taoh1

I

The sky was like hammered gold that morning. Even to glance at it was hurtful. There was no comfort in it. It had cast itself as an unbounded sheet of metal, blond and purified. So she looked downward: down the hill, down the path, toward the village.

She was shielding her eyes with her right hand, as though it were a curve of armour.

She was looking for nothing and for nobody. She was watching, merely, how the light shimmered above the earth; how it distorted whatever lay behind it; how the village - its streets, its terraces, its pubs, its shops - blurred without sound and trembled; how the tower of the church seemed to be wobbling, invertebrate, a block of gristle, repulsive and grey.

She was standing in the gap in the low stone wall. The gate that sometimes filled the gap was open and its wrought iron curlicues cast shadows, faint - like stagnant cigarette smoke – on the grass.

She was calling herself Arabella these days. Amid the whispers of her mind, she said it – the name: Arabella; Arabella; Arabella. She repeated it until it possessed no colour and no meaning - until it was infantile. It became four syllables to which no past could be attached, four syllables which had a random future, four rubber balls bouncing inside her head: A-rab-ella; A-rab-ella; A-rab-ella.

The hand that was protecting her eyes was growing warm, unpleasantly. Its skin was tingling, as though stung, and she could feel - she could not see - its knuckles pinkening then reddening. Still, she watched; and, decidedly, the nature of her watching had changed during the last few moments. Its object was no longer just the village. She was studying now a figure’s approach.

The figure was alone and it was walking up the hill, in her direction - travelling through the shimmer and distortion at a rapid and a steady pace. In its left hand it was carrying what was probably a sports bag; and, from the movement of its hips, Arabella guessed that the figure was probably a man’s. It - he - it was a man - drew closer, assuming definition as he emerged from the haze.

Appearances counted. Appearances, Arabella knew, were the field on which she and the figure shortly would meet. Arabella strove to measure the figure’s appearance.

He was wearing pale blue combat boots, laced to halfway up his calves, and a dark blue flying suit that bore no insignia - no stripes, no badges, no signal of function or rank. Its many zips, embedded in the fabric, resembled scars - their teeth metallic sutures that, because of the prevailing brightness, glinted and dazzled and jaggedly shone.

The man was tall - about six foot and one, two inches. His hair was olive black and slicked straight back. His hands were wan. His face was long and narrow - remotely, it had an equine structure - but fascinating in its hieratic style. It glistened with a veneer of perspiration. It had the radiance of pallid wood; and, in spite of the man’s exertion, in spite of his rapid walking in the heat, it stayed immobile. There was no parting of the lips; no panting; no flaring of the nostrils; no wrinkling of the flesh beside the eyelids; no creasing of the brow; no indication of any struggle, fatigue or distress.

Already, he - the flier, perhaps - was within hailing distance. In fact, it seemed to Arabella that he had emerged, had approached, too quickly. He should, she reckoned, in the time that had elapsed since first she had noticed him, have covered three hundred yards at most. Instead, he had covered six hundred, seven hundred, eight. His apparent speed was puzzling. Hastily, Arabella ascribed it to a trick of refraction - to a combination of brilliancy and differential pressure - that kind of oddity - that kind of effect. She was not an expert in optical foolery; and such phenomena, in precise terms, did not matter - had no mattering. What did matter was that the flier was not an illusion. He was real enough. His boots, on the dust of the path, creaked pliantly and subduedly. His flying suit - maybe a mixture of cotton and silk - rustled. The handles of his sports bag faintly squeaked against each other where he gripped them. Soon, Arabella expected, he would speak.

She could not be sure how she felt. In the bygones - those bygones obscured, not shed, by the sham of ‘Arabella’ - she had trusted intuition. Intuition had never sussurated falsely of the men who had approached her then: on cloaked and public corners, to begin with; later, in hotel lobbies, via veiled telephones, via intermediaries and via the happenstance of messages afloat. Always, her intuition had advised her which bodies wanted solace, which ones pain, which ones humiliation, which ones a dreary twist of novelty. Always, her intuition had been smart - had diagnosed the form of the desire: its ordinariness or its oddity, the risks to which its service might expose her, the levels of control she would retain. She had been her own pilot, always - saving that grotesque occasion when the obese matrons had tormented her.

Intuition, here, was worse than silence. It neither warned of danger nor promised reward. Its voice was confused, torn into a dozen separate voices and a dozen separate pieces of advice. Listening to it was like listening to the occupants of an insane asylum howling through grilles, mumbling at chamberpots, screeching quaint melodies to tiny ghosts - the words commingled, mangled, of the damned. This – intuition’s bedlam - was alarming; and Arabella wondered whether it was a consequence of her no longer paddling her professional canoe or of the flier’s proximity - whether her intuition had simply fallen out of the vessel or whether it had been snaffled by the flier’s imminence.

Agitation would not allow the questions to be answered. Trying to conceal her turmoil, Arabella remained as she had been for several minutes: with her right hand protecting her eyes against the harsh, inflaming morning glare.

Posed thus, she remembered how - last night - she had been disturbed from sleep by helicopters. She had risen naked from her bed; and, from her bedroom window, she had seen searchlights - to the east, above the marshes, above the estuary, out at sea. She had seen them - those investigative, illuminating, swooping funnels - and she had heard, accompanying, the interwoven drones of airborne monsters, the rotors’ thrum, the rotors’ fade and thrash. She had heard - unless she had dreamed it: the disturbance, the rising, the nakedness, the seeing, the whole.

By now, the flier - certainly, a flier - was five feet away: no more. He stopped. He set his sports bag on the yellowed grass. He said -

“I need a place to rest for a while.”

His age, Arabella estimated, was forty-one or forty-two or -three, or -four. He was clean shaven. His pearl grey eyes were calm. His arms were folded to his ribs. His manner was assured - not supplicating.

Arabella told him -

“There are two pubs in the village from which, I imagine you’ve just walked. There’s the Rose and Crown and there’s the Golden Star. Both of them take in paying guests. You should try them. This is a private house.”

With the hand that wasn’t shielding her eyes, she gestured behind her - to her cottage; but she hoped that the flier would not accept her suggestion - would not pick up his sports bag and would not turn to walk back down the hill to Bivenhoe. She wanted to find out what he had to offer; and, if it - the offering - was bad, she would be rid of him as she had been rid of so many others in the era that had preceded ‘Arabella’.

As though it were a source of pride, the flier said -

“I have no money. I can’t pay.”

His voice was accentless. It carried flatly in the dry air. It coiled, like a lariat thrown horizontally.

Arabella asked -

“You have no money?”

It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard: it was that she was stalling, seeking seconds, sifting possibilities. She wondered if he were a criminal, escaped from some correction centre; if what she had supposed to be his flying suit were really prison dress; if he were - instead - the victim of a crime; if he had been robbed - made destitute. Still, he had kept his charming boots. She wondered if he were mad or if he were implementing a stratagem - hustling the hustler. In any case, it should not matter - should have no mattering - to her. She had had her rules from the beginning, from the corners: there was no charity; the cash was ‘up front’; there was no credit; additionals were dealt with in advance; ‘surprises’ generated consequences. Those were the terms for those - the toughly calculated nights, when she had called herself Aventa Layne.

Abiding by such rubrics - that had been as simple as the brushing of the teeth. However, here the rubrics did not apply. Together with intuition, they - the thumbed simplicities - had grown confused. This situation was neither as lucid nor as sordid as a contract settled beneath a lamppost or beside a curtained limousine. It had the element of mystery that her profession lacked. It was not an approximation of business. It was a prospect of patterns less predictable than penetration, fuck, his exit, wipe, back on the corner, next.

The flier said - “The only bank in Bivenhoe is closed. It doesn’t open on a Saturday.”

His - or the convict’s or the lunatic’s or the hustler’s - tone implied that he thought it likely that Arabella had forgotten which day of the week it was. She had forgotten. She had forgotten that. She had forgotten what the time was.

She asked -

“Then, what is it that you want? Then, for how long will you need to stay?”

“I don’t know yet. I can’t know yet,” the flier told her.

Whether he was answering the first question or the second, or whether he was answering both, was unclear. Arabella took her right hand away from her brow with a flicking motion and turned toward the cottage. Behind her, the man - whose identity was vague again, was blurred and splintered, was an element of the landscape in the heat - picked up his sports bag and followed.

Over her shoulder, Arabella said -

“It isn’t me - it isn’t truly me - this cottage. It’s too twee. It should belong to a spinster who writes rhymes for birthday cards and practices patience in the afternoons, her solitary cards...”

“Ouch,” the vague man said.

Arabella swung round to look at him. He was kissing, as though they had been burned by the wrought iron gate, the tips of the fingers of his free hand. It would be hot, the gate - of course it would; but the touching of it and the saying of ‘ouch’ rather than ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’, and the kissing of the fingers - all of these acts struck Arabella as faked.