*
By eight o’clock this morning we were on the platform at Worksop station with time enough to stand and watch the train come rolling in. There was an unholy commotion of steam and brakes before it juddered to a halt and blocked out what little light had previously illuminated the place. I was helped up into my carriage by Clement, who then heaved himself and the baggage in after me; he swung my cases easily up onto the racks and generally fussed about the place. I must say I had not expected the carriage to be so luxuriously fitted-out. The last time I travelled by train it was little more than a wooden box with a leaking roof, but now there are curtains and cushions and carpets and even a mirror in which to comb one’s hair.
I had on my William IV coat with its high moon pockets and deep collar and a letter of introduction from Mellor tucked away somewhere. On the seat beside me I placed my knapsack which had in it a vegetable pie, some fruit and pastries and a flask of hot sweet tea. It had been my intention to travel to Edinburgh alone and to stand on my own two feet, but I had come under pressure from various quarters to allow Clement to come along. It was Mrs Pledger who pointed out that my shirts and trousers would need pressing after spending the best part of a day crammed in their cases, and that though there may be no end of boot-cleaners in our hotel there is slim chance they will know one end of a boot from the other. So I relented, on the strict understanding that he travel up in a separate carriage and generally keep out of sight, so that anyone coming upon me these next few days might think me a regular and independent man about town.
Clement was now back on the platform, checking departure times with various railwaymen and working himself up into a right old state. And now he was back in the carriage and checking me for the journey and now very reluctant to close the door.
I shooed him away with my cane until he finally relinquished the door. Then a guard came along and slammed it shut and Clement loped off to his own carriage. Then somewhere down the platform a whistle was blown and a second later the whole contraption made an awful lurch, followed by a series of smaller, more frequent lurches until my tiny, fancily-furnished room began to carry me away. I poked my head out of the window to watch the station slide by and saw Clement two carriages back down the train, looking anxiously up at me. I shouted at him to put his head in and eventually he did as he was told. I suppose he just wants to be sure of me. But he needn’t have worried for I had my floating boy for company.
The engine dragged us through the town, coughing and spluttering most unhealthily, but gradually managed to clear its lungs and soon we were out of Worksop and generally flying along. The wheels squealed on the tracks beneath me like little pigs and through the window the hills took to rising and falling in great earthy waves and, what with farms and cows slipping past as if on greased wheels, I must admit I began to feel a little sick. Drew the curtains to try and quell the queasiness and took deep breaths until some composure had been regained.
Clement had taken the precaution of fixing a sign to my door which read
ESPECIALLY RESERVED
so that passengers waiting to board at stations along the way would be discouraged from barging in on me.
Well, we seemed to call in on just about every town and village in the North of England; forever pulling to or pulling away. There was a little porthole by the curtained window and at the first few stations I stood on the seat and peered out to watch the people come and go. Huge trunks were being wheeled in every direction and there were kisses and handshakes and embraces and much waving of handkerchiefs as we set off. But I soon tired of spying on these anonymous leave-takings and as the stations grew steadily further apart I slipped slowly into a not unpleasant torpor.
An hour or two later, I ate some pie.
Although I was very nicely curtained-away and cordoned-off, at every stop the station’s noises still bundled their way in. Countless calls of ‘Take care!’ and ‘Write … Promise to write!’ came through to me, along with ‘Give my love to suchandsuch …’ – all punctuated by the shrill comma of the guard’s whistle and the clatter of slamming doors.
I found myself unintentionally eavesdropping on these hurried farewells and began to note how, mingling with the voices of the returning Scots, one could make out the local accents and how, as we ventured further north, these slowly shifted from one brogue to the next.
The boy in the bubble floated up by the luggage rack with his back turned most defiantly towards me. I thought perhaps he bore me a grudge of some sort; an idea which I proposed to him, but which received no reply. He is not a very talkative chap.
We had been travelling for several hours and I was beginning to feel thoroughly bored. So bored, in fact, that while I knew we were still a good way from Edinburgh, I resolved to leave the curtains open at the next stop and as we sped across a viaduct I slipped my arm out of the open window and removed the sign which Clement had fixed to the door. I told myself that if Fate decides that I should have travelling companions then so be it. I had a sudden desire to be in the company of my fellow man.
By Newcastle my fellow man had taken the shape of a young mother and her twins (a boy and girl, aged about five years old) and a severe-looking chap in his fifties with an over-waxed moustache. My hopes of some camaraderie between fellow travellers were dashed immediately: the young woman was almost too exhausted to lift her children up onto the seats and the attitude of the gentleman who sat down next to me made it quite plain that conversation was the last thing on his mind. After our initial greetings I think not a single word was exchanged. The children were the epitome of good behaviour, only piping up once or twice, but each time met by a vicious glance from the evil Moustache Man. So imposing was his presence that I became aware how my own gaze had rationed itself to the smallest plot of carpeted floor, my eyes barely daring to stray from it. At the time I wondered (as indeed I wonder now) how we can allow one person to get away with so wilfully and malevolently imposing himself on a situation and generally poisoning the atmosphere. Perhaps it is the strangeness of modern travel which cultivates such dismal isolation in its human freight.
The train brought us right alongside the North Sea, which was a wonderful brackeny-brown and so utterly sharp and shiny it looked to have been hacked out of flint. If I had been on my own I might have opened up the window and drawn great draughts of the sea air into me. As it was, all five of us stared rather balefully at it before returning our gazes to their prison cells.
Soon after, one of the twins let out a terrific yawn, totally debilitating its little owner. It was then a wonder to see the speed at which the same condition struck down the rest of us, though we adults hid ours behind raised palms and subjected them to such terrible compression as to squeeze all the pleasure out of them. Even so, the young one’s yawn swept round the carriage like a contagious infection, bouncing from seat to seat just like a ball. And very soon, we all found ourselves vacant-eyed and full of sighs, as we surrendered to the motion of the train. And we adults were all slowly reduced to infants, each one of us rocked in our mother’s arms, so that while we failed to come together in conversation in the first place we found ourselves united in sleep at the last.
*
*
A free day before visiting Professor Bannister so Clement and I spent the morning touring the town. As we trailed up and down the windy streets, going from tea-house on to tailor, I noticed how strangely everybody appears to be dressing these days – hats and collars so meanly cut. Felt quite old-fashioned and over-fancy in my burnous and tall hat and my shirt with its double frill.
After lunch, on Mellor’s recommendation, we visited the famous Camera Obscura, which is right at the top of the High Street just outside the Castle gates. It is a chubby sort of tower, a little like a lighthouse, but has a half-timbered air about it and a wholly wooden hat.
Mellor had become highly animated when telling me about the place, saying how he never visited Edinburgh without calling in at the Camera. So, having located it, we went straight in and up to a tiny counter where I paid our pennies to a woman dressed from head to toe in tweed. She congratulated us on choosing such a breezy day for our visit as all the morning cloud had been blown away, thereby guaranteeing, she insisted, a particularly spectacular show. Heartened by this news we set off up the stone steps – hundreds of them, there were, like marching to the top of the world– to emerge, at last, on a high terrace where three other gentlemen stood, smoking and taking in the view. And what a prospect! – so grand and gratifying it alone was worth the effort and the entrance fee.
The Camera shares the Castle’s great chunk of rock, so we had an almost perfect panorama of the vertiginous city below.
‘So many spires,’ I said to Clement, who nodded vaguely in reply.
Indeed, there looked to be one on just about every street corner, puncturing the firmament. The nearest clouds were banked up on the horizon several miles away and the sky was a most heavenly hue, lending all the roofs and churches an even frostier sharpness and making one’s eyes prickle with delight. I had counted well over a dozen spires and steeples and had plenty more to go, when the woman in tweed (and a magnificent pair of brogues, I might add) came puffing up the steps.
‘This way, gentlemen, if you please,’ she announced.
She opened up a door off the terrace and waved us into a wooden room, which from the outside looked like a tall windowless gazebo or a bathing-machine with the wheels removed.
Now, I must admit that as we were herded towards that tiny room I had not the least idea what to expect. The Reverend Mellor, whilst heartily promoting the Camera Obscura and even endeavouring to describe the mechanics involved, had left me with no abiding notion as to what the occasion might actually entail. So, finding myself in a small round room with only a high ceiling to distinguish it, I will admit I was a trifle disappointed. If we were to bear witness to a visual demonstration of the magnitude and beauty which the Reverend had led me to expect, then surely, I mused, some major gadgetry would have to be drafted in.
As these thoughts drifted around my head the woman in tweed closed the door behind her, then took a minute or two to introduce us to the basic principles of the Camera. I was not overly impressed and took some satisfaction from seeing another chap stifle a yawn. But when she reached over and began to dim the lamps I was suddenly all eyes and ears as it dawned on me I might be about to endure another session as claustrophobic as the one in Mellor’s cave. So in those last moments before we were completely engulfed in darkness I made quite sure I had located the door’s precise whereabouts, in case I was gripped by another fearful attack and had to make a sudden and embarrassing dash for it. ‘Small wonder this is such a favourite of Mellor’s,’ I thought to myself, as my stomach tied itself in a familiar panicky knot and the darkness swept up from the corners and covered the room and its inhabitants with its gloomy cloak.
But, as in the cave, one moment I was on the verge of absolute terror, with my own child’s voice screaming in my ear, and the next I found myself landed on the other side of the abyss. Somehow the knot in my stomach had been magically undone and I was keen and lucid again.
Like my co-spectators I rested my hands on a circular railing and looked down on a broad concave table – perfectly smooth and white – whilst the woman in tweed pressedon with her practised intonation about the room in which we stood. With one hand she had hold of a long wooden rod which hung down from the high ceiling and as our eyes accustomed themselves to the dark she gradually became more visible. Her hands and face had about them a ghostly luminosity. She twisted the rod, saying, ‘… the same principle as the camera. A tiny aperture in the roof allows an image to be cast on the dish below …’
And indeed, as her incantation washed over me I saw the first outlines of a picture take shape. I saw trees – the trees of the nearby gardens, their branches slowly coming into focus, whilst behind, the whole length of Princes Street was emerging from the mist. It was as if we were witnessing, from a bird’s-eye view, the very making of Edinburgh. For a minute I was quite overcome with emotion and when I snatched a glance at my fellows found my own astonishment reflected there. Like characters in a Rembrandt their faces shone with the dish’s milky light.
I looked back to the dish just in time to see the whole picture suddenly slip on its axis, accompanied by the creaking of the tweedy woman’s rod as it was twisted in her grip. The castle swung into view.
‘Hurrah,’ cried one of the other gentlemen.
‘The Fortress,’ announced our guide.
Every detail was sharp as a pin now and I was thinking how remarkably like a photograph this image was – a very round and colourful one at that – when a seagull sailed right across the shallow bowl and the scene was suddenly brought to life. Well, the whole company burst into startled laughter. One or two started chattering excitedly.
‘What we see,’ announced our guide, as if to calm us, ‘is not fixed but a living image of the world outside.’
So there we stood, in the belly of a breathing camera, as the whole city leaked into us through a single beam of light. Yet the vision it cast among us was not in any way frozen but as real and vivid as could be.
As we watched that white dish and clung to our railing we were transported through each of the city’s three hundred and sixty degrees. Here were horse-drawn trolleys inching up the High Street, past street pedlars with their baskets laid out – all the trade and transport of a working city, with the deep sea standing by.
The whole of Edinburgh was poured into the bowl before us, as if we were ringside angels, yet was conjured out of nothing more than a couple of lenses and a small hole in the roof.
*
When we emerged blinking into the daylight I honestly felt as if I had sat in the lap of the gods. And for the rest of the day, as we carried on with our sightseeing, I found I had to keep the odd giggle from slipping out.
*
*
‘Professor Bannister,’ I say, holding out my hand.
‘Come, come,’ says the tall fellow, and waves a finger in my face like a metronome. ‘William, if you please.’
I was in the very bowels of the University’s Anatomy Department, meeting the man around whom this whole trip had been arranged and, judging by the deference bestowed upon him by his students and colleagues outside his office and the capaciousness within, he must be a singularly important chap, for he had sofas and armchairs and an aged chaise, not to mention a vast writing desk with a green leather top.
The Professor set about impressing upon me what old friends he and Mellor were. And, for a while, we juggled between us the pleasantries such occasions demand, regarding train journeys and the dampness of Edinburgh, before we returned to our mutual friend.
‘Is he still round?’ asked Bannister.
‘Very round,’ I replied, which seemed to please him no end.
‘Excellent,’ he said most earnestly, and ushered me into a chair.
I should, I think, make some reference to my host’s extraordinary height, as this greatly occupied my mind at the time, in that having taken his own seat he proceeded to cross his long legs with such far-reaching swiftness I worried he might inadvertently cut me down.
‘Heads, is it?’ said William Bannister, waving my letter of introduction at me. ‘Mellor says it’s heads you want.’
‘Information, rather than the heads themselves,’ I replied, rather lamely. ‘I am … working on a project to do with heads.’
He smiled at me, slid down into his chair a foot or two, made a church and steeple with his fingers and perched his chin on top. In retrospect, I appreciate that his silence most likely denoted a man who was ordering his thoughts (for I soon discovered he had no shortage of them), but at the time I wondered if he hadn’t simply drawn a blank. The only animation about the man was the huge foot which balanced on the kneecap and waggled madly, as if all his energy had congregated there. He sized me up for another minute, pursed his lips, then finally let loose.
And I must say he turned out to be about as full of head-information as a man could possibly wish: how a head might be judged and measured, for example, or how it might be broken and repaired. In fact, it soon became clear that, like his old friend Mellor, Professor Bannister was a wordy fount and once his tongue had properly got into its stride it left me struggling far behind.
Unfortunately, his monologue seemed to me quite tedious, being marred in two different ways. Firstly, the tone, which was academic and totally humourless (no anecdotes, which will often keep my interest up). Secondly, the sheer magnitude of the thing for, stored in his skull, he seemed to have information equivalent to several dozen regular headfuls and in no time my own rather small, unacademic head was filled right to the brim.
After twenty minutes I was so thoroughly saturated I began to wonder if he did not perhaps have some work he should be returning to and my only participation had been whittled right down to the odd nod or grunt, to signify I was still awake. Then, right in the middle of this very erudite and thoroughly boring flood of words, my ear caught hold of a vaguely familiar term. A phrase I must have come across in one of my medical dictionaries.
‘Trepanning?’ I said (putting something of a stick in the Professor’s spokes). ‘Now what is that all about?’
Well, at first he was quite floored by my interruption. He looked like a man who had just been snapped out of an hypnotic trance.
‘A hole in the head, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘A man-made hole.’
And an arm reached out to a distant desk, scrabbled among the papers for a second or two, before scissoring back and dropping into my lap a yellowed, jawless skull.
‘Well held, sir,’ said Bannister.
I turned the thing cautiously in my hands. I was beginning to understand why Bannister and Mellor are such firm friends – both are such wordy fellows and both enjoy sporting with bones.
Having a dead man’s head rolling in my hands made me feel a little strange, but I was determined not to be outdone and managed to gamely ask, ‘And who is this fellow, then?’
‘That is Homo erectus amazonas, Your Grace. We found him down in Brazil.’
I had a good long look at what was left of him – I had never met a Brazilian before – and gently ran a finger along the fine fissures where the different continents of the skull had merged.
‘If you care to look at the crown,’ Bannister told me from the depths of his chair, ‘you’ll find a hole about three-quarters of an inch wide.’
Indeed I did.
‘Now, while we medical men find these holes very handy for carrying old skulls about the place – one’s middle finger fitting so snugly inside – there are a good many in our profession who claim that such holes are, in fact, the result of primitive surgery …’
‘But why would a Brazilian consent to having a hole made in his skull?’ I asked.
‘Well now, Your Grace, that’s a fair question, for there’s no evidence that the fellow consented to any such thing. But it is commonly held that such operations were undertaken in order to release Evil Spirits.’
I looked down at the dried old husk in my hands. Whatever once possessed it had long since upped and gone.
‘Tell me, William,’ I said, continuing to look down at the skull, ‘are men still trepanned today?’
‘O, plenty. Plenty of them. I should say there are several hundred people currently walking about with some sort of hole-in-the-head. Though not for spiritual reasons, of course, but to relieve a haemorrhage perhaps or to allow us to have a poke around. But, to answer your question … Yes, Your Grace. We still like to make the odd hole or two.’
Bannister was now so far down in his armchair he was practically horizontal, with his legs stretched out before him and his feet crossed neatly at the ankles. I was anticipating another verbal onslaught when, quite without warning, an arm swung out from his body and came at me like the boom on a boat. I had to duck down out of the way as it swept around the room. When it finally came to rest I saw how the finger at the end of it was pointing towards a glass cabinet on the other side of the room.
‘Have a gander at my old John Weiss,’ said Bannister.
So I made my way over to the cabinet and found behind the glass a slim case, about ten inches by five. In its open mouth lay a row of evilly-gleaming instruments.
‘A trepanning kit, Your Grace,’ said Bannister, coming alongside. ‘A little out of date, but beautifully made, wouldn’t you say?’
It certainly was. Like terrible jewellery; each piece very snug in its own velvet bed. The centrepiece resembling a small carpenter’s drill – but not so modest – with a finely turned wooden handle at one end and all glinting metal at the other. Its own little army of apostles lined up on either side. But I was baffled by a tiny brush and a phial of oil which lay in their own little concavities.
‘For lubrication,’ Bannister explained.
I was so completely taken with this macabre machinery that I asked the Professor where one might purchase such a trepanation kit. But he was quite emphatic that such things were not commonly available to non-medical folk, so I said no more on the matter.
*
Bannister took me out to his dining club for luncheon, which was entirely unexpected and very kind indeed. I have had very little appetite lately, the food in the hotel being far too fancy, but when we were seated and served and Bannister launched into another incomprehensible monologue (something to do with carbon this time, I think) I rather found myself tucking in. We had a thick broth, grilled trout, spicy plum pudding and a bottle of sweet red wine. I was sleepily spooning the plum stones in the bottom of my bowl when some sort of rumpus went off at the table to my right.
There was the scraping of chair legs, the clatter of abandoned cutlery and the sound of conversations being hastily brought to a halt – in other words, that particular atmosphere which usually precedes some sort of fight. I was still trying to identify the protagonists (and praying the mêlée would not spread and engulf any innocent by-standers, such as myself) when Bannister suddenly sprang up from the table, sending his chair skittering off across the floor.
I had not the slightest idea how he had been drawn into it. Perhaps looks and glances had been exchanged. But in a couple of strides he was at the next table, had a fellow by the throat and was pushing him right back in his chair. The chap with Bannister’s hands clamped on his windpipe was flat on his back in no time at all, whereupon Bannister jumped on top of him, sat on his chest and pinned his arms down with his long legs. Then his hand went hard down into the fellow’s face. Screams now came from all parts of the room and one woman (who I took to be the fellow’s wife) tugged vainly at Bannister’s shoulder as he drove his fingers down into the fellow’s throat.
When his hand came back up it had a piece of pork fat dangling from the fingers. It was very white and very wet. Bannister dropped it into a nearby saucer, then helped the unfortunate diner back to his feet.
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you,’ said the red-faced fellow. ‘The damned thing got caught right under my tongue.’
But Bannister merely bowed a restrained little bow and returned to the table, while the rest of the room babbled admiringly.
‘Some people simply refuse to chew their food,’ he confided in me, wiping the grease from his fingers with his napkin.
The dining room slowly restored itself. The conversation settled, the broken crockery was cleared away. The chap who had got the chop fat lodged in his gullet came by to shake my companion’s hand and heap yet more praise on him.
When he was finally out of the way Bannister got to his feet.
‘Well, onward and upward,’ he announced. ‘What says Your Grace?’
I said that ‘onward and upward’ sounded like good advice. So we collected our coats and hats at the cloakroom and went out into the already-darkening day.
*
That morning Bannister had suggested I look around his Special Collection, the implication being that this was something of an honour for a layman such as myself. By the time we emerged from the dining club, however, I would have been happy to go back to my hotel and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. But, as I have already mentioned, William Bannister is very keen on remembering those details others might be inclined to forget. So, with his long arm around my shoulders, I found myself escorted back to the Anatomy Department and being led left and right and right and left and eventually down into the deepest depths of the place.
At the bottom of the steps stood a pair of doors with frosted windows which I thought very pretty indeed, and I might have stood there admiring their wintry sparkle a good while longer had Bannister not given me a smart shove towards them.
‘You should find everything labelled,’ he told me. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ and disappeared back up the steps.
It was not long before I was regretting having eaten such a substantial lunch or, come to that, having lunched at all. The vast white room was much too brightly lit and the bottles and jars and glass cases all gleamed like great chunks of ice. But as I made my way among them I recoiled not from the piercing light and its many reflections but from the overwhelming, all-pervading smell. The air was awash with formaldehyde – was warm and sticky with the stuff – so that, advancing down that first aisle of exhibits, I wondered if, by the time I came to leave the place, my own organs might not be as pickled as those on show.
That atmosphere of profound liquidity encouraged in me the notion that I made my way through some underwater world, for I found myself in the company of entities so wet and strange they would have looked more at home on an ocean bed. I could have read my Gray’s Anatomy cover to cover a thousand times without preparing myself in the least. The lasting impression was of my having come upon an awful carnage, the result, perhaps, of a terrible explosion, which had scattered its victims into several hundred jars.
Handling the bones of an Ancient Brazilian may be fairly gruesome but coming face to face with his descendants’ bottled brawn is something else again. Man had never seemed to me so mortal, had never seemed so sad. For as I slowly padded through that vast stinking room the voice which spoke to me most intelligently was a melancholy one – seemed to seep right through the thick glass jars.
Having never previously come across a man’s vitals I was hardly likely to recognize them. Thus, here (the label assured me), suspended in alcohol, was a human heart, looking like nothing but a soft black stone. Here was a sectioned kidney, like a mushroom ready for the frying pan. All around me the innermost, most secret pieces of man were laid bare, hanging slack and horribly sodden in their prison-jars.
A Cumberland sausage of intestine.
A single eyeball dangling in fleshy mid-trajectory.
A human tongue, long enough to choke a man, coiled up like an eel.
And a brain – a man’s brain, for goodness’ sake! – with all the contours of a bloated walnut. And not the ocean-blue I had always imagined but a dismal, pasty grey.
A curious construction, marked ‘broncho-pulmonary’, sat atop a pedestal in a fancy bell jar and which, after much puzzled label-reading, I finally understood as being an intricate representation of the interior of a lung. Again, I found my own picture of a body’s mechanics well wide of the mark. The inside of my lung is apparently less like the branches of a leafless tree and more like a coral bouquet. Yet even this beautiful, bizarre lung-tiara, I thought, seemed to sparkle in a mournful way.
The whole collection evoked in me tremendous feeling. Certainly there was horror in those glass cases and some peculiar pulchritude to admire, but above all else I sensed that every organ was drenched in the same sad concentrate and that disappointment filled every last vessel.
I had wandered up and down those humid aisles for getting on half an hour and, rather surprisingly, my lunch had stayed where it was, when the following idea occurred to me …
Is it not possible to take all these marinaded pieces and reintroduce them to one another? To recreate out of all these miserable, disparate parts one frail but functioning human being?
But the answer was all too apparent.
No, of course it is not possible. He has been unwhole for far too long. If he was put back together there would be no making sense of him. He would be an altogether too vinegary man.
By now, I had had enough of the place and was making my way towards the door, eager to fill my lungs with fresh air, when I came across an exhibit which struck such a deep chord in me that it stopped me in my tracks. Through the jar’s inch-thick glass I saw what appeared to be a tiny but perfectly-formed child. The little fellow was all hunched-over. His bald head was bowed in meditation, his hands rested delicately on his knees. He seemed to float in an entirely different world to me, looked to be scowling with concentration. But from under his right knee I saw that there dangled an umbilicus, which hung uselessly like a disconnected pipe. And at that moment I realized that he had, in fact, never lived outside the confines of his mother’s belly – was but a foetus of a child. He must have gone straight from the warmth of the womb to the awful chill of the jar, effectively living and dying without ever having breathed a mouthful of air.
How close he had come to being born or the circumstances of his death I could not tell. The label made no mention of these facts. Yet he had on his head a smattering of hair, had fingernails and neat little toes … all the detail of a born boychild.
There was something familiar in his luminosity. Something in the magnification of the water and the glass. I looked in on him, hoping he might unfold himself and look me in the eye. But he did nothing but peer down into the solution which buoyed his poor body up.
*
As I was sitting here in my hotel room and recording the entry above I was reminded, no doubt by all the meaty imagery, of the one time I saw a rabbit being prepared for the pot.
I happened to call in on one of my gatekeepers and found him sharpening up a knife for the job. I remember the rabbit hanging forlornly in the corner from a hook on one of the kitchen’s beams and my keeper going over and gently lifting it down and laying it on the table top. The prospect of a rabbit-skinning quite intrigued me, so I asked if he would mind me staying to see how it was done.
I reckon I must have thought back to that day a hundred different times in an attempt to get a hold on that transformation; trying to locate the precise moment when the rabbit ceases to be a creature and becomes nothing more than a piece of meat. Certainly, when one looks upon a dead rabbit one easily senses the difference between it and the rabbits which live and breathe. Its head hangs too heavily, its limbs are limp, it is too deeply asleep. Yet one somehow imagines the situation might be resolvable. As if the rabbit has just temporarily lost its quick. One feels that if one could only summon up in one’s lungs some essential heat or spirit one might breathe some life back into it.
But to see the rabbit stripped of its fur and see its flesh bloodily gleam is to admit to some important threshold having been crossed and that only a genius with a needle and thread could return this animal to its previous form. I recall the fur being peeled back with care (even kindness), as if helping an aged relative off with her coat. The leg-joints were neatly bent and tucked in order to ease them out.
Only when the creature’s head is detached from the body can one say with certainty that the process is complete. For when the cleaver strikes cleanly through the neck and its awful edge is sunk in the chopping block, then both parts of the bloody rabbit must know how significantly they have been rent. And when the head is gone we have no eyes, either conscious or unconscious, and it is there that we plumb for life.
When the belly is slit open and the innards are removed (although, to be perfectly honest, I cannot now recall at which point in the proceedings this took place) we are, without doubt, in the domain of the butcher, not the open field. And by the time the keeper had done with his twitching knife and gone off in search of herbs and onions to accompany the grey-red chunks into the pot, what I looked upon was not a rabbit but most definitely rabbit-meat (which, not surprisingly, I have never had much fancy for).
*
*
Last night, when I was all tucked-up in bed with the light out and just beginning to drift away, I caught a glimpse of the most distant, yet heartfelt memory. A recollection of some moment before my birth. There I was in my mother’s belly; warm. My whole world very close to me. Yet there was something else – something important. Some other aspect which has slipped away. It is hard to find words to describe a time before words were available to me. But I have no doubt that what I momentarily caught hold of was a memory of the womb.
*
This morning I decided to stroll up to the Castle and break in a new pair of boots. Allowed Clement to come along, on the understanding that he walk several yards behind. I think the wind must have been behind us for we reached our destination in no time at all and finding I still had a little spirit to spare I left Clement at a chop house and carried on down the High Street to pick up some tobacco.
Bought a ‘Visitor’s Guide to the City’ from an old woman on the corner of Bank Street and was pleased to find it contained a folded map – very simple, about two foot wide. The old lady, who wore a pair of spectacles with one lens missing, said it was by far the best street map of Edinburgh … of such quality that it had won an award.
‘What sort of award?’ I asked her.
‘A map award,’ she replied.
No doubt. Well, I asked if she knew a good tobacconist in the neighbourhood. A straightforward question, one would have thought, but one which provoked in her no end of personal discord and face-pulling before she finally reached some tentative agreement with herself. Having firmed up her directions she informed me how if I took the next-but-one passage off to the right and descended two long flights of steps I should come out right opposite one of the best tobacco shops in town.
Well, I thanked her, set off and, as directed, turned right at the second passage along the way. So confident was I of my imminently entering the tobacco shop and hearing the ‘ding-a-ling’ of the bell above my head that I had gone down, I think, three flights of steps and was climbing a fourth before I sensed that I might have gone awry.
Twenty yards further down the passageway I found myself at the wrong end of a cul-de-sac. A huge iron gate stood before me, bound by a rusty chain and lock. At this point I felt distinctly worried. No, why should I lie? Panic is what I felt. I saw at once how that old crone had led me – a stranger in town and about as green as the hills – into an easy trap and how, any minute now, some great lumbering nephew of hers would descend on me, club me on the noggin and rob me of every last penny in my purse.
So I filled my lungs in preparation for a desperate cry for help and my head prepared itself to be clubbed. I waited … then waited a minute longer. The lumbering youth must have forgotten our violent little tryst, so I set off back down the steps as fast as my old legs would go.
When I descended that first flight on returning I saw a passageway off to the left which I must have gone straight past before. It looked long and dark and full of drips. Was it possible that the old woman had included an extra turn in her instructions and that I had not taken it in? Perhaps she had meant to mention it but had omitted it and the mistake was on her side? Either way, I decided to follow the passage for a minute or two and that if the tobacco shop had not given itself up by then, I would simply turn myself around and come straight back.
Well, I can only imagine that I took another left or right which went unaccounted when I tried to return. For within five minutes I was feeling as if I were the object of some practical joke, whereby a half-dozen stagehands constantly switched the set between my going and coming back. The passage walls, however, seemed quite solid and not like the set of a play at all. My bearings found no tally in their surroundings. In other words, I was completely lost.
Then I suddenly remembered my award-winning map and got it out and studied it very hard, as if the sheer intensity of my gaze might draw from it the information I required. But, of course, a map is absolutely useless unless one can say for certain whereabouts one is on it, and as there was not a single street sign on the walls around me I might as well have held up a blank sheet of paper and tried to set a course from that.
Well, I must have bounced around those passageways for getting on three-quarters of an hour, with that map flapping uselessly in one hand. My mind became the debating chamber for two fiercely dissenting voices … one reassuring me that I would be out of this awful stone maze the next minute, the other screaming that I would never get out alive.
All this time I did not come across a single other soul. It was bitterly cold and every door and window was firmly shut. If I had been wandering across a desert, I thought to myself, I would have about as much hope of finding a helping hand. Tenement buildings towered all around me and every once in a while I would come out into their yards. No doubt there were people within a few feet of me who knew this labyrinth like the back of their hand, but they were too busy warming them by their firesides to be bothered with an old man’s distant halloos. The only signs of life were an occasional baby’s cry or the distant bark of a dog, which echoed up and down the empty passageways. Given the choice, I think I would have elected to hear nothing but my own footsteps than those eerie, anxious sounds.
I trekked up cobbled valley and down cobbled dale. Turned myself about so many times I became dizzy and forgot which city I was in. I had marched myself deep into a state of exhausted fretfulness when I came out suddenly into broad daylight on a narrow footbridge which spanned a busy road below. Beneath my feet, on the floor of that city-canyon, the street was hectic with carriages and shopping-folk, all flowing merrily along. But my footbridge leapt straight across it, to disappear into a dark passageway on the other side.
As I peered hungrily down at all that humanity I noticed a row of three or four tiny shops. In the middle of them I saw one whose windows housed many mounds of freshly-rolled tobacco and many shelves of pipes. I saw the door of the shop open, heard the bell faintly ring and the proprietor, in a neat white apron, step out into the street. He looked left and right, as if he expected me, checked his watch, then turned to go back into his shop.
I shouted – at the top of my voice I shouted – so loud I felt sure I would set in motion tobacco-avalanches in his window display.
‘Halloa! Below there!’ I yelled through cupped hands.
But the tobacconist disappeared. As he closed the door I heard the bell briefly jingle again but it was soon gathered up and washed away by the wind and wheels and horses’ hoofs. I pushed myself back from the railing and there and then consigned myself to being for ever stuck up in the sky.
*
It would be as impossible for me now to explain how I managed to extract myself from that conundrum as it would be to explain how I became lost at the start. Certainly it was not due to any resourcefulness or calculation on my part and, though it is strange to hear myself say it, I can’t help but feel that some piece of me is still trapped in those passageways … doomed to wander, exhausted, for evermore. The rest of me suddenly found itself pitched back onto the High Street, as if the malevolent force which had held me for its entertainment had at last grown tired and spat me out.
By now the very idea of tobacco repulsed me. So I brushed myself down and, in the poorest condition, set off to try and find old Clement. On my way I passed the spot where the old lady with one lens in her spectacles had stood with her visitor’s guides. If she had still been there I might have had a good old shout at her, though I am not sure what I would have shouted, or if I would have had the energy to shout for long.
*
*
It must have been late afternoon when I came across the bleak little cemetery at Greyfriars’. The air particles which had held the daylight were being slowly vacated and made cold.
I strolled between the gravestones in their weathered gowns of green and brown and read the epitaphs of horse-dealers, pulpit orators and medical men. Took some comfort from the fact that even the most patronizing, puffed-up doctors do not escape the earth’s deadly pull.
Sat on a bench and pulled my coat about me and watched the world slip through gradations of grey, a change so incremental in its nature that it was as if my own lungs were bringing it about. I remember pondering how an Edinburgh dusk might be different to an English one and chewing over corresponding matters of light and dark and, one way or another, reached such a zenith of enlightenment that I inadvertently drifted off.
I must have tumbled in the shallows of unconsciousness for quite a while, for when I came to things were altogether darker and chillier. My left leg, which was crossed over my right leg, was completely senseless and my fingers, which had formed a small cairn on my knee’s hilltop, were similarly numb.
I carefully set about disentangling my frozen joints, thinking how this is becoming something of a habit with me, when I became conscious of the most heavenly music slowly pouring over me. A whole host of celestial voices were singing their Praises Be, as if welcoming me to the kingdom in the sky. The graveyard was utterly dark and dank but my mind was filling up with light. And though the air particles remained tight and empty, they had become enlivened and quivered amongst themselves.
It was some time before I gathered my wits and understood that the glorious sound which had stirred me emanated from the church behind my back. The choir was rehearsing the harmonies of ‘Father Who Didst Fashion Me’ and had not quite reached the end of the second verse when they were pulled up by their master’s muffled voice and, after a short pause, made to recommence with the first line of that same verse.
I was stamping some life back into my dead leg and rubbing some heat back into the palms of my hands when I saw just how marvellously the church was lit up, so that all the tableaux in the stained-glass windows radiated from the candlelight within. The saints, the angels and even the lambs – all brimmed with a heavenly glow. It was as if a great ship had stolen up behind me, with its cargo of hallelujas and kindly light. And no one else there to witness its arrival – just me and the grudging graves. I was struck by how a church’s windows might be admired from outside as well as in, and I stopped my stamping to watch as the blues and purples were gently coaxed from the glass by the choir.
I was sitting up in the bath back at the hotel with Clement scrubbing my back before the significance of my experience in Greyfriars’ cemetery truly came home to me. That here, if I could only put my finger on it, was a demonstration of the duality of man. We are not, as I had feared, simply a camera obscura – just a spectator of the light of the world. No. We are both the camera obscura and the lighthouse. We receive light and we send it out.
*
*
Called in again on Bannister. He did not answer his door. In fact, he had rather carelessly left the thing unlocked. I was in and out without anybody paying me much attention. Perhaps they think me some learned old gent.
Skipped down the stairs and was halfway back to the hotel before I realized I had cut my hand on the glass. Bandaged it with my handkerchief.
Clement wanted to know how I had come to hurt myself. Told him I had taken a fall. Packed up my bags without too much interference from him and we got to the station with hardly a minute to spare.
*
*
Home again. The estate looks even colder and more wretched than before.
Unpacked and bathed and was back in my old routines within a couple of hours.
A month ago, I was quite convinced how my own body, or some element in it, was intent on bringing me down.
I see now how it is upstairs I am akilter – my mind which is askew.
*
*
Out onto the balcony late last night. The wind was all around. Fished out my father’s Dutch clog pipe from my pocket but found it broken in two. Must have sat on it. So I stood there in my slippers and leaned against the balustrade and let the breeze billow in my dressing gown and whistle in my ears.
A while later – perhaps an hour or so – a strange mist crept in from the lake. It rolled silently over the orderly lawns and seeped right through the hedges. I stood and watched it thicken up, watched it lap against the walls below. And quite soon the whole house was adrift in it and beginning to gently creak and sway. And we were advancing through a milky sea, with me in my slippers at the helm.
The clouds stole back at some point to reveal a sky alive with painful stars. And I became cold and tired and empty and my legs began to ache. I felt lost in the world and lonely and found no purchase in the mist below. So I took a reading from the heavens, set a course for the Cotswolds and retired to bed.
*
In the night I had a terrible vision.
I saw a small ship with twenty men aboard, trawling off some Icelandic shore. The nets had been cast and the crew stood by to heave in the evening’s catch. But the captain, who was up on the bridge and whose company I shared, saw that something was amiss. The compass was twitching in its glass and the vessel shifted towards starboard of its own accord.
Orders were given to bring her back about but the young man wrestling with the wheel complained that his efforts all came to naught. He turned to the captain. ‘It’s the North Pole,’ he cried. ‘It is pulling us in.’
Then I am no longer alongside the captain but floating high above the sea in the cold night air.
I hear men wailing, calling out in the darkness. Some jump overboard into the freezing waves. And I see how it is the magnetism of the pole which has got a hold of the metal ship and begins to haul her inexorably in. And that when they reach the North Pole the compass will be spinning and the ship will be torn apart in the jaws of the ice.
*
This morning, peering at myself in the mirror, I noticed a mole on my left shoulder which I had never seen before and, turning, saw how it was just one of a considerable scattering, spread diagonally across my back. A great constellation of freckles, stretching from my shoulder right down to my waist.
Is it possible, I wonder, that there might be some correspondence between these moles and the stars I watch at night? There is something undeniably Orion-like about that cluster just beneath my shoulder blade.
The next time I am out on the balcony at night I shall compare them. I shall use a mirror.
*
*
A grey and tedious day today. Nothing worth noting at all with the exception of a letter from Professor Bannister (threatening me with all manner of things, including policemen, which I chose to ignore) and an experiment I undertook in an idle moment, as I sat at table waiting for lunch to arrive.
Found my attention drawn towards a jug of water, about two foot in front of me. No doubt the same jug which has sat there every day for the last ten or twenty years. Today, however, I noticed how its little spout was turned up and away from me most contemptuously and how, when I moved my head to get a better view of it, the water in its belly threw back all sorts of refracted and untrustworthy light.
My first thought was to put something in it. Put something in the water and spoil its fun. I thought, ‘If there is mashed potato on my plate when lunch arrives I shall drop a spoonful straight in.’ But then I thought, ‘No, not mashed potato. I shall harness the energy of my mind to send the blasted thing whistling across the table and crashing to the floor.’
I should mention that, for quite some time now, I have been wondering if it might not be possible for a man to cause objects to move by using the power of his mind. (I have some notes somewhere.) So I went straight ahead and concentrated my attention on that patronizing jug, glaring at it with undiluted fury and bringing to the boil such quantities of psychic energy that my ears were soon as warm as toast. I glared and I stared and grunted, but my efforts were all in vain. The damned jug did not budge a single inch, which was, of course, deeply humiliating. Outwitted by a common jug!
When my lunch finally arrived I told Mrs Pledger that I was sick of the sight of the water jug and asked it to be removed at once. I now wonder, however, if the experiment’s failure might be down to not just my mental shortcomings but an unusually stubborn jug.
Lying in bed this evening, I eyed all the phials and bottles on my bedside table which contain all my preparations and powders and pills. How merrily they jangled against each other as a maid strolled past my door. I feel sure this has some bearing on the water jug business, though I cannot think just what.
*
*
Most of it fades or falls away. We are more like Mr Snow than we care to think. But the odd memory, or sliver of it, perseveres. Nags away, like a stone in the shoe.
It is as if it has been stalking me since I first disturbed it in the Deer Park in the mist but even if I had known it was closing in on me I somehow doubt I would have been able to get out of its way. It had a fair old head of steam on it, had momentum on its side.
I happened to pick up my Gray’s Anatomy, as I am in the habit of doing, and it fell open at the title page, where I clearly saw the name ‘Carter’, who is credited for all the illustrations in the book. I was not aware that the name had so profoundly registered in me – I must have picked that book up a dozen times before – and was half out of my chair to poke at the dying fire when I became suddenly aware of something moving powerfully in on me …
I froze. I listened hard. Something inside me stirred. As if a whole series of forgotten cogs had been set in motion; some deep-sunk machinery in my memory fired-up by the name in the book.
My free hand clung to the mantelpiece and I felt my presence in the room diminish. I heard a voice cry ‘Carter’ down all the years. Then,
I am a boy again, in the old family carriage, come to a halt on the beach with the mist creeping in.
My father has his head out of the window. The driver argues with another man, whom I cannot see. I do not understand what they are saying. All I hear are the voices to-and fro-ing towards a crescendo, before suddenly giving out.
A man with a long branch in his hand and a leather cap on his head passes the carriage window, heading back the way we came.
‘Carter,’ my father calls after him.
This Carter-man with his cap and his stick means nothing to me. I only know that I wish he would stay. I watch him marching off into the mist across the cold flat sand and when he has been all but swallowed up by the mist I see him turn and shout,
‘This way. For the very last time.’
He waits a second, then turns and is gone.
I believe my mother is crying. Her tears start off some tears in me. After a minute she says, ‘Not to worry. Not to worry.’ But it is no good, for we are all of us worrying a very great deal.
Then my father pulls himself back into the carriage and gives me an unconvincing smile. He tells us how our driver is certain he knows the way. And as if to back him up the brake is let out and we are moving again. We travel through the mist, which goes a little way towards relieving me. And I concentrate all my attention on the sand thrown up by the wheels, so as not to be frightened by my mother’s tears and my father’s unconvincing smile.
So successfully do I wrap myself up in my own small world that I have almost forgotten to be afraid. My father is talking and watching the sand with me and my mother has dried her eyes. But then the carriage suddenly comes to a dreadful halt and my precious sand stops flying for good.
My father has his head out in the mist again, which now carries on it the smell of the sea.
The driver is saying to my father, ‘Sir, I think perhaps we should turn about.’
My hand has the poker in a fierce grip, as if I am about to do someone some terrible mischief. But whatever machinery previously stirred in me has all but seized-up again and I am left clinging to the mantelpiece, staring into the fire.
I prod and I poke at the embers, but they refuse to come back to life.