‘What’s meant to happen?’
‘Just watch. It’ll take a little while. This is what I was talking about. People are like crystals. They solidify into a particular shape so that we can see them, but really it’s just a sort of code for something that has no shape at all. That’s what I see all the time, not the shapes of people and things, but their . . . potential.’
Her cousin used a great many words she had never heard before, and at first he had had to explain quite frequently. But soon, as she grew accustomed to the flow of his speech, the individual words became part of the flow, and she found she could absorb their meaning most of the time without asking. Maybe this too was because they were cousins.
The two of them watched the jar intently for some time in ticklish silence. Sasha got down on her knees and elbows on the bridge, curled up almost like a hibernating animal. Her nostrils flared soundlessly from time to time, and an indescribably sweet breeze streamed against her chest and made her gauzy dress stir where it was scissored between the elastic flesh of her legs. Before their eyes a transformation was taking place in the multicoloured crystals. At first they simply seemed to blur, as if about to dissolve. Then it became clear that they were actually growing. Tiny though they were they began to grow into shapes more fantastic than any cave formations. Their colours were as delicate as the dyes of coconut pyramids. Their emerging shapelessness was something between that of a stalagmite and some bizarre fungus. The liquid became a little cloudy, but Sasha thought she had never seen anything so eerie and beautiful as this miniature crystal garden. It was like a garden from some dark, alien planet.
‘What about the x-ray specs?’ she asked suddenly. ‘If you can see these things all the time, then why do you need to wear x-ray specs?’
‘They’re just a toy. In a way they actually make my sight worse. What I usually see is even more x-ray than bones and stuff. I s’pose it’s like the ultimate x-ray. So I don’t usually see people’s naked bodies.’
‘What is it then? What do you really see?’
‘It’s the Unlived World.’
She felt the inky shadows of trees crouch in upon them, and her child’s heart flickered at some profound thrill hidden in the words. They made her feel not just the thrill of the grown-up world, but of a world beyond even that, transcending its authority absolutely and paling it into triviality and dullness. Just as the leaves and branches hung in a canopy over them now, so ordinarily there were many canopies of adult authority between Sasha’s pretty little head and the sky. Now all those canopies were removed by her cousin’s soft-spoken words, and only the serene and unlimited freedom of the sky remained. No one had ever spoken to her like this, with words that communicated directly with her heart. Just hearing them was like the relief and kick of truancy, but with a deep peacefulness to it that was almost religious.
Her heart was seesawing toward the sun when she suddenly realised what it was she most wanted to ask. As she felt herself swing back down again towards the lurching bridge and bank, the sun was behind her, and the hair dangling in her face and the summer dress were bells of shadow.
‘What do you see when you look at me?’ she asked.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ said her cousin, frowning in thought. ‘Anybody can see these things if they want to, it’s just we are taught not to. For a start you’ve got to stop cutting things off from each other. Like, say if I look at that tree, I see the sun and wind moving in its leaves. The sun and the wind are not different things. They are both the tree too, as I am looking at it now. And in the same way when I look at you, the tree and the sun and the wind are you too. But that’s really simple stuff. The other things I see are more like memories, but they’re memories of things that never happened. In order to have shape and exist this world became solid, limiting everything to its lowest possible form, as if existence itself were the only thing worth having, and we had to throw away everything else for it. Everything else was banished. There are no possibilities in this world ’cos everything is already solid. We’ve gained something, that is, existence, and lost everything because of it. So anything is everything and something is nothing.
‘So now, when I look at you, I see the real you attached to your earthly body by a thin cord. It’s floating above you like the leaves of the tree. But it’s hard to put it into words. It’s like a dream. You can describe what happened and what you saw, but in the dream those things had meanings that the words just don’t. I see you floating in blue water and you’re see-through, like a chalk drawing, and there are lots of other see-through chalk sea creatures around you. And the water you’re floating in is a song that you’re singing and the creatures are the words that wanted you to sing them and every time you open and close your lips they blow kisses like jellyfish. I see you running through a forest where every tree is a legend and the shadows are all stories and your feet are deer’s hooves and your hair is antlers that twist into dreams and the forest is just a pattern on your dress that you are running through. I see your body is a tree trunk and your hair is a tree of feathers full of caves of spying and adventure and hibernation. I see dust on the pavement outside an old shop, it’s a sort of blue dust, and I can hear singing, and the whole thing is very sad and beautiful.’
As she listened to the stream of words something happened to her. She soon knew that the words themselves could have been almost anything. Cousin X was simply letting what he saw flood out of him as a feeling. The voice needed words to give it shape. But the important thing was the voice and not the words. Even so there was a strange preciseness about the words which gave her a prickling, floaty sensation. It was as if something like an after image made of gooseflesh were drifting slowly away from her body. What her cousin had said was true, the words themselves had nothing to do with what he saw, but his very tone showed that what he saw was the real thing—the real Sasha, the real world. How else could his words have such an effect?
Cousin X continued to talk, but Sasha could no longer hear any individual words. The sounds issuing from his lips, like the spinning of a prayer wheel, became utterly strange. Sasha thought he was speaking a foreign language. Instead of words came a whole revolving montage of images at whose hub there lay a still and wondering permanence.
Only when she spiralled back down to her body as dizzy as a sycamore seed did she realise how high she had been soaring. Cousin X had stopped talking and was climbing up on to the bank. She took in the dark school-uniform, the skinny legs, the pale hands and feverish, saturnine eyes. He seemed to her now a being without age, an intense will in the shape of walking shadows. When he spoke again it was with the sensuality of a singer or an actor. Although he generally seemed to manifest a glowing shyness in his very flesh, soft and pale as a fish’s belly, now he assumed a mantle of charisma. It glowed about his hands like magic dust. Sasha had entered into his world, crowded about by the shadows. Here he ruled with miraculous confidence, though he was perfectly crippled in the light of a more public world.
‘What if I hypnotise you?’ he murmured. ‘If you trust me we could do anything. There’s just the two of us, so we’re free.’
Her pupils dilated a little at these words.
‘What do you most want to do now?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. More than anything else in the world?’
‘More than anything else in the whole world?’
She tossed back her head and caught the glinting of sun between the sharp mackle of leaves.
‘I want to fly,’ she said with sudden zeal.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘can I come too?’
The words should have been unbearably sugary, but with that smile it was clear they were a wink from someone who knew life itself, knew that great secret. If you do not do these things now, in childhood, then perhaps you never will. And what a freshness there was to that smile, like the taste of mint.
‘Yes,’ she said, and smiled.
His youthful palm folded around the darkness of hers, the c
reases and perspiration, glowing at the cracks with the blood-orange of sunlight on closed eyelids. There was a breath-like warmth in the slight breeze masking the gentle chill beneath. It seemed to Sasha then that to fly was quite the same thing as entering a new world, the great adventure of her true self. And if her cousin joined her they would be as intimate as two skeins of wind twisting together. Their thoughts would mingle until it would not matter exactly who was thinking what. And to remember herself in the midst of such harmony would be an incomparable thrill.
‘Just listen to me,’ her cousin continued, ‘Before you know it we’ll be flying. For a start we’re children, so anything is possible for us. We have time, and we still have the power to believe. Belief is all you need. It’s dead easy really. It’s so easy that when you see how easy it is you’ll start floating just like that. The easiness will take you over and you won’t be able to help it. I’ve got your hands now, so don’t worry. If you suddenly feel frightened and start to fall, I’ll keep hold of you. I can already feel us getting lighter. Very soon we’ll be treading on the air.’
Cousin X continued in a flickering, half-whispered excitement as if he were trying to kindle a flame amidst dry tinder. And, slowly as sunlight creeping over dust, Sasha felt herself lifted. The hairs upon her head and body bristled eerily as if with static electricity. Her chest dissolved into a blind molten core, like the image of the sun sizzling colourfully on the retina. There was the discreet feeling of her feet leaving the earth. She even forgot this was strange. She was simply rapt. Then, from nowhere, there came the reflection that she was actually doing the impossible. The rapture that held her suspended was shattered like the surface tension of a pool touched by fingers. She sank back to the ground with odd slowness, as if she were still resisting gravity a little. When her toes and then her heels touched earth and her cousin’s face jolted before her, suddenly she became uncertain that her toes had ever left the ground. The event remained in her memory, but perhaps the beliefs that she had whilst on the ground and the beliefs she had whilst in the air could not co-exist. That is, while one was true, the other was a lie. Now she was on the ground so even if she could remember floating in the air, that memory had become a lie.
With a blinking, Sasha’s whole world became strangely overcast, and from her stream of thought all that was left was that what had happened was a lie. Somewhere she sensed that even this was a contradiction.
‘Did you feel it too?’ asked Cousin X, ‘It wasn’t just me, was it?’
‘No, it was both of us. But was it real?’
‘It must have been!’
‘But it can’t have!’
‘Anyway, even if it did happen, something was stopping us from getting any further. I don’t understand. I thought I believed perfectly. What about you?’
‘Yes. That’s what I remember most. It’s like I believed everything. Completely everything.’
‘But you don’t now?’
‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Maybe it’s just ’cos we both really believed it that it seemed real.’
‘After all I can do on my own, it’s still difficult with other people. I thought it was enough just to trust my imagination, but maybe there’s some hidden machinery behind the world so that different people can live in it. In which case I’d have to understand that machinery first.’
Even in his smouldering frustration and disappointment his voice was excited, as if he were sure he was on to something immense.
He looked at her again with a determination that was in essence impregnable confidence, and delivered what he believed, quite without conceit, to be an utterly winning line.
‘Don’t worry, when I find out how to fly I’ll let you know.’
He smiled. He was as good as clicking his fingers, as if all magic were a question of style, the precocious hip of a child that is a hell of agony and embarrassment to look back upon. But he could be the hipster now because he was still in mid journey. He had not arrived anywhere.
‘Yes,’ she suddenly said sweetly, as if it were all just a silly childish game anyway. ‘Let me know. Promise you will.’
This was a horribly sentimental contribution, all Sunday and rainbows. But like the sweetness at the wet heart of a kiss, he accepted it silently.
It seemed ridiculous to carry on playing now, so they turned without discussion back towards the house. Along the dusty path running up from the stream and through the brilliance of the garden, Sasha cast searching eyes on her surroundings. Things were not quite back to normal, after all. For a start, now that she looked closely, it seemed to her that much of the lower half of her cousin’s body had been rendered faint and see-through by the filtered rays of the sun. The effect of this was to make it look as if he were about to disappear at any moment, to ascend and become one with the great spattering of sunspots and foliage and leopard shadows. Then, as if they were the spreading cloak of his own extreme tenuousness, the paths and plant life, and even the lowering canopy of the air, took on a churning, vivid, disjointed quality. It seemed the scenery itself was breaking up and turning into mist. The whole impression was of the dusk of midsummer.
As they wended back to the house through the cool fragrance and white flowers of garlic, Sasha remembered thinking to herself that she never wanted this sweet, bright, yet hazy blanket to leave the world. It even seemed possible. Some worry like that slipping from a mind sinking into sleep still troubled her vaguely.
For a child in the middle of summer holidays one eternity is piled upon another. Sometimes he might come to and remember he was once at school and that he will some day go back, to a different class, and he is seized with a strange feeling, as if he is the sun, hanging blind in the sky. This week, luxuriant with greenery, and with scattering dandelion seeds, had been one eternity, but now it was sinking before another.
It was with all the sense of matters unresolved that such visits usually possess, that the Tuesday of departure lengthened its maudlin shadow across the preceding days. The children’s play, their make-believe bravura, had swept the adults and all their organised structure into the corners like discarded toys. But as is the nature of such structures, it was not content to be relegated to the corners of things, and now it was moving back to reclaim the foreground of existence.
The parents were taken up with the strange relief that typifies so much human experience—that of having avoided all confrontation, and especially the confrontation of self. This relief is apt to bring on a whimsical, philosophical mood. There is sadness in it, too, the sadness of capitulating once again to eternal compromise, of committing the sin of procrastination and getting away with it. This was why Kevin could toss a notebook with a few tentative plans in it into a suitcase, and look up to Eunice and say, ‘Well, I think it’s been something of a success, after all,’ as if one more achievement could be crossed off a list of chores and duties. Mundane achievements such as are apportioned to the hands of all people. Doing homework and marking it. Earning money and spending it. Washing sheets and dirtying them. Achievements that leave as much trace as the tide coming in and going out.
Barry had started on a newly commissioned sign to paint and was conveniently busy and solitary. Lynn was sunk in a different kind of solitude. She could see that Sasha had brightened since her cousin’s arrival, and so reassured herself that all was well. Nonetheless, certain misgivings refused to be assuaged, and as a result she kept her thoughts entirely to herself.
Looking from the window of the first floor bedroom where he had stayed with his parents, Cousin X’s will was bent fiercely against those of the adults. He could not bear the collusion of which this parting was woven. Tomorrow they would leave. Children’s fates are decided by the movements of their families, as helplessly as if they were tied to them, constantly jerked this way and that without so much as a warning. The deadline for their departure, an invisible line as it was, was rather like the glass pane before him. Although it seemed hardly to be there at all, once he passed through it, it would sha
tter about him into sharp and deadly shards.
The day was overcast. Perhaps it would even rain. The dullness of the air awakened in Cousin X a newness of feeling, an edgy nervousness. In this state of expectancy he almost believed he felt the tiny wet pinpricks of rain from a sky whose greyness resounded as beautifully as the plucked strings of a guitar. Then, there behind the hedge, a silken glimpse of long hair and parti-coloured dress. Young girls can dress like princesses just to play in the long grass. This flash of hair and frock was as provocative to Cousin X as if he had been a detective searching for a murder victim, and had seen these beautiful, flower-like scraps on some thorn. But the head and frock were part of something living, and they bobbed off out of view, like a grazing animal. That flash of silkiness and its sad, sudden absence called to him with an intensity like heat, like playground threats, an alarm. The call and his response were one event. He ran from the room and after the vanished silk. He tore out into the garden. His heart was thumping as heavily as his footsteps, and he thought of football boots, their studs ripping up turf.
He slunk behind the hedge, where a little path ran alongside rows of flowers and vegetables. She stood at the other end of the hedge, facing it, like someone counting to a hundred while others hid, or like someone lying in wait herself. His thief’s pace slowed now that the object of his search was safely in sight. In the hush of beaten grass he walked upon he was suddenly unsure of what he wanted to say or do. So much for special powers! But then, even the superheroes in the comics were wracked by the most terrible doubts. They had to wear costumes to remind themselves, their enemies and those they protected, of their ideal, transcendent identity. So Cousin X must stick to dreaming bravado at all costs, however ridiculous and flimsy the role might seem. Once lost, forever lost. He stopped short in front of her, and she looked at him with questioning eyes.
‘I’m going tomorrow.’
‘Yes. I know.’
Morbid Tales Page 10