by Simon Avery
They’d driven back to this house and she’d stayed that night. They’d just talked. She’d stayed the day after that too, and the next. Within a month she was living with him. Within six months they were married. There had never been a moment that it had struck her as being a mistake, that they had been rash in their decision. What happened to them afterwards was not a fault of the relationship, but it had strained it beyond breaking point; it had changed them for the rest of their lives, clouded it, changed the way they saw each other. No one’s fault.
Susanna moved the pile of papers on Dave’s chair and sat down, feeling the weight of it, of that memory. She pushed her hands into her eyes to stop the tears. Twice in an hour. Christ, she thought, perhaps I’m not capable of doing this alone.
No. She wouldn’t let those old wounds open again. She sniffed and swivelled in the chair to look at what was in the desk. Throw yourself into the work, she told herself, be brutal and fill the bin bags up.
But it was hard not to be as distracted as Dave had appeared to be the last time he’d sat here. His attentions had been divided by several different areas of interest. Here was what she presumed to be a clumsy attempt at fiction, aborted at page six, just as something came to life in a back garden as the protagonist slept; here was his final interview with the Hungarian singer/songwriter Krisztina Ligeti for Wire magazine, along with annotations in the margins. Here too were several sheets of print-outs detailing the properties of the mandrake root, and various accounts of magical rituals that she took to be research for the story she’d skimmed over earlier; then there were several sheets of doodles that appeared to be dry runs for the symbols over the doors and windows. A mouldy old book was open here too, with a series of these symbols and their respective descriptions. They appeared to be some kind of protective wards or sigils. But what did Dave need protection from? She recalled now his words when he’d called her: It won’t stop following me, Suze. It’s been fucking following me for six months. I don’t sleep anymore because I’m terrified of it, of what it’ll do…
Susanna found some print-outs detailing the results of drug-trips with various hallucinogenic substances, along with the methods of their growth and preparation. Had that been where it began, this spiral into suicide? After years of abstinence despite being surrounded by rock stars imbibing, had Dave given in to the urge to see what it was he had missed out on all that time?
Perhaps Felicity Annenberg was the foundation of it all. There were photos of her here among the papers, either alone on an empty beach, or with Dave. She was a journalist too, working for glossy magazines like Vogue, Grazia, Esquire and GQ. Felicity the mistress; the other woman. But that was over, wasn’t it? She hadn’t been at the funeral, or if she had, Susanna hadn’t noticed her. Perhaps she’d kept her distance, or perhaps she was ancient history.
The truth of it was waiting on the pages of a journal Dave had kept. It was a haphazard record of the last year. Susanna flipped backwards and saw that whole weeks would go by without any indication of the days contained therein. But Susanna was looking for mention of Felicity; she was aware she was leafing through the pages like a suspicious spouse looking for evidence of her husband’s misdemeanours. She found mention of her name several times, but after scanning the entry, she flipped back until she located the earliest mention of her. The sounds of movement had begun again downstairs; a restless sound, as if a child was hammering endlessly at a wall. It only ceased when she glanced up angrily at the doorway and for a brief, breathless moment thought that something was standing there, something small and devoid of features. But there was nothing. Susanna pushed herself out of her seat and went slowly to the door, glanced out onto the landing. Nothing. She peered down into the staircase and studied the darkness pooling downstairs. Hadn’t she switched all of the lights on? She hesitated for a moment, then abandoned the thought of going room to room and returned to the journal.
The first entry to mention Felicity’s return was nothing more than a reminder that she was due here at the house to interview Dave about his career on the eve of the release of his third book, collecting his articles from five years at The Guardian. Below that was an unusually descriptive entry about the day.
Dave and Felicity’s affair had fizzled out not long after Susanna had left. Dave hadn’t wanted Felicity anymore and he’d sent her away, back to London. But it had been five years and clearly something of the flame still flickered between them; enough for Felicity to come back to Birmingham to interview Dave for GQ magazine.
After the interview, he’d clearly been so swayed by her attentiveness that he’d taken her to his favourite restaurant in the city centre. Afterwards they’d retired to a pub on the canal and had more than their fair share of drinks. Susanna felt the sharp stab of jealousy as she read how they’d caught a taxi back here to spend the night together. Rekindling that old flame. She thought about the bed that she’d sat on an hour ago, weeping for what was lost. He’d fucked her there the way he’d fucked her while Susanna was still married to him. He wrote as if to a confidant about her stamina and her eagerness. They hadn’t restricted their lovemaking to the bedroom either; they’d fucked in the front room and on the dining table, and then in the shower in the morning. Susanna found she couldn’t stop reading, despite being aware that it served no real purpose. This was no longer infidelity; they had been divorced for five years. Perhaps it was the sense of him getting on with things when she had not. Getting on with things and enjoying it. She was ashamed of her sudden jealousy. When had she last enjoyed herself with such abandon? Had she at all?
Felicity had introduced Dave to cocaine when she came up from London the following week. He had resisted initially. He was a bit of a middle-class twit at this point, set in his ways; he’d made a set of decisions that had become hard and fast rules in his forties. Nothing that a pretty girl with perky tits and an arse that defied gravity couldn’t sway him from, apparently. All those years taking the moral high ground about drugs and booze, swept away like cobwebs.
It was the euphoria I enjoyed the most, he wrote. I was in the moment after years of being stranded in the past. It was a release. I felt invincible, somehow vital after thinking the best of my life was behind me. We used the entire bag of coke that night, fucking in every room, in every conceivable position, until I had nothing left to give. It was a revelation.
There were pages like this but they became repetitive after a while and Susanna tired of reading about Dave’s newfound vitality. He was aware of the temporary nature of it, but he still went ahead and bought new underwear and clothes for himself, a diamond necklace and knickers from Agent Provocateur for his rinky-dink old/new girlfriend. The after-effects of the coke the next day would lay him low for a while, and he made several entries where he considered renouncing his new Trainspotting lifestyle, but once Felicity was wearing her new underwear and bending over the kitchen counter, he couldn’t help himself.
But he knew it was just another distraction, probably for both of them. In the quieter moments, he was aware that he could barely conceal what he referred to as an absence in himself, in his life. Felicity only compounded it; she was as much the past for him as anything else. She brought some tabs of acid with her after a month and they cleared their professional decks for a couple of days.
I feel like an explorer, he wrote. One of those cartographers from the turn of the century, when there was still something left to find. But I’m trying to find part of me that was lost after Millie. Perhaps it’s always been lost. I don’t know. I’ve spent my life trying to exert control over events that resist order. I couldn’t do anything about Millie. I just stood and watched. And I watched it fall apart too. Maybe this is me letting all that go.
She couldn’t blame him for that, but again, she felt that pang of jealousy that he’d been able to find some kind of closure on that part of his life when she had not. The trip was, of course, detailed in colourfully eloquent language. Dave had sat waiting for the effects to begin and,
when they did, they were initially relatively ordinary. Then he became euphoric and filled with the urge to play Felicity what he considered to be the highlights of his vinyl collection, then losing track of four hours as they lazily engaged in foreplay. He described a mass of colours as he entered her, and her face seeming to take on the aspects of everyone he had ever known as he came. They walked in Cannon Hill park that night, and the trees were like hands clasped in prayer, fingers scratching at the winter sky, the lights soft and strange haloes. Everything was charged and alive and infinite; everything was a possibility. But then, when they returned home, he saw something rise out of the earth in the back garden, something small that was nothing more than a sketch of life that he could not comprehend, that he felt sure would follow him to the end of his life. It was the start of something. The seed of what came next. He woke up the next morning on the floor of the living room with records all around him. He felt sated by the experience.
But after the acid trip, something changed in him. The writing took on a less coherent quality as he began to explore other avenues. His deadlines for The Guardian came and went. He became interested in magic and in other hallucinogenic substances. Felicity suggested mandrake. She told him the folklore that he hadn’t come across before: that mandrake would only grow where the semen of a hanged man had dripped on to the ground; that the roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures; that when the root is dug up it screams and kills all who hear it; that alchemists speculated on the culture of the Mandragora and experimented in the artificial reproduction of fruitful soil and sun to humanise the root, and create humans without the concurrence of the female, producing a homunculus that rooted itself up from the earth.
They were entertaining asides but the hard facts were that it was narcotic and aphrodisiacal. It was noted in the journal as: A tincture of 100 grams and powdered Mandragora officinarum was made using ethanol. Reports of strong reactions due to high doses of mandrake inspired us to keep the initial dosage low. Roughly one half dropper full of this potent liquid was placed under the tongue and remained there for approximately 30 seconds before swallowing. The taste resembled none other than that of bitter earth but the alcohol numbed my mouth, making it bearable.
After an hour of foreplay, we fell asleep. Throughout the night we kept waking to find ourselves in different places around the house. It became like lucid dreaming. I couldn’t prise apart the experience of sex with a simple, yet urgent, erotic dream. At one point we woke in the garden in the middle of a storm, just as I ejaculated into Felicity. We were both naked and covered in mud. I may have lost control of my bowels at some point. I could hear a psychotic mantra repeating in my head. It was erotic dementia… Eventually I woke up in the morning, having attempted to dig myself into the earth of my garden. I was covered in leaves and fallen branches…
There were several entries like this, each one seeming to strip something of Dave’s personality away from him. It was at this point that Felicity seemed to drift out of the narrative that Dave had made of his actions. He continued to experiment with the mandrake, combining it with pot and acid, but most often alone. At some point, as the entries became increasingly fractured, Dave’s mind seemed to leave him too. He began mentioning having dreams about Millie. He would meet her while tripping, speak to her. She would be gone in the morning and he felt a fresh spear of loss. There was a photograph, a Polaroid, tucked into the journal that Susanna couldn’t look at. It was covered in earth. She pushed it aside. Dave wrote about magical rituals and of dreaming of growing something in the earth of the garden. He wanted to control the aspect of his life that had eluded him, that had led him down this path. He no longer needed Felicity. He knew what he needed, but he was uncertain how to go about it. He stripped the lawn of grass and ploughed it. He studied accounts of golems and homunculi in Jewish folklore and alchemical texts. It took him to some dark corners of the internet in the hours while he came down from the acid and the mandrake. He feverishly began to gather materials over the course of several weeks: clippings of his nails, hair, and a strip of skin; he collected a bottle of urine and some of his semen, his tears and his blood; other objects that he simply alluded to. He had no idea what he was doing, but sensed that it was the force of the intention in magic that made it matter.
It rained that night. I completed the ritual, naked and tripping on mandrake and acid. I buried a mandrake root in the ground along with everything that constituted my essence and what remained of her. I don’t recall the minutiae of the event, but sensed I’d invoked something with words I’d composed while looking at that photo of darling Millie. I pinned the picture on the root. I woke the next day, covered in shit and soil and leaves on the dining table. How disgusted Susanna would have been to see what had become of me! I stumbled out into the garden and found where the earth had been disturbed, as if something had dug its way out of the ground.
Susanna rose when she heard the footsteps in the hall downstairs. She’d been reading for several hours, so that when she roused herself, it seemed like waking from a strange dream. She was hesitant. Was the front door unlocked? She left the room reluctantly, thought she could hear something huffing breath out of its lungs in the hall two floors down. She felt a rising panic. She gripped the banister and peered down into the dark. All of the lights below had been extinguished now.
But there was nothing to see. Of course there was nothing to see. She had been caught up in the madness of Dave’s journal. And it was madness, wasn’t it? Drug-induced madness. It was clear he hadn’t dealt with the events that had driven them apart and this was his mind’s way of dealing with the fallout.
It was late. She switched off the lights in the study and wavered at the top of the stairs. She peered into the darkness that was clutching the walls and the landing on the first floor. It was cold and she was tired, and the story of Dave’s insanity was clinging to her like the smell of earth. Eventually she plunged down the stairs and flicked at the light switches on the landing. The light chased away the shadows into the corners of the hall downstairs. It sounded like something was skittering across the polished wooden floors, like a startled dog. When she held her breath and listened, the sound seemed to be eaten up by the blackness. She inched downstairs and flicked at the lights in the hall. From here she could see into the kitchen and out through the window to the back garden. All she could see were the soft shapes of swaying trees, the tapping of rain and fallen leaves being blown against the glass. She was hesitating again. She didn’t want to pass an open door. The front room was brimming with darkness. She looked at the symbol over the door and wondered if it wouldn’t be better just to go home.
No! She pitched herself forward, into the kitchen and stabbed at the light switch. The window suddenly lit up with a distorted reflection of her face staring back at her, and the fleeting glimpse of something that was barely a face behind hers. She cried out and swung around, knocking a pile of cups from the kitchen counter. The sound seemed to chase away the face for there was nothing behind her, although her neck was tingling with the notion of its proximity. The cups shattered at her feet, breaking the spell. She closed her eyes, grasped at the kitchen counter and breathed deeply until sense returned to her.
This had been her home once. She wouldn’t let the distressing state that Dave had found himself in to deter her, chase her away. She cleaned up the cups. She boiled the kettle and made some tea. She ventured out through the conservatory and into the garden and stared at the disturbed earth in the centre of what had once been the lawn. She tried not to think of Dave and Felicity hallucinating and wrestling naked in the wet earth. But it was there. As was the idea that something had been born here. I stumbled out into the garden and found where the earth had been disturbed, as if something had dug its way out of the ground.
She went inside and locked the doors. She finished her tea and went upstairs, and got into bed. She read for a while and, when she began to hear movement downstairs, she closed the
bedroom door, pushed a chair against it. She didn’t sleep.
5
Susanna rose early the next morning, just as the day’s light was beginning to creep across the roofs and treetops. If she’d slept then she certainly didn’t feel its benefit. At some point she had stirred in the middle of the night to hear something breathing heavily in the house. Whatever it was seemed to have earth lodged in its throat, its nose. The breathing was ragged, savage, animal. She’d sat up in bed and stared into the darkness, certain that something was squatting in the shadowy corner of the bedroom, watching her. She’d fumbled with the lamp and by the time its meagre light had reached the corner she was sure whatever it was had moved, either behind furniture or into the wardrobe. She left the lamp on.
By the time the rest of the neighbourhood was waking, Susanna had already called a couple of charity shops in Moseley to collect as many books as she could box up by the afternoon, and was now out in the backyard, having emptied the shed at the bottom of the garden. She had given the spot of disturbed ground a wide berth, finding it made her feel somehow uneasy. She was burning old broken furniture, leaves and fallen branches and paper and magazines that she’d gathered from the house. It was laborious stuff but she was glad to be doing something that emptied her mind. Beyond the garden she could hear the chatter and laughter from children being taken to school; cars hissing through the suburbs into the city; the crackle of the winter breeze chasing the leaves down the suddenly busy streets. She lost herself in the sounds as she fed the fire. She had returned to the house for the next bag for burning when she heard keys in the front door. It was such a familiar sound that she froze in the hallway, part of her expecting Dave to walk through the door, looking surprised to see his ex-wife in his house, destroying his possessions.
