Free The White Body of Evening by A L McCann Page A

of the radiant maiden who breathes light and meaning into the visible world.
    “Overblown rubbish,” he concluded.
    “But better than the usual woman-hating stuff they come up with,” Anna rejoined, snatching the magazine out of his hands.”Listen. This from the wisdom of Nietzsche on the Red Page:‘Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? Mud is at the bottom of her soul.’”
    She blushed as she read it, wondering why it seemed so repulsively resonant to her.
    “He was a lunatic,”Albert muttered.
    Anna dropped the magazine on the table sensing that Albert felt exposed.
    “Anyway, it’s nice to have a muse,” she said finally. “Hamish has a romantic temperament, which in this day and age is a good thing.”
    Albert slouched into a chair, resenting Hamish all the more. Anna treated him as one of her own children, not perceiving the stranger so close to their daughter. At the back of his mind Albert harboured the tremulous thought, which he knew he dare not explore, of the boy, chubby, freckled and with lumpish white hands, and Ondine, only seven, yet still on the verge of the cold sensuality that he imagined in his wife.
    Years later, when Hamish McDermott dwelt upon his childhood, he’d recall parts of the city as if they were enchanted. He couldn’t be sure of the extent to which his imagination had invented the phantasmagoric city of his youth. Sometimes, when he had time, he’d go for walks through the streets and lanes looking for places that he had known as a child – a cyclorama, a dilapidated arcade, or a used-book stall selling banned literature – and not find the place, which made him suspect that it had never been there at all. Even so he never tired of the streets, which would wink at him with the promise of his childhood and draw him out into forgetfulness. To the casual passer-by it must have looked as if he walked in a completely aimless manner, with no apparent destination. And in a way the aimlessness of these walks was their pleasure. With no ostensible goal or object in mind, he’d meander off the main thoroughfares and find himself confronting some unfrequented lane or dusty window where time seemed to have stood still and an eerie calm prevailed.
    “Ich
weinicht, was soll es bedeuten, daich so traurig bin.”
He recalled the poem about the Lorelei that Anna had read to the three of them, Paul, Ondine and him, when they were children. In the poem a beautiful maiden with glittering jewels in her hair sits on a cliff overlooking the Rhine and sings a song of such intoxicating power that a sailor is lured off his course onto the rocks and drowns. The poet who tells this story describes it as a tale from olden times. In the gloomy absence of the Lorelei’s song, the song of death, he is inexplicably sad, and this sadness is the mystery explained by the description of the song’s violent power.
    When he was thirteen Hamish and Paul had run off into the city to look at near naked mannequins in the window of a ladieswear store in the Royal Arcade. The plaster figures stretched their smooth, white limbs into various postures of arousal. Behind the glass window, which caught reflected light from the other shops and the glowing white orbs suspended from the ceiling, they seemed to be swimming in a sea of stars.
    “That must be what the Lorelei looks like,” Hamish said to Paul. He paused. He was on the verge of adding that he loved Ondine. He wanted to tell someone. He was bursting with the secret of his innocent desire, but put off by the closeness of the brother and sister, and the awkwardness he felt being excluded from their blood bond, he caught himself.
    Instead he put the question to Paul:“Do
you
love Ondine?”
    The younger boy smirked at him, shrugged and said nothing.
    When a passer-by disturbed the moment of reverie the boys withdrew from the window and headed back towards Bourke Street. Hamish couldn’t remember what