The Lightning Cage (15 page)

Mineral jewels, Judas tears.

King David too had the darkness inside him.

And shortly after writing this, Richard Pelham disappeared from history. Where he died and how were never recorded, and if his body was placed in a grave, no one since had ever found it.

Withdrawal

To Withdraw: To take back; to bereave.

Johnson's
Dictionary

 

One day I was in so much pain that I couldn't face the walk to the DSS building, so I didn't collect. Then it struck me how much I hated standing in line, as though posing for a posthumous L.S. Lowry painting, amongst the bowed down, the listless, the crooked and the evidently and permanently defeated. The place had a smell to it and that smell was failure, massive, inconsequential, state-monitored failure, mixed with a little disinfectant. The five flights of steps I had to walk up and down to get to my flat had become such a deterrent that I only went out at all when in need of food. Then one day my mother arrived, unannounced, by taxi and looked with wonder about the place, littered with debris of all descriptions, some of it once edible, some of it once wearable. The spaces on the wall where Alice's pictures had hung made the place look even more desolate.

‘But Chris, you were always so fastidious.' She was already opening a window. Something else I'd stopped doing.

‘Sometimes it's hard for me to bend down,' I said. But I was ashamed. I was surrounded by emblems of my own dissolution. There was even a smell in the air I could never get rid of these days, and I wasn't sure it was so different from the one at the DSS building.

A week later on the telephone my mother suggested I should sell my flat and go to live with her. Even three months before I would have found the notion absurd. But now, after pondering the matter for a couple of days, I called the local estate agent and told them to come round for a valuation that Friday. I needed three days to clean the place up, often on my hands and knees, and often doubling the dosage of my drugs to numb the pain. One of London's intermittent housing booms was booming away at the time and six weeks later we had clinched a deal. In less than four months, I was back in Tooting. Even after paying off my mortgage, I still had some money to put on deposit in the building society, from which I could expect a return each year. It wasn't much, but then I no longer had any bills to attend to. I always paid for the shopping when I accompanied my mother to the supermarket, but that was it.

In the process of clearing out my flat, I discovered at the bottom of my wardrobe a pile of papers. They looked familiar but neglected: it was the notes on my thesis from all those years ago in Leeds. I put them on one side, together with my Pelham books, and as soon as I was settled back in Tooting I placed the books on the shelves in the little room on the ground floor which I made my study, and I placed the sheets on the table.

One day I heard my mother, on the telephone to her sister Agnes, saying she'd decided to nurse me back to health. I thought perhaps she was simply finding her widowhood a little too solitary for her taste. I certainly hadn't been round much, and I had never once taken Alice to meet her – couldn't face that. But now we had one another's exclusive company, and I soon turned to that pile of notes and started reading them again after such a lengthy interruption. By the end of that first week of reconnoitre and retrieval, my attention had turned once more to the mystery of Richard Pelham. But this time I had nothing else to distract me, and I certainly needed something to occupy the chill vacuum left behind inside me, with the departure of Alice, my job, my car, my running – and most of my walking too. The chaos and grief of Pelham's life still needed annotating, so it seemed, since no one had come forward to do it in the meantime. His work had been out of print for the better part of a century. Most people had never even heard of him.

But six months after my mother started nursing me, we had to switch roles. She'd been growing slightly odd for some time before that, and would occasionally be returned to the house by one of the bemused local traders, to whom she had confided that she hadn't the faintest notion where she presently lived. I came back one day from a tentative walk outdoors to find her carefully scrubbing used food tins with a toothbrush before putting them in perfect rows in a cardboard box on the Formica table – ‘We've always had
clean
rubbish, Christopher, your father insisted on it right up to the end' – and I sat and listened to her elegiac monologue about what life had been like when they had lived in the colonies. But they never had lived in the colonies. ‘I was so sensitive to the climate out there that your father would say, “You're all wrapped in fly-skin, Sylvia'” – but my father had been an accountant in Tooting all his life, and had inherited our house from his father before him. She had carried on scrubbing and talking and talking and scrubbing. The bean tin's blue label was torn and flapping, so she healed it gently with a dab from the Sellotape dispenser which she kept on the shelf above the sink. An asymmetric sardine can, with its ragged remnants of serrated lid, had the blackened toothbrush applied with vigour into its awkward corners. And on it went. On and on and on.

‘Probably Alzheimer's, I'm afraid,' the doctor had confided professionally, as we stood out of earshot months later. He leaned close to me. His breath smelt of peppermint. ‘Premature senility, as we used to call it.' And I watched her mooning about the place, her grave, beautiful face turned incredulously towards the window sometimes. What it was that caused her so much amazement out there, between the grass and the swaying trees of the common, I never did find out.

But she didn't appear greatly troubled and still cooked and cleaned, though with increasingly eccentric results. I spent most hours of the day in my little study, scraping away at the patina that had accrued about the age of Pelham. I began to think that the problem with the eighteenth century was that you could only see it through the funnel of the nineteenth; could only see Pope through Wordsworth or Byron; only see Smart through Blake; only see Richard Pelham through Coleridge and De Quincey, or Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Even the forms of his degeneracy were contaminated by the future that still lay ahead. I would take walks across the common, over to the Lido and back again, pondering this or that conundrum. By now, despite my back, I did all the shopping and tried, as far as possible, to keep my mother from going out.

My mother took to saying grace before and after meals.

‘Your father always insisted on it,' she said, but I never remembered any such insistence. My father, even in his Roman Catholicism, always seemed to me to be accountant all the way through, one who kept the gestures of his faith to an economic minimum. He counted and he calculated, he added up and he subtracted, and he smiled with his own small glow of satisfaction when the figures balanced. But I reckoned that the only agency he had ever truly credited with transcendent power was the Inland Revenue. The mention of its inspectors could, uniquely, hush his voice to a tone of reverence. For him, the atonement had balanced the books, and the ledger had thus been completed.

That Christmas my mother insisted we should go to midnight mass at Westminster Cathedral. I tried desperately to talk her out of it, but she would not be budged. She always had been strong-willed, and the onset of her mild senility had in no way modified that characteristic. On Christmas Eve I opened up the garage to look at my father's car. This last was at my mother's bidding, since I had no doubt it would be non-functional: flat-tyred, flat-batteried, untaxed, undrivable. To my astonishment, his old Rover started at the second turn of the ignition. The tyres were at the right pressure, and when I checked the tax disc it had been renewed three months before. Inside the glove compartment I found my father's motoring file and service history, and discovered that the insurance was up to date too, for any driver over thirty. I couldn't believe my mother had had anything to do with this, for she didn't even drive, so I asked her who had been tending the car.

‘Harry does it.'

‘Who's Harry?' I said.

‘Harry who?'

‘Never mind, mother.'

I had to some extent come to terms with my disability. Whether the pain had actually declined, or my accommodation of it had increased, I can't say. That's one of the curious things about any pain that comes to stay: after a while you can't remember what life felt like without it. I had simply learnt not to move whole sectors of my body whose fluency and strength I had once taken for granted. But it was the first time I had driven since my accident, and I had forgotten entirely what a great cumbersome beast my father's car was. It had been designed for a more genteel age, when petrol had been cheaper and the roads emptier. The smell of old leather and the dashboard's gleaming mahogany triggered memories of years before, but it hurt my back every time I had to turn the wheel full circle. The distance between the gears using that old metal stick seemed to require an acrobatic contortion. Whenever I leaned forward to find the indicator switch, the slack safety belt would tighten suddenly across my shoulder and jerk me backwards. There were frequent bleatings from the horns of other drivers. When we arrived at Victoria I was so nervous about parking, and having to twist my head around to do it, that I drove in and out of the surrounding streets for twenty minutes before I found a gap large enough to pull into without reversing. My mother sat tranquilly at my side, gazing out with contented wonder at the world beyond her window, flashing and flickering away out there like another galaxy.

In the car on the way back that night, my mother was silent for a few minutes, until she said finally, with a great sigh of satisfaction, ‘Well, amen to all
that.
' The next day I couldn't even get out of bed. She brought me my
TENS
machine and switched me on. The crowds of electrons whirled and cavorted inside me, bearing their infinitesimal burdens of negativity.

My mother's smile was much in evidence that spring. Once I came back to find her chewing contentedly on a piece of soap. It was a pink bar of Lux – she had always been choosy regarding the bathroom accoutrements. Then something entirely unexpected happened: my mother started to speak to me as she had never done before, and using words I never knew lurked in her vocabulary.

I was sitting at the table one morning, eating a boiled egg and reading this line of Pelham's from the letters:
‘I am the age's gull, and every year that passes cozens me.'
My mother was staring through the window with a copy of the New Testament open on her lap.

‘Do you remember what God said to Paul?' she asked. I carried on reading Pelham, as I normally did these days when my mother started on one of her monologues. ‘He said:
“My grace is sufficient for thee; for power is made perfect in infirmity.”
I was thinking how true that is. In your case for example, Chris.'

‘How's that mother?' I said without looking up.

‘Well, when you were successful, and a director, and had that lovely little car, I couldn't help noticing something about you.'

‘What was that?'

‘You were such a twat, dear.' I swallowed hard on the piece of egg I was chewing and turned to look at her. She was serene as usual, her face pointed towards the window. I thought I must have mis-heard.

‘I was a what, mother?'

‘What?' she said.

‘What did you say I was a moment ago?'

‘Oh,' she said. ‘A twat. Such a fucking twat and you were so pleased with yourself about it, too. I found myself wondering if you'd ever given a bugger about anyone but yourself in the whole of your life. Your father was a bit like that, to be perfectly honest with you. Reliable, of course, like those cars of his. I think the people who built them might have done him as well, when they had a day off. But what a bloody bore he could be with his trial balances and all of that palaver. I don't think anything ever excited your father as much as double-entry book-keeping. Certainly not sex. He'd come home at night and sit in that armchair by the fire and talk to me about … cases of insolvency. Not surprising we only had the one child, is it, Christopher? Though probably just as well. Did you get those sausages, by the way? And I could see so much of your father in you that I thought it would be better if you became a priest, that's why I encouraged you in that direction, if you want to know. Then if you were going to be a selfish little shit you could be a selfish little shit amongst men, who wouldn't get damaged by it, since most of them were probably selfish little shits as well. How many women did you have, over the brush, as your father would have said?'

‘I can't remember, mother,' I said slowly.

‘Too many then. I only hope you gave them money.'

And when I thought about it, the only thing I could be absolutely sure I had given Alice
was
money. My mother sat in silence for a few moments, then she said brightly, ‘I sometimes think that if they made a twat that didn't have a woman round it, there'd be quite a lot of takers amongst you chaps.' Then a slab of pain so hard it almost lifted me off the chair suddenly met my neck and brought tears to my eyes.

‘Bayliss men don't weep,' my mother said evenly. ‘Your father always said that. He always said bollocks to men who blub.'

*   *   *

We both coped in our different ways until the incontinence began. I've heard tell that the faeces of an infant can seem like fragrance in the nostrils of a doting mother, but I've never heard anyone claim the smell of a parent's shit can be sweet to the child, however loving. I came back from my walk around the common to find her smeared from the waist down with streaks of the fetid sludge. One of her fingers was brown from poking at herself in bovine incredulity.