I see Aegburth who is called Peter with his sandal idly scuffing the Golgotha dirt, revealing a protruding corner of grey stone, too obviously chiselled to be natural, its angles right. He claws and scrabbles for an hour to finally unearth the ancient rood, holding it up two-handed in the sun to see it better. Soil rains on his sweaty brow, his slippery cheek, falls into the Sargasso of his beard. He tastes the crucifixion ground and he wears the cold shadow of the cross upon his face. His weak heart sounds a rhythmic blacksmith clang, BDANK! BDANK! BDANK! He totters, unaware, upon the precipice of his mortality. There at the brink he sees me and the meaning of the universe is altered evermore about him. In France, for his mighty perspiration, he is known as ‘le canal’, which means ‘the channel’.
I see Oatsie Chaplin in debate with Boysie Bristol, there outside the Palace of Varieties on Gold Street corner in the first years of the twentieth century. “But if they’re millionaires, why do they dress as tramps?” I see him come home to his native Lambeth following the First World War, a famous film star now, returning from America. The cockneys — former neighbours who’ve lost sons or brothers to the conflict while he batted his long lashes for the camera — dash pints of beer into his face. Rescued by his assistants and wiped down with borrowed towels in a nearby public convenience, he smells his past, he smells his father in the sodden jacket, the damp trousers.
I see Henry George, praying in barns when he no longer trusts the church. Pigeons are cooing in the rafters and the light falls in a twinkling shaft through breaches in the slates, the thatching. On his shoulder flares a brand that is my own design, that is his private shame, that is his holy burning glory: pallid violet lines on purple skin, the balance and the road. Road of the exodus from Tennessee to Kansas, drovers’ road from Wales to Sheep Street where he washes up into the Boroughs on a bleating tide of white, all paths are one. The lynch-ropes of his youth are now the tyres that speed him on his way, with the black champions and martyrs of Northampton striding in his wake.
I see Benedict Perrit, writing lines of painful beauty, laughing, drinking, arguing with ghosts. I see him sitting up alone save for the distant sirens, fingers hesitating over his typewriter’s dusty keys on the night prior to Alma Warren’s exhibition. He stares like a lost explorer at the Arctic whiteness of the empty page, waiting for inspiration, for the least brush of my wing. Three miles away, off in the yellow Whitehills lamplight filtering through the curtains, Michael Warren cannot sleep and thinks about Diana Spencer’s funeral procession, all the people on the footbridge as she came into Northampton. All the eyes and silence.
I see Thomas Ernest Warren, Michael’s father, digging holes or taking time off work with a bad back which doesn’t seem to bother him much after his retirement. Earlier, he’s in his twenties, learning how to throw grenades. He’s part of a long file of men who one by one leap up onto a platform with their sergeant, pull the stalk from their iron pineapple, count three, and hurl the death-egg over a high wall of sandbags to explode. Tommy is next in line, wanting to do it right. The chap in front of him pulls out the pin and starts to count. Tom, over-eager, has already jumped up on the platform right behind the nervous soldier, who counts up to three, then accidentally drops the lethal fir-cone at their feet. Sighting along my cue, I hit their sergeant so that he streaks forward, knocking Thomas and the other man to either side and simultaneously sweeping the grenade over the barrier; into the death’s-head pocket, and we builders at the table all throw up our hands. Iiiiiyyyesssssss!
I see the stipple and the hatch, the filigree and the fine shading. I see Doreen Warren carefully unwrap the cherry-menthol Tune and place it in her infant’s mouth. I see the councillor, Jim Cockie, in his bed full of bad dreams. I see the pavement artist Jackie Thimbles, and Tom Hall, the minstrel ghost. I see Fat Kenny Nolan as he contemplates the species of datura he has cultivated, and I smile to see it is an Angel’s Trumpet with the blossom’s white bell hanging down, all rueful. I see Roman Thompson sitting in a borrowed car, silently in the darkened mouth of Fish Street with a snooker cue at rest on the back seat behind him, cold blood coursing through his heart. I see John Newton after his unblinding. I see Thursa Vernall turning German bombers into her accompanists, and the heroic dream of Britton Johnson. I see Lucia Joyce and Samuel Beckett, see him chatting to her in the institution; by her graveside. I see miseries. I see redemptions.
I see Audrey Vernall on the dance-hall stage, her fingers trickling on the keys of her accordion, tossing back her hair, with one small blue shoe keeping time on the worn boards, skirt swinging, “When The Saints Go Marching In”. Her tight smile falters in the spotlight and her eyes keeping darting sideways to the wings where her dad Johnny, the band’s manager, gives her the thumbs-up, nods encouragingly at her, and then, later on, he’s taking off his loud checked jacket, hanging it up on the hook for dressing gowns behind her bedroom door.
I see Thomas á Becket, and I see the brown-skinned woman with the scar who works from the St. Peter’s Annexe up in two thousand and twenty-five. I see the saints go marching in.
I see the dog turd on the central walk of Bath Street flats, unbroken on the Friday afternoon, stepped in by midday Saturday when Michael Warren notices it on his way to Alma’s exhibition.
I step back before the canvas, reeling in its splendour.
At the very start there are a thousand planets racketing about the solar system, ricocheting and rebounding, pulverising one another in a pinball free-for-all, and this is where we get the idea for our trilliard table. Something hits the fledgling world, with debris from both bodies settling at the edges of Earth’s field of gravity, coagulating to a moon, a lucky opening break.
Some short while later a less sizeable projectile makes its impact, and also its contribution to the culling of the thunder-lizards. In the aftermath, amoebic creatures called agglutinated foraminifera clothe themselves within protective tests of meteoric nickel and space-cobalt; plate their unicellular forms in peacock displays of microscopic diamond dust. The ornaments of their miniature cosmos, clad with jewellery from the void they scintillate there in the Late Cretaceous silence, in the very dusk of life. They neither know about nor have concern for the extinctions of the macrocosm. They remain oblivious to the trees and monsters toppling and dying overhead, in the long night that follows the extra-terrestrial collision. In their multitudes they are as various as snowflakes and yet I know each one intimately, know them by their individual coruscations, their signature sparkle. They move with the moon’s pull, with the magnet-tides, as do the generations that come after them, migrating on lunar meridians to feed the underwater bugs that feed the fish, that feed the birds and bears and crouching monkey-men.
You will appreciate that our game involves a great deal of strategy.
Sometimes we’re on the ball. Sometimes we get distracted, miss the easy shot, but only when we’re meant to. I give Solomon the holy torus and he wears it on his index finger when he subjugates the howling djinns that have rampaged through Egypt and the Middle East as an infernal weather-pattern, as a hornet swarm. When he elects that they should build his temple I try to prevent it with a safety shot but I misjudge; I miss.