It was — as she had said to Marsden — a beautifully mild day. She felt enlivened, thoroughly revived. The net of the sky laced the trees and invited afresh convertible line and support through which the distances between Marsden and herself sometimes seemed wide, sometimes close. Something suggested to her — on coming to the site where St Paul’s School used to stand on the road between Hammersmith and Olympia — that she should enter the deserted grounds and sit for a while on a covered bench under the webbed trees. Someone would call to her in a little while … ten, fifteen minutes…. It had all been arranged — that something seemed to say. She would become susceptible in or after that call — through rod and line — to intimate voyage of “other self’ or “other selves”.
Three
Sebastian woke and extricated himself from bed. It was thirteen minutes to eleven by the clock on the table close at hand.
Sebastian felt little, perceived little, or so it seemed to line or rod of place that hovered in Mary’s book of lives and masks above him, seeking support in him, and studying his movements that were those of a log half-staggering a little, half-floating on arousal from sleep. There was no visible bandage around his ankle but he seemed nevertheless as lame as Anancy. Or, if not lame, an inversion of Marsden. Marsden’s consenting support for great spirituality had become in Sebastian a hollow tree, the hollow shadow of towering presence.
Thus an odd puppet-like stiffness distinguished Sebastian’s limbs — odd, one would have thought, in such a young man, Mary’s twin-brother but lacking her fluidity of grace and line. On closer inspection, one was less sure of Sebastian’s true posture (how much had been invented by Mary and Stella to transmit to Marsden), and whether it was less an outer stiffness of body and more an inner deprivation of mind that cast its scales over his eyes.
He did not see the crumpled sheets and blankets he had left on struggling out of bed; he did not see the miniature map and relief model those bedclothes had made as if they were ridden by a cosmic chariot, cosmic anancy plates under Africa, Asia and Europe to divide the bed into land masses and oceans, into compressed towering mountains, into descending boats and troughs, now fashioned into a geologic toy with which precocious baby John could play at continents in motion.
Sebastian parted the curtains on being pulled by the line of place to turn his unseeing eyes up to a mild grey web of sky that seemed more ashen over Dolphin Street than over Angel Inn or St Paul’s schoolground, Hammersmith.
The world of geologic daemon was intrinsically grey in Sebastian’s eyes, possession of ash that turned heaven around into depressive function of hell. Thus even when he drowned his senses they persisted in a crackling or sedimentary conflagration under the sea or high on the land of his hollow spirit. Yet it was here in alchemies of water and fire that Sebastian unwittingly drew close to a religious sensibility, a religious mould within which his deprivations became the soil of an epic callous or torment of being.
That distinction or divide between callous insensibility and genuine torment was a factor in the line Mary unfurled between “possession” and “freedom”; save that possession masked itself as epic callous, freedom as unwitting torment.
Sebastian now repaired to the lavatory in his smouldering boat of a house cast adrift on the winter of space. Then he stumbled into the cave of the kitchen, lit a couple of gas rings, made indifferent coffee, boiled an egg, buttered toast.
Inverted paradise or depressive function of hell — in the degree that he was obscurely conscious of it — made him both lame and desirous of “speed” (a drug he secured on private prescription and also from underground sources). He was also addicted to codeine linctus and this he was able to buy in the open market at any chemist.
When he was on speed he tended to vanish into the lavatory and dream he was Stella’s prisoner but would erupt into gigantic liberator, that toilet paper was the post office he had founded in paradise upon which to scribble messages and wishes. Out of such ash-grey, ash-blue rolls of paper he had constructed laconic music which he afterwards transferred to a diary.
This February morning he felt himself master of the empty house. Stella was in hospital. Mary was at Angel Inn. He stacked egg-cup, saucer, plate, etc. in the sink, and reached up to a shelf in the kitchen where he kept his 1980 and 1981 diaries. Each day was allotted an area of no more than one inch by one inch within which to transfer his lavatory ruminations. Sebastian squeezed a spidery line or two, spidery vein or two, into each restricted day.
The habit of recording seeds of greatness in each locked hour or day stained the wall with invisible hieroglyphics that taxed both Stella and Mary. The diary entries were visible and in conjunction with invisible institution, epic lavatory, they achieved the random alchemy of seed of majestic lament that Mary had dreamt as resident in Sebastian’s ambivalent foundations of paradise in the wake of the letter he had received from Stella and the action of remorse to save her life; it was as if Sebastian had stumbled upon an equation between his unseeing mind in ironies of the liberator and invisible genius or unseen presence, as if he had rifled resources between “epic callous” and “torment of being”, torment of need.
Perhaps Sebastian was a thief of love, a thief of genius, to shore up his rotten life. If so he was oblivious of it. Sick genius of Dolphin Street.
The first entry in his diary (the first transferred lavatory code) was on 5 November 1980. He had lost his job that day as a porter in the Victoria Maternity Hospital. The entry ran in spidery, sad letters BANG BANG to imply not only that it was Guy Fawkes Day but that he had drunk two bottles of codeine linctus on top of speed. He was unemployed again. One could barely decipher what he had written and the effect of BANG was like a muffled drum or silent shape of ghostly liberator, ghostly, confused freedom-fighter. The explosions, the fireworks, constituting Guy Fawkes Night, were therefore fodder of blindness as far as Sebastian was concerned except for the thief of grandeur he saw flitting in them, in their ash-grey, ash-blue flares.
He had attempted on that Guy Fawkes Night to steal Stella from John and take her to bed but she had resisted saying she hated him when he was on drugs. He had retaliated with words that had been put into his mouth by blind jealousy. “I know what it is — you’re just like my bloody sister Mary. You want to be fucked by a holy man.”
Stella went white. She knew it was less Sebastian speaking than the hollow giant he was, the hollow founder of epic institution, epic family. Yet she was angry. She saw (if Sebastian did not) the effect on precocious baby John who was listening. He responded to their quarrel by bleating like a lamb, then he became mute as rock, his face nevertheless like glass or a mirror in which the sad, stifled refrain of the baton of place passed, the shadow and the rhythm of blood. The spectacle of the music he had stolen confused, yet held Sebastian. Stella clung to John and wondered whether she had been right to resist her husband. She imprinted a kiss on John’s face of glass. Hysteric imprint. She became a toy herself, even as she held, or submitted to, a toy. Flesh-and-blood glass in her hands and upon her breasts. The quarrel of drugs and sex had fused into a third party — their child in whom (in whose tabula rasa mirror) were contained all hostages to love and fortune. Thus in their child — whom she wished to protect in the sullen gift of herself to his father — lay also a catalyst through which to break that sullen gift by aligning it to him and to all pledges of liberation, pledges against sexual blackmail or pawns of flesh-and-blood every freedom-fighter unconsciously makes.