The bad one was the leg, that first time. Veins collapse, shrinking before the needle, and the circulation fails. The limb ballooned into an agonizing comedy inflatable, drew substance from the body as it did so until Weston was a giant angel-skeleton trying to fight its way out of a brown paper bag. The visits to the hospital were harrowing. His tolerance to opiates meant that it was impossible to find a dosage strong enough to touch the pain that would not also kill him outright. Somehow he survived with a full complement of limbs intact and took the cure. Stayed clean a month or two, then offered to safeguard a pharmaceutics cabinet belonging to a friend. The first his wife Rene knew about his tumble from the wagon was when he went on the nod there at the dinner table, face down, bubbles rising through the mash. Said he’d been feeling a bit tired just lately.
When his circulation failed again early this year they couldn’t save the leg. He’s been through detox and rehab again since then, kicking while there’s still something left to kick with, and the signs look promising. He hopes one day to surf the Internet. Hang five.
The curious proliferation of both injured and completely missing legs within the current text emerged unbidden, much like the preoccupation with November, from the histories themselves. The crippled nun, Alfgiva, and the lame crusader, Simon; Clare’s bad foot on the trek from Essex and the burned-through leg outside Alf Rouse’s car. After a while, one notices the wide array of signs and murals in this boot-and-shoe town that depict a leg or foot outside the context of the body. We may read these lost or damaged limbs as warning hieroglyphics on the place’s parchment, coded tramp-marks denoting the difficulties and dangers of the trail.
The severed heads are harder to resolve; a starker, more insistent motif and reiterated with a greater frequency. The minted head of Diocletian or the more substantial one of Mary Tudor. Francis Tresham, Captain Pouch, and the mysterious head revered by the Knights Templar. Ragener, and Edmund with a black and snarling Cerberus to carry him by one ear to the underworld. Heads are the soft and staring eggs from which the fledgling skull hatches. They are the bloody emblems of an information, final and chthonic, that exacts a price. When Odin asked for wisdom from the head of Mimir, he paid with an eye: this knowledge carries with it a curtailment of perception, or at least a narrowing. The depth-vision is forfeit.
Time passes, jumpy interrupted continuity in life and manuscript. The eldest, shortest daughter comes down on the train from Liverpool for Christmas, in a state of mixed intoxication by the time she reaches Castle Station. Ringpulls now in eyebrow, ears, nose, lower lip, as if her large shaved head were full of hidden pockets. Leah. Everybody thought it was a lovely name. Means ‘cow’ in Hebrew. In a day or so her taller, younger sister Amber will be following, a fourteen-year-old, fifty-foot-tall Goth whose biggest influences are Morticia Adams and the World Trade Center. Walked out from her school six months ago and stared down various education/welfare representatives until they buckled to her hideous will and let her go to night class. Such a privilege, this company of gorgeous and alarming women.
Caught up in the seance-trance of this last chapter and in search of a denouement, a way out, a fire escape, it seems a final expedition is inevitable, necessary. Fiery Fred is roped in as chauffeur; Leah in tow. Depart late afternoon for Hunsbury Hill with snow upon the ground, in Fred’s most recent surge of optimism. Graduated from a halal school of motoring, all of his previous cars he butchered personally, by the book. Tattooed and ear-ringed, with eyes like Broadmoor buttons beneath the panto-demon ginger brow, he is a horrid dream invented by the middle class to terrify their children. Laugh like Pig Bodine, out of Gravity’s Rainbow: Hyeugh-hyeugh-hyeugh. He has the courage and the fines of his convictions, both outstanding.
Fred was handling the door the night that Iain Sinclair and his mesmerizing golem Brian Catling did their reading at the round church of the Holy Sepulchre. Asking for trouble, really, the deliberate conjunction of two charged, shamanic presences with this still-unexploded site. Halfway through Catling’s reading of The Stumbling Block there came an interruption, an outburst from a sometimes homicidal medicine-head of local notoriety. Poetry hooligan. Evicted swiftly, he was led off to a nearby bar by Fred and offered a placating drink. Next, explosion. Broken glass. A foam-jawed lunge across the table at Fred’s jugular. Two teeth knocked out, blood everywhere. Thrown from the bar-room in the wake of his attacker, to the street outside, Fred found himself staring into the quivering muzzle of a gun and hoping that he wouldn’t die there, in between the Labour Exchange and the Inland Revenue, a victim of that local speciality, the stroll-by shooting. Somehow extricated himself. Slept downstairs with a sword that night, unconsciously sucked into the crusader aura of the church and the event.
These sudden violent surges, tidal movements in Northampton’s undermind, that blossom into gory actuality at the least provocation, hidden forces that exist beneath the surface, underneath the paved veneer of waking thought and rationality. The town is like a mind expressed in concrete, its subconcious buried deep in lower reaches where the fears and dreams accumulate. This underworld is literal, though occult: webs of tunnels lace the earth below the settlement, burrows that wind back to its earliest days. The major churches are believed to be connected in this way, with rumours of a passage running underneath the river to the abbey out at Delapré.
Though glimpsed in living memory, with bricked off entrances in childhood cellars, this pellucid subterranean domain is now consigned to legend, with the council issuing denials that such catacombs exist. Once more, the slippage between fact and folklore: a vital, hidden strata of the county’s psyche is suppressed, refused.
The eagerness of the authorities to edit out this secret subtext from the county’s narrative is suspect, and unduly purposeful: the crypt beneath De Senlis’ round church of the Holy Sepulchre that represents the tomb of Jesus at Gethsemane is known to exist, yet has no entrance and has not been seen since the foundation, centuries ago. When labourers in nearby Church Street broke through their trench wall into a draughty space beyond, it was beyond doubt that they’d chanced on the forgotten crypt. The rector, feverishly excited by this prospect, hurried down to Church Street the next morning to discover that a council work gang had been called out overnight to concrete off the opening.
The undertown is out of bounds. The sacred space has been co-opted by Civil Defence contingencies: the bunkers of nuclear-exempted bureaucrats, the dressing rooms where they will underwrite the Apocalypse. No more may we peel back the flagstones to reveal the cadavers of murdered saints, bones marrowed with appalling light. Cold certainty replaces visionary speculation. Thus displaced, the landscape’s secret soul moves elsewhere, a fallback position that can be successfully defended. The mystery retreats behind its oldest bulwarks; seeks the highest ground.
In the Briar Hill estate just down from Hunsbury Hill neolithic remains were discovered, predating the leavings of the Bronze and Iron Age found further up slope. Fred’s vaguely suspect vehicle crawls through the narrow, winding roads between the housing blocks; avoiding areas where the yellow Neighbourhood Watch stickers are the thickest, he parks in a silent close.
On foot through the estate and up towards the relic Iron Age camp, with Leah striding through the snow ahead, face rattling and chiming, mournful music in the gloom. She talks about a dream she had some weeks ago in which she found her bedroom occupied by a colossal coal-black dog, its horse-sized form slumping across a bed too small for it, wheezing and straining in the throes of labour yet too enervated to give birth. She had to reach inside and pull the monstrous Shagfoal puppies out into the light, at which the dream mutated and she was in hospital, having just given birth herself to these blind horrors and yet filled with a maternal pride and overwhelming love for her repulsive children. She showed them off to visitors, who looked up from the cradle speechless with distress. Cot death. Her newborn blackdog babies all lay stiff and chill. She woke up racked by helpless tears of loss.
&nbs
p; The black dogs sniff around the book’s periphery, nose through the nightmares of those closest to the author as the text and its phantasmal hounds alike draw closer to the brink of actuality. Shagfoals are seldom seen these days outside of dream. A solitary sighting in the 1970s: a motorist on the A45 found a massive shadow-dog big as a pony keeping pace with his fast-moving vehicle as it raced through the fields beside the road. Since then, though, not a glimpse. Half-real perhaps, or only solid intermittently, a creature out of Borges’ bestiary that pads through the shifting wastelands at the edge of form, perpetual firelight in its flaring eye.
The Briar Hill houses are a labyrinth in the descending dusk, made unfamiliar by their powdering of snow. At last the huge white circle of the strip-mined camp presents itself, ringed round by ditch and looming ash tree, stark against the failing light. An eerie silence. Nothing stirring in the clustered homes beyond the treeline. Maybe everybody’s gone.
Why did its Iron Age inhabitants abandon this place with such haste that all their brand-new corn querns were left behind? Not fire. Not plague, nor flood, nor the attack of wild beasts. Not the Romans. Something happened here. A settlement of sixty or so people tumbled out of history and into myth, more victims of the worryingly flimsy border-territories separating those two states.
Off in the twilight, men are laughing. Something runs down from the rim of the raised ditch and sits down in the snow, there in the empty campsite.
Peer myopically, then turn to Fred. ‘What’s that?’
He frowns, trying to focus through the half-light, red brows knit. ‘A dog.’
‘What colour?’
Further scrutiny of the still-seated and unmoving form, that neither barks nor growls.
‘Black, by the look of it.’
Two men burst from the cover of the trees, run laughing down the slope to where the shape waits motionless. One of them picks it up and slings the limp, inert weight of the animal across his shoulder, like a sack. The pair then race off chuckling across the frozen site, engulfed by shadows on the far side, gone from view. Was that a dog? If not, how did it run downhill and thirty feet across the field? Some time, thing change and come like other thing. Here, in this gloaming no man’s land dividing dark from day, the chasm yawns between what happened and what never was. The certainties of history fall in, are swallowed whole. Only the anecdote, only the tale remains.
At length, we file out from the site bewildered. Past the trees, a classic view of the recumbent town, seen from the spot at which the earliest line engravings of the place were executed, although with the subject much changed between sittings. Then, church spires ruled a small cluster of low buildings. Now, a field of Pernod-coloured stars, a luckless constellation grounded by inclement weather.
Eastward is the shimmer of the new developments that have doubled Northampton’s size and population over fifteen years. Blackthorn and Maidencastle, named nostalgically after whatever natural feature was paved over to create them. Bellinge. Rectory Farm and Ecton Brook. A former Eastern Bloc now simmering with malice: crack, and guns, and flamed-out cars.
Towards the west, the jaundiced earthglow of Northampton’s epicentre, of the splashpoint from which the great slow rings of brick and mortar rippled out. Everything is visible from here. Lift up both hands before your face to either side and you can hold the town, its lights strung in a cat’s-cradle between the outstretched fingers. Pubs and terraces. Neglected cinemas, adapted and transformed. The traffic moves, a constant toxin, through the over-burdened arteries. The cold and bright heart falters, clots of neon accumulated in the valves, but carries on, the coronary averted for the moment, a postponement only.
Drive home. Settle down to write here on Phipps’ Fire Escape. It’s been five years since the book was started. That was when the Galileo probe set out for Jupiter, the earliest broadcast images just now arriving on our screens: hereto unseen phenomena of gas in thrall to monstrous gravity. Beguiling comet scars. The long-anticipated landscape is at last revealed.
Some chapters back, the notion of a shaman with the town tattooed upon his skin, its boundaries and snaking river-coils become a part of him so that he might in turn become the town, a magic of association with the object bound up in the lines that represent it: lines of dye or lines of text, it makes no difference. The impulse is identical, to bind the site in word or symbol. Dog and fire and world’s end, men and women lamed or headless, monument and mound. This is our lexicon, a lurid alphabet to frame the incantation; conjure the world lost and populace invisible. Reset the fractured skeleton of legend, desperate necromancy raising up the rotted buildings to parade and speak, filled with the voices of the resurrected dead. Our myths are pale and ill. This is a saucer, full of blood, set down to nourish them.
The Dreamtime of each town or city is an essence that precedes the form. The web of joke, remembrance and story is a vital infrastructure on which the solid and material plane is standing. A town of pure idea, erected only in the mind’s eye of the population, yet this is our only true foundation. Let the vision fade or starve or fall into decay and the real bricks and mortar crumble swiftly after, this the cold abiding lesson of these fifteen years; the Iron Virgin’s legacy. Only restore the songline and the fabric of the world shall mend about it.