They say there’s no such thing as photographic memory. But years of seeing the world through a viewfinder left me with the ability to reconstruct an image in my head, as precisely as if I were staring through a loupe. I waited in the doorway until a trio of customers left the cafe, then strode alongside them until I reached the corner, where I sprinted across the street the instant the light changed. I glanced back but saw no sign of the woman in the parka. It might not have been the same person. But I wasn’t betting on that.
Poppy Teasel lived in Arbour Square, on a block that had survived both the Blitz and reconstruction. Snow sifted across a terrace of neat three-story brick-and-stucco structures, nearly identical save for one that sported a door painted turquoise. I double checked the address: This was Poppy’s place. I glanced down a sidewalk empty except for a man walking a pitbull, hurried up the steps, and rang the bell.
No one answered. I pressed it again, this time kept my finger on the buzzer. I was sweating despite the cold, and the sound of the doorbell lanced me like a fever. I needed a drink. After a minute I heard someone moving inside the house. A shadow passed across curtained windows covered by a metal grille.
“Who is it?” a voice rasped.
“I’m a friend of Morven’s.”
“What?”
“Morven Dunfries. I have, uh, a present.”
Long silence, followed by the click of bolts being drawn. The door suddenly swung toward me and something small and white darted out.
“Who are you?” a slight, white-haired woman demanded. “God damn it.”
She lunged down the steps to grab something, then raced back up and tossed a cat through the open doorway before glancing at me in irritation. “For Christ’s sake, get inside.”
I stepped in, and the door shut with a muffled boom. She turned the dead bolts and straightened, gazing up at me.
As a young teenager, Poppy’s intelligence and humor provided ballast to her luscious face and wolf-whistle figure. By the time I saw her at the Bottom Line, junk and cigarettes and general hard living had eroded her beauty while perversely enhancing it, like one of those ancient statues whose iconicity is associated with their deterioration, and even unimaginable without it. Smoking had coarsened her voice: If you closed your eyes in the club that night, you wouldn’t have guessed the woman singing was still in her twenties. Betty Boop had morphed into Lotte Lenya.
Now, like Morven, Poppy Teasel looked like one of the Weird Sisters, if she shopped at OxFam. Offstage, she was much smaller than I remembered—almost a foot shorter than me—and much thinner. Her pale skin appeared chalky, almost friable, as if it would crumble if you touched it. Behind a pair of cheap reading glasses, the famous pansy eyes were sunken, the irises so deep a brown they appeared violet. Her once-wild dark hair was straight, bright silver and cut in a severe chin-length bob. She wore loose black yoga pants, beaten-up leather clogs, and gold hoop earrings. A baggy lavender sweater revealed a glimpse of the cleavage that had made her irresistable to every male singer who’d graced the cover of Circus magazine. Above her left breast was a calligraphic tattoo identical to Morven’s: FC. Flaming Creatures.
“Who are you?” She whipped the reading glasses from her face and peered at me, frowning as she took in the scar beside my eye. She smelled of Opium perfume, with an underlying chemical tang.
“Mor—”
“I heard: Morven sent you. Who are you?”
I stared at the snow melting around my feet. “Cass. Here.”
I reached into my bag for the package and handed it to her. Poppy stared at it, bemused, then smiled wistfully.
“Right. It’s her birthday. I’m the one should be sending a present. I’ve not been well. Were you there?” I nodded. “It must have been a good time.”
“It was.”
I assumed she’d turn me back out into the snow. Instead she said, “Would you like coffee? Tea? Unless you’re in a hurry. I’d like to hear about it.”
I hesitated. “Yeah, sure. Coffee would be great.”
“You’re American,” she said, beckoning me down the hall. “I’m from Laguna Beach originally. New York?”
“That’s right.”
The flat was large but in rough shape. It reeked of cat. Scuffed hardwood floors, cracked plaster walls, a framed poster for the Best Eaten Cold album, Poppy resembling a black-haired Stevie Nicks after a long night. In the kitchen: chipped flame-orange Le Creuset pots and a formica-topped table. An old yellow raincoat hung beside the back door. Leggy geraniums in pots lined the windowsill, their blossoms a defiant fuchsia.
Poppy set Mallo’s package on the table and began to fill an electric kettle. “Sit. So, how do you know Morven and Mallo?”
I said, “I’m a friend of a friend.”
“Which friend?”
I decided to risk the truth. “Adrian Carlisle.”
“Adrian?” Poppy started, quickly recovered, and removed a bag of coffee from the freezer. “Is he still in London?”
“As far as I know.”
“He was such a beautiful kid.” Her voice sounded strained; anguished, even. “So smart, we used to talk about Lawrence Durrell. I always wished we could have stayed close.”
I tried to hide my own surprise as I unzipped my jacket, shoved my hat and gloves into a pocket, and dropped my scarf on the table. I looked for any sign of a bottle. Nada, except for some Pellegrino on a counter by the fridge.
“Want some fizzy water?” asked Poppy.
“No thanks.”
“I don’t have anything else. I quit drinking a long time ago. Quit everything. That was fun.” She made a face. “So do you live here?”
“Just visiting.”
“Have you been to London before?”
I fought the impulse to snap at her questions. I recognized the defensive maneuver, deployed by people who’ve spent too much time at the receiving end of a microphone. I wondered how long it had been since she’d had a visitor. The flat had a melancholy air, enhanced by its sweetish, sickroom scent.
“I’ve been here a couple of times,” I said. “Not in a while.”
“I miss New York. California, never. But I loved the city.”
She leaned against the sink and looked at the floor. Her bright cap of silvery hair had shifted so that I could see dark lesions on her bare scalp. A wig. Poppy raised her head to stare at me, violet eyes burning in her haggard face. She nodded, as though I’d asked a question.
“I have cancer,” she said. “Milk or sugar?”
“Black’s fine.”
She poured boiling water into a cafetière, watched the grounds swirl then settle. “I lost touch with Adrian a long time ago. He stayed away from smack but got pretty badly into coke, didn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Bad for the heart.” She laughed hoarsely, pressing one hand against her chest. “That and lead guitarists. He would have been better off getting heroin through the NHS.”
Her mouth twisted as she reached to pick up my scarf and traced the outline of one of its patterned skulls. “Now this never goes out of style, does it?”
She let the scarf’s folds slide through her knobbed fingers, turned away to pour coffee. “Here, we can take these into the living room.” She handed me a mug and picked up her package. “Pretend it’s my birthday; you can watch me open my present.”
Again, I recognized the old-style groupie manner—ingratiate yourself with strangers, confide in journalists, plead with drug dealers; then seduce all of them. In another era, she would have been an aging survivor of the Parisian Beau Monde. Now she was a relic of another lost demimonde. Beautiful People who die young become immortal. The rest just die.
The living room faced the street. Yards of dusty orange silk were draped across the windows. A once-white sofa took up most of the space, its cushions now a fungal gray. A white cat slept on one end, curled like a smaller, cleaner cushion.
“Sit wherever you like,” said Poppy.
She settled onto a Moroccan leather hassock, the package in her lap. I sat on the sofa opposite the cat. The room was overheated. I sipped my coffee and waited for the throbbing in my head to subside. I was in no hurry to rush back out into the snow, but the craving for alcohol was starting to gnaw at me. Rats in the brain, Quinn called it.
“I bought this place when the album came out,” Poppy said, as though picking up the thread of an interview. “The neighborhood was sketchy—it still is—but it was cheap. I thought I could fix it up when I had money. Only I never did have money.” She gave that raspy laugh. “I could have bought a flat in Mayfair for what I spent on smack before I moved here.”
She had a beautiful, smoky voice. Honey on sandpaper, Lester Bangs once described it. In the half light, her gaunt features made her resemble one of the Dunfrieses’ carved figures as she stared past me at the window. Her skin glistened with sweat and gave off a scent like spoiled peaches. My neck prickled: Whatever damage Poppy had sustained over the decades, it was now indistinguishable from her disease.
“Shall we open this?” she said at last.
She set her mug on the floor, picked up the little box, and shook it. She smiled, not at me but at some recalled memory, and began to unwrap the package. Slowly, unraveling the long ribbons and running a thumbnail beneath each bit of tape, unfolding the bright paper with painstaking care, then smoothing it across her knees. It was like watching someone create an origami in reverse. At last she held up a plain brown cardboard box.
“What do you think it is?” she whispered, her bruised eyes huge.
I said nothing, and she tossed the wrapping paper onto the floor. The cat stirred, then coiled back into slumber. Poppy bent avidly over the little box and withdrew something wrapped in layers of white tissue that fell like a bandage unrolling at her feet. The lines in her face faded, her sunken eyes blanked into shadow.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Oh, my goodness.”
She picked up a small object and cradled it in her palm, put on her reading glasses then moved to scrutinize it under a lamp. She seemed to have forgotten I was in the room with her.
I started to sweat. What was the protocol for delivering contraband? Did you express polite interest in the product? Ask if there was a return message for the sender?
Or split as silently and quickly as possible? I had just started to my feet when Poppy glanced up at me.
“Look at this.”
She extended her hand so that I could see a small disc, about the size of a silver dollar and bone-pale. I stared at it without comprehension. I’d been expecting a ziplock bag of white powder or pills, a wad of cash.
“Go ahead,” she urged. “You can pick it up.”
I did, careful not to drop it. I thought at first the disc was plastic or maybe Bakelite. But when I leaned into the circle of lamplight I saw that it was irregularly shaped, its surface striated with fine lines easier to feel beneath my fingertips than to see. There was a small hole drilled through the center.
I looked at Poppy. “Is it bone?”
“Mammoth ivory.”
“Mammoth ivory?” I held the disc closer to the lamp, turning it back and forth to catch the light. Very faint lines were incised in the center, a pattern that was oddly familiar. “I recognize this,” I said, and frowned.
Gingerly, Poppy took the disc from my hand and turned it over. Almost the same image was engraved on the other side, only slightly larger and more rounded: a crude figure, with tiny gashes for eyes. Twin inverted triangles symbolized breasts above a pair of diagonal lines that indicated arms. The figure seemed misshapen until I realized it depicted a pregnant woman, crude arms angled protectively above her distended abdomen. The hole had been positioned where her naval would have been. I looked at Poppy.
“A goddess figure?”
“Maybe,” she said. She turned it over, so that I could again see the first image, noticeably thinner than the other, its triangular breasts narrower and its eyes larger. “Here, come with me.”
I followed her into an adjoining room that seemed to be an office. A small desk with a laptop and scattered papers, an armchair beside a chrome standing lamp, shelves filled with books. On the wall, a framed poster for a show of Ice Age art at the British Museum.
Against the wall stood an antique curio cabinet. Poppy opened one of its drawers and removed a slender length of rawhide about eighteen inches long. Carefully she threaded the rawhide through the bone disc, stepped to a standing lamp, and beckoned me over. She switched on the light, and I shaded my eyes from a halogen bulb.
“Now watch,” she commanded.
She took one end of the rawhide in each of her hands, holding it slack with the disc suspended in the middle. In one smooth quick motion she pulled the string taut. The disc spun, flipping from side to side. I stared at it, confused. “I don’t get it.”
“I’ll do it again,” said Poppy. “Move closer.”
I did, near enough to feel the halogen bulb’s heat on my face. Once more I heard the twang of the rawhide string when she tightened it. Inches in front of me, the disc spun in a whitish blur. In a flicker so fleeting it happened in an eyeblink, the carved figure’s abdomen swelled. I felt goosebumps rise along my arms.
“Do it again,” I said.
Without a word, Poppy repeated the gesture, not once but over and over. Each time the spindly image of the woman’s belly expanded then deflated, like a tiny, humanoid balloon.
“That’s fucking incredible,” I whispered.
As a kid, I’d drawn a stick figure on the bottom corner of every page of a history textbook, each image in a slightly different position than the previous one. A crude flipbook—a trick every kid learns, or used to, and probably the simplest form of animation there is. My teacher confiscated the book and made me stay for detention. There she showed me a book of Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential black-and-white photos of running horses, the stop-motion effects that predated motion pictures.
That was when I became obsessed with photography: the moment I realized that a camera could stop time, and even allow you to see back through time. It was a kind of magic, especially the revelation that a series of static images could fool the brain into perceiving motion.
Old-fashioned motion pictures run at twenty-four frames per second—much slower than that and you detect a noticeable flicker. But the brain perceives motion in as few as ten frames per second, like a flipbook. And like this spinning disc—proof, if it was genuine, that prehistoric humans had understood the persistence of vision.
I stared at Poppy, stunned. “It’s a thaumatrope.”
She nodded. “That’s right. A paleolithic thaumatrope.”
“How old?”
“About thirteen thousand years. They found the first one in a cave in France in 1868. They thought it was a button—it was only a few years ago that they’ve speculated as to what they really are. I’ve known for longer than that. I figured it out by mistake, fooling around with that one. Probably there’d be more scientific discoveries made, if people played with the things they found, rather than locking them away in storage cabinets.”
She laughed. “But there’s only two or three of these in museums. One shows a hunter being attacked by a cave bear, but the disc’s not intact. The others are of animals. No humans.”
“Two or three.” I turned toward the curio cabinet. “And how many are in there?”
“Two more.” Her eyes shone feverishly bright. “They both have images of people carved on them. One’s a woman. I think women made them.”
“Really?”
She pointed at the cabinet. “See for yourself.”
I looked at the bone disc hanging limply from the rawhide in Poppy’s hand. “You’re showing these to a total stranger?”
“You’re Morven’s friend—I thought she might have mentioned them. And you know what a thaumatrope is. Are you an archaeologist?”
“I’m a photographer. It’s one of those things you learn about.”
She smiled, and I glimpsed the girl trapped within the cage of bone and decaying flesh. “I knew it. I can always tell a photographer—their eyes are always clocking the light.”
“I know who you are,” I said. “I saw you at the Bottom Line in 1979, when you did that stand for Best Eaten Cold. You were fucking brilliant. That song about the wind—when you sang that it made me cry.”
She shut her eyes. After a moment her fingers grazed my wrist, her touch so hot that for a second I thought I’d burned myself on the halogen bulb. “Thank you. That was such a long time ago. You’re kind to remember.”
“I never forgot.” I gestured at the cabinet. “But I don’t know anything about this kind of thing. All this stuff—you should take it to a museum. Or an antique dealer. Mallo and Morven, they own that shop in their building, right?”
“Mallo has no interest in these, other than financial. I don’t know anything about his other customers, or his supplier. I don’t want to.”
So Adrian was right: Mallo wasn’t dealing in drugs any longer, but illegal antiquities. I watched as Poppy folded the thaumatrope into a scrap of chamois cloth and set it aside. She crossed to the curio cabinet, opened the bottom drawer, and ran her fingers across the glass lids of numerous small boxes. Each contained some kind of artifact: flint arrowheads, stone ax heads, beads made of shell or bone. With her aureole of silver hair and heavy gold earrings, she looked as though she were deliberating over a card for a tarot reading. At last she selected a box, removed another bone disc, and held it out to me.
“In July 1980 I was in Paris, that same tour. I’d just finished my first stint in rehab. This was before my relapse—I had nine good years, then…”
She closed her eyes and drew a hand to her forehead. I thought she wouldn’t continue, but her hand dropped to her lap, fingers trembling, and she went on.
“After one of the shows, this girl came backstage and gave me something wrapped in a bandanna. I thought it was going to be a crystal or pentangle or some kind of little amulet. People were always giving me things like that.
“‘Something to keep you strong,’ the girl said, and she left. I never knew who she was. I unwrapped the bandanna and this was inside, on a bit of ribbon. I wore it around my neck for years. I knew it was old, but I didn’t know how old. Then one day I was playing with it, like cat’s cradle.”
She mimed pulling a piece of string back and forth between her hands.
“And suddenly I saw it—the same way you did, all at once I saw that the figure was moving. That you were meant to see it move. But I had no idea what it was. This was before the Internet, so I talked to someone at the British Museum. I didn’t bring it to him, just described it as something I’d seen in a museum in France. I told him I thought the image would change as you spun the disc. He said it was an interesting idea but completely ridiculous. Like I said, there were only one or two of these discs in museums, and everyone thought they were buttons. So I tried searching for one on my own. It took years.”
“On the black market,” I said.
She nodded. “Morven found it for me, actually. She’s like my sister. Was, until I did something terrible. Unforgiveable.” She drew a hand across her eyes as though the light pained her. “And of course Mallo and Leith were like brothers. Mallo was doing other things back then, and he … knew people. He—”
She stopped. “Oh, none of that shit matters. The future wasn’t meant to be like this, that’s all.” She smiled ruefully. “I alway thought that Best Eaten Cold would be the beginning of my career. Instead, it was my career.”
“You seem to do okay.”
“I still get residuals from ‘Juice It Up.’ But I had to cut most of my ties from back then. Morven and I stay in touch, but not really. These things—” She gestured at the disc in my palm. “These are my real daughters.”
I examined the disc. Like the first, it was made of bone, and had a crude face scratched into it: eyes downcast, mouth downturned, twin gashes to indicate age. An old woman. On the other side, a similar face had been carved. But its eyes were uptilted, the mouth upturned with a second curved line beneath it, to make the lips appear full. A crosshatch above the eyes indicated hair, or perhaps a knitted cap.
“When you spin it, you see her age,” said Poppy. “From a girl to an old woman and back again.”
I shivered. I felt the same unease as when I stared too long at a face in a daguerreotype—the uncanny sensation that the subject of the image stared back.
But now I had the even more disturbing sense that whoever carved the thaumatrope had been aware that she was gazing forward through the millennia: For an instant, our eyes had met. I looked at Poppy. “I still don’t understand why you’re showing me these.”
She shrugged. “You seem interested.”
“Yeah, but what if I went to the police? How do you know you can trust me?”
“I don’t. That’s why they call it trust.”
She took the disc and handed me a third object: a flattened oval with a circle etched in its center and a hole drilled in the middle of the circle. An eye—the hole formed the pupil.
On the back of the disc was another eye, this one closed. When the disc was spun on a cord, the eye would seem to wink. It was perhaps the simplest thaumatrope. And, maybe, the oldest.
I recalled the vision I’d had as a teenager: an immense, remorseless eye within a vortex of cloud above an empty field, gazing down at me. I stared at the thaumatrope, finally returned it to Poppy. She wrapped it in a piece of chamois cloth, did the same with the other two; slowly walked to her desk and put the three wrapped objects into an orange plastic Sainsbury’s bag.
“There,” she said. “Now you’ve seen the eye of god. Or goddess. Let’s get more coffee.”
She left the room. I lingered, feeling the way I did after watching a movie I didn’t quite understand. My gaze drifted across the shelves, clocking books on archeaology and prehistoric art, rock and roll, experimental film. A framed photo of the members of Lavender Rage after a gig, Poppy draped across Jonno’s sequined torso like a lamia in tie-dye and fringed leather.
And a picture of Poppy, Morven, and the same woman with auburn hair. I could see her face more clearly in this one: high cheekbones, high forehead, russet hair held back with a Liberty print scarf. She looked a few years older than the other two, though that might just have been her expression, haughty and somewhat hostile, as though she disliked whomever was behind the camera. Beside this was another photo, curled with age. The charred ruins of a mansion, its towers blackened, broken glass glinting from heaps of rubble.
I picked it up. On the back, someone had written Kethelwite September ’73. Both Adrian and Mallo had pictures of the same place.
I frowned, slipped the photo into my pocket, and perused the next shelf. Shelved between a couple of early collections of Helmut Newton and David Hamilton photography was a large book, spiral bound.
I pulled it from the shelf and whistled softly. The stiff board cover showed a photo of a nude woman’s torso, cropped so that her face was barely visible. Her skin was paper-white, so flawlessly smooth that the photo might have been of an alabaster statue.
But the woman’s skin was flesh, not stone, and I’d seen her image enough times to recognize it immediately, even before I read the book’s title.
MONSTERS AND MADONNAS
A BOOK OF METHODS
WILLIAM MORTENSEN
I checked the copyright page: 1936, the proper first edition. It was Mortensen’s best-known work; as a collectible, more desirable to most folks than The Command to Look because of its full-page reproductions of Mortensen’s work.
I’d never held a copy. I drew the volume to my face and breathed in deeply.
“Do you always go around sniffing books?”
Poppy stood in the doorway, steadying herself with one knobby hand. She looked decades older than she had only minutes earlier, the end product of a time-lapse film.
“Just the ones that are worth a few hundred bucks,” I said.
She glanced at the book with disinterest. “What is it?”
I held it up.
Poppy wrinkled her nose. “Oh, right. Someone gave me that a hundred years ago. I could never get into it. You can have it if you want.”
“You sure?” I asked, already sliding it into my bag. “It’s a valuable book.”
“Not to me. It’s yours.”
I followed her back into the kitchen. She pulled out a chair and sat, picked up my skull-patterned scarf and stared at it for a long time before dropping it onto the table beside the orange Sainsbury’s bag.
“I’m deaccessioning,” she said at last. “It’s late-stage brain cancer. Inoperable. I don’t take painkillers because I’m an addict. I have about two good hours a day, if I’m lucky. This is one of them, but I think it’s just about over.”
She sighed, and added, “Everything’s over. Most people, if they remember me at all, it’s because of Jonno. A few people know my album, but mostly I had nice tits and fucked rock stars. So…”
She pointed at the orange plastic bag. “I’m donating them to the British Museum. Everything else as well. There’s a curator there I’ve spoken to; she’s the first person who hasn’t dismissed my ideas outright—that the artifacts might have been made by women. I could sell it all to the museum, but then I’d have to get a solicitor involved, and there’d be questions about their provenance that I’m not interested in answering.
“So I’ll just make the donation while I’m still alive and relatively compos mentis. They should be able to establish provenance by carbon dating or paleomagnetism or whatever. If they’re as smart as they say they are, someone will figure it out. My things will be in a nice glass vitrine in the British Museum, and it will say Gift of Patricia Teasdale. No one will know who that is, but maybe they’ll figure that out, too.”
She gave that spectral laugh and struggled to her feet. “I’ll get the door for you.”
“There a place around here I can grab a bite?”
“The Blackbird used to be a decent pub. If you’re just looking for a sandwich, there’s a Pret a Manger by the tube station.”
I zipped my leather jacket and stood. Poppy picked up the Sainsbury’s bag and stuck it on the windowsill between the bright geraniums. She rubbed one of the green leaves between her fingers, brought her hand to her face and inhaled, smiling. Then she walked me to the door.
I stepped outside, pulling on my watch cap. Frozen BBs beat against my neck: the snow had turned to sleet. Poppy remained in the doorway, scooping up the white cat before it could dart after me.
“Thanks for what you said about my show that night,” she said. “I was a different person then. Not a good person.”
“But you were an amazing singer.”
“It’s funny, I never really think about any of that anymore. It was all such a long time ago. The twentieth century’s dying away.”
“The twentieth century’s dead,” I said. “We’re the ones who’re dying.”
“And look at you. Last punk standing.” She stroked the cat in her arms, and in a raspy voice began to sing.
“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high
Ash comes falling from the sky
And all the children say they’ll die
For want of the Golden City.”
Her words vanished into a motorcycle’s roar and the rumble of buses as she slipped back into her flat and closed the door. I felt a twinge of grief and regret, a strange despair that lingered like the last notes of Poppy’s song; then I checked to make sure the Mortensen book was safe in my bag and hurried off to find a drink.