Swollen, empurpled, leaking pus from every crack.
In this disease
part spiritual
my hands are betrayed
gross, flaccid
decayed to illuse
and all the silent
tender strength
they hold is
in abeyance
out of their reach.
She has a sudden desire to play her guitar. But two days ago, she had sent it to her family's home. No letter. Just the Ibanez.
Now the need to take the dark and pale between her arms, pearwood surface and ebony underbody. The black neck fretted with silver. Recollection of the palace of shadows.
O God, even my guitar wore mourning.
Fifthly
I went away. Now, I am come.
The gorse is still yellow on the hill. The rich musty smell still drifts downwind. She had found new strength after deciding to come here. South into the high barren hills, the anchored remote land, the intense country of shades and storms and snows and sun… crystals and desert. The McKenzie country where the windswept hut belonging to her family still stood. Unused since the long-ago summer when three of them had searched for gold, the door was loose on its hinges, and the glass in the one window was cracked and coated with spiderwebs. The floor was rammed earth: she kicked the refuse on it outside. The fireplace under the massive chimney that formed the far wall, was marred by broken bottles and a dead mouse. She kicked them out too.
There were two bunks in the hut. The sacking on the top one had rotted: she tore it off and burned it as soon as the fireplace was cleared and laid.
On the shelf under the window, she set out her books and paper and art gear. She placed the drawing board on its legs at an angle that let it serve as easel and desk without further adjustment.
She hung the pack with her clothes on it at the end of the bunk.
By this time, her gift of new strength was fading. In a long effortful day, she hitched into the nearest town, and bought a new guitar, two crates of whisky, and three cartons of foodstuffs, salami and milkpowder and dried bananas and everything else the store had, that she could keep without a refrigerator. She travelled back as
far as she could in a taxi, but it took six trips to transport it all to the hut.
As she looked at it piled on the floor, her hands trembling, her legs weak, the pain in her gut overwhelming, she fainted for the first time in her life. The last piece of visual consciousness showed the corner of a crate before she hit it.
A little thread of bright crawling awareness.
Then a slow weary return to light.
It had taken the night to arrange the hut. When she dragged herself to the bunk, a fire gleamed on the hearth, the cupboards were full, and there was water in the tank outside.
She slept the next day and night through. Woke still tired, full of tension ache, with a thick bruise on the side of her face to warn against going beyond her strength again. She washed, dressed, ate her mixtures slowly, drank little, and crawled to the doorway. There she soaked up the sun when it was fine, and watched the rain with detachment when it rained. So she had grown into a habit of days.
Joy of the worm is upon thee.
Most afternoons she would walk, not for pleasure but because she deemed it necessary. Past the boulder-riven stream. Past the triangular tussock that marked the halfway point. Past the gorsewoman, huddled and weeping with the wind's stroke. Limping, bent, weary to death, back home.
At evening, she lit the fire, and made the only cooked meal of her day. She would paint, or write as the mood took her, all the pain down. Notes for a mushroom dealer. And then, until the fire died, would strum the guitar, or pluck untunes, or simply hold it in weeping hands.
I am decaying piece by piece.
The skin of her face has gone taut and masklike. Lizardskin eyelids and scales that disguise the lines that meant laughter. And once, high and uncaring under the benefice of the mushrooms, she caught herself laughing at the way a bead of pus leaked from the bend in her wrist down her sloping forearm onto the guitar's strings. It shocked her momentarily, the whole stupid end. But then she had giggled again, not in despair or dismay, but because that was the only way it was, and always had been, except for the lucid luminous days when the paintings grew like music under her brushes, and it was apt and fitting to go this way, to end the stupidity, decaying piece by piece.
The nights were full of the musk of gorse.
It is calm outside tonight, no wind, frost, bright stars. I have lit the fire.
There is a constant rustling… moths, fluttering, flattening, giddying at the window. For now, we are uninhabited by Mothon, goblin spirit of drunkenness and bestiality.
A sober night, straitly joyful is looked forward to. For some deep mystery has decreed the momentary relaxation of battle. The canker is there, but not omnipresent. I no longer feel drained by its growth. Drawing breath for the next round? Maybe. And yet… despite this truce, I am bothered. For all the calm stillness, a despair pulls at me from beyond the doorway. An alien despair.
It seems unfair that on this rare eve of peace, something other than my own revolting condition should interpose itself.
Try the guitar… I could get to love this badly varnished parody. For it gives me back music, music to match the images in my mind, to draw them out and make a realm of exultant leaping joy.
Something calls in the dark beyond and I must fret strings until I can answer it.
Let the door creak open. For this moment, I need the cold sweep of air over my skin.
There are trees, like dim stagmen on that shadowed hill, caught and frozen by the over-riding moon. The ground is uneasy under the frost. I feel it mourning. So back to the fire.
It's dying slowly. Whole areas of ash and then sudden blazing flare, one high arm of flame aloft, unfurled. A sap reservoir, amber and sizzling, that lasts for minutes of sparking fire.
A moth has come in.
Furry, and horned like a foreign owl.
E, silvergrey fleeting-feelered moth messenger of night, who cries out there?
It leaves my finger and flies heavily away. It is a gravid female, plump banded body ripe with eggs, O lay my loverly, lay-
I keep hearing someone walking.
The feet have a rustly echo echo that sounds about my dreaming… the moth brushes past and the tickle persists, itching my nose… there is no-one here, just feathered air-
But who is it?
I can feel that despair out there, closer now, crouched and solitary. Let me in, it whimpers.
I am minded of that night in Whangaroa, at the pub with Joe, and that voice beat against my heartboards. I am minded of the in his silent darkness.
But I can no longer share even my thoughts with them. I am too near my death.
And why must I be bothered by the ills of the world at this late time?
Ah berloody hell, pass me the whisky bottle, self, and down drown the whole berloody sickness.
Shitworld, I leave thee in thy chamber.
Without even prayers.
Seventhly
For most of the third week, she lay unmoving in bed.
Reduced to unsteady crawling, she shitted outside, but only just.
Part blind, and the world growing dimmer daily, she no longer painted.
The dead fire stayed cold. She no longer ate.
She didn't endure pain any more either, but swallowed whisky and hallucinogen water that stood in the billy by her bunk.
"Every pig to its trough," huskily one daynight, before lapsing back into slurred horrifying confusions of dreams.
Something screamed.
Simon stands, with strange crooked eyes. His lips are corroded with small slots of ulcers. A worm writhes out of his mouth. Hi! he gurgles, I'm clear. He dissolves into sanies.