The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  “Yes thanks,” I said.

  “Want anythink else?”

  I could see her looking worriedly at the girl.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  The M6 was deserted. From the moment David launched us down the access ramp into a rushing darkness broken only by the occasional oncoming light, someone else’s will clung round us like the smell of the car. Despite our speed we were in a kind of glue. David wouldn’t speak to me. If Lawson’s daughter had isolated me from him, what I knew about her seemed to detach all three of us from our common humanity. “The sacrifice,” Yaxley had taught me at Cambridge, “has its own powers.” She made herself comfortable in the back, and sat so quietly at first that after a few minutes I asked:

  “Are you all right?”

  “I quite like this gray fur,” she said, touching the seat covers. “It’s soft as a cat.”

  Then: “I’m not often car sick.”

  “Are you warm enough?”

  “The last time we went on a motorway with Daddy, there were three dead cats,” she said suddenly.

  “When we got home we found our own cat had been hurt by a lawnmower and had all the flesh stripped off one front leg. You could see all the lines under the skin. You never know whether it’s bones or tendons, or what, do you? He kept pawing us and howling, there was blood all over the kitchen top. Mummy was funny after that. Every time she saw something in the hedge or in the gutter, she made us stop the car.”

  She laughed.

  “‘Is that a dead bird?’” she mimicked.

  “‘Is that somebody’s walking stick, or just a broken umbrella?’”

  Unnerved perhaps, David began to talk too—

  He had seen the most brilliant film when he was small. “Flying Tigers, fucking amazing!”

  He was reading a book about the Auschwitz museum.

  “In Birkenau,” he said, “they cut the hair off the women prisoners before they gassed them. It was sold to manufactures for mattress stuffing. Can you believe that?”

  I admitted I could. He added:

  “But the worst thing is, tell me if I’m wrong, some of those mattresses could still be on beds. Couldn’t they?”

  He was worried about his mother.

  “She’s due to go into the Maudsley for a couple of days soon.” It turned out that she had some kind of bone disease. A broken wrist had failed to heal after two months in plaster, and would have to be pinned. “It always happens to someone else, doesn’t it? Cancer, air crashes, drink-driving, it’s never you it happens to.”

  He stared ahead for a moment.

  “It always happens to someone else.”

  He meant to be ironic, but only wound up sounding wistful. “Look!”

  Our shadows had been thrown on to an enormous exit sign by the headlights of the car behind. Briefly we became monumental and cinematic—yet somehow as domestic as the silhouettes of a married couple caught watching TV in their front room—then the journey resumed itself as a series of long, gluey moments lurching disconnectedly one into the next until we reached the outskirts of London, where the traffic, inching along under a thick orange light, filled the steep cuttings with exhaust smoke. Two men fought on the pavement outside the Odeon cinema, Holloway. Lawson’s daughter had gone to sleep, her face vacant, her head resting loosely against the window, where every movement of the car made it slide about uncomfortably. She didn’t seem to notice when I reached back and tucked a folded pullover under it. Later—or it might have been in the same moment—I looked up and thought I saw roses blooming in a garden on top of the Polytechnic of North London. Between the lawns were broad formal beds of “ballerinas” grafted on to standard stock, with lilies planted between them. Dog-rose and guelder spilled faint pink and thick cream over old brick walls and paths velvety with bright green moss. White climbing roses weighed down the apple trees. Two or three willows streamed, like yellow hair in strong winter sunshine, over the parapets of the building; briars hung there in a tangle. A white leopard was couched among the roses. It was four times the size it would have been in life, and its tail whipped to and fro like a domestic cat’s. Other buildings had put forth great suffocating masses of flowers; other animals were at rest there or pacing cagily about among the service gantries and central heating machinery—baboons, huge birds, a snake turning slowly on itself. “The Rose of Earth is the Lily of Heaven.” The scent of attar was so strong and heavy it filled the street below: through it like flashes of light through a veil came the piercing human smells of fried food, beer, petrol.

  David braked suddenly.

  “Jesus!” he said.

  The back of a refrigerated truck filled the windscreen, TRASFIGURANTE painted across it in huge white letters. I jumped out of the car in the middle of the road and shouted back through the open door, into the heat and smell and David’s surprised white face:

  “I’ll walk home from here.”

  “What?”

  I slammed the door. “I’ll walk.”

  * * *

  That night at home I had a nightmare about hiding from people. I was rushing about trying to keep trees, buildings, cars, anything between me and them. I heard a voice say, “The double paradox. Life is not death, and neither is death,” and woke up to an empty bedroom. It was three o’clock, pitch dark. A rhythmical thudding, with the muffled but determined quality of someone banging nails into a cellar wall or knocking on a heavy door two or three houses further down the street, had carried over from the dream. When it failed to diminish I got up unsteadily. The bedroom door was open, the stairwell dark.

  “Katherine?”

  Pounding, as distant as before.

  “Katherine? Are you there? Are you all right?”

  I went from room to room looking for her. All the internal doors were open. Orange street light had established itself everywhere, lodging within the mirrors, slicking along each mantelpiece, discovering something in every room. In the lounge that evening a book, Painting and the Novel, had been pulled partly off a shelf—the shadow of its spine fell obliquely across five or six others. In the kitchen, a knife, a breadboard and a loaf of bread lay next to a Braun coffee-grinder like a little white idol. Up in the studio, near the top of the house, something had fallen and broken in the empty grate.

  “Katherine?”

  She wasn’t there. Outside, St. Mark’s Crescent was full of parked cars; behind the house, the Regent’s Canal lay exhausted and motionless. Though I was naked I felt languorous and comfortable, as if I was surrounded by some warm fluid; I had a partial erection which hardened briefly when it touched the fabric of the living-room curtains. At the same time I was filled with anxiety. Its cause was hidden from me, but like that noise it never stopped.

  “Katherine?”

  Eventually I went back to bed and found her lying there awake in the dark.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered.

  “I—”

  “What is it?”

  “I thought you’d got up,” I said. “That noise—”

  “I can’t hear anything.”

  “Didn’t you get up?” I said. And: “There! Listen!”

  “I can’t hear anything.”

  I had begun to shiver. “I went all round the house,” I said. “I can’t get warm.”

  Katherine put her arms round me.

  “What have you been doing to get so upset?”

  “Listen!”

  Some dreams, I know, detach themselves from you only reluctantly, amid residual flickers of light, sensations of entrapment, effects which disperse quite slowly. Everything is trancelike. You wait to understand the world again and, as you wait, fall back into the dream with no more fear. But there was something awful about that thudding noise, its remoteness, its persistence.

  “How do you feel?” Katherine asked next morning.

  “Oh fine, fine,” I told her.

  But I knew that something had been knocking. Something had come into the house.

  �
�I hope you are,” she said.

  She was a painter. We had met one night two or three years before, at an exhibition at Goldsmith’s. Somewhat older than me, she had been recovering from an affair I never asked about. At first she was unwilling to commit herself. But soon we couldn’t be away from each other for a day, or even pretend to be: so she woke one morning in her perfect house to find me propped on one elbow, staring down at her with a kind of slow delight, and smiled and said, “I can always feel you near me, even when I’m asleep;” and that was that for both of us. We were married almost immediately. I loved to look at her, in those first few weeks. I would hold her head gently between my hands and stare down into her face and think: She’s in there.

  “I’m fine.”

  * * *

  Later that morning I went up to her studio. There, a ghost of the canal-light, reflective and mobile, lived like a quiver at the edge of vision in the matte white ceiling and walls. I don’t know whether she ever noticed it, any more than the smell of the turpentine she kept in a Victorian glass inkwell; but it resides in her paintings too, whatever their subject—the flicker of summer sun off water and green trees.

  For Katherine, painting was about space. “You should always sit,” she had told me the first time I visited her, “in the middle of a studio, not along the edges of it.” I wandered about now as I had then, leafing through a shoebox in which she kept small sketches on French watercolor paper—wavering pencil lines and little dabs of paint, clues to her inner life; inspecting the brushes—dull orange, blue and brown—laid out on the varnished floorboards beside her on a sheet of corrugated paper to stop them rolling about; or turning over the tubes of oil paint in their wire basket. Vandyke brown, Indian red, crumpled tubes leaden in the dull light. Their names will always delight me. Oxide of Chromium. Monestial green. Speedball oils from America. I still own the picture she was working on that morning. In it a woman stares out at the viewer. Behind her are some other people, and an unfinished, ghostly background of desks in a school or typing pool.

  A kind of hypnotic tranquility always seemed to issue from Katherine as she worked. She had an extraordinary calming effect. You could hear the dab and whisper of the brush on canvas; and behind that, so faint as to be an illusion, the sound of her breathing. It was like watching my mother, ironing in the kitchen on a September evening. I touched the place where the nape of her neck made its soft but powerful transition into the muscles of her freckled upper back. After a moment she turned her face up to me and said, “Kiss me then.”

  We stared companionably at one another. She put her brush down and took my hand.

  “Are you sure you feel OK?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  She picked the brush up again.

  “I wonder about you,” she said. “What a lot you keep to yourself!”

  SEVEN

  Number 17, Hill Park

  William Blake experienced his first vision during the course of a family outing to Peckham Rye, which was at that time a village of quiet, largely agricultural character in the Parish of Camber-well. Eight or nine years old, his biographers report, William hallucinated (what else can we think?) a tree full of angels, “bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”. He escaped a thrashing, though his father wanted to give him one. More importantly, his foot was on the path. He had his idea. It wasn’t yet a burning spear, but it was never to let him down.

  Whether Lawson’s daughter saw anything after David installed her in Peckham, I can’t say.

  17, Hill Park lay on the left of the Rye as you looked south, caught between some bleak low-rise flats and two or three point-blocks built on a hill. A burned-out Vauxhall had sagged on to its brake drums in the street outside; the basement area was full of broken furniture—chipboard, Formica, warped and lifted veneers. If you stood on the doorstep and looked up and down the road, it was nothing but a line of skips heaped with builders’ rubbish. Inside, I never saw much more than the staircase—grimy lino, spent matches, missing banisters, a corroded sisal mat outside each door: At night the stairwell was lit by bare forty-watt bulbs, one on each landing. By day a kind of gray illumination leaked in through the skylight, high up in its shaft. You could hear the sound of rain on the glass. When you walked through the front door of the upper flat, you were faced with two or three carpeted steps then a little passage with white plasterboard walls and chocolate brown woodwork. It was like finding your way to the toilets of a tea shop in some bleak tourist town at the top of a cliff.

  The morning after Lawson’s daughter arrived there, I had a call from Yaxley.

  “I want you to fetch some things for me,” he said. “A few things.”

  Prominent among these was a shoebox of Polaroid photographs he had taken himself, but which he never kept by him, I suspect out of fear. Magic had exhausted him sexually long before Pam, Lucas and I met him. He found it difficult to reach the levels of arousal necessary for a demanding operation. Neither was ordinary pornography of any use. One of the first tasks of my apprenticeship to him—though at the time I didn’t think of it in that light—had been to accompany him on a round of the Cambridge public lavatories once a week. He preferred the older ones, seeping and cracked, reeking of piss, which you approached down a dozen greasy stone steps. There would be a soaked uneven floor in the gloom; three stalls with shiny black doors; blue distemper flaking away above the chipped white tiling. Homosexual graffiti covered the walls, done in straight lines and little boxes, in careful expressive designer handwriting. Heterosexual commentary blundered over and around it, in a vigorous but barely legible scrawl. Where Howard had articulately written that he owned his own place and would be happy to try you out any Friday evening—including for your information a hyper-realist illustration of what he claimed to be his penis in an erect state—some drunken boy had added:

  YOU POOF.

  “These simple endearments,” Yaxley said. He photographed them all. “See that no one comes in for a moment.”

  It was an unnecessary precaution. Places like that are always empty when you go in. A sound in the cubicles turns out to be the trickle of the cistern. Nevertheless, unwilling to be blinded however briefly in such circumstances, I was grateful to establish myself in the doorway and stare across the road—at the rain, the railway station, the woman with the dog—while Polaroid flashbulbs etched at the gloom behind me, and panel by panel Yaxley built his reredos and altarpiece.

  * * *

  “That man,” he had told me the day I first saw Lawson, “knows four things about the Pleroma. Three of them he learned from me. He is unaware that he knows the fourth, or that he is keeping it from me.” In some sense I couldn’t comprehend, Lawson himself was to be made to stand, by metonymy, for that fourth item of knowledge, so that its resources could be drawn upon without it being present in the world. Yaxley called this metaphysical sleight of hand an “infolding”. I pondered it as I bought or collected objects and artifacts from all over London—books from dealers in Shepherd’s Bush and Camden; secondhand garden statuary from Kent; dusty artificial flowers, hanks of hair and a jar of something which looked like preserved ginger from a woman in Golders Green—and delivered them, over the next week, to Peckham.

  The upstairs flat at Number 17 could not simply receive these things. First, David must strip it bare. The furniture and carpets came out. The floorboards were scrubbed. In certain places, to erase some stain Yaxley thought might interfere with the operation, they were sanded down to reveal pinkish new wood. All stains, spills, dirty marks, carry an energy of their own. Particular attention was paid to the walls. To ensure success, all the old paper had to be taken off: above the fireplace and near the windows, Yaxley had got down through the old plaster and into the brick. Another kind of magician might have wished to preserve the resonances of Number 17; in other circumstances Yaxley himself would have valued them. But recourse to pornography is by definition a loss of confidence. Where previously he had conceived and assembled t
he details of such an operation on impulse, holding them together by sheer force of will, he now let caution undercut insight. He made David hire a steamer from a DIY store in Nunhead, and watched thoughtfully as twenty or thirty years of interior decoration bagged and blistered away from the yellowed, sugary plaster in front of his eyes.

  “The stuff underneath’s not much better,” David told me one evening, when we met on the stairs outside his mother’s door. “These old places are rotten to the core.”

  He was sweating. His clothes were covered in dust from the plastic bags of lino, plaster and broken furniture he had been carting down to the bins in the street. Clearly though, it was an effort he enjoyed: something to do. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and had a look at the parcel under my arm.

  “What you got there?”

  “Gethsemane.”

  “You what?”

  Gethsemane, in a plastic frame the color of bone. Painted in greens and golds by someone with no sense of perspective, nevertheless it had in some lights a strange stereoscopic quality. Christ swam out past the picture-plane with his arms spread wide in a gesture of welcome difficult to understand, while the trees and rocks of the Garden, laid on with a palette knife, roiled and eddied behind him like bad weather. It had been much stocked by Catholic outlets a decade before, but after scouring the secondhand shops for two or three days without result, I had taken Yaxley’s advice and tried boarded-up premises on the Old Kent Road, under the sign “ICTURE, Sean Kelly”. Icture, I thought, would resemble ichor, that fluid which runs in the veins of angels as well as kitchen beetles. Or perhaps it was a service, like acupuncture. Anyway, there the picture was, not even dusty, hanging up in a smell of old men and milk bottles, while in the back room an American pit-bull terrier fought with silent determination against its tether to get at me.

  “Somethink else for His Nibs, eh?” said David. He winked.

  “Is he mad, or what?”

  “Make your own mind up,” I said. “How’s the girl?”

  “Hardly a peep out of her. She’s with Mum most of the time.” In the day, she stuck pictures in a book, or helped with the housework. “Watches telly a lot.” It made you wonder what she did at home. You had to give her full marks for quietness, though.