My mother used to tell me about a lot of things. About the old city, the arenas and the cathedrals, the cobbled squares and the tiny jagged streets. All the things I was born too late to see. And she used to tell me about my mother, my other one, the one woman she said she loved even more than me.

It was at the arena she saw her first. By then it was in the last few years of its long life, right down by the lake’s edge, a year perhaps before the waters flooded through the halls and claimed it for themselves. The arena was a huge thing, built some said at the founding of the city. She said it was a mile just to walk around the top row of the tiering, and when the steps were full there must have been a hundred thousand people there all watching the day’s entertainments, the grand old parades and the fire displays.

On days like that you’d only ever get seats at the back, so far away that you’d have to watch everything through those lenses they had then, those old things with the tongs, where you would have to open and close them to move the lenses apart just right to bring something into focus, holding them awkwardly to one of your eyes and keeping the other one closed so you didn’t end up feeling sick.

But mother preferred the small shows, the gentle afternoon romances, or the late night outrages, anything where you could sit at the front, up close where you could see it with your own eyes. Plays, dancing, fighting, magic – she loved it all.

Especially magic. She delighted in tricks all her life, and if there’s anything that I really, truly remember about my childhood it was her mastery of sleight of hand, pulling endless teeth from our gaping mouths, placing coins in our pockets or our wallets, even our shoes, coins we’d only find much later, after we’d left the house disappointed that she’d refused to give us any sweets.

One time she even managed to place coins in the palms of my hands, beneath my unbroken skin. I remember scratching them out and realising then for the first time, as I held these two bloody coins in my two bloody hands, that money smelled like blood, and blood like money.

My mother saw her first at one of the late night shows, performing late at night in a barely attended stadium, the stage lit by a circle of bright lamps, the crowd in near darkness, even right down there in the front few rows. She was a magician, which was enough on its own to entrance my mother, even if you ignored the beauty, the charisma, the talent, the charm.

The conceit of her performance was that each of her tricks was used to illuminate a retelling of one of the old tales – The Floating Of The Moon, The Transmutation Of Nothingness, Mother Crow And The First Births, all the others we learn when we were young and relearn again when we’re not. The climax of the show was the story of Eymn, the First Son, and his corruption at the hands of Corinna, The Cat, that wily old devil and tormentor that grandmother long ago chose as the emblem of our house.

At the centre of the stage stood a small black tent, and at the end of each trick she would retreat back inside, making a show of taking with her all the old props and costumes, and then emerging improbably seconds later, costume already changed and new props at the ready. For this final performance she would come out dressed as old Corinna, her dark skin now greyfurred and shockingly covered in scars, her body naked and lithe, with claws as long as her fingers and a tail with a life of its own.

She prowled around the edge of the arena, frightening the crowd, picking their pockets, threatening them, kissing them, sitting down amongst them and weeping until those she sat with wept, laughing until they laughed, screaming until they flinched and turned away. Behind her her assistant, by now transformed into Eymn, the first son, tall and beautiful and naked, emerged unnoticed from the tent and wandered round the stage in a state of idyllic naive delight, finding joy in everything that he found in what was supposed to be now the virgin plains of old that these day lie lost beneath both the city and the lake. The tent became the first tent, the first home, where Eymn lived with his many sisters, the first born, the first children from which all the other children came, before they moved out and built their own tents, the dwellings from which all the subsequent towns that eventually became this city emerged.

The devil – the magician – turned from the crowd then, saw Eymn for herself, followed him, pondered him. She recounted to herself, to the crowd, her fury at the Mother Crow, whom she could never catch, and at the first children, Mother Crow’s army of daughters that were too wise and numerous to be tricked. But Eymn, the son, the brother, a boy alone among his sisters, he had vanity, he had pride. Thus, he could be flattered, and therefore tricked.

She seduced him first, the touch of her furred paw soft against his obsidian skin sending exaggerated shudders of pleasure through his immaculate body. And then, there on the dusty floor, they made love. When it was over – and they took their time to be over, my mother said – Eymn was exhausted, spent, but Corrina, as insatiable and insistent as every unsatisfied cat that followed her, demanded more, more, always more.

Eymn wanted to satisfy her. He tried to satisfy her. But he was too tired, and had nothing left to give. So here was the first trick of this tale – from the tent she summoned a boar, huge and wild, bigger surely than the place from it which it appeared. “Let me give you his heart, so that your stamina becomes boundless,” she said in a seductive whisper loud enough even a full stadium could have heard. “Never again to leave anyone unsatisfied.”

It did not take much to persuade poor Eymn, any attempt at refusal wiped away with a kiss, a touch, his agreement greeted with gales of delighted laughter from the cat. She motioned Eymn to lie at her feet, the boar sidling up to him and laying by his side, rolling dutifully onto its side as if to hold Eymn in its tattered hoofs. A trained beast the likes of which the watchers had never seen.

Corinna cut a circle in the boar’s chest first, a single twirl of her vicious claws slicing effortlessly through the pig’s ripe flesh. From the hole she pulled out the heart, this huge and monstrous thing, absurd in shape and size, each beat as heavy and as solid as a pounded drum.

With her other hand, with those fearsome claws, she bored deep in to Eymn’s chest, his quivering heart as tiny as a sparrow in the palm of her hand. She held them both aloft for the crowd to see, turning slowly in a circle, blood running down her outstretched arms and dripping down onto the bodies beneath her feet.

She switched them, then, Eymn’s bare heart thrown carelessly into the cavern open in the boar’s breast. Then, somehow, that huge monstrous organ, the animal flesh still throbbing out its ceaseless beat, was pushed, forced, into Eymn, each heavy thud of this infernal engine juddering through his body until he was jerked heavily to his feet. The heart, bulging out like a tumour, every pulse of its flesh grotesquely visible, dominated him now, all the savagery and animalistic passion demanding, commanding, that he gets what he wants, again and again and again.

But of course Corinna does not oblige. Her work is done, the corruption of man and the desecration of that early paradise complete, everything ended for us through no fault of our own, just the weaknesses of men and the infinite malevolence of the gods.

The show would end with the magician taking the applause of the crowd, Eymn behind her pursuing the boar back into the tent, and then she too would enter the tent, one last bow to the crowd as she cross the threshold, and then down the tent would fall, flat to the ground, and then a gust of wind would blow it away into the dark skies. Beneath it would be empty ground and nothing else. Everything was over.

My mother was hypnotised – by the show, the tricks, the tales. But, mostly, by the magician. She searched the stadium in vain for her, went again and again to the performances in the days that followed. By the end she had seen the show so often she knew each tale by heart, could see how well rehearsed it was, every seeming improvisation perfectly the same each day. She could see the outline of scars beneath the assistant’s obfuscating make-up. But she could never see the secret behind the tricks, and even, as the days went by, she became less sure which parts were the tricks.

Eventually they met, by chance. My mother found herself walking lost down a dead end alley towards the lake, one of those empty places where lovesick boys from the city go to make their grand gestures, to cut off their cocks and hurl them into the lake, committing themselves to a lifetime of celibacy – or at least until their cocks grow back, and their heart’s desires have been transferred to another. As she realised it led nowhere she turned back and saw the magician pass by the entrance to the street, her assistant pulling a cart filled with their props, the boar running along by her side.

I’m not sure if the magician stood a chance. We’ve all seen the faded prints, the old paintings, been beguiled at least once by my mother’s charm. She could be her own Corinna when she wanted. Unless even this was a magician’s trick, to let my mother believe it was her that led the way. Not that she would ever entertain this idea when I suggested it during her tellings of this tale.

So they fell in love, a winter’s storm of passion that blew unrelentingly through those endless new year’s nights. My mother moved from her apartment to the rotten old place down there by the arena that the magician lived in. Even then no one wanted to live that near the lake, amidst all the damp and the mould and the general decay. You could get lost in the endless labyrinth of the interconnected buildings, she said, every room full of old junk left behind by long departed occupants. And into that the magician had brought her junk too, her props and her costumes, her assistant and her animals. A squalor my mother was not accustomed to but which she embraced.

But spring as ever brought with it trouble. The magician fell pregnant, and my mother reacted furiously. No matter that it was probably from the last act of the show that had brought her and my mother together. This was, to her, a betrayal. After several days of no doubt excoriating argument, my mother left and returned to her old house – this old house. And when regret overwhelmed her and she returned to try and make amends it was already too late. The old house was abandoned, the performances cancelled.

She went down one of those old streets to the lakes edge and stared out across the immensity of it. My mother always claims she could see all the way across that night everything was so clear, see the twinkling fires burning on that far distant shore.

And the next morning, when she woke in the cold light of her own room she found me. Inside, placed that night in her womb. The magician’s final trick, carried out without leaving a mark.

I’ve never known her name, my first mother, nor what she looked like. Over the years, when I could, I’ve sneaked a look at mother’s albums, the sketchbooks and the paintings, and tried to guess at which one my lost mother was. Which one I looked most alike. Which one I most wished I did. There’s so many, and at one time or another they’ve all been her.

But then I remember my mother, the one I knew. Her love and her anger. Her intelligence and her enthusiasm. And I am her daughter, totally and without regret.

__________

Notes:

1. I wrote this in 2013 sometime
2. And it languished unseen until now
3. I don’t know why, because althouvgh it’s clearly not the best thing I’ve ever written it is definitely not the worst