The Books: “Sugar and Other Stories” – ‘In the Air’ (A.S. Byatt)

Next in my adult fiction shelf:

This excerpt is from “In the Air”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

Mrs. Sugden is a woman in her 60s, a retired schoolteacher, elementary school. She lives with her dog Wolfgang. As she has gotten older, certain phobias and fears have become almost fixations in her mind. One is going outside. The second fear is related to the first. She is almost irrationally terrified of being attacked and raped on her daily walks with Wolfgang. She can feel that her body is old, that she would not be able to fight back … and she also questions Wolfgang’s readiness to come to her defense. She takes her walks every day and it is almost like a monumental act of courage for her … because the sense of impending doom is so overpowering.

The story is terrible as it unfolds. Because sometimes our worst fears are not irrational. Because SOMEONE experiences your worst fear. My worst fear is to be sitting calmly in my apartment – only to have blood-crazed lunatics come in and chase me around like an animal for the slaughter. No mercy for me. tee hee what an irrational fear, right? Tell that to Abigail Folger, why don’t you. Tell that to Jay Sebring. The fear doesn’t rule my life but it does come into my head from time to time.

Mrs. Sugden sees a blind woman walking wiht her seeing-eye dog in the park. And she notices, too, that a man appears to always be trailing along behind her – something about it sends an alarm bell in Mrs. Sugden. Who is that man? Sometimes he dances in a circle around the blind woman, waving his hands in the air … because he knows she can’t see him. Mrs. Sugden just does not ike the look of this so suddenly – she befriends the blind woman – and they start to have their afternoon walks in the park together.

But the man keeps trailing along.

The story is terrible. You want to applaud Mrs. Sugden for being so brave … for stepping into the breach, trying to protect the blind woman … and you also want to save her. It’s not right that she should be alone in this. That she should have to live with such fear. Her fear is so ever-present that she thinks of the future attack that WILL come to her as an inevitability. She doesn’t think of her attacker as a stranger, or an unknown. He is already known as “he”.

Excerpt from from “In the Air”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

She knew it was irrational, though there was logic in it, to feel better indoors. There were women who had found men waiting for them in the dark when they came home, women who had been followed and then pushed quickly in from behind, women whose windows or barred doors had been contemptuously shattered. Mrs. Sugden still felt safer within walls. Partly because of Wolfgang, who knew that this was his territory, who set up a whole orchestra of aggressive sound if anyone knocked, or stopped to stare, who howled and growled and pealed defiance and threat. In Brent – Mrs. Sugden thought it was Brent, certainly somewhere like that – only two per cent of homes with dogs had been entered and seventyy-five per cent of homes without. Inside her own walls she and Wolfgang had a chance. Outside was different. She knew other women might organize their fear differently, might be most afraid of being cornered, of having their own bed violated, their carpet smeared, their kitchen tools turned against them. In her own rooms, her heart ran evenly like her clocks, almost always, except when she was locking up, except when her hands were on cold glass with black night and whatever else just over the threshold. Fear seeped in through the warped lavatory window. But in general it was in open spaces that she expected the encounter. In open spaces her breath came short, her heart was larger and fleshier and beat in little spurts, she was webbed with dizziness. She could not have run for her life and knew it. This also was shaming. Fear and shame, these were what was left, were they? Mrs. Sugden put on her coat, defying them as she defied them daily. Wolfgang circled and pranced in ecstasy. Mrs. Sugden put on her woolly hat and gathered up his lead.

Her path took her along two roads of pleasant Victorian suburban houses, upwards towards the high ground. The roads debouched on a wide and whirling motorway junction which carved the common land, white and lethal. The underpass was the secret entry to the wild land beyond the concrete. Wolfgang rushed to and fro, lifting his leg on lampposts and parked cars, glistening with good health. A sudden car changed lanes as Mrs. Sugden was looking over a hedge at some iris reticulata, and screeched to a halt beside her, facing the wrong way. Now? Out of a car, now? She looked at the driver’s face, which was square, oriental, and expressionless. He was simply parking, he lived there, he had simply failed to signal. Mrs. Sugden dropped her eyes and proceeded towards the underpass. The arch over this was adorned in shaky blood-red paint with the pacific slogan MEAT IS MURDER. The graffiti inside were mostly the work of a neat fanatic, with a spray-gun of white paint, who had surrounded the usual inscribed lists of names, pierced hearts, Julie, Lois, Sharon with tidy boxes and correctly spelled admonitions. “You are a whore.” “You are an exhibitionist tramp.” “You disgust me.” Mrs. Sugden would have given this moralist nine out of ten for handwriting, and ten for spelling. She imagined him in a shiny white raincoat to match his paintwork, staring fixedly from inside metal-rimmed glasses above well-polished shoes. He was certainly a manifestation of the man she feared: his work showed that his hand was steady and his intention clear. It might be that he preferred the young and the pretty, with whom he seemed to have a quarrel. He might not notice a thickened person with grey frizz under a woolly hat, plodding quietly through the puddles?

That was not certain. She had watched a whole television film on the subject, sitting on the sofa with a reluctant Wolfgang panting beside her. There had been an interview wiht one young convicted rapist who, silhouetted black against a bland turquoise ground, had said that he always chose ugly or unattractive women. Incredibly, he put his hand to his mouth and added, oh, I hope none of them are watching, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. He explained. He did it out of a deep sense of inadequacy, a need to dominate. The civilized words tripped easily off his tongue, in this classroom discussion. He had been exposed to intensive group therapy. Pretty ones, he said, might have intimidated me, you know, I might have backed down. Hearing him say this, in his pleasant young voice, out of the black hole of his obscurity, Mrs. Sugden had known that this voice was his voice, the man’s voice, that she was listening to him speak. He was like boys she had taught, coming back to show off how they had got on in the world. Boys had liked her, as a techer, in those younger days. She had liked boys. The cheeky youngster, the workman with his wolf-whistle from scaffolding, the teaching student grateful for being shown the ropes. It was the world that had changed and she with it.

At the further mouth of the underpass, on her way up into light, she encountered a solitary man, walking rapidly and frowning. He was tall, black-avised with a heavy growth of stubble on gaunt cheeks under a woollen cap pulled well down. Combat jacket, faded jeans, dirty trainers. Fear fogged Mrs. Sugden’s gaze. She went on walking, past him. He held his eyes averted, rigidly, as alarmed by her, apparently, as she by him. Or perhaps just English. Once there had been a time when people passed the time of day, surely there had, even if their polite greetings had been a formal indication that they posed no threat? Now, no one dared. She, for fear of provoking him, he, for fear of misapprehension. Or perhaps he was just sour. Perhaps he had not really seen her at all.

In the earlier days of her fear Mrs. Sugden had tried to make herself think about other things. She hd promised herself little rewards. If I get as far as the first copse, on the way to the pond, without thinking about him, there will be a letter from James. Or, more reliably, I will allow myself to buy a chocolate eclair. She had long ago given up this childish self-bribery with things she didn’t really look forward to – she found it hard to look forward to anything much, except sleep. It had directly brought on the one mental battle which had caused her to turn tail before the copse, crying for Wolfgang in distress, battling her way home with bursting chest and wandering eyes. No, no, fear was better faced squarely. She could go out into his world if she was prepared for him, if she thought him out rationally, if she knew him and what might happen.