SYLVIE'S RIDDLE Read online

  The Edgar Allan Press Limited

   Alan Wall 2012

  Alan Wall has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of biding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  ISBN: 978-I-909018-12-9

  Cover  The Edgar Allan Press Ltd

  www.EdgarAllanPress.co.uk

  NOTE

  In 2003 I was awarded an Arts Council/ AHRB Fellowship to work for a year with the particle physicist Goronwy Tudor jones of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Birmingham University. The aim of the Fellowship was to promote understanding between the arts and sciences. The collaboration proved fruitful. It continues to result in new work. We have already published various essays together, such as 'Extremities of Perception' (Leonardo). This novel is the first book-length result of that fertile year. I am greatly indebted to the Arts Council of Great Britain and the AHRB. It would be hard to express my gratitude to Goronwy Tudor Jones himself, whose gift for exposition let me catch a glimpse of the astonishing insights of modem physics. This book is dedicated to him.

  I am also indebted to the Royal literary Fund for RLF Fellowships at Warwick University and Liverpool john Moores.

  Contents

  Mystery Play

  City of Ghost

  Living on Air

  Through the Lens

  The Riverside Gallery

  Wolf Morning

  The Convenience of Women

  Earth, Water, Fire and Air

  The Second Interval

  Through a Lens Backwards

  A Man of Peace

  The Burn Lecture

  Water Goddess

  Euland

  Ariadne's Bobbin

  The Motel Route to Wisdom

  Doll's House

  Nudes

  Claparède's Drawing-Pin

  Mirada Fume

  Marks of Light

  Genius

  Lenses and Constellations

  Five-Star Hotels of the Spirit

  Confessional

  The Fade on the Greatcoat

  Back at the Signum

  Inquisitorial Lens

  Inside the Labyrinth

  Special Dispensation

  Quorate

  Duet

  The Tragic Lecture

  Rising Waters

  The Shipwreck of the Singula

  Coda -228

  To

  GORONWY TUDOR JONES

  If this should be written on the mind, then always in a fugitive ink ...

  FRIEDRICH EULAND

  Mystery Play

  The man finds enough money in his greatcoat pocket, once deep blue but now greying with age, to buy a coffee. Only as he sits down to drink the coffee does it occur to him that he has no idea where the money came from. Nor for that matter the greatcoat. And where did he come from?

  He drinks the coffee. Although he remembers the word coffee he has no knowledge of the taste. A taste of hotness, gushing down a drainpipe. He fumbles through the pockets of the unknown coat. There is a card. He takes it out. An oblong piece of plastic, blue and red. A library card. The name is written in black ink: Owen Treadle. He drinks more of the coffee; now he can taste only scalding milk. A cow's udder dunked in a cauldron. He rises from the formica table, stained with ten thousand cheap meals and as many cigarette butts, and walks across to the counter. The woman behind it in her sky-blue overall stares at him without interest.

  'Do you know Owen Treadle?' he says.

  'Owen Treadle.' She repeats the name slowly, non-committally. Her blonde hair is permed. The perplexity in her eyes is magnified by her thick glasses. He sees a shoal of tiny fishes in a bottle, the subaquean thrash of cold silver flesh. 'Owen Treadle. Rings a bell.'

  'Do I look like him?'

  'What?'

  'Do I ring a bell? Do I ring the same bell the name just rang?

  *

  Do you think I might be Owen Treadle?' Where all these words were coming from, he had no idea.

  'Well, I'd have thought if anyone should know that it would have been you, darling. Wouldn't you say? Are you going back to the hostel?'

  'The hostel.'

  'St Clare's, my love. I think that's where you normally come from, isn't it, when you come at all? But you've never told me your name, all the different times you've been here.'

  Outside he stopped the first person he met.

  'Could you tell me the way to St Clare's?' The old man, bent but cheerful, had a plastic bag in his hand, swollen with potatoes and a cauliflower. The man in the greatcoat looked from the cauliflower to the little old man's head; one was shinier and smoother. That was the one you mustn't boil. He remembered.

  'Carry on along that road until you come to the bridge over the canal, and it's opposite the steam mill.' He heard a piston from another century shrieking in spite and potency. Heard pitmen in thin seams, wheezing with emphysema. Heard the sound of history begrimed. Was that where he had to go back to then? Back into the filth of history?

  He found Saint Clare's with no trouble. In fact, once he had started walking towards it he realised he hadn't needed any directions in the first place. The streets around him seemed to hold their own information, and now they were sharing it with him. Once inside its door, past the glass window on the left where the uniformed man nodded him through, he knew where to go. He walked up the steps to the second floor, and then along the corridor, pale green paint all around, tropical vegetation gone milky and anaemic, till he came to Room 212. Inside, Alfred was sitting as usual on one of the beds, a leather-bound copy of the Bible open on his lap.

  'Hello Owen,’ he said. 'The flies on his face are only there because they want to be. Did you hear the buzz of the traffic outside?'

  Owen sat on the other bed without taking off his greatcoat. He stared at the much smaller and older man. A goatee beard, yellow and stained. He should wash that. His head largely barren but with a scrubland of whitish hairs straggling on either side. Bright blue eyes. No glasses though, even though he was reading. Unusual that. Blue eyes are often the weakest.

  'Have you started remembering anything yet, Owen? You've already been here two days. You normally start to remember by now.'

  'What should I remember, Alfred?'

  'I'm not telling you. It changes every time. Each year I learn something different. Each year you come, that is. So I'm not telling you.'

  Later they sat next to one another in the refectory. Neither of them joined in as the Christian soldiers were exhorted onwards, and their colleagues sang about what a friend they had in Jesus. They ate. Owen found smells, tastes, sensations on his gums and tongue, and tried to slide them into the silk pockets in his mind, or let them swish smoothly through the interstices. They left when the meal was over. Alfred whispered quietly to him: 'Same escape route tonight?'

  'Which route would that be?' Alfred looked at him with interest, a fragment of cabbage still snagged in his goatee.

  'You really don't remember, do you? This one's worse than usual.' As they reached the end of the corridor, Alfred took him by the arm and led him quickly through a curtain and into an unlit room. At the end of that room was a door with only an ancient lift-up metal handle to close it. Alfred opened the door. It was dark outside.

  'And remember,' Alfred said as Owen stepped out, 'bring me some news from the other kingdom.

  *

  'In amnesia, implicit memory is often left untouched. But
I should say something here. We've come to understand that much of what used to be termed amnesia can be a lot more complicated than a single psychological slippage. Sometimes there's a neurophysiological event we call a screen occlusion. It's as though the mind decides to dispense with the whole enmeshed memory system as too much of a burden. It's like steam being released from a boiler. It voids the system of all the pressure that's built up. No mental faculties have been lost, only put into temporary suspension.'

  'How temporary?' Sylvie asked, though she didn't really need to.

  'No way of knowing. It varies from case to case. Often depends on the extent of the trauma. In most cases the period is relatively short, until at least some form of restoration of memory begins. Often, as I said, the implicit memory can remain pretty much unaffected. So that, for example, a musician would still remember his music, still play his instrument, but he wouldn't be able to find his way to the concert hall, or even remember the last meeting with his wife an hour ago. But he wouldn't get a note wrong in the Hammerklavier Sonata, if he'd been able to play it before the onset of the amnesia.

  'It's a paradox, a riddle, this relationship between explicit and implicit memory. Implicit memory seems to be in some cases largely imperturbable. Certain motor functions, certain skills. Some things, certain structures of the mind, are not displaced by amnesia, even anterograde amnesia.

  'Claparède's drawing-pin experiment established that. The patient knew that a concealed sharp point was going to hurt her. She remembered the pain the following day, even though she couldn't remember the visit.'

  'So what's Owen's sharp point then?'

  'Either what's closing him down or what will open him up again. Often they're both the same thing.'

  'Pretty certain I know what it is, either way.' She looked at the young doctor in his white coat; steel-rimmed glasses, a professional smile. She wondered what his wife was like. What a clean life they must lead. Maybe not.

  'Where is he?'

  'St Clare's. The hostel where he always goes. Amnesia Hotel, I call it. I phoned up. Even arranged for them to put some money in his pocket so he doesn't have to steal. No point bringing him here again, I suppose?'

  The doctor shook his head. 'The pattern seems so established by now, doesn't it? After a few weeks his memory will return in full like last time.' He was turning over his notes. 'Three years ago. Five years ago. Seven years ago. Unless the trauma was something notably worse. Wouldn't want to give him any drugs, in any case: he seems to have developed his own techniques for displacing the centre of his nervous system, as it is.'

  As she was leaving he put his hand on her shoulder. Such a gentle touch, not like Owen's gripping urgency. Medical not marital.

  'One thing I never got to the bottom of with him. Owen's mother. What was she, exactly?'

  'A succubus.' She had turned to face him. She was smiling now; he wasn't. A tiny curl of brown hair beneath his right nostril registered a failure in shaving that morning. The tiniest wisp.

  'Is she still with us?'

  'Not physically, no.'

  *

  Owen walked along the canal and then up on the city walls. Now the water was beneath him, catching lights the city threw away. He looked up at the sky. There were gods up there, amongst the wreckage of their ancient implements. Ploughs, nets, tridents. He walked on beneath the glowing graveyard. Stepped into a pub. A mesh of smoke, words like trapped animals tangled inside it. Laughter sharpened into blades. Finally he was back at the hostel.

  Alfred sat on the other bed counting out pills from a bottle into the palm of his hand. And Owen started to speak, without considering the words at all.

  'Quite a number of people think that medicine must be nauseous and drastic if it is to do them any good. They take strong, violent, stomach-irritating purgatives when a small dose of Holloway's Pills would restore them to perfect health without the least inconvenience or distress. Holloway's Pills suit the most delicate stomach. They are easy and agreeable to take and they never cause any griping pain, but quickly and effectively eject all impurities from the system. That is why they will suit you if you suffer from indigestion, constipation, biliousness, flatulence, or any stomach, liver or kidney disorder. Try them today and get both immediate relief and a permanent cure. But where there is rheumatism, gout or any kindred complaint, Holloway's Ointment should be used in conjunction with the pills.'

  'Where did that come from?' Alfred asked.

  'I don't know.' Owen was sitting on the other bed, startled at his own little speech.

  'Word for word, I should think. A sign in a pharmacist's window. I remember them.'

  'What?'

  'Holloway's Pills. When I was a boy. You don't though. Too young. Done a lot of reading, I think, Owen, in your time.

  Probably too much. Should stick to this.' Alfred held up the leather-bound Bible. 'But then I seem to remember you've read that too, haven't you? Or bits of it anyway. Research, was it, different tattoos for different hides? You'd better get some sleep.'

  *

  The next day after breakfast Owen went out alone again. This time he let the ticket in his pocket guide him to Chester library. He found a Bible, Alfred's book, and hunted through it quickly in a flurry. God, he thought, seems to be a much unrequited lover, so angry at the faithlessness of his little darlings. And with every lethal shakedown another book gets added to his scripture. More deaths; more forgiveness. He keeps setting things up so they can love Him, obey His commandments, live in peace. And they keep killing one another. Always killing one another. Owen moved on. He felt a strange craving to open other books.

  Shakespeare: he looked into that large volume for more than an hour. It seemed that reality was elusive until it donned a mask; identity gained its energy by translating itself. So where had he been translated from, then? Could it really be true that a man must put an antic disposition on, so as to madden himself into action? Owen had been here before, hadn't he, just as he had been on the city walls before. Just as he'd walked beneath the shining emblems in the sky before. He went over to the other shelf.

  Picked up a book called Autobiography by Charles Darwin. A sad man lost the most beloved member of his family, his daughter. He could no longer hear her beguiling speech. So he searched and searched through all the family archives until he arrived at ancestors with no speech at all. Then ones behind them with no souls. Beyond those were others who had no tongues. Then ones with no heads. Headless molluscs. What a melancholy genealogy. What kind of science could yearn for such amnesiac parents? Amnesiac. Now why was that word such a prompt to memory? Suddenly Owen had to be out in the air.

  He stared across the square at a window filled with ghost brides, wrapped in white cotton, satin and silk. The Havisham Room: it filled him with dread, a dread he had no words for. What had he not done to those manikins? He walked across to the cathedral gate and before he even arrived he could hear it. The laughter, the cheering, the shouting, even though no one there was actually laughing or cheering or shouting, only leaving their traces back and forth in a mangle of space. Here was Alfred's other kingdom. Here's where the mysteries had all been played out.

  A white plastic bag flipped and dawdled before catching the wind and trundling along once more: a transient ghost in its ill-fitting shroud.

  And you could see them?' Alfred asked later. 'I could see them.'

  'God and Lucifer.'

  'Both.'

  'Ranulph Higden.'

  'Who?'

  'Ranulph Higden, Monk of Chester. And the author of Polychronicon. He wrote them, so they say anyway. Even went to see the Pope to get permission for the performances. The Chester Mystery Plays. You could have seen the things you saw five hundred years ago every Whitsuntide. On the other hand, you could have seen them last year. You couldn't have seen them today, though. Most people forget the past, Owen, but you manage to forget the present. Your amnesia forms a little hole that lets the past come back to fill it, from however far away. But the pr
esent won't let you alone for long, you know. She always seems to come back to get you.'

  The next day he left early, wandering in and out of the shops, a vagrant, a revenant of his own curiosity. Instruments, confections, garments: they were all slotting back in place now. The cupboard of invisible objects inside him was filling up again. The present's inventory. He stood before the antique jeweller's window: so many lives in those little gleaming emblems. Engagement rings, wedding rings pawned off after death or divorce. The ouroboros of love. What was that? He couldn't remember. A snake with its tail in its mouth? Was that what he was? Eating the endless circle of himself? There was even an eternity ring. He only hoped death had brought that one here. Otherwise eternity was so short it didn't even last for one lifetime. He went into the music shop. Watching, listening, observing once more the reality he seemed to have recently exited.

  The shop assistant was silently observing an older man as he picked up one of the nastiest items in the whole shop: miniature bongos, a ten-pound piece of nonsense, constructed out of cheap plastics somewhere in the ill-paid depths of industrial China. The old man in the raincoat tapped at them tentatively, as though a couple of tiny mammals might still be locked inside. Dwarf marmosets, perhaps, thought Owen. Or Gobi rats.

  'What's the skin on these?' the man enquired gravely. 'Mongolian warthog,' the assistant replied without missing a beat. 'Yak supplies have been pitiful this year. '

  'How do they compare?'

  'The warthog with the yak?'

  'Yes.'

  'Aficionados claim the skin softens quicker. You might need to re-tighten them every eighteen months. Easier on the old fingers though. For the more intimate numbers. Tito Puente wouldn't have anything else next to his palms, so I've heard.'

  And he was good, was he?'

  'The best.'

  'I'll take them.'

  'Big gig, is it?' the assistant asked as he rang up the till. 'Sorry?'

  'I was wondering if Sir needed the miniature plastic Chinese bongos for a forthcoming musical event. Or is it merely a matter of private pleasure?'