by Alan Wall
But the last sign had been the blackest and by far the most potent. There had been a boy called Midgely, who had lived in the neighbourhood ever since I could remember. In fact we were the same age. He had been arrested on a murder charge a month before, and was now awaiting trial without bail. Murky stories were circulating about what had happened, but one night I went down to the local pub and stood nursing my drink while I listened to the chatter all around me. Midgely, it seemed, had had a few pints and then set off unsteadily to a place in Streatham half a mile away, where a housing estate and a piece of wasteland between them provided the possibility of sex for sale. There was little doubt in the minds of the regulars that Midgely had been a virgin before that evening. It had not taken him long to be approached by one of the local rent-girls. The two of them had engaged in whatever grim and mechanical manoeuvres were on offer, then Midgely had informed his partner that he had no money. He had told her not to worry, he would return the following night with the five pounds that had been requested. The fact that she had not demanded the money first meant that she was no professional. After she had screamed at him, and even cut a part of his cheek with one of her nails, she had then started laughing, and had suggested they should call it quits after all, since he now had VD, though it would take a week or so before he started squirming with the pain.
Whether through terror or anger or shame, or a mix of all three, Midgely had dragged her back into the derelict building and, holding her down by the hair with one hand, had smashed in her head with a brick that he held in the other. They said that there had been nothing left of her face by the time he was finished. She had been nineteen years old.
This little trinity of signs, I had come to feel, was angled directly at me. You see, I’ve never believed anything to be accidental. There are no coincidences, only a veined complexity sometimes too deep to fathom. Only the wounds of time and what’s hidden inside them. And so it was that I began to make preparations for my life in Rome. Whatever doubts I had, I knew that I still had to go. I had told all this to Alice once. ‘What a God,’ she had said, ‘who only speaks through other people’s misery.’
Once in Rome I was a most devoted student, and was highly thought of by my superiors. The minor orders presented no problem: porter, lector, exorcist and acolyte. These ancient ruins of courtly degrees I received without demur. I even wore my tonsure with a kind of pride. But I started to falter as the subdiaconate approached, for it contained that fateful commitment to lifelong celibacy. In the magnum silentium after ten at night I would lie in bed and try to work out whether the women striding through my mind were shapes sent to distract me, like St Anthony’s desert seducers, or merely a warning that I would surely fail, should I ever make an irrevocable commitment to forsake the intimate presence of women and the comfort that their flesh and their spirits afforded. How often the ghost of Pauline Healey ministered to me. How often she pulled that white T-shirt over her head and reached down again to take me.
So that’s when I had started to slip into the streets outside, uncassocked, to find out before it was too late what it was I might be missing, and it was then I first discovered in that great city of pagan monuments that what I would be missing was too much, far too much.
Soon after I had left for England and that degree course up in Leeds, and had put celibacy behind me as one of those childish things, not fit for adults in an adult world. Or at least only possible for those for whom the passions burned with a dimmer flame than they did in me. The Christ of redemption shrank back into the Jesus of history, and the resurrection became whatever filled the chasm between hope and mortality. My mother found it difficult to speak to me for a while after that, and I had the dreadful suspicion she was praying for my lost vocation. Every night.
I had gone out to buy some vegetables and rice. I was walking along distractedly on my way back, carrying my meagre bag of groceries, when I suddenly stopped and stared down at the pavement. How many years before had there been brown paving stones? York stones my father had called them, though it seemed like a long way to bring them to me. Billy Haggarty and I had crouched opposite one another. We had both stolen chisels from our separate houses. He hammered first at the flagstone and made a white circle out of its ochre. Then I raised my own blunted blade and drove it down into the centre. Tiny flakes of stone had risen into our faces like sharp-sided hail.
‘The rat is dead for another year,’ Billy had shouted. ‘Can’t eat my toes, can’t eat yours. He’ll have to find a baby if he’s hungry.’
Furtive and priestly, we had buried both chisels in his garden. I never did know what the ceremony meant. There were no rats that I knew of, not in his house, and not in mine either. Two months later I caught my father hunting through his tools and muttering, ‘Where on earth has that chisel gone?’
That night I spent twice as long as usual with my TENS wrapped blinking round my neck. It would probably surprise you if I were to tell you that electricity can flirt inside your body. It can, though. It hovers in obscure muscles, and dawdles along the corridors of veins. It snuffles out little hidey-holes in membranous corners, and quivers foxily in there and won’t be ferreted out. And so you end up walking around with all this electricity quirking and scrolling inside you. If they stuck a bulb between your lips, believe me, you’d light up a field.
My bedside reading was the little book of Count Zabrenus’s sermons I had managed to buy that week, the words faithfully transcribed by the faithful in the conventicle off Tottenham Court Road which Pelham had once attended:
Would you eat anything, my brothers and sisters? Would you swallow a nightingale live for the sake of its warm, liquid song, just to catch the pulse of it swelling? And if not, then why not? Do you imagine a cow is any less kind than a songbird? Jesus told us he was the lamb, and yet we continue to shed the blood of lambs as men once shed His.
I had been brooding on this passage before I fell asleep, and in my dream I was in an abattoir, dressed absurdly in eighteenth-century costume and a periwig, but with a priest’s stiff collar, shouting at the men, who in their blood-stained T-shirts ignored me and went about their business: ‘Celery, carrots, potatoes and bread don’t bleed, my friends, don’t get dragged from their cribs before dawn, or stacked into lorries, knee-deep in blood-spattered straw and their own faeces…’ My words were chewed up by the sound of machinery. Then the dream turned inside out and I was travelling through my own intestines, the internalised homunculus of myself, animula, little soul, and I saw how the walls inside my own body were stained badly by the dreadful yield and cull of slaughter. Then there was nothing but smoke in an oven, just black smoke stains and scratches inside a huge, municipal, over-used oven.
In the weeks that followed, and without ever consciously making a decision about it, meat disappeared once more from my diet, as though I were back with Alice in Battersea. I felt I couldn’t face the smell of it cooking, or the sight of dried blood gathering inside its wet shrink-wrapping. I could almost hear the pitiful moans and demented whinnies in the butcher’s shop window, and I thought I could hear Pelham at Smithfield on his knees, calling aloud for mercy for all the creatures of God’s bounty, just before his second arrest.
The Zabrenus sermons made intelligible much of the fury in those late letters of Pelham. I lifted my eyes from the book in the early afternoon and saw with extraordinary vividness an image from my childhood. Billy Haggarty and I had found some old battered tins, still full of whatever it was they contained, but with all the printed wrapping long gone and with enormous rusted dents in each one.
‘They explode,’ said Billy, ‘if you throw them on a fire. Let’s start a fire.’ So we pulled together pieces of old wood on the stretch of wasteland near where Billy lived. He had matches and after a while he managed to get a flame alive. Then we watched and coughed as the blistered paint of the timber belched out its black, stinking smoke. We started to throw on the cans, one by one, laughing at the danger we knew we were courting. There must
have been ten or eleven of them, and each time we threw one into the flames our yelps of laughter grew louder. When the last one had been thrown, we stood in silence staring at our own private bonfire, our faces blackening from the sooty fumes. Then there was an explosion, so loud it seemed the world had stopped all about us, and Billy stood staring at me in solemn disbelief, his face and clothes spattered with red gobbets where the tinned tomatoes had hit him. I waited for him to fall over from his wounds, but he never did.
The next day I went down into the cellar for the first time since I had come back to live in Tooting. A spider had made its web across one corner, and it was littered with the eviscerated carcasses of insects. A few months before I had bought an eighteenth-century edition of Swift’s The Battle of the Books, in which he meditates on how the spider, the representative of all that is modern, spins its new world out of its entrails. And then I saw the jar of money. It sat on the trestle table in the middle of the floor, an enormous glass jar, almost the size of an amphora, filled with coins; of copper, brass, silver and others unspecified, made of alloys unassayed. I had in my teens collected them from all over the world, but mostly England. Put there originally as a gesture towards possible redemption one day, but left finally to gather in their own gloom and for their own dull sake, rotting gently like outdated ordnance in a military dump. Even burglars wouldn’t bother to touch that pile, should they ever come on a visit.
What had I done to earn them and, more to the point, why had I failed to spend them? Why had I not simply thrown them away? And what were they, anyway, these coins? Congealed labour, the symbolic issue of the sweat of someone’s brow? Not mine anyway, so maybe only the random tokens scattered by the Goddess of Fortune spinning on her wheel, Lady Luck’s hard-nosed gifts. Pennies and dimes, drachmas and centimes, Deutschmarks, pesetas, lire. And a few antique ones I picked up one day at a jumble sale and tossed into the pot. Most likely issued by a Roman quartermaster to some bored and randy legionnaires centuries before. Hundreds of sundry fingers had pressed most of them into my palm. In bars in Tuscany, French cafés, Greek doss houses, on the top decks of dirty buses in south London.
I remembered how I had once sat in the evening staring at that glassy vault, asking myself what happened to such money if you declined to use it. Did it become merely a ghost of itself in metallic retirement, forgetting at last the corrosive sweat of the flesh? It had been freed from any burden of its usefulness, that was for sure. The paper money, having no weight or gravity to begin with, had all long since floated into other people’s hands.
It was odd to think that every head portrayed in relief in that jar had once been the centre of the circle of its world. This was my little protest at the hellish infinity of money, its ceaseless, monstrous, reproducible fecundity. I had only one use for it these days: to buy other men’s words, written centuries before.
Simon Surtees would drop in most weeks to arrange my next asset-stripping session, though most of the rooms were now so void of furniture or ornament that there wasn’t too much left over to strip. And two or three mornings a week I had to answer the door for the postman, as he delivered a holograph manuscript or a set of eighteenth-century first editions. That particular morning it was the postman. I opened the door and took his parcel, signing his little form.
‘You all right, Mr Bayliss?’ he said, peering at me solicitously. He was in his early twenties, with closely cropped hair, a single earring on one ear, and an open smiling face, always cheerful whether the weather was wet or dry.
‘I think so. Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondered,’ he said, and walked off whistling. I took the package through to the kitchen and carefully cut it open. A Doctor’s Meditation on the Melancholic State in two volumes, by Frederick Threlwall. I had been waiting for that. I laid the books out on the table and stared at them lovingly. Only then did I look down and realise I had no trousers on. Worse than that, my underpants had a big yellow patch across them. How long had I been wearing those? How long had it been since I had washed? That explained the postman’s quizzical look. I went upstairs and found some trousers. They were stained too, and crumpled, but I put them on all the same and looked into the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe, the only mirror left in the house. It was weeks since I had shaved. What surprised me most was that my straggly new beard was entirely grey. And so was my hair, which had not been cut for months and months and now reached below my shoulders. Then the knocking on the door started up again. Probably the postman, come back to make sure I wasn’t ill.
It wasn’t though. It was my Aunt Agnes, my mother’s sister, the newly hatted comforter at the funeral.
‘I’ve come for lunch,’ she announced as she stepped through the door and past me. ‘Good God, Christopher, you look like Ben Gunn.’
‘Lunch isn’t possible,’ I said quickly, following her. ‘I have an appointment in an hour with some bookdealers. But have some coffee.’
She walked about the place, emitting sounds of ill-tempered incredulity. ‘Where has all the furniture gone?’
‘I decided to refurbish the house.’ Had I picked up that phrase from Simon? It can’t have been one of mine.
‘It’s yourself you should be refurbishing, by the look of you. All Sylvia’s lovely wooden chairs gone, even the little coffee table. What have you done, sold them?’ I didn’t answer. She ran a hand along one of the remaining surfaces, a 1930s sideboard even Simon had balked at buying, and held out her finger towards me, smudged in black. ‘There’s more dust in here than where your mother is. Are you seriously telling me you’re not going to make me some lunch, after I’ve come here especially all the way from Surrey?’ She had ringed her mouth with a dangerous streak of red lipstick.
‘You should have phoned.’
‘I did phone. About ten times. Nobody ever answered.’ It was true I seldom picked up the receiver any more, either to call or to be called, except to place my orders with the dealers. ‘And just look at you. You look like death warmed over. You’re fading away, you are. You’ll be with Sylvia soon, if you carry on like this. Anyway, at my age going from one county to another is not something to be taken on lightly. You’ll have to drive me back, then. I told Ernest not to bother coming till four.’
‘I can’t drive the car today,’ I said. ‘My injury.’ I gestured at my shoulder. ‘It’s playing up.’
‘Injuries. At your age. Your uncle’s been waiting for an operation on his rupture for three years, but it’s never stopped him driving me around.’
I made her coffee, but the milk was rancid – I couldn’t remember the last time I’d needed to use it. I found a biscuit for her. She looked about in unremitting pique at the state of the house.
‘You’ve started to look like somebody in one of those films,’ she said, shaking her head. Her hair had been frozen into place with aerosol. ‘Fresh out of the desert. And you used to be quite presentable.’ People simply didn’t come here any more, I wasn’t used to it, and I soon grew so exasperated with the ceaseless scissoring movement of her jaws that I excused myself. I grabbed a book from my study then made for the bathroom on the top floor, where I read a whole page slowly in an unsuccessful attempt to cleanse my mind of the clutter of my jabbering aunt. When I came back down the stairs I stopped on the landing. There was a humming sound coming from mother’s bedroom. ‘Green-sleeves’ – a tune of which she was never fond, so it seemed unlikely to be her ghost. I peered round the door. Aunt Agnes was trying on my mother’s shoes, flipping her toes in and arching her instep for size. She’d already pulled three pairs out of the wardrobe.
‘I’ll take these, Christopher,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘it’s not as though you’ll be doing much with them, is it? Even you wouldn’t have the heart to sell her personal effects, though you’re obviously hell-bent on selling everything else. She’d have wanted me to have them, I can promise you that.’
Finally, in speechless relief, I steered her to the bus stop clutching her bag of shoes, and
loaded her on to the first bus that came, claiming I myself would have to wait for the second to go and meet my dealers. Then I slouched back to the house, even more crook-backed than usual, climbed to the bedroom and connected myself up to my TENS. AC/DC. Take the AC out of Alice and you were left with the one word lie. Even the bedroom was now denuded of all furniture except the mattress, and besprinkled all over with an inch of dust. This was a domicile of ghosts, even if my mother’s wasn’t one of them. Desire hadn’t died with Alice’s departure – those ghosts moved from room to room as well. And I suddenly realised lying there, with the great clarity of the totally isolated, that if I didn’t try to pull myself out of the eighteenth century, I would shortly disappear entirely from the twentieth.
And so that weekend, with the hesitancy of one doing it for the first time, I bathed and shaved. I went to the barber’s in Tooting Bec, who stared at me with wonder, and told him to cut it all off. I called into a shop and bought myself some clothes. And finally, all dressed up and with nowhere to go but home, I looked around the house and realised that my Aunt Agnes, selfish, hard-nosed bitch that she was, had been right: I had turned the place into the inside of a tomb. There was enough dust in there to start a cemetery. So I took the vacuum cleaner out of its retirement under the stairs and set it loose to wheeze brutally about the place. Now without dust the house looked unnervingly empty (what a lot of things I’d sold). And, for the first time, I didn’t want to be locked inside it: I wanted to be out instead. So I tried to think of some place I needed to visit. And then I remembered Grub Street. Except that it wasn’t called that any more. Nowadays they called it Milton Street, but I’d never actually been on a visit.
