Blood and Water and Other Stories

by Patrick Mcgrath

  So Harry began to talk. He described how Anson swept him into a summer of hectic and dazzling pleasures, of long nights, riotous and frenzied, when all of America seemed to be convulsed in a spasm of fevered gaiety, and the two of them had moved through the revels like a pair of gods, languid, elegant, twin souls presiding with heavy-lidded eyes over the nation’s binge. That summer, the summer of 1925, Harry often found himself leaving Anson’s house in the first light of dawn, still in evening clothes, and slipping into the welcome gloom of St Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue. ‘You wouldn’t know it, Bernard,’ he said; ‘they tore it down in 1947. A lovely church, Gothic Revival; I miss it . . . at the early Mass it would be lit only by the dim, blood-red glow from the stained-glass windows, and by a pair of white candles that rose from gilded holders on either side of the altar and threw out a gorgeous, shimmering halo . . . The priest I knew well, an ascetic young Jesuit; I remember how his pale face caught the candlelight as he turned to the congregation – the whole effect was so strangely beautiful, Bernard, if you had seen it you would understand the attraction Catholicism held for so many of us . . . it was the emotional appeal, really; disciplined Christianity we found more difficult to embrace . . .’

  Harry rambled on in this vein for some minutes, his eyes on the spire and his fingers curled about his glass. My own thoughts drifted off down parallel tracks, lulled comfortably by his voice. As a raconteur Harry was slow and fastidious; he composed his sentences with scrupulous care and lingered indulgently over his more graceful phrases. ‘I doubt I would have done well in business,’ he was saying, inconsequentially; ‘I just haven’t the kidney for it. One needs strong nerves, and I was always much too effete. Anson used to say that the world was a brothel, and he was right, of course. So where is one to turn? I can tell you where I turned: straight into the arms of Mother Church!’ He swallowed the rest of his gin. ‘But that’s another story, and forgive me, Bernard, I seem to be digressing again. All this happened so very long ago, you see, that I tend to confuse the order in which things occurred . . .

  ‘There are two questions, Bernard, that have to be addressed to an angel. One concerns his origins; the other, his purpose.’

  • • •

  At these words I began to pay active attention once more. This angel business was, of course, nonsense; but I had come to suspect that something rather fantastic, or even perverse, might lie behind it.

  ‘About his origins I could learn almost nothing,’ Harry continued. ‘People said he arrived in New York during the last year of the first war; he had apparently been raised in Ireland by his mother, who was from Boston and had married into an obscure branch of the Havershaws of Cork, an eccentric family, so they said; but then, you see, well-born Europeans with cloudy origins have always been drifting into New York, and so long as their manners and their money are adequate — particularly the latter — they’re admitted to society and no one’s very bothered about where they’ve come from. We are, after all, a republic.’

  Boston! At the mention of Boston an idea suddenly occurred to me. Harry was old Boston, this I knew, and I wondered whether this angel of his might be nothing more than an elaborate sexual disguise. Anson Havershaw, by this theory, was simply an alter ego, a detached figment of Harry’s neurotic imagination, a double or other constructed as a sort of libidinal escape valve. In other words, Harry transcended his own guilty carnality by assuming at one remove the identity of an angel – this would explain the physical resemblance between the two, and the contradictory themes of hedonism and spirituality; what Catholic, after all, lapsed or otherwise, could ever believe the body was a temple in which nothing was unclean? I watched Harry smiling to himself, and his expression, in the twilight, and despite the patrician dignity of the nose, seemed suddenly silly, pathetic.

  ‘And his purpose?’ I said drily.

  ‘Ah.’ The pleasure slowly ebbed from his face, and he began to make an unpleasant sucking noise with his dentures. ‘Who knows?’ he said at last. ‘Who knows what an angel would be doing in a century like this one? Maybe he was just meant to be an angel for our times.’ There was a long pause. ‘Immortal spirit burned in him, you see . . . Sin meant nothing to him; he was pure soul. This was his tragedy.’

  ‘His tragedy?’

  Harry nodded. ‘To be pure soul in an age that would not believe its existence.’ He asked me to give him more gin. I was feeling very irritable as I poured his gin.

  • • •

  We sat there, Harry and I, in silence, he no doubt contemplating these spurious memories of his, while I wondered how soon I could decently escape. Harry had taken from his pocket a small jade compact and was powdering his face with rapid, jerky movements, his eyes averted from me so I had only the beaky profile. ‘Pure soul,’ he repeated, in a murmur, ‘in an age that would not believe its existence.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I said wearily.

  ‘Oh,’ he replied, snapping shut the compact, ‘I lost sight of him. I believe he came to a bad end; I believe he was sent to prison.’

  ‘No he wasn’t.’

  Harry looked at me sharply. There was, for the first time in our relationship, a genuinely honest contact between us. All the rest had been indulgence on his part and acquiescence on mine. ‘Am I so transparent?’ he said. ‘I suppose I must be. Dear Bernard, you’re angry with me.’

  I rose to my feet and moved to the window and stared into the night. ‘I don’t think Anson Havershaw ever existed,’ I said. ‘There was instead a man consumed with guilt who created a fairy story about angels and spirits in order to conceal certain truths from himself.’ Why, I thought, do old drunks always choose me to tell their stories to?

  ‘I haven’t told you the complete truth,’ said Harry.

  ‘There was no Anson Havershaw,’ I said.

  ‘Oh there was, there was. There is,’ said Harry. A pause. Then: ‘There was no Harry Talboys.’

  I turned. This I was not prepared for.

  ‘I am Anson Havershaw.’

  I laughed.

  He nodded. ‘I shall show you,’ he said, and rising to his feet, he began laboriously to remove his jacket, and then to unbutton his shirt.

  • • •

  In the middle of Harry’s ceiling was a fixture into which three light bulbs were screwed. A short length of chain hung from it; Harry pulled the chain, and the room was flooded with a harsh raw light. Beneath his shirt, it now became apparent, he wore a garment of some sort of off-white surgical plastic. Slowly he removed his shirt. The plastic, which was quite grubby, encased him like a sleeveless tunic from his upper chest to a line somewhere below the belt of his trousers. It was fastened down the side by a series of little buckles, and a very narrow fringe of dirty gauze peeped from the upper edge, where the skin was rubbed to an angry rash. Harry’s arms were the arms of a very old man, the flesh hanging from the bone in loose white withered flaps. He smiled slightly, for I suppose I must have been gazing with horrified curiosity at this bizarre corset of his. I was standing close to the incense, and as Harry fumbled with the buckles I brought the censer up under my nose; for the smell rapidly became very bad indeed. He dropped his trousers and underpants. The corset extended to his lower belly, forming a line just above a hairless pubis and a tiny, uncircumcised penis all puckered up and wrinkled in upon itself. He loosed the final straps; holding the corset to his body with his fingers, he told me gently that I must not be shocked. And then he revealed himself to me.

  There was, first of all, the smell; a wave of unspeakable foulness was released with the removal of the corset, and to defend my senses I was forced to clamp my nostrils and inhale the incense with my mouth. Harry’s flesh had rotted off his lower ribs and belly, and the clotted skin still clinging to the ribs and hipbones that bordered the hole was in a state of gelatinous putrescence. In the hole I caught the faint gleam of his spine, and amid an indistinct bundle of piping the forms of shadowy organs. I saw sutures on his intestines, and the marks of neat stit
ching, and a cluster of discolored organic vessels bound with a thin strip of translucent plastic. He should have been dead, and I suppose I must have whispered as much, for I heard him say that he could not die. How long I stood there gazing into his decaying torso I do not know; at some point I seemed to become detached from my own body and saw as if from high up and far away the two figures standing in the room, the flowers and the crucifix between them, myself clutching the censer and Harry standing with his opened body and his trousers at his ankles. It took long enough, I suppose, for the full horror of his condition to be borne home to me. This is what it means to be an angel, I remember thinking, in our times at least: eternal life burned in him while his body, his temple, crumbled about the flame. Out there in the hot night the city trembled with a febrile life of its own, and somewhere a siren leaped into sudden desolate pain. All I saw then was a young man standing in the corner of a shabby room watching an old man pull up his trousers.

  • • •

  As I write this it is late January, and very cold outside. Snow lies heaped in filthy piles along the edge of the sidewalk, and the Chrysler Building is a bleak gray needle against a thickening winter afternoon sky. The men from the men’s shelter huddle in the doorways in the Bowery, selling cigarettes from off the tops of plastic milk crates, and the smell of incense still pervades the lower floors of the building. I can’t help thinking of him as Harry – it seems somehow to suit him better. He asked me to write an account of our friendship, I wouldn’t otherwise have done it; writing seems futile now. Everything seems futile, for some reason I don’t fully understand, and I keep wondering why any of us cling to the raft. The one consolation I can find is the presence of that other spirit traveling with us in the body – a consolation denied my rotting friend downstairs, whoever, whatever, he is.

  THE LOST EXPLORER

  * * *

  ONE FRESH AND GUSTY DAY in the damp autumn of her twelfth year Evelyn found a lost explorer in the garden of her parents’ London home. He was lying in a small tent beneath a mosquito net so torn and gaping as to be quite inadequate, were there any mosquitoes for it to protect him from. His clothes were stained with sweat and blood, and a grizzled beard stubbled his emaciated face. On the folding stool beside the camp bed stood a flask, empty, a revolver, unloaded, two bullets, three matches, a small oil lamp, and a dirty, creased map of the upper reaches of the Congo. He was delirious with fever and occasionally gibbered about the pygmies. Evelyn thought he was wonderful.

  And he thought she was wonderful, too. When the delirium had passed and he lay, pale, spent, and shivering, she loomed out of the fog that was his consciousness like a bright ministering angel.

  ‘Agatha,’ he whispered. ‘I want a drink of water.’ The angel vanished, and the explorer lay panting feebly in his tiny tent. In the deep, still place at the center of his frenzied mind a flame of hope was lit, for Agatha was here. What had happened was this: the explorer had mistaken Evelyn for the nanny who’d nursed him through a childhood illness!

  Evelyn returned to the tent with a cup of water. She folded back the ragged netting and helped the explorer onto an elbow. Much of the water spilled onto his bush jacket, but at length his parched lips smacked up their fill and he lay back, exhausted. Evelyn gazed down at him with benevolent compassion.

  ‘Agatha,’ he whispered, ‘give me your hand.’ She knelt on the ground beside the camp bed and took the explorer’s clammy palm in her fingers. A ghost of a smile hovered at the cracked edges of the man’s lips. ‘Agatha,’ he sighed; but then, seized suddenly with a fresh wave of panic, he started up from his bed. ‘The pygmies, Agatha!’ he shouted. ‘I hear the pygmies!’

  Evelyn remained calm. She laid her cool hand upon his fevered temples. The traffic of London murmured in the thoroughfares beyond. ‘They’re miles away,’ she whispered. ‘They don’t know you’re here.’

  ‘They’re coming!’ he shouted, his head jerking from side to side and his red-rimmed eyes abulge. ‘They’re coming to eat us!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ breathed Evelyn, stroking that troubled brow. ‘No one’s going to eat us.’

  The panic passed; a moment later the tension was visibly draining from the explorer’s body. He sank back onto the camp bed. ‘Agatha,’ he said weakly, his hand still clutching hers. ‘You’re good.’

  ‘Rest,’ murmured Evelyn. ‘Sleep. You’re safe now. Sleep.’

  • • •

  When she was sure the explorer was sound asleep, Evelyn skipped up the garden to the house. A washing line was strung from a post at the top of the steps to a tree by the wall at the side of the house. To this line were pegged three white sheets, all flapping wildly in the wind. Dead leaves spun about the girl as she pattered gracefully up the steps from the garden. She opened the back door. Her mother and Mrs Guppy were bent over the oven with their backsides to her.

  ‘Are you quite sure it’s done, Mrs Guppy?’ her mother was saying.

  ‘It’s had twenty-five minutes, Mrs Piker-Smith. It must be done.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope so. Gerald is so fussy about his chop. Ah, there you are, Evelyn. Run and wash your hands, dear, and we’ll eat.’

  Mrs Piker-Smith was a plump, tweedy woman, and she was commonly in the throes of mild anxiety. Ten minutes later she sat at the dining-room table gazing at her husband, Gerald, the eminent surgeon. He in turn was gazing at his chop. Evelyn had already started to eat, and paid no attention to either of them.

  ‘Is it all right, dear?’ said Mrs Piker-Smith. ‘We gave it almost half-an-hour.’ Her own knife and fork were poised at a shallow angle above her plate. A sudden gust rattled the windowpane. The surgeon tentatively sliced a small section of meat and raised the fork to his lips. He chewed the meat thoughtfully, his eyes wandering about the ceiling and upper walls as he did so. Finally he swallowed and, laying down his cutlery, dabbed at his lips with a starched white napkin. ‘It’s quite thoroughly cooked, Denise,’ he said, his eyes suddenly settling upon his wife’s troubled face. ‘You need not worry so.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Mrs Piker-Smith, brightening, and with some gusto cut a potato in two. ‘What have you been doing all morning, Evelyn?’ she said, turning to her daughter.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ said her father, eating.

  ‘Just playing in the garden, Daddy.’

  ‘What ever does the child get up to?’ he murmured, as he transferred a spot of English mustard from the side of his plate to a neat rectangle of chop.

  ‘Daddy,’

  ‘Yes, Evelyn?’

  ‘Are there still pygmies in the Congo?’

  A frown briefly ruffled the calm surface of the surgeon’s fine-domed brow, like a breeze whispering across a lake. ‘I believe so. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, school.’

  ‘Are you doing Africa, darling?’ said Mrs Piker-Smith.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘It’s not called the Congo anymore,’ said Daddy. ‘It became Zaïre when the Belgians left.’

  ‘When was that, Daddy?’

  ‘Nineteen-sixty, I think.’

  • • •

  After lunch Evelyn always had to go to her room and read on her bed for an hour. Today she stood at the bedroom window, gazing into the garden and thinking about her explorer. White clouds fled like driven rags across the blustering blue sky, and the branches of the great elm at the bottom of the garden flailed about like the arms of drowning men. The Piker-Smiths’ was one of those long narrow gardens enclosed by an old wall whose crumbling red bricks were overgrown with ivy. The path ran from the foot of the back-door steps between two flowerbeds and then twisted over a stretch of lawn before arriving at a small round goldfish pond, the surface of which was half-hidden by clusters of green-fronded water lilies. Beyond the pond a gardening shed, its windows misted with dust and cobwebs and its door secured by a huge rusting padlock, clung in ramshackle fashion to the corner formed by the east wall and the end wall. The rest of the garden beyond the pond w
as a tangled and overgrown mass of rhododendron bushes, into whose labyrinthine depths, since the death of the old gardener, only Evelyn now ventured. It was in that tangled thicket of evergreens that the explorer’s tent was pitched, and there that the man himself lay struggling with a furious malaria. The three white sheets billowed in the wind, and for an instant Evelyn imagined the house and the garden as a great ship shouldering on to the tropics. Absently she picked up ajar containing a pickled thumb that Daddy had given her. She swirled it round in its liquid and willed the time to pass.

  • • •

  When her hour was up, Evelyn came downstairs to find Daddy in the hall just leaving for the hospital. He was telling Mummy something about dinner: the Cleghorns were coming and there was no sherry in the house. Then Daddy said goodbye and left.

  ‘Now, darling,’ said Mrs Piker-Smith, ‘I’m off to my bridge. You’ll be all right till Mrs Guppy gets back?’

  ‘Yes, Mummy.’

  Then Mrs Piker-Smith left too. Evelyn was alone. She was down the back-door steps in a flash, under the billowing sheets, across the lawn and into the bushes. The explorer was still fast asleep. Evelyn knelt beside him and watched his face with intense concentration for some minutes. Then her gaze drifted to the objects on his camp stool, and settled on the black revolver. She had never touched a gun before, and it fascinated her. She reached out hesitantly, and clasped it by the grip. How cold and slippery it was! And how heavy! She lifted it and pressed the barrel to her cheek. It smelled metallic and oily. She touched it once with her tongue, and recoiled with a small shock as she tasted its steely sweetness. Ugh! She cradled it in her palms, in her lap, and stared at it solemnly. How would you put bullets into it? She could turn the cylinder, but she could not release it. Perhaps this little catch . . .