Sheena and Other Gothic Tales. Brian Stableford
full name was, ‘because Rosemary’s for remembrance.’
‘She’s not Rosemary now,’ Howard pointed out. ‘She’s Rose.’
‘But she has no thorns,’ John said, still trying to be clever, ‘and a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet. If only Ophelia hadn’t gone mad....’
It was Barbara who took the next step. Like any new girl, not knowing what to expect, I’d come to university liberally equipped with notebooks and files, all neat and new and far more brightly-colored than anything I ever wore, and I’d punctiliously stenciled my name on every one of them, in formal capitals: R. EDGELL.
‘Rag doll,’ said Barbara. ‘They called her Rag Doll.’ She was quoting an old song by the Four Seasons, that must have been her mother’s or her grandmother’s vintage. She’d never even heard of Inkubus Sukkubus or Midnight Configuration or All Living Fear, or any of the bands I liked. Not many people had—which was one of the reasons I liked them so much.
Maybe she wasn’t being vicious, at least not consciously. Maybe she was just looking to apply the same methodology to my name as she’d applied to ‘Coldheart’ John’s. She certainly didn’t have any good reason to attack my clothes, which were no worse than hers. I was used to people remarking on the fact that they were uniformly black, but no one had ever criticized their quality.
Perhaps, if I’d been quick enough, I could have derailed the entire train of thought. Perhaps, if I’d only known how, I could not only have kept myself in their minds as Rose but made her Barb or Barbie in our everyday usage—but the suggestion was rejected on the grounds that the contractions were too obvious, and too commonplace to qualify as a private joke. I suppose it must have been John who took up the baton and dubbed her ‘Mischief’—on account, of course, of the fact that her surname was Schiff and she was, for the moment, single.
‘Mischief’s no good,’ I pointed out. ‘It won’t make sense after she gets married.’
‘Nor will Rag Doll,’ Barbara was quick to point out. ‘But that won’t matter. When you marry John, you can be Mrs. Coldheart.’
She only said it to make mischief, of course. She only said it because she knew full well that it was Howard I liked. It was the first inkling I’d had that she liked him too—and that she had already considered, as coolly as you please, the possibility that if John’s obvious desire for her might be deflected, I was the direction in which he ought to be encouraged to look.
Even if the nickname itself hadn’t been a kind of curse, that supplementary remark certainly was—and like all the worst curses, it unwound over time, rebounding as it went, and it kept on and on rebounding.
‘It wouldn’t be as bad as Mrs. Flasher,’ John contended, but even I could see that it all depended how flash she was to start with—and Barbie was very flash indeed. Not that beautiful, and not that rich, but certainly flash. She thought she could have everything she wanted, and she would probably have been right, if she hadn’t tangled with a witch. We were tangled already, of course, but only by common-or-garden friendship. It wasn’t until the business of the nicknames that the tangles became thorny, catching like curses. Until then, it hadn’t mattered that I was a witch, but afterwards....
I didn’t swear anything there and then, but that was when it all began in earnest. John had been right about my having no thorns. Until then, in spite of my being Rose instead of Rosemary, I’d been entirely innocent of thorns. From that moment on, though, I was fated to be crowned with them.
Howard arrived at half past eleven. If he’d only had to drive from Marlow it wouldn’t have taken him nearly as long, but he hadn’t been at home. Lately, he’d been spending a lot of time away from home, exactly as John had, and probably for much the same reason: fucking someone else’s Barbie while his own got fucked in her turn. No witchcraft involved, of course: no love potions, no real glamour. Just the everyday routines of ordinary folk, supposedly hurting no one. But a needle in the eye is a needle in the eye, and you feel what you feel, even when the needle isn’t literal, especially if you’re a witch.
Flasher Fletcher rang the doorbell in an uncommonly assertive manner, although I didn’t take more time than was warranted letting him in.
‘Hello Howard,’ I said. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Where’s John?’ he demanded. He was already looking up the stairs, wondering if he ought to bound up them two at a time and hurl back the door of the room I had claimed as a counterpart to John’s ‘study’: the room in which I kept my cabinet, and my recipes, and my pathetic apology for a sewing kit.
‘Why?’ I asked, innocently. ‘Do you want to beat the living daylights out of him for fucking your wife?’ My assiduous rehearsals were still paying dividends.
Howard cast one last look up the staircase, and then turned to look down at me. He looked down from a much greater elevation than Barbie, greater even than John. From way up there I must have looked very tiny indeed, and utterly harmless. I must have looked meek, too, because he relaxed perceptibly.
‘You’ll never believe this, Rose,’ he said, perhaps hoping that it might even be true, ‘but Barbara’s got some stupid idea into her head that you might have killed him. She only insisted that I came round to make sure that he was all right.’
‘Only insisted,’ I echoed. ‘That doesn’t sound like Barbie at all. She was never one to take things one at a time.’
‘She said that you were pretty pissed,’ Howard said, blundering on regardless. ‘I can understand that, of course. I mean, I was exceedingly pissed myself when she told me what had happened. It’s not the first time she’s got off with one of my mates, but I would have thought that John, of all people, was way out of bounds. You’re supposed to be her best friend, for Christ’s sake! And what on Earth could he be thinking of? It’s one in the eye for us both—but we do have to be adult about these things, don’t we?’
There was a tiny hint of self-congratulation in his voice, born of the tacit assertion that he wasn’t the kind of guy who would go around fucking his best friend’s wife. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never once heard Howard the Flasher say ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ It was difficult to understand, at that particular moment, why I’d ever been besotted with him.
Then he smiled, and I remembered.
‘I know you better than Barbara does,’ he said, mistakenly. ‘I know you’re tougher than you look, and smarter than any of us. You wanted to throw a scare into her, didn’t you? It was something you and John cooked up together, wasn’t it?’
I smiled too. ‘I wanted to throw a scare into her all right,’ I said. ‘And you’re absolutely right—it was something I cooked up, with John in mind. Are you sure you don’t want that drink?’
‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew you couldn’t really be sitting upstairs sticking pins and needles into voodoo dolls. I knew it had to be a joke—like all that awful music you like so much.’
He laughed. That was Howard all over; whenever he was in doubt, he laughed. The first time he’d found out about his wife’s little adventures he’d probably had to choke back a tear or two, but in the end, he would have decided to laugh about it. He would have pursed his lips, gritted his teeth, and matched her adventure for adventure, so that they could both laugh at life’s little ironies, and congratulate one another on how civilized they were.
I had to put a stop to that train of thought, or I’d have merited far too many thorns to fit into any mere crown. I’d already opened the door to the sitting room and I was standing there like some midget butler, trying to usher him through. ‘Drink?’ I said, again. Men are like dogs; if you reduce communication to one-word sentences and repeat them often enough they usually get the message eventually.
‘Well, OK,’ he said. ‘Just one—I’m driving. Bloody Mary, if that’s OK.’ His BMW was bigger than John’s Peugeot, but he had two more points on his license. He’d