Saltskin (2 page)

He pushed the door and saw Magdalene, her back to him,
sitting in the tin bathtub, the shape of a woman's curves,
in front of the kitchen fire. Oh, is it wash day? thought
Angelo, the way one ignores countless hunches, choosing
the less frightening scenario — excuse, reason, version of
the truth — stalling for a better answer. He stepped into the
room. It wasn't wash day — that was Wednesday. This was
Friday, the day of the fish market. But Angelo was young
enough not to have grasped the notion of date and time;
for him it still moved in direct relation to his wishes.

The kitchen was small and dank, its gloom exaggerated
by the curtains drawn against the light of the morning.
The dirt floor needed sweeping, straw and vegetable
peelings uneven under foot. Angelo stood very still, like
in the statue game, puzzled that his mother hadn't waited
for him. They usually bathed together, with him reclined
between his mother's legs while she sponged him clean
with a cloth, her breasts nuzzling comfortingly at his back
and her breath marking his wet face.

He felt the coiled eel twitch in its bag. Usually Magdalene
would take the sack from him, blue veins raised on her
pale arms, and pull out the eel, slam its body on the table
then, with a butcher's axe, whack off its head. Usually they
both leapt back while the eel swivelled and thrashed on
the table, flicking bloody juice about the room. Sometimes
they'd laugh nervously, guiltily, until the captive finally
died, which often took a long time; sometimes Magdalene
would whack it again, but typically they would wait, gripped
by the death throes, like the audience at a hanging, unable
to move until the victim finally expires.

But Magdalene did not get out of the bath with water
dripping down her body to wrap herself in a sheet and
reach for the eel. Nor did she make any motion at all. Her
hair hung damply dark over the edge of the tub and Angelo
had the urge to lie under its cascade and feel its seaweed
caress on his cheek. His body jerked involuntarily, as one
does sometimes on the verge of deep sleep, and he moved
as if against a sea wave toward her, whispering the name
only he used for her. 'Mama?' His voice upset him for it
sounded odd — it echoed about the stone walls and made
his throat constrict.

He said her name again, low, warning. He moved
toward her, and as he approached, more of her was revealed
to him: her white forehead and then her closed eyes, the
bridge of her nose, the heart point of her chin, and he went
pale when he saw the bathwater swilled crimson rose and
the transparent waxy sheen of her skin.

Angelo screamed and threw the eel across the room. He
made a dash at the bath, landing on the rim, whereupon
it capsized, drenching him with water. Magdalene slid,
heavy and awkward, onto his lap like a reversed pieta. He
grabbed at her, grunting as he tried to get a grip, but she
was rubbery and slippery and so very cold. He pulled her
from the hollows of her armpits, tried to stand, tried to
make her stand, but his feet slid on the newly muddied
floor and shot out from under him and he fell hard on his
back, with the dead weight of Magdalene on top of him,
her face in the crook of his neck. Angelo breathed hard
and jagged at the ceiling. His mouth worked spastically to
make sounds for help but he could not, his shocked face
pale as fatty hogget.

He saw the black eel snake from its bag across the filthy floor,
winding itself audaciously around the table leg, and he thought, we must get
up now and tend to it. He lifted her arm and waggled it and a trickle of watery
blood ran from the blurred gash of her wrist to his grubby fingers. Water
from the upturned tin bath gushed out the door and made a path through the
cobblestones and dirt, trickling past the basement window of the loom shop.

Pierre glanced up from the trance of his work and felt
the twinge of hunger in his belly. He stretched and every
vertebra clicked; he moaned with the self-righteous pity
of the aged. He cracked his fingers and thought for the
hundredth time that day, I am old, and looked forward to
a slice of bread and a mug of beer. He moved slowly and
stiffly, as pious as a monk, for he insisted to himself that he
was better than most. Resting the bar of thread between the
wefts on the low loom, Pierre walked out into the street,
where he, too, caught on the air a whiff of discontent,
which he took to be the natural state of the world. He
ambled into his home and found the boy Angelo prone,
trapped by the dead body of Magdalene. He stepped over
them towards the larder, for his instinct was to pretend he
had not seen.

But the boy had seen, and the image never left him.
His spirit snapped like cotton thread that had been bitten
through, and the shock turned his vibrant ginger hair grey.
The separation from his mother wounded him and he was
to spend the rest of his life trying to mend it.

Winter set in with a vengeance. Hail and rain assaulted
London, carried on furious winds that uprooted entire
trees, blew off roof shingles, upended carriages and tossed
little girls off their papery feet. Angelo's clothes were
perpetually damp. The sun barely made its power known
through the grey density of fog, and frosty shadowed
corners rarely thawed. The stretches of daylight became
shorter and shorter and the shadows chased at heels. With
the dense mists it seemed always to be dusk; even the
dawns lacked the brilliant bursts of coloured light. Even
the moon was dark.

Mildew grew to mould on the walls, and the crystals of
rising damp settled in the house and in their lungs, splitting
and growing. Angelo coughed up phlegm, his nose ran with
snot down the groove to his mouth, drying in crusts, and
his eyes were bloodshot and irritated with the stinging salt
of smothered tears. He could not find warmth anywhere.
And he bit his nails and made up scenarios as to why his
mother had had to leave him. The ultimate sacrifice — she
had to do it, for his betterment. But the bag of gold or the
long-lost real father or any such fancy never materialised.
And always he knew — like adulthood crashing through
the door — that she did it because she missed someone.
He recognised the faraway strain of her face because it was
what he now wore.

In the days following his mother's death Angelo became
obsessed with womanhood in all its configurations, straight
or curled. He stalked women secretly, adoringly and forlornly.
At the start he searched for women like his mother, with the
same aristocratic air Magdalene had possessed, for he had
heard tell that his mother was once a courtesan. Women
with pasts, women with secrets . . . but he realised that every
female was different, and in a curious way each, despite the
flaws of low brows or irregular features or an ill-proportioned
torso, seemed exotic, like a cat on a leash.

He watched the wealthy, their profiles shaded, bump past
sitting rigid in their carriages, and he watched the poverty-ridden
lift their muddy hems above the puddles. Angelo
was struck by the tender sight of an exposed, stockinged
calf, and he followed women stealthily and silently, fearing
what might happen if they spoke to him. Yet he was hurt if
they did not, and he began to think of himself as invisible
— a spectre, omnipotent and omnipresent. On market days,
he shadowed them, as their soaked bonnets flapped against
their cheeks, their hands dangling scrawny rabbits by their
hind legs or grasping soggy cabbages that were already
rotting, food intended for a family loved and secreted away
someplace.

Sometimes he'd follow the women home through the
dreary streets, roaming far into the warren of alleys, and
stand, lost, outside until a candle was lit within and the
woman shrieked, 'Scat, you filthy beggar!' Once a nightwalker
put her nail-bitten fingers tenderly to the mole
above his lip and said, 'Want some love, honey?' showing
him her black gums. Angelo did want some love, but there
seemed to be so many kinds.

His shoulders rounded over his chest to embrace the
heaviness within, the shame, and he began to see lonely
people everywhere, as if they wore gossamer shrouds to
hide and yet display their loneliness, in the hope that
another might seek them out as refuge. Where did all the
lonely people come from and where did they go? They
appeared everywhere, as though they had always been
there, but unseen, like dead birds. He identified with them
and that fact horrified him.

Angelo worried that he would never be his old self
again. He wished he could pull a lever, like the brake on a
carriage, jump off and head in another direction. He stopped
looking at his reflection in windows because he didn't like
what he saw: the freakish grey hair over the worn face of
a small boy. He avoided mirrors. The reflection was never
the charming person he had once imagined himself to be.
He resolved to practise smiling, and when he had mastered
that he would look upon himself again. No one told him it
was normal to feel sad, or that time would soften it.

Why she had done it he couldn't say. No one asked
him directly: it was as if they already knew, and what he
took for their secrecy stopped him asking, for who knew
her better than he? He didn't like the fact that she might
have had a life before him. He was her life. He didn't like
it that now he was insignificant in her other world. He
recalled the milky look in her eyes, the strange way her
face closed him out when he surprised her alone, and he
knew that the reason she wanted to die would hurt, for he
suspected it had nothing to do with him.

A man, young or old, rakish or honest, would reach out
and grip Angelo by the sleeve or his grey hair, his ear or
his collar, and, with eyes as vacant and hollow as Angelo's
own, whisper, 'Ginger.' For a moment, with a bonding
stare, they would blend their sorrow on the breath mingled
between them. And for a short space Angelo shared his
grief, but a rash of jealousy would follow and he would
squawk, 'She was mine, not yours — mine!' And he'd bend
the man's little finger back trying to snap it, until he was
sure the man would never reach out again.

Angelo worried: of all her admirers, whom had she
admired most? He was accosted by pictures of her in his
mind, crystalline, of the sadness lurking behind her cheer,
and he was ferocious to hurt whoever had put it there, for
he was sure that person was a murderer.

Yet everyone seemed to claim an intimacy with Magdalene. The
day of the wake, men and women crowded into their tiny kitchen and fondled
her things, thinking: Once she touched this. The visitors took scant notice
of Pierre or Angelo, making the loss of Magdalene theirs alone, ignoring Pierre
as husband and Angelo as son. Lost wife, lost mother. Angelo pressed himself
against a wall while the mourners sobbed in private, primitive sounds that
made him wince and cringe, and by the time all had paid their respects and
left, almost all of Magdalene's possessions had been stolen, even the worn
wooden spoon she used for cooking. All except her small collection of books,
expensive and prized possessions that were stowed in a basket under her bed.
Angelo did not think to ask them why the visitors loved her, for of course
they did. And when he asked Pierre why they stole, Pierre replied, 'Souvenirs'.
By which he meant the French: memories.

One month after their loss, Angelo and his stepfather sat
together eating ugly food that had no taste, no seduction,
no nourishment.

'You should sweep,' said Pierre with a grimace, gesturing
at the floor. He always accompanied his speech with shrugs
and pouts that were as much as words.

Angelo looked up from his plate, his eyes resting on
Pierre's sagging jaw, watched it move in mastication. He
looked down at his meal again, said nothing. His stomach
felt hollow, even though he ate.

Pierre pushed his plate away and Angelo stood and
cleared the table, adding the plates to the pile of food-encrusted
dishes that had been there a week or more. He
turned around and an unbearable heaviness anchored in
his chest, for Pierre was slumped in his chair, and the sight
of him made Angelo feel so sorry for the old man that it
crowded the space and pushed the boy from the kitchen
into his room.

In the afternoon light the sheets on his bed appeared
soot black, with the imprint of his unwashed body and the
pillowslip yellow where his head lay but rarely rested. He
perched on the end. He practised smiling. His cheeks felt
tight and dry and he stretched his lips back and bared his
teeth, crinkling his eyes. Feeling a little better, he stood and
pretended to play the fiddle and dance, but his body took
a sudden deep breath that shook him and made him gasp,
and he was about to surrender to his melancholy when
somebody knocked on the door.

Angelo felt the pause, followed by the sluggish
movements of Pierre going to answer. Curious, Angelo
edged into the kitchen and stood behind his stepfather
at the opened door. With a shock of surprise he noticed
that either Pierre had shrunk or he himself had grown, for
where before the old man's shoulder had been above his
head, now they were of equal height. And the observation
made Angelo protective of Pierre.

A lad dressed in red and green livery, ruddy of face,
looked as though he had run at full speed a great distance
to deliver the letter he now presented to Pierre. Angelo
caught the flash of its wax seal in the shape of a rose as
Pierre slid a fruit knife along the envelope and broke the
seal of the coarse paper. Its contents fell earthward, slowly.
A cartoon drawing wafted onto Angelo's upturned palm
and he felt a queer thrill as he gazed at the image. Pierre
grunted as he picked up the letter and shoved it at Angelo,
half turning away as he did. For, of the two of them, the
boy was the only one who could read, and this distinction,
apparent now, made Angelo yearn for his mother and the
quiet lessons they had shared. Pierre huffed and Angelo felt
superior to Pierre, as if he were the elder. The boy cleared
his throat ceremoniously and read the letter aloud.

To the Master Tapestry-maker, Loves Court

It is with a great humbleness in my heart I ask of you
to forgo all prior and current assignments in favour of
the fulfilment of this commission. I can think of no other
artisan who might make of it a finer rendition than you.

Please find enclosed a sketch on which the tapestry
is to be based. It is rough to be sure, as an old whaler's
hand was the marker. He claims to have seen such a
creature with his own eyes in the remote Southern Seas,
and more, he claims she sat for him long enough for him
to make this likeness. Would that it be true, for you can
see what a divine nymph she appears.

It has by way of many exchanges fallen into my
hands by one of our great patrons from The House of the
Rose.

With the request has come a note of urgency. In
compensation for your time in this endeavour the
payment shall be at quadruple your rates, at your own
discretion.

Furthermore, you are to deny any and all knowledge
of this correspondence, as requested by our eminent
patron, for reasons not ours to question.

Yours,

Monsieur Francois de Brieuc

Pierre gave the messenger a hunk of stale bread, whispered
his price in his ear and dismissed him. He put the letter
on the table and went down to make preparations in the
loom shop.

Angelo's mother had read to her son every day of his
life from a couple of large, heavy books filled with myths
and legends and fairytales, and he had learned the shapes
of words and their meanings as much as he had memorised
the picture plates. He read the letter over, then impulsively
ran to his room and stashed it under his pillow. He stood
quaking, one hand to his face and one to his chest.

And so it was that a distraction chanced upon the barren
home, which changed the course of life thereafter. Pierre
and Angelo turned their hearts and minds to the labour of
making a grand tapestry which, in the stilted discourse of
their task, they referred to as 'the lady'.