It was the start of the Summer. We were on Quai Henri IV, and there was no one else around. He showed me this. We sat there for a really long time without saying anything. I started crying. I think he might have been crying too, but I didn’t look. He had his sunglasses on.
He left without saying goodbye, and I went back to work. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know where he goes. I hardly ever see him anymore. We have lunch sometimes. He’s often distracted and absent. I don’t know what to talk to him about these days. Never used to be a problem.
He prised up this paving-stone long ago, and launched it at the Forces of Order.
Sous les pavés, la plage … Under these cobbled streets, the lone and level sands stretch, far away.
On the barricades, it was one of their slogans. The streets were paved with stone, and underneath was liberty and lust. So they prised up the paving-stones, and they used them as weapons against the Forces of Order. Bottles of Fire, Philosopher’s Stones. They threw a stone in the still water of the pond: jeter un pavé à la mare: to set the cat among the pigeons, to rock the boat, to be the fly in the ointment.
This is what we used to do, together; this was the whole point of Us.
Now what?
If you’re lucky, there comes a moment in your life when you ask yourself the most important question of all:
“If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”
For most people, this is an invitation to fantasy, to daydream. Everyone has an answer. Often elaborately worked out. “I would score the winning goal in the World Cup”, “I would become an astronaut”, “I would go and rob banks”, “I would stand up for myself”, “I would quit my job and go travelling”, “I would go and live in New York”, “I would give it all up and go live in the Woods”, “I would run away with the circus”, “I would run away with the gypsies”, “I would run away to sea” … These were the daydreams of our youth. But they weren’t things that could happen. They were daydreams. A momentary distraction. They kept us going; they kept us docile. But they were pretty, and precious, and we hid them away. We took them out sometimes to admire them, and share them with our friends. We wrapped them in silk, and kept them in a drawer. We treasured them. They were enough.
Over the years, it seems, the dream-life of our generation has decayed. Often, now, the answer is “I would be a celebrity”. Not by doing anything, you understand: just by being. Too late, too late. We’re already living the dream. All of us, 24 hour rolling news coverage; hair and make-up, mise en scène, tabloid following, indiscreet snaps, exposé, sex scandal, nipple-slip, “what are you working on?”, permanent publicity tour … overdose, rehab, “where are they now?” … homeless, crippled, dead … That is everyone’s story now; everyone is special. Everyone is fabulous. Everything is awesome.
But that’s not the point. The real point is this, my pretties:
You have to ask the follow-up question. “If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?” is a hypothetical. The necessary follow-up is:
“And what the fuck is stopping you?”
This is the one that throws a prised-up cobblestone into the still pond of your life. This is the one that has to be hurled at the Forces of Order. This is the one underneath which you find the Beach. Sometimes, you can pose the question yourself. But that requires an effort of will and self-awareness that few of us can manage. Talking to yourself coherently is hard enough: asking yourself an existential question is beyond most of us, most of the time. So yes, he asked me the question. But I had asked him first. He never forgot that.
I was twenty-one years old. I had just finished university. I had no plans (except the vague “become a celebrity” that everyone my age has had inserted like an alien-abduction implant). I was more or less totally aimless. I had barely scraped through with a degree. I hadn’t applied for anything else. I was a singer in a punk band. And, most of the time, I worked in Bella Pasta on the Royal Mile. Every summer, I would go back there, and they would take me back, grudgingly. They had tried to make me a manager the summer before, as I’d been working there on and off since I was fifteen, and then they had rescinded their offer, because I was so terrible. I was a bad manager, a bad waitress, a bad bus-girl (?), a bad dish-washer. This made me pretty fucking cool, I thought. I just didn’t care. Viva la Révolucion. I would do split-shifts during the Fringe Festival, and spend the hours between lunch and dinner wandering among the weirdos papering their shows, watching the little acts of random street theatre that would happen when a bunch of students from Down South would burst into a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque show-tune, or something equally effete, and then an honest to goodness Edinburgh Tramp would go and get stuck in; sometimes they’d join in the singing, despite not knowing the words or tune; sometimes they’d start haranguing the theatre company or the crowd; once I saw a John the Baptist Junkie with a bottle of Buckfast and an infested duffle-coat push his way into the middle of whatever interpretive dance shite was going on and fucking deliver all of Macbeth’s soliloquies from the last act of the play. Christ if you’ve never heard “Out Out Brief Candle” in a really raw and gravelly Edinburgh accent from a filthy prophet on the Royal Mile, you have nae really lived, buddy. The English am-dram students were nonplussed, but had the decency to stop what they were doing and listen. I hope it made them question their life choices.
So at night, real late, we’d play gigs in whatever dive would have us. We knew that it was only a matter of time. We were going to get spotted, and the Hand of God would descend and lift us up. You know. The basic fantasy of all of the Western Tradition: if you are good enough, you will be chosen; those who believe as we do are the Elect; Some Day My Prince Will Come: the Rapture. All of us, forever, waiting to be Chosen. Like day-labourers in a pen, like slaves on the block, like whores in the procession, like hors d’oeuvres on a menu, like mug-shots in a line-up. At the time, it was already getting totally pathological and overt. It was now the narrative of all television: choose me, I’ve dreamed the hardest, wanted it the most; choose me, take me away from all this. Bring me to the Promised Land of Fame and Fortune. Elevate me above the unwatched masses.
I had no idea how much worse it was going to get; when I was twenty-one, smartphones were just about to happen. Social media was just about to explode and atomise the whole process. Everyone a constant reality TV show. Everyone a model/actor/brand-endorser/designer/ advertiser/manager. Everyone a writer, for fucksake. They used to say everyone had one book in them. I wish the fuckers had stayed put instead of splurging out all over mah fuckin phone. Keep yer book inside ya, pal. It’s where it belongs. With the daydreams. I wish you had to apply for an artistic licence. I wish they would shut the fuck up.
Everyone everyone’s own Latest Project. Everyone everyone’s competitor and consumer. Everyone a Product. O Consummation Devoutly to be Wished! It’s beautiful. It’s the Apotheosis. It’s the Rapture, finally here. And we’re all missing it, because all we can see is the Feed we’re plunging into our last few viable veins, over and over. The daydream is projected constantly on the screen. It is no longer precious. It is no longer secret, or treasured. No, it is a simulacrum, it is a tranquiliser, it is a drip-feed, it is our methadone. We have never tasted the real thing, and yet we hook ourselves on the ersatz version. We carry it in our pocket. We take a hit whenever we start twitching. We don’t wonder what we would do if we could do anything anymore. We wonder how to monetize pretending it’s already true. We wonder how to keep feeding the Machine, and how to keep the Feed flowing. We’re on life support. We don’t wonder at all. We don’t need to. It’s all there for you. And either you’re a whore, and you cash in, or you’re a windowlicker, furiously wanking while you watch the Carnival go by behind the glass and leave you behind.
If you stop and look around for a minute, we’re living the dream: Every Man and Every Woman is a Star. We are star-stuff … star dust … dust to dust, ashes to ashes … funky to funky … We know Major Tom’s a Junkie … Ladies and Gentlemen, we are floating in space.
Because this was still back when I was twenty-one. It hadn’t hit critical velocity/terminal mass yet. We still believed that we’d receive a Messenger, and that He would tell us we’d been Chosen. And, like for all good dreamers, this would happen in a sort of erotic, languid vision; we wouldn’t have to do anything: He’d come, the Angel of the Annunciation, time would appear to slow down, we’d be on the pedestal just doing our thing, as we always did, being beautiful and pure and young, and He’d be there in the crowd, and we’d see the way He looked at us, as he started coming towards us. Find someone who looks at you the way Gabriel looks at the Virgin. That is the hottest fucking thing I can possibly imagine. “Hey Girl … God wants to fuck you. You want to be a Star?” That’s the fantasy, isn’t it? It’s always been the fantasy. They implanted this one deep in our Unconscious, so that they could activate it whenever they wanted to. Nice work if you can get it. How strange, that now we’ve finally realised it. Me too, me too, me too …
In the Summer, that far North, there is hardly any night. At midnight, the sky is a deep, velvet blue, and it stays that way for about three or four hours, then starts to lighten again. After our shifts in bars and chain restaurants, after our shifts as ushers in shitty little Fringe venues that were made by converting tiny backrooms to gouge some rent out of Southern Theatre Troupes. After maybe spending an hour in an all-night internet café writing to friends from Uni who we would probably never see again, telling them all about our pathetic fucking hopes and dreams. After all of that, the sky was still not fully dark. We’d play catch up, necking vodka from the naggins we had hidden in our crotches where the bouncer wouldn’t frisk us. We’d go into one heaving Garden of Earthly Delights where the lights were strobing and the sweat was dripping off the inner walls, and we’d race each other up five floors, each one with a different theme, each one more debauched and wild than the last. And then, at the top, there was a Gentlemen’s Club with leather couches and a barman with braces mixing cocktails, with a twinkle in his eye for the ladies, his gimlet eye, his Singapore Arm in a Sling, his balls skewered on cocktail sticks in a Dirty Martini. We’d never buy our own of course, and then we’d baffle the shite out of the poor sap who’d bought us the drinks by saying we were going for a cigarette and flying out into the twilit sky like witches (he’d eventually figure out that five floors up we were still at street level, but it took a while. Edinburgh, eh?)
It was on a night like this that he came to me again.
I’d been dreaming about him for years. People still used to write to each other in those days, or at least, he did. He would send me his cryptic postcards from the Edges of the Known World, occasionally a wedge of pages stuffed in an envelope made of newspaper or calfskin, covered in his close, spidery black scrawl. There were sometimes diagrams. He’d been my Guardian Angel, my Imaginary Friend, since the very first time. Oh, nobody ever forgets their first time! It was in another cellar, I wasn’t supposed to be there, it was past my bedtime, she was staying at my place and I at hers. Our skirts were short, our hair was straggly, we had slashes of red lipstick in wee pale little faces. I saw him light a cigarette, and in the flare, a darkblond curl fell in front of his face, just so, his hollow delicately-stubbled cheeks. I grasped Isobel’s wrist and nodded my head towards him. She whirled me round and made big eyes at me, daring me, daring me. This was what we were all about: we were always asking each other The Question: “What would you do? Do you dare?”; it’s the same question, isn’t it? Isobel and I were ghostly little sisters, haunting the underage-drinking underground, stravaigin’ faithless wee hizzies. I whirled towards him, and whipped the cigarette out of his mouth; I took a deep draught, blew the smoke in his face, and then delicately inserted it between his lips again. To his credit, he remained admirably unphased. I attached myself to him, and we were inseparable all night. I made him bring me back to the party in the place he was staying with a dozen other actors in a three-bed apartment in Bread Street right across from The Burke and Hare strip club. Was there ever a better name? Fleshmarket. Bodysnatchers. To his credit, he didn’t try it on when I told him how old I really was. In any case, though my skirt was way too short, I was wearing the thick and midnight black woollen tights, the granny-pants, the steel-toe-capped Doc Martens. Aye, they’ll get you right enough, but make them work for it! I knew what I was about, or liked to think so. He tucked us up in bed together, Isobel and me, boots still on. He sat in the window smoking and drinking tea while we slept. In the morning, the light fell just so behind him, dust and fag ash spiralling, his golden curls a halo. I woke and sat up, head hammering, throat raw, and saw him and fucking wept. He was the most beautiful fucking thing I had ever seen.
And for a few years, he came back every Summer, when the nights were short and twilit.
One year, for it was time, one year, I asked him the Question. I took his hands in mine beside the jukebox in a bar called Fadó, under a bridge, where we had once met Morrissey’s guitarist, from the solo stuff, and I looked him full in the eyes and I bit my artfully trembling lip, and I said to him: “What would you do if you could do anything in the world right now?” and he looked at me and there was only one possible answer and we leaned our heads in and our foreheads touched, and I whispered “What the fuck is stopping you, you daft cunt?”, and that’s when our lips met, met halfway. And I took him back to my parents’ house, and I took him into my bed and he got grilled by my Ma and Da over breakfast. You thought that was just Trainspotting? Maybe it’s an Edinburgh thing. The aul folks like to know where their bairns are layin their heids. No matter if there’s an Irish vagabond snuggled up with their darlin wee lassie. Make him a fried egg and ask him what he thinks of Scottish Independence. Tell him it was nice to meet him. I love mah folks.
But then he disappeared. He didn’t come back. Something had gone wrong, somewhere. He was on the lam, he was a wanted man, he was persona non grata. Whatever it was. He didn’t come with the theatre company the next year. And the year after that they didn’t come at all. And I had started the band, and I had my dreams, I wrapped myself in them, I trod softly, wearing big boots. And I would read his letters over and over, and try to chart how far off the Edge he’d gone, and if he could ever come back again. I would write to him, but I don’t know how many of my letters ever reached him. His addresses were like Hollow Trees in graveyards. He might pass that way again, but who knew how, who knew when?
He wrote to me in ever widening spirals (turning and turning, widening gyre): London, Paris, Amsterdam; Quimper, Jórvik, Cruachán; Aarhus, Zurich, Trieste, Monserrat, Grenada, Lisboa, Pamplona; deosil then widdershins, outwards and outwards, attempting to reach escape velocity (Svalbard. Reykjavik. Marrakesh. Eritrea. Ramallah.)
His writing was wild and full of esoteric theory. I gobbled it up, I drank it down, I learned his poems off by heart, and sang them as incantations to the Moon. Oh my Lost Boy. Oh my Herald Angel of Apocalypse. Oh my 5am Saint. I kept the writings, sure that they’d one day be sacred texts. I bound them into leather covers, tooled with gorgeous spiral patterns. Holy Writ. In the Beginning Was the Word. I was his Book-Keeper. I was his Imaginary Friend. Dear Ailsa, he’d say, Dear Diary-Keeper, Dear Secret-Sharer. I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.
I talked about him, and people didn’t believe me; I began to wonder if I’d only dreamed him. He had long scars down his shoulder-blades, where they’d amputated his wings. When he came, it was cold as ice, and I couldn’t stop shivering for hours. He was the Master of the Revels, the Lord of Misrule. He DJed at the Witches’ Rave. He led us through the streets piping a merry jig, and all the little street-rats followed. And then, like that, he was gone.
Until that night, twenty-one years old, already running out of time, out of options. I was thin as a rail, taut as a whip; one of his sigils was inked in black on my ribcage, and my hair was wires of copper and flame that flowed down my back like a comet’s trail. My clothes were made of rips and straps, in every shade of black. That night I wore my grandmother’s ermine until the sweat ran in runnels down my temples, flooded my back, and I held up my arms in cruciform, and flung it to the ground, and my vest underneath stuck to my narrow body and you could see my nipple-rings through it. My big boots crushed my enemies. My eyes were painted like unto death’s head moths. My mouth was a bloody slash, opened in a never-ending scream. Under the lights, up on the stage, I howled. The guitars on either side of me roared and stabbed, duelling. The drums hammered at the doors of perception. We were on fire. We named our band after him, my Imaginary Friend, my Muse, my Angel. They named the beer after our band. 5am Saint. Mead from Valhalla. I swept down among them, and gathered the souls of the slain.
Fuck me but that was a Power. And then, in a lull, between the assaults, the strobes raked the crowd of surging, stuttering flesh, and I saw Him come. Down the steps into the pit, hit by a spotlight that swept across, caught in a tableau like a Horned God in the headlights: Doré, Lucifer Descending.
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
Those were the words that sang along my veins just then, I had learned them off by heart, of course. Still he came, and his shirt was open to the navel and blinding white, and he wore a long leather coat. He looked like a total fuckin bawbag, as I told him later as we lay together in the wreckage of the sheets of a four-poster bed in a haunted hotel just off the Meadows. I told him that as I licked sweat off his chest. I told him that as I traced his sigils up his inner forearms, drawing them with my nails, spelling runes upon his skin. I told him those lines, again, and whispered in his ear, real close, “bottomless perdition … adamantine chains … penal fire”. That made him hard again.
In the vaulted underworld pit, he sashayed down like a showgirl in a big production number, as the figurants swayed around him, and I lost my place. The song went on without me. They all stopped one by one. Isobel, for it was she, who cradled her bass like a sexy Jesus in a Pièta, she saw him too. She was the only one who’d ever seen him too. Her eyes went wide, just like the first time, her great big buggy eyes in their pools of black, and she gave me the Look. “What would you do? Do you dare?” And then she kicked the band back into life, shouted something at Fancy Dan, and he whipped out the opening riff of the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man”, and I did it in a trance, and I pointed at him with both arms held out, and invited him in, invoked him to apparition. He had conjured a Jack and Coke and a Benson and Hedges out of the air, and he was lying back languorous on a velvet couch surrounded by seething harpies with long pale arms. Homme fatale. Angel of the Annunciation. Total fucking wanker.
We walked back together in the gloaming, through the Meadows bulging with the plague-dead, fertilizing that green green grass. Along the slanted paths, under the isolated lampposts, under the golden boughs of reaching trees against the deep blue velvet sky, we walked with our bodies trying to melt into each other and our arms snaking around, our hands wandering. At one point we had to stop at a bench and I pushed him down and climbed astride him like he was a broomstick, and I writhed upon him like I was trying to get the flying ointment to where it counts. Benighted travellers went past us, pretending not to see. I think we might have been invisible. Our mouths drank each other deep. His spit tasted like honey: like shitty bourbon and too-sweet cola. That’s what we have for honey, nowadays. That’s what have for mead. God Bless America. He tasted like Manifest Destiny rotting from the inside.
He got me back to his hotel, by which point my legs were quivering out from under me and I trembled in my fur coat, my makeup smeared all over my face like I was blurring out of focus. My cunt was weeping fire for him. In the lift on the way up to the room, I saw myself in the mirrored walls over the shoulder on which I lay, held up in his arms, and I saw myself swooning and faint, carried over the threshold. No need to invite me in. I’m already there; the Call is coming from Inside. In the lift, the Hall of Mirrors, I looked over his shoulder into infinite regress, as a thousand thousand whores stretched out to the Crack of Doom, cradled in the arms of the Angel, the Scarlet Women stretching out behind me forever, all of them, the Daughters of Fortitude, carrying a chalice overflowing with blood so far back into history that they cannot write or speak but only dance their joy and their abandon. Oh my Watcher! Oh my Son of God! They saw the Daughters of Men, and that they were fair …
In his room, there was champagne on ice, and a gently blowing veil upon the window, the night air whispering in so warm and dim. I sat at the head of the bed, propped on a pile of pillows that each cost a week’s rent, sat there in my fur coat and my big fuck off boots and he knelt before me and poured champagne out of the bottle into my mouth, and I writhed up to catch the falling stream and quaffed til I choked and gasped and laughed and then he turned the bottle on himself and tilted it up for what seemed like ever, and it ran down the sides of his mouth and onto his chest and I snaked up and lapped it like a demon-cat.
I flung my booze-drenched fur off with a whirl of my hand, he shrugged off his foolish leather coat, I tore his shirt asunder and pushed him down beneath me. No, I will not serve. No, I will not lie back and take it. No, I will not go hungry. I will feast upon your body. I will slake my thirst on your blood, your sweat, your tears.
Do this in memory of me, he said. Always, I said, always.
He began muttering the words, I knew them well, he said the words as his hands uncovered my body, as his hands wandered and lingered, as his fingers traced the lines of my shoulders, my breasts, my sharp ribs and hipbones protruding …
Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.
Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.
Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.
I put my finger to his lips, and hushed him. I said, no man, I have a spot. I have a spot or two. I have the witch’s mark. I have the Black Spot. I have the Mark of Cain. I have the stigmata. I have the scars.
I took his head in my hands and I guided it to kiss the sigil on my side, the one his pen designed. His brand upon me. I pushed my long white forearms to his lips, and let him taste the pale scar tissue riddled there. I fondled his gold locks and brought his face between my thighs. He saw the place where the needle had pierced, the place far up my inner leg, the column of ivory where I have had the capital engraved, with acanthus leaves volutes and scrolls, to hide the track marks. He kissed each trace upon my flesh, and with his lips and tongue knit up the wounds and sealed the scored flesh. And when he reached the Apex – mountain of myrrh – he opened me again.
It was the first time, the last time, the only time. I knew that this meant it would end, even as the few barely-dark hours seemed to stretch and warp in weird uncanny ways; he would get up and go to drink water, and hours would pass while I lay in a hypnogogic swoon, visions pulsing behind my fluttering eyelids; he would be back beside me, sleeping soundly, his hair a golden storm upon the pillow, his arm flung across me; but then he would be behind my arching body, my face plunged into the sheets, my hair a phoenix’s mane around me, him buried to the shaft in me, deeper with each thrust, his head thrown back, his arms held up as if in invocation; I seemed to see us from above: we looked like a stylized engraving of a Black Mass, a Great Rite. I could feel my body twist into hieratic positions. Our bodies together formed sigils in an Alphabet of Desire. We had dispensed with Lust of Result; there was only the process, the ritual, the pattern.
I lost count of how many times my body went into warp-spasm: black blood spouted from my head, my limbs twisted themselves backwards inside my skin: I was a Battle Goddess in her fury. He spent himself first across my tits and traced cave-drawings in his spunk upon my skin. I tasted his come and let it slide along my fingers, dripping slowly and quivering, carried it to my lips and sipped, licked, smiled then in the half-light; I caught his come in my hands as he stood and I wrestled his beautiful cock into submission with my lips and fingers; I let it slip between my fingers. What a glorious waste.
Only the last time, we were half asleep and I was dreaming of a satyr’s dream about me, I was watching myself through his eyes as he hid in the foliage and I bathed in the pool. He lay behind me, his fingers gently tracing the inked lines on my arms and back. He was whispering something. Possibly in Latin. His tingling traces on my skin ran down my back and around my buttocks and then spiralled round and centred in. Light fingertips. Stroking. I was sore, and sensitive, red raw. I pushed back against his touch, pushed into his grasp. He steadied his grip on my hips, and I reached my hand behind and guided him home once more like a lighthouse like a beacon like a fire on a hill at dusk. I gripped the silky sliding skin along the shaft and I took aim and pierced myself with him, impaled myself on him, engulfed him in myself. I invited him in. Just as I always had; they don’t need any formal invitation, usually, but it’s good to feel wanted. They can cross the threshold whenever the fuck they want, and so it’s good when they linger in the doorway, and wait for you to take their hands and pull them to you. This was that; he always waiting for the invitation. I arched my back and pushed and took him in.
That time, only that time, he came inside me, and like all the other times, it was cold and heavy and smelled like musk. I could feel it pool within me, and all the day it froze my thigh in a long slick drop from time to time, because I did not wash him away. I couldn’t stop shivering.
He held me, my back cradled against his chest, my legs wrapped up, foetal, amniotic. The sheets were twisted and stained and draggled in a whirlpool. The breeze from the Meadows stirred the Veil, and it was chill upon the pale damp skin. His was gold, mine silver in the guttering light of candles on the mantlepiece. He whispered to me, very close to my ear, his breath stirring the twisted locks of copper there.
“What would you do, Ailsa? What would you do if you could do anything in the world? If you could be anyone? Go anywhere? See anything?”
“I’d be right where I am.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me.”
“I’d be right here with you. Right now. Just this.”
“This is over. This never happened. This is written on sand.”
“I know …” Silent tears started slipping down my cheeks.
“What will you do with the rest of your life?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll stay here and wait tables and play late-night gigs in shitholes will you? How long do you think you can make that last?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not long, Ailsa. The band won’t last. The band won’t make it.”
“Whisht.”
“I saw them, Ailsa. Fancy Dan and Bonny Charlie. They’re already putting it between their toes, aren’t they? Not an intact arm-vein between them.”
“Stop it. They’ll get off. They said they would.”
“Isobel’s next, isn’t she? I know she’s been eyeing it up.”
“Only smokes it. Never the needle.”
“But she will.”
“Not Isobel I won’t let her.”
“She will. And then she’ll dare you, too.”
“I already did. It’s not worth it.”
“Ah but it is, Ailsa Crowe. It’s better than anything else. Better than this.”
“No, not this.”
“Oh yes. What would you do, Ailsa? Who do you want to be? Where do you want to go? You can be a small goddess on a tiny altar three nights a week for maybe three more years. And then you’ll probably all die. That’s the bargain I’m offering you. Or else … You do something else. You make a choice. What would you do if you weren’t afraid, Ailsa?”
He held me really tight for a while then, and I lay curled up in a ball, and I cried, and trembled. He stroked my face, and his fingers brushed through the tendrils of my hair. The candle stubs had flickered and gone out. The dim pale light suffused the chamber. All was soft greys and silver.
I woke up a little later, and he had laid the fur coat over me, still damp, but comforting. My inner thighs were sticky with his come and my blood: my period had come and I hadn’t noticed when. There’d be a stain. Out damn spot. Life is but a walking shadow … struts and frets his hour upon the stage …
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But we know this. And we tell it anyway.
Wrapped in the fur, I looked at myself in the mirror, a shadow in the dark before the dawn.
He had left a book on the night-table. Bound in soft leather, tooled with spiral patterns.
I opened it.
Inside were all my letters, sewn into the binding with red thread.
On the first page, there was a drawing of a crow, and underneath it he had written:
“What the fuck is stopping you, you daft cunt?”
Ailsa Crowe
Writer and performer
DIY Punk Marxist Anarchist Dark Erotica Witchcraft
