Fleur Du Mal
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4 Lunacy
Bits of light-hearted conversation and wisps of steam carried out of the opened kitchen window. A woman in an electric blue shirt and dark-grey skirt leaned against the glass, her back turned to the city. Rocking to the bursts of laughter, her wavy hair swayed against her shoulders, shimmering in hues of chestnut.
On the street below, Matthew turned his glance to concentrate on rummaging through his pocket, trying to find the key, the rose still locked in his right hand. The bright afternoon had turned into a clear, cold night. Above, the vast, obsidian sky sucked the warmth out of the crust and out of his fingers. Just as the chill started to creep into his bones, he finally remembered leaving the key with his friends. He reached for the buzzer tagged with the familiar name.
The woman in the window turned and leaned out. Her extremely skinny figure and heart-shaped face didn't go unrecognised from him. Lisa.
“Meredith, is your brother meant to be left freezing outside?” she asked over her shoulder.
“No...how come?” Matthew heard his sister's voice coming from the background.
“Then you might want to open the gate, ” Lisa said, smiling and waving her hand at the man standing outside. Instinctively, he mirrored her gestures until she disappeared from the window in answer to Meredith's request he could barely hear,
“Could you be so kind? My hands are covered in olive oil.”
A low buzz noted Matthew the gate unlocked. Just to get his blood circulating again, he ran up the stairs to the first floor and engaged himself with jumping up and down while waiting for someone to let him into the apartment.
“Oh my, you are a fast one, my boy,” teased Lisa as she opened the door for him.
“Good evening to you too, Lisa,” Matthew replied and stepped into the hallway. His sister's friend and colleague drew the door shut and leaned on the wall to watch as he shed his shoes and thin overcoat. While she waited for him to be ready, she took a sip of red wine from the glass she held. Matthew glanced at her sideways, wondering if she was a bit drunk or just her overtly bubbly self or if it was even possible to differentiate between those two states when it came to her. As soon as Lisa noticed his glance, she raised the glass, as if she was making a toast for him and grinned.
“I assume that cute little rosebud is not for me,” she said, decorating her words with a quirk of an eyebrow.
“You are very correct.”
Her grin turned into a smile. She knew how much Matthew valued his privacy, so she couldn't help but poke him with more questions. “Well, I know for sure that Meredith doesn't care for roses, so I assume it's not for her, either.”
“Aaaand, you are correct again.” It was his turn to tease.
“What's she like?” countered Lisa, curling a strand of hair around her fingers before blowing it off again.
“Who?” Matthew played ignorant.
“Oh, did I use the wrong pronoun? My mistake. What's he like?” Another strand of chestnut got curled and blown away.
Matthew squinted his eyes in response. Had it not been the smile that gave him in, he would have looked like a duellist, measuring his opponent before a gunfight.
They both seemed to have forgotten that they still stood in the hallway, until Meredith appeared to the kitchen door.
“OK, Lisa, you can let him in now. There's enough food for the both of you,” she said, laughter sparkling from her voice. “Actually, there's enough food for five. Where are G.J. and Charlie?” Only now did Matthew smell the tomato soup and warm baguettes. Walking to his sister, he mused,
“I guess they are still sightseeing, then. We split after the London Eye.” He stopped in front of Meredith, peeking into the kitchen behind her. The counter was a mess, dotted with pieces of crushed tomato and a miniature lake of olive oil flooding over them. Pieces of lettuce had dropped on the floor tiles, yet some of it had successfully landed in the salad bowl. Nothing had changed; Meredith had the gift of cooking but still not the patience to do it slowly so that half of the ingredients wouldn't end up beside the pot.
Matthew turned his gaze from the exploded kitchen to his sister and grinned, “Or they heard that you were cooking and did the wise thing.”
“Jerk,” Meredith punched him lightly with the back of her hand.
“Sister.”
After three hours of sleep, Matthew woke up with an urgent need to go to the bathroom. His eyes adjusted for a moment in the darkness before he could read the time from the clock on the wall. One am. Dim light shining under the door and the low sound of conversation betrayed that Meredith and Lisa were still awake. Cursing all the tea his sister had poured into him after the supper, he sneaked out of the bedroom.
They had enjoyed their meal in the living room, away from the mess in the kitchen, Meredith and Matthew sharing the sofa while Lisa sat on the rug. Eating soup in the reclining chair would have been too technical for her and too disastrous for the furniture, she had joked.
At first, everybody had been too hungry to converse. Their plates had emptied and then again filled in quick succession as the hostess handled the ladle fast and steady while holding a slice of bread between her teeth.
As they ate side by side, even a blind man would have marked the family resemblance between the brother and sister. The liquid shimmer of Meredith's short, raven curls matched that of Matthew's, their eyes bore the exact same hue of grey, and their nose and cheekbones, made after the same model, could have served as substitutes for an artist painting Apollo and Artemis, so perfectly they presented the feminine and masculine version of the same face.
For the umpteenth time, Lisa was mesmerized by this uncanny resemblance of the siblings. It was she who had disrupted the silence,
“So, you two are absolutely positive that you aren't twins?”
The brother and sister had looked at each other. After realising that they even held the spoon the same way, they burst out laughing, until Matthew managed to blurt out,
“I wouldn't know for sure otherwise, but, you see, I happen to remember her overwhelming me with her sheer size-advantage and dragging me home by force more than once when I had been up to some usual mischief.”
After that, the conversation had continued with the pros and cons of having sisters and brothers until it slowly drifted to Lisa's and Meredith's work. For some time, Matthew had listened to those two analysing the stock market and then the extent of slimyness of Lisa's boss, who apparently, knew every word in the dictionary except 'no'. Finally, he had started to doze off with a teacup in his hand, until Meredith had poked him on the shoulder and told him to go sleep in her bedroom instead of the sofa as she and Lisa planned to stay up for a while. He had fallen asleep on the bed without changing into his pyjamas.
Returning from his trip to the bathroom, Matthew took a glance at the guest room and saw that Charlie and G.J hadn't returned yet. In his half-asleep state, he didn't make much out of it, he just felt slightly curious, knowing that neither one of them was that big of a night-owl.
The bedroom lay right before the living room along the hallway. Stopping by the door he saw both of the ladies on the sofa, their backs turned towards him, and Meredith's head resting on Lisa's shoulder. Matthew realised that they hadn't noticed him waking up. Under the illusion that he lay fast asleep their conversation had coursed through a set of confidential topics and now they were talking about him. He knew he would be better off not knowing, but he wasn't to be the first human on earth to skip a chance to hear what others talked of him behind his back.
The hallway carpet felt warm and luxuriously soft under his bare feet. He spread his toes to feel the threads tickle in between them, a familiar feeling from the early days of his childhood. His parents had had a similar mat in their bedroom. Until he had thrown the infamous party to his friends while his parents were on a conference trip in Cardiff. After that, the Henshall saying went: always throw your guests out before they throw up.
Matthew came to from the reminiscing and remembered that he should be either sleeping or spying by now. His ears caught his own name again and the option of laying down got immediately erased from his agenda.
“I am worried about Matthew,” said Meredith. Her voice rippled with a tone he hadn't heard for a while.
“Still because of the same-old-same-old?” asked Lisa, stretching out on the sofa. The leather made a low sound in protest beneath her to movement as it always did.
Same-old? What's that supposed to mean?
“Partly, yes, but that rose he dragged in tonight made me see something new,” Meredith said, pointing at the flower her brother had put in a slender vase and placed on the windowsill to wait for the morning sun. “I know for a fact that he has had a girlfriend or two, but he never talks about them. I mean, not the real stuff, like their name, what they do, where they live and so on. Actually, I've never met single one of them.”
“Then how can you be so sure he's even had any?” inquired Lisa.
“He sometimes refers to meeting someone. I trust he wouldn't lie.” A short silence followed. Matthew imagined how Lisa was probably raising her eyebrow now, faithful to her habit.
“I thought that when it comes to what people do or what they don't do, you always demand hard facts before drawing any conclusions, ” said Lisa.
Meredith started to giggle before her friend had even finished the sentence. Then she let out little uncontrolled bursts of laughter. Lisa voiced out Matthew's question, “What?”
“Believe me, I've seen some poorly disposed evidence lying around...back when I used to visit him in Canterbury more often.” Now, they both laughed. Matthew felt his cheeks burning red in the dark. And he felt the pain he elicited on himself by biting his lips too hard, to avoid ratting himself out while eavesdropping. Only he knew that this wasn't because of embarrassment. It was pure anger.
You have no right to intrude my privacy. You can't even begin to comprehend my need for it, sister.
The laughter ceased. With gentle strokes, Lisa caressed the curls that shaded Meredith's cheeks before voicing the exact thoughts of her friend, “Do you think the reason Matthew quit his studies was a woman?”
“He'll never admit, but I'm betting my life on it,” answered Meredith, just as his brother quietly withdrew himself back into the shadows, the dark shelter of the bedroom.
After spending a good hour in the London Dungeon, Charlie and Gareth ached for fresh air and a diversion for their thoughts. Of course, if anyone would have asked, they would have rather sat on nails than admitted the actors had managed to give them a good scare.
G.J. suggested heading for an ice-cream, just to celebrate the first warm days of spring, but Charlie quickly dismissed the idea. Mumbling something about his imagination running so wild that he would no doubt invent a torture device utilizing cream and cones, he stayed a few feet from the Dungeon's exit, scanning the people pouring out of the closing attraction.
“Feel like going back to Meredith's?” G.J. asked after a while. He pointed towards London Bridge Station, already taking a few steps. Charlie, however, seemed to be glued on the spot, refusing to budge before they had a common agreement on where to go. Rubbing his palms against his jeans, he wondered if he could talk his friend into checking out some London-style night life; a pastime G.J. claimed he didn't really care about and he himself never had time for during semesters .
“Too early to go back yet. Wanna check out a pub?”
“I doubt they are any different from those we have in Canterbury. Just more expensive. Plus I don't want to carry you back,” G.J. said, serving his answer with the usual good-hearted insults.
“I may have no backbone but you have even less brawn,” Charlie countered. Then he looked at the bright-blue sky and sighed. The weight of history, the weight of dirt above dismal cells in bygone prisons, and the mental pictures of London covered in smog less than a century ago reminded him how valuable the sight he beheld was. How easy to pass by unappreciated. “How long until sunset?”
“Two hours, I guess,” said G.J., checking his watch, and pushing strands of blond hair from his face. Avoiding barbershops had warranted his locks plenty of time to grow long enough to launch a mutuny on him. “It's quarter to six now. What're you scheming?”
“I'm trying to figure out what's the best place to watch sunset over the Thames now that you excluded the pubs from our agenda,” Charlie answered, scanning the street in both directions as if it would tell him which way to go.
“You need a perfect angle or something? I think any bridge could do.”
Around eleven, the friends decided to head back towards Whitechapel. Their last pit stop on their tour had been just west of Fleet Street; an informal and popular student-bar they entered to watch stand-up.
Still quoting their favourite parts of the show, they alighted from the Tube, their voices pouncing from the yellow-tiled walls of the platform area. On the streets, nearly all pedestrians had vanished, leaving behind only the occasional car cruising down the street, and blurred silhouettes of people in lit windows. The narrower side streets they passed on the way amplified their steps with a hollow echo, hewn down by the sharp edges of their laughter.
Just as Charlie reached the high point of his mimicking performance on one of the comedians, a stranger rushed out from dark, freezing the friends into their places. The man ran straight into Charlie, terminating his play and sending him staggering backwards. Luckily, the young man caught his balance just before he backed into a shop window.
“I'm...I didn't...I...” the stranger started his apology, but never finished. His words trailed into the air, leaving him to stand bewildered in the middle of the street. His clothes encased him in dismal shape: his trousers were covered in soot and the extra-large jumper he wore over his broom-stick thin torso had more holes than fabric in it.
The human beneath the clothes didn't look much better. Eyes red and sagging, his gaze wondered around from the boys to the shop to a garbage can and back to the boys. Dehydration had cracked open wounds into his dried lips which he constantly fingered.
“Are you all right?” asked Charlie after having recovered from the surprise. The stranger said nothing, but his left hand started to tremble. G.J. tried to signal Charlie to back away from the man, but his friend ignored his waving. “Are you all right, mister?” he repeated.
“I'm... Did you come to take me away now?” the man mumbled, taking a step towards Charlie, offering both of his arms for him as if he expected to be cuffed. His right hand began to tremble as profusely as the left when he stretched them nearer.
Charlie exchanged a quick look with G.J. A homeless guy with some kind of mental situation, G.J. read from his eyes before nodding in agreement. Stepping in to help, Gareth laid a hand on the man's shoulder while Charlie gently pressed his hands down. Only now did they notice that compared to the average Joe living on the streets, he wasn't that old, only in his mid-thirties.
“Calm down, we are not going to take you anywhere,” Charlie comforted the man. Twitch by twitch, his hands became still and his gaze turned clearer.
“You are not? Oh.” The expression on the man's face turned quickly from deranged to relieved to friendly. He looked straight into Charlie's eyes, evaluating him, before turning to G.J. and repeating the same process.
This is getting interesting, thought G.J. while the man apparently tried to decide whether he was going to tell them something he deemed important. A lone car hummed past the group, sending a few tossed-down flyers floating in the cold air. G.J. noticed Charlie shivering.
“Can you spare some change?” the stranger blurted out. His tone wasn't that of a homeless beggar, but innocent and excited, like he just had come up with a plan to accomplish great things in his life. Charlie and G.J. shared another quick glance.
“Uhm. OK, I guess, if you tell us what you need to money for,” said the younger of the friends, suspecting that the haggard would use it on alcohol, no matter what he would answer.
“I need to buy my darling girl some flowers. She loves fresh flowers.” The man looked energized to the brim, as if he was already living the moment of handing the bouquet to his sweetheart.
That's a new one, thought G.J. while he dug out the couple of pounds worth of change he had. A bill from the bar fell out of his pocket when he withdrew his hand to give the coins to the man. Still curious to know if he really was going to buy any flowers, Charlie asked:
“What is she like? This girl of yours?”
“Thank you, that's very generous,” the man said when he felt the weight of the coins on his palm. Not for once did he lower his gaze. For some reason, he kept the coins in his extended hand even after he had started his monologue about his love.
“She's very clever, she knows everything. She has to, she's a tutor at Univ...Universti...University. Civilized and beautiful. To my eyes, she cannot be other than beautiful, beautiful like,” the man recollected, slowly turning to gaze into the sky. Charlie and G.J. expected him to finish his sentence with “stars,” but the word never left his lips, as he could see none. The city lights, the modern waste of humanity, hid them from him. He grew awfully silent. His expression fell. A minute sneaked by before he opened his mouth again, now with new conviction.
“The stars are gone, yet I know they are beautiful. Like she is. Beautiful. Gone. Dead, but beautiful,” his voice trailed somewhere the boys couldn't follow.
“Did he just say what I think he said?” Charlie whispered to his friend. G.J. didn't reply, just watched as the man grabbed his hand and dropped the coins in it.
“I can't take your money,” he muttered, his hands shaking again.
“But...” G.J. tried to protest, he tried to say that he could buy some food with it, but Charlie disrupted him, by pulling him away. The man's back had slumped, his eyes were glazing over. As if he just now saw the two men, he rewound his words as if they were on a broken record,
“Did you come to take me away now?” he asked, extending his trembling hands again. Despite of Charlie's attempts, G.J. refused to leave.
“What are you saying? Did you kill your girlfriend?” he asked. Now the man's trembling got out of control. Not only his hands and arms, but also his legs twitched, and his lips quivered, preparing tears to spill over. Falling to his knees on the hard pavement, he cried out,
“I can't remember! Do you understand? I can't remember!”
“--er! --and! --member!” answered an echo from the lurking dark.
“Can we go now? Please?” Charlie said, still pulling G.J. by his jacket.
“And leave him like that?” his friend asked, watching the wretched creature rock back and forth, squeezing his head like it would explode if he let go.
“Are you being serious? We can't help him. Call an ambulance or police on the way. We are leaving now! Or, at least, I am...”
Hearing the word police, the man suddenly staggered onto his feet and ran down the street like the lunatic he had proven to be, the hem of his over-sized jumper flapping around his thighs. Only now did Charlie and G.J. realise he wore no shoes, while they stood silently watching him go. They kept watching the empty street even after he had vanished around a corner, until the hum of a passing car awoke them from their astonishment.
Silence shadowed the rest of their way home. Silence, and the recurrent hollow echo of their steps. No dungeon, no sunset, no stand-up comedian, only a ragged man running down the street, occupied their thoughts for the night.
On the way in, Laila flipped the sign on her door to show “Do not disturb.” Once inside, she fetched a long glass the hotel had provided for the use of Minibar-refreshments, and filled it with water. She lay the four flowers on the bedside table and cut the ends of the stems with a pocket knife. Again, I proved myself right: never leave home without your Swiss knife, she thought. Smiling at her own thoughts, she placed the roses into the glass. The golden reflections of evening light illuminated their buds.
The flowers changed the room from dreary and small to cosy. Laila leaned against the opposite wall and beheld their beauty until the vanishing colours heralded the hour after sunset, and until all she could see was the delicate contours of the buds against the dim light. Then she blinked, and moved quickly for her camera. She wanted to capture the shape of the roses, when the deep-red and velvet-green natural colours had been washed away with nothing but blue. Love painted over with sadness.
The remaining light waned fast, but she did manage to shoot around twenty frames. As she pulled out the memory card, and placed it into the pile of full ones, she counted them. Four. She expected five.
She clicked on the lights and looked around for a moment, in case the missing card would be lying on the floor. Nothing.
Oh, come on! she thought, starting to empty her pockets on the bedside table. From the first one, all she found was a ballpoint pen and a handkerchief. In the other one, the back of her hand slid against paper: a used ticket to London Eye with a name and number scribbled on it.
He was...lovely, she thought, in want for a better word. An unmistakable warmth spread inside her along with a flutter of wings. In her mind, she relived everything from the moment she dropped the flower to the symphony of movement she had witnessed as he wrote his number on the piece of paper.
”Call me, while you are here,” Matthew said. He pushed the ticket along the smooth surface of the table to her. As she took it, his fingertips brushed lightly against hers.
While I'm here... Laila had already spent five days of her two-week vacation in London. A little over a week left before she would have to return home.
A picture of her mother in a wheelchair, watching the mountains huddling their little home, came back to her mind. Watching and watching. Occasionally, she would turn her head away from the window, and ask feebly for some water. Then, she would continue her eternal watch until Laila pushed her to the dinner table. They would eat in silence. Sometimes, she was spirited enough to change a few words with her daughter afterwards. But most often not. She would just watch her like she watched the rocky giants, her eyes swelling up with water that would run down her cheeks for hours, no matter what Laila did in attempt to comfort her.
She broke under the guilt that never was hers to bear. She broke under the bought silence.
A sarcastic laugh escaped Laila's lips. Never had money bought such silence as her mother was displaying now. And she did exactly what they had done to her daughter: just watched...
Laila slipped the note under the telephone before walking into the bathroom. The neon light flickered long before stabilizing into a steady glare. Its bluish hue made her image look more tired than she really felt.
She could give Matthew only the name of her hotel, because she had smashed her cell phone. Of course, she didn't tell that, but said her cell recently broke. That was no deviation from the truth.
She relived the moment when the anger rushed through her veins. The picture of him in her mind. That coward! After she had bought the book, she tried to phone him once more. With the very expensive mobile phone bought with his money. Despite all the money he forced down her mother's throat, he refused to have any direct contact with Laila.
He denied her the answer to her only question. Why? She wanted him strapped in a chair and a syringe of truth serum injected into his veins. She had wanted that for years. All he ever responded with was by sending more of that filthy money they had no other option but to take.
“You can't buy your choices undone. You may not have blood on your hands, but you were responsible for hushing it down... You are responsible...” she spoke out the condemnation. Her hands gripped the sides of the sink, as she became scared of the shrillness of her own voice. You will give me my answers after you've seen the ones you protected in ruins. That was my last call, your last chance. You missed it.
A stream of tears twirled down the drain when she finally lifted her head again and faced her image. Who are you? she asked her reflection. To cry till the death pays you a visit, is that all you are good for?
On her right, lay a deep, luxuriously engraved bathtub. In the otherwise simple bathroom it looked just as out of place as Laila felt. Her eyes still wet and aching, she opened the hot and cold faucets. The sound of the gushing water soothed her. She remembered what she had been doing when she came back to the hotel: thinking of the young man, Matthew.
Yet now the warmth didn't return with the thought. She took a couple of steps back to stand right opposite the mirror, far enough to see herself from the cloud of red hair to almost her waistline. Slowly, she started to peel off her shirt. With each centimetre she rolled up the hem, she revealed a piece of a web, a web of very fine scars, almost unnoticeable, stretching over the left side of her abdomen, subtly contrasting the smooth skin on the left side, on her back, on her face.
She halted to run her palm along the markings, the familiar feel of those etchings still there. The lower her hand travelled, the wider the web became, until around the belt line it sent jagged tentacles also to the right side.
I wonder, if he could feel what's not...what was...if he would lie it wouldn't matter and still run? she thought, while the steam continued to rise from the tub, gradually condensing on the cold surface of the mirror. She stared at her reddened eyes until the reflection clouded, until her raging emotions washed away, leaving only calculative mind and the will to plan the first strike.
She returned to the room and took out the book from the hotel room safe. She didn't have to search for the right page. A sheet of paper in hand and the end of a pencil in her mouth, she sat down in a chair to write.
To whom shall I repay first?
She didn't think long. Her pounding pulse drowned the scratch of the pencil as she wrote down the name of the chosen one. By accident, she cut her finger on the sheet, but she didn't notice that until later. She sliced one of the rosebuds in half and crushed it between the note, with the freezing weight of the volume. When she slipped the book back into the safe, with the remains of the rose in between, she could have sworn she heard a hungry sigh.
As she stepped into the tub, she whispered a few words of Latin, the beginning of an old prayer, “Ave Maria, gratia plena...*)” It just didn't sound like a prayer at all.
Only then she noticed the blood seeping from her finger, floating in the water like a cloud of crimson ink.
*)Translation:
Hail, Mary, full of grace
< Message edited by fabula -- 5/20/2009 6:37:14 >
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