by Alex Pheby
When we eventually excavated all the rock from the shaft, there was another disagreement as to which of us would have the honour of breaching the chamber; there was insufficient room for us both to be lowered in safely. This was our first indication that the tomb might be unusual, since an adult male’s sarcophagus will generally require a wide enough shaft to allow two men to enter at once; perhaps this was the burial site of a woman or a child.
The matter was decided by the drawing of lots, and I won (although as they let me down I wondered whether I had thought it through – he could, after all, order me buried alive and return when I was dead).
I had heard that an undisturbed tomb has a particular odour that emanates from the oils and resins that the corpse and the burial wrappings are preserved in. This, very excitingly, was present in our tomb.
I asked for a torch to be thrown down and I lit it, trembling. A little disappointingly, the tomb was small, roughly hewn, and was vandalised, despite appearing to be intact from the surface.
The statue is censed with the smoke of burning aromatics
First, the corpse is eviscerated. They enter the skull by breaking the ethmoid bone with a metal implement, and stir the brain until it is liquid enough to be drained through the nose. The interior is then rinsed with palm wine and frankincense. Having no further use, the brain is discarded.
THE DESECRATOR OF THE MORTUARY LITERATURE
THE GARDEN OF , MAY 1988
The box was more a chest, or one of those trunks that first-class passengers’ lackeys loaded aboard the Titanic – the sort that got pushed up the rickety gangway, with brass at the corners and a double barrelled name stencilled on the side.
It was bloody heavy, and very difficult to drag across the tarmac. His orders were to avoid the house – which was the quickest way – and the next shortest route had steps.
There was nothing for it: brute strength would win the day! Oh, for an abandoned shopping trolley! He didn’t care what brand; anything pushed into the bushes would do. There was nothing like that round here, though: it was too well maintained.
Here was Mr .
—What are you waiting for?
—Nothing. Just working out a plan of action. It weighs a tonne. I was wondering whether…
—Bring it round the back.
That had already been established. How wasn’t yet as clear. His was not to reason why… his was to suffer permanent degradation of the lumbar region at the whim of some bossy, old bastard.
Well, if that was the way of it, then it was best to get it over and done with; then he could return all the sooner to the enforced and welcome indolence of the long summer break, his parents mollified, and the impression of a hardworking and dutiful son restored.
*
It wasn’t so bad, once the slope down to the garden kicked in – which was something to be said for riverside places.
—You should set a fire and burn the lot.
That was do-able; the boy scout training proving useful again, despite what everyone said. It was not simply a charitable front for kiddy-fiddlers and retired black-shirts. It equipped a boy for life.
That said, hadn’t this heard of shredders? Presumably not.
—I have lighter fluid.
Well, that was almost an insult! The use of accelerants? Cheating! Where was the skill in that? If the old fellow wanted to go that route, why not do it himself? Anyone can pour lighter fluid into a box and light it.
—Thanks. Where do you want it?
—Anywhere.
—Not on the lawn, though?
—Anywhere.
Anywhere. Right.
—Matches?
The old man patted himself all over and went into the house.
Right. Anywhere. He dragged it over, right into the middle of the grass, by the bird bath, away from any overhanging branches and whatever. In his head a scene played out from Apocalypse Now – the napalming of a jungle, trees aflame, helicopters swooping. Wagner.
He prised the trunk open and… letters. No wonder it was so heavy: thousands of letters. With ribbons and stamps. There were postcards, too.
—Not there! Down by the compost heap.
Not ‘anywhere’ then, for God’s sake! The decrepit fucker couldn’t make eye contact – he was utterly clueless.
Down at the compost heap, produced with a yellowed hand a rectangular tin of lighter fluid, which was also yellow, and then Cook’s Matches, the box for which was more yellow.
—I want to keep this trunk.
Really? How was that going to work?
—Well, sir, I can’t burn them one at a time, can I?
—Why not?
Because there were fucking thousands of them.
—Perhaps you have an old metal dustbin? Or a barbecue?
—I don’t have a barbecue. He didn’t have a barbecue.
—So, burn them one at a time.
His back, like a bag of tennis balls, and his head, just visible behind as he walked away, looked eminently kickable.
—Don’t read them!
This was delivered from inside, with old man muttering after.
He wasn’t to read them? He was prohibited from reading them. So now, suddenly, he wanted to read them. The interdiction provoked its own transgression. It defined it. Enforced it. Now in his head was a scene, played out not from Apocalypse Now, but from a tedious Wednesday morning lecture from his subsid. course – a middle-aged man, bearded and beige, laconically indicating words in chalk, unreadable in this memory.
Fuck it.
Thousands! There would be n hours work, where n is a large integer. Perhaps not if there was a system: perhaps if he lit each letter from the flames of the last, with no pause, no taking of breath?
The first Cook’s Match didn’t catch on the safety striking strip, but skidded across, ineffectually, damply. He pressed the next harder and the thing flared: yellow – all so yellow. Charlotte Gilman Perkins? Yellow was the most popular colour for psychiatric wards. Was that a coincidence?
The eggshell blue Basildon Bond was as damp as the matchbox, and cold, and reluctant to burn: more reluctant than the matchwood at least. It curled and brittled slowly, flattening and twisting and then surreptitiously burning his fucking fingertips white. He dropped it and the thin line of fire crept along, irregularly jagged, like a scar or a coastline.
He picked it up again by the landmass.
‘Don’t read’ was not, as it turned out, a problem; the handwriting was careful and regular, but in another language: more than one – Italian, French, German – fuck knew. All at once?
As if the heat broke down the paper’s resistance, or the pulp suddenly became willing to burn, the letter flared, racing red up to his wrist, and this time he dropped it right onto his jeans.
Later, the ash was a problem; it smudged into everything. One piece floated around and moved as if spiteful, travelling on improbable vectors indirectly towards the old cunt’s open French windows, towards his cream carpet, his cherry wood table.
He wondered if he should chase after it? No. That would be too comic, too prone to ridicule and failure. One false step and there would be smudges, recriminations, tedious exchanges – all of it.
It landed, eventually, on the soil of a potted sapling.
He took another match. The system of letter lighting letter needed to work for this afternoon ever to end; moreover, there was only half a box of matches, and once they ran out there would be no option but to talk to the unbearable bastard, which was something that would be… unbearable.
He thought about trying two at a time? Three at a time? Five?
Some letters were older, brittle in their envelopes, antique in their layout, the address so neatly ordered that it spoke of a care no longer paid to niceties. Old letters, old people: they had a respect for, and a consideration of, the convenience of postal employees, a long gone obsequiousness to figures of authority and ideas of proper conduct, however minuscule or manifestly lowly. He d
idn’t have any of that. None of his generation did. Which was progress, as far as he saw it.
Other letters were in different handwriting… the other side of a correspondence? Perhaps they were stealable for an epistolary novel? Pamela. Shamela. Spamela? For the modern sensibility?
The flame liked these older letters, though, and Spamela was up in smoke before she was ever properly conceptualised. She wavered in the transporter beam, corrupted in the buffer, trapped forever in the quantum flux of the flux capacitor, forever meowing between one state and an opposing state until eventually Newton decided one way or the other, or one way and then the other, that she never existed. Wooo! There she went, like a ghost when the light comes on, sending the cockroaches under the skirting boards.
More letters and the Olympic torch relay undid his reliance on the scarce reserves of matches. June 5th, 1948, was consigned to the flames, June 11th, June 20th, were ash flakes drifting recklessly up and down the garden. Some came down to rest in the still, green water of the bird bath, others made for the safety of the treetops to lodge unwanted in the nests of unsuspecting birds. Choking a hatchling? He hoped not.
asleep now, the old fucker. The glasses on the arm of his chair rested as if there was a second face invisibly staring up, corpse-like and still, prostrate beside him. The Ba? The Ka? The Akh? One of them, willed into its limbo by the insufficiency of the wall paintings of his tomb: no slaves, no ushebti, bushels and oxen absent, brain undrawn through the nostrils, canopic jars unfilled with organs.
October, 1975, was one bundle in another hand, and the heat enforced continual movement, a pass the parcel anxiety to avoid the flame being at rest, the critical skin-scorching temperature avoided by minimal contact. Each bundle was another month.
In an uncovered lower strata were Manila folders and X-ray plates.
He brought them to the light and the plastic caught. Drips fizzed into the open trunk and hissed like napthalene, like Dresden, like toy soldiers lit with Dad’s lighter, their arms rendered wax, their legs reddened, bulbs of molten primordial matter swirling with black dust, brought up to the eye.
Too hot to handle.
It was working, but this method risked burning too fiercely. He might burn to death.
The old cunt was asleep, myopically dreaming, snorting in his chair, and here was a terracotta plant pot, low and long and rectangular, empty except for a snail shell, a bus ticket, and some leaves. Fuck it! Who was this , anyway? The old must make way for the new!
There was plenty of room in there – end to end there would be at least six months per foot. The job was easy with this new innovation. It was sensible. It was time and motion study-able. On an hourly rate, how much effort would he make and for how much money? This system was amenable to rules. To principles. There was efficiency, Nazi-style. All things were justified if the end was justified. Even if it wasn’t. The end in itself was… there was a quote… he couldn’t think of it.
He loaded up the pot with a row of paper saplings, trees pulped and resurrected, and the x-ray plates were firelighters. He lit one bundle and placed it beneath the others, the remainder waited their turn, nice and patient, in the box. There was an efficient procession: their muddled proximity formed crowd dynamics in the trunk and in the pot. The possibility of either escape was reduced to zero, chaos turned into queuing, even to the point of ignition. The letter ahead, the letter behind, the similarity of those to each side made this movement towards the fire, towards their destruction, tolerable, manageable. Inevitable. He ushered them forward not eagerly, but inexorably. He had no alternative. Why would he separate some from the others? Bring them forward out of turn, to be next on the pile? Let them wait together, he felt, and hope, vainly, that the fire burnt itself out before their time arrived.
January 15th, dawn to dusk in a cursive hand, scrawled, English, three words to a line; the effort not to read was not enormous, but it was there. He tried not to shift his attention.
But the job needed a certain direction of gaze, or did want the curtains set alight? Ash everywhere?
There were words in a row, but they were meaningless. How many, he thought, would break the law against reading? What makes meaning? One word? Two? That would be too vague, surely. He tried: two words. Nothing. Two words was not reading. Three? This was getting close, but nothing much. Perhaps seven was the magic number. Definitely nine. Then still, what combination of the parts of speech? Nouns and verbs? They’d be dangerous. Look away! Modifiers? Safe, surely, in isolation, but what if they came en masse? In sequence? They might be telling – can a story be made from a string of adverbs? A code? Information on this side of the event horizon…
Silly old cunt. If he hadn’t made such a fuss, it wouldn’t have been a temptation.
His eyes moved by themselves. His eyes moved, your honour, by themselves, and in the fire, curling and agitated, half-fluttering like a butterfly whose wing was being held by an eager child – which will, despite her infinite care, be rendered useless for flight, crushed on one side, the other doing the work of both, neither enough – was a polaroid. It had come free from a bundle, and was now a lone, black square, framed and isolated.
Don’t read, he had been told. But an image?
Look away!
Around the polaroid was a sheaf of billfolds, other polaroids, the wrong side of the contact sheet, and a headshot from a black and white film. A random burst of plasma, a release of stuttering gas, and one of the polaroids was on its obverse, its inverse, heads and tails, the one side of a coin, whatever it was called – it had a name… and, and, and in the space in which a word was sought the image propagated even when his eyes closed in shame and his head turned. It was an old woman staring at the camera, hair severe, badly cut round a bowl – like a Plantagenet king – but the eyes staring, one sken, mouth set and small, three dots – therefore – like the finger-holes of a bowling ball, but stern.
A second look and it was gone to black and the polaroid beneath it was already burned, the film still, the billfold beneath it too, and there was embarrassment within him, in his throat: heartburn, acid was behind his teeth, acid was on his tongue.
Now each image was invisible behind her face, her eyes, her pyre. Who would look past it? Shoes and teeth and parcels wrapped in string, certificates of birth and death, all personal effects the property of the state, stateless, piled and shorn, seat stuffing.
Shovel it on, shovel it off.
Diaries and passports, fairytales and ledgers, ration books and exhibition catalogues.
Bedtime reading white as smoke.
The walls of tombs of this period were decorated with pictures and script, so I was expecting to see things of this type as I moved the torch across the nearest wall; and, indeed, there were paintings and engravings, but there were also what appeared to be scratches and excisions all over, places where the images had been mutilated and the funerary texts desecrated. If you’ve ever seen a photograph after scissors have been used to score out the faces, then you’ll have an idea of what it was like.
Time had been dedicated both to the original works, and the process of defacing them.
The more I saw of the walls, the more apparent it became that there had been an effort made to erase something specific, though what was erased was unclear at that point.
From above came a shout from my colleague that echoed down the shaft. Somewhat reluctantly, I told him it was safe to descend, and that he should bring the good lamp, pencils, and paper.
Entering, gazing upon her
The slitter comes and makes an incision in the left hand side of the abdomen with a knife of volcanic glass. Because he has desecrated the corpse, he is chased from the house of purification, and stoned.
THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
PARIS, SUMMER 1917
There are many bedtime stories that are suitable for children, and there are many that are not.
Some stories are not suitable because children find them tedious to hear, and while a certain de
gree of tedium is desirable, at least inasmuch as there ought to be a lack of exciting incident that might otherwise cause children insomnia through overstimulation, a complete lack of engagement will cause a similar restlessness, and not that easy drifting off into sleep that the reader of stories aimed at children prior to their sleeping requires.
Other stories are not suitable for children because they contain content that the child is not ready to hear – for example that dealing with adult themes, or incidents – or contain content that would cause the child distress, such as tales of horror and the uncanny. Tales in which small mammals receive rough treatment at the hands of an authority figure should be avoided. Lucia associates herself with the animals in these stories, even if she is quite content to eat lamb at dinner. The necessary separation between eating and the sympathy-inducing face of an animal is present in the serving of stew, for example. Here, the animal’s face is barely in evidence, or is only present in a way that is not recognisable, but illustrations in a book where kittens and mice are given central roles rely on the sympathy that may be induced in a child for a young mammal.
Other stories are not suitable for children because they might provide them with examples in which disobedience to the rule of law is met with positive outcomes. This will make the parents’ job all the harder when, in the morning, they are faced with a wilful child who will then not eat her porridge without it being accompanied by a prohibitively expensive amount of honey, or is not at the correct temperature, or will not dress herself and perform her ablutions in a timely fashion, now we are late, smack to the back of the calves, stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.
Other stories are not suitable because they refer to worlds of which the child has no knowledge. These are disengaging through their unfamiliarity, or are redundant. Also, there is no subsidiary benefit that other stories do possess. A morality tale from the Bible teaches as it entertains, for example. Take the one about a mouse who gnaws on the rope that is around a lion’s muzzle, or Daniel in the lion’s den, or the prodigal son, or Androcles and the Lion. These are all stories which will send Lucia to sleep well prepared for a night of dreams in which proper moral behaviour will be evidenced. Though it is not said that God punishes actions which take place in a dream, why not? Surely there must be some residuum of the self that carries into the dream world? Isn’t there some attribute of the heart the actions of which will weigh heavy against the Ma’at feather when the dog-headed god puts it on the scale and throws the offal to a crocodile?