“Well. Sit down.”
Then she turned and went tiredly out.
It was a “birthing” chair, designed less for comfort than the correct posture.
“I hate it,” whispered Elizabeth, when the door was closed at last.
“Will you come to the funeral?” she wrote to her Uncle Tony. She was seventeen years old, not so much angry as puzzled. “The world is just such a hateful place.” In the end, though, he was less support to her than she had hoped. He arrived late, left before the meats were served. She watched him walk away down the rain-silvered cobbles of the high street. He was preoccupied, and his shoes were new. Later, it turned out that he had remarried, to a middle aged woman with a few black curly hairs along the line of her jaw, whose thirteen year old son, gassed by a faulty boiler, had drowned in the bath the year before. She wore a little silver bird on a thin silver chain round her neck, and all she ever talked about was how to cook vegetables. Elizabeth met her only the once.
“How is my uncle?”
“He eats well.”
“How are his odd skies and yellow fishes?”
Uncle Tony’s wife wiped her upper lip. Uncle Tony was eating his greens: but no one was buying his pictures. They had been called too colourful for the middle-class taste. Uncle Tony, on the other hand, believed they weren’t colourful enough. It was his theory that there was something wrong with the paint.
“It isn’t lively. The colour is washed right out of it as it arrives on the canvas,” he complained to Elizabeth in a letter.
“The world seems washed out too,” he admitted.
He and his wife had moved into a smaller house, on a road that was always being dug up.
“I miss the children most,” he wrote: “Their bright clothes and ribbons. Do you remember when we fed the birds together? You looked like a little wooden doll in your red coat. So proper, yet you asked: ‘Can I have cheese for breakfast?’ I miss the language of children, which we forget so easily. Perhaps my eyes are tired, and I have grown out of sympathy with my public; but my ears are perfectly good. The world has grown out of sympathy with us all. Of all the things the dead have stolen from us I miss the children. Of all the children I miss you, Elizabeth, the most.”
Elizabeth was obscurely disappointed by this.
She imagined Uncle Tony in an upstairs kitchen, arguing desultorily with his wife. Outside, workmen were shouting, and a mechanical digger went to and fro, shaking the fabric of the house, making it hard to hear what anyone said. Uncle Tony’s wife stood by the window, lifting one corner of the faded net curtain. The room smelled of cooked macaroni. As she looked down at the new hole in the road, which was full of muddy water, some thought made her face tighten briefly then relax again.
“You never go to church,” she accused.
“Pardon?”
If she wants me to hear, Uncle Tony thought, she’ll have to shout.
“You’ll have to shout,” he said.
His wife looked down at the mechanical digger, rocking backwards and forwards in one place with a mouthful of paving slabs.
“Nothing,” she said.
Elizabeth had hoped Uncle Tony would help her, but he came to nothing. Uncle Tony was someone who needed help himself. She wrote to him:
“I remember the breakfasts we had.”
She wrote:
“How happy we were, long ago.”
“They’ll never put the gas back on,” he told his wife. “I know that.”
* * *
Dawn breaks over the town. Its factories and recreation grounds and terraces of dark bricks are silent in the pale horizontal wash of light. The old chimneys make faint long shadows across the grass. The railway bridges and advertising hoardings are silent. An old bicycle is parked against a wall in the rain. Every wall—every factory or warehouse, every nice house on the outskirts—is carved with the names of the dead. There are dried flowers in the niches. The air chokes on the muddy perfume: lavender and birdlime. Lavender and birdlime, and the smell of yeast from a run-down brewery on Thomas Street.
Elizabeth gets up too early and walks through town. Time has passed. Uncle Tony is dead now too. At nineteen years old—tallish, and with what would have been called a good body—she is already greying at the left temple. Her eyes are rather large, the irises unnaturally wide. She has a thin, anxious smile.
“I’ll wear a green and gold dress,” she promised herself last night.
By now the town is waking up.
Bicycles go past, wheels hissing in the rain. Workmen will be gathering in the bus station. At the cafe, Hetty Calver is already playing patience at the table by the window. She says to herself aloud:
“Hearts on hearts, my love.”
Her cards are soft and sticky with wear. “Hearts on hearts.” Then: “Be with you in a minute, love.” Her chair scrapes back. Breathing heavily through her mouth, she squeezes behind the counter. “Nasty day.” Out comes the marjolaine and honey. “There you are, dear.”
Elizabeth smiles and empties the glass.
“Thank you.”
“They all loved me when I was young.”
In the centre of the town, where the canal flows through the municipal park, there is an iron bridge. At all times of day but especially in the quiet morning, before the town wakes properly up, this bridge is grey with birds. You think they are pigeons: they cover the pavement like a rustling, cooing rug. You think they are starlings: they perch heads cocked on the railings, the mossy rusted beams above and beneath. You think they are great soft grey geese: they fill the sky with creaking wings which obscure the sluggish green water of the canal below. They wheel about you. The air flutters and susurrates with their feathers. They are like a musty grey growth on everything. Elizabeth comes to the mid-point of this bridge, where the oldest birds perch. When you pass they launch themselves from the rails and swoop close to you, brushing your hair for luck.
“Not too close,” says Elizabeth.
“I love you, but not too close.”
On the other side of the canal she takes the brick-paved lane to gardens, wrought iron benches, and the ornamental lake where her mother and her uncle used to sit talking while she fed the birds. Now she can sit on the same bench and reflect: “How proper of the dead to leave us their ashes, which silt down quietly in the lake.” A breeze springs up, full of dust, bringing from the waking cafes the smells of instant coffee and soap. Elizabeth feels it through her mother’s dress, against her skin. She grips the bench with her hands and brings her hips forwards so the small of her back rests against the cold iron slats. She bends her knees to take the weight of her body, and parts her legs so the wind can penetrate. Dust on her skin. Dust on her breast. Dust in shapes rotten and terrible and heartbreaking: but the years have passed, all exactly alike, and she has grown so used to them.
She remembers her mother’s advice.
“If someone is there, have them look away.”
No one else was ever there.
Back in her room, Elizabeth pulls her mother’s dress up round her waist, and tells herself:
“It’s always cold in here.”
Shut the windows, draw the thin curtains.
What light they admit is as grey as a feather.
Elizabeth sits in the birthing chair. Her pains begin.
“What? Are you so beautiful?”
She groans: “Oh, oh, nnnnh, oh no.”
The first of them is stillborn, a draggle of wet feathers. The next two unwrap in an instant, flutter to the window and beat their wings against the glass. Elizabeth is dizzy. Pushing the last one out, she has wet herself. Birds, little birds, flutter round the room, all colours first, then fading to grey. They throw themselves so helplessly against the glass. “If only I could get them to the light!” As soon as she can Elizabeth goes to the windows to release them. Out they go, one after the other, glisten for an instant in the light as if they might regain their colour; then they’re gone, round the corner of the building, of
f towards the bridge. Exhausted, Elizabeth washes the blood-streaked mucus from her thighs—cleans the window, looking out—rubs half heartedly at the stain on the carpet. Mid afternoon: she lies upon her bed and goes to sleep. The boundaries between states have all crumbled: no more snow, no more sunshine. The dead leave no room for us: if anyone is there when you do it, make them look away. Oubliez les professeurs. Why do you have a stale bread roll in the pocket of your red coat, if not to feed the birds?
So that they will feed you.
It would be an odd world, Elizabeth thought, if we could really forget our teachers.
She wakes hungry, looks out. The birds have left a heap of things under the window while she slept—some peanuts from the floor of a bus shelter, breadcrusts, a square of chocolate with the blue silver paper still on it. Elizabeth squats down on the bricks outside her room to go through this stuff, the air still and warm on her skin. Everything sorts quite easily into a meal. While she is eating, a single starling flies in and settles on the bricks beside her. Its feathers have a mad, sticky, iridescent look. One of its eyes is green, the other gold. In its beak is a cigarette butt, which it drops in front of her.
Elizabeth looks at it and smiles.
“Thank you,” she says.
She says: “I don’t think I’ll eat that though.”
CHRISTOPHER
FOWLER
Norman Wisdom and the
Angel of Death
FOR HALF OF EACH DAY, Christopher Fowler works with the writers, producers and artists at The Creative Partnership, the Soho film promotion company he runs, creating poster and trailer images, writing publicity scripts, producing behind-the-scenes films and designing title sequences.
For the other half of the day he writes short stories and such novels as Roofworld, Rune, Red Bride and Darkest Day, which loosely make up a “London Quartet” set in an alternative city. His stories have been collected in City Jitters, City Jitters Two, The Bureau of Lost Souls and Sharper Knives, while recent anthology appearances include The Mammoth Book of Zombies, I Shudder At Your Touch, Dark Voices 4: The Pan Book of Horror, Narrow Houses, In Dreams, The Time Out Book of Short Stories and London Noir.
On the movie front, both Roofworld and Rune are in development (the latter from Total Recall director Paul Verhoeven); his story The Master Builder was recently filmed as a CBS-TV movie starring Tippi Hedren; Left Hand Drive has been produced as a feature short, and he has written an original screenplay, High Tension, for State Screen Films.
The author reveals that he “watched every single Norman Wisdom film” to write the following story and that the idea came from “reading about Asperger’s Syndrome, the insidious disease that exists by degree in people who become obsessed with everything from train-spotting to Star Trek. If you’ve ever seen the home video footage of mass-murderer Dennis Nilsen with his victims, you’ll know that far from being a Red Dragon type, he was a deeply boring man.”
Possibly even more disturbing is that Fowler admits he actually wrote the story because “I happen to find Norman Wisdom really funny. Not many people are prepared to admit that in print, eh?”
Too right, they’re not.
Diary Entry # 1 Dated 2 July
THE PAST IS SAFE.
The future is unknown.
The present is a bit of a bastard.
Let me explain. I always think of the past as a haven of pleasant recollections. Long ago I perfected the method of siphoning off bad memories to leave only those images I still feel comfortable with. What survives in my mind is a seamless mosaic of faces and places that fill me with warmth when I choose to consider them. Of course, it’s as inaccurate as those retouched Stalinist photographs in which comrades who have become an embarrassment have been imperfectly erased so that the corner of a picture still shows a boot or a hand. But it allows me to recall times spent with dear friends in the happy England that existed in the fifties; the last era of innocence and dignity, when women offered no opinion on sexual matters and men still knew the value of a decent winter overcoat. It was a time which ended with the arrival of the Beatles, when youth replaced experience as a desirable national quality.
I am no fantasist. Quite the reverse; this process has a practical value. Remembering the things that once made me happy helps to keep me sane.
I mean that in every sense.
The future, however, is another kettle of fish. What can possibly be in store for us but something worse than the present? An acceleration of the ugly, tasteless, arrogant times in which we live. The Americans have already developed a lifestyle and a moral philosophy entirely modelled on the concept of shopping. What is left but to manufacture more things we don’t need, more detritus to be thrown away, more vicarious thrills to be selfishly experienced? For a brief moment the national conscience flickered awake when it seemed that green politics was the only way to stop the planet from becoming a huge concrete turd. And what happened? Conservation was hijacked by the advertising industry and turned into a highly suspect sales concept.
No, it’s the past that heals, not the future.
So what about the present? I mean right now.
At this moment, I’m standing in front of a full-length mirror reducing the knot of my tie and contemplating my frail, rather tired appearance. My name is Stanley Morrison, born March 1950, in East Finchley, North London. I’m a senior sales clerk for a large shoe firm, as they say on the quiz programmes. I live alone and have always done so, having never met the right girl. I have a fat cat called Hattie, named after Hattie Jacques, for whom I have a particular fondness in the role of Griselda Pugh in Series Five, Programmes One to Seven of Hancock’s Half Hour, and a spacious but somewhat cluttered flat situated approximately one hundred and fifty yards from the house in which I was born. My hobbies include collecting old radio shows and British films, of which I have an extensive collection, as well as a nigh-inexhaustible supply of amusing, detailed anecdotes about the forgotten British stars of the past. There’s nothing I enjoy more than to recount these lengthy tales to one of my ailing, lonely patients and slowly destroy his will to live.
I call them my patients, but of course they aren’t. I merely bring these poor unfortunates good cheer in my capacity as an official council HVF, that’s a Hospital Visiting Friend. I am fully sanctioned by Haringey Council, an organisation filled with people of such astounding narrow-minded stupidity that they cannot see beyond their lesbian support groups to keeping the streets free of dogshit.
But back to the present.
I am rather tired at the moment because I was up half the night removing the remaining precious moments of life from a seventeen-year-old boy named David Banbury who had been in a severe motorcycle accident. Apparently he jumped the lights at the top of Shepherd’s Hill and vanished under a truck conveying half-price personal stereos to the Asian shops in Tottenham Court Road. His legs were completely crushed, so much so that the doctor told me they couldn’t separate his cycle leathers from his bones, and his spine was broken, but facial damage had been minimal, and the helmet he was wearing at the time of the collision had protected his skull from injury.
He hasn’t had much of a life, by all accounts, having spent the last eight years in care, and has no family to visit him.
Nurse Clarke informed me that he might well recover to lead a partially normal life, but would only be able to perform those activities involving a minimal amount of agonisingly slow movement, which would at least qualify him for a job in the Post Office.
Right now he could not talk, of course, but he could see and hear and feel, and I am reliably informed that he could understand every word I said, which was of great advantage as I was able to describe to him in enormous detail the entire plot of Norman Wisdom’s 1965 masterpiece The Early Bird, his first colour film for the Rank Organisation, and I must say one of the finest examples of post-war British slapstick to be found on the face of this spinning planet we fondly call home.
On my second visit to the boy
, my richly delineated account of the backstage problems involved in the production of an early Wisdom vehicle, Trouble In Store, in which the Little Comedian Who Won The Hearts Of The Nation co-starred for the first time with his erstwhile partner and straight-man Jerry Desmonde, was rudely interrupted by a staff nurse who chose a crucial moment in my narration to empty a urine bag that seemed to be filling with blood. Luckily I was able to exact my revenge by punctuating my description of the film’s highlights featuring Moira Lister and Margaret Rutherford with little twists of the boy’s drip-feed to make sure that he was paying the fullest attention.
At half past seven yesterday evening I received a visit from the mentally disoriented liaison officer in charge of appointing visitors. Miss Chisholm is the kind of woman who has pencils in her hair and “Nuclear War—No Thanks’ stickers on her briefcase. She approaches her council tasks with the dispiriting grimness of a sailor attempting to plug leaks in a fast-sinking ship.
“Mr Morrison,” she said, trying to peer around the door of my flat, presumably in the vain hope that she might be invited in for a cup of tea, “you are one of our most experienced Hospital Helpers”—this part she had to check in her brimming folder to verify—“so I wonder if we could call upon you for an extracurricular visit at rather short notice?” She searched through her notes with the folder wedged under her chin and her case balanced on a raised knee. I did not offer any assistance. “The motorcycle boy . . .” She attempted to locate his name and failed.
“David Banbury,” I said, helpfully supplying the information for her.
“He’s apparently been telling the doctor that he no longer wishes to live. It’s a common problem, but they think his case is particularly serious. He has no relatives.” Miss Chisholm—if she has a Christian name I am certainly not privy to it—shifted her weight from one foot to the other as several loose sheets slid from her folder to the floor.
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