The Journal of Dora Damage(148)

I became aware of a burning sensation somewhere around the lower regions of my body, and struggled to recall where I had been. Lucinda, I thought. Where was she? I lifted my head to see if she was in the room with me, and my pelvis groaned with the effort. I laid my head back down on the bed. At least, I rued to myself, it was not Lucinda who had had to undergo this, and I felt my body flood with a curious sense of relief, and gratitude even. I wanted to laugh again. Peace, at last. Where was my shame? It had been removed, excised from my body. I had been suitably punished. Ah, the relief. Relief at last.

Slowly and with tremendous fear I worked my hand down between my body and the bed. I tugged at my skirts, and pulled enough of them up by my waist to be able to get my hand between my legs. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find. Bandages stiff with blood, presumably. But there were none. My thighs were smooth, and not sticky with drying fluids. My hair was still as it should have been.

With trepidation, I placed the very tip of my middle finger where my clitoris used to be, and waited for it to descend into an excruciating mess of tissues, a raw savage wound, and recoil in agony and disgust. Oh, but I was angry now. This was the seat of my new-found sexuality. This was where Din had been. This was where I found myself. And now it had been taken from me.

But it hadn’t. I touched it gently, and then more firmly, and it answered me willingly with its usual golden rush. I pulled my finger away, not comprehending. This wasn’t right either.

The pain, I started to realise, was coming from my behind. I pushed upwards on my hands until my arms were straight and my trunk almost upright, and twisted my head to see. My skirts were still covering my bottom, so I reached round and yanked them upwards. But it was too dark; no light fell on the bed. In the darkness I passed my hand over the skin of my bottom. It was a series of raised dots and small welts. It stung, like a scrape.

I stood up slowly; my head felt surprisingly clear despite my recent stupor. I twisted again to get a look at myself in the mirror, but I could only see myself from the waist upwards. I stood on the bed; I was the right height now, but out of the light. I got off the bed, and pulled it laboriously a couple of feet towards the mirror, and stood on it again, directly in the shaft of moonlight. I pulled up my skirts once more, twisted round, and over my shoulder could see that the moonlight was illuminating my bottom perfectly.

On the left cheek it seemed as if someone had painted an ivy wreath, in the centre of which was a portrait of a young woman with a snub nose and an indoor cap and ribbons. She looked not unlike me. On the right cheek, someone had painted the insignia of the Noble Savages, and the word Nocturnus underneath.

I rubbed at the artwork with my finger. It was too sore for me to press firmly, and when I examined my finger in the moonlight I could see that not even a smudge of paint had transferred on to it. Comprehension only dawned very slowly. I knelt on the bed, with my bottom in the air, for I could not sit down on it.

I had, I finally realised, been tattooed.

What had he, ‘Nocturnus’, said, in my bindery? ‘Strange to think we find such beauty in the posthumous scarification and gilding of an animal’s hide. He had said that tooling was like a tattoo, on dead skin.’ What else? Of course. ‘I have left instructions in my will to bind my complete works with the skin from my torso, with the scar left by the spear wound resplendent across the front panel, and the tattoo round my navel on the back cover. Is it not a fine way to achieve immortality?’

One cannot tattoo leather, I thought to myself, only living skin.

My magnum opus, he had called me, in Glidewell’s study. I had not thought to take him literally.

My skin was being prepared to become the leather for a future book.

I would be Volume Two.





* * *





This, surely, was a knowledge I was never meant to possess. Does a tree know of its life beyond the papermill? Had the buffalos, crocodiles, goats, calves I had so casually used known of their destination? Or was only I to go to the slaughter with this horrific awareness of my future reduction? I, who was once woman, was to become a book covering? Sartor Resartus. The binder re-bound. Was I nothing more than the beasts of the field, air, swamps, prairies, which I now would join in death?

And when would that be? Would I be permitted to live to a ripe old age, and die of natural causes, after which Sir Jocelyn would come and claim my hide? Not likely. It was reasonable to surmise that, pretty much as soon as my skin had healed from the tattooing, I would die. I would, more precisely, be killed.

A key turned in the lock, and the door opened. ‘Ah, she is awake,’ Diprose said, as he entered, with Sir Jocelyn close behind him. I glimpsed the corridor beyond them, and realised that we were back in Berkeley-square.