Morbid Tales

by Quentin S Crisp

  Now she knelt on the kitchen floor with her knick-knacks and dolls’ accessories hoarded around her. She was working on some colouring books with felt tips, being careful not to go over the lines, her lips pursed in what could have been concentration. But if one looked at her eyes one might have seen that they were strangely unfocused.

  Her mother had settled into a rhythm of slicing which seemed to accelerate towards peaks where she would have to pause and hitch up the shoulder of her loose woollen jersey or brush back her hair before continuing. This time when she stopped she dropped her eyes down to the side, where Sasha sat like the caterpillar on the toadstool in Wonderland. Lynn felt something sticky and uncomfortable in Sasha’s hushed pensiveness. Her palm around the knife handle was sweaty and grubby.

  ‘Did he touch you?’ she said without prelude.

  The two straight diagonal lines beneath her eyes pulsed. It was a simple question, but there was something strange and purposeful in the word ‘touch’ that Sasha found unpleasant. Not, ‘did he hurt you?’ but ‘did he touch you?’ Sasha felt instinctively that this was some language meant to be common to adults and children.

  ‘No, Mummy.’ Sasha shook her head back and forward in the exaggerated denial of a child.

  ‘Just you keep clear of your cousin, you hear now?’

  Something in the tone of this last edict forbade the question ‘why?’

  ‘Yes, Mummy.’ She nodded with the same slow exaggeration.

  So staying away from Cousin X is more important than being nice to him after all, she thought. At least that was settled. It was curious though that her mother should say such things. She had always been the one to tell her father that he was ‘going too far’ or ‘being unfair’, in the remarks he made about her enigmatic cousin.

  Just then Barry came back in with the newly split timber as if the whole thing had been arranged that way beforehand.

  Upstairs: Cousin X sat on the bare wooden chair and worked at the old clock with his penknife. It was beginning to come to pieces now. Eunice, his mother, was absent in the bathroom. A suitcase lay open on the bed, and his father was inspecting its contents absent-mindedly, as if he had forgotten something.

  ‘Son,’ he said, using the word he had every theoretical right to use rather tentatively, ‘I have something to say to you.’

  He kept his eyes on the folded clothes for a while then turned slightly.

  ‘You have to live in the same world as the rest of us. It’s all very well having your own little dream world to escape into, that’s up to you, but you’ve got to learn to interact with other people too. Not doing something you should can be as bad as doing something wrong. Listen, if bullets were flying I would jump in front of them if it would save your life. It wouldn’t hurt you just to use your common sense and try to help others when they need help. It’s no good just pleading shyness or helplessness and hoping people will understand. They won’t! It’s pure selfishness! Now, do you understand what I’ve said?’

  There was a sort of long-suffering sigh beneath this lecture, as if his father were trying his utmost to be reasonable and truthful. Even as the skein of words wound tiresomely from his lips, however, he saw that they were as hopelessly colourless as daylight. His words were like so many glass lenses, carefully cut, but with no bias of convexity. To look at the world through these words changed nothing. He was tired of himself before he began, but he kept talking, like a teacher who has acquired a chronically pedagogical idiom.

  Cousin X looked sullenly at the pieces of the clock in his hands. How was it that his father had such a way of speaking that it dried up all words in the listener? There was something in his father’s voice that asserted itself as reality. Is reality really such a sterile, unanswerable thing? Cousin X was brimming with a resentment he could not begin to express. Then there came the sting that made all that came after pall into a dullness even more terrible. ‘If bullets were flying I would jump in front of them to save your life.’ In this phrase alone his father’s voice took on some elasticity. The sting he felt was like that of the bullets themselves. So his father would intercept bullets, but he would not spare him these words? The words pierced him with the invisible stigmata of embarrassment he would not lose for the rest of his life.

  It was absolutely true. Cousin X was absorbed for hours on end by the dismantling of anything mechanical. Seeing how meticulously he worked, Barry felt confident enough to let him dismantle things that were still in working order. He would sit cross-legged on the floor in the corner of the room and bend his head in serious intentness over a transistor radio or a calculator and examine each part of it minutely. More than just seeking a thorough understanding of the functions of separate parts, and how they interact, he seemed to regard each component with a reverent excitement as if the mystery of life itself were laid out plainly on a circuit-board in front of him.

  Barry still distrusted him, but was beginning to think this distrust arose from a simple clash of natures. Cousin X was not the kind of person he could ever feel in sympathy with, but that was no reason to be unkind to him. So he gruffly conceded him those things that kept him amused, and occupied.

  Cousin X had shown a particular liking for the rambling garden, too. It was a place ideal for hide-and-seek, with paths and trees aplenty. It was just overgrown and untidy enough to appear magical and quaint, florid with petals that fell on the paths, its hedges swollen like beehives dripping with the honey of sunlight. Cousin X looked at the hedges and pathways and flowerbeds with the same wonder as he looked at the machines he took apart. The only difference seemed to be the scale, as if the garden were a circuit-board whose elementary marvels he could walk among.

  It did not take long for Cousin X to begin mixing his pleasures by taking his latest mechanical appliances out into the garden. This was how Sasha found him on the Sunday after his family’s arrival. He was sitting cross-legged in the lush, tousled grass at the edge of the bottom lawn on the far side of the little bridge. The sun was a golden sheen on the blades of grass, which tickled Cousin X’s exposed legs. Scattered in the grass about him were the pieces of a small tape recorder. There was something fascinating in the contrast between the luxuriant grass and the brittle little bits of machine. It was not exactly a sensual attraction, but rather that the illusion that such lifeless and artificial fragments were growing in the garden evoked thoughts and feelings other than those named by human beings. To stare at the scattered parts was to be driven to distraction by their opaque existence, and to wonder if such useless and impractical emotions as they now conjured can really be.

  Perhaps there was something peaceful in the self-containment of this figure, or perhaps her parents’ warnings had been counter-productive. And then again, perhaps it was some trick of body language or pheromones. Whatever the reason, Sasha was suddenly intrigued by the inward-looking private world of the cousin who had made her faint. She had had a cousin all this time, removed to invisibility by distance, leading a parallel, unknown life somewhere. Now was a chance to discover it. Her legs began to move and she tottered over to him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, standing in front of him.

  He raised his eyes to her knees, then her face. He blinked.

  ‘Why are you always taking things apart?’

  ‘I want to know how they work,’ said Cousin X, as if this were self-evident.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . .’ he began, twisting loose a tiny screw with one of his penknife blades, ‘because if you know how things work then you can control them. And if you start early you can get ahead of everyone else.’

  ‘Ahead of them?’

  ‘Yes,’ he responded absently as if already bored with the conversation, and showed no sign of explaining himself. For a moment there was a peculiar look of concentration on his face, then suddenly he took an odd looking pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. He stopped his dismantling and simply stared up at Sasha wordlessly, a faint smile fixed on his face.
The glasses were plastic, and some sort of spirals seemed to be swirling slowly in the lenses. She thought that maybe she was supposed to laugh, but then she was suddenly uncertain, and the continued silence made her shrink in discomfort. She did not know whether to move or keep still.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m looking at you.’

  ‘Why are you wearing those silly glasses?’ she asked.

  ‘These are x-ray specs.’

  ‘No they’re not!’

  ‘Yes they are. I can see through your clothes right now.’

  ‘That’s stupid. If they were x-ray specs then why can’t you just see my bones? That’s what x-rays are, stupid! Anyway, there’s no such thing as x-rays specs.’

  ‘Don’t you want to try them on?’

  ‘No’

  ‘Look, they’re only called “x-rays specs”. They don’t use real x-rays. They really use magic. Magic shows you how things really are. And people are really naked, but they pretend they’re not.’

  ‘Where did you get them from, then?’

  ‘I sent off to a comic for them. You can always find these things if you look in the right way. People don’t believe in them, but they’re all around. But I think, if you can’t find these things when you’re still a child then you never will, perhaps.’

  Sasha pouted as if determined to prove she was right: a peculiarly childish determination.

  ‘All right then, let me try.’

  Cousin X carefully, and with a hint of reluctance, removed the glasses that so disconcerted her and handed them over. For some reason she began to giggle as she was about to slip the glasses on to the bridge of her nose. Her laughter fizzed up involuntarily, and, as if it weakened her very limbs she lowered the glasses again twice before she finally managed to settle them comfortably on her face. The moment they were in position a change came over her vision. She could not see the spirals from this side—instead everything was rich and bursting with a strange fluctuation of light, like the wind between leaves. She looked down at her cross-legged cousin. His golden form beamed back at her. She yelped in surprise, snatched off the glasses and flung them into the grass, as if she had just discovered a snake crawling on her.

  ‘You pig! You bloody pig! You let me stand here all this time while you could see everything!’

  ‘I told you!’ protested her cousin.

  ‘But how am I supposed to believe something like that? You knew I wouldn’t.’

  He shrugged. She was being quite unreasonable. He glanced at the discarded glasses, their arms half-folded in the grass, and a new mischief ignited the tips of his smile. He lightly swept them up again and crammed them back on his face.

  Sasha shrieked and ran off, her dress fluttering behind her like the wings of a butterfly. As if tugged by the rhythm of her galloping feet, Cousin X ran after her. In childhood such bawdy adventures are suffused with the highest passion, and though they may pass in a moment, they form the ideal thrill of which all later love is but a tamer version. Even the dullest of wallflowers can often recall moments in childhood when, for reasons justifiable or not, they felt the perfect ribald Lothario, so much so they may have even imagined thick, dark hairs suddenly growing on their chest and forearms. Running with the crystalline wind of exhilaration that chased after his cousin in her invisible clothes, this was one such moment for Cousin X.

  When he finally caught breathlessly up with her by a brilliantly stirring flowerbed, she grappled the glasses from his face. Amidst the mutual heaving and panting, like the churning of fast water around rocks, she fitted them boldly onto her own face, and the rules of a new game became clear. It was his turn to run away, laughing and giggling. Both in the same water of their breathlessness they could only run at a weak jog until they gathered strength. The game fluttered back and forth like this for a child’s eternity, watched by the little black kitten that had tottered unsteadily out into the garden.

  Much is said of the physiological peculiarities attendant on pregnancy. The spiritual and psychological gremlins remain somewhat more nebulous. Lynn, standing by the broad window that overlooked the garden, was inclined to distrust her own condition. Gazing ruminatively through the dull transparency of the glass, she saw Sasha and Cousin X running up from the lower garden. He seemed to be chasing her, and for an instant Lynn’s nerves jangled in horrid alarm. The goggly glasses that Cousin X was wearing made him look like some creepy, grinning monster. But Sasha was laughing and appeared entirely at ease. If anything bad had happened she could not possibly be so exuberant. Even so, Lynn thought she sensed something fey—otherworldly—in her daughter’s voice and movements. Even such effervescence can be unwholesome.

  But as her own body had become heavier, so the world around had become clouded and muddy with all sorts of unnamed portents. Pregnancy makes women irrational. This was the convenient explanation that the world of medical science, in all its sharp edged brilliance, had honed and developed, and it was the explanation that she had decided to take on as her own. When she became pregnant she had disengaged from the cyclical rhythm of life. She had sunk beneath the surface of things, deep into the twilight swamp of the body—a kind of stagnation that was also the purest fecundity. In every nutritious particle of this protoplasmic swamp life was dormant. But so was deception.

  She remembered how Blackie, their she-cat, had walked around the house with a sagging belly and a strange self-consciousness that seemed doubly unnatural in an animal. Even the cat was affected by the ominous intoxication of unformed life, of the dangers that enter in with birth. And when Blackie had safely dropped her litter and lay licking them like a superstitious mother banishing devils from the hearth, Lynn had looked at the fur and the slime and the loose sack of the now empty mother’s womb, and thought to herself what a messy, shapeless, chaotic thing the generation of life was.

  The two children ran into the house, their faces ruddy, nearly tripping over each other. Something too natural in their frolicking excluded and reproached her. She felt small and void of all authority. A sudden anxiety sliced through her, but she knew she could not repeat her injunction to Sasha to stay clear of her cousin.

  Past the trees at the edge of the bottom lawn, in the cool confluence of air and shadows beneath boughs shifting slightly from the waving of the outer branches (the sap taking the creak from their exertions), where the worn wooden bridge spanned from one bald, dusty bank of the pebbly stream to the other, Sasha stood watching Cousin X studiously attending to a jam-jar of some clear liquid. The jar itself, one such as children might collect tadpoles in, rested on the bridge. Cousin X stood on a dry, narrow verge of mud and stones at the foot of the bank, so that his head and shoulders just emerged from the edge of the bridge like a goat-eating troll. Sasha leaned against the bridge’s one handrail.

  Sasha still remembered her mother’s warning, and it had flashed through her mind that the trick with the x-ray specs might have been the kind of thing her mother was afraid of. For some reason, however, that episode had not left her with a bad feeling, as perhaps it should have. For one thing, her cousin had treated this virtual nakedness as perfectly natural, and although he had laughed, it had been for the sheer fun of the game, not any sort of dirty sniggering. And besides, they were cousins, and that was a little bit like brothers and sisters, wasn’t it? If they were to bathe together, for instance, it would not be so very strange. Only—she didn’t know because she had no siblings yet—only, cousins were perhaps more like friends as well. It was a strange relation they existed in, one that she could not quite bring into focus, an intimacy that remained full of the crawling buzz of new and exciting acquaintance.

  Cousin X took up a small satchel that rested by a flock of primroses, undid the buckle and extracted a number of glass phials.

  ‘They thought I was autistic,’ he said, as he placed the phials, carefully, like the components of an explosive device, next to the jar of liquid.

  ‘What’s autistic?’

  ‘It means
when someone can’t, um . . .’ he screwed his face up thoughtfully, ‘can’t concentrate properly on the real world.’

  ‘And that’s what you are?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t concentrate that much on what they call the real world. But I’m not autistic. They did tests and the results were negative—that means they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. So maybe it’s them who can’t focus properly. Now watch!’

  Unstopping a phial, he tapped a number of tiny crystals into the palm of one hand. As soon as they had spilled onto his skin he covered one crystal with his fingertip and tipped the others back into the phial. In the jar a spangle of jellied light dangled peacefully. Cousin X dropped the crystal into the liquid and watched it float soapily through the rainbow-like illusion of light. He repeated the process with crystals from each of the phials.