Hard Light (13 page)

Without a word, Poppy repeated the gesture, not once but over and over. Each time the spindly image of the woman's belly expanded then deflated, like a tiny, humanoid balloon.

“That's fucking incredible,” I whispered.

As a kid, I'd drawn a stick figure on the bottom corner of every page of a history textbook, each image in a slightly different position than the previous one. A crude flipbook—a trick every kid learns, or used to, and probably the simplest form of animation there is. My teacher confiscated the book and made me stay for detention. There she showed me a book of Eadweard Muybridge's sequential black-and-white photos of running horses, the stop-motion effects that predated motion pictures.

That was when I became obsessed with photography: the moment I realized that a camera could stop time, and even allow you to see back
through
time. It was a kind of magic, especially the revelation that a series of static images could fool the brain into perceiving motion.

Old-fashioned motion pictures run at twenty-four frames per second—much slower than that and you detect a noticeable flicker. But the brain perceives motion in as few as ten frames per second, like a flipbook. And like this spinning disc—proof, if it was genuine, that prehistoric humans had understood the persistence of vision.

I stared at Poppy, stunned. “It's a thaumatrope.”

She nodded. “That's right. A paleolithic thaumatrope.”

“How old?”

“About thirteen thousand years. They found the first one in a cave in France in 1868. They thought it was a button—it was only a few years ago that they've speculated as to what they really are. I've known for longer than that. I figured it out by mistake, fooling around with that one. Probably there'd be more scientific discoveries made, if people played with the things they found, rather than locking them away in storage cabinets.”

She laughed. “But there's only two or three of these in museums. One shows a hunter being attacked by a cave bear, but the disc's not intact. The others are of animals. No humans.”

“Two or three.” I turned toward the curio cabinet. “And how many are in there?”

“Two more.” Her eyes shone feverishly bright. “They both have images of people carved on them. One's a woman. I think women made them.”

“Really?”

She pointed at the cabinet. “See for yourself.”

I looked at the bone disc hanging limply from the rawhide in Poppy's hand. “You're showing these to a total stranger?”

“You're Morven's friend—I thought she might have mentioned them. And you know what a thaumatrope is. Are you an archaeologist?”

“I'm a photographer. It's one of those things you learn about.”

She smiled, and I glimpsed the girl trapped within the cage of bone and decaying flesh. “I knew it. I can always tell a photographer—their eyes are always clocking the light.”

“I know who you are,” I said. “I saw you at the Bottom Line in 1979, when you did that stand for
Best Eaten Cold
. You were fucking brilliant. That song about the wind—when you sang that it made me cry.”

She shut her eyes. After a moment her fingers grazed my wrist, her touch so hot that for a second I thought I'd burned myself on the halogen bulb. “Thank you. That was such a long time ago. You're kind to remember.”

“I never forgot.” I gestured at the cabinet. “But I don't know anything about this kind of thing. All this stuff—you should take it to a museum. Or an antique dealer. Mallo and Morven, they own that shop in their building, right?”

“Mallo has no interest in these, other than financial. I don't know anything about his other customers, or his supplier. I don't want to.”

So Adrian was right: Mallo wasn't dealing in drugs any longer, but illegal antiquities. I watched as Poppy folded the thaumatrope into a scrap of chamois cloth and set it aside. She crossed to the curio cabinet, opened the bottom drawer, and ran her fingers across the glass lids of numerous small boxes. Each contained some kind of artifact: flint arrowheads, stone ax heads, beads made of shell or bone. With her aureole of silver hair and heavy gold earrings, she looked as though she were deliberating over a card for a tarot reading. At last she selected a box, removed another bone disc, and held it out to me.

“In July 1980 I was in Paris, that same tour. I'd just finished my first stint in rehab. This was before my relapse—I had nine good years, then…”

She closed her eyes and drew a hand to her forehead. I thought she wouldn't continue, but her hand dropped to her lap, fingers trembling, and she went on.

“After one of the shows, this girl came backstage and gave me something wrapped in a bandanna. I thought it was going to be a crystal or pentangle or some kind of little amulet. People were always giving me things like that.

“‘Something to keep you strong,' the girl said, and she left. I never knew who she was. I unwrapped the bandanna and this was inside, on a bit of ribbon. I wore it around my neck for years. I knew it was old, but I didn't know
how
old. Then one day I was playing with it, like cat's cradle.”

She mimed pulling a piece of string back and forth between her hands.

“And suddenly I saw it—the same way you did, all at once I saw that the figure was moving. That you were
meant
to see it move. But I had no idea what it was. This was before the Internet, so I talked to someone at the British Museum. I didn't bring it to him, just described it as something I'd seen in a museum in France. I told him I thought the image would change as you spun the disc. He said it was an interesting idea but completely ridiculous. Like I said, there were only one or two of these discs in museums, and everyone thought they were buttons. So I tried searching for one on my own. It took years.”

“On the black market,” I said.

She nodded. “Morven found it for me, actually. She's like my sister. Was, until I did something terrible. Unforgiveable.” She drew a hand across her eyes as though the light pained her. “And of course Mallo and Leith were like brothers. Mallo was doing other things back then, and he … knew people. He—”

She stopped. “Oh, none of that shit matters. The future wasn't meant to be like this, that's all.” She smiled ruefully. “I alway thought that
Best Eaten Cold
would be the beginning of my career. Instead, it
was
my career.”

“You seem to do okay.”

“I still get residuals from ‘Juice It Up.' But I had to cut most of my ties from back then. Morven and I stay in touch, but not really. These things—” She gestured at the disc in my palm. “These are my real daughters.”

I examined the disc. Like the first, it was made of bone, and had a crude face scratched into it: eyes downcast, mouth downturned, twin gashes to indicate age. An old woman. On the other side, a similar face had been carved. But its eyes were uptilted, the mouth upturned with a second curved line beneath it, to make the lips appear full. A crosshatch above the eyes indicated hair, or perhaps a knitted cap.

“When you spin it, you see her age,” said Poppy. “From a girl to an old woman and back again.”

I shivered. I felt the same unease as when I stared too long at a face in a daguerreotype—the uncanny sensation that the subject of the image stared back.

But now I had the even more disturbing sense that whoever carved the thaumatrope had been aware that she was gazing forward through the millennia: For an instant, our eyes had met. I looked at Poppy. “I still don't understand why you're showing me these.”

She shrugged. “You seem interested.”

“Yeah, but what if I went to the police? How do you know you can trust me?”

“I don't. That's why they call it trust.”

She took the disc and handed me a third object: a flattened oval with a circle etched in its center and a hole drilled in the middle of the circle. An eye—the hole formed the pupil.

On the back of the disc was another eye, this one closed. When the disc was spun on a cord, the eye would seem to wink. It was perhaps the simplest thaumatrope. And, maybe, the oldest.

I recalled the vision I'd had as a teenager: an immense, remorseless eye within a vortex of cloud above an empty field, gazing down at me. I stared at the thaumatrope, finally returned it to Poppy. She wrapped it in a piece of chamois cloth, did the same with the other two; slowly walked to her desk and put the three wrapped objects into an orange plastic Sainsbury's bag.

“There,” she said. “Now you've seen the eye of god. Or goddess. Let's get more coffee.”

She left the room. I lingered, feeling the way I did after watching a movie I didn't quite understand. My gaze drifted across the shelves, clocking books on archeaology and prehistoric art, rock and roll, experimental film. A framed photo of the members of Lavender Rage after a gig, Poppy draped across Jonno's sequined torso like a lamia in tie-dye and fringed leather.

And a picture of Poppy, Morven, and the same woman with auburn hair. I could see her face more clearly in this one: high cheekbones, high forehead, russet hair held back with a Liberty print scarf. She looked a few years older than the other two, though that might just have been her expression, haughty and somewhat hostile, as though she disliked whomever was behind the camera. Beside this was another photo, curled with age. The charred ruins of a mansion, its towers blackened, broken glass glinting from heaps of rubble.

I picked it up. On the back, someone had written
Kethelwite September '73
. Both Adrian and Mallo had pictures of the same place.

I frowned, slipped the photo into my pocket, and perused the next shelf. Shelved between a couple of early collections of Helmut Newton and David Hamilton photography was a large book, spiral bound.

I pulled it from the shelf and whistled softly. The stiff board cover showed a photo of a nude woman's torso, cropped so that her face was barely visible. Her skin was paper-white, so flawlessly smooth that the photo might have been of an alabaster statue.

But the woman's skin was flesh, not stone, and I'd seen her image enough times to recognize it immediately, even before I read the book's title.

MONSTERS AND MADONNAS

A BOOK OF METHODS

WILLIAM MORTENSEN

I checked the copyright page: 1936, the proper first edition. It was Mortensen's best-known work; as a collectible, more desirable to most folks than
The Command to Look
because of its full-page reproductions of Mortensen's work.

I'd never held a copy. I drew the volume to my face and breathed in deeply.

“Do you always go around sniffing books?”

Poppy stood in the doorway, steadying herself with one knobby hand. She looked decades older than she had only minutes earlier, the end product of a time-lapse film.

“Just the ones that are worth a few hundred bucks,” I said.

She glanced at the book with disinterest. “What is it?”

I held it up.

Poppy wrinkled her nose. “Oh, right. Someone gave me that a hundred years ago. I could never get into it. You can have it if you want.”

“You sure?” I asked, already sliding it into my bag. “It's a valuable book.”

“Not to me. It's yours.”

I followed her back into the kitchen. She pulled out a chair and sat, picked up my skull-patterned scarf and stared at it for a long time before dropping it onto the table beside the orange Sainsbury's bag.

“I'm deaccessioning,” she said at last. “It's late-stage brain cancer. Inoperable. I don't take painkillers because I'm an addict. I have about two good hours a day, if I'm lucky. This is one of them, but I think it's just about over.”

She sighed, and added, “Everything's over. Most people, if they remember me at all, it's because of Jonno. A few people know my album, but mostly I had nice tits and fucked rock stars. So…”

She pointed at the orange plastic bag. “I'm donating them to the British Museum. Everything else as well. There's a curator there I've spoken to; she's the first person who hasn't dismissed my ideas outright—that the artifacts might have been made by women. I could sell it all to the museum, but then I'd have to get a solicitor involved, and there'd be questions about their provenance that I'm not interested in answering.

“So I'll just make the donation while I'm still alive and relatively
compos mentis
. They should be able to establish provenance by carbon dating or paleomagnetism or whatever. If they're as smart as they say they are, someone will figure it out. My things will be in a nice glass vitrine in the British Museum, and it will say
Gift of Patricia Teasdale.
No one will know who that is, but maybe they'll figure that out, too.”

She gave that spectral laugh and struggled to her feet. “I'll get the door for you.”

“There a place around here I can grab a bite?”

“The Blackbird used to be a decent pub. If you're just looking for a sandwich, there's a Pret a Manger by the tube station.”

I zipped my leather jacket and stood. Poppy picked up the Sainsbury's bag and stuck it on the windowsill between the bright geraniums. She rubbed one of the green leaves between her fingers, brought her hand to her face and inhaled, smiling. Then she walked me to the door.

I stepped outside, pulling on my watch cap. Frozen BBs beat against my neck: the snow had turned to sleet. Poppy remained in the doorway, scooping up the white cat before it could dart after me.

“Thanks for what you said about my show that night,” she said. “I was a different person then. Not a good person.”

“But you were an amazing singer.”

“It's funny, I never really think about any of that anymore. It was all such a long time ago. The twentieth century's dying away.”