PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Pricksongs & Descants
Robert Coover is the author of some twenty books of fiction and plays, his most recent being Noir and A Child Again. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches ‘Cave Writing’ (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed-media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write programme. Coover currently splits his time between the United States of America and London, and Pricksongs & Descants, Gerald’s Party, Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid are all published in Penguin Modern Classics.
Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed international bestselling author ever since. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the critically acclaimed novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, and One Good Turn.
Case Histories introduced her readers to Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, and won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster. Brodie also features in One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and most recently, Started Early, Took My Dog.
This was the hard truth: to be Jack become the Giant, his own mansions routed by the child he was. Yes, he’d spilled his beans and climbed his own green stalk and tipped old Humpty over, only to learn, now much later, that that was probably the way the Old Man, in his wisdom, had wanted it.
He swung, chanting to himself to keep his stroke steady, and he dropped those tall hard trees, but he was all too aware of what he was really doing, of what was happening up there, or about to, and how the Ogre in him wouldn’t drop away and leave her free. And, look, he was picking on the young trees today, too, he caught himself at that, my God. Was it envy, was that all it was? Feeling sorry, old man, that all that joy and terror is over for you, never to rise again? Hell, now.
But, no, it wasn’t jealousy, she was his own blood, after all. And just a child.
He swung, a sinew snapped, the tree leaned, crackled, toppled with a great wheeze and crash. He decided to chop it up into foot-length logs.
And, listen, he wished her the joy, yes, he did, both of them for that matter, if not all the world. He had told her about it, he’d wanted her to love life and that was part of it, a good part of it. Those frantic trips up and down his beanstem had taught him that much. But he liked to hear her laugh and watch her wonder with a smile, and, well, he hadn’t said much about the terror.
He saw the tree had held a nest. Its pale speckled eggs lay scattered, all broken but one. He stared at the unbroken egg. He removed his hat, wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. But what could he do about it? Nothing.
And so he was afraid. For her. For himself. Because he’d given her her view of the world, in fragments of course, not really thinking it all out, she listening, he telling, and because of her gaiety and his love, his cowardly lonely love, he’d left out the terror. He’d smelled the blood, all right, but he’d called it essence. And when she encountered it, found herself alone and besieged: what then? He’d be part of it, that’s what, feared and hated. And he’d thought the old Giant had lived in heaven, the poor bastard!
He swung furiously at the felled tree, his whole body vibrating from the shock of the blows, enraged at life that it should so resist. People-agony. Love. Hanging on. A goddamn mess.
There was his old mother up there, suffering continuance, preferring rot to obliteration, possessed like them all by a mad will, mindless and intransigent. Did he resent her? yes, he did. There they all went, birthing hopelessly sentient creatures into the inexplicable emptiness, giving carelessly of their bellies, teats, and strength, then sinking away into addled uselessness, humming the old songs, the old lies, and smiling toothless infuriating smiles. God! he leaned into the tree with all his strength.
And worse: that she could fear, his daughter, that she could hate. He’d willingly die to save her from death, live with all the terror if he could but free her from it. But, no, he thought, remembering the world’s dead and all their forgotten itches, you can’t get out of it that easy, old buddy, only kings could sleep and rise again, and all the kings were gone.
He paused in his chopping. Yes, a knock, he’d heard it. Perhaps today then. Perhaps very soon. He leaned his axe against the felled tree, turned anxiously towards the cottage. He remembered the old formula: fill the belly full of stones.
But wait. Sooner or later, it must happen, mustn’t it? Sooner or later, she’d know everything, know he’d lied. He’d pretended to her that there were no monsters, no wolves or witches, but yes, goddamn it, there were, there were. And in fact one of them got ahold of him right now, made him grab up his axe, dig ceremonially at his crotch, and return to his labours, and with a weird perverse insistence, made him laugh . . .
so bless me I’m ruminatin on the old times when virtue was its own so-called reward and acquired a well-bejewelled stud in the bargain propped up there in the stale limp sheets once the scene of so much blood and beauty like I say propped up and dyin away there in my old four-poster which on gamier days might seem a handsome well-lathed challenge to an old doxy but which this bad day threatens to throw up walls between the posts and box me in God help and I’m wonderin where’s my goodies? will I make it to the end? where’s the durned kid? and to while the awful time workin up a little tuneful reminiscence or two not so much of the old obscenities suffered but rather of the old wild dreams of what in some other kinda world I mighta had yes me with my wishful way of neckin ducks and kissin toads and lizards
oh I know why she’s late you warn her and it does no good I know who’s got her giddy ear with his old death-cuntand-prick songs haven’t I heard them all my God and smelt his hot breath in the singin? yes I know him can see him now lickin his hairy black chops and composin his polyphonies outa dread and appetite whisperin his eclogues sprung from disaster croonin his sacral entertainments yes I know him well and I tell her but Granny she says Granny you don’t understand the times are different there’s a whole new –
don’t understand! whose nose does she think she’s twistin the little cow? bit of new fuzz on her pubes and juice in the little bubbies and off she prances into that world of hers that ain’t got forests nor prodigies a dippy smile on her face and her skirts up around her ears well well I’ll give her a mystery today I will if I’m not too late already and so what if I am? shoot! let her go tippytoin through the flux and tedium and trip on her dropped drawers a few times and see if she don’t come runnin back to old Granny God preserve me whistlin a different tune! don’t understand! hah! for ain’t I the old Beauty who married the Beast?
yes knew all the old legends I did and gave my heart to them who wouldn’t that heard them? ain’t there somethin wrong with Beauty Papa? my sisters would ask ain’t she a little odd chasin about after toads and crows and stinky old creatures? but I had a dream and Papa maybe was uneasy about it but he was nothin if not orthodox and so had to respect it and even blessed my marriage when I found me a Beast
only my Beast never became a prince
but Granny it’s a new generation! hah! child I give you generations without number transient as clouds and fertile as fieldmice! don’t speak to me of the revelations of rebirthers and genitomancers! sing me no lumpen ballads of deodorized earths cleansed of the stink of enigma and revulsion! for I have mated with the monster my love and listened to him lap clean his lolly after
and the basket of goodies? is that you on the path my dear? hurry! for my need is great and my wisdom overflows and your own time is hard by
for listen I have suffered a lifetime of his doggy stink until I truly felt I couldn’t live without it and child his snore would wake the dead though now I cannot sleep for the silence yes and I have pawed in stewpots with him and have paused to watch him drop a public turd or two on sidewalks and seashores in populous parks and private parlours and granddaughter I have been split with the pain and terrible haste of his thick quick cock and then still itchin and bleedin have gazed on as he leapt other bitches at random and I have watched my own beauty decline my love and still no Prince no Prince and yet you doubt that I understand? and loved him my child loved the damned Beast after all
yes yes I hear you knockin come in! hurry! bring me goodies! for I have veils to lift and tales to tell . . .
Something had changed. She stood motionless at the cottage door. Suspended. She felt abandoned, orphaned. Yet discovered. The bees hummed relentlessly among the flowers alongside the path. The sun beat down on the white weatherboards with an incessant, almost urgent, calm. What was it – ? Aha! To begin with: the door was open!
Yes, she had been coming here for years and years, forever it seemed, and many times each year, always for the same reason, if that’s what it was, a reason, and always – she hesitated: some dim memory – ? no, no – always the door had been closed.
Well, and so what? She stepped back from the door, and a kind of relief swept over her, and a kind of anxiety. It was curious. That door. Yet, otherwise, things seemed about the same: the cottage itself, white in the sun; the garden, well cared for and in neat little rows, and over there the small shed where the garden tools were kept; the old well with the bucket drawn up under the small parasol-like roof, the bucket itself dry and cracked, surely useless, but much as it had always been; finally, down a short distance from the cottage, the woods, where even now could be heard the familiar chuck-chuck-chuck of the lumberman’s axe, measured, deliberate, solemn, muffled but clearly audible. It was simply that the door was open.
But wait! She frowned, clutched her basket to her side, glanced around. The sun, like just the sun: wasn’t it somehow hotter today, brighter, didn’t it seem stuck up there, brought to a strange deadly standstill? And the cottage, didn’t the cottage have a harder edge, the vines a subtler grip on the weatherboards, and wasn’t the air somehow full of spiders? She trembled. The old well seemed suddenly to hide some other well, the garden to speak of a stranger unimagined garden. And even the friendly rhythmic chucking of the lumberman’s axe: wasn’t it somehow too close by today, perversely insistent in its constancy?
Old stories welled in her like a summation of an old woman’s witless terrors, fierce sinuous images with flashing teeth and terrible eyes, phantoms springing from the sun’s night-tunnels to devour her childhood – in fright, she reached impulsively for the doorknob, glittering brassily in the sun’s glare. She hesitated. Beyond the door? The knob was warm in her grip, and she had a new awareness of breath and motion. She stared at the aperture and knew: not her. No. That much was obvious, an age had passed, that much the door ajar had told her.
She listened to the lumberman’s steady axe-stroke. The woods. Yes, an encounter, she smiled to recall it, to remember his deference, surprised by it then, but no longer. An encounter and an emergence. And so: she had known all along. And knowing she’d known somehow eased her anguish. She smiled faintly at the mockery of the basket she clutched. Well, it would be a big production, that was already apparent. An elaborate game, embellished with masks and poetry, a marshalling of legendary doves and herbs. And why not? She could well avail herself of his curiously obsequious appetite while it lasted. Even as the sun suddenly snapped its bonds and jerked westward, propelling her over the threshold, she realized that though this was a comedy from which, once entered, you never returned, it nevertheless possessed its own astonishments and conjurings, its towers and closets, and even more pathways, more gardens, and more doors.
Inside, she felt the immediate oppression of the scene behind drop off her shoulders like a red cloak. All that remained of it was the sullen beat of the lumberman’s axe, and she was able to still even that finally, by closing the door firmly behind her and putting the latch.
I wander the island, inventing it. I make a sun for it, and trees – pines and birch and dogwood and firs – and cause the water to lap the pebbles of its abandoned shores. This, and more: I deposit shadows and dampness, spin webs, and scatter ruins. Yes: ruins. A mansion and guest cabins and boat houses and docks. Terraces, too, and bath houses and even an observation tower. All gutted and window-busted and autographed and shat upon. I impose a hot midday silence, a profound and heavy stillness. But anything can happen.
This small and secretive bay, here just below what was once the caretaker’s cabin and not far from the main boat house, probably once possessed its own system of docks, built out to protect boats from the big rocks along the shore. At least the refuse – the long bony planks of grey lumber heaped up at one end of the bay – would suggest that. But aside from the planks, the bay is now only a bay, shallow, floored with rocks and cans and bottles. Schools of silver fish, thin as fingernails, fog the bottom, and dragonflies dart and hover over its placid surface. The harsh snarl of the boat motor – for indeed a boat has been approaching, coming in off the lake into this small bay – breaks off abruptly, as the boat carves a long gentle arc through the bay, and slides, scraping bottom, towards a shallow pebbly corner. There are two girls in the boat.
Bedded deep in the grass, near the path up to the first guest cabin, lies a wrought-iron poker. It is long and slender with an intricately worked handle, and it is orange with rust. It lies shadowed, not by trees, but by the grass that has grown up wildly around it. I put it there.
The caretaker’s son, left behind when the island was deserted, crouches naked in the brambly fringe of the forest overlooking the bay. He watches, scratching himself, as the boat scrapes to a stop and the girls stand – then he scampers through the trees and bushes to the guest cabin.
The girl standing forward – fashionbook-trim in tight gold pants, ruffled blouse, silk neckscarf – hesitates, makes one false start, then jumps from the boat, her sandaled heel catching the water’s edge. She utters a short irritable cry, hops up on a rock, stumbles, lands finally in dry weeds on the other side. She turns her heel up and frowns down over her shoulder at it. Tiny muscles in front of her ears tense and ripple. She brushes anxiously at a thick black fly in front of her face, and asks peevishly: ‘What do I do now, Karen?’
I arrange the guest cabin. I rot the porch and tatter the screen door and infest the walls. I tear out the light switches, gut the mattresses, smash the windows, and shit on the bathroom floor. I rust the pipes, kick in the papered walls, unhinge doors. Really, there’s nothing to it. In fact, it’s a pleasure.
Once, earlier in this age, a family with great wealth purchased this entire island, here up on the border, and built on it all these houses, these cabins and the mansion up there on the promontory, and the boat house, docks, bath houses, observation tower. They tamed the island some, seeded lawn grass, contrived their own sewage system with indoor appurtenances, generated electricity for the rooms inside and for the Japanese lanterns and postlamps without, and they came up here from time to time in the summers. They used to maintain a caretaker on the island year round, housed him in the cabin by the boat house, but then the patriarch of the family died, and the rest had other things to do. They stopped coming to the island and forgot about caretaking.
The one in gold pants watches as the girl still in the boat switches the motor into neutral and upends it, picks up a yellowish-grey rope from the bottom, and tosses it ashore to her. She reaches for it straight-armed, then shies from it, letting it fall to the ground. She takes it up with two fingers and a thumb and holds it out in front of her. The other girl, Karen (she wears a light yellow dress with a beige cardigan over it), pushes a toolkit under a seat, gazes thoughtfully about the boat, then jumps out. Her canvas shoes splash in the water’s edge, but she pays no notice. She takes the rope from the girl in gold pants, loops it around a birch near the shore, smiles warmly, and then, with a nod, leads the way up the path.
At the main house, the mansion, there is a kind of veranda or terrace, a balcony of sorts, high out on the promontory, offering a spectacular view of the lake with its wide interconnecting expanses of blue and its many islands. Poised there now, gazing thoughtfully out on that view, is a tall slender man, dressed in slacks, white turtleneck shirt, and navy-blue jacket, smoking a pipe, leaning against the stone parapet. Has he heard a boat come to the island? He is unsure. The sound of the motor seemed to diminish, to grow more distant, before it stopped. Yet, on water, especially around islands, one can never trust what he hears.
Also this, then: the mansion with its many rooms, its debris, its fireplaces and wasps’ nests, its musty basement, its grand hexagonal loggia and bright red doors. Though the two girls will not come here for a while – first, they have the guest cabin to explore, the poker to find – I have been busy. In the loggia, I have placed a green piano. I have pulled out its wires, chipped and yellowed its ivory keys, and cracked its green paint. I am nothing if not thorough, a real stickler for detail. I have dismembered the piano’s pedals and dropped an old boot in its body (this, too, I’ve designed: it is horizontal and harp-shaped). The broken wires hang like rusted hairs.
The caretaker’s son watches for their approach through a shattered window of the guest cabin. He is stout and hairy, muscular, dark, with short bowed legs and a rounded spiny back. The hair on his head is long, and a thin young beard sprouts on his chin and upper lip. His genitals hang thick and heavy and his buttocks are shaggy. His small eyes dart to and fro: where are they?
In the bay, the sun’s light has been constant and oppressive; along the path, it is mottled and varied. Even in this variety, though, there is a kind of monotony, a determined patterning that wants a good wind. Through these patterns move the two girls, Karen long-striding with soft steps and expectant smile, the other girl hurrying behind, halting, hurrying again, slapping her arms, her legs, the back of her neck, cursing plaintively. Each time she passes between two trees, the girl in pants stops, claws the space with her hands, runs through, but spiderwebs keep diving and tangling into her hair just the same.
Between two trees on the path, a large spider – black with a red heart on its abdomen – weaves an intricate web. The girl stops short, terrified. Nimbly, the shiny black creature works, as though spelling out some terrible message for her alone. How did Karen pass through here without brushing into it? The girl takes a step backward, holding her hands to her face. Which way around? To the left it is dark, to the right sunny: she chooses the sunny side and there, not far from the path, comes upon a wrought-iron poker, long and slender with an intricately worked handle. She bends low, her golden haunches gleaming over the grass: how beautiful it is! On a strange impulse, she kisses it – POOF! before her stands a tall slender man, handsome, dressed in dark slacks, white turtleneck shirt, and jacket, smoking a pipe. He smiles down at her. ‘Thank you,’ he says, and takes her hand.
Karen is some distance in front, almost out of sight, when the other girl discovers, bedded in the grass, a wrought-iron poker. Orange with rust, it is long and slender with an elaborate handle. She crouches to examine it, her haunches curving golden above the bluegreen grass, her long black hair drifting lightly down over her small shoulders and wafting in front of her fineboned face. ‘Oh!’ she says softly. ‘How strange! How beautiful!’ Squeamishly, she touches it, grips it, picks it up, turns it over. Not so rusty on the underside – but bugs! millions of them! She drops the thing, shudders, stands, wipes her hand several times on her pants, shudders again. A few steps away, she pauses, glances back, then around at everything about her, concentrating, memorizing the place probably. She hurries on up the path and sees her sister already at the first guest cabin.
The girl in gold pants? yes. The other one, Karen? also. In fact, they are sisters. I have brought two sisters to this invented island, and shall, in time, send them home again. I have dressed them and may well choose to undress them. I have given one three marriages, the other none at all, nor is that the end of my beneficence and cruelty. It might even be argued that I have invented their common parents. No, I have not. We have options that may, I admit, seem strangely limited to some . . .
She crouches, haunches flexing golden above the bluegreen grass, and kisses the strange poker, kisses its handle and its long rusted shaft. Nothing. Only a harsh unpleasant taste. I am a fool, she thinks, a silly romantic fool. Yet why else has she been diverted to this small meadow? She kisses the tip – POOF! ‘Thank you,’ he says, smiling down at her. He bows to kiss her cheek and take her hand.
The guest cabin is built of rough-hewn logs, hardly the fruit of necessity, given the funds at hand, but probably it was thought fashionable; proof of traffic with other cultures is adequately provided by its gabled roof and log columns. It is here, on the shaded porch, where Karen is standing, waiting for her sister. Karen waves when she sees her, ducking down there along the path; then she turns and enters the cabin through the broken front door.
He knows that one. He’s been there before. He crouches inside the door, his hairy body tense. She enters, staring straight at him. He grunts. She smiles, backing away. ‘Karen!’ His small eyes dart to the doorway, and he shrinks back into the shadows.
She kisses the rusted iron poker, kisses its ornate handle, its long rusted shaft, kisses the tip. Nothing happens. Only a rotten taste in her mouth. Something is wrong. ‘Karen!’
‘Karen!’ the girl in pants calls from outside the guest cabin. ‘Karen, I just found the most beautiful thing!’ The second step of the porch is rotted away. She hops over it onto the porch, drags open the tattered screen door. ‘Karen, I – oh, good God! look what they’ve done to this house! Just look!’ Karen, about to enter the kitchen, turns back, smiling, as her sister surveys the room: ‘The walls all smashed in, even the plugs in the wall and the light switches pulled out! Think of it, Karen! They even had electricity! Out here on this island, so far from everything civilized! And, see, what beautiful paper they had on the walls! And now just look at it! It’s so – oh! what a dreadful beautiful beastly thing all at once!’
But where is the caretaker’s son? I don’t know. He was here, shrinking into the shadows, when Karen’s sister entered. Yet, though she catalogues the room’s disrepair, there is no mention of the caretaker’s son. This is awkward. Didn’t I invent him myself, along with the girls and the man in the turtleneck shirt? Didn’t I round his back and stunt his legs and cause the hair to hang between his buttocks? I don’t know. The girls, yes, and the tall man in the shirt – to be sure, he’s one of the first of my inventions. But the caretaker’s son? To tell the truth, I sometimes wonder if it was not he who invented me . . .
The caretaker’s son, genitals hanging hard and heavy, eyes aglitter, shrinks back into the shadows as the girl approaches, and then goes bounding silently into the empty rooms. Behind an unhinged door, he peeks stealthily at the declaiming girl in gold pants, then slips, almost instinctively, into the bathroom to hide. It was here, after all, where first they met.
Karen passes quietly through the house, as though familiar with it. In the kitchen, she picks up a chipped blue teakettle, peers inside. All rust. She thumps it, the sound is dull. She sets it on a bench in the sunlight. On all sides, there are broken things: rubble really. Windows gape, shards of glass in the edges pointing out the middle spaces. The mattresses on the floors have been slashed with knives. What little there is of wood is warped. The girl in the tight gold pants and silk neckscarf moves, chattering, in and out of rooms. She opens a white door, steps into a bathroom, steps quickly out again. ‘Judas God!’ she gasps, clearly horrified. Karen turns, eyebrows raised in concern. ‘Don’t go in there, Karen! Don’t go in there!’ She clutches one hand to her ruffled blouse. ‘About a hundred million people have gone to the bathroom in there!’ Exiting the bathroom behind her, a lone fly swims lazily past her elbow into the close warm air of the kitchen. It circles over a cracked table – the table bearing newspapers, shreds of wallpaper, tin cans, a stiff black washcloth – then settles on a counter near a rusted pipeless sink. It chafes its rear legs, walks past the blue teakettle’s shadow into a band of pure sunlight stretched out along the counter, and sits there.
The tall man stands, one foot up on the stone parapet, gazing out on the blue sunlit lake, drawing meditatively on his pipe. He has been deeply moved by the desolation of the island. And yet, it is only the desolation of artifact, is it not, the ruin of man’s civilized arrogance, nature reclaiming her own. Even the wilful mutilations: a kind of instinctive response to the futile artifices of imposed order, after all. But such reasoning does not appease him. Leaning against his raised knee, staring out upon the vast wilderness, hoping indeed he has heard a boat come here, he puffs vigorously on his pipe and affirms reason, man, order. Are we merely blind brutes loosed in a system of mindless energy, impotent, misdirected, and insolent? ‘No,’ he says aloud, ‘we are not.’
She peeks into the bathroom; yes, he is in there, crouching obscurely, shaggily, but eyes aglitter, behind the stool. She hears his urgent grunt and smiles. ‘Oh, Karen!’ cries the other girl from the rear of the house. ‘It’s so very sad!’ Hastily, Karen steps out into the hallway, eases the bathroom door shut, her heart pounding.
‘Oh, Karen, it’s so very sad!’ That’s the girl in the gold pants again, of course. Now she is gazing out a window. At: high weeds and grass crowding young birches, red rattan chair with the seat smashed out, backdrop of grey-trunked pines. She is thinking of her three wrecked marriages, her affairs, and her desolation of spirit. The broken rattan chair somehow communicates to her a sensation of real physical pain. Where have all the Princes gone? she wonders. ‘I mean, it’s not the ones who stole the things, you know, the scavengers. I’ve seen people in Paris and Mexico and Algiers, lots of places, scooping rotten oranges and fishheads out of the heaped-up gutters and eating them, and I didn’t blame them, I didn’t dislike them, I felt sorry for them. I even felt sorry for them if they were just doing it to be stealing something, to get something for nothing, even if they weren’t hungry or anything. But it isn’t the people who look for things they want or need or even don’t need and take them, it’s the people who just destroy, destroy because – God! because they just want to destroy! Lust! That’s all, Karen! See? Somebody just went around these rooms driving his fist in the walls because he had to hurt, it didn’t matter who or what, or maybe he kicked them with his feet, and bashed the windows and ripped the curtains and then went to the bathroom on it all! Oh my God! Why? Why would anybody want to do that?’ The window in front of Karen (she has long since turned her back) is, but for one panel, still whole. In the excepted panel, the rupture in the glass is now spanned by a spiderweb more intricate than a butterfly’s wing, than a system of stars, its silver paths seeming to imitate or perhaps merely to extend the delicate tracery of the fractured glass still surrounding the hole. It is a new web, for nothing has entered it yet to alter its original construction. Karen’s hand reaches toward it, but then withdraws. ‘Karen, let’s get out of here!’
The girls have gone. The caretaker’s son bounds about the guest cabin, holding himself with one hand, smashing walls and busting windows with the other, grunting happily as he goes. He leaps up onto the kitchen counter, watches the two girls from the window, as they wind their way up to the main mansion, then squats joyfully over the blue teakettle, depositing . . . a love letter, so to speak.
A love letter! Wait a minute, this is getting out of hand! What happened to that poker, I was doing much better with the poker, I had something going there, archetypal and even maybe beautiful, a blend of eros and wisdom, sex and sensibility, music and myth. But what am I going to do with shit in a rusty teakettle? No, no, there’s nothing to be gained by burdening our fabrications with impieties. Enough that the skin of the world is littered with our contentious artifice, lepered with the stigmata of human aggression and despair, without suffering our songs to be flatted by savagery. Back to the poker.
‘Thank you,’ he says, smiling down at her, her haunches gleaming golden over the shadowed grass. ‘But, tell me, how did you know to kiss it?’ ‘Call it woman’s intuition,’ she replies, laughing lightly, and rises with an appreciative glance. ‘But the neglected state that it was in, it must have tasted simply dreadful,’ he apologizes, and kisses her gently on the cheek. ‘What momentary bitterness I might have suffered,’ she responds, ‘has been more than indemnified by the sweetness of your disenchantment.’ ‘My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spell-bound.’ She collapses, marvelling, at his feet.
Karen, alone on the path to the mansion, pauses. Where is her sister? Has something distracted her? Has she strayed? Perhaps she has gone on ahead. Well, it hardly matters, what can happen on a desolate island? they’ll meet soon enough at the mansion. In fact, Karen isn’t even thinking about her sister, she’s staring silently, entranced, at a small green snake, stretched across the path. Is it dozing? Or simply unafraid? Maybe it’s never seen a real person before, or doesn’t know what people can do. It’s possible: few people come here now, and it looks like a very young snake. Slender, wriggly, green, and shiny. No, probably it’s asleep. Smiling, Karen leaves the path, circling away from the snake so as not to disturb it. To the right of the path is a small clearing and the sun is hot there; to the left it is cool and shadowed in the gathering forest. Karen moves that way, in under the trees, picking the flowers that grow wildly here. Her cardigan catches on brambles and birch seedlings, so she pulls it off, tosses it loosely over her shoulder, hooked on one finger. She hears, not far away, a sound not unlike soft footfalls. Curious, she wanders that way to see who or what it is.
The path up to the main house, the mansion, is not even mottled, the sun does not reach back here at all, it is dark and damp-smelling, an ambience of mushrooms and crickets and fingery rustles and dead brown leaves never quite dry, or so it might seem to the girl in gold pants, were she to come this way. Where is she? His small eyes dart to and fro. Here, beside the path, trees have collapsed and rotted, seedlings and underbrush have sprung up, and lichens have crept softly over all surfaces, alive and dead. Strange creatures abide here.
‘Call it woman’s intuition,’ she says with a light laugh. He appraises her fineboned features, her delicate hands, her soft maidenly breasts under the ruffled blouse, her firm haunches gleaming golden over the shadowed grass. He pulls her gently to her feet, kisses her cheek. ‘You are enchantingly beautiful, my dear!’ he whispers. ‘Wouldn’t you like to lie with me here awhile?’ ‘Of course,’ she replies, and kisses his cheek in return, ‘but these pants are an awful bother to remove, and my sister awaits us. Come! Let us go up to the mansion!’
A small green snake lies motionless across the path. The girl approaching does not see it, sees only the insects flicking damply, the girl in tight pants which are still golden here in the deep shadows. Her hand flutters ceaselessly before her face, it was surely the bugs that drove these people away from here finally, ‘Karen, is this the right way?’, and she very nearly walks right on the snake, which has perhaps been dozing, but which now switches with a frantic whip of its shiny green tail off into the damp leaves. The girl starts at the sudden whirring shush at her feet, spins around clutching her hands to her upper arms, expecting the worst, but though staring wide-eyed at the sound, she can see nothing. Why did she ever let her sister talk her into coming here? ‘Karen!’ She runs, ignoring the webs now, right through all the gnats and flies, on up the path, crying out her sister’s name.
The caretaker’s son, poised gingerly on a moss-covered rock, peeking through the thick branches, watches the girl come up the path. Karen watches the caretaker’s son. From the rear, his prominent feature is his back, broad and rounded, humped almost, where tufts of dark hair sprout randomly. His head is just a small hairy lump beyond the mound of heavy back. His arms are as long as his legs are short, and the elbows, like the knees, turn outwards. Thick hair grows between his buttocks and down his thighs. Smiling, she picks up a pebble to toss at him, but then she hears her sister call her name.
Leaning against his raised knee, smoking his pipe, the tall man on the parapet stares out on the wilderness, contemplating the island’s ruin. Trees have collapsed upon one another, and vast areas of the island, once cleared and no doubt the stage for garden parties famous for miles around, are now virtually impassable. Brambles and bunch-berries grow wildly amid saxifrage and shinleaf, and everything in sight is mottled with moss. Lichens: the symbiotic union, he recalls, of fungi and algae. He smiles and at the same moment, as though it has been brought into being by his smile, hears a voice on the garden path. A girl. How charming, he’s to have company, after all! At least two, for he heard the voice on the path behind the mansion, and below him, slipping surefootedly through the trees and bushes, moves another creature in a yellow dress, carrying a beige sweater over her shoulder. She looks a little simple, not his type really, but then dissimilar organisms can, at times, enjoy mutually advantageous partnerships, can they not? He knocks the ashes from his pipe and refills the bowl.
At times, I forget that this arrangement is my own invention. I begin to think of the island as somehow real, its objects solid and intractable, its condition of ruin not so much an aesthetic design as an historical denouement. I find myself peering into blue teakettles, batting at spiderwebs, and contemplating a greenish-grey growth on the side of a stone parapet. I wonder if others might wander here without my knowing it; I wonder if I might die and the teakettle remain. ‘I have brought two sisters to this invented island,’ I say. This is no extravagance. It is indeed I who burdens them with curiosity and history, appetite and rhetoric. If they have names and griefs, I have provided them. In fact,’ I add, ‘without me they’d have no cunts.’ This is not (I interrupt here to tell you that I have done all that I shall do. I return here to bring you this news, since this seemed as good a place as any. Though you have more to face, and even more to suffer from me, this is in fact the last thing I shall say to you. But can the end be in the middle? Yes, yes, it always is . . .) meant to alarm, merely to make a truth manifest – yet I am myself somewhat alarmed. It is one thing to discover the shag of hair between my buttocks, quite another to find myself tugging the tight gold pants off Karen’s sister. Or perhaps it is the same thing, yet troubling in either case. Where does this illusion come from, this sensation of ‘hardness’ in a blue teakettle or an iron poker, golden haunches or a green piano?
In the hexagonal loggia of the mansion stands a grand piano, painted bright green, though chipped and cracked now with age and abuse. One can easily imagine a child at such a piano, a piano so glad and ready, perhaps two children, and the sun is shining – no, rather, there is a storm on the lake, the sky is in a fury, all black and pitching, the children are inside here out of the wind and storm, the little girl on the right, the boy on the left, pushing at each other a bit, staking out property lines on the keys, a grandmother, or perhaps just a lady, yet why not a grandmother? sitting on a window-bench gazing out on the frothy blue-black lake, and the children are playing Chopsticks, laughing, a little noisy surely, and the grandmother, or lady, looks over from time to time, forms a patient smile if they chance to glance up at her, then – well, but it’s only a supposition, who knows whether there were children or if they cared a damn about a green piano even on a bad day, Chopsticks least of all? No, it’s only a piece of fancy, the kind of fancy that is passing through the mind of the girl in gold pants who now reaches down, strikes a key. There is no sound, of course. The ivory is chipped and yellowed, the pedals dismembered, the wires torn out and hanging like rusted hairs. The girl wonders at her own unkemptness, feels a lock loose on her forehead, but there are no mirrors. Stolen or broken. She stares about her, nostalgically absorbed for some reason, at the elegantly timbered roof of the loggia, at the enormous stone fireplace, at the old shoe in the doorway, the wasps’ nests over one broken-out window. She sighs, steps out on the terrace, steep and proud over the lake. ‘It’s a sad place,’ she says aloud.
The tall man in the navy-blue jacket stands, one foot up on the stone parapet, gazing out on the blue sunlit lake, drawing meditatively on his pipe, while being sketched by the girl in the tight gold pants. ‘I somehow expected to find you here,’ she says. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ replies the man. Her three-quarters view of him from the rear allows her to include only the tip of his nose in her sketch, the edge of his pipebowl, the collar of his white turtleneck shirt. ‘I was afraid there might be others,’ she says. ‘Others?’ ‘Yes. Children perhaps. Or somebody’s grandmother. I saw so many names everywhere I went, on walls and doors and trees and even scratched into that green piano.’ She is carefully filling in on her sketch the dark contours of his navy-blue jacket. ‘No,’ he says, ‘whoever they were, they left here long ago.’ ‘It’s a sad place,’ she says, ‘and all too much like my own life.’ He nods. ‘You mean, the losing struggle against inscrutable blind forces, young dreams brought to ruin?’ ‘Yes, something like that,’ she says. ‘And getting kicked in and gutted and shat upon.’ ‘Mmm.’ He straightens. ‘Just a moment,’ she says, and he resumes his pose. The girl has accomplished a reasonable likeness of the tall man, except that his legs are stubby (perhaps she failed to centre her drawing properly, and ran out of space at the bottom of the paper) and his buttocks are bare and shaggy.
‘It’s a sad place,’ he says, contemplating the vast wilderness. He turns to find her grinning and wiggling her ears at him. ‘Karen, you’re mocking me!’ he complains, laughing. She props one foot up on the stone parapet, leans against her leg, sticks an iron poker between her teeth, and scowls upon the lake. ‘Come on! Stop it!’ he laughs. She puffs on the iron poker, blowing imaginary smoke-rings, then turns it into a walking stick and hobbles about imitating an old granny chasing young children. Next, she puts the poker to her shoulder like a rifle and conducts an inspection of all the broken windows facing on the terrace, scowling or weeping broadly before each one. The man has slumped to the terrace floor, doubled up with laughter. Suddenly, Karen discovers an unbroken window. She leaps up and down, does a somersault, pirouettes, jumps up and clicks her heels together. She points at it, kisses it, points again. ‘Yes, yes!’ the man laughs, ‘I see it, Karen!’ She points to herself, then at the window, to herself again. ‘You? You’re like the window, Karen?’ he asks, puzzled, but still laughing. She nods her head vigorously, thrusts the iron poker into his hands. It is dirty and rusty and he feels clumsy with the thing. ‘I don’t understand . . .’ She grabs it out of his hands and – crash! – drives it through the window. ‘Oh no, Karen! No, no . . . !’
‘It’s a sad place.’ Karen has joined her sister on the terrace, the balcony, and they gaze out at the lake, two girls alone on a desolate island. ‘Sad and yet all too right for me, I suppose. Oh, I don’t regret any of it, Karen. No, I was wrong, wrong as always, but I don’t regret it. It’d be silly to be all pinched and morbid about it, wouldn’t it, Karen?’ The girl, of course, is talking about the failure of her third marriage. ‘Things are done and they are undone and then we get ready to do them again.’ Karen looks at her shyly, then turns her gentle gaze back out across the lake, blue with a river’s muted blue under this afternoon sun. ‘The sun!’ the girl in gold pants exclaims, though it is not clear why she thought of it. She tries to explain that she is like the sun somehow, or the sun is like her, but she becomes confused. Finally, she interrupts herself to blurt out: ‘Oh, Karen! I’m so miserable!’ Karen looks up anxiously: there are no tears in her sister’s eyes, but she is biting down painfully on her lower lip. Karen offers a smile, a little awkward, not quite understanding perhaps, and finally her sister, eyes closing a moment, then fluttering open, smiles wanly in return. A moment of grace settles between them, but Karen turns her back on it clumsily.
WHAMPOOF