EAT!
by Alison Wells
She walked like Quasimodo, limp-shuffling down the road. Her hair was long and briary, she had talon fingers, blinked continuously.
I surmised that she was eighteen years and on some kind of edge. Folded over life itself, a knife blade of endings and beginnings.
The paths were pockmarked, potholed. She bent down, scooped the dust bowl gravel into her mouth, the debris poured through her fingers, her teeth crunched against the stone. On she limped down the hopeless through road: boarded up windows, graffiti slashed on pebbledash, the frantic bang banging of jimmied back doors.
Sated on the pebbles she snatched leaves off Griselinia, chlorophyll filled. She made tiny teeth marks round the edges. She gulped them whole like oysters. She ran her fingers against low walls until they fuchsia bled. She licked the joints of bricks, cream in a biscuit. She crushed bees on her tongue, fizzy bright sherbet.
Slinking, dunking, slim, drinking from the blue swathes of the sky, velvet vessels. She turned to me.
“I’m alive!” she said in a voice that was dying.
Allium lollipops. Sugarcraft petals. Grass like salad. I kept close watch.
She began to run. Snapped sticks, like toffee liquorice. Filled her face with forsythia stars. Sucked nectar from the first flowers. ‘The world!’ she said. She was laughing now.
Her hospital gown became the sleek silver shimmer, a girl by a river in a cotton frock, mud between toes in a meadow. Years, endless.
I knew her! Anise Fish fled back, running backwards, to the hospital. I knew her. I was the doctor. I fed buttercup honey into the drip in her arm. With her other hand she reached out through the window, plucked the cotton wool cumulus for her wounds, then ate it instead, mouth marshmallow. She snapped the frail wafer of the moon in two and let it dissolve in her mouth.
“I’m alive!” she said, in a voice that was living, still living. I went to attend to the dead.
It was no longer the same. When the relations came in, solemn and ready their coats smelled of wind and blossom. With every rotten consolation I tasted the grit of the sand and the brine and slime of seaweed. Later the world was beautiful but I couldn’t save her. I fled out of doors made of ice. The earth tasted like chocolate. I drank the sea until I drowned in it.
CH1 APPREHENSION
(Interview Room: Hospital)
Detective Savage: How was the girl apprehended?
Doctor: He gave me advance warning. He was afraid for her.
Detective Mike Savage: You were waiting for her in a particular, peculiar place.
Detective Dorian Merriman: You apprehended her at the crypt of her mother, Beatrice Fish?
Doctor: (Head in hands, mumbles) Yes, these things come full circle. (Gets up, walks round and round, goes to the window.)
Savage: Do you hear the noise outside? (Joins the Doctor at the window) Look at the cut of them. Chewing on metal, swallowing mortar…
Merriman. Do you have a clue what’s the problem Doctor?
Doctor: It’s pica – a psychological condition characterised by the ingestion of inedible things.
Merriman: In your expert opinion, is this something to do with Anise Fish?
Savage: Would you be thinking she might be the cause of this madness?
Doctor: (Mutters) That jingle, jangle, the sounds of her insides…skin like stretched canvas…
Savage: D’ye see what you’re doin’ right now doctor, you’re chewing on your glasses. Making a holy show…What’s the story?
Merriman: You seem apprehensive. Is there something you’re not saying?
Doctor: (Throws down the glasses, exasperated) I knew her, I was the Doctor. The things that happen eat away at you…
Savage: Spit it out doctor. Come on…
Doctor (Head in hands, mumbling) Can’t you imagine..? What do you think..? It was my job to save her.
It was my job to save her.
She had to come back or she would die of all the sharp, forgotten things inside her. I went to help her at the grave.
Colin’s Dad had brought her back. “Here she is, here’s Anise.”
I knew her. I was the Doctor. Her white cotton frock. Her body lithe like wires, despite the hunchback. She moved like waterfalls and starlings…
She looked at me and flinched. Anise…Fish. She was slippery and gill gilded, salt encrusted from her time on the cliffs, glistening with flume and cuckoo spit and sap as if she’d swum through the sunken underwater limbs of the petrified forest. Her mouth flowered, violent with petals, violet and vermillion. She looked as if she was dying. I stared, remembering and then she ran. Jingle, jangle.
I sent the orderlies after her. They were all in white, immaculate gloves, she blinked against the glare of them. They took hold to stop her scarper. She felt the pinch of their fingers, they winced at the knife of her bones. They were dressed in long white overalls like house painters as if they had come down ladders of cool lickable metal to get her.
I shook Colin’s Dad’s hand. The look she gave him. “I had to help,” he pleaded, the words lost in his moustache, his hands turned outward. He said he thought she would die, all the things she’d eaten, all the things she’d kept inside.
I said I would take her now. I indicated the car. She thrashed in the orderlies grip. “I didn’t kill her,” she protested. “I didn’t kill her.”
Should I have taken her hands and smashed that mantra once and for all? Should I have admitted “You did not kill her, Anise Fish”? Kept on saying it, until she could take it in, until she could swallow it whole? Instead her hands flailed as the men pulled her backwards. I followed, spitting bark from my teeth.
Now, outside the hospital the mob was disconsolate. Wailing and screaming and eating still. Munching on leaf sludge, chewing the metal from cars. A contagion of pica. I must say this now. It is my expert professional opinion that the trouble originated with Anise Fish. That following the initial trigger she fell prey to her own neurosis. Then, somehow, like sound waves getting louder, the shape and make of her pain struck a chord with the people and their own losses. Over time, that identification amplified, like a great clanging bell calling all the townspeople, singing in the dark caverns within them, so that in the end, they lost control, and became voracious, and in the case of one, awful things were done. So yes, in the final analysis, I must concede that it was Anise Fish, responsible for everything.
It wasn’t just me, who thought it. It was already known, by everyone. You are poison Colin’s mother, had told her. “We were fine before you.” Anise herself mentioned this, when I first found her. She was folded in two with guilt.
The last time I’d admitted Anise to the hospital, she’d escaped. Now with the mob roaring outside, I observed from the doorway as she lay in the ward. Leaning in, I almost cried out in pain as one of the architrave’s flaky fibres pierced my skin.
Anise had started all this. Then she and Colin’s Dad had fled into the wilderness. To escape? Save the mob from her contagion? If only psychosis could be that neat! But it’s multi-layered, organic – rooted in the brain – and situational – the underlying disposition triggered by circumstance.
Alongside the town’s manic thriving, the mob’s agitation, a sickness underneath…that relentless emptiness. I pressed my gut. I prised the splinter from my palm and fed it into my mouth.
I saw the nurse peer outside, fearful, her neck stretching then pulling back. “Look at them! Eating the parking meters, munching on leaf sludge!”
The spit in her testament was evident. She said the town had gone mad. Rife was the Council’s strife, she reported, saplings ripped from the recreational areas of housing estates, people chewing the leaves, and gnawing on twigs. Nibbling bricks, bricks and blocks more than anything, then manhole covers and copper pipes which whistled as people consumed. The mob kept on, they could not be cured or dissuaded. And now this congregation!
“That crowd outside!” the nurse exclaimed, tutting. She pulled at Anise, put pillows behind. She fussed.
Outside the window, a sudden frenzy of flashing. The cameras came nearer. “Knees! Knees!”
“Anise! Anise!” it was. They were out for her.
I watched as the nurse snapped the curtains closed. Shut the outside out and the crowd shouting. She regarded Anise. I heard her mention my name. I stepped further back.
The nurse tugged against the white sheets and stared pointedly at Anise. “There’s people in Africa, the Doctor said, that have a custom of eating chalk. White dirt, they call it. To them it’s normal. Doctor said it wasn’t…psychotic…”
She became brisk: checking the monitor, adjusting the drip. She shuddered. “But them out there, they must be…”
Psychotic Anise whispered. Psychotic a choking, wretched, retching word. That guttural stop, like someone vomiting their own mind. But this illness Anise had was not wrenching. I knew that, it was a tender administration to the gap within her.
The nurse ochóned on. It was all the council could do to reinstate the municipal walls alongside footpaths, she revealed. There was a fella with the sole job of pointing the new masonry. There was a fella with the sole job of guarding the concrete – the children were licking the bucket like cake mix. It was like the whole world was being taken asunder and they wanted to consume every bit.
Whatever about the mob, Anise herself had had to be apprehended. I had gathered her from her wild adventure and brought her back to rid her of all the gathered things inside her. Still lurking at the door I watched her.
Lying lank in the haggard hospital bed could Anise still feel the life outside: sticks, twigs, paths that rose, roots, dapple, pine needle carpets and the scaled skin of trees? Had I done wrong to bring her in? For now, in this hospital life: ragged breath, constant motion, cloth swish. Had I done wrong in retrieving her at her mother’s grave – both of us leaning against the cold stone?
But it was my job to save her. I’ve been watching all along.
Another dark November, earth tilt, night creep. Samuel Fish leaning over his books of alchemic symbols and equations, head bent under the forbidding x’s of the library’s latticed windows. Anise at seven or eight years, slip of a thing watching him, pretending not to be there, like me.
The next morning, I was at the grave when I saw Samuel Fish arrive. The cut of him! The reason I must stay vigilant for Anise! I retreated to the trees, watching as Samuel staggered towards the grave. He knelt on the grass, keening over the simple headstone that said simply Beatrice, and her span of less than 30 years. What ridiculous unmerited grief! As if he owned all sorrow! Beatrice…
Then Anise, following on, bent, apologetic. She hid among the black stems of the yew.
Samuel took a vial from his pocket, poured liquid, reverently, into the soil, clasped hands in invocation. It went dark, cloud shrouded the sun. But the grave did not open. Anise leaned in to the crook of the tree’s branches, feeling the bark at her cheek. She lifted her hand and touched the bark in a way so familiar, of her mother.
Samuel raised his head and stared at the headstone. His black hair shone. He stood, staggering a little on the rough ground. He took his hand out of his pocket, scattered something. Seeds.
When he was done the small girl watched her father lurch away between the graves, then disappear, suddenly down a slope, as if he’d fallen under the ground. From out of the yews a murder of ravens descended on the grave, pecking and pecking. Anise first mesmerised, then ran towards them, an eerie yawp escaping her mouth. The black cloud of birds ascended into the trees. I watched Anise kneeling on the grave, raking her fingers through the matted grass. Then she’d backed away and went down the slope that had eaten up her father.
It was my job to save her. I was, I am, the Doctor.
I go into the room. I speak to the nurse and then dismiss her.
I move close, chewing the ends of my glasses. There are flowers in a vase, I can almost taste them. I look at Anise, the sheets starched and white – tight around her in her own oblong plot. I see her expression as the pain in her gut rips her asunder. I remember.
I touch the bed, the tightly woven blanket, I could press it between my teeth. Anise sees me. She starts like an animal. None of the sauce of her mother. She’s afraid of me…
She was left with a fool, a limp and dim-witted man.
Despite the birds, Samuel’s endeavours worked, of a sort. In time the grave was gorged with flowers, blood red poppies, daisies and purple loosestrife, clover, tormentil and sage. As if his wife, her mother, dear Beatrice, had never died, as if all were well, unending.
But my brain is filled with noise.
And today the mob still chanting “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.”
CH2 BEEF
Detective Dorian Merriman: You are not just a doctor of the body, you are a doctor of the mind.
Savage: You’re one of those, whaddytheycallits?
Doctor: Yes, a psychiatrist…
Savage: And the young wan, Anise? You were thinking she might be the cause of it?
Merriman: As an expert witness, can you paint a clear picture Doctor? Draw a definitive conclusion, professionally?
Doctor: (Staring into space) I’m thinking of writing a book to make sense of it all…
Merriman: A medical treatise?
Doctor. (Covers his face, then looks up.) No, not that… an ordinary book, for people, to understand
Savage: Understand what?
Doctor: (Gestures towards the sound of the mob.) What has happened to everyone; this greed, this loss, fist in the gob to shore up the hunger…
Savage: But, in the meantime we need you to tell us about the people you dealt with – as patients. The crime requires your co-operation.
Merriman: Where to begin then, Doctor with the story of this psychosis? In the past?
Doctor: (Composing himself)) The formulation of a patient’s case necessitates taking a history. So we begin in the family of origin…
Savage: Tell us then…
Doctor: (Nods)
In the sprawling Big House Anise Fish roamed as a child. Elbows and shoulders in the gloom of the grand hallway, dark panelling, staircase of mahogany. Hopscotch on the lower quarter’s black and white tiles. Cavernous kitchen, sturdy boots echoing on the stone floor, monstrous Aga, metal accoutrements over the fireplace; hooks and springs like articles of torture. Heavy ceramic jugs to lug her milk, and cupboards to hide in until the morgue chill roused her and she fled outside.
Wandering the grounds like a lonely girl from an old novel, silent in the sprawl of its landscape. Strange place, close to the motorway’s moan though muffled through the cloth of trees and grass. The wild encroaching – at one end an enormous granite outcrop – towering over the height of the house. Swathes of lawn and greenery and darker, damper places, forgotten tumbledown summerhouses, dragonflies in the damp ditches.
Only one running along the long ponds weed choked, thick with fish, mutated out of darkness and algae. Only one when there was room for legions of free children. So much wild space, so proximate. Close to the house, gothic and looming, the formal hedges run amok, offshoots thrust out in grotesque caricatures of surprise and shock. Leaves entwined, box shapes bent over. In pathos, lone, lonely statues, happened upon. Rose bushes reverted, sky high, standards gone wild, a mass of bramble and thorn and thickening branches, annexing all gentrification. Anise tours all the spaces until the wind whips up making eddies on the long ponds and showers bluster.
Back in the house, Anise watches the rain battering the sash windows. Off the main hall, an orangerie, of creeping vines, glass, white window frames, plinth nymphs, ladies of alabaster and marble melancholy.
In the empty kitchens, Anise moulds herself to the residual heat of the Aga as she warms some milk. Eating crackers and pizza and porridge that goes on and on out of the same pot. And spaghetti hoops.
Then to the grand hallway, past the library with its view of the long ponds and the vista beyond, the eye running on to the hills and the wild. Years going by, the child, suspended in time, has become an adolescent, wary and wandering, the library and the sitting room darkening against the uncut bushes outside. Anise avoids the sitting room despite the comfort of deep horsehair armchairs, the open fire, the jaded, elegant curtains, old pennies in the lining to keep them weighed down.
All these years, steps retraced, her lengthening footsteps layered on each other like grass tramped paths. Up the grand mahogany staircase, patting the friendly, patient balustrade, paying witness to the small changes falling upon the wood and masonry. Past ancestor’s poignant and villainous portraits.
On this particular day Anise traverses the long corridors, the boards ring out under her feet. Picture windows the length of the gallery are zoetrope frames with hill views, marking out the march of time. Behind ignored heavy doors: room after room of floorboards, cracked coving, dark wardrobes, empty bedsteads.
Up a narrow stone stairs, the wing where nannies once stayed; catastrophes of beady eye, sharp finger; cacophonies of instruction and entreaty. Anise’s room has a bed, a wardrobe, a bedside table with a wrought iron lamp and a small window, too high to see out of without climbing.
Foot clatter on the wooden floor. Anise goes back along another length of abandoned rooms, the east wing. She stops. At the corridor’s far end, the always locked room – her mother’s.
Anise sniffs the air, knows her father is out. Her heart beats loud in her ears. She goes to the door, rests her head against the warm wood. One time she’d fallen asleep against the door and woke to find her father leaning over her, his fingers flexing. She’d fled ahead of his roar. Now Anise pictures her mother’s possessions inside, a photograph, some clue. She bangs the flat of her hands again against the solid wood but there’s no way through.
She was ten years old when her father began dragging large rocks from around the estate and piling them around her mother. He’d buried her in the fairy ring, a clear space left by the woodsmen who planted trees round the plot, a place no-one dared to cross.
That day he was a man stepped out of a dream, half dressed, hair wild, sleeves rolled up on an evening shirt he’d slept in. He started first, trying to force rocks out of the ground, imagined he could edge them along the long wooded avenue to Beatrice’s burial place. He acquired a digger. He drove it with the same ferocity with which he’d shouldered the boulders. He drove it up and down, revving the engine, snatching at the throttle, the reluctant moan of it echoed round the hills, piled bigger boulders round the site of his young wife’s grave.
The strangeness this act ignited his own parent’s revulsion. After Beatrice’s death they’d tried to secure ancient structures of family history, generosity and responsibility around him. Grief was understandable and noble, madness an indulgent luxury. Some men can’t be helped. Samuel Fish was one of them. Worse, his parents fell victims to their son’s grief. Hoping to give him a short, sharp, shock they left him as sole custodian and took the chance to have an adventure. Their car went off the road on the Amalfi coast.
Anise raised herself in the corridors of the Big House. I kept watch, from a distance until we met again.
For every pathology to be switched on there must be some spark, or ignition. The gist of the story she gave to me at our first interception was this. That day, keeping vigil once more at the forbidden door, she heard something, felt a change in the air. And she smelt food, the pull of gravy and meat. Going downstairs, noise was coming from the large dining hall that had remained unused for years. She went in.
There were place settings at either end of the long table; silver knife and forks, bone china plates, cut glass goblets. Her father sat at the far end beyond a triple candelabra. Anise was shot through with shock. In the centre a steaming side of spiced beef on a large platter, the beef rare, pink and running with blood. Samuel’s plate was piled high with the beef. She looked at him, his young cheek, still, his purposeful chewing. She felt so hungry.
He looked up, his knife held aloft. He met her eye. “Anise,” he said, as if it had all been arranged. He nodded at her to sit. The table – made from the lengths of an oak tree that had fallen in a storm -stretched out between them.
Long lonely face, hair black and matt, corrie eyes, unfathomable, eyebrows likes swept grasses, the protruding brow, a man searching and solemn and stopped by grief. That wide brow was the only way in which they resembled each other, although in the heft of his shoulder was there the hint of her slouch? There was nothing that made her feel drawn from his blood.
All the years, he’d been here, and not – a ghost in the panelling – and she, similarly hidden, a girl, running along the walls. It was possible to co-exist in these sliding realities and hardly see each other, know each other.
In the nights she woke to lonely eerie callings from some far away room. Pale and sudden cries, like foxes on the lawn, the mating cries of cats.
In the day she’d become an investigator, creeping along the gravel paths to uncover him. She found a potting shed, his homemade laboratory. She prised her way in through the failing windows, witnessed a self-made scientist’s collections and concoctions; frogs in jars, dissections in formaldehyde, Petrie dishes, vials of phosphorescence and blood, scribbled notepads, undiscernible, heaps of animal bones, a sheep’s skull on a shelf, its eye sockets startling. She gathered all the evidence but could tell nothing from it, could form no deductions apart from the facts, he was still alive, still curious. And if curious there was still hope for him. Why could he then not live?
Why could he then not live? That wretched, hopeless man.
The house had come generations back from privilege against the backdrop of a starving population, Now, Samuel muttered that it was a noose, lack of money a constant obstacle.
Muffled voices from his study, ejaculations of commerce and industry. Men, convincing, and him ripe for the picking. Samuel paying in for schemes that never amounted to anything, that all failed, eventually.
The little girl detective had continued gathering clues from gossip in the community hall, deducing in his potting shed laboratory, loose in the library, creeping down the long corridors of the all but abandoned house and in the night aware and listening. Brittle late-night laughter – some new woman on the stairs. His sordid sadness. Samuel thumping out of his room, angrier than ever, Anise making herself a shadow against walls, sliver-sliding like a fish into the sand, under rocks.
Now, at opposite ends of the table they sat, silently slicing the meat and putting it into their mouths. When Samuel finally spoke, the silence fell, shockingly, in pieces. But he wasn’t loud, Anise strained to hear.
“Well, you’re almost eighteen. Now the house will be sold.”
“What?”
“I’m selling up, what do we want this place for?”
Anise stopped eating. Stopped in this room, part of herself slipped out and around her old haunts. The long ponds, the long corridors, the library, the long vigil, the lime walk, the long years, the forbidden room. A taxonomy of places. The potting shed, her mother’s grave.
“My mother’s grave? We can’t just leave it.”
His eyes seemed to travel over a distant landscape. In the moue of his mouth, distaste.
“Your mother…” An exhausted sigh. “Arrangements will be made. The house will be shut up till the sale goes through.”
“Sell?” she said, ‘hell’ echoed back.
“Yes, sell! What do you expect?” Samuel stabbed at the food, then slumped.
Anise felt the slouch of her back harden, one shoulder raise in defiance. “But what do I do now?”
A trust,” Samuel mumbled into his meat.
“Trust?”
He revived a little as he sipped some wine, “a Trust, you’ll receive your share, if you’re worried about the money.” He patted his lips with a napkin and she hated him.
“Money?” Her chair scraped against the wooden boards, the sound unbearable in the large echoing hall. The metallic taste of blood was in her mouth. On her plate, small chewed pieces left in heaps like a small child’s rebellion.
On the table in front of Anise was a tiny dinner bell. She picked it up, ponderously and put it to her lips. With a quick glance at Samuel, who’d returned to his own oblivion, she slipped it into her pocket. Then, turning her back on him she walked out of the hall and out of the house.
Outside the light stretched and low, like a long note on the violin, dusk commencing, the topiary solemn, the statues doleful. There was a faint, reviving breeze with a hint of sea. Anise Fish strode into town, the bell jingle-jangling in her pocket. She took her usual route – along the dual carriageway with the traffic’s white noise, the tall granite Head at her right, swooping gulls.
Anise walked along the old terraces with their knobbly walls and nodding dahlias, their wooden doors and gates of metal. Peering in windows, admiring the gardens, noting, compassionately, each one. A lamp, a sofa, a woman laughing at a door, family photos in a hallway, a man pulling the curtains, his wife knitting in front of the fire. A boy on a trike up and down a concrete path, a girl kicking a football against a wall.
She took the measure of each house and the lives in them, the stories growing and evolving with her own deeper, maturing view. It pleased her to think of the kindness that could be behind those walls. The tiny gardens were tended by their older, house-proud inhabitants, not like the new houses out of town, poised at the mouth of the motorway, fitted with fake grass.
The house of the tall trees was not so well tended. Firs lined the driveway, the front was unpainted, the fence – two planks once travelling in parallel – was now dilapidated. Anise came to this place where every day for years she’d seen the boy just sitting at a front window. Sometimes the blinds were closed but in the later part of the afternoon the fir cast their shadows and the blinds were raised up.
Today sure enough, there was the boy in the window.
Today she would talk to him.
She went up to the window. The boy didn’t look.
Tap tap “Who are you in there, still in your box?” she called in.
He looked up. “I don’t like the outside,” he said, muffled.
She would not give up. She pressed her nose against the glass. She saw he was in a wheelchair with a white blanket over his legs. He was not just a boy. Stubble speckled his chin.
“You’re like Colin in the story. Do your legs work?”
He shook his head. “What story? How do you know my name?”
“That story about the boy in the room and the girl and the secret garden that saved him.”
Emotions scuttling like clouds. Confusion first, then anger. “Go away,” he said. “Private property. Fuck off.”
Anise Fish laughed. This was what she used to. She felt the jingle jangle of her insides, the faintest ringing of bells. Her face fell away from the glass. She left the house of the tall trees.
Outside still the zombie mob, still chewing on sticks, still compromising the begonias. I could not attend to them, Anise Fish’s surgery was due. In my still intact white coat I made my way again to Isolation. Despite all Warnings and Injunctions the man had come right in. It brought me back, jolt of a thing to see a man like that, bedside, head bent beside a girl who was the spit of her mother and lying back on the pillow, like her, as white as death. But this was now, it was not the same tragedy, it was certainly not the same man. It was Colin’s Dad. Colin’s Dad stopped still, not gnawing the metal, just sitting in vigil, holding Anise Fish’s hand.
CH3 BOOM
Merriman: Do you hear that racket Doctor, outside the window? Do you hear what they’re saying?
Mob: She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.
Merriman: You look startled, doctor. Your hand’s shaking. What are you thinking?
Doctor: He called me – the man with the John Lennon glasses, cornflower blue eyes.
Merriman: Tell us everything…
Doctor: I don’t know everything, I don’t know all the in-between things…
Savage: Are you in two minds?
Doctor: (Confused, rambling) She’s dead… (speaks almost inaudibly) Sometimes what we do is bring them back into the past. Regression. Boom! Boom! Boom! Make them relive the…
Savage: (Gently) No, come on, man. Start again. Tell us what happened,
Doctor: Where do I start?
Savage: With…the John Lennon guy. His name?
Doctor: (Shakes head) I don’t know it. I met his wife Mona, and his son, Colin. He was just ‘Colin’s Dad.’
“I don’t like that new door,” said Colin.
“But the old one was warped.”
The boy was staring. The new door was strange, the stained glass rose, too rich red and dripping. It was what they had chosen but it seemed all wrong now.
“I don’t like things changing,” he said and went back to his room.
His Dad tried once more. The next day, the new door, newly opened, they stood, looking at the world outside.
“You see,” Colin said, “everything’s different!”
“It’s just…you’ve been inside so long. The dreadful weather… your illness, we haven’t been able to get out.”
“It’s not that,” said the boy. He stood in the doorframe not touching the sides of it. He looked at the forsythia that was as bright as an atomic blast, at the fuchsia that was the blood of a million dead men, at the sky that was a vast deep, hummingbird blue.
“Come outside,” Colin’s Dad said, holding the boy’s hand firmly until they’d stepped an inch outside.
Colin flinched, “You see!” He shouted out. “Everything is…more!” The mud under their feet shuddered, the grass blades stung and the boy and his father were pockmarked by the dust motes that rose from the shoulders of everything. The two bent in the wind like tiny fragile flowers.
“It’s nothing to do with the door…” agreed the man who now could hardly breathe. The air was rich with jasmine, old roses of bishops purple, and sea and shit and cut grass, cut glass, glass blown of ash and ash from an Icelandic volcano.
But he looked back at the door and the door was wood and winking, semaphores of pine and irony.
“The door is too new. The day is too…full.” The boy’s face contorted with panic.
“Come inside,” said Colin’s Dad ushering him back through the door that had that honey hue.
“Too much yellow,” said the boy. “Yellow.” And he rubbed his chin. Then he went back in.
Before the boy was inside, the boom began – this was the word they had for the building of thousands of houses. If he tried could see them now from out his window. A new estate, in the distance, thrown up out of the ground, flimsy walls and foundations, gory with greediness. When they were built the boy remembered his Dad, head in hands, lamenting. “More houses! More houses! This all used to be fields!”
One day, back then, when he still went out, he remembered – so dreamlike and improbable now – travelling with his Dad on the train into Dublin city. At Booterstown with its pungent marsh smells he watched long-legged birds balance on the silt. And soon after that the mechanical cranes standing on one leg, necks stretched out, heads bent over the city, intent on construction. Colin watched his Dad’s foot in frantic rhythm on the floor, tears sliding down his Dad’s face like raindrops on window glass. Colin wanted to comfort him. The train swung through the sidings, click clack hammer, voices like gunshots, songs of metal.
That was the last time they went to the city.
Soon after that, something happened and he no longer went out. It was nothing sharply recognisable. First, a flu of some sort, the life sucked from his bones, he was feeble and frozen and later as frail as paper. His energy would not come back, his doctor came and put an acronym on him. M.E. it said, as if it were him and he was nothing else but it. After that the diagnosis skirted the As of Anxiety, Autism and Agoraphobia settling on none.
Now he was no longer a boy but on the cusp of growing right up, with fluff on his upper lip. He was zinging with nervous energy but he was physically fatigued, flaked out in that pale room, flicking through pages of books vaguely chosen by his mother at the library. Earlier she’d shuffled in with her stupid fake cheeriness. “Look, Colin, I got these for you.” She piled the books – full of mythology and heroism – on the bedside locker like an offering to gods. He’d ignored them and put his head under the covers but now, bored, Colin flicked through. Apparently Horus was conceived after his mother, Isis had gathered together his murdered husband’s dismembered remains. Gross. There was a pelican goddess who protected the dead.
Now Colin leaned back on the pillow, letting the book drop from his hand. He felt the treacherous slip of fabric against his skin. Sometimes the sensation of contact was like knives or bee stings. He remembered: age five, in front of a mirror, wrapping himself up from head to foot with toilet roll. When it was done, his mouth opened a slit to say to the mirror. “I’m a Mummy.”
As if he’d conjured her, his mummy, his mother, Mona returned to the room. She placed her tight hands mournfully against his forehead, gazed into the dull pools of his eyes, pools of algae and newts and anxious tadpoles. She begged him to put out his tongue and take a single drop from the vile vial. It tasted of spite. For a moment he felt alive. But he pretended to spit to rile Mona. She was still fussing. Colin ignored her, picking up the story of Alexi Nikolaevich, the Russian haemophiliac boy prince. There was more gore in this: when the Bolsheviks shot his family, Alexei remained alive in the chair, protected by a shirt of precious gems. They had to finish him off with a shot to the head.
“What did you think of that story?” That fake light voice. Colin didn’t answer. “They said he was the likeness of his mother,” Mona remarked, pulled vainly at the sheets.
The Tsarina had got the faith healer Rasputin to treat her son. His mother Mona was a “homeopathy practitioner.” She saw her clients in the Health Food Shop’s upstairs office. According to her people came from all over. She said she had a reputation, she took her consultations seriously. She used her techniques on him. She consulted her repertories, analysing his symptoms, personality, physical and psychological states. Well she tried to – he liked to frustrate her. She would lay out her tinctures and tiny pills on the locker, all white flappy hands. She’d pick up each pill in turn and lay it on his tongue. Now she touched him ‘under his gills,’ deciphering. He shuffled further under the covers, fucking sick of it.
She lifted the blind to see him better, before sighing and pulled it back down. “What’s wrong with me today then?” he goaded.
“Come on, Colin…” Mona sighed again but somehow seemed energized. She seemed to measure her happiness by the weather of him. She was humming as she went out. Seriously.
“Where’s Dad?” he shouted after her.
With Mona it was as if he was missing a map and he was scrabbling to find his way. With his Dad he was hilltop, surveying a great landscape. That evening Colin’s Dad sat in the comfortable wingback armchair beside Colin’s bed. Hair like straw thatch and eyes a cornflower blue. Round glasses, long chin, a Victorian moustache. He told Colin tales of old things he knew, castles and towers now hidden in the woods, ancient burial sites dismantled, fairy rings and houses of spinsters, clinking. The Health Shop where his mother worked was built on the site of the old Victorian Turkish Baths, so his Dad said. He had an image of his mother, hovering above water and steam as if the old place was still there underneath. Moats and follies and old routes. Places under places replaced. All the new people blowing in from England and The Philippines and Poland and China and Kerry and Mayo and Donegal. All these people, not knowing what used to be there. And the local people, by age and generation no longer seeing, no longer remembering.
“When I was young it was all fields,” he said, describing a wide landscape, beyond the room’s stale air, racing round in the ruins of stones in the grass, tumbled down shacks, standing on a headland, headlong over the sea. These wild remote places of air, sky and water.
This metropolis of memory, but now, Colin’s Dad said, skyscrapers of spin and pyrrhic victories. Dodgy dealings, brownfield sites thick now with iron spikes, concrete reinforcements, rather than veg thrusting out of the ground. Rubble and robbery. Wood quay, the palace of the corporate aristocracy built, controversially, callously, Colin’s Dad emphasised, on the site of Viking remains. And here in town, the castles torn down, bronze-age burials uprooted, bowling balls rolling over the ghosts of wounded servicemen and the quick breaths of couples dancing in the old hotel. These spaces of old carved from his Dad’s slow tones were breath to the boy, grounded him in a world where, usually, his anxieties went at him, poltergeist-like, alongside his mother’s endless pecking and flapping. When his Dad left and he was alone in the long night, he felt a nostalgia as if his father was gone, long ago.
Later Colin woke out of dream, or remembrance. The feeling of flapping. Aged five, he’d wrapped himself up in the toilet paper like an entombed Egyptian. Mona had found him. Along her neck and under her eyes, the hollows of her disappointment, in her fingers, agitation, all along her upper limbs this flapping. She’d gone at him, trying to unravel him while he screamed and screamed.
Now more than ten years later and he was seventeen woken up in the night experiencing this thing again as a great calamity that had just happened. He felt his skin had shredded and he was lying in it.
Rolling slightly, Colin reached under the bed, feeling around, frantically, finally finding the edges of a first aid box Mona had left him. He took out skin coloured bandages. Standing up, leaning against the bedside locker for stability, he began winding the bandages round his boney toes and thin shins, then round his warped knee joints and rickety hips, the ridges of his sharp ribs, the blades of his shoulders and then the thrill of his neck. He stopped, looking in the mirror once more, that face flat and betraying before he covered it in disgust. He unwound the bandages again and his limbs weakened as the scaffold fell away. He got into bed, the covers around him forming mounds and crevasses, a mass of undulations and shifting tectonics.
There was a soft knock at the door.
Colin’s Dad seemed to sense that Colin could not sleep, that the night was too wide and featureless. He’d once told Colin that in ever changing landscapes you could orient yourself in the topography by following worn grass routes called desire trails. So Colin’s Dad reached for a book that was loved and familiar – Call of the Wild. The author was a man whose surname was a city. Jack London. Colin would have liked to have been called Jack – a name with far more spark and possibility than his own. “Like that boy from The Secret Garden whose legs don’t work,” the girl had said. A boy stuck inside. “Colin,” she’d said. A lucky guess. A strange coincidence.
The name London conjured up a life, bustle, grand monuments, evidences of endeavour and adventure. Colin’s Dad would call it “pillage and rampant colonialism” – so many countries eaten up through the Empire’s voracious appetite. But London was not the man’s original name. Jack London had been John Chaney, the illegitimate outcome of a liaison between well-to-do Flora Wellman and William Chaney an itinerant Irish American astronomer before Flora married John London.
Flora Wellman – a fine name for a mother.
One evening Mona had flustered in on Colin and his Dad together reading. She’d flapped around, pecking at Colin’s Dad with jibes at his idleness, until he assumed a bemused, tired silence. Soon afterwards she began a frenetic vendetta of offerings from the library, watching Colin closely for gratitude. And he’d tried. Making her happy was his only means of escape.
Jack himself had made his own escape. His mother’s love of books led him to writing and eventual fame and fortune. But not before he set off into the wilderness, age 15, living life as a tramp, then a boatman and then to the goldrush, where he did no good. Aged 21 Jack London discovered he was not London’s son. He wrote to William Chaney. But Chaney would not admit to being Jack’s Dad. Went so far to say he was impotent. Meant he did not have the wherewithal to be a father.
“Alright?” said Colin’s Dad as he closed the book to go. Colin did not know. Closing his eyes he heard the first birds of the dawn chorus. As the sound carried him away, his mind formed a picture – his own face in the mirror. So much like his mother’s, nothing like his Dad.
The surgeon prepared his instruments. They shone so fiercely in the overhead lights. The mob from outside set off bombs in his head. He chewed fast on his mask of candy floss and lemon. As a boy his bad dreams were bladeflash slicing quickly the thick night. His job was to take out all the things she kept inside her. Blood was the richest river, wine hued, replete with sticky fish.
Alison Wells Author 