Quilt

by Nicholas Royle

  It’s Saturday morning, the day of my father’s death: he would have wanted details of the date and hour, the precise time. His obsessive love of time, his fascination with the hour meant manual, radio-controlled or atomic, battery or electric, clocks bought by mail order, watches received as so-called free gifts on the waves of junk mail, clocks and watches all over the house, the most accurate and reliable of all of course strapped silver on his wrist, bright bracelet of time as he stood in the kitchen day after day, year after year, at the appointed hour listening to Big Ben or the pips on the radio, checking his watch and commenting on how on or out of time it was. His love led me once, years ago, to the caustic comment that I could imagine his last words, on his deathbed, looking in my eyes and asking:

  – What is the time, please?

  The post is past. Words come away. Letters capsize. She is digression, syncopation, asyndeton, ontradiction. Her ‘c’ curls off invisibly, leaving the shoreline of a new language: ontra. She touches all the words, she’s amid them, mad as Midas, without a trace. Of course the matter is impossible:

  – Everything you write about me, she says, is old and worn out. I am just a character in a book to you.

  She is due to arrive this morning, from a great distance. Originally it was the other way round. Reality ontradicts. Because of my father’s condition I cancelled my flight:

  – He is very weak, I cannot leave him. Will you come to me?

  She is pristine. I would like this word to do justice to her, in her absence. I picture this job vacancy, taking a position as an overly well-dressed man who leads people around some local caves, not with a view to telling them about matters of age and rock-formation, what the caves were used for during wartime, how effective they once proved for the cultivation of mushrooms or for clandestine royalist meetings during the civil war or for haunting by a demon lover, but in order to address, soften the audience, explore aloud and without interruption the angelic oddity of pristine. Say it, in the dark, to be prised aurally. Pristine. Paid by the local tourist board to conduct small groups about in almost pitch-blackness, underground, I am investigating the subject of pristine. Strange well of feeling, curvature of space, unseen the caves except for a single hurricane-lamplight held aloft.

  – You might think they know you inside out, I begin. In these caves nothing is what you imagine: everything becomes pristine. Listen. In these delicate clinkings prised, I add, with a kind of irritating emphasis.

  I need to get their complete attention. Tin lamp on wrist, cavernous prudence, intestinal possession. Enormous difficulty of trapezoid act of speech to get the punters to listen properly. It’s a nightmare of a job: rush nothing, slow down to a speed that might just ontradict everything a man or woman has thought, treading carefully in the lamplight. Cold air always the same temperature. Pristine bazaar.

  – If I attune my mouth with sufficient precision, and align my ear, I can reveal the names of everyone in this cave, at the drop of a pin, I say to them as a warm-up.

  It is necessary to come up with something, after all, and I no longer see the point of saying anything unless it is in the form of a pronouncement made effectively with my dying breath. Many auditors could be forgiven for having already abandoned me, but I have a job to do, in the employ of the local authorities, not a significant salary but I wouldn’t be doing this for the money would I, for me it’s about supporting a new phenomenon spreading far beyond any cultish local initiative, for the authorities it goes without saying it is also a previously unheard-of tourist money-spinner, how to get grockles, that is the dialect term in this part of the world, how to get them, or the locals themselves, down into the otherwise out-of-bounds and commercially pointless caves and allow them to experience something to set their ears ringing, have them recall and talk about it to family and friends, like so many echoes, long after listening, generating notable future income of ear and pocket.

  – What on earth is he talking about? I overhear a disgruntled fellow asking.

  That’s it, I say to myself, I don’t take offence. I request that the gentleman repeat the question and I listen with the special attentiveness that I have acquired from spending innumerable and improbably long hours in the caves and, after a pause, I say simply:

  – Your name is Thomas Swarovski.

  And the man in question is of course awestruck, as are others in the group, and the problem then is to quieten them down so that the event doesn’t turn into an audio-freakshow of clamouring infantilism, what’s my name, tell me, tell me, or conversely, for this can also happen, to placate any listener who should then voice their surmise that Thomas is just a plant and I knew his name before we entered the caves. In truth, however, it is an easy thing to do: if you attune your hearing properly in the silence of the caves and listen, most people are speaking a more or less audible version of their name in most of the things they say. It consists in a sort of layered or side-on effect, like the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, a kind of private embassy of the ear, hallucination’s jinn.

  But in the ordinary run of affairs how many people go out of their way to pass even five or ten minutes in a good deep cave completely cut off from the outside world and take the opportunity to hear themselves speak and really listen to themselves? It can come to seem strange that people pay good money to entertain or instruct themselves with drugs or sex or universities or even submit themselves to psychiatric counselling when they could just as well spend a few free minutes in the silence of an impressively tucked-away cave and experience this ordinary auditory apocalypse, discover themselves as never before. And so, in this foolhardy attempt to unearth something astonishing resonating in the depths of their being, I submit to the group’s special attention the word or rather the sound: pristine.

  By this point they are of course a divided crowd, some receptive to the angelic oddity, intrigued, even rapt, others who just cannot be doing with it, riled and stirred to opposition by all appearances of magic or conjuration for, as I happily avow, it really is a kind of hocus pocus, of a weird but utterly innocent variety. They won’t be going back to tell Jack or Nina about this fiddle-faddle some fellow tried on them in some caves one rainy afternoon when they were at a loose end for something to do away from the beach, or perhaps they will mention the thing but they won’t have twigged, they won’t have gathered that this, yes, this little outing to the caves is the closest thing they will ever have to an apprehension of what it is to hear oneself and ‘be someone’.

  And if I were absolutely to clamber up on my soapbox, an obviously ridiculous piece of equipment for a cave, indeed just what the spelean setting ecstatically slides from under you, if I were to ski or be skied in this way, I might go further. I might very readily proclaim that it is here, in the sonic simplicity and purity of these subterranean environs, that it becomes possible to return, yes, for there is always some echo-effect, to return to that conjectural snatch of what it is to be at the very threshold of life, being born, in amniotic oblivion, and in this moment think, and speak.

  It is always the speech of a stranger, of course, that is doubtless why Jack and Nina are never any the wiser. In this chamber, in such darkness, by the simple light of this lamp, scrabbling about in your minds for memories of similar experiences or correspondences, from cunts to Plato and beyond, you will understand nothing, no, nothing will come home to roost. But in the blissful disappearance of soapbox merely say pristine, this quaint idiocy almost pretty, almost philistine, almost christian, and none of these but odd, yes, above all in the jets of its pure, clean, fresh, unused, untouched effects, the house, sports field or voice in pristine condition, for example, and in the same breath, as was, formerly, the original, ancient, most olden days and nights, living daylights of night’s day. Pristine: fresh and ancient.

  – Listen.

  Predictable hushed silence. Shuffling of a foot or two, someone vaguely stifles a yawn or cough. Day’s work done. At least until the next group. Rarely applause. Group-clapping in a ca
ve is never to be advised: undesirable confusion of amassed bats stirring.

  The ray is stationary. You wouldn’t even register it there, retracted into its environs. It sees you before you see it. The ray lies on the substrate. On it, in it, what you will. The ray is prone, adoringly, to a decent bottom. Without an appropriately sandy, muddy or gravelly one, the ray cannot bury itself, which it does both in self-protection and with a view to prey. Vivisepulture is its lifestyle. Now you don’t see it, now you do. Then not now again. The ray blends in with the substrate, altering appearance, what is around disappearing into it, eye encrypting camouflage.

  All these words, ravaged from scratch.

  You say the ray, concerning this solitary surreal tea-tray, this creature of clairvoyant charactery, and all is lost already. The ray is stationary, as if invisible, a nocturnality. You call it it, and ditto, lost already.

  To say the ray is stationary is to invoke the question of singularity, this solitary ray, straightaway. It is a great problem, shield-shaped, you might suppose. Really, it is enough to put the world in disarray. To bring such a creature to account, to arraign it: that’s out with the bathwater in advance, when it comes to the ray. It’s categorically different from man or woman. The woman is this one, a writer, for example, not woman, the man this man, a lawyer, say, not man. ‘The ray’ operates incommensurably. It can be understood generically, as a term for all the rays that ever existed, including the countless millions in deep time, bearing in mind that deep time at once somewhere no one will ever be visiting and, to coin a phrase, the substrate of the present (see above). Or ‘the ray’ can mean just this or that one, singularly. Language wrecks the ray. Revealingly perhaps, the comparison doesn’t hold in the same way in the case of children. The child is closer, in this respect if not in others, to the ray. But the ray is a problem, insuperably so. Or rather, it is an aporia. The ray wrecks language. The revolutionary ray: you reach for words, you riparate. You dream of a new vocabulary, a new reality. Or it dreams you.

  What does a man do on the day his father dies? Outside the sun has taken up the baton for another hot summer day. But the relay has stopped. He wonders if he is capable of driving. He thinks at the time he manages it quite well. Later he will receive a speeding ticket, for driving too fast that morning to collect her from the bus station some twenty miles away. He arrives an hour or so early. He parks close to the station and walks around a crowded Saturday morning country town. Like an altercation developing in his peripheral vision he becomes aware that time has slowed down to a catastrophe. Whatever is occurring is occurring with unbelievable, piece-by-piece, falling-apart diffusing diffracting lentissimo decrepitude. No cinema, mental or mainstreet, could capture it, the jostling soundless shopping centre crowds, the lentic swamp, the shattering lens. What he is trying to make out has slowed down to something grinding but imageless, weightless as the noiseless rip of detaching a retina.

  And at the same time, in this life-ending slowness, this being a mollusc under someone’s descending shoe, he finds himself walking into a clothes store with a MASSIVE UNBEATABLE SUMMER SALE. Disturbed by his own calmness and foresight, he buys a pair of black trousers and a lightweight black raincoat he can wear to the funeral.

  Back at the bus station it is restless, people milling about, dull but strange oppression. He asks does anyone know about the bus from Heathrow. Because it is a Saturday the ticket office is shut. Gradually it emerges that there has been a pile-up on the motorway and the resulting chaos means indefinite delays. He manages to establish that the crash occurred too early for her coach to have been involved. He tries to shrug off the thought that the day is imitating itself. It’s something quite alien, he thinks, to that falseness in the impressions of external things that Ruskin called pathetic fallacy. It’s as if perception itself were a strange mimosa. Everything seems shadowed, shadowing something else.

  It should be hallucinational news.

  He sees a man, a blind man, standing at the very edge of the pavement, in danger of stumbling off the kerb or being swept into the air by the next passing bus. He is wearing an intolerably hot, shabby brown winter coat and bearing a sandwich board with the announcement:

  SCIENTISTS DISCOVER NEW MIMESIS

  This waiting at the bus station is an orchestrated revision of what happened in the hospital, in someone else’s mind’s eye. He anticipates, open-mouthed, the reappearance of Mary, even darker-eyed than earlier:

  – Sorry about this, she says, this sort of thing happens from time to time. You just have to wait for it to pass. It is the aleatory procession, you can never tell how long it is going to last. And when it is over is when it begins. Just wait and see.

  It is as if the people who are waiting in vain, either to collect family or friends or to travel themselves, are in truth, unaware, waiting for test results. The gloom of uncoming buses is repeated in the sky. The brilliant sunshine is inexplicably smacked on the back of the head. Big clouds tumble over, clowns without coherence. The darkness spreads like strong, spilt medicine. Gusts of wind scrap, a chill has crept in. Is this his father’s work? There is nothing eerie about it, everything is simple and matter-of-fact. He goes back to the car park to put more money in the meter and pick up something warmer to wear. In the back of the car he notices the unbeatable knockdown sale-price black trousers and black raincoat he has bought. The sky looks so black it must open.

  Back at the bus station news has filtered through that no one has been injured in the accident, and other bus arrivals have been held up by two to three hours.

  When she comes it is as usual as if she had beaten him to it, been hiding round the corner and sprung out like the return of the dead that she always will have appeared.

  She sees the blank pall of a man undone. He takes her in his arms. She observes his trembling and waits for his speech. He says, already weeping into her shoulder and neck and ear:

  – He’s already gone.

  It is as if she knew, gathering it thousands of feet in the air, over the night ocean. For some minutes he is fixed, like a piece of paper blown onto her, senselessly secured by the wind. Then he falls back, still speechless. He becomes aware of her baggage, a suitcase and other bags, and wonders how it got there. She tries to take in his stooped, stopped-up form, his strange display of tears in a public place, his frighteningly wiped-out face.

  – It was this morning, he says.

  On the way home, the sunshine comes back, as if televised, as if the relay were again real, breaking out of a period of implausible interference. Passing through a quiet village, she points out the pretty church and he suggests they stop and have a look. The path up from the lychgate is shady and they pause in the cool of the porch. Her eyes run over the pinned-up notices, her own language but foreign: flower-arranging, organ practice, an announcement for the village fete already two weeks ago. Everything is destroyed. She knows he wants to kiss in the porch, always yes, kiss, the portal, find her lips in the cool shade of the threshold before entering and she lets him, she has him touch her mouth with his fingers, stroke her beautiful face, longing to throw herself into the mirror of his grief while herself already effaced, happy, yes, that she will have been just a character in a book, unrecognisably old and worn away. Nothing of her will get through, not a name, not the faintest vestige of a gesture. She insists on the truth, therefore nothing more can be said. But of course now more than ever with his father dead, she cannot give him up, she cannot leave him. He holds her in his arms in the cool of the porch and runs his fingers through her hair, eyes bulging in stupefied speechlessness gazing into hers, as if she is going to let him be who he had imagined himself being before any of this happened. She lets him kiss her, on the cheeks and lips, she lets her lips be affronted, comforted by the thought that for him she is just a character, she has made that abundantly obvious, and will never be the subject of anyone’s attention and all their love-making, so wild and singular and untranslatable, will pass unrecorded.

  The hous
e is inconceivably empty. There is so much to do it seems more logical to leave again, evade the emptiness and perhaps, when the bright day is done, return in the cool of summer dusk. They drive down to the coast and walk up a cliff-path they have taken once before. She feels paralysed. She can only stay a fortnight. In that period she will do everything she can to make things less unbearable. But there is so much to do. He doesn’t tell her about the mimosa, fearful of what she would think. The order is impossible to disentangle. There are all things at once. There is the phoning, the labyrinth of calls, family, friends, former work colleagues and of course official bodies, official bodies of death, the hospital to arrange the collection of clothing and other personal items, the doctor to thank her for her help but will he ever make that call, what help, she was so pleasant and clarifying and let him die, the coroner, the man who will actually be carrying out the post-mortem, the people who organise his father’s pension, organised, that yawning gap of tenses keeps coming over, gone, no longer to be organised, the bank, the electricity company, the phone company. And then there is the incredible world of the cottage, dead and surviving, stuffed with the past now present, the present now past, in a convulsion of lunatic tranquillity. It’s an impossible coincidence, at once a celestial creaking galley, quiet as the moon, and a mine turned upside down with all its shafts, riches and debris suddenly at the surface and no one in charge. No one and nothing is in charge. That’s the true madness, as Polonius should have pointed out, had he not been a father himself: the sudden and absolute obliteration of authority. Not that his father was authoritarian, on the contrary he was the least a man could be, but that makes the chasm all the more appalling, into which he now sees he has begun falling. It’s not a question of a yes or no regarding this or that thought or desire, this instant of decision or that impulse to act, it’s the basis of everything: it’s the dissolution of law, truth, rationality, sense, logic, light itself. That’s the wizening mimosa, the madness of the truth, seeping into view before the nurse had even told him what had happened, the magisterial, blankety trick-photography of the changing of the light.