Elementals - A. S. Byatt [49]
It is in this way that she discovers that the Good Fortune Mall extends maybe as far into the earth as into the sky, excavated identical caverns of shop-fronts, jade, gold, silver, silk, lacquer, watches, suiting, bonsai trees and masks and puppets. Lifts that say they are going down go only up. Stairwells are windowless: ground level cannot be found. The plane has now taken off with or without the directors and ladies of Doolittle Wind Quietus. She takes time out in another concrete and stainless-steel lavatory cubicle, and then looks at the watch, whose face has become a whirl of terror. Only now it is merely a compressed circle of pink skin, shiny with sweat. Her watch, too, has gone. She utters faint little moaning sounds, and then an experimental scream. No one appears to hear or see her, neither strolling shoppers, deafened by Walkmans or by propriety, or by fear of the strange, nor shopkeepers, watchful in their cells.
Nevertheless, screaming helps. She screams again, and then screams and screams into the thick, bustling silence. A man in a brown overall brings a policeman in a reinforced hat, with a gun and a stick.
‘Help me,’ says Daphne. ‘I am an English lady, I have been robbed, I must get home.’
‘Papers,’ says the policeman.
She looks in the back pocket of her handbag. Her passport, too, has gone. There is nothing. ‘Stolen. All stolen,’ she says.
‘People like you,’ says the policeman, ‘not allowed in here.’
She sees herself with his eyes, a baglady, dirty, unkempt, with a bag full of somebody’s shopping, a tattered battery-hen.
‘My husband will come and look for me,’ she tells the policeman.
If she waits, if she stays in the Mall, he will, she thinks. He must. She sees herself sitting with the flotsam and jetsam beyond the swept no-man’sland, outside.
‘I’m not moving,’ she says, and sits down heavily. She has to stay in the Mall. The policeman prods her with his little stick.
‘Move, please.’
It is more comfortable sitting down.
‘I shall stay here for ever if necessary,’ she says.
She cannot imagine anyone coming. She cannot imagine getting out of the Good Fortune Mall.
Jael
Jael and Sisera, School of Rembrandt
Jael
I remember very clearly, Mrs Hodges said, ‘What a lovely colour, Jess,’ and I spread it further and further across the page of the Scripture book. If you got five As in a row, you got sent to the head-mistress to be congratulated, and I had got as far as four, though none of us thought Scripture counted, compared to English, or History, or Science. It was a lovely colour, it was a true vermilion, and I spread it and spread it, all over the page. I had a good box of pencils, about twenty-four colours, including some unusual pinks and turquoises. You could get quite convincing flesh colours with those pencils, but I wasn’t much good at drawing. In fact, I had made Jael’s headdress fall forward over her face, and concentrated on her arm and the hammer, and the tent-peg, and the great sheet of blood stemming out like a great river into a sheet, or a cloth, over the couch he lay on, and the floor of Jael’s tent, and the greyish, over-absorbent lined page of my exercise book. I don’t really think I asked myself at the time why we were being asked to illustrate this very odd tale. I really don’t think so. Nor do I really think there is any reason why I remember that drawing more than any other in that exercise book. I can’t, for instance, remember what I got the four As for, or even whether I got an A for my rendering of Jael’s neat and bloody disposal of Sisera. I wasn’t particularly trying to please Mrs Hodges, who was not religious,