Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter
‘She’s given you her best nightdress; she always told me to lay her out in that.’
If, the night before, his face had been a construct of paint and shadow, now it was entirely bone again and she got no messages whatsoever from his eyes. Perhaps he was trying to make friends with her or perhaps he was trying to learn her. There was no pain this time. The mysterious glide of planes of flesh within her bore no relation to anything she had heard, read or experienced. She never expected such extreme intimations of pleasure or despair. If he was surprised at her response, he kept it to himself but when he withdrew he remained lying across her, covering her, still fixing her with this same, assessing regard as though he were trying to see the web of tissue and muscle behind her eyes, or even more of her interior than that. As they lay clasped together in this fashion, the door opened and Mrs Green came in carrying a dish in her hands. She placed this dish on the box where the bowl of water stood and bent to gather Jewel’s scattered clothing from the floor.
‘I’m glad you’re getting on so well,’ she said, glancing at them. Her voice was warm with contentment. Marianne was disconcerted and turned her flushed face into the furs but Jewel appeared unmoved. He shifted slowly away from her, accepted a handful of rings from his foster-mother and slid them on his fingers, one on each finger, two on some. It was full morning and the room had become a dazzling bubble of sunshine and air. Mrs Green pointed to the dish.
‘I brought you some breakfast,’ she said. ‘I thought that would be nice. It’s, you know, all right.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Marianne, puzzled, surfacing from the covers.
Mrs Green set her hands on her hips. Her soft, white face took on as inscrutable an expression as any Barbarian born.
‘He came padding downstairs early in the morning, unlike him, and he gave me a little bottle of stuff and told me to feed it to the happy couple as he called them, so they would have many children, see. He must have thought I was soft, dear. I fed some of the stuff to the brown bitch’s puppy and it ran round in circles till it dropped down dead.’
When she heard this, Marianne felt so cold she thought the sun had gone in and she crept back into Jewel’s arms but Mrs Green and he burst out laughing.
‘He’s losing his subtlety, poor old sod,’ said Jewel. ‘He’s getting old.’
‘I suppose he’d have said the girl poisoned you.’
‘I daresay.’
While Marianne stared from one to the other, trying to discover the reason for their amusement, Mrs Green bent down and ripped the furs off them.
‘Look at him, isn’t he a lovely boy? If I was thirty years younger …’
‘Forty years,’ said Jewel. ‘Don’t let’s exaggerate.’
He pushed Marianne to one side, threw his arms round the old woman’s neck, drew her down to him and kissed her, laughing. Marianne watched them, leaning on her elbow, colder than ever; then she saw an extraordinary pattern on Jewel’s back, flickering through the black river of his hair, a pattern of as many colours as Viperus berus in his cage in Donally’s room. At first she thought this must be the symptom of some extraordinary disease, no doubt connected with his fits of coughing, and reached out to touch it but Jewel was collecting the porridge bowl and pushed her away again. He scooped up a little of the thin, grey, viscous substance with his fingers and said to Marianne: ‘Look at me carefully and, if I swell up and die, don’t eat anything but go to Johnny directly and tell him to look after you.’
‘Don’t tease her.’
Jewel ate, did not die and passed the food to her. She did not want to eat, she put the bowl down on the floor beside her.
‘Give us my shirt,’ he said to Mrs Green. ‘I’d better be up since I’ve lived to see another day.’
On her way to the door, Mrs Green threw him his shirt.
‘Is she going to stay with me today or what’s she going to do; we’ll have to find something for her to do.’
‘She’ll do what she wants.’
Mrs Green nodded and went out; the closing of the door dislodged a fresh piece of roof into the room and every bird in the world sang outside.
‘Don’t put your shirt on, yet – turn round. No, lie down again. On your face.’
He raised his eyebrows but obeyed her. She parted the black curtains of his mane and drew her hands incredulously down the ornamented length of his back. He wore the figure of a man on the right side, a woman on the left and, tattooed the length of his spine, a tree with a snake curled round and round the trunk. This elaborate design was executed in blue, red, black and green. The woman offered the man a red apple and more red apples grew among green leaves at the top of the tree, spreading across his shoulders, and the black roots of the tree twisted and ended at the top of his buttocks. The figures were both stiff and lifelike; Eve wore a perfidious smile. The lines of colour were etched with obsessive precision on the shining, close-pored skin which rose and fell with Jewel’s breathing, so it seemed the snake’s forked tongue darted in and out and the leaves on the tree moved in a small wind, an effect the designer must have foreseen and allowed for.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Jewel. ‘I understand that’s very impressive.’
He put on his shirt and covered up the grotesque disfigurement, which fascinated her. Even their wedding breakfast of poisoned porridge was less remarkable to her than this close undergarment of colour.
‘You can never take all your clothes off,’ she said. ‘Or be properly by yourself, with Adam and Eve there all the time.’
‘Out of sight is out of mind,’ said Jewel. ‘I’ve never seen it, it being on my back. He called it his masterpiece, he did it when I was fifteen.’
‘Was it very painful?’
‘He took a fortnight and I was delirious most of the time but the needles didn’t poison my blood because Mrs Green looked after them. Though green, in fact, is the worst, green hurts most of all. You’ll notice what a lot of green there is in the picture.’
He got up and put on his trousers. Then his boots. The concealing shirt. Then sorted necklaces from the heap on the rug. He was putting his daytime self together.
‘He wanted to do the Last Judgement on my chest, but I didn’t want nothing I could see all the time, did I.’
‘Is he very fond of the Bible?’
‘When pressed, he’ll talk about the poetic truth of the legend of the Fall of Man.’
‘Why did you let him mutilate you so?’
‘Do you see it as a mutilation?’ He was engaged in plaiting his hair.
‘It’s hideous. It’s unnatural.’ But she was lying again; the tattoo seemed to her a perilous and irresistible landscape, a terra incognita or the back of the moon.
‘From time to time, he makes me take off my shirt for him and he prowls round admiring me, saying: “Ha, hum, what genius I had then.” I think he’d like to flay me and hang me up on the wall, I think he’d really like that. He might even make me up into a ceremonial robe and wear me on special occasions. He tattooed some little girl all over with tiger stripes, once, and said she’d be the Tiger Lady. But she died, it was a failure.’
‘Why did you allow him to attack you with his needles?’
‘I didn’t have much choice. I was only a kid.’
‘I do not like it here,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘I do not like it at all.’
She sat up straight, formal and prim, with her hands around her knees and the furs in a shawl around her shoulders. He looked at her with something like nostalgia, as if she were an old photograph.
‘Poor kid,’ he said. ‘And there I was, afraid of you.’
‘Please will you go away and leave me alone, now,’ she said for he had taken on in her eyes the ghastly attraction of the deformed and she needed time for introspection on this account.
He gave her his vilest, snarling grin, paused as in thought and then returned to where she lay. He kissed her breasts and mouth for several minutes and left her alone, after that, accompanied only by her newly
Donally had written on his wall: MEMORY IS DEATH. Marianne studied this for a long time, while the wall itself shivered from a furious assault on the baroque organ behind it which was undergoing a toccata fit to bring the house down. She thought of asking Donally to tattoo this slogan across her forehead, where Jewel could see it all the time, or else to tattoo: MEMORY on one of her breasts and: DEATH on the other. But she soon thought better of this plan when she remembered that Jewel had never learned to read.
5
The tribe no longer protected itself against Marianne with signs, for marriage had secularized her. She was still a stranger and hence fearful but now she was specifically Jewel’s responsibility and evidently they trusted him to control her dubious magics, keeping them knotted in a bag, perhaps, under his pillow, for now the children were content to ignore her and she could come and go about the camp as she pleased, creating no ripples about her. When she asked for a pony, they gave her a little, black and white dappled one like a toy horse in a nursery, with a coarse white mane. Sometimes she rode around in the edges of the wood but went no farther. Time passed and Jewel watched her from the corners of his eyes but still she did not load up her pony and ride away for, as soon as she and the young man found out how to annihilate one another, she was unable to think of anything else for long. Courting her own extinction as well as his, she discovered extraordinary powers as soon as the dark removed the dangerous evidence of Jewel’s face. Then their bed became a cold, black, silent world and its sole inhabitants were denied all other senses but those of touch, taste and smell.
But once she woke before him and was surprised to see his face quite reduced to gentleness. His hands had fallen upon her breasts as soft as snow in the abandonment of sleep and then, with fascinated horror, she revived the memory that these same hands which, a few hours previously, had temporarily altered her to a river of fire, also, a few years previously, had irrevocably murdered the flesh of her flesh. Jewel’s face seemed to whirl about in the tense hollow of her shoulder, scatter and come together again in shapes of perfect fear; but he opened his eyes and suddenly she saw herself reflected twice, so quickly she turned her head away, before she could make out the expression she herself wore.
Another time, she woke in the middle of the night because a night-jar, come to perch on the tree in the room, whirred extremely loudly. It was the time of the month when there was no moon. She felt her eyes had been put out and, as she groped for Jewel’s hand to prove she was not there all by herself, she encountered, by accident, his face. She touched a promontory of bone very lightly padded with flesh, which must be his cheekbone. She moved the whorled tips of her fingers lightly across this ridge and found a fringe as of grass, presumably an eye hooded under an eyelid. But she had no sense of real eyes or a real face under her fingers. All seemed a small landscape from which she received only the most abstract information and she soon identified this landscape with the blasted heart of the old city; this puzzled her a little but she refused to think about it for long.
Again, accidentally, afterwards, some other night, moving uneasily, she touched his face and found it was wet with tears. But he stayed still, sleeping or pretending to sleep, and she instantly repressed her curiosity.
Apart from these stray contacts, she defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel. This third thing, this erotic beast, was eyeless, formless and equipped with one single mouth. It was amphibious and swam in black, brackish waters, subsisting only upon night and silence; she closed her eyes in case she glimpsed it by moonlight and there were no words of endearment in common, anyway, nor any reason to use them. The beast had teeth and claws. It was sometimes an instrument solely of vengefulness, though often its own impetus carried it beyond this function. When it separated out to themselves, again, they woke to the mutual distrust of the morning.
In daylight or firelight, she saw him in two dimensions, flat and effectless. When he came riding across the meadow on his black horse, soaked with rain or spattered with mud or blood, returning from the hunt; or waiting for the evening meal in the kitchen with his brothers, playing the game with bones and quarrelling sullenly about the fall of the pieces; or, occasionally, domestic, cradling furry Jen on his knee when she went to sleep there, as she sometimes did – all these activities were no more than sporadic tableaux vivants or random poses with no thread of continuity to hold them together.
On the wall outside the Doctor’s room was written up: OUR NEEDS BEAR NO RELATION TO OUR DESIRES. He let it stay there for several weeks.
‘But how can one tell which is which,’ Marianne asked herself and thought no more about the slogan.
Marianne sat white and silent on the broken chair in the kitchen and sometimes sounds of organ music flitted around like baroque spooks and sometimes they did not. One evening, Jewel broke every pot on the old dresser in an outburst of rage. He hurled the antique crockery around the room; his brothers fled, helter-skelter, giggling with fear, but Marianne did not bother to move from her seat. He threw a soup tureen at her; it missed, of course, since neither it nor he were real. It crashed into the fire. He also began to attack the slaughtered carcasses with remarkable ferocity and, another evening, silently approached her during the butchery hour and daubed her face with his bloody hands, an action she construed immediately and immediately despised, as if he were helplessly trying to prove his autonomy to her when she knew all the time he vanished like a phantom at daybreak, or earlier, at the moment when her body ceased to define his outlines.
Sometimes, when it rained, rain drove across the room and soaked them to the skin. On windy nights, the room tossed like a cork upon stormy breakers of air. Every morning, a little more of the roof had fallen in, until they would soon be as cruelly exposed as babies on a mountain side and, each night, the spiral staircase grew a little more treacherous. Once she trod on a toad on her way to bed and broke its back.
Meanwhile, the tribe prepared to raise camp and move on. They made repairs to their carts and shod the horses. Jewel had inherited an affinity for horses from his mother’s side, the Lees, but all the brothers looked very beautiful among the horses and Marianne inspected these sights as if she were looking at colour illustrations in an ingenious book. So at all times she maintained a triumphant loneliness in this strange place where she found herself.
She lived in this disintegrated state for some time, until, prone under his weight, she heard him growl into her throat: ‘Conceive, you bitch, conceive’ and was shocked into the most lucid wakefulness, so their connexion seemed all at once grotesque and brutal and the spurt of seed a terrible violation of her privacy. She never once, had thought the fish of night might achieve a concrete symbol, a child inside her; if she had ever idly considered it, she would have hoped their breeds were so far apart a cross would not have been possible. She desperately looked for him but could not see him for it was another night without a moon. So she had to speak to him at last.
‘Why?’
He was silent so long she began to wonder if she had actually spoken aloud.
‘Dynastically,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a patriarchal system. I need a son, don’t I, to dig my grave when I’m gone. A son to ensure my status.’
‘Give me another reason.’
‘Politically. To maintain my status.’
‘I suppose these are both good reasons, given the initial situation, but I think there is a less abstract one.’
‘Revenge,’ he explained. ‘Shoving a little me up you, a little me all furred, plaited and bristling with knives. Then I should have some status in relation to myself.’
‘By submitting me to the most irretrievable humiliation. By making me give birth to monsters?’
‘What, like the sleep
‘You’re very sophisticated,’ she complained.
‘I do the best I can,’ he returned politely.
She turned on her side and listened to the sounds of the night, nothing more than a small wind with a few drops of rain on it.
‘And I saved your life, as well,’ she said reproachfully.
‘I shall give you another one.’
A flurry of rain pattered against the glass of the window and down on the hard leaves of the holly bush. Only the thinnest corroded shell of brick and slate protected them from the cold summer’s night and the black deeps of sky. Rain blew into her face and settled on her cheeks. The idea of pleasure died now she realized pleasure was ancillary to procreation. When he reached out for her, she twisted away, disgusted.
‘Go to sleep, then,’ he snarled.
But now the room was full of faces floating bodiless on darkness like cream on milk, faces of diseased children shrieking raucously from warped mouths that she was their mother. The bed became hateful to her and the moisture seeping between her thighs some vile, powerful witch ointment which would send its victim mad. What was left of the roof would shortly cave in and bury them for ever in the infernal pit of their embraces; she choked on the stale air as if already buried alive. In fear and trembling, she slithered from the covers on to the floor, suddenly determined to be gone. Jewel was asleep, so far as she could tell. She dressed herself quickly in her Barbarian clothes, the only ones she had, now, trousers, a woollen shirt embroidered with daisies and little chips of mirror and a jacket of grey squirrel fur fastened at the throat with a diamanté brooch scavenged from some grave. She made her way to the door by touch and feel; underfoot was rubble and holly leaves. Jewel was not asleep.