Morbid Tales

by Quentin S Crisp

‘Don’t you want to do something about it?’

  ‘What like?’

  ‘I don’t know. Aren’t you fed up with the world controlling everything you do? Our parents brought us together without thinking about it, and now they’ll split us up again with no thought at all. It’s just some stupid visit for them.’

  ‘But we can still be friends, and maybe see each other sometimes.’ She smiled faintly.

  Cousin X saw how frail the words were. There was warmth in them, the warmth of real feeling. But their innocence was not to be supported by reality. They were like little birds fallen from their nest.

  ‘It took hours to drive here. It’s not going to happen very often just ’cos we want it to. We’re still children. Our feelings don’t matter. Anyway, somehow it wouldn’t be right, just seeing each other every couple of years or so. It would spoil everything.’

  He threw back his head and breathed deeply. He still had his vision. As long as he had that he could not be beaten. He looked at his cousin and tried to calm himself. There she was, breathing, talking, near enough to touch. First he saw just her physical form, then came the memories of the Unlived World, the whole spreading tree of beautiful things that never were. One leaf falls. In this leaf they are waifs, wind-ruddy, barefoot, running past the limekiln over stubbled fields. Another leaf. They are dolls in the bright world of paper and sponge against a background of darkness. Another. She descends on a moonbeam at the summons of his poem. One by one the leaves fall.

  He looked at his cousin suddenly as he might do any other object. Why was it that compared to all others, this object had so much power to draw the eyes? It was an object unique and warm with the mystery of life. Already the air seemed sharp and jagged as a broken bottle, so that if he moved he felt it would lacerate him. But the jagged air accentuated something delicate in her. Suddenly, all his persuasion and portentousness was futile and utterly beside the point. What was important was action, and the living body from which action originated. Just as he had been called out into the garden, so a calling in his very flesh seemed to correspond to the flesh of his cousin’s face and hands as those things met his eyes. The two were meant to be joined, and this separation of theirs was unbearable. He needed to articulate himself by more tactile means. Even to touch was not enough. Touch was not possession.

  ‘We could run away together,’ said Sasha.

  It was a brave attempt, but by the catch in her voice both of them knew that it wasn’t working. This was not the effortlessness of magic. It was just childish whimsy, now rendered flat and broken by the knowledge of something more substantial.

  Contrary to the usual laws of his being, whereby he had to make himself do anything, Cousin X now had to restrain himself from touching her. He did not think he could endure the fractured feeling when those touches failed to add up to anything more. His urgency was forced along other channels. He could no longer stand stupidly in front of her. In a burst of momentum he ran off into the shadier regions of the garden.

  Sasha was oddly shocked by this action, which seemed to forbid any pursuit. Downcast, and now quite put out of the solitary reverie that had allowed her to play alone, there was nothing for her to do but return loiteringly to the house.

  Eunice was helping Lynn in the kitchen and Barry was carrying on an intermittent conversation with his brother between the kitchen and dining areas. The adults noted Sasha’s solitary entrance without comment.

  ‘Sasha, will you go and tell your cousin dinner is ready?’

  Her mother’s voice jogged her into alertness. For once this was a welcome order. It was an excuse to follow her cousin and escape the trap of dull anxiety she had been caught up in. She wriggled from her seat and pattered outside with the stale head of someone who has just woken.

  The scene in the kitchen and dining room had not altered much since Sasha had come in. Now, however, the women were moving the dishes from the kitchen to the dining table. Kevin was helping them a little, and Barry was pulling up the table’s wooden wings to accommodate their guests.

  Sasha had been gone only two or three minutes when there came from the direction of the garden a high-pitched shrieking. It came in continuous bursts, like thin jets of blood pumping from a living heart, and was so shrill it must have stripped the membranous skin off the throat that it issued from. Lynn dropped the bowl of salad she was carrying and it shattered on the floor. Blackie, too, sat up and twitched her ears as at some ultrasonic frequency. The screaming continued. At first it had simply been a horrific sound, detached from any owner. But the terror in the sound was undoubtedly human, and from this fact it was only a single step to the conclusion that something had happened to Sasha. Each stricken with their own fears as to the meaning of the screams, the four adults raced towards their source. No one could have stayed in the house. No one could have done anything other than run.

  The screaming drenched the air around them so that its transparency was brittle and shocking. They did not hear it at all now. It was a wincing pulse, now all brightness, now overcast, which surrounded them completely, and to whose centre their every action was drawn. At last the vivid scene came into view where the sun lay like resin on the clover, and fat bees, their legs swollen with pollen, hung heavily in the air. Everything had taken on the smarting slow motion of an accident. The two children and the adults around them had the drained, puffy look of the subjects of a cheap pornographic flick, at once bloodless and flushed.

  Sasha’s screams were now coagulating into sobs. The foam of grass and clover was striped all about with a dark crimson, like the mess of a child’s painting. Cousin X sat cross-legged at the centre of this stinging summer scene, himself slick with dabblings of red. In his left hand was an unidentifiable purple mass, and in his right his penknife, now sticky.

  His eyes had in them that same pitiful appeal as when he had hovered over his unconscious cousin. But this time he looked utterly lost. More than one person present felt that they finally saw what was missing from Cousin X, for surely something was missing.

  Tears stitched their pinched and bloody way down his cheeks, and between hiccupping snivels he made the plea that caused the parents to groan and turn away, unwilling even to go near the boy’s raw, incurable sickness.

  ‘I just wanted to see how it works. That’s all. Please. I just wanted to see how it works.’

  The mass he held out like an offering, lolling between his fingers, was a kitten.

  ***

  Years blurred and came into fragile focus again with imperceptible lightness. Sasha jerked her head slightly, twitching with tiredness. It had been an early morning, and she still felt its harshness in her eyes and in the too-smart clothes she was wearing. She dragged her thoughts out of the murmur of conversation that surrounded her and into consciousness. The whiteness beyond the window she sat at blurred once more into the background.

  It was her younger sister Leona’s wedding reception. Colourless daylight limned her champagne glass and she watched the bubbles inside rise in strings from nowhere, or now and then detach themselves from the transparent wall where they were anchored like barnacles.

  Far from feeling excited or moved by her proximity to one of life’s celebrated events, she could detect in her surroundings only the usual deadly flatness of reality. The day was sprinkled with words like a handkerchief with perfume, but those words—in speeches to be made, documents to be signed and vows to be taken—could do nothing to change the air of the world in which people lived. The perfume of the words themselves would evaporate and the state of affairs which they brought about would become an entrapping normality before the spell of once-in-a-lifetime excitement they promised could ever take hold.

  She yawned, stale as a passenger on a long car journey. Bored and restless. When had the world lost its glamour? All the things that had once been the proudest feathers in life’s plumage, seemingly known to all, synonyms for life itself, things such as love and adventure, were now so rare that no one even recognised their
names if you spoke them. And all the stops along life’s way had become like the motorway cafés that so well displayed the advantages of modern life. Tasteless food and furnishings, extortionate prices, an overall sense of having been helplessly cheated by no one in particular, leaving one angry and depressed.

  She was in just the mood to notice things to which she might not usually have paid any attention. Across the room her Uncle Kevin stood by the buffet table in a creased beige suit, an expensive professional camera slung over his shoulder. As ever there was that vaguely ironic air to him, as if he were an anthropologist merely observing the social behaviour of primates, yet unaware himself of the rather crumpled, awkward figure he cut. Those around him might be apes, but at least they were apes who shared a common sense that might be called fashion, or even sex. He was all the more ridiculous for being an intellectual ape. But then perhaps, just perhaps, for all his blind spots, he was peripherally aware of this too and simply did nothing to disassociate himself from this image. A strange man. Sasha knew very little about him except by vague repute.

  But who was the young man who had come with him? Sasha had noticed him fleetingly before, but had been distracted by her sister talking to her. Then, later, she saw that her parents had noticed this shady guest, too, and exchanged close words that Sasha had been unable to catch. Now he was standing next to Uncle Kevin and listlessly picking out peanuts and hors d’oeuvres from the spread to load onto his paper plate, which seemed in danger of bending and spilling its contents. He was turned almost completely away from her, so that she only just caught a glimpse of his ear and lower jaw. She still had not seen his face squarely. Indeed he positively seemed to be hiding behind his long, floppy fringe. He averted his face, skulked in corners and shadows, like an incognito celebrity, and generally did his best to darkle his way through the whole day.

  What was it about this faintly dishevelled figure that continued to attract Sasha’s attention? The more she watched him the harder she found it to take her eyes off him. Perhaps he really was famous. She examined him meticulously. His dark suit was even more crumpled than Uncle Kevin’s, and on the back of his head a ratty little tuft of hair stuck up as if his pillow had pressed and set it like that permanently, so that no amount of combing would ever persuade it to lie straight with the rest of his hair. From the back, at least, his was the kind of appearance that prejudiced unfavourably even those who like to believe they are liberal minded. And yet, to Sasha now, although she was scarcely able to be frank with herself on the matter, he looked so bad that he looked good. There was something incisive, something sharp about him. People often speak of performers, religious leaders and so on as having presence, and Sasha had always believed this was simply evidence of the human willingness to succumb to mass hysteria, but this young man, even in the slant of his arm to the point of his elbow, seemed to have something.

  If he had presence then perhaps she possessed some opposite but corresponding faculty—vision perhaps? At any rate, after a while he seemed to detect her eyes upon him, and in an unguarded moment looked round. His eyes widened when he realised he had turned inopportunely and met her unprotected gaze. Maybe it was the undisguised recognition on his own face, exaggerated in something like shame or regret by the sharp scarecrow lines about the eyes, that sparked off something in Sasha too. Anyway, she was instantly sure that she knew the person, but found herself tantalisingly unable to shape his name or pin down the circumstances under which they had met.

  The young man became even more furtive and, after a word or two to Uncle Kevin, left the room. Before she had made any actual decision, Sasha got up from her seat as if she could stand the tedium no longer, and followed through the same door by which he had disappeared, out into the corridor. She blinked in the bleaching excess of light from the row of windows here. The man was nowhere to be seen. Continuing along the corridor she reached the foot of a staircase, and hearing a creak looked up to see the back of his suit disappearing around the crook in the stairs.

  The location for the reception was a house loaned by friends of the family. It had a strange feeling about it, as if it had once been used for some kind of business or institution, but was now converted to more domestic purposes. Or as if it had once been a home, but was now devoted to functions more public and formal, such as today’s celebration. A stiff hush seemed to reign on the stairs, so that Sasha felt as if she were stepping over the rope that hung loosely before the forbidden wing of a stately home otherwise open to the public.

  She passed the wood-panelled walls, turned at the landing, and arrived at the passage of the first floor to find the man had once more vanished. He had obviously taken refuge in one of the rooms adjoining the passage, but which one? Some of the doors were ever so slightly ajar. Sasha felt instinctively that he would not be in one of these rooms. Anyway, there was nothing really to be afraid of. If she stumbled into a private room that was currently occupied she could just make some hasty excuse and back out again.

  She closed her hand around the brass handle of one of the doors and twisted it open. The man turned at the sound. He was sitting at a large, sombre, polished table in what looked like some sort of study. He gave a look of blank, unreadable surprise, and then a nervous smile seemed to catch at the sides of his mouth. It was, at any rate, a sad expression; whether because it expressed inner sadness or because it evoked sadness in the onlooker, was hard to judge.

  Sasha had done this before, made her way as if compelled to where he sat waiting. Now that she had arrived at the adytum of his presence her memory came back in a tingling shiver, as obvious and easily forgotten as the air she breathed. And in the next instant there flashed out from this calm remembrance a vicious fear, like a hound left to guard a forgotten chamber, crazed and half starved, no longer able to distinguish between those who put it there and those who it is meant to guard against. The books lining the shelves, the curtains, the warped panes, the wallpaper, her cousin himself, everything in the room was for a moment sprayed with a déjà vu of crimson, an obsession of blood. It was just a memory, though, wasn’t it? Just a memory . . .

  ‘I should have known you’d come,’ he said, and the crimson faded.

  It seemed ridiculous now to try and explain that she had come because she hadn’t known who he was. Surely, she had come for the very opposite reason. She had known who he was all along.

  ‘Do my parents know you’re here?’

  ‘I think they do. But they won’t say anything. They don’t want to cause a scene.’

  Sasha installed herself in the seat opposite him.

  ‘It was getting a bit much for me,’ he explained further. ‘I felt the need to escape.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  He smiled, ‘I’m beginning to think it was a mistake. Actually it was another of my father’s ideas. He thought it would be good for me to prove I can mix perfectly well in a social environment.’

  ‘You’re taking a bit of a risk.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Your parents have not forgiven me, apparently. They seem to regard what I did as simply malicious, rather than the act of a child who needed help. That’s typical of this barbaric country. Northern Europeans just don’t like children.’

  ‘Northern Europeans?’

  ‘North of the Channel. It’s the same mentality they had when they would hang children for stealing bread. Nothing has changed much.’

  He looked gloomily at the table, then up at Sasha.

  ‘I’m sorry. I know they’re your parents.’

  ‘No, no. It’s all right.’ She found herself brushing away his apologies automatically, slight and grudging as those apologies were.

  It was a curious feeling to meet someone again as an adult who you had last met when you were both children. On the one hand there was some essential aura to the person that was unchanged, so that it would almost have seemed natural even now to run down to the bottom of the garden to play together; the intervening length of time seemed to have evaporated entir
ely, so that they were simply taking up where they left off. But on the other hand, both their vocabularies had broadened and deepened, and a veil of restraint and sophistication had fallen over each. He was more changed than she. He must have been in his mid-to-late twenties, but he could have passed for ten or fifteen years older. Most of all it was his eyes and his skin that layered him with extra years. His face was scored by a tracery of tiny lines giving him the vagueness and roughness of a burnt-out case, some veteran of the underworld of self-abuse in all its multifarious forms. Just as a dish or cup of bone china may be pieced together again after it has shattered, but will always be marked and weakened, ready to crack along the same hairlines, so he appeared painfully fragile. His eyes, intense and protuberant as ever, reflected the light a little too wetly, a little too slackly, like an animal in poor condition. If, for all this, it was still not strange to think he was only twenty-something, it must have been because of his posture, his appearance of extreme sensitivity and lucidity, and a certain flame of animation.

  ‘Do you know I’d completely forgotten you existed?’ said Sasha. ‘It’s really strange, as if I’ve suddenly gained a past that I didn’t have five minutes ago.’

  ‘But you remember everything now?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Everything?’ And he leaned forward, looking meaningfully up from beneath his eyebrows.

  There was something about the question that made Sasha hesitate, and before she could rally an answer he had interrupted musingly.

  ‘I remember something—I remember a conversation very like this with you about how much you can remember. There are certain states of mind or feeling, like love, that are impossible to remember clearly when you’re not actually in them.’

  Since this was not a question Sasha let it stand simply as a statement without adding anything of her own. In the intervening time since she had last seen Cousin X, she had lost the ability to respond naturally to such allusions to the impossible. Still seen and not heard, she had become part of the adult world. As if she had not understood she changed the pace of the conversation with a question of her own.