On the far side of Ilford, a neighbouring town, in the flat-spirited area beyond the housing estates, Mark and the Boy happened to come across each other walking the same pavement. It was apparently the first time they had met since the night I ‘introduced’ them. A passer-by on the other side of the road, Sidney Street, it was, saw Mark give a great, elastic smile. That person’s attention was caught by something in the manner of the two talking. It did not appear to him a usual acquaintance or a usual conversation. His first feeling was of vague alarm, but when he saw that the two were smiling and chatting in an apparently friendly manner his reason told him there was nothing to be alarmed about. Still, his curiosity was aroused and he walked along with many backward glances, till eventually he saw Mark and the Boy walking away together in the opposite direction. Out of some sense of novelty, perhaps, Mark had invited the Boy to have an afternoon pint with him. The Boy had accepted and kept up with Mark’s swift strides by half walking, half running, so that he almost appeared to be skipping. They followed the low, smooth-worn pavement to the nearest pub, The Hound and Hare, where neither of them were known. It was a thin-carpeted place with the atmosphere of a launderette, where sad-looking regulars measured out their watered-down pints over hours.
Mark and the Boy sat down at their own table, and Mark bought drinks. The regulars glanced their way now and then, sensing some odd tension or excitement in their conversation. Mark drank far more than the Boy, drank with a determined, methodical haste, as if steeling himself for something. The conversation became heated and now everyone looked their way. Something the Boy said must have struck a powerful nerve. Whatever it was it turned Mark’s face a terrible pale colour, like white-hot iron. Most people understand that someone like Mark, who seems incapable of taking anything seriously, will suddenly become incapable of humour when certain things are mentioned, and they simply try to be careful. The Boy must have obliviously, and with shocking naïvety, ran into some inner territory of fear and anger that no one else would ever even have discovered, some incontrollable molten core of pure, brutal reaction. In some way, the Boy’s naïvety, comparable almost to a congenital deficiency, mirrored Mark’s equally pathological implacability. When the two met was it is not bound to result in some crisis?
‘You fucking queer!’
Mark spewed out the words as if they were silage. His mouth was turned down in a sneer of disgust. Everyone in the pub heard serious danger in the looping vowels of the three words as plainly as if they themselves had been kicked in the stomach and slashed with a Stanley knife.
This is where the story becomes splintered. Most of the witnesses saw Mark pull a knife, and described one very much like that Mark had given the Boy last summer. Mark swept the table away from between them and hurled it across the room. He grabbed the Boy by the front of his shirt, yanked him to his feet and dragged him outside. The proprietor phoned the police. The pub regulars looked at each other uncomfortably and a few of them got up to follow Mark and the Boy in a vain show of doing something useful. It was already too late. The pavement outside was slick with blood that was to remain and attract all kinds of people for days to come. Mark himself looked like he had been in some terrible accident. He was stunned and simply stood, unspeaking, his chest heaving, until the police came and the blue of their sirens flashed garishly on the glutinous crimson. The strange thing is that one witness swore that the Boy actually passed a knife to Mark a moment before Mark’s outburst. Three witnesses swore that there was no knife at all, and indeed no knife could be found on Mark, on the Boy, or anywhere in the vicinity of the crime. Mark was later to insist, against the advice of his solicitor, that there had been no knife. But the debate is redundant anyway since the white body whose head hung back touching the pavement and whose scrawny arms were raised feebly into foetus-like fists, had been pierced many times by a blade and lost blood like a shredded bag. He had been stabbed to death. Perhaps stranger than the absent murder weapon was the Boy’s silence. After he had been dragged outside the customers in the pub had heard Mark shouting, and noises of a scuffle, but the Boy’s voice had not been among those noises. Perhaps he had died instantly with the first stab before he could raise a cry of protest.
I never saw the body, of course, but I spoke to more than one person who did. They seemed shocked that such violence can be contained within the human frame, unseen, to be released at any time. There was something about the violence that was almost superhuman. The corpse itself seemed so fragile and vulnerable it was more than they could bear to look at it for more than a few dismayed seconds. It was as if the Boy were still suffering the explosive agony of his wounds from which there continued to flood a sweet, dumbfounding, compassion. The bled-pale skin looked more tender than ever, the poor, stupid, slaughtered Boy ravished and wasted by the merciless iron tongue of Death.
Mark went down for that. There was no avoiding it. His solicitor somehow managed to get the charge reduced from murder to manslaughter on the plea of diminished responsibility and drunkenness. I attended the trial and saw a subdued figure standing in the dock. There was something missing from him, as if some spirit had left him with the frenzy of violence he had wreaked upon the Boy. If I didn’t know him I might have thought he was mentally retarded. He did little to defend himself, often had to have questions repeated to him, and only showed any signs of remaining will when two points were touched upon—the knife, and the subject matter of the final conversation. He insisted almost deliriously that there was no knife, then weakened his own defence by insisting he had been too drunk to remember the conversation or what had ignited his anger. His avoidance of this latter subject had about it the shadow of superstition. It was clear, at any rate, that nothing on Earth would induce him to talk about it, and as he stood there I seemed to see the bricks of a prison building themselves up around him, the gloomy walls box him in with shadows, bars spring up before his face and grass curl from beaten soil below.
Something odd came out at the trial. It had little bearing on the case, at least from a legal point of view, but it left me unable to concentrate on much that came after. I was called briefly to witness as someone who had known both the victim and the accused. I was asked how I knew the victim and replied that I had tattooed him. There was some whispered consultation in the Dock as the defence lawyer questioned some anomaly in my statement. It seems that there had been no tattoo on the body, but this was soon explained, albeit in a way which begged further and equally mystifying questions, by the presence of a strange scar on the right upper arm. It was apparently too old to have been inflicted by the accused. In any case it was not a stab wound. Instead it appeared as if a whole section of epidermis and subcutaneous tissue had been painstakingly removed, as if with a flick-knife.
***
A spring day released me and made the intervening years uncountable; many or few, they were simply years, now over. As a matter of fact I had been meaning to make the visit for a long time. At first my intention had been pointed, but I did not know where the grave was. Then I learned which churchyard it was and visited a couple of times, but the headstone had still not been erected, so I could not find the plot of earth that belonged to the Boy. Not knowing when it would be erected, the visit became just something I would do ‘sometime’, and whilst I did not quite forget about it, it lost all urgency. Life came closer again, stood between me and the quiet grave. So years passed. The day of my visit seemed to come round naturally enough of its own accord. A number of things prompted it. Barry happened to mention that he had seen the grave, that it was well-tended and peaceful. I had also heard of Mark’s release from prison. In his absence Mark had become some grim bogey of folklore. It was not that he was feared because he had committed a crime whose violence no one had expected, even of him, although doubtless that was a part of it. It was more that something of the ill omen of the grave he had made, and something of the iron dark shadow of prison, now clung to him. He was feared not for any harm that he might do but for the ruin a
nd dolour, the frame-distorting and spirit-wrecking bad fortune that had fallen on him. People were afraid that something of that unhappy shadow might fall across them and blight them with blindness or lameness. He had become something like the shuck, the monstrous black dog that haunts country lanes, a harbinger of Death.
So I did not know how to interpret the omen of his release. Would the spring sun blast away the darkness of that shadow? Or would the darkness spread from the very dust of his footsteps to infect the sun in the sky? How had he lived in prison, and how was he to live now?
I set the day for the visit as formally as if I had had to consult the Boy himself to see if it was convenient for him. It was a Sunday, a day of time-honoured timelessness. The churchyard in question was in the hill-secluded village where he had spent the primary years of his life. I had not been there often. I caught one of the irregular buses that go by the slow undulating coast road and got off in the High Street. Suddenly it seemed as if I had been detached from all those things which gave life direction and a sense of chronology. School, work, the family, were all forgotten things. Even my name seemed abstract and unnecessary. This is the condition in which awareness exists before it is born into the world and forced into narrow channels of identity. I was simply me, casual clothes, a pair of hands both strange and familiar, a pair of legs to walk with, vision and the air on my skin, a shadow to accompany me. What I saw were the sun-baked, gritty pavements, old as the hills, ancient, irremovable chewing gum trodden in, and everywhere the grey dust of memory become unconscious, inanimate. I noticed the spiky-leafed dandelions growing from cracked tarmac. I saw in their ragged shadows the shadow of Mark’s release.
Time in this village was of the same quality that time has for a child, pure, boundless and unmoving. It seemed appropriate that the Boy should be buried here, where time was a still, limpid pool. It was an unreal place, with the special unreality of the past. When the past is gone it becomes unreachable, as remote as something that never was, and takes on that haze of nostalgia so often conjured up in phrases such as ‘The Good Old Days’, or ‘The Golden Age’. Many people insist that such things are a mirage, a cuckoo-land that is the vestigial memory of the child’s innocence of the existence of Death. That world has the bold simplicity of an illustrated ABC on the walls of a classroom. A is for Apple. B is for Ball. C is for Cup. A person’s own childhood can seem to be something archaic, belonging to some free-floating idyllic century that is close to history, close to storybook, but far from reality and more real than life.
As I walked I saw few people. The village was hushed. Even the church bells did not seem to touch that hush; they were a part of it. I listened to the bells as I walked. The sound has always been to me a disturbing cross between gaiety and melancholy, like a smooth, grey patina dulling the rays of the sun.
I looked at the map that Barry had sketched for me on the back of one of our flyers. I turned into an alley, passed a bowling green, a public lavatory, a car park. I arrived at a road at whose side was a low wall. Looking over it I saw the fast flowing, thrush-coloured waters of a narrow stream, swelling clear as birdsong over rocks and pebbles, a constant racing from one unknown to another unknown, which to the onlooker was as if static. The walls that banked it in were thick with weeds. This must be the river marked on the map, I thought. All I had to do now was follow it and I would arrive. In fact I was nearly there. The church tower, the source of the time-slowing, solemn clangour, was visible cresting a mound of green and grey that could only have been the graveyard. I became conscious now of every step I took, so that my steps became uneven, standing out in strange, echoless relief in the afternoon. To the left was a small Victorian park, the grass trim and shining in the sunlight. I looked at the empty benches, the neat lines of roses, and there was a fragility to the whole scene that made me think of the last days of life, the serenity and faintness of old age. That too was a return to elemental things, perhaps, to be retired and to see the sheen of the grass so blinding and vivid that it might disappear at any moment. Both old age and childhood approached the fragility of non-existence.
A few more gritty footsteps and I came to a lichgate at the base of whose posts there grew lush clumps of long grass. The lichgate was also a bridge over the rich, variegated brown of the stream I had been following. Just inside the wall of the graveyard there stood an old well, and, under the iron dawn chorus of the bells, on my way to the grave of the Boy, I found myself suddenly thinking of an old rhyme. The rhyme came from such a dark depth of memory it was as if I had hauled it up from that well in a bucket. And yet, so appropriate was it in feeling to the situation I now found myself in that it was as if it repeated itself automatically in my mind with the monotony of the bells.
Ding, dong, dell,
Pussy’s in the well.
Who put her in?
Little Johnny Green.
Who pulled her out?
Little Tommy Stout.
What a naughty boy was that,
To try to drown poor pussy cat,
Who never did him any harm,
And killed the mice in his father’s barn.
I was prepared to take my time searching for the grave, a sightseer of lichen, stone and archaic, weathered epitaphs. As it turned out, my way was destined to be signposted and my leisurely perusal to be cut short. I started up the path that rolled between the sod banks of graves. The blades of grass were translucent with sunlight; a ragged peace had gone to seed, as old and vague as the letters chiselled in headstones. I felt like whistling, but some noise or movement told me I was not alone. Beyond a screen of small, scraggy trees, someone else was standing. Usually, in such a situation, I would have avoided the area where the stranger stood, but this time I just kept walking. I rounded the edge of the line of trees and saw a figure in jeans and T-shirt. They were not standing in a formal attitude, but looked almost ready to run. Nonetheless it was clear they were mourning. There was agony in the shoulders, the face turned away like someone caught in the act. I did not know if it was this wild and natural grief that struck me and made me feel as if the scene was something to do with me, or whether there was some detail my conscious mind was missing. Then I realised. I was astonished at first, but in an instant it seemed not so strange, after all. It even seemed fitting and inevitable, as if I had come here expecting this. And, in a way, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I finally acknowledged what that unnamed anticipation I had felt all along was? Perhaps he had been pretending not to notice me, but it was no use. It was obvious I was not going to go away. And Mark finally turned his face towards me.
His pointy smile was now replaced by the grimace of sorrow, creasing that plastic action man face grotesquely. He did not look away, so I approached. The grave was the Boy’s, of course, overhung by a hood of crooked boughs and surrounded by pillows of grass. Only the stone itself gave away the relatively recent date of the internment. To see Mark and the grave at once was almost too much to take in. My own feelings were brimming and spilling so that it seemed first that I was moved and then that I felt nothing in alternate flashes until I could not tell numbness from profound emotion. I could feel the presence of the Boy’s body, though it was presented to my mind as whole and perfect. I could almost see it. I did not want to think what the true condition of the corpse must be.
Mark held something in his right hand and he gave it to me now. It was a rusty tin box covered in sentimental Victorian designs. Perhaps it had once contained cough sweets. I tugged off the tight fitting lid and saw inside an envelope, a bundle of papers and a knife.
‘He left it me,’ said Mark in a clogged voice. ‘He knew before I did it. He knew.’
I took out the knife. It was Mark’s old flick-knife with the ivory handle, but there was something different about it. On the handle there was an image I knew well, Little Girl Death, standing on tiptoes, about to kiss someone. It glimmered on the hilt like a plundered jewel. At first I marvelled at how it had been done. Then I saw the lines around the tattoo where t
he skin had been cut away from the arm. Inside the envelope was a simple note from the Boy, which read, ‘This belongs to you.’
I almost forgot Mark was beside me and fished out the papers that lined the bottom of the tin in the hope they might resolve this mystery. They only confirmed it. They were the copied pages of the will. Young as he was, the Boy had taken the unusual precaution of making a will, rudimentary, but scrupulously legal. It was witnessed by one Sidney Matthews, a local pariah, a little backward, who was said to have offered small boys and girls money to see and touch them.
I turned the knife over in the palm of my hand in admiration and wonder. Could such an object, with all that it implied, really exist in the world? Who had removed the tattoo so skilfully from the Boy’s arm and pasted it onto the handle under a layer of varnish, preserving it like an ant in amber? None of the details of the story behind this object, taken separately, were impossible, but together they defied belief. Now the dark, miraculous nature of the whole chain of events was brought home to me in the knife that joined them all together and formed their cryptic embodiment.
I looked up at Mark to confirm in his eyes that we were involved in the same mystery. I could not quite make out what his expression was. Then, as if the knife were actually some obscene heathen artefact, incriminating evidence, he burst out, ‘I’m not queer! I’m not fucking queer!’
Morbid Tales Page 23