by Rod Madocks
I’ve popped one of those suckers from its orange bottle. Maybe the anxiety neuron transmitters will damp down at last. I’m scanning the crews’ faces. They don’t look the least bit concerned.
Time? Been turning over my talisman in my fingers, it’s strangely calming to feel a bit of Kaiser with me. Could see a few lights down there in the dark, a ship? A burning ship?
Everything I really knew slid away, the familiar streets, Memorial Park, Old Glory flying outside Scotties. I left the good old Ford Explorer in Lot D for extended stay at O’Hare. I was already worrying what I was going to eat over in Brit land and sweating over how much of the inheritance from Grandpa would be left. Before leaving the apartment I had got it into my head that I needed some sort of talisman to take with me and help protect me. Looked around. I couldn’t see anything. There was that photo of Kimmie in a frame? No, better not. That might not be too lucky; nor Pa’s eyeglasses—I want to keep away from spirits. I ended up putting the small wooden nameplate stamp in my pocket. Hope he’ll stay with me. I’m fingering the worn wooden handle, the small, backward letters that spell—Howard Kaiser MD. Ut spiritu tuo protegas me. Those Romans believed in the Veteres, the ancients, the guiding ancestor spirits. I’ve got my parents, but maybe they are still angry at me. There’s my dead fetus sib and Grandpa of course. Further off there is Miss Keyse and Mary Ann Fey—not Lee though. I’m pretty sure he’s a bad spirit.
Passengers talking on their phones; wish I had someone to ring. Kimmie, what you doin’ now? What if I rang you out of the blue? It would sure surprise you to see me here, it took everything you had to get me to go to Kmart with you.
Drowsing under the airline fleece blanket: dreamt that everything went pop in a cloud of orange dust. I’m falling into the blades of a spinning jet engine.
Plane altering course, engine pulse changed slightly. All alert again. Don’t even ask how this idea all started. The idea of a pilgrimage, a confronting, a squaring.
Flat-toned English accents of the cabin crew, so different from the slow, rich voice of Lee I’ve listened to all these months.
Dude, I hope to crappin’ crap we get safely down. I prayed like a bastard to the Lady of the Snows as we launched at forty five degrees against the moon. No terror like that moment the plane banked over Chicago, the lights glittering like death below. It all begins in the belly, the icy, chilling horror. I keep going to the restroom, dodging the ‘occupied’ signs. In the yellow light my sickly terrified face appears in the vague mirror, the belly goes through peristalsis whatever.
November 11th
Came in low over London, the city packed in squares and whorls around the slow scribble of the Thames. Gray light, our wings clipping the shreds of puffy cumulus. A dim wet cloistered light so unlike our bright Midwest skies. I was numb with tiredness. Let’s just get this over.
Customs raked through the tablets in my carry bag. Guarana, Bacopa, Lion’s Mane, Herbalife memory EPA. They particularly didn’t like the Gaba. They took that away, customs man said it was not on his permitted list. Hell! How am I to manage to find my own equilibrium? Wonder how easy it is to get nootropics in the UK?
Green fields and old world trees. The birches I could recognize with their butter-yellow leaves. Fall not much advanced here. Everything packed in here real tight, houses each with neat squares of backyard made into gardens. Toy towns with roads jammed full of cars. Boxy new commercial buildings with corrugated walls. Forests of TV aerials.
Searched for my candy in vain at Waterloo Station. Asked the clerk if she had any Tootsie Roll or Peanut Butter M & Ms. She didn’t know what they were. Strange accent, kind of Middle Eastern face. Thought of Lee being dragged through the crowds there, manacled in his snuff-brown uniform with Governor Cowtan, on his way to prison. Saw ‘Exeter St. David’s’ on a big sign board. Now we were cookin’. Soon as I saw that sign I felt better, felt that something might open up for me.
I’m not sure how to speak to folks at the best of times and I don’t know what to say at all to the Brits around me. No one seems to look at each other in the rail carriage. All they do is look at their phones or gaze out the window. There’s a black bro’ a few seats down who keeps pulling his braids round and sniffing at them. Maybe he is as alienated as I am. I feel proud of myself though to be here. Something changing.
Destination: Plymouth by way of Exeter. How Lee dug his trains. Their rattle was never far from him wherever he lived.
On the train to Torquay, and here it is at last—Lee’s land. Small, sloping green fields edged about with trees and neat clumps of woodland. All is scarp and slope and deep green pasture, the rivers run red and full, and there’s a misty light on the undulating fields. These are Lee’s birth lands. The white stone houses tight to the ground make our stateside houses look temporary.
Torre Station in the drizzle is shabby and neglected-looking. I took a slow stopping train that let me off there. I waited for that one special train at Exeter.
“Not a lot come by Torre nowadays,” said the cab driver. He told me the town council wanted to change the name of the station to “Torquay Central” to make it more popular. “But we won’t hold with that,” he said, “It will always be Torre to us.”
Damn right, I thought, it will remain Torre for me also. So many of the characters in Lee’s story made their entrances and exits there. Lee himself in a GWR uniform toiling in the baggage rooms, him with the Brownlow’s silver under his arm, slinking off to Plymouth, the trial witnesses going to Exeter herded onto the train by Sergeant Knott in the rain and Lizzie lighting out, bound for her emigrant ship.
“Don’t get many tourists in November,” the cab man continued in his burry Devon accent. In St. Marychurch, he lowered his window and called out to an elderly buddy, “Alroit, boy!”
Jet lag, lolling, sick with wrenching change, half-amazed to find myself here. I read once that ‘amazed’ comes from the English country belief that you are ‘mazed’ or had a spell cast on you by a place or person. I guess that Babbacombe and Marychurch has cast such a maze on me. I seem oriented, I know my way like someone returning to a childhood place.
The cab dropped me on Babbacombe Downs and I booked in at the hotel. I am writing this in my cramped room mainly occupied by a double bed. The hotel is one of a Victorian row of houses, once great villas I reckon. I have bought many old postcards of Babbacombe off the Net and scanned them. I think my current hotel is one of the buildings in an old card I have from about 1890. I recognize the chimneys. You can see the bluffs dropping to the sea with the Cary Arms barely visible tucked down under the cliff and the mole that sticks out into the Bay. It was built while Lee was in jail. Lee must have walked by this building every day, on his way to drop the post into the box on Babbacombe Road. It has morphed into a weird hotel, done out with white rough plastered walls and wrought iron fittings in a faux-Spanish style. A sign on the door says it specializes in honeymoons. I guess that’s why the huge bed and the giant wall mirror. It also advertises, “Pink weddings a specialty.” It took me a while to realize that meant gay weddings. Gee, wonder what John Lee would have made of that? No sign of any other guest though, gay or not. A wind straight from the sea presses against the window.
I went out onto the cliff path as soon as I could. This was the moment I had been waiting for. All those hours listening to the recordings, the months of research trying to figure it all out. A deep recognition of place. Afternoon misty light, dog walkers limned against the skyline, that iron fence on the cliff edge looking the same as the one in the postcard. The view out to sea that had drawn so many, the sad insistent sound of waves on Oddicombe Beach far below, the dark bluffs dropping to the heaving back of the sea. A couple of freighters at anchor a mile or so out. Too hazy to see Portland. That view was one to die for. I thought of Miss Keyse looking out there for the last time on the 14th November, John Lee standing behind her, 130 years and more ago. The pleasure grounds at the cliff top, Victorian patterns overlaying more ancient track
s, all the houses packed in along the front, lop and slant and jammed together under a stone-colored sky, the streets folded and stratified like rock in this little town. Christmas lights swayed and clanked, strung up on the old gas lamp holders, and their constant creaking and clinking made it all more spooky.
I walked down Beach Road by the Babbacombe theatre built in 1920 on the site where the Prussian band once played for the Regatta, going down into Babba’s gulch. Space is a central fact for man born in America, and here everything is folded, sunk, cramp and secret. I felt dropped into an ancient place. It was a troglodyte world below Babbacombe Cliff: ancient, goetic, groined and damp. You are wrapped in the smell of wood smoke, wet earth and leaf mold and the lichened breath of the sea licks over you. The wind bustled on the cliff edge above but down there it was still as death. I’ve spent time wandering over the old grounds of the Tamaracks and the Indian Mounds back home but I had a sense of something immeasurably older here. At Kent’s Cavern round the headland they have found fossil human bones from half a million years ago.
The yipping gulls flickered around me. How close it all was to the sea. I’d imagined a long empty strand where all that murder drama was played out but no, it’s a pocket- sized patch.
A few paces and I was going past the Cary Arms, now a thriving bar and hotel. I couldn’t afford to stay there. It’s so cool the joint was doing the same business as in the time of Gaskin, the ruthless entrepreneur. I was sure that flinty bounding wall was the same one as in Lee’s day. My hand trailed over its rough barnacled texture and I leaned with my back to the three red rocks that Miss Keyse said looked like sounding whales. A dog barked across the way and the noise rolled out over the water. The bay was a natural echo chamber. I realized that everyone in Babbacombe must have heard the sound of Lizzie retching in the mornings and yeah, surely they’d heard Mary Ann’s screaming.
Only someone young and dumb like me would think that truth from the past could be pried out of this place. Still, I told myself I’m going to give it a shot. I was going to sniff out that genius loci. A milky sea hissed on the shingle; I imagined Mary Ann carried away out still screaming under the water. Cormorants stitched in and out of the dimpling wavelets as I stood on the stained patch of concrete, now a civic car park, where the Glen once existed. I wondered stupidly if some fragments of Miss Keyse’s DNA still lay lodged in the mossed roots and crevices of the beach cliff. Sea–rod fishermen paid me no mind, hunched there on the rocks, scanning the water as if also looking for ghosts. The waves glubbed and sighed under them. All of a sudden a man came past me with a dog. He said something like, “Arthurnoon, commin on rein.” I nodded, not really sure what he’d said. I felt suddenly dead beat from all my travelling and far, far from home.
I came up the steep slopes through the thick woods where the house called the Vine once stood, past Victorian garden seats coiled about with weeds and ledged with fallen leaves. I thought these were the remains of the old pleasure grounds of the Glen and imagined Lee sullenly sweeping down those paths in his long coat. Near the top of the bluffs I disturbed two figures who had been embracing or maybe having sex on one of those old seats. I could just see that it was a man and a boy. Black shapes sprang apart and scooted away. They left something on the bench. It looked like a kid’s blue T shirt. The smaller of the two must have been really quite young, a child maybe. They fled away through the trees. I had the sense of having stumbled on something ugly. I’d been looking for ghosts but maybe these dudes were the real guardians of the dripping trees. Maybe that fleeing man was one of Lee’s true inheritors. After all, Lee used to maul at Liza Maile up there, taunting her to show him her bubs. Perhaps I was in cold hell, in thicket there, ya, selva oscura, lost in a wood.
I look for the truth but I keep missing it or it misses me. I keep thinking I’ll know it when I see it surely? Rinsed by weariness, fear has ebbed a bit. What am I afraid of anyway? Is it failure? A failure to recognize. I lay for a while in the lousy, cold, English hotel room, and got under the covers. Mushroomy smell in the room, streaks of mold down the windows. I watched TV but it’s like in a code I can’t quite get, we’re separated by a common language sure enough. A lengthy weather report. They spend a lot of time on the weather here. Lay down again, tried to draw my routines around me but there were none to grip onto. Real stupid to come here. To be an oblate means to accept new rules and commit to them whether you like them or not.
I slept and dreamt of my Ford Escape SUV, dreamt of flying like a bat down a narrowing tunnel or journeying somewhere by night on a strange route. Fine dry Wisconsin snow ticking on the windshield, then the road blurring out, tires churning in a rut, headlights darkening and no light behind.
Woke late, maybe nine at night. A storm had come up, strings of lights clashed and jerked in the forecourt outside and the palms vibrated their leaves in the sea wind. I went out. Lights were visible out along the coast, must have been Teignmouth and Exmouth. The moon laid a milky path on the black sea for a moment then clouds dragged across it. I walked in the rain through St Marychurch, past the Babbacombe Corinthians sailing club, along by the marble obelisk to Doctor Chilcote and then past the Town Hall where the Lee inquest was held. The place was now remodeled to shop units and a real estate office. I seemed to find my way easily, the town fell open to me like a book. Dinky windows, thick walls, close alley ways and St Mary’s flat-toned bell sounding out the hours. I thought, I must go and see Miss Keyse’s grave tomorrow. Felt really hungry and the hotel didn’t do food at night, so I looked for a convenience store. I might have known the dark narrow streets but I couldn’t find anything to eat there. I was looking for da Pig, ya know, a Piggly Wiggly or something. Kept going round the same blocks and seeing the same guy in a hooded jacket drinking from a beer can in a dark alcove of a shop doorway. Each time I came past he gave me the same dead-eye hostile look.
In the end I went into the Crown and Sceptre pub. Kind of a Dickens scene in there with low benches and a log fire trickling smoke. The walls were festooned with strange objects: bed pans, old record sleeves, dolls with cracked faces, antique urinal bottles. There was definitely a toilet theme going on. Even had items of clothing pinned up there. Maybe stuff the customers had left over the years? A few locals came and went. They greeted each other with a muttered, “’Ow you been?” Their blunt-faced dogs were strapped up in leather harnesses, and fixed me with their mean little eyes as they crouched under the tables. I asked one owner what sort of dog he had. He said it was “a staffie”. Her name was Daisy, he said. Huh, Lady the brach, might sit by the fire and stink, I thought. Don’t suppose they know their Shakespeare here nor Latin neither. Still, I guess that truth’s a dog who must to kennel, he must be whipped out in any man’s language.
I sat and listened to the murmurous Devon voices. Each table had a big dome of melted candle wax, supersize lumpy candles formed out of generations of smaller candles melting and molding one on top of the other. Bit like this country. Generation after generation stacking down and staying put. A shrouded people. Their dogs might stare but none of their masters seemed to look at me directly—they all were watching, I guess. I wondered if Lee had ever come into the Crown and Sceptre. If he had it was only to do deals, he was no drinking man. Maybe to meet Cornelius. I’m sure that jerk Cornelius would have known the place.
I drank cider. It was thin and acid and looked like piss. I felt woozy after one glass and tried to order some food. There was a low rumble of laughter from the drinkers. The barmaid said, “No, we don’t do none. Try the chippie, my lover. Hanbury’s is what you want. On Princes Street.”
First night at Babbacombe. Feel sick and floaty. Cider and jet lag. Smell of fat on my fingers from the food. Holding Kaiser’s name stamp, protegas me.
November 12th
Woke after a fitful sleep, and felt better. I sat at my window with crappy powdered coffee made from the kettle in my room. Outside the wind jigged the strings of festive lights, crows patrolled the Babbacombe Down. The
cliffs here are a startling red and the sea a deep dark blue.
I began to feel like making a poem, each line beginning with ‘because’. How would it start?
Because pain, because of a peeled mind,
Because feeding, because sick sheets,
Because life folds down to a circle.
The piece had a way to go, I thought maybe I’d call it ‘Looking for the Muzot Tower’. It was good to be forming poetry again; the words had been shaken loose by travelling. Perhaps I’ll send it to Del Sol Review when it’s done. Poetry has helped me, the doctors pressed me down with diagnoses when I was a kid, autistic spectrum, conduct disorder, developmental disorder, social phobia. Poetry saved on all that Advil and Zoloft they wanted to give me. Poetry and the study of Latin have given me a way to survive. I have lived through books.