the Pools, he heard a splashing sound, and, turning a corner, discovered that the tide was coming in up Leopold Street. What sea was this?, he enquired of the gulls overhead, for the salt tang in the air declared these waters as ocean, not river. Did it matter what sea it was, they returned?; weren't all seas one sea, finally? He stood and watched the wavelets creeping across the tarmac. Their advance, though gentle, overturned lamp-posts, and so swiftly eroded the foundations of the buildings that they fell, silently, beneath the glacial tide. Soon the waves were around his feet. Fishes, tiny darts of silver, moved in the water.
'Jerry?'
Carole was on the stairs, staring at him.
'What the hell's happened to you?'
'I could have drowned,' he said.
He told her about the trap Garvey had set at Leopold Road, and how he'd been beaten up; then of the thugs' presence at his own house. She offered cool sympathy. He said nothing about the chase through the spiral, or the women, or the something that he'd seen in the shower-room. He couldn't have articulated it, even if he'd wanted to: every hour that passed since he'd left the Pool he was less certain of having seen anything at all.
'Do you want to stay here?' she asked him when he's finished his account.
'I thought you'd never ask.'
'You'd better have a bath. Are you sure they didn't break any bones?'
'I think I'd feel it by now if they had.'
No broken bones, perhaps; but he had not escaped unmarked. His torso was a patchwork of ripening bruises, and he ached from head to foot. When, after half an hour of soaking, he got out of the bath and surveyed himself in the mirror, his body seemed to be puffed up by the beating, the skin of his chest tender and tight. He was not a pretty sight.
Tomorrow, you must go to the police,' Carole told him later as they lay side by side. 'And have this bastard Garvey arrested-'
'I suppose so...' he said.
She leaned over him. His face was bland with fatigue. She kissed him lightly.
'I'd like to love you,' she said. He did not look at her. 'Why do you make it so difficult?'
'Do I?' he said, his eyelids drooping. She wanted to slide her hand beneath the bath-robe he was still wearing - she had never quite understood his coyness, but it charmed her - and caress him. But there was a certain insularity in the way he lay that signalled his wish to be left untouched, and she respected it.
I'll turn out the light,' she said, but he was already asleep.
* * *
The tide was not kind to Ezra Garvey. It picked up his body and played it back and forth awhile, picking at it like a replete diner toying with food he had no appetite for. It carried the corpse a mile downstream, and then tired of its burden. The current relegated it to the slower water near the banks, and there - abreast of Battersea - it became snagged in a mooring rope. The tide went out; Garvey did not. As the water-level dropped he remained depending from the rope, his bloodless bulk revealed inch by inch as the tide left him, and the dawn came looking. By eight o'clock he had gained more than morning as an audience.
Jerry woke to the sound of the shower running in the adjacent bathroom. The bedroom curtains were still drawn across. Only a fine dart of light found its way down to where he lay. He rolled over to bury his head in the pillow where the light couldn't disturb him, but his brain, once stirred, began to whirl. He had a difficult day ahead, in which he would have to make some account of recent events to the police. There would be questions asked and some of them might prove uncomfortable. The sooner he thought his story through, the more water-tight it would be. He rolled over, and threw off the sheet.
His first thought as he looked down at himself was that he had not truly woken yet, but still had his face buried in the pillow, and was merely dreaming this waking. Dreaming too the body he inhabited -with its budding breasts and its soft belly. This was not his body; his was of the other sex.
He tried to shake himself awake, but there was nowhere to wake to. He was here. This transformed anatomy was his - its slit, its smoothness, its strange weight - all his. In the hours since midnight he had been unknitted and remade in another image.
From next door, the sound of the shower brought the Madonna back into his head. Brought the woman too, who had coaxed him into her and whispered, as he frowned and thrust, 'Never... never...', telling him, though he couldn't know it, that this coupling was his last as a man. They had conspired - woman and Madonna - to work this wonder upon him, and wasn't it the finest failure of his life that he would not even hold on to his own sex; that maleness itself, like wealth and influence, was promised, then snatched away again?
He got up off the bed, turning his hands over to admire their newfound fineness, running his palms across his breasts. He was not afraid, nor was he jubilant. He accepted this fair accompli as a baby accepts its condition, having no sense of what good or bad it might bring.
Perhaps there were more enchantments where this had come from. If so, he would go back to the Pools and find them for himself; follow the spiral into its hot heart, and debate mysteries with the Madonna.
There were miracles in the world! Forces that could turn flesh inside out without drawing blood; that could topple the tyranny of the real and make play in its rubble.
Next door, the shower continued to run. He went to the bathroom door, which was slightly ajar, and peered in. Though the shower was on, Carole was not under it. She was sitting on the side of the bath, her hands pressed over her face. She heard him at the door. Her body shook. She did not look up.
'I saw...' she said. Her voice was guttural; thick with barely-suppressed abhorrence. '...am I going mad? No.'
'Then what's happening?'
'I don't know,' he replied, simply. 'Is it so terrible?'
'Vile,' she said. 'Revolting. I don't want to look at you. You hear me? I don't want to see.'
He didn't attempt to argue. She didn't want to know him, and that was her prerogative.
He slipped through into the bedroom, dressed in his stale and dirty clothes, and headed back to the Pool.
He went unnoticed; or rather, if anybody along his route noted a strangeness in their fellow pedestrian - a disparity between the clothes worn and the body that wore them - they looked the other way, unwilling to tackle such a problem at such an hour, and sober.
When he arrived at Leopold Road there were several men on the steps. They were talking, though he didn't know it, of imminent demolition. Jerry lingered in the doorway of a shop across the road from the Pools until the trio departed, and then made his way to the front door. He feared that they might have changed the lock, but they hadn't He got in easily, and closed the door behind him.
He bad not brought a torch, but when he plunged into the labyrinth he trusted to his instinct, and it did not forsake him. After a few minutes of exploration in the benighted corridors he stumbled across the jacket which he had discarded the previous day; a few turns beyond he came into the chamber where the laughing girl had found him. There was a hint of daylight here, from the pool beyond. All but the last vestiges of that luminescence that had first led him here bad gone.
He hurried on through the chamber, his hopes sinking. The water still brimmed in the pool, but almost all its light bad flickered out. He studied the broth: there was no movement in the depths. They had gone. The mothers the children. And, no doubt, the first cause. lie Madonna.
He walked through to the shower-room. She had indeed left. Furthermore, the chamber had been destroyed, as if in a fit of pique. The tiles had been torn from the walls; the pipes ripped from the plasterwork and melted in the Madonna's heat. Here and there he saw splashes of blood.
Turning his back on the wreckage, he returned to the pool, wondering if it had been his invasion that bad frightened them from this makeshift temple. Whatever the reason, the witches had gone, and he, their creature, was left to fend for himself, deprived of their mysteries.
He wandered along the edge of the pool, despairing. The surface of the water was not quite calm: a circle of ripples had awoken in it, and was growing by the heart-beat. He stared at the eddy as it gained momentum, flinging its arms out across the pool. The water-level had suddenly begun to drop. The eddy was rapidly becoming a whirlpool, the water foaming about it. Some trap had been opened in the bottom of the pool, and the waters were draining away. Was this where the Madonna had fled? He rushed back to the far end of the pool and examined the tiles. Yes! She had left a trail of fluid behind her as she crept out of her shrine to the safety of the pool. And if this was where she had gone, would they not all have followed?
Where the waters were draining to he had no way of knowing. To the sewers maybe, and then to the river, and finally out to sea. To death by drowning; to the extinction of magic. Or by some secret channel down into the earth, to some sanctuary safe from enquiry where rapture was not forbidden.
The water was rapidly becoming frenzied as suction called it away. The vortex whirled and foamed and spat. He studied the shape it described. A spiral of course, elegant and inevitable. The waters were sinking fast now; the splashing had mounted to a roar. Very soon it would all be gone, the door to another world sealed up and lost.
He had no choice: he leapt. The circling undertow snatched at him immediately. He barely had time to draw breath before he was sucked beneath the surface and dragged round and round, down and down. He felt himself buffetted against the floor of the pool, then somersaulted as he was pulled inexorably closer to the exit. He opened his eyes. Even as he did so the current dragged him to the brink, and over. The stream took him in its custody, and flung him back and forth in its fury.
There was light ahead. How far it lay, he couldn't calculate, but what did it matter? If he drowned before he reached that place, and ended this journey dead, so what? Death was no more certain than the dream of masculinity he'd lived these years. Terms of description fit only to be turned up and over and inside out. The earth was bright, wasn't it, and probably full of stars. He opened his mouth and shouted into the whirlpool, as the light grew and grew, an anthem in praise of paradox.
0 Comments