‘But they aren’t different things. I mean, they aren’t contradictory.’ It was a word I had read many times but never said aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the wrong places. Contradictory.
She wore a thin dress, made of a white, silky fabric. Her eyes were a pale green, a colour that would now make me think of tinted contact lenses; but this was thirty years ago; things were different then. I remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure that they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.
Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were talking nonsense, even if her name wasn’t really Triolet (my generation had not been given hippie names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the Moons, they were only six, seven, eight years old back then). She said, ‘We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live for ever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun-systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again.’
‘And then what happened?’
She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as if she stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask. ‘You cannot hear a poem without it changing you,’ she told me. ‘They heard it, and it colonised them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known.’
I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg pressing against hers. She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my face.
‘There are places that we are welcomed,’ said Triolet, ‘and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, still smiling. I could hear the unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and boomed in the front room.
She leaned into me then and – I suppose it was a kiss … I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips, anyway, and then, satisfied, she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as her own.
‘Would you like to hear it?’ she asked, and I nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain that I needed anything she was willing to give me.
She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the strangest thing about poetry – you can tell it’s poetry, even if you don’t speak the language. You can hear Homer’s Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it’s poetry. I’ve heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn’t know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind’s eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.
Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don’t remember. I know I wanted to.
And then Vic was shaking me violently. ‘Come on!’ he was shouting. ‘Quickly. Come on!’
In my head I began to come back from a thousand miles away.
‘Idiot. Come on. Just get a move on,’ he said, and he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.
For the first time that evening I recognised one of the songs being played in the front room. A sad saxophone wail followed by a cascade of liquid chords, a man’s voice singing cut-up lyrics about the sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and hear the song.
She said, ‘I am not finished. There is yet more of me.’
‘Sorry, love,’ said Vic, but he wasn’t smiling any longer. ‘There’ll be another time,’ and he grabbed me by the elbow and he twisted and pulled, forcing me from the room. I did not resist. I knew from experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out of me if he got it into his head to do so. He wouldn’t do it unless he was upset or angry, but he was angry now.
Out into the front hall. As Vic pulled open the door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to see Triolet in the doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at the top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her face.
This all happened thirty years ago. I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on Stella’s face as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall remember that.
Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes—
You wouldn’t want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.
We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and the tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm was on our heels, a mad helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets, threading through the maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until we could not breathe; and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer. We were in pain. I held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long, into the gutter.
He wiped his mouth.
‘She wasn’t a—’ He stopped.
He shook his head.
Then he said, ‘You know … I think there’s a thing. When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn’t be you any more? You’d be the person who’d done that? The places you just can’t go … I think that happened to me tonight.’
I thought I knew what he was saying. ‘Screw her, you mean?’ I said.
He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and twisted it violently. I wondered if I was going to have to fight him – and lose – but after a moment he lowered his hand and moved away from me, making a low, gulping noise.