Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Read online

  Except the lover of the Golden Herm.

  In his spare moments, when he was not off about his Master’s various businesses, the Puck, wistfully lingering outside the Herm’s magic circle like an urchin outside a candy shop, concluded that, in order to take full advantage of the sexual facilities offered him by the Herm, should the barrier between them ever be removed – and, unlikely as this eventuality might be, the Puck’s motto was ‘Be Prepared’! – if there was to be intercourse between himself and the Golden Herm, then the Herm’s partner would require a similar set of equipment to the Herm in order to effect maximally satisfactory congress.

  Then the Puck further concluded that the equipment of the Herm’s hypothetical partner would need, however, to be attached in reversed order to that of the Herm, in order to procure a perfect fit and no fumbling; the Puck, a constant inquisitive spy on mortal couples come to make the beast with two backs in what they mistakenly believed to be privacy, had noticed there is a vexed question of handedness about caresses, so that all right-handed lovers truly require left-handed lovers during the preliminaries to the act, and Mother Nature, when she cast the human mould, took no account of foreplay, which alone distinguishes us from the beasts when we are being beastly.

  Try, try as he might, try and try again, the Puck could not get it quite right, although, after strenuous effort, he at last succeeded in turning himself into a perfect simulacrum of the Herm and would, at odd moments, adopt the Herm’s form and posture and stand facing him in the wood, a living mirror of the living statue, except for the fierce erection the satyromaniac Puck could not subdue when in the presence of his love.

  The Herm continued to smile inscrutably, except when he sneezed.

  But all of them can grow BIG! then shrink down to . . . the size of dots, of less than dots, again. Every last one of them is of such elastic – since incorporeal – substance. Consider the Queen of the Fairies.

  Her very name, Titania, bears witness to her descent from the giant race of the Titans; and ‘descend’ might seem apt enough, at first, to describe the declension when she manifests herself under her alias, Mab, or, in Wales, Mabh, and rules over the other diminutives, herself the size of the solitaire in an engagement ring, as infinitely little as her forebears were infinitely large.

  ‘Now, I do call my horned master, the Horn of Plenty, but as for my missus –’ said the Puck, in his inimitable Worcestershire drawl.

  Like a Japanese water-flower dropped in a glass of water, Titania grows . . .

  In the dewy wood tinselled with bewildering moonlight, the bumbling, tumbling babies of the fairy crèche trip over the hem of her dress, which is no more nor less than the margin of the wood itself; they stumble in the tangled grass as they play with the coneys, the quick brown fox-cubs, the russet fieldmice and the wee scraps of grey voles, blind velvet Mole and striped Brock with his questing snout – all the denizens of the woodland are her embroiderings, and the birds flutter round her head, settle on her shoulders and make their nests in her great abundance of disordered hair, in which are plaited poppies and the ears of wheat.

  The arrival of the Queen is announced by no fanfare of trumpets but the ash-soft lullaby of wood doves and the liquid coloratura blackbird. Moonlight falls like milk upon her naked breasts.

  She is like a double bed; or, a table laid for a wedding breakfast; or, a fertility clinic.

  In her eyes are babies. When she looks at you, you helplessly reduplicate. Her eyes provoke engendering.

  Correction: used to provoke.

  But not this year. Frosts have blasted the fruit blossom, rain has rotted all the corn so her garland is not gold but greenish and phosphorescent with blight. The acres of the rye have been invaded with ergot and, this year, eating bread will make you mad. The floods broke down the Bridge of Ware. The beasts refuse to couple; the cow rejects the bull and the bull keeps himself to himself. Even the goats, hitherto synonymous with lechery, prefer to curl up with a good book. The very worms no longer agitate the humus with their undulating and complex embraces. In the wood, a chaste, conventual calm reigns over everything, as if the foul weather had put everybody off.

  The wonderful giantess manifested herself with an owl on her shoulder and an apron-full of roses and of babies so rosy the children could scarcely be distinguished from the flowers. She picked up her defunct friend’s child, the Herm. The Herm stood on one leg on the palm of Titania’s hand and smiled the inscrutable, if manic, smile of the figures in Hindu erotic sculpture.

  ‘My husband shall not have you!’ cried Titania. ‘He shan’t! I shall keep you!’

  At that, thunder crashed, the heavens, which, for a brief moment, had sealed themselves up, now reopened again with redoubled fury, and all the drenched babies in Titania’s pinafore coughed and sneezed. The worms in the rosebuds woke up at the clamour and began to gnaw.

  But the Queen stowed the tiny Herm safe away between her breasts as if s/he were a locket and herself diminished until she was a suitable size to enjoy her niece or nephew or nephew/niece à choix in the obscurity of an acorn-cup.

  ‘But she cannot put horns on her husband, for he is antlered, already,’ opined the Puck, changing back into himself and skipping across the glade to the heels of his master. For no roe-buck now raises his head behind that gorse bush to watch these goings on; Oberon is antlered like a ten-point stag.

  Among the props of the Globe Theatre, along with the thunder-making machine and the bearskins, is listed a ‘robe for to go invisible’. By his coat, you understand that Oberon is to remain unseen as he broods magisterial but impotent above the scarcely discernible quiverings among last year’s oak leaves that conceal his wife and the golden bone of contention that has come between the elemental lovers.

  High in the thick of a dripping hedge of honeysuckle, a wee creature was extracting a tritonic, numinous, luxuriantly perfumed melody from the pan-pipes of the wild woodbine. The tune broke off as the player convulsed with ugly coughing. He gobbed phlegm, that flew through the air until its trajectory was interrupted by a cowslip, to whose freckled ear the translucent pustule clung. The infinitesimal then took up his tootling again.

  The Herm’s golden skin is made of beaten gold but the flesh beneath it has been marinated in: black pepper, red chilli, yellow turmeric, cloves, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, ginger, mace, nutmeg, allspice, khuskhus, garlic, tamarind, coconut, candlenut, lemon grass, galangal and now and then you get – phew! – a whiff of asafoetida. Hot stuff! Were the Herm to be served piled up on a lordly platter and garnished with shreds of its own outer casing, s/he would then resemble that royal dish, moglai biriani, which is decorated with edible gold shavings in order, so they say, to aid digestion. Nothing so deliciously aromatic as the Herm has ever been scented before in England’s green and pleasant land, still labouring as it is at this point in time under its unrelieved late medieval diet of boiled cabbage. The Herm is hot and sweet as if drenched in sun and honey, but Oberon is the colour of ashes.

  The Puck, tormented for lack of the Herm, pulled up a mandrake and sunk his prodigious tool in the cleft of the reluctant root, which shrieked mournfully but to no avail as old shaggylugs had his way with it.

  Distemperate weather! It’s raining, it’s pouring; the earth is in estrangement from itself, the withering buds tumble out of the Queen’s apron and rot on the mulch, for Oberon has put a stop to reproduction. But still Titania hugs the Herm to her shrivelling bosoms and will not let her husband have the wee thing, not even for one minute. Did she not give a sacred promise to a friend?

  What does the Herm want?

  The Herm wants to know what ‘want’ means.

  ‘I am unfamiliar with the concept of desire. I am the unique and perfect, paradigmatic Hermaphrodite, provoking on all sides desire yet myself transcendent, the unmoved mover, the still eye of the tempest, exemplary and self-sufficient, the beginning and the end.’

  Titania, despairing of the Herm’s male aspect, inserted a tentative forefinge
r in the female orifice. The Herm felt bored.

  Oberon watched the oak leaves shiver and said nothing, for he was choked with balked longing for the golden, half and halfy thing with its salivatory perfume. He took off his invisible disguise and made himself gigantic and bulked up in the night sky over the wood, arms akimbo, blotting out the moon, naked but for his buskins and his great codpiece. The mossy antlers on his forehead aren’t the half of it, he wears a crown made out of yellowish vertebrae of unmentionable mammals, down from beneath which his black hair drops straight as light. Since he is in his malign aspect, he has put on, furthermore, a necklace of suggestively little skulls, which might be those of the babies he has plucked from human cradles – do not forget, in German, they call him Erl-King.

  His face, breast and thighs he has daubed with charcoal; Oberon, lord of night and silence, of the grave silence of endless night, Lord of Plutonic dark. His hair, long, it never saw scissors; but he has this peculiarity – no hair at all on either chop or chin, nor his shins, neither, but all his face bald as an egg except for the eyebrows, that meet in the middle.

  Indeed, who in their right minds would trust a child to this man?

  When Oberon cheers up a bit, he lets the sun come out and then he’ll hang little silver bells along his codpiece and they go jingle jangle jingle when he walks up and down and round about, the pretty chinking sounds suspended wriggling in the air like homunculi wherever he has passed.

  And if he is not a creature of the dream, then surely you have forgotten your dreams.

  The Puck, too, yearning and thwarted as he was, found himself helplessly turning himself into the thing he longed for, and, under the faintly twitching oak leaves, became yellow, metallic, double-sexed and extravagantly precious-looking. There the Puck stood on one leg, the living image of the Herm, and glittered.

  Oberon saw him.

  Oberon stooped down and picked up the Puck and stood him, a simulated Yogic tree, on his palm. A misty look came into Oberon’s eyes. The Puck knew he had no option but to go through with it.

  Atishoo!

  Titania tenderly wiped the Herm’s nose with the edge of her petticoat, on which the flowers are all drooping, shedding embroidery stitches, the fruits are cankering and spotting and coming undone for, if Oberon is the Horn of Plenty, then Titania is the Cauldron of Generation and, unless he gives her a stir, now and then, with his great pot stick, the cauldron will go off the boil.

  Lie close and sleep, said Titania to the Herm. My fays shall lullaby you as we cuddle up on my mattress of dandelion down.

  The draggled fairies obediently started in on a chorus of: ‘Ye spotted snakes with double tongue,’ but were all so afflicted by coughing and sneezing and rawness of the throat and rheumy eyes and gasping for breath and all the other symptoms of rampant influenza that their hoarse voices petered out before they reached the bit about the newts and after that the only sound in the entire wood was the pit-pattering of the rain on the leaves.

  The orchestra has laid down its instruments. The curtain rises. The play begins.

  Peter and the Wolf

  At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there. Above a certain line, no trees grow. Shadows of clouds move across the bare alps as freely as the clouds themselves move across the sky.

  A girl from a village on the lower slopes left her widowed mother to marry a man who lived up in the empty places. Soon she was pregnant. In October, there was a severe storm. The old woman knew her daughter was near her time and waited for a message but none arrived. After the storm passed, the old woman went up to see for herself, taking her grown son with her because she was afraid.

  From a long way off, they saw no smoke rising from the chimney. Solitude yawned round them. The open door banged backwards and forwards on its hinges. Solitude engulfed them. There were traces of wolf-dung on the floor so they knew wolves had been in the house but left the corpse of the young mother alone although of her baby nothing was left except some mess that showed it had been born. Nor was there a trace of the son-in-law but a gnawed foot in a boot.

  They wrapped the dead in a quilt and took it home with them. Now it was late. The howling of the wolves mutilated the approaching silence of the night.

  Winter came with icy blasts, when everyone stays indoors and stokes the fire. The old woman’s son married the blacksmith’s daughter and she moved in with them. The snow melted and it was spring. By the next Christmas, there was a bouncing grandson. Time passed. More children came.

  When the eldest grandson, Peter, reached his seventh summer, he was old enough to go up the mountain with his father, as the men did every year, to let the goats feed on the young grass. There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock. Then another wolf, following the first one.

  If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have inspected them so closely, their plush, grey pelts, of which the hairs are tipped with white, giving them a ghostly look, as if they were on the point of dissolving at the edges; their sprightly, plumey tails; their acute, inquisitive masks.

  Then Peter saw that the third wolf was a prodigy, a marvel, a naked one, going on all fours, as they did, but hairless as regards the body although hair grew around its head.

  The sight of this bald wolf so fascinated him that he would have lost his flock, perhaps himself been eaten and certainly been beaten to the bone for negligence had not the goats themselves raised their heads, snuffed danger and run off, bleating and whinnying, so that the men came, firing guns, making hullabaloo, scaring the wolves away.

  His father was too angry to listen to what Peter said. He cuffed Peter round the head and sent him home. His mother was feeding this year’s baby. His grandmother sat at the table, shelling peas into a pot.

  ‘There was a little girl with the wolves, granny,’ said Peter. Why was he so sure it had been a little girl? Perhaps because her hair was so long, so long and lively. ‘A little girl about my age, from her size,’ he said.

  His grandmother threw a flat pod out of the door so the chickens could peck it up.

  ‘I saw a little girl with the wolves,’ he said.

  His grandmother tipped water into the pot, got up from the table and hung the pot of peas on the hook over the fire. There wasn’t time, that night, but next morning, very early, she herself took the boy back up the mountain.

  ‘Tell your father what you told me.’

  They went to look at the wolves’ tracks. On a bit of dampish ground they found a print, not like that of a dog’s pad, much less like that of a child’s footprint, yet Peter worried and puzzled over it until he made sense of it.

  ‘She was running on all fours with her arse stuck up in the air . . . therefore . . . she’d put all her weight on the ball of her foot, wouldn’t she? And splay out her toes, see . . . like that.’

  He went barefoot in summer, like all the village children; he inserted the ball of his own foot in the print, to show his father what kind of mark he would have made if he, too, always ran on all fours.

  ‘No use for a heel, if you run that way. So she doesn’t have a heelprint. Stands to reason.’

  At last his father made a slow acknowledgement of Peter’s powers of deduction, giving the child a veiled glance of disquiet. It was a clever child.

  They soon found her. She was asleep. Her spine had grown so supple she could curl into a perfect C. She woke up when she heard them and ran, but somebody caught her with a sliding noose at the end of a rope; the noose over her head jerked tight and she fell to the ground with her eyes popping and rolling. A big, grey, angry bitch appeared out of nowhere but Peter’s father blasted it to bits with his shotgun. The girl would have choked if the old woman hadn’t taken her head on her lap and
pulled the knot loose. The girl bit the grandmother’s hand.

  The girl scratched and fought until the men tied her wrists and ankles together with twine and slung her from a pole to carry her back to the village. Then she went limp. She didn’t scream or shout, she didn’t seem to be able to, she made only a few dull, guttural sounds in the back of her throat, and, though she did not seem to know how to cry, water trickled out of the corners of her eyes.

  How burned she was by the weather! Bright brown all over; and how filthy she was! Caked with mud and dirt. And every inch of her chestnut hide was scored and scabbed with dozens of scars of sharp abrasions of rock and thorn. Her hair dragged on the ground as they carried her along; it was stuck with burrs and it was so dirty you could not see what colour it might be. She was dreadfully verminous. She stank. She was so thin that all her ribs stuck out. The fine, plump, potato-fed boy was far bigger than she, although she was a year or so older.

  Solemn with curiosity, he trotted behind her. Granny stumped alongside with her bitten hand wrapped up in her apron. Once the girl was dumped on the earth floor of her grandmother’s house, the boy secretly poked at her left buttock with his forefinger, out of curiosity, to see what she felt like. She felt warm but hard. She did not so much as twitch when he touched her. She had given up the struggle; she lay trussed on the floor and pretended to be dead.

  Granny’s house had the one large room which, in winter, they shared with the goats. As soon as it caught a whiff of her, the big tabby mouser hissed like a pricked balloon and bounded up the ladder that went to the hayloft above. Soup smoked on the fire and the table was laid. It was now about supper-time but still quite light; night comes late on the summer mountain.

  ‘Untie her,’ said the grandmother.

  Her son wasn’t willing at first but the old woman would not be denied, so he got the breadknife and cut the rope round the girl’s ankles. All she did was kick, but when he cut the rope round her wrists, it was if he had let a fiend loose. The onlookers ran out of the door, the rest of the family ran for the ladder to the hayloft but Granny and Peter both ran to the door, to shoot the bolt, so she could not get out.