To Margaret:

Voice of velvet, voice that cracks:
Drunken, reeling, thread of spit –
Relic of that ancient cult,
Of Fiction dispossessed, of
Structure as the common Lɪᴇ:

That, she’s found in a tipping glass.
Drinking deep, she flits, my Margaret,
‘tween curtains, veils,
The coloured panes of glass,
That distract the church-goer, who,
All in all, believes very little.

Flitting from distortion to another,
Each a different face, each herself,
Oh, then somebody else’s –
What it is, to choose a costume over the other!
In choosing one’s skin, one chooses their enemy.

If the world is shattered when the rum is gone,
Shall we weep?

Already, she is made blind,
Stupid, senseless,
The last drop is downed, and
She is transported –
Another brightness cleared –
All is one, all is all (said the baseless philosopher),
That is the Reveller’s one Tʀᴜᴛʜ.

One could say that her ankle
May twist or break,
Her voice be drowned,
Body placed in shallow waters,
For the gentle fish to tear asunder,
For the mother croc to feed her babes;
But the last veil will be dropped:
This is of no consequence.

O, the last veil will be dropped,
The last pane smashed to rainbow dust,
That is to lungs like razor.
Only then is she most herself,
Being all the selves, all the masks
Of joy or obligation.
(No questions are asked to stones,
Cool, unchanging; or to running water,
Rushing river, interminable drivel.)

The true face is a conjunction,
Of sawdust and steel, but
Crueller than sweet, sharp of
Cheek, gut of boiling bile.
Like Orlando, she was discovered a man
only after.

Pleasantries

By late afternoon, they were back in the wood, knee-deep in the slick, careful of any stone that would make them misstep; Dylan and Erik and he, one hollow-cheeked, the other as lively as the vacuum ‘round his boots would let him, and the other – oh, the other, thinking of everything and nothing, that is, forgetting each thing – first he would see a starling, hear a warbling and smile to himself – and return to numbness. He stroked his russet chin, rough, as if burnt by candle, hanging behind the others, the other hand in his pocket.

His expression changed very rarely, and only in relation to his inner stirrings, however drugged they were. The weight of a world, he knew, could be a nepenthes pharmakon, if one concentrated enough. “I am a brigand,” he thought. “And Life is my coinage,” though he could never part from his, not yet. “The word is Murder.” This he repeated over and over again, until the words lost their meaning, and he might as well have been thinking of the sandwiches he’d asked Lottie to make, or wondering if finches mated for life, or if permanence was attainable to any man at all.

To mislay something is to turn it to dust, like the magic in a rune, or a path through the wood. To forget it is to strip it of everything. And he had learned this lesson by heart.

Erik led them both – “Boy as Commander”. Not Mrs Ripon’s portrait of him, warmly received at the Grosvenor, titled “The Young Reveller”, flushed flesh and blossoming magnolias – for El-Gabal was a primitive god, much older than the one some call “father”. In his canvassed likeness, he seemed old as the trees, as the fruit and the rejoicing of birds, heavy-lidded, his smile suggestive of sensual knowledge. But whoever said that Erik was this always would be a liar. There was – now, this very moment, the moment he lived –  something distinctly modern in his excitement. The pursuit of glory, and not a care given to its achievement. This Erik – and there were many Eriks, in the meat and blood and bone branded by the name – sought pleasure in adventure for adventure’s sake. As Richard himself sought drunkenness for drunkenness’ sake.

The thrilled body-called-Erik regressed to the most savage of ages – boyhood. All twenty-six years peeled from scalp to cheekbone to chin. He was new and thought he knew everything. It was a feeling he’d missed verily. And this he did relish.

Suddenly, he had the haunting impression that he was forgetting something, and retreated two trees.

“Oy! Richard!”

Richard wiped his brow.

“Will it be done soon?”

“We are the closest yet.” Erik started again.

Richard could not admit he longed to go back and forget it all, as soon as his memory let him, as soon as the drugs and the drinks and the lotus-flower conceded him rest. So they trudged on, servant and master alike, behind he who felt himself an illustrious son, a vanquisher. (That is the feeling one gets, when he strangles a cat with wire.)

And so edged the gloom. Dylan wore it the worst of all: he could not look at either of them. His hand had frozen to the steel of the shovel, painless, shaking, and somebody else’s. It was for the best, that he was not truly there. Richard felt something like pity for him, only for a second. But as it would have made it all more difficult, he decided to forget, and so he did, until they reached the ravine where they had flung him.

What had his name been? The boy – well, it had been a boy once – had told him. This, too, he had put in the back of his mind, for they were two miles from Greyslip and this was his land –  that the thought would shake him was ridiculous, now that he had nearly overcome himself. He reminded his brain of the following: He was still a Lord, the last of his house, though he did not rule – and for once he was thankful that there were no men for him to govern. By the thirties, no peasant had made his home in the wood for a century. Not that he would have had any authority on them, either. Being aware of this reassured him, like a child being told a story.

The boy they’d thrown over had wanted a silver coin. A “piece of eight”, he’d said, though the currency was long out of favour. He’d been a Stevenson boy – like Erik, if he thought about it. Looting was no different from asking, if the other was expected to yield. One a trickster, the other a whore, both pillagers. One dead and the other leading him to the gallows, to die a lovers’ death, if they were lucky. They might even be hanged side by side, each hearing the other’s bubbling and choking. This, too, comforted him.

The corpse was like they had left it. Face up. Flies swarmed about his eyes and lips and genitals. (Nobody had clothed him. Only now did he see it as a discourtesy.) Already, the scent of Death – of rot and damp wood, the soft muttering of lice. Yellow over gray, webbed with violet, especially on the back, where the blood had pooled inside him.

Erik looked down, pensive, put his foot over the ledge and turned around: “Which of you will climb with me? See, it is not steep.” He kicked down a pebble. Indeed it was not – there were hardly two metres from where he was standing to the bloaty belly and glazed eye, and the buzzing. He put a hand on each hip, his eyes darting back to the work of his doing, giving the others a view of his back – Richard saw the silhouette of a coin, in the left jodhpur pocket, the brown leather one he’d nicked from a certain lady, which shaped his bum so nicely --  a doubloon? Surely not. He thought not. Even Erik would not have been so cruel. Though he was of a different land, that Richard did not know personally, and thus suspected of savagery, being himself an Englishman.

Erik turned again, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Of course! It is so, so, very obvious. You, Mr Harvey, have the shovel. A miracle you haven’t lost it. You haven’t said a thing! The whole walk! To think of it!” He laughed so hard he bent at the stomach, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “Forgive me. I have hurt your sensibilities. I knew you were your Mother’s boy. What I mean is, will you aid me with the finishing touch? Be assured that, as a work of art, I claim all the credit. Burying him is no different than feeding him to pigs. I say it is better. And who better than you, footman? Boy? Gentleman?”

He paused, and turned serious. “Which of them are you, anyway? But no matter…”