3.
That feeling. That strange one that you get when you think something has happened to you before. That you have seen it, and know how things are going to turn out just seconds before they actually happen. There was a particular word for it. Soddin French like eating frog-legs and consuming large quantities of garlic flavoured snails. What was it again? Déjà vu. Right, that's it. That was the bloody word I was digging for!
There was a young couple; a woman, dressed in a flesh coloured gown with lace trimmings at her up-right collar and sleeves, her auburn hair tied into a bun at the back of her white swan-neck. She was with a short, brooding bloke in a black three-piece suit with a golden watch-chain looping across his grey vest. They were standing just to the right side of me, only pretending to be interested in a violently coloured picture of Holy Mary nursing a fat baby Jesus in her mumly arms, but actually, they both were too occupied with dealing with more personal matters to notice bugger of anything else around them.
I was minding my own business, flexing my fingers, my eyes hooked on that bloke's wallet that stuck out of his back pocket like a luring candy cane in a clumsy toddler's fist. And that was when it hit me. That déjà vu thing. Hit me like a soddin smack by a rotating windmill.
That girl, she is going to crumble up a letter in her hand and nod with her pretty head while that git standing beside her starts accusing her and then keeps on rambling like a lunatic.
"This is unacceptable!" The poofter in the black suit hissed. "He shouldn't be writing you this! Everybody knows that we're engaged!"
The girl bowed her head and stared at the envelope that she held in her hands, wrinkling it as she clenched her fingers around the paper.
"And writing such insolent filth! Such pretentious, incompetent dribble! I read it, you know! Every single word that came from the perverted mind of that lovesick poet of yours! HA! Poetry, you call this? It doesn't even bloody rhyme most of the time!"
She started nodding then, warily. Her large chestnut eyes were glossy with tears. Her hands tried to hide the letter between the folds of her dress.
"If it wasn't for the maid!" the crazed lunatic of a jealous fiancée of hers exclaimed. "If it wasn't for her, I would have been totally unaware of all this. What you were up to behind my back! You and your impious male friend would have been quite successful in keeping your rancid rendezvous a secret from me!" he raised his hand and waved a finger at her while his head became redder and redder till it looked like he would just bloody explode, and spittle flew from his lips. "God! That puny little shit! He's lusting after you like a rancid dog wagging his tail after a wet little bi- "
He managed to swallow the word, just in time. From the side, I could see a large vein pounding angrily in his neck. Just like I had known it would, and I thought:
Now she is finally going to say something. She won't say anything real nasty to defy him though. Oh no, she wouldn't dare. At least, not yet that is.
"Henry." The woman whispered. "Please, don't be so angry. He's just a boy. A boy struck by calf-love who's busying himself writing silly poetry. He doesn't know anything about us."
But Henry wasn't going to calm down, not before the dimwit had made a complete arse out of himself and had turned her into the popular subject of every fancy tea-party the gossiping upper-class bints were going to throw for the next couple of months. I stood a good few of feet away from the angry bugger and still I could sense the hate pulse off his body like a bad odour damping from his cheesy armpits. But it wasn't any of my business, I thought, even if I happened to have some sort of strange precognition about what the two bickering upper-class twats were up to, it was no issue of mine, so I checked the green eyed goop's back pockets again and saw that his purse was tauntingly close, but I kept my hands buried deep inside my own pockets. Didn't want to strike out yet. It wasn't the right time, because Henry wasn't finished with fooling around.
He was going to read it. I knew it even before he snatched the envelope out of her slightly trembling hands and tore it open like he was dealing with the correspondent instead of his correspondence. Henry the bloody bastard was going to recite the poem that was meant for his fiancée's eyes only, out-loud in public for all of us to hear.
"Henry! No!" She cried, no longer keeping her voice down to the low murmur that was kind of the standard for civilized private conversation, and she made a couple of heads turn into their direction. Not that it would change anything. Henry was about to blow it wide open, dish the dirt, blow the gaff. No more closet dancing for the two of them. The scrutiny by others be soddin damned.
"You said it was poetry, right darling?" He yelled at her in a haughty boisterous voice. "It's art then, isn't it? If anything this ridiculous open-door policy of the National Gallery had taught me, it must be that art should be shared freely with others. So why don't we share this twinkling little gem of a masterpiece with the rest of the good company we're in, my dear? I'm sure that, among the graceless fishwives and petty self-made Yorkshire men, we'll find at least one or two illiterate imbeciles who would know how to appreciate this!"
The entire company turned their attention to the short bloke with the red face and the offensive loud voice of a public announcer. Even Pete and Bradbury, who were working at the other side of the hall near the white columns and the wall with the small collection of dead-ugly da Vinci drawings, were distracted for moment and craned their necks to see what was happening here.
Henry smiled a real wanker's smile, and stared triumphantly at his miserable fiancée, whose cheeks had turned the colour of bleached linen by now.
"Ladies and gentlemen." He barked, grinning madly. "I give you a poem by Mr Paul Alderman, who's apparently worshipping and may be even bedding my lovely fiancée at the moment. The honoured lady Francesca of Sussex!"
"Please, no." I heard the woman whisper, but it was already too late. Envy had eaten away the last bits of Henry's sanity, and with a voice that balanced at the verge of having the nutty giggles, he started to read. In my head I unconsciously started reciting the entire bloody thing, following the movement of his lips, as if I actually knew it by heart.
Perfect by nature,
she is a waterfall of dark passion.
Lustful eyes that had captured my soul.
Sinful lips, pulsing heat.
Her longing for a true love.
Untold.
Restrained by nurture,
She is a wall of rigid indifference.
Scornful brows that had shattered my heart.
Silent mouth, filled with deceptive lies,
for true is her heart,
but dishonest are her words.
Grieving, my lady puts
her throbbing heart
inside a mute tomb
and seals it with hot tears.
My lady and I are divided,
a vast, dark ocean lies between
my love and I.
But our souls remain.
Together,
connected they are in dreams.
In dreams, we bond.
I dream.
I caress your corpse-white skin.
At the shore of my delusion,
I kiss your cold-cold lips,
And watch you return to life.
And under the diamonds,
Of a high red sky
I drown,
inside the flood
of your wet sex -
"That's enough! Do you hear me, Henry? Enough!" Her voice trembled, and her hands were clenched into delicate white knuckled fists.
Henry the git smiled back at her with all the charm of a growling weasel.
"Oh, but you have to let me read this, darling! I haven't even got to the real saucy bits yet. We must continue for the sake of this fine piece of artistic pornography, I insist!"
Her hand shot out like a pale bolt of lightening, slapping him so hard across his right cheek that it echoed inside the crowded hall. Henry just gazed at her, startled and with his gob finally shut. He slowly raised his hand up to his struck face and she was able to snatch the poem back from him. She ripped it into a thousand pieces. The shattered remains of the poem landed on her dress and the gallery floor like a white flock of irregularly shaped seabirds.
"You." She said, her voice soft but vibrant with anger. "I loathe you. I HATE you. You're lower than a worm, and I wish you to hell!"
She stared at him for a while. Not saying anything but just glaring him with her chestnut eyes all spitting daggers. Then she slowly turned around on her heels, shooting a hateful glance at the people in the crowd who were gawking at her like she was a deformed calf with three heads. She took a good deep breath like she was preparing herself for a dive, raised her chin up high and made her way through the group. I smiled, because I felt that she did right not to give a bugger all about those hypocritical twats. After she was gone, the feeling of having a seriously bad case of being all- knowing suddenly stopped. It was like I had been watching the first act of a badly written play with lots of overdramatic dialogue and very irritating characters. One that I'd seen before and now that it was finally over, I'd gotten out my seat to rush into the direction of the big exit sign. Henry, the dandy lady-killer with the refined taste in poetry, still stood there, gob-smacked with his hand rubbing over his cheek. Easy picking. I reached out and grabbed the git's wallet, stuck it into my pocket, turned around and made my way through the crowd toward the da Vinci collection where my mates were waiting for me.
"What was that all about?" Bradbury asked, flashing an eyebrow.
Pete had obviously seen more of the action. "Did she really hit him? He asked, eager to know. "She hit him, right? She smacked him! Right in the face! Did you see it, Will? Did you?"
I handed my price over to the boy using our special finger-smith's handshake. "Just a bit of hearts juggling among the upper-class twats." I said. "Nothing big. And yes she did, Pete. I got a good look at the red handprint she left behind on his ugly bloated mug."
"Wicked!" The boy grinned. "I hate that bloke! He sounds like he got his balls jammed between doors. He sounds like a real snooty bastard!"
"And that poem he recited. Absolutely dreadful stuff." Bradbury opted.
"Really? I thought it was rather good." I said, blinking slightly in disbelief. "I mean, it wasn't exactly something worth to be bundled into a collection and shipped to the stores or anything, but it wasn't that terrible."
"Will, Will, Will." And Bradbury shook his head at me real sadly. " I'm afraid that I should reconsider your taste in poetry with true abomination if you applaud to that sort of mindless adolescent drivel." He said. " It's a good thing you don't write. The effect of such verbal ravishment on the lady of your affection could only be devastating, I imagine."
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Later that afternoon (and a good bunch of fat wallets later) I bumped into her again. As soon as I set eyes on her, that odd feeling returned together with a quiet nagging, something that was not completely right. A cat on hot bricks sort of feeling, right before the cat gets its paws roasted and jumps off the soddin wall in a suicidal dive, that sort of thing. She was sitting together with a girl who was dressed very plainly and who could only be her maid, on a bench underneath a large painting that covered half of the wall. It was that one with that medieval Dante bloke standing in the middle of his fairy tale nightmare. All of a sudden, I knew that whoever had written her that letter was about to show up to get his heart pulverized.
"I'm sorry madam, truly sorry!" The maid lamented. She was a frail little thing with red curls and freckles and had all the manners of a scuttling field mouse. Even her voice sounded squeaky, like a frightened rodent caught in a trap. "Lord Spencer, he caught me by surprise, madam. He saw me talking to Mr Alderman and intercepted the letter when I was hurrying back, trying to deliver it to you!" The woman who had been so recently scorned by her idiot fiancée, tried her best to fake a smile at her, but I thought that the result looked rather unconvincing, like she had just swallowed a good swig of vinegar or had brushed her teeth with lemon juice and was trying to convince her maid that it didn't sting that much at all. "It's all right, I don't blame you, Mary. If there's really anyone to blame here, it should be me. Me, and perhaps that mindless buffoon Henry." She cast her eyes down at her hands on her lap where they were busy garrotting the remains of what was once a delicate lady's handkerchief. Instead of the ghostly paleness, her cheeks now carried a flush that spread over her nose and ears, and she looked like she was about to cry or to start swearing real loud.
"God, what an idiot he is! We'll be the laughing stock of whole of London by tomorrow! Everybody in our circle is bound to know. I can't even bare the thought to go home and tell Papa what just happened. It's too horrible! Too horrible for words!"
I walked up to the two women and went to stand behind them, pretending to be looking at the large medieval painting, but cautiously following their conversation instead. Mind you, I'm not a nosy wanker, only did this because I had that peculiar feeling again. You see, I knew what she was going to say seconds before she actually said it, which was not much of a sense of precognition if you looked at it from a "I-want-to-make-lots-of- easy-money-at-the-dog's-races" sort of way, but it was there and you had to admit that it was soddin strange. The bloody eerie thing was (and that was the most important reason why I had such interest. It was some kind of morbid fascination I wager, the way you just had to stop walking by and stare at a horrible accident that was bound to happen) that I knew exactly, word by word, what she was going to tell him. Just like the poem, I could recite her like a diligent scholar mouthing after Shakespeare. The question that haunted me of course was how - and why - I should know all this in the first bloody place. What in bleedin hell it had anything to do with me?
"Franny, are you all right?"
She looked up. Startled first, but then she recognized him, and the shocked expression on her face quickly made way for overall glumness.
"You." She sighed. "I don't want to see you."
The young man was about my age. He was slimly built with deep sunken eye- sockets like he hadn't slept once in his entire lifetime on his head grew an unruly, clumsy hairdo. He wore thin spectacles and stared at the girl with that real sad dreamy look that was enough to let me know that the poor lad was completely buggered. I didn't need to use my special eerie insight to see that he was the poor lovesick nit, who had fabricated that now famous poem Tactless Henry was so particularly excited about.
"I understand." And he nodded his head like a wooden jack escaped from his box, eager to please. "You must be angry with me. It was stupid of course not to take more care when I was getting Mary to bring you that letter. If you want, I could go away and visit you tonight at your father's house."
Her eyes were cold when she observed him. They looked like the eyes of someone I knew but couldn't really remember, the existence of that particular person, and I thought it was a girl, was only a shard of broken memory, a glimpse of a dream. It didn't matter that Francesca of Sussex's eyes were almond shaped and brown like shiny chestnuts, and the ones in my mind were round and green-blue like a stormy ocean, or maybe I remembered it all wrong and they were even a shade darker then hers, large and black like those of a startled deer. The colour didn't really matter. The shape wasn't important. It was the expression that those eyes carried that really mattered. That dismissive look that said: What are you doing here? You're not a part of my life! You're nothing to me! How dare you even to show up and breathe my air and occupy my space? And where did you find the IMPUDENCE to SPEAK to me?! Looking at that God-awful expression on that haughty woman's face made me want to grab her by her bony arms and shake her like an irritating loose pebble in a shoe, shake her and yell at her. Ask the bloody bint what the bleedin hell was wrong with all the bitches in this world, why in hell's name they all had their blind googly eyes stuck at their soddin backsides!
"No Paul." She said, and her voice sounded even frostier, absolutely sub- zero now. "You better not."
"But perhaps what happened today is a good thing, Franny!"
"How on earth can this be a good thing, Paul?"
The young man shrugged. "Henry now knows everything. There's no longer any need for us to hide our feelings for each other."
He lowered his eyes shyly to the ground. His object of affection however, was like a statue, with a heart carved out of solid granite. On her face was a look of absolute horror and I braced myself for the impact.
"I don't have any feelings for you, Paul." And she shook her head angrily at him. " I never had."
The puny poet's expression was one of flabbergasted bewilderment. When he spoke, he sounded like a sheep, bleating away in the field. "That's - That's not true. You're just telling me this because you're angry with me."
"No Paul." She said. I was quickly developing a major dislike for the way she wore out the poor bloke's name, like it was her favourite curse or anything, that she said "Paul" every time she meant balls or bollocks. And now she sounded real sympathetic, real vomitey sensitive toward his feeling.
"It's not because I'm angry with you. It's how things really are. I was never in love with you. You were just making it all up inside that little fantasy world of yours." She put a hand on her breasts, inhaled deeply and continued in a teary voice.
" I thought it was harmless. I mean every lady likes to have poetry written about her. Of course we do. It's flattering. But it's just words, Paul. Ink wasted on paper pages. It has nothing to do with reality."
"But - all of my poetry readings you attended, and the private sittings that we had together -" He gulped, then his voice broke down and then he started to sound all teary, real pathetic. "I read to you out on my study's balcony at night under the stars. You sat on my lap at my desk, whispering words into my ears." He cocked his head to one side like a whipped dog and then he whispered. "You are my muse, Franny."
"I only regarded you as a friend. I'm sorry Paul, if I let you believe that there was ever more to it than friendship."
"You're lying." He said, shaking his head. " You're only trying to deceive me and yourself with this!"
"I'm not lying to you. I don't love you, and I'm not your goddamned muse! I'm Francesca of Sussex, and I'm engaged to lord Henry Spencer, the man I'm bound to marry. You, are Paul Alderman, a struggling poet, talented perhaps, but you're nothing compared to Henry."
She looked away, turned her wasp-waisted body away from him and gazed at the picture behind her instead. She was looking at that funny looking multi- layered wedding cake that was painted in the middle of the panel, the one that the sweaty bloke in the black suit had explained to be picturing the mountain of Purgatory. There were men and women struggling up that mountain, carrying large slates of stones on their crooked backs. The road up to the top slithered around the mountain like a large ash-coloured snake.
Suddenly, my heart started to beat much faster.
"You should stop writing me." The cold vixen said, her face still turned away from the poofy poet as if she couldn't stand to the look of him any longer. " Henry just made a terrible scene in public after reading one of your less exotic poems. I can't imagine what he would do if he knew about the rest you've written about me."
Her voice was only registered somewhere at the back of my mind. My attention was turned to the picture, my eyes scanning feverishly over the hundreds of tiny faces painted on the canvas. There was a man with an amputated leg who was falling off the mountain, his mouth opened to utter a scream and his hand snatched like a vulture's claw at a boy's leg, who happened to be so unlucky to be standing nearby. Beneath them, miles away and stretching out like a grotesque ashy flower bedding, was a graveyard of pale bones.
Look at those sad losers. I heard a frightening but very familiar voice whisper inside my head. Completely blind they are, and stubborn. Carrying their sins like a bunch of Australian tourists hauling along oversized backpacks.
"I can't do that! That would be like silencing my heart!" He was weeping now, I didn't have to turn around to see the big crocodile tears dripping down his chin or the large red spot spreading over his nose, making it look like a snotty strawberry. "I know you, Franny. I know you better than that you know yourself! You're lying to me. It's like that last poem that I've written about us. You do love me, but you're just too afraid to admit it! You're afraid every time that you're offered a chance to let your heart speak out! Why Franny? God, why?"
I couldn't find what I was looking for by staring at the faces of the damned, but something else struck me like a knife's cold blade pressed on the throat and made the hairs at the back of my neck all raise. I looked again, because I thought my eyes must have got it wrong. But then I still saw it. I saw that the picture was changing. The sky that had been dark, grey and gloomy started to glow eerily, like someone was playing a sick practical joke on me and was lighting up the canvas from the back with a red light-bulb, giving the starless sky a touch of fresh aortic crimson. Just like it had been stabbed with a knife and was now slowly bleeding to death, I thought, and for a moment, I was sure I was going to lose my soddin mind. The painful argument of the star-crossed drama queens was a soft drone coming from a thousand miles away.
The woman, who was undoubtedly reacting in the way she'd learned from her tortured heroines from her favourite romantic novels, seemed to be totally unaware of the change inside the painting. She was looking at the same bloody thing all right, but I figured from her still composed facial expression and the lack of horror in her eyes, that she was only looking without seeing, just the way she had been looking at the poor wretch who was now pouring his heart out in front of her. She was like an imbecile strapped to the bed gazing up at cracks in the ceiling, eyes wide open but all of her neurons were firing bugger to the brain.
"Oh bollocks." I whispered, a nauseating feeling rolled inside my stomach like an empty shell toiling in the soddin breakers. The picture slowly, gradually, started to sway, going from right to left and back again, drifting on an invisible ocean. Or maybe, I thought and I fiercely hoped, I was only moving my head unconsciously. Maybe my legs were just giving up.
"Let go of me - Don't touch me!" The woman yelled. And I knew that the desperate poet had grabbed her now by her wrist and was begging her with dog-faithful eyes to admit that one thing to him. That one soddin thing that he needed to hear from her. The words that could save them both and break this endless circle, this unfinished business between the girl and him that was happening perhaps for the millionth time by now. It's like they are running around in a giant pet wheel, I thought, and mad giggles escaped my throat, a string of noisy bubbles, cause it was then that I suddenly realized that we were ALL running inside a giant pet wheel. Pete and Bradbury and Higgins. Doll and her sick mum and that fat Henry twat I just met. All going round and round and doing things for the millionth- trillionth time without knowing anything. Without someone to tell them to stop being this daft, to stop running because there was no soddin point to it. God, I wished that picture would stop moving. I was so close to getting the bloody pukers.
And then the weeping writer really started to lose it. "Franny!" He yelled, and suddenly he didn't sound like a sad little noche anylonger. There was fear in his voice, fear and desperation and he sounded real mad. "Franny, you have to listen to me! Admit it! Do it now! It's your last chance! It's OUR last chance! Don't let me go through all of this again! You have to let it STOP!"
But Franny wasn't going to say anything. She never did. She wasn't going to throw away the rest of her life by becoming Mrs Alderman, the spouse of a talented but rather unsuccessful poet. She wouldn't dream to turn in her luxurious house for a poorly furnished, dirty old studio, or exchange her pretty silk gowns for plain looking rags even her maid Mary wouldn't wear, or return the golden engagement ring with the diamond settings to Henry to replace it with a red ribbon tied around her finger, one on which Paul had scribbled their names in his wavy love-sick handwriting. Instead, she was going to lie, rip her lover's heart into a million tiny pieces like she had done to his offensive poem, and she was going to kill herself by doing so.
"Let go Mr Alderman! You're scaring my mistress!" The field-mouse of a maid squeaked.
"Let go of me I said! How dare you to speak to me like that! You're mad! You're out of your bloody mind!" His precious Franny sneered.
And I thought; Right you are, luv. We're all mad. All obligatory sinners here who fell of the bloody mountain and landed on our noggins one time too many. So round and round we all go, going up and down, crawling on our bleeding knees in this giant pet's wheel like a dumb herd of suicidal lemmings. And now-now I'm really going to throw up.
I gagged, expecting my body to take care of the rest and lurch forward to get rid of the bloody nausea, but instead, I kept waving back and forth like a tall pine in the wind. I could hear myself panting faintly, while my head rolled over my shoulders as if it had somehow become disconnected from my neck.
"Something wrong here, miss?" A man asked and at the same time, someone caught me by my shoulders right before my head swung way too far back for me to keep my balance. If it wasn't for that, I would had creaked my skull on the spotlessly polished marble floor. My floppy body had just decided that it wanted me to lie down for a while, just until everything stopped moving.
"Whoa! Are you all right, sir? Do you need to sit down?" A friendly gentleman's voice asked. I rolled my head around as if it could possibly mean anything, and overheard the conversation between the other man and the unfortunate couple.
"Is this young man threatening you?" The meddler asked.
"That's absurd!" The artistic bugger explained. "I was not threatening her! Look, she knows me! We were just talking!"
"Really? I have to say, it didn't look like you were having a quiet conversation to me, sir. No Sir! Not at all! The lady was asking for help and you were holding on to her like you were trying to drag her away from her maid."
"He was pinching in my mistress's arm! Screaming like a madman! Look at it, she has red bruises everywhere!" The squeaky maid complained.
I heard a loud sniffling followed by a wet sob, which was undoubtedly coming from the somewhat ruffled mistress.
"I - I didn't mean to hurt her." Poetic boy rambled. "I just - just wanted her to listen to me."
I shut my eyes, and felt how hot blood pulsed inside my sockets. Someone walked me over to the bench. The man who was prying with the young couple was asked politely to step aside to let me sit down. He did and I gratefully obliged. I kept thinking to myself that I had imagined it. It can't be real. I thought. Pictures don't change, they just don't. Not even the ones that seem to be bloody book- illustrations of your own bloody nightmares.
"I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me just then - Franny, please." The poet tried, but there was no more strength left in his voice, he sounded defeated, no longer all fired up by his desperation and fear. He sounded sane again, and quite dead.
"Don't you dare lay your hands on me again." She hissed. "I don't want to speak to you. I don't want to see you. I want you to get out of my life!"
I opened my eyes, slowly, and different patches of vision blurred into each other, till I could see in focus again. The swaying had completely stopped, which was a true blessing.
"But Fran -"
"Hey! You heard the lady!" The nosy pillock interfered. "Now move along, sir. Before I have to cuff you and drag you down to the station."
The words cuff and station cut into the calming pace of my heart and sent it right into a frenzied gallop again. I peeked at the bloke who was playing saviour for the lady in distress. He was a large, elderly man, with sagging folds were once his cheeks had been and a drooping moustache that covered all of his upper lip. He reminded me of the big fat walrus who ate all the oyster orphans in Alice in Wonderland. Even more upsetting, he reminded me of someone I'd seen at the exposition only yesterday, and even now that he was no longer wearing his split ended coat, I recognized him as the bollard eye bloke who had been watching us till I got the bloody creepers. Sweat broke out at my back. Slowly, I rose up from the bench and tried to get the hell out without him noticing. But as soon as I had taken one or two steps, the room started to wobble again like a plate full of blackcurrant jelly, strapped to a bloody hippopotamus crossing swamps. Breathing heavily, I spun myself around and headed for the corridors, becoming aware that our secluded corner of the exposition hall was now bathing in reddish light, coming from the side of the wall where the picture of Dante's Divine Comedy was exhibited.
I'm not going to look over my shoulder to see if it's really coming from where I think it is coming. I told myself. No, I'm not going to see if there were now skeleton demons galloping on ink black horses around the painting or people crawling out of the sea like swarms of really deformed cod. No - bloody - way.
"Hey there my friend! Where do you think you're going like that! You better stay put."
A hand locked around my upper arm, but I twisted my arm like a wheel and ended up with my hand lifted at shoulder's height in a gesture that said that the helpful bloke should back off.
"Don't need your help." I managed to mumble with a wax mouth. "Just - need a breath of fresh air. Need to get outside."
I stumbled away, my hands reaching out for the wall to find some support. My sweaty palm searched to find the smooth cool marble, but it touched the sharp edges of rough mountain rock instead. My heart just sunk like a walloping whale, my stomach adding a couple of extra knots. If I turn around right now, I thought, if I turn around I will see a deep gaping abyss laughing back at me like some dark hungry maul filled with rocky teeth. There will be pushing and screaming of folks trying to get up the mountain, trying to bloody survive, and there will the thick stench of decaying flesh hanging around like a cloud of toxic gas. And for a moment, I did sense those horrible things. I did feel the nearly dead scrape their ulcerous skin over my own. My ears rung with the violent screams of despair and my nose picked up the nauseating smell of dead corpses left to rot in the hot sun. Oh God, I just managed to whisper, and then I felt how my legs turned into pudding and I collapsed on the floor.
"Are you all right, sir?" A voice, a man's voice, different from the first. It was lower with a more growling quality to it and it sounded sort of muffled like the bloke was speaking from behind a thick curtain. My heart jumped up to my throat where it stuck to pound like a mad drum. The red glow became brighter, as if a blood red sun had just risen inside the hollow bowels of the gallery hall. I urged myself to keep my eyes on the floor, but it was like I was completely daft or something. I turned my head and let my eyes fall on the painting.
The picture was now a large crimson rectangle, a thin canvas of black lines and dark blots, running across the surface like an intricate web of arteries with spots of rupture. It pulsed! The bloody thing just pounded like a living, breathing thing, a membrane sack covering the foetus of a hideous monster. The mountain of Purgatory in the middle had somehow come closer, like the thing had crawled its way to the boundaries, nudging itself snugly against the frame, and now the soddin thing was dominating the entire landscape! The humans on the slopes had turned hideously deformed with sunken faces and black empty eyes, an army of the damned with screaming skulls carried around on frighteningly thin necks and skeleton bodies bearing horrible wounds. And that Dante bloke had totally disappeared. Only his book was there, lying all deserted on the ground. It was flipped open, facing the public, and someone had scribbled lines across the pages with ink that was red and runny like fresh pig's blood.
It read;
Saints go heaven - Sinners go to hell. The rest of us are doomed to fall forever.
"Right." I muttered, then added sardonically. "Redrum Redrum."
The picture throbbed faster and faster, with the illusive mountain in the middle pounding madly like a decaying heart. Screams echoed in my ears when the humans threw themselves off the cliffs, their falls depictured in the jerky movements of a film with not enough frames. The lines of paint started to melt and run, turned liquid before my eyes, and was pumped across the entire surface, flowing and toiling like blood that went through veins. Cracks began to appear, like tiny organic rips in the folds of a tatty batwing. And then I heard it, the sound of horse hooves, coming nearer, and nearer, and nearer.
"Sir! Sir! Can you hear me?"
Someone shook me, and my head bounced around over my shoulders, the tiny bit of reason left in my brain rattling inside like lose grains of sand. No, I muttered, not again. Not -him- again. This wasn't real. This was NOT really happening. I had to turn away, shut my eyes, stop looking for bleedin's sake, but I just kept staring at it like I was a senseless idiot, my mind blank and my eyes as large as bloody saucers.
A slap across the face, hard enough to rush the blood back into my cheek. Someone screamed into my ear and I blinked, two, three times, just enough to get me back at the reigns to put a halt to my galloping frenzy. I shut my eyes and with the same burning eagerness of a naïve little boy, wished real hard for the nightmare to go away.
The chemical smell of sulphur and the stench of rot were gradually replaced by the dusty odour of rooms that hadn't been aired in centuries and the ripe smell of a gentleman's cologne. The sound of hooves also died down - todnot todnot - it sounded - todnot tod -todnot - tod -not - like a slowly unwinding clock, till only a soft thumping remained that became quickly undistinguishable from my own balmy heartbeat.
"Oh God! - oh bollocks." Frightfully, I opened my eyes and saw that my hands were shivering badly.
Some bloke was so helpful to help me get up.
"It's all right, sir. I got you now! You really should get outside for some fresh air. It's too crowded in here and much too hot."
"-That -that - that painting." I rambled, talking total gibberish. "It moved! The sky, the sky was all red!"
"Painting?" The man followed my wide eyed stare and looked back over his shoulder. "You mean the one over there, the one painted by Michelino?"
I staggered a few steps forward, my frightened senses telling me to get the hell away from it as far as possible, but the obliging pillock held firmly onto my arm, perhaps afraid that I would start tripping over my own feet again. Irritated, I glanced up at him, and for the first time since he had jolted me back up to my feet, I got a good look at his face.
"What about it, sir?" He asked. His eyes met mine, confused bollard eyes that suddenly caught that same spark of recognition. His walrus moustache drooped down like heavy curtains at the end of a play, as did the corners of his mouth.
"Wait a minute." He said, and his voice had that sort of affronted quality to it. "Wait a minute! I know you!"
I did the trick with the wheeling arm again. At that moment, walrus face was too flabbergasted to hold on, and I could unlock myself easily out of his grip. Having now twice that many reasons to skedaddle out of the soddin place, I spun around, and fled toward the corridors. The pair of star- crossed lovers was still standing there and I almost bumped into the woman and would have knocked her down if it wasn't for poetry-boy who caught her by her delicate, injured little arms and jolted her out of my way. I did brush my hand over her hips for a just second though, and as I did, imagines started to flood into me. They were pictures of a not too distant future. I saw a room, a lady's bedroom, with a large opened window through which gushes of snow were blown in with the ghostly curtains billowing in the icy wind. A woman dangled from the ceiling, swinging like a pendulum, a noose made out of an expensive rose patterned scarf tightened around her pale neck. The carpet beneath her feet was entirely white, covered not by snow but with shattered pieces of paper that toil and flutter like a flock of impatient crows. She held a letter in her stiffening hand, and tied around her right hand ring finger was the red ribbon, a gift from her beloved poet, with the colour faded into a murky brown, the ink worn and aged. I blinked and the images were lost again. I caught her eyes as I looked up. There were fear and confusion in her chestnut eyes as if the spark of precognition that I just had was something that went both ways and she had caught a glimpse of it too. Or maybe she figured I was dangerous, and was just terrified that I might do something to her.
"I'm sorry." I muttered, and I was. I really felt sorry for her after I knew everything, after I'd seen what would happen to her.
"Me too." She whispered back. Her face was still a blank sheet with two frightened doe's eyes glittering in the middle. "I'm sorry for you too. And for that boy."
Of course I didn't know what the bleedin hell she meant by that, but her sympathy and sincerity gave her message a grim gravity and I really wanted to ask her what she'd seen, but I had no time. Walrus face had snapped out of his temporarily brain paralysis and came after me, his walrus whisker's flaring and his drooping cheeks flushed like blobbing berries.
"Hold that man!" He shouted, and glistering drops of spittle flew from his lips and landed on his monstrous moustache. "He's a pickpocket! Hold him!"
I ran like the bloody wind, fled out of the main exhibition hall with the fancy marble pillars and the horrible painting, cut through the middle of the crowd like I was fighting my way through a thick forest, pushing away the bodies any protruding limps and kicking away their fashionable accessories, my head kept down so that the walrus bloke would hopefully lose sight. But instead, I heard him screaming and I knew that he was tailing not too far behind.
"There! There he goes! Catch him! Catch the bloody crook!"
Suddenly, the moving wall of bodies that had only been an annoying obstruction so far, started to grasp at me, trying to get hold of my clobber with long, greedy hands. Someone grabbed me by the shoulder so I gyrated around and gobbed him down so hard that the pillock crashed back into the crowd. They all fell down like soddin bailey that had been trampled in the field. Then some aristocratic bint started to scream real hysterically, because the grabby pillock was bleeding out of his nose like a butchered pig. That was perhaps something good though, because they all just glared at me then, all puffed eyed and nostrils wildly flaring and with their sleeves tugged up and fists all raised, but none of the gents really got the large enough googlies to stop me anymore. I bolted, and the crowd of stiff-bordered, pigeon eyed upper class twats parted like the bleedin red sea. Somewhere amid the fear and the panic, I found that I had enough cockiness left in me to feel real good about myself, but that didn't last for very long. Walrus face was still barking at them not to let me get away, and when I shot a glance over my shoulder I saw that two less gutless goons had joined the chase with that marine mammal faced bastard. I turned, my feet almost tripping over one and another because they each wanted to bolt into a different direction, and I knocked down a boy who suddenly stood in front of me with all the convenience of a bleedin flagpole in the middle of the road. When I looked down, I saw that it was Pete, frowning up at me with a bloody bedazzled expression on his freckled face.
"Will! What's going on here?"
"Walrus face." I panted, and I shot another flustered look over my shoulder. "He 's coming for the orphaned oysters."
"Orphaned what?"
But there was bugger-all time to educate the lad, so I just grabbed him by his shirt and jolted him back up from the floor. Walrus face's two helpful acquaintances were only a few human obstructions away from us. I turned Pete around and gave him an urging shove into the right direction.
"Run!' I yelled. "Or we're bloody buggered!"
I didn't have to tell him twice. Pete trusted me more than anything in the world and besides, he could read all the panic right off my face even if he had been soddin blind. We both bolted for it, ran through the halls and into the main corridor, and out into the streets. When we were on Trafalgar Square I kind of hoped that the blabbering bloke and the two meddling idiots would stop chasing us, b'cause the wobbling old wanker didn't come after us outside the gallery yesterday. So when we passed the iron doors and got down the steps we already started to slow down a bit to catch our breath. We didn't expect them to follow us out into the main street and when I heard walrus wanker shouting I almost had a soddin heart attack.
"There they are!" He blabbered, and pointed at us while we were leaning against one of the stone lion statue trying to recuperate and rediscover how to breathe properly. "Don't just stand here! Catch them! Go take these criminals into custody!"
And the two of them went running for us like a couple of well-trained guard dogs. As if the old wanker could just order the two dimwits what to do, as if he was not only a proper copper, but may also be a highly ranked officer as well. All three of them, bloody coppers out of uniform and in disguise to mingle with the crowd. Just our bloody luck.
"Pete, we've got to try to get to Holborn." I said. We had to get off the bloody square and into the back street alleys. It was our only chance. Pete nodded knowingly and we both took off, running into the direction of Shaftesbury Ave and the White chapel district and I just hoped that we could shake off those bloody coppers in that maze of narrow and crooked streets.
TBC
That feeling. That strange one that you get when you think something has happened to you before. That you have seen it, and know how things are going to turn out just seconds before they actually happen. There was a particular word for it. Soddin French like eating frog-legs and consuming large quantities of garlic flavoured snails. What was it again? Déjà vu. Right, that's it. That was the bloody word I was digging for!
There was a young couple; a woman, dressed in a flesh coloured gown with lace trimmings at her up-right collar and sleeves, her auburn hair tied into a bun at the back of her white swan-neck. She was with a short, brooding bloke in a black three-piece suit with a golden watch-chain looping across his grey vest. They were standing just to the right side of me, only pretending to be interested in a violently coloured picture of Holy Mary nursing a fat baby Jesus in her mumly arms, but actually, they both were too occupied with dealing with more personal matters to notice bugger of anything else around them.
I was minding my own business, flexing my fingers, my eyes hooked on that bloke's wallet that stuck out of his back pocket like a luring candy cane in a clumsy toddler's fist. And that was when it hit me. That déjà vu thing. Hit me like a soddin smack by a rotating windmill.
That girl, she is going to crumble up a letter in her hand and nod with her pretty head while that git standing beside her starts accusing her and then keeps on rambling like a lunatic.
"This is unacceptable!" The poofter in the black suit hissed. "He shouldn't be writing you this! Everybody knows that we're engaged!"
The girl bowed her head and stared at the envelope that she held in her hands, wrinkling it as she clenched her fingers around the paper.
"And writing such insolent filth! Such pretentious, incompetent dribble! I read it, you know! Every single word that came from the perverted mind of that lovesick poet of yours! HA! Poetry, you call this? It doesn't even bloody rhyme most of the time!"
She started nodding then, warily. Her large chestnut eyes were glossy with tears. Her hands tried to hide the letter between the folds of her dress.
"If it wasn't for the maid!" the crazed lunatic of a jealous fiancée of hers exclaimed. "If it wasn't for her, I would have been totally unaware of all this. What you were up to behind my back! You and your impious male friend would have been quite successful in keeping your rancid rendezvous a secret from me!" he raised his hand and waved a finger at her while his head became redder and redder till it looked like he would just bloody explode, and spittle flew from his lips. "God! That puny little shit! He's lusting after you like a rancid dog wagging his tail after a wet little bi- "
He managed to swallow the word, just in time. From the side, I could see a large vein pounding angrily in his neck. Just like I had known it would, and I thought:
Now she is finally going to say something. She won't say anything real nasty to defy him though. Oh no, she wouldn't dare. At least, not yet that is.
"Henry." The woman whispered. "Please, don't be so angry. He's just a boy. A boy struck by calf-love who's busying himself writing silly poetry. He doesn't know anything about us."
But Henry wasn't going to calm down, not before the dimwit had made a complete arse out of himself and had turned her into the popular subject of every fancy tea-party the gossiping upper-class bints were going to throw for the next couple of months. I stood a good few of feet away from the angry bugger and still I could sense the hate pulse off his body like a bad odour damping from his cheesy armpits. But it wasn't any of my business, I thought, even if I happened to have some sort of strange precognition about what the two bickering upper-class twats were up to, it was no issue of mine, so I checked the green eyed goop's back pockets again and saw that his purse was tauntingly close, but I kept my hands buried deep inside my own pockets. Didn't want to strike out yet. It wasn't the right time, because Henry wasn't finished with fooling around.
He was going to read it. I knew it even before he snatched the envelope out of her slightly trembling hands and tore it open like he was dealing with the correspondent instead of his correspondence. Henry the bloody bastard was going to recite the poem that was meant for his fiancée's eyes only, out-loud in public for all of us to hear.
"Henry! No!" She cried, no longer keeping her voice down to the low murmur that was kind of the standard for civilized private conversation, and she made a couple of heads turn into their direction. Not that it would change anything. Henry was about to blow it wide open, dish the dirt, blow the gaff. No more closet dancing for the two of them. The scrutiny by others be soddin damned.
"You said it was poetry, right darling?" He yelled at her in a haughty boisterous voice. "It's art then, isn't it? If anything this ridiculous open-door policy of the National Gallery had taught me, it must be that art should be shared freely with others. So why don't we share this twinkling little gem of a masterpiece with the rest of the good company we're in, my dear? I'm sure that, among the graceless fishwives and petty self-made Yorkshire men, we'll find at least one or two illiterate imbeciles who would know how to appreciate this!"
The entire company turned their attention to the short bloke with the red face and the offensive loud voice of a public announcer. Even Pete and Bradbury, who were working at the other side of the hall near the white columns and the wall with the small collection of dead-ugly da Vinci drawings, were distracted for moment and craned their necks to see what was happening here.
Henry smiled a real wanker's smile, and stared triumphantly at his miserable fiancée, whose cheeks had turned the colour of bleached linen by now.
"Ladies and gentlemen." He barked, grinning madly. "I give you a poem by Mr Paul Alderman, who's apparently worshipping and may be even bedding my lovely fiancée at the moment. The honoured lady Francesca of Sussex!"
"Please, no." I heard the woman whisper, but it was already too late. Envy had eaten away the last bits of Henry's sanity, and with a voice that balanced at the verge of having the nutty giggles, he started to read. In my head I unconsciously started reciting the entire bloody thing, following the movement of his lips, as if I actually knew it by heart.
Perfect by nature,
she is a waterfall of dark passion.
Lustful eyes that had captured my soul.
Sinful lips, pulsing heat.
Her longing for a true love.
Untold.
Restrained by nurture,
She is a wall of rigid indifference.
Scornful brows that had shattered my heart.
Silent mouth, filled with deceptive lies,
for true is her heart,
but dishonest are her words.
Grieving, my lady puts
her throbbing heart
inside a mute tomb
and seals it with hot tears.
My lady and I are divided,
a vast, dark ocean lies between
my love and I.
But our souls remain.
Together,
connected they are in dreams.
In dreams, we bond.
I dream.
I caress your corpse-white skin.
At the shore of my delusion,
I kiss your cold-cold lips,
And watch you return to life.
And under the diamonds,
Of a high red sky
I drown,
inside the flood
of your wet sex -
"That's enough! Do you hear me, Henry? Enough!" Her voice trembled, and her hands were clenched into delicate white knuckled fists.
Henry the git smiled back at her with all the charm of a growling weasel.
"Oh, but you have to let me read this, darling! I haven't even got to the real saucy bits yet. We must continue for the sake of this fine piece of artistic pornography, I insist!"
Her hand shot out like a pale bolt of lightening, slapping him so hard across his right cheek that it echoed inside the crowded hall. Henry just gazed at her, startled and with his gob finally shut. He slowly raised his hand up to his struck face and she was able to snatch the poem back from him. She ripped it into a thousand pieces. The shattered remains of the poem landed on her dress and the gallery floor like a white flock of irregularly shaped seabirds.
"You." She said, her voice soft but vibrant with anger. "I loathe you. I HATE you. You're lower than a worm, and I wish you to hell!"
She stared at him for a while. Not saying anything but just glaring him with her chestnut eyes all spitting daggers. Then she slowly turned around on her heels, shooting a hateful glance at the people in the crowd who were gawking at her like she was a deformed calf with three heads. She took a good deep breath like she was preparing herself for a dive, raised her chin up high and made her way through the group. I smiled, because I felt that she did right not to give a bugger all about those hypocritical twats. After she was gone, the feeling of having a seriously bad case of being all- knowing suddenly stopped. It was like I had been watching the first act of a badly written play with lots of overdramatic dialogue and very irritating characters. One that I'd seen before and now that it was finally over, I'd gotten out my seat to rush into the direction of the big exit sign. Henry, the dandy lady-killer with the refined taste in poetry, still stood there, gob-smacked with his hand rubbing over his cheek. Easy picking. I reached out and grabbed the git's wallet, stuck it into my pocket, turned around and made my way through the crowd toward the da Vinci collection where my mates were waiting for me.
"What was that all about?" Bradbury asked, flashing an eyebrow.
Pete had obviously seen more of the action. "Did she really hit him? He asked, eager to know. "She hit him, right? She smacked him! Right in the face! Did you see it, Will? Did you?"
I handed my price over to the boy using our special finger-smith's handshake. "Just a bit of hearts juggling among the upper-class twats." I said. "Nothing big. And yes she did, Pete. I got a good look at the red handprint she left behind on his ugly bloated mug."
"Wicked!" The boy grinned. "I hate that bloke! He sounds like he got his balls jammed between doors. He sounds like a real snooty bastard!"
"And that poem he recited. Absolutely dreadful stuff." Bradbury opted.
"Really? I thought it was rather good." I said, blinking slightly in disbelief. "I mean, it wasn't exactly something worth to be bundled into a collection and shipped to the stores or anything, but it wasn't that terrible."
"Will, Will, Will." And Bradbury shook his head at me real sadly. " I'm afraid that I should reconsider your taste in poetry with true abomination if you applaud to that sort of mindless adolescent drivel." He said. " It's a good thing you don't write. The effect of such verbal ravishment on the lady of your affection could only be devastating, I imagine."
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Later that afternoon (and a good bunch of fat wallets later) I bumped into her again. As soon as I set eyes on her, that odd feeling returned together with a quiet nagging, something that was not completely right. A cat on hot bricks sort of feeling, right before the cat gets its paws roasted and jumps off the soddin wall in a suicidal dive, that sort of thing. She was sitting together with a girl who was dressed very plainly and who could only be her maid, on a bench underneath a large painting that covered half of the wall. It was that one with that medieval Dante bloke standing in the middle of his fairy tale nightmare. All of a sudden, I knew that whoever had written her that letter was about to show up to get his heart pulverized.
"I'm sorry madam, truly sorry!" The maid lamented. She was a frail little thing with red curls and freckles and had all the manners of a scuttling field mouse. Even her voice sounded squeaky, like a frightened rodent caught in a trap. "Lord Spencer, he caught me by surprise, madam. He saw me talking to Mr Alderman and intercepted the letter when I was hurrying back, trying to deliver it to you!" The woman who had been so recently scorned by her idiot fiancée, tried her best to fake a smile at her, but I thought that the result looked rather unconvincing, like she had just swallowed a good swig of vinegar or had brushed her teeth with lemon juice and was trying to convince her maid that it didn't sting that much at all. "It's all right, I don't blame you, Mary. If there's really anyone to blame here, it should be me. Me, and perhaps that mindless buffoon Henry." She cast her eyes down at her hands on her lap where they were busy garrotting the remains of what was once a delicate lady's handkerchief. Instead of the ghostly paleness, her cheeks now carried a flush that spread over her nose and ears, and she looked like she was about to cry or to start swearing real loud.
"God, what an idiot he is! We'll be the laughing stock of whole of London by tomorrow! Everybody in our circle is bound to know. I can't even bare the thought to go home and tell Papa what just happened. It's too horrible! Too horrible for words!"
I walked up to the two women and went to stand behind them, pretending to be looking at the large medieval painting, but cautiously following their conversation instead. Mind you, I'm not a nosy wanker, only did this because I had that peculiar feeling again. You see, I knew what she was going to say seconds before she actually said it, which was not much of a sense of precognition if you looked at it from a "I-want-to-make-lots-of- easy-money-at-the-dog's-races" sort of way, but it was there and you had to admit that it was soddin strange. The bloody eerie thing was (and that was the most important reason why I had such interest. It was some kind of morbid fascination I wager, the way you just had to stop walking by and stare at a horrible accident that was bound to happen) that I knew exactly, word by word, what she was going to tell him. Just like the poem, I could recite her like a diligent scholar mouthing after Shakespeare. The question that haunted me of course was how - and why - I should know all this in the first bloody place. What in bleedin hell it had anything to do with me?
"Franny, are you all right?"
She looked up. Startled first, but then she recognized him, and the shocked expression on her face quickly made way for overall glumness.
"You." She sighed. "I don't want to see you."
The young man was about my age. He was slimly built with deep sunken eye- sockets like he hadn't slept once in his entire lifetime on his head grew an unruly, clumsy hairdo. He wore thin spectacles and stared at the girl with that real sad dreamy look that was enough to let me know that the poor lad was completely buggered. I didn't need to use my special eerie insight to see that he was the poor lovesick nit, who had fabricated that now famous poem Tactless Henry was so particularly excited about.
"I understand." And he nodded his head like a wooden jack escaped from his box, eager to please. "You must be angry with me. It was stupid of course not to take more care when I was getting Mary to bring you that letter. If you want, I could go away and visit you tonight at your father's house."
Her eyes were cold when she observed him. They looked like the eyes of someone I knew but couldn't really remember, the existence of that particular person, and I thought it was a girl, was only a shard of broken memory, a glimpse of a dream. It didn't matter that Francesca of Sussex's eyes were almond shaped and brown like shiny chestnuts, and the ones in my mind were round and green-blue like a stormy ocean, or maybe I remembered it all wrong and they were even a shade darker then hers, large and black like those of a startled deer. The colour didn't really matter. The shape wasn't important. It was the expression that those eyes carried that really mattered. That dismissive look that said: What are you doing here? You're not a part of my life! You're nothing to me! How dare you even to show up and breathe my air and occupy my space? And where did you find the IMPUDENCE to SPEAK to me?! Looking at that God-awful expression on that haughty woman's face made me want to grab her by her bony arms and shake her like an irritating loose pebble in a shoe, shake her and yell at her. Ask the bloody bint what the bleedin hell was wrong with all the bitches in this world, why in hell's name they all had their blind googly eyes stuck at their soddin backsides!
"No Paul." She said, and her voice sounded even frostier, absolutely sub- zero now. "You better not."
"But perhaps what happened today is a good thing, Franny!"
"How on earth can this be a good thing, Paul?"
The young man shrugged. "Henry now knows everything. There's no longer any need for us to hide our feelings for each other."
He lowered his eyes shyly to the ground. His object of affection however, was like a statue, with a heart carved out of solid granite. On her face was a look of absolute horror and I braced myself for the impact.
"I don't have any feelings for you, Paul." And she shook her head angrily at him. " I never had."
The puny poet's expression was one of flabbergasted bewilderment. When he spoke, he sounded like a sheep, bleating away in the field. "That's - That's not true. You're just telling me this because you're angry with me."
"No Paul." She said. I was quickly developing a major dislike for the way she wore out the poor bloke's name, like it was her favourite curse or anything, that she said "Paul" every time she meant balls or bollocks. And now she sounded real sympathetic, real vomitey sensitive toward his feeling.
"It's not because I'm angry with you. It's how things really are. I was never in love with you. You were just making it all up inside that little fantasy world of yours." She put a hand on her breasts, inhaled deeply and continued in a teary voice.
" I thought it was harmless. I mean every lady likes to have poetry written about her. Of course we do. It's flattering. But it's just words, Paul. Ink wasted on paper pages. It has nothing to do with reality."
"But - all of my poetry readings you attended, and the private sittings that we had together -" He gulped, then his voice broke down and then he started to sound all teary, real pathetic. "I read to you out on my study's balcony at night under the stars. You sat on my lap at my desk, whispering words into my ears." He cocked his head to one side like a whipped dog and then he whispered. "You are my muse, Franny."
"I only regarded you as a friend. I'm sorry Paul, if I let you believe that there was ever more to it than friendship."
"You're lying." He said, shaking his head. " You're only trying to deceive me and yourself with this!"
"I'm not lying to you. I don't love you, and I'm not your goddamned muse! I'm Francesca of Sussex, and I'm engaged to lord Henry Spencer, the man I'm bound to marry. You, are Paul Alderman, a struggling poet, talented perhaps, but you're nothing compared to Henry."
She looked away, turned her wasp-waisted body away from him and gazed at the picture behind her instead. She was looking at that funny looking multi- layered wedding cake that was painted in the middle of the panel, the one that the sweaty bloke in the black suit had explained to be picturing the mountain of Purgatory. There were men and women struggling up that mountain, carrying large slates of stones on their crooked backs. The road up to the top slithered around the mountain like a large ash-coloured snake.
Suddenly, my heart started to beat much faster.
"You should stop writing me." The cold vixen said, her face still turned away from the poofy poet as if she couldn't stand to the look of him any longer. " Henry just made a terrible scene in public after reading one of your less exotic poems. I can't imagine what he would do if he knew about the rest you've written about me."
Her voice was only registered somewhere at the back of my mind. My attention was turned to the picture, my eyes scanning feverishly over the hundreds of tiny faces painted on the canvas. There was a man with an amputated leg who was falling off the mountain, his mouth opened to utter a scream and his hand snatched like a vulture's claw at a boy's leg, who happened to be so unlucky to be standing nearby. Beneath them, miles away and stretching out like a grotesque ashy flower bedding, was a graveyard of pale bones.
Look at those sad losers. I heard a frightening but very familiar voice whisper inside my head. Completely blind they are, and stubborn. Carrying their sins like a bunch of Australian tourists hauling along oversized backpacks.
"I can't do that! That would be like silencing my heart!" He was weeping now, I didn't have to turn around to see the big crocodile tears dripping down his chin or the large red spot spreading over his nose, making it look like a snotty strawberry. "I know you, Franny. I know you better than that you know yourself! You're lying to me. It's like that last poem that I've written about us. You do love me, but you're just too afraid to admit it! You're afraid every time that you're offered a chance to let your heart speak out! Why Franny? God, why?"
I couldn't find what I was looking for by staring at the faces of the damned, but something else struck me like a knife's cold blade pressed on the throat and made the hairs at the back of my neck all raise. I looked again, because I thought my eyes must have got it wrong. But then I still saw it. I saw that the picture was changing. The sky that had been dark, grey and gloomy started to glow eerily, like someone was playing a sick practical joke on me and was lighting up the canvas from the back with a red light-bulb, giving the starless sky a touch of fresh aortic crimson. Just like it had been stabbed with a knife and was now slowly bleeding to death, I thought, and for a moment, I was sure I was going to lose my soddin mind. The painful argument of the star-crossed drama queens was a soft drone coming from a thousand miles away.
The woman, who was undoubtedly reacting in the way she'd learned from her tortured heroines from her favourite romantic novels, seemed to be totally unaware of the change inside the painting. She was looking at the same bloody thing all right, but I figured from her still composed facial expression and the lack of horror in her eyes, that she was only looking without seeing, just the way she had been looking at the poor wretch who was now pouring his heart out in front of her. She was like an imbecile strapped to the bed gazing up at cracks in the ceiling, eyes wide open but all of her neurons were firing bugger to the brain.
"Oh bollocks." I whispered, a nauseating feeling rolled inside my stomach like an empty shell toiling in the soddin breakers. The picture slowly, gradually, started to sway, going from right to left and back again, drifting on an invisible ocean. Or maybe, I thought and I fiercely hoped, I was only moving my head unconsciously. Maybe my legs were just giving up.
"Let go of me - Don't touch me!" The woman yelled. And I knew that the desperate poet had grabbed her now by her wrist and was begging her with dog-faithful eyes to admit that one thing to him. That one soddin thing that he needed to hear from her. The words that could save them both and break this endless circle, this unfinished business between the girl and him that was happening perhaps for the millionth time by now. It's like they are running around in a giant pet wheel, I thought, and mad giggles escaped my throat, a string of noisy bubbles, cause it was then that I suddenly realized that we were ALL running inside a giant pet wheel. Pete and Bradbury and Higgins. Doll and her sick mum and that fat Henry twat I just met. All going round and round and doing things for the millionth- trillionth time without knowing anything. Without someone to tell them to stop being this daft, to stop running because there was no soddin point to it. God, I wished that picture would stop moving. I was so close to getting the bloody pukers.
And then the weeping writer really started to lose it. "Franny!" He yelled, and suddenly he didn't sound like a sad little noche anylonger. There was fear in his voice, fear and desperation and he sounded real mad. "Franny, you have to listen to me! Admit it! Do it now! It's your last chance! It's OUR last chance! Don't let me go through all of this again! You have to let it STOP!"
But Franny wasn't going to say anything. She never did. She wasn't going to throw away the rest of her life by becoming Mrs Alderman, the spouse of a talented but rather unsuccessful poet. She wouldn't dream to turn in her luxurious house for a poorly furnished, dirty old studio, or exchange her pretty silk gowns for plain looking rags even her maid Mary wouldn't wear, or return the golden engagement ring with the diamond settings to Henry to replace it with a red ribbon tied around her finger, one on which Paul had scribbled their names in his wavy love-sick handwriting. Instead, she was going to lie, rip her lover's heart into a million tiny pieces like she had done to his offensive poem, and she was going to kill herself by doing so.
"Let go Mr Alderman! You're scaring my mistress!" The field-mouse of a maid squeaked.
"Let go of me I said! How dare you to speak to me like that! You're mad! You're out of your bloody mind!" His precious Franny sneered.
And I thought; Right you are, luv. We're all mad. All obligatory sinners here who fell of the bloody mountain and landed on our noggins one time too many. So round and round we all go, going up and down, crawling on our bleeding knees in this giant pet's wheel like a dumb herd of suicidal lemmings. And now-now I'm really going to throw up.
I gagged, expecting my body to take care of the rest and lurch forward to get rid of the bloody nausea, but instead, I kept waving back and forth like a tall pine in the wind. I could hear myself panting faintly, while my head rolled over my shoulders as if it had somehow become disconnected from my neck.
"Something wrong here, miss?" A man asked and at the same time, someone caught me by my shoulders right before my head swung way too far back for me to keep my balance. If it wasn't for that, I would had creaked my skull on the spotlessly polished marble floor. My floppy body had just decided that it wanted me to lie down for a while, just until everything stopped moving.
"Whoa! Are you all right, sir? Do you need to sit down?" A friendly gentleman's voice asked. I rolled my head around as if it could possibly mean anything, and overheard the conversation between the other man and the unfortunate couple.
"Is this young man threatening you?" The meddler asked.
"That's absurd!" The artistic bugger explained. "I was not threatening her! Look, she knows me! We were just talking!"
"Really? I have to say, it didn't look like you were having a quiet conversation to me, sir. No Sir! Not at all! The lady was asking for help and you were holding on to her like you were trying to drag her away from her maid."
"He was pinching in my mistress's arm! Screaming like a madman! Look at it, she has red bruises everywhere!" The squeaky maid complained.
I heard a loud sniffling followed by a wet sob, which was undoubtedly coming from the somewhat ruffled mistress.
"I - I didn't mean to hurt her." Poetic boy rambled. "I just - just wanted her to listen to me."
I shut my eyes, and felt how hot blood pulsed inside my sockets. Someone walked me over to the bench. The man who was prying with the young couple was asked politely to step aside to let me sit down. He did and I gratefully obliged. I kept thinking to myself that I had imagined it. It can't be real. I thought. Pictures don't change, they just don't. Not even the ones that seem to be bloody book- illustrations of your own bloody nightmares.
"I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me just then - Franny, please." The poet tried, but there was no more strength left in his voice, he sounded defeated, no longer all fired up by his desperation and fear. He sounded sane again, and quite dead.
"Don't you dare lay your hands on me again." She hissed. "I don't want to speak to you. I don't want to see you. I want you to get out of my life!"
I opened my eyes, slowly, and different patches of vision blurred into each other, till I could see in focus again. The swaying had completely stopped, which was a true blessing.
"But Fran -"
"Hey! You heard the lady!" The nosy pillock interfered. "Now move along, sir. Before I have to cuff you and drag you down to the station."
The words cuff and station cut into the calming pace of my heart and sent it right into a frenzied gallop again. I peeked at the bloke who was playing saviour for the lady in distress. He was a large, elderly man, with sagging folds were once his cheeks had been and a drooping moustache that covered all of his upper lip. He reminded me of the big fat walrus who ate all the oyster orphans in Alice in Wonderland. Even more upsetting, he reminded me of someone I'd seen at the exposition only yesterday, and even now that he was no longer wearing his split ended coat, I recognized him as the bollard eye bloke who had been watching us till I got the bloody creepers. Sweat broke out at my back. Slowly, I rose up from the bench and tried to get the hell out without him noticing. But as soon as I had taken one or two steps, the room started to wobble again like a plate full of blackcurrant jelly, strapped to a bloody hippopotamus crossing swamps. Breathing heavily, I spun myself around and headed for the corridors, becoming aware that our secluded corner of the exposition hall was now bathing in reddish light, coming from the side of the wall where the picture of Dante's Divine Comedy was exhibited.
I'm not going to look over my shoulder to see if it's really coming from where I think it is coming. I told myself. No, I'm not going to see if there were now skeleton demons galloping on ink black horses around the painting or people crawling out of the sea like swarms of really deformed cod. No - bloody - way.
"Hey there my friend! Where do you think you're going like that! You better stay put."
A hand locked around my upper arm, but I twisted my arm like a wheel and ended up with my hand lifted at shoulder's height in a gesture that said that the helpful bloke should back off.
"Don't need your help." I managed to mumble with a wax mouth. "Just - need a breath of fresh air. Need to get outside."
I stumbled away, my hands reaching out for the wall to find some support. My sweaty palm searched to find the smooth cool marble, but it touched the sharp edges of rough mountain rock instead. My heart just sunk like a walloping whale, my stomach adding a couple of extra knots. If I turn around right now, I thought, if I turn around I will see a deep gaping abyss laughing back at me like some dark hungry maul filled with rocky teeth. There will be pushing and screaming of folks trying to get up the mountain, trying to bloody survive, and there will the thick stench of decaying flesh hanging around like a cloud of toxic gas. And for a moment, I did sense those horrible things. I did feel the nearly dead scrape their ulcerous skin over my own. My ears rung with the violent screams of despair and my nose picked up the nauseating smell of dead corpses left to rot in the hot sun. Oh God, I just managed to whisper, and then I felt how my legs turned into pudding and I collapsed on the floor.
"Are you all right, sir?" A voice, a man's voice, different from the first. It was lower with a more growling quality to it and it sounded sort of muffled like the bloke was speaking from behind a thick curtain. My heart jumped up to my throat where it stuck to pound like a mad drum. The red glow became brighter, as if a blood red sun had just risen inside the hollow bowels of the gallery hall. I urged myself to keep my eyes on the floor, but it was like I was completely daft or something. I turned my head and let my eyes fall on the painting.
The picture was now a large crimson rectangle, a thin canvas of black lines and dark blots, running across the surface like an intricate web of arteries with spots of rupture. It pulsed! The bloody thing just pounded like a living, breathing thing, a membrane sack covering the foetus of a hideous monster. The mountain of Purgatory in the middle had somehow come closer, like the thing had crawled its way to the boundaries, nudging itself snugly against the frame, and now the soddin thing was dominating the entire landscape! The humans on the slopes had turned hideously deformed with sunken faces and black empty eyes, an army of the damned with screaming skulls carried around on frighteningly thin necks and skeleton bodies bearing horrible wounds. And that Dante bloke had totally disappeared. Only his book was there, lying all deserted on the ground. It was flipped open, facing the public, and someone had scribbled lines across the pages with ink that was red and runny like fresh pig's blood.
It read;
Saints go heaven - Sinners go to hell. The rest of us are doomed to fall forever.
"Right." I muttered, then added sardonically. "Redrum Redrum."
The picture throbbed faster and faster, with the illusive mountain in the middle pounding madly like a decaying heart. Screams echoed in my ears when the humans threw themselves off the cliffs, their falls depictured in the jerky movements of a film with not enough frames. The lines of paint started to melt and run, turned liquid before my eyes, and was pumped across the entire surface, flowing and toiling like blood that went through veins. Cracks began to appear, like tiny organic rips in the folds of a tatty batwing. And then I heard it, the sound of horse hooves, coming nearer, and nearer, and nearer.
"Sir! Sir! Can you hear me?"
Someone shook me, and my head bounced around over my shoulders, the tiny bit of reason left in my brain rattling inside like lose grains of sand. No, I muttered, not again. Not -him- again. This wasn't real. This was NOT really happening. I had to turn away, shut my eyes, stop looking for bleedin's sake, but I just kept staring at it like I was a senseless idiot, my mind blank and my eyes as large as bloody saucers.
A slap across the face, hard enough to rush the blood back into my cheek. Someone screamed into my ear and I blinked, two, three times, just enough to get me back at the reigns to put a halt to my galloping frenzy. I shut my eyes and with the same burning eagerness of a naïve little boy, wished real hard for the nightmare to go away.
The chemical smell of sulphur and the stench of rot were gradually replaced by the dusty odour of rooms that hadn't been aired in centuries and the ripe smell of a gentleman's cologne. The sound of hooves also died down - todnot todnot - it sounded - todnot tod -todnot - tod -not - like a slowly unwinding clock, till only a soft thumping remained that became quickly undistinguishable from my own balmy heartbeat.
"Oh God! - oh bollocks." Frightfully, I opened my eyes and saw that my hands were shivering badly.
Some bloke was so helpful to help me get up.
"It's all right, sir. I got you now! You really should get outside for some fresh air. It's too crowded in here and much too hot."
"-That -that - that painting." I rambled, talking total gibberish. "It moved! The sky, the sky was all red!"
"Painting?" The man followed my wide eyed stare and looked back over his shoulder. "You mean the one over there, the one painted by Michelino?"
I staggered a few steps forward, my frightened senses telling me to get the hell away from it as far as possible, but the obliging pillock held firmly onto my arm, perhaps afraid that I would start tripping over my own feet again. Irritated, I glanced up at him, and for the first time since he had jolted me back up to my feet, I got a good look at his face.
"What about it, sir?" He asked. His eyes met mine, confused bollard eyes that suddenly caught that same spark of recognition. His walrus moustache drooped down like heavy curtains at the end of a play, as did the corners of his mouth.
"Wait a minute." He said, and his voice had that sort of affronted quality to it. "Wait a minute! I know you!"
I did the trick with the wheeling arm again. At that moment, walrus face was too flabbergasted to hold on, and I could unlock myself easily out of his grip. Having now twice that many reasons to skedaddle out of the soddin place, I spun around, and fled toward the corridors. The pair of star- crossed lovers was still standing there and I almost bumped into the woman and would have knocked her down if it wasn't for poetry-boy who caught her by her delicate, injured little arms and jolted her out of my way. I did brush my hand over her hips for a just second though, and as I did, imagines started to flood into me. They were pictures of a not too distant future. I saw a room, a lady's bedroom, with a large opened window through which gushes of snow were blown in with the ghostly curtains billowing in the icy wind. A woman dangled from the ceiling, swinging like a pendulum, a noose made out of an expensive rose patterned scarf tightened around her pale neck. The carpet beneath her feet was entirely white, covered not by snow but with shattered pieces of paper that toil and flutter like a flock of impatient crows. She held a letter in her stiffening hand, and tied around her right hand ring finger was the red ribbon, a gift from her beloved poet, with the colour faded into a murky brown, the ink worn and aged. I blinked and the images were lost again. I caught her eyes as I looked up. There were fear and confusion in her chestnut eyes as if the spark of precognition that I just had was something that went both ways and she had caught a glimpse of it too. Or maybe she figured I was dangerous, and was just terrified that I might do something to her.
"I'm sorry." I muttered, and I was. I really felt sorry for her after I knew everything, after I'd seen what would happen to her.
"Me too." She whispered back. Her face was still a blank sheet with two frightened doe's eyes glittering in the middle. "I'm sorry for you too. And for that boy."
Of course I didn't know what the bleedin hell she meant by that, but her sympathy and sincerity gave her message a grim gravity and I really wanted to ask her what she'd seen, but I had no time. Walrus face had snapped out of his temporarily brain paralysis and came after me, his walrus whisker's flaring and his drooping cheeks flushed like blobbing berries.
"Hold that man!" He shouted, and glistering drops of spittle flew from his lips and landed on his monstrous moustache. "He's a pickpocket! Hold him!"
I ran like the bloody wind, fled out of the main exhibition hall with the fancy marble pillars and the horrible painting, cut through the middle of the crowd like I was fighting my way through a thick forest, pushing away the bodies any protruding limps and kicking away their fashionable accessories, my head kept down so that the walrus bloke would hopefully lose sight. But instead, I heard him screaming and I knew that he was tailing not too far behind.
"There! There he goes! Catch him! Catch the bloody crook!"
Suddenly, the moving wall of bodies that had only been an annoying obstruction so far, started to grasp at me, trying to get hold of my clobber with long, greedy hands. Someone grabbed me by the shoulder so I gyrated around and gobbed him down so hard that the pillock crashed back into the crowd. They all fell down like soddin bailey that had been trampled in the field. Then some aristocratic bint started to scream real hysterically, because the grabby pillock was bleeding out of his nose like a butchered pig. That was perhaps something good though, because they all just glared at me then, all puffed eyed and nostrils wildly flaring and with their sleeves tugged up and fists all raised, but none of the gents really got the large enough googlies to stop me anymore. I bolted, and the crowd of stiff-bordered, pigeon eyed upper class twats parted like the bleedin red sea. Somewhere amid the fear and the panic, I found that I had enough cockiness left in me to feel real good about myself, but that didn't last for very long. Walrus face was still barking at them not to let me get away, and when I shot a glance over my shoulder I saw that two less gutless goons had joined the chase with that marine mammal faced bastard. I turned, my feet almost tripping over one and another because they each wanted to bolt into a different direction, and I knocked down a boy who suddenly stood in front of me with all the convenience of a bleedin flagpole in the middle of the road. When I looked down, I saw that it was Pete, frowning up at me with a bloody bedazzled expression on his freckled face.
"Will! What's going on here?"
"Walrus face." I panted, and I shot another flustered look over my shoulder. "He 's coming for the orphaned oysters."
"Orphaned what?"
But there was bugger-all time to educate the lad, so I just grabbed him by his shirt and jolted him back up from the floor. Walrus face's two helpful acquaintances were only a few human obstructions away from us. I turned Pete around and gave him an urging shove into the right direction.
"Run!' I yelled. "Or we're bloody buggered!"
I didn't have to tell him twice. Pete trusted me more than anything in the world and besides, he could read all the panic right off my face even if he had been soddin blind. We both bolted for it, ran through the halls and into the main corridor, and out into the streets. When we were on Trafalgar Square I kind of hoped that the blabbering bloke and the two meddling idiots would stop chasing us, b'cause the wobbling old wanker didn't come after us outside the gallery yesterday. So when we passed the iron doors and got down the steps we already started to slow down a bit to catch our breath. We didn't expect them to follow us out into the main street and when I heard walrus wanker shouting I almost had a soddin heart attack.
"There they are!" He blabbered, and pointed at us while we were leaning against one of the stone lion statue trying to recuperate and rediscover how to breathe properly. "Don't just stand here! Catch them! Go take these criminals into custody!"
And the two of them went running for us like a couple of well-trained guard dogs. As if the old wanker could just order the two dimwits what to do, as if he was not only a proper copper, but may also be a highly ranked officer as well. All three of them, bloody coppers out of uniform and in disguise to mingle with the crowd. Just our bloody luck.
"Pete, we've got to try to get to Holborn." I said. We had to get off the bloody square and into the back street alleys. It was our only chance. Pete nodded knowingly and we both took off, running into the direction of Shaftesbury Ave and the White chapel district and I just hoped that we could shake off those bloody coppers in that maze of narrow and crooked streets.
TBC