Night (8 page)

I wouldn't mind a visit from the Holy Ghost, the paraclete with his tongues of fire. I can't master languages, and for a very simple reason, too thick a tongue, the words curdle. That's why I haven't been to Baden Baden or the Hermitage.

The lad sleeps out in fields, sometimes under a mosque wall. He has no bed covers, not even a net. I expect it's scorching and there are times when he looks down at his own feet and finds them skinned or blistering. Jesus feet they used to call him in the public baths. I can chart it all, the way he graduated from fuzzy socks to knitted boots to buckskin boots, to plimsolls to wellington boots, to leather boots, to football boots and then back to the merest sandal when he was free to decide his own footwear. Minor epistles he used to write whenever I was out of his sight. “You are a big nit.” “Pam pam pipe.” “Remember the plum jam.” “I need paints.” Always in block letters. Daftness itself. I can tell the different years from the different style of the lettering. In the very beginning the letters were like numbers, they were bold and assertive. Then he wrote
in capitals, then he developed his own style of handwriting which was spidery. “Come to my tree house for a Punch and Judy show, entrance 1d.” Perfected a code, a semaphoric system, the hanging of rags and utensils from a tree. Once he douched me when I stepped under it and said, “Aren't I the witty boy?” That was from the time we lived on the big estate, in one of their cottages. We had a commode that we didn't dare use, had it in case of dire emergency. In the nights we used to gab. He loved hearing about the thanes and knackers of Coose. Above all else he relished the yarn concerning a joxer who came upon us in the middle of the night, surprised us, Boss, Lil and I, his lorry revving and squelching in the mudded field, and Boss declaiming Who goes there, and Sarsfield is the word, and Sarsfield is the man, and clothes getting donned, a trespass through the kitchen that was already inhabited by a different spirit, the lantern pumped, then lit, even its flame shifty and enigmatic. It was inferred that the joxer was an emissary of the supernatural. His attire was earthly enough, baggy trousers, twine round the middle, his gansy mottled, full of miscellaneous-sized holes. He had come with the express intention of covering the hayshed with his miracle spray to protect it from the rude elements and he demanded a commission there and then in the form of five readies, and upon such a demand Boss told him to scutter off but he held his ground, saying Up the Republic, and he had to be beaten away with lantern and the jut of the broom and afterwards in lofty tones Lil was heard saying that she had a hunch he had been sent to squeeze the
foot-and-mouth disease into the crops and Boss tut-tutting and saying, “I bested him, I cut the ground from under him, I told him who's landlord around here,” although in fact he had quaked like the rest of us and insisted we congregate near him. And there he was, complimenting himself, and there she was, rambling on about dead beasts, the economic war, a sacked land, dead beasts gaping at us, the workhouse, and Boss saying the intruder could go up the river on a bicycle. All of a sudden there was a bout of recitation suggested by Boss, to exorcise the panic, a snatch of verse from the eviction days.

The lad loved that, used to bounce up and down in his bed to it. And no sooner having heard it but he would say Tell it again. He loved the swear words and details of the joxer's gansy and Boss letting on to be braver than he was. He even asked to see a photo of them, his grandparents. It is a muzzy photo where they are both leaning on a pier and are curiously allied to each other, an alliance brought about by perseverance.

We were in a two-roomed cottage, everything ramshackle, the fencing reinforced with bits of galvanise and old wardrobe doors. We kept pullets and a dog. The estate itself was owned by a health farm. I worked there. It was funny tending to all the fat people, hearing them talk about food as they got
slapped and slathered around, talking about the coffee with the cream on it, in Vienna. Nyumyum, Nyumyum. When I got home there would be the notes. Sometimes he had the dog on the table with a headscarf or a bowler hat on her. Laughing they used to be. The dog was called Rosie, a mongrel. Outside the window there was a commune of birds, about a hundred, and they used to grub in the fields, wander in and out between the cows' legs and then all of a sudden they'd fly, and because of their underwings being white and their actual bodies silver, they were like a whole lot of razor blades, darting up into the sky, cleaving the skin of the air. I got cream for free from the health farm and we used to have it with the porridge, or the pancakes, or, in season, with fresh raspberries or fresh loganberries from their walled garden. Some people don't know when they're flying it, I knew it then. Everything had a rhythm to it, my cycling in the morning to the crèche with him, then coming back to find him already there, having been brought home in the school bus. He had only to walk up a lane. “Me a latchkey kid,” he used to say. He was very quick at slang. There was one note of his that I didn't care for though. It wasn't addressed to me personally, it wasn't addressed to me at all. I found it the day after he went to boarding school. That was much later and we were in a city by then. I had a job in Hull as a cosmetic manager. It said:

I crinkled it, bunched it up, not wanting to admit that he was prone to such thoughts, that he too had the pall, a bit of the Coose moroseness. He'd gone a long way from the dozy dazy times when he looked up at leaves and buses and played with beads and yodelled from the safety of his cot. All the joyrides he used to have. And laughs, nearly always followed by splutters. Made theatres out of match-boxes. He used to get in under the big brown table to fiddle with the castors. As the evenings got colder he used to reach up and pull down the green baize cloth, and cowl it round himself and wear it like a kind of igloo. Of course it wasn't roses all the way. He had a bowel problem. His father, Dr Flaggler, recommended a cereal, a special brand of corn buds. Dr Flaggler was very imperious, always faggoting his notions upon us. He said if the cereal did not work it would have to be clysters. We were in mortal fear of these clysters whatever they were. The lad had a rebellious streak too, probably brought on by his adstrictions. He scratched the paint off a newly painted lavatory seat and left the shards – they were a shade of duck-egg blue – strewn all over the green rubber mat. He got his come-uppance. Dr Flaggler produced the water bag, and after insertion and later the movement, the lad was dispatched to his bedroom and locked in without benefit of bread or water. He says it is then he wished he had mastered the Chinese language, because it would have given him something to think about, as his mind was clamouring for new thoughts, theorems, puzzles. No doubt he knew all there was to know about the boxed house, the drab
garden, Dr Flaggler and I. So many little memories of him loom up, his constipation, hence his shadows, his cheeks like discs, the striations on his forehead, the pre-lines, mere tracings, presaging where the real lines would later be. They have begun now. He must have always bathed in cold climes because I have a memory of drying him brusquely with old towels and his skin mauve and his little teeth chattering together. He had a dream once of being one of the three Wise Men, on a moped and calling at a gate lodge to look for the infant child. That must have origined while we were in the cottage, since there were various other little lodges scattered around. At the same time I dreamt that he was on his tricycle in Times Square, getting squashed in by convertibles and trucks. He kept busy. I used to bend over him, brush against him, while he was drawing horses and chariots. There was always a bit of jam lodged somewhere on his lips so that the kisses had a fruitiness and brought to mind the orchards of Coose where he hailed from, but scarcely knew. He had a little chain around his neck and a St Christopher medal that he bit. Blackened his front teeth. When he crammed pebbles up his nose Dr Flaggler had a brainwave. He poked at the nostrils, first with an orange stick and then with a wire. The wire happened to be a clothes hanger that he snapped in two. It bored me most painfully that usurping wire. No go. The pebbles refused to budge. Dr Flaggler let out a yippee and moved to the garden where the peony roses were in full rampant bloom; the lad loved these flowers, their colour, their chromes, their creaminess, the smell,
their softness perhaps. In fact he had the bad habit of breaking them off their stems and tossing them around as if they were toy boats or one of his paper kites. Naturally he got whacked for such usurpations. Consider his surprise then at being handed one with glee, a full-blown peony rose of the pink variety as it happened. “Nice nice flower,” Dr Flaggler said, as a tease. The lad laughed. He brought it to his nostrils because he was told to and just as flesh touched flower the realisation occurred. He sneezed like an old grandfather. The pebbles came cascading down. His father had put snuff in the rose. A snuff and pepper mixture. Ingenuity. He says his prime memory is not that, but of a cow's tail and his hand in someone's, an old man's, or an old woman's, a relation perhaps, a forebear. Anyhow it was a white hand with brown nicotine stains. It was after that he drew the chariot. Then he got out of bed one night and descended the steep stairs by means of his bottom, hopping and flopping from one step to the next. He avoided the last step altogether and darted cumbersomely across the hallway into a dark room. He was afraid of being found. Still, he must have mewled or puked or let out some little exclamation because Dr Flaggler found him there and surprisingly enough offered him poached egg. We tried for other children. I was pregnant on two occasions but lost them due to fucking. I believe our covetousness drives our future children out of us.

The day he was going to boarding school, we had to metal ourselves. We went by train. It was autumn. We came upon a little pile of sticks, then water with
green scum on it and belts of young trees, young poplars, shivering, then more woods and tail-ends of woods, and jumping posts and horses and a bonfire and a solitary clump of Michaelmas daisies on a grass bank near a signal-box. I can see them still – insignificant and purple, a mournful purple at that. It is a strange thing that they did not remind me of field daisies at all, it must be the colour, it must be the difference between what white does to our sensibilities and what purple does. It would be nice to understand a colour, or get flooded by it, by the lineaments. Then came a different kind of wood, where the trees were very low, scutty, as if they had sunk into the ground, into mire maybe. Sunken trees, their tops bushy, like hammocks on which one could lie, a nesting wood as opposed to a forest where knights could fight a battle. It would have been perfect except for the situation, but come to think of it, it might not have hit us, the view might not have impinged were we on an ordinary day's outing. He said little. He would look at his belongings from time to time or he would touch them or he would put his fingers through the holes of his tennis racquet, wedge them through. The low farmhouses were so right, so friendly, so safe and even then I said to myself what am I missing, and why do stone walls and white gates and sheepdogs and blond roofs speak so, along with little bushes and the clotheslines and the garments going swirl swirl and all the other inconspicuous things and the white birds, the gulls, and the black birds, the crows, and the black-and-the-white birds, the magpies. We waited till we saw four
magpies and recited together as of yore, “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a wedding, and four to die.” It wasn't the jolliest thing to say as the train carted us along. I almost said a daft thing, one of those heady things that gets said on state occasions. I almost said that I wanted to shield him against all awful things, against the reeks of darkness and the perfidy of people. It is the grace of God that I did not. We took a hire car and the driver had the funniest accent, an accent new to us, as if a pot of syrup had been spilt in his mouth. He said, “There be gold in our hills, there be gold in Wales, there be gold in Hampshire.” Hills, dun, their harvest just stripped from them, the edifices of souring silage a decent distance away from each farmhouse. Anyhow as I drove off, instead of waving as he might have done, the lad did a side hop in the opposite direction, as if he were playing with ball or skittle. Maybe he was. Two other boys, no doubt newcomers, mohawks, were coming towards him and maybe they kicked a ball in his direction. Anyhow it was not the farewell that we feared, it was inconsequential, him running away like that, his hair spilling over one side of his face, and the object whatever it was, maybe a piece of newspaper, the butt of his attention. The first letter said, “I eat the bit of cake with the cherry in it and think of Mamma.” He must have had the corners knocked off him soon after, because his vernacular changed. The letters got very perky and there were the nicknames, Tin Breasts, Huge Penis, Farnham Pervert, Gravy, and so forth.
The food was called Muck and the girls, drips. The letters were very succinct.

His handshakes grew more tepid the manlier he became, he knew the inference of such things, he knows the havoc of binds.

He writes now about the latrine service and the fruits that they eat and the mangoes that they stole, how perfumed and juicy they were. He has discovered all the uses for the mango tree, as a dye, and for pectoral complaints and as a laxative and to clean teeth. He is determined to get back to nature cures. He will be a healer yet. He did not use the word orchard so I get the impression that the fruits there are growing in the fields, just like the noble spud and the not-so-noble mangold in Coose. There are four of them, they gave blood in Morocco because blood is pricey there.
He describes the tracks, the adobe huts, the interiors, the cooking utensils used in the different parts. He seems very interested in what is underneath the earth, not for death's sake but for antiquity. Always off at a tangent – “I have been to extraordinary places and walked over desert, and explored caves that monks lived in during the fifth century, caves carved out of cliffs, that are sheer, dizzying, in their drop to the sea. Sun, glaring sun. And I have been to the tombs of Abraham and Isaac. The landscape was fantastic, a movement of giant swellings, eruptions, corrosions of land where the earth has been stripped away, leaving rock vertebrae that look like monsters. The rituals at the Wailing Wall are too much, you should witness these. What a contrast of explosive nature between what occurs on the surface of this land and what the archaeologists find right under it. More, much more, but not now.”