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Putrescent – that was the only way to describe the odour that pervaded the library suddenly and unexpectedly: A smell of carrion. And there was a sound, too. If he was pressed he would say it was the faint buzzing of flies, but that would be ridiculous and besides the buzzing was so faint he would never swear on it. Nevertheless it was the smell that compelled Roy to place the book back on its shelf and shift away, pull a handkerchief from his pocket and clamp it over his mouth and nose. He backed down the aisle towards the high windows some of which remained open even at this late hour, admitting fresh air. But there was no escape.
‘You love me don’t you?’
The voice came from behind the shelves; a woman’s voice, seductive and soft, plaintive almost. A mature voice containing no trace of madness; a voice you could listen to all night on a veranda as you held its owner’s hand and rejoiced in the fact that she was addressing you.
The words lured him, so he forgot the handkerchief and let it slide from his mouth. And as he did so the odour changed, became fresh meat with a touch of lavender, as though a cow grazed in a meadow on a summer’s day. He smelt cloth and leather, and the more he allowed the shifting odours to pervade him the more they changed, as though a woman was being manufactured, cobbled together, adjusted and assembled into the love of his life, one of those lucky moments when you are in the right place at the right time and you come together, when you can sleep secure in the soft touch of flesh.
And still that faint sound; he thought of a stone kitchen on a cool day, with those strange flies hovering between life and death, grown fat and old and lazy through the season; labouring through the air, groggy on their diet of filth.
‘Tell me you love me.’
His eyes wandered the spines of books trying to locate her as she moved; the clicks of her boots travelling the parquet floor. He looked up and down the aisle. She spoke to him because no one else was there, unless her lover waited for her on the other side of the books. That thought made him sad, and as if to swamp him in that emotion the odour transformed into a rich and flowing scent, a mountain stream, invigorating, healthy, seductive. He slid the handkerchief back into his pocket and waited. Absently, his hand smoothed his hair.
She spoke to him; who else? It was a deserted library he entered on this Friday evening. Most people were home with their families or out with their friends after study. He came to read Kafka, in particular his novel, The Castle, something he had failed to understand in his youth, and it was that, the challenge to his now hopefully mature mind, which made him want to read it again, that and the fact that his life now mirrored K’s – a labyrinth of bureaucracy stifling his purpose. He stared at the parquet floor and grimaced; so easy to defeat his intentions, pessimism attached to every thought and the wooden blocks of the floor staggered him, their zigzag patterns snaking away, offering any number of routes, but always there lay the question – which one?
She was there, of course; a threat to his sanity, confusion offered up, a litany of options demanding answers: but thank God she was stubborn. She stood at the end of the aisle, rake thin and dressed in black, her pale face gaunt as a satanic Madonna, her lips crimson with paint, her dark eyes protected by cathedral arches of bone.
At once her beauty struck him, but his mind already searched for flaws: perhaps he was blinded by loneliness and she was in fact a grotesque; only the laughter of people he vaguely knew, neighbours and the like, would wake him to that fact: Such a useless man.
‘You don’t know me,’ she said, ‘I watched you enter from the street, I chose you.’ A smile sculpted her mouth, it revealed brown-stained teeth, no cavities, just staining; perhaps she was addicted to tea, or had a prodigious smoking habit. He imagined a junkie, lost in thought, smoking all through the night, unconscious of the action, simply requiring a drug. ‘Impulses should be followed, don’t you think?’
Velvet black eyes.
He shrugged; she would soon tire of him. ‘Love for someone you have never met?’
‘Sometimes you can just tell.’
Now that she was close the odours once again stewed. The smell of sewers and morgues, the smell of mass graves, chicken rotten and unwisely brought out following a week of poor storage: a smell you would reel from. And the flies; at least half a dozen cleaning their forelegs and jerking around on the sleeves and the collar of her tight black jacket, almost a bodice, clothes you’d see on a dummy in a theatre changing room if they were performing Ibsen. She had a veil, too, black and lifted to her forehead, crisscrossing her flesh in such a way that it made him gasp. The back of his hand rested against his mouth.
‘Do you love me?’
‘How …’ what was the point …? No doubt she had escaped from some institution and at that very moment the police were waiting for her downstairs. How could anyone love someone they had never met? Someone they didn’t know? It was a childish attitude, the behaviour of an unbalanced mind, a mind that would eventually and inexorably wreck him and leave him suicidal. If, by any chance, she was sane and she did in fact love him for some reason so obscene that it was intelligible only to an unbalanced psychiatrist who operated in the same desert, he had no doubt that the caprice would end: she would leave, she would take his heart, she would remove his dignity and leave him shredded like a mantis dismantling a fly. He sighed, ‘What if I said yes?’
She smiled again but this time the staining damage the drug habit had wrought on her teeth appeared attractive. Attractive in the sense that he couldn’t imagine kissing her, and yet the teeth were solid and well-formed, sound enough to be recovered, the veneer of staining acting as a temptation, lingerie in her mouth, offering him a glimpse of what lay beneath. His gaze travelled her face; the tight, half-starved flesh allowed only two faint lines to bracket her smile. Her relief was palpable.
‘I knew it,’ she said, ‘I knew I could not be wrong. Why don’t you come with me? We will celebrate our love, the union I have been craving for.’ She held out her hand, as pure white as candle wax, a delicate leaf of slender bones, wrapped close with flesh, and, yes, stained with tobacco. ‘We shall have romance.’
Insane or not why would he decline her offer? Who cared if she pushed him to suicide? That day was not far off anyway, a man could only take so much and Kafka, as ever, confounded his investigations, left him confused and alone, shivering with fear and confusion in the snow. He allowed his mind to transform her scent. It became a bank of flowering plants in the sun, the flies were productive bees … he took her hand and as he approached her she raised her face and parted her lips. They kissed: her arms snaked about his shoulders to the nape of his neck, her hands moved through his hair, her body pressed. And the flies flew, buzzing lazily, waiting for the time when once again when they could settle.
‘It’s going to be wonderful,’ she said, as they drew apart. She bit her lip. ‘I cannot tell you what I am thinking now. You would run away. But can you feel it, the charge in my fingers?’
This – by turns – stinking, beautiful and wretched woman whose dreadful teeth and company of flies would make any sane man think twice, had, nevertheless, tempted him. She did taste of coffee and tobacco, she tasted of crimson paint and lungs, she tasted of silk and bread and leather boots, she tasted of the air in the street, she tasted of pages that she had absolutely no interest in reading; she tasted of the universe she traversed; he moved as if to kiss her again. He felt her fingers close tight on his own, and, despite everything, he still said; ‘Yes.’
‘Do you welcome it?’
Another Friday night, but this time unexpectedly and joyously changed forever. Ordinarily what would he do now? Go home, cook pasta, listen to the clock, think about death, drink some alcohol to forget it all and then fall asleep. Why should he miss any of that …? He nodded.
She let out a short breath of satisfaction. She squeezed his hand and led him away from those awful books.
‘I know a place,’ she said, ‘where we can drink something and get to know each a little better before tonight, after all, some protocol should be followed. I have no father to guide me in these things but I have read enough magazines to have some idea of how we should conduct ourselves. What is your name?’
‘Roy.’
‘Roy,’ she smiled and cocked her head as though she could hear the syllable echo around the library. ‘Mine is Helen.’ She squeezed his fingers again. ‘So, Roy, you must be a little surprised. I have been forward, haven’t I?’
Her skirts were long and black and heavy and clung to her figure. Despite her thinness her limbs had shape and the word that came to his mind as he watched her in motion—in the blurred periphery of his vision—was ham; meat he could move his hand over; flesh that made his breathing hard to control: ham, shank … thigh. She wore a pair of black lace boots, but her skirts obscured her calves; he found he wanted to see them. Remembering her question he replied.
‘No, you haven’t … Well, yes, you have been forward, but I am more than glad of it. I …’ he grew afraid of his voice. How easy and how terrible it would be to say the wrong thing.
‘I – what?’ She smiled and stopped and touched him with her hip.
Suddenly he remembered and his dialogue became an unconscious search for facts. ‘You saw me enter the library?’
She tugged him and started to walk on. ‘Ah, I wondered when you would ask. All in good time: first we must get a coffee.’
They paraded, yes, that was what is was, they paraded between the aisles of books. He squeezed the bones of her fingers. Within five minutes he had ventured from being alone to being in company; he felt the ridges of her knuckles and the sharpness of her nails. He drifted with her.
‘But before the coffee,’ she said, as though everything she said was normal, ‘I would like to be reassured that you are at ease with me. I would hate for you to be shocked by the things I do. For example, I like mustard on its own; some girls eat peanut butter from a jar with a knife, and I do the same, only with mustard.’ She laughed lightly.
‘Mustard?’
‘Does that alarm you?’
They reached the library desk, the librarian smiled as they went by.
‘No books?’
‘No,’ Helen said, ‘I’m afraid we won’t have time to read tonight.’ She stopped and draped her arm about Roy’s waist. ‘I have found the man I love.’
The librarian smiled, stamped a book and closed it. ‘Love,’ she said, ‘Such a strange word. There’s a finality to it, isn’t there? Open and close your heart. Of course if you remain in love it stays open. Love: both beautiful and yet, at the same time, gross and indecent; filthy even, in the way of clothes carelessly dropped, the bed occupied and time forgotten as these bladders of our corpses merge.’
‘I know what you mean!’ Helen bit her lip. ‘I know exactly what you mean. And I intend to enjoy both aspects to the full.’
The flies settled back on her clothes. They moved jerkily, stopping here and there to feed. Roy thought about brushing them off but then he thought that would be like roughing her skin with sandpaper, an attempt to erase her identity. He watched the flies, gazed at Helen’s slender neck and loved them both.
The librarian laid down her stamp. ‘I read a book once in which the love described was so sordid it became sublime.’
‘What is your name?’ Helen asked. She leaned on the desk.
‘Florence.’
‘Well, Florence, we are sisters, and it has been my fortunate joy to meet you.’
‘I shall give you something.’ Florence pulled open a drawer and reaching inside retrieved a small sketch pad which she brought out and offered. ‘It’s empty,’ she said, ‘you should fill it with illustrations of your experience.’
‘Oh.’ Helen gazed at it. It had a black and white print of a Parisian café on its cover. Underneath, in Gothic font, the words Sketch Book imprisoned themselves. Helen underlined the words with her fingers. ‘You are wonderful,, Florence. I shall return and we shall pore over everything, I shall leave nothing out. It will be like you had been with us and we reminisced over a love, over an episode of filth that we had enjoyed together.’
Helen took the book and then a library card upon which, with an efficient glance, she found Florence’s name.
With a soft tug on Roy’s hand, she led her captive away.
Copyright © Rob W. Bayley 2012
So, then I thought if a Swedish film company was to make the film or the TV series then Vanessa Palmer would have to be played by a Swedish actress (I would still love Maruschka Detmers to do it, but that’s just a dream). So which one? I googled Swedish actresses and came up with three straight away (amazingly they were all Librans and one actually shares my birthday – weird). I selected one – Rebecca Ferguson – a star in The White Queen (damn, now I will have to watch that). She’s just about right I think. I could see her having a relationship with a postman and hot wiring a land cruiser.
On the same page I spotted a candidate for Heather (not a Libran this time) the exotically named – Tuva Moa Matilda Karolina Novotny Hedström – ideal art teacher junky type. I could see her in the fields spraying glue on corpses and smoking fungus joints.
So whose are those eyes in the header image? They belong to Maruschka Detmers, the star in the film of one of my favourite books, The Devil in the Flesh, penned by Raymond Radiguet.
I have 10 followers, that is so very cool. So I think I should be serious for a moment. Fine lines – you know them when you read them. In Nathan Filer’s Shock of the Fall one sentence stood peerless above the rest. It is where Matthew cajoles Simon into going with him to see a dead body in the middle of the night. Simon giggles, a parent coughs, they both freeze: ‘Simon made a show of it, making his whole body rigid, only his eyes moving from side to side, grinning at me.’ Such a simple line. But with great economy Filer perfectly describes a child with Down’s syndrome. The writer himself said of this line that when he had written it he knew he had got the work, meaning he had nailed it. And quite often a powerful line can ‘get’ the reader, atone for a multitude of sins, poor plot, bad characterisation, clunky syntax, just one extraordinary line will allow the reader to forgive and really believe that reading the work was worthwhile. Simon, confused and frightened, but happy and excited to be with the brother he trusts and loves, is an image that returns to me often. It’s a haunting image bearing in mind what follows.
Last Stop ... 