by Adam Thorpe
Outside, the angel leans panting on the information panel, looking like von Sebottendorff giving his lecture on astrological coordinates, my uncle and a couple of others nodding eagerly. This could have been theirs, I’m thinking. The wind age, the wolf age, comic-opera types in black leather strolling about. The green barrow dozing on like a decrepit old dog, regardless.
Brut’s no longer living up to his name; he should be called Sweaty. He’s standing over me, getting his breath back.
‘You led us a merry run, Mr Duckett.’
We return the longer way, avoiding the drilled field. He talks about golf, as far as I recall. Duckett must be dead. An unseen ambulance yelps as if someone’s stepped on its paw. All I have to do is ask the first person I know to say who I am. If they say, ‘You’re Ray!’ then I’ll know I’m mad. If you know you’re mad, you’re not mad. If you know you’re dead, you’re not dead. If you know you’re a leopard, you’re not a leopard.
That’s all for now.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Still hot. Water shortages. Lawn yellow. Very high sky.
My dear Mother,
We pass three or four people but all of them are strangers to me. Strangers to Ray, too, because they don’t say, ‘Morning, Ray.’ If I’m not Hugh, that is. Sweaty Brut steers me bodily into Bew’s Lane, so no popping into the Green Man or the Old Barn or the shop. I mustn’t run off again or he’ll have a heart attack; can happen even to ambulance men.
The ambulance has gone. ‘Where’s he gone, then?’ says Sweaty Brut. He looks around him in the middle of the lane with his hands on his hips, like a morris-dancer. The door of the cottage opens. It’s Jessica Marlow. I’m on the little brick path. She asks me how I am.
‘I’m fine,’ I lie. ‘What’s happened?’
‘What do you mean, what’s happened?’
‘To Ray.’
She doesn’t say, ‘Um, you’re Ray, Ray,’ but, ‘Oh, Cliff Trindle took him out for a drive.’
‘A drive?’
‘First thing this morning, apparently. Those seeds will be hell to get out of your jumper. Did you want to see him? He’ll be back soon. They left very early, I’m told. Goodness knows where they’ve gone to.’
Sweaty Brut comes up and I ask Jessica to tell him who I am. She’d heard Ray was back and wanted to see him, she knew where the key was hidden. Ginger returns in the ambulance, having done a little tour looking for us. Brut tells him who I am – it’s official. Ginger eyes up Jessica but it’s me she plants the kiss on, leaving.
When Ray comes back in the blue Rover, there is a small reception party: Ginger, Sweaty Brut, and myself. But you cannot tick off a dying man. His eyes are shining with delight.
‘I saw it,’ he says. ‘I saw the sun rise behind Silbury Hill. I saw the stones of Avebury go blood red. Now God can have me whenever.’
Cliff grinning, shaking his stubbled head.
‘Good for you, Ray,’ I say. ‘Your notebooks were most revealing.’
The ambulance doors close. I wave. No one waves back, as far as I can see.
I return the notebooks to the cottage. Well, I can hardly burn them.
After a nap, I make up a sandwich and pack my claw-thing and screwdriver. I want to go to the house, Mother. You know why I want to go to the house.
I pick up some fruit from the trays outside the shop then try the door. Damn. The old Ever Ready sign’s half-pulled to ‘Closed’. I pop a pound coin into the lobotomised head of the RNIB Sooty and wait: it ought to have been open five minutes ago, on a Friday.
Muck emerges from the Never Fear, guffawing loudly. A knot of crop-headed kids are fooling about on the long bed of orange sand left by the pavement-layers. They make rude noises and he swears at them. Dr Johnson of the apothegms has followed him out in his usual flared suit. They’re heading my way. I feel I know what the guffaws were about.
Halfway up the lane, I sense he’s following me. The dart of something red, behind a beech trunk. But the sunlight and shadows are so confusing! There. And again there.
Well, I make Ilythia’s gate almost at a trot. I want to get to the woods, I don’t care which one. Halfway across the lawn something breaks away from the wildwood. It’s John Wall, holding a gun.
He walks towards me, dragging his foot, and my face starts to burn. He’ll still have the smell of the field on him, the covert. That sly, knowing smile. I prepare my firm, neutral mask when suddenly he jerks, starts to yell, waving the gun, shrieking. Shrieking at me to gerroff, to gerroff and out, to scarper bloody quick or else. He’s gone mad, and he’s armed. Camouflage jacket, khaki balaclava, the works. Maybe he’s already been killing! Stranded in the middle of the lawn, I drop to my knees and crouch, knapsack held in front of me, my heart wild, as he runs yelling towards me, waving his gun.
There’s cat-calling from the house, behind me. I glance back. Three of the crop-headed youngsters give us the finger as they run off, one in a sports-type hooded blouson, red as a postbox.
John Wall waving his fist just next to me.
‘Trespassin’, Mr Arkwright. All they understand is a gun, these days. No discipline.’
I stand up, brushing my trousers, puffed again. ‘They followed me from the village. Just fooling about. Thought you were waving your gun at me.’
‘I wouldn’t do that, sir.’
The familiar half-smile, a thinner version of Muck’s. Am I in hell?
‘I hope you weren’t shooting in my wood, John.’
‘Vermin.’
‘You were shooting in my wood.’
‘Cleanin’ it up, see.’
‘Like father, like son . . .’
Am I snarling? Yes. Yes yes yes, Mother. I am snarling. John Wall looks frightened! Well, my face has twisted up, my poor teeth are exposed to the gums. It happens to all of us, mostly when we’re alone. I’m feeling very cross all of a sudden, you see. I’m puffed. I’ve had enough. The filthy notebook business is trampling delicate things in my head. ‘Listen, you can’t just go killing things in my wood. There’s no such thing as vermin. No such thing! If there is such a thing, then humans are vermin too. In fact, I think there are more verminous humans than verminous animals.’
Or words to that effect. Enough to make him step back. I’m aware of my fierce scowl, and lose it. John Wall screws his eyes up as if taking it over and looks towards the point where the youngsters disappeared. He’s not scowling, he’s reflecting. Perhaps I didn’t frighten him, after all. ‘Wonder what them lot were about, stalkin’ you like that?’
‘Having fun, I should think. Didn’t you do the same sort of thing at their age?’
His eyes settle on my face, locked there for a second. Then he sort of brushes past me, towards the house. The limp distorts his body today, hips as if on cogs under the jacket. The one left by the Pied Piper, the lonely limping boy, dragging behind the others as the rock shuts on them, shuts him out.
The gun’s canvas case bounces on his back next to a brace of ring doves, hung by their necks.
I disappear into the wildwood.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Dull.
Dearest Mother,
When I emerge, wiping my mouth, John Wall is a silhouette against the brightness. That was the whine that ruined my picnic. A pullulating strimmer strapped to his body, stinking of diesel smoke, he’s slitting into the long grass and bracken, the hidden fence ringing against the blade, sending out sparks. He has earphones on. Then he sees me and silences the machine, takes his earphones off, goes on about hiring the thing at his own expense from the Manor’s gardener. He calls it a ‘bush-cutter’, not a strimmer. Is there bush in England? Not now, surely.
I say I’ll refund him, of course. The earmuffs are from a mate in the army.
‘A gunner, see. Tanks. Big historical display tomorrow, Salisbury Plain. Panzers, Churchills. If you’re interested. I’ve got all the books.’
Eyes gleaming – but no sign that he k
nows what I think he knows, no suggestive stuff. I leave him to it, saying I’ll be in the house, not to be disturbed.
‘Sortin’ private matters out, then?’ he calls after me.
I turn round. That stupid, knowing grin again, the shadow of Muck’s! ‘I’m clearing junk. Sentimental interest only.’ This said to expunge any scent he might have of valuables.
Now he actually winks, Mother!
‘Comprendo,’ he says. ‘Mum’s the word.’
Muck told him everything this morning, over sips of the thermos, both men snorting and sniggering. I can tell.
‘Thank you,’ is all I say.
His eyes linger on mine. Some mercenary motive stirring in him, perhaps. Say nothing. I walk away towards the house. The bush-cutter starts up again. Its diesel stink is foul, but there was no scent of wild garlic in the wildwood today.
I drop the latch on the kitchen door and give myself a moment to recover. Then I walk up the stairs, flashing my torch, heading for the attic. So John Wall has books. I walk along the corridor in the gloom, past your room – and in the moment before I see the crouched shape I’m rolling over it as if over a barrel!
The fetish box rolls to the edge of the stairs, lingers a little, then drops down step by step, thump thump thump, as if too old to flee any faster. I retrieve it in the hallway, where it’s lying against the front door, next to an old umbrella leaning there. Aunt Rachael’s, I presume. The two look as if they’re waiting for me to take them for a walk.
The fall has loosened the base of the fetish box, not the lid. I had never planned to open it, but its leaking cinders smell of Africa. I cradle it in the gloom of the hallway, fumbling at the base. Then there’s a shuffle the other side of the door, a low mutter, a grunt – and the bush-cutter bursts into its demonic shrieks again.
I flee up to your room, Mother. A corner of the lino that covers the window is loose. I work my hand under it and the length, rotted by the rusty tacks, comes away as I pull. It smacks on the boards, chivvying dust out in clouds. Light shafts in, marbling the air in long columns.
The trick base is still jammed. I take my claw-thing from the knapsack and work the gap wider, splintering the wood slightly: it’s one solid tree-bark, smoothed and patterned at the flick of a blade with diagonal herringbones, as on prehistoric pots and urns. Pandora’s Box, you called it. The base falls on the floor and I look inside.
The scent of burnt wood is overwhelming, Mother. So much of Africa suddenly pouring out that I have to stand up. John Wall’s on the lawn just below, belted to his bush-cutter – my shadow catches his eye. He waves as I duck.
The box’s interior is very dark, full of cinders. My hand comes out patched with black, holding something quite large, sharp and white and curved.
A talon.
I lay it on the boards, again reach in. A small honey-coloured bowl turns into a skullcap.
There’s other strong medicine, Mother: a frontal lobe with a red tint to it, bits of redheart, an iron ring, a miniature version of the box containing more wood cinders. My hand is black, now. I’m thinking: the sorcerer sat with his initiates, making this, somewhere in the last century, in the deep bush. And no one’s touched them since! Or can say what they mean! The eyes of the sorcerer in the firelight, the drums and feathers and shivering limbs, the fireflies on the edge in the darkness and the beasts’ eyes in the deeper darkness beyond. Oh, I hear the frogs from the brown river and the crickets zizzing over and over with the hot flannel of air on my face, so comforting, so close, as I rest it on your lap and watch out for crocodiles on the slip of silver beyond the land, Mother.
Your lap, smelling of clean laundry. Infinite breadth and softness. But something taut in the soft legs, as if you might suddenly turn evil and devour me. Yes, I used to fancy like this, Mother: that you and Father were imposters, that you were only pretending to be sweet and good so as to lull me into dropping my guard. That this was a long contest between us, already a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand years old. It might be at this moment, with your hand slightly tense on my head, my head given to your lap in the evening darkness, that you turn into the croc you really are and gulp me up.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Cooler. Leaves blowing about.
Dearest Mother,
I’m much better now, thank you.
I’m in your bedroom, still. My head is lying on my own black hand. Some of the cinders have spilled out, and I scrape them together to put them back. In amongst them is a tiny slip of paper.
There are three lines typed on it. The type is uneven. Just like Nuncle’s old machine, that he would bash on day after day.
The centre
Never gives
Seven answers
I count the fetishes.
Seven.
I stand and go over to the window. I recall Father telling me again how the great fetishes were passed on from chief to chief. That when the chief has to fight, he would open the fetish box in front of his warriors and rub its cinders on his forehead, making himself invulnerable. I see in the glass my black-smudged face. The great gongs that sounded the gods. That summoned the end of one’s enemies.
I gaze through my face at the garden. October was always the month it retired gracefully, leaving the stage to the trees and their burnished colours, bringing out the rake to scratch its way across, finishing in smoke. I half expect to see Aunt Joy clipping things down there, in her blue gardening apron. The whine of the bush-cutter as it slices away at the brambles by the front door, as if John Wall is attacking the house. Next week he will come with a giant hoover for the leaves.
The centre! I’ll show Nuncle the centre.
The Hugh Arkwright Centre. Oh yes.
I’ll sit on his face.
Study weeks on Bulwer, conferences on Heywood, Gayton, Bacon, summer fortnights on Galenic medicine, courses on metre, gesture, the humours – the lot. Masques on the lawn, crumhorns over dinner, a huge library. Eilrig the training ground, here the intelligence HQ. Body and brain in fusion. Colossus.
Can’t recall how long I stay by the window, nursing my vision. The next thing I remember is turning the forehead in my hands, its red blush clear in the light from the open window. I’m thinking of Nuncle’s boiled skull smeared with ochre in its glass case at the funeral. This one’s too small and modest to be Nuncle’s, I say to myself, smiling. And anyway, he planted the note!
Mother, I think it’s around now that I have my detestable thought. Or rather, when my previous detestable thought to do with you, Mother – I mean the Red Lady and midwinter rituals and sacrifice and the wildwood and Nuncle’s thing about nearest and dearest, about having to please the gods an awful lot for the wildwood to spread over the kingdom into one great greenwood, into thick and impenetrable bush, all those horrible connections lumping into one thick wet thought in my head (I don’t wish to spell it out, I have a violent distaste for this sort of thing, I want to keep it a lump!) – when that abstract thought hardens into something very solid in my hands. All it lacks is your hair.
So I drop the skull-part with a clatter on to the boards. The thing rocks upside-down, like a fat-lipped laughing mouth in a fun fair. It’s all I can do to put it back with the other things, seal the base.
I certainly can’t open the trunk today.
John Wall literally bumps into me outside, at the corner of the house. I remind him as calmly as I can about the leopard skin – that it’ll be needed this evening, at the village hall.
‘I’m your man, Mr Arkwright.’
Steady eyes, then he yanks the bush-cutter into roaring life, making my face quiver.
Now I’m back in my cosy garret, making tea. Yes, that’s right. It’s almost dusk again. I’m still nursing my exciting vision as a means of forgetting the detestable one – watching Ilythia turn and become beautiful in my head, hearing the crumhorns, the metrically perfect renditions, the murmuring scholarship, the gaiety and precision of it all!
That’ll do. There’s a samba concert given by the local primary school, any minute. I want to be at the other end of the grounds.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Drizzle.
Dearest Mother,
Hope you’re well, etc. I am.
Dozing off, I’m late for the rehearsal, it’s already underway – I think a broom fight between the Witch and the Fool, stage-boards groaning and banging, something like that. How can I remember everything! A big brown-paper parcel lies on the table, addressed to me. John Wall left it on Malcolm’s doorstep with a cleaning bill meticulously itemised in red, the sloping signature taking up half the page: I remain, cordially yours, as ever, John Leslie Wall (Mr).
‘Taken you to the cleaner’s, has he?’
Malcolm’s been saving that one up. He turns and tells the horse to get a move on. ‘Can we have Derek, too, on this one? We’ve got Derek now,’ he adds, quietly. ‘Beelzebub. His mum died last week, so he’s a bit fragile. Give him lots of oomph.’
Derek appears to the sound of a roaring waterfall (the cistern has not been changed, then) and shakes my hand breezily. He’s still in his work suit, Rotarian badge on his mauve lapel, not a hint of grief or mourning.
‘Hope it doesn’t make me sneeze,’ he says. ‘Blimey, it’s enormous.’
I tear at the paper. The great head snarls into view. The paws fall out with a thump on to the table. John Wall has somehow enlarged it.
‘Big beast, in its time,’ says Derek.
Young Gary and younger Mark whistle and wow. Jenny and Sally pull faces above their saggy jumpers. (I don’t think I’ve introduced you to the cast, Mother, but you’ll catch on.) Little Rebecca gives a brief lecture on the Siberian tiger and the fact that there are only four hundred and thirty left and it’s the biggest cat in the whole world. ‘School project,’ whispers Jenny, wreathing me in stale tobacco. She has completely yellow teeth. Derek, Gary and Mark are marshalled into hobby-horse position and we drape the skin so that the head closes on Derek’s large skull and the bulk of the rest covers Gary. Mark doesn’t know what to do with the tail, and giggles, pulling it like a bell.