Tallow

I spotted the village from the train window. It emerged from grey fields, its houses crooked upon the short slope of a hillside. Tallow - that was its name - possessed a certain sadness, as if it longed to be forgotten. A manor, with its many wings and porticoes, loomed over the houses from the hill’s peak.  

There were few signs of life when I exited the train. No one walked the streets and all the curtains were closed. It stunk of old cabbages and sulphur. In the distance, children played, but no school or playground existed in the village.

The hotel keeper was asleep when I entered, her chin slumped upon her chest. A pair of reading glasses, hanging from a string of pearl-like beads, rested upon her chest. I felt rude ringing the bell, but even when I did, it took several trills until she woke up. She weighed me with a single glance.

‘You’re the guest,’ she said.

‘I should hope so,’ I said. 

Immediately, I regretted the joke. She slid the key across the reception desk with disdain.

‘There’s no breakfast now,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to wait till later if you want to eat anything.’

In the lobby, the rack was dense with coats and hats. Boots lined up alongside the wall. Despite this, while climbing the stairs and searching through the labyrinthine corridors for my room, I heard no one. Aside from myself, the hotel was unoccupied. 

*

My room was the bare minimum - a single bed, a wardrobe for three shirts at best, and a portrait, sun-stained, of some once green forest. 

I had come away to write, and for the first three mornings, this was what I did. After consuming a breakfast of runny eggs and bacon, cooked up reluctantly by the hotel keeper, I came upstairs and sat for an hour at my desk doing little of anything, before heading out for a walk. Usually I would arrive back in time for lunch, then I would try again to write (fail, somehow more miserably) and head out for yet another walk.  

At first, my walks avoided the manor on the hill. I walked instead through the dead fields surrounding Tallow, seeing little more than a few bony horses and the occasional abandoned tractor. A drought had been scouring the south for some months; occasionally, in the far distance, you would see someone, standing outside their house, hands on hips, looking towards the cloudless sky.

It seemed you could not get away from the manor wherever you walked. Its windows followed you across fields and into woods, over streams and up hills. As time wore on, my walks seemed to draw closer to it, until I trespassing upon the grounds themselves. Once, just once, I spotted the groundskeeper, a huge man, a whole head taller than me, with a bag of suet over his shoulder. He nodded with a gnarled intensity and dumped down the bag. I hurried on.

*

‘Who owns the house on the hill?’ I asked the hotel keeper one morning. She frowned, and placed down the breakfast. Then she sat opposite me, as if this question could not be answered standing.

‘That’s the Mackintoshes,’ she said. ‘Rufus, Cordelia, I forget the names of the twins.’

‘What do they do?’

‘They own Tallow,’ she said.

‘The town?’

‘Yes.’

At night, I began to hear the growl of a motor car. It started in the distant hills, grew closer and closer, then ripped past the window and howled off into the night. The sound seemed larger than the village itself, as if I could place my arm out of the window and feel the very air vibrating. I soon found myself waiting for it by the window. I finally spotted the car on the fourth night. Its headlights beaming down through the country lanes like twin stars, before illuminating the village in sheer white light. It sped past; a dark green beetle of a car, its hood down and its driver guiding it confidently, almost arrogantly, with a single hand, his other splayed across the passenger seat.

‘Who was that?’ I asked the hotel keeper, after returning from my walk the next day. 

‘Rufus,’ she said, and shook her head as if I should know this by now, ‘he’s in one of those moods.’

*

The hotel possessed a single cramped bar, really no more than a cupboard stocked with alcohol. The hotel keeper would stand in there, usually, from 3 until 5, and then again from 7 until 9. 

I came in from my walk, and for once, she was not alone.

A voice, filled with the hearty opulence of the British countryside, filled the room:

‘A guest!’ it said, ‘my boy, come into the light, let’s get a look at you. We haven’t seen a guest in years!’ 

The voice belonged to a man sitting before a glass of whisky. He smiled broadly, revealing greying gums and a vast set of crooked, yellowing teeth. He had on a tweed waistcoat, its top sprinkled with dandruff. Almost immediately, I did not want to be in his company.

‘What brings you to Tallow?’ he said.

‘I came to write,’ I said. I hated that I said this, but something about his manner meant I could not lie.

‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘most excellent. You will return to the city with many splendid poems detailing our beautiful town, its beautiful countryside, its…’

I waited, but he said no more.

‘Certainly,’ I said, at last.

He smiled, clenching his teeth together, so that they may be admired.

‘I won’t detain you long,’ he said. ‘The muse calleth. The blank page beckon. All of that.’

‘Thank you,’ I said and turned to go. He held up a finger.

‘There is one more thing, if I can say, and this will be awfully forward of me, but you look to have the most wonderfully soft hands. It would be a pleasure to me if I could touch them.’

I remained in the doorway.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come closer.’

Something in me, politeness lets call it, compelled me across the room. I held out my hand to him. He took a sip of whisky and placed the glass meaningfully down. Then he leaned close to inspect my hands. The dim lights shone upon his moist lips. With calloused fingertips he traced slow, gut-wrenching circles across my palm.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘lovely.’

He pushed my hand back towards me, as if returning it. 

 ‘Thank you,’ he said and he gave me one last awful look at his teeth to remember him.

‘It’s Rufus Mackintosh, by the way,’ he said, as if I had not already sensed this fact

In my room, I ran my hand under hot water and scrubbed it with soap until it began to ache. No matter how long I worked for, I could not seem to get it clean.

*

I noticed on the doorsteps of the village a set of tawny, whittled dolls. Many wore dresses or waistcoats. I expected the children of the village, who, still, I could hear playing in the distance, would steal these dolls, but that did not appear to occur. At the hotel, the keeper’s had a tiny straw bonnet, which she adjusted so it sat askew on the doll’s head. 

A day after I met Rufus Mackintosh in the hotel bar, I discovered a crow outside of my door. Dead, obviously, with both wings removed and crammed into a shoe box. The scent of rotting flesh had penetrated my room while I wrote. When I finally stepped outside, the stench overwhelmed me, and I hurled my guts into the toilet bowl.

Downstairs, when I had finally gathered myself, I told the hotel keeper about the bird I had found. I tossed the shoe box onto the counter. She eyed it with a certain melancholy. 

‘That can’t be helped,’ she said.

‘Can’t be helped! What do you mean it can’t be helped?’

‘It’s just part of it.’

‘Part of what?’

‘Tallow.’

She took the shoe box and placed it under the desk. She sighed. 

‘I suppose you’ll be wanting a discount.’

*

Nothing I wrote seemed to stick. If I wrote a sentence in the morning, I would return in the afternoon and find the words jumbled. But always when I sat down at my desk, it seemed as if I were seeing things truly for the first time, my pen moving rapidly across the paper, solving issues of consciousness and mortality with a few pithy phrases. I was enjoying my work, perhaps for the first time ever, but it seemed all I was producing was nonsense.

I still went for walks. Often I saw Rufus on the balcony, looking up towards the sky, attempting, it seemed, to make the heavens open through willpower alone. If he spotted me, he raised his hand in greeting and smiled. Even from some distance, I could make out his teeth.

*

The invitation was for dinner, that night, 7 o’clock. ‘Bring some poetry, boy,’ it said in blue ink scrawled beneath the address, ‘regale us.’

‘You won’t be needing supper then,’ the hotel keeper said when she delivered it.

By the time the appointed hour came round, I was dressed in my best outfit and waiting in the hotel lobby. It felt excessively hot and I could not get comfortable in the chair. I felt I should have left the village of Tallow at that moment and headed back to the city. But I stayed, stupidly, rashly, believing I would get some answers.

I heard the purr of Rufus’s motor car approaching through the country lanes. He entered the lobby beaming.

‘Come on, old chap,’ he said, ‘supper’s waiting!’

Outside, his car puttered on the driveway. The interior was flaking leather. Rufus climbed in after me. 

‘Let’s hit the road,’ he said and wrenched the mighty gear lever into position. The car growled beneath his feet. Before I could adjust my seat belt, I was thrust back into the seat as the car hurtled on towards the hill. Houses, bushes, trees all streamed past. The wind cut viciously into my eyes. I glanced at Rufus, tears streamed from his eyes, but he seemed to take a sinister delight in the pain. Over the howl of the engine, Rufus shouted:

‘Sorry about the short notice, my boy, but I heard soon you’d be leaving us. I thought you may as well see the manor before you go.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘THANK YOU.’

He cranked the gear lever once again and with a crunching shift of his feet, the car shifted in speed and momentum to get careen around a corner. I was almost thrown through the window. 

‘Almost there!’ he shouted. 

True enough, we arrived. The car crunching across the gravel, spitting stones from the wheels. The final stop jolted me towards the dashboard. My heart was hammering, my vision blurry.

Already, he was ushering me out. 

‘Come on,’ he said, glancing up at the sky. ‘No time to waste.’ 

*

Cordelia awaited in a long, poorly lit room, at a table spanning almost its entire length. She sat near its head, her wheelchair pressed up against the wood. An empty plate before her. She was veiled and wore a black lace dress, incredibly intricate. Her white silk gloves, like a pair of snake skins, sat beside the plate. Rufus came over and touched his lips to his hand. 

‘A delight,’ she said when I entered and held out a hand for me to kiss. I could not see her face, so I could not tell her expression, but I bent to her hand and touched my lips to it. She was freezing, her skin tasted like moss.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘take a seat.’

They sat me at the head of the table. When the first course arrived, toast with pate, they paused, both of them, to see how I would eat it. After I began scraping the paste across the toast, they shared a look, as if to confirm something and then they too began spreading pate upon their toast.

‘Rufus tells me that you are a writer,’ Cordelia said.

‘That is true.’

‘A fiction writer?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘He’s really very good,’ Rufus said, mouth full, flecks of toast on his teeth. ‘I have read all of his books.’

I, of course, had never published a book. In truth, I was a really very unsuccessful writer. It was, at best, a hobby to me.

‘You have the right shape of cranium for it,’ Cordelia said, ‘and you have inquisitive eyes. I suspect you are rather good at water sports as well.’

I did not know if that was true or not. Rufus gave a little chuckle.

‘This is my wife,’ he said. ‘A scientist! Always working away in her laboratory, tinkering, delving deep. Truly it is all beyond me.’

‘I must read your earlobe,’ she said. 

I suspected it was perhaps the wine and a slightly empty stomach, but this idea, which normally would have filled me with horror, felt sound.

Before I knew it, the second course was arriving. It was mozzarella and tomatoes. But the tomatoes were unripe and gave way with soggy ease. When I ate them (I am too polite), they had already turned tart. The mozzarella, I dared not touch. This did not stop the Mackintoshes devouring their meal though. They ate as if they had been starving for days, often foregoing their knives and forks and using their hands to push the food into their mouths. Come the end of the course, Rufus had tomato juice down his chin and the hands of Cordelia were spotted with food.

‘Your earlobe,’ Cordelia said, tapping on the table, ‘I wish to inspect it.’

‘My apologies,’ Rufus said, ‘I suspect this is all a ruse. I told her you had the most perfectly soft hands.’

I laid my cheek upon the table. She wished to look at the right earlobe. The left, she said, was often a liar. I felt safe doing this for some reason. It was around then that I noticed I felt entirely safe altogether. That the feelings of anxiety and turmoil that had accompanied me prior to the trip had dissipated, that, in fact, the anxiety and turmoil that had haunted my whole life had flown away as well. I focused upon the fingers tracing my ear and felt almost bliss. I smiled at Rufus, and he smiled back, innocently, back.

‘You are beginning to enjoy it then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I am.’

It was at that moment that Cordelia leaned suddenly forward and clamping her teeth forcefully down on my ear. Before I could speak, she’d bitten through the bone and swallowed it whole.

*

I passed out, how could you not. When I woke, my left ear was gone. A patch of bloody flatness remained. They stored me in the barn, alone. Once a day the groundskeeper arrived with my feed. He pushed the bucket through the feed slot and waited for me to eat, sitting, smoking, watching. When I was done, he took the bucket. 

He felt sorry for me, he said, his voice a low growl.

‘Then let me out,’ I said.

But he shook his head. ‘In time,’ he said. ‘A few moons.’ He looked skywards, nodded once.

In the nights I dug at the ground to the back of my cell. The dirt was dry and rough. After an hour my hands were bloody from the effort. I lost nails, turned my hands black, but did not stop digging. Eventually, I was able to tunnel under the boundary wall, pull myself under and out. A pair of purple bruises, shaped like kidneys, still adorn my hips.

I fled into the night. 

Though Tallow glowered below, I did not trust the locals any longer. I found safety in the trunk of a fallen tree and sheltered there for a night. They hunted me, Rufus’s motor car tearing through the countryside, its lights emerging over the crests of hills and sending a searching white cone into the darkness. 

I emerged come dawn, lacking sleep and hobbled on, my stomach growling.

Eventually, I came to a new town, a new hotel, and managed to persuade them to let me stay. How dishevelled I must have looked standing in their foyer, with my ear lost and my clothes bloodied. They provided me with a small, ill-outfitted room. That night, in the cramped confines of a single bed, I heard the howling of the car again. I left, once again, before dawn. 

It went like this for several days, me finding some place to camp, Rufus pursuing. I was heading, vaguely, for London. Still am, really. Though there is no knowing of when I shall arrive, given my kinking and arduous passage through the quiet country towns.

There have been times when Rufus has grown close. I have spotted his car outside of various hotels, parked on the roadside gates while he stalks across an empty field. I know, inevitably, he will catch me. When, however, is undetermined. Despite this, every night, I dream of Tallow. Not nightmares, but a kind of strange nostalgic reverie. I wonder if there is a part of me that wishes to be caught. Perhaps there is that part in all of us. Perhaps that is why, an hour or so before bed, I unlatch the window and leave it open, just a crack, just an inch, so that, while I sleep, anyone may enter.