That was when all the clocks stopped again.
The rivulet was in full gush as it rained and rained. The dead have membranous feet you see, leaving behind the translucent mucous trails like snails, silvery footsteps that last only up until the nascent dawn. It’s easier for them to move around along wet tracks. Martha taught me that, many years ago and it made sense of what I’d always observed around the rivulet and the sea mist.
When you saw I had really stopped all the clocks in your house like I told you I used to, (both the clockwork and digital therefore ruling out an electrical surge) you started to really believe in me. -Not to contradict your earlier assertion about timing. Merely to say that our experience of belief has layers, like being slowly stripped by a lover. It’s one thing to accept the proposition that I have come back from the dead, in absence of another explanation. Quite another for a woman of a time that has grown so very modern to believe the whole story I bring up out of the Bridgewater Jerry with me…
Belief has its own apocalypse wrapped up in it. Once people know something is possible it doesn’t take long before it must happen. The mustness gathers pace behind all possibilities like the early stages of an avalanche. Once you start to believe you can… It’s as if people cannot bear to sit with the tension of the uncreated, of the not-yet-come-to-being… To be honest I don’t blame them, my whole body for so long has been made up of not-yet and maybe-never, and who (given the chance) wouldn’t release one’s true soul song in a spasm of apocalypse? This urge in us, it comes from a place so deep morality has never been there.
I went outside in the rain after the ticking stopped for good, and walked through the deserted streets. With my fingers I reached out to touch old buildings that I recognized with my eyes closed, dragging my pink tips along the wet rock, reading the wear and tear of a century and a half of wind and rain in the surface like a brail message from the elements. The wind seemed to play music on my exposed ribs as I walked, even though I was fully clothed for the weather. Where once I was the musician I had become the instrument. This city is the artist, out of whose dark imaginings and underbelly I’ve come forth, slouching my way up out of the sludge of forgotten things.
I longed savagely to play music. I think the wanting was what always made the clocks stop. But even as I delicately palpitated my fingertips against the stones I could already feel it was gone. The delicious tremor of music that used to thread through my muscles and tendons, starting somewhere in my hips and rising, had been sucked away by the retreating wave as I left the water. The sea will have her sacrifices, after all. I smiled softly, sadly, because I knew in that moment, passing through the curtain of rain, what it meant and why it was worth it. Later, as you know, when I first sat in front of a piano and tried to play and felt the stump of my cut out tongue flap uselessly against my mouth’s roof I reacted somewhat less gracefully…
Nonetheless I’ve learned that its not about where you reach at your lowest that defines your courage, but it’s what decisions you make about how you will go forward from there. The purity of the decision I would make for him again and again, will outlive and outlast the memory of that graceless tantrum, where I kicked my feet about, flailing at the great binding of the Old Woman Fate.
When you’ve had someone you love grow old while you were away, you slow your step even in the rain. I didn’t care if I couldn’t play anymore, only that I would find him and with whatever art was left to me I would at last find expression, in some way that would reflect the fineness and intricacy of the feeling itself. Nothing else of who I was or what I could do mattered to me by comparison to that one dread wanting… The one I had broken my body against, inside the gullet of the rivulet in flood.
I watched for his slower moving shade to keep pace. I lined our steps up so that they came into rhythm. I had wanted to grow old with him, after all, and so sometimes now, I do... The moisture in the air makes my old man joints ache and I am forced to shuffle. My feet are made of whatever the hands of frogs are made from. This is why no one can hear the dead when we’re walking beside or behind you. We move when you move and stop when you stop. Our patience is infinite. There are no ticking clocks where we come from, that’s why when the part of me that is Other arrives there are no ticking clocks around me either… Nobody can watch you sleep quite like us. My mother died in our rocking chair and whenever she would watch me sleep afterwards she would always rock back and forth just the same, as though caught in some eternal loop.
If one could be as the dead whilst still alive the power one would have! There are some crooked paths I’ve walked, and know of, where feral visionaries meet you with meadowsweet in their hair and wormwood on their breath, they will tell you that such a thing is termed ‘initiation’ among the hedge-wise.
If I’m still here does this mean I’ve achieved initiation?
All I know is that my mind tries to fill the blanks in, to catch up with the life lived while I was away. My love has become a dead man while I was gone and now the wind and the rain that sleet my face become eroticized, even with their moss-bleak taste. The feelings that once belonged exclusively to the shiver of his hand grazing my skin, diffuses, in the forever-absence of that touch, into the old stone, into the thick soul of our city… Don’t think I mean an easy letting of the edges, where grief just pop goes and weasels away... No…. This is a grim, cold joy-sorrow in the pit of the gut, a cutting elation. Our city caresses me with his many hands made of wind currents, rain running down the back of my shirt, jagged bird flight, and the way stone holds the sorrow salt and the tremors of shroud-muffled voices.
I wanted to go with him where he’d gone. I suppose I only didn’t because you cared for me... Rather than sending me to the insane asylum as would have likely been my fate if I turned up in my time from yours, you have sheltered me, tended my wounds, cooked me strange and fascinating new foods... You showed me how music could be immediately conjured which seemed to suit any mood or taste, even my eccentric ones. Soon I found songs on your machine that gave voice to the music I could no longer make with my hands but had spilling out of my heart. Maddie worked for hours on repairing as much of my clothing as could be salvaged and you brought me home replacements in the modern style for what could not be fixed. With great gusto you dressed me up in this hybrid costume, much like my own mind, straddling two eras.
Instead of killing myself again I walked to his old house, because you cared. As I stood outside his home on Upper Davey Street that night in the rain staring up at the windows, I was on the outside looking in again. Never to be invited inside, a stray of sorts, part of time’s beach rubble and jetsam, floating in and out of the picture with too much agility for history to get a lock on me. The type of uncatalogued item he never could quite collect... The name that gets omitted, the part of the journal torn out, the letters confiscated... A watermark here, a scrawled name there but nothing that would stand up in court...
The wind that caught my clothes, blowing through the bone tunnels of me, spiked a longing so savage I heard a wolf’s howl echoing out over a frozen tundra inside me. So stark was the desolation of this feeling-sound that I shuddered as no returning cry answered. I had thought longing to be a hot, pulsing, palpitation of sound something thick and percussive that made me sometimes wish to hit the body of my cello with my open palm and hit out a beat. But instead perfect-want is a thing of stark, cold purity. Colder than the low-soft-ache of the cello, like a violin made of ice, lupine sharp and nuclear bright.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y7TAZtbqzI
You found me about dawn. I should have found it strange you knew to come to Fernleigh... It suggested a bit of knowledge about the Allports, but at the time I thought nothing of it and of it nothing... I was sitting in the gutter trying to hold so as not to fall off the surface of the world.
“Hey, look at me. That’s better… You’re doing so well, you get that?” Forcefully you made me hold your gaze as though with pure force of will and persuasion you could convince me I was all right. “What you’re processing at the moment… It’s huge. How many people have ever had to process something like this?”
These words, said to fill the silence, in themselves seemed to mean very little. But what was more important was the certainty in your warm brown eyes. You seemed to believe I deserved to live, not everyone had always shared your opinion, and so I trusted you.
“Indeed,” I replied.
“Who are they to you?” you asked, looking up at the house.
“You know of them? The Allports? You had heard of their family before I mentioned the name?”
You smiled oddly at me, kind of ruefully. “I hope you’re not going to hate me when you find this out…. But when you mentioned Elizabeth Allport, Maddie and I went back through our family tree to check we were right… She was the grandmother of my great, grandmother Eileen Allport.” You came out with this all in one breath. “You don’t hate me now do you? Am I, like, descended from your arch nemesis or something?”
“Who was your great, great grandparent?” My voice a husk of sound. “Which of the Allport children was Eileen’s parent?”
“Cecil Allport.”
I swallowed down hard and closed my eyes.
“Who was Elizabeth to you?”
“The mother of my dearest friend,” I replied quietly. Those words stuck thickly in my throat like I’d swallowed glue. “She did not wish me well, in a way, you could say... there was an action of hers that caused me much misfortune.”
Understatement sticks me together with sticking-plasters, always a sign you’ve hovering over a deep bruise.
“She’s the one you were setting out the witch bottles against? To avert her evil eye? Was my ancestor a witch or something? But… So… does that mean her son Cecil was your… friend?”
I jumped at the mention of his name as I always do, even though it was the one his family called him, not the one I did, or even the one on his birth certificate. My friend was, you might say, a man of many faces. “Yes.” The fact you knew of him left of me nothing but an ache that harrowed up my lungs with its sucking power. I wanted to ask all the questions immediately, about what he did with the rest of his life, but the grief was still too near for words.
Those moments outside his home were of the leaden hour. For focusing on the next breath that must be taken without him, and then the one after that. Grief is an endurance run and I am more of a sprinter... People depict the Victorian Age approach to mourning as hyperbolic and melodramatic but there is a discipline expressed in it that was part of our love language. To lose well and deep is part of loving what is mortal, part of holding it with no guarantees, knowing your life depends on it, and having it ripped away, or suddenly granted back, with no real understanding possible of why.
“Are you just finding out that the love of your life married someone else, hun?”
The unexpected understanding I read in your words degloved me. Normally I’d not have confirmed it but I nodded. What was to be lost now?
“He named his son Henry, if that helps?”
“Lovely,” I murmured, because there weren’t really any words, but custom demanded I make a response. I was thinking through the pain of knowing there was a woman who did for him and gave him all that I never could. I was pushing through it to how this shrieking pain meant your skin and hair cells carried part of him alive into the future, so therefore it was worth it.... I found myself gazing into your face like it was a skrying ball, trying to see something of him still echoing up to the surface of manifestation and joining me in the world of the living.
“Your eyes are somewhat like his.”
“There’s something I want to show you,” you said getting to your feet and offering me your hand as if you were the gentleman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSmrryfxGM
When we arrived at Parliament lawn you showed me the textual public monuments worked into the pavement there. The first of them said: ‘In the wake of your courage I swim’ the other: ‘Sorry for not holding you in my arms.’ Upon reading I closed my eyes for a moment and they misted with tears. I didn't yet know it's meaning to its creator, but I knew what it meant to me.
“What do they mean?”
You came and put your hand on my arm. “They mean the city is saying sorry to you, Henry.”
It took me some time to understand what you meant, and after that what it meant, even once you explained about the Stonewall riots and the civil rights movement. I was coming to understand that I wasn’t a deviant deserving of death in your eyes, but a fellow human carrying the albatross of a story around my neck. Because you were his flesh and blood it was important to me that you knew. “He was a good man,” I said in the tight-lipped way that people use to gloss over the raw choking power keg of life when its gets stuck in the throat of their narrative. “A kind and decent man,” I continued, gaining courage in my convictions as I used that word I was told was off limits to me. “With a beautiful soul. If anyone spoke ill of him… well… evil be to he who thinks evil of it.”