The shock hit her in the strangest of ways. An unknown taste entered her mouth; her spine shivered, and she had the overpowering sense of being very far away, of being tiny while her body bloated, expanding to become the size of a continent. A flapping edge of swoon treacled her eyes, making everything peripheral to her speeding distance. And worst of all, in this ocean of disgust, fright and repulsion, delight quivered, on a far-off island, on the other side of the world: in her womb.
It was two days before she could bring herself to return. She did not know how she had escaped that last afternoon; her memory had been rinsed to make space for her imagination. The image of their unholy coupling had crowded into her skull, the elbows, knees and heels knocking against the bone. When she opened the door, he was standing by the shutters, picking at paint. He turned and anxiously began to speak. She put her finger to her lips and hushed him.
‘Say nothing,’ she said. ‘Say nothing.’
She crossed the room, taking his raised hand away from the shutters and holding it tightly in hers. Quietly, she led him through the room into the adjoining bedroom, guiding him onto the edge of the bed, and unbuttoning her long raincoat. She stood before him, naked and trembling. He undressed quickly, fumbling with the buttons while she sat next to him. His last garment discarded, he placed his hands on her shoulders and felt her shudder. He was startled by her softness and warmth, and she shivered in the excitement of wrongness, the fear of the unknown and her commitment to the untold levels of power she knew she would wield from that point on. He ran his hands along her body, feeling the curves swell against his touch. She had the same contours as Luluwa, but his first teacher’s cool hardness had never moved under the pressure of his body and her rigidity had been the height of his eroticism. Now, the heat and pliancy was transferred; she was like him, and they exchanged pressures by exquisite degrees. His fingers touched the inside of her legs, leaving tiny flakes of paint from under his nails. There was a jolt when he brushed against her pubic hair. He lowered his head and looked deep into her nakedness. An unmapped cog turned in the pale engine of his near-humanity.
They coupled for two hours, shifting positions and angles until every aspect had been achieved. He fell into sleep while still inside her, his weight balanced across her. She looked down across his back at his breathing. He was drawing out of her, leaving a glistening trail across her thigh, in the shadow of his body. His penis had an anti-clockwise spiral, and turned as it retracted. In future couplings, she would find herself watching it in fascination, but for now the motion was hidden and proclaimed itself in a tickling sensation that made her squirm, waking him from his total slumber.
It had been Ghertrude’s first time with another. She felt tired and exhilarated. There was no blood – she had taken her own virginity many years before. She had learned the conclave joys of auto-satisfaction through
hours of practice, and used the secret acts to inform her clandestine ways. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, the way it elevated her above common appetite. The day was a fissure in her containment, one that she would monitor with precise care.
Ishmael lay sprawled across the bed, ecstatic and soothed by his own pleasure, feeling his male dominance rise for the first time on the third floor. He reached out for her as she moved away from him, his fingers just touching her hips as she grabbed her coat and prepared to leave. He wanted to say something warm and appreciative, but did not have the language. Beneath his heart, there was a subtle and churning bonding, and he wanted to be able to stroke and soothe her with its gentle fire. She left him, unrelieved of his thoughts, and hurried downstairs to the bathroom on the second floor, where she had prepared a douche of alkaline salts.
* * *
I feel as if I have been asleep, asleep too long. My dreams, if they are dreams, are always in advance of my sleep, awaiting me to continue their tale to unwind their continuity. In daylight, they ache continuously. I have become bewildered by their closeness and my distance. I have been swallowed to this spot of land, the previous arrows stitching the way to here. I cannot see the bow, which must have fallen beneath me, lying somewhere in this place of contradiction, where it smells of snow and glows humid. My feet had held the ground before, but now I am unattached, and the roots and sinews of my pain nag at my hope in dopey, vague wafts. I am being erased by familiarity, the sense of knowing this journey from before. The arrow’s path has made me as vacant as the half-light landscape around me.
There she moves; there in the scrub grass, wire and rotted paper, she turns towards my hand again. I have been too slow on this journey, the
air and sky has seduced me. No blood has been shed, and history cannot move without this. I have to cut the light with blood, let her exhale and twist in my hand. Tonight, I will divide a life and paint the future road glorious. Enough of these shallows: the cities lie on the other side of the great forest, and I will burn my way towards them. She is in my hand, demanding arrows and distance.
I loosen the first blue arrow into the evening, towards the first star, which has risen over the lip of the world and would set amongst the far-off trees. The arrow I release stole its colour from the
Bunga telang
, which grew at the edge of our garden. Its small, vivid flowers give it a female instinct that brushes the curve of the day, telling me to stop at this place and use the last moment of its light to set my direction for tomorrow. I do this as the breeze freshens, and its coolness reminds me of sleep, like a whistle towards an impatient story.
* * *
With a fine sable brush, he corrected the moment of death, magnified the tiny errors and removed them. After his focused labours, the crashing horse would be perfect.
Horses had guided his life and crippled his journey. He had agreed to create the last set of images to kill the horse. When his brain was on fire, all those years ago, after the stagecoach had overturned and the solid rock that collided with his skull had rearranged his head, he saw them all the time, galloping in headaches, their iron hooves sparking the dendrite fuse-wire. He saw them cantering, all turning to white, eyes rolling savage. He heard them walking, their echo mocking the vacant night streets below his hospital bed. They paced his beginning and his demise with an equal, measured step. He had been empty before the accident, a man filled with
vapour, aimless and devout, seeking a place in the world where he might gain weight and merit. When the speeding stagecoach had tripped on the unseen root, it had spun into the air and splintered, mangling and spilling all the lives it carried. He alone survived, tossed amongst the wrenched luggage and the broken, kicking mustangs. He had cut himself out of the canvas, a petticoat staunching his head, blood swooning clear of the hooves that were now running against the sky, trying to gain purchase on the dying clouds.
The court had awarded him funds for a new beginning. On some of the papers, he altered his name again, to match the glitches and eruptions in his new brain. He was topping up with existence, and it pleased him. By the time he saw the doctor in England, he was becoming known. Only the best was good enough for this rising stalwart of art and science.
Their first consultation was in the hospital by the river, at London Bridge. He was early for the appointment; this was something that happened constantly. He deplored tardiness and overcompensated for it in every aspect of his life. He would rehearse the most trivial of deeds: framing the minor in advance of its time; having keys in his hands four streets away from home; talking under his breath to have a convincing answer to questions that would never be put to him. He forced himself to stop on the bridge and allow the slowness of actual time to catch up to his velocity. Placing his hands on the gritty stone, he looked down into the frantic activity of the Pool of London; cargo ships were moored three-deep along its banks, their masts creaking against a spiny forest of cranes and the new verticality of the smoke from the steamers, all extending higher than the buildings that clung, crablike, to the land; dozens of barges obtusely nudged and grated each other in the restless tide and the wake of commerce; hundreds of small craft ferried to and fro, carrying pilots, passengers and information. Every surface seethed and bristled with working men; stevedores and lightermen moved tons upon tons of goods, and exchanged cargos in what looked like ceaseless confusion.
At times, the river could not be seen at all. The vast activity smothered it, and the detritus it bred was like a rough woven carpet, heaving over a secret turmoil. It was impossible to believe it was the same river which so gently flowed through his home town. In Kingston, its broad ripple gave reflection and beauty, it was for fishing, idle boating and rumination. There, you could smell its vitality. The tar, smoke, sewage and proximity of Billingsgate gave the stretch in front of him a very different signature.
He pulled the great watch from his pocket and flipped it open. It had been the only thing he had kept of his family whilst on his travels; they had given it to him to ease his departure and secure at least one dimension in the distant colonies. He squinted at the Roman numerals. Time had finally caught up with him, and he started to walk briskly towards the Surrey Side.
William Withey Gull was on schedule. His consulting room sat high on the brow of the building, facing the river. The spire of Southwark Cathedral and the dome of St. Paul’s could be aligned from his oriel window.
Like them, the two men were almost cartoon opposites: Gull, opulent, padded, slick; a man grounded and in possession of his life; he retained the bones of his labouring family, held them in check with fine but simple tailoring; he wore his growing eminence in saturated gravity. Muybridge, lean and dry, a longing husked in doubt; frowning himself into biblical status; nervous, darting and ill.
They shook hands, each gauging the other. Muybridge sat, and proceeded to relate his medical history: the condition of his skull since the accident, the shifts of perception. Gull stood behind him as he talked, examining the cranium of the agitated man, feeling the words reverberate beneath Muybridge’s scalp. He held the cup of the occiput and moved his hand forward, until it felt the ridge in the bregma, the
overriding bone. He fingered the coronal suture, sensing its tension under his controlled pressure. The motion of his square hands under the long, matted hair made it look like a bizarre tableau of ventriloquism; he moved them further forwards to determine the displacement or division in the nasofrontal suture. He then sat back down behind his Jurassic desk, and began to make notes of his observations.
‘Was it your face that took the impact of the crash?’
The patient put his hand to his face and covered his eyes and forehead. ‘Here,’ he said.
‘Tell me,’ the surgeon said, ‘when you came to after the crash, what sensations did you feel? What sensory images do you remember?’
‘I smelt cinnamon, and everything was blurred, like a double exposure, for days.’ His hand fingered the scar where the bone had peeped through that terrible day. ‘Cinnamon and burnt leather; a numbness in my hands; and the horse. I was lying on the earth, near one of the dying horses, staring at it, as it lay on its back, a slithering superimposition of many bodies, multiple legs outstretched. I did not know which of us was upside-down.’
‘How do you sleep?’
‘Badly. Sometimes not at all.’
Unsurprised at the answer, Gull nodded and made a mark in the open book on his desk.
‘Is that a bad sign?’ asked Muybridge.
‘No, not for you. Sleep is a complex matter, the body only needs an hour or so. But the mind requires more, and so the soul sometimes becomes involved, and greedy.’
‘I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Gull.’ But before Muybridge could press his confusion, Gull had sealed the matter and continued in a different direction.
The questions lasted for twenty minutes. Then the surgeon moved across the room to one of his glass-fronted cabinets and selected an instrument from within. He carefully wound its clockwork mechanisms and strapped
it onto his patient’s head. It was made of brass and glass, with a delicate set of folding blinkers and mirrors, some darkened by plating. The surgeon pulled up a chair to face his patient, and adjusted the metal discs, close to the sides of Muybridge’s worried eyes. Both his hands worked the device, bringing his face so close to Muybridge’s that each could smell the other’s breath. Tiny ratchet clicks announced the adjustments.
‘It’s a peripherscope,’ the surgeon explained. ‘It should interest you, being a scholar of the optic world.’ He then moved his chair and physically turned the patient’s head towards the oriel window, setting a clamp on his neck and chin. ‘Just like one of your photographic portraits,’ he said mildly. ‘Now, look through the central panel of the window and focus on the dome.’
The patient wanted to correct him about the old-fashioned portraits, in which the sitter was secured in a metal frame, held still while the slow camera collected their deathlike image. He had long since dispensed with such artificial contrivance. He would explain his experiments in chemical preparation of film, he would…
‘The dome, please!’ the surgeon demanded. The middle pane of glass was different to the rest, clearer, with a greenish hue. The distant dome was framed in its bright confines. The patient stared. ‘Now, please, do not move, just stare at the dome.’
These were the surgeon’s last words, as he paced from one side to the other, behind the patient. He touched the headset, activating spinning discs and minute reflections of light, almost out of vision, like the suns and moons of distant planets, contained in an unstable darkness inside the corners of the patient’s eyes. A night which shimmered with endless space, drawing light particles from inside his vision, from his surroundings, even from the glowing dome. Outside, time was changing and the tide of the seething river had turned back towards the sea. Something in the space between the double dome fluttered and shifted in unison.