The Silver Bestiary

By A R McHugh

On a train, a woman smells a familiar perfume and suddenly leaves her marriage. One hot afternoon a man confesses a horrifying secret about a child in his past. A tutor attempts to explain entropy to a bored schoolgirl. A woman buys the services of a man who comes with a mysterious medallion and scars from a distant war. The short stories in this c

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diving Bell
• Release date: Jun 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9780648914587

A R McHugh

Only a woman of surpassing self-possession would wear so many bees at her neck, and allow them to suck the pearls there, without fear of being stung to death in her scented loveliness. Only he could have bought it, and she worn it.

Book preview

Ankle Socks

Richard liked her to wear ankle socks in the summer. He liked it when her legs became really brown and her feet white and innocent. It had been the tan lines on her feet from her sandals which had attracted him in the first place. But ankle socks were even better than sandals, though Viola didn’t know quite why.

It had something to do with his childhood. There was a photograph of him on the wall of his study, near the window. A boyish version of him looking intently at a girl with bobbed brown her and wise, sad eyes. They both looked about nine, and there was something about the light that suggested an English summer. Viola came across him once, leaning against the wall, staring at the picture with a kind of hopeful, regretful look. He looked like a man shipwrecked, she thought. As if he had lost everything.

She never mentioned it. They didn’t have that kind of relationship anyway, and neither of them wanted it. They wanted to love quietly, calmly, like adults, without the emotional storms that had wrecked both of them. They gave in to each other’s fetishes and fascinations with good humour and without questions.

She didn’t mind the ankle socks anyway. Not really. She would have drawn the line at anything with a frill of lace around the turnover. That really was childlike. They had no children and, having both been ruined as children themselves, didn’t want any. It was funny how a pair of socks generated an entire outfit around themselves, and hair and makeup around that, and a persona around them in turn. The last time adult women could get away with ankle socks was the 1940s, she thought. Boxy shorts, floral blouses, and a scarf in their hair. A kind of fresh-faced Land Girl healthiness. Haystacks and Digging For Victory.

He came into the bedroom as she took her shirt off and crawled up the bed in her bra, shorts, and socks. She lay back and closed her eyes. Richard sat at the foot of the bed and took her right foot in his lap. She opened one eye and watched his back, the shadows of the ivy dancing across the thin shirt she had bought for far too much in Grenada. She smiled at his shoulder, his ducked head holding her foot firmly. He turned it over, flexing the arch back and forward, cupping her heel, and pulled at her toes through the thin cotton.

Gently, he drew off the sock and wrapped the palm of his hand right around her foot, thumb to middle finger around the arch. She flexed her other knee and prodded him a little with the left foot. ‘That can’t smell nice.’

‘Mmm, it’s not bad. Loam and summer and sweat and you,’

‘The poetry of foot odour. You could publish it. The Odour Eaters. Give Mark Haddon a run for his money.’

‘No. Sun and summer and your sweet feet belong to me.’

She smiled again. The years of tacitly-agreed privacy, of knowing only the front rooms of each other, leaving everything else to stories which proved how different they were now – it all seemed worth it. Not that it had been hard. Living with someone, even – maybe especially, for ten years, who remained largely a mystery was what kept it going. Privacy made you continually new for each other. And honest with yourself about how lonely life really was, how it could only be faced with a calm heart and solitude.

She rubbed his back with her other foot. Silence, punctuated by the sound of the wood pigeons, lulled her. After a few moments she became aware that he was crying, silently, holding her pale foot, one hand cradling her toes with the chipped pink varnish on her nails. She sat up and touched his back.

‘Richard?’

He stiffened. ‘Richard. Why are you crying?’

He brushed the tears away roughly. ‘Nothing. Sorry. Ignore it.’

‘I can’t ignore it. I’ve never seen you cry before. What’s going on? It’s not really my feet, is it?’

She watched his shoulders give a huge, convulsive shrug. ‘You have such…It’s stupid. You…they remind me of something. From a long time ago.’ He shook his head.

She could see his eyes close briefly, as if he was in pain. She scooted forward and embraced him from behind, sliding her legs alongside his. ‘Richard, I know we don’t…we don’t really talk about the past. Maybe less than most people. I’m fine with it, but …you can, you know, you can tell me anything.’

He said nothing for several long seconds. She brought her feet up, trapping him in the circle of her legs, her feet in his lap, one sock on and one off. He gripped her bare foot fiercely. ‘You’d be horrified,’ he said.

‘Try me. And if I was, it doesn’t matter, does it? Horrified or not, it’s the fact of the past. And it’s done.’

He looked out of the window at the ivy, waving like a handkerchief in a breeze that touched nothing else. She waited for his unwelcome story. She tried to assume the calm she remembered in her mother, whose talent for a kind of impassiveness brought out the worst of her teenage exploits.

‘She … the little girl. In the picture. On the – ’.

‘I know. I know which one you mean.’

‘She wanted to find this frog in the woods. It lived near pools, she said. She’d got this idea that some endangered species of frog was living in the stream that ran through the woods at the back of the house.’

‘Who was she?’

‘Her father was a sort of gamekeeper, odd-job man for the estate. Huge man. Drank and swore like a cauldron on fire. It was just the two of them. Her mother was dead. It had set him off.’

She thought about the child in the picture. ‘She doesn’t look like a happy child. In the photo, I mean.’ She felt hot drops on her foot. The corner of his face showed a kind of furious concentration. ‘But you were friends with her. That’s good, Richard. It is.’ She put her cheek to his back and felt it, wet with sweat and the tremours of withheld emotion.

‘I loved her. I loved her. We were kids, but…you see it then, don’t you? What people are really like. Straight as an arrow to the heart of her. I didn’t even realize it. Like…. like living with a disease or something.’

‘Not at all. Children love fiercely. They love truly and with complete, well, honour, I suppose. You’re inside your own world and the little you know about yourself is completely known by the other. I suppose everything after that’s a bit of a let-down.’ She smiled ruefully.

‘It wasn’t like that, though. It was all wrecked. It was…’ He gave a huge sigh, pushing her head off his back. She dropped her forehead back again.

‘So did you find this frog?’

‘We walked through the woods to the stream and she kept saying that she could hear it croaking. I couldn’t hear it. I just became aware, as we walked, of how… I don’t know, how perfect it all was. How perfect we were. It was all so clear, so sharp. Nothing, no sight, no place, no smell, no feeling of being in my own skin or being me with someone else, had ever been so perfect. The whole day felt as if it was, almost, I don’t…shimmering.’

She nodded soundlessly against his wet shirt.

‘We got to one of the pools near the river. It was just a kind of hole the size of a laundry basket full of muddy water. The stream flowed there sometimes and wore away the banks and made these sort of pot-holes.

‘Anyway, we crouched down beside it and, my God, I can still smell the forest earth, and her hair, her smell. She didn’t take a bath very often. They had no hot water and …God, her pulse, I could see her heartbeat under her skin in her neck on the other side of her mud hole.’

He sank his head into his hands, his fingers in his hair. ‘She put her arm in, right up to the elbow and felt around in the water, and I was getting ready to laugh at her and all of it even though I could have stayed there forever – I think part of me has stayed there for…as if I’m still there. Still there.

‘She pulled her hand out and she actually had the thing! She really had got a frog.’

‘One of the endangered ones?’

‘God, I’ve got no idea. But she had this thing in her hand and it was blinking at her, at us, and, it was so alive, the whole moment was so alive. She had mud everywhere, on her shorts and her legs, her feet were covered in it. And I knew that she’d get a belting for it, but none of that seemed to matter. I mean, it was like … can you imagine everything, every idea about childhood being beautiful, and perfect, a perfect heart in a perfect place, completely outside of time?’

‘I think so. I’ve never felt that, not when I was a child. But I know what you mean.’

‘She was holding the thing up and laughing and I was laughing and then she opened her hand and the bloody thing jumped at me, and we laughed until we cried and then I … she looked … you had to see her face. It was like a candleflame, as though all of it was the flame and I was standing inside the flame. She was perfect. And I kissed her. I don’t know; it just seemed the thing to do. You know, the way children do, sometimes?’

‘I know.’ She thought of greeting-card schmaltz. Cheap high street images of saccharin, adult-aped affection.

Another convulsive shudder. ‘And the second I touched her lips I knew. It just hit me like, like a stench. Something rotten. She just immediately went kind of soft. As though she’d been kissed many, many times and she just automatically became unresisting. Sort of floppy and … my God, it was like, like putting rotten meat in your mouth when it had smelled so good. I just knew … that fucking man.’

He gave another shudder. She