X was the problem. Y was a docile character and rarely spoke. Maybe he was capable of something, but whatever it was it was clear he would never actually get around to doing it. Y, therefore, wasn’t someone I needed to worry about. X, on the other hand, was effusive and just the type of person who would not only get around to doing something, but would do it in such a way that it would seem as if he hadn’t. This, it need hardly be pointed out, is precisely the type of danger I had to guard against.
A bit more about X. He always wore a tatty-looking cloth cap, for one thing. For another, he spoke a kind of gibberish. (Think avant-garde poet trying their hardest, their damnedest in fact, to be as inscrutable and abstruse and grammatically obtuse as possible and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. Or better still, think of a two-year-old child burbling words with no regard to syntax. Or perhaps, on reflection, a madman spewing out the incoherence of his own mind into the void would be a more accurate way of putting it.) Then there was his tendency to skip rather than walk as he conveyed himself from point a to point b, and the perennially cunning yet dazed look in his eyes, and the blue pills he continuously popped, and the buck teeth, and the greasy lank of hair that hung down his back like the tail of a donkey. In summary, X was an oddity, hence my concern.
Every morning, X stopped by the old yew tree to sell his wooden puppets. It was at this time of day and in this place, I had surmised, that he was at his most dangerous and so I took to watching him from the bench a little way up the hill behind the yew tree, next to the mulberry bushes and not far along from a stall that sold delicious banana fritters day and night. The bench had a small brass plaque affixed to it commemorating the life of an unnamed man, who, according to the plaque, had sacrificed everything for an unspecified caused and was greatly missed by his unnamed loved ones. Other than the plaque, the bench had nothing special about it. Often it was wet and I took a towel to sit on for these occasions. Sometimes I sat on the towel even when the bench was dry.
Of course, X knew I was watching him from the bench. How could he not? It wasn’t as if I took pains to hide what I was doing. He would be talking in that vociferous gobbledygook way of his to someone (who these people were who stopped to talk to him I have no idea, but they rarely seemed interested in his puppets – that much I do know) and he would look up at me with a knowing smile. Actually it was more of a cocksure smile than a knowing one, which made me realise, of course, just how seriously he took my presence on the bench. As indeed he ought to have. I wasn’t playing around, after all. I had my sights set on him for good reason. As I say, he was a problem. A big-arsed problem. Much bigger than I realised, as it happened, although it would be a long time before I discovered the true magnitude of what I was dealing with (if I had had an inkling, I’ll admit I’m not sure I would have been quite so brazen about my surveilling him).
Y, funnily enough, is how I got to know about X. Besides being the silent type, Y was a bony man who had a sly grin. Another thing about him was he continuously smoked cigarettes whilst loitering outside a shop with frosted glass windows. (How I know this is another story, but the summary version is that for a time I had, against my better judgment, been keeping tabs on Y.) I have no idea what type of shop it was that Y was forever loitering outside of chain-smoking cigarettes, neither do I care to know. But one thing I do know is that I only ever saw men enter that shop, at all times, I should point out, of the day and night. Strangely enough I never saw any of them leave. Y himself never entered the shop, although I often noticed him staring longingly at the men who did, as if he were envious of them somehow, as if they possessed the courage that he so patently lacked. Although why you needed courage to enter that shop, who can say.
On one occasion, X himself approached the shop. He was carrying a basket of his wooden puppets and he stopped to hand the basket to Y. For some reason this gave Y cause for concern. I could tell this by virtue of the fact that Y’s sly grin had slithered off his face and onto the ground where it sat in a dark puddle cowering with fright. Y also screamed. It was a bizarre scream, more like a whistle that had come out wrong. It lasted for a matter of seconds and then it stopped. Then I heard Y say, I don’t want anything to do with your infernal puppets! It was the first and last time I heard Y say anything. X, being X, replied with a sally of solecisms. Then, clutching his basket to his chest, he ran away, leaving a pall of dust behind him. Naturally, my interest was piqued immediately and I decided there and then that it was time to turn my attention away from Y and direct it towards X.
Which is what I did. Monitoring X, as I say, from the bench. To begin with anyway, but such was my mounting level of concern regarding X and what he was capable of, I soon realised that I would have to widen the surveillance operation. So I started following him wherever he went, pretending to be doing something else whenever he turned around to look at me (for example, pretending to be looking in a shop window at the artefacts on display or pretending to be talking to a pedestrian who happened to be in the vicinity or disguising myself as a tableau vivant), which he did frequently, knowing full well that I was tailing him and even seeming to enjoy it in a perverse sort of way.
Of course, a lot of the time he would be in his little domed tent in the glade in the conifer forest. I could tell from the look on his face whenever he exited the tent that he’d been up to something. It got to me, of course, how could it not? But I knew my limits. To confront him, I’d need more information, a lot more. He was far too cunning to be confronted without it. If only, I thought, I could get into that tent to see what he was doing in there. Maybe then I’d have enough information. Yes, I was almost sure of it. But how, was the question, how would I get into his tent to see what he was doing in there? And then it came to me. I would disguise myself as a woman. X had a weakness for women. I’d known it from day one of being aware of his existence. I’d sensed it somehow, intuited it you might say. As a woman, my thinking went, I might be able to sweettalk my way into that tent of his and then see what was going on in there and finally obtain the incriminating information I needed to make a case against him, with the ultimate aim, of course, of having him expunged from the community of which I had myself only been a member for a short while, but which I had every intention of being a member of for a long time to come or as long as I needed to be in any case.
So, I bought a smock, pink with frills, just the type of garment I imagined he liked a woman to wear. And then I had a guy I know, a guy who works out of a basement clinic in the ghetto by the arroyo, cosmetically alter my face and insert fake bosoms into my body and inject my arse with oestrogen and hey presto, I was a woman. Or at least I looked like one. I called myself Jane because I liked the idea of having a monosyllabic name and for no other reason.
After practicing being a woman for a bit, I went to the yew tree to make X’s acquaintance. Pretending as if I was just passing by on a random whim, I stopped to have a look at his wooden puppets, which were all laid out in neat rows on a trestle table. Immediately he was taken in by my ruse. I could tell this because he started blathering on in a way that was utterly incoherent even by his own standards. He kept smiling at me as well, in a wholly perverted manner, and looking at my cleavage, which I admit I had pumped up a bit by using a special bra I’d bought from a shop in an underground bunker not far from the esplanade. I had never seen the puppets up close before and I was somewhat taken aback by how exquisitely detailed they were, so detailed in fact that they looked almost lifelike. I pretended to peruse the puppets for a while and then I chose one at random. I’d like that one, I said, pointing to the puppet I’d decided to procure. But X seemed reluctant for some reason to sell me that puppet and shook his head, waved his hand. Not for sale, he seemed to be saying in words that could, in truth, have meant almost anything. Then he picked up another puppet, a little black-man puppet with thick dreadlocks tied into a pineapple sprout with a headband and a mournful expression in his eyes and tried to hand it to me. No, not that one, I said, that one. I pointed at the puppet I had originally chosen. It didn’t matter a jot to me which puppet I bought, but obviously enough I now wanted what I seemingly couldn’t have. X put the black-man puppet down and picked up another puppet and proffered it to me. This one was a perfect facsimile of an Hasidic Jew, replete with a circle-shaped fur hat, curly side-locks, a carbuncle-like tefillin in the middle of his forehead, and regulation black suit.
I was about to get aerated and insist on my original choice of puppet, when I realised all of a sudden the preposterousness of the situation. What did I care if I got a Jew puppet? I took my purse out of my handbag, from which I extracted a few silver coins in order to pay. But X would have none of it. Waved his hand quite vociferously. Shook his head. Made it known that this puppet was on the house or I think that’s what he was trying to make known, although of course I couldn’t understand a single word that came out of his mouth. I put my money back in my purse and my purse back in my handbag. Thank you, I said, that’s very generous of you (suspiciously so, I felt). I took the puppet and tucked it under my free arm (the other arm being occupied with dangling my handbag). Adieu, I said and then I walked away feeling quite pleased with myself that my plan was going exactly as I had intended thus far.
I bumped into X several more times round and about. Each time I feigned felicity at the seemingly random serendipity of our paths having crossed. Each time I tried to wangle my way a little bit further into his affections by doing my best to be coquettish (I had been practising my technique on other men I’d also been bumping into) and doting on his every word as he bloviated away about God knows what. Then one time when we bumped into each other, X suddenly took my hand in his, which felt papery to the touch. He’d fallen completely silent as well, which, I remember thinking to myself, was either a propitious development or a bad omen.
We skipped around for a while hand in hand (I tried to walk to begin with, but I soon realised it would be easier if I synchronised with X’s skipping), until I realised X had led me straight to the glade in the conifer woods, to his domed tent, at which point we abruptly stopped skipping.
Brazenly, X unzipped the tent and then indicated with an angled palm that he wished for me to enter, which I did with some trepidation, I have to confess. Once inside, X zipped the tent straight back up again and lit a paraffin lamp. I looked around. The tent was a lot larger on the inside than seemed feasible. There was a futon in one corner and a television on a stand. In the middle section there was a kind of lounge with a mini settee and two armchairs, a bearskin rug and a coffee table with some art deco books arranged in a fan shape. On the opposite side to the futon there was a kitchenette: a fridge, a small stove, a microwave, a small rectangular worktop and a few cupboards.
X, who still hadn’t said a thing, indicated for me to sit myself down on one of the winged armchairs. I did as I was beckoned. The armchair was capacious and seemed to swallow me up, as if it were the fleshy mouth of a large toothless herbivore that had mistaken me for a plant of some sort. Won’t you sit down? I said to X or something similar, probably less formally articulated. X looked taken aback, as if the thought hadn’t crossed his mind until now and that now that it had he saw how strange it was that it hadn’t. Then he sat down, quite abruptly, as if he were a sack of potatoes being slung down by the bearer of the sack, not on the other armchair facing mine or the mini settee even, but on the bearskin rug, cross-legged, facing away from me so that I could see the back of his head and that long droop of a ponytail of his poking out of the back of the tatty cloth cap. Then for whatever reason he started making a whistling sound, kind of like a kettle boiling, only shriller and louder. And all of a sudden I felt shivery, as if I were on the cusp, or already in the grip, of a fever. I was trembling as well, I realised. Had I been poisoned? It was possible, anything always was. All the while X kept up with his infernal whistling. I wanted to shout out to him to stop it, but I couldn’t muster any words.
I passed out.
Or so I assumed, for the next thing I knew I was no longer sitting in the armchair but lying on my back on the futon staring up at a green ceiling. X was lying next to me with an arm draped across my midriff. He was asleep on his side, gently snoring, drool leaking out of the corner of his mouth. I felt my body. My legs, my little bulbous tummy, my fake boobs. Naked. What, I thought, had the wicked man done to or with me? Ever so gently, I removed X’s arm from my midriff and quietly as I could I sat up and then got off the futon. I felt dizzy, as if the blood had rushed from my head to my feet. I walked over to the settee and sat down. I was too dizzy to stand for the moment. Tears sprung to my eyes. I let them fall for a while down my face and then I tried to pull myself together. The information, I thought, the information. I wiped my eyes, breathed deeply a few times and tried to stand up.
Then I heard a man’s voice calling out ‘Jane’.
It took me a moment to remember that that was my name. It was X calling out to me. He sounded concerned. I turned to him. He was sat bolt upright on the futon, looking directly at me, smiling. It was a simple warm smile, not a cocksure or a knowing one. He looked different. His hair was cut short and his incisors were normal, not protruding. What’s the matter? he said. What’s the matter? I repeated. Then I realised that X had just made perfect syntactical sense, had constructed a completely normal and understandable sentence. This is strange, I thought, very strange. Come back to bed, he said, you’ve had that dream again I imagine. That dream? I said. Yes, he said, you know the one where you’re following me and think I am up to no good and you can’t make head or tail of anything I’m saying. I didn’t reply. I didn’t have to. He was right. It was all just a bad dream; it had to be, didn’t it? Well, didn’t it? I got back on the futon and X gave me a blue pill to swallow. Just before I drifted off to sleep, I asked X if he sold puppets for a living and he said he did. Actually, that was just before just before I fell asleep. Just before I fell asleep, I had a thought, a strange thought about how absurd it would be if I were merely a character in a story made up by an author who’d had the impudence, the audacity even, to play the ‘it had all been a dream’ card, which as everyone knows is a pretty lame and mean-spirited thing to do to the reader. To me and the reader. Then I fell asleep.