Fox Fires E-Book

Wyl Menmuir

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 264

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A lost girl and a sprawling map of an unsettling city.Wren Lithgow has followed her concert pianist mother around the cities of Europe for almost two decades. When they arrive in the mysterious city-state of O, where Wren was conceived during a time of civil war, she resolves to find man she believes is her father.As the city closes in around her, Wren gives herself over to a place of which she understands nothing, but to which she feels a profound connection, in a story of the watchers and the watched, the ways in which we conceive of home and, finally, the possibility of living on our own terms.

Leseprobe

FOX FIRES

WYL MENMUIR

For Em

Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus.

Wilhelm Müller, ‘Gute Nacht’

In many ways, O resembles the sea more than it does the land. We live at the mercy of the capricious Meret, and of the light that filters down to us through shallow waters.

Georges Formezt, A History of O

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHPART I:The Wind-up GirlONETWOTHREEPART II:The Book of MapsFOURFIVESIXSEVENEIGHTNINETENELEVENTWELVETHIRTEENPART III:A Photograph of Wren LithgowFOURTEENFIFTEENSIXTEENSEVENTEENEIGHTEENNINETEENTWENTYTWENTY-ONETWENTY-TWOTWENTY-THREE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSABOUT THE PUBLISHERABOUT THE AUTHORALSO BY WYL MENMUIRCOPYRIGHT

PART I

The Wind-up Girl

ONE

Wren Lithgow arrives in O in the golden haze of late September as the sun is setting behind the mountains of the interior. She observes the approach of the city sprawl from where she sits on a metal lifejacket box bolted to the ferry’s deck. Golds shift to red and, in this red glow, the city is all embers.

In many ways, the city state of O looks to her much like any other of the cities in which she has lived. The port is dense with derricks and cranes, with towers of containers. It is busy with stevedores anxious to be home. She tries to make sense of the confusion of buildings that stretches inland, but, beyond the port the hard lines of warehouses and steeples, the sweeping curves of grand buildings on which sit coloured and metallic domes seem impenetrable. In the furthest distance, beyond the city’s density, beyond the farms and the fields lined with charming hayricks, the slopes of the mountains, which comprise O’s land border, are in silhouette.

The setting sun catches the walls of a building that is taller than all the others, a glass tower that rises far above the rest of the city. Aside from the tower, this could be Antwerp or Rotterdam, Marseille, Athens, Trieste, she thinks. She hopes it might be in some way tangibly different to these other places. She has imagined it often.

She checks her watch. Cleo, her mother, will be, at this 4moment, starting her long journey up through the thick layers of tranquillised sleep.

O will be different, she tells herself. She tells herself the same thing about each new place. But it will be different. It will be different because O is the city in which she was conceived, the city in which her father lives, or in which he lived, she does not know which. Her father and O itself, like so much of her mother’s past, have always been off limits. She blames Cleo for the first of these taboos, though she can hardly blame her for the second; until a month ago, the borders of O were shut to the world.

Arrangements have been made for their belongings to travel separately. She can picture the process clearly, from the moment the well-groomed man from the removal company arrives at the apartment on Potsdamer Platz. She sees him appraise the uneven steps at the entrance doorway. They will cause the removal team some difficulties, though they are equal to the task. She sees his slight frown at the width of the staircase down which all the furniture must be carried, the tight twist that must be navigated. It causes him to pause, though he does not need a tape measure. He is a professional, after all. She sees him remove his shoes at the door and take out a notebook and pen. He will survey each of the rooms before itemising, wrapping and packing the smaller objects and trinkets. The photographs and concert tickets, creased and faded in their frames, the books from the shelves, the copper-bottom pans her mother insists they should have despite the fact she does not cook, the necklaces and scarves from Cleo’s dressing table. Each item wrapped in paper and placed in a small box, labelled, catalogued and stacked with the other small boxes by the door.

5Later, a team will arrive to move the heavier pieces: the coffee table, her mother’s dresser, the Turkish rugs that they will roll and seal and stack in the hallway, the baby grand piano that requires the care of a specialist from the moment it leaves the house to the moment it is unpacked at the new house in O.

Wren is nineteen years old. She is more than half her mother’s age. At five foot four inches, she stands an inch taller than her mother, though people who meet them leave with the impression that Cleo is the taller of the two. Wren wears a black trouser suit and over that a black jacket and her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Around her neck, she wears a pendant, a loose diamond encased in a tiny box of sapphire glass on a long silver chain. The diamond tumbles incessantly as she walks. She feels in many ways she is like this diamond, always moving and never getting anywhere. Against the huge deck, she appears tiny. With her knees up on the box of lifejackets she takes up as little space as possible. She has a slightly rounded face and she bears little resemblance to Cleo who, despite her slightness, fills all spaces and makes herself the centre of them all. From the age of about twelve, men have been assessing Wren against Cleo often vocally and within hearing of both women. Several of them have commented on Wren’s peculiar beauty.

It is her eyes, one of Cleo’s admirers said before they left Berlin. Or her eyebrows. Or her whole facial structure. So unusual.

When men start to talk like this, Cleo steers the conversation back to music, back to herself, back to safer ground. It is one of the few ways in which she shows her protection for 6her daughter, though Wren suspects that she does this also to conceal a small jealousy.

Before O, they were in Berlin for three months and they have left under a cloud. It is a cloud of a similar formation to the ones that have followed them from country to country since Wren was a small child.

She has lost count of the places in which they have lived. Each of their moves follows a well-worn pattern. The early days in any new city are filled with expressions of love and of regret for the way things have ended in the city they have just left. Each new start fills Cleo with a sort of fervent light. Each new city represents hope.

Some places they stay for just weeks and others for months but never more than that. London, the place Cleo calls home, is most familiar to Wren, though they have not been there since her uncle fell out of favour. If she adds up the broken months they have spent in other cities, they have lived in Frankfurt, Rome, Paris and Venice for longer. Each move too brief for even thin roots to take hold. There are places through which they have passed several times briefly: Valletta, Riga, Timisoara, Odessa, and a small island in the Mediterranean, the name of which she has forgotten. Most recently there has been Berlin. At times the cities threaten to merge into a single, nameless metropolis.

The end of things in Berlin was about money. The end of things is almost always about money. Cleo keeps a meticulous list of restaurants and shops in which they can still get credit. Even so, their last days in Berlin felt like an exercise in risk. It seemed to Wren as though they walked along the edge of a cliff. She was aware that in places this cliff was undercut to 7the point at which it may collapse at any moment and she was unsure exactly where they were safe and where they were in danger of falling through to the rocks beneath. By the time they left, there were so many places, so many people to avoid it had become difficult to keep track of where they were still welcome. To make it worse, she was even more on edge and more distracted than usual.

The cause of this distraction was the prospect of O itself. Wren knows this. She watched her mother’s face carefully as she read out the invitation forwarded by Cleo’s agent, Anita. The letter was full of the usual flattery. It detailed the many ways in which her presence in O would enrich the city in this year, the first of the new millennium, a year the letter writer referred to as the Year of Hope. There was talk of borders opening and of a grand parade, a chance for the world to rediscover a small corner of Europe that once thrummed to the reverberations of its concert halls and opera houses, and that she, the recipient, the talented and fondly remembered, the much missed and now hurriedly invited, was to be at the vanguard of its rebirth.

At first she said no, they would stay in Berlin and wait for another offer to come through, until Wren revealed the fee. She hoped this news might lift Cleo’s mood, though, if anything, it seemed to Wren to send her into a depressive tailspin.

All she said was, Call Anita and tell her they must send an advance.

Cleo takes all her payments in cash. It is a habit she has cultivated over long years of promised money that has never materialised. Once she is paid, she stashes small rolls of bank notes in a wooden box they keep in the living room, which sometimes covers rent and food shopping and other times 8does not. Some evenings, she takes the money from the box to the casino and leaves Wren alone in their lodgings as she has done since the age Wren began to walk.

Depending on the way the night goes, the next day might be spent shopping in a department store or jeweller’s, where Cleo will pick out necklaces and earrings for both of them, clothes, rolls of material, or paintings for the house, and they will eat in the best restaurants. At these times, they make plans. They admire each other in their new clothes and they are the best of friends. If things have gone badly, Cleo will lock herself in her room for days on end or Wren might wake in the night to find her raiding her jewellery box or wardrobe for pieces to sell or to return to the shops from which they were bought only days before.

At Wren’s feet is a small case of clothes and essentials. The case contains a few clothes and a small mechanical toy, wrapped in a silk scarf. In her hand, she carries a copy of a battered paperback guidebook to O that she picked up at the Bodemuseum Buchmarkt long before she found out that she and her mother were to move to the city.

Cleo never flies and on the long ferry crossing Wren scanned the pages of the badly produced guidebook. The book’s title is O: An Illuminated City. Its binding is disintegrating and many of the pages are missing, though how many pages have already disappeared she has been unable to ascertain as they are not numbered. Those that remain are out of sequence and Wren spent the first few hours of the journey reassembling the book into an order that made sense to her.

O, she read in the guidebook, has been referred to as the Illuminated City since at least the time of Fyador Vary’s 1646 9text of the same name, a manuscript that is now remembered by title alone. It is a city, according to the author of the guidebook, ‘practised in the art of devouring itself’.

It is not just this experience that draws artists to O, the book says, but the quality of the light, a result ‘of some indefinable purity of the air that is impossible to measure even with the scientific equipment the city’s university has set up around the place in order to quantify what everyone already knows’. She is under no illusion, though: what has attracted her mother is the money on offer.

It is a city beloved of artists, the book claims. Manet holidayed there, she read, and Turner too in later life when his eyes had started to fade. They came, they said, ‘to take in the healing light, much as Catholics take in the waters at Lourdes, and to experience the sense of disorientation that is an equal part of O’s charm’. Alongside these rhapsodic, floral passages there are a few grainy photographs of monuments and churches, photographs that do nothing to support the central theme of grand illumination, and the book contains no map.

Through the hours in which the few other passengers on the enormous ship slept, and throughout much of the next day, she skimmed through pages of poorly translated character sketches of architects, painters and photographers, through over-wrought descriptions of statues and parks, libraries, monuments and plazas. She checked her pager for messages several times, though there had been none. She mouthed O’chian phrases from a page of transliterations to her own skewed reflection in the ferry’s scratched windows and felt in the words the unfamiliarity of a language that is nothing like any of those she already speaks: English, Italian, German, French, a little Russian, a little Greek. It depends on Cleo’s mood, 10which of these languages they use. Often, Wren will ask a question in one language and Cleo will respond in a second, with neither willing to switch for the sake of the other.

Wren remains on deck as the ferry passes between the white salt-pillar lighthouses that mark the deep-water passage and is gathered within the outstretched arms of the breakwater. As she watches the city draw closer a thrill runs through her, a sensation that starts in her feet and radiates up through her calves, her thighs, up through her body to her scalp and out through her arms and legs. Whether it is the sub-aural thrumming of the ship’s engines that causes this or something else, she does not know, and as the sensation passes through her in great waves, she glad that she is alone on the deck.

It is a sign, she thinks, a sign of welcome from the city in which she was created, some latent recognition from the place in which half of her genes originate. She has imagined this moment countless times, just as she tried to picture the place her father calls, or called, home.

When the tannoy sounds for disembarkation, her mother appears on deck to observe the ship’s final approach. Wren stands and joins her and they lean side by side on the railings. The sea below is dark green, bordering on grey, and there is a chop to the waves. When her mother asks to see the guidebook, she passes it to her, though she holds on to the few loose pages for which she has not yet managed to find a home. Cleo looks at the cover briefly. She riffles through the browned pages and drops the book over the side. Wren watches in horror as the covers spread against the white walls of the ferry and when the book hits the water it floats briefly before the loose pages fan out across the surface and are sucked, one by one, into dark water churned white by the propellers.11

How dare you, Cleo? she says. Why?

You know I don’t like it when you call me Cleo, her mother says. You call me Mother and I’ll call you darling.

The book, Wren says. Why?

We’ll get you a new one, darling, Cleo says. I’ve hated that thing for an age. I could smell the mildew on it from here. Anyway, who knows whose fingers have been all over it?

Wren stows the remaining pages in her coat pocket and keeps her hand there for fear she will slap Cleo or push her over the railing after the book. She counts off ten on her fingers and forces her breathing to slow.

Cleo is smiling, though it is a smile Wren does not like. It is a smile that says their friendship is on rocky ground. Cleo has been on edge for days. She does not want to make this trip, though it is the only one on offer. Wren is aware that an argument now could unbalance their arrival, send Cleo spinning off, and there is still, she hopes, a small window in which she might be able to get answers for the questions she has been asking Cleo for years.

There is a queue in the customs area. It is not a long queue. Not many people are disembarking. As the ship’s crew glide past with their cases on wheels, Wren wonders if there might have been more members of crew than passengers. At a desk, there are two unsmiling customs officials above whom blink closed-circuit television cameras.

The officer asks if they have anything to declare. He wants to know the purpose of their visit. Cleo answers for the two of them. She is here at the invitation of the government. She is here to perform Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, Mahler. The customs officer nods, as though this does not impress him at 12all, and asks Wren the same question. What is the purpose of your visit? She considers, for a moment, telling him that she is here to find her father, though this is something she has not even revealed to Cleo.

She is accompanying me, Cleo says. That is purpose enough.

The customs official ignores Cleo and turns his attention back to Wren.

You are from here? he says.

She shakes her head.

You are sure?

He is leafing through her passport, looking for evidence that she is mistaken. He paws at each page busy with stamps and signatures, with visas and notations. He wants to know why they have travelled so much. He makes some notes and seems to weigh up letting her through. This is a deliberate tactic. It allows us to perform searches in our databases.

You were born where, then?

London, she says. St Jude’s Hospital.

But I was conceived here, she thinks. Again, she wants to say this to the customs officer, though adding any form of complication into the situation would be a mistake, she thinks.

He asks them to put their bags on the desk and Wren can see her mother struggling to keep her temper in check.

He unzips the bags one at a time and puts his hands down the sides and then prods the contents with a finger. He is hardly making a professional job of it, Wren thinks. When his fingers find the hard bulk in the silk scarf and he sees it is a child’s toy, he closes the bag again.

Be careful, that dress is Chanel, her mother says, when he opens her case.

13The customs officer seems unimpressed by this too. Eventually, after he has looked them up and down several times and prodded through the rest of the contents of their bags, he waves them through.

On the other side of the gates they are met by a driver with a placard on which their family name is written, incorrectly. Lithcow. It is a sign of her sleeping pill hangover that Cleo does not pull him up on the error, Wren thinks. She hates this particular misspelling. The driver is a man in his sixties or perhaps his early seventies. He looks unhappy at having been made to hold the sign, though the arrival of two women seems to brighten his mood a little. As he holds the car door open, he looks Cleo up and down and repeats the process as he does the same for Wren. He says something that sounds to her like shist sees ista obyezevek. Cleo coughs into the collar of her coat.

Wren has said nothing to Cleo since the incident with the book and she does not intend to now.

He approves, Cleo says.

Wren stares out of the window and says nothing.

He approves of you, she continues. He says you’re pure O.

Wren can feel the driver watching her in the rear-view mirror and she sinks a little deeper into her seat. Cleo’s translation of the driver’s words, she knows, is a peace offering though it seems to her a poor exchange for the destruction of her book.

It makes sense, Cleo says a minute or so later, though Wren can tell these words are directed somewhere else and not to her.

She thinks for a moment that Cleo is going to continue, 14though it becomes clear she is going to leave it at that. Wren’s curiosity gets the better of her and she breaks.

And what’s that supposed to mean? Wren says. At that moment the driver puts a hand on the back of the passenger seat head rest, turns and speaks to her again. He talks rapidly and alternates between watching the road and looking back at her. Cleo pays him no more attention. She is watching the city through the window.

Cleo? Wren says. Don’t be cruel. Just tell me what he’s saying.

He says we shouldn’t go out on our own, Cleo says without turning her face from the window. That’s what he was saying. He says that it’s easy to lose your way. You could end up in the wrong street, the wrong part of town, the wrong side of the wrong river. He said to avoid Zamésche. There are dissidents there. He says that we should avoid coming into contact with the police, and the hospital too, especially the hospital. And that we should observe the curfew. He says we should watch what we say. He should learn to mind his own business.

Her mother translates in the fashion of a child parroting advice given by a worried parent and when she has finished, she directs a short statement to the driver. Wren is surprised at the fluency with which Cleo speaks O’chian. She has always thought that should her mother ever be unable to play piano, she would be able to make a living as a translator, though her lack of patience and diplomacy and, unless it concerns music, concentration might count against her.

Okay, okay, he says. He releases the headrest and mutters something under his breath. Although Wren cannot understand the words, they need little translation.

Though the driver stops talking, he continues to watch 15Wren in the mirror. He barely seems to look at the streets. She avoids his wandering eyes and turns her attention to the city. The cars, including the one in which they sit, are ancient and the roads, except for the larger ones, are half-finished, rutted and wide. Through the window, O seems to her like a stage set before the production has started to take shape, before the set has become what it is destined to be. Or one so old that it is fading and disintegrating in places, so much so that the repairs that have been made over the years now constitute the best part of the scenery.

As the car winds its way through the streets, crossing and re-crossing rivers, seemingly with no consistent direction, she winds down the window and inhales the city and the driver continues his monologue. O’chian sounds familiar. It is, she thinks, like a radio that has been set just a few fractions away from a station. She can hear what he is saying and almost make sense of it, though the meaning remains shrouded in static. Every so often she glimpses water and recalls a passage from the guidebook to the effect that each of the great cities of Europe is run through by a great river and O is greater than all of them as it is threaded through by several. One line in particular sticks in her head. ‘Any city run through with veins of water is changed by that water, by its mutability, but O’s rivers course through it like eels, which remake the city daily.’

TWO

1166 Gylincourtstriste is a grand house in the middle of a row of grand houses that face the wide, slow waters of the Meret. These houses date back to before the war, by which we do not mean our more recent skirmishes but the second great war during and after which O changed hands several times before being left, once again, to its own devices. These houses are survivors and they are reserved for dignitaries. Most of them have sat empty in recent years and in the week before Wren and Cleo arrive, the rooms are aired, layers of dust removed from the windowsills and kitchen surfaces, and various bugs and recording devices checked, standard practice. Wren observes her mother trying not to be impressed, though even in darkness the house is more imposing and impressive than their apartment in Berlin. Cleo’s agent, she knows, will have demanded the best. She appears to have come up trumps here. It is almost a pity, Wren thinks.

The driver carries their bags to the door. He is hurrying now. His air of insouciance has evaporated and he has become brisk, though not so brisk that he does not wait for a tip to appear. Maybe fifteen minutes after they close the door behind them, Wren hears the curfew bells ring.

Cleo takes herself straight to bed. She times her pills to perfection and, even as she arrives, Wren can see her head lolling a little as the sedative takes effect. The beds, she already knows, will be as per instructions, already made, the piano 17already situated, settled and tuned in the largest reception room. There will be hell to pay if not. All their other belongings remain wrapped in boxes or sit beneath dust sheets.

Wren is still wired from the journey and from the knowledge that she is finally here. Her many years of imagining this place have reached their conclusion. She cannot work out quite how she feels; there are too many emotions jostling for space inside her.

The house is too quiet. There is no traffic noise, no sound of ancient plumbing booming in the walls as there was in the Berlin apartment. There are no curtains at the windows yet either and the thick blanket-like quality of the dark beyond them unsettles her. It feels unnatural to be in a city and for there not to be light, movement, a constant background hum. Though she can only see her own reflection in the front room window, she feels she is being observed from outside and retreats.

She opens her bag, the one she packed on the bed of the apartment in Potsdamer Platz. The first thing she unwraps is the object in the silk scarf and lays the small, articulated figure of a girl in a grey, hooded coat on the bedcover. This toy has been with her since she turned twelve. On the night of Wren’s twelfth birthday Cleo had returned home late, long after the concert hall had shut its doors. Wren had listened as she crashed about in the kitchen. When Cleo appeared at her door, Wren watched her through almost-closed eyes. She could see by the way her mother propped herself in the doorway that she was drunk. She was holding a small bundle, which she threw onto Wren’s bed before leaving and when she was gone Wren near as leapt up to see what it was. It was wrapped in a silk scarf of the sort her mother often wore and she unwrapped 18the package on the bed as carefully as any archaeologist might unwind a mummy from the tomb of a pharaoh.

She’s the only thing, her mother said when she asked about it the next morning, aside from you, that I took away from the city in which you were conceived. She belonged to your father.

It was a rare moment of openness and Wren listened hard, barely daring to move or breathe. This was the first time Cleo had mentioned her father and she was unsure how to react, any information about her father having been forbidden until then. She was unsure too, at this time, what it meant to be conceived, though she held onto these words in the way that a child starved of attention will remember a hug or a brief moment of connection. Even at this age it surprised Wren that her mother had kept the wind-up girl. Her mother disliked anything childish. Wren asked her if the wind-up girl had a name and Cleo said no, there was no point naming something that is not a person. All the same, Wren named her Ariadne after the girl in a story her uncle had told her on their last visit to London.

Ariadne is unlike the other things in Wren’s life. She is unmanicured, plain and heavy. When Ariadne came to her, she carried her own key on a thin cotton belt around her waist. Her keyhole is accessed through a slit in the side of her grey coat. Ariadne wears a dark robe with a hood that can be pulled up over her head and which, when it is raised, masks her face entirely. On her underside, she has several tiny wheels. Beneath her robe, her wooden body has been polished smooth by the touch of countless hands; there is a case around a hidden mechanism, and she feels far heavier than she looks. Wren picks her up from the bedcover and holds her for a minute. This is part of a ritual she has perfected over a long 19time. Ariadne has an unusual weight, as though she is dense in a way that is somehow too great for the small frame. Her face is serious, the small line of her mouth a tight half-smile.

Sometimes, Cleo would leave her on her own for days at a time. She never explained where she was going and she sent Wren no messages as to when she would be back. Wren learned to live off what little money was in the wooden box, or on the credit they had in various shops where her mother was well known. When Cleo returned from these absences, it was often with armfuls of gifts, things Wren neither wanted nor understood, and promises that Cleo would never leave her daughter alone in a strange city again. Other times, Cleo returned empty-handed and locked herself in her room. In some ways, this was worse than when she was not there, a worse kind of alone. Cleo referred to her variously as her precious, her everything, and her burden, and the feeling Wren was left with as she grew older was that she was loved at times, tolerated at others, and always costly.