It had been Ghertrude’s first time with another. She felt tired and exhilarated. There was no blood – she had taken her own virginity many years before. She had learned the conclave joys of auto-satisfaction through hours of practice, and used the secret acts to inform her clandestine ways. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, the way it elevated her above common appetite. The day was a fissure in her containment, one that she would monitor with precise care.
Ishmael lay sprawled across the bed, ecstatic and soothed by his own pleasure, feeling his male dominance rise for the first time on the third floor. He reached out for her as she moved away from him, his fingers just touching her hips as she grabbed her coat and prepared to leave. He wanted to say something warm and appreciative, but did not have the language. Beneath his heart, there was a subtle and churning bonding, and he wanted to be able to stroke and soothe her with its gentle fire. She left him, unrelieved of his thoughts, and hurried downstairs to the bathroom on the second floor, where she had prepared a douche of alkaline salts.
I feel as if I have been asleep, asleep too long. My dreams, if they are dreams, are always in advance of my sleep, awaiting me to continue their tale to unwind their continuity. In daylight, they ache continuously. I have become bewildered by their closeness and my distance. I have been swallowed to this spot of land, the previous arrows stitching the way to here. I cannot see the bow, which must have fallen beneath me, lying somewhere in this place of contradiction, where it smells of snow and glows humid. My feet had held the ground before, but now I am unattached, and the roots and sinews of my pain nag at my hope in dopey, vague wafts. I am being erased by familiarity, the sense of knowing this journey from before. The arrow’s path has made me as vacant as the half-light landscape around me.
There she moves; there in the scrub grass, wire and rotted paper, she turns towards my hand again. I have been too slow on this journey, the air and sky has seduced me. No blood has been shed, and history cannot move without this. I have to cut the light with blood, let her exhale and twist in my hand. Tonight, I will divide a life and paint the future road glorious. Enough of these shallows: the cities lie on the other side of the great forest, and I will burn my way towards them. She is in my hand, demanding arrows and distance.
I loosen the first blue arrow into the evening, towards the first star, which has risen over the lip of the world and would set amongst the far-off trees. The arrow I release stole its colour from the Bunga telang, which grew at the edge of our garden. Its small, vivid flowers give it a female instinct that brushes the curve of the day, telling me to stop at this place and use the last moment of its light to set my direction for tomorrow. I do this as the breeze freshens, and its coolness reminds me of sleep, like a whistle towards an impatient story.
With a fine sable brush, he corrected the moment of death, magnified the tiny errors and removed them. After his focused labours, the crashing horse would be perfect.
Horses had guided his life and crippled his journey. He had agreed to create the last set of images to kill the horse. When his brain was on fire, all those years ago, after the stagecoach had overturned and the solid rock that collided with his skull had rearranged his head, he saw them all the time, galloping in headaches, their iron hooves sparking the dendrite fuse-wire. He saw them cantering, all turning to white, eyes rolling savage. He heard them walking, their echo mocking the vacant night streets below his hospital bed. They paced his beginning and his demise with an equal, measured step. He had been empty before the accident, a man filled with vapour, aimless and devout, seeking a place in the world where he might gain weight and merit. When the speeding stagecoach had tripped on the unseen root, it had spun into the air and splintered, mangling and spilling all the lives it carried. He alone survived, tossed amongst the wrenched luggage and the broken, kicking mustangs. He had cut himself out of the canvas, a petticoat staunching his head, blood swooning clear of the hooves that were now running against the sky, trying to gain purchase on the dying clouds.
The court had awarded him funds for a new beginning. On some of the papers, he altered his name again, to match the glitches and eruptions in his new brain. He was topping up with existence, and it pleased him. By the time he saw the doctor in England, he was becoming known. Only the best was good enough for this rising stalwart of art and science.
Their first consultation was in the hospital by the river, at London Bridge. He was early for the appointment; this was something that happened constantly. He deplored tardiness and overcompensated for it in every aspect of his life. He would rehearse the most trivial of deeds: framing the minor in advance of its time; having keys in his hands four streets away from home; talking under his breath to have a convincing answer to questions that would never be put to him. He forced himself to stop on the bridge and allow the slowness of actual time to catch up to his velocity. Placing his hands on the gritty stone, he looked down into the frantic activity of the Pool of London; cargo ships were moored three-deep along its banks, their masts creaking against a spiny forest of cranes and the new verticality of the smoke from the steamers, all extending higher than the buildings that clung, crablike, to the land; dozens of barges obtusely nudged and grated each other in the restless tide and the wake of commerce; hundreds of small craft ferried to and fro, carrying pilots, passengers and information. Every surface seethed and bristled with working men; stevedores and lightermen moved tons upon tons of goods, and exchanged cargos in what looked like ceaseless confusion.
At times, the river could not be seen at all. The vast activity smothered it, and the detritus it bred was like a rough woven carpet, heaving over a secret turmoil. It was impossible to believe it was the same river which so gently flowed through his home town. In Kingston, its broad ripple gave reflection and beauty, it was for fishing, idle boating and rumination. There, you could smell its vitality. The tar, smoke, sewage and proximity of Billingsgate gave the stretch in front of him a very different signature.
He pulled the great watch from his pocket and flipped it open. It had been the only thing he had kept of his family whilst on his travels; they had given it to him to ease his departure and secure at least one dimension in the distant colonies. He squinted at the Roman numerals. Time had finally caught up with him, and he started to walk briskly towards the Surrey Side.
William Withey Gull was on schedule. His consulting room sat high on the brow of the building, facing the river. The spire of Southwark Cathedral and the dome of St. Paul’s could be aligned from his oriel window.
Like them, the two men were almost cartoon opposites: Gull, opulent, padded, slick; a man grounded and in possession of his life; he retained the bones of his labouring family, held them in check with fine but simple tailoring; he wore his growing eminence in saturated gravity. Muybridge, lean and dry, a longing husked in doubt; frowning himself into biblical status; nervous, darting and ill.
They shook hands, each gauging the other. Muybridge sat, and proceeded to relate his medical history: the condition of his skull since the accident, the shifts of perception. Gull stood behind him as he talked, examining the cranium of the agitated man, feeling the words reverberate beneath Muybridge’s scalp. He held the cup of the occiput and moved his hand forward, until it felt the ridge in the bregma, the overriding bone. He fingered the coronal suture, sensing its tension under his controlled pressure. The motion of his square hands under the long, matted hair made it look like a bizarre tableau of ventriloquism; he moved them further forwards to determine the displacement or division in the nasofrontal suture. He then sat back down behind his Jurassic desk, and began to make notes of his observations.