The PowerBook (10 page)

My father Guido had long been at war with Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. A marriage was planned as a condition of peace, and Paolo rode in retinue to wild Ravenna to fetch me.

We lit the dark hall with candles, which forced the darkness off a little, made it crouch in strange shapes, like a thing whipped.

We dressed ourselves in black, my mother and I, for my father told us that every day is a day of mourning. I wore no adornment, but my hair is as loose and flowing as the cataract that roars under my window, and just as the cataract is tamed to the waterwheel, my hair is tamed to the braid, but both escape.

I bound myself as tightly as I could and went downstairs.

There was a curious light in the room. It was not the fire nor the candles nor the effect of the storm outside. I did not dare raise my eyes to discover the source, but walked mute and downcast towards the table, where my father presented me to Paolo.

I did not look up. I offered him my hand and he kissed it and placed a ring on my finger.

Through our meal my father talked only to the envoys and said nothing to Paolo or myself. I heard Paolo’s voice talking to my mother, and the music of it was like a flute or a pipe. I wanted to see him, but I had not the power.

At the end of our meal my mother and father and all the envoys and servants left the room abruptly. None of the dishes had been cleared and the wine was left spilt on the table. I could sense Paolo looking at me.

There was a low rumbling noise, like a scaffold being wheeled out, and from the shadow on the floor, I understood that a great canopied bed had been pushed into the room.

I did not raise my eyes, but my skin was as cold as wax.

I heard Paolo get up and, coming round to my side of the table, he took my hand and bade me stand up.

‘Francesca,’ he said, ‘let me see your breasts.’

I could not move, but his hands were sure as falcons and he soon had me pinned under him.

We lay on the bed and he kissed me—nothing more—one hand on my breast, the other gently stroking himself, until he felt my kisses meet his, and then he took my hand to where his own was active, and now freed, began to open my legs.

The pleasure was as shocking as the thought of pleasure.

The next morning, both dressed in white, we passed through the walls of my father’s castle as easily as ghosts. In my whole life I had never been beyond the shadow of the castle. The shadow-tip of the flag marked the limit of my walks and my own shadow followed me wherever I went.

Today was not like that.

Today was sun and sky and birdsong and open faces, and I blessed my father’s war, which had made this love.

As we rode, the light went with us. He was the light.

Paolo il bello.

My lover, my loved one, my love.

I need not tell how we passed our days as we rode in splendour along the coast. There was such lightness in me that I had to be tied to the pommel of the saddle to keep myself from bird height. I was bold as a starling. You fed me from your own plate. My eyes were always watching you. I thought you were one of the angels from the church window. We flew together, your wings in gold leaf from the sun. Time flew with us, and very soon we were in sight of your father’s lands.

I noticed a change in you—a dampening and a quiet that I did not understand. I thought you were ashamed of me, but you shook your head, your beautiful head like an angel, and asked me to wait.

I did wait. I had waited before now. Waited all my life, it seemed. ‘What is life,’ my father had said, ‘but a waiting for death?’

Then there were trumpets and running feet and crowds gathering and pennants and a team of white horses in silver harnesses and the white horses drew a carriage and in the carriage was a strange swarthy misshapen man, dressed all in leather, his fingers full of rings.

You turned to me and your voice was breaking as water breaks against a rock it cannot wear away.

‘That man is to be your husband,’ you said. ‘That man, my brother.’

Oh Paolo,
il bello
, why did you lie to me?

Say you are lying to me now.

The wedding took place that afternoon.

My husband was scarcely four feet tall and as twisted in body as Paolo was straight. These things need not have been laid to his fault, but his heart was his own making and his heart was as unformed by kindness as his body had been neglected by beauty. He cared for nothing but hunting and women, and he lashed his dogs and his whores with the same strap.

The horrors of my nights with him might have been bearable if I had not been taught a different way. The grave of my childhood life and the grave of my married life might have crumbled into one another without distinction, if Paolo had not kissed me and raised me from the dead for those few wide-open days.

Then, months later, when my husband was away, Paolo came into my room. He suggested we might read together to while away the time, and this was approved with a short nod from my waiting woman who was paid to be my gaoler.

Every morning Paolo came to me, and we read together the story of Lancelot du Lac, and his love for Queen Guinevere.

We read out loud, and there were many pauses, many broken sighs and swift glances, and as we bent our heads lower and lower over the page, to scribe a private world, our cheeks met, and then our lips, and he was honey in my mouth as I kissed him.

There was no more time for reading that day.

We contrived it—oh I don’t know how—to be together, alone with our book, though we never turned another page.

Paolo, your love for me was a clear single happiness, and I would not give it up to save my soul.

He caught us. You know he did. Perhaps he trapped us. He might have done.

We were in bed together, naked, hot, Paolo inside me, when Gianciotto burst through the door with his men. I saw his face, triumphant, malign, and I saw him raise his terrible hand. He had a hand made of iron that he had fashioned into a spike. It was his hand that he ran through Paolo’s smooth back, and through into my belly and my spine, and into the flock of the mattress. The force was so great that it lifted him up and pinned him above us like a weathercock.

I put my hands to Paolo’s bleeding body, and he said to me, so that only I could hear—

‘There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.’

He was dead then, and I dead under him, and hand in hand our souls flew down the corridors and out of his brother’s palace as easily as our bodies had done when we left my father’s house.

I have never let go of his hand.

We are as light now as our happiness was, lighter than birds. The wind carries us where it will, but our love is secure.

No one can separate us now. Not even God.

Night. The window is open. Thousands of miles away your tears tap tap on the board. If your make-up is run-proof, my heart isn’t.

‘Is this how it ends?’ you said.

‘It isn’t ended yet.’

‘If only you could accept me as I am.’

‘This is where the wheel spins and spins.’

‘We just dig ourselves in deeper.’

‘We know all the common-sense solutions.’

‘You make it sound like floor cleaner.’

‘I don’t know how to give you up,’ I said.

‘You could rewrite the story.’

‘I’ve tried. Haven’t you noticed?’

‘Isn’t there a better ending than either/or?’

‘I can’t write it.’

‘Bloody bloody absolutist.’

‘Blame my parents.’

‘For the wild look in your eyes?’

‘For telling me that the treasure is really there.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Some things are worth looking for all your life.’

‘You weren’t looking for me.’

‘No, and I wasn’t looking for love either.’

‘Then what happened?’

Then. Then what? Then what happened? What can I say? I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can’t give up love. Maybe it’s the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

I said, ‘Perhaps there are a few things you should know.’

‘About you?’

‘About what makes me what I am.’

‘You can’t blame your parents for everything.’

‘I don’t blame them for anything.’

‘So?’

‘So do you want to hear this story?’

‘Tell it.’

I was adopted by a man and a woman who owned a Muck Midden. They had no children of their own and they wanted me to be their little muck-hole—to shuffle and snuffle through the daily cast-off of the all-consuming world.

They were superstitious people. The kind of people who kept a rabbit’s paw in each pocket and a crucifix round the neck, just in case.

They knew, with some squint-eyed sweaty knowledge that had never been learned, that by themselves they could never find anything in muck but muck. They were muck-solid, muck-sure. They had no trouble with muck.

And yet …

And yet an orphan was what they wanted. A changeling child. A child without past or future. A child outside of time who could cheat time. A lucky bag. A charm. The smallest silver key on the heavy keyring. The key that opens the forbidden door.

To get an orphan they had to visit the orphanage.

They put on their best clothes. They squeezed their feet into hostile shoes. They caught the bus to
the orphanage and the Warden showed them inside.

‘Pink room or Blue?’

(Choice. Panic. They whispered to one another hastily.)

The warden tapped her foot on the linoleum.

(Girls are cheaper, easier, cleaner.)

‘Pink, please.’

Back home, at the Muck House, Mrs M buttered the loaf for corned-beef sandwiches with pickled onions, while Mr M threw another car tyre on the fire. They were warm and fed. They loved their baby.

‘How much do you love her?’ asked Mr M.

‘As much as a pram with its wheels off,’ said Mrs M. ‘How much do
you
love her?’

‘More than two bags full of washing-machine hoses,’ said Mr M.

The baby gurgled and played with its little necklace of spent bullets strung across the cot.

‘Is this where the treasure starts?’ said Mr M.

‘Read the signs,’ said his wife.

But he couldn’t read the signs because he couldn’t read.

My parents called me Alix because they wanted a name with an X in it, because X marks the spot.

I was the one who would find the buried treasure.

That there was treasure they never doubted. My father dug so fiercely at the end of the rainbow that part of the kitchen subsided.

They were always out—on full moons, on new moons, with a box of magic mongoose droppings and a metal detector.

Metals were my domain.

I learned how to strip a fridge of its cooling unit, thermostat and plug. I unwound miles of copper wire from millions of solenoids. I separated zinc from lead, lead from iron, iron from steel, steel from tin.

My father made me a bed from a galvanised water trough. My mother lined it with flock from an old mattress.

One night, when she was tucking me up under the eiderdown, my feet on an old car radiator that
served as a hot-water bottle, I asked her what the red stamp on the side of my bed meant.

‘That’s a word,’ she said.

‘What word is it?’

‘
CATTLE
.’

‘What’s a cattle?’

‘More cows than one.’

She went out and I traced the word with my finger—
CATTLE.

Reading and writing were both forbidden at the Muck House. My mother could do both, my father could do neither, therefore they had no value.

What had value were starter motors, carburetors, twelve-volt batteries, three-core cable, push buttons, switches and car seats battered as prize-fighters.

In the workshop in the scrapyard my father assembled unbadged monster cars; petrol-driven Frankensteins, bolted together on oversize wheels.

I was his pit-monkey. I was the one who crouched under the chassis in the oil-stained well. I handed him his hammers and swivel joints, and freed the seized metalwork by swinging off a
ratchet bar with all my weight. Suddenly the thing would give, and I would drop down, scraping hands and knees on the dirty concrete. Then, stumbling for my spanners, I would climb the steps and begin again.

It was night. The stars were out, metallic and contained. My mother was putting me to bed.

‘Write me a word,’ I said.

‘There’s no reading or writing here.’

‘Write me a word that goes with
CATTLE.
NO one will notice.’

Of course there was no one to notice, except my father.

Carefully, and with many glances at the door, my mother wrote in red letters on my galvanised trough-bed—
TUBERCULOSIS.

‘Is that a cattle word?’

‘Yes.’

‘What word would you give me if you could?’

‘I can’t. There’s no use for words here.’

‘But if you could?’

She scribbled on a piece of cardboard out of her pocket, and pressed it into my hand, nervously, afraid.