Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Read online

  She sings: Cold blows the wind, tonight, my love,

  And a few drops of rain.

  With a taper made from a manuscript folded into a flute, he slyly takes a light from the fire.

  I never had but one true love

  In cold earth she was lain.

  He sets light to her fingers, one after the other.

  A twelve month and a day being gone

  The dead began to speak.

  Eyes close. Her pupils contain in each a flame.

  Who is that sitting on my grave

  Who will not let me sleep?

  All sleep. Her eyes go out. She sleeps.

  He rearranges the macabre candelabra so that the light from her glorious hand will fall between her legs and then he busily turns back her petticoats; the mortal candles shine. Do not think it is not love that moves him; only love moves him.

  He feels no fear.

  An expression of low cunning crosses his face. Taking from his back pocket a pair of enormous pliers, he now, one by one, one by one by one, extracts the sharp teeth just as the midwife did.

  All silent, all still.

  Yet, even as he held aloft the last fierce canine in triumph above her prostrate and insensible form in the conviction he had at last exorcised the demons from desire, his face turned ashen and sear and he was overcome with the most desolating anguish to hear the rumbling of the wheels outside. Unbidden, the coachman came; the grisly emissary of her highborn kinsman shouted imperiously: ‘Overture and beginners, please!’ She popped the plug of spiritous linen between his lips; she swept off with a hiss of silk.

  The sleepers woke and told him he was drunk; but his Virginia breathed no more!

  After a breakfast of red-eye, as he was making his toilet before the mirror, he suddenly thought he would shave off his moustache in order to become a different man so that the ghosts who had persistently plagued him since his wife’s death would no longer recognise him and would leave him alone. But, when he was clean-shaven, a black star rose in the mirror and he saw that his long hair and face folded in sorrow had taken on such a marked resemblance to that of his loved and lost one that he was struck like a stock or stone, with the cut-throat razor in his hand.

  And, as he continued, fascinated, appalled, to stare in the reflective glass at those features that were his own and yet not his own, the bony casket of his skull began to agitate itself as if he had succumbed to a tremendous attack of the shakes.

  Goodnight, sweet prince.

  He was shaking like a backcloth about to be whisked off into oblivion.

  Lights! he called out.

  Now he wavered; horrors! He was starting to dissolve!

  Lights! more lights! he cried, like the hero of a Jacobean tragedy when the murdering begins, for the black star was engulfing him.

  On cue, the laser light on the Republic blasts him.

  His dust blows away on the wind.

  Overture and Incidental Music for

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Call me the Golden Herm.

  My mother bore me in the Southern wild but, ‘she, being mortal, of that boy did die,’ as my Aunt Titania says, though ‘boy’ in the circumstances is pushing it, a bit, she’s censoring me, there, she’s rendering me unambiguous in order to get the casting director out of a tight spot. For ‘boy’ is correct, as far as it goes, but insufficient. Nor is the sweet South in the least wild, oh, dear, no! It is the lovely land where the lemon trees grow, multiplied far beyond the utmost reaches of your stultified Europocentric imaginations. Child of the sun am I, and of the breezes, juicy as mangoes, that mythopoeically caress the Coast of Coramandel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian shore where everything is bright and precise as lacquer.

  My Aunt Titania. Not, I should assure you, my natural aunt, no blood bond, no knot of the umbilical in the connection, but my mother’s best friend, to whom, before she departed, she entrusted me, and, therefore, always called by me ‘auntie’.

  Titania, she, the great fat, showy, pink and blonde thing, the Memsahib, I call her, Auntie Tit-tit-tit-ania (for her tits are the things you notice first, size of barrage balloons), Tit-tit-tit-omania boxed me up in a trunk she bought from the Army and Navy Stores, labelled it ‘Wanted on Voyage’ (oh, yes, indeed!) and shipped me here.

  Here! to – Atishoo! – catch my death of cold in this dripping bastard wood. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain!

  ‘Flaming June’, the sarcastic fairies mutter, looking glum, as well they might, poor dears, their little wings all sodden and plastered to their backs, so water-logged they can hardly take off and no sooner airborne than they founder in the pelting downpour, crash-land among the plashy bracken furls amid much piteous squeaking. ‘Never such weather,’ complain the fairies, amid the brakes of roses putting on – I must admit – a brave if pastel-coloured floral show amidst the inclemency of the weather, and the flat dishes of the pale wild roses spill over with the raindrops that have collected upon them as the bushes shudder in the reverberations of dozens and dozens of teeny tiny sneezes, for no place on their weeny anatomies to store a handkerchief and all the fairies have got shocking colds as well as I.

  Nothing in my princely, exquisite, peacock-jewelled heredity prepared me for the dank, grey, English midsummer. A midsummer nightmare, I call it. The whirling winds have wrenched the limbs off even the hugest oaks and brought down altogether the more tottery elms so that they sprawl like collapsed drunks athwart dishevelled fairy rings. Thunder, lightning, and, at night, the blazing stars whizz down and bomb the wood . . . nothing temperate about your temperate climate, dear, I snap at Aunt Titania, but she blames it all on Uncle Oberon, whose huff expresses itself in thunder and he makes it rain when he abuses himself, which it would seem he must do almost all the time, thinking of me, the while, no doubt. Of ME!

  For Oberon is passing fell and wrath

  Because that she, as her attendant hath

  A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;

  She never had so sweet a changeling;

  And jealous Oberon would have the child!

  ‘Boy’ again, see; which isn’t the half of it. Misinformation. The patriarchal version. No king had nothing to do with it; it was all between my mother and my auntie, wasn’t it.

  Besides, is a child to be stolen? Or given? Or taken? Or sold in bondage, dammit? Are these blonde English fairies the agents of protocolonialism?

  To all this, in order to preserve my complicated integrity, I present a façade of passive opposition. I am here. I am.

  I am Herm, short for hermaphrodite verus, one testis, one ovary, half of each but all complete and more, much more, than the sum of my parts. This elegantly retractable appendage, here . . . is not the tribade’s well-developed clit, but the veritable reproductive erectile tissue, while the velvet-lipped and deliciously closable aperture below it is, I assure you, a viable avenue of the other gender. So there.

  Take a look. I’m not shy. Impressive, huh?

  And I am called the Golden Herm, for I am gold all over; when I was born, wee, tiny, playful cherubs filled their cheeks and lungs and blew, blew the papery sheets of beaten gold all over my infant limbs, to which they stuck and clung. See me shine!

  And here I stand, under the dripping trees, in the long, rank, soaking grass among draggletail dog-daisies and the branched candelabras of the buttercups from whom the gusty rain has knocked off all the petals, leaving their warty green heads bald. And the bloody crane’s bill. And the stinging nettles, those Portuguese men-o’-war of the woodland, who gave me so many nasty shocks when I first met them. And pease-blossom and mustard-seed and innumerable unknown-to-me weeds, the dreary, washed-out, pinks, yellows and Cambridge blues of them. Boring. In the underpinnings of the trees, all soggy and floral as William Morris wallpaper in an abandoned house, I, in order to retain my equilibrium and psychic balance, meditate in the yogic posture known as The Tree, that is, on one leg.

  Bearer of both arrow and target, wound
and bow, spoon and porringer, in my left hand I hold a lotus, looking a bit the worse for wear by now. My snake coils round my other arm.

  I am golden, stark naked and bi-partite.

  On my golden face, a fixed, archaic grin. Except when –

  Atishoo!

  Damn’ occidental common cold virus.

  Atishoo.

  The Golden Herm stood in the green wood.

  This wood is, of course, nowhere near Athens; the script is a positive maze of false leads. The wood is really located somewhere in the English midlands, possibly near Bletchley, where the great decoding machine was sited. Correction: this wood was located in the English midlands until oak, ash and thorn were chopped down to make room for a motorway a few years ago. However, since the wood existed only as a structure of the imagination, in the first place, it will remain, in the second place, as a green, decorative margin to the eternity the poet promised for himself. The English poet; his is, essentially, an English wood. It is the English wood.

  The English wood is nothing like the dark, necromantic forest in which the Northern European imagination begins and ends, where its dead and the witches live, and Baba-yaga stalks about in her house with chicken’s feet looking for children in order to eat them. No. There is a qualitative, not a quantitative, difference between this wood and that forest. The difference does not exist just because a wood contains fewer trees than a forest and covers less ground. That is just one of the causes of the difference and does not explain the effects of the difference.

  For example, an English wood, however marvellous, however metamorphic, cannot, by definition, be trackless, although it might well be formidably labyrinthine. Yet there is always a way out of a maze, and, even if you cannot find it for a while, you know that it is there. A maze is a construct of the human mind, and not unlike it; lost in the wood, this analogy will always console. But to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world, to be abandoned by the light, to lose yourself utterly with no guarantee you will either find yourself or else be found, to be committed against your will – or, worse, of your own desire – to a perpetual absence from humanity, an existential catastrophe, for the forest is as infinitely boundless as the human heart.

  But the wood is finite, a closure; you purposely mislay your way in the wood, for the sake of the pleasure of roving, the temporary confusion of direction is in the nature of a holiday from which you will come home refreshed, with your pockets full of nuts, your hands full of wildflowers and the cast feather of a bird in your cap. That forest is haunted; this wood is enchanted.

  The very perils of the wood, so many audio-visual aids to a pleasurable titillation of mild fear; the swift rattle of an ascending pheasant, velvet thud of an owl, red glide of the fox – these may all ‘give you a fright’, but, here, neither hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt your spirit because the English lobs and hobs reflect nothing more than a secular faith in the absence of harm in nature, part of the credit sheet of a temperate climate. (Here that, Herm? No tigers burn bright, here; no scaly pythons, no armoured scorpions.) Since the last English wolf was killed, there is nothing savage among the trees to terrify you. All is mellow in the filtered light, where Robin Wood, the fertility spirit, lurks in the green shade; this wood is kind to lovers.

  Indeed, you might call the wood the common garden of the village, a garden almost as intentionally wild as one of Bacon’s ‘natural wildernesses’, where every toad carries a jewel in its head and all the flowers have names, nothing is unknown – this kind of wilderness is not an otherness.

  And always something to eat! Mother Nature’s greengrocery store; sorrel for soup, mushrooms, dandelion and chickweed – there’s your salad, mint and thyme for seasoning, wild strawberries and blackberries and, in the autumn, a plenitude of nuts. Nebuchadnezzar, in an English wood, need not have confined his appetite to grass.

  The English wood offers us a glimpse of a green, unfallen world a little closer to Paradise than we are.

  Such is the English wood in which we see the familiar fairies, the blundering fiancés, the rude mechanicals. This is the true Shakespearian wood – but it is not the wood of Shakespeare’s time, which did not know itself to be Shakespearian, and therefore felt no need to keep up appearances. No. The wood we have just described is that of nineteenth-century nostalgia, which disinfected the wood, cleansing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it. Or, rather, denaturing, castrating these beings until they came to look just as they do in those photographs of fairy folk that so enraptured Conan Doyle. It is Mendelssohn’s wood.

  ‘Enter these enchanted woods . . .’ who could resist such a magical invitation?

  However, as it turns out, the Victorians did not leave the woods in quite the state they might have wished to find them.

  The Puck was obsessively fascinated by the exotic visitor. In some respects, it was the attraction of opposites, for, whereas the Golden Herm was sm-o-o-o-th, the Puck was hairy. On these chill nights of June, Puck inside his hairy pelt was the only one kept warm at all. Hairy. Shaggy. Especially about the thighs. (And, h’m, on the palms of his hands.)

  Shaggy as a Shetland pony when naked and sometimes goes on all fours. When he goes on all fours, he whinnies; or else he barks.

  He is the lub, the lubber fiend, and sometimes he plays at being the nut-brown house-sprite for whom a bowl of milk is left outside the door, although, if you want to be rid of him, you must leave him a pair of trousers; he thinks a gift of trousers is an insult to his sex, of which he is most proud. Nesting in his luxuriant pubic curls, that gleam with the deep-fried gloss of the woodcarvings of Grinling Gibbons, see his testicles, wrinkled ripe as medlars.

  Puck loves hokey-pokey and peek-a-boo. He has relations all over the place – in Iceland, the puki; the Devonshire pixy; the spook of the Low Countries are all his next of kin and not one of them is up to any good. That Puck!

  The tender little exiguities that cluster round the Queen of the Fairies do not like to play with the Puck because he is so rough and rips their painted wings in games of tag and pulls the phantasmal legs off the grey gnats that draw Titania’s wee coach through the air, kisses the girls and makes them cry, creeps up and swings between the puce, ithyphallic foxglove spires above Titania’s bed so the raindrops fall and scatter in a drenching shower and up she wakes. Spiteful!

  Puck is no more polymorphously perverse than all the rest of these submicroscopic particles, his peers, yet there is something particularly rancid and offensive about his buggery and his undinism and his frotteurism and his scopophilia and his – indeed, my very paper would blush, go pink as an invoice, should I write down upon it some of the things Puck gets up to down in the reeds by the river, as he is distantly related to the great bad god Pan and, when in the mood, behaves in a manner uncommon in an English wood, although familiar in the English public school.

  By the Puck’s phallic orientation, you know him for a creature of King Oberon’s.

  Hairy Puck fell in love with Golden Herm and often came to frolic round the lovely living statue in the moonlit glade, although he could not, happily for the Herm, get near enough to touch because Titania forethoughtfully had thrown a magical cordon sanitaire around her lovely adoptive, so that s/he was, as it were, in an invisible glass case, such as s/he might find herself in, some centuries later, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Against this transparent, intangible barrier, the Puck often flattened still further his already snub nose.

  The Herm removed his/her left foot from its snug nest in her/his crotch and placed it on the ground. With one single, fluent, gracile movement of transition, s/he shifted on to the other leg. The lotus and the snake, on either arm, stayed where they were.

  The Puck, pressed tight against Titania’s magic, sighed heavily, stepped back a few paces and began energetically to play with himself.

  Have you seen fairy sperm? We mortals call it, cuckoo spit.

  And no passing, cla
yey mortal, tramping through the wood on great, heavy feet, scattering the fairies who twitter like bats in their fright, just as such a mortal could never hear them, so he would never spot the unafraid Herm, sticking stock-still as a trance.

  And if you did chance to spy him/her, you would think the little yellow idol was a talisman dropped from a gypsy pocket, perhaps, or a charm fallen off a girl’s bracelet, or else the gift from inside a very expensive cracker.

  Yet, if you picked up the beautiful object and held it on the palm of your hand, you would feel how warm it was, as if somebody had been holding it tight before you came and only just put it down.

  And, if you watched long enough, you would see the golden sequins of the eyelids move.

  At which a wind of strangeness would rise and blow away the wood and all within it.

  Just as your shadow can grow big and then shrink to almost nothing, and then swell up, again, so can these shadows, these insubstantial bubbles of the earth, these ‘beings’ to whom the verb, ‘to be’, may not be properly applied, since, in our sense, they are not. They cannot be; they cannot cast their own shadows, for who has seen the shadow of a shadow? Their existences are necessarily moot – do you believe in fairies? Their lives lead always just teasingly almost out of the corners of the eyes of their observers, so it is possible they were only, all the time, a trick of the light . . . such half-being, with such a lack of public acknowledgement, is not conducive to any kind of visual consistency among them. So they may take what shapes they please.

  The Puck can turn himself into anything he likes: a three-legged stool, in order to perpetrate the celebrated trick (‘Then slip I from her bum, down topples she’) so beloved in the lower forms of grammar schools when the play is read aloud round the class because it is suitable for children because it is about fairies; a baby Fiat; a grand piano; anything!