Disclaimer, bladda-yadda: ain't none of it mine, ain't none of it for profit. See the as-usual Excessive Notes for further details.
"We were evacuees, in the war. This was in a train crash, several years later. I was not there."
She is not there, although she had been invited. She has other things to do. She hangs up on her brother because that offense is better than a shout, and she knows better than to go where she is no longer wanted. She knows there is no way to ever explain this to the others: she is no longer necessary, and she was told this by the only being in this or any other world she could ever trust. She was told she could not come back; that was a dismissal, if ever she'd heard one.
She spends the day relaxing. She has a dinner party at eight. First, a long luxurious bath. She has a new dress, still wrapped in paper, hanging on a hook on her bedroom door. It is a fine thing, made of silk, cut to flare and flatter in all the right places. It is as red as blood.
She paints her nails scarlet, fingers and toes, to match the dress. When the telephone rings she ignores it. When it rings again she turns the radio louder. There is always a pleasant tune on the radio, and there is no sense in dwelling on past sadnesses with so many things to enjoy.
No sense in dwelling on what she once was, when she can find enjoyment in what she is now. It is the only thing left to her, and besides, she always has been sensible.
The girdle and brassiere are slightly less enjoyable, but – as she reminds herself, fastening the row of tiny metal clips – pain is beauty, and surely whatever breath she loses will be nothing compared to the breathlessness that shall affect the men who see her, tall and slender in a blood-red dress.
She slides a stocking up a long bare leg and clips the garters on carefully. These are new stockings with Cuban heels and seams down the back. They are perfect and she loves them, although she knows they'll only last her a week. She dances far too much to keep stockings intact. She always has loved to dance. Pursing her lips, she inspects her flesh, and decides another day of tanning will soon be in order. The sunburns are worth the color afterwards; her skin is always such a lovely golden color with some sun in it. The thought of gold disturbs her, in an abstract way, and with only one stocking on she goes back to her dressing-table to exchange her golden earrings for ones made of marcasite and silver. Everything goes with red, after all. Every metal in the world goes with red.
It is when she is fully prepared, stockinged and coiffed and made-up to perfection, wearing her red dress and a white wool wrap with a fur collar, that the knock comes on the door. She is expecting her date; she calls downstairs for him to come on in and have a drink.
It is, then, quite shocking when she stops at the top of the stairs to see five police officers, hats off, wearing somber expressions on their clean-scrubbed faces.
The dress, when she sees it, only reminds her of death. She never wears it, but she can't throw it away because it's the only fine thing she has left.
--
"I don't know about the girl in the books, but remaining behind would also have meant that she was able to identify her brothers' and her little sister's bodies. There were a lot of people dead in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school – it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier."
He does look like he's asleep, but the color is wrong: he is pale in death, and purplish in places. She has not seen her brother naked since they were young children and their parents would put them both in the same bath, but the medical examiners have cut away his clothing and she sees everything. She is surprised to find that he is an adult, not a child, with an adult's well-muscled body. Her brother is a man, and he is dead.
His fair hair is surprisingly dark against his bloodless face. Under his fingernails the flesh is blue. His fingertips are mottled. There are angry black contusions down his chest. His leg resembles something the neighbor's dog had tried to bury in their garden, a long time ago, before the war.
She nods, speechless, to the medical examiner. He pulls the sheet up so that only her brother's face shows. His eyes are closed. She cannot decide if this is a good thing or a bad one – he'd had the most amazing blue eyes. If she were to ignore the color, and the stillness, and the flies, he might be sleeping. She tries to imagine. An enormous black fly lands on his face. It walks across his eyelid and he does not flinch. He had always been a light sleeper. She turns away in horror.
The younger boy is more difficult: his head and his body have, somehow, separated. She does not want to know how that happened, although she suspects it had something to do with the way the back of his skull collapsed. She knows it is his face, but she does not want to believe it, because his face belongs on his body. Not next to it on a tray.
She remembers the line of four freckles that mark a path between his shoulder blades. She tells the examiner this, and his assistant removes the staring head. Susan does not know where it is placed. Her brother's flesh is rigid, the skin a clammy grey, and when they turn him he is as stiff as a store mannequin. But the marks are there, four dots, alarmingly dark against bloodless skin. As white as – as white as a nightmare. She nods and presses her lips together behind a hand clamped to her mouth. The emergency workers nod, relieved, and make marks in little books. They pull the tarp back over the body without righting it, although by now "face-up" is only a metaphor. His face is elsewhere.
Her little sister is next, and thankfully after this she'll be finished. Her little sister was hugs, as many a day as she could get, and scabby knees over thick wool socks, and an endless propensity for wandering off. Her little sister was trouble and frolic. Her little sister was a girl with a lilting laughing voice that could get her out of almost anything. Her little sister was fond of cats, and horses, and lions, and dogs.
Her little sister is a corpse on a cafeteria table. Again, strangely, she remembers that brown mongrel tugging on whatever it had got. She remembers her brothers' gruesome excitement, and her little sister announcing quietly that she was going to be sick. She promptly was, all over her best shoes, before anyone could turn to help. Her little sister's feet are no longer in shoes. They are mottled green and black. She turns away just in time, and vomits on the floor instead.
"I remember thinking what a great deal of damage a train can do, when it hits another train, to the people who were traveling inside."
She hears her name called, and nearly collapses in relief: it is an aunt, or since the remarriage perhaps an ex-aunt; the wife of her father's brother who never made it home from Dunkirk. They embrace and the aunt cries loudly while trying to communicate: the aunt calls her a poor thing, oh Susan you poor poor thing. The aunt says she's so sorry, she arrived as quickly as she could, she didn't make any calls and didn't know anyone else was there. The aunt explains that she's identified the other two – her parents – so, you poor thing, you don't have to do any more, nobody should see their family like this.
She remembers, strangely, the fact that her father had had to identify his brother's body when it was retrieved from Dunkirk. Nobody should have to, but he did. And now she has.
After this thought has passed and fled, she realizes she hadn't known her parents were also on the train. They had been in Bristol, she remembers, and were supposed to return that day. She does not cry. She does not have any crying left; that was all done the previous night. She insists on seeing them anyway. There is no other way she can believe she's lost her whole family in one day.
"I remember looking at them and thinking, What if I'm wrong, what if it's not him after all? My younger brother was decapitated, you know. A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well... he's enjoying himself a bit too much, isn't he?"
After the sheet is pulled over her mother's face – over that smiling mouth locked in a silent wail of fear – she is led away and seated at the end of the room. The flies buzz less thickly here. Her aunt bustles away, muttering something about tea. The whole place stinks of a cafeteria, which it once was and probably will be again, after everyone's named the dead and gone home. A priest moves slowly from table to table, mouthing nonsense and waving his hand. At one time, this would have given her comfort. She wonders, now, what he is trying to accomplish. When he feels her gaze on his back, he turns to her. The book closes in his hands and he tries to smile. The look on her face disturbs him so greatly that he turns back to his task. She is strangely satisfied by this. It gives her strength enough to leave the room full of corpses and flies.
--
"I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn't for me. A little money – less than one might imagine – from her parents' estate, to lodge and feed her. No luxuries."
There are funeral arrangements to be made, of course. There is talk of money, and how she will be able to keep herself now. She is satisfied to let her aunt handle this – if she had not, it would not have been handled at all. She lives in a trance, nodding yes to questions she does not hear, signing her name on papers she does not read.
The house is sold. It has to be. House and contents. Some of the furniture is quite good, and the buyers offer a bit extra to keep it. The estate sale takes care of the rest, although she does not think there is money enough in the world to watch strangers dismantle her childhood home, piece by piece. Anything left over goes to Oxfam, or to hell for all she knows. She moves like a ghost through it, before the sale, taking what small artifacts she can to remember five lives. She salvages photographs, her mother's jewelry, her younger brother's drawings and the elder's schoolbooks, her father's cufflinks, her sister's odd collection of rocks that look like animals. She packs them away in boxes which she vows never to open again.
With the house sold, she has enough to get by – if she's careful. She moves out of her beloved flat because her parents are no longer there to supplement the rent. She takes a room let by a widow. Mrs. Wilton is nice, in a forgetful sort of way, and often tells stories of the time when "dear Algie" was alive, before the Great War. She listens, and offers hollow sympathy, and inside she wonders: what is so great about war? Wars, like railway accidents, only cause death. Her part-time shop job, all fun and long lunches, is forgotten in favor of a full-time job as a typist.
She had long prized her ability to enjoy what things she could, but now – now, with wool stockings instead of nylons, and with shoes bought with an eye for durability instead of fashion, and with very little money left over to see a movie or go dancing, she finds herself bereft of the things with which she'd soothed herself.
--
The dreams come on like a slow sickness. She cannot pinpoint a day when they began, except that they had not happened before the crash. She'd had dreams before, of course, but not like this.
In her dreams, she sees her family, alive and well. She sees her parents, and her siblings, and the faces of old friends whose names she won't allow herself to speak by the light of day. They are young, whole, and happy. They pick fruit from ever-ripe trees. They dance to the wild woodland tunes of pipers. They celebrate in a world more green than any world she has sworn to forget. The contrast is especially jarring in a London still rebuilding from the Blitz: it is all smoke and smog, fog and overcast days, the grey of concrete and the dry-blood red of brick. In these dreams, her family is happy, frolicking in an ever-young forest, under the watchful eye of a phoenix. Sometimes she hears them speaking, as though she is a ghost in their presence. They never mention her. They do not seem to know she ever existed.
She begins to join Mrs. Wilton in her "evening tipple," in hopes that it will stop the dreams. It does, for a while. When one glass of sherry becomes three, Mrs. Wilton expresses concern and extends an invitation to church. She does not know how to say no. It does even less to soothe her than the alcohol does, and when they begin to sing the Requiem on V-Day she flees before the congregation has wholly got to its feet.
She goes to work and comes home. She eats potted meat and coarse bread. She darns the holes in her woolen stockings and augments the evening tipple – only one drink in front of the good widow, whose faith in her resilience is restored – with a glass or two from her own private stores. Much stronger stuff, that. She listens to the news on the radio: all positive, now. England is recovering. England shall prevail. She privately thinks that England will prevail just as well with or without her. She has nobody to whom she could tell these things, and even if she did, they are too private to voice aloud.
She dreams of lions – of a lion – of the lion – and she dreams of her family. In her dreams the lion closes its mouth over her elder brother's leg, just like that neighbor's dog with its piece of meat. It takes her younger brother in its jaws, shaking him like a rag-doll, until his head flies from his body and crunches, sickeningly, against a tree. It turns to her sister and rakes one enormous paw down her body, parting the skin and muscle, and the girl's intestines spray out like a child's can of snakes. They laugh, the three of them, during this mistreatment. The lion purrs as it pulls the intestines from her sister's body. It groans in contentment as it licks the marrow from her brother's leg. It growls, softly, when it scoops her younger brother's brains from his smashed skull. They laugh, and they clap, and they say jolly good trick, and they tell the lion that they love it.
Then it turns to her. You were forbidden, it says. You were no longer necessary. You have been forgotten, you see; they do not need you now. It opens its mouth wide. It raises a paw studded with knife-sharp claws. Its breath smells of honey, and the baby-smell of her sister's scalp, and apples.
...only then does the lion amble over to her head on the grass and devour it in its huge mouth, crunching her skull in its powerful jaws, and it is then, only then, that she awakes.
Her life, now, is separated in two parts: Before The Crash, and After. She does not speak to many of those Before friends anymore. None of them were the sort with whom she would share her deepest secrets. They were drinking friends, dancing friends, dining friends, fun friends. Some have advanced to social circles she cannot afford. She does not cling, but she watches, wistfully, when their faces show on the society pages. Some she has let go of because of her grief; they wished to help, and she knew nothing could, so she withdrew and faded and hoped they would forget her. A few stay in touch, occasionally meeting her for a lunch or a cheap dinner, now and again for a night at the cinema, and they tell her how brave she is, how strong, to go it alone.
She was Susan, then, when she was the smiling beauty at the party. She was Su for her family, for her brothers and sister. When well-intentioned people call her Sue, she flinches. She is Suzy now. She is Suzy the typist, Suzy who takes the Tube twice a day, Suzy who has the evening tipple with dear Mrs. Wilton; Suzy, says the older woman, that's life, dear. Nothing to do but live it.
Nothing to do, she thinks. Nothing she can do. Nothing she can be, for she is forgotten and unwanted.
--
She hears about the party from one of the few friends from Before. The friend teases and jokes, trying to clown her out of her cold flat mood – haven't you grieved long enough? Isn't it time to live again? She accepts when she learns where the party is being held.
It is a charity ball, this event; she'd been saving that money for – well, it doesn't matter now, although she'd been hoarding it for far too long for it to be as small an amount as it is. She uses it to buy a fresh pot of rouge, a fresh tube of lipstick, and a new set of nylons. A beautiful set, with Cuban heels and seams down the back. She buys fresh blades for her father's safety razor, too, smoothing her legs so that the stockings won't run.
She tells Mrs. Wilton that tonight, instead of sherry, she'll be drinking champagne. The old woman claps her hands delightedly, and promises to stay up as late as she needs, so that she can hear every detail about all the fine people the moment the girl comes home. Mrs. Wilton says, Suzy, you look like a movie star in that red dress.
Susan – or Su, or whoever she is – smiles a cold quiet smile.
When she arrives at the Zoo, it is something from a fairytale. Every light is glowing, and extras besides – the old gas lamps have been lit, and strands of fairy lights hang everywhere. Waiters in white dinner jackets pass smoothly through the crowd, offering finger-food and flutes of champagne.
Although it is a cold night, she turns her white wool wrap with the fur collar in at the cloakroom. A dress such as hers is meant to be seen, and soon enough she'll warm up with the dancing and the drinks. She stops in the ladies' to powder her nose and touch-up her makeup. She tucks the cloakroom token in her purse, although she knows she will not need it.
She knows that once she loved champagne, the delicate taste and the way the bubbles tickled her nose, but to a palate dulled by hard liquor, it tastes like tonic water. She drinks it anyway. The finger-foods, as fine as they are, seem too rich for her now. She eats sparingly, and drinks the flavorless champagne until that familiar ache loosens in her chest.
She does not stay still; the entire zoo is done up tonight, and it is easy for her to find the places she will need. She permits herself to be taken for a few dances, and she exchanges embraces with a few people she recognizes.
"Susan, my darling!" they say. "It's so good to see you again!"
"Susan, dearest, it's like seeing a ghost come alive!"
"Susan, you've come back to us – you're back where you should be!"
To the last, she nods, and offers that strange small smile. She says that she will be, soon enough, and this is met with much laughter.
--
She is standing on the battlefield, holding her sister's hand. She looks up at the golden lion, and the burning amber of its eyes. "He's not a tame lion, is he?" she whispers to her sister, and they shiver.
She vaguely remembers a line from a book she'd read for school, that there is no privacy at a small party and nothing but at a large one. She thinks this is true, because when she hides herself, at the end of the evening, nobody notices that they're one guest short. She had arrived alone, after all, so there was nobody to miss her.
Her hiding-place is a ladies' room, across the walkway from the enclosure where the lions are kept. Once the zoo is locked and abandoned for the night, she creeps out. Her fine shoes, kept so long in storage, grind strangely against the pavement. Her toes are numb with cold. A hundred-year cold, she remembers, and reflexively she slaps herself for the thought. She is more drunk than she thought, because she knows her cheek must sting but she does not feel it. That, or it is colder than it feels – although this, too, could be from the drink. The moon is full and bright, and the sky free of clouds. This, too, is helpful.
The handlers' gates are locked, of course, but they are not much of an obstacle. They are not too tall for a woman who spent her childhood outdoors and has kept in shape. Though she hates herself for admitting it, they are no obstacle at all for a woman whose first adulthood involved frequent wars with medieval weaponry.
She hears it. A strange, quiet sound. Hnk, hnk. This is not what she expected, and not what she remembers, but she reminds herself that she's here for the truth, or perhaps to prove a point.
The lion's enclosure is made of concrete, poured in lumps to resemble boulders. In the moonlight and the cold it may as well be stone, and she remembers – again – a lion lying dead on a slab of rock. There is straw strewn across the enclosure, and sticks thrown by misbehaving schoolchildren; she thinks she can see a stuffed toy or two, filthy and shredded. The enclosure stinks of piss and shit. Clearly the keepers do not clean it as often as they ought. She hears the animal moving, in the shadowed places, but cannot see it. Hng. Hngk. She finds a small rock and throws it at the sound.
In reply she gets a growl. Her spine tingles. This is more like it. She has not felt this alive since – since – since--
When the lion steps into the moonlight Susan is disappointed. She had expected it to be larger. She had expected it to be majestic. She had, perhaps, expected a human intelligence in its eyes. This lion is a zoo lion, languishing in a world far removed from the African savannah. In the sharp moonlight Susan can count each rib, and each hollow between. Its ears are notched and torn. Its pelt is rough, and in some cases gone bald; partially from lying on concrete, and partially from mange or flystrike. Its tail is kinked, as though it had been broken, close to the tip. Its mane is thin and tangled.
The lion's eyes are the worst part: they are clearly the eyes of an animal gone insane. Instinct tells it to roam, and to crunch living flesh between its jaws for food, but reality gives it a tiny enclosure and cold shanks of horse meat. The lion paces, watching her, unsure of what to do. Whatever instincts it's kept have been twisted by captivity.
"There you are," Susan says. "That's all you are. After what you did to me, this is all you deserve."
She laughs, a full-body laugh, a belly laugh, for the first time in years.
The lion growls again. Its body language shifts: it is now on the defensive. This may be a miserable pit in the cold, but it is all the lion has, and one thing lions know how to do is defend what is theirs.
"Look," she tells it. "This is what you've turned me into. Are you happy?" She lunges forward, spreading her arms. "Is this what you fucking wanted? Is this what I deserved?"
The lion shifts on its forepaws and growls, louder, in a precursor to a roar.
"Come on, you bastard," she shouts, aiming a rock at its head. The rock sails clear – her aim never was good, not here – and clatters harmlessly on the concrete. "What? I wasn't good enough for you?" She is screaming now, as loud as she can. "Thought you'd be rid of me? I've found you. You're stuck here."
It roars, now, although this mad zoo-lion's roar is a small, pitiful thing compared to the memories Susan will not admit she has.
"Do it!" she shouts. She picks up a stick and throws it. This time she connects with the animal. "You took them – you take me!"
The lion gathers itself and springs, silently. It lands hard against Susan's body, and its foreleg wraps around her. Instinctively, she writhes away. She clambers to her feet. The lion swipes, angrily; she dodges back with a dancer's grace. "You killed them all," she shouts, and now she is crying, a thick heavy cry that messes her makeup and makes her nose run. She never cried like this before. If she had, perhaps... perhaps all of this would not have been necessary. "You killed them all and forgot me!" she wails.
When the lion springs again, it captures her.
It tears at her arm with its great filthy claws – festooned with dirty straw, redolent of urine and rancid meat – and it is nothing like the things she wishes she could forget. Its breath, when it goes for her throat, is foul. This, too, is wrong. But this shocking pain cannot be rationalized away – although she's had long practice doing just that – and Susan knows she was right all along.
In the morning, when the keepers find her in her fine silk dress and hair piled high, the blood has drained from her body. Where it dries it is shiny and brown. Flies gather around the sticky parts. Her hands are purple and blue, swollen grotesquely. In some strange way, she looks satisfied. Her face is as white as paper. As icing sugar. As snow.
The lion, mangy and flyblown, is quiet while Susan's body is removed. His muzzle and forelegs are gaily decorated with Susan's blood. He watches, behind a partition, occasionally dipping his head as though to tell the bustling people that justice has been served.
Its muzzle is spotted with fresh, scarlet blood. Then the vast pinkness of its tongue wipes around its face, and once more it is perfectly clean.
Author's Notes:
This one has been sitting in my head, and in my notebook, and on my hard drive, for at least a year. I don't know why I wrote it now. The Last Battle has always struck me as a gruesome and frightening book. I couldn't understand why such a thing was allowed to happen to Susan – or why nobody said anything about it. I still don't get it. I could go on here for ages about Susan, but I'll spare you... my Narnian feminist manifesto is kept elsewhere.
I've never been to London, much less to any of the zoos there. I have no idea how they are paved, or if they have lions, or how they keep the lions, much less whether or not there's a ladies' across the walkway from the hypothetical lions. I do know that zoos in the forties and fifties were often grim affairs, and the animals kept therein lived short miserable lives.
Technically, it's a fanfic of a fanfic, because...
All the italicized bits are from a short story by Neil Gaiman, called 'The Problem of Susan.' It can be found, at least in the US, in a short-story collection titled 'Fragile Things.' He and I agree that Susan had been mistreated horribly. I'll leave you with a quote from the book's introduction:
"I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children's literature."
Neil's is better. Go read it. It's worth it.