by Miles Gibson
I assume many shapes. I am Siva, purveyor of death in a thousand disguises. I am the Sandman. Doctor Death. The Golden Reaper. The nightmare of old ladies, the ambition of young men, the Hammersmith Horror, the Monster of Maida Vale, the London Butcher. But you, for reasons of personal comfort, may prefer to call me insane.
I am beyond capture. I shall retire and leave nothing behind but the silence. Can you imagine the sense of loss that overwhelms the artist at the prospect of leaving less than a thumbprint to mark his career? A painter hangs his daubs in public galleries, a sculptor plants his bronze in city parks and the people gather round to admire it. My work is also extraordinary and not without its beauty. Yet, once discovered, it is wrapped up in sheets and bundled away under cover of darkness. I do not beg your applause for the whisper of my knife or expect you to gawp at the blood of the corpse. But some account of my work is demanded.
Perhaps it would be easier, you suggest, to surrender myself and allow the authorities to broadcast the authorised version of my life? But what patience would they have for the explanations of a lunatic, a man who was asked the questions and invented his own replies? What do they understand of the artist and his vision? They trade in motives and morals, jealous husbands and greedy thieves. No, it is better that I explain myself in my own words.
How then shall I describe myself? I am the balance and the razor’s edge. The snake in the grass. The grain of sand in the oyster’s soft flesh. The shadow at the end of the street. The bogeyman beneath your bed. Others struggle to scrawl their likenesses on history’s faded blackboard, repeating and repeating the same crude face. I am the man with the bright, wet sponge. I am the hand which wipes the board clean.
When I die I shall return to the world as a fatal disease for which there is no remedy. It will not be a painful or disfiguring disease. No, I’ve thought about it and I want to be an exotic fever. I will inhabit the bodies of young girls, heat them up until their breasts swell and their faces glow. I will appear suddenly and produce a strikingly beautiful corpse, so that people will say, if I must die, I hope I die of Mackerel Poisoning or Butcher’s Brain or whatever they call me.
I am not without mercy for the mourners who fall on their knees behind me But, you must understand, death is not a machine of my own invention. Death touches everyone. I merely choose the time and make the arrangements. My capture would not grant you eternal life. I would continue in the shape of a sudden chill, a faulty brake pedal, a spark of fire in the bedclothes. The evening news describes my arrest, you thank God for mercy, and the television explodes in your face. But I must make you understand. I must find the beginning and make you understand.
*
My mother kept a private hotel in a small, damp seaside town where the water was deep and the cliffs were as soft as cheese. All through the summer the house was crowded. There were strangers in every room. But during the winter the house was empty and the rooms smelt of paraffin and rain.
In those days I lived in the attic, a tiny kingdom of pygmy furniture and giant dolls. The walls were covered in a heavy yellow paper printed with rows of radishes. My kingdom contained a wardrobe, a table and a broken chair. I kept a bag of crayons on the table, a jigsaw puzzle of a flying boat and an alphabet book made from waterproof cardboard. The bed was a blue box with shallow wooden walls to prevent me from falling out of my dreams, over the floor and down the stairs. Beside the bed a tiny candle in a paper collar that glowed in the night for comfort From the end of my bed I could sit and survey the dolls who kept sentry at the window.
The dolls were made from rags. They were nothing more than scarecrows sewn from petticoats and shirts, but I loved them. Sometimes, when I was alone, I would gather them together and lie beneath them while the herring gulls stared through the bars of the window.
There was one doll who became my favourite, a handsome creature with a cotton cushion for a head and glass button eyes. Her body was made from a satin blouse and although she was soft she felt especially heavy and warm. When I crawled beneath her on the bed I suffocated under her weight. For a time I refused to be parted from this shapeless concubine and often confused her with my mother.
My mother was a small woman with large red hands. She wore trousers and several cardigans. I cannot remember her face. During the first few years of my life I recognised her by the colour of her hands. And a very particular smell. Whenever I try to conjure up this early memory of my mother I can smell breakfast, for she had always cooked a dozen breakfasts before she came to wash and dress me and lead me down from the attic. Her embrace held the smoke of fried eggs and streaky bacon. If my mother came to haunt me now her ghost would hide in a trail of frying-pan smoke. For this reason I never eat breakfast. But then, in those faraway years, breakfast was the most glorious and exciting time of day.
The breakfast room was warm and filled by tables dressed in limp linen shrouds. I was too small to reach the tops of these tables so I crawled under them and sat in the twilight, sucking toastcrumbs I gleaned from the carpet and staring at the legs that surrounded me. Sometimes a hand would appear between a pair of knees and offer me a finger of toast soaked in egg yolk, a shred of bacon or a sugar lump. I crawled up and down the corridor of legs with my mouth open and my tongue hanging out.
After breakfast everyone left the house and I was taken to the kitchen and filled with rusks and milk until I was sick.
As I grew older the furniture in the attic shrank, holes appeared in the flying boat and geraniums replaced the radishes. The dolls turned shapeless and grey. My oldest friends began to rot and fall apart. One day I smuggled a pair of scissors into the attic and opened up my favourite, snipping at her dusty seams. I examined the contents of her stomach. I found a scrag-end of carpet, a small net curtain, a sock, a vest and sixpence. I buried the remains in a suitcase stored beneath the bed.
I was soon tall enough to rest my chin on the tops of breakfast tables and stare at the faces of strangers. I learned to stand motionless with my head balanced on the edge of the cloth, my mouth open, my eyes watching the movement of forks loaded with egg and bacon and sausage.
I was called Mackerel because for the first six or seven years of my life I never closed my mouth. I sucked air like a drowning fish. But it was not merely the promise of table scraps that made my jaw hang heavy in my face. Every time I saw a man or woman my mouth popped open in surprise. No matter how often I looked at them I never overcame my astonishment. At first they were only hands, legs and sandals leaking sand. As I grew older and taller their faces came into view and the shock was too much for me. I had expected the same, simple pastry cut-out that I saw whenever I looked at myself in the mirror. Sultana eyes and a keyhole mouth. Instead, these faces were huge and bruised and forlorn. There were long, wrinkled faces the colour of rotting apples. There were broad, scarlet faces with the skin falling off in silver flakes. There were swollen faces that blistered and bubbled and shone.
One night, as my mother helped me into bed, I described these various skin complaints: She shrugged her shoulders and told me that people liked to sit in the sun. But I knew she was trying to conceal the truth. Sometimes she smeared a gobbet of calamine on my nose, forced a hat down over my ears and sat me in the sun. I remained as pale as distemper. These people were not sitting in the sun. These people were falling apart and had probably come here to die. I had seen it happen to my dolls. I rolled another question around my mouth but my mother was too quick for me, pressed a finger against my lips and clucked impatiently.
“Shut up, Mackerel. Close your eyes or the Sandman will catch you.”
“Who?” I demanded with interest.
“The Sandman. He’s a wicked old man who catches children when they won’t go to sleep and sprinkles sand in their eyes.”
“Does he live on the beach?”
“No, he tiptoes around peeping through bedroom windows searching for children who won’t close their eyes.”
“Why?”
“You can ask
him yourself when he taps on the glass,” she sighed and snapped out the light.
Well, it was a complete mystery. I imagined the Sandman as a local barbarian, half man and half beast, a shambling corpse packed full of wet sand. I never saw him while awake but I often saw him when asleep. As I grew older my dreams grew darker.
My new growth also gave me a better view of my mother. I discovered that her face was plump as an egg and speckled with tiny freckles. Her hair was the colour of a certain inferior brand of toffee and she wore metal rings in her ears. Her mouth looked very small and her eyebrows were drawn with a pencil. I liked to sit on her lap and stare at the face, tracing its lines with my finger. The breakfast fumes in her cardigans were forgotten at such a height as I nuzzled my nose against her skin, searching for the little patch of Yardley scent she liked to keep on her neck.
It was about this time that Uncle Eno first noticed me under his feet. He was a tall, narrow man who smelt of tobacco and Brilliantine. He wore sunglasses and a green shirt. He did not leave after breakfast and sit in the sun with the other guests, but seemed to walk around the house for hours and stare through the windows in silence. There was an expression of unspeakable sadness about him. Whenever he caught sight of me he would bend down slowly, pat my head in a friendly manner and breathe over me. His breath was as black as funerals.
He came to the house each August and slept in the bedroom under my attic. I was always excited when his enormous leather suitcase appeared in the hall. He was a mysterious figure and I fancied he came to shelter with us from some great personal tragedy. I suspected a tragedy because my mother cooked him special breakfasts which he shared with me in the kitchen. He was my mother’s favourite and I could understand her feelings – my own favourite having only recently been laid to rest. My mother suffered regular bad health throughout the month of August and she often told me that Uncle Eno proved a comfort.
“Your Uncle Eno has come as a blessing,” she would declare as she loaded his plate with bacon, “He’s a great comfort to your poor mother.”
“You’re a fine woman,” Uncle Eno would say as he waved his fork in her face. “And you shouldn’t be ashamed of your appetites.”
My mother cast an anxious glance in my direction. Good grief. I had never seen my mother’s appetites, but I hoped they were not infectious – I certainly didn’t want them.
Uncle Eno was especially sympathetic to her complaints, I concluded, because he suffered some rare and malignant disease of his own. Sometimes, on quiet afternoons when the house was empty and nothing could be heard but the faint echo of gulls in the chimneys, my mother would collapse on a sofa and complain of a tightness in her stomach. Then Uncle Eno would sit beside her, stroke one of her big red hands and make soothing noises in his throat. The tightness must have been very uncomfortable because finally Uncle Eno would have to unbuckle her trousers and rub her stomach to ease the pain. My mother would moan as he rubbed the affected parts but it did not frighten me. I knew, of course, she was having more trouble with her appetites. But on the few occasions I tried to catch sight of them Uncle Eno would winkle me out of my hiding place and send me away to buy chocolate.
I was a happy child. The days passed blissfully. I sang and danced and blew bubbles of chocolate over my chin. I stared at the world and laughed.
Does the knowledge upset you? Would you prefer that Mackerel the murderer, the London Butcher, had been shackled in the cellar and beaten with a leather strap? Would it suit your sensibilities to learn that I had been locked in a cage, neglected, deprived and deserted by my mother? Would it help you make sense of my life? Would your sleep be sweetened by the knowledge that my brains had been poisoned in childhood? It seems a shame to disappoint you but, alas, my early years were happy as a picture book.
There were long, parched afternoons when I was marooned on the beach and made to pick sand from packets of tomato sandwiches. There were nights of tremendous blustering storms when the streets sparkled with salt and the sea coughed seaweed against the windows. There were bonfires big as haystacks and fireworks that fell in the mud and shot sparks into my hair and eyelashes. There were Christmas parties when the house was lost in a fog of blue cigar smoke and the carpets were sharp with pine needles. There were birthday parties when I dribbled warm sugar over my wrists and glued my hands to the curtains. There were conjuring tricks and clockwork boats, tin trumpets and goldfish. There were rubber cushions that farted, magnets, footballs and invisible ink. I was deprived of nothing. I was gorged on the richest foods and wrapped in the warmest overcoats. My mother and father did everything they could to entertain and amuse me. I have none but tender memories of them.
Although the first time I remember taking any particular notice of my father was the day I found his corpse on the kitchen floor.
*
It was November and the house was empty. My throat was sore and I had been kept away from school for a week. Boys who breathed through their mouths, my mother warned, were prone to sore throats. I shuffled aimlessly through the house, wrapped in a dressing-gown and scarf. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and nearly dark. My mother was asleep in her room.
I was passing the kitchen door when I was suddenly seized with a craving for biscuits. The biscuits responsible for my addiction were called Godfrey’s Fingers. They were long, brittle sticks dusted on one side with grains of sugar that flashed like a coat of mashed glass. The thought of them made me sweat with lust. I stood trembling by the kitchen door, coiling the scarf around my chin and mouth and plotting their theft. My mother, who was never sympathetic to the weaknesses of the addict, kept Godfrey’s Fingers in a tin box on the highest and most difficult shelf in the kitchen. It needed a crafty eye and a lot of courage to recover them. But the addict Mackerel had a measure of both when the lust was upon him.
The kitchen was full of shadows. I crept through a crack in the door and tiptoed towards the great chest of drawers that guarded the larder. I had learned from experience to pull open each of the drawers (baking tins, ladles, knives and roasting trays), until they formed a rickety ladder over which I could scramble and scratch my way to the top. And there, among the cobwebs and earwigs, on the very roof of the chest, lay the magic box of Fingers. It was a dangerous climb for a small boy and made Godfrey’s holy digits taste even spicier.
The box, when I reached it, opened with a startled gasp. I tucked five fingers into the pocket of my dressing-gown and turned to make the descent. It was my second robbery of the week and, despite my sore throat, I loved to break the biscuits into pieces and let them dissolve slowly against the roof of my mouth until there was nothing left except the buttery sweetness. Their delicate flavour –and the length of time it took me to suck each biscuit into nothing –usually drove me into the lavatory where I knew I could enjoy myself without being disturbed.
I had reached the ground, my scarf full of spiders and my mouth full of biscuit, when I noticed my father. He was spread on the floor beneath the far window. Had he been there all the time, I wondered, or had he tiptoed through the door while my attention had been taken up with the biscuit box and I was safely out of view beneath the ceiling.
It was a surprise to see my father in the house at that time in the afternoon. During the winter he took a job with the council, painting the promenade railings, and he did not usually come home until I was in bed and asleep. Why then had he appeared so abruptly on the kitchen floor?
While I was wrestling with this problem it dawned on me that he was flat on his back. It was perfectly natural, as far as I was concerned, to jump or roll or scamper about on my hands and knees. But I had never seen men or women attempt any of these more eccentric forms of locomotion. And, anyway, he was not moving but simply lay there on his back, arms folded neatly over his stomach, and stared at the ceiling.
I coughed at him. It hurt my throat but he did not turn his head in my direction. I grunted at him. I whistled and clapped my hands. But my father continued to ignore me.
<
br /> After a few minutes in which neither of us moved I shuffled across the kitchen to take a closer look at him. His face was a most unusual colour. The skin was a sinister shade of slush and his eyes were yellow. I waggled my hands in his face and stuck out my tongue. But nothing seemed to draw his attention.
I could not understand it. I sat down beside him and waited for him to recognise me. It was dark and cold on the kitchen floor. I turned, for comfort, to Godfrey’s Fingers. I recovered one of them from my dressing-gown pocket and pushed it firmly between my father’s teeth. It stuck out of his mouth like the handle of a swordswallower’s blade. He made no attempt to suck or chew this precious offering. It was a waste.
Finally I grew tired of watching him and retired to the lavatory to suck my remaining Fingers. I cannot remember when my mother discovered the corpse or what happened to me during the following hours. But by the next morning it was obvious that some kind of holiday had been declared and I was delivered into the hands of a distant aunt.
I understood that my father had died but it did not trouble me. He had gone but, I felt certain, one day he would come back. Everyone else came back to us in the season. For a little while I missed him. I continued to look for him when the doorbell rang or someone moved on the stairs, but then I forgot. My father had died. I accepted it. My aunt informed me he had gone to Heaven but I preferred to believe he had gone to Bolivia. Why he had lain down on the kitchen floor and refused to speak to me before his departure was a mystery.
