The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  When I woke next it was to a coarse and screaming cry like a herring gull’s. Filled with panic, surfacing from dreams in which great masses moved against one another in a confused space, I could only imagine that the wheelchair had fallen into the pool. Still half asleep, I went running to see if I could help.

  Nothing so simple.

  The blind woman and the paraplegic had quarreled at last. They were at one another with a frightening muddled ferocity, pushing and shoving and panting while the wheelchair rocked precariously this way and that. Every so often one of them, I couldn’t tell which, let out that inarticulate animal cry. Then the woman knocked the chair over, spilling the man out and falling on top of him. He went down slowly and reluctantly, making a noise like a laugh and waving his arms. They struggled there, while the dog first rushed round them in circles then turned yelping and growling to attack me. Fending it off, I shouted:

  “Are you all right? Can I do anything?” and “Stop it. Stop it!”

  I was too disgusted and frightened to get close enough to separate them. They were murdering one another. Sick to death of its dependency on the dog, the wheelchair and the van, the violent, miserable half-creature they made had pulled itself apart. “Stop!”

  Neither of them even looked up. Their faces were drawn into snarls of concentration; they were grunting and sobbing frustratedly. Suddenly I saw my mistake. I put my hands up to my face and laughed. Not murder, then. They were fumbling and ripping at each other’s clothes. In a moment they would be down to the pale, starved flesh. The dog was only defending their privacy.

  I retrieved my things later: two days after that I was back in London.

  NINE

  The Place of the Cure of the Soul

  We are so quick to look for closure, for the clear termination of sections of our life, that we often invent it. After the debacle at 17, Hill Park I had assumed I would never be caught up with Yaxley again. Indeed, obsessed with the Pleroma, he did leave me alone for two or three years. But after his failure with the infolding, everything failed. The fear that he would be absorbed grew daily, until his whole position was undercut by it. Associated phobias developed to include a horror of dirt. That, and the residue of one too many magical operations, drove him out of the rooms above the Atlantis Bookshop and into a spacious modern block on the north side of Upper Richmond Road, close to East Putney tube station. There I found him, on a rainy, morning in June. He needed me again.

  I walked past the building twice. It reminded me less of Yaxley than Lawson, and perhaps it was in fact some fossil of their brief partnership, prepayment for a sleight of hand which never came off. The people who lived there worked in property or investment banking. Traffic labored under their windows all day, but double glazing muted the noise to a comfortable hum. By night their black European executive saloons lined up outside in rows. I went through a cold well-kept entrance hall, unrelieved by two shallow brick structures like small municipal flowerbeds filled with decorative gravel, and took the stairs to the top floor. Between landings I wavered; touched for reassurance the white painted metal handrail. Had I heard someone coming up behind me?

  “Yaxley?”

  Modern flats have a precision, a bleak openness to their angles, which encourages hygiene. Yaxley’s was painted off-white throughout, with white woodwork. Every wall, every wainscot, was spotless. There were some rather nice carpets in a kind of flushed pink. Furnished properly, it might have been comfortable if rather affectless. But all I could find was a telephone on a table and, in the middle of the lounge floor, a state-of-the-art VCR. (When I switched it on, an unlabelled tape began to play. I switched it off again immediately.) The kitchen was fitted expensively enough, with oak units, Creda Solarspeed hob, butcher-striped roller blinds. Under the immaculate stainless-steel double sink I found Flash, Jif, sponge floor-mops, plastic buckets and Marigold rubber gloves—several of everything, all brand new, as if he had cached them against a siege; or agoraphobia.

  The night before I had received a telephone call, I don’t believe from Yaxley himself. After I picked up the receiver there was a prolonged silence, into which I prompted—

  “Hello? Hello?”

  Nothing. Then someone said softly: “Go to this address—”

  Other instructions followed, some infantile, some meaningless. I did not recognize the magical operation to which they referred. The voice was hard to hear, let alone to identify. It paused, failed, picked up again. Once or twice it laughed. “Two fucks and a pig,” it said. It seemed to come from a long way away, and there were other voices behind it. “Two fine fucks and a pig. Go to this address.”

  * * *

  Yaxley was in the bedroom.

  He lay naked on his side in the middle of the uncarpeted floor, knees drawn up slightly. One hand was curled gently under the side of his head to support it. The other cupped his genitals. Death had aged him. With his long deceitful face, gray stubbled jaw, and lips drawn back over blackened or yellowish teeth, he might have been seventy or eighty. He looked like an old untrustworthy dog, shrunk, famished, reduced. Before he died, he had been trying to make something with two sticks. Above him on the wall was pinned a postcard reproduction of the steps of the British Museum. Under this he had scrawled in soft pencil the words “The Place of the Cure of the Soul”, a description reputed to have been carved over the doors of the Library at Alexandria. Otherwise the room was empty. There was no furniture, not even a bed. It stank. Yaxley hadn’t washed since I last saw him. The dirt was glazed on, as if he had spent the intervening years living in a doorway off the Charing Cross Road. In addition some sort of fat was smeared all over his emaciated upper body, perhaps as lubrication. He had been frightened the Pleroma would invaginate him. In the event though he seemed to have been not so much sucked in as sucked.

  Behind him on the floor I found an envelope; inside that the key to a safety deposit box in the City. In the box, I knew, there would be two thick black notebooks. I had seen them before. I collected them that afternoon, and over the next two days, coming and going under Yaxley’s dead ironic eye, fetched his papers, his pictures and other magical paraphernalia from locations to which the notebooks gave access. Some of the larger items—an old-fashioned Dansette record player, a wooden chair with awkwardly curved arms, two crates of books—I was forced to move by taxi. Decaying ring-binders burst and gave forth yellow papers, upon which I read in a scrawled hand:

  “The door! The rosy door!” Or:

  “…two distinct and irreconcilable worlds, pleroma or fullness—which has come down to us as the muddled Christian promise of ‘Heaven’; and hysterema or kenoma, pain, illusion, emptiness—the life we must actually live. Between them, it used to be said, lies the paradox or boundary-state horos. But the great discovery of this century has been to knock at the door of horos and find no one at home. Horos is the wish-fulfillment dream, the treachery of the mirror…”

  Eventually I had assembled it all in the stinking bedroom. The rest of the instructions proved harder to follow. I was required to set certain small objects—including a stoppered bottle half full of rose-water and a Polaroid photograph of someone’s left hand—in precise relationships to one another on a small wooden table, about five feet in front of the corpse. The table itself must stand at the apex of a precise triangle, the other two points of which were represented by a burned-out electric kettle from some Tufnell Park bedsitter; and a split PVC bucket. I was to turn on the old Dansette in its peeled gray leatherette case, play a certain record, then to undress and masturbate. That was the difficulty. At that time I rarely needed manual relief. If I did, I would think automatically of Katherine, and one of her favorite ways of making love—

  How she would lie on her side with her legs drawn a little way up and encourage me to enter her from behind, then move one leg gently and rhythmically over the other, so that her body rocked while I remained still. How after a minute or so she would moan and stop—the signal for me to begin moving inside her
until her breathing became ragged and harsh, she sighed and began to rub one leg against the other again so that her body rocked and rocked on the pivot of the lower hip.

  “Is that good? Is that good?”—turning her head to look at me over her shoulder, sometimes reaching round to draw my face down to kiss it.

  “Is that good?”

  “Yes.”

  How, after a few minutes of this, I would reach round to where the base of my penis emerged from her and dabble my hands there until they were wet. Then, with this lubrication, gently insert the middle finger of my right hand into her anus, slipping it in and out in a counter rhythm to hers. How this drove her quickly to orgasm, at the approach of which she would whisper:

  “Do you want to fuck me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to fuck me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you fucking me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, fuck me then, come inside me. Fuck me, come inside me. Fuck me, come inside me. Fuck me, come inside me…”—until the words lost their meanings and became an intense, moaning, rhythmic incantation. How a deep pink flush spread across her shoulder-blades. How just before her orgasm I would straddle her with my right leg, press her half over on to her front, she would groan in anticipation and push my hand away from her anus. “Oh God Oh God Oh God. Yes. Oh yes. Oh God oh fuck me yes I’m coming I’m coming oh yes oh fuck me.” How, clutching her breast or hip I would drive into her as hard as I could until we both shouted and stiffened and groaned and relaxed, panting and smiling and beginning to laugh—

  All men keep to themselves some image like this of love, exciting but at the same time valued, full of sentiment, even if it is only a memory of someone whispering “Make me wet,” at the beginning of the night. But when in Putney I set out to remember mine, I could see nothing. I took my clothes off and folded them up in the corner of the room. I knelt down before the table, with its burden of futile or malign objects. I pulled bleakly and unhappily at myself for perhaps ten minutes, but every time I felt the drowsy approach of orgasm, I seemed to snap back into a self-awareness, and feel upon me the dead magician’s amused, dispassionate gaze.

  “Fuck me, come inside me—” whispered Katherine. “Yaxley never did anything to anybody,” Pam Stuyvesant reminded me. “He encourages you to do it to yourself.”

  From the cloth-covered speaker of the Dansette, to a background of crackles and distant music, some chirpy prewar entertainer sang:

  Who’s been polishing the sun,

  Sprucing up the clouds so gray?

  Does she know that’s how I like it?

  I hope she’s going my way!

  Suddenly I felt exhausted and ill. I gave up the attempt and instead was violently sick into the plastic bucket. Yaxley, I suppose, may have allowed for this. It was hard to see whether the act had been designed to free or redeem him; or as a last meaningless sneer. Anyway, nothing seemed to happen, so after a bit I left. I closed and locked the door behind me, and later threw the key and the notebooks off Putney Bridge and into the river.

  As far as I know, Yaxley’s corpse is still there now.

  * * *

  When I got home that evening I found letters from Pam and Lucas. They had written separately: they were going to get divorced. They were never quite able to say how it had come about.

  Lucas claimed they had grown out of one another, and raged with guilt:

  “I always knew you couldn’t cure other people of their character. Now I see you can’t even change yourself. Anything in that direction is just thrashing around, a kind of panic. You haul yourself over the wall, you glimpse new country: good! You can never again be what you were! Just as you’re patting yourself on the back you see this string of stuff tied to your leg like the tail of a kite, and it’s all the fucking Christmas cards you ever sent. All the gas bills you ever paid. All the family snaps which will never, ever allow you to be anybody else: there you are, goggling out, nosing against the glass—your own pet fish.”

  He had moved into a flat in Manchester, he said. “I’m getting a lot of work done.” He asked me to make sure that Pam was all right.

  Pam wrote:

  “I don’t feel as if Lucas knows what he wants.” What had upset her most was that he had left most of his things with her. “He said he was sick of the clutter, but he must need his books.” She asked me to make sure that Lucas was all right. “I don’t quite know what went wrong,” she added puzzledly.

  Neither of them knew, in fact.

  “That’s why you’re being so silly,” I told them. But Lucas would only repeat that he had suddenly felt suffocated under a weight of objects he had never meant to own; while Pam, though desperately miserable, repeated, “We fell out such a lot,” maintained that Lucas must do what he thought fit, because she only wanted him to be happy; and claimed that she had often wondered what it would be like to try being on your own. And so it all went ahead later that year.

  They seemed in such bewilderment, afterwards, to find themselves apart from one another. Lucas kept trying to explain his rage, which was in the end directed less at Pam—or even himself—than at some incurable state of the world. “A thirty-five-year-old woman,” he wrote to me that winter, “holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces, works tenderly its loose arm. The expression which trembles on the verge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain this to you?” Meanwhile Pam fell full length into herself, hour by hour, and was chronically hurt. “He always used to love the north. That’s why we came here.”

  They had been not so much divorced, I suspect now, as wrenched apart by some metaphysical event none of us could imagine, precipitated by Yaxley’s death. Whatever the meaning of his intrusion into the Pleroma—however he had distorted its shape, however it had vomited itself inside out—one of its effects here had been to cause similar convulsions in all our lives. Pam and Lucas blamed themselves increasingly for living apart. They were bemused. But in the end the very inexplicability of the experience became something they could share. If nothing else, they had been given the fiction of the Coeur, to which they soon returned, developing it by letter.

  * * *

  Yaxley’s death, which I believed then would free us all, had filled me with a kind of excitement, to which the divorce only seemed to add. Unable to sleep more than an hour or two at a time, I took to the canal, rowing down to the empty lock basin every morning before anyone else was awake, in an old boat with peeling blue paintwork Katherine had found tied up at the bottom of the garden the day she moved into St. Mark’s Crescent. An acre of water waited for me, flickering in the cool sunlight. It was very quiet. On the towpath side stood a crescent of Edwardian houses, each with a long thin wedge of overgrown garden. Brambles, willow herb, and some kind of red-leaved ornamental ivy had rioted over the walls to within a few feet of the water. On the other bank wrecked cars glittered in a repair-shop yard; beyond them were the silent arches of a railway bridge.

  It was the longest summer, Katherine often said, that anyone could remember.

  One morning I lay back in the boat, my eyes half-closed against the reflections from the water, wondering if I could make myself operate the lock. I was never sure of myself with locks. As soon as I looked into one it would bring back some childhood afternoon when, kneeling down to peer at a swarm of fish-fry eight or nine feet below in the narrow cleft, I first suspected the depth of the water. I decided that if I wanted to go any further it would mean dragging the boat out. I let the oars trail. A dog began to bark monotonously from its wired run in the garage yard. A milk-float rattled past on the main road. Tufted ducks were diving in the basin, vanishing unpretentiously under the surface to bob up some seconds later like cork toys, bright of eye and beaded momentari
ly with drops of water.

  A faint breath of air moved the willow herb.

  I heard a voice say to me quietly but distinctly: “The woman that grows, and may be harvested for ever. The grown, not the natural woman.”

  When I looked up I saw her watching me from the towpath, her outline filled with the leaves and stems of burnet roses, her eyes blind, intent, and speedwell blue. She raised her arm. Somebody in one of the houses behind her woke up and opened a window. The sun caught it and filled my eyes with light.

  PART THREE

  The Course

  TEN

  It Always Happens to Someone Else

  After that my life seemed to settle down again. The publishing industry was expanding greedily to meet the 1980s. Never comfortable with authors, I moved on to the production side of things. Katherine, meanwhile, exhibited pictures in London and then New York. She renewed her membership of the Chelsea Arts Club, and I would find her there sometimes in the evening after work, watching the players nose quietly round the billiard tables like fish in a lighted tank. We had a daughter we called Kit. Kit learned to talk early, then encouraged us to sit her out under the willow in the garden at St. Mark’s Crescent, where she could whisper at the muted reflections of the water in the foliage. She loved the seaside. At Fowey or Caswell Bay she spent each hot afternoon crouched on the tideline, sorting bits of nacre from the gravel of tiny colored stones and wave-polished glass. Once she called out in her sleep: “The lights in the shells. Daddy! The lights in the shells!” Kit turned out to be a dreamy, equable little thing, sensual, patient, pleased with everything she found. As if to compensate for this, Pam and Lucas were as demanding as children. Pam continued to write letters full of vague regrets, Lucas telephoned me in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t like the sound of her voice,” he would say. “You try her.” And I would sigh and shrug and in the morning catch the Huddersfield train and visit whatever bleak village she had removed herself to this time.