by Adam Thorpe
The parcel’s huge crackly looseness is hopeless. I need string. I’m downstairs in the hallway, wondering where to find string or twine, when I see the front door handle turning, the door itself shivering to thumps from outside. The old umbrella topples over, shredding its cobwebs. I see a scarfed pirate the other side of the door. Nuncle’s bearded skull. John Wall and his gun. The door opens a few inches, sticks on the floor.
I dive for the nearest door, the one down to the cellar, and close it behind me just as the other bursts open. I sit there, panting, on the stairs, holding my awkward child whose oil paper coughs each time I move. Blood from my hand trickles down my wrist, so I suck it. A muffled voice – a man’s – says ‘Hello?’, but too timidly to recognise. I can’t even say that it’s not Nuncle’s.
I am stuck ten minutes or so, in that darkness. The person out there thumping about for ten minutes, all over the house, perhaps looking for spoils. Then the gleam of a torch under the door sends me scuttling down to the bottom. Everything falls out, the fetish box bumping and rolling down to the bottom again, the mask and the letters only just caught by my arms. The door opens and the torchlight flashes in, me pressed to the shadows and filled with such, with such a pure thrill of terror! Wellington boots coming down a few steps, flashes catching crates, rows of empty bottle stands, the blade of an old bacon slicer. My heart very loud in my head, the fetish box lying next to a hooped wooden cask. Torchlight shivering through dust, catching the tips of my shoes, the rough earthen tiles, the white cobwebs. Nuncle never wore green wellies, no. John Wall wears army boots.
Then the flashing retreats and the door closes. The front door closes, too. I bolted the back door, of course, that’s why the intruder had to try the front. Like the attic door, the cellar door creaks in sympathy. The house knows everything that happens. It always did.
I flash my own torch round. A pile of old crates, empty wine bottles, a broken bench. Remember the cellar, Mother? Given real light, the tiles would sprout grass again. The cellar of the old Jacobean farmhouse your granddad demolished, living on, the must of dust and age gravitating down. Nuncle kept his wine here, and then it had a mad rat. The mad rat meant that I couldn’t go down, not on my own. Much later it became, so I understood, a shelter in case of nuclear war. The mad rat happened around the time I first saw Rachael during that symposium, in 1937. The door was always locked, but I was used to that.
I clear the cobwebs from the crates. They’re full of bleach, judging from the peeling labels. Aunt Joy’s hygiene fetish, perhaps.
My heel catches a stiff rag. But it’s not a rag.
It’s the mad rat, stretched on the tiles, mummified in all its plumpness, its fatted-up folds! Must have died in a summer of drought. Next to it, something that makes me step back in absolute horror, knocking the cask so that it collapses into a flower of staves, the hoops clattering at my feet.
A bigger head, just the head, all tiny pointed teeth in a glare of pure agony.
And another one, a much smaller rat, curved taut beside the mother. A family group. The mother and the child, in their agony of hunger, ate the father. That’s it. That explains the plumpness, and their deaths. Don’t you think? One never really knows, one can only suppose.
I can’t touch them. The mummified fatness and the shocked, agonised head appal me. The head especially, looking as if it still can’t quite believe it! Just thinking of them lying unchanging in that pitch darkness appals me to nausea even now, Mother. Even now.
Outside there’s an indecisive squall; I have to cradle my bundle like a refugee with all his worldly goods. I need string. There are the ruts of a car in the grassy gravel. I’m amazed I didn’t hear it – the clop of the door, the splintery growl. The cellophane shell of a cigarette packet, just peeled, blows to my feet: Brian Padmore smokes like a chimney. Litter-bug! There’s no dustbin, and I have to stuff it in my pocket where it expands, crackling. That very good idea of mine will be presented by Brian Padmore in Monday’s meeting. It really is a very good and increasingly exciting idea, but it doesn’t quite smother the detestable one.
The two outhouses escaped the auction: there are good tools in the wooden one, but no string. Trays full of withered little testicles – scrunchlings, of course. The other shed is of brick with a solid wooden door: another locked area in the old days. The lock’s screws are half out of their holes and my claw-thing finishes the job. I find some greased twine in the debris of harmless junk and also Aunt Joy’s bike, still haughty in its rust, the pannier loaded with clogged tins of Trojax enamel paint. There’s a big dark bottle of rat-killer on the shelf – definitely 1930s from the besuited and rat-like operator on the label. I smile, picking it up. So much for the empathy with the animal and vegetable kingdom, the railings against chemicals. The tin is sticky.
I clear the bicycle of cobwebs and wheel it out. It has the most dreadful squeak! The deteriorated rubber pumps up, amazingly. I place the package in the pannier and squeak into the village, wondering whether the last bottom it took was Rachael’s that weekend in 1940. I think I hear flames, but it’s Brian’s cellophane crinkling in my pocket as I pedal. The spitty air refreshes me.
I carry on squeaking two or three miles towards Fogbourne, despite the package. No old men on bicycles, these days – ah, except me! The parcel thumps slightly when I go over bumps or pot-holes: I try not to think of the tinted forehead inside it – but when I do, I feel strangely comforted. As if I am in unique possession of something vital to me, once more. Then a horrified nausea. Then the comforting warmth again. Malcolm passes me in his car, looking anxious, and I wave. He slows as if to stop but doesn’t. I think I upset him, leaving the rehearsal like that, as if in a huff. I wobble back into Ulverton, startling everybody with my squeak. Look, I have been away over the sea, on the wastes of ice in company with Captain E.R.G.R. Evans. You do not know me any more.
The parcel goes straight into the wardrobe, unopened – even for the letters; I’ve only an hour before the next wretched rehearsal. A generous single malt oils my naked thoughts, whatever they are. I don’t remember exactly. You can imagine, dear Mother: dark shapes in fog, confusion. I reach into my pocket for a handkerchief and open my damn cut again on a folded piece of paper. This is the letter on its own, that was placed on the top. I read it straight away, dotted though it is with my blood. It’s dated November 28, 1931 and is full of Bamakum news, though you have only been back from England for a month. I can’t distinguish it from others I received at the time. I hear your light, cheerful voice, smell the warm pungencies of Africa. You mention halfway through how ‘jolly’ a time you had in England, describing various excursions and visits to friends (none of which I recall, so they must have happened without me). Then you say something I find odd. I’ve got it in front of me now. What do you think of this?
‘Africa smothers you with all sorts of hot and shadowy thoughts, as if one is lightly fevered all the time. The matter we talked about will go on getting more difficult, each time I visit it’s more difficult, he gets bigger and bigger and it’s as if there’s a sort of – O, I’m frightening myself just putting it down like this! (Can nothing be done about that eye?) I have stripped his old room to the bare walls and put it all in a trunk: I meant to do it straightaway, after he’d left, because guests aren’t very fond of the big spiders in the hut, it seems, but the months and then years slip by like water. I’ll either bring the trunk with me one time or send it on its own. James believes the trunk just to be full of Hugh’s things: look carefully and you will see different. I enclose the key now, in case. James finds everything of mine, in the end, and the ants will only carry it off on their backs. I feel – O, so released! Is this the meaning of your “propitiation”, dear Edward?’
Well, Mother? I’m sure you don’t recognise it, do you? Nuncle put it in, remember.
The rest of the letter returns to gossip. I pour another malt and reflect: What is the difficulty? Parting, of course. Why is she frightened? I grow bigger and bigger
and she feels time slipping past ‘like water’, time for ever lost, until she will no longer know me. Why does she feel released, propitiated? Because she has severed her obligations, by stripping her African home free of me. The competition of her instincts has been smothered. Mental imbalance will follow.
Or in other words (I know the language now) – she will become dysfunctional. She will not be able to process her pain.
I pour another malt. Some signal was received from me, somehow, through my sickness, and she dropped everything to see me. Then what? The red lady became the Red Lady.
How, exactly?
Spilt blood. Smothering, melancholy boughs.
The malt spills on to my cut, because my hand is trembling. My cut stings. I look at the lines on my palm.
My dead love gave
Lips warm with love though in her grave.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Fug. Musn’t waste heating by opening the window. Have asked for a hand-held fan.
My dear Mother,
Malcolm is sitting in the middle of the hall on one of those chilly bucket chairs, like Krapp without his tape recorder. St George is a chinless, very plain man from the new estate, called Chris; the Turkish Knight is one Bruce, holding a file with his name and his role in big black Letraset on the cover. His Knight’s boast sounds like a contribution to a sales meeting. Gary and Mark are without Beelzebub. Before the big duel there is a fight between the Fool and the Old Witch (Sally and a wheezy Jenny, both giggling), in which the Fool sees his own death in the mirror of the locked swords of some Morris dancers and draws up his will. He’s killed and revived several times. Malcolm tells me that the Fogbourne Morris Society are invited for the real thing. The duel between the Turkish Knight and St George will weave in and out of the dance, dead leaves flying about in the air. ‘How did you cut your hand, then?’
Mrs Pratt comes in with dog and younger son and I am shocked to see the latter in the bright-red hooded blouson that followed me up the lane into the garden. His eyes are as red-rimmed as his coat, and he keeps sniffling. Drugs, I think. Mrs Pratt invites me to supper on Tuesday. I quite fancy the kind of stumpy English fare she will no doubt heap on the porcelain, and thank her. Someone asks where the leopard skin’s gone and Malcolm mumbles something under his breath. He glances at me guiltily. Lost? Stolen? Left out in the rain? ‘Haven’t seen it at all,’ I say, ‘perhaps John Wall’s got it.’ Malcolm stares at the floor. There’s something strange about him, tonight.
I do the best I can with the duel and its aftermath. Afterwards Malcolm scratches his beard and asks if I want a ‘jar’. I invite him to have dinner with me in the Old Barn, in case he thinks I’m in a huff. Anyway, I need company. Mrs Pratt’s sons are now humping in dolmen-sized speakers with the help of an orange-haired man with a crucifix in his ear and baggy camouflage trousers. ‘I’m Ed,’ he says. ‘I’m Disco Night.’ I say I’ll come if he’s playing some Venom and he says of course he is. Malcolm’s jaw drops. ‘It’ll be a gas,’ says Ed. ‘See you when I see you.’
Gas. Mad rats. That’s when the dormant tendril started to uncoil in my head, Mother. Maybe Ed started it all. Maybe I should blame Ed.
Malcolm’s nervous about meeting Jessica, who’s serving tonight – some old history to do with his wife and Roger. But there’s this something else, too.
‘OK,’ he mumbles, studying the menu, ‘the skin’s missing. Your skin.’
‘The leopard skin?’
He nods. He’s actually blushing. It was in the hall’s big walk-in storage cupboard along with the old W.I. banners and card-tables and a few of their own props and then it wasn’t. I knew the cupboard well, helping with things before the war. Big bolts on the door, but not stiff. Now they’re stiff, you shoot them with difficulty. Somehow I know this, Mother, before he says that it was really safe there, it’s hardly ever used, the bolts are rusty, you have to practically hammer them free. It could have been a kid, it could have been Wall, it could have been anyone. Nothing else missing, that he could see. He looks at me over the menu.
I tell him that I don’t mind at all.
‘But I do,’ he says. ‘Maybe someone didn’t like the way it was being used.’
What does he mean by that?
Jessica does seem a little strained in his presence. But then so am I. She tells me she popped over to my garret this evening, with a tub of blackberries. I don’t tell her that I’ve temporarily gone off hedgerow fruit, since the Ray debacle. Tim and his bog bodies. What a sweet kind person she is, I think.
Scooping out his avocado, Malcolm tells me that he’s finally got hold of a copy of Nuncle’s little tale. Which tale? I, Nubat, of the Forest People. He wants to turn it into a musical. A youth thing, really relevant, with African rhythms. What can be relevant, I say, about a 1930s fantasy on Creswellians, Maglemosians and early Neolithics in prehistoric England? Amazonian Indians versus McDonalds, he replies. Shell in Nigeria. Agribusiness, forest destruction, all that. By the time his daughter’s his age, he says, there won’t be a shred of rain forest left.
He even peddles Nuncle’s line about war starting with agriculture: hoarded grain, the owning of land, sources of water, fences, fortresses, the inevitable seeds of rivalry and slaughter. ‘Your uncle was right, you know. Reflections on Windmill Hill is a great work. We’re all more Stone Age than anything else, deep inside us. We’re all Maglemosians, that’s what he said. The Forest People, living in harmony with the forest. Dug-outs and bone fishing spears and roasted hazel nuts. It all went wrong with the farmers, the owning of land, these bloody nationalisms. I stuck an anti-McDonalds sticker up on Windmill Hill, after reading that.’
But, I point out, it’s Nubat the Maglemosian who wipes out the poor little farmers at the end with his sorcery, paralysing them all in a rather horrible act of vengeance.
‘It’s not sorcery, it’s nerve gas.’
He said so in an interview in the Listener not long before he died, apparently. Prophesying the day we’d use nerve gas on our own food, Malcolm suggests, like they do on strawberries in California. It paralyses you. I point out as best as I can, without sounding superior, that we knew absolutely nothing about nerve gas until after the war. It was the Nazis who developed it, not us. And Nubat was published in the 1930s!
‘Why didn’t they use it, then?’
‘I have no idea, Malcolm. I’m glad they didn’t.’
Malcolm then virtually whispers to me that Jack Wall was poisoned, not by his own ratsbane, but by arsenical agri-chemicals while badger-baiting. The stuff leaches into the groundwater; we’re poisoned even when we drink from the head of a stream. He’s making me very gloomy, as Nuncle used to do. Can he be right about the rain forest? Ours seemed as infinite as starry space, Mother. Me in my miniscule bush clothes, and the rearing trees.
He’s talking on, excitedly. There’ll be a final performance of I, Nubat on the top of – guess where? – Windmill Hill! A sort of authentic midsummer fayre with real politics and real theatre. Oh dear. I must sound enthusiastic. His eyes are shining over the crème caramel. You, Hugh, have the rights. I know, I know! The apostate guarding the sliver of the True Cross (fake, but still a relic, still worshipped). I say of course he can do whatever he likes with it.
But frankly, my thoughts are elsewhere: not in starry space but on Aunt Rachael’s rheumy eyes, thinned hair, hoarse voice, the gas-tight blinded cocoon of the house. I am not my usual self. I am getting bigger and bigger, Mother.
Night night, Malcolm. Splendid evening.
The tub of blackberries sits like a discreet offering to some nature god in front of the door, but there’s a foul smell in my garret, of burnt pan and sour smoke. A note on the table: To Hugh Arkwright Esq. You nearly burnt my pub down!! Yours Sincerely, Ted. P. S. Switch gas off at night, please. Words to that effect. I toasted a muffin just before going out, feeling peckish. Careless. I’ll have to see him, apologise. If he spots me sneaking away without apologising that’ll be
worse. I pocket my torch and the heavy claw and go down to the bar, trying to remember which gas smelt of garlic. Either lewisite or mustard. No, lewisite was geraniums. Odd smell, geraniums: scruffily chemical, sweet-sour, almost nasty. I notice scurf on my dark coat and brush it off in the corridor. The bar sounds packed. I sneak past the open door straight into Ted’s sight line. He waves.
Bleach. Aunt Joy was a stickler for hygiene, but not that much of a stickler.
Mustard gas smelt of garlic. Iridescent patches on dry roads, like Castrol piddled from motor cars. Insidious, penetrating, absorbed by skin and by tar, but not water. Rubber boots and oilskin clothes stop it but like oven, service respirator stifling. Gas-drill dreaded, stumbling about like gargoyles over the moor, tropical in freezing winds. Cloud blown downwind and mixing with air grows bigger and bigger, still able to blister and inflame until thins into harmlessness. Like crop-spraying, I suppose.
Nuncle and his apocalypse. Gog and Magog on the heath. The great gods finding out their enemies. Blow, winds.
Nick of the pony-tail appears in the door. ‘Ted really wants to see you,’ he says. ‘You’re not his favourite customer.’ I enter the din. The hag’s face appears through the smoke. Muck and John Wall are both at the bar. Wall’s arguing with Ted about the condition of the flights on his darts. Why don’t they have their own? Because they are scavengers, that’s why, a pair of mound-pickers, twin fishers of flotsam! Muck perches on his stool like a Rackham goblin on a mushroom, smoking. To my horror they are hallooing me and nudging each other and attracting people’s attention. Ted advances to my end, pushing his heavy specs up. ‘I’m terribly sorry about that, Ted!’ He’s telling me how close it was, he’s telling me off. But the pint he’s drawing dribbles its head in front of me: propitiation, Mother. Otherwise I’d have left.
Muck and John Wall are separated from me only by the kick-wrestling man. I will take my drink to the bentwood chair in the corner occupied by Fatso, the resident tabby, having a friendly word as I pass. The priority is to smother the disaster yesterday morning in the field with a blanket of ignorance: make them think in the end that they’d misheard things, that it was all their own invention. I’m quite cool about all this: I’m not heated at all, not at this point!