The Wilful Eye Read online

  She lied to you, my memory hissed at me.

  Ah, yes, that was why I’d shot her. You make no sense, old woman, I’d said. Sick of looking at her ugliness, I’d turned cruel, from having been milder before, even kind – from doing the old rag-and-bone a favour! Here I stand, I said, with Yankee dollars spilling over my feet. Here you sit, over a cellar full of treasures, enough to set you up in palaces and feed and clothe you queenly the rest of your days. Yet all you can bring yourself to want is this old thing, factory made, one of millions, well used already.

  I’d turned the Bic this way and that in the sunlight. It was like opening a sack of rice at a homeless camp; I had her full attention, however uncaring she tried to seem.

  Children of this country, of this war, will sell you these Bics for a packet-meal – they feed a whole family with one man’s ration. In desperate times, two rows of chocolate is all it costs you. Their doddering grandfather will sell you the fluid for a twist of tobacco. Or you can buy a Bic entirely new and full from such shops as are left – caves in the rubble, banged-together stalls set up on the bulldozed streets. A new one will light first go; you won’t have to shake it and swear, or click it some magic number of times. Soldiers are rich men in war. All our needs are met, and our pay is laid on extra. There is no need for us to go shooting people, not for cheap cigarette-lighters – cheap and pink and lady-sized.

  Yes, but it is mine, she had lied on at me. It was given to me by my son, who went off to war just like you, and got himself killed for his motherland. It has its hold on me that way. Quite worthless to any other person, it is.

  In the hunch of her and the lick of her lips, the thing was of very great worth indeed.

  Tell me the truth, old woman. I had pushed aside my coat. I have a gun here that makes people tell things true. I have used it many times. What is this Bic to you? or I’ll take your head off.

  She looked at my pistol, in its well-worn sheath. She stuck out her chin, fixed again on the lighter. Give it me! she said. If she’d begged, if she’d wept, I might have, but her anger set mine off; that was her mistake.

  I lean over the king and push the door-button on the remote. The queen’s men burst in, all pistols and posturing like men in a movie.

  It was dark under there, and it smelled like dirt and death-rot. I didn’t want to let the rope go.

  Only the big archways are safe, she’d said. Stand under them and all will be well, but step either side and you must use my pinny or the dogs will eat you alive. I could see no archway; all was black.

  I could hear a dog, though, panting out the foul air. The sound was all around, at both my ears equally. I knew dogs, good dogs; but no dog had ever stood higher than my knee. From the sound, this one could take my whole head in its mouth, and would have to stoop to do so.

  Which way should I go? How far? I put out my hands, with the biddy’s apron between them. I was a fool to believe her; what was this scrap of cloth against such a beast? I made the kissing noise you make to a dog. Pup? Pup? I said.

  His eyes came alight, reddish – at the far end of him, praise God. Oh, he was enormous! His tail twitched on the floor in front of me, and the sparse grey fur on it sprouted higher than my waist. He lifted his head – bigger than the whole house my family lived in, it was. He looked down at me over the scabby ridges of his rib-cage. Vermin hopped in the beams of his red eyes. His whole starveling face crinkled in a grin. With a gust of butchery breath he was up on his spindly shanks. He lowered his head to me full of lights and teeth, tightening the air with his growl.

  A farther dog woke with a bark, and a yet farther one. They set this one off, and I only just got the apron up in time, between me and the noise and the snapping teeth. That silenced him. His long claws skittered on the chamber’s stone floor. He paced, and turned and paced again, growling deep and constantly. His lip was caught high on his teeth; his red eyes glared and churned. The hackles stuck up like teeth along his back.

  Turning my face aside I forced myself and the apron forward at him. Oh, look – an archway there, just as the old woman said. White light from the next chamber jumped and swerved in it.

  The dog’s red eyes were as big as those discs the bosses carry their movies on. They looked blind, but he saw me, he saw me; I felt his gaze on me, the way you feel a sniper’s, in your spine – and his ill-will, only just held back. I pushed the cloth at his nostrils. Rotten-sour breath gusted underneath at me.

  But he shrank as the old woman had told me he would, nose and paws and the rest of him; his eyes shone brighter, narrowing to torch-beams. Now I was wrapping not much more than a pup, and a miserable wreck he was, hardly any fur, and his skin all sores and scratches.

  I picked him up and carried him to the white-flashing archway, kicking aside coins; they were scattered all over the floor, and heaped up against the red-lit walls. Among them lay bones of dog, bird, sheep, and some of person – old bones, well gnawed, and not a scrap of meat on any of them.

  I stepped under the archway and dropped the mangy dog back into his room. He exploded out of himself, into himself, horribly huge and sudden, hating me for what I’d done. But I was safe here; that old witch had known what she was talking about. I turned and pushed the apron at the next dog.

  He was a mess of white light, white teeth, snapping madly at the other opening. He smelled of clean hot metal. He shrank to almost an ordinary fighting dog, lean, smooth-haired, strong, with jaws that could break your leg-bone if he took you. His eyes were still magic, though, glaring blind, bulging white. His heavy paws, scrabbling, pushed paper-scraps forward; he cringed in the storm of paper he’d stirred up when he’d been a giant and flinging himself about. As I wrapped him, some of the papers settled near his head: American dollars. Big dollars, three-numbered. Oh these, these I could carry, these I could use.

  For now, though, I lifted the dog. Much heavier he was, than the starving one. I slipped and slid across the drifts of money to the next archway. Beyond it the third dog raged at me, a barking firestorm. I threw the white dog back behind me, then raised the apron and stepped up to the orange glare, shouting at the flame-dog to settle; I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

  He shrank in size, but not in power or strangeness. His coat seethed about him, thick with waving gold wires; his tongue was a sprout of fire and white-hot arrow-tips lined his jaws. His eyes, half-exploded from his head, were two ponds of lava, rimmed with the flame pouring from their sockets – clearly they could not see, but my bowels knew he was there behind them, waiting for his chance to cool his teeth in me, to set me alight.

  I wrapped my magic cloth around him, picked him up and shone his eye-light about. The scrabbles and shouting from the other dogs behind me bounced off the smooth floor, lost themselves in the rough walls arching over. Where was the treasure the old biddy had promised me in this chamber, the richest of all the three?

  The dog burned and panted under my arm. I walked all around, prodding parts of the walls in case they should spill jewels at me or open into treasure-rooms. I reached into cavities hoping to feel bars of gold, giant diamonds – I hardly knew what.

  All I found was the lighter the old biddy had asked me to fetch, the pink plastic Bic, lady-sized. And an envelope. Inside was a letter in boss-writing, and attached to that was a rectangle of plastic, with a picture of a foreign girl on it, showing most of her breasts and all of her stomach and legs as she stood in the sea-edge, laughing out of the picture at me. Someone was playing a joke on me, insulting my God and our women instead of delivering me the treasure I’d been promised.

  I turned the thing over, rubbed the gold-painted lettering that stood up out of the plastic. Rubbish. Still, there were all those Yankee dollars, no? Plenty there for my needs. I pocketed the Bic and put the rubbish back in the hole in the wall. I crossed swiftly to the archway, turned in its safety and shook the dog out of the cloth. Its eyes flared wide, and its roar was part voice, part flame. I showed it my back. I’d met real fire, that choked and c
ooked people – this fairy-fire held no fear for me.

  Back in the white dog’s chamber, I stuffed my pack as full as I could, every pocket of it, with the dollars. It was heavy! It and the white fighting dog were almost more than I could manage. But I took them through and into the red-lit carrion-cave, and I subdued the mangy dog there. I carried him across to where the rope-end dangled in its root-lined niche, and I pulled the loop down around the bulk of the money on my back, and the dog still in my arms, and hooked it under myself.

  There came a shout from above. Praise God, she had not run off and left me.

  Yes! I cried. Bring me up!

  When she had me well off the floor, I cast the red-eyed dog out of the apron-cloth. He dropped; he ballooned out full-sized, long-shanked. He looked me in the eye, with his lip curled and his breath fit to wither the skin right off my face. I flapped the apron at him. Boo, I said. There. Get down. The other two dogs bayed deep below. Had they made such a noise at the beginning, I never would have gone down.

  And then I was out the top of the tree-trunk and swinging from the branch, slower now than I’d swung before, being so much heavier. The old woman stood there, holding me and my burden aloft, the rope coiling beside her. She was stronger than I would have believed possible.

  ‘Do you have it?’ She beamed up at me.

  ‘Oh, I have it, don’t worry. But get me down from here before I give you it. I would not trust you as far as I could throw you.’

  And she laughed, properly witch-like, and stepped in to secure the rope against the tree.

  She is not the first virgin I’ve had, my little queen, but she fights the hardest and is the most satisfying, having never in her worst dreams imagined this could happen to her. I have her every which way, and she urges me on with her screams, with her weeping, with her small fists and her torn mouth and her eyes now wide, now tight-closed squeezing out tears. The indignities I put her through, the unqueenly positions I force her into, force her to stay in, excite me again as soon as I am spent. She fills up the air with her pleading, her horror, her powerless pretty rage, for as long as she still has the spirit.

  I left the old woman where she lay, and I took her treasure with me, her little Bic. I walked another day, and then a truck came by and picked me up and took me to the next big town. I found a bank, and had no difficulty storing my monies away in it. There I learned what I had lost when I put the sexy-card back in the cave wall, for the bank-man gave me just such a one, only plainer. The card was the key to my money, he said. I should show the card to whoever was selling to me, and through the magic of computers the money would flow straight out of the bank to that person, without me having to touch it.

  ‘Where is a good hotel?’ I asked him, when we were done. ‘And where can I find good shopping, like Armani and Rolex?’ These names I had heard argued over, as we crouched in foxholes and behind walls waiting for orders; I had seen them in the boss-magazines, between the pages of the women some men tortured themselves with wanting, during the many boredoms of the army.

  The bank-man came out with me onto the street and waved me up a taxi. I didn’t even have to tell the driver where to go. I sat in the back seat and smiled at my good fortune. The driver eyed me in the mirror.

  ‘Watch the road,’ I said. ‘You’ll be in big trouble if I get hurt.’

  ‘Sir,’ he said.

  At the hotel I found that I was already vouched for; the bank had telephoned them to say I was coming and to treat me well.

  ‘First,’ I said, ‘I will have a hot bath, a meal, and some hours’ sleep. I’ve travelled a long way. Then I will need clothes, and this uniform to be burned. And introductions. Other rich men. Rich women, too; beautiful women. I’m sure you know the kind of thing I mean.’

  When I was stuffing my pack full of dollars underground, I could not imagine ever finding a use for so much money. But then began my new life. A long, bright dream, it was, of laughing friends, and devil women in their devil clothes, and wonderful drugs, and new objects and belongings conjured by money as if by wizardry, and I enjoyed it all and thoroughly. Money lifts and floats you, above cold weather and hunger and war, above filth, above having to think and plan – if any problem comes at you, you throw a little money at it and it is gone, and everyone smiles and bows and thanks you for your patronage.

  That is, until your plastic dies. Then I understood truly what treasure I’d rejected when I left that card in the third cave. There was no more money behind my card; that other card, with the near-naked woman on it, behind that had been an endless supply; that card would never have died. I had to sell my apartment and rent a cheaper place. Piece by piece I sold all the ornaments and furniture I’d accumulated, to pay my rent. But even the worth of those expensive objects ran out, and I let the electricity and the gas go, and then I found myself paying my last purseful for a month’s rent in not much more than an attic, and scrounging for food.

  I sat one night on the floor at my attic window, hungry and glum, with no work but herding and soldiering to turn my fortunes around with. I went through my last things, my last belongings left in a nylon backpack too shabby to sell. I pulled out an envelope, with a crest on it, of a hotel – ah, it was those scraps from the first day I had come to this town, with all my money in my pack. These were the bits and pieces that the chamber-boy had saved from the pockets of my soldiering-clothes. Shall I throw these away, sir? he’d said to me. No, I told him. Keep them to remind me how little I had before today. How my fortunes changed.

  ‘Ha!’ I laid the half-spliff on my knee. A grain fell out of the tip. That had been a good spliff, I remembered, well-laced with the fighting-powder that made you a hero, that took away all your fear.

  ‘And you!’ I took out the pink lighter, still fingerprinted with the mud of that blasted countryside.

  ‘Ha!’ One last half-spliff would make this all bearable. A few hours, I would have, when nothing mattered, not this house, not this hunger, not my own uselessness and the stains on my memory from what I had done as a rich man, and before that as a soldier. And then, once it was done . . . Well, I would just have to beggar and burgle my way home, wouldn’t I, and take up with the goats again. But why think of that now? I scooped the grain back into the spliff and twisted the end closed. I flicked the lighter.

  Some huge thing, rough, scabby, crushed me to the wall. I gasped a breath of sweet-rotten air and near fainted. Then the thing adjusted itself, and I was free, and could see, and it was that great grey spindly dog from the underground cave, turning and turning on himself in the tiny space of my attic, sweeping the beams of his red movie-disc eyes about, at me, at my fate and circumstances.

  I stared at the lighter in my hand. A long, realising sound came out of me. So the lighter was the key to the dogs! You flicked it, they came. And see how he lowered his head and his tail in front of me, and looked away from my stare. He was mine, in my power! I didn’t need some old apron-of-a-witch to wrap him in and tame him.

  Sweat prickled out on me, cold. I’d nearly left this Bic with the old biddy, in her dead hand, for a joke! Some other soldier, some civilian scavenger, some child, might have picked it up and got this power! I’d been going to fling it far out into the mud-land around us, just to laugh while she scrabbled after it. I’d been going to walk away laughing, my pack stuffed with the money I’d brought up from below, and the old girl with nothing.

  I looked around the red-lit attic, and out the window at the patched and crowded roofs across the way, dimming with evening. I need never shiver here again; I need never see these broken chimneys or these bent antennae. Now I enjoyed the tweaking of the hunger pangs in my belly, because I was about to banish them forever, just as soon as I summoned that hot golden dog with his never-dying money-card.

  I clicked the lighter three times.

  And so it all began again, the dream, the floating, the powders and good weed, the friends. They laughed again at my stories of how I had come here from such a nowhere. For a tim
e there my family and our goats had lost their fascination, but now they enthralled these prosperous people again, as travellers’ tales had once bewitched me around the home fires.

  I catch the queen by the shoulders. One of her men dives for his gun. I shoot him; his eye spouts; he falls dead. The queen gives a tiny shriek.

  I heard about the princess from the man who fitted out my yacht. He had just come from the tricky job of making lounges for the girl’s prison tower, which was all circular rooms.

  ‘Prison?’ I said. ‘The king keeps his daughter in a prison?’

  ‘You haven’t heard of this?’ he laughed. ‘He keeps her under lock and key, always has. He’s a funny chap. He had her stars done, her chart or whatever, right when she was born, and the chart said she’d marry a soldier. So he keeps her locked up so’s this soldier won’t get to her. She only meets people her parents choose.’

  Oh, does she?, I thought, even as I laughed and shook my head with the yacht-man.

  That night when I was alone and had smoked a spliff, I had the golden dog bring her. She arrived asleep, his back a broad bed for her, his fire damped down for her comfort. He laid the girl on the couch nearest the fire.

  She curled up there, belonging as I’ve never belonged in these apartments, delicate, royal, at peace. She was like a carved thing I’d just purchased, a figurine. She was beautiful, certainly, but not effortfully so, as were most women I had met since I came into my wealth. It was hard to say how much of her beauty came from the fact that I knew she was a princess; her royalty seemed to glow in her skin, to be woven into her clothing, every stitch and seam of it considered and made fit. Her little foot, out the bottom of the nightdress, was the neatest, palest, least walked-upon foot I had ever seen since the newborn feet of my brothers and sisters. It was a foot meant for an entirely different purpose from my own, from most feet of the world.

  Even in my new, clean clothes, like a man’s in a magazine, I felt myself to be filth crouched beside this creature. These hands had done work, these eyes had seen things that she could never conceive of; this memory was a rubbish-heap of horrors and indignities. It was one thing to be rich; it was quite another to be born into it, to be royal from a long line of royalty, to have never lived anything but the palace life.