Omne animal triste post coitum

It was generally agreed that Toby’s was the best entry, even before the judges had arrived. He stood with his shoes polished and together, looking it over on his section of the long row of trestle tables that ran from beneath the window of Saint Kentigern to the noticeboard with its appeals for bric-a-brac and Darfur.

The tops of his socks gripped tightly around his shins. He felt the prickle of sweat burrowing through nylon. He felt the tinge of embarrassment as grownups would pause for a moment and examine his entry on the table; and he would watch their expression alter as they attempted to comprehend, take in, adjust themselves to the thing that they were seeing. He had expected this, of course. He had wanted it; desperately sought and dreamt about the examination of his capability by adult eyes and minds. Yet now – had he had any help from anyone at home? – as he stood – was this his first year exhibiting? – beside the table – had it taken him a very long time? – receiving this realisation of imagination – it was ever so good, they were sure it would win – this fantasy of praise; he found he had not prepared any responses for the comments, and so he blushed and burrowed fingernails into the fleshy cushions of his palms.

It was ever so good, was Toby’s. They couldn’t understand why he had not entered the competition before.

Only that, thought Toby, was the very point of the thing. He could not have entered until he had been sure. He had been to the event in previous years and had strolled along the long U of trestle tables, hands behind his back, silently observing the other children’s projects. If he were to tell anyone that, then they might presume that he had entered because he thought the other entries were no good; that he’d seen their standard and had known he could do better – but nothing could be further from the truth.

Toby had come here year after year – silently; never speaking – and he was of the opinion that the other children’s entries were excellent. He had been in awe of their production, of their skill and their attention to detail. He had imagined that if he were to enter he would, quite simply, be laughed out of the competition.

But he had also longed for the praise. He had watched successive children stand on the erected little stage and receive the tiny silver cup and have their photograph taken for the local evening newspaper. Toby could sense how that would make him feel. It was a feeling that was real and potent and forcibly equal to the pain that would touch him if he weren’t to win, if he was laughed at and made to realise that his dream was not for him.

It was no absurdity to imagine the laughter. Though there were many entries that were truly brilliant, there were also those that were not. He had heard the judges’ whispered comments as other children had suffered their disappointments: the glue was not applied very tidily. There was not enough string. The piece was imaginative, but was not to scale. It lacked scope. That bit there, it was rather askew. What if Toby was one of those children?

As each year came, he resolved that he would enter that time. In the weeks before, he would lie in bed, his back on fire against the mattress as his brain reawakened his single plan for what he would make to display at the competition. There was only one idea: the same plan year after year. Only whenever it was time, the imagined pain of not winning would present itself and his back would become cold again, and he would realise that the competition was not his to be won. The plan was never realised. It was for better children, more talented ones.

So this, it appears, is our story. One year Toby overcame his shyness (for that, if we’re frank, was all it was) and he entered the competition. We might infer a moral – that once he received the praise that he so desired, he did not know what to do with it, or it did not satisfy him as he thought it might.

Only this is not the story at all.

For while it’s true to say that Toby only ever had one plan of what he would make for the competition, the thing that he entered was almost unrecognisable to the initial dream. Successive years of frustration, of disappointment, had contrived to adapt his vision. He knew that if he were to win he would have to create something so astonishing that it stood out far beyond the entries of the other children; something so technically perfect that it would halt the judges in their tracks.

Only that is not the story either.

For Toby’s entry did not grow out of a spirited sense of competition. It was a development of frustration. As the years passed, successive failure became a comfort to him. He began to trust the mellow hopelessness of not putting in; of his silent tread about the trestle U, examining the other children’s entries but not his own. Whenever he came to imagine the thing – that leap into the air, that burning fear – it could all be comforted by the dampish sense of failing to fly. He knew what to expect from failing and would cuddle up to the unmade thought at night.

It’s a tricky business growing up. Talents mature, and failure for a boy like Toby became harder to achieve. He became more skilled with his fret saw. He learned how to solder neatly, and found easier methods by which he might wire the mechanism to the stand.

As much as Toby wished to build something that would defeat the other children’s attempts, he also longed to build something that would defeat himself and bring that delicate salve of frustration. So the plan, though there was only ever one plan, grew more intricate, more hopelessly baroque, more likely to fail. Until finally he failed at failing.

He boiled the bones himself in his mother’s milk pan. He used a dentist’s drill (obtained with his own pocket money from the back of a homeopathy pamphlet) to bore neat holes through each epiphysis. Through these he ran green silk threads to attach them to the central cog.

He cleaned the brass rods with methylated spirit which he applied from the end of a cotton bud that later proved invaluable for lighting the little burner beneath the glass dome of condensed rainwater. He placed the snails into the glass tube one by one and coaxed them to glide further into the pressurised funnel with a corner of iceberg lettuce.

With a craft knife he scored away the many oblong windows of the telephone box doors, which he had modelled with perfect accuracy in white metal at 1:42 scale. These he left unglazed and hinged them to the boxwood frame so they could flip open and act as vents for the steam to escape.

Using a tiny needle he stitched together the swatches of grey leather, and attached them to the starched fabric he had formed upon the reproduction death mask of Napoleon found in the art store at his sister’s school. The bulbs he painted black, and screwed all twenty in by hand; and around these he pushed pheasant feathers at alternating lengths into the ox-blood putty that he had moulded about the vertical sheath.

The trumpet was the trickiest part, but it was attached to the bellows with a minimum of tape, and gripped by the skeletal retort he had positioned, reaching with deathly stillness from the arm of a 1920s dinner sleeve.

It was ever so good was Toby’s.

All who saw it admired it and said he had done so well making all that in so little time.

Only, Toby thought, it’s taken me my childhood to make this thing. Years of worry have resulted in this one object. So many thwarted attempts to enter have conspired to produce something so unlike the thing itself – magnificent – but fulfilling only by frustration.

And the mechanical fingers whirred; and Napoleon’s glass eye swung round upon its silver spring to face the many judges; and the trapped skylark, tail feathers nailed to a little wooden cross took fright and finally began to sing; and the plaster lips parted as the trumpet struck up: this is heartbreak, this is heartbreak meanly felt – but the thing admired was not how Toby had dreamt it.

In recession

Everyone I went to school with passed along the wall in twos or threes behind the rope barrier. What light fell into the chamber fell through the shivering of the bead curtains at either end of this passageway. I felt rather than saw their shifting gaze, sensed rather than heard the shuffling footfalls – here a pair of trainers, there office shoes, now again trainers, expensive ones – a set of motorcycle boots, even. After the first few months my exhibitors laid an anti-electrostatic pad along the walkway, which intensified the sounds I could no longer detect while distancing the vibrations I could. I can remember the carpet in the room where their obliging arms laid me to rest, can remember its patternless field. I am glad they’ve seen fit to protect it. It bodes well.

I still knew a few things about my self, and prize these shreds of knowledge like talismans. As my skull has steadily softened in the darkness, my eyes have grown, now many times their original size. Blind and opaque, they register only the dimmest distinctions in a broad field of unchanging blue. In early life I might have called the sensation that at times overwhelms me ‘skin-crawling’ – the great expansion of the surface area has led (indirectly or otherwise) to a remarkably increased sensitivity in its registry of sensation. ‘Crawling’ is not it, though: it puts me more in mind of a harbour or a sea, a crystal sea. It is like the motion of wind through a vast cornfield. (In the midlands of the Transkei, or in the fields of Oklahoma. How soon such images are so cheaply forgotten.) Clearly in my mind I can see the landscape of a deep harbour endlessly shifting, each instant a fractal landscape that came so close to never happening. In this way I am at peace for months at a time. Though I would guess my outward appearance became horrible or freakish a long time ago, I suppose I am rather like a plant. A cactus, perhaps. I always admired trees.

The room is in darkness. I feel rather than see those shafts of light from the room beyond, where the assembled can bear witness to the projected memory of every thought that has struck through my mind. Every dream, every aspiration, every sinful thought is registered. Eager graduates synthesise untrodden philosophies from fantasies of debasement that to me have long become mere amusements. Emotional biographers step outside in tears, overwhelmed by scrying fugues of pain and thwarted need that I lost the ability to hear decades since (“I call this one Five-Part Invention for Wounded Father, op. 32”) but whose turns and deliberations I can remember with fond affection. Compassionate physicians swaddle their terminal cases in blankets and chairs to audition pleasant daydreams recovered from ribbons of magnetic tape that would circle the globe.

I’ve welcomed this sense of departure, ascending confidently if slowly from the anguish of the flesh into the harmonic mechanisms of pure language and mathematical systems. No more the mean temperament, the guilt-ridden attachment to anaesthetic routine. My future is a blue heaven, and I may decorate or empty it as I please. I am not alone. There are others. I cannot see or speak to them, but they are everywhere, and they are glad that I am with them.

Reflection

I HAVE NEVER found out if my Great Aunt Judith’s calculations were correct. Being a spinster living alone in a small seaside resort, she had much spare time which she divided between philosophising, and preserving broad beans by blanching and packing them in rock salt in the hundred or so Kilner jars that dotted her kitchen. At both enterprises, she excelled, and she theorised that if we were to take a small reflective disc – the mirror from her powder compact; or, I suggested one of the countless CDs that came free with her Sunday newspaper – and if we were to take her large magnifying lens (supplied to her free of charge by the county library to compensate their under-investment in large-print editions), and we were to go outside and stand between the hollyhocks in her front garden (which overlooked the cliffs high above the rest of the resort), we might spend a most pleasurable afternoon permanently blinding any people using the coin-operated mechanical telescopes on the central promenade. Unfortunately she died before either of us was to test this theory, and I am too much of a sentimentalist to undertake the proposal without her. And so her thinking goes unrealised and I am left with only the broad beans to mark her life’s achievements.

Clothes Moths

April delivered clothes moths, and one Sunday Daniel was tying cinnamon, and ginger, and cloves into the square envelopes he had cut from a bedsheet to hang in the doorless wardrobe in his room.

‘You’d be better off just getting a door put on it,’ I told him.

‘No, what I really need is cedarwood.’

‘Or a heavy curtain, something to stop them getting in.’

‘Cedarwood’s the best thing for repelling them, I read,’ he repeated, his thick fingers fumbling with the twine.

‘But if they can’t get in–’

‘You know, it’s not actually the moths that do the damage,’ he said, pulling the cord tight around the neck of the cotton bag, ‘it’s the larvae.’

‘But if the moths can’t actually get in with the clothes in the first place–’

‘That’s what the spices are for,’ he said, ‘to deter the moths.’

He was finding the knots difficult; his hands hardly made for such delicate work. Stooped over the table, he struggled on, bag after bag until all eight were sealed. Eight pomanders to fend off the countless moths.

‘There,’ he said with a satisfied grin upon his face, ‘that should do it.’

He showed me the holes a moth had made in the jumper he was wearing, right in the middle of the front.

‘That was last year’s,’ he told me, ‘last year wasn’t so bad for them, but the year before that! You should have seen them! They’re a nuisance more than anything. Just little holes they make, but they ruin a perfectly good jumper.’

He made us tea. He made us tea in the brown-glaze teapot that is missing a lid. He stomped about the kitchen, unable to find spoons, and cups, and finally the milk, and I said it was fine because I could take it without milk, but he said it was annoying because he was sure he had bought some the other day.

‘And how is work?’ I asked.

‘Work?’ he said, ‘work’s fine,’ he said, and he looked at the floor.

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, ‘it’s been going fine.’

‘That’s great.’

‘Only–’ he said, and he looked at me with those big empty eyes, he looked at me with the helplessness of a child who is lost and appealing to be saved from the world, ‘there’ve been one or two incidents lately,’ he said, ‘just little things, but they’re bugbears all the same.’

I nodded. I understood. I thought I understood.

‘The first,’ he said, beginning to tell his tale, ‘happened a few weeks ago. We’d had some German visitors in. It was all top brass, but they showed them round. Introduced them to us all. They were very interested in the work I’d been doing, and they complimented me on it, and I said that I couldn’t have done any of it without Karen, my assistant. “Karen’s shown me such devotion,” I told them.’

‘Devotion?’ I repeated. It seemed a funny word.

‘That was just it,’ he said, staring glumly at his cup, ‘she was there, and I think she probably heard. It’s been very awkward since then. I’ve not known what to say.’

I nodded. It was hard, I said, but it probably didn’t matter. It was a silly thing to get worked up by.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘there was the incident over the minibus.’

‘The minibus?’

‘They didn’t send one. Or rather they did, but they sent the wrong one. They sent us someone else’s minibus and they got ours by mistake.’

I nodded again. I didn’t understand.

‘We were going to take some of the seniors out for the day. There was the floral show on. We thought; floral show, pub lunch, we could have them back before their tea.’

‘It sounds nice,’ I said.

‘So we ordered a minibus for them. Minibus and driver. For the day. There’s only ten of them, but that’s too many for two cars. So we booked this minibus and the chap to take us there and back, and it was all sorted.’

I sipped my tea. I was listening, but I’d become distracted. A clothes moth was walking across the table, brazenly weaving its way in and out of the stacked bags of spice.

‘Only when he turns up, it’s the wrong minibus. He says “Minibus for Lurch.” I said, “There’s some mistake, my name’s Rudd.” I said, “I think you’re meant for somebody else.”’

‘No–’ I said staring at him in disbelief.

‘I sent him away. Clearly this Lurch fellow ended up with our minibus for the day–’

‘No–’

‘But I’ve had no explanation–’

‘No–’

‘No account for why we were left without transportation for ten senior citizens.’

‘No,’ I said, appealing for him to understand, ‘it was a joke,’ I said, ‘the driver, he was making a joke.’

‘A joke?’ he said.

‘He was joking,’ I said, ‘when he said Lurch, he meant –’

And there was no going back. I realised only then that the thing had to be said. That for him to understand it could not be unsaid. The hole began to unwind around him, to grow ever larger and swallow both of us inside. I looked away briefly. Perhaps he would get it on his own. I looked away, and only then saw the milk bottle on the dresser half obscured by an untidy sheaf of newspapers. There was no disguising it; it had to be said.

‘He meant you,’ I said, ‘he was calling you Lurch.’

‘It was booked under the company name. There’s no Lurch that works for us. I made the booking. It would be under my name.’

‘From The Addams Family,’ I told him, ‘the television programme from the sixties.’

‘I’m aware of it,’ he said.

‘Well the butler, the big lumbering butler, is called Lurch.’

And only then did he get it. He hadn’t known, I think, that that's was the character’s name was; but he knew now all right. We sat there in silence watching the clothes moth trip and dally about the table. It crept across the pomanders and then took flight only to settle on them again.

We watched it and neither of us said anything, until finally it took off one last time from the table and I pushed it firmly with my thumb into the wall.

‘Don’t do that,’ Daniel said as I pulled back my thumb to reveal the dead insect, flattened, surrounded in a halo of silver dust on the wall; the scales of its wings a smudged imprint of its final moments, ‘the marks,’ he said, ‘they never come out.’