Midday People
TANITH LEE
I
The Ancient Romans had called noon the Ghost Hour. She had been told this, or read it, but could not remember why. The Italian light perhaps, she thought, staring out across the square. It took away the shadows, it bleached and turned the buildings to flat gold, and any people walking there, they were golden too, and without physical depth.
Unlike Chrissie, sitting under the dark pink umbrella of the cafe table. She could never tan; she even found it quite hard to burn.
‘It’s fucking hot,’ observed Craig.
Chrissie turned to him attentively. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘And that food. Too heavy. Oily. I’m going in for a lie-down. Or a throw-up. Whatever comes first.’
She thought probably it was the amount of food he had consumed, rather than its type (surely even Craig had known that Italy meant pastas and cheeses and olive oil). Also the two bottles of red wine they had drunk between them. Although he did not like wine.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she brightly said. ‘Yes, of course. Let’s go in. It’s almost siesta time, isn’t it?’
‘God, get your facts straight. Not yet.’
‘Oh, I see.’ He could be right or wrong, but was right of course. And she, stupid.
As they rose, she imagined the few people around them might think the English couple were going in so soon because they were eager for fervent holiday sex. This was not at all the case. Craig would indeed go straight to sleep, lumpen on his bed, his thick short sweaty hair plastered to the pillow. She would lie on the bed next to his, and look up at the curious patterns of pale stains in the white ceiling. She was, after three days at the little hotel, getting to know these stains. She tried to make them into something interesting (childishly attempting to enjoy even this). Then, adult, she would try to go to sleep instead. But she was always awake, wide, wide awake.
At about five, Craig would himself wake, lumber into the bathroom and piss, grumbling, angry at his leaden head. At the room. At the hotel for something - some noise that had irritated him, a fly that might have got in, Italy, Italians. Her.
As they crossed the square, Chrissie looked longingly over at the church, with its biscuity façade and carved doorway. She wanted to go to the church, look inside, maybe attend a service even, decorous, with a scarf respectfully tied over her hair. She was not religious, yet she would like to do that, here. And she would like to walk round the town, go out into the countryside, admire the olive trees and the vineyards in the dust-haze, the round hills with villas tucked up on them under old red roofs—
So far, they had not done much. They had seen more of the hotel than anything else.
Why had he wanted to come, she wondered? Oh, that was easy really, he had been showing off to a colleague when he produced the idea of the trip. More to the point, why had Craig wanted Chrissie to come with him?
They were only in their thirties. They had only been together, that is lived together, for two years. It had never been much good. They both worked, but he considered what she did with her group of decorators to be ‘fey’ and useless. ‘Tarting up the houses of rich cunts,’ was Craig’s term for it. Meanwhile his high-powered job kept him out a lot, drinking and eating with his clients. Coming back, he had no time for her, yet expected, as a man much older might have done, the flat cleaned and, if he had not had a meal, one ready. If this meal was then not to his taste, he told her so. Usually it was not.
She had tried, blaming herself, making excuses for him.
But by now she wondered why they stayed together. Fear she supposed, on her side. She was in looks thin and ordinary, and before Craig, had had very little interest taken in her by men. As for him, probably she was convenient. One day some other woman would appear on the scene and sweep him off. And Chrissie dreaded the inevitable shame. But then, it might not happen, because Craig was no catch himself. Not very tall, heavy and thickset and now, from all the wining and dining, getting extra chins and quite a belly, his small-eyed, discontented face had no compensatory attractions, his voice grated, and his personality was - well, what?
Void, she thought.
And, humiliated as he pushed rudely in front of her into the side street, almost shoving her out of the way, she pretended instead to have stopped on purpose to look at something. And she cursed herself. All this should end. He loathed her. Surely there might be one man in the world, someone with low enough standards, who might care for her, actually like her, find her talented and appealing despite her 32 B bra-size and her limp dull hair? And even if there was no one - could she truly not manage on her own? Probably, if she suggested they part, he would shout for joy. Only it was all so complicated now - the flat in both their names, the joint account and - coward, coward, she thought.
And-
saw that, pretending to look at something, she was actually looking. Staring. Back across the square. At two people, there by the fountain. Two golden people, glittering in the middle-of-the-day light bright as the scattering water.
Oh, typical Italian young, gorgeously clad in their shining youth. Am I jealous or simply having a religious experience?
She could not take her eyes off them. And they, in their perfect new-minted world would never notice, so it was quite all right.
They wore jet-black shades. His hair was as black, and the girl’s was corn-blonde, like the bars of sunlight. Their clothes, smart, white, or simply whitened by the glare - the bare arms strong and graceful, the long throats and mouths that had not lost, like fruits, their juice—
She was in love with both of them. And really, they were not so young. No. They did not wear the fashions one saw the young put on everywhere - yet wealthy they must be. They glowed with health and money, as with light.
Something made Chrissie glance along the side street after Craig. Walking away, he had either not noticed he had lost her, or else he was entirely indifferent. Either way, it meant much the same. In the shadow that did not fall from anything, but simply amassed in the channel of the narrow street because the sun had not got into it, Craig looked extremely thick. Physically, that was. Too solid, as if he were trying to prove his existence, his importance; opaque as a block of stone.
Chrissie looked back towards her beautiful ones. They were still there, not speaking, leaning at the fountain’s rim, oblivious of the water spotting their flawless garments and skin. Lizards, she thought, golden lizards from another planet.
And then both their heads turned, and they looked, each of them, right at her, through their inky shades.
Chrissie felt herself colour. “Scusi,’ she muttered. Her Italian was hopeless and virtually non-existent - and anyway, they could not hear her from this distance.
She turned herself, quickly, and walked after Craig into the thunder-shade of the street.
* * * *
By the time she reached the hotel, Craig was nowhere to be seen.
‘Has my husband gone up?’ she asked the man hovering at reception. She said it happily, as if this loving ‘husband’ and she had been separated by unavoidable circumstance, and arranged to meet again, lover-like, in the erotic seclusion above.
The man agreed the signore had taken the key and gone upstairs.
Chrissie began to walk towards the stairs. They would take longer, and also provide a little exercise. She had nearly reached them when she hesitated. She fumbled in her bag, pretending to search for something without which she could not go up. She could not face it. Not again, lying so close to Craig and a hundred miles from him, divided by wine, sleep and his utter antipathy.
She would not cry. God, don’t let me cry.
Oh the hell with it, cry if you want, she thought, this is Italy not bloody Cheltenham.
Oddly, the urge to cry at once receded.
Across from her she noticed the bar, open and airy, the now-one-thirty light streaming in over small marble tables and rococo chairs. Above the counter, every bottle had become a lamp with a flame of sun blazing inside, green lamps and scarlet ones, indigo and apricot.
Should she, after the wine?
Apparently she should. She was in the bar, and now another, smiling man approached, with coal-black curls, and she ordered her drink from him, a large vodka, not especially Italian at all, but when it came, dressed in its glass, it was an Italian vodka, with Italian ice.
The room was empty, save for herself and the barman. She sat drinking slowly, looking out into the street to which the sun had now miraculously soaked through. She wondered how that was. In the light, everything sprang alive out there, the burnt sienna of walls, the terracotta roofs, the red and rose geraniums—
Chrissie put down her glass and shrank back into the little chair. Caught in a window, there on the street, They. They idled by the bar, past the hotel, framed in sun and geraniums. Her Beings from the fountain.
She named them abruptly, she did not know why, Arrigo and Gina. Arrigo and Gina moved over the windows, one window after another, making each window wonderful a moment. Then they were beyond the last window. Where were they going?
It was the vodka of course which made Chrissie get up. She walked hurriedly from the bar now, back across the hotel lobby, out into the street - as if to an appointment. Not with an unmarried husband in a loveless bedroom, but to something - strange, inexplicable, crazy, terrible.
What was she doing? This was stupid. She stood in the street, looking along it, the way they must have gone. The sun scorched now directly down on her - and yet, shadows were beginning to come back, yes, creeping like spilled darkness from the edges of things.
Chrissie started to walk rather fast along the street. A merry dog ran by. Some children were laughing in a doorway. In a yard a fair young man perched on a stationary Lambretta, and a fair girl, hand on hip, hair streaming. But these were not They.
When she reached the street’s end, a huddle of buildings stood around a space with a tall tree, perhaps a plane, and the shadows were coming - but nothing else. She had lost them, lost Arrigo and Gina. And that was just as well. What would they have said to her, done to her, with those slimly muscled bronze arms, those cruel serpentine-fruited tongues - some torrent of abuse and a calling of polizia? What was she, some stalker?
She braced herself to retreat. Precisely then she became aware of them once more.
It was almost as if they had not been there until she made the (mental) move to give up, which was absurd.
And they waited - were they waiting? - at the mouth of an alleyway, where a bunting of gaudy washing hung, doubtless deceptive to the eyes. But they - once more they were staring back at her. Chrissie felt a wave of fright and dismay, and next second - they were sliding away from her, as if they stood on a platform with wheels - how could that be? And the washing and the alley were all she could see.
Astonished, she found she bolted forward, she also on wheels attached to their wheels . . . And running across the space, under the deep metallic flags of the plane tree, right up to the alley mouth, and there, only there, she stopped, as if - ended. For they were not to be seen any more. Finally they had eluded her and slipped away.
Lovers, she thought. Let them alone.
I must be mad, she thought.
She felt sick, but it went off. Then she only felt ludicrous and shaken, as if she had fallen over on the cobbled street and made a fool of herself. By that time it was just after two o’clock, and in the square the church bell was ringing.
* * * *
By the evening Craig was very hungry and needed, he said, a stiff drink. So they went out, but only back to the small restaurant in the street the other side of the square, which they had visited every night so far. Craig ate voluminously, but without enjoyment. It was Chrissie who complimented the waiter on the very good food. They - Craig - drank a lot of alcohol. Chrissie watched the bottles and the brandies mount up. She was unable herself to eat or drink much.
When they came out, the evening had arrived and filled the street and square with soft blue ashes, lit by the gentle globes of old-fashioned wrought-iron lamp-standards. People were there who strolled arm in arm, gladly together - plump matrons with young dark eyes, benevolent men in shirtsleeves, and many Romeos with their Juliets.
‘Isn’t it a lovely evening - shall we—’
‘You do what you want. I have to see to some work.’
‘Work.’ Her voice sounded flat and childishly silly.
‘You don’t think I can just laze about like you, do you? Where do you think the money came from for this jaunt? Not your pathetic little rich-cunt-pleasing rubbish. No way.’ Craig explained/told her that now he would go up to their room and make some international calls on the firm’s mobile. He would also, she knew, order a bottle of brandy or whisky to go with this, and smoke a pack of Marlborough. If she stayed with him then, in the cramped bedroom, that was it: a desert storm of smoke and fumes and his important voice talking loud across continents. She knew, because this was how it went at home.
‘Okay,’ she said. Neutral. ‘I’ll just—’
‘Get on with it then. Do something on your own for a change.’ And he left her, standing there.
She poised in the square, pretending they had planned all this beforehand. She watched the couples going round and round her, talking to other couples or groups seated at outside tables, all under the great wild-eyed stars that were swarming in the sky and the coloured lightbulbs that were coming on. Music sounded, a horn, a mandolin, then an accordion, perhaps from a radio, or from some unseen orchestra. And the carousel of loving couples were dancing, some of them, though not the younger ones, who strutted to and fro like warriors who will always win their war. Or some swayed into the shadows, and two became one.
Chrissie thought abruptly of Arrigo and Gina. But that was not true. She had been thinking of them all the time.
She walked to the lunch cafe and found a little table going spare, just inside. She ordered an espresso to bring her round.
Of course, she had been looking out for them, even if she had not admitted as much. At the restaurant, out of the restaurant windows, in the square and streets both going and coming back.
Other men and girls were by the fountain now, splashing each other with its spray, amused, and drinking cola.
Had she ever done that? Ever, ever? On frigid English nights?
There had been summers, so perhaps. But always it was done in disappointment, sadness, alone, then as now.
Stop it. Have some coffee. Forget all that.
Chrissie drank her coffee.
Outside, the darkness grew darker. There was absolutely no sign of Arrigo or Gina. Obviously they had only been passing through and were now gone, in a slim white car, back to some extraordinary other place, some sparkling city, some villa on the navy blue hills, strung with lights, a vivacious party, or a deep bed.
Not until it was ten o’clock did Chrissie return to the hotel. She idled even then, and in the street, not at all dark now with its ornamental streetlamps, wondered if she might be mugged, an unattractive woman loitering by herself in the night. But the night was not dangerous, not here.
When she got back to their room, Craig had annexed the bath. She took the opportunity to open windows. Moths would fly in and he would shout at her, but that was better than the stench he had created.
She thought about throwing his mobile phone from the window and down on the cobbled courtyard below, between the pots of roses and lavender. But she did not.
All she did was undress and get into the twin bed which he had told her, on the first night, was hers.
She thought she would take a long while to get to sleep, especially after the espresso, but her encoffeed heart drummed her excitedly fast from wakefulness.
She regained consciousness, surprised, in the centre of the night, and saw Craig’s bulk, like some mountain she could never get over.
The windows were once more shut. Yet when she went to clean her teeth, some silvery thing sang. Was it a nightingale?
She had been dreaming - of what? She wanted to recall. Then she remembered a man in the dream, an old man, who had emerged from the carousel of dance in the square, and said to her, ‘Why do you think we take luncheon, and make siesta, at those hours? To keep us safe off the streets and the squares.’
How puzzling. What a peculiar dream - but dreams were dreams.
Craig rumbled in his slumber like a train, or an approaching earthquake, and then was silent again, as if even to snore would be to offer her too much companionship.
* * * *
The next day she asked if they might go to the city. She had always wanted to see the cathedral. Also, could they not browse in the shops, visit the museum - the Roman ruins of a circus? ‘Well, go,’ he said. ‘Why do I have to hold your hand?’
‘But I thought you wanted—’
‘This jaunt was your idea. I’m just the one paying for it.’
I am paying for it too, she thought.
And then, is it my fault? Have I dragged him here against everything he wanted? He can, after all, drink brandy and whisky and make calls at home. I’m inadequate. Should I have come on my own? But then he would have complained because the flat was dirty and no one did the shopping . . . And he’s told me I can’t cope, not on my own. Yes, I’m a fool. I do see that. I make a mess of things.
She recollected how Craig had criticised her choice in music. He only liked classical music - ‘What else is there? That? That’s not music.’ But then too, only certain classics were all right. Bach, and Mozart. Rachmaninov, apparently, was a load of ‘soapy crap’, and Bartok and Prokofiev ‘certifiably insane’. Sometimes Craig played Wagner at top volume, and the flat shook, and twice a neighbour had come to remonstrate, and Chrissie, trembling, had had to deal with this, before the neighbour gave up on reason, and began instead to retaliate with the most appallingly bad loud pop music at all hours of the day and night.
After recalling all that, Chrissie shook herself and went out into the street and meandered towards the square. She had tried to talk herself into hiring a cab to take her to the city, but her Italian was so poor - he spoke it quite fluently, though his accent was not good, so sometimes people would seem bemused: ‘Fucking cretins,’ deduced Craig. Even so, he could usually make them understand, could understand them. He had told her on her own she would be a laughing-stock, monetarily cheated, perhaps physically attacked, in the city. Told her all that before he told her to go alone.
* * * *
Chrissie sat at the table under the dark pink umbrella.
She had drunk two glasses of rough white wine and was thinking, if the city cathedral was out of bounds, she might try to see the church across the square.
But she kept glancing at her watch. As if she were waiting for someone. Who?
She knew who exactly.
And now the watch said 12:00 am.
No one much was in the square. Like yesterday, and the days before.
A stooped man scurried over it, darting from one side to the other, as if evading enemy surveillance. A woman went by with baskets, walking fast, disappearing into a doorway.
Those that were here seemed to cling to the square’s edges, the outdoor tables closest to the three cafes, the steps of the church. It was completely relaxed, reasonable. Sensible to avoid the midday sun, the blare of trumpets in heaven that continued from noon until two—
Chrissie finished the last of her wine. As she put down her glass, she saw, through the base, the stem, the globe of it—
They were there. Her Beings. Arrigo, Gina.
By the fountain, as before.
She had not seen them enter the square, missed it, as she had the going-away of the boys who had been sitting smoking on the church steps, and the people from nearby tables.
How very odd. It had not been this way yesterday, had it? She - and They - were alone in the square.
Alone in the light, the glistening, glistering gold.
Golden Arrigo, with his crow-wing of hair, golden Gina, with her lemon, Botticelli Venus hair, and herself, Chrissie, a small nothingness taking up (and wasting) a tiny bit of space.
Don’t stare. For God’s sake.
She lowered her eyes.
In the side of the wine glass, however, she saw them still. They were moving now, out of the square. She felt a pang of loss. Where were they going? The same destination as yesterday? Stay put. Don’t get up.
Chrissie found she had got to her feet, and tried to discover an excuse for this. While she was doing that, again she glimpsed them, how they paused. And then - it was irresistible - she looked at them again.
Made of spun crystal, coloured like Murano glass.
Perfect.
They were gazing back at her through their sunglasses. At Chrissie.
And then, infinitesimal, perhaps imagined, the slight motion of their two heads, the flicker of light on hair. Come on then, the movement seemed to say. Come with us.
Chrissie, rooted in earth. Heart in mouth, palms wet—
While they stood. Waiting.
A kind of sound that had no sound—
She too moved, quickly. She ran, forgetting she had not paid for her drinks, towards them. And now they ebbed away, so she must really run—
She did not think what this must look like, as normally she would have done. Her thoughts seemed absent now, as under great pleasure, horror or agony, sometimes they are.
Which was this, anyway? What were they doing, calling her, summoning her, yet never letting her catch up? Ah, she was thinking again now.
She saw she had reached that open area between buildings, the spot with the curious, metal-leafed tree, and she had not seen the street she ran through before that, or anything.
They were under the tree.
Under the tree, and in front of her. And
she had reached them.
Chrissie stopped running. She was panting. It did not matter, not really.
They were only three or four feet away.
Oh God, how splendid they were. Not like anything as human as a film star or a statue - they were like fabulous insects made of ivory, gold leaf and gems. And somehow, through the black shades, she could make out - the blue of his eyes, aquamarine, and hers, like platinum over pearl - but it was guesswork, maybe. She could not truly see.
‘I’m sorry, I thought—’
Chrissie heard herself blurt that, but this was all.
And then he, Arrigo, beckoned with his hand.
Although like jewels, they wore no jewellery. Not even the expensive watches she would have expected. And their clothes, so seamless, elegant and simple, were of a material that reminded her of Egyptian linen. Not only their flesh then, translucent and shining.
Now they were walking on. The three of them. Not too far. Just to this corner, where this rose-brown masonry craned into a half-shade, and there, between the plaster and the cobbles underfoot, Gina bending, brushing with her fingers, a sort of green frond which grew from the stone.
Is it a weed? Chrissie did not ask. Not necessary. She was meant to pick it, that was all. Why? Oh, but she knew. She knew everything.
She knew who they were.
All in that moment.
And an internal singing, like the nightingale’s, rushed through her, music gold not silver, sharp not sweet.
She bent also to the frond, and watched her thin hand with no nail varnish or rings, and the hand snapped off the frond.
Chrissie raised the weed to her face and sniffed at it. It smelled pungent, like a herb. Neither appetising nor un.
It would be a little bitter, she thought, like paracetamol. And tingle on the tongue, like aspirin.
At that instant too, suddenly, essentially, she could smell them. They had a scent like honey, and the clean fur of cats. But also they smelled of dry heat, like sand.
She twirled the frond of weed-herb between her fingers, admiring the green suppleness of it, which had forced its way, spinelessly, through the hard plaster and adamant cobbles. She was happy. Then, all she could smell was the afternoon.
She flung round - there was no one else there. That is, They were not.
Children were playing under the plane tree. Women called across from upper windows in a mellifluous Italian Chrissie could not fathom. Gusts of a rich spaghetti sauce hovered through the air. The town was awake. It was noisy, and five past two.
* * * *
She did nothing. Nothing at all. Days passed - how many? - two, three - probably only one - and she did nothing.
The frond-weed-herb, whatever it was, wilted in the glass of water in the bathroom.
He never mentioned it. Never noticed?
Was that bizarre?
Yes, it was bizarre.
Chrissie, however, looked at the frond as it shrivelled. And at lunch-time, when they went down to the cafe with pink sunshades, she looked - she looked—
For them.
But they were not there.
No, they were there, but she could not see them.
Campari with ice. Red wine. Antipasto. Fresh peaches in a basket. The brandy bottle (his).
A green lizard (not gold) spangling across the baked earth. Cyclamen in pots on a wall.
Today I’ll walk out and see the vineyards.
She did not.
She sat, long after Craig had gone back to the hotel. She sat looking, looking. Not seeing them. Seeing their absence.
Those nights, or that night, Craig and she ate their dinner in the usual restaurant.
* * * *
The priest who emerged from a little side door by the church, at a quarter past twelve, listened to Chrissie’s stammering request. He spoke enough English, and did not seem to mind her lack of anything but die most basic Italian, which mostly consisted of exclaiming Bella! and endlessly apologising to or thanking him.
She had thought the church was locked, but it was not.
He let her go in, and in a panic of courtesy, Chrissie pulled off her sleeveless cardigan, and draped it over her head.
When she did this, he glanced at her, and she thought his face was sorry, sorry for her. She noted he had seen she was not a Catholic. So then she stood there, ashamed to have let him down.
And how graceful it was, when he genuflected before the altar and the Idea of God. Yes, she wished she had been a Catholic, and able to do it, not just for his sake, but her own, to offer this, and receive the undoubted blessing of an inner response.
It was a powerful church, dark amber out of the sun, the windows hanging in space, brass gleams cast at random, as in some cunning ancient painting. The stone floor and pillars induced a sense of heavy depth, as if under water. There was a triptych above the altar, birth, ministry, death and resurrection.
Chrissie went round and gazed at the few ornaments, the windows and paintings. Then she sat on a wooden seat for half an hour. She felt she was an impostor and should not be there. Part of her wanted to throw itself howling at the naked, nail-pierced feet of the Christ. But why? What could she ask for?
She had never been religious. This was ridiculous now. She was ridiculous (as Craig had again told her, when she protested at today’s policy of having a sandwich lunch in the hotel bar). She did not have the effrontery to go running to Jesus.
In the end, she had to face the fact the church could not help her. She got up and went out by the other little side door the priest had taken when he left her. She did this, she believed, quite innocently.
Outside was the narrowest, dimmest alley.
For a moment, she might have been anywhere in Italy, even in time. The encroaching walls were cracked and high and somehow black even in the shadowed daylight. Chrissie thought that she must go left, to return herself to the square. But the alley looked twisted that way, almost deformed - impassable, and it stank of urine and some sort of trouble - she did not know what that was, but vaguely she heard, or thought she did, angry male voices. Her independence, which was so pathetic, had maybe been stated enough when she left Craig at the hotel. So she went the other way along the alley. The wrong way. And here the light came, a topaz flood, and then she walked out into a place that seemed to have formed between two cliffs of sunstruck primrose plaster. High above, a delicate iron balcony let loose a torrent of violet flowers all down the wall.
And under these, they were waiting for her.
There came a wash of terror. But adventure, joy, always made Chrissie afraid. She laughed, and Arrigo and Gina laughed back at her, soundlessly, their teeth like summer-resistant snow.
And then - they were—
They were touching
her—
caressing her . . . they were covering her like a silk blanket.
Chrissie had not often been deliberately touched. In love-making, even then, the explorations of her flesh were (she surmised) unimpressed and, accordingly, swift and desultory.
But no one anyway ever could have touched her - like this. Their hands, sliding over her, their arms encircling her, their lips - their tongues - moving across her face, her neck, her skin - They pressed firmly against her. Every surface of her felt them on itself. And she could not particularly notice which was Arrigo, which Gina - it did not matter - they were, all three of them, One.
So warm, so electric. It was like sex, yet not like sex. It was another kind of sex? Perhaps, maybe - for it had its own glorious momentum, its own rising to summit after summit—
Don‘t let it ever stop.
She lay back on the wall, in their arms, holding them, feeling them against her (part of them) these hot, satiny-smooth bodies, that were scented of fur and sand and honey and - Was she conscious? Yes -No—
Her eyes were shut. She could not open them. She spun upward, mile after mile, swimming with Arrigo and Gina in a sea of sun, desire and flame.
They did not kiss her. They did not seek to probe her body in any way. She was not penetrated. No, she was permeated. It was - osmosis. Oh - God-
What were they? In her swimming blind delight, the questions darted round her, swimming too, like tiny pretty fish. Arrigo and Gina were not ghosts - for they were solid, she could feel and grasp them, as they her.
There had been another dream. Forgotten, now - with the questioning fish - it surfaced too. What had the dream shown her? Something visual - she had seen the square, and a banner floating there, as if in some renaissance festival. White, with golden words written over it, and what had the words said? Something spelled out in her own faulty Italian - what? What?
Who cared? Only this, with them. Only they - They—
Never let me go.
Never stop.
Don’t leave me—
Take me with you—
On the banner, seen now over hills of the mind, through hazes of unthought, the words, hardening. She read them from the drowning sea.
Popolo di Mezzogiomo.
A cloud must have swallowed the sun. She tried to ignore how abruptly cold she was, chilled and shivering.
But the wall, reality, pushed hard into her back, and the purple flowers so near her face gave off a tang that all at once she did not like, a cat’s-piss smell - and she was
alone.
Chrissie opened her eyes. A sob wrenched convulsively as sick out of her mouth. She coughed and swore. She raised her wrist, visibly shaking, and stared at her shaking watch. One minute after 2.00 pm.
* * * *
She drew the withered weed out of the glass that afternoon as Craig slept like an exhausted rhinoceros. The stem was rotten, the rest of it parched and blackened. The scent, if anything, was slightly stronger.
The latest bottle, whisky this time, still two-thirds full as only brought up here this afternoon, stood on the little desk between the windows.
Craig slept, but carefully she kept her back to him. She undid the whisky and crumbled into it the frond, which swirled in the clear brown liquid, for a moment like flakes from a fire, then melted, disappeared.
Chrissie did not know what the frond was, its exact nature or name. Only that it had fragilely forced its way through stone. She did know what it would do, approximately. It was no use making out she did not. So she would fail to be at all astounded at following developments and would need to take extra care, be cautious, and, in the theatrical sense, act. As she had acted for years with Craig, pretending to a light-hearted tolerance and respect that had long since died. And instead of a thick grey rhinoceros hide, like his own, that she had also tried to pretend she had, she must become soft and startled, emotional and desperate. Just those very things she had always had to keep inside, from about the age of thirteen.
* * * *
After she had seen to the whisky, Chrissie took another shower. (He cursed and grumbled at her when she came out, for waking him, then went back to sleep.)
Having dressed, she went down and had an espresso in the bar. There were a few people there by now; it was about four-thirty, and the light deepening, thickening, the lamp-like bottles turned to chunks of green and tawny shadow.
She engaged the barman in a little touristy banter. He flirted at her, kindly, nicely, seeing she would know enough not to push her luck, but would appreciate the civility.
‘My husband’s been getting so tired,’ she added sadly. ‘We so want to go to the city, see the red and white cathedral. But he just can’t face it. And I’m afraid the food isn’t agreeing with him. Such a shame. I love the food.’
When she had finished the espresso, she went out for a stroll. In the lobby, an oldish, blond man was standing talking to the reception clerk. She heard the blond man say, ‘They won’t listen, never will, won’t believe what you tell them. About the streets, the square. Especially the square.’
Chrissie thought he spoke in an accented English; how else could she understand? An American, perhaps.
As she crossed into the spotlight of levelling sun at the threshold, as if into a red-gold box, isolated, she heard the man say, ‘Only a couple of hours. Does it hurt to watch out, to take precautions, just from twelve till two? Little enough. Doctors say you should keep out of the midday sun now, anyway. For the skin. Too many bad rays getting through.’
Chrissie found she had hesitated. Pretending now to examine the strap of her sandal.
‘Popolo,’ said the man. ‘Citizens of noon,’ the man said. ’Mezzogiorno.’
And then she realized he spoke in Italian, not English, and suddenly she could not understand him.
She stepped out into the street, where cats were lying on balconies and in doorways, and a woman was selling bunches of flowers from the hills.
The bell sounded in the square. Five o’clock.
Inside, upstairs, behind her, Chrissie visualised Craig rolling off the bed, pouring himself two or three stiff drinks before taking his shower.
* * * *
Craig did not want dinner, he said (he told her why not; the disgusting food), but she, being a wimp, would make a fuss if they did not go out.
They walked down to the restaurant, through the square. (The families were strolling. Two handsome young men on Lambrettas entertained a batch of beautiful girls - bella! bella! Stars had appeared.) Craig’s colour was not good. He looked a little older.
In the restaurant he pushed most of the food far from him across the plates.
‘Filthy fucking muck,’ he said, too loudly. Around the room, faces glanced and away. The other diners looked almost fearful. But not precisely of Craig. Of something.
Although he did not eat, Craig drank copiously. He had the brandy, all the bottle.
His speech was slurred.
His little bluish pinkish eyes peered at Chrissie.
‘What are you staring at me for? Eh? Fuck you, you stupid cunt bitch.’
If he had made a public scene like this previously, and now and then it had come close, Chrissie would have curled together, shrivelled with embarrassment and terror. Tonight, she sat looking obediently away from Craig, her face stamped with a sort of compassion.
The other people in the restaurant would see how much he drank, how he behaved, his violence, the purple-red and porridge-sludge tones that alternated in his face. And they would observe how sorrowful Chrissie was, how meek, how she did her best, stayed quiet and unruffled. And yet so concerned - she had often pretended to solicitous concern before.
When Craig smashed his brandy glass - part accident, part dislocated rage - the manager came out with his son, a tanned and muscular youth in jeans and a white shirt.
‘I regret, signore, I must ask you to—’
‘Leave? My fucking pleasure, you nonce.’
At the door, she slipped back.
‘I’m so sorry. He’s not himself. He’s been feeling ill. He works too hard.’
‘E ben difficile, signora. But - it is nothing. Yourself, you are always welcome, while you remain.’
But in his face, as well, even in the face of the burly and competent son, a shifting of unease, a carefulness.
Outside, suddenly Craig swung sideways and vomited raucously on to the cobbles.
This went on some while, during which Chrissie stood, a picture of anxious helplessness, wide-eyed, clutching her hands together. Calm, and unmoved.
Raising his now mozzarella-coloured face, wiping his mouth. ‘There’s the advert for this crap joint,’ croaked Craig at the empty street. ‘That’s what their food’s good for, in that shithole.’
But then he had to lean over and commence puking again, and for some time, his sounds were restricted by and to this activity.
* * * *
All night Craig vomited. At first he made it to the bathroom, returning, staggering, to crash on his bed. Later he told her to bring him the waste-paper basket, and presently he told her to empty it. This became the routine. The colours changed, however. Black appeared, and crimson.
Between the bouts of his sickness, Chrissie slept a little, lying on her bed. There was an awful smell in the room, but this time he did not object when she opened both windows.
Above her, in the faintly luminous night, she saw the stains in the ceiling were quite different after dark, yet still she could make nothing of them. And then she believed she had, and she followed the map of stains and came into a place of nothingness, crowded with unseen, incredibly tall trees, but then a fearsome noise began and she woke up and it was Craig being sick again.
(The sounds he made now were so alarming, she was half-surprised no one had come to knock on their door. If they did, she was primed and had her performance all ready.)
When first light began, Craig spoke to Chrissie, in what was left of his voice. ‘Get me a doctor.’ So she got off the bed and went out of the room, closing the door behind her. She had kept on her clothes from the previous evening, and now she ran her fingers through her hair which never, anyway, looked like anything, so why bother. Then she turned the sign round on the door handle, so that it read, in Italian, French and English, Do not disturb.
There was already movement in the hotel. Spectral maids pattered through the corridors with armfuls of linen. In the lobby, the doors stood open to a cool nacreous dawn and they were watering the flowers in tubs by the doors.
Outside, birds sang.
Chrissie went straight to the square and sat at one of the tables left out, but its umbrella folded to a pencil, the doors of the cafe shut.
It was very early. She would have to wait.
She could smell the dew, the morning. She might never ever smell that again, or see a dawn or a night. She understood this quite well, and what she had renounced.
Each day, there would only be two hours of life. But a life of gold and crystal, a life of perfection. Spent - with Them.
All this they had promised her when they showed her the venomous frond. If only she would be brave enough. They had really wanted her. They had made that so obvious. Why did not matter. And armed with that she had been brave. Although, in fact, it had needed no bravery at all. Which was as well, since her courage had been entirely used up by the years of staying with him. To kill him - that had only been, ultimately, common sense.
Chrissie sat calmly, almost mindlessly, at her table, and when the cafe opened just after eight, various people came and put up her umbrella, and wiped the table, and brought her coffee and an orange.
She enjoyed them so much, the black bitter drink with its caffeine zing, the tart fruit - the last foods she would eat in this world.
She knew They did not eat, and when she became one of them, neither would she.
Were there others? Other people of the noon - perhaps. Possibly, when no longer visible to the susceptible human eye, they assumed, or returned to, some other form. Which was—? - diamante lizards -gleaming smokes - that glitter which sometimes came, when glancing away from something bright, and was thought to be some reflex of the optic nerve—
Was she excited at the prospect before her? Oh, she was radiant. She thought of how she would change, her skin turning to copper and her straw hair to spun gold. She thought of their embrace. Their love.
She had never been loved. Had she ever, herself, loved? No. Not until now.
‘Arrigo,’ she murmured, ‘and Gina. And . . . Chrissie . . .’
Men and women came and went around her and about the square. A cart rumbled by, a lorry. Mopeds. A girl who shouted. Children tumbling. A striding man with striding dogs. Her table was no longer approached; the waiters did not come to chivvy her, ask her what else she would have. They left her in her thrumming peace. As if they could see the shining cloud which contained her, as she waited for her lovers in the sunlight’s unfolding sunflower.
At about ten to twelve, Chrissie rose. When she did so, a curtain seemed to hang down from the burning sky, which drew itself all round her. Beyond the curtain, the quietness throbbed faintly with the undertones of other things, separate existences. The square had emptied entirely; no one was there any more, but for herself. All around, barricaded inside the glass windows of the cafes, she saw them, these others, at the tables, eating and drinking, playing cards. And in windows above the square, high up, she saw them too, their backs turned, their shutters closed. Already she had left them all.
Chrissie stood by the fountain. Its spray leapt up and over, over and up. She had brought nothing with her. She would need nothing ever again.
She knew, this time, she would see them arrive. The midday sun would bring them out, like flowers, like blisters in paint, like creatures from under a rock.
The bell rang from the church, cracked and irreversible.
They came up out of the rim of the fountain’s bowl and up from the ground. It was the way something might squeeze out of a tube, except that the tube was invisible. They were ectoplasmic, yet liquidly glassy. She thought of the wings of insects which, emerging from the chrysalis, must harden in the sun.
And then they were really there.
The light flared off them, through them, out of them, and heat radiated from them.
Chrissie smiled, and Arrigo and Gina smiled. Chrissie stretched out her hands, and as she did so, the sun flamed on her skin, the harmfully bad rays of twelve o’clock till two. And her skin was altered. It was peachy and translucent - Already, it began.
‘I did it,’ Chrissie said to Arrigo and Gina. ‘I poisoned him with the plant.’ They smiled. ‘He’ll probably be dead by now.’
Chrissie thought abruptly, perhaps not everyone uses the poison that way. Maybe they swallow it themselves. Or even sometimes it isn’t poison, that isn’t appropriate - a knife concealed in a wall, a razor-blade in a dustbin - we are all their potential victims, we susceptible ones. We won’t heed the warnings. They can do their work through us, one way or another way—
But she was not scared, no, not at all. For the first and last time in her life, Chrissie was exalted.
And then - what was it? Some new sound, some other awareness - Chrissie felt that after all, she and they were not quite alone in the noon square. And although she did not care, she looked over her shoulder. This was when she saw the two policemen, in their dark uniforms, with their spouting guns, standing across from her, at the entry of the street which led to the hotel.
Like Arrigo and Gina, the policemen wore sunglasses, very black, and as she had infallibly known it with Arrigo and Gina, Chrissie now knew that the policemen were staring directly at her. She turned again, away from them.
Arrigo and Gina smiled.
‘Well,’ Chrissie said. ‘They must have found him - I thought it would happen in the night, someone coming in - I was all ready to act upset, frantic - but then it was morning and - oh, I forgot, didn’t I, to empty out the last of the whisky - I thought it wouldn’t matter. It can’t now, can it? It’s too late. See my hands - my hands are almost transparent, aren’t they—’ But no, she thought then, something in her stumbling, the motion-sickness of the fall, no, her hands - were just as always. Bony, opaque, white, thin and thick.
Chrissie began to feel the new feeling, which was of utter darkness, there in the sun. Darkness and a wild flash of anger. For the town had known, this nice Italian town, most of them. They had seen, and warned, and stood aside, protecting themselves, knowing that Chrissie was the dupe - was the one - who would be lost—
She thought how lions stalked a herd of deer, and how one deer would become hypnotised, or was singled out because it was already in some way impaired and slow. How the lions brought the deer down. And then the rest of the herd settled, and began again to feed innocently on the grass, alongside the lions feeding on the meat of the dead deer.
Arrigo and Gina still smiled, but they did not touch her. No need for it now. Instead they took off their own sunglasses, as if to see her better.
Their eyes were not as she had imagined. They were small and round and brilliant blood-red beads, without pupil or white, set in swivelling scaly portholes. The eyes of lizards. And their strawberry tongues (lizardlike) flicked in and out two or three times. Tasting.
‘Oh,’ Chrissie said, blankly.
Arrigo and Gina dissolved. They shimmered away, they and their horrible radioactive beauty and their reptile eyes and their satisfaction.
And Chrissie once more looked back towards the policemen, who remained exactly where they were. Waiting, perhaps, as Chrissie did, to see whether or not she too could impossibly grow transparent and vanish, or if she was only a human English woman, who had premeditatedly and viciously murdered a man in the hotel, her motives clear as day, and who was too fucking stupid to have covered up her tracks.
* * * *
Tanith Lee began writing at the age of nine and became a full-time writer in 1975 when DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave. Since then she has written and published around sixty novels, nine collections and over two hundred short stories. She also had four radio plays broadcast during the late 1970s, and early ‘8os, and scripted two episodes of the cult BBC-TV series Blakes 7. She has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master. In 1998 she was shortlisted for the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction for her novel Law of the Wolf Tower, the first volume in the ‘Claidi Journal’ series. More recently, Tor Books has published White as Snow, the author’s retelling of the Snow White story, while Overlook Press has issued A Bed of Earth and Venus Preserved, the third and fourth volumes, respectively, in the ‘Secret Books of Paradys’ series. She is currently working on a sequel to her novel The Silver Metal Lover for Bantam Books. ‘Two of the hours of day that fascinate me the most are sunset and noon,’ reveals the author. ‘But there has always been something sinister, perhaps, about the departure of light, while midday is dangerous, not only now, but always. It is the time of sunstroke, of accident, when eyes are blinded a moment, even fatally, by the raw presence of the sun. Added to this now, the warnings of apparently no longer shielded UV rays. Only mad dogs and Englishmen are stupid enough to dare it. All over the Mediterranean, they resort to the siesta. Is there something more to all this? Some instinct valid as the uneasy alertness encountered in the early hours of morning, or in the ‘tweenlight of dusk? Bright light conceals maybe even better than shadows .. .’