by Ian McDonald
It is only in the historic period that the institution of priesthood has become an almost exclusively male preserve. In prehistoric societies, the role of guardian of the mysteries has largely been female. While man-magic in primitive societies is directed toward the exigencies of the hunt, women, as guardians of the fire and the home, and of the deep mysteries of reproduction and fertility, have developed a magic, a system of belief, that goes beyond practicalities into philosophical and symbolic conjecture. At some time in our racial history, did evolution bestow upon some guardians of the mysteries the ability to reach to that grey place where mind impinges upon reality, and through their shared-subconscious domain of symbol and myths, shape it into living, material expressions? And did those walking, breathing manifestations impress themselves into the subconscious domain again so that future manifestations would come to resemble them? It seems entirely possible that a few scattered mythoconscious individuals passing down through history could have been responsible for our entire mythic landscape, from primal bogeymen to Faeryland to Roman Catholicism. What is Blessed Mary, Ever-Virgin, in effect, but a mother-goddess figure, female gateway to the symbols and mysteries; was the Mother of Christ, of the Church, no different from foul-mouthed, lying Jessica Caldwell?
13
A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place—a set of perceptions of place.
On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds.
The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons.
They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city.
And through the streets of that city flies one of the singing birds, and the city it perceives is an avian metropolis of ledges and perches and nesting sites connected by great canyons of air at the bottom of which shapes move, by day and by night, among whom endless food may be found.
And the eye of the bird passing through the highways and byways of the air spies a cat creeping in an alley, and to the cat the city is a cubist jungle of pheromones and territories and runways, some great, some small, some abutting each other, some sharing common ground, some occupying the same space on different levels, demarcated by oil, glandular secretions, and urine, mapped by nose and eye and whisker, defended by tooth and claw and hiss.
And the cat weaving along the boundaries where territories and pheromones touch passes a tramp lying in a gaslit doorway, and to the tramp the city is a place of doorways and archways, of dry places out of the wind and shelters from the rain and corners where the cold does not penetrate, of railway arches and wooden park benches, of public toilets by harbour walls, back alleys and abandoned houses, where life is cold, damp, and short, where sleep is hard and food harder, acquaintances few, friends fewer, love not at all, save for a dog, or a cat, or a singing bird.
Three cities, many cities, all different and inaccessible to each other, all continuous with each other.
By the signposts and Baedekers of the hidden city they came, by half-legible chalk marks, scratching on stones, careful defacings of street names, by the freight sidings on Abercorn Road, by gas lamps and laundry-festooned windows (flags of triumph, or surrender?), by tenement steps and cracked fanlights, by the low-rent streets of the bread-and-tea people, the six-to-a-room people, the child-a-year-till-we’re-forty-thank-you-Your-Holiness people, the Junos and the Paycocks, the captains and the kings, under the shadow of the gunman and the Starry Plough blessed and cursed by priests and rebels, saints and martyrs, by the smoke-stained gods of the four rivers of Hibernia on the Custom House and the cabbies’ shelter under the Butt Bridge with its tins of carcinogenic tea sickly with condensed milk and bacon sandwiches thick as a doorstep. Thence, with the lamplighter on his evening rounds, across Dame Anna Liffey to the shadow of the gasholders at Ringsend.
A fire was burning on the domed concrete inside the skeleton of the dismantled gasholder. It lit Tiresias and Gonzaga across the broken glass and rusted barbed wire and poisoned earth to the circle of tramps who had gathered there to pass around a bottle of milk through which they had bubbled gas from a street lamp. One of their company, an old woman named Sweet Molly Malone, had already succumbed and lay slumped in a heap of tattered woolens and shawls. The firelight glinted from the string of thick drool that leaked from her mouth. Tiresias and Gonzaga joined the circle and shared the sacramental bottle, though they were immune to inebriation, be it whiskey, methylated spirits, petrol sniffed from a red jerry can, or milk fortified with municipal gas. A vast blue evening opened itself like the wings of an angel over the city. Beneath the first tentative twinklings of stars, the tramps sat sharing their communion. Around goes the bottle, around and around the camp fire, to the widdershins, the witching side, the lefthand side, the sinister. Others were drawn from their particular cities into the circle, and one by one they too fell over where they sat, wits blasted by Dublin Corporation Gas. The bottle slipped from a hand and the milk ran out in an uncertain pool on the chipped concrete.
Gonzaga circled the ring of inebriates clicking fingers in ears, lifting eyelids. Satisfied there would be no witnesses, he moved to the edge of the firelight and began to set his watches and wards. The pookah phagus had gathered strength and definition with every mile they had drawn closer to the chaos of mythlines around the city. They had passed through the palisades of flailing, fractured mythlines with the sure and certain knowledge that they were being hunted.
“Our problem, in the proverbial nutshell,” mused Tiresias, “is that we created our pattern of gyruses with the sole purpose of protecting our ward from attack from without. It is to our eternal chagrin that we never gave thought to the possibility of our charge breaking through to mythoconsciousness herself, breaking the pattern from within and thus leaving us exposed and vulnerable to the fury of our Adversary. We have been negligent in our duties, my dear Gogo—inexcusably negligent.”
Gonzaga could feel the phagus, moving out there in the hot night like low, cold mist over the broken glass and barbed wire. He clutched his staff to his chest and set his watches and wards, a Guinness bottle here, the end of a roll of tram tickets there. Sounds carried for immense distances beneath the great lens of stifling, stale air that hung over Dublin: the clang and shunt of engines in the sidings at Fairview; a ship’s siren, disconsolate as a lost soul, in the offing beyond the bar mouth: the oaths of drunks; the whistles of policemen; the crash of breaking glass; the peal of the great bell of St. Patrick’s chiming one. The down-and-outs stirred and grumbled in their sleep. Gonzaga completed his task and sat across the fire from Tiresias. They watched each other’s backs. Things that might have been rats or cats or dogs, and might as easily not have been, moved fitfully beyond the watches and wards. Tiresias felt the Dreamplace beckoning; hypnagogic illusions fluttered in the corners of his vision, crowded like insects around a beggar’s eyes. Old Molly Malone—she who had succumbed first to the seductions of the bottle—called out in her sleep and started, as one deliberately waking himself from a nightmare. Her eyes flicked open.
Black vapour poured from her open eyes.
Tiresias and Gonzaga were on their feet in an instant.
The woman shrieked and tried to beat the smoke away from her eyes, but it was beyond her stopping. Within seconds it had mounted into an inverted pyramid of darkness that filled the interior of the gasholder. The woman’s hysterical screaming and pleading was waking the other tramps.
“I
f you value life and sanity, remove yourselves forthwith!” Tiresias commanded, transformed by firelight and gas-befuddled wits into a shining Merlin wielding a magic wand. The tramps fled, ragged coattails flapping, clapping greasy hats to greasy heads. A tattered size ten came down on a packet of Senior Service cigarettes. Gonzaga let out a cry, but the errant foot had sent the empty pack spinning into the night. The circle was broken. The smoke-thing immediately condensed and solidified. Tiresias uttered a stream of early Mesopotamian oaths. With the phagus drawing only on the subconscious desires and fears of old Molly Malone, whose very unconscious power had sent her out from mainstream society into the company of the tramps, their staffs would have prevailed. Against a phagus shaped by the old alcoholic’s imagination but powered by the almost limitless power the Adversary could summon through the rent it had torn in the Mygmus, all the pieces of power in Gonzaga’s knapsack might not be enough.
The cloud of darkness swirled and knotted into the pookah phagus, dressed in the fears and longings of the howling woman. A thing of matted hair and shadows, it uncurled from its crouch to stand the height of three men. Accustomed as Tiresias and Gonzaga were to the powerful perfume of tramps, its stench still made them gag. It had no eyes. Black bare skin covered the sockets of orbs. It sniffed the air, caught the scent of woman. Its penis unfolded from the tangle of hair between its legs—six feet of rigid black muscle rimmed with spikes and rear-curved horns. Pleading with God, with Mary, with any deity that had not washed its hands of her, Sweet Molly Malone scrambled away, but too slowly, far too slowly. Claw hands scooped her up, opened her legs. The barbed penis juddered and smoked; twin blades of bone extended from the sides of the glans. It thrust one, two, three times, split the woman like a wishbone. The pookah tore the remains in two and smashed them against the girders while it ejaculated gouts of green semen. The stench was overpowering. Chittering and bubbling in its throat, it sensed other presences and reached for Tiresias. The old man’s staff met the reaching paw. There was a cascade of sparks and a small crack of thunder. The phagus howled. Tiresias pressed home his advantage, swinging his staff above his head. Realizing it was more shocked than hurt, the phagus rallied. Its penis trembled against its belly and dribbled goo. Its attack was halted in a storm of thunder flashes, then a well-timed swipe separated Tiresias from his staff. Gonzaga had been slower to recover from the old woman’s appalling death. Tiresias’s plight snapped him to sensibility. His staff drew a line of blue fire across the pookah’s back. Burning hair momentarily overcame the fishy, sexual reek of the phagus.
The two old men stood at opposite sides of the circle with the pookah, wary and burbling softly to itself, at the centre.
“It seems to me that we are in something of an impasse,” Tiresias wheezed. “It can hold us here until it gathers enough power to finish us off.”
“Have you forgotten all your phagus lore?” asked Gonzaga.
“Cold iron is the bane of faerykind. Since the ancient blacksmiths of the Celtic race,
Did, with sword and spear of cold hard iron,
Drive their bronze-using elders from this land,
And all their goods and gods and mysteries.”
“And, pray tell, where are we going to find enough iron to magic away this faery?”
Sensing an opportunity, the phagus lunged and was driven back in a blur of staff-play. Dawn was beginning to colour the east. Should day and the police find them here, with a pookah and a dismembered alcoholic… Gonzaga suddenly darted for the wasteland beyond. No longer needful to mind its back, the pookah came down on Tiresias, drove him back behind his swinging stick.
“Is needful you should buy this one some time!” Gonzaga yelled. Tiresias could spare him no more than a glance. He saw hands busy and bloody with barbed wire.
“Good friend, please to direct the beast this way.”
Tiresias stole another glance. Claws whistled across his face. Gonzaga seemed to have connected one end of a length of barbed wire to his staff, the other to the gasholder. He gave ground, drew the pookah step by step over the broken glass and crumbled brick. Trickles of black blood ran from its ears, its nostrils, the skin over its eyes, its penis, expressed by the force of its sexual fury.
“Down, friend, down and let my aim be honest!” Tiresias threw himself to the ground. Gonzaga hefted his staff and speared it with all his might at the pookah. The sharpened tip penetrated the left shoulder. Ringsend shook to a tremendous explosion. Tiresias squinted through his fingers into the glare. The girderwork of the disused gasholder blazed with blue lightning. Forks of lightning crackled from girder to girder; drips of electricity fell to the concrete, blue as burning brandy. The two old men danced do-si-do on the broken bottles and broken brick as the phagus energy dwindled to flickers, to a St. Elmo’s fire glow, to nothing.
Gonzaga went to pick up his staff, and dropped it with a howl. The heat of the blast had seared away everything combustible—bottle caps, pieces of glass, crockery, cutlery, and miscellaneous metals had been fused to a cancerous slag. The barbed wire had been vapourised. The gasholder was festooned with viscous glops of blue mucus. In the far distance, rapidly approaching middle distance, were ringing fire engine bells.
“With watch and ward we sought to thwart her power,
But all along the power was in our midst.
In our company she found one like herself
Of latent gift, a rose that bloomed unseen
To waste its fragrance in self-dissolution,
The beast was here among us all along.”
Then, as if scenting a change in the wind, Gonzaga added, “Ereh fo tuo teg ew fi aedi doog a eb dluow ti kniht i.”
14
IT HAD TAKEN DAYS of psychological warfare, but she had persuaded Damian to take her to the Arcadia Ballroom. To hand your coat to the cloakroom attendant and bay cigarettes from girls with trays around their necks and step out under the glitterball was to undergo a rite of passage into Grown Up Stuff. Rozzie and Em went to the Arcadia Ballroom with their respectives, and their plush descriptions of that soft-shoe pleasure dome had made her prickle with envy. She would never have gone on her own—people would have thought she was that sort of girl. But as a couple, it was more than respectable, it was a social necessity. Jocasta aided and abetted in the deception. Caldwell mere and pere must never suspect if difficult questions and more difficult answers were to be avoided.
The band played “Moonlight Serenade” as she hoped they would: cat-sensuous, purring clarinets and muted saxes. The Harry Hall Orchestra sat in white tuxes and Brylcreem behind sequin-studded frontals. H. H. himself conducted flaccidly and shot twenty-four-carat smiles at the dancers moving in crowded orbits, dappled with glitterball freckles. Jessica pressed close to Damian. She was shocked and delighted to feel a hard lump in his number one best pants.
“Oh, you naughty bugger, what’s that I feel?”
“It’s, shall we say, my professional credentials?”
Jessica was considerably more shocked than she would have been if what she had felt had been mere erectile tissue.
“You mean to say that you are in here carrying a…”
He put his hand over her mouth.
“You never can tell…”
The dancers wove through a fog of mentholated cigarette smoke. A crooner crooned something into a squat microphone. Couples applauded. The night and the music played on. A cord of sexual tension wound tighter between Jessica and Damian. She looked at him and felt something in her chest struggle to tear free. The power of her emotion frightened her, and that edge of fear made her hunger sharper. They left the dance before the last waltz to make the last tram. They sat on the open top deck in the heat of the night, smoking, communicating at a level beyond speech. Jessica rested her arms on a railing and looked out at her city, purpled, mellowed, by the hot summer night.
“You think you have your life all set, that nothing’s ever going to change, and then it changes, all at once. All of a sudden, things happ
en and life becomes very complex.”
“What do you mean?”
She did not answer immediately, but rested her cheek on the brass railing and watched the city roll past. “Complex. Like you see all the things you’ve ever wanted for your life falling through your fingers and you can’t keep a hold of them anymore.”
“You come away with me, and you can be anything you want to be.”
“Don’t piss me about, Gorman.”
“I’m not. I’m serious. Come with me.”
“Oh? You keep saying that—come away with me, to the waters and wild, to Sligo and a new life, just us, together, forever. Daydreams, Damian, daydreams. Life is not like this.”
She returned to a number twenty asleep, the house all dark save one sliver of light under Jasmine’s door. The sliver expanded into a wedge. The Shite stood, arms folded, faintly intimidating in flannelette nightie.
“Go to bed, you spying little frigger.”
The Shite was defiant, unassailable.
“No, I won’t go to bed, I won’t. You won’t make me.”
Jessica made to push her sister back into her roomful of teddy bears and toy horses and Girls’ Brigade pennants.
“No one likes you, Jessica. No one likes you, don’t you know that? You tell lies and swear and no one likes you because you have to be different from everyone else. You can’t be the same, you have to be different, better. The boys don’t like you; they all talk about you and laugh. Bullshit Caldwell, they call you, did you know that? None of them will go out with you. The only boy you can get is a murdering IRA man.”
“Shut up!” Jessica hissed, fearful of lightly sleeping parents, but The Shite was speaking with a voice and inspiration of her own. She had discovered she could hurt her sister and was wielding her newfound power with vindictive abandon, twisting the knife.