Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt Page A

termite heap, or carefully crafted rubbish tip.
    Damian and Martha stayed where they were for some time, sipping the wine, which wasn’t bad, asking each other whether Sue Basuto’s work did or didn’t have any reference to the circulation of blood and lymph in the human body. They decided to go and have supper and talk about it. They drifted over to the centre of excitement, before leaving.
    IT WAS A REPRESENTATION of the goddess Kali, who was constructed like an Arcimboldo portrait out of many elements. She was enthroned in what resembled—what was—a seventeenth-century birthing chair, below which, under the hole into which the baby would drop, was a transparent plastic box full of a jumble of plaster Infants and plaster Mothers from crèches old and new. Kali’s black body was a painted
écorché
sculpture. Her head was a waxwork
Vanitas,
half smiling lady, half grinning skull, lifesize, crowned with matted ropes of seemingly human hair. Her four arms were medical prostheses, wooden or gleaming mechanical artefacts, ending in sharp steel and blunt wooden fingers, and one hook, from which hung what looked like a real shrunken head, held by the hair. Her earrings were preserved foetuses, decked with beads, enclosed in mahogany-framed glass jars like hour-glasses. She brandished a surgical saw in another hand, and the final two arms were crocheting something in an immense tangle of crimson plastic cords. Her crochet hooks were the tools of the nineteenth-century obstetricians, midwives and abortionists; the dreadful formless knitting glittered like fresh blood. She wore, as she traditionally does, a necklace of tiny skulls— apes’, rats’, humans’—and a girdle of dead men’s hands, in this case wax clasping plaster of Paris, clasping skeletal fingers clasping what looked like the real thing. Her legs were constructed of interlaced forceps and probes. Her feet were prosthetic—one booted, one a miracle of mechanical joints. She was signed, at her feet, with a flower-shape, a daisy, composed of a circle of the exquisite tiny ivory women round what, on inspection, could be seen to be a yellow contraceptive sponge, about as old as the church.
    Damian went white with pure rage.
    Martha said, “Oh, how terrible. And how
good.
”
    Damian said, “Someone call the Police.”
    Martha said, “No, wait—”
    The gallery manager, one of the black-clad thin women, came and said, “What’s the problem?”
    Daisy sidled up from behind the Kali, just as Damian began to say, very loudly, almost shouting, just controlled, that these objects were valuable museum artefacts—well, and body parts—they were relics and should be treated with respect, they were private property, and their display constituted
theft.
He demanded, he said, that the object be dismantled
immediately,
and the Police brought in.
    Martha said to the gallery woman, “He’s right. But for God’s sake get photos of it before it goes. It’s good.”
    “It’s disgusting,” said Damian. Daisy was standing indecisively, looking as though she was considering the possibility of creeping away through the vestry. He strode up to her and seized her bony little wrist.
    “How dare you? How could you? We
trusted you
—”
    “I wasn’t stealing. I was borrowing.”
    “Rubbish. I suppose you would have sold it if you’d had an offer? I hope I never see you again.”
    Martha said, “Can’t we—discuss . . .?”
    Damian roared,
“Get the Police!”
    The people slunk away. Daisy twisted free of Damian and began to tear down her structure. Damian shouted that she shouldn’t touch the things without gloves, had she learned nothing, she was a little idiot, she seemed to be completely
stupid,
as well as deceitful and hypocritical and
disgusting
. . .
    Martha put her arms round Daisy, who stood shuddering in her grasp for a few minutes, and then twisted free and ran out of the church.
    DAMIAN’S DINNER with Martha did not go as he had planned. He was