Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black Read online

  And I shouted at the top of my lungs, like I was trying to burst them out of my chest: Ellis! ELLIS!

  Some Civil Defense chap with a mustache that must have irritated even him took me firmly by the shoulders and guided me back up to where Maenad Road should be, and told me that the bomb site wasn’t safe and the cellars under the pub could give way at any minute. Might be other stuff under that, he said. Who knows what?

  Bugger that, I shouted. My brother’s down there. All the more reason to get on with it.

  The mustache man twisted his mouth. If he is, then he’s dead. Direct hit. Any idea what the blast from one of those rockets is like? No unclaimed male fatalities on my list from the bodies they recovered. We need a heavy-duty crane now.

  He looked back at the center of the blast, counting off the body count on his sausage fingers. A lot of women, two Wrens, a Yank, two Polish boys. Lots of other bits and pieces we can’t put together.

  He peered at my head, at the bandages. What happened to you?

  I was on the bus, I said. The 354.

  Bus? he said, frowning. The 354 doesn’t run past here. You look white as a sheet, young man.

  The shivers had really got me now, so I came over to the fire and sat down, and here I am.

  Sparks shooting up into the early morning sky, a truck backing up to take bigger chunks of masonry off the road. A friendly woman from the damaged row of houses behind gave me this glass of some filthy whisky or other, and that’s helping calm the shakes a bit. Still this terrible numbness like that wool stuffing up my head.

  And now what? Think I’ll join the helpers digging out the wreckage when these big bits of beam and masonry are shifted. If Ellis is down there — whatever state he’s in — I want to be there when they find him. Just feeling a bit wobbly. I’ll sit a few more minutes.

  That dog really does remind me of our Lottie. Poor old thing.

  And I keep thinking about that girl Agatha too. I think maybe I should help her — she looks like everyone has forgotten her.

  Seems madness to draw now, but nothing else to be done while we wait for this crane. So . . .

  I lurk behind Harry, looking over his shoulder,

  watching the miracle marks his pencil makes,

  and I peek at the paper and then at his subject,

  and then I stand back, and say, Well!

  What a thing!

  If I had a hat, I’d tip it.

  No!

  I’d take it off and throw it into the sky.

  Harry!

  You’re a wizard, a magician of sorts;

  and this is the true intensity of your magic,

  for you don’t draw things as they really are:

  you draw them as they deserve to be seen.

  Well!

  What a thing!

  He’s drawing Greene!

  The man whose pub has just been destroyed.

  Look! There’s his head,

  and there are his arms.

  And look at the way he’s doing the boots!

  Ha!

  Well!

  What a thing!

  And . . .

  And, and . . . ?

  Well,

  not too far from where Greene stands

  lies a single shoe, lost by a child.

  Harry’s seen it — he starts to draw.

  And this is the power,

  the mystical power of Harry’s skill,

  for in that shoe I see a million things.

  I see girls like Agatha;

  boys with no name.

  I see children dispatched

  on overflowing trains;

  I see the trains plowing through darkening rains.

  I see families split, broken apart.

  I see their worn-out hearts.

  I see the tears, I see the dread,

  I see the fear inside everyone’s head.

  I see men like Greene with guns in their hands;

  I see men like Greene taking careful aim.

  I see men like Greene dropping bombs from planes.

  And I see men like Greene

  trying, yes, they’re trying,

  to make the world whole

  again.

  That’s the power of Harry’s art,

  and if you only see a fraction of it,

  well, that’s a start.

  Was surprisingly OK while I was drawing. As if a guardian angel had a hand on my shoulder, steadying me. Often the way; but now that I’ve stopped, the shakes are back along with that gnawing fear and grief in the pit of my belly. The sun is rising up over the battered horizon, shifting rays coming through the smoke from the crater and the fire. I can feel its warmth creeping through all that cold space between it and me, helping my fingers to work. Funny thing: as I scribbled away at the shapes in the wreckage, an image started to form in my mind.

  I always try and make the things that you could fudge — clouds, trees, waves — as accurate as possible, and then you don’t run the risk of missing something vital in front of your nose. Some tiny detail that will explain why the world makes you feel shaken and moved. There was a shoe, a child’s tan shoe, its lace missing and tongue pulled back against the uppers, and I drew it, and the crane and all that. But the rest, the heaps of charred and pulverized building, seemed just too confusing to draw, too dizzying to understand how something as solid as the White Horse could be reduced to all these constituent, random parts in a handful of seconds.

  Yet the more I concentrated on drawing the broken bricks and smoke and rescuers and Greene poised at the very edge, immobile, the more I felt Ellis. His presence, argumentative, paying compliments (backhanded, like always), chivvying me along. Come on, H, do something useful. Call that a bloody line? I thought you were supposed to be able to draw! What are you waiting for? I’m here, brother. Right here when you’ve done messing about.

  Morphine again, I suppose, and my imagination working hard in the void. Conjuring him. Can’t believe he’s dead. Therefore he isn’t. He was meant to be the indestructible one always, the tough one. The fighter.

  P.S. Just heard it again: a violin singing, beyond the blast radius on the far side of all the rubble and ruin. I worked my way around to see who was playing and blow me down, if it wasn’t the same fiddler as at the warehouse fire. I’m sure of it. Different tune, though, lively, upbeat, making my toes move and tap along, almost wanting to dance despite everything. The very same man for sure, wreathed in smoke that was curling up from the bomb damage and swirling round him with the stiffening breeze. There was a gaggle of street kids staring at him, and now they started to move, clapping their hands, woefully out of time but getting enthusiastic, warming themselves up.

  I shouted, Has one of you lost a shoe? Tan one without a lace? It’s over there. But they all just looked at me as if I was a bit touched and kept dancing.

  Good that he’s lifting their spirits. Maybe some of them lost a relative or a neighbor in the blast, yet here they are dancing. I wanted to wait for the fiddler to finish and go and ask what that tune was he was playing the other night. Feels like it matters. The kind of thing that once I’d have rushed to share with Ellis before all the awkwardness got in the way. Coincidences, things that stand up suddenly in front of you and salute the mind. But the fiddler didn’t seem like he wanted to stop and the children were having a good time, so I just scribbled it down best I could. I’ll finish this (feel compelled to finish this), then get digging with the others.

  Funny thing is, my hand keeps trying to draw lines that aren’t there. Feels like if I let it off the leash, it would go crazy, like a dog with a fresh scent. Like our Lottie chasing rabbits on a hillside. Feels as if I would need a massive sheet of paper, double elephant or bigger, and would fill it. Maybe I’m not right in the head after all. Strong ache there now from the wound again, and Eunice’s warnings coming back at me. And doing that last drawing, I had a horrible moment of double vision and everything blurred.

  Seven urchins, linking hands n
ow as they caper around and around the fiddler like mad things. A bit dizzying, but then I suddenly think how much Agatha would enjoy something like this. She seems so quiet and contained, and she needs to feel some warmth and movement. Some life!

  Come on, H! It’s like I can hear Ellis in my head again. Better get cracking.

  Well, time to dig. I feel pretty rough, have to say, but I can’t wait anymore.

  So . . .

  And dig, Harry did.

  I watched him from across the radius of death,

  while I scratched a tune on this old violin,

  a fiddle I found in the first of the blasts,

  when I was new to the city and wide-eyed with wonder.

  It’s a terrible instrument but that doesn’t matter,

  for I could make music from any old thing,

  from the beat of a heart to the twang of a string

  releasing an arrow;

  and besides,

  the children I played for

  were sweet little sparrows,

  who could have danced in the dust till the war was done.

  And then!

  I saw Harry drop something into the deep.

  A blue glass eye!

  That was it: the thing I had not predicted;

  that Harry would find a new way of seeing.

  And then he dug, and shifted and lifted

  and pulled. And then I saw him looking across at me,

  at me and my spellbound kids.

  He paused, and seemed about to speak.

  Then his head swung up and his eyes rolled back,

  and he fell to the ground.

  Not dead!

  Just spellbound too.

  Some others came and carried him off;

  an ambulance van came and took him away,

  back to that hospital, both royal and free,

  where he slept deeper than sleep and half as alive.

  For hours he drifted, hours and hours, and I?

  I wondered whether I might lose him, then.

  I stood by his bed. One hand on his head,

  feeling for thoughts, memories, emotions, anything.

  And all I felt was the beat of his blood, and then,

  just faintly,

  a snatch of a song,

  a scratchy old tune on a bad violin.

  Then he coughed and sucked up a lungful of air

  and I laughed and I swore like Harry himself.

  Bloody hell, lad, but you gave me a scare.

  I watched from the window when the doctors came by.

  They scolded and chided and finally had Harry understand

  that the wound in his head was deep, and bad,

  that any motion could make it much worse,

  that if he wanted to live he needed to rest.

  That they knew best.

  And Eunice came when the doctors went, and reproached him as she had before, only not quite. This time, there was a softness in her voice, and a softness in her eye, which made me pause.

  In that softness I felt a thousand things, of times long ago, of lovers lost, of a tenderness that cannot be described with words, only music.

  And that is why I sing.

  As I watched Eunice, I doubted myself.

  Perhaps, Harry, perhaps.

  Perhaps you’re not the one for me.

  Should I go and blow in someone else’s ear?

  Leave you to Love and let Ellis die?

  Who am I to bring you to life?

  You could get well and take this nurse as your wife,

  live happily and long and remember your brother

  as one whom you loved but who drifted away,

  place a rose on his grave every hundredth day.

  And then, Harry, you woke.

  You decided, you spoke.

  It was your doing, your choice,

  and then I knew how strong you are.

  You made Eunice blush with a kiss on her cheek,

  and sat up in bed, and asked for a paper.

  Something to pass the time, you said;

  and indeed the time passed as you got out of bed,

  and went and found Agatha

  and fled.

  At last a moment to rest. A moment of stillness and a chance to put down the events of today.

  We’re sitting now, Agatha and I, in the warm hugger-mugger of a deep shelter, with the thump and roar of the rockets and buzz bombs just noises off. How many people down here? A couple of hundred, all inhaling each other’s breath and odor. There’s some quiet chatter, some snoring, laughter at the other end of the tunnel. It feels good to be down here, safe.

  Makes me think of a wonderful poem that Ellis wrote in his Orpheus sequence, about a fox going to ground. About her catching something cold on the wind — the scent of a hound or a bugle — and racing away up a hill of twilight, zipping the night up behind, diving through the tree roots for the den and safety. Into the arms of the warm earth.

  I always loved that hill of twilight — should have told him as much — and now I know what his fox felt.

  Rocket impacts are making the ground tremble. It’s a big wave of an attack, and they would have moved us out of the Royal Free tonight anyway, if we — Agatha and I — hadn’t evacuated ourselves. So to speak.

  After blacking out at the bomb site, I woke up in my hospital bed again, still digging frantically with both hands, trying to burrow down into the rubble and keep up that hunt for Ellis, yet finding myself scrabbling away not at debris but at the tangled bedsheets. Eunice hurried over, clearly alarmed by my state, and put me in my place gently. She said I was lucky to be alive, that I had to listen to orders, and then came back every hour to check. A lovely girl; she clearly likes me — and for a moment, just a moment, I thought about giving up and letting her look after me, and then maybe, when I’m better, we might go for a walk together . . . a drink . . .

  But I knew that was for another time. Now I had to get going again. Ever since I saw those kids dancing in the smoke, I’d been thinking about poor little Agatha — and I could feel that need to resume the hunt for Ellis tugging at me.

  So when Eunice came back for the third time, I sent her on an errand that I knew would take a good ten minutes, and then, like that fox, slipped away up my own hill of twilight. Or down the darkened corridor at any rate.

  I found Agatha back in her room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her shoes on, and an overcoat buttoned up to her chin. She smiled when she saw me, a fraction of a second of smile, but a smile nonetheless. As if she had been waiting for me and had known I’d be there any minute.

  There you are at last, she said. My Mister Orpheus.

  I told her to stick to Harry, for God’s sake, and she nodded as if humoring a daft teacher.

  You weren’t here when I looked in last time, I said. I was worried I’d lost you.

  I can’t go on my own, she said. I need someone to help me find my parents. And I think you are the one, Mister Harry.

  Just Harry, I said. But do you know if they even made it to London? You didn’t seem sure when I asked you the other day.

  Yes, she said. I think so, by now. You will help me find them. I know it. And I will help you find your brother.

  She held out a hand, steady this time. We shake on it? An agreement?

  It’s a deal, I said, and took her hand in mine.

  Me: You’re freezing.

  Recently I have bad — ach — Blutkreislauf.

  Circulation?

  She nodded.

  There’s something about this girl: for all of fourteen, she’s very grown up indeed. I suppose that’s what being put on a Kindertransport must do to you. And there’s something about her determination and her occasional lightning-flash smile that gives me fresh strength too.

  So what we do now? she asked. Have you made up your mind? Are we going to find your brother?

  Yes, I said. We’re going to do what we English call a runner. Have you got everything?

  She nodd
ed. I have my photograph of my parents and that is all I need. I am ready for our runner. I always liked to run when I was little.

  And that’s what we did. My third escape bid, just like you read in the papers about POWs trying again and again to get out of Stalag — whatever. Because they are determined to do their duty. Well, they’re not the only ones.

  As we made our dash down the back stairs, the sirens blared across town and a rocket attack came in. That helped us; everyone was going berserk and no one even saw us, let alone tried to stop us. We started towards the bomb site, but then a couple of hits very close by forced us to take shelter, jostling with the rest to flee underground, every bone in my body urging that direction suddenly, demanding we get below the earth, burrow beneath the city.

  Ellis is still alive, I know it, and an inner voice keeps telling me I need to go down not just for safety, but to find him. And bring him back. As soon as the all-clear sounds, we’ll head to the blasted bit of ground where the White Horse stood and start digging down into the rubble again.

  Agatha was very silent as we joined the crowds making their way down into this shelter. Suppose she’s done a lot of this since she came from Germany, and God knows what she went through over there. Even crowds might bother her, I suppose.

  I told her she was brave as anything, and she just shook her head and gave me a smile.

  When this attack is over, I said, I’m going to look for Ellis again. I should find some official help for you. You must be registered at a town hall as a refugee, and they might know something about your parents. Any idea where you have been staying?

  I cannot remember, Mister Harry, she said. But you will help me find them?

  Of course, I told her. I just don’t know where to start. And first I’ve got to see about Ellis.

  I will help you, she said. I want to stay with you.

  Overhead there was a hell of a thud, followed by a throaty roar as something struck not more than a few hundred yards away. She squeezed closer to me on our bench.

  Show me that picture of yours, I said to take her mind off the rockets, and she plucked the creased photo out of her coat pocket and gave it to me.