Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

Unless she came here to England to get rid of it!

  That quite upsets me, for some reason.

  But she wouldn’t have packed the clothes, idiot, if she’d been wanting to get rid of it! And beneath the infant clothes there are more clothes, less tiny. I have never seen any of these before.

  A layer of brittle wallpaper, then more clothes. Know us, some of them say – those I hated wearing. A pink nightshirt with a lace collar. A bright blue felt jacket. A solaro bush-shirt that gave me a rash. The others are indifferent, then three or four shirts say: know us too. You liked us. You were glad we came back from being pummelled on the smooth stone in the yard, still warm from the charcoal iron. You know who folded us, too: Baluti, the laundry boy. He would always turn our sleeves up and over the chest, so that we looked as if we were praying. We were comfortable and you liked living in us. Remember?

  All the shirts are praying dutifully. My white shorts, my long bottle-green trousers. Clammy feel on my thighs, the difficult way they buttoned, the bloom they’d make on my knees if Baluti hadn’t rinsed out all the Reckitt’s Blue. Oh, the thin strip of red cotton that served as my tie. Oh, a faint violet stain on a tropical jacket where my new pen burst in the heat. You were annoyed about that, though it wasn’t my fault. Oh.

  The last layer of clothes: the ones I’d not yet grown out of at seven years old but which were too tropical for England. An abandoned air to them. Helpless, still praying. The trousers laid on their side as if indisposed only for a moment.

  Under these are shoes.

  Each pair wrapped in oil paper, the oil paper we swaddled things in when green canvas was not practical. My tiny blue baby shoes in wool, my first leather pair, my sandals of untanned leather from the market in Ikasa, my white cricket shoes, my scuffed bush-boots. All the heels well worn. Deformed by pressure, like the Cheshire bog-body’s face that Tim drew the other night on the paper cloth. Mouths and noses and eye-holes, squashed by sixty years of pressure.

  These are phantasmagoria, compared to the hands I see behind them, laying them down just where in turn I’m lifting them from. Only you would have done this, Mother, setting down my wardrobe in levels of age, like sedimentary rock! This would not have been Father’s thing, nor Baluti’s, nor any of the other servants’. Mother did this thing, I’m thinking. Sorted my clothes out. This is what rather moves me, up there in the attic. Not the things themselves, not my things, I’m not moved because they are mine. I see you as if you’re underwater, reaching up as I lift them from their place and stack them neatly next to me. Our fingers almost touch.

  Beneath the shoes, halfway down now, under a roll of oil paper, lie the books. Illustrated annuals from the 1920s; my dogeared Treasure Island, Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies and Just So Stories; Orczy, Pearson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with the frightening pictures; Hodgson Burnett, Henty and Rider Haggard and others now forgotten; my child’s encyclopaedia; my ‘Empire’ atlas, my Heroes of Modern. Adventure; my leather-bound and gilt-tooled Beauties of Shakespeare; my scruffy Lamb’s Tales with bookmarks of broad dried leaves, the torn school history book and a few clothbound poetry anthologies clamped and bowed to their own fossilised damp. And so on.

  This layer affects me more. I had always imagined myself as embedded in a great heap of my own books out there, defying the shadows of ignorance and loneliness with words. But I can’t think of a single volume of my own that is not here, and there are less than twenty!

  The books smell so much of our house in Africa, Mother; the time between doesn’t so much telescope as feel scanty. Everything I have achieved since peters out. If no one touches this house, then the wrack in the attic will survive me. And the wrack is really junk, old junk lying unmoved beneath the pitter-patter of rain and birds and mice, while the world dissolves not only my person, but my influence.

  This is what the books do to me, up there in the attic.

  And what lies beneath the books? A corrugated layer of newspaper, from September 1931, loud with forgotten quarrels, diplomatic crises, floods and fires, defunct furniture stores and fashions. The sun will set at 9.06 pm over the smoky rumble of London, the jazzy lights will dart in the puddles as the heels cross them on their way to see Escape Me Never at the Lyceum, and I can’t tell anyone about Hitler, about the Reichstag, about what is to happen soon.

  As I can’t tell myself, crouched there in the attic, what is to happen soon.

  You must know all about this, though. You must be mouthing warnings all the time.

  And what is the newspaper hiding?

  Toys.

  My furry animals. Oh yes. My big red tin car. My lead farmyard set, my jigsaw puzzles, my trick tightrope-walker, my clockwork train, my building blocks, my sailing-boat, my Napoleonic rear guard, my model of the Crystal Palace, my framing kit. The cuddly animals are small and uncuddly. They are the unwanted ones, the ones I abandoned; I was allowed to take only two to England, remember? I chose my broken-armed teddy and my fat, frayed dog. You promised to replace everything I had left behind. Mostly, you did. Perhaps this was a means to protect yourself – if I had taken everything and left nothing, it would have struck me earlier, the fact that I might not be going back for years. Or at all! At no point do I ever remember you admitting that I wouldn’t be going back for years, or at all. Don’t go away, there’s worse to come. I mean, you must be strong, Mother. There are so many wicked people in the world, so much calumny and lies. I just want to say that you slid away from that responsibility, rather as you slid slowly from my life after the very bad news. The way your eyes used to slide

  Get on.

  Under the farmyard base, sawn by Father out of Whale & Co. chop-boxes, there’s a toothy face grinning up at me.

  Oh.

  Massa Hargreaves, ’e no go worry me atall.

  The torch falls with a clatter as I step back in fright.

  Don’t step back in fright, Mother. You packed the trunk, after all. And please don’t think I’m taunting you. I’m not taunting you. I’m just writing you all my news! When I was beaten at Flytings or Randle, or something really rotten was done to me by an older boy, I never told you, did I? The people here say I must now tell you everything, however unpleasant. Because by telling you, I’m telling myself. Think of your mother and you as processing the pain together, they say.

  What an extraordinarily unfortunate remark. But they don’t know, do they? They don’t know the half of it, do they, Mother?

  Your affectionate son,

  Hugh

  Chilly. (But the heating’s always on too high. It makes everyone sleepy and safe, I suppose.)

  My dearest Mother,

  I’m holding the farm base like a shield against a Medusa. I am, in fact, stooped and as still as stone. Ridiculous. I know what it is now, without looking again. I look again with the torch.

  The mask. A worm-holed Babinga mask, from up-country. Dan the Devil. That was my name for it. Dan the Devil. Still snarling at the world. It was lying quite peacefully under the clothes, in the darkness, until the torchlight woke it and it snarled out of instinct, not spite.

  Father brought it back on one of his trips, didn’t he? Oh, you don’t remember? Fancy that. While he was away I’d had the most awful dreams. One of the servants – Mr Henry, I think – said that what I needed was a horrible mask to frighten away the bad spirits that were taunting me. What I needed was Father, but I believed Mr Henry. You were very busy with the dispensary at the time, there was some sort of epidemic. I asked to have the mask and it was hung next to the bed and the nightmares stopped. Then the mask itself began to bother me. I had toothache, from my second teeth; the mask had given me the evil eye as I lay asleep, mouth open, breathing softly beneath it.

  It was taken down and appeared above the drinks cupboard – to frighten away light-fingered tipplers, went the joke. Now do you remember? Good good good. It still belonged to me, of course. Father reckoned it was a masterpiece and very old and valuable. He did know about these things, didn’t he?

&nb
sp; I hold it up in the attic and agree with him. Its midget’s bulbous forehead presses down upon an alcoholic’s eyes – like Father’s towards the end, I’m afraid. Have I told you about his end? It was sweet, it has to be said – one of the prostitutes, from the room across the passageway, held his hand, and he looked at her and murmured your name. He couldn’t really see anything of course. I was there, wiping his brow, rather choked. I thought you’d want to know that.

  The eyes are cut deep above a square mouth. The mouth is huge and angry and filled with teeth, their ivory sharpened to a point precise enough to sever flesh, like Mawangu’s teeth. And do you remember the extraordinary nose, feline almost, nostrils stretched and creased by the snarl, set right up between the thin baggy eyes? A big hollow bowl of a head, really, the tassels of hide dangling from the chin like Nuncle’s late Confucian beard. The decayed twine stuck around the inside edge proving it was worn, that it wasn’t a wayside terror on a post. You never liked it, did you? What’s the point of having something nasty-looking on the wall, James? Missing the point completely, if you don’t mind me saying.

  I lay it down with care, as one does with antiques. It stares up, rigid, like the corpses in the war. Or my face in a pond. I’m touched by the fact that whoever packed this trunk remembered that this mask really belonged to me. Would Father have remembered, in his grief, or even without it? I think to myself: no, not likely. I hope you didn’t pack it only because you wanted to get rid of it, Mother.

  Your affectionate son,

  Hugh

  Dull again. Michaelmas is always dull, though. Here it’s even duller, despite the entertainment.

  Dearest Mother,

  They insist I carry on. I hope they know what they’re doing. I had a spot of bother but I’m much better now.

  I will not talk, however. I preserve that right. One does not have many rights. Why the fuck should I talk, anyway? No other beast talks. How sensible.

  I’m thinking hard, up there. I haven’t the foggiest idea why you’ve packed this trunk with my things. I sniff a touch of rue. Hm. Whose, though? Only one or two of the toys could have interested me at the age of eleven. The books had mostly been replaced by new, unwarped copies. Nuncle never told me about the trunk, and I wasn’t allowed up in the attic, under pain of losing a month’s pocket money. If the scrawl on the ticket is correct, I was ill when it arrived. If it arrived with you seated next to it in Stan’s trap, and you then vanished here in some way I am yet to fathom – of course he wouldn’t have told me! It was as good as out of sight, out of mind, up here. Yet why the envelope and letter, placed so carefully on the top – the rest untouched, shifted only by the swell of the sea-journey, the handling on the docks, the slow train, Stan’s badly sprung trap?

  You see why I got myself a little worked up, up there?

  I crouch on my knees and run my hand around the sides for any last tiny thing, like a child with its Christmas stocking. In one of the bottom corners my fingers hit something, concealed in the lurid shadows thrown by the torch and by its wrapping: an oil paper parcel on the oil paper lining of the trunk.

  The trap sprung. Snap.

  I undo the string by rubbing it against the metal teeth of Ted’s hacksaw; in the process I cut my thumb, but not severely. The oil paper reveals a bundle of typed, carbon copies. Your letters. To your brother and sister-in-law in Ulverton.

  You kept copies of all your letters, for your planned account of your life on the station – for a nursing journal, was it? You couldn’t trust that your news would be saved by the recipient and you were right: not a single letter of yours has survived – outside the trunk. I read the first immediately, and am gripped. It appears that they are the chronological survival of your earliest time in Africa, before I was born. Perhaps they will take me right through to the mystery of your vanishing. I scrabble, hands trembling, to the last letter at the bottom of the bundle: its faint blue date disappoints me profoundly. It is later than the first by only five months – April 1921 – and written from the Mission Station on your way to Bamakum. Would you have written twenty or more letters to Uncle Edward in five months? I notice something scribbled in pencil across the greasy paper wrapping, perhaps in your own hand: Not in order. Sort through!

  It is at this point, before I have even asked myself why these letters should have ended up in a trunk otherwise dedicated to me, or considered who that pencilled command was addressed to, that I hear a footfall somewhere below me.

  And then another. Someone is climbing the main stairs, betrayed by the booming hollowness of all empty houses.

  I switch off the torch and keep very still. John Wall probably lied when he said he was off all day at the tank demonstration. The clothes lie spread across the green canvas next to the empty trunk. I am holding the bundle of letters in my hand. The rustly copy-paper would be enough to give my position away, were I to tuck them back out of sight. In the near-darkness, in that forest of junk, between branches of chair legs and boles of carpet, I feel like a little animal when the big beasts stalk or the python slides soundlessly through the tangle. I am as terrified of discovery as I once was of death in the rumbling bomber. Oh yes. Exaltedly so.

  The mask is watching me, the image of something hung up above the piano in the English Club in Victoria. Father and I noticed it together one Christmas. It was a night photograph, taken by means of a low wire tripping a flash. A pair of eyes dazzled by the glare into two shilling pieces dragged slightly in a blur of shock, lips drawn back to a wavy glint of teeth, the phantom of itself behind it. This was the moment the night had exploded in the trees, thrusting this most secret easy languishing man-creature into light, into reason, into a world of dress collars and pink gin and Gilbert and Sullivan. Having no name for itself, it’s given a name. Gorilla. Or King Congo, in the Victoria Club. Because of your thing about gorillas, you didn’t like to look at it.

  I did.

  I crouch on my haunches thus for far too long; my legs are even stiffer. Age is unavailing, Mother. You won’t know about this! It pours over the breakwater of morning exercises and brisk walks, it batters and shreds bone and muscle, yet it is so silent.

  My face is the flash-lit gorilla’s, showing all its teeth. I’m tense, you see, as the stairs creak. We stood under the big wobbling fan and Father told me about evolution, pointing at the photograph, using words like ‘stagnant’ and punning phrases like ‘brains stopped play’; drawing a strange parallel with a private branch-line he knew whose grass whipped the little train’s undercarriage, and that ended in an abandoned cocoa-plantation and its rusting sheds from the time of the Germans. As we hominids flashed past the poles, faster and faster, clacketty-clack. No buffers in sight, not yet.

  There’s grit under my palm. It’s black sand from the boat.

  Whoever it was on the stairs has gone down again: a light step, perhaps a woman’s, but not Wall’s because his foot drags. Nerve gave out on seeing the long corridor and its shadows, probably. Should have locked the kitchen door behind me, I think. There’s a far thump and the attic door creaks in sympathy. Whoever it was has left. Yes, I hear through the skylight a far-down sneeze. A man. I hurry down to the kitchen and bolt the door from the inside, just in case. Hold the stockade, pieces of eight, Job Anderson at the middle loop-hole. Just as well the windows are mostly blocked. When they’re not, I duck to pass!

  Up in the attic again, I flutter through the dates on the letters and, yes, they are not in order – but they only go up to May, 1922, and there are only ten of them (the rest is bills, memoranda, scrawled accounts). The first was written soon after your arrival in Africa in 1920. Precisely the period that doesn’t concern me, ending just as my clothes start! As I start!

  Then it occurs to me that maybe this is all my life, from even before the womb. If the female carries a finite number of eggs from birth, then I was in you from the beginning. From when you arrived in Africa and when you were working in the sanny and even before, from when you were running about and squeal
ing on Ilythia’s lawn. Oh yes. Ah yes. Or even before that, wheeled out in your perambulator to gurgle at the shadows in the leaves above, while your big brother crawled about with his wooden ducks long before the first war.

  Even then I WAS INSIDE YOU.

  I smile at this, feeling the weight of the letters: I was closer, I realise, than ever he was.

  Ah yes.

  From your loving son,

  Hugh

  Weather better. Crisp. Crisp and clear.

  Dear Mother,

  I’m fine, now.

  Unpleasant article in the paper, should never have been shown to me. Drew a parallel between Artaud and myself. Artaud was a famous French theatre man who went bonkers, really bonkers. Nevertheless, having drawn this parallel, the journalist then uses a quote from the poor chap to harangue me: Arkwright has ‘a fetishistic superstition for the past’. But I know that quote, it comes from Artaud’s rejection of modern costume! If I meet this journalist, I will challenge him to a duel, as in Pushkin. ‘Who’s Pushkin?’ he will say. A duel to the death. I did unspeakable things to the cutting. I can do unspeakable things to him, too. I can do unspeakable things, full stop. As you can see, I am a bit angry. The people here have been excellent, on the whole. They want to give me a vegetable patch.

  I pack everything away again in the trunk and close the lid, then use one of the big sheets of brown oil paper to wrap up the letters and the mask. I go down to your room and wrap the fetish box into the same huge bundle. I can’t possibly leave anything valuable here. It’s an awkward overgrown child in my arms.

  I stand stiffly and there’s a sudden gust of cold: the window is swinging petulantly back and forth, the heavy morning breaking into a squall. I must have left it open yesterday: the rain has darkened the floor beneath it in a precise curve. Careless. Closing the window, I see a piece of red moving in front of the wildwood.

  Let me embarrass myself: it was the little service tree in full autumn crimson. But in my silly haste, I cracked one of the panes.