Broken Bodies

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1

Anne Fitzgerald stood transfixed before a marble man fighting a marble centaur. The centaur had long since lost his head, as had the man, but still they fight on through the centuries, their battle unresolved. It seemed the man might be winning. His right arm, what was left of it, stretched back as if holding a dagger which he was about to thrust into his opponent’s heart. But still the centaur reared up, still the soft folds of the man’s cloak rippled, still the man remained on the very point of plunging that dagger – long since gone – into the cold stone flesh of his enemy.

‘She’s been here every day this week,’ said one doughy-faced attendant to his colleague, who scratched his hook nose and stared.

A tall young American, Patrick Browning, overheard and glanced over at Anne who was slim, with long red wavy hair and a pale complexion which bordered on sickliness but helped to create a fragile beauty. She took what looked like a sweet out of the pocket of her coat and popped it in her mouth which was oversize and added to the drama of her face. She wore tiny red leather gloves.

Patrick Browning ambled across the black marble room, and stood nearby. He was from Connecticut originally, and had gone to college in Boston, then worked for a while on Wall Street before giving it all up, flamboyantly, to be a historian. Since then his life had not been flamboyant in the least, but simply hard work, with very little money. Some of his spare time was spent working as a bouncer in a club. It was not quite the elegant world of the demi-monde he had imagined when he gave up his highly paid Wall Street job. But it suited him well, in particular because it was a long way from home.

‘Fabulous,’ said Patrick out loud in a voice which was curiously intimate, compared with his broad-shouldered appearance. With his baggy beige corduroy trousers, belt and soft shirt, he was dressed like an English academic.

‘What?’ she said, turning to him. Her tone was light and slightly amused.

When he smiled, and he smiled now, his smile crashed through his face, knocking everything else out of the way. His dark brown eyes were enormous, like walking into a room covered in brown velvet.

Anne studied him for a moment then crossed her arms and returned to the battle between the centaur and the swordsman. He noted she was quite young, maybe early twenties.

‘It’s a fabulous piece,’ continued Patrick.

‘Fabulous piece!’ she said, turning back to him. She looked surprised that he was watching her hands not the sculpted frieze of centaur and warrior. ‘Fabulous piece! Is that all you can say?’

‘Well no,’ said Patrick, ‘I could…’

She gave the impression of having green eyes but he couldn’t make them out properly in the light.

‘These are the greatest existing works of Greek culture – look at the skin there – you can see the bowels.’

‘Yes. Amazing,’ said Patrick.

‘Amazing!’ repeated Anne contemptuously.

This conversation was not going as he would have liked but for some reason he couldn’t stop. It was almost as though he was becoming annoyed by the intensity of her interest in the statues, whether because he would have preferred her to be interested in him or because he felt the statues were his own private area, he was not quite sure. He pursed his lips, and his brow felt heavy, overhanging, irritable and his hands large.

He occasionally got into fights when suffering from these particular symptoms.

The two attendants were watching Patrick and Anne with pleasure, both crossing their arms just as both Patrick and Anne were crossing theirs, as if to mock this entertaining show.

‘Pity,’ said Patrick, ‘they should by rights be in Greece.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Anne, murderously, tucking hair behind her ears, tilting her tiny chin.

His former girlfriend Kate in New York had always been good natured, and had even been good natured about his leaving for London two years ago. He still received letters from her. Her good nature was one of the things which had made him beat his fists against the white walls of Kate’s Upper East Side apartment. Good nature did not seem to him an appropriate response to the world. Besides, he didn’t want a committed relationship, and she did.

Patrick coughed. To his right, broken sculptures from the Parthenon gestured with handless arms, without heads. Above, spotlights bathed the sculptures in a pink light.

‘I said it’s a pity. They should by rights be in Greece.’

The horses driving the chariot of the sun god surged up through the marble.

Anne’s face tightened. She took a step away from Patrick.

‘I said they should be in Greece,’ insisted Patrick, ‘not in the British Museum. Of course, Lord Elgin should never have removed them from the Parthenon.’

‘Oh really?’ said Anne.

Her lips are far too big for her face, he thought.

‘Lord Elgin,’ continued Patrick, ‘stole them from Athens in the early 1800s. From the Parthenon.’ He wished his throat wasn’t so dry. His body felt larger than any of these huge sculptures, and far more cumbersome while she stood there like some butterfly, ethereal, poised, questioning, yet without any apparent awareness of the clumsy business of human, mortal limbs. ‘As perhaps you know.’

Anne drew back a red glove and examined her watch. As she did so, her hair fell forward slightly. Her silly glittering hair clips did not hold her landslide of hair well.

‘You know about Elgin?’ he said. ‘He was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire – in Constantinople – who took it upon himself to steal these invaluable sculptures.’

The woman’s high-heeled boots were close together. Her coat was soft velvet, like a cat’s skin.

‘Interesting you say that,’ she said.

There was a distant, condescending note to her voice, which unnerved him.

‘I must be getting on,’ said the young woman, turning away, the folds of her black coat rippling with a beauty more immediate than the cold folds of the soldiers’ cloaks all around them.

Patrick panicked. He had behaved like a boor. He should apologize. He couldn’t imagine why he did it, except for her tiny hands. His mind sorted through a variety of words and haphazardly landed on ‘Lord Elgin was a jerk’. He uttered these words.

Anne stiffened. She smiled gently, pityingly at Patrick, then walked away.

For a moment he followed, but there was something about the defiance of her shoulders that made him stay back.

He settled his thumping heart, which felt as though some pulsating creature was at loose within him, by studying the broken wonders all around him.

Behind him Dionysus reclined, his hands and feet gone, and Iris, messenger of the gods, hurries on, the wind blowing her dress against her stone body, racing through time, but never arriving.

As he walked out a few moments later, through the museum, sunlight strikes down over colossal black scarab beetles, over two pillars soaring up, over stone hawks sitting docile through the centuries, a world of violent shapes. This is magic, he thought, this is a world of magic and transformation. He stayed quite still, awed by the sunlight and splendour, the moment of glory in a city day, and as he stopped he saw that the young woman, the young woman of the centaur and the swordsman, of the gloves and velvet coat, had also stopped to look at the sunlight, before hurrying on, away from him, the long coat swinging behind her.

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2

Anne walks off, through Bloomsbury to the new British Library, a desolate place which nevertheless efficiently retrieves books through the computer system. It is odd, she thinks, how certain areas of London always have a particular weather. This no man’s area up to King’s Cross is nearly always windy. Even when it is sunny it seems faintly apologetic about it, as if embarrassed by inappropriate behaviour. She glances behind her. She strides on, feeling better by the moment as she gets nearer to the library.

Anne takes a fruit pastille from her pocket and sucks it.

She thrusts her bag into the library cloakroom.

In the library she lost awareness of her body bit by bit. First the feet, then the legs, the rest of the body, until just the hands were left, the hands and the head, all that counted. She liked the feel of the pen in her fingers.

‘The Grand Vizier,’ she writes, ‘told Elgin that his name in Turkish means evil genius, the Devil.’

All day she works, surrounded by others whose bodies no longer exist. They turn pages, occasionally rustle paper, make notes, and some tap into laptops.

At around 5 p.m. she takes the Underground back to her flat near Tower Bridge.

Later that day, in her bedroom, Anne Fitzgerald undresses, watched by Alexander, her lover. Her little red leather gloves lie on the bed. He has a wife in another part of London. She knows that. The wife knows nothing. Alexander likes his double life. We all like our double lives. Anne too likes being with this man who seems to know nothing about her, who sees only what she shows him so the rest of her can remain intact. Alexander sees the outside of Anne Fitzgerald – the lily-white skin, the darkness between her legs, the way she moves towards him with something steely in her eyes. She goes down on her knees.

‘Yes,’ he murmurs, holding her head.

But even then, at those moments of pleasure, his other life is continuing in his head. His wife boils a kettle, his child skips in the garden, some bills lie on the hall table, and he thinks how his house up near Bishops Avenue has far too many windows. When he bought the house he felt it was wonderful to be able to see out but forgot others could see in.

As for Anne, as she kneels, she thinks only of her books and the library, her other life, her secret life, sweet and private.

Of course she is aware of her milk-white skin, its beauty, the way it so closely clings to her shape. But this is to her just dreams, mere clothes which she knows she will change in time. She neither loves nor doesn’t love her body, or the attention it receives. What she loves is her mind – her clever, solitary, cavernous mind in which she sometimes loses herself in a labyrinth of delight far more exhilarating than this bumping and slipping of flesh and sweat she’s experiencing now as the plump Alexander grabs at her, pushing his ill-fitting flesh towards her. His flesh seems to have been acquired for him by someone who has never met him – the flesh is far too heavy and flabby for his bone structure. The shoulder pads are too wide, the arms too padded and lumpy, even the flesh on his legs seems to be designed for someone with longer, different legs. The fat has rumpled up over his short legs. But his ill-fitting body helps give him an endearing quality and certainly his eyes are merry.

‘My angel,’ he says.

‘My little Buddha,’ she says.

Patrick thinks about Anne as he lies in bed, tossing and turning, the sheet rippling over him as the cry of an ambulance reaches him through the cool, still streets of London.

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3

In the British Library Patrick stabbed at the computer which allowed readers to access the book collection. He was trying to get out a book on the Elgins. ‘In use’ sprang up in front of him. He scratched his nose. His hands splayed out on the computer keys.

‘Fuck,’ he whispered.

Last night he had worked at deciphering what appeared to be the diaries of Mary Nisbet, who became the Countess of Elgin, which he’d managed to buy up in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago. They were written in tiny handwriting.

Patrick made sure to lock the diaries away carefully.

Ever since he’d got them he’d felt uncomfortable, as if he were being watched.

Patrick recalled with irritation the auctioneer Robert Frank, who had demanded a huge sum for the diaries in Edinburgh. He’d had inflated lips, a bulbous nose and broken blood vessels over his cheeks.

He’d met Patrick in a dark cafe after speaking on the phone, and refused to tell Patrick where he’d got the diaries.

‘I promised not to. It was a condition of getting them,’ he told Patrick grandly, and took a swig of a mug of coffee. ‘I need to sell them quickly. I got your call just after I bought them – hadn’t even taken them into the auction house.’ He stared intently at Patrick. ‘See – if you buy them now, that’ll be it. No questions. No auction.’

Patrick had taken the cardboard box, opened it, and felt a shiver through him as he had undone the blue ribbons and held the old paper, saw the tiny writing.

‘This is impossible to read,’ said Patrick.

‘Difficult,’ said Robert Frank, taking a flask of whisky from his back pocket and pouring it in the dregs of the coffee. ‘I doubt if it’s impossible. I made out some words.’

‘Huh,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ll pay half what you ask for.’

‘I need more,’ said Robert Frank uneasily. He kept looking round. His mobile phone rang and he switched it off.

He could probably see how much Patrick wanted the diaries.

‘Oh, take the money,’ said Patrick, writing a cheque.

Patrick thought about Robert Frank and the stink of whisky on his breath. When Patrick looked back, he did seem almost afraid. It wasn’t just that he wanted to sell the documents quickly, without giving the auction house any of the profits. It was as if Robert Frank thought that what he had in his possession could cause him trouble, and he wanted to be rid of the diaries fast.

Patrick tapped more letters into the computer, but still received the same information, that the book was not available. He glowered. He loathed this library, with its steady temperature, its rows of computers, the empty corridors, the virtual absence of books. The old British Library – especially the Round Reading Room – had had magic. It had been like walking into a great book.

Maybe I should stop all this research for a while, he thought. It’s getting to me. Sometimes when I’m working late in my flat I even imagine I can see Mary Nisbet sitting by me, smiling shyly, with that underlying intelligence at the back of her eyes. Biography is all about ghosts, taming ghosts, understanding ghosts.

Patrick stood up. The people all around him looked at him in part because he was so disturbingly tall. He also had broad shoulders, a curious, sweet smile and immense long eyelashes. The mousy-haired girl in blue turned a page, and frowned, the plump man adjusted his circular glasses and coughed, a woman searched for a mint in her pocket. I can’t stand this, he thought.

That night he worked again as a bouncer in a club by the river, near Shad Thames, where he wore a black suit and hung about the door in the cold night air. As a biographer he didn’t earn much. His last book on Turner had been received with respect, not rhapsody. He liked being an American in London, a stranger.

As Patrick walked to the Tube on the way home after leaving the club, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Patrick turned round, expecting to see a tramp. He was in a dark alleyway with tall walls near the river. The area by Tower Bridge was still full of the atmosphere of spices, and ledger books and the edges of the river, the way it broke things down, lapping over the bodies that wash up here, over the pebbles, over the Coca-Cola cans, over the mud which represents long ago time, ground down, soft, nothing really, not a human or an object, somewhere in between, the remains of all these things, the dead and dying.

He was faced with three men. One of them had a thin, sharp face, his skin white and taut, another a soft face, with a fat lower lip. The third approached him, his face wide and flat. For a moment it seemed to Patrick that this must be some kind of joke.

‘Can I help you?’ he said.

To Patrick, London was not a threatening place. He knew he was able to use his bulk to intimidate. He liked the way most of London is so poised, so accomplished, its buildings slotted together with such confidence, different styles of the past elegantly locked together. All those black statues hanging about at street corners, in squares; in the rain they glistened and towered over running figures as if to say we can never get too wet, or suffer, the rain just tumbles over our cold stone bodies whereas you, how cold and mortal you are in your thin raincoat and delicate, pathetic white skin.

Some part of him thinks, ‘Good, a fight, this is what I can do, this is simple, straightforward, this is easier than dealing with the haughty girl or with Mary Nisbet,’ and his whole body gathers up, grows bigger. Cars pass but no one stops.

As a bouncer, he knew how to hold himself and the man who’d put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder took a step back.

He thought of the purple river up in Edinburgh, where he’d bought the diaries, and the violence of the orange sunset drenching the sky.

Patrick felt his body become steel, waiting for what might happen. The three men seemed a long way below. One, with the taut skin, took out a knife from his pocket and stared at it.

‘I think you must be making a mistake,’ said Patrick easily. ‘I have no money.’

In Edinburgh the dark clouds sank down, clamping out the orange sky.

‘We don’t want your money,’ said the man with the sharp, taut face.

‘We’ll have his money anyway,’ said the soft-faced one.

In some ways, he thought, I should give them my money. I have no credit cards, just about £100 cash. So what? But I have just earned that. Why should I give it to these squat thugs, and besides, he could sense his body wanting a fight, wanting violence, longing to swing a fist at the ugly little faces, to fling them away. And even his own pain, he didn’t mind that. Except the knife. He didn’t like the knife.

‘Get back to America,’ said the sharp-faced man. ‘Fuck off.’

As they all moved nearer him, he was aware of a man over the other side of the road walking faster to be free of the responsibility, he was aware of the empty houses around him, and he was aware of the way the whole weight of his body seemed to be sinking into the fist he is clenching now.

‘Get him,’ said one of the men.

With a quick movement Patrick hit the sharp-faced man on the chin while grabbing the wrist which held the knife, and twisting the wrist so it made a snapping noise. As the knife clattered to the ground the man yelped and fell to his knees, and Patrick kicked him in the jaw while swooping to get the knife. As the other two came nervously towards him, he held out the knife and smiled.

‘I’d hate to kill either of you in self-defence. I’d feel really bad.’ He kept smiling, then took a step forward. ‘Maybe I’d feel really bad.’

And then it seemed, quite simply, that the darkness swallowed them up, engulfed them as they stepped quickly off into a sidestreet while the guy on his knees looked up afraid while Patrick turned his back and walked away, whistling, putting the knife in his pocket, liking the knowledge of the silver steel so close to him, aware they might spring at him, every sense alive and waiting, listening to the hum of the cars, aware of the height of the buildings, the hardness of the pavement beneath his feet.

He strode on.

But when he got back, he was exhausted and sat on the bed with his head in his hands.

The phone rang.

It was Victoria, his married lover, her voice like silk.

‘You okay?’

‘Sure.’

‘I just suddenly got a bad feeling about you.’

‘I was attacked by some thugs.’

‘Some thugs?’

‘You’re sure your husband doesn’t know about us?’

‘Sure.’

‘Expect it was some disgruntled guy from some club. Didn’t let him in. Or insulted him in some way. That happens.’

‘But you’re okay?’

‘Oh yes. I’m okay.’

But it took a while to sleep. His anger was a problem. It was always there, following him around, leaning casually beside him, sharing a drink. For whole chunks of his life the anger had gone but now it was back, nudging against him, grinning, chatting inanely.

Whoever had been attempting to intimidate him must be a fool. The thugs had been inept. The attack, far from making him run back to the US, had made London seem brighter, even more interesting.

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4

Mary Nisbet,

Archerfield,

Scotland,

October 13, 1798

I wish I thought of him more.

The cold fat crows sit on the grass outside our house. I do not know if I should marry Lord Elgin. He is a fine, clever man, but eleven years older than I am.

There is something about him. He dreams of glory and immortality. I can see it in his eyes; the way he talks of becoming the ambassador to Constantinople. It seems vain and foolish stuff. There are plagues, primitive people, and the journey there will take two months.

Here in Scotland, I am loved by my mother and father. I love my walks through Aberlady