Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter
The gaunt, crazy, shameless child rolled her among the roots for a while as he probed underneath her clothes with fingers amazingly long and delicate but, it would seem, moved more by curiosity than desire and she wondered if he were too young to do it so she unbuttoned her shirt and rubbed his wet mouth against her breasts for him. The tips of her breasts were so tender she whined under her breath and he became very excited. He began to mutter incomprehensible snatches of his father’s prayers and maxims and she roughly seized hold of him and crushed him inside her with her hand for she had not sufficient patience to rely on instinct. He made two or three huge thrusts and came with such a terrible cry it seemed the loss of his virginity caused him as much anguish or, at least, consternation as the loss of her own had done. He slid weakly out of her, shivering, but she retained him in her arms and kissed the tangles of his hair. She was unsatisfied but full of pleasure because she had done something irreparable, though she was not yet quite sure what it was. So they lay there for a while in the inexpressible stillness and sombre colours of evening. He touched her without sensible contact for his frail body gave out no warmth.
‘Did you know you’re in the family way,’ he said in a voice like a thread of glass.
She saw the ghost of a crescent moon floating in the coppery sky over a red down, between the hazel twigs. Donally’s child was never to be believed even when he stubbornly insisted:
‘Here, Jewel’s put a kid up you.’
He licked the swollen nipple of her right breast softly and laughed to himself. He had another question.
‘Does he do you often?’
‘I’ve never seen his face, in bed with him; perhaps it was never him at all, perhaps something else.’
Because of this, it occurred to her to raise his head so she could scrutinize his own face. It was soft and formless, a fat, drooping mouth and the huge, lost eyes of a child in a wood menaced by the nightingale. Now the sun was down, he was as white as if it ordinarily forbore to touch him. There was a long scratch down his cheek. He shook himself free and lay down on top of her again. He ran his tongue along the downy groove between her breasts.
‘Does he know?’
‘Does he know what?’
‘That you’re going to have a baby.’
‘How do you know, yourself?’
‘I think you are,’ he said. ‘Am I your friend?’
A wind shifted the reeds and he shivered again. He quite forgot the question he had just asked her and remarked accusingly:
‘I’m cold.’
She was caught in a storm of warmth of heart; she wanted to fold him into her, where it was warm and nobody could harm him, poor, lucid, mindless child of chaos now sucking her as if he expected to find milk. She stroked his scarred sides and thought: ‘Is he right, am I pregnant? I might be, I never thought about it, not till the last night in the old house, I never bothered to watch for the signs.’ These signs were cessation of menstruation; morning sickness; indigestion; constipation. She laughed, because all these things seemed so undignified and he raised those huge, wondering eyes of palest grey. She was suddenly unnerved for these eyes might not reflect a lack of mind at all but an intelligence which, though extreme, ran along a parallel course which did not abut on her own and, maybe, on nobody else’s.
‘Go away, now, and leave me alone.’
He nodded obediently and stood up.
‘Here, you silly –’
She sat upright and fastened his ragged trousers for him. He curled his fingers in her short hair and sang a phrase from one of his father’s tunes. As if answering him, a bird trilled out from a neighbouring tree; perhaps it was a nightingale for the Doctor’s son stopped singing at once, aghast.
‘But what name will you give it?’
‘Give what?’
‘Jewel’s kid.’
‘Modo or Mahu,’ she improvised.
‘You can’t catch me,’ he said. ‘You’re joking. You don’t believe me, do you?’
In the perfect innocence of his lambent regard, she experienced utter conviction and, with it, a desolating sorrow. Half unconsciously, she drew her shirt over her breasts again in order to hide them from him.
‘I do believe you,’ she said.
He scratched an insect bite on his upper arm, gave her a slack smile which showed he had decided to become an idiot again and slipped away through the thicket like a pale fish. Marianne lay down on the grass, aching with sorrow. After a while, she took off her clothes and immersed herself in the stream. There was an unexpectedly strong tug of current; she half wanted to let it take her away with it, down to a river, down the wide river perhaps to arrive, drowned and dead, long before the tribe at the unknown sea. But instead she washed herself carefully again and again, sluicing the cold water between her thighs to wash away every trace of the boy’s casual visitation until the light began to fade and the water turn black. She dried herself on her clothes and put them on again. They stuck to her wetly and she was chilled through, though the evening was still warm.
The brothers had eaten and now lounged around their private fire. Johnny was cleaning a rifle, as if trapped in a vignette of Barbarian life, and Precious was nowhere to be seen, probably sleeping in a tent. Mrs Green sat on an upturned bucket with the child Jen wedged between her knees, going through her hair with a fine comb. Jewel lay on his face and Marianne was all at once convinced he was dead and she had helped to kill him, that his heart had stopped at perhaps the precise moment when the boy had launched himself on to her belly. Jewel was a dead pile of rags, bone and hair and she flung herself down beside him in a state of the wildest confusion, for the idea that he was dead was all at once unbearable.
‘Wherever have you been, dear?’ asked Mrs Green, trapping a flea and crushing it between the nails of her forefinger and thumb. ‘Hush up,’ she admonished Jen, who was squealing to have her hair tugged so.
Marianne could make no answer because she was so sure Jewel was dead.
‘She’s been sending signals to the Professors,’ suggested Johnny, briefly levelling the rifle at her and showing his teeth.
‘She’s been bewitching the horses,’ said Bendigo. It was a perilous kind of joking. At any moment, they might turn against her.
‘Don’t go on at her, poor thing, she looks worn out.’
Jewel’s hand of ravisher, murderer and grave-digger acquired a form of life and grasped her elbow. She could have wept with relief but found she had temporarily forgotten how to cry.
‘She’s been swimming, she’s all wet. Here, why are you so wet?’
‘I fell into a stream.’
He was also washed clean. She saw his face in the transfiguring firelight and felt a sharp, extreme, prolonged pain as though the lines of his forehead, nose and jaw were being traced upon her flesh with the point of a knife.
‘Are you ill?’
She shook her head.
‘Want something to eat?’
She shook her head.
‘Best get you some dry clothes, then, or you’ll catch your death.’
She crawled against his side and lay there.
‘She’s showing you affection!’ exclaimed Bendigo derisively.
‘She’s like a little rag doll, she’s all limp,’ said Jewel curiously. He picked up her arm and dropped it; she allowed her arm to fall uselessly on the ground. He said to her softly: ‘What’s the matter, love, what’s the matter with you?’
‘You’ve given me an endearment,’ she said. ‘Why did you give me an endearment, what have I done wrong?’
She tried to climb into his jacket and vanish. Mrs Green slapped Jen’s bottom.
‘You run along, our Jen. I’ll just go and see to the Professor girl –’
‘No,’ said Jewel. ‘I’ll look after her. She’s in a funny mood.’
She tagged along behind him, vacantly biting her fingernails. He took her to the cart where their possessions were packed, scared away a clutch of children who were playing hide and seek a
‘What do you want?’
‘I went for a walk and I met the boy.’
‘What, the half-wit? Did he go through you, then?’
She nodded and continued to kiss the hollow of his throat. He laughed, perhaps with genuine amusement.
‘Well, what happened, did he get you worked up and then couldn’t finish you off, is that it? Is that why you start making up to me with such unexpected affection, is that it?’
He continued to laugh in a way that made her wonder if he were not perhaps within a hair’s breadth of killing her; she shook her head.
‘What is it, then, did he hurt you?’
She shook her head again. He sighed and remarked casually: ‘I’ll say this for you, you aren’t half good at getting yourself raped.’
She hit his face and he immediately struck her such a violent blow on the side of the head that she fell to the ground and lay there, half-stunned.
‘You ever hit me again and I’ll beat you to a bloody pulp,’ he said pleasantly, took out his knife and began to pare his fingernails.
When she got her breath back, she said: ‘I hate you. Next time you hit me, I’ll take your knife and stab you.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said; since he was right, she crept back to his feet, ashamed.
‘He says I’m pregnant.’ The dark shapes of the carts and the gleams of firelight reeled about her and the sky with its first few stars now swung over and now under her. She caught hold of his hand and covered it with helpless kisses, bruising her lips against the rings.
‘Something’s got into you, anyway,’ he said. ‘You’ve gone out of your mind.’
‘I’m sick.’
‘Sick?’
‘He’s right, I know it.’
‘And is it mine?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘There’s no “of course” about it. You go sneaking off and who can tell who tumbles you, you randy bitch.’
‘I don’t want it. I don’t want to stay here.’
‘Stop slobbering over my hands.’
‘And I’m sick …’
‘If you stop slobbering over my hands, I’ll be kind to you for a while.’
He picked her up; she climbed inside his jacket as much as she could and would have climbed inside his breast to vanish there if such a thing had been possible. Her nostrils were full of wood smoke, the rank richness of horses and the disturbing odour of imperfectly cured animal hide, all of which combined in Jewel’s peculiar perfume, but when she looked upwards towards his face, she saw no palpable structure, only a series of hallucinations. Face of a painted devil. Then a cruel, hieratic carving of brown wood and shadow. Then a moving darkness folded, perhaps, in sorrow. But each image was projected successively not on the real face of a living man but against or in opposition to the spare outline of features now traced as with fearful needles on the inside of her brain.
‘Who do you see when you see me?’ she asked him, burying her own face in his bosom.
‘Do you want the truth?’
She nodded.
‘The firing squad.’
‘That’s not the whole truth. Try again.’
‘Insatiability,’ he said with some bitterness.
‘That’s oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,’ she insisted. ‘One more time.’
He was silent for several minutes.
‘The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.’
‘Now you’re being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?’
He appeared to smile and asked if she were feeling better.
‘I am terrified,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been so terrified in my whole life.’
‘It’s not that you’re very old,’ he pointed out. ‘Stand up.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Lie down, then.’
He found some blankets and made her a bed inside the cart, with her head upon a bale of skins. He continued to hold her, however, though abstractedly, and she kissed his throat again and again, reaching under his shirt. He grunted and, not ungently, took away her hand. He was now sunk in thought. She examined his necklaces closely and soon all her attention was concentrated on them. The St Christopher medallion; a string of clear glass beads like eyes of blue; the teeth of a number of wild animals hanging from a strip of leather; three loops of moony pearls which gleamed in the dark; a garland of leaves of gold beaten extremely thin, a beautiful and ancient looking piece.
‘I want a necklace,’ she said. ‘I want your string of beads.’
‘Then want must be your master. I’m not giving away my charms and talismans, what would become of me without them?’
It was the necklace of leaves she wanted, such golden leaves as might have grown in Eden itself. As she hung round his neck, herself another necklace, some creakings heralded a visitor to the cart. Donally’s shadow fell across them. He held a candle lantern in his hand and carried a flask. The candle was faintly scented with vanilla, a smell at once exotic and domestic.
‘A drink,’ he said, setting down the fragrant lantern and offering the flask.
‘After you,’ said Jewel, exercising his usual caution. His tutor drank and Jewel took the flask. Donally clambered in beside them, causing the cart to sway and rock; he cleared a space for himself and settled down uninvited. They were all three so close together they could hear one another breathing. The camp was now in the silence of sleep. Jewel drank and put the mouth of the flask between Marianne’s lips.
‘Do you good.’
She swallowed a mouthful of the crude liquor and wound around him more closely than before. He covered up her thighs with a fold of blanket.
‘Fatherhood,’ said the Doctor warmly, introducing the subject without further ado. ‘How will you accept the role of father?’
‘Complacently.’
‘And how shall she cope with that of mother?’
‘Only most reluctantly, I should think. Look at her, she’s a changed woman; but who knows how long it will last.’
She was half-deafened by the banging of Jewel’s heart and far too unhappy to attend to the two men who started to converse above her head in voices which hardly seemed connected with the mouths from which they issued. She kissed her husband’s wrist or throat now and then and he absently patted her head as if she were now one of the family and drowsed on his knee like Jen when she was too sleepy to go to bed.
‘She says it’s my kid. Do you believe her? I guess I’ll have to accept the role of father, anyway.’
‘I’d believe her, yes. Your brothers wouldn’t dare, in fear of whip and noose since you married her, and my son never approached her before today.’
‘And him only thirteen years old!’ said Jewel in admiration.
‘I shall have to keep him chained up all the time, now,’ brooded Donally. ‘Or else he’ll scatter his semen through the tribe like infected dew. I beat him severely when he told me and chained him to a tree. At the moment, he’s too affronted to howl.’
‘She’s really done for, then,’ said Jewel, grinning. ‘I’ve really done for her, now.’
‘Don’t rest on your laurels.’
‘What, should I still beware the occult charge of her touch? Are you asleep, Marianne?’
‘She isn’t. Give her another drink.’
‘Doesn’t she look young. When I was about her age, I was perfectly innocent, do you remember?’
‘Perfectly. Were you scared when you went out raiding, that first time?’
‘Not at all. When I painted my face
‘And she watched you.’
‘She converted me into something else by seeing me. Whenever I think of her, when I’m away from her, I always imagine her to be wearing long, black gloves up to her elbows, riding behind me on the saddle, biding her time till the fatal moment.’
‘What does the future hold for your child?’
‘What does the future hold for yours? Why don’t you kill him now, instead of dragging it out?’
Marianne bit his hand. He put his mouth against her ear and said: ‘Don’t push your luck.’
‘What does the future hold for your child if you won’t accept your responsibilities?’
‘What’s that?’ demanded Jewel, astonished.
‘Would you have punished Precious of your own free will?’
‘No.’
‘Would you have married her of your own free will?’
‘No.’
‘Would you create a power structure of your own free will?’
‘No.’
‘Then how can you hope to be Moses when you won’t acknowledge a chosen people?’
‘I don’t want to be no Moses. And the future is a dream.’
‘Hope,’ proposed Donally.
‘Hope,’ repeated Jewel. He contemplated the rings on his fingers for a long time. Then he said:
‘Perhaps I should ask her to take me to the Professors, who at least make the pretence of nourishing such a thing. I would resign the tribe to you to do as you pleased with, Doctor, and ride away to the Professors with Marianne as if she were a white flag. Perhaps now is the time to capitulate.’
‘Wake her up and ask her what they’d do to you.’
Jewel shook Marianne but she was awake.
‘They’d shoot you on sight,’ she said.