The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Hole

  ‘Wally,’ said the voice from the far corner of the dormitory, with relish, ‘wasn’t merely fat, or even obese. He was enormous …’ I had never heard a horror story before, and I was getting my sense of what this first one was going to be like from everybody else’s anticipation, which promised a pleasurable gross-out, fear you could enjoy feeling and then put away again when you were bored with it. After all, this was reading aloud – which we could do because, at thirteen, we were the oldest boys at the choir school, and slept in a room off at the end of a corridor, where we had the informal right to talk after lights-out, so long as we didn’t make so much noise we forced authority to take notice of us. It was reading aloud; and everyone knows that a story delivered by voice has its meaning held within the circle created between speaker and listeners. That was how it had been before I could read, when my parents read to me, and that was how I expected it to be now, with the difference that the atmosphere that governed the story now would be the atmosphere of the dormitory.

  At first, when I went away to school, my parents having discovered the miserable miles I was covering round the playground, I had hated the way that even sleeping wasn’t private. You were in bed, but the bed wasn’t truly your bed, the sheets weren’t your sheets. I pulled the covers over me as if they were the bedroom door I hadn’t got, but it never entirely worked. The pocket of warmth you made as you curled up was still an ambiguous, only semi-boundaried zone. Rustles and snuffles and coughs came from the beds four feet to the left, and four feet to the right. You could hear the world that had rung electric bells at you all day, and called you by your surname, and required you to be on your guard all the time, still going on; and though the oblivion that came when your mind’s grip on your surroundings softened, and frayed, and parted, was truly private, sleep being a kingdom whose doors opened equally everywhere, it never seemed to last for more than a moment before morning came and the long cycle of the school day began again. Boarding school was a town of children, just like the stories said, but what the stories hadn’t told me was how strange it would feel, at first, to live for weeks at a time with boys’ social hierarchies omnipresent and the deep connections of family nowhere.

  Now, though, three years later, I was used to it all. I had found the compensations in boarding school, from having teachers who seemed actually pleased when I knew things, to the astonishing comfort of fitting in. I had, not just a few best friends, but a role I could play. Other boys knew what I was when they saw me coming, and had a workable set of expectations about it. It turned out this town had an actual niche for someone bookish who was willing to play bookish, and live up to the images of cleverness that were current in our shared world of comics, and war films, and TV programmes. I could be Brains in Thunderbirds, I could be Q in Live and Let Die. I could be the officer there invariably was on the escape committee at Stalag Luft 17 who wore glasses and came up with cunning plans. In short, I could be a Prof. It was a mask, but it felt as if it bore a friendly relationship to my face.

  And beneath these satisfactions, I had a feeling as if a long-tied private knot had been loosened. My family’s unending medical crisis had gone into lovely, unexpected remission. The prediction had been that Bridget would die by the time she was eight or so, but by chance she had survived long enough for medicine to move on. They still couldn’t do anything about the cystinosis itself. Cystine crystals were still forming, an accident happening in every one of her cells. But transplant surgery had arrived, by 1975, pioneered as a solution to quite different diseases but perhaps adaptable to her problem. The doctors thought that a transplanted kidney could probably be protected by careful management from going the way of her own; maybe it would give her more life; maybe it could even give a semblance of an ordinary life. So in the year that she was eight and I was eleven, her medical notes, by now a mass of paper it took a trolley to move, were transferred to the kidney unit at Guy’s Hospital, and to save time looking for a compatible kidney my father donated her one of his. He and Bridget were trundled into theatre together on two gurneys. They disappeared through the red rubber doors: my mother took me to spend the afternoon in a little stamp dealer’s shop under Waterloo Bridge. I should have been terrified, with two of the three people I loved most going under the knife at once, but I had cultivated blind faith in doctors as an essential fear-limiting tool, and I don’t remember being afraid during that long, edgy afternoon, nor noticing what my mother was feeling either. I remember the stamps. They were the ordinary pre-decimal British definitives, in strips, in little glassine envelopes. The Queen on them was a young woman, her black-and-white photograph an oval island on a rectangle of pale, clear colour. The halfpenny stamp was orange, the penny blue, the thruppence purple.

  The operation had its costs. My father’s hair turned white at forty-one. The steroids they pumped into Bridget to stop her body rejecting the kidney made her bloat up, turning her abruptly from a very thin person into a very fat one, so drastic and irreversible a transformation that for the rest of her life it was hard to find more than occasional reminders of the person she had been before, in a glimpse of the back of her neck, for example, always slender even when she was most enpudgified. But it seemed to work. Suddenly, for the first time, Bridget could walk distances, and eat normal food. The crated bottles of sugar-water faded out of her life, leaving nothing behind but a hatred for sweet things, and a counterbalancing taste for vicious little salad dressings, heavy on the pepper and the tabasco. Suddenly her life had no fixed expiration date any more. The year after the transplant, she stumped to the top of a Scottish mountain. It was a small mountain, but it was a mountain. The wind on the summit blew her tartan cape around her ears, but she herself was anchored: solid enough, decisively enough there in the flesh that there was no danger of the wind blowing her away. Gravity had hold of her. I didn’t have to see her any more as thistledown, or bird bones, or a crushable paper sculpture. Something in me that had been vigilant for years, relaxed.

  So my mood was more luxurious than desperate as I settled down to hear about Wally. I knew who I was in relation to the six other thirteen-year-olds in the room; I knew that I was comfortably separate from my family, without having to accuse myself deep down of running away from its insatiable needs. If Bridget didn’t need propping up any more, then I, who had scarcely done any propping, needn’t feel guilty any more. I applied a practised negative capability to the task of enjoying the half-privacy that was available in a room that wasn’t my bedroom. I stretched out in a lazy X, wedging my feet down the sides of the mattress and my hands behind my head, and listened.

  Wally was enormous. But he hadn’t started out that way. On the contrary. His mum and dad were fitness freaks, maniacs for flat tummies and buffed muscles. They kept Wally off milk as a baby – too fattening – and made him lift weights as a toddler, so that at the age of two he ‘developed a nice little cluster of muscles: triceps, biceps, pectorals …’ The child they sent off to primary school when the time came was as lean as a greyhound; and then their comeuppance began, for Wally soon refused to spend his four hours a day in training, and began to swell. He went on swelling, and on, and on, even when they fed him nothing at home for weeks at a time, and cut off his dinner money at school. What was he eating? ‘Nobody knew except Wally. And perhaps the men who came to empty the school dustbins … It was while selecting tit-bits from the garbage that Wally caught his first rat. It struggled a little, but it tasted delicious: so much so that he took to visiting the sewer outfall on his way home …’ After rats, pets; after pets, when Wally gets sent to hospital for observation, ‘the child in the next bed vanished without trace, proving they weren’t very observant. How Wally did it without making a mess is a mystery.’ And so, humiliated beyond endurance, Wally’s father began to make a plan for his disposal, a plan involving a scalpel and a cylinder of compressed air –

  But at this point I wimped out, and made such a fuss that my fr
iend in the corner had to put away The Fifteenth Pan Book of Horror Stories and the torch. I never did hear how Wally turned the tables and (of course) ate his parents, until I re-read the story to write this book, an experience that was not so much frightening in the present tense, as haunted by the memory of my gradually increasing terror at thirteen. That night, I made no conscious connections between the story and my life. I didn’t say to myself, how odd, in real life fatness signifies reassurance to me, but I’m reacting to the story of this fictional lardball as if it meant the total opposite, and carries me to a place where nothing is safe. I only discovered, that night, that if you used books as other worlds, you granted them a reality you couldn’t instantaneously take back just because this time you wanted to say that a story was only a story: false, untrue, nothing to worry about. I believed in Wally. I believed in his furtiveness, and his gross jelly of a body, and his bloodstained mouth that swallowed people. As I listened, I could feel that particular phrases from the story were being imprinted on my memory in a way that guaranteed that they would pop back into my consciousness over and over again, night after night when I was at the borders of sleep, so that the dark would have the thought of Wally in it. Sometimes, when something is going to prey on your mind, you know it there and then. Some things your mind swallows, with a helpless alacrity, just so they can be regurgitated when you least want to pay attention to them. But I’d fought against this knowledge for as long as I could because I wanted to be able to handle the story sociably; I wanted to share the unbothered group shudder. It was humiliating to feel solitary fear instead. But I couldn’t help it. I was scared shitless.

  It was the tone of the story that did it, as well as the events. ‘Wally’ was a string of black jokes, like the one about the hospital not being very observant. When I look at it now, I see that the author was playing a game in line with the central premise of all horror fiction. Horror is about disproportion. It takes acts of cruelty or spite or neglect that are perfectly recognisable from the world as we know it – like Wally’s parents treating their son as an exhibition piece for body-building – and it amplifies them till they dominate the whole little world of the fiction, by having these ordinary causes produce extreme effects, sometimes supernatural ones. Another way of putting it is that, in horror, sins become teratogenic. This is one of those extremely precise words devised by doctors so they can discuss disturbing things in front of those afflicted by them without being understood. It means, ‘giving birth to monsters’. Wally is the monster – the belching, waddling, literal monster – that his parents give birth to because they are secretly monsters, in a way that would not breach the rules of suburban normality if this weren’t a horror story. The central joke of the story – the one that generates all the author’s subordinate jokes – is that, although a cartoon of their insanity, in the shape of Wally, has broken free of proportion and is pounding the pavements eating rats, cats and people, the rest of suburbia is still there unaltered. Cannibalism happens amid keep-fit classes, Sunday car-washing, and all the other aggressively ordinary stuff that constitutes the ’burbs. It’s a nightmare on Acacia Avenue. But I didn’t take this game with the setting as the slightly snobby comedy that it is. I heard the jokes as sneering demonstrations by the author that he could pack any ordinary thing with malevolence, that he could seize any aspect of the daylit world and crack it open to show monstrosity inside. I thought he thought it was funny that the whole, real world could show Wally’s teeth at any moment.

  Maybe none of this is comprehensible to you, and my adrenalised panic in the dormitory corresponds to nothing in your experience. If so, you’re lucky. You’re part of the horror genre’s intended audience. You’re one of those people whose minds contain little or no fear they can’t bear to look at; none or little, therefore, that you can’t bring to a film or to a novel, and have it roused, coaxed expertly to a crisis, and then discharged, leaving nothing behind except the pleasant afterglow of successful catharsis. You leave the cinema and think, Hmm, time for a Chicken Korma. You lay down the Stephen King, give a comfortable shrug, and never think about it again unless you want to, you lucky bastard. If you are like me, on the other hand, the efficient mechanism of the horror plot tugs and yanks and drags at an existing terror down deep in the substrate of your psyche, where you either cannot or will not dislodge it. It is too hard to let the story pull your fear right out into the open, where it can be worked on, resolved in the story’s terms, and so purged. Instead, the story just passes it new colouring, a new stock of images, which linger, too real to be easily dismissed, because they are being lent the reality of the fear you already felt. In my case, the existing fear was the clot of black anger that I had never been able to express at the way my family’s family romance had worked out, leaving all of us (I thought) so eerily fragile that rage might blow us away. I had never dared confront this emotion in its true, unambiguously self-centred form: for it was not that I was compassionately upset over Bridget’s illness or the pain my mother’s breaking bones caused her. No: I was deeply, ferociously pissed off at how the long saga of illness had thwarted me. But ferocious is too weak a word. My anger could have been murderous, for all I knew. It had the omnipotence of the never-acted-on. I thought if it got out it might lay waste my whole world. To save my world, I had buried it in my psyche under the heaviest slab of virtue I could lay my hands on, relying on the books I read to furnish whatever was under there with whatever it needed.

  So even at thirteen, I knew that the reason I was scared wasn’t that I believed Wally might come and eat me. In the elastic space of fiction Wally’s mouth could come close to me without me being close to it. What menaced me was the idea of Wally – which, in its way, came closer still. Wally embodied the idea of wanting the world, not to touch, or to hold, or even to possess, but to crunch, to mash, to chew down into digestible slurry. That Wally did this by eating people was almost incidental: cannibalism is the most ancient and direct way of treating the world as all-devourable, by reclassifying flesh as meat, and after hearing ‘Wally’ I avoided any fiction with cannibalism in it like the plague, but it was not in itself the centre of my alarm. Eating here was just the image for any appetite that destroyed what it desired. For that reason, I don’t think that Wally aroused my fear because he embodied any direct ambivalence of mine about Bridget’s return to health, manifesting as a horror of her new size. To be sure, hope had arrived in a situation that for as long as I could remember had been grimly static, and it had arrived in the shape of a drastic physical transformation, a ballooning of the flesh. That was disturbing. Hope is a higher-risk state altogether than endurance; and here was it arriving inexorably, biologically, abolishing all the little private accommodations I’d made with hopelessness. But Bridget was not the only one changing just then. I heard the story of Wally when I was just on the cusp between childhood and adolescence, just beginning my own transition between one regime of appetites, and another whose outlines were not at all clear to me yet. As childhood’s relatively stable economy of desires started to break down in me, so did my arrangements for concealing from myself what I feared about myself.

  Now the terrain inside me was shifting, loosening, faltering into motion. The things I wished for were undergoing a dizzy, hormonal enlargement. Lately on the verge of sleep in the dormitory I’d been seeing in my mind’s eye the waves of a night-time sea breaking hypnotically against a cliff, and the surge of the breakers and the pluck and flex of the web of moonlit lines on the surface of the water seemed to be stretching me out with it into a swaying sensual daze. I’d lie in the dormitory with no idea what the future would hold, only knowing that it was coming, and would contain sensations I hadn’t even imagined yet. It was very exciting.

  But when I heard ‘Wally’ and felt my panic rise, I was getting a reminder that there was still this pocket of emotion in me, undischarged and unaccounted, which was also being let loose by the upheaval inside, and which might also shift into a new form influenced by t
he tides of hormones commencing to flow in me. I wasn’t frightened of Wally as a force out there in the darkness. I was frightened, all of a sudden, that with this repressed thing come back again to blend with them, my own new appetites might prove to swallow the world. What if my wishing turned out to be teratogenic? That was the alarm I lent out to be dressed as a monstrous fat boy, a mouth that walked. I was frightened of being him. It was a fear for a moment when I didn’t yet know what I was going to want, now that I wanted more; and when I was, indeed, getting bigger, and feeling the body I’d had for as long as I could remember getting ready to stretch, in all directions. The epic peckishness of true adolescence had not yet come upon me, when I would absent-mindedly sit at the kitchen table at home after midnight, novel spread flat with my left hand, while I ate a bowl of cornflakes with my right, and then another, and then another, until to my vague surprise I’d reached the bottom of the family-size cornflake packet, and two or three pints of milk were gone. I hadn’t arrived there yet; but already the usual boarding-school willingness to hoover up second helpings was stepping up a gear. I remember one lunchtime that year when the school kitchens wildly overestimated a pudding, and in a carbohydrate blow-out I and the whole table of seniors ate five bowls each of chocolate sponge with chocolate custard.