His father’s father’s father, Mulligatawny Orange, was wounded at Ypres in 1916 having tripped over a German helmet and fallen into a bomb crater, impaling himself on a British bayonet the property of one Sgt. Curzon, who owed him fifteen shillings from a bet of a week before involving two Belgium girls and a chicken. Curzon’s legs and lower torso were missing, but he had a solid grip on his rifle, the butt of which sank along with the sergeant’s right elbow into the mud of what once had been a barley field.
Private Orange couldn’t believe his luck. Sgt. Curzon had been avoiding him for days.
The bayonet pierced his left shoulder just below the collar bone. He lay with his face a foot above the sergeant’s, his knees trailing in guts, blood running down inside his shirt.
The survivor of a mining accident two tears previously (even at forty-one the war had seemed the safer option), he wasn’t about to lose hope now, not with a pregnant wife at home and the lure of an honourable discharge pending. No sir. He searched Curzon’s pockets. But any valuables he’d had on him must have been in his trousers, as Mulligatawny found nothing besides a tin watch and some French letters.
He cursed, and dribbled spittle onto the officer’s nose.
It was a story he would tell his children, and they theirs, a number of exaggerations coming in along the way, the six hours he spent in the crater becoming six days, the fifteen shillings fifteen pounds and so forth, the entire battle raging around him while he slept like a baby, cosseted in the arms of death yet refusing to die.
The truth was that eventually he thought to detach the bayonet, stumbling back to the British lines as machine-gun fire rippled the swollen air and men plodding in the opposite direction marvelled at his luck, hoping for some of the same in the seconds in took for them to pass from this world, last thoughts spinning from heads opened by shrapnel, vital fluids turning the field into what later generations would come to envisage as a particularly vile Masalla sauce.
So he lived to tell the tale, fathering another child, his father’s father, Franklin, who served in the Spanish Civil War.
The nick-name was inevitable, he supposed.
‘Hey, Franco, why you never scared?’
He just shrugged and cleaned his rifle.
‘Me an Juliana, we think you got no balls,’ said Pepe. ‘No fear, no balls.’
As a theory it lacked science. As a joke, humour. But Franklin just shrugged; he was impossible to goad.
‘Maybe you should take a look in his pants, eh?’ Pepe suggested to his compatriot, lithe and agile.
Her smile was mischievous. She crawled toward him on all fours, shaking her long hair like a mane.
Franklin shook his head and cleaned his rifle.
Juliana nudged his chin with her nose. ‘Ignore the fool,’ she whispered. ‘Meet me after dark.’
How could he refuse?
They made love in an orange grove, which Franklin found amusing, rutting like farm animals midst heat and straw. Juliana professed undying love for him and a real hunger for his seed, which he gave in abundance, aged thirty and a virgin, finding the time right to procreate, the woman healthy and the night air clean, which he believed important insofar as the begetting of an heir was concerned. His mother demanded grandchildren. She had fourteen. Only Franklin was still to deliver, leading to rumours that all was not well with his mind.
He studied. He read books. He did not smoke or drink, was unmarried, his life, he professed, given to a higher purpose…
‘Not the church!’ Father clutched his chest.
‘No,’ he explained. ‘Freedom.’
A sigh of relief from Mulligatawny, whose shoulder he said was giving him gyp, his excuse to head off down the pub.
Mother rolled her eyes…
So did Juliana.
And Franklin cleaned his gun.
Two days later Pepe was shot in an ambush. Those not killed were captured and tried.
Found guilty, Franklin and Juliana married before a firing squad. His last wish. They dragged her aside - her salvation a colonel who clutched his groin like it were a bag of fruit, who later deserted (and was shot), leaving her free to raise her child - aimed and missed.
Although all professed to be atheists, the soldiers worried that his calmness was a sign from God.
His father then was Franco Junior, a boy with an angel’s face who all the girls wanted to kiss, a choir boy with a voice so sweet it made the blackshirts cry. And an unholy temper quite at odds with his father, his mother’s bane and an embarrassment to those of sensitive hearing as Junior raged and blasphemed, kicked over pews at the slightest provocation, dropped his pants during services and assaulted young ladies in the bell tower, for which he became rightly famous.
‘Ah, that little Franco! Who has he up there now?’
Trouble inevitably followed. As did a spell in the army, and, inevitably, jail.
On his twenty-first birthday, having served two years for reckless endangerment – with a doctor’s wife twice his age and a friend of Juliana’s – he was put on a boat and returned to England, his father’s home, where, after many adventures, deflowerings and run-ins with the law, he met his match in a girl with a mean right hook, named Flo.
Sylvester was born in 1965, the only child of obdurate parents.
At his Christening, insisted upon by senior family members, his mother and father glaringly absent, the vicar remarked on his sad countenance, unsuccessfully pulling a face before dousing the babe, who cried with the weight of worlds on his shoulders and sent a shudder of hopelessness through the assembled throng. They blamed Franco and Flo of course, scheming thereafter how to prise the child away from their angry presence, into the warm comfortable bosom of the Orange clan, whose sons were miners, whose daughters telephonists, whose northern roots were set in coal and fixed with iron.
But Franco Junior would have none of it. He took his wife and child home, simmering for years after as the boy grew, timid yet unafraid of his father, staring into the distance when his mother called, independent of them both from age five and the start of school.
School to Sylvester was where time stood still. He could spend years there, he realized, and not change at all.
School was the safe, stable environment he adored.
Until, aged fifteen, he was expelled.
Suddenly fate had taken a hand, it seemed. Franco laughed so much he wet himself, piss stains adding to beer stains on the couch from which he held his vigil, Flo having absconded with a postman years before. Overnight his father’s ire had turned inward, rotting him with bile. Only now he had his poor fool of a son to console him, the spotty youth whose crime was masturbation.
In a cubicle, behind a pink door, either side plugging and evacuating girls.
They let him sit his exams, most of which he failed, but in a psychiatric hospital, a long road of counselling his reward for genes whose narrow survival he blamed on those same fates, mocking him still, as they mocked his father in his inebriation, mocked his father’s father before a lead-puckered wall as the firing squad was made to reload, mocked his father’s father’s father who in his dotage was to relate a story no-one cared about anymore, the spittle dribbling down his chin as he murmured Sgt. Curzon’s name, rambling about Flemish girls and the chicken that got away…
Such was life, he thought. That he’d anticipated disaster from an early age made it none the easier to rationalize. But then why should he? Wasn’t that just dodging the issue? His forebears had fought evil, sometimes with evil. And here was evil again, back stronger than ever.
His great-grandfather would know what to do. He’d give his blood to feed the soil; his grandfather too. Even his old man, dead now, would challenge those squeezers of throats whose oratory was predictably heinous, even if their language was sometimes close to his own. He’d make them pay, with lives if necessary, just as his father had before, although with rather less fuss. The Oranges were a breed, he told himself, swallowing ha
rd. They did what they did and didn’t explain. Whatever their personality, be it phlegmatic or choleric, they knew what to do, and in doing it remained true to themselves.
Sylvester’s truth, however, was melancholic. Pensive and sad. He had victim written all over him, yet with a hint of acid…
Underground.
The passages were slick with condensation, the cement between the bricks crumbling with age. Rats scurried, slugs slithered, the dispossessed gathered about bean tin fires.
None of these took much notice of the prophet. They were beyond redemption, no longer caring of sunlight and solace. They crouched in the dank sewers and wandered the subterranean waterways, fishing for debris. They were, man and beast, scavengers. No amount of promise could lift them. Happiness for them was forgotten, too painful to envisage, wiped from their minds by a submerging panic. Many were deformed, outwardly twisted. Some were even born to this, into a kingdom of misery, bright children who would never shine in clean air, ears twitching and eyes shuttered, as one with the gloaming through which he travelled. Yet even here there were subversives, rebels whose outlook was estranged from the core, rogue satellites that might at any time cross the divide from maudlin to ecstatic. Never able to survive in the world above, they still were curious, making expeditions and securing prizes, buying and stealing with deft hands and salvaged money, notes and coins washed their way by luck and accident. Shy creatures, they kept their distance.
Sylvester kicked beer cans and trudged across unknowable surfaces. He had a blonde girl’s insistence on answers to guide him, her sought after resolution driving him with a memory of insect wings and a threat of violence, subtle and to the brain.
He had conduits.
Water treatment works.
Sluices, cataracts, weirs, dams, a host of manmade and natural features for the guidance of the planet’s liquid resources, its circulation of prime importance, to nature and industry, power to electrify and cool. He wondered how many individual drops there were and if they clung to a particular continent, ocean or hemisphere. More likely the drops journeyed through bodies, flesh and stone, made tours of countries and circumnavigated the globe, never settling in the same place twice, lest it be by chance, occupying through time every pore of the Earth, composing plant and animal over generations, being drunk and passed from one condition to another, frozen and boiled…suspended in clouds.
The drops carried information vital to the development of mankind. Each had a million stories to tell; it was a matter of understanding their language, deciphering their codes. All history was encapsulated in the wet spheres, singularities whose composition of hydrogen and oxygen was deceptively simple, belying a computing capacity in excess of Arthur C. Clarke’s wildest dreams. The drops were energy as well as information stores. They powered themselves and the world. They knew everything and forgot nothing. No detail was too small.
But water merely flowed, it did not decide. It coloured the land and the air; but it was left to men and women to give those colours names.
And what the child sought?
Sylvester, his head in a channel, listened as best he could to the chatter of distant drains, the gossip of sewerage as it was swept on its way. There was something strange out there, bobbing, the currents affected by its presence, pushing and shoving but unable to escape. The thing was determined. It had already travelled the globe. Washed up it would be stranded, a situation that did necessarily suit its purpose, as it would then have to wait to be found. In transit, manipulating waves, it retained some control. Only its identity, its destination were a mystery, perhaps even to itself. The thing was drawn, as Sylvester was drawn, given to favour certain courses. He and it breathed with fishes…
He and it were found.
And wakened, he in a toilet bowl with no memory of himself or the other – memory now returned.
It one box that had eluded him, not here among his collection at any rate, those items he had begun assembling in his teenage years. They made him the artist he was, Sylvester appreciated, oddments and trophies, some of which were representative of people, places or events, most of which weren’t; curiosities discovered on beaches and under benches, hidden or lost; treasures collected and thereafter employed as his inspiration, the motive force behind his artistic ego, the love apple of his creation who at times seemed like an entirely separate being.
Sylvester wasn’t aware of him at that moment. He replaced lids and returned the torch to its niche above the door.
He’d changed into winter clothes, dull and heavy.
The phone rang, which surprised him. Someone was out there. Someone with him in mind.
Descending the stairs he debated whether or not to answer. Whoever it was must suspect he was home, so was there any use in hiding? From whom? The receiver vibrated under his fingers. His mouth was dry.
‘Hello…’
The ice cracked and a head appeared, tumbling dark straw curls.
The men came forward and raised the child, dressing her pink flesh in a rainbow of scarves.
But she had a dissatisfied smile.
Twenty Eight: Painted Lady