The New Uncanny (22 page)

My childhood was unspent in Harrogate. Har-Low-Gata: Anglo-Saxon name for an Anglo-Saxon town of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, but with a dark side. Biggest carbon footprint in God’s Own County; Dickens’ ‘queerest place’ (and he knew London), Agatha Christie’s bolt-hole when she did her own disappearing trick. Dad liked it for different reasons. After Mum died he’d take me on walks around it. Bonding sessions. Making up for lost time. Like most healthy people my age, I travelled everywhere in my room, plugged in to the electronic, unsafety net of the world of unsafe words. But no – Dad thought he was passing something on to me, apart from blisters. So we’d stray on the Stray, me traipsing after him as he’d point out places associated with another of his heroes, Jack Metcalfe. Metcalfe had been a bit of a rogue (Dad would smile indulgently as he told this story) a quondam card-sharp, horse-dealer, smuggler and one of the original boys from the black stuff, laying most of the roads around here. But when his country needed him, he stood up to be counted, turning out for Bonnie Cumberland against the Jacobites and the Young Pretender. And Jack had been completely blind from the age of six. Wanker.

I’d call in to Dad’s work on the way home from school sometimes to pick the keys up; I’d see a customer under that inverted pyramid of letters, wearing those iron-maiden metal goggles into which Dad slotted lenses like pennies. ‘Better or worse?’ But as I got older, all the customers began to look the same in them to me: they all began to look like James Joyce, one of my heroes, who had eyes only slightly better than Metcalfe’s. But Jacobus Jocundus was more Jacobite than Jack. ‘Non Serviam!’ Even without the rebel yell, it’s kind of goth, Catholicism: the guilt, the misery, the Latin, contemptus mundi – I loved the lushness of words like ‘Papish’ with its mammary etymological penumbrae. There were lots of anti-Catholic Gothic writers – ‘Monk’ Lewis, Maturin of Melmoth – but they were of the Devil’s party without knowing it, tripping into Gil Martin’s snares, the Devil Catholics prefer in literature. I wanted to be a writer even if that meant slighting my father’s hopes of children, ending his line with his number one and only son, the withering of his family tree in me. I will make your name live on in my own way, I wished I’d told him. Better or worse?

If I tell you too any more about myself, I will have to kill you.

Wet joke.

Aqueous humour.

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My new freedom made me kind of drunk all the time. Just not feeling like I was being watched was a fantastic sense of liberation. One of the things that made me realise that the idea of Heaven stunk was the notion that your parents would be there. Did you remember to tidy your room before you died? Free, not Freemason: free as a word. I wanted to forget about family and all that but Tyr agreed with Dad about following in his footsteps. Tyr has been my best friend in childhood; I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but it was good to have him back. Tyr is short for something. Tyrone, like the character in ‘Andromeda’ on the TV? I asked once. Nearly right; from the Irish, he said, means ‘Land of Owen’. Like in Tyrnanogue? Yes, he’d replied, the Land of the Young, a kind of heaven for heroes.

Now he was trying to make me feel guilty - Opththalmic opticians are respected professionals, just as good as, say, pharmacists, he declared. Hospital pharmacists, that is, not the high street kind just following prescriptions – a cut above. It’s because I don’t just want to follow prescriptions, I tell Tyr, that I want to become a writer. On the subject of writing, he added, who’s going to be writing all the cheques for this? You won’t get a grant for a foundation course. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I countered, and I don’t just mean my Dad’s will. I’m going to write stuff that sells, exciting stuff like spy novels or horror, under a pen-name, and the good stuff in the evenings. I went on, as if to demonstrate my research, Did you know that in World War II, Ian Fleming was in the secret services and he ran Aleister ‘the Beast’ Crowley? And that de Pessoa used to correspond with Crowley, de Pessoa who was an expert on Freemasonry and wrote an essay about it? He really was a master of disguise. In fact, de Pessoa was several masters of disguise.

Don’t change the subject, snapped Tyr, you’re in denial, as usual. Even if this ludicrous plan works out, what are you going to do for money until then? I proudly unveiled my secret plan: I was going to be a spy myself for MI5 into on-campus terrorist activity. They’d just opened a regional office in Leeds: the fact that this city’s name is a pun, and the fact that it sells more surveillance equipment than anywhere else in the country must be good omens. It would be both research and grant aid. The universities are full of terrorists nowadays. Bradford is perfect – even their Chancellor got arrested under terrorism legislation in Pakistan. For now, my controller tells me, he just wants me to keep an eye out; the security services only know the tip of the iceberg of terrorist activities in our region. How come I didn’t see this controller, Tyr wondered rhetorically, when I’m with you virtually 24/7? Because he’s a professional, I countered triumphantly. You need to keep an eye out too. Tyr winked.

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I’d only been to Bradford once before the course started, and then by night on my own, in a car and a rush. But if you train it to Forster Square from Leeds, as I was now having to do regular, it’s like entering a parallel universe, trundling down the Aire valley past the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey – if there’s been another theft of copper signal wire, you’ll have plenty of time to contemplate the ironies of the once-Catholic heritage of God’s Own County while sidelined in a sideline of a sideline, going nowhere on a train to a place going nowhere, cursing your Chinese watch, which is one of the things the stolen copper is eventually going to make more of, while our Western industries go down the pan. Cistercians, from ‘cisterna’ meaning cistern. Dry stone walls are a Cistercian signature in Yorkshire, they told us at school. Sometimes dry stone walls weren’t built to keep animals in, but just to use stones cleared out of those fields, so you could plough them, or more likely nowadays drive your 4x4 around them without knackering its axles. They’re thrown over the Dales like a huge net, but when you drive through, the fields enclosed by the dry stone walls are almost always completely deserted, the hefted sheep elsewhere, the goats invisible. I repaired some for a while as a conservation volunteer, for compulsory work experience at school (it was either that or an office). Gap-walling, it was called, which sounded ontologically interesting. Smoots, throughs, footings, heartings, vocabularies changing in every village, like codes. I found out too that the Mason’s word for a spy, who Entered Apprentices were continually keeping an eye out for, was ‘cowan’, which means ‘dry-stone-diker’ in the OED. A different kind of apprentice now, I’ve got to practice a different kind of stonewalling. That’s rather good, isn’t it?

But these delays gave me a chance to get stuck into the anthology on the reading list. The size and weight of a footing for a Cyclopean wall, it soon became the foundation-stone of my reading. Reading it added to my sense of drunken freedom. Didn’t Kipling say words were the most powerful drugs known to humanity? The right words are, in the right order. That’s what literature is. A distillation: once for prose, twice for poetry. Like a wall, I was getting plastered. There’s a Simic poem about being a wall, isn’t there? As the train’s engine ticked over, I read Martha Moulsworth’s ‘Memorandum’ (‘My muse is a tell clock’); goth ur-texts from Browne and Burton; Langland on how Plague can be a good and Godly thing; Gawain’s Beheading Game and off-his-head Smart’s Masonic imagery-poems; Marlowe (‘One is no number’), also an intelligence agent, who got a spike in his eye for his trouble; Newton on light and Locke’s ‘association of ideas’ (I’d say ‘train of..’ if that wasn’t a bad joke in a stalled train) which prefigures the stream of consciousness; all the way back to Caedmon (England’s first poet and another good thing about Whitby apart from Dracula and goth weekends) feeling too rude for ‘his The Dream of the Rood’ then writing his dream, a dream of a vision. There were letters between Ignatius Sancho and Sterne the unLocker, master of straying and digressions; but I digress...

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Brat. It’s written ‘Bradford’, but locals pronounce it ‘Bratford’. Formerly proverbial for millionaires (well, in Eliot anyway) it’s now Leeds’ runt kid brother, disinherited, impoverished. That Tory think tank wanker was right: this place will never recover, its decline is terminal. It should just be bulldozed, concreted over and turned into a car park for Leeds, as Sunderland for Newcastle - though some Mackem called that an Alice-in-Sunderland idea. In Leeds, so much new building goes on because the Council rubber-stamps planning applications to no overall plan, blind. Cranes on towers everywhere, rising like piles of coins on a counting house table. Bratford’s got no towers with cranes on at all, just a bloody great hole down from the station, first place I came to, which I still wait impatiently for them to fill. But it does have the plan, Alsop’s vision; they showed us a promotional video in Fresher’s Week – ‘Bradford Squared’ it was called. In it, a road-sweeper wakes the sleeping city: Town Hall windows become brilliantly-coloured squares, exploding like a Mondrian with the city’s wonderland future, illuminating water features and post-modernist architecture, flying around and eventually reforming as the letter B, for Bradford. Or Bullshit. Or Big Brother. Better or worse?

The National Media Museum was a bit disappointing, though it was interesting to find out that Michael Rennie, the alien disgusted with the human race in ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’, was a local. Bradford would give you insight into worlds standing still. But Imax is fantastic. I watched a balloon ride and my stomach turned over when it crossed the Grand Canyon. The screen takes up your whole field of vision. I’m glad I had my curry after - good for curries, Bradford. I’d liked to have seen where they burned ‘The Satanic Verses’, but it’s still a touchy subject, judging from the reaction of the waiters I asked.

Tyr came with me to Bradford when I started my foundation course. He even read all the same books as me so we’d have things to talk about. A real pal. Good thing as well, since the natives weren’t too friendly, even in the halls of residence. Also, problems with sleep meant I had long hours to talk through. I sat for weeks of days in the Atrium – ‘the Hub’ they call it, of their ‘e-campus’, suggesting the hub of a wheel, a web, or of activity. Activity? Students? Here, they tended to group around their separate tables in little archipelagoes of people they already knew, some risking a paddle between islands from time to time to laugh and flirt in a strangely modest, ritualised manner. Who described social interaction as ping-pong in masks? Mostly though, they just looked at each other in shy and meaningful ways. They began looking at me too after a while. The whole campus was paranoid after the arrests of their fellow students and their big sentences, like those given out to the rioters after the Battle of White Abbey Road and the other parts of the City. They wrecked the BMW garage, which could have been a message to the rich, or drug-dealers, or both. You’ll hear now round here that BMW stands for Break My Windows.

E stands for eye-campus: security cameras, scanners, informants, computer monitoring programmes, the government telling lecturers to spy on their students. Lecturers couldn’t be relied on to do that. None of them could run a bath, never mind a surveillance operation. That’s why they need me. I spy. Stand up and be counted. I to the Max.

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Before too long, I had to give up this keeping an eye out due to the attention it was attracting, hollow-eyed and slurring my words with tiredness. Everywhere there are invisible walls, but the fact that you can see through them doesn’t mean it’s OK to look. I’d research in the Library then, whole museums and art galleries of words. I found out a high proportion of the student body were local, had been with the same friends from primary school, through middle and high into University. Still lived with their parents, dropped off at 9 picked up at 5. Close families. I thought the whole point of University was to get away from family, but it still seemed important to them. The family shop. How was I ever going to get to shop them? My controller suggested that if I continued to be isolated for a long time, I might consider making the first move – agent provocateur. I resented this slight on my dedication. I told him my eyes were now open nearly 24/7; in fact I was spending a fortune on over-the-counter preparations so I could get a bit of shut-eye just once in a while. And, if no one will talk with me how will I get them to plan bombings with me? He asked me if I really was creative. He liked to answer questions with more questions. Ping pong. Perhaps I should volunteer to be decapitated on the internet, I wondered aloud. I could tell from his silence he felt that this was another idea with more pong than ping.

The terrorist and the policeman, Tyr quoted Conrad, come out of the same basket. He speculated as to whether, if my controller was the Ian Fleming figure, did that make me the Beast? Then he laughed and mimicked the Lone Gunmen in the ‘X-Files’: ‘We’re going through the lookingglass here guys!’ Strolling through the University winter wonderland, where even the lifts are glass, I checked out a few departments: Pharmacy was on the top floor of the tall block by the Atrium. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. LSD. Joyce’s Lucy, Dracula’s Lucy. My Lucy. The Exoculation of St Lucy. Sacrifice. All these boys and girls sacrificing their youths for careers. Dad would have loved them. But words were my drug of choice. The weirdest Department I investigated was Peace Studies – as obsessed with war as Uncle Toby. In Archaeology, I saw photographs of a local urn burial, reminding me of Browne: ‘Circles and right lines limit and enclose all bodies’, 1s and 0s of internet signals, Disjecta membra on the Circle Line, the ends of all those lines. Jacobus Heaney translates Horace in ‘District and Circle’: ‘Anything can happen, the tallest towers//Be overturned, those in high places daunted,/Those overlooked regarded...

Through the overlookingglass: if the idea of calling Catholics ‘left-footers’ is to suggest something literally sinister in the way they dig, has it never occurred to these Prods that all right-footed people dig with the left foot so you can balance on your right? I’ve got the blisters on my instep to prove it. Tenderfoot. Catholics say haitch and Protestants say aitch. Over here it’s the haves who say aitch. In the Key of H, as the German intelligence agent mentioned, to snare plucky Brit spies, who have no such key in their country.