Two extracts from Joseph's Box
Extract 1
Archie moved stealthily through the elms, dodging from one tree to the next. There was no-one about, yet he felt that he was able to sense the movement of every single worm in the ground, every leaf as it desiccated in the sunshine. For though here in Lincolnshire it was deep night, it was as though he was moving through all times simultaneously. At first he had been consumed by an inchoate terror, and he’d wondered if he was in Hell. But then, as he had noticed that he was no longer naked, that his internal organs were no longer exposed to the blinding light or the freezing darkness and that the terrifying mirror had faded to nothing, he had begun to attain something approaching equanimity. And now, wearing, for the first time in over sixty years, his World War Two Royal Air Force uniform, Archie found himself beginning to revert to the old forms of discipline. And it was so good to be able to breathe properly again. He took a deep breath in and held it there at the apex for a few seconds, to savour it, to hold and caress the oxygen as though it were a vintage wine or a finely distilled single malt whisky, to let it fill his being and set him alight, so that he would feel like an angel, or like God. Granted, his throat was barely a fist’s diameter and he was hungry yet unable to eat. Nonetheless, this fugue had rendered him a certain lightness of touch and existence which was far from being uniformly unpleasant.
He wasn’t sure how long it had taken, but by what seemed like several weeks later he had figured out how to travel great distances without having to … travel. He could go in all directions at once, through time and space. But although he moved unseen through the affairs of the living, who now seemed like shades, he had not yet spotted any other spirits. Only once had he become disturbed, when a woman wearing narrow-rimmed spectacles of the sort his mother had had in her younger days had been able not only to see him, but also to pull him down into herself – into her mouth, for Chrissake – a most unpleasant experience, especially as she had halitosis! He’d told her in no uncertain terms to fuck off, but he wasn’t sure the words had come out quite as he’d intended, since her tongue and palate had simply howled as though she had been a wolf. She’d scared him half to death – or would have, if he hadn’t already been dead. After that, at the slightest hint of psychic activity he’d streamed himself away, flown up beyond the furthest plane – or at least, the furthest he’d been able to go; there had seemed a point, or rather, a great translucent ceiling, beyond which he was unable to rise. The fact that he no longer needed to eat, drink, piss, shit or bath had come as a pleasant surprise. Once or twice he’d tried to talk to people, but had ended up producing only music. So Archibald Enoch McPherson had come to the conclusion that he was completely alone, and though he was startled by this realisation, he felt that in some respects solitude wasn’t so bad: indeed, that it could be liberating. Especially when you knew things.
He was at the lake shore, in the middle of the forest. In sixty years the ground had sunk, the trees seemed taller and the house was a ruin, but the air and the night were the same. He half-expected the ghost of his twisted bicycle to come spinning out of the woods towards him, but even thinking about this gave him a headache. How can a head ache, when it’s not there? he thought. He reached up to his temple and when he brought his right hand down again, he noticed that there was blood on the fingers and palm. I have just fallen off my bicycle and have walked through the forest. It is June 1942 and Hitler is at the height of his fucked-up power. But I am in freshly laundered uniform. Furthermore, the house was definitely in a far worse state now than when he had taken refuge in its interior. Indeed, there no longer seemed to be an interior. Perhaps only some things reproduce, he thought. Strange that I haven’t seen Margaret yet. Then a harrowing sorrow welled up from the pit of his belly.
By the edge of the jetty, at the place where the small island sank into deep water, he saw a figure diving and splashing. He thought at first that it was a dog, or an otter. Cautiously he moved closer (he had become much more cautious following the encounter with the medium) and saw an arm raised as though someone was swimming. His watch had been screwed from the beginning, its hands spinning at random. Looking at it made him dizzy and he thought of flinging it into the long grass, but then the swimmer was moving towards him at a rapid pace, switching styles noisily. Instinctively, he hid behind the great brain of a fungus that had attached itself to the trunk of a large beech tree.
The swimmer hauled herself onto the bank – yes, through the substance of the tree Archie made out the figure of a woman. She was completely naked and her thin body gleamed in the moonlight. Her skin, pale as milk, had gathered and atrophied in places and her hair was lank and silver. Yet she moved across the grass, moss and sandy earth like someone rejuvenated. She sat down on the bank and Archie saw that this was where she had left her clothes and bag. Removing something from the latter, she held it close to her mouth. A sudden flash, a momentary illumination, startled him. And it was odd, but for a moment he fancied by something in the manner in which she paused that perhaps she had sensed his presence. But then, as she began to smoke, she eased herself down onto the grass so that she was lying down, staring at the circle of sky formed by the ring of the highest leaves of the clearing.
Her breathing was deep and relaxed and reminded Archie of the sound of flowers growing from moss, or the sibilance of a breeze teasing the edge of a counterpane. He crept around the trunk and positioned himself so that he was directly above her. She was in her late fifties, maybe older. Her pubic hair largely had turned white and her small breasts sagged. An unfamiliar smell, a certain lightheadedness. He could see that once she would have been attractive, alluring. He could see back through her life, to the time when she was in her twenties. And the old feelings began to return. The old physical compulsions that had used to drive his being into the hunt, into the fire, into war, into Margaret. And again he wondered why it was not the young Margaret he was seeing lying there, her back taut against the cool moss laid atop stones old as creation. He wondered why it was not Margaret, whom he missed so terribly it tore his insides out, whose absence wound an unseen thread around his body. But then the web was formed by the physicality of the forest, by the night, by the Queen of the Night, by this stranger who was bathing in the lake of his soul.
And Archie began to seep like liquid through her skin and into her flesh, so that the lake inside him began to heave and roar as it had done when he had gone to war or else to the whore, the woman whom he had almost killed with his own hands. Or perhaps he had killed her, it was all so mixed up now in this state of distorted clarity. He was caught in the sweeping electric discordance that was rising from this crone’s flesh. He struggled wildly, but was unable to reverse the movement, and at the point where the guitar hit crescendo, Archibald Enoch McPherson found himself inside the body of Laila Sciacca Asunsi, inside her childless womb. And from there, inside every cell, every coiled protein of her being, the being of the woman whom he had never known and who simply had taken a short grass-break from her regular midnight swim in the place, upon those very blades of grass and those broken twigs, those dead leaves pressed layer upon layer into the bosom of the warm earth where, over six decades before, he had entered the narrative and the song that was of a quite different loka.
For the second extract, click here.