Bull Running For Girlsl (6 page)

Rog and his friends had made sure the pallid man was quite dead. They had made sure that what he did to Connie wouldn’t happen to anyone else.

“
After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world
.” Oscar Wilde is first reported as saying this about absinthe, by Ada Leverson, in 1930.

Susan caught the TGV from Paris, a bottle of absinthe in her backpack. In her head, the plan of a novel that refused to be written, at least until she had settled into her friend’s farmhouse near Saint Seurin Sur L’Isle, not far from the town of Montpon Menesterol, which itself was on the edge of Le Foret de la Mole, in the Dordogne. She walked from the small station, her rucksack heavy, the Stone Roses playing over and over again on her iPod. Typically, she had packed too many books. She had a couple of kilometres left to travel, on a windy October afternoon.

The woman who had been looking after the farmhouse left a bottle of Bordeaux on the doorstep, and a spray of late white wild roses and briar thorn, to welcome Susan on her arrival. That cheered Susan as she had just recovered from glandular fever (been kissing too many low-lifers—she suspected). Also, there had been the fire. Although almost six months had passed, the scene surrounding that terrible night was still too fresh in her mind—and she had left her Manchester house feeling some relief.

We were asked to leave the street as they brought the bodies out. Some other neighbours took us in. Whilst the paramedics worked hard, the fireman broke into our house next door to check the property. The cats got out, fleeing into the backwoods. They didn’t want to watch either. We stared out through cold glass, like stricken zombies, mesmerised by the flashing lights of the paramedic’s vehicle. “Why wasn’t it rushing away?”
I thought
.

The kitchen was in true French style, with huge stone sink and a vast cooking range. Le Creuset was everywhere in orange and the name reminded her of a small, French general or a loaf of bread; Susan could never make her mind up which. She took off her rucksack, reached for the absinthe and thought better of it. Determined to leave the bottle alone for awhile, she took the white bedding from the downstairs bedroom, intending to sleep in the big double bed in the converted loft. Susan buried her nose in the duvet, which smelt of lavender, and struggled with the billowing mass up the old wooden staircase to a large room, where a door (presumably once used when winching something up for storage) opened up to nothing but the foggy fields beyond. Susan left the door slightly open, looking forward to the cold of the morning mist. She would soon be in the warmth of the thick white mass and would not care. A near-full moon hung low above the horizon and the blue-shuttered dwelling of the farmhouse lay beneath it. Her friend was away in America and the farmhouse was Susan’s, and hers alone.

The next day, Susan hired a bicycle with an attached basket to get provisions from the small village of Saint Seurin Sur L’Isle. She wandered around, getting a feel for the place. The afternoon was spent lost in
The Wine Dark Sea
by Robert Aickman; Susan wished that she had a green ship to sail away on. In the evening she snacked on cheese, meats, half a baguette, and drank wine. She still did not open the absinthe.

Halfway through the bottle of wine she glanced out of the kitchen window, into the misty evening. It was still reasonably light and the hills beyond took on a blue hue. Against the brief streak of reddening sky she could make out the shape of a horse and its rider, standing stock still, staring right at her. On impulse Susan waved. The figure waved back. A few minutes passed before the rider turned the horse and descended into the blue-grey of the evening.

Next day, Susan found a dead fox on the doorstep. The head lay at an odd angle. The neck looked to be snapped in half and a chicken, all bloodied, was wedged inside its mouth. She was both appalled and confused by the spectacle. Finding a spade in the barn, she dug a hole behind a half-crooked tree and buried both of the creatures. Susan shivered. She returned to the main house and made a fire with the wood that was stacked up by the hearth.

All that time, a tiny figure had watched her from behind the bushes, a girl of no more than ten years old.

It was then that Susan locked the kitchen door and decided to open up the absinthe. She took a crystal glass down from the dresser and from her rucksack took out her own little silver spoon with patterned crosses on it, and a bag of sugar cubes. She had a jug of chilled water handy. She placed the spoon across the top of the glass, placed a sugar cube on the spoon and almost reverently poured the cooled water over it. As the sugar dissolved into the green liqueur she watched the swirl of white wind its way into the peridot green like a ghost trailing through a verdant forest.

Just as dawn was breaking the
fi
remen led us back up the once-shared path into our house. It had been relatively untouched. The door had one broken window, which they had put through to get to the door catch. There was smoke damage but the rooms were still intact. My heart was not. The fire chief saw the fear in my eyes and he led me upstairs into the corner of the bedroom, where I could still imagine the mummer-black face of the smoke as it had tried to get to us. The smoke-damaged carpet had been pulled away and a few floorboards ripped up. The fire chief gently took my hand and I crouched next to him, my blackened bare feet picking up splinters which I did not feel. He had some sort of heat-sensor that he stuck down through the gap in the boards, and he showed me its reading. He had to do this three times before he saw the flicker of recognition on my face. He assured me that the house next door was cooling down now, and there was nothing left of the inferno that ravaged it. I shrugged, and simply offered, “Thank you.”

It became colder in the farmhouse so Susan fed the fire, using kindling which caught easily. Fanned by the warmth of the blaze and the absinthe-haze in her head, she poured a second glass, then a third, and looked down at her feet in front of the fire. The flame—shades of red, orange, and yellow—combined into a confusion of gold that seemed to be grabbing for her ankles, but then yanking back as if gasping for air. One tongue flickered up and became an intense orange, the like of which she had never seen before. It spat and danced its way round the hearth: brighter, sharper, snake-like with its spits and snaps; teasing, tormenting before jerking towards her ankles again. Susan had no idea how much time went by.

She sat up, clutching at the arm of her chair, the fire forgotten. Her half-empty glass fell onto the blue rug, spilling its contents—it too forgotten. On the other side of the fireplace she saw a figure sitting in the rocking chair. The person was wearing brown buckskin; a rifle leant against one knee, and there was a bottle of whisky in their right hand.

“No sense in drinking alone,” the figure said in a thick Texas drawl.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The figure was dressed in a man’s clothes but with a bosom straining at the buttons, which suggested that Susan was talking to a woman.

“Purty color. What is it you’re drinking?”

Susan blinked—but the figure was still there. “Absinthe,” she replied, in disbelief.

“Never heard of it. Must have come after my time.”

Susan bent down to pick up the glass, looked up again—and the phantom was gone. Thinking that the visitation had been brought on by the absinthe, she turned to put the bottle away in the cupboard of the dresser. The bottle wasn’t there. The little silver spoon was there, the bag of sugar cubes, the jug of chilled water, but the beautiful bottle of absinthe was not. She looked everywhere, thinking that she’d had a lapse of memory. Unsteady, and equally uneasy, she decided against sleeping in the loft because of the steep stairs, and wandered into the front bedroom of the farmhouse. The evening moon had risen, heralding a restless night for her.

In the morning she lazed about in the kitchen and drank the last of the coffee. There was little food in the fridge. She thought about going again into the village of Saint Seurin Sur L’Isle but decided on venturing further afield, perhaps to the town of Montpon for lunch. As she opened the kitchen door she saw on the doorstep a bunch of weeds, with yellow flower heads, all tied up with string, and a note. On the note, scribbled in green crayon, were the words:

JAGO HURTS ME

Puzzled, Susan sat on the doorstep, looked at the yellow flower heads, and re-read the note. Jago—who is Jago? Obviously a girl had left the note, because of the flowers, though, perhaps not. Was this Jago some silly kid who was bullying her? Susan put the note on the large oak table, closed the kitchen door and went off on her bicycle in search of lunch, coffee, and a few basic food stuffs to keep her going, although she wasn’t really in the mood now to eat.

The journey to Montpon, on the backroads, was an easy ride. The road surface was fine, with only a few potholes hindering her progress. It was a cold morning and Susan was wearing a herringbone jacket, zipped up to under her chin. She never wore a scarf on a bike. It reminded her of how the dancer Isadora Duncan died; her long silken scarf had got caught in a car wheel, and it snapped her neck in two.

Susan looked at the blue swirling mist, which lingered and clung to the trees, even though it was midmorning.

The road wound around a large forest that was a mixture of oak and chestnut, which seemed as if it hadn’t been disturbed for hundreds of years. Susan glanced at the sky getting cloudier by the hour. It was going to rain.

The errands didn’t take long. She bought coffee, bread, more croissants, a tin of cassoulet, brie, and some wine, all crammed into the grey rucksack on her back.

In the Café du Commerce,
Susan seated herself by the window, ate a modest lunch and drank her beer. She listened to “London Calling”
by The Clash on the old jukebox, followed by Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay”. The waiter with large brown eyes smiled at her. Susan smiled self-consciously and looked away. It was quiet in the café and she was happy just to sit and read. She always took a book to a foreign destination, that reflected the people and the country, or at the very least was set in it. This trip, it was
Madame Bovary
and even the English translation was hard going
—
on an afternoon when she was far more preoccupied by the attentions of the French waiter, who lingered longer to talk to her as he served her beer after beer.

With great reluctance she said goodbye to the waiter; he reminded her of Gerard Depardieu, although the waiter would have made a better-looking Cyrano de Bergerac.

As the first drops of rain splattered onto her trousers, ink-spotting the pale, grey material, the chain slipped on the old bike and Susan caught her trousers on the chain ring.

“Shit,” she muttered while reattaching it, before pedalling on down the lane and around the edge of the forest.

The rain came crashing down onto the road with such a force that she sought shelter under the trees. She rested her bike against an oak and leant back against another, when a brightly-coloured poster nailed to a tree trunk caught her attention. It advertised the Cirque de Foret.

Above the sound of the rain she could hear the noise of something else, a buzzing, like that of a woodsman cutting through a tree. Susan followed the sound, making her way through the undergrowth, until she came to its source in a clearing.

A man was cutting a fallen tree into pieces and had a large wheelbarrow next to him. He was a tall man, in his late thirties she guessed, wearing old green cord trousers and a threadbare navy jumper. His long, brown hair was tied back in a scruffy ponytail. Susan had no reason to speak to him. She didn’t want anything from him, and anyway, she was just passing time until the rain stopped. There was also another man, smaller and much thinner. Above the din they seemed to be arguing, shouting at each other. The tall man then moved a little so that she couldn’t see the other. There was a scream and the tall man stepped to one side. The small man clutched his arm. The noise of the saw stopped and, unthinkingly, Susan ran into the clearing. She took off the rucksack and used her jacket to attempt to stem the flow of blood from the man’s wound, which was on the side of his arm just above his right elbow. He was howling with pain and the tall man was just standing there—the saw in both his hands—doing nothing.

“Jago!” the small man called out. Susan recognised the name. It was the name on the note—
JAGO HURTS ME

“Can’t you help him? Put that damned thing down and do something.”

Jago put the saw down, gave her a contemptuous look which surprised her, and then took off his jumper. He tugged her jacket off the arm and threw the blood-soaked thing to the ground. He bound his jumper around the wound, with one hand picked up the saw, as if it was made of plastic, and with the other hand dragged the small man off through the trees, deeper into the forest. The small man was weeping bitterly and all Susan could hear between his cries was what sounded like a prayer. “Father of all delight, and mother of all our longing, come to me—” Susan couldn’t hear the rest of what he said but she was puzzled by the words.

The small man whimpered as he was dragged at speed between the trees. He stumbled once and cried out. Susan could see the green branches, lashing him and adding to his torment. Susan hung back, wondering if perhaps she should just cycle to the local gendarmerie and explain what she had seen, or go back to farmhouse to think about it some more. She did neither, but still followed through the thickest part of the forest where the damp moss clung to channels of water. The oak and chestnut forest had given way to pine and the needles cushioned the sound of her footsteps.