Stranger than Fiction

Grotesques

by 

 

Marc Ellis

Published in Australian Writing 1988, Outrider Magazine, Manfred Jurgensen and Robert Adamson (eds.), Indooroopilly, Queensland, 1988 (subsequently published in Australian Writing Now, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1988).

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Inside the abbey, Walter begrudgingly paid ninety pence to a verger and walked through a turnstile. He stood and stared at some tombs for a moment, then settled himself carefully on a fragile chapel chair and let the grotesques mock him from the cornice. They gave him the same feeling as when he woke up to find huge tarantulas staring at him from the top of the wardrobe door.

A group of tourists entered the abbey, revolving the turnstile steadily like a mill race. Pre-paid vouchers were pinned to their chests with name-tags. Walter slid back in the tiny chair and stared at them, considering what aliens a thirteenth century pilgrim would have made of them. The group hovered then dispersed, like a cloud of dust. Walter stood, stretched, and walked to a row of gaudy royal tombs. “You and I are earth,” proclaimed a plaque. Walter looked at it and felt the soothing hum of the ancient roof stretching to the left and the right of him, surging to and fro since 1225. Vergers circulated ceaselessly, like flies at a picnic, and the tourists stood in clumps, trying simultaneously to watch out for them and to ignore them. There appeared to be no local visitors at all.

Two of the vergers led their gowns towards each other and met at the plaque. After a whispered, business-like conversation, they separated, their robes unveiling the plaque again. Walker noticed that it bore the face of a woman carved in deep relief above the inscription. Her egg-shaped head, its top and sides finely drilled on its ruff, like an ice-cream on its cone. The eyes stared and the mouth, pursed with the expression of confident piety with which the deceased’s beneficiaries armed her for purgatory, looked as unpromising as the spout of a dry fountain.

Stepping up to it, Walter realised that the pupils of the eyes were in fact holes drilled into the eyeballs. Paradoxically this gave the woman a vibrant stare. Placing his hands on his knees, he bent to look into them. “The more you look in,” he observed, “the more she looks out.” In contrast, the realistic detail of the nose proclaimed its artificiality. It had none of the curious liveliness of the eyes. Almost perfectly Roman, a slight suggestion of bulbousness indicated the restraint which had been urged on the sculptor. Walter peered into the face like a rescuer staring at a mound of impenetrable rubble. ”Somewhere back there," he realised, “there were people like me.” For a moment, he was unable to evade the strength of expression in the eyes and to see beyond, to the ribs which had been made by the drill as it was ground into the lump of rock. The sight visited him for a few seconds. “Too clever for his own good.” Walter mourned the sculptor as, with the reassertion of their steady gaze, the eyes shut like a safe door on his glimpse of the artist. Walter stepped backwards and the words “You and I are earth” rose like film credits into his line of vision. “Condescending bitch,” Walter fulminated, “there’s nothing earthly about her at all. She looks as though she was marble all her life.”

Turning from the plaque, Walter discovered that a group of tourists had arrived at the font behind him and were gazing at it with blank intensity, as though they were considering buying it. A verger invaded their circle and flapped to a standstill. “For chrissakes!” he spat. In their astonishment, some of the group smiled and nodded. "Take it off!” he barked, pointing a bony finger at the cloth hat which one of the tourists was wearing. The appalled man stared blankly back at him. Simultaneously a flabby hand slapped onto the hat and slid it from view. The group shuffled in around the victim and gently moved him away.

Walter turned to look at the plaque again, but found that it was concealed from view by a woman who was carefully readjusting the vinyl strap of her travel bag. She wore a navy blue nylon shift over baggy matching trousers. One of her little toes poked out of the strap of her white sandals. Its nail had been painted pink. Her wide hips made her appear slightly diamond-shaped and her big, round head, onto which a pudgy nose and a pair of thick, sausage-like lips had been stuck, appeared to have been popped on top of her at the last minute.  Her hair had been dyed with henna and permed into mean little waterproof curls. The brilliance of her aquamarine eyes was an almost shocking contrast. She was looking expectantly at Walter.

Walter felt a bit trapped. He wondered if she was waiting for his reply to a question he hadn’t heard her ask. “They were worse than that at Notre Dame,” she said, as though giving him some important fact. Her chin, which retracted into the circle of her face when she was silent, identified itself when she spoke by pushing out two folds of flesh at the top of her neck. This created subsidiary creases of such width that she looked as though she said everything with a sarcastic smile. “Oh but this is history,” she said, oblivious to the irrelevance, “this is what I’ve really come to see.” Her eyes turned upwards, racing along the perpendicular lines like trolleys on tracks. Walter noticed that her name tag was stamped “Neeta Featherstone.” Her eyes returned to him, possessively. “It sort of makes it all, you know, worthwhile, doesn’t it?”

Walter felt quite unable to reply. The abbey hardly needed her endorsement, but he was interested to know what it made worthwhile. Neeta smiled at him confidentially. As though they had shared a private joke. Walter had the awful feeling that she was going to tell him something he didn’t already know. As a means of defence, he tried to categorize her, but this proved to be difficult. The group which had been around the font seemed to have completely vanished and, in any case, despite her name tag, Neeta showed no signs of belonging to that particular group at all. There was something about her that made her seem disembodied. Her tourist’s uniform sat on her with indifference, as though it was a fancy - dress costume. Walter smirked at the idea and was annoyed to observe that she noticed. “You know these parts?” she asked, rather abruptly. “No, I’m from Australia too,” he obliged, curling his toes wit impatience. Her response was unexpected. “You must be used t it ten,” she said. Walter, avoiding her eyes, was surprised to realize that this was an accusation. He felt as though he had been asked to explain what he was doing there, as though he had no right to existence at all. “I beg your pardon?” he responded pointedly. He was not confident that he was strong enough for Neeta. “You seem a bit bored,” she explained, smiling, “you young people don’t need to be concerned with the past, not like us old fossils.”

“Oh, but I’m very interested, “Walter said, earnestly. Her unilateral declaration of intimacy attracted his satirical cooperation. “I’ve always wanted to come here, all my life. It’s a little overwhelming, actually. There’s something about this place what makes you wonder what point there is in being alive.”

Neeta’s eyes gleamed, then travelled back up the perpendicular vaulting. “Oh this is a real treat for me, dear,” she said, “I don't concern myself with all that sort of stuff. I mean we have no choice in the matter, do we?” Walter tried to think of something to say. “Do we?” she repeated, almost imperiously. “No,” he replied, obediently. Her occasional intensity made Walter wonder if she was mad. “How long are you here dear?” she asked with what Walter felt was almost malevolent solicitude. He tried to deflect it by smiling at her. He noticed that the verger had returned to the font and that, although he was staring at him, he was showing no interest in Neeta at all. “A year or two,” he said, warily. The eyes narrowed slightly. Walter watched the verger clasp his hands behind his back, turn a full circle about the font, and disappear. Something made him feel that he had a lot of explaining to do. “Well, you are lucky I must say,” Neeta declared. “We’re on a tour,” she said, eagerly, parking her head at an angle and outing her mouth into gear, preparing to recite. “We’ve been in England for two days and we’re going to Scotland this afternoon. But we were in France last week and we’re going back over there to the continent to Germany Saturday. Then Italy, then Bangkok, then home.” She smiled her congratulations to herself. “We like this sort of thing,” she continued, still smiling purposefully. “Churches tell you so much about yourself; they really bring the past alive, don’t they. I don’t know why, but I feel really comfortable in a church.” Walter felt reproved. “They just go on and on,” she concluded liltingly. “Yeah,” Walter said, a bit gruffly, “but where does that leave us?”

Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.: “Magazine of Art Illustrated” (1878)

“Yeees," Neeta sighed. Her eyes focussed on his very carefully indeed.  Walter felt that she had understood his question. He was curious about why he felt that she was pretending she hadn’t. He wanted to find out who she was, but to ask her seemed ridiculous when she was wearing a name tag. “This is history, dear,” she said, indicating with her head to the left and right. “There’s not a lot we can do about it is there. We're just the meat in the sandwich!” She laughed mechanically and hollowly. Walter observed that all of her sentences concluded with almost perfect cadences, like hymns. He smiled politely and looked about him.

Neeta looked at her wristwatch. “I have to be off,” she said. “Off to everywhere,” sang Walter cheerfully. Neeta looked at him silently and hitched up her bag. Her arm moved automatically, as if it belonged to someone else; its action did not disturb the gaze she had turned on him again. Walter blushed to find himself meeting her brilliant eyes as they bore into him. “There they are,” he said enthusiastically, breaking the spell and rising on his toes to point to the group of tourists standing by the turnstile. A bus - driver was counting them. “Oh, I’m not with them,” said Neeta with a reassuring gush intended to convey her thanks for his trouble. She turned and stepped backwards towards the plaque where Walter had first seen her. Nodding goodbye, Walter turned as casually as possible and studied the font. When he looked back he saw that Neeta had gone.

Over by the turnstile the last of the tourists were trooping out of the abbey, their heads turning to the roof, the walls, the windows, soaking it up, making the most of their visit. Walter felt as though he had been left behind. A verger stood at the turnstile, occasionally nodding a brisk, begrudged farewell. When the last tourist had departed, the verger turned crisply and headed towards the font – towards Walter.

“This week Scotland, Germany, Italy, and Bangkok,” Walter sneered to himself, searching for a fraternal remark to make to the verger. “Get off that grave!” the verger snarled at him. Walter jumped. Looking down, he saw that he had been standing on some writing embedded in faded gilt. The verger rounded on him, “remember this is a church!” he hissed, turning and flapping his sleeves. The writing was everywhere that Walter could see. There was no way that the grave could be avoided.Warm with embarrassment, Walter hopped from place to place, trying to follow in the steps of the verger as he led the way across the plaques to the turnstile, where another group of tourists was streaming in from outside.

©     Marc Ellis, 1987