I surreptitiously follow Peter down into the mattress, at a prudent distance, keeping a discreet eye on his progress and moving the strings to nudge him away from any direction I am not particularly pleased he has taken, to where I think he ought to be going. Sometimes the nudging works, sometimes it fails. If I get him away from the holy art book, it is almost impossible to get him out of the tall, bow legged wardrobe from Maples on the Tottenham Court Road, a furniture empire that collapsed in nineteen ninety seven although, of course, this particular time machine was bought by his newlywed parents, with his grandfather’s money, in nineteen fifty three.
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The wardrobe had two high gloss lacquered doors, and the keyholes mirrored each other, one with its Bakelite ornamentation chipped and broken, both sporting skeleton keys with ornate twisting flowery bows of a tarnished worn brass metallic colour. Nineteen fifties dark brown mirror smooth lacquer, and universes floated in the walnut veneer, black holes for Baby Belladonna to out of body travel into, rich nostalgic, almost sad sepia walnut browns and near blacks in veneer Rorschach swirling stereo test reflections and the two doors to the imagination melted and, if it was not enough for Baby Belladonna to float through the doors via the universal veneer, because the monstrous faces of ogres and goblins got in his way, then he would simply reach up and open the universe with one of the keys, usually the right hand one.
The universe inside was, initially, profoundly black and filled with an old fur coat. There were, of course, other things hung and stored away in there too, ladies leather shoes and leather ladies gloves added other scents of different leathers to the cured and dyed rabbit skins, and they all had their textures to touch and perfumes to smell.
The fur coat, however, was the universe Baby Belladonna was most interested in wrapping himself into, and it still is. When he was inside, and the wardrobe door was closed, the smell of fur and leathers and fading perfumes and face powders and the camphor all had a tranquilizing effect, and, in this fur womb, in the fur and leather dark, eyes closed, Baby Belladonna would gently press his eyes with his loosely clenched fists and thousands of multicolour universes and thousands of lonely space adventures would open up right there inside his head and he was at the center of it all, and it was dangerous, lonely sailing, and delicate too, because he only had to release the pressure a little on his eyes, or the heel of a shoe would get a little too uncomfortably under his leg where he was kneeling and he would be back home in a wardrobe again, on the Cambridge Estate, Kingston upon Thames.
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Baby Belladonna’s time travel is secure because it is a constant in a universe of constant change and that has been the function of wardrobes and cupboards under the stairs and larders and dark enclosed places for special, beautiful, time traveling flowers all through the ages, and will be so all through the ages to come, it is just that, now, I try to hold his hand on his trips and kiss his lips.
I often ask myself what would have happened to Baby Belladonna if, when, one afternoon in nineteen sixty five, when he had time travelled up to the top shelf of the wardrobe, into the well thumbed books under a pile of old handbags, gloves, and silky scarves, instead of finding himself voyaging unrecognizable in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, he had found himself sharing time and space with William S. Burroughs.
Would he have made a more successful agent of himself?
I surreptitiously follow Peter down into the mattress, I look into his eyes and kiss him on the lips.
Perhaps the universe would have been a different place. Perhaps, perhaps not. Bigger things have hung on smaller threads.
