“I see, I see, yes. Well, we’d better give you something for your tummy.” The doctor scribbled. “And how old are you now, Derek? Really, twenty-seven, is that right? Still working at the library?”
The door opened and the doctor’s wife came in, hands swaddled in knitting. “Tommy’s feeling ill,” she said.
“Well, now, tut, tut. We can’t have that, can we. You keep an eye on him and I’ll be up to see him. This’ll keep your tummy happy,” he told Derek. “Come and see me in a few days if it doesn’t clear up. Well, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…”
Waiting for the prescription to be filled, Derek wandered to a news-stand. His stomach seemed calmer, cowed by the threat of medicine. He bought a Brichester Herald; on the front page was a photograph of the Radio Brichester personnel, in the background Janice in a military mini-skirt, looking as if she’d rather not be photographed — he couldn’t imagine why. He was sorry he’d missed her at the coffee bar, but he would have been poor company. He returned for the medicine.
Back at his flat he unwrapped the bottle, heavy with a thick white liquid. He poured a spoonful. Some escaped although he tried to tip it in, and crawled down the neck between his fingers, solidifying into a drip of tallow. He swallowed the spoonful. It was nauseating, reminiscent of something he’d forgotten. He left the bottle on the table and gazed from the window at the silver railway, leading the eye to emptiness. The swallowed liquid fought for freedom. He constricted his throat, moved unsteadily to the bed, stripped and lay back.
A knock at the door awakened him. When he opened his eyes, he realized that it had come before he was awake. He waited, but there was silence. Who could it have been? Janice, perhaps? He stood up and threw his dressing-gown around him. The room whirled through his brain. He reached the door and fumbled it open. A transparent sheet of sunlight made an angle with the empty hall. He padded to the stairwell and peered down, but only hot dust moved.
His stomach sickly yawned. Angry with himself, he supported his legs to the kitchen and glanced about for food. Anything to fill him. He buttered bread; he watched the knife spread blobs of grease. Sickness rose, but determinedly he picked up a slice and chewed.
The night’s taste was defined. It was the fruit — but as in the paper bag. The wine was bitter; the meat crawled; the juice drooled thickly. He dropped the bread and pinched his lips shut with his fingers. Frantically he read the clock: ten past four — time for the medicine. It must work. He filled the spoon and shut his eyes. Unbelieving, he stared at the spoon. The medicine was the fruit, but the decay had progressed. The spoon thudded on the carpet. Suddenly he clapped his hand over his mouth and rushed into the bathroom.
He lay down shaking. Heat clung like steam. The room veered, spun, swayed as in a storm. The taste seeped through him. At last it was intolerable; sweating, revolted by his body, he weaved to the sink and drew off a glass of water. At the first sip he knew. His hand drooped into the sink; the glass slid free and spilled.
There was nothing to do but accept. He lay inert. A bird’s silhouette flashed across the ceiling and was gone. He closed his eyes, empty of intelligence. Gradually the sea stilled.
He couldn’t hear what Janice was saying. His throat was clogged. The vortex of darkness on his eyes remained when he opened them; it was night. Janice was still speaking. Her voice came from above. She was in the married couple’s radio. Derek’s eyes closed. The coffee bar. Alan but no Janice. Alan’s point — “to render pain meaningless.” A thought explored Derek’s brain, touching, reviving. His body lay enervated, but his mind still functioned. His mind, his soul; suppose it had some supernatural power, inherent in its identity with God, to heal his body —
Nonsense. Nothing so mystical. His mind was in control; it knew that food tasted as it looked, for how else could it taste? His mind took control. It forced him upright, inserted his shaking limbs into clothes, urged him into the kitchen. The light found the slice of bread on the floor, collecting fluff. He almost broke, but his mind was ruthless; he gasped but that was all. It guided his hand to the door, set his feet on the stairs. To conquer the body: this was true self-sufficiency.
The icy front-door knob shuddered through him; he was outside. He went toward the car, but his mind forbade him; he might weaken and cause harm. He’d walk. His watch showed eleven. The nearest restaurant open at that hour was on the edge of Lower Brichester, less than half-an-hour away.
The road was bare, raked by the night-wind. The moon hung bruised like fruit. He dragged himself along by the wall; it crumbled beneath his nails. A car came up behind him; he extended a thumb and fell back as the car flashed past. But why? he cried. What have I done? His mind drew itself up sternly; he concentrated on the distance gained. Beyond his flat a train muttered beneath the bridge. A second car rushed by; a couple in the back pointed and laughed. “Sober up!” they shouted. Grimly he followed their garish light to the crest of a hill. Below on hillsides headlights exchanged winks; beyond, the steady lights of Lower Brichester.
When he reached the restaurant, swaying down the street toward him as he fought an itch in his throat, it was closed. The pane beneath his forehead cooled his brain. There must be other restaurants. Inside, above the inverted chairs, a clock showed midnight. Desperately he looked to his watch for help, but found none. Three motor-cyclists roared by shouting; a cat scampered from their headlights. Derek wadded his handkerchief over his nose. In the next street the motor-cycles coughed their last. Then he remembered: round the corner was an all-night pie-stall. The wind cleared the grey fumes, and Derek tottered forward.
When he reached the stall there was a brief struggle; he wanted to flee the drunks chewing and spitting, the two smeared trestle tables, the girl behind the counter, surrounded by the motor-cyclists, the corners of her eyes blocked by sleep — but his mind was adamant. The food was edible, he’d eaten here one midnight, so that he already knew its taste. Gripping the counter, gripping his throat from within, he ordered two pork pies and a coffee. Discs of grease floated on the coffee as in a stagnant pool; he pushed the cup to one end of the counter and unwrapped the lukewarm cellophane from a cold pie. You know how this will taste, he told himself. The nature of the world can’t change. He bit.
Around the corner of the stall came Alan Price, taking in the tables, the drunk asleep at one. “Derek’s right,” he said enthusiastically. “It’s like Hogarth 1968.”
Janice touched his arm. “I don’t like it,” she said. “I find it frightening.”
The fruit had decayed completely. Derek staggered behind the stall and was violently sick. When he swayed out of the shadow, Janice and Alan had gone. The stall, the watching eyes, were unreal, part of some other world. He hadn’t purged himself of the taste; it was stronger than before, filling his mouth, his nostrils. A hundred yards from the stall he saw a taxi-rank. A hundred yards — yes, levering himself along the walls, picking himself up when he crumpled, he would just make it. He knew that this time the taste would not fade.
Above him a voice sang “Deo gratias”. He was awake at once; the fruit woke with him. But he had triumphed. As he’d rocked miserably in the taxi he’d seen salvation. When he’d reached his flat he’d found an envelope thrust beneath the door. He’d opened it and read: “We all came round after the play but you weren’t in. Lovely news! Radio Brichester say they’ll be able to use your programme on the arts! Love, Janice…” It no longer mattered. As the taxi had approached his flat he’d seen the church against the moon: no longer quaint, just solid. He wasn’t alone with his suffering. Instantaneously the altar, the inextinguishable light, dimmed down the years from his childhood, sprang into dazzling focus. That night he slept.
The radio church service in the flat above moved singing down the aisle. Derek stood; his head throbbed; his gorge rose, intensifying the taste. Calmly he dressed, ignoring shudders. The taste grew sweeter, cloying. No matter: it was meant: perhaps to reconfirm him from his dutiful Sunday church-going, to impose a fast, to bring him
back to God, to strengthen him. He descended the stairs, only once falling against the banister, his perspiring hand sliding down the metal.
To the left of the path stood bright white headstones. Cars gathered at the gate; women gossiped as they donned their hats; children struggling on the grass separated at their father’s call. A girl in a mini-skirt crossed herself and caught her toppling transistor radio, eager to be outside again and listening. Derek brushed by her, moved unsteadily to the front row, looked up at the flame dulled by the stained-glass sunlight, and knelt.
The organ blared. Everyone stood. The stained-glass image was a trifle naive, Derek thought. He brought his eyes back to the flame. At the next cue he deliberately stood abruptly, jolting his body, wrenching his stomach. I offer this as penance. The priest preached on the evils of the mini-skirt. Janice? Of course not. The true God was behind the priest, was the flame that would sear the taste from Derek’s throat. He would take Communion. His acceptance of his suffering had purified him, he knew. A bell rang; the purest members of the congregation hurried to be first at the altar rail. Derek bowed his head. This is my body. He looked up and saw the priest raise the first wafer from the chalice.
He choked. The fruit transmuted everything. At once he knew how the wafer would taste. The bench collapsed. He clawed himself to his feet and blundered down the aisle, crashing into pews, knocking communicants aside. Incense suffocated him like poison-gas. He fell out of the church. The void surrounding him would not tolerate a God, and no God could tolerate the void. He ran blindly, fleeing the taste which moved with him. A tombstone tripped him. He fell to his knees, then forward.
For an age he lay there, mouth gaping against the soil, hands gripping stone. Then he heard voices. He raised his head. His hands recoiled from the headstone whose erased name could have been anyone’s. In the babble on the path, he thought he heard a voice he knew. It seemed to call to him. Spitting soil, forgetting the taste, he stained his ears. At last he was sure. Slowly, painfully, he raised himself. The congregation was emerging onto the sunlit pebbled path, some meeting friends. He could see no face he recognized, but the voice, its words inaudible, continued. In a minute they would turn and see him.
He turned aside from the tombstone, and began to crawl toward Janice’s voice.
MADE IN GOATSWOOD
The man behind the counter of the curiosity shop wore a cloth cap; when he bent his head Terry Aldrich felt he was being served by a toad. The man’s hands were brown and crinkled as the paper in which he wrapped the parcels. The paper flapped: dust billowed round the shop, passing like incense across the window through which the summer sun was dulled as by sunglasses, changing form and leaving particles on clasped leather-bound books, carved vases, ornamental knives, a naked wooden boy frozen in the act of crying praises to the sun or possibly of beating off an attack from above. The hands set the parcel before Terry; he thought that the dim eyes gleamed in derision. Briefly his hand was clasped by fingers drier than the notes he paid.
His car was parked at the end of the street, beyond a canvas stall like a shrine; a girl’s eyelids lowered wickedly as she held out fruit which reminded him of peaches. He shook his head. Across the street, beyond the crowd, the shirts revealing arms muscled as with roots, the dresses flaunting thick legs and breasts, a man stripped to the waist stood against a hot wall gnawed by weeds and stared at Terry’s parcels. He grinned, and Terry grinned back: he was overwhelmed by Goatswood. He admired them all; they were rooted in the earth, in nature.
Ted Pyke turned in the front seat as Terry dumped the parcels in the back. A girl squeezed by Terry, warm with sweat imperfectly overlaid with perfume; her bare leg brushed his. “Presents for the girl friend?” Ted commented. “I should be sure she wants them before you spend your money.”
Terry climbed in beside him and started the engine. “I told you, Kim’s a gardener,” he said. “These ought to bring her garden closer to nature.”
They drove toward Brichester. The curtained windows of Goatswood’s offices blazed in the sun like stamps on display. Even here, Terry thought, beneath the office buildings, one could sense the moist earth, rich as a ripe field; he imagined the workers returning not to the red-brick houses beneath hillsides held in thrall by the bright still air, but to canted cottages, moist at dawn, resounding with the snorts of muddy pigs. If only he could persuade Kim to live on a farm! He was sure that they could learn to make it work — but he knew she’d never agree; he’d accepted this. As he turned the driving mirror, wincing at a brief blade of sunlight, he saw the parcels jostling on the back seat. “Symbols of the earth,” he said to himself.
“I don’t know what you said,” Ted muttered, “but I’m sure you weren’t talking to me.”
“Sorry, Ted. I’ve even got Kim talking to herself, she says. “It’s the sign of an enquiring spirit.”
“I’m sure,” Ted said.
On their left the progress of the houses had already been barred by trees. Opposite, before the woods closed in, a last street of dingy houses lay exhausted between gardens high with grass, uneven with rocks, and on the corner a news-paper-shop, its cramped windows full of yellowed cards; baked mud preserved the tracks of cars. “Stop here/ Ted ordered.
“I thought you wanted a lift all the way to Brichester.”
“I’ve changed my mind. This is Fitzroy Street. You’ve heard me talk about it in the pub. You find the card you fancy in the window of the shop, and they direct you.”
“At this time of day?” Terry had heard Ted’s tales in his local pub, but he hadn’t thought about them; he didn’t know Ted well enough to care. “I hope you get your money’s worth. Good God, man, what can you gain from this?”
“A woman who won’t keep you awake wondering when she’s going to leave you, that’s what. Maybe one day you’ll know what I mean.”
“I hope not,” Terry said. He drove on, flinging Ted’s hand from the door. He felt cheapened, stopping for that on his way to Kim. “I may love nature,” he said aloud. “That doesn’t place me with the animals.” Behind him Goatswood was swallowed by the forest. On the back seat paper rustled.
On the frosted front-door pane Kim shimmered, flesh and flowered cotton. The pane flashed and they embraced; her hair was warm and scented as her flowers. Behind her in the hall an angel hung, eternally elevated. “There’s something for you on the back seat,” Terry said. “It’s not much, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, what?” She sped between the ranked flowers and opened the car door. On the seat the paper had split; rough grey faces grinned at her. They were ornamental gnomes.
“They’re like devils,” Kim said. Terry came up to her. “They’re — different, aren’t they?” she commented.
“I thought you needed something for the garden,” he said.
Drawn by the open doors, Kim’s mother approached. “Heavens, what are those?” she cried.
“Look what Terry’s brought me.”
“You must be famished, Terry. We should really wait till Kim’s father comes home, but — ”
“That’s fine,” Terry said. “We can decorate the garden while we’re waiting.”
“The front’s a bit crowded. They might go better in the back,” Kim suggested. Terry lifted them carefully, like a father cradling babies, and carried them through the house; beyond the painted angel radiating her own sunlight, they heard the clatter of plates. In the back garden two flowerbeds blazed about the lawn; near the hedge, over which rose the first trees of Brichester Central Park, a rockery shone dull red, tending to molten in a tinge of sunset. On the clothesline pegs nodded like birds. “I think they’d only make the garden seem more artificial, Terry said. “Would you rather they weren’t seen?”
“Of course I wouldn’t, darling.” But she was glad that the street was almost deserted. On the pavement opposite a small girl in a muslin curtain and a tablecloth led a quiet procession; Kim hoped they weren’t blaspheming. Two legs drew their body from beneath a Mini: Mr Logan from ac
ross the way, who waved to her and watched Terry, setting the gnomes in a triangle, the apex staring over the low white stone wall.
Finished, he leapt the wall and considered the garden. Kim took his hand. They weren’t amiable suburban gnomes at all. The eyes were grey globes set deep in pits; the noses were hooked like those of childhood witches she’d leafed over; the mouths grinned, revealing pointed teeth. Terry indicated the park behind the houses, the trees awakened by an evening breeze, like an outpost of Goatswood beyond; he pointed to Mercy Hill, his home, where a spire fingered the sun above the hills. “Now there’s something of that here,” he said.
A car drew up to Terry’s. “I’m glad you’re here,” said Kim’s father. “You can help me argue my case for salad.”
“Splendid,” Terry agreed. “Plants torn from the soil. Nature in the home.”
“I’ve made salad already,” said Kim’s mother from the doorway.
“Well done.” Kim’s father started up the path, then saw the gnomes. “What on earth are these?” he asked the evening. “It looks like a Druids’ meeting-place.”
“Probably/ Terry told Kim. “There’ll be a hot time in Goatswood on Monday.”
June 24, thought Kim. “Why?” she asked.
But at that moment a spoon clanged within a pan; her mother was announcing tea.
Terry sat back. full. Outside the front-room window the backs of the gnomes seemed to emanate dusk, drawing colour from the flowers. Kim’s father was reading the Brichester Herald; her mother was pouring the tea. He saw the crowd outside the curiosity shop in Goatswood, accepting the sunlight, vital,-primitive. “I can’t get over that film we saw on Thursday,” he said to Kim. “The sheep running into the church as soon as revolution breaks out. The flight from primitivism.”
“Whoever made that film,” declared the Brichester Herald, “must be a very unhappy man.”
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