The frozen field is compressed. The knock of a spade. Ice creases me. I am drawn up through the earth. I rest my chin upon my knees. Without sight, I am pure. The scratching of voles. Oak and elm protect me. My chaplet of heartsease is gone. I float in the dust of my own skin. Who is that standing over my bed? The plan forms: over the bare trees, the dark buildings, a vein in the clouds. From the lattice of old pains I infect myself once more with venereal promptings. From beyond my death, I am guided.
The surgeon’s hand is become his emblem.
He entered; I crossed the room, barefoot – I slipped the bolt. He paused, uncertain. Divinatory shapes in a garden of flame; the decision was forming. I had oiled the lock, tried it, but still he was startled. Directly, I initiated the new ritual: he was suppressed, stiff, anxious. He submitted. Rigid spine, fists clenched; the struggle etched stern lines around his empty sockets. A Mosaic will troubled his flesh: the skin of a glove left too long in water.
I would anticipate the motives of his actions, I would forestall him. If he lost his certainty he would no longer be my father. I would not have to kill him. The close walls rub my shoulders, powder me in fine bone dust. It is an obscene wedding, a blasphemy. The grey muslin bells around my nakedness. His black coat is grassed by firelight. The gold ring is my virtue.
Water has been boiled, it has cooled. I pour it carefully into a blue stone bowl, spilling no drop of it. The salt runs through my fingers in a vortex. I stir the surface of the water, setting the flow against the direction of the sun. Against nature.
I kept him standing where he was. Slowly I removed his coat, waistcoat, chains, cuffs, collar, the long cotton shirt. I laid out his things upon the table. An altar of offerings, touched by him, warmed with use. The turnip-watch had a seal and a red stone hanging from it. There was a key, a cigar cutter, some coins. I spotted his pale skin with water. I circled him, four times, dipping my fingers into the bowl. Four times I touched him.
He flinched, twisting, helpless, towards the direction from which he would be marked. Forehead, base of spine, liver, heart.
Behind him: I pressed myself against his back, my chemise between us, his as much as mine. My lips to his neck, whispering, whispering the names. I held him. My strength flowed out of me. Our veins were opened. My finger raced, rapidly, over his ribs. His nipples stiffened. I bound his wrists, lacing his thumbs together: a split sex.
He wanted, then, to turn. But I would not allow it. He was engorged; the thick vein pulsing in his neck. He was a painted statue. I saw the salt burn in him, his skin tightening to crystal scales. He was crowned with wild light. Priest, lion, sacrifice.
That autumn the skies over the city were scarlet, the market buildings and the tenements standing against them: plague islands. High windows were stained with this fire and the derelicts babbled millennial threats. It was the right time; I drained him, I milked his venom. The tower of the church, white ashlar blocks, was Egypt. His mouth was dry – he cried out – his tongue black: locusts. I fed him, dripping the salted water from the nipple of my finger. My tongue went into his mouth like a fish that becomes a knife. I wanted to slash his vocal cords, to make him speechless as well as blind. I wanted to give him rubies instead of eyes. To wrap him like a pharaoh.
Thunder shattered the mirror. A slate. Each segment, a forbidden syllable.
The hour had expired, his man was at the door. Yellow glove on the claw of the handle. A subtle pressure at his elbow. The surgeon hesitated, turning his great dim head towards me: a ceremonial ram caught in a thicket. My back was to him, I faced the fogged window. He was led away, slipping on the cobbles, unprotected, his face brushing through old sacks. This evening’s victim was already naked on the cutting bench. Hiss of naphtha. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, he washes; the audience is seated, expectant, the blade is placed in his hand. Twice as long as the neck is wide, without flaw. No break in its perfected edge.
Now he cannot leave my room. Stretched upon my bed, his hands behind his neck, his breath slow: out of his element. There is only light as we remember it. His man fidgets in the yard, muttering of appointments, digging at his groin.
Red incense in a brass mortar; smoke like the visible traces of an unheard sound. He loses all orientation. His man is dismissed, with no interval set for his return. Smoke scarfs the surgeon’s face, eroding his individuality – unsexing him. It is warm, it insinuates; it whispers. He seems to be on fire. The smoke connects him to the brass mortar. It is without origin.
She is moving, barefoot, circling; white chemise. Man without eyes, her equal. A night when neither sun nor moon are to be found. She has painted a tree of bones over his spine. And he is made to lie upon her bed, his face to the open sky. The incense is pure. It takes his breath.
She is moving, all around him: the names. He is not aroused; stretched out, his length upon her bed. He rests on the painted tree, the tree of bones; it supports him.
One ceremony became another. The first ceremony – the stirring of salt, and of water – was repeated. His skin drying to leather. He sleeps. Oak and elm. Beyond the courtyard, a girl’s voice, ‘Only a violet I plucked for my Mother’s Grave.’ Each new beginning brought something fresh to the ritual; was, in its turn, absorbed and transformed. He is partly conscious, conscious for part of the time. The hospital was another life; a fiction, an excuse. Duties, rewards: a wife somehow implicated in his guilt, broken. Memories, pre-visions of a crime that has to be committed: a terrible act that remains just beyond the horizon; a service, an unavoidable savagery…
His visits to her were restricted: thirty-seven visits, thirty-seven ceremonies. The incense of salt. The smoke. The smoke erasing detail from time, making the room a cell, drawing the walls in against his shoulders. Always circling. The same names, whispered. She unrolls a flint blade from a wrapping of felt. She marks him. The knife is his own. Now there are only eleven blades on the surgeon’s desk.
She pressed him from behind. She held him until her life was his life. Her pulse in his wrist. Now her hands have acquired his skills. He is handless. They lie together in darkness. She is alone, dead leaves scratching on the lid of her coffin, flakes of disturbed alabaster: the heavy door to the mortuary shed is locked and chained. An east wind rushing among the chipped effigies. Snow falling. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones. She sees with his skin.
Oak and elm. Dull wheels ringing through the packed black earth. Earth in her throat. The shiver of root hairs. Who are these men standing over my bed? Mud feet across the slope of the sky. Dreaming, open-eyed, of a murder that is not a crime. She is dreaming his dream. He has absorbed her anger, and her strength. He will act for her and condemn himself beyond all hope of remission.
Seasons, years, a century; bones into sand. He was young, he was moist. Weed-flowers breaking through the cobbles, splitting the black stone slabs. The church tower overbalances, topples towards him: a crisis, moral vertigo, a new fear. The tower is flint: shechita blade, white ashlar blocks. And now – as he rests in the elbow-chair, at the fogged window, worrying the grey muslin between his finger and his thumb – she covers his eyes with her hands. Trust. Warm, fresh bread. Clay. She draws them, suddenly, back. No warning. And he is pained. With light. The chamber streams with uncurtained brightness.
There was no hope for him this time. The serrated brilliance of snow. The pain! The white angels. The chipped and mutilated congregation of the dead, the witnesses. Casually severed fingers, fallen into the slush, are carried deeper into the undergrowth by disappointed scavengers. A thought fox, an outcast. Brambles bleed the plaster ankles.
Undefended outlines. Ghosts of objects that have disappeared from his memory. Unnamed shapes that he cannot use. He is driven back upon the bed, an ice hand cupping his heart – drawing it from him, a virgin’s lantern. His breath screams. He is drowning in silt. Choking. Yellow blood. A snow of muslin.
She is forcing the slit of his bag. She has all the bright instruments; the secret tools, for
bidden implements of power. The touching sticks. The bones of chrome. The perfected edges. His knowledge. She has leeched him of his will. But she cannot see these hieratic weapons. She can know them only by stitching her eyes, by moving in the thick certainty of darkness. This ceremony is the re-enchantment of life. The scalpel follows the heat-path of the scarlet tracings she has already inflicted upon his white skin.
The threads of his being are drawn out from his belly. He must reclaim the dream that was her existence. She is no longer trapped in his story, like a fly in amber. He is quite ignorant, he does not know her. He is effaced by a sudden scatter of snow. An unrecorded effigy on a dissenting tomb. His small heart. His heart-bird lifts. The threads are unpicked; he is scattered. The moisture of life. Her lips press against his wounds.
She looks from, and she rests in, the prescient socket of his eye.
She holds, in her hands, the womb – in which she should have been conceived: she is reborn. A dream of life. A key turning in a well-oiled lock.
In the elbow-chair, bare-legged. The glow of dissatisfied embers. Black kettle with a transmuted spout. Something shapeless and made from felt is smouldering in an open grate. The guttered stub of a candle in a broken wine glass. A cracked pane in the window, cold air belling the muslin. She wraps herself in darkness. The room closes on her; she has no further need of it. The intensity of that single moment scorches her lips. There is nothing more to say. The shadow of the church tower falls uselessly across an empty chair.
‘Murder – Horrible Murder!’ Shout at the dead. The door, bolted from the inside, is broken down: the servant (blood on his gloves), men in uniform, neighbours, barking dogs. A gay woman, an unfortunate – disembowelled. Throat cut to the spinal cord, kidney on thigh, flesh stripped from the ankles. Horror! Lock it, seal it, bury all trace.
Where is the surgeon? Gone, vacant: an empty house. Seizure? Madness. He is confined: there is no life in him. He stares into a frozen fishpond, his mouth agape. Toothless, spoiled. He is absorbed in a cup of cold water. He exists only in the vapour of the clouds racing through the high windows. Where? Anywhere, nowhere. Leytonstone. Whipps Cross.
Footsteps on the cobblestones, and a single knock at her door. The dream of a perfect murder fades.
VII
Beneath the odd, parchment-shaded lamp, a meniscus of pale light: the room quilted in bulky darkness. The bundle of blue papers has stuck to my hands in a single block, heavy as stained glass, interleaved with lead. Millom’s face is bestial. He insinuates, whispers, rasps: fixes me with his sunken, chalk-rimed eyes. His fleshy lower lip shivers in a mime of humour. He is amused. He leans over; his buffed pike-teeth glinting voraciously. White hands break free of his cuffs, to flap around the lamp, as he signals his triumph. ‘Gotcha!’ He has implicated me in horror, infected me with a small corruption from which there is no immunity.
‘You understand the nature of her triumph? Yes?’ Millom preached, determined to poison the silence with a redundant afterword. ‘It was indifference: “surviving death through death”. The blind surgeon wanted something that excited him more than honour, more than sanity, more even than life. He wanted the one crystal absolute she denied him – yes, apathy; he wanted it so much he was prepared to pass over the borderline of identity, become her, and suffer her vengeance within her flesh.’
No. I didn’t want to be drawn into giving mind to this fiction, but it seemed to me that Millom was wrong, completely wrong. As wrong as it is possible to be. I repudiated his terms: ‘vengeance’, ‘apathy’. I could only read the crucial ‘exchanges’ between the woman and the surgeon in terms of the madness of love-death – the ‘little deaths’ of physical ecstasy. Within this tale, the woman exploits those out-of-the-body post-coital experiences, where both partners become the loved one and the lover: the metaphysical poets’ mingling of souls. Through the focus of repeated ritual acts the woman infiltrates the surgeon/father’s consciousness – so that, when the inevitable moment comes, she takes responsibility for her own death; leaving him with nothing, an achieved emptiness.
‘The woman, the woman,’ Millom twitched on. He was talking to himself. Without having ‘written’ anything, he found himself an author. His performance was magisterial in its self-deceit. ‘The woman allowed the surgeon to enact the deed that was his inescapable destiny. She could not change the events of history, but only the meaning. In the freedom of death, she used her more potent memory, her older soul, to avenge herself by trapping the killer in the seductive mirror of her youthful skin. His sightless blunder damned him. His act of sacrificial slaughter, releasing her (as he thought) from an inherited taint, was, in fact, the very movement that brought him down, crushed his over-weening pride. You follow me now? He is the man, and he is still “alive”. He has no need of a name; his identity is transferable, so he’s immortal. He wanders the city, seeking out the fatal woman, like a benign host desperate for the only satisfying plague bacterium – the one that is fatal. Hopelessly, in drinking clubs and hotel bedrooms, he feels the contours with his trembling hands, face after face after face, searching for his own earlier self, his woman soul. He is prepared to commit any crime to avoid the dreadful ceremonies that have already taken place.’
Millom brought his jerky moth-catching hands together in a clap of self-satisfaction: he sealed the circle of morbid light. ‘Am I wrong? Only the dead have the time adequately to revenge themselves. Their sense of honour is older than the sun; but the damage they inflict upon the dream of their lives is terrible. They die in obedience to some posthumous whim.’
It may have been the unconvinced nature of the light in this room, or some failure of nerve among my retinal fibres, but it now appeared that the manuscript sheets had lost their colour: the lines had faded and the blue escaped. Millom’s double-spaced, tightly controlled Italic script had narrowed, spidered, speeded into an over-familiar black scrawl; a sequence of Bic-incisions intended for decoding by the author alone. The manuscript was in my own hand. The writing of this tale had nothing to do with Millom, nor with the ‘Prima Donna of Spitalfields’. It is mine: lost or suppressed. But I have no memory of its composition. The risks were too great. I had sworn to finish with all this compulsive nightstuff. I locked the story away, and dropped the key into the canal. How then had it come into Millom’s hands? If he was ‘communicating’ with anyone it was not the dead. I discounted the possibility that he (or his agents) had simply broken into my house and stolen these papers, from among all the stacks of ruin. Could John Millom have evolved some psychic ‘fax’ machine, the ability to invade my sleep? Was it possible that I functioned, in some ugly, involuntary way, as a scribe to the worst of the sites that I was foolish enough to visit?
I knew that, whatever the price, I would have to carry the bundle away from this place and destroy it. The thing was too volatile. It must never be published. The bargain it represented was no longer one I was prepared to honour. I clawed myself, frantically, out from the hissing leatherette chair.
Millom put his hand against my chest. I was relieved to find that it did not pass directly through the mantle of flesh. He signalled for me to follow him.
‘I have a gift already prepared for you. Take it when you go, but be sure not to open it until you are safely back indoors.’
I agreed eagerly, intending to drop whatever it was, sight unseen, into the nearest bin. Millom blocked my path and – swivelling on his heels – opened a door which led into what might have been a bedroom. He scratched at the walls, looking for a light switch. Nothing had prepared me for this.
I would not cross the threshold. I remained outside, staring into a chamber of blasphemy, from which escaped bands of stifling air, the low smoke of wet leaves burning. Millom, in a palsied dance of celebration, waved the corset-spring key in my face. This, I realized, was the heart of the matter, the revelation he was desperate to share.
‘Shaped,’ he whispered, ‘like the Egyptian character for neter, the one supreme God; this insignificant m
etal tool activates the entire operation. Its outline describes the passage through which we travel to communicate with the world of spirits.’
The only spirits I was interested in, at that moment, were in a bottle. I needed a stiff pull before I could take another step. But nothing of the sort was on offer. The floor of the room was divided into lettered squares; in its centre was a circular raised platform, a table masquerading as a bed. Placed, obviously, at the four cardinal points were narrow-lipped jars, filled with something dark, earth or ashes. Millom now reached into his jacket pocket and – ceremoniously – added the latest graveyard transfusion to the eastern jar. Silver wires ran from these earth-batteries, across the canopy of the bed, to a gilded ring, a serpent swallowing its own tail; on which Millom laid the key. The canopy itself was a grey and lumpy conglomerate: rags of faded cloth, ribbons, dried flowers, hair curls, maggoty earth-meat. A body had been shaped from pillaged clay, dressed in wisps of net; wigged, laced, booted. Sufficient space had been left on this necrophile altar for the unthinkable implication that Millom himself would lie beside his mud-bride in a form of vermicular marriage.
‘With this key,’ Millom said, ‘the dead man, whose rituals ensured both his invisibility, and his immortality, escaped from the asylum. Without memory, or a past, he paddled over the marshes, to pass unremarked among the houses and the traffic of East London. He left behind his pentacle of victims – not as a barrier warding off future evils, but as an achieved act of occult geometry, sealing the secrets of that room for ever.’
The burial place had been physically shifted, cup by cup, from the cemetery into Millom’s chamber. He had dug his nails into corruption: listening attentively while his mind split, and branched into previously untested chapters of madness. This self-recording conjurer was trapped, under a carapace of hysterical conformity, in degradation. He personified all the furtive impulses of his time and his city. Like a ruthless bibliophile, he collected dead whispers. He walled himself in bad faith, in fantasies of decay. He attempted to demonstrate with his septic wax tableau, the ultimate extension of horror. He had earned the right of becoming, in his own words, ‘one of us’.
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