Lucia's Masks (15 page)

He cannot imagine the Lady Forager so debasing herself, even if love tormented her piercingly. She would never grovel or forsake her dignity. It strikes him, and not for the first time, that she is protected by some invisible armour. He has no idea what this armour might be — only that it seems to deflect any prurient thoughts. He is gripped by the notion that Lucia has some inevitable part to play in his fulfillment of his penance, but he cannot even begin to speculate how this might come to pass.

Lucia draws a glistening bottle from her pack. Even through the forest’s gloom, he can see the water’s silvery sheen and his saliva glands contract at the sight. In his former life, he would have seized the bottle from her and satisfied his own thirst first. Or would he? Is it possible he has begun to judge himself more harshly than even he deserves?

Bird Girl steps forward to grasp the bottle by its neck. She takes it to Candace, uncorks it, and lifts it to her patient’s lips. They all avert their eyes as Candace splutters, drinks deeply, and makes a mewling sound that reminds him of a kitten someone had thrust into his arms when he was a boy. Involuntarily he shudders, recalling how the sponginess of its soft-boned body repulsed him, and how he had struggled with a distressing urge to crush the helpless creature between iron hands.

He observes that Bird Girl does not drink. She takes the bottle next to Old Harry, who seems barely to wet his mouth before giving the bottle back. Bird Girl passes it to Chandelier, who demurs, shaking his head so that his wonderful corkscrew curls seem to float and catch at what light there is. The boy goes into one of his fluid mime shows, his right index finger symbolically closing his lips, his left hand next covering his mouth. Finally, he makes Bird Girl a slight bow, his upturned open palms inviting her to drink. All this is accomplished in a second. The Outpacer wants to applaud but resists, for the harsh sound would spoil the lingering tracery of gesture Chandelier has written on the air.

And so Bird Girl drinks, and then Chandelier. The bottle passes again to Lucia, who is panting still. He drinks last, and sets the bottle down beside him. He marvels at how civil they all are. And wonders what it might take to smash that civility to bits. He thinks of how the bottle had moved — from weakest (for the moment) to strongest (likewise).

An image of startling clarity bursts upon his brain. He sees six glass beads, of various colours and sizes, strung on a wire. Here we are, he realizes, separate entities yet ready to slide and touch. Or indeed, to clash and crash, if tilting chaos sends us there. How long can they maintain this obliging separateness, he wonders. With the exception of Candace, they are still all so careful not to intrude on each other. They have somehow tumbled into a tolerant, resilient looseness. They are not tightly bound. He foresees this state cannot last.

Lucia is finally able to summon the breath to speak clearly. At first he cannot grasp her meaning. It is so long since he has heard the word she utters, it remains for some seconds an empty cage of sound.

“House,” Lucia repeats. “I found an abandoned house.

“There is food there,” she tells them. “And water.”

“House,” Chandelier repeats to Harry, who is apparently having problems hearing. “Food and water.”

Is it a morning for miracles? The Outpacer has never heard the boy speak so many words consecutively.

Only Harry does not appear surprised. “Yes, boy,” he says. “This is good.”

Bird Girl has skipped up to Lucia, her skimpy skirt bouncing on her slender legs. The Outpacer makes himself look away until she stands still again, on her tiptoes, in order to whisper something in Lucia’s ear.

How pleasing it is to gaze on these two women standing together. One blond. One dark. One sinewy and small. One strong-boned and muscular. His former self would have automatically imagined their heads touching on a pillow, their naked limbs tangled for his delectation. Now he finds the mere idea of their sexual juxtaposition distasteful. He decides this is a good indication of how far he has come.

He is curious, however, as to what Bird Girl has whispered to Lucia.

He sees Lucia slowly shake her head and Bird Girl take a step back, momentarily dejected. But not for long, for she is soon summoned to Candace’s side.

Candace is obviously agitated. She struggles to sit up, plucking Lucia’s bundled shawl from under her head impatiently, and tossing it at her feet. Candace’s gracelessness irritates him. As the woman draws her knees up to her chest, readying herself to stand, he has to turn his head away. He has no wish to see her exposed upper thighs where her shorts bell out unbecomingly. He judges this aversion must have more to do with Candace’s character than her physicality. At the height of his philandering, he had bedded plenty of well-rounded women.

Outside of his tormenting thoughts, Candace is undoubtedly one of his sorest trials to date. Her smugness seems to permeate her entire being so that even her retroussé nose (which in another woman he might have found charming), strikes him as repugnant. He notices that Lucia looks on glassy-eyed as Candace, now apparently fully recovered, hugs herself and hops about in a parody of childish delight. “Clean socks,” she sings. “Are there socks, Lucia?

“Oh, how wonderful! A house! A house! We can be a real community in our own house.”

Harry launches a cannonade of coughs so harsh, Chandelier puts his fingers in his ears. Candace glares at him; then turns to the others: “Are we all ready, then?”

Lucia and Bird Girl exchange a look in which the Outpacer reads a much-tried forbearance.

“Are you well enough to travel?” Bird Girl asks Candace.

“Oh, yes. I am quite recovered. And much more than that. I am re-energized. A house. Abandoned, you said, Lucia? A house in which we can settle, let our tensions diffuse. Purify ourselves.”

“Drop you down a cistern, perhaps.” The Outpacer is close enough to make out Harry’s muttered comment. Behind him, he hears Lucia’s smothered laugh. He turns to see her bend from the waist to gather up her shawl; watches as she smoothes out the crushed bundle, folds the material corner to corner; then stretches it with her arms fully extended so that from the eyes down, her face and upper body are veiled by a triangle of black silk. Its deep fringe brushes her knees. Then a flick, a twist of black in the air, and the shawl settles again on her shoulders.

“The heat in the field is fierce,” she warns them. “We must all keep our heads covered.”

Harry tugs from his pocket the tubular toque that looks as if it might once have been a sock. Bird Girl pulls a man’s ancient fedora rakishly over one eye. Candace puts on her hat of woven straw, with its clump of garish plastic cherries. Lucia sleeks down her head scarf and draws it tightly over her brow. Chandelier’s headpiece is a battered plastic mixing bowl. What a marvel, the Outpacer thinks, to see this dull object transformed, once set upon the boy’s pliant curls. Immediately it becomes the delicately moulded helmet of a young warrior god.

So they set off, with their heads protected, and their naked hands either thrust in their pockets or tucked up inside long sleeves.

Lucia takes the lead, followed by Bird Girl; then Chandelier with Old Harry, then Candace, and the Outpacer in the rear.

Once they leave the cover of the forest, it is as the Lady Forager warned: a heat so fiery, it would surely split open the flesh of an exposed infant. Even swathed in his burlap cowl, he cannot rid himself of the image of sizzling meat. Long afterwards, when he thinks of that fateful crossing of the field, it is the picture of a blazing hot grill that comes to him, and six bodies squirming on its murderous surface.

He silently curses again his smothering disguise as the sweat streams down his face and chest. His eyes sting. He sometimes stumbles blindly. When he can see clearly, it is Candace’s ample backside that fills his gaze. The plump cheeks straining against striped fabric remind him of the inflated beach toys of his childhood. He recognizes at once how cheap and vicious is this projection and forces himself to examine the real roots of his own gnawing and growing unease. How can he properly protect these five beings when he can barely see? It was one thing to shadow them, to circle them silently at night, brandishing his torch at the odd scavenger mutt that crept up to their camp. It is quite another to be constantly in their company. It weighs on him so oppressively, this awareness of all their various frailties and of his own shortcomings as their champion.

Is it this vulnerability that feeds his concern they are being followed? He will catch some disconcerting rustle, or snap of twig behind him, and turn and see nothing. But the prickle at the back of his neck persists, as does the gluey sensation of unknown eyes watching their every move. There is no one there, he assures himself as he turns yet again, the damned hood always slightly obscuring his peripheral vision.

Someone shouts. He nearly collides with Candace who has stopped in her tracks.

“Oh, how darling!” he hears her gush.

Candace is jumping up and down, waving her straw hat in the air. “Our house! Our house!” she exclaims. She hops from one foot to the other.

“Hush!” This from Lucia, who raises her left arm in warning. He sees the forager’s hand close on the handle of her knife. Automatically he manoeuvres his arm inside the bell of his gown to grasp his own dagger.

How inept our preparations are, he thinks. It is all merely gesture. We could not even make a decent show of force: three women, an aged man, an adolescent boy, and I. Without the cover of darkness I have neither stealth nor cunning. And I am boiling, blinded by this damn disguise. He wipes the sweat from his brow and studies the stone house. It is a dull, squat affair. No entrancing wooden gables here. He thinks the stone face looks clammy. He feels a chill in his spine, and then in his hands and feet.

He glances at Candace. Her eyes are round and glowing, her face flushed. She stands on tiptoe. Her fingers twitch. He reads her body’s agitation as a naked wish to launch herself into the waiting house, and crown herself chief organizer. She will hold little morning colloquies or pep talks, try to thrust them all into roles she has elaborated in her ever-busy brain. The idea is so unbearable he almost groans aloud.

And if the group elects to stay? How can he maintain his duty as protective watcher on the boundary of this exposed, putrid farmyard? He is getting ahead of himself, he realizes. Who could tell what the group might yet choose to do?

“I’ll go in first,” Lucia calls back. He nods his assent, but moves quickly to follow in close behind her.

“It looks just the same,” she tells him as they stand together inside the front door.

Indeed, it could look no worse. His spirit recoils at the putrid smell and chaotic mess of the place. Every surface offends his sensibility: the coarse upholstery, the synthetic lace curtains, the flung hay bales.

The others seem captivated, though. They crowd inside, heedless of danger. He sees Lucia’s black eyes widen in alarm. Her arm jerks forward. For a second only, he thinks she may grab his hand. Instead, she draws her knife from its sheath. “We must check upstairs,” she whispers.

“I will go first,” he says. “Stay close behind me.”

A tawdry schoolboy thought flits through his overheated brain: Oh, yes, to precede this lovely woman upstairs, usher her into a bedroom where he might gaze upon her nakedness, spread her muscular legs apart, and trace on the tender flesh of her inner thighs invisible messages of his desire. Until her back arcs in answer, and her dark eyes implore. First, he would use his tongue, entering and withdrawing from her dark, luxuriant nest in a rhythm she cannot anticipate. So that she would writhe and twist away from him in such a frenzy, he must hold her down with his hands on her shoulders. And her passionate shudders would reverberate through his arms. Oh, what pleasure he would give her. He is erect again, lost anew to this wonderland of lust for Lucia who is just behind him on the wooden stair. I must stop this, he urges himself. I must pull myself together. Who was it used to tell him that? It is not an expression he has thought of for many years.

As he mounts the last step before the landing, with its two closed doors, one straight ahead and one to his left, he freezes. For he is sure he has heard something. What? A deep intake of breath? And not from Lucia, but ahead, from behind one of the doors.

He starts to ask, “Did you hear that?” when he is silenced by an abrupt wail, a shrill, animal cry that seems to signal either impending death, or the basest possible despair. He turns to Lucia. “Cat?” she whispers.

“Perhaps.” He smiles bravely even though she cannot see his face. He glances down and sees that the others have gathered at the bottom of the stair. From their widened eyes and opened mouths, he reads their fear. He knows he must make a move.

Only Harry appears unperturbed. He looks up, one hand on his stick, the other stroking the boy’s cheek. Chandelier’s face has turned the colour of sour milk.

The wail pollutes the air again, a curdled, strangled sound. The Outpacer grabs the door handle, pulls, then pushes. The door is apparently locked. Dagger gripped firmly in his right hand, he heaves at the door’s central panel, using his left shoulder as a battering ram. There is a metallic snap, and a shudder of the wooden frame as the door gives way.

The wailing is unbroken now, a human siren so shrill he can hardly bear it. The siren’s source is, if anything, more horrific than the sound, and he stands for a moment hypnotized by what he sees.

The creature on a narrow bed wails through an open mouth ringed with carmine. Its cheeks are daubed with a ghastly mauve pigment; the eyes so thickly outlined with kohl, it is impossible to see their true colour. This coarsely painted being is wizened, as fleshless and apparently brittle as a twig. As she wails (for it is a “she,” he can see her shrunken dugs beneath a transparent blouse of gauzy stuff), her body writhes. Her gaunt arms are spread wide, and her fingers are laced through the tubular bars of the metal bedstead.

The old woman writhes and wails and the metal bed shakes. And still he stands frozen as if her grotesqueness has literally petrified him. She is a gargoyle, a fright, a nightmare come to life. Feel pity, he tells himself. He plumbs what he believes are his emotions and hits only revulsion.