Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

The day passes. The roses are bought and some are given to Father Mencaroni for the church. From the bakery ovens comes the smell of pastry. Annette asks Elemme to mind the stall for her. She eats a small baked crust. The Romany by the fountain gives her two long beans that have been strung with wire over his grill. Outside the high enclosure, she can hear the growl of traffic on the cobblestones, the zuzzing of mopeds, and the grumble of old farming carts as they judder and box their axle shafts. The pedestrian steps sunk into the Etruscan walls echo. A train rattles on its track as it arrives from the city. There are no screams. There are no alarms ringing, no calls of murder. There is no lewd breathing.

She returns to the flower stall and thanks Elemme for keeping watch over her trays of buttons and threads. ‘I haven’t seen your mother in a while,’ says Elemme. ‘Is she still unwell?’ Annette inclines her head. ‘Yes. Headaches. She gets them all the time.’ Elemme says that she is sorry to hear this. ‘But at least she has your brothers and your uncle to care for her, which is good.’ ‘Do you have brothers too?’ Annette asks. ‘I do. But they’re in North Africa. They’re unable to come here now. They are bullies but I really miss them. To have brothers is lucky. Especially such handsome ones as yours!’

Annette would like to ask Elemme about all the things she finds confusing, all the things she knows so little about and that have not ever been explained to her. Like the scenes cut out of the projector reels that Mauri complains about. Like the blossom she feels in her abdomen before it begins to ache every month. Once she asked Elemme if she had ever seen the Bestia, and Elemme laughed and said, yes, the night she got married. Annette asked what he was like. ‘I can tell you that he was not gentle. He was quite wild in fact.’ When Elemme said this she did not sound scared. It was like an amusement, and Annette wondered if perhaps in North Africa the Bestia was not the worst of all creatures. Whenever Annette asks Mauri about the Bestia he pulls her to the floor and says, ‘It’s me, it’s me.’ Then he growls like a dog and barks and pretends to be possessed by a demon. He digs her in the ribs and crushes her until she is breathless, or until their mother finds them and pulls Mauri off, slapping him and sending him out of the room.

Her mother will not be drawn on the subject — it is too upsetting. Her voice plunges into dark blue regions when she talks of it, like the reaches of water in the middle of the lake where no one swims. ‘I don’t know what he looks like, Annette! He looks like the most grotesque thing imaginable. A monster from hell! Your poor father,’ she cries, ‘he saw. He heard the flies swarming. He felt the red shadow falling over him. Why must you punish me with this question all the time?’ She weeps and makes Annette promise not to let him take her away, not to make herself vulnerable or open herself to him.

Annette promises. She tries to picture this famous scene in the gardens, when her father died in the most terrible of circumstances, but the picture will not come. Uncle Marcello once let slip in an argument that there was also a woman present. Annette’s mother became very upset, and said ‘Never speak of that whore,’ and Uncle Marcello tried to take her hand and comfort her, but her mother would not be touched. The mystery woman was not mentioned again. Annette wonders how her mother knew that her father heard flies swarming around the head of the Bestia when he died. He could not have told her so, because he was dead. Perhaps her mother was there in the gardens too. She says she was at home, feeling faint and asking God for forgiveness, as if she knew something terrible was occurring. By the time Uncle Marcello and the police arrived, the Bestia and the mysterious woman had disappeared, leaving only a pool of red evidence. Annette suspects that her mother has in fact seen the Bestia, and knows exactly what he looks like. The trauma was extreme and now she is simply too frightened to talk about it.

Annette wonders whether there is a strict tradition involved when it comes to the Bestia. She wonders whether other people hear flies and feel the red shadow before they die, or whether they hear and feel other things. Perhaps to some people the Bestia might, instead of flies buzzing, sound like Olivetti keys tapping, or a cat hissing, or a firework wailing into the sky. If they were expecting flies how would they know to run? How would they know to kneel and pray to be saved? It is a mystery.

The market begins to close. Behind her Maurizio steps up and hugs her fiercely. ‘I’ve come back for you, even though you treat me with such contempt.’ He puts his hands over her mouth. ‘No, Mother, no one can hear you scream!’ Elemme laughs and claps at the performance. Annette wriggles free. Her brother smells of musty potting soil and the vinegar solution with which he and Uncle Marcello have been dousing the greenfly.

Other than those strange six months with Dr Dixon and his creepy insects, your childhood was good. You liked being brought up where you were, in the border expanse. It was rural and difficult, and you felt hardy and capable because of that. You and Danny ran wild. The fells were on your doorstep, those brown and red massifs that your dad brought into his studio and undressed and made profitable. You swam in the rivers and waterfalls, made dens, climbed trees. You took over the tumbledown barns, swung off the beams, and reared yourselves among the bleating livestock. It was an exterior childhood, and you and Danny were exterior children. There were gales, floods, hardships, funerals; you were taught that this was nature, and you’d better respect it.

The north of your youth was practically pre-industrial. You are always amazed when you hear people’s ideas about idylls and pleasure grounds, the myths of the sublime. Back then it was a landscape of filth loosened from fields, ringworm, walls of snow, and long, sickening bus rides to school. It was bad weather, burning carcasses, kids with disabilities, black-eye Fridays and badger baiting; collecting wood off the fell and trying to keep it dry under tarpaulin so the logs didn’t fizzle with sap, hiss and blacken on the grate, because that was how you stayed warm. No Economy 7. No piped gas. Fowl were strung from hooks in the outbuildings by your parents’ cottage. In another shed trout was smoked. The heating range, which was installed by your dad when you were fourteen to run some radiators, was bought from a local farmer, a cut-and-shunt boiler, previously used to incinerate stillborn lambs. Your mother washed all the clothes by hand until that same year, when his paintings started bringing in good money, and a machine was bought and plumbed into the greasy, goose-hung bothy.

And when your best friend Nicki collapsed with an asthma attack on the moor, she was airlifted to Newcastle Infirmary by helicopter, after forty-five minutes of lying under a witch-hazel bush, her brain bluely solidifying. It was January. The black furrows were frozen and an earthy winter scent radiated from the ground. You ran back from the phone box along the road and wrapped Nicki in your coat and held her hand. It was the first and only time you’ve had to dial the emergency number. You waited for help, so insanely long, it seemed. Then the sky was ripped open by noise. You watched the Sea King buzz down through sleet, and you opened Nicki’s mouth because the wind from the propeller blades seemed strong enough to re-inflate her lungs. The witch-hazel carried pale orange flowers on its bare twigs, the blossoms impossibly delicate in the storm of the landing.

And that was that for Nicki. Deep Indefinite Unconsciousness. Technically, she is still alive. Officially, she was lucky. They got to her just in time to scrape up off the hillside the last biological part of her life. It’s not hard for you to associate the north with tragedy. Nicki. Danny. There’s always half a truth to cliché.