Read by Sarah Feathers
This landscape’s white, hard, unrelenting, slippery, without shade or vegetation. His feet skid wildly, searching for purchase on the shiny surface. A strange surface, now he looks more closely. It is not entirely white. There are faint swirls of colour within: a pattern like the memory of veins.
He is not himself. If he is not himself, then who the hell is he? Where was he before?
Firstly, his last, his most recent life: he is part of a chain of men who creep, so weary they can barely trudge, across a blinding crust of ice. Beneath this surface lies snow to a depth of fifteen thousand feet. Antarctica!
Long ago they finished their last square of chocolate; after that they ate the dogs. Between them they’ve lost several toes; one of the men has lost his reason. All know they are dying. Nevertheless their moustachioed upper lips remain metaphorically and actually stiff.
Farewell letters have been written. He imagines his wife, Marianne, back in Blighty, slitting open the white envelope with her ebony paper knife, her face a beautiful blank as she reads the news of his demise. She’ll bear his loss well, and bring up their child to be an English gentleman.
“I volunteered because it seemed best for our marriage,” he’d said, before he left, addressing the curve of her half-naked and indifferent back, the ruby clasp of her neck’s encircling pearls, the glimpse of her flawless face in the dressing table mirror.
He’d remembered the hard white crust of their wedding cake. Clutching the knife together they could hardly saw through it. Later, in bed, he’d attempted to explore the frozen miles beneath her surface. The coldness of that embrace. No, she wouldn’t miss him.
*
What about an earlier life then?
He remembers a sultry room with shutters closed where slatted shadows fall across the bed. He and Marianne lie and sweat after love.
In this life he is black. His arm curving across her bleached body is like an extra shadow. There is a sound of horses’ hooves. He knows she will betray him, yet he is so overwhelmed with torpor that he cannot rouse himself to run away.
*
And another life; one that happened centuries ago.
He stands by the arched window of a tower, a tower that overlooks the plains of Aquitaine. He and Marianne are playing chess. (As usual her appalling husband is out killing things – boars, ducks, heretics - who knows?) Her tall white headdress is made of sculptured linen folds. Her long finger pushes forward the black queen; she looks up and smiles at him, her troubadour.
He cannot help but love her; at the same time, he’s not blind. He guesses that she has another lover in her sights. He knows the signs: the dreamy look, the colour of the new favour that flutters from her jewelled girdle.
He picks up his lute and sings.
Lives have but a little span
Love lives on in spite of time
Let me love you Marianne
Love me, dear one, if you can
Hope lasts longer than a rhyme
Turn not from me, Marianne.
But when she smiles at him her eyes are cold.
*
And before that, long before that, there was another life.
In a hot white town a woman, entirely shrouded in black, bearing a glazed water jar on her head, walks down an empty street. Music, stringed music, slithers and drops, note by note, from a window. The window is a black velvet space of nothing surrounded by a glare of white.
Beneath her burqa Marianne’s hips undulate to the beat. How perfectly her allure radiates through the enveloping black. He recognises that little curl of the hand, the only part of her that he can see. Helplessly he follows, his fingers just touching the hilt of his dagger.
He sees the shadow moving in the shadow. He anticipates death.
*
All that was the past. Now this is now. But now who is he? He swivels his eyes, which seem to be on either side of his head, a head that feels as broad as his body. They are so far apart, these eyes, that he has two quite different views at once. Now he sees that the stony promontory on which he walks is set deep in a glade of soft green oak and beech.
Who cares? The really big question is, how many legs has he got? Can there really be six of them? He tries to look down, but it’s hard. He has the sensation of being armoured. And talking of arms, branched arms seem to protrude from his head. Then there are these other emanations which wave before him – ferny floaters – could they be antennae? Might he have become a lobster? A land lobster presumably, since he is not under water. Creakily he swivels his head, looks back at his shiny blackness (a hint of glossy chestnut) and glimpses his dinky little pincer feet. Now he knows what he has become. Of course! He is a stag beetle!
There’s little time to ask himself why he is now lucanus cervus after so many lives as homo sapiens. He suspects that someone up there might be trying to make a point.
Little time because at this moment a great bird lands beside him, skittering on the slippery white stone. Black feathers, black eye, black beak agape. His life as a stag beetle will be a short one if he doesn’t act now. But what are pincers for if not to fight? He leans forward and grabs a scaly leg, squeezes like a car mechanic. The crow gives a startled cry, then heaves and flaps herself into the sky.
And now our hero remembers something else. Once in every lifetime he has been given an overview, a chance to see things clearly, an opportunity not to repeat.
He looks down, and sees that he has been walking over a statue, a marble representation of Aphrodite. He can even see the pedestal from which the statue tumbled onto the forest floor. His crow has carried him high enough to notice that the pedestal stands in a little grotto, in a glade of what looks like an old park.
Now, as the crow swoops lower, still cawing angrily, it is possible to see that the statue has the perfect, the regular, the utterly divine features of Marianne. Beauty turned to stone. And he, a lonely black stag beetle has been crawling over her smooth white marble flesh, clambering up the dimpled slopes of her familiar bottom and down the curve of her delicious thighs.
All this he sees in an instant, and then that angry open beak confronts him again. If she weren’t so busy squawking, the crow would already have snapped him up. There’s only one option and that’s to release his grip, to fall, perhaps to die.
But now that he is falling, and buoyed up for a moment by a kindly current of air, our stag beetle feels a little stirring in his back, the unfolding of another power. Miraculous papery brown wings appear. He can fly! Jerkily, like an aeroplane driven by an elastic band, he circles and lands once more on Marianne. He alights on her smooth shoulder, against which he has so frequently, so yearningly, longed to lean. How often has she coldly turned this shoulder towards him!
Her body is without scent or savour. But out there, beyond her, the forest is rich with the rotten stink of decay. This is what I am for. He lets go and rolls down into beech leaves, leaf mould, welcoming loam and the rustling bustle of the forest floor.
He must forget everything and follow the purpose of a stag beetle that, after six years in the larval stage, emerges into the world with only six weeks of life to live. In those six weeks the stag beetle has but one purpose, the pursuit of the female, successful consummation and impregnation. He is a sex machine, a beast propelled by lust.
“This is real,” thinks the stag beetle, except that he cannot think any more, he has become pure beetle. He catches the faint and gingery whiff of a female. He rises into the air looking like a saint in an old painting, flying upright and awkward, with cloak-like wings outspread, and limbs extended beatifically; little claws, like hands, ready to bless.
(c) Stephanie Brann, 2014
Stephanie Brann is a Londoner. She is taking forever to write a novel. Her only previous publications have been three tiny tales on Tube-Flash and one at Liars' League. She is fortunate enough to have attended the class of the late, the wonderful, the long to be remembered, John Petherbridge.
Sarah Feathers trained at East 15. Theatre work includesAll You Ever Needed (Hampstead Theatre), A Hard Day’s Month (Rose Theatre, Kingston), 26 (BAC), Moll Flanders (Southwark Playhouse) andThe Winter’s Tale (Courtyard Theatre). Film includesCoulda Woulda Shoulda, Feeling Lucky and More Than Words. TV: The Real King Herod.
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