Quilt (4 page)

– These things happen from time to time.

The tears surge like waking up in Eden, in need of Eden. In the wings all this while, yet it was only yesterday they ran down my face as my father lay upstairs in his room, dying it can now be said, dying in neither the dining nor drawing room, can be said
post
, post saying past, all post past past the post. The room is almost knee-deep in junk mail, a choked sea of pointless post. My father never, so far as I know, sent any money to any of these scam-mongers, but he seems also never to have given up believing that somehow some day one of these proclamations that he was winner of the lucky draw, sitting in the lucky drawing room, would come true and a cheque for some huge amount of money arrive in the post. He would receive up to twenty items a day, meticulously open and read them, then replace the letters in their envelopes and annotate the envelopes with a summary of what the senders were promising, the amount of money they wanted from him first of all, the date of receipt, and the deadline for response. In the past six months the mounds have risen dramatically, he stopped bothering to throw the stuff away. But he kept up this barmy archivism, annotating and specifying dates. Now the post is so deep you can hardly cross the room, his armchair the solitary accessible island, humble sedentary fortress lapped by postal tides.

It’s Saturday morning, the day of my father’s death: he would have wanted details of the date and hour, the precise time. His obsessive love of time, his fascination with the hour meant manual, radio-controlled or atomic, battery or electric, clocks bought by mail order, watches received as so-called free gifts on the waves of junk mail, clocks and watches all over the house, the most accurate
and reliable of all of course strapped silver on his wrist, bright bracelet of time as he stood in the kitchen day after day, year after year, at the appointed hour listening to Big Ben or the pips on the radio, checking his watch and commenting on how on or out of time it was. His love led me once, years ago, to the caustic comment that I could imagine his last words, on his deathbed, looking in my eyes and asking:

– What is the time, please?

The post is past. Words come away. Letters capsize. She is digression, syncopation, asyndeton, ontradiction. Her ‘c’ curls off invisibly, leaving the shoreline of a new language:
ontra
. She touches all the words, she’s amid them, mad as Midas, without a trace. Of course the matter is impossible:

– Everything you write about me, she says, is old and worn out. I am just a character in a book to you.

She is due to arrive this morning, from a great distance. Originally it was the other way round. Reality ontradicts. Because of my father’s condition I cancelled my flight:

– He is very weak, I cannot leave him. Will you come to me?

She is pristine. I would like this word to do justice to her, in her absence. I picture this job vacancy, taking a position as an overly well-dressed man who leads people around some local caves, not with a view to telling them about matters of age and rock-formation, what the caves were used for during wartime, how effective
they once proved for the cultivation of mushrooms or for clandestine royalist meetings during the civil war or for haunting by a demon lover, but in order to address, soften the audience, explore aloud and without interruption the angelic oddity of
pristine
. Say it, in the dark, to be prised aurally.
Pristine
. Paid by the local tourist board to conduct small groups about in almost pitch-blackness, underground, I am investigating the subject of pristine. Strange well of feeling, curvature of space, unseen the caves except for a single
hurricane
-lamplight held aloft.

– You might think they know you inside out, I begin. In these caves nothing is what you imagine: everything becomes pristine. Listen.
In these delicate clinkings prised
, I add, with a kind of irritating emphasis.

I need to get their complete attention. Tin lamp on wrist, cavernous prudence, intestinal possession. Enormous difficulty of trapezoid act of speech to get the punters to listen properly. It’s a nightmare of a job: rush nothing, slow down to a speed that might just ontradict everything a man or woman has thought, treading carefully in the lamplight. Cold air always the same temperature. Pristine bazaar.

– If I attune my mouth with sufficient precision, and align my ear, I can reveal the names of everyone in this cave, at the drop of a pin, I say to them as a warm-up.

It is necessary to come up with something, after all, and I no longer see the point of saying anything unless it is in the form of a pronouncement made effectively with my dying breath. Many auditors could be forgiven for having already abandoned me, but I have a job to do, in the employ of the local authorities, not a significant salary
but I wouldn’t be doing this for the money would I, for me it’s about supporting a new phenomenon spreading far beyond any cultish local initiative, for the authorities it goes without saying it is also a previously unheard-of tourist money-spinner, how to get grockles, that is the dialect term in this part of the world, how to get them, or the locals themselves, down into the otherwise
out-of-bounds
and commercially pointless caves and allow them to experience something to set their ears ringing, have them recall and talk about it to family and friends, like so many echoes, long after listening, generating notable future income of ear and pocket.

– What on earth is he talking about? I overhear a disgruntled fellow asking.

That’s it, I say to myself, I don’t take offence. I request that the gentleman repeat the question and I listen with the special attentiveness that I have acquired from spending innumerable and improbably long hours in the caves and, after a pause, I say simply:

– Your name is Thomas Swarovski.

And the man in question is of course awestruck, as are others in the group, and the problem then is to quieten them down so that the event doesn’t turn into an
audio
-freakshow of clamouring infantilism, what’s my name, tell me, tell me, or conversely, for this can also happen, to placate any listener who should then voice their surmise that Thomas is just a plant and I knew his name before we entered the caves. In truth, however, it is an easy thing to do: if you attune your hearing properly in the silence of the caves and listen, most people are speaking a more or less audible version of their name in most of the things they say. It consists in a sort of layered or side-on effect,
like the skull in Holbein’s
Ambassadors
, a kind of private embassy of the ear, hallucination’s jinn.

But in the ordinary run of affairs how many people go out of their way to pass even five or ten minutes in a good deep cave completely cut off from the outside world and take the opportunity to hear themselves speak and really listen to themselves? It can come to seem strange that people pay good money to entertain or instruct themselves with drugs or sex or universities or even submit themselves to psychiatric counselling when they could just as well spend a few free minutes in the silence of an impressively tucked-away cave and experience this ordinary auditory apocalypse, discover themselves as never before. And so, in this foolhardy attempt to unearth something astonishing resonating in the depths of their being, I submit to the group’s special attention the word or rather the sound: pristine.

By this point they are of course a divided crowd, some receptive to the angelic oddity, intrigued, even rapt, others who just cannot be doing with it, riled and stirred to opposition by all appearances of magic or conjuration for, as I happily avow, it really is a kind of hocus pocus, of a weird but utterly innocent variety. They won’t be going back to tell Jack or Nina about this fiddle-faddle some fellow tried on them in some caves one rainy afternoon when they were at a loose end for something to do away from the beach, or perhaps they will mention the thing but they won’t have twigged, they won’t have gathered that this, yes, this little outing to the caves is the closest thing they will ever have to an apprehension of what it is to hear oneself and ‘be someone’.

And if I were absolutely to clamber up on my soapbox, an obviously ridiculous piece of equipment for a cave, indeed just what the spelean setting ecstatically slides from under you, if I were to ski or be skied in this way, I might go further. I might very readily proclaim that it is here, in the sonic simplicity and purity of these subterranean environs, that it becomes possible to return, yes, for there is always some echo-effect, to return to that conjectural snatch of what it is to be at the very threshold of life, being born, in amniotic oblivion, and in this moment think, and speak.

It is always the speech of a stranger, of course, that is doubtless why Jack and Nina are never any the wiser. In this chamber, in such darkness, by the simple light of this lamp, scrabbling about in your minds for memories of similar experiences or correspondences, from cunts to Plato and beyond, you will understand nothing, no, nothing will come home to roost. But in the blissful disappearance of soapbox merely say pristine, this quaint idiocy almost pretty, almost philistine, almost christian, and none of these but odd, yes, above all in the jets of its pure, clean, fresh, unused, untouched effects, the house, sports field or voice in pristine condition, for example, and in the same breath, as was, formerly, the original, ancient, most olden days and nights, living daylights of night’s day. Pristine: fresh and ancient.

– Listen.

Predictable hushed silence. Shuffling of a foot or two, someone vaguely stifles a yawn or cough. Day’s work done. At least until the next group. Rarely applause. Group-clapping in a cave is never to be advised: undesirable confusion of amassed bats stirring.

The ray is stationary. You wouldn’t even register it there, retracted into its environs. It sees you before you see it. The ray lies on the substrate. On it, in it, what you will. The ray is prone, adoringly, to a decent bottom. Without an appropriately sandy, muddy or gravelly one, the ray cannot bury itself, which it does both in self-protection and with a view to prey. Vivisepulture is its lifestyle. Now you don’t see it, now you do. Then not now again. The ray blends in with the substrate, altering appearance, what is around disappearing into it, eye encrypting camouflage.

All these words, ravaged from scratch.

You say the ray, concerning this solitary surreal tea-tray, this creature of clairvoyant charactery, and all is lost already. The ray is stationary, as if invisible, a nocturnality. You call it
it
, and ditto, lost already.

To say the ray is stationary is to invoke the question of singularity, this solitary ray, straightaway. It is a great problem, shield-shaped, you might suppose. Really, it is enough to put the world in disarray. To bring such a creature to account, to arraign it: that’s out with the bathwater in advance, when it comes to the ray. It’s categorically different from man or woman. The woman is this one, a writer, for example, not woman, the man this man, a lawyer, say, not man. ‘The ray’ operates incommensurably. It can be understood generically, as a term for all the rays that ever existed, including the countless millions in deep time, bearing in mind that deep time at once somewhere no one will ever be visiting and, to coin a phrase, the substrate of the present (see above). Or ‘the ray’ can mean just this or that one,
singularly. Language wrecks the ray. Revealingly perhaps, the comparison doesn’t hold in the same way in the case of children. The child is closer, in this respect if not in others, to the ray. But the ray is a problem, insuperably so. Or rather, it is an aporia. The ray wrecks language. The revolutionary ray: you reach for words, you riparate. You dream of a new vocabulary, a new reality. Or it dreams you.