Quilt

by Nicholas Royle

  – No, my dearest, I’m telling you about the new project.

  – But I’m asking you about the doctor…

  – You wouldn’t believe what I’ve managed to do here. I’ve been working at it day and night. It’s a new pool.

  – What do you mean, a new pool?

  – Well, not ‘pool’ exactly. More like ‘donut’. Ah! They’re doing it again! Incredible! When you said you were asking me about the doctor, when you put the stress on ‘you’, they started choreographing you again. Hilary gave this sort of twitch of grace and went sliding, jetting up the side of the glass, coming to rest virtually on my face here, while Taylor took to shuffling in the substrate. They’re directly responding to you. If you were here you’d understand. When are you going to be here?

  – You know this, I told you: I can’t get across for another month. Donut?

  – Remember last summer? The marvellous donut-shaped rays’ enclosure at the aquarium in Barcelona? And then when we got to the place in Boulogne – what’s its name?

  – Nausicaa.

  – The very same. You remember the eagle rays at Nausicaa?

  – Don’t tell me. You’re building a donut-shaped pool for eagle rays in the drawing room.

  – How did you guess?

  – Could it be because last time you deigned to talk to me you were telling me all about how you had got the estate agent in and how you’re putting the house on the market and now you’ve come to the realisation that the property will be much more attractive, especially to families, if most of the ground-floor accommodation is taken up with touchpools for rays?

  ‘Touchpools’ is a mistake. Creepy, it’s as if I’m losing touch with him.

  – Touchpools?

  Exasperated and uneasy, I am starting to apologise, but he cuts me off:

  – I changed my mind. I realised it couldn’t be done. I’m keeping the house.

  I’m inclined to query this (how can he afford it? what about his job?), but he’s irrepressible now:

  – You want to know about the doctor? Exactly. Everything’s fine. My brain’s entirely normal: that was their actual phrase. I signed up in town as a temporary resident and saw the doctor and he set up a hospital appointment for me the very next day. It was like being in a very slow washing-machine. And then the letter came through from the consultant just yesterday. I’m all clear. I’m entirely normal! But here’s the thing. And it has to do with the photograph I was telling you about. It’s about ghosts and nakedness and superimposition. When I signed on at the local surgery I’d expected to see the GP who saw my father, but actually it was the old one, the other one, the doctor who used to be our family doctor, twenty years ago. Dr Scrivens is his name. He’s always given me the creeps. My mother couldn’t tolerate the thought of him and when she began to decline, through the disintegration of days and years following the point at which as she told me she was losing her marbles, she connected keeping her health with not seeing this doctor, and then the question came up of her seeing him. It would have been a sort of declaration that she was certifiably off her rocker. The whole prospect terrorised her. It delayed for weeks the very idea of getting her seen by anyone at all. In the end my father managed to get her transferred to another doctor. But then on some later occasion, to do with a graze on her leg that would not heal, my father took her along, sitting with her in the waiting room before guiding her through the door when called, virtually into the arms of Scrivens. Floating face-up in Alzheimer soup was she by then merely oblivious? Or did seeing this object of terror somehow return her to life, in the way that sometimes a tiny incident or chance encounter can trigger a massive recuperation, if only for a moment? All of this only comes back to me now when I find myself in the same trap. I am at the surgery and before I realise what’s happening there I am, just six feet away from him, and of course he has been expecting me, he’s had time to prepare, but our encounter is the strangest phantasmagory, his eyes shifting eerily into focus like binoculars on a death-camp. Naturally he smiles, and I too. It is Scrivens, unmistakably, twenty years later yet miraculously aged, as if from a fairytale. And perhaps he, almost completely gray-haired, fainter-eyed, experiences from head to toe the passage of a similarly wayward vibration: I will look twenty years older to him too. And any second, I know, because now it comes back to me, he’ll do that thing with his eyes, that ocular passover, coming out with the standard portrait, the medical gaze that all doctors are trained to impose. But for that crystalline split-second slice of replay, in which we set eyes upon the other, I’m seeing Scrivens in my mind’s eye seeing me, double strangers both, outstaring ghosts. That’s when I have this eureka thing, and I realise my theory.

  What convinces me that he is having a breakdown? It is not when he goes on to outline the beautiful bareness, as he calls it, of his theory. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, is it a few minutes later, when he drifts off into what, to anyone else, might seem demented singsong.

  It is a question of veils, capes, sheets, shrouds, cloaks, blankets, quilts, mantles.

  It’s too crazy for a cult. He realises that. And it might indeed remain for centuries illegible, incomprehensible or even imperceptible to the general public.

  But a ray doesn’t constitute an analogy or ‘lively metaphor’ for a ghost. Rather, it is the other way round: it is necessary to think spectrality starting from the ray. There is no ghost without a trace of the ray. Everything that might be identifiable with the singularity of a living cape or gliding sheet comes back to this. Put crassly, the pallid underside of a ray is not like the bed-sheet whiteness of a spectre. The ray is at the origin. It’s the originary spook. Plato was already onto that, in the ray haunting Socrates and Meno. What people call the Gothic is a kind of anamorphic manifestation of the effects of the ray. The whole sprawling industry of ghosts and vampires is, in truth, largely a ray-phenomenon. Any moderately reflective reader might notice the importance of cloaks, mantles, shrouds, shawls and so on in the Gothic novel. It is necessary, however, to realise how integrally, how inextricably, this motif is folded into the figure or property of the ray, the living blanket or quilt. The bat is a red herring, in fishy phrase, dried and smoked, tried and tested, a making small and manageable of what is neither. What haunts is of greater scope, more minatory and dangerous, all-enfolding, from another element.

  Broadly speaking, the manta and the vampire (or ‘vampyre’, in its earliest orthography) emerge at the same period, in the first half of the eighteenth century. That the latter (a fantasy) seems to owe something to the former (the real) might veritably be classed a no-brainer. We don’t know when exactly the word ‘manta’ (meaning ‘blanket’ or ‘cloak’) was first used to designate the rays now linked with that name, but it appears to have been originally used interchangeably with ‘quilt’. In Socratic spirit it is tempting to construe ‘quilt’ here in its other sense, namely as a reference to that point in the throat at which swallowing becomes involuntary, but Antonio de Ulloa in his Voyage to South America (1758) writes of the ways in which the negro slaves off the coast of Panama are fastened with ropes and forced to fish for pearls, ‘and the mantas, or quilts, either press them to death by wrapping their fins about them, or crush them against the rocks by their prodigious weight’. This is as shocking an evocation of the reality of slavery as it is a fictitious and absurd description of mantas. Despite their often great size, manta rays are of course completely harmless. De Ulloa goes on: ‘The name manta has not been improperly given to this fish, either with regard to its figure or property; for being broad and long like a quilt, it wraps its fins round a man or any other animal that happens to come within its reach, and immediately squeezes it to death. This fish resembles a thornback in shape, but is prodigiously larger.’ It seems unlikely that, for all his luminous childlike gifts as an actuary of the imaginary, Lewis Carroll had the ray in mind when he frabjously unveiled his portmanteau but, once the double meaning of ‘manta’ is registered, it seems equally difficult not to en
visage such a creature in the bag, so to speak, or lurking at any rate under his cloak. It is a question of a new imaginary, not a regression into the vagary of animistic belief, a restituted primitivism, but a thinking of the ray as a force, a trace, whether buried or dancing, in a quite different understanding of the spectre and the wake. Like a dream of excarnation without any possible fossilisation, dream as impossible fossil, there is a naked cape and it is alive. Rays to the ground: starting off in the substrate. It is a matter of a new teratology, an enantiodromic animism that is radically non-theological, nanothinking through the ray.

  But next thing he is framing snatches of Clarence, speaking of ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon, wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, his internal marination, lengthening after life, in search of the empty, vast, and wand’ring air.

  Gently I ask him what he’s talking about, but he’s hopped into blurred song, and I am inclined to think this is his way of acting off the slightly ‘possessed’ sense that he claims his theory has given him:

  It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring, I see the doctor, I see the doctor and couldn’t get up in the morning, it’s roaring, marauding, we went to bed and deformed the head, of hearing and hoarding, who’s moaning, who’s speaking, it’s raining, it’s pouring, it’s howling, it’s calling, the moon rings, the moon sings, it’s paining, it’s spawning, wedged your head and went to bed, it’s feigning, it’s shoring, you hear the words are calling, cawing, they’re gnawing, and can’t get up in the can’t get up in the staining, it’s boring, she’s reigning, he’s fawning, I hear your voice, I know you’re dead, and can’t get up in the morning the morning the morning.

  Such is the range of his more lyrical and impassioned traits. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, I think. No, the horrifying conviction comes when he tells me about some writing project he’s begun elaborating and proceeds to read it aloud to me over the phone. It is a work of lexicography devoted to the buried life of anagrams and homophones, each word with its own idiosyncratic definition, a dictionaray, yes, as he is pleased to declare: the world’s first English dictionaray. It would be a verbal laboratory, a dictionary testamentary to the way the ray leaves its mark in everyday language, a vocabulary that might constitute a new species of bestiary, and generate an altogether other estuary English. He remarks that it is practically impossible to complete, particularly on account of the peculiarity of the adverb form in English, interminably stirring up as it does new terrain. And then he begins. With each new letter of the alphabet he pauses momentarily, then proceeds to the next series of words, giving each entry equal measure, enunciating throughout with customary care and scrupulosity (no doubt, it occurs to me, also his father’s). He reads it, in short, precisely in the manner of a poem. It takes me a while to get a grasp of what is going on:

  A

  Airy

  Awry

  Anniversary

  Anteriority

  Arraign

  Arrange

  Actuary

  Afraid

  Allegory

  Amatory

  Arty

  Abrasion

  Aurally

  Absurdity

  Already

  Astronomy

  Astrophysics

  Arbitrary

  Acrylic

  Antiquary

  Archetype

  Archetypal

  Apparatus

  Alteration

  Alterity

  Abruptly

  Army

  Attractively

  Admirably

  Articulately

  Apparently

  Angry

  Aleatory

  Archaeology

  Archery

  Astray

  Adversary

  Ashtray

  Aviary

  Adoration

  Anticipatory

  Apothecary

  Approvingly

  Alary

  Adultery

  Adulterate

  Asseveration

  Accordingly

  Accurately

  Accelerate

  Anywhere

  B

  Brae

  Beray

  Brain

  Bleary

  Binary

  Betray

  Berate

  Brassy

  Brazen

  Braised

  Barbarity

  Break

  Breakdown

  Brake

  Boundary

  Braid

  Bray

  Brave

  Balustrade

  Battery

  Brutality

  Barely

  Brace

  Barley

  Broadly

  Beret

  Bibliography

  Biography

  Bastardy

  Brandy

  Barmy

  Bakery

  Braille

  Bestiary

  Bizarrely

  Brainy

  Birthday

  Bystander

  C

  Crafty

  Centenary

  Charade

  Crystal

  Chrysalis

  Coronary

  Carry

  Combinatory

  Category

  Circularity

  Culinary

  Chivalry

  Courageous

  Concentration

  Craven

  Crayon

  Cranny

  Crazy

  Contrary

  Carvery

  Centrality

  Crane

  Cranky

  Crape

  Crate

  Crater

  Consecrate

  Creatively

  Celebrate

  Corroborate

  Collaborate

  Courtyard

  Cradle

  Crassly

  Customary

  Carpentry

  Cartography

  Carefully

  Contradictory

  Churchyard

  Chrysanthemum

  Commentary

  Cinematography

  Crayfish

  Chlamydospore

  Canary

  Charmingly

  Comfortably

  Creamy

  Cannery

  Calibrate

  Clairvoyant

  Clearly

  Carbohydrate

  Cartilaginously

  Certifiably

  Constrain

  Constraint

  Certainty

  Conspiracy

  D

  Derange

  Diary

  Dairy

  Dictionary

  Deprave

  Dreary

  Draughty

  Deliberate

  Deliberation

  Drained

  Disgraceful

  Driveway

  Desecrate

  Dray

  Drape

  Derail

  Disparity

  Democracy

  Dreamy

  Dromedary

  Debauchery

  Dilatory

  Decorate

  Defloration

  Dearly

  Disarray

  Dysphoria

  E

  Enrage

  Exploration

  Exploratory

  Exhortatory

  Extraordinary

  Essayer

  Earnestly

  Entreaty

  Errancy

  Extravagancy

  Erratically

  Exaggerate

  Eternally

  Embrace

  Experimentally

  Estrange

  Estuary

  Early

  Erase

  Eraser

  Entrails

  Electrically

  Entrain

  Elementary

  Exasperate

  Extraneousr />
  Eccentrically

  Everyday

  F

  Frail

  Frailty

  Fragrant

  Fragrancy

  Freight

  Fraternity

  Freaky

  Feathery

  Fakery

  Foray

  Frugally

  Fairytale

  Fray

  Frenetically

  Faraway

  Fainter-eyed

  Fearsomely

  Friday

  Forsythia

  Figuration

  Foolhardy

  Factory

  Ferryboat

  Frabjously

  Frame

  Framework

  Filtration

  G

  Granary

  Grange

  Gyrate

  Generate

  Generically

  Gray

  Gravy

  Grassy

  Great

  Grate

  Granny

  Grail

  Grave

  Graveyard

  Graveside

  Grain

  Grammatology

  Grammatically

  Gravity

  Gutturality

  Grade

  Grace

  H

  Hairy

  Hoary

  Hydra

  Hydrate

  Hilarity

  Hysteria

  Hysterical

  Husbandry

  Hairspray

  Hearsay

  Hardy

  Holy-water

  Hardly

  Hierarchy

  Hearty

  Harmony

  Heraldry

  Hydrocephalic

  I

  Infirmary

  Innovatory

  Iconography

  Irate

  Irritably

  Irascibly

  Iracundity

  Idiosyncratic

  Infiltrate

  Incorporate

  Interchangeably

  Irenically

  Irrecoverably

  Irreconcilably

  Irreproachably

  Ironically

  Irradiate

  Imagery

  Incommensurably

  Improbably

  Irreciprocally

  Irrecognisably

  Irrealisably

  Irrefutably

  Irremediably

  Irreparably

  Invariably

  Irrevocably

  Irrecoverably