Stone Gods (17 page)

I saw him pack the Egg into his headband, and begin his descent, quick and clean as rain over the rock-face, moving down and down towards success.

And then, him still high, and a light wind rippling him, I saw his rival, the oaf, grabbing his way round the cliff with heavy hands, dislodging rocks with his feet like paddles, and I saw him meet a ledge and crouch on it, and as Spikkers came down, light and quiet as a new beginning, this oaf grabbed him by the back of the neck and took the Egg.

I cried out, but the wind tore my voice away, and if either man heard me, he gave no sign. Spikkers struggled and fought, but the lightness of his body and his quick strength were no match for the brute who seized him above his head and dashed him over the cliff.

* * *

And in the air a body falling. And in the air a body falling like a star. And in the air a body falling like a star out of its orbit. And in the air a body falling like a star out of its orbit and corning to earth and seen no more.

I swam to him and lifted him from the rock into the sea and towed his limp body round the coast to the shore of our cave and carried him out of the water.

I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.

Do not die.

Night comes long and straight and his breath comes in shorter bursts like an animal that has run too far.

In the sky there is a star called Holland and the tall wooden houses of Amsterdam are clear to be seen.

'In my dream,'
he says, 'the island is thick-forested like fur, and green and dark and alive. The waterfalls flow again and there is a lake as hidden as sleep.
Where are we going, Billy?
' he says.

To him I say, 'We are coming by Ship to the Amstel River, and look at us now with bales of cloth and a palm tree in a barrel. A canal-boat will take us along the Singel and stop us at a house where the door is open.' I held up the Delft tile, like a mirror to his face.

He smiled.

'Go in,' I say to him. 'Go in.'

And he passes through the door. And in the house he must make ready till I have finished my business here and come back to him.

A white Bird opens its wings.

I was travelling home on the Tube tonight and I noticed that someone had left a pile of paper on the seat opposite. It was late, I was a bit drunk, a bit bored, a bit restless, so I swung across the centre gap from one bum-soiled seat to another and carefully shifted the bundle on to my knees. It was yellow, pre-war, you don't see much paper these days, maybe scrap, maybe rubbish, maybe old instruction manuals translated into English from the Japanese.

The Stone Gods
, said the title. OK, must be anthropology. Some thesis, some PhD. What's that place with the statues? Easter Island?

I flicked through it. No point starting at the beginning — nobody ever does. Reading at random is better: maybe hit the sex scenes straight away.

At night in the belly oj the Ship, I lay beside Spike and thought how strange it was to lie beside a living thing that did not breathe.

A love story, that's what it is — maybe about aliens. I hate science fiction.

There's a name and address on the front page. I wonder if there'll be a reward? Or is that just for cats and dogs?

I had another look:
Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

Is that true?

This isthe story of my life. Before I was born, curled up like a universe waiting to happen, my mother heard that my father was not going to marry her. It was too late to do anything about me: I was coming, ready or not, and whatever I was, I was there. She was going to give birth.

My gtandmother believed in Trial by Baby. Take the thing in your arms and go from door to door until someone says yes.

They had no television, no phone, no car. They hadn't been long of rationing. The streets where they lived were a junk-yard of bomb damage and scrap. I was born on a metal-framed bed, horsehair mattress, spring coils, so much blood they had to burn the sheet. But I was born, and nothing anyone can do about that.

My advice to anyone is, 'Get born.'

So here I come, turning like a skydiver, head first, my skull soft and open where the stars come in, and one star just visible like the bud of a horn. Here I am, using the edge of the star like a laser to cut through the tissue of the uterus, a light-edged baby into a star-cut world.

The bed broke. The springs in the middle had been tied together with fencing wire. It snapped. My mother folded in half, and I was pulled out like a calff rom under her. Don't cut the cord: get some fencing wire and tie me to her.

The line that fed me, the line that breathed me, the line that tapped messages from the world outside, the line that was a tightrope between her fear and my joy, the line I would have to cross, some day, and never come back. The line that is the first line of this story —
I was born
. The line that had nothing to read between it — being only one, one only, my lifeline.

Cut it.

* * *

My grandmother cut the cord with her teeth. Her teeth were false and the greasy, bloody umbilical cord caught in her top plate and pulled it out. She went to soak it in Steradent and left my mother to her first milking.

Joy. I wanted to be born. I wanted to be here. Fear. She didn't k now what to do next. She was young, seventeen. My grandmother was not yet forty. But it was a different world then because the world is always remaking itself, and after the war there was a lot of remaking to be done. I was born in the ashes of the fire, and I learned how to burn.

I remember reading that Samuel Beckett remembered life in the womb. Everyone believes him because he won the Nobel Prize; I doubt that anyone will believe me, or if they do they won't understand that it's possible to be telling the truth even in the moment of invention.

I remember my mother telling my grandmother that she wanted to make a new life. They'd been going to Ireland on a boat, her and my dad, but now he was going and she wasn't, and she said she couldn't sit at home and look after me. I was knocking on her stomach wall trying to be heard —
'Don't stay at home! We can go together. I don't eat much.'
She didn't hear me.

She was frying bacon in a burned pan on the gas stove. I was pressed against the slot where the grill pan goes. There's not much room in there, unless you're a grill pan. I can see why no one wants to spend their life in front of an oven.

We did mopping and washing. She was tired. We went to sleep under the quilt, and it was the last night that I would ever spend inside her.
Keep me in the mop bucket or the slot where the grill pan goes, but don't let me go because I love you.

Love without thought. Love without conditions. Love without promises. Love without threats. Love without fear. Love without limits. Love without end.

I think she did love me, for a minute, for a second, for the time it takes to remember, for the time it takes to forget. We had twenty-eight days together and then I was gone.

My grandmother went up and down the streets, and it would have been easier to give away a rabbit or a chicken. 'Nobody wants it,' she said, but that wasn't true: the one person who wanted it was thle one person it wanted too.

We slept in the same bed; there was no other. They wound the gaping spring round a bit of wood and jammed a broom across the frame. My father said he'd marry my mother if she gave the baby away. Then they could start again. Then they could have a new life. But I was a new life.

It was a long time ago.

— I was born in the year 1632 in the city of York, of a good family, tho' not of that country ...

That's not me, that's Robinson Crusoe. Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land. My mother's body split open and I was the cargo for salvage. I suppose you have to believe there is something worth salvaging, and with me it seems that nobody did.

There are so many stories of barrels and pots and chests and trunks that haul up on to the beach, and they may contain treasure, or they may be spoiled, or they may be just ballast and rocks. The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe — no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. Spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on a time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents.

And to make life more difficult, babies who come as treasure bring with them their own magician. Open the box and it may be empty. What's inside may already have been spirited away. By the time you get to it there may be nothing there. Rot? Evaporation? A vanishing trick? Are all those empty adults born so? Or did something happen in the box?

There I was, sealed and locked, chances of a piece of gold inside me as chancy as tapping a barrel of rum. The seawater gets inside, life is easily adulterated. Only in stories does the thing come out fortunate and clean, gifted and golden. But there's another story within that story — the toad, the beggar, the silted-up well, the pigsty, the stinking sludge, the dark cave, the wounded deer, the forest where nothing grows. The buried treasure is really there, but it is buried.

Here I am, arms and legs like handles and levers. Open me if you can. Carry me off. Take me with you.

This new world weighs a yatto-gram.

Shipwrecked on the shore of humankind, the baby can only hope that someone will keep it until it is old enough to keep itself. That didn't happen to me. My mother had the doctor in and he filled in a certificate in flowing blue fountain pen that said I was healthy and normal and that there was no reason why I should not be adopted.

My grandmother took this piece of paper with her on her rounds, hoping that bright eyes and no infectious diseases would persuade a gambler to try their luck. But the initial investment was high — feed it, clothe it, send it to school, and it might turn out rotten, after all.

At night, coming back from my visits round the world, my mother was there, worn and anxious, but I didn't know those words, 'worn', 'anxious', I knew only that she cried and then I cried too, not for wet or hunger but for the fear that was slowly darkening the joy, the way a shadow crosses the floor.

There are things that you can do with a baby you can't keep. You can set off one day and come home without her because she can't scent her way back like a dog, or make her way home over the rooftops like a cat. Wrap her up well and put her down and there she stays, wailing till some passer-by might take her up out of pity.

My mother set off. We went for a walk. A bonfire gone out but warm in the ashes was burning on the edge of a derelict street. She laid me gently in the ashes to save me getting cold, and went away.

She walked for two hours and came back. I was asleep. She picked me out of the cinders and we went home.

There were other attempts: the conductor saw what she'd done and made the bus driver turn off-route, right round and behind her, and the conductor stood on the open platform, me in his arms, with the bus going at walking pace, in the wrong direction, and me the size of a sardine, watching the shine on the badge of his hat.

She's walking along, crying, trying not to look, then the conductor pulls her up on to the platform with one hand, and sits her on the torn leather bench seat at the back, and plunges his hand into the bag of coppers and sixpences that is the fare money, and just gives her a handful, there and then, breaking open his ticket machine so that the bus company won't know what he's done. She takes the money. She takes me. She goes home.

Love is not easy to leave behind.

The doctor comes back. This place is unsanitary, bleak, damp; the mother's health is at stake. The baby has a weak chest. No good under the quilt on the broken bed. There's a place the baby caan go, and soon some new parents can be found. It will be better. Better to begin again. This time she won't have to leave me and falter. This time someone will take me away, and they won't bring me back. You don't know that, when you're a baby. You go with them, you go with anybody, and for a little while, it's all right, but there's only one face, only one smell, only one voice. Where is she?

* * *

You never stop looking. That's what I found, though it took me years to know that's what I've been doing. The person whose body I was, whose body was me, vanished after twenty-eight days. I live in an echo of another life.

It's like one of those shells with the sea inside it. Not every day, not often, but put it to your ear and the other life is still there.