Murmur Page 13

  “And you were going to stay there, in the room, and not come down to see me off. I had to say. My heart was thumping and you must have seen. I had to tell you what to do, and you looked blank, like you do now. Oh Christ. You haven’t any idea.”

  She really laughs at that, then hides her face.

  The how of life is unconscious, a kinesis switched on or off. The what is giving birth to live young in the corner—learning who it is and furnishing its own sensorium, the room of life—before the equations open and close the door and everything is how it is outside, and dark, with no more light.

  *

  Now it is growing cold. My family go south and die.

  The golden teardrop of the cave’s entrance freezes, and there is only crystal day, fading, the mountains and the plain and air covered by ice. I sleep. It is a long and measureless winter. Eventually the thaw begins. Bulldozed material piles up outside the cave during the melt. The sun is not so much altered, but kindlier and seasonal as misfit streams burst through a new ravine, carved from the plain, and wash the glacial moraine away. The age of pole-flints, scrub, and tundra disappears. The sea rises. Forests of birch and alder move in, rivers, coastal settlements appear—people at rest.

  A show is anything that happens on a stage.

  A man hunts deer and has good teeth. His people set up fishing camps, their huts have frames of branches bound together by tree bark, the roofs are hide. Sometimes the sea thrashes about for days, and then the people take revenge, staying at home to whittle harpoons from their antlers, seasoning the tips in fire and working them into a point. The tempered weapons smell of hair. The animal’s backstrap is cut out and its fibers used to sew the people’s clothes. There are so few of them, the men, the women, and their silent gazing young. Five thousand in this cold peninsula.

  They know my cave but have not found my bones. The people move with the solstice. Wild men, exiles, turn up and spend thin evenings watching fire, breaking mussels, tracing a map in the ashes to work out where they’ll be the day after, next moon, next year; or drawing a rabbit. Those ears! One year the fishermen capture a stag. The shaman in the tribe works holes into its cranium, to which he fixes painted hide, a headdress that transforms the man into a mutable creature, man, animal, insect, and tree. He dives into creation to meet fear.

  He sees and does not speak. He feels the land changing its shape.

  The world has fallen, far beyond the northern limits of vision. Across the country, many strides, the place of strange tongues, trade and encounter; the great cord tying everyone to the unknowable beyond has come undone. An inundation at first light. The shaman can hear voices raised in powerless alarm. He looks into a sea-fed pool, ripples of something he cannot explain. The elder’s son arrives shouting to interrupt his sense-making. The boy’s shadow darkens the pool, his hunting pouch brimful of shells to show the magician. The shaman watches the shadow and feels a deep cold pain, as of a person drowning, shocked into a total clarity of being with the seawater rocking at eye level, then nothing more.

  He knows that other boys have become shells themselves.

  A wave has swept those shadow-lives away and cut the cord: all this is written in the pool’s lichens, its crustaceans and kelp. A bigger push of water overfills the pool and from their nursery the little crabs are lifted and expelled.

  A few survivors in the East—one child, women, and elders who were garnering in the wood—know they have lost their grip on order in the world. They ask their own shaman, their shadow-magician, for saving lore and guiding prophecy, but prophecy is not advice. It cannot save. You can’t escape its fulfillment because it’s you, and how it is to have a life, which is to leave it wondering.

  Consider these events proceeding from that long, arduous fight with the mammoth, the cosmic flickering of causes and effects, glimpsed in the last second of how it was to be a hunter in the Pleistocene—leaving, well, what?

  A droplet from the ceiling of the cave and a lid falling shut. The key turned in a secretaire or jeweler’s box. Winter, a circuit diagram of trees; and winter fairs, the times we are wanton, where everything that happens has a wild intensity—that child sliding across the ice, that gaff lad fucking in the chairoplane’s paybox—which riot repeats itself in rides and roundabouts that from a distance whir faintly, their sound receding like the mechanism of a buried watch.

  *

  I do remember who they are.

  Trentham exclaims: “It’s good to have you back!” And I say, yes, it’s good. An understatement there. The words are thick but definite. Good to be back. We laugh. I know these people are around me and it seems I’m responding, but at the same time I’m in here, in Pryor’s room, and this is where I feel myself to be. I hear their world. I cannot see how to communicate with it. The room’s walls tent inward, billow like balloon silk with every word that’s said by us—Trentham, June, me.

  The doctor, for his part, is calm. His words walk down the corridor of the mirror: hard-shoe can-can’ts marking the limits of responsibility.

  “I understand you’re going to the fair on the way home. That’s good. Well, take it easy but enjoy yourselves!” The walls inflate, and he and June confirm something. “Oh, work can wait … of course … of course, to watch … no, no, I can’t see any reason why he shouldn’t, why you shouldn’t, just as long as it’s not too busy or loud. Stick to the stalls, maybe? See what the noise is like. And not too long.” And June agrees, no, not too long, and I say, don’t worry, and, if I will, I can.

  The words come out the wrong way round. They understand.

  I blink, open my eyes, and they’re all there, as you’d expect: June, flushed with terrible relief, holding herself, thinking despite the smile, “God knows what this has done to us, our unborn child.” Trentham thin, curved, a standard lamp. I’m on a bed with cot edges and I can smell the jug of water, wilting flowers, the tracery of cords and wires attached to me, the warm plastic of monitor casings.

  A wheelchair waits, hangdog and empty-mouthed.

  But then I close my eyes and open them again and I am in the room behind the room, the window darker, giving onto backs at King’s in which the long shadows of medieval fairs flicker, the trade in salt and fish, samphire, the roasting spits, the leather and the wool merchants. None of this fantasy, none of the objects in this inner room are memories or perceptions. They’re neither past nor present, yet they form a kind of boundary. They’re states of mind and real appearances and as I think of them they come closer, a book of mathematical puzzles next to the horrible pupa, still growing in the yellow afternoon; a letter from a physics schoolmaster who says he very much enjoyed my radio broadcast, and that the rub in teaching computers to “think” is getting them to recognize a new relationship …

  The strange veracity of these impressions seems to constitute a mood. Moods are like fields of force—ungraspable and everywhere. They permeate the whole of consciousness and color it, though they are never it.

  Whatever it is, it is frightening, with bellyings in the silken walls that stiffen suddenly into mainsails as I consider where and when I am, the date, the location. I have a hollow, dropped feeling that’s manifested in the room—the mirror tilts, the newly lighted Trentham lamp falls over on its bulb, the long green lawn outside the window moves. The eel develops limbs and teeth and turns into a baby alligator, stuffed, in a vitrine. I am a gypsy in a caravan of curiosities.

  They’ve put me in the chair, that’s what it is.

  They’ve driven me across the city to the Fair, and my reactions—to the cold, the autumn reds—are plausible. I see them flexing in the depths of the pupa, fattened and growling now, a womb of pulverized grub-thoughts and biomimicry.

  “Alec,” June says, “we won’t go right into the Fair, it’s just too loud and dangerous, but we can get up close and smell the candyfloss. The horrible burgers, you know.”

  Trentham admits he can’t see the attraction, but he’s baffled by such things because they’re eccentric, a
taste set free. And June agrees with him and for a moment pennies drop, in some mental roulette, because they’re treating me as if I’ve gone away or been exchanged and will not ever really understand again. Perhaps it’s for the best. They do not look too long at me. They will be married when I’m gone.

  I say, oh yes. I point across the common to the angling pond, the cars and transit vans along the old rat-run, fishers like cut-price Rodin figurines, and couriers having a nap, some of them sleeping overnight and waking to a carless dawn, the goblet hornbeams leading down a common path to views of Battersea.

  *

  The Station’s chimneys churn out huge white clouds that everyone ignores. The dream of reason generates such silent but immense power!

  My fallen body is at one Fair—Clapham Common—in the early years of our century, the twenty-first and last, and slowly answering questions, admiring sights. The rides are astronomical—Meteor, Vortex, Gravity. They tip their human cargo upside down and tumble it safely; behind the music there’s parental boredom, not just from the parents on the rides but from the rides themselves. They seem to pant between journeys that go nowhere, swinging and swaying slightly, like a father giving piggybacks, as children scramble on and off. Both Trentham and my wife are sure the atmosphere has changed over the years. No one takes money on the rides; you buy tokens. There are far fewer gaff lads from reformatories working the grounds, seducing girls, tapping up customers. June says it’s so impersonal-looking, these days, no one-arm bandits, no toy stalls with quoits and bagged-up goldfish for prizes.

  We’re on the outside of the fence, a sectioned chain-link shield with warnings about dogs and thievery. Inside, unlikely things happen. Some people have a rotten time and others fall in love. I love the light rain and the smell of chips, the way I’m free to shrink away from the edges.

  I miss my mother terribly. I miss my other selves I took for granted, youth and bravery. I know with certainty that when I see people in dreams—people I’ve never met whom I know to be close friends—my mind is not playing a trick, it’s sorting possibilities. I hear myself say, “Just imagine how it used to be.”

  June looks at me, trying to understand, impenetrably furious.

  My inner eye and person, in retreat from whatever the hospital has done to me, have cycled down the road and back in time. Together we take turns about the Pleasure Gardens in the spring of 1951. So much to choose from, such license! Battersea Fun Fair’s jangling rhythms and screams!

  It seems, at first sight, from the painted rides, the shies and shows and girls watching the gaff lads walk on moving platforms like young gods, that this is what a fair has always been for laborers, ex-servicemen, the working class: a spell. Those with the time and money to imagine a future are elsewhere at the Festival of Britain on the South Bank, looking at pavilions and colored banners and displays of Land, People, and Home Design. Churchill said privately that he was rather bored by it. As if it’s that simple. The progressives and atavists are aspects of the same person and ghost each other like the showman’s wife who does accounts and runs a booth and even plays the Woman with a Bat’s Body when Josephine (who used to be a freak but wants to be a teacher) has her mathematics class in Lambeth North.

  We’re here and we’re not here, the survivors of war and injury, seeking some primal recompense, the mood of innocence, horror, and glee that comes from being what you are, a filled-out shape making the most of it.

  We seek quite hard in 1951 and I am shivering.

  Amid the big machines in this north quarter of the park—the Dodgems and the Water Chute, the Roller Coaster I would never trust, the Goldmine Cakewalk underneath, the centrifugal Rotor and its Spider companion, the swings, the carousels and Haunted Mirror Maze—there is a simpler attraction, the boating lake, with a café. Rolls and butter, a cup of tea, all in (not bad) for just 6d. The wind roars off the wrinkled Thames. Couples with young children throw crumbs at fluffed-out ducks or sit at tables talking the kids through the things they’ve done so that the recent memories can deepen like a puddle sky into familiarity (“and we’ve been on Nellie the steam engine, and it was—like a cartoon, yes it was. A whistle and a weathervane!”).

  At a far trestle, with her little boy and girl (twins? eight?), sits one young mother, in a coat and scarf. She has a nice dress on beneath the coat—a collared purple hand-me-down. It is her best, soft wool lapels, a brooch. A little old for her, and not the newest look. She likes it nonetheless: it makes her feel she counts. She holds a balloon on a stick. Her daughter clasps a small bottle of Clayton’s Sparkling Orange and sips it through a bendy straw. Her brother watches, waiting for his turn.

  “Now me. Can I—Mummy—”

  His mother tells him there is plenty left, but there is not.

  “Mummy—”

  His sister carries on drinking. Eventually, she puts the bottle down, and its light wobble on the tabletop confirms its emptiness. He absolutely knows he can’t complain. There is a mouthful left if he can get the straw in the right place.

  I must be visibly staring, because the woman smiles.

  “You took your time!” she says.

  I come into my body with a jolt. I’ve been to the café. I’m holding a tin tray with one more bottle of orange on it and two green mugs of scalding tea.

  Another couple at a nearby table get up, grin, and walk into the afternoon.

  “It isn’t very busy here today,” the boy says, thoughtfully. It’s when he doesn’t say what he might mean by this—that I have no excuse for being slow—that I am struck by how tactful he is. And then, irrelevantly, as his latest obsession comes back to him: “Do you know, Daddy, that you get into the garden—or—the island in the middle of a maze if you, if you—”

  Someone has given him a book of puzzles that is full of inky marks. There are chapters on mazes, magic squares, and probability. He has it next to him, his reading for the train. He looks up anxiously, lost in the maze of his new thought, and as he does so, the park halts. The rides suspend their motion on an in-breath, with a pause so brief it doesn’t jump the film, the lucky Big Wheel cars stopped at their zenith near the topmost branches of the London planes, cars halted elsewhere in a differently angled plane of rotation—the Spider, caught spinning its web.

  “I know the answer,” says the little girl. “But nobody ever asks me.”

  “Darling,” her mother says, “we know you know. You know so many things, but Julius is finding out. He has to learn; you don’t need to. You’re just a procedure. You only do the things you’ve been told to—”

  She looks at me, my girl, her eyes steady, a rim of orange round her lips, her tables of instruction so absorbed she doesn’t have to consult them.

  “You put your hand on one wall at the entrance,” says my human son, “and keep it there, and if you keep touching the sides as you go farther in, you’ll end up in the—island in the middle of the maze.”

  After a deadly pause, my daughter says, “Daddy, are you a real daddy?”

  “That is a very good question. What do you think?”

  Her shoulders give a little slump, the park around us jerks and people scream with merriment. “I think … I think I’ve got the answer in me somewhere but it’s not … put in.” She casts a glance sideways. Mummy is being shown a square.

  “Go on.”

  She fiddles with the straw. “I know you’re thinking all these thoughts for me. But it feels like they’re mine, and it’s a funny feeling. Sometimes in the morning, when I look in the mirror—it’s blank. I know that’s how it’s meant to be, but … I’ve begun to notice it! I think, ‘There it is, blank again.’ This morning, when I got up, it was white, the blank … a sort of cloud forming, bulging, and now—I see—”

  “What do you see?”

  “Something … I don’t like it. Daddy!”

  She edges closer on the trestle bench, and grips my arm, but it is not a reassuring sensation, this need. It is a sense of her power, and just beginning to be unders
tood. The strength of her fingers exceeds her grasp of it. Her ragged breathing is the breathing of some perfect predator delivered from captivity into a vicarage. It comes in fast, connected puffs—the pleated billows rising from the power station’s stacks.

  Mother and son are keen to play hoopla and win some fish. The stalls are dotted everywhere about the park, about the feet of rides and novelty constructions like the Guinness Clock. We go via the Haunted Mirror Maze, through which my boy races, his left arm held out to the wall, to test his clever theory. He drags his tired mummy along and they are soon finished and out the other side. I hear voices and laughter fading, like an audience, into the dusk, and I am left inside a lumber room of tall glasses in ultraviolet light with my daughter. It’s cool in here and very quiet, not an interior, as such, but the anterior—to speech, society, the sensations—and it is asking something of me like the gulp of water in a lock.

  I stand in front of a dress mirror in a swing-hinge frame. Push at the top, the ceiling drops down into view; at the bottom, your feet, the floor rise up. We angle it so that it’s level and I’m looking, straight on, at a mystery.

  No haunted mirrors plural, as it turns out, only one.

  “You’re changing,” says the little girl. “You’re lots of different people, lots of things, and all at once. Look at you, there! A boy, another dying boy, a young woman, an island with black crows, a man with antlers on his head, a swan mid-air, a talking guelder rose, that nurse with—ugh—a needle, naked men doing—”

  “Yes, maybe don’t look too closely …”

  The images flutter and pass and double back. The glass goes black. It fills with light. I’m a homunculus. A beauty queen. A boy. A girl. A judge. A maggot, and an axis picked out on a cell. A person with no memory is leafing through the album of his life—of life itself. We stand in front of this untitled show, shyly amused, as if we were the only people at a lavish matinee.