Downriver (35 page)

The resonance of a church bell runs a prophetic tremor along
the board floor; a warning step, uneven on the cobbles. A single knock.

The door is opened, I do not move; yellow suede gloves of his manservant. Hair oil and horse ordure. ‘I shall return, sir, upon the hour.' High, mud-spattered boots.

His hand, then, lifted; out in front of him, grey cotton; stretching to touch me – so lightly – on the cheek. Paternal. To confirm my agreement, to implicate me. His leather travelling bag is abandoned on the floor; hideous, a mastiff with its limbs amputated. Or, a soft pouch for transporting bees. He turns, turns from me to bolt the door. The key to the room is his, the knock a sham: another of his subtle cruelties. He does not speak.

She stood in the centre of the room while he undressed her with his gloved hands. A foliage of flame, fern tongues, disturbed the grate: a demented tangle of blades. Crippled shadows, across the wall, uniting them in urgent and repeated acts.

She sat in the elbow-chair, waiting; he selected a pair of intricately laced boots from the cupboard. Nothing is said. Mumbled threats, instructions. The heavy cloth of his coat pressing on her, greasy with spilled food, old smoke.

Then he was at the window, worrying a corner of grey muslin between his finger and his thumb. She was on her knees, water steaming from the spout of an old black kettle: washing him. They were helpless, without breath, sunk in their poses – when the knock came. They were drowned.

An unyielding hand upon his elbow. The blind surgeon is led away. Out of the court, through the warren, and across the highway to the lit building, the source of his power. The opera house of all her dreams.

It could have continued indefinitely. I do not remember how it began or how long it endured, who had initiated the affair, or who had set its terms. Our meetings succeeded one another with the remorselessness of a black letter text. So long ago, so far back; voices beyond the court were calling to the shore. Sparks from
the train, like fire-sprites released from a shattered stone; like sun-specks on water. Abandoned. Forgotten. My consciousness divided, bound, tied in brown paper parcels: jogging on a onehorse cart towards some mortuary shed.

There were times when it was
his
pleasure to sprawl in the elbow-chair, my linsey over his knees, my reflection beyond him in the grime of the window, my long hair a wig to his glistening white skull. He required me to brush him, powder him, to gently stroke the pulse in his temples. There were times when he fell to his knees – as in a seizure – clasping my foot to his lips, an alabaster gull chipped from a fallen monument; his dry mouth rubbing, a sand beetle in a nest of dead twigs.

It could have continued, it did, the years, ageing together, ghost-tryst, shadows miming desire in a house of the dead, a museum of trapped reflexes: masked, we enacted obscure rituals.

I understudied my own mythology; I was withdrawn, I surprised him, inspiring the grossest intimacies. My hands behind my head, beyond him, I lay on a bare mattress, plunged back into the current that ran through my bones, dragging him on to me, his beard-splintered skull down upon my belly. I learned to split the ceiling, to prise open the roof-tree, let the star threads cut my brain into Platonic segments. Babylonian histories swept over me: brass and thorn and crocodile. There was neither contentment, nor suffering. He moved only as I caused him to move. It could have continued, if I had not known from the beginning that he was my father. He had no choice. He did not want me to live. He
had
to follow me into his own extinction.

The frozen field is compressed. The knock of a spade. Ice creases me. I am drawn up through the earth. I rest my chin upon my knees. Without sight, I am pure. The scratching of voles. Oak and elm protect me. My chaplet of heartsease is gone. I float in the dust of my own skin. Who is that standing over my bed? The plan forms: over the bare trees, the dark buildings, a vein in the clouds. From the lattice of old pains I infect myself
once more with venereal promptings. From beyond my death, I am guided.

The surgeon's hand is become his emblem.

He entered; I crossed the room, barefoot – I slipped the bolt. He paused, uncertain. Divinatory shapes in a garden of flame; the decision was forming. I had oiled the lock, tried it, but still he was startled. Directly, I initiated the new ritual: he was suppressed, stiff, anxious. He submitted. Rigid spine, fists clenched; the struggle etched stern lines around his empty sockets. A Mosaic will troubled his flesh: the skin of a glove left too long in water.

I would anticipate the motives of his actions, I would forestall him. If he lost his certainty he would no longer be my father. I would not have to kill him. The close walls rub my shoulders, powder me in fine bone dust. It is an obscene wedding, a blasphemy. The grey muslin bells around my nakedness. His black coat is grassed by firelight. The gold ring is my virtue.

Water has been boiled, it has cooled. I pour it carefully into a blue stone bowl, spilling no drop of it. The salt runs through my fingers in a vortex. I stir the surface of the water, setting the flow against the direction of the sun. Against nature.

I kept him standing where he was. Slowly I removed his coat, waistcoat, chains, cuffs, collar, the long cotton shirt. I laid out his things upon the table. An altar of offerings, touched by him, warmed with use. The turnip-watch had a seal and a red stone hanging from it. There was a key, a cigar cutter, some coins. I spotted his pale skin with water. I circled him, four times, dipping my fingers into the bowl. Four times I touched him.

He flinched, twisting, helpless, towards the direction from which he would be marked. Forehead, base of spine, liver, heart.

Behind him: I pressed myself against his back, my chemise between us, his as much as mine. My lips to his neck, whispering, whispering the names. I held him. My strength flowed out of me. Our veins were opened. My finger raced, rapidly, over his
ribs. His nipples stiffened. I bound his wrists, lacing his thumbs together: a split sex.

He wanted, then, to turn. But I would not allow it. He was engorged; the thick vein pulsing in his neck. He was a painted statue. I saw the salt burn in him, his skin tightening to crystal scales. He was crowned with wild light. Priest, lion, sacrifice.

That autumn the skies over the city were scarlet, the market buildings and the tenements standing against them: plague islands. High windows were stained with this fire and the derelicts babbled millennial threats. It was the right time; I drained him, I milked his venom. The tower of the church, white ashlar blocks, was Egypt. His mouth was dry – he cried out – his tongue black: locusts. I fed him, dripping the salted water from the nipple of my finger. My tongue went into his mouth like a fish that becomes a knife. I wanted to slash his vocal cords, to make him speechless as well as blind. I wanted to give him rubies instead of eyes. To wrap him like a pharaoh.

Thunder shattered the mirror. A slate. Each segment, a forbidden syllable.

The hour had expired, his man was at the door. Yellow glove on the claw of the handle. A subtle pressure at his elbow. The surgeon hesitated, turning his great dim head towards me: a ceremonial ram caught in a thicket. My back was to him, I faced the fogged window. He was led away, slipping on the cobbles, unprotected, his face brushing through old sacks. This evening's victim was already naked on the cutting bench. Hiss of naphtha. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, he washes; the audience is seated, expectant, the blade is placed in his hand. Twice as long as the neck is wide, without flaw. No break in its perfected edge.

Now he
cannot
leave my room. Stretched upon my bed, his hands behind his neck, his breath slow: out of his element. There is only light as we remember it. His man fidgets in the yard, muttering of appointments, digging at his groin.

Red incense in a brass mortar; smoke like the visible traces of an unheard sound. He loses all orientation. His man is dismissed,
with no interval set for his return. Smoke scarfs the surgeon's face, eroding his individuality – unsexing him. It is warm, it insinuates; it whispers. He seems to be on fire. The smoke connects him to the brass mortar. It is without origin.

She is moving, barefoot, circling; white chemise. Man without eyes, her equal. A night when neither sun nor moon are to be found. She has painted a tree of bones over his spine. And he is made to lie upon her bed, his face to the open sky. The incense is pure. It takes his breath.

She is moving, all around him: the names. He is not aroused; stretched out, his length upon her bed. He rests on the painted tree, the tree of bones; it supports him.

One ceremony became another. The first ceremony – the stirring of salt, and of water – was repeated. His skin drying to leather. He sleeps. Oak and elm. Beyond the courtyard, a girl's voice, ‘Only a violet I plucked for my Mother's Grave.' Each new beginning brought something fresh to the ritual; was, in its turn, absorbed and transformed. He is partly conscious, conscious for part of the time. The hospital was another life; a fiction, an excuse. Duties, rewards: a wife somehow implicated in his guilt, broken. Memories, pre-visions of a crime that has to be committed: a terrible act that remains
just
beyond the horizon; a service, an unavoidable savagery…

His visits to her were restricted: thirty-seven visits, thirty-seven ceremonies. The incense of salt. The smoke. The smoke erasing detail from time, making the room a cell, drawing the walls in against his shoulders. Always circling. The same names, whispered. She unrolls a flint blade from a wrapping of felt. She marks him. The knife is his own. Now there are only eleven blades on the surgeon's desk.

She pressed him from behind. She held him until her life was his life. Her pulse in his wrist. Now her hands have acquired his skills. He is handless. They lie together in darkness. She is alone, dead leaves scratching on the lid of her coffin, flakes of disturbed alabaster: the heavy door to the mortuary shed is locked and
chained. An east wind rushing among the chipped effigies. Snow falling. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones. She sees with his skin.

Oak and elm. Dull wheels ringing through the packed black earth. Earth in her throat. The shiver of root hairs. Who are these men standing over my bed? Mud feet across the slope of the sky. Dreaming, open-eyed, of a murder that is not a crime. She is dreaming his dream. He has absorbed her anger, and her strength. He will act for her and
condemn himself beyond all hope of remission
.

Seasons, years, a century; bones into sand. He was young, he was moist. Weed-flowers breaking through the cobbles, splitting the black stone slabs. The church tower overbalances, topples towards him: a crisis, moral vertigo, a new fear. The tower is flint:
shechita
blade, white ashlar blocks. And now – as he rests in the elbow-chair, at the fogged window, worrying the grey muslin between his finger and his thumb – she covers his eyes with her hands. Trust. Warm, fresh bread. Clay. She draws them, suddenly, back. No warning. And he is pained. With light. The chamber streams with uncurtained brightness.

There was no hope for him this time. The serrated brilliance of snow.
The pain!
The white angels. The chipped and mutilated congregation of the dead, the witnesses. Casually severed fingers, fallen into the slush, are carried deeper into the undergrowth by disappointed scavengers. A thought fox, an outcast. Brambles bleed the plaster ankles.

Undefended outlines. Ghosts of objects that have disappeared from his memory. Unnamed shapes that he cannot use. He is driven back upon the bed, an ice hand cupping his heart – drawing it from him, a virgin's lantern. His breath screams. He is drowning in silt. Choking. Yellow blood. A snow of muslin.

She is forcing the slit of his bag. She has all the bright instruments; the secret tools, forbidden implements of power. The touching sticks. The bones of chrome. The perfected edges.
His
knowledge. She has leeched him of his will. But she cannot
see
these hieratic weapons. She can know them only by stitching
her eyes, by moving in the thick certainty of darkness. This ceremony is the re-enchantment of life. The scalpel follows the heat-path of the scarlet tracings she has already inflicted upon his white skin.

The threads of his being are drawn out from his belly. He must reclaim the dream that was her existence. She is no longer trapped in his story, like a fly in amber. He is quite ignorant, he does not know her. He is effaced by a sudden scatter of snow. An unrecorded effigy on a dissenting tomb. His small heart. His heart-bird lifts. The threads are unpicked; he is scattered. The moisture of life. Her lips press against his wounds.

She looks from, and she rests in, the prescient socket of his eye.

She holds, in her hands, the womb – in which she should have been conceived: she is reborn. A dream of life. A key turning in a well-oiled lock.

In the elbow-chair, bare-legged. The glow of dissatisfied embers. Black kettle with a transmuted spout. Something shapeless and made from felt is smouldering in an open grate. The guttered stub of a candle in a broken wine glass. A cracked pane in the window, cold air belling the muslin. She wraps herself in darkness. The room closes on her; she has no further need of it. The intensity of that single moment scorches her lips. There is nothing more to say. The shadow of the church tower falls uselessly across an empty chair.

‘Murder – Horrible Murder!' Shout at the dead. The door, bolted from the inside, is broken down: the servant (blood on his gloves), men in uniform, neighbours, barking dogs. A gay woman, an unfortunate – disembowelled. Throat cut to the spinal cord, kidney on thigh, flesh stripped from the ankles.
Horror
! Lock it, seal it, bury all trace.

Where is the surgeon? Gone, vacant: an empty house. Seizure? Madness. He is confined: there is no life in him. He stares into a frozen fishpond, his mouth agape. Toothless, spoiled. He is absorbed in a cup of cold water. He exists only in the vapour of
the clouds racing through the high windows. Where? Anywhere, nowhere. Leytonstone. Whipps Cross.