“I believe, I have faith, I have faith.” She recited under her breath for the umpteenth time. “I believe!” She prayed, as if, if she repeated it enough, it would magically turn into the truth, not just any old untrustworthy truth of hers, or anyone else’s come to that, but she prayed, as if “The Real Truth” would be revealed, would be visited upon her.
“There are gods, trillions of gods, trillions in the way back then, trillions in the here and now, trillions yet to come, in trillions of infected heads. In trillions of heads a different figment of a distinctly rusted imagination....” I whispered to myself and left it at that, because she had lost me and I her and, at long last, I had seen through to the corrosion that was eating away at her beauty, I had travelled back into a rusty sepia Sunday vision, and saw that it was not her fault, none of it was her fault, but I could no longer bring myself to feel anything for her anymore, no pity, no anger, no love, nothing.
It had been a lopsided kind of conversation, a lopsided relationship. I had, finally, been out manoeuvred by the ghostly goblins lurking in the shadows in her past.
Somewhere in my head William tried to console me, “You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort, as if you were dismayed: be cheerful, sir.”
She was a vision. I had first met her when I was six, in the inferno, amid the cinematic hell fires, amid all the heroic pain and death, suffering and guilt, amid tempests, plagues, and an occasional miracle, imparted and lived and believed in, as children will believe, in the passageways and cramped, dusty dark brown varnished offices that served as classes in the slightly musty Methodist church hall that was our Sunday school. She was truly a miracle and, in the end, over the years, I only wanted to go there to be in the presence of the miracle that she was. She was hope.
The white car had backed out across the pavement and down the kerb, making us check our step. It was rather over full of happy faces and movement, full of theatrical colour. It was an incident that seemed a touch sinister on that warm summer’s day months ago. It caused me a momentary shudder, but was quickly forgotten, filed away in one of those half empty cupboards floating about somewhere in the back of my mind.
By that time she had already numbered and labelled, codified me as “furniture” and, I had an inkling, offensive furniture no less.
“Well, who am I to argue?” I thought to myself.
“You have no faith!” she had lamented over and over in her soft, sweet, resigned tone of voice, and I had no words left to say.
“Our revels are now ended.” William rattled at me from somewhere in my head.
So, one day, when I was feeling particularly troubled and thoughtful, one sticky evening, facing yet another dreary, dusty Sunday school lamentation, I melted through the rumpled up sheets into our pale blue covered foam mattress with its little white flower design and, thus losing the power of speech, which never came that easily at the best of times, I was unable to utter a single word.
I was melting away, into and through things, and deep down in that foam mattress there was a vast sepia sea and a shadow, a misty rectangular shape, a mirage. “Perhaps Moses is bringing me a tablet,” said something in my head, but I had to work for it and I kind of drifted towards it and the closer I got the more obviously it became a holy book I began to remember from my childhood days.
It was coming for me too. The closer we got to each other the clearer the image became and the holy book was just there, in the corner, against the skirting boards, under the back, left hand foot of mother’s wardrobe, there so as to stop the thing rocking on the uneven floorboards of her bay windowed bedroom. It was art, with a grey cloth hardback cover, the Tate Gallery, Illustrations, from The British School, a nineteen fifties edition.
While pondering my slightly suffocating sepia tinted predicament, I arrived, by and by, at this conclusion,- I had always thought of furniture as accommodating, though not necessarily comfortable, but now it was all just simply empty.
I was empty but the furniture was full of me and so was my mother’s book and its images and so I drifted into Etty’s rippled sepia stream with the bather, at the doubtful breeze alarmed, as I had done so often as a child, because the bather was beautiful and somehow forbidden and I wanted to be with beauty and so I was, I was momentarily consoling beauty and I was at rest on page fifty, reference six one four, and it was definitely not absurd being naked and up to my knees in that cool sepia coloured stream soothing my alarmed bather, because it was surely I that had caused the ripple of alarm in the first instance.
Knock, knock! Knock knock, on the wardrobe door,-William again, “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air.”
And I was empty, and alone with beauty, and I was free and it was not absurd!
Later, as Victoria and I walked on down the windy street toward some trivial chore, I suddenly felt she was missing. She had been following, just a step behind because of the crowds all going about their little businesses, but I could easily have held her hand, if I had so chosen. And so, quietly shocked and chilled by the sensation of emptiness, I glanced back to see her in the slightly, strangely familiar white and beige car I had seen over the weeks before, but which had never really registered in my memory, only in my nostalgia, and I felt the full absurdity of it all.
Then said William, somewhere in the back of my mind, “And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.”
I turned the sepia picture pages over and over again, on through Blake’s infernos, looking for reference sixteen forty, on and on pages more pages in the sepia lacquered rocking wardrobes of my nostalgia and then, suddenly on page fifty seven, Hope, and I was there and Watts’ Hope was blind again and somehow yet again so utterly, attractively, masochistic! So Hope’s beauty grew before my eyes, before my emotions, although blind and bound, because Hope’s hope was free while blind faith burnt forever in divine flames. I kissed her neck, I brushed her cheek with my lips.
William chided me, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep....”
Victoria was in the rear seat, kerbside, pressed awkwardly against the window of the two- tone Zephyr, with the absurd clowns applying makeup to her face and she shared with them such a beautiful smile, such an aura of contentment that I had to confide to myself, “Well, it must have been true. It must have been pretty irritating, to say the least, for her to have lived with the furniture!” But, now I was smiling because I was empty, and alone, and I was free and, for an instant, nothing seemed quite so absurd anymore.
I understood what William said when, just then, the next instant, he warned me, “Should be, but, it isn’t always the furniture men that do the moving!” Now, this was, of course, a bit strange because, as far as I could remember having read, he had never written anything at all like that.
References,-
Blake, The Simoniac Pope, Hell Canto 19.
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
Etty, The Bather, At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed.
Ford, The Zephyr Zodiac, 1954-1956
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV.
Watts, Hope.
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