Pavo

Amor et melle et felle est fecundissimus.

Love is rich with both honey and venom.

Mayura is the Sanskrit word for Peacock. Literal translation: Killer of Snakes. Omnivorous, Peacocks have a penchant for stalking King Cobras and gobbling them up venom sac and all. Of course you can taste venom, inhale it, lick it, as long as you don’t have a cut in your mouth or your digestive tract, yeah, go right ahead and drink it. Not likely to kill you. It’s venom not poison. Quelle différence?

I collect antique poison bottles: small, brilliant, and cobalt blue in hue. Terribly fascinated by venomous scorpions that glow aqua under ultraviolet light. The biblical vision of Hell is a sort of ultramarine fright.

And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. (Revelations 20:10 King James Version)

Anyone who has played extensively with fire knows that brimstone, (read sulphur), burns a bright brilliant electric blue. Hell sounds like it’s happening, like a hip club, like the inside of the Viper Room.

Which brings us to the Devil. I say Satan, you say Red. Which is rather weird. No, I get it: Red the heart, red the blood, red the rose, red the alchemical stone, red the genitals, and red the fires of Hell. But to be Biblical the fires of Hell are fuelled by brimstone and brimstone burns blue.

…

Blue-blooded. Blue eyed. Blond-headed. Plummy speech. Psychopathic.

Plot: A middle-class, well-educated woman meets an elegant English psychopathic peer. Drama. Not so much, boy meets girl more Lord meets woman and drags her through Hell.

I have written four novels. You could say they are all Love stories, but I know love well. I think my prose quartet deals less with love, more with depth, and could be titled Hierophants of Hell. I have always been fascinated by The English Gentleman. May be to do with the rapid decline of Western European values; things that are fast vanishing begin to gleam with meaning. Maybe the upper-class Englishman that symbolized Western power is being turned from a present reality into a relic.

My four novels are dominated by a quartet of Aristocrats: Septimus Seton, Duke of Malford. Moniker: Malfie. The Right Honourable Nicola Blackwood. Moniker: Nico. Mr. Michael Helston. Moniker: Mickey. Augustin Chatterton, Comte du Bellay. Moniker: Gussie.

Malfie, Nico, Mickey, and Gussie. Meet my Hierophants of Hell.

What fun describing them! Their way of dress. Those bespoke Italian suits. Burgundy corduroys. Olive green windowpane suits. Blue velvet suits. Tasseled Italian loafers. Linen shirts. White trousers, cuffs rolled up. Suede loafers. Panama hats. But as important as their manner of dress is their manner of speech: plummy, poisonous, public-school prosody.

Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee; it springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech. Ben Jonson

Poisonous, venomous, toxic, caustic. Malfie, Nico, Mickey, and Gussie are the four horsemen of my inner world. Hellish the landscape. J’accuse. Being poisonous I compare them to fatal flora and accuse them of inflicting The Foxglove Love on their victims. Their heart-stopping beauty, their cruelty, their allure. Theirs is a poisonous touch no physic can cure. Being venomous I compare them to the toxic trinity of serpents, scorpions, and spiders. Their fangs are in their cold eyes which startle and hypnotize. The killing is in their kiss, the Devil hath no deadlier drug than this. Caustic: the vitriol, the villainy, the vice, all hidden behind the façade of virtù, vibrancy, and virility. Aside from all the comparisons made the Ultratotem of the Upperclass male is the Peacock. I much prefer the Latin. Pavo.

…

Pavo is a blue-blooded, blue-eyed, blond-headed English Gentleman who lives in London though he spends most of his time when not traveling abroad on his country estate. Public school educated, Pavo read English and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He attained a Masters from Havard Business School. Pavo speaks in a plummy baritone drawl. Languid and elegant. Sometimes his mask slips and he unconsciously reverts to his true speech patterns. The psychopath possesses a monotonous voice. When I speak with Pavo, I imagine him as the dream child of two cinematic villains. He speaks and I note the initial monotony of his voice, though it is masked well enough. You won’t hear it if you’re not looking for it. I’m paying attention. I say something. He gets interested. There is blood in the water. He moves in. His voice changes. It’s now warmer. I mention something. He laughs. His laugh is beautiful. It’s rich like his baritone voice. It comes from deep within him and is authentic. No fanged fiend cackling against a bat-ridden night sky. His chuckle is lovely. He’s lethal. Pavo sounds like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey except of course, Pavo is British. But the energy is the same: a cold head and a calm delivery. He asks me a question. He laughs as he asks. His chuckle is chocolatey, I haven’t answered yet. I feel him baring his serrated teeth. His eyes are cold, dark, and as pitiless as a shark’s.

Introduction to Film. I studied cinema in University. In my first film class we studied a lot of monsters. From Ridley Scott’s Alien to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I remember being taken aback by my professor’s description of the Shark as a monster. It’s not a monster, I thought, it’s just a shark. He made us rewatch a scene. If you’ve watched Jaws it’s sort of the main moment. The protagonist, Chief Brody, is tense as fuck. Tense as fuck on the beach where everyone else is enjoying the summer sun and fun. His svelte spouse starts to give his responsibility-laden shoulders a massage. A small child plays in the sand while he sings “do you know the muffin man?” Screams of delight are heard in the ocean from the young. From the shore someone is calling out for their dog. Cue the soundtrack. Dark and sinister. We are underwater. The camera is underwater, but we are looking through the eyes of someone. And that someone is moving fast. The soundtrack’s tempo speeds up. I see white legs in the water. Then I see red.

The shark in Jaws is monstrous not by intent but through a sort of gestalt effect. Sharks inhabit the ocean. It is their natural place. They have fins not feet. Animals kill. Animals kill to eat. Humans kill to eat too. But Civilisation injects cognitive dissonance into the whole matter so that when I prepare a meal of duck vermicelli and I bite into the succulent bits of fowl’s flesh I never have to bear the burden of blood and squawks and screams and feathers on the floor. We don’t get duck from Nature. We get duck from the Vietnamese grocery store down on King Street. Duh.

Here is what Spielberg’s camera did: for a moment, a few seconds, I looked at the world through the eyes of a pure, perfect, predator. I saw the white legs kicking in the water. And I moved in for the kill. My human perspective through the perception of an apex predator gave me a window into the mind of a monster.

Silence. I have stopped speaking because I have nothing to say. Pavo says nothing. We enjoy the silence. Words are very unnecessary. I feel his eyes on me. I see the world through water from underneath. I see the world through the eyes of a middle-class African woman. I see the world through the eyes of a shark. I see myself through the eyes of a wealthy, handsome, blue-blooded English psychopath. We speak again. “What’s the difference between venom and poison,” he asks. He knows the answer. He’s testing me.

He is HAL 9000. A machine. He is the Great White Shark in Jaws. A monster. He is venom and he is sulphur fire. Honey laced with poison. He’s every Dark Lord you can think of from Darth Vader to Sauron. Most importantly he is Malfie, Nico, Mickey, and Gussie. He is the malevolent male mind that seethes inside of me. My dream guy. No, the man of my nightmares. Spider, serpent, scorpion. The peacock gobbles snakes up venom and all. Bird whose feathers are the colours of hell flames, electric blue. Bright burning brimstone. Symbol of ostentation and aesthetic excess, the elite, and the aristocratic.