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To begin with she sat, old bat with her Habsburg dewlaps and her fat, implacable hands. The colour of suet, she was, but her body blown up in its bombazine tulle to a great black blot, like the spot from some tropical pox. He twisted his lips in repugnance, for he was spare and lithe. How now, Saxon sow? And he bowed to her. A mocking flourish he had learnt from the stage.
To begin with she sat, in silence. Her widow’s wattles tumbling down the front of her high-collared morning dress. A silky over-spill of wax from a candle about to be snuffed. Well? Old Empress? Anything to say? And he peeked under the hem of her skirts as if looking for a thimble he had lost. Just checking, he says, to her souring face, that you were still alive under there.
To begin with she sat, motionless. Like a guy, fit for the burning, overstuffed with straw. The image amuses him and he smiles to himself. But professionalism, always. He has a job to do. He sits down on the edge of her dresser and picks up a dainty pot of powder. He pours some in to the palm of his hand and sprinkles it on to the floor below, releasing the smell of lavender. He sighs. You know why I’m here, he says. In the year of your Lord eighteen hundred and forty-seven… He leaves the sentence hanging, this too he has learnt from the stage. It is called a pregnant pause.
To being with she does not reply. Or even turn her head. He does not like looking at her either, for hers is not the obesity of abundance, not a fertile sort of house frau fatness. No, hers is a kind of austerity, a deliberate, embattled gigantism. She is monumental, grim, an edifice. But he forces himself to look at her. He has learnt much from the stage. In the old days he’d carry them off in a trice, no relish, no discernment; not playing it out, not savouring the moment, heedless if they even understood. Ah, but this modern age, this theatre, its poised hysterics and arbitrary fidelities, it has taught him much. Now he cherishes every moment, an epicure of awful denouements, a connoisseur of last gasps. You do know why, you sagging old mare, and didn’t we tell you? Is it not written? Or did you not believe? That the land will have blood? Hum. Too much, he thinks. I am carrying on like a member of parliament. You saw it was written, he whispers it now, leaning in close and catching the smell of her, antique books and curdled milk.
None of them move, or speak, to begin with. They all fancy themselves as immovable objects. But then, just a minuscule motion of the head, and she catches sight of him, his reflection in the glass, his true form, his ancient shape, an ancesting echo peeling back to pre-verbal, plebeian terrors, from the world’s primordial glory days when the hind brains of would-be man rocked in a stygian amniosis. They are all from this. The slime. Those humans. It doesn’t matter to what estate they are born. He knows where they’re from- the coddling slop of the bog’s slack cunny- and he knows where they’re going- to the black be-shitting hole the wall, the Hadean anus of the underworld. And their quaint and Christly God help them if they ever fall in to his power, if the land wants blood, if the land sends him.
Sometimes they scream. Or piss themselves. Some become angry and pompous in their fear. But her, she is chilly, as cold and distant towards death as an unrequited love. But that’s all right, he has time. The rank nether parts of the land are calling, but they’ll wait a while. This fat one’s a prize. You know, he says, almost conversationally, there were warnings for you if you’d bothered to read them, we could have told you, you could have done right, all this could have been avoided, but now…
The old queen in her exemplary mourning, an unlucky umbrella opened indoors. One, she says, one… He smiles. One followed one’s conscience, yes? It is strange to him how often they say that. As if a conscience were an external thing, some volitional force or invisible friend they could blame it all on like errant children.
But perhaps that is what a conscience is. He wouldn’t know. He doesn’t have one. What he knows is that for years they have come, and she is just the latest to heed no warnings. Between defilements he waits, filing his teeth in the neck of the womb, anticipating the next one. There is always a next one. They are deaf and blind, not omen-savvy. They have lost the language of portent. All of their civilising, snivelling, snivellising. He hops now, on to his haunches, and points his finger at the constitutional monarch. She might be royalty, but he is gentry. A fanged mercenary, traditional monster, older than recorded time. Come, he says. And she says no, of course she does, his coy mistress. Come, he says, I shan’t ask you again.
Come where? Her voice is trembling now. This is the part that he likes best. To a place where you’ll always be busy, where hunger is only a tenth of the work. Will you wail? Yes, you look like a wailer, and writhe a bit too, a rheumatoid orgasm, very pretty! He is dancing now, jabbing her with his nails, each twelve inches long like mad marlin spikes. We’ll have such fun dear lady, such fun. It is not your dispassionate God that decides. The land will judge and she is in temper.
In a near ecstasy he takes the queen of England by the hair. Her discourse was brief, but gracious to the last. He had so enjoyed his audience.
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The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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a ghost story (Ainmire)
