by Edward Carey
But it was very hard not to think, there was really very little else to do. I tried to remember the names of the stars, but I needed my father’s help for that. And one thought, no matter how hard I tried to extinguish it, kept repeating itself within me, and the power of that thought was so great that it opened my mouth and made me whisper:
Rule 11. It has recently been decided that in one certain extraordinary circumstance dead hands may continue to function. When a gloved individual is suffocating and bleeding down in a dark tunnel and surrounded north and south by rubble, it has been agreed, by popular demand, that hands with dirty or ripped white cotton and even hands lacking white cotton altogether may move and be put to work.
My fingers began to shift rubble. Piece by piece, cutting that most vulnerable part of me open, progress was rewarded with more rubble and more cuts. My poor hands were being ruined for ever. They stung, they ached, but on they worked. And slowly I began to build the rubble up behind me and to move, shifting loads, slowly, slowly along the tunnel, until after three or four breaks and curses that the rubble would never thin out, I was able to push backwards an obstructing beam and climb, scraping against the tunnel ceiling, forwards on top of the rubble. And then, finally, dusty and bloody, I felt myself descending and I was able to crawl along the floor itself.
A while later I felt the tunnel steps and slid open the tomb lid, the light burned my eyes. The first thing I saw were my betrayed hands, ugly and ashamed. My nails bled, tiny strips of jagged skin hung from ungloved fingers, the gloved fingers all had red tips. Sitting with my legs dangling, half in the church, half in the tunnel, panting and crying, I looked back into the dark. In the distance, just touched by the light, I could see a sad still life. Untidy, uncared for, lay a few, too few, objects from my exhibition, smashed and broken.
I could just see the rounded top of my last exhibit, lot 996, that most precious of all the objects. The object for which the exhibition was made. The ever-moving exhibit, destined always to be placed in the furthest spot, always to appear the most recent possession. I slipped back down, into the semidarkness.
In the tunnel the lives and loves of so many people were represented. Father was there and Twenty and Claire Higg and poor Peter Bugg and Emma, too, and even Anna Tap. But most of all, there was a person of such importance stored down there that his love was proclaimed by me as being above all those other thousands of people exhibited: lot 996, a skeleton.
I picked up this exhibit, held in its three transparent bags. I felt its polythene skin. For a moment in the half-light I thought he was alive. I thought I saw flesh grow on his skull, his eyes push out into his sockets and a large ever-smiling mouth. I thought I saw his breath caught in the polythene bag, but then the life faded again, only the head continued to smile, a skull’s smile. The rounded top of his skull was well polished, it glistened, I had looked after it so, such a wonderful roundness. I kissed it. I studied the bag that held the precious object’s hands. I brought the bags up into the church, and laid them out on the church’s cold stone floor. I spilled out one bag, positioned the bones, there were carpals and metacarpals and phalanges too; delicate family. What tiny hands, they were. They had touched, they had collected, they had been put together palm against palm to pray, they held things, other hands among them. Brother hands to my hands. Brother skull to my skull. Brother Francis to his younger brother Thomas. My elder brother. Brother object above all other objects, the object for whom I would come to be loved always but never liked.
I slid away the cover – which only a few months ago had been removed for Father – so that only half of it was open and then I began to tip the contents of my brother on top of Father’s coffin. Up-turning the polythene bags, I began to spill my brother’s bones, back from where I had taken them. One, at least one object would be returned, I could do that much. I could at least give Father some company. I could remind him that he once had two sons, no matter how hard, for the portraits’ sake, he tried to believe that I was his eldest son. Home the bones went, each splinter, each chipped fragment of the little brother who was my senior. Back to his stone bed, stick by stick. Finally the skull, but first one final polish.
Francis, Francis?
Someone was calling.
Francis? Francis?
I’m here, Anna.
You missed it. How could you miss it? It’s fallen down, Francis. Your mother said like a once mighty elephant, its knees buckling before it fell, groaning. They said it was a magnificent thing to have seen. You should have stayed. I called out for you. There were some huge explosions. You should’ve heard them.
I did.
The people cheered when it fell. They took photographs and cheered. There’re still lots of them there, they’ve gone among the rubble, they’re playing over what’s left of our home. It took me so long to get away. The chalk artist brought me here.
The Porter’s dead.
No one’s seen him.
He’s quite dead. The exhibition’s gone.
Yes, I suppose it must have. I’m sorry, Francis.
He was squashed, and they squashed the exhibition too.
Where are we going to sleep tonight?
All that work, all gone.
They’ll probably find us somewhere. Surely they will.
Anna, five steps away, seemed to want to come closer. She felt her way forward, made brave by the events of the afternoon. She put out her hands, searching for me through the air, striking her hands upon the chapel bars until she found the open entrance gate and then, stepping forward, her fingers rested on the object that I was holding. Her hands moved about, they felt the skull, the teeth, her fingers slipped through the eyeholes.
Francis!
It’s all right.
What is it?
It’s from the exhibition. I’m putting it back.
What is it?
Neither of us spoke. Then, after Anna’s breath had calmed, she whispered:
It’s a skull.
I’m putting it back.
You stole it.
But I’m putting it back.
You stole a skull.
He’s going back. I’m putting him back now.
Whose was it, Francis?
It’s the object Father was so upset about. They wanted him forgotten. But I remembered him. It’s my brother.
Put him back.
Back in his box.
In went the skull. I closed the lid. Lights out. I locked up the chapel. Anna was sitting on one of the front pews, if she had eyes she would have been looking at Saint Lucy. I sat beside her.
Anna, I’ve run out of gloves.
When she began to take off my ripped gloves, I did not stop her. Nor did I complain or pull away when she placed my hands to her face. Skin on skin. Skin on skin.
VIII
CITY HEIGHTS
Porter.
The Porter, whose real name we never knew, died in the demolition of Observatory Mansions which he had helped to bring about. Among the rubble of our former home it was said that certain scavenging children found a metal trunk, identical in description to the one that was seen in the basement flat where the Porter lived, in which it was supposed all that remained of his private life was kept, all proof of his existence before he began his work in Observatory Mansions. The trunk was badly dented in the explosion and its aftermath, one of its padlocks had been ripped off – but one still remained. The children, it has been related to me, smashed open the surviving padlock and when they lifted the lid off the trunk to look inside they found nothing. The trunk was empty. This is conjecture. A rumour. It may or may not be believed.
Claire Higg.
Claire Higg is dead now too. She died a little before the Porter, on the same day. During the build up to the destruction of our former home, television cameras were filming the crowd, which was large, which stood and shrieked, waiting for action. One of these television cameras was pointed in the direction of Miss Higg. The television crew had positioned monito
rs which displayed the various pictures being filmed by the surrounding cameras. These monitors were very near to Miss Higg, and Miss Higg was happily watching them, feeling by their presence quite relaxed in the outdoors. Miss Higg, watching one particular monitor, suddenly saw on its screen a figure of a woman, watching a television monitor, who she knew she had once known, but couldn’t quite place. She looked at that old woman on the television monitor, that old woman had greasy hair, was bony and pale and certainly dirty. Who could it be? Concentrating intensely, she scratched her forehead. As Claire Higg scratched her forehead she noticed that the old woman on the television monitor scratched her forehead too. That disgusting old woman, who looked like she’d been kept in a shoebox for decades, even seemed to be wearing the same nightdress as her, she noticed as she looked at herself and then back at the monitor. She noticed too that the old woman had, coincidentally, exactly the same dirt patches on that identical nightdress. Then Claire Higg, former resident of flat sixteen, once loved by Mr Alec Magnitt (deceased), once perhaps loved by the Porter (soon to be deceased), realized in fact that she was that unpleasant-looking old woman. In the instant that Claire Higg saw who she was, in the instant that she saw what she had become, she immediately leapt into one of those moments of high consciousness and, filled with mounting horror, disgust and breathlessness, decided to have a heart attack on the spot. She died, of course. But she may have been comforted to know that the last moments of her life made very watchable television. This is not conjecture. This is to be believed.
Mother.
My mother is still alive but I no longer live with her. Mother lives in a large white building on the other side of the city. This building is one of several, specifically organized to look after old people. When the crowd began to disperse after the demolition, Mother was forced along with it. And the crowd, moving far quicker than her old body could easily endure, spat her out, pushed her aside and rammed her against a wall. Mother collapsed. When the last people were drifting away someone found her and called for help. She was carried away on a stretcher, into an ambulance, and disappeared into the city. It took us a week to find her again. We telephoned all the hospitals but none had admitted her, had never even heard of her. Finally, someone suggested we call the large nursing home. The ambulance drivers had taken her there immediately, to the tiny hospital adjacent to it, where so many old people have been seen to, which nobody thinks of as being a hospital but only a sanatorium within the nursing home grounds. Mother had broken her hip. They gave her a new one but told her that she would never be able to walk without sticks or a frame ever again.
The nursing home has a staff of eighteen nurses and three doctors, but is otherwise filled with old people. The old people are packed tightly together, and there they talk about old things and other old people and old objects that can’t be bought in the shops any more and old food which everyone has forgotten the recipes to. Mother is furious at the old people, she screams at the nurses and asks them why she is being housed with drooling idiots who constantly wet themselves and don’t know who they are any more. She says she is not like the other old people; she is still aware. The nurses smile at Mother and give her some pills. Mother hides the pills. She has begun a great collection, which she keeps in a little plastic bag immersed in one of the nursing home’s lavatory tanks. I am very proud of her, there is no doubting that we are related.
The nurses do not allow her to play the tape of my father’s teeth and she complains that she gets no sleep. Mother has her hair brushed every day.
Anna Tap.
Anna Tap has chosen to look after me. After Observatory Mansions collapsed she said I became quite helpless. We spent our days on long walks around the city. For a long time these walks took us to the place where Observatory Mansions used to be. The rubble had been taken away, skip by skip, and on those walks we would often go into Tearsham Park Gardens. The bathroom scalesman was still there and he said, each time we met him, that Anna was putting on weight. Indeed, she became quite fat. Her stomach showed through her dress. Soon she had to buy new dresses made of a stretchy material, large enough to keep her and her growing belly inside. For a while she even gave up cigarettes. Now, though, she has become thin again, not dangerously thin as she was before, but as thin as she was when she first came to Observatory Mansions.
Certain changes have been made to her eyes. The glass ones arrived at the eye hospital but not before another pair had been made and Anna wears those eyes and never the hospital ones. The eyes she wears are partly constructed of glass and partly of wood. Ottila, the eye maker at the waxworks, assembled them. It was William who organized this for us.
So, in the end, Anna did get to wear Saint Lucy’s eyes, the surface of which has been carefully glued on to glass balls and fit Anna’s skull wonderfully well. And she looks beautiful with them. They make her happy too. (Sometimes when Anna keeps still with her eyelids open, showing her wooden eyes, I think that Anna has become an object. But then she talks, and I am reminded that she is the real Anna Tap, made of flesh.)
City Heights.
Anna and I live together in a building just opposite Tearsham Park Gardens. We have been living here for a few weeks now. It is a modern building but it suits us well enough. Our new home is built on exactly the same spot as Observatory Mansions, as Tearsham Park, it is called City Heights and it has twenty floors, all of which are identical.
They have built a tunnel out from City Heights stretching towards Tearsham Park Gardens, a concrete subway so that all the new residents can walk beneath the traffic of the roundabout and have no fear of it. This tunnel has yellow strip lighting which makes it feel claustrophobic and hostile. There is some graffiti there too, the work, I believe, of Mark Daniel Cooper.
But even though Observatory Mansions has gone and City Heights has taken its place, it is possible, if you’re really quiet, to hear the old building. Sometimes I can hear Miss Higg’s television set or Twenty barking, and occasionally I think I can smell the one hundred smells of Peter Bugg. If you’re really still, so still that your heart almost stops, you can just pick up Tearsham Park sound, you can just hear the dog Hope scratching or my father talking to the stars or even Emma telling a story. And perhaps, if you’re as proficient at outer and inner stillness as I am, you might hear, might, and then only barely, the troubled breathing of my brother, of that other Francis Orme.
Francis Orme.
I wore white gloves. I lived with my mother and father. I had a swollen lower lip. I no longer wear white gloves. I live with Miss Anna Tap. My lips are not swollen.
I no longer work on the plinth in the centre of the city. I was offered employment by the company who own City Heights. I accepted their offer. They have given me a wonderful blue uniform with golden epaulettes and they have given Anna and me a wonderful two-bedroom flat in the basement. Anna says I make a fine porter. I know everyone who lives in the building.
Anna and I spend most of our time together around a new object. This new object has absolutely no understanding of either inner or outer stillness and keeps moving all the time and makes loud, loud noises that keep us awake at night. The new object is alive. It is a female new object and we have called her Frances.
When I first saw our baby daughter I cried because she had such tiny hands. Now they are larger. Now they grip and won’t let go.
I have been painting our new home white. Sometimes I dip my entire hands into the pot of paint. On those occasions I walk to the mirror and look at myself with white hands, and then I feel sad.
APPENDIX
FRANCIS ORME’S
EXHIBITION OF LOVE
(Lot Numbers 1–996)
1. A till receipt.
2. A used envelope (white).
3. A used envelope (blue).
4. A white plastic bag.
5. An empty wine bottle.
6. A pencil stub.
7. An empty can of plum tomatoes.
8. A red plastic bag.
9.
An empty vinegar bottle.
10. An empty can of pineapple chunks.
11. An empty cardboard box (white).
12. A rusted and bent nail.
13. A brown paper bag.
14. A quantity of pencil shavings.
15. A goose’s feathers.
16. A light bulb (blown).
17. An old mop head.
18. An empty cardboard box (brown).
19. A number of fish bones.
20. An out-of-date calendar.
21. A collection of toenail clippings.
22. A quantity of various dogs’ faeces in a glass jar (sealed).