Jackdaw, page 4
‘I think you’re just cynical,’ I said.
‘No. I’m experienced and I am very good at my job.’
She was right. Eleven years later, I nearly destroyed my life by being stupid. I came back from the brink by focusing on something she told me to look out for, on an unconscious need to self-sabotage.
It turns out when you have an unstable childhood, one of the reactions is to expect instability at all times so that when things are going relatively well, you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, and if that shoe takes too long, why, you have to do something to help it fall. Drop that fucker yourself. It’ll be chaos, but chaos is familiar: chaos is where you live. You might be suffering, but you’re used to that, and life goes on.
My eyes flicked open as I was seized with the certainty that I had missed my stop. I hadn’t, but I felt like I was being watched. There were only two other people in the carriage at this time, well spaced out. One was knitting, while the other seemed engrossed in a glossy while chewing the cud. I stared at the cover of the glossy, looking for cracks in the narrative the cover stories told. Looking for a discreet hole through which the reader might be observing me. It sounds silly now and it felt silly then, but I promised myself I would write everything. There was no hole because it was not a 1940s detective story. I left the train at the next stop all the same.
I still felt observed, so I walked all the way home, with my phone in my chest pocket, camera facing outward, set on record.
I got home, slammed the front door shut, rushed from the hall to the living room and parted the blinds a crack, just a sliver to see the road. Nothing. Nobody. A hammer kept up a rhythmic banging for a few seconds, then stopped.
I went up to the bathroom and soaked my feet in warm water while going over the footage on my phone. When the film ended, I started again, just in case I had missed something. And again. And again. I shivered, and realised that the water had gone cold while I was checking my phone. My feet had those prune water wrinkles and for a second, I didn’t recognise them as my own.
I took a hot shower to warm up and reset myself.
I didn’t have anyone to call. I couldn’t call Elise because I didn’t find talking to her comforting. It just wasn’t the kind of relationship we had. She didn’t handle problems well. They brought out a selfish side to her and she would panic and make it worse by talking about the problems that her perspective of my problem would bring to her. It was best not to tell her anything unless it had a specific connection to her.
I did what I always do: I went up into the attic to read. I climbed up in my housecoat, which was unwise, but I was tired and lonely.
I sat down and read Blake for an hour or so. I can’t remember what it was, but I know there were illustrations with that subversive ecclesiastical energy that Blake always brought.
I yawned, looked up, and there, in the corner, stood a woman in Coke-bottle glasses, still, staring right at me.
‘Uh…’ I said.
I dropped Blake and rocked backwards in the chair.
She was slight and grey, by which I mean all the colours around her were muted, a kind of blending. Her eyes were the main thing, fixed, powerful, and with a suppressed monomania.
Dotun hadn’t failed.
This was Jessie Lightfoot.
Even if you never had a nanny, you’d be able to imagine what a nanny could do. Granted, not every nanny could be practically perfect in every way like the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Mary Poppins, or that other Julie Andrews alter ego, but you can imagine the basics: dress children up, wipe their arses, soothe them when they cry, keep them away from the parents when the parents don’t want to see their offspring, which tends to be quite often, strangely. A nanny teaches everything from manners to ABCs, and if you’re thinking of a kind of surrogate mother, you’d be right.
We had a nanny, my siblings and I. Her husband, Roland, was responsible for my earliest memory, which is holding on tight to his back while he gave me a ride on his motorbike. I was like three, man. You’d never get away with that these days. I can’t remember much about Janet, but I do know that about ten, fifteen years ago she got in trouble and threatened to blow up a tower block with two jerry cans of petrol as a dramatic way of killing herself. I kid you not. She wasn’t even arrested. My mother called the police and they confiscated the petrol.
Immediately after they were gone, she called my mother and said they hadn’t found all of her stash, and that she was going to self-immolate. So not Mary Poppins, then.
But let’s get back to Jessie Lightfoot.
Did your nanny do the basic childcare stuff, then move in with you as an adult, help you score illicit drugs, sleep on the kitchen table, go out with you to commit petty crime to fund your necessities, your drug habit? Was your nanny your pimp when you indulged in a spot of prostitution? Was she your medium? Did she control access to you while being the surrogate parent you needed when your biological mother was a bit casual about the whole thing? That, I understood, was who Jessie Lightfoot was to Francis Bacon.
Nanny Lightfoot organised illegal gambling in Bacon’s residence and charged a generous tip when guests needed to use the loo. There is a racehorse named after her right now. I can see her knitting in the corner of the room, glancing over the ‘gentleman’s companion’ respondents’ letters, deciding who Bacon would offer services to while being rabidly homophobic herself. She apparently believed in capital punishment for sodomy, among other things. I’m told she thought the Duchess of Windsor should be the first to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Marble Arch. Lightfoot was loyal to Bacon and Bacon was loyal to Lightfoot.
Jessie Lightfoot died in 1951, sending Francis Bacon off on a brief spiral of instability.
And she was in my fucking study.
You invited her.
I blinked, closed my eyes for sixty seconds and opened them again. I pinched myself (why do we do that? Does it ever work in dreams? Has anybody ever been able to wake themselves up from a dream that way?). None of this made Lightfoot disappear.
I was scared, of course, seeing anything that wasn’t there. But seeing a person, and that person being Lightfoot, somehow made it worse. When it came to Bacon, Lightfoot had no flex. I didn’t know if she could harm me, I didn’t know if her presence was meant to chastise me for what I was doing, I didn’t know if I should be reacting to her or ignoring her. I felt unprepared for this encounter. I liked to be prepared. I liked instructions, manuals, briefings. This left me at sea.
It was different from Henrietta. Moraes was more my own projection, a perverse extrapolation from a Deakin image, very little to do with the actual person, more to do with my own depravity. Lightfoot, on the other hand, seemed to have an agenda.
She stood there, breathing, taking up psychic space, her mouth a thin line.
‘What do you want?’
No answer.
No matter. I scrambled down the attic, almost tripping over the housecoat belt. I managed to get down without falling to my death. I stripped it off and hurled it from me. Naked, I went to the bedroom and closed the door. Lightfoot was waiting for me, in a corner, still. Why was she staring? I’d read that in life she was practically blind.
I closed my eyes. Henrietta was there.
‘What?’
I phased through the Henrietta-rotten-meat cycle, but it was too little aversion too late. Maybe being naked didn’t help the situation. This is one of those times where, because of the shame, my fingers slow down in the typing of this account and outright stop. Right there, under the gaze of Jessie Lightfoot, I pleasured myself, if one can call it that. She did not react. I didn’t imagine she would show or feel disgust. She’d seen far, far worse perversions and been an accomplice to as many.
The bedroom carpet needed work before Elise came home.
Those two were in my head now: Lightfoot when my eyes were open, Henrietta when they were closed. The worst part of this was the rotting meat, which persisted without curbing my arousal. On some occasions it worked the other way around, as in, I’d smell rotting meat, see it, then get aroused, then see Henrietta. Any meat could set it off.
Lightfoot, meanwhile, was everywhere. Home, work, on the cycle path, in the car, in the gents. No matter how cramped the space was, Lightfoot would be there staring, silent.
I started to lose my appetite because putrefaction has never quite done it for me as a spice.
When I was with people I made a concerted effort to ignore Lightfoot, but, when alone in the attic, I took to speaking to her.
‘Where’s Francis? Why are you here? What do you want? Can you just fuck off now? I have work to do. FUCK. OFF.’
Not even a ripple on the blankness of her expression.
Not that I didn’t understand Lightfoot’s felonious side.
I’d stolen before.
In my teenage years, my father was detained by the government. His bank accounts were frozen and they seized his cars and property. This was a political thing after a military coup, and roving mobs were burning people like my dad alive, sometimes tethered to their families, thus creating a bonfire. My father was of the rare breed who attended to both broad strokes and details. He had a safe house and he made my siblings and I disappear to this barely completed house in the middle of nowhere. I’m not kidding. There was no bus route, and you had to hire a car to take you part of the way. You had to walk the rest. It wasn’t a country stroll; it was a forced march. The road was unpaved, there were no street lights, and while it seemed safe, it looked scary as hell, and by ‘looked’ I mean it was darkness and crickets and flowing water. I did that trip alone a few times and I always expected some bandit to spring out at me. Nobody ever did, and I never heard of anyone getting robbed on the way there.
Deep down this way, a few folks, my father included, had built houses, expecting civilisation to grow from the end of the road. Except it never did, although this might have been part of the plan my father depended on. The result was our safe house, surrounded by a few empty dwellings, with no connection to the national grid, no amenities, no shops. It was better than burning to death.
My older brother and I had to cut the grass with machetes every other day, all to the cooing of wood pigeons and doves. I don’t know birds; I know blisters from machete handles. The first time we did it, the grass was taller than me and it took a week to clear.
We did have a generator, but it presented a dilemma. When we turned it on it could be heard for miles around and the electric lights turned into a beacon. This was a problem since our task was to lie low. There was the matter of diesel. What would we do if it ran out?
But that wasn’t our most pressing supply problem. We had no food, just some canned stuff that would disappear in days.
My brother Sam and I went exploring during the day. I didn’t know the plan and thought he was just staving off boredom. He wasn’t. He was casing farms. He didn’t write anything down or scribble a map, or even indicate that he had noticed anything, but come nightfall he and I would steal out into the dark, navigating by whatever gods guide thieves.
We dug up yams, yanked maize off the stalks, stunned and abducted chickens and turkeys. I advise avoiding geese as targets for an agrarian crime spree. They are vicious and noisy.
We would take our ill-gotten gains and cook them for our younger sisters and brothers. At times we had to travel miles before we found a farm that didn’t have dogs or a fence. We’d have to eat on the way. I was kind of low-key ashamed that neither of us knew how to make fire and had to use matches. On these occasions we would dig a hole, stuff it with grass and drop a yam in it, then set the pit alight. The fire stayed below ground level, so it wouldn’t be seen from a distance, and the smoke was invisible at night. We would eat the yams by dipping them in palm oil, sometimes salt. We’d then drag the rest home on full bellies.
We didn’t always succeed, and we starved sporadically. We would make do by chewing kundi, dried jerky-like meat, panla, and beef hide, undigestible, but hunger-killing.
Eighteen months of this we endured, and the surrounding farmers had to put up with thieves in the night. I wonder how much they knew, and how much they suspected. Sometimes our neighbours would bring us food. They knew there were kids in the house and never saw any adults, I guess. We ran the genny from eight to midnight on most days. Towards the end, Sam got into a torrid sex thing with a farmer’s wife where she fell in love and started bringing us cooked meals.
While I couldn’t recommend starving to anyone, that whole experience left me unafraid of shit like losing my job, not having any supplies, losing money, or any kind of deprivation. Once you’ve lived a life of not knowing where your next meal is coming from your outlook on life and luxury changes.
I told this entire story to Lightfoot in bits, over time, in my study and in the bathroom and while driving.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be blind? How can you be staring at me like this?’
Nothing from her. While Henrietta would laugh occasionally, Lightfoot never spoke.
6
Regardless of the first haunting with Henrietta or the second haunting with Lightfoot, the rest of my life was expected to go on. Including an expectation to be a husband, which I was fucking up; a father, in which I was lagging behind; a doctor, which I was barely managing; and a writer, which was poisoning my mind.
‘What’s going on with you?’ asked Elise. ‘You’re not here. You’re not with me. You tell me I’m distracted by my phone, but you’re the one off with the fairies or the Jabberwocky or something.’
‘You mean the Jabberwock. Jabberwocky is the poem.’ It slipped out before I could control myself.
‘Shut up, Tade. You’re missing the point here.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Why is there blood on the towels?’
‘What blood?’
‘You think I don’t look at the laundry? There’s blood on your underwear, housecoat and towels from time to time.’
Yeah. Abrasions on the skin of the penis after too much rubbing.
‘I have piles. You know that.’
‘This isn’t haemorrhoids. I am not stupid.’
No, she was not, but that didn’t mean I was going to tell her the truth.
‘Any other man and I’d think you were being unfaithful,’ said Elise.
This was true. I didn’t cheat, although not for moral reasons. I had a deep-seated belief in some form of Karma. So remember when I said there was no hell in Yoruba cosmology? Well, there may not be eternal punishment, but there are temporal consequences to offending. Eshu, the god of chaos, is allowed to make life on Earth difficult for you if you step outside your destiny. I know, it’s weird, but I figured if I was a good person and didn’t cause pain to anyone else, I would be fine too.
‘I have some scratches. Down there,’ I said.
‘Show me.’
I glanced at Lightfoot, who was as bland as before and had seen me naked already, but this seemed different. I showed Elise.
‘Jesus, what the hell, Tade?’
I could understand her consternation. It was discoloured, crusting in some parts, scabbed in others, raw and weeping in some. It looked worse than it was. Okay, it didn’t, but all of this carnage healed pretty fast in my experience. And I was becoming quite experienced.
What happened next wasn’t surprising, but I didn’t expect it. A slight breeze and the smell of rotten meat, maybe a dash of Henrietta, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t see her this one time. I got erect. Couldn’t be helped.
Elise looked at me with a disgust that matched my own. She slammed the door on her way out. That’s when Henrietta appeared.
Since you’re already up…
Back to my family doctor, this time with Elise in tow. No, I was in tow. Elise dragged me there.
‘Your blood results are fine,’ said the GP. She wore a bright red bindi that moved when her expression changed. If you’re Hindu, that dot is symbolic of Bindu, which is where creation began, which can be reconciled with physics if you have time and three beers. I stared at the bindi rather than her eyes, and I didn’t think she could tell the difference. ‘You have a mild leucocytosis, but I’m not worried about that because of your… scratches down below.’
Another moment I will never live down. Showing a distinguished Asian doctor my junk and explaining the appearance.
‘It’s not infected?’ asked Elise.
‘No. Just abrasions of various ages, that’s all.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Elise had lost the rage and was now in concerned-wife mode. It was touching, I supposed, but I just wanted to get out of there before I died of shame poisoning.
‘Compulsive masturbation,’ she said. She didn’t look up but continued to type. ‘I’m giving you fluoxetine.’
‘And that will stop it?’ asked Elise, looking from me to the GP.
‘It might.’
She was right. You could give fluoxetine for compulsive behaviour to good effect, as they say, but as I looked at Lightfoot and the flashes of Henrietta when I blinked, I wasn’t optimistic.
I still needed a story to give to Francis Bacon’s people. They didn’t want the outline just yet, but they did need an idea of where I was going with the book and I didn’t have a fucking clue.
My imagination flowered for every other project and even brought forth new ideas for short stories, books, screenplays, comics and console games. I even had an idea for a short musical about life on Mars. Just nothing for Bacon.
Whenever I started working on anything else Lightfoot made me feel guilty because obviously she was a hundred per cent for Francis and any deviation was slacking off. She stood there judging me like a schoolteacher. I found myself telling her my excuses, like how I had deadlines or needed variety to stimulate my imagination.
The worst thing is when I started the fluoxetine I felt restless, which happens as the serotonin rises, usually during the first week. I had a sense of internal motion, constant, and a need to do things, touch surfaces, bite into objects, throw rocks, stare, crash my car, and, yes, suicidal impulses. I felt like jumping from the roof of the hospital a number of times. I didn’t want to, but I got a strong urge to. I wondered what it would be like to leap into space and fly for a while. Would I hear the sound of the ground hitting me? Would I feel my brain disintegrate? Would I lose consciousness or would I be aware of the pain until my heart stopped? I didn’t want to die, but I sure spent a lot of time ruminating on it in that first week.
