Jackdaw, page 3
I command time to move backwards.
I command it to be 1953 so I can talk to this slippery motherfucker myself.
I fell asleep before I could determine if spacetime had obeyed my command, and by the time I woke up I was in my own day and age.
Pity.
4
I had been staring at the Bacon books for hours. Morning light streamed in with improbable cheer. I looked out of the attic’s skylight and saw the world as wet, layered not with dew, but the shower that fell just before dawn. The leaves on the trees, the sheds in the allotment, the asphalt, they all looked new, full of promise.
My pen poised over my notebook; my mind barren.
Not entirely true. My mind was fertile with dozens of other projects which I scribbled down ferociously. Not that I didn’t want them, I just didn’t want them then.
Frustrated, I pushed away from my desk. I decided to approach in the oblique, not at Bacon, but at his inspiration. I had Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion on my shelf, and I knew it was on Bacon’s radar. I opened a random page, and it turned out on Plate 57: Men Boxing.
The young men in the photos weren’t truly fighting, and they had open palms; a staged slap-fight, really. Twelve photos. Blocking, slipping, weaving, ducking.
This was much better. Violence was something I knew intimately: the sexual kind; the random, unexpected kind; the disciplined, martial variety, and everything in between.
I come from violence.
We arrive at the matter of my mother.
The fact is, I was an unwanted child. I had to prove my worth over time, but in proving it, realised that I shouldn’t have to.
My parents’ marriage was a sham, based on false pretences from the very start. My mother only pretended to love my father. She needed him to transport her from Nigeria to London where her true love lived. Her plan was to seduce this rich dude, my dad, that is, follow him to London, then disappear into the loving arms of her beau. Which she did, but without counting on my father’s tenacity. He found her and, according to him, dragged her back to the marital home five times.
That fifth time, though. Yeah, that was the beginning of my psychological life.
My mother and her lover had called it quits and she had moved into a shelter or some kind of home. My father went there, coaxed her out because men were not allowed, and raped her in the back of a truck. This was in full view of the Wimbledon public. People came to help and apparently he kept shouting, ‘She’s my wife! She’s my wife!’ or whatever the fuck.
Reader, that’s where I came into the picture. From this sexual assault, this rape, I was conceived.
Pregnant, my mother returned to my father’s house, which began a tumultuous nine months, during which my father was physically and emotionally abusive. Police were involved on at least one occasion – I’ve seen the report. One time, when she was about seven months along, my mother was found unconscious in a pool of blood.
Are you disgusted yet?
As soon as I was born, my mother hated my fucking face because I looked like my father. I mean, I don’t blame her for this given the horrific time she had, but I didn’t do anything to deserve being the object of her hatred.
Not a great start to life, you have to admit.
Plus, stress hormones from the mother definitely affect the baby.
Plus, I’m guessing each time my mother looked at me she had a flashback to rape and physical violence.
The first violence I experienced outside television and outside the womb was from my stepfather. The TV part is important because as a child I never really thought violence was real, that killing was real. And when I thought it might be real, I didn’t know whether it hurt and if it did hurt, how much. I’d seen people in films punch other people to unconsciousness with one blow and no blood, so, naturally, I thought if you swung your fist at someone, they would fall asleep. I was a weird, quiet kid. I hadn’t got into any playground fights by then.
Up until that time my stepfather George had been blustery, yelling and the like, and maybe he had scuffed me once or twice, but nothing that I remember. One day, when I was nine, I crossed the living room. He was on the sofa watching television, drinking a beer, a lit cigarette unspooling a line of blue smoke to the ceiling where a lazy fan dispersed it.
As I passed him, his leg lashed out like a striking scorpion, hitting me in the flank and hurling me across the room. Only the screen doors stopped me from rolling out to the balcony. If you’ve ever been hit in the gut you know it’s a different kind of pain from everywhere else. It spreads everywhere in an instant. Later, in medical school, I found out this is due to the tangle of nerves called the coeliac plexus. The abdomen has an apron of fat called the omentum, and fat is liquid at body temperature. Liquid transmits force uniformly in a sealed container, called Pascal’s Law, the basis of hydraulics. The abdomen is a sealed container. You hit someone in the gut, the force is transmitted rapidly and equally to the coeliac plexus. If the strike is forceful enough, the diaphragm is pushed upwards, and you’re out of breath.
Oh, and the coeliac plexus is what is commonly and mistakenly called the solar plexus. Alas, pulp writers, there is no solar plexus.
I didn’t know any of this when I was nine. I just knew I’d been shoved like a tenpin and was in pain like I had never known. The surprise of the unexpected was almost as bad as the pain, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was his face.
When you hit a child, he tries to understand the reason, what he’s done wrong, where the mistake was, what to avoid next time.
George was blank, no emotion, no yelling, no anger, no drunkenness, just… smooth features. I can’t even say he was looking at me at all. For a moment, and for some days after, I even wondered if I had imagined the whole thing. This uncertainty only lasted until he did it again.
This changed my life. My house became an obstacle course where I had to avoid George at all costs. I spent a lot of time outside, and when I was home I tried to be in the company of other people because the dude only hit me when I was alone. But, like I said, I was a strange boy and nobody wanted to hang out with me. I also enjoyed being alone so seeking others went against my natural inclination.
It went on. I did not bruise. I’m black, and he was smart enough to hit me where it wouldn’t show even if it could. You’re wondering where my mother was. Let’s just say she and I didn’t have the kind of relationship where I could open up to her. When I did tell her, years later, she did not believe me, or chose to say she didn’t.
I found indirect ways of telling. I said I had a belly ache and chest pains, which were true sensations. I just didn’t say where they were coming from. I had ultrasounds and x-rays and trips to the doctor, none of which revealed anything. I had hoped something would show up and the doctor would say, ‘This boy is being beaten up. Stop immediately!’ but that never happened.
Obviously, I had to run away.
The first time I had no real plan except to leave. I slipped out at four pm and started walking. It seemed like hours, but it always does to children. Left my street, my area, into some woods. As I walked through the trees it started to get dark and I was too scared to go back the way I came in case it took too long, and forward because I didn’t know how much longer it would be before I got out.
Well. Stupid. There was no end. I mean, yes, there was, but not an end that a nine-year-old boy could reach on foot. Exhausted, I found a patch of grass and lay down, curled up in the same way I did when George beat me. Cold and wet, living things crawled underneath me so I kept moving. The tiredness must have taken me, because I woke up with people standing over me.
They took me home. My cover story was that I got lost, which was true in a way. I got lost while running away.
The second time I ran away was a year later. At ten I was all grown up and wiser. I took supplies this time, for example. I also scouted the route by skipping school a few times. I realised that the best way to do this would be to pretend to go to school, change clothes, get my stash of food, and keep going. I could make good time before they even realised I was gone. I had not a single mitigating thought, no reason to stay. My mother… yes, maybe, we’ll get to her later.
My plan was to go by the railyard and sleep in a large concrete pipe, then set off again. I did get to the pipe, but my supplies were gone. Some homeless person must have found them, I don’t know. I contemplated just going on the lam, like an outlaw, hunted by the forces of child abuse, but I was tired. I went home late and I got a kicking.
Since the beatings continued, and I didn’t see how I could run away, logic dictated that I would kill myself. I fantasised about stabbing myself in the gut and being found bleeding to death. It was important that they found me alive, not going cold. I wanted to see the looks on their faces when they realised what they had done to me. Which is weird logic, but don’t fucking beat your children and you won’t have to face it. In fact, don’t have children, you wankers. Work out your aggression on a punching bag.
I say that, but what I’m hiding is that my father, my biological father, was also violent. My mother had a thing for abusive, controlling men, I guess.
I never actually attempted to kill myself. I did flirt with a knife one afternoon, but never followed through. Later, when I was an adult and life became too interesting, I acquired some insulin and a syringe with the intention of putting myself into a fatal coma if nothing worked out. I kept that in the fridge all the time until the day Elise found it and, being the common-sense person she was, threw it out.
5
None of my usual literary tricks worked.
Elise saw that the project was driving me to distraction and said, ‘You are mistaken. Francis Bacon is not the assignment. You don’t need to learn the soul of the man if you’re not writing his biography.’
She wasn’t wrong. I found Bacon as silent now as when I started. He was unknowable, his mysteries eluding me more and more as my research intensified.
I wrote a trashy vampire story to loosen up the words. It only loosened vampire words. I sedated myself to avoid Henrietta and slept like a dead man. In the morning I had an idea, not the literary kind, but the type to shine the light of optimism on endeavours. Everything would be all right.
I took a train to Brixton.
A colleague of mine once got a flat a few yards from Brixton tube station; this was in the late 90s. She was mugged twice on the same night on her way home. She never returned. I was mugged when I was twelve or thirteen, although it was without violence. In the same area my younger brother was set upon by four muggers and had to spend time in hospital after being robbed. He fought back, too stupid to surrender. In the face of unfavourable odds, as Sun Tzu never wrote, get the fuck out of there.
But those are the worst experiences. I’d still rather live there or Stockwell, all a mile from where I was born, and South London is the only place I truly feel at home. What can I tell you? First kisses mean something.
Out of the train and I started to feel energised; hometown invigoration. I started to have flashbacks of loud jungle and drum and bass, just walking by old record shops. I aimed myself at Brixton Market, a place where you can buy everything. I wasn’t buying, well, I wasn’t buying commodities. I was in the market for a service.
Just before I turned into the aisle I wanted, I got sudden gooseflesh, like the International Space Station had passed over my birth spot.
Dotun was there, selling knock-off DVDs. Not Blu-ray, DVDs. He specialised in mindless action flicks on the face of it, but his under-the-counter stuff was DVD rips from streaming porn sites (not now, Henrietta). Yes, there were a lot of older folk who did not stream their porn, and Dotun supplied them all.
But that wasn’t why I was there.
‘Oh, boy, wey you, na?’ I said.
‘Doktor Tade! Which ones?’
We shook hands and hugged.
‘What can I do for you, sir? Why are you in my office?’
I hummed a few bars of a song.
Dotun looked at his watch. ‘Give me ten minutes.’ Which in Nigeriaspeak means an hour.
While waiting I browsed a second-hand bookshop that had a narrow frontage, but seemed excavated deep inside like those places in Amsterdam. I remembered a girlfriend of mine lived close by, and I had a flashback to neuron-ripping sex and arguments about Proust. I could not remember her face. Brief encounters.
The song I hummed to Dotun was ‘Babalawo mo wa Bebe’, which, loosely, means ‘I need your help, priest’.
I better give you a crash course on Yoruba cosmology before we get to the next bit.
There’s heaven and there’s Earth, but no hell. God is in heaven, and he sent a whole bunch of supernatural folks to Earth. One of those is Orunmila, his son and the god of order; another is Eshu, god of chaos. Ifa divination gets input from both. Babalawo are the ones who perform the divination.
Dotun is a babalawo.
Now you are an expert.
Later, in his flat, his narrow and dilapidated place, he produced a flat dish and uncorked a bottle. He poured sea sand into the dish.
He looked up. ‘Who do you want to enquire about?’
‘Francis,’ I said.
‘Mother’s name?’
‘Christina. Winnie.’
‘Which is it?’
‘Winnie.’
Dotun’s forehead creased.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said, fearful that he’d discovered Henrietta.
‘He’s white?’
‘Yes.’
Dotun sucked his teeth, chiding me. ‘Go out and get me sand. This sand is from Lagos. Get some sand from this land, where white blood has been shed.’
I used to own a flat in Potters Bar. I liked it, although I was never able to convince any woman to come live there with me. After I sold it, I kept dreaming of owning it. I still do. The dreams vary, but the universal theme is of me forgetting that I live there or ought to be living there or ought to visit. In the dream I usually take a desperate trip to the property and find squatters or tenants or encroachments by people who just seem weird, but my flat would be empty, no furnishings, no drapes, no nothing. I have this dream every few months, like an anxiety dream.
I had it on the train on the way to Brixton, but in dreamworld the building had just been demolished, rubble in the process of being cleared away by heavy machinery. All that remained was sand.
This was not creepy at all.
Me, a grown man, wandering around Brixton playgrounds, looking for soil from sandpits. Luckily, it was a school day and nobody but the most hardcore of truants were out. I did scrape together enough – using a cotton bud container from Boots – and I took it back to Dotun without getting myself on the sex offenders register.
Dotun had a thing, a lesion, on his upper lip. He wouldn’t get it looked at because he believed it gave him a clearer connection to the spirit world. ‘You don’t shave Samson’s hair,’ he once told me.
I focused on it while waiting. It looked like a raisin sunk into his skin and mortared in place.
Dotun dropped his hands. ‘He’s not there.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘There’s nobody there. Nobody’s answering.’
Worth a try. I didn’t know what I had expected. I didn’t fully believe in Ifa, but I didn’t disbelieve either. I had seen some weird things in my time. Still. Maybe white people’s spirits didn’t work in the same way. They did have that self-flagellating concept of hell. What if Bacon’s spirit thought he ought to be punished? Like he did with his body.
Wait.
‘Check for Jessie Lightfoot. Jessie.’
‘What’s his mother’s name?’ asked Dotun, smoothing the sand.
‘Her. And I don’t know. Just look. Jessie was a medium of sorts.’
Dotun pressed and stroked the sand, pursed his lips and shook his head.
‘Sorry, bruv.’
I gave him a fifty.
‘You want to talk to your dad?’
‘Fuck, no. I’ll be in touch.’ I stood.
‘Where are you going? I’m about to cook.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
On the way home, on the train, jostled by its movement into the person on my right and my left. The person in front of me was eating a cornish pasty that I’m sure he got from the kiosk at the station. My belly was full of Dotun’s food, but the aroma from the pasty made my mouth water. I felt an intense urge to leap up, snatch the snack and bite into it. I wasn’t hungry, so I couldn’t understand the want. I stood, moved to another carriage. What was going on?
I found a seat, sat down and closed my eyes.
You didn’t go to a medium or psychic for information. At least, that wasn’t how I understood it. You went to witches and clevermen to speak to your own subconscious, to shake something loose.
A writer’s work is mining the subconscious, the deep well where all of life experience and learning mixes together and sprouts something new, and if you do it right, it feels original to readers, the Holy Grail of art. It can only be original if it is a true reflection of the deep mind of the artist, and that requires honesty whether you’re writing about robots or vampires or suburban life.
If Dotun had found nothing, heard nothing, did that mean my subconscious was empty?
Once, years ago, I had eighteen months of psycho-analytic therapy. What I remember the most is how the psychotherapist found me frustrating. I didn’t notice this myself, but she said so in one of her interpretation sessions, where she theorised about our journey so far, and offered hypotheses.
‘You’re very well defended,’ she had said. ‘You’ve set up shields in almost every aspect of your life and you feel no psychic pain. You have a moat, a castle, and a squad of knights. You sit in this impregnable space, and you’re smug. Don’t be. You’re young. It’ll work for a decade, two at most. Then it’ll come crumbling down.’
