The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath: From the Peculiar Adventures of John Lovehart, Esq., Volume 1 (Notebooks of John Loveheart, E) (10 page)

W
hen Goliath rescued
me from the clock and lifted me deep within his arms, I remember closing my eyes, keeping them shut. Soft darkness in my head, pounding, fizzing pressure. A sheep’s head boiling in the pot. For the light was burning my eyes; like grandfather striking matches to ignite his tobacco pipe, gripped by his great fingers, those dirty sausages. The flame, a phosphorous green glow with something alien underneath. He spat on the flame to put it out.

That’s what you do with fire

G
oliath had lifted
me out of the clock, my coffin. An alien whiff surrounding me, as the hinges creaked open. I had been swimming, I had been drowning, I had been with the dead, talking with ghosts. But he carried me away, far away. My eyes shut tight. To Egypt, to Egypt.

I
was holding his hand
, under a sun that looked like a lemon floating in the sky.

“Why is it so bright?” I said, peering squinty eyed.

Goliath squeezed my hand. “To sizzle up the demons.”

We were standing outside a lopsided wooden bookshop in Cairo. It was painted orange and pink with little balconies and pot plants with creeping greenish fingers. Goliath showed me around Cairo while we were staying with his father, the archaeologist: he is a man who digs up the dead and finds secret things.

I know I am supposed to be with Goliath. I am sewn into him, the threads in my tummy criss-crossed with his. If you cut us apart we fall to pieces.

In the street was a man with a donkey, the saddlebags loaded up with books for delivery. I patted the donkey’s nose. He smelt of earthy things and warm fuzzy fur. Wet tongue, black flies buzz like wicked angels around his eyes. I slapped them away. We walked onwards down the street, the air smelling of sweet-shit and honey. A sort of fairy stench. I liked the smell of this place, I liked the feel of Goliath’s great hand and its black fuzz of hair. He held me so tight, a bearish grip. That is what safety feels like. Safety is a great bear standing beside you.

I
would think
,
If you touch me again, Grandfather, he will crush you with his great paws. Chomp on your bones. Lick your blood from his fur. Leave no trace of you.

We passed a café where men were sitting smoking tobacco with their snake pipes. They watched us pass, I think the colour of my hair caught their eyes. Grandpa always said my hair was too red. The Devil likes red, he said. The Devil likes red and little girls.

“They are staring at me,” I said.

Goliath rubbed my head with his great hand, so my hair would stick up. “Because you look like a little fire imp,” and then he picked me up into his arms and carried me onto his shoulders. I got a whiff of the tobacco and its hot, smoky beetle-scent. I waved at the pipe smokers, who wore long white nightshirts, as though sleepy and ready for bed. I thought, I am a fire imp. I am a fire imp. I am fire.

And someone will try to put me out.

I reached upwards towards the lemon floating in the sky. I saw boys sewing a tent with ripples of colour like peacock eyes: dazzling emerald and deep-sea blues, and they were smiling and laughing. Goliath pointed to the university – its entrance carved in leaf-like patterns. A student sat on the steps, putting on his slipper-like shoe. There was a hole in it and his toe was sticking out. We continued along the streets of Cairo, hot and yellow, burnt. White donkeys with cargo, bright birds in wicker cages, moon symbols on doors and onion shaped towers reaching into the sky like telescopes. I wondered if there were princesses in the towers? Hair like a cloth of gold? But the princesses in Egypt would have hair as black as nightfall. Black as a theatre curtain closing. Black as an ending.

I saw the heads of men up here, little white caps and coloured turbans. Heads floating towards a blue Mosque. Star shapes imprinted on the walls. A temple of the night sky. I reached out and touched the magic shapes with my hands. Lay a hand on a star surface. An imprint.

“Do they worship the stars?” I asked Goliath.

“Yes. They believe when we die, we return to the stars,” he replied, and handed me some figs which I gobbled up. I tried to count the stars on the temple, but I ran out of numbers in my head and the stars took over. Head full of them, we walked on.

Two old men were bent over a game of draughts; I saw them move their pieces. Old knobbly fingers, white beards, missing teeth. A piss pot rested by the entrance to their home, freshly emptied. Onwards we walked, and I saw a great white bird fly overhead. Soaring. Its wings were made of angel pieces.

That is freedom. That is what freedom is.

D
id
I tell you that Daddy was dead? Yes, I think I did. He’s floating in space, somewhere. Space, that heavy spooky hole of stars. I remember the night before Mr Fingers came to our house, I looked up into the dark sky at all that glitter, at all that wonderland of emptiness and I wanted to be sucked into it. And I suppose, in some ways I got my wish.

I remember watching Mr Fingers stuff my father into the black obsidian Egyptian sarcophagus in the hall. He wanted my father to tell him where the grandfather clock was, the clock that was stolen. My father was crying – he had no idea. And then Mr Fingers shut the lid and my father disappeared like a magician’s assistant.

Goodbye, Daddy.

Mr Fingers, the man with the black spectacles and the waistcoat dancing with ladybirds. Some sort of magic man. Some sort of demon. Some sort of father. And he took me by the hand and we walked outside in the snow. Everything was so white, as soft as sugar dusting. Hand in hand through the garden we walked, our footsteps squelching into the fuzzy snow.

“Where are we going?” I asked. And he smiled, a smile of a thousand cats. A smile of angels. A smile of sharks. Ice cool. Devil hot.

A spiral staircase appeared in the earth and down, down, down we stepped into the Underworld. The layers of earth were moulded into human faces, whose eyes, bulging and swollen, watched us descend. Souls trapped in the mud. Some glittery and green, others with eyes like leaves. Green beetles burrowed into their eye sockets and laid eggs in their mouths. I wanted to touch them with my finger but Mr Fingers kept hold of my hand and we continued down into the wet darkness.

In the Underworld a black river coils like a serpent around the palace of the King of the Dead. It bubbles and shimmers and I imagine there are strange creatures underneath with black scissor teeth and eyes swelling like pearls. The palace of Mr Fingers is enormous and filled with clocks that chime every quarter of an hour. There are odd shaped rooms and strange carvings. It is like a museum or mausoleum, stuffed with oddities. He squeezed my hand. “You are now a prince of the Underworld. This is your playground,” he said, like any proud father. He is a kind of magician. He is a kind of madness.

My bedroom was in one of the towers. It was painted with stars and the cosmos. A great telescope peered out of the window like an enormous eye. I peered through it. What do the stars in the Underworld look like, I wondered? They seemed smaller, further away. Tiny dots of starlight, winking like fairy tale frog eyes. I am in the Land of the Dead. This is how the dead see the stars, at a greater distance. And this made me feel a great sadness.

I was in a great empty space. I was a prince of a great empty space. My room had a bookshelf stuffed with books, again, all on the stars and the planets. I sat on my bed and flicked through the pages of star charts and sketches of constellations. I held in my hands maps of the universe and yet I could only peer into them. Like my father, I had been placed in a tomb and I had disappeared.

I sat with my new father at the dinner table. My black-eyed Daddy. The clocks ticked round us.

“What is going to happen to me?” I asked him.

Mr Fingers peered over at me. “You will grow up here as my son.”

“Why do you want the grandfather clock?”

“It has something inside of it.”

“What?”

“Something I want.”

“How will you find it?”

“I have my spies. My little blackbirds on the Earth with their beady eyes. Now eat your supper.”

And so I ate. I gobbled down what was on my plate. After dinner, Mr Fingers scratched his belly and yawned. He reminded me of a great crocodile. How bright his eyes looked. Like glistening ebony. Like black magic. Like a serial murderer.

After dinner, Mr Fingers took me by the hand and led me down a long black corridor. On the walls were paintings of human bodies piled upon one another in great heaps. They twisted and writhed like worms in a jar. I was sure they were actually moving.

“You are going to meet the other princes, now. Your brothers.” And he opened the door at the end of the corridor.

We stepped into a great circular chamber where a series of glass coffins stood in a row. Each glass coffin had a little boy inside with eyes as black as midnight. Mr Fingers put his finger to his lips. “Shhhhh, they are sleeping. You are number fourteen. My fourteenth prince and my favourite boy.”

“My brothers,” I whispered. I looked at them in their glass cages. Identical dolls. One of them was softly snoring and I could see, yes, I could see his teeth. Little and very pointy, like tiny blades. They were my brothers and they were something horrible. They had black hair and black eyes. My hair was yellow like my mother’s, my eyes pale. I was not one of them. Mr Fingers put his hand on my shoulder.

“My dear boy. Tomorrow you can play with them. Now run off to bed and get some sleep.”

And I ran. I ran into the tower and into my bedroom. I covered myself in star charts. I wanted to dream of the stars. I wanted to escape through my telescope, but I was in the Land of the Dead and my dreams were those of corpses.

In my dream I was in my old family home again. It was a place of charms and punishments. I was having dinner with my father and mother and Aunt Rosebud. We were eating something strange. We were eating an angel. It was still alive and its wings were beating like a heartbeat. I said, “I cannot eat this.”

My father looked cross. “You must eat what you are told.”

My mother said, “It’s good for you. It will make you a strong boy.”

My Aunt Rosebud added, “You have a weak brain. Angel meat will cure you.”

I tried a piece of angel meat. Chewed it and swallowed. It tasted sweet. It tasted wrong. I spat it out and ran out of the room. My dead family watched me leave and continued eating. I ran out of the house and into the garden. I ran to the fields and to an old well at the bottom of the estate near the woods. I sucked my thumb by the well, and stroked the long grasses, touching the daisies. I peered down the well and saw Mr Fingers waving. “Jump down, little boy. Come with me.”

I didn’t want to eat angel meat. I didn’t want to jump down the well. I had nowhere else to go. I saw the lake and started to run to it. It was big and cool and blue like suicide. I jumped in and sank to the bottom. I was safe there with the mermaids. I was drowning and safe.

When I woke up Mr Fingers was standing over me. He wanted me to meet my brothers. He wanted to tell us a story. We sat round our father like choirboys round a priest and he opened a big black book and began:

O
nce upon a time
there were fourteen princes. And they lived in a magical kingdom deep down in the underworld. Their father was a very powerful magician and he was very proud of his boys.

Prince number 1 liked to carve faces in potatoes to make him laugh.

Prince number 2 liked to set fire to butterflies.

Prince number 3 liked girls with big hairy legs.

Prince number 4 liked to eat pancakes with sugar and butter.

Prince number 5 liked to chase ghosts and catch them in jars.

Prince number 6 liked to cut off heads and hang them from trees.

Prince number 7 liked to cut smiles into people’s faces.

Prince number 8 liked to fall in love with mirrors.

Prince number 9 liked to draw strange symbols on doors.

Prince number 10 liked to tell pretty lies.

Prince number 11 liked to sit in graveyards.

Prince number 12 liked to steal love letters.

Prince number 13 liked to collect teeth.

Prince number 14 liked to stare at the stars.

And they were all so happy with their Daddy in the magical underworld. And they would do anything their Daddy would tell them. Anything.

Because if they ever disobeyed him, their Daddy would gobble them up in a heartbeat.

A
nd he shut the book
. I stared at my identical brothers with their black sharp eyes and wondered if it could get any worse.

A stupid question, really.