A Monstrous Romance - Prelude

Document 4

A young man’s journal, found wedged beneath an armoire in a row of London flats scheduled for demolition

Dated 1923

The woman was stunning.

You will notice that I do not say she was pretty, though I suppose she might have been. The fact is that I was already too far into an altogether too pleasant evening to make any reliable statement of the sort. I was admirably soused, naturally, but that was not the whole of it. No. While the libation was strong and abundant, and I should probably have been favourably impressed by anything minimally more feminine than an African Cape buffalo, there was also the fact that I simply could not see enough of her to form an opinion one way or the other.

Part of the trouble, of course, was the lack of cooperation of my own gin-drenched eyeballs, but it was not at all helped by the sea of aromatic tobacco smoke ebbing and flowing through the club, nor by the fact that she had chosen the gloomiest of corners in a building constructed entirely of gloomy corners.

So, you see, I could not rightly have called her pretty, but I do feel thoroughly justified in calling her stunning, because, you see, she stunned me.

Something about her struck my champagne-addled brain sort of sideways, like one of those mad, mind-bending surrealist paintings which chew up one’s sensibilities, swish them about a bit, and then spit them out again, and not always in an entirely unpleasant way.

I stood for a moment in the grip of a strange paralysis, my drink frozen halfway to my lips. It felt as though all the club had stopped right along with me, caught in a sort of metaphysical shudder at the sudden realisation that the universe could get queasy. Gooseflesh on my eyelids, and probably on my tongue, too.

At any rate, I took it upon myself to investigate. Poor dear, she sat all alone. Maybe she was waiting for someone, but her potential companion had not yet arrived. Why not go offer a moment of comfort to the lonely thing?

Plucking another drink from the tray of a passing waiter, I made good use of my elbows in crossing the crowded dance floor, two steps forward and one stagger back. It was a trial. A cloud of fringe and sequin impeded me, but I persevered.

I drew closer, and as I did, her eyes fixed on me. Or, at least, her head turned toward me and stayed there. I could not see her eyes; they were hidden behind small, round, tinted lenses, but gin or no gin, I would swear I could feel her gaze.

She smiled as I approached.

My confidence thus bolstered, I strode right on up and gave her the drink in my hand and my name.

This, of course, I considered a charity in my drunken state. The solitary darling, I could see in closer proximity, was robed in a singularly unfashionable frock of midnight blue, with a high neck and long sleeves edged with lace. Her tall boots were likewise outdated, as were the long gloves. The turban was just strange. In contrast to her parochial dress, she seemed to wear an outlandish amount of makeup, caked so thick that one could scarcely tell what her natural skin tone might be, and yet so artfully applied that she seemed more like a mobile painting than a professional woman.

A second wave of disorientation overtook me. There was something more, something I could not place. She was not an old woman, dressing in a nod to her youth and painting her face in a nod to her wrinkles. I doubt that would have so punted my brain, even tight as it was, then. No, that would have been natural. It was something else.

I wove closer and plopped down in an empty seat at her table. This did not seem to surprise her, so I chose to interpret her smile as an encouragement.

“What ho!” I exclaimed, or at least that was the idea, though I couldn’t with any confidence swear to what actually came out of my mouth.

This excellent sport nodded tolerantly.

I think I said something salacious which – I swear on my dear mother’s grave – I honestly intended as a compliment. I followed this with – I believe – a rather inappropriate, if oblique, offer of a rather personal nature.

“Oh,” she said blandly, “no, thank you.” Her voice was a high, sweet chirp, which reminded me rather strangely of fiddling crickets. I had never heard a voice like that.

I also took offence. To be honest, it was the third such rejection I had received in as many days, though the other two were delivered in terms not quite so courteous, and serious self-doubt was beginning to set in. Hence the drinking. On the other hand, perhaps the drinking contributed to the rejection. No matter.

“Are you certain?” I asked rather plaintively.

“Yes,” she replied. “Quite certain, sorry. But there’s a girl over there who’s been eyeing you. You might try her.”

I squinted in the direction she indicated. There was, indeed, a girl over there, all alone, befringed and besequined, with a full drink in her hand and three empty ones on her table. She was dazzling, too, despite her smudged lipstick, or perhaps even because of it. It seemed to speak of a certain wanton desperation that mirrored my own. She was not strange and mysterious, though, and the strange and mysterious called to me in ways the flesh simply did not. I turned back to the woman before me as she regarded me with curiosity.

“I’m a poet, you know,” I tried.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she replied, and at first I puffed with pride, but a closer analysis of the words deflated me.

“Well,” I clarified, “a writer. I’m writing the next great novel.” This fact was generally considered quite attractive by the fair sex, despite the fact that absolutely everybody in the City of Lights was writing the next great novel, fair sex included.

This representative was not attracted, though she was interested. She leaned forward, further into the light, her tinted lenses glittering. “Oh! Do you like stories?”

This appeal to my artist’s nature served its purpose. Elevated, though not quite in the sense I had initially hoped, I sat up straighter. “You dashed well may say so! Only more than life, itself! Shall I tell you one?”

“That would help to pass the time. Thank you.”

“Ah, waiting for something?”

“Someone. But I may be waiting for some time. Do tell me a story.”

I rattled off the plot of my novel, with some embellishments that had occurred to me just in that instant. It turned out better than it ever had in the past. At least, it seemed to. But, as I have sine forgotten those embellishments, I shall never know for sure.

For the drink and all, it seemed to impress my companion favourably, and she nodded and asked questions, all the while glancing periodically over my shoulder. No need to enumerate the boring details here; they are all written down in my other notebooks, in all their boring glory.

She listened to me go on as the night wore itself out and the club gradually emptied as other, juicier places opened up in other parts of town.

“Getting a bit sparse,” I commented, and I named a few other entertainments we might try in the vicinity or a short cab ride away.

But the poor thing shook her head, looking as though someone had just shot her dog, and she breathed a sigh of such exquisite melancholy my heat nearly was nearly torn in twain, as it were.

“No,” she said. “We were to meet here. If nobody is coming, then nobody is coming, but I don't want to go anywhere else.”

It goes without saying that I felt pretty bad at that, more so for the asinine way in which I had initiated our acquaintance, since a sigh like that sigh could only be attributed to true love lost.

“Oh, I say!” I offered up. “I say, one mustn't lose hope. Look, it's quietening down, but they won't bodily heave us out of here for a few hours yet. Why not stay until then?”

“I intended to. I'll wait outside the door until morning, if I must.”

“Better not,” I told her. “Not that it's a bad neighbourhood, or anything, but after dark is after dark and all that.”

She was pointedly silent, and I thought that her point was probably that I hadn't any say in the matter, so I dropped it and picked up a passing bowl of champagne, instead.

“Sorry my story didn't last very long,” I said, though it had lasted long enough to dry out my mouth abominably. “I might give you a poem or two, but none of them would rhyme, at the moment. Anyway, I'd say you owe me a story, now. How about it? You seem to like stories. I'm sure you know some.”

“Some,” she agreed slowly. “I don't know if any of them are any good, though. I'm not writing the next great novel.”

“Stories are magic,” I told her. “All of them are good.” As bold a lie as ever I had uttered, but she smiled all the same.

“Well, then, perhaps,” she said. “There is one. I've never told it, though. It is very strange.”

“The stranger, the better,” I assured her with warmth. She seemed recovered from her moment of distress, and I congratulated myself on a distraction well executed. “Astound me.”

She leaned forward, glancing from side to side as though to ensure she would not be overheard.

And, by God, she told me a story.