The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  ‘You’ve just made an old man very happy.’

  ‘Which one?’ I wanted to touch her, but I knew that I mustn’t. She didn’t seem greatly inclined to touch me. There were new rules here and I didn’t understand them yet. She couldn’t take her eyes from one picture, the storm-whipped canvas of the coast at night.

  ‘You really like that one, don’t you?’

  ‘I think it’s beautiful.’ I picked it up and put it in her arms.

  ‘It’s yours.’ But she looked unsure.

  ‘You know, Chris, I think you used to give things to people as a way of controlling them.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I probably did. Never worked though, did it?’

  ‘And I used to do things just because somebody asked me to.’ For the passing of a moment, a look of that old distraction covered her face ‘I miss her sometimes, you know.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘The Alice who used to do things just because somebody asked. Now I seem to have ended up in charge of the house up in Whitby, and now people do things because I ask them to. Which means that I must be always reminding myself what I’m supposed to be asking them. There are some days when the whole of my head is so filled up with all those questions, there doesn’t seem to be any space left in there for pictures at all.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘then both our lives have changed.’

  I offered her, very tentatively, Fordie’s room for the night, but I sensed that she wouldn’t be staying. She explained that she had to drive over to the East End. She was expected. Her exhibition.

  ‘Drive?’ I said.

  ‘I have my little Morris outside.’

  ‘When did you learn to drive?’

  ‘Oh, I could always drive.’

  ‘You never drove when you were with me.’

  ‘You never asked me to.’ Silence for a few moments.

  ‘You won’t forget, will you, to talk to your friends in Whitby?’ She shook her head. ‘Hermann Siegfried?’

  ‘I don’t do it any more. It served its purpose.’

  ‘You got born then?’

  ‘What?’ she said, and the lines on her forehead deepened.

  ‘In Tenby I asked you to marry me. Said we could have children. No embryos from embryos, is what you said. Remember?’ Alice looked at me in silence and then started to laugh, very slowly at first and I realised that I had never heard her laugh in all the time we had been together. Once it gained its full momentum, there was a hint of wildness about the sound, as though something new had been born inside her, and was only now beginning to try out her senses for size. The laughter continued and increased and I realised that it was not an entirely comforting sound. There was menace in it as well as joy, but even so I had started to laugh along with her.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I was talking about you, Chris, not me. You should have read Siegfried, you know – I was always leaving the bloody book about for you to pick up. You might have learnt something, except I suppose you couldn’t imagine how silent little Alice could teach you anything back then. One of Siegfried’s rules was this: complete changes are no changes at all. They’re disguises. Every time you were given the opportunity for a birthing you ran away. There was that girl you told me about, what was her name?’

  ‘Pauline Healey,’ I said uncomfortably.

  ‘Then your priesthood. You could have taken something away from it all, but no, not you. You couldn’t just become a non-priest, you had to become an anti-priest. Then you dropped your thesis, at least partly because you couldn’t stand your supervisor. So instead of working occasionally with one dreadful man, you ended up working all the time with that other dreadful man, what was he called again?’

  ‘Andrew Cavendish-Porter,’ I said edgily. I wasn’t enjoying this.

  ‘And now you’re here with the ghosts of the priest, and the Olympic runner, and the high-flying businessman, and the racing-car driver and I suppose you’ve added Stamford Tewk’s ghost to the mix as well. All Siegfried’s book said finally was that getting born is a long, slow change, not a sudden transformation. You’re a mammal, Chris, not a butterfly. Could you get that machine of yours out again? I was intrigued by the way it squatted on your neck and gave off those little blips of light.’

  So I took it out and explained how it worked. And that was how, before she left that night, Alice’s final courtesy was to fit me up and switch me on and give me a good long look before she went out of the door and left me flickering away inside, as though, in amongst the thousands of books, I was trying to signal to someone out there in the dark.

  Resentment #2

  The melancholy of this day hung long upon me.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, Diaries

  The next day the knock on the door kept on, until I went and peered cautiously through the blind. It appeared to be some sort of uniformed courier. I opened the door and he handed me the package. It was a painting, the painting I had given Alice the night before. And attached to it was this note:

  Dear Chris,

  I reckon you might need this picture more than I do.

  Why don’t you finish your book first, then maybe we can talk about Whitby? There are some things we can only get done by ourselves. I think I’ve learnt that much at least.

  Take care of yourself.

  Love,

  Alice

  I still had the money Charles Redmond had given me, so I went out and bought a bottle of whisky.

  Late in the afternoon, and half-way through the bottle, I shouted out a single word, a single obscene word, at the top of my voice. I just wanted one of them in front of me, that was all, just one, whether it was Fordie or Harry or Andrew Cavendish-Porter or Alice. I wanted someone to yell some truths at, you see, I wanted to get a few things off my chest. I didn’t want to hurt any of them. If I had taken hold of them, which I probably would have done, it would have been merely by way of restraint, to stop them leaving, to make them concentrate on what I was trying to say, upon the importance of it, for you must realise by now, as I did, that everything had gone, and even what hadn’t gone yet was about to. It seemed to me that I’d paid a fortune, the whole fortune of my life, for the pleasure of these people’s company. And now Andrew was in Bath in his grand Georgian house, and Harry was back in Stockport counting the money I’d given him, and Alice was in Whitechapel supervising her exhibition. Even Fordie was probably up in heaven, with my blessing on his head, redeemed through his beneficence to his crazy stepdaughter. Financed by me.

  And the whisky poured down, without even a single egg to absorb it. It scorched my throat and made my memory blaze with anger, until I stumbled round the shop picking up the photographs of Fordie and all his literary friends and smashed them one by one against the walls. There were tiny shards of glass everywhere. Finally, sometime in the evening, I decided it was time to talk to Alice. A little unsteadily I held up that card she had sent me so that I could read the telephone number of the gallery. I picked up the phone, then I banged the receiver up and down on the cradle until my befuddled brain realised at last that the phone was dead. I had been cut off for not paying the bill, so I ripped the whole unit out of the wall, and staggered down to Richmond Bridge with it in my arms. Then I threw it all in the river. It floated for a few yards, then slowly sank.

  Next day I rose early with a sense of the catastrophic hangover that was slowly gathering pace inside my body. I went straight downstairs all the same, avoiding the tiny splinters of glass all around. I stood before the safe, that steely tabernacle in the wall. I knew now why Fordie had abandoned it: because of the way the story ended. Or because of the way it didn’t end, not even with Pelham’s death. You’d think a man could at least rely on death for a decent terminus. I leaned forward then and, through the blur of my distemper, started carefully turning the dial, having resolved at last to get on with my work, and this time finish it.

  * * *

  When Lord Chilford finally drilled into the cranium of the
corpse on the table before him, he briefly held his breath. The sheer absurdity of it, he thought, but still he held it. No malignant shadow swooped wildly round the room. No dreadful new stench assaulted their nostrils, though the smell in the underground chamber was bad enough already. Neither he nor his friend Benjamin Franklin fell twitching to the ground. And no sound was emitted from within the calcined chamber of the body before them. So they set about their business, doing that which the law of the realm did not permit them to do, but which intellectual enquiry demanded of them all the same. And when they had finished, they both stepped back, almost in unison.

  ‘The mind of man expands,’ Lord Chilford said, wiping the blood from his hands and leather apron, both stained from the hacking and sawing, ‘but none too quickly, eh Ben?’ Then Chilford walked over to the nearest cask, and taking the wooden mallet which hung on its bristling string, he thwacked out the bung. He filled the two half-pint tin pots to the brim with claret, and carried them across to his companion, sweating gently now on his stool at the other side of the makeshift autopsy table. Then he raised his cup in a toast.

  ‘So much work,’ he said, ‘so much work in medicine and natural philosophy, merely to establish the parameters of the great void that is superstition. Half the time we labour so fiercely only to establish what’s not even there.’

  ‘The body?’ Franklin asked, getting his breath back slowly. Chilford pointed a finger down towards the shiny stone slabs beneath their feet.

  ‘Jacob will inter the remains of Richard Pelham later tonight. The man has already disappeared into obscurity. He passed beyond the reach of legality or legitimate inquest some time back. To all intents and purposes, the body before us is anonymous. It belongs to no one. Our little posthumous enquiry has made no difference to that.’

  Franklin nodded, and they both drank deeply for a while in silence, before rousing themselves finally to collect up the dismembered remains of the poet Richard Pelham, which lay between them.

  In 1998 renovation work began on 36 Craven Street near Trafalgar Square, the house in which Benjamin Franklin lived from 1757 to 1772, when he was in London as agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, and the very years in which he did his crucial work on electricity. The men digging out the old basement found the bones of four adults and a minimum of six children. The bones had been sawn and drilled. It was probably Dr William Hewson, Fellow of the Royal Society, and a pioneer of modern surgery (also husband to the daughter of Franklin’s landlady) who performed the operations. These appeared to be anatomical experiments, either on Hewson’s patients or possibly on bodies stolen from graveyards. It is now assumed that Franklin probably knew all about these activities, for it is thought that his scientific interest would have weighed more strongly in his mind than his fear of the illegality of the operation. Before the 1832 Anatomy Act, it was illegal to dissect a human body at a private home. Doctors frequently bought their specimens from grave-robbers.

  Some of the Craven Street remains showed evidence of trepanning – the drilling of holes in the skull to lessen the pressure on the brain, or even to release evil spirits. The normal assumption has always been that it would be pointless to carry out this operation on a corpse.

  Also by Alan Wall

  JACOB

  CURVED LIGHT

  CHRONICLE

  BLESS THE THIEF

  LENSES

  A TO Z

  SILENT CONVERSATIONS

  RICHARD DADD IN BEDLAM & OTHER STORIES

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  THE LIGHTNING CAGE. Copyright © 1999 by Alan Wall. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

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  First published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg Random House UK Limited

  First U.S. Edition: March 2003

  eISBN 9781466874787

  First eBook edition: May 2014