They particularly affect his or her speech, in an attempt to fullfil their instincts to reproduce.
Following the format established in Jacob Buscard’s pamphlet, the wormword is traditionally rendered yGudluh. This is recorded with some trepidation: the main vector for the transmission of Buscard’s murrain over the last two centuries has been the literature about it.[7]
CURES: Randolph Johnson’s claims about bergamot oil in Confessions of a Disease Junkie are spurious: there is no known cure for Buscard’s murrain.[8] There is, however, persistent speculation that the second word on Jansa’s lost paper, if spoken, might engender some cure in the brain: perhaps a predatory “hunter” synapse to devour the wormwords. Several “Jansa’s papers” have appeared over the decades, all forgeries.[9] Despite numerous careful searches, Jansa’s paper remains lost.[10]
DETAILS
When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I wasn’t an outsider. But I wouldn’t join in when my friends went to the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.
One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. They defended me, even though they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t come.
I don’t remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.
On Wednesday mornings at about nine o’clock I would open the front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my mother had given me. Inside there was a hall and two doors, one broken and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and enter the dark flat. The corridor inside was unlit and smelt of old wet air. I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards from me. The door to Mrs. Miller’s room was right in front of me. I would lean forward and knock.
Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter.
Sometimes I was not alone. There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.
I might find one or other of them in the hallway outside the door to her flat, or even sometimes in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.
There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry.
Occasionally I’d meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller’s room, swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.
“Come on, you old slag,” he wailed, “you fucking old slag. Come on, please, you cunt.”
His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realised I could hear her voice, Mrs. Miller’s voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.
I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.
I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller’s food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.
My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatine or cornflower with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavourings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She would stir it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller, and sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.
So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller’s door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I would hear a shifting and then her voice from close by the door.
“Hello,” she would call, and then she would say my name a couple of times. “Have you my breakfast?
Are you ready?”
I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.
Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door would swing open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I would thrust the bowl into the gap. She would grab it and slam the door quickly in my face.
I couldn’t see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs. Miller’s sleeves were white too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman’s eager face.
If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.
“How’s your mother?” she would shout.
At that I would unfold my mother’s careful queries. She’s ok, I’d say, she’s fine. She says she has some questions for you.
I’d read my mother’s strange questions in my careful child monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she would take ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.
“Tell your mother she can’t tell if a man’s good or bad from that,” she’d say. “Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father.” Or: “Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.” “Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her, and three of them used to be dead.”
“I can’t help her with that,” she told me once, quietly. “Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly.” And my mother did, and she got well again.
“What do you not want to do when you grow up?” Mrs. Miller asked me one day.
That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.
“He’s begging you, you fucking old tart, please, you owe him, he’s so fucking angry,” he’d been shouting. “Only it ain’t you gets the fucking sharp end, is it? Please, you cow, you fucking cow, I’m on me knees . . .”
“My door knows you, man,” Mrs. Miller had declared from within. “It knows you and so do I. You know it won’t open to you. I didn’t take out my eyes, and I’m not giving in now. Go home.”
I had waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I had knocked on her door and announced myself. It was after I’d given her her food that she asked her question.
7
Contrary to the impression given by the media after the 1986 Statten-Dogger incident, deliberate exposure to the risks of wormword is neither common nor new. Ully Statten was (no doubt unwittingly) continuing a tradition established in the late eighteenth century. In what could be considered a late Georgian extreme sport, London’s young rakes and coffee-house dandies would take turns reading the word aloud, each risking correct pronounciation and thereby infection.
8
This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Johnson’s work. The man is a liar, a fraud, and a bad writer (whose brother is Britain’s third-largest importer of bergamot oil).
10
“Years of Violent Ransacking Leave Slovenia’s Historic Churches in Ruins,” Financial Times, 3/7/85.