Unconcerned, the site turns up its collar at the first breeze of the next millennium, attempts to play down its anxieties. The population swells, spills over into cardboard box and piss-streaked doorway. The surveillance cameras on every corner are a hard, objective record of the town’s reality, admissible as evidence. If we are to refute this brutal and reducing continuity, a fiercer, more compelling fiction is required, wrung from the dead who knew this place and left their fingerprints upon its stone.
John Merrick, sitting painting by the lake at Fawsley, monstrous angel-foetus head in silhouette against the silvered waters dazzling beyond. Hawksmoor at Eastern Neston, stooped and squinting lines of ink through his theodolite; aligns the whole thing with Greens Norton church spire although nobody is certain why. Charles Wright, the Boy o’ Bell Barn, moving everyone to tears with recitation at the Mutual Improvement Hall. The thieves, the whores and ditch-damp victims. Witchman, alderman and madman, magistrate and saint. We teem from the demolished slipper factories and arcades to gather in the streets of Faxton, of the villages that simply disappeared. We stand and speak our piece in our own moment, and about us fires of time and change fan out unchecked. Our words ignite upon our lips, no sooner spoken than made ash.
It is the last night of November, with the month a cold expanse of smoke and cordite and celestial signs, behind us now. The time has come to end and seal this working; to complete the story-path with absolute immersion of the teller, a commitment and a sacrifice. The moment for concluding ritual arrives, announcing itself in a change of mood and light, a sense of shapeless possibility. Up in the hazy marine dapple of the attic space, a ring of ceremonial tallow is now set to glare and slobber. In this stuttering of shine and shadow, the fixed edges of location are become ambiguous, a further loosening of the world. The information in this flickering light is that of any century.
The rite is simple, of its kind, intended only as a point of focus, a conceptual platform on which to stand amid the swirl and shift of this delusory terrain: imaginary serpents are placed at the compass points to guard against the mental snares those cardinal directions symbolize, while at the same time an appeal is made to equally symbolic virtues. Idea is the only currency in this domain, and all ideas are real ideas. A heavy language is engendered and employed to fix these images as marker buoys within the mind. This incantation and the novel both progress towards the pregnant, hanging silence of their culmination. This is how we do things here, and always have done.
Wine and passionflower and other substances of earth. Shapes painted with contorted fingers on to empty space. Deranged, of course, but then derangement is the point. Speak the desire in terms both lucid and transparent. Write it down
lest it should be forgotten when the spasm hits. Deep in the stomach now the tingling approach of horrid ecstasies. A naming and a calling, and then silence. Failure. Nothing happening, and then the rush of other. Sudden heat loss and convulsion. Hurried, white-faced navigation of a loft-ladder become an Escher staircase, only managing to reach the strip-lit ultra-violet of the bathroom as the venom surges up to spill into the yawning porcelain.
Shivering and hallucinating, with an opalescent glamour now descended even on the trailing threads of sepia bile. Pale snakes of light swim through the tangled hair. Beard jewelled with vomit, and the flickering eyes rolled back. A need to spit, to drink and wash the scalding acids from the punished throat.
Downstairs, there is a curdling of the atmosphere, a thickening of presence as the evocation’s final paragraphs approach. These words, as yet unwritten, are incipient in the loaded air. The television’s on. Drifting across the luminous, insistent window of the screen, an image of the new Crown Court, on Campbell Square behind De Senlis’s round church, penetrates the shimmer and delirium. The outcome of a murder trial, the crime occurring months back with a resident of Corby fatally assaulted in his home, all details previously withheld. The fine hairs at the nape rise up. The room grows cooler as the veil begins to tear. There’s something coming through.
Shots of the relatives, grieving and haunted as they leave the court. Something about the victim’s head: they couldn’t find it at the crime scene. Lost for weeks until discovered underneath a hedge. Found by a black dog. Dragged across the grass and pavement, through the purpling twilight of the Corby streets, the dark jaws clenched upon a pallid, waxen tuck of cheek. The imagery is risen, chill and glittering, like a dew. One of the trophy’s eyes is limp, half-closed, the grey hair caked with mud. Labrador breath, a hot and urgent whisper in the cold, deaf ear. Black jackal lips peel back, impart the snarling knowledge of Anubis, travel information for the lately dead. The head bumps through the guttered litter, nods in solemn affirmation of this grim intelligence, and knows what saints know. Round and bloody, a full stop penned in a larger hand.
A static ocean swells up, roaring in the mind. Hands raised, alarmed, into the field of vision. Gaze at incoherent characters and words that seem to crawl across the naked skin, an epidermal poetry. The lampglow is obscure and scumbled, as if filtering through smoke. There is a want of air.
Reel through the kitchen to the back door and the yard beyond, staggering out into the weed and starlight, gradually becoming calmer in the clean night breeze, beneath the slow and distant wheels of constellation. All the old, same lights. Their perfect, sombre continuity. Stand swaying here upon Phipps’ Fire Escape, the promised sanctuary of the century to come, a creaking and uncertain balcony, that is not now so far above. Through roiling clouds the landings of the vanished years below, these lower floors all lost in spark or panic and devoured already. Overhead, long rags of cirrus snag upon the arc of night, an interrupted glimpse of grace through veils of fume and soot.
These are the times we dread and hunger for. The mutter of our furnace past grows louder at our backs, with cadence more distinct. Almost intelligible now, its syllables reveal themselves. Our world ignites. The song wells up, from a consuming light.