You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  In the penultimate sequences of the poem, every vestige of Starnism has abandoned. From the broken-backed terza rima of ‘Room 121’ to the unpunctuated free verse of the ‘Lullia’, these Cantos resonate in the same way as the late paintings of Audsley King: for a time the world flares up like an autumn bonfire as the poet reverts to his earliest persona – ‘Gifting,’ as Desablier has it, ‘himself to himself,’ and becoming his own influence. He returns in his imagination to Greenmartin Swale, where ‘unemployed boys build fires on waste ground, fight quietly under the bridges in the afternoon’ and he remembers a geranium on the window sill of his mother’s bedroom, ‘its white petals more or less transparent as the clouds covered and uncovered the moon.’ But for Crome this acknowledgement or recognition acts to flatten his perspective. From now on, lyricism will be strictly contained. The sublime will recede. The world will become for him, finally, the world. ‘Neither blessed with immanence,’ he wrote to Rack, who was by then himself ill, ‘nor wrenched by the unthought known, the streets of the city are emptied and become streets; and there, unlike Audsley King, I am compelled to live.’

  He was not to be ‘compelled to live’ there for long. By 1941, Maria Voolay had moved her elite cadres down from the North, and the city was under constant artillery bombardment from sites fifty miles off in Harpington and Beaumarchais. Many of the inhabitants of the Quarter removed themselves to Uwal Ease, the largest of the camps outside the walls. At first the journal seems optimistic, describing ‘the amiable optimism of waking up in woods on a sunny morning. You hear birds. You hear other people beginning to stir. It’s still cool but sunlight is falling through the branches and soon it will be warm. Insects loop past. You smell coffee. You’re part but not part of everything that’s going on – you’re inside it somehow.’ But he is soon enough complaining, ‘On this long, muddy, partly-wooded slope beside the river we try and fail to introject the dreary vastness of the outside.’ Running out of morphia, both his legs ‘rich’ with gangrene, he lay for three weeks on a low bed, distracted by airbursts and, closer-to, the cries of ‘the chaotic middle classes, with their flapping tents and impractical demands, their attempt to face the inevitable by exporting the kitchens and dinner tables of Dynevor Road into a field in the middle of nowhere.’ Every morning, he notes, the trodden earth is shimmed with water from the night’s rain; the air fills with smoke and the ‘brutal’ cries of the children; while in verse after verse of the final cantos of Bream Into Man he depicts the city ‘eating itself up in the distance like wood in a stove, like flames eating the work of the dead painter.’

  At last, unsure whether he’s awake or asleep, he begins to dream fantastically of the Vule Portny Lords, who, ‘coming and going at unpredictable intervals on New Rose Ground, fuck half-clothed in the woods at night –

  ‘Cold airs move around them. The dog sits looking away. It’s brindled, with patches of bluish grey on a brown ground; as scabbed as they are. As thick-legged as a pony. Mist the colour of an exposed thigh – the colour of arsenic in milk – fills the wood for an hour to waist height, then pours suddenly away downhill. At dawn the sun falls on soft grey ashes tinged yellow or pink. The stones of the temporary hearth drips with solid candle grease. The Lords’ curious old iron pots are caked with rust and ash; their barbeques, bricolaged into existence for a single night, are abandoned. Fragments of old furniture can be found scattered around a trampled glade, where they now begin to dig for a briony mandrake.’ He writes with astonishment of the ‘sheer effort of dragging this thing up out of the black and rusty strata – the crushed time in the earth – and then of hauling it away.’ He writes with admiration of the courage of the dog: ‘You can see that all its days this animal has drawn up bad luck. Yet it is still alive, and in its heavy poise and balance demonstrates the old couple’s own qualities of persistence and endurance.

  ‘On Greenmartin Swale,’ he recalls suddenly, ‘these roots were valued for their palliative effect. [Indistinct, but perhaps ‘Poachers’ or even ‘Pochards’] would carve them into the shapes of babies, then sow the crudely-formed heads with rapeseed. The result was known as a ‘genette’ or ‘jenny’, and was sold to the newly bereaved across the months of May and June, sometimes into July.’ He is not clear how the jenny worked, and asks himself: ‘Was it herbalism or magic?’ A jenny could weigh half a hundredweight and approach the dimensions of a seven year old child; later it might develop some rudimentary volition of its own. In the villages of the Hangline Estuary they never allowed a mature specimen to be brought within two hundred yards of a church, in case it gave up its true history and origins.

  ‘The dog strains into its filthy old canvas harness. The old couple whisper and smile and click their tongues encouragingly. Where it falls on the aimless pathways between the bramble colonies and the thick stands of hawthorn, oak and sloe, the sun is warm; but the wood itself is always cool and damp. Branches with a laden curve, sagging close to the dark wet earth. Nettles lean out from the base of the dense growth. Small brown birds move in the undergrowth. They chip at the silence, hop into the sunlight. The Lords of Vule Portny wait until evening; then, themselves heavy and smelling of earth, join the dog in its harness and drag their treasure along the banks of the Royal Canal towards Omber Grove and into the city.’ And then, inexplicably, ‘I would have expected them to be dead by now, but they looked no different.’

  Finally, sick of his own smell – ‘which had stuck by then to every surface of the fabric’ – and hardly able to move, Crome had himself carried out of the tent and into a nearby clearing, where he was left on his own. It was August the 8th, 1945. We can imagine the shouts of children in the twilight, the scents of bruised earth, rubbish and gangrene. Then, cutting across these sensations, the complex signature of the burning city: faint screams, the rumble of artillery, the red hot metal of sinking ships dowsed in the harbour. Night fell. After an hour or two without speaking, the poet became agitated. Indistinct sounds were heard. No one seems to have dared to go and see what was happening. Crome called out incoherently two or three times and was then silent. In the morning it became clear that he had left the camp for the wilderness outside. There was a shallow depression between the hawthorns, where in his pain he had tried to dig himself into the earth; a few scrapes and disturbances where he had dragged himself away. When Eric Desablier arrived at Uwal Ease three days later, Crome’s tent was still intact. A woman from the camp had been paid to clean and tidy.

  Crome left a box containing clothes, small ornaments and a framed pen drawing of a young woman in the style of Audsley King; while on a collapsible wooden table were arranged his favourite pen; his journal with its battered cover ‘bound in wood & velvet’; and a full ream of paper, carefully squared-up, which proved to be the final raging cantos of Bream Into Man, with their liturgic and ultimately mysterious references to a ‘King and Queen, installed, with garlands’ and ‘the dog that is not a dog’. On the bed lay a few stained but carefully folded bandages.

  ‘It seems impossible to believe,’ Desablier records, in his ‘conditional biography’, A Poet of the Quarter (New Light Press 1947), ‘that this final act wasn’t – like everything in the text itself – a considered and precise act of language. To Crome, village, city and wilderness were by then indistinguishable, his thoughts were indistinguishable from memories, and none of it was any longer distinguishable from the overgrown ruins of New Rose Ground.’

  Last Transmission From the Deep Halls

  … Saying, once those outsiders get in your tortured halls… I’m saying we didn’t have command of the vast fictions of the day… The city wasn’t, in the end, where those of us who lived there thought it was. We had already lost it in all senses of that word... All we knew of this place was the news... the halls are aware that – in the end – they can never know what, exactly, the plot was. It’s only silence after that. Back at the beginning there’s the tapping sound, like metal on stone... then the call signs, several of them, very amplified and con
fused... cries in the halls... a cruel few words and then, ‘We no longer know which way to face.’ The halls are still aware... What if the city didn’t ‘fall’. What if nothing ‘fell’? Nothing was lost but existed just alongside everything else, fifty years later in the rubble by a farm at the flat end of nowhere... who could write this... everyone has a different story to sell... call signatures in rooks, fresh plough, old silence: ‘We don’t know what to do. Everything is the alongside of something else.’... Minor players gesture helplessly... signals hard to make out in the chaos as the big institutions go down… everyone desperate now.

  Studio

  Matte white walls. Overall hung on the back of the door. Black futon pushed against the wall. A Victorian hatbox, complete with travel stickers. A shelf of books high up along one wall, its line extended on the adjoining wall by four small square canvasses. A couple of larger, rectangular paintings on the walls and several small ones stored on a shelf in the chimney breast: the rest she keeps downstairs. ‘Always sit,’ she says, ‘in the room. Never along its edges.’ She keeps turpentine in a Victorian inkwell, won’t use white spirit because it’s carcinogenic. ‘Always have a lid on the bin for turpentine rags, especially in a small room, otherwise you have to live with the fumes.’ Rectangular glass palette with a bevelled edge, resting on a pile of boxes, placed low to eliminate shine off the glass. A Stanley glass-cleaner to scrape the palette. Brushes – dull orange, blue and brown – laid out on the varnished floorboards, or next to the palette on ribbed or corrugated paper to stop them rolling about. A tub of acrylic gesso primer. A wire basket full of tubes of oils. Vandyke brown, Indian Red, crumpled tubes leaden in the dull light. Oxide of Chromium. Monestial Green. Rowney, Windsor and Newton. Speedball oils from America. Small sketches on French watercolour paper, wavering pencil lines and little dabs of paint, their edges torn neatly along a ruler. On the easel is an unfinished picture. A woman stares out at the viewer. Behind her, more men, women and children are caught.

  The Old Fox

  Alexa would lie back with a glass of white wine and light the stub of a scented candle which she had cemented to the edge of the bath with its own juices. By its light you could see every bone in her body, brought up in relief like patterns in the sand. Even so, she regarded herself with bemusement: ‘I’ve put on so much weight!’ In a way this was true, though not to you or me with our skewed standards, the meaningless thins and fats of our social scale. I had seen the photographs of her. At five and half stone she looked saintly. She had the drawn yet peaceful face of a bog-burial, as if she had been killed but had got over it.

  Alexa’s father had doted on her until the age of twelve, while her mother looked on. Then he left them both, without saying why. It was a time of panic, first for him, then for Alexa’s mother, then for Alexa. Panic conflated everything. One minute he was watching television, the next he had filed for divorce from Pasadena. ‘He doesn’t even know anyone in America,’ Alexa’s mother had said, looking down at the papers. The sense of him over there, working, living, opening and closing the door of some other house, getting by without her support while she sat at home in Holland Park, threw her into a worse panic than him leaving in the first place.

  ‘Can he do that?’ she asked Alexa.

  Alexa shrugged. It was already clear he could. They sent letters care of his solicitor but never heard from him again. ‘Why do you want to do this?’ Alexa wrote. ‘I don’t feel you owe me an explanation. But if you could just help.’

  A few months later, Alexa’s mother went out into the garden one night because she thought she heard him coming back. After that she went out every night. Alexa couldn’t disengage from either of them. She left home. She attended university. She put together some kind of life of her own. She was a successful theatre designer. Theatre suited her: she fell apart, she put herself back together, she fell apart again. It was a story of her own. She dreamed that if she stayed thin her father would return, in the guise of an animal. She was a survivor of all those late twentieth century wars. Family wars, self-image wars, wars of transformation and dysfunction: in those photos she had of herself at five and half stone, she was more soldier than victim.

  I never knew what to make of her, or myself, or the relationship we had. I would manage to end it one way or another, meet someone else, involve myself elsewhere. Then I’d get a call. She would be coming in from Prague or New York, could I meet her at the airport? I would go there and find they had brought her off the plane in a wheelchair. I could see the relief on her face half way across the terminal.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you!’

  As soon as I heard that it would all start up again.

  Her mother had been thin, too, Alexa said: but not really thin, ‘just upset and not eating much.’ Because this was back in the 70s, before the scales were loaded against thin people, before all the fuss. It was before the world over-reacted. ‘My father always teased her about it,’ Alexa told me. ‘But she was never what I’d call thin.’

  ‘Did you feel as if you were competing with her?’ I said.

  Alexa stared and didn’t answer. A fleeting stubborness came into her face.

  I never learned anything about the father. But from the things Alexa said I had a clear picture of her mother – a woman dark-haired and disorganised, nostalgic, a little deracinated, always missing something, even before he went away. After he’d gone, she spent her time in the garden. She halved the size of the big rectangular lawn, put in new paths and flowerbeds. She got rid of the vegetables. She grew roses. She was unlucky with one cat after another. ‘Those cats!’ Alexa remembered. ‘Mum always had one rubbing round her legs, but they never lasted.’ While her mother dug the garden, Alexa awaited her father’s answer; which, of course, didn’t come. By then she was seventeen and eating an eight ounce tin of green beans a day. ‘Eight ounces. There was something so precise, so dependable about that!’ Precision kept things at bay. But she worried how the strategy would evolve. ‘I was going to want to eat less, I already knew that. Splitting a tin of beans wouldn’t be so precise. I woke up one night in the dark in a panic. My father was in America, my mother was standing in the garden. How much of that weight was water? I had to get some scales, some really dependable scales, before I went to university.’

  When Alexa talked like that she widened her eyes. Her voice took on tender, ironic values. In each wry shake of the head there was regret for a lost innocence, for the time before numbers began their flocking behaviour in her head – pounds, ounces, calories, ordering themselves by a few simple rules at the beginning, then paring down from there.

  Sometimes she seemed to have an almost poetic insight into her own condition. Once she said: ‘By the time I was thirteen all my fears had collapsed into one. That’s the economics of it.’ And then, after a pause: ‘I need to grow up again. I need to grow up properly in some really safe place.’ Later, I came across the same phrases in magazines and newspaper articles. In fact any rationale would do. ‘Faced by the precariousness of tribal life,’ she would misquote Italo Calvino, ‘the shaman loses weight and flies to another world.’

  I could usually take Alexa’s mind off things.

  ‘We all need to feel safe,’ I told her. ‘But what I want to know is this: what happened to those cats?’

  She looked puzzled, even a little stubborn again.

  ‘I don’t see what you mean by that.’

  ‘Those cats of your mother’s.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Those.’ She laughed. ‘Run over mostly,’ she said. ‘All those pussies.’

  Whenever I tried to make Alexa feel safe it ended in sex. ‘Come and hug me before you go,’ she would beg. ‘Only a hug, I don’t want anything else.’ Hugging Alexa was like holding a child. She wriggled and fussed like a child settling itself, she smelt of soap and toothpaste. Then just as you thought she had fallen asleep she would murmur, ‘Mm, that’s nice, that’s a nice thing you’ve got down there,’ and that would be that. She was so obviou
s. I could hardly blame her for that because she was so completely cryptic too: she had her own motives for everything. It was some little internal ritual, you had to tuck her up in bed and give her a hug before she could do anything. She had to have a clean nightdress. And afterwards she would say something like, ‘I always feel so safe with you!’ as if she was at that moment discovering it. Other times she would just stop talking in the middle of a sentence and fall asleep. I would sit on the edge of the bed for another five minutes, then blow out the candles and leave. The nights were open and windy. I would walk down the empty street towards the tube station, thinking about Alexa asleep. She probably hadn’t even heard the door closing. It gave me a feeling of satisfaction to think that.

  Even when I ended it, Alexa continued to send me notes. They came as letters folded into airmail envelopes as flimsy as Alexa herself. Or home made cards with bits of sexy feathers or glitter stuck on. Or as mail from other people’s computers in Hastings or the Hague. They ranged from the naive to the gnomic.

  ‘I know you haven’t got time for me at the moment,’ she would write, ‘but I wondered if you wanted this.’ Whatever it was, she had forgotten to enclose it.

  At night her thoughts broke surface as mis-spellings, stories, puns accidental and deliberate; or at the other extreme, stripped themselves to a single bleak metaphor. 3am, and Alexa had woken up long enough to email me her dream: ‘I was running back to you. You lived in an old hotel, in a small town where the last bus goes at eight. I didn’t care if I missed the bus. I was suddenly filled with joy! It didn’t matter how tired I was. I was going back to you! But when I arrived the hotel had been sold. There was nowhere for us to go.’