ERIK
13.
I climbed from the bed where I’d buried Christine to save her from the fumes of the Lethe and the fire from the guns. Her would-be lover had forced himself through the fog; either passion or an incredible lung capacity had rescued him from the same sleep his minions had succumbed to. I did not notice him at first. I had no time to count the numbers of the rescue party. There were nine men on the floor.
I gave the big blond a kick to test the effectiveness of my drug; the black toe of my brogue landed between his armpit and his hip. He flinched reflexively. Good, I thought. He will recover in every capacity. Christine will be pleased.
I called to her, ‘Christine! All is well. You can come out now!’
And that was when the boy attacked me. He had stalked me from the shadows, hiding behind a pillar or perhaps the large wardrobe. He shouted, ‘Monster!’ and fired his gun at the same instant that I turned to face him. If his hand had not been shaking there is no doubt that I would have been dead; he was standing less than three feet behind me. Luckily, the bullet flew into the door of the cabinet, piercing a dress.
I leaped forward, striking at the gun with my foot. The sharp heel of my shoe collided with his wrist and I had the satisfaction of seeing the gun clatter to the floor. I had disarmed him, but it wasn’t enough. I was, I am, more than fifteen years older than he is. The difference in prowess between a boy of twenty and a man at the edge of his prime is surprisingly vast. I was quick on my feet; I’d had some experience fighting. He was faster, and poisoned by wrath. It acted on his blood like a compound of coca leaf.
The boy leaped at me, pinning me face down on the tiles at the edge of the pool. His knees were digging into my kidneys. He was binding my wrists with a length of rough rope that he must have had on his person. I scanned the room, seeking another gun, a knife, anything I could use as a weapon. I could see a revolver still clutched in the hand of the nearest attacker; he looked like an out-of-luck soldier that the boy had hired for the evening like a suit. There was no hope of reaching it, my bonds were too tight; the reach was too far.
I couldn’t think. My head was swimming with anxiety. I hadn’t been this close to another man since I left Monsieur Garnier. I was frightened, also, for Christine.
I saw her head, her dear dark eyes, appear over the lip of the pool that I had furnished for her bed. She looked terrified. My lungs were compressed, but I had enough power to throw my voice in her direction. I gave her a message, ‘No Christine, no. Remain perfectly still. Do nothing. I love you too well to see your life ruined.’ Brave girl, she obeyed, sinking back beneath the blankets, but Raoul must have seen her because he dragged me to my feet and hauled me towards the nearest pillar, stretching upwards until he hung me like a scarecrow from the brass light fixture. My shoulders screamed in protest at this treatment; my head swam with blinding pain. He struck me in the stomach several times for good measure, so hard that my diaphragm spasmed. I could not speak. The metal was so hot that it burnt my wrists.
Leaving me there, he ran back to the pool and fetched out my darling. She was pale, shivering, unable to stand. To his credit, he handled her delicately – as though she were composed of china. He settled her into a chair, tucking a blanket around her limbs. When he loosened the scarf that served as an air-filter her poor teeth started chattering. It was probably shock.
The boy was not finished. Part of me rather hoped that he would take her and leave, returning later with help to rescue his friends. If he had done so, I am certain that I would have been able to work the ropes against the bar until they frayed and I freed myself. I would run, as fast as I could, to one of my more hidden bunkers, well stocked with food, medicine, and mental stimulation. After a few weeks, when the furore had died down, I would emerge again and rescue Christine.
It wasn’t to be. The little Comte wasn’t finished. He left her sitting in the chair, facing me. Our eyes met. Hers were wide, too wide, and filled with terror. I would have given anything to calm her. I could only stare.
The boy was limping a little now. Good, I exhausted him. I would have been disgusted with myself if I had not managed at least that. He bent beside the man that I had kicked – I recognised him now as his own elder brother, the one in love with the dancer, La Sorelli; now deceased. Raoul pried the gun from his hand and slouched back to me.
Christine, thank God, could not see the way that the maniac was grinning; his smile split from ear to ear as though he were telling himself a good dirty joke. He stood beside me, breathing almost into my ear, raising the gun until the black barrel penetrated the eye socket of my mask nearly touching my eyeball.
For the first time in nearly twenty years, since my time in the nunnery, I said a prayer to Our Lord.
He withdrew the barrel. I thought it was mercy.
Then he turned to Christine and said, ‘Do you not wish to look upon the face of your abductor?’
I knew I was damned.
He tore off my mask, my wig in one smooth motion, revealing my face which is so much like the skull of a corpse.
Christine saw me. Her face contorted with fear and repugnance; she vomited onto the floor.
By the time that he shot me I knew which was mercy; I would rather have died then, than live with the memory of her disgust. Unconsciousness claimed me.
I spent a long time in a darkness that I mistook for hell. I saw hideous visions. My mother, screaming at me when I tried to kiss her; the face of the old nun who told me terror tales night after night in the dark; the villagers who toured the carnival that purchased me, their twisted faces leering as they threw their rotten fruit. If Hell is any worse than that, we are right to fear it.
When I awoke I found that I was alone in utter darkness, buried beneath soft layers of carpet, blankets, a few scattered stuffed animals. I panicked, until the sharp stab of pain in my side recalled the past to me and provided my mind with a modicum of focus.
I have no idea how long I slept, and I have no way of finding out. By the time I hauled myself, with much agony, from the bed that I had been placed in I had enough energy to light a nearly full-length taper from a candelabrum that I groped from her dresser, before collapsing to the floor again, blacking out.
By the time I resurfaced, the candle had burnt down to a stub a half-inch in length and the brass stand had been glued to the floor in a puddle of wax. The first thing I saw was the crushed remnant of my mask, smashed into splinters at the foot of a pillar that had been bathed in my blood.
I gave myself a thorough examination and found that I had two small holes above my left hip; an entrance and an exit. They had been washed and bound with Christine’s white scarf, now crusted, stinking with blood and infection. I smiled, my mouth flooding with bitterness. It was she who saved me, then, despite her disgust.
The candle was guttering. I reached into the pocket of my coat, seeking another Lucifer, and instead my hand withdrew with a folded sheet of stationery. I gave up my search for the matches, using the rest of the light to locate another candlestick that I ignited from the source just before the last of the flame turned blue and guttered out.
I opened the note. It was her handwriting. Ten words:
Erik, I love you. Forgive me. I’ll lie to him.
She left me. She wrote that after she had seen my face. It almost made the trouble worth it. I could live the rest of my life on the memory.
I blacked out again after reading it, rising several hours later, the note in my hand, the candle extinguished.
It took me the better part of the day to return to my chambers, hauling my carcass across the floor in the darkness. By the time I made it I was delirious with infection and dehydration. My arms felt as though they had been half-wrenched from their sockets. Thankfully, I had set aside supply of laudanum, alcohol, and a powder made of white willow bark to quell the infection. I had a good supply of preserved food in my cache. Even if I had not been severely injured I would have needed those stores to save me – three months into my recovery I discovered that the managers had treated their Opera Ghost problem with the same level of ingenuity that the rest of Paris applied to disposing of rats; they had sealed me in, blocked every entrance and exit I’d made with hardened cement.
For nine months I battled against a dangerous blood infection. I spent the following four months burrowing out of the basement like an escaping prisoner. Towards the end of my time, before I escaped into moonlight, I was reduced to catching sewer rats in traps and roasting them on fires that I built by burning first the doors, and then the furniture. Luckily, I had a good supply of chairs left over from the construction of the theatre – my original plans had called for nearly double the seats as were finally installed. None of this saved me from madness. Every night I dreamed again of the cage, my humiliation, my filth, their flung garbage.
Occasionally I saw her face in sleep again and, in spite of her note, I relived her disgust.
Over a year passed before I saw the moon again. I had a well; I had water, so I washed my body and my clothes. I dressed in suit, in hat, in cloak, and emerged through a crack in the wall like a ghost. I spent all of that first night out-of-doors, walking the park, touching the bark of the trees with my bare fingers. It was beautiful; a sensation I’d forgotten. Living wood is so much different in feel from furniture.
I sat beneath a laurel tree and thought. By the time that I had reached my conclusions the dew had fallen. My bare face was wet with it. I had barely enough time before rosy-fingered dawn drew back her curtain to purchase supplies at the river market. My bare face allowed me to make my selections without harassment – and in some cases, without making payment. I found that there were hidden benefits to the honesty of terror. I wondered why I had not tried this before.
On my return to my home I saw that the opera house was still under reconstruction. I would have time to rebuild my passages, not that I expected that I would need to use them – Christine would be married by now, forbidden from singing – but they were familiar to me, it would be comforting to have the option of the occasional free show. Who knows, I thought, she might sell the rights to Don Juan. I could see a production.
Time passed. I set down to work. I played music. I tried to forget her. Eventually, when records became available in the riverside market (about six months after they turned up in the homes of the wealthy), I purchased a gramophone. I never did use those corridors I’d spent three years rebuilding.
And then, one night, I read in the paper that the Palais Garnier was failing; Comte Phillipe was dead, Andre and Firmin were on the edge of bankruptcy. I could not allow it to close; it seemed like every hope I’d ever treasured had been buried in its walls. I could not let it fall into ruin again. Luckily, I retained a few old contacts from my days as an architect; though, it is true, they did not know me by face or even my true name. I wrote a letter which I posted at midnight, using the new boxes the government had conveniently installed almost under every lamp post.
Eventually, a response came. I read it, and felt myself return to life.
14.
When periods of happiness are described in books they are almost always insufferably boring. Nothing exciting seems to happen, and when it does it is entirely internal, growing like a disease beneath the skin of the world. This is why fairy tales are so fond of that classical summary, ‘and they lived happily ever after’. If we heard the day-to-day minutiae of the Prince and Princess’s marital bliss we would be tempted to murder. On the other end of the scale, I am sorry to report that protracted misery comes across to the reader in much the same fashion. Nothing seems to happen, nothing seems to change. Every day becomes the same miserable slog, the same stasis. And it is true, nothing does change; externally.
I endured this limbo for twenty miserable years following the abduction of Christine; two decades of nothing to report but an encroaching bitterness that, before I knew her, I would have leavened with a little healthy malice. But the years the Opera House stood empty robbed me of my appetite for ghost-work. I committed no murders.
I wasted time, or spent it. I tried to work; designing buildings, composing music, without success, rarely getting beyond the first basic notes. I produced the occasional sculpture in soapstone, a technique I learned in childhood. They generally began well enough, but I was inevitably forced to abandon them when I realised that I was releasing nothing but the same repeated face. The same wide eyes, the same look of disgust.
By the time that I read about the possible closure of the theatre I was close to suicidal. That morning I had woken late, and spent several hours beneath my red sheets, staring up at the celling. I remembered that it was possible to overdose on my sleeping serum and I wondered why I had not thought of anything so brilliantly easy before. I pondered; why did I survive my time in the carnival, my own blighted childhood, if only for this?
And then, that very morning, I happened across the notice of sale and wrote the letter that I mentioned before. Assuming the name of Monsieur Reynard – an improbable name for the Englishman I played, I realise, but gold precludes all questions – and contacted an agent I knew of that my Master Garnier had used to arrange the construction of his Paris home while he and I were working for the Persian Shah.
I listed the acceptable non-negotiable terms of purchase (they were generous indeed, and as I was a practised hand at blackmail, I could afford to be generous) and told my agent that he was only to contact me in order to confirm a sale; at which time he would hire the two gentlemen I’d named to serve as managers. Once this was done, they were to do everything possible to keep the doors open, even resorting to acceptable levels of scandal. Nothing on earth packs a theatre like the rumours of an affair, a bastard, or a murder. Even decent people feed on a whiff of the devil.
The managers could contact me only though a mail drop I had selected, and they should do so only in the event of a catastrophe on the scale of a fire (which I would be well-enough aware of anyway) or a financial crisis devastating enough to threaten the opera as an entity performed behind these walls.
The young Comte agreed to everything at once, as I knew that he would. He was as deeply in love with money as he imagined he was with my darling Christine. Raoul had reason to despise my Opera House, God knows he rarely passed its gilded threshold or bothered with the office work. As for Christine, her worst prophecies had come true. He never allowed her to visit at all, not even to sit under chaperone in their private opera box. If he had, then, before our sundering scabbed in my heart, I would have been unable to restrain myself from visiting her.
As for the managers I’d hired, they were very skilled. By simple application of common-sense business methods they boosted seat-sales enough to begin turning a modest profit, though my encouragement of scandal had to wait a while, until the right players presented themselves.
First, they hired a beautiful unmarried mezzo; a voluptuous blonde originally from Germany, to sing the witchy roles. Her voice was middling, but she was a lovely creature, and she came with a small child whose last-name was not her own. I followed the newspaper coverage with interest, and watched as the balance in Monsieur Reynard’s bank-account flourished and grew.
A few months later Christine appeared at their door, newly divorced and demanding a contract. They had heard of her from their predecessors and were more than willing to negotiate on the strength of her early reviews. I read about her return in the paper; a tawdry portrait of a brazen, immoral female-composer who shone briefly in her youth (they wrote about her youth as though it were behind her. She was only 25!) who came trampling down the doorways and demanding to be treated as a diva.
The crucifix-clutching reporters lamented the declining morality of the City of Lights; imagine a strumpet performing on stage! They admonished the last bastions of morality to shun the Palais Garnier and never darken those faux-gilt doors with their Christian coinage.
Who knows, perhaps the population of people with an interest in the heaven that comes after earth did stay away. They were not missed. The rest of the city came out in droves to see an angel sing on earth. For the first five years of her return we had a packed house every night, though I suspect that, given Christine’s curiosity and driving need for challenging roles, she grew rather tired of portraying Carmen.
I admit that I was tempted, sorely tempted, to contact her after I read the announcement of her second debut. I remember that I sat at my desk, grappling with myself, gripping the sides of the writing surface so hard that the wood splintered and I peeled the skin from my fingers like a shell from an egg. But in the end I managed to chill my desires and refrain from my pen.
I did it by remembering the look on her face the last time I saw her, her repulsion so deep that it brought up her vomit. Ten words written in comforting haste could not erase the wound she inflicted in her surprised innocence. And then I remembered what brought her to me in the first place. It was my goal to help her to rise high enough in the service of art to be worthy of our composition, our Don Juan, and to help her earn the clout to bring it into production.
As for Christine, I had been primarily her teacher, a means to an end. She wanted a life on the stage more than anything, and I had helped her to get it. Her feelings for me, whatever they were, were the passion of a girl held in close proximity with one man only – for want of a choice she had chosen the monster. Until she saw his face. The brief time we had was rather like a candle; easily extinguished, in spite of the foolish kiss I gave her cheek. It was time for me to let her go.
After five years playing Carmen she had her chance to bring Don Juan to prominence, and of course she took it. She sang the role of Ana with such poignancy that hearing the faint strains of her aria, even through metres of bedrock and thick-tiled floor, was too much for me. I took to visiting the markets a little earlier than usual, to escape the sound of her living voice. I never saw the production live, you see, I had no wish to risk weakening my resolve.
When I re-entered the world I discovered a surprise. Ten years ago I would have expected to be arrested immediately for the crime of extreme ugliness. I believed, to my bones, that the world was merely biding its time to stick me in a cage again, or in the ground. But, as it turned out, a hooded cape was enough – it washed me in shadow, and even the constabulary ignored this ghost.
Our opera outlasted the original release, spanning a full year and spawning recordings, reprintings, and a yearly revival. And while the critics damned it with the faintest praise that they could muster; written, as it seemed, by a young girl, the public adored it. And when I eventually purchased a recording (her voice was safe enough to manage, flattened onto a grooved disk) it was as wonderful as I knew it would be. I wept freely for the first time in my life.
Oh it was bitter to have authored a structure even more wonderful than the Opera House and then have to endure knowing that the credit would forever be ascribed to another. My only consolation lay in the fact that the ‘other’ was her. We were connected, eternally, in art even if no one else knew it. It did not even matter, really, if Christine allowed herself to acknowledge it in the solitude of her thoughts.
Years passed, as they will, and even to me they seemed changeless. Perhaps the years themselves were changeless. After all, spring bled into summer, summer died into autumn and the bones of the winter rose through the skin of autumn’s rot. So, just possibly, the world was in stasis.
I was not.
I found myself submitting my ego to tests. I went outside, earlier, and more frequently, constantly maskless. The idea of hiding had become suddenly repulsive. Sometimes I even emerged into twilight. I never did risk the sun. It had been too long since we had greeted each other.
My face was as abhorrent as usual, but after Christine’s dramatic reaction the disgust of mere mortals no longer frightened me. Besides, my body had changed – not in structure, I was still hardly more than a skeleton, however strong – but I held myself more firmly erect and, in the river market at least, monstrosity was respected. This was especially true when it came with a reputation for a willingness to fight. I did not, at that time, understand the cause of my sudden acceptance of the truth of my nature, but I realise now that it was a symptom of the spiritual callouses I’d formed. In short, I still wore my cloak, my wide hat, as a courtesy to the unsuspecting, I have always loathed to make a child cry, but I no longer cared that those who did manage to peer beneath my hood were terrified.
My context had changed; I was finally free of the mental cage I’d been walking around in, carrying with me. Perhaps it came from growing older. I was (it shocked me) nearly fifty-five years old; beyond the expected mid-point of my life.
The sweet taste of freedom added to the cup that otherwise brimmed with bitterness was enough to make it palatable. For the first time in over twenty years I was happy to live.
I came to enjoy walking in the parks. I found myself enthralled by the sight of the green haze of twilight darkening like a bruise until the sky joined with the crowned heads of the trees and bled into blackness. The night, in late spring, was unspeakably beautiful. I had taken a seat on a wrought-iron bench lodged in the shadow of an enormous, leaf-rich oak. I was watching the flitting forms of bats flicker against the gas-light, engaged in their own small glories; their battles, their courtships, defeats, carving the warm air with their wings and shrieking with ecstasy.
And that was when I saw Christine, walking alone on the little path, dressed in an expensive rose-coloured walking costume and leaning a little on her pink parasol as though she had injured a knee.
She was much changed, so much so that at first I did not recognise her, mistaking her for an ordinary, attractive, middle-aged woman; only something in her posture, in the delicate arc of her neck caught my heart like a fishhook. When she turned her head to scan the shadows (a move made, I am certain, entirely by instinct) I saw her eyes and lost all doubt that it was Christine’s spirit lodged in that too-thin body, her voice behind that fading skin.
All of these years, when I thought of her, I had been picturing the wild, laughing girl I knew; not this sad-eyed woman.
Christine walked off, vanishing into the darkness without glancing back. Had she been Orpheus, Eurydice would have been dragged out of hell, ready to live. I braced my hands on my knees, held my head down between them. My mouth filled with the fear-taste of copper carried on a flood of saliva. It was a long while before I could comfortably breathe, or trust that my intestines remained where God placed them.
In all fairness, this delusion of her eternal youth was not entirely the product of a romantic illusion. She was still frequently reviewed and the critics never described her as anything but vibrantly young and exceptionally beautiful. And, in truth, once my body overcame its shock I understood that although she was a girl no longer, she had only just entered the middle-age. In short, although she was a ghost of the girl I knew, she remained entirely herself, and seen that way, she remained glorious. Whoever she was now, however she thought of herself, whatever changes had occurred, whatever small deaths, she remained my genius; I wanted to know her again.
As soon as I could walk, I returned to my home, to the desk that we had once covered with poetry to be converted to song. I sat down and wrote:
Dear Miss Daae´é (or may I be so bold as to address you as ‘Christine?’),
You saved my life once, long ago, and I have been inexcusably remiss in thanking you for providing that service.
When I was satisfied, both with what I had written and with what I had omitted to write, I tipped Madame Giry five francs to deliver the envelope to her rooms after the last curtain.
The flies were very dirty; no one had bothered with them in a long time. There were new conventions, now, for changing the scenery. No one had ever retaken the role of flies-Master. No spirit but mine occupied the rafters.
While I waited I kicked a few desiccated pigeons on to the floor, they fell slowly, like clumps of dead leaves. Otherwise I left everything as it was when I arrived. I laid no carpets this time, lit no candles. Everything must be exactly as it seemed if we were to meet again.
15.
I did not expect her to come. In composing my letter, I considered refraining from telling her about my abandonment of my disguise, but in the end I decided against it. I knew that she would have been more likely to dare the approach if she thought that my monstrosity were covered, but that omission, that lie, would have been a bad basis for building a beginning on. Worse, possibly, than not beginning at all.
Besides, I told myself, she was a girl then, with little experience in the world. Perhaps, after all of this time, we could meet on level ground.
Somehow I doubted it. I remembered, too clearly, the last look that she had given me. I remembered the vomit, fresh on her lips.
The party began in the foyer. I heard music, the piano, the strings, and a woman’s high laughter. Soon the great staircase I built would be swarming with waiters bearing bottles, glasses that brimmed with champagne, trays laden with hors d’oevres and canapés. Soon there would be dancing: women swaying in bright-coloured taffeta brushing against the bodies of the creatures who loved them.
Well, I was also dressed for a party. My wide brimmed hat, my dinner jacket, my silk cravat were impeccable and, I noticed, glancing into the mirror, slightly obscene beneath the gross face of a corpse. I never had to try very hard to achieve a dramatic effect.
I turned away from the ladder leading up to my platform. I leaned over the railing and remembered my disposal of Jacques, contemplating the drop, the sound of meat-splatter. It was so easy to fall.
And that was when I heard it, the soft sound of a silk shoe gaining traction on iron. She was coming after all; she risked mounting the ladder.
I did not turn, but I straightened my back, so that I would be standing at my full height when we met. Her breathing was as musical as it ever was. I wanted to hear her behind me; I wanted to know that she was there, not three feet from my skin. I wanted this so that, even when she ran, I would have something to treasure forever, the knowledge that she had returned to see me at last.
I heard the sound of her mounting the final step, felt the scaffold vibrate as she edged forward a few feet and then, suddenly, stopped. I heard her breath come faster. I did not know if it was fear or excitement, until she spoke.
‘Erik?’ He voice was trembling. So it was fright.
I would not turn and startle her. I would answer. We could, at least, speak.
‘Christine.’
The blood was pounding in my skull. I hardly heard the sound of her sprinting. I felt the scaffold swinging as she ran. I felt the collision. It was almost an attack.
She wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face into the back of my jacket, reaching around my chest and gripping my hands so fiercely that I felt my knuckles crack.
She was trembling, almost shuddering, and when her voice came again it was muffled by mucous and fabric, her throat, her great instrument, was terribly choked. ‘You’re alive, you’re alive. I waited so long for you. I didn’t know I was waiting. Thank God, you’re alive.’ She tried to turn me to face her, I stood firm.
She laughed, nervously, attempted to detangle herself from my clothes. Her will was as strong as her embarrassment, yet she could not manage it. She remained where she was, ‘You said “Come as you are”. Well, this is what I am, now. A silly old idiot. You haven’t seen me yet.’ Her voice suddenly chilled, softened, ‘I am much changed, even from the shadow that I show on the stage. I feel like I have been trying, and failing, to remain who I was.’
She squeezed my hand, more gently this time. I ceased to worry about the buttons on my jacket.
‘Oh Erik, please speak to me.’
I opened my mouth and found my voice had fled. I coughed, once, to clear it. ‘I have seen you, my dear. Last night in the park. You walked beneath the streetlights. You looked almost as though you were weeping.’
And now it was my turn for trembling.
I let my free hand fall upon the scaffold, supporting myself, braced against metal. I said, ‘You have changed, Christine, not beyond recognition, and the change is not unpleasing, but you are not the girl you were. You have altered. I, unfortunately, have not – or not enough.’
‘You have not turned to face me.’ She was not clinging now, merely resting her face between my shoulders. I could feel her warm breath through my silk. ‘You came without your mask to test me. Do it.’
I drew a long breath, felt her detach herself from me, stepping backward into the dust.
I turned, happy to finally be able to look at her, terrified that it would not last, terrified of what I would see in the seconds before she fled.
It appeared that she shared my trepidation. Her hands were clenched at her sides, nails boring into her flesh. She was staring at my feet. I was pleased to see her face again, even bowed away from me. She was as beautiful as ever in the afternoon of life.
With a shock, I recalled that I was entering the evening myself. How had we survived so long without each other’s voices?
Her dark eyes climbed my legs, lingered a moment on the place where the wound she bound formed a secret scar beneath my clothes. She shook herself, forced her head higher. When she looked up into my face her teeth were clenched, her muscles bunched beneath the skin. Her near-black eyes were focused as a hawk’s.
I saw her body jerk with supressed repugnance, I saw her thighs tremble beneath her skirt, but she would not look away. She did not run. She took in every inch of my face, until our eyes locked, held. Finally, after what felt like a century had passed with me in the burning, her jaws relaxed. She smiled.
The expression was small, a little sickly round the edges, but it was real enough.
After a while, she spoke, ‘Forgive me, please, for my revulsion. I cannot help it, but I will overcome myself.’ She tried to take a step forward, and found that she could not manage it. ‘I kissed you once, you know, while you were hanging there unconscious, before I brought your body down and hid it in the bed. I had to close my eyes to do it, but I did. Your breath was sweet. I have never forgotten.’
I smiled at her; she flinched slightly at the effect. I was sorry for that – it was the best that I could manage with the ruin I was born with – before her revelation rocked me like a hammer-blow and I felt myself sinking to the floor, spreading my legs across the filth, the dust and rat bones.
I could not control my voice when I spoke, and that frightened me. It was the one thing left to me that I could rely on, and now even that had fled. ‘I had no idea.’ I buried my face in my hands, a mercy for both of us. There was so much wasted time that we could have spent together, so many wasted years alone.
After a moment I heard the rustling of silk, felt the warmth of her body pressed so close to mine that if this were a play, we would have been considered obscene, an implied event occurring off-stage, to be hinted at only.
She leaned her head across my shoulder, spreading her faded hair across my collar. She spoke, ‘And now I find that no matter the age we are always children sprawled in the dirt.’ She laid her hand atop my own, covering the poison of my life with her soft flesh. ‘We are filthy, stupid, but alive. Now that I know that you live, I will never leave your side.’
I had to laugh at that; I meant to laugh. It sounded like screaming, ‘And how are we to manage, then, if I will not mask myself and you cannot stand to look at me?’
Self-blinded as I was, I felt her body shift until I could not feel her. Convinced she was leaving, that I was missing my last glimpse of her, I reached out, groping for her hands in my fevered desperation.
I caught hold of her shoulders. They were inches from my chest. I had kept my eyes closed; now I opened them and found my Christine.
She was kneeling in front of me, her knees pressing into the waffled iron on either side of my thighs. Her face and dress were streaked with dirt, with clean paths her tears had carved for her.
Christine was looking at me; not staring. To her I was not some animal that needed to be caged. It was a soft look, kind, if a little ill around the edges. She reached forward, cupped my face in her hands, and in a firm voice that brooked no argument, she said ‘Teach me again, Erik. You taught me to sing, now teach me to look. I am a fast student. I am ready to work.’
What could I say, but ‘Yes’?