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lou-graves · 3 years ago

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(Excerpted from the novel LET THE DOGSBODIES HOWL)

Spider couldn’t sleep, sitting in his chair, staring at the television. Or rather he was staring at the wall behind the television, looking down now and then at the flickering screen, his body washed over by the pale light. And over the sides of his chair hung his arms, each with a sharp pain in the elbow, a twitch of arthritis, an itch spreading slowing towards his hands. On the television Charlie Chaplin stood upon a stage, alone in the spotlight, his flea-dance seen by a crowd who had more or less forgotten him, as the spotlight more or less forgot him, moving across the stage without him. And although it wasn’t a silent film, with the volume turned down his lips moved as silently as they always had, his footsteps silent, and the pale light of the television was the only light in the room, casting onto to the wall a shadow of an old man who was tired but couldn’t sleep.

He couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t stand staring at the ceiling any longer. Better off on his arse than on his back. Better off staring at the wall or at the television. His violin silent in the corner of the room. His hands itching to play it, and he would have played it were it not for Mary asleep in the other room. Perhaps he could hold it. Hold it around the neck to mute the strings. But even that would wake her up. Even so much as a mouse fart would wake her up, so light a sleeper she was. And likely he had already awoken her with his tossing and his turning, but as easily as she woke up she would fall back to sleep, sliding back into the dream from which she’d been pulled, and pulled like a vaudevillian pulled from the stage by a walking stick hooked around the neck. She always fell asleep so easily, and when she awoke she awoke rested and tickled by odd and peculiar dreams. When Spider awoke he awoke restless and tired. He was always tired. And as hard as it was to wake him up was as hard as it was to fall back to sleep. And so he tossed and turned and then tiptoed out of the room, sitting in his chair with his arms hung over the sides, his body washed over by the light of the television. As a young lad Spider ran with the bulls in Spain. Though he didn’t do much running. Instead he was tossed in the air and trampled, rolling over and covering up and then crawling to the sidewalk where the local boys put him back on his feet, slapping his back and laughing, and saying “Viva San Fermín, Gora San Fermín.” And later he slept with a matador’s wife. Though they didn’t do much sleeping. And now he sat staring at the wall, thinking of the matador’s wife, and he couldn’t help but laugh. It was a long time since he’d lost sleep over a woman, and though he had slept with a lot of women, and even married some of them, still he never forgot the matador’s wife. And now he was an old man who couldn’t sleep, staring at the wall, looking down from time to time at the television, his arms each hung over either side of his chair. And a twitching in both elbows, an itch slowing spreading up his arms towards his hands, his hands stiff and curving inwards as though clutching a whiskey glass. And holding the phantom whiskey glass, a phantom cigar clutched between his teeth, he raised his hand and said, “Let the dogsbodies howl, and we shall laugh all the better in bedrooms of noble ladies.” A slight sound of rattling ice, rocks in a whiskey sea. And a stirring in the other room. He sat still. Sit still and she’ll soon fall asleep, as easily as she was awoken. Sit still and she’ll slide back into the dream. He sat still and thought about the matador’s wife, and though he had forgotten her name, still he could remember the softness of her skin, and the way she smelled in a small dark room in Paploma, with the Spanish moon watching them through the window, a voyeur caught in her almond eyes like moonlit drops of rain. And if he closed his eyes he could almost feel her lips on his, her hands on his body and his hands on hers. Their bodies moving together, and sweating together, washed over by the pale moonlight. The universal language, nounless and verbless. Eros, the two-backed beast. And though he spoke little to no Spanish, still he remembered her voice, softer than the sheets and warmer than the whiskey, and strong in a way he’d never known a woman’s voice to be strong, stronger than the carajillo they drank on the balcony, side by side with her head on his shoulder. The women we remember are not the ones who make us think, but rather the ones who made us feel, who soothed the misery of feeling nothing, the ones who made us forget. No more stirring in the other room. A twitch in either elbow. And he wondered what Mary was dreaming about. Not that he needed to wonder, he’d find out in the morning, at the kitchen table. She would say, “Bejesus, I had the oddest and most peculiar dream,” and would tell him all about it. And he would listen, drinking his coffee. And through all the years of nights of dreams they’d been married, he never tired of hearing the odd and peculiar stories born of her sleeping mind. And the more odd and peculiar they were, the sweeter her voice was in telling them, the softer it fell, the more featherlike it rose, as lilting and melodic as birdsong. He turned the television off, turned on a lamp and walked over to the window. The streets looked different at night. Less real. More odd and dreamlike, whitewashed by the moonlight and made peculiar by the shadows which seemed to move and shift in doorways and alleyways and windows, lying stretched across sidewalks and rooftops and storefront awnings, clinging to curbs and front steps and windowsills. And across the street a bicycle leaned against a lamppost, not so much still as it was unmoving, suspended between its shadow and the lamplight which cast it. And down the street, in the mouth of the alleyway leading to the churchyard, two small figures moving in the darkness. Two small figures, one carrying something long and slung over the shoulder. Was it a flagpole or a sword or a stick? A rifle, perhaps? Or was it a shovel? Two small figures, one of which he recognized the moment they stepped out of the alleyway and onto the street. Stood beneath the light of a streetlamp, a shovel slung over his shoulder, was the lad who threw a stone through window of the Eager Poet Pub, the same lad he’d seen a few days before crawling out of the window at Polly’s old house on Sackville Street. But Polly was dead and her boy Roddy was dead and the house was abandoned, and a young lad had no business being in there. No matter, lads will be lads, as curious they are as dead cats. But what business had a young lad in a churchyard with a shovel? And not with another lad, but with a young girl none the less. It all felt odd, as peculiar as a strange dream and he wondered if he was dreaming. He wondered was he not imagining them, stood beneath the light of a streetlamp, nothing more than dark figures of his imagination. They stood beneath the street lamp, and she took the shovel slung over his shoulder and leant it against a wall. Then she kissed him. And for a moment they stood so still he felt he was looking at a photograph, and it was only when the young lad looked over the girl’s shoulder at Spider’s window that Spider moved to one side, peering around the window frame in time to see them walking away, the shovel once again slung over the lad’s shoulder. He watched them disappear around a corner, sat down in his chair, turned off the lamp and closed his eyes. His thoughts began to turn odd and strange, twisting themselves each around the others, forming peculiar patterns and images, odd dreamlike scenes, a house of thought and feeling built upon a foundation of nonsense. Losing himself he was in the funhouse, twisted and distorted he was in the funhouse mirrors. Falling asleep he was, and the thought that he was falling asleep woke him up. But only for a moment, and soon his thoughts turned odd and strange again, and peculiar, and more and more odd and strange until they no longer seemed odd or strange. And slowly, with his arms each hung over either side of his chair, he sank into a dream, losing himself in a playground of absurdities. Dreamscapes, strange worlds unto themselves. The playgrounds of wise men, they say, the wellsprings of soothsayers and sages. And they say we are all fools in love. But Spider thought the inverse was true, that we are fools when we dream and wise in love. A man in love knows too much, he has looked through the mirror and met himself on the other side, in a place without masks or mythologies. He’s seen himself naked in the garden. Only when we dream are we young again, and mad and foolish. Only in dreams can we fly or float or breathe under water. Fools in that little death, in utero. And what of the other death, the sleep in which who knows what dreams may come? Fools again in death, again in utero, again able to fly or float or breathe under water. “Dreams don’t mean anything,” Spider would say, “nonsense of the head is all, rats in the attic, pay them no mind, Freud was a madcap who couldn’t keep his hands off his prick.” And that time in Spain, with his suitcase and his violin and nothing else, when he sat on the balcony with the matador’s wife and she drew from a Tarot deck the fool card, and he couldn’t help but laugh when she pointed at the card and then pointed at him. But she didn’t laugh, and when she drew the death card he took the cards from her and threw them to one side. He tried to kiss her, but she pulled away and he saw something in her eyes. And although she spoke no English and he spoke no Spanish, he knew what she wanted to ask him. What are you running from? And so he told her. He told her he had been in prison, and had burned a mattress once during a riot. He told her he had the blood of an innocent man on his conscience, that he was an army deserter, a man of cowardice and treason, that he was a fool and lost the girl he loved, the only girl he had ever loved. He told her this and more, and she listened, and although she couldn’t have understood the words, something in her eyes understood what he was saying. Her head to one side, her hair like a muddy waterfall cascading over her naked shoulder, the moonlight caught in her eyes like drops of rain. And somewhere the fool card lying face down. Spider was born on the first of April, in an upstairs bedroom with his mother and a midwife and a lady who lived down the street, a friend of his mother’s, and the midwife had to slap his arse to wake him up. An April fool, and his father would say, “you’re a fucking joke, lad.” And in some ways he was, but his father said this so often it became a kind of joke. He would get himself into trouble and his father would say, “you’re a fucking joke, lad,” as though one was the set up and the other was the punchline. He was a fool and his father the straight man, the stoic king sat upon a throne at the foot of which knelt a jester, as bad at sports as he was at school, and good for nothing more than getting himself into trouble. “You’re a fucking joke, lad.” But it was a joke without a punchline, or rather a joke with a punchline as lost on his father as it was lost on Spider. The punchline was simple, and however many years later when he died on the same day, it was though his life had resolved itself like a well written joke. From one April to another he lived and died, as foolish in death as he had been in life. Born in one house and dead in another, and although he’d spent much of his life running with the bulls and had seen much of the world, and although the two houses were each on either side of Sackville Street, one to the north and one to the south, if you slammed the door of one on a quiet morning you might hear it through the other’s open window. And just as he was born in a upstairs bedroom, with his mother and a midwife and a woman who lived down the street, so too would he die in an upstairs bedroom, sat in his chair in front of the television, his arms hung over either side of his chair, his hands crippled with arthritis and no good anymore to play the violin. When we die we die alone. Alone we walk that pathway into oblivion, and no one knows the thoughts of a dying man. Still, Lou liked to think that Spider was in on the joke, that he had a good laugh the night he died, or that morning even, when he awoke with pains in his chest and arms and a shortness of breath, a shortness more severe than the breathless staggering of old age. He must have known something, and knowing Spider he would have had a good laugh, a good and foolish laugh. “Some fucking joke,” he would have said, speaking not to himself or to the room, but to something beyond the room, someone either without or within. He would have laughed knowing the gods were laughing with him. “You’re a fucking joke, lad,” his father said when he came home from his first day of school without shoes. The older lads took his shoes and kicked him around and he walked home in the rain barefooted. And years later when he was kicked out of school for fighting, and kicked out for good this time having opened another lad’s head with a cricket ball in a sock, again his father said, “you’re a fucking joke, lad.” But taking off his sock and dropping the cricket ball inside, then swinging the sock the way a medieval knight might swing a mace, Spider felt anything but foolish, and for years after he would smile every time remembered the sound the cricket ball made when it collided with the lad’s head, not unlike the sound it would make colliding with a well swung cricket bat. And even the sight of the blood spilled out on the cricket field made him smile. Dark red on yellow and green grass. “You useless cunt,” the lad said, scolding Spider for turning away from the cricket ball rather than catching it, and he called him a sissy and a son of a bitch, and so Spider took off his sock and dropped the cricket ball in it, then swung the sock at the lad’s head. Like David he slew Goliath and left him on the ground covered in blood, screaming like a sissy, shrieking and crying like a son of a bitch. He had turned away from the ball, and turned away because he was daydreaming and didn’t see it until it was too late, turning away at the last moment before the ball struck his head, and before he was back on his feet already the lad was calling him a cunt and a sissy and a son of a bitch. After that first day of school, when they took his shoes and kicked him around, Spider swore he would never be made a fool of by anyone. And since he was a lad of few words, too shy to say much of anything at all, he let his fists speak for him. And after he opened the lad’s head with a cricket ball, still he didn’t say anything, and when they told him to leave he left and that was that. “You’re a fucking joke, lad,” his father said. But the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and his father, like his uncles, and like most of the men in town, worked in a factory making machine parts, and they worked long hours for little money. And every night he came home covered in grease and sat in his chair so tired he could barely lift his arms, his arms each hung over the sides of his chair. And yet, it was the tiredness in his eyes that frightened Spider, and no matter how tough he looked sitting in his chair, covered in grease and clutching a bottle of whiskey, something in his eyes wept. And he saw the same look in the eyes of his uncles, and in the eyes of the other men, each of them beaten and broken and left with nothing to show for it but a payslip each week and a bottle of cheap whiskey. They were forgotten by the world, ghosts who walked the earth without hope and without purpose, working in factories and sitting in chairs drunk, and on Sunday mornings they went to church too tired to pray. They were dead men, and Spider would likely have ended up as dead as they were, with the same tiredness in his eyes, working in the same factories and sitting in the same church, had it not been for one slow morning when he heard the saddest and most beautiful sound he had ever heard. One slow Moanday morning, or Tearsday, or Wailsday, or some other day, Thumpsday or Frightday, some day other than Sunday. Shatterday perhaps. Though most likely it was a weekday since weekdays were workdays, and having been thrown out of school, Spider now worked as a custodian at the Church, a job of work he’d found himself by catching the priest on his way out of the Eager Poet Pub. “Steady on, father,” he said, “a little tipsy are you? Looking for a handyman are you father? I noticed your church is looking worse for ware, run down like a protestant building, and filthy too, as filthy as sin. Buy you a drink, father? What’s your tipple?” And though he was only fourteen, still he was hired to work on the upkeep of the church. And hard work it was but quiet work, alone with himself and his cigarettes and a flask of coffee, and it kept him out of the factories. One morning, whilst sweeping the cobblestoned alleyway which lead from the churchyard to the street, he heard music coming from inside the church, and not church music but something else, something more real and raw than an organ and more devastating than any choir he’d ever heard, and the more of the alleyway he swept the louder and more possessing the music was until he reached the end of the alleyway and stood in the church doorway holding his broom handle with both hands. At the far end of the room was Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, the music teacher, her hands wrapped around a violin, her violin weeping at the foot of a cross, and behind her were the empty pews and the unlit candles and the unrung bells, and him stood in the doorway, holding his broom with both hands as though holding on to keep from falling. If he fell he might miss the floor and keep falling, and fall further and farther into something endless, an endless something, and so he held onto the broom handle. And though he had never heard the Kreutzer Sonata, or anything like it, and thought it impossible that anything like it had ever been written, still he felt as though rather than hearing it for the first time he was remembering it, remembering something he heard in past life. He knew it as well as he knew his own voice, as imtimately as he knew the voices in his head, the thoughts to which he fell asleep. There were no gods or devils in the music, it was him alone in every note, a piece of him pouring out in every scratching and drawing of Mrs. Fleischpeitsche’s bow. He closed his eyes, struck in a way he’d never been struck, wounded in a way he’d never been wounded, and when he opened his eyes Mrs. Fleischpeitsche stood facing him, holding her violin around the neck, her song’s throat strangled. There was a fury in her eyes, and so he took his broom and left, but whenever he heard the music he would set his broom down or hang up his rag or dustcloth, or he would set aside his knife or hatchet or whichever tool he was using for whichever odd job he was doing, and he would stand in the doorway and watch as Mrs. Fleischpeitsche conducted an orchestra of students, of violins and violas and cellos, of flutes and tubas, and any number of instruments he couldn’t name. And always it was the violins he watched, held captive by the weeping of bows on strings. Mrs. Fleischpeitsche didn’t believe in god, or at least she didn’t go to church on Sundays and pray and confess and such. And neither did Spider, and sometimes it seemed they were the only two people in town who didn’t. Rather she used the church as a place to teach her students and to rehearse with her orchestra. Spider hadn’t been to church since his mother died, but unlike Mrs. Fleischpeitsche he not only believed in god, he hated him, and if he ever met him man to man he would spit in his face and call him a bastard and a son of a bitch. Sundays were for the flock, but workdays were for the wolves, himself and Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, and a homeless man who slept in the graveyard, the cold dirt for a blanket and a tombstone for a pillow. And if this was funny to Spider, it was a joke no doubt lost on the humorless Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, a hard woman and a lonely woman, a refugee from Germany, and since she spoke little to no English she would instruct her students instead with a long thin stick. One strike on the back of the hand, or the back of the legs, or even the forehead, could say far more than words ever could. And by placing the stick under your chin or across your ear she could, almost without touching you, move your head in any direction she so pleased. In this way, and by striking at the offending limbs, she taught her students not only to play the music, but to feel the music, to speak so beautifully the language of the soul, nounless and verbless, the language of the gods, the Mousai, Apollo, the agony of Beethoven struck deaf. Strike not the sins but the sinner. Scorn not the devil but those possessed by the devil. Cursed is a mind torn by daemons and touched by gods, cursed and wretched and pure. And when he found the church empty one day, Mrs. Fleischpeitsche’s violin resting against one of the pews, he couldn’t help but pick it up and hold it the way he imagined he would hold a woman, running his hard and callused hands over her soft curves and her smooth neck, her mahogany skin with scratches and knots and curlicues, the smell of living wood and the resin on her strings. Everything about it was beautiful, and most beautiful of all was the mystery, the songs he knew she could sing even as he held her silently in his hands. Such songs as were kept behind locked lips, her neck held softly by the tips of his callused fingers. Then something struck him, a long thin stick struck him first on the shoulder and then on the side of the head, and as blood spilled into his eyes he felt a sting, and somewhere else, somewhere within, he felt something burning. “Thief,” cried Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, hitting him again with her stick, and so he placed the violin down gently and turned to leave. But she struck him again, and as he ran out the door she followed him, swinging her stick and crying “thief, thief.” She cut him up pretty good, just above the eye, and so he rinsed it off with a hose and held a rag against his head until the bleeding stopped, sitting in his shed in the churchyard, a cup of coffee to steady his nerves. And his hands were shaking, and not from the pain but from something else, something that was neither anger nor rage nor shame, but all of these together, and something else, something for which he had no words. He held the bloody rag and his hands shook, and above his eye a stigmatic wound, and not the blood of Christ but the blood of Judas, or the blood of the devil himself, the fallen one. Later that day he got a visit from Bobby Billyclub, a peace officer who carved onto his truncheon the name of the first person he killed with it, a young boy he beat to death for looking through his daughter’s bedroom window. Bobby Billyclub, or just Billyclub, or sometimes Bobby Blue, but most often he was called simply Bobby. And if Bobby hated Spider’s father, he hated Spider in the same way. And Spider’s father hated Bobby, and had always hated him, since their schooldays when he would kick him around and call him Billy Bobbysocks. Strike not the sin but the sinner, cast out the outcast. But the beaten never forget their beatings, and since Bobby was afraid of Spider’s father, as he was afraid of most of the men in town, most of whom stood by and watched when they were school children and he was being thrown around and kicked around, he instead looked for reasons to use his truncheon on Spider, as though in striking the son he was striking the father. “If you fuck up, lad,” he would say, “if you so much as spit in the street, I’ll open your head on the sidewalk,” gently tapping his truncheon against his open palm, the way policemen do in films and cartoons, and always with a crooked smile and a light in his eyes. But that evening, as he stood on Spider’s doorstep, something was off. Gone was his crooked smile and dimmed was the light in his eyes. It seemed something was weighing him down, and had he been his ordinary self, he likely would have pulled his truncheon from his belt and dragged Spider out of the house. Instead he just stood there, as though selling encyclopedias door to door. “The lady thinks she overreacted,” he said, “thinks maybe you were just curious,” his truncheon hung on his belt like a sleeping dog. “Of course, we know better, don’t we lad,” and for a moment his smile was back and a light shone somewhere deep within his eyes, “you’re a born thief, like your old man, rotten to your core.” And as he turned to leave he stopped himself and said, “as rotten as your dead mother,” smiling now with his eyes, and his hand found his truncheon. “Let’s dig her up, have a nibble on her apple. What do you say, lad? Bet there’s some worms in there.” Spider said nothing, but again he felt something within him burning, and again he felt the sting of blood in his eyes. “Goodnight, lad,” Billy said, and he must have seen the look in Spider’s eyes because his smile widened and the light in his eyes shone brighter. Spider closed the door. And with the door closed he stood in the hallway not moving, his fists clenched so tight his hands were stinging, and his jaw locked so tight he left pieces of tooth in his mouth like sand. His mother’s photograph on the wall, and another of him and his mother and the old man, and upstairs, above where he stood in the hallway, was the room where he was born and where his mother later died, coughing blood into a tin bucket while he sat and read to her. He was too young to remember much at all about her, but he remembered reading to her from books of fables and fairytales, and when he struggled with a word she would say, “take your time, sound it out.” He remembered this, and he remembered the sound the blood made hitting the side of the tin bucket, but not much else. Leaning against the wall in the hallway, left there by his father in case of burglars, was a cricket bat, and without thinking too much about it, Spider took the bat in hand and opened the door, but when he opened the door Bobby was gone. And still, something burning within him, he had to hold himself back, to keep himself from swinging at the empty streets. And he had to pry his fingers from the wooden handle. A few days later, as he was adding paint to a weatherworn window pane, he felt something tapping the foot of his ladder, and looking down he saw Mrs. Fleischpeitsche striking the ladder with her stick, and with her stick she led him into the church and put a violin in one hand and a bow in the other, and holding the bow the same way he held a paintbrush, the way he held a hatchet or a hammer or the handle of a broom, he drew it across the strings and it made a godawful sound, not so much weeping as shrieking and wailing. But within a few days he could make a nicer sound, and within a few weeks he could play a song or two, his long fingers wrapping around the violin in a way Mrs. Fleischpeitsche’s never could. “Verdammter Scheiß,” she would say, holding his hand and stroking his long spidery fingers, “Gottgegeben,” and whenever he struggled to learn something, whenever his fingers tangled up or tripped over each other, he would hear his mother’s voice saying, “take your time, sound it out,” and within a year or so he was playing in a way beyond the other musicians in the orchestra, and beyond even Mrs. Fleischpeitsche. He found within himself a language more natural to him than words, and his violin, held in the same hands with which he once fought, the hands with which he mopped the floors and swept the alleyway, wept as it sang, as anyone who heard him wept, as angels and demons, had they heard him play, would no doubt have wept. And all his father ever said was “you’re a fucking joke, lad,” and he sat in his chair with his whiskey bottle, and he sat at the back of the church too tired to pray and too hard to weep. He was a broken toy, and in his turn Spider too was a broken toy, a rotten apple fallen not far from the tree. Of course, he hadn’t been to war, like his father and his uncles, and the other men in town. And if he was wounded by demons so too was he possessed by angels, touched by the gods of music. One night, as the orchestra rehearsed, it began to rain and it rained so hard that when he looked up he saw tears pouring down the faces on the stain glass windows, an audience of Saints, and of Mary and Jesus, and even Lucifer, all of them weeping even as the sky wept, and all of them weeping for him. There he stood beneath the storm, his bow stabbing the air like the spear of destiny, like the wounding daggers slung on the Ides of March. Et tu, lad. Stabbing the air with his bow, holding his violin by the neck and slicing his finger on one of the strings, and from his wounded finger and down his wrist, and down the neck of his violin, poured blood, as the rainwater poured down the windows, as Mrs. Fleischpeitsche raised her hands in praise, conducting the storm and conducting an orchestra of gods and men. That night he fell in love with music. And of course, he fell in love with a girl, as every story goes, whether sung or slung, he fell in love with a girl in the same way he fell in love with music, struck and wounded in the same way. She was a flautist in the orchestra, and was so shy she almost never spoke. Music was her first language and she spoke through her flute, and he spoke through his violin, and slowly they fell in love. But still she wouldn’t speak, or rather she wouldn’t speak to him, and so he followed her and watched her from a distance. Her name was Polly, and just saying her name made him smile, popping his lips and tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. And he would lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling saying her name, and finding as many ways as he could think of to say it until he fell asleep. “Polly. Pretty Polly,” popping the P’s, and the way his lips parted reminded him of school, when they would chase the girls and if you caught one you could kiss her on the cheek. “Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly picked poppies, Pretty Polly played possum picking poppies, picking pecks of peppers, pecks of posies, pretty Polly picked pecks of peppers and posies,” and he always thought the girls allowed themselves to be caught, that they wanted to be caught and kissed on the cheek. She was an Irish girl, the daughter of Bobby Billyclub, and she sold flowers on Sackville Street with another girl, a girl as short and as plain as she was forgettable, and together they stood on Sackville Street holding baskets of flowers and singing songs of poppies and posies, of violets and lilies and roses, or whichever flowers they were selling that day. He would stand on Sackville Street, leaning against the lamppost in front of the Butcher’s Shop, or in the doorway of the Eager Poet Pub, rolling a cigarette or packing his pipe with tobacco, and he would watch her selling flowers and singing songs of flowers, and even though she was across the street, still he could smell the flowers as she sang of them, and he wondered if she smelled of flowers. And the other girl, Margret her name was, Margret Shagwidth or Shagwort or Shagmoore, or some such name. No doubt she smelled like turnips. But together they sang pretty songs in pretty harmonies and even danced as they sang, their dresses windswept, their baskets swinging from their arms, singing “ring a ring o’roses, a basket full of posies,” and pretending to sneeze as they sang “a-tishoo, a-tishoo,” and sometimes they would even fall down, springing up in time to sell a rose or a posy to a passerby. “It was the truth in her eyes ever dawning,” they sang, “that made me love Mary the rose of Talee.” And they sang, “daisies, daisies, give me your answer do, I’m half-crazy all for the love of you,” and “red is the rose that in yonder garden grows, fair is the lilly of the valley,” and across the street Spider would sing along, singing under his breath, “clear is the water that flows from the sea, but my love is fairer than any.” And in November, with a basket full of poppies, as they sang, “we shall not sleep though poppies grow, in Flanders Fields, in Flanders Fields,” a crowd gathered around them and wept. Still, most of the time it was the men to whom they sold flowers, lured in by their songs like sailors to sirens. “For the wife,” they would say, handing Polly a couple of coins for a rose or a daisy, and later Spider would see them giving the flower to a barmaid at the Eager Poet Pub, or to some drunk old girl sitting alone at a table. Sometimes they turned the corner and tossed the flowers in the gutter but always returned to buy another. And Polly, though shy as a cocoanut stand, knew just how to smile and tilt her head and lower her eyelashes, and when she gave them a flower her hand lingered just long enough for their fingers to touch. And though their fingers had never touched, Spider would watch her from across the street and wonder if anyone had ever watched her that closely, if anyone had ever really seen her. Her saw her, and thought perhaps he was the only one who did, the only person in the world who saw her, swaying her hips, bending her knees, her foot swiveling on the tips of her toes, a lazy pirouette, her dress windswept, her mouth open and smiling and singing songs of flowers, her tongue moving around inside of her mouth, tapping her teeth and sliding along her lips. He watched her eyes change with the words of the songs, her hair caught by the wind, as alive as any animal, as alive as a grounded bird flapping it wings. And always with a ribbon in her hair, and always the ribbon matched some color on her dress, some part of clothing, her shoes or shawl, or even her eyes or hair, and often her clothes and Margret’s clothes blended, each the opposite of the other, and each had a ribbon which matched their dresses, and each ribbon the opposite of the other’s ribbon. And if Margret was short and squat, Polly was tall and thin. And if Margret’s eyes were as dark as her hair, Polly’s were light and full of color just as her eyes were light and full of color. They were the sun and the moon together in a starless sky. And if Margret scowled and snarled and pouted, Polly smiled and smiled not only with her mouth, but with her eyes as well. Her whole body smiled, and he watched her smiling at passersby and handing them a flower and cupping her hand to receive a couple of coins, and every time she dropped a coin into her pocket her hand shivered, or fluttered, or shimmied in some way, as though she were a magician performing a sleight of hand coin trick. And though not a word had passed between them, still they shared what was said by their instruments, the words spoken by his violin and her flute, the language of Apollo and Eros. And as closely as he watched her on Sackville Street, he felt closer still in those moments when he looked up from his violin and saw her looking back at him, their eyes meeting in the middle the room. He saw her, and perhaps she saw him too. Perhaps she was the only person in the world who did. Tobacco and roses. Fiddles and Flutes. And there was another lad in town named Roddy, known as Muckspout since his tongue was too big for mouth, and he was a nice enough lad, the gentle type, an innocent who wouldn’t harm even a fly, but he was slow in the head and often the others in town made fun of him or kicked him around. Stepped on he was by the crowd, kicked and beaten like a dog with the mange. And like a dog he would follow Polly and the other girl, wagging his tail, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. And rather than kick him like a dog, Polly was patient with him and kind and would fix his hair or straighten his tie, licking his handkerchief to wipe smut off his cheek, and with her nearby nobody made fun of him. Shy as she was, she wouldn’t allow it, and flew into a small rage if anyone even smiled or snickered his way. And if anyone took a flower from her basket and refused to pay for it, Muckspout would puff out his chest and back your man down until he gave him either the flower or a couple of coins. And once in while he even sang a song, the Unquiet Grave, and with his tongue hanging out of his mouth he sang “never have I had but one true love,” and across the street Spider would sing along and feel as though he was the one singing the song, as though he was stood beside Polly, holding the jar of coins and making sure nobody stole her flowers, and as he sang along he felt as though he had not only written and spoken the words in the song but had lived them and carried them somewhere within him. Such words he knew all too well. “My time be long, my time be short, tomorrow or today,” and “I crave a kiss from your cold clay lips and that is all I crave,” and all the other lines of the song were sung by both men and each man thought himself the one for whom the lines were written. And if Polly looked across the street, to the doorway of the Eager Poet Pub where Spider stood smoking a roll-your-own and leaning against the doorframe, quietly mouthing the words to the song, she would smile and he would smile, but neither of them crossed the street, and standing each on either side it was as though they were separated by an ocean, or a wild river, him stood on the east bank and her on the west, him leaning in the pub doorway and her with a basket of flowers swinging from her arm. The Eager Poet Public House, his home away from home, as they say. And more and more he found himself leaning in the doorway, or sitting at the bar or at one of the small tables, drinking a drink of stout, so often drunk it seemed his father’s house, rather, was his home away from home. There he slept but otherwise he was either at the pub or at the church, either leaning in the pub doorway or sitting in his wooden shed with the small window looking out over the churchyard, over the graves and the tombstones lined up like empty bottles, and there in one corner was his mother’s grave, and beside it an empty plot for his father, an empty space waiting to be dug up. Restless dirt. And the thought of restless dirt him angry, and though old enough to know better, still he was young enough to think he would never die, and would never be buried. He would outlive even the dirt. “They’ll never bury you, Spider,” Muckspout said one time, rolling a cigarette on the pub table, and licking the edge to seal it, “you’re too stubborn to be buried, they’ll have to burn you instead.” Muckspout was about the same age as Spider, maybe a year or so older, and from time to time they would see each other at the Eager Poet Pub and one would buy the other a drink. And off came their considering caps. “Come, lad,” Muckspout would say, “let’s sit down and chew some fat,” and chew some fat they did. He was easy enough to talk to, and Spider found he could talk to him for hours, about nonsense and nothing, and he found also an odd wisdom to what he said, a kind of ancient wisdom hidden within his simple head. “Animals are sometimes cruel,” he said one time, his tongue flapping about his lips, “and people are animals, so people are sometimes cruel.” Another time Spider asked him if he believed in god, and he said “maybe there’s a heaven and a hell, or maybe it’s the same place, like it is here. Heaven is here, but so is hell.” And god damn if that wasn’t the truth. Spider drank his pint and didn’t say much else. He’d been through hell, and still there was music, still there was love and light, and laughter, all born out of the same depths, out of the same darkness. One evening, as Spider left the Eager Poet, rolling a cigarette and stumbling down the steps towards the street, he heard Polly’s voice, so soft and sad and melancholy that it stopped him dead. And there he stood and listened as Polly, alone on the other side of the street, sang a song so mournful and haunting and sorrowful, singing to the moon and to the empty streets, or singing to herself, singing a song she alone would hear. And as he listened he found himself possessed by some spirit, and he felt transgressive, as though she was alone in her room and he was watching her through an open window. Like the moon he was a voyeur who having climbed the heavens now gazed upon the earth, spellbound and speechless and left with nothing to do but witness, nothing to do but listen. “I remember my mother’s smile when I was very small,” she sang, her voice echoing on the cobblestones, “sitting in her rocking chair and reading to us all, but while life does remain, to cheer me I’ll retain, a small violet I plucked from mother’s grave.” At her feet a basket, and in the basket the last of the violets she hadn’t sold, bodies still warm and touched by the memory of having lived, of having loved and laughed. Touch has a memory. Life lingers, even in the shadow of death, even there a light flickers like a dying a candle. Cobblestones at his feet. His shadow cast into the street by the lamplight. And as he stepped clumsily down from the curb and crossed the street his shadow crossed ahead of him, and as he tossed his cigarette into the gutter his shadow did the same, both leaving a trail of sparks on the wet stones. Spitting rain it was and the streets were wet, and he stood there looking at Polly who looked back at him, their shadows cast into the street by the lamplight. And if his shadow was long and thin and distorted, so too was hers distorted, only more delicate and gentle and flowerlike. He looked down at her basket of violets, laid out with their stems crossed, raindrops gathering on the petals. “Didn’t sell much,” he said, and she shrugged. "They want roses, not violets.” She turned to leave and he followed her, carrying her basket while she walked several steps ahead of him, looking now and again over her shoulder, but never looking at him, rather she would look at something in the street or in a nearby window, watching him out of the corner of her eye to make sure he was following her. And with his footsteps slow and steady, and hers as light as windswept flowers, almost as though they were floating across the cobblestones, she led him to the church and down the alleyway to the churchyard, through the gate and between the sleeping graves and the rain touched tombstones, and between the empty patches of restless dirt, to his mother’s grave, and they placed the violets beside her tombstone. Still spitting rain, their feet sunk into the churchyard mud. And holding her basket in one hand he held her hand in the other, and she sang “red is the rose that yonder garden grows, fair is the lily of the valley,” and even though his voice was deep and rough and clumsy, he joined her, his voice like mud and hers like rain, and they sang “clear is the water that flows from the sea, but my love is fairer than any.” Her hand in his, hers soft and his hard, a flower and a weed in the rain, and beneath their feet the churchyard ground softened and their feet sank deeper and deeper. And when the rain began to fall heavier and harder they took shelter in the shed where Spider kept his tools, his shovel and his rake, his ladder, his knives and saws and hammers, and tins of paint or varnish, striking a match to light a lantern hanging from a hook. Often he sat in his shed between odd jobs at the church, and before rehearsals with the orchestra, drinking coffee or sipping on a whiskey bottle he kept hidden behind boxes filled with rosary beads and old bibles and hymn books, and whenever it rained and he took shelter in the shed, he would drink his coffee and sip his whiskey and listen to the rain. It was greatest sound he’d ever heard, raindrops on a wooden shed, and he would imagine himself alone on a ship in the middle of the ocean, as far away from people as one could get, as far removed as possible from the rest of the world. “Are these your digs?” Polly said, looking around the shed and wringing the rainwater out of her hair. “This is my kingdom,” Spider said, searching for whiskey glasses, “my home away from home,” emptying two jars, each filled with odd nails and screws and bolts, and pouring whiskey into them from his hidden bottle. “I thought the pub was your home away from home,” she said, and as he handed her a jar of whiskey she drank from it and her face twisted and distorted. “Good lord,” she said, and they both laughed. “I take it you don’t drink whiskey.” “I prefer wine,” she said, holding her jar with both hands, her wet hair running down one side of her face, down her neck and shoulder, dripping water onto the floor. And with her head titled to one side her eyes seemed to be studying him. “They say you’re a rotten apple,” she said, “red enough on the outside but rotten at the core.” “And what do you say?” She shrugged, “I’m not sure yet, I don’t think you’re rotten, I think you’re rather sweet, a little confused perhaps, and angry, but not rotten.” He drank his whiskey and poured himself another. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “we used to scrump apples from the orchard just outside of town, the one with the big red barn.” “It burned down,” he said. “We burned it down,” she said, looking away for the first time, “or my brother did, one day when we hid from the farmer, and we found a book of matches and tried to light a lantern the farmer hung on the wall.” She took another drink from her jar of whiskey. “It took us three or four tries to strike the match, and even then the lantern wouldn’t light, and the match burnt his fingers he dropped it in the hay. We went back later, after they put the fire out, but no one said anything, and even when they caught us scrumping a couple of months later still they didn’t figure out we’d burned down the barn.” She took another drink of whiskey, and she smiled, remembering something, looking passed Spider to the shed window and the drops of rain running down the dirty glass. “I don’t know why we stole the apples,” she said, “they were too sour to eat, and too hard to throw at anything, and too large to carry much farther than the road which ran alongside the farm. But we stole them anyway and we carried them out onto the road and threw them to see how far we could throw them. My brother always won, he could throw them much farther than I could. He could likely throw them as far as the adults could.” Her voice soft and ghostly in the storm battered shed, her whiskey jar held in both hands. Spider poured himself a third glass and as he finished his she finished hers, and with the storm rattling the walls of the shed, she blew out the lantern and climbed onto Spider’s lap. She was less shy in the dark, her mouth finding his, her hands finding his belt buckle and pulling it open, her legs wrapped around the back of the chair as he tried to keep it from toppling over. And outside the storm battered the wooden shed and lightning struck the churchyard filling the shed with brief moments of light, sudden moments when he could see her, soaking wet and with their clothes half on and half off, her eyes closed and biting her lower lip, and when it at last stopped raining the churchyard was so bogged with water he had to carry her to the alleyway which lead to the street, her basket lost somewhere amongst the graves. “No matter,” she said, as he walked home, “I’ve got other baskets.” A few nights later, walking home from the Eager Poet Pub, Bobby found him and threw him up against a wall, his truncheon held under Spider’s chin, and with his other hand he grabbed a handful of hair, grinning in Spider’s face like a hangman fastening a noose to fit the neck. “Where you coming from, lad,” Bobby said, and when Spider told him he was coming from the church, that he stayed late to clean the stained-glass windows, Bobby laughed. “You think I’m idiot,” he said, “like that halfwit Muckspout, you think I was born with dust cloths for brains.” And pushing his truncheon into Spider’s throat, so tight he couldn’t breath, he said, “I’ve seen the way you look at my Polly, following her like a mangy dog. Do you really think a mutt like you has a chance with a girl like her?” Spider tried to say something, but with the truncheon held against his throat nothing came out, or not words at least, and all he made was a raspy choking sound. “Still, it’s not a crime to look at girl, no harm in a lad looking at such a pretty flower as my Polly,” then leaning in so close Spider could smell his whiskey breath, “but somebody has been sneaking in and out of her bedroom window,” lifting the truncheon up and forcing Spider’s chin so high he had look down his nose at Bobby. He let go of the handful of hair and took hold of Spider’s hand, lifting it to his nose and sniffing his fingers. “That’s her,” he said, grinning in Spider’s face, “that’s my Polly,” and he sniffed them again, “and I was sure it was that halfwit Muckspout.” Spider felt nauseous, not at the truncheon pressed into his throat, nor at the vulgarity of Bobby Billyclub sniffing his fingers, and not even at the thought of being forced up against a wall like a mangy dog on a short leash. He felt nauseous at the thought of Muckspout climbing in and out of Polly’s window. Something sank inside of him, some hole opened within him, and as Bobby loosened the truncheon at his neck, Spider was able to breathe again. “I know about you,” he said to Bobby, catching his breath, “about you and my mother, thought you had a chance with her didn’t you,” Bobby’s hand tightening around his truncheon, “and if I’m a dog than you’re a dog, a bastard dog and a son of a bitch.” Barely had the word left his mouth when Bobby struck him with the truncheon, first on the side of the head again on the chin, and when Spider didn’t go down he hit him a third time, a kidney shot. Spider dropped to his knees and Bobby hit him again and again, and likely kicked him a few times. Not that Spider could remember. So fast it was and sudden, no sooner was he on the floor than Bobby was walking away, swinging his truncheon and whistling a tuneless songless whistle. Spider stumbled home, bleeding from his nose and mouth, his head split open, a stabbing pain in his side, and as he stood in front of the bathroom mirror something burned inside of him, a fire in his stomach that was neither anger nor fury nor rage, but something else, something base and carnal, and he thought about one morning as a wee’un, not long after they buried his mother, when he was in the bushes behind the church digging up worms to fish with, and he heard Bobby and the preacher laughing through an open window, laughing at Spider’s mother, remembering when they young lads and used to smell each other fingers. “She smelled like apples,” the preacher said, laughing, and Bobby laughed and said, “fruit from the tree of good girls and loose morals,” and together they laughed, a man of the law and a man of the cloth. And something burned in Spider. And the room started to sink or float, twisting itself around itself, and he saw himself in the mirror, distorted by the circus glass, the ground gone at his feet, and he had to hold on to the sink to steady himself. His father found him the next morning on the bathroom floor, his clothes covered in blood, and fetched a lady down the street, a friend of his mother’s, to clean him up and stitch up the wound on his head. “You’re a fucking joke, lad,” his father said, thinking he’d been scrapping with another lad at the Eager Poet. “A stitch in time saves nine,” said his mother’s friend, kneeling beside the bathtub while Spider lay naked in the warm water, a glass of brandy to numb the pain. “Don’t worry about me, lad,” she said, “it’s not the first time I’ve seen you in your altogether, I was there when you were born, naked as mole rat, and even then you didn’t cry, even when the midwife smacked your arse,” kneeling beside the bath as though praying, working away at his head with a needle and a piece of string. “A stitch in time saves nine,” she said, “you’ll be better soon enough, don’t you worry, lad, bright as sun and right as rain in no time.” But she could have stuck the needle into his eye and he wouldn’t have felt it. His mind was somewhere else, and the more he drank the further away he was, and if his closed his eyes he saw flashes of lightning, and he saw Polly with her eyes closed and biting her lower lip. It was his mind which needed stitching up, not his head. It was his thoughts which hurt the most. But he didn’t say anything not having the words to say anything. “You daft sod,” his father said, standing in the doorway, “scrapping down the pub were you?” and he left, laughing to himself, and from down the hallway he said, “that lad’s a fucking joke,” sitting in his chair in the other room, turning the dial on his radio, trying to find something to listen to, something to drown out the silence. Spider listened to him turning the radio dial and it sounded like rain, rain inside of which were voices and music. And of course water dripping from the tap over the bathtub. And his mother’s friend, kneeling beside him with a needle and thread and saying, “a stitch in time saves nine, don’t you worry, we’ll fix you up good and proper.” A shiver ran through his body, and she said, “what’s wrong, lad, somebody walk over your grave?” But he barely heard her, his mind was elsewhere, on another night, in another room, where Polly was combing her hair in front of the mirror, singing softly to herself, and in the mirror, asleep in the bed behind her, snoring like an animal, was Muckspout. “Somebody walk over your grave?” she said, and he barely heard her. Such a morbid thought, that somewhere he was dead and buried and somebody was walking on his grave, that even as he lay in the bathtub, still bleeding from a half stitched wound, somewhere else his body lay rotting in the ground, or was long since rotten, nothing but bones and dirt, not food anymore for the worms, his mouth stuck in an infinite grimace. A walking shadow, dead soon and dead already. And somewhere else, sitting at his desk with a cigarette hanging from his lips, his lips moving silently as though talking to himself, Lou scribbled in his notebook, scratching at the page and writing down a story told to him many years ago by an old man many years removed from the young lad he had once been, the young lad who stood outside the Eager Poet Pub, rolling a cigarette and watching Polly on the other side of Sackville Street, with her basket of flowers and a ribbon in her hair. Spider liked to tell stories, and would tell the same stories over and over, and so enthralled was Lou, so entranced and possessed by them, no matter how many times he heard them he listened as though hearing them for the first time. And rather than simply hearing them and imagining them in his head, he felt as though he was there when they happened, as though he was Spider standing outside of the Eager Poet Pub and watching Polly on the other side of Sackville Street. And even as he sat at his desk scratching at his notebook, as Spider slept six feet under the ground, buried now for however many years, he felt as though rather than writing down a story told to him by an old man, he was instead remembering something, reliving some memory from a past life. He could see Polly standing on the other side of Sackville Street, and he saw Muckspout and Margret and Bobby Billyclub, and he saw Mrs. Fleischpeitsche and felt her long thin stick striking him on the knuckles, and he heard the storm battering the outside of the shed and as the lightning struck the churchyard he saw Polly, soaking wet from the rain, her eyes closed and biting her lower lip. And he heard her breathing heavily in the darkness. And he heard her voice as though he was remembering her voice, and he felt her lips on his as though remembering how soft they were, and how warm her mouth felt against his, her arms wrapped around his neck, the walls of the shed trembling under the storm. And somewhere a voice said, “a stitch in time saves nine,” and he felt the needle going in and out of his wounded head, not as though he was imagining it, but as though he was remembering it, as though he remembered the needle piercing his head, each sting softened by mouthfuls of cheap brandy. Of course, the real pain was inside his head. It’s not the skin which needs stitching but what’s under it. Thoughts worse than wounds, unstitched even in death. And maybe that’s why skulls grimace. But the voice he heard most clearly was Spider’s, and as he scribbled and scratched in his notebook, a cigarette hanging from his lips, smoking itself into a small pile of ashes, he forgot he was sitting at his desk, and he forgot about his notebook and his pencil, and he even forgot that Spider was dead and buried, and long since eaten through by worms. He heard Spider’s voice, telling him the story for the first time, sitting across from him at the Eager Poet Pub with a pint of stout, his green eyes shining out of a grey face, and Lou with his back to the window shielding his half-pint from any old biddies who might be passing by, who might look in and see him drinking. With his back to the window they would see only a small boy sitting across from an old man, his grandfather perhaps, the old man waving his hands in the air and talking on and on about god knows what, likely boring the young boy. But Lou was anything but bored, hanging on every word that fell out of Spider’s flapping jaw, his mouth opening and closing like a puppets mouth and smoking his cigarette in the way always did, holding it to his lips with his thumb and finger and taking a heavy drag, then tossing it into the ashtray and leaving his hands free to paint violent shapes in the air, then picking it up again with his thumb and finger and taking another heavy drag. And although he was old and grey, his eyes were still young and alive, shining green out of his grey face, as though he could remember Polly’s lips on his and Polly’s arms around his neck, as though he could hear her singing on the other side of Sackville Street. “That night I couldn’t sleep,�� he said, “and not because my head hurt, but because of something in my head that hurt, some worm inside my skull, burrowing in like a bastard, and as soon as the sun came up I went downstairs and took the cricket bat my dad and I kept in the hallway, in case of burglars.” Lou sipped from his half-pint, swallowing a mouthful of stout and doing his best not to make a face. Men don’t make faces when they drink. “And then what happened?” Lou said, taking another mouthful of stout and putting it away with a heavy swallow. “And then what happened was I went looking for Bobby, swinging the cricket bat by my side like a sword or an axe, and anyone on the street must have seen something in my face, or in my eyes, because they moved out of the way when they saw me coming. Must’ve been something in my eyes, the devil in me looking out, searching streets and doorways and alleyways, windows and storefronts. Eventually I found him on Sackville Street, outside the butcher’s, and he had Muckspout on the ground and was sitting on him so as he couldn’t move his arms, and he was slapping his face and spitting on him, not hard like but hard enough to hurt him, hard enough to humiliate him. The bastard son of a bitch was sitting on his arms, and all Muckspout could do was scream like an animal, screaming to be let go, yelling, get off me you bastard. Poor lad, he wouldn’t have harmed even a fly, and all around them both a crowd gathered and they were laughing at him.” “Even Polly?” Lou asked. “Except for Polly, she was doing everything she could to pull him off, hitting him in the head and back. And when she looked up and saw me coming, she must have seen the same devil the others saw, and she got out of the away.” “And what did you do?” “I hit him the bat, on the side of the head, and when he looked up at me I hit him again and put him on his back. Then I went for his legs and hit him over and over, and a few shots to the ribs. And during the…” and here Spider searched for a word, taking his cigarette from the ashtray and taking heavy drag and realizing it had gone out, then lighting it again, taking a drag and again tossing it into the ashtray. “During the… kerfuffle, the rough and tumble, as I was hitting him with the bat, Polly was trying to pull me away and I clocked her one by mistake.” “You knocked her unconscious?” “Not quite, she was sat on the curb holding her eye and her eye was already blackened. And when she looked at me, the way she looked at me was,” again searching for a word, “well, I don’t know how to explain it, and I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes or when I stare into the mirror, her sat on the curb and holding her face, looking at me as though…” shaking his head and taking a long drink from his stout, his hand shaking and clawing at the pint glass. “I just left her there, sitting on the curb, and I went looking for the bastard priest, that son of bitch.” And he found the bastard son of a bitch in the church, lighting candles ready for the afternoon mass. “Father,” he said, and when the father turned around he hit in the side of the head with the bat and left him on the floor like a shadow of the large crucifix at the foot of which he fell with his arms outstretched, his feet crossed, his eyes blinded by the blood spilled from his head. “They arrested me later that day, took me from the house in handcuffs, and all my father said was that I was a fucking joke.” He fell silent then, pulling his cigarette from the ashtray with his thumb and finger and taking a heavy drag, and again his cigarette had gone out, and again he lit it and tossed it into the ashtray. And as he sat there, drinking his stout, he looked almost as if he had forgotten about Lou, as though he was talking to himself. “It was a stupid thing to do,” he said, a strange smile on his lips, “such a stupid thing to do. Man thinks himself into to stupidity. Homo sapiens sapiens. Twice wise he thinks himself and all the more stupid he is for thinking it. Give us enough rope to hang ourselves and we’ll hang ourselves, and the gods always give you enough rope. Don’t be stupid, lad. Find yourself a good women and marry her. And find yourself a quiet corner and sit in it.” “Pride goeth before destruction,” Lou said. “Damn right it does,” said Spider, “destroyed by thoughtfilledness, the world belongs not to the wise but to dunces and imbeciles, it belongs to the emptyheaded.” Lou took another heavy drink, and another, and with each one it tasted better, with each one he made less of a face. “Did you go to prison?” he asked, and Spider shook his head. He should have gone to prison, but he was just young enough to be sent to borstal instead. “Not a bad place. A bit rough, but rough was all I’d ever known. And I couldn’t play my violin, but I learned how to play chess, and I read books, the Russians mostly, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It was in Dostoevsky I found a mind like my own, the same demons, the same devil inside the skull looking out. I read Dostoevsky and thought myself not so sick and wicked after all, not as odd and strange as I thought. Two years I was in, and it passed slowly. Playing chess and poker for cigarettes, and drinking coffee and reading every book I could get my hands on. Two years for a moment of stupidity. And I lost everything, and I didn’t go home because I didn’t have a home to go home to. I lost everything, even Polly.” He finished his cigarette and starting rolling another one, his hands clawing at his tobacco pouch, his stiff fingers struggling with the papers. He gave up on the cigarette and took his pipe from his pocket, filling it with tobacco and packing it in with his thumb. Lou finished his half-pint. “Give us a cigarette,” he said, and Spider laughed, striking a match to light his pipe and glancing at Lou through the cloud of smoke. “Not on your life, mate, now run along before you worry your mother.” And again he laughed. And Lou laughed, sitting at his desk, a crushed pack of cigarettes tossed next to his ashtray, his ashtray filled with punched out cigarettes, most of them crippled and twisted ends, and others only half-smoked, forgotten and left to go out on their own. He laid his pencil down on his notebook. It was a story he had heard many times and it changed slightly every time Spider told it. Some parts he forgot, others he embellished or fattened or exaggerated, and sometimes the order in which things happened changed, or something said by one person was instead said by somebody else, or said in a different way. But the backbone of the story remained the same, and always it ended with Spider in borstal, playing chess for cigarettes and drinking coffee. Lou closed his notebook and went into the bathroom, and standing in front of the bathroom mirror, himself staring back from the other side, he saw something in his eyes he hadn’t seen before, not a weight or a darkness, but a stillness, the stillness of two lifeless planets. His was a hollow shell, his light as low as his whiskey bottle, his face as grey as Spider’s had been, only his eyes didn’t shine. He saw in the mirror neither youth nor the memory of youth. And behind him the bathtub, filthy as a coffin and unused since Lorelei left. Often she took baths and always for hours at a time. Lou would hear her running the water and would go to the pub for a pint or two, and when he came back always she was still in the bath, surrounded by candles, sometimes with a cup of tea and a cigarette, and the door open so she could hear the radio in the other room, turned on low and touched at the edges with white noise and crackling static. And now the bathtub was filthy and empty and cold as a coffin. Unused since she left, and in the other room the radio sat silent on the windowsill. Lou would rather wash in the sink. But even the sink was dirty, as the bathtub was dirty, and even the mirror was dirty. Still, through the dirt on the mirror he saw the empty tub and for a moment he thought he saw Lorelei, her arms hung over the edge, her eyes closed, her wet hair clinging to her body like dead leaves. And he heard her voice. “You should eat something," she said, “you look sick.” And he was sick, in a way. Poisoned he was by memories. And he knew that if he turned around all he would see was an empty bathtub, and so he watched her in the mirror, placing her hands on the edge of the tub and resting her chin on her hands, smiling up at him. “Can I have a kiss?” she said, and when he shook his head she looked cross, lifting her chin from her hands and asking him, “and why not?” “Because you’re not there, darling, you’re nothing but undigested beef. Less grave, more gravy.” And she said, “pure gravy, baby,” again resting her chin on the edge of the tub. “You said that the night we met, or the next morning rather, sitting in that café by the beach with all those stuffed birds on wall, and it was raining, and I asked you how your coffee was and you said pure gravy, baby.” And again she asked him for a kiss and again he ignored her, standing with his back to the bathtub, his haunted face in the mirror. She was right, he needed to eat something. His eyes hollow, his lips cracked and broken from chewing on them. And scratching his head. Scratching his arms. Fleas again, no doubt, like he had before Lorelei came and threw powder all over the apartment, some mixture of baking soda and turmeric, and something else, pepper perhaps, and she threw so much of it around that months later they were still finding powder in the strangest places, in the cracks and crevices on windowsills and in walls and doors and corners, most of all the corners, and even under things and behind them. And once in a while he would reach his hand into his pocket and find a handful of powder, or he would pull off one of his shoes and a cloud of powder would rise out of his sock. Scratching his head. His eyes hollow and haunted in the mirror, hunted by something. And no food in the fridge. Still, he needed to eat something. Getting sick, lad, sick and thin, losing weight and mind, thought needs food, fuel to think and think and. And although the bathtub was empty, he heard Lorelei’s voice echoing off the bathroom tiles. “There’s some eggs in the fridge,” she said, “why not cook them up and throw on some salt and pepper.” His face hollow, his eyes haunted and hunted. One time Lorelei ate hallucinogenic mushrooms and watched him as he slept. “There was this old man,” she said, “illuminated by some kind of pale light, and he was watching over you. He was so beautiful. So kind and gentle and calm. I knew then you would be okay, that no matter how far you sank you would always find a way out.” Another time she was so sick that she ran a bath and sat in it, not smiling or laughing, not talking, not even eating. The radio turned off, and no candles lit. She just sat in the bath in the dark, so sick she refused to get out, and so he made her a sandwich and lit a couple of candles, and he sat on the floor reading to her from her favorite book, Moongoose and Marleroux, reading her the last story in the book, about the watchmaker and the vintner and the vintner’s wife. But now the bath was empty and the mirror was dirty. He closed his eyes. He scratched his head. He scratched his neck and his arms. He could hear water running.

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