The Moors Last Sigh

dodging into the human thickets with an unnerving rabbit-like scream. What would I find when I found her? I put the headphones on, lengthening them until the earpieces fitted. There was the play button. I don’t want to play, I thought. I don’t like this game.
    I pushed the button. My own voice, dripping poison, filled my ears.
    You know those people who claim to have been captured by aliens and subjected to unspeakable experiments and tortures – sleep deprivation, dissection without anaesthesia, prolonged tickling of the armpits, hot chillis inserted into the rectum, overexposure to marathon performances of Chinese opera? I must tell you that after I stopped listening to the tape in Uma’s Walkman I felt I had been in the clutches of just such an unearthly fiend. I imagined a chameleon-like creature, a cold-blooded lizard from across the cosmos, who could take human form, male or female as required, for the express purpose of making as much trouble as possible, because trouble was its staple diet – its rice, its lentils, its bread. Turbulence, disruption, misery, catastrophe, grief: all these were on the menu of its preferred foods. It came among us – she (on this occasion) came among us – as a farmer of discontents, a fomentor of war, seeing in me (O fool! O thrice-assed dolt!) a fertile field for her pestilential seeds. Peace, serenity, joy were deserts to her – for if her noisome crops failed, she would starve. She ate our divisions, and grew strong upon our rows.
    Even Aurora – Aurora, who saw the truth of her from the start – had succumbed in the end. No doubt it had been a point of pride for Uma; like the great predator she was, she had been most eager to devour the most elusive prey. Nothing she could have said would have taken my mother in. Knowing this, she used my words – my angry, awful, lust-provoked obscenities – instead. Yes, she had recorded it all, had gone that far; and with what seduction she led me down that road, eliciting the fatal phrases by making me think they were what she needed to hear! I do not excuse myself. The words were mine, I said them. A lesser fool would have said less. But loving her and knowing my mother’s opposition I spoke at first in rage, then in confirmation of the primacy of romantic love over the mother-son variety; coming from a house where easy obscenities had always peppered and spiced our conversational dishes, I did not flinch from fuck and cunt and screw. And then continued these dark murmurs, because in our lovemaking she, my lover, asked – how often she asked! – that I tell her those things, to heal – O most false! O foully false and falsely foul! – her wounded confidence and pride. Your lover asks, in loving’s midst, for your endorsement of her need; she needs you, so she says, to need it too: do you refuse? Well, if so, so. I do not know your secrets, nor desire to know more. But perhaps you do not refuse. Yes, you say, O my love, yes, I also need, I do.
    I spoke in the privacy and complicity of the act of love. Which, too, was a part of Uma’s deception, a necessary means to her end.
    Forty-five minutes a side of our lovemaking’s edited highlights were on that sad cassette, and running through the bump and grind, the loathsome leitmotif. Fuck her. Yes I want to. God I do. Fuck my mother. Screw her. Screw the fucking bitch . And each coarse syllable drove a skewer into my mother’s broken heart.
    When Aurora was already deep in shock, with Mynah newly dead, the creature seized its moment, disguising her errand of hate as a pilgrimage of love. She gave my parents the tape that night, she went there for that purpose and no other, and I can only guess at their terror and hurt, can only create my own image of the scene – Aurora slumped all night on the piano-stool in her orange and gold saloon, old Abraham hand-wringing helplessly against a wall, and through a shadowed doorway a glimpse of frightened servants, fluttering like trembling hands at the edges of the frame.
    And the next morning, when I left her bed, Uma must have known what awaited me at home – the grimly ashen faces in the garden, the hand pointing at the gates: go, get thee from hence and never return any more . And when in my bewilderment I came back to her flat, how she surpassed herself! What a performance she gave that day! – But now I knew everything. No more benefits of doubts. Uma, my beloved traitor, you were ready to play the game to the end; to