Still Waters

Twenty-two

They started the day with the shower scene. Poor Janet, a good girl really, regular and law-abiding, though not above the occasional sex and tumble with a married man in her lunch hour, succumbing to a momentary temptation and stealing forty thousand dollars. Pursued, suspected, she clings to her last vestiges of calm and is almost clean away. Then in the storm she takes a wrong turn and checks into the Bates Motel.

The day school audience responded the way audiences were programmed to do: the insistent, keening music, stabbing at the ears, the slash and cut of blade, the absurd figure of the attacker, all-powerful, unreal; shot after shot of the woman’s body, naked, falling, cut after cut; blood on the shower curtain, blood on the tiles; her face, unmoving, the open, staring eye; blood merging with the flow of water, running away.

Poor Janet.

The lights came up on sixty, seventy people sitting there, the smaller auditorium; some with notebooks opened on their laps, some with cups of coffee cooling in their hands. Mostly women, young to early middle-age, a scattering of men: teachers, media students, specialists from the caring professions, academics, a phalanx of hard-core lesbian feminists, the obligatory few crazies, lost already in their own impenetrable agendas, a shaven-headed young woman exhibiting a fetishistic interest in body piercing and tattoos, a nun.

“What we’ve just been watching,” the first speaker pronounced, “is the classic scene of ritual punishment, ritual cleansing. The female protagonist has transgressed the laws of her male-dominated world. The camera, while delighting in her sexuality-remember the first shots in the film, almost like a contemporary advertisement for Wonderbra, the way they emphasize her wantonness, the size and shape of her breasts, lying there on the bed while her lover gets dressed-the camera still punishes her for it. And us, as audience. Having pried on her, involved us in her secret activity, aroused us with her sexuality, it becomes her attacker, the movements of the camera becoming those of the knife, taking us, whether we want to or not, deep down into the cut.

“But Hitchcock being Hitchcock, extreme chauvinist that he was, these extremes of punishment that we witness, and in which we are forced to participate, are not carried out by a man. As the end of the film makes clear, it is only when Norman Bates is taken over by the other half of his divided personality, the mother half, that these murderous impulses come to the surface. Norman didn’t kill the Janet Leigh figure, Norman’s mother did. It is the female, the feminine side of our nature that is the site of evil here, the blood is on our hands.”

It was some seven minutes short of eleven o’clock. Before the first break at noon, they would see brief extracts from Hellraiser, Dressed to Kill, and Hallowe’en. In the afternoon there were separate seminars, running simultaneously, one on women’s fiction-In the Cut, The End of Alice, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Zombie-the other devoted to sado-masochism and the fetishization of the female body in high fashion. Everyone would come back together at the end of the day for a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, followed by a final question and answer session and discussion.

Sister Teresa had brought sandwiches and a thermos of tea and sat on one of the low walls outside the media center, talking to a lecturer from Trent University and an earnest young man with a disturbing look of Anthony Perkins about him, who was in his first year of studying video and film. The person she really wanted to talk to was the bald woman with the wonderful tattoos.

“Aren’t you the one who does that radio program?” the lecturer asked suddenly, her eyes brightening. “Sister something-or-other, is that you?”

Teresa smiled apologetically and did her best to deflect the question.

Why was it, she thought, people were always so fascinated with nuns? Especially today, when there was all that sex and repression up there on the screen? At least they weren’t showing Black Narcissus, that was something to be grateful for. Although in a rash moment a year or so back, Sister Bonaventura had confessed that it was Kathleen Byron’s portrayal of a nun in that film which had persuaded her into holy orders, the messianic look of jubilation in her face before throwing herself to her death.

Sister Teresa’s other colleague from their order, Sister Marguerite, would be attending that afternoon, specifically to go to the seminar on fetishism and fashion; after prayers that morning, she had threatened to break with protocol and go along wearing her traditional habit. See what they have to say about that!

Hannah and Jane were sitting just inside the Café Bar, sharing a crowded table with Mollie Hansen and several other members of the Broadway staff.

“So what do you think?” Mollie asked, spooning chocolatey froth from her cappuccino toward her mouth. “The turnout. You pleased?”

“Why, yes,” Jane said, excited. “Aren’t you? I mean, I never thought … I suppose fifty, you know, that would have been terrific. Saturday, people away. But this, well, there must be getting on for eighty, don’t you think?”

“Sixty-nine.” Mollie matter-of-fact, chocolate or no chocolate.

“Are you sure? I would have thought … But, well, it’s still good; it is, isn’t it? Okay? I mean, you are pleased?

“Oh, yes. Yes, it’s fine.”

“I thought it got us off to a good start,” Hannah said. “The first session. She had some really interesting things to say. Don’t you think that’s right?”

“I thought she was great,” enthused Jane. “Really, really good.”

“She was all right,” said Mollie, who had heard it all before and was wondering if she would bother going back after the break.

Jane had decided to go to the session on fashion, and since Hannah had done all of the reading for the fiction seminar, she would go there. Arriving slightly late, Hannah found herself sitting next to Sister Teresa, who had positioned herself midway along the back row, and immediately behind the young woman with the shaven head.

The group leader, a journalist and published writer herself, kicked things off with some observations about writer and reader, killer and victim, male and female, the weapon and the wound. She referred to an article on slasher movies which talked about the Final Girl, the one woman strong and resourceful enough to defeat the serial attacker, rather than becoming his victim. “The same,” she said, “in books. Books by men. Think about The Silence of the Lambs. But here, in these books we’ve been reading by women, this doesn’t happen. There is no escape.”

She paused and looked out at her audience.

“Now is this because these women writers are more bloodthirsty than their male counterparts, want to scare us, chill us more? Or are they simply being more realistic, more serious, more concerned with the truth? If we become, as some of the female characters in these novels do, fascinated by violence, especially by a combination of violence and sexuality, then there is a price to pay. If you stick us-as someone, as far as we know not a woman, once famously said-do we not bleed?”

She sat down to the sound of coughing, furious scribbling, and some generous applause.

The questions were not all as productive as they might have been; as was often the case, too many people were concerned to state their given positions instead of opening out the discussion. But Sister Teresa asked a quiet, well-formed question about the absence of any wider spiritual morality within which to contain a more individual, sexual one, to which the shaven-haired young woman, who turned out to have a soft, Southern Irish accent, responded by comparing the sexual wounds received by women, the often ritual nature of their bleeding, with the Christian tradition of the piercing of the body of Christ.

At the end of the hour, Hannah’s own question, about women asserting their right to explore the nature of their own fascination with violence and domination, remained unasked.

Time for tea, a quick cigarette or two for some, a degree of female bonding, and then back in for the main feature. Teresa barely had time to catch up with Sister Marguerite, her face aglow from good strong argument; for Hannah, a few moments in which to observe Jane’s continuing elation that the project on which she had worked so hard was proving such a success.

As she was slipping back in through the front doors, Hannah passed Mollie Hansen, slipping out.

“Not staying for the film, then?”

Mollie shook her head. “I’ve seen it already.”

“And?”

Mollie smiled her oddly invigorating smile. “It’s bollocks. If you want an informed opinion.” And, sports bag slung over her shoulder, hurried off to her workout in the gym.

Some hundred and thirty-nine minutes later, stumbling somewhat numbed out into daylight, Hannah wondered if Mollie might not have been right. For all those around her who spoke with admiration of the director’s control of the big action sequences, or Ralph Fiennes’ beauty, there were others who were appalled by the inclusion of a lengthy rape sequence, shot almost entirely from the point of view of the male aggressor.

“Talk about ending the day where you started off,” said one of the group, hollering her exasperation. “You expect that kind of thing from someone like Hitchcock, but this is a woman, for fuck’s sake!”

“Well, I’m sorry,” said another. “But I loved it. Every minute.”

Sister Teresa had remained in the cinema some sixty seconds into the scene in question before leaving.

Hannah looked around for Jane, to give her a final hug of congratulation, but failed to pick her out in the crowd that was milling around the service area in the Café Bar. Tired, stimulated, Hannah headed along Goose Gate in the opposite direction to that taken by Lynn Kellogg the night before. She would phone Jane later.

When she rang Jane’s number at twenty-five past seven, Alex answered abruptly that she hadn’t yet arrived home; at half past nine, there was no answer, and Hannah left a brief message on the machine. It was past one in the morning, Hannah alone in her bed and not quite able to sleep, when Alex phoned her: Jane had still not returned, nor been in touch; he had seen nothing of her, neither hide nor hair.