Adornments of the Storm Read online

  Shaking with fury, the emotional pitch of the dream degrading into nightmare, Daniel reached down to the forest floor and took up a branch that had broken from the trunk of one of the elms. It was mossy and felt cool and damp. Daniel swung the branch at the nearest crop of cans. He beat at them, a man loose amongst an array of terrible, industrial piñatas, the clangs and waterlogged chimes echoing around the forest. They clattered against each other, a dull, dismaying campanology, spilling gouts of infested water across the forest floor. Daniel strode amongst the trees and smashed the cans from the branches and trod them flat. The mulch beneath his feet wormed with black, dying germs.

  “Wake up, Daniel,” said Dr Natus.

  Daniel opened his eyes.

  “I was dreaming,” he said again.

  Dr Natus slid from Daniel’s chest and onto the floor. He stood at the side of Daniel’s bed. He was the size of a doll. Daniel had once held him cradled in the palms of his hands. Dr Natus walked across to the bedroom door. Daniel watched. He had never seen Dr Natus walk before. He took tiny, unsteady steps, like hops from one foot to another, his little frail back bent beneath the disproportionate head, spine like a stack of coins defined against the fabric of a silk pocket, arms limp and useless as a frog’s.

  Daniel got out of bed and followed Dr Natus from the bedroom. He took a dressing gown from a hook on the back of the door and slipped it on over his pyjamas. Dr Natus stood on the small landing at the top of the stairs.

  “Help me,” he said.

  Daniel picked him up and carried him downstairs to the front door of Elizabeth’s house. Daniel thought of the last time he had held Dr Natus, lifting him from the broken shards of a jar on a street in a dream-place some seven years ago, holding him and weeping.

  “Why are you back?” Daniel asked.

  Dr Natus pointed to the front door. Daniel held him in the crook of his left arm and reached out to open it. He noticed that the door was different. The chintzy voiles that framed the glass above the letterbox were gone. The door was bigger than he remembered, and the paint was dirty and flaking and discoloured by rainwater. He knew this door well.

  He turned the handle, an old steel lever, and the door opened. Daniel stood at the foot of a steep flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs. He could smell dust. The walls were scraped and scuffed, narrow and rising to a high sloping ceiling illuminated by a single low-wattage bulb that hung from a dusty cord.

  There was an empty matwell full of aged and yellowing circulars and junk mail. Untidy piles of unread free local newspapers were stacked against the first stair riser.

  Daniel stepped over the junk and started up the stairs. He reached the landing and stood facing another door. This one was open. He put Dr Natus down between his feet and stood. He experienced a moment of anxiety and felt light-headed. He blinked and took a deep breath, and the feeling passed.

  He pushed open the door and followed Dr Natus inside. He reached for the light switch but nothing happened when he flicked it on. Daniel stood at the threshold and waited for his eyes to accustom to the gloom.

  He watched the indistinct figure of Dr Natus shuffling across the linoleum floor of the bare living room. Dr Natus swivelled his heavy head and beckoned with a limp flick of his wrist for Daniel to follow him.

  Daniel stepped across the threshold of the flat he had lived in during his most desolate days, nearly a decade ago. Here he had spun his delusions, a frightened and lost man, trying to find his purpose again in fantasy and terrible dreams. Here he had brought Dr Natus to life, in a Kilner jar at the back of a cupboard in a room at the top of this building. Dr Natus; totem, guide, phantasm. Floating in a preservative of sloe gin and purple sediment.

  Daniel felt himself begin to tremble. He closed his eyes for a moment and willed himself to settle. The smell of the place, its age and unlit, sealed darkness, brought with it memories of the despair he had felt living here, and it shook him that they could arise so quickly, with such harsh and harrowing novelty.

  He opened his eyes and bared his teeth at the room. He had been at his lowest here, trapped and treated with a barbarism that denied him his true calling and subdued his abilities to nothing more than a dull memory. Here he had been able to do nothing more than force everything he had been, was capable of, into bringing this strange, pale, dead creature into a jar at the back of a closet and projecting his true self into it, a symbol of furious preservation. And it was here he had eventually decided to end it all.

  Dr Natus had crossed the room and stood at the entrance to a small space at the back of the flat. Two steps led up into Daniel’s old bedroom, an eight-foot-square box beneath the sloping eaves at the top of the building. Daniel stepped into the room.

  The room was uncarpeted and Daniel could feel the gaps between the narrow wooden planks plucking at the soles of his bare feet. It was empty but for an old wooden wardrobe against the back wall. The wardrobe leaned to the left, awry on perishing joints. The doors were held closed by a piece of string tied through the handles but they were also askew on their hinges allowing a narrow tapering gap between them.

  Daniel could see fire flickering through the gap. It throbbed and fluttered, orange-yellow, filling the interior of the wardrobe. There was no smoke, no sound. He walked towards the silent blaze and reached out a hand. His fingers flinched away from the handles as he touched them, expecting them to burn, but they were cold and tacky with the mildew that coated them. The string snapped like hay when he pulled the door open.

  He stumbled backwards, away from the thing inside that burned.

  Daniel looked down at the jar that was full of fire. It was a Kilner jar but bigger than any he had seen. And what it held, what burned unendingly inside it without heat and without being consumed, had not been put there by Daniel. He went down on one knee and watched the fire rage inside the glass.

  The head was blackened, a charred skull papered with crisps of skin and running with fat. The features had been burned away, leaving a hole where the nose and mouth had been and from within which flames pulsed and flickered. The tongue was gone, and the throat. The teeth were charcoal nubs. But the eyes were open, and they were a clear, demented blue.

  And as Daniel sat heavily on the floorboards, his legs giving way, the rest of its eyes opened, too.

  DANIEL JERKED AWAKE with a shout. He sat up, staring around the bedroom, his heart pounding.

  Elizabeth touched his arm. Daniel turned to look at her, his eyes wide. She patted the bed between them. He sank down onto the mattress and lay next to her as she stroked his arm. He was breathing as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs.

  “You were dreaming,” she said.

  Daniel stared at the ceiling.

  “That wasn’t a dream,” he said.

  "TELL ME YOUR history,” said Trevena.

  Chapel sat forward in his chair. His posture was attentive but his intelligent eyes were unfocused, looking inward to the past. His fingers were loosely clasped between his knees. “It’s fragmented,” he said. “I will try.”

  Trevena listened to Chapel’s story.

  I WAS BORN in the ’sixties, but I was raised in the ’fifties.

  By which I mean the attitudes and sensibilities of my parents, which had been formed by poverty, war and few expectations beyond their historical working-class roots, were embodied throughout our household and kept in rigid opposition to the chances and opportunities my decade was providing. The ’sixties were being gradually shaded in pastels, a deliberate attempt to drive out the deprivations and armament-gray of the first half of the century by a generation my parents might have felt a part of but didn’t. For them the world was changing too fast. They were disoriented by it, and deeply threatened.

  My mother went to the shops along the high street every day and bought just enough to make an evening meal. There were no impulse buys. I went with her. I liked the bustle of the supermarket with its tills clacking like old typewriters. Mum shopped like we were still on rations. I underst
ood this. The war hadn’t been over long enough. We were on rations. I have always been on rations. Once a week on payday, dad would come home from the factory with a paper bag of sweets. They were what I thought of as adult sweets: Toblerone, Fry’s chocolate, Revels, Ripple, a Walnut Whip. I wasn’t allowed any of these. It was a time when even spontaneity was planned; a treat meant something. It was an event.

  There was a cheap shop run by a spiv called Dave. He had a large, longhaired Alsatian called Flash. Dave flirted with the women and seemed very fashionable. He was probably only in his twenties but those ages and beyond were, to me, staring up, staring around, mythical. There were men who worked in shops along the high street with their wives. They had been there forever, starting their businesses in a post-war time before my birth. It was a time when workingmen could see a future unchanging, and drew their modest plans accordingly. One of these, a man called Eric, died one day of a heart attack. He was of the stocky build and age where men drop prematurely dead. He was full of good humour and worked in the fruit and vegetable shop at the top of our road. I liked him. Mum told me he had died but there was to be no discussion. I was just aware that something I had assumed was fixed in the world, that had perhaps always been there, had gone, a nail head banged too far into the wood. Eric had been banged too far into the wood. In my young head a brain was developing, a personality shaping out of the events of the life I witnessed and perceived and their action on the temperament I was born with. A forming of neural pathways as inimitable as the trajectories of asteroids colliding through the spiral of a galaxy.

  I know now that there is no reason to be sad about anything. Happiness, too, is a thin gas, a puff of vapour between axons, a neurotransmitter’s peculiar waste.

  There can be no extremes now, just reactions to reactions.

  Pressures remain, and the tension that arises. But when they are no more than the trembling of moving air against the hairs on your arms, or the grit in your eye, or the sudden blood that sheets across your brain bringing with it the end of you, or the partial erasure, then what of them?

  "TELL ME,” SAID Trevena.

  Chapel sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He reached for a glass of water and took a sip.

  OUR HOUSE HAD been built in the ’thirties. A mid-terrace house in a side road off the high street. The interior of our house was as it had always been. Windows were single-glazed in aluminium frames; they wept with condensation and made puddles on the sills. The gas-fire had a tiny tiled hearth. The tiles were pinkish like a feverish cuticle. Thin carpets with newspaper underlay, and paraffin heaters to carry from room to room. A picture above the fire, the kind that was framed but without glass. It was of a woodland with a path and beyond a field and a distant church spire. It was a pleasant picture. I would sit on the worn red sofa opposite, with the gas fire fluttering and the early dark of four o’clock outside, and walk that path away from winter.

  Our TV was black and white, and rented. The world it showed was moving on. There was colour out there, thwarted deliberately by monochrome, and change. Sudden, ill-conceived change it seemed. I think my parents were actually soothed by the introduction of the three-day week and power cuts. It put them in mind of the war, and happier times. Their youth was gone and mine was beginning and they wanted for me the life they had had. When the lights went out and the candles came out from under the sink, the atmosphere in the house was one of stoic good cheer. I think they dreamed of the sound of bombs dropping. They were happiest in the gloom.

  I played outside in all weather. I played alone for much of the time; the population of children my age was small, a sequestered demographic. They played indoors, or with siblings. I was an only child. I roamed the alleyways and allotments, tips and back roads on foot or on an old bike I had made with my dad from parts donated by the men he worked with. For months I waited for a Raleigh racing frame that was promised but never delivered. There was a smell of cinders and oil on me. The turn-ups on my jeans were friable with streaks of black grease from the chain of my bike.

  I watched the autumn spiders grow fat in their webs in the blackberry bushes that lined the alleys. I scooped crane flies from the air, hating their ineptitude, their indecent size, and threw them onto the webs where they stuck and flailed, and watched them succumb like balsa in the jaws of the spiders.

  In winter I played, lost in mist and hoar frost, the trees silvery white, disappearing into the vapour like cables tethering something above, vast and unknowable. Sounds were muffled, blunted; even time seemed muffled by the mist, stretching, diminishing, stretching and diminishing. I had been out for hours. I had been out for days.

  At night I dreamed of polygons in the sky.

  Black polygons tethered one to another, all around the world.

  ONE SUMMER I spent some time playing with a girl called Louise. Her mother and mine had become friends and so therefore it had been expected that we should, too. She was quiet, gentle, almost spectral, with a pretty oval face and very blonde hair cut short and boyish. I remember nothing else about her. Her personality, her voice, her laugh are gone from my memory. I can just see her face, and her expression when I hit her.

  Louise was an only child too, and perhaps like me, had lacked the formative stimulus of fighting and competing for love, belongings, attention, or whatever it is that toughens us up and prepares us for life. I didn’t fight for things. What I had, I had. My parents didn’t argue in front of me, or raise their voices. I didn’t learn the language of confrontation from them and despite applying certain strategies later on in life I’ve never felt comfortable raising my voice.

  I think her vulnerability enraged me. Her soft deference generated aversion and untapped a well of spite I didn’t know I harboured. When we were alone, playing together in the gardens of our mothers’ houses, I thrilled to touch her, pinch her, hold her limbs too tightly.

  One day, beneath the apple tree at the bottom of my garden, I punched her in the stomach.

  Her shock and surprise registered on her face before the pain did. And then her pretty face crumpled and she hobbled away from me, and she was made even more insubstantial by the watery dapples of sunlight that passed over her head and shoulders through the apple tree leaves.

  Her mother was of course furious and took Louise away, her face tight-lipped and white. Nothing was said, no voices raised, no cries for retribution. I cried then, but only for myself, and the sudden astonishment that the world sees what you do and when the screen rolls back all that was hidden is projected onto it. The effect on all the other players. The unexpected and abrupt change to their roles.

  My father was told on his return from work and I stood before him as he paced the floor. He was ashamed, humiliated by my behaviour. As punishment he took one of my toys, a wooden model aeroplane I loved, and tore the wings from it in front of me. By then I was wailing and my mother held me. She held me with love, I believe, but still she held me to the kiln of my father’s rage. I watched him snap the wings off the plane and I thought of the crane flies thrashing in the spiders’ webs.

  There was a difference to the way my parents watched me after the incident with Louise. I imagine they forgave me. I imagine also that the protective process of denial played a large part in their forgiveness. I had wailed my innocence despite knowing I was lying; I had said we were playing and I had hit her by accident. I had wanted to believe it myself. The enormity of it went way beyond the act itself, I perceived. And even then I knew I must shore up the terrible fissure I had clubbed through the gauzy fabric of my world, through which it seemed a nail head could be hammered and disappear, even if it was with lies.

  CHAPEL STOPPED TALKING. He glanced out of the window, his eyes flicking upwards, searching the clouds.

  “I’ve always been sensitive to changes in the air,” he said. “To what drives us, affects our behaviours. I think it was oppressive that afternoon, when I hit Louise. Humid.”

  “What else do you remember about growing up?”r />
  I ALWAYS KNEW when the flying ants were ready to swarm.

  I would feel the readiness in the air, the combination of humidity and pressure that heralded their flight. It was primal, pure physics, a force that I felt in my lungs, and against my skin, which brought me out of the house as it brought them out of their nests.

  They had nests made in the soft earth at the sides of lawns and around the edges of drains. The earth looked sandy, granulated, and fine. And in the tension of the evening, the air thickening with pheromones and apprehension, the queens would emerge, dragging their larval bodies and their transitory, tear-drop wings, and rise up on the slow, oppressive currents of air.

  And they were pursued by the males, which came in greater profusion, specks of panic in the air, unaccomplished flyers too, but better proportioned, diminutive in comparison, their wings minuscule, a donning of genetic information to enable dispersion and a one-time act of insemination.

  Once they have mated, the sexual organs of the male explode and they crawl off to die. I wonder, as our population increases, will this process evolve in us, too? Will the junk in our DNA tumble over like dice and provide the new information necessary for this kind of change? Or perhaps women will develop teeth sharp enough, and the poison sufficient in glands in the roofs of their mouths, to eat us after we fuck. Some may say this is already happening.

  Will we be glad to go? With our seed implanted at long last, blown in a brutal spray against the necks of their wombs? No longer a tiny death, but an actual death. I could go on with this, but there really is no point. Speculation will ultimately lead to overstatement, and there is little point to absurdity now because the graveyard we whistled past once is now gaping wide, and there is nothing to pry out the nail head, not even a little, or even dignify it with a decorative brass cap.