Little Colin was scared.  But Colin’s being scared was not outright terror nor, even, simple fear.  His being scared derived from the fact that he was not scared at all.  After all, he should have been scared upon discovering the thing in his bed.  So, he pretended to himself that he was scared, so he wouldn’t be so scared at not being scared in any way by the thing he found under the bed-covers.  Onion layers of scare being peeled back one by one and he hadn’t even cried once.  

Emerald's dress of salvaged curtains, now hanging in tatters, barely concealed the ancient garters upon her bare legs.

 "I'm not going to be on your side!"

 Emerald mischievously used one of her fingers to threaten poking into the eye of a doll, a doll that simply acted dead in the woman's arms, where it had resided for most of both their lives, except that the doll had never been a proper baby.

 Emerald could not remember being a baby, although she supposed that she must have been - disbelieving in a continuity of existence which had no beginning if, as yet, no end. Yet her consciousness had emerged from the mists ... and, now, here she was, quite bedraggled, with only her loyal doll as company. Yet, for such loyalty, she often paid it dear.

The men who had abandoned her in such a parlous state, had long since slipped her memory, as had their behaviour towards her. She merely sensed vague shapes in the past. She shook her head as she forced the possibility of their return into some forgotten corner of consciousness.

"You're a pretty sight!"

She mouthed the words, miming them towards the doll, not needing to speak them out loud, since the words had in fact been suddenly sounded by a nearby figure of standing darkness.

 Emerald raised her head from gazing into the doll's soulless eyes and tried to sort form from form. It was a man who had spoken, not unlike those who had been the cause of her downfall - dressed in a similar manner, true, but his eventual face spoke more kindness than cruelty, although cruelty was present, too. No man could empty himself fully of a man's natural leanings.

Emerald smiled, an act of second nature, with no force behind it. The eyes issued her true feelings; her mind was not far short of being empty, having given up the ghost. She had, in fact, often attempted to bring the doll to life by surrendering her own thoughts to it, with the result that most of her mind escaped altogether. So, she became no better than the doll itself, even if, tonight, fitfully stirred by the external force of another human shape.

"I'm a pretty sight? I'm a pretty sight?"

 Emerald spoke as if someone had pulled a thread from her back that had rewound, whilst activating a recurrent sound-recording from a speaker in her chest.

The man had intended his words to be reassuring rather than otherwise - but his misplaced tone had given her the impression of yet another enemy to face, in a long line of such enemies. Her own words, in answer, were less automatic than they sounded - indeed attempting to draw more comfort from the man's words than they warranted. She convinced herself that she was a pretty sight - but, upon casting another look downwards to view the makeshift frock of lizards' tails around her gartered calves, she rubbed away tears as they formed.

"Me - doll."

 She pointed to herself and the doll in turn, believing that formal introductions were required, if only to differentiate. She had forgotten the name she had once given the doll - and "me" was as good as any for herself, in these times of clandestine associations. For all she knew, she might be talking to just about anybody - and probably was.

Trust was a treasure that lay undiscovered. Nobody was King.

The man shrugged his shoulders, showing that he did not trouble himself as to her identity. When man met woman, there was usually one thing on a man's mind. He held his empty palms upward to prove that he carried no obvious weapon.

 "Have they been gone long?"

 His voice had lowered to a whisper, in deference to his audience. Close up, he had read fear in the woman's eyes that no amount of telepathy had earlier revealed in the first spate of encounter. He felt more au fait than any storyteller.

"Who have been gone long?" she asked.

"The other men."

"Longer than I can remember, I suppose."

"Did they ... hurt you?"

"No - I don't think so." She self-consciously examined those parts of her body on show as if to substantiate her opinion.

"You don't think so?"

He thought: if the other men had not hurt her (or raped her, as he had wanted to say), then why ever hadn't they? The world had not changed that much, surely, since he had been away.

 The exchange of words had faltered into an embarrassing silence. He felt an urge to fetch the violin from his rucksack and play a turn, to assess whether there was any dance left - left within either the woman or the doll. Stranger things had happened in the world and, if nothing else, it would tell him a fact or two about the residual power of spells in these parts. He did not immediately go for his fiddle (as he preferred to call his violin), since any action might have been misinterpreted as aggressive.

The minstrel returned the smile - at last. He had debated whether to issue such a friendly reciprocation whilst initially presenting a surly expression. Smiling was the ultimate sign of weakness; yet the woman's smile may have been a double-bluff from an enemy in drag. But he now sensed that the woman's smile had in fact meant nothing, merely a reflex echo of an erstwhile girlish emotion.

 So, yes, he was safe to return the smile. In the old days, he had not been mean with his smiles - prided himself on being a lady's man - when that expression actually signified something. The weathering of the years and the endemic mistrust had altered his looks, but not markedly - or so he hoped. He had given up peering into surfaces of water, where its customary murkiness added shadows to his complexion - if not to his soul.

The woman tilted her doll so that its eyes closed, but this manoeuvre also seemed to cause a smile of its own to fleet across the fixed lips - yet the minstrel put that down to the quirk of twilight. He listened to the sucking from the surrounding creeks. Anything, these days, had the capacity to make noises, even invisible creatures. His hair-trigger reactions set off a series of trip-switches in his brain - but it did not show. Odds on, the sucking was a spirited quirk of the mud - harmless, if ugly. He might be able to catch it for supper. The woman looked hungrier than him. He couldn't be sure about the doll.

The minstrel had carved the carcass, musing upon the world and its mysteries. The quirk of the mud was still alive, since cooking was not what it used to be: cooking, once upon a time, could kill, as well as tenderise, even the most blatantly mineralised life form. Yet, the quirk's flesh melted in the mouth, even if slightly squirming as it entered the stomach. He glanced across at the woman who was picking desultorily at the quirk's twitching carcass. Her hunger had quickly been appeased. He winced as she tried to feed a sliver of the quirk to the doll, whose eyes were still shut, long eye-lashes upon plump waxen cheeks.

The fiddle was played whilst the residual quirk continued to braise over the fire - a fire which he had cunningly fixed from scrawny root-tops and ignited by a gnashing of his teeth. The fiddle's strains had magically empurpled the air. He had never played so well. The bow had been drawn across the gut-strings as sweetly as a nut, the trees acting as an echo-chamber, eschewing the bad notes whilst retaining the best. On this occasion, the woman's tears were not rubbed away.

Eventually, he became drugged with a slumber so deep, he would wonder later whether he had not died, if temporarily - and would be wrong as to the truth of the matter. There was a dream, on his way down, one where the doll crawled from the woman's lap and jigged slowly to the fiddle's wafting lilt. Only in dreams, of course, could fiddles play so sweetly and dolls dance and women be so beautiful.

Emerald watched the man sleep.

Trust in someone of the opposite sex was indeed the treasure trove she had instinctively sought all her life - and now here she possessed it at last in this minstrel man. He seemed vulnerable, curled around the fire he had so carefully set.

 The quirk's carcass - sadly depleted by the needs of their supper - crawled off towards the mud to die properly in private.

 She held the doll to her breast, feeling its soft gums drag on the nipple.

 Eventually, she deliberately dropped the doll into the smouldering of the man's nurtured fire. The waxen shape twitched, melting in turgid bubbles from around the glinting dagger hidden inside it.

 Not remembering anything was tantamount to remembering everything - blowing the mind simply by recalling a whole living world's pantheon of memories.

Brandishing the dagger, Emerald wept fresh tears. She'd have the man's guts for garters, if not for fiddle-strings. Visualising her legs decked anew, she mouthed: "I'm a pretty sight - I'm a pretty sight."


First published ‘Auslander’ 1995