Hell

III: Hell

The lockstep roads, the exercise yard trudge, a population made to anxious children, darting-eyed as they await the rod. Their golden skies transmuted by bad alchemy to lead. And on each tongue the Pentecostal nightlight flickers and goes out. The rhetoric turns back to chain-gang consolations. The red bonnets are removed, are hidden, buried, burned, and justice treads the curfew as an angry widow, vigilante whispers in her trailing skirts. As well to own a bomb-hoard as a printing press. This is no time for trust.

Across the lane a curtain moves. He plays his business cards close to his chest with limited editions sold to friends, subscribers. No advertisements, no exhibitions, voice suppressed, lips stitched, the vision has nowhere to turn save inwards. Psychic cabin fever. At Hercules Buildings on the landing is a cruel-eyed ancient crouching at his measurements. The human soul has fallen to anatomists, is flensed with the dividers' every slicing arc. The tyrant ratio is everything. The wings grown from his temples are clipped back for battery convenience. He takes the decade personally, its nightmares are his own. He is at home to every panic and delirium. The spectre rushes at him down the stairs, green, gold, and scaled, its snake tongue licking at the air for blood. Hail, horrors! Hail!

With language now under surveillance he resorts to code. Stealth prophecy. Boils down oppression and resistance into glowering essences, to barbarous names. Uncharted pantheons, past legislation's Newgate reach, in cryptic masks to sing his teeming mind behind. But how to sing of this? The casual brickings, word of innards dragged about the highway, infants lynched or else discovered dead and nameless out on Lambeth marshes, sooty warts already blooming on the half-dropped balls. London as suburb of Inferno. Bad news waiting maggot-lively on the tide line, and the spirit hobbled to a rock of care. His tightening gin-trap finances, grey prison shadows stripened in graver's tablet. In his dipping jar, the water black at once, although he's used none. Both his father and his mother gone by turn into the mortal clutter off in Bunhill Fields. The turf in pregnant hopes wherein bone babies incubate with bare jaws working in their sleep at the imagined berries of the yew tree, sticky nipples, white and poisonous. He doubts if he will live another year.

And yet his fortieth English winter comes and goes and he survives, but not with ease. The work grows thin. The doubts made sleek and stout with nervous fear sat often at his elbow now. Though he'll conjecture with Hoxton diviners, Rosicrucian brickies, cabbalists from Cripplegate, in mantic lulls, or when the wind is in the south, then bedlam shrieks, its lights out, bellows madhouse rape, shit murals, bleats and stammers while amongst the audience soup a voice that weeps and laughs in turn and sounds so like his own. Unwelcome futures limp, all spit and bandage-seep, along the Blackfriars Road. But Catherine believes in him, though how much more unbearable, to slide below the mire with her sweet, loyal weight dragged down beside him, unprotesting, blameless save for having wed a fool who swore he talked with angels when he but imagined them. Whose vanity was not placated by his works, his ordinary talent, but insisted that each verse and picture be the handicraft of God. The dread of his undoing seizes him and when his benefactor Hayley offers premises upon the coast at Felpham then he packs his sixteen trunks amidst the bread riots and the bun fights and he's drummed out of the city then, a tiger on the lam. Their cottage, once the early beatific ozone rush is gone from the sea air, is damp and poorly humid. Mildewed pointillism bleeds into the stipple of his miniatures. Angry at his subservience to a lesser writer, to a lesser man, he comes to loath the thing that he depends upon. Hayley, his patron, is a self-inflated mediocrity and yet so generous. The work, the fine commissions, portrait cameos of poets. He can see them, funeral processions of giant phantoms on the Sussex shore. Milton and Dante, Chaucer, William Cowper lost and broken, shying at the bar of his own lunacy. A lesson there. His drawing paper cockles with the damp. He put a brave face on it all, one of the only faces he has left. Across the Channel, Bonaparte is tooling up. On each salt-breeze the idiots tattoo of a recruitment detail, table-slamming rally songs with cannon meter, then, the dray-breathed squatty in the garden, Scolfield, just when he was spoiling for a fight, just when he'd had enough of drums and bunting, drums and bully buttons, and all right, with hindsight, he might have done better than to make a fist and throw the bugger out but then the harm is done. Sedition trials, stomach-heavy months 'til the next hearing and the shackle-rattle in his dreams, yet, in the end, he is acquitted. Even they can see how vulnerable he is. At last he can no longer stand the constant salvo of the tide bloom and returns with Catherine to the city, to South Moulton Street, but not unscathed. The cowering whipped-cur letters to his patron, the missed deadlines and the friendships lost to paranoid diatribes. Dog eat dog London barks above the dull slave-galley thudding of his heart.