More Than Human

He was big and bright and very popular. He needed to be very popular, and this, like all his other needs, he accomplished with ease. He played the piano with a surprisingly delicate touch and played swift and subtle chess. He learned to lose skilfully and never too often at chess and at te

He found the Air Force a rather different institution from any school he had ever attended, and it took him a while to learn that the Colonel could not be softened by humility or won by a witticism like the Dean of Men. It took him even longer to learn that in Service it is the majority, not the minority, who tend to regard physical perfection, conversational brilliance, and easy achievement as defects rather than assets. He found himself alone more than he liked and avoided more than he could bear.

It was on the anti-aircraft range that he found an answer, a dream, and a disaster…

Alicia Kew stood in the deepest shade by the edge of the meadow. ‘Father, Father, forgive me!’ she cried. She sank down on the grass, blind with grief and terror, torn, shaken with conflict.

‘Forgive me,’ she whispered with passion. ‘Forgive me,’ she whispered with scorn.

She thought, Devil, why won’t you be dead? Five years ago you killed yourself, you killed my sister, and still it’s ‘Father, forgive me.’ Sadist, pervert, murderer, devil… man, dirty poisonous man!

I’ve come a long way, she thought, I’ve come no way at all. How I ran from Jacobs, gentle Lawyer Jacobs, when he came to help with the bodies; oh, how I ran, to keep from being alone with him, so that he might not go mad and poison me. And when he brought his wife, how I fled from her too, thinking women were evil and must not touch me. They had a time with me, indeed they did; it was so long before I could understand that I was mad, not they… it was so long before I knew how very good, how very patient, Mother Jacobs was with me; how much she had to do with me, for me. ‘But child, no one’s worn clothes like those for forty years!’ And in the cab, when I screamed and couldn’t stop, for the people, the hurry, the bodies, so many bodies, all touching and so achingly visible; bodies on the streets, the stairs, great pictures of bodies in the magazines, men holding women who laughed and were brazenly unfrightened… Dr Rothstein who explained and explained and went back and explained again; there is no poison sweat, and there must be men and women else there would be no people at all… I had to learn this, Father, dear devil Father, because of you; because of you I had never seen an automobile or a breast or a newspaper or a railroad train or a sanitary napkin or a kiss or a restaurant or an elevator or a bathing suit or the hair on – oh forgive me, Father.

I’m not afraid of a whip, I’m afraid of hands and eyes, thank you Father. One day, one day, you’ll see, Father, I shall live with people all around me, I shall ride on their trains and drive my own motor car; I shall go among thousands on a beach at the edge of a sea which goes out and out without walls, I shall step in and out among them with a tiny strip of cloth here and here and let them see my navel, I shall meet a man with white teeth, Father, and round strong arms, Father, and I shall oh what will become of me, what have I become now, Father forgive me.

I live in a house you never saw, one with windows overlooking a road, where the bright gentle cars whisper past and children play outside the hedge. The hedge is not a wall and, twice for the drive and once for the walk, it is open to anyone. I look through the curtains whenever I choose, and see strangers. There is no way to make the bathroom black dark and in the bathroom is a mirror as tall as I am; and one day, Father, I shall leave the towel off.

But all that will come later, the moving about among strangers, the touchings without fear. Now I must live alone, and think; I must read and read of the world and its works, yes, and of madmen like you, Father, and what twists them so terribly; Dr Rothstein insists that you were not the only one, that you were so rare, really, only because you were so rich.

Evelyn…

Evelyn never knew her father was mad. Evelyn never saw the pictures of the poisoned flesh. I lived in a world different from this one, but her world was just as different, the world Father and I made for her, to keep her pure…

I wonder, I wonder how it happened that you had the decency to blow your rotten brains out…

The picture of her father, dead, calmed her strangely. She rose and looked back into the woods, looked carefully around the meadow, shadow by shadow, tree by tree. ‘All right, Evelyn, I will, I will…’

She took a deep breath and held it. She shut her eyes so tight there was red in the blackness of it. Her hands flickered over the buttons on her dress. It fell away. She slid out of underwear and stockings with a single movement. The air stirred and its touch on her body was indescribable; it seemed to blow through her. She stepped forward into the sun and with tears of terror pressing through her closed lids, she danced naked, for Evelyn, and begged and begged her dead father’s pardon.

When Janie was four she hurled a paperweight at a Lieutenant because of an unanalysed but accurate feeling that he had no business around the house while her father was overseas. The Lieutenant’s skull was fractured and, as is often the case in concussion, he was for ever unable to recall the fact that Janie stood ten feet away from the object when she threw it. Janie’s mother whaled the tar out of her for it, an episode which Janie accepted with her usual composure. She added it, however, to the proofs given her by similar occasions that power without control has its demerits.

‘She gives me the creeps,’ her mother told her other Lieutenant later.’ I can’t stand her. You think there’s something wrong with me for talking like that, don’t you?’

‘No I don’t,’ said the other Lieutenant, who did. So she invited him in for the following afternoon, quite sure that once he had seen the child, he would understand.

He saw her and he did understand. Not the child, nobody understood her; it was the mother’s feelings he understood. Janie stood straight up, with her shoulders back and her face lifted, legs apart as if they wore jackboots, and she swung a doll by one of its feet as if it were a swagger-stick. There was a Tightness about the child which, in a child, was wrong. She was, if anything, a little smaller than average. She was sharp-featured and narrow-eyed; her eyebrows were heavy. Her proportions were not quite those of most four-year-olds, who can bend forward from the waist and touch their foreheads to the floor. Janie’s torso was a little too short or her legs a little too long for that. She spoke with a sweet clarity and a devastating lack of tact. When the other Lieutenant squatted clumsily and said, ‘Hel-lo, Janie. Are we going to be friends?’ she said, ‘No. You smell like Major Grenfell.’ Major Grenfell had immediately preceded the injured Lieutenant.

‘Janie!’ her mother shouted, too late. More quietly, she said, ‘You know perfectly well the Major was only in for cocktails.’ Janie accepted this without comment, which left an appalling gap in the dialogue. The other Lieutenant seemed to realize all in a rush that it was foolish to squat there on the parquet and sprang to his feet so abruptly he knocked over the coffee table. Janie achieved a wolfish smile and watched his scarlet ears while he picked up the pieces. He left early and never came back.