by Adam Thorpe
The next thing I remember is standing by the wildwood. I can’t remember everything, can I?
Have you clicked yet, Mother? One of your favourite Father Brown stories started with that comment about dogs – that they’re all right as long as they’re not spelt backwards. Well, Nubat is all right as long as he’s not spelt backwards.
I see it all, standing by the wildwood’s moonlit tangle. The knowledge must have enthralled Nuncle. No wonder he had this apocalypse fetish! The silky thread of salvation is so fine, spun out of the belly of the white worm: he knew people on the fringe of the top science bods, must have discovered that no one had the foggiest, that there wasn’t so much as a milligram of nerve agent outside Germany – and might so easily have passed this on to the likes of von Sebottendorff, or someone even more rabidly Nazi.
But he didn’t, or none of us would be here, or not like we are. The tale of Nubat and his mysterious paralysing powers did not come true. The Stone Age did not come round again. The country of the trees, the smoking huts, the abandoned fields.
But why didn’t he tell? Perhaps he couldn’t bear the prospect of the emptiness being filled by strutting, Teutonic vulgarities, the nationalism he so detested – he didn’t even believe in countries! It can’t have been the anti-semitism: he was anti everyone who didn’t think a Mesolithic bone-prong was the ultimate in technological progress, wasn’t he? Even in your day, Mother! God’s mistake after the Flood being to spare Noah and his kin. He would even chide you for being a nurse, for trying to interfere with the natural ‘decay’ of things – ‘People should have the same rates of survival as a little oak sapling, my dear!’ You would laugh. But I knew how irritated you really were.
My fists are bunched: a minatory gesture. Bulwer’s Minor, perhaps, as used by all our Lears against the storm, though mine are dangling by my hips. Ah yes. I am in a kind of enthralled rage. An owl hoots. Not even birds in his poisoned Palaeolithic paradise. Perhaps Nuncle preferred the idea of just holding us all in the palm of his hand, the whole shebang rolled around in his palm like a ball of earth. Each morning he got up and thought: all I have to do is to tell my German friends that we don’t know of this. And whoosh. Or crump. Or whistles – yes, probably whistles, like kettles on the boil, like that wretched man!
Then silence. No, screams. Then moans. The whole island twitching, all of us helpless in our puddles of piss, blind and incontinent, along with the animals, maybe the birds, probably even fish belly up in the rivers, don’t know about the plants and trees, maybe as after Chernobyl, maybe not, maybe hitting only sophisticated nervous systems after all, cockroaches continuing to scuttle, flowers to bloom, birds to chirrup, rats squeaking – while the minutes of twitching subside to paralysis and peace, the Third Reich waiting with the ovens, the hoovers, the meticulous cleaning-up plans, and Nuncle with his bleach ready to greet them, like a cleaning-lady before the conquest-flesh’d prince and his scaly troops. In poison there is physic. Oh yes.
Greeting them with what? Just a lot of Vim? Now that’s where I get very very clever. I walk up and down by the wildwood, sniffing, on the scent at last. Literally on the scent, Mother. Ah, what if I could prove all this! What sweet revenge, to shatter a reputation, however minor! Nuncle’s is big enough for me. Always some mumbo-jumbo or other in print, the flame kept flickering by the Edward Arnold Society, letters from nut-roast types requesting some piddling piece of information sent on to his nephew, who tears them up into pieces. Even here!
I sniff the night air, the length of the wildwood along the lawn.
There!
Garlic. That lingering garlic smell, pungent somewhere but thinned out here so that it vanishes after a few minutes. Always the danger of gas, that – getting accustomed to it when it can still scald and blister.
It’s there, then it vanishes.
It was so delicate, it might have been imagined. It might even have been imagined as something sweetly vegetal, like ramsons.
I stride back up the garden and enter the house by the front door for the first time, the door shrieking as I push. A thorn from Wall’s slicing, caught and shrieking over the tiles.
I flash the torch over the crates in the cellar, then prise off one of the lids with violent jerks of the jemmy’s claw: tins labelled Vanco. White bleaching powder. Bleach and nothing but. I smell hospitals and the swabbed insides of bombers. Vanquish armies of germs with Vanco. Only one of the crates is different in any way, a little smaller: this contains several large bottles of Optrex eye lotion and some metal eye-baths. Soothes the eyes when attacked by gas. Gas goes for the eyes first. It is suitable for young and old alike. No date anywhere, though. That would have clinched it.
I sit among the crates and close my eyes and try not to think of the stiff rags in the shadows. I imagine the stuff crawling under the door and down the steps, heavier than air, invisible, a whiff of garlic and then nothing though still deadly, still penetrating, still persistent. And what does Tabun smell like? Can anyone ever know, if it’s so deadly? Odourless, I expect. Did Nuncle sit down here when he, and only he, knew what thread the world hung by from his finger, balancing the pros and cons, smiling at the possibilities? Something large scuttles at the back, a flash of eyes, then silence. A cat, or a living rat. I hurry out without looking back.
Facing again the steely gropings of the massed trees of the wildwood, the moon now clear of the tops. Mad rat, my foot. Why do grown-ups lie all the time? How do these lies manage to linger on with their sharp little teeth, even unto old age, Mother? Why did Nuncle want to do such things to me?
I’m speaking of the other thing. The bundle on the table, here. We’ll come to it.
I’m inside the wildwood before I know it – the effect of Wall’s strimming, because I’m half-expecting the unkempt edge of nettles and brambles. I never even felt the springiness of the fallen chicken wire underfoot.
The moonlight carves and probes its way deep into the interior, scattering silver doubloons behind it. The wind’s sorting them out. It’s more like a forest, now, more like the bush. How does moonlight manage such nothingness in its shadows, such black nothingness set among the bright bones?
I manage to go twenty, thirty yards without scratching myself, until the glare of the lawn is shut off by the growth behind me. Mostly lime trees, wasn’t it? A few oaks, alders, birch. Maybe it is a tiny patch of the original bush, after all. Maybe not. Does it matter? I stand, sniffing for the wild garlic smell, waiting for my eye to smart. This time, nothing. Either I’m accustomed or the wind’s dispersing it. No pungency or even hints of it, no sensation of poisoned air. Yet the wind is not cold, and gas rises in warm air, blowing out to the fringes of the village, creeping in under doorways and over window sills, even in these double-glazed times.
Then I remember the cows, how they’d stood in a line away from the garden’s wire. I should talk to the Jennets – go up there tomorrow, ask them if their cows wheezed and wept. I’m still on the scent. The stockpile must be somewhere in here. Waiting for them. The victors. The scaly-flesh’d, unsuspecting troops. The reptilian survivors.
And then? After Nuncle had dealt with them? Like a thane killing his guests in the mead hall? The lowest trick?
Nothing but this, of course. Trees. As it was. Silent. The little wildwood spreading like algae, silently. The animals slowly returning as after the Ice Age but not for a long time.
This.
I hear rustles ahead.
Speckles of moonlight. Not a breath of wind for a moment.
Then I definitely see something move, or flit, between the trees about ten yards or so to the side. Twigs snap above the blowing gusts and the pitter-patter of the falling leaves as the shadow, then the light, is clouded by movement. As if a piece of the cross-hatched moonlight had detached itself and shifted a few yards, no more than that.
It might have been a deer, it might have been a woman. It might have been the Green Man. Might have been the wine at supper, the beer. Stand stock-still. Only the
monotonous, mechanical, hoarse whistle of some owl or other, I never remember which one, disturbed into its drill. The wind gusting about a little, but that’s all. On and on the call goes, as it always used to do, audible from my window on sleepless summer nights. I think the presence might be you, Mother. After all, you could be very close, if my detestable thick wet lump of a thought holds any water. I’m hoping it’s you and not Nuncle, or Aunt Rachael, or Aunt Joy, or Sir –!
No. Not him.
Stillness. Breaths of wind. Stillness.
I make a sudden, jerking movement with my leg; no response. Gone to ground, perhaps. Perhaps a badger. Yes. Where does the wildwood end? I have never thought of the wildwood as ending. Nuncle’s fault, going on about the great original wildwood, rolling unhindered from cliff to cliff. Yet I know it slopes to a freshet, to a boggy place of bright moss and tangled alders, before the rise of Jennets’ field – but that end was never drawn in my head. And on the other side, towards the village? That was where the army camped, on that rough field where the gypsies used to camp before them – where you once found a rare orchid among the iron bits and bobs, Mother. Gypsies frightened me. Their dead return to avenge themselves.
My hands are bright, the skin like milk just starting to boil. It’s the leaves sifting the moonlight. Like Jekyll’s changing hands in that old film we watched in the village, a draught billowing the sheet – old Mr Belcher shouting at Mr Linzey to look lively and hang on to the picture, stop her blowing out that blasted door, look. Hands billowing!
I retract my own into my own sharp shadow. They come out again as if not really mine – as they did in the brighter moonlight of Africa, when I’d turn them into claws, frighten myself with myself. And after that film in the village, I spent a long time gumming the horse-hairs collected from the farm, until my hand was hidden behind a swart mass, more like a gorilla’s than a man of evil. Aunt Joy was dead by then, or I’d have teased her with it. Instead I made Mrs Stump shriek, creeping my fingers around the back door. I can’t remember being punished.
I retract and advance them again, let them come out of the moonlight again. They’re not mine any more. They have their own life. Like that story of yours you told us on your last leave. Father was away on a bush tour and I was away in England, you went into the chop-shed one night, bright moonlight, and you reached up for a tin and instead of your hand coming out of the blackness into the ray of moonlight, there was a small monkey’s paw, covered in a sort of transparent porridge –
‘Protoplasm.’
That’s Nuncle. He has to have his say. The hearth’s crackling, throwing our shadows against the spotty wallpaper. You’re wringing your hands and your cheeks twitch. They always twitch when you tell us this sort of story about home, about some close shave or other. Nuncle smiles knowingly behind his pipe, hooding his eyes – but you say that whatever it was, it was most disagreeable and you couldn’t go back in the chop-shed alone for weeks.
I’m turning back, now. My eye-patch and cheek are scratched by a bramble I don’t even see. A thicket, as if just grown up! Gathering my bearings (it’s like one enormous X-ray, if you know what I mean), my fingers close on the clawed jemmy in my coat pocket. Of course! What luck! I bring my sleeve up to the knuckles so that only the claw of the jemmy obtrudes, flashing in the moonlight, and slash. Slash again. The brambles catch my sleeve. I tug it free, the stems falling back with a snigger.
A snigger?
It wasn’t the brambles, I think. I grip the jemmy and silence my breathing. I must really look the pirate, now: Captain Hook, perhaps. Or Black Dog. Wanting two fingers of the left hand. Blade loosening in the sheath. Give Bill a little surprise. Pieces of moonlight. Blind Pew in the frosty fog. Croaking of the crows in the wood. My mother almost entirely exposed. Flint’s fist –
A snigger. A human snigger.
Get some lead in him. Pieces of eight, pieces of eight. All that.
I move forward towards the snigger, waving my hook to clear the scrog out of the way. A figure rises. Hooded, dark. Bright nose in a slash of moonlight.
Then more of the face.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
I’m spittling. Oh, I’m in such a rage! Terror straight into rage! I wipe my mouth. Well, I’m old. Mrs Pratt’s son’s looking terrified, now. It’s my face, I realise. I’m showing my gums, my teeth must be so unnaturally white.
‘Just sitting,’ he says, in an unintentioned falsetto.
‘You know it’s private property.’
‘Is it?’
Another snigger and a crash. A friend emerges next to him. Something flashes the moonlight – good grief, it’s the claw – my upraised arm holding back leaves, the metal at the end of it. Hook. The two pale faces are so soft, like the faces in the war moving through London or through the sky or wherever metal might shred them. Metal doesn’t flinch. Flying metal and glass are as free of mercy, Mother, as a leopard’s eyes. You’d be wasting your breath, pleading.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Aconites in the snow. Or sweetpapers.
My dear Mother,
I’ve had quite a few visitors. One of my finest actors and his little boy, for instance. The little boy didn’t like my patch.
I lower my arm, let the leaves rustle back.
‘Get out.’
They don’t move.
‘Are you on drugs?’
Silence.
‘Did you know that this wood has a mad rat?’
A glance at each other.
‘Does it?’
Mrs Pratt’s son is the age I was when gazing on Rachael through binoculars. The owl has stopped. Then starts.
‘Mad owls,’ I say.
‘We like it.’
The other boy doesn’t speak, but nods. Then it’s a girl, her face moving into the light. Her jaw is large, the rest of her face balances uncertainly on top of it. Their youth touches me, Mother. My blood is already cooling.
‘If you’re not doing anything chemically harmful to yourself, then carry on, but not in here.’
They nod. I follow them out, they seem to know a path. We emerge on to the lawn.
‘Em, are you really famous?’
‘Yes. Horribly. But it makes no difference, in the end. When you’re prime minister you will remember the pirate in the woods as if you’re not prime minister. The moonlight. The owl. The mad rat.’
The girl draws in her breath, sharply. I ask if they’ve been coming here long. Yeah, at least two months. I ask the girl if she’s had runny eyes, a stingy throat, after being in the wood. She giggles and shrugs. Her eyes look bleared in the steely light, her face a white mask with dark little spots on the chin. Sloppy sweater hiding her hands. Mrs Pratt’s son lowers his hood. It must be the same bright red blouson, but the moonlight makes it a dull brown, like old blood. Where the shadows are, it is pitch black; not even the brightest colour can escape night’s scissors. No wonder I never saw it back there. Was I talking to myself, then, out loud? Annoyance rises again.
‘You’re supposed to be in bed, aren’t you, David?’
‘Dominick. I’m not ill. It’s just boring.’
‘What is?’
‘Oh, mothers. Bye!’
They leave me, moving sedately over the lawn. Perhaps they were talking, petting, nothing more. I’m an old irascible bully. I shout after them:
‘Tell him to play some Venom, next time!’
Laughter, then friendly shouts of ‘All right!’ They run off, leaving the stale and hoary to itself. I could have ticked them off, torn a strip off them, but what a dreary residue to leave after I’m dead and gone! Residues are important, aren’t they, Mother?
Your loving son,
Hugh
Frosts. Misty all day. A throat. I don’t want to grow vegetables.
My dearest Mother,
They thought the last one or two a bit short.
They’re terribly good, on the whole.
There’s blood on m
y face.
The spots of it are almost black on my fingers. The lawn is empty, too big to cross.
My legs ache rather a lot.
The dead grass gleams where John Wall cut it. The moon is so lovely, chasing its shreds of cloud, a halo of mist around the gawping face. Or screaming face, mouth wide open. Or laughing. Big flat-faced man in it.
He isn’t where he was.
The second moon was a dream, because the third moon has not shifted as far, yet it has moved. My forehead’s encrusted with blood, some of it in my ear.
Way after midnight, I should think. I don’t carry a watch. The owl has started up again, like a wind-up toy or a very slow metronome.
Blackness, the black moor and the starry firmament. Orion’s Belt. It has four stars, now. Moving in formation. Well spotted, shine a light on it, angle 18. Sheep everywhere bleating, shoving me as I struggle with the searchlight. It’s switched on but-the damn thing’s tipped over, it wants to roll its huge black drum down the slope. The others wave their arms at me, they’re just like moths in the great cone of light. I’d better get it upright because the light of the universe is gushing out of it. All roaring and booming out of this plug-hole and the light going down everywhere, all over the universe – the stars fading, the sun shrinking, the moon not bright enough to see itself in any of the lakes. There’s a raw smell of darkness, even Sirius can’t hang on. The night air’s shrivelling up and getting terribly cold. Oh, bother. Nuncle’s flying around laughing at me, so I throw myself on the hole. I’m swallowed in light. I’ve saved the universe. The population of the world is clapping, it’s nice but terribly loud. Right overhead. I’m awake now, that’s the trouble. Very cold with this light engulfing me, clawing me into bright pieces and this terrible monotonous clapping. Pieces flake off my clothes as I try to stand up, with the light pouring down so I think perhaps the moon is crashing towards the earth, the apocalypse, the end. This is the end. Heart attack. This is death! I’m awake and this is death!