Authors: Tanith Lee
“Come over the pub with us. Jill and
Terry’ll be there. And I know Ray will. He asked me if you were coming.”
Viewed sober, a night of drinking
followed by the inevitable Chinese nosh-up and the attentions of the writhing
Ray, was uninviting. But I, as all pariahs must be, was vaguely grateful for
their toleration, vaguely pleased my act of participant was acceptable to them.
It was also better than nothing, which was the only alternative.
“It’s
nice here,” said Jill, sipping her Bacardi and coke.
They’d decided to go to a different pub,
and I’d suggested the place on The Rise. It had a log fire, and they liked
that, and horse brasses, and they liked sneering at those. Number 19. Sea View
Terrace was less than a quarter of a mile away, but they didn’t know about that,
and wouldn’t have cared if they had.
Lean, lithe Ray, far too tall for me,
turned into a snake every time he flowed down towards me.
It was eight o’clock, and we were on the
fourth round. I couldn’t remember the extra-marital relationship’s name. Angela
apparently couldn’t either; to her he was ‘darling’, ‘love’, or in spritely
yielding moments, ‘Sir’.
“Where we going to eat then?” said Ray.
“The Hwong Pews’s ever so nice,” said
Jill.
Terry was whispering a dirty joke to
Angela, who screamed with laughter. “Listen to this—”
Very occasionally, between the spasms of
noise from the bar, you could just hear the soft shattering boom of the ocean.
Angela said the punch line and we all
laughed.
We got to the fifth round.
“If you put a bell on,” Ray said to me, “I’ll
give you a ring sometime.”
I was starting to withdraw rather than
expand, the alternate phase of tipsyness. Drifting back into myself, away from
the five people I was with. Out of the crowded public house. Astral projection
almost. Now I was on the street.
“You know, I could really fancy you,”
said Ray.
“You want to watch our Ray,” said
Angela.
Jill giggled and her jelly chest
wobbled.
It was almost nine, and the sixth round.
Jill had had an argument with Terry, and her eyes were damp. Terry, uneasy,
stared into his beer.
“I think we should go and eat now,” said
the extra-marital relationship.
“Yes, sir,” said Angela.
“Have a good time,” I said. My voice was
slightly slurred. I was surprised by it, and by what it had just vocalised.
“Good time,” joked Angela. “You’re
coming, too.”
“Oh, no—didn’t I say? I have to be somewhere
else by nine.”
“She just wants an excuse to be alone with
me,” said Ray. But he looked as amazed as the rest of them. Did I look amazed, too?
“But where are you going?” Angela demanded.
“You said—-”
“I’m sorry. I thought I told you. It’s
something I have to go to with the woman where I stay. I can’t get out of it.
We’re sort of related.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Ray.
“Oh well, if you can’t get out of it.”
Angela stared hard at me through her mascara.
I might be forfeiting my rights to their
friendship, which was all I had. And why? To stagger, cross-eyed with vodka, to
Daniel’s house. To do and say what? Whatever it was, it was pointless. This had
more point. Even Ray could be more use to me than Daniel.
But I couldn’t hold myself in check any
longer. I’d had five days of restraint. Vile liquor had let my personal animal
out of its cage. What an animal it was. Burning, confident, exhilarated and
sure. If I didn’t know exactly what its plans were, I still knew they would be
glorious and great.
“Great,” said Ray. “Well, if she’s
going, let’s have another.”
“I think I’ll have a cream sherry,” said
Angela. “I feel like a change.”
They had already excluded me,
demonstrating I would not be missed. I stood on my feet, which no longer felt
like mine.
“Thanks for the drinks,” I said. I tried
to look reluctant to be going, and they smiled at me, hardly trying at all, as
if seeing me through panes of tinted glass.
It was black outside; where the street
lights hadn’t stained it, the sky looked clear beyond the glare, a vast roof. I
walked on water.
Daniel’s mother had been drunk when she
told me about the rape. Truth in wine. So this maniac was presumably the true
me.
The walk down the slope in the cold
brittle air neither sobered me nor increased my inebriation. I simply began to
learn how to move without a proper centre of balance. When I arrived, I hung on
her gate a moment. The hall light mildly suffused the door panels. The upstairs
room, which was his, looked dark.
I knocked. I seemed to have knocked that
door thirty times. Fifty. A hundred. Each time, like a clockwork mechanism,
Mrs. Besmouth opened it. Hallo, I’ve come to see Daniel. Hallo, I’m drunk, and
I’ve come to scare you. I’ve spoken to the police about your son, I’ve said you
neglect him. I’ve come to tell you what I think of you. I’ve booked two seats on
a plane and I’m taking Daniel to Lourdes. I phoned the Pope, and he’s meeting
us there.
The door didn’t open. I knocked twice
more, and leaned in the porch, practising my introductory gambits.
I’m really a famous artist in disguise,
and all I want is to paint Daniel. As the young Apollo, I think. Only I couldn’t
find a lyre. (Liar.)
Only gradually did it came to me that
the door stayed shut, and gave every sign of remaining so. With the inebriate’s
hidebound immobility, I found this hard to assimilate. But presently it
occurred to me that she might be inside, have guessed the identity of the
caller, and was refusing to let me enter.
How long would the vodka stave off the
cold? Ages, surely. I saw fur-clad Russians tossing it back neat amid
snowdrifts, wolves howling in the background. I laughed sullenly, and knocked
once more. I’d just keep on and on, at intervals, until she gave in. Or would
she? She had over fifty years of fighting, standing firm, being harassed and
disappointed. She’d congealed into it, vitrified. I was comparatively new at
the game.
After ten minutes, I had a wild and
terrifying notion that she might have left a spare key, cliché-fashion, under a
flower pot. I was crouching over my boots, feeling about on the paving round
the step for the phantom flower pot, when I heard a sound I scarcely know, but
instantly identified. Glancing up, I beheld Mrs. Besmouth pushing the wheelchair
into position outside her gate.
She had paused, looking at me, as blank
as I had ever seen her. Daniel sat in the chair like a wonderful waxwork, or a
strangely handsome Guy Fawkes dummy she had been out collecting money with for
Firework Night.
She didn’t comment on my posture,
neither did I. I rose and confronted her. From a purely primitive viewpoint, I
was between her and refuge.
“I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,”
she said.
“I didn’t think you would, either.”
“What do you want?”
It was, after all, more difficult to
dispense with all constraint than the vodka had told me it would be.
“I happened to be up here,” I said.
“You bloody little do-gooder, poking your
nose in.”
Her tone was flat. It was another sort
of platitude and delivered without any feeling, or spirit.
“I don’t think,” I said, enunciating
pedantically, “I’ve ever done any good particularly. And last time, you decided
my interest was solely prurient.”
She pushed the gate, leaning over the
chair, and I went forward and helped her. I held the gate and she came through,
Daniel floating by below.
“You take him out at night,” I said.
“He needs some fresh air.”
“At night, so he won’t see the water
properly, if at all. How do you cope when you have to go out in daylight?”
As I said these preposterous things, I
was already busy detecting, the local geography fresh in my mind, how such an
evasion might be possible. Leave the house, backs to the sea, go up The Rise
away from it, come around only at the top of the town where the houses and the
blocks of flats exclude any street-level view. Then down into the town centre,
where the ocean was only a distant surreal smudge in the valley between sky and
promenade.
“The sea isn’t anything,” she said,
wheeling him along the path, her way to the door clear now. “What’s there to
look at?”
“I thought he might like the sea.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Has he ever been shown it?”
She came to the door, and was taking a
purse out of her coat pocket. As she fumbled for the key, the wheelchair rested
by her, a little to one side of the porch. The brake was off.
The vodka shouted at me to do something.
I was slow. It took me five whole seconds before I darted forward, thrust by
her, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, careered it around, and wheeled it
madly back up the path and through the gate. She didn’t try to stop me, or even
shout, she simply stood there, staring, the key in her hand. She didn’t look
nonplussed either—I somehow saw that.
I
was the startled one. Then I was
going fast around the side of Number 19, driving the chair like a cart or a
doll’s pram, into the curl of the alley that ran between cliff and wall to the
beach. I’m not absolutely certain I remembered a live thing was in the chair.
He was so still, so withdrawn. He really could have been same kind of doll.
But the alley was steep, steeper with
the pendulum of man and chair and alcohol swinging ahead of me. As I braced
against the momentum, I listened. I couldn’t hear her coming after me. When I
looked back, the top of the slope stayed empty. How odd. Instinctively I’d
guessed she wouldn’t lunge immediately into pursuit. I think she could have
overcome me easily if she’d wanted to. As before, she had given over control of
everything to me.
This time, I wasn’t afraid.
Somewhere
in the alley, my head suddenly cleared, and all my senses, like a window going
up. All that was left of my insanity was a grim, anguished determination not to
be prevented. I must achieve the ocean, and that seemed very simple. The waves
roared and hummed at me out of the invisible, unlit dark ahead. Walking down
the alley was like walking into the primeval mouth of Noah’s Flood.
The cliff rounded off like a castle
bastion. The road on the left rose away. A concrete platform and steps went up,
then just raw rock, where a hut stood sentinel, purpose unknown. The beach
appeared suddenly, a dull gleam of sand. The sea was all part of a black sky,
until a soft white bomb of spray exploded out of it.
The street lamps didn’t reach so far,
and there were no fun-fair electrics to snag on the water. The sky was fairly
clear, but with a thin intermittent race of clouds, and the nearest brightest
stars and planets flashed on and off, pale grey and sapphire blue. A young
crescent moon, too delicate to be out on such a cold fleeting night, tilted in
the air, the only neon, but not even bleaching the sea.
“Look, Daniel,” I murmured. “Look at the
water.”
All I could make out was the silken back
of his head, the outline of his knees under the rug, the loosely lying artist’s
hands.
I’d reached the sand, and it was getting
difficult to manoeuvre the wheelchair. The wheels were sinking. The long heels
of my boots were sinking too. A reasonable symbol, maybe.
I thrust the chair on by main force, and
heard things grinding as the moist sand became clotted in them.
All at once, the only way I could free
my left foot was to pull my boot and leg up with both hands. When I tried the
chair again, it wouldn’t move anymore. I shoved a couple of times, wrenched a
couple, but nothing happened and I let go.
We were about ten feet from the ocean’s
edge, but the tide was going out, and soon the distance would be greater.
Walking on tiptoe to keep the sink-weight
off my boot heels, I went around the chair to investigate Daniel’s reaction. I
don’t know what I’d predicted. Something, patently.
But I wasn’t prepared.
You’ve heard the words: Sea-change.
Daniel was changing. I don’t mean in any
supernatural way. Although it almost was, almost seemed so. Because he was
coming alive.
The change had probably happened in the
eyes first of all. Now they were focussed. He was looking—really looking, and
seeing—at the water. His lips had parted, just slightly. The sea wind was
blowing the hair back from his face, and this, too, lent it an aura of
movement, animation, as though he was in the bow of a huge ship, her bladed
prow cleaving the open sea, far from shore, no land in sight.... His hands had
changed their shape. They were curiously flexed, arched, as if for the galvanic
effort of lifting himself.
I crouched beside him, as I had crouched
in front of the house searching for the make-believe spare key. I said phrases
to him, quite meaningless, about the beauty of the ocean and how he must
observe it. Meaningless, because he saw, he knew, he comprehended. There was
genius in his face. But that’s an interpretation. I think I’m trying to say
possession, or atavism.