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Philippa Thomas
Her needle went in easier than anticipated, but lost its thread as it followed through. The fabric shivered as if feeling the absence. “Hold still”, muttered ScheheraSade, pushing down firmly on the surface and rethreading the needle from a deep blue spool. The stretched fabric was a fine, pale calico, marvelously blank, interrupted only by tiny, random freckles.
Biting her thin lips in concentration, she remembered the nights when she dreamt that every tooth fell out, each stumbling over her bottom lip like drunks foot-faltering after a lock-in. The canvas bucked underneath her hand. What do the innocent know of suffering? Hard to love these stupid, beautiful, brutal youths, wondering only at their own victimhood, hoping that they will be the One to be miraculously spared. She knew from experience it is only when you accept that you really are going to die, that you learn how to fight for your life.
Catching sight of herself in the mirror opposite her bed, she cackled; a crone of indiscernible age dressed à la mode, a nude girl procumbent, stretched taut across her knees. The threaded needle she had just dragged through her flesh was all that united them. ScheheraSade noticed how her own mouth demarcated a boundary which had grown indistinct with age, (as had so many others). The red paint blended with cheap face powder in the folds of her face, forming red veins tapering outwards from her mouth, leading it to resemble - now more than ever - its metaphorical open wound. It was the most sensible organ she had, the wound under her belly reserved for the sporadic business transactions that still occurred but no longer commanded her hours.
ScheheraSade knew the girl’s back like an aviator knows the control panel of her vessel. The Girl was her medium, her warm leatherette. She cared more for this beautiful stretch of flesh than for the girl who gave it shape. She fancied herself the owner of a priceless automobile, fantasised about coming down to the garage each morning to discover the Girl crouched and waiting for her igniting touch. She would wash her with lukewarm water and then rub her skin gently with chamois leather - both materials retaining a slight dampness after the encounter.
She reflected with pleasure (mouth metamorphosing into a crimson slit), that in old age she was able to perform a coy knowingness long denied her as a career-whore. Laughing backwards at the crude peasant tales she had embellished for the King of Persia when she was barely more than a child, what wonders might her experience have woven for him now? Or perhaps she would have swiftly hacked under his beard on their first night together, and saved herself 1001 nights of graft and the kings enthusiastic belabouring. She had neglected to consider that her nightly entertainments would be expected to continue long after she was made his bride.
She told different stories now, and not for self-preservation. Safely damned and not subject to the aging process, she watched the humans flail and tear out their whitening hair before her. Like a life-coach or commanding officer, she told tales to inspire action, to stave off the ennui that dogs civilian heels like a whining child. “Make it new, please, make it new again.” She had no friends among the other storytellers, they were not weird sisters but rivals always, always, through the years, like the Brothers Grimm in corsets, they sat pressing ears to the library wall to hear the women next-door knitting revolutions, omissions, betrayals. Here, they were forced into the same frame of reference, their singularity denied them. Storytellers, plural. Hateful to share a platform.
This vamp had lived too long to seem naught but a syphilitic to the young. Her frothy anachronisms leant her little in the way of glamour, she smelt so very bad, like the filth under fingernails mixed with real fur. A gigantic pub-quiz of a woman, her body and knowledge spanning centuries, opening out like a pornographic fan hidden behind old ivory spines. She had not sought this knowledge out, but collected it into her lap the same way that drool collects at the corners of a dog’s lips - always the apt pupil, always the obedient servant.
Performing her nightly contract now in the optimistically entitled ‘Chamber of Orgies’, she sang of self-styled libertines (her employers): men masking their boredom with a hedge of kinky rules, grandfathers huddled over their broken priapisms; a grand theme for obscene topiary! Flaccid at the dangerous unthinkability of the lover-as-rival, as-partner, or as loose-canon, they invented more and more tediously elaborate ways to make their authority absolute. She was bored with these small-time dictators, these college professors drunk on their own rich speeches. She prided herself in always being able to distinguish a client from a man, was frustrated by their inability to tell weakness from innocence in their victims. They had no imagination, their vices and virtues were so commonplace.
Not that all the stories she told were true. Every experienced saleswoman knows the power of suggestion: enflame them with language, and the act is buried insignificant under the sweaty bulk of your words. Tell them human faeces are the finest delicacy on the planet and they will be greedy to gobble it all themselves, pressing it into their red-raw gums, years of zealous brushing revealing fangs – the archaeologist’s self-dig.
She was disgusted by how the most corrupt youths tried to stave off death via long, wet kisses with their executioners, unwittingly ensuring themselves the most hideous, ‘personal’ end. On their knees, in agony, contemplating the antiseptic properties of saliva as kisses dried on their bloodied lips. This kind of love is an insufferable weakness of the head, power is nothing without complicity.
She was proud she’d never loved her Sovereign. Every morning when she woke up alive beside him she thought of the other girl, saved by proxy through her own survival through the night. When he had finally married her she was unsure as to whether it was down to her storytelling, or the intimacy of a ‘1001 night stand’. It didn’t matter either way. After the King had died, she realized she had accumulated a lot of good karma that needed balancing out. She had had the men who sought her hand, then castrated them and sent them on their way, killing them over and over; eldest sons every one of them. Needless to say she soon fled. Living and travelling in Europe, it was easy to thrive in this body, around which rumors swarmed darkly. She recognised that she was a story herself, one of the many, which tell of the ‘Last Girl’: the one who stays the murderer’s hand, dismembering him through her sheer inexhaustible potential for a life outside that particular tragedy. She delighted in rumors for the same reason; the delirium of what is said-unsaid.
They did not converse; ScheheraSade knew nothing of the Girl save her passivity, her body of laughter and guilty arousals. She knew how it smelt when she sweated, she knew it could take the weight of her own body, was green and strong. Trapped once a day underneath her crepe rump whilst ScheheraSade dressed for the Chamber of Orgies, the girl’s skinny back shook slightly from remaining so long on all fours, naked, under the weight of this historical Madam who had selected her for a boudoir furnishing. This was the Girl she knew, the physical Girl. She feigned no interest in what the child thought, felt, or desired. She forced her face away from her. To occupy the girl’s eyes and in rebellion to the house rule against religion, she had nailed a sentimental portrait of the Catholics’ Christ between her canvas’s hands on the floor, so that every time she hung her head to rest or find some escape she would be harassed by his image. It was one of those images where White Christ is tapping his slender fingers to his chest, wide-eyed as if he were about to complain of heartburn, the other hand raised to signal to a waiter.
Now working the green thread, a secondary base for her depiction of the gods in all their debauched glory, she deliberately overloaded the needle, dragging an excess of thread through the canvas. It did not take well. Pinching the surface, she watched carefully as the needle re-sought the surface, a black point behind pink, like the eyes of a newborn pup. Pulling the thread through, black blood spooled to the surface besmirching the green.
ScheheraSade fretted earnestly about the discolouration caused by the girl’s blood. As the embroidery advanced, she began using the first layer of secured threads as her base for the figurative stitches (currently, Bacchus drunkenly tripping over a lyre). This was not to avoid paining the Girl – although they both benefited from a steadier canvas. For a start, the naiads were shapelier, the hellions more human in their perversity. Without the girl’s cries of pain to punctuate the stillness of the room, she had started telling stories again. Not the stories she contrived to perform nightly for the libertines, but fictions which made them laugh out loud, the girl’s back dipping irresistibly in the middle, her flat belly bulging outwards like a sail. This pulled at the threads or made the shape sag and hang off her like a semi-skinned hare. She improvised, revised, and forgot the original 1001, some of which she presumed that the Girl had already heard in her childhood. But the Girl had only heard the frozen form, as if transmitted by gods’ tongues. She filled in the missing thirty years of experience - beyond the simple triumphs of the Good over Evil.
The Girl was the perfect canvas, neither particularly clever, nor beautiful, but rather useful (she had lovely teeth, which ScheheraSade used to bite through thread). In turning her into an exquisite piece of bespoke furniture, ScheheraSade believed she had performed a unique improvement. A carapace was forming over the first layer of threads; the sky. Swallowing the threads into the skin itself, beautiful edges of transition at the rims of the design emerged, like the scud of the Oceanside, the threads lying tight underneath waves of subtle colour.
It occurred to her one night as she lay, eyes pressed to the ceiling, that she would save the Girl. Indeed, it was as if that moment of choice had passed, she was saving her as she sewed her. Now plumper than the other girls (the libertines liked their boys and girls almost indistinguishable), her eyes brighter: she had rescued her from the majority of vices which befell the other children in the day. She had refused to allow her beautiful object to be subjected to the blood letting and shit bathing that the others endured on the plea that it would ruin her embroidery. The Girl was smart enough not to look too grateful, not to search out a smile from her, not to utter a word. Not to notice how slowly ScheheraSade worked, nor how often she unpicked the stitches. When the girl laughed so hard that tears dripped off her nose onto Heartburn Christ, she pretended not to notice, telling the guards that it was she herself who was laughing at her ingenious torture. The Girl was lucky, but she had no brilliance. ScheheraSade decided to manufacture this ordinary girl into the ‘Last Girl’. She would thrust brilliance upon her, would ensure her survival by offering up her own ability to persevere, and the stories. She would blind her if necessary, so like Tiresias she could slip past into the underworld unnoticed, sexless and ageless; an uncanny object. This merciful transfiguration would be her last and only act of defiance against the libertines.
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Coupling the storyteller’s of Pier Paolo Passolini’s films Arabian Nights (1974) and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
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