The Maggot People

by Henning Koch

  THE MAGGOT PEOPLE

  THE MAGGOT PEOPLE

  a novel

  Henning Koch

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  THE MAGGOT PEOPLE. Copyright © 2014, Henning Koch. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd, Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  ISBN: 978-1938103537

  First edition: November 2014

  This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the MCACA.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  I see myself again, my skin pitted by mud and pestilence, my hair and armpits full of worms, and even bigger worms in my heart, lying among strangers without age, without feeling…

  —Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

  …And Jesus hurt me when he deserted me but I have forgiven you Jesus for giving me all this love when there is no one I can turn to in this world…

  —Morrissey, I Have Forgiven Jesus

  Michael

  1.

  At the age of twenty-three, Michael had the bad fortune to inherit his grandmother’s house in the south of France. For two long years, he spent his time dutifully going to the bar, buying drinks for strangers and talking about topics such as partridge shooting and viticulture, neither of which interested him very much. There was something fundamentally hopeless about his attempt to cultivate a local outlook in Provence. A typical local man in Michael’s village home was a cardigan-wearing inhabitant in his sixties, passionate about using his body as a sort of temporary wine barrel. Michael struggled for human companionship and felt like the oddest man in the world.

  Back in Finsbury Park, London, where he used to live in a rented room, Michael had never done much more than play backgammon and drink Red Stripe with his neighbor, an unemployed drummer. Occasionally, when his anxious mother had called to tell Michael that he had to find himself a job, he almost gloatingly told her his favorite words of wisdom: “Consider the lilies of the field, mum. They don’t work, do they?”

  Since coming to France, Michael no longer had the benefits of Social Security or a like-minded neighbour. He tried all sorts of activities to brighten up his existence and earn him a living of some kind. At first he thought he’d have a go at carpentry. After spending weeks laying a new floor upstairs (to stop himself crashing through the rotten floorboards), he found to his annoyance that the cheap pine boards warped in the humidity and creaked underfoot like dissatisfied old men. Later he got hold of a decrepit car which he thought he might use to familiarize himself with mechanics. He spent days scrutinizing a manual before deciding that his hands were not made to mess about with screwdrivers and socket sets. It led only to temper fits, oily lacerations, and a mad desire to commit arson.

  Clearly, if he was to have a job of some kind, it would have to be rooted in the creative industries, as they were known.

  Among the jumble of the attic he’d found a large easel and a box of spattered tubes of oil paints. It seemed an invitation, but as he was coming very late to the art of painting, his technical abilities were limited.

  His first attempt was a family portrait based on a memory of himself and his father on a beach in Normandy while his mother sat under a bright parasol waving at them. In the end the technical problems of this emotive subject proved too much for him. Instead he went back to his usual motif, which he’d been scribbling in the margins of his school notebooks since he was eleven or twelve. Michael could not quite explain his liking for the walled city he always depicted clinging to the sides of a rocky pinnacle, more or less like Tolkien’s Minas Tirith or Mann’s monastery in The Magic Mountain. He assumed it was something obsessive that always brought him back to the same rocks and crags—the air filled with philosophical eagles spreading their wings and casting noble glances at the human fortifications below.

  He began to worry that his mind was dissolving. At night he’d wake and lie hyperventilating. A few times he went jogging through the dark village, pursued by outraged hounds. He sat by the mountain painting, which seemed to settle his nerves. He napped in his chair, a blanket round his shoulders, or just listened to the dormant house and the night passing.

  His churning question was always the same: What am I doing here? What am I trying to achieve?

  And so, almost twenty-six months into his French sojourn, Michael still had not found out what he was supposed to be doing with his life.

  Back in England, his parents had recently passed away when a derailed train came hurtling through their house just as they were settling in with their tea tray—the bulbous China pot under its custom-made chicken cozy, two chocolate digestives each, and oranges—to watch the six o’clock news. Before they knew it, they had fused with the country’s news offering, which would particularly have pleased Michael’s father, who was interested in domestic politics, although of course they never had the pleasure of seeing themselves on television.

  Michael took a ferry back to England from Le Havre. It was a misty morning. The oily waters of the Channel lapped against the stinking hull of the giant ship. The fabled white cliffs of Dover materialized like large stage backdrops to an operetta. He felt obliged to cry, but a terrible sense of unreality made him doubt the impulse. Standing there on deck, he brooded as he watched his native country coming into view through the haze.

  Michael now had two houses, or rather, he had one house in Provence and another in Borehamwood with a large train on top of it. Luckily the emergency services took the view that it was their responsibility to remove it, which was a good thing. Michael spent a day sifting through the rubble, but it’s amazing how efficiently a burning train pulverizes a human dwelling. The solidity of buildings is really a bit of a sham. Solidity is illusory. The universe is constructed from tiny fragments that have a tendency to pulverize when struck by a great force, he mockingly told himself as he wandered about at the bottom of the garden, where a few daffodils were doing their best to maintain a semblance of normality. Wedged into a rhododendron bush, Michael found a smashed chest, from which blackened cutlery had spilled. Inside were some neatly pressed tablecloths and a couple of oven gloves, which he later brought back to France but could not quite bring himself to use. Should they be framed, perhaps, as a sort of keepsake?

  At the end of that heavy day in Borehamwood, he decided to knock back a couple of shots of whiskey before returning to London. As soon as he stepped into the pub, he was able to confirm to himself that Borehamwood was quite likely even duller than Provence, although there were more similarities than one might have thought. In Borehamwood, men in beige or brown corduroy trousers drank flat, hop-stinking beer. Women opted for shapeless skirts slung around their hips like loincloths. Vaguely menacing younger women wore sharp heels strapped to their feet. They drank a kind of white wine that the French might have described as a soda pop.

  Also, the English diet had an element of the humdrum about it: baked beans, fried eggs and bacon were interspersed with fish fingers, liver and onions, or pork sausages spattered with punishingly strong mustard. On Sundays, English people had a custom of consulting glossy cookery books, then resignedly putting large cuts of meat in the oven and watching cricket matches while the house filled with carbonized smog. Instead of viticulture they liked to talk about how many pheasants or rabbits they’d shot. In England there was m
ore interest in the actual shooting part, whereas Frenchmen hunted for the pot.

  If he ever did go back to England, the government would very likely enroll him on some plebeian course in Modern Morality and Citizenship Standards for the 21st Century. English politicians were brilliant at coming up with these types of schemes. When they first applied to enter Parliament, they had to be able to show gnomish or dwarven ancestry. This was a requirement of public service—it was believed, quite correctly, that only gnomes had the necessary oddness and fondness for gold to be able to represent their sceptred isle.

  At least in France no one bothered with you. Especially if you were foreign they considered you an irrelevance and this was much better.

  In any case the possibilities of going back to England were scuppered by a long, flowery letter from an insurance company, explaining that because of his parents’ invalid insurance policy, there would be no payout on their house. Soon after, a carefully worded letter from the train company expressed sincere regret about flattening his family, then offered a very small amount of statutory compensation.

  “Engineering, that’s a good subject,” his father had once advised Michael when the question of his education came up. “An engineer is never out of work.” How uncanny that, in the end, a group of plotting engineers got together, built a train, laid some tracks by his house and maliciously finished him off one evening just as the poor man was looking forward to his cup of tea.

  After Michael had gone back to Provence, the electrics in the house started playing up and he worried he’d have to find the money to rewire the place. His bedroom became a particular problem. In its earlier days, the house had been used as a residence for seminarians—young virginal men preparing for ordination, narrowly preferred in those times to a life of digging the sod. He often saw a ghostly figure at night, floating across the room to fiddle with his bedroom ceiling light. As a result, Michael had to change the lightbulb every few days. It irritated him. Was he not entitled to live in a house that had been the legal property of his grandmother, a respectable French woman who had bought the house fair and square at a church auction? Nowadays it was little more than an emanation of humidity and mold. Surely the spirits should be happy that someone was willing to live there at all?

  The ghost problem got pervasive enough for Michael to seek advice about it. He went to Alain, the retired village priest, a tiny stooped man with poetical eyes and silvered temples. His grandmother had once been very fond of him; she used to sweep his church for him and polish the candlesticks.

  Alain nodded knowingly and tapped the side of his nostril, then whipped out a bunch of dried herbs, set fire to them, and spent the morning walking round Michael’s house, waving the smoke about whilst intoning prayers.

  “That should do it,” he said, reposing in one of grandmother’s toxic armchairs. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Well, I am worried about it. I seem to be having terrible luck.”

  “It’s not about luck,” said Alain. “This spirit is angry with you for not being a Catholic and for soiling the house with your disrespect. I take it you’re abusing yourself?”

  “I don’t really see what business of his it is,” said Michael. “People don’t choose their religion. Some are born in Salt Lake City and they can’t do anything about it.”

  Alain did not understand Michael’s comment and put it down to the young man’s confusion. Gently he put his knobbly hand on Michael’s sleeve and said, with a sage nod, as if what he was about to suggest was in some way revolutionary:

  “You’re an orphan now, my boy. What you need is to get married… to a nice girl… who does not have the Devil in her eyes.”

  After Alain had gone, Michael went to the kitchen, a sort of studio and storage area for junk. He sat there sipping his morning coffee, whilst staring at the big canvas of the mountain, trying to assess how he could improve it. Seized by a notion, he painted a small figure in one of the windows: a woman leaning out, hanging up a garment on a clothesline. As soon as she was there—a tiny black smudge in a corner—he felt she had acquired a life of her own. But who was she? What was she doing in that city among the tiered rooftops? And did she have the Devil in her eyes?

  Somehow he felt he might prefer her if she did.

  2.

  Waking up in the old house had a certain ceremoniousness to it. He lay there listening, feeling himself enclosed as if in a tomb, the shutters excluding every bit of light; yet by the distracted sound of birds idly twittering under the tiles or the whoosh and scrape of incoming swifts, he knew it was morning.

  Eventually he got up and, after stepping into a pair of threadbare slippers, dragged himself across the rough stone floor to the window. Opening the shutters was one of the great perks of Provence. The sky, always blue and pristine, surprised him every morning. There was something marvelous about existing on the inside of this bright, oxygenated bell.

  In the street he heard mothers scolding their children, also the slamming of pots in kitchens and mouthwatering smells of meat or shellfish being cooked in oil and garlic. When he saw the vivid sky overhead, he had a sense of life happening around him—his place in it more or less that of the alien or automaton, concerned with drinking his coffee, lighting his cigarette, munching his dry bread and cheese and then shuffling off to expel his bodily waste.

  There was a measure of humiliation to the whole thing, he thought to himself, sitting there on the cracked seat beneath the sputtering cistern. “I am not an animal, but all I ever seem to do is eat, drink, and shit.”

  Whilst indulging in his usual self-flagellation, he saw a large seagull landing on the roof opposite. Flat-footed, it made its way to a crack in the tiles, stuck its beak inside and pulled out a fluffy nestling, then tipped its head back and tossed the little flapping thing down its gullet. All round its head, swifts were darting, screaming, performing aerial displays, zigzagging between chimney pots and clotheslines—fully engaged in the pressing duty of procreation. Very well, they seemed to be saying, we have lost one but we can make another. It was a good Catholic view.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, the dripping tap nagged at the piles of crockery left from last night. He had an espresso with plenty of sugar and added his empty coffee cup to the greasy mound in the sink.

  After showering under a tepid, limp spout of water that emerged with a vibrating humming sound, like an aged diesel engine, Michael dressed and went out to have breakfast. He stopped in front of the painting and cast another beady eye on the woman in the window.

  Possibly because his mind was already on the subject, he was more receptive when he saw the girl crossing the square. A primitive mechanism was set off in his brain. He knew he was powerless to resist because he was the mechanism, he actually heard it groaning into life and felt the emergence of the foolish love cliché, like a cuckoo springing out of its clock.

  He stood, one arm extended as if he were a blind man trying to stop himself crashing into a wall.

  The girl had also stopped and was facing him with a complex frown on her face.

  Between them, in the village square, there was a good deal of bustle. Parents drove their herds of infants across the concrete with much cracking of their whips and loud cries. A group of Chilean immigrants had set up market stalls in a corner, hawking the meat grinders, flour sifters, rolling pins and other historical artifacts that they filched from dying widows and sold to tourists. Chinese merchants were also piling up their defective wares.

  Michael was surprised when she steered her steps towards him, threading her way through the busy square until she stood in front of him. He brought his arm down—it seemed the right thing to do.

  “I noticed you were watching me,” she said,

  “Was I?”

  “I was just wondering why?” said the girl, and as she spoke he noticed one of her side incisors jutting out. There was something owlish about it, like a tiny beak; he half-expected seeing a mouse tail hanging out, the remnants of her l
ast meal.

  “I don’t know. I noticed you, that’s all,” he said awkwardly.

  “Well, if you’re sure.”

  She turned round and started walking away at a good pace. With her back turned, he had an excellent opportunity to look at her some more. She was wearing espadrilles and a dark strapless dress that showed off her smooth limbs.

  She stopped at one of the non-Chilean, non-Chinese stalls to buy eggplants and grapes and pack them into her cloth bag.

  Within a matter of hours, the locals were aware of the presence of a tourist who must have rented somewhere to stay near-by—yet another of these puzzling individuals carrying plenty of money and wandering about in search of something. No one knew who she was, nor did it particularly matter; although, in a village, such things are considered important.

  Michael began to keep tabs on her, though more carefully, to avoid detection. Next time they spoke, he felt, it had to be more purposeful and not so foolish.

  She crossed the square every morning at nine o’clock precisely and this suited him perfectly. It gave him time for ablutions and coffee. Sometimes he followed her and sometimes watched her in the distance.

  A few times he saw her sitting motionless and amphibious in the sun, a pair of oversize sunglasses obscuring most of her face.

  When he learned where she was staying, it made perfect sense: a scruffy bungalow by the beach with a fence of old car doors, prickly pear trees, and rusting bed frames lashed together with wire. The place had been abandoned for years and lay shuttered and steeped in silence, its overgrown garden populated by stray cats drawn by the fish she put out for them and left to go putrid in the sun. Burgeoning fig trees pressed against the walls, plunging the front entrance in welcome shade. He never saw anyone sitting on the rusty cast-iron chairs by the table on the patio.