And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead
- W. H. Auden [1]
1
We’d been having another argument. I was too lazy around the house, apparently. She was too controlling and wouldn’t let me do things in my own way, in my own time.
Even though you know even while you’re having them that these bitter disputes are actually about something else, not the subject under discussion, that doesn’t make them any easier to endure – or work through.
This time I decided my best bet was to go out and let the air clear before trying to reach some compromise position. So I flounced out of the flat in high dudgeon, and was halfway down the stairs before she realised I was gone. Not something I’m proud of, in retrospect, but at the time it seemed the best way of avoiding saying something truly unforgiveable.
It was late morning, and the shops were all open and doing good business. The flashy, successful ones on the main street, that is. Go a block or so back, and you start to find a layer of less glamorous businesses – the ones which seem to breathe an air of defeat in advance.
It doesn’t really seem to matter what exactly they sell, whether it’s sheepskin soft toys, greenstone ashtrays and other tourist trinkets, or assorted junk in the guise of antiques. You feel desperation oozing from their windows – one last chance at redemption before bankruptcy looms.
I tried to stay in the main street, with the people, but somehow they didn’t match my mood. I found myself slinking down one of the brighter restaurant arcades till I reached the retail equivalent of Skid Row. That was my place in life – for the moment, at least.
Some of the junk shops had books in them – not prominently displayed, but in small cardboard boxes beside the door, or even arranged properly on shelves inside. They tended to be wildly over or under-priced, depending on your point of view. Paperbacks could be as little as two or three for a dollar. Hardbacks were sometimes as much as twenty or thirty.
I had some memory of once having found a nice book in one of these shops: an edition of Apollinaire’s poetry, in the original binding, displayed (naturally enough) for its aesthetic appeal rather than the contents. Ever since then, I’d been looking in vain for a similar windfall.
I must have spent half an hour or so poking around in various shops, and was beginning to wonder when I could give up the pretence of being otherwise occupied, and nerve myself up to go back to choke down a few slices of humble pie. But then I saw it.
The shopfront was quite unobtrusive. I could see how you could walk past it without really noticing what was there. I must have done so many times, in fact, as it was right in the middle of my usual route through the second-hand shops. But – seen just from the right angle, with the right glint of the sun on the glass, you could just make out a few letters inscribed on the window: ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS.
But was it open? Perhaps it was one of those mirages – those premises that exist solely for the purpose of sending out obscure, exorbitantly priced titles to an international clientele. There was no ‘open’ sign on the door, and the catch didn’t seem to be working.
Unless there was some trick to it. There was! When I twisted the doorknob the other way, it seemed somehow to click, then engage. It opened and I walked in.
•
My first impression was of chaotic profusion. There were bookcases on all sides, overflowing with volumes. Not just garish paperbacks, either – solid hardbacked tomes: even collected sets in long rows, old library-bound treasures.
There was a way through them, just barely – unless you paused for a moment to think about it, that is. But it left me feeling uneasy, as if I’d invaded some sanctum. Just then, however, a singular presence materialised before me.
At least, he must have come from one of the side alleys, since one minute he was there and a moment before he hadn’t been. I wondered, in fact, if – seen from above – the sinuous lines of bookcases traced some kind of pattern, some Chartres-like maze of corridors converging on a single symbolic point.
– Can I help you?
– Well, yes, I certainly hope so. You are open, aren’t you? I mean, I can come in and have a look around?
He looked a bit doubtful at that, then brightened up as if something amusing had occurred to him.
– Of course, sir! You’re only too welcome. Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?
That question is generally a trap. The smaller the range of stock in a bookshop, the more likely its proprietor is to ask if you have anything specific in mind. And the leaps of logic they go to in finding cognate books is amazing, at times: although also somewhat depressing. In a shop as extensive as this, though, I thought it might be worth taking the risk.
– Well, I’m very fond of poetry. Do you have any books in that line?
– Poetry? Old poetry? Or the newer kind?
He frowned in contemplation.
– I think I’d better take you there, as it can be a little difficult to explain our layout. It’s meant to imitate a human mind: with the harder, more analytic subjects associated with the left side of the brain over there, and the right brain subjects to do with the more intuitive, humanist arts over here.
I didn’t quite know what to say to that, so I followed him down the curve of the bookshelves towards the right of the shop.
•
Oh. My. God!
I’d never dreamed of anything like this. The shelves that he brought me to were overflowing with poetry of all eras.
There were wonderful seventeenth century books with ‘f’s’ for s’s’ and fulsome dedications to aristocratic patrons at the front. The poems seemed mostly to consist of dialogues between shepherds and shepherdesses on the supposed obduracy of the latter to the former’s requests. Most of the author’s names were unknown to me, but I recognised Marvell and Vaughan and one or two other Eng. Lit. stars among them.
Then, with the shift to the eighteenth century, the books became fatter and more multi-volumed. Satires on city life and the decay of modern morals now began to prevail. Until, that is, the outburst of the Romantic era, when foreign travel and the gods of Greece and Rome burst in to sweep all before them.
On and on and on. There were earnest volumes of 1930s functionalist poetry in praise of the Machine and of its historical embodiment, the Party. There were 1940s New Apocalyptic paperbacks. There were 1960s Beat Era pamphlets with crudely stencilled collages and assemblages of concrete poetry.
But what did these volumes cost? I could see no prices pencilled inside them, and I’ve learnt long since that it’s most unwise to ask unless you’re very dedicated to buying the book in question at almost any price.
There’s something about bookcases set up in rows that leads you inexorably on to the next shelf, the next book. It’s a little like that gingerbread house which so beguiled Hansel and Gretel – you start off with the breadcrumbs and end up with the sweets.
Cruising the stacks, we used to call it when I was at College. Most of the university libraries I’ve ever had the pleasure to browse through were arranged just like this, in long, inexorable rows which attracted your eye away from the book you were ostensibly looking for – its catalogue number hastily scribbled on a convenient scrap of paper – to something exceedingly apposite in the next shelf.
So, too, here. The poetry section was, to tell the truth, a trifle overwhelming. I couldn’t really conceive of a place to start in so comprehensive a collection of rare editions.
But then some modern novels caught my eye. Graham Greene. Ho-hum. But some of the titles looked a little … unfamiliar. The Quiet American, yes; England Made Me, yes; but what of The Name of Action, or Rumour at Nightfall? Those weren’t books I remembered seeing before. But when I started to leaf through them (first editions, of course) they had all the hallmarks of real books – signs of wear on the pages, and other books by the same publisher advertised in the endpapers.
Greene has never been precisely my cup of tea. All those protracted, strained theological scruples, awkwardly soldered onto slambang action plots. It was, admittedly, a little petty of the Nobel Prize committee to deny him the literature prize for all those years in favour of such luminaries as Pär Lagerkvist or Marguerite Yourcenar, but one could rather see their point, at times.
But Greene led on to other things. More and more novels, some in wonderfully bound sets of complete works, others in their original three-decker form. George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope … Dickens, of course. So much Dickens. Biographies, letters, bound-up sets of the original parts of some of the longer novels. And there it was: The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Not that there’s anything particularly surprising about that. Ever since he died with only three of the twelve planned parts of his final novel in print, and enough material left over for three more parts, Edwin Drood has been the abiding obsession of Dickens enthusiasts.
It’s all so good, that’s the trouble. From the madness of the first chapter, where John Jasper wakes up in an opium den, to the spectral precincts of Cloisterham Cathedral, it’s intensely atmospheric even by the standards of other late works such as Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend.
But this seemed to be a copy of a complete novel! Not the truncated text we’d all become accustomed to. Not that I didn’t know that there had been continuations of his work by various people. One late nineteenth-century effort was actually supposed to have been revealed to its author through spirit messages! Perhaps the most famous of these is Leon Garfield’s. Certainly he’s the most stylish among the various continuators (if that’s a real word).
But this wasn’t that. Nor was any collaborator mentioned on the title page. So far as I could see, this was just one more Dickens novel, only the text in these pages was, strictly speaking, impossible.
Was it a novelisation of some kind? There had been a few movies and even some TV adaptations, I knew that much. Perhaps a written-out version of the famous lost BBC miniseries of 1960? No. This certainly appeared to be a genuine Victorian novel: not a later imitation.
I had to have it. Armoured in the invincibility of my VISA card, I started to make my way towards the centre of the shop where (presumably) the sales counter must be located. And yet it wasn’t.
Normally you can steer by the sides on such occasions. Once you hit one wall, you’re bound to encounter a corner if you follow it far enough. One corner leads to another, and eventually to the exit. Not in this shop.
For a start, the walls were unreachable (if not invisible). Thick drifts of dusty books piled up on the floor blocked just enough of the aisles to angle you only in certain directions. If those other book bays were reachable, it could only be through some mysterious backdoor route.
The size of the place, too! It must have been a warehouse of some kind in a previous existence, since no normal retail premises could possible require so huge and unfocussed a space. Could there be so large a building, existing unseen among all the other, more familiar shopfronts along this back street?
But when you’re lost in a maze of shelves, there’s really nothing for it than to go forward. And so I did. The day must have turned overcast outside, as the shadows certainly lay long and dark on some of these corners. Nor was it possible for me to dismiss entirely the strong impression I had that some of them were … occupied.
I did try calling out once or twice, but I felt a certain diffidence about attracting too much attention. Perhaps this shop was really a front for some more nefarious occupation – perhaps these dark recesses were just as unsafe as they appeared.
Until finally I emerged. There it was, the counter. There was an old cash register on it, and a bearded old gent standing, beaming, behind it.
It wasn’t the same person I’d met coming in. That man had been younger, more suave – less dusty overall.
This one looked far more cheerful, though – almost Dickensian in his demeanour. One might have identified him as one of the Cheeryble brothers if it weren’t that he was on his own.
– You’ve found something, sir?
– Yes, I have. This book.
– Ah, Edwin Drood. A nice clean copy. Not a first, but quite an old edition nevertheless.
– Is it really the whole novel? I mean, I thought only part of it had survived.
– Only part of it? Oh no, sir, this is certainly complete. There are no pages missing. The spine is intact.
Curious though I was, I didn’t want to draw attention exactly to the superlative rareness of my find, so I subsided.
– A guinea suit you, sir?
– A guinea? You mean two pounds? What would that be in dollars?
– In dollars, sir? I can’t imagine. Perhaps ten?
– Ten dollars? Do you accept plastic?
– Ten dollars will do it, sir.
I began to see my windfall drifting away. Time to settle without further ado. Did I have ten dollars? Surely I must have that in change, if not an actual ten dollar note.
I began to shovel out some one and two dollar coins onto the counter, as he watched me with a slight air of puzzlement. Was he not used to modern money? Had he never encountered it before?
Finally I’d piled up ten dollars in coins. He poked at it gingerly.
– All that to make ten dollars! Well, I suppose it’s all right.
He began to shovel it into the cash register, then – as I stared myopically into the recesses of the glass case behind him: could that really be a multi-volume set of Henry Torrens’ Arabian Nights? – started to parcel up my novel in brown paper, topped off by a little string sling sealed up with wax.
– How beautiful! It’s nice to see that old way of wrapping up books – so much better than a carrybag …
He looked a bit startled, but pushed the end result of his labours towards me, as I prepared to beat a hasty retreat.
Luckily for me, leaving the bookshop was far easier than navigating its interior. I could see a gleam of daylight in front of me, and managed to follow it out to the front door. It tinged behind me somewhat hungrily, I fancied – as if it had missed out on some anticipated feast. Roast customer!
Never mind. Even if I never quite dared to return there, I had my prize. I’d seen perhaps the greatest bookshop of my life, and had bought a rarity which would undoubtedly repay much further gloating – not to mention investigation.
2
Except that it didn’t. Repay investigation, that is.
As soon as I got home, I went into the study to have a thorough trawl through my new book. Which turned out to be fool’s gold. The back read quite simply: Edwin Drood and Other Stories. It was just a reprint of the truncated portion of Dickens’ half-finished serial, with a few other bits and pieces which had appeared in periodicals here and there during his lifetime.
But that was not how it had looked in the shop.
I’d anticipated a certain asperity from Margaret when I’d first arrived home. I did, after all, go out with our differences unresolved – and, indeed, largely unexamined.
But with the book on my mind, my only desire had been to unpack the parcel and rifle through its contents.
Fortunately it turned out that her mind was on quite different things. I’d managed to sneak all the way into the flat, leaf through the book, and digest my own disappointment, before I heard her voice outside the door.
– Oh you bad thing! Naughty!
I certainly was a naughty bad thing. A pretty accurate overall description, I thought. But it just seemed a bit out of character to hear her use the phrase. She was not usually so … roguish – on occasions such as this, at least.
Nor did her words sound as if they were particularly addressed to me. They were audible from where I was sitting, yes, but I couldn’t imagine her cajoling me through a shut door.
Sure enough, when I went out to see, there was Margaret with a towel on her lap and – somewhat bizarrely – a baby’s feed bottle in her hand, nursing a little bundle of fur on her lap.
A baby’s bottle? I hadn’t even realised we had such a thing. Certainly there’d been no need for it down the long years. But there it was, being wielded determinedly (if inexpertly) by my long-suffering, longtime partner.
– What’s this?
– What do you think?
– It looks like … a kitten.
– That’s right. That’s what it is. A kitten. He came to the door and he’s so hungry.
– Does he have a collar? Is there a telephone number?
– No, no collar. I’d say he’s been away from home for a while. His coat’s very rough, and I think he’s got fleas.
– Hadn’t we better ring the vet?
– What, to have him taken away?
– No, no, to have him checked out. He may need medicine. For that matter, his owners may live just round the corner for all we know.
– We’re keeping him.
– You can’t say that. We don’t know where he comes from.
– We’re keeping him.
The kitten, largely preoccupied with the novelty of sucking at a feedbottle, had remained largely silent up to this point. Now, however, he lifted up his little head and gave vent to a burp, followed by a funny wheezing sound.
I’d heard that it could take cats quite a while to learn how to meow, and that they mostly did it to communicate with humans on what they thought was equal terms. Certainly this one looked terribly young and fragile.
I bent over to examine him more closely, and he put out his little paw. That was it. That was enough. There was something about that little gesture which made him seem so alive, so self-contained and wilful that I immediately fell in love.
The coup de foudre! I’d heard of such things, had experienced my share of passion for other humans, but never had I felt the bastions of my heart fall so thoroughly to the ground at a single stroke.
I could see that Margaret was reluctant to give up holding him cradled on her lap, so I contented myself with bumping paws with him. He seemed to enjoy it. Certainly his bright little eyes seemed fascinated by all the wondrous new sights and sounds all around him.
– Can we? Keep him, I mean?
– Why shouldn’t we? He came here. I’ve fed him. He wants to stay.
– But …
– But what? Wherever he was living, they clearly haven’t been taking care of him. He needs food, and cuddles, and lots of attention.
– He’s beautiful.
– Isn’t he?
– That little black nose, those white stripes on his face.
– Yes. I think he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
– Me, too.
And so it was settled. I don’t know if Margaret felt any misgivings. I certainly did. A kitten! Right in the middle of town, with all those motorcars and hazards, in our tiny flat. Would we have to walk him on a leash? What if he ran away?
The terrible truths of a hostage to fortune began to dawn on me. From now on, from this moment till the end of time, I would be continuously worried about the safety and happiness of this little creature.
He seemed so helpless! And yet he’d clearly been fending for himself, out there, in some random gutter. Had he tried to get in through other people’s doors? Had they turned him away? How could they? Certainly Margaret was a bit of a soft touch at the best of times, but opening the front door to find such a gift from God must have seemed like the answer to all her prayers at that moment.
He was so furry! Before us stretched a sea of troubles, but from now on history would have to be divided into two epochs: BK and AK: Before Kitten and After Kitten.
– What shall we call him?’ I asked. Actually, do we know if he’s a ‘he’ or a ‘she’?
– Oh, he’s a ‘he’ all right. She lifted him up. Look at those big splay paws. Even if …
– Even if he hasn’t been spayed.
•
We did learn some more things about him at the vet’s, a couple of days later. His little operation went off quite easily. I tried to justify it by thinking that what you’ve never experienced, you don’t miss, but I still felt uneasy about it.
More to the point, he did have fleas – tons of them – and we went away with a flea comb and a treatment to be put on the back of his neck.
The vet guessed his age at no more than six weeks or so, and gave as his opinion that he’d probably been abandoned by someone passing through, perhaps as a result of the flea infestation (never a pleasant thing to encounter while driving home from a holiday).
He might have been on his own for a few days, but not much more than that, he felt.
– Quite frankly, he wouldn’t have survived. He’s clearly been brought up by a mother who showed him how to use a feeding bowl and a litter box. If you do install a cat-door, and I’d strongly advise it, you’ll probably find that he already knows how to use it.
It was somehow reassuring to know that he was now, officially, listed as ‘ours’ – though actually the sentence should probably have read the other way round. We were now his, wrapped round his little paw, and anxious to smooth every bump in his bustling little life of jumping, scratching and cuddles.
•
He just seemed to sicken. After all that running and jumping in the first few days, he grew more and more listless.
We took him back to the vet, who was at a loss what to do. He suggested an x-ray – pricey but informative – to check out the kitten’s internal organs.
We agreed unhesitatingly.
When the results came back, a short time later, they were indeterminate. There was nothing obviously wrong, but there were a couple of suspicious looking dark spots on the lungs. His best guess was pneumonia.
By now we were beside ourselves. Whatever the solution, we were ready to implement it – drugs, operations, you name it. But it turned out that there wasn’t really much we could do except try to keep him calm and quiet.
Fat chance, I would have said just a day or so earlier. Now, however, he simply lay in his little faux-fur cat bed, his big eyes hooded with fatigue.
It killed us to do it, but in the end we had to agree to have him put down. It was cruel to keep him suffering when there was clearly no road back for him.
Did it bring us closer? I’m not sure. We both shed more tears in those last couple of days than we’d probably ever done in the whole previous course of our lives.
The vet suggested adopting another kitten straight away – or possibly two to make it seem less of a betrayal of his memory. We couldn’t face it, though. It wasn’t the idea of having a kitten which had attracted us, it was him – his personality, his sweet little face and big splay paws.
So intense had been those few short weeks surrounding his coming and abrupt departure, that they seemed almost like a time out of time, a section of life which could be soldered off and consigned to history.
It wasn’t long before you’d have thought we’d entirely forgotten it, so few were the references to his life and death. We were careful to bundle up all of his toys and towels and beds and donate them early on, so there was little tangible evidence left.
And I have noticed in the past that extreme emotional stress of this type is often instinctively corralled off by your body’s own processes. It foresees damage – or so I presume – from further exposure to this source of pain, so it cuts off your mind’s access to it.
It wasn’t so much that we became emotional zombies, as that our brains rerouted all traffic down different paths.
Which is perhaps one reason why it had taken till then for me to start to examine fully the curious circumstances surrounding my visit to that strange antiquarian bookshop.
When it comes to the comparison between kittens and books, even I have to admit a prejudice for thinking about the former. But now that that was forbidden to me – or rather, absent from the list of topics to think about, by order of some shadowy general management committee – it came back to mind.
But when I went back to find the shop, you probably won’t be too surprised to hear that it was gone. There was no real evidence it had ever been there, in fact. I tried to retrace my steps that day, and God knows there were few enough streets it could have been in. Nothing. Not even any blank warehouse frontages that might have stood in for it.
Nor was the book itself available for me to check. I’d looked through it cursorily on the day he came, but only enough to establish that it wasn’t the bibliographical anomaly I thought I’d seen in that strange bookman’s paradise.
Where was it now? Had I shelved it carelessly in some out-of-the-way part of the study? Margaret denied ever having seen it, let alone tidied it away in any paroxysm of housewifely zeal. Nor did I feel I could press the point, in her present state of emotional prostration.
Why did it matter to me, anyway? Was it purely the distraction which made it nag away at me day after day? Something to fix the mind on that wasn’t small and furry?
Or was it the threat of something wrong in myself? Some mental shunt or bypass which was making me see things, misread simple title pages, and generally create illusions and hallucinations out of thin air?
I tried rereading a book I’d once bought on hallucinations, but found it the reverse of comforting. The author pointed out the immense commonness of such mental disturbances, and the unreasonable association between seeing things and serious mental illness: until recently such manifestations were regarded as definitive proof of psychiatric disturbance.
But what he couldn’t give me was any explanation why I would suddenly start to manifest a complete system of apparitions in the form of a phantom bookshop, an impossible book, and a series of faux-Victorian personages at this late date in time.
If I’d been seeing things all along, and had gradually learned to deal with it, like so many of the patients mentioned in the book, that would be different. Or if I’d suffered some kind of mental or physical trauma to bring it on, that too would make a certain strange sense. But I hadn’t.
The trauma had all come afterwards, in the form of our delightful little visitor.
And then, what about him? Where exactly had he sprung from? His advent did seem suspiciously serendipitous, diverting us totally from any other thoughts or preoccupations. Had it all been, somehow, arranged? And if so, by whom?
When I repeat them now, these thoughts sound quite crazy. But at the time they seemed anything but. And certainly the circumstances were odd, outside my quotidian reality, even if others might have been better suited to taking them in their stride.
Without further data, further speculation was fruitless. I’d visited a strange shop and bought a strange book there. We’d found a stray kitten and adopted him. But then he died. Those were the facts. Simple, impregnable, and yet replete with doubts, fears and suspicions.
I tried to spare Margaret most of these speculations after one unhappy attempt to explain to her just what was on my mind to make me look so distracted. I’d have done better just to say that it was the memory of our little friend. I’m afraid that she found the existence of any other motives in me not so much a necessary mode of deflection as a callous disregard of the central facts of life.
But it was driving me mad! Without a sounding board, your thoughts go round and round in your head like a pinball machine.
Who did I know to share such conjectures with? Nobody. But wait, what about …? No, I haven’t talked to him in years. Do I even still have his address and contact details? It turned out, by some curious chance, I did.
3
But before I go into all that, let me backtrack a little.
I had a dream that night. It was odd. I was back in the bookshop, but this time it was more of a general purpose junk emporium. The aisles were filled with ceramics and car manuals. Something for everyone, in other words.
There were some books, still, but rattier and less elegant than the ones I had seen.
The thing that impressed me most was the puppets, though. There was a whole section devoted to those, and some of them were quite unbelievable. There were Japanese samurai dolls, complete with articulated armour and inscribed ceremonial swords. There were Punch and Judy dolls – hanging from their hooks with all their macabre companions: the Policeman, Death, The Baby, the Butcher …
And there were elaborately made-up two-headed wooden Rajasthani puppet dolls (or that was what the label said, at any rate).
These latter seized my attention most of all. I took down a couple of them (they came in pairs), before discovering they could be reversed. You could turn them upside-down, twist around the head, only to find that the elaborately coiffured female doll was also a bearded male doll. The dress, too, reversed to become his long flowing warriors’ robes.
This led to certain difficulties in display, as only a single facet of their character could ever be on show at any one time, which is why (I suppose) they were ticketed as having to be sold as a couple. One male and one female half could be up for a while, only to be reversed every second day, perhaps.
Just why this obsessed me so was not quite clear to me when I woke up. In the dream everything had seemed crystal clear – some profound truth coded into these dual-sex dolls – but such concepts felt far less meaningful to me in the light of morning.
•
The friend that I mentioned above, my old university buddy Phil Drake (known as ‘Dick’ to his intimates – not because of any silliness in his disposition, but because most of us were rabid Alt Sci-fi fans), was certainly the person to ask about matters such as this.
A storehouse of miscellaneous information, he had the disconcerting habit of failing exams because of a tendency to go off on tangents at the drop of a hat. All you needed to do was mention a word, and that would be it.
That one word ‘Rajasthan’, for instance, would have led to a long disquisition on the foundations of Romany culture, historical speculations about the place of origin of these so-called ‘gypsies’, and the clues which had led modern scholars to postulate an origin for these enterprising people in far-off Northern India.
Again and again his essays and scripts would come back with comments to the effect of: ‘Fascinating – but not what we were asking you to discuss’, and a bare pass mark (or even an outright fail).
For this, and possibly other reasons, he never seemed to advance in his studies, perhaps because most of his instructors were conscious that he should have been teaching them rather than the other way round. His grandmother had, however, bequeathed him a certain amount of money to be paid out each year he was in tertiary study – that was the exact wording of the codicil – so there was no real incentive for him to stop what he was doing and get ahead.
As long as they had interesting new courses for him to sign up for, he was ready to keep on studying until the crack of doom.
Even the laid-back universities of all those years back had regulations about the need to complete your qualifications in a certain amount of time, however. So there did come a moment when he had to choose between advancing to graduate level and leaving the place altogether.
One could see what a struggle it was, how much he resisted even that much coercion, but he did finally consent to trade in a number of credits for entry to a graduate-level programme in ‘General Studies.’
It didn’t take. It’s much harder to hide at the back of the class when you’re one of only three or four students in your professor’s office. He couldn’t hide his immense knowledge and omnivorous appetite for random information. He also couldn’t hide his refusal to specialise in just one aspect of this avalanche of erudition.
Finally they gave him an ultimatum. Finish a focussed researched essay on a certain, pre-announced topic, or leave with whatever qualifications (if any) could be salvaged from this heap of half-completed or scraped-through courses.
I think that that may have been when I stopped visiting him, in fact. I’d graduated from the university long since, moving from Bachelor’s to Master’s studies in my chosen discipline, Library Science. On one level I could see that he envied this: this adhesion to just one approach to the labyrinth of knowledge – and, given it really concerned a kind of meta-knowledge, a way of systematising information so that it could be made as easily available as possible for an almost infinite range of diverse needs, right down his alley, really.
But at the same time he despised it. He was born to roam through the stacks of massive collections, rather than accepting the pre-sorted world of the Information Machine. On and on he ranted at his tormentors, resisting at every step the assigned topic of his dissertation: Sanskrit Influences on the European Folktale Tradition.
His original plan had been to trace the development from Max Müller and other adherents of the ‘solar religions’ fixation of the late nineteenth century, to the proto-Structuralist formulations of Vladimir Propp and the Finnish School. He could talk about it for hours, but somehow he couldn’t get started on actually writing it.
I advised him to record a few of his rants – if necessary, by taping, then transcribing them. Then, I argued, he could go back over them and try to splice some of them together. The introduction to all this would be dictated by the content of the eventual patchwork quilt – or mosaic.
But no, that wouldn’t work, that wouldn’t be logical. Unless one had a clear starting point, how could any mere collection of facts have lasting validity? And where to start?
I told him that this difficult in knowing how and where to start had itself been the subject of much writing. That he could begin by quoting portentous critical dicta on the paradox of beginnings, especially in a case like this, where the inherited storytelling instinct of the human race itself was in question.
I flatter myself I waxed quite eloquent on the subject.
But no, no, no, no – I didn’t understand – that was all jiggery-pokery – no-one could understand who didn’t know enough to bear in mind that … blah, blah, blah, more ranting, more reams of diverse information laid out in interminable streams.
I never consciously dropped him, but it had become obvious to me by then that I was the only one of our circle who still visited him at all, and the others’ attitude of stand-back-and-see began to make more and more sense to me.
Finally it culminated in one horrendous night at the pub, formerly the place where a group of us could argue the night away in increasingly alcohol-fuelled incoherence – our vehemence growing as our intellectual focus waned.
I’d arranged this night some weeks in advance – in itself an ominous sign of the oncoming compromises of adulthood for the rest of us (professional obligations to be rescheduled, even babysitters to be hired). Nor did it begin particularly auspiciously.
I was running a little late, and when I arrived I could see that something had already happened. The rest of the group were all assembled around a small table in the saloon bar, but Phil was standing at the bar by himself, and the others were already checking their watches and looking as if the first drink was going to be their last.
I went over to him.
– Hi man, it seems like it’s been ages and ages since we last met.
– It has.
– You’ve said hello to the others?
– I have.
– Umm … is something wrong? Did someone say something? It seems a bit frosty over there.
– Don’t ask me.
– Shall I help you with the drinks?
– No. I’ve got it.
– Mine’s a pint of lager, if you’re asking.
– Oh, I’m ordering for myself, not for anyone else. I don’t want to get into one of those standing-your-round messes.
Now that I came to think of it, he had always been a bit of a rebel when it came to buying drinks for other people. That was one of his less endearing traits, in fact, the disposition to produce a calculator and start to work out his precise share in the proceedings at the end of any shared meal out.
Actually, did he have any really endearing traits? It was hard to think of many – if any – on the fly like that.
Luckily by now the barmaid had come over to us, and we were each able to place – and pay for – our orders separately. His was a neat whisky, I was rather surprised to observe.
We came back to the table as a duo, and there seemed to be a certain reluctance in the others to shift around and leave us somewhere to sit. Just what had preceded my arrival? What had he said?
Susan, one of the more sensible of our friends, an up-and-coming GP, was quick to try to start things off again on a more even footing.
– We were just saying that it’s hard to get away for a night in the pub any more when you know you’re going to have to be up and about next morning.
– Huh, grunted Phil.
– Yes, I know what you mean, I gabbled quickly, to fill the silence. When I think of the hours I used to keep: up mid-morning, with an aching head, and not good for much till afternoon at least. It’s a miracle that any of us actually got through!
– Not all of us did, said Craig, a weaselly fellow who’d been somewhat at the edges of our gang, and whom I’d invited mainly to make up the numbers. Who, in our circle, was left who hadn’t already parted brassrags from Phil, or else left town – or even the country – though hopefully not with that as the principal motivation?
– What’s that supposed to mean? said Phil.
– Just what it says.
– You’re calling me a loser?
– If the cap fits …
– You mean that I haven’t reached the dizzying heights of middle-management in a Council office?
– It’s a long way closer to a real job than you’ve ever shown any signs of getting.
There was a raw edge in all this which implied something truly awful must have happened in the opening stages of this meeting. What had he said? He must have called them all out somehow to justify concerted retribution on this scale.
– Hey, hey, hey, I said. Let’s keep it civil.
– Civil! You didn’t hear what he said.
– No, I didn’t. But here’s your chance to forget it, whatever it was, and to concentrate on having a nice relaxing drink talking about old times.
– I don’t regret any of the things I said, chimed in Phil, eager to assist with setting the evening back on an even keel.
– You don’t? spluttered Craig. Well, in that case, I’m out of here. I don’t need your input on my life, you ridiculous dick. We all used to tolerate you for old times’ sake, but none of us ever really liked you, except for old pedantic over there.
Old Pedantic? That was a new one on me. It’s true I had observed a few poorly concealed sighs when I’d launched into a longer-than-usual explanation of some subject or other that intrigued me from time to time. Is it possible that all the time I was thinking of Phil as the pariah, it was actually me? Or even us as a pair? That we were that couple of mouthy, mismatched twins everyone dreads sitting down next to?
– That’s a little uncalled-for, I said.
– Fuck off, he replied. By now he’d worked his way out and around the table and was looking for his coat. Fuck the whole bunch of you, actually.
With Craig gone, I’d hoped that the temperature might go down a notch or two, but Phil obviously had other ideas. From the look on his face, he was actually beginning to enjoy himself. Come to think of it, he had always been one of those people who associate chaos and discord with truthfulness, and pleasant conversation with hypocrisy.
– Well, at least I got rid of that little weasel for you all. I think I might have been sick if I’d had to look at his smacked-bum face any longer.
At this even Susan, who’d been sitting purse-lipped through the previous exchange, exclaimed:
– Grow up, Phil! I knew this was a mistake, but I didn’t want to let you two down. I can see this is going nowhere.
As she stood up, the others joined her and started to make their collective way out the door. I could see by the relieved looks on their faces that it had taken quite an effort to wait even this long before decamping.
As usual, though, Susan had spoken for them, and had – in her quiet way – correctly read the group.
– Sorry. I’m really sorry, I said to her (the others deliberately not making eye contact with either of us).
She nodded, brusquely.
– Don’t call me again until you’ve both had a chance to grow up. This kind of thing gets old pretty quickly.
And then she was gone.
– What on earth did you say to them? Why were they all so mad? I asked Phil.
– Nothing they didn’t need to hear.
– What kind of an answer is that?
– Don’t you start in. It’s none of your business, anyway.
– How can it be none of my business? I’m the one who arranged for everyone to turn up this evening – and it took some doing, I can tell you.
– Maybe you shouldn’t have been late, then.
– Maybe not. But I didn’t think it was physically possible to offend so many people so fast. They do know you, after all.
– I just asked them how their kids were getting on. It’s all that lot ever think about, anyway.
This was not good news. Craig and his wife had been trying to get pregnant for what seemed like years. Susan and her husband had one kid so far, with another on the way. Their first child had Down’s syndrome, and they were hoping against hope that the second would show a clean bill of health.
One could hardly imagine a more sensitive topic for any of them, especially if accompanied – as it probably had been – by a few inflammatory comments on the statistical probabilities of birth defects.
It was, in retrospect, amazing – not that they’d left, but that they’d hung around so long. Some tribute to the enduring power of social convention, I suppose.
– But you know how hard it’s been for them! How could you do that?
– Sorry, Nanny. Did it ruin your plans for the big reunion? Trotting out the freak so all of them could patronise me and pat me on the head and tell me it doesn’t matter that I’m such a flop?
– It wasn’t going to be like that!
– You know it was. I don’t need it. I don’t need anyone’s validation, especially yours.
– Well, that’s good, because you’re not likely to get it anytime soon.
– Oh, why don’t you just piss off? I know you want to, nobody wants to get drunk with the loonytune down from the attic for his one night off per annum.
– Is that what you want?
I knew that it wasn’t, but the fact is that he was right. I did want to get out of there. I couldn’t face another evening of barbed assaults and windy speeches.
He grunted assent, and so I left.
That had been some five years before, and a good deal of fence mending had had to go on before I was readmitted to even the outer regions of the others’ sodality.
Not that I cared particularly. The revelation that Phil and I were seen as a pair had been enough to sour me on the whole bunch of them. And thus it is that adolescent friendships are eroded and shipwrecked on the hard reefs of adulthood – or words to that effect, anyway.
•
– So what you’re saying is, you went to a bookshop and found a book, but when you got it home, it wasn’t quite what you thought. And now you can’t find the shop again.
– Well, that’s about the size of it, yes.
It had been a bit of a shock to meet the new Phil. Married! With children, yet. Admittedly, his wife was a charmingly diminutive lady from South-East Asia. And the two children, a boy and a girl, were hers from a previous marriage.
Nevertheless, the immaculate nature of his home, the careful hospitality of the greeting, were all quite unexpected manifestations of the great Master of Misrule.
He seemed to regard the changes with amused equanimity. And yet some aspect of his self must have craved them. He was not a person you’d associate with being railroaded into something he didn’t want to do. And yet there he was.
The study upstairs which I’d been ushered into after some minimal civilities had been exchanged at the front door was more of a piece with the former Phil. There were books spilling out from the walls onto every flat surface, naturally.
But I noticed some tell-tale signs of regular cleaning and maintenance – filing cabinets had been arranged to accommodate the overflowing mountains of paper he’d always been prone to collecting, and I felt that some kind of guiding intelligence had at last entered his life.
Conversationally, he was still much the same. But then, after all, that was what I needed: a sceptical eye to look in on some of these events and assess what they amounted to.
– So you just think I’m making it up. Or going crazy.
– I didn’t say that. The kitten had come to the door that same afternoon, is that right?
– Yes, but there’s no way those two things can be related: the kitten and the bookshop. We were at different ends of the town, and there’s nothing to suggest …
– But you came home with the book, which had somehow changed on the way back, only to find your wife …
– My partner. Margaret. We’re not married.
– Only to find your partner with a brand-new kitten. Looking after the kitten drove everything out of your mind for the next few days?
– Yes.
– So the kitten can be seen as a decoy.
– It was a real kitten. Very real.
– I’m sure it was a darling. Kittens tend to be. That’s their evolutionary advantage over other small parasitic animals.
– If you insist.
– And the book was a posthumous, unfinished work … only this one looked finished?
– Yes, that’s right.
– And the kitten died shortly afterwards?
– Yes.
– And how did your wife, or rather partner, react to that?
– Well, she was devastated, obviously. We both were.
– Rendering you both incapable of further investigations of time-shifts or other dimensional anomalies?
– You make it sound like something out of Harry Price! Yes, I suppose so, if you want to put it that way.
– What about this dream of yours?
– Oh, I only told you that because it was the only odd dream I’ve had lately which I’ve actually been able to remember next morning. I’m sure I’ve been having plenty of others, just as weird, but they tend to dissipate the moment I wake up.
– But the dream you did remember wasn’t so very weird now, was it? You were back in the bookshop, you found two puppets, then you woke up …
He stood up and went over to one of the cupboards to one side of his study. As he opened the doors, I got a momentary sensation of something wrong, some danger, somewhere. It passed in a flash.
The cupboard was full of a mass of bric-à-brac of various kinds: toys, clocks, statues, mostly garish in their colouring, and yet, somehow, not childish in their overall effect.
Among them were a number of puppets, with their strings hooked round wooden clothes-hangers. He unhooked two of them and brought them over to show me.
They were brightly coloured Indian puppets. One was male, the other female. Reversed, each contained an alternate of the opposite sex.
– Is this what they looked like?
– Yes. Yes, but not exactly. The ones in the dream were slightly larger and more detailed. But basically, yes.
– So you dreamed about these puppets before you came to see me. Had you ever seen anything like them before?
– Well, I guess that I must have done. I couldn’t have seen them in my dream unless I’d already known about that way of constructing dolls, I guess.
– Let’s leave the guessing out of it for the moment. You’ll agree, at least, that it’s a remarkable coincidence that I should have two puppets of precisely the same type, and should be able to show them to you just after you’ve finished telling me about them?
– Yes, I’ll give you that. But what does it all mean?
– Mean? Well, nothing, of course. That is, in the sense that you’re using the word. But if you’re asking is there something going on, something out of the usual range of probabilities, I’d have to say yes.
– How did you get them? The puppets, I mean?
– You certainly use that word mean in a lot of different ways! I got them from my wife, actually. They were a wedding present. Apparently, where she comes from, it’s customary to have a pair of puppets of this type. Rather like love-birds.
– Rather Freudian, isn’t it?
– Well, yes, that’s what I thought, too. But Amina is quite a remarkable person. She doesn’t do anything without a good reason. So I’ve got used to going along with her ideas on matters like that.
It was hard to believe my ears. The ultimate reductionist chauvinist turned feminist! It did go some way towards explaining just why he’d listened so patiently to my patently paper-thin story of semi-paranormal events, though.
– So where does that leave us?
– It leaves you right where you came in, I suppose. I have no light to throw on any of the phenomena you’ve described to me, but I accept that, in aggregate, they appear to have some as-yet-undisclosed meaning for you.
– Oh, great. Thanks for nothing. So I’m just going off my trolley, is that it?
– Maybe. But maybe not. Your ability to consider and examine the things that you’ve told me all weighs in your favour. You don’t sound like a fanatical occultist, determined to find meanings in everything that happens. And then there is the matter of the two puppets.
– But is that any more than a striking coincidence?
– Who knows? I’d be inclined to call it more of a synchronicity … in the Jungian sense.
– Which is?
– A manifestation of some principle of significant grouping in events as they befall us. In their book about it, Jung and his collaborator, Wolfgang Pauli, call it ‘an acausal connecting principle’ behind the universe as we see it.
– So what do I do now?
– I’m not sure that you actually have to do anything. If anything further occurs, it won’t be at your prompting, I shouldn’t think. Just wait and see. And keep a record of what’s going on. Oh, and keep me informed.
– Are you sure? You’re not just saying that to get rid of me?
– No, no. You’ve got me interested now. Just one thing, though. If anything further does happen, and you want to discuss it, I think we should include Amina in the conversation. She’s not scientific, but she is insightful about matters of this sort.
Another bombshell. A mere woman to join our conversation! Who was this man? More to the point, was I the one who’d been underestimating him all this time. After all, where was Margaret in all this? Why hadn’t I shared any of my thinking with her?
I guess I’d thought, at first at least, that the loss of the kitten would make it too painful. But maybe it simply was that I didn’t associate our relationship with abstract discussions of this kind.
Not so with Phil and Amina. Food there for thought – thoughts on many different (and mostly uncomfortable) subjects.
4
This time it got genuinely weird.
I was caught in one of those recurring anxiety dreams which come to plague us all at times. This time I was in a vast camping ground with a group of friends: I’m almost sure that one of them was the actor Edward Woodward, but I have no idea why. I’ve never met him, and wouldn’t say I’d particularly followed his career. I did, however, once watch a film where he was caught on a small island full of strange people from whom he was trying to escape – until he discovered he was actually one of them …
At some stage I’d discovered that I didn’t have any pants on – they were lost with the rest of my luggage – so I kept on wandering around in my shorts, trying in vain to find a way out of this labyrinth of cramped corridors, muddy fields, and inquisitive crowds of tourists.
When I finally woke up, I thought I hadn’t. It was still pitch black, and I seemed to be lying on some raised banquette covered in felt.
I certainly wasn’t in my bed at home, but when I reached out my arm to find a lamp or some other source of illumination, there was a spine-chilling crash of falling objects.
I couldn’t see what they were, but they sounded like books. It’s not entirely unknown for me to go to sleep with a few books on the bedside table (and sometimes one or two on the covers as well – Margaret and I decided long since that in the interests of getting a good night’s sleep, it was best to occupy separate bedrooms).
It wasn’t especially easy to get up. I seemed to be bumping into walls and tables in unexpected places, and there was a definite feeling of size about the place I was in. It seemed larger than my bedroom – than any of the rooms in our apartment, in fact.
Had I been sleepwalking? Had I somehow ended up in somebody else’s space? An open garage, perhaps? Or the stockroom at the back of a shop? Surely I’d have been conscious of doing something like that?
I didn’t have any matches, and the luminous dial on my watch did nothing to light up the ambient space. I used to sleep with a torch by my bed as a boy – until they discovered me using it to read after light’s out. I hadn’t regretted the loss of it for years, but now it would have come it very handy indeed. And one can never find a light-switch in a strange house.
By now I was at risk of losing contact with even the shelf, or couch, or whatever it was I’d been lying on. It was only by dint of much groping about that I was able to locate it again.
I patted it down quickly to make sure that there was nothing left there to find: no keys, no wallet, no other useful trinkets. And then set out on my journey of discovery.
I was in two minds about it, really. On the one hand, there was something to be said for staying put – for waiting for dawn to come and the light to come in and guide me on my way out.
On the other hand, what if there was no dawn? What if this space was completely blanked out to outside light? In that case I’d be sitting there forever, waiting for a release which would never arrive.
Strangely enough, I hadn’t even tried shouting for help before this. The embarrassment factor of being found in someone else’s lockup was so strong that I’d hoped against hope to be able to find my way out without alerting anyone to my presence.
Now, however, I threw caution to the winds, and started to cry out. Tentatively at first, and then more loudly.
Nothing. Nothing at all. I could have sworn that I felt the slight swirl of a breeze on my cheek after my initial shout, but it must have been my imagination. Certainly there was no answer; no creaking boards, even, to betoken a silent presence watching me.
Now there was a creepy thought. What if this place was being overlooked by someone with special glasses? They’d be able to see me easily, watch me groping around, my arms outstretched to locate unseen obstacles, whining and screeching with fear of the dark.
But then all the lights came on.
•
I don’t know why, mind you. Perhaps they were on a timer. Certainly there was no patter of feet coming to investigate the intruder as the light spread out all around me.
I was quite blinded at first. I had to close my eyes and gradually try to accustom them to such a shift in the spectrum.
As things began to come into focus, though, I could see that I was in a long aisle of books – in the midst, presumably, of many other such aisles stretching out all around me.
Was it the bookshop again? There seemed little reason to dispute it. It did make me wonder just how much I was actually ‘there’, however. It felt too real for me to be dreaming, though. I pinched myself. Ow!
There seemed no real point in doubting that – to all intents and purposes – I was stranded in that same strange space, with no idea how I got there, dressed only in a vest and pyjama bottoms.
But while I was definitely there in the flesh – and awake, too – how could it be that I’d found my way back to that invisible shop? There was something so odd about it, that I couldn’t help wondering if I’d been drugged, or was simply hallucinating.
The bookshelves looked horribly familiar, though – I hadn’t had time to explore the whole place, but I knew the general look of its displays well enough. Wherever ‘there’ had been, then, I was definitely back in it again.
All of which should have made it easy enough for me to find the exit. After all, I’d had less trouble getting out than getting in last time. There’d been a sense of illimitable expanses around me even then, though, and this time I seemed to be stuck right in the middle of it all.
But it’s a long road that has no turning, and this one too had its centre – if not (as yet) any obvious way out.
There’s a scene in an old Three Stooges movie, where the hapless trio come round the corner in a library only to find a ghostly custodian hovering in front of one of the shelves.
When they try to speak to her, she shushes them. She is, one presumes, the ghost of a librarian who has never found her way out of the stacks.
Coming round this corner, I saw … not a floating female ghost, nor even a tiny kitten, but a slightly shimmery patch of air.
It looked like a kind of membrane, stretched over the passage between two sets of shelves. A membrane, but also a flame – there was a distinct intensity to the light refracted through it, seen from certain angles, which almost resembled fire.
Whatever it was, it stopped me short. There seemed to be no way forward without pushing through it, and that I felt distinctly reluctant to do.
Turn back, then? Looking behind me, I saw nothing but ridge after ridge of shelves, with no apparent end, stretching out to the unimaginable back shelf.
Should I stay or should I go?
Coming nearer to the area of disturbance, the patch in the air, I had the distinct impression that I could at least partially see through it. But where you would have expected to see a refracted version of the shelves that surrounded me, instead I thought I saw something else.
Not a room inside, though for a moment it looked a bit like a blank chamber, a bit like those imaginary buildings created on bombing ranges: half bunker, half suburban dreamhouse. It somehow resolved itself and came into focus as a desert landscape: ridged with slight dunes, and some stubby vegetation accentuating its contours.
Was that anywhere I wanted to visit? Not really, no, but there wasn’t much profit in staying where I was now, either. Nor, even if I did escape, again, from this bewildering bookshop, was there any assurance I wouldn’t find myself back here again, the next time I nodded off, or turned a corner in the street.
I put out one hand, tentatively – there seemed to be no resistance. Nor, when I pulled it back, did it seem scorched or otherwise altered by the experience.
At a certain point you have to act or admit defeat: submit yourself to be acted upon. There was no clue what to do in such circumstances, what action to choose, so I chose to go forward. I pushed through the patch of slightly resistant air.
•
– The dreams I’ve been having lately, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy!
This was the first time I’d sat down with Amina as well as Phil to discuss what was happening to me. He seemed convinced that she might be able to help, and given his own disposition simply to question each statement I made, I couldn’t help but think she could hardly do worse.
I’d just told them about my bookshop experience, the third time I’d found myself in there, if you counted the time when I’d found the puppets. It hadn’t been quite a bookshop then, but seemed in some sense to inhabit the same space.
Amina looked doubtful, then darted a glance at Phil, as if asking permission to speak.
– Go on, he said. Tell him what you told me.
I won’t quote her verbatim. Her English was good, though slightly accented, but there was a good deal of groping for words and expressions which I can’t really reproduce. Nor would it be worthwhile to do so.
The substance of what she said, though, was that I was in grave danger.
– The place you are in, is no place. It is in your mind. But that does not mean it is under your control.
– How do you mean?
– I mean that it keeps on making itself known to you: saying hello in the language it has taken from you. You like books and bookshops, so it acts as a bookshop.
– But I don’t like deserts, particularly. So why did it turn into a desert? Or why did it look like a desert on the other side of the membrane?
– The membrane, you call it? I would call it the door. You have stepped through the door, and now it has you. You have entered on its path.
– What path do you mean? How do I get off it, get back to reality, normality?
– There is no way back. You have chosen.
– But I didn’t really have a choice. There was no way back.
– You understand that that is just how it seemed. If you had been a different person, it would have been different.
– So what do I do now?
– You must go on.
– But how. How do I go on? I’m back here, now. Where is it it’s trying to get me to go, anyway?
– You are familiar with the, how do you say it? … the underworld?
– I know that there’s supposed to be such a thing in some religions and belief systems. I wouldn’t say that I’m familiar with it, exactly.
– But you know what it is?
– I know some things about it, yes.
– Phee-lip (No-one else had ever called him anything but Phil, or Dick, but for her it was something like Phee-lip) Phee-lip knows more about these things than I do, but he has not been there. All theory for him.
– And you have? Been there, I mean?
– Yes, I believe so. A long time ago. More than one time. But not like you. I had a guide, help from others.
– Perhaps you should tell him? prompted Phil.
– Okay. I don’t speak of this often. Especially not here. People do not understand. At home, though, the older people know more about these things.
Long time ago, when I was a little girl, I fell into a well. It was very deep, and very dark, and it was too narrow for anyone else to come down and find me. I cried for my mother, but she couldn’t reach me. They lower me water, food. I stay alive, but I can’t get out.
But then the wise one. How do you call it? Phil says Shaman, Medicine Man. We just say wise one. He is a she. They come down and find me, in the dark, in my dreams, while I am still there, in the well. They offer me choices, speak to me. I can go on or I can stay. I ask what there is to go on to. They tell me no way of knowing unless you choose that. They say there is pain here, if I stay. There, no pain.
I ask about my mother, my brothers. What will happen to them if I go? The wise one don’t know. Only show me the bones of all the others around me, ones who have gone on. I can join them and then the bones will all stand up!
This scares me. I am only a little girl, only seven years old. I say I want to stay.
– Are you sure? they ask. Yes, I am sure.
And then I wake up. I am back in my room in the house. No fall in well, no lowering of water. No-one knows what I am talking about! But after I tell them my dream, they take me to see the wise one. And the wise one, they know. They say they will speak to me alone. They ask ‘Well, are you happy?’
– Yes, I say, but feel confused, don’t understand.
– We will speak of this once, and only once, they say. You make that choice to go back, not go on. Now it is set. You will live out your life, but all will be changed. You will go to strange places, and live a strange life. No-one can tell where or when it will end. You will see things others don’t see, know things others don’t know. You will speak strange languages, and sometimes you will be able to help people on their way.
– And will I be like you? I ask. Will I be a wise one?
– Yes and no, they say. I will not be trained, like them, not live apart and talk to strange people no longer alive. But I will still know things and hear things that others don’t. But I must resist the desire to know more: to push on into the shadows. That is not for me. That is not what I come back for.
– So is that what you think has happened to me? Was I offered the same choice that you were?
– Not quite the same, no. For me, I could go on, be dead, as you say it. Or I could go back, be alive instead.
– So you’re saying, in the dream I chose death rather than life: chose to push on into the next world?
– No, no, no. For you the choice is different. You are already dead. You have been dead quite some time. For you the choice is which level to be on: what to see, what you can allow yourself to understand.
•
As she said it, I knew it to be so.
Dead! It explained so much: the catching up with – strangely transformed – old friends, the dream of the ideal bookshop, the shifting sightlines from moment to moment.
I began to see what an effort had gone into maintaining this illusion. How much I’d laboured at creating a simulacrum of everyday life. Not consciously, mind you, but simply because that’s what the mind does.
Not so much the brain as the mind, you understand – my brain was no doubt oxygen-starved long since – though, come to think of it, just as in dreams, the sense of duration might be wildly misleading; I might have stopped breathing just a moment before.
Presumably my continued sense of a self must be centred somewhere to be reacting to these mind-created events and scenes all around it. I hardly dared use words such as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ – pneuma to the Greeks – but then if not that exactly, what?
So long as there was a self to deride and punish, there was, presumably, life – ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’
All I could see now were Amina’s dark eyes, kohl-darkened, as if framed by a hijab or a veil. They looked at me kindly, I thought, as if conscious of my turmoil, and yet unable to help in any substantive way.
My last thought, as I closed my own – non-existent? – eyes was of the kitten. So much pain and emotion, squandered on a mere dream creature. But what else were we here for? What other objects could I salvage from this darkness?
Here we go again, my lips whispered.
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[Editor’s note: This is where the fragment ends. There are a couple of notes some pages further on in the ledger which seem to be referring back to the same story, though:If Phil is van Helsing, Amina Lucy, Margaret Mina, and the narrator Jonathan, who is the Count?It’s hard to see how this apparent reference to Bram Stoker’s Dracula is to be squared with the rest of the narrative, but I include it here for what it’s worth. – M. S.]
Strange meeting with the shadow?
Notes:
[1] W. H. Auden, 'As I Walked Out One Evening'. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957 (London: Faber, 1966), 86.
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