Heredyssey continued...
What a jolly old time, not. But the pedestrian precinct is quelled and quieted, the crowds mostly buggered off, laying off from their shopping at last, by the time we emerge from that den of obscurantists by what route I can't remember. I am left with the impression that the room I have just exited existed not at the back of any pub, let alone that one, but at the back of any mind led so astray as to entertain it. I vow not to again. Sunset is not long off as Weasel hurries me past the brassy thighs of vainglorious Athena or Boudica, or whatever she is, the statue's pedestal still visibly stained by my late offering, but not a bone of it left, and I wonder what dog nibbled there or what butcher plundered for his choicest cuts, had he the wisdom.
Walking westwards the blood red sun is pierced by the lance of a steeple, light dribbling from the wound, snagging hazily in yellow blurring haloes around gravestones, tombs, sepulchres, lairs, grottoes and the like. And I pause for a second, sniffing dog-like, straining on the invisible leash by which Weasel seeks to drag me, tensing, to kneel and examine a few graves. Putting down roots, I sit down with my back against the wall of the auld kirk for a moment and plug my sleeve wires into the mossy stones, turning the dial on my chest like a radio set, tuning into the waves, afore and aft, astral sailor at the bridge of present time. The willows weep, the yew yawns the ancient oaks open up their secrets. I watch a legion of Roman soldiers emerge from one wall and march across to vanish through another. I can almost smell them, the sweat and olives, the spilt blood of savages still misting their tired eyes. They will be ambushed presently, by my obliging ancestors. I could stay and go back to plunder further time for Norsemen's raids and echoing prayers of monks in rough sackcloth, glinting altar pieces, jewels and armour, but Weasel is tugging at me and we must away.
Weasel leads me through the resplendent gardens of suburbia, mazelike, parterre walls of hedge and bush, losing both of us quickly in the failing light as the orange sodium blossoms droop from overhead, strange fruit on iron trees. I am suddenly haunted by fragmented memories of childhood, coming home from school on winter evenings. So I was a child once, with a mother somewhere. But the dark window closes as quickly as it opens before I can catch sight of…. What? There it is again, Weasel, walking always slightly ahead as if dragging my like a sleigh across snowfields, is jabbering again about me having a brother. The streets get quieter and posher, passover kosher, hushed in bushes, hunched in bunches of branches, carefully tended and mended, until we arrive at the door: fine iron gates in voluptuous curves and Weasel squeaking into an intercom like an over-awed overwrought urchin.
We are in, up a winding path then through large carved doors into an interior like an ornate lighthouse burning in the confused night, a temple of unreason. Then strangely, Weasel is gone, out like a rat through a tradesman's entrance, leaving me to Elissa. I feel naked, like a morsel poised upon a trap. She comes down her long hallway, a swishing of white satin, flowing and pouring, a soft storm pinned by two red lips and above them a nose which sniffs at the blood on my stained shirt. You bear such a resemblance to him! -she shrieks, -to Zenir! Let me look at you, your profile. She turns my cheek with hands of a practised film director or perhaps a manqué hairdresser. The nose, the aquiline profile, that Arabic brow, or are you of Armenian, Persian descent… I forget?
I forget also… I say, sotto voce, eyes down, aiming for modesty. Then she plunges me into her studio, her salon, to show me Zenir's pictures.
Look, Nadith, isn't it? He told me so much about you. When did you two last meet? He's always on the move. Look at these pictures. I bought far too many of course, but I simply couldn't restrain myself. He is in his prime, this is the mother lode of inspiration he's ploughing these days, have you ever seen such strangeness, such illumination?
Now at last, used as I am to trees and skies and the green and natural things that spring from the fields and seas of terrestrial creation, I must admit that these paintings make me halt, break step, skip breath, skip breakfast, jump ship, jump backwards. Each canvas is huge and hugely strange. Here one is a crab, transforming into the face of a man, then into the scene of a sea cliff, a landscape in wondrously sad light. And here is one of a flock of horses galloping through the air and turning into clouds then into the white dress of a young woman falling backwards her golden hair lifting up in strands and turning into a halo around a summer sun. And yet another of a tree of red apples but each apple is a bullet hole and the tree is also a hand, the branches and leaves the lines on the palm, and there is something inside of each bullet hole, other tiny scenes that draw me in and I'm starting to feel sick as I bend down to look closer into one, when Elissa's hand on my shoulder brings me back to my senses with a jolt.
What was it like to grow up with him? -Such a great artist, did you watch him doing his first sketches, did you play together? Did you urinate together, taking care to generate convergent streams from alternate sides of the water closet? Where does he get his ideas?
Enough! I raise my fingers to my lips, then my temple, wishing it was one. It was a difficult childhood. We were often separated by our obstreperous governess.
Obstreperous?
Yes, she was an obstetrician. I mean… an optician… a magician.
A musician?
That as well, certainly. A polymath.
A mathematician?
A polymathematician then, shall we settle on that?
Appallingly. Assuredly. It accounts for your extensive education.
Elissa is an exceptionally tall woman. Her head always seems to be out of focus somewhere above me, dimmed in a swirl of blonde hair haloed by her halogen lights in smoked glass lampshades. And between the paintings, I can see Art Nouveau stained-glass windows with cryptic glimpses of meadows beyond. We are on the outskirts of town now, where she has bagged herself the best views. But the interiors are old, Arts and Crafts, Jugendstil, Fin de siecle, sinuous curves and languid androgynes. Education? I'm not sure I get your drift…-I reply, and we do seem to be drifting, from the studio to the parlour from the parlour to the boudoir. We must get back to the Renoir. Ce Soir.
Zenir told me, how your nanny gave you your first sexual experiences.
Did he indeed? How indiscreet of him. Had he had a tipple when he let that slip a little?
But I'm almost muffled now. She has me pressed up against a wall, my head between her breasts like one or all of the three of us is going to give way to make fruit juice. A tipple… a nipple, even. Evening. Leaving.
Special dispensation. I plead inability, disability, gullibility. I've been too long in the hills, the smell and taste of a real woman is too heady a wine for my rarefied senses to refine. She puts me in the library like a book, in an inglenook, scaled by one of those little mobile ladders you only see in dreams. And I sleep between several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica keeping company for once with the truly great until my head hurts without a pillow, or is it the dreams of everything from A to Z and from Eden to Armageddon all strictly in order that do me in? At any rate, long before dawn, I'm gone. Down the treacherous dream-ladder and out through an Art Nouveau portal, slipping the bolt without a jolt, scared to wake her.
I sleep instead where I love, a more familiar bed, in the swaying fields of wheat not a hundred yards from Elissa's palatial abode, under a tree with the stars and the moon overhead, the only bed-mates I crave on a good day or a bad night.
In the morning Weasel wakes me, with Cynthia Beiderbecker at his side, just the ticket for a thicket, you can never find a retired occupational therapist when you need one, an occupational hazard-to-shipping in a sea of cereal, beached by the lighthouse. All those books and big ideas and bollocks. I let her ease my back with skilful hands while Elissa peers from on high from her parted voile curtains wondering what's ruptured, what we're up to, the three of us, what little's on show, with so much below, beneath the waves like golden hair on a summer's day, the sun like a wan face rising. Then it dawns on me as I glimpse her through her lacework windows moving about her corridors, pacing to and fro, that she has no head, only a glowing light, which all her flowing white dress flourishes and burnishes towards like the handle standard of a bed lamp. My false brother's lady is a false sun, a perambulating artificial illumination whose power fades by day, shamed by the sun she shuns so.