The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  Oh, but the back door is open, the birds are singing, and the sunshine of the afternoon is puddling warmly on the old gray stones. It is springtime now, and the damp days of that awful February are behind us. Cleo, I notice, is indulging a bizarre new hobby of hers, collecting nail clippings in a matchbox, and Doris, who is operating the scissors, pauses now and then to sip her sherry. A scene of pleasant domestic tranquillity, then, and frankly it’s hard for me to keep my mind on gnawed bones and dismembered corpses. “Now your toenails,” says Cleo, and the pair of them get down on their hands and knees to remove my shoes and socks. I derive enormous pleasure from this ritual, indeed from any situation in which I am physically touched, though feeling their fingers on my feet is ticklish, and I should giggle like a child if I were capable of it. “What smelly feet you’ve got, Daddy,” says Cleo. “Like a pair of old Cheddars, aren’t they, Mrs. Fledge?”

  Doris is giving me her lopsided smile. Dear Doris, I would much rather think about her than about dead Sidney and his pig-gnawed bones. Doris for me is the source of life now. She feeds me. She washes me. She changes me, she dresses me. She coos and burbles over me like the fondest young mother. And I, devoid of any other physical contact with the world, have come to crave and adore the touch of her hands on my body, I have come to love everything about the woman, even the smell of drink on her breath and the intoxicated fumblings of the night. I cry sometimes when I am with Doris, when she handles me tenderly in the bathroom or the lavatory, but it never occurs to her, as it has to Cleo, that crying should be impossible for a vegetable. This is because she does not see me as others see me, in terms of my brain damage. I am her baby.

  Dear Doris. I haven’t told you about my return to Crook; it could hardly be called triumphant. My condition had apparently “stabilized”—“fossilized,” I should have said. I could sit in a wheelchair, masticate and swallow, defecate, weep—and that, in terms of physical activity, was it. I had an alarming tendency to grind my teeth, and sometimes my breathing would become heavily labored—I would snore, in fact, while wide awake. I noticed that this snoring occurred when I thought about painful topics, like Fledge, and hence I would snore much of the day, though in sleep, apparently, I was quiet. (Such reversals were common, in my life as a vegetable.) At moments of vivid emotion the snores would become increasingly strained and build towards a crescendo of honks and grunts, at which point I would be forced to abandon thought altogether and concentrate hard on bringing my respiration back under control; nurses would run over to clap me violently on the back. It was this phenomenon that provoked Walter Dendrite, my neurologist, to refer to me publicly as a pig. But the point is, Doris volunteered to look after the snorting monster I had become; she agreed to perform the services of a mother to me, and for this I love her.

  Harriet and Hilary traveled back to Crook with me in the ambulance. Harriet no longer burst into tears every time she laid eyes on me, the doctors had seen to that, I’d heard them murmuring at the foot of my bed. In fact, it was one of the most striking aspects of that first stage of my vegetal existence, the experience of seeing my family’s reactions shift from grief and compassion to acceptance and apparent indifference in a remarkably short period of time. Thus, I notice, are the dead forgotten; thus are persons in my state rendered tolerable. For who can look long upon a creature whose one stark message is: see how close you are to grotesquerie. Our kinship with the grotesque is something to be shunned; it requires an act of rejection, of brisk alienation, and here the doctors were most cooperative, for they permitted Harriet and the rest of them to reject my persisting humanity by means of a gobbledygook that carried the imprimatur of—science! Science! And this is not the least of the ironies with which this tale of mine is so liberally peppered—science proposes, this is how I had lived, but science also disposes, and now I found myself frozen, stuck fast, like a fly in a web, in the grid of a medical taxonomy. My identity was now neuropathological. I was no longer a man, I was an instance of a disease, and as such I could no longer arouse the profound pity I so richly deserved. I don’t think they gave me very long to live, frankly. They knew about my ticker and its sclerotic arteries. I imagine if I’d been an Eskimo they’d just have pushed me out into a blizzard, and that would have been that. I wouldn’t have minded, or rather, I wouldn’t have minded if I could have taken Fledge out into the blizzard with me. Then I’d have died a happy man. Did I mention that the appalling Patrick Pin had been hovering at my bedside when I regained consciousness? It seems that Harriet, fearing for my life, had had him administer Extreme Unction. That was not all: I now sported a small crucifix on a silver chain around my neck. I would be safe from vampires, in any event. Ha!

  But the point is, my return to Crook was remarkable for what it taught me about the nature of hope. Bear with me, please, the pertinence of these remarks will soon become clear. Fledge, you see, had wheeled me from the ambulance to the house, and down the hall to the drawing room, and as he’d done so it had been impossible not to be aware of a quite sickening aura of triumphalism that clung to the man like a smell, that seeped malodorously from all his wretched pores. He put me against the wall, facing the fireplace, and left me there.

  Now Crook, as Sidney’s mother had so astutely remarked to Harriet on New Year’s Eve, is a house of wood; and despite the fact that it is falling down, it retains strong character precisely because it is wood. The staircase and all the floorboards are of oak, as is the wall paneling, which is dark, and makes the rooms snug and warm. The doorframes are also wood, and have a lovely shallow arch to them, delicately cusped at the center. The front door is divided into studded panels, but decoration is otherwise limited to the tops of the wall panels and the downstairs skirting boards. Around the chimneypiece in the drawing room, however—and my wheelchair, as I say, had been placed so that I gazed directly at it—there is some very elaborate work. It is in fact a masterpiece, a masterpiece of Tudor low-relief carving.

  A pair of oak columns flank the fireplace, supporting an entablature, or superstructure, comprising architrave, frieze, and cornice. The projection of the latter forms the mantelpiece, and upon it the design of the entire fireplace is repeated, though naturally in greatly reduced proportions. There is thus an echo upon the mantelpiece of the whole fireplace—can you picture it?—and whereas the space between the lower columns is the open grate itself, in the carving above are displayed the arms of the Coal family (Chimaera, salient, gules on sable) and beneath them our motto: NIL DESPERANDUM.

  Nil desperandum. Since I was a boy I’ve felt that those words were meant for me. At times of crisis—in Africa, for instance— they have given me strength. It’s surprising, is it not, how much solace can be had from two words—literally, “there is no reason to despair”? Perhaps they matter so much to me because I have a very real tendency to despair. It runs in the family: Sir Digby Coal was a suicide, and Cleo, I’m very much afraid, appears also to have a melancholy cast of mind; along with the teeth she gets it from me. But for four centuries the words over the fireplace, standing, perhaps, in allegorical relation to the fire beneath, have helped my forebears to struggle against their innate inclination to give up hope. These words have warmed their souls, while the flames beneath have warmed their bones. There is a way, I have come to believe, that a structure, in time, becomes immanent with the spirit of its residents, and to this also I may have been responding when I gazed at the chimneypiece that morning. Strange sentiments for a scientist, you say. But as I think is becoming clear, I was by this time losing my grip on the sternly empirico-mechanist view of Nature to which I had for years been faithful.

  Well, as I gazed at the chimneypiece, at the coat-of-arms and, below it, our motto, something totally unexpected occurred. Something stirred within me, and I felt a brief surge of exaltation. Those immortal words over the fireplace, you see, reminded me that I was a Coal, and that I would not be bested by a servant. Completely unwittingly, Fledge had provided me the one single stimulus that was guarantee
d to brace and hearten me—and for the first time since the accident I felt the spirit move within me. Perhaps, indeed, I suddenly thought, there really was no reason to despair. From what I had heard in the hospital, the doctors had no confidence in my ever regaining the use of my body, but I decided, there and then, to hope all the same, and within the fossil of my frozen frame something took fire and blazed.

  Yes, coming back to Crook revived and reinvigorated me, and so it was, after all, a sort of triumph. As I think back on it now, I remember being shocked at first at the racket my wheelchair made on the old wooden floorboards, how it had rumbled and thundered down the hall, me at the helm with my prowlike nose jutting forward and my old claws clamped on the arms of the thing; but I remember too how, after a moment or so, the shock had been replaced by a grim delight that my progress about my house would be such a noisy business, that my movement would be signaled so loudly and emphatically to all within earshot by this thunder of wheels on boards. Then, too, I was in my tweeds again. I had shrunk in hospital, they were ill-fitting now, but they were my tweeds, my hairy tweeds, with leather patches on the elbows and thick flaps on the pockets so that nothing could fall out. It was a suit that had been made for me by a firm of London tailors who catered exclusively to the country gentleman, and who had dressed my father, and his father before him. (They have since gone out of business, sadly.) But all these things helped to revive me from that awful torpor to which my month in hell had reduced me. And while not a hint, not a flicker, of any of this was apparent in my posture or expression, there was, within, a sort of life-affirming celebration under way. Nil desperandum, Hugo, I told myself, nil desperandum, old chap.

  Oh good God, I’ve drifted far ahead of myself. My chronology is all skewed again. Where am I?

  George Lecky had gone into the Ceck Marsh, and Limp’s men had been unable to find him. Nothing strange about this; George had lived close to the marsh for twenty-five years, ever since I’d brought him back from Africa with me, and he probably knew that drear tract better than any man in Berkshire, with the exception of old John Crowthorne. So it would not have been hard for him to evade the constabulary out there. But I was not surprised when, three days later, he appeared in my barn. Actually I’d been expecting him—who else would he go to but his old African comrade?

  I was sitting in my wicker chair, gazing at Phlegmosaurus, when I became aware of movement in the roof. I looked up; he was standing at the top of the staircase to the loft, his head bathed in a pool of wintry sunlight from the little window in the gable behind him, so that his features were entirely masked by shadow. For a moment neither of us spoke, neither of us moved. It was an important moment, a sort of test. I did not hesitate. Rising from my chair, and extending my arms upward toward him, I cried: “Well good God man, come down. You must be starving!”

  I embraced my old comrade warmly, despite the smell. A man who has been living rough in the Ceck Marsh for several days is not in pleasant condition. His jacket and trousers were filthy with mud, still damp on the seat and cuffs, sticks of straw and other plant matter clinging to them. He was bareheaded, unshaven, and foul of breath, and from his features had disappeared that habitually stoic and tranquil expression, replaced now by watchfulness, nervousness, and fear. He had a hunted look. I sat him in the wicker chair and gave him some scotch. He took a swallow, then pulled back his lips from his teeth and briefly rubbed his scalp and then his eyes. He drank more whisky. I could sense it heating and reviving him. I gave him a few minutes to compose himself. Should I go to the house for food? No, not yet, he wanted to talk first. He finished the whisky and bent his body forward in the chair, his palms on his knees and his elbows sticking out, his arms thus forming a pair of rigid buttresses to his tense, exhausted frame. He gazed at the floor of the barn and took a series of deep breaths. “So George,” I said at last, “what’s going on?”

  Have I spoken to you of the unreliability of memory? Retrospection does yield order, no doubt about that, but I wonder if this order isn’t perhaps achieved solely as a function of the remembering mind, which of its very nature tends to yield order. I say this only because the conversation that follows occurred a long time ago, and much has happened in the interim. But the spirit of that conversation—this I think I have captured, and this is the important thing.

  George shook his head. His hand kept going to his neck, where he rubbed it hard against an angry rash, the result of contact with some virulent piece of vegetation out in the marsh, I presume. Clearly the thing itched badly, and I made a mental note to bring ointment with me from the house. Still staring at the floor he began to speak; and he surprised me, for it was John Crowthorne he spoke about, he was abusing the man, calling him an old fool—it had occurred to me that old John might play a part in all this, but I hadn’t pursued it very far. George spoke with a low, halting cadence; then up came his head, and he glared at me with an angry but pathetically futile passion, the passion of a man who knows his predicament is intractable and hopeless.

  “But what about old John?” I coaxed him. In the silence that followed we could both distinctly hear a rat scuffling through the hay at the far end of the barn. “I give him the lorry,” said George at last, dropping his eyes to the floor, “and he takes it round the back of the marsh.” I nodded; old John used George’s swill lorry for his more far-ranging nocturnal poaching expeditions, this I knew well. “I didn’t hear him when he come back, but something woke me in the night so I go to the window, and there’s a light in the shed. Well, I open the window and I hear it.”

  Another silence. “Hear what, George?” I said softly. I gave him more scotch.

  He rubbed his neck. “Someone chopping in there. I could hear someone chopping in there. So I go down.”

  I nodded again; when George mentioned the shed, it was his slaughterhouse he was referring to. “I go down,” he said. His voice had become blank of emotion, hollow, as though unable to admit to comprehension of what he was saying. “I go down,” he repeated. “I can hear him in there as I cross the yard; he’s chopping something. ‘That you, John?’ I say, when I’m at the door. He’s at the back and he’s chopping something up. He turns round, grinning at me like a bloody monkey.”

  George fell silent again. His eyes were wide as he stared at the floor. “He didn’t know who it was,” he muttered, and a terrible understanding dawned upon me, and as George stared at the floor the barn seemed to grow suddenly very dark, and in my own mind I could hear that terrible chopping in the night, the terrible chopping that woke George from sleep, and I could see old John grinning in the gloom of the shed as he chopped up what he’d found out on the marsh. “He didn’t know who it was,” whispered George, and there was horror in his voice. “He found him out on the marsh in a sack, and since it weren’t a local man, he says to himself I’ll let the pigs have him.” Silence again; George dropped his head, set his elbows on his knees, and again rubbed his neck. “I took the chopper from him,” he muttered, “but it was too late.”

  “Too late?”

  Another long pause. George didn’t answer; it hardly mattered, I’d guessed his meaning. “I wanted to knock him down, I was that furious,” he muttered. His voice had a faraway sound to it now, as though it came from the end of a very long tunnel. “Wouldn’t have done no good.” Another silence; the crow stirred in the rafters overhead, then flapped noisily to another perch a few feet higher in the roof. I rose from my chair and again paced the barn; I was now all too clear about what had happened. Just as I’d speculated on Christmas night, someone had disturbed Fledge out on the marsh, and found Sidney’s body in a sack. That someone was old John Crowthorne. “Just had to finish the job,” George murmured, a little later, “that’s all there was to it.” Then he looked up and said in a clear, firm voice: “It was old John buried the bones, when the pigs was done. Didn’t do a very good job of it, eh? Eh?” George laughed, a terrible laugh, hopeless and black. “Made a bloody awful job of it, didn’t he? Oh good Christ”—and
he clenched his fists tight, closed his eyes, and pulled back the lips from his teeth in that terrible grimace. A single harsh screech came from the rafters, and again the clumsy flap of wings.

  I said nothing more for some minutes. I had come round to the back of George’s chair. I gripped him by the shoulders and squeezed them warmly. I understood his predicament; he would never go to the police with this story; for one thing, he had worked beside old John Crowthorne almost as long as he’d been in Ceck, and besides, his own complicity was clear. But I put it to him anyway, and as I expected he was adamant. He was a countryman, and he had all the countryman’s suspicion of police and officials and institutions; he followed natural law, but the ghastly irony at the heart of all this was that so did John Crowthorne. I told him he should stay in the barn while we tried to think the thing through. Then I went over to the house to get bread and cheese for him, and ointment for the rash on his neck.