The New Uncanny

by Priest, Christopher

  ‘Felix?’ She bent down over him.

  His eyes were open but he was far away. He was lisping, almost inaudibly. ‘Goosey goosey gander where do you wander goosey goosey gander where do you…’

  ‘Felix, love, can you hear me?’

  He was feeding geese only he could see. His face was pressed to invisible chicken wire.

  She reached for the hand that rested, limp, at his side and wrapped it in hers. ‘It’s Mummy, bunny rabbit. Mummy.’ Then she hauled him into her arms.

  *

  As she bore Felix away, the Earl passed, laden with a mop and a hose on a reel. She stared, her eyes molten, but only the Doberman paused to observe them, its ears sharp and its nostrils flaring.

  Dan came running, with Rosie pressed, pale-cheeked and tearful, to his chest.

  ‘I’ve got him,’ she breathed. ‘It’s okay. I’ve got him.’ In the room, she collapsed on the bed under his weight.

  They got him under the covers, then sat hunched, watching him sleep. Dan pressed his thumbs to his eyes. ‘Maybe it was the funeral. The coffin being lowered…’

  She could hardly speak. ‘It’s my fault.’ She pulled the sheet over Felix’s ankle. ‘When I ran off to get the First Aid kit, I should have explained.’

  ‘Explained what?’

  ‘He was in my arms, and I was saying “Mummy’s here”. Then I was gone. I was running away. And afterwards, I knew he was upset about it, but I just papered over the cracks because we had to get to the funeral.’

  ‘No. He was upset because he’s never hurt himself that badly.’

  ‘But what could he see? The back of me, leaving him.’

  ‘Mia, if this is still about– You have to let it–’

  ‘And when I found him just now, he was muttering about the geese.’ She turned to her husband and winced. ‘Yesterday, The Earl ticked him off over by the duck pond. He warned him not to go too close; Felix says he told him the geese would peck out his eyes. I didn’t know if he was making it up or not. Maybe he was – to please me.’

  ‘To please you? To please you how?’

  She shook her head, cancelling the thought. ‘Something did scare him, Dan, something that bloke did or said. Felix said his eyes weren’t alive.’

  ‘He’s six, Mia.’

  ‘I should have told you yesterday.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because I thought you’d think I was making something of nothing. You know – over-egging The Earl. But it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left Felix alone at the duck pond. I should have been with him.’ She pushed her hand up his T-shirt and rubbed his lower back. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You didn’t let him down.’ He reached behind and pressed his hand to hers. ‘You have never let him down.’

  *

  She was at the office door as they opened for business. Dan waited in the car with Rosie. Felix had announced that he wanted to go to the office too. He wanted to see The Earl’s glass eyes one more time. Mia breathed easier. He’d woken an hour before and bounded into their bed, himself again.

  But it was Mrs Earl who looked up from the desk as he and Mia walked in. Felix sighed and kicked the floor softly. The Venetian blind was half open. He walked over to the window sill and made faces in the shiny lanterns on display.

  ‘We’re on our way,’ she said, avoiding the woman’s eyes. ‘I’m just popping in for our passports.’ She couldn’t bear to speak of that morning. She had to believe what Dan had said. It was all just a horrible, sickening fluke.

  Mrs Earl disappeared and returned with three passports.

  Mia opened them. ‘There should be four. The name on the other one is Felix Hamlyn.’

  Mrs Earl crinkled her forehead and disappeared again.

  Mia drummed her fingers. Outside, she heard Dan switch off the engine. Felix was trying to raise the blind.

  When the woman re-appeared The Earl was behind her. He laid the missing passport on the desk. Felix turned to stare.

  ‘I’m afraid it was in with Room 12’s,’ explained Mrs Earl. ‘Sorry about that.’ Her smile flickered. ‘Safe journey.’

  Mia watched her son. He didn’t go shy this time. He didn’t blink. He held The Earl’s bland gaze, as if something was passing between them.

  She felt her skin go cold.

  Then Mrs Earl leaned across the desk. Her cheek twitched. ‘Aren’t you cute?’ She looked at Mia. ‘Six? Seven?’

  Mia got hold of Felix’s hand. ‘Six.’

  Mrs Earl looked from Felix to her husband and back again. She wiped her palm across her forehead. Then she leaned across the desk towards Felix, her smile straining. ‘We’re going to have to keep you!’

  The Earl laid his hands on the desk and blinked.

  The Un(heim)lich(e)Man(oeuvre)

  Ian Duhig

  DAD WAS CHOKED. It was the day I got the e-mail telling me I’d passed A-level Maths, Physics and Biology, all at grade A! Success beyond his wildest dreams! His dreams. Far from wild to me. He’d pushed me into the sciences, but only because he wanted me to have a safety net, he always said. He was keeping an eye out for me; it was the promise he’d made Mum. Well, over her grave anyway. I left her there, don’t remember much of her, hardly saw her after I got the microwave, tv and computer with broadband in my bedroom, which then became my bedsitstudiocellspaceship. But Dad fixated on her once she was good and gone. A man is as good as his word, he’d say, and his word is his bond. And now I was the weakest link. He was letting me have it good style...

  Sacrifice. I didn’t know the meaning of it. Hard work. Alien to my nature. Shirking. All I’m good for. Appearance. A disgrace. Self, self, self. Mother. Grave. Turning. Duty. Indulgence. On his back. Shoulders of giants. Which led him to one of his heroes, Isaac Newton. Real geniuses worked hard, showed dedication, patience, attention to detail: can it be a coincidence so many were lens-grinders like Newton? Or Spinoza? Or Descartes? Or Hooke? He told me for the umpteenth time about Newton pushing needles into his eyesocket in the course of his experiments on optics. He knew this got me as I had a real thing about eyes - I’d been told at school about a kid in another class who was running with a newly-sharpened pencil...he’d have been safer with scissors. I never used a pencil again. It gave me nightmares for months. Some things are well beyond my ability to put into words (that’s where the creative writing foundation course came in). I wanted to talk to Dad about images, about glass and mirrors, his world being the one, mine the other, that’s all – in fact, as careers, they reflected each other... but I didn’t have the bottle.

  If I had said this, his eyes would have bulged out on their stalks like chapel hat-pegs, the veins on his face colour it to a road map, his loosened teeth in their retreating gums drop out and rattle into his glass of Sanatogen, then his whole head explode like in the film ‘Scanners’. Scary but I’d like to have seen him explode. I’d keep that picture on my mobile so I could look at it and laugh to myself whenever the whim took me. Whim, not prescription. It would take more than a prescription to fix Lucy, another one I couldn’t get out of my mind. St Lucy that is, not my Lucy. We saw a picture of her ‘Exoculation’ (good word, though) in an art gallery once; she’s stood there with her eyes held out in front of her on a little silver dish as if they were a couple of oysters for the viewer to eat. The world is your. Choose. She didn’t need them, saw better without them, like Oedipus.

  11000100

  I was born with a caul and espionage skills. Mum said she didn’t even know she was pregnant until I was nearly due. I kept them guessing about when I’d arrive, was late, wrongfooting everybody. Eventually they resorted to a Caesarean, lancet not forceps. Blended into the background at school. Exams have always been easy for me: photographic memory and even speed-reading, a flypaper-mind for words, hoovering up millions from all kinds of books like a whale shark taking in plankton. Everything sticks, even much of what I wanted to get rid of - I envied Sherlock Holmes, who could do that easily. The Copernican theory? Do
I look like I give a shit? I’m doing my best to forget lots. How do you do that? It’s like trying to count up to ten without thinking of rabbits. The ties that bind. Even bondage freaks had their safe words. Dad wanted me to be safe in a way that he knew would work, because it had worked for him: to get married and give him grandchildren during the course of a successful career as an optician, like him. Ophthalmic, that was, not just Dispensing in a shop, a cut above: able to test and make out prescriptions. I’m sure Dad was on the square as well as square, though of course we couldn’t talk about it. But he was always out for some ‘meeting’ or another, coming back half-cut with no explanation, strange creases in one trouserleg. But he wore the trousers in our house. I was a Lodge orphan, Mum a Lodge widow so he could play the Widow’s Son. So the Widow’s Son begat a widower’s son, his mirror image, but unworshipful. Who said the only secret Masons possess is the secret of getting drunk? It’s a secret.

  My childhood was unspent in Harrogate. Har-Low-Gata: Anglo-Saxon name for an Anglo-Saxon town of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, but with a dark side. Biggest carbon footprint in God’s Own County; Dickens’ ‘queerest place’ (and he knew London), Agatha Christie’s bolt-hole when she did her own disappearing trick. Dad liked it for different reasons. After Mum died he’d take me on walks around it. Bonding sessions. Making up for lost time. Like most healthy people my age, I travelled everywhere in my room, plugged in to the electronic, unsafety net of the world of unsafe words. But no – Dad thought he was passing something on to me, apart from blisters. So we’d stray on the Stray, me traipsing after him as he’d point out places associated with another of his heroes, Jack Metcalfe. Metcalfe had been a bit of a rogue (Dad would smile indulgently as he told this story) a quondam card-sharp, horse-dealer, smuggler and one of the original boys from the black stuff, laying most of the roads around here. But when his country needed him, he stood up to be counted, turning out for Bonnie Cumberland against the Jacobites and the Young Pretender. And Jack had been completely blind from the age of six. Wanker.

  I’d call in to Dad’s work on the way home from school sometimes to pick the keys up; I’d see a customer under that inverted pyramid of letters, wearing those iron-maiden metal goggles into which Dad slotted lenses like pennies. ‘Better or worse?’ But as I got older, all the customers began to look the same in them to me: they all began to look like James Joyce, one of my heroes, who had eyes only slightly better than Metcalfe’s. But Jacobus Jocundus was more Jacobite than Jack. ‘Non Serviam!’ Even without the rebel yell, it’s kind of goth, Catholicism: the guilt, the misery, the Latin, contemptus mundi – I loved the lushness of words like ‘Papish’ with its mammary etymological penumbrae. There were lots of anti-Catholic Gothic writers – ‘Monk’ Lewis, Maturin of Melmoth – but they were of the Devil’s party without knowing it, tripping into Gil Martin’s snares, the Devil Catholics prefer in literature. I wanted to be a writer even if that meant slighting my father’s hopes of children, ending his line with his number one and only son, the withering of his family tree in me. I will make your name live on in my own way, I wished I’d told him. Better or worse?

  If I tell you too any more about myself, I will have to kill you.

  Wet joke.

  Aqueous humour.

  10110011

  My new freedom made me kind of drunk all the time. Just not feeling like I was being watched was a fantastic sense of liberation. One of the things that made me realise that the idea of Heaven stunk was the notion that your parents would be there. Did you remember to tidy your room before you died? Free, not Freemason: free as a word. I wanted to forget about family and all that but Tyr agreed with Dad about following in his footsteps. Tyr has been my best friend in childhood; I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but it was good to have him back. Tyr is short for something. Tyrone, like the character in ‘Andromeda’ on the TV? I asked once. Nearly right; from the Irish, he said, means ‘Land of Owen’. Like in Tyrnanogue? Yes, he’d replied, the Land of the Young, a kind of heaven for heroes.

  Now he was trying to make me feel guilty - Opththalmic opticians are respected professionals, just as good as, say, pharmacists, he declared. Hospital pharmacists, that is, not the high street kind just following prescriptions – a cut above. It’s because I don’t just want to follow prescriptions, I tell Tyr, that I want to become a writer. On the subject of writing, he added, who’s going to be writing all the cheques for this? You won’t get a grant for a foundation course. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I countered, and I don’t just mean my Dad’s will. I’m going to write stuff that sells, exciting stuff like spy novels or horror, under a pen-name, and the good stuff in the evenings. I went on, as if to demonstrate my research, Did you know that in World War II, Ian Fleming was in the secret services and he ran Aleister ‘the Beast’ Crowley? And that de Pessoa used to correspond with Crowley, de Pessoa who was an expert on Freemasonry and wrote an essay about it? He really was a master of disguise. In fact, de Pessoa was several masters of disguise.

  Don’t change the subject, snapped Tyr, you’re in denial, as usual. Even if this ludicrous plan works out, what are you going to do for money until then? I proudly unveiled my secret plan: I was going to be a spy myself for MI5 into on-campus terrorist activity. They’d just opened a regional office in Leeds: the fact that this city’s name is a pun, and the fact that it sells more surveillance equipment than anywhere else in the country must be good omens. It would be both research and grant aid. The universities are full of terrorists nowadays. Bradford is perfect – even their Chancellor got arrested under terrorism legislation in Pakistan. For now, my controller tells me, he just wants me to keep an eye out; the security services only know the tip of the iceberg of terrorist activities in our region. How come I didn’t see this controller, Tyr wondered rhetorically, when I’m with you virtually 24/7? Because he’s a professional, I countered triumphantly. You need to keep an eye out too. Tyr winked.

  01100110

  I’d only been to Bradford once before the course started, and then by night on my own, in a car and a rush. But if you train it to Forster Square from Leeds, as I was now having to do regular, it’s like entering a parallel universe, trundling down the Aire valley past the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey – if there’s been another theft of copper signal wire, you’ll have plenty of time to contemplate the ironies of the once-Catholic heritage of God’s Own County while sidelined in a sideline of a sideline, going nowhere on a train to a place going nowhere, cursing your Chinese watch, which is one of the things the stolen copper is eventually going to make more of, while our Western industries go down the pan. Cistercians, from ‘cisterna’ meaning cistern. Dry stone walls are a Cistercian signature in Yorkshire, they told us at school. Sometimes dry stone walls weren’t built to keep animals in, but just to use stones cleared out of those fields, so you could plough them, or more likely nowadays drive your 4x4 around them without knackering its axles. They’re thrown over the Dales like a huge net, but when you drive through, the fields enclosed by the dry stone walls are almost always completely deserted, the hefted sheep elsewhere, the goats invisible. I repaired some for a while as a conservation volunteer, for compulsory work experience at school (it was either that or an office). Gap-walling, it was called, which sounded ontologically interesting. Smoots, throughs, footings, heartings, vocabularies changing in every village, like codes. I found out too that the Mason’s word for a spy, who Entered Apprentices were continually keeping an eye out for, was ‘cowan’, which means ‘dry-stone-diker’ in the OED. A different kind of apprentice now, I’ve got to practice a different kind of stonewalling. That’s rather good, isn’t it?

  But these delays gave me a chance to get stuck into the anthology on the reading list. The size and weight of a footing for a Cyclopean wall, it soon became the foundation-stone of my reading. Reading it added to my sense of drunken freedom. Didn’t Kipling say words were the most powerful drugs known to humanity? The right words are, in the right order. That’s what litera
ture is. A distillation: once for prose, twice for poetry. Like a wall, I was getting plastered. There’s a Simic poem about being a wall, isn’t there? As the train’s engine ticked over, I read Martha Moulsworth’s ‘Memorandum’ (‘My muse is a tell clock’); goth ur-texts from Browne and Burton; Langland on how Plague can be a good and Godly thing; Gawain’s Beheading Game and off-his-head Smart’s Masonic imagery-poems; Marlowe (‘One is no number’), also an intelligence agent, who got a spike in his eye for his trouble; Newton on light and Locke’s ‘association of ideas’ (I’d say ‘train of..’ if that wasn’t a bad joke in a stalled train) which prefigures the stream of consciousness; all the way back to Caedmon (England’s first poet and another good thing about Whitby apart from Dracula and goth weekends) feeling too rude for ‘his The Dream of the Rood’ then writing his dream, a dream of a vision. There were letters between Ignatius Sancho and Sterne the unLocker, master of straying and digressions; but I digress...

  11100101

  Brat. It’s written ‘Bradford’, but locals pronounce it ‘Bratford’. Formerly proverbial for millionaires (well, in Eliot anyway) it’s now Leeds’ runt kid brother, disinherited, impoverished. That Tory think tank wanker was right: this place will never recover, its decline is terminal. It should just be bulldozed, concreted over and turned into a car park for Leeds, as Sunderland for Newcastle - though some Mackem called that an Alice-in-Sunderland idea. In Leeds, so much new building goes on because the Council rubber-stamps planning applications to no overall plan, blind. Cranes on towers everywhere, rising like piles of coins on a counting house table. Bratford’s got no towers with cranes on at all, just a bloody great hole down from the station, first place I came to, which I still wait impatiently for them to fill. But it does have the plan, Alsop’s vision; they showed us a promotional video in Fresher’s Week – ‘Bradford Squared’ it was called. In it, a road-sweeper wakes the sleeping city: Town Hall windows become brilliantly-coloured squares, exploding like a Mondrian with the city’s wonderland future, illuminating water features and post-modernist architecture, flying around and eventually reforming as the letter B, for Bradford. Or Bullshit. Or Big Brother. Better or worse?