Untouchable Things

TARA GUHA

UNTOUCHABLE
THINGS

Legend Press Ltd, The Old Fire Station,
140 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4SD
[email protected]
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www.legendpress.co.uk

Contents © Tara Guha 2015

The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

Print ISBN 978-1-7850799-4-8

Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850799-5-5

Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd.

Cover design by Simon Levy
www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

Lyrics used on
pages 220-221
“Consider Yourself” written by Lionel Bart.

Excerpts from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Waste Land” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” from
Collected Poems
1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Extract taken from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Waste Land” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” from
Collected Poems
1909-1962 Estate of T.S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Tara Guha
was born to an Indian father and English mother and spent her childhood in the Ribble Valley, passing many a wet day writing poetry and music. After studying English at Cambridge she embarked on a career in the classical music industry in London, promoting artists including Placido Domingo, Paul McCartney and Dudley Moore.

Over the years she has also been a freelance journalist, charity worker and has trained as a counsellor. Tara is a keen amateur pianist, singer and songwriter and lives in the hills of West Yorkshire with her partner and two daughters.

Untouchable Things
is Tara’s first novel.

Follow Tara
@taraguha

For my family, who believed.
And for my younger self, who didn’t.

Prologue

For the third time this week he is watching her scream.

Watching, not listening.

After the first time he tunes out of the less interesting part, the sound. The vibrato is uneven, the pitch wavering, the timbre too harsh. But the face is mesmeric, eyes contracted to penny slots while the mouth gapes to spew its cheap auditory prize. Munch, of course, is behind some of the distortion, stamping
The Scream
all over anyone who expresses horror. Even the pretty ones.

But the scream is hers too, and his by default. Not that she knows he is here, not as such. The invitation is tacit, a door left ajar. A paying peephole where he ogles with the others.

She has it down to a fine art, that slight shake of her head, almost a nervous tic, sending a ripple effect down the length of her hair until marigold tresses swing around her like the arms of twirling children. People approach at their peril. She likes it that way: look but don’t touch. All her power wound into her hair, like Samson.

Her body holds no fear as it ripples through a series of postures designed to tantalise. Virgin, whore, mother, lover, a sequence choreographed especially for him. And it works. It works as she knows it will and she thrills in his powerlessness to do anything but watch.

His hand twitches and he stretches it slowly so the knuckles crack. Quick glances of disapproval: the watchers must stay silent. They must abide by the protocols of the genre, contain themselves until a glorious ovational climax.

It costs him nothing to wait.

For the fourth time this week he is watching her scream. Watching, not listening. Watching with the mute button on, pressing pause here and there to savour a particular expression, a line of her body. She moves like a dancer. Her hair is a responsive partner but a limelight stealer, forever trying to pirouette off but dragged back, like a recalcitrant Siamese twin. It shimmers in a weightless red-gold haze but he knows its truth, how it slumps into his hands hot and heavy and sticky.

You’re staring at my hair.

Who goes here? Witch, spirit, dream? Curls converge to make a veil, darkened to rust and hiding her face.

You remind me of someone.

Do I?

Perhaps there is no face. Perhaps it’s just bones under there, freckled skin peeled away to leave the gasp of eye sockets and a toothless grin. He hears rustling, the squirming of caged limbs and realises it’s him, writhing, palpitating so that people are craning their heads to look. His neighbour shuffles away a little, crosses her leg with some difficulty so that her booted foot points passive-aggressively, Britishly, in the other direction. He thinks about crossing his own leg and sending one pristine Italian shoe in to remonstrate. He laughs, possibly aloud, and refocuses his gaze.

She has a face, he can see that now, but he can’t tell which one. Her hair has fallen back into rank, a mutinous army ready to surge, jostling on her back, a teaming mass, a plural. Flickering memories project onto the exposed visage: Abigail. Ophelia. Julia. Rebecca. He can channel surf, one jab of his thumb to flick between them. But he can’t be sure they’re not in cahoots to confuse him, the mouth of one with the eyes of another, a high stakes game of
Guess Who?
He narrows his eyes to focus but the effect is to separate them, to see double, quadruple, until they have claimed the stage and evaded his remote control. His head throbs and his vision pixelates, spilling them – her – into patterns of dancing dots. Flies crawl down from his hairline and when he dashes them, his hand comes away wet. The sucked taste is salt, and it soothes him.

For the fifth time this week he is watching her scream.

Act 1 - Scene 1

When she bows she lets the roar of the audience fall on her like a wave.

Tonight it’s a tidal wave, pressing down on her head, booming in her ears until she wonders if she’ll ever fight her way up again. She must. She has something left to deliver.

She raises her head, stands tall, stares out at them. She feels the ripples of shock spreading up from the ground to the gallery to the upper circle and back through her body. She is dripping and shivering, her hair matted into dark soaked tresses trickling a thin stream across the stage. The director’s idea, reminding the room that Ophelia is dead, drowned, done. Blurring the line between art and life. The clapping shudders and stills, people horrified to find themselves applauding a suicide. She forces herself to stay with it, letting them feast on the sight of her, her nakedness skimmed with sopping white cotton, medusa coils of thick red hair slapped to her breasts. The classic male fantasy of Ophelia as neurotic virgin, laid out to arouse and shame the paying voyeurs. She shudders and it’s not for effect. She is being sacrificed for a higher purpose.

The silence is louder than the applause, pulsating like a giant heart in her ears as she stands. But she is not done. She is in the round, heated by the gaze of those behind her waiting for their turn. Slowly she pivots, rotating like a ballerina impaled in a musical box. Swathes of gasps follow her round as she is revealed to each section of the house. She turns again into blinding lights. Squinting would spoil the effect so she suffers the white beams that will imprint purple circles on her vision for the next half-hour. She turns and lets them gawp, crane their heads, clench their fists. Then one voice cries out from the front of the stalls and the floodgates reopen, the audience bellows and she is felled once more.

Goodnight, ladies; goodnight, sweet ladies; goodnight, goodnight.

Thank you, Miss Laurence. To clarify, you met Seth Gardner on September 27th 1996 after a performance of
Hamlet
?

Yes, in the pub.

Which pub would that be?

The usual.

The Red Lion off Hanover Street. It was a favourite. She knew the landlord, Des. That night her hair was still damp, glowing like embers as Seth would tell her later. She was first in, first to the bar, looking to numb the places where so many eyes had burned.

Clunk
. Eyes slotted into the gaze of another, a jigsaw completed, freeze frame of a shutter coming down. A dark-haired man sitting at a table is watching her. A moment stretched.

Then, turning back, her friends, the post-mortem, the babbled deconstruction and congratulations. A quick glance over her shoulder, the table now empty. A casting director? The usual chit-chat.
My agent isn’t returning my calls. Is yours any good? Have you got anything lined up afterwards?
The older contingent banging on about the demise of rep.

She doesn’t want to do this, not tonight. Instead she plies people with drinks, makes them laugh, reminds them it’s a day off tomorrow. But by pint number three people are making their excuses. Drastic tactics are needed. She sways to the bar and orders three tequila slammers.

How now, fair Ophelia?
The voice pours deep into her ear like warm water. She turns and he is right there, next to her, the dark-haired man from across the room. Close up she sees that his eyes are the wrong shade of green and she can’t look away from them. They drip amusement.

“It looks as though Rosencrantz has just exited pub left. So might I avail myself of one of these?” She’s vaguely surprised at his cut-glass English accent. The hair, the eyes, suggest something other. She sees the curve of his mouth, plush as a woman’s. Then a hand reaching, she’s transfixed for a second before her ears pop and she grasps both his drift and the glass.

“No, you may not. I don’t generally buy drinks for strange men.” If he is a casting director she’s blown it now.

“Not even a strange man who loves Shakespeare? You were amazing tonight.”

A laugh, her laugh. Too far gone for self-deprecation. “Thank you. I was, wasn’t I?”

His laugh, louder, more sonorous. “And modest too. It gets better.” He stretches a serious hand out to her hair. “You must have been cold though. Look at you. You’re still wet.”

She is wet, suddenly, but not in the places he means. He has her hair in his fingers. If she tried to leave now, would he stop her?

There’s a commotion to her right and an inebriated Hamlet, risen from the dead, lurches forwards.

“Becs, I gotta go. Lucy’ll kill me if I’m late again. Oh… hello.” He smiles at the man, tries to stand upright.

He thinks it’s a casting director.

“Jez, meet…”

The man’s lips stretch and curve. “Seth.”

“Seth thought we were wonderful tonight. Isn’t that right?” She giggles, her grip a little too tight on Jez’s arm.

“Indeed I did. An electrifying performance.”

Jez shoots a quizzical glance at Rebecca and she shakes her head. Then he grins and slaps the man on the back. “Cheers, mate, glad you enjoyed it. Here, have my drink. I’ve really got to go, Becs – will you be all right?”