The Underground Man (24 page)

The whole collection evoked in me tremendous feeling. Certainly there was horror in those glass cases and some peculiar pulchritude to admire, but above all else I sensed that every organ was drenched in the same sad concentrate and that disappointment filled every last vessel.

I had wandered up and down those humid aisles for getting on half an hour and, rather surprisingly, my lunch had stayed where it was, when the following idea occurred to me …

But the answer was all too apparent.

By now, I had had enough of the place and was making my way towards the door, eager to fill my lungs with fresh air, when I came across an exhibit which struck such a deep chord in me that it stopped me in my tracks. Through the
jar's inch-thick glass I saw what appeared to be a tiny but perfectly-formed child. The little fellow was all hunched-over. His bald head was bowed in meditation, his hands rested delicately on his knees. He seemed to float in an entirely different world to me, looked to be scowling with concentration. But from under his right knee I saw that there dangled an umbilicus, which hung uselessly like a disconnected pipe. And at that moment I realized that he had, in fact, never lived outside the confines of his mother's belly – was but a foetus of a child. He must have gone straight from the warmth of the womb to the awful chill of the jar, effectively living and dying without ever having breathed a mouthful of air.

How close he had come to being born or the circumstances of his death I could not tell. The label made no mention of these facts. Yet he had on his head a smattering of hair, had fingernails and neat little toes … all the detail of a born boychild.

There was something familiar in his luminosity. Something in the magnification of the water and the glass. I looked in on him, hoping he might unfold himself and look me in the eye. But he did nothing but peer down into the solution which buoyed his poor body up.

As I was sitting here in my hotel room and recording the entry above I was reminded, no doubt by all the meaty imagery, of the one time I saw a rabbit being prepared for the pot.

I happened to call in on one of my gatekeepers and found him sharpening up a knife for the job. I remember the rabbit hanging forlornly in the corner from a hook on one of the kitchen's beams and my keeper going over and gently lifting it down and laying it on the table top. The prospect of a
rabbit-skinning quite intrigued me, so I asked if he would mind me staying to see how it was done.

I reckon I must have thought back to that day a hundred different times in an attempt to get a hold on that transformation; trying to locate the precise moment when the rabbit ceases to be a creature and becomes nothing more than a piece of meat. Certainly, when one looks upon a dead rabbit one easily senses the difference between it and the rabbits which live and breathe. Its head hangs too heavily, its limbs are limp, it is too deeply asleep. Yet one somehow imagines the situation might be resolvable. As if the rabbit has just temporarily lost its quick. One feels that if one could only summon up in one's lungs some essential heat or spirit one might breathe some life back into it.

But to see the rabbit stripped of its fur and see its flesh bloodily gleam is to admit to some important threshold having been crossed and that only a genius with a needle and thread could return this animal to its previous form. I recall the fur being peeled back with care (even kindness), as if helping an aged relative off with her coat. The leg-joints were neatly bent and tucked in order to ease them out.

Only when the creature's head is detached from the body can one say with certainty that the process is complete. For when the cleaver strikes cleanly through the neck and its awful edge is sunk in the chopping block, then both parts of the bloody rabbit must know how significantly they have been rent. And when the head is gone we have no eyes, either conscious or unconscious, and it is there that we plumb for life.

When the belly is slit open and the innards are removed (although, to be perfectly honest, I cannot now recall at which point in the proceedings this took place) we are, without doubt, in the domain of the butcher, not the open field. And
by the time the keeper had done with his twitching knife and gone off in search of herbs and onions to accompany the grey-red chunks into the pot, what I looked upon was not a rabbit but most definitely rabbit-meat (which, not surprisingly, I have never had much fancy for).

Last night, when I was all tucked-up in bed with the light out and just beginning to drift away, I caught a glimpse of the most distant, yet heartfelt memory. A recollection of some moment before my birth. There I was in my mother's belly; warm. My whole world very close to me. Yet there was something else – something important. Some other aspect which has slipped away. It is hard to find words to describe a time before words were available to me. But I have no doubt that what I momentarily caught hold of was a memory of the womb.

This morning I decided to stroll up to the Castle and break in a new pair of boots. Allowed Clement to come along, on the understanding that he walk several yards behind. I think the wind must have been behind us for we reached our destination in no time at all and finding I still had a little spirit to spare I left Clement at a chop house and carried on down the High Street to pick up some tobacco.

Bought a ‘Visitor's Guide to the City' from an old woman on the corner of Bank Street and was pleased to find it contained a folded map – very simple, about two foot wide. The old lady, who wore a pair of spectacles with one lens
missing, said it was by far the best street map of Edinburgh … of such quality that it had won an award.

‘What sort of award?' I asked her.

‘A map award,' she replied.

No doubt. Well, I asked if she knew a good tobacconist in the neighbourhood. A straightforward question, one would have thought, but one which provoked in her no end of personal discord and face-pulling before she finally reached some tentative agreement with herself. Having firmed up her directions she informed me how if I took the next-but-one passage off to the right and descended two long flights of steps I should come out right opposite one of the best tobacco shops in town.

Well, I thanked her, set off and, as directed, turned right at the second passage along the way. So confident was I of my imminently entering the tobacco shop and hearing the ‘ding-a-ling' of the bell above my head that I had gone down, I think, three flights of steps and was climbing a fourth before I sensed that I might have gone awry.

Twenty yards further down the passageway I found myself at the wrong end of a cul-de-sac. A huge iron gate stood before me, bound by a rusty chain and lock. At this point I felt distinctly worried. No, why should I lie? Panic is what I felt. I saw at once how that old crone had led me – a stranger in town and about as green as the hills – into an easy trap and how, any minute now, some great lumbering nephew of hers would descend on me, club me on the noggin and rob me of every last penny in my purse.

So I filled my lungs in preparation for a desperate cry for help and my head prepared itself to be clubbed. I waited … then waited a minute longer. The lumbering youth must have forgotten our violent little tryst, so I set off back down the steps as fast as my old legs would go.

When I descended that first flight on returning I saw a
passageway off to the left which I must have gone straight past before. It looked long and dark and full of drips. Was it possible that the old woman had included an extra turn in her instructions and that I had not taken it in? Perhaps she had meant to mention it but had omitted it and the mistake was on her side? Either way, I decided to follow the passage for a minute or two and that if the tobacco shop had not given itself up by then, I would simply turn myself around and come straight back.

Well, I can only imagine that I took another left or right which went unaccounted when I tried to return. For within five minutes I was feeling as if I were the object of some practical joke, whereby a half-dozen stagehands constantly switched the set between my going and coming back. The passage walls, however, seemed quite solid and not like the set of a play at all. My bearings found no tally in their surroundings. In other words, I was completely lost.

Then I suddenly remembered my award-winning map and got it out and studied it very hard, as if the sheer intensity of my gaze might draw from it the information I required. But, of course, a map is absolutely useless unless one can say for certain whereabouts one is on it, and as there was not a single street sign on the walls around me I might as well have held up a blank sheet of paper and tried to set a course from that.

Well, I must have bounced around those passageways for getting on three-quarters of an hour, with that map flapping uselessly in one hand. My mind became the debating chamber for two fiercely dissenting voices … one reassuring me that I would be out of this awful stone maze the next minute, the other screaming that I would never get out alive.

All this time I did not come across a single other soul. It was bitterly cold and every door and window was firmly shut. If I had been wandering across a desert, I thought to myself, I would have about as much hope of finding a helping
hand. Tenement buildings towered all around me and every once in a while I would come out into their yards. No doubt there were people within a few feet of me who knew this labyrinth like the back of their hand, but they were too busy warming them by their firesides to be bothered with an old man's distant halloos. The only signs of life were an occasional baby's cry or the distant bark of a dog, which echoed up and down the empty passageways. Given the choice, I think I would have elected to hear nothing but my own footsteps than those eerie, anxious sounds.

I trekked up cobbled valley and down cobbled dale. Turned myself about so many times I became dizzy and forgot which city I was in. I had marched myself deep into a state of exhausted fretfulness when I came out suddenly into broad daylight on a narrow footbridge which spanned a busy road below. Beneath my feet, on the floor of that city-canyon, the street was hectic with carriages and shopping-folk, all flowing merrily along. But my footbridge leapt straight across it, to disappear into a dark passageway on the other side.

As I peered hungrily down at all that humanity I noticed a row of three or four tiny shops. In the middle of them I saw one whose windows housed many mounds of freshly-rolled tobacco and many shelves of pipes. I saw the door of the shop open, heard the bell faintly ring and the proprietor, in a neat white apron, step out into the street. He looked left and right, as if he expected me, checked his watch, then turned to go back into his shop.

I shouted – at the top of my voice I shouted – so loud I felt sure I would set in motion tobacco-avalanches in his window display.

‘Halloa! Below there!' I yelled through cupped hands.

But the tobacconist disappeared. As he closed the door I heard the bell briefly jingle again but it was soon gathered up and washed away by the wind and wheels and horses' hoofs.
I pushed myself back from the railing and there and then consigned myself to being for ever stuck up in the sky.

It would be as impossible for me now to explain how I managed to extract myself from that conundrum as it would be to explain how I became lost at the start. Certainly it was not due to any resourcefulness or calculation on my part and, though it is strange to hear myself say it, I can't help but feel that some piece of me is still trapped in those passageways … doomed to wander, exhausted, for evermore. The rest of me suddenly found itself pitched back onto the High Street, as if the malevolent force which had held me for its entertainment had at last grown tired and spat me out.

By now the very idea of tobacco repulsed me. So I brushed myself down and, in the poorest condition, set off to try and find old Clement. On my way I passed the spot where the old lady with one lens in her spectacles had stood with her visitor's guides. If she had still been there I might have had a good old shout at her, though I am not sure what I would have shouted, or if I would have had the energy to shout for long.

It must have been late afternoon when I came across the bleak little cemetery at Greyfriars'. The air particles which had held the daylight were being slowly vacated and made cold.

I strolled between the gravestones in their weathered gowns of green and brown and read the epitaphs of horse-dealers, pulpit orators and medical men. Took some comfort
from the fact that even the most patronizing, puffed-up doctors do not escape the earth's deadly pull.

Sat on a bench and pulled my coat about me and watched the world slip through gradations of grey, a change so incremental in its nature that it was as if my own lungs were bringing it about. I remember pondering how an Edinburgh dusk might be different to an English one and chewing over corresponding matters of light and dark and, one way or another, reached such a zenith of enlightenment that I inadvertently drifted off.

I must have tumbled in the shallows of unconsciousness for quite a while, for when I came to things were altogether darker and chillier. My left leg, which was crossed over my right leg, was completely senseless and my fingers, which had formed a small cairn on my knee's hilltop, were similarly numb.