imagine the sky and the earth are an apple …
While the mourners consult in low, pious voices on how to deal with the earth’s rejection of their dead, Lily stands off a little to one side, her head bowed at a mournful angle, savouring this hiccup in the proceedings. How just like Mother! Not for her the muffled, wormy passages of the earth. The rose that burns with horns of dew on the lid of her coffin lights her mother’s heart with rage. She has chosen the earth over the annihilation of fire to prove her point: that the earth does not want her. The holy rage of the rose calls her back to the land of living. This death has no passage for the soul but for the resurrection of the rose.
Mother would have her body back!
The ever-present clouds race above her in shifting shapes, and she can imagine the face of a teddy or the torso of a Barbie doll; she has stepped from the enclosed passages of her rooms to the larger enclosed passages of the sky – Travesty itself, slung between heaven and earth, lit by a dull candle, its streets vanishing off into the rat infested quarters of its own inner rooms.
Into this landscape strides the Reverend Minister, a white circle around his throat, ready to administer on behalf of God the most sacred rites of passage, only to find his office barred by a grave three-quarters filled with improbable, muddy water. Lily recognises him as the Reverend Most, Mother’s old flame from her Spiritual Years when she turned to voodoo and whisky. A hundred and twenty if he was a day, given equally to sermons and séances.
But where was Imogen? It is impossible to think of Mother’s funeral without Imogen.
As he goes by the coffin the Reverend Most pauses and looks at the rose, and looks up in turn right into Lily’s eyes. Lily meets his stare boldly, not about to be intimidated by the eye of any man. Reverend Most smiles. He recognises a true mourner when he sees one, understands the gleam in the corner of her eye. This is the most precious thing in her life right now: her tear, a token of true grief, still making a wide-angle lens of the world. She harbours this tear as if it were a child, allowing it to be born out of the swollen tissues of her eyelids, allowing it to gather there, swell up with itself and head off through the portcullis of her eyelashes to make witness on her cheek.
The Reverend Most nods at her as if he understands how proudly she wears this tear, and how reluctant she is to send it out into the world. In fact Reverend Most is so perfect for the job, Lily is immediately, righteously jealous that this funeral, animated by real, living mourners, should boast such a credible figure, whose eyes linger upon hers, while her own poor model funeral, lying in the dark in a cave of soft toys, can offer no more than a plaster-of-Paris Friar Tuck with a facile grin and a tankard in one hand. Mother would not exactly have approved.
Thinking of Mother brings up another sore point as far as Lily is concerned. At this living funeral they have a genuine coffin with real brass handles and a genuine corpse inside; at home she has nothing but a matchbox she has painted black containing a dried up piece of salted bacon. Surely the toy mourners, particularly the woman with the black veil, deserve better than that.
She can hardly contain her jealousy as Reverend Most joins the cluster of important males around the flooded grave. She sees him looking down into its turbid clay depths. He has knowledge of important things like volcanoes and climate change; he’s talked of Creation Spirituality with the wise, and moral law with the foolish; he’s gone down to Tartarus to visit the dead. All that is very well, but does he know what to do with a grave filled with water? Apparently not.
He stands around with the dark-suited men and stares into the muddy, occult mix the grave has become, bemused and chagrined at this turn of events.
He doesn’t know Mother! Mother could flummox the devil himself.
There is no choice. The coffin will float. They must hold the service now, and leave the coffin standing beside the grave for the gravediggers to cover later, when the water has receded. Therefore the service will have to be held in the territory of the imagination, and when the great lines about ashes to ashes and dust to dust are uttered – there is no mention of mud – the mourners will just have to imagine the coffin going into the depths instead of being able to see it with their own eyes, imagine the descent that covers the coffin with the body of the earth, imagine that the clod they will symbolically place on the lid next to the rose ends the matter for good and all.
Meanwhile the coffin will remain stubbornly above ground.
Lily thrills to all this, savouring it on Mother’s behalf. Mother wouldn’t suffer the indignity of being lowered into her grave in front of all these people, half of them strangers. Being buried is a little like making love or going to the toilet, and should not be done in front of others.
No, her coffin will stand, alone and proud, on the edge of its doom, until all the hypocrites and well-wishers have gone their way.
The wind has dropped and a grey cloud hangs flatly over the cemetery like an enormous slug. A mourner blows into his fingers as if for warmth, although everyone is sweating. He wears pearly-grey gloves, the fingers of which are smudged with mould. Standing beside him, head covered with a dark scarf, is a young woman of fourteen or fifteen years, whose mourning apparel cannot hide the pretty curl of her hair or the flush of her cheek beneath. Catching Lily’s eye, the young woman detaches herself from the rest and approaches her. When she gets near she lifts her veil and Lily recognises in this beautiful young woman the figure of her niece, whose name has temporarily slipped her mind.
“I’m Spring Morning,” the girl says in a bright clear voice. “Someone said you must be Great Aunt May.”
Lily nods. The poor girl is confused of course: May died years ago, in another country, but now is not the time to say so. A gentle correction later over a cup of tea and some scones, perhaps, would suffice.
Spring Morning has the face Mother had when she was young and beautiful, even more beautiful than Spring Morning is right now. And her smile was the same. Then her mother would fold her up in a faded yellow blanket, with soft toys in the pattern, and her smile would burn brighter than the dew-beaded rose in the spring morning of the world.
“Then I’m your grand niece, Aunty May.” On this young woman’s charming tongue Lily’s name, which is not in fact her name but Lily doesn’t care too much, sounds fresh and new, full of lilt, as if life were just beginning for Lily as well as for her. Here we go gathering nuts in May …
Lily is charmed and a little spooked. At one time she, like Mother in her turn, was just like this girl. A bloom sat on her cheek no rose could imitate. Her hair curled across the whiteness of her neck in a manner beyond the grace of a swan. Her voice floated up to heaven where it wooed the immortals; and she could hold her arm in such a way, so limpid and so pure a ballet dancer would hang her head in shame. When she walked, leaves of brown and red fell from the trees back towards the earth, twisting to the rhythm of their shape in the air; when she slept the stars winked out, and when she woke wild flowers opened up to the sun, what more could she ask than that – youth and beauty and an eternity to know it?
Lily is charmed. Neither the greying of the skies nor the yawning of the muddy grave can hide the rouge transcendent on her niece’s cheek, the touchingly bleeding eye-shadow. The heavy, shuffling tread of the mourners cannot blot out her light, lithe step. Here is the very image of felicity engraved in the flesh; here is Mother flush out of the grave, returned as spirit to walk again as a youth. All I have to do is to follow the white light, she told Lily before she died. The whisky and morphine she consumed in these last hours left her in the glow of some kind of certainty, an ineluctable abasement in the face of pain.
Spring Morning says, “Do you have a flower for the coffin, Aunty May?”
Lily gestures towards the coffin, “That’s a beautiful rose,” she says, a lump in her throat.
The girl smiles, opens her cloak and takes out three white lilies, the petals of which glow like polished ivory, like the skin on Spring Morning’s neck. With a brief bow she hands one to Lily, who receives it with trembling fingers, wondering how long it is since she has had anything so beautiful in the palm of her hand, noting how old and gnarled her hand is compared to the luminous flesh of the flower.
And for it to bear her name! What magic is this? But this lily will have faded before Mother has finished laughing.
Spring Morning takes Lily’s arm and leads her, surprisingly, not towards the grave to join the cluster of mourners, but away from it, deeper into the long grass, the gravestones and the silence of the earth. Glancing back she sees a pile of yellow clay, a stubborn coffin and a dark cluster of mourners. Beyond them, at the gate, the two passers-by still stand, their heads leaning towards each other, exchanging riddles. Why haven’t they passed by?
Spring Morning takes Lily to a hidden place bound by bushes and a mossy crypt, the sides of which are carved with the faces of the ancestors of the dead, each scrawled face grimacing out at the visible world. In front of the crypt is a piece of inlaid marble which Spring Morning wipes clean to reveal the same milky translucence as the lilies the two women are still holding. After clasping her hands together in a brief prayer, Spring Morning solemnly places one of her lilies onto the inlaid marble. Her simple, concentrated gestures are soaked in youth, making her seem even younger than her years, a child.
For a moment her hand lingers by the lily – and lily, hand, flower and marble make a single study in translucence. Lily recalls the pearly glove resting lightly on the shoulder of the voluptuous angel. This is the colour of Spring Morning’s fingers as she bends over and places the lily down, gesturing to the older woman to do the same.
“Now do this,” she says, and, disregarding the mud, gets down on her elbows, like a Moslem at prayer, cups her hand around her mouth and hums into the earth, making a channel, a funnel for her voice with her fingers.
For a moment nothing happens and it seems as if the girl’s humming is totally absorbed by the earth, then the voice begins to return, not from the spot into which she is humming, but from all around, from the long grass, the clay and the gravestones; slender spirals of sound weaving into the air, beside and behind Lily, as if the girl could snake-charm sounds out of the clay. When she stops the sound goes on for a little while as a high, fading note, a dying fall.
“How do you do that?” Sitting on top of those divine sounds, Lily’s voice is like an old cracked jug on a silk embroidered tablecloth.
Without speaking, Spring Morning guides Lily to the earth, bending her over so that her mouth is separated from the ground only by the thin flesh of her hand and the web of her bones. Her years of crawling in the tunnels now stands her in good stead as she secures a balance on her knees and takes a deep breath. A faint exhalation from the damp earth ripples over her cheeks and forehead.
Her own hum is nothing like the girl’s celestial tones, more like a broken reed, weak and thin against the massive density of mud and rock. No soft toy tunnels here. The sense of the enormity of the earth almost pushes her over but Spring Morning is at hand to steady her. She keeps humming and it begins to happen, her voice picked up and magnified back to her. The sound of her humming turns a weak, human thing – thin against the vast skin of the earth – into a rumble, full of years, coming up out of the ground, as if her life was rushing back up at her out of the stone.
Along with this come the dreams of the dead who are buried here. The pale dreams of the dead are gossamer thin, like the most delicate of silks, as whispery as a spider’s web in moonlight, and she finds nothing to fear in them, for their voices have even less substance than her own. Her voice, in itself, has no more substance now than the earth gives it, and she is, in that moment of annihilation, breathing into a massive, living being.
It stops and the stones surrender the last of her sounds. Lily makes no movement to get up. Into the silence created in the wake of this sound creep the whispers of the earth and its secrets; the rattle of schist, the quantum scurrying of stone, the torpid settling of mud; through these multitudinous whispers from the mineral intestines of the earth, she hears the boom of distant oceans slushing in her ears with the wash of her blood.
Lily takes away her hand, places her mouth directly on the earth and slides her tongue into the grit and the sour. Whispers rush through her in elemental tongues like the babble of prophecy. One day soon, she too will step between the hinges of heaven. Demons will inherit her mantle while angels will cast lots for her skin. Beasts in the guise of men will arrive at the gates, their snouts raised inquiringly to the walls. Insects with human faces will tear at the flanks of dogs. Each will take the shape of the animal inside them. Demons will stalk in human skin. Para-beings suck blood.
And they are there, just as she has foreseen them, and heard rumours of them in the rathouse, as she raises her head from the ground, guiltily sucking up the understanding of the earth: the Biology Bureau guys in their dark suits, badly disguised as mourners, infiltrating the cemetery, but Lily knows who they are. They are not just carnival faces but the real thing; guardians of the bloodline. They have an instinct for anybody who’s indulging in dangerous intercourse with the planet. Lilly wonders what they’re looking for as she clutches the life in her moist pocket.
When the dark ones come, hide your children, smother their cries; hide them in despised places.
Spring Morning sees them too. They both watch as the dark ones hang microphones, tuned to the wavelength given out by the crying of a child in the upright cypresses. Lily pulls some moisture from the damp, death ridden earth, and feeds it to the life in her pocket.
They will never find it, she thinks, they are looking in all the wrong places.
A new mutation has arisen; a fresh expression of the bloodline, she thinks. The Biology Bureau want to hunt it down and destroy it, just as the scarred male rat would have sniffed out the life at present squirming in her pocket and gutted it. So the youngest generation of Travesty will be massacred by their own toys in a Day of Delight gone mad. And it will be blamed on terrorists, of course.
Something must have spooked the inhabitants of the Dark Fortress.
Lily wonders what it is. What face it wears.
Her hand grips her pocket, which is like an external womb. Its tiny life is still squirming, ever in need. Lily gives a guilty start at having neglected it for so long. Somehow, everything in the world depends on that tiny despised life, stalked by enemies. Lily, surrogate mother to its world, feels the messianic power of its pulsing will to survive, even unto the smelly holes of her pocket. Something bigger than she can understand.
Things appear that give forth a new note.
I’ll get rid of it as soon as I can, she vows. What with mother’s funeral and all, it is too big a responsibility. To carry a life like that.