Will Page 4

  If I’d been born betimes I’d never have hung on, so she said. As it was I had only a week to do battle with the killer of Shakespeares.

  ‘Lucky Will.’

  You speak true. And so I won. But still she hated April.

  ‘An April baby. Look at you now.’

  An April corpse. Call for the shroud, the pick-axe and the spade, to take me back to the womb.

  ‘Here we go.’

  Look, here’s my mother, come to cradle me again. Fifty-two years, a blink ago, and I was born. She pushed me out from between her legs and into time, where the unstoppable clock started up, and the women wasted not a second.

  ‘A good example. Let’s follow it.’

  These were the certainties. Wash off the blood, the muddle and the mire, swaddle me well from the cold, show my father what he has done, and bring me quickly back to the breast that bulges for me already. Lay me there like a leech, my lips to the nipple. Butter and honey first, laid on my tongue, and later the jellied brains of the hare.

  ‘Ugh. Never fancied hare.’

  Jug jug. Don’t knock it. Something kept me going. Who’s to say it wasn’t hare’s brains?

  ‘Jellied down. Jesus. Can’t stand the texture.’

  On the Wednesday my father carried the fruit of his loins from Henley Street to the church, where they dipped me into the font water, gave me a name, and put a chrisom cloth on my head. If I’d died within the month it would have been my shroud.

  ‘Thrift, thrift.’

  Who said that? Horatio? Thrift’s the word, a quick and convenient step from baptism to burial. But it never happened. It was third time lucky for John and Mary. And for me, little William the Conqueror they called me. I had beaten the odds and would live to die at a later date.

  ‘For unto them a son was born.’

  You said it, a lucky son. Lucky I didn’t join my infant sisters, early conscripts in the ranks of death, under Holy Trinity’s damp grasses. Or those poor brothers of mine, now so dead. Lucky? Lucky I didn’t become a plague-bill number, cannon-fodder, chance casualty of some awful affray that sent brains and bones screaming to the sky and scarred the moon with splinters.

  ‘You always had a way of putting things, Will.’

  And my eyes, moist as they are, they might have been pearls by now, my bones to coral turned. Or I could have watched my tripes tumble bloodily through the Tyburn sky. Or a red hell scorch me to a Smithfield cinder.

  ‘Nice way to go.’

  There’s only one entrance to the great stage of fools, unless untimely ripped, but there are a thousand early exits. I avoided all of them. I escaped, opened hell’s trapdoor, and stepped out onto the London stage.

  ‘To become the foremost playwright of your time.’

  Known to queen and king, and known in the country too. A life well lived, you could say.

  ‘You could. Let’s wrap it up then, shall we?’

  And usher me into eternity? Pause there awhile, give me breathing space, some shriving time allowed, you fat bastard.

  ‘You starveling, you bull’s pizzle, you’ve put on weight yourself, though.’

  And lost it again. Don’t be in such a hurry to close the gate. Offer me my infancy at least.

  ‘Your infancy. What was it?’

  It was a wasp, dizzy with drink, banqueting to abandonment in the black mortuary juice of the September plum, where it throbbed and blundered. It was the cat-opened carcass of a pigeon – a silent murdered metropolis, roaring with maggots. It was the dried skeleton of the heretic spider, strung out on the wheel of its web, dead in the corner of my room for decades of dawns, a ghostly medieval martyr with the daylight showing through. It was the knots in the floorboards, charting the kingdoms of my childhood with their own special geography of fear, knots that ran along the beams like tigers, roaming the roofs and rafters, changing to cannibals, swarming down the walls and up the legs of the bed – the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.

  ‘That’s a fantastic start to life.’

  After that I remember the fields, turning over like the sea, like Uncle Henry and Aunt Margaret in their sleep, the Snitterfield sleep, and in the slow sleep of their lives, every day turning back to the earth they tilled, turning to dust – John Shakespeare’s and Mary Arden’s folk. How quickly and quietly they turned, though it seemed slow at the time, those fields of folk. And the folk themselves died without fuss, like beasts turning over in the fields. Only sometimes they turned like beasts on the spit, spitting and snarling in their juices, the red-faced fevered farmers of Snitterfield, roasting in their beds at nights, wallowing and swallowing and snorting, revolving over the snarling coals and the hissing logs, getting ready for hell. I could smell them cooking in their beds, baking in the ovens of an imminent eternity, filling the house with last supper whisperings.

  ‘Not short on imagination. Born with it, I suppose?’

  Everything seemed to be turning at that time – the Arden doves spinning in tight little circles as they died, headless and dizzy by the dozen. They whirled like dervishes, as if death were a dance. Then they took a bow and lay down, exhausted, their legs in the air. Not like the animals at the Rothermarket, down from our shop, where beasts struggled and slipped in the greasy shambles and the bluebottles went mad among the wet red yells, whizzing through the screaming and the stench. Death didn’t come easy at the slaughter-house.

  ‘You shouldn’t have looked. I’d have looked away.’

  It was my first experience of treachery. You give an animal a name, as if it were a sister, a brother, a Christian soul. You scratch its back and tickle its chin, babble your baby-talk to its silly snout, stick daisies and dogroses behind its ears. You feed it from your hand – and it comes running to the sound of your voice. It’s one of the family. Then comes the day of the great betrayal.

  And as the butcher takes away the calf, and binds the wretch and beats it when it strays, bearing it to the bloody slaughterhouse; and as the dam runs lowing up and down, looking the way her harmless young one went, and can do nought but wail her darling’s loss…

  ‘Whoa! Whoa!’

  Woe’s the word.

  And you see your father as you’ve never seen him before, stained with the purple butchery of his business, your loving father with his brandished steel, which smoked with bloody execution…

  ‘All right, all right, you’ve made your point.’

  It never left me, that farewell to infancy. And its emblem, one figure standing brutally above another, murder most foul. I see it in silhouette, and memory blurs the detail, but I know it’s my father, the two-footed one with arm raised high, with axe in hand, over the four-footed one, the victim. Down comes the blade – and no, not now, not never, not even if he wanted to, can the executioner leave off his hacking and slicing, not till he unseams him from gullet to groin, releasing the terrible torrent. It hits the floor, steaming, the high-pitched screaming dies away and the silence that follows fills your ears like blood.

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  O, horrible! O, horrible! Most horrible!

  ‘I said that.’

  My father, methinks I see my father.

  ‘Let’s change the subject.’

  Even to this day I avoid Rother Street if I can. Or I find myself unawares, creeping past the shambles and starting like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons, just like I did when I was a boy.

  ‘Buttoned it up, did you?’

  If you want to know where my player’s days really began, it was right there in the Rothermarket. I’d entered the theatre of blood, and the only defence was to whip on the visor, stop up the access and passage to remorse. False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

  ‘Your own special room in hell, eh?’

  Reserved for me alone. No-one else seemed to mind.

  ‘Young Will. Well, well, well.’

  As to the fireside fears, they were different, ensnaring the mind, not the senses, the stories told
by the wind to the chimney when the storms over Snitterfield made the flames burn blue. Henry said it was just weather in the grate, that cold blue firelight. But Asbies Agnes said it was ghosts, come to populate your hearth and dreams.

  ‘And give you a good night’s sleep.’

  Aye, revenants from a darkness almost unimaginable. Almost. But she made me imagine it, all the same. The spectres slipped like shadows from their graves, where the worm forked and fretted, and they swarmed across the sleeping town, just like the million eels Henry said he once saw migrating by moonlight across the fields, downhill all the way, down on Stratford, an eerie exodus.

  ‘They was ghosts,’ Agnes shrieked, ‘they was spirits, you old disbeliever – they was white ladies!’

  ‘I know a fucking lady when I sees one,’ roared old Henry. ‘They was fucking eels! And a million too, just like I said. I stood and counted them, I did. Every fucking one!’

  Eels or spirits – it made no difference to the spirits that the darkness now unleashed upon Stratford, making straight for my bedchamber. I saw the wraiths, made white by the moon, sliding like fog against the closed shutters and gnashing whatever they had for teeth in their frustrated rage and envy of the fireside sitters and snug sleepers – while they, the souls of the dead, had no beds to return to but cold clay, no halls but the wet echoings of the eternity they inhabited, no amber-chaired companions of the chimneyside – only the slimy probing worm. And so they’d slither up the whispering eaves, over the anxious prickling thatch (just birds and rats in the roof, Henry said, but Agnes knew better), and so down the chimney, still shivering, to make the flames change colour, the stones of the grate go violent blue, and the lamps round the kitchen shrink and quiver like frightened hares. I sat there too, twitching and trembling, listening to the oldest terrors of the earth.

  ‘Fucking bad weather coming, that’s all,’ growled Henry, ‘storm in the chimbley. Severn Jacks coming up from Wales. Always from the south-west, those fucking clouds, and always bringing rain.’

  But I didn’t believe him. Agnes had spitted me on her tongue.

  ‘The hour of the phantom. Never went there myself. Don’t go there now. An evil hour.’ Francis was giving me his reproachful look.

  When spooks troop home from churchyards and ghosts break up their graves, moaning in the icy winds, scrabbling to be let in out of the streaming rain.

  ‘History’s full of ghosts.’

  We didn’t have classical ghosts in Stratford – not the text-book types from Julius Caesar’s time, when graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. These were schoolboy ghosts and appeared later. My childhood ghosts, country shadows, came out of the arms and hands and fingers of the trees, they came drifting out of the marshes and sweating out of clammy gravestones, out of damp flagged parlour floors. They coiled up round your knees and ankles like cats, hissing and sidling, and were sucked up into your nostrils to enter your blood and take hold of your soul. Old Agnes ladled them into me with broth and brew.

  ‘Everybody’s ideal aunt.’

  The archetypal granny, crammed with comforts. She’d seen fairies in foxgloves, she’d seen Queen Mab and had been Mabled herself, all the way to madness, and had met the man in the moon, come down with his lantern and his dog and his bundle of thorns. She’d seen devils too, she said, as well as ghosts, seen them in fields and forests – now as toads, sometimes as snakes. The wingpath of the crow to the rooky wood, the shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums, the bat’s cloistered passage through the thickening light – they took on a thousand different disguises. They even grew up out of the ground, materialising as mushrooms, delectable to the eye, but they turned men mad if they ate them, made them want to tear up trees and topple castles down. This was the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.

  ‘She’d been around.’

  And if you were a girl and stepped by accident into a ring of these demonic toadstools, they ripped themselves out of the forest floor, screaming like mandrakes, and whirled about you till you fell mesmerised among the ferns. Then they had you at their mercy and came roaring up your skirt for fun and fury – mob-raped by phallic fungi you were, but you never fell pregnant, not unless you told. After which you swelled up all in one day and went on swelling till you burst and died.

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  And if you were a boy and ate one of them by mistake you’d wake up that night and find your willie turned into a toadstool.

  ‘Holy Thomas!’

  Then goats would come and find you and nibble it down to the root, and they’d go mad in the moon with pure lust, and roam the countryside looking for upland virgins to deflower – and for staid old wives, to make them flower again, good country rides that they once were, leaving their stunned spouses – sexless since seventy – foundered in their beds, de-masted and derelict like wrecked men-o’-war.

  ‘Fancy filling your noodle with all that!’

  That was how Agnes ran it. Uncle Henry told me a different story.

  ‘Listen, Will,’ he said, ‘Agnes Arden brought old Arden’s grey hairs down to the grave before his time – but not with sorrow, as the scriptures say, O noni fucking no, but many a time and oft on that good old truckle-bed of theirs. Never stayed at anchor long, that bed, bucking like a brig on the Bay of Fucking Biscay-O! – where O! was the only word. Oh yes, she quickened his end all right. No bugger can have his end away at that rate and hope to see out his three score years and ten. For the life of a wick depends on the dipping, don’t it? And as scripture also tells us, there’s a time to fuck and a time to refrain from fucking – and Agnes Arden needed a fucking clock!’

  ‘A ninety-year-old itching for it!’

  ‘As for her stories, pay no fucking attention to them, young Will, because I’m telling you straight, now that her well’s dried up, she tickles herself by getting a young lad’s fancy going with forest fairy stories, love-juice of flowers and all that crap, when all the world knows what kind of juice she ran on in her day, that’s run out now. Shut your ears, my lad, or she’ll pour her spirits in and charm you with her tongue. And fuck knows where that’s been!’

  ‘What a woman! What a man!’ Francis as tickled as I was.

  Crude old bastard, was Henry, and full of vigour and prickly common sense. But it was hard to banish old Agnes’s demons. I could hear them booming like bitterns in the darkness of the far-off foggy fens. I could see them falling as rain. They hissed at my shutters on cloudburst days and stormy nights and I shut my eyes tight in my terror. I couldn’t shut them out. She told me about witchcraft too, and long before I read Reginald Scot and Royal Jamie, long before I could even read, I was a graduate and an authority, petrified by my own knowledge. Agnes cracked it open for me, the secret hive, broke the earth’s crust, and I saw straight into the sombre comb of horrors, hell’s black honey, hot and ripe for mischief.

  ‘Do I look like I want a lesson on witches, Will? Do my lips say so?’

  They’re purple with my wine. Pour me another glass, you gormandiser.

  ‘And let’s drown Agnes in it, I beg you.’

  She taught me all the steps of the Satanic ball, from the first pact with the Dark Master to the last handful of ashes scattered to the four winds: the ghastly gatherings on blasted heaths when the west bled like a black pig and the wolfish wind came prowling over the Welcombe hill in thunder, lightning, and in rain. Crops rotted in the flood, cattle toppled and died, women’s breasts gave gall, the milk of human kindness curdled, and the infant sickened and stiffened in the crib. A man’s member melted between his legs, and as he lay supine beside his sleeping spouse the succubus slid in from the fog and filthy air, hovered over him, lingering on the ceiling. Waking him into stiffness. Descending wide-legged and purple with love’s wound onto his unlawful erection – and the night was stabbed by the surrendering sperm, sucked up and shot out into that thing of darkness. Which flew off then, metamorphosed into male. Over the rooftops and dow
n the chambered chimneys. To find out some sleeping female, a virgin or a nun, to thrust into her with a will, to complete the deep deed of diabolical cross-fertilisation, while bees and birds slept out their innocent sleep and the foul and ugly night limped tediously away.

  ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ Francis suiting the action to the word, melodramatic. Wine turned even this lawyer theatrical.

  You might have made an actor, Francis.

  ‘A small part, perhaps.’

  For a large man.

  ‘Well, goodnight to demons, and good morning, Stratford!’

  Ah, but not until a world of horrors had been consummated before dawn: pig-killing, shipwrecking storms, direful thunders, drugs and drunkenness, fucking the devil, fucking the dead, tucking into the exhumed flesh of unbaptised infants, concoctions gathered by the midnight moon, stewed into brews that would make even hell’s bones burn and tremble.

  ‘Mine ache to think on’t. Anything more?’

  A filthy whore heaved in a ditch, open-legged, and strangled the infant even as it slipped from her belly. A sow gorged on its litter of nine, chopping and crunching, till every one was back inside her, bloodily. A murderer swung on the gibbet and the fat was melted from his bones by the same greasy finger that cut the liver from a Jew and sifted the stomach contents of a shark – plucked from the ocean by what terrible force? Slice the lips from a Tartar, tear out a tiger’s entrails, snort a root of hemlock, cool it with a baboon’s blood – and your dream is sealed.

  ‘Some dream.’

  Wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep, witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder, alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf, whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, with Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design moves like a ghost.

  ‘Sounds like a good night.’

  There was always worse to follow.

  ‘Jesus, what could be worse?’

  That’s what I asked.

  ‘And what was the answer?’

  And what was it? – I asked Agnes – too terrified to know, yet having to.