‘Okay. Okay,’ I said, trying to reassure him without thinking about whether I believed him or not. It was as if he had wanted to say many things in his own defence but when he opened his mouth there only came this dubious denial. There was nothing he could say now that would not dig him deeper into a hole. He could only be defiant.
He looked into my eyes a moment longer. Long enough for him to see that I accepted his grief and vulnerability as genuine, that I saw him now as a mourner and not the Boy’s killer. I replaced the knife, the letter and the will in the tin and gave it back to Mark. There didn’t seem any need for further words. Indeed, I could not have spoken if I had wanted to. Mark took the box, looked at me once more and walked silently away. I stood by myself in front of the grave a while longer to pay my respects and contemplate all that had happened. When I finally left, the rhyme was still tolling dolefully in my head.
Ding dong dell,
Pussy’s in the well.
Who threw him in?
Soon after that time there came a strong resurgence of the daydream images that had first overwhelmed me on the Boy’s last visit to my shop. The images came quite involuntarily and with sufficient power to crowd out the everyday world entirely. Their vividness was abnormal, and I was particularly disturbed by the quality of forcible intrusion from outside that the visions possessed. I even wondered about my own mental health, as I suppose I still must. I did not feel as if I had received the necessary shock or undergone the necessary trauma to explain such psychological malfunction, but perhaps a subtle accumulation of events in just the right spiritual combination had caused something inside to crack silently, just as one can bleed internally with no external signs of injury. I don’t believe we are ever sure when to consult professionals about our symptoms, especially when those symptoms are mental.
All this made it difficult for me to work. Once or twice, in a sort of trance, I even incorporated details from these visions into customer’s tattoos. On these occasions I apologised embarrassedly and gave a discount. I believe it was only the exceptional quality of these details that enabled me to placate the customers.
The visions themselves still centred around the same images, that primary school playing field and the wind-torn, hilltop Union Jack. The periods spent beneath the earth in these visions seemed to grow longer and somehow more intense. That is, when my disembodied consciousness lingered beneath the soil of the sports field there was still a sense of eternal laziness, but intermingled with a buzz of expectancy. The darker soil of the hill, however, seemed to squeeze me tight as a rugby scrum. I felt a sort of thudding that I thought might be heartbeats, and a sweet, piercing sensation that was a mixture of the coldness of mud, exquisite loneliness and the exhilaration of running with bursting chest from a gang of bullies.
Some of the visions focused on traditional childhood games, some of which I had forgotten about for a long time. There were girls doing cartwheels, handstands, splits, the crab. Doing the crab—they pushed their bellies up into an arch and progressed gymnastically on all fours. Their skirts fell between their legs and I could almost see the flat mandibles of the creatures they were imitating. There were boys foraging for conkers in the outlying lanes and fields of the village on misty days. This pastime in particular seemed so ancient and so clichéd that I could hardly believe it had ever been reality. There was a mystery in all these games and pastimes. That mystery was their transmission. They were all traditions limited to children; they could not be passed from adult to child. They seemed to come to children with the naturalness of the passing seasons. Now it occurred to me that the Boy was of one piece with this mystery. I did not know where he came from, and he seemed to exist in a self-contained world of youth and immaturity.
Mark was to become as much of a pariah as the witness to the Boy’s will. No one would employ him and the only words cast his way were insults. This was nothing to do with concern or grief for the fate of the Boy. It was simple superstitious fear and that petty hatred that lives wherever there is ignorance, seeking out any target to sting with its poison. So Mark seldom came out in the daylight anymore. The will to fight had left him. He was sapped of all courage. He had taken a blow that had bled the colour from him, drained the very life from his tissues. Now there was nothing left for him but to skulk in lonely places. This condition of Mark’s was obviously a terminal one, but it was more nebulous than a physical illness and so the whole environment was involved in it. Mark’s end came inevitably and soon, the world falling in with the grave taint that had soured his will to live. He was kicked to death on a grassy sports ground in front of a rugby clubhouse. His killers were an evil pack of thirteen and fourteen year-old boys from the local comprehensive. Their grating accents could be heard cheering the word ‘queer’ like a football chant. I know their type well, kids in whom utter stupidity is the basis of evil, in whom not a single natural instinct for kindness exists, whose dicks get white-hot hard on violence and cheap hate-lust, and whose sense of humour does not extend beyond tormenting the disfigured and socially inept. They are the grease and scraps that collect around the microwaves of bickering households. They are the lager-swilling essence of British manhood. And they are spineless. Mark could have pulverised the lot of them. Their hearts are so harrowed up with bullying fear and hatred, they are nothing more than a nasty jelly. Compared to them Mark was great and noble. It was his tragedy to be savaged by such a mangy pack of dogs. Not so much British bulldogs as British pit bulls. I do not believe he even defended himself.
The boys, in the manner of their kind, ran away when a few people with pluck began to approach. Mark was as bruised and dented as if he had been the soil of the pitch itself. His blood soaked into the dark grass and mud around him, filling up the footprints and the pits made by studded boots.
Perhaps because I was the only one who ever looked him in his eyes after his release from prison, Mark left me something in his will. It was the flick-knife. Mark, too, must have foreseen his end. So my work has returned to me, as I always thought it would. You throw something out into the sea and eventually the waves carry it back to you. And this piece, pasted to the handle of the knife like a pressed flower, is undoubtedly my greatest work. I keep the knife in my wardrobe. Sometimes I take it out to look at it, turn it over in my hands. The tattoo is still exquisite. Even detached from the body of the Boy, it seems to be alive. Now that the knife is in my possession I understand just what a deadly object it is. The blade is unbelievably sharp. I have even used it to shave with.
Soon after I received the knife, which came with a note written by Mark that was word for word the note the Boy had written to him, I had a dream. It was very simple, but in its very simplicity it was strangely impressive and quite unlike any dream I have had before. In fact, I only call it a dream because I believe it occurred when I was asleep and I don’t know what else to call it.
I thought I awoke to find the Boy standing at the foot of my bed. I say standing, but actually it was a patch of turf he stood upon, and the turf itself hovered just above the level of the bed frame. I knew the Boy was dead, and yet I had no doubt this was really him. One cannot mistake the presence of another human being, especially when it has become so much a part of one’s life that they live inside you as well as outside. There was a sort of halo of sunshine around him and in a moment I recognised it as the background of the tattoo. The Boy himself had somehow taken on something of the texture and character of the tattoo. He smiled at me for some time. I was not afraid, but I could not speak. I felt at peace. I was glad just to receive the blessing of that smile. I could have lain like that for so long. So often people search and search for another’s soul with probing words. If you know how to smile and how to look, that is enough. Words then convey mere information. At length the Boy did speak.
‘Thank you for the tattoo. It was with me till I died.’
‘What happened?’ I hardly knew what I was asking. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I realised I was grieving aga
in for the Boy’s brutal death and the wasting of his beautiful life.
‘It’s okay. Mine was a happy death. I was blessed with the great fortune to die by the hand of someone who loved me. That is a very rare blessing, believe me.’
‘You died a cruel and ugly death.’
‘Behind the violence is a sweet mercy. Please remember this.’
‘What about Mark? What happened to him?’
The Boy lowered his eyes and his face looked strangely sad. The look was so pure that I found tears pricking hotly and springing once more from my eyes.
‘Sometimes getting what we want is painful.’
That is all I remember. The visions increased after that dream and I can no longer work. The image of the hilltop has developed into a more explicit scene, which I experience over and over. The thudding is the thudding of boots. The sweetness and excitement accompanies the pain of being kicked by those boots again and again as I sink with my flowing blood into the dark unconsciousness of the soil beneath. I stay at home in this gloomy room and watch the visions cascade in front of the closed, sun-blocking curtains. Barry calls. He wants me to see a doctor, but he will not call one without my consent because he doesn’t want to see me put away. My thought processes are lucid and logical enough and perhaps that has helped to convince him that this is only temporary. But I can see he is frightened and doesn’t know what to do.
More than anything else I find myself contemplating for hours the last words the Boy spoke to me.
‘Sometimes getting what we want is painful.’
What do I want? What is my ultimate fulfilment? Will it be painful? Will it turn me inside out? I await in cringing, tingling anticipation.
***
Shane’s testimony ends there, a fragment curiously incomplete. It was not meant for publication. Writing was not his true vocation and in the manner of amateurs he failed to bring the piece to a satisfactory conclusion. It ends with a question and an unnamed expectation. However, there was another record far more eloquent than these roughly-cobbled words. Shane died before Barry ever knew what the best course of action was. His body was found covered with tattoos of almost supernatural beauty. Not a square inch of his skin was left untattooed. The tattoos formed a sweeping tapestry, a seamless pageant folding back in on itself at every point of the cornerless body. The scenes depicted in this tapestry seemed to make up a sort of story. There were children playing on a sports field, a pale-skinned boy among them. A pseudo-skinhead offering a flick-knife to this boy as if it were a Holy Grail. A body gnawed by stab wounds. A Victorian park, a well, and a grave in a halcyon churchyard. A Union Jack flew atop a hill with seabirds scattered around it. The skinhead was kicked to death below in another field. There was all this and much, much more; a miracle of detail, a silken, skin-tight, illustrated shroud. The carpet around the corpse was soaked with blood. Strangest of all, the tattoos were executed in Shane’s own inimitable style.
Ageless
From the flat roof of the tall building the whole world seemed to tilt dizzily in different directions. Everything was impressively unsteady, as if the nearby buildings were ridiculously tall masts from an endless flotilla of ships below. Breezes tipped off the very edge of the roof and alighted again from the emptiness above. They existed only because a man and a woman were there to feel them in their hair and on their skin, and sense them vaguely in the middle distance.
One would have placed the man and woman somewhere in their thirties, though it was impossible to say what exactly gave this impression. They had brought a few simple articles up with them: two deck-chairs, a low table, a chessboard, a bottle of champagne, two glasses, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. They sat close to the low barrier at the edge of the roof, in the deck-chairs. Everything else they had brought was placed neatly on the table, the chess pieces in mid-conflict. In the centre of the roof was the door they had emerged from, set in a rectangular box like the narrowest of sheds.
‘Shall we take a break?’ the man suggested, sitting back in his deck-chair. His hair felt hot when he ran his fingers through it. The sun had bleached it again recently. Now it felt as if it might disappear from his head like candyfloss.
‘You’re not giving up, are you? I was getting into it.’
‘I could tell. But the game has reached a crucial stage and I’m not playing well. I need to clear my head a bit. I want to do this properly.’
‘Yeah. Okay.’
They picked up their glasses from the table and walked over to the wall. The man leant against it and the woman sat on it with a casualness totally unassumed. The wind began to play with her long, dark hair, making spikes float about individually, as if to highlight her position at the edge of a sudden drop.
‘You’re not regretting the game, are you?’ she asked. ‘We don’t have to finish it. We don’t have to do anything.’
She hugged one leg and rubbed her knee with her cheek.
‘No, we’ll finish it. It’s perfectly okay. I don’t think the chess was such a bad idea.’
‘I thought I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate, but you were right, something irrelevant and complicated like that is just what we need.’
‘I’m the one who can’t concentrate, after all. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll do my best. The champagne is good, anyway. I don’t usually like it, but something about the bubbles is just right, I think.’
He grinned at the woman and nodded meaninglessly. She took another sip of her champagne and smiled back. All of a sudden he felt very flushed and the veins pulsed on his temples with incredible, dark pressure. He dragged his shirt and T-shirt over his head as one piece, scruffing up his hair as he did so and swaying a little. He moved closer to the woman and she placed both her feet back on the roof and put her arms around him. They looked over the edge of the roof together. The traffic crawled with novel, mechanical movements across a plan of the city streets, grey, dotted with white markings. The city was stark and ugly in the sun. Yet in its concrete ugliness was a kind of taut, nervous vibration that could have been called beauty. Further down the street were road works, cordoned off, and a pneumatic drill sent up clouds of white dust. The man was suddenly impressed by the idea that all of this architecture and road construction was quite within nature. The office buildings seemed to have soared skywards just as the sun had. They had appeared with the day and were as much a part of it as the sun itself. And these buildings too would disappear, just as the fleeting day did with the setting sun.
As his gaze moved upwards one of the quicksilver windows in a building opposite flashed in a million-splintered scintillation of sunlight, and he winced. When he looked back to the woman there were colours before his eyes. She said nothing, just smiled lazily. He waited for the colours to disappear. He felt that he had talked too much, or said the wrong things. That feeling was inevitable, perhaps, but there was still something he wanted to say.
He disentangled himself from the woman and retrieved the cigarettes. He offered her one, which she took silently, and put one between his own lips. The orange flame of the lighter was almost invisible, so strong was the presence of the sun. Something about the synchronicity of smoking meant they did not need to speak now. Just as he could hardly see the smoke on the air, so he could hardly taste it. Yet it dragged like gravel down his throat. It was a pleasant sensation.
He looked at the woman’s face all the while. She looked back, placidly. He could not tell if she were beautiful or not any more, he had looked at her so much and so closely. But her face attracted him like no other, as if it had been made for his eyes; that was the natural home of his gaze, and when he looked elsewhere it was only to rest awhile from the intensity of this fulfilment. It wasn’t just her face, of course. It was a whole experience manifest in that voice and body, now clothed in T-shirt and jeans, and known to him by the name of Jackie. He did not love her because she was the most intelligent or most beautiful or most anything. If he felt love, and he supposed he must, though the word sounded holl
ow, then it was simply because there was something unique in Jackie that was just right. She was more right than the chess and the champagne and the cigarettes, more right than any of it could ever be, and that’s why nothing could go wrong now, even if, for instance, he couldn’t concentrate on the chess or he spoke too much, or too little.
He flattened the cigarette beneath the sole of his shoe.
‘It would be nice if it rained. Just a few spots of rain, while the sun’s still shining. You know the smell of hot pavements after a shower?’
‘Mm.’ She nodded in agreement, making an almost feline noise in her throat.
It was the slightest purr, but it contained a world of nuance. This wordless voice was the life-giving sun that blinded him if he looked too long. Once again he remembered their promise, which they were living even now, as easily forgotten as that fierce, all-encompassing sun. He tossed aside a lifetime’s circumspection casually, as he had grown used to doing of late.
‘I never believed there was someone like you in the world. The person I was before I knew you has gone forever. He’s not even important. The world is utterly different, and everything that was impossible is normal, as if I’ve stepped through a mirror.’
Jackie drew close to him again and put her head on his chest.
‘You talk as if I had some special power that saved you, but really I felt the same way too. I just felt lost and clueless, no one in particular, until you discovered me.’
The man sighed in wonder.
‘Maybe we’re both no one in particular, but we’re luckier than anyone I’ve ever heard of.’
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