Melting Point E-Book

Baret Magarian

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Melting Point fuses prose and poetry, realism and literary inventiveness, in dealing with the absurdity of humanity. It's fourteen stylistically diverse stories, flirt with irony, paradox and enigma. The most striking thing about Magarian's collection is its range of interests, the multiplicity of the worlds evoked, and the extreme contrasts among its characters: a feted, reclusive writer; a seductive murderess with a fondness for Bourbon and fellatio; a thief obsessed with a Toulose Lautrec print; a fruit and vegetable merchant who has a genius toddler; and a deep sea diver who can only be free from clumsiness when she is submerged in water. Stories and characters flow from these molten moments in a series of fictions that touch on ecstasy, excess and the elemental.

Leseprobe

MELTING POINT

by

Baret Magarian

SYNOPSIS

Melting Point fuses prose and poetry, realism and literary inventiveness, in dealing with the absurdity of humanity. Its fourteen stories embrace a dizzying variety of genres: hyperrealism, sci-fi, the Gothic and melodrama, all subtly re-invented.

The most striking thing about Magarian’s collection is its range of interests, the multiplicity of the worlds evoked, and the extreme contrasts among its characters: a feted, reclusive writer; a seductive murderess with a fondness for Bourbon; a thief obsessed with a Toulouse-Lautrec print; a fruit and vegetable merchant who has a genius toddler; and a deep-sea diver who can only be free from clumsiness when she is submerged in water.

Stories and characters flow from these molten moments in a series of fictions that touch on ecstasy and excess.

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

‘The stories show stunning imaginative range.’ —ANDREW KIDD

REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK

‘Magarian has one of the best voices in contemporary fiction.’ —SIMONE INNOCENTI, Correire Della Sera

‘Magarian’s authentic poetic voice is strangely addictive, articulated with a shamelessly exotic accent.’ —Review 31

‘Mr. Magarian writes with a cultured wit and seems quite capable of making just about anything funny.’ —The Seattle Book Review

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORK

‘Magarian uses his fiction to pose some of the biggest, most complex questions about life. The themes which excite him are permanent and universal. How does one live with the passage of time, the transience of things? Can our desires ever be satisfied? How can one live a complete, meaningful life? Like all the best writers and thinkers, Magarian knows that you cannot paint an accurate portrait of the world without recognizing its essential, desperate absurdity.’ —JONATHAN COE

‘Never more prescient than in our post-fact world — in which reality TV show figures who never read books but watch endless hours of television hold the highest political offices in the land, The Fabrications’ satire is spot on … a tour de force of the literary imagination … It’s a wondrous novel both cleverly satirical of our spectacle-based society and philosophically profound, a rare accomplishment.’ —LEE FOUST, The Florence News

‘Smart, witty, and honest.’ —San Francisco Book Review

‘Delightfully absurd’ —Seattle Book Review

‘A resplendent tale’ —Kirkus Review

Melting Point

BARET MAGARIAN was born in London and is of Armenian origin. He was educated at Durham and London universities and has published The Fabrications (Pleasure Boat Studio), Mirror and Silhouette (Albion Beatnik Press), and Chattering with All my Favourite Beasts (Ensemble). He has worked as a lecturer, translator, musician, journalist, nude model, stage director, and book representative.

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Copyright © Baret Magarian,2019

The right ofBaret Magarianto be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2019

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-78463-198-7 electronic

For my mother.

In the end you transmitted so much light.

Crime and Bread

When she lookedout of the window of the café, as the Astrud Gilberto song finished, it looked like rain.They didn’t predict this, she thought, as she pressed the glasses up her nose. They rested for a few minutes, only to succumb to gravity again. A shaft of sunlight pierced the cloudy, filmy lines and something exotic crept up her nostrils, an aroma of something half forgotten.With that guarantee in her pocket, or under her skin, in her nostrils or floating around her brain, she tumbled out onto the street, gladly performing the street walk she’d been rehearsing like a samba. She was ready for her dance with the world, she was shining and beaming, a newly-minted coin. The trees made way for her, passers-by admired her from near and from far. They smiled at her nonchalance, they tried to guess her age, whether or not she had any interesting birthmarks, or was hiding the insignia of childbirth or loss, whether or not she had a husband or boyfriend, whether she was a fiery lover or a passionless one.

Now it’s my time, she thought, I’ve waited long enough, now I’m ready, washed, cleaned, perfumed, my hair is immaculate, my skin is porous and my eyes are pellucid. See if you can catch me!

At a street corner life leapt at her like a newly-released cat, claws exposed. Little children played, cars honked, bankers drew up investment plans, mortgages and loans, mothers worried, fathers fornicated, city dwellers dreamt of the country, artists saved coupons, priests considered Paul’s epistles to the Romans.

But life only makes sense to me when I’m burning the candle at both ends, I can’t stand that dullness, when things go stale, I can’t stand that grey area. I need sequins, raisins, spices from Morocco, French wines. What would they say if they saw me tail-spinning out of control, intravenous needles hanging from me, would I be like that astronaut from 2001 as he enters the star gate, perpetually glazed eyes? I’ve breakfasted and starved, waited tables, taught kids, life-modelled, sang at auditions, made soufflés, answered the telephone, shepherded tourists. When was I really me? And what would it take to make me lose myself? Maybe if I could get into a really bad accident, get stabbed by a stranger, drink a bottle of brandy neat . . .

Reine de joie par Victor Joze . . . . chez tous les libraires. That bit of French caught her attention. She came to a standstill in front of a window pane. Behind the window was another pane of glass surrounded by a wooden frame, underneath it there was a poster. Such wonderful colours: a bronzed, sunset orange that had stepped out of Tunisia, she imagined though she’d never been, the yellowing brown lettering in old-style charm. Grace and squalor were combined as the slightly emaciated woman with a skeletal arm planted a somehow tender kiss on the nose of the old, bald, half sleeping fatty with the bloated belly. The woman looked innocent despite it all, with her neck wrapped in a brown ribbon and her red dress. Perhaps that was what drew her to the poster, that innocence, or was it the single brown curl of hair on the woman’s forehead, it was beautiful, distinctive.

Had she ever really looked at a poster or a painting, she wondered? Who was the other man on the woman’s left, some English brigadier, a buffoon, or prude, with his faintly ridiculous orange-red moustache?

Later, in the evening, in her flat, outside which vines crept upwards, inside which cat-smells spread, she was in the kitchen mixing spaghetti and a sauce she had carelessly prepared. In her hand, on and off, a goblet of red wine. In her mouth, on and off, a rolled-up cigarette. In her eyes, all the time, a far-off look. She was thinking of that Toulouse-Lautrec print and how nice it would look next to her book case, which was not full of books at all, but magazines about furniture, motor bikes, graphics, landscape gardening, tree surgeons, lingerie, package holidays, mountaineering. She had put up a shelf and dismantled a table, painted her sister’s living room, driven a Harley Davidson in California, tried to design a webpage, used a Ouija board at a party, planted an apple tree, admired Japanese gardens, dressed in a black négligé for an old boyfriend, avoided package holidays and hated the idea of mountaineering, being afraid of heights.

In her dreams that night she entered the Toulouse-Lautrec poster, or rather, its essence turned into a scenario she became part of.

She was in a café, which she knew in her dream to be Parisian. The clientele was an elegant one, dressed in velvet, capes, and dinner jackets, like the three figures in the painting. She recognised the old, fat, bald man and the red brigadier, but she couldn’t find the lady and she had the dim sense that she couldn’t find her because she was that lady. At the far end of this café, the shape and size of which seemed to fluctuate so that at some moments it appeared vast and at others small, she noticed a long string of flamboyant women – courtesans, she realised. She regarded them from a stool at the bar and sipped a glass of absinthe. As she perused the crowd, she noticed that some of them had assumed very distinctly the appearance of figures from famous paintings: Van Gogh’s self-portrait, Munch’s screaming skull. On turning her attention to the bar again, she knew that the old fat slob was expecting a kiss from her, the very same kiss she had seen her counterpart in the poster plant on his nose. But she couldn’t do it, and she felt his irritation grow. A tall man in a top hat flicked a pair of dandyish black gloves across her hands until she finally had to relent. As she kissed him everything altered. She was aware of the sounds of the ocean. A blue sea ebbed and pulsed with virile life.

When she woke up the next morning, the dream came back to her as she sipped a cup of weak Earl Grey tea. On her way to the dentist’s surgery where she worked as a receptionist, she wondered whether she might be able to somehow steal the poster. She could have afforded to buy it, that wasn’t the issue, she just felt that stealing it would represent some kind of victory over life, would amount to an act of necessary defiance.

In the evening she was reading, her eyeglasses slowly slipping down her nose.

Maya tells this story:

A man is on his way to the bakery in search of a loaf of bread. On his way there he comes across a fresh loaf lying on the road, still in its wrapping. For a moment he hesitates. Should he pick up the loaf and so save himself a visit to the bakery? Or should he go through with his original plan? In the end he decides to pick up the loaf of bread. As he bends down, he is run over by a bus. By a miracle the loaf stays undamaged. As an ambulance arrives, a man turns up and, seeing the bread, takes it home and eats it.

She kept thinking about the story.

She rang a friend, his name was Gilbert, he was extremely myopic and owned a pet snake.

She read him the story and asked, ‘What do you think this means?’

Gilbert said that he would have to think about it.

‘Well, this is what I think,’ she said. ‘It might mean: the Man was stealing, in a sense, the loaf of bread that he found on the road, or rather he shouldn’t have tried to take what wasn’t his, or what he hadn’t paid for . . . . and when he did, he was punished by being run over. That ends that. But then someone else comes along and “steals” that same loaf and he gets away with it, which suggests the randomness and imprecision of cosmic crime and punishment . . . plus it could be argued, of course, in this interpretation, that the punishment the first man receives was excessively harsh. Or maybe the Second Man gets away with taking the loaf of bread because he never had the intention of going to the bakery as the First Man had, which leads me to the second interpretation: the First Man betrayed his original impulse, and by so doing, created a new problem for himself. He isn’t punished, he merely suffers the consequences of not being true to himself. The Second Man is true to himself and doesn’t hesitate or get side-tracked. But does this mean that to commit what might be regarded as an unscrupulous, or rather unfeeling act (after all, the Second Man has presumably just witnessed the First Man being run over by a bus) is all right so long as you don’t question yourself or as long as that act is true to the original instinct which it honours? What do you think? Gilbert?’

Gilbert said that he would have to think about it.

After a goblet of red wine, she concluded that she should steal the poster.

She stayed awake until 4 a.m., reading and drinking wine. By then she was so drunk that if someone had pricked her with a sewing needle she would have felt nothing. Her limbs were relaxed and inert and her eyes glazed and bloodshot. She rummaged around for an empty bottle of Glenmorangie, a fairly hefty bottle which she kept for sentimental reasons. She stuffed it inside her overcoat and began to walk to the shop.

She stopped a few feet away from the shop and looked around her. The street was deserted and quiet. The moon seemed to be burning up the sky. Slowly she removed the bottle from her overcoat and crept towards the window. Gripping the bottle tightly she looked at the poster, admiring it more than ever, its finesse, its subtlety. She scrutinised the pane of glass, judging it to be quite flimsy, no match for the bottle of Glenmorangie. The resulting alarm would probably be dismissed by those awaking to its vile whining as a malfunction. She steadied herself, took aim and hurled the bottle, it became a missile. The glass shattered with shocking loudness. A little bit stunned, she scrambled towards the display, avoiding the shards of glass that showered across the pavement. It was only then that she noticed no alarm was sounding. A second later a dog started barking insanely. She grabbed the poster, which was small enough to fit under her sprawling overcoat. She was expecting sleepy people to seep out in droves, she was expecting howling sirens and police cars, she was expecting someone to make a citizen’s arrest. But nothing, no one. She was back at her flat in a matter of minutes and on her way there she encountered no one.

It was done.

The next morning, in her sobriety, she expected her doorbell to ring, but it didn’t. She expected someone to stop her on the way to work, but they didn’t. The world had hardly even batted an eyelid.

When she got home from the surgery, she breathed a sigh of relief and stared at the poster. She couldn’t quite believe that she had done it.

A week passed and she summoned up the courage to walk past the shop. There was a new pane of glass there, thicker. In the place of the Toulouse-Lautrec now there was a virile seascape by Emile Goüter.

But now, rather than giving her pleasure, each time she looked at the poster, she felt pangs of guilt. The release, or health, or energy, she had hoped for didn’t come and she thought about confessing her crime to the shop owner, but decided against it. Eventually she wrapped it up, shoved it in a parcel, and mailed it back to the shop with an anonymous apology.

She was reading an article about Japanese gardens, vegetable moussaka was cooking in the oven, and her goblet of red wine stood on a little table. She was back to normal, she had practically forgotten the whole thing. Then the phone rang. It was Gilbert.

‘I was thinking about that story, do you remember . . . ?’

After a puzzled moment she did.

‘How did it go, like this, right . . . the First Man wants the loaf, sees one on the street, gets run over, the Second Man sees it and takes it and eats it, right?’

‘Yeah, I think that’s it.’

‘Well, I was wondering: how did that loaf get into the middle of the road in the first place?’

‘The story doesn’t say.’

‘But it’s obvious, someone must have stolen that loaf, then they had second thoughts and decided to abandon it.’

‘But why in the middle of the road? Why not in a dustbin?’

‘They probably thought it would be too wasteful, so they wanted to give someone, a tramp perhaps, or someone on the breadline – if you will excuse the pun – someone very poor, the opportunity to claim it without knowing it was stolen.’

‘This is all very speculative,’ she insisted.

‘Of course. Well, what’s your explanation for how the loaf got there?’

‘Someone dropped it by accident.’

‘Then why didn’t they pick it up?’

‘They didn’t want a dirty loaf of bread.’

‘But it was still in its wrapping.’

‘Ok, you win, Gilbert.’

‘Or maybe the Second Man who comes along and picks it up had dropped it earlier, before the story begins. And he was just coming back to claim what was rightfully his?’

She said she would have to think about it.

Eventually she went back to the shop and was greatly relieved to see the poster in its frame back in its original spot in the window. Without a moment’s hesitation she decided to buy it and even insisted on paying a little bit more, to the assistant’s astonishment. He responded to her generosity by taking special care when wrapping it up, tying it in a single brown curling ribbon. Once she was the rightful and legal owner, clutching it proudly, the fog in her brain lifted and life took on a new clarity. As she walked she felt the first intimations of spring. She stopped in the middle of a quiet street, where hardly any cars passed. Looking around furtively as though she was about to carry out another crime, she laid the poster down gently in the middle of the road. Then she walked home.

The Watery Gowns

1

In the sea,ever changing, ever redefining its shape, the divers felt life pulsing through them as they plunged downwards into that vast world where every kind of life and colour and light existed. That underwater universewas as rich and variegated as the one above. In three they went and they had no need of words, just gestures and signals that they all instinctively understood. Everything down there was disembodied, slow moving, the divers were shadowy, stripped of their faces, hidden behind masks, their skin hidden behind diving suits, their mouths concealed by their breathing apparatus, oxygen cylinders turning their backs bumpy and rounded. The odd refraction of light; soundwaves quelled by the cushioning glory of water and unimpeded space. Shoals of fish darted this way and that, undisturbed by the three divers, who watched them in fascination. Every now and then a weirdly shaped fish, a tapered apparition rolled and passed by and then twos and threes followed, perfect replicas of one another, clones, recurring moments; their gauzy, distorted forms made the divers think the sea contained more mysteries than any earthly realm. The truths and feelings to be found down there could not be communicated to anyone who had not experienced that dark, luminous abyss, that underwater garden.

One of the divers pointed to a distended shell, half-hidden by a faintly glowing shrub. The shrub seemed to be coated in a phosphorescent substance and the tallest of the trio extracted the shell, which resembled a human ear stretched into weird plasticity. It sank from end to end like an overburdened rope bridge. The shell was promptly set down in an underwater case where it took its place with a hundred others like it and yet different. Later those shells, small, large, odd, intricate, gaudy, plain, would be glued together to create mosaics, mosaics that depicted scenes from Greek mythology. The works went on show at the Mediterranean Art Gallery in the small town of Caphos on the island and they usually attracted quite a lot of attention and plaudits. Giorgios, the artist-diver and the leader of the three, was as magisterial and driven as a cheetah; he had even written a book detailing his passion for shells and for their transformation into details in works of art, painstakingly and lovingly assembled. He also ran a taverna with Dora, his wife and fellow diver who was floating close by him. She reached out an ungloved hand to touch the skin-like surface of the shell. She smiled through her mask and the couple executed a little dance of triumph. As they did this Kirsten, who was the youngest of the trio, felt a little displaced from them. They, after all, were bound by marital vows and the activity of their loins. Kirsten had no such connection to another human soul and was wary of people. Only in the sea, in its underwater chambers, in its caressing, silent embrace, did she feel truly complete, truly whole and peaceful. Up there, in the earthly world, in the terrestrial shell of noise and strife, life was heavy, and people made no sense, with their changing patterns of behaviour, contradictory, selfish, and sometimes downright cruel.

The divers began to rise, drifting upwards like elongated shadows of birds borne skywards. They passed great gold corrugated leaves of macro-algae, moving slowly up and down like giant feather fans, palpitatingly alive. As the divers spiralled upwards towards the shimmering ceiling of light, small fish with black and yellow vertical stripes imitated the arc of their movements, almost as though setting up some wondrous homage to their human counterparts. Then the fish sped away, gone, vanishing into the secret places only they knew how to reach.

The divers, one by one, glided up to their small diving boat, and climbed up over the side by means of a small ladder, removing their gear and breathing apparatus and placing it on the stern. The sun was setting and the air was full of the heady vivid sensations of summer. Overhead the sky was beginning to fade to a pinkish red glow. The moon was already visible and Kirsten spied it with her furtive, shy eyes. How different this scene was to those of Kirsten’s childhood and teenage years, before she had come to embrace her new Mediterranean life. English summers had only ever been at best a tepid affair; the temperature never rose above the twenties and the sky was more often than not a screen of clouds and greyness. She preferred this richer, more luscious backdrop, its subtle light, dying now, but all the more beautiful and poignant for it, the endless surface of the sea, ever changing, ever moving, but always a harbinger of calm and joy, the tiny vantage point afforded by their boat, and the salt air, which seemed to hold all the textures of life in its invisible embrace.

They started making their way back to shore, silent and slightly overwhelmed as they tended to be after a dive.

Kirsten said goodbye to the couple and walked over to her Volkswagen Beetle, dusty and battered in the sandy driveway that led down to the beach. The car had dents everywhere, as though serving as a visible reminder of Kirsten’s lack of grace whenever she was out of water. As a child she had always been accumulating bruises and blisters and seemed to have a knack for harming herself: bumping her head, scraping her knee caps, falling off slides and breaking her wrist, her hip, her nose. Underwater everything was lighter, friction was robbed of its power to hurt, weight was dissipated. Maybe that was why she loved to dive . . .

She drove back to the village, where she was staying at a villa that the parents of her friend Melissa had bequeathed to her for a few days. The villa contained worlds of old-style grace, filled with ethereal pleasures that only Kirsten (she liked to think) was allowed to sample. From outside the simple beauty of the indigo-blue wooden front door with no lock, just a latch, tantalisingly hinted at the magical dimensions of what lay beyond its threshold. The door remained without a lock because the locals and the village still existed in a universe of guilelessness. In Caphos, everything slowed down, buses were late, coffee was sipped rather than swallowed, the souvlaki was cooked slowly, the hours passed slowly and it didn’t matter because either the sun or the sea or something ensured that it was fine to do absolutely nothing and yet somehow it was never boring or oppressive. Life could be lived merely by observing, meditating, being.

The villa was a glorious gift to Kirsten and for three days she sampled all its delights, prising open its secrets: the magnificent view of the village down below and the rows and clusters of evening lights as they switched on magically; the breakfast room and kitchen, with its strangely modern sink, a burnished, smooth block of elegance; the unbelievably opulent plants and geraniums and bougainvillea, which she lovingly watered; the long, almost Victorian bathtub that was twice as long as she was; the summerhouse that adjoined the main body of the villa and, most wonderfully of all, the outdoor swimming pool, which she slipped into at midnight every night; a small, exquisite pool whose surface was hardly disturbed by the movements of her lithe, naked body, as she swam without sound, greedily clutching at those gowns of water, and wrapping them around her. She strove to become one with the water, to move in tireless, perfect patterns, as each stroke and each length she completed became a better and better embodiment of technique and elegance. There, in that midnight shrine, outside, as she floated on her back, looking up, she peered into the basin of the night sky and the constellations and clusters of stars were like freckles on the face of the universe. Here was the perfection she had dreamed of: a silky, almost erotic abundance of water, her own form dissolving, melting into it, almost becoming water in all its protean freedom, the natural scene around, where stones and flowers existed in symbiotic, breath-held harmony, as though reality had become an etched painting, and the vacuum of utter silence, far far away from noise and people. She swam in wonder and gratitude as the night reached out and made love to her.

2

A wild stretch of the shore with a small beach.

Close by clusters of rocks formed tiny islands that caught the sun’s glare; children clambered over them, their parents stretched out on them. Inland, a complex of new, ugly apartments had just been built. Kirsten hated them. Far off, out to sea, the wreck of a ship was embedded in the horizon. A gargantuan Turkish freighter with a cargo of steel had struck the jagged rocks some fourteen years earlier and there it sat, a rusty, static monolith of decay. Tourists sighted it and wondered why it was always there day after day until someone pointed out that it would never move again. Something held Kirsten to the shipwreck, and she stared at it all the time she was down by the beach, with its wooden umbrellas and pork-chop British tourists and leaden, unsmiling Russians. She stared at it for hours and sometimes shuddered at its dark form: an unmoving malevolent presence that, as the shadows of night gathered, became even darker and evocative of damnation. The perpetual stasis of this great decomposing entity seemed truly to carve an incision in the water. When Kirsten drove her car along the dust road, running parallel to the beach, but at an elevated point, she would always look out for the shipwreck. And it never failed to appear, it always came round eventually and, in a way, it had become part of the sea, even as it tarnished it, ensnared by the rocks with which it had begun to fuse. Kirsten began to feel that the secret of life lay hidden in that shipwreck, and gradually it occurred to her that she must somehow confront it, come face to face with it.

One warm, windy night when the moon was almost full, Kirsten took out the little diving boat and gradually drifted all the way out towards it, afraid and uncertain of what she would find there, but knowing that confronting her fear would bring her some kind of peace. She half expected to see grinning corpses. She stopped the boat some meters away from the shipwreck’s orbit – a perpetually splashing foam around steel and rock – and stood, scared, hypnotised by that gigantic, cold, dead form towering above her and her tiny boat. She felt her skin crawl as some nameless dread gathered all around her. She stood frozen, trying to arrest even the tiniest of bodily movements, even her breathing, on the lookout for a predator that would leap out at her from the darkness. The moonlight caught patches of the watery membrane around her, and a dark beauty was born. Her boat inched forward. The waves snarled and crashed ever and again into the ship’s derelict hull, as though trying to knock dents in it, and weird phantoms were made in that clash between dead metal and water, strange reverberations that scurried across the body of the freighter.