The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  ‘The car?’ I said.

  ‘Either give it back or go abroad in it for a very long time. And do give my love to your mother.’

  * * *

  My running had slowed down with Alice around. I think it might have had something to do with the marijuana. My circuits around Battersea Park had become meditations, I had even stopped now and then to stare at the river, but when I came back from seeing Victor that day I ran as hard as I ever had. I ran as though I wanted to hurt myself, and only as I came round the railings by the zoo did I stop. Helena was walking towards me as her Irish setter dashed and then dithered and sniffed over the grass. She carried on approaching me as I heaved for breath. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without her make-up, and her bony face and thin lips now looked pale and ghostly in the morning light.

  ‘Hello, Chris.’ I said nothing, but simply stared at her for a moment as I got my breath back. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Out of a job,’ I said finally, ‘otherwise fine.’ There was a flicker across her face, but no more than that.

  ‘Yes, it’s all a bit awkward isn’t it?’

  ‘Where’s Andrew, then?’

  ‘Down in Bristol most of the time. Well, going between there and Bath – we’ve just found a new house. We’re moving down there. It’s lovely, actually.’

  ‘Nice for you.’

  Helena suddenly moved forward and put her hand on my arm. ‘Andrew’s sorry he’s not been in touch. He was hoping you’d be kept on at Shipley’s, but we heard it hadn’t worked out that way. He’d be happy to take you on at CPT, you know.’

  ‘Big of him,’ I said. She let go of my arm and stepped backwards. The setter was still cavorting jerkily about the place.

  ‘You know they let him down? You know they’d always promised him a directorship and a shareholding in the main company as soon as he’d raised your turnover to half a million?’ I shook my head.

  ‘Then they changed their minds and made it a million. He decided it was all my eye and Betty Martin, and decided he’d best start looking out for himself. And us, of course.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll have to start doing it from the inside of a prison,’ I said, but she shook her head and smiled briefly.

  ‘They won’t do that,’ she said. ‘If that’s your worry, you can forget it. You’d like it down in the west, Chris. Think about it.’ Then she turned her head and looked up towards my flat.

  ‘Is Goldilocks still with you?’

  Now it was time for me to shake my head. ‘No. I eat my porridge alone these days.’

  Her smile became fuller. ‘I always thought you might drop by one of those evenings after you’d left Andrew abroad.’ I suppose she saw the mild commotion of shock as I looked at her. ‘Well, come on,’ she said, ‘you didn’t really think I sat at home grieving for my darling Andy while he screwed his way across Europe, did you? I’ll drop you a line with our new address, anyway. Andrew would have contacted you himself, but even a hint of connivance at this stage could be risky. Let’s give it a few months, shall we, till it’s all quietened down.’

  Then she kissed me, shouted for her dog and set off swiftly towards the bridge. And by the time I was back in the flat standing in the shower with the scald of the water on my face, I thought: Alice and Helena, Helena and Alice. And I could feel my soul crouching down in preparation for some serious woman-hating.

  With only a few days left before that car had to be returned, I thought I might as well put it through its paces. I had never cornered so hard, never accelerated so hard, never braked so hard. I probably took more rubber off those tyres in three days than I had in the previous three years, and every time I turned to look at the empty passenger seat, I pressed my foot down a little harder. So I suppose I can’t really blame the man in the white Sierra. I accelerated too hard and he followed me, then when I braked hard as the lights changed he really wasn’t expecting it. And I wasn’t expecting the hammer blow that seemed to hit me on the neck. I climbed out rubbing the back of my head and walked round to look at the mangled chrome of the bumper, and the sheet of buckled blue steel that two minutes before had been the boot. I think the middle-aged Indian in the clapped-out Ford, with his grey cardigan hanging down below his grey jacket, was expecting me to be angry at the damage he had inflicted on my beautiful sports car, and was a little surprised as we exchanged details to see me starting to laugh, despite my physical discomfort.

  I drove the car back to Shipley’s and left the keys with the secretary.

  ‘It needs a bit of attention, I’m afraid,’ I said as I walked out. It was their car and their insurance policy, so they could sort it out. But by the time I’d walked home I realised that I needed some attention too. I went to the doctor the next day, and the day after that I was at the hospital. The bruising and soreness constituted a classic whiplash injury, which I was at first told might well turn out to be temporary, but by the third week of visits and X-rays and examinations, it began to seem that it might not turn out to be so temporary after all. I shan’t bore you with the details of all those medicals, though there are some giddy-sounding words involved: spondylosis, radicalopathy, osteophytes. My frozen shoulder and neck showed no signs of thawing. And the pain wouldn’t go away, despite the ibuprofen and the Neproxen. They offered me an epidural, but did explain to me that it’s a bit awkward up there around the neck, what with the gaps for the needle being so small. Should there be a mistake while doing it, you end up paralysed. I decided to say no to that one. For a while I wore a brace, a soft white plastic one around my neck that looked like part of a urinal. Even with my new machine, my TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) blipping little bolts of lightning from one patch of flesh to another when I hooked myself up and switched on – even with this, I couldn’t bend, couldn’t lift, couldn’t turn my head without thinking it through beforehand. Sometimes I could barely move at all, my neck was so solid that I was immobilised. I felt like Humpty Dumpty, with a ridiculous, vast egg on my shoulders, and a bird’s neck far too delicate to support it.

  Just as well I no longer had the car, since I couldn’t have driven it, being barely able to move or see what was going on behind me for days at a time. I soon learned to stop and consider the implications of bending down to pick anything up. More often than not I would leave it where it fell.

  And that’s how, within a couple of months, I ceased to be a promising junior executive in a printing company, and became instead a stiff, disabled figure edging about in a flat eighty feet above Battersea Park, seldom going out except to buy food and walk up the road once a week to collect my state benefit.

  I certainly missed Alice. And her dope.

  Madmen’s Epistles

  A madman’s Epistles are no Gospels.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

  Much of the early part of Pelham’s addiction, like anyone else’s, was sheer delight. A number of the letters from this period, which were collected in the Clarendon edition, testify to that. It is worth remarking that Pelham must rank as one of the most unrequited correspondents in the history of the language. Of his letters to his wife, all went unanswered. Of those to Samuel Johnson, a few were answered with a little note and a little money. Of those to Ferdinand Lowndes, an old and wealthy friend from Cambridge, an occasional reply was forthcoming, when Lowndes, away on his family estate outside Norwich, was not himself so debauched that he was incapable of lifting a pen. To be fair, when one examines these letters, it is often hard to see what precisely their recipients were meant to say in reply. They could be extremely short, like this one:

  The elephant-shrew bathes in a dew drop.

  Or this:

  A schism in the weather. The mist that hovered and clung about everything with its creeping infection is gone. The sun’s disc has hit the river with a wintry clang.

  Others were more discursive, clearly reflecting the messianic vegetarianism of Prince Zabrenus and the Children of Bethany:

  I have seen the oil-la
mps burning in the windows and thought of the poor vast whales, harpooned by men in their Nantuckets, so that oil might pour from those great insides. I have looked on carp, salmon, trout, even the lobster, and wondered at their watery pleasures of the day before. Blood stuff’d in Skins is British Christians’ Food? And eating hearts roasted? And why do so many souls lie sprawled among the ashes of a glass-house, so the heat of its daytime fires might leach into their flesh? Are they cooking too? For whose grand table? Only once, my friend, did I eat swan pie. And the pain that later developed was a white ghost in my intestines, yearning to fly.

  To some extent one can observe the classic pattern of an opium addiction. In the early stages the mind achieves an unimagined fluency and scope, and thought expands to fill the million new universes provided for it. A fly crossing a curtain emits such a clamour of sound, such an intricate weave of noise, as to absorb the thinker for hours in the visualisation of all the worlds that surround him in a room, each one infinite, and each a source of ceaseless wonder. There are extraordinary mutations of time and space, with colours grown utterly spectacular, spectrums everywhere to rainbow the light. Astonishing undiscovered cities. Rivers that run with liquid gold. Every addict in the early stages is a traveller bearing exotic knowledge:

  Have you ever seen the egg of a peregrine falcon? The texture of its skin is Mars, all clotted blood and sullen anger. Portents. An inflammation in the eye of war. Put your ear to it close enough, you’ll catch the trigger of the claw and the spear of the beak beneath it. But then a second later pick up the swallow’s egg and look at the scatter of stars there. Heaven shrunk to the size of a fingernail. This day our only angelus is the scavenger’s bell. A gleaner of time’s detritus.

  Then the other symptoms begin. We have an eloquent testimony of this from De Quincey: ‘I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at … I was kissed with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.’ Or this letter about the unnameable and unsustainable terrors, written by Coleridge to Poole in 1796: ‘It came on … several times on Thursday … but I took between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum, and stopped the Cerberus … But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion.’

  Whatever Pelham’s psychological symptoms from the drug, his physical state was made incalculably worse by the pints of gin which now accompanied his morphine intake. When he wrote to Lowndes, ‘I fear my entrails are rotting’, he was telling no more than a literal truth. The deterioration of his mind was for him a decline of the soul itself, which he had decided was leaking, dripping out of his pores in unaccountable torrents of cold sweat, and falling from his mind and memory like leaves quitting a tree. Even the hair, which tumbled with increasing urgency from his scalp, he felt represented the departure of his shaping spirit. The last letter printed in the Clarendon edition consists merely of these three lines:

  An amethyst weeps in its crystal glitter

  Mineral jewels, Judas tears.

  King David too had the darkness inside him.

  And shortly after writing this, Richard Pelham disappeared from history. Where he died and how were never recorded, and if his body was placed in a grave, no one since had ever found it.

  Withdrawal

  To Withdraw: To take back; to bereave.

  Johnson’s Dictionary

  One day I was in so much pain that I couldn’t face the walk to the DSS building, so I didn’t collect. Then it struck me how much I hated standing in line, as though posing for a posthumous L.S. Lowry painting, amongst the bowed down, the listless, the crooked and the evidently and permanently defeated. The place had a smell to it and that smell was failure, massive, inconsequential, state-monitored failure, mixed with a little disinfectant. The five flights of steps I had to walk up and down to get to my flat had become such a deterrent that I only went out at all when in need of food. Then one day my mother arrived, unannounced, by taxi and looked with wonder about the place, littered with debris of all descriptions, some of it once edible, some of it once wearable. The spaces on the wall where Alice’s pictures had hung made the place look even more desolate.

  ‘But Chris, you were always so fastidious.’ She was already opening a window. Something else I’d stopped doing.

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard for me to bend down,’ I said. But I was ashamed. I was surrounded by emblems of my own dissolution. There was even a smell in the air I could never get rid of these days, and I wasn’t sure it was so different from the one at the DSS building.

  A week later on the telephone my mother suggested I should sell my flat and go to live with her. Even three months before I would have found the notion absurd. But now, after pondering the matter for a couple of days, I called the local estate agent and told them to come round for a valuation that Friday. I needed three days to clean the place up, often on my hands and knees, and often doubling the dosage of my drugs to numb the pain. One of London’s intermittent housing booms was booming away at the time and six weeks later we had clinched a deal. In less than four months, I was back in Tooting. Even after paying off my mortgage, I still had some money to put on deposit in the building society, from which I could expect a return each year. It wasn’t much, but then I no longer had any bills to attend to. I always paid for the shopping when I accompanied my mother to the supermarket, but that was it.

  In the process of clearing out my flat, I discovered at the bottom of my wardrobe a pile of papers. They looked familiar but neglected: it was the notes on my thesis from all those years ago in Leeds. I put them on one side, together with my Pelham books, and as soon as I was settled back in Tooting I placed the books on the shelves in the little room on the ground floor which I made my study, and I placed the sheets on the table.

  One day I heard my mother, on the telephone to her sister Agnes, saying she’d decided to nurse me back to health. I thought perhaps she was simply finding her widowhood a little too solitary for her taste. I certainly hadn’t been round much, and I had never once taken Alice to meet her – couldn’t face that. But now we had one another’s exclusive company, and I soon turned to that pile of notes and started reading them again after such a lengthy interruption. By the end of that first week of reconnoitre and retrieval, my attention had turned once more to the mystery of Richard Pelham. But this time I had nothing else to distract me, and I certainly needed something to occupy the chill vacuum left behind inside me, with the departure of Alice, my job, my car, my running – and most of my walking too. The chaos and grief of Pelham’s life still needed annotating, so it seemed, since no one had come forward to do it in the meantime. His work had been out of print for the better part of a century. Most people had never even heard of him.

  But six months after my mother started nursing me, we had to switch roles. She’d been growing slightly odd for some time before that, and would occasionally be returned to the house by one of the bemused local traders, to whom she had confided that she hadn’t the faintest notion where she presently lived. I came back one day from a tentative walk outdoors to find her carefully scrubbing used food tins with a toothbrush before putting them in perfect rows in a cardboard box on the Formica table – ‘We’ve always had clean rubbish, Christopher, your father insisted on it right up to the end’ – and I sat and listened to her elegiac monologue about what life had been like when they had lived in the colonies. But they never had lived in the colonies. ‘I was so sensitive to the climate out there that your father would say, “You’re all wrapped in fly-skin, Sylvia’” – but my father had been an accountant in Tooting all his life, and had inherited our house from his father before him. She had carried on scrubbing and talking and talking and scrubbing. The bean tin’s blue label was torn and flapping, so she healed it gently with a dab from the Sellotape dispenser which she kept on the shelf above the sink. An asymmetric sardine can, with its ragged remnants of serrated lid, had the blackened toothbrush applied with vigour in
to its awkward corners. And on it went. On and on and on.

  ‘Probably Alzheimer’s, I’m afraid,’ the doctor had confided professionally, as we stood out of earshot months later. He leaned close to me. His breath smelt of peppermint. ‘Premature senility, as we used to call it.’ And I watched her mooning about the place, her grave, beautiful face turned incredulously towards the window sometimes. What it was that caused her so much amazement out there, between the grass and the swaying trees of the common, I never did find out.

  But she didn’t appear greatly troubled and still cooked and cleaned, though with increasingly eccentric results. I spent most hours of the day in my little study, scraping away at the patina that had accrued about the age of Pelham. I began to think that the problem with the eighteenth century was that you could only see it through the funnel of the nineteenth; could only see Pope through Wordsworth or Byron; only see Smart through Blake; only see Richard Pelham through Coleridge and De Quincey, or Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Even the forms of his degeneracy were contaminated by the future that still lay ahead. I would take walks across the common, over to the Lido and back again, pondering this or that conundrum. By now, despite my back, I did all the shopping and tried, as far as possible, to keep my mother from going out.

  My mother took to saying grace before and after meals.

  ‘Your father always insisted on it,’ she said, but I never remembered any such insistence. My father, even in his Roman Catholicism, always seemed to me to be accountant all the way through, one who kept the gestures of his faith to an economic minimum. He counted and he calculated, he added up and he subtracted, and he smiled with his own small glow of satisfaction when the figures balanced. But I reckoned that the only agency he had ever truly credited with transcendent power was the Inland Revenue. The mention of its inspectors could, uniquely, hush his voice to a tone of reverence. For him, the atonement had balanced the books, and the ledger had thus been completed.