. . . having skinned up to the neck, detach the head . . .
‘I think I might go up soon.’ She lingered in the doorway. ‘Coming?’
‘In a bit—’
‘Can you put it in the shed?’ She was speaking to his back.
‘Yep.’
‘Say it?’
. . . without having to skin the head . . .‘Love you.’
He heard the bedroom door close.
When she came downstairs early next morning, he’d already gone.
Pulling off the motorway, he took the sharp fork to the right and followed the long lane with stubble fields either side, as instructed. The house, more like a series of low barns, was set back from the road behind tall trees.
The man was somewhere in his sixties, short, with a firm gaze; a bunch of keys dangled from his thick leather belt. Matthew noticed the size of his fingers. When they shook hands, the softness of his touch took him by surprise.
The man led the way through long, low-ceilinged rooms. The walls were crammed with alligators, exotic birds, weasels, bear skins, sambars, gazelles. A black monkey with mournful eyes stretched forth one arm.
‘A doleful fellow,’ said Matthew, trying to sound casual.
‘Black Bearded Saki,’ the man said. ‘Chiropotes Satanus. Nothing doleful there.’
Behind, a massive stallion reared, its eyes rolled back inside its sockets. In front, a hideous fish stared out from a long glass case; beneath, a brass plaque with ornate scroll: ‘Monster of The Deep’.
‘The Arapaima. Nine foot six,’ said the man. ‘Amazon river.’
‘My grandfather used to catch these,’ said Matthew, nodding at a pike, relieved to have found a point of reference.
‘Dark creature,’ said the man. ‘Eat your kiddie. If you let him.’
A fair young woman brought tea in delicate cups on a silver tray. Matthew noticed the whiteness of her skin; her long, flawless neck. She approached softly, leaving the faintest trace of perfume behind her. The scent was unusual, not quite sweet.
He looked to the man, as if to acknowledge her, but the man was looking at him.
‘I’ve never actually seen one of those.’ Matthew pointed to a kingfisher quickly. ‘Alive, I mean.’
‘Touch it,’ said the man.
Matthew raised a finger to the tiny outstretched wing. It quivered.
‘With a cargo of ivory and apes, peacocks, sandalwood and sweet white wine. That’s poetry,’ said the man. ‘My wife’s French, you know.’
‘Very nice,’ Matthew said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’
‘Likes to be quiet does Seraphina.’
Matthew searched for an appropriate expression.
‘Unlike my third wife. She was fiery, as they say,’ said the man, touching his keys. ‘You got a lady?’
‘We’ve got a shop,’ Matthew said.
‘Very beautiful is she, your wife?’
‘She’s not actually my wife,’ Matthew said.
By four o’clock the lane back to the motorway was shrouded in mist. A thin moon hung over the fields. With the lights on full beam he kept the van at a crawl. Ignoring the mist, he picked up speed, rounding a blind corner, not caring, half daring catastrophe, when he felt the thud beneath him.
He climbed out. A pheasant started up from the hedgerow. Glancing round again, he moved to get back inside the van when he heard it.
The fox lay in a ditch. Blood bubbled from its nostrils, glistening in the moonlight. He squatted beside it, letting his palm rest on its side, feeling it breathe. When the breathing stopped he lifted his hand, feeling the warm, sticky texture between his fingertips. He turned the van around.
The man seemed unsurprised to see him. Matthew held the creature in both arms.
Behind, down a long corridor, the woman was lit by a dim bulb. Matthew saw that she had changed into a pale evening dress and white satin shoes.
‘An accident?’ The man smiled.
He looked into Matthew’s eyes and called to the woman. She came forward, the slow rhythmic click of her heels echoing through the silence around them.
‘I can’t do her before Christmas mind,’ the man said.
‘How do you know it’s female?’ said Matthew.
‘Scent.’
The man caught the glitter in Matthew’s eye.
‘No good without scent,’ the man said.
‘Do we need to discuss the price, positioning, and so on?’
‘Perhaps we can come to some arrangement,’ said the man.
Only then did Matthew notice that the fox’s eyes were open.
He didn’t mention the fox, only that the man was more than happy to do the owl. Erin had never understood that expression. How could you be more than happy? At first it had seemed charming. He might use it on customers when he was trying to close a sale. He’d be more than happy to deliver the armoire for no extra charge. He’d never used it on her.
‘I thought I’d do the antiques fair tomorrow. We need stock.’
‘But we always go together.’ She sounded hurt.
‘It’s the run up to Christmas, Toots,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford to be closed.’
The week dragged. In the shop, Erin wrapped herself in woollen layers, but the cold seemed to penetrate her skin. She shuffled the greeting cards and re-arranged the display cabinets.
She found the owl, the following week, in the centre of the mantelpiece. It was in a domed case, perched on a grassy base, its enormous eyes like two watery marrons glacé. The Meissen figures that her mother had left her, which were usually either side of the mantelpiece, had vanished; the Meissen figures, she’d thought, both she and Matthew adored.
She closed the door on the bird, leaving it to gaze through the milky afternoon light. She sat in the car, looking up at the window.
That evening, he explained he’d merely been fooling around; the Meissen figures, he promised, would be reinstated. They made love for the first time in weeks. He left the lights on, exploring every inch of her, which excited her. Afterwards, in the dark, she rolled over, letting him brush his fingers across her stomach, the way she liked it. Suddenly he stopped.
‘Hey, sleepy,’ said Erin.
While driving home that afternoon, when the sky was almost vermilion, he’d seen the pair of swans crossing at the beck.
‘Say it,’ she whispered.
Rather than slowing to let them pass, he’d put his foot hard onto the accelerator.
‘Matthew?’
He remembered a sort of popping sound.
‘Do you know something?’ he said.
She nestled against him, her hot toes tickling his.
‘You still have the body of a teenager.’
She curled in closer, quietly grateful, remembering her teenage face covered with acne.
As she dozed, she became aware of a delicate scent, the faintest trace of musk. She inhaled more deeply, unsure whether it was coming from her, from Matthew, or the room itself. Was it the pillow? The down inside? She thought of her mother’s favourite French quilt, silk edged. After a moment, she sensed something soft fall onto her cheek – snow soft, but warm, like ash – and imagined Matthew holding her, her eyes shut, her mouth crammed with feathers. She listened to the rhythmic pounding of his heart, lifted her fingers lightly from his chest, and, inching herself away, lay there, incredibly still.
The Heights of Sleep
SAM THOMPSON
The novelist J. S. Gaunt gets described as a writer’s writer, but for me, he’s more than that. I sometimes think he’s the writer that made me what I am.
When I met him, fifteen years after I started reading his work, I told him so. This was one of the many ways I embarrassed myself during those ninety minutes of conversation in a Soho coffee shop. In person, Gaunt was gentle-m
annered, accommodating, sometimes lost for words – the man was unlike the writing in all these respects – but even so, I spent the encounter disoriented, saying foolish things. Some books come to feel as if they belong to you alone. And then you find yourself face to face with the person who made them, and what are you supposed to do?
I was seventeen years old when I discovered Gaunt. I knew I was going to do English Lit at university – in those days a fairly modest ambition – but alongside my curricular reading, I had a taste for the more disreputable stuff. I thought I had a radical streak because I liked horror and space opera and dungeonpunk fantasy in just the same way I liked Austen, Dickens and Woolf. I was a rebel in my own head because I refused to make a distinction.
I kept coming across Gaunt’s name in magazine interviews with genre writers I admired. When asked about their influences, they all said the same thing: J. S. Gaunt was a stylist and a visionary, and it was a crime his work was not more widely known. I needed no further encouragement to make a day trip to Charing Cross Road. Tucked away on the top floor in Foyles, I found a copy of the old omnibus edition of the Masquador novels, with its ugly cover and its selection of cryptic critical praise on the back. ‘Perturbing fables, twisted and occasionally perverse’; ‘The Man Who Was Thursday as rewritten by Ballard’; ‘The Alexandria Quartet meets Lovecraft via Djuna Barnes’; ‘These hallucinations would crumble if they were not sustained by prose of such unfaltering precision’; ‘From its pulp-fiction roots the Masquador cycle blooms as a strange new flower of evil’.
It was an ideal introduction to Gaunt. I tore through the three novels. In The Silver Curtain, the story of supernatural intrigue was largely conventional, but A Conspiracy of Wasps twisted the same scenario into baffling surrealism. And then came Among The Masquadors: I had never finished a book with such a strong intuition that it contained a hidden pattern, some secret I needed to understand. The omnibus concluded with the handful of short stories usually known as The Masquador Dances: really they were no more than sketches for the mythos, but I combed each of them for clues to what it all meant.
While I was a student, I read all the Gaunt I could find. I tracked down his first two novels, The Remnants and The Foal, in the library stacks. They were set in 1970s Manchester and dealt with the adventures of bohemian young men who were mystified by women and angry with the world. There was a lot of cynical sex and hippie philosophy, broken up by moments of unexplained violence, betrayal and magic. They weren’t great, but I read them studiously. There was a thrill in recognising Gaunt’s way with a sentence, his daredevil adverbs and ruthless commas, highly characteristic and already there in his earliest stuff. From the beginning, he was using some of his favourite motifs: iridescent green beetles, bereaved women, poker, strange buried machinery, one-eyed cats, a pair of clasped hands that suddenly takes on the appearance of a face. These images, and certain key phrases relating to them, recurred through all the Gaunt I had read, as if they were a tarot that he dealt and re-dealt, finding new meanings each time.
I read the books he had published in the twenty-odd years since the Masquador sequence. It took me a long time to get through The Ablation Colony, The Heart’s Retreat and Crocodile Fires, though all three of those novels are so short. For a while, I was defeated by their density and their refusal to belong to any obvious category, and even when I had finished them, I had an odd feeling I shouldn’t move on. It was as if I had glimpsed something lurking in the edges of the fictions, as if getting the three books into alignment would reveal a figure that had nothing to do with what the stories seemed to be about.
When I tried introducing friends to Gaunt, I always ended up regretting it, always feeling they hadn’t quite seen what I was getting at. It gives me the same shiver that I get when I remember stupid things I did at that age: blurting out private matters to people I had just met, getting infatuated with girls I didn’t like, making obnoxious remarks because I didn’t know what I believed. That urge to share Gaunt’s work was no different.
Once I ran into another fan. I was in the union canteen, reading my new hardback of his novel Form, and she came over. We enthused for a while over the sheer fact that he had written another; I told her I was only up to page seventy-nine but so far it was astonishing, that you could see how it grew out of what he had been doing in short stories like ‘Caffè Atrocità’ and ‘Dancing in the Disaster’, but it went so much further. She begged me not to say more because she was going to read it the first chance she got. It flashed across my mind that maybe we would start a relationship, an affair. Maybe this was how it was done – we’d be thrown into it by shared passionate intimacy with Gaunt’s work. Instead, we found we had nothing else to say.
Form was the longest book Gaunt had written. The reviews said it was his most ambitious but also his most accessible. I wasn’t sure about that, but it was a major feat, big and picaresque, with five protagonists on odysseys through the past, the present, the future and several parallel universes. The satirical edge was sharper than ever, and the ending was as bleak and enigmatic as anything he had written. Obviously, it was going to be understood as a comedy of despair at contemporary culture, and its inventive vigour would be seen as redeeming its nihilism. But as I read, I found myself dwelling on smaller details. When Lulu Zhong finds her daughter, why is the nail bar where they meet called ‘Rainbow Foam’ – the same name Gaunt gave to a bioengineered psychedelic virus in a story he published in a New Wave magazine more than thirty years earlier? Why is Rossi quite so frightened when he mistakes Lamb’s face for his own in the mirror? What’s with all the molecular chemistry stuff? Why does Dorian Scurf, who first appeared as the proprietor of the junk shop in The Silver Curtain and turned up again in The Heart’s Retreat to usher the protagonist to his doom, now feature as an occult card-shark? And what’s actually at stake in the last game? I had dozens of questions along these lines.
A year or so after Form was published, I had an argument with a young woman. I was about to travel two hundred miles by National Express to a provincial book festival where Gaunt was making an appearance, and the young woman, to whom I would later get married, ribbed me for being so into a writer no one else had heard of. I responded so humourlessly that I still cringe to think of it, getting indignant and asking if she had even read him. She said she had tried one of his books but found its attitude so singularly male that she lost interest. I fumed for the whole coach journey and decided she and I had no future. As for the author talk, I didn’t remember much of it afterwards. Gaunt was a slight, trim man in jeans and a hooded top, who kept his feet flat on the floor and had a way of pressing his palms together between his knees. The slate-grey hair was cropped close to the small, handsome head, and the steel-rimmed spectacles flashed when they caught the lights. At one point the chair quoted Henry James: ‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have,’ and so on. I thought Gaunt was going to skewer the man’s pomposity, but instead, he said that for him writing was like sleep. It takes you to the same place you go when you fall asleep, he said, but the gravity is reversed. Up becomes down, so you can’t get there by falling. You have to climb. When the chair invited questions from the audience I did not raise my hand.
* * *
Gaunt followed up Form with a novel called Harm, ostensibly a sequel although it bore little resemblance. It was a quarter of the length, and instead of a rambling epic, it was a tight three-hand psychodrama set in a single location. Harm’s nameless characters don’t appear in Form, but the sharp-eyed reader recognises that the isolated, decaying manse where the woman, the man and the daughter play out their catastrophe is the same house where the Nyberg children go missing in the earlier book. I reviewed Harm for the Times Literary Supplement. I had got into book-reviewing the year I graduated when I sent the TLS a clipping of something I had written in a student paper and they sent me back a copy of some novel and a deadline for 600 words. Since then I had been doing a piece e
very few months and had not ceased to be amazed at what a painful process it was to review a book. Less harrowing than my attempts at fiction, for sure, but its own special kind of misery. In a review, there are so many ways to be lazy, dishonest, timid, ignorant, bullying, spurious, inexact, ungenerous or unjust, and so few ways to be true. Reviewing Gaunt was ten times worse than usual. I re-read everything he had published, then spent most of a week on my opening paragraph, trying to encapsulate his career, his style, his preoccupations and his significance to date in eighty words. I scribbled all over my review copy. I wrote nine different plot-summaries and rejected them all as too reductive. I realised the apparently straightforward action of the book was in fact irreducibly ambiguous. I kept leafing through Gaunt’s collected short fiction and finding clues in stories he had written over four decades. Stories like ‘Little Quadratics’, ‘Spider Dimension’, ‘Singularity Blues’, ‘Disco Lazarus’: all bore vitally on this new phase of work, and, what was more, the post-apocalypse sections of Crocodile Fires now had to be seen in a completely different light. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible for a life’s writing all to map together like a great fractal falling into itself forever on every scale at once. What it was or what it meant, what figure might show itself at last, I had no idea.
A couple of months later I went along to the TLS summer party, out of some impulse to drink warm white wine with several hundred people who would all prefer to be at home. To my surprise, Gaunt was there among the moleskin jackets and balding heads. He sometimes wrote for the paper, but he didn’t seem the sort to come to drinks parties. He was in motorcycle leathers, not holding a drink, listening closely to a woman in a purple shawl. I felt I should speak to him – perhaps I would always regret it if I didn’t – but I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I hovered for a while and then, murmuring Hey I’m no one you know but I’ve read all your books and what do you think about that, I left.
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