Quilt

by Nicholas Royle

  – Then I wake up. I’m covered in sweat and my heart is thumping like a nightclub. It’s pitch dark and I can hardly breathe.

  I call you and begin by asking where you are, even though you are always in the same place. I depend on this routine. As you sit in your father’s armchair you can tell me about Mallarmé, Hilary, Taylor and Audrey. It’s calming to hear your voice and description of the movements in the pool. But then there’s no knowing which way the conversation might go. A couple of days after the gravel-dream (which you tell me comes back repeatedly over the nights that follow, and which you relate to a disquiet you have about ‘no substrate at all’), you declare:

  – I am going blind.

  – What do you mean?

  – I mean blind. I catch myself staring, as if I’m simply failing to shut my eyes, and what I see is dissolving. It’s as if I couldn’t sleep, but I go out like a light. Things appear bright and blurred at the same time.

  – That’s just what you’ve been going through, the burden and strain of everything. It will get better. Try to sleep longer tonight. Have a lie-in.

  But the thing persists. A couple of days later you refer again to troubled vision and then, after a pause:

  – I’m overlooking myself.

  Sometimes I wonder if I hear you correctly, your accent foreign and still unfamiliar (doubtless in part that is why I love your voice), an impression accentuated by the telephone and hundreds of miles between us. One cannot endlessly ask, Could you say that again? or Did you say you’re overlooking? Signifying what? A surreal game of Whisper Down the Lane tracks our every syllable.

  – In France they call it Arab Phone.

  – Sounds offensive. What are you talking about?

  – No more than calling it Chinese Whispers. I’m sorry, I was thinking out loud. It took a moment to realise you said ‘overworking’…

  – I didn’t. I said I’m overlooking. But you’re right, as always, my love: I don’t actually know what I meant by it. We might have invented another game: Overlook.

  – What is this? Shakespeare meets Stephen King?

  – Sorry. It’s an odd word, I see that. I’m overlooked in my birth.

  – I guess you’re overlooking the rays.

  – Yes, I’m looking after them. But I only meant I have this strange feeling of looking too much, seeing too hard. Like I said, things are blurred and bright at the same time.

  – So: go to a doctor or optometrist or whatever.

  There follows soon afterwards a torturously lengthy examination process at the local optician’s, with the optometrist over-close, fitting the measuring cage to the face, quietly spoken, insinuatingly moralistic:

  – And when did you last have an eye-test, sir?

  The examination seems interminable.

  – I’m now going to shine this light into your right eye, sir. Very bright is it, sir? We’re almost done here, if you can just bear with me for a few more minutes. Turn to the right, please: look straight ahead. That’s splendid. And to the left…

  – Hmm, says the optometrist finally, his breath cloudy in your face: That’s not so good.

  Yes, finally you are told, your eyes have grown markedly weaker, and new glasses are provided with unexpectedly promptness.

  – Are they helping? I ask him in due course, as easy-going as I can.

  – Let’s wait and see.

  You are an increasing worry, more elusive, desultory. I miss you intensely and wish I could join you but work commitments prevent me for at least three months. In the past we have undergone longer periods of being apart, but now things seem more precarious and difficult.

  There’s no substrate, you say.

  Words appear to you in a dream: ‘In the grave you hear no sound / But all the things in the ground.’ And then another time: ‘The asseveration comes in the night.’

  You keep dreaming that you are late for the funeral. You miss it altogether. You miss most of the reception as well, like the cousin who turns up only at the end. You haven’t organised anything properly. You still have to do the gravel. This recurrent nightmare proceeds, you believe, from a sense of outrage at the so-called specialists who have the gall to suggest that there is no need for a substrate. It may come as quite a surprise for the creatures on arrival and they will certainly experience discomfort, for they are accustomed to using their pelvic fins for shifting through the substrate and they’ll find themselves slipping horribly. But they can get used to it, these specialists imply, as if these creatures that so love to bury themselves, whether out of sudden fear or simply in order to express a deep behavioural instinct, the delight in covering themselves so that only the eyes protrude, and the joy in blowing water into the substrate, to spout up morsels of food, could readily adapt to the imposition of a completely different, nonspecific gravity, the carpet pulled out from under their ghost-white bellies.

  I remember when you first mentioned these creatures, around the time of your mother’s death. You came to see me, not long after, and said in the car as I was driving us out of the airport that you’d like to visit a sea-life centre of some kind to see if they had any rays. What a strange man, I thought, how I love you. Who else would come out with a remark like that, more or less the first thing you say to someone having not seen them in several months?

  And so the next day we located somewhere, in fact one of the oldest aquaria in the country, in a little seaside town a couple of hours’ drive away, and sure enough they had a ray pool or, as they called it, a touchpool. It was in that dead period, no longer winter, not yet spring, with a raw wind blowing off the ocean, and we were the only ones there, besides the girl who worked at the aquarium who was feeding them. It was the first of many trips to marine-life centres, but I’ll never forget the strangeness of that first time. I don’t think I had ever in my life really looked at a ray or given a moment’s reflection to the subject. I guess I fed off your fascination, and also caught something from the girl, since she seemed surprisingly well-informed about these creatures and at the same time obviously fond of them. It still feels odd to talk of being fond of rays, I guess, but standing there with you and the girl (despite the freezing cold and gray blank of the afternoon) I came to share something of what you called this ‘new imaginary’. I mean, when I looked at these fish, really looked at one, for the first time, up close, in detail: weird!

  Of course we didn’t know at this time about the injurious effects of touchpools. The girl eventually asked would you like to touch one. I said, don’t they sting? She said they’ve had them removed. An image of strange pathos came into my mind: the art of archery, without arrows. It’s a constant discombobulation to reflect on what we overlook, for of course then it was plain as day the creatures at the base of their tails featured these pinkish stumps. Your distaste for the trade began right then: I could see it. Driving back to my apartment I saw that you were sobbing. I assumed it had to do with your mother, but all you said was:

  – Those pointless stumps!

  On later trips to marine-life centres you would often become visibly enraged at seeing the spines had been snipped off, if that’s the right phrase. Doubtless an understatement. ‘Sawn off’ is more apt, more in accord with the brutality of the act, even if it is done with an anaesthetic like Finquel.

  The first we witnessed were a cow-nose variety, not the loveliest on the eye, but still they were eerily engrossing. Even then, on that first encounter, when the girl invited you, you wouldn’t touch. Already there was a certain reserve in relation to these creatures who were to acquire such centrality in our life. I couldn’t simply say they were beautiful, because there is also something uncomfortably negative about them. They’re never exactly a happy-go-lucky sight. They always remain wayward. Irreproachably creatures of elsewhere is how I think of them. Even if you are close, as we were that afternoon, to this fellow with a sad stump rendering him completely harmless, and he comes bobbing up through the surface and looks up at you like a blind pet spaniel. You
can feel you’re infinitely far away from him, but still there’s this singular unease he generates. Gazing in a quite detached way, just as you might find yourself other creatures in an aquarium such as sharks, still you get caught up short somehow. You are unable to have a clear impression of what perspective or dimension to look at them from. Are they upside down or back to front, fat or thin, facing you or away? How can this creature be looking at me? Fish don’t look at you. Makes no sense.

  Neither fish nor fowl, they move like moles in the gravel of the substrate, burrowing and blowing up air, like animated pancakes, or stay at rest on the bottom, half-hidden dark moons. Or they glide through the water like ghosts on a shopping spree in an empty mall. But the otherworldliness is constantly undercut by a kind of normality. They gently bump into one another and shift accordingly, like courteous commuters. They eat with their little plates of teeth, grinding up whatever it is they select as the plat du jour. They shit into the watery depths, like muting birds in flight. They indulge in sexual congress, though it was a fair number of visits to sea-life centres before finding ourselves one day, in Portugal, peculiarly a party to that voyeurism.

  How to talk about them? They are eerie machines for creating and overturning words. Every time you think you have come up with an appropriate way of describing them, a submarine bird or robotic frittata or psychodelic beret, you are undone. You’re mere bystanders. They’re Teflon: nothing sticks because in reality they are the cooks, the makers, somnifluent agents of provocation and alterity in a maddening game with invisible rules in operation before you set eyes on them and being perpetually revised. But nothing sparks talking like the constraints of doing so. Our telephone conversations thus find respite of sorts, from the more or less constant anxieties over which we range, regarding nightmares and eye problems, the apparently never-ending business of clearing the house and gardens, and how rawly we experience each other’s absence.

  One morning (for it is morning in my time-zone) you sip from your glass of ice-cold Aspall and describe how Mallarmé is nudging up the side of the tank to within a foot of your face. From the patina of ocellation you have learnt to distinguish easily between the rays and, picturing these differences, I have memorised them so that I can follow. Of course the single male is the most immediately identifiable, having claspers.

  – It’s a completely different world, you say.

  I assume you’re referring to the pool. But you go on:

  – The totter has gone.

  I have to cast my mind back.

  – The beautiful lionish man: vanished! He hasn’t been there since we saw him there together, just before the funeral. I meant to tell you. It’s a completely different world.

  – At the tip?

  – Everything is being stripped away. I can’t express it. I’m experiencing new, incredible possibilities. It’s a kind of magical sharpness, as if shadows have light, and the totter’s disappearance belongs to a time that is coming back but for the first time. It has to do with that mimosa thing I told you about. It’s a kind of upside-down space of coincidence, a portal. I can’t stay…

  Your voice is strained and I’m having real difficulty following what you are saying.

  – What is happening there? Are you missing me?

  – I can’t wait to see you again. But the weirdest thing has just happened. I wonder if I’m not going completely off my head.

  A long pause ensues. An expanse of hundreds of miles of deep cold sea dangling the frailty of a telephone is not a reassuring medium for a long-term relationship.

  – What do you mean?

  – I’ll write. I love you.

  Then you hang up. I call back but there’s no answer.

  There is no internet at the house, but you must have gone, as you sometimes do, to the café in town to write: the Tea Party, as it’s quaintly called. For a couple of hours later an email arrives, in which you explain that yesterday afternoon, having just overseen the day’s final fire of ripped-up nettles, clipped brambles, hedge trimmings and scythed grasses, eyes a-blur stinging and watery from acrid smoke, a slight breeze at the fireside an almost pleasurable twisting of a knife swirling smoke one way then another, walking up the steep back lawn towards the house bulking up with almost manorial proportions above you, it occurs to you, a decision precisely contrary to all your desires and hopes. You’re going to sell the house. You phone the estate agent and a meeting is arranged. And so this morning the gentleman duly appears and enthuses and proposes an asking price and takes photos, starting with the gardens from this and that boundary or angle, standing on a woodworm-eaten ladder (a big man, perspiring in a suit and tie, trying to get the best photogenic perspective) which snaps clean through under his weight and he tumbles vaudeville roly-poly down the slope of yellowing grass. And inside he clicks and slicks away at this and that room, deterred only here or there. Naturally, unphotographably, your father’s study remains the last stronghold of chaos. The biggest obstacle, of course, is the first thing inside the front door (but Shakespeare, you want to say, is working on it). The agent’s lack of surprise suggests he has been tipped off (down in the town things get about). Encountering what was once a dining room now a major aquatic display he blandly enquires what you plan to do with it.

  – Not, he queries chuckling, presumably to be part of the fixtures and fittings?

  – I’d be taking that with me, you say, struck momentarily by the enormity of doing so.

  – What are they in there anyway? asks the man, stooping a little and peering in.

  And then one of them, Taylor, flaps into vision, and it occurs to you that you haven’t in fact shared the secret of the rays with anyone since the funeral.

  – Curious, exclaims the visitor. Like an underwater kite.

  There is now a delayed version, you suggest, a shadow-replay of his falling through the ladder five minutes earlier and almost breaking his legs when, his curiosity getting the better of him, the agent goes to put his hand near the surface of the water as Taylor edges up close and you, rallying to the defence of both parties, pull the arm back, exclaiming at the danger of the spine lashing his hand. Stung at any rate mentally, the estate agent remarks that it is not going to be easy transporting a contraption of dangerous creatures that size and you have to agree. Surveying the upstairs rooms he more than once poses the question of the fate of other furnishings and items obviously capturing his business eye.

  – Some nice furniture, he remarks. Will you be instructing the auctioneers in town?

  A query too far for you at this moment, you merely note you have not yet decided what to do with it, and the agent with newfound gusto and boldness avers that while the condition of the house, so obviously in need of modernisation, is not going to put off a prospective purchaser, given that the price would be tailored to that fact, and while such a person would be attracted as much as anything else by the size of the plot of land coming with the property, nonetheless a bit of tidying up and clearing space in the bedrooms and the drawing room downstairs might be advantageous for the purpose of viewings.

  – Your father’s study in particular, he sighs with but a thin veneer of professional decency.

  He leaves you with the promise of papers to sign, coming with luck in the post next day, and an unnecessarily impactive handshake.

  Five minutes later you too drive out, seeking replenishments of your favourite bottled cider.

  It happens, or has already begun, on your return. There is a sound coming from the kitchen. You can hear it above the noise made by the water-pump in the pool as you come through the front door. There is, you write, a resting place in every mental archive, a discrete space of effects walled up without a listener’s awareness. Most remain unnoticed in the dull daily roar. Then there are the others, those isolated, unmistakable sounds which, once heard again, transport more directly and more frighteningly than any odoriferous power of reminiscence or snapshot visual recall. Of course there is a kind of common stock, shared files of a
rchetypal distinction, the sound of rock falling, a footstep where none is expected, the thrown vocable of a diabolical chuckle, the autumnal rustling of trees, a snatch of distant seas shrugged off in the dozy instant. But there are also sounds peculiarly your own, received and buried, as it were, in your heart of heart. It is what you mean, you remind me, when you tell me I am your pristine.

  The sound you hear on coming back through the front door, carrying over the peaceful bubbling of the pumps in the ray pool, is a screech. You recognise it immediately: it is the shriek, initially a scrawny cry but rising, made by your mother locked in the bathroom upstairs one night twenty years ago, shortly after the local GP downstairs administers a final dose of morphine, on the occasion of the first death, the deciding death. And now coming into the house the hallucination, for you tell yourself it could only be such, is that unmistakable but faint cry, started up from you can’t think where. It is a savage gutturality, a fugal scree. After a moment of absolute disorientation you think of the upstairs bathroom, where you recall she would not respond to your murmured entreaty but kept up this speechless screech intolerably, forcing you in due course to let her be and return downstairs. Climbing the stairs again now the sound, you note, has outstripped you. The upstairs landing is silent and still. Coming face to face with a bathroom door that is closed, however, re-establishes your disquiet with a sharp, unpleasant flutter. Always in the time of your parents the door of the bathroom, if unoccupied, would be ajar. With trepidation you open it. There is nothing: a once pleasing up-to-date emerald-green bathroom now unequivocally in need of what the estate agent called modernisation, the chrome covers to the taps long since broken off, the cracked cover to the cistern leaning against the wall below the window, the bath and bidet stained bone-gray and cobwebbed. Then you realise it must have been the estate agent, closing the door behind him as he was making his tour of the house.