occasional filthy sherry with pulp orange juice, thin cream, cubes of white sugar and various kitchen colourings. Soda water to top up and at £5.00 a couple (we only served couples at Southern Comfort) cheap at the price during Happy Hour.
The management ordered a March pianist and told him to make his way at his own speed through the Simon and Garfunkel songbook. For some reason he became autistically stuck at ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Whenever I arrived for work at 5 o’clock the silver girl was sailing by on words supplied by a tearful crowd of already tipsy punters. Against the lush chords and the aching tremeloes of our guests, we Spring Greens leapt from table to table, dropping food parcels of pizza and jugs of consolation. I began to despise my fellow man.
Still no word from Elgin. Work harder, mix more cocktails, stay up late, don’t sleep, don’t think. I might have taken to the bottle had there been anything fit to drink.
‘I’d like to see where you live.’
I was behind the bar grimly jigging a few pints of Lethal Ex
tra when Gail Right made it clear that she was coming home with me. At two in the morning when the last of our night birds had been tipped from their sodden nest, she locked up and put my push bike in the hatch of her car. She had a Tammy Wynette tape on the cassette.
‘You’re very reserved,’ she said. ‘I like that. I don’t get a lot of it at work.’
‘Why do you run that place?’
‘I have to do something for a living. Can’t depend on Prince Charming at my age.’ She laughed. ‘Or with my tastes.’
Stand by your man, said Tammy, and show the world you love him.
‘I’m thinking of having a Country and Western Festival in the summer, what about it?’ Gail was taking the corners too fast.
‘What will we have to wear?’
She laughed again, more shrilly this time. ‘Don’t you like your little body stocking? I think you look gorgeous.’ She pronounced the word with an accented ‘O’ so that it sounded less like a compliment and more like the gaping chasm.
‘It’s very good of you to drop me off,’ I said. ‘I can offer you something if you like.’
‘Ooh yes,’ she said. ‘Ooh yes.’
We got out of her car under the frozen sky. I unlocked my door with frozen fingers and invited her in with a frozen heart.
‘Lovely and warm in here,’ she said snuggling herself in front of the stove. She had a vast bottom. It reminded me of a pair of shorts a boyfriend of mine had once worn which said (GL)ASS. HANDLE WITH CARE. She wiggled and knocked over a Toby jug.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It was too fat for the fireplace.’
She eased herself into the trembling armchair and accepted my offering of cocoa with a leer about Casanova. I had thought that was an esoteric fact.
‘It’s not true,’ I said. ‘Chocolate is a wonderful sedative.’ Which isn’t true either but I thought Gail Right might be susceptible to a bit of Mind over Matter. I yawned pointedly.
‘Busy day,’ she said. ‘Busy day. Makes me think of other things. Dark exciting things.’
I thought of treacle. What would it be like to be caught in the wallow of Gail Right?
I had a boyfriend once, his name was Carlo, he was a dark exciting thing. He made me shave off all my body hair and did the same to himself. He claimed it would increase sensation but it made me feel like a prisoner in a beehive. I wanted to please him, he smelled of fir cones and port, his long body passion-damp. We lasted six months and then Carlo met Robert who was taller, broader and thinner than me. They exchanged razorblades and cut me out.
‘What are you dreaming about?’ asked Gail.
‘An old love.’
‘You like ’em old do you? That’s good. Mind you, I’m not as old as I look, not when you get down to the upholstery.’
She gave the armchair a mighty thwack and a cloud of dust settled over her exhausted make-up.
‘I have to tell you now Gail that there’s someone else.’
‘There always is,’ she sighed and stared into the murky lumps of her cocoa like a fortune teller on a fix. ‘Tall, dark, and handsome?’
‘Tall, red and beautiful.’
‘Give us a bedtime story then,’ said Gail. ‘What’s she like?’
Louise, dipterous girl born in flames, 35. 34 22 36. 10 years married. 5 months with me. Doctorate in Art History. First class mind. 1 miscarriage (or 2?) 0 children. 2 arms, 2 legs, too many white T-cells. 97 months to live.
‘Don’t cry,’ said Gail, kneeling in front of my chair, her plump ringed hand on my thin empty ones. ‘Don’t cry. You did the right thing. She would have died, how could you have forgiven yourself that? You’ve given her a chance.’
‘It’s incurable.’
‘That’s not what her doctor says. She can trust him, can’t she?’
I hadn’t told Gail everything.
She touched my face very softly. ‘You’ll be happy again. We could be happy together couldn’t we?’
Six in the morning and I was lying in my saggy rented double bed with Gail Right sagging beside me. She smelled of face powder and dry rot. She was snoring heavily and would be for some time to come, so I got up, borrowed her car, and drove to the phone box.
We hadn’t made love. I’d run my hands over her padded flesh with all the enthusiasm of a second-hand sofa dealer. She’d patted my head and fallen asleep, which was as well since my body had all the sensitivity of a wet-suit.
I put the money in the slot and listened to the ringing tones while my breath steamed up the barren phone box. My heart was over-beating. Someone answered, sleepy, grumpy.
‘HELLO? HELLO?’
‘Hello Elgin.’
‘What time do you call this?’
‘Early morning after another sleepless night.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Our agreement. How is she?’
‘Louise is in Switzerland. She’s been quite ill but she’s much better now. We have had good results. She won’t be back in England for some time if at all. You can’t see her.’
‘I don’t want to see her.’ (LIAR LIAR.)
‘That’s good because she certainly doesn’t want to see you.’
The phone went dead. I held on to the receiver for a moment, staring stupidly into the mouthpiece. Louise was OK, that was all that mattered.
I got into the car and drove the deserted miles home. Sunday morning and no-one around. The upstairs rooms were tightly curtained, the houses on the road were still asleep. A fox ran across my path, a chicken hanging limply from its mouth. I would have to deal with Gail.
At home there were only two sounds: the metallic ticking of the clock and Gail’s snores. I closed the door on the stairs and left myself alone with the clock. In the very early morning the hours have a different quality, they stretch and promise. I took out my books and tried to work. Russian is the only language I’m good at, which is a help since there aren’t that many of us competing for the same jobs. The Francophiles have a terrible time, everybody wants to sit outside a Paris café and translate the new edition of Proust. Not me. I used to think that a tour de force was a school trip.
‘You idiot,’ said Louise cuffing me gently.
She got up to make coffee and brought it in fresh with the smell of plantations and sun. The aromatic steam warmed our faces and clouded my glasses. She drew a heart on each lens. ‘So that you won’t see anybody but me,’ she said. Her hair cinnabar red, her body all the treasures of Egypt. There won’t be another find like you Louise. I won’t see anybody else.
I worked until the clock chimed twelve and there was a horrible heaving from upstairs. Gail Right had woken up.
I moved quickly to the kettle, sensing that some appeasement would be necessary. Would a mug of tea protect me? I put out my hand to Earl Grey and settled on Empire Blend. The Stand Up And Be Counted of teas. A man-sized tea. A tea with so much tannin that designers use it as pigment.
She was in the bathroom. I heard the judder judder of the water pipes then the assault against the enamel. Unwillingly the tank was forced to part with every drop of hot water, it wheezed to the very end then came to a stop with a dreadful clank. I hoped she hadn’t disturbed the sediment.
‘Never disturb the Sediment,’ the farmer had said when he’d showed me round the place. He said it as though the Sediment were some fearful creature who lived under the hot water.
‘What will happen if I do?’
He shook his head doomfully. ‘Can’t say.’
I’m sure he meant he didn’t know but did he have to make it sound like an ancient curse?
I took Gail her tea and knocked at the door.
‘Don’t be shy,’ she called.
I prised open the door from its stiff catch and plonked the tea on the bathside. The water was brown. Gail was streaky. She looked like a prime cut of streaky bacon. Her eyes were small and red from the night before. Her hair stuck out like a straw rick. I shuddered.
‘Cold isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Scrub my back h
oney will you?’
‘Must stoke up the fire, Gail. Can’t let you get cold.’
I fled down the stairs and did indeed stoke up the fire. I would gladly have stoked the whole house and left it roasting Gail inside. This isn’t polite, I told myself. Why are you so horror-struck by a woman whose only fault is to like you and whose only quality is to be larger than life?
Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam. Gail Right was at the bottom of the stairs. I straightened up and made a quick smile.
‘Hello love,’ she said kissing me with a suckering sound. ‘Got any bacon sandwiches?’
While Gail made her way through what was left of Autumn Effie, the farmer’s yearly pig to the slaughter, she told me she was going to change my shifts at the wine bar so that we could work together. ‘I’ll give you more money as well.’ She licked the grease from her lower lip and where it had dripped on to her arm.
‘I’d rather not. I like things the way they are.’
‘You’re in shock. Try it my way for a bit.’ She leered at me over the crusts of her breakfast. ‘Didn’t you enjoy a bit of home company last night? Those hands of yours got everywhere.’
Her own hands were wedging Effie between her jaws as though she feared the pig might still have the guts to make a break for it. She had fried the bacon herself then soaked the bread in the fat before shutting the sandwich. Her fingernails were not quite free of red polish and some of this had found its way on to the bread.
‘I love a bacon sandwich,’ she said. ‘The way you touched me. So light and nimble, do you play the piano?’
‘Yes,’ I said in an unnaturally high voice. ‘Excuse me please.’
I got to the toilet just ahead of my vomit. On your knees, seat up head down, stucco the bowl with porridge. I wiped my mouth and rinsed out with water, spitting away the burning in the back of my throat. If Louise had had chemotherapy she might be suffering this every morning. And I wasn’t with her. ‘Remember that’s the point, that’s the point,’ I said to myself in the mirror. ‘That’s the route she won’t have to take so long as she’s with Elgin.’