Mistification Read online

  "I don't have a thing," she said. "I have nothing. But I love all your bits and pieces."

  She looked through his collection of buttons, toe rings, ring pulls, string.

  "Tell me a story," he said again.

  "I only know stories about sex," she said. That was okay by Marvo. For the first time in his life he had an erection.

  "You know how the only sound worse than your parents fighting is your parents fucking? That surreptitious grunting, the squeak, squeak as they quietly go for it. You think it's not possible, and they look the same the next morning, so you think you might have imagined it, but who would be sick enough to fantasise parents doing it? Who would be that depraved?"

  "You," said Marvo. He had an idea what she meant. He had heard the bedsprings through the thin walls in the house. He grinned.

  She offered to give him a sponge bath and he accepted, for the first time forgetting about getting a story. He remembered a long time later, only when he realised what she had done. He wanted all of her time but she couldn't give it to him. She would not even give him a story. She knew what great value there was in them. He wanted all of her trust.

  Although Marvo didn't trust easily, he worked hard at gaining trust. Without trust he would not be believed.

  Marvo gave a show in the clinic for patients who thought and accepted like children. They trusted him then, they told him stories.

  "My son was desperate to reach the world," one woman said. She rubbed her hands with oil, her skin glistened with it. She was allowed to be naked; she could do what she liked so long as she didn't hurt anybody. In this place, they competed to be the most naked, the most crazy. Alone, they said, "I'm totally sane," but they enjoyed the insanity they invented.

  She rubbed oil into her arms as she talked.

  Helpful Old Lady

  He was always a weak little thing. He wasn't finished when he came out. He didn't have strength yet, so he was sick and weak for his first three years.

  I met an old woman in the park. She had been watching my son playing his gentle games in his slow and gentle way alone at my feet.

  "The poor dear has weak limbs. That's all," she said. "All his illnesses stem from that."

  She looked at me to see my reaction. I nodded. It had been my instinct, that once his legs and arms strengthened, his defences would too.

  "What are you willing to do for your son?" she asked.

  "Anything," I said. Truly. I never lie. So I agreed to her cure.

  "Only human fat, rubbed into the skin daily, will strengthen his limbs. I have the knowledge to render the fat, but I do not have the raw materials. I'm too old and ugly. I look like a witch, and people don't trust me. I need your help to bring the material in."

  "Do you have to kill them or can you just take the fat?" I wanted to be clear about what I was doing.

  "There will be some death involved," she said. "That's why we will select people who will not be missed, and who deserve to die anyway. Like that fellow over there."

  The park attendant leant on a rake and watched the children. He smiled and nodded at them, big brother and best friend.

  "When he finds them alone, he takes them to his little office and molests them," said the old lady. "Each child he touches will be truly damaged."

  My son could be next, I thought, and our partnership was struck. It was successful; my son is wonderfully strong and healthy, an athlete and father. But the old lady died and her house was cleaned up. They found all sorts of things and there was a photo of me and my baby. Not fair, really. My baby is lost to me anyway. They have locked me up here and he does not come to visit.

  #

  Marvo freed the lady from the home. He got her a job as a park attendant, where she could be with children, watch over them, protect them. And he helped her son to love her again. This was an action he would not regret. The son, now loved and wanted, became a movie maker, and spread the mist over the world.

  Another time, Marvo met a very sleepy woman in the hospital.

  "I can't seem to keep my eyes open," she said. "Sleep, that's my motto."

  "Why are you so tired?" Marvo said.

  "They always ask me that, but they don't want to know the answer. They want some story about my terrible childhood, how sleep was the only way to escape it."

  "But your childhood was good."

  "Oh, yes. Would you like to hear the story of my birth?"

  Marvo nodded.

  Born Without Waking Up

  My mother was the Queen of Spades, a dark and serious woman, who taught me to respect the serious side of life. My father died when I was very young, and Mother never got out of the habit of wearing black. It suited her.

  She would let me sleep as much as I wanted. She knew I needed it, because of my birth.

  I was taken by caesarean section, not because of my mother, because of me. The doctors thought I was still – they thought I was dead, because I didn't move and struggle to leave the dark room.

  So they lifted me from my mother and saw that I was merely sleeping. I was fast asleep! I received a nasty slap and woke up, and I've hated waking up ever since.

  #

  Marvo could see this woman was happy to be so sleepy so he did not want to take that away from her. Instead, he convinced the director of the clinic to change the rule that no patient was to remain in bed during the day. It made no sense they were allowed to be naked but not allowed to sleep. Patients began to sleep in, to have afternoon dozes, and, after a while, much recovered, to be released. The woman amongst them. Once she was allowed to sleep when she was tired, she wasn't tired when she was awake.

  Marvo was seen as recovered also. They admired his problem-solving skills and his way with people. They packed his bag and sent him off within an hour, his paperwork done. He had no time to say goodbye to Andra. But he did not forget. He could find her when he wished.

  Marvo did not ever go to school, though it was hard to tell. He was very knowledgeable. He was clever with figures; one of his tricks was to add large numbers in his head and give the answer as if surprised by it. He did not talk of his lack of education because he did not believe it existed. He swapped stories for his education. He learnt something from every story he heard.

  He learnt from the stories he told as well as the ones he heard. He didn't always know how they would turn out; he didn't know how the person would react to the story. Telling the story changed it, every time.

  On the bus to a lecture by his friend the Chrysostom historian, Marvo watched a woman eat a meat pie with such delight he had to talk to her. Marvo often found stories on the bus. He rarely drove; there were no stories in a car. There was no magic in a car. He caught the bus or he ran.

  "Is that a special pie?" he asked. "Why are you eating it on the bus like that?" The woman didn't answer, so he told her a story:

  The Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life

  In the year we now call 4004 BC, there was a great king. He was humble, as far as his intelligence went. But he did not believe in gaining knowledge; there was no learning in his kingdom. He believed you knew what you knew and that was good enough. Other places on the earth were creating jewellery and culture to go with it; glazed soapstone beads and communication. The priests of this king were the only communicators. They were the ones with knowledge.

  But there was the evil of travel and salesmen. They came with their paper and tools. They spoke of ideas, of thought. They became wealthy by their addition and sums.

  The king's citizens knew nothing of mathematics. They held out full palms and the priests and the travellers would take what they wanted.

  The people began to wonder. They said, "What if?" and "Why?" It was a matter of great concern to the priests.

  They took the people to the plain, where two trees rested side by side.

  "These," said the priest of Voice, "these are all you seek. This tree is the Tree of Life. This the Tree of Knowledge. You may all choose, but let me say: Life is eternal, Knowledge de
stroys life as you know it. Choose."

  First the king and queen, Master and She, had to choose. They knew nothing of the fruits of the tree – save from what they could see, that Life was small and brown, Knowledge red and large.

  Master wanted to choose Life. His wife preferred Knowledge; she had long mistrusted the priests and wished to know what they knew.

  "Take Knowledge with me," she said to her husband. "With Knowledge we can discover the secret of eternal life ourselves." The king loved and respected her deeply. It was one reason he was king. They turned to the Tree of Knowledge, watched by their people.

  To try to convince them otherwise, a priest hurried forward to take a berry from the Tree of Life. He ate it, then leapt and leapt, laughing and shouting for joy.

  "Oh, precious life," he said. The people saw the nut-brown berries, colour of their colour, flesh of their flesh, so comforting, so familiar. They watched Master and She.

  Then She stepped forward and took two pieces of the red fruit. She gave one to Master.

  "No," said the priests. The king was not to eat the fruit. Where was fear?

  Master and She placed the fruit between their lips.

  "From ignorance to knowledge," said She, staring a priest right in the eye. He recoiled from her strength, from the force of her knowledge already existent.

  She bit her fruit. She pressed her husband's chin up, his head down, crushing his mouthful between reluctant teeth.

  The people waited; they did not choose.

  The king and queen died within minutes of each other, six days later.

  There was no burial. Their unconsecrated bodies were kept as an example of what knowledge can do: destroy the soul.

  Everybody else chose Life.

  When the people eventually died, of old age or disease or accident, the priests said, "You destroyed the magic of everlasting life with your aberrant behaviour. It is not the fault of the Tree of Life."

  Soon the Trees were lost, the plain forgotten, the people gone. The story remained, though, Great Man and Woman, Master and She, Adam and Eve, lost to knowledge. The names changed slowly, lost letters and gained letters, as people with different tongues spoke them and the other players faded against the importance of the two long-dead rulers. The two trees became one.

  #

  The woman said, "You know it's not normal to tell stories to people on buses."

  "I love stories. Hearing them and telling them."

  "Why?"

  "It's magic, mythology."

  "But you said your story was true," the woman said. Her pie was finished but she still smelt of it.

  "The Greeks said mythology meant a story telling – mythos, or story, and logo, or telling. Or a rationale of stories. So a story becomes true just by the telling of it."

  She stared at him. She had gravy in the corner of her mouth.

  "I tell you that story because it's about an ancestor of mine," he said.

  "The king?" she asked.

  "No, the priest," he said. Her face fell; she did not like the priest's role in the story.

  "No, the priest was very important. He was protecting the people from knowledge, from truth. Nobody needs to know everything. You would prefer not to know, perhaps, that you have gravy in the corner of your mouth."

  She wiped the gravy away with her fingers, rubbed them together to roll the gravy off. Taking on the formal tone of his storytelling, she said, "I have six children. The last time I ate a pie all to myself, without having to give away any pastry or a bite, was three months before I fell pregnant with the first one. We went to the football. After the match, my husband wiped the gravy from the corner of my mouth. He kissed me. He said, 'I really would like to marry you', because we had not yet decided – he had not yet agreed – to marry. As I was eating that pie I remembered the kiss. I don't often get to eat a pie on my own. And I was imagining I'd murdered my husband and cooked him in a pie."

  Marvo laughed. He sent the woman a mist to thank her for showing him you could never guess what a person was thinking. The mist made her husband seem kind and loving again.

  The woman did not feel silly telling her plain tale of pies and kisses in the same voice as his tale of kings and priests and creation. Marvo made her feel her story was vital.

  Under other circumstances, he would not have told her this priest was his ancestor. He would have allowed her to discover it for herself, because that would make the knowledge stronger, more magical. Reputation grows through rumour, not self-advertisement, but sometimes you have to start the rumour yourself. He did not have time, on that bus trip, for anything else.

  Marvo learnt from his grandmother that listening is very important in magic. You have to try to feel what your audience feels, sense what they want. They will tell you, by sighing or muttering and if they forgot they said something and you remind them they think you're clever.

  He never forgot this. He always listened, like a shaman.

  Marvo felt more in control of his mist at a personal level. He still wasn't sure he could control a large mist, but he knew it leaked out anyway, sometimes while he slept. He would awake to news of a wealthy philanthropist setting up a fund so that every child would have a computer, and he would see smiling faces when he went to buy the milk. He would know the mist was thick.

  His grandmother had told him the story of Master and She to teach him that eternal life is never easy. It was a prescient warning against what he would do in the future: he sought eternal life, fearing death. She hoped to persuade him to accept death as the natural and right process, but her message was not enough to change his mind, many years later.

  • • • •

  Some stories he overheard on the bus and stole. He heard a man muttering this to his companion one day:

  The Tick-Tock Man

  Look, there's a watchmaker's shop. See in the window: all those watches. Always reminds me of a story I once heard, never forgotten it.

  This was before the advent of television, when we had the radio. There was a show called Five Minute Glimpses.2 You know, supposed to show how the other half lives.

  There was this one story which stuck in my mind, never forgotten it.

  It was about a watchmaker, who worked alone in his shop all day. Being alone like that, all those clocks ticking incessantly drove him mad, so he sold his shop and bought a flat, I don't know where it was. But his neighbour upstairs had a peg-leg, you see, tap tap with his wooden leg on the floor boards all day. Drove the watchmaker mad, and he went up and murdered the fellow!

  So they gave him life in jail, a cell of his own. But you wouldn't believe it – a tap outside his cell leaked, drip, drip.

  So… he had a chair in his room, an old one, and he took a splinter of wood, the longest he could find, and pierced his eardrums so he couldn't hear a thing.

  But it didn't work. He could hear his heart, thump, thump. So he took another splinter and pierced his heart. Killed himself. Then he was free from it all, not bothered by clocks or taps or hearts or drips.

  But I always wondered if he made it to the Pearly Gates, and there's Saint Peter, plucking away on his harp all day. Pluck, pluck.

  #

  Marvo never left a story behind.

  Sometimes he traded a trick for a story. If the story was good, it would be a good trick, a magic trick to help the storyteller. If it was not much of a story (he did not think the lady with the pie told much of a story, but she had surprised him) he would perform a trick of illusion and leave it at that, make the person think they were happy or make them forget one nasty memory. He took away one woman's memory of an abortion; it didn't happen.

  Sometimes he realised later he already knew something. Sometimes he used a lesson before he learnt it.

  He slept in odd places, with odd people. He was awoken by screams one night, screams of such intensity they entered Marvo's dreams. He dreamt he was cutting down a rain forest and the saws were squealing and screaming like banshees.

  "I had a
terrible dream," the man next to him said. His hair was wet with sweat, his voice hoarse from screams. Marvo did not believe in dreams but he used the name for them anyway.

  Marvo said, "There are no dreams; there is only the interpretation of the truth in unusual ways."

  The man rubbed his red raw eyes.

  "Your dream involved your eyes?" asked Marvo. "Tell me about your eyes. What have you seen? What did you dream?"

  The Murderer of Girls