Carnivorous hotels - Michelle Lovric

Until very late in its pre-publication life, The Wishing Bones was called The Hotel of What You Want. Naturally, that’s because it’s about a hotel where exactly what you don’t want is what befalls you. Indeed your worst nightmares would be pleasant daydreams compared to the evil operations of ‘The Hotel of What You Want’.

There was always going to be a hotel novel. I love hotels. I am a child of hotels and a grandchild of hotels. Hotels are in my blood. Up until my twelfth year, my grandparents ran and lived in a grand hotel called the Carrington in the genteel Blue Mountains resort of Katoomba, a few hours by train from my home-town of Sydney, and several decades behind the city that was even then an edgy combination of chic and brash. Katoomba was my first experience of time-travel, and I loved it.


The Carrington Hotel , perched above Katoomba railway station,
Blue Mountains, in 1890: City Library and Wikimedia Commons. 

The air up in Katoomba was dry and spicy with the scent of Eucalyptus; the shops sold old-fashioned sweets and the world’s most grotesque dolls, known as ‘mountain devils’. These were complicated horned seed-pods of the wild honey flower, dried and mounted on pipe-cleaners and then dressed in dreamy ball-dresses. I collected mountain devil ladies of fashion and created auto-ethnographies for them - sadly, none extant.

Katoomba Street was almost as sleepy as this when I used to frequent it.
 State Library of New South Wales, Wikimedia Commons.

But the best thing about Katoomba was the Carrington, and I adored almost every inch of it. I was a child who hated growing up in Australia. I craved Europe and the old world. The Carrington delivered every possible old world trope: fluted columns, a suit of armour in the hall, a grandfather clock, stained glass windows, conservatories, the billiard room.

The entrance to the Carrington -  Sardaka and Wikimedia Commons

Even then I had a passion for architectural detail

In the dining room of my memory stood stalwart Chinese vases, far taller than a child. Behind them was a good place to hide from the cook who was known to hate and rumoured to eat children. A magnolia tree bent over the swimming pool, casting its blooms into the water like waterlilies. Romantically, it even snowed occasionally in Katoomba. The railway station was next door to the hotel; trains chuckled quietly to themselves all night.

My favourite place was probably the little minstrels’ gallery above the ballroom. There was a sad dearth of minstrels. So that eyrie became the den for myself, my sisters and a cousin. Being the spoilt grand-spawn of the bosses, we were served an almost fatally sweet cherry cordial that the staff called ‘Dragon’s Blood’. (Orange juice would have probably tasted better, but we were not going to pass on Dragon’s Blood.)

There was even an element of Gothic horror. The Carrington’s plumbing was terrifyingly percussive in the night. Click, howls and growls emerged from the radiators. The bedrooms were reached via endless corridors clad in vivid Turkey carpet, thick enough to mask creeping footsteps. I was terrified of the black lioness sculptures that lurked in unexpected corners up there. I felt their eyes swivelling to watch me. I felt their breath on my neck. I used to run past them as fast as I could, my heart beating fit to burst. And yes, in The Wishing Bones, those black lionesses stalk The Hotel of What You Want, one of those screamingly obvious warnings that guests in haunted houses never ever heed, making them almost complicit in their own murders.

The Carrington was in my mind when I started writing The Wishing Bones, though by this time both my writing and my life had transferred to Venice. In Venice, I found a shabby building that seemed to be melting into a quiet canal. It had the appropriate hidden entrances and a water-gate convenient for the disposing of bodies. So this was the building I chose when elaborating on an idea for keeping English tourists both entertained and detained in Venice: pink window awnings containing dioramas with mechanical models inside to represent all those exciting cities in Europe that it would, in truth, be uncomfortable, hot and dusty to visit.

In my dioramas, I was initially inspired by lantern-box shows or mondi nuovi, as the Venetians called them, could be seen on the streets in the eighteenth century, providing magical-seeming glimpses of other worlds and wild creatures, apparent ghosts and devils. In fact, it is thought that the magic lantern or ‘lantern of fear’ was invented by Giovanni Fontana, a Venetian, in the fifteenth century. In the time when this book is set, an era before movies, televisions or computer screens, the dioramas of the Hotel of What You Want would have seemed like magic. The fresco below by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo shows crowds clustering around a Mondo Novo. It comes from the frescoes of the Villa di Zianigo, courtesy of the Web Gallery of Art.

But I am not the first person to think of miniature tableaux of moving parts inside an eyelid-shaped awning. The artist Mariano Fortuny Marsal (1871–1949) made his home near San Samuele in Venice in the late nineteenth century. This dashing portrait of him comes from Wikimedia Commons.

In 1899, Fortuny began to experiment with lighting and scenery engineering for the theatre. In April 2012, when I was starting to think about the Wishing Bones, his theatrical models were on display in the Venetian palazzo that now bears his name. They included a structure like a delicately pleated eyelid that could open and close. Fortuny also made ‘cloud machinery’ of painted glass on tilting frames. In his time, electric light was available to illuminate the ‘moving clouds’. In the world of my novel, there are only lanterns, plus small wind-up automatons and delicate toys that could be powered by the warmth of a candle.

I’d written the second draft by the time I found out I was also not the first person to think of a hotel as a useful place to kill guests and harvest their body parts for money. Researching the history of hotels, I came across the 19th century case of Herman Webster Mudgett, whose establishment in Chicago had more in common with an abattoir than a hotel. I found a 2003 book by Erik Larsen The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.


a reliquary box of tiny bone fragments
from different saints
Science Museum, courtesy of Wellcome Images

At first I was a little crestfallen But my book’s set in 1740, and in Venice. It has other elements: a cruel convent where children are worked as slaves. fake saints’ relics, mermaids, vampire eels and prophecies. So I decided that Mudgett was a suitable research resource. After all, the task of the fantasy novelist is to create a believable scenario. Mudgett’s grisly techniques actually worked, so I prepared myself to read and learn. Larsen’s book is fascinating, twinning the story of the psychopath Mudgett with that of the decent people who battled against all odds to create a stunning World Fair.

 One of the first known serial killers in America, Herman Webster Mudgett, trained as a doctor – and went by the name of Dr Henry Howard Holmes. However he discovered that murder could be more lucrative than medicine and better suited to his chilling talents for seduction. Mudgett was well-groomed, exquisitely dressed, well-spoken and the owner of a pair of hypnotic blue eyes plus the classic villain’s droopy moustache. He looked good in a hat. Like many psychopaths, he possessed an ability to make women fall hopelessly in love with him and to believe everything he told them – right up until the moment when he murdered them. Also in keeping with his psychopath trope, even as a child he’d had a morbid interest in the killing and dissecting of animals. His lack of squeamishness around corpses led him to a scam even when still a medical student: stealing and mutilating teaching cadavers to try to claim insurance pay-outs in faked names.

In Mudgett’s time, Chicago was home to the Union Stock Yards, the great abattoir of its day – a fact that was probably not lost on him. The city was also about to host the World’s Fair, which would bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city. So it was there that Mudgett opened a three-storey maze of a hotel in 1893. Its official name was ‘The World's Fair Hotel’ but its grandiose size led locals to call it ‘The Castle’ . It was not a welcoming place, being gloomy and dark. The layout was illogical and unfriendly. The room rates were not expensive. But that was because Mudgett made his real profits from selling the corpses of the guests and employees he murdered.

Mudgett had changed builders several times during its construction so that no one but himself knew all its secrets. Those included airtight rooms set up as gas chambers, a soundproof vault and a greased chute for discreetly dropping the bodies of his victims down to the basement so that he wouldn’t have to drag them through the corridors and down the stairs. In the basement were an operating table for dissecting the bodies and a special kiln for incineration. Mudgett sent some remains to an ‘articulator’ who prepared the skeletons for sale to medical schools.

Over several years, Mudgett got away with uncountable crimes. He may well have kept his victims alive in their sealed rooms for long periods before he killed them. Suspicion was eventually aroused by the large quantities of chloroform he bought and the number of missing girls who had at one time or another stayed or worked at the hotel. It was also discovered that all employees had been obliged take out a life-insurance policy in Mudgett’s name.

Mudgett eventually confessed to 27 murders but he may have killed ten times that number. He persuaded some victims to take out life insurance policies that named him as the beneficiary. So he earned from their deaths twice over. Mudgett, who had three wives at the same time, was eventually arrested and tried after he kidnapped three children and killed them in different cities in America. His dissecting chamber was discovered in the subsequent investigation.

A fire conveniently destroyed much of his carnivorous hotel before the full story could be uncovered. However, detectives had already located a vat of acid containing eight human ribs and a skull, his incineration kiln and his dissection table, human hair in a stovepipe, blood-stained overalls, high heeled shoes, a dress and substantial quantities of quicklime. Also found were a shoulder blade, a hip socket, a foot bone and more ribs.

While in prison, Mudgett wrote three different sets of confessions and a memoir, all full of lies. Some of the people he claimed to have killed were still alive. But many more missing people seemed to have crossed his path. Of himself, he said, ‘I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing -- I was born with the "Evil One" standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.’

 The Chicago Times-Herald wrote: ‘He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character.’

He was hanged in Philadelphia on May 7th, 1896, leaving elaborate instructions for his own burial to ensure that no one would ever dismember or dissect his corpse. His coffin, he insisted, had to be encased in concrete and buried ten feet deep. Mudgett of course knew better than anyone what kind of disrespect could befall a dead body.

Some of Mudgett’s diabolical ideas turned out to answer problems I had set myself in my plot. My dark fantasy was more than equalled by his reality. Mudgett had added baroque curlicues I could not have dreamt up.

Not surprisingly there's any amount of lurid and tasteless material online about Mudgett. If you’d like to see images of the hotel, this is one of the least offensive videos. I earnestly suggest you avoid the others.

The Wishing Bones has had a long gestation and it changed more than its title along the way to publication. A year after I started it, the wonderfully shabby Venetian building I'd chosen for it had a makeover and was painted a crisp russet red. Its romance died. So did its loucheness and decadence. It looked almost suburban. If I didn't live in Venice, I would have felt the need to find a new Hotel of What You Want. But I do. That meant I knew that humidity would reclaim those walls within a few years. And so it has. By the time The Wishing Bones is year old, that building in the Calle Racheta will look pretty much as it did before the owners spent all those euros on it.

A few years ago I went back to the Carrington. It had been ‘done up’. To me, it seemed as if it had been ‘done over’. It felt corporate, unwelcoming. Even if I’d been allowed to do so, I would not have wanted to go upstairs to inspect the black lionesses or put my ear against the ululating radiators. I feared both lionesses and antique plumbing been purged. I did not check on the minstrels' gallery or the tall vases in the dining room. Being in prosaic company at the time, poetic memories were not evoked: the modern Carrington did not dent the porous old container in which I keep them.

And perhaps that’s for the best. They're still safe where they are.

Michelle Lovric’s website

The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th

New website pages about the book can be seen here.

A shorter version of this story has appeared in COLLECTED, writings from Royal Literary Fund Fellows on the RLF website.

Tetchy Madonnas when you need them – Michelle Lovric

Make your way around any corner in Venice and you may lock eyes with a Madonna in a niche or a miniature chapel. She might be painted, sculpted or made from mosaic tiles. There may be a candle, a lamp or a vase in front of her. She usually cradles the Holy Infant. These street shrines are known capitelli (or capitèi in Venetian dialect). Many date back to the 15th century, a time when they provided not just metaphorical and spiritual illumination but actual street-lighting. Most are to be found, for that reason, in ‘sottoportici’ (tunnel-like passageways) or by bridges and near jetties.

The city appointed people to set a lantern in every capitello by night. There was a tradition of leaving flowers there too. To lend sanctity to business arrangements, contracts might be signed in front of them. And of course a Madonna might serve as a kind spiritual proto-security camera on the street: few would want to commit a crime in front of those steady eyes. Those were times when no one would have dreamed of stealing a holy image, but most often, these days, the Madonnas are behind bars, like solemn canaries in ornate cages.


There are more than 500 capitelli in Venice: 136 in Castello; 91 in Cannaregio; 43 in Santa Croce; 43 in San Polo; 114 in Dorsoduro, of which 35 are on Giudecca; 83 in San Marco. It is interesting to note that the highest proportion of the figures are in the poorer zones of Castello and Cannaregio. The painting above, by James Holland, is entitled A Shrine in Venice (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). It shows women of the city sewing, talking and praying in front of a capitello, which serves both as an extension of sacred space but also as a meeting place.

I’m not the only or even the first person to notice that the Virgins inside these little chapels often look rather disapproving. I discovered that my artist friend, Christine Morley, who’s recorded many of them, has also felt the aura of severity that radiates from some of these Virgins. To Christine, they seem like stern gate-keepers to a world beyond the wall, a secret place behind the forbidding bars and grates of their niches.

Of course, over hundreds of years these Venetian Madonnas have seen it all, which may account for their expressions. Meanwhile, full of grace She obviously is, but is not the Virgin Mary one of the most put-upon women ever?

A couple of years ago, I started holding conversations (in my head) with some of these dimly-lit ladies-of-the-night as I walked around the city. Those conversations took a turn I had not expected. This is why: although each street-Madonna is as individual as Her artist could render Her, each personifies the same Mother of God. So I felt that the Madonnas from Castello to Santa Croce would in fact talk with the same voice and have the same preoccupations – including annoyance at noisy passers-by waking the Holy Infant when She’d just got Him down.

No matter whether painted or carved, my Madonna-of-the-moment was always irreproachably virtuous in tone, but also just a little bit reproachful, not to say tetchy. Irritation is a gift for a writer: it scratches up interesting vocabulary. So you won’t be surprised to hear that this slightly vinegary Madonna-of-many-manifestations soon became a character in a children’s book, The Wishing Bones, which will be published next month.

Children have always had the run of Venice. It’s safer than cities with carriages and now cars. In The Wishing Bones, I write of the ‘secret sacred ties’ between Venetians, binding all her citizens to one another with affection. The picture below right shows mother holding her child up to a painted Madonna at capitello near the entrance to the Doges Palace (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). A slightly older Venetian child, on his or her daily journeys, would pass by dozens of Madonnas, and it seemed logical to me that their universal Mother would probably have a few things to say to them. I imagined that Our Lady would be keen on personal hygiene in a city that was obsessed with health matters (if Venice ever got the reputation of being a sick city, her international trade would have been in danger). So I thought She’d probably want Her supplicants to have clean hands. Running noses would be absolutely out.


 

Venice identifies comprehensively with the Virgin Mary. The city’s very founding date – March 25th – is the same as that of the Annunciation. This scene is depicted in marble on the Rialto Bridge. But in my book, Our (understandably Ornery) Lady has to deal with rival protectresses of the city: mermaids who live beneath it. Pagan mermaids and Madonnas – bound to be a problem. Then there’s a convent where fake relics of saints are churned out by orphans working as slaves in cruel conditions – an offence to any mother. Saint Lucy’s bones have been kidnapped. A prophecy dictates that, if this happens, the secret sacred ties between Venetians will break down, leading to blows and blood in the street. Really, for a Madonna in 1740, when The Wishing Bones is set, there’s a lot to be tetchy about.

The whole issue of mermaids and Madonnas is played out, in everyone’s favourite church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli. Inside, Tullio Lombardo’s friezes of beautiful young mermaids enclose an ancient miracle-working painting of a Madonna. In The Wishing Bones, the young Miracoli mermaids, clearly victimized by adolescent hormones, briefly flee their frieze to join the villains. (Then they’re very sorry).

Back to the real-lifeVenetian capitelli. They have their own story arc. While loved and maintained by the state and the public, the street-Madonnas have not been immune to passing time. By the middle of the nineteenth century the little chapels were under threat, some degraded by the centuries, some removed or damaged during restructuring and renovations. So in 1870 a group of young Catholics set up an organisation to defend them. The city was divided into sections and groups of young Venetians patrolled the streets, making sure all was well with the capitelli.

By the twentieth century, the chapels were under a different threat – chemicals coming from the factory suburb of Marghera. A new generation of capitelli protectors, the Amici dei capitèi, was formed but later absorbed into one of the bigger organisations that protect sacred monuments, I.R.S.E.P.S.

It's not surprising that the gondoliers still have their own waterborne capitelli. These little green shrines are to be seen at the stazioni where the traghetto services run. Inside their mullioned windows you can make out tiny Madonnas. If Venice were living her best life right now, those Madonnas would be doing something to protect her from the cruise liners.

But this is real life, and fiction can only imagine away the brutal ugliness and danger of the cruise ships. That’s increasingly hard, with the news of the massive Viking Sigyn running down a smaller vessel on the Danube in Budapest two weeks ago; with the vast MSC Opera smashing, out of control, into a river-cruise boat and then into the Zattere in Venice on June 2nd; with the 30th anniversary of Marchioness disaster approaching in August; with the Thames now threatened with the arrival of Europe’s biggest party boat, the Ocean Diva, which is the length of a football pitch and hosts 1500 revellers. The great historic cities of Europe are succumbing to Dubai-ification.

 

Not just Venice but Barcelona, Amsterdam, Bergen and many others have succumbed to this brutal commodification by the mega-companies that run fleets of vast boats. The protest movements are energetic and creative, but what Venetians called 'interessi' are deeply entrenched. Too many people, it seems, have fingers in the pie: not just the cruise operators but also those institutions that licence piers and party boats; also, those companies that service and provide catering for them.

 

Too much greed leads to too many monsters cramming into the same far-too-finite waterways. The danger to life and the ruination of heritage views are all too visible; possibly worse are the invisible dangers of nitrogen oxide, sulphur and particulates, for marine fuel is many times more toxic that land diesel. These poisons make their ways into the lungs of the citizens and they also destroy public art. The statue at right, on the Gesuati church, is just a few hundred yards from where the MSC Opera struck the shore. In a city without cars, boat emissions are the only reason for the blackening and blunting of this saintly figure.

Writing about, and so living in the 18th century, I can blot the mega-ships off my horizons. However, into my next book, currently entitled The Palace that Ate Boys, has crept the notion of certain public offices in the city – those charged with protecting Venice – instead welcoming in a terrible blight in exchange for sackfuls of money …

Michelle Lovric's website
The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th in the UK.

Last week marked the second anniversary of the terror attack at London Bridge and the Borough Market. Five hundred people were locked in or out of their homes for days, as their streets became a crime scene. A year ago, at Southwark Cathedral, members of the community performed a play made up of excerpts of their longer testimonies. This year, the Cathedral has posted the text of Testimony online so everyone can read it.

The Curious Incidence of Light Dancing in Dark Places - Michelle Lovric

The protagonist of my forthcoming novel is called “Sorrowful Lily”, and her burdens are great: she’s an orphan with none of the secret sacred ties that bind all Venetians to one another in affection; she’s the self-doubting daughter of a madwoman; worse, she’s particular scapegoat of a cruel Sicilian badessa in the grim convent where she’s brought up.

However, Sorrowful Lily is coaxed into a rare moment of optimism and joy by a phenomenon that I think unique to Venice – the way illogical and unlikely light dances on the undersides of bridges, on high facades and on ceilings, places where these lacy kinetic illuminations don’t seem to have any business to be.

Lily’s experiences what some call “gibigiana” and others “sbarlusso” when she tries to run away from her latest captor, the woman who runs the mysterious hotel where she's been sent to work as a punishment for setting fire to the convent. Venice, meanwhile, has been glowering grey and sunless for months since someone stole the foot of the city’s beloved Saint Lucy.

To Lily’s horror, the Signorina turns out to be the sister of the very badessa she thought she’d left behind at the convent. Worse, Lily remembers that the last orphan sent to “The Hotel of What You Want” was never seen again.

In this extract from The Wishing Bones, Lily’s just crossed the hotel’s threshold for the first time ...

The door was open. I breathed the air of freedom and took a step towards it. 

    ‘Aldo!’ shouted the Signorina. ‘Show her what happens to girls who try to escape!’
 
    I fled. But my first turn led me into a blind alley that ended in a canal. At a safe distance from the water, I leaned panting against the bricks watching the ripples of the waves that were reflected like starbursts on the underside of the arch. We Venetians have a word for that watery, wavering light: sbarlusso.

   Of course, with Saint Lucy’s foot gone, the light was sunless and today the sbarlusso winked sadly, like a widowed uncle.

  ‘Sbarlusso,’ I said aloud, still panting. That’s what my life would be like – free, scintillating, lively – without sisters from Sicily to insult, bend and beat me. I would find decent work. I would make some secret sacred ties of my own.

    I felt the rumble of footsteps before I even heard them. Then my arms were pinioned behind my back and a sack thrown over my head. I smelled garlic, meat and anger through the coarse weave.

   A man’s voice told me, ‘Thought you’d get away? Don’t make me laugh. I know all about you. You are the daughter of a madwoman. You are not destined to live free. Your wits are not up to it, girlie.’

   This coarse high voice must belong to Aldo, I realised, the man the Signorina had summoned. 

    ‘And if you try that again,’ he whispered, ‘I won’t bother bringing you back. I’ll drown you like a kitten in a bucket. Who’s going to miss you?’

And so Lily is dragged away and back to servitude in the hotel, where the exclusively English guests regularly fall into declines and disappear.

I won’t pretend that The Wishing Bones isn’t a very dark novel. And indeed my last post in this parish was about Venice in the physical and metaphorical night. But even the deepest darkness becomes monotonous without light – which is why I allow Lily a little of it.

Not far from me in Venice is a glass shop called “Gibigiana”.

The owner told me this week that he’d named the shop after the phenomenon because of the light trapped inside the best of his delicate productions – like this teardrop of a bottle.

And it's true that the best Venetian glass does reflect what you see on the facades of buildings that breathe in the light of the water:

It was a luminous April this year. But I talked to Gibigiana's proprietor Stefano on a rare day of monsoon-like rain that had driven all the tourists off the streets. They sheltered disconsolately under awnings and in steaming cafes. The light was not dancing through Gibigiana's windows - but somehow, magically, it was still there in the mirrors and jewellery.

Stefano told me that 'Light is different in Venice'. He explained that's because water acts as a mirror, doubling the light and making mischief with it, playing, deceiving.

Meanwhile, he saw that day's kind of rainlight as a “fascino decadente” – a decadent charm, and I understood exactly what he meant.

No one can look at Venice's sbarlusso, in all its forms, without experiencing a strange effect on one's mood. It's a phenomenon of newly-coined light in old or ancient places: a light that's suddenly tarnished with memories.

So I guess sbarlusso really is the right kind of light for a dark kind of novel.


Michelle Lovric’s website

The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th . New web-pages have just gone up, using the wonderful night-time photography of David Winston to set the scene for this dark story.

 One of the characters is a young Casanova. I shall be talking about him at the Casanova in Place symposium in Venice at the end of June.

Commissioning a reliquary of Rose la Touche - Michelle Lovric

This post is a meditation on the confluence of belief, grief and love. It’s also about how research takes you into places of the heart as well as crevices of the brain.

There are some stabs of wretchedness that all bereavements have in common. The brute sense of loss comes to anyone who loses a parent, a friend or partner, a child, a sibling or trust in someone they thought they knew.

But what do you do with mess of feelings that darken your life when a pet dies? Mixed up in all the mess is shame. Pet-death is first-world problem. The drama in your home and heart is dwarfed by the crises in Syria, Yemen and all the humanitarian scars on the world map today.

And yet, grief there is, and it must be dealt with.

Anyone who has recently lost a cat may need to look away now.

Rose La Touche of Harristown was named after the girl who inspired John Ruskin with devotion. (I urge everyone to read this definitive article by James Spates about the relationship between Ruskin and Rose. It demolishes the prurient myths that have served too long instead of truth).

The human Rose La Touche died tragically young of a brain fever. The feline Rose was a recycled rescue cat, so I could not be sure of her age. She was an inveterate tea-rustler. She liked it with milk and sugar, as I do. She hated pretty much everyone except me, and made her disdain quite clear, which was somehow gratifying. Anyone who telephoned me would be informed by Rose – nosing into the telephone mouthpiece – that any more than a few minutes of my time was an outrageous theft from her. During dinner parties she would sit up in the beams, sneering down at guests and sometimes flicking dust on to their plates.

Rose struggled through her last year. She fell from one of the beams, tearing her side on an old nail, breaking both a leg and her spirit. She was never the same cat. She grew profoundly deaf. She became a night-howler and began to walk not like the Pink Panther but like a prematurely old lady. She had fits.

In the end, she suffered a stroke and went blind. I made the classic error of cruelty through imagined kindness, keeping her alive far too long, anointing her with noxious ointments I had couriered in from America. (Yes, there is quackery for cats too, expensively and emolliently marketed.)

Finally, I let Rose go. Even though I watched her die, I found could not quite accept that she was fully gone. Painfully, I imagined her, like this image, dancing in the dark. Rose and I listened to a lot of Springsteen together, so this image has a sound track.

At the time Rose died, I was thinking a great deal about saints and relics, drafting out ideas for a children's historical novel that eventually became The Wishing Bones. It started as YA but I was asked to change it down to Middle Grade. So I faced the challenge of trying to explain the potency of saints' relics in a way that would make sense to a readership of relative young children of all faiths and none.

In the end, I decided to put my explanation in voice of an orphan named Eulalia, known as ‘Sorrowful Lily’. She lives in a convent on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon, the site of a factory churning out fake saint bones. As guests start disappearing from a hotel in Venice, Lily becomes aware that the fakery is not a victimless crime. The date is 1739. At twelve years old, Lily is in some ways naïve, in other ways very knowing. This is how she relates Venice’s obsession with saints and their relics:

 ‘Relics are bits of saints: fingers, knee-bones, skulls, noses, ribs, toes and teeth. Relics can also be things that saints once touched or wore, such as shrouds, nails or sandals.

   The Venetians were mad for a bit of saint. ‘Mad’ is the only word I can use for it, because the Venetians loved those old bones and rags so much. But, like any fairy-story, the mad love of saints has a certain strange sense to it.

   Now I was brought up with these things and so do not think them so odd. But I do declare and admit that if a stranger were to arrive in Venice from a distant planet they would quite probably find our love of bones very hard to understand. So let me try to tell you how it started.

   In the very very old days, when the Christian religion was as new as a fresh laid egg, it was quite a risky thing to be a good Christian. It was against the law. To be an especially good Christian – doing good works like healing the sick – might bring you to the attention of the authorities and then you could find yourself in deadly trouble. You could even find yourself dead – executed by the leaders who worshipped the old gods.

   People who lived or died this way often became saints, the specially honoured servants of God.

   The holiest saints were the ones who were made to suffer horribly for their faith. These ‘martyrs’ were thought to be a bit like Jesus Christ, because he also died for his religion, nailed to a cross in Golgotha in the Holy Land. ‘Martyrdom’ was what also happened when the Romans tried to make the saints give up their religion and worship the old gods. If the saints refused, then the Romans would boil them in a bath like Saint Cecilia, or roast them on a gridiron, and tear their body with tongs and set fire to their hair, like Saint Eulalia, my own patron saint.

   The braveness of these saints won them the special love of God. This meant it was good for ordinary people to pray to them for help in difficult situations. And the prayer was even more powerful if you had a piece of the saint’s body to pray to.

   The saints might have died on earth; they might have been cut into pieces by those who hated and feared them, but their souls were still alive in heaven and could do you a rare amount of good. You could catch holiness yourself, like a cold, from these fragmented parts of a saint’s body. If you owned one of those pieces or prayed in front of it, you could also get special blessings and promises of great things to come.

   Every time a saint died, other Christians would try to touch a bit of his or her skin and even bones, just to get a smudge of holiness on their fingertips or even to graze it with their own eyes. 

   Years and centuries after they died, these saints were still so holy that even one small morsel of their body, even a rusty drop of their dried blood, or a splintery bone from their nose, or one of their toes, was thought to be powerfully holy. So were the sponges and clothes dipped in their blood or their sweat as they suffered their tortures.

   Even after they’d been buried, if these saints were dug up, their bodies would be fresh and whole, and smell of flowers. Those bodies divided into as many pieces as possible so that lots of people could have the benefits.

   Some saints’ bodies were cut up into so many pieces that it seemed they had as many limbs as a centipede. If you believe it all, Saint Gregory must have had four heads and Saint Mary Magdalene had six complete bodies …

   It may seem a gruesome and unkind thing to cut up these much beloved heroes and heroines, but usually the Romans had already broken their bodies, so they were not whole any more.

    And each piece was as important and as holy as the next. Every tooth and every finger was full of special powers to do rare good. And so these little pieces of saints were prized, and sold, and traded; wars were fought over them.

  Rome has the whole bodies of some of the most important saints, like Peter and Paul. But Venice has her share. Of course we have the body of Saint Mark, our patron saint. The blind warrior doge Enrico Dandolo had also sent to Venice the whole body Saint Lucy, an ampoule with the blood of Jesus Christ, a piece of Saint John the Baptist’s skull, the arm of Saint George, and three nails from the cross on which Jesus Christ had been crucified …'

 

What has this to do with Rose la Touche?

Three years and three more books had passed and two new cats arrived, but I found myself still frightened of revisiting the pain of Rose’s death. Trauma’s like that: you get used to the knife embedded in your feelings and you know it will hurt more to pull it out.

Even in memory, Rose was no saint. But I decided that I would see what it felt like to create something tangible in her memory, intending, of course, no offence to any religion. This was not entirely my own idea. I had always admired the work of my dear friend, the mosaic artist Susie Nickerson Palmarin, and I asked her to help me.

Much of Susie’s work plays on three themes interwoven by the media of found objects, mosaics, ink and mortar. Venice is evoked in the theme of relics and reliquaries: small precious objects caught in glass. Literature is evoked by words in mosaic form: letters as tesserae, words as painting, and painting as words. The rhythms of the spoken word are preserved, expressing the artist’s conviction that writing is in itself art. Finally, the artist brings into play the nature of her own medium, the mosaic itself: an interplay of colour and texture, light and concealment, and softness and permanence.

Susie had made a mosaic reliquary for her own beloved cat Arturo after his death. In this beautiful piece, she created a frame of tiny tesserae that simulated Arturo’s tabby fur. In the centre, she set a tiny white funerary bouquet of his whiskers, which she had saved over the years.

I too had a collection of whiskers, some translucent half-moon nails and the fur the vet shaved from Rose before administering her final injection. Susie offered to make a memorial piece that literally incorporated Rose. It would be different to Arturo’s memorial as Rose herself was of course very different. Arturo and Rose were both tabbies – but one was born in Venice and one (I guess) in South London.

Susie immediately asked me for some words to put into her artwork and to guide her. But I was still tongue-tied with grief. The words had fled. Like all novelists, I write about loss persistently, as the changing rhythms of gain and loss shape every story. But faced with the actual aching absence of Rose la Touche, words seemed trivial. As for writing something ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’ – that was not appropriate to the continuing brute reality of Rose’s absence. What I was feeling could not be accessorized, elaborated or made picturesque. Yet it was quietly and sometimes loudly omnipresent, like certain kinds of physical pain.

Last year French artist Sophie Calle produced a kind of reliquary for her cat Souris. Calle, famous for her multi-disciplinary collaborations, did it her characteristic way. When Souris was close to death, Calle called on a friend to whisper the words of a song into her dying cat’s ears. Later, she requested a full song as a tribute to Souris. Then Calle asked her friend Laurie Anderson to write something. Offers flooded in from other friends and people who heard about the project. They happen to include Bono, Pharrell, Jarvis Cocker and Jean-Michel Jarre. An album evolved, Souris Calle. Some of the 39 contributing artists knew Souris in life. Others were briefed about her with photographs and a video that Calle prepared about her life with Souris. Here’s a sample. The songs and associated artwork turned into an exhibition in Paris.

As Sophie Calle commented, ‘I am not the only person who has ever lost a cat.’

And nor am I. But like Calle, I felt the need to respond to the loss: to create something lasting from my memories of a cat who lived too short a life.

So how did Rose’s reliquary turn out?

Having given Susie the raw ingredients of fur, whiskers, claws and love, I asked her to surprise me.

And she did. She chose a rose-coloured gesso background and on it she too imagined Rose – housebound in real life – running through a forest of trees in the light of a setting sun – that time when cats are most twitchingly themselves. She set Rose’s corporeal relics into a silver skeleton of a leaf.

The words I finally delivered were without sentiment, Susie reproduced them on the front and the back: Here lie the remains of Rose La Touche of Harristown, the beloved green-eyed tabby of Michelle. No-one knows where she was born but she lived from around 1997 till 2011. She will never be forgotten by anyone who met her and she is sadly missed, sadly missed, sadly missed.

And yes, she still is. But the reliquary helps.

 

Made with Susie’s love, including the immortal parts of Rose, it really does.

Michelle Lovric’s website

Photographs of Susie’s work by Giordano Russo and Aurelia S. Palmarin

The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th, 2019. The extract above is from an earlier draft.
I'm afraid I don't know the source of the image of the cat dancing in the dark, but happy to add credit if someone can identify it.