The Monster's Wife(61)
Oona looked more closely at Bridget’s face than usual, saw the spider veins on her cheeks and the down of fair hair that fringed her forehead. Bridget stopped smiling and her eyes grew clear. When she leaned close to Oona, there was a tender look in them. Her hand hovered near Oona’s bruised throat, but when Oona blinked, it fluttered away.
“You can’t see what will be.”
Oona blinked hard. “No one can.”
“No. No, you’re right. It’s better being honest than being loved.”
Bridget got up, her movements as agile as a hare’s. Her hand rested on Oona’s neck and then it was gone and she was away into the valley, singing out of tune. Oona rubbed her throat, not knowing why Bridget’s words had made her heart ache. She looked back down at the shirt, blooming in the water like an ungainly flower - and there in the centre, a ragged red mark. Held to the light, it looked like blood.
53
Oona stood in the big house kitchen with her back to the stove, her fingers tingling from the heat flowing too quickly into them. Unless she took care, she’d grow chilblains again.
The still-damp shirt lay plastered to the back of a chair, stain-down. Outside the window, linens hung on the line threw flickering shapes that reminded her of puppet figures made from hands and a candle to entertain children. In their shadows flickered an image of May’s face that last time. The dark eyes gazed at Oona sadly before bleeding into Victor’s drawing of the woman tied by her wrists. A sheet flapped in the wind and the picture smashed. It was now a black vision of Stuart’s hands choking her while the scarred man at the window watched, bent on revenge.
Maybe this was how Bridget felt, flooded by pictures that wouldn’t come clear.
A board creaked upstairs. Oona straightened. She grabbed up the shirt and swung into the dark hallway with its mothball scent and ticking clock, then took the stairs two at a time.
Victor stood at the top of the stairs, elegantly coiffed and crisply dressed, poised to descend.
She held the shirt up to him, unfolding it to reveal the rust red mark. “I was washing your clothes and I found this.”
He took the shirt from her and leant on the bannister, peering down through his silver eyes as he turned the damp cloth in his hands. Then he handed back the shirt and took out a handkerchief. She remembered his lips on hers and wished she hadn’t shown him the stain.
Victor blew his nose, folded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket. “You wanted to ask me about this…blood?” His eyebrow flew up at the last word.
“I want to know how it happened.” She listened to her own voice, so suspicious and bitter these days.
His eyes moving from her cheek to her swollen lip, her necklace of bruises. “Were you not with me the other day when I was beaten bloody?” He laughed his boyish laugh.
“Yes, but you weren’t wearing this shirt.”
“I changed into it after I dressed my wounds and burned the other that was ruined.” He smiled wryly. “That is an old one given to me by my cousin Eliz...” His eyes blurred. He looked out of the window, cleared his throat. “Burn it also if you wish, but don’t kill yourself trying to clean it.”
She nodded and turned away, feeling the heat prickle along the nape of her neck. He’d been kind, considering.
“Wait, I have something to show you.”
She stopped, the prickle turning to a shiver.
“Do you not wish to view my little invention?”
In the music room, the noon sun painted gold squares over the white walls. It was tidy for once and even the floor around the billiard table was free of scrawled papers. Orpheus strutted across the floor, chasing the sunlight, a dazed look in his red eyes. He barely seemed to notice her. Victor crossed the Persian rug, beckoning to her to follow.
Long limbed and angular, a doe-hare lay on a board on the writing desk. As Oona came near to it, she saw that the doe’s dark-lashed eyes were half open. Her body was stretched apart, slit along the belly. Though Oona was as used to dressing game as the next girl, the sight of the doe’s guts pinned out across the board made her wince. There were wires tangled with the veins of the small heart, cogs and a circular piece of metal serrated inside, with what looked like teeth gripping the spine. In the centre of the metal contraption was a smooth, metal flap. Victor untwisted the pins that held it shut and stared inside at the metal circles, at their teeth, knitted tightly together in the centre of the doe’s entrails.
“I have struggled with some means to begin things...to find the spark that animates flesh! It is in nature, in lightning. It’s what has made this place so fruitful, all the storms from the sea, all that electricity filling the air. But even here there are calm days when there is nothing... Well, I have tinkered and pondered and stumbled upon a way of making bodies become their own source of energy, their own source of power. I have harnessed the lightning within the body, Oona.”
Oona looked at Victor’s face so that she didn’t have to see the pitiful thing anymore, undignified now as any creature could be. He seemed so pleased with himself, as if all his tortured tale of the monster stalking him was no more than some act he believed was expected of him, as if he had no conscience at all. “And why do you need all this? So that you can keep killing animals and turning them into toys?”
He laughed and it chilled her now. “I need it...to keep a promise. That is all. Anyway, enough. Observing the living tells as much as any study of the dead ever does. Sometimes the living can be so instructive.” He was staring at her chest, unashamedly. “May I?”