The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  ‘I’m a builder, mate. Got my own business up in Stockport.’

  ‘Ah. Spare me five minutes of your time, would you, Harry? I’d just like you to have a look at my roof.’

  Ten minutes later Harry came back down, shaking his head and muttering.

  ‘That should have been seen to years ago,’ he said, ‘years and years ago. Those slating nails have been rotting away ever since the war, I should think. Surprised any of the roofs still up there.’

  ‘How much would you say it might cost to sort it out? The minimum decent job is what I’m talking about.’ Harry mused, twitching sometimes his eyebrows and at others his lips, and always fiddling with his hearing aid as he considered this.

  ‘I could probably do it for about three grand,’ he said. ‘But let’s understand one another. We’re talking cash. Forget VAT and forget the taxman. Otherwise we’d have to be talking more. I’d see you right though, mate, the way I always did with your old mum. What’s the point in you paying all that money to the taxman anyway, and then me having to do the same?’ I could see his point. I also wanted the simplest solution to my roof problem, and I did not want to be distracted from my studies.

  ‘If I agreed to it,’ I said, ‘would it be something I could just leave you to get on with? What I mean is I’ve a lot of work to do, and I don’t want to be taken away from it.’

  ‘Your father and your mother always trusted me,’ he said with a slightly wounded tone. ‘Trusted me to do anything, they did. There’d be one thing. There’s a mate of mine, well a relative actually, could do the job with me for a lot cheaper than anyone you’d get down here. But he lives up in Manchester, and I don’t have any digs at the moment. Could we stay here, while we did it? It wouldn’t take us long anyway.’

  A week later Harry and his nephew Neil moved in. I gave them my bedroom and Fordie’s and I made myself a temporary sleeping place down in the shop.

  Descensus ad Inferos

  These drear delightless London days.

  RICHARD PELHAM, Letters

  I tried as best I could to ignore the hammering and crashing, and the blare of the transistor radio in the roof, and concentrate instead on what was before me. I was fascinated by the way Fordie had tracked the image of the black sun in Pelham. At first he had thought it merely a parahelion, a falsity of illumination, the mirage of a god, but little by little he had come to feel that it was more significant than this. Its later manifestations, as in de Nerval’s Les Chimères, he felt added nothing to Pelham’s original usage. He looked instead at the following possibilities. Could it be, he asked, if wired up as he had been by the age’s new obsession with electricity, he had in some uncanny manner come to sense that the earth had an iron core and that the currents hunting around it which generated the globe’s magnetic field were also part of that same field of force that created electricity? Fordie made plain from his readings that the oddest thing about Pelham’s black sun was not that it was black, but that it was at the centre of the earth, buried cryptically beneath his feet. Could some unaccountable shaft of insight have taught him about the currents around him and the force they generated? Pelham was obsessed with force fields, and there were these lines from The Instruments to prove it:

  The earth, the world, this spinning globe

  Charmed still with lines of force invisible.

  By now I was beginning to wonder if I was anything more than a field of negative forces myself. I switched on for a while, but I wanted to be cleansed. I went up to the bathroom and stared down at the porcelain of Fordie’s Victorian bath begrimed with black. Anthracite black. As though a bevy of pitmen had just doused themselves there, and no one had bothered to scrub it out later. Obviously Harry and his young relative had been making use of my facilities without feeling any need to leave them as they found them. I thought briefly of marching up into the roof to order one of them to come down and clean up, but the hammering and the shouting and the disintegrating blare of the transistor dissuaded me. I cleaned it up myself, and then I lay in the hot water for a while and tried not to consider my financial situation. In the halcyon days of the work’s commencement I had also told Harry and his young relative to help themselves to whatever was in the fridge. That evening, they went through three bottles of the Chablis and eight eggs.

  ‘Haven’t got anything else apart from eggs, have you?’ Harry shouted happily from the kitchen.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Must be very binding, this diet.’

  I had given them two thousand on account already. Now Harry returned on the Monday to confront me.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate, but it’s going to take us a bit more work than we thought. And we’re having to replace more stuff up there than I’d realised. It’s not cheap, you know, that sort of material. You’re going to have to have it done, though, or you’ll be in real trouble next time.’

  ‘How much?’ I said.

  ‘Another two thousand.’

  ‘When do you need it?’

  ‘Well, now really.’

  ‘In cash obviously.’

  ‘The only way we’ll get the job done on time, to be honest.’

  So off I went to the building society and took out another substantial chunk of my rapidly diminishing resources. I realised as I handed it over to Harry, and he fiddled with his hearing aid, that I didn’t like to look at his face any more. The permanent bonhomie of his grin had begun to grate. He had a gold filling between his two front teeth that seemed always to glint at precisely the wrong time. I just wanted the job done and both of them out. I soon had the latter anyway, for they didn’t come back the next day. I crept up into the roof. A part of it was still tarpaulined over, but there were no gaps now that I could see. The following day, when they still didn’t come back, I read in silence and with relief Fordie’s notes about the black sun.

  At its worst, it seemed, the black sun of melancholy cast its chill rays on the black river of bile in which a man sank, as the gummy lava bore him slowly towards hell. Not forgetfulness, though, not Lethe. Hell, where nothing was ever forgotten except for the possibility of forgiveness. And this image had become associated irrevocably in Pelham’s mind with the dark king, David. David the Psalmist and the murderer, he who could summon from the night inside him either evil or good. This blended, by a process hard for the rational mind to track, with Pelham’s conception of the parables, in which all must re-enter the dark womb of meaning, and thus learn how to be born in intention as well as flesh. This for him was the true burden of the words Christ speaks to Nicodemus, and of all the other parables too. The world assures us that we have been born, but the spirit informs us otherwise. And so the language of the parable refuses the language of the world as merely a jargon of the unborn. Why else would Jesus insist that a man must be born again? Why else would he constantly speak in such a dark and riddling manner? And the ultimate king was God himself. He darkened too at the time of the death of Jesus when, according to the disciple Luke, the sun went black. And if you found yourself inside the darkness of the Almighty, whose light could you call upon then?

  Harry did not come back the next day either, nor the one after that, and I found myself wondering if he might not be coming back at all. This had never even occurred to me before, and I shrugged off the idea as the paranoia of a once-more solitary man, but after a week I had to accept that I’d been right the first time. Being paranoid and being right are not incompatible conditions. I also realised then that I had no address for Harry, not even a phone number, not even a mobile phone number. And what a lot of cash I’d given him. For another week I did nothing, then one night I climbed up there during a storm and thought I heard the whole structure gently creaking and moaning. In a panic the next morning I telephoned the district surveyor and explained my dilemma. He had someone round an hour later, a thin, besuited young man in his twenties who had a quick look at what had gone on up there and whistled quietly.

  ‘Just as well you called us, sir
. Did you realise these cowboys have taken the purlins out from both sides and not put anything in by way of replacement? Another month or so and the whole of your roof would have started sagging. It’s already moving now, in fact. Do you mind if I ask who did it?’

  ‘Harry,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Who’s Harry?’

  ‘Harry who?’ I said and started laughing, though a little bleakly.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m following this.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘one of my mother’s jokes. Do you know anyone we can get in straight away to sort all this out?’

  ‘Not technically supposed to answer that question,’ he said, ‘but here’s someone you’ll be all right with.’ He took a card from his wallet and handed it to me.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I know him.’ I called ten minutes later and arranged for Mr Birkett to come and sort out my roof. He spent half a day shoring it up, then said he’d be back on Monday to start the reslating.

  ‘You do realise they’ve gone off with half your slates?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Worth a few bob these days. Now you’re going to have to pay to replace them, I’m afraid.’

  * * *

  So I made more visits to the building society and took out more money. I noticed that my balance had some time before moved from five figures to four. I decided not to get distracted and sat down to the next section of Fordie’s notes with my eggs on my plate and a bottle of Chablis open on the table before me.

  This was the stage in his study where Fordie had obviously started to falter. An unsureness of tone began to affect his formulations, and as I read on I understood why. In the final part of his paper on Pelham, Lord Chilford gave his own account of that night when he had been summoned from Piccadilly by the frantic Jacob.

  I entered the room to see for myself at long last the effects of one of these apparent fits of insanity of which I had heard so much from other, unreliable sources. Pelham was seemingly comatose. The temperature in the room was remarkably low and I was initially afraid that he might be suffering as a result. He was speechless, seemingly without consciousness. He appeared to be in a state such as that of one who has endured a violent accident. His pulse was weak. There were no reactions to my promptings.

  I had intended to leave him for a while until some glimmer of consciousness returned, when my servant Josephine, who had attended him in our absence, directed me to his chest. On removing the sheets that covered him, I observed the following phenomenon. Red welts had appeared upon the skin, which had formed themselves into the following intelligible sequence:

  PEIIIAM

  In other words, what appeared to be the subject’s own name had been inscribed in his flesh, but with this curious anomaly: that the bridge between the two verticals of the letter H had not been formed.

  Why hadn’t the bridge of the H been formed? Perhaps that was the message: the message lay in the very distortion of the signature. That was what was being signalled, that a desire so strong, or an aversion so terrible, had separated itself from the main character, gained its own tortured autonomy, and so wished to sign itself differently.

  A displacement of the agency of selfhood, pressed into a writing upon the flesh by an aetiology we cannot at present track, leaves its calling card. We might describe this as yet another, though an admittedly extreme, manifestation of the melancholy temperament. It might also surely begin to explain certain phenomena which have always previously been described in the terminology of superstition.

  In its milder phases Pelham’s condition was not dissimilar to hypochondriasis, and what would traditionally have been called a leucocholy. All his symptoms were compatible with religious monomania. It is doubtful if his residence at the Collegium Insanorum in Chelsea did anything other than provide the time required for remission.

  In his hypomanic phases, Pelham believed that he was thronged with angels, some of whom confided in him visions of paradise. But in his black phases, his occlusions and eclipses, it was the landscape of hell that confronted and confounded him, peopled by the inferno’s personnel.

  And so to conclude, if we are to apply the characterisation melancholia to Richard Pelham, it must be with the clear understanding that the notion of bodily functions which once underlay the humoral system is now clearly defunct. However, just as remarkable nuances of planetary observation were possible within the Ptolemaic system, despite its fundamentally flawed conception, we may also remark the highly detailed, and frequently accurate, observation of melancholics over the years, made from the perspective of the humours.

  While Pelham was in my care, the most alarming symptoms of his condition were never much in evidence, until this extraordinary occurrence. But the overall cast of his mind remained one of distraction, and I would continue to argue the following:

  Pelham’s immersion in often barbarous and fanciful modes of thought and literature, whether of a devotional, theological or poetical kind, exacerbated a form of disjunction between himself and observable reality which grew more acute during his periods of affliction. The Society has been only too aware of the pernicious function of fanciful language in the process of mis-perception, and the remarkable retentiveness of Pelham’s mind meant that this grand language-hoard, standing so aslant to the actual world, created in effect a massive screen, which could at times protect him from unwanted stimuli, but at other times could isolate him inside his own dreadful confinement.

  It is quite possible that this misalignment with general perception is precisely what enabled some of the unfortunate poet’s more notable observations, but I have no doubt that the Members will be in agreement with me when I say that such mental deformations are surely not a price worth paying for these, increasingly exiguous, achievements.

  When writing moves from mind to flesh, it is perhaps because it has become unworthy of that higher realm.

  Richard Pelham Concluded

  Edward Allingham

  In his notes, Fordie had written:

  Any student of the mind’s morbidity, the spirit’s contagions and infections, must end up sooner or later with a simple question – does the mind in its bleakest and blackest descent reflect a reality or create one? Either way, it strikes me, the mystery is by no means diminished. Either way the consequences appear to be just as dreadful for humanity.

  Then there was a further note, in Fordie’s margin: Might Chilford himself have been mad? And he had answered his own question thus: I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.

  * * *

  Now my roof was finished. All that had been required of me was one more trip to the building society. I had resolved now not to think about money. Fordie had assured me that he never did, though he had been astute enough in acquiring mine. When money worries take command of the mind, he had said, the whole of life translates itself into that loveless language. I knew this, I’d been here once before, with sandwiches half-eaten turning back suddenly into the price you paid for them, or a mouthful of beer becoming metallic on your tongue as it solidifies into the coins you just handed over to have it poured. And I remembered again Fordie’s utter contempt for those who make nothing but money: better to make none at all, he had said, and I tried harder than ever now to believe him. I didn’t want to think about money and I didn’t want to think about Pelham or Chilford for a few days either. I might have had the first hint as to why Fordie had put it all away in that safe of his and left it there for so long. I, too, was beginning to feel contaminated.

  I locked the bookshop door and set out walking. Without even considering the matter I went off down the river in the direction of Twickenham. I’d never spent much time on or near the Thames. We lived too far away and didn’t go to it often. It was simply a river I occasionally encountered in making my way across London. But for Pelham it was the mystic snake of life itself. I looked at it, but I couldn’t see whatever it was that he saw. It was only as I came towards the town that I realised where I was
heading, and I turned off into the centre. I didn’t want to stand before the ghost site of Chilford Villa again at the moment, so I was simply meandering, no more, when I stopped in front of the little gallery window. Ten seconds later, the man at the desk looked up affably from the table where he sat.

  ‘The painting over there,’ I said, ‘the Chimera painting, I wonder if it might be possible to get the artist’s address. We were once great friends, you see, but we seem to have lost contact over the years.’ He disguised his irritation that I wasn’t about to buy something and riffled through a drawer until he found a piece of paper, which he then handed to me and turned back to his magazine. And I wrote down the following:

  Alice Ashe

  47 Bingham Road

  Whitby

  There were a number of restaurants in Richmond where Fordie had signed a bookshop cheque for our food. That evening I took my own Tewk chequebook and set off to the Italian one, hoping the time for the cheques to start bouncing had not yet arrived. The owner had heard about Fordie’s death and was solicitous. I placed Fordie’s order: ‘Anything. Anything at all, so long as it’s without eggs. And the usual wine.’ He smiled sadly, and went off to provide for me a meal of the sort he had provided for Fordie over so many years. Then, between the drinks and the food, I wrote my letter to Alice. It ended like this:

  So, discovering to my surprise that I don’t seem to want to kill you any more, I now find I’d like to see you instead. I’m so pleased that you’re still painting. I’m not the man you left behind in Tenby, believe me. Stopped running. These days I don’t even drive. I now own the bookshop whose address is printed at the top of this page. But please don’t imagine that means I’m wealthy. The opposite is increasingly the case. But I do have a fridge full of white wine and eggs. Should you ever be passing through London, I’ll give you some of both.