Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black Read online

  And they did, dumbstruck not by Greene, I don’t think, but by the joyful racket that Agatha had been making with the young man.

  I thanked Greene, then wandered over to the piano to talk to the young man and offer him the rest of my sandwich.

  He looked up at me, his face older than I had first thought, lines thickening around the eyes, the marks of both laughter and tears, I fancied, his fair hair untidy, unkempt. He gazed at me with steady blue eyes that reminded me instantly of the ones nestled in my pocket. Angular face, clear skin.

  He shook my hand, a smile playing on his lips. No thanks, mate. I’m a vegetarian. If you can believe that!

  Then a queer thing: he looked me straight in the eye and said, It’s really good to meet you again. Or meet you properly at least.

  Do I know you? I asked.

  Not really. We almost met the other evening. I like your work. I saw some of it at your exhibition at the Slade.

  That brought me up short. But that was in Oxford, I said. I don’t see how you could know me.

  Oh, I know a lot of people, he said with another smile. A lot of people who work with paint and music and words. I know your brother, for example. Now, there’s a fine poet by any standard.

  He turned to mutter something to Agatha that made her laugh.

  Bewildered, I tapped him on the shoulder. We’ve never met, though, have we? How could you know about a student like me?

  He turned back, that clear blue light bright in his eyes.

  Like I said, we nearly met the other night. He lifted his arms, cradling an imaginary violin, and mimed the push and pull of his bow.

  Then I recognized him — the fiddler I saw making the children dance, the same one from the Heurtebise factory.

  You were there in Kilburn the other night, I said.

  He nodded. Keeping an eye on you!

  What was that? The tune you were playing?

  My head was aching, trying to make sense of this odd conversation. All I could manage to ask, of all things, was what tune he’d been playing.

  Just an old thing, he said. This was a variation of it we were doing on the piano here. Your friend’s a clever girl; she caught on straightaway.

  He stood up and cast a glance at the crater behind me. Have to keep playing, mate, he said, whatever happens. Am I right?

  Do you really know Ellis? I asked. I think he’s under all that lot somewhere.

  My voice cracked then, and I had to struggle to hold myself together.

  He patted my shoulder. It’ll all be OK, he said, and then turned away.

  I’ve got to go and play for someone, he called over his shoulder. Up near the Heath.

  Something about him felt reassuring, hopeful, even if what he was saying didn’t make complete sense. I didn’t want him to go and threw out another question: You’re not in uniform, are you an objector too?

  Not really, he said, walking away with a wave. But I’m not going to fight anyone. See you again, I’m sure. Happy New Year!

  Agatha watched him go, past the piles of brick, the swept heaps of glass from blown-out windows glittering like ice.

  He is a good man, she said, sucking the tips of her hair. He told me this will all be over soon. He’s going to ask around to see if anyone has seen my parents. Send them to me.

  Night’s falling now. Year ending. No point digging anymore, especially in the fading light. Greene is offering us a bunk for the night, and I think we’ll take it. If Ellis is down there, whether he’s dead or alive, I don’t feel I can abandon him like that and make the trek out to the Hudsons’ place. We’ll stay close, and tomorrow we’ll dig some more. At least a bit longer. Can’t give up all those years of brotherhood just because logic’s telling you it’s no good. And I can’t face the thought that we are parting from each other on the sour note of the last couple of years. There has to be more than this. There has to be.

  We’re tucked up and cozy, and despite the bleakness about Ellis, I’m glad of the warmth. Greene’s wife set a roaring fire in the grate, and we all huddled round it, watching the flames dance. Christmas tree in the corner, its decorations hanging still and intact, hard to believe the destruction just a street or two away.

  I roused my spirits a bit, as much for Greene and his family as for myself, and told them I should have lodged with them all along. The Hudsons are good to me, but it’s a bit far out.

  The landlord laughed, lifting one of his boys up, that snake on his arm flexing with the muscle.

  I wouldn’t have taken you then! An art student with no references and no uniform? It was only a week or so ago that your brother told me what a decent bloke you are.

  Ellis said that? I mumbled some reply, caught off guard, and felt tears stinging.

  Greene nodded. Oh yes. He was drunk at the bar. But he meant it. You can tell things like that in my job. Went on about how you would be a great artist one day.

  Then he looked somber. God, he said, it’s New Year’s Eve. Normally my busiest night of the year. And look at me!

  Now it’s late, the fire down to glowing coals, Agatha asleep. I keep thinking of what Greene told me — in vino veritas, they say, but did Ellis really mean that?

  Ellis.

  People always joked or teased or marveled how close we were. Nothing could prize you two apart, uncles and aunts would say, as we returned from some daft and misguided and frequently imaginary adventure on the hills, in the rivers, blood- or mud-daubed. Spooked, elated. Even when we fought, it was more like a ritual, pummeling away under big skies, stuffing grass in each other’s mouths, locked in different versions of the same damn story. Dreaming the same dreams on the same nights as if we were twins.

  But there’s always a gap, a fissure, where the world can get in and start to push you apart. Perceived (?) parental favoritism, the effect of a first girlfriend breaking our charmed world, different strengths, different weaknesses. And there has to be, of course: we are different people. What saddens me is how wide that gap has become. We disagree about so much now, and when we talk, I see that push-pull of what we share and what we just can’t stand in each other. But I need him to be alive. I need him to be. And while there’s a chance, I’m going to give it everything I can to find him.

  The fight broke out over nothing.

  Just nothing, nothing at all.

  But it felt like it was everything

  that threatened to fall,

  to destroy you both:

  brothers, with wheeling fists,

  on an April hillside.

  For a long time forgotten by you both.

  It was years ago, when you were boys:

  maybe you squabbled over a toy;

  maybe one of you said something mean.

  It’s not important anymore

  what you hit each other for;

  and anyway,

  you do not remember it now.

  But I do, Harry;

  I can feel it still.

  I can feel the blows raining down

  as if it were me they were striking

  (and I mean every word I say).

  As if it were me

  who slugged, and scrapped,

  and kicked and spat,

  as if I were your brother,

  or something like that,

  while spring came rolling on in . . .

  and never missed a beat.

  Awake again after fragmented dreams, broken thoughts muddling up waking and sleeping and memory. Just a mess of images until the last dream, which felt so real, so important. Something from long ago, I think.

  Just me awake in the house now — from the sound of it just me awake in the whole blasted city. No sirens, no bombs, no shouting. My muddled head has been weaving together ideas for Warriors with things I’ve seen with Fire Force 34. There were snakes escaping from the zoo in my dream, fleeing the cull they ordered in case of bomb damage to the reptile house, and that was getting mixed with the return of those vicious ladies, this time with a bunch of gangst
ers for company. And then some of the Warriors of the Machine ideas came flooding back, all that stuff about robotic killing machines as small as insects. A sky thick with radio-controlled attack robots, tiny rockets that could sniff out a target or even think for themselves . . .

  There are owls hooting outside — more than one, a host of them, some close by and loud, some farther off like echoes. With the blackouts they’ve been coming into the city more and more, bringing the childhood countryside with them. I like that; it’s comforting somehow that they are withstanding the war, at least. So many cats were put down at the start of the war in ’39 that the mice and rats have had a productive few years. (Ellis told me when we were still talking properly, his poetic eye bright, twinkling, that there was a secret mass grave in southeast London for the murdered felines — and let that imagination of his off the leash, picturing tens of thousands of ghost cats on the loose, sliding white along fences and through the undergrowth.) But ghost cats only catch ghost mice, so now the owls, white, tawny, are having a grand time scavenging the bombed wastelands and parks, crisscrossing darkened London skies, dropping silently to take what they need. Do they notice the rockets, the bombs, the fires, as being out of the ordinary?

  One owl really close now, tu-whooing loudly. Apart from that, nothing but the whisper of my pencil.

  The last of the dreams won’t dislodge itself from my head. It was more coherent, more powerful, than the other bits and pieces: started with some kind of version of that memory of Ellis and me on the apple-green hillside, tricking the stream to flow somewhere else. But now we were in a house, something rather like our rambling childhood home, and we were on the stairs — neither young, nor old, just us — and somebody was clodding around on the boards overhead, making loud stomping footsteps like a giant in a fairy tale, and there was the sound of urgent, tumbling water. Voices too, muttered through the sound of the bath or toilet flush or rain overflowing the old gutters, and then suddenly the stairs were awash with a flood. Sheets of water lipping over each step one by one, falling towards me, and I looked round for Ellis, checking my older brother’s reaction (like I invariably did back then) to see what my reaction should be — joy, wonder, fear?

  But he was gone. And more than that, I sensed he was irrevocably gone, swept out of existence in that moment and now somewhere I could never reach. Or not quite.

  I turned, knee-deep in the cascade, and looked down. The stairs jinked and twisted, once, twice, three times, and the water kept tumbling, through a hole in the floor of the hall, down into some kind of gaping basement, engulfed by the darkness. Somebody — it might have been Agatha, but I only saw her hand — gave me a flashlight, and though the beam wasn’t strong, it shone through the falling water into the darkness and, briefly, illuminated Ellis’s face. He was gazing up at me, reaching out a hand. And then I heard Oakley’s voice quite distinctly, as if he were standing at my shoulder, saying, It’s OK, it’s just a matter of braving the blooming water. Get a move on, you daft bugger! And I started to wade down the slippery stairs, gripping the banister, knowing it wasn’t too late, knowing that if I was fast enough and brave enough, I could still save Ellis.

  I woke abruptly.

  And now I’m more sure than ever that Ellis isn’t done yet. He’s down there somewhere. I’ve just got to find a way in. Not impossible, after all. I’ve come across it enough myself: people pulled from the wreckage of a terrace reduced to carbonized nothingness, and all they’ve got is a raging thirst. One chap, gruff old codger we dragged back into the light in Islington, grabbed my hand and ran his tongue across his cracked lips. I thought he was about to thank me or ask about a relative, but he just coughed up the words: And what took you so bloody long?

  It’s not just the images in the dream, but the feeling of urgency. I’m sure he’s not lost yet. Or maybe my head’s just worse than I thought, and something fell into it through that crack in the skull and is busy making up stories, getting things muddled. (Too much imagination’s dangerous, boys, Father always told us. And we nodded, and then secretly let ours off the leash.)

  Greene and his wife have been so kind to us, but I have to go. Agatha’s asleep soundly now in the camp bed they’ve made up for her. Maybe I should leave her to this family’s resources and decency, at least for the rest of this night. I’m a mess right now. Her breathing is so calm again, her face relaxed and that photo propped next to her.

  I’ll let her recover here for a bit — didn’t like that exhaustion on her face when we were digging — and come back for her later tomorrow when I’ve satisfied myself about Ellis one way or the other. I’ll leave her a note — and an eyeball for Greene and his family on the dresser.

  And then I’ll go.

  Somewhere,

  on the other side of the world

  (probably),

  there’s a tree that no one has ever seen.

  I don’t know where it is.

  I don’t know what it’s like.

  It could be small; it could be mighty.

  It could even touch the sky.

  I don’t know; no one does.

  But,

  I do know this:

  its arms are laden with insects

  that are not yet named.

  Beneath its boughs stalk other beasts,

  who as yet have not been tamed.

  Around its trunk twine tendrils

  of plants of unknown green,

  and in the ground beneath its feet

  crawl creatures never seen.

  No one must know this tree;

  I hope they never do.

  It’s vital that there remains a place

  far from the reach of me, and you.

  Far

  from there

  lies London.

  Nineteen hundred and forty-four.

  Where,

  walking through the city,

  it’s easy to feel

  that the whole world is a ruin

  of rubble and twisted steel.

  A planet of desolation,

  of rolling dust and smoke,

  of poisonous air that cannot be breathed;

  even the sun is choked.

  And what is this destruction for?

  There has to be a why,

  there has to be a reason,

  to pull the sun out of the sky.

  I love mankind,

  I truly do.

  I think of all the things we’ve done that are beautiful and true.

  But then I think of other things,

  like guns and hand grenades,

  like armored tanks and rocket bombs,

  that the mind of man has made.

  And then it becomes hard to sing,

  much too hard to sing.

  So.

  What’s it for?

  What is all this destruction for?

  We’re making a new world,

  I heard someone say

  as I walked through Vauxhall the other day.

  In Dalston I saw someone shake their head

  and mutter,

  If this is life, I’d rather be dead.

  In Balham I saw two children run

  at the sound of a buzz bomb overhead;

  and when it was done they said not a word,

  for the simple reason that they were dead.

  From Clapham to Dresden,

  from Hamburg to Bow, I hear

  people ask, Why? I have to know!

  All of them with the same question as mine,

  and answers are so hard to find.

  For Justice! For Vengeance!

  Some even say Peace!

  But are these solutions?

  I cannot tell,

  and yesterday I heard this:

  — bomb them to Hell.

  Those were the words

  of a vicar in Hampstead.

  I did not dwell to hear more.

  I walked on.

  Trying to find a familiar song,

  trying to find a seed of
hope.

  And then I saw it

  and knew.

  I did not need a metaphor,

  for what I saw was this:

  a weed. Just a weed,

  pushing its way through piles of broken bricks,

  and then I knew

  that yes, perhaps,

  we are making a new world;

  and when we’re done,

  nature will make a gentler one.

  The light is returning and we’ve stopped for a rest after our trek through the rubble. I say “we” because Agatha — bless her! — is still with me.

  Trying to be as silent as possible, I’d got no farther than Greene’s front door when I must have made some kind of noise, and she opened her eyes and sat up, wide awake in a moment, and standing resolutely with me and taking my hand in the next. She looked me in the eye and said, I am coming with you. Harry. No arguing. It’s our fate.

  And here we are. We should accept the people fate brings into our lives and love them with all our heart, a wise man once said. So . . .

  I thought we’d go back to the far side of the bomb site, try and poke around in neighboring exposed cellars to see if I might work my way under the crater. But somehow — ridiculously — we’ve managed to lose our way and ended up in a real muddle, walking for ages. That’s the trouble after the big raids: everything is transformed, landmarks obliterated overnight. Add to that the partial blackout and Bob’s your uncle. We’re lost. What a way to start the year!

  I’ve never seen the streets so empty — even when the evacuations happened in ’39, or after the big raids of ’41. For an hour or two, Agatha and I didn’t see a soul. The fog thickened, thinned, then really thickened back into that old sheep’s wool again, and we were well and truly disorientated. I began to think I’d made a mistake leaving Greene’s warm and cozy house, and perhaps something got to A too, because, rounding a corner and seeing the mountains of rubble in front of us, the burnt-out brick and steel and wood, she reached out a hand looking for mine.

  It felt cold. I squeezed it back. Didn’t want to alarm her, but didn’t want to lose time now.