Crowe's Requiem

ANGEL

When I was a child

I was told that the man who made time made plenty of it. But whoever told me that was wrong. There is never enough time, never. There is only this time and you mark it and pass it and kill it any way you can. Now, with what time I have left, I want to tell the story of my time. My time has come, what else would I be doing? I see this story as the gift of my second childhood, a story of death and enchantment, madness and delusion, faint hearts and fair maids; in short, a love story. Given more time it might have been a different story but that is not the point. The point is that like all stories, if it goes on long enough, it will end in death. The trick is to avoid spoiling it.

I am twenty years old but I am already an old man. In fact I am a very old man and like all old men I am dying. And though I am dying from any number of things I am dying mainly because I have a bad heart. I would like to be able to say that I was led astray and killed by it but that would not be strictly true. If it wasn’t my heart it would be something else, some other foolishness which did for me.

Nevertheless, a bad heart is a bad heart and no matter how well intentioned it is or whether it is in the right place or not, given time, one way or another, it will kill you.

1

Sometimes, in spite of all I know I think of it this way . . .

Falling, falling, falling through the heavens, this tiny seed of myself plummeting with the speed of a cast down thing. For how long? I don’t know, there are no signs in the darkness to mark out the progress and duration of my descent. All I know is the speed and breathlessness of it, the rush and pull of the air which sucks away my buoyancy and tightens the night around me.

That and the sense of loss. Deep in the wound of myself there is a terrible sense of forfeit, some rare and priceless thing gone forever. It is the chief torment of this terrible descent. And where are my brothers? Surely I am not alone, this limitless darkness cannot be mine alone. There must be others like me, equally anguished, equally disoriented, all in the same headlong pitch. And yet I feel alone—the darkness hums with a vast indifference, my descent causes only the slightest disturbance, a tiny thread pulled from the limitless fabric of the night.

My wings are gone, long gone, shorn by the terrible speed of my descent, burned and scattered to dust throughout the heavens. More than anything it is these I will miss most, these fabulous accoutrements of my one-time grandeur. I will never cease to grieve for them. In fact a time will come when I will think of them as the fundamental grievance of the entire world. Beneath all the despair and wretchedness there is only this one fundamental misery. This dim but unforgettable memory of flight, the heartbreak of an entire race.

I will arrive without blemish, mewling in infant perfection. It is as if the descent itself, the attrition of the winds and darkness, has moulded and polished me for arrival. This is an outrage, a betrayal of my ordeal. I need lesions, scar tissue, testimony of some sort, not this bogus perfection.

And so on down, down, down, unseaming the darkness as I go. There is no going back now, not that there ever was. Suddenly a thickening of the air, I am entering a new element. I feel the dampness and a sudden breaking into light; the stony ground rushes up to meet me . . .

. . . It was the end of the world.

I am talking of my birthplace, Furnace, a small village in the west set beneath hills which looked out over the hammered lead surface of the Atlantic towards the distant precipice of the horizon where it spilled over into the abyss. Outside those hills lay the world but the world to Furnace was little more than a rumour, a thing of myth and half truth which sometimes you could believe and sometimes you could not. Now, when I’ve seen enough to know that the rumour was indeed largely the truth, I find it difficult to believe there was ever a time when the world had the substance of a child’s tale.

I was born in the winter of that year, a winter so long and hard that tough mountain lambs were stricken with frost and left dead as far into the year as April. All I know of my birth I have from my grandfather and he told me that right from the beginning I was wrong. When I was washed and placed in my mother’s arms it was obvious to even the most biased observers in the room that, despite my aura of infant perfection, there was about me also a miasma of ineffable error. My grandfather said that I exuded a tension, a black effulgence which set me apart even in Furnace. I was wrong in the same way that pale crows and black lambs are wrong.

Worse than being wrong I seemed to know I was wrong. On being born I cried solidly for three days and three nights, a long, harrowing howl which broke only for air but which died mercifully at the end of the third night by which time my throat was lacerated and my blanket flecked with blood. By then my cry had deteriorated to a low croak and my whole appearance was that of a raw, infant demon. Despair had shredded my father’s nerves and reduced my mother to a sobbing hulk. I think this was the moment they surrendered me and I do not blame them for it. How terrible I must have been, a maddened ingrate who forswore sleep, the breast, maternal succour, all for the sake of one long cry of outrage. But my grandfather recognised something different. Hovering through the room, gaunt and decisive as a raptor, he pounced suddenly and wrested me from my father’s grasp. In that instant I stopped crying. I stared up at that old man and into his blue eyes and immediately I was at peace. I had found my mentor, my guide, my oracle. This was the moment I passed into the care of that fearsome old man and it was the moment also that I entered into that most awkward and soul-destroying of all disciplines: self-knowledge.

My parents were powerless in the face of my grandfather—I was his and that was that. I was the small moon which fell through the heavens and he was the giant ochre planet within whose gravity I’d come to wheel. He would tell me later that he recognised my cry as the kindred note of despair which sounded in his own heart and he told me also that it was not so much the theme or passion of my cry which impressed him but the sheer length of it. Any child who had the endurance and wherewithal to protest his condition for three days and nights without sleep was a child after his own heart.

So from the very beginning I came under his sole influence and a time came when I passed so completely from my parents’ reach that now I have lost all sight and memory of them—they are now no more than ghosts reaching out of the ether of memory towards me. Maybe they could have been saved to me had I just once spoken some words of filial love and affection, words which would have assured them that our parting was not their fault. But if they were powerless in the face of my grandfather’s influence I was powerless within it. Words of love and assurance were impossible to utter from out of this gravity—the only possible words were words of query, words of extremity, words of madness.

Nothing good grows in the shade, and in Furnace, where the light was thin, all children were pale. But in a village of pale children I was paler than the rest by virtue of the fact that I was also bald. I was born hairless, born even without that protective fuzz over the soft blue pulse in the middle of the skull which makes all children so vulnerable. And I would remain that way, blue, hairless and pulsing until my second year and the moment I took it upon myself to grow.

In spite of this lunar appearance I was a healthy child. Germs gave me a wide berth, so much so that not once did I succumb to any of the croups, colds or colics which beset other infants. But if I was a healthy child I was also a reluctant one. At six months I was no bigger than a newborn and by the time my first birthday came round I had gained only three pounds with little appreciable lengthening of my frame. Good health in a child is nothing without growth and I refused to grow.

I refused to do other things as well. It was after I cut my teeth that they realised there was something wrong with my mouth, more precisely, my tongue. After the long howl of my birth I settled down to become an eerily silent child. All through the agony of teething I sat on the floor, red-faced, outraged, and enduring bitterly, making a low canine whimpering in the pit of my belly. But no howl passed my lip. My tongue languished like a slug, rooted and speechless in the floor of my mouth.

My parents were worried. Furnace thronged with imbeciles. Clutches of half-wits, all of tangled provenance, wandered through the village, chewing heels of bread with blank expressions on their faces. In desperation my father prised my mouth open, gripped my tongue between thumb and forefinger and pulled it out over my lips. It was there all right and it looked normal enough, why then wouldn’t it sound? He brandished trinkets and tools in front of my face hoping I would grasp the world and speak it.

This is a fork and this is a knife, I was told. You take one in each hand and use them to eat three square meals a day. Eat enough and one day you’ll be big and strong like me.

This is a dog, his name is Rex. He eats bones and herds sheep. One day he’ll be your friend and you’ll be his master. Until then be careful not to vex him.

But I wouldn’t be coaxed. I sat in silence and drank in his words, hoarded them up like coins, already careful in these things. I was taking stock of the world and had made a decision not to pronounce on it until I was in full possession of the facts. I would not be lured so easily. So throughout my infancy I stayed dumb, a watcher on the kitchen floor, piling up information in my heart, waiting for my moment. When it came I was going to make sure that all things were clear and understood.

This silence caused anxiety in everyone around me. Everyone that is except my grandfather. He hunkered down in front of me and tilted my face up with the tips of his fingers. He looked into my eyes and my plan was as clear to him as if I had passed him a note. He nodded his head approvingly.

Leave him alone, he said quietly. Give him time.

And so I was given time.

2

My grandfather was a man from another epoch, another world. I see him now as a solitary, harrowed visionary, a man from a time when plague ravaged the land and books were burned, a fiery spirit who inspired droves in his wake to lay down their tools and pick up scourges and hair shirts in a universal call to repentance. He was a man from some benighted time of myth and superstition.

I remember him as the tallest man in the world. Sometimes I thought he must have been the tallest man who’d ever lived. Having left Furnace and seen part of the world I now know that this is not true. Yet I won’t have it any other way. When, towards fifteen, I stopped growing at over six foot the old man still had a fraction over me. That fraction pleased him immensely. Sometimes when walking the fields he would look out over the top of my young skull and smile in satisfaction. That fraction was important to me also. I didn’t ever want to be taller than him.

But it was when I was a child that he seemed to be at his tallest. On certain days and in certain moods he would rise up before me in his nailed boots and galluses and block out the very sun itself. He seemed to me taller than heroes, taller than giants, taller than anything my infant imagination could conjure with back then. Therefore it is difficult to take the measure of him. Everything about him defies description and I cannot find the words to encompass him. I will put it like this; in another time and another place my grandfather would have had a sect or a congregation of some sort. But he never did. All he ever had was Furnace. And me.

I picked up my infant skills suddenly, thoughtlessly, without any preparatory stumbling or slobbering. I see this now as part of my conscious decision to grasp the world as cleanly and clearly as possible, a cutting down on the margin of error. It was a ploy I would use later in life, this heedless and sudden plunge into things and circumstances.

I was being fed by my father when I decided I’d had enough, I was ready. I took the fork from his hand and began eating of my own accord with the same thoughtful relish I had seen my grandfather favouring. My father tried to correct me by changing the fork to my right hand but I returned it stubbornly to my left and continued feeding. He tried to correct me a second time but I fixed him with a blank stare and returned the implement to its rightful hand. This was the hand which served my grandfather and if it was good enough for him it was good enough for me also. I finished my meal and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Then I slid easily from my chair and walked solemnly through the front door and into the ferric light which illumined the day. I was well aware of the amazement this caused—I had taken my first steps without any exploratory crawling or stumbling. I had simply landed on both feet, placed one foot in front of the other and moved off in perfect balance. I had watched and hoarded, there was no mystery. Just keep your backbone straight and shift your weight onto your falling hip; you are carried forward smoothly.

Outside on the road, savouring my new strength, I surveyed Furnace. It opened up before me like a wound in creation. The hills rose behind my back, scooped gently under the house and rolled out to sea. The land under the house was stony and uneven, broken up into small fields by stone walls. To the left, a conifer windbreak overshadowed the house, keeping it in perpetual gloom. I was eighteen months old and somehow I felt myself heir to this ruined kingdom. A tentative swagger built in my young bones. I tilted my chin to catch the breeze and drew myself up to my full height. The sky darkened overhead and my grandfather towered beside me. I looked up and made it known to him that all my watchfulness was at an end—that this was my moment of entry into the world. He spoke to me without turning from the sea.

The world is a mystery, he said. It solves in one part and balances out by falling apart in another. It is a place of heartbreak and misery. You’ll pick it up as you go along. He placed a large hand on my shoulder. Is there anything else you want to know?

It was then I spoke my first words. They tumbled through me and over my tongue into the world before I had time to recognise or sort them. And it was not I who spoke these words but the other way around: I was spoken by them. All the ignorance and bewilderment I would ever know seemed to be summed up in them.

Will it always be like this? I asked.

Yes, it will always be like this, the old man said. There will be death and pain and affliction, illness and grieving and humiliation, any number of variations on the fundamental misery of being. There will also be ignorance and confusion. I would like to be able to tell you a different story but any other version would fly in the face of the facts.

And what about happiness, will there be happiness, what about love?

I don’t know how I came by those two words, I had certainly never heard them spoken before. Like the others they seemed to speak themselves out into the blue air and I had only a faint notion what they meant. The old man pondered a moment.

There will be moments without pain or affliction, he said cautiously. But these are moments of respite, nothing more, periods of strength-gathering so you can draw breath and suffer better the next time. Happiness here? Real happiness? I don’t think so. How is it possible to be happy in a world which is so fundamentally flawed?

It was a grim lesson for a child and yet I knew it was the truth. I knew somehow that this world was nothing but a shabby counterfeit of some greater ideal I carried in my heart, some place of light and love. But I was grateful to the old man, he’d spoken difficult words and he’d spoken them straight, he hadn’t sugared them over in fables or pretty tales. Young as I was I was no fool and he knew it. He’d treated me as a scholar and I was proud of that. It made me strong, gave me backbone. It made me capable of knowing things. Most of all I knew this old man wasn’t going to lead me astray.

Now that I’d found my feet I trotted everywhere after the old man, labouring to keep pace with his loping stride. I hungered to know now and at every opportunity I plagued him with questions. He had told me that the world was a mystery and mysteries were there to be solved. I had intuited myself that it was a massive fraud—I knew this from the aching of my own heart but that did not explain why it had to be this way. I had to solve it and I was certain that this old man could tell me. So I gave him no peace. How far did it extend, I wanted to know. Why was it this colour? What lay beyond the sea? Would the sky ever fall on our heads? What held it up? Why did we have to wear boots when the rest of creation didn’t? Within days of me opening my mouth for the first time the old man’s patience was exhausted. He scooped me from the ground and sat me on a stone wall.

Why all the questions? he demanded. Can you not open your mouth for something other than a question?

No, I answered bluntly, I have to know.

Can you not ask someone else?

No, I can’t.

Why not?

Because you’re the one with the answers.

How do you know that? He was bristling now, peering at me as if I was about to come out with some fatal idiocy.

I just know, that’s all. You’ve lived a long time. You must know things and I want to know what you know.

The old man swore softly. He took in the sweep of the land as if trying to draw inspiration from it. It was an unusually dark day. The sun lurked behind a bank of cloud, thin spears of light shone through the creases, barely illuminating the world beneath. There was a terrible division in the air, a tension between light and earth as if both were trying to deny each other, both seeking a bolt-hole in creation. And I saw too that my grandfather was part of this division. He stood dark and fearsome like a giant, yet his large hand rested lightly on my shoulder.

All I know, child, is that this is wrong, he said. "I can’t put my finger on it and I don’t have the words to speak it but everything about it is shot through with error. Sometimes I wonder how the whole thing staggers on from one day to the next. I walk out some mornings and I’m afraid the whole thing will cave in under my feet.