Will Read online

  ‘You can’t put that in a will.’

  Why not – if it’s my will? Go on, note it down.

  ‘Let’s ask for a bit of bacon for lunch.’

  Stop changing the subject. Write it down, what I asked you. I’m never to be disinterred.

  ‘All right, but that’s a separate arrangement. It has no part in the will.’

  Then we’d better discuss the separate arrangement.

  ‘Later. Let’s get the will done first. We’ve a long way to go. You shouldn’t have got onto all that scary stuff.’

  Oh, it was just something else to give me the shits when the storms over Stratford made the flames burn blue and ghosts were sticky as Snitterfield snot on a frosty morning. Tangible, as a whore’s tail, those stinking spooks, old Agnes swore. You could smell them, taste them, coming up out of the ground like worms from their beds in all weathers, the dead of Warwickshire that refused to lie down but burst their cerements like Lazarus –

  ‘Not him again!’

  And came at me and kept on coming and wouldn’t let me be, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous.

  ‘Lie down? It’s you that won’t let the poor buggers sleep!’

  Not that they’d open a chink a whisper wide to reveal an inkling of their immortality. Of what went on in the dark. Stones have been known to move and trees to speak, but the spirits of Stratford kept the secrets of the next world, the merest whiff of which, Agnes said, would freeze thy young blood – the old bird’s very words – make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine. Lazarus kept his mouth shut.

  ‘So they kept their mouths shut.’

  So the occulted secrets of eternity stayed unkennelled. Not one word. Not even from my father, decades later, after his death, when I dreamt about him, dreaming I was a boy again, and he came to me in sleep – a spirit or a dream? – and for a second lifted up his head, as if he would speak, whisper a secret to me in the dark.

  ‘Only a dream, I’d say.’

  It was a figure like my father. These hands are not more like. But even then the morning cock crew loud and at the sound it shrunk in haste away and vanished from my sight.

  ‘An apparition?’

  Who knows? It faded on the crowing of the cock. Agnes said that on Christmas Eve the cock crows all night long. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘no spirit can walk abroad, the nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, no fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, so hallowed and so gracious is the time.’

  ‘Will, you’re on another planet yourself. Come out of it, do you hear me?’

  Do ghosts feel the cold, granny?

  ‘Go to sleep, Will.’

  6

  Sleep? I’ll sleep soon enough. And long enough.

  But sometimes it was impossible to sleep in those days, for sheer fear and cold, when ghosts whooed me out of bed in the long nights and I had to run outside in the dark to see to the needs of nature. Picture me if you will, sweet Francis, should you feel sufficiently cruel –

  ‘No problem.’

  Snivelling in the winter shithouse up at Snitterfield at night, when there wasn’t the sliver of a moon to light up my solitary stooling.

  ‘Ooh, don’t make me shiver!’

  And the icicles glittered wickedly in the starlight, hanging from the privy roof.

  ‘Good grief!’

  Night after night they’d lengthened in the fast frosts and I had to duck under them in the end to get to the thunderbox, where I sat and shat at glacier speed, picturing the daggers getting longer by the turd, imprisoning me like a portcullis before I’d done.

  ‘Castle Crap. Jesus.’

  Spring would come around the corner like a green turnkey, blowing on the icicles with the breath of the bull, dissolving the freezing bars – but only my skeleton would be found in there, straddling the shithole, and the surprised flies would buzz out through the cage of bones like black sparks from a cold hell.

  ‘The curse of fancy, Will. Why didn’t you just finish your crap!’

  Not all craps were as bad as that, though winter shits were dire.

  ‘Suppose we change the subject.’

  Let me take you briefly through what I would class as a good one, notwithstanding winter.

  ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’

  You are.

  ‘Posterity at least will be spared – unless you want your craps itemized!’

  A dim dawn over Snitterfield, an angry smudge of blood on the skyline, the stars still crackling in the sky, and me shivering on the throne, hidden behind the portcullis as usual, watching those icy teeth, catching the stars, the glint of day. A poetic moment, my masters.

  ‘Nothing so poetic as a privy.’

  Anyway I don’t have the chance to commune with nature. Just as I screw up my eyes and draw in my clouded breath for the big one, there’s a loud hurly-burly and a certain scene takes place, of a low bucolic nature.

  ‘Which you will now describe.’

  The screams that shattered the sanctity of the privy council and ruined my concentration issued from the right hefty lungs of no less a lass than Marian the milkmaid. Who was being chased as usual by Dick the shepherd, the randiest bastard in Snitterfield. She to her milch kine and he to his sheep each morning, but their beasts sometimes had to wait until the beast with two backs had been seen to first. Not this morning, though, it was too ball-freezing for bull-work, and they settled instead for this wild Arcadian cavort. Dick caught up with Marian right at the shithouse door, snapped off one of my prison bars – which made me blink but improved my view – and grabbing her round the waist, thrust the glittering icicle all the way up her skirt.

  Scream? I doubt if a higher note were ever sounded on this planet, nor emitted even by the spheres. Or their driving angels.

  ‘There you are, stick that one in your oven – and that’ll be quicker than a sea-coal fire for a nice hot brew!’

  Marian screamed again and jabbed at his groin with her knee.

  ‘I’ll melt you down in a minute, you fucker!’

  But Dick had parried many a pass of that sort and took advantage of her one leg to tip her off balance and send her flying backward among last month’s frozen leaves. Her skirt flew up, her legs spread wide and I caught my first ever sight of pussy. Scarcely an ideal or expected setting for this gratuitous glimpse of the gates of life, but young as I was, my prick tingled. And there was something else: I felt my whole will plume up, felt godlike, sat there like the Ancient of Days, unseen by Adam and Eve, and the man about to know the woman. A far cry from the voice in the garden taking the cool of the day. But I, Will Shakespeare, was their Lord God and I knew her already, better than Dick, because she didn’t know that I’d seen her, seen that crushed fruit between her thighs, and that I’d hold it there forever, the apple of my eye, for memory’s the warder of the brain, you know. Even now it thrills me, like the first shiver of the morning air, like a whore’s hand clutching your balls.

  Dick, following his name and nature, opted to go all the way after all. He threw himself on Marian, baring his backside, despite December, but she flapped her skirt back down and stabbed at his groin with the icicle.

  ‘Fuck off, Prickdick! Come any closer and I’ll trim your yard to a fucking inch! I’ll give you a crook to shag your sheep with!’

  Her laughter rose shivering to the stars and she ran off, glowing with the sunrise and her youth. I blew on my numb knees and rose stiffly into the stars. My prick was on fire with the frost and my balls were bound in brass for Marian alone. I stretched. Snitterfield was waking to its work, the same and only work it had known since the world began.

  ‘Is that the end of that scene, Will?’

  Yes.

  ‘Pity. I was enjoying that.’

  There’s more background though.

  ‘Very good. But warm it up.’

 
Ah, but it was a cold cold world in winter, cold enough to put out the fires of the robins, though their upturned breasts still embered in the snow, the last tired braziers of the year. Kettles froze overnight by the hearths, where the ash was turned to snow by morning. Cattle died on all fours, stopped dead in their tracks and traces, even the strongest – stalwart bulls gorgonized by winter. Fish were stilled in the iron streams, fish that glittered like Greek stars, ice-eyed, frozen in their courses. Huge oaks split with the overnight frost that was fleeter than lightning on its lethal feet – you could hear them going off, bursting like bombs in the night, echoing over the white tight rooftops, and the owl’s inscrutable stare went wider in the moon.

  A tough world, my masters.

  But always it throbbed with life. I sat in the arctic chill, my lips two frozen roses, glued to my knees, my ears bitten to buggery. The frost shot up my behind like white fire and a brace of Russian gun-stones graced my groin. Even so it was a turning time for me. A time when the balls buzzed like a saw and the blood danced and sang, answering the angels. I had known Marian the milkmaid, known her like a god, better than Dick the shepherd, this bumpkin, this mere mortal, this man of mud. I had carnal knowledge of her. From the cool of the privy I, the Lord God, secret as a serpent, invisible as a voice, had known her through the keyhole. I had tingled to a billion tendrils, the universe reaching out to my tongue. And my tongue took root and sang. And the stars sang too.

  ‘What was it they sang now?’

  When icicles hang by the wall…

  A fine song, a fair song, an old song of winter. I heard it in the breeze that blows from childhood. A song of icicles and logs and bitter winds. You know how it goes. The birds are pissed off, your feet and fingers frozen stiff, your robin reduced to a blue acorn, your nose is red raw, you’re up to your knees in snow and sludge, can’t hear a word the parson says for every other bugger coughing down the kirk. But there was a certain merriness in winter, outside the usual clutch of churchyard coughs and sudden graves. We kept red with labour and laughter, splitting our sides, splitting logs, hedging and ditching and dodging Uncle Henry. The hot poker sizzled in the jug of ale, Dick’s sizzled in Marian and was dowsed – once too often – and by the time Plough Monday came in early January she hallooed his name to the reverberate hills, poor bugger, and the fields and forests rang with proclamations that Dick had done his ploughing early that year and for what wages – well, that would show soon enough. The wages of sin is death – and there’s no death so hard as an unexpected marriage and a bellyful of bitter fruit. But that’s the way the land lay. He’d tilled her and she’d cropped.

  And a merry enough mating for a winter month that one was – followed by the sickly time, when Marian puked up with the lark and nightly pissed with the staring owl, and Dick’s wick went down and burned as low as the sun’s. But by Lady Day the sun had recovered from his winter sickness and everybody came out of doors to wish him well again. The men sowed their fields and the women their gardens, putting in lettuces and radishes, cucumbers and mustard, spinach, rosemary, sage and thyme, eyebright, bloodwort, liverwort, lavender – and loads of lovage too. It was the time of year when ladysmocks silvered the meadows and virgins’ smocks lay bleached in the summer field. Marian bleached hers too – to brighten her ripening belly and to bewail her long forgotten virginity, if she’d ever had a virginity, who knows. And Dick, fast married, heard the cuckoo call for the first time with a difference. Cuckoo, cuckoo. O, word of fear. Unpleasing to a married ear.

  Unpleasing to a prickdick perhaps. But nothing could compare with the pleasure of that first spring day when the starved cattle tasted the young grass. Or when the sheep took their first green mouthful of May. Summer’s lease, my friend, hath all too short a date. Soon they went shorn and shivering into rainy July. Hay-making, harvest, the world a whirl of wheat and barley, and suddenly the cattle were dunging the stubble again and the butcher grinding his blade. Michaelmas gales stripped the acorns from the trees by quarterday, bringing the hogs gruntling round the trunks while we gathered in the berries.

  So we yoked ourselves to the light, following it all the year round. We were the oxen of the sun. And I formed fellowships with flowers: daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty; violets dim but sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses that die unmarried ere they can behold bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady most incident to maids; bold oxlips and the crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, the flower-de-luce being one; hot lavender, mints, marjoram, the marigold that goes to bed with the sun and with him rises weeping – I remember them all, remember them well, better than the sunless times, the flowerless times, when the gilded puddle lay on the land. That was the grisly time, the Martinmas, when the beasts were slaughtered for salting down and that old screaming and slithering started up all over again. Even the barrels of meat refused to keep quiet. They were packed hard with agony, a compression of sounds and struggles that never go away. No escape, no escape from the life of the land – you’d have to be invisible.

  I tried it once. I was crying that day, I remember, sitting snivelling in the Snitterfield shithouse, don’t ask me why, two days after Christmas it was, with the door shut fast on my bad temper, when uncle Henry put his eye to the chink and told me about the fernseed, to try to bring me out of my dumps.

  ‘Can’t see me, can you, young Will? But I can see you sitting there. How’d you like to have that power, then, eh? You can have it too if you search far and hard enough, today being St John’s Day. If you can find fernseed today, you’ll take on its powers and become invisible, you mark my words, lad, you’ll see the whole world and stay unseen yourself, you’ll be so secret you’ll be able to hear folk think.

  So I came out of the shithouse and combed the frozen fields and forest flowers that day, sifting the snowdust with fingers that were flakes of fire and thumbs as numb as thunder, blue as devils they were, searching for green seeds under all that woven snow. Well done, old Henry – he got me out of the shitter, all right, and out of the house all day. And I stumbled home and fell asleep at once, and woke up not invisible but feeling a lot better, and wondering if you ever could be so invisible – able to hear men’s thoughts, without them hearing you. No, you couldn’t.

  Or could you? Once I did achieve invisibility – of a kind. I was coming from the well one morning, earlier than anyone. A Snitterfield summer it was, the one that rounded Marian’s belly, and only the blue larksong breaking the silence. That was the morning she came to wash herself, moving sleepily, as if in a pleasant dream, yawning and stretching, one hand rubbing her eyes, the other rumpling my hair as she passed me on her way to the water – ‘Morning, young Will’ – pulling off her smock as she went by, throwing it aside like a swimmer shaking off a wave. I turned and stared, taking in the naked Marian from the back as she bent over the well. The bucket came up with a clatter and a thump and she threw the water over her shoulders in a bright shawl of music. The droplets splashed my face and rang in my ears and I licked them up, each note sanctified by contact with the suddenly mysterious Marian. I’d never seen her like this before, never seen anyone so naked, and so I came round to the other side of the well for a frontal view. Marian saw only a child, little Will Shakespeare, not yet at school, not till after summer, the immunity of infancy sitting on me like a mantle, and she never minded me for a moment. ‘What’s the matter, young Will, never seen pussy at the well till now?’ Silvery laugh, like the larks. And she took my hand and placed it pat on her belly, taut as a pod. I stood no higher than her waist, and placing both hands now on the big globe of her belly, I peered hard into her navel. More larksong.

  ‘Ah, see something I can’t, can you? Little friend for you coming out of there soon. Not out of that hole, though – lower down, where you mustn’t look, you little bugger, not for another ten years. Oh yes, you can look up here, though, bless your little balls!’

  I, the Lord God,
beheld the two planets that hung in space above me. Her face and neck had caught all the sun that shone in Warwickshire that summer, her arms too, freckled and golden brown, but her breasts were blinding white worlds, as white as morning milk, and the shocked nipples stood up among the cold waterdrops like raspberries in the rain. I reached up with my two hands and she bent to let me feel their weight.

  ‘Like them, do you, little bugger? Well, that’s what your friend Dick’s gone and done to me – filled me up with milk, just like my dairies, bloody bull among cows. And who’s going to milk me then, eh Will? Off with you anyways, it’s time for work.’

  And she threw her smock over her, shrouding the moons, the huge Jupiter of her belly, the black burning bush between her thighs. She left me full of fernseed. I had known her all over. I, Will Shakespeare, was once again the Lord God of Snitterfield. And Marian was the fairest of the creation, with her great gravid belly filling the sky over my head and her cratered moon-tits dancing attendance. For weeks afterwards I walked around in a dream, not seeing what was in front of me, bumping into walls, breaking my head, stubbing my toes, stumbling into pot-holes and ruts, till everybody thought I was going blind. I wasn’t, I was drifting through the geography of Marian’s unclothed globes, the only Eden, and I its only god. And all I could hear was that line of hers, ‘Never seen pussy at the well before?’ The thrill of it filled my ears for reasons unknown. I heard nothing else. Apparently I was going deaf as well. At nights she descended on me from the ceiling. Belly first like a setting moon, the succubus of Snitterfield. She was still there at dawn, perched on my prick, taking advantage of my early erections. They couldn’t get her off me, couldn’t get me out of bed. Now I was a cripple too.

  It didn’t last. By the autumn I was in school and being beaten back into worldly awareness – and Marian’s belly had gone down. Out of it had come a pink bawling blob that turned Dick’s prick to a shithouse icicle and Marian’s temper to sour milk. When I asked her one morning if I could see pussy at the well again, she made my ear sing a different song. The Snitterfield idyll was over. But while it lasted maid Marian was the wonder of the world.