‘One
night I saw him standing naked at his bedroom window. Between his
thighs hung the dark semblance of a hank of knotted rope. Later, I
caught sight of him sitting on his fancied throne at the corner of the
moonlit walled garden. His shoulders appeared to sag under the sheer
weight of unbearable loneliness.’
Witness statement by schoolgirl Christelle Grace Temple, aet. 16,
from the Case Notes of Dr. Tibor Decuillé Cowry Ph.D., D.Sc., LL.D.,
Director, Royal Baronsgrove Institute, preparatory to the
pre-trial Psychiatric Report on Eugene Zerah Hoffrege, aet. 19.
•
In the humdrum is the beginning of murder.
Painfully bored, I found myself once again in the chapel robing room with my mild objections sermonised to silence.
‘The Ready Answer,’ the school chaplain raged, ‘of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue!’
He pointed for the nth time to the absurdest of the acronyms he’d scrawled in red pen on the title page of my latest slapdash essay, an initialled comment from his crackpot system of grades that denoted, I knew, the dire mark of Beta double-minus for our Revision papers.
He stabbed the paper with a nail-bitten forefinger.
‘It must have taken considerable ingenuity to produce a mark as bad as this.’
I nodded and smiled encouragingly.
‘I can’t pretend to say I understand you very well.’
‘R.A.P.I.E.R! The Ready Answer of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue! My faith is a true blade that cuts through deceit!’
Old Hopalong snorted and examined me forbiddingly over misted specs.
‘Qui vult decipi, decipiatur. I am not among the gullible who wish to be deceived, young man, nor shall I be deceived.’
The face of the Rev. H. W. F. Walmesley darkened a shade and he eased the celluloid of his dog collar.
Tears had gathered in his failing eyes so he fumbled in his haste to retrieve a loose sheet of notepaper tucked under the first page of my essay.
I recognised the oppressive regularity of my father’s handwriting.
Like iron railings.
‘Judgement notwithstanding the verdict, this morning I had this curious letter from your father making enquiry as to whether the results of your entrance scholarship exam have been delayed. Hmmm.’
His voice softened with a conciliatory – almost pitying – shift of tone.
‘For the sake of your poor parents I suggest you break the delicate news of your defeat without delay.’
He limped to the ambry to fetch his missal and dismissed me with a grunt.
‘Cut along, boy.’
•
That evening, secure within my mother’s abandoned henhouse, I withdrew from a dusty ledge above my dissecting benches an official-looking letter and the envelope which had enclosed it.
Its flap hung loose.
I’d steamed it open weeks earlier.
I read again the satisfying words in the dim light that filtered through the ventilation shutters.
It was formal notification of the failure of the candidate to pass his University Entrance Scholarship examinations under an early admissions scheme.
‘I’m tired of setting an example,’ I sighed. I was aware the muted defiance in my voice possessed a new edge of rancour. ‘I’ve deliberately flunked where I was expected to win.’
I resealed the letter in its envelope and returned it to its hiding place behind a congealed rubber glove.
‘I’m not at all sure that what I’ve done isn’t a chargeable offence – in the eyes of the Guv’nor,’ I murmured. ‘But at least I’ve won a brief reprieve, so ...’ I vowed to seize the precious fleeing hours!
‘Fugit hora! Carpe diem!’
Until midnight I laboured to trim my best catapult for perfect balance, and to rebind the whipping cord on its grip.
There was no hindrance to my remaining in the workshop from teatime to the small hours as the Ancient Parents were attending one of their interminable civic meetings exhorting bleeding-heart worldlings to bankroll country holidays for poor city children.
I saw them leave by the gate, wearing their virtue for all the street to see.
In the henhouse, the remains of my mother’s dry mash mixture packed in hempen sacks furnished a serviceable baffle for the thudding of my catapult practice.
A half inch diameter ball-bearing or a one ounce drilled lead angler’s weight can deliver the knockout shock of a giant-killer’s sling-shot.
After my carpeting by Old Hopalong, I’d sloped off in the lunch recess to visit Leggett Ironmongers and, just before Wednesday early closing, Edgar Leggett the elder had served me himself.
‘Found a fish to play?’ he’d mumbled; his chestnut hair was not his own, neither his teeth.
‘Yes,’ I’d nodded, ‘and one that will follow the bait.’
•
This morning, when I woke up, I thought, ‘Now there’ll be all Hell to pay!’
Not even to my mother had I confessed my self-scuppered scholarship.
The old Memsahib and the Governor – missionaries both – formed a definite idea long ago that their pious son should follow their righteous path and, like them, serve the Lord in heathen parts. From infancy my future has been the ever-pressing subject of their pained solicitude.
I found the Governor in our sunless front parlour, bible in hand.
‘My bright boy,’ he began, with a wealth of sarcasm on the adjective.
His posture was as straight as a harp string. He was waiting for me before the dead hearth, feet planted astride on the dark parquet. A faint glimmer of daylight struggled through the half-drawn blinds.
‘Ahem.’ He cleared his throat the way he does as a prelude to a bawling out.
‘Without faith, the world will end in spiritual ... ahem ...’
‘Mayhem?’ I suggested.
‘What have you to tell me? Can it be news of that free scholarship they put you forward for?’
‘Yes, Father. I’ve been ploughed.’
He was smiling to himself.
He had known all along! A copy of The Times lay open on the sideboard.
‘The ways of Providence are strange, sonny. Strange to us now.’
He clasped his hands and I could see his eyes were raised heavenwards.
(Though my parents consider me as an object of general censure, they also regard our family as having been elected by God to know the privileges of saving grace. These canting sectarian pieties are shared by the Redemptorian League whose usage, habit, and practice consume our daily lives.)
‘It’s evident that you have neither the desire nor the vocation for the divine calling.’ He turned his head with a resigned glance for an instant.
‘Yet one cannot help feeling that a wise Providence has done all for the best.’
To my astonishment I was then told that my hard-souled and joylessly joyous father is busily preparing for the Promised Land Upstairs. Apparently, the Great Rapture of the Second Coming is far, far more imminent than his peculiarly illuminated Redemptorians had hitherto reckoned, and Judgement Day is now practically round the corner!
‘When, precisely?’ I demanded.
‘Certainly in less time than it would take for you to earn a first class degree, my boy.’
‘I see. But what day will it be, exactly?’ I persisted, thinking: ‘I may have other plans.’
‘The End of Days?’ My father’s answer rang out with rare good humour. His eyes were now fixed on a celestial distance. ‘Who knows? Today? Tomorrow? We may next meet when we rise with the Saints to greet the Lord in the air!’
The old clock on the mantelpiece struck eight and he started.
‘Of one thing you may be certain.’ The Guv’nor snapped shut the Good Book with an air of finality. ‘We shall not taste death.’
He stood in the doorway with thrown-back head and downward glance as from a pulpit and announced in organ-like tones:
‘This year, my boy, Holy Cross Day falls on a Sunday so the Elders are in good earnest to take our mission meeting to the Juvenile Colony and hold our Bible classes there.’
I felt the pressure of his grip on my shoulder.
‘I count on your attendance. Observance is more than skin deep.’
‘Another praying-shop,’ I thought resentfully.
•
The farm settlement on the Fens is a training colony for juvenile delinquents and the Gov and the Mem are appointees of the Redemptorian League, charged to act as almoners in the disbursement of the league’s charitable funds.
The inmates of this agrarian reform school are drawn from the lowest type of offenders, spawned by some of the most villainous families known to stalk London’s slums.
I began to refine subtle thoughts that soon dominated my mind: ‘It would be something new and altogether exhilarating to be among young tearaways who consider it rather amusing to smash things or to steal without scruple or to reap some dim gratification in childish viciousness that finds joy in the pain of another.’
My mind was beset by a curious inner turmoil.
‘Every reformation must have its victims,’ I brooded. ‘My thirst for blood has to be appeased. An urge over which I have no sanction.’
I remained for some time in a state of sullen self-absorption, imagining my life degenerate into monotony, sacrificed to some futile sort of treadmill intended by my father.
•
The Sabbath found me trailing down the aisle, trapped in my wretched Sunday-second-best suit, keeping pace with the Gov and old Hopalong ... a poor sap doomed to hear the old trouper trumpet forth once more the Redemptorian League’s great work of moral rehabilitation and its God-given mission to reclaim every class of juvenile criminal and every den of East End undesirables from unwarrantable uncouthness.
(Seven years ago, I – a boy soprano – sang solo in this very chapel. Psalm Twenty-Three. The voice of a seraph. As the notes rose to sweetest perfection, I remember, I would think of fists soaked in the vinegar of Christ to toughen my resolve to live without any thought of the punishment scroll.)
I hid myself by the choir stalls, wedged in beside two doltish farmhands.
From my breast pocket I produced a bloodied handkerchief (Old Hopalong’s red ink has its uses!) and pressed it to my nose and lips.
My shoulders heaved. Dry retching is a ruse that even the dimmest First Former knows will succeed when intent on cutting lessons.
The farm-oafs, appalled, propelled me towards a staff door where, with one sickened glance at my official Redemptorian Yellow Pass, a sidesman waved me through.
(I had, that morning, filched Mother’s almoner permit from her handbag.)
I found myself in the exercise yard, a paved quad commanded by a guardhouse perched on a upper level like a signal box.
A flat racing forecast from Goodwood blared from a wireless. Evidently, staff watchfulness markedly slackens during the hours of compulsory divine worship.
So I slipped through the entrance to the Laundry block, and up the stairs to the Infirmary overhead, wholly unchallenged.
•
The first thing I noticed was the rosary looped through the boy’s pyjama cord, and I smiled inwardly. My raid behind enemy lines was over before it had properly begun.
The boy-martyr I sought was the sole occupant of the sick bay.
I removed my Bible from my pocket, inserted the Yellow Pass prominently as a book-mark, and approached.
Diagnostic Observation Schedule: Alester Baptiste, aet. 14 years.
n.b. Collective worship abstention/recommend Constructive Play (d/c).
Thus was his entry on the bedside medical chart. I read rapidly.
Apparently, the boy was in disgrace. (His playtime had been ‘d/c’, that is, ‘discontinued’.)
I then put into execution the plan of action that had germinated in my uncurbed thoughts. Often and often I had pictured to myself what true devilment might be like, now I was to find out.
I examined critically his dirty pudding of a face, his bizarre frizzed fair hair and the weak mouth of the simple-minded. Even so, he had perfect teeth.
‘Alester Baptiste?’
‘Who tell you my name? Yuh de bredthren fram de amshouse?’
‘Yes,’ I replied more or less truthfully.
‘Wozzup?’
‘I have news from the almoners. They have those funds for your release.’ I was guessing, yet his tawny eyes widened with recognition.‘We can get you out of here. Tonight.’
‘Inna de nigh? Yuh a jester, man!’
‘If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in this state-run snake pit, then listen.’
I went to the window and pointed to the building below. It would be so easy, I explained forcibly, to climb over the roof of the refectory, drop on to the coal bunker, and slink away into the shadows of the shrubbery beside the moat.
‘Then cross the water in the shallows to the base of the tower, where I’ll be waiting,’ I said.
At once he began to whimper.
‘Wenna de watta is dutty dey say don’t play inna it wid de running belly. In dis country I am cold too bad. It does leave me sick.’
As evidence of this he withdrew his chamber pot from concealment under the bed.
‘Nonsense! We don’t have time to go into side issues, just do as I say! ’
The lad’s intelligence was not keen enough to follow the drift of this remark so I shifted my position.
‘You can expect nothing here,’ I continued. ‘Nothing. It’s because you know they have nothing to give that you know you have nothing to lose.’
‘Dem is a no good bunch. I know dis t’ing for true.’
He groaned heavily, and sank into his pillows.
‘Agreed. So it’s only right we get you out of here. And fast. Is that not so?’
He regarded me with sudden doubt.
‘Wha’s agowin wid yuh?’
‘Are you able to keep a secret?’
He looked at me with a vague fear in his face.
‘Shouldah wanna hear it?’ he wavered.
I then explained every detail of his escape.
‘Tonight. Eleven o’clock.’
‘Eleben!’ the boy exclaimed with extraordinary brightness and emphasis.
‘We must hurry,’ I urged. ‘You need to decide now.’
‘Eleben! Yuh pwomise dis is true?’
‘Don’t ask for promises,’ I rounded on him, ‘ask only for revenge. Only blood drowns the pain.’
I glanced at my watch, then plunged my hidden scalpel into the ball of my thumb. A thin stream of blood appeared.
The demon in me waited and would not be satisfied until I saw the boy’s end written in his own blood.
‘You and me. We’re brethren. We must take the Oath of Brothers-in-Blood.’
Sight of the blood seemed to transfix him and render him as passive and tractable as a little child. He allowed me to make an incision in his right thumb.
It is repugnant to see mixed blood, to see blood mingle with mine in two veins at once, yet to achieve my ends I concealed my distaste.
‘Remember, you’ve to keep this business dark,’ I reminded him.
‘Breathe easy, man. My blood take yuh, man. Yuh is my best fren.’
‘Then that is all that need be said.’
His dark listening face, framed by the smooth whiteness of the bed sheets, made him for the minute a painting imagined by an orientalist.
‘Eleven o’clock,’ I repeated.
‘Yuh mean,’ he muttered awkwardly, ‘dat yuh soon come back?’
As a sign of the strange kinship we had sworn to one another, I bathed my mouth in his blood.
I washed my hands in an enamelled tin basin, and reapplied lanolin cream to the boy’s bandage.
The boy looked up with a gleam of something very like hope in his troubled eyes.
I had been called upon to act the part of the Tempter and he was cast perfectly as the Tempted.
‘You have my word,’ I smiled.
•
Out on the colony forecourt I stood at the ramparts and surveyed the waters of the moat. A breeze coming up from the river brought with it the odour of sedgeweed.
The margins of the far banks were defended by barbed wire entanglements and, anyhow, as I’d warned the boy, the mud on the other side was so sticky and thick that, if he attempted to wade in at any point, the mire would be sure to swallow him up. The approach I favoured was a direct ascent of the bailey tower ruins, never mind the water’s shelving depth.
As I strode across the causeway I could think only of the boy, and of the bond of blood which had sealed our oath and united our hands; I could think only of the debt of blood that must be honoured and consecrated to my ends.
•
Later, when I returned for tea, I overheard the Memsahib talking to the Guv’nor.
‘It is clearly our duty to see those boys come to no moral harm.’
She sniffed as only my parents can sniff; her own cue to yet another moralism.
‘None shall be forgotten; not a grain of corn shall be lost. Of that we may be sure.’
•
When eleven struck from the Colony stables I was much relieved somehow that it was not the sinister chimes of midnight I heard breaking the stillness of that desolate spot.
The Moat Farm clockhouse surmounts the mews where the colony’s working horses are quartered and, despite our separation by the breadth of the moat, the shuffling of their hoofs in the straw reached my ears as I stood at the parapet of the ruined bailey I’d made my own watchtower.
Of other farm sounds I heard none save for a rat scurrying on the ramparts to the waste bins behind the refectory kitchens.
The planet Venus shone like a blue lamp, a caution I ignored.
I had been standing there for two hours thinking of how I should kill him – slowly, in my own time, as with my animal and bird specimens – talking to him all the while. Thus I stood for many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of my point of vantage and assigning my actions to it.
Then eleven struck and I perceived a shadow of a shadow stir below the roofline and the darkness yielded a new scurrier, which as quick as a trained monkey slid down a drainpipe to the bank of the moat.
I heard Lester’s half-stifled gasp before he slipped into the shallows and breasted the smooth evenness of the waters towards me.
‘Young’un!’ I called softly.
‘A-who dat?’
‘Keep still until I throw a line.’
I had secured a doubled rope to the tower’s lightning rod and I swung the two lines within the boy’s grasp.
He rubbed his slim brown hands together and grabbed the ropes.
‘You my bredthren, man!’ he grinned with a show of extraordinarily white teeth.
I braced my feet against the parapet and began to belay him up, foothold by foothold, until he reached a weathered stonework shelf that capped a buttress.
I held the ropes taut then I caught his left wrist in my grasp.
‘Dis is not an easy somet’ing.’
‘Take hold of that slab,’ I whispered. ‘You don’t have a dog’s chance unless you do as I say.’
As his hand gripped the ledge I whisked the rope up from his snatching fingers so smartly that it struck my face like a whiplash.
‘My arms ache,’ he moaned. He was panting hoarsely. ‘You nah hear what I say?’
‘No time for tears,’ I taunted. ‘Think of it as Constructive Play.’
I had contrived his plight to be this dreadful and uneasy posture. Over one corner of the stone ledge was crooked his left arm, which principally supported the weight of his body, while his right leg was turned up and precariously hooked over the lip of the slab.
In all truth he was on the slab at last.
•
I was greatly cheered by the success of my scheme and my heart now panted with eagerness to accomplish my great purpose.
But I resolved first to explain to him the infallibility of the Redemptorian Elect and the preordination of all that would come to pass.
Below me, in the darkness, the whites of the boy’s eyes widened.
‘Yuh inna big chouble, mista! A whole heap’f chouble.’
One warning tug of the remaining rope was threat enough to silence him.
‘Sound travels on still water. If you raise your voice, the Superintendent will hear.’
I then explained that special liberty by which we Redemptorians, the Chosen and Elected Ones, are made free.
‘You must know, Lester, that I was chosen and elected to be saved before the world was made.’
‘Yuh inna a jam, man, trus’ me!’ he persisted, writhing in pain.
Fear held him in a vice.
I smiled sweetly. Nothing in the world delights a Redemptorian so much as consigning detractors to eternal perdition.
So I took the boy to task for his ignorance of the great doctrine of the election of grace, and of how I had been assured of salvation by an eternal decree never to be dissolved.
I remembered word for word the assurances of my father.
‘We are the Chosen Few,’ I recited, ‘covenanted by God, who will never fall away.’
‘Tink God a-go help you?’ His voice was half-afraid, half-reproachful.
The boy’s snivelling remarks began to nettle me and I became irritated beyond measure until I was positively glad to give up the task of delivering the sublime truths my father had brought to light.
So I relaxed the remaining rope to see my half-strung marionette squirm and grapple with the ledge in a moment of panic.
I was conscious of the sound of the tearing of some material, probably the canvas of his haversack as it fell. It rebounded off an outcrop of rock some eighty feet below.
‘Wha’appen to you? Wha’gawenon?’
‘I am going to kill you,’ I said quietly, without hurry, and my resolution rose, indignant to be quit of him.
‘You must be joke!’
‘Your last hour has arrived. You shall go your way, and I shall go mine.’
That boy must have died a hundred times in the ten minutes I held him dangling in dread on the line. Looking down I saw his mouth gasping like a fledgling’s panting gape as he glanced sideways at the water.
He was fighting for breath and I had the satisfaction of hearing his teeth chatter; I think he knew his end was near.
‘Fear is better than pain for the pleasure derived by the tormentor,’ I thought with a lighter heart. ‘To inflict great suffering and hear the cry of it and not to doubt. It is in this torment that one finds true greatness.’
He seemed grateful when I smiled. That smile I bestowed on him was like the kiss of the torturer.
Then a beam of light shot out across the causeway and the Reformatory Superintendent blew three loud blasts on his whistle.
Lester’s lips trembled with a premonition.
I let go the rope and reached for my catapult.
He clutched his last safehold in bewilderment before a more than lucky slingshot caught him a true sockeroo smack between the eyes.
‘Lawd have mercy pon ...’
He stopped suddenly, with a jerk, as a man stops in the narration of something which has left an ineffaceable pain in his life.
His shirt clung wet to his back. The marks of his fingers were still wet on the ledge.
As he fell, I remembered the thrush in our garden that had flown from the bird bath that morning.
‘Flying with wet wings,’ I thought.
•
The details of my return on the empty last bus are fragmentary and vague.
My coat-sleeve was nearly torn off, while all the buttons of my shirt had been wrenched away while lying on the parapet. Otherwise I showed no sign of scratch or hurt.
‘You do look cold, love.’
The blue-trousered conductress with henna’d hair gave me the glad eye while she poured sweet tea from a chipped thermos flask into its stainless steel cap. Behind her right ear was a tucked a thinly rolled cigarette no more substantial than a toothpick. Her voice rasped.
‘How about it, lovey?’ She proffered the steaming cup.
I smiled my hard inscrutable society smile that never betrays an emotion.
I did not trust myself so far as to speak.
Then she probed. ‘Well, you are a night-owl.’
‘Flat tyre,’ I lied without hesitation. I produced my cycle clips from my jacket pocket.
‘‘Had a spill. Gonna to fetch my bike in the morning.’
The tea soon brought me to myself, and, after another deep draught, I was greatly revived and felt my spirit rise again above the sphere of mortal conceptions and the bourgeoisisms of the laws of men.
On that rapturous night I came to the belief that the more laden with transgressions the sinner tends, the more likely is the bestowal by Heaven of the mercy of eternal grace.
And I calmed myself with the serene and indissoluble certainty that, since my salvation was divinely preordained, so also was the manner of Lester’s death.
•
I remembered the scene in the vestry and the words of our school chaplain. He was afflicted by a curiously lazy right eye, which causes his active eye to gleam with greater fixity on the penitents summoned before him.
‘I confess I am grievously displeased to see a debauchee so strayed from the path as to have wholly lost his way.’
He had leafed through my manuscript again before sounding off.
‘I fear the clear light from the candle of the Lord no longer shines on your soul.’
‘I agree, sir,’ I answered placidly, ‘my premise is a somewhat complicated and abstruse calculation.’
Judas Iscariot: How the Twelfth Man Won the Match, my casuistical entry for the Divinity Prize Essay on the set topic of Predestination and the Betrayal Paradox, draws on the laws of cricket to examine the fulfilment of prophecy. I cited a recent notable county game in which the match was saved by a left-handed substitute player no less able than his fellows. (Three left-handed catches in two innings! A county record!) Of course, Judas was reputedly a southpaw; medieval iconography invariably depicts his bag of thirty pieces of silver clutched in his left hand.
My contention, then, had been to reveal to my schoolmasters that Judas was not the villain-of-the-piece nor unusually wicked, and the lesson we can learn from Judas’s rôle as fate-conniving instrument in the drama of the Apostolate is that out of any twelve men chosen for the advancing of an enterprise – in fact, out of any twelve men assembled on a field of play, never mind the cricket pitch – one man probably is, or will be, a Judas.
•
That night, I dreamt I saw a Judas tree take root and blossom in my father’s high-walled garden. In my dream the flowers were blood-red.
(Extract from an unpublished novel, The Boy from the High-Walled Garden.)
Catherine Eisner © 2023
Catherine Eisner believes
passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary
craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and
psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and
ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines
Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from
psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive
recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry,
rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and
the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
