The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds)

by Harris, Wilson

  Which alternative she chose depended on the measure of toy she became. She could—at one stroke—select a square inch of mirror possessing all hostages to the devil and imprint it with a kiss until third-party child-hostage of the family of man mirrored all unfulfilled pledges and hypnotic abuse.

  Sebastian apologized to Stella for his behaviour the following morning and sought to please and placate poor John by making faces of saviours and kings he had liberated from prison, the faces of millionaires, astronauts, coalminers, even barbers and emperors, all in his name, his (John’s) body. John bided his time. His troubled innocence, the price he had been for so many liberations, needed now to invest in a bank of flowers. He wiped away the faces Sebastian invited him to mimic and drew him into the street. Sebastian was taken by surprise. He suggested that they go to Paddington Station where the great trains run. John refused to be bribed by sweets and promises. With a sweep of his hand he insisted on another rich train, rich fate.

  The emphasis on rich was consistent with Sebastian’s adoration and unconscious parody of liberated millionaires but because of the troubled innocence of a child, it was all the more compelling, all the more layered with naïve traces of angelic moral and subtle grandeur. Wealth or riches had achieved great things, aeroplanes, nuclear rockets, fantastic buildings, fast trains, ships, cathedrals, etc. etc. etc., but in essence it seemed now even to blind Sebastian—as John thumped him with his small fist—that all these magnificent conceptions were native to a child’s genius. They were—whatever their splendour—still divided from the lighthouse of maturity no one had yet founded in paradise. And therein lay—in the irony of hostage to the devil who commanded the globe—the memories of hypnotic family, hypnotic abuse, upon which great architects and scientists, great composers draw as they too, like John, wave a hand, strike the ground, strike up the orchestra of a train of flowers to match every gamble of soul.

  With a sinking heart Sebastian was being tugged and pulled by John along Dolphin Street. They did not have far to go. The pale November sun painted the houses on their side of the street with glimmering pearl and threw the other side into chill and luminous shadow. There was no wind and the sun in which they walked was warm as a light rabbit or a piece of cheese on toast. They came to the garage John had in mind. A procession was emerging, it crossed the pavement at a snail’s pace and moved on to the street. A faint chime of bells rang far across the city.

  “Millionaire,” said John, pointing to the great black hearse banked high with flowers that seemed to Sebastian’s hollow senses remote or faded like squares of toilet paper stuck together with ash. Sebastian felt the faintest, yet stifling, burden, he seemed to see unseeingly his own addiction laid bare before him; to see unseeingly as if the eyes of ashen bell in his head were open in the other’s head, whoever the other was in the coffin in the hearse. It was faintest awakening, faintest baton, faintest cracked coffin (rather than resurrection) that the angel of liberated wealth invoked. And it was still shrouded in parallel wheels of oblivious innocence and guilt (his guilt and John’s troubled innocence). John was delighted, convinced it was all a celebration; it was as if he knew (though how could he know?) that the hearse possessed millionaire hostage to faintest awakening, faintest orchestra of the unemployed, faintest descent into the funeral of an age.

  If John were not rabbit-child, cheese-child, paradise-child, to be consumed in the games they played, Sebastian would have sworn that he knew, that he had planned the cultivation of a rich procession to mimic or strike back at his (Sebastian’s) hollow games of wealth and theft of genius. That theft required the foundations of the coffin, that the scales should not fall from one’s eyes until the faint time was ripe to re-visit paradise. When would that be? Sebastian looked at John but John kept his own counsel. The procession now began to roll. Each car was a sleek composition of chariot-and-cat. The hearse possessed wheels to accentuate the deaf road on which it ran even as it incorporated the blind springs of animal grace one associates with sombre countenance, purring fate, angelic chauffeur.

  “Holy, oblivious chauffeur,” Sebastian thought he heard John say. But that was impossible. The faint bell had ceased to chime but an invisible presence peered over the rim of the coffin and waved to Sebastian.

  *

  Sebastian waved back from his cell, the last day in November, meditating upon lavatory codes he had compiled over the month that bore upon the debts he was accumulating, the credit he had received, unpaid bills, for drugs.

  There were three spidery entries for the 13th, the 21st and the 29th that ran as follows:

  90 minute script, White City

  180 minute script, White City

  90 minute script, White City, cancell’d

  Minute actually signified day, and 90 days’ supply Sebastian knew would last for scarcely a fortnight. Script was code for prescription but in the underground market it implied high-priced scene or promised money.

  White City implied the pavement opposite the greyhound stadium close to the Broadcasting Studios in White City. That was the rendezvous where Sebastian met his producer or middleman. Cancell’d implied that he was up to his eyes and ears in debt (he owed his producer close to fifty pounds and had had to cancel his last script). Thus it was clear that Sebastian had paid dear to the underground market for speed.

  The slide into debt had started when he had forfeited prescriptions from his GP after a quarrel and had thus lost his normal supply at the normal rate or price. The facts were that as a porter on night duty at the Victoria Maternity, he had successfully appealed to his doctor or GP for a prescription by explaining how starved he was for sleep during the day by the fiendish racket that a road repair gang was making just beyond his bedroom window. He needed a rich speed to face the night, the abyss of the night, after a snail’s crawl of sleep during the day; eyes pounded and barely shut when it was time for him to open them to the last shades of the sun.

  In any event—even if he had not lost his job at the hospital — the gang had long since dispersed, and the funeral, long-suffering faces he turned upon his doctor, long-suffering, coffined day husband, long-suffering, coffined night porter, were of no avail. His deception had worn thin when the doctor happened to drive through Dolphin Street at noon and to come upon no sign whatever of the mysterious road gang, the mysterious grave diggers of Sebastian’s exasperated daytime soul.

  Sebastian was awakened rudely by Stella’s voice just beyond the lavatory door. “Sebastian, Sebastian, how long are you going to remain in there? I need to have a word with you before I leave for the market.”

  Sebastian hastily pulled up his trousers, pulled the chain, and shot through the door BANG. His alacrity made it clear to Stella that he was high. Not high like Mary’s Father Marsden upon whom a great spirit leaned to patrol the globe, but high in an inverted sense as if he (Sebastian) ran on the edge of numinous, Alfred Hitchcock coffin or pit, yet stood upon a pole held aloft by a devil in the depths of that coffin, a pole on which he danced with numb toes, and skilfully, however blindly, preserved himself from the swirling grave beneath.

  The hierarchies between Marsden’s freedom and swirling depths of possession were multifold, both Mary and Stella knew. Sebastian’s high—in point of fact—stood above other stilts or highs or needles’ points in the coffin of space. Each high presumed that it stood on the lip of the coffin however deep it may already have fallen … that it waved at passers-by rather than sink into oblivion.

  “Sebastian, what have you been up to?” Stella said. “It’s been an age. Look! It’s time we sorted out this dole business. I’m not even sure how much you are getting. You’ve been pinching from it, Sebastian. I know it’s hell to be out of work. Do you realize it’s Mary’s salary that’s been seeing us through? Thank god for Father Marsden.”

  “I can spend my money as I like,” Sebastian grumbled.

  “Your money? What about John? What about food, rent, electricity, gas?”

  “We’ll make out,” sa
id Sebastian. He suddenly had an inspiration, a way of making his debts look like high, devilish cunning assets. “I’m writing a play for White City.” It was a euphemistic confession to himself that though he had cancelled his third script he would have to find money and pay something next time to secure a body of speed. Stella was deceived, as she often was, by the faces he made. She opened her eyes wide. “White City television studios? Have you really written a play, Sebastian?” Then she laughed, it was quite absurd. Of course, on the other hand, all he needed was to string a few words together. The camera would do the rest. Still, even so, she was sceptical. “What nonsense, Sebastian.” She was staring at him hard. “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Someone’s been approaching you to appear on a programme about drugs. I know they’ve been talking to addicts and that they appear to pay good money to the heroin people. I’m not sure it’s your scene, Sebastian. Speed’s nothing at all, nothing at all, compared to heroin.”

  Sebastian was surprised by the turn of events. He felt he must build on the immediate lie, erect a higher and higher pole on which to dance even if it lasted but for a moment. “My scene does interest them. It does. It does.” But, even as he dwelt on the notion, his mind went blank. The truth was he had been driven by her (the bitch!) into an area that would require of him a confession of obliviousness to the torment he endured. Without that obliviousness how could he endure the invisible spectres that waved at him?

  “Why should I tell them anything? Why should I say how I feel or don’t feel?” The silent question about oblivious mask seemed to pop into his mind from nowhere and to make him more unhappily conscious of Stella’s uncanny capacity to unsettle him, when he was high, to unsettle the foundations of the coffin that ran far deeper than his perception.

  “I shan’t go through with it, that’s all. I won’t appear. They won’t pick my brains.”

  “But why not? You needn’t worry,” said Stella. “I shall tell you what to say.”

  “You? Tell me what to say?”

  “All I mean is I could work out something for you. You won’t have too much—to say too much.”

  Sebastian stared at her with rising anger at his risen lie beyond which it seemed now he could not escape. He felt, given a chance, he could rip … Dolphin Street ripper. That was the way to keep a lie solid. When did he and Stella ever say too much to each other? They tended, on the whole, to speak in monosyllabic bursts and utterances; except on those occasions when the need for blood music became so intense it created excited quarrels, terror and loathing, fascinations with horror. And even then those fascinations tended to fade like a forgotten dream the next morning, the phantom, warring cities they had erected tended to fall.

  “You’re a bitch, Stella,” said Sebastian now. He’d show her he could talk. “One day you’ll cave in … you’ll write a letter….” It was a random shot. Perhaps he had had a glimmering sensation of the future.

  “What letter?” Stella was hurt and puzzled.

  Sebastian ignored this. “Everything has to be your idea. You invent even the lies I tell. You feed me cues, you, Mary and John. I’m your fucking nobody genius. Even this interview (or would it be an inquisition?) at White City, even now…” He didn’t know how to confess at last that there was to be no television programme, that he had been lying, not she. He had been building heroic (not heroin) playwright into himself.

  Double-edged play indeed, play that accumulated into money masks he owed his drugs’ middleman; but play also that signified the abstract programme of a bitch (that was how he now saw Stella’s cue)—a cue all the more needling in that it constituted the pole he wished to climb from which to wave to a million viewers from the coffined, brilliant box that glowed like live ashes in their sitting rooms.

  What was sobering and frightening, Stella felt, was how the trivialities of their lives, the quarrels about nothing, could breed an enormity of double-edged play, Sebastian’s actual money debts, and their mutual debt to the cliff or precipice of inner truth to which they clung for dear life. Stella knew she could slip if she were not careful, that Sebastian could wear her to a shred.

  Stella felt suddenly, irrationally, worn to a shred. Perhaps it was true that she tended to stitch words into his mouth and to treat him like a failed coat. Her attitude aroused him to retaliate, to feign a desire to see her perish. How—Stella wondered—did all this reflect on the lie he had told? Was it not, however unwittingly, as much her lie as his?

  Here was stage indeed, White City studio, in which she could become his interrogator, and also interrogate herself, implicitly interrogate Mary.

  The question they needed to ask themselves was this: what was the difference between lies and truth?

  Some lies were called white lies but others such as Sebastian’s were punted around like a ball or seized upon to ease the unbearable pressure of truth that the seed of genius and responsibility resided—however rotten its state—in every man, every woman, every child; seed of dawning consciousness of plagued humanity, seed of unique perception of birth and death—a perception that no paradisean animal possessed prior to Man. For the first time, perhaps, who knows, in the entire universe, the lie had become a little death that affected the body of the animal kingdom in the human imagination, human kingdom. And, as a consequence, truth (however faint) was ubiquitous; it resided in the heights and in the depths, in flower and in beast, in perceived cradle as much as in perceived coffin—in awareness of little births, little deaths in order to usher in the infinite metaphysic that all are born to die several deaths, to endure several lies, if one is to move by degrees into genius of mutual responsibility, shared responsibility for the truth, shared capacity to judge and to be judged for the lives one lives, the way one treats everything. That judgement was intrinsic to genius and to the terrifying reality of love.

  Stella was almost lost in judgement of herself. Her interrogation was fading, the lights of the studio went down and Sebastian’s voice came to her from within the hollow tree of himself. It was as if he had retreated into perceived coffin or television box and summoned her to follow him. She hesitated. He was humming a tune. Stella was startled almost out of her wits at the consequences of the lie she had unwittingly put into his mouth. It had led to this! It had led to a tune that riveted her backwards in time, into childhood associations. The voice of the humming dead! Her mother’s voice had tended to be deep, contralto, and in the depths of Sebastian’s tree, the depths of the studio, it seemed to rumble anew out of the past.

  Her mother’s voice (she could scarcely believe it was so close at hand in coffin or studio) was Mary’s mother’s voice. Why did she have to say that now? Ah yes, said Stella, I am a mask Mary wears, a way of coping with truth. We are each other’s little deaths, little births. We cling to sarcophagus-globe and to universal cradle.

  It was the song that her mother was singing that brought it all back. “Mack the Knife”.

  “Put on a record,” said Sebastian in the depths of the studio. “Tell the old woman to stop.”

  “She isn’t old,” Stella protested.

  Her mother stopped.

  Stella wondered if she would fly, if she were offended, but no, she didn’t, the music returned once again coming this time from an old gramophone her mother possessed. It was “Mack the Knife” sung and played by Louis Armstrong. The absurdity and tall story lyric, oceanic city, were sustained by Armstrong’s height of trumpet and by his instrumental voice, hoarse and meditative in contrast to the trumpet he played, ecstatic cradle, ecstatic childhood, ecstatic coffin, ecstatic grieving surf or sea.

  Where the shark bites with his teeth dear

  Scarlet billows start to spray….

  On the sidewalk Sunday morning

  Lies a body oozing life….

  Mack the Knife was a sailor. His follies, his callous epic of loves and crimes, left him bereft and exposed and storm-tossed, trumpet-tossed, on the hoarse sea or voice upon which he sailed from port of call to port of call through a proce
ssion of phantom women, Sukey Tawdrey, sweet Lucy Brown and Jenny Diver; all were apparently as doomed as he. Only a consummate naïveté, consummate riddle of childhood truth, could beach Mack the Knife in Armstrong’s and Stella’s mother’s voice and turn him into anti-climactic folly or hollow crime and into a pageant of tricks, the lame that walked, the blind that saw, the dying body that oozed life.

  Stella was shivering. The fascination of the song for her mother was something that she grew up with. Mack was also the name that her father bore. Mack was her mother’s god. And her mother’s name? Guess, Stella whispered to Sebastian in the darkened studio. Jenny! It was a random hit, bull’s eye. It struck home. Jenny heard. She was weeping. It came with the faintest whisper of the sea, the faintest whisper of a flute, in the studio. Mack’s women were the Sukey Tawdreys, the sweet Lucy Browns, of the world. Between the ages of four and seven Stella thought that the postman was her father. Until she realized that he was but the middleman between her real father and Jenny her mother. He brought the letters from foreign ports with foreign stamps over which Jenny wept. On her seventh birthday the last letter arrived. Her father was dead, his ship sunk. It was a lie. It drove her mother in to an asylum where she contemplated Mack clinging for dear life to sarcophagus-globe even as she vanished into the arms of god, bride of god.

  Stella was taken into care by a Social Welfare Body and placed in an orphanage in East Anglia.

  The loss of her parents imbued her at an impressionable age with an ambivalence that was to haunt her all her life; an ambivalence that subsisted upon the apparent eclipse of her antecedents (Mack the Knife and Jenny Diver) hand in hand with a sensation of being pulled by them nevertheless into the depths and heights of the studio of place, studies of earth and sea and sky. It was akin to a dream of intensest moment she had forgotten though that dream was alive to contain her in its folds of unconscious memory, to possess her and to give her a sense of being charged with flight, a sense also of charging others to come to her or to be possessed by her. The energy of that charge broke life into several masks, several paths, several patterns of obliviousness by which Stella could bear her earliest terrors of love and death.