Metro Winds

Metro Winds - By Isobelle Carmody

METRO WINDS



So there was a girl. Young but not too young. A face as unformed as an egg, so that one could not tell if she would turn out to be fair or astonishingly ugly. She was to be sent to a city in another land by a mother and father in the midst of a divorce. The one thing they could agree upon was that the girl should not be exposed to the violence they meant to commit on their life. There was a quality in her that made it impossible to do the ravening that the end of love required.

‘She must be sent away,’ the father had said in civil but forbidding tones.

‘For her own good,’ the mother agreed. ‘My sister will have her.’

The girl stood between them, wordless and passive as a bolster, as it was arranged that she be sent to the city where her mother had spent her childhood, this girl who had lived on a remote coast of a remote land in a solitary yellow house listening to the chilly grey sea that rushed straight from the ice pole to pound on the shore beside her bedroom window.

Red-nosed and blue-lipped, bare-armed and bare-legged in a faded shift, she had played amongst rocks where crabs scuttled through pools of clouded sky, but on the day of the departure, she wore a navy blue dress and jacket lined with grey silk, dark stockings and patent leather shoes, all of which had been purchased from a catalogue. The heavy mass of silken hair had been wetted and bound tightly into two braids. She watched her white night shift being folded into a dark boxy suitcase, although the mother and aunt had agreed that once she arrived she would be provided with a wardrobe befitting her life in the city.

‘She can’t go with nothing,’ the mother murmured to herself as she closed the mouth of the case. There was little enough in it, yet how could she be blamed for the lack of clothes or beloved toys to pack, or much-read books? The girl could not be forced to accumulate such things.

The mother glanced at the girl with a pang of unease as she straightened, but reminded herself that the child’s destination was a very old and sophisticated city, and not some dangerous wilderness, so what need was there for anxiety? She wanted to cup the girl’s face and kiss the cheeks and eyelids tenderly, but only rested her hands lightly on her shoulders; felt the fragility of them; noted absently that her own fingers were stiff as dried twigs.

‘You will see,’ she said vaguely.

There was no need to invoke good behaviour, for the girl was calm and biddable and, remarkably, did not practise deceits. When a question was asked, she saw only that information was required. The consequences of her answer or the uses to which the information she gave might be put did not concern her. Being asked, she told. If she did not know, she said. This might have made her blunt and tactless, but she seldom spoke unless asked a direct question.

What would the girl’s aunt make of her? the mother wondered. Rather than leaving her plump sister embittered, the lack of a husband or children had softened the centre of her until she was sweet enough to ache your teeth. She had been full of delight at the thought of having a vessel into which she could pour the rich syrup of her emotions.

‘I shall adore her and she will be happy,’ she had written.

The mother frowned at the memory, for it seemed to her the girl was too deep and odd to be content with mere happiness. Once, seeing a storm brooding, she had gone seeking the girl, only to find her standing at the edgy rim of the sea, hands lifted to the bruised clouds like a child wishing to be taken up. What sort of child is it who wishes to embrace a storm? she had wondered in appalled awe. The girl’s lips had been drawn back from her teeth in a rictus that looked at first to be an expression of pain, but was only what laughter had made of her.

Even so, one could not say to one’s sister that the child had a capacity for rare and frightening joy, and so she had simply agreed that they were bound to get along. That, at least, might be true.

Stowing the case in the boot of her car, the mother thought how often over the years she had tried to convey her disappointment in the girl in letters to her sister, who had only congratulated her on her good fortune with an extravagant wistfulness that left no room for a confession of the fear that she had borne, not a flesh-and-blood child with fits of ill temper that must be humoured and fears that must be soothed, but a sort of angel. And not the soft fat promiscuous angels of Italian frescoes, but a wild untameable creature of dry feathers and blazing sunlight and high wailing winds. Neither the mother nor the father thought of the girl with intimate possessiveness. It was not the man’s nature to wish to possess anything other than abstract ideas, for he was a doctor and medical researcher. And the woman found it impossible to love a child who required neither forgiveness nor tolerance. A mother needs needing, she told herself, to excuse the guilt that churned her belly from time to time.



The girl sat docilely in the car on the way to the airport, hands folded loosely in her lap. ‘Are you afraid?’ her mother asked after they had checked the bag in and learned the seat allocation.

‘No,’ the girl said simply.

The mother swallowed an aimless spurt of anger, knowing that for anyone else, being sent into the unknown would be reason enough for fear. Perhaps the girl had nothing with which to people her nightmares because she lacked imagination. The mother felt a shamed relief when the time came to say goodbye, yet at the same time it seemed to her there were words that should be said.

I should understand something, she thought urgently.

When the girl turned to pass through the door to international departures, the woman found herself remembering with sudden shocking clarity the lumpy slipperiness as the midwife pulled the child from her womb and swung it up onto her flaccid belly; the rank animal stench of the fluids that flowed out of her, and the purplish swollen look of skin smeared with white foam and strings of bloody slime; that black hair and the dark bottomless eyes that looked through her skin and into her soul.

The airport doors closed with a smooth hiss, severing them from one another. The woman stood for a time looking at the ambiguous smear of her face in the dull metal surface, feeling grief, longing, fear.



The girl spent much of the journey gazing out at the sky, surprised at how substantial the clouds appeared from above. For of course she had only ever seen their undersides, which must have been grazed to flatness by the mountains they passed over. When the sky darkened as the plane entered the long night, a steward asked if she wanted chicken or beef. She never ate meat but the travel agent hadn’t thought to ask when booking the ticket. It did not matter. She liked the way hunger gnawed at her belly from the inside with sharp little teeth.

When she slept, it was to dream an old dream of wandering in dark tunnels searching for something she could not name.



The girl’s aunt had been tremulous and moist with emotion before her niece came at last into the arrivals foyer, yet the first sight of the girl caused the older woman to draw a swift breath. A moment later she could not have explained her reaction; she had seen photographs so the child’s appearance was no surprise. In the taxicab she fussed and tutted over the late flight and told herself it was pity that had made her gasp, for the girl’s clothes were so severe they only accentuated the vagueness of her features.

The aunt’s apartment was large but managed to be cramped as well, being filled with fringed lamps, occasional tables, plump tasselled cushions, painted china ornaments, little enamel boxes, carved animals, winged armchairs, frilled curtains, and vases of stiff dried flowers. The floors were carpeted in dove grey, but exotic rugs coloured henna red, turquoise and emerald were laid here and there atop it to form gorgeous pools of colour. The sound of movement was altogether smothered.

The girl slipped off her shoes and wiggled her toes, searching for the bones of the place under its fat pelt. She thought of the hard wooden floors of the house by the sea, which had been limed the icy hue of a winter sky. Noticing the pale slender feet, the aunt assumed she had removed her shoes out of consideration for the carpets.

She ushered the girl to a bedroom where rose-coloured lamps gave off tiny pools of blushing light. The walls were covered in a velveted indigo paper and the window and four-poster bed were draped in thick folds of violet lace surmounted by an overdress through which gold ribbon had been intricately threaded.

Having noted the lightness of the case, the aunt left the girl to unpack to avoid embarrassing them both by witnessing the paucity of her possessions. Her sister had clearly made a worse marriage than she had feared. She smiled in pity at the girl over a late supper laid out on gold-rimmed plates. There was a silver pot of hot chocolate, rich cream puffs, jam horns, sugary slices and little sandwiches. The girl ate one corner of a cucumber and lettuce sandwich, and when pressed to try a paste sandwich, explained politely that she did not eat meat.

‘But these are only fish,’ the aunt said, taking a bite from one of the sandwiches. She was discomfited to be so frankly watched, but the girl made no comment, other than to ask if she might go to bed soon. In a gush of guilty relief, her aunt promised a shopping expedition on the morrow.

In the bedroom, the girl removed her outer clothes and laid them aside. She was wide awake, for her body told her that it was early morning. Wanting to taste the air of the city, she struggled until she opened the window, which had been painted shut. Gazing through it, she stared at the city beyond, blanketed in shadows and pricked here and there by light. There was a breeze and she watched her hair float up in tendrils that seemed to quest as blindly and voraciously as the tentacles of a sea anemone. She thought of the icy wind that slipped up through the cracks in the bone-pale floorboards of her old bedroom, shuddering the window glass in the frame as it tried to get out again. Sometimes it was so strong that when you opened the drawers in the kitchen, the wind blew out into your face, so loud that people telephoning would ask who was screaming. If one looked through the windows at night, there were not the thousand and one lights visible from this lean window, but only darkness laid like a film over shadowy trees, and beyond them the lines of foam that trimmed the relentless waves. If she opened a window, the air would fly like a dervish into her room, smelling of icebergs and open grey seas.

There was nothing green or wet or wild in the air of this city. It was heavy with the odours of people and their machines. She imagined it as weary and sour as the breath of an old man who had lived too long. She thought that she would find it hard to breathe or move quickly in this dense air with so many people and their lives pressed up against her, but she was not afraid. If she felt anything, it was curiosity to see how she would manage it.



The following day, the aunt came bustling into the room and shut the open window at once in a fluster of incoherent warnings. She did not believe in fresh air. In fact, moving air of any kind troubled her. She bade the girl rise, for she meant to keep her promise: they were to go shopping. First they caught a taxi to a market of little stalls to buy food. This expedition was undertaken with great seriousness. The girl had never seen fruit laid out with such reverence. Apples gleamed a wicked, tempting red, and each flawless cherry seemed to have been polished to gleaming crimson. Pears and mangoes glowed gold, and there was a mound of queer intricately spiked green orbs she had never seen before. The aunt discussed everything with the stallholder and they seemed to come to a joint decision about what should be bought. They went to a bread stall and a cheese stall, and again the aunt spoke with the proprietors, who were assertive but courteous. They carried nothing from the stalls, for their purchases were to be delivered to the apartment where the maid, D’lo, waited to put them away.

They ate lunch at a restaurant where, the aunt said, a man had once come with a gun to shoot his lover’s wife. She relished the details of the anecdote in the same way she had enjoyed dissecting the composition of her favourite dishes on the menu. The girl listened solemnly but asked no questions, to the aunt’s regret, for she had withheld several salacious details she would have alluded to if pressed.

The room they were in was decorated with huge vases of lilies and on the spotless white tablecloths, which the tables wore as if they were ball dresses, were small vases of violets. The girl chose a clear vegetable soup and bread, a lemon sorbet and strawberries drizzled with Armagnac. The aunt was disappointed by her poor appetite, and enjoyed her own food less as a consequence.

Afterwards they walked along a boulevard of shops with wide windows. In one, lights converged to worship a single stiletto shoe with a transparent icicle for a heel; in others were a red dress, a baroque pearl and a diamond dog-collar. The girl was led from one dress shop to another where skeletally thin women with white china complexions and slick red mouths discussed cut and fabric. The aunt was puzzled by the girl’s passivity. One would think she was being dressed in a bazaar for all the interest she showed in the clothes. Perhaps she was mildly retarded. Her sister had not said so, yet in looking back, hadn’t there been something unspoken in the letters she had sent over the years? Something struggling to be revealed?

The girl was unaware that the clothes were more important than the people who sold them. She was fascinated by the languid gestures of one woman ordering this or that dress to be brought out, with a ferocious smile that reminded the girl of a panther she had seen once in a cage, lying perfectly still with a bored expression in its lovely eyes. Only the flick of its tail had revealed its savagery. Pale, pastel-clad acolytes scurried to do the woman’s bidding. The girl saw that despite the identical pastel smocks and neat buns, they were quite different. One had a saucy look and quick nimble fingers, another smelled of cigarettes, and yet another had red-rimmed eyes which she had tried to mask with powder.

The aunt’s taste for frills and beading and what she called dramatic colours was gently but firmly directed towards more delicate fabrics, paler hues and plainer styles. The only thing she resisted was a white voile dress.

‘Not white,’ the aunt had said. Could they not see how it increased the insipidity of the girl’s features? Besides, white was the colour of confirmation dresses and shrouds. Privately she thought the use of white for brides was unfortunate; if she had ever wed she would have worn violet and peacock blue.

Like the foodstuffs, the clothes were to be delivered, so they made their way unhampered to an open-air restaurant within the main park in the city for afternoon tea.

‘I thought you would like the wildness of it,’ the aunt said, pleased by her own generosity, since open-air restaurants were not to her taste. She fancied the girl might be missing the primitive beauty of her home. She spotted an acquaintance who was invited to join them, a thin woman with glistening eyes snuggled on either side of a long sharp nose, who proceeded to whisper an interminable story about a man and his doctor wife.



The girl gazed around. It was the hottest part of the day and she could feel the dampness forming in the curve of her upper lip and along her spine, pricking at her palms. Beyond the awning roof of the restaurant, the park shimmered. There were green hedges manicured into animal shapes but they cast no shade. Carefully edged rose beds surrounded a small marble fountain where a woman with bare stone breasts endlessly poured water from a jug into a bowl. The paths were made from crushed white gravel that radiated a bright, white heat. Grass grew only in circles marked off by chains from which were suspended signs forbidding feet. Wrought-iron chairs stood about the edge of these pools of dazzling green and a few people sat in them and stared at the grass as if it were a pond where their faces looked back at them or fish swam.

There were not many other customers in the restaurant at that hour: a table of businessmen stabbing fingers at a map and an elegant woman in a grey pantsuit talking animatedly to a poodle seated on a chair opposite. After a time, a group of people converged on the restaurant talking loudly in foreign accents punctuated with expansive gestures and bird cries of delight.

‘Tourists,’ the acquaintance murmured regretfully.

A waiter approached the group and they opened their lips to display huge white smiles. Pink gums showed around the edges of their teeth. The waiter herded them gently but firmly into an arbour where their cries were muted and their bright clothes could not disturb the other diners.

An elderly man in a perfectly tailored cream suit and panama hat entered and made his way to the next table. He sat down, drawing out a long slim cigar. The waiter approached and lit it deferentially after snipping off its end, then, without being asked, a second waiter brought a coffee and a small glass of green liquid on a little tray. The girl watched him pour some of the green liquid into a spoonful of sugar and set a match to it. An emerald flame swelled and hovered above the spoon. When it had burned itself out the man dribbled the thick dark residue into his coffee, stirred and drank it.

At length, the aunt pronounced it time to go, refusing the offer of a lift home in the acquaintance’s car. They were going by metro, she explained, for the girl must learn to use the subterranean train system in case she wanted to attend the theatre or visit a gallery when her aunt was otherwise occupied. ‘But the metro,’ the acquaintance said doubtfully, ‘she should never use the metro after dark . . .’

‘I will explain all that needs to be explained in good time,’ the aunt said in a mildly peevish tone, and then the two women smiled acidly at one another and agreed to take tea together again very soon.



The girl had a photograph taken in a booth for her metro pass, and this was snipped out and slid into a laminated case which she slipped obediently into her purse. Inside the metro station, which was only a sort of corrugated tin shed with turnstiles and a ticket machine, there were windows where men and woman sat looking bored and annoyed. The metro platforms themselves were deep underground, the aunt explained, pointing to an escalator that would carry them down to the platforms where one boarded the electric trains.

It was a steep descent and the girl seemed to lean into the air that swelled out of the tunnel.

‘Hold tightly to the handrail,’ her aunt said sternly. ‘You could fall.’ The girl rested her hand on it and found it moved slightly faster than the steps, so that she kept adjusting her grip. The ascending escalator was alongside and the girl looked into the faces of people riding on it: a tired man cradling a briefcase as if it were a baby; a young couple twined and kissing voluptuously; two nuns; a group of drunk men singing an obscene song and leaning on one another; a swarthy man with a surly expression; a big woman with a beautiful wide-mouthed face and a stained ecru bodice; a young woman muttering rapidly to herself. The girl was entranced. She had not seen such people in the restaurant or shops or in the park.

The aunt murmured discreetly that one should not stare because aside from being a mark of ill-breeding, it virtually obliged some sort of intercourse. The girl did not see how any sort of exchange could be conducted with people going decisively in opposite directions, but she looked away obediently.

A short hall between two opposing platforms came into view at the end of the escalator. One went left or right through little archways to the platforms, the aunt explained, one side for metro trains going east and south, one side for those going north and west. Just before they reached the bottom where the silver teeth of a grille swallowed the escalator, an enormous gust of cold wind blew up into their faces from the depths, as if the earth itself had sighed. The girl gasped as it tugged her hair from its braids and licked the sweat from her upper lip.

‘I smell the sea,’ she said in wonderment.

The aunt sniffed surreptitiously but could smell only the oily escalator reek, under which lay an unpleasant tang of urine. She pursed her lips; her notion that the girl was mentally afflicted strengthened, for the city was far from the sea.

When they reached their platform there were only a few people waiting down the far end. Between them and the aunt and the girl, a lone man stood in a niche unwrapping an instrument. He wore corduroy pants with threadbare knees, a greasy blue shirt and an embroidered cloth cap from beneath which hung a narrow plait. A black dog with a faded bandana knotted around its neck sat by his feet. The girl felt a thrill when it looked at her with the same startled recognition as her aunt’s ebony maid.

‘I told you, it is better not to look at anyone,’ the aunt admonished. ‘Men like that call themselves musicians but they are beggars, or worse.’ She flushed slightly.

The ghostly subterranean wind blew again, and the girl’s hair and clothes fluttered wildly. Her aunt was glad that her own coiffure was firmly lacquered, and that her clothes had substance enough not to be trifled with by the draft. She tried to take shallow breaths, certain the air was laden with the germs of these odd and unsavoury people who lingered between the arches. Thinking of her acquaintance, the aunt told the girl never to go beyond the end of the platforms, which narrowed into ledges that ran away down the dark tunnels.

‘The workmen use them when they repair the rails or the signals. The metro is very old and there are disused stations and tunnels and bricked-up stairways and goodness knows what else where you could easily lose your way,’ she said. It had been many years since she had used the metro and it seemed to have been allowed to lapse into a queer sort of anarchy. If only the girl had the wit to be afraid, but clearly she did not.

A moment later, the metro train, a sleek snake of silver, burst from the tunnel and sighed to a halt beside the platform, where its doors glided open with a soft hiss. The girl and the aunt entered the nearest carriage and found a seat. ‘Never make the mistake of entering the metro when people are going to work in the morning or leaving work in the evening, for it is impossibly crowded,’ the older woman warned. She spoke of pickpockets, but in her eyes there was something more than hands feeling for a purse. ‘You must also avoid the metro when there are too few people around,’ she added.

When they reached the correct stop, they stepped out onto the platform and mounted the moving stair to return to the surface, where the aunt explained they were within walking distance of their apartment. At the top of the escalator there was an old beggar woman gazing downward.

‘A storm is coming!’ she cried. ‘See how it has turned my soup sour!’ She pointed accusingly to a battered metal boiler sitting squatly and incongruously in a tattered pram upon which hung a multitude of bulging plastic bags. The crowd split smoothly into two streams which passed either side of the old harridan, everyone averting their eyes. But several young men with army greens and shaven heads stopped to jeer. One had a swastika tattooed on his scalp, the aunt noted, wondering if the girl knew what it was, what it meant.

They made to pass the old beggar woman who, without warning, plunged forward and caught the girl by the wrist. The aunt gave a little shriek and batted uselessly at the clutching hand, the blackened fingers reminding her of the dark, leathery paw of an ape.

The old woman had eyes only for her pale young captive. ‘Do you know what it means when soup goes sour?’ she demanded.

The girl shook her head in wonderment.

The old woman leaned close enough that the girl could smell her earthy reek. ‘It is a sign,’ she said, eyes aglitter.

The aunt wrenched her free with a strength born of indignation, and hustled her firmly away, before taking out a tiny lace-edged handkerchief and rubbing hard at the girl’s wrist. The old beggar woman’s fingers had left a perfect print of grime on her pale skin, but the mark seemed indelible as a bruise.

‘Never mind,’ she comforted herself. ‘I have carbolic soap that will remove it.’

It was night when they came out of the station and the girl was surprised, for they had entered the metro in daylight. Their underground journey had not seemed so long, but of course time might move differently with the weight of so much earth pressing down on it.

They made their way past shops and restaurants and houses behind neat little wrought-iron fences with lace-curtained windows through which she could see people laughing, talking, reading and smoking. She thought of the web of metro tunnels deep down in the chill dark earth beneath all this, and wondered if what had been wild and untamed in this land had not been destroyed, but had retreated and leaked or crept down into the metro. She thought of the old man in the cream suit conjuring his green flame with its dark residue and imagined that what lay below the city might sometimes rise up in spectral threads or strange furtive flames.

That night, she dreamed the tunnel dream again, but this time it was the metro and the old beggar woman with her pram had found her way into it.

‘What are you looking for?’ she asked the girl in a raw crackle, clutching her wrist.

‘I don’t know.’

The woman shook her grizzled head. ‘Then you must learn or you will never find the shape of your heart’s desire.’

‘I don’t understand,’ the girl said.

The woman looked sad. ‘Then all is lost.’



The following day, the aunt chose which of the stiff new dresses the girl was to wear with which shoes and which cardigan to carry in which bag. The girl let herself be turned this way and that by the aunt and by D’lo, who said, ‘She fine. She sho’ lookin’ fine.’ D’lo had a voice than flowed as thick and golden viscous as warmed sap. The girl liked to hear her talk, and wondered what might be imparted in that voice, in the absence of her aunt.

They had been invited to luncheon and the aunt suggested they walk, since their destination was in the neighbourhood. They passed through a small park and the aunt reminisced about her poodle, , who had been walked there. He had died, but the aunt said passed away, dabbing at her eyes sentimentally and interpreting the girl’s silence as respect for . She told herself the child was perhaps only a little slow, and that was not so detrimental in a girl as in a boy. Indeed, looking at the mess her sister had made of her life, it might be said that cleverness was more of a disadvantage to a woman than anything else.

The girl was thinking about her dream, for it seemed to her that she had seen something in the tunnels just before the old beggar woman appeared. Something huge and white.

Their hosts’ apartment was stylish, with blond leather furniture and chilly, gleaming, marble floors. There were clear vases of yellow irises, heavy cream silk curtains and paintings in muted colours, but also many blank walls which had their own beauty. Most of all, there was empty space filled with shafts of sunlight.

Privately the aunt thought the apartment ostentatiously bare, though of course she admired her hosts’ exquisite taste. She preened when they insisted that her own apartment was much nicer, for this was exactly her own opinion.

Their host appeared with the daughter of the house and the girl was introduced to them both. As the man took her hand, an odour arose from him as if he carried something old and musky in his pocket. Instinctively the girl pulled her hand from his fingers when he made to press it to his lips. The other girl reached out a slender white hand and bobbed slightly, her eyes amused.

‘My daughter is just returning from her piano lesson,’ their hostess explained. The daughter smiled at the aunt and her niece and asked questions prettily, tossing a head of radiant honey curls adorned with a pink ribbon. The three adults smiled.

It became clear that the visit had been arranged in order that the two girls, who were the same age, could become friends, but though the girl answered the daughter of the house gravely, both understood at once that they had nothing in common. Under different circumstances, one would become the victim of the other.

The aunt regretfully compared the pink and gold feminine flirtatiousness of her friend’s daughter with her sister’s solemn child. Out of loyalty, she murmured to her hosts that the girl was very shy, having lived in isolation with only her parents for company.

As they ate a crumbly dark fruitcake and drank raspberry sirop, the girl was subjected to a smiling inquisition by their hosts. Her responses dissatisfied because she would only answer what she was asked. She could not be persuaded to elaborate on the one thing the adults wished to know but could not openly ask: what had caused her parents to part.

‘She is delightfully unspoiled,’ the friend murmured to the aunt when they were preparing to leave. The aunt smiled but took this as the criticism it was, and on the way home spoke disapprovingly about her friend’s husband, who was the president of a firm that had lately been accused in the newspapers of bribing a politician to secure a government contract. She might acknowledge the girl’s deficiencies, she thought to herself wrathfully, as was her familial right, but other people should be more restrained. She was now glad she had not followed her initial impulse and issued an invitation to the small party she had planned in honour of the girl’s birthday, which was two weeks away. Given the girl’s limitations, a party could only be a social disaster.



A fortnight later, a box arrived from the girl’s father and also a parcel from her mother. They had been sent separately, but perversely, the same carrier brought them to the apartment. They were a day early, but the aunt suggested the girl open them in case they contained something perishable.

The parcel contained a sleeveless shift of white silk with small leaves sewn in white satin thread around the hem and neckline, beaded with seed pearls. It was far too young, the aunt thought. Worse, the card from her sister specifically bade the girl wear the dress on her birthday because the mother had dreamed of her in it. The aunt thought this a ludicrous and even irresponsible thing to confide, but only admired the needlework in a lukewarm voice.

The girl fingered the dress, wondering what her mother had dreamed.

The box from her father contained roses. Not long-stemmed roses with tender pink buds, which the aunt would have deemed appropriate for a young girl, but a dense tangle of crimson buds nestled amongst dark green leaves, with stems that curled impossibly in on themselves and fairly bristled with thorns. The colour of them as well as their barbaric confusion confirmed the foolishness of her sister’s choice in a husband.

At first the roses seemed to have no scent, but that afternoon, when they returned from an exhibition at a gallery, the whole apartment was filled with their perfume.



The following morning, the aunt woke in fright from a dream in which she had been running naked through a forest of wild red roses, pursued by some sort of animal. Wrapped in a soft lace nightgown under chaste pink linen, she patted her plump belly and told herself she ought not to have drunk coffee so late in the evening. But when she opened her bedroom door, the smell of the roses was so powerful that she blamed them for her dreams. Panting, she broke her own rules and struggled to open some windows.

Later, as she set a dainty birthday breakfast table, she glanced from time to time with real loathing at the roses, which had opened during the night and now gaped in a way that struck her as frankly carnal. She nibbled at the haunch of a marzipan mouse as she set its companions on a small glass platter, consoling herself that at this rate the petals would be dropping by midday and the flowers could reasonably be disposed of by evening. Beheading the mouse with a neat, sharp bite, she thought of the pictures she had seen of her sister’s husband and reflected that she had always known there was something wrong with him. A doctor should look ascetic and have slender, white pianist’s fingers and soft, limp, blond hair, but the man was swarthy and his hands were as big and rough as those of a village butcher.

She shuddered to think of such hands on her body and wondered how her sister had borne it. She folded pale green napkins, and remembered her own birthday at this age. There had been an elegant party to which silver-edged invitations had gone out. She had worn lavender taffeta and a matching chiffon scarf in her hair, and she had met her guests with skin as pink and cool as ice-cream waiting to be licked. But the boy she had hoped would kiss her had gone to the garden to wait, and when she had been delayed, had embraced another girl instead. The aunt had come out into the moonlight in time to understand that her moment of romance had been stolen. It seemed to her now that there was an inexorable current flowing from that night to this apartment and this day, where she stood as virginal as the girl for whom she was sugaring pink grapefruit slices.

Her eyes misted at the thought of the life of connubial bliss that had passed her by, but then the stairs creaked and the girl appeared in a sea-green nightgown. The aunt could only gape, for the pale, dull girl had become a ravishing sylph with high, flushed cheekbones and heavy slumberous eyelids fringed in sooty black lashes that drooped over eyes so dark they appeared to be all pupil. Her lips were red and swollen, as if she had spent a night of bruising passion.

‘You . . . you look . . .’ the aunt began, then stopped in confusion.

‘I dreamed I was lost,’ the girl murmured, rubbing at her eyes with hands balled into childish fists.

Remembering her own dream, the aunt wondered if it was possible for a dream to have wrought this astonishing change. Then common sense prevailed and she told herself the girl had a fever, that was all. Illness produced such hectic beauty; she ought not to have opened the windows.

The girl was thinking about her dream in which she had run along a wind-scoured, sea-scented tunnel. She had glimpsed a white beast running ahead of her and had followed it until she had lost herself. She had come quite suddenly to a place where all of the metro tunnels converged in one huge, barrel-vaulted cavern with many entrances and exits and much graffiti. The cold ground had been clammy under her bare toes, the walls stained by seepage that oozed from cracks and congealed on the floor in overlapping circles of sulphur yellow and livid purple. The smell of the sea had been overpowering there, and then came a drumming as if the cavern were actually under the ocean.

The man with the black dog had been standing against one of the walls, playing a mournful saxophone pitted with green warts of verdigris. The girl had listened to his music from the other side of the cavern, wishing to respect the aunt’s fears, even in a dream.

She had felt a prod in the ribs, and found the pram woman behind her. The beggar woman gave a snort that could have been a sneeze or a laugh or something of both and scratched at wiry, fried-looking hair, asking, ‘You think you have come so far to obey the forbidding of a frightened aunt?’

The girl knew that she was dreaming, and that the woman and even the saxophone man knew everything she knew because they were all shapes worn by her own mind.

‘Dreams are passages,’ the old woman had gone on in the manner of one confiding a vital secret. ‘The right dreamer can travel anywhere in them.’

‘Can I go to the ocean?’ the girl had asked. Without warning the cavern plunged into darkness and the dream broke.



After D’lo had cleared the remnants of grapefruit, croissants and coffee, the aunt suggested they dress and go to hear a string trio in the afternoon as a treat. In the evening they had been invited to supper. She hoped the girl would choose one of her stylish new dresses, but obedient to her mother’s desire, she donned the white dress that had been sent. When the aunt saw her in it, she felt the blood rise to her cheeks, for far from making the girl look too young, the dress was so soft and pale and sinuous that it caressed and outlined every muscle and curve, giving the impression of nudity.

It might have been made for just such an unearthly transformation as had occurred in the night, the aunt thought with renewed unease.

The girl noticed the fullness of her lips and the heaviness of her eyes in the hall mirror as they left, and wondered if it meant that the bleeding that she had been warned of was about to begin. Certainly her body felt heavy with some fluid that undulated and lapped inside her. She was not afraid, although when her mother had spoken of it, she had made it clear that girls were expected to fear the blood, and what it heralded: womanhood and all of the pains of heart and soul and body that flesh was heir to. She had wondered if she would be afraid, for she knew she experienced the world differently from the woman and man who were her mother and father, and also from the other people she had encountered.

The thought came to her like a whisper that the raggedy people who prowled the dank metro corridors experienced the world differently too.



In the taxi that brought them to the theatre, the aunt gave her three small, beautifully wrapped packages. The first contained an antique bible with a leather cover and a tiny metal lock, which must be ornamental, for why would one lock a bible? The second held a slender silver torch attached to a key ring which the aunt suggested she use to locate the keyhole in the front door at night, since there was no external light. The last parcel contained a set of exquisite pearl combs which the girl was persuaded to push into her dark locks. It occurred to the aunt that, clad thus, the girl looked like a bride.

It was very hot outside, the culmination of a string of hot days, and a record for the month. They arrived at the concert hall early and stood outside to wait, for there was no air-conditioning in the foyer. The facades opposite looked bleached, and the asphalt gave off a hot black smell. Women around them stood wilting in expensive gowns, while their escorts fanned florid faces. The leaves of a caged tree hung motionless as the sky grew ever more mercilessly and perfectly blue. God might have had eyes that colour when he expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, the aunt thought dizzily, feeling her blood vibrate under her skin and hoping she would not faint.

She decided they should walk a little to escape the press. Around the corner, they came unexpectedly to a church and the aunt led the girl inside. The coolness beyond the arched stone doorway was so profound that she could have wept for the relief of it. They sat in the very last pew until the glimmering stars that had begun to wink before the aunt’s eyes had faded. Then she glanced sideways at the girl and wondered if she had not been drawn into the church for a reason. The girl had a dangerously potent look. The aunt uttered a silent prayer that she should be safe, while the girl sat immobile beside her. Of course she was a heathen, her sister having abandoned their religion, but in the eyes of the church it was better to be a heathen than a member of another church. The latter went to hell, while heathens and unbaptised babies went to the grey eternity of limbo.

The aunt didn’t believe in limbo anymore. Not exactly. But she didn’t disbelieve either. Her mind was not shaped for such decision-making. She had a nostalgic affection for the innocent rites of her childhood faith, and in old age would be able to draw her religion tightly back around her like a beloved shawl.

The girl liked the cold smell of the church, the cool tobacco-dark shadows striping pictures of dim, tortured saints and the faint humming of the stone under her feet. She liked the little banks of candles and the font of water and the smell of wood polish on the pews.

Finally the aunt touched her and motioned that they should go. If God existed, and the girl was in some sort of danger, perhaps He would see fit to intervene. The aunt could do no more.



The performance they had come to see was merely competent and afterwards the aunt said it was a shame but one could never be sure with violinists. Excellence was as likely as mediocrity. But it was a pity.

Neither had the girl enjoyed the performance, finding the music too consciously intricate. The violin had sounded to her like something begging to be free. She had a sudden profound longing to hear the disordered cadences of the waves and the yearning grew until it hurt the bones in her chest to keep it in. It was the first time in her life that she had consciously desired anything and she wondered if wanting was something that came with the bleeding.

Outside it was hotter than ever and the sun still shone, although it was now early evening.

The aunt wished she had arranged a taxi so they could go immediately and directly to her friend’s apartment. With the crowd swelling around them, there was no chance of hailing one, so they walked, searching for a telephone. The aunt’s eyes watered at the brightness of the sun and she flinched when sunlight flashed off an opening window and stabbed into her eyes.

The girl was thinking that the heat was a trapped beast prowling the streets with its great, wet, red tongue hanging out, gasping in the exhausted air. If someone did not let it out soon, it would go mad and tear everything to pieces.

At last they saw a passing taxi and the aunt hailed it gratefully. To her irritation, when they arrived at her friend’s home, he announced that it was too hot to stay in. He had organised for them to eat in a nearby café, but at least they were borne there in a car with air-conditioning. The friend was very like the aunt in his plump pinkness, although he was somewhat sharper in mind and manner. His eyes were a beautiful transparent aqua that reminded the girl of the sea on certain days when an unexpected beam of light penetrated a dark sky, and they settled on her avidly.

‘You did not say she was beautiful,’ he said.

The aunt was almost suffocated with all the replies she might have made, from the inappropriateness of giving impressionable young girls such notions, to the strangeness of the fact that she had not been beautiful until this morning. Fortunately a waiter chose that moment to lay a starched napkin in her lap, preventing any response.

‘This terrible heat,’ she said, when he had departed with their orders.

But her friend ignored the warning tone. Or perhaps he did not notice it, for he was still studying the girl. ‘It is interesting to think that with lips a little less full and eyes a tiny bit closer together, you would not be beautiful at all,’ he said. ‘Such a thin line between ugliness and beauty.’

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ the aunt said firmly. But her friend gave a laugh.

‘Yes, and inner beauty is more important than outer fairness. I know all of that and of course it’s true, but my dear, the child is exquisite, and her life will be shaped by that because, regardless of what people say, humans revere beauty. Something in us is thrilled by it. Aren’t you thrilled by her?’

The aunt glanced involuntarily at the girl and thought that she was more frightened by her impossible radiance, which surely had grown since the morning.

‘We who are not and never have been beautiful must be a little envious as well,’ the friend went on. ‘Few are pure enough to simply worship at the altar of beauty. For the rest of us, there is some cruelty in our makeup that makes us want to shred and smash it even as we adore it. Which is why it is dangerous to be too beautiful.’

The aunt made a business of buttering a roll for herself and offered one to the girl, but her friend would not be diverted. ‘You were very pretty and your sister was what one would call handsome,’ he said pensively. ‘But this girl surpasses all of those lesser forms. Is your father very beautiful?’ he asked her directly.

The girl thought a little and then said composedly, ‘He is very clever and when he is thinking about his work, he is sometimes beautiful.’

He laughed aloud in delight. ‘What a sophisticate! My dear, you must be so pleased.’

This to the aunt who did not know what she was supposed to be pleased about. A certain vexation began to show in the wrinkles rimming her eyes. ‘How is your salad, dear?’ she asked the girl determinedly.



Over dessert, the friend clutched at his chest and made a strangled noise. The aunt knew he had a heart condition and cried out for the waiter to summon the friend’s driver. She did not call an ambulance, knowing that he thought them vulgar, and in any case they were notoriously slow. Waiting, she massaged her friend’s wrists and temples and was sorry to have been angry with him. After all, it was true that the girl had by now become almost unbearably exquisite. She noticed that two storm clouds shaped like long-fingered hands were reaching out towards one another, closing the blue sky in a black grip. She had never seen such a thing and, fearing it was an ill omen for her friend, she thrust some notes into the girl’s hand and bade her catch a taxi home.

‘I may be some time,’ she said, climbing into the black car after the friend. Only as the car pulled away and she glanced back, did the aunt see that the dark hands were clasping directly behind the girl, as if the sky itself would pray for her, or crush her. It was too late to stop the car, and she would have been a fool to do so, for of course it was an absurd fancy.

She turned with relief to wipe the brow of her ailing friend.



The girl watched the car until it was out of sight, then she looked around for a taxi. There was none to be seen and the waiter had gone back into the restaurant. She decided to walk until she saw one, since there was no need for haste. No one was expecting her. She walked three blocks, then five. Thirsty, she stopped to have an orange pressé in an outdoor café. Nearby were two young men talking and smoking; one was half lying on his seat and the other was staring into the froth of his beer. An older woman in a red dress batted at the grey ribbons of their smoke winding around her.

The girl felt no desire to talk to anyone. She thought she could find her way back to her aunt’s apartment if she only had the river to guide her. She enquired of the waiter, who pointed the way, and set off, trying to imagine how it would be to marry one of the young men in the restaurant and let him hold her. She found it impossible to contemplate. Yet if one did not join with a man, what else was there? The sort of life her aunt led, with its overstuffed cushions, restaurants, the theatre with friends. Neither appealed, but what else was there? Her body seemed to ache, as if it understood its purpose better than she did, and yet all the uses to which it might be put felt wrong. In that moment her longing for the sound and scent of the sea returned with such intensity she felt nauseous and she wished that one could be taken as easily into the arms of the sea as the arms of a man.

Thunder grumbled and she looked up to find the sky filled with surly cloud. A storm had been brewing overhead and she had not noticed. Oddly, the heat had grown more fierce, as though compressed by the dense cloud cover. Thunder rumbled again and even as she remembered the beggar woman’s soup, soured by the storm, she saw the open mouth of a metro station at the end of a long narrow street. As she drew closer, she could smell the black skin of the river that glimmered darkly beyond it. There was no illumination at the entrance to the metro, but a light glowed from somewhere deeper down. She entered the station and heard the hum of the escalators. She used the sound to guide her to them and descended. The light increased until she could see the advertisements in their slanted billboards. There were no other people going down or up, and the girl supposed she had chanced on a still moment between the surges of the crowd, for it was still quite early. The aunt’s warnings about going into the metro when there were too few people rose in her mind and then faded like one of the unintelligible posters.

The escalator was longer than those she had been on before and she wondered if this particular tunnel was some sort of natural fissure that had been incorporated into the metro web. She thought of Persephone, who had made a bargain to live six months of each year beneath the earth, and wondered how she had felt as she travelled downwards, knowing she would not see the sky or the sun for another six months, and that this was the price she paid for tasting forbidden fruit. Without warning, the metro wind blew and the girl breathed in the briny coolness of it, wondering if it were possible that a dark ocean lay at the heart of the world.

Finally she reached the bottom, and there in an archway stood the man with the greenish-gold saxophone. She was startled to see him, but no doubt he moved about between the stations. He played a long note that strove upwards at the end, then he laid his instrument in its open case, pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and a lighter from his pocket. The flame gave his features a reddish cast as he lit it and took a deep breath, eyes half closed.

As she passed him by, some impulse made the girl fish for a coin to throw into his case. Only then did his eyes open a slit and rest momentarily on her. They were the dull sheeny colour of his saxophone. The platform beyond the arch was empty and she thought of the disused stations her aunt had mentioned. Then a man in a sleeveless singlet stepped through another of the arches. He came towards her brandishing a deformed arm that ended at the wrist and the girl wondered if he wanted money. She had a few coins in her pocket, but the man did not hold out his hand.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Salvation . . .’ the man said so softly she might have misheard, but he withdrew back into the shadows before she could ask him to repeat himself.

The aunt had said many troubled souls gravitated to the metro at night, trying to evade the police who would come to herd them out. One could imagine they might know the maze beneath the city better than the police, and when all of the metro doors to the outside were secured, they would creep out of their hiding places, knowing that they need fear no one except others like themselves.

She thought of the beggar woman with the pram, wondering if the enormous pot of soup had been intended to feed the metro dwellers. She seemed to see her for a moment, wheeling her pram along the platform, a gypsy woman shuffling alongside her in disintegrating slippers, clutching a baby to her chest. The old woman glanced straight at the girl with a level, questioning look which seemed to ask, ‘What are you searching for?’

The girl closed her eyes and when she opened them, there was no sign of the two women or the baby, but sitting at the edge of the platform was the black dog that she had seen before with the saxophone man. The dog turned its head to watch her approach, and gave its black tail a single flick that might or might not have been a welcome.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked it softly, not smiling.

The metro wind gusted again and this time it smelled of the storm which must be breaking in the city overhead. The girl’s hair flew forward in twin black flags and she turned her face in time to watch a train punch from the tunnel and howl past the platform. The girl glimpsed the driver looking out, his mouth opened in an O of surprise. Then she turned back to the dog, but it had gone. Before she could make anything of this, the metro train had passed without stopping, taking all of the light with it and leaving the girl standing in inky blackness. She did not move, thinking the lights would come back on, but the dark remained, settling like a dust cloth thrown over a couch.

Reaching into her pocket, the girl found the key ring with its slender torch which the aunt had given her. A narrow pencil beam of light sliced the blackness. It was too thin to be useful in such massive darkness. Without knowing why, she turned it on herself, saw the hem of her birthday dress, its winking beads and pale sequins, and wondered if Persephone had been forced to dwell six months in total darkness, or had been allowed a candle.

Turning the light away from her again, she played the narrow beam carefully back and forth to find the archway that would lead her to the escalator. She could no longer hear its asthmatic hum but it might have gone off when the lights went out. She must have gone further along the platform than she had realised, for she could not find the archway openings. She was about to turn when the light illuminated a ghostly white sign. She walked towards it, hearing how her footsteps echoed. There was an illegible word written on it, but the arrow beneath directed her clearly and authoritatively onward. Thinking there must be another part of the platform or perhaps steps that would bring her outside, she set off more briskly. The way narrowed suddenly, and seeing the graffitied wall on one side and the drop to the rails on the other, she understood that she was making her way along one of the narrow ledges that ran inside the metro tunnels.

She stopped, remembering her aunt’s warning, and in the silence heard muffled laughter or screams or crying, which her footsteps must have concealed before. She felt cold and wondered if that was fear. She listened again and thought there was not one voice but a babble of them coming from behind her. She turned to face the voices and the metro wind blew so hard she rocked on her feet.

Another train? She glanced back, but turned again because now she could hear a tremendous clattering as if a herd of cows or goats were being driven along the tunnel. But the cacophony resolved into the hoof beats of a single beast, with a loud accompaniment of echoes. Something appeared in the torch beam which could not be contained or encompassed by it. The only certainties were a massive whiteness and a black eye rolling in terror. The girl staggered back against the wall and something huge passed her so closely that she felt the roughness of its pelt on her cheek and the damp heat of its fear.

A horse, she told herself, hearing it gallop away towards the platform. Or maybe a bull, but bigger than any bull or horse she had ever seen. Impossibly big. How had it come down here?

The voices were louder and now she could make out shouting and laugher and grunts and cries and shrieks and even what seemed to be discordant snatches of song. Instinctively she switched off the torch and let them come, pressing herself to the wall. In the light of dull lanterns that barely lit their faces, let alone the way ahead, she saw men and women, ragged and degenerate and shambling, some so hirsute and hunched over that they looked like beasts. As they clamoured along the passage in a narrowing stream, she thought she saw the gypsy woman she had imagined earlier pass by, her mouth open in a soundless scream. Last of all came the saxophone man carrying a great loop of rope over one shoulder and only then did it occur to her that the motley crowd were a hunting party, and the white beast that had thundered by her their quarry.

When they had passed and the noise had faded, the girl flicked on her torch and shone it after them. Her heart leapt into her throat, for there, looming in its thin stream, was the wild tormented eye of the white beast. Somehow it had evaded the rabble and doubled back. It was trembling and she sensed it was about to plunge away from her into the darkness, perhaps onto the rails below.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

The beast shifted uneasily but stayed as she moved closer with the torch. Its thin beam illuminated an ear pricked forward and, fleetingly, something shining and sharp. She reached out with her free hand and laid it on the coarse white coat. Powerful muscles rippled under her palm as the beast gathered itself to leap away or perhaps trample her to death. Then all at once, it became still and the violence of its terror faded.

‘Come,’ the girl said, and it went with her. Now that she walked by its head, she could see it was definitely a horse, but its head was deformed. For the first time she wondered if it actually belonged to the metro denizens. It was no less a freak than they, for all its strange beauty. Perhaps she had been mistaken and they were not hunting it but trying to catch their pet. Hadn’t there been a tender yearning in the eyes of the saxophone man? Even so, why should the poor beast be kept in the blackness of the metro tunnels?

Her thoughts galloped ahead and she began to run lightly to keep up with them. The beast kept pace so beautifully that it was as if they merged into one animal. The sensation was unlike anything she had ever experienced. Waves of pleasure shuddered through her, and as they ran, her hand on its hot neck, she understood that this was the thing she had sought through all the dreams and all the tunnels, this running, the hot hide under the whorls of her fingertips.

When at last they reached the platform again, she forced herself to stop so that she could look for the arches with her torch. The beast nuzzled her neck tenderly, seeming to draw her smell in, and she shivered with pleasure at the intimate touch of its nostrils on her bare skin. Then she heard the distant clamour of the hunt, if hunt it was. Instinctively she turned to the beast and bade it run, but though it shivered, it would not go. Its eyes pleaded with her. She made herself push it away roughly. It was like trying to push a mountain. She could smell the salt of its sweat.

‘I can’t protect you from them!’ she cried to it. ‘Run, can’t you?’

But it stayed. It rested its head on her shoulder and leaned against her. The weight of the massive head forced her legs to buckle slowly, and when she had settled on the ground, the beast knelt and laid its lovely deformed head on her knees.

‘Oh you poor thing, you must go,’ she murmured helplessly, shining the torch down onto it, but the violet sadness of its eyes asked only where it should go, and there was no answer to that.

Then it was too late. There was a great hullaballoo of triumph and the ragged men and women with dirt-streaked faces and crazed eyes were capering around them in the darkness, crowing with glee as they caught hold of the great white beast by its mane and tail and ears. A dozen filthy pairs of hands bore it away and brushed the girl aside without seeming to notice her when she tried to hold onto it. Or so it seemed, until one of the men, a great hulking hunchback with an ash-brown beard, looked over his shoulder at her and said with rough gentleness: ‘You found it.’

‘Will you take it out of here?’ she said.

‘Up there?’ the man asked, jerking his chin up contemptuously. ‘There is no place for its like up there, girl.’

She stood boneless and will-less, as they surged away and were swallowed by the dark, knowing she had stayed the beast for the crowd. Without her, they never would have caught it. Exhaustion deep as a mineshaft opened within her. A surge of the metro wind wrested the torch from her fingers. It rolled away and came to rest against the wall beside a tunnel, its beam reduced to a flickering golden egg. As the girl retrieved it, the wind blew again, gently, a mere sigh, cool and damp with the smell of the sea. She did not know what to do, but it seemed to her that she could not go back up to the city and her aunt. There was no place for creatures such as her there, either. She began to walk in the direction in which the ragged people had taken the beast, uncaring that she did not know where they were going.

The torch light gave a sepia spasm and she was again in darkness. She lifted her hand, groped for the wall, and continued on. She did not know how long she had walked except that her feet hurt. She knew she must be on one of the ledge paths again, and thought she would sit down and rest, but the salt-strong smell of the sea drew her on. The ground under her feet began to slope down and she wondered again if, deeper than the metro, there was a sea, awaiting her. If she could find her way to it, she would surely find the beast and the ragged metro people. Perhaps they had a camp of some kind and she could stay with them and help tend the beast. If it lives, whispered her heart, and oh, she knew what fear was then. There was no mistaking it.



She was still walking an hour later, or perhaps years later. In the darkness, time had become elastic and then liquid. Memories floated around her of the wind and the sea and of her solitary childhood, the way her parents had touched her so rarely. She had never wondered at this, but now it came to her that they had been afraid to touch her.

Ahead she saw a blue light and then the tunnel spilled her into what must be an immense cavern filled with ghostly phosphorescence, but if it was a cavern, then it was big enough that she could not see the walls or roof of it. She walked across pallid sand, cold and soft as powder under her feet, which the blue light turned aquamarine. Beyond it a sea stretched away and away to an invisible horizon. She walked to the edge of it and heard how the waves hissed as they unrolled at her feet. Some distance away, the narrow beach jutted out in a long pale finger, and at the very tip, through a dark jostle of people, she saw the red flare of fire. Beyond them or in their midst stood the white beast, swaying slightly to and fro, its milky coat stained red and pink by the firelight.

Stumbling with relief, she made her way along the beach and out onto the peninsula. When she was close enough to hear the fire crackling, she stopped, for the saxophone man held a knife and so did several others. They wielded them as they danced and the dance was full of stabbing and slashing.

‘No,’ she choked. ‘No!’

‘There is nothing else for it,’ said a voice and she turned to find the old beggar woman by her side. Her hair shone white in the ghostly light as she went on gently in her cracked voice, ‘The beasts come but they cannot stay here in the darkness and they cannot live up there. To let them go running and running in the darkness until they are blinded, until they starve or founder and fall prey to the rats would be too cruel.’

‘What is it?’ whispered the girl, numb with dread. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘From dreams, like all of the others,’ said the woman. ‘They are the shape of our yearning.’

‘Why do they come? What do they want?’ The girl felt thin and insubstantial, as if she were a dream.

‘To be taken in,’ said the woman. ‘To be known. To be free of those who dreamed them. We let each of them run for as long as we can bear their desperation, and then we hunt and end them. Out of love and mercy. Join us. We saw at once that you were one of us.’

‘Is there no way to save this one?’ asked the girl.

The old woman looked at her then, squinting as if to see her better, and her eyes widened. ‘For most of us, there is no way. But for one who is pure and empty, an unused vessel, there may be a way. If you have the courage for it.’

The girl did not understand what the woman was saying. The wild, deadly dance was coming to a crescendo, and through the faltering movements of the capering figures she saw the beast, white and trembling, foam about its lips and nostrils.

‘Tell me,’ she said, her heart yearning and yearning towards the beast, till she thought she would die of longing. She was astonished to find she was weeping, for she had never wept before.

The old beggar woman took her cold fingers and squeezed them to draw her eyes from the beast. ‘You must go to it and claim it. But there is no going back once you begin.’ The girl nodded, and the woman reached into a battered bag and drew out a garland of dried red roses, regarding it with wonder. ‘I have carried this for long, long years, ever since I came here as a girl. I had not the courage to wear it, but I could not bear to throw it away.’ She set it upon the girl’s head. ‘Do not baulk or flinch or cry out when you face the beast,’ she said. ‘Only courage will avail you.’

The scent of the ancient roses was very strong. The girl thought of the flowers sent by her father, his frowning concentration and big bony wrists as he laid the sheaf of roses in their box.

She thought of her mother, packing the white dress in layers of fine tissue, singing softly in a darkened room. She pitied them and marvelled at their love for her, despite their frailty, their short, short lives.

The dance ended.

‘Go,’ the old woman cried. ‘Before it is too late.’

The girl moved towards the tattered men and women, who stood panting and sweating and gasping from their exertions. But they drew back and fell silent when she came among them, white as a votive candle in their midst.

‘You are mine,’ she told the beast.

Hearing the words, it ceased to sway and its gaze fixed upon her. Its eyes glowed like hot coals in the firelight, fierce and terrible and beautiful. They looked through skin and bone and into her essence. Moving closer, she saw herself reflected infinitely in its eyes; the short life that had been and all that might be and her death as well. She did not turn away from it, because she would never see its like again. Whatever it cost to see it, and to save it, she would pay.

She realised it was waiting and that words alone were not enough. She stopped and opened her arms, and at last it came to her. It lowered its head, it pierced her through, white dress, white flesh, red heart. The pain was immense, monstrous, impossible. But she did not scream. She clenched her teeth and closed her arms about the beast’s head, embracing it, holding herself up by it as her life and strength flowed away. The world dimmed to grey and she dropped to her knees. The air was full of the smell of blood. Then flames leapt and churned in the air as the beast began to pour itself into her. It burned to take the beast in, for she was only flesh. Then she felt the hot red gush of blood within and without, for she could not contain him. Her back split and blood fountained out, but that scarlet gush was not wet and it was not blood. She was on the ground on her hands and knees, gasping and rocking with the pain.

The old beggar woman knelt before her in the sand, seamed and withered face shining. There was wonder and terror in her eyes. She reached out to touch the girl’s cheek with papery reverent hands.

The saxophone man and the hunchback stood either side of her. They lifted her to her feet, grunting with the effort. Miraculously the blood had ceased to pour from her chest and the skin was smooth and unbroken, though the torn bodice of the dress was drenched and crimson. But there was a dragging heaviness at her back as they released her and bowed. She staggered under an unfamiliar weight as a great softness moved and unfolded behind her. She craned her neck to look over her shoulder and saw what knowledge of the beast had done to her. Wings emerged from the shreds of cloth. Not white but red as the dawn sun, red as fire, red as a beating heart.

‘I am changed,’ she said.

‘How could you not be?’ asked the beggar woman. ‘There have been others, it is said, who claimed one of the horned beasts, but never did I see it. Never did I speak to anyone who saw such a one. Rare and rare they are. You are.’

‘Where did the others go?’ asked the girl who was no longer a girl.

‘Up,’ said the gypsy. ‘Out into the world to fly fearless in the sunlight. Alone and complete.’

The girl who was no longer a girl smiled at the beggar woman and at the other poor, dim, ragged people gazing at her, and they lifted their hands before their eyes and reeled back. Knowing she would blind them if she stayed, she spread her wings and the metro wind rose to carry her up and up and out into the dark world where she would haunt the dreams of the fearful, stir secret wings in the hearts of poets, sing lullabies to the dying and reveal herself to those who dared to see her.