The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [17]
I had an obscure feeling that all was not over, that Frankenstein would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past … To freeze the scrolling lines, Noel reached into his pocket for some Hot Rock candies, tipped his head back and emptied the bag into his mouth. “No, I … I’m working on something for you,” he said as the friable pebbles foamed and frothed on his tongue. “A cure for your sex addiction.”
Norval raised an eyebrow, at both the candy and the remark. “A cure? Shouldn’t you be trying to self-infect? When was the last time you made love to a woman? Or boy or goat or whatever titillates you Scots.”
Noel didn’t have to think. He knew the exact date, exact hour. He waited for his saliva to calm. “Norval, for the seventeenth time, my parents are Scottish, not me, OK? Can you remember that? It’s not that difficult.”
“You rotten wee scunner, what are you girnin at noo? No need to raise a stushie.”
Noel closed his eyes, determined not to encourage this with even the faintest of smiles. The accent, he had to admit, was pitch-perfect.
“So answer my question,” said Norval.
“Which question?”
“When was the last time you made love?”
“I … am not going to answer that.”
“Quick, what’s the name of that colour?” Norval pointed to the screen, on which the theatre’s giant logo had just appeared. “The perimeter.”
“Amaranth.”
“Amaranth?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that was an imaginary flower, an undying flower.”
“Formula?”
Noel sighed. “Na3C20H11N2O10.”
“Principal commercial use?”
“A dye for pharmaceuticals. Banned in North America, but not in Europe.”
Norval nodded, rubbed his chin. He couldn’t decide whether Noel was a genius or someone who’d soon be jumping off Champlain Bridge. “Amaranth. Doesn’t Keats or Shelley use that somewhere?”
“Endymion. ‘The spirit culls unfaded amaranth, when wild it strays through the old garden-ground of boyish days—’”
“OK, OK. Now shut up and watch the film …”
But Noel wasn’t listening. The letters of amaranth were strobing inside his brain, along with piggybacking words, phrases and paragraphs from distant times. It was like a mad librarian’s slide show and he decided to let it run. First came Aesop—each sentence helically cascading into the next, like slinky toys—which his mother had read to him when he was five:
The Rose and the Amaranth
Rose and Amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden, and the Amaranth said to her neighbour, “How I envy your beauty and sweet scent! No wonder you’re such a favourite with everyone.” But the Rose replied with a shade of sadness in her voice, “Ah, my dear friend, I live but for a brief season: if no cruel hand pluck me from my stem, my petals soon wither and fall, and then I die. But your flowers never fade, even if they are cut; for they are undying.”
Greatness carries its own penalties.
Next came soft and rubbery words from Don Quixote, which he’d read in bed on the night of his fourteenth birthday:
blond young maidens, none of whom seemed to be under fourteen or over eighteen, all clad in green, with their locks partly braided, partly flowing loose, but all of such bright gold as to vie with the sunbeams, and over them they wore garlands of jessamine, roses, honeysuckle, and amaranth …
Noel opened his eyes, looked sideways at Norval, then forward at the cream-coloured subtitles of the Bergman film, which quickly dissolved into copper-coloured lines, imbricated like shingles, from Pinocchio. He was in his buffalo-wallpapered bedroom in 1973, wearing his favourite pair of clown-covered pyjamas, listening to his mother’s voice:
The little donkey Pinocchio made his appearance in the middle of the circus. He had a new bridle of polished leather with brass buckles and studs, and two white camellias in his ears. His mane was divided and curled, and each curl was tied with bows of coloured ribbon. He had a girth of gold and silver round his body, and his tail was plaited with amaranth …
Last, in a riverine double line, oscillating like a polygraph needle, came lambent sapphire letters from