A Song Of Stone

Chapter 4

I regret I am impressed with our lieutenant, if mildly. She has a sort of uncut grace, and I find her lack of beauty (as she does, not unthinking) beyond the point. I do not like people who make me notice what they fall to find impressive in themselves.

You rise and walk round the table, straightening the flag as you approach, then stand behind me, hands on my shoulders, gently pressing, kneading, massaging. I let you work my tired muscles for a while, my body rocking slightly, my head moving slowly back and forth. I do believe sleep may be coming at last; my eyes half close, and a sleepy focus brings my gaze to the surface of our flag, spread upon the table. Dried mud lies scattered on the flag, a souvenir of the plains delivered courtesy of the lieutenant's boots. No doubt their soil lies sprinkled over most of our rooms, corridors and rugs by now. My gaze, filtered through the blurring eyelash veil of my half-closed eyes, stays fixed upon that caked dirt lying on our colours, and I recall our second tryst.

I threw you on this same flag once, though not on this table, not in this room. Somewhere higher than here; an old attic, dusty and warm with the day's soaked in sunlight. On the other side of those slates we had used as a prop to our pleasure the night before, we crept while the rest of our party, still recovering from the night's excitement, lunched on the lawns or soaked away hangovers in baths. I wanted you immediately my desire stoked but smothered, banked for the rest of that night first by your too proper concern for our absence being noticed, then by the sleeping arrangements, which meant we each had to share a room with other relations but you demurred at first, in some recollected aftermath of shyness.

And so, like the children we no longer were, we investigated old boxes, trunks and chests, our declared pretext become real. We found old clothes, moth eaten fabrics, ancient uniforms, rusted weapons, empty boxes, whole crates of hard, heavy phonograph records, forgotten urns, vases and bowls and a hundred other discarded pieces of our history, recent and antique, risen here like light detritus upon the swirling currents of the castle's fluid vitality, deposited at its dusty, unused summit like dusty memories in an old man's head.

We tried on some old clothes; I brandished an age spotted sword. The flag, unfolded from a trunk, made a carpet for our shoes and discarded clothes, then after I grew bolder, taking off more, helping you with your assumed attire, letting my hands and fingers linger, then kissing it became our bed.

Within the arid calm of that dark, abandoned place, our passion took and shook the flag, rumpling and creasing it as though to a slow storm it had been exposed, until I dampened it with a sparse rain more precious than air and storm clouds ever have to offer.

I recalled those offered moon pearls of the night before, and on the flag it was as though they now lay returned, memento vivae unstrung upon a sewn on and now crumpled shield, with swords and some mythic beast shown rampant.

You drained me, sequentially; our pleasure became pain and I discovered that you suffered in silence, and screamed quiet, hoarse, bitten off for satisfaction only. We fell asleep eventually in each other's arms, and on our family's.

You took your repose like your pleasure, sleeping one eye half-open, above an embroidered, fading unicorn. We slept an hour away, then dressed and luckily unseen hurried down apart; you to a bath and I to a hillside walk we each pretended had begun long before.

You continue, working my shoulders, stroking my neck, pressing into the top of my back. My gaze remains fixed upon the mud the lieutenant's boots have left. When I was young, just a child and you were away, held from me by that family dispute our mating somehow sought to mend I remember that for my early years I hated dirt and mud and grime more than anything else I could imagine. I'd wash my hands after every contact with something I thought unclean, running in even from sports and games outside to rinse off under the nearest tap what was no more than honest earth, as though terrified that somehow I might be contaminated by that mundanity.

I blame, of course, my mother, an essentially urban woman; that excess of fastidiousness which she encouraged served me ill for those young years, bringing down upon my head a shower of insults from my friends, peers and relations more filthy than anything I thought I might pick up from wood, ground or park.

It was a horror of the common; something Mother thought was ingrained, indeed genetic, within both our class and particularly our family, but insufficiently so by her strict standards; something which required reinforcement, feeding, bringing on and bringing up, like a carefully trained flower or a well bred and well groomed horse.

My fanatical cleanliness was the symbol of my worship of my mother, and the acknowledgement, the very expression of our superiority compared to those beneath us. It was a” belief which Mother was perfectly appalled she could not effectively evangelise to others of our station. I knew of people of our kind as well connected, as ancient in their lineage, as abundant in the extent of their estates who, as far as my mother was concerned, entirely let down the side by living as meanly or at least as grubbily as any peasant with bare feet, an earth floor and a single change of clothes. I knew people who owned half a county who habitually packed more dirt beneath their fingernails than my mother considered decent in a window box, whose breath and person smelled so that it was possible to detect their earlier presence in a room for half a day subsequently and who, save for the most special of occasions, dressed in old clothes so tatty, torn and holed that each new servant brought into their employ had to be carefully instructed, should they come into contact with these rags on the rare circumstance when they were not being worn by their owner, not to pick them up between finger and thumb and at arm's length take them promptly to the nearest fire or outside bin.

Mother regarded such laxity with disgust; of course it was easy to live as one wanted when there was no one to tell you otherwise and one possessed an income independent of external sanitary sanction, but that was precisely the point; the poor had an excuse for their grubbiness while the better off had none, and to reveal oneself as being happy to live in conditions which might unnerve a pig was an insult both to those like my mother who clove to the true faith of immaculate hygiene, and indeed to those less fortunate as well.

My thoughts on such matters matched those of Mother perfectly; they were the very image of hers, and I remained her disciplined disciple in all this until one day in early spring, at the age of nine, when I was walking alone in the woods to the north of the castle. I had had an argument with my tutor and my mother and, when my lessons had concluded for the day, had stormed from the house, not noticing the rain that was approaching from the west. The wind surprised me underneath the still bare trees, a loud commotion shaking their tops, and only then did I turn back towards the castle, clutching my thin coat around me, seeking in the pockets for gloves that were not there.

Then the rain came, plunging in a cold fusillade through the near naked branches of the broad leaved trees where only the first hints of bright buds broke the brown monotony of bark. I cursed Mother, and my tutor. I cursed myself, for paying too little heed to the weather and for neglecting to ensure I had both cap and gloves with me. The coat my best, another foolishness born of angry haste snagged on branches as I made my way back down. My shoes, polished to a gleam, already bore scuffs and were spattered with dirt. I cursed the grasping trees, the whole noisome forest, the dung shaped hills themselves and the dark, spitting weather (though only, it must he said, in terms that would have made Mother frown a little I believed as did Mother that my mouth as much as my well scrubbed skin must stay unsoiled).

The path angled down the side of a hill, beneath the tall, swaying trunks; it zigged and zagged, taking a shallow, easy route towards the castle, but long. The rain, by now tumultuous, stung my cheek, plastered my hair to my head and started to insinuate its way down the back of my neck, icily intimate and crawling like a cold centipede against my skin. I roared at the heedless hills, the witless weather and my own cursed luck. I stopped by the side of the track, looked down and determined to cut out the bends in the path and head straight down the slope.

I skidded twice on a slurry of mud and decaying leaves” and had to clutch at the wet and slimy ground to prevent myself from failing further. Cold muck and the rotted humus of the previous year's fall squelched between my fingers, gelid, brown and troughed; I wiped my hands on the grass as best I could, leaving smears. My treasured coat was growing heavy with the rain, its surface everywhere darkened by the incessant drops, its cut elegance made loose and incontinent by the lathering rain, probably ruining it for ever.

At the bottom of the route I'd chosen there was a steep bank and a deep ditch to negotiate before I could regain the path; I blinked through the water streaming down my face, looking this way and that, trying to see an easier passage, but the bank and ditch ran on to each side and there was no simpler route. I decided to jump, but even as I stepped back to gather myself for the leap, the bank gave way beneath me, sending me tumbling and flailing down the muddy slope. I collided with exposed roots and was thrown outwards, landing on my back on the far side of the ditch, knocking all the wind out of me and smacking my head back on a stone, and then winded, dizzy, helplessly disoriented I could not help myself rebounding, falling forward, into the dark soiled depths of the ditch.

I lay there, hands clawed into the filth on either side, my face stuck into the rank mud. I pulled my head free of the earth's cloying grip, eructing the muck from out my nose and mouth, gagging as I spat and snorted out its thick, cold mucus. I tried to breathe, swallowing between spits and splutters and attempting to force my lungs to work while a terrible vacuum I could not fill sat within my chest, mocking me.

I rolled over, still wheezing for my breath, thinking in a panic that I might die here, suffocating in the midst of these woods” frigid excrement; perhaps I had broken something; perhaps this awful sucking inability to take a breath was the onset of a terrible, spreading paralysis.

The rain plummeted down at me. It cleaned my face a little, but my neck and back were sinking down into the mud and my shoes were filled with cold, filthy water. Still I laboured for air. I started to see strange lights above me in the trees, even as the totality of the view dimmed, and the air roared at me like an obscene lullaby presaging death.

I forced myself to sit up, kneel, then get on all fours to cough and hack once more, and finally persuaded some spittle charged air to whistle down my throat towards my lungs. I gagged and spluttered again and stared down at the brown glue of mulch and soil flowing up around my hands; it rose until the dark tide quite covered them and only my wrists showed, pale against the muddy swirl, while below the scummy surface my hands kneaded the giving, pliant, warming mud that suddenly felt like flesh. I coughed once more and sneezed, and watched long glutinous strings loop down from my mouth and nose, attaching me to the soil until, with one enmired hand, I brushed them away.

I began to breathe more easily at last, then, believing that I would not now die and had not been seriously injured, I looked about me. I gazed at the lashing drops sprinkling all around, at the slick, swollen curve of the ditch's flank, bordered by a soaking skirt of heavy, drooping grass, at the darkly towering trees standing imperiously over me, at the thin, gauzy veils of rain still sweeping and drifting through the moistened forest, at the little silky rivulets of water running down over glistening, limb like roots protruding from the earthy bank and flowing across the surface of the path like some rough, chill sweat of the land.

Somehow, I began to laugh. I coughed once more as I did so, but still; I laughed and wept and shook my head and then flopped forward into the dun sludge, surrendering to it, making swimming motions within its glutinous embrace as I tried to gather it to me, squeezing it between my fingers, taking it into my mouth, smearing it on to my face, drinking it. I started to strip off my soaking clothes, wriggling wetly from them, casting them aside, half maddened, half incited by their cloying, clinging resistance, until finally I was naked in the cold filth, rolling in it like a dog in ordure, freezing and numb but laughing and growling, smoothing that slime all over my body, excited by its clammy caress so that the cold and wet fought a losing battle with my own raised heat, and in a while I knelt there in the bottom of the ditch, plastered in streaked mud and for the first time in my life masturbating.

There was no issue, the soil went unsoiled and I did not truly join the earth then but after that dry and fiery coming,

and with that warm, thigh deep glow still echoing within me, I dressed, shivering, and cursed the grainily slick, damply uncooperative clothes. My curses were more florid now; I used language appropriated from some gardeners I'd overheard months before, those cuttings only now taking root within my soul and blooming from a now quite thoroughly fouled mouth.

The rain was clearing by the time I returned to the castle; I accepted the servants” attentions, Mother's kindly shrieks and busy sympathy and gladly took the warm, steaming bath, the fluffed towels, the clouding, perfumed talc and the sweet cologne, then let myself be dressed in crisp, clean clothes, but there was something else I wore now, something that was now part of myself, like the gritty water I had swallowed in the ditch and which was slowly making its way through my system, becoming, in part, part of me.

Mud, dirt, filth, soil, the very earth itself, in all its slimy, scatological uncouthness, could be a source of pleasure. There was an ecstasy in letting go, a value in continence beyond its own reward. To remain aloof, to stay unsullied, to maintain a certain distance from the unholy marl of life could make the final embracing, the eventual taking and possessing of that fundamental quality, one of one's most sweetly precious, even blissfully acute pleasures.

I think Mother looked upon me differently from that day on. I know I regarded myself as being someone quite distinct from the boy who had set out upon that walk. I tried to remain as civil and polite as Mother might desire when I was in her company or with those on whom she knew she could rely, through good or bad reports, to provide a vicarious presence, but in my soul I was a new and knowledgeable creature, possessed of a certain wisdom, and no longer really hers. No more advice, no censure, rules nor even love itself could she offer me in the future, without it being measured against the intelligence of that taste for base surrender and brazen possession I had discovered in myself, inside the saturating force of that deluge, descent and fall.