The Lightning Cage (19 page)

‘Right,' I said rising, ‘off the bus.' And I grabbed him by the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him along into the aisle, but he struggled and before I could pull him any further a pain struck with such force down my neck and my back that I let go of him as I froze, then almost fell over. The boy shrieked with sudden delight, ‘The poof's a cripple. The poof's a fucking cripple,' he shouted, turning to everyone around him so that they could share his joy. The bus stopped and I managed somehow to get out. I had to stand for ten minutes leaning against a wall, in too much pain even to register the humiliation I had suffered. Mercifully a taxi came by and I talked him into taking me back to Tooting. When I arrived home, I shut the door behind me and locked it, and after that I didn't go out any more even to see the bookdealers. I had them post me their catalogues. Thus was I confined to the little acre of my bare necessities.

Now Pelham took up the whole of my days and most of my nights too. Since I had improvised my own study downstairs, I seldom ventured into my father's on the first floor. I think its atmosphere must have retained something of the calculating precision of his spirit. Perhaps I felt the value of what I was doing was put too severely into question there and I already doubted how much questioning it could stand. But I meandered in one day and that's when I found the stash of postcards, all neatly stacked into filing drawers.

It had been a family tradition ever since I could remember: from each holiday location my father would post a card home, with a brief account of our vacation penned on the back. I picked one out and read it:

Dear House,

The weather has been mixed, but has not deterred us from the coastal paths. Christopher fell on the rocks and cut both his knees. Hope you are free from burglars and leaks. See you Saturday.

Bayliss, Bayliss and Bayliss

His clear copperplate script was festooned with unexpected flourishes, as though indulging an otherwise well-concealed decorative vitality. On the obverse was a photograph, heavy-handedly enhanced, of Fowey in Cornwall. The garish colours seemed somehow entirely of their period: that was precisely how I remembered the world of my childhood, as though the unsophisticated repro work corresponded in some mystical way to the reality around it. I kept flicking through the cards.

Manorbier in towering black and white, the castle a rearing cloud above the shoreline. Oast houses in Kent, herring stores in Hastings, the white cliffs of Dover, the Isle of Wight chines, the flatlands of East Anglia stretching away to meet an even flatter sky. Eastbourne, Worthing, Hove, Bridlington (how that Rover had purred contentedly at fifty miles per hour all the way there and back). Rocks from glacial valleys, limestone coves and blue-watered harbours, Marine Parade, Lyme Regis, the pier and pavilion at Weymouth, detailed line engravings of distant waterfalls and tarns. Each stamp bore the young queen's head in profile and a neat postmark clearly recording the date; each card seemed to have absconded into the future bearing a tiny shred of the past. How like my father to have filed it all away, these random thievings from chronology. And now of the three Baylisses there was only one of us left to count the years, while the locations themselves had shrunk to this house in Tooting. But then the past was my study, after all, since I had already put the future behind me as something too nostalgic even to think about. Simply remembering the word Alice was enough to bring on the pains in my neck.

*   *   *

Dust. The house had been filling up with dust. I'd started to notice it rising round my stockinged feet as I padded downstairs in the morning. I didn't care much about the curtains or the carpets or the wooden surfaces, but now it was settling over the books too. I didn't know how best to handle this. I could hardly clean each volume every week, for there were far too many of them, and I certainly didn't intend to open any windows. The very thought of it. And the notion of plugging in my mother's Hoover and introducing its querulous, wheezing clamour to the library that this place had become, struck me as sacrilegious. It would have been like weighing in with an organ during the more reflective passages of a string quartet. The whole house was gaining on itself in silent increments, but I didn't know where it was coming from, whether blown upwards somehow from below, or silting down gently from above. Perhaps it had always been there, except that mother had once chased it from room to room, keeping it furtive and fleet-footed. But since I'd stopped pursuing it, now that I'd introduced this lax regime of silent laissez-faire, the dust was growing confident, claiming more and more territory for itself, covering my little world with its minutiae.

One day I noticed a bowl of dead oranges. How long had they been there? My mother must once have bought them, but how far back was that? Each looked like a little shrivelled skull, blood-blackened with rigor mortis; a pile of them, a headhunter's collection after a good season hacking the necks of pygmies. I picked one up and fingered its dry, dimpled dunes, the hide of some spherical foetus that had never made it through. Little dead stars, I thought, too far gone now for even the sun to touch them.

*   *   *

I had taken to thinking a great deal about the past. Not merely the past that had once held Richard Pelham, but the past that had once held me. I had spent nearly three years at the English College in Rome, but in the few months before I set out to embark on my vocation, I did start to consider very carefully whether this should really be the pattern of my life. Pauline Healey's body did not come to the house to confuse me any more, but her spirit visited my dreams most nights. I had begun to wonder if I were not simply too worldly to be a priest, and then a number of things happened. First, I started to have my dream, the dream in which a leprous disease would slowly cover the flesh all over my body, as I looked on in horrified paralysis. My skin would slowly erupt in small volcanoes of disfigurement. I itched all over with some nameless filth. And then right at the end, as the tears started coming, invisible arms would hold me and heal me, and I woke then sobbing with gratitude. I had looked up Matthew 8:3, where Jesus puts forth his hand to the leper and touches him, and tells him he is made clean, and the leprosy instantly vanishes. A new man walks away. First sign.

The second sign had been this: I had read an article about Merrim, the multi-millionaire businessman, in which one of his disgruntled ex-employees described the scene each morning when the mogul shouted to his advisers to join him in his personal lavatory, the one with the solid gold taps, and there bawled instructions at them, as they tried to avert their eyes from the fat, hairy thighs protruding out of his shirt-tails, and breathe as little as possible so as to avoid the stench of his abundant faeces. This image of earthly power had been sufficient to make me wonder once again whether I shouldn't in conscience try, in however small a way, to be a part of the world's leaven. The salt, its savour.

But the last sign had been the blackest and by far the most potent. There had been a boy called Midgely, who had lived in the neighbourhood ever since I could remember. In fact we were the same age. He had been arrested on a murder charge a month before, and was now awaiting trial without bail. Murky stories were circulating about what had happened, but one night I went down to the local pub and stood nursing my drink while I listened to the chatter all around me. Midgely, it seemed, had had a few pints and then set off unsteadily to a place in Streatham half a mile away, where a housing estate and a piece of wasteland between them provided the possibility of sex for sale. There was little doubt in the minds of the regulars that Midgely had been a virgin before that evening. It had not taken him long to be approached by one of the local rent-girls. The two of them had engaged in whatever grim and mechanical manoeuvres were on offer, then Midgely had informed his partner that he had no money. He had told her not to worry, he would return the following night with the five pounds that had been requested. The fact that she had not demanded the money first meant that she was no professional. After she had screamed at him, and even cut a part of his cheek with one of her nails, she had then started laughing, and had suggested they should call it quits after all, since he now had VD, though it would take a week or so before he started squirming with the pain.

Whether through terror or anger or shame, or a mix of all three, Midgely had dragged her back into the derelict building and, holding her down by the hair with one hand, had smashed in her head with a brick that he held in the other. They said that there had been nothing left of her face by the time he was finished. She had been nineteen years old.

This little trinity of signs, I had come to feel, was angled directly at me. You see, I've never believed anything to be accidental. There are no coincidences, only a veined complexity sometimes too deep to fathom. Only the wounds of time and what's hidden inside them. And so it was that I began to make preparations for my life in Rome. Whatever doubts I had, I knew that I still had to go. I had told all this to Alice once. ‘What a God,' she had said, ‘who only speaks through other people's misery.'

Once in Rome I was a most devoted student, and was highly thought of by my superiors. The minor orders presented no problem: porter, lector, exorcist and acolyte. These ancient ruins of courtly degrees I received without demur. I even wore my tonsure with a kind of pride. But I started to falter as the subdiaconate approached, for it contained that fateful commitment to lifelong celibacy. In the
magnum silentium
after ten at night I would lie in bed and try to work out whether the women striding through my mind were shapes sent to distract me, like St Anthony's desert seducers, or merely a warning that I would surely fail, should I ever make an irrevocable commitment to forsake the intimate presence of women and the comfort that their flesh and their spirits afforded. How often the ghost of Pauline Healey ministered to me. How often she pulled that white T-shirt over her head and reached down again to take me.

So that's when I had started to slip into the streets outside, uncassocked, to find out before it was too late what it was I might be missing, and it was then I first discovered in that great city of pagan monuments that what I would be missing was too much, far too much.

Soon after I had left for England and that degree course up in Leeds, and had put celibacy behind me as one of those childish things, not fit for adults in an adult world. Or at least only possible for those for whom the passions burned with a dimmer flame than they did in me. The Christ of redemption shrank back into the Jesus of history, and the resurrection became whatever filled the chasm between hope and mortality. My mother found it difficult to speak to me for a while after that, and I had the dreadful suspicion she was praying for my lost vocation. Every night.

I had gone out to buy some vegetables and rice. I was walking along distractedly on my way back, carrying my meagre bag of groceries, when I suddenly stopped and stared down at the pavement. How many years before had there been brown paving stones? York stones my father had called them, though it seemed like a long way to bring them to me. Billy Haggarty and I had crouched opposite one another. We had both stolen chisels from our separate houses. He hammered first at the flagstone and made a white circle out of its ochre. Then I raised my own blunted blade and drove it down into the centre. Tiny flakes of stone had risen into our faces like sharp-sided hail.

‘The rat is dead for another year,' Billy had shouted. ‘Can't eat my toes, can't eat yours. He'll have to find a baby if he's hungry.'

Furtive and priestly, we had buried both chisels in his garden. I never did know what the ceremony meant. There were no rats that I knew of, not in his house, and not in mine either. Two months later I caught my father hunting through his tools and muttering, ‘Where on earth has that chisel gone?'

That night I spent twice as long as usual with my
TENS
wrapped blinking round my neck. It would probably surprise you if I were to tell you that electricity can flirt inside your body. It can, though. It hovers in obscure muscles, and dawdles along the corridors of veins. It snuffles out little hidey-holes in membranous corners, and quivers foxily in there and won't be ferreted out. And so you end up walking around with all this electricity quirking and scrolling inside you. If they stuck a bulb between your lips, believe me, you'd light up a field.

My bedside reading was the little book of Count Zabrenus's sermons I had managed to buy that week, the words faithfully transcribed by the faithful in the conventicle off Tottenham Court Road which Pelham had once attended:

Would you eat anything, my brothers and sisters? Would you swallow a nightingale live for the sake of its warm, liquid song, just to catch the pulse of it swelling? And if not, then why not? Do you imagine a cow is any less kind than a songbird? Jesus told us he was the lamb, and yet we continue to shed the blood of lambs as men once shed His.

I had been brooding on this passage before I fell asleep, and in my dream I was in an abattoir, dressed absurdly in eighteenth-century costume and a periwig, but with a priest's stiff collar, shouting at the men, who in their blood-stained T-shirts ignored me and went about their business: ‘Celery, carrots, potatoes and bread don't bleed, my friends, don't get dragged from their cribs before dawn, or stacked into lorries, knee-deep in blood-spattered straw and their own faeces…' My words were chewed up by the sound of machinery. Then the dream turned inside out and I was travelling through my own intestines, the internalised homunculus of myself, animula, little soul, and I saw how the walls inside my own body were stained badly by the dreadful yield and cull of slaughter. Then there was nothing but smoke in an oven, just black smoke stains and scratches inside a huge, municipal, over-used oven.