The World and Other Places: Stories

  In those days scores were settled with a knife at night. My family were murderers. Most families were. It was difficult to run a business without killing someone now and then. It still is, but we are more civilised. We don’t take their lives, we take their livelihoods.

  I prefer the more direct method. Don’t turn away. It’s just a joke. Just a joke.

  You will notice that the little preamble I give my visitors is not necessarily well received. Some of them would like to leave at once and I enjoy the visible agony of mind fought out between their distaste and the fact that they have parted with £10 entrance money including tea.

  The tea wins. It is waiting for them, holding out a promise of the future where all is spice buns and warmth. I am in the past with the murderers. I am a figure already receding down a corridor marked ‘PRIVATE.’

  PRIVATE. That’s the part they really want, those visitors of mine. There’s always someone ready to step silently backwards into the shadows. They duck under the ropes as though the house were a boxing ring. Who is it in the Red Corner? Me, always me, waiting for them politely. A house like this, people don’t understand, a house like this is alive. They think it’s closed circuit television. No, no, it’s the house itself.

  The other day the telephone rang and I answered it myself. I had to inform the caller that the house was not open until April. Enthusiastic by race, American, she said, ‘No problem.’ I took that to mean she would book herself on the first tour of the season. She took it to mean she would arrive one evening, face lively, cheque blank.

  I answered the door myself. I cannot seem to find any servants at all at the moment. I answered the door. I am a gentleman. I showed her in and poured her a drink. It was not so very difficult. Perhaps I am too much alone.

  My sentences were a little stilted, formal. I tried to say, ‘My name is Samuel Wisbech. I am fifty-three …’ but she held up her hand. She had heard it already, last summer on a tour, wouldn’t I just talk to her, be myself?

  Myself? Itself? The house, me, me the house. My voice sounds like the wind at the window. My skin is the texture of flaking plaster. I am upholstered like an old man, an old house, there is decay on us both.

  What shall I say? The words here are out of date, we have never replaced them, there is no need of speech when the stones cry out. The house and I understand each other and there is no one else. I think the servants must have left long ago.

  I watched my visitor taking in the room. I used her eyes. Perhaps it does look odd, the furniture cowering under dustsheets, the paintings taped over with brown paper. I did explain that we were not open.

  She asked me to show her over the place, as though she were looking for a mortgage and I were an estate agent. Her voice was as bright as cut glass. She stood up on those heels of hers and we set off, the sound of her tapping like a hammer at my head, myself passing as silent as ever.

  ‘There’s plenty of work for you to do before opening day,’ she said, as another door fell from its hinges.

  ‘These rooms are private,’ I said.

  ‘But there are so many of them.’

  I smiled. I was turned away from her but I smiled. The secret places pile one on top of the other like bodies in an open grave.

  I showed her the revolving fireplaces, the priest’s hole, the trap door, the dungeon. I showed her the kitchen and the wheel where the beagle was chained to tread endlessly and turn the spit for roasts.

  ‘How barbaric,’ she said. I nodded. Myself, I hardly eat at all these days.

  ‘Here’s the dog,’ I said, opening a cupboard. A heap of dust fell out, a collar somewhere in the middle of it, worn, chewed, with a lead medallion, REX.

  My visitor fainted. I thought she would.

  Night came and with it the fog. The house was held in the fog’s long embrace. I half carried, half dragged my visitor back towards the fire, whispering to her, stroking her hair. I told her these stories and many more. The stories I had learned from the house.

  As I talked it seemed to me that the house itself was craning inwards to listen. Then I knew it was the house speaking. My lips flapped uselessly. I sat in the lap of the house. The house had its arms round me. I was safe.

  April the first. Opening Day. The garden is an orchestra of flowers; strings of wild clematis, tulip flutes, a timpani of lily pads on the skin of the pond, and the raised horns of the daffodils blaring light. Spring is so noisy.

  I am pleased. Pleased with the crowd at the door and the new roof for the west wing. My American visitor paid for that. We talk almost every night. She loves the place. She loves the place so much she will never leave. I have let her have mother’s room. Did I mention mother’s room?

  My mother’s room is not part of the tour. It is preserved exactly as she left it, in 1921. When she entered the stable. She was bound to keep it as my grandmother had left it, when she died in 1895. The heavy curtains, the ink well, the blotter, yes the blotter with its strange inverted message, ‘I am going mad.’ There is something theatrical about the female sex.

  I took my visitor there on the night she arrived. I thought it unwise for her to attempt to leave in the fog. I made her as comfortable as I could, although the bed was musty and had a stain in it. I told her to ring the bell if she wanted anything. From my own quarters I heard the bell’s dull clapper all night. I would speak to the servants if I could find them.

  I took her breakfast the following day. I took her lunch. I thought it unwise for her to leave. We talked that night and many others, she said less and less. It is something to do with the house.

  The house. How ruined it seems. How tired. Do the visitors come at all? Are they here today or was it last year, the year before? My name is Samuel Wisbech. I am fifty-three. The record is cracked. The gramophone won’t play. We have no servants these days.

  I went to find her. I called down the corridors of time, ‘Mother, where are you, come out, the guests are here.’ She didn’t answer me, and the little boy ran faster, pushing open the heavy doors that swung at him like weapons.

  Where was she? The house grew bigger and bigger and the room she was in faded further and further away. I saw the outline of her dress, nothing more, and the river pouring into her room.

  Spring comes. The river bank flowers and the brown winter waters turn clear for the trout.

  The room is there, somewhere, it must be. I can see the window from where I stand at the weir. I know the way through the house. When I go indoors to find her the house mocks me. There is no room.

  They must be there somewhere, on the other side of the wall, separated from me by an inch or two at most. I can hear them laughing, the women together, laughing at me uselessly shaking the dead doors. They are all in there and I am here, caught in my house, room by room, unable to find the only room where there is peace.

  The Green Man

  To honour. To mock. To fear. To hate. To be fascinated. To laugh out loud.

  The gypsies come here every year once a year. Come living. Come memory. Half dream. Half danger. Half man half beast. Satyr them, satire us; safe, good, time keeping, clean, for a day dragged in front of their silvered mirrors.

  Get my fortune told. Buy a pony. Sharpen my knives to their murder edge. I wear my pants baggy but pass their glass and I look like a stag in rut. Down Sir! Oh cool comfort on a sunny day that my embarrassment is mine alone. The river is wide where they camp either side and I am clothed but my reflection is naked.

  They breed horses. That is they breed themselves and sell off their children of the nether parts, piebald rascals all mane and tail, to set a swag at a girl. Well known it is that young girls love horses, loving the wild underside of themselves, loving the long neck and hot ears of animal seduction.

  Buy the young lady a pony and the trap is thrown in free. These round-bellied glint-eyed hosses are Trojan horses. Truant, feckless, anarchic, unsaddled and munching to bare earth the ordered weekends of Daddy’s life; the lawn.

  Didn’t Daddy save
up to move out of the city? Didn’t he save for a painted house and a picket fence? Didn’t he save for wife and daughter? And after one long satisfactory shower of sperm hasn’t his wife bottled him like a genie and taught him to spend his lust on the lawn?

  Oh the suburban weekend oh!

  On Friday Daddy cuts the lawn. On Saturday Daddy waters it. On Sunday Daddy barbeques on the lawn. On Monday Daddy leaves it and looks with half regret on his close-cropped green-eyed doll. His manhood is buried there and next weekend he’ll spike it.

  But the gypsies are coming and his daughter is thirteen.

  Talk of the town is that the fair should be banned. This time could be the last time if the Mayor has his way. Time is gone when folks needed travelling play, when the bright band of gypsy caravans looping down the hill made a gold ring of holiday fire. What the gypsies sell you can buy any place and better. No one keeps their pans to copper. This town is stainless steel.

  Why am I frightened by the scissor man? Why does my heart curl? The noise of the blacksmith hurts my feet and the knife grinder whets my backbone. The red-head trull selling silk will deck me in a beaded scarf. She would make me her Corn King if she could and take what little I have left. The Green Man on the green lawn sprouting ears of wheat.

  My daughter came back from school and said, ‘Daddy, in the Olden Days the Queen married the King and after a year she killed him.’

  I said, ‘I know that sweetheart.’

  She said, ‘It was to make the crops grow,’ and I went out and worked on the lawn.

  The gypsies are coming. Gutsy from the North. Open faced from the West. Beguiling from the East. South and Sexy. In less than a day’s march, less than a night’s scheming, by compass and constellation they will be here. Spread out the map and pinpoint me. I am voodooed head to foot.

  My wife said, ‘What are those punctures in your chest?’

  I said, ‘I fell on the spiker.’

  I have taken great pains to neaten the garden. It is a triumph of restraint. Although it is summer and clematis and rose would garland my head if I let them I have clipped their easy virtue into something finer. They climb, they decorate, they do not spread. My wife admires this from her bedroom. Meanwhile, our inner and outer spheres have met at a point of mutuality. It is our daughter’s birthday and the day of the fair.

  When a horse pisses it locks its front legs raises its tail and drops a shaft of vast dimensions that shoots a fireman’s douse. This was the first thing we saw, the three of us, as we walked hand in hand in the field.

  ‘Daddy, look,’ said my daughter and gripped my finger. The grass turned liquid. I thought, ‘We shall have to swim for it.’ My wife was wearing peep-toes.

  A Hispanic came by selling ice creams.

  ‘You want one?’ he said, looking at the trunk of piss.

  My wife paid, while my daughter and I stood helplessly together and I thought, ‘She wants to touch it. Oh God.’

  She broke from my hand and went up and patted the horse, dry now, shrinking up into himself. The green pool winked at us.

  We walked on, a normal three-way family, eating our ice creams. I tried to win at the shooting gallery but they screw the guns. There was a woman behind me, the kind I don’t like, big boots and jeans, and a slender body and a stare. She slung a gun and massacred the target. The stall keeper laughed and said something to her in their own tongue. She chose her prize and strode away with it, another girl at her arm.

  ‘Ciao Reina,’ shouted the stall keeper and I told my wife it was a put up job to fake an even chance and pull a sucker after his luck.

  He gestured to me. ‘Try again.’

  I said, ‘You screw the guns.’

  He shrugged and picked up a glass rolling pin. ‘Maybe your wife would like this?’

  They were blowing glass at the next stall. There were men in leather aprons, their skin as thick and dark, playing on their soundless trumpets and forcing a ball of glass into the fire-shot air.

  ‘See your future in it,’ said the hag who took the money. ‘Quick, now, as it comes.’

  I turned away. My wife wanted to buy a witch ball for her display cabinet. I said I thought it was a mistake, ‘They are just cheap stuff.’ But she liked the way the colours caught in the lacunae of the surface. Reluctantly I gave the hag the money.

  She caught my hand as I did so. Instinctively I closed it into a fist but she twisted it like a door knob and my fingers fell open, palm up under her greasy stare. My one hand was much bigger than both of hers together and if I were a quick bite horror writer I suppose I would call them claws. With her hooked nail she scored my heart line and laughed out loud.

  ‘The heart stops,’ she said.

  ‘You mean I’m going to die?’

  ‘Only your heart.’

  I pulled away from her and put my hand up to my chest. My ironed cotton chest. My heart was still beating time. The two glass blowers were looking at me with open contempt, as though I were the one filthy, scarred, vagrant. I stepped backwards and collided with one of their women selling bracelets from a basket. My force spilled some of them and I bent down with her to pick them up, saying ‘Sorry, sorry,’ all the while. I was conscious of the others watching me. Where was my wife?

  I concentrated on scooping up the last of the fakey sliding gold and raised my head. Her breasts were by my mouth. Her breasts falling out of her man’s loose shirt. Her breasts, tan, taut. Her breasts, unharnessed.

  She pulled my head forward and even while I was pulling away I had her skin against my upper lip and my cheeks were burning with shame and I was worrying that I hadn’t shaved enough and hating myself and hating this …

  To honour. To mock. To fear. To hate. To laugh out loud. To be fascinated.

  Where was my wife?

  They were laughing at me, all of them, as I scrambled off the grass and blundered away. My wife and daughter were up ahead moving at the same mesmerised pace as everyone else. I shoved through the tranced crowds and caught up with them both, their backs to me, hand in hand, my wife and daughter. I smoothed myself down and put my arms round their shoulders. My wife turned and smiled and together we watched the jugglers and my heart paced back to its normal metronome and I breathed again, not too shallow, not too deep. I began to think about a beer.

  ‘What happened to your trousers?’

  My hand went straight to my crotch but my wife did not notice. She was glaring at my knees. I let my eyes travel downwards and there were two green splotches neatly capping my white ducks.

  Yes I know we have only just bought me these trousers. These trousers were expensive. These trousers are blatant in their whiteness. Sassy as a virgin courting a stain. These are bachelor trousers not gelded chinos. These are touch trousers in fourteen ounce linen and we had a fight in the shop.

  Now we shall have a fight in the field and our raised voices have sawn out a circle in the crowds around us. Our daughter is embarrassed and walks away. My wife says, ‘Ruined.’ ‘Stupid.’ ‘Specialist cleaning.’ ‘Grass.’ ‘How could you?’ and gradually her words break up, out of their sentences, verbs and objects falling away, leaving the subject, me, me, failed again. Failure.

  I could no longer hear her. Could see the words forming in glass bubbles out of the crazy trumpet of her mouth. My cartoon wife. Her cartoon husband. Waving their arms and blowing bubbles at the crowd.

  Till death us do part. Nothing in the marriage service about a pair of stained trousers. Let me pass. A man can still have a drink can’t he? I went into the beer tent where there was a pianola and a long trestle table, a merciful place to hide my knees and prop my elbows. I don’t go out to bars. I’m a family man and proud of it. We like to eat together and share a bottle of wine. My wife buys it from the Family Wine Club. We usually get the Mystery Mix and it’s always the same. I would prefer beer but I don’t do the shopping.

  Sometimes, when I leave for work early in the morning and my wife and daughter are still asleep, I truly believe that I w
ill never come back. I love them both, sincerely I do, and I can’t explain how you can love a thing and want to be parted from it forever. Sometimes I wish she would kill me, collect the insurance, go on with her life and free me from the guilt of staying, the guilt of going.

  A friend of mine did go and now he lives in a rented place in the city, two rooms and no responsibilities and he is about as miserable as before. Change your life, they tell me, in those popular New Age Bibles, and my wife and I both understand the importance of speaking the truth and we have learned about quality time. Yet when I look at her and when she looks at me our eyes are pale.

  What’s in your eyes darling? What do I see? The daily calculations of money and sex. How much of one, how little of the other, the see-saw of married life, keep the balance just. Keep the balance, just. I am a heterosexual male. My wife is a heterosexual female. Are we too normal to enjoy our bed?

  Normal male to Norman Mailer: Please tell me how.

  Have you ever had a boy? I’d like to but I can’t do it.

  Listen to me. A man will try anything or thinks he will. I talk like a tomcat but I act like a worm. What happened to youth and glory? What happened to those bright days when the sun was still rising? Soon it will be Midsummer and the light beginning to die back, imperceptibly at first, a few minutes a day, and then the gradual forcing back indoors earlier and earlier, helpless against the dark.

  Midsummer used to be a fire festival. They used to light the bonfires on Midsummer night and burn them through June 24, Midsummer Day. Maybe they thought they could prop up the sun in his luminary ride. Hold him in the heavens at his peak. It was a night of visions and strange dreams. A night of lawlessness, for the Corn King, the Green Man, could copulate with whomsoever he pleased. For a spell time stopped. At the moment of decline accelerate. Call it a wild perversity or a wild optimism, but they were right, our ancestors, to celebrate what they feared. What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is quietly killing me. Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.