The House at the Edge of the World (11 page)

After storm-tides we collected debris from
the beach: wraiths of driftwood, which we balanced on string and hung over the landings;
runic stones and spheres of rusted iron, which we placed on the ledges. We strung
garlands of sea-perforated pebbles on frayed fragments of rope and arrayed bleached bird
and sheep skulls on the mantelpieces.

Matthew never objected to this desecration
of the ancestral seat – occasionally he would ask after a painting or an ornament that
had been part of his home-scape for seventy years. When we said, ‘We packed it
up,’ he would say, ‘Oh, did you?’ It was as though the house slumbered
in hibernation behind the door of my parents’ bedroom. Matthew didn’t change
a detail of our arrangements, although I noticed, with each visit, that something we had
packed away had found its way into his study, things
that must have had
sentimental value – a decanter that had once sat on a shelf in the living room, a
picture that had once hung in the hall, a porcelain figurine of a shepherdess, which
must have belonged to our grandmother.

We began importing new acquaintances for
weekends in the country and made them drink strong cider and laughed at their
inappropriate footwear as we dragged them up and down the coast in all weathers. In the
mornings we took coffee and chocolate with Matthew. Sometimes we visited Mum, Corwin
more often than I. She was always smiling and made us take off our shoes in the
hall.

But this little game of domesticity
didn’t last because Corwin had the addict’s craving for pure experience.
Immediately after he graduated, and without ceremony, so that at first I didn’t
grasp the magnitude of his defection, he banished himself to the rainless, warring
places where he moved through seas of confused, displaced human beings, digging and
piping and irrigating. And the number of such places was infinite. He spun off so far
into the unknown that I assumed he would eventually rewind in my direction. But then he
had been gone for a year or two, and soon five, and, before long, ten. Of course, every
so often he returned laden with gifts and he spoke as Corwin always had done and cracked
the same jokes at which Matthew and I laughed overmuch and gratefully.

My bedroom at Thornton filled with objects
that spoke nothing to me of my brother, the family peacemaker. Red and gold Afghan rugs
patterned with tanks and Kalashnikovs; unlovely fertility figures with swollen bellies
and knife-hacked genitals; strings of enormous crude beads of crackled blue and coral
red and embossed silver. They intruded so violently upon the white of my room that I
began to believe they were given not in love but in anger.

I turned out to be a villager after all – I
made of London my village and lived there quietly. That gift of my father’s, that
first book press, turned out to be the gift that shaped my life. One morning
in the autumn after I graduated, I walked into the bindery outside
which I had been hovering for the preceding three years, like a street-child outside a
bakery. It was one of those places that occupied its own temporal dimension: you could
find it only if you knew exactly what you wanted from it. When I entered I sensed
immediately that it was a place of great discretion, somewhere safe from intrusive
questions and uninvited confidences. It was no bigger in floor-plan than the living room
at Thornton, but with twice the ceiling height, and every square inch of wall and floor
was taken up with chests of drawers and shelves of papers and cloths and leathers. At
the back, squeezed between presses and piles of books and slip-boxes, was a large table
at which three or four people worked in silence. The owner of the bindery perched behind
a high counter, which was shoved into a corner by the display window. She was small,
very thin. Her hair was pulled back into a plait, and the scattering of grey in it made
it impossible to determine her age. She might have been anywhere between forty-five and
sixty. She wore dark makeup around large eyes and a bright red lipstick, which,
strangely, had the effect of austerity. Her name was Ana. She looked at the books that I
had bound and brought to show her, said nothing about the many imperfections that I now
know them to have contained, and took me on as an apprentice. And there I stayed put and
there nothing ever changed. All around us London primped and preened while we sheltered
in our time-loop. I began to understand Matthew better.

Still, shiny London was more enjoyable than
grim London had been. Grey buildings returned to pale limestone, light bounced off
multiplying panes of glass. I permitted myself some vicarious sparkling. In the
semi-legal jerry-rigged industrial spaces that were my homes, I strung up fairy lights
and held parties to which my few slow-won friends came, bringing with them smiling
strangers.

Corwin came home to see in the new
millennium with us. That Christmas, I unwrapped from a paper printed with robins and
snowmen a malignant fist-clenched figure. It was about two feet high
and was pierced all about with spikes of different shapes and metals. I placed it on the
coffee table, where it bristled aggressively.

‘Goodness!’ said Matthew.

‘Powerful, isn’t he?’ said
Corwin, smiling affectionately. ‘These,’ he said, gently fingering the end
of a metal shard, ‘are petitions. They’re driven into the statue to bring
down curses. It’s a bit like the principle of a wax doll, except that he
doesn’t represent the victim. He’s the spirit who has the power to exercise
the curse.’

I put the curse spirit on my bedroom table
and contemplated him. I thought of Corwin’s weightlessness: how little he carried
with him; how I was his proxy consumer of interesting ethnic artefacts, so that he might
drift through the world alleging passion but committing to nothing. I thought about
Thornton and how firmly it sat in the combe, how weighted it was with a heavy ballast of
furniture and books, and I set to devising a counter-punishment. I knew how to slow
Corwin down. I would send him books. And he would not be able to give them away because
I would bind them myself and make them personal to him, and over time his bags would
fill with books and they would all be about Here, and he would have to take Here with
him, wherever he went.

I raided Matthew’s collection of
forgotten local histories, excavated from the dustiest corners of failing second-hand
bookshops, and started with
Cove and Combe: Secrets of the Devon Coast
, a
gentleman’s vanity publication, as so many of them were. It had been nicely
produced, with engravings of looming cliffs and fishing vessels tossed on unlikely
waves, but the cover was coming apart, which was the only reason that Matthew allowed me
to wrest it from his collection. I gave it an inappropriate periwinkle-blue cover and
overdid the endpapers with extravagant marbling – the books must be conspicuous and the
materials too expensive to discard. I wanted the periwinkle blue to mass, book by book,
so that Corwin might take measure of the extent of his abandonment
of me. At the base of the spine I tooled a device: it was Matthew’s farting
Devil.

Later, as Matthew receded, I stopped asking
permission to remove books from the shelf. I sent Corwin
West Country Myth and
Mystery
and
Tales of the Moors
and
Fairies, Pixies and
Knockers.
I plumped up earnest limp-bound parish histories. They were as you
would expect: a lot of health-giving striding of the coast punctuated with amusing
bursts of buzzing Devon dialect.

Every time I went down to Thornton and
lifted another book to weigh down Corwin, my curse spirit seemed to grin at me a little
more obscenely, as though I had tasked him with another metal spike to his head. I would
grin back, and think, as I drifted to sleep: I curse you, Corwin Venton. I curse you to
Here.

I didn’t see Corwin again for five
years. Perhaps (although I was still sending him books) I had almost learned to do
without him. The weather had already turned cold, and I sensed another eviction coming,
if you could call it an eviction when you didn’t have a tenancy agreement. I was
beginning to wonder if, at thirty-three, I wasn’t getting too old for this. My
homes had become precarious – every last garage in the East End was being bought up by
developers and turned into a construction of sheets of glass set in a material that
looked like the grey plastic from which Corwin used to build model aircraft. My
landlord, Linton, had begun to look shifty. He ran a factory that made things out of
fake fur from the three floors of warehouse beneath my flat. Rolls of artificial leopard
and bear leaned stacked against the walls on all the landings and moulted onto the worn
stair carpets. There was a layer of synthetic lint on every surface of the building.
Maybe ‘shifty’ was unfair. Linton had always been considerate of me. When we
met on the stairs we danced awkwardly around rolls of pretend zebra, which lodged
between us and caught in the wobbly banisters. I had seen men with expensive mobile
phones and stripy suits looking up at my window, but didn’t want to upset Linton
by asking about them. ‘Regretful’ was a better description of his expression
– he didn’t want to displace me.

I began to spy on my own front door. I had
to stand on my workbench to get an oblique enough view into the narrow cut of street
below. One Sunday morning there was a man pointing his camera up at me, taking
photographs. I pulled on a jumper and sheepskin boots over my pyjamas and sprinted down
the four
flights of shaky stairs to confront him. He was taken aback by
the sudden opening of the door of a building that had been shuttered up for the weekend.
I said, ‘What are you doing?’

He was strangely rectangular, I noticed. It
was the coat he was wearing, some kind of military surplus parka. He said, ‘I
don’t think that’s any of your business.’

I said, ‘You’re photographing my
home. I think that’s my business.’

‘Well,’ he said,
‘that’s my point … sort of.’

He pointed up to a glass-studded ledge level
with the second-floor window – an area of flat roof between my building and the next.
‘That’s what I’m actually taking a picture of. There’s a CCTV
camera up there.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I
hadn’t noticed.’

‘You should pay more attention,’
he said sternly.

‘I prefer not to,’ I said.
‘Paying attention just makes me anxious. Why are you taking a picture of the
camera?’

‘It’s an act of
resistance.’

‘To what?’

‘Did you know,’ he said,
‘that the average Londoner is captured on CCTV three hundred times a
day?’

‘Yes,’ I said, although it
wasn’t true. ‘And?’

‘I’m capturing them
back.’

‘What? All of them? Is it conceptual
art, or something?’

‘Not at all! It’s about basic
principles of civil liberty.’

‘You sound like my brother. What are
you, then? Some kind of urban
guerrillero
?’

‘Not really,’ he said.
‘It’s private. A sort of secret subversion – like spitting in
soup.’

‘Do you spit in people’s soup
too?’

‘No!’ He sounded offended. He
looked far too noble to stoop so low. ‘I was speaking metaphorically.’

‘What do you do with the
pictures?’ I asked.

That was how I acquired
Ed: by accident, in November, over a bacon butty under the railway arch. His hands were
strangely delicate, protruding incongruously from the block of khaki that he was
wearing. He said that what he did with the pictures was print them off, passport-photo
size, label them with date and time, and stick them to the wall. He had been doing it
since January. It had been his New Year resolution to photograph every CCTV camera that
he walked beneath.

‘I’m surprised you haven’t
been arrested,’ I said.

‘Oh, I have,’ he said
proudly.

‘Well, there you go!’ I said,
not asking for details. ‘Can I see them?’

A new landscape opened up to me as I looked
for CCTV cameras. At ground level, London was a flickering sequence of shop windows, or
the same front door flashing up in different colours, but now I looked up and it became
more geometric, stepped and zigzagged, embellished by rolls of barbed wire and
boastfully inaccessible graffiti. There were unexpected ornamentations and vanities: a
mosaic panel of birds; the face of a woman in relief above the arch of a doorway. I felt
pleasantly dizzy. We stopped to document six cameras.

Ed’s flat was in the basement of a
terraced house; a weak winter light came in through the bay window. Two entire walls of
his living room were covered with a wallpaper of tiny squares, pictures of cameras
against brick wall or concrete or glass. The effect was surprisingly soft; it looked
like cloth.

‘Don’t you find it
oppressive?’ I asked.

‘I found it more oppressive not
knowing where they were.’

‘What happens on New Year’s
Eve?’

‘I haven’t decided
yet.’

‘My grandfather has a map on his
wall,’ I said, running my fingers over a row of the photos. ‘This reminds me
of it. He walked as far as he could go and still get back in one day and then he used a
pair of compasses and marked a circle around himself.
He says that
there’s nothing outside his circle that can’t be found within it. He paints
at it all the time – every time he finds something worth recording it goes into the
map.’

‘Sounds cool,’ said Ed.
‘But it’s not the same thing.’

I scanned the wall of cameras, all pointing
at him. I liked the futility of his project – he tilted at windmills.
‘You’re both in the middle,’ I said, without rancour, shrugging my
shoulders. Clearly he was one of those annoying people who correct you all the time, but
I was raised on pedantry. I elaborated, ‘You are each the point to which you
return.’ I myself didn’t seem to have a middle, I reflected, suddenly seeing
myself with a doughnut-hole where my abdomen ought to be.