Basil
I couldn’t remember getting up and opening the door, but found myself on the other side of it, looking down at the light shining underneath. Behind me was the hall, a dingy space filled with chill, musty air. The long window at the top of the first flight of stairs, rain rippling over its surface, cast a grey glimmering radiance down into the hall. My eyes strained to make out two upright shadows at the foot of the staircase—newel posts, thick carved blocks of wood.
I crossed the hall, through a patch of moving light like a reflection thrown on a wall of gently agitated, moonlit water, and climbed the stairs. I stopped on the landing and leaned towards the window, which drew the warmth from my cheeks and mouth. Through the rain I saw the vague shapes of trees thrashing about in the wind, featureless cloud, and a flooded lawn reflecting the sky’s pallor. My hands, mottled with shadow, seemed to be corroding.
Below, beneath the parlour door, the firelight shone, as startling and singular as a furnace in a dingy mill.
I stopped on the first floor before a door that, open a crack, gave on to a room that was quiet—not as empty rooms are quiet, but hushed—like an occupied room where the occupant is contriving to stay very still. At the end of the narrow hallway was a round window, which cast a circular patch of light on the floor. As I watched, the light began to change, tints growing gradually within the circle, till the boards were tinged with transparent splashes of colour, like sunlight through stained glass, or a watercolour of a bouquet of flowers. I moved towards the window and the colour faded, as the first flash of an explosion will fade, or a searchlight sweep away. Through that window too was only a view of a drenched overgrown garden, and soft rain striking the glass.
I began to wonder what I was doing, wandering around the hallways of this house. The question didn’t appear to me to be a matter of great urgency or interest, yet I wasn’t just idly ‘wondering’. Instead I was having immense difficulty focusing what would be, in ordinary circumstances, confusion, suspicion and fear. I felt wrapped in several layers of cotton wool. It was almost the same sensation of apathy I had as a kid, doped up in hospital after an accident on my bike. Now, though my physical senses were fully awake, and I was able to take in my surroundings, I felt indifferent to what was happening. I knew it was strange that no one had noticed me get up and leave, and it was certainly strange that I was standing thinking about it instead of taking to my heels, as I had when first disturbed by this house.
It had been stupid of me to come back here, bringing the others. I wondered what had made me do it. Spite? Curiosity? Fatalism?
Another narrow corridor led away to my left, lined with windows letting in the cloudlight, or rainlight. At the end of this corridor was a dusty full-length mirror. It had to be a mirror, because I could see a figure at the passage end, standing in an oblong of light, like a door opened on rain—not the cold storm beyond the window, and icy raindrops like hailstones—but a thick, summer drizzle. I began to walk towards the mirror. Surely the figure was me, my hair still wet. I went five paces along the passage, and then I knew—I wasn’t really walking at all, I wasn’t really there at all. I was still lying safely by the fire downstairs, dreaming that I was here.
Sometimes when I discover I’m dreaming I panic. I’m rarely inclined to just let go and enjoy myself. I feel obliged to do something to put in order the terrible territory in my head—this other country in which I live too. And yet, with the discovery, I always lose all confidence in my own abilities. Everything begins to appear as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope, my arms and legs feel elongated and weak, and my nerves become gossamer—bearing slow, weak signals—like that position check signal from the old liner, Queen Mary, that bounced back to earth off some distant body in space, and was picked up by a radio operator on the QE2 decades after it was sent.
I tried to concentrate on bringing my warm, irresponsible body up the stairs, but that was like trying to suck up a string of spaghetti into an already full mouth. I wasn’t being fetched, or waking up—I was still walking towards the barred doorway, dusty mirror, myself.
When I was eighteen and in my first year at university I lived in a dorm. My room was in an old building with a high ceiling. It was a narrow room, with only enough space for a wardrobe, single bed, desk and chair, plus a little left over to get around in (not enough to stretch out my legs if I was sitting on the bed or chair). Accustomed to my comfortable, spacious family home I hated this room and used to fantasise that I’d build some machine that would let the room create its own gravity. The ceiling and walls would become floor too, and I would be able to distribute my furniture over the whole room, with an effect something like that in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the astronaut is jogging around a track which is the inside surface of a loop.
My room was next to one of the downstairs telephones, which I got into the bad habit of answering, being so lonely in my first semester. I’d even get out of bed on the off chance it would be for me.
The room was also next to the car park, where apart from people staggering in drunk at all hours on Friday and Saturday, girls in silly, clacky heels, or the inevitable short guy in wooden-soled cowboy boots, there were congregations of cats, fighting and screwing till the snow came.
I got on all right, struggling at first with the work high school hadn’t really prepared me for. I studied History, and loved English Lit—doing ‘critical analysis’ of a text, my head set in a vice over a single page, self-consciously imitating the language of literary criticism and nodding rapturously at the revelations in history lectures (so this is why the world is as it is?). I was absurdly grateful to the people behind the podiums—of whom the fashionably cynical would say, ‘Oh, he made that witty remark last year too,’ or the old cliché, ‘Those who can’t—teach.’
And there was a girl who used to sit opposite blond, good-looking, unimaginative Scott in the café, and tell him how she felt about the university. Chain-smoking menthol cigarettes and mashing butt after butt, talking always through smoke that curled wrathfully out of her mouth and nostrils into her hair. ‘You know what it’s like for me?’ she’d say, the smoke parting in a wake around her face. ‘When I’m listening to my lecturers, under their words I hear, “This is not your world”.’ Then she’d look down, apologetic, expecting to be misunderstood. ‘You won’t find any Indians comfortably studying concert piano, because their ancestors aren’t hovering over the keys. I study philosophy, but none of my people ever sat rationalising the world by candlelight, above narrow streets stinking of cooked cabbage.’ Scott would watch her like she was some wild animal which would soon exhaust itself and become tractable. ‘My people were cooking the cabbages,’ she’d say.
I got on all right with the students in the dorm and in my classes. I was always friendly and disarming, and was generally liked. My trouble was that I didn’t like people. I didn’t dislike them, but they seldom moved or warmed me. As individuals they were of no great consequence to me, which is why I remembered that girl, Audrey. She too seemed to be looking for something, as I was looking, friendly, open, willing to be satisfied with a face, a voice, a friend, yet not finding one who’d satisfy me. She was looking for herself—trying to make up, to invent, her own face in a glass that refused to reflect her, a world that declined to remember her.
But I remember Audrey, with her shoulders rounded and hands stretching her coat pockets, after being told off by handsome Scott for being too ‘angry’; explaining to me, the only witness she had after Scott stalked off, ‘I’m comfortably angry. If I wasn’t angry I’d be insane. So I’m comfortably angry.’
‘Audrey, I can’t feel the way you feel,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘But I won’t insult you by saying I wish you didn’t feel that way.’
‘I wish I didn’t.’
‘But you just said you were comfortable.’
‘I was being heroic. I don’t have any choice. I’m sane, I’m brave, therefore I am angry. P dot Q
implies R. I’ll be angry till I die. Or defeated, or insane.’
It was very strange for me, the odd-man-out, not getting into liquor, drugs, video games, food-fights, sex, ice hockey, or even gossip; the only person I admired distant and uncompromising: she a heroine fighting inside a cloud, me a clown trying to reassure myself by being entertaining.
When winter came and created considerable spaces between each house in the town and building on the campus, and an old woman died of hypothermia on her way across the supermarket car park, my world became intolerable. I began to feel oppressed—like a soldier waiting for the sound of the artillery. One morning I was sitting at the back of a theatre, listening to a lecture on T.S. Eliot. I stretched, throwing my arms up over my head. Looking upwards at my hands against the fluorescent light above me, I could see the bones within the rose flesh of my fingertips. And suddenly I was afraid that I was going to die.
I stopped in the last patch of cloudlight. The faintly illuminated figure on the mirror’s grimy surface wore my clumsy, distressed face, and at the same time was still a silhouette against a mist of rain, clothes and hair dripping skin-warmed water.
And then I knew I was going to die. I saw the fate of my body: first the green gowns of the pathologist and his assistant, and my naked, smashed corpse on a stainless steel table; then daylight shining on a brass crucifix in an old country church; outside the window a graveyard full of marble urns, beckoning angels and briar roses—steep hills rising suddenly from the flat valley floor.
And then just death. An aftermath of the great event. My body, any human body. Blood still, veins collapsing, skin glistening, still elastic, but cold. Or on TV, 1972, the cholera epidemic: two glassy-eyed children holding hands on a white cloth-covered table—a doctor pulled at the flesh of one’s stomach and it settled slowly back into place like stretched bread dough. Dead, the flesh that yields at last, ceases to recover—white pressure prints flooding with blood. Stiffening, full bowels swelling, belly grey-green and tight, eyes drying and crusty.
The tramp’s body found riddled with hydatid cysts in a city house. Aunt Beryl two weeks dead in her bath, her fat floating on the water. Myself a mummy in the upper hall of an empty house. In a furnace, fat in flames alight. Wrapped in black polythene in the seeping earth. Corroded by quicklime, lathed in mud. The corpse from the Egyptian tomb, plastered with earth and wheat seeds and sprouting vegetable hair on contact with the moist air.
Like watching a splatter movie, like being a child in bed listening to its parents fight, I had already seen and heard too much. I must fetch myself. I must get up and fetch myself.
Jill
‘It would have to be Wahine-storm weather for them not to start clearing the slip off in the morning,’ Hannah said.
‘Or even before that?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Maybe. What’s the time now, Ellen?’
‘Eleven-twenty.’
The room was quiet. All the men were asleep. I studied Kelfie, trying to think of a way to bring him up. Perhaps abruptly was best: ‘The kid is bloody weird, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, I suppose he is,’ Ellen agreed.
Hannah shook her head. ‘He’s just a self-centred little prick.’
After Basil had settled down again, Kelfie had sat with the cup of steaming coffee, smiling at me. Then he turned to watch Basil, remaining quite still until, after several minutes, in his eyes the depth of focus changed, just like in Shackleton’s eyes when the bird he is stalking flutters away before he has sprung. Kelfie seemed to uncoil, his eyelids drooped slightly, and I almost expected him to turn his head and give his shoulder a distracted, cursory lick. Instead he glanced at us again, drained the coffee and turned to the fire, musing. After a while his face began to alter. Not a muscle moved—it remained expressionless, but under its young, unmarked surface, another face was being shaped, as if something were cooling and hardening under his smooth skin, until his face was no longer that of an intelligent, eloquent teenager, but something older and eminently forceful. Then he sighed, brushed the little flakes of bark off the carpet beside him and lay down, singing or saying something under his breath.
‘What is it, Kelfie?’
He looked at me sleepily. ‘Did I say something?’ He blinked slowly several times and closed his eyes.
‘No, he isn’t just self-centred,’ I told Ellen and Hannah.
‘I agree he’s not only that, he’s a little crazy too,’ Ellen said.
‘Well that’s decided then.’
‘I’ve known a few crazy people in my time, Jill, and the most noticeable thing about them is they are always crazier than one thinks. Their delusions and illogic can really warp one’s sense of reality.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my sense of reality,’ Hannah protested.
‘Maybe you’re immune.’
‘Look. He’s just a kid.’
‘You mean, how much can he know anyway?’
‘Yeah. He doesn’t worry me. Kids usually aren’t very assertive, and he’s no exception. He’s just an arrogant smartarse, not tough.’
‘Sorry, Hannah, I think you’re wrong. He’s got a lot of self-control—I’d call that toughness.’
‘But he’s not civilised with it,’ Ellen complained.
‘Uncivilised and controlled, oh God!’ It sounded ominous. ‘You know, I’m beginning to think he did believe me about the dream. You believed me, Ellen, but mostly out of kindness I think.’
‘I believed you partly because he didn’t. But I still can’t see how a dream can be “unnatural”.’
‘Yeah, I know. But Kelfie did believe me, and he understood what I was trying to say.’
‘What do you mean?’ Hannah asked, and at the same time Ellen said, ‘Implying what?’
‘Implying that what he said to Basil—’ I began, when suddenly, as if at the mention of his name, Basil, who had appeared to be fast asleep, leapt up and reeled to the hall door. He wrenched it open, and vanished into the darkness.
We sat gaping, then Ellen and Hannah got up. Hannah’s legs were trembling and Ellen was white. ‘What the fuck?’ Hannah said, then she reached down and hauled me to my feet. I was shaking too.
Through the doorway we could hear the sound of a heavy body blundering up some stairs. He was whimpering.
Hannah’s hand was clammy; I felt cold, the blood draining from my skin back to my vital organs. Kelfie came up beside us. ‘Shall we go and see what’s happening?’ he said calmly, then strolled out the door. After a second’s hesitation we rushed out after him, catching up with him at the first turn of the stairs.
Somewhere above us Basil started shrieking. Kelfie faltered and put out a hand, which found and curled around the banister.
Hannah reached Basil first. He was sitting with his back to the wall in an upstairs corridor, his knees drawn up and face covered, no longer screaming, but moaning softly like a child in a fever. Ellen and Hannah crouched on either side of him. Hannah put her hand gently on his hair.
Kelfie stopped, surveying the scene, for all the world like a teacher entering an unruly classroom. He wore the expression that had infuriated me before, a mixture of sarcasm, superiority and disbelief. His hands were even on his hips. Then his face softened, he put out his hand towards Basil and as he did so a light seemed to come up under his skin. His expression passed through gentleness into pity—radiant, outpouring compassion; too much for this occasion, too much for any occasion, except the liberation of life prisoners, or the resurrection of the dead. He said, ‘It’s all right, Basil. There’s no need to be afraid,’ his voice full of calm authority.
Then he fell. Something invisible seized him by the hair at the back of his head, jerked him backwards, and flung him to the floor. He crashed onto the boards, the light in his skin went out, and he curled up as people do when they are on the ground being kicked.
For some reason I couldn’t explain I threw myself over him, as if he were a child I had to protect. I imposed my body between him and his i
nvisible assailant. The rational part of my mind was expecting to have to cope with epileptic convulsions, or some such ordinary thing. His muscles were all locked, but he wasn’t convulsed. I sensed the body beneath mine was alert, only slightly troubled, and violently alive.
Ellen asked, ‘Is he having a fit?’
Hannah was saying over and over, ‘Basil? Are you all right?’
‘Ellen, help me get Kelfie up, I think he’s fainted.’
We wrestled Kelfie into a sitting position and tried to force his head down between his knees.
Basil took his face out of his hands and stared at Hannah. They peered into each other’s eyes, re-establishing themselves by this contact. She asked again, ‘Are you all right, Basil?’
‘I’m a box of birds. Vultures in a coffin.’ His voice was thin and peevish.
Kelfie
In the mirror at the end of the hall I had seen myself flare up with phosphorescent fire. As I put out my hand to Basil, for a second’s fantasy, I felt I was strong enough to intercede with the silence lying about us. Then my reflection blurred, the face dissolving into a pallid smear among those other clear, flashlit faces. I faded; the scene was a film snagging, frames jumping like, when very stoned, I have the sensation of standing on a station platform as a lit train flashes past, and being dizzied and dazzled by a world revealed and concealed, second by second, light by light.
I fell away until the others were a chiaroscuro Christmas postage-stamp far off down a long black gallery. Then for a second there was nothing—the gaping roar of a departed universe—and suddenly, a long trench with sloped sides, a near-white, watered-down sky, and something muddy picking itself up, with a sucking sound, out of the mud. Something speaking, saying, ‘Miracle worker, bring me back to life!’ Behind this were other voices, faint, amused, exasperated. I felt pins and needles in my hands and feet, heard sound swooping in on me like a loud radio in a fast travelling car and, as my vision cleared, caught sight of a dusty wooden floor. I was propped up against the wall in the corridor.
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