The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds)

by Harris, Wilson

  The garden was neglected; there were two battered buckets, one empty, the other half-filled with mossy soil; there was a wiry rose-bush in one corner and the stump of a sunflower plant in another. A clothes-line ran across the square of the garden and Jackson ducked to avoid it. He paused on the other side with one hand still on the line, his body so angled in Marsden’s supernatural mirror, it seemed about to run on an implicit horizon of space. The back windows of other buildings stared down at him like opaque galaxies, a faint glitter here and there. A blackbird was singing its heart out up on one of the roofs blissfully unconscious of the dereliction of the little garden. Jackson looked up but could not see it. All at once the singing ceased. But not before a curious almost thrilling sadness, thrilling note of warning, descended into the garden and seemed to issue without antecedent from an unseen throat.

  As the silence deepened and the traffic itself grew dumb, Jackson was aware of another or other presences in the garden. A cat had appeared. It held a mouse by the nape of its neck.

  It deposited the mouse. The mouse ran. One could hear its shriek in a dumb aeroplane that passed overhead. It appeared on the point of secreting itself under a cloud of bricks but the cat sprang, gave it a glancing blow and flung it into the open again. The mouse lay still under the stump of the sunflower. The cat tapped it lightly like wind rustling a dead leaf. It moved, advanced, the cat played with it softly. The mouse’s fur was in the cat’s teeth, gloved silence, gloved uproar and cessation of all sound. Jackson recalled as if the mirror that held him, held the sky, the scene of a street fight he had once witnessed in downtown Buffalo, USA, the conflicting bodies like shadows against a satellite wall in the evening sun.

  The cat let it fall. After an eternity, it seemed, the mouse darted like an enlivened root or leaf blown by an unfelt wind across the earth. The cat remained wooden for a lightning frozen instant. Then it pounced, seized the mouse, bit deeply again and again into nape and neck before consuming its victim, starting with the head and eating into space downward.

  Jackson was gripped by fascination. Rioting foreigners at the South Pole had vanished. The worn battery voice of the news-reader had grown cold. Minute drops erupted from sunflower in the garden. The cat came towards him. He wanted to strike at it but as it paused by his leg and rubbed itself against him, recognizing its master, its eyes held him with a fiendish innocence, a yellow, imperturbable light as of animal divinity, animal suns.

  “Innocence,” said the mirror with a start. “Fancy that! What an idea. Whose discovery I wonder? Neither innocence nor guilt resides in the garden unless one converts play to death into womb of qualities that resembles nature, yet is other than nature as it gleams in a mirror of consciousness. Call that gleam, if you like, innocence and guilt.

  “We regress into a womb that is other than any given womb—we regress into silence in the midst of noise, we regress into original light and darkness in the midst of complacent blind—to seek a way across the gulf between animal, divine priority (food, territory, hierarchy) and human, divine perception of innocence and guilt, human inimitable space that converts the food of lust into redemptive passion….”

  *

  Sebastian rolled over in bed and lay beside Stella. His mind was blank. The roar of a motorcycle passed in Dolphin Street but he heard nothing as if he had died in Stella’s arms and become a log beside her. Or as if he had been flung into space by the passing machine. Nothing lived except the whisper of growing hair, infinitesimal stabbing growth in callous flesh, infinitesimal breath, web and spider of non-sensation. He had forgotten to buy a packet of razors and had awoken that morning, the morning of his death it could have been, unable to shave. Perhaps he had been fired from his job for coming to work unshaven and unkempt. A year it was today that one of his senior mates had lost a son in a motorcycle accident. Sebastian had been at the funeral and placed a wreath on the grave. The dead young man had been growing a beard that would continue to grow for weeks. Unemployed dead. His son (John) was then four months old. The Jamaican tea-lady had said it was a bad omen. Not John’s age… She meant that accidents came three or four in a row. Another would follow, and still another, each a year apart. Instead he (Sebastian) had lost his job on the anniversary of his mate’s son’s death. Was that an accident? A little death perhaps. Living casualty. Another unshaven self-portrait of collective funeral. Where did such thoughts come from? They were foreign to him. Sebastian wondered. He lay still, without thought, yet thinking as if the creature of a larger, absent mind; without reflection, yet reflected as if the creature of a larger pooled reflection; without life, yet alive as if the creature of non-memory of the origins of life.

  He floated in the mirror of Mary’s “absent body”, immersed still it seemed in the very gateway of dying into Mary’s messenger of ephemeral bullet. She (Stella), in the first distant roar of approaching motorcycle coming at them in the mists of Dolphin Street, had submitted to him, but it had all been an orgasmic confidence bullet, flood and ebb, fullness and vacant hollow. It was a trick whose subtlety never ceased to amaze him, a trick of resemblances, webbed blood and bloodlessness, cellular evaporation into life. Even John in his cradle, it seemed to Sebastian, was a born chameleon, capable of interior, random fire, presences and absences, in each sudden cry, sudden smile.

  Every chameleon-in-depth was a creature of glass. One touched it and it became the colour of one’s flesh. One drew blood from mother-in-child, child-in-mother. Each bloodbank assisted one to venture upon the dangerous web between divinity of the son (Sebastian’s John) and humanity of the mother (Sebastian’s Stella). Sebastian lay now absolutely still. Thinking without thinking as if he were fathoms deep, yet floating above his bed like unshackled soul from body. Just an inch or two up the ladder of space beneath the warring factions under his shadow of the globe where he slept and knew nothing.

  Divinity of sleeping son in the cradle! What did it mean? It meant that the baby in its cot, dreaming of playing on the floor, dreaming of food, was a privilege beyond words; its waking gesture should be a miraculous command, its arousal from death immune to punishment, its beauty remind one of the terror of love plucked from appetite and the temptation to batter innocent life that provokes and is helpless.

  Humanity of wife and mother! What did it mean? It meant that Stella was vulnerable, that all his imaginings of Titan coition with her made her reflect him in herself as less the masterful lover and more the mimic child, mimic phallic train, father mimicking emergent vehicle or son from mother’s body, jealous father in face of privileged son, privileged wheel of sleep and waking. Except that the child’s unselfconsciousness was beyond the reach of the father’s machine or log; beyond yet linked to it paradoxically not as parody of the son by the father, of the foetus by the parent, but as potential riddle of capacity for related features across all ages, all things and beings and creatures… Heracles strangles a serpent in his cradle. The mouse arises and kills the mystic cat in Jacksonian reversed epic as it descends animal, divine throat into human temptation to strike or intervene.

  *

  Lucy Brown, archetypal Jamaican tea-lady, of the electrical factory from which Sebastian had been fired in the summer of 1979, came to see Jackson during the week of the Brixton disturbances in 1981. She brought her daughter (whose name was also Lucy)—a young woman of nineteen—with her, and Jackson could see from the younger woman’s manner that she did not altogether relish coming. It was her first visit to North Pole Road but her mother—who was attached to Jackson—spoke of it often. Young Lucy sniffed and cast an unappreciative glance at the spartan room with its mist of faces on the ceiling. The cat lay coiled and still in a corner.

  Lucy’s boyfriend had been arrested three days before in Brixton, and the older woman was unhappy over her daughter’s political acquaintance. She hid her anxieties and bustled all the more strenuously with trays of tea. Few of her friends saw her as she was, sagging body, psychical exhaustion. For nothing was self-evident on the surface. S
he dressed to preserve a robust appearance. Her composure in public was wooden save for a sudden, occasional flicker of alarm when she became enlivened—almost ecstatic—in confessing that blessings and misfortunes came three or four in a row.

  Lucy Brown (the mother) had arrived in England from Jamaica on the day Jackson fell from a ladder. Lucy (the daughter) was born in Notting Hill Gate. Her birth coincided with the death of Indian Lucy in India after which Khublall had come to Europe with his shaven head. It was all recorded in Mary’s automatic writing and Angel Inn mirror’s wealth of a-causal coincidence enfolding series of “absences” and “presences” through which to read a conception of the family of Mack the Knife.

  Lucy Brown had had a difficult time as an unmarried mother bringing up the child. She had met Jackson comparatively recently, scarcely more than four years ago, by chance, when he was returning home from his portering duties in a large hotel. They were sheltering from the rain in the wide doorway of the Odeon Cinema close to his workplace and he had casually asked her, on hearing her accent, whether she was interested in having some old furniture he had decided to get rid of.

  It was what she wanted and she jumped at the opportunity, and that was how she first came to visit him in North Pole Road. Spartan as his flat was, it needed cleaning at times and she cleaned kitchen, bath, sitting room, etc., everything except the garden at the back in which the cat roamed and killed the occasional bird or mouse.

  It was a curious friendship since Jackson was of middle-class Jamaican origins (he no longer possessed a bean of his father’s money) and she was of peasant stock from the hills and had retained traces of her accent and a modified pattern of West Indian speech.

  She grew to trust him implicitly and he found himself by degrees linked to her by wry comedy, exasperated spirit, yet ominous and serious understanding.

  “Oh Mr Jackson,” she said, “I been promising myself to bring Lucy to see you these past four year. She need counsel. The girl headstrong. She won’t listen to me….”

  On the surface it seemed a familiar enough story to Jackson, the gulf between the generations. “You look well, Lucy,” Jackson said, trying to make light of her woebegone countenance. “I mean your dress,” he added soberly. “It’s new, isn’t it?”

  Lucy was wearing a full dress that disguised and suited her large figure. “I not feeling as bright as I look, sir. And if I collapse on the road and got to be taken to hospital…” She lifted her dress almost unconsciously to reveal a snow-white, spotless petticoat. “They say I would win a prize for the best-dressed tea-lady in London.” Her voice rumbled into a laugh.

  Jackson smiled. Lucy, the daughter, stared into space. It was astonishing how swiftly the older woman’s mood could change from sad to bright like flickering shadows in Angel Inn mirror.

  “You know, Mr Jackson,” she confessed, “there’s nobody else in the world I talk to like you. You know my private feeling.” She turned to her daughter. “I don’t mean by that what you thinking Lucy. All you young people is a hard generation….”

  “Platonic,” said young Lucy, “how good.” Her accent was Notting Hill Gate, flat-earth English, sharp, sceptical, it stung a little, but Jackson felt oddly stimulated. Her mother ignored her except that her demeanour changed again within chameleon bite of blood. “I frighten one day of dropping down on the road, sir. All them prying eye, prying hand, undressing, dressing me.”

  “What does it matter?” Jackson said. “You won’t know a thing.” He turned to hard-edged, slightly enigmatic daughter for support but she looked away swiftly to stare into space. Why had she bothered to come, he wondered. What could he say to please her?

  “It matter,” said the older woman. “I would know, my hair would breathe, when strange hand touch me. Nowadays nobody care. People shooting each other in Jamaica. Call an election and bullet fly. Killing, wanting to kill, wanting to be killed, wanting to fight in the street, is immodest…” She stopped.

  Immodest! The word struck him. He had never thought of it like that. What did she mean? He stared into the woman’s eyes and caught the drift of half-sealed, half-unsealed consciousness as her fictional death, fictional disrobing, overshadowed the room. She was obsessed, he saw, by the thought that a dead person could come immodestly alive in the “boudoir of the coffin, the boudoir of politics”.

  What an outrageous notion! Yet it glanced through his mind as a true conception of dressed urban angst and peasant black humour. It drew him down into the grave of the streets, the self-advertised killed around the globe upon Marsden’s towering stick converted now into Lucy Brown’s height of fear, her heightened fear of violence, the theatrical deaths that one saw on television, the tall dead celebrated by fanatics, the extensions of immodest naked action, immodest prosecution of feud, unconscious strip-tease, immodest wishfulfilment, hunger-fasts, hate-fasts.

  Young Lucy now got up from her chair and made her way over to the vase of flowers. Her mother’s eyes and Jackson’s eyes followed her across the room. “I wish she would marry a good man, not a freedom fighter, god knows what unfreedom he fighting for like in a nightmare; a good man with a bit of money in the bank, Mr Jackson. Can’t you talk to she?”

  It was the kind of half-rude, half-rhetorical question for which the West Indian peasant was famous. By “talk” Lucy Brown meant the magical power to bind to one’s will, to make someone do one’s bidding. That “talk” was equated with “good or bad persuasion” arose from an unconscious conviction that words were a sacred or daemonic medium since their roots were mysteriously cast in the rhythm of things, the implicit voice in every object one uses, implicit trance, utterance of binding contour in every feared object, respected object. Yet fear, Jackson wanted to say but could not, could also breed silence—the fear that’s close to ambiguous love—the fear of nemesis that helps to unravel temptation to seduce others or to be seduced by others.

  “Three year pass,” Lucy Brown said, “since the motorcycle accident in 1978. Three anniversary. First anniversary ’79 Sebastian Holiday lose his job.”

  Jackson did not know that Sebastian Holiday was hollow relation to his lost “daughter of Man” and assumed the tea-lady was referring to someone at her workplace.

  “Second anniversary ’80 the recession bite deep and a lot of redundancy follow. Third anniversary ’81 Lucy Brixton boyfriend in trouble. Can’t you talk to her, Mr Jackson?”

  “A day’s just a day for me,” said young Lucy coldly. “No talk will change that.” She turned around a little from the vase of flowers. “And anyway you do enough talking for everybody and your anniversary’s early this year, isn’t it, mother? This is April not June.”

  “What motorcycle accident?” said Jackson, turning away for a moment from young Lucy’s hard-edged, disturbing beauty of limb and breast.

  “It was a white boyfriend Lucy had. He die on the road in ’78.”

  The young woman moved away slowly from the flowers, crossed the room and fondled the cat. Jackson’s eyes were unobtrusively glued to her. It was suddenly clear to him that there was an element of dream in the way she walked however sceptical or cold she seemed. On the surface her body was a wall between herself and eclipsed antecedents. Through Mary’s automatic codes however that clothed the room and propelled her pencil across the page of a mirror, Jackson perceived depths of characterization, hypnotic expedition.

  His eyes seemed to open. Something came back to him like a blow of silence. A file of black women walking through the hills of Jamaica. He was a boy at the time in a car on his way with his father across the island. The women were dressed in white. They carried covered trays of food and other materials on their head. There was a statuesque deliberation to each movement they made, a hard-edged beauty akin to young Lucy’s that seemed to bind their limbs into the soil even as it lifted them very subtly an inch or two into space.

  That lift was so nebulous, so uncertain, it may not have occurred at all. Yet it was there; it gave a gentle wave or groundswell to the
static root or the vertical dance of each processional body. It also imbued the women with enigmatic privacy. Were they on their way to a wedding or a wake? To ask them was to be greeted with a smile one could not interpret. Was it the smile of secret mourning or secret rejoicing? Were they oblivious of secret, ecstatic ladder of space? Did they incline without knowing it into psychology of stasis, the stasis of the hills?

  Jackson heard Lucy Brown’s voice again—her obsession with sudden death in the street, her obsession with her own funeral side by side with intimate (almost naked) desire for her daughter to marry “a good man with a bit of money in the bank”. No wonder her fear of immodest exposure possessed an involuntary compulsion or subconscious strip-tease funeral expectation (the eyes that would see her, the hands that would touch her) woven into a vision of her daughter’s wedding….

  Such unconscious or subconscious strip-tease was an aspect of enigmatic privacy laid bare in half-comedy, half-tragedy, of Angel Inn mirror. It was an aspect of strangest carnival strip-tease of oblivious mankind, obliviousness of fashionable bullet-ridden nudity in the eye of the camera, obliviousness of Stella’s nudity in the street, obliviousness of Sukey Tawdrey’s rag dances of refined, imperial bombast, obliviousness of Mother Diver’s shawl of possessions.

  All this moved like a stroke of mingled lust and sorrow in young Lucy’s dream-body, hard-edged, disturbing beauty, in the mirror of spectres by which Jackson was held in Mary’s “fictional book”. A series of reflections filled his mind from nowhere it seemed. She was a stubborn young woman, no one would deny. But there was more to it than that. The file of the folk by which Mary’s mirror had invested her emphasized that her feet were upon the ground but also made darkly clear the precarious linkage of secret ladder of space and static hill of earth. The link was actually broken, the static had begun to engulf them, that file of women, even in those far-off days of his boyhood.