The fire worm, p.3
The Fire Worm, page 3
And here I was, still living in Newcastle, unmarried, with my elderly widowed mother sharing the house. True, I’d achieved a certain modest notoriety thanks to PLT. But wasn’t my own life passing prematurely by? Apart from practicing unconventional therapy, why had I notdared ? To marry, really to believe in reincarnation, emigrate to California, become a popular guru? Whatever. Such dreams were treacherous. I’d be flying too high. I’d bring about the downfall of nations. Look at the mental and social mess which my patients got themselves into! They needed a stable, unhectic personality to face them in the consulting room.
Now of course, with AIDS, the whole world was becoming …
(To remind me what I looked like — in case I needed to look the same again.)
(Helen Daggett, under hypnosis, had related an extremely pious life as a nun in medieval France.)
… was becoming ever more constrained and scared. To dare was — treacherous. Treachery stalked the streets, since if you had an accident and needed blood, well! Treachery lay in bed with you, withering you. Though to be sure, I dared let Jack rip writing horror stories!
(Two kids who lived next door in Jesmond Road. People who call their firstborn “Philippa” really wanted a boy, a Philip. Philippa was their female boy.)
Horror stories were a kind of therapy too. Looking around Tyneside, you might wonder how a person could ever dream, ever imagine anything extraordinary. As soon as you put on horror glasses immediately the view altered. The whole place glowed with potential significance.
JACK: “Horror liberates your viscera, man.”
JOHN: “Do I shit in my pants? Do I crap on the carpet in fear? I’ve hardly ever been in asickness hospital, have I? Mental hospitals aren’t exactly Holiday Inns but they don’t nauseate. They only disturb. What I do in the consulting room … well, there can be terror and sweating and crying out in a trance — but it’s spoken terror. It’s words, words. Images cast by the mundane upon a wall of mist I conjure.”
JACK: “Horror’s a bit like the Phantom of the Brocken, isn’t it? Travelers on the Rhine saw their own shapes cast huge upon the mist. Horror casts a hideous shadow to chill us with our own worst fears, with a sense of sick lunacy — till the sun burns away the mist.”
JOHN: “So you said in Birmingham. The vomit, the blood and guts, is quarantined in horror novels.”
JACK: “There’s no reason why you should be mopping up actual puke. Don’t flay yourself. That isn’t what I meant by letting your hair down.”
JOHN: “That’s why Tony’s story — the horror of it — is such an intrusion. It’s as though something dreadful has crossed a boundary from yourself, Jack, to me.”
JACK: “The stuff’s symbolic. Said so yourself! Let me handle the material. At full length, as it deserves. I’ll illuminate it and transfigure it for you. I’ll lock it up where it belongs — in pages where there are safeguards, eh? In the shape of ironic distancing devices? The average reader mightn’t suss that I’m being ironic, but sometimes I laugh out loud at the horrors. I chuckle and slap my thighs. And that’s good. Keeps nightmares at bay, eh? The foul passions, the clutch of evil. I use nightmares to shine a searchlight, a black beam.”
JOHN: “Passions can be harmful, can’t they? Especially now that the imp of AIDS is loose from Pandora’s pot. That’s what Gavin found out. Yet without ecstasy and passion-fire there is no world, no future.”
JACK: “Avoid touch, lad. Mutate the passion. Speak it in the voice of horror. That’s what we’re up to, you and I. And don’t feel guilty. Let me rip.”
Jack hadn’t typed a word all evening. I had been preventing him. I heard a bell tinkling. Mother was calling me to say goodnight. But yet I hesitated. Mother wasn’t impatient. She would wait. I hadn’t thought sufficiently aboutTony’s life. Too preoccupied with my own. With both of my lives.
Why, during these special hours of evening — these Jack hours — should I think of Tony Smith?
Ah, that was because Gavin had spoken out in Jack’s native language.
Tony hadn’t totally screwed up his life, but nor had it exactly been a success story. Under-performing at school. Making the wrong friends there (in so far as he made friends), leading to some drug taking, shop lifting, and probation. His only adolescent success with girls was with one whose principal interest was in smoking dope and sniffing cocaine.
“Did he choose her,” I’d written speculatively in my case notes, “so that he could pursue heterosexuality yet at the same time avoid it?”
Yet Tony had seemingly pulled himself together in spite of bouts of migraine, fierce sick headaches that recurred at the end of each winter. He had landed a job in Fenwick’s, and now he was in charge of the audio section. LPs, pop singles, tapes, compact discs.
I suppose thatdid identify Tony Smith. Say rather: a job in a smart department store.
He went to discos, and drank, but kept off the drugs. A couple of years ago he had married a younger counter assistant who thought he was romantic, broody, brill, Byronic.
Carol — the assistant — should have wondered why Tony hadn’t chased girls more energetically. Within two years he progressed from premature ejaculation to impotence.
The bell again. Mother’s bell. Not yet the plague bell.
“Oh that cave,” groaned Jack …
Chapter Four
orJingling Geordie’s Hole, continued
It rained a lot during the next week, so that he didn’t meet Gavin at all, only spying him once or twice in the distance down school corridors. However, the following Saturday was a scorcher. When Ted arrived for the matinée, Gavin was already waiting near the cinema.
“I’ve got one of those photo magazines to show you,” said Gavin. “You know? It’s in my pocket. I can’t take it out where anyone might see. Why not skip the cartoons? That’ll give us longer to look at it.”
“How did you get it?”
“From a newsagent’s down on the fish quay. I went specially. Sailors must buy these.” From the strain in Gavin’s voice Ted could guess how hard it must have been for his friend to sneak into that shop, down in rough territory, where at least he wasn’t likely to be known. No doubt Gibbon Senior never had such qualms. Had Gavin worn his school blazer?
“Did the newsagent make it hard for you?”
“Not much.”
“Are there lots of pictures?”
“Quite a few. Some show everything.”
“Where shall we go? The monument?”
Gavin shook his head. “How about the rocks below the priory? It’s more natural there. More beautiful. We could climb up into Jingling Geordie’s Hole. We’d be private; it would be light and airy and clean.”
Jingling Geordie’s Hole was a small cave a little way up the cliff face, which high tides lapped into. Legend had it that the cave drove deep into the headland on which Castle and Priory stood; it had supposedly been used by smugglers, and was haunted by a ghost who jingled chains. According to an old book calledNorth Country Lore and Legend in the Percy household, a young knight had once fought his way past demons into the pitchy depths to drink from “the chalice of truth.” An engraving showed him wielding a sword, which shone as bright as the sun, against beasts resembling pterodactyls and prehistoric crocodiles. In reality, the cave was only shallow.
“All right,” agreed Ted.
Ten minutes later they were crunching over shingle littered with torn-up bladder wrack, broad black whips with explosive air-pods. They skirted pools inhabited by button anemones, limpets, whelks, and small crabs, then clambered over tumbled white boulders to the towering cliff. Gentle waves slopped and hissed. The tide was barely on the turn, so they couldn’t be cut off for another two or three hours. Further along the shore a couple of blokes were sea-angling from a spit of black rock, but a deep inlet of water carved its way in between. No one else was exploringtheir area; most kids would be at the matinée.
Past storms had tossed weed into the cave but no recent wind-whipped waves had reached as high, thus crisp black heaps matted the stones thickly. Hot morning sun had been warming the weed mattress. Gavin shucked off his blazer, encouraged Ted to remove his, and laid both down as rugs. From his inside pocket Gavin slipped a small folded magazine and creased it the opposite way to straighten the pages. On the colour cover: the upper half of a smiling naked suntanned woman with raven hair and big bouncy breasts.
“Health and Efficiency. It’s for nudists.”
“Oh boy,” said Ted.
Inside were black and white photos. A dark-maned young woman splashed naked in the sea, her bottom turned to the camera; Ted thought he saw a hint of hair between her buttocks. He felt those parts tingle and swell. A blonde woman lay supine on a towel, her nearer leg raised to conceal her groin. Gavin turned the page. The same blonde was leaping in the air, but between her legs was only a blurred grey smear. However, on the right-hand page a flaxen-haired girl with little pointy breasts showed faint delicate curls on the mound where her legs met.
Gavin propped the magazine open on a hump of weed. “You’ll hurt yourself, keeping your parts squashed up like that. So will I. It’s dangerous.” He opened his belt and unbuttoned his trousers; opened Ted’s gently too, his hand brushing Ted’s aertex-clad parts. “Better let it right out. In fact, we ought to take our trousers and pants right off. We don’t want to stain them.”
Remembering the hot wet gush in bed, Ted agreed. Soon their flannel trousers and aertex pants lay discarded. Gavin looked at Ted’s now urgent parts; Ted looked at Gavin’s hairs and swollen cock, then at the photo. Ted wanted to hold himself but Gavin pushed his hand aside. From his pocket he took a blue and white glass jar, unscrewed the lid, scooped a mass of Nivea skin cream on to his fingers.
“Watch the photo, Ted. Pretend I’m her.” Gavin massaged him teasingly with cream-smeared fingers. Presently he whispered, “Lie over. Let’s pretend you’re a woman too.” Briefly he took his hand away to smear cream on himself, emptying the jar. Now Gavin gripped Ted’s cock wonderfully; and a creamy cock butted up Ted’s backside. “This might feel strange. It’s worth it.”
Ted stared at the photo in front of his face, moving his own parts up and down now in Gavin’s fist. His bottom felt as if he was straining on the toilet with a huge turd stuck half way out, but this discomfort was secondary to the pleasure in his front part. He shut his eyes. From deep inside him something was rising, a snake of hot jelly that lived in his belly. Hotter, more urgently it rose. The therm-o-nuclear explosion was coming — the blinding light; that was why he had his eyes shut. For timeless moments boiling milk burst through the squeezing fist; he saw whiteness everywhere. Simultaneously the burning rod which killed the king entered Ted’s bowels. Gavin gasped, “Sweet Prince, I come!” Fiery stars exploded throughout the blank smooth whiteness, and Ted cried out.
The world boomed as though the cave was a bass drum which the sea beat upon. Ted felt that some door had been torn open in him — a door which was also in the backside of Jingling Geordie’s cave. A dim tunnel stretched away. Far off, a transparent ghost gibbered and writhed. Ted’s limbs were the ghost’s, his gibberings and writhings, its. At the heart of the ghost floated an albino tadpole. Somehow that tadpole swam within Ted too.
Then the wild wave which had burst its bounds hissed back to its source. Gavin let go of him, turned him over, kissed him on the lips.
Ted drew away, and saw vivid blood streaks on Gavin’s foamy cock like strawberry syrup on an ice cream cornet. As he drew on his underpants hastily Ted felt cream and blood ooze out to stain the cotton.
Feeling sore and awkward, Ted walked home alone, worrying about his underpants. There’d hardly been any need for Gavin to say so strenuously that he shouldn’t tell anyone; he had no intention of telling. But his soiled pants! Maybe he’d stained the inside of his trousers too.
He detoured through the huge cemetery near his home. Around the back of the chapel and crematorium was a shabby public lavatory; he could examine himself.
He generally admired the marble chips within the boundaries of graves: little lakes of emerald crystals, ruby crystals, ice, and amethyst. He usually enjoyed seeing the glass bells covering bowls of china flowers faded to pastel. Today he hardly noticed. Rooks cawed from their black stick-nests in the green heights of elms. Decaying wreaths lay heaped along one new grave; nobody had cleared the rotting flowers away yet. He hardly heard, or saw.
The men’s lavatory was a short dark concrete tunnel with pee-stained wall and yellowed gutter sloping to a drain-hole. The stone floor was slicked with damp. Cocks had been penciled on the wall as if to remind users — in vain — which way to aim. At the end: a door battered with bootmarks, carved with initials, a stout brass mechanism bolted to it. Ted fed it a penny.
Behind the door he found a china bowl with no seat, a string dangling from the overhead cistern, a piece of metal where toilet roll would fit, had there been any. He forced the bolt shut with difficulty, fearing that he might lock himself in. He undid his trousers, which to his relief were reasonably unblemished. But a big dark brown patch disfigured his underpants.
He recalled how much soaking and bleaching his hanky had needed, when he had a nose-bleed. He couldn’t possibly clean this mess in secrecy. It mustn’t be known that he had bled between the legs. His sister presumably bled — Gibbon told dirty jokes about tomato sauce — but that was different, and private. He wasn’t meant to.
So he eased his trousers off, keeping them clear of the wet floor, removed his underpants and put his trousers back on. The underpants he stuffed behind the chipped bowl. Maybe his mother mightn’t notice for weeks that he now owned only three pairs of underpants instead of four. If she did find out he would say that he messed his pants at school one day, took them off in the school bog and got rid of them. Because there was dirt in them. But he’d been ashamed to tell her.
A week later the summer term ended. In the hall the assembled school sang:
“Lord dismiss us with thy blessings,
Thanks for mercies past received … ”
Ted had avoided Gavin during that final week, and on the last day once again he caught a crowded bus home in company with a gang of boys rather than walking. For the first two mornings after the events in Jingling Geordie’s Hole, he had found smears of blood on the toilet paper, but then no more.
During the first ten days of the summer holiday Ted mainly stayed at home, re-reading old copies ofHotspur andWizard, sorting out his cigarette card collection, drawing pictures of therm-o-nuclear explosions. Though he was no nuisance his mother chased him out occasionally for a breath of fresh air. He stayed close to home, wandering round the wooded back lanes of the cemetery.
On the eleventh day the Appleby family set off by train to spend a week in Edinburgh. Ted’s Dad, an electrician with the Council, was now on holiday; also sister Helen who had left school the year before and now worked as a dental receptionist.
The family stayed in a boarding house off Hanover Street, ate porridge and kippers for breakfast, explored the city. The Botanic Gardens of Corstorphine seemed to Ted a paradisiacal version of the cemetery back home. The tiny room Ted stayed in was directly behind the red neon sign,Princes Guest House, which stayed lit all night long, tubes humming and buzzing, bathing the room even through the curtains in a blood-stained light. Though it wasn’t obvious from the street below the sign was thick with spiders’ webs and hundreds of insect corpses.
On the fifth morning of the holiday Ted was sick before breakfast. He vomited clear bitter liquid into the tiny wash-handbasin and couldn’t face kippers or porridge. Likewise the next morning.
“You must be off colour,” his Mam observed. Ted wondered if this could be some reference to the neon sign outside his window.
On the train home he felt nauseated, then better once they had returned. He carried on reading, drawing, walking in the cemetery, daydreaming about the botanic gardens of which he’d bought picture postcards. He wished he could live there forever, camping in the orchid or fern house, after a therm-o-nuclear war which had killed everyone else. Since that would include his Mam and Dad, he cried a little. Soon it was September, and the new school term began.
“Have a good holiday?” Gavin asked, meeting him in the corridor near the physics lab.
“We went to Edinburgh. I was sick a few times.” This stuck in Ted’s mind since he had hardly ever been sick before, and never on just getting out of bed.
Gavin looked hurt, as though Ted said this to reproach him.
“We went to the Lake District,” said Gavin. “I thought about sending you a card but I decided not. Your parents might have asked. I bought you a present.”
A tin of butterscotch with a picture of a hill called Helvellyn.
“I climbed that mountain. Early on, I found a sheep lying on its back in the bracken. I rolled it over but it couldn’t stand up. I thought about you at the cairn on the top and added a stone for you. Are you going to the matinée this Saturday?”
“I don’t know.”
Noisy boys were clattering in their direction. Gavin slipped away into the lab.
On Saturday Ted set off for the cinema, since his Mam expected this; but he went to the cemetery instead. Parking himself on a bench, he read most of the stories in a new copy ofHotspur and ate all of the butterscotch. Careful that no one saw, he chucked the empty tin under a laurel bush before returning home. For several hours afterward he had indigestion.
Playing rugby that winter, Ted soon got puffed out and could only trot around after the ball. The crush of the scrum bruised and scared him. Bill Gibbon often shouldered into him, tried to trip him.
Ted was very hungry these days, sometimes gobbling four slices of bread and marg with his Mam’s meals. He sneaked biscuits from the pantry. He always bought chocolate bars with the money he saved by missing the cartoon matinée; these gave him the energy to endure the cold of the cemetery.
Toward Christmas his Mam said, “You’re putting on weight,” and it was true. His trousers — long ones, since his October birthday — pressed cruelly into his waist. He hadn’t seen much of Gavin at school; Gavin seemed offended by Ted’s long trousers instead of admiring them. Ted found that the trousers tried to cling together at the turn-ups when he walked; he waddled, legs apart. The turn-ups filled with fluff which wadded into felt, but he couldn’t bend to clean them out with his finger. If only his elastic belt, with the silver snake-clasp, would stretch still further.
