Peter was staring hard at me. ‘That’s why I became an addict,’ he said. ‘Self-love. Egotistical love. Break all sound barriers. I drink the lotus, the opium of the masses. The death wish of an age. I am a popular singer and player and I feed on the lotus, belly to belly, back to back death wish in Calypso’s and Tiger’s band. A new lament, a new ballad of the soul, Robin!’ He was staring at me quizzically and I could not be sure how serious he was, whether he was testing me, mocking me, mocking himself, testing himself.
Emma tore the shred of incipient but mutual addiction, mutual self-pity from our eyes. ‘That’s not what Robin is saying, Peter,’ she said to me as though she were addressing him. Her voice softened. ‘Poor Peter! He’s an incurable romantic, Robin. But what would I do without him? Robin’s talking of a voice and an ear, Peter, we seldom hear or use. Not BOOM, BOOM, DOOM, DOOM. He’s saying it’s a voice and an ear we may come to perceive within ourselves when we return to ourselves and know ourselves for the first bleak and terrible time. Without fallacy. Without illusion. Nothing egotistical. Know suddenly at the heart of despair the true stranger in ourselves, Peter, beyond all our vanity in whom lies the promise of glory.’
She uttered the word ‘glory’ with reluctance, misgiving. An abused word. Napoleonic glory? The glory of lust? I knew she meant neither of these. What did she mean? It was as if she had read the question in my mind as I had read the question in hers in the tunnel of classical penetration, classical endurance, classical genius of love. I sawin a flash that she was a priest,a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope, unconventional hope.
‘It’s divine Communism,’ Peter murmured, ‘when the male priest sups with the female priest at the same high table in the tunnel of centuries …’ He stopped as if he had said too much. But even so it was a definition of ‘divine’ and of ‘Communism’ I had never heard before. Still I wondered. What was ‘divine Communism’? Like ‘glory’ it was of debased coinage, an abused term. Take ‘Communism’! What was ‘Communism’? Surely not the Communist Rome that burnt at Chernobyl while the Party fiddled. Take ‘divine’! What was the ‘divine’? Surely not the pomp and the robes in the theatre of Skull.
Emma, the priest, caught the drift of reflection. She turned to Peter as if he were me in the veil of the tunnel and I were he in the play of divinity. ‘When one breaks true bread,’ she said, ‘with the true stranger in oneself who knows one, is unsparing with one, yet perceives the creative conscience and potential in one, then one begins an ascent through the follies of one’s age to a vision of divine Communism. Alas it’s not easy.’ Her eyes were both dark and pale. I saw she wished to goad me, to startle me, within our pattern of lucid dream. She shot at me, ‘You, Robin, will need Peter as alter ego stranger — alter ego theatre — when you climb the Mountain of Folly above Skull.’
A beam shone through the tunnel that alerted us — Peter, Emma and I — to dateless day infinity comedy in which we were involved. Perhaps it was Emma’s allusion to ‘alter ego theatre’ that reminded me of the ruses and the labyrinths of Faust, the simulated voices, simulated scripts, that passed as normality in Skull. Imagine the various factories, pubs, bedrooms, drawing rooms, football arenas, offices, stages — imagine the elegant and violent puppetries, the strings that are pulled, the solemn manifestos, the rages, the brutalities, the sermons, the curses, the drunken fights, the programmes, the dangling shadow of bait — imagine the follies of which Emma had spoken. Follies of Skull! Circus of Skull! Reflexes of Skull!
We — Emma, Peter and I — were caught in the web of Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours that passed for normality. And yet … I paused, reflected again. Did I mean abnormality? There lay a distinction between ourselves and the ‘normal’ world. We accepted our abnormality and the bizarre truths associated with ourselves as a capacity to mirror yet repudiate and breach Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours. Our apparent unreality — our very unreality — witnessed to a self-confessional reality in which we came to the edge of ourselves and looked through ourselves. To be true (to know truth) within an age of violence and lies, an age subject to the reflexes of Skull, was to sense a curious irreality in oneself, a curious originality, a curious divergence from the circus of the real (or what passed for the real).
All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing! That was her bizarre truth, her divergence from what passed as the real in the circus of the normal and the real.
‘O Emma,’ I cried impulsively, ‘tell me please. How have you made out all these years? There were debts to pay, the old house was sold. Even Miriam’s theatre fell under the hammer though W. H. preserved it for a while.’
‘I have paid dearly,’ Emma said. ‘Survival is dear, it is beyond price, but it is worth it.’
‘It must have been a difficult time after Alice’s death, Miriam’s death, my death.’
‘A difficult time indeed,’ Emma confessed, ‘a difficult adjustment for Peter and me. We once shared everything, remember? We were part of your family, remember? We shared the little theatre in the magic wood, remember? We shared every meal. And then came the earthquake, the crash … It was as if we had been orphaned all over again. Flung out of the cradle all over again. But there was no one like Alice to take us in this time. As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition. Music such as we had dreamt to hear in our little theatre.’ She stopped as if she remembered something I had forgotten. ‘Did you not ask Aunt Miriam, Robin, what is laughter’s mask? Did you not hunt through a trunk of dresses and costumes, etc., in an old cellar?’
‘I remember.’
‘Aunt Miriam wept when you asked her on the bed of the sea. Well let me tell you, Robin, that the answer lay in a bird’s cry, a bird’s feather that pierces heaven and strings the music of laughter into the grief of rain. It was a nail, a half-rending sound, that rose from the sea, from Tiger’s broken body, from the shattered boat, from the ships of all the navies of all the oceans, from a broken barrel, an invisible barrel on which Alice leaned into the crest of a wave. It was a nail. And it pierced me. I was nailed into the ground.’
‘My God, Emma!’ I was confused. I recalled the apparition of Ghost, multi-faceted Ghost, innermost Ghost, outermost Ghost, arising from the sea.
‘My God, Emma!’
‘In such a nail that shatters one’s prepossessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.’