The Journal of Dora Damage(141)

I saw Din standing there, as in a far-away dream. He was excited. He started to talk at me. He spoke so quickly, I could not hear him.

‘Dora. Mrs Damage,’ he said, uncertain how to address the lover from whom he had absented himself. Sylvia is here too, I could have said, to taunt him. Who would you prefer?

I shook my head, as if to dislodge the water in my ears after a swim, like when I was a child back in Hastings, but it did not help. Still I could not hear him clearly, only through glass, through worlds, or dream-states.

‘It’s happenin’, now. War is breakin’ in my country. I have to . . .’

And then his words screamed clearly into my ears as if the water had cleared, the glass had shattered, the dream had broken.

‘I have to . . .’ he repeated.

‘Go!’ I screamed back at him, as if completing his sentence for him. ‘Go away!’

His face faded from me, and then swam back into focus.

‘Go!’ I screamed once more. ‘A war? I have enough blood on my hands already!’

But still he stood there. He was questioning me, and I was not to be questioned. I wanted to be obliterated, but his presence was making me more real. I needed him to walk away from me, so I could vanish with him.

‘Please. Leave me alone!’

De humani corporis fabrica. Made of human skin.

And have you fucked us both into the bargain?

And then I closed the door on his approaching foot, arm, face, feeling the resistance of his flesh until the latch finally found its hole, and I bolted the door and felt him disappear. But he did not take with him my self-loathing, which took me straight towards the bottle of Black Drop on the dresser, and soon I did not know if Sylvia was still watching me, or had gone away with her own miseries.





Chapter Twenty-two

Dancy-diddlety-poppety-pin,

Have a new dress when summer comes in;

When summer goes out, ‘

Tis all worn out,

Dancy-diddlety-poppety-pin.





'Oh my, how clear it suddenly becomes! Dora, do you know what sati means?’

Sati? The immolation of a Hindoo widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. It’s been illegal for some time.’

‘It still continues, in the more rural, out-of-the-way places in India. Jocelyn told me so.’

‘Why would he torment you thus?’

‘Torment me? Why, he was assuaging me! I hated his long absences, and he would lecture me on the barbaric practices that went on in the darkest corners of the world which he, and only he, could put a stop to. He told me he had to go, in the name of civilisation. To stop the Africans taking a knife to their little girls in the name of chastity; to stop the Hindoos from burning their widows in the name of fidelity; to stop the . . . oh!’

‘Do go on!’

‘It is hard for me. And that is why I must explain to you, Dora, for I heard Jocelyn boasting to someone – Valentine, Charles, Hugh, whoever – that he would rescue a brave and beautiful widow from sati – from her husband’s funeral pyre – and immortalise her for ever in the greatest scientific and literary work of the century! Surely . . . but I had presumed that this meant the woman would become the basis of a phreno-logical study! That she was a biological curiosity to him. That there must have been something in her cranial shape and general physiognomy that predisposed her people to barbarism, that it was Jocelyn’s duty to discover. This I had so nobly assumed! I would never have thought to take him at his word!’

Is this the intrinsic worth, I wondered, of the human body, to be so reduced after we are gone? And what leads a man to reduce it so, in the name of exaltation? Is he so severed from our source that he must sever more in his quest for wholeness? We tear down trees and rip up animals for our books; we kill elephants and destroy forests to make pianos on which we make music to soothe our souls; small wonder the music is so plaintive, with ivory yearning for its life back. But what when the materials are from amongst our own? For the exaltation of his own fleshful library, Sir Jocelyn had stripped this woman of more than her clothes.

I thought of the books of our lives, and I prayed to St Bartholomew for the opportunity to erase the last few pages of my life and rewrite them. St Bartholomew. And then it dawned on me. He had been flayed alive by Astyages for converting his brother, the King of Armenia, to Christianity. He was not merely patron saint of bookbinders, but of tanners, cobblers and leather-workers besides. Was this a macabre prank? Or was this a tradition whose origins ran deeper and bloodier than I could imagine? I could only think of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the slaughter of thousands of innocents for their differences, and the power that continues to be wielded by the most unworthy.