Hamlet’s mental map had changed year by year. As he and Horatio had reached ten, eleven, twelve, the map increased in size, at the same time as it incorporated new landmarks. Now it extended to the farmlands, the forest, the villages. And within the castle it was no longer defined by his mother’s suite of rooms, or the corner of the kitchen where the kind cook kept biscuits, or the sheltered courtyard where his nurse had taken him to play.
When he moved bedrooms at fourteen, the tower room became the centre of his map, and three important lines ran from it. One went down the staircase with the shiny handrail, which he slid down every day, then down a narrow darker set of steps that led to a small back door. This gave the quickest exit from the castle.
The second line wound its way to the southern wing, where old Polonius lived with his faithful son Laertes and his feckless daughter Ophelia.
The third was the line of routine, the daily route of breakfast room, school room, duelling hall, dining hall, art room, a route that most days the young prince followed with little thought.
There was a fourth line too, a secret line, that Hamlet lied to himself about. Were the map ever to be drawn, this route might appear as a series of faint dots, like an unmade road, or a horse trail across the mountains. Much of the time it was invisible, though it was more likely to be seen at night. It started in the tower room, like the others, and like them it went down the stairs. From there it led onto the roof and across the ridges and valleys, pausing near Ophelia’s window, where the girl could sometimes be seen, by the light of the one mean candle her father allowed her.
Oh yes, she could be seen all right, seen as the white slip slid down her body, seen stretching, arms above her head, as she danced the pale nightgown down her body. Could be seen bending to the candle, her face glowing in its sweet light, her swollen lips open to blow the room into darkness. Even after the darkness she could be seen, in Hamlet’s fevered mind, the swelling breasts and the smooth legs, the soft crack: he saw all but the pink light between her legs.
From there Hamlet would creep on past the servants’ wing, watching for the assistant cook with the huge prick, the oafish nineteen-year-old stroking himself on his palliasse, in the dimness of the candle his cock casting a giant shadow on the wall. Hamlet stared at the shadow as much as he did at the cock, wondering and wishing, excited by the awful sight.
Down to a small window, in the shape of a slice of bread, where he would make his exit into the kitchen gardens, but before that he passed the room of one of the scullery maids. Forty or more years old, breasts like bags filled with water, genitals lost in her giant thighs, the triangle of hair spreading high up her navel, standing every night in the galvanised iron tub, obsessed with cleanliness, washing herself with dreamy concentration. The boy felt a deep hunger as he gazed at her. He could never feed at those breasts, could never satisfy her with his little thing. She always in the room, he always outside it. Always in the past, never in the future.
Then through the window to the staircase, down the stone steps, through the green door and into the squares of carrots and peas, potatoes and pumpkins, beetroot and squash. Some squares weeded and neat, others unkempt or barren. Around the perimeters, a hundred metres away in any direction, the pens of chickens, ducks, geese, the sheds of pigs, the huts where tools were kept.
In this strange land, in this tiny kingdom of pigs and turkeys, of beans and berries, the grotesque was not unknown. In this controlled world of moon at night and sun by day, of rain and snow and frost and summer warmth, Garath—always first to emerge from his hovel, Garath, the man charged with the care of the kitchen gardens—occasionally found hens strangled and sows stabbed, vines ripped down and soft fruit plucked and trampled.
The garden boys learned not to speak of this, not to speculate, just to obey Garath’s grim orders: ‘Strip the birds and scorch the sows, bury the fruit and restore the vines.’
Garath sent the meat to the kitchen but he did not eat it himself.
This is where the fourth line of Hamlet finished.