Her sobs ceased, she seemed to calm.
‘Don’t you want me there for you when you’re well again?’
I turned to her. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her right hand, gave me a piercing look, grinned, a cold grin that haunts me still. I shrugged.
‘Well,’ she said.
And that was the last word to pass between us. She stood, walked away, left me sitting there on the lawn. I saw her only once more, a year or so later, walking down Tottenham Court Road. She was laughing, hand in hand with a man a few years older, who looked to dote on her. I ducked into a shop and watched them go by through the window.
I scarcely treated my family any better than I did Rachel, but they stuck by me.
During my time at the Institute, I strove to remain distant from the other inmates – I couldn’t be sure who I could trust. But even the most leery may blunder into the toils of friendship, and so it was with me; there was one whose company I fell into often: Colin Elton, middle-aged, a former lecturer in Medieval History at a red-brick university. He’d suffered a breakdown when research he’d been engaged in for many years was copied and published by a trusted colleague. Few believed Colin’s claim, he was thought resentful, his reputation was ruined, the thesis was forever linked with the plagiarist’s name. It had to do with the way the Black Death spread its contagion; it was abstruse, and I couldn’t quite grasp it.
Colin’s was a fascinating mind, and we had many long conversations ranging over divers subjects. The Middle Ages were, of course, his particular area of interest, but he could discourse on everything from architecture to the Eleatic paradoxes. In truth, our chats were less dialogues, more lectures: for the most part, I was attentive merely, just from time to time prompting him with queries (then I knew little; now, now I wish I knew less). Colin was generally quite well, but so afraid of his ideas being thieved, he was mute with most people. I don’t know why he chose to trust me.
One evening, about six months after my committal and confinement to the asylum, I was playing my, by then habitual, evening game with Colin – mostly we played chess, but that evening it was draughts – when he interrupted a disquisition on the court of Louis XIV to look about him nervously.
‘You can’t ever be sure someone isn’t listening in,’ he said, leaning close, lowering his voice, tapping the side of his nose with the forefinger of his right hand. ‘They’ve got people everywhere. It’s not safe, even here. Any of these lunatics could be one of them.’
‘How can you be sure I’m not?’ I asked, impish.
He scowled, cocked his head. Then picked up two counters from the board, one of each colour, pressed them into his eyesockets, squinted to hold them in place.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, irritated.
He grinned.
‘Do you know why the dead in Ancient Greece were buried with coins in their mouths?’
‘No. Can we get back to the game?’
Colin took the pieces from his orbits, pocketed one, or seemed to, then put both hands behind his back. A moment later, he held out his fists to me.
‘Choose.’
‘Stop it,’ I said gently, shaking my head.
He opened his fingers. There was a counter cupped in each palm. He returned one to the board, flipped the other into the air with his thumb. It arced, tumbling slow. He caught it with his right hand, slapped it down on the back of his left, kept it covered.
‘Heads or tails?’
‘Colin,’ I groaned.
He grimaced, got up from the table, walked away, taking the piece with him. Reaching the door, he turned, held up the piece, called to me.
‘To pay Charon’s fare.’
‘What?’
‘The boatman. Ferried the dead over the River Styx.’
He was shouting now, his voice hoarse, breaking, his eyes wild.
‘Did you know, photography, at first, was used mainly for filth, as it is again now, I suppose, and memorializing the dear departed? Mothers holding their just-dead infants up for the camera as rigor set in. Dead wives propped up by rods hidden beneath their skirts. Think of that. And remember me like this!’
‘Don’t be so morbid, Colin.’
He put the counter in his mouth, under his tongue, turned, and left. His outburst had distressed some inmates; an old woman who sat in a wicker chair by the window, puckered up her face, began to hoot like an owl, thrash about, and a young man clutched his head, howled, soiled himself. Nurses rushed over to restrain them, another hurried after Colin to ensure he’d not swallowed the draughts piece.
That night, he somehow crept past staff on duty, found a way over the wall, threw himself off the cliff. At least that’s what was assumed to have happened; there were smears of his blood on rocks at its foot, but his body was never found, perhaps swept out to sea by the undertow.
Pangs of remorse goaded me from listless stagnation; I felt my confinement, was seized by an urge to get out, even if it meant putting myself in danger. I called my parents, and the following day they came to see me. They saw me well and, that afternoon, signed the papers rescinding my committal. I returned to London. In the asylum I’d been denied news of the outside world, deemed too troubling; it wasn’t till after my release, then, I learnt the chef whose body I’d discovered had been the last victim of the beatings, that no one had been convicted of the attacks, that there were no suspects or leads.
My parents had organized for the major repairs to my flat to be carried out, but there was still much to be done; I spent my first few weeks at home redecorating. Sooted walls needed stripping, a fresh coat of paint; curtains had to be washed and aired; scorched, mouldering carpets taken up, replaced, though in the hall and lounge, I found the boards in good condition, left them bare. The work done I revelled in the results: the place felt new, purged of dread associations.
My life returned to seeming normality. I found temporary work, it didn’t pay well, but enough to get by on; I was thrifty. After a few weeks, I felt settled enough to contact some old friends, sent text messages saying, simply, ‘I’m back. Get in touch.’ I went out drinking with them. They all said how well I looked, awkwardly skirted mention of my sickness. I did not, though, attempt to contact Rachel; there seemed no way I could make amends, and I thought seeing her might cut me to the bone.
And that’s the end of this tale; a return to an ordinary, if slightly hollow, existence. At least till the day, frantic to share my woes with any who might understand, I placed the classifieds.
Or almost the end. There’s an uncanny epilogue to relate. One evening, perhaps six weeks after I was released from the Fairchild Institute, while walking past Smithfields Market in a stupor, listening to music – I distinctly remember the song playing was Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ – a harrowing gospel-blues, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned, taking out my earphones. An old man stood there, smiling a thin-lipped smile.
‘Don’t remember me, eh?’ he said.
I shook my head.
‘Well. I was the one warned you about them wolves.’
Then I recognized him: the man who’d accosted me in the Saracen’s Head all those months ago. Thinking him a phantasm, I shook my head to clear my senses. But he was real.
‘Seems you didn’t take heed,’ he said, took a roll-up from his shirt pocket, lit it with a match struck on a filthy thumbnail. He cupped his hand round the flame, drew on the fag, got it smouldering.
‘You’d’ve done well to’ve listened to me,’ he went on, without taking the roll-up from his mouth, letting it dangle from his bottom lip.
But I’d turned away. I put my earphones back in, set off briskly, not once looking back, Blind Willie’s hoarse zeal drowning out anything further he might have said.
I
I’d had an eternity to brood over the writing of this memoir, to order my impressions, to consider by what alchemy to turn incident into prose; yet, when I came to set down the first
words, to begin, I faltered. Baffled by its convolutions, I’d no idea at what point to open my story.
Perhaps the proper way to have started would have been to introduce myself, give my name, but that’s something I couldn’t do. My memory’s no better than that allotted any common man, is entirely unsuited to immortality. The events I’ve written of, and those I’ve still to tell, seared, burnt, blistered, scarred my brain, but I’ve forgotten much else. My recall of names is especially poor; mine was lost to me long ago, as were those of the others I will write of: I’ve made up those used in this account.
Deprived of this gambit of name-giving, that brazen alloy of brag and cozen, that feigns a laying bare, while claiming sway, it took me many hours of staring up at the wheeling constellations and ruminating before I hit on an opening. I knew I’d need to plunge in, write swiftly, allow myself to be swept along by the currents of my tale, or else I’d founder. I decided simply to begin at the beginning, cast my mind back to that time, long ago, when I saw the eldritch skull beneath the skin of the wonted world and my life was changed forever. But what happened to me on that dreadful night is only part of what I wish to set down here; I must, lest I lose the momentum I’ve built up, press on.
II
Having found out the world I’d known was merely a bright painted scrim, and glimpsed the vile shambles on stage behind, I shambled through life, staggered, listless. My brain had baulked at what I’d seen, yet I was sure it was no delusion. The ground beneath my feet had been undermined; I felt it might at any instant give way, and I fall through into some dread cavern. The next year and a half passed in routine and tedium; my seared nerves took solace in the bland and dull. After a while, though, I began to gag on that pap life. I wished no longer to cower from, but rather to confront my fears, and in so doing perhaps put them to rout. I grew frantic to talk with others who’d suffered as I had, to share my tale with people who wouldn’t sneer or doubt my reason.
It was then I conceived my plan of placing classifieds in national newspapers, advertisements seeking those who’d seen, as I had, dread things. Sifting through replies was frustrating; I had many, lots mocking, several clearly deranged. In the end, I winnowed them down to just six, the only ones, I believed, in good faith and showing sound mind. I contacted these respondents, arranged a meeting.
The day set soon came round. It was midwinter, less than a week before Christmas, but though it was cold, and blustery, it was sunny. After lunch, I took a walk across to Hampstead Heath. On top of Parliament Hill, a number of people flew kites, a colourful flock against the clear blue sky. I spent some time gazing out over the city from that spot, seeking landmarks, my eyes returning again and again to the dome of St Paul’s, which looked the top of some bald giant’s head, some bald giant buried to his brows in the silt of the floodplain. Then I went home, continued work on a critical essay on The Lost World I was writing for a journal of Conan Doyle studies. I managed a few paragraphs, but, when the light began to wane, I grew agitated, unable to concentrate.
Though I’d managed to keep most friends, in spite of the impassivity that was my bulwark against the quailing of my mind, I’d been feeling, sometimes, alone, since I knew all would have met my telling of the diabolical Punch and Judy show with concern or scorn, but not belief. I’d been, then, in previous weeks, filled with joy at the thought of meeting others who might hear and give credence to my tale. But, as the time of the gathering approached, I grew apprehensive, anxious lest the evening be filled with horror. I fought to quell these misgivings. Would that I had not.
I still, though, had nearly two hours before I needed to leave. So I put on the radio, listened to the tail end of an interesting programme about the Delta blues. But it was followed by a comedy panel show, and the forced drollery twanged my nerves, and I got up to change the station. Turning the tuner knob at haphazard, I happened upon some loud yowling, perhaps a radio play, which startled me, set my heart hammering in my chest. I switched off the radio, went through to the bathroom to splash my face at the sink.
My flat was on the top floor of a mansion block about halfway up Highgate Hill,3 a little uphill of the spot where, in the folk tale, Dick Whittington (why is it I can recall this name and not my own?) heard the bells of Bow Church calling him and turned back, and just by the place where, or so the tale goes, William Powell, the Highgate Prophet, passed on, one sunny morning, in April 1798. Powell’s tale is strikingly bizarre. He’d been a parsimonious Treasury clerk till he’d won a sum on a lottery and grown spendthrift, lazy and insolent at work. He’d been sacked from his position, the money had soon run out, and he’d ended up destitute. It was after his fall he became known as the Highgate Prophet; he’d a strange ritual: early every morning, in all seasons, all weathers, he’d walk from the Sloane Street poorhouse he lived in, to the foot of Highgate Hill, stand a moment in contemplation, raise up his arms to the sky, then run up the hill. If he was spoken to by a passer-by, or stopped, or looked back, he’d return to the bottom, start again, would keep on till he managed to dash all the way up in one go. He’d explain, should he be asked about his odd behaviour, his conviction the world would end if ever he failed in his rite. Well, that fine spring morning in 1798, he did, dropped dead, heart burst. Of course, the world did not end then, or so, anyhow, it would seem.4
Being high up, my flat commanded good views, and the bathroom window, which faced south-east, afforded a prospect of the river basin, from the City to the Isle of Dogs, and, on a clear day, even of far-off Shooter’s Hill. That evening, though it wasn’t late, six o’clock by the chimes of a nearby church, it was already quite dark, and all I could see were strewn lights below and, above, in the east, glimmering, the first faint stars of the evening. The sky was clear, and I hoped it would remain so; the following morning saw a celestial event, a total eclipse of the moon, apparently the first Winter Solstice eclipse since the seventeenth century, which I wanted to see.5
Returning to the living room, I poured myself a whisky, settled into my armchair to read from my collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. I find Poe’s prose, with its bizarre mixture of the punctilious, the arid, the droll, and the macabre, a calming influence. His idiosyncratic genius lies not only in the narratives themselves, but in the way they crystallise some abstract notion. I began with ‘The Angel of the Odd’, superficially the most frivolous story he ever penned, though a close reading reveals it to be a poignant account of the havoc alcohol can wreak on the mind. I found myself distressed by the eerie tale that followed ‘The Angel of the Odd’ in my anthology, ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, so flipped to ‘The Sphinx’, a story I had, since my return from the Fairchild Institute, found absolutely invaluable as a means of staving off madness. Under its influence, all that seems grotesque admits of a rational interpretation. It helped calm my perturbation.
When it was time, I dressed warmly to spite the cold, in coat, scarf, and gloves, then left my flat, locking the door behind me. Little did I realize I should never return.
For the meeting place of the gathering, I’d settled on a pub in Borough, the Nightingale. It was a convivial old boozer, and I’d chosen it in part because I thought its friendly air would mitigate the horrors we were there to tell of. I also knew that there’d be a lock-in, a tradition of the landlord’s in the weeks running up to Christmas, which would allow ample time for the unfolding of our tales.
Walking down Highgate Hill, the festive decorations everywhere struck me, jarred with my mood: Christmas trees, tinsel, fairy lights. I headed for the stop at the hill’s foot, where I could catch a bus to take me all the way to London Bridge. It would have been quicker to travel by tube, but I’d, of course, conceived an acute loathing of the chthonic. When the bus came, I got on, went upstairs; I always preferred to travel on the top deck for the view it afforded. The bus drove down Holloway Road, almost deserted at that time, to Highbury Corner, where an altercation started up between the driver and a youth who’d boarded without paying. The engine, at idle, judder
ed. Finally, the youth was intimidated into getting off by other passengers, who were annoyed at being held up, and we were on our way once more. When I next paid attention to where we were, the vehicle had just turned onto City Road. A row of shabby Georgian terraces there recalled Mildmay Park, filled me with dread. I stared down at my feet till the bus reached Finsbury Square.
Then, raising my head to look out, I saw office buildings, constructed, according to some strange panoptic rationale, almost entirely of glass. The road was congested and progress was slow. A few minutes later, passing Moorgate, I glimpsed 30 St Mary Axe through a gap between buildings; its tessellating windows reminded me of an insect’s compound eye.
Finally, the bus crossed London Bridge, the lights of waterfront buildings reflected in the river below, gemstones strewn on a jeweller’s blackcloth.
When the double-decker pulled into the terminus, I alighted, struck out for the Nightingale. On the way, I passed a man in the entrance to a pharmacy, lying on his side, back to me, knees drawn up to his chest, swaddled in a frayed blanket, half a beer can, jagged torn edge, with a few coins in, by his head. In the glass of the chemist’s door, I could see his face reflected. He was youngish, had short, brown hair, a full, matted, reddish beard. Though his eyes were half open, I was sure, from the sedate, regular rise-and-fall of his chest, he slumbered. On his nape was a crude tattoo in blue ink, pigment bled, hard to make out. I leant in to peer. It seemed a sword, straight crossguards, blade hanging down. Just then he snorted, twitched, and, thinking he was, after all, awake, to cover my gawking, I scrabbled in my pocket, drew out a pound, tossed it into the makeshift alms cup. But when the coin hit with a loud chink, he stirred, opened his eyes, blinked, looked dazed. Turning, he squinted at me, then pulled out, from beneath his bedding, a pair of glasses, black plastic frames held together with gaffer tape, put them on.
The Wanderer Page 6
