by Adam Thorpe
Mother, up on Windmill Hill, putting the last letter down, I think of him. I think of that surviving painting. I think of myself looking at that painting in the ante-room a few years later and thinking of him. Then of myself looking at the scratchy old black-and-white photographs of all those lost frescoes in another room and thinking of him. Then of myself looking at the petroglyphs of nail holes and awl holes on the scorched brick of the cloister’s walls and thinking of him. And how I’d heard by then from a friend that he’d killed himself, soon after our meeting. An eye for an eye, and all that. Shovelled down into the boiling oil and searing bunsen-burners of hell, clutching his Air Force cap. So much alarm and dismay in that painting; I stood and pictured the flames of his bomb throwing huge shadows upon its terrible liveliness, as if the painted flames had escaped from themselves. It had rippled and blistered in places, around the grimaces and grinnings and even around the benign smiles of the saved on their celestial escalator – some of them surprised no doubt, but not showing it. It had survived, prevailed over the damage, over the smouldering debris of the rest.
Isn’t it extraordinary, Mother, that I should be thinking of him, up on that English hill, on a quiet Sunday in October some five decades later, the pile of rice-papery letters at my feet, ruffling in the rising breeze?
All their words read. Every single one in its pale violet.
Violation.
Some cackling abstract thing pressing a branding iron against my mark, clutching my neck with an ice-cold hand. His slow drawl over the Martini.
‘Hey, y’know what I feel? I feel those pictures against my life are no goddam contest. I feel like it might’ve been kinda better if I’d not been born. Ever feel that, Hugh?’
Please, please, please. No primal exhibitionism, no hysterics. Most of all, no Shakespeare quotes.
(I didn’t realise then, Mother. Please bear with me. I am to go with the pain, they said. Think of it as one of your plays. My plays? I have never written a play!)
I stay on the hill an hour, maybe two. Perhaps three. People are around but they pass quickly. No one asks me if I’m all right but one doesn’t these days and they probably think I’m drunk, a drunken vagrant, lost an eye in a brawl. One pulls away his kid who’s come over to see why I’m crouched in a huddle, hugging myself, rocking to and fro. I’m the same shape as that curled-up rosewood Buddha paperweight on the mantelpiece over there – see it? My actors brought it back from Tokyo recently, so kind.
Mad. Mad rat. Don’t touch.
Paperweight. The rice-papery bundle such a dreadful weight.
Rocking and moaning. Why shouldn’t I? Everyone has the right to self-expression once in a while. Outside doesn’t exist for me: I’m very very drunk but on something terribly bitter – quinine, that’s it. You always forced me to drink my quinine! If I rock far enough I’ll probably roll all the way down to the bottom. But I always rock back, like a clock’s weight. Tick tock. People. Voices. Gauche voices. Awkward.
Then there’s a moment when I stop, clear my throat, stand, pick up the letters, pick up my bike and walk as if nothing has happened but stiffly, achily, down to the gate. Stop McDestruction. That all seems so far away and yet possible, suddenly. Deliriously possible because there’s nothing else left to do. When one has no life, no core, sucked of one’s blood so one is undead but not alive, one can see how, there being nothing else left to do, all that Malcolm’s little sticker says is possible, and I am probably the one to do it. I shout YES in a sort of roar and make the family threesome near me jump. Then they walk quickly away under their bobble hats. I wheel my bicycle down the path towards the vast field the other side, where the red blob went and where the Neolithic herdsmen sowed their harmless little plots. I can’t go back the way I’ve come. Not ever again.
The path cuts across the field like a hair-parting. There is no one else. It only leads to the road, way off. It’s a long slog. On either side, the dark and stony field. Seagulls scattered over it, but moving, not impaled. A plain of brute matter, the hill rising behind it, eye-catching, its top a place of safety and comfort – I can see this, yes, I can see why they chose it, Nuncle. Comfort? Big hard muscles and thick necks, coughing away in the smoke, dying wrinkled and still young, squawls of babies, fever, damp bones. Ten minutes, and I’ve still got half the field to go. Why do we live, why all this effort? The package bounces about in the pannier as Aunt Joy’s bike bounces on the path. It’s like a joyous little animal, in there.
You see what a state I’m in, Mother, after reading all about us.
It takes me years to cross that field. My head keeps lagging behind my body.
‘You all right, in there?’
It’s Ted, through the door. I’m back in my room, you see. I tell him that I was gargling. There isn’t even a tap in my room, but he plods back down anyway.
Sleep.
Black pudding for breakfast. Ted has dry tea leaves stuck in his cardie. I want to get back to when they were wet, freshly slipped from the spout. When I was someone else entirely.
‘You ought to see to that scratch.’
It does sting, yes.
‘Bed all right, is it?’
Fine, massa, fine.
I’d dreamt it was a coffin, the sheets sliding off with a crash. And the other one, the nightmare. Uncurling from my bed, padding about the pub, seeking all the sleeping faces and giving them a quick claw. Even in the empty numbered rooms below, one face in each, ready for me, all soft. The pub was the house and I slipped into your old room, Mother. You were asleep, like the rest. The art of it in the swiftness, to do it before you screamed. But no one ever woke up, I was so quick. Working methodically, padding this way and that, my bony supple body so light on its paws, the claws so white and strong. I entered the dark, silent bar and there was Fatso, on his bentwood chair, flat cat’s face staring at my flat cat’s face advancing towards him but his claw flashes and finds me first, finds my eye! Ohhh! Waking up to a stinging forehead, my blind socket sore – from not being able to make tears, I suppose, like its partner.
Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?
What does Nagg reply?
I didn’t know.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Sunny intervals. Everything sopping.
My dear Mother,
Not been wonderful recently, but on my two feet again now.
Ted hands me more toast.
‘Anyway, there was a message for you. Barry phoned. If you want to talk to him before the meeting.’
In five minutes’ time. I phone Cliff. He gets me there only fifteen minutes late. He nods at my scratch. ‘Tried to be nice to Fatso, did you?’
The council building’s all dazzling lino and sick cheese plants. Meeting place like a classroom, same dank smell, looking out on the concrete lump they call the Post Office. Their heads turn and there is a collective gasp. My scratch livid, my eye red, my patch scored, my hair full of woodland flora, my clothes rumpled. The heads are topped by greying or absent hair and set off by loud ties. Jackets stretched on the chair backs. A few rolled-up sleeves. A map of Netherford pricked by red pins just behind me, showing Sites of Pedestrian and Vehicular Conflict. Never realised the town was so big, like a hereditary birthmark worsening with each generation.
Brian Padmore eyeing Barry suspiciously, country mouse and town mouse. Barry’s tie is thinner, jacket snappier. He looks nervously eager, ready for the kill, the Hugh Arkwright Centre idea sewn up legally. We’re told that the Council are to give a start-up and maintenance grant to something called Green Shoot, which gives disturbed youths a second chance. How are they chosen? By their disturbed backgrounds. What is the definition of disturbed? Broken homes, adoption difficulties, ‘negative’ environment, neglect, mild but unrecognised autism, little contact with adults, loneliness. ‘Dysfunctional,’ someone says. That’s the very first time I heard it, Mother, in that unpleasant room.
‘I would,’ I say, ‘like to do whatever I can to encourage yo
ur project.’
Barry’s mouth drops open, as if on a ratchet, the longer I don’t add a ‘but’. The founders of Green Shoot – a fortyish couple with hair almost as wild as mine, sporting lumberjack shirts and ties that look strained – thank me tenderly and suggest I have a place on the charity board. I accept. Barry now frowning at me. The others glance at him as if he might, at any moment, squeak like Piglet. He must have warned them, in my absence, of his client’s ‘alternative proposal’. Brian looks nonplussed, the comfortable countryman. I avoid Barry’s eye as the overhead projector hums into life and an ink drawing of Ilythia wobbles on the white wall.
‘Ah, the House of Usher,’ I say.
A few laugh. The young but balding architect, in a black waistcoat and fob-watch, taps each image merrily with a stick, as if pointing out anticyclones. Dainty Venusians stroll between immaculate shrubs and converse before the glassed extension, where the growing of plants will drive the chlorophyll of tenderness into those troubled hearts. He wants to be ‘sympathetic’ to the original house. ‘Gut it, go on,’ I growl. Titters. The meeting continues in a fog of acronyms and in-words. The Green Shoot people are talking about the woodland, so I raise my hand.
‘There’s a problem there,’ I say.
‘A problem?’
Barry perks up, starts shuffling his notes.
‘The wildwood – the wood to the left of the beechwood – is poisoned.’
‘Poisoned?’
‘I have reason to believe that there is an old stock of poison gas there, and it’s leaking. Probably mustard – mustard gas. Maybe also lewisite.’
Murmurs and gasps of disbelief. Barry scratches his head.
‘First World War, wasn’t it?’ someone says.
Someone else starts droning on about their grandfather. ‘I think we should have it checked,’ I interrupt.
Further questions, so I explain: the garlic smell, the dead poacher, the thing about a curse, runny eyes, the diffident cows. The fact that Edward Arnold was rather ‘disturbed’. More titters.
‘And just to make sure, he fenced it off. I was not allowed in.’
‘Was your uncle planning on using this stuff?’ asks one of the Green Shoot people.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘He had the messianic touch, you know. All in the cause of a greater good.’
‘Which was?’
‘To kill everybody off.’
My right bottom eyelid and the upper muscles on my cheek start twitching. A tic so venerable that I am quite fond of it, but it afflicts me only in moments of extreme emotion – and it’s not the same as yours, Mother. A thoughtful, slightly amazed silence.
‘He liked trees,’ I add, pathetically. ‘Under the melancholy boughs.’
I keep nerve gas out of it. Anyway, my tic’s worsening. I stand, make my apologies, and hurry out into the corridor. To a passing pair of stilettos’ amazement, I am sobbing quietly. I don’t know if they’re amazed, really, but they’ve certainly swivelled and stopped.
‘I’m quite all right,’ I sniff. ‘It’s an allergy.’
Heartily relieved, the stiletto-woman claims she has the same thing, it’s the cheese plants – and tic-tocks off over the dazzling lino, her huge, ungainly figure moving me rather deeply. Murmurings through the door, like rumour. I blow my nose and go back in. It all goes better than anticipated.
Afterwards I have to explain to a disgruntled Barry that I’ve had a change of heart. ‘A triple bypass would’ve been better,’ he jokes. ‘Must be the country air.’ The woodland can’t be dug up, but ‘a bod’ from Environmental’s going to check it over. ‘You haven’t been digging around in there yourself, have you? You look a bit mustardy, if you don’t mind me saying.’ ‘It’s been weighing on me, Barry.’ Like Midas’s servant, I do feel a certain relief; my secret’s not dotty any more! Then the letters gush over my head and I have to sit down. My frontal lobe is bare bone and tinted with ochre. It makes me feel very self-conscious, but I mention it to no one, because I know it’s not real.
When I’m back, I head straight for Ilythia, pausing only to buy a bottle of paraffin, a packet of bin liners and some matches at the shop. I check Wall isn’t about, go up to the attic, open the trunk, and stuff five bin liners. Carrying them one by one down to the garden, I disgorge them near the wrecked summerhouse where Wall has already charred a circle, tuck in a few little stray sleeves, splash most of the paraffin on the heap, and set the thing alight.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Fitful sun. Hail has dashed the daffs.
My dear Mother,
The smoke is awful – thick, black, noxious – but a deal of prodding and poking, and the rest of the paraffin, keep the flames at work. After an hour, there’s nothing left but a residue of black fibrous material on a pile of ashes, and part of a baby legging that refuses to catch. My scalp and eye itch, my face is greasy with smoke, my hands are black, my clothes stained – but I am terribly happy, terribly happy! Lighter, lighter, much lighter. I ought to burn the letters too, I suppose – but I have never been able to burn words. Anyway, I can’t burn my own brain, can I?
I tell those whom I encounter on my way back (Mrs Pratt with her dog yet again, Jenny collecting her children from school in a swarm of mums bowing to little heads, Roger Marlow touching-up the hotel sign in a vile scarlet) that I have been firing leaves. They look quite concerned by my appearance, and I’m too light-headed, it’s not normal. I make a strong mug of tea and take it into the bathroom where I run a very hot bath and throw in some bath salts found above the basin. The bath and tea are equally delicious. Lazing in the steam, I congratulate myself. I am a cavalryman, not a foot slogger. My bottom grates on the salts, not quite dissolving as they should. Life, I think. I can still hug life!
I have dealt with the house, yes. I have a clear conscience. I must start afresh, cleanly diving into my new self. For my self is new. I am not who I thought I was, am I? No. (Mother, please forgive me for being so naive. Bear with me. I had not yet begun to realise.) No. No, not at all. Green shoots are springing up all over me, millions of tiny soft warm shoots. Ah yes.
I am, in one way, my own enemy. I must learn to – to respect him. Did the natives not find the crocodile worthy of worship, even as it dragged them to the deeps in its chops?
To love him, even.
Ancestors. Appease them but do not petition them.
I leave a Plimsoll-line of dark, greasy scum on the bath’s sides that takes me quite a time to remove with no sponge, no Vim. Ted is in the corridor, to my surprise, when I emerge – a towel around my waist and my eye-patch off. He talks to me with his eyes circling my bared blindness: this looks, to those who don’t know it (almost everyone but you, Mother), like a dried date flattened by a sharp heel, though the skin grew successfully over the hole.
‘Muck’s gone missing,’ he says. ‘Vanished. Frank Petty. The police are involved. Here we go again.’
Whether it is my exposed left eye, or the mention of the police, I don’t know, but he’s shifty.
‘When you say vanished, do you mean run off, following some misdemeanour?’
‘Vanished,’ he says again, as if that curtness supplied the answer.
‘Oh dear. Well, I’m sure he’ll turn up.’
I feel much sympathy towards my fellow human beings, in whatever shape or size, but Muck has strained it, hasn’t he? That obscene mime, that awful tune still tiptoeing through my head – it starts up again now, like a hurdy gurdy. I am feeling the chill in the corridor. I nod at one of the locked, numbered rooms.
‘Perhaps he’s in there, staying for free. You’d better check, Ted.’
Ted doesn’t laugh, but quite the contrary: he looks offended.
‘Anyway,’ I go on, ‘if I see him, I’ll let you know.’
‘Let the boys in blue know, you mean,’ he murmurs, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, but really because he is hiding something.
I wait a few seconds. As if proving the truth of orato
rical gesture, of theatrical decorum, of everything I have striven to reintroduce, I find my hands in the perfect posture of Bulwer’s Gestus 11: Innocentia ostendo. Can you believe it! It is the same gesture Mrs Siddons would use when playing the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth – and familiar from all my own productions, Mother. The back of one hand rubs in the hollow of the other, as if you are trying to wash them. You would do this, sometimes.
‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘they’ve found blood.’
My hands freeze.
I must be betraying my discomfort, because Ted backs away, mumbling something about seeing to the eggs. I want to ask him where they’d found the blood, but the wet chill in my gut makes me cough instead. I mount the steps and enter my room with what feels like the beginnings of belly palaver. As dusk falls, I wonder whether I should leave, for a week or so.
When I look in the mirror, I don’t see my face, but someone else’s. Neglected and hairy, despite the bath. Teeth bared like a wolfs, showing the gums. So very anxious. Well, all the parts of me I have treasured, like shining pieces of eight, only because I saw your face in them, Mother, have vanished.
Knock knock knock, after a light tread up the stairs. The police. Always the same felon’s mask immediately gripping your face. A bulky freckle-eared one and another, a woman. I am only half dressed. Because the male one didn’t mount the steps at first, sniffing around in the corridor, I thought the cautious knock was Ted. Very embarrassing, because she is embarrassed. I make sure she realises I do have my underpants on, under the shirt-flaps. (At least I was strapped into my eye-patch.) Looks as if she was born in her uniform some twenty years ago: even her large teeth look officiously regular. A lumpish tread and the other one joins us. ‘Hello,’ he says brightly, as if he knows I’m odd or too old.
They want to know what I did after leaving the pub ‘with Mr Petty’. I did not leave ‘with Mr Petty’, I tell them. The witnesses are mistaken. I followed him out. Them out, I should say. He was with Mr Wall. We had a little chat. I presume you’ve made enquiries with Mr Wall?