The Comforts of Madness

by Paul Sayer

I was alone in the blackness, hanging weightless, my face wet with the condensation from my breath and from my sweat, since I too had felt the exertion involved in this effort. There was terror too, hidden somewhere in some hole, in some dark abyss in my mind. My heart, that dry old vessel, began stabbing rustily, surging into life - surely some part of it would rupture, some chamber split open with the pressure, spilling bile to poison what remained of the rest of my insides? I began to see pools of colour in the darkness, spreading like oil on water. I was choking, sure to be. I began to see old shapes, hear ancient voices laughing in the shadowlands of my recall. Thus, it seemed, I was to be destroyed, I balked at my thoughts, ducking and feinting, but there was no escape. In an instant I realized the purpose of this new game: I was being asked to confront my past, my history. It would render me senseless, of that I felt sure. I began to see old forgotten images, not so much visually as by inference, pictures so powerfully suggested that I felt I had already passed beyond the point of death and was now keeping company with ghosts who had joyfully come to claim me as one of their own.

  THIRTEEN

  My sister, Alison, if that was her name, (yes, that was her name) led me by the hand to a clearing she had made in our weed-strewn back garden, her white fingers wrapped firmly about my wrist. Maybe she was eleven or twelve years old then, I don’t know, a bit older than me, I think. ‘You can sit there,’ she said, pointing to a corner of the rug she had brought from the kitchen and laid in the green overgrowth. I sat down.

  She was wearing shorts, a yellow vest, and a pair of our mother’s sunglasses which covered half her face. When she saw that I was sitting down she lay on her back in the thundery warmth, looking at the skies for a few moments. Then she sat up again, snatching an old magazine from the untidy pile at her side, magazines given to her by a girlfriend a long time ago. She flicked the pages over irritably then stopped to read for a while. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Oh my dear God, the things they put in here. Rubbish. For kids. “Hazel eyes”, “Dreamboats”, it’s enough to make you puke.’ She threw the magazine aside and stood up, kicking off her sandals. She knelt beside me. ‘Do you know what I’d do,’ she said, ‘if my “Dreamboat” lover came along right now, right this very minute?’ She leaned closer, whispering, her lemon breath on my cheek. ‘Do you know what I would do, my little quiet one?’ She lay on her back again, her legs flat on the rug, her toes twitching. ‘I’d do this,’ she said, ‘sit back just like this. Then I’d let him have his rotten way with me. And afterwards . . .’ She paused, cupping her hand over her mouth, her soft yellow stomach quivering with suppressed laughter. ‘Afterwards,’ she said, ‘before he went on his way again, he might condescend to toss me a nice bright shiny coin.’ She laughed forcibly, rolling on to her side, her long straight hair falling over her face.

  Thunder rumbled from somewhere over the fields at the back of the estate where we lived. A woman appeared in the next garden to bring in washing from her line. She stared at us, her hands on her hips. Alison sat up and returned her stare, making a screeching noise then flopping back to the dirty wool of the rug, her arms and legs tremulous, crooking slowly into the shape of a human swastika, her tongue lolling, her eyes strained to show the whites. She remained motionless, unbreathing. The woman stepped up to the fence. ‘Is she all right? Your sister? What’s the matter with her?’ Alison suddenly jumped up, dancing and kicking. ‘No,’ said my sister, ‘I’m not all right. I’m a loony, you know that. We’re all loonies here, that’s what you all say, isn’t it?’ She fell into the grass, then crawled up to me, sobbing now, resting her head on my crossed leg. The woman tutted. ‘You’re not all there, you lot. There should be somewhere for people like you.’ She went into her house and began arguing loudly with someone inside.

  We, that is me, Alison, our mother and father, lived at the end of a village, near a big town, in a maze of red-bricked, red-roofed houses, all like our own, grouped in twos and fours around rough greens, looking at each other. It was somewhere, I don’t know where, a ‘North of England’, a ‘Yorkshire’, which could have been the land to the end of the field behind our house or it could have extended to the very extremities of finite life; it was a place or it was an idea or it was a people, I could never decide which.

  When I was very small, since I did not speak, I was sent to a special school with other children who had slit eyes and hard flat heads. They could be very wild and they did mad things, biting their fingers to the bone then gnawing the bone itself if they could get away with it, fighting as if possessed, baby minds in growing children’s bodies. Some wore leather pads strapped to their heads to protect them when they threw themselves to the hard concrete of the high-fenced playground. It wasn’t so bad there, though they soon realized I was not like the rest of them and although I think they might have liked to have kept me on account of the fact that I was so quiet, I was eventually taken away to a children’s ward annexed to some hospital, I don’t know where. There I learned to read and write, that kind of thing; they said I could be quite bright. I would go home at weekends and for long leaves, until I hardly seemed to need to be in a hospital at all and I was taken away and sent to the same school as Alison. That’s when I started having the fits, jack-knifing from my seat and thrashing away on the classroom floor, no air, biting holes in my tongue, a body fighting alone - they say you’re not meant to remember what happens to you during a fit, but I can recall everything, the throb in my temples, the taste of blood in my mouth, the curious looks of my classmates as they gathered around me, and the mixed scepticism and apprehension on the face of the teacher as she knelt beside me. I was put back on the children’s ward.

  The people on the estate talked about me often; I did not imagine this, since my sense of hearing was and has always been very good. Sometimes I would go to the shop for my father and I began to realize how artificially cheerful the woman behind the counter was, counting my change into my palm unnecessarily loudly and methodically. The men strolling down the street always avoided my eyes. And when I came home on leave, the news of my return seemed to percolate from house to house with the silly rejoinders those people seemed to go in for, ‘Shame. For his family. Such a shame.’ Sometimes I got beaten up by other boys, older girls too, and my mother would look at my cut and bloodied face and weep in her detached resigned way.

  My mother was tall and very white-skinned. Her hair was long and dark, strayed with white, and she kept it tied back in a rough pony-tail tied with funny spotted ribbons. She seemed to take pleasure in small things, things my father and sister might have regarded as merely incidental to their lives: the kitchen with its yellowing wall-cupboards, the tea caddy with the purple lady on the lid, old mugs and cups hanging from badly spaced hooks, the biscuit tin under the sink where she kept dusters and shoe polish. Now and again she might spend her evenings writing, if the mood was on her, poetry mostly, filling shiny-backed exercise books, sitting at the dining-table in our through-lounge. This activity both excited and irritated my father to the point where he would snatch the book from under her pencil and read aloud to Alison and myself commenting, ‘What good’s that, then? I’ll tell you, it’s no good. Do you know why? Because it doesn’t say anything.’ Alison would become annoyed. ‘Shush you, nasty,’ she would say. ‘Why can’t you do anything creative? Why do you have to pull everyone to pieces all the time?’ ‘Do I?’ he would counter. ‘Tell them, Peter, when did I last pull you to pieces? Anyway,’ he would say, ‘what’s the point in encouraging all this writing stuff if she’s no good at it? She’ll only look silly in the end, silly like she does now. Nobody would ever want to buy that stuff, so what’s the point?’ My mother, vapid, though I’m sure equal to the task of reprisal against my father, would gently ask for her book back and my father, suddenly and sheepishly, would comply. Later, the next day maybe, I might find my mother crying in her stooped-up, introspective sort of way, the way she did when I came home bruised and bleeding, and I would feel sort of sorry for her, bending
over her, puzzling as to where I should put my hands to offer her comfort.

  My father was a thin, enigmatic man with a calamitous passion for projects beyond his capabilities: antiques, mushroom farming, sifting for gold dust in the local river, car mechanics, even though he couldn’t drive. Mostly he did odd jobs for people on the estate to add to the money he collected from the post office every week. I do not believe we were unhappy, that I must say, though it did seem to me we were never a family given to talking much with each other, not in the way I imagined others might.

  One day when I came home on leave Alison took me straight up to her room. Her hair was pinned to one side with a small flower. She was wearing a little woolly cap and silky clothes I had never seen before. She had a cigarette, which she lit. She sat me on her bed and began pacing the floor in front of me. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘there’s something I have to tell you. It is my duty. I must tell you because no one else in this squalid little household would ever think to tell you and I am, after all, your sister and your elder.’ She drew on the cigarette and sneezed a little as the smoke came out of her nose. ‘For some time now I have been keeping an eye on Father. In fact, yesterday I felt it necessary to miss school and follow him down into the village. You won’t know about his present daft scheme, of course. Mother, that poor suffering woman, thinks it’s market gardening, but I have reason to believe that it’s something else, something altogether more sinister. You need to know, we both need to know, since it could have implications for us all.’ She paused, looked out of the window, then into the dressing-table mirror, as a result of which she began furiously rubbing at a smear of eye make-up that had run down her cheek. She tilted her head to one side and began pacing the floor again. ‘Drugs, Peter,’ she said. ‘Our father is dealing in drugs. Or it may be guns. Drugs, guns - whatever it is, I fear the inevitable has now happened, that is, our father has descended to the level of the criminal classes. I have seen him with the commonest people. Oh I’m so sorry,’ she said, throwing herself down in front of me, bracing herself against my knees. ‘I know’, she said, ‘that all this must come as a shock to you, but you had to know: it’s your right. You must promise me Peter that you will not let yourself get too upset. We have to be brave and realize that our future happiness cannot be taken for granted any more. Ah life,’ she said. ‘Cruel, cruel life.’

  She stood up, put out the cigarette and went to the window, brushing her hair out of her eyes and folding her arms. She looked out over the fields saying:

  ‘Just once Peter, just one time, I wish you would say something to me.’

  FOURTEEN

  It was like Alison to dramatize things, it was in keeping with the weirdness of our family. We were an odd bunch, I knew that; I, probably the oddest of them all.

  Sometimes my father would get sick, always in the same way, something to do with the skin on his back. It would come upon him in a matter of hours, tedious in its quality and regularity. I might suggest that it was one of the few constant values in his up-and-down existence. In keeping with his nature, he would scream his disregard for the illness or else he would take to his bed and declare he was dead and in a state of transition from this life to the ascension into eternity. Once, after an attack which seemed quite momentous, Alison made me stand outside his bedroom door while she crept in to take a folder of photographs from the wardrobe. She was very good at that sort of thing, and my father never stirred from his troubled sleep. She led me out to the garden shed and emptied the snaps on to the floor between us. ‘This one will do,’ she said. ‘No, that’s no good, he’s too happy on that. This one reflects his personality better. I don’t know, though. Here, you shall have that one of you and him.’ She handed me a small black-and-white print of him carrying me on his shoulders. I was wearing a cloth hat with cartoon characters on it. ‘I shall have this one,’ she said, not letting me see. ‘You do understand, don’t you, Peter?’ I didn’t, but the general impression she gave me was that we were to carry these pictures in some kind of memory of our father who was not yet dead. I told you we were odd. My mother later found mine in my trouser pocket, long after Father had recovered, and she thought about it for a while, gave a little smile, and hugged me tight. All without explanation. I digress perhaps.

  However elaborate Alison’s interpretation of Father’s recent behaviour had been, there was some truth behind it; that is, he was in some kind of trouble which was to necessitate our moving away from the village very quickly one night in a big van. It sort of seemed in keeping with Father’s mad sense of adventure, and he laughed throughout it all. Mother, though, was dumb the whole way.

  Was it at this point that I became unhinged, cast loose in the doubtful precincts of my mind? It would be easy to weld this story, my confession, (as I have said my last, I hope), into an explanation of my later intransigence: it was what they wanted with their needles and their blindfolds. But I could not be swayed so easily. It was there, sure enough, my history, a calamity of baubles, something to appease my tormentors’ appetites for motive, for cause and effect, neither of which have I genuinely seen to exist. So what? Here, have it anyway.

  Somebody, a relative maybe, drove us through the night, huddled in the cab of the wagon, to the coast somewhere in this Yorkshire. We were bumped and jostled in the old vehicle along a rough track. I could smell the sea, hear its soft waves, something at once soothing and alarming to me. It was getting light and we were all tired except Alison, whose excitement, inflamed by our father’s unaccountable euphoria, served to put Mother into a state of silent distraction. We arrived at a small, rundown cottage near the edge of some low cliffs. I stepped from the cab behind my father and went and stood on the springy turf of the cliff-top, drawn by the emptiness in front of me, frightened by its hugeness, knowing somewhere in my young mind that this vacuum could suck me out of myself, draw me head, skin and gizzards into a void I could not bear the thought of.

  Behind me, the man helped Father and Mother unload our sticks of furniture, shaking his head as Father broke a window at the back of the cottage to get in.

  Along the cliff-top we were to find other bungalows and houses, empty shops, odd bits of a partly developed tourist village that had failed to catch on, a place of dead dreams that immediately captured my father’s volatile imagination. ‘I will work in this place,’ he said, ‘and we shall be rich.’ The air, he also said, would be good for Mother whose nerves had been bad of late. She was indifferent to the move; no, she was passively against it, suffering quietly, knowing it was hopeless to try and argue with her husband. She sat in the kitchen looking back along the cliff-top road for many hours, thinking I did not know what.

  Within a week of our arrival our neighbours, whoever they were, moved out of the next cottage. Days afterwards an old man who died was taken away by a solitary hearse which my Mother watched bobbing away along the road, turning inland and out of sight. Men came in a truck to board his home up, but this did not stop Alison from breaking in while I stood outside. She came out with a roll of clothes in her arms which she dumped in front of me. ‘Look what I’ve found,’ she said. ‘You’ll never believe, it’s so awful.’ She unrolled what I took to be the dead man’s jacket and revealed the limp body of a black and white cat, something yellow oozing in a bubble from its mouth. ‘The poor thing,’ she said. ‘The poor, poor thing. Of course, we’re responsible for it now, aren’t we, Peter? We could bury it, but I think we should consider the possibility of disease. It’ll have to be cremation.’

  She left me with the cat while she went to our own cottage, quickly returning with a handful of matches and bits of crushed newspaper which she had taken from the boxes of Mother’s still-unopened crockery and ornaments. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘nothing to be afraid of. Think of it as our duty.’ She re-wrapped the cat, picked it up and led me to a copse a little way up from a rift in the cliff. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘this will do. It’s nice and sheltered. Appropriate, don’t you think?’ she said as she began making th
e newspaper into a pile. She soon realized she had nowhere near enough material and she began searching around for dried grass, leaves and twigs. Eventually she decided: ‘It is ready.’ She produced the cat from the bundle and laid it on top of the unlit bonfire. My heart was throbbing, I don’t know why. Alison dragged bits of grass from under the cat to obscure its body before she struck a match on a flat stone and lit the paper and the driest of the grass. She took me by the hand and bade me stand back as the flames grew. Inexplicably, I loosed myself from her grip and ran a few paces up out of the hollow, stopping and then turning to watch the flames reach and crackle. Alison seemed oblivious of my presence as she stepped forward and prodded the fire with a stick to let air into the centre. She turned to me, looking in my direction yet appearing to focus some way beyond me. ‘I should say a prayer,’ she said, ‘but I can’t think of one. I know, I’ll sing instead. The school song, that’ll do.’ She began, ‘Land of our birth we pledge to thee . . .’ Then she started to giggle and couldn’t continue the verse. She ran right up to the fire, squealing with curiosity, prodding at the charring, falling outer tent of sticks with her foot, her eager eyes seeking a better view of the cat’s smouldering red outline. Then her enthusiasm began to fail as she circled the dying fire and realized that the heat it had given was not strong enough to reduce the cat’s bones to ashes. The fire went out and Alison kicked at the little black skeleton. I saw the soft charred entrails nestling in its head and ribcage, before my sister ran up the banking, grabbed my hand and led me off, running at first then slowing to a walk as we came to the beach.

  The spectacle of the cat weighed heavily on my mind; everything weighed on my mind. I began to examine my own thin constitution, my flesh, my pink fingernails, my soft white belly, and I took to looking at myself in mirrors, asking myself strange, obscure mental questions, straining backwards to look over my shoulder at the reflection of my thin white back. I would feel my hair, sketch round the features on my face with my thumb, and watch the little pulsing vein in my ankle. That this skin, these bones, eyes, teeth, organs, would also one day end up as ashes, as nothing, imparted in me a dread I had not known before. I had an impulse to end my life there and then. I had no experience of suicide, I believed it to be my own invention, and as such it became suspect in my mind. It would never do, I realized that. I hesitated and the urge withered, and became locked and lost somewhere inside me.