Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black Read online

  Black Out

  Boxing Day, 1944, 4:15 p.m.

  Becoming

  6:45 p.m., Fire station 34

  Boxing Day, 7:45 p.m., White Horse

  Orpheus in the Underworld

  10:45 p.m., on the bus

  Haagse Bos

  27th of Dec.? 28th? 9:15 a.m. Hospital bed

  December 27th, 5:20 p.m. Royal Free Hospital, C Ward

  Dec. 28th, 10:20 a.m., Royal Free

  December 29th, Early morning (I think)

  Psychopomp

  December 29th, Evening

  Closing time

  Dec. 30, Dawn, Site of the White Horse

  Kinder

  Later

  Spellbinder

  December 30, Evening, deep shelter, Camden Town Underground

  Sleep

  Later, Camden Town Deep Shelter

  Orpheus, Descending

  December 31 (?), Early morning. Underground

  Charon

  December 31 (possibly), Dawn

  The White Horse

  New Year’s Eve, Late afternoon, White Horse bomb site

  Horde

  Later, still at the side of the crater

  New Year’s Eve, Evening, Greene’s house

  The Fight

  Later

  Spring

  New Year’s Day, Morning, wasteground. Lost

  Sisyphus

  New Year’s Day, Sunset

  Cerberus

  New Year’s Day, Nightfall

  Gateway

  Night, Underground, platform

  Deeper underground, this year or next?

  The Ring

  Later

  Pomegranate Seeds

  1st Jan.?, Sewer tunnel

  Warriors of the Machine

  Transformation

  Transformation 2

  A Note to the Reader

  Letter from Ellis Black to his father, January 6, 1946

  Electricity.

  Robot bombs.

  The dark cave, also known as the Underworld.

  Trans-cranial subsonic manipulation.

  Courage and cowardice,

  fear, abhorrence

  and love.

  The light of the sun.

  I’ll sing of all of these things before I am done.

  I’ve a story to tell of Harry Black,

  who went to the Underworld and how he came back;

  of the love for his brother who’d pushed him away.

  Of London by starlight, under attack,

  of bombs falling, of people calling through the darkened streets,

  of sirens and wayfarers, of lost souls,

  of vicious women and mindless dogs.

  These are the things of which I’ll sing.

  These, and besides them, many things more:

  the persistent thrumming from deep underground,

  the way that firelight flickers on faces,

  and how the air vibrates after the smack of a bomb.

  Of underground rivers and swarming drones,

  and a pale German girl who wants to find home.

  Of eyeballs and landlords and tankards of beer.

  Of laughter when danger’s near.

  Of Harry (and his brother, Ellis) and —

  What’s that? What’s that?

  Who am I?

  Ask me slowly . . .

  . . . and I’ll tell you.

  Who am I?

  I am Orpheus.

  Musician, singer, poet and guide:

  at your service!

  Always.

  You’ve met me before — in the streets, on the hills, at the edge of the milling crowd. When I stood like a wanderer at the cusp of your vision — that was me.

  When you thought you heard singing but couldn’t be sure, when you felt someone breathe on the back of your neck, and when a voice said follow, but you didn’t dare.

  That was me.

  When something whispered inside your head, and implored you to listen, urged you to open your eyes, begged you to believe, hoped beyond hope that you would decide to expose your mind to something more; called out to you to say, Wake up!

  Wake up!

  Wake up!

  When that happened . . .

  Was that me too? Or was it you?

  Perhaps it was both of us.

  Perhaps we were working together, you and I, because we have already met.

  Mine is the oldest story of all. Mine, or one very much like it; in which a hero with gifts beyond all measure (in my case the gods had taught me to sing) ventures into the deepest cave of greatest danger, going to face the ultimate foe — the one who waits on a throne in the dark, with a patient smile and a fingernail ticking.

  Descent to the Underworld, the story so old it existed before there were words with which to tell it. To venture into the dark cave . . .

  And the outcome? Triumph, or tragedy? For either can occur; there are no guarantees where our hero is going.

  Triumph or tragedy? In my case, a little of both.

  And yes, you have met me before.

  My reputation rests on the power of my song;

  I could still the beasts; charm birds from the trees; make fighting men sit down and weep.

  My song could change the course of streams,

  make stones rise up and dance.

  Make trees lift their roots

  and stride to the sea.

  My reputation rests on my song,

  and the fact

  that I went to Hell, and back.

  Orpheus, Orphée, Orfeo.

  Hermes, Theseus.

  Gilgamesh.

  Odin.

  Even Alice, who went to wrestle with the unconscious of her creator.

  You have met me before.

  And now I’ll sing to you of Harry Black, disowned by his father, shunned by his brother, but with gifts beyond all measure (in his case, a skill with a pencil like a wizard with a wand).

  The stage is dark.

  Blacked out.

  And as the curtain lifts, fire falls on London town . . .

  Winter dusk in Kilburn, London. The world has been reduced to rubble and flame and dirty water, and the rockets and buzz bombs are falling again.

  They bring death in two ways. The first, you receive some kind of warning at least. A siren, an engine growling and then cutting, a searchlight picking out chunks of shadow between the clouds. And the second, where it just hurtles at you from a clear sky, where there’s no advance sound, no wailing, no time for a last thought. It simply arrives, annihilates, and only then comes all the noise and fury trailing in its wake for the survivors to hear. Then, if I’m still lucky enough to be amongst those survivors, I have to clear up what comes after.

  Obliteration is our daily business, these days. My daily business.

  I told Father I didn’t want any part of it, told Ellis just the same, but one way or another, death pulls you in, and you are meshed into the machinery of war.

  The strange thing is you get used to it after a hundred nights or more. You get used to anything in time, I suppose . . . or at least you think you do.

  But tonight something has changed, as if a switch has been thrown deep inside me. And I need to try and understand what has happened — and start to do things differently.

  Begin with immediate reality when you need to make sense of things, my old art teacher always said. Start with what’s bang slap in front of your damn nose if you want to put the world into perspective.

  So: the air smells of cold and smoke and burning plastic. I can hear flames crack as they devour the last of the factory we were never going to be able to save, a dis
tant shudder as something big slams into Hackney and the ground rumbles. There are people shouting, a dog barking, and faintly — bizarrely! — someone scratching out a tune on a fiddle, a weird little melody that keeps repeating over and over, tickling away at the night air. Above me the sky is slashed by searchlights, and the antiaircraft boys are banging away at any hint of a ghost or shadow they can see now that the fog’s blown clear. Yellow tracer and orange shell bursts to make a good show, lighting up the barrage balloons, littering the city with thousands more shards of hot metal.

  Pointless.

  But good for Father’s business; good for the family’s fortunes. The gunners are making the most of the clear spell, eating up the shells made by Black and Company at an appalling rate. They have some chance with the doodlebugs — they’re slow enough to hit — but the new rockets are just too fast, as good as invisible. They hurtle up and through the stratosphere, and then fall where fate or luck or God or whatever you want to call it decrees.

  It’s four hours since we got the call that something had struck the Heurtebise Warehouse. A day-late Christmas lunch in full swing in the fire station, the radio at the maximum the volume knob will allow, blasting out Sandy MacPherson playing carols on his organ, and roast spuds and brussels sprouts and a black-market turkey being served under the makeshift decorations. Shouting bang because there’s no snaps in the Christmas crackers! Just about got a mouthful of everything, and then the alarm went and we were on our way. Swearing mixed with the jokes from the crackers and everyone saying wasn’t it frigging cold just to mask the fear. Brittle laughter. Keep it all warm, love; we’ll be back in a jiffy. Keep it all good and warm till we’re home.

  But deep down everyone knows sometimes you don’t come back.

  Our engine picked down Maida Vale, feeling its way with the thin light from the slits we’re allowed for headlights at last. (Thank God for that: I can still remember the awful thud when we hit that elderly pedestrian near Archway. He didn’t stand a chance. More people were being killed in road accidents than from Hitler’s bombs in those dark days.)

  Jokes and laughter dying as we approached the bomb site, words giving way to a dry mouth, a busy heartbeat. As soon as I saw the blazing remains of the warehouse, I knew it couldn’t have been a V-2 because there was still too much standing. Oil bomb probably, to make that much flame. Or a doodlebug. We dragged out a hose and got it working from an underground tank, stepping round a bare foot lying in the street, an arm — the kind of horror show that comes back at you in the middle of lunch the next day and makes you feel bad because you didn’t feel bad at the time. (It’s only the unusual or fantastic that sticks some days, like that hit on the taxidermy shop: stuffed crocodile lying in the gutter, zebra head perched on the canopy of a nearby hotel looking astonished to find itself there.)

  This evening just seemed a job of dousing down the surrounding buildings and containing, but then through a shattered window in the factory I saw figures in the flames. Five or six of them standing, arms raised curiously as if beckoning me, but not moving at all. None of them trying to run or turn away and shield themselves from the approaching fire.

  I batted Oakley on the shoulder and pointed. He gave me that solid nod of his, shouted to shift my blooming arse, and the two of us fought our way into the ground floor, under that pile of flame and burning timber and unstable masonry, the kind of theatricals we’re not meant to be doing and the CO hates.

  Two of the trapped figures were already burning, the flames serpenting along their outstretched arms, sending up black smoke, poor souls swaying to and fro — very, very slowly. My stomach lurched and I waved, screamed, For God’s sake get out of there, then fought on towards them through the heat and smoke around us when they still didn’t react. (Oh, Ellis, if you could have seen me then, my brother, you might take back some of those things you said about bravery and cowardice and the relative distribution of those attributes in the Black family!)

  And then I heard Oakley laughing and simultaneously coughing up his guts as the fumes got to him.

  He tugged my arm. It’s just a load of dummies, you dummy! Let’s get out before the whole ruddy place comes down on us.

  I looked around bewildered, too slow to understand (as ever!), still fixated on saving the doomed factory workers. I saw the other figures catch light and start to burn, still not making any effort to escape at all, and pushed on through the heat towards them — and at last realized what that daft bugger Oakley meant. Turns out Heurtebise was a factory and warehouse for shop outfitting: mannequins and display stuff like that. Just dummies.

  Bloody dummy yourself, I thought, and turned to go, but a beam came thumping down between Oakley and me in a curtain of sparks, fire blocking my way, the heat hitting that intensity you know means you’ve only got a minute or so left. I turned, ran blindly towards the back of the building, and kicked through a smoldering door, and found myself in an untouched storeroom. Boxes were standing open, half packed, spilling up their contents: an entire crate of crooked left arms; a line of rounded-off female torsos; long legs with pointed toes; ghostly, unseeing faces waiting for wigs or hats — bodies! — to become something. A surrealist’s dream.

  An utter stillness there, strangely beautiful and yet gruesome too, like that image in Goya’s Disasters of War. (Maybe I could do something with that for Warriors of the Machine? Could be a big double-pager — words wrapping around the bodies, maybe a monoprint?) Despite the heat building at my back, the sound of the flames biting closer, the scene held me to the spot, images fixing themselves in my mind. Wonder-full.

  On the far wall my escape route: a fire door, but next to it a row of small, dark wooden drawers caught my eye. They were neatly stenciled with words to excite any artist, begging to be opened: BURNT SIENNA; LAPIS; VIRIDIAN GREEN. Paints? I opened the one closest to the exit, labeled CERULEAN, and found myself staring at a rack of neatly arranged glass eyeballs of the most wonderful, celestial, gorgeous blue, all presumably waiting to be planted in some dummy’s head, but now, disconcertingly, hypnotically, gazing back up at me. I can’t quite put it into words — presumably why Ellis is the writer, not me — but those blue eyes seemed somehow to see me. To gaze right into me, deep into my soul. As if somebody had just asked a vital question and was waiting for an answer. What a blue! Like when you look towards the horizon on a late summer’s day. When I get the Warriors book up and running at last, I’m going to use that exact blue in each and every blessed image.

  God knows how long I stared at those eyes. Probably just seconds, but that was the moment something clicked inside. As if someone had shouted my name and catapulted me from sleep. As if I’d just been looking at things for days, weeks, months, but not actually SEEING anything. And suddenly my own eyes were wide open. The blue staring at me . . .

  Bugger it, I utterly forgot where I was, that I was in danger . . .

  I suppose technically it was looting, but they would only have melted anyway, and I couldn’t leave without taking something of that piercing blue vision with me, so I took off my glove, dipped my hand into the box of eyes. They were cold, really cold. Untouched by the heat of the firestorm all around. I hadn’t expected them to be so cold. Took a couple of decent handfuls and thrust them into my pocket. Around fifteen or so. A Christmas present to myself.

  Then everything roared back into life, the fire coming through the door behind me like a dragon, the beams overhead cracking thunder, and the sound of falling masonry that you soon learn in this job is telling you to get yourself out PDQ. I felt the back of my helmet becoming hotter and hotter, felt the fire through my jacket, vision going like I was on the edge of passing out, and bludgeoned open the locked fire door with my ax at the fourth blow and tumbled out into the backyard, coughing up all the smoke I’d swallowed along with a bit of Christmas lunch, trying desperately to find my bearings. Then staggered back round to the engine to report that the building was clear of people.

  And all the time the eyeballs were c
licking away in my pocket.

  Thank God, Oakley said. I thought we’d lost you this time, you daft sod. There’s still Christmas pud to have! He tried to laugh, but his face was white. No jokes now, just relief and the exhaustion that comes towards the end of a shift.

  And indeed here I am, still alive. I’d normally be shattered, but instead there’s a kind of agitated excitement throbbing through me. Like I should be somewhere else or have forgotten something. That fiddler keeps playing steadily. Feel like I’ve heard that tune recently, but I can’t place it.

  I can see him now: a slim shadow leaning against a building on the other side of the street, loose strands of the white horsehair on his bow flickering in flame light as he picks out his melody. The water from our hoses is snaking down the street past him, slick with oil, pooling, flowing around the bodies and parts of bodies still lying in the street: a left hand disembodied, little finger cocked as if holding a cup of tea at the Café Royal. A head and shoulder and arm, the face turned away from me towards the fiddler. Nobody else seems to see him but me . . .

  Something has changed. For the first time in ages and ages (first time since childhood?), I have realized that I am alive. Not just walking and breathing and talking and thinking, but really alive. I know it’s not enough that I just survive, that I am still breathing. That’s not living, is it? I need to make my life matter, my work matter, to see things clearly . . .

  I want to write down what’s happening, and in detail — not just scribble notes alongside my drawings like normal. My new project will be an artist’s book, text and images together, as strong as I can make it. As I go through the dark streets of London, I want to describe each precious moment and try and make something that’s powerful and true from all this. The flames and bright stars and glittering river that defy the chaos: I want to make them sing! Too many false steps in my life so far.

  So now I shall begin to live. And maybe that will help me put matters right with my brother. Maybe it will give me the strength to say the things I want to say. Because I need to say them. Can’t take the pain of this rift any longer.

  And because I can’t sing for toffee, I’ll rely on what I can do: draw and write with new conviction so that I can create something that will live independently of me. Even if Father has washed his hands of me, even if Ellis thinks I’m a waste of time right now, I’ll make Warriors of the Machine my weapon against all this nonsense around us. A New Year’s resolution, a few days early — and one that I mean to stick to with every last little bit of my energy and strength. With the urgency of brushing fire from my head.