Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  My mobile rang again, its shrill immediacy slicing through the drums above. As I scrambled for it I heard the music quieten and, stepping back half tripping from the porch, saw shadows move against the window’s light. I turned away quickly, whispering to the phone an urgent ‘Hello?’, and headed down the street without looking back. Ahead I could see dingy lights around the station, the miniature late-night border town that fed on it. ‘Who’s there?’ I said, but once more had no reply. The caller’s number was blocked again. I turned the phone off, a process retarded by my trembling hand.

  By the time I had found a minicab office and waited for a car, my abstract panic had abated, and in the space that it left the events of earlier that night reasserted themselves. As the driver sped us through the back streets of Islington, my mind kept veering to the vision of Adam at the front of the queue, then flinching away with directionless embarrassment. ‘Now then,’ I muttered involuntarily, as if to distract myself with some imaginary agenda: ‘so, so, so.’ I lowered the window for air and saw the driver watching me curiously in his glass.

  *

  ‘Wow,’ said Sarah, when she opened her door. ‘That’s … quite a look.’ I had forgotten what I was wearing, and peered in surprise at where my boots met the jeans rolled over them.’

  ‘We went out,’ I told her vaguely.

  Sarah was dressed for bed: a pair of man’s boxers and a tank top that showed the sides of her breasts. Beside her on the sofa, I frowned at them, wondering if it was the shape they made without a bra that so drew my attention, or simply such an exposure of flesh. She gave me a look and stood to make us tea. Returning, she said, ‘So did you have a fight?’

  ‘Sort of. Not really.’

  ‘Well, come on then: details.’

  ‘ … I don’t really want to talk about it. Do you mind?’

  ‘I thought that’s why you were here.’ She worried at her teabag with a spoon. A minute later she asked if Adam or I had been ‘having an affair’, a concept that seemed so incongruous, from another world system entirely, that despite everything I laughed. This angered her, and soon she wrinkled her face in frustration and said, ‘I don’t know why you find it so hard to talk.’

  ‘I don’t want to think about it. It’s just … nice to be here.’

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell Sarah, more that I didn’t know how. The whole context of what had happened was so far removed from how she must think of me and Adam (‘Are you having an affair?’) that I couldn’t now imagine making such a transition. For all the glee once generated in her by my gonorrhoea, I suspected that Sarah’s exuberance around my sex life was as touristic and circumscribed as a hen night’s at a gay disco. Instead I said, ‘I got a bit weirded out on the way over. I found this building where Ian Stuart lived. Totally by accident. I just found myself standing outside.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A square near Kings Cross.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting up since you called. Why were you wandering round Kings Cross?’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘How is all that — the nazi stuff? Are you close to finishing?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s all getting quite … complicated. I mean, the research is fascinating but I don’t know if I can keep it under control.’ I looked down at my jiggling boots. My legs ached with tiredness and I couldn’t keep them still. ‘Sometimes,’ I told her, ‘I wonder if I’m just wasting my time.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It can seem a bit recondite.’

  ‘Really.’ She sounded irritated. It had been a mistake to come over like this. I should go home. At the very least, Adam and I needed to talk. ‘Mum and Dad remortgaged the house,’ Sarah said abruptly. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’ I sat up. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe for the same reason they went to Spain last summer instead of the three weeks in Bali they’d planned.’

  ‘I didn’t know they were going to Bali.’

  ‘They didn’t. Be a shitter if the market tanks, though. The remortgage.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t sit still. I risked closing my eyes and thought I reopened them immediately, but found images lingering as if my mind had had time to wander: kissing boys on the top deck of the bus; liquid guts splashing on the Euston Road; flowers for a black kid, taped to a lamppost. How do you drive into a lamppost, anyway? Car crashes, flowers, funerals. Derbyshire in the early morning: fog, a Volkswagen Polo spinning off the road. A group of men facing a camera. I blinked and shook myself. ‘They’re old, James,’ Sarah was saying. She sighed noisily: had I missed something? ‘They should be buying a cottage for the weekends, not going back into debt.’

  ‘Well exactly. So why should they …’ I trailed off again. I saw the conversation veering away ahead of me, a track from which my carriage had come unfixed.

  ‘Because you’re their son and they still believe the horseshit that some day you’ll produce this masterwork you claim to be working on, and which is much more important than anything so humble as getting a fucking job.’

  This brought me back. I sat upright and looked at her ‘Are you … angry about something?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t fucking imagine. Jesus Christ, you’re a solipsistic prick.’ She reached for her cigarettes and lit one clumsily, and when she continued her voice sounded ready to crack. ‘I’m thirty-two next year, we talked about this, I’m all alone and I want kids. I’m going to need financial support from somewhere. You’ve spent the last — how many years? — pretending to be a bloody artist, and apparently now you’re suddenly agonizing that maybe it’s all a big waste of time. Well I’m sorry but apart from you and our deluded fucking parents, I think everyone came to that conclusion ages ago. ‘

  She gave a moan of frustration and subsided into muffled sniffs. I stared at the floor, trying to unpack my reaction. Was she really accusing me of spending her unborn child’s school fees? There was no point in shouting, and besides, I was too tired. In the end I said dully, ‘I don’t think it’s a waste of resources.’

  ‘Who’s going to fund this film of yours, James, when you’ve finally written it?’

  ‘There’s various —’ I began, and shrugged. ‘There’s no point talking about it when you’re like this.’ This she acknowledged with a bitter, tearful smile.

  I sipped my tea. It had gone cold.

  ‘I’ve stopped using condoms,’ Sarah said eventually. It was so quiet I took a moment to register.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not that it happens that often. I tell them I’m on the pill.’ She sniffed. ‘I had thought that maybe Adam … well, its not like you two could have kids. But maybe he’s not going to be around now either and God knows we don’t want you feeling responsible.’

  I closed my eyes and let them stay that way. I could hear a truck passing somewhere near by. Sarah was still talking, apparently about some man she had briefly seen. ‘But I don’t, you know?’ I heard her say. ‘That’s not what I’m looking for. But if I’d told him that …’ What friendship did we have, outside the roles we played for each other? She knew nothing of my life. Blu-tacked over her desk was a photo of the Bodil Manz ceramic that had been our joint gift to Mum and Dad a few Christmases back. It had gone down well: a particularly filial gesture, successfully to assume your parents’ taste.

  At some point she told me she was going to bed. ‘We’ll be OK,’ she said. ‘We should talk to each other more.’ Though my inclination was the opposite I nodded and let her hug me. When she had closed the door I lay on the couch with my boots, which I had no energy to unlace, hanging off the end. But it was getting light, and I was too tired to sleep. I went through to her bathroom, where I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment. Then I left as quietly as I could.

  It was past six by now, and the streets floated in tenuous, grey light. I walked north up the Holloway Road. So early on a Sunday the traffic was sparse; two men loudly raised the shutter on a convenience store, but most shops an
d businesses looked like they had been closed for months. I felt hungry but there was nowhere to eat. I passed the graduate centre that Daniel Liebeskind, the architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, had built for what was no longer North London Polytechnic, where students had once picketed to demand the exclusion of Patrick Harrington. Its silver angles dull with exhaust grime, it looked like a cheap, stunted rip-off of Liebeskind’s own work, or one of those cardboard models of famous buildings you buy in museum shops: clumsily assembled, badly glued.

  Men facing a camera. A wooden marker. The side of a road: the A38.

  Where had I seen it? Some website, a nazi one. Some time ago: two, three months? On a terminal, in the library. Comrades from, I don’t know, Sweden or Germany or wherever pay their respects at — not Ian’s resting place. At the site of Ian’s — falling ? murder ? martyrdom ?

  At the site of his sacrifice?

  An early jogger overtook me, did a double-take at my outfit as he passed. I smiled at him and walked faster. I had my ending; I knew what LOG had achieved. The road curved west, the buildings before me lit now by the sun almost risen at my back.

  You’re HIV-positive in 1993. What you need is a magician.

  The side of the road, a grass verge. A group of men salute the camera around a wooden marker in the ground: like a cross but with arms pointing diagonally up.

  Perhaps Nicky Crane disappears without explanation for several days. Perhaps he is found to be missing from his hospital bed. His friends and the doctors panic, then wonder if he has gone off quietly to die. But when he comes back he says he is feeling better, that he has finally had the one man he always wanted. His friends notice the mud on his clothes and boots but do not say anything.

  The houses lining the road had gone; it led now between wild grass and trees. I had the intense feeling that I was walking back through history and might never see a town again, before I realized this was Hampstead Heath. The sun made occasional low winks through the trees to my left, and shone off the bodies of passing cars, which I took as confirmation that I was still in the same time after all. There was a strange, mounting silence, less an absence of noise than a thing itself, swelling thickly into space. I could feel its substance as I stepped into it: it shivered, as if living. I felt the need to get away from the road; I thought that way I might longer preserve my grasp on this palpable silence-thing, and somehow examine it. I stepped off the path into grass and mud, lurched a little as I remembered to attend to where I walked. What I saw ahead could have been the entrance to a forest: it was not a London park of level surfaces and formal plans; it was barely London at all. As I stepped between the trees I had the vague idea of news reports, the bodies of lone ramblers, victims of malefic rituals or damaged minds, and wondered if now was the best time to be doing this; but if there was a threat I could not feel it. Yellow light rippled across me in patterns; the bark of trees was damp and scarred; my boots churned the mud, where water glinted in tiny pools. The land rose sharply and took effort to climb. The sun came through gaps, heating patches of air like puffs of breath warm on my face. I passed over whole dioramas of labouring insects, with their vast appalling discipline, and there was a scent building, rich, sweet and heavy, as if it were summer and this a field of flowers. Ahead of me, on the crest of the rise, the sun glowed through bare branches so vividly they thinned into absence before it; as I walked they moved across its surface, and it pulsed. I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell myself what I saw; I had never paid attention to the garden at home, didn’t even know what trees these were. I grasped at names: oak, elm, hazel, ash; fern and ivy; peonies, dandelions, daffodils. What did you call these bright yellow autumn flowers? The silence was unbroken and yet also filled with the manifold hum of bees — was this even the time of year for bees? I felt them anyway, an impromptu retinue, rustling the air at my neck. The sun that waited at the top of the slope was full in my face and gave off an unexpected heat. Dark green needles of grass wove vivid carpets on the higher ground. So this was how it felt, revelation: shimmering light on the beckoning crest of a hill, the colours of things saturating, a fine accruing surface detail, as if looking close at a familiar painting and seeing for the first time the texture of the oils. That inner intensity you knew as a boy and had since forgotten spilling and flooding into the physical world, into warmth and colour, the vibrant thrum of awoken nature. I stumbled up, found the summit, swayed in place as the sunlight pounded me. The land fell away ahead, and all across it I could see meadows unfurling in emerald and gold, thick mantles of trees, their dense canopies merged, falling and rising over distant hills. A vast flock of birds swirled in the sky; a squirrel nudged my feet without fear; a pair of dogs, their fur thick and black, and the size, it seemed, of donkeys, lumbered from nowhere up the path towards me, smelled something on the wind, gave a laughing bark, were gone, plunging through waist-high stalks like the waves of the sea. I walked forward in their wake; the ground dipped and rose; I bobbed in the tall grass. I knew what vision I had been granted: Imperium, the new dawn, the Satanic aeon; the return of the golden age long lost to algebra, industry, abstract thought, foolish insistence on the pre-eminence and commonality of man. The dogs were wolves, the wolves what men could be, and they chased the power to conquer galaxies. Nicky Crane was alive, and before me, now, the city burned: I had reached another crest and there it was, far below and tiny, its dull anaemic greys glistening with the reflected red of the flames consuming it, the air, even here, thick with the caramel taste of burning flesh. And through its smoke, the risen sun. The old age never died; it was in retreat; it slept, while all the time its ancient guardians, loki okkult gesellschaft, lupinæ, operæ geruli, legati, ordinis galaxici, tended it with secret rites, sacrifice magnified by powerful relics passed on in unwritten rituals of initiation. The martyrs of the Munich putsch, Röhm at Stadelheim, Himmler at Wewelsburg, Savitri Devi at the Externsteine, Anton Long by the Syiperstones, and Ian and Nicky — where? — blood touching blood, energies presenced and channelled, death turned to immortality, until dawn rises on the new race: skinhead, Werwolf, Homo Galactica.

  Climbing down into Kentish Town, which was no longer ablaze, across a once more wet and muddy heath, I struggled to keep the details of the vision in my mind. On the tennis courts ahead of me the first players of the day were limbering up, men who had risen early to fit the game into their crammed weekends. Before I reached them I saw the dogs again, half the size I had thought, happily following a woman in a Barbour from whose left hand, hanging at her side, trailed the loose edges of crumpled plastic bags.

  On the tube I fell asleep, and had to double back to my stop. It was only as I walked to the flat that I remembered to turn my mobile back on, and got the voicemail that Adam had left me hours before, and the several that followed. I listened to the first, then ran the rest of the way home.

  Adam had somehow managed to fall asleep. He lay on top of our bed, still dressed, in his usual foetal curl. In the crook he made lay Sonny, whose cut paw he had cleaned and bandaged, and who watched me silently as I inspected it.

  The heat had been turned up high, but the living room was still freezing. Glass sparkled in shards across its floor. The brick that had shattered our window lay like a trophy on the table, weighing down the paper it had been wrapped in. It was an ordinary A4 sheet, the kind any office stocks in reams. The side facing up was decorated with swastikas drawn in red ink. On the other each corner was marked by a circled pentagram, and large capitals at its centre spelled out L. O. G.

  Outside a wind was picking up. The newspaper Adam had taped across the frame rustled, and now and again thudded like a drumskin. I wasn’t as scared as I thought I should be.

  The shock of discovery had come in a great cold rush, but of vindication as much as surprise, and my head now buzzed with inferences. Another, more detached part of me remarked on this already detached reaction, and wondered if I was in shock. But I knew, now, where things were heading.

  As soon as I touched
him, Adam opened his eyes. ‘Hey,’ he said, reaching out to me. He looked shockingly vulnerable, as he often did when I woke him; I used to wonder if I had been hurting him in his dreams. It was familiar, this anxious, expectant expression, as if waiting for me to say — what? There’s been a phone call. I just saw, on the news; I heard a noise. There’s been an accident. There’s been an attack. It’s your mother; it’s your home town; it’s outside; there’s someone here. I’m sorry; you’re going to die now; go back to sleep, it’s nothing; I’m so sorry.

  Speakers’ Corner

  The surface of the water is scummy with rinsed shaving foam and stubble from his face and scalp. When he gets out this gunk clings like him to his ankles, sealing the hair against the skin in tapered verticals, so, with the bath drained, he holds each foot under the running tap, flicking water about to wash dirt from around the plughole.

  He pulls on clean underwear, sealing inside a climate still slightly moist; next, bleached jeans, old ones and getting tight, into which he tucks an even older Bulldog T-shirt — with the original logo of the crouched and slobbering beast, almost collectible now — hooking his braces over. He unwraps his new white laces and ties a knot at one end of each, to anchor them in the bottom outside eyelets of his boots. He threads each to halfway up in a single zigzag line, pulls the boots on and laces tightly to their penultimate holes. He wraps each untethered end several times around the top of its boot, threads it through the final hole, doubles back, threads it through again, and tucks it in.

  He tips old biros from a jam jar to reach the sharpener inside and carefully trims with it an HB pencil, which he puts in his back pocket. He pulls on his jacket. He looks in the mirror. He checks his watch.