Some years ago I used to walk at night in the mountains. It had been a long dry summer and the heather was grey and brittle, loud in the warm darkness. we were cast in shadow, heading up towards the crest of a hill beyond which the sky was filled with a curious pearly light that we thought might be the northern lights. Then, from the dark before us, quite quickly we found ourselves enveloped in a fog of hoof-beats crashing through the heather, their panting breath surrounding us and the brush of deer hide sweeping past. Just as quickly they were gone , a river of dark shadows sweeping away across the valley. But we never actually saw them.
One. Silver Nitrate. --- When I awoke, sunlight was leaking through the blind with the sound of a tired diesel engine about to slip the clutch. Voices muttered in the tree outside my window and a dog barked. Once. Supine in my bed, wound in sheets and tired from a night of reverie and violence I felt closer to the tomb than the womb. --- It had rained in the night. Milky splashes of water spattered on the metal rim of the skylight above me, tattooing a pointless pattern in my head, while images of the 1890’s flickered before me in hessian and grey felt. Two women of indeterminate age beckoned to me from a dark upholstered sofa, their silver nitrate faces twisting, floating in the dark as I drank from the glass in my hand.
The first, voluptuous as Venus, heavy as a butcher, ineffectually encased in a brocade corset, waved her painted nails and smiled the enigmatic smirk of the mistress in an Old Master. The second, grey as a mudflat and thinly wrapped in an army blanket watched me sullenly, her lips twitching something unspoken. The room was otherwise empty, save for the rain that now fell in torrents. --- I turned and left and, running through a no-man’s land of grey-brown clay was engulfed in a hail of white blossom hurled from the regiments of stunted apple trees that stretched away beyond the horizon.
Two. The Pilot. --- And now this morning. I peer at the familiar crack in the ceiling through the pale haze that fills the room. If I concentrate I can just about make out the sky beyond. The edge of the crack is a mountain range along which rides a man on horseback, silhouetted against an alpine sky as clear as the virgin’s robe. And in that blue, a biplane circles slowly over London, its pilot, my grandfather, making notes and taking pictures. --- He wears a leather helmet, with flaps like a spaniel’s ears and his nose is wet with the cold. His left foot touches the rudder pedal and his right knee holds the stick. The tea in his vacuum flask, tucked away behind his seat, is still warm with his anticipation as he scribbles in his notebook and the world below drifts ever more blue towards the dark horizon.
Three. The Sound of a harp. --- Beside me my wife twists in her carapace. She has never been the same since reading that book. Just before the bell rings, which is not a bell but the sound of a harp, she sighs, and I watch in wonder as her warm breath leaves sparkles of mist on her glossy black jaws. --- I found the mandibles a little disconcerting at first but have gradually come to find them endearing. Beautiful even. Now it is the strange clicking that irritates me even though I have learned to make out the words. --- The harp rings and she unfolds her many slender legs. Not bad for a woman her age. “Is it morning?” she asks and I reply “Yes, I think so.”
Four. Stanley falls.
A little before a quarter to eight. Still dark at home, though the hooves in the street never cease their parade and the gas still purrs in the glass. And here - bright, hot, and the incessant screech from the trees. Slowly, with my eyes on the far bank, I descend the steps, today as every day, to feel the cool of the river on my toes. It is necessary. Necessary to be seen, necessary to cool my feet. Stand a while and watch the farther shore. See and be seen. Fishermen. Fish. The sound of the water. --- The sound of the water, though the river is a roar like the angel of judgement. I remember – the gentle hissing in the ears, soft at first and delicate, like a distant choir of boys. Then a low murmur that grows into a growl, a growl from the crypt behind a door which will not stay closed. That’s when you first feel it in the pit of your belly. The scratch. And then the chorister screams and you are lost in the maelstrom. The tomb is not silent but filled with the roar of all the dead. Those dead, my dead. Yes I pity them. Have pity. I adjust my hat, turn and retrace my path to the house.
Five. Night. --- It is dark and the serpents are out, kissing my feet, licking the air. The clock ticks and from behind the kitchen door a long wail slithers down the corridor from somewhere in an upstairs room. It is tremulous, fearful, yet full of rage. We are animals - apes with teeth bared in a subtle smile beneath cold, red eyes. And the walls tremble like leaves in the forest.
Six. By the river. --- Last night, for the first time in nearly a thousand years, I slept with my mother. I recognised her by her voice – clear and soft as meltwater. “You remind me of my father” she said. “I remember him” I replied with a wry smile, “He was no oil painting.” We did it there by the river in the dark with the faint smell of wood-smoke from the fire that had nearly gone out and the sound of the night-birds in the trees. But it was so long ago that I barely remember.
Seven. In full flight. --- I know they have decided that I am to fly. I can tell from the way they glance at me furtively through their soft linen smiles. And I know that there will be dogfights, barbed and bloody, I see them through the open window. The open window. And I know how to fly, despite the confines of these sheets - white, webbed, tight as a hen’s foot. They wound them round me in the night to protect me from myself, from the flames.
Still, I lie, waiting, while the grey walls sweat softly, leaking the colours of the sky on a day smothered by cloud that should have been hot. The bricks are painted with shadows shifting slowly through the forest of chrome saplings and trailing creepers, and the whispers flutter like birds in the half-light. The rubber mask thrusts its breath inside me and I swallow, gagging on my own excitement, I feel the cold, scratched metal beneath my gloved fingers and pitch forward into a screaming dive. I know I am to fly.
Eight. --- The dog rested its head in a thin strip of sunlit dust that sliced through the empty attic air. In so much as it thought, it thought of rabbits, at least perhaps that’s what they were those flickering grey-furred heart-beats that seemed to leap through what must be the long grass beyond. Panting in the soft silence it plunged forward in stark staring delight though all that could be heard was a slight scratch in the dirt from the final tremor in its right hind leg.
Nine. --- The wreckage lay there for seven months before it was removed. Of the pilot who came to grief that afternoon in late July nothing remained save a single glove, swamped in the ditch that smelled only of rotting canvas and the nests of mice.
Patrick StPaul lives and works in London, sifting through the past and the present in a studio filled with neatly labelled boxes containing half-forgotten things much loved by moths. --- www.patrickstpaul.com oldworldmonkey.blogspot.com
Unease was produced in an edition of 50 under the pseudonym Patrick St Paul in 2014 to accompany the exhibition at Mark Hix’s Cock & Bull Gallery in Shoreditch, London.
