The Course of the Heart (12 page)

We stared companionably at one another. She put her brush down and took my hand.

“Are you sure you feel OK?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

She picked the brush up again.

“I wonder about you,” she said. “What a lot you keep to yourself!”

William Blake experienced his first vision during the course of a family outing to Peckham Rye, which was at that time a village of quiet, largely agricultural character in the Parish of Camber-well. Eight or nine years old, his biographers report, William hallucinated (what else can we think?) a tree full of angels, “bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”. He escaped a thrashing, though his father wanted to give him one. More importantly, his foot was on the path. He had his idea. It wasn’t yet a burning spear, but it was never to let him down.

Whether Lawson’s daughter saw anything after David installed her in Peckham, I can’t say.

17, Hill Park lay on the left of the Rye as you looked south, caught between some bleak low-rise flats and two or three point-blocks built on a hill. A burned-out Vauxhall had sagged on to its brake drums in the street outside; the basement area was full of broken furniture—chipboard, Formica, warped and lifted veneers. If you stood on the doorstep and looked up and down the road, it was nothing but a line of skips heaped with builders’ rubbish. Inside, I never saw much more than the staircase—grimy lino, spent matches, missing banisters, a corroded sisal mat outside each door: At night the stairwell was lit by bare forty-watt bulbs, one on each landing. By day a kind of gray illumination leaked in through the skylight, high up in its shaft. You could hear the sound of rain on the glass. When you walked through the front door of the upper flat, you were faced with two or three carpeted steps then a little passage with white plasterboard walls and chocolate brown woodwork. It was like finding your way to the toilets of a tea shop in some bleak tourist town at the top of a cliff.

The morning after Lawson’s daughter arrived there, I had a call from Yaxley.

“I want you to fetch some things for me,” he said. “A few things.”

Prominent among these was a shoebox of Polaroid photographs he had taken himself, but which he never kept by him, I suspect out of fear. Magic had exhausted him sexually long before Pam, Lucas and I met him. He found it difficult to reach the levels of arousal necessary for a demanding operation. Neither was ordinary pornography of any use. One of the first tasks of my apprenticeship to him—though at the time I didn’t think of it in that light—had been to accompany him on a round of the Cambridge public lavatories once a week. He preferred the older ones, seeping and cracked, reeking of piss, which you approached down a dozen greasy stone steps. There would be a soaked uneven floor in the gloom; three stalls with shiny black doors; blue distemper flaking away above the chipped white tiling. Homosexual graffiti covered the walls, done in straight lines and little boxes, in careful expressive designer handwriting. Heterosexual commentary blundered over and around it, in a vigorous but barely legible scrawl. Where Howard had articulately written that he owned his own place and would be happy to try you out any Friday evening—including for your information a hyper-realist illustration of what he claimed to be his penis in an erect state—some drunken boy had added:

YOU POOF.

“These simple endearments,” Yaxley said. He photographed them all. “See that no one comes in for a moment.”

It was an unnecessary precaution. Places like that are always empty when you go in. A sound in the cubicles turns out to be the trickle of the cistern. Nevertheless, unwilling to be blinded however briefly in such circumstances, I was grateful to establish myself in the doorway and stare across the road—at the rain, the railway station, the woman with the dog—while Polaroid flashbulbs etched at the gloom behind me, and panel by panel Yaxley built his reredos and altarpiece.

* * *

“That man,” he had told me the day I first saw Lawson, “knows four things about the Pleroma. Three of them he learned from me. He is unaware that he knows the fourth, or that he is keeping it from me.” In some sense I couldn’t comprehend, Lawson himself was to be made to stand, by metonymy, for that fourth item of knowledge, so that its resources could be drawn upon without it being present in the world. Yaxley called this metaphysical sleight of hand an “infolding”. I pondered it as I bought or collected objects and artifacts from all over London—books from dealers in Shepherd’s Bush and Camden; secondhand garden statuary from Kent; dusty artificial flowers, hanks of hair and a jar of something which looked like preserved ginger from a woman in Golders Green—and delivered them, over the next week, to Peckham.

The upstairs flat at Number 17 could not simply receive these things. First, David must strip it bare. The furniture and carpets came out. The floorboards were scrubbed. In certain places, to erase some stain Yaxley thought might interfere with the operation, they were sanded down to reveal pinkish new wood. All stains, spills, dirty marks, carry an energy of their own. Particular attention was paid to the walls. To ensure success, all the old paper had to be taken off: above the fireplace and near the windows, Yaxley had got down through the old plaster and into the brick. Another kind of magician might have wished to preserve the resonances of Number 17; in other circumstances Yaxley himself would have valued them. But recourse to pornography is by definition a loss of confidence. Where previously he had conceived and assembled the details of such an operation on impulse, holding them together by sheer force of will, he now let caution undercut insight. He made David hire a steamer from a DIY store in Nunhead, and watched thoughtfully as twenty or thirty years of interior decoration bagged and blistered away from the yellowed, sugary plaster in front of his eyes.

“The stuff underneath’s not much better,” David told me one evening, when we met on the stairs outside his mother’s door. “These old places are rotten to the core.”

He was sweating. His clothes were covered in dust from the plastic bags of lino, plaster and broken furniture he had been carting down to the bins in the street. Clearly though, it was an effort he enjoyed: something to do. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and had a look at the parcel under my arm.

“What you got there?”

“Gethsemane.”

“You what?”

Gethsemane, in a plastic frame the color of bone. Painted in greens and golds by someone with no sense of perspective, nevertheless it had in some lights a strange stereoscopic quality. Christ swam out past the picture-plane with his arms spread wide in a gesture of welcome difficult to understand, while the trees and rocks of the Garden, laid on with a palette knife, roiled and eddied behind him like bad weather. It had been much stocked by Catholic outlets a decade before, but after scouring the secondhand shops for two or three days without result, I had taken Yaxley’s advice and tried boarded-up premises on the Old Kent Road, under the sign “ICTURE, Sean Kelly”. Icture, I thought, would resemble ichor, that fluid which runs in the veins of angels as well as kitchen beetles. Or perhaps it was a service, like acupuncture. Anyway, there the picture was, not even dusty, hanging up in a smell of old men and milk bottles, while in the back room an American pit-bull terrier fought with silent determination against its tether to get at me.

“Somethink else for His Nibs, eh?” said David. He winked.

“Is he mad, or what?”

“Make your own mind up,” I said. “How’s the girl?”

“Hardly a peep out of her. She’s with Mum most of the time.” In the day, she stuck pictures in a book, or helped with the housework. “Watches telly a lot.” It made you wonder what she did at home. You had to give her full marks for quietness, though.

“Mum’s teaching her to knit.”

I knew Lawson was in the house with us. I had passed his BMW in the street, black and shiny among the rubbish skips. I could hear his voice, ba-luddy caw pawking away in the flat upstairs. Somehow this magnified David’s good will and made it all the harder to bear. I wanted to shock him out of it. I wanted him to feel the girl’s danger. Most of all, perhaps, I wanted him to feel guilty. I pushed him into the corner of the landing and said urgently:

“This is the real daughter.”

He gave me a puzzled look.

“Yaxley’s substituting the real daughter,” I said.

“What?”

“He’s going to use Lawson’s real daughter for the operation! You must have known that!”

“Operation? I don’t—”

“Hasn’t he told you anything?” I shouted. “For Christ’s sake, David!”

He stared at me.

“I’m just helping him out,” he said eventually.

“Shit.”

The door to the top flat banged open, and down came Lawson. He was in a hurry. He had on a beautifully tailored overcoat in gray wool, which somehow accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his neck, the forward thrust of his head; and he was carrying a bottle of Louis Roederer champagne as shiny and incongruous under the yellow forty-watt light as the car outside at the curb. “I can’t be bothered with that now,” he called back up to Yaxley. “Get someone of yours to do it.” There was no answer. When he reached the landing, he inspected David, as if he had never seen him before.

“Just as a matter of interest,” he said. “What
does
your bloody mother cook all day in there?”

I don’t think he once suspected his daughter was behind the same door, watching
Game for a Laugh
and
Celebrity Squares
every evening when he went past.

David, who had never understood Lawson well enough to defend himself, could only laugh and shrug. Lawson laughed too. “Well, best be off, eh?” he said. I was in his way: he started to shove me aside, then stopped abruptly and, his hand still resting on my arm, eyed me with hatred. Yaxley appeared at the top of the stairs and smiled weakly down on all three of us, his face damp and indescribably vacant in the yellow light. Leaning forward, he looked as if he might launch himself off the top step and float out over us; or else cover us with vomit.

“I’ll remember you,” Lawson promised me softly, as if he had only now understood something.

“Oh, I’ll remember you.”

The infolding took place two or three evenings later, in the main room of the upper flat, at about nine o’clock. I arrived late and, in the end, saw very little of it.

* * *

The room was cold. On the wall surrounding the empty fireplace, Yaxley had pinned a dense mass of overlapping Polaroid photographs. From a distance, these tiny, often blurred images seemed to condense into a single sign from some randomly devised but powerful magical alphabet. Above them, like a lock to keep their meanings under control, he had hung the Gethsemane I had found on the Old Kent Road. Its central figure swam out of the cheap frame with motions of despair. In front of the fire had been placed a stripped-pine table with short bulbous legs, which in any other ritual would have taken the part of the altar. Since no actual sacrifice was to occur here, I wondered how Yaxley would use it. For a moment I had a clear vision of Lawson with his trousers down round his ankles, trying to mount his own daughter as she clung pale and goosefleshed to this object, with its cigarette burns and whitish ring-shaped stains. Then I caught a glimpse of the girl, and saw what they had done to her.

She was sprawled legs apart in a corner, naked but for a pair of white briefs designed for someone twice her age, with lace detail and legs cut very high to accentuate the pubic mound. Her ribcage and immature nipples stood out in the forty-watt light. Shadows pooled in the hollow of her collar-bone. A musing, inturned expression was on her face; but every so often she laughed inappropriately at something Yaxley or her father said. They had got her drunk on some kind of cherry liqueur, which I could smell from where I stood in the doorway at the end of the passage.

Yaxley and Lawson were occupied burning something in the grate. Yaxley’s wrists were covered in new scabs; Lawson blew on the pale blue flames until his cheeks were red. I could hear them murmuring excitedly, but I couldn’t quite see what they had set on fire—glossy paper, I thought, of the sort used for soft pornography: I could see it, wadded, reluctant to catch, curling at the edges. But its thick, stale odor was of something else entirely, wood, hair, kitchen waste. The fourth person in the room was David. David seemed drunk too. He had propped himself up against the wall near Lawson’s daughter and was staring at her small white shoulders and arms. Every so often his gaze would fix with a kind of wonder on the place between her unformed thighs where the lips of her sex were quite discernible beneath the thin white fabric.

Apart from the girl they were all fully dressed.

I watched for a minute or two in silence. Lawson was the first to notice me standing there.

“I told you he’d turn up in the end,” he said to Yaxley; and then to me: “Traffic bad, was it?”

His daughter laughed.

“See any dead cats?” she asked me.

“Christ, Yaxley!” I appealed.

He turned away from whatever he was doing. His eyes were yellow and empty, his face gray. He looked like a cancer patient. “I’m not going to be involved in this,” I told him.

“Yes you are,” he said.

David laughed suddenly.

“Fucking hell,” he said. “Eh?”

“Yes you are,” Yaxley repeated.

“Come here, lovey,” Lawson said absently to the girl.

She pulled herself to her feet, then clutched at herself with both hands.

“Daddy, I’ve wet my knickers.”

I took a pace into the room, said, “Lawson, this is your
daughter
,” then when I saw the expression on his face, turned round and walked straight out down the stairs and into the street. Rain was falling through the sodium light, pattering on the leaves of the sycamore trees. It would have been easy enough to walk into Peckham and catch a train into London Bridge. I meant to go home to St. Mark’s Crescent and tell Katherine everything. I knew she would help me. Instead I crossed the road, positioned myself in a doorway with the collar of my coat turned up, and stared numbly at the lighted upper windows of 17, Hill Park.