She took off more like an animal, the obvious inner strength of her limbs belying their slender shapeliness. I admired the backs of her knees… and the fine fuzzhair accentuated, rather than softened, the long new-moons of her calves.
I realized there could not be any underwear within the skimpy gray dress, for no telltale lines marred the incipient cut and thrust of her buttocks. I could not help recalling in a new light how the dress had ridden to her upper thighs, whilst she was sitting on the rock. I followed, even in spite of myself, more to retrieve my expensive headset than to pursue a vision of delight, who should be beneath the concerns of a man of my years. Or that was what I told myself at the time.
The woods that bearded the lower reaches of the valley were deceptive in their extent. Once through a seemingly slight outcrop of some trees which I could not recognize (their branches having thicker foliage than the lower ones intertwining in an apparent conspiracy to hide the sky), the two of us came into a large clearing unseen from my previous vantage point by the rock. Scattered over what was little better than colorless scrubland was a commune of wooden sheds, some leaning against each other in mutual support. Young men and women, also in gray dresses, like my guide, were waving.
The girl tugged me by the hand toward one particular older man who stood in the middle, hands on his hips, arms splayed at odd angles, like a kite ready for flight.
“Listen to the sounds that Steve has brought us,” said the girl excitedly.
Wondering what the hell I had gotten into, I recalled that there was no way she could have known my name, other than by a wild guess.
I decided to take the initiative.
“Excuse me, I don’t know your names or who you people are… or come to that, where I am…”
“Our names are forgotten,” interrupted the man I took to be the girl’s father, using the same strange lilt in his voice. He refused to try on the headset, and the girl took it back, as she was led away by a surly-looking individual who delivered her into the hands of the other females.
“Can you show me the way back to my rucksack and umbrella?”
Nobody moved. The father, after a while, pointed to the edge of the clearing whence I had originally appeared to them with the girl, and I could just make out a moving shape, human in its form, but weirdly treelike in its coloring. The face appeared to have on a cheap party mask, since it was painted a bright green and pig-snouted, its overlarge brown eyes with very little white, and fangs like large splinters of wood. I could discern a red tongue flickering from between the fenced lips. Its dress was an aged deeply wrinkled trunk, moving swiftly like a snake on end.
“Get the goads!” shouted the father.
I was frozen to the spot, not through fright so much, but by the anger at suddenly realizing that the creature was dragging my opened umbrella behind it over the tussocks and thus damaging it beyond repair.
The gray people had by now gathered several long rods, thicker than the fishing variety, but just as bendy. I was handed one and encouraged to help the group in cornering the creature between two conjoining shed walls—which, to me, looked so ill-constructed that it would only take a light touch to topple. However, the silent creature, evidently smiling—though it was difficult to tell whether it was indeed a smile or a grimace—stood its ground, accepting that it was trapped. The father started prodding its chest with the “goad” and black sap oozed from the rupture. We all had a go, me included, for I had not forgiven it for the umbrella (its shattered skeleton now lying by the creature’s feet, shreds of material still clinging to the ribs).
The creature’s carcass eventually became little better than that umbrella, its life force mercifully long departed—mercifully, because I could not accuse myself of acting cruelly in continuing to pierce the sides of something that was already dead.
Toward the end of our bloodthirsty ruck, I turned to see the girl who had led me here, heaving with tears, the upper part of her dress now sodden and doing little to hide the pert, lightly-nippled breasts. The shattered cassette player was in her hands, the headphones still resting from ear to ear, its sound pads yellowed over with some sort of earwax.
I could not believe my eyes. Could any of this have happened? Why had I taken it all as a matter of course? The girl’s eyes indeed told me that the creature I had helped flay to death had only brought me my umbrella in its own clumsy fashion because it thought I had forgotten I left it behind.
She must have listened right to the end of Sergeant Pepper for, as she handed back the case (but at the same time keeping on the earphones as a sort of ornamental souvenir), I could see that the tape had certainly run to the end.
This was a day in the life, and more! Grabbing the wreck of the brolly as an insane keepsake, I took to my heels, with the whirring, whirling crescendo of nightmare in my ears, fleeing, as I now understood, from a people more monstrous than the monsters they feared. Except, of course, the sweet girl who knew not who she really was and would figure no doubt in all my erotic dreams for ever and ever.
And dreams would certainly be very wet, when all I’d have was that brolly to guard me against the drenching nights. My mother’d turn in her grave with worry, I thought, as I entered the trees which rustled behind me, camouflaging my escape.
It was twenty years ago today.
TRACKS
by Nicholas Royle
Do you love me?”
“Of course I love you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
I used to torment Melanie like this a lot, unintentionally, constantly asking the same questions when the answer should have been abundantly clear: of course she loved me. She told me sometimes how irritating it was and in exasperation asked: “What do I have to do to convince you I love you?”
“Nothing,” I’d say. “Just keep on loving me.”
She’d reply: “But if you constantly doubt me, I feel undermined. It’s tiring.” An edge would have crept into her voice and I’d feel compelled to ask again: “Do you love me?”
Egerton spoke: “That company in Birmingham have paid, Alex.” He flashed me a proud smile as he passed on this information. Egerton was responsible for chasing up bad debts. “That means you can go ahead and process their festival entry. The check arrived in the lunchtime delivery.”
I couldn’t care less about the Birmingham company paying up—I’d already processed their festival entry in the knowledge that I could delete it in one keystroke if they failed to pay—but Egerton’s interruption reminded me of what had happened before I left home for work that morning.
Melanie lived in the Midlands, which accounted in part for my insecurity in our relationship: I lived in London and missed her during the week when we were not together. We wrote letters so I was always eager for the sound of the postman in the mornings. He often came when I was in the bath, gaining entry from the street by pressing the service bell, then climbing the stairs to deliver letters to the individual flats. I waited for the rattle of the letter box.
It had become one of my favorite sounds, and I invariably jumped out of the bath to see what the postman had brought, then got straight back in. Bills I dropped unopened on the bathroom floor where they generally stayed for at least a week. Circulars and marketing scams from Reader’s Digest went straight behind the laundry basket and only when the basket started to walk did I take them and put them in the rubbish. If there was a letter from Melanie, I would open it and read it in the bath, sinking down in the bubbles and steam, always a sensuous experience, to be enjoyed to the full, even if it meant being late for work.