Adornments of the Storm Page 3

  CHAPEL PAUSED. TOOK another sip of water. Until now his speech had been fluent, eloquent, his tone modulating as he described the past, his repressed and confounding childhood. He had seemed comfortable despite the intensity of his recollections and their impact on him. Now he looked at Trevena, his eyes focused on him, and his face was pale and his voice resumed flat and halting.

  NOW POLYGONS FILL the entire sky.

  Yesterday there was low cloud, and a warm mist that surged across the rooftops, and they were concealed. I knew they were everywhere, packed behind the wood we are being hammered into. They appear and disappear with a pure randomness impossible to forecast. They are not matter.

  They are nothing.

  "WHERE WERE YOU?”

  I WAS IN the park, below the mist. It was as if the air we breathe, the dimension we inhabit, had been pressed down into a low yet broad rhombus of dull light.

  My child played on the swing. He had his back to me and kicked his legs out to make himself go higher. His coat was brown, his hood was up, and as his legs kicked out in front, and his back arched into the ascent, he appeared larval, protean. I wondered, if I took him down from the swing and unzipped his coat, would he emerge with wet wings unfolding like polythene, and look at me with dumb thousand-lensed eyes?

  I watched two boys run across the tarmac. They had been tearing around all the time we had been there, faces red and ferocious. Their fun looked awful. I thought back to my own childhood and the long, timeless days. Their play appears more urgent now, as if imaginary worlds are to be sacked and burned before their vanity depletes them.

  Childhood is no longer quietly left behind, but ravaged and then set ablaze.

  I have always dreamed of these things, black polygons throughout the sky. I always knew they were there. And then: they were there.

  They meant everything, and then they meant nothing. And nothing is now everything. I communicated with them but they did not communicate back. They do not exist, yet they are all that exists. How many are there? How high do they go? Where do they come from?

  Satellites cannot see them. There are no images from space. I see them only when I look up. Telescopes cannot see them. There are no observatories studying these shapes and calculating their extent. They cannot be touched, or detected by anything other than my eyes. They emit nothing.

  I wanted truth.

  But I got Truth.

  "YOU GOT A different truth to the one you would have liked?”

  WE ALL INVENT our own truths. The Truth? The Truth is the end of everything. Once it’s unavoidable how can you go back to anything else? Denial can only take you so far. But you know you’re lying. I knew I was lying to my parents as a child and it was enough to get me through the self-abhorrence, the shame. But it was only repressed. I’ve got no one to lie to, only myself, and there’s no point to that, not now. The dissonance is unbearable. It swills like dark matter alongside every thought, rocking them, shaking them, like some beast crouched over a cot. From waking to trying to sleep, and the awakening in the night.

  "YOU BELIEVE YOU know the Truth?”

  Chapel threw his arms wide. He turned his head and looked out of the window. He laughed without any humour.

  “You don’t see them?”

  “I don’t see them, Andrew,” said Trevena. “But I believe you do.”

  Chapel slumped in the chair. Not with relief, thought Trevena, but with resignation. People want gods, interventions, life on other planets, multi-universes, even panspermia or protein carrying comets. Just something to hang their denial on, even the atheists. They might not want a god, but they still want something. But Chapel had experienced a revelation that had removed all possibility of meaning. Trevena knew different, but how to break down this man’s complex and obstinate delusion? With time, he thought, and patience.

  “What happened this morning?”

  Chapel lifted his chin and looked at Trevena. He went on.

  AS THE MIST receded, a million black polygons appeared. It was still humid.

  My head was aching and I could feel the tension in the air. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck were alert to the pressure.

  In the grass at the side of the playground the earth was granulated and fine. I saw heaps pushed up all along the edge, and things beginning to emerge.

  I pushed the toe of my boot into a narrow heap of earth. It disgusted me, this frothing from below, this unseemly lathering of the dirt from which hideous, blind and groping fecundity was breaking out. I stamped them flat—fat, egg-laden things, encasing them in pats of soil, wriggling and straining.

  I heard my child call out in surprise. He had stumbled and fallen dismounting from the swing. I watched the black lozenge of the seat coil and twist on its chains above his head. He had hurt his leg and grazed his face.

  The air around us was full of ants. They pattered and ticked against the fabric of my coat.

  My child was crying. There were ants fucking in his hair.

  I walked away.

  "AND THEY FOUND you half a mile away,” Trevena said. “Trying to hang yourself in the woods.”

  Chapel sighed, put the fingers of his right hand to his throat.

  “Do you still want to die?” Trevena asked.

  Chapel looked out of the window. “More than anything,” he said.

  “I GOOGLED HIM,” said Peter Foreman.

  “Good thinking,” said Trevena. “I hope you did it on your phone.”

  Peter looked up from his desk, his eyes narrowed with contempt behind his glasses. “What do you think, Phil? There’s eyes everywhere now. There’re little fuckers in Human Resources going through our search histories just trying to catch us out. Won’t risk it.” He sneered, his teeth showing in a derisive gleam behind his beard.

  “Anyway, what do you think?” said Trevena. “From a Social Worker’s perspective, of course.”

  “Bit of a twat,” said Peter.

  “Okay,” said Trevena. “What else?”

  “Appears to be reclusive. Can’t tell whether he’s minted or not but he must be worth a bit. He’s won awards for his sculptures. Studied at London College of Art in the ‘eighties. Pretentious associates. He’s not really that well known outside of certain circles. No history of doing anything particularly mad, other than creating bad art. Genuine psychosis, d’you think?”

  “I don’t know. There was something not quite right. He mentioned lying and the mechanisms of denial. That’s insightful. His history seemed a bit scripted, too, rehearsed. There’s definitely personality stuff going on, and over-valued ideas. But the psychotic stuff? Still not sure. If it is though, it’s full-blown.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a look at him myself,” said Peter.

  Trevena smiled and put a hand on Peter’s shoulder.

  “I would, Peter.”

  OVER HIS LUNCH in the hospital canteen, Trevena had another look at Andrew Chapel’s Wikipedia page on his phone. His finger scrolled the screen through early life, career, work, exhibitions, awards, references and links, although the links were only to a few short interviews he had done over the years. Chapel didn’t appear to have a website, which Trevena thought unusual but not particularly remarkable. Not everyone felt the need to parade themselves throughout the ether. There were a couple of photos beneath the exhibitions heading showing an installation he had won an award for at the Tate Modern seven years ago. It was called, Trevena was unsurprised to observe, Polygon Storm. Large sharp-edged blocks of gleaming black stone (Trevena assumed it was stone—Chapel’s medium of choice) braced against the vaulted ceiling of a gallery with an intricate framework of scaffolding. The whole effect was oppressive and perilous. According to a description beneath the photograph, people were encouraged to enter the room and walk through it resisting the urge to look up. Art without spectator. One was encouraged to experience the installation through repressed senses, knowing it was there but not acknowledging it. No wonder it won an award, thought Trevena.


  Trevena put the phone flat on the table and ruminatively sipped a spoonful of tomato soup. Something was bothering him.

  He put the spoon down and picked up his phone again. He scrolled through the Wikipedia page again, this time more slowly. He sat back and looked out across the canteen, thinking. Perhaps it wasn’t that important.

  There was no mention of Chapel’s son anywhere on the page.

  Part Two

  Rainscissor and Morgoder’s Autoscopic Calavalcade

  1985

  MR CHARD WAS in his shoemender’s hut. He had his charges, small, broken men in gray overalls that he bullied and tortured, as was his habit. The men had bowed backs and shuffled along the narrow space of the workshop wearing dirty clothes beneath their overalls that were often many sizes too small because when they awoke on their cold, vaulted wards, they would put on each other’s clothes, whatever first came to hand.

  Old Lenny explored the inside of an ancient boot with long, white fingers. He located bare nail heads and a thin ruck of stinking insole. Lenny’s file, held in a thick blue NHS cardboard binder at the back of a cupboard in the Charge Nurse’s office on Kestrel ward, labelled him an imbecile. He turned to Mr Chard, who sat on a wooden stool at the bench on which they worked. He grinned; but then Lenny always grinned, and Mr Chard stared at him through his wire-framed spectacles with pale and emotionless eyes. He continued to stir his boiling hot tea, the spoon rattling against the thick municipal china, which was decades old, stained and chipped—not unlike Mr Chard’s teeth, which were bared within a lipless sneer, as if the man himself was a product of the system he characterized, an organic extrusion formed from the very clay upon which the asylum stood.

  Lenny held out the boot and nodded his small hairless head. His eyes, like the eyelets in the boots he repaired and laced, were dull and black; he was given draughts of psychotropic medication, brown as swill, three times a day in crude measures. Mr Chard reached out and encircled Lenny’s wrist with his fingers and pulled him a step closer. Lenny grinned. Mr Chard took the spoon from his steaming tea and pressed it hard against the sagging web of flesh between Lenny’s thumb and forefinger, and held it there. Lenny twitched and his hips cocked backwards but he didn’t pull away. He grinned. If he didn’t grin, or should he pull away, he knew what would be next. Mr Chard had pockets in his long white coat that were full of bradawls, and it wasn’t just shoe leather he liked to gouge strips from.

  LATER, WITH THE day’s work behind him again, another day like all the others spent against the bench in that timeless place that smelt of feet and old leather, supervising the menial work of idiots, Mr Chard sat at the bar in the staff social club and drank his bottle of Mann’s brown ale from his half-pint pewter tankard. He smoked cigarettes, knocking the ash off in quick, impatient taps after each pull, before it could build up and hang from the end like a wilting bore of his sick and dirty right lung.

  He still wore his white coat, having come to the single-storey, one-room prefabricated building immediately after work. Some of the porters were still rumbling about on their electric floats, carrying mattresses and stacks of timber from the collapsed ward, delivering sheets and stacks of towels, office equipment and files. None of them waved or acknowledged Mr Chard as he crossed the roads that wound through the grounds and struck out across the football field towards the club. Mr Chard didn’t care; they were all fools.

  The air had been cold and he had felt it like a charge in his chest. It had been dark, and the crescent moon was low. Mr Chard had regarded it with enmity, thinking it looked like something sent by God to hook him and reel him away.

  Mr Chard lit another cigarette. The stool next to him was pulled out and a man sat down.

  “Evening, Chardy,” the man said.

  “Good evening, Griff,” Mr Chard said without looking up.

  “Pint, Malcolm, please,” Griff said to the barman.

  Malcolm poured Griff a pint of subsidised lager from one of only two pumps fixed to the bar. He coughed, a damp, vicious rattle, and he expelled something from his mouth that stippled the frothing muffin-like head on Griff’s pint. He glanced up but Griff was talking to Mr Chard.

  Griff was the head porter and his long face seemed, to Mr Chard, to lengthen further with each year of service the man put in. It nodded towards Mr Chard from the neck of the porter’s blue overall like something gouged out from a huge, elongated bean.

  Mr Chard sipped his ale and stared at the back of the bar as Griff spoke.

  “Busy day tomorrow, Chardy. Don’t know why they bother year in year out. As if the boys don’t have enough to do without working a fucking Saturday for that crap.”

  The overtime Griff was referring to was preparation for Fun Day, a desultory fete the staff were obliged to put on twice a year, in summer and before Christmas, for the patients and their families. Families never came, and the patients were corralled around the green at the front of the hospital by therapists and nurses for a couple of hours. The cricket pavilion was full of junk for the stalls: stocks and boxes of diseased sponges to be thrown by weak arms in the direction of a volunteer target, usually a student nurse still dedicated enough to get involved, a test-your-strength machine made from old boxes and a cricket ball, folding tables for the tombola and bric-a-brac, reams of tangled and antique fairy lights that would be looped around the green like a jolly sparking, sputtering electric fence, and a stack of other heartbreaking tat that had to be transported, assembled, disassembled and transported back within the six hour window allotted for it by the nursing officers.

  Mr Chard didn’t care. He would spend Saturday lying in his bed in his room in the staff accommodation watching Grandstand as he always did, filling the ashtray on his bedside table with dog-ends until it was time to go to the club and drink. Shoemenders had nothing to offer Fun Day and he didn’t need the overtime.

  Griff drained his pint and asked for another. Malcolm poured the lager into Griff’s dirty glass. He looked up as the door opened and a couple of student nurses came in. They were pink-faced from the cold and laughing. Thick Steve, one of Griff’s boys, followed them in and made for the bar.

  “Pay day,” he announced. He had a big white face capped with a thinning mat of greasy blond hair. Mr Chard wanted to hurt him.

  Griff had almost necked his second pint, and tipped the glass towards Thick Steve, his eyebrows raised.

  “Paid Friday,” Steve muttered. “Skint Saturday.” He ordered two lagers, which Malcolm duly provided, vectoring a generous film of phlegm onto both sloshing inch-deep heads.

  “Cover your mouf, you dirty old cunt,” Steve said as Malcolm set the glasses before them on the bar.

  “Drink somewhere else then, you daft flid,” Malcolm replied.

  “Gonna,” Steve said. He swallowed his pint in a single open-throated gulp and smacked his lips. “Goin’ into town. On the piss.”

  “Another one?” asked Malcolm.

  “Go on then.”

  Mr Chard stopped listening. He was watching the two student nurses from the corner of his eye. A pretty girl with short dark hair and a tall fair-haired boy, both aged about nineteen. Mr Chard had seen them about, on their placements, looking keen and happy. Here they were, eking out their paltry grants. Well, the boy would be; the girl probably wouldn’t pay for anything. She’d be repaying him later the way girls do, with an obliging, tight little quimful.

  Mr Chard drank his ale and thought about the last time he had fucked anything. Mr Dugdale, the night nurse on Pegasus ward, used to be able to provide female patients for little get-togethers but he had retired two years ago and since then Mr Chard’s satiation had been thwarted. He pictured the girl, pictured thrusting into her hairy hole, her face pressed into a plastic pillow, his knees chiming off the metal bed frame like bony clappers against a thin iron bell, trousers round his ankles and white coat open and flapping like a shroud. Dugdale had given her a bath and she smelt of laundry and corridors. Her anus was still greasy with whatever he had sc
rubbed her with. She might have been pretty if her face hadn’t been slackened by brainlessness and he was glad he didn’t have to look at it, with its cracked lips and walleye.

  Mr Chard turned and glanced at the couple. They were sitting at a small round table, chatting away. The girl kept touching the boy’s hand. Had they been together yet, he wondered? Was tonight the night? A Friday two weeks before Christmas? Money in the pocket? That sweet relaxation of early evening alcohol in a warm place and a hot promise for later? Mr Chard turned back to the bar and ordered another drink, using the bottle opener on his heavy key ring to prise off the cap before pouring it into his tilted tankard.

  He was aware of movement behind him as someone walked over to Griff and punched him in the face.

  Mr Chard swung around on his stool to watch. The girl squealed and the boy rose from his seat to stand in front of her.

  “Don’t, Phil,” Mr Chard heard her say.

  Mr Chard looked down. Griff was on the floor. His eyes were closed but his fists were raised in a defensive and instinctive catalepsy. The man who had clumped him stepped in and shoed Griff in the exposed throat. The girl squealed again and the boy moved towards the ruck.

  The assailant was a big man, wadded into a tight leather jacket with a suede collar. His face was dark and broad and his whole head fluttered with fury like interference on a screen breaking up the picture his features would normally make; he was so livid he had lost his cerebral hold.

  Griff was stirring. He tired to sit up. His jaw was dislocated and it hung, revealing what remained of his bottom set of teeth, like that of a ruminating horse.