SYLVIE'S RIDDLE Read online

  'Oh, they're not for me. My grandson.'

  'And how old is the little man?'

  'Five. But I always try to get him something decent.'

  'Yes, it's so important, isn't it? Imagine how different life would have been if the youthful Miles Davis, asking the old man for something to blow, had been given a comb and a piece of toilet paper, instead of that beautiful trumpet.' The assistant was looking straight at Owen, who was recovering another skill from time's abyss: he had finally remembered how to smile.

  'Did he say Alpha and Omega?' Alfred asked him later at the hostel.

  'The one called God did, yes.'

  'He called himself Alpha and Omega?'

  'And the other one called himself Lucifer. He talked about the light.'

  'That's what his name means, Owen: Lucifer, bearer of light.

  I think you might have known that once. Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.'

  He was on the city walls again. He was part of a story, like every stone beneath his feet, but he didn't know the plot. He stared down. The bridge of sighs. Beneath that the dead men's room, hewn from rock, stinking, fetid, domicile of rats and prisoners awaiting execution, ultimate confinement before ultimate indignity. And Little Ease, a cell the size of a man, reducible even further by boards employed upon the unco-operative miscreant. Less than the size of a man now, but still with a man inside it. Pit and pendulum. An iron glove at hand for the coaxing. The drop. The hanging. The twitching exhibition. The crowd eating, jeering, perhaps even mourning sometimes. How did he know all this?

  A little further on he stopped and stared at the old stone warehouse. He remembered the lights swinging inside it. That's where the other mystery play had been performed, wasn't it? He could hear the woman screaming. He knew what they were doing to her; he had set them on to do it, after all. He was responsible for this. He could almost see her face. Almost. He could feel her body. And he had caused it: he had brought the catastrophe about. This much he knew for certain – her pain was his creation. He felt cold all the way through to his bones, sick with himself. He walked quickly to the hostel and there, seeing him shivering on the bed, Alfred reached under his own bed and took out the whiskey bottle, which was forbidden. He smiled as he handed it to Owen, the leather Bible still clutched in his other hand.

  Translucent gold, it was, hydrogen to helium in a big bum, a blaze in your throat that soon became a blaze in your mind and heart. They called her Deva, the fort and the river whose coils still held the town so tightly. The goddess. The holy one. Often hungry. She swallowed men whole in her battles. Young women big with child swayed back and forth among her weeds, the mother dead while the child still clamoured for life inside her. Why was that part of the mystery play? He felt the pull of the cold snake of the ancient river, but he could feel the hot god too. He poured another whiskey into the tumbler.

  'Do you know what it was this time?' Alfred asked, finally. 'No.'

  He reached down once more under the bed and pulled out a newspaper. 'Take another drink, Owen. Take a big one this time.' Owen did as he was told, then Alfred placed the newspaper on his lap and Owen stared down at the picture of the young woman and the caption beneath it. He put down the whiskey, stood up and left the room. At the bottom of the corridor he went into the bathroom and stared at the mirror.

  His face was the map of a country too many people had overrun. The rivers of gold were polluted already with prospectors' boots. Frightened beasts were heading for the highlands, followed by bullets.

  City of Ghosts

  Sylvie Treadle was Sylvie Ashton again. That wasn't to say she had divorced Owen; she hadn't. But despite the legal entity Mrs S. Treadle, who still received sundry communications from one authority or another; she now thought of herself entirely as Ms Ashton. She marvelled at what had once been her readiness, for a time anyway, to relinquish that identity. She was once more Sylvie Ashton and would remain so unto death, even though she shared a house in Chester with Owen Treadle. When he was there.

  And now she was on her way to Liverpool, to the Signum Institute where she worked. She had already telephoned to check that Owen was still safely berthed in the hostel. She had arranged to leave a little more money for him. She accelerated away as the traffic cleared. He always wore that old RAF greatcoat he'd picked up in a sale somewhere. She had tried to dump it more than once, but he insisted on keeping it, down in the cellar along with the dead books and the defunct film cans. And whenever he went missing on one of his walkabouts, that coat went missing with him. The amnesiac's greatcoat, a cover for the great wound of remembrance. A vast serge made for a modem learns but ending up on earth-bound Owen instead. Bloody Owen. At least he wasn't belly-up in the river, in the old bitch's maw. That was always the first thing she checked. She sometimes wondered if it might have been simpler if he had been. Down amongst the weeds, where everything's forgotten.

  The Signum on Rodney Street was only a few doors along from the Institute of Western Acupuncture. Signum was not quite as dilapidated as that Georgian building, slowly mouldering back towards humanity's original organic dwelling place, but it was far from spruce. In fact it was stained, despite the copious rain. The Cathedral, Paddy's Wigwam, had once more stuck the spikes of its famous, modernist rotunda into the sky and the heavens had been duly punctured. Pious precipitation, Father. Rain covered the city. The docks were wet, the roofs were wet, the streets were wet and the people were wet. Not that they looked too hang-dog about it: they'd got used to being rained-on. Liverpool is a city of cargoes, and so, like the hold of any cargo ship, it is often half-submerged.

  She remembered how John Lennon had sat on the Albert Dock in the early morning inside that soft insistent rain and heard the basso profunda of a ship in the Mersey mist. He'd heard the call of the Atlantic, the USA, the glitter of the future. And what could she hear? The plaintive drone of Lennon's voice, a noise that was surely death's insistence against the come-hitherish vocal curlicues of Paul McCartney. A descant on the inescapability of night.

  John was singing now, on her car's tape player: Don't Let Me Down. It was pretty evident it wasn't Yoko he was singing to, but life itself, and the urgency of his tone was maintained so compellingly because he knew life would indeed let him down, since it always does. Time is on death's side, that's why the hooded figure always looks so relaxed about each forthcoming contest. John knew this in his heart of hearts, and the knowledge still came through in his singing, despite all that arty prattle with Yoko, the hair-growing for peace, the lengthy weekend bed-malingerings of sincerity. He knew it and the knowledge simply wouldn't go away. The bullet was already flying. That was why the music stayed with us now; the tunes, the image, the voice, so long after the man had gone. One more image from the city of ghosts, then. This was the nature of her research. This was her work at the Signum Institute. The afterlife of images: how they mapped the mind's ravaged landscape, like trenches and barbed wire on the Western Front. How we couldn't live without them any more. Why was Liverpool so laden with ghosts and their images? And why did they sometimes seem more real than the living?

  The afterlife of images: that was her work. The title of her thesis, the title of several essays in The Burlington Magazine, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Modern Painters. It was the title of the main course she taught at the Signum Institute, and many of the lectures she gave at home and abroad. It would be the title of her book too when it was finally finished. And it might as well have been the name of her room, because that creaky attic on the top floor, though capable of holding seminars of up to eight at a time, really only embraced the images inside it and they were the images that went to make up their own afterlife. Labyrinths, paintings, photographs, cinematic stills, holograms, and a huge Wurlitzer rainbow, a gaudy spectrum of the gaps between the quantum states. All around the walls of her room, jammed into every spare inch of each bookshelf, even in the corners on the floor, were images, and all the images were so dense with
information that she could often sit in here in silence for hours at a time and look around her. That's if she was permitted to do so, which she seldom was. She glanced at the timetable she'd pasted on her door. Nothing until the afternoon. That was a relief. A few hours of serious thought. The anxiety about Owen had finally abated. Well almost. It was the same as before. Something bad happened. Owen's mind decided the events were too dark to be coped with in the conscious state, so it sent all the information elsewhere. Then Owen sent himself elsewhere, anywhere his wife wasn't. Or whatever makeshift wife he'd recently been toying with. There was a knock on the door. Alison peered around it. Tiny moon face, glasses hanging off her nose, shoulders, as ever, hunched.

  'Any news on Owen?'

  'He's all right. At the hostel. Give him a week, maybe less.

  He'll be home, don't worry. The usual routine.'

  'Can I do anything?'

  'Not really, AIL Thanks. I wouldn't mind seeing that video Charlie made of the crippled girl some time.' A hand fluttered its condolent fingers round the door and her tiny friend was gone.

  She had met Owen while he was in Liverpool making the film City of Ghosts. It was a decade after the shooting down of Lennon in the streets of New York. Owen was technically the writer, Sue Granville the director, since he hadn't yet teamed up with Johnny Tamworth, but it was soon evident that it was Owen's project. Sylvie looked out of the window down towards the Albert Dock and remembered the first time she had seen the film, at a screening at the university. She had asked him afterwards how he had achieved the curious dream-like quality of the black-and-white sequences.

  'I got Sue to shoot it all at dawn, and slightly underexpose the footage. We filmed from the back of a truck, told the driver to hold a constant speed. So it's like those Atget pictures of Paris: mostly deserted, the scene of a crime after the criminal's escaped. Call it the landscape of Lennon's mind after our quarryman had escaped this city for the last time. Imagine the imagination of a dead man. Part prison; part cemetery; part dreamscape. Maybe it's the same with the imagination of a living man. Remember the weirdness of Strawberry Fields Forever. So we were looking at Liverpool through Lennon's eyes after the man was already dead.'

  When the soundtrack wasn't filled with Lennon's music it was filled with Owen's script, an odd, surreal montage of impressions, biographies, elegies, notes for love songs to women and places. This was someone who seemed to understand the relationship between image and word, which was precisely what she'd been working on at the time; the truth was, it was what she'd always been working on. She was still working on it now too: the afterlife of images is always situated in language. It was pretty obvious Owen was sleeping with Sue, simply from the way she touched him from time to time, but he didn't give any indication that this was likely to prevent him from sleeping with anyone else. And it didn't. Three months later he moved into her house in Chester, the house she had bought from the money she inherited after her father's death. She had been about to sell it, since she had realised that she couldn't really afford to maintain it by herself.

  'Don't sell it,' Owen had said, after he'd spent an hour with her there. 'I'll help you keep it.' And he had. His work on scripts, treatments, and the television films he now made with John Tamworth, had always kept coming in. The Tamworth-Treadle collaborations had been highly acclaimed. Commissions had followed. Their television features were sometimes given independent screenings in art cinemas, more in Europe than in Britain, but they made it on to the small screen all over the world. He couldn't be criticised on the financial front. He'd paid his way. Even a little stretch of her way too, from time to time. She looked at the photograph of him above her desk. Black hair, a face simultaneously delicate and strong. The darkest, largest eyes she'd ever seen, apart from the photographs of a certain Spanish painter. Black holes through which the world disappeared. In more ways than one sometimes. The afterlife of images.

  She decided to stay the night at the Signum. She had a little sofabed over by the window, which she occasionally used. She surely deserved one night left entirely to herself, without the luminous silence of the telephone crouching six inches from her ear.

  Hamish was around at seven asking when she was planning on leaving.

  'I'm staying the night.'

  'You should really inform security beforehand. '

  'I thought you were security these days.'

  'Well, in a manner of speaking. '

  'I shan't be in too late and I shan't be bringing any boys back, I promise. It'll just be me and you here. We can listen to each other typing.'

  Hamish Flyte was something of a mystery himself. As far as anyone could recall he had originally arrived at the Institute on an accounting assignment, but had subsequently made himself so invaluable to the Signum, becoming a member of every significant committee and a controlling figure over every aspect of the Institute's slightly unfathomable finances, that no one could now see a way of getting rid of him, though many would have liked to. He was not popular, and was only too aware of the fact. That was why he had installed a scan-and-trap software programme which could gain access to all incoming or outgoing internet texts or email communications. In the event of certain phrases occurring, the screened passage would become available to Hamish through his exclusive monitoring system.

  He had claimed to the other directors that this was an unfortunate necessity, a result of a residual racial clot in Liverpool's cultural arteries, a disfigurement still capable of affecting even so healthy a body as the Signum Institute, because, Hamish claimed, of the mental conflicts which three centuries of slavery, immigration, emigration and religious strife had between them generated on Merseyside. In fact he was primarily if not solely concerned with any references made to the diminutive stature, combative personality and geographical origins of the present Director of Studies. Himself, in fact. So the Racial Epithet Catchment Enumerator (RECE for short) would surely have appeared unexpectedly specific to anyone other than Hamish who might have gained access to it, which no else in fact ever could, since he had ensured that he was in possession of the only monitoring trigger. The lexicon of sought-for phrases which he trawled daily, and usually nightly too, included 'malignant Hiberian dwarf', 'Glaswegian toad', 'kilted wanker', 'Jockstrap Willie', 'Scotch Midget', 'masturbating Pict', 'Clydeside Chlamydia' and 'Gorbals Gonad'. He was entirely convinced that such disobliging phrases were continuously passing back and forth through the ether, but he could never manage to nail a specific user. He knew what they said about him: he didn't need telling. He'd always known. He'd get one of them one day. But for now they were managing inexplicably to evade his scrutiny. He often saw them huddling together at the bottom of corridors, trying to hide their giggles and guffaws as he approached. He wondered if they might have dreamt up some sort of code. An inserted semi-colon perhaps, to facilitate the disparagement of his own still semi-colonised land and those engendered there? Or full-stops inserted, just the simple minuscule black mark in the middle of certain words, perhaps? He tried it out on the scanner: Toe. rag. Scum. bag. Dick. head. Shitface.

  Still nothing. Evidently something more exotic and encrypted then: they were a hieroglyphic lot at the Signum Institute. He knew that well enough. Bastards.

  Thus it was that while Sylvie finally switched off the light and stared out over the Mersey and its mighty ships, Hamish click-clicked on his keyboard with quiet determination four doors away. She switched the light back on for a moment to look at one of the pictures pinned to her wall. In the art of Laos, the river-dragon itself is indistinguishable from the river. Those spumes, fumes, flushes; those fanged rushes; those meanders… And yet there was something she was trying to focus. The river god was sluggish, dark, possessive where the nymph was quick, light, constantly escaping. Where did that leave Deva then? Had she combined them both in one? She switched the light off again. The waters of Lethe at last: they were the ones that brought forgetfulness.

  *

  When she arrived back the f
ollowing evening in Cathedral Close, Chester, the lights in the house were on. As she opened the door she heard the soundtrack of the film. She knew it only too well. Owen was back and was watching City of Ghosts. It seemed an appropriate choice for his return trip into his own dark time. He was re-acquainting himself with his work, finding out what might be contained in his head. She walked into the room quietly. Lennon's lugubrious tones were lamenting his inability to go back to the place of his birth because of all the drug-charges against him. Owen looked up from the armchair and smiled. Anyone would think he'd popped out to the shop fifteen minutes before, to buy some red peppers.

  'Back then, Owen.'

  'I always come back.' A cargo ship bleated through the mist and Lennon's voice came over the soundtrack once more, disparaging one old comrade, annihilating another.

  'Reminding yourself who you are?'

  'I thought I was reminding myself who someone else was.

  But let's not quibble.'

  *

  She made him shower and shave, then let him come to bed.

  He stared down at himself rising. His body had memories that his mind had lost. It was veined with memories.

  'This has happened before, you know.'

  'I don't know.'

  'I do know, Owen. And it has.'

  'Even this.'

  'Even this. It's you on day release from repetition. Your little wormhole out of consciousness.'

  A little wormhole. Eve's little wormhole. That was in the mystery play, wasn't it? He felt her flesh and clutched it tightly. Closing his eyes at last, praying tonight there would be no dreams.

  In the morning she left him sleeping. She went down to the cellar and saw the greatcoat hanging from its rusty hook. Out of the pocket you could just make out the newspaper Alfred had given him. She lifted it out and saw the image of the young woman's face. That was enough. She didn't need to read any of the words.