The Monsters We Deserve

  I want to ask her a question. Of all the things I could say, I want to ask her a foolish question.

  ‘There is a matter on your mind.’

  I wonder if it was that obvious or whether she knows what I am thinking. My god, I hope she doesn’t know what I’m thinking. As I’m wondering whether that is true she says, ‘Is this you?’

  Her book is gone. I must have been mistaken. For now her book is gone and she’s holding my notebook in one hand and with a fingertip of the other she’s tapping my name where I always scrawl it in capitals across the cover.

  My throat constricts, and I find I cannot speak.

  I nod a yes, and she says, ‘We have the same initials. Amusing.’

  I start to smile but the smile dies on my face, with a trembling of the lip, as it is not returned.

  ‘I’d never thought of that,’ I say, almost to myself.

  She turns back to the armchair, and sets herself down in it.

  ‘What is the thing you wish to ask me? My arm?’

  Now I know she must be able to read my mind. There is no other explanation for it. Her arm. It hangs awkwardly. She is using it, but it seems to move somewhat differently. We know it affected her as a girl, but no one knows what happened, whether she was born with a problem of some kind, or if some accident befell her.

  ‘You want to know what afflicts my arm? Are there not more interesting questions you wish to address? Did you tri-an-gu-late for such trivialities?’

  She draws the word out. Is she mocking me? She may merely be enjoying the word (I do the same myself sometimes) and all the time I am thrown, truly thrown.

  ‘Very well,’ she’s saying, ‘we have made our introductions. I have confirmed your identity. And you know who I am, correct?’

  I nod.

  ‘Do you do more than nod?’

  I just catch myself and drag a question out.

  ‘What, then,’ I stammer, ‘I mean, what are you – what are you doing here?’

  Now her mouth forms a smile, but it’s a cool, unkind smile and the pit of my stomach knots.

  ‘May I offer you a chair?’ she says, and points at the wooden chair I use at the desk. I fetch it, and know that I am bothered by her offering me a chair. This is my house, at least while I rent it, and it belongs to Étienne the rest of the—

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Excellent. You ought to keep warm, no doubt you are feeling the effects of your libations.’

  I follow her eyes to the empty whisky bottle lying on the floor, one beautiful golden drop still left inside. I feel my cheeks redden. I feel a touch nettled too.

  ‘Did you light the fire?’ I ask, still asking all the wrong things. When she doesn’t answer, I sit the chair a few feet away, facing her, slightly tilted to one side, for looking at her straight on is too much.

  ‘How old are you?’ I ask.

  ‘One doesn’t ask such questions,’ she says. ‘In my day. But then I never paid much care to the conventions of my day. I’m fifty-three years of age.’

  I wonder if she knows she’s dead. But then, she isn’t. At fifty-three she was still alive. Just. Anyway, she’s sitting in front of me, that’s more alive than many people. Then I wonder if she’s about to die and whether she knows that moment is—

  ‘What do these signify?’ she asks, and then I know I’m sunk.

  Her book is in her hands again. Her copy of my book, no, I mean, my copy of her book; the one with all the corners bent down, the corners that mean …

  ‘I mark … I mark pages, pages of significance. Significance to me, that is. So I can find them easily when—’

  ‘What do they signify?’

  My mouth dries, and my throat constricts again, as if two fingers are pressing on my Adam’s apple with insistence.

  ‘I … That’s to say, I mean … I—’

  ‘What do they signify?’ she repeats, her voice dropping a note or two and I find that I really don’t want to answer.

  She stares at me, her gaze penetrating me in ways I do not like. I see her move, she puts down her book, and picks up my notebook again. I don’t let anyone look in there, anyone. She leafs through it like a magazine, until she stops, evidently finding what she’s looking for.

  ‘“You hate this book”,’ she says, quoting my words at me, ‘“Destroy it.”’

  She lifts her gaze.

  ‘So, what are these turned down corners?’

  There is nothing to be done. I know she knows more than I am saying.

  ‘They are passages in the book,’ I say quietly, and without looking at her, ‘which I find … less than … convincing.’

  She says nothing at first.

  Then she simply says one word.

  ‘So.’

  I have no idea what that means.

  ‘Would you care to give an example of such moments?’

  I would not. I say nothing.

  ‘Let me put it like this; why do you hate my book so much?’

  I stare at the floor, at a space between the tips of her silken shoes, which protrude from beneath the hem of her dress.

  ‘Come now, what you intended to say to your reading public, you surely are bold enough to say to me, the target of that approbation?’

  I sigh. She has me. This is just how I feel about the people who so freely declaim a writer’s work in public forums; I doubt many of them would be so rude or so clever to say it to the writer’s face. So, I have to confess she has won the argument, but I still don’t want to list a book’s perceived faults to the woman who wrote it.

  ‘You were very young—’ I venture, but she cuts me off.

  ‘I don’t believe you think that has anything to do with it. Do you? No, I thought not. We both know that my first book was my best. And I dare a little immodesty in pointing out the obvious to you: it has become a pinnacle of the literary canon, remaining in print for two hundred years. And wildly influential. Can you say the same about any of your writings? I don’t believe you can. Except maybe one that will stand the test of time, and of that one, well …’

  She trails off and I do not like her implication.

  ‘Maybe you think,’ she goes on, ‘that something you pen will achieve the immortality of my masterpiece? Perhaps, yes. Probably, no. So I ask you again: what is it about my book that you have such intense dislike for?’

  She’s goading me, deliberately. But successfully it seems, because I find I have the nerve to fight back.

  I wave a hand in the air.

  ‘It’s clumsy. I believe one of your most forgiving biographers said the book is “beset by many faults, weakened by improbable situations”.’

  ‘Yes, I remember that account of my life and work. We also share the same initials as that particular biographer; did you not observe that either? What else besides? Perhaps you believe your own work to be above criticism? You only deal it out to others, is that right?’

  Very well, I think. You’re asking for it.

  ‘Simple weaknesses in the plot; the large number of overly convenient contrivances that could have been easily avoided. Aside from Victor and the creature, your other characters are weak. The style is overblown at some points, at others crushingly banal. And I don’t forgive your age, or the era in which you were working – Jane Austen was producing her finest work around then, wasn’t she?’

  I know I have gone too far now, but I don’t seem to be able to stop. I have the floor, I may as well say my piece.

  ‘But fundamentally, I would happily ignore all these faults and imbalances, happily, were it not for one thing. Your book displays snobbery—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Elitism—’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And racism.’

  ‘Racism? You find it xenophobic? You must remember that it’s a work of fiction, and that the words of my characters do not—’

  I cut her off this time.

  ‘Don’t try to pull that one. Of course I know that, I may be a bad writer but I am a writer. You’r
e using that defence retrospectively, and one only has to read your private letters and diaries, as we all have, to see your views on the “indolent French”, the “slothful Asiatics”, and the shabby working classes in general.’

  ‘“As we all have”,’ she quotes me back. ‘Many people have read my private letters?’

  The note of paradoxical arrogance underlying this question does not escape me. I chew it over, then spit it out.

  ‘A few people.’

  She’s silent for a time, staring at the fire. I seem to have won this skirmish, but I have a pressing feeling that I am far from winning the war, not least because I don’t know what the war is. I am suddenly aware of the space of the house; the air it occupies and which occupies it, of the hanging weight of it, high up here at five thousand feet, and the empty night rising out of the ground as dusk arrives in the mountains, and down in the gorge, ringing chasms throat roaring water into fathomless depths, unseen by Humankind and all but the bravest of beasts, while I sit and converse with a woman long dead.

  Around her neck she wears a bivalve locket, the kind with a picture in each half, or, in this case, as I already know, two locks of hair. It’s covered in fine, dark green leather. I have seen it before. I saw it in a museum in Oxford, ages ago. Ages. Yet it sits now around Mary’s neck, resting on her chest. I wonder briefly if air is passing into and out of those lungs, then the firelight catches the inscription on the locket, set in brass filigree. I don’t need to get closer to read it.

  Beati gli occhi che lo vider vivo.

  Blessed are the eyes that saw him alive.

  Time bends above our heads as the fire licks the soot from the inside of the stove and she thinks her memories and I think mine, and then she tilts her head towards me again.

  ‘You are not going to complete your project,’ she states, with such certainty she might have been talking about the coming of the night.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. For all your … dislike of my book, you are clearly aware that it has reached into you. Furthermore, I notice you do not mention one of the criticisms that is most frequently levelled at it …’

  She wants me to ask, and I do.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That it was not even my idea in the first place – this hideous tale of a man creating a monster – but was suggested to me by the conversing of my husband, and his … mentor.’

  ‘Lord Byron?’

  ‘Yes, you know who I mean, and you know the episode to which I refer – it was their discussions of galvanism and modern natural philosophy that I listened to. They wondered aloud about the reanimation of the dead. And lo! That was the story I wrote. I wonder why you don’t care to list this among your compilation of the faults of my book.’

  She fixes me with that gaze. I hold it for a moment.

  ‘But that isn’t a fault with the book itself. Everyone takes inspiration from somewhere, don’t they?’

  ‘Don’t they indeed,’ she says. ‘Would you care to enlarge upon this subject?’

  No, I think. I would not. I keep my mouth shut. She lets it drop.

  ‘Anyway, all this is beside the point. And in some ways, I agree with you. There is one matter, however, that is more important than all of these other matters.’

  ‘Which is?’

  I find I have begun to talk more formally, more in the way she’s speaking.

  ‘Which is that there is something I need from you.’

  Not for the first time I am unable even to find words, never mind the way to say them.

  ‘From the start,’ she says. ‘From the very outset, my book has been misunderstood. And so it is hardly to be marvelled at that no one understands it now, when from the outset it was misinterpreted. I can no longer allow this to happen. I need the true meaning to be disseminated. And you are the writer who is going to make that happen.’

  I lift my head sharply.

  ‘No,’ I say. I almost laugh, but there is nothing funny about this situation. ‘No. I am not that writer.’

  ‘I’m growing weary,’ she says. ‘I need to retire. I give you three days to think it through. Ask yourself questions if you like … And I might say, it is conceivable, after my having come here … that there will be other visitations. I suggest you consider everything that has been said. I should add that …’

  She falls silent. I wonder if it is true that even ghosts grow weary, that even ghosts tire. And then I think, my god, of course they must, faced with an eternity of nothingness. Who would not tire? Is she trapped here, in the centre of a triangle of her own devising? Or perhaps I have conjured her, with my magical triangles.

  I see she is waiting for me to ask her to continue.

  ‘What?’ I mumble. In protest, I get up and pretend that the stove needs more wood. Opening the door, I throw a log to the flames.

  ‘I give you a word of caution. I suggest you beware other visits, especially if that visitor turns out to be my creation.’

  I turn towards her, and see that she has disappeared.

  Staring at the chair where she was sitting does not make her come back, and she is not the only thing to vanish: the fire is out. Where a moment before the log burner had been roaring, it is dead. I put my hand on the top of it. It’s cold.

  What is it that makes us create? What drives us to carve images in stone, to daub ochre and charcoal on the walls of caves? Why do we put oil on to canvas, blow notes of music into the air, why do we make marks on paper? Some would have you believe it’s all a waste of time; some random and essentially meaningless by-product of evolution that expends our energy on frivolous things, unimportant things; things unconnected with the central matters of life: food, clothes, shelter.

  These people are wrong.

  Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other activities that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, the need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy. Underlying both is the need to understand the world and to interact with it; and creation is a frightening act; one that takes courage, or at the very least naivety, while destruction is both easy, and (maybe) surprisingly, much safer.

  To understand the world. To understand what we are doing here when we are dropped on to a spinning rock in space, opening our eyes in wonder at the utter confusion of it all.

  Confusion. That’s what it is.

  You want horror? Isn’t that horror enough? We’re born into confusion, and there are but two responses to it.

  Creation. And destruction.

  *

  As soon as Mary left me, I was struck, as if by an invisible blow.

  I fell back on to the wooden boards of the chalet and my body smacked them like a hand on a drum. The house reverberated then, echoing in the hidden rooms that lay beneath me, and I wondered if Mary was down there, while at the same time knowing I could not go and find out.

  No doubt, in the darkening forest below the house, the stag was at large, its immodest antlers ducking under low boughs while I lay on the floor with my throbbing hand, slowly healing. Away across the mountaintops I could sense the cold lifting of the night; early stars emerging on to the ink-sheet, frost nipping the leaves of the few deciduous trees, leaving bare spindles to await the following spring.

  I lay, and time melted deeply into me and then I thought about what Mary had said.

  Beware of my creation.

  I relit the fire. Or should I say, I lit it for the first time that evening, then sat and waited out the long night in the armchair, sitting where Mary had sat, wondering many things, not least the pressing question of whether I am losing my mind. I felt very little, save apprehension about what might come, and how it might unveil itself to me, unveil itself. But nothing came.

  Eventually, I slept, and dawn woke me with stiffness in my neck and back and the chilling air of the house without the fire.

  I pulled myself from the chair, and went to throw
open the door, wanting the cold to wake me up properly. There was an inch of snow on the ground, no more.

  Then I pulled myself from my chair while I realised that I was already standing by the door. I shook my head, trying to understand what was happening, and while I did, I watched the snow steadily melt. And then I pulled myself from the chair.

  *

  By lunchtime, the snow had gone. The sun bowled over the high lip of the mountains opposite the house and the world began to steam with the evaporation of the damp from wooden surfaces, from the tin roof of the house, from the roof of the woodshed, from the flat stones that lay beside the stone water trough.

  Then there came a time of space in which I knew nothing more than that a dead woman had shown herself to me and I knew most profoundly that things were starting, not winding up, as I had thought. I had thought that time was closing and I was in that all too short and lovely spell of creation and now I saw that what I was doing was not writing, not creating, but that I had been co-opted into an act of re-creation.

  You want more words? I have none. Why are more necessary? Why? Are people so stupid that they do not see what has been put in front of them in black and white? Or not stupid, but rushed, hurried for time? Too harried to understand the words? And this despite the fact that the words are not only in black and white, but black and white that they can choose to reconsider. It only takes some moments to flick back and re-read, doesn’t it? And this is not a gift the moving picture theatre offers you, is it? Nor can you have a singer skip, re-skip and repeat at your whim. So if you have missed something, here, in black and white, then you could enable your god-given right to remind yourself of everything I have said so far; I promise you it is enough.

  And you, I give you this, you always taught me to say less. You always taught me to draw back where others would waste a dictionary’s worth of words, for things that have already been stated, in black and white.

  But, here:

  I give you this too.

  A dead woman came to me, and spoke. She bid me to do her work, where she could not.

  And I am not of a mind to obey.