Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  November 14th

  Dawn over Portland, sea mist spilling up over the bluffs at Babbacombe. What are those lines from Peter Abelard, the castrated lover?

  I got up and looked into a mocking bathroom mirror: stubble-headed as a penitent. Oh yeah, I remember them now, est mihi pallo in ore, my face is pale from love’s disappointment. How was I expected to feel? I did feel something. Maybe that was the point of it. I should thank her for that. I still felt stupidly tender about her. My love had been like a cactus flower that had bloomed for one night only.

  The tide was out. I walked across the shingle towards the pier that Leveson Harcourt built in 1889. Prisoner L150 Lee might have quarried those Portland blocks. Harcourt was kin to Home Secretary Harcourt who had commuted Lee’s death sentence. The mist cleared to reveal a greasy swell far out. Cormorants stood sentry on Harcourt’s pier. I saluted the webcam on the café roof that I had spied through all that year; now I in turn have become a stuttering image for unknown eyes. My feet trod down on squeaking pebbles, crackling wrack and shells. I have certainly fished by obstinate isles. So strange for my Redwing boots to stamp hollows down on real Babbacombe Beach. Wave-smoothed brick, chips of green glass, whisps of bast: I picked up handfuls of it. Fragments of the Glen in there, I reckoned. I’m set on building up a torre with those fragments, exegi monumentum. Yep, I will build me a monument. I have a male brain. I can accept it now, its asperities drum at my temples. It’s not much good at love but dandy for facticity.

  You realize how eccentric Miss Keyse must have been when you feel the closeness of the sea there. She must have been crazy to live in the cottage on the beach and not in the more spacious Vine up the hill. All that is left of the life of the Glen are remnant buttresses and pediments. You can only see indentations behind the devouring ivy, shadows of buildings that once were there.

  I’ve been studying another one I’ve saved. It’s my favorite old postcard of the bay from John Lee’s day. The picture must have been taken from the path leading up to Walls Hill. It’s more treed up there nowadays. There is no Harcourt pier to disfigure the curve of the bay. You can see the red cliffs of Oddicombe to the right. The outcropping Blackball Rocks lurk in the middle. There is no sign of Babbacombe Down or St Marychurch behind the trees on the rim of the bluffs. You can see the pale lozenge shapes of fishermen’s shacks to the left of the Blackball Rocks. The Cary Arms roof is the main focus of the picture. It is still thatched. That thatch burned in 1906 to be replaced by the red tiles it now carries. At the apex of the crescent of shingly beach you can see two buildings belonging to the most northerly parts of the Glen, the Music Room and the Boat House, where Miss Keyse’s body was laid out immediately after the fire. The Glen itself is invisible under the trees. It is a space, an elision in this photograph then and as it is now. You could put a sign there, hic iacet aenigma, here lies an enigma.

  There was a weird incident near to the Blackball Rocks this afternoon. I came across a pack of guys chasing two girls. There were five of them, young but strong-looking, their faces barely visible from the hooded jackets they all wore. They were throwing stones and shouting stuff at the girls. I’m sure I heard one yell that they were gonna rape them. They kept on throwing wood and stones and one of them pushed the girl’s dog into the sea with his boot. The dog yelped and swam in circles. The girls looked scared. They didn’t see me at first. I came out the shadowy woods and screamed at the boys to get lost. They looked surprised and seemed even more freaked when I came up close to them.

  “Fuck off, mate,” said one of the larger guys.

  “Yeah, why don’t you fuck off?” said one girl. She didn’t look too pleased at being rescued. Maybe I’d misunderstood. Pretty soon all of them had turned on me. Those kids thought they were hanging tough but compared to the gangstas of South Milwaukee they were small fry. I picked up a piece of driftwood.

  “Ya want some?” I slapped my leg with the wood. I pointed at them. “Which one first? You? You?”

  Pretty soon they beat a retreat, pausing only to shout at me from a safe distance. I had no idea what they were saying and didn’t care. They hadn’t had a chance. I had a feral Lee on my side. He’d taught me a bit. Wish I had him with me when I had those bullies at High School, that Cody Breadgood with tattoos up his neck and the fattass Lanette Blair. They were so shitty to me. It felt good to run the kids off my beach. Yeah, run, you jerkass shitbirds. Jesus, the Brits sure do a line on skeazy deadbeats. Maybe my problem has been fear all along. Hitting Pa like that must have choked off my confidence.

  Had to walk a while to ease the adrenaline rush—I had no high strength Gaba to calm me thanks to Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise. I stamped around on the groaning shingle reciting exegi monumentum, the one great part of me that will never die. There have been consequences to my pilgrimage here but I’ve not quite figured out all their ramifications. For one thing it came to me that Lee had internalized his guilt because he felt responsible. Maybe he had so many bad thoughts he imagined they had leaked out into the actual world. “I will make an end of one,” he had raged. What had mattered about his story was his transfiguration.

  Tonight Hannah rang me, checking I was okay. We talked like old friends. She sent me some texts which she signed with an ‘x’. There are many kinds of love. We have agreed to meet tomorrow and drive around some John Lee sites.

  I’ve come to understand something real important. I’ve been going in circles looking for the truth but maybe there is more power and beauty in a secret that is well kept. Everyone makes a big deal of ventilating their thoughts these days but I think Melville wrote about a different way in his Notebooks. Something about Captain Pollard of Nantucket and his terrible secret. I would check but I’ve not got my old books with me and this is something the online world has not noticed.

  That’s it, I’ve now remembered. Melville wrote: “To live with a secret may have more power than to bask in the full light of the truth.” That’s what Lee did, he learned to swallow down his secret and live with it. An unknown heroic act by which he earned his crown of stars.

  November 15th

  I stood outside Torquay Library waiting for Hannah to pick me up as the Torbay citizens went about their Saturday morning business. They were a strange sight in the muddy light. The old people had guarded faces, they slunk along without looking right nor left, especially avoiding a gaggle of young shitbillies hanging outside Riley’s snooker hall. Quite a few old timers rode on scooters, they were everywhere here. In fact, every third person looked disabled in some way. The Brits have given up on the gentleman thing. Their newspapers and TV seem now to celebrate swaggering scuzzball soccer players, and the well-dressed Englishman has been replaced by a crumple-faced, ill-dressed inheritor. My old postcards show the streets of Torquay full of snappy dudes in boaters and the women in crinolines and bonnets but now they are filled with a sullen, bundled, shabby people with guarded unhopeful faces. Only the black folks here seemed to walk about with an animated stride and bustling confidence. Maybe they are on the up. The English have retreated to their last redoubts. I saw a sort of fear in their eyes. It seems like they didn’t know who their neighbors were any more.

  I had most connection with the street bums selling magazines and such. We had loneliness in common. I felt they were my homies and I gave them money, solid English coins like bullets. I tried out my John Lee slang on one of them. I said, “How be you nackin’ vor?” He stared at me as if I was crazy then replied “Alright, mate. What’s on?”

  Hannah told me to stop talking to guys on the street. I might get into trouble, she said. I didn’t tell her about the beach incident.

  Her car was real small, we had to move the seats about to fit me in. She found it funny. Her sharp white teeth showed as she laughed. She’s so beautiful, my heart still does a back flip to see her.

  First off, we drove on the coast to Teignmouth to look for Templer. He had died in that asylum in Surrey but they shipped him back home for burial. We wand
ered up and down the big burying ground on a hill above the town but he eluded us. In the end we admitted defeat. He was always sneaky that Templer—syphilis-wracked buddy to Miss Keyse. Whatever was he up to when he volunteered to defend Lee? I guess maybe he decided to do such a spectacularly poor job of it so that Lee was bound to get hung.

  “Well, that was a good start,” said Hannah as we left Teignmouth. Irony again right? We went on towards Exeter by way of the coast, through folded West Country hills with their small packets of fields. Red trails of mud leaked across the twisty wet roads.

  We stopped in Dawlish for lunch. The rail line there ran on buttresses right along the sea front. I thought of Lizzie Harris looking out the train window there on the way up to the Exeter hearings to condemn her brother. A high tide slopped and swirled at the sea defenses as we walked past the shuttered amusement parlors by the front. The eatery had prints of foxhunting scenes and they played sounds of bird calls and cow bells in the rest rooms. I guess the English seem always to be looking for a vanished rural past.

  I saw a stagshorn sumach growing in a front yard. I sure was far from home and my old comforting routines. I seem to have lost my fixity these last few days and I’ve only now noticed that my essential tremor has calmed down a lot.

  As we travelled, I entertained a fantasy of me living in Torquay. Maybe teaching in writing school and living in a threesome with Hannah and her friend. They could be my own Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Only a lot better looking. Creative writing, huh? I read a handbook once, ‘A Guide to Narrative Craft’, I think it was, it said the business of writing was ‘the study of humanity’. For me that is not enough. In our post-human times we should write about humanity confronted by the relentless facticity of the world. Lachrymae sunt rerum, the tearfulness of things is the bitter truth of men. Maybe I should quit literature altogether, live on a torre, be a gardener in Torre Abbey, yeah! Or fish for lobster in the murky waters off Babbacombe Bay.

  We poked around Exeter Rougement Castle. Hannah seemed interested in everything although I got the impression she humored me some of the time. Sometimes she gently corrected my misperceptions of her country. Once or twice, she laughed outright. Especially when I asked if a cool white dog we saw was some kind of special English hunting dog.

  “No, it’s just a poodle,” she said. She seemed to find that real funny though she tried to hide it.

  Rougement was where Lee faced his death sentence. The cells that he once occupied in court have become chi-chi apartments and the court rooms were being ripped out for a shopping mall. We could see Exeter Prison a half mile below, just visible through a screen of leafless sycamores. That at least was still being used for its original purpose. I told Hannah about how the last witch of England was hung off those Rougemont battlements in 1680 something. Thereabouts anyway. The luckless Alice Molland. There was to be no fuck-up with her hanging.

  We came looping back to Torquay by the back roads, stopping at Bishopsteington. The village sits on a rise overlooking the wide curving estuary of the Teign. I had a memory that the Fey sisters hailed from there, and I had a hunch we’d find them in the burying ground around the old church. Crows were fidgeting and calling in the churchyard trees as we searched. Hannah said they weren’t crows they were “rooks”. We found the girls close under an old tree. They were buried together.

  It was hard to read the lichened sandstone. There was a butterfly motif at the top. Hannah said that represented the freed soul. I had to feel the letters to read them.

  In loving memory of Sarah Elizabeth Fey aged 17

  Also Mary Ann Fey Sister of the Above died 17th November 1884.

  To die in Jesus o how sweet

  You need not shed a tear

  You need not wish us back again

  You have no cause to fear.

  Those words seemed like an invocation to stop a haunting, as if someone was scared of the girls becoming revenants. The date 17th November was from when Mary Ann was found washed up off Portland. Sarah had died on about the 13th according to Lee. Only I knew that today, the 15th November, was the real anniversary of Mary Ann’s death. Hannah left two posies by the grave, made up of wild blue asters we’d found still blooming.

  Our last stop was Abbotskerswell, the home village. Modernity has overwhelmed the place. Rows of new houses have crept up the valley, even the old cob-walled houses had spanking new thatch and vinyl double-hung windows. I stared up at Town Cottages but could feel no presence. Ma’s bean rows and woven skeps had been replaced by neat front yards, faux rustic benches and rose arches. The churchyard had weeds that were knee-high. The Brits seem to have stopped using their churches. We stumbled round in the dusk and found a sullen group of Lee kin clumped together. The last Lee grave was from 1951. There was one marked with the white Portland stone they use for military graves here. It was for Freddie Lee, the sailor, killed in a fire on H.M.S. Eaglet in 1920. On Freddie’s grave was written, ‘Resting where no shadows fall.’

  Streetlights began to light up. We found only one other authentic survivor from the past: the Ladywell at the far southern end of the village. The pool was still there, enclosed within an ivied recess and guarded by a mysterious door. Inside was a circular translucent brimming circle of clear water seemingly cut into the bedrock. Hannah threw a bent safety pin into the unsteady waters. I asked her what she saw there for us but she would not tell me.

  “Nothing bad,” was all she’d say.

  Night of 15th

  I am in my hotel room, it’s late, my leg is throbbing like a bitch and I am inputting this left-handed.

  It being the anniversary of the Babbacombe killings, I thought somehow that I’d tap into the night vibe down in the Bay. I really didn’t know what I was looking for—searching for the authentic I guess. England takes on its old guise at night, once you move out from the dull orangey glare of those sodium street lights. I went down Beach Road off Babbacombe Down. All of a sudden it got old world creepy. There was a misty uncertain light, and I kept bumping into wet breathing walls and jumping when the shadowy trees creaked and shifted. I could hear bursts of laughter from customers at the Cary Arms away off by the shore, and the sound came now nearer, now more faintly as the wind shifted. I blundered along through the woods. All of a sudden a gunshot moon flared in a space in the clouds, lighting the scene. I could make out the shadowy structures of the Glen gardens. I didn’t want to go ass-over-teakettle into those old cellar pits so I hunkered down on one of the benches by the side of a path with my feet tucked into the fallen beech leaves.

  It seemed peaceable at first, and I told myself to chill. Nothing was going to harm me now. I thought I’d tune into the night sounds for a while then go back to my hotel. The sea kept up its low rhythmic wash, wash. Sometimes there was a fleeting call of a sea bird which was then abruptly stilled. What did Lee call them? Oh yeah—mewies. The wind dropped and it became quiet. I felt kinda comfortable, even a little drowsy. I settled back, arms folded with the back of my neck resting on the smooth old bench. Once, something zipped across between the trees in the moonlight. I thought a raccoon maybe. Then I remembered they hadn’t any of those here. Maybe it was a rat then or a small bird even, like the one the Devoners call ‘a crackety wren’. Whatever, they were only critters settling for the night. Nothing to get fussed over. I sunk back in peaceful contemplation.

  Then I was on the alert. Something was moving on the wooded slope above me. A distinct, non-natural noise. I sat up. There it was again, then a new sound, a creaking and clanking of an iron gate. I thought that surely was the gate at the top of the gardens, a secret back way to get to the Glen but I was pretty damn sure it was kept secure with a big padlock. Silence fell again. I strained to listen then it came clear and unmistakable—the grating rhythmic crunch of a solid footstep. Yep, holy shit, I realized someone was on the move towards me, a person with something heavy on their feet like hiking boots or maybe hobnails. It was getting louder. I had sudden sickish thought it was that ped
ophile guy I had seen earlier, a badass who was gonna be resentful of me squatting in his woods. It seemed too late to back off out of it, I’d make too much noise groping about. Nearer and nearer came the brisk purposeful tread; whoever it was obviously knew their way in the woods. Then I picked out movement against the pale dirt of the path. He was coming straight for me. I reached for Kaiser’s nameplate stamp, still in my pocket, and bunched it in my fist. The noise stopped. The intruder was somewhere to my left. Maybe whatever or whoever was trying to sniff out where I was crouching. Two more loud crunching steps then I saw him. The moon came out the cloud a moment and lit him up: a long dark coat, circular hat tipped right back and a mole-like, feral face glaring at me.

  “’Ow do, me boody?”

  That low growly buzz-saw voice was shockingly loud. I knew it at once.

  “’Ow be nockin’ on there? All conferable on thikky bench?”

  My heart was stammering full belt. I just wanted to get outta there and away from that freaky thing. I tried to speak but my throat went dry and crawly. The air seemed cold all of a sudden and my breath came out in pufflets like dry ice. All I could manage was a feeble, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Nay, ’oo do you think? Whose me? Now, what a question after I’ve come special to see thee.”

  “I don’t know you,” my voice had become a squeak by then,

  “Caw my dear days! What is it? Are you frit o’ me? Do you think I’m a spirit, condemned to walk the night? Ha! Well, I’m not.”

  The figure moved. It seemed to be pointing at me,

  “I’m out and about because I’ve been called. You wanted to see me though you look wisht to see me. Do you know what wisht means, boy? No? I can’t hear ’ee, what the matter, has kitty cat got the auld tongue? Well, it means bewitched, whisht does.”