Blood and Water and Other Stories

by Patrick Mcgrath

  ‘All right, all right. Do you want a drink?’

  ‘No. So there won’t be a problem?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Jack sniffed. He ordered a beer.

  ‘Good. Thank you.’ Her cigarette barely lit, she ground it out in the ashtray and reached for her coat. She began to slide out of the banquette.

  ‘You’re not leaving?’ said Jack, rather shocked.

  ‘Yes, I’m leaving. You obviously don’t want to see me -’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Erica paused. ‘You ask me to meet you here, not upstairs. You arrive late. You’re drunk already. I don’t like watching you get drunk, Jack. I did it for four years.’

  ‘Christ, Eric, get off it,’ said Jack. ‘You mean you’re going back to London tomorrow and that’s it?’

  ‘Not tomorrow, Friday. But yes, that’s it.’ She slid out of the banquette.

  ‘Jesus.’ They shook hands and said goodbye. She left. That was it.

  • • •

  Quite predictably, Jack Fin got very drunk that night. But he was not murdered, he was not arrested, he didn’t even go for a ‘swim’. He was, in fact, asked to leave only one bar, and that because it was closing. The tone of his night was maudlin, and at several points he informed sympathetic strangers that his wife was divorcing him. He was back on his couch by five in the morning, and awoke the next day with a compound hangover. But it was a rule with Jack that a hangover must never keep one from working. He took a shower, and made coffee, and settled on a hard chair in front of Wharf. It was not easy to concentrate, for Eric’s face, and the sound of her voice, kept rising unbidden into consciousness. But he forced her down and anchored his gaze in Wharf. The secret to making work, he knew, was very simple: you just had to be with it until you saw it clear and straight, without illusion. The trouble with a great many artists was that they couldn’t accept that all work must fail. Fear, that was what kept them from making good work. Fear of seeing it straight. Not Jack Fin. He could stare into the teeth of his failure hour after hour after hour. That was his strength. In the early afternoon he realized it had to be a bull, and he saw the bull very clearly: it was a beast with massive shoulders, heaving slabs of sheer muscle, and blazing eyes, galloping straight out of the yellow depths of hell, a thousand pounds of concentrated animal fury, timber-brown and oozing tar from every pore — now, that was power! He hauled the clinking paint trolley in front of the canvas and began to work.

  All through the afternoon he worked, and on into the evening. He left off at nine, feeling very happy indeed, for he knew he had solved it, that it was going to come out. He exulted. From somewhere deep inside himself he’d squeezed out another one — and you never know which will be the last. This is art’s angst. He drank not in Dorian’s, but in a rundown bar on Washington Street, a quiet bar, where he could savor his day’s work, his triumph. He did not think of Eric; he saw only his great bull, his bull out of hell. He stood at the bar with his Scotch, bewitched by his glorious bull.

  The boy from the Plymouth was standing by the jukebox. Jack was by this point reconstructing the process by which his bull had come into being. He remembered the figure that had haunted his wharf, then hovered over his cattle, and then been swallowed in the emerging bull; and it was with a shock of embarrassment that he saw the boy now. He felt guilty; he was, in imagination, deeply familiar with the boy, for he’d used him, he’d exploited him thoroughly to reach his bull. They had met only once, when Jack gave him a light on the waterfront, but he found it uncomfortable to look at him now.

  ‘Hey mister,’ said the boy, coming across the bar to him. ‘Why you go in the river?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jack, turning on the barstool. ‘I was drunk, I guess.’

  ‘I saw you,’ said the boy. ‘Yeah, I saw you go in the river. Hey, I thought, this guy’s crazy.’

  ‘Pretty crazy,’ said Jack.

  ‘Give me a cigarette,’ said the boy. He stood there looking Jack over, grinning at him. He was quite self-possessed, a cocky kid, sizing up the crazy guy who went in the river. He looked at Jack’s hands, with their smears of yellow and brown. ‘Hey mister,’ he said at last, ‘you an artist or something?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jack.

  The boy lost interest. ‘Yeah, an artist,’ he said, and went back to the jukebox. Jack returned to his reverie, without difficulty extinguishing the brief spurt of heat he’d felt while talking to the boy. He returned to his bull. He thought he would call it Beef on the Hoof

  AMBROSE SYME

  * * *

  AMBROSE SYME WAS a man of God and a superb classicist, perhaps the finest student of Petronius since Sir Hugo Crub; but before I begin his tale allow me to say a word or two on the subject of priest’s clothing. First, it’s been suggested that since the collar is worn backwards, ought not the same be done with the trousers? The idea is less absurd than it may at first appear, for the Catholic priest, if not his Protestant colleague, is bound by a very strict vow of chastity and has little call, urination excepted, for a system of buttons the sole function of which is to permit the member to be extracted with ease and rapidity from its subsartorial crypt. A rather more peculiar feature of the priestly garb, however, is the sleevelike strip of material attached to each shoulder of the long black cassock favored by the Jesuits. These curious appendages, possibly a vestigial legacy of the days when the Holy Fathers had four arms and could distribute the Body of Christ in two directions at once, tend to flap in the breeze when the priest is in motion and are for some reason called wings.

  When I say, then, that Ambrose Syme stepped across the quad of an English public school called Ravengloom one very wet December morning not many years ago with the skirts of his cassock billowing about his long stick-thin legs and his wings flapping, you will understand exactly what I mean. He was a tall young priest with a long face of sallow complexion and slightly pointed ears, and he held aloft in one hand a vast black umbrella. His arms were like pipes, and had a way of branching from his shoulders at sharp angles so that the umbrella-bearing, or umbrelliferous, limb, for example, shot up on a steeply ascending vertical before articulating crisply at the elbow into a true vertical, while the other arm seemed to correspond precisely in the descending plane. His bony knees jerked like pistons in his swirling cassock and black baggy trousers flapped wildly about his skinny shanks. His feet were shod in stout black brogues, the leather soles of which would, in drier circumstances, have rung out loud and clear on the cobblestones; and against this rather dreary composition in clerical blacks and yellowish fleshtones only the stiff white collar stood out with any luster, gathering up what light there was in that dull day and reflecting it back into the murk with a pale gleam; and thus the figure of Ambrose Syme, agitating itself across the rainswept quad.

  On three sides of him reared the high, inward-facing walls of Ravengloom, the gray stonework punctuated by serried ranks of narrow casement windows. Behind him two great crenelated towers flanked the main gates, beyond which the gravel driveway stretched straight as an arrow for half-a-mile before disappearing into the mist. It was at the top of one of these towers that Ambrose Syme had his lonely scholar’s cell, and for hours that morning the rain had flooded down the gray slate roofs all around, streaming into the troughs beneath the eaves and descending by drainpipes to the gutters below. The drainpipes were old, and several of them clogged with dead birds and tennis balls and the like, so that in places the rainwater overflowed the eavestroughs and gushed down the walls, and in those places a greenish lichen had begun to colonize the masonry. The eastern wall of the quad was the one most heavily afflicted by these fungoid incursions, and against it now there leaned a high swaying ladder. Standing on the top rung, framed against the wild gray sky with a long barbed probing tool in his left hand, was a figure in a black oilskin raincoat.

  Were we to examine Ambrose Syme’s features at this moment, seeking some clue to his mood, we would find them locked, tense, and grim. We might detect the
re a quiet desperation. When he looked up, however, and saw the figure poised on the ladder, a startling change came over him. His high-step faltered. He gazed aghast at the poised probing tool and a febrile spasm seemed briefly to seize his long black stripe of a body. Then, as the color rose perceptibly in his cheeks, the figure up aloft suddenly plunged the probing tool into the mouth of the nearest drainpipe, hooked out a soggy mass of decomposing material, and deposited it in a bucket dangling from a nail on the side of the ladder. The purpose of the work was clear; why, then, did Ambrose Syme react with such apparent horror? We cannot know, not yet; but as we observe him resuming his progress across the quad, we notice that his jaw is now hanging slackly open, his eyes are bright with shock, and something less than dynamic vigor characterizes the angles of his joints and the tempo of his moving parts. And it is at this point, as he ducks into the cloistered gallery giving onto Ravengloom’s cast wing and with trembling fingers folds the flapping panels of his umbrella, that we must briefly examine the mind of Ambrose Syme, a piece of machinery rather more complicated than the simple system of jointed pipes alluded to above.

  • • •

  First of all, a couple of facts about the setting. Raven-gloom heaved up out of the damp Lancashire moors some fifteen miles from a decaying industrial town called Gryme. Originally the country house of an eccentric Liverpool merchant with a fortune made in the slave trade, it had been appropriated by the Order in 1867 and converted into a tortuous complex of cubicles and classrooms, wherein the priests had begun instructing the sons of the Catholic gentry in two dead languages and a Spartan regimen designed to tone their physical and spiritual gristle.

  When Ambrose Syme, aged thirteen, arrived at Ravengloom in the year 1947, he was in most regards quite unremarkable. He was tall for his age, rather bookish, and equipped as most schoolboys are with a sort of erotic condenser deep in his loins that generated a steady stream of vividly pornographic imagery and constantly interfered with his reading. Ambrose’s father, an Anglo-Irish businessman with extensive holdings in Malayan rubber, had himself been educated at Ravengloom, and knew what boys of thirteen were like. He trusted that the Holy Fathers would harness the boy’s impulses and divert them into socially useful channels.

  In the years that followed, Ambrose Syme was first terrorized with visions of eternal damnation, and then taught how to displace energy from the lower part of his body to the upper. The technique employed in his case was somewhat analogous to the operation of the common refrigerator, in which liquid is pumped up through tubes to the evaporator at the head, being turned in the process into gas. This transformation requires the absorption of heat, and thus is the temperature of the refrigerator’s contents lowered. Ambrose Syme did not turn his sexual urges into gas, exactly; rather, he learned to convert them into long, ponderous sentences of a verbose and bombastic turgidity which he then translated into Latin verse, after which he analyzed the form, function, and interrelation of the various parts of the verse, counting the accents and scanning the feet until the heat generated in his nether organs had been drawn off and the primitive thoroughly assimilated to the classical. And this, in a nutshell, is the psychosexual history of Ambrose Syme, a textbook case of compulsory sublimation in the literary mode. In the fullness of time he joined the Order and after a long and rigorous novitiate was ordained a priest and returned to his alma mater to teach classics.

  So far, one would think, so good. Each one of us has a cross to bear, and in Ambrose Syme’s case that cross was the cross of carnal appetite, of which, it now appears, he was cursed with a considerably larger than average amount. For after more than two decades of successfully defusing his desires by aestheticizing them, it seems surprising that he should suddenly succumb to temptation once more, that he should fall But fall he did, for not even poetry can channel the flood forever; and in his falling he unleashed the full force of his long-dammed lust upon one ill-equipped to repulse it.

  • • •

  ‘Ambrose Syme!’ cried a feeble voice.

  Ambrose was by this time hurrying along an ill-lit corridor in Ravengloom’s east wing. Passing the rector’s study his progress was once more arrested. The rector was an old, old man called Father Mungo; for many years he had done missionary work in the Zambesi Basin, then returned, like an elephant, to Ravengloom to die. He sat now beside the window of his study with a breviary in his lap. No lights had been lit, and the room was heavy with the gloom of that damp winter day. ‘Who is that boy?’ murmured the old man, lifting a trembling finger to the window.

  Ambrose joined him. Outside the window the ground fell away steeply, then leveled off to a very muddy stretch of rugby pitches. Tramping rapidly across this morass and about to be swallowed by the mist was a boy in a school raincoat. Ambrose could not identify him, and Father Mungo remarked that he was no doubt off for a smoke in Blackburn’s Bog. These words produced in Ambrose an involuntary shudder, and the color flared in his cheeks once more.

  ‘What’s the matter, Ambrose?’ said the rector, with concern, turning toward him in his chair. ‘You look feverish.’

  A large, glass-fronted cabinet stood against the wall of the rector’s study. It was filled with masks and totems the old man had collected in Africa. Suddenly it seemed to Ambrose that the eyes in the heads of all these ancient idols were peering directly into his own guilty soul. With a small cry of distress he steadied himself against the desk, and turned away — only to meet on the opposite wall the gaze of a large hanging Christ! He was seized then by an intense claustrophobia; pressing a palm to his forehead he murmured something about the flu.

  ‘Get on, then,’ said Father Mungo, gently; ‘and send a prefect after that boy. I shall want to see him.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ said Ambrose Syme, and hurriedly left the room. Glancing over his shoulder as he reached the corridor, he saw the rector’s nodding head etched sharply against the window, the lips moving silently over the opened breviary in his lap.

  • • •

  The land attached to Ravengloom was still leased to the farmers who had grazed their sheep and cattle upon it for centuries, and of these tenants the oldest and most durable were the Blackburn family. Their holding included a stretch of low-lying, heavily wooded country about a mile-and-a-half from the school, a damp pocket of the moors which had always been known as Blackburn’s Bog. Generations of schoolboys had found in its wild and dripping heart a welcome refuge from institutional existence, and these occasional outlaws would generally gravitate towards the pond in the middle of the bog; for there was in its black depths – its shadowed and unmoving surface, its swampy banks of drooping bullrushes and nodding convolvuli with trumpet-shaped flowers of pale blue – a sort of darkly exotic aura of tragedy that proved irresistible to the gothic soul of the Ravengloom boy; and the nameless lad who had cut so boldly across the rugby pitches was just such a boy. By this time he was over the gate that gave onto the lane leading to the bog and sloshing happily through rut and puddle. The sky was gray, and the rain continued in a steady drizzle. To either side of him stretched the rolling, soggy moors, intersected by low stone walls and scrubby, bedraggled hedges, and over in the east the great brown back of Broadmoor Pike reared up dimly through the misty film of rain. Ahead he could make out the first trees, vague, leafless, skeletal structures whose slender dripping branches he imagined to be the dendroid limbs of some bewitched and denatured army of lost Arthurian knights. As he tramped into the wood and down the narrow quagmire of a track that wound through the soggy bracken he could hear no sound but the steady plash of rain on dead leaves and the damp squelch of his boots in the mud. Gently descending into the heart of the bog, he caught a glimpse between the trees of the black water ahead, and a few moments later he was standing on the bank beneath the withered branches of a blighted old willow. An eerie, dripping silence seemed to lie upon the place, and the only motion the spreading ring of ripples about each drop of rain that touched the dark surface of the pond. The boy smoked quietl
y, leaning against the tree, and watched each set of ripples become the epicycloid of a new ring, until that ring was subsumed by a third, and it by a fourth, and so on, such that the whole expanse of water resolved to a patterned flux of constant transformation more complex and geometrically perfect than the eye could for more than an instant comprehend. And then, as his gaze wandered over the water toward the mist-enshrouded forms of the birches and willows on the far side, he realized that the pattern was disturbed. A thin stream which drained into the pond amidst a copse of silver birches seemed to be tugging at something caught in the weeds in the shallows, creating a series of swirling vortices that eddied outwards and ruffled the patterned ripples to a turmoil and aroused in the boy an urge to know its nature; so he made his way around the pond and through the copse of silver birches till he was standing at the outlet of the stream; and there in the shallows of the black pond he found the source of the disorder. He gazed unbelieving for a moment, then trembled violently and stepped back into the dripping trees, where with shaking hands he lit another cigarette; and then a voice spoke, and the boy’s blood froze and the hairs stood erect on the back of his neck.

  ‘Bird!’ Being named, he was subjected; for there, advancing upon him with a bicycle, was a Ravengloom prefect. Bird threw the cigarette behind him, but the gesture was futile. It landed on a fallen trunk and continued to burn, the thin drifting trail of smoke indicating him beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  ‘Smoking, Bird,’ said the older boy. ‘Father Mungo wants to see you.’

  ‘Look, Holmes, there’s a body in the pond.’

  ‘Don’t push it, Bird.’

  ‘See for yourself!’ cried the boy. And he splashed forward through the weeds to the place where it lay.

  ‘I say, Bird,’ said the prefect, following him, ‘it’ll be the worse for you . . .’ Then he too saw it, and the pair of them stood in silent contemplation of the puffy little body turning back and forth, back and forth in the thin sluggish current of the discharging stream.