Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter Page A

crossed her face, he laughed until silenced by a brief spasm of coughing.
    ‘What’s that?’ she exclaimed.
    ‘Donally says,’ he told her when he could speak. ‘Swallow you up and incorporate you, see. Dr Donally says. Social psychology. I’ve nailed you on necessity, you poor bitch.’
    When he left her to collect his rifle, she was too weak to attempt to run away. He also picked up her bundles, which had fallen from the tree with her, and offered her his hand. She ignored it and scrambled upright. She put him at a distance with an impersonal question.
    ‘You must use a good deal of ammunition, since you operate a hunting economy. And do you steal it all?’
    ‘Every bullet, yes.’
    ‘What will you do if they stop casting bullets?’
    ‘Bows and arrows, like the Out People,’ he said with disinterest for the Professors continued to cast bullets and he was prepared to cross the bridge of their ceasing to do so when he arrived at it. He mimed the gesture of drawing a long bow and watched a non-existent arrow fly off into the air. And his elegance and style in doing this were so remarkable and so archaic that, although Marianne disliked him intensely, she could not help but marvel.
    ‘You’d take to bows and arrows like a duck to water,’ she said. ‘You are a complete anachronism.’
    Though, as soon as she had said it, she wondered if it were true, for he blended into the landscape around them while she herself did not.
    ‘What’s an anachronism,’ he said darkly. ‘Teach me what an anachronism is.’
    ‘A pun in time,’ she replied cunningly, so that he would not understand her.
    ‘Come off it,’ he growled; he was by no means an intellectual.
    ‘A thing that once had a place and a function but now has neither any more.’
    ‘Well, well,’ said Jewel, once more self-possessed. At that, they began to walk through the wood the way she had come. All the time, he repeated the word ‘anachronism’ over and over under his breath, as though learning it by heart, until she suspected mockery. He stopped to shoot a rabbit.
    ‘Look, do I really have to marry you?’ she asked despairingly. He dangled the dead rabbit by its hind legs; its iridescent ears trailed in the grass and blood dripped from its nose.
    ‘So it would seem,’ he replied.
    She kicked a tuft of briars.
    ‘My father said it would be a deep spiritual experience,’ she remarked bitterly.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Defloration. And presumably marriage, for he saw the two as complementary.’
    ‘He went in for that kind of thing, did he?’ said Jewel.
    ‘He was only married the once.’
    ‘What I meant was, he had the time to think about things, did he?’ explained Jewel laboriously.
    ‘Thinking was his function.’
    ‘Are they going to pickle his brain and keep it in a jar?’ demanded Jewel. ‘Or was he a preserved brain at the best of times?’
    ‘Talk like that about my father and I’ll kill you.’
    ‘You wouldn’t know how,’ he said.
    He saw another rabbit and shot it; that made two. When they came in sight of the house again, her courage almost failed her and she tried to run away. He tripped her up easily. Her face was naked with misery and nausea; he shrugged, set the muzzle of the rifle between her shoulders and walked her in this fashion into the courtyard at the back of the house. Here, Mrs Green squatted on the ground scraping food from a frying pan into the half-witted boy’s dish. He raced round at the end of his chain, yelping.
    ‘Right or wrong, he’s going to get a square meal, whatever Donally says,’ she said. Then, blinking, she recognized the figures before her.
    ‘What have you been doing to her?’
    Jewel lowered his rifle and laid the dead rabbits in his foster-mother’s arms. Marianne stared at the ground, her face stiff with silence; he took hold of her chin, and, raising her face, forced her to look him in the eyes.
    ‘The lady has lost her smile in the woods,’ he said.
    ‘And not only her smile,