By Paul Holman
[Photo: Steve Duncan]
S P R I N G S
1
Malis follows the course of the stream that once ran along Flask Walk, casting a troubled glance at the Wells and Campden Baths and Wash-Houses to her left, before continuing past Burgh House, to move through a street plan defined by the imprint of vanished spas. Tall, with heavy dreads hanging down over a dress sewn with fragments of broken mirror, she crosses the road at the intersection of Christchurch Hill and Well Walk, to enter the pub she still thinks of as the Green Man.
There she sits in the western corner as if placed in an alcove, in an area of shadow intensified by the bright daylight showing through the windows set a little further along the walls on either side; a large photograph of one of Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon statues to her left; two pale lights, with fleshy leads and upturned bowls that illuminate only the blank space above them, positioned in the angle over her head.
She drinks one pint of Blindside after another, paying for them with an assortment of mostly small coins, which she produces from a drawstring bag. At first the barman thinks that this has been stencilled with a design of a snake with its tongue extended, but then realises that it holds a key in its mouth.
When at last she rises to leave, Malis takes a step away from her table, only to hesitate and turn back to collect her empty glass: she carries this to the bar, where she asks for a refill of water, and gulps that down too before walking a little further along the street to pause in front of the houses numbered 42 and 44 – once the site of a fountain that issued from two lions’ heads – then crosses to the left side of the road to inspect the Victorian structure that replaced it, set between two shortflights of steps that rise to meet the pavement.
She stands on the narrow area before the well in order to lay her hands upon the mismatched panels that flank the inscription to the Honorable Susanna Noel and her son Baptist: one of these depicts a plant of some kind, now too worn to make out, the other bulrushes. Green leaves push through the dry outlet, its lip incongruously carved into the shape of a scallop shell: despite the promise of refreshment given in the verse above it, even in its best days this merely released a slow drip of water, gathered in the early morning to treat failing eyes.
She ascends the steps to the other side, where a drinking fountain faces the narrow passage that climbs to Well Road. Here the mains water jet proves as dead as the chalybeate spring. Malis leans forward, and spews beer and rust coloured water into its half octagonal basin.
2
In the Breakfast Room of Kenwood House, Eunica gazes at Reynolds’ painting of the Gipsy Fortune Teller. Her interest is engaged by its setting, which her eye reads as simultaneously a room and a wooded landscape: perhaps it is the fortune teller’s hut. Whatever, it strikes her as analogous to the zone which she herself inhabits.
A girl and boy, both richly dressed, occupy a wooden chair set in front of a table: the girl, whose cloak is thrown over the back of the chair, sprawls upon the lap of the other in a way that seems both childish and sexualised. While this pair is firmly located indoors, the fortune teller gives the impression of having stepped straight in from the woods, or perhaps to have carried them into the room along with her.Now Eunica turns her attention to the pattern formed by these figures’ hands, tracing it in a notebook which she produces from her slim shoulderbag: the character which she draws begins with the raised right hand of the fortune teller, its first finger extended in playful warning. The downward curve of her left arm leads the viewer to the focus of the picture – the extended right palm of the girl, whose hand is grasped around the fingers by the dark left hand of the fortune teller, and around the wrist by her companion’s right. The right arm of the girl gently rises towards the large blue bow on her breast: the boy’s left hand is laid upon her side, just beneath it. Her left arm tilts very slightly outwards to the elbow, and then in again to the wrist, where her hand twists loosely back: its curled fingers close the flow of movement across the canvas.
The matter of the artwork itself seems trivial and sly. The fortune teller delivers her oracle with an arch expression: the boy’s face is attentive and strained; the girl, who is evidently amused by the revelation, stares laughing out of the picture.
As Eunica turns away from the painting, she closes her hand upon the soft pouch of knucklebones in her pocket. In divination, she casts them five at a time, drawing responses from a list of fifty-six proverbs she has assembled. These are mostly adapted from overheard remarks, graffiti, and snippets of prose from the free newspapers: she updates the entries as new material arises.
Neat and greyclad, she leaves the house, descending the wide shallow steps to the pasture ground, and then walks alongside the stream that runs from the narrow outcrop of trees on her right across the lawn to the Wood Pond, feeding the Highgate Brook.
[Film]
3
The Knight of Labour treads Millfield Lane in his waterlogged shoes. The trailing ends of the orange cord tied round his neck are tucked inside his badly buttoned jacket, its upper pocket still distended with a half brick: other items of builders’ rubble have long since dropped through his clothes.
He watches Eunica from across the South Meadow, as she exits the Kenwood Estate to stand motionless at a point where the outflow of two streams meets in a V. He first encountered her, along with her two sisters, at the scene of his transfiguration: they have become a familiar sight to him since, as he also has found himself bound by the course of the Fleet.
He leans against the parapet of the Bird Bridge, and studies its wide ledge, incised with symbols and initials: his eye wanders over it, seeking coded messages and the acronyms for secret organisations which might be attempting to re-establish contact with him. He desires nothing so much as to be given access to some vent in the earth through which he may descend to guard forgotten hoards.
At the outer edge of the East Heath, he exchanges glances with a figure carrying an uprooted tree stump. It is really too unwieldly for the bearer to manage, and he holds it upside down in front of him, with each hand clutching a projecting root: others fan out around the edge, so that it resembles nothing so much as the severed head of some monstrous king, still firmly wedged into its crown.
The Knight nods to that too, and proceeds towards the Vale of Health Pond. He settles on a bench there, but is disturbed by two men out walking an American bulldog, who pause to discuss their opinion of foreigners who lurk around, plotting to steal the cormorants.
Although he cannot stray far from the water, their tone makes him uncomfortable enough to push on a little distance towards the fairground caravan park. Just in front of the falafel stand, he notices a shopping bag, printed with an image of a mermaid, jammed upside down over a parking cone. In the open space to his right he can see the giant teacups of a dismantled roundabout: the area to his left is screened by tarpaulin.
Malis strides down the road between them, singing fragments of scrapbook ballads.
B R OO K S
4
More or less as soon as Eunica sets foot on Swain’s Lane, having taken the zebra crossing from Parliament Hill Fields, she becomes aware of two people who have just turned the corner onto the opposite side of the road to her. These are a woman with a gaunt, wary face and a younger, shambling man: they have come from the direction of the church of St. Anne, holy grandmother and patroness of many English wells, and they are engaged in a loud ongoing argument.
It becomes evident that a second man, who hurries some way ahead, carrying a plastic bag stretched thin over the outline of aluminium cans, is also of their party, but he is doing his utmost not to be drawn into the dispute, although the woman calls out to him for support as she passes between the images of tethered bulls’ heads – one upright, one curiously askew – that decorate the window of Elite Meats. Opposite the convex traffic mirrors that reflect the entrance to the Holly Lodge Estate and Hillway, her companion shouts: “I never brought stolen food home to cook!” And Eunica stands aligned with the narrow edge of the sign reading ANCIENT LIGHTS on the east wall of no. 20 to copy down his words into the notebook in which she records oracles. Not long after, she turns right into Brookfield Park, while these messengers continue towards Highgate Cemetery: it is characteristic of her that she should accept people as the bearers of signs, just as Malis would consider them utterly irrelevant, and her third sister Nychea, who she last saw joined in merry marriage with a cat skin clad barbarian in Kentish Town, would attempt to lose herself among them altogether.
5
Malis, who had once taken the grotto at Bagnigge Wells for her court, splendid among sea-shells, fossils and broken glass, enters the glitter of the mosaic at the Fleet Community Centre, gaining access to it by means of the spiral located beneath the red right shoe of the small girl who, with her lips drawn back from her teeth and her face set in the expression of one determined to reveal the workings of creation, holds up a white tile bearing the artist’s name.
From here, the intruder slips past the black cat and the newspaper reader in his hammock, to lean her back against a tree, her lower legs blocked from an onlooker’s sight by the bull terrier that strains at its leash in the foreground, while her own gaze follows the magpie that ascends towards a second spiral on the upper border of the design: then it shifts outward, to take in a bicycle parked behind the crazed glass of a balcony at Palgrave House, the black wall of the Stag, and the opening of Cressy Road.
When she tires of this game, she picks her way out past the cluster of people engaged in conversation or dispute and the old lady clad in black, her head topped by a white cone of hair that supplies a visual echo to the paper wrapped around the stems of the flowers she carries. Malis leaves her own startled mask beside the Greek key at the lower right hand corner of the mosaic, and walks on between the wan murals of the Gospel Oak Estate, to rest upon a broken slab in the woodland garden established by Mary Barnes and Ayla Larke at Lismore Circus, where a beehive composter stands across the road from the Goddess Hair Salon.
6
The Knight of Labour notices a home made sign in front of no 14 Inkerman Road: it is a corrugated plastic board, such as estate agents use, set on a pole, with white sheets of paper pasted to its surface. The message on the side visible to him reads: YOU CAN’T PLAN. As he draws closer, it becomes evident that the sheet has become folded over on itself, so he has to straighten it to view the full inscription: YOU CAN’T PLAN AN EPIPHANY. The text on the reverse of the board is briefer: THE TRUANT SKY. He walks around it a couple of times, to read it in one order and then the other, but feels that the red lettered notice on the door of the next house but one carries a more pertinent motto: NO FREE POST.
As he walks north up Kentish Town Road from Angler’s Lane, he glimpses Nychea, who has risen at last from where she has sat in contemplation in a corner sealed by a semicircle of broom heads and dismantled light fittings, beneath the iron staircase that leads halfway up the back wall of the Christ Apostolic Church on Greenwood Place. She is poised to go into the Oxford and, although the Knight feels no desire to drink anything, he follows her into the pub out of curiosity: he knows that these creatures of the springs suffer torments of thirst as they move further from their source, and has come to appreciate that she differs from her sisters, in that it bothers her that she can only mirror the external world, lacking an inner self to reflect.
He steps past a man in a hat with a dogtooth pattern, engaged in making arrangements with the bartender about the Thursday comedy club, and looks around for somewhere to sit unobserved. He takes note of a party of students that occupies the large table near the side door that opens onto Islip Street: they overlap onto the nearest corner of the adjoining table, which is set at an angle to their own, so he places himself at the furthest point away from them, with a clutter of glasses in between. Nobody pays him any attention except for one girl who, detached from the chatter going on around her, stares fixedly at him out of pale eyes. In response, he drags his papery lips away from his long teeth in the anxious, placatory smile of an ugly dead man.
Then he turns his attention to Nychea. Plump and grubby in her sky blue tracksuit, she has settled at a low round table opposite the ladies’ toilets. Two men, dressed in clothes smeared with paint and dust, lean over her chair to view some fine pencil sketches executed on old paper: these are all of male faces, some bestial or divine. At one point she remarks in her flat voice: “He did this to me”, and lifts her hair away from the side of her head furthest from the Knight to show them what he supposes to be a wound.
She stacks the papers together. As her companions step up to the bar to buy her a drink, the door is pushed abruptly open and a grim bearded face looks in, the horns that curl closely to either side of the skull scarcely hidden by a baggy hat. Nychea rises and steps outside. While she is absent, the younger of the two men talks vaguely of what it might be possible to do with her, but the other shakes his head and says: “She could weep a man to death.” So they leave a glass of Camden Hells Lager beside her drawings on the table, and stroll off with their own drinks in hand to stare at the TV screen at the far end of the empty dining area.
Now the girl who has been studying the Knight rises unsteadily and sits beside him. When she leans in close to his ear and breathes: “Who does it should expect it”, he gives her an anguished look and rises jerkily to his feet. As he passes the tables set outside, Nychea, standing in furious argument with the interloper, recognises him for the first time, and turns towards him a face perfectly white and indistinct, its features ever changing.
7
In the course of her drift down Clarence Way towards Castlehaven Park, Malis pauses to gaze at the wiry simulacrum of an elemental scaling the wall of Harmood Grove. Another four figures rise in the gated courtyard at the end of the cul de sac: the topmost is abstract, attenuated; the lowest is still emerging from a bed of smooth white stones. Malis knows better than most that the seas and rivers are inhabited by such beings, as well as the air; that the earth is filled almost to the centre with the guardians of treasures; and that the dwellers in fire tolerate the company of philosophers: it bothers her that the sculptor may have conflated these undines, sylphs, gnomes and salamanders with the human dead.
She lifts herself upon tiptoe before the curved railings, throws back her head, and fans out her arms with the palms of her hands turned back, long fingers outstretched. This action is interrupted by the occupant of one of the properties, who comes bustling up to the fence to challenge her presence there: as she turns her dragonish, heavy lidded eyes to him, he photographs her with his iPhone. She shakes back her dreads and bares her teeth in a smile for a second picture and, as he taps the button with his index finger, curls back her tongue to reveal the gleam of a golden key lodged underneath it.
8
On Hawley Road, where the Hampstead and Highgate Brooks meet, the Knight sees Malis and Eunica descending the steps of one of the parade of condemned houses that stands across the road from him. Its wall is painted with the head of a black cat, steampunk goggles pushed up on its brow, but the sisters look back towards the front door as they reach the pavement. Malis is laughing as By the time he has struggled past the traffic, they have moved on towards Kentish Town Road. He raises his eyes to the door of no. 15, taking in an image of three 746 type telephones, respectively coloured red, blue and orange, positioned side by side in an unsteady line. Higher up, a photograph of Bettie Page is superimposed over the notice plate on a yellow postbox: two more pictures of her mirror each other on either side of the crown and Royal Cipher. In the space between this pair of triads, the words SWIM DEEPER have been stencilled.
He stands beside the public drinking fountain, set within five circles of upended bricks, in front of the north gates of Camden Gardens, and looks around for any further trace of Malis and Eunica. After some thought, he wanders back in the direction of Angler’s Lane, to find a message he had not seen before, sprayed in silver ink upon the boarded up window of the former Pizza Express at the corner of Prince of Wales Road: WE NEVER LAND. Satisfied with this communication, he reverses his path beneath a darkening sky, and strolls past Water Lane, descending to Kentish Town Lock, where he turns left along the towpath. A sudden hailstorm forces him to take shelter beneath Camden Road Bridge: while he waits for the sky to clear, he studies the childrens’ painting of boats and arches, a horse, a fish and a butterfly, affixed to the brickwork opposite.
The sisters hear the rattle overhead as they sit together, sipping blackcurrant squash in one of the steam rooms in Rio’s Health Spa. They wrap their damp white towels around themselves – Malis just beneath her breasts, Eunica above hers – and walk past another steam room and a sauna, to join the other more or less undressed figures assembled at the entrance to the garden, watching the hailstones clatter down on the statuary, the little galvanised steel buckets that serve as ash trays, the plastic chairs set out upon the low banks of artificial turf on either side of the central path.
WELLS
9
Eunica tips a little water, collected from the springs at Kenwood, into the palm of her left hand, and uses the index finger of the right to trace a pattern between the thirty-six apertures in the circular manhole cover at her feet. When she stares down through the vents, she can see the river itself, sleek and fast. She tries to coax the Fleet back into distinct speech, but it has become intractable, withdrawn in darkness and enclosure.
Eunica straightens as a car turns from Lyme Street onto Royal College Street, and takes a step back into the cycle lane, knocking her heels against the low zigzagged wall of a triangular planter. She glances across the road at the southwest wall of the Prince Albert, much of its green tiled lower storey blocked from sight by the laurel hedge that rises behind the fence which encloses the beer garden: even more is obscured by the canopy of a large span parasol.
A figure that pauses by the bollard at the opposite corner catches her attention: it is that of a girl, dressed in a loose approximation of Wonder Woman’s outfit: a yellow band marked with a red star about her forehead, a red lycra top clinging to her heavy breasts and belly. She carries a candy bar phone in her hand, and there is a 375ml bottle of vodka tucked into the waistband of her blue shorts.
This newcomer looks northeast up Georgiana Street, and then walks to the end of Lyme Street. When she finds nothing of interest there, she turns towards Eunica, who is once more leaning over the drain.
“Excuse me,” she asks. “Have you seen any other people in costume?”
Eunica shakes her head. The girl gazes round once more, and then comes to stand beside her.
“What are you looking at?” she enquires curiously.
“See for yourself,” Eunica replies in a mild tone, and stands aside.
The girl peers down into the shaft with a puzzled expression which turns into one of absorbed interest: suddenly she lifts her gaze and draws back, startled.
“What the fuck is that?” she asks.
“Tell me how it showed itself to you.”
The girl draws a breath, and then says: “At first I thought it was some kind of snake, or an eel perhaps, but then it lifted its head to look up at me, and it had horns and a man’s eyes.”
Eunica rests her hand upon the girl’s forearm, just above one of her Bracelets of Submission: “You saw the River Fleet. It moves between forms: sometimes a rambling bull, sometimes a writhing snake, sometimes a man with water streaming from his beard.”
“But it spoke to me.”
“What did it have to say?”
“‘Truth lies at the bottom of a well.'”
Now it is Eunica’s turn to give the other a surprised look. She is about to ask something more, when the girl’s phone buzzes: even as she flexes her thumb to answer it, a shout comes from across Royal College Street, where her friends have at last come into view.
She glances down and, as if registering Eunica’s touch for the first time, disengages herself from it, then goes to join her companions as they move on down Lyme Street.
Eunica turns back to the Fleet, but her concentration is disturbed by Malis, who stands just inside the open gate of the beer garden. She is holding up an almost full glass of Foundation Bitter in one hand and an almost empty one in the other.
“I’ll drink yours in a minute!”
“Help yourself – I’ve got this,” Eunica replies, holding up a clear plastic bottle containing the spring water she had used to draw her sign.
“Water is for nixies!” Malis calls back, and retreats behind the hedge again.
10
In St Pancras Old Church, Eunica stands before the carved wooden figure of Our Lady of Walsingham, set within the desecrated Sacrament House. Her eye glides down, past the virgin’s crown and the halo behind it, the threefold lily sceptre balanced upon the fingers of her right hand, the raised cross on the cover of the book clasped in the left hand of the prophetic child upon her knee, to settle upon the smooth rounded base on which her gold tipped slippers rest. Eunica studies this for some time, then, dissatisfied, speaks her thought aloud: “A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”
She finds Malis in the southernmost corner of the churchyard, in a place screened from view by buddleia and midland hawthorn: she is gazing down at an improvised altar – a pile of stones and half bricks, laid with a cloth of silver and blue, upon which wooden bowls containing honey and beer have been left among offerings of greenery. Dolls of plastic, wood and cloth are heaped up against it. Eunica picks up a Barbie with a faint turquoise bloom to its skin: its neck and limbs glitter, and its spangled crop top appears to have been painted directly on; a skirt of ragged strips of gauze is secured around its waist by a crinkled belt of dull bronze material. When she turns it around, she sees two empty slots upon its shoulders: the sockets of cast off wings, she supposes.
Malis looks at her through bewildered eyes: “Is this meant for us?”
Eunica puts the model down again, and slowly rotates her head to summon back a view of the demolished West Tower, the full extent of the churchyard, and the lost Wells to the south: she remembers their House of Entertainment and Ladies’ Hall and, behind these, the Pump Houses and Long Room, the Old Walk and New Plantation. Then she shrugs, and reaches into her shoulderbag to enclose the shrine within a scatter of knucklebones.
11
On Gray’s Inn Road, Malis and Eunica pause in front of Willing House, now a Travelodge, to lift their gaze past the winged lions that guard the archway over the entrance; the frieze depicting figures clustered about a globe; the massive bow window and the dormer projecting from the slate roof above it; all the way up to Mercury, his feet planted upon the finial, his right arm raised, the left folded about a golden caduceus. The god, of elm clad in bronze, stands as if ready to guide all those images maimed and cast into wells back from the underworld to which they had been committed.
As the sisters walk down St Chad’s Place, they check the recessed openings of fire escapes and other shadowy spaces for any indication that an offering may have been made here, although neither of them refers to their earlier find. Once they reach the end of the passage opening onto Kings Cross Road, they double back, turning left onto Wicklow Street, where they spot a pink haired doll propped up in the sharp corner bounded by the Margaret Pyke Centre and the wall over the railway: it is impossible to tell whether this object is a stray or has been set there on purpose. Next they make a perfunctory sweep of Leeke Street and Britannia Street, but discover nothing of interest there, and move on towards Bagnigge Wells.
12
Eunica stands within the passenger shelter at the Gwynne Place bus stop, and gazes up through the left hand perspex panel at the carved head of some woodland god, crudely set into the wall between nos. 61 and 63 Kings Cross Rd. Beneath it, an inscription reads:
+
ST
THIS IS BAGNIGGE
HOUSE NEARE
THE PINDERE A W
AKEFEILDE
While the stone bearing this text has been transferred between various locations, it has now come to rest more or less above the lost outline of the east gate that opened onto the gardens of Bagnigge House: the head itself has been detached from a full length figure that once stood against the north wall of the Long Room, looking across at the Grotto. Over time, its identity has merged with that of George a’ Green, the Pinder who took his blue blade in hand, and plodded to the greenwood to join Robin Hood and his company.
Not wishing to crowd her sister, Malis has positioned herself to the right of the shelter: from here she can observe the head at an angle, noting the cracks that run along the join of its chin and whiskers, the shallow flake of stone scooped out of one cheek – she also catches the gesture with which Eunica opens her notebook, before marking the page with a slow continuous line. At last, her hand falters, she blinks, and takes a step back onto the pavement. Malis comes to stand beside her as she studies her pencilwork with a dubious expression.
A spiky crawl of letters can be made out beneath the erect, bestial figure that emerges from the tangle of graphite on the paper.
“Chucky?” Malis asks.
“I don’t know,” replies Eunica in a tired voice. “I suppose it’s what he calls himself.”
Her thoughts stray to the half bound leather volume, its cover papers shimmering, scaled, from which she had extracted their own names.
13
The Knight of Labour walks along Gray’s Inn Road, passing the Water Rats, formerly known as the Pindar of Wakefield, although it was not the first property to carry that name. He takes the northern branch of the inverted Y shaped crossing at Acton Street to stand in front of the block between Harrison Street and Cromer Street, now occupied by a solicitor’s office and the old King’s Cross Telephone Exchange: it is here that the original inn stood, among brickfields and a cluster of cottages. This is the site where Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan carried out alchemical operations together in the time before a flame of whitish fire broke from the toes of his left foot, or the stone horse came to bear them away, one after the other.
Vaughan wrote:
I employed myself all her life time in the acquisition of some natural secrets, to which I had been disposed from my youth up; and what I now write, and know of them practically, I attained to in her days, not before in very truth, nor after, but during the time we lived together at the Pinner of Wakefield; and though I brought them not to perfection in those dear days, yet were the gates opened to me then and what I have done since is but the effect of those principles.
The front wall of the Exchange is decorated with a repeated motif of a candlestick telephone set within a laurel wreath. The Knight stares into the mirror glass windows, his refection obscured by the spiked barrier set above the sill. Inside the building, a jaded security guard views the onlooker’s grey face on a monitor, and decides that he cannot rouse himself to shoo this apparition on.
As the Knight crosses back to Acton Street, Nychea and her latest pick-up scramble down the artificial boulders at the Calthorpe Project, to tread the mosaic path that runs past the Walter Segal building towards the foot of the bridge: she bears a bird’s nest in her right hand, a rake in her left; an unlit pipe is jammed between his teeth, the snaith of a scythe rests upon his shoulder.
They approach the open gates, only to retreat to the sunken garden as they glimpse the Knight of Labour walking southeast down Gray’s Inn Road. When they are sure that he has passed, they climb back up and turn right, to walk down Ampton Street towards the New Calthorpe Estate. They parade slowly along Cubitt Street, pausing to clatter the tools they carry against the gated entrances of Wells Square and Fleet Square.
When they reach King’s Cross Road, Nychea catches sight of her sisters at the bus stop, and heads away to join them. Abandoned, her boyfriend shoots them a look of dislike, hangs his scythe off the scaffolding that extends from no. 45 to the front door of no. 49, and crosses the road, to pass beneath the second most northerly arch of the Travelodge at Gwynne Place, and ascend the steps leading to Granville Square.
14
The Knight continues past the old Royal Free Hospital and then follows the northeastern wall of Trinity Court into St Andrew’s Gardens, where he takes the outer path, its perimeter marked with upright gravestones. As he approaches the gate that opens onto Wren Street, he notices two figures hunched over a model theatre set up on a tomb to his right: a plastic crate, with a rucksack stowed inside it, rests upon the grass beside them. He wonders if they are putting on a show, but there is no audience apart from themselves, and their voices are pitched too quietly to reach any of the people eating sandwiches on the benches around the edge of the gardens or the party of drinkers sitting among a cluster of monuments further off. Whatever drama is being enacted seems more akin to a private game than a performance. It is this air of ritual absorption which draws him in, until he is almost standing over them.
Only then do they raise their heads from the stage to look back at him. To his eyes, the woman’s face is damaged by bridge and dimple piercings. Her hair is mostly blue where it flows over the right side of her head, grey where it has been shaved and regrown on the left, exposing an earlobe stretched wide over a flesh tunnel. While she is faux uncanny, the Knight, who had maintained an extraordinary belief in mysterious things even before his translation, suspects the man beside her of having been the vessel of a brutal power, now almost exhausted. He is feral, heavyset, with a beard growing out in rusty spikes beneath massive cheekbones. He wears threadbare jeans, turned up a long way at the hem, and a scuffed leather jacket with a fur collar, despite the heat. This flaps open as he turns towards the Knight, to reveal a bare torso. A faded blue baseball cap is pulled over his brow. A sigil has been inscribed upon the brim, which he wears forwards, with a thick marker pen.
The theatre is made of cardboard, meticulously cut and folded, and supported by a wooden frame. A sphinx is perched at the top of its proscenium arch, and two wildmen clad in leaves stand guard on either side, brandishing clubs. The wing to the left of the onlooker shows a castellated hexagonal grotto, separated into two floors by a band decorated with lozenges, which are outlined in shells. The lower storey is further divided into two open compartments in which figures in Georgian costume stand, drinking and chatting. This arrangement is echoed on the floor above, where each opening is surmounted by a lunette patterned with shells, fossils and ceramic fragments. Each of these arches is extended into the form of a wishbone, that on the left ending in a crescent moon and that on the right in a star.
The other wing shows a circular temple, its dome topped by a weathervane, raised upon a double ring of columns: two jets of liquid rise in the centre. These have been coloured red and white, to symbolise sulphur and mercury. A few trees are positioned across the stage, and two female figures stand just before the steps that lead to the entrance of the single storey building pictured upon the backdrop, the long room of a spa.
When she sees the Knight’s hesitation, the woman makes eye contact with him, and says: “You can come and watch if you like. We’ve nearly reached the end.”
“These are the mud-nymphs Nigrina, Merdamante and Lutetia,” says the man, indicating a trio of characters affixed to metal slides at the front of the stage. One of these is attired in a mantua and high plumed hat; a second is bare breasted and garlanded with vines; the last is a boyish figure, clad in a tricorne hat, knee length coat and breeches. All three maintain a defensive posture, holding up a scythe, a rake and a whip as weapons. They face a hulking figure in rustic clothing, bearing a quarterstaff.
“Those are their names in a different book,” the other interrupts, “not what they’re called here”. She taps the grubby screen of a tablet that rests on the tomb between them, before turning her attention back to the stage. “And that one is George a’ Green – his castle was an earthwork at Mount Pleasant.”
“Not an ancient hill fort, but a defence raised in the Civil War. All past history comes down to this: a great city has been besieged by little kings.” He indicates the standing figures at either side of the arch: “These wildmen off the Calthorpe Arms are his homies.”
“And she’s the genius of Sphinx House, over there,” she says, pointing past the drinkers towards a brick building to the left of Trinity Court.
By now, the Knight is quite entranced by them both. He suspects that the names they have given apply to themselves, rather than the features towards which they have directed his attention, and entertains little doubt of the identity of the three characters upon the stage. As he settles into their company, he catches sight of the rucksack he had noticed earlier. This has been casually slung into a plastic crate, which has evidently been used to carry the theatre into the garden. The straps have been left unfastened, and dolls spill out over the edge and onto the grass.
“We play games with those too,” Wildman remarks. “But never mind them – why don’t you take a part in our drama?”
“I’ve just read this,” adds Sphinx, profferring the tablet to him. He makes out words beneath the patina of fingerprints upon the screen:
EUNICA: Let us stand in some corner for to heare What braving tearmes the pinner will breathe.
He shakes his head, and draws back from the device.
“Well, do you mind if we finish off?”
“There’s not much background to explain,” puts in Wildman. “George is utterly pissed at these nymphs because they have been toying with his emotions, and playing various weird tricks on him. In the scene we’re performing now, they’re trying to get into the gardens of Bagnigge House, where he stands guard over the two springs that rise in the temple.”
The Knight relaxes, and leans in towards the stage, while Sphinx and Wildman take up their positions again. She stands to the left of the theatre, and he to the right. The tablet, which appears to serve as the merest prompt, rests in front of the stage between them. Wildman infuses the figure of the Pinder with nervous movement, and delivers the following lines:
GEORGE A’ GREEN: Backe againe, you foolish travellers,
For you are wrong, and may not wend this way.
Sphinx tilts the gowned character with the scythe towards him:
MALIS: Peace, saucie mate, prate not to us.
GEORGE: I am the pinner, and before you passe You shall make goode the trespasse you have done.
At this, the cross-dressed figure glides to the side of Malis.
EUNICA: Come, we will forward in despite of him.
GEORGE: Ile prove it goode upon your carcases,
A wiser wisard never met you yet,
Nor one that better could foredoome your fall:
Now I have singled you here alone,
I care not though you be three to one.
MALIS: Why, art thou mad? dar’st thou incounter three?
We are no babes, man, look upon our limmes.
GEORGE: Marry, come, let us even have a bout –
Ile draw thee on with sharpe and deepe extremes.
The Bacchante frantically weaves between the opponents.
NYCHEA: Sirra, downe with your staffe, downe with your staffe,
Least you be torne in peeces with shee devils.
But the Pinder makes for her in a threatening manner, and all three sisters engage in combat with him, driving him back across the stage.
GEORGE: Ha, stay a little; hold thy hands, I pray thee.
MALIS: Now, sirra, Ile lay thy head before thy feete.
Malis sweeps forward with her scythe. The Pinder is tipped to the ground, and the other two sisters advance to stand over him. They sing a ballad about ladybirds and stinging nettles and April in a green jerkin with a rook on one fist and a horn on the other. All this time, the Knight has kept his gaze fixed upon the prone body, expectant. Then, when their song ends and nothing further occurs, he lifts his gaze to the players.
“That’s all, folks!” says Wildman, in a put-on accent, bringing down the curtain.
Sphinx looks at him kindly. “It’s not a mummer’s play. There’s no resurrection scene.”
Wildman extricates the figure of the Pinder from the stage. He detaches it from its metal slide, and passes it to the Knight. As his hand closes upon it, the Knight receives a vision of the Pinder, his faun head set upon a lumbering body, following Nychea across dewy fields. She leads him to a riverside hut, but when he crosses the threshold, he finds Malis awaiting him in her place. He accepts the change of partner, and settles upon a joined stool so that she may mount him, only to struggle from beneath her as she slips some burning object into his mouth. As he pushes past her to leave, he observes a golden key protruding from between her teeth. Back outside the hut, he encounters Eunica, lounging beside the doorway. She looks him up and down and says: “The time is come, but not the man.”
15
The Knight pauses on the broad area of pavement set between two closed gates of the Royal Mail car park, and looks down towards Blessed Mary’s Well, later known as Black Mary’s Hole: the impiety of the shift makes him tremble, though it is scarcely surprising – in the green language in which he has been instructed, his ears can detect the heretical name of Oldcastle hidden within Coldbath Fields.
Hotel staff stand smoking in front of the goods entrance of the Holiday Inn across the road from him. Postal workers move along the edges of Mount Pleasant: he eyes these with distrust – his contacts at the Bird Bridge have long since brought the writings of the so-called Monsieur Dupont to his notice, and he suspects them all of nihilist communism.
As he walks on towards the end of Calthorpe Street, he sees Malis, Eunica and Nychea nearing the end of King’s Cross Road: to his alarm, Malis is swinging a scythe in front of her. She and Nychea settle down at a table outside the Union Tavern, while their sister steps into the bar, to return with three pints on a round plastic tray.
Once they have all taken their glasses, Eunica slowly pours water into the tray from a plastic bottle which she produces from her satchel. Now they gather with lowered heads to gaze into the surface of the liquid, forming three points of a triangle around a black circle.
His attention is distracted from this scene by the approach of a postman along Farringdon Road. Dressed in a summer cap, high-visibility waistcoat over a short-sleeved shirt, and combat shorts, the newcomer stops, and hands the Knight an item drawn, not from his shoulder bag, but from a pocket.
“I’ve been trying to deliver this for a long time,” he says.
The postcard is worn and creased. It shows Blackfriars Bridge, with Saint Paul’s in the background. A dangling figure has been roughly sketched under one of the arches of the bridge. On the reverse of the card, the Knight finds an inscription, written in red ink: “IL GIOCO DEL PONTE.” His own doubly accursed name is marked on the right, with his old address at Chelsea Cloisters crossed through beneath it.
A twelve and a half pence stamp is positioned in the upper corner. Although this is of a date to be conventionally gummed, rather than self adhesive, the sender has chosen not to lick the back, but has attached it to the card with a paperclip. The Knight detaches this and holds it out upon the flat of his hand towards the envoy, who shrugs off the implied question.
“No free post,” he says, stepping out along Calthorpe Street. As he walks off, the Knight notices that he has an armillary sphere tattooed on each of his calves.
16
When the Knight looks back towards the Union Tavern, he sees that Malis, Eunica and Nychea have just moved off along Lloyd Baker Street. Their empty glasses and the black plastic tray remain where they have left them; the rake and scythe are propped against the wall of the pub, and the bird’s nest is balanced upon a windowsill. After a moment’s indecision, he crosses the road, to settle at their table before it is cleared.
Eunica has not bothered to tip out the layer of spring water that covers the surface of the tray and, as he lets his eyes shift focus, the reflected sky is displaced by the image of a figure occupying the paved central area of a narrow sunken garden, enclosed between a series of blind walls and a council block. She is seated upright in what appears to be an armchair, a blanket printed with a recurring design of sphinxes thrown over it. A sheet of cloth hangs in iridescent folds behind her, from a line supported by poles set in the earth of the borders, painted red and blue.
The sisters are stretched out upon their bellies on the black and white checked sheet of linoleum laid over the ground before her. At first, he thinks that they have prostrated themselves in her worship, but then realises that their adoration is directed towards the object on which her feet rest: this is no cushion, but the Toadstone, its grey-green surface studded with bumps, slick with bitter liquid.
In disgust, the Knight rises to his feet, and lifts the tray from the table, as if to empty its contents onto the pavement, but then he hesitates, and holds it level before him as he walks on down Farringdon Road, past the overgrown garden in front of Charles Simmons House, the balconies that look down upon it bright with drying laundry.
17
The Knight sits on the seventeenth step down, the eighteenth up, of the enclosed staircase that twists from Rosebery Avenue down to Warner Street. The tray from the Union Tavern is balanced on his knees, his right arm curled around it. In the spring water, he has watched the sisters rise as a single being, triple headed, six breasted, rearing up on three serpentine tails – glittering white, grey and sky blue. The image breaks from time to time as passers-by let coins fall into the tray.
“Do I make a wish?” asks his latest benefactor, dropping in a handful of coppers with a splash.
The Knight, whose pockets are stuffed with useless currency, makes no acknowledgement, but inclines his face towards the wrought iron tracery to his left. He sees the wit exit the staircase and steer right onto the street, and a man in overalls slide open the concertina door of Viaduct House in order to enjoy a cigarette outside.
When he looks back into the water, he finds that the sisters have vanished: in their place, there appear figures who dismount from their scooters and leave their weapons of shaped flint in a stack before entering the garden. As they raise the fox and cat masks from their faces, he sees that they are little more than children. Not too long afterwards, he hears footsteps approaching from the direction of Mount Pleasant. Malis, Eunica and Nychea clatter up the stairs, and stand in an arc around him.
“Those are ours by rights,” says Eunica, indicating the coins in the water.
“We have drinks to buy,” Nychea adds, dredging the tray with her hand. “Not that this will even cover the next round.”
“And I think you’ve had that long enough too,” puts in Malis, knocking the tray so that his trouser leg is soaked. The water runs off along the narrow drainage channel behind him. He makes no reponse to the insult, and they go back down the steps. Through the tracery, he views the crowns of their heads as they emerge onto the pavement and turn in the direction of Ray Street.
18
After a while, the Knight rises, leaving the tray propped upright in the corner he had occupied. He follows the direction taken by the sisters and feels no surprise when he catches sight of Malis and Nychea sitting outside the Coach and Horses, drinking pints of Portobello Star. Eunica, who has been standing about a quarter of the way across the road, darts back towards them as a delivery motorbike approaches from Warner Street.
A peep board has been set up opposite the pub, at the foot of Back Hill. Made for Clerkenwell Design Week, this commemorates the death of Christopher Preston, the proprietor of the Bear Garden once located here. The board, rendered in mosaic by Designworks Tiles, shows a baited bear, rearing up on its hind legs, with a human figure dangling from between its jaws. The latter’s face is a void: any passer-by may choose to fill the space with their own, and so meld their identity with his, both tormentor and victim.
Although the incident took place in 1709, Preston is turned out in the fashion of a still earlier era. Nattily dressed in jerkin, doublet and trunk-hose, he maintains a nonchalant posture even while the bear’s teeth crunch down on his skull, his right hand resting on his hip, his left still clutching one end of the chain attached to the animal’s collar. The effect is as worryingly incongruous as Dalí’s appropriation of the courtier portrayed in a Hilliard miniature: relocated from a rose garden to the greenwood, he is tethered to the ground even as he floats upwards in the guise of the Prince of Love, or is suspended by one foot among weird smears of foliage as the Hanged Man.
19
The Knight observes a burly figure, clad in a leopard skin edged with scarlet, walking towards Saint Peter’s Italian Church on Clerkenwell Road. A bass drum harness swings from his right hand; a pair of mallets is clutched in his left. A further three members of the marching band, all dressed in the dark tartan of the Sutherland Highlanders, have been waiting outside Terroni’s delicatessen. As this stretch of pavement becomes more busy, they regroup beside the bus shelter at the eastern corner of Herbal Hill.
The drummer strides past the taped off entrance to Back Hill, where floats are being made ready for the procession; the shop on the corner, its balcony painted with the tricolore, stocked with religious artefacts; the women positioned in the doorway of the church, medals suspended from red ribbons about their necks. While he keeps pressing onwards between the holy images on the north side of the road and the waiting crowd on its south, the Knight takes his time, pausing to gaze at the figures at the feet of the Madonna of the Miracles of Mussomeli: the man who has just received healing from her, flexing his left arm and leg, and a cherub who regards him from a little outcrop of rock, holding up a shield bearing the town’s coat of arms – three towers, each surmounted by a large golden bee.
Other statues occupy the pavement in front of the Bryson Hotel: Our Lady of Fatima; Saint Anthony of Padua, bearing white lilies and a blond infant Jesus; Saint Lucy, who carries a palm branch in one hand and holds out a goblet containing her eyes with the other; Saint Franca of Piacenza, in Cistercian habit, positioned in front of a painting of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, whose right cheek is marked by a double scar; the Archangel Michael standing in triumph over the dragon; Saint Francis of Paola and Saint Rita of Cascia, the patron of impossible causes, who clutches a bunch of roses to her breast: the imprint of a thorn is visible upon her forehead. A second image of Saint Anthony is placed beside her, his head surmounted by a nimbus: in this variant, the child he lifts is portrayed with dark hair. While these figures stand ready to be carried in the procession upon wooden litters decorated with flowers – the fercula of pagan Rome – Saint Calogero, the black hermit of Sicily, remains parked in a trailer on the road alongside them, as he is to be conveyed by car.
The Knight looks on as a pilgrim’s staff tied with white ribbons is placed in Calogero’s left hand, and an ornate silver box – a copy of his reliquary – is hung from his other wrist. As he does so, he catches sight of Nychea among the onlookers moving along the pavement towards him. She pauses to stare at Saint Michael, trampling upon his fallen adversary, and the Knight’s mind turns to the vision of the sisters prostrated before the Toadstone. Before he has time to consider his actions, he has moved forward to confront her, and he is astonished to hear his own voice speak out: “In the end you will be a serpent and dragon, like Melusine and others of her kind.”
She opens her eyes wide at this, and pushes past him. In an unfamiliar state of fury and elation, he pursues her as she dives down the pathway left open for pedestrian access on the western side of Back Hill, scarcely registering the floats lined up, ready to depart, alongside the Parish Office and Herbal House, or the costumed figures assembled behind the high white Cross of Peace. All at once, he feels the power drain from him as he encounters Malis, who has left her place outside the Coach and Horses to come to the aid of her sister: even as the queue descends towards Ray Street, she steadily forces him back to the corner, until he is standing outside Ngon Ngon. There is a note of glee in her voice as she says: “You’re right in the wolf’s mouth now, where a prince who recognises you is sure to pass.”
He turns from her at a sudden intensification of noise from Clerkenwell Road, to see three white doves ascend into the sky amidst a cloudburst of tinsel. As the procession sets off from outside the church, he hurries to join the crowd on the opposite pavement, anxious to leave Malis behind. Even so, her words continue to distract his attention, so that he can only take in the spectacle as fragments.
a group of women dressed
in regional costume / who
carry baskets of produce
and a jug of wine / one
has transferred her burden
to the crook of her arm
/the better to cool herself
with a lace edged fan
/while her companions wear
bonnets in keeping with
their aprons and shawls
/her face is obscured by a
bright pink sun hat / the
area from her eyes to
her lower lip is patterned
by sunlight falling through
its brim of mesh / her
chin and throat swathed
in shadow
a blonde nun
/ clad in a white veil and
pale grey habit / drawn on
a long red ribbon behind
the float dedicated to
Saint Vincent Pallotti / the
Knight registers the glint
of a wristwatch above
her left hand / the silvery
toe strap of her sandal
a pair of helium foil
balloons in the form of
winged blue unicorns that
hover for an instant between
Christ and John the Baptist
as they pass the entrance
to White Bear Yard
/ the Baptist is a feral
presence / grizzled hair
straggling over his shoulders
/ his sackcloth outer
garment partly covers a
robe streaked with varying
shades of green / the wooden
bowl he holds upraised
is carved with a recurring
pattern of leaves
/ reminiscent of that which
borders a foliate head
the burly / full bearded
legionary who strides in front
of Christ along the Via
Dolorosa / in leonine middle
age / he seems both
wily and strong / apparently
left-handed / he carries
his spear on the side
closest to the Knight / his
helmet / topped with a plume
of red bristles / cradled
beneath the opposite
arm
the bare chested
youth led captive between
four guards / his hands tethered
by a leash of rope / his
evident self-consciousness
intensifies the impression
that the figures
which surround him are
moving in a trance
the white
traces of glue visible
in the space that would have
been occupied by a stone
representing one of
the tribes of Israel
/ fallen from the breastplate
of judgment worn by Caiaphas
the ghostly outline
of the head of Jesus upon
the veil borne by Veronica
/ its features smudges
As the Knight regains his composure, he steadies his gaze upon a one legged man, a pale blue sash with a white border and gold tassel around his torso, who follows Our Lady of the Snows. A zebra striped bag dangles from the left handgrip of his wheelchair, while his attendant, elegant in sunglasses, a blazer and high-waisted dress, steers him forward with the other.
An angel, whose raiment appears to be of the same substance as the silver plumage of her wings, sits before a background of unbroken blue above a float patterned in gold. She briefly lowers the shroud she holds, upon which the image of Christ is imprinted as if in blood, in order to sweep aside the hair that persistently drifts across her face. Further down, just beneath the semi-transparent panel that conceals the driver of the vehicle, the Knight reads the legend, displayed upon the simulacrum of a scroll: ON THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN.
Christ himself stands with one foot upon the lid of his opened sarcophagus, the other upon its rim, a pennant suspended from the Triumphal Cross in his hand. On the ground before him, a guard props himself up by his right elbow, his left arm raised before his face, while another legionary, positioned towards the back of the tableau, shields his eyes with a hunting knife: a child, dressed in the same uniform, is huddled against him.
Mary is raised among pillars, their bases hidden by clouds of gauze. She supports a porcelain doll, a rosary stretched between the first two fingers of its right hand and the thumb of its left. An attendant with downy wings, clothed in some material that resembles shimmering fur, holds a chaplet of roses over her head. A second angel is perched further down the white slope of steps upon which the Queen of Heaven is enthroned in victory, and a third stands at its foot: each of these clasps a lily. In front of them, a nun and monk, one robed in white, the other in brown, are seated upon concealed chairs in a zone divided by shimmering ribbons, beams that emanate from the figure above them. At the further end of the float, the Knight sees two girls in tabards of purple cloth, embroidered in gold with a pattern incorporating crosslets, crowns, leaves, flowers and a fruit which he thinks might be a pomegranate. One extends a trumpet before her, facing in the direction of the church; the other is turned towards the virgin and her child, a censer swinging from her hand.
All the while that the procession has been slowly moving on towards Rosebery Avenue, the Knight has drifted back through the crowd until at last he reaches Saint Peter’s. The participants in the tableaux, kept in position by hidden supports, make him think of the figures manipulated by Wildman and Sphinx, while the statues carried in between them seem quick with the energy they have accumulated through worship. As he encounters each of the multiple incarnations of Jesus, he strains forward to receive that acknowledgement Malis had foretold, but one after another goes by without paying any heed to his presence.
Now, as a second flight of doves is released to mark the outset of the statue of Our Lady of Carmel, the Knight looks across to the steps in front of the church, only to meet the calm, benevolent gaze of one who knew secrets he could not dream of, who had been admitted to the presence of Aldo Moro in some safehouse of the Red Brigades, perhaps in a palace, beneath a frieze of lions attacking horses, or in that very flat in the Via Gradoli identified by another ghost from the years of lead by means of a talking board. It is this same man whose father had expelled the Knight from a meeting of priests and bankers on the last day of May in 1982, whose brother the Knight himself had threatened, in the misery of his imprisonment, with a name that should never be spoken, even in confession.
In panic, he plunges down to Warner Street, to lose himself in the hubbub of the Sagra taking place there. Once he has regained his sense of security among the throng, he idles before a table upon which gigantic playing cards are laid out, and examines the stalls offering honey and home made wine. He picks up a book commemorating the Italian immigrants sent to their deaths on the Arandora Star, victims of an old panic about the enemy within. As he reads through the names of the drowned, a couple of boys approach him. The smaller of the two is turned out in a suit and tie, and the Knight wonders if he has slipped away from the group of First Communicants who took part in the procession. His face is concealed by a plastic carnival mask, striped with the colours of the Italian flag – white for faith, green for hope, and red for charity. Mutely, he holds out a duplicate by the strip of black ribbon attached to its back. His companion regards the Knight with a bold expression, and says: “He thinks you should wear this.”
The Knight reaches forward to hook the mask from the boy’s hand in the fervent belief that this encounter has been brought about for his protection. It does not occur to him that the child may merely have wished him to cover up his death’s head.
Confident that his identity is shielded behind the mask, he returns to Back Hill. The procession has followed its course around Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road during the time that he has lingered at the Sagra, and the foremost floats have now returned to their starting point. As soon as they turn off Clerkenwell Road, the characters in the tableaux drop their fixed postures and become fluid and uncanny: other figures appear, to dismantle the scenery and tidy away the props – to the Knight, these appear to be scavengers, making off with the everyday relics of the divine.
Outside the church, he finds no trace of that apparition, more disturbing than himself in its vitality and power, which caused him to flee. He bends stiffly to gather a handful of silver strips from the pavement, then looks up again to catch sight of the larger statue of Saint Anthony being conveyed by its bearers, uniformly dressed in white shirts and black trousers, southwards along Hatton Garden.
20
As the Sagra disperses, the Knight returns to the Coach and Horses. Malis and Nychea must have drunk up and left long before, and the space once occupied by the peep board has been taken by a fiddle player for her pitch. She is clad in a bear suit, her own face exposed through its gaping mouth. The Knight steps into the road to approach her, but comes to a halt above the square drain cover where Eunica had stood. As the tune shifts from “Black Mary’s Hornpipe” to “Hockley in the Hole”, he becomes aware of how the music is accompanied by the voice of the river deep beneath his feet.
He wanders on down Ray Street Bridge to Farringdon Lane, where he pauses before the plate glass window of number 16, to see Eunica kneeling upon the opened trapdoor of the Clerks’ Well and staring down into its depth. The water that reflects her image is no longer that of the Fleet, but leakage from the mains pipes. She stretches her hands over the well and various coins, broken pieces of jewellery, and a mobile phone stir upon its tiled floor, disturbing the sediment that covers it, and sluggishly begin to rise. As she becomes aware of the presence of an onlooker, she lets her hands fall back to her side, and these trophies gently sink down again.
She emerges onto the pavement to confront him, but whatever anger she feels at his intrusion is dispelled by the manner in which he briefly lifts the mask from his face, as if there was some possibility that she might not have recognised him: the gesture carries an implication of trust, of rendering their exposure mutual. He tugs a stringy mass of tinsel from his jacket pocket, and offers it to her in imitation of the gift he received, as if it might be a contribution to her hoard.
Solemnly, she tucks the offering into her bag. In return, she produces her