The Grotesque (21 page)

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I presume it was the sight of Phlegmosaurus overgrown with fungus that provoked the dream I had that night, in which I discovered to my horror that my wheelchair was an excrescence of the living boards of Crook, and that I was its sentient blossom, that I was growing into my wheelchair, merging with it and in the process turning into a sort of giant plant. Hindered though I was from investigating my own extremities I knew somehow that green, leafy extrusions were sprouting from my back and my arse and my arms and legs and feet, and these extrusions, these sprouts and tendrils, had fused with the wood and the basketwork of the wheelchair, and had begun to crawl across the floorboards and clutch at table legs and doorknobs and electrical wires, and I knew they would in time colonize the entire structure, and bring it down; I would then merge organically with Crook and we would rot together on that high hill overlooking the valley of the Fling. God alone knows what monstrosity would sprout from our composting remains.

B
reakdown and decay were much on my mind, during those rainy days of late April. It occurs to me, in retrospect, that perhaps I was merely finding echoes in the outside world for that which I intuitively understood to be happening within my own body. Perhaps there’s a limit, a threshold, to what a man can take when his relation to the world is one of pure passivity. Perhaps the world begins slowly to overwhelm him, if he is without the power to react to it. Is this feasible? I’ve told you about Harriet’s assault, her insistence on my inability to think, and how it weakened me. Inasmuch as George, and Cleo, and Doris, and Phlegmosaurus were all dear to me, their respective breakdowns also weakened me, for I was acutely conscious of my inability to intervene in any way— watching things fall apart takes its toll, I discovered; one tends to fall apart oneself. When, a few days later, George’s trial began, I was not even equipped to provide him, at a distance, with the spiritual support he so desperately needed. I seemed able to muster only a sort of helpless, hopeless resignation as I saw how things would go with him. (Even in the kitchen of Crook the case was discussed, and in this way I was able to keep abreast of developments.) I did at least retain my imaginative faculties, and attempted to generate some idea of what the poor man was going through; whether it did him, or me, any good that I did this, I very much doubt.

Yes, it was of George that I was mostly thinking, as we emerged from that dismal rainy period and into springtime proper. I was imprisoned myself, locked away in a cage of bones, and so my sympathy for George in his prison of bricks and steel was rendered all the more poignant. That silent good man had been a sort of right arm to me ever since our first encounter in a sweltering and fetid little fly-infested, tin-roofed bar on the east coast of Africa, and for this reason I was now, despite my catalepsy, profoundly implicated in whatever fate should befall him.

I saw him in the dock. He stood between a pair of grim-faced, black-clad prison warders, meshing his eyebrows in fierce concentration as he gathered his depleted moral resources for the coming ordeal. Below him, in the well of the court, eminent counsel in tight-curled wigs of an unnatural whiteness murmured one to another, while over to his left was the witness stand, and beyond it the jury. Directly opposite him, and similarly elevated, sat the judge, Mr. Justice Congreve, an old man, and in my mind’s eye I saw him survey his courtroom from bleary, tired eyes, as his bony fingers clutched the gavel then thumped it three times for order. When his moment came George stepped up to the rail of the dock and barked out in a deep, gruff, defiant voice: “Not guilty.” He did not make a good impression at all. Mr. Justice Congreve had seen enough men in the dock to know at a glance that this one was going to swing.

Why do I say that? Why, even then, was I so certain that George was doomed? Perhaps because I was doomed myself, and could not help yoking his fate to mine. Bear with me, please, but those occasions when I was able to observe the events occurring around me with any vestige of objectivity were growing increasingly rare. In fact, I began to find that the only events that I could record with any real precision were not those that happened outside myself but, rather, the operations that my own mind performed upon the fragmentary stimuli that now constituted reality for me. And one of the most pernicious of these operations was the tendency to, as it were, cast nets of my own thought outward onto those close to me, and see them not as separate and distinct from myself but rather as extensions or manifestations of elements of my own mind. George, in other words, was becoming a bit of me, inasmuch as I was now able only to imagine his experience, and had only the most fragmentary means of testing my projections against reality. The same was true of Cleo and Doris, to a lesser extent. Oddly enough, the only ones I could see at all clearly were Harriet and Fledge.

Forgive me if I’m being tendentious. I do feel, though, that in the interests of candor I should warn you of the distortions to which the passive and isolated mind is prone; you will perhaps take this into account, should I slip unwittingly into anomalous or contradictory positions. George was in the witness box—and this I am not inventing, but paraphrasing from the Daily Express—standing stiff as a ramrod, his hands gripping the rail so fiercely that the knuckles whitened to livid bony knobs. He had been called as first witness for the defense; Sir Fleckley Tome, prevented by the accused man from making a plea of insanity, was forced to argue that all the evidence was circumstantial. The entire courtroom listened attentively as he gently and carefully drew out George’s version of what happened out on the Ceck Marsh that night, and so mellifluous, so utterly reasonable was the flow of the discourse Sir Fleckley produced that one could begin to feel the jury succumb, and this I imagine is an exhilarating feeling for a trial lawyer, though Sir Fleckley was, of course, far too experienced to express pleasure in his own rhetoric. So it was, then, that George, in the collective gaze of that packed courtroom, was gradually transformed from a monster in human form to a simple, decent man of the soil, a man who’d made a foolish blunder in failing to report the finding of Sidney’s body—but a foolish blunder, Sir Fleckley implied, was by no means the same thing as capital murder. George Lecky was a foolish man, a wrong-headed man, but he was not a killer. And then he sat down.

As I say, I’m translating this from that appalling species of “prose” that organs like the Daily Express perpetrate upon their gullible and vulgar public. In any event, the apprehension I mentioned earlier (whatever its origins) that George was bound to swing, was to some extent dissipated by the account Cleo read me of that first morning’s session. The afternoon, however, utterly dashed those hopes. For counsel for the prosecution, an energetic barrister called Humphrey Stoker cross-examined George so vigorously that he totally destroyed any faint aureole of innocence that might have begun to shimmer about him. Why, he wanted to know, had George failed to report finding a body out on the marsh? With withering scorn he lacerated George’s somewhat inarticulate explanation, held it up to ridicule, implied that George was a liar, and then set about exploiting the pig-related aspect of the affair; and soon poor George was bathed once more in a lurid and terrible glow. Time and again a thrill of horror rippled around the courtroom as Mr. Stoker enlarged upon the events of that night—several women turned pale and had to leave the courtroom—and though Sir Fleckley repeatedly rose to his feet with objections to his learned friend’s questions, Mr. Justice Congreve consistently overruled him.

George grew increasingly tense, and his warders sensed it. “Take it easy, George,” they murmured, but this was not a situation that George could take easily, not at all.

“I suggest to you,” cried Mr. Stoker, who had worked himself into a fine lather of indignation, “that from some primitive motive hard for civilized men and women to understand, you plotted the killing of an innocent young man, and then you carried out your inhuman plan, and then you cold-bloodedly disposed of his body in the manner you yourself have described!”

“It’s not true, damn you!” shouted George, incapable of further restraint. He leaned over the rail, banging his fist on the paneling of the box. “I didn’t kill him, I tell you!”

Down came Mr. Justice Congreve’s gavel. “Order!” cried the old man as a hubbub of excited chatter broke from the public gallery and drowned out George’s shouts. “Order!” And then, at a nod from on high, the two warders clamped George’s arms to his side and hauled him, still shouting, out of the courtroom and down to a cell below. Mr. Stoker, who had of course set out to provoke just such an outburst, wiped his brow with a snowy handerkerchief and then sat down, glancing, as he did so, with one uplifted eyebrow, at Sir Fleckley; and Sir Fleckley made a wry moue at his colleague. The story appeared under the banner headline: CECK MONSTER DRAGGED FROM COURT: BLACK LECKY LOSES CONTROL.

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But if that was bad, there was worse to come. For when, the next morning, Humphrey Stoker got George back on the stand, he elicited from him the shocking information that after feeding Sidney to the pigs, he’d then slaughtered those same pigs, butchered them, and sent the meat to Crook!

Cleo began to giggle hysterically, and Doris turned white; and I quickly realized that all autumn and winter we had been eating meat from Ceck’s Bottom. And it was not only the Coals who were implicated. The local gentry had hungrily devoured sausages and ham sandwiches during Harriet’s Christmas party. Patrick Pin and the Catholics had been in Crook on Christmas morning, drinking my sherry and eating ham sandwiches. The Horns had eaten ham with us on New Year’s Eve, and so had Mrs. Giblet. We had all, indirectly, and unknowingly, eaten Sidney.

And then I thought of the satyrs of Ceck, sitting in George’s kitchen on Christmas night with their bottles of brown ale and their roast haunch of pork; and it suddenly occurred to me to wonder, as I remembered their gusts of coarse rustic mirth, if they, unlike the rest of us, had known. It’s a question that perplexes me still; but I rather think so.

I
have been experiencing painful twinges from the region of my ticker. I have sclerotic coronary arteries, did I mention that? A bad heart; a faulty pump. Also, certain of my facial muscles have been pulled back and clamped tight in a rather ghastly grimace, a fierce, involuntary grin that never leaves my features now, regardless of what I am feeling. Often in the alcove I weep and grin simultaneously. My breathing is stertorous all the time, so I’m an unpleasant piece of work, all told, and I’m not surprised that Fledge turned my wheelchair to the wall that day, though of course there was a great deal more to the man’s action than that.

But the rainy days of March and April were behind us now, and the weather was warm enough that I could be put out in the back yard for hours at a time. There I would sit, listening to the birds sing (those little dinosaurs!), and grinning at the gate in the old brick wall on the far side. At other times I sat on the terrace just outside the French windows and bestowed my smiling bounty on the little jungle that the flower garden had become. I saw George down there once, by the pond. That day the garden was a riot of color, and so was I. A garland of oak leaves encircled my skull, and peeping through it was a pair of little white horns with blunt tips. My forehead had fallen, my eyes slanted upwards, and my brows came sweeping together at the root of my nose like a pair of hairy handlebars. My mouth was frozen in a broad, lascivious grin. George was on his knees among the flowers, and when he saw me he rose to his feet and stood with a weeding trowel in one hand and the other shading his eyes from the sun, which blazed down upon him from a cloudless blue sky and reminded me of the days he’d gazed up the hill in Africa at me, before setting off for the coast. The sun was strong, and he seemed to shimmer, just as his reflection in the black pond water would shimmer when a goldfish rose to the surface for a bot-fly. He was wearing his collarless blue policeman’s shirt and his old brown corduroys, but not his boots, I noticed, because his feet were cloven now, he was a hoofed man, and a fringe of coarse hair licked in thick bristly hanks over his goatish ankles. Phantom, of course, projection of a crumbling mind; also I was bareheaded, exposed to the sun, for Doris had forgotten my hat.

Another time I saw Fledge in the garden, and I saw him die. He was lying naked in the grass. I’ve told you what Fledge looks like naked: he is long and thin with a very slight plumping of the flesh on his chest and belly. He is very white, and a narrow line of reddish hair runs down his body from a point midway between those plump chests of his, all the way to his pubic hair. Cleo, all in black, was crawling toward him through the grass. She had a knife between her teeth. The sun was directly overhead, and shining so brilliantly that the blade was like a bar of molten silver. Cleo reared up on her knees and drove the shining knife into Fledge’s heart. His body arched up as a great glob of blood and other body fluids exploded from his mouth. For a few moments his arched body shuddered in convulsion over the grass, and his mouth fell open; his eyes stared up at the sun. Then he subsided onto the earth with a long gasp. Another time, just as Cleo lifted the knife, he suddenly sat up and seized her wrists, and the pair of them began to struggle violently on their knees, then keeled over and writhed together in the grass. Events like these, if I can call them events, disturbed me greatly, for while I knew they were entirely illusory, at the same time they appeared quite real; they felt real. But they were hallucinations, merely, symptomatic of the sort of slippage, or dislocation, to which my mind was increasingly subject in the late spring.

But it was mostly George I saw down there. I would sit at the French windows and watch the fine spring rain come drifting like gauze upon the flower garden, where the untended weeds were crowding the blooms of the bulbs he’d planted in the autumn. The shrubs and the hedges spilled in an unruly manner onto the paths and flower beds, and their greenness had a peculiarly vivid quality to it, in that misty rain, a sort of viridescent effulgence that struck me as oddly and wildly beautiful. The smell of the garden rose to my nostrils, the damp, rich smell of vegetation luxuriating in its own unchecked profusion, and as I gazed out over this hazy jungle, over the lily pond, which was spotted and circled with the gentle, unceasing rain, I grinned at the phantom of my imprisoned comrade toiling in the earth.