HUSBAND: I think you’re right.
WIFE: And then we’ll know.
HUSBAND: Yes. Then we’ll know.
CURTAIN
EATING FLOWERS
“What are you thinking about now?” the naked eighteen month-old girl asks, mounted on the similarly naked old man’s shoulders. In each tiny fist she holds a lock of his white hair as reins. His leather hands, articulated bone and sinew birdcages, are closed around the infant’s ankles to prevent her falling off as they progress down the enormous icebound hallway under diagrams of failing stars. These are the Fimbul distances of the time-avenue. Puzzle-ball beads of hyperwater, frozen into glass sea-urchin intricacies, chime and tinkle in the drifts about the wading ancient’s knees. “I’m thinking now of how I died,” says he, “When I wiz
Snowy Vernall always sitting, always snuffing it there in the daughter’s house on Green Street. Orange, sage and umber mottled in a hearthside rug of wool-ends where the black cat is asleep and snoring. In between the clock ticks you can hear dust settle on the sideboard, on the emerald glass bowls, one full of golden apples withering, the other full of hard-boiled sweets becoming damp and soft. There is a mildew perfume on the indecipherable crowns-and-lilies wallpaper, just sliding off like skin above the skirting board where it’s that wet and heavy. From behind, below, the muffled fuss of chickens tutting in the long back yard outside as it drops down the slope onto Saint Peter’s Way, from which there’ll sometimes come the echo-silvered clop of hooves or else a rag and bone man’s speech in tongues, frail little noises shouldered by the smelly summer wind that’s always blowing on that Wednesday afternoon. There in the daughter’s house, there in the living room a table on the left – with fifty years of slipping cutlery and scalding teacups logged meticulously in the varnish – and upon it stands a china vase of tulips; stands the china vase of tulips. Glorious, they are. Bright custard yellow, icing-sugar pink, blackcurrant purple deep as midnight, you should see them. An old man alone, let himself in, come visiting with everybody out and starting to get loose in his intelligence, starting to have a trouble with the old perspective as he nears the mortal turning. Up above the sideboard there’s a mirror with another hanging opposite above the hearth, or rather up above the sideboard there’s a window with another set into the south wall opposite. It isn’t easy telling which it is, the same as how the corner of a room can be concave and convex at the same time if stared at for long enough. Adrift in the warm air with opal motes all blazing there are other details
that may come to me after a while, but that’s the long and short of it.” He picks his bony, barefoot way amongst cold dunes of spiny hypersnow accumulating on the frosted parquet of that stupefying corridor. May squirms uncomfortably, a small warm weight on her grandfather’s nape, and squints through an intense chandelier flurry of suspended, whirling crystals that have more than three dimensions, a hypnotic meta-blizzard. Gazing past this diamond spindrift, the profoundly beautiful nude baby focuses her sad Galapagos eyes on the soaring cliff-face walls that border perpetuity’s gargantuan emporium, away to either side across the intervening miles of tundra floor. She knows that in these latitudes of Always there are fewer living people in the neighbourhood downstairs, and that they have less complicated dream-lives. Consequently, the immense arcade surrounding her and Snowy has accumulated very little in the way of astral furnishings and decorations, trimmings borrowed from the sparse imaginings of a polar encampment that has less to dream about. Set into the north face is something May believes might be somebody’s vision of a massively expanded trading-post, with walls of varnished wooden shields and drapes of wolf-pelt that are bluish-white speckled with faun. Elsewhere, her almost-turquoise eyes alight upon what she supposes to be the inflated dream-form of a twenty-second century hostelry, the excavated ground floor of an ancient office block where she can make out local date-specific ghosts with their fur burkhas and their wind-up radios, their barbed and ornate wolf-killing ‘vulpoons’ inevitably clasped in one raw fist as they trudge stoically through a bereft Valhalla. Other than this, the endless hallway offers only the occasional stone edifice or concrete hulk enduring from a previous era, set amongst an unrelieved expanse of towering rock and chiselled ice. The optically confounding hyperflakes fall silently around them, an obscuring lingerie-lace hung on air. She tilts back her exquisitely made head, haloed in hair golden and nebular, perusing the ruined canopy above this chronologic thoroughfare’s unending winter vastness. The green-tinted glass that had once sheltered the great boulevard is long broken and gone, with its containing framework of Victorian iron reduced to rusting carcass spars through which unfolding blueprint constellations made from overstars are visible. Recalling the conspicuous array of shops and buildings to be found only a hundred years or so back down the hall, May understands that there may not be streets or street-names anymore down in the territory below. A perfectly developed mind within a glorious arrested form she feels a distant disappointed pang at the idea but nothing more, consoling herself with the observation that there are at least still trees. Weathered immensities as realised on this upper plane, the crystal-heavy giant pines extend up out of the remaining floor-holes here and there, where these have not been covered over by the glaze of permafrost or else collapsed entirely. It occurs to her that the material ground below their higher mathematic reaches is most probably no longer called the Boroughs, and she even wonders if these arctic furlongs of the overworld are still referred to as Mansoul. Returning her attention to the mad old man on whom she’s riding, May asks him a question, her voice an unsettling blend of infant gurgle and elderly lady syntax. “Do the builders and the devils ever make it up as far as here?” His sunburned neck gripped fast by the precocious toddler’s knees, her grandfather is chuckling, almost giggling as he replies, “Of course they do. You’ll still find them about when there’s not people any longer. It’s just that they tend to hang about more in the populated bits of time, like in the stretch that we’re from. And before that, if you ever choose to go back that far, you’ll find even more of ’em. Back in the pastures there, they even venture downstairs every now and then, when they’re directing that monk here from Geographical Jerusalem or when they’re ordering that Saxon halfwit back to Peter’s Church so he can help dig up Saint Ragener. One speaks to poor old Ern, my dad and your great-granddad, in the dome of Saint Paul’s during all the usual thunderstorm and lightning that they seem to favour, though it’s really just all the electromagnetism that’s discharged. It’s thundering when I have that one speak to me that time, when I wiz drunk and on top of the Guildhall in St. Giles Street if you can imagine that: your granddad on the roof’s crest swaying in
a bitter breeze out of the east with storm-clouds riding it towards the town from Abington, from Weston Favell and the pale blue slates beneath his feet already dampening to navy in anticipation. Down in George Row and St. Giles Street below all the pale ovals tilting back and gaping in amazement, milling beetle-fashion in their bonnets and their caps around the bike-shop at the top of Guildhall Road with the aroma of French chalk and rubber lifting from its doorway. Seeing how the figure on the skyline sways and wobbles some of the assembled crowd call warnings, with the greater part of their admonishments bowled off toward All Saints or Bridge Street in the rising wind and leaving only scraps behind: “… making a show …”, “… sending for a bobby …”, “… ruddy fool. You’ll break your neck and …”, but that’s not what’s going to happen. In the lofty gusts chopped by the chimneys, in the pepper-shot of birdsong and in rubbish waltzing down the guttering at the approach of rain, that’s not what’s going to happen. Next there’s a precarious little dance, as if spontaneous, as if not foreordained from the commencement of eternity, which has a slip and slither in it and a teetering recovery that makes the audience gasp at the appropriate juncture of their unacknowledged schedule. What a spectacle the world makes of itself. What a performance. Although everything is motionless in the thick glass of time there??
?s the appearance of a drunken stumble and another indrawn breath from the flat multitude compressed by the perspective, people painted on the planner’s diagram of a street beneath. A threadbare arm is hooked about the rooftop statue’s chilly shoulders, draped between the hard stone pinions and a garland of encrusted pigeon shit encircling the neck, in an inebriate over-familiarity that also offers increased purchase and stability. It’s spitting now, the first cold droplets breaking against cheeks, the backs of hands, but still the idling mob squint up into the light precipitation at the drunk and the stone man with wings together up against a darkening sky like they were pals. A long and principally inaudible harangue commences, aimed at the bemused terrestrial observers who seem unsure what to make of it. “I’m with my dead granddaughter walking naked through a frozen afterlife nearly three hundred years from now. Tell all of your descendants to be careful of the wolves. They might want to devise a pointed stick of some variety.” In Giles Street down there, a peacock carpet of uncomprehending eyes. The light jumps suddenly and after comes the bruise-mauve rumble of a cymbal firmament, masking the softer, closer sound of grinding stone-on-stone as the winged icon slowly turns its head to make eye-contact. All about the chiselled throat there is a fissure-necklace of small cracks that ripple briefly into being, splintering and branching before fusing seamlessly into the new configuration. Similarly, there are fine webs of self-healing fracture at the corners of the eyes and mouth as the carved features blink and smile and, ultimately, speak. “Vernalimt, whorey skung?” The shattered syllables are settled slowly like an ash or sediment upon the eardrums of the listener where they arrange themselves into an information or, as in this instance, an enquiry. Something like, “Vernall, what limit are you seeking?”, but attended by a dizzying array of subtexts; of conceptual and linguistic pleats hung in a shimmering veil at the peripheries of apprehension. Underneath, the earthbound onlookers see nothing, peering into drizzle or distracted by the search for shelter from the coming downpour. All they hear is the intoxicated steeplejack’s delirious laughter and unfathomable reply. “Are not the edges of the heavens and the brim of reason and the shunting-yards of time itself all boundaries requiring my inspection and therefore within my jurisdiction? Answer that with a straight face and droppings on your chin!” The granite being shakes its head, slowly and imperceptibly, to an accompaniment of further minute fracturing and subdued grating, then admits “Yohuav metr”, which translates to somewhere in the region of “You have me there”. The weathered cranium shifts by fractions back to its original position and grows silent. By now, overhead, the thunder takes its bull-run through an ironmonger’s with the weather coming down like tinsel curtains on a nude theatre show. Down in the modern painted dots that throng the painted street is suddenly a great preponderance of indigo as the constabulary arrive who, from that elevated vantage, look to be largely unsympathetic. Lightning-scattered pigeons whirl
about me, or at least that is my honest recollection.” They stride on, the old man and his infant burden, for a distance of perhaps another dozen years before they both agree to halt and make a bivouac. The younger of the Vernalls asks to be set down within a hollowed-out concrete concavity there to one side of the great corridor, ceiling subsumed beneath an optical illusion chandelier-growth of mathematically abnormal icicles. The light refracting through these from the shattered ceiling of the infinite arcade outside suffuses the whole chamber with prismatic blush, with iridescent specks accumulating in the wrinkles of his brow or powdering her flawless skin. There are still the frost-dusted dreams of wolf-pelts piled discarded in a corner, and Snowy supposes that their current whereabouts may be one more further reiteration of the makeshift astral tavern they passed some few decades back. Exploring in the misty dazzle of the spectra, toddling on plump little legs, the ageless baby May emits a sudden shrill peal of delight that chimes and echoes, shivering through the ice-stalactites and bringing her intrigued grandfather to her side. There at their naked feet a modest carpeting of what at first glance look like ordinary Puck’s Hats spreads for a few yards in all directions. Only upon close inspection is it evident that this is some new strain of the ethereal fungus, born from the imaginings of different times and different people. The traditional lithe fairy-forms that they are both familiar with have been replaced by slightly shorter, plumper female figures, although every bit as winsome and still sharing limbs and facial features with each other, fused into their customary starfish or snowflake configurations. Strikingly, the exquisite nude women are all now albinos with pink gems for eyes, with alabaster skin and at the central tuft and the furred junctions of their petal legs alike the silky pseudo-hair is made a bright snowblind titanium. The elder Vernall splits a chalky stalk with one black thumbnail, thus eliciting the usual dying whine that neither of them have been previously aware of, the peripheral sound of an electrical appliance suddenly switched off, sliding from a dog-whistle high to slump into the audible. Turning the meta-blossom over in his leather hands he notes that on the underside the ring of tiny wings are now no longer dragonfly-like gossamer but are instead the feathered kind, like those of minuscule white budgerigars. Breaking the pallid fruit in two and giving half to his granddaughter he allows himself a taste, surprised at the increased intensity of the higher-dimensional bloom’s sweetness. In between slobbering mouthfuls he and May conclude that this perhaps reflects a lack of refined sugar in the diet of those still living in the realm Downstairs, whilst the altered appearance of the Bedlam Jennies possibly suggests changed notions of allure and beauty down there in the icebound mortal continuity below. As the anticipated tingling and illuminating warmth spreads through their phantom systems, they both understand without the need to voice the thought that this profusion of uneaten astral fungi must imply that there are fewer peckish ghosts about these reaches of the over-life, if indeed there are any left at all. The Gulf Stream warming Britain, as they’ve previously agreed, must have seen its benign convection current cease sometime around the middle years of the twenty-first century, when the continued melting of the Greenland ice-shelf meant that it was no longer sufficient to power that longstanding hydro-thermal drift. The country, always sharing the same band of latitude with wintery locales like Denmark, would have been reminded forcibly for the first time in countless generations of its actual polar situation. It would also have become one of the last remaining areas in the world along with the Antarctic mega-cities to have weather suitable for growing produce on a planet where the equatorial regions were increasingly surrendering to desert. May has at one point suggested that this seems to have resulted in a period of overpopulation, possibly occasioned by invasion or a frantic wave of refugees and immigrants, before the massive human die-back that they have already witnessed in the later stretches of that century, when the unending boardwalks of Mansoul were crowded with bewildered just-dead apparitions that the naked baby and her wild-eyed steed were forced to push their way between. After that point the pair are both agreed there’s been less company around and fewer signs of spectral habitation, indicating that down in the frozen wastes of the First Borough underneath them there abides a population which is much diminished, at the very least. Snowy and May consume their fragrant supper, the variety of Puck’s Hat that they have decided to refer to as “the snow-queen sort”, in a profound and thoughtful silence. Up above the endless hall outside their gutted billet with its crust of glass geometries, abstracted constellations are unfolded against blackness of unfathomable depth. They brush the frozen hyper-crystals from the luscious wolf-skins and each take one as a blanket, just for the familiarity and comfort of the notion rather than for the unnecessary warmth or cover. Snuggled there beside each other in their wraps for the same reason, both close their remembered eyes to drift in time and memory. The old man thinks of the tremendous distance down the sempiternal corridor that they’ve already come and the much greater distance yet to go, the countless furlongs of one foot before the other or the parallax in separate layers crawlin
g by at different speeds to either side of him, and is reminded of the similarly lengthy hikes that are his habit while in life and in the third dimension,
the long treks out of Northampton and across the lanes and fields to London, from the Boroughs into shining Lambeth, wet after the rain. He knows a trick that will compress the journey, telescoping his fond farewells to Louisa at their Fort Street doorstep into his footsore arrival on the angel pavements there south of the Thames. Detaching himself from his usual perspective on the solid, trudging world of three dimensions he adopts an altitude from which duration has become a thing of feet and inches. His wife’s goodbye wave and her accompanying suspicious frown smear into cobbled lanes, to breweries and brickyards on the edge of town and then to wayside flowers, cowslips, forget-me-nots and such, a floral motif on the county’s crawling wallpaper. The fixed disc of the sun swells up and reddens like a sore eye, staring angry and aggrieved until relieved by the protracted blink of a cloud-cover eyelid, grey and full of tears. The world of form and depth and time is flattened to a single plane as in a map, and the ensuing downpour is reduced to only a metallic texture spattering an area of the diagram. Day tans to night, twice, two thick stripes of purple tar stippled with nail-heads, and then past this point on the unwinding canvas of the days the emerald verge of Watling Street gives way to thick impasto crusts of pigeon-streaked geometry. The finer details of broad avenue and narrow terrace are unfolded from these intricacies to surround him, with flat factories now springing into being at the corners of his glazed sleepwalker gaze and the whole capital become a children’s pop-up novelty. Along Hercules Road’s unspooling length he goes down into the familiar Bedlam reaches of his birthplace, starving hungry and for some forgotten reason suddenly near lame, and it all seems to him to be accomplished in a moment. He gulps down the sixty or so miles in one debilitating, dizzying swallow and slams his drained journey on the Lambeth counter, smacks his lips with relish on the nearest barmaid by way of a celebration. Her mouth is the taut but yielding ribbon of his finish line and yet he stumbles further, stumbling and gasping to her chucking-out time chamber, to the purlieus of her womb, and the unfaithfulness is somehow wrapped around, is an extension of Louisa’s knowing scowl there on the front step. Even while he’s bearing down with the milk-jellies of her thighs against his chest he knows he is remembering this moment from the vantage of a furry eiderdown, an ice-decked cavern in another world long after he and everyone he knows are dead. He has the brief impression of an endlessly reiterated series of his self, an infinite array of wild-eyed men in an apocalyptic state of mutual awareness, waving to each other down a long and narrow hallway that at first he thinks is time itself but realises is another image from another moment as he moans and empties himself into her, into the sweaty linear rush of human circumstance, both of them writhing, pinned like martyrs to the crushing wheel of everything. It is immediately morning. He uncreases from the bed and grows a skin of clothes, grows a new room around him that unwraps into a street, another pub, a few days decorating work in Southwark where the hours are applied in coats, the brush-stroke minutes smoothly melting into one another. There’s a roofing job in Waterloo, dancing with sky and gravity and he looks out across the lead braid of the river to the east where in the distance the bleached skull of the cathedral rises. In its famous gallery he knows that fifty-year-old thunders are still whispering to the faint residual vibrations of his father screaming, going mad, an endless conversation between echoes. Strains to see if he can catch it, overbalances and twirls his arms like windmills then regains his footing in a scripted accident, wobbling there upon the rim of a new century. His heart pounds from the near miss and he shakes a little in the wake of the adrenaline, his mind aware that there was never any danger of a fall and yet his flesh remaining unconvinced, as ever. He breathes down his nose as he descends the ladder into sequence, into filthy history, the rungs transmuting in his clammy fingers to become a buff pay envelope, the slopping glass weight of a pint, a different barmaid’s cunt, her bedroom doorknob and at last the laces of his boots where he kneels fastening them for the walk home to Northampton. Streams flow backwards and almighty storm-fronts crumple and contract to balls of tangerine-wrap tissue before vanishing. A labouring dray horse snorts and shivers, breaks apart into two spinsters riding bicycles who raise their hats in passing. Parasol seeds gathered by the wind are reassembled into puffball clocks before condensing into piss-gold dandelions and then the planet sucks them in through their stem’s milky straw. The planet sucks it all back in eventually, drinks every blade of grass, drinks everyone as he retracts the centipede-length of his form expressed in time from Blackfriars Bridge to Peter’s Church and Marefair, reels his here-and-now along the Roman Road into the Boroughs with leaves ripening and filling out from ragged russet to a sleek viridian as they float up to reattach themselves. He ties the over-shape of his excursion in a tidy bow, greeting Louisa with a kiss on the front step, another woman’s juice still flavouring his lips and all the while he knows