Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  (Crash) ‘law says I have to speak if I don’t want to? To you or anyone?’ (Running footsteps. Falling glass. Icy gusts.) ‘Gives you the right to treat me as dumb, then? No cock, (crash) no balls, (crash) no voice? That it, master-gardener? Just do what you like with the poor riff-raff gypsy?’

  ‘Felix, Felix. You’re wrong, boy. You were dying. And we were lonely, weren’t we? You can’t deny that.’

  The wraith with the hammer had descended and now flickered across Leon’s vision. The smashing began again all around him, louder. The gasped words resumed.

  ‘Fine, you rescued me. (Crash) would love their rescuer. Of course. I was (crash) wasn’t I? But repayment? Stoke boilers and shut up? Lie doggo by day and lie still at night, that it? (Crash) Saviour, nurse, lover? Can’t tell me that’s natural. (A loud gonging as the hammer, wielded by tiring muscles, flew off and struck a girder.) Who’d want that? Forced on me. Whoever wanted to have to be saved? (Still the feet whisked over the gratings and winter billowed behind.) All that (smash) about your Chinese bit of stuff, Keemun or whatever her name was. On and on about her (crash) bloody months on end. Stupid cow. I still think you made her up. (Crash) thought a lot more of her than you ever did of me. What does a handkerchief prove? Nothing! (Crash) Nothing! (Crash) Nothing!’

  Now the voice was becoming fainter as it ran off down the far end of the aisle, shivering panes as it passed. Leon had to strain to hear above the wind the tatters of words as they twirled fiercely like the eddies of straws and dead leaves in an empty street. Alone on the gravel with a mortally ill companion, dreamed girl, imagined boy, he could only repeat ‘I thought you couldn’t speak,’ helplessly. ‘Oh Felix, my poor Felix, I thought you couldn’t speak. If only you’d said.’ The wind was terrible. All at once the brightness in his chest grew, filling the House with remarkable light. All his plants wore fragments of multicoloured glass and were jewelled. Blazing gems fell slowly through the air. In this radiance only his own voice grew dusky. ‘Look, oh look,’ he murmured wonderingly. Then, ‘Felix, my love,’ his mouth spoke directly into gravel which tasted of foreign lands. ‘If only you’d said. I thought you couldn’t speak.’

  And at these words his heart, carneous fig, burst to pieces, each fibrillating with wings awhirr. They fluttered inside their bonework cage and yearned to be gone. One by one, as the snowflakes drifted through the ribs of his shattered House and settled on his back, they began finding their way out.

  How, then, could the tamarind which grew beside the Conium near the door have broken in, half drowning Leon’s ‘I thought you couldn’t speak’? What commentary is possible from a man near death? Who could believe in a mind, embarked on its last short wandering, finding refuge in the branches of a favourite tree? Yet on the edge of nothing a voice spoke to itself, neither plant nor man:

  ‘With what mixed feelings we watch our gardener fail! This man whose hands we loved, whose scent we knew, who spoke to us in a tongue we nearly understood: did he not give his health for us in desolate times? This atrocious cold from which he sheltered us, the wind puffing through shattered panes speaks, shuuuff, of treason. For, as we feel the sap thicken and grow sluggish, as our leaves turn numb and roots shrivel at the seep of this mortal chill, we recognise the scale of the deceit.

  ‘Some time ago the coconut palm voiced one of his tedious theories. Apparently his idea is that the wall around the Gardens must support another, vaster, transparent dome which contains this House. And beyond that there’s probably another, and another: an infinite regress of ever-larger structures enclosing one another, each with its own atmosphere and temperature and pressure. There’s no single house which can claim to be definitive, he said. I imagine he’s too ill to speak now.

  ‘The rest of us did our best to ignore the way mere loftiness of stature was presumed to license banal philosophising. Frankly – and this is the deathbed frankness which has neither time nor will to dissemble – I’ve always tackled these Great Questions with a device of my own invention which I call “Bunkum’s pruner”. Wielded with the right dexterity I find it lops away at proliferating theories much as a vine, shorn of its pretentious intercoils, can be satisfactorily reduced to an essential and quite humble expression of its vineness. Chilled to the marrow as we now are, I can see my primer’s value is going to be proved right to the last. Never mind concentric universes, the one outside’s killing us so to hell with the others. There is nothing beyond it and it’s pouring in so fast the House echoes to tickings and crunkings as the pipes cool. Pipes, you see? It’s all artificial. It was always artificial. For as long as it lasted – and we were practically all of us raised here, knowing nowhere else – this place was everything and everywhere. But there again, what could any of us have done about it had we known? It was never anything but lethal outside.

  ‘So what are we to make of this poor man lying at our feet, the breath leaving him like moths from a bottle? Do we hold him to blame, who until so recently was the god with the brass wand, the great prestidigitator who magicked us through our lives so that we thrived and grew, heading only for the siren sun and cursing the glass which kept us from bursting through? He, of course, knew that the sun is nothing but a great thermal deception. It is in fact as stone cold as the moon, and had we really managed to grow through the roof and walls we should have perished as surely as we’re perishing now. So what was it all for? My patented pruning hook whispers as it slices: it was for his benefit alone. What else? A falsehood he wished to sustain for obscure private reasons, hiding behind glass, showing off his menagerie to his own kind, people who blew smoke in our faces and smudged our blossoms with lipstick and sebum. To his greater glory, then, since they evidently thought he was no end of a fine fellow.

  ‘It’s growing very dim and I can no longer feel most of my body at all. My darling neighbour, my hemlock, overheard that and says tartly that she was numb from birth so why don’t I stop moaning? Her words pierce me utterly because they show – oh, too late! – that not only does she have wit but is, after all, quite capable of hearing the truth without going into ecstasies of childish confusion. Very well, then. Dearest Conium, little hemlock: I love you. I always have, and will for however many more minutes. My last formulated thought will be of you; it’s your fading image I shall carry with me. How could it be otherwise? I don’t for one moment believe you can magically cancel the dark but your presence will be what it has always been – something to hold as I’m released for ever from the messiness of love and the absence of redemption. Don’t cry, little hemlock, you shan’t die just yet. You were designed for cold climates and I rejoice in whatever chance or error brought you here. That Annona, who’s more soppy than he’s sour, used to say you weren’t made for this world. Were any of us, I should like to know?

  ‘But … ah, I can just see people gathering around our gardener, vainly trying to catch the moths. They turn him over and there is a coal hammer under him which would not have helped their artificial respiration. Others are hurrying in with hand trolleys, spades and sacking. We – that is, those of us still alive – gather the intention is to move us at once to the Temperate House. No thanks. I’ve never known where I came from and now I never shall, but let’s say I feel in my roots (as would still have been possible until quite recently) that I, too, was meant for a different place, a different land, even a different universe. They can shunt my remains from one phony house to another but I shall put forth not one green shoot for them. Never. We were always dupes and I wish I’d paid more attention to what my roots were telling me. I must admit, though, that the great duper could even now coax some green out of me were he not himself beyond it. He did have the most wonderful hands. Not one of us failed to respond to those remarkable fingers. Since my frankness now knows no bounds I’m obliged to add that I actually thought it was a disgusting thing to do, drenching us in festering tobacco juice every so often. When it dried on one it gave off a stench of tawny spittle which will be with me to my dy—. Ah. Well, they do say laugh
ter’s the first and last sign of intelligence.

  ‘No time for that now. We’re pinched, frozen and blackening. We’re being dismantled. It’s ending after all. I’m sorry, for I used to love the way the light stole in at dawn when we were all together, bedded down in our humous thoughts. It was like a slow scent rising into the air and the flittering birds beyond the panes sang it up. Everyone began stretching at the same moment and the sound was a soft hum. I imagined it spreading out on all sides in a space a million times vaster than this House such as I know couldn’t exist. I seemed to hear this illimitable hum as if there were nothing under the sky between one horizon and another but growing things all tensing themselves at the light’s silky command. Hard to believe I heard it this morning for the very last time.

  ‘I used also to love the sun’s decline, how the galleon’s shadow sailed a curving course across the roof. In summer months its keel would cut overhead, skid off into evening and vanish into the darkening sky. Often I would wake in the night and see it up there, tacking in the moon’s cold mauve. I felt such affinity for it I wonder if my ancestors may not have arrived thus, borne in a golden ship from wherever it is the wind begins. Never again, then. Nothing can possibly follow cold like this. (Oh, this dark!) And all right, to be fair to the man, he did speak like the wind itself and he loved and loved us as best he knew. But love’s a worthless disease; there’s nothing to learn from it. He wore himself to the selfish bone and beyond. He heard our hum. In a minor way he was our sun.

  ‘I believe they’re taking him away now with a mask over his nose. I can tell them it’s in vain, since I am he. And as for the rest of us … “Transplant”. What a vile smell that has! It’s one of their words, and carries. They’re coming this way, I think, although I can no longer see. I sense mutilation and sacking. I’m frightened, Cou Min, my hemlock. I’ve tried to be brave but I’m terrified now it’s happening. No redemption, none. Remember me? Promise me that, my dear? That I truly loved you, for all the good it did us. You alone will survive. Remember me … Are you still there? You are? Oh, then, farewell my House! Precious hemlock, little Conium, farewell!’

  Thirteen

  Nowadays the Royal Botanic Society’s elegant old mansion is, most likely, the Museum of Historic Instruments, beautifully restored and smelling of beeswax polish. Here the more culturally-minded tourists may stop for an hour on the way to the Zoo (trams 8, 9, 17 and 26a pass the door) and wander through rooms of zithers, cimbaloms and portable organs, passing an immense gilded piano made for Liszt by Pleyel. They can pause before a harpsichord whose ebony keys were once depressed by the fingers of Mozart (aet. 10) while touring with his father who was claiming his wizard son was not yet nine. On all sides the building is jostled by shops. The plane trees are still there but the great wall went quite recently. In its place is a half-mile frontage of stores, including the apotheosis of the music shop whose wartime window felled a lion. This now sells jazz in the basement, classical CDS on the ground floor and Japanese electronic pianos under its post-modern eaves.

  Of the original Gardens themselves not a stick remains. Their site has become a chic residential precinct. The tropics are represented in a well-patronised corner delicatessen which sells blowsy mangoes and cans of a fizzy drink claiming to be made of 18 per cent pure maracujá juice. The nearest jungle is one depicted in a poster in the local travel agent’s window. Very occasionally, as when spring thaw coincides with heavy rain, a particular quarter of this enclave has the tendency to flood. None of the residents there know they are living on a lake; that at any moment the concrete of their apartments might turn to glass and, peering down past other people’s cut-price Iranian rugs, they might spy a ghostly yellow-haired gardener far below hauling in a fowling net in whose meshes are snared the brilliant webs of an oystercatcher. But like everybody else they suspect nothing of what preceded them. Solidly rooted (as they would assert) in the present, they turn out to be helplessly caught up in a directionless future.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © James Hamilton-Paterson, 1993

  The right of James Hamilton-Paterson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–32017–2