MOUSEHEAD Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

         
         Mousehead Magnificat.

         Mousehead Inviolate.

         Mousehead screaming silently because he always screamed silently, so silently he heard nothing. Sitting watching television with the volume off, knees to chin, long back bent forward, hair swept back, just beginning to thin at the front and whiten at the sides. Oh Mortal Man! Watching images moving unfathomably on the screen. Groups of soldiers or guerrillas or rebels or terrorists running from wall to wall or crouching in dusty places to fire rockets at a distant village which sheds smoke into the cloudless sky. The heroic freedom fighters or fascist murderers grin at the camera as if they have just paid 50p a shot at a fairground. Cut to a row of bodies in a courtyard. Weeping and anger. Elongated faces, hands turned skyward, perplexed eyes. Close-up of pool of blood congealing to brown in the high white sun.

          Cut to woman immaculately suited, slim, trustworthily brunette - no flighty air headed blondes for us thank you very much - hazel eyes wide open with astonishment. No sorrow, no anger here. She is wearing a sky-blue suit, fashionable yet conservative, and a white blouse. Her world holds no terrors. It is world without pain. World without poverty. World without war. World without the body-odour stench of verminous millions turning toothless faces to the dust. World without end, amen, amen. She is amazed because the whole wash is cleaner, brighter, fresher than it has ever been before. Suddenly the sun has come from behind the clouds. The high white sun splintering over the clothes line, drying the blood. Cut to new Cola anthem, heroes and heroines turn their clean, astonished faces to the sun, to the high white sun. Cut to cornflakes. Cut to death.

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         Mousehead Magnificat.

         I hold these words like cracked and polished knucklebones. I speak the truth, for every polished word is true; every scoured and rubbed and burnished word is true. They have their own weight, these words. I can feel the weight of them in my hand. They are beauty, these words. I can feel the beauty of them in the hard ball of my stomach. I open my mouth and they fall out -scatterings of bones in the corner of a sunlit silent room where particles of dust drift lazily down to the open pages of a small, old leather-bound book.

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         Aubrey Mousehead, 65 and fading.

         Named in a moment of divine pomposity after Beardsley. So named, but not of course baptised, by Arthur and Elizabeth Mousehead, nee Freeman. Conceived in splendour, born in what Arthur, clinging to Art like a life raft in his shipwrecked post-war world, called "Celestial Poverty".

On the mantelpiece behind him are several curling black and white photographs of young pretty women. He does not see them. They exist, possibly, somewhere in the unfocussed past.

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         Aunt Dorothy moved her pale translucent fingers as she spoke. With every word her bottom lip quivered as if it were struggling over the strange vowels and consonants of an alien language.

         "Let me tell you, m'boy. King Edward had legs like stripped-down herrings! What d'you think of it? Hmm?"

         Mousehead - then 20 and untamed - liked Aunt Dorothy. He liked her age, her crumpled face, her distaste for all things commonplace, her endless stories of a regal girlhood, her fruity voice, her bizarre sense of humour, her blatant animosity towards the others. Most of all he liked her because he felt she could see through him as easily as he felt he could see through her.                              

"Saw 'em once, y'know. Stripped-down herrings! He came to stay with us for one of those ghastly weekend party affairs. Everybody just so. Frightfully posh. Thirty-two of us sat down for dinner, don't y'know - quails eggs and all that. Squirrels' backsides in aspic. Revolting stuff! Anyway, we gels were there for decorative purposes only. We weren't supposed to eat. After the meal the men had their cigars and brandy. The whole blessed lot of them were as drunk as skunks by ten O'clock, and the footmen had to carry them all up to bed. I was looking out of my window and I saw him come out in his dressing gown. I believe he urinated behind a tree. Whatever, that's where I saw 'em. Skinny and white like fishbones in the moonlight. Ha!"                                        

         Her face disintegrated into a smile, as brown and creased as an old ten shilling note. Mousehead smiled back at her and leaned back in his chair, looking out of the window at the black Cornish night.

         "They spy on me," she said. What curious path had taken her from Royal legs to this tired old obsession he knew not. He turned reluctantly to look at her, at her watery colourless eyes.

         "They watch me every moment of the day and night. Every moment. Now. I can feel them watching me. I can hear them behind the doors, behind the windows. And what do they hope to see? Hmm? What do they hope to see? An old, old woman withering away her last few years. Old and decrepit and stupid. Half dead already. They tried to put a curse on me, y'know. Or somebody did anyhow. I'm sure it was them. I found the crossed sticks outside the caravan door, three mornings in a row. They want rid of me. I scare them. Your Father daren't speak to me. He leaves the room as soon as I walk in. And your Mother leaves notes, just like talking to a child. 'Your dinner is in the oven.' 'Have you got any laundry?'. They wanted to kill me with the crossed sticks but I lit candles and prayed. Soon saw 'em off! They can't get me, y'know. They keep spying and leaving their curses, and I keep praying and lighting candles."

         Mousehead allowed his gaze to leave her and to settle instead on the black rectangle of the window. He had heard it all before, this talk of curses and candles, and it was at such times he liked Aunt Dorothy least. He found any talk of things spiritual profoundly uncomfortable, although he would never have admitted it. The persona he offered to the world was that of the omnivorous intellectual, avidly devouring every creed, philosophy, idea and statement which came his way; then diligently sifting through them all, sucking out the meat and discarding the bone, so maintaining his integrity. In fact his mind was teeming with half-digested and half-understood snippets of other people's thought and beliefs. Of himself there was little more than a desire for self-preservation at all costs, sharpened by an almost superstitious dread of mortality. Anything which smacked of personal reality gnawed at his stomach and sent him scurrying for cover. Abstractions and earnest late-night conversations were more his forte.

         Outside it had begun to rain steadily, so sadly it constricted his chest and brought the kitchen shadows into painful focus, providing the perfect setting for his mood. She would be slipping out to her solitary caravan soon. She was almost done now, almost talked out. The stories were over and the confused, fearful mumblings had begun. She would rise like a ghost and drift ghostlike out of the door, exhaling ectoplasm. Rain dribbled down the window. His chair creaked as he settled himself back on it.

         "They hate me," she continued, " because I know all about them. They want to suck me - they're vampires don't y'know. They want to make me just like them; hollow and bloodless. They've no blood of their own so they want to take mine. They want my heart and guts. I'll never let 'em, my dear. I'll die first - Ha! Then I'll come back clanking and rattling and haunt 'em. Not that they'd notice. They'd just carry on reading their silly books and looking at their silly pictures as if writers and artists were something more than just plain ordinary men. Ha! God's not to be mocked, y'know!"

         Mousehead doubted it.

         Father's books reached the ceiling, shelf upon shelf, multiplying over the years until they filled every wall of every room apart from the kitchen - and even this haven possessed two shelves of cookery books. In the rest of the house Arthur's wildly catholic taste in reading matter had originally been arranged in alphabetical order of authors, so that Groucho rubbed shoulders with Karl, and Death of a Salesman brooded alongside the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Eventually this system had been abandoned in favour of classification by subject, which appeared to work quite successfully as far as non-fiction was concerned, but which led to some startling bedfellows among the novelists. Finally, with so many books in the house, the criteria had become size alone. Now the different systems vied with each other in ecstatic confusion, their musty scent pervading the air and constantly dragging him back to his childhood.

         Then he had sat for hours on end in the enclosed world of an only child, leafing through big canvas-bound Art books. Botticelli, Durer, Cezanne, Magritte, Rembrandt, Hals, Turner, Picasso - these were the stuff of his imagination, the Heroes and Supermen who's passions and labours cascaded undiluted into the uncomprehending and indiscriminate heart of an eight year old boy. And there, among these glossy prints, he had seen for sure all those mournful Christs hanging in such precise and delicate agony between snarling villains or trees or marbled architecture, while overweight winged babies held aloft golden cups to catch the fountains of blood. So many sacrifices. So many impaled hands and long, pale legs. So many nails and thorns, tears and scarlet gushings. Yet these images - these erotically beautiful men with dark hurt eyes turned heavenward in mute surrender- were, he had been assured, the images of God Incarnate. Surely God was to be mocked.

         "It's raining," she said.

         "I know. It's been raining for hours."

         She looked out of the window. "You can't see the moon any more. Only the night. Doesn't it scare you?"

         "No."

         "Ha! Yes it does. I can see the fear in your eyes. I can smell it. That's why you sit hunched up like that."

         He sat up. "No I don't!"

         "Yes you do. You've always been scared or angry. Small wonder with them as parents. The Living Dead."

         "They love you, you know." He was on the defensive now. Reality was lumbering out of the shadows and he was genuinely afraid. Also, whatever else could be said of them, they were his parents after all.

         "They love me, as you put it, because I am your Father's Aunt, that's all. They would change me if they could. They'd push me and prod me like a piece of dough until I was the right shape. They'd dress me in tweeds and thick stockings and sensible shoes don't y'know and dust me off for visitors."

         Mousehead looked at the splash of Indian colours she was wearing, and at the embroidered Turkish slippers, and he knew she was right. Mother and Father were free-thinking in principle, just as long as the practice did not in any way venture beyond the horizons of their own moral and aesthetic landscape. They tolerated his long hair because it could be interpreted as Artistic, though they would have preferred it not to touch his shoulders, let alone flow past them. But the jeans were another matter. Corduroy, preferably brown, was the correct male attire Chez Mousehead.

         "When your Father was a child," continued Aunt Dorothy relentlessly, "he loved to dissect frogs. I believe it says a lot about his outlook on life. He was a fat little boy, always cutting things up. If it was small and twitchy he'd be at it with his chloroform and scalpel before you could say slice. His nanny was terrified of him. Then he'd draw 'em. Yards of squiggling entrails across the paper. I can't imagine what he hoped to get from it, unless it held some sort of mystic significance for him, which is most unlikely. He only drew their insides y'know, right up to the age of fourteen I think. Then he left off frogs altogether, thank God, and went on to those blotchy landscapes he hangs everywhere. I'd have strangled him at birth myself. At least your Mother has some technical ability, if nothing else."

         Mousehead was trying not to listen, casting around desperately for a way of diverting the conversation. The subject of frogs had brought crashing into his mind the incident with the worm. Already he could feel the bile of anguish rising into his throat, sending hurricanes of panic through his nervous system, draining the colour from his face. He needed a drink badly, but there was none in the house. They were teetotal.

         Aunt Dorothy began to prepare herself to rise out of her chair. He wanted her to stay, in spite of the spectres she had released. Or, had he been honest, because of them. Forgotten things were now stalking the corridors and he was afraid. He wanted to reach out and cling to her sleeve, cling to her curled, brittle leaves of hands and force her back into her chair.

         "Don't go yet," he said, trying to keep his voice flat and neutral, "it's not late."

         "I'm not a nightbird like you, m'boy," she smiled. "I'm an antediluvian lady with tired old bones who should have been tucked in hours ago. Anyway, you know I can't bear this house. If it wasn't for you I'd never come here. Look at it. Books, books! Dusty bits of leather and cardboard and paper gathering more dust. Printed with dust. Illustrated with dust. There's no life here, none at all, that's what I can't stand. No life. He reads everything but sees nothing. Never read if you can possibly help it, m'boy, or you'll die just like your Father. You'll sit like a beached jellyfish sucking in other men's lives and thoughts until you grow a crust. Ha! But I don't have to tell you. You only look at the pictures, and God alone knows what you see. Promise me you'll go out tomorrow and get drunk, then perhaps I'll get some intelligent conversation for a change."

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         Scatterings of cracked bones in the corner of a sunlit, silent room. It was an illustrated prayer book. He was three, and had not yet learned how to read. Father had gone out and Mother had wandered off in the house somewhere, leaving him to amuse himself in the dining room. The window had flung an oblong of sunlight, latticed with shadow, across the threadbare Persian carpet. He sat cross-legged in the oblong with the open book on his lap. The picture was a clumsy woodcut of David and Goliath. Young David, wearing only a loincloth of long fur, was holding up Goliath's severed head, one foot placed on the corpse in a gesture of victory. Aubrey stared unblinking at it, but his child's mind could make nothing of it. The giant's hair was a mass of tight curls. His eyes were open as if even now, in the certainty of death, he could not quite believe what had happened. Between them a circular wound emitted a trickle of blood. More blood, carved into intricate, frozen shapes, gushed from his neck. David's expression - had it been better worked - would have been holy, suppliant, cleansed of all traces of self. As it was he looked merely bland and faintly absurd, with his eyes rolling upwards and his effeminate lips slightly parted. In fact he looked more than anything like a young pouting girl sighing over the foolishness of boys. Little Aubrey possessed neither the vocabulary nor the intellect to articulate the feelings which were being aroused in him. A nameless tremor was passing through his body from the pit of his stomach to the tips of his fingers. He was unknowingly in the grip of something magical, something mystic, something aflame with occult light. His blood tingled, and there was a sense of the oppressive weight of Religion in his groin. Somewhere in the universe a dark and terrible God stared down at him with evil intent like a hungry cat.

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         "I won't be here tomorrow," he said.

         "Why? Where are you going?"

         "Back to London."

         Aunt Dorothy tutted. "What d'you expect to find there? You go and come back, go and come back, and nothing changes. It's no place for a young man. What's wrong with Cornwall?"

         Mousehead ploughed through his flailing emotions in search of some reason which would satisfy both of them, but as always his internal wasteland was a place of chaos and rapidly shifting shadows. Nothing could take root there - nothing could flourish and blossom and be called his own. His mind, he told himself, was set upon a Noble Quest. Ahead, somewhere in uncharted waters on a distant day, lay his goal: the Holy Grail, and eventually God Himself. His heart however yearned for those other elusive, trembling delights it had lumped together under the sparkling title FUN. And FUN - his heart said - could be found only in London among his friends, those reckless Sons and Daughters of Impossibility. Aunt Dorothy may have known a lot about him, but what she didn't know would, he suspected, have straightened her frizzy grey hair in spite of her bohemian principles.

         He stood up and stared into the saturated night. "I must go," he muttered lamely.

         Aunt Dorothy looked sharply at him. "D'you need any money?" she asked.

         "No. No thanks. I'll get by."

         "Sure?"

         "Certain. It'll only tie me down."

         She sank back into her chair and gazed blankly at the books on the opposite wall. "Take nothing for your journey," she mused, "neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money..." Her eyes misted over. For one heart-wrenching moment Mousehead thought she was going to drop dead on the spot. But then she apparently regained whatever had been slipping from her and smiled sweetly at him.

         "You're such an odd boy. Sometimes I think you come from a different dimension altogether. Are they all like you in this London of yours, I wonder, or are you unique?"          

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         He put down the book and remained sitting on the rug, seeking the microscopic. Motes of dust suspended in the dry summer air; flecks of plaster drifting from the ceiling; cat-hairs in the pile of the rug. An ant appeared from a crack in the skirting and stood as if in an anguish of spirit, transfixed by the sudden sunlight, feverishly waving its antennae, seeking reassurance in the familiar. Unable to find any it retreated back into the gloom.

         He followed it.

         The passage was hot and dry and dusty, twisting and branching its way deep into the wall, rustling and whispering in its hidden places. Ants lowered their black, armoured heads as he passed, avoiding his gaze, shuffling their hairy feet. They were the captives of their antness, just as he was the captive of his humanity. They must walk these passages. They must move when chemically commanded; they must fight, sit, build, tend, carry, march, eat - even die - without thought, without question, bounded by the circumference of their being. Their humiliation was complete, as was his. Their shining, bristling bodies vibrated with the blind futility and horror of their existence. Sounds of mysterious activity came from the lightless tunnels around him. Eggs glowing sickly pale and plump lay neatly stacked in twitching piles, tended by anxious nursemaids. There was a sweet earthen scent in the air, and a sense of base itchy fear.

         The ant he was following stopped at the entrance to a chamber and stood there deferentially, waiting for him, swivelling its large head slowly from side to side. He walked past it, seeking some clue from its expressionless face, and entered the chamber.

         Enormous, bloated, quivering and pulsating, the queen filled her room from end to end, hugely and obscenely fat. At her head a team of slaves constantly fed her, fussing and worrying over her, touching and prodding and stroking as if they feared she may at any moment lose heart and cease to function properly, passing unknowingly with their saliva the chemical codes which kept their queen informed of the present condition of her domain. Her parchment-coloured sides throbbed noisily as she emitted from her rear an unending stream of pale yellow eggs which were immediately caught and carried off by more slaves. Queen in name only, she did only that which she was born to do, and could do no more.

         Then she raised her sagging head and looked up at him.

         Her huge black eyes held an expression of ridiculous self-conscious pride, tainted with pain. A soundless shriek of shame and agony glanced off the walls and resounded among the corridors. Something sticky oozed from her mandibles and dripped into the dust. Another egg popped out and was caught.

         He thrust his hands over his face and fell away from her, stumbling through the labyrinth and back into the sunlit room. Outside all was silent; but inside - among the meat and bone and cartilage, among the blue-veined rolls of gut, among the juice and blood, among the lump and bump and gristle of it all - inside, little Aubrey Mousehead was screaming again.

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         He laughed out loud.

         "No, Aunt Dorothy, I'm not unique. Far from it. I'm just exactly the same as everyone else - the same old battleground. The only difference between me and... and Father for instance, is that he sees the world as an Art Gallery, while I see it as a pigsty. That's all."

         He was being melodramatic, and he knew it. But this night - this eve of departure - was made for melodrama. The truth was that he knew nothing of himself, nor of how he saw the world. Emotions, ideas, vision, hearing, touch taste and smell tumbled uncontrolled and often unnoticed through him, bearing him like a leaf on their tides. To these amorphous shreds and shadows he attached such meanings and titles as seemed right at any given moment. Thus, a rush of adrenaline brought on through an unexpected twist in the meanderings of his half- thoughts would become a visionary experience, a foot placed upon the threshold of the doorway of Truth. And thus muddied feelings, more organic than spiritual, would translate into the short, meaningless poems which he collected in a small blue notebook. Believing himself to be a little lower than the Angels, he was in fact sensuous and utterly weak.

         "Strange boy. Strange boy. If I were fifty years younger I'd make love to you right here on the kitchen table and put an end to this nonsense once and for all."

         "Aunt Dorothy!" he laughed, deliciously shocked. "You're a villain and a witch, and if you were fifty years younger I'd let you! But I'd still leave tomorrow."

         "Ha! There! You've still remembered how to laugh! Honestly m'boy, you can be the most dismal company at times. Don't take things so seriously. Wait until you're old and crabby like me."

         "You're not old!"

         "Ah, but I am, I am." She stood up and opened the door, letting in cold moist air which she inhaled deeply. "I'm just well-preserved, like a wrinkled prune or a Chinese egg pickled in vinegar. I'm Dorian Grey's picture, decaying away in the attic while he still carries the bloom of youth in his cheeks. I lived in palaces once, y'know. Really. Beautiful, glorious palaces with long, cool rooms and marble walls. Now look at me! A prune! A thousand-year-old egg! What Prince would want me now? They think I'm eccentric, y'know. Your parents I mean. But I'm not. Oh no. I'm completely batty! Ha!" She breathed in the night air again. "I envy you. It was all too proper in my day. We weren't allowed to actually live. Everything was planned out and done for us. If you wanted to know how to smile at a man you looked it up in a book. Live, m'boy. Live while you can. They'll put a stop to it in the end, y'know. Your parents or the police or the politicians or the Church. They'll suddenly realise there are still a few free spirits wandering around, and they'll handcuff you and cut your hair and put a tie around your neck and strangle you with it."

         She stood irresolute for a few seconds as if she were about to say something else - something which had lain upon her for decades, coalescing, ripening for this moment, shivering now upon her lip. There came into her eyes an unreachable sadness. Mousehead was truly afraid. Then she smiled again and pushed her hair away from her face.

         "Goodnight, dear heart," she said, with an unexpected depth of fondness. "I don't suppose I shall see you in the morning?"

         "No. I'll make an early start."

         "Well, good luck then."

         "Thanks. Night, Aunt Dorothy. Love you."

         "Dear boy."

         He watched her totter through the rain across the few yards of paving to her defiant caravan. She paused and waved to him. He waved back and blew her a kiss as the door clicked shut behind her.

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         Mousehead Inviolate.

         Mine is the sacred heart, the graven heart, the heart-altar, stone-nourished. Life is broken here. Fear and hope are cracked, split, bled to death. The great things and the small are here dashed, crumbled, sliced and shredded. What can I say? This is a strange Temple. The worshippers are gone, its halls empty. Scatterings of old, marrowless bones in the corners of sunlit, dusty rooms. Even the God of the Temple is gone.

         I touch no one, as the man said, and no one touches me...