The House of Breathing Read online

  The topic of my thesis in English history at Cambridge was ‘Documentary responses to the Peterloo massacre’. On the sixteenth of August 1819 almost sixty thousand working men and women (plus sundry attendant children and domestic pets) met at St Peter’s Field on the outskirts of Manchester for a peaceful demonstration in the cause of radical reform. The scene was, by all accounts, one of manifold pageantry. Banners bore slogans proclaiming ‘Liberty and Fraternity’, ‘Votes for Women’, ‘Unity and Strength’ and ‘Parliaments Annual, Suffrage Universal’. One dog, it is recorded, carried the words ‘No Dog Tax’ hung decoratively at its neck. The crowd was orderly and unarmed and feeling somewhat festive. Women in white bonnets grew brave with ideas. Men became loud and happily animate. There were greetings and discussions and hail-ye-well-mets. A maid received, unnoticed, a kiss from her admirer. The dog with its sign snoozed at somebody’s feet. A baby drank slowly at a cushion of breast.

  On the orders of the magistracy—so it is written—the local yeomanry charged into the crowd with their horses, intent upon the speaker, a man called Hunt. The baby was trampled; the speaker seized. The crowd grew angry and began to jeer. The Yeomanry panicked and drew their swords and then Mounted Hussars intervened to aid the Yeomanry. An energetic ten minute slaughter ensued. Eleven were killed. Four hundred and twenty-one were seriously injured; one hundred and sixty-two (including women and children) bore evidence of sabre wounds. St Peter’s Field, initially so bright and carnivalesque, was completely deserted, littered in retreat with dropped caps, shawls, banners and shoes, and densely marked with a pattern of semicircular declensions that showed in the soil the agitations of the horses.

  I remember devouring scones as I totalled up casualties. I sat in the cafe and spread my books before me, savouring, in part, the sweet aspect of discrepancy between the pleasures of my feast and the unfortunate, woebegone miseries of the past.

  R has phoned to say that she and the others are moving underground. They request that I join them.

  I have noticed that the telephone, in its particular, technological distortion of voices, tends not to affirm the presence of people but remove them further away than they could possibly be. R’s voice hung somewhere in distant space; it was loose and unearthly. I had joked on this before, but it now seemed she inhabited a somewhere utterly unimaginable.

  You must come right away, she whispered in English. We will meet you at eight at the place we agreed on.

  It was as though she was proposing to travel through light years of dark, past planets and stars and speeding meteors, just to meet up with me.

  I will come, I lied, unconvinced of her existence.

  Upon hearing the news of the Peterloo massacre the Romantic poet Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy. In a sparkling glass tower at Villa Valsovano in pretty Livorno he took up his pen. The poem is spare and metrical and too well rhymed (following the fashion of the time), and tells the tale, rather abstractly, of St Peter’s Field. Against the sabres and bayonets of the class-bound State, it urges passive resistance.

  Stand ye calm and resolute

  Like a forest close and mute

  With folded arms and looks which are

  Weapons of unvanquished war …

  The poem was not published in the poet’s lifetime; no publisher would risk gaol for its blatant sedition.

  In this difficult time I distract myself by re-reading The Mask of Anarchy. Here, in my own country, I imaginatively rehearse an English atrocity of 1819. I cannot encounter unmediated the reality of worse events in the streets outside. I am overcome by the idiotic melodrama of recitation, by the fact of repetition, either as tragedy or farce, around which my own anxieties centre and turn. Like an unmotivated automaton I spin out words, seeking, in this sad act, some semblance of comfort.

  Images of Cambridge continue to assail me. As I lie awake at night I see the past re-presented: the languid Cam with its streaming threads of green slime, its obese grey swans, its false Venetians; the silhouetted and multiple spires of Kings College; silent bicycles weaving down dark winding streets, donnish groups in conversation, over-stocked bookshops, picturesque teahouses. I contemplate its facade of manners and rectitude, its smug self-enclosure, its apoliticism. And I think, half in reverie, of sexual encounters, of lovers—one in particular—with whom, in my studenthood, nationless and irresponsible, I sought dissipation.

  I had a terrible dream. It began calmly. I was alone on a couch, reclined and insouciant. A book lay face downwards somewhat heavily on my chest; I had just finished reading. It was one of those dream moments entirely plausible, as though some chunk of waking life had infracted accidentally and lodged itself in sleep. I was comfortable and composed, the scholar recumbent. But then, without warning, the light bulb in my room began swinging large arcs. The walls began to fill with shadows of invisible people. I felt my heart arouse, waiting for the fearful strike of steel. But instead of hard blows I began, inexplicably, to be smothered by paper. The book on my chest had transformed into cardboard and it lay with a suffocating weight against my lungs. I could feel myself being cancelled, becoming flattened, negligible.

  I awoke sucking in anguish at the cold night-time air.

  My supervisor at Cambridge was a gentleman, it was said, of impeccable humanity. That is to say he took sherry with his students and spoke earnestly and sincerely of the benefits and rewards of a liberal arts education. As I sat in his shaded, oak-panelled room, surrounded by the required contingent of leather bound volumes glinting gold titles, I believed for a moment that I had reached the very summit of Western civilisation. I contemplated the garnet swaying in its glass, smelt its alcoholic odour in the instant before I sipped, and thought to myself: this is how it should be, this leisure, this repose, this oak-and-leather ambience.

  The old man leaned slowly forward—I remember it well—and asked me, in the most genial and patient of tones, to describe the institutes of higher education which existed in my country. What was I to say? I looked down at my brown hands and recalled irresistibly only those features of my home that were rude and inexpressible: the press of thin bodies in a crowded market place, garments blowing brightly in dark, narrow doorways, spiced food cooked outside on pathetically doll-sized burners, the stench of human excrement, paraphernalia of brass, rumblings of bullock carts, altars, trinkets, familiar syllables. But I could not summon any kind of intelligent response. I heard myself stammer a few awkward and halting sentences about ethnographic difference, about infrastructural absences, about the indisputable, regrettable depredations of colonialism.

  And then I noticed that the sherry glass had become tiny and very brittle in my large home-made hands.

  On the walls beneath my window square posters have appeared. They show the media-wise politician, the one who used funds once intended for roadworks. He does not deign to smile, since in the convention of our country politicians appear stern; they must resemble in opacity and seriousness the statues they will inevitably erect. Nor does he stare; the eyes have been replaced by oblongs of dark glass. He has already achieved the eyeless and irreproachable equanimity of statuehood. I am reminded of Shelley’s famous 1817 sonnet, Ozymandias, in which the shattered statue of a ‘king of kings’ is discovered in a realm of boundless desert. On the surviving face of stone it is still possible to read ‘the sneer of cold command’, though nothing at all remains of the empire and its authority.

  Beggars continue to bed down against buildings. I find them preoccupying. I watch their shapes curl and huddle and arrange large flaps of cardboard which, from this distance, look like the wings of black Harpies, settling hungrily over prey. Try as I may I cannot even imagine their emotions or thoughts. They are inscrutable as the servants who attended my childhood.

  Gunshots ring out at some inestimable distance. There is an explosion to the west signified by a bow of illumination resting low in the smoky and oppressive sky.

 
I wanted so desperately to become an Englishman. More specifically I wanted to be Percy Bysshe Shelley: languorously privileged, poetically audacious, bright, sexual, famously young. Instead I set to work, there in my study, resolving to produce a volume on Peterloo to honour my history teacher. In it I would attest the superior exegetical powers of the historical mode. It would be a stunning approval of cause and effect, of the stringency of facts, of objective and disinterested scholarship.

  I did not, as it happened, achieve my aim. The examiner’s report—though in some ways praising—announced that this candidate had problems with expression in the English language (too florid by half) which, while not wholly constituting any failure or disqualification, would not, in the eventuality, recommend the text for publication …

  I did publish, nevertheless, a small volume of mediocre poems titled Personal and Political and dedicated to my lover. I remember that I rushed through the streets with an extravagantly wrapped copy, holding it out like a kind of trophy before me, my words, my desires, all print-elegant and bound, until I arrived huffing and puffing and dishevelled by excitement. My lover glanced at the volume with an incurious stare. His slender white hands casually flicked at the pages. He said he was actually-awfully-busy-at-the-moment and would I care to return at a more satisfactory time.

  They have come to arrest me. I cannot pretend I had not expected it. The files on Ozymandias were taken four days ago and my dissent is recorded in the very fact of their existence.

  I am heaved outside into a waiting van. I pass beggars and posters, the former with all the diffidence and anonymity of the dispossessed, the latter familiar and strikingly specific. The night is very dark. Above me space stretches away to infinity and I find myself stupidly thinking that R is out there somewhere, that she is orbiting above, that she and the others are caught up in a realm of wheeling stars, are distant, lost, unrecoverable.

  His slender white hands casually flicked at the pages. My book spun before me like a radiant fan. For you, I said; the love poems are for you. His beautiful eyelids slowly raised. I remember I thought his eyes particularly exquisite. He said he was actually-awfully-busy …

  This prison is not at all as I expected. I had somehow imagined much noise and crowding but it is quiet and solitary. Perhaps I am kept in a section of the prison divorced from others. Perhaps this is a concession to the wealth of my family, to their past political influence. Nevertheless it is damp and unspeakably cold. My limbs have contracted, I am sure, with the effect of incessant shivering. I try to warm myself mentally. I think of garnet sherry in a short fluted glass. I think of Devonshire tea in a streak of sunlight, more precisely of the wavering steam above the tea, of the willow pattern plate, of the mound of cream, the lemon of the light. In my vision I inhabit a sparkling glass tower.

  I prepared an excellent line of defence. I would argue that my interest in the politician Ozymandias was merely historical, that I was a member of no party, politically innocent, clean, pure. I would invoke the principle of impartiality in scholarship and argue the importance of documentation and research. I would cite my old teacher and wax eloquent both on the necessity of the discipline of history—its nationalistic benefits, its handy property of assimilation to any state ideology—and on the final ineffectuality of academic words.

  But none of this worked. The man in military uniform who confronted me in my cell cut short my speech and simply laughed outright. Your crime, he said, is of sexual deviance. You are sexually corrupt; you have corrupted others. And then he did the most extraordinary thing. In the dialect of my district he began to recite, with a fine solemnity, one of my early love poems, one written twenty years ago for the lover, my lover, my long lost English lover, who was actually-awfully-busy.

  Maps are eradicable.

  The place of your residence

  has remade space. I think to myself

  ‘he lives over there’ and elsewhere

  floats off as though wholly

  uninhabited, mythical as Garuda

  lifting such graceful and improbable wings.

  Invisible is visible.

  Absence does not seem

  to diminish you at all. Here

  in my room, so crammed and populous

  with self-proclaiming curios,

  fabrics from far lands, shells,

  books, the desk with its papers,

  you hover definitively. The very air

  contains you. My potted flowers

  quiver by the touch of your hand.

  Your breath at the window,

  your certain face.

  The blind would say knowingly

  ‘There are two people here’.

  The military man paused at this point in his recitation and laughed once again. The rest, he said, is too dirty to say; and he turned and walked away, presumably taking the remainder of my poem, translated into dialect, and reeling to its lascivious conclusion in his head.

  I cannot remember the rest of my poem. I keep repeating to myself the last uttered line ‘There are two people here’, in the hope that I will recuperate the lost direction of the words. I know that I fantasised the sexual act, that I joined with my conjured figment of a lover and embraced in some imaginary aspatial place. I know that my language became rich and romantic, that I lavishly described presence in absence. It was a poem of infatuation, naive, flagrant. My words, however, do not seem forthcoming. The poem of my youth is entirely forgotten.

  I am so very, very cold and not at all courageous. This cell has a quality of ill-omen about it; it is dark and damp and filled with repugnant quantities of spiders and cockroaches. I think of the world that exists beyond this cell, the press of thin bodies in the crowded market place, garments blowing brightly in dark narrow doorways, spiced food cooked outside on pathetically doll-sized burners, the stench of human excrement, paraphernalia of brass, rumblings of bullock carts, colours, altars, trinkets, syllables. I think of beggars bedding down beneath sheets of cardboard. I think of the posters multiplying throughout the city, each image like the last, each face made eyeless, each repetition extending the infiltration of a man whom no one actually sees; of the dark sky arching above, of my friends lost and drifting in its airless depths. I think of smoke and gunfire and the blank gaze of cameras. Crowds rushing before tanks in a modernised Peterloo. The fallen, the crushed, the crimson rose-flourish.

  Two men have unexpectedly brought M to my cell. He is naked and unconscious and his testicles have been burned by cigarettes. He is cast back on the stone floor like one already dead.

  You next mister professor, says one of the men. He speaks, like the reciter, in the dialect of my area. His skin is exactly the colour of mine. His hair as black. His expression as imprecise.

  M lays on the floor obscenely exposed. M’s face has changed: it is no longer the face my lips explored, no longer preciously lover-familiar. It is barely, in fact, recognisable at all.

  I walk to my burning not wanting to be Shelley. I walk to my burning simply wanting, more than anything, to recover the lost, modest memory of my poem, to return to the moment in which such things were tellable and such words possible, in which the liberties of the body were wider liberties, in which history was something sequestered, sedate and academically amenable. I keep saying to myself ‘There are two people here’, but beyond that nothing comes. Beyond that there is a terrible pandemonium of words which shift and change with no order or reference, which are anarchic and inconsequential, and which sound in my head as though they were spoken from deep space through all the coils and deviations of telephone wires. The past is lost. I feel weak and pathetic. Yet I say to myself, again and again, ‘There are two people here’.

  The Word ‘Ruby’

  (De minimus non curat lex: The law does not concern itself with trifles.)

  Janet Allotson, barrister, of Hawthorn, Melbourne, had awoken with the force
of a dislocating memory. She blinked into consciousness and found herself tumbled elsewhere, other age, other class, other time.

  The morning-caught memory was one of striking lucidity: no enigmatic residue, no dream paraphrase, no unsystematic or circuitous flotsam and jetsam, but almost, one might say, a clear and distinct idea.

  It concerned her parents. She had somersaulted backwards to some moment of nexus between them all which skewed the familial triangle first female-wise then male-wise in sharp differentiation. Janet Allotson could not have said how the memory was released, what night-pertaining mechanism might have set it free, but contemplated, in any case, in the quiet grey of dawn, in the blue chill of the hour (plus omnipresent traffic sounds, faint trills of thrush song, the slight movement of the body lodged deep sleeping beside her), the strange and involuntary grace of its recurrence.

  The memory was dual. In the first part she watched her mother paint a picture in watercolours. It was her seventh year. She stood at the kitchen table and studied the movement of her mother’s hand as it dipped and swirled a paintbrush, took up a flame-shape of colour, and then dispersed it on a page lambent and glistening with damp. She did not know what it was that the brush lines represented; it was an abstraction of forms principally scarlet and orange and meaningful, perhaps, by colour alone. The hand rose and dipped slowly in repeated parabolas, the forms swelled and gathered pigment, became more bloody and bright, began to extend unimpeded to the perimeters of the paper.