Someone is waiting for me to die. Me. Maybe. The priest’s vestments are thick again, they abandoned the modern materials when the modern ceased to be. It’s linen now, thick linen, thick like it was quilted. Though my eyes are half shut I can see the seams. It looks grey. It reminds me of something. A picture. Only it was a woman in it. Not a man. This priest is a man. Bastard.
They are snuffling at the end of my bed, snuffling like pigs, their eyes full of truffles and tears. They are looking for some sign from me. A raised hand to show that I want his blessing. All I want is to pick my nose but a raised finger would make them pounce. The gods have spoken, I can hear the squawking cry, anoint him. Anoint him.
Anoint me arse. Fuck off.
The priest moves closer. I can feel his hot breath on my cheek, his stubble brushes my cheek. He moves away and I see that a flake of my flesh has scraped away and dangles from the black hair. He has murmured something to me and his eye flicks sideways, I am half dead but I see the rhomboid reflection of the faraway window in his eye, a pane of white over the blackness of his pupil. He glanced at me and I knew he didn’t like me. I was an awkward bugger, he knew that, he knew I would hold out and that there’d be nothing in it for him, not even a shilling at the gate of heaven.
It was that that did it for me. Knowing the priest didn’t like me, I mean. I was too happy to die then. Fuck the lot of them. I thought I would not be able to do it, and that I would die trying. Which is why I did it, really. I thought I knew what would happen. But it didn’t. Anyway, what I did was this: I raised myself first up onto my elbows, the joints snapping and popping moistly.
‘Has he seen a vision? Is it a vision?’
Some old bitch was bundled up in the corner, some ancient old slag who could function as nothing any longer except as a prayer-raiser, earning a miserable existence at the foot of deathbeds.
‘No,’ said the priest sharply. No one as bedevilled as me would have a vision. The angels did not descend from the seventh sphere for cussed bastards like me. No, they didn’t.
I couldn’t speak, my throat was parched and full of painful cracks that throbbed beautifully when a meagre stream of water covered them. My lips were swollen. The insides, now brightly pink and slick, puffed out over the thin, stretched band of the outer lip. Minute flakes of skin clung and fell, and the corners were blocked with a shockingly white scurf. I don’t know who it was, in their wisdom, who strategically placed the mirror so that anyone pushing themselves upwards with their hands and glancing, as we do instinctively, towards the window, towards a means of egress, could see themselves. Perhaps they feared I might do it, that I might start to struggle back from the gateway into the Valley of Death, and they thought to scare me into the arms of the Prime Mover by letting me see the sight of myself. I had tramped the world over and dragged my banded rags through every city and hellhole, I had slept nights in sewers and at the last rattle of brutal sicknesses, and they thought to scare me into faith by my reflection in a polished glass.
Mind you, I look at myself now and I think perhaps they had a point.
The mirror is badly polished, at that, but I see clearly what it is that they have had to look at this last week and for a nanosecond I feel a fleeting pity for them. They don’t know what to say. I brought back my own sickness from the filthy heathen countries I chose to visit, so they should be able to happily wash their hands of me and leave me to die, and to descend, as they believe I should, to the First Sphere. But I stomped from country to country, growling and shouting, for what they also believe is a noble cause. I had the Necrologue.
The realisation of their discomfort at that particular cleft stick pleases me and gives me enough strength to continue my journey into the vertical.
The greatest distance I travelled was into the East, out where the Crusades had been fought millennia ago. It would hardly be the death of me to run out into the garden but the fact of the matter is that I hoped it would. I wanted them to have to chase my corpse. Dead man running.
I was used to running. I had lived my life almost always in sewers, that is how I got from country to country. The whole world was reduced to that but we didn’t say so. No, we pretended. And that was how I survived. Night after black night, cities full of people all staring at the stars – what are they saying now? Are we safe yet? They lay on the mountains, on the hills and on the turrets. I sneaked below them, gathering the names and adding them to my list.
Now any of you lazy bastards who have bothered to read any of your recent history, any of you who have the faintest interest in why it is the world seems to be going down the sink hole and doing its best to turn itself into an arsehole will have missed reading about the disappearance of the Emperor of Never. The blistering heat flashing like the wrath of the Angel from the helmets of the men, the swirling clouds of red dust in the brittle desert heat and the impatient hooves of the stallions, not a cliché left unchewed by every hack journalist around and many of the serious faces from the quality newspapers, the kind of newspapers that your budgie wouldn’t be ashamed to see on the floor of his cage. The battle, the steel, the shouts of the fighters and the screams of frightened horses and then, abruptly, the end. They were gone. The journalists stood, puzzled, on the ends of phones in their sweating hotels, looking into the old-fashioned receivers as though the smooth metal would tell them something. Bar owners and taxi drivers, leaning their elbows on their counters or glancing in the rear-view mirror at their trapped audience, choking off into silence, predictions left unmade, crafty interpretations exposed and naked and false. People stood in the streets looking at each other, at the white walls, then up at the shield-blue sky like it would tell them something. There was a second in the whole world into which anything could have fallen. And the fucking Angels got there first, fuck them from a height. Into the pre-natal silence from which anything could have come – a symphony, Venus rising, a magical tree – a caterwaul went up and the bastard Angelites claimed this moment of birth for themselves. This was proof, they said, of what they had always maintained, that the ancient bands round the earth were true, spirits and humours and ideals and what-have-you floating serenely between them, and a deputation of Angels to make sure each band was ticking over. All as you might image, these Angels, dream-coloured wings and long dresses and smug smiles you want to smack off their faces. After everything else they’d all been through it was not surprising that people flocked to this. My grandfather had been in the desert at that battle. Being low scum that we were, he wasn’t on a shining stallion or encased in silver armour. He had not come of the right stock for that bright history. He was on the ground dodging and running and shitting himself, stabbing here, biting there, hoping he didn’t maim or kill the wrong person. When he didn’t come back to his factory-work lifestyle, my grandmother’s grief drove her into the ethereal wings of the angels and we became the most viciously Angelite family for miles.
That priest waving angrily out the window at me is tired, the old prick. He can’t give up. He has to be the stony face that does not hear the insult or feel the missile. They wear all the vestments that they used to clear a path through the scavenging, oily-clothed street urchins in the cities when the priests were ascendant, and though the urchins now include the unskilled but savage priests who ran away, some, stubborn, stupid, hand washed the heavy grey skirts and ironed the length of surplice in shabby rooms. Bastard. Everywhere you go now you cannot escape the afterlife, the pride in the faces of people who have winkled the reality out from behind the merely manifest, you can dispute it and you will hear happy talk of wheels and everything being one but you see a glitter in an eye, a hidden eye where before it had only been a dark corner, a sideways movement away in a tavern.
I went to the desert. I went where he disappeared. The last sight of my grandfather. You’d disappear too, if the place was rotten with vast underground caverns, big tunnels joining them up. I don’t know what they were. They used to say there were trains ran in tunnels, but who knows what that looked like? I did. I saw maps, you see. No one else was allowed to see maps, but a Necrologue, that was different, I had to see them, see? Mincy old fuckers couldn’t not let such a holy one see where to hell they were going. I saw the maps from years ago and the straight lines and the projections. That would have explained the iron stairs. I knew what would happen if I said anything about it. Some years ago, some poor bollocks was digging up his land, whether he expected to find a mine of gold or he was just wanting to plant one bastard of a crop, he dug and dug and his sons dug and his neighbours dug and they found just such a stairs. He, having some shred of sense left despite the unveiled sun and thunderous past, bethought himself of these shreds of history, but no. These were, it was announced, a sign that arrogant ancestors had tried to build a stairway through the Angelic Spheres. I haven’t heard anything that stupid since the Tower of Babel. Anyway, they invented a whole story about it, the civilisation, what it looked like, what those hubristic forebears had looked like and their long fanatical eyes yearning to see the faces of the Angels. And the poor dick with the shovel? Well. One of life’s little mysteries, what happened to him. But sitting in the desert I knew what I was looking at. I took my own little shovel, with a cherry-wood handle, and I dug. There was no one to see me but vultures. Just enough to let me in and to see the irregular serrated iron step, a tattered remnant of bridle, the moonlight gleam of the first skull. Collapse and landslide. Angels, my arse.
There is sand under my feet now. It is a dark night and very very cool, almost solid, cool and reassuring. There are no clouds. The moon is stripped and shadowless, the stars like perfect thoughts. There is a garden, a little border garden. It has cool leafed flowers with petals with colours like jellybeans. Jellybean. Now there’s a word. I’ve never eaten a jellybean – though I have eaten flowers, when things got rough – but I know what they look like. The house is a shadow behind me, blurred edges, cloth-filtered lights. My knees are shaking, they look enormous in my scrawny legs. The skin is so dry and lined I look like a fossil. A dreadful cackle emerges from my lips and I realise I have laughed. That thought makes me laugh again. A legend will start if I don’t stop. I am sick with tiredness. I wonder will I break anything if I sit down. Fuck it, I’m practically dead, what can happen? I creak down and sit. The grass is cold under me but it instantly warms to me. Feebly my toes flick the sand.
I had to stay a while in a monastery on my way back from the desert. It was like a different world, high wet wind and cliffs safe from landslide because they had been so stripped to the heart rock there was nothing left to fall. The men and women in their black gowns with the strange little coloured beads around their wrists. They had a huge dinner when I was there and they were very polite about not letting me near the table until I had washed. For fuck sake, I had had to crawl through a sewer on three occasions on the way back and even without the shite of a city clinging to me, walking and sweating and never being able to wipe my arse would make anyone smell. But they chucked me into a big ceramic bath that was full of red water and leaves, and enough foam to cover my modesty as well as wash me, and this bustly woman monk gave me a good scrubbing. I grinned up at her and she just rolled her eyes, she’d probably seen better and been getting it oftener than me. She kept her beads about her wrist. They were a furry sort of red colour, and they smelled sweet. I caught her wrist and grabbed the beads and sniffed them. I looked at her.
‘Rosewood,’ she said.
A little band of the beautiful beads like a bracelet on her wrist.
‘And you’ll pray for the people who can’t eat,’ I said, in a singsong voice, ‘on your little rosewood beads.’
‘Fuck you,’ said the monk and shoved my head under the water to apply the scrubbing brush to my hair. When I was out of the bath and drying on the mat she looked quite surprised, as though she hadn’t expected under all the shite and the clothes so old they had to be peeled off me like paper that there would be anything worth looking at. Mind you, she scrubbed so hard she could have brought a diamond out of granite. She smiled at me, and I flashed her but she just went pink and raised her eyebrows nonchalantly.
The dining hall was a marvel to behold, with a vaulted ceiling and tall windows with narrow panes of glass. There were tables all along the sides and sloped black shapes ducking towards their plates, leaning back to spit out gristle, standing up to grab the salt or punch their neighbour. At the far end was the knobs’ table, a gem-eyed man with a beard, a boy with a face like thin alabaster. Here, I ate. We didn’t speak, I just ate for all the days to come when I would find no food. And afterwards I had to earn my keep. Everyone was silent. I walked into the sunken bit of the floor, shaped like a horseshoe only without the bits of shit and people’s bones stuck on. I dragged my bag behind me as though it weighed like the world, which it did, it was full of dead people.
I looked round me solemnly, trying to keep with the mood, but I was reckless and that alarmed me, something was running through me like a narcotic and I feared it was the desire to shock. I unfurled my life’s work, paper ran on for miles. I looked round and everyone was silent.
The gem-eyed man said, ‘We have heard until June 7th of last year.’
Hmm, I wondered, who told them that much? Fuckers.
I filled my belly with wind and my voice blew out like a trumpet.
‘Manger Dorset,’ I bellowed, ‘Trampled.
‘Ram Dolly. Appendicitis.
‘Nory Pepper. Choked on vomit. His own.
‘Ittie Lamplaz. Died of being aged 102.
‘Felly Rubble. Blood poisoning.’
There was a rustle of arses in seats and the breathing changed. They were getting sucked in by the words and waited, in hope with a tiny crumb of watered-out fear, that they would hear a name they knew.
‘Yelk Mann. Drowned.
‘Payta Mann. Also Drowned.
‘Lackey Pard. Crushed by landslide.
‘Edoll Tayama. Committed suicide by means of hanging.
‘Says Timmer. Bled to death after amputation of leg.’
Usually I stood in one place when I read the chosen section of the Necrologue. That way if anyone couldn’t hear me they just had to shout and I would know where to move. But that fuck-you-all feeling was rippling under my skin and there was nothing I could do but scratch it. I walked towards the pit.
‘Tarette June. Stillborn.’
They thought they were hearing the population of heaven. This was a personal introduction to the choirs of Angels – Archangel Gabriel, this is the Abbot Smalls. Pleased to meet you. Likewise, I’m sure.
‘Garganta Smalls. Kicked by his horse.’
I was viewed as a sort of escort agency of the afterlife. They heard the names, they suddenly knew the Spheres of the Immortals, did they, and the names gave them protection from being the next one like poor Raman Korik Influenza. They made me laugh and made me so angry I could have killed them all, with one great roar, one great thunderous explosion of vengeance. There was nothing in this except the poor sons of whores who had died. That was the only reason I did this insane job. There would be these irrefutable double-facts; these people had lived, these people had died. The world would not whirl on into a tangled future without there being the reminder that Bail Newfork lived and died from Eating fermented berries. Poor little cow. She’d only been three. That is what eventually did for me. Not the realisation that I did not believe in the Spheres, in the Gods of the Spheres, which I had been taught to revere for all of my life. It was the realisation that I did not believe that what I did had any point. Where are these names going to go? I had not realised that I needed eternity.
They said that thousands and thousands of years ago there lived people who were giants and strong, and who had been born from the heads of eagles. They had circular cities and they travelled all around the world and when they died they became petrified, their apotheosis the transformation into huge statues made of polished marble. Now and then, as the countries of the world tossed and split and fell in upon themselves, parts of this ancient life were revealed back to us. An upraised arm here, a hand modestly covering an impossible nipple, the foundations of a building to give guidance to our modern fools trying to raise a building that won’t fall down at the first fart.
The monastery where I was staying had been one such place, it had found the circular origins of a long-gone city, but the bit that they had got, though useful, was not perhaps what the abbot would have chosen. There was no question but that cities have always been built on shit and that the means of tidying the effluvia of the citizens is a clue to the state of the state. That ancient culture had some nifty shite arena. Right in the middle of the hall was the crumbled semi-circle of stone, baked under a remembered sun. Dusty and bits still crumbling so the monks would get up with grit and buttons of stone embedded in their buttocks. A little step for your feet while you sat and a bottomless seat where you could sit and chat while you strained.
‘Paritty Gull,’ I intoned, pacing slowly forward, ‘Alcohol poisoning.
‘Nate Bloogar. Choked on a fishbone.’
I stepped down into the sunken arena and I could hear them shifting in their seats, some unable to hear, some being put in mind by my position of the turmoil in their guts, clamouring to get out.
‘Avvid Lore. Car crash.
‘Weston Fish. Leukaemia.’
My flesh thrilled to the unmistakable gasp that sounded; it slipped out through unprepared throats. Now that the rosy-titted monk had scrubbed away the clothes that had been growing on me the last years, the robe, butter yellow, slid briskly up my legs and I bunched it, like a wedding train you see in ancient old paintings of certain ceremonies, over my arm.
‘Dassy Roy. Race attack – kicked to death.
‘Juntie Kracker. AIDS.’
The abbot, gem-eyes gaping and his dark cheek lumpy with blood, was facing the smooth moon of my arse, then the dark curled silk in front, atop my long brown legs, as I turned, very slowly, reading.
‘Tamede Almata. Dehydration in a detention centre.
‘Dot Commis. Lung Canker.’
I sat down and wriggled to settle myself in. No one on the list yet died of having a shit in public, so I settled in and let rip.
I didn’t really think I’d last the night and I was right. The monk who washed me brought me to the square white room they had set aside for me, washed and aired as soon as they knew that the Necrologue would be coming their way. They had to add their names to my list, so the abbot, killing himself to pretend he couldn’t see me wiping my arse with my free hand, read out the names and the causes of death for me to scratch on to the paper after poor Halana Pae who had been snuffed out by making too many shoes.
‘Brother Carmatel,’ said the abbot through gritted teeth, ‘Drug overdose.’
I knew, I could see in his eyes, he was struggling with an ultimatum he did not dare to give to God. Strike this cunt, this son of a bitch dead or I will never believe again.
‘Sister Latam. Pernicious Anaemia.’
Give me another Necrologue that I may be spared entrusting the brethren’s names to this.
I smirked as I left the room but I already had an eye to the narrow chute down to the kitchens where I knew I could land back into a midden heap, a favourite haunt of mine. The monk with the rosewood beads showed me the room and shut the window while I slithered out of the yellow robe and sat cross-legged and titty naked on the bed. She laughed, and I looked at my watch.
‘I washed my hands and everything,’ I said. ‘And I have probably half an hour before they come to boot my well-observed arse out of the window.’
It only took twenty minutes and she seemed pleased and I was nicely set up to go creeping around the intestines of the monastery, to go crawling out of the cloaca of the abbot’s home. Well fed, well watered and well laid. What more was there to want?
I can’t remember her face now. All I can remember is the raspberry shade of her mouth and the way she laughed. Her hair was like silk.
I can see them in the lighted window. They are debating whether they should come down for me. Even at this distance I can see the look of horror on the face of the old bitch the prayer raiser, the resentment on the face of the priest. He no more wants to come anywhere near me, wouldn’t piss on me if he could avoid it. The old biddy is terrified and frosts it with sanctimonious rolling of the eye. The others, the washers, the carriers, the lifters, they are weak in expression and they look mulish. They think the priest has to be immune, no better than them fuckers the Angelites if he’s not immune. But the poor bollocks doesn’t know what it is I have. The whites of his eyes show at the possibility that he might have to die of the breath of a shitty rag like me. He would have been astounded, I was astounded, to know of the sumptuous, satin-lined place in which I contracted it. Whatever the fuck it is.
It isn’t what they had in the court, that’s for sure. The prince was flailing; his father was failing upstairs, his life seeping away, pushed out by the hardened residue of a life spent fucking the parlour maids; the prince was in charge. Powerful and stupid, his weak head grew merely hot and full of wind when faced with any problem, and faced with an epidemic he could hardly stand up. He stayed in his breakfast room all day eating peaches and only sometimes he had the courage, silk wrapped over his face, to flee across the courtyard to the stables where his chestnut would bear him away and the stable hands might or might not be alive when they got back. The prince had screamed for blessings from the abbey, and the abbot, who did not like the earthly princes at all, slyly kneaded his hands and mournfully told the prince that there was at least a Necrologue in the vicinity, if not a cure.
So I was dragged in from the highway, stumbling and hurrying with a tattered yellow gown and the bones of the dead on my back. I scribbled the names on the paper as fast as could be but I became impatient with the ‘cause of death unknown’. It should bloody be known. It’s the only thing we do. So I went and had a look at them. It was not often I had occasion to praise the country of my birth but somehow this court had managed to contract a virus common where I was brought up. They’d never seen it before and had no clue what they should do about it. The fever, the delirium, the skin colour, all left the doctors scratching their scabby heads and lost ones wailing at the back walls near the pits. It was really quite easy.
‘A little of this,’ I said, ‘and a little of this, a pinch of that, a spoonful of that one over there and a few drops of the hard stuff to make it less revolting – for fuck sake don’t spit it out, you stupid wanker.’
The prince was instantly in love with me. The king, when he heard, was so grateful he would have let me suck him but I said I could only chew so we left it at that. The communal fevers dissipated, the heat of fear and sickness had gone. I was allowed to stay.
She was curled up by the redcurrant bushes when I saw her. A comma of a woman in a swathe of tangerine silk, her bare feet turned towards me, her face turned east. The sun fell in little drops on her jewellery. She was not doing anything, just looking. In front of her were patterns that even I saw instantly. The rounded phlox of darkness in the centre of the bushes, the stark sap-green leaves, the perfect, luminescent red globes hanging perfectly still from the brown stems. She was being perfect, doing nothing. I stood still, looking at her, watching the way the cloth and her skin and her jewellery absorbed the light and the sun and made the air look richer for it. I knew, or at least I guessed, that she was one of the king’s concubines, but she turned around and looked at me and smiled and I knew instantly that she might have been procured for that reason but that the king had never laid a hand on her. With an elegance that made me want to dance, she turned around so she was still coiled but facing me. The king’s cock would have fallen off in terror if he had tried to make it stand up to her. I knew it for a fact. Mine nearly did and I didn’t even have one. She was the blackest person I had ever seen, so black she was almost violet, so black her white teeth, her tawny palms came as a shock, and she was a giant, she must have been over seven feet tall. But it was neither her colour in a milky, pink-and-yellow country nor her size that made her so terrifying. It was her eyes. She looked at you and you wanted to roll over to her like a croquet ball. Wrap yourself up in pretty paper with a bow in her favourite colour and hope she would unwrap you. Put your viscera on a plate and see if it entertained her. She smiled at me and I subsided like a ghost when the child runs out from under the sheet.
I could never do it with her. I was certain of that. I helped her pick flowers for the staff quarters, and I helped her clean the swans’ lake and I helped her wash the dogs and groom the horses. I sat with her once while she bathed. The bath was big and square, a ceramic bath, white, with little flattened bits for the honey soap. The tiles around it were also square and white but they had red splashes on them, like a curl of red smoke in hardened glass. She spoke to me gently and easily. She spoke everyone’s language, seven or ten languages and people came to her to translate and she would do it, always the same with everyone. Letters of diplomacy for the ministers, letters from their mothers to the ten-year-old apprentice gardeners, reread in their language by her gentle, easy voice. The water in her bath was green from the scented pellets she put in it, and white petals floated. She talked to me and I said something that made her laugh, she lay back and laughed a chuckly sort of delighted laugh and lifted her legs up, paddling her feet on the surface of the water like she was walking on it. She kicked her feet up and I wanted nothing more, ever, not a single other thing in the world but her clean legs with rivulets of water running down and the plashing noise of her feet, and the shapes she made on the tiles and the water.
But then of course I got sick and I had to go. Whatever my country gave them that they could not cure, they had their own medical peculiarities. They had germs of their own, the bastards, at the mention of which everyone looked wide-eyed and innocent. They had been immune to it for so long that no one got ill any more. Even if I had given it to her she would not have noticed. And they were all very sorry but they couldn’t fucking cure me when I started to die.
‘Why do you not believe in the Angels, the god of the spheres?’ she asked. I never asked her name because I never wanted to add it to the Necrologue.
I told her. I have never told anyone else.
I had been brought up from a child with one of those fucking angels hovering at my shoulder. I couldn’t piss without them knowing about it. But I believed and I said what I was told to say and I believed what I was told to believe. We no longer had any reasons for anything, no coherence against the chaos, no thread to bring us from the monster’s cave into the light of civilisation. We deduced, from what we had experienced, the real causes for things and believed in what seemed apparent and the strength of our emotions and what seemed to keep us safe. It was less that I believed, and more that I did not not believe, until when I was eleven, I was struck by lightning. And I survived, but nothing else did. The jolt did not shatter me or snap my bones apart but when we were certain I was still alive and when that apocalyptic intrusion from the Spheres into my world became part of my history, rather than I part of its, everything had snapped apart. What had happened to me had not killed me, as I would have expected. I was not different as a result of it, as I had expected. It had happened for its own reason and it had nothing to do with the mysterious and esoteric lines and tangled threads with which we had attempted to map the idea of it before it had even happened. It was a different colour, when it happened, a different smell, a different everything. Like the first time you drink or get high or make love. Never what you imagine, good bad or ugly, but never what you thought it would be and never, ever, conceivably, any other way. So don’t tell me about angels. Even if they existed we would know nothing of them. Wouldn’t recognise them. Cocooned by the timorous pictures we would draw and the protective mesh of notion, expectation that would rip apart at the first brush of the actual. Don’t fucking tell me about fucking angels.
I had meant to tell her quietly and gently as she spoke to me but I was pacing up and down over the stone by the time I had finished. I knew I was sick then, too, and that I would have to go, so I cared even less than I did by the time I was twelve. We were in what I knew had been an old church, a mega church, high almost as the sky, because the spire was left and, though bits of the walls had fallen out, the coloured glass was still there. Thin, impossibly thin columns swooped into arches and clustered together like pagan fists in the centre. There was a raised table with steps up to it, and a stone, a big stone slab. From there we could see right back into the back of the church, past the sapling forest of columns, to the four tall windows with tiny rectangles of coloured glass. I paced as I spoke and I felt as full of electricity as if I had been struck again. She was sitting on the white slab. She was wearing green and on her arms she wore bands of jade and silver. I stared at her and I can recall very little else. Not because I don’t remember what happened, but because I never really knew. I was enveloped by her. Green silk and gold thread that straggled from the edge of the cloth, bloomy grape skin, her white teeth, her eyes that could redirect towards her everything about another person, her hands with the most delicate, elegant bones, the tawny palms, irrefutable woman, unquestionable solidity, flashes of copper, of apricot, of coral and shell pink when she smiled and made me fall to pieces that she was pleased, of rose and poppies with dark hearts. And somewhere in all of this bobbed I, ginger-topped snuff-coloured streak, and there was not a single fucker in the world better than me because I made her smile and she had wanted me.
The night is very dark now. I had always said my last act would be to write my own name in the Necrologue. I am not going to. I do not, now, know, whether to scream till I bleed, or just sit, quietly, looking at the petals that are turning black with night, becoming secrets that I might have unfurled but have not.
Like scabs they all fall away. The spheres of heaven, the circles of hell, the world ceiling and wall in symbol. We stand in a carnival hall, trick mirrors and sly hands tilting them this way and that. Words writ large, the whole bag of bones and knives rattled in our ears so we can’t hear and can barely tell where we stop and that which we fear begins. I do not know how many years I have lived. Thirty? Forty? And in all that time I have never seen eternity. I yelled in triumph that I have not been fooled, I see the warp in the glass, the fake limb hidden in the jacket, marked cards, loaded dice, lies, innocent faces, fucking lies. I stagger under the silence.
The sky is black and full of stars. If I close my eyes I can hear the sea, the memory of the sea. Shells. Fossils in a grey mountain. I will die here, and for the first time that I recall, I do this not because they don’t want me to. Because I want to. I sit in eternity and am briefly a god. For me to go to my grave with my knowledge of the cracks beneath the plaster has not been enough, and it is too late, now, to go with anything else. The dark is smooth like a jelly, her touch, my life, distilled into one breath. And I am about to die. Fuck.
