Dark Places (Albion's
Story): extract
Chapter
One
I WAS
ONCE long ago a fat
boy, and in the privacy of the bath I investigated my rolls and folds with
interest. 'It is all muscle.' Father said. 'Do not slouch, Albion, muscle
is nothing to be ashamed of,' and I said nothing, for if Father wished to
have a son of muscle, I would do my best to please him.
I knew I was a disappointment to Father. He
was a man of unbending lip, his fob-watch never far from his hand: stern
reminders of how I must one day fill his shoes were never far from his
lips, although he made no secret of his inability to imagine me doing so.
I was Albion Gidley Singer, son of
George Augustus Singer, and had a position to maintain under so many eyes.
But who was Albion Gidley Singer?
He was a boy who learned early on how to
tie his own bootlaces and not to cry when he spilled his milk. He was
a boy who had learned to call his father Sir, and his mother Mama,
who had learned how to conceal the various sounds and discharges of
his body; he was a boy who learned to say thank you to servants in just
the right way, and to say his prayers for the poor people. He was a boy
who knew all this: his various skills and knowledges armoured him so that
life could never flummox him.
But Albion Gidley Singer was also a large
and cumbersome suit of armour wheeled around the world, made to speak and
smile and shake hands, by some other, very much punier person within: some
ant-like being who did not know any- thing at all, an embattled and lonely
atom whose existence seemed suspected by no one.
The only comfort in the existence of that microscopic Albion Gidley Singer
was the certainty of facts. In bleakness of spirit, a fact was a rock to
cling to. As other boys collected stamps, my joy was in the accumulation
of facts: I cherished and polished my collection, poring over The Golden
Treasury of Knowledge, Incredible But True, and Every Boy's Encyclopedia
until I ran at the mouth with greed for facts.
What a wealth of facts were in the world!
When I was dispirited, or confused by my sister Kristabel's long green
eyes and way of making me feel clumsy, facts were my best friends: in the
uncertainties of childhood, facts alone could be depended on never to
change, never to betray, and never to lose their charms.
How it comforted me to know that the
average human skin measures seventeen square feet, that there are
forty-nine thousand words in the English language, that a single pair of
rabbits can produce three hundred and twenty-four more rabbits in the
space of a year, and that a man can live for a hundred and thirty-three
days without food but only forty- one without water!
Before I knew better, and reluctantly
abandoned the scheme, it had been my hope to know every fact in the world
by the time I died. This did not seem to me impossible: even the
Encyclopaedia Britannica held a finite number of facts. I envied those who
had lived before me - ancient Greeks, for example, who seemed to know
almost nothing, and who could therefore easily digest the entire store of
facts in existence.
But I began to see that there was one fact
I would never know: the fact of myself. I watched myself in mirrors, and
saw how broad of shoulder, deep of chest, imposing of height I was, how
utterly solid within all my fat, or muscle: I was a well-built young
fellow, and anyone looking at me would have been sure I was as solid as I
looked. They could not know that for all my massiveness, I was as
insubstantial as a dan- delion: and for all my appearance of strength, I
could be reduced at any moment to a failed pair of bellows wheezing and
squeaking.
I did a lot of watching of myself, and told
my reflection its name: 'You are Albion Gidley Singer, you were born on
the twelfth of January eighteen seventy-five, you have brown eyes and a
mole under your fourth rib, you live at Rosecroft, 7 Palmer Street,
Bayview, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, the Southern Hemisphere, the
World, the Galaxy, the Universe.'
This did not help: the reflection in the
glass was unmoved, but the speck within was thrown into turmoil by the
thought of all those stars, and the spaces between them that made the
human brain reel to measure. There seemed no way to attach any kind of
fact to that speck: the fact of its existence - the fact of myself - could
be deduced only from my reflection in others.
From Mother, for example. She brought
comfort to my hollowness, filling it slyly every night. 'Here, Albion,'
that lavender-fragrant mother would say, and bring a bag of fairy-cakes
from behind her back. 'I know these are my boy's favourites.' I sat up in
bed, watching her over my nose as it moved, set in motion by my chewing
jaws. She watched every mouthful and sighed when I had used a wet finger
to pick up the last grains of sugar in the bottom of the bag. 'Sweet
dreams, darling,' she murmured, 'the night-light will keep the ghosts
away,' and she tucked me in as I lay down, queasy from such an engorgement
of cake taken too quickly late at night.
Mother was something I never seemed to get
quite enough of, delicious but unsubstantial like those cakes she offered,
for it was borne in on me early that a manly sort of boy does not wish to
spend time with his soft mother. I read and re-read the thick pages of the
Boys' Own Annual, thos of Chums and Ripping Yarns, soaking this knowledge
into my pores like a stain. I could not have pointed to the page where I
learned this, but it was very clear: females did not feature in the world
of boys except, now and again, as objects to be rescued.
I knew that the correct sort of behaviour
for a manly young chap was winning blue-striped marbles from other lads,
poking cats with sticks, and swashbuckling around with a wooden sword.
Boys shouted each other down, boys jeered if you gave them a chance, boys
could not wait to tell you what a dill you were, what a thick-head, how
yellow, and how you couldn't run for nuts.
Mothers, on the other hand, did not wish to
engage in any kind of bold action: they were people always sitting down,
with a bit of tatting in their hand or a silver teapot, and soothing
phrases always on their lips: Never mind, not to worry, it is not as bad
as it seems. Mothers were people who spent their time in the company of
other women, and if sons wished to be near their mothers it seemed it
could happen only in those private moments when the world had its back
turned. But oh, there were times when I longed to be spared all that
marble-winning, all the cat-poking, and all that swashbuckling, all that
puffing-up of yourself like a frog, to impress the others with how big you
were, how fierce, how fearless.
No one needed to tell me that Mother's
cakes were one of the things that were not to be spoken of to the other
boys. No one needed to tell me - somehow it seemed I was born with the
knowledge - that they would mock. Had Mother ever said, 'Do not tell your
father, Albion,' as she handed me cakes, or had I always known this was a
secret between us? Those cakes were the currency of the love between us:
sweet but flimsy, a private transaction of which the evidence soon
vanished.
When Father was present, Mother suppressed
her sighs as well as her smiles, and only watched when Father prodded me
in the chest and exclaimed, 'No mollycoddling for you, Albion. I will not
have you malingering, it is just a matter of will-power.' So I
straightened up and tried to please by being board-like in erectness and
blankness of feature, and kept my eyes on the middle distance,
concentrating on keeping the breaths steady in and out of my chest, and on
not letting Father see that his poking of me made me want to cough.
I certainly had no wish to be a cissy, in
spite of that longing to feel Mother's arms around me now and then. Father
said, 'No cosseting, Angelica, the boy will become a milquetoaste!' and
Mother would agree, 'I would not dream of it, George,' but later there
would be a bag of cream puffs, or bull's-eyes, and her soft eyes watching
while I ate.
Then there was my sister. Had we been a
pair of brothers, Kristabel and I might have got on, for we were alike,
but as it was she could not forgive me. I was the boy, so I was sent away
to one of the top schools, and was given the benefit of Greek and Algebra,
and I would be groomed for the business, later on.
Because she was a girl, Greek and Algebra
were kept from Kristabel, and she did not have to master anything more
baffling than a little polite French chit-chat, a few Kings and Queens,
and a tuneful tinkling on the piano. Perverse as she was, she did not see
her good fortune. 'Why does he get to do all the interesting things?' she
would demand loudly of Mother. 'I am better at sums than he is, any day of
the week,' and she sulked for all that Greek and Algebra, and did not
believe when I told her she would not want to have anything to do with it.
She envied me, and was sure she could have done better than I. 'Say
something in Greek, Albion, go on,' she would say, and sneer when I tried.
Mother did not seem able to warm to her
eldest, that skinny girl with her scrawny freckled arms and bumpy elbows,
who had nearly killed her in coming into the world so reluctant and
awkward. 'Just look at the state of you,' she exclaimed, and tweaked and
tugged at Kristabel's skirts. 'And what in Heaven's name have you done
with your hair?' Mother and Kristabel spent long hours with Morgan the
dressmaker (Kristabel surly, standing sullen while they circled her with
pins), and she made her lie in darkened rooms with slices of lemon all
over her face and arms, and walk around with books balanced on her head.
But Kristabel remained all sharp angles,
rough elbows, lumpy-knuckled hands: her skirt always hung awry on her
angular hips: she remained unalterably plain, and so much lemon seemed to
make her freckles darker than ever. All Mother's labour and worry -
hurrying home from a tea-party with a new kind of poultice that Mrs Adams
swore by, to try on freckles, or a flesh-increasing diet recommended by
Mrs Phipps, and all the calling to the kitchen for bowls of cucumber and
oatmeal, or the yolks of four eggs in stout - poor Mother: after all this,
her daughter was as bony and freckled as ever. Into the bargain she was
now sulky, sullen, grizzling: 'Let me be, Mother, it is just the way I am
made, it cannot be helped.' There was never a soft look for her poor
mother, or a smile.
Although so plain, skinny, and short, she
never had a day's illness, and could run and climb and jump with nothing
worse to show for it than a red face and wild hair. Just breathe, Albion,
she would say. Look, like this, and would demonstrate with her own
fieshless chest how to breathe.
But Kristabel, for all her inadequacies,
was a female, and shared with Mother the underworld of women, from which I
was forever excluded. What were those secrets they shared, Mother and
Kristabel, murmuring away on the corner of the verandah, that made them
fall silent when they saw me? 'Some things are just between us girls,'
Mother might murmur, and wink at Kristabel. 'We girls must be allowed our
little secrets. Mustn't we, Kristabel dear?'
They seemed to think they had some sort of
superiority to me with their women's vapours. For no visible reason,
without being feverish, or wheezing, there were days when Kristabel would
not play tennis, would not even walk, would do nothing but lie on the
chaise-longue saying, I am a little indisposed, Albion, just at the
minute. She would whisper to Mother, and disappear mysteriously
below-stairs with some little bundle in her hand. They made me feel
frumpish and stupid, with their secret knowing glances at each other - We
know, but he does not. I was made tiny by their freemasonry of femaleness.
To spoil Kristabel's poise, then, was a
necessary relief. She might be as smug as a coiled cat, but I could cause
her complacency to crumble, oh yes indeed! The calm and pallor of my
skinny sister could always be transformed by her brother Albion, and
Albion could deduce the certainty of his existence from his sister's
frenzies under his fingers.
'Albion,' she shrieked throughout our
childhood, 'Albion, let me go!' She was a wanton one, with a red mouth
full of teeth gasping for me, and her eyes lost in flesh when she cried
out. 'No! No, Albion, or I will tell!' She loved nothing more than my
hands tickling her, under the pinafore, into her ribs, under her arms, her
belly. 'Albion, stop, I cannot bear it!' she shrieked, and I heard the
passion in her voice that made a lie of her words, and I would not have
thought of stopping until the tears ran down her red blotched face, and
her voice became reedy. Sated, crazed with pleasure, she sat doubled up
over her crumpled pinafore, breathing hard, hunched over on her own
pleasure.
'You love it, Kits,' I whispered into her
hot red ear. 'You love it more than anything.' Kristabel would shake her
head -'No, no, no' - and I would laugh at her game of pretending to hate
it, and tickle more if I had energy to spare. She, the wanton, gasping and
crying out, arching and writhing under my hands: it was her pleasantry to
tell me it was no pleasure.
(end of
extract)