I’ve heard it said that the first people of this land sometimes wore about themselves bone relics of their beloved dead. Some might think the idea of wearing human bones uncivilized, and I won’t dispute the charge with them. I’ve seen what people believe civilization looks like... I would that I could take no part in it again, and keep my heart’s native territory girt round by the beautiful barbarism of love.
As I approached his grave the primary urge wasn't a million miles from grave robbing. While we walked you seemed uncomfortable with my obvious desire for this strange reunion of the bones. Dread was indeed mixed in with my wanting too, but I doubt it showed.
“So… am I getting the right end of the stick from your writing that you and great great granddad Cecil never actually… you know, did it? I mean, made love, or whatever sex was called in the olden days?”
The question should have stung like lemon juice in a fresh cut, but for some reason I was taken by a sad, poignant smile. A soft old longing tugged at my belly, an antique ache as old as the hills. It belonged to something bigger than both of us. Its bone-deep bruise was too far below the surface for a sting. “Not in the conventional sense, no,” I replied quietly, my voice almost a whisper, as I watched the lonely path of a gull in the talcum-smelling-blue of the sky.
I sensed when I looked back at you that you felt a cultural gulf between us you couldn’t cross, Carmen… As though I was strange to you because of the year of my birth. And indeed it is still strange to me, the openness with which you ask questions around this topic. But in reality it was something different that lay between us in that conversation. A seer of visions has no mortal age, belongs properly to no era, nor country, for we are but hollow bones with stops upon which the devil plays tunes to himself. Transients pass through, setting up tent cities in the arches between the ribs of people like me. If I seem unfamiliar in some way have no doubt I did so to my contemporaries also.
“How many other ways are there to do it?” You asked, looking down at the map to try to locate the Allport’s gravesite as if the paper itself might solve all love’s mysteries.
I smiled to myself the secretive type belonging to those who have arcane joys in their lives undreamed of by most. There are things that pass between two sorcerers that cannot be spoken. Additionally, when the more immediate method of gratification is suppressed, the energy of the erotic is never fully quelled, it rises like a silent revolution, seeps back up like a blood stain of a murder victim through a carpet. The energy of sex pervades every little curl of hair pressed into our poetry volumes we passed to each other. Out into sound, as I would play while he watched me from behind, the very back of my neck feeling his gaze like a burn.
I am always confusing the emotions with the feeling senses and colours with smells, so perhaps it is my personal peculiarity that eye contact itself was eroticized, conversation conjugal... The colour saturation of every sex-stained thing like this is hyper intensified in my memory, the pitch of reality turned right up. Repression is inhumane, but like all sacrifice it holds a terrific power that crouches waiting in the shadows for when its moment has come at last, ready to burn the world to the ground.
“A few.” I didn’t mean to be smug or enigmatic in this answer, I just didn’t know how else to answer your question. The black shapes of text on page place a membrane of ink between my viscera and your gaze that makes a full explanation more bearable.
I knelt down on the edge of the tomb he shares with his family and lay down above him. How good it felt… there was less of sorrow in the gesture than sensuality. Love tumbled from me in a white water gush, love washing out of me for every tiny thing, every creeping thing that had consumed him in his tomb and whose tiny legs he’d walked with, every bird he’d flown as and the mice he’d skin-rode who had eaten those crawling things that ate him, every graveyard skulking cat who had eaten those rodents... The love that I had secreted inside his skin popped free from the holes between his now exposed bones and gushed in a terror of universal overflow that manifested as peace.
It was only when I let my edges go until I had blurred out into the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, and the grey of the stone and the heavy wet of the grief and the light green-to-gold of the new growth, that I realized I was feeling his presence. Ecstatic tears and a smile of irrepressible beatitude took ownership of me. The world outside went down the drain backwards (like they say it happens here at the bottom of the world where the seasons are reversed and all is doubly inverted by our island of madness and rainbows) and my inner sight came on with a sound like the old school camera flash.
When Bronte had Jane Eyre say ‘reader, I married him’ far more is said of her and her Mr. Rochester than any explicit description of their happiness and its consummation. For this reason part of me wants to say ‘and I saw him’, and leave it at that, poetically understated and breathless. Yet the me who enjoined our dear Madeleine to tell her story until she became as transparent as beach glass knows better. Every word of this telling is punched and kicked out while I scrabble with my enemy upon the edge of the void. My enemy wishes to subdue me and stuff my nose and mouth with seaweed so I may not name names, but this time I will never stop fighting. You might say I'm staging a late come-back.
They tell us all life comes from the ocean and it makes sense. The oceans are the tear ducts of Grandmother Earth. It’s in the same wet place within the human eye socket that holds the salty seed of future life joy. I don’t think I really understood that until I saw him again, after having survived the Riga Mortis of grief, -what Elizabeth Barrett Browning termed ‘the hour of lead’… Just how much joy is possible to a landscape of the heart carved out deep through grief like the land torn up by retreating glaciers.
Arthur was leaning against his mother and father’s headstone casually,
-despite his black three-piece suit, top hat and begloved elegance. He wore a great coat lightly and unselfconsciously, as though he’d known when he put it on how good it looked on him, but since forgotten. As always he owned the look of our period as if it was designed for him. Yet the way he smoked his cigarette had a cocky quality to it that I associated more with the wharf men. He blew his smoke in my direction while maintaining eye contact in a way that among the riff raff might have indicated sexual interest or threat. Under the surface of the perfect gentleman in Arthur there was an animal confidence that lurked, biding its time, feral and sniffing, dirty in all the places hearts were meant to be clean, clean in all the places Victorian hearts were usually dirty, still waiting for its moment to set the ridgeway and the Thames on fire. Still holding all four aces...
Before I could recover from the gut punch of the sight of him he pulled out his fob chain and consulted the pocket watch. “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.” The words were not delivered in the breathless, timorous tones of the rabbit in the story, or the way my father might have said them, but with the tone of the wolf that waits and salivates.
“Arthur,” I think I whispered his name, taking a step or two forward and hesitating. Even though no words clustered I noticed how powerful he’d become. I knew I was in the presence of a strong spirit, a conjurer of note, because all the air was sucked away from my lungs when he entered. The black hole hidden under his buttoned down waistcoat, a force that drew all eyes and wills in his direction, the air that fizzed with electricity around him, as if reality was ready to take a different form at his whim, each told me a story.
“Hello Hen.”
He moved from leaning on his parents to standing before me without having taken a step. I didn’t startle at his speed, but I did grab him the way someone starving might accost victuals. For a few moments, where planetary-sized forces seemed to collide, it felt that I clasped flesh to flesh. He did not ask me why I had disappeared so long ago or where I went. He didn’t ask anything and yet a dozen or so questions howled between us. Instead, with fierce mutual pressure, it seemed we tried to stuff each other back in through the hole we’d left in each other’s hearts.
I wept in his arms and I believe I told him ‘I’m so sorry’ many times over and over again and that he kept saying ‘no’, forbidding me sternly to apologize. ‘You have nothing to apologize for’… I can account more certainly for everything he said next. Because these words were slow, distinct and clearly articulated like a speech that someone has long planned to give and finally got the chance to deliver. He gripped me hard while he spoke lest I get away before he finished.
“Don’t explain! Not yet... I just need you to hear me in this first.” He held me back with his arms to force me to make eye contact. “I loved you all my life, Henry. It was always you. Always. I never felt that way before, or again. I wanted to grow old with you, to cherish and protect and bestow all my worldly goods upon you, to have given you my last name, for God’s own sake… But that wasn’t allowed to us of course… That sort of thing… So I had to put that feeling somewhere. I’ve hidden something away for you. There’s an object that I’ve put my family’s magic into. You will know which one as soon as you recognize what fairytale we’re in. When you find it you will know. Even after all these years, sweetheart…” he whispered with a tenderness that gutted me open like a freshly landed fish. “I still know you better than I know anyone or anything.”
I tried to press my forehead to his but he redirected me. Instead he took off his hat and placed the side of his head against mine until our ears touched.
“Blood of my blood… You awakened me to the darkness within me, and then you left me alone in it…It's not going to be easy to find my way home...”
My heart broke apart for him. Drawing back I opened my waistcoat as if it were ribs and reached inside myself. In my hands I drew out diamonds, crystal bright shattered things. “There are some things we can give each other that are ever renewable, but not this… these are truly something of myself,” I explained as I pressed the light inside my bones into his hands.
Arthur was ever one to return a gift for a gift. As though from his ear into mine the image of a shell within an ear came into my mind and then the image of a turning mill. I knew that I had received the clues to his riddle. But they were more than clues, they were distilled sadness. I could taste in them the complexity of years of quiet dedication.
I bit my lip hard with the knowledge. I was truly human then, not a faerie changeling that my mother had always called me because of my lack of obvious outward emotion. I was human to the core, for I knew utter regret. There was red blood flowing from the places I’d picked out from myself the diamonds to give him. I would turn that blood into a ointment to salve the wounds I’d left in him, that I vowed to myself.
He touched my face. Though his smile was sad and gentle his eyes had a lupine spike under their old warm twinkle. “After you left silence grew inside me like a cancer. What started out as unwillingness to share became inability. All of us tasked with suppressing out deepest truth require our outlets, yours was your opium and your music… mine the act of collection... Objects are silent like I became, you see? A thing encoded for me with intricate layers of meaning and memory… To another it is but a pocket watch or a cigarette case. To me the doorway to another time, another way of being, a flurry of sense memories… If you follow me down the rabbit hole into the worlds within things, down here you can hear my silence roar.”