*
People assume, when they have not met him, that Augustine is lean and aquiline. They take as their model someone like Julian the Apostate, all nose and clavicle and sunken eyes. If they award him a beard it’s a long one, bushy and narrow so that he can stroke it in contemplation. They imagine a benign theological vulture, cavernous and cadaverous but filled with inner light – but Augustine was born in Thagaste and his mother’s people are brigands, of the respectable sort that are so successful as to become rulers. They hunt on foot and wrestle in the town square every seventh day, and there’s not one of them could not lift a dead gazelle across his back and carry it home. The bishop’s beard is black and cut very sharp. No doubt there’s a little grey in there, now, some salt amongst the pepper. But his arms are still the ones that lifted me and held me on his hips, and his hands would look better on a sea pirate. Picture me, then, slight and very female, standing him down. He uses my old name twice, and twice I correct him. He tries to tell me he is my father in the Church. I remind him that whatever relationship we now have, ‘father’ is surely not an appropriate descriptor.
There is some shouting. I raise my hand, finger in the air to make a point – and the ground shudders just fractionally, as if in response.
I’ll take it.
Later, we sit across a table, with eggs and dry bread.
‘You look the same,’ Augustine says at last.
I snort. ‘I look older and wiser and I have fat cheeks. You look … episcopal.’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose that is inevitable.’
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this.’
‘Doing what?’
‘This alchemy. You will tear down the Church and all we knew.’
‘Perhaps it’s time. Perhaps the Church is wrong. Unjust. Unholy, even.’
‘I don’t accept that.’
‘I didn’t ask you to.’
‘I can stop you.’
‘I don’t think you can.’
Long silence. We regard one another.
It becomes a very long silence. Where did he learn to do that? My Augustine was unnerved by a hiatus in an emotionally charged situation. He’d be climbing the walls, pre-emptively justifying and declaiming, and then on to the business of the day: no time for human feeling, God requires.
But then maybe this situation isn’t emotionally charged for him, any more. In fact, I’m not sure it is for me, either.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says finally.
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry. To you, for everything I did.’ A plain apology, without passion, and a dangerous anger in my gut.
‘For seducing me?’
Last time we met he cast me as his victim, as if I hadn’t entirely been the predator and he the prey at our first encounter. I was very cross with him about that.
But this new, improved Augustine just laughs. ‘God, no! I may not be quick on the uptake when it comes to the heart, but I do learn, eventually. No. For our love: for our physical joy in one another, and our unity. For our son, I make no apology and I regret I ever tried. But for his death, which I could not prevent; for my clumsiness around it; and for my treatment of you when I found my faith, I am forever sorry. I do not anticipate your forgiveness, but I dearly desire it, in time.’
Well. I might believe in miracles, after all. Here he is, Aurelius Augustine, and he is both the priest and the man I loved, at once and in the same skin. Gone, seemingly, is the self-flagellant, and here instead is a reconciled leader of his faith, at home with his history and his future: a man to move mountains.
Again that unaccustomed quiet. I realise it is mine to break.
‘Thank you. Oaf.’
His eyebrows twitch. Not many people address the Bishop of Hippo thus.
‘Perhaps,’ he murmurs, ‘you can tell me all about it now. If you are strong enough.’
I will, of course, but first there is something I must do. I lean across the table and kiss him lightly upon the brow in benediction, and feel something unknot in me that I hadn’t known was tied. Malice, saved up against the day, but never really anything I wanted. I let it go.
Benedicte, Augustine. You silly arse.
It’s like releasing a heavy sack. I feel muscles in my chest open and unlatch: freedom. I catch my breath at the feeling, and the scent of him hangs in my nose and mouth.
The wrong scent, and with it the sound of doors.
I push him away, and find a weeping Greek in a dark cave.
*
Coming out of Alem Bekagn was the first holy instant in my life. I was seeing something more than real, the linen sheets of the hotel in Tunis where I awoke. I was desperately thirsty, stinking and be-sored, but most of all I was cold, because I had grown used to the oven heat of my cell.
It was an expensive hotel. There were white towels on an ottoman at the foot of the bed, and the room filled with the light of a sun I had not thought to see again. I was no longer mad, as well, and that escape also was implausible and delightful. I saw clearly and cleanly. I drank the whole jug of water from beside the bed – fortunately it was a small one, and I did not vomit it all straight up again. There was a loaf of bread on the little coffee table, some fruit and cheese. I ate like a bird, tiny bites, and then sat, and a moment later ate again, so that for the whole morning I did nothing but contemplate the flavour of Ossau-Iraty and apples and unsalted Italian dough. Then I bathed in cool water and put on the clothes – my clothes – that were laid out in the next room. I had no idea how I would pay for it all, until I found – to my amazement – the bracelet of gold coins that lay by the cuff of the shirt, thick South African coin, and however much I did not love that nation in those days, I was not fool enough to turn up my nose.
For me, it was not rebirth that happened in the Grand Forum Hotel, hearing the muezzin from the Zitouna Mosque; it was a journey away from my own death. I think that is how I have seen all good things since then – not as blessings of addition, but as the unmaking of sorrow, as if there is a given amount of it in the world to be washed away by effort and hope.
Now, as we step from the safe room into the fire – as I half carry the children in my ragged arms because if not me then who else? – I look ahead, and find a ragged young black man upon his knees. He reaches for me, and I catch the stink of Alem Bekagn, shocking and present. Oh, sweet Mother: let it not all be the fever dream of a dying fool. Say it is not ’74 and I have not the whole horror to do again.
No. It is not, but as the boy clutches at my arm he looks up, and I find myself staring into my own young face. I shout at him: ‘COME,’ and for a moment he does nothing. The young fool has absolutely no idea. Will he fail me? Good God, does he dare? Here am I, decades more decrepit, fighting his battle for him in a new country, carrying his grandchild out of danger, and here he cannot be troubled to lift his sorry arse to his own salvation! A sharp kick in the backside, boy, and be about it!
And he is, thank God. I feel a kind of twisting along my spine, and then he’s gone, and with him the familiar weight from my left arm, the bracelet of ’67 krugerrand.
There was a man I met once, in the security trade, who suffered from the most curious ailment. He was blind, but could remember sight.
I don’t mean just that he had recently gone blind – although he had, courtesy of an ill-judged bar fight in Soho – but that while he was blind in the present, his memories included visions of the recent past, so that if he looked at a shopping list he would see nothing, not even the vague outline of the paper and his hand, but when he tried he could recall it perfectly, in memory. The damage to his brain had made him blind to the moment, but left him the past. That is what I have now. I remember walking downstairs into the lobby of the hotel, handing over my gold coins with the knowledge that this was what I had wanted them for. I remember the look of pleasure on the manager’s face at this massive overpayment. I remember calling the British embassy and asking if they could assist a young genius on his uppers, and finding t
hat the ambassador was a frantic Ethiophile and a fan.
I remember these things, but I never did them. They are like the contours of a statue, or my portrait of Selassie: points marked on the map of the real that, when you come to them, were never there. Or perhaps everything else is unreal and when you sweep away the shadows only they remain.
The loop is closed. Does that mean I have discharged my magical obligation? Did my strange escape take place only so that I could escape again, later? Or am I escaping now only so that my escape then can be completed in the manner I remember? If I go ahead from here and eventually die, does that mean that the middle part of my life – artless but contented – will exist for ever?
In the darkness in the place where I have been before – where perhaps I always am – I see a woman, and a man.
*
She is tall and he is short. She does not look pleased by his presence, for all that she has just bestowed on him the sort of kiss of recollection that belongs to old lovers and to Lauren Bacall. She’s in her forties and for all the world looks like one of those deep, sensible women whom I would have met at an art world party, and who would, with grace and emphasis, have turned down my inevitable invitation.
I always admired those women for their quite accurate first assessment. This one has about her the presence of a collector in her own house. In some manner, this place belongs to her.
The man is the opposite. Annie would say he looks as if he’s been rescued from an aquarium. He has water all over his clothes, oil and grime and what looks like tobacco on one shoulder. I recognise him from the papers: the finance maven who swims with sharks – literally and figuratively.
Wait. Wait.
Wait.
As I see them together, I realise that I painted them, not just once but many times. They were part of my inner landscape back when I painted my quintets. They were there on the walls in my cell.
*
Bugger every jinn and angel from here to the radiant, heavenly city! Damn and blast and—
Oh, damn.
After jennaye and miracles and all the rivers of Hades, I should be used to it by now: this turbulent theological switcheroo. No doubt at any moment I shall be exchanging banter with some godly twerp in an overlarge hat. Who knew that becoming the keeper of a divine and almost unlimited power was like walking down the street in Hippo dropping gold coins? Every addle-pated demiurge and drunken river sprite must come and lay his head upon my feet. This one looks woodsy enough: a little man in pyjamas covered in what smells like gull-shit and bile.
I think he’s blind. His hands are very red and raw, as if he’s dipped them in some caustic gel. It’s still there, viscous slime from a fishmonger’s block.
Stella Stella Stella.
Oh, save me. A lost dog in love. But I can’t have him incapable – and even if I could, I’ve always had a weakness for strays.
I spit in my hands and rub the silver Alkahest across his palms and face, watch the acid wash away and the flesh turn pale and healthy. Call it practice, then, for my dead son.
Adeodatus must be here. I walked through the wall of fire. I passed each river, as I must. The protocols are attended to, the gates of Hades are unlocked, and I am owed a life. I am in the kernel now, the heart of the world tree. This is the cave where the worm Ouroboros swallows his tail. Everything begins and ends here.
But all I have to work with is a lachrymose fat man, an old geezer and the promise of a smirking peacock.
In which case, that must be enough.
‘Oy, lard-arse!’
‘Stella?’
‘Oh, good Lord. No. Where’s my son? He’s in a coffin, buried in honey, but he’s here somewhere and I’m not leaving without him.’
The Greek stares for a moment, and I wonder how he came here, and whether he is dreaming or dead. He’s the first person I’ve met since all this began who seems as bewildered as I am.
Now I know them. The satyr, with his golden throne; the Aksumite, priest or painter or both; and the demon, not ‘Know-all’, however close the divine whisper of the Alkahest brought me to its real name.
There’s one missing; the woman on the table, the sacrifice who becomes the goddess … or the other way around. It all depends on your direction of travel.
Quite.
Well and good. Perhaps the goddess intends to put in her appearance, or not, but I have work. I did not come to be part of whatever exciting theological dumbshow is in the offing. I have spoken the words and given of my body. I have paid with a token and proved my heart. I have crossed the rivers and opened the gates of Phlegethon: five tithes paid and five doors unlocked. By a sacrifice accepted, a name given, a secret spoken; by the breath of Cerberus and the hard choice I made: I have paid for a life. I am here for my son.
And possibly also Scipio, as I may have accidentally cut him into pieces and definitely ripped out his heart to make a point, with the questionable assistance of my jennaye servant.
Which of us serves probably also depends on your direction of travel, come to that.
The Greek, looking around, seems to come to himself, or perhaps he loses the residue of his sanity, for he laughs and mutters: ‘Hierophant.’ It’s a little grand for a round fellow in a sticky shirt, but why not? Truth be told, our priests rarely look the way we feel they should, and the ones that do are the ones you really have to watch. So, let him be the Hierophant, if that’s what he wants – mine or anyone else’s. We all should have our moment.
‘I can take you where you need to go,’ he says, quite formally. I realise he’s trying to be nice.
‘Conduct me,’ I say, and he nods, and does.
He leads me back the way he came, and through a door into a tiny room, and I know it is where Adeodatus died. I can smell pain here, in the straw mattress and the sweat that clings to the plaster. This is where he was when he called my name and I did not come. It is hot and dank and somewhere a woman is screaming, or maybe a child. Maybe it’s him, or me. I wonder if he heard me, all that time ago, heard the sound I made when they brought me the news. I wonder if he will hear me now, down the long tunnel of the Alkahest:
‘It’s me. It’s me. It’s all right.’
Please, let him hear me.
The Greek Hierophant, I think, was expecting something else, and in its absence he finds a new thing to be worried about. A star swallowed by a fish, apparently – I shall have to fathom that later.
I look at the walls, and see paintings scratched in pencil and ink and I think this here is blood: two women, two men, and the divinity poised above us, always watching but never quite moved to join in. I don’t bother to examine the faces.
Behind me, the Aksumite is weeping a little. ‘This was my cell,’ he says.
‘It is the room where my son died,’ I reply, and see him nod.
It is the Chamber of Isis – the intersection of worlds. The conjunction. The waterfall. The belly of the beast. This is where everything is decided.
I look at the room all around, and I know. The Chamber is made and remade. It exists wherever it is painted. But in some sense that makes no sense at all, it was painted here first, in whatever place and time this is, and I know which are the eyes that see it for what it is.
I lower my lips to the Aksumite’s old face, and kiss each lid, drawing his sight into my mouth, feeling it settle on my vision like fine cloth on sunburned skin.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
When I look back at the room, the coffin is waiting.
I lean down into the box, as I did once before, and touch the skein of the honey. It is oily and warm, resistant to the pressure of my fingers. I push harder, and feel it give. I am stronger this time. When last I bent over the body of my son it was in grief and denial. I recoiled from the task even as I performed it, and my most devout prayer was that my hands pass through him as through a ghost, and the whole venture be revealed as a strange mistake. When finally he came loose and I knew the corpse was of my flesh; when I wa
s forced at last to contend with the stark indissoluble certainty of his death: it seemed so unfair and so irrational. Of all the times and places for the world to be no more than it appeared, when butterflies in the wind may seem from the wrong vantage a troop of cavalry and by their presence bring nations to the brink of war, or the sighing of the sea whisper calumnies that end a man’s life – with all that, why must the truth in this one instance be so drab and unameliorable?
Now I find myself at the heart of something stranger and grander than I dared then, and it is the truth – or I am mad. Did I just mistake the scale of things? Was I too timid in my dreams?
The honey is warm and thick. My questing thumbs brush against the flesh inside the box. My fingers stretch, crabwise, for a grip.
The moment will be strange. My son has been dead, and I may not know what he has felt. He was torn apart, yes, in his soul, but not destroyed. Was it pleasure, to be made so, spread out and at peace? Did he touch the souls in which he hid and come to know them, to cherish their company? Do I draw him back from paradise, all unwilling, to a cage of bone and meat? Subject him once again to the indignities of thirst, itch and shit, to unrequited love and bodily fear? Was it blissful to be many rather than one? Or has he been in torment all this while, not punished but injured in his soul, as my old nightmares howled? Will I bring back a suffering thing? Then, too, this is resurrection, not rescue. Time has passed and life is different. The land, the friends, the family he knew are changed or gone. He will be born out of time into the world, held at two decades while the rest of us have advanced along the course laid out by the stars, as travellers claim to feel after a long voyage that some part of them yet lingers between one harbour and another. Will he stretch, or snap, at this attenuation? Will those he knew receive him, or fear his return? I will by this act announce myself to the wider world, incontestably a force and a wonder. There will be consequences I can barely imagine. Have I the right?
I can feel the pieces, strange and floating on a dark sea, hidden from everyone but me. Hidden, but yearning for one another, to be no longer torn. Yet still: have I the right to reverse the river of the world?