Quilt

by Nicholas Royle

  And a few of the mourners laugh and he, suddenly mindful of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, also known to the aunt (but very far, in fact, from her mind), who were once just an ordinary sad bunch of people but became permanently radiant-faced after getting the glory, replies with all due gravity:

  Taylor, Audrey, Hilary and Mallarmé, one male and three females.

  Sometimes a house is bigger than a heart, an apparently crazy thought, scarcely stands to irreason: a house is always bigger. But the thinker of the heart knows that in its pull, voracity, embrace and engulfing power it is at least as colossal as the mouth: it sucks up an ocean, casts out decades, burns down at a quiver forest after forest, searing soaring seeking or holding onto its prey, its inseparable maker, in a valley of kings of its own making. But sometimes a house is bigger. You can huff and you can puff but the walls won’t give, making the heart collapse, taking it all in at its own pace, a matter of a minute or a year and the house has prised open the heart and built itself so big inside it sprawls out finally standing alone with the heart pulverised, faked within, beyond repair. She recognises this in you and fears you have no sense of it. You know nothing of this.

  Three days after the funeral you drive her to Heathrow. In the receding visibility of the security line winding towards the departure lounge, her green shoes and lower body already gone, she turns back and sees you in tears, but she is always weeping first. It is unclear when you will next see one another, if ever, this miraculous relationship that has been going on already for years; she is fearful for you to the trembling tips of her fingers for what will happen now as you head back down the long road west through the summer dusk anxious already for the creatures abandoned that morning. There is the calm of water-lights, the shade and cool of this other world restfully alert to the eye, buried in time, the placid underworld and prehistoric clarity of sitting beside the great tank and watching. You establish a routine in your solitude as keeper, maintaining the quality of the water with the pH value at seven, and the temperature thermostatically regulated to between 24 and 27ºC, ensuring a good supply of oxygen to the tank via the filter outlet, removing faeces and left-over food from the substrate using the vacuum siphon, making regular partial water changes to the tank to avoid the build-up of ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, and of course feeding these creatures, securing the appropriate supplies of shrimp, whitefish, perch, occasionally mussels and squid, as well as earthworms, along with a variety of plant foods such as cucumber and lettuce leaves.

  In the doldrums of grief these blazing dog-days alone unflaggingly you patrol the extensive gardens on a small tractor, cutting the chaotic former lawns back to something resembling a controlled state, weeding the former flowerbeds, assaulting the high hedges toting an electric hedge-trimmer like a machine-gun, sweat pouring off you as you shift load after load of grass and weeds and hedge-cuttings dry as a tinderbox down to the bottom of the garden to stack it up on a fire along with the steady flow of combustible material from inside the house, the innumerable papers bills pieces of correspondence, bits of bereft wood from here or there. In the dazzling heat of these raw grief-days you work with mole-like speed and feverish determination to clear as much as you can of the jungle that was once garden, your father’s swards, your mother’s joy untended, the flowerbeds infuriated with brambles nettles thistles and other weeds, all orderliness choked up in the two and a half years since she died, and making sorties into the drawing room cupboards and bureau-drawers and edging your way furtively, unsteadily, eyes swimming, before setting foot in the end in your father’s study, ruinous reliquary of the all-in archive and bibliography of remains.

  You encounter, but it is already too late, your father’s things: the sturdy, built-in, ceiling-high shelves of old books never read or read in youth fifty or sixty years ago, gathering dust more or less untouched ever since, the numerous boxes and cases and cabinets stuffed, the diffuse array of small wooden tables, some of them of your father’s own construction, and the great oak desk piled high with all the gubbins of the inveterate pipe-smoker and former proof-reader and graphic design artist, the papers, the pens, the rulers and magnifying glasses, the erasers, paper knives, inks, ashtrays, debris of stationery, calendars, jottings, newspaper clippings and other memoranda stretching back twenty-five years or more on the surface of the desk alone, untouched since his wife, some four or five years earlier, acted a madness of Miss Havisham in reverse, blundering into her husband’s sanctuary, careering maniacally tipping over tables, pushing over pictures, like the strangely unreal stylised portrait of her father-in-law taken in a photographer’s studio in Ealing in the 1930s, scattering papers and implements, tearing down books, since which time he stopped working in his study or stopped retreating there to sit in his melancholy old age, taking temporary respite from the otherwise more or less constant responsibility of looking after his beloved wife, mad as an attic as she was, and never again disturbing the disturbance she had created in that berserk interlude but letting the place be, archive of chaos, overrun by spiders and mice.

  You encounter, too too late, not only his collected works already scattered but in the deep drawers of the great oak desk and boxes and cases and cabinets the remains of all else, every letter, document and photograph relating to the family, from birth to death certificate, from toddler holiday snaps to terminal correspondence, and of the lives of your father’s father and mother, the last deranging flotsam casting up as from a kaleidoscope of sepia a photograph from Bexhill-on-Sea in full beachwear circa 1920, another of your mother’s grandparents, labourers on the farm in Scotland never before or again to be pictured, circa 1890, another of your mother’s father’s father from the Highland Games even further back, caber-tossingly dark and in the vestiges now yours to keep or consign to the almost daily garden pyre or further trip to the tip. With folders containing heating bills and letters exchanged on the subject of the boiler from a quarter of a century ago, or documentation relating to the extension built and the purchase and sale of the house you had previously all lived in, the bundling up and dispatch is almost automatic, but in the case of more personal relics, however apparently trifling, you can linger and lose all sense of perspective before deciding no, not now, not yet, and returning the folder to its place in the drawer.

  It is practically crushing you, this end of the end, the ends altogether, coming together, end upon end of the world of your father and mother and family, house and history to be from now on adrift in your body alone. The end presses your forehead as if it were necessary for material to retreat that can no longer do so, slide away when everything has already gone. You remember a book to which he was strangely attached, called The Hampdenshire Wonder, and find it with surprising speed. You blow the dust off and you laugh. You laugh with your father. You feel his laugh in you. You have never read this book and wonder why. He showed it to you perhaps thirty years ago and you vaguely recall immersing yourself in the opening pages but no further. You wonder what he so liked about it. You connect it with the word ‘hydrocephalic’, which you hear, as you have always done, in the precise humorous intonation of your father.

  Watching is also to be watched, the singular oddity of bearing witness to these creatures sometimes buried and virtually out of sight in the substrate, eyes nonetheless kept free, pricked up like cats’ ears, at attention in the quartz sand, again and again picked out after the event the realisation of another creature realising you, and at other times as if electrically surging, a trained-up veritable school of four, unforeseeably together, one by one or in ones and twos, ghost birds flapping up through the water, plapping at the surface and looking, yes, from the wings, in alary formation, indisputably on the watch at you, at where you are if not at you, the body rising through the water seen in its pulsing forcing resurrecting swoop, showing its creamy white underside, the gill slits and mouth organised as a smile returning to the world dolphin-like yet phantasmic, this rearing up of a living white sheet of ventral alien face, then the superbly
fickle jilting gesture, surfacing or retreating, the flip and show of the dorsal view, the waving through the water of backs dark and gorgeous spotted, another world of eyes, the ocellate gliding, neither peacock, leopard, butterfly nor chameleon, but motoro, the rays all four the same variant or morph, name unknown. Following the torrid automatism of war in the garden, traipsing your father’s hand-built chicken-wire wheelbarrow full of tinder-dry grass, weeds and hedge-trimmings, like a bier down to the site of the daily fire, and driving out to the municipal tip with yet more filled black bin-liners and objects you can no longer face, sweltering days ending always this pseudo-iterative somnambulism, this delirium between repetition and alteration, in the late afternoon you stop, fetch out a bottle of chilled Aspall cider from the refrigerator, and sit down in your father’s favourite armchair, immersed in the rhythms of coming

  and going, rising and falling in the cool shadow-life of the great tank.

  There is a new literature. It does something new with people. It has different slownesses and spectralities. It celebrates nanothinking.

  There is the lull and leave off, the to you surprising compassion shown by many of the official bodies, not the coroner or registrar or undertaker certainly, but so many mostly unnamed others, representing the utility companies, your father’s bank, local authorities, the pensions company, the tax office, the solicitors entrusted with the original of the will. There is time given. It is a time that never existed before. It is as if your father’s phrase ‘from time to time’, apparently so casual, opens up like a cuckoo clock, intimating a time in between the one and the other, a mad gift. Even your employer proves unexpectedly benign, granting you compassionate leave (officially described as ‘sick’), for as long as, so long as, what does the voice say? You try to recall the manager’s exact words: three months, is it? What does it matter?

  You will stay here now in this house with Taylor, Audrey, Hilary and Mallarmé, in need as they after all are of almost constant attention. Really, so much care must be taken: it is a far more onerous task than having children or looking after elderly loved ones. You will watch in this house for as long as it takes.

  In the first days after the funeral there are occasional visits or calls from neighbours, further cards of sympathy and calls from family friends. The farmer down the lane offers to help with carting stuff off to the tip and tidying the garden, his wife to collect supplies of food for ‘the fish’, as she insists on calling them, from the city where, some twenty miles off, you have to get such supplies. Someone else, an old friend of your father, calls and tries to put you in touch with another local man who specialises in house-clearance, to move along the business of sorting out the house. You politely decline all these offers, but when the farmer’s wife asks for the second time within that first fortnight when are you going to put the house on the market you struggle to remain courteous. As in the story of the man who cannot go into the street because he is absolutely sure he will kill everyone he meets, you find yourself driven deeper into the solitude that is in any case never yours.

  It is while you sit with your Aspall, eyes sunk in the cool shadow-life of the great tank, that you talk to the girl last seen in green shoes. In the calm of water-lights, in this placid lost world of motoro, you drift for hours, telling her what you have been doing and thinking, enabling her to follow your life by telephone. When the conversation ends it is always the same. It is time to feed the rays. You relish the almost dissociated pleasure of seeing them seeing food on offer and rising to the surface accordingly, or remaining oblivious, at a distance, like Auden’s reindeer, altogether elsewhere, picking up a morsel of whitefish, shrimp or piece of cucumber only after it has come to rest on the substrate. It is strangely compelling to observe them eat while being unable to see what it is they are eating, since their eyes are on the other side of their bodies, the sense suggested of a communication between dorsal and ventral not of the order of vision, and the faintly frightening plates of teeth, the closest resemblance the rays have to their cousins the sharks, as they inexorably imperviously grind up their prey living or dead.

  One day the telephone rings and it is H, asking if you would read something from Shakespeare on French radio. You laugh because she always makes you laugh.

  – In French?

  – No, darling, in English.

  She asks you how you are. You want to tell her that you fear you are going crazy. In fact you merely note your unease at what you call the disappearance of the house.

  – You must film it, darling.

  You want to say yes, but the word stops in your throat. Instead:

  – What is the Shakespeare?

  – It is Clarence’s dream. Will you do it?

  And so a couple of days later, at an hour agreed, the radio station calls and they record you reading, over the telephone:

  Methoughts I was embarked for Burgundy,

  And in my company my brother Gloucester,

  Who from my cabin tempted me to walk

  Upon the hatches. Thence we looked toward England,

  And cited up a thousand fearful times

  During the wars of York and Lancaster

  That had befall’n us. As we paced along

  Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,

  Methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in stumbling

  Struck me, that sought to stay him, overboard

  Into the tumbling billows of the main.

  Lord, lord, methought what pain it was to drown:

  What dreadful noise of waters in my ears,

  What ugly sights of death within my eyes!

  Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,

  Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,

  Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,

  Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels.

  Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in those holes

  Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,

  As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,

  Which wooed the slimy bottom of the deep,

  And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.

  You hear methoughts in your father’s playful fashion, like ‘me wife’: someone is hearing me thoughts. The recording is not good. To disguise it they later layer a crashing of waves over you. You sound as if you are speaking from the deep, within the tumbling billows.

  The next day you tell me:

  – Shakespeare has been filming the house.

  You had a terrible night and could hardly sleep. You had a nightmare of unimaginable length and intensity. You attribute it to your ‘marine correspondence’ with H.

  – I dream of gravel. I’m going to miss the funeral because of it. Time’s recoiled and we are completely lost in the logistics of acquiring the gravel, the agitation about having the right kind. It’s as if I were dreaming intermittently aware that what’s happening is an allegory but I keep forgetting this. The surface of the body is such a strange kettle, I remind you, with no scales, and even the dermal denticles on the dorsal surface affording limited protection at best, the ventral surface another hopeless hazard of sensitivity. We are arguing about it. I tell you I know that gravel is already a perversion of the standard natural habitat of mud, sand or silt, and no amount of scientific research will bring a satisfactory resolution to the question of the right kind of gravel, granted that gravel it needs must be. I know that the very fineness of sand or mud creates an unsustainable havoc, filter-blocking and anaerobic in the artificially generated world of a home aquarium. You suggest that there are numerous other, equally important issues to be concerned about, such as the type and quality of water, filters, pumps and so on, but I’m not to be deterred. I accuse you of being no better than the so-called authorities who blandly note the abrasive character of gravel as a minor problem to be avoided, since it can lead to infections of a fungal or bacterial nature. Only as it were in passing do they note that such infections are ‘almost inevitably fatal’. The ray is but a
trifle, easy picking, so many more in the sea. Like cookies churned out on a factory conveyor-belt: such is the tone. I can see I am upsetting you, comparing you quite unjustly with these scientifically trained specialists and collectors, but I’m on my high horse and haranguing like a crazy man:

  – Then there are the online dealers. Replaceable ray, dish of the day, this one or that! Initially set you back a hundred dollars, my friend, but if it arrives damaged or dead, refund guaranteed, we’ll dispatch another within twenty-four hours! If, on the other hand, you get it home and it acclimatises and seems happy but after three weeks begins to develop fin curl or abrasions from that gravel you selected for the substrate, or if it turns out the creature never really developed an appetite and has succeeded in starving itself, such apparently suicidal behaviour not unknown, if it dies it dies: just think of it as one of those balloons that go flat, simply pick up the phone or get online and order another one!

  – I notice that you have stopped listening and put in your earphones and are playing music, but this only makes me rail the more.

  – Nothing sharp that might abrade the creature’s ventral surface. That’s the main thing. It’s hardly a question of driving down to your local gravel pit and filling up the car in a series of stealthy operations: so many black bags filled, like all our recent life in reverse. Obviously it is necessary to realise that there is no such thing as aquarium gravel in the plain and simple sense. Nothing is reliable. If you spend most of your adult life burying yourself in a mass of tiny rocks you perhaps should expect to get into a few scrapes. But don’t imagine the guys at the building supplies company are going to give us much useful information or assistance in a situation like this. We’re strictly on our own!

  – So then I’m sitting on the dining room floor surrounded by bags of gravel, the sort known as quartz sand, with a grain thickness of 0.4 to 1mm. You’re nowhere to be seen. Nothing’s been done. There’s no sign of the frame or any of the other equipment. I’m working my way through, bag after bag. From one bag to the next I inspect every little pebble, taking it like snuff between the thumb, forefinger and middle-finger, feeling, turning and assessing its abrasiveness, accepting or rejecting accordingly. I’m distracted by the thought that among all the hundreds of thousands of tiny granules there may be a few, a child’s handful or just one, a solitary single serrated little bastard that will injure and quite possibly lead to death. And I’m going as fast as I can, but all the time I’m thinking to myself: I’m missing the funeral.