by Bridget Penney

This story has been collected in Suspect Device, the Serpent’s Tail ‘anthology of hard-edged fiction’ edited by Stewart Home, available in paperback. The anthology also features Steve Beard, who has also had fiction in The Edge.

I am rediscovering the immediate. I hold the pen three inches from my eye. Even so, the letters blur away from me. But I’m writing very carefully. I’m rediscovering my writing. why do I write this way? I’m looking at my fingers and thumb around the pen - like all the pens in the house it seems always on the verge of running out of ink. Normally I never examine my fingers so close up. The skin is very rough and cracked. Round the nails, especially. I can see the lines of dirt under my nails that I always mean to do something about. My hands seem permanently dirty. I don’t know why.

What do you mean by not being able to see? I’m trying to think about it. Two mornings ago, there was freezing fog which did not lift all day, and when I got up early to go to work, the pavement was black, sheer and glistening - at least I pictured it so when I tried to walk and found my feet slipping, for if I could see my hand in front of my face that was all. While I waited for the bus I was more jumpy than usual, as I could not see what was coming, and the park on the far side of the road was invisible - the fog so thick I could not even discern the absence of buildings.

It’s strange how the sentence escapes me. Because I can’t keep it all under my eyes, I have to remember it in my head. I find that difficult. what does this say about me? That I’m not used to it. It’s too easy to rely on the eye. Everything I’m used to in the world is visual. This text has a serial integrity. I cannot read what I’ve written, I form it as I go along.

This is a notebook of losts and founds. I can write without seeing what I write. You have no idea how liberating this appears to me.

Her name is Flora. If she was in the street and a military band went past, she had to stop her hand from rising in salute.

It is Christmas Eve. Children are whooping in the street outside. It is six days since the end of the diary of blindfold.

Grandmother/Grandfather

Why am I thinking about Flora? Because I read about her somewhere and she comes to mind like a character in a story I’ve already written.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like to fight in the First World War. When I was growing up there was more of a link with that time.

Both my grandmothers were born in 1898. They were sixteen when the war began, twenty when it ended. Their lives were very different, but had this common shaping factor. My mother too grew up during a war. She was eighteen in 1945, my father four years younger.

I’ve heard it said that people who have fought together always know each other. That war puts a stamp on people, marking them out for the rest of their lives.

My grandfather lost an eye and a lung in the war to shrapnel and mustard gas. In their wedding photo he stands beside my grandmother. It seems they are both leaning slightly towards the camera. She wears a long veil with a circlet of flowers round her head. I can’t remember her expression. He wears an eye patch. The effect is not rakish, but grim. He died of a heart attack in his forties - a long-term casualty. My grandmother remained a widow for thirty years.

I helped clear out her house after she died. I was maybe fourteen at the time. The house was tall and chilly. It was the place where she had spent all her married life and widowhood. When we’d stayed there, many Christmases before, my sister and I slept in the room our father had once occupied. It still had children’s books in it, some toys. Now, sorting through the accumulated litter of her possessions, came a fresh sense of surprise. At fourteen I’d started to become curious in a new way. I was mostly self-absorbed, but to things I could read as a part of my own history I was intensely open.

What was it like to marry a man who came back from the war? Could she have let herself think about what might have been. Behind my grandmother’s neat water-colours there was no sense of personality at all.

Flora

—My father, she sighed. —I loved my father. I did everything I could to please him.

Her father was a self-educated man. He developed an addiction to learning, passed on to her everything he knew. To teach her helped him to get things clear in his own mind. He was ex-army, walked with a limp. She liked the way he walked. It never struck her that there was anything wrong.

Flora is in an old folk’s home. She will be eighty next month. She wouldn’t mind the place so much, she’s been in hospital, worse places, but here the TV is on quite loud all day and she cannot get used to it. When she tells the nurse who is combing her hair that she never had TV before the nurse looks at her, thinking she’s senile.

—What did you do all day?

—I had plenty to do, Flora said clearly, thinking back to the days before she broke her hip and ended up here. The nurse passes her a mirror. She studied her reflection, thinking who is this old woman? - and says to the nurse (who’s young, her favourite) —how do you stand being around old people all day? The nurse smiles at her. —It’s my job. She turns away to lay down the mirror and comb, then says abruptly

—So what did you do when you were my age?

—I was in the army, Flora said.

—What did you do? the nurse repeated, taking the crimson scarf higher round Flora’s neck.

—I was a soldier.

It was a long time since she’d said it to anyone, not forgetting but trying to live it down, integrating unsuccessfully with the life she was expected to lead. She felt herself stiffen a little, pride maybe, ridiculous in any case. She wanted to laugh at herself and was glad that her tear ducts were so old and useless there was no danger of her weeping.

—I’m not senile.

She met the girl’s uneasy gaze. —I was a transvestite.

The effect of the word was so clearly shocking on the young woman’s face. Old people weren’t supposed to know such words. Age made them innocent. The world had been more innocent when they were young.

—You fought? said the nurse —You killed people then.

Flora sighed. —They were the enemy. It was war. You can’t understand. I can’t justify myself to you now.

Among my grandmother’s possessions was a box with a decorated lid. On it was a picture of a lady in a ballgown by a window. As I held it up to the light, it glittered and shimmered, turning from blue to green. The skirt was fashioned from a butterfly’s wing. When I realised that I never touched it again.

*

Other things happen in the diary of blindfold. Everyday things have become fiddly, making a cup of tea is a complicated process when I can hardly see. Worried that I’ll hurt myself at first, Paul insists on doing everything for me - it’s rather nice to be waited on hand and foot but after a few hours it’s just frustrating - and I sneak away when he’s busy or asleep. I find I can do most things as long as I’m careful - it’s just the margin of error is so small and the detail of objects when I peer at them close up becomes distracting.

We walked over to Whitechapel. It was raining very lightly when we left, and he’d rather have taken the tube but I said that I wanted to be in the fresh air and the underground would confuse me, I’d find the darkness in the tunnels and the bright lights too disorienting. Besides it will stop raining darling (it didn’t). He held an umbrella over us both and I couldn’t see myself getting wet, it became apparent only as my clothes started to feel damp. We walked across the common, traversed the bridge over the canal, along back streets, past workshop units, Paul telling me when to mind the pavement and cross the road. Bored, fed-up, and even more ungracious than usual, I was perversely determined to prove (though I was glad he was there) that I could manage on my own - I saw that kerb, yes, and I know the pavement dips there because I’ve walked this way so many times, there’s the railing, yes, and we have reached the road. Cars approach, their lights blur, spangle and fracture, growing huge. That sounds like a lorry which way is it coming? I realise I can’t separate out noises directionally at all - is this something that people who are not just blindfold but really blind learn to do?

We’re walking past the Trinity almshouses which echo the sea in every curve of their construction: rigged ships perched at each corner, monsters’ faces and the delicate openings of shells over doorways and windows. The roof beams are old ships’ timbers.

Buildings appear skeletal. They’re hard to describe. Lines and angles dominate. The people walking towards me are sticks on two legs with round heads. The faces of the blind have a different set of expressions. I wonder what my own face looks like.

*

1915 - Flora paused in front of the photographer’s shop in the main street of a small town miles from anywhere except the military training camp. Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. She was suffering from a serious failure of nerve as she stared at her uniformed reflection among the framed prints in the window - the weddings, babies, and the pictures of young girls to give to their friends. She had never felt she fitted in before, but now she was sick at heart with the hundred small embarrassments and uncertainties arising from her changed state.

Tired of looking, she was about to move on when she heard a girl’s voice calling her —hey soldier soldier boy where are you off to in such a hurry?

The interior of the shop was dark, crowded with equipment and smelt of chemicals. —I’m Maud, said the girl —my father’s away today, he’s photographing a wedding over at —. Flora smiled though the name meant nothing to her, looking around as her eyes became used to the gloom. —I was watching you from the window, said Maud —there’s nothing much else to do here. You’re from London, aren’t you. What’s your name? —Gerrard, Flora said. She was suddenly nervous of Maud. There was an intensity in her eyes, the face framed by dark ropes of hair. —Do you want your picture done, Mister Gerrard?

Maud smiled then, seeming self-conscious, and turned away, picking a stray black hair off the pink knitted cardigan she wore. —I’ll do it for free as my contribution to the war effort. From your face you must be a good fighter, Gerrard.

Flora laughed then. Maud brought out her own recklessness, and she was aware of a freedom in her position that was unfamiliar, elating. Maud unlocked a door at the back of the shop. As Flora stepped through, she glanced up. Several heavy wooden rollers were suspended from the ceiling. —These are the backdrops, Maud said quietly, almost uneasy. —I think we should use this one for you.

What had she expected when Maud puffed the cord and the canvas unrolled too quickly, raising all the dust? Not this, not the crowded intensity of colour, abstract shapes settling into a foreign landscape - a village in the background but not like here, smooth rolling hills, a meadow crammed with flowers. In the foreground was a tree with spreading branches and fruit growing among the leaves. —You painted this? Flora said turning. Maud nodded. All at once she seemed older, weary, and when she smiled Flora felt she knew how she’d look when she was an old woman.

It was scary and very strange. It made her think would she even be alive a year from today - would the war be over - what else would have happened—

During the First World War phosphorescent paint was applied to the grass in London parks with the idea of fooling enemy planes into believing they were large buildings lit up.

The iconography of the female warrior

On medals, Renaissance princes had themselves depicted as armed women, reconciling Mars and Venus. Queen Christina - Garbo’s uncomfortable laugh. Kleist’s Penthilisea, Amazon turned vampire feeding on her lover’s flesh. Phoebe Hessel, who served in the English army during the eighteenth century and is buried in Brighton where she died aged 108.

Flora had one particular friend while she was in the army. His name was Leonard. He spent all his time reading, he would read anything, old newspapers, manuals, that he could get his hands on.

They talked about London. They talked about Victoria Park. She tried to imagine it with the grass painted silver. It would shine like a great unearthly lake, in the moonlight glowing, the trees would rise up out of the lake. The flamingos which lived on the pond would walk across the phosphorescent grass.

ghost of Maud the painter

In Flora’s imagination she always appears as on the day of the photograph. Ghosts should be dressed in white but Maud is resolutely Technicolor.

Flora—Why did you cut your throat?

Maud points to her neck. She tries to speak but there is only an ugly gasping sound.

Flora wakes shivering.

when reading becomes difficult
you start to think about it

when walking is difficult
when speech is hard for some reason

the primacy of the visual sense
if we could see ghosts walking in daylight
Chinese ghosts with black spittle

paper motorcycle ... typewriter
paper Walkman
shoes made beautifully of paper
Hell passport, bank notes
entering another country with due precaution

Hell's windows
play ball
bouncing
a soft paper ball
that makes no sound
won’t fly straight

Tiresias could speak without blood
‘the sense of the pleasure she gave
doubled her own pleasure’

in cold hell
Blindfold’s Black Book

‘and then Ille’

when this you see remember me
when/this/you/see/remember/me
remember me but oh forget my fate

Amour

Maud: ... keeper of the gate
Maud Ruthyn

serpent coils
girls in white dresses
(some of Maud’s paintings have the qualifies
of pornography the cold eye)

hard
Maud sits in a room, reading
she has one eye on the camera taking the picture

her own camera
she is frozen there by her own
resolution

Amour:

his eyes are blindfolded with a black cloth.
He is naked, flambeau in his crossed hands

She kisses him on the knee
she feels the movement
of the plates of bone
under fluid
she presses her tongue against his kneecap
sliding her hands
up the back
of his thighs
she tastes the skin of his thigh
slightly salt
she lets her tongue find him
how to awaken him
he’s like a statue
she takes his dick in her mouth
she sucks
she pushes
the skin back
gently
with the very edges of her teeth
she thinks of things for her tongue to do
it seems
too big
for her mouth
she pushes
teases it around
her hands clasp his buttocks

the torches above her head tremble
she feels
the muscles tense
in his back
she hears his voice
he is no longer silent
he cries out
marvellous words of love

*

Tuesday, January 28th: a disappointment. I walked over to the Whitechapel Gallery curious to view the exhibition. A cabinet of signs I’d visited seven weeks before with seriously restricted vision. I avoided the dioramas with wildebeest my eyes had previously inched over. I looked at the books made of cut-up comics (X-men and bathing belles), sleek machines showing a raw image of human flesh, white pillars with cool messages, flashing lights revealing numbers where there had been a blur. It was the last free day so the gallery was quite crowded. Lots of people were drawing things. Why is the sight of people drawing in an art gallery so bizarre.

Alison is going to Japan in two months’ time. She is to sublet her brother’s flat in Tokyo and teach English to Japanese kids. She expects to find it much easier than what she’s doing now. I said—you’ve got to be joking, teaching kids? but she says they’ve all been learning English for six years already and can read and write it’s just the speaking they’re not confident about. I told this to Mark and he said that’s right, teaching English in Japan you do it totally on your own terms and don’t have to know any Japanese. I like the thought of Alison speaking English to all these Japanese kids. She has a few contacts over there, she’s really looking forward to it, even the gardens, she says, are like works of art.

I remember a postcard my uncle sent me from Tokyo. It showed the hotel garden. He said he’d tried to find it and when he did he discovered the space was so small you couldn’t really go in it, you just looked at the arrangement of rocks, the fountain falling into a stream and carefully tended plants. I made a miniature garden in a pie dish. The ground was moss I scraped off a stone. It was brighter than grass and somehow exciting even in the ragged patchwork I made of it. There was a pond in the middle - silver foil or a fragment of mirror. I edged it with tiny white stones I picked up from the gravel, but was dissatisfied. I wanted an effect like flowers or stars. The stones would never unfold like wood anemones. The pond was in stasis. It could not ripple. When I stared down into it, it returned an unwinking reflection of my own eye.

Flowers are for

The fields are full of flowers. The fields are full of women. Crimson poppies, brave women. The army is made up of women soldiers massed against the sky and mud. What would it—Flora thought—what would it be like?

She leans against a tree. Once the landscape was green. All the leaves have gone now. The trunk was blackened by the explosion that blew them away. Ash has scored deeply into its bark. What does the landscape betray? It is covered by a fine grey cloud that sometimes rises and fills the air. It gets in your eyes and furs your tongue, but it’s not like gas. You can close your eyes against the cloud. With its poison, the gas ruins your whole body inside out.

*

She shifts her position, still against the tree. Its stark outline on the abandoned battlefield offers some protection. Her clothes are wet through. She puts her face against the bark. She has a pistol in her hand from habit, regulation. It would be useless if she was attacked.

It is so quiet. There are men back there behind the mounds of earth she helped to dig, packed icy hard now and slippery as glass with the morning’s frost. They are talking and smoking, singing, playing cards. The boredom they all have to face is the unutterable thing. Waiting for something you know will happen makes you want it to happen however much you are afraid.

She can’t imagine this land in other than its outline. Where have the birds gone? She is the only living thing. The soldiers march and turn everything to mud under the sky.

At moments like this it’s better not to think. She is part of the mood that grips them all. She has to do well, there is that in her, but it is fear that drives her, a strange notion of dying unfulfilled.

Maud the painter

Maud the painter. Maud my sister. Maud the impatient.

She is reading Uncle Silas. She likes books in which she appears. She flips from page to page, drawing pictures in the margin. Her sketches start to enclose the words. She circles words that take her fancy, drawing them out of their place in a sentence to let them stand forth as raw material. MAUD. She isolates her name. HAGGARD. PALLID. TRANCE. I WAS MORE NERVOUS AND MORE IMPETUOUS, AND MY FEELINGS BOTH STIMULATED AND OVERPOWERED ME MORE EASILY. PROFANED. TRANSFIXED. HE GOES BY THE EYE AND BY SENSATION. HAUNTED REGIONS. THE SERPENT BEGUILED HER AND SHE DID EAT.

Maud finds herself staring into the mirror above the fireplace. The reflection is dim but then her eyes clear and she sees her lover standing by the French widow. He is tall and dark, no longer blindfolded. When he smiles at her his eyes are piercing rays.

—What do you want? Maud says. Though barely into middle age her face is lined and her hair already white. —You left me remember I thought you’d done with me a long time ago.

He is changing as she speaks. When he opens his mouth millions of sparks waver on the air. —Maud, he says—Love is eternal wherever you take it.

She feels the heat of his breath, no, it’s the heat of the fire in the grate. She takes in the familiar objects around her, the clock with its subdued tick, the calendar on the wall which says 1934. She opens the window out into the yard. It has been raining. The smell of the wet city night enters the room. It’s full of smoke and stars. She can hear voices in the next street. She feels remote from them. She looks at her pictures propped around the room. A detail catches her eyes here and there: an arm, a throat, a branch, the eyes of death looking at her through the leaves.

*

In one sketch there is nothing but ribbons. Ribbons are for a bride. When she walks and talks. When she kneels and stands and sits. Ribbons are to cover her. They are one colour, all colours of blue. They change according to her mood. Some are deep indigo. She lies.

Bridget Penney is the author of Honeymoon with Death. She grew up in Edinburgh and lives in East London.