The New Uncanny (7 page)

He ate up his breakfast and went into the garden but not to play. He had so seldom been lied to directly that he did not understand it. Thought and speech were one in his closed world. But he knew, he knew that nanny had made a deliberate gap between her thoughts and her words. He went into the garden, but not to play. There was playing, which was not relevant; there was hearing, which was not trustworthy; there was seeing which was not possible. There was touching and feeling. He looked at the little red mark at the base of his thumb, which was beginning to bruise and very tentatively, very, very carefully, using only his finger tips and ready for sudden attack he began to explore the back of his head.

After an hour he knew. And knowing, he knew that he had always known. There was another face: he could feel its nose through the flannelette of his hood, shorter perhaps than his own, though hard to tell, but with two indentations for nostrils, certainly; he could feel its lips though carefully with the flat of his hand so as not to get bitten again. He knew already it had teeth. He thought he could feel the hinge of its jaw moving just behind his ears.

He could not untie the string of his hood, but after some effort he worked it loose enough to pull it back from his head. He placed his two hands delicately on the back of his head, either side of its nose, and could feel the hollow underneath his palms. He waited and felt a flutter, like a butterfly’s footfall. It was blinking. He pulled his hood back on and wriggled the knot tight. He went inside and sat on the sofa again and chanted his times tables, all the way from one-two-is-two to twelve-twelves-are-one-hundred-and-forty-four over and over again, all day long.

Later on, just as the day began to fade, he left his room very quietly so as not to disturb nanny and went along the passage to find his father. After he had passed the bottom of the stairs that went up the attic he did not really know the way. He opened various doors into various rooms all heavy with dust and cold. A huge cold dining room with twelve empty chairs and faded red velvet curtains; a room with an even bigger table covered in green cloth; there were no chairs and the edge of the table was turned up – he did not know what it was for. There was a long passage, a huge hall almost dark, and a room with little uncomfortable sofas and lots of little tables with lots of little things on them – that room was lighter, with long windows looking out over the shaggy field that his father called ‘the lawn’; he had only ever seen it from high up on the hillside. That room seemed a strange thing to him because it was both beautiful and pretty. He had not known that something could be both. But his father was not there.

He came to a door with light coming out underneath it. He opened it very softly. The room was warm and clean and wonderfully untidy, with precarious piles of paper and books stacked up or lying on the floor, as nanny never let him leave his. His father was sitting with his back to the boy; his bald head inclined forward over a large desk. The boy could see that he was writing. He watched him, watched the smooth back of his skull and the slight movement of his elbow.

His father was unaware of him. After quite a long while the boy said, ‘Daddy.’

His father raised his head, apparently without shock or surprise and said, ‘Hello, what are you doing here? I was just going to come for you. It must have been a boring day for you with Nanny
hors de combat
.’ He often had to guess what his father meant, and it did not worry him. ‘But you must learn not to be impatient.’

‘I am not impatient,’ he said with dignity. ‘I have come to ask you something of grave importance.’

‘And what is that?’ His father smiled at the formality of the announcement.

‘I need to ask you why there is someone else on the back of my head.’

The boy was aware that the warm peace of the study was broken. It made him wary – his father was a hero of the nation and should not be afraid of anything. He said nothing, awkward now. After a pause his father said, ‘How did you find out?’ He sounded weary.

‘It bit me.’ The boy walked towards the desk holding out his hand.

He was almost too big to climb into his father’s lap but the older man held him close, kissing the small bruise. He sagged there for a while exhausted by the long slow day, but it was not enough,

‘But why, Daddy?’

‘I don’t know,’ his father said, ‘no one knows. It is a strange and mysterious thing.’

‘Couldn’t you take it away?’

‘No, no, I’m afraid not. But it is not a someone, it is a part of you.’ The boy could hear a strange insistent urgency in his father’s voice; and he thought it might be fear. So his father was afraid of something. The boy’s world shivered, threatened. Perhaps it was his own fear that made him daring, because even as he asked, he knew it was a dangerous question. He asked, ‘Is it what killed my mummy?’

‘No.’ But the no was too loud, too strong, too resolute. It was like Nanny’s ‘naughty girl’; it was true but not true; the speaker chose it to be true although there were other choices which the speaker did not choose. Grown-ups, he learned far too suddenly, spoke with double voices, cunningly, so that true and not true weren’t like white and black, like either-or, like plus and minus; they were like the bogs on the hill side, shifty, invisible and dangerous.

His father’s revulsion from the boy’s deformity was very strong. Because he was a man of self-discipline rather than courage he would never admit this even to himself; this was why, each evening, he obliged his often reluctant lips to kiss the secret face so tenderly. This was why, too, he missed the boy’s curiosity and tried to offer him consolation instead of information.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘have I ever shown you a picture of your mother?’ He turned the boy’s head very gently towards a miniature set up on a filigree easel on his desk. She smiled there, all pink and blond and blue-eyed. She was pretty. But it was a picture, a painting; the boy knew that paintings did not always look like the thing they were paintings of. He could never be sure. And he did not much care; he had other things on his mind. But he understood that his father had let him into a secret place of his own and deserved some sort of thanks. He tried, slightly experimentally, to say the right thing, to do that grown-up speaking which makes a gap between the feelings and the thoughts and the words.

‘I don’t look much like her, do I Daddy?’

He had got it right. He felt his father smiling. ‘No, you look more like me, and bad luck to you, except that men should never be that pretty.’ Their dark eyes met in what the father thought was a sweet moment of male complicity and bonding. And a little later they went upstairs, hand in hand, to play with their train set.

But the day had been too difficult and his need had not been met. What he had learned was not about the other face, but about the way grown-ups did not want to talk about the other face. There was something dark and horrible about it. They were ashamed. They wanted him to keep it secret with them and from them.

But alone, alone in the darkness of night, and the deeper darkness of its invisibility, with delicate and attentive fingers, he began to explore the back of his head. He learned that what hurt it, hurt him, so he had to treat it tenderly; he learned that it blinked when he blinked, but did not smile when he smiled, or weep when he wept; he learned that its nose never dribbled, but if he pinched its nostrils closed, it did not breath through its mouth, but he became breathless; he learned that he could make it happy or angry, but that it seldom bothered to be sad.

In the end fingers were not enough. He needed to see. He could not ask.

It took him nearly two years to work it out. Then one day while the blind servant was in charge, he stole into Nanny’s bedroom and borrowed the mirror from her dressing table. He took it into the bathroom and began to experiment. His father had by now taught him both some physics and how to play billiards. There had to be a way of angling the light, like angling a delicate in-off with the ivory billiard balls. If he looked in a mirror into another mirror at the right angle, he calculated that perhaps it might be possible. It was awkward. The bathroom was not designed for the purpose and its mirror was fixed to the wall.

Then, almost unexpectedly, with Nanny’s mirror propped a little precariously on a tooth-mug on the windowsill, he turned his head a little and he saw what it was he was trying to see. The face was paler than his face and had no proper chin so that the mouth was angled slightly too much downwards; but he could see that its nose was very like his and its eyelashes were longer. It was prettier than he was, and it was not a painting or a picture; it was real. It opened its eyes and they were blue, as blue as the summer sky, as blue as his mother’s were in her painting. Its eyes met his and it smiled, a cunning triumphant smile. It was not an it, but a She.

All women have double mouths, he thought and then he thought that he did not know where the thought had come from.

After that he could hear her voice. She whispered to him. She used his brain to think her thoughts. She used his breath to be alive. He was never alone. And he could not tell anyone.

Sometimes it was fun – She was his friend and he had never had a friend before. They played games together, and usually he won because their feet and hands were under his management; but when he tried to run away She would come with him, following close behind, though looking in the other direction, and he could never get away.

Sometimes it was not fun – She thought thoughts he did not want to think; She said words he did not want to hear and he could never get away.

He could not have any secrets. He made his life a secret from Daddy and Nanny, but they were not real secrets because She always knew and he could never get away.

Adolescence. That was what Daddy and Nanny called it, affectionately usually, even proudly. But She called Daddy ‘Papa’ in a sweet little voice, which Daddy would have loved if he could have heard it; and She was mean about Nanny and refused to understand how much he needed and loved her. She complained when he wore a hat; She would wriggle and protest if he tried to lie on his back, to sleep or to look at the sky; She loved the light, and the sunshine, to which he did not like to expose her.

She hated it when he masturbated. His fingers, now well practised in delicate explorations, had new plans of their own, plans which sometimes he found appalling and sometimes found intriguing and occasionally found absolutely the most fascinating and delightful and demanding and consuming ideas in the whole wide world. She would distract him with loud noises, silly giggles, filthy words and a scathing contempt at his ineptitude, both physical and manual. He was to her both pathetic and disgusting. She was always there, and he could never get away. She had to be kept secret but he was allowed no other secrets, or privacy or silence.

When he was seventeen he fell in love. A new maid came who sang like a bird in the early morning and was soft and round with dimply cheeks, big breasts, orange hair and a merry smile. He never spoke to her, but he watched and yearned and dreamed and hoped. He wanted without knowing what he wanted. Sweet first love, or first lust without knowing the difference. But She was having none of it. She was jealous and mean and set up a shrieking in his head. Over and over again she shouted, ‘Freak, freak, freak. That one will never love you – she’ll only want to see me.’

When he tried shouting, ‘freak’ back at her like a little boy, she giggled spitefully and said, ‘No, no. I don’t exist. I am just the freak in you. I don’t have a me. I have a you. I’m not a someone. I’m a part of you. Ask Papa.’

She said, ‘That little trollop won’t love you; she won’t spread her legs with a Lady watching.’

‘Never?’ He asked her plaintively.

‘Never,’ She said with undisguised glee.

‘I’ll kill you,’ he threatened.

‘You can’t,’ she said, ‘You can never get away.’

So one evening, just as the day began to fade, he left his rooms very quietly so as not to disturb Nanny and went along the passage, but not to find his father. As he passed the bottom of the stairs that went up the attic he remembered the train set with which he and his father had not played for years. It was not enough. He opened various doors into various rooms all heavy with dust and cold. Then he went downstairs to the gun room, wrote a short note for his father and shot Her through the mouth; his mouth because he couldn’t get the shot gun into the back of his head.

I FIRST GOT the idea for The Underhouse when, as a child, I would stand on my head in a corner of the living room, and thereby find myself in a different house entirely, one where the furniture hung from the ceiling rather than stood on the floor, where light bulbs grew at the tops of tall, thin trees, and where doors had to be passed through like stiles, one leg at a time. I desperately wanted to explore this exotic house, and was profoundly disappointed every time I uprighted myself (at the behest, usually, of my exasperated parents, ‘the blood will pool in his head!’) to find that it had vanished.

Then, as a grown-up with my own house, I noticed how the cellar, which was underneath only one room (the living room), exactly matched, in shape, the room above it. And then I thought how the horizontal boundaries of rooms, unlike their vertical counterparts, change their essential nature depending on which side you are viewing them from. To put it more simply, a wall is a wall no matter which side of the wall you are. But a floor, when viewed from underneath, becomes a ceiling, which is a very different thing. Do you follow?

Standing in my cellar one day, looking up at the boards which provided a floor for the living room, I had the turn-around thought; what if I refused to regard this thing above me as a ceiling – what if I decided to call it a floor also? The thing is, it looked like a floor. It was made of wooden boards supported by joists. The only difference was that the joists were foremost, and the boards were rough, dirty wood, whereas on the floor above they’d been varnished and draped with rugs. Dimensionally the only real difference between the cellar and the living room above it was to do with height. The cellar was a much lower room than the living room. I had to stoop whenever I went in there, though in fact this was an unnecessary precaution, for when I measured it it turned out to be six foot five inches from floor to floor boards (i.e. ceiling), and six foot exactly from floor to joist. At five foot eleven I had plenty of headroom, but still I felt the need to stoop.