Bridget

In the Fall, the leaves in the cemetery change and some idiot’s been by with roses again, stems carefully de-thorned, wrapped in lengths of crêpey black ribbon which blows in the breeze. They are, she thinks, a thoughtless extravagance. Some days, she thinks that she likes that about them best.

Fall is a moving season.

She looks at the carved stone benches, the wet leaves, reddish and gold, and she things about these things and who knows what the other-she thinks. They have never pretended to understand each other. They come from the same house in different places.

The other-she wears a red bodice and she smokes a pipe, though the smoke is odourless and colourless here, in this place. The wind takes it. She sits with her knees wide spread on the wet stone bench, her ruddy skirt kilted between her thighs, her boots muddied, though God knows where the mud comes from. Because they never leave the bench. Someone carved their name there (their shared name), and kept them. They stay.

Bridget Bishop. Hanged June 10, 1692.

And that’s the truth of it, and there is no justice in the world but the justice belonging to God.

They sit together on that bench, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, a carefully black wrapped stem across their knees…the both of her. The two of them, and the children come running and laughing along the road. The children, not children at all but young women, tall and graceful in unfamiliar clothes, old enough to run homes and bear children, bear husbands, but still, they run like children, laughing, with the wind pulling at the unbound length of their hair.

And they are both jealous but they recognise that times do change, and that this is a moving season.

Here it is: to begin with, she was Bridget Wasslbee and she was not the best wife, but she tried. There was gagging in the marketplace and whipping, and all because she raised her voice. You shouldn’t raise your voice. Those girls, those running girls, they shout and laugh.

I am no witch. I am innocent. I know nothing of it.

Like it mattered what she knew and didn’t know. Women fall and are taken into history and sometimes they hang you so that, centuries later, the leaves will still turn.

“They made you up,” she says, when she’s feeling old and vicious and unloved. “They made you up because a good story is better than a bad one.”

The other shrugs, her linen stained above her red bodice, her pipe leaning between her fingers. Their shoulders brush and the roses falls to the floor and maybe someone will pick it up and maybe the wind will take it. There will be other roses.

“Better made up than forgotten.”

Too, too cruel. Too cruel by far.

These are the things which they do to each other. These are things which she does to herself.

June 10^th, 1692. Even if that wasn’t carved beneath her backside, she’d remember it. Red bodice and brown, they sit beside each other on the bench. Once, up on the hill, there was an oak tree, and they hanged her there alone, and both of them died.

And that’s the truth of it, and there is no justice in the world, not one bit.

(This memorial is dedicated to the enduring lessons of human rights and tolerance learned from the Salem witch trials of 1692).

Eurydice

In the end, They pinned the stars to his dark suit, in the shape of his lyre.

And so, goodbye. I am in immense darkness holding out my hands which are, alas, no longer his. One points up, the other down and here I am, forever, waiting. My body is a signpost and my veins make many dead roads. My heart is a folly; outside, beautiful but inside it’s door-less and it holds no heat. I mark the way, here; where he left me, were they kept me, as a warning.

To love is to hurt.

Above, there’s a long white road and it leads up to the sun. We dream of that road and, in our sleep, we walk it. We walk backwards with our eyes tightly closed, against the wind, counting steps. That way, if we ever make it back, we’ll know when to stop walking and be at peace. Even in our sleep, we know the truth; we mustn’t look back. We almost always do, though. It’s human nature to want things most when they’re almost gone. We must do everything in our power, everything we can, not to look back.

But we do it, anyway. We look back and we wake up.

Up or down, though. That is the choice that we always have.

Up then. Up there.

He looked back. That much I understand. He didn’t take them at their word but he was right to. They pulled me back so fast that I left a cloud of dust behind, my post deserted, the road unmarked. Carrying grey dust in my hair, I couldn’t hear him…my singer, and I couldn’t hear. The rushing noise rose and deafened me, but I saw him, and I bloomed life. I couldn’t read his lips but I tried. I would have held my hands out to him but my hands had forgotten any purpose which they had before. When they let me go, I followed him automatically; close my eyes and followed his smell and counted the steps. Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back.

He did, of course.

It’s human nature. We always look back.

The road to Elysium was long and pale. I took it slowly in my bare feet, the dust stirring upwards and into my open hands, all that I had to bring with me. Somewhere something was burning and the smoke was pressing against our sky. One, two, three backwards steps and the city came back into view…a a palace tightly walled, a prison, a present. Hades built it for his stolen Queen…

In the courtyard, three old men sat nodding. Their miscarriages of justice were legendary. Back before them in my raggy wedding gown, faded scarlet, I waited.

“Take the high road.” I took it, backwards and forwards, down and up.

One of them was blowing smoke rings. I tried to catch one, one handed, thought that I might wear it on my cold hand. They were looking at me, leering. I imagined him there with me, and I opened my eyes, repeating one number, over and over, and I was not afraid.

“Tartarus is for whores, murderous mothers, inconstant wives. Elysium waits for heroes.” What did I know about heroes? What had I ever done that was brave? Now I was learning, but too late to change anything at all. I was learning to be brave.

“Such is life, woman. Your tragedy is to burn, if briefly.” I don’t think that those old men had any idea of just how viciously I could burn, just then. My heart was solid stone, like a comet. I could burn with a blue fire and not be consumed. That was what I had left to me. To burn and burn and never eat myself alive.

I got a last glimpse of the palace as I walked away, pale, perfect in it’s symmetry, and it broke my heart. Nothing grew in her garden but the marble was worked with buds always on the edge of bloom. Persephone was waiting for her Spring, always.

I was so thirsty. The numbers stuck in my mouth, against my teeth and repeated. There are two pools beside the gates. Up to my ankles, I stopped but I did not drink. I stood there with the hem of my dress floating and I watched the heartbroken women scrabbling on their hands and knees for mouths full of water. They say that Lethe takes away pain. It’s always that way with women; shared grief, but hidden. I needed my pain to keep my shape, needed the number of steps, the memory of the light. I needed them so that I would know when to stop. I twisted my hair, dropped my flowers and my dancing shoes on the surface of the water and watched them sink. I was so thirsty and so, so cold. That’s all that the dead are. We are cold from the inside out.

In Aspodel, I saw a boy newly arrived in hell. His body clung to the shadow of his armour. A Spartan, maybe, although he could have been from Carthage or Mogadishu or Amiens, too. He wore his hair shaved close against his skull. I asked his name…he couldn’t remember. I asked him where he’d come from. A field. There had been red flowers growing. How had he died? He hadn’t. He was just dreaming of this chilly girl in this chilly hell. Sometime soon, he’d wake. He touched me with both hands and stained my dress red over my heart. And how dare they talk to me about heroes, when I went walking in dim Aspodel and saw the faces of the million dead boys.

There was a clamouring noise, a jazz chatter across the whole of hell. The red hand print bled across my heart and I was going up, up, up.

In my dreams, the dog barks and snarls, warns that I am escaping. I was expecting that, but all that he did was lift his great heads to watch me pass. He knew who I was and barely made a snarl. My body left no warms shapes in the air. There was no mistaking me for anything other than I was.

The banks of the Styx are thick with mud and I left deep, backwards footprints there. On the opposite shore, the shuddering masses pushed and pulled. I had no money to pay the toll but I did have some silver; the ring that he gave me would have melted down into two rough coins.

“Take the oar,” Charon said. If he can find someone to take the oar then he can finally walk away, but nobody was ever that stupid. I folded my arms across my chest and I watched the shore slip away. He talked, but I didn’t hear…I drew my rusty veils around me and I watched and I waited. I don’t think he’ll ever find anyone to take that oar. It’s his hell and nobody else’s.

You don’t have to stay anywhere forever. You don’t have to do anything forever.

I know that it’s an abstract, but the cold. The cold creeps in and freezes you, hardens your cracked and bleeding heart. Beyond flesh and blood by then, I was beginning to thaw. Blinded and shivering, feeling the cold, I felt my way through a forest wooded with suicides. Lips moved against the palms of my hands. Whispers came to me through my pores. (What is the word for a mother of dead children? Why does love begin? Why does it end? Is there such a thing as too much love? Can you die of too little? How many people have died that way? How far would you go? When would you stop? Why does blood taste of metal? How many dreams can you explain away? How many days? Where does the good go, when it goes (and it does)?). He might have gotten a song out of it, my singer, but they would have devoured him as payment for their secrets. They would have eaten his warm heart whole. I didn’t belong there. It wasn’t my fault. I just wanted to be happy. I just ran out of luck.

I wrapped my fingers around the fibres of their prayers and pulled myself on up.

The world fades out at the edges, becomes all kinds of grey. It’s difficult to tell which direction to walk in, which way is up, but we have dreamed of this road and with your eyes closed it all looks the same anyway. One step after the other, one foot behind the other and, eventually, the light.

Sometimes, we even think that we see the sun and the unbroken blue of the sky.

And I grew up there, no distant Thrace for me, so I should have known all about snakes and long grass. It was a sudden, sharp pain; the snake’s teeth, my bare foot. I should have known better. The snake slithered back into the long grass, left beaded blood but no punctures. I danced and it smeared on my skin, blood and poison, and did me no harm, and all of the warmth came rushing back, like an orgasm, like all of the light in the world. And I actually saw the sun.

For a moment, I was frozen but so warm.

On my wedding day, the sun was shining and I stood naked while they brushed out my long hair. The grave-dirt, the particles from that grey sky fell to the round like silver sparks and I was free of it, then. For a moment. For a time, at least. My body was a circle, and I was beginning all over again.

The dress laces on around me…it needs me for structure. Without me, there is no dress, you see. Without me, there is no dress, and without him there is no me, and without us…

There is no world without us, only the grey sky and the long white road.

Eurydice, they’re calling and, ready at last, I lift my arms, pointing only to myself this time. They same my name again, calling me to my wedding: Eurydice, which means ‘width’ and ‘justice’ and if anyone deserves all of the justice in the whole wide world then it is me and him. It is Orpheus and me.

Eurydice (again)

…in other words…

The hell of loving other people is not enough to stop us.

Eve

She came to love England. It was so different from the place where she’d been born, better and worse, less flowers, more rain. She came to love the way that summer in England lost its shape, became hazy, all of its days spinning out, one into the other and all in the wrong order. Summer in England came and went quickly and nobody missed it once it was gone — no harm, no fuss, no thunderclaps or flame. She loved gentle things, by then. She loved him because he was gentle, his big hands, the way the light hit his dark skin. Her first love had been whiter than white but he hadn’t loved her nearly so well, or so gently. When she told him what she thought about summer, told him her grand thoughts with the tall windows open to the night, he laughed at her.

“You need everything to be more beautiful than it needs to be.”

“It isn’t possible for something to be more beautiful than it needs to be.”

He laughed again,

“You’re beautiful,” he said. He thought that she was Middle Eastern, Arabic, a barefoot daughter of a red hot desert. At night, in her little house wrapped in its big garden, they played guessing games, his heads against her shoulder, her legs around his waist, his fingertips against her heart.

“Istanbul,” he said, “Cairo…Dubai…Baghdad.”

Even the names of those places sounded like a song.

“As a woman, I have no country,” she said, quoting another woman, an Englishwoman, who’d known where her country was all along. Some women were just born lucky that way.

“Jerusalem?” That was usually when his voice cracked, when he pushed against her harder, when she arched under his weight and spread her arms across the bed or pushed against him with both palms, opening like the world to rain, welcoming him.

“My country was burnt away.” He thought that she was a wanderer, a nomad, a refugee. In a way, she was. In his body, she sheltered.

What she remembered most often, with her eyes closed, was the smell of the place, the lush after rain smell that made her feel like the world was open and ready and waiting…for what? With hindsight, she knew. It was waiting for the inevitable: for time to start and rush in and ruin everything. In the beginning, in the first place, there was Him and He said ‘let there be light’ and there was light on the surface of the deep and over everything. Light had already been spilling all over everything by the time she opened her eyes. Nothing had had names then, least of all herself. He’d named her first, her husband, her Adam. He’d been her lover but so had the world, the trees reaching for her with eager fingers, the grass aching to hold her. If Adam was the lord and master of what he saw, then she was a part of that, a part of creation and she blossomed and bloomed. She preferred to think of that world as spiral-walled and eternal, somehow wrapped in itself and preserving itself for ever. She scoured news reports for a glimpse of a topography that she’d known, once. Nothing. The world had moved on, but if she thought of it neatly closed within itself, she didn’t miss it so much.

“What are you thinking about?” he said, up early for work, dragging his shirt on over his head without unbuttoning it. He was older than he looked but still barely more than a boy, skinny and tall and fine with his beautiful smile. One man had been enough. He wasn’t just a pretty face; he was a reader, a lover, a talker. He knew plants and could make anything grow. She had thought of herself as so much dead wood, and then he’d laid hands on her and watcher her burst into blossom and fruit. Even his name meant ‘gift from God’. God probably owed her plenty, by then. He’d asked her to marry him again last night. She’d shook her head and kissed him.

“I had a husband once,” she said. “Why would I want another?”

He lent over her, ready to go out, and kissed her belly, the stretch-marks and silvered scars. There had been children once. Sons.

“What are these?” he said, touching her gently. She could see how his fingers could draw life out of nearly dead things.

“To the woman, He said, ‘I will increase your labour and your groaning and in your labour you will bear children.”

After he went to work, she lay in the warm hollow that his body left in the bed and she thought about him and Adam, and her sons. She picked up the phone and held it for a long time before she realised that she had nobody to call.

It was all such a very long time ago.

They watched her as she walked by and she didn’t care. At her side, his hand in hers, he murmured about the history of the place, Hampton Court, stolen by a king but built by a man who dreamt cathedrals. She walked through the crowd towards the display gardens and the sound of running water. The heat was oppressive. The English women drank tea on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, tutted and whispered as they walked by. How old did she look? Forty? Fifty? She had grey in her long black hair, twisted back from her face to leave her neck bare, any hope of a breeze. Let them tut at denim low on her hips and silver piercing skin…let them whisper about breasts above white cotton and a boy half her age, a bicep tattooed with a coiled snake (biting it’s own tail, symbol of the never ending world). Let them talk. Did my weeping lifetimes ago, ladies…did my sack cloth and ashes time.

She kissed him in front of them, in the end, her bonny boy, her young man and walked away from the English women, loving him wildly and wearing the grey in her hair with pride. He wrapped his arm around her waist and spun her. He made her feel like a girl again. He renewed her. She was older than she looked.

The thing which she loved most about England (apart from the summer) was that English people really loved their gardens. They had the right climate for that kind of love. He was American, but he saw it too; the little miracles that were roses and trees. Every year, she picked one; there were a handful of these shows, dotted around middle England. He liked them because they were English, quintessentially so, and so did she; she enjoyed watching old women haggling clematis and jasmine plants and middle aged earth mothers hoarding painted earthenware pots and glass ladybirds to put in bouquets. Every year, he’d come home one day with a pair of tickets and they’d take themselves off to a place cluttered with stalls selling ripe strawberries and compost and champagne.

“What do you want to see next?” he said, sat beside her, a strawberry distorting the slight concavity of his cheek before he chewed, his eyes flickering at the sudden burst of juice and light. “There’s a talk we could see on chrysanthemums or…”

“The show gardens,” she said, stealing one of his strawberries (even though she had her own, they tasted better from his bowl). “Let’s go see them next, before the judging. Before we have our minds made up for us.” He smiled. He was on the verge of laughing at her again.

“Your wish is my command,” he said, popping another strawberry into his mouth.

It was her favourite of the show gardens. It amazed her that something so perfect could have not exist at all a week before; could have sprung complete from a rough square of bare dirt. She fell in love with it, the long grass whispering to her, the honeysuckle and climbing rose creeping inside her, twining her heart in tendrils. It didn’t look fake, that garden…it was difficult to imagine it rendered down to its component parts. It felt created, not merely made. The name shouldn’t have surprised her.

“Eden,” he said, and she didn’t hear him after that. The garden had her in its fragrant arms.

“You look different,” he said, coming to sit beside her, his arm warm and heavy across her shoulders.

“I was just remembering,” she said, leaning her head against him, letting his smell, sweat and deodorant and youth, mingle with the garden’s.

“I feel like I’ve never seen you before,” he said, twisting his fingers around a loose curl of her hair, but she was silent, remembering that all gardens were the same garden, the way that all loves connected and seeing, for the first time in a long time, God in everything that moved.

Lilith

I was a star in the earth, and he was soil, and I was soil too, and we fell apart into each other, and a garden…no, not a garden…a world, between us. We fell apart into each other, and we were the world, under God, and he was under me, and I was in him. Yes.

In the beginning we were a garden.

I was a star in the earth, and the entire earth was blooming, and I was blooming with it, arms over my head, swaying in the warm and varied breezes, the ones that came in from the sea, oh, the ones that bought promises and seeds. And I was a star in the earth.

He made me a promise, but he forgot what it was before he had a chance to break it.

Lie down, he said, but all I wanted to do was grow towards the sun. Lie down, he said, but all I wanted to be was above. I had lain in the soil for too long. I was a below-ground thing, learning to be in the light.

Oh, to be in the light.

There were things without names, and I was thing without a name, too, and we all, every one of us, every part of us, learning to be in the light.

The sun never set in those first days.

There was light on the face of the deep, oh, yes. There was light on every face, and all of the faces were upturned, except his.

He was looking at me.

What could I say? I was only reflecting the light given to me. I could make no light of my own. It was not in my design to shine.

Lie down, said Adam.

No, said I.

I was a star in the earth, and I grew in the bark of trees, and the heavy, nodding heads of flowers, and I flew with birds, and drank water with the others, and I raised both hands, and every finger was a no.

No, said I. Because if he could stand, and the trees could stand, and mountain could stand, then I could too, said I. I had been there at the beginning, said I. I’d been a part of everything too. He wanted to be inside me. Little brained, he’d forgotten that I was already inside him too. Adam’s problem was that he lacked imagination, and I was all dream. I was all want. I was more than the sum of my parts, yes. I was more than he wanted me to be.

No.

There are creatures that are born knowing how to run, and, within minutes, they run, keep pace with a herd, keep safe. I didn’t need to run. It seemed to me that the rising sun made a path to walk, goodbye. The world was ever expanding, and there was a world in me, getting bigger all the time, seas and continents. There was so much to be done, yes, and he’d wanted me to lie still, and lie quiet, like the soil, and I was pushing, yes, I was exploding up up up. Up, where there was only the sky to stop me.

Angels and demons, they say. Experience, say I. So I opened my arms and let the entire world come rushing in. I was a mystery to myself. I was learning the purpose of every inch. I was a walking miracle. I was coming to understand, and I gave birth. We are a self perpetuating cycle. We are a light that never goes out.

My children were numerous as the stars in the sky, complicated constellations entirely of my own design.

And I was in the cities by the sea.

They cam after me, the angels, beautiful with their eyes made out of burning love. To love is to burn, be burnt up, consumed. My purpose was to burn for him, for Him. Oh, I was going to burn, one way or another. I was always going to burn, when all I wanted to do was shine.

“Come back,” said the angels, solititious. It was the only choice I ever had; leave, come back…stay or go. I had wanted to shine, not burn. I had wanted to shine so badly, shine and go on shining, without being consumed. If they could do it, why not me?

“Come back,” the angels said. “Or we’ll kill them.”

My babies, my children, numerous as constellations, sprung beating from the soil of me. A story which I told in living blood and bone. A hundred children a day, they said, to be crushed between their long hands, the ugliest hands, hands for doing ugly work, and nobody would remember me then, either way. I would be dirt and no more. I would be soil, to be planted.

“Come back,” they said.

“No,” said I.

Maybe I could have loved Him on my own, if they’d given me the choice. No choice given, and it would never be in my nature to shine, not now. They rubbed the shine off me and left me dark and bitter, a thing for ripping, never to nurture. I was the ground in which weeds would grow, strangle them, and me too. And I could have been a star.

So my children died in their thousands, in their millions, so many. I lost count. Their screams only a mother could hear, and I heard them, and locked them away in my many hearts. I was the eye of a storm, and I raged and I tore at the sky. And I wouldn’t go back then. I would never go back. I changed, adapted and became closer to what they were making me into.

My temperature was dropping. I was becoming a cold blooded creature, a drop in a great sea. She had been born by then, the apple of his eye, and the world had turned further away from me, opened its arms and welcomed her, which made it easier, in the end. I was the eye of a storm. Like a storm, I raged, and like a storm, I blew myself out, clean out.

And I was gone, then. I was utterly and completely gone.

And I was everywhere. I was mirrors and water and windows. I was everything that reflected light, and I was sort of shining, then. I was everywhere, dogged by their lies, lies told by men with beautiful eyes and ugly, horned hands. What lies they told, that I lay with me and demons, that I was the devil’s wife, and the Queen of some Sheba. That I took their children. That I reached through mirrors and took them, took them away. I became every one of their bad night dreams.

The truth: that they lost me when they took my children, and that all things heal, given time and space and air. Not all scars are ugly. A weed is a flower in the wrong place, and not all of us choke the earth in which we grow.

The truth is that they lost me when they fell in love with Eve, when I was free to go, and I was so utterly gone.

Gone into my own darkness.

Gone with my borrowed light.

Gone to shine.

Helen

Beautiful*

___

* Part bird, part god, what was anybody expecting of her, anyway? Born to spark, and burn brightly. Born to grow into her own face. Her eyelashes could dispatch fishing skiffs out onto the deep wine sea, just a fraction of a face that would one day launch fleets, one way or another. And she was doomed before ever she saw him. She was doomed because she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Something to be owned. A prize to be given. To Paris, of all people. Stupid boy. Neither of them stood a chance; pretty and stupid, selfish and carelessly cruel. A peacock lives for twenty years, but a swan? Too sad. Too, too sad. Her husband, the one with the bloody hands, gave chase, but not for her. For pride. For honour. For ownership of the most beautiful thing in the world. The topless towers burned for many things, love and loss of love not withstanding. And who else would launch his ships? Helen’s crime: her mother’s gift. Her curse: beauty is only skin deep. It took fifteen years but, by the end, even in Sparta, they were calling her Helen of Troy. Oh, loss. Oh, broken heart. Menalaus took her back, but she left a part of her behind. At her centre now was a trinket box, gold and silver filigree. She carried it with her back to Sparta, and, by then, all that it contained were wisps of smoke and the screams of the Trojan women, the wives of the city. Cassandra should have burned her while she slept. Men die on their own. Women last longer. Helen outlived all of her squabbling men and came, at least, to Rhodes, her welcome in Sparta well run out. Such is life. Such is history. And Helen had no sons to keep her there. Polxyo welcomed Helen with one arm open, all the time holding her gown shut over the empty room that was her heart. When men died on the beaches of Troy they buried them in great ditch graves and there was only her, only Polyxo to remember her, her husband, T-le-pole-mus like a song. All of those dead husbands, and everyone of them dead for her. For Helen. The end is simple: the Erinyes return rightness to the world, but, rarely, are they kind. Mortal women are crueller still and who knows what Polyxo paid her handmaidens to don wings and cruel knives, and who knows what they will pay for what they did? Mortal women hanging a mortal woman from a tree that bent slightly under her weight, but, in the end, held. Poor Helen. Poor beauty.

Hanging is hell on a face.

Scheherazade

Here it is: he killed the girls because he couldn’t trust his wife. Three thousand girls who went to his bed virgins and left in the morning both married and dead. Because of a kiss given to another man. Because of a kiss.

Those are the facts. The rest is the story.

Here it is: I’m telling you the story of the story of how you save your own life.

It’s harder than you think to tell a good story.

You have a few minutes, so make yourself beautiful. Take care, you who have carried water and swept dirt floors. Now is your time for dancing, dancing girl. Now is your time to paint your palms with henna and bind your hair with ruby for royalty, pearl for wisdom, and both of them protect. Be straight backed and downward gazing. You can learn to be a wife. You were your poor father’s poor daughter and here you are, veiled like a bride, enough gold for a King’s ransom. Just remember: even in the dark, the moon and stars know where they are. Know where you are. Do not lose sight of what must happen here. Go carefully. You know this palace like the back of your hand. They cannot touch you. They cannot know you. You are promised to a king, and you have been promised before, all of these one thousand nights.

Your body will recognise him by now. There is a place for his head in the crease of your thigh. Look how your body is already mimicking that of an honest wife. His beard is soft like a boy’s. His eyelids are heavy and smoky with kohl. A story, he’ll say. Scheherazade, you tell the most beautiful stories in all of the world.

Your stories are what they are. Open your eyes wide, so that they reflect his marrying eyes right back at him. He has to want you. He has to need you. You’ve lasted two years and seven months and nine nights and three hours longer than any of the others. Tonight, tell him the story of the woman who knew her duty, and the king with marrying eyes…of the poor man’s daughter who told stories so beautifully that she broke men’s hearts and saved the world.

And married a king.

Tell him that one. Save your own skin, and let them go, the three thousand girls that you loved so well, sight unseen…the ones who came before you. Release them, so that, one day, they can come creeping back to him in the reproachful eyes of his daughters.

Make it count. This one is your killing stroke. This is your story, as well as his.

Nobody else must die here, daughter. Nobody else must die.

Joan

“Ex-junkie gun loving novelist, pensive in a black bow-tie gazes at his clasped hands. He looks like a church deacon, a riverboat gambler, a soft palmed widow strangling con-artist.”

Adrian Searle, describing a photograph of William. S. Burroughs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

In a long room in Philadelphia, there are photographs on the wall. The silver makes the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. When I was sixteen, I was given a worn copy of a book and I read it and it changed me, one molecule at a time, and made me into something different. I can’t exactly put my finger on how it happened or why but maybe that book made me into who I wanted to be after I read it. The person that I wanted to be at the time?

And somehow that Changed Me makes it to Philadelphia in the winter and I stop in front of this particular picture.

In the photographs of him that I’d seen before, he always looked like an old man. It was at odds with the life that I know that he led, but maybe Old Bill cheated…where Dorian Grey had a picture of him that aged, maybe, somewhere, there was a photograph of William Burroughs in an attic that lived a good and quiet life for him in his absence?

Yeah, maybe.

It’s cold in the city but in here it’s too warm and I sway quietly on the balls of your feet while I look at the photograph and don’t think a lot of anything at all. I let my mind go blank. I didn’t hear her come up behind me because, if I’m listening to anything at all it’s the distant murmur of my friends’ talking because the last thing that I want is to be left here, in this strange gallery and this strange city. I’m chewing on the blue plastic chip that they gave me so that I could eventually claim your coat, which I’ll need. It’s cold.

“That’s a bad habit.”

I look at her like it’s none of her business, but I take the chip, the piece of blue plastic, out of my mouth too. It’s damp and you hold it in my hand.

“Sorry.”

She’s a little woman, lumpen, black coat, black hair. She’s one of those women who seem possessed of a huge and ancient sadness, a sadness that centres as an absence in the eyes. I feel like I might have seen her before; I don’t know her, but there’s that sort of glancing familiarity that comes with brushing past someone in a crowded corridor at roughly the same time every day for a week or so.

“He looks so peaceful.” I hate small talk. I’m not good at it.

“He looks old,” she says. “And sad.”

I am twenty two years old. At this age, anything older than your parents is a flat line, but you’ll learn.

“He was young once,” she says, her dark eyes pinpricks, fixed on Bill’s white hands. “We were young together. It was Allen’s fault, though.”

And now I remember where I saw her. Tucked into a reader which I took out of the library once, little more than an appendix, a footnote, a blurry photograph of a woman in her twenties, the same age as I am now, but looking much older, her pockets full of papers, her eyes closed against the sun. The picture was blurred by the shake of someone’s hand. She’s blurred now by how quickly I look away and then look back again.

“I know who you are.” I can’t help it. I blurt it out, and then it’s said and can’t be taken back. She doesn’t look at me, so I stare, for a moment. Either I’ve finally gone out of my mind, or something miraculous is happening. It’s always difficult to tell in these situations. Either she’s a ghost, or a figment, or she’s really there. Her name, I know now, is Joan.

“I read Junky when I was sixteen,” I say, trying to act as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened. “It made me want to be a writer, sort of.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. She looks older than twenty, but she did in the photograph too. It’s difficult to tell if she’s actually got older since 1951.

“For what?”

“Writers. They’re flawed…and they tell lies.”

I look at her. The first time I read about her death I was in the grip of hero worship and I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe that, at a party, Bill rested a glass on the top of her head and shot at it and missed, but did not miss her head. I didn’t want to believe that he was capable of doing that and walking away.

“You could have stopped it.” There I go, blurting things out again. “You could have. It was a stupid game. You didn’t have to…”

“You’re a baby,” she says, house mother of that sprawling slum, more important to them, for a while at least, than Joyce or Edie. “How can you possibly know how much things can hurt?”

I want to tell her, then…want to set her straight. I want to tell her about all of the things that have happened to me, and all of the things that can hurt and how, at twenty two, I am just now coming to the conclusion that sometimes your life can have too much life in it, but I’ve never been good at talking about those things, so I don’t.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” That’s all I say. That’s all I can say.

We stand there for a moment, her and me, me and the woman who held her own for a little while in that circle jerk, that boy’s club that, fifty years later, I’d still be trying to get into. It doesn’t really matter if she’s there or not.

“Don’t you think he looks sorry?” Personally, I would like to think that Bill was sorry for what he did. For a long time before a hopeless Californian stole my head in a way in which, maybe, it would never be stolen again, Bill was my favourite in the world. I want to think well of him.

“I don’t know,” she says and squints her empty eyes at him. “Well, Bill? Are ya?”

Bill doesn’t say anything. I almost expected that he might. I remember reading somewhere that, afterwards, Joan’s death kept him constantly terrified.

No way but to write myself out.

“His books changed my life.”

“He isn’t sorry,” she says, and shakes her head, once. “He isn’t sorry and I love him anyway.”

She’s silent then except for a barely breathed goddamnit. I want to put your arms around her or at least my hands on her, somewhere. I want to be a comfort but I’ve never been good at that, either. I’ve never had to be anybody’s mother. Unlike Joan in that photograph, I’ve had the luxury of never having to grow old before my time.

“He loved me,” she says. “But not hard enough and not for long. I lost him in a…” she moves her hands like I do when I can’t remember the exact words for what I want to say, “…Benzedrine dream, and I saw double, and, by the time I blinked and saw right again, the real him was already gone.”

Joan bends down in her black coat with it’s full pockets, slightly blurry, and sets something on the gently sloping floor, off-centre under the photograph, which is perfectly aligned. From the door, I’m being called and I have to go – there’s a dinner and beer and a train to catch. This is a journey which I had to promise yourself. Sometimes, I’m just dying to move.

“He said that it was an accident,” I say.

Joan smiles, and it’s not the tight lipped smile that she’s showing in that one photograph I’ve seen of her. It’s broad, wide open, and she looks, if not twenty two, then no older than thirty-seven.

“In the magical universe, there are no coincidences and there are no accidents…” she says.

“Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen,” I say. And I think that I understand.

And then she’s gone, as these things are.

And the glass doesn’t break this time either.

Bonney & Read

The noise comes back first. The noise, the appalling noise, wood splintering, cannon firing, men screaming and the whole world reduced to something blown entirely apart. Yes, that’s it. We were blown completely to pieces. What was it that she said? Dogs…dogs. Something about…weaklings and women. She didn’t have to make it worse for them. It was already bad enough. They were boys, babies, not one of them over twenty and she honestly expected them to be brave? I loved her, I would have gone to the end of the world for her and yet, I could have hated her for the boys. Those poor boys.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to end.

No, no, no. Not there. Back. I can’t start there, I’ll finish too soon. Portsmouth. I like the way that that word tastes. Ports-mouth – round, like something beginning, and kissable like lips. My life, my little land lover’s life, could have been over; I’d had my three times three bad luck, and then I saw The Vanity floating out in the harbour. Easy enough to take a shilling, hers if not the King’s. Easy enough to swear featly to her, in her shiny leather, her stolen gold. There was no shortage of new recruits, and one by one we knelt and, one by one, we swore our loyalty to her, Anne Bonney, kohl-eyed pirate queen, star of many a sea. Calico Jack Rackham was there too, twirling his waxed mustaches, flashing his gold teeth, but it was Annie who held the eye. On second thoughts, forget Portsmouth in the drizzling rain. Start with them. Just picture it; pretty girl, handsome rogue, best ship in the world. Doesn’t it sound like a dream?

Let me start over once more. Once more. I’m new at this.

After Portsmouth, newly in Anne Bonney’s service, it was the Caribbean for us, for me. Not strong enough to heft cannon, not slight enough to walk the tightrope, powder at my hip, I spent a lot of time at Annie’s side. She’d been lonely without me, she said. She took lovers, though. Everybody knew (everybody did). Annie had a taste for pretty Christian boys, fed them rum and rolled them. Never let any of them really touch her, though, not until me. Annie had made herself into a tower; I watched boys scale her and slip, never to be seen again. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want into Annie’s knickers, I did, but that wasn’t the only thing. I was her confidante, see? There were things about her which nobody knew but me. I didn’t want to climb, Annie. I wanted to take her apart brick by brick.

“Come here and sit beside me, handsome boy,” she used to say. Like a dog, I was there when she called.

On the deck, she sat with her head against my shoulder. I knocked my wrist again the keys bunched around her neck to hear them chime dully.

“What are those for?” I said, as she wrapped them in her fist to silence them.

“A key for every room where I ever left something precious,” she said. Over the years, I pieced together what it was that Annie meant when she said ‘precious’ – gold, silver, jewels, paperback novels and baby bones. There is more to life, pretty girl, than riches.

Still, on the deck. We were on the deck, her head was against my shoulder, and I was thinking about the way that she smelt. In the sticky heat of the tropical night, she sweated, sweet and sickly but there was also the perfume in the coils of her hair, copper, gunmetal, gunpowder clinging to the tails of her coat. She smelt like a woman, but more than that. She smelt like the place between decks where the cannon are. Anne Bonney smelt ready to fire.

“Tell me a story, Read.”

“A story, Captain?”

“A star story, if you please.”

“A star story.” She could navigate by them but nobody had ever taken the time to tell her the stories. Vainly, I searched for something I knew; a hunter after a bear, or a faithful mutt, anything. They’re all messed up down there. I did the best that I could, though. I improvised.

“Did I ever tell you the one about the mermaid and the desert?” She shook her head against my arm. “You see those stars there? Her tail, see, and her tangled hair?” I was warming up. “If the Pacific is a woman (and she is) then the desert is a woman too. The sea, she’s a broad hipped, bare footed dancing dancing dancing girl, hands over her head good time girl, all things to all men, bearing no grudges, remembering nothing. The desert, though, she’s older, meaner. The desert fucks and eats the bones for breakfast. You know the kind of girl I’m talking about. Now…you imagine that poor mermaid, ripped out of her Pacific slumber, perfect and dumped in a damp whole in the middle of all that desert. Imagine being taken out of all that vast coolness and waking up one morning too big for your very small pond. Horrible, isn’t it? A pond. No…it wasn’t even a pond. A puddle. A drip. A teacup’s dream of utter fullness.”

“What did she do?”

“What did she do? Sang out of tune, of course. The world crime the mermaids have is discord. A siren would have had her eyes for less. And now the sky is the only blue she ever sees, a great dry desert, cold, and there are no tides for her now. She is a gilled creature; she chokes on clouds. Her world is murky and silt laden. She dreams of breaking waves.”

Annie made a soft, content sound and pressed her cheek against my shoulder, sleeping, rising and receding like the tide. She was as much of a puzzle to me as she was to everybody. She liked to bare her teeth and growl. The crew told stories about a husband who turned King’s evidence, a baby who died of lack of love. Anne Bonney was a storm, a lot of noise, but beyond that, what I remember is her when she was quiet. Annie was a roaring, wild girl, but it’s when I think about the quiet times that it all comes rushing back without warning, like opening floodgates. Like blowing charges. At night, I lay awake and imagined Jack touching her; the other ones came and went but Jack stood his ground. In my hammock, I cataloged her; the imagined weight of her breasts, the way that her hair would feel on my face if I closed my eyes, the taste of her if I sucked my fingers after. Was I ashamed? I never was. It never felt wrong to me. Wanting her was like looking at the ocean from the crow’s nest, from the very top of our moving world; it was bigger than all understanding.

Was I jealous of Jack? Oh God, yes. I hated everything about him where she was concerned. She was so difficult to talk to but Jack seemed to have the knack, the sort of thing that only that comes from long practice. I think that she needed the both of us, Jack and me, one for her left hand, one for her right. Annie had the feel of a not whole person; she needed other people to help her keep her shape. Yes. That’s it. There was too much of the sea in Annie. She never knew when to stop. There was a night, that night, not the beginning of the end but the point after which nothing could stay the same. We’d been in the islands for nine months or a year; I’d told her all of the star stories that I knew. That night was a wild party night. A blue heavy moon, Annie’s mouth spiced with fruit and rum, her jewels the spoils of running battles and all of her heat spilling over. Too hot to spend much time below, so we made a circle of warm light on the deck, out in the air and while men aged against each other and sang Annie danced in slow spirals, her linen skirts kilted up above her knees.

“Oh, Annie, oh, Annie,” I called to her, “Come sit here with me.” It was the first time in all of that time that I demanded anything of her. I was almost surprised when she came. She dropped down onto her hands and knees and crawled to me, too drunk to walk steadily. Behind me, Jack was saying something but I didn’t hear him, distracted as I was by the fragrant shadows between Annie’s breasts. She knelt in front of me, her hands resting on my knees, and Jack was still talking and I didn’t catch a word. Annie’s kiss was sharp and sweet, a flicker of her tongue. Oh, God, she caused a flood in me.

I think that that was what did it for Jack, that kiss. It’s that old thing about the Queen’s head, isn’t it; if the Queen stands, you bow, if she sits, you kneel, and, when the Queen is sleeping, you get on your belly and kiss the ground. Jack could take the stupid, gaudy boys, he could take the singing and the dancing and the noise, but he couldn’t quite take that moment when Annie crawled and her head was lower than mine.

When he slammed me back against the wall I let him; I’d seen Jack beat a man into unfamiliar angles for Annie or because of her. He always pleaded headaches or remorse by morning and Annie made a big show of weeping and sponging scrapes and bruises. I didn’t fancy scars, wasn’t sure that I could carry off a heroic limp. I didn’t want to know if Annie would weep for me.

“Did you ride her, Master Read?”

“What would be the difference if I did?”

“I am asking you if you fucked her?”

“Wouldn’t be the first, would I, Jack?”

When he hauled back and punched me, still holding my shirt, I heard linen tear. Much mending leaves weak points. Blood trickling, my nose hot and tight in a cold face, I looked up at him. He’d torn the front of my shirt. If I’d been a girl like Annie it would never have worked, not in a million years, but I was all angles, see, and there’s a lot that you can do with linen bandages pulled tight, and hope. When he yanked me to my feet, he pushed his hand inside my shirt. There wasn’t much to feel.

“You lied to us, Master Read.”

“Mary,” I said.

“Like the virgin,” said Jack, smiling.

“Nothing like that at all,” I said.

Of all the things that I ever expected of Jack, Jack, Jack the Cad Calico, I never expected that he’d turn locksmith on me. He’d tried it on with me before; boys, girls, it was all a warm body to Jack, but he’d made so much noise, caused such a caper that giving him the slip had been easy. I never expected him to sit down on the deck, make me sit down beside him, one arm around my shoulders, one hand still tucked inside my shirt. He fished a flask from somewhere.

“I’m in love with her.” It was the first time that I’d ever said it. Saying it made it real.

“You too?”

“But she’s so cold.”

“It isn’t cold,” he said, “so much as that she doesn’t love. Not anymore. Not anybody.”

“Why not?”

“Has to do with rotten husbands and dead babies and other lives.” He raised a toast to nobody in particular, to the sea, maybe, or to Annie. “There was a time when I wanted her to wear my ring. Now…now I realize that that isn’t our Annie, not at all. You make a wife out of a woman like that, you put out all of her light.” Yes. That’s exactly what he said. You put out all of her light.

“Why do you stay then? If she’ll never…if there’ll always be others?” I was just beginning to realize that what Anne did best of all was break people, by burning and cooling too quickly, leaving people cracked and useless after. She ruined Jack’s life. She ruined mine as well. She kept us there too long.

“Why?” said Jack, finally. “Because sometimes it’s just bliss to bask in borrowed light.”

When Annie found out, found me in Jack’s arms, she smiled.

“I always knew that there was something peculiar about you, Master Read,” she said. “Soft hands and stories indeed.” A normal woman might have screamed and thrown things, not shrugged her shirt from her shoulders and lifted her breasts in her hands. Annie was not a normal woman. Neither of us were.

“Come to bed, love,” said Jack, lifting the blanket, and Annie slid between our bodies, her skin cool like the spray from waves. And that was how it was then. Not for a long time, but for a while…It was…Yes. It was. It was two years, which didn’t feel like long time at all and probably wasn’t. In the autumn, not that there are seasons at sea or that far south, but in the autumn, Annie’s belly grew round and tight, firm around Jack’s child. We should have known that the end was coming, with Annie read to bear fruit and the sky always very blue. Bad things always happen on beautiful days. Fruit turns rotten.

The sun shone brightly on those handsome navy boys.

“I think that I’ll give it a miss, girls,” said Jack, stumbling on his trousers. Not a bad bloke, Jack, handsome and funny but not quite brave, which made him predictable, not bad.

“We’ll all go down the same way, Jack,” said Annie, lovely and angry and loading her guns. “You can do it shitting yourself and begging or you can do it properly, but you’ll still go down.”

Jack grinned, all bravado.

“Have a good afternoon, Ladies,” he said, and doffed his hat.

Outside the door, the world was very bright. Annie kissed me on the mouth in the light from the doorway and I mistook the first shots for the shudder of my heart. And I lost her, as she stepped out.

It was a losing fight from the very beginning, when Annie shot three of our boys for hiding and kept them in the hold forever. The things which Annie did are legend, now, shot the boys when they wouldn’t fight, called frantically for women like we were ordinary in any way. We were extraordinary. There was never anything like us. We were beautiful and terrible and Annie was bloody terrifying. I wish that I had died there, instead of the slow drowning which followed. I was never going to die there. That isn’t how stories like this one end.

With my head pulled back by my hair, I watched the Commodore strike Annie, watched her go down on her knees. At least if the Commodore was there, Annie would be safe, from rape and that kind of woman’s death. I was still wearing my boy’s coat. They bought Jack out in heavy chains, his eyes swelling shut, black ugly bruises. It was the last time that I saw Jack alive.

The trial was a face, a joke, a play on words. Annie pleaded pregnancy, and I followed suit. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d bled by then, not in that way that didn’t leave a scar. I have a feel that a woman’s body can be all scar and where she’s sensitive are the places where she isn’t quite healed. Annie and I saved ourselves by showing ourselves up as whores; better a whore than a quick drop and a slow dance. Not that being a whore saved Jack. I didn’t see what happened to Jack, but I can imagine it; there’s no worse death for a handsome man than hanging. Hanging ruins a face. I heard what Annie said to him; “if you’d fought like a man, ye needn’t now be hang’d like a dog.” Sounds like her, doesn’t it? Always did know how to make things worse, our Annie.

What became of Anne Bonney…She never hanged, that’s for sure. Too clever for that, Annie. Liar. Bitch. Escape artiste extraordinaire. Anne Bonney, stuff of legend and banner headlines. There are a lot of ways that Anne Bonney’s story can end. Just think; Annie on her Irish daddy’s plantation, her bastard fostered, dwindling into an old maid’s life. No? What about the husband; the one who gave the game away, the one who gifted Annie with nothing but dead babies. John Bonney. What about him? Imagine what a trophy wife Annie would have made by then, sun-edged, scarred, grown tight and lithe and well-oiled, shrunk by salt to be her most useful size in her stolen gowns. Still no? No, no. Too, too sad. Okay. I’ll have one last try.

Listen:

Annie is nowhere where I’ve been before and she’s very happy. She is walking with bare feet and her hair is shining in the sun. She’s…she’s hand in hand with a little girl and the sea is as clear as a true heart and the exact blue of loss and there she is, Annie Bonney, pirate queen. There are other girls there, but she’s too old for that kind of life. She has another role now; my heart is buried in the soft warm sand and Annie is the keeper of our secret history. Annie takes her little girl swimming and it occurs to me that the sand that clogs my heart’s pathways is a bit like Annie’s memory, warm and soft but somehow coarse and it’s good. It’s very good.

“Is that it? That can’t honestly be it.” I thought that you were sleeping, thought I’d detected that sodden slowness in your breathing but no.

“That’s it.” Since you’re awake, I shift my body up against and under yours, lifting weight off of my numb shoulder. Your hair smells faintly of cigarettes smoke and beer; even after they sent the smokers out into the cold, the scent clings to their clothes.

“That can’t be it…There’s no happy ending. It doesn’t even end.”

“Nobody knows what happens to Annie. I told you what happened to Jack.” Stories, always stories with you. Pirates are exhausting. Next time, something easier…children, railways, a summer of slow days.

“Yes. Yeah, okay…but what about Mary? Don’t tell me she’s a…a…” Somehow the burns on your hands make them more graceful instead of ugly. “A literary device. Don’t tell me that she’s just a way of proving that you’re cleverer than I am.” I’m not cleverer than you. I just know different things.

“Mary, Mary.” I’m too tired for this; yeah, my story was imperfect, but I had thought that it was over and I’m sleep now and that ship…sailed. “Died of pneumonia. Very sad.”

“She drowned.” And that’s where you’re cleverer than me, lovely; the ways in which you care.

“It was a long time ago,” I say, and I’m sorry that the story which I told you was a sad one. You roll against me, your breasts pressed flat against mine and if you can’t see than you’re Anne Bonney and I’m Mary Read you’re blind and never leave me never leave me never.

“Tell me a star story,” you say.

“Alright,” I say.

Okay.