Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Fuck off,’ Gary says, muffled voice cracking into the upper register.

  Derek peers out as if at a slightly tricky committee meeting. The leopard’s maw is about to close on his head and swallow it whole. His fingers absently stroke the paws dangling either side of his shoulders; they must feel like teddies, like his old teddies.

  ‘Is it OK?’ he asks. ‘Rather uncomfortable, to be frank.’

  I’m sure it is, but I wouldn’t know, would I? No.

  Malcolm says it looks fantastic, then explains why it’s so important – the centaur is the earliest hobby-horse and in classical art it’s often depicted sporting a leopard skin. I think of Arviragus in my old Shakespeare volume, and Florizel’s skirt. The ancient shamans of Indo-Europe, Malcolm continues, were the first performers – they travelled in trance on their hobby-horses to meet with the gods and bring back the Asclepian cure. ‘We the Ulverton mummers are in the same genetic line as the first actor.’ He looks around. I’m not sure he’s convinced, though.

  The real hobby-horse has by now uncoupled its three vertebrae and Derek bears the skin alone like a chief – or maybe the skin bears him! Its savage grin and glassy eyes move whenever he moves his head or scratches his ear. It looks as if it’s weighing us up, calculating the distance.

  ‘Did centaurs really exist, then?’ asks Jenny, face screwed tight, perplexed. ‘I’m dying for a fag,’ she adds, turning to Sally.

  Malcolm says that they were a mythical creature of the imagination or rather the deep psyche – and then confuses us further by mentioning birds as traditional trance vehicles. Eaglefeathers on the shaman’s drum, Icarus, something about Jung. Nuncle stuff, really.

  ‘Like the native Americans,’ says Sally. ‘All those big headdresses. It was symbolic, really, wasn’t it?’

  Because Malcolm’s playing the Doctor, riding in on the trancehorse (groan from Gary), Hugh will be directing, which is ‘an incredible treat’. Malcolm can’t stay on and the three parts of the horse cannot move together. I tell them to enter and they don’t enter. Then Derek enters on his own, asking if it’s now. This happens too many times. It has never happened to me before. Every time they’re on, they giggle and snort and the leopard skin ends up in a heap. It’s somehow wrong, what they are doing to it. There is no control.

  I say this. Malcolm picks himself up and shouts at everybody. Derek blinks at him and nods fervently. The leopard agrees with him. Or maybe he is agreeing with the leopard. ‘Director’s tantrum,’ says Jenny. ‘I’m off for a fag if I’m not needed. It’s too bloody hot in here.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Malcolm, addressing me, ‘but I don’t like wasting your time.’

  I shrug. His comment has attracted hostility towards me, I can feel it, I can feel the tiny iron filings all over my skin. Every production is a little country, complete with its own scapegoat, Mother.

  Jenny goes off for a fag, Sally disapproving because Jenny is pregnant. From the door, smoke draughting into the hall, she asks how Rebecca’s German measles is getting on. It’s past the dangerous stage, Sally reassures her, or Rebecca wouldn’t be here. I express surprise that German measles is dangerous.

  ‘For pregnant women,’ Jenny corrects me from the door.

  Sally looks up at the ceiling, sighing as if blowing out a flame in her hair.

  I’ve had a flash, Mother, there in the draughty hall. My life is passing in front of me. It stops just when you appear at my door that time I was very ill – in England, not Africa! Snow in your black hair. That coat, red as a berry. Not coming any closer, no.

  Then I travel to your door and see your sudden look of fear, kneeling in front of the doll’s house, all over again.

  And later, maybe a week or so later, up on my feet once more: ‘Why can’t I go out of the grounds for six weeks, Susan? I’m not sick, now. I’m feeling jolly fine.’ ‘The doctor says as you’re more infectious now nor you were when you were poorly, Hugh boy.’ But you must know all about scarlet fever, being a nurse, Mother.

  ‘Hugh?’

  ‘Ah, yes, quite so.’

  Everyone looking at me.

  I make my excuses and go straight to the surgery, which was open late but is now just closing. I catch Alan Scott-Parkes as he’s locking his consulting room. He’s a taller version of his father, with the same look of someone only doing this because he likes to tell people the worst. He’s ten years or so younger than me, we never knew each other. He’s never even heard of me – the waiting-room’s all back-numbers of Hare & Hound and The Sporting Life. I tell him I used to come to his father as a boy and that his father had very cold hands. I was petrified of his father, actually. Did you know that, Mother? The son frowns – the same chilly blue eyes.

  I have a simple question, purely academic.

  Your loving son,

  Hugh

  Still dull. How many shades of grey are possible? I’ve counted fifty.

  My dear Mother,

  I go straight from the surgery to the Old Barn. It’s the geologists’ last night, they’re leaving tomorrow. I’m regaling them with the creakiest stories of the boards. Jill is lots of loose hair, all shampoo and bath-salts when I lean to hear what she’s shouting. I’m a bit overwrought, perhaps. It’s all these detestable thoughts. Well, one detestable thought, Mother. All it lacks is your hair.

  I pop my other question of the evening. Jill and Tim only know that skulls used to be tinted red with ochre, and that ochre was in use at least half a million years ago. That’s not what I want to know. They ask down the table; their tutor, a big bespectacled man of about forty-five, rather merry already, tells me that it stood for potency.

  The lad next to him feebly hoots, then goes bright red. The table’s gone quiet, listening: the tutor’s so many places away from me that he’s having to bellow. ‘The skull’s lost its life-blood along with the flesh, so they replaced it with red ochre! Maybe they reckoned ochre was the earth’s life-blood! It looks a bit like veins, when you see it in a cliff! Its use goes back at least half a million years! The first expression of something symbolic, you might say! All right?’

  The other tutor, an ageless woman with straggly ginger hair still wet from the shower, adds that the most famous example of a painted skeleton is the Red Lady of Paviland.

  The Red Lady! My heart congeals.

  She continues in an unattractive falsetto – she doesn’t have to bellow. The Red Lady was really a man. Giggles. The famous William Buckland dug him up. He reckoned the rubble of glaciation was caused by the Flood. ‘And he thought these rufous bones were of a Roman lady with a fondness for rouge. In fact, they were of a vigorous young man of the late Palaeolithic, some fifteen thousand years further back!’ The assembled students laugh obediently as she chortles. What on earth can link these two Red Ladies, one of which was a man? Somebody’s birthday produces a cake with Sedimentology Rules OK iced in green over an actual flint, which has sunk part way into the sponge. Squeals and raunchy in-jokes: the pin money of youth but how soon it’s spent! How soon, how soon!

  I kiss Jill gallantly on the cheek and leave. She catches up with me at the main door and hugs me for rather a long time. Soft flesh, thick curls: a smell of honeycombs and musk-rose and sweaty joints and wine. I quote some Shakespeare, God knows what. How can I remember everything? Her father died when she was small, that’s my reading of it. Why else go after old men? Out on the pavement I find a long coppery hair in my mouth.

  I’m back in the Green Man’s yard by about ten o’clock. Ted catches me sneaking upstairs and insists I have a jar on the house. No idea why, but we’re as tiddly as each other. The bar is full and its smokiness thrusts me into having a cigar. I don’t see either Muck or John Wall. It’s clamorous and packed but I’m sloshed enough to be tolerant. An ex-sailor tells me he was sunk in the Falklands conflict, jumping fifty feet into an icy grey swell.

  Meanwhile I’ve found the link between the two Red Ladies: Ray Duckett. He’d have christened the ghost, making a sort of scholarly
homage. Threads, threads. They’ll end up weaving a pall.

  The bar help on Friday night’s a New Zealander with a pony-tail, called Nick. He tells us a horrible yarn, as if tuning in to my thoughts. I only mention it, Mother, because it led to the best spontaneous joke I’ve ever made. It might not be to your taste.

  Some Israel Hands of the high seas, a mate of Nick’s on a freight ship bound for mainland China, would draw his evening tipple off a pickling vat in the hold: a free glass of pure alcohol from its drainage tap. One night, instead of the booze, a black tentacle of hair appeared, dangling from the tap’s mouth and dripping alcohol on to his shoes. He checked in the vat and saw, at the bottom, curled in the inch of liquid that was left, the naked body of a young Chinese girl, preserved like an onion for burial in her homeland.

  ‘How did it taste?’ someone asks.

  ‘Nice and sweet,’ Nick replies, showing a yellow tooth.

  ‘Schnapps for chaps,’ comes out of me, somehow.

  I make my exit at that high point with the gales of appreciation blowing in my ears. The echo is still blowing in my ears when I finally drop off into dreams of entanglements in seaweed and hair.

  Before I drop off now, shall I tell you what I asked Dr Scott-Parkes, Mother?

  I asked him if scarlet fever is dangerous for pregnant women. Yes, he replied, even in these days of antibiotics – the streptococcus bacteria, you see. And pneumonia? Even worse. Why, do you know someone at risk?

  Yes. Very much so, Doctor. But I think it’s much too late, now. Much much too late. Isn’t it?

  Your affectionate son,

  Hugh

  Blowy, terribly blowy. All the leaves off.

  Dearest Mother,

  I’ve started painting classes again. Quite enjoying them. So far I paint only grey blobs, but they say that’s fine. If I only want to paint grey blobs, that’s up to me. Think of it as a process. I’ve got forty-nine more shades to play with, after all.

  You can order books. Thank God, because the library’s not quite up to scratch. What are we without books, without writing, Mother? Mute, like me – a muteness of bits and bobs, big stones, enigmatic mounds and bones. The ceremonies between the upright sarsens thousands of years ago (not Nuncle’s weedy frauds) all dispersed, every last feather and fire of them, into the stars. We don’t know what they thought inside those skulls, not a flicker of what they thought. A few pots and axe-heads. No sounds. Not even the loudest shout, not even the booms of drums given no quarter. How satisfying. What luck. As you can see, I’m rather well, now.

  Get on.

  I wake up (it’s Saturday morning) with another hair in my mouth – my own white one – and I’m not smiling. Nauseous headache, horrible taste, stiff legs. A dream about Jill, who showed me her new antique shop in the middle of the orchard, called Latin Remainders, a bungalow stuffed to the gills with overpriced junk. For £39 I bought a turnip watch in a presentation box that included a wax recording of Edward Arnold, manager of the machine-tool factory, congratulating the retiring worker on his productivity. As Jill showed me the wax record in the lane it became very heavy and we dropped it, or it became elastic and bumped against the tarmac – it cracked, anyway, and there was a lot of bellowing which turned out to be a delivery man outside, shouting at his mate over the rattle of drink crates.

  On the way to buy a paper and draw money from the tiny Nat West sub-branch with its hairline opening hours, I spot Gracie Hobbs hobbling out of Shirley’s (the village hairdresser) with a fabulous and strangely opalescent coiffure, like the inside of a conch.

  ‘You tell ’em,’ is all she says, gripping my arm and then crossing the road to the shop. I trot after her. ‘Gracie,’ I pant, ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘What is it, Harry?’

  ‘Hugh, but never mind. Mr Arnold’s first wife. My mother.’

  ‘That’s right, it’s only natural. That’s what I tell ’em. It’s only natural.’

  Must be exhausting for Marjorie, I think, and shine the brightest beam I can into the fog. ‘You saw the ghost of my mother, Gracie. She had on a lovely new red coat. Was it snowing? Was there snow on the ground? Were those nice fluffy garlands for Christmas hanging in the square, just there?’

  She peers at me. The fog is Time, and I’m on the wrong side. Mrs Pratt approaches with a lolloping teenager at her side, all sleeves, sex indefinable.

  ‘The very same day she died,’ Gracie says. ‘And that’s official.’

  ‘Snow?’

  ‘Bright as a button, white as a sheet,’ she confirms. ‘“O Come, All Ye Faithful”. Those Aladdins, swinging on a chain. Not that we needed ’em, but you can’t go doing a carol round without the old lamps, can you? Not the same but you never know. It gets dark so early. Ronald squeezing me on “The Holly and the Ivy”. Can’t have been tiddly on the mulled, as that were after it. Even that time.’

  Words to that effect. She gives me a great wink as she turns to go and is nearly run over. Mrs Pratt bustles up and witters on about sleeping policemen, while the indefinable appendage looks as if he’s planning a break-in while they are. It must be her younger son.

  ‘Dominick,’ says Mrs Pratt to her son, ‘please learn to say hello. A little charm gets you a long –’

  I’m already turning away.

  There’s a message from my old friend Morris, at the newsagent’s-cum-Post Office. This old-world custom displeases the grumpy chap behind the grille. He shoves a scrap of paper into the coin-tray and says something a sudden burst of bell-ringing drowns. The note reads:

  Message for Mr Hugh Arkright residing in Green Man. No Arnold on elder Demser passenger lists from November to January 1933. Could she have travelled freight? Hell to get hold of. Have put them in post. Thule dates for 1933 are December 17 to 21 in Visitor’s Book. Also hell to find in your boxes. Phone soon. Good luck. Love Morris.

  I return to my room with the note. Sorry to spy on you like that, Mother. All in the course of duty. You might have travelled incognito, I’m thinking. You might even have embarked from somewhere like Calabar, where none of the port officials would have recognised you. And the crew? You might have taken a boat new to you, or perhaps you were in disguise on the SS Abinsi. Keeping yourself to yourself, with a different cut, you would only have resembled Mrs Arnold, who was much jollier and such a dashed good dancer, too, what?

  There are many other suppositions running through my brain as I pack my tools. Nothing quite fits, but bobbing among all of them is a tasteless remark of Nuncle’s after the war, when I met him at Father’s funeral: ‘What a pity you took fire to those poor people of Hamburg, my dear boy. Freya doesn’t like them cooked.’ I feel I’m in league with you, Mother, that I’m stretching out a hot hand to you, and you to me. By the time I get to the attic, I’m sweaty. Rushing about as usual.

  I set up my torch and move a huge valve radio in mottled brown plastic away from the little skylight. The trunk sits like an upturned boat, sparred with bamboo: when I blow on it, the dust is trapped by the cobwebs. I make short work of one of the locks with the claw-thing; the lock’s anchor in the lid of the trunk has been loosened by woodworm and the metal spike pulls out quite easily. The other tongue is firmly fixed, and I have to use my steel teeth (Ted’s hacksaw, actually). It takes an hour and a lot of my breath before – oh, bliss – the rusty iron divides.

  Your call, Mr Arkwright.

  The lid is stiff, opening only with jiggles and a heave that leaves me breathless.

  Green inside, all green. Humpy green, like pasture, like the open downland before it was ploughed. Green canvas. Ants didn’t like it, did they? They liked everything else but not green canvas, so our beds and soft chairs were covered by it. Now the heady smell of old cloth, mothballs and the must of damp. On the canvas lies an envelope, right in the middle.

  Yes, Mother.

  I recognise your writing, the sort of blue-edged envelope you would always use. It’s addressed to Edward Arnold, Esq., Ilythia, Ulverton. Holding
the torch close, I can just make out the date on the blurred postmark: 1931. The letter arrived here, yes.

  The trunk has already been opened, then. If only to place this envelope inside.

  Nuncle has again been here before me!

  I glance over my shoulder, cast an eye on the shadowy attic. I feel him watching, you see. The demon watcher. Some degraded form of my life touches me. It has such cold fingers, I shudder.

  The envelope is open, and contains a letter. With fumbling hands, I remove the letter and unfold it. At first glance, no more than the usual chattiness, Mother. I’ll read it properly later, put it aside. The dates are now confusing me; the trunk was sent from Africa in 1933, but my uncle has placed a letter inside from 1931. I feel like that excavator friend of my uncle’s who found, digging for King Sil’s grave deep inside Silbury Hill, a bottle of nineteenth-century port.

  I lift away the canvas, lighter than I remember but still awkward, still a weight.

  A hideous, flesh-peeled face.

  No, a pair of tiny shorts. Tiny trousers. Tiny socks. A tiny jacket and two tiny hats. All neatly folded on top of the spotted wallpaper you ordered one year, but which slid off the sweaty walls. Of course. The evidence. I hadn’t expected anything quite so obvious, I hadn’t thought of baby clothes as such (being a man, perhaps, Mother), but the surprise of there being no surprise is so odd it’s almost frightening.

  So, I think, staring into the trunk – she fled Africa with my sibling in the pod! And she never liked to talk of my birth, it was so difficult and dangerous. My half-sibling, I presume. Someone native, even?

  Scandal.

  This is what I’m thinking, kneeling in the gloom, Mother. I’m terribly sorry. And then it gets worse.