The Tally

Every year, George would give them each a spaniel for Christmas. A generous gift; but George was a man of give and take.

Every year, George would give them a spaniel for Christmas, but without fail by St. Valentine’s, all of the dogs would have mysteriously vanished.

One would run away on Boxing Day night, homesick for its mother; a firecracker would startle one on New Year’s Day. The January frosts took most; they would go out walking and most probably they had fallen through the ice.

The Mill Brook Lake had taken 43 dogs all told. That’s what they said – the bottom must be dog deep.

But every year, George would give them all a spaniel for Christmas.

It would not be the same spaniel; that would be reckless. For such an operation to work you must rotate the dogs, otherwise folks would get suspicious.

“George,” they might have said, “you said dog drowned Mill Brook Lake, Handsel Monday last. Now you give dog back. Why you do this, George?”

But George rotated the dogs, so each would receive their neighbour’s dog of the previous year. Nobody was any the wiser, though occasionally one might say,

“George, I am not so good with the dogs, is there not some better gift? Four have drowned; one stole my horse and left for the East; birds ate two. Please George, no more dogs.”

Or one might think, “the dog at my neighbour’s house is the likeness of poor Rex, who burned straight to ash.”

Every twelve years or so, George would have to buy new dogs. This was the part of the plan he hated most.

Devices

Oxford, 1997.

When was the last time you climbed a ladder? Do you remember how it feels, when there's no-one holding on to the bottom? That's part of the problem, really, how it started: sometimes there just isn't anyone to stand on the bottom rung, and you still need to get to the top. There's a fire, or a cat, some damn thing or other. There's always a reason.

I had made a bad mis-step about eight feet off the ground and for a long sickly-sweet instant I felt that feeling, the feeling that means the centre of your mass has shifted outside the limits of your body. There's nothing quite like it: out there it goes in one swift motion, as if a faith healer has hauled it out in his fingers, and you become weightless, and what used to sit inside you does not, the stone pulled from the date.

There isn't time for this reflection, naturally. Something settles over you, something makes a smooth concession to the abominable state of uncertainty that surrounds you, a presence in the mind that says everything is in control. Not 'under control', but 'in control'. Everything knows what's going on. You don't, necessarily, but that's fine. Objects of notable mass are subject to accelerate due to gravitational force in the absence of an equal and opposing force. Specifically, they fall right out of the fucking sky, sunshine.

At the open end of the twenty-first century, before everything winnowed down to a point, I took a deep breath as the hated mass of my fat body fell apart in the sunlight. Joints separated cleanly and painlessly, the shroud of skin gathering in loose folds and spread smooth in taut planes as lipids smudged and shifted heavily about the anguished skeleton. What business remained was brisk and efficient. I passed into history like the birthday of a dull child.

As I lay dying, I could hear music on the breeze of that summer afternoon. A melody of sorts, ringing and chiming. It put me in mind of a church in a pleasant mood, and I smiled to think of the green-and-blue church by the river I'd promised to take her to. Why hadn't I done it? My skin prickled with tears. How gently these things become so vital, become the edges by which we trace and fumble out the shape of our lives.

Before now it had bothered me, the thought that my last thoughts might be of her, that those last thoughts might make the stuff of my life between those points all a terrible lie. If I sat on the staircase and put my head on my arms in that warm, lonely light and waited for thousands of days. Do you ever stop needing people, I had shouted, was it pre-ordained that you had to hate that failure to be truthful to the next, or the one after that? I had been certain that I was a liar. From host to host, tabletop guitar and broken skin, shadow to sunlight. Priest. No message between these lines.

For some, the day will be unexpected and devastating. For me, losing the images meant losing everything. Yes. Absolutely.

I made very sure of that.

Moving in

00000000: 00 FF FE 00  00 00 02 06  00 00 03 D6  00 00 03 DE
00000010: 00 00 03 E6  00 00 03 F2  00 00 03 FA  00 00 04 02
00000020: 00 00 04 0A  00 00 04 12  00 00 04 1A  00 00 04 26
00000030: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000040: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000050: 00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  00 00 04 32  
00000060: 00 00 04 32  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00
00000070: 00 00 11 26  00 00 02 00  00 00 0B 10  00 00 02 00

The remainder of the first block is intentionally blank:

00000080: 00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00
[...]
000000F0: 00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00  00 00 02 00

Subsequently, certain important information is disclosed:

00000100: 53 45 47 41  20 4D 45 57  41 20 44 52  49 56 45 20
00000110: 28 43 29 53  45 47 41 20  31 39 39 31  2E 41 50 52
00000120: 53 4F 4E 49  43 20 54 48  45 20 20 20  20 20 20 20
00000130: 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20  48 45 44 47  45 48 4F 47

Which is to say:

|SEGA MEGA DRIVE |
|(C)SEGA 1991.APR|
|SONIC THE       |
|        HEDGEHOG|

The majority of the remainder of this block is also left blank. Afterwards things necessarily become human-unreadable:

00002660: 0E AE 0E 4E  08 08 0E A0  08 00 00 00  06 26 0A 2A 
00002670: 0C 4C 0E 8E  0E EE 0A AA  08 88 04 44  08 E0 02 60
00002680: 00 EE 00 88  00 44 00 0E  00 46 00 00  0E EE 02 20
00002690: 04 42 06 64  08 86 0C CA  00 44 00 EE  00 0E 00 0A

Consequently:

Omne animal triste post coitum

It was generally agreed that Toby’s was the best entry, even before the judges had arrived. He stood with his shoes polished and together, looking it over on his section of the long row of trestle tables that ran from beneath the window of Saint Kentigern to the noticeboard with its appeals for bric-a-brac and Darfur.

The tops of his socks gripped tightly around his shins. He felt the prickle of sweat burrowing through nylon. He felt the tinge of embarrassment as grownups would pause for a moment and examine his entry on the table; and he would watch their expression alter as they attempted to comprehend, take in, adjust themselves to the thing that they were seeing. He had expected this, of course. He had wanted it; desperately sought and dreamt about the examination of his capability by adult eyes and minds. Yet now – had he had any help from anyone at home? – as he stood – was this his first year exhibiting? – beside the table – had it taken him a very long time? – receiving this realisation of imagination – it was ever so good, they were sure it would win – this fantasy of praise; he found he had not prepared any responses for the comments, and so he blushed and burrowed fingernails into the fleshy cushions of his palms.

It was ever so good, was Toby’s. They couldn’t understand why he had not entered the competition before.

Only that, thought Toby, was the very point of the thing. He could not have entered until he had been sure. He had been to the event in previous years and had strolled along the long U of trestle tables, hands behind his back, silently observing the other children’s projects. If he were to tell anyone that, then they might presume that he had entered because he thought the other entries were no good; that he’d seen their standard and had known he could do better – but nothing could be further from the truth.

Toby had come here year after year – silently; never speaking – and he was of the opinion that the other children’s entries were excellent. He had been in awe of their production, of their skill and their attention to detail. He had imagined that if he were to enter he would, quite simply, be laughed out of the competition.

But he had also longed for the praise. He had watched successive children stand on the erected little stage and receive the tiny silver cup and have their photograph taken for the local evening newspaper. Toby could sense how that would make him feel. It was a feeling that was real and potent and forcibly equal to the pain that would touch him if he weren’t to win, if he was laughed at and made to realise that his dream was not for him.

It was no absurdity to imagine the laughter. Though there were many entries that were truly brilliant, there were also those that were not. He had heard the judges’ whispered comments as other children had suffered their disappointments: the glue was not applied very tidily. There was not enough string. The piece was imaginative, but was not to scale. It lacked scope. That bit there, it was rather askew. What if Toby was one of those children?

As each year came, he resolved that he would enter that time. In the weeks before, he would lie in bed, his back on fire against the mattress as his brain reawakened his single plan for what he would make to display at the competition. There was only one idea: the same plan year after year. Only whenever it was time, the imagined pain of not winning would present itself and his back would become cold again, and he would realise that the competition was not his to be won. The plan was never realised. It was for better children, more talented ones.

So this, it appears, is our story. One year Toby overcame his shyness (for that, if we’re frank, was all it was) and he entered the competition. We might infer a moral – that once he received the praise that he so desired, he did not know what to do with it, or it did not satisfy him as he thought it might.

Only this is not the story at all.

For while it’s true to say that Toby only ever had one plan of what he would make for the competition, the thing that he entered was almost unrecognisable to the initial dream. Successive years of frustration, of disappointment, had contrived to adapt his vision. He knew that if he were to win he would have to create something so astonishing that it stood out far beyond the entries of the other children; something so technically perfect that it would halt the judges in their tracks.

Only that is not the story either.

For Toby’s entry did not grow out of a spirited sense of competition. It was a development of frustration. As the years passed, successive failure became a comfort to him. He began to trust the mellow hopelessness of not putting in; of his silent tread about the trestle U, examining the other children’s entries but not his own. Whenever he came to imagine the thing – that leap into the air, that burning fear – it could all be comforted by the dampish sense of failing to fly. He knew what to expect from failing and would cuddle up to the unmade thought at night.

It’s a tricky business growing up. Talents mature, and failure for a boy like Toby became harder to achieve. He became more skilled with his fret saw. He learned how to solder neatly, and found easier methods by which he might wire the mechanism to the stand.

As much as Toby wished to build something that would defeat the other children’s attempts, he also longed to build something that would defeat himself and bring that delicate salve of frustration. So the plan, though there was only ever one plan, grew more intricate, more hopelessly baroque, more likely to fail. Until finally he failed at failing.

He boiled the bones himself in his mother’s milk pan. He used a dentist’s drill (obtained with his own pocket money from the back of a homeopathy pamphlet) to bore neat holes through each epiphysis. Through these he ran green silk threads to attach them to the central cog.

He cleaned the brass rods with methylated spirit which he applied from the end of a cotton bud that later proved invaluable for lighting the little burner beneath the glass dome of condensed rainwater. He placed the snails into the glass tube one by one and coaxed them to glide further into the pressurised funnel with a corner of iceberg lettuce.

With a craft knife he scored away the many oblong windows of the telephone box doors, which he had modelled with perfect accuracy in white metal at 1:42 scale. These he left unglazed and hinged them to the boxwood frame so they could flip open and act as vents for the steam to escape.

Using a tiny needle he stitched together the swatches of grey leather, and attached them to the starched fabric he had formed upon the reproduction death mask of Napoleon found in the art store at his sister’s school. The bulbs he painted black, and screwed all twenty in by hand; and around these he pushed pheasant feathers at alternating lengths into the ox-blood putty that he had moulded about the vertical sheath.

The trumpet was the trickiest part, but it was attached to the bellows with a minimum of tape, and gripped by the skeletal retort he had positioned, reaching with deathly stillness from the arm of a 1920s dinner sleeve.

It was ever so good was Toby’s.

All who saw it admired it and said he had done so well making all that in so little time.

Only, Toby thought, it’s taken me my childhood to make this thing. Years of worry have resulted in this one object. So many thwarted attempts to enter have conspired to produce something so unlike the thing itself – magnificent – but fulfilling only by frustration.

And the mechanical fingers whirred; and Napoleon’s glass eye swung round upon its silver spring to face the many judges; and the trapped skylark, tail feathers nailed to a little wooden cross took fright and finally began to sing; and the plaster lips parted as the trumpet struck up: this is heartbreak, this is heartbreak meanly felt – but the thing admired was not how Toby had dreamt it.

In recession

Everyone I went to school with passed along the wall in twos or threes behind the rope barrier. What light fell into the chamber fell through the shivering of the bead curtains at either end of this passageway. I felt rather than saw their shifting gaze, sensed rather than heard the shuffling footfalls – here a pair of trainers, there office shoes, now again trainers, expensive ones – a set of motorcycle boots, even. After the first few months my exhibitors laid an anti-electrostatic pad along the walkway, which intensified the sounds I could no longer detect while distancing the vibrations I could. I can remember the carpet in the room where their obliging arms laid me to rest, can remember its patternless field. I am glad they’ve seen fit to protect it. It bodes well.

I still knew a few things about my self, and prize these shreds of knowledge like talismans. As my skull has steadily softened in the darkness, my eyes have grown, now many times their original size. Blind and opaque, they register only the dimmest distinctions in a broad field of unchanging blue. In early life I might have called the sensation that at times overwhelms me ‘skin-crawling’ – the great expansion of the surface area has led (indirectly or otherwise) to a remarkably increased sensitivity in its registry of sensation. ‘Crawling’ is not it, though: it puts me more in mind of a harbour or a sea, a crystal sea. It is like the motion of wind through a vast cornfield. (In the midlands of the Transkei, or in the fields of Oklahoma. How soon such images are so cheaply forgotten.) Clearly in my mind I can see the landscape of a deep harbour endlessly shifting, each instant a fractal landscape that came so close to never happening. In this way I am at peace for months at a time. Though I would guess my outward appearance became horrible or freakish a long time ago, I suppose I am rather like a plant. A cactus, perhaps. I always admired trees.

The room is in darkness. I feel rather than see those shafts of light from the room beyond, where the assembled can bear witness to the projected memory of every thought that has struck through my mind. Every dream, every aspiration, every sinful thought is registered. Eager graduates synthesise untrodden philosophies from fantasies of debasement that to me have long become mere amusements. Emotional biographers step outside in tears, overwhelmed by scrying fugues of pain and thwarted need that I lost the ability to hear decades since (“I call this one Five-Part Invention for Wounded Father, op. 32”) but whose turns and deliberations I can remember with fond affection. Compassionate physicians swaddle their terminal cases in blankets and chairs to audition pleasant daydreams recovered from ribbons of magnetic tape that would circle the globe.

I’ve welcomed this sense of departure, ascending confidently if slowly from the anguish of the flesh into the harmonic mechanisms of pure language and mathematical systems. No more the mean temperament, the guilt-ridden attachment to anaesthetic routine. My future is a blue heaven, and I may decorate or empty it as I please. I am not alone. There are others. I cannot see or speak to them, but they are everywhere, and they are glad that I am with them.

Reflection

I HAVE NEVER found out if my Great Aunt Judith’s calculations were correct. Being a spinster living alone in a small seaside resort, she had much spare time which she divided between philosophising, and preserving broad beans by blanching and packing them in rock salt in the hundred or so Kilner jars that dotted her kitchen. At both enterprises, she excelled, and she theorised that if we were to take a small reflective disc – the mirror from her powder compact; or, I suggested one of the countless CDs that came free with her Sunday newspaper – and if we were to take her large magnifying lens (supplied to her free of charge by the county library to compensate their under-investment in large-print editions), and we were to go outside and stand between the hollyhocks in her front garden (which overlooked the cliffs high above the rest of the resort), we might spend a most pleasurable afternoon permanently blinding any people using the coin-operated mechanical telescopes on the central promenade. Unfortunately she died before either of us was to test this theory, and I am too much of a sentimentalist to undertake the proposal without her. And so her thinking goes unrealised and I am left with only the broad beans to mark her life’s achievements.

Clothes Moths

April delivered clothes moths, and one Sunday Daniel was tying cinnamon, and ginger, and cloves into the square envelopes he had cut from a bedsheet to hang in the doorless wardrobe in his room.

‘You’d be better off just getting a door put on it,’ I told him.

‘No, what I really need is cedarwood.’

‘Or a heavy curtain, something to stop them getting in.’

‘Cedarwood’s the best thing for repelling them, I read,’ he repeated, his thick fingers fumbling with the twine.

‘But if they can’t get in–’

‘You know, it’s not actually the moths that do the damage,’ he said, pulling the cord tight around the neck of the cotton bag, ‘it’s the larvae.’

‘But if the moths can’t actually get in with the clothes in the first place–’

‘That’s what the spices are for,’ he said, ‘to deter the moths.’

He was finding the knots difficult; his hands hardly made for such delicate work. Stooped over the table, he struggled on, bag after bag until all eight were sealed. Eight pomanders to fend off the countless moths.

‘There,’ he said with a satisfied grin upon his face, ‘that should do it.’

He showed me the holes a moth had made in the jumper he was wearing, right in the middle of the front.

‘That was last year’s,’ he told me, ‘last year wasn’t so bad for them, but the year before that! You should have seen them! They’re a nuisance more than anything. Just little holes they make, but they ruin a perfectly good jumper.’

He made us tea. He made us tea in the brown-glaze teapot that is missing a lid. He stomped about the kitchen, unable to find spoons, and cups, and finally the milk, and I said it was fine because I could take it without milk, but he said it was annoying because he was sure he had bought some the other day.

‘And how is work?’ I asked.

‘Work?’ he said, ‘work’s fine,’ he said, and he looked at the floor.

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, ‘it’s been going fine.’

‘That’s great.’

‘Only–’ he said, and he looked at me with those big empty eyes, he looked at me with the helplessness of a child who is lost and appealing to be saved from the world, ‘there’ve been one or two incidents lately,’ he said, ‘just little things, but they’re bugbears all the same.’

I nodded. I understood. I thought I understood.

‘The first,’ he said, beginning to tell his tale, ‘happened a few weeks ago. We’d had some German visitors in. It was all top brass, but they showed them round. Introduced them to us all. They were very interested in the work I’d been doing, and they complimented me on it, and I said that I couldn’t have done any of it without Karen, my assistant. “Karen’s shown me such devotion,” I told them.’

‘Devotion?’ I repeated. It seemed a funny word.

‘That was just it,’ he said, staring glumly at his cup, ‘she was there, and I think she probably heard. It’s been very awkward since then. I’ve not known what to say.’

I nodded. It was hard, I said, but it probably didn’t matter. It was a silly thing to get worked up by.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘there was the incident over the minibus.’

‘The minibus?’

‘They didn’t send one. Or rather they did, but they sent the wrong one. They sent us someone else’s minibus and they got ours by mistake.’

I nodded again. I didn’t understand.

‘We were going to take some of the seniors out for the day. There was the floral show on. We thought; floral show, pub lunch, we could have them back before their tea.’

‘It sounds nice,’ I said.

‘So we ordered a minibus for them. Minibus and driver. For the day. There’s only ten of them, but that’s too many for two cars. So we booked this minibus and the chap to take us there and back, and it was all sorted.’

I sipped my tea. I was listening, but I’d become distracted. A clothes moth was walking across the table, brazenly weaving its way in and out of the stacked bags of spice.

‘Only when he turns up, it’s the wrong minibus. He says “Minibus for Lurch.” I said, “There’s some mistake, my name’s Rudd.” I said, “I think you’re meant for somebody else.”’

‘No–’ I said staring at him in disbelief.

‘I sent him away. Clearly this Lurch fellow ended up with our minibus for the day–’

‘No–’

‘But I’ve had no explanation–’

‘No–’

‘No account for why we were left without transportation for ten senior citizens.’

‘No,’ I said, appealing for him to understand, ‘it was a joke,’ I said, ‘the driver, he was making a joke.’

‘A joke?’ he said.

‘He was joking,’ I said, ‘when he said Lurch, he meant –’

And there was no going back. I realised only then that the thing had to be said. That for him to understand it could not be unsaid. The hole began to unwind around him, to grow ever larger and swallow both of us inside. I looked away briefly. Perhaps he would get it on his own. I looked away, and only then saw the milk bottle on the dresser half obscured by an untidy sheaf of newspapers. There was no disguising it; it had to be said.

‘He meant you,’ I said, ‘he was calling you Lurch.’

‘It was booked under the company name. There’s no Lurch that works for us. I made the booking. It would be under my name.’

‘From The Addams Family,’ I told him, ‘the television programme from the sixties.’

‘I’m aware of it,’ he said.

‘Well the butler, the big lumbering butler, is called Lurch.’

And only then did he get it. He hadn’t known, I think, that that's was the character’s name was; but he knew now all right. We sat there in silence watching the clothes moth trip and dally about the table. It crept across the pomanders and then took flight only to settle on them again.

We watched it and neither of us said anything, until finally it took off one last time from the table and I pushed it firmly with my thumb into the wall.

‘Don’t do that,’ Daniel said as I pulled back my thumb to reveal the dead insect, flattened, surrounded in a halo of silver dust on the wall; the scales of its wings a smudged imprint of its final moments, ‘the marks,’ he said, ‘they never come out.’

The rope.

I say that I remember, with complete clarity, how and where I stumbled over it. On a warm self-absorbed Saturday in April, I was on my knees in the Toc H bookshop near the Hythe Bridge, searching through a fourth or fifth box of tattered paperbacks with that special kind of tenderness that the book-lover reserves for the old and infirm.

(True romantics, of which I count myself one, can never pass up the untold possibilities of an old shoebox or orange crate parting at the seams with dozens of blanched dreaming spines, but they soon learn, as all romantics must, that care and caution are the real safeguards. All of us have at one time or another left most of a book’s cover adhering to its neighbour, or had a particularly thumbed specimen discorporate over one’s shoe. Suffice to say that if I ever do happen to make myself a paper doll... well, nevermind.)

I’ve found all manner of things, kneeling beneath trestle tables or at the feet of overstuffed bookshelves, breathing in that low-key dream smell of cheap paper, old ink, mould and spores. The Death Ship by B.L. Traven. Barrington Bayley. Gerald Kersh. Elisabeth Bowen. All messages in bottles, all drifting in the pale tide. It’s one reason to worship the moon, I’ll say that much, to be grateful for the tide.

A.L. Curtis was not a name that I recognised, but I never can resist someone who has the advantage of me, especially when his words come in cloth covers. The cloth had lost most of the title a long time before I’d gotten to it, so I eased his book free and laid it carefully in one palm. It opened a little too easily, and I shifted to steady myself. No sudden movements: very well. I turned the endpaper back. A.L. Curtis, it said, A Study of Recent Progress In Rope & Knot Magic. First printing. New York, 1926.

Sometimes one cannot help but recognise the hand of serendipity. Moments before it smacks you in the teeth is always a good time for this, so that as you stagger back spitting out blood and splintered enamel you can at least form the outline of a knowing smile. I had something like that smile on my face as I crossed the river. The book was wrapped in vinegar-paper under my arm, fat and weightless in the way that truly old books become.

But one of my main complaints with contemporary society, while I have your attention, is the simple poverty of expression afflicting many of our young people. People of A.L. Curtis’ generation had standards and reservations, what used to be called common courtesy. They did not parade the streets forcing unwelcome intimacies on strangers. They did not, as a rule, even drink to excess. But people these days, generally speaking, you understand, people these days just don’t know how to be nice. At the Toc H bookshop that was never a problem, I should clarify, but other places... other places I had come to feel less and less comfortable with.

Here is what A.L. Curtis had to say on the matter of other places:

It can be seen that even the most perilous entertainments developed by the American illusionists pale in their characteristically base impact when considered with the infamous so-called Rope Trick of the Indian fakirs, whose young male assistants are frequently dismembered or otherwise disappear without trace at the climax of this dubious entertainment, which, as I have found, is equalled only in its questionable taste by the conundrums it presents to the aspirant performer and by the numerous unreliable accounts of its exact proceedings. [Curtis’ emphasis. He continues:] Many Western spectators appear to have wilfully confused memories of what may, considering certain reports, be an intensely distressing spectacle.

This last passage had been underlined in pencil and marked approvingly: ‘Yes!’

I fancied I could detect the influence of imperialism here, but perhaps it was just the armchair. It was a high wing-backed thing that seemed to exert psychoactive influence over whatever I read while sat it. Once settled in this munificent work of furniture, books would read as if the sun had never set on the empire.

(At one point in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the emperor and his narrator settled peaceably in hammocks, conversing without speaking, as if each might only exist in the other’s imagination: what I am attempting to suggest is that this chair was clothed in the same cloth. (For all that I know, it still is.))

So, in any case, I got up and walked around the room. As I passed by the door for the second time, I picked up a large plastic bag with string handles, lifting it with some difficulty, and spilled its contents out onto the dining-table among all the maps and pamphlets.

Nothing that looks like rope looks should be quite so heavy. But rope does, or is, and in spite of my distrust--not helped by the braiding of royal blue and hot pink--I had been assured that this was, in italics, the quintessential stuff. I picked it up in one hand. It was wound in a fat figure-of-eight, sixty metres of it. Rope.

As anyone who has ever held a snake will tell you, holding rope of any kind feels nothing whatsoever like holding a snake. A snake feels alive--unless it is dead, that is--and beneath its scales, the thing will yield and shift about your touch without so much as your say-so. Snakes have their own agenda. Rope does none of these things, but there is something similarly uncanny about how it weighs in the hands, something that fouls the senses. I imagine one gets accustomed to it with regular exposure, fits of metaphysical introspection at 15,000 feet being unwelcome, but I have not, myself. And then--well, here is what happened:

At five o’clock the following morning, I locked the door behind me and climbed the stairs as lightly as I was able to the highest landing, where a small doorframe set into the wall admits the intrepid into the lower parts of the roof itself.

With care, one can almost stand up straight here, although I have never lost my terror of slipping from a joist and plunging one great clumsy hoof through the ceiling below. (At one time I had this recurring nightmare of falling a very great distance through space: losing my footing, I would find that the plaster and lath yielded not to a room but a great inky darkness through which I would continue to fall. After a matter of minutes I would crash through a tiled roof, into an attic, and just as quickly into darkness again. In my dream, this fall would last so long that I became able to mark birthdays since it began.) However, at the end of the building, where the roof descends to meet the floor in another meeting that makes the eye ache with wrongness, there is another door, a door fastened by a pin on a chain.

Outside the roof levels out for a few square feet at the end of the building. Friends of mine have used the place to get high before now, following some complex reasoning that the ideal environment for consuming intoxicants is the cold place spattered with bird shit that rewards the uncoordinated with an eighty foot drop onto pavement. A steel box resembling a newspaper dispenser holds a rope ladder, for emergency use. (It occurs to me, writing this, that I have no idea if it is still there: by now it may well have been used.)

In any case, I had brought my own rope. I'd loaded it into my wickerwork laundry basket and dragged it up here alongside me. It seemed to weigh as much as I did.

It occurred to me at or around this point that I had devoured A.L. Curtis' book, or the parts of it that interested me, in the space of a single weekend. By my standards, this counted as uncommonly swift.

Let me be clear: what I mean is that I had sat and read the twenty-one pages of his account and theory of the Indian rope trick, making thorough notes, and when I was quite satisfied that my preparations would be adequate, I had cut the pages from the binding of the book and methodically sliced them along the diagonal into thin regular strips.

(I have found that diagonal cuts are most effective at encouraging the fibres to separate, especially with older books. It is very important to ensure that all of the words are divided. It's a symbolic thing, I suppose, moreso than a practical consideration, although I cast a blind eye to the indefinite articles. A little too much like hard work, that. Betrays a lack of faith. Symbolic things.)

In the wreckage of my kitchen, I had then filled a stockpot with water and set it to boil. Once it was on a fine, rolling boil, I added two sliced onions and five tablespoons of vinegar before feeding the fragments of manuscript in a handful at at time, stirring slowly. By this time it was around two o'clock in the morning: there is an ovoid alarm clock with radium-green hands that sits on the kitchen counter which I inherited from my grandmother. I had figured that I would have around two hours remaining. It is important to keep stirring. After twenty minutes I saw that the fragments had begun to pulp and bloat, and I reduced the heat a little, putting a lid on the pot.

Over the next hour, I reviewed my notes and sat in my armchair, practicing knots. There are two in particular that Curtis emphasises, one being an implausible and seemingly pointless variation on the standard double sheet bend that he nonetheless is absolutely insistent about; I found that my hands kept deceiving me with vacant facility into tying the normal sheet bend, and so I kept practising it until I was quite certain of its movements. The second, he explained, should not be tied until the trick is underway, but I could see its movements clearly enough. It was an elegant thing: no arcana here. It didn't look especially dangerous.

Context is everything.

After another hour had passed, I had returned to the kitchen and inspected my word broth. The water ran thick and opaque now, and when I raised a forkful of fragments from it, I saw with satisfaction that they had become blank, flensed of whatever meaning my knife had left there.

I strained the contents of the pot into a bowl and set aside the pulped paper. It would harden and be spooned out into the waste disposal later, if I remembered. I laid a clean dishcloth over the bowl to draw out the worst of the steam. I couldn’t help but remember the first time. The memory caught at my chest like a boathook, and I had to sit down, at once, before I could die. At such times, gentle reader, it can be hard to maintain a sense of humour about one's past.

But it passed, as it always does, and when I returned to myself again, sitting by the empty litter tray among stunned clouds of newspaper, somehow I got up and carried the bowl in with me to sit at the dining table where I had left the rope. I sat back in the hard-backed chair and took a few deep breaths. The force of the memory had cowed me, and for a moment I felt like tipping the bowl out over the carpet, or emptying the thing from the window.

When I felt strong enough, I looked down into it. Whatever had existed of A.L. Curtis' thoughts on the rope trick gazed back up at me, swimming in its brave new ocean. In the words of that famous song, it was now or never.

I lifted the bowl up to my lips and drank it all, in steady patient gulps. When it has been prepared correctly, one doesn't taste the acids. They disappear. What you taste is just unlike anything else. It doesn't taste of paper, or ink, or any of the things you might expect. It's warm, and it's clear - well, fairly clear - but it's also heavy, but not in the way that honey is. It doesn't burn. It pushes its way into the body. It has the forceful weight of history. One might as well imagine what it feels like to swallow a month.

1926. Christ. I'd really done it this time.

And here I was, back in the now, still doing it, really doing it. As I stood and watched chalk lines were stealing out across the surface of the city, gable by gable, eave by eave. The Hythe shone brightly in the middle distance, refusing to belong. I felt unreal.

I zipped my jacket up across my chest and checked my feet. I'd worn the usual dusty trainers out onto the roof, but they had to go. I shoved them off one heel at a time and bent to pull up my stockings. Padded soles and arches. I rubbed a toe gingerly against the roof.

If everything was right, that is, if I had read and understood everything correctly, this should be fairly sensible. Esoteric, certainly, but perfectly straightforward in its own (hopelessly imprecise, perilous and unaccountable) fashion. What I couldn't entirely decide was why I was doing it. I seemed to move without motive.

I took a knife from my pocket and opened the basket. From the top of the coil I cut an arm-length, and then a second. These two I tied into an approximation of a loop - it had to be an approximation, Curtis had been very clear, not a loop itself - using the knot I had been told not to tie.

I closed my knife and studied the thing. It lay on my arm like nothing much in particular. I picked it up in one hand and swung it through the air; a cataclysmic event of staggering import did not happen. Very well.

I proceeded as planned. There was a tautness gathering in my stomach and my pelvis, but I took the severed lengths and tied them to the remainder of the rope. I had to stop myself halfway through, finding the usual knot beneath my fingers again, and undid it slowly, counting my steps. One, two. Three. I gave it a sound yank in both hands and set it down, satisfied, on the edge of the basket.

Curtis had mentioned that from the moment one completed this, it was important to be on one's guard for the unexpected. I did not remember this warning until several moments after I completed the knot, which is why I was not on guard when the end of the rope gave a jerk and shot straight up into the darkness, uncoiling from the basket so quickly that it crackled. Somewhere along its coiled length there must have been a hitch, as with a sudden choke the basket burst, most of it pinwheeling and sailing in splinters over the edge and into the empty road below.

The rushing stopped.

I looked up.

Curtis hadn't said anything about this.

The strange loop was now completely vanished from sight, not even a dot, while the remaining length of the rope described one long straight crawl up into the darkness. The other end trailed by my feet, hanging an inch or so above the roof.

(Once more, I found myself thinking that anything other than hot pink would have been a better choice.)

I looked around me. The city seemed darker now. I had barely heard the basket land, and I crept toward the edge just to see that it actually had, and had not simply acquired the taste for levitation from its contents. A sudden wave of vertigo rushed into me as I took the next step, and I felt an implacable push in the centre of my chest. No. I just couldn't take another step. It was the wrong direction. I could feel my stomach reaching for my mouth. I stepped back.

My head cleared with a few deep breaths, and it was a moment or two before I realised that I was leaning on the rope for support, one hand gripping it quite tightly. I looked down at where it rested, swaying lightly with my grip, and gave it a hard tug. It held.

I have never been scared of heights. When I was a young girl, for instance, I used to love to climb trees. Passionately, that is, and of course I wasn't supposed to. I'd fall out, now and then, and it would hurt - once I broke my thumb - but it was all so terribly worth it for that sensation of hanging in the higher branches with the swarm of life all about me, carried by the air like a spider. You can get a similar feeling in the water, swimming I mean, but it really isn't the same. Water has a certain quality to it, it has something akin to mass, one suspended in water is buoyant. Being in the air is really nothing like it, but most people have never had experience with it. Air will let you fall.

No sunlight where I was going. No swarm of life ecstatic. Or so I thought. I looked up again. It occurred to me then that predictions are fallible.

My jacket has deep pockets, and in one of them I had sealed a bottle of talcum powder and my gloves. I dusted and clapped my hands until they were ready, and strapped on the gloves. I tugged at my socks again and looked up. The boathook caught me again, blunt and deep. What was I doing?

For a certain amount of time I felt this deep, important ache push through my belly. I don't need to say that it felt like the summed total of every mistake, loss, frustration and disappointment that I'd bitten off and swallowed in my ridiculously brief life. I mean, people suffer, don't they? It just isn't news. It's not even especially meaningful. It's hardly, this is what I mean, it's hardly a matter of principle.

Oh, I thought, that, that’s what I’m doing, and reached out to grab hold of the rope. It swung just a little, enough to work with in any case, and I hauled my legs up off the roof and planted my feet against it.

There's nothing like it as a sensation, really. If you ever want to be assured that the material substance of your body is more plastic, heavier and far more separable than you ever supposed it should be, hanging from a rope is it.

I closed my eyes and reached up, inching as my feet struggled to seat themselves. You forget how, at first. This wave of panic settles in as you try to figure out how the hell to do it, choosing which limb to move at a time, which means choosing which limbs are left to hold you up in the air. It's painfully slow, and for a moment you are horribly tempted to look down, but you don't, because you don't want to see that you are all of four feet above the ground.

But this is it, you know. To a certain extent, that's how climbing works. You don't look down. You don't look up either, if you can help it. You merely dangle and climb as best you can, limb by limb, inch by inch if necessary. You understand that I make it sound easier than it is.

I won't try to explain what happened when I caught up with the loop. You'd never believe me, and besides, in the greater scheme of things nothing did happen: "I kept climbing, somehow." Things do drag at you. Even simple homesickness, looking down as one eventually can't help: all those sunlit dreaming streets, for instance, or the way the waters of the earth seem to lie still: it looks so whole, so benevolent, so detailed.

I could let go and give in at any time, should my spirit flag. As I have made my ascent, I have become quite blind, so that now I tell day from night by the warmth of the sun alone; but this much remains clear to me. The flesh can only do what it's told to, after all, and knowing in its chambers what we pretend we don't, it surrenders readily enough to the higher will.

This will be the lone achievement of my skill and knowledge, as a tree is the achievement of a seedling, and though I have long passed the point where I can see the world I leave behind, my memories seem to become clearer with every handhold. The air does not hold me aloft--it never will--but it does soothe. It's a condition to aspire to, which itself is something to do while waiting to die.

So I really do not exaggerate when I say that I can remember precisely how I fell forever through ceilings and rafters suspended in the darkness oceans of time apart; or that dear Marco's Venetian fables remain as vivid to me now as the unfortunate colours of the braid between my fingers; I do not even, as I have said, declaim to secure your attention when I tell you that I can remember with complete clarity how and where I stumbled across the book itself.

The book: I am sorry that I excised the pages, now. I am sorry, for that matter, that I left the kitchen in the state that it was in. When I say I am sorry, though, there is an abstraction at play here: it is not that it pains me to have done and not done these things. I suppose what I am saying is that I see simultaneously how they were necessary, in the immediate sense of the word, and not necessary, in the sense that a sense of perspective is not necessarily the same thing as a sense of scale. All of us go up the rope someday, of that I am certain: we all go climbing up to the moon.

I could have waited; but I was tired of waiting.

Public Writing

A story opens at the nape of Alec’s neck. It winds its way across the skullish hump of his shoulder down into the soft cleft beneath his arm. In the morning light, beside him in the bed, I sometimes study it. I trace the unfamiliar words as they weave themselves between follicles. Commas sprout unsuspecting hairs. I try to make sense of the story as it grows across his body, but the words – some of the letters in fact – are unfamiliar to me.

Some people conceive of themselves as a unitary part of a greater being: Alec is experimenting with public writing. Earlier today, in a second-hand bookshop, he encountered a well-thumbed architectural guide to the smaller churches of Zürich. It was a surprising find. Two aisles away, I was attempting to justify the purchase of a seven-volume edition of Burke’s essays, but I heard his exclamation through the shelves. He had found amid the swart, sanserif text pressed out in two dense columns, large black and white photographs of places he had known. Until that moment, he had not realised he had ever visited Zürich.

Sitting, as he is, in the café with his laptop; Alec has become the thing that disgusts him most. Sitting at one of the tight, red tables, vaulting inwardly out, fingers to the keys he is proclaiming he has some purpose in the world. Some point of being that is not only reasoned, but addressed. By sitting here, Alec is declaring himself. He is an object: a spectacle. Though nobody can read what it is he writes, he feels a certain guilt in this act. Like the words hidden beneath his t-shirt upon his body, he feels the admonishment of eyes both seen and unseen. Mainly they are unseen eyes. For those about him in the coffee shop do not look at Alec. He is just another person at a laptop. Alec is just another one of those guys.

One of those churches – he wishes now that he had bought the guide – one of those churches in the book, he had stumbled upon quite by chance whilst looking for the house where Joyce had lived while writing Ulysses. He remembered that now. There had been a museum in the house. A museum, or a library, and he had not gone in because it had been raining. Or it was closed on Mondays. Something like that.

He had gone inside the church, however. It had been obscured from the street by a high privet hedge, the dark leaves glistened – that was right, it had been raining – and he had entered and sat in one of the rows of pale wooden seats; dining chairs, really. He had sat there for an hour while he made up his mind what to do.

The difficulty, Alec tells me, is that there are not enough places where one can sit. As a rule he has an objection to cafés. He sees the requirement of buying a coffee as a tax upon solitude. Churches are as bad, he says. In this country, churches are mostly closed, or the larger ones request a donation. Out of guilt – or politeness I suggest, though Alec argues that politeness is a symptom of guilt – he estimates that he has spent over £100 this year in visiting the major English cathedrals alone. This is despite not having any firm conviction or interest in faith.

Churches have another disadvantage, Alec says. He has noticed a tendency for the staff in churches to come and speak to him. “Where are you from?” they sometimes ask. “Have you come far?” The subtext is Christ, though they have a guilt – a politeness – about raising that too. Sometimes they tell him about the history of the building. I know all this, Alec thinks. Alec wishes they would leave him alone.

Cafés have the advantage in this. The staff in cafés rarely speak to him. They have little interest in making him feel welcome because, solitary drinker that he is, they are generally anxious for Alec to leave. He takes up too many seats; he claims a table for himself; and he never buys more than one coffee. He cannot afford to. He usually cannot afford the first coffee alone.

There are also libraries. Alec is not sure about libraries. To look at him on paper, he is a man designed for the public library system. He is predestined to grow into the thick, bottle-bottom bifocals of the reader in Periodicals. He should, were the world as he imagined it, be happy amongst all those books. He should fit in with the dispossessed that congregate there. He could grow old with a creased lending card in his wallet and die knowing the furtive pleasure in keeping books overdue from beyond the grave. Only Alec is not sure about libraries. They have the advantage of being free. Their staff is generally unobtrusive. Only libraries suggest a purpose. Libraries are there to be consulted. You go to a library, Alec says, in order to consult books. He has no need for books right now. Books stop Alec from writing. The exposure to books make Alec realise the world of things that he should be writing, the duty to the wider subject, the great expansive fullness of the world; and they make him realise his own diminutive stature: an ant attempting to write the universe. If he writes in libraries, he feels guilty that people will see him doing this. They will see him ignoring the world. His back turned bluntly upon all those Roman histories, snubbing everything else for his own ends.

In libraries he finds himself contriving excuses for his presence. He finds himself constructing alternate narratives for being there. Should anyone ask – which certainly they would never do – he likes to have reserved some alibi for why he is there in the public library. “I am just working on…” he is ready to say.

Alec has never got to grips with his local library. He has never fully worked out where things are, or established where likeminded people – for surely there are others like him – go to sit. He has wandered around reading the bright yellow labels sellotaped to shelves, and he has read them off – local government, business studies, law – and he has known them all to be inapplicable to him. The only place Alec has found to work in the library, the only reasonable place where his presence would not have been too obtrusive, his alibi not seemed too false, has been amid the Marxist criticism, for the desks there are large and the subject is reasonably within his ken. At the library he sits, with three books chosen by weight from the shelves, one of them propped open, passively ignoring the contents; and this, this might seem a suitable place for Alec in the world. It’s not where he is, but this, one might think, would be a habitat he might fit into. Only the section is walled on one side by plate glass, etched with the council’s logo and optimistic tag-line, and Alec has realised he is overlooked there by the people who use the vending machine. Nobody comes in to read Das Kapital, but there is a reasonable expectation that four times in every hour, somebody within the building will want a Twix or Um Bongo.

And so, Alec finds himself here today, sitting in the café at one of the tight red tables. He is here because I am next door having my hair cut. I had suggested that Alec had his hair cut too, but for the last ten years he has taken care of his own hair, keeping it short with electric clippers, unaided by a mirror. I have seen him sometimes in his flat, crouched naked upon the kitchen floor, feeling his way around that unnatural nut like some ancient philosopher scratching for truth out of his skull. He knows every lump upon that thin fleshy surface, the soft brown ponds of moles, the brittle ridges and craters of the bone beneath. He shaves himself hairless with his eyes tightly closed, blotting out the reality of his furtive occupation, blotting out his nakedness, his shame. Alec cannot have his hair cut by other people. He cannot live out the passive conversation that strangers require him to deliver.

I have asked him about this on occasion. He has a preference for machines and for solitude. Yet, though he claims to be unable to survive the hairdresser, every month or so Alec subjects himself to the tattooist’s needle.

“Alec,” I have said, “surely that situation is the same, is more intimate; the penetration of ink beneath your skin invades you more than the scissors’ blade against your hair.”

“It is not the mechanism,” he says, “the tattooist only writes what I tell him to write.”

After he had left the church he had walked through the rain. His guidebook told him that one of few places open in Zürich on a Monday was a museum of printing in the university. He had thought about taking the tram, but resisted. Alec does not like spending money. The museum was situated at the end of a long corridor, and he was not entirely certain that he was supposed to be there. It felt like he was intruding, bursting into an academic department that had somehow found itself listed in a popular guidebook by mistake. There was an exhibition of expressionist lithographs of the 1950s. He took it in and promptly left.

Every month, the story gets longer. Does he know how it will end? As I trace the words wending themselves across the divots of his spine, through the thick rivulets that arch between the ribs across his flanks, I ask him how much more there is to go.

Alec shrugs.

“It is just a story,” he says, “it’s no big deal.”

“What is it about?” I ask him.

He shrugs again.

“It is my story,” he says, “it is mine, and in my native tongue.”

Some words repeat themselves. Some appear to have capitals. I wonder if Alec will one day run out of room.

“No,” he says, “that will never happen.”

By an arrangement of mirrors, the woman is showing me the back of my head. It is not how I had imagined it. I had not realised how my head tapered into my neck. I have quite a thin neck. It seems vulnerable; obscene. I am anxious to pay and leave. Alec is next door, sitting with his laptop and he is experimenting with public writing. He will not be finding it easy.

The Boy Lunt

As a child Cameron Lunt was conspicuously proud of the fact that he could walk quickly; a point which, had it been remembered would have seemed ironic, when aged twenty-two he was knocked to his death by a reversing ice cream van. Nonetheless, the Boy Lunt could walk quickly. Walking quickly was his thing. He would practice at home; an uncompetitive child, he would practice in the sitting room with the curtains drawn. I can walk quickly, thought Lunt, this what I excel at: the pace of my gait. Circuit training around the three-piece, pacesetting by the pirouetting mechanism of the Windsor mantle clock. It became an obsession. This is my greatest endeavour, thought Lunt, this is the thing I can do.

Though it was, of course, not his thing; it was not a thing at all. Nobody in real life actually values that, there’s no need or reason to be able to tread a course around a suburban sitting room at high speeds. Many people would actually consider it a disadvantage in life; a risk; a danger to the Waterford Crystal and Doulton ladies in their perpetual curtseys. “Cameron,” they would have said in later years, “Cameron, what are you doing? Cameron, stop doing that. Just sit down, Cameron. Just sit down.” Cameron Lunt did not have a thing, that was his thing. Walking quickly is not a thing.