Ah was absolutely forbidden to enter mah parents’ room.
When ah was just four mah Ma grabbed ahold of mah ear and, twisting it viciously, she hissed into mah eyes, ‘To enter me an ya Pa’s room, baw, keep ya spyin eye peeled for the V1XO! Beware! The Vixo will ask ya for the password and if ya cain’t say it out loud, baw, it will jump up and jam a tin-stick square ups ya lil ass and all his screamin wogs and hog-dogs will hunt ya down and eat ya brains for supper. Unnerstan?’
Ah was scared – yes, ah was. Ah could feel mah innards become bundles of livid rope from which swung a chattering sabbat of hunchbacked bell-ringers – the dread gnashing Wogs – vile misshapen gnomes shinning up mah spine for a brain-bake – and ah could feel the Vixo’s bloody butcher’s knife punched up mah flue – oh yes – and the gush of guts running down the insides of mah legs – oh and listen – here comes the Hog-Dogs grunting and snarling in the distance, hungry and drawing near and so on and so forth.
Ah can only add at this point, that at four years of age mah mind was but a thirsty sponge. It was absorbing all the wonders of life without prejudice, drinking at every fount and spring, drawing no conclusions, no correlations, making no order of mah observations, accepting the long with the short, the good with the bad, without question and without query.
In mah infant years and so through to mah teens – even as a young man ah sat not in judgement of mah fellow man. But hear this. Even as ah dangled from one pinched empurpled ear, a wincing woeborn puppet surrendered up to the pedophagic freak show which mah mother would so sadistically invoke – even then, no more than a mite, not even a lustrum of life’s waters passed – ah, Euchrid Eucrow, harboured such a hate for that sick fucken bitch that ah felt mah glands fill with a deadly venom that polluted mah bodily secretions – it did. Ah emitted a lethal catarrh – black spit, foul and deadly.
Ah was corrupted by hate. Ah was monstrous. Ah was diabolical, deadlier than a rattlesnake, and while the sow slept, the snake – it struck! Listen. Once, while Her Slutness lay sprawled in her armchair, ah slid up to her and deposited whole mouthfuls of warm, morbid sputum into her bottle. Then ah left the house, making sure ah woke Her Bitchship with a slam of the door. Ah slipped around to the south wall, pulled the spigot from the spy-hole, and put mah eye up to the hole – mah black little heart romping in its cage, happy as hell.
Ah watched her down the killer elixir in one long swig. Mah eye went cold. She belched ominously and shut her eyes like before. She began to snore. A minute passed and ah fell into a sickly sweat. Mah mouth filled with foul and acrid rheum.
Ah slammed the spigot back in its hole and hissed.
The hog was immune.
Utterly shitted ah gobbed at mah shadow and watched an onion-weed curl and die on mah left shoulder.
Needless to say, ah never entered the room until Ma and Pa were both dead and gone. Even so, the Vixo reigned long in mah brains, butchering the passing years.
V
Sometimes ah would sit unner the dubious shelter of the porch and watch as the parade of vehicles climbed and descended Hooper’s Hill – unner the curtain of the rain, deep into the night.
Sometimes ah would single out one vehicle and watch it crawl down the harlot’s hill and ah would follow with mah eyes the bright fanning of its beams all the way to the faceless driver’s nuptial nest.
Often ah could see, like the glowing doodles left hanging by a firefly upon the face of the night, the car beam’s after-light, like a golden chain binding together whoredom and wifedom – like two massive lead balls – and shackling them to the shins of the falsehearted fornicator who could never again feel the presence of one without suffering the weight of the other.
But as the rain persisted and the months passed and the seasonal and permanent workers alike began to abandon the ruined valley, the parade to and from Hooper’s Hill gradually thinned.
Even so, the little pink caravan remained upon the hill like a valentine.
For a time
VI
When the malignant year 1941 finally abdicated, it left as its successor a black and monstrous spawn. A sullen year was 1942, stewing in the pits of constipation but nevertheless pissing a dark and gravelly stream down into the valley as if it were a pot.
The deluge had lost its former wrath and roar, but the bane of the valley was far from lifted. To the townsfolk, God seemed as a mule who would not budge: a dog in the manger of mercies. The grey and bitter swill of the Second Year steeped the valley and its denizens in a bog of glum torpor.
The streets lay all but empty, the streetlights in permanent use; for the days were dim and pitch-dark were the nights.
The town slumped. Things rotted. Others swelled. Some got bogged while others sunk. There were things that withered and things that shrunk.
The Second Year saw the funk and fear thicken as apathy closed up the eyes and ears and grew upon tongues like a mould. Able-bodied men succumbed to an inertia that saw them spend more and more days on their backs, in their beds. Women sat at windows, lost in other worlds. Some bore the scars of rejection in their hearts, others upon their faces. There were those big with favours given, and those wasted by favours taken.
Intemperance. Self-abuse. Gluttony. Sloth.
There were some homes that took in Madness as a tenant.
It was on one wet and eldritch eve that Rebecca Swift, Sardus’ young but abstracted wife, heard a knocking in her head – too loud this time to ignore – and with trembling heart and tiny, trembling hands, drew back the big, black bolt a crack, and let the tenant in.
Rebecca was slave to a crushing melancholia that plundered at will her frail person and lay upon her like a spent lover. As these attacks grew longer and more funest, so too her moods, deep and blue as bruises, grew more deeply fumid, and Sardus paid agonized witness to his beloved’s slow but steady estrangement, seeing himself in his long-practised, self-abasing mind’s eye as an odious mockery of manhood – a wretched travesty, cuckolded by an incubus, by a circus of blue devils.
But it was in the nature of these fits to shun the afflicted with as little warning as they possessed her. Even under the head of the storm she would perk up, her blue mood suffusing with silvery light.
Like a laughing lark in a fountain of mirth, Rebecca would hop and chirp, her chatter kittenish and fanciful, flapping about her heart-sore husband as she gushed forth her eidetic vision like a child.
Sardus would listen, battling to keep a smile upon his lips, indulging her in her monomaniacal chatter as if he had not heard it all before. With tiny hands dancing about her in a succession of fluttering gestures, the childless Rebecca Swift would gaily evoke a world of frosted pink and baby blue, of booties and bonnets and bunny-rugs, of rattles and rubber teething rings.
Cooing and clucking over her ecstatic imaginings, her eyes filling with tears and cooling her flushed cheeks with her own shivering fingers, Rebecca would squeeze shut the real world and behind closed lids create around her the same crystal palace that she always built: a palace of frosted spires and arches of glass, cloud-capped towers and mirrored floors and staircases, white and winding, crystal walls and porcelain doors, the clear peal of vesper bells like the laughter of children – all spilling with warm light beneath a spinning silver sun.
And there she would stay for a day or so, until the sun spun white and melted her babies and the palace of glass all down around her. And there in the heavy folds of melancholia she would brood, drowned beneath her own little rain that would wash across her heart, but could not bring to bud one shooted seed, to swell and to split inside her. No. Not a solitary one to breach the grief of Rebecca.