The Night

THE NIGHT

Published by

Escargot Books and Music

Ojai, California

Copyright © 1993 by Terence Stamp. All rights reserved.

First digital editions 2013

Terence Stamp asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN 978-1-908191-48-9 (ePub)

ISBN 978-1-908191-52-6 (Mobi)

The two lines quoted from ‘I Get Around’ (Brian Wilson) are reproduced by permission of Warner Chappell Music Ltd.

Cover design: Betina La Plante

For Christopher Thomas and John Drew

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED AS the fire started. There was a moment without thought, and then he remembered how it was.

How cunningly he had been led to this moment, how willingly he had followed the path. As the ache cleared, he could work out dim shapes and knew where he was. They had piled leaves against the door, no doubt pushing them in until the last moment—closing the two halves, fastening them together and finally shooting the bolt—when the fire caught. The window behind him was open and, if he craned his neck, he could follow the pain from his wrists, link by link, through the open frame to the point where he was manacled—probably to the spokes of the larger back wheel. His dog was howling with fright. The sound was close. Tied to the same wheel no doubt. Just like our great elder, he thought, to keep with tradition: all possessions to be burned with him.

The dead leaves were taking now, their scorching fumes filling the air with the smell he had loved as a boy, a smell which reminded him of all the good things of life on the road.

To end this way. He examined the voice within him, whose whisperings assured him that everything was all right, that rescue was at hand—and saw the folly of it. What was this insane optimism? It had been with him as long as he could remember. But now he must cut himself loose. Tonight he was surely to die. He had to admit it to himself, had to prepare for his last great adventure. But there was no one to pray to—no one to listen. He called to his dog—poor, dumb creature. It yelped at the sound of his voice, as trusting of him as he was of . . . who?

How would it be to die? To die in the fire?

From the birth of his race, fire had been the tradition: “It is only a moment of discomfort,” his father had told him, “then you are somewhere else.”

His feet were closest to the line of flame. He could see his brown lace-up boots, not new, but not old—they would take the heat first. And how would his feet burn? The same as hedgehogs cooked in mud, probably.

He found himself staring at the basket beside him, filled with quince and medlars, the last fruit they had picked together. He had known even then. Been watching. Seen him gazing at the slimness of her back, loving the head that turned profile as she reached up, aching to caress the small imperfection in front of her ear—the butterfly birthmark that moved as the seasons changed. Yes, he had been watching. Seen him take her. Seen her give herself. And now—the price.

His eyes started to smart. The leaves crackled into flame. His eyes—would they melt? He supposed they must, they were water: but what of the radiance? Did it melt, too? He had always wanted eyes like hers—maybe it was part of his love for her. Did he love her more than himself? He tried to remember her eyes the first day he had seen her, the day she had joined their camp. Blue, as blue as the stone in his grandmother’s ring. There had been days when they had been grey, too, when he had followed her to the river and watched her washing linen. And green. He mustn’t forget the green, when she sat under the willow. The first time she had smiled at him. She had entered through his eyes, seen who he really was.

A patch of light fell near his foot and he was filled with an urge to see the moon one last time.

He leaned forward, his arms shackled behind him stretching until his joints cracked, the auburn hair on his wrist shaking with strain. There she was in her fullness, grey streams of cloud scudding across the black sea she floated in and . . . a terrible scream echoed across the ravine. His name. She was calling his name. He filled his lungs with the smoky air, choking as he cried to her: “Rawnie. Rawnie, my love. You will never be alone. I will always be with you. Now. This night. For ever.”

He could feel his grasp on life easing away, taken by the smoke he had not allowed for. So this was how it was.

Her cries were becoming fainter; they took on a mournful unworldly note, like a train whistling in the darkness. A train? How strange that this word he had never heard should come into his head. Her cries to him were drowned as a great gust of wind passed over him. He saw her face as lovely as he had ever seen it, and with the vision came a haunting refrain.

THE DAY

ON THE MORNING of the night, Zeno awoke early, yet his waking was so unusual it felt indelicate to move. He had been having a dream, a vivid dream; but, then, lots of his dreams were vivid. Then he had seen the face of a loved one he knew was dead, and asked himself if he was dreaming. In that instant two things happened: he understood that part of him was awake and witnessing the dream—although his body was still asleep, safely alongside his wife; whilst in the dream itself, his body began a headlong tumble into a dark chasm.

If this is a dream, he assured himself, I should be able to fly.

No sooner had he reached this conclusion than his panic stopped, the air rushing past him became velvety smooth, and he found himself suspended, weightless.

I should be able to fly, he repeated. In answer to his wish, his body began to move upward, and he assumed the flying posture of his earliest comic book hero, Captain Marvel.

It was dark and smoky, but he rose above it, moving effortlessly towards the horizon where the sun was about to rise. He lay without movement, flying over a Turner landscape. He had no way of knowing how long the condition lasted, and it was only when the mattress moved—his wife getting out of bed—that the dream canvas faded and the sounds of Victoria Road reached his ears.

The experience left him fragile. Analysing the sensation, he found it similar to one of his first memories. His breathing was soft and finer than usual, and he had less sense of the perimeters of his body. He lay motionless, afraid of rupturing the sensation, the passage of time monitored only by the sedate chimes of the long case clock in the ground-floor hall. His sense of smell was heightened: he could recognise the flavours of the teas being brewed in the kitchen and, when the refrigerator door was opened, the aroma of celery was strong, as though freshly pulled from earth alongside him.

He heard his family leave, felt the early rays of the sun come through the east-facing window without stirring, and even the pneumatic drill in a road nearby did not breach his silence.

When Zeno was young he saw things that weren’t there; at least, others couldn’t see them. But they were real to him, and he would chat to them in the same way he chatted to other kids. This became an embarrassment to his parents, mainly his mother, who would take young Zeno everywhere with her. When she stopped for a chat with a neighbour, he would carry on a conversation with one of his ‘chums’. Finally, she had to ask him to talk to these friends in the privacy of their own home.

The problem solved itself by the time he reached puberty, when the companions faded from his life. He did not pay much attention to the going of them, being preoccupied with more pressing matters. It was only when he matured that he realised the extent of the gift he had lost—yet his outlook remained different. For while he could no longer see into the unseen world, he knew it was there—rather in the way a person suddenly forced to wear spectacles knows that it is his vision that is impaired, not what he is looking at.

This particular morning, getting out of bed, he remembered an image from his dream, and wished he still had one of his ‘chums’ to discuss it with. It was to return to him more than once that day—a procession of figures carrying circular trays. He recalled one figure in particular, a ginger-haired youngster whose tray radiated light. In this moment he felt lonely, a loneliness no amount of company could fill. It was as if something or someone he had known and cared for had been taken during sleep, and some form of psychic surgery administered to leach the memory-bearing atoms from his mind. Sometimes an iota was revived and he experienced this hollowness of absence.

He folded the linen sheet to the bottom of the bed and plumped up the pillows. It had been unusually hot during the weeks leading up to Midsummer’s Eve and the English had, with their typical contrariness, begun to regard the sun as an enemy.

Friday, he said to himself. A day of prayers answered and dreams realised.

It was his habit to remind himself of the symbolism of the day when he woke every morning. There was much of this kind of clutter in his life, left over from the Sixties and Seventies. He paused in his chore to regard the unusual angle of the bed, remembering the day his wife had helped him move it to match the changing fluctuations of the Earth’s electromagnetic field.

“When the circadian rhythms are harmonised, the proper amounts of hormones are released while we’re asleep,” he had told her. Of course, he had long since moved through his biorhythmic fixation, but he didn’t have the heart to revise their sleeping arrangements again since he had overheard her repeating to a friend, “It suits the Caucasian rhythms of our bodies.”

He had married young, in the grip of biological tyranny. As a teenager, he had come across an erotic illustration by the artist Vargas and vowed that if he ever met a girl who looked like that he would marry her. He had. And he had.

Prudence wasn’t much of a talker, but she was a great kisser. And her passion and unexpected innovation had reduced him to mindless vapourings. He was married by the time he realised that this rapt lover—who listened so intently—did not understand very much of what was being said. When their daughter was born, he took steps to insure that she remained an only child: it was not so much that he didn’t want to have more children—he wasn’t sure he had the stamina to persevere with married life.

Zeno looked again at the large bed he had positioned for the summer equinox, and the mural he had painted on the wall behind it—a nude of his new wife. Was it so long ago? He remembered the erotic studies he had done of her when they had returned from their honeymoon; how he had pinned them around the walls. He found the memory stirring, and thought of the first time he had undressed her, every moment anticipating a flaw—and finding none.

“Kings kiss the dust whereof the fair spring from . . . ” he quoted to no one in particular. “I must make this marriage work,” he said firmly. It was a sentence he repeated regularly. Something he had picked up from a book which advocated frequent vocalisation as a way of making wishes become facts. Not that Zeno’s heart was in the statement, for by now it was only a habit, something he said automatically. Are all marriages this way? he mused.

Who’s asking this anyway? he wondered abstractedly. There were lots of such unanswered fragments behind his tall brow; phrases he didn’t understand, yet had committed to memory in the hope that the meanings would unfold by themselves. He had led most of his life this way—‘education by the senses’ was what he called it.

It was a topic which never came up on the many talk-shows in which he had taken part during his long and intermittent career. In fact, he didn’t regard it as a career at all. He had been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time: he had landed a minor role in a television series which had lasted a season, and in which he had sung a song. The song had become the surprise hit of the summer, climbing up the charts and displacing the inevitable American single from the top spot.

Zeno found himself a celebrity, even winding up on the road with Billy Fury. His voice outside the echo chamber was hardly equipped for the rigorous tour of the coastal cinemas in which he gyrated, but he persevered. His sullen look pleased the entrepreneur, and his hangdog expression brought instant gratification to the teenage groupies of the time.

Zeno was smarter than most of his hip-swivelling contemporaries, and remained level-headed in spite of the groundswell of adoration. While others partied late and slept soundly—their new surnames and pancake make-up intact—until late afternoon, he rose early. Investing his money in odds and ends he felt would suit the home he shared with his mother, he explored the many antique shops sprinkled around the provincial town in which he woke. It didn’t take too long for him to recognise the discrepancy between provincial and London prices, and soon the charabanc conveying the bevy of pop swans was also transporting Zeno’s finds.

The personal manager who had rechristened him (he had been magically transformed from Jenkins to Studd) and the other acolytes—Biberfeldt, Solly and Crump had become Ripp, Havoc and Stiff—introduced Zeno to the gay underground of West End dealers, and he soon became a freelance supplier of antiques to the trade who just couldn’t find the time to scavenge the provinces themselves. It was a role that suited him, combining as it did his natural interest in unfamiliar places with an uncanny knack of finding pieces almost at will, sometimes from only a pencil sketch or a long look at an illustration.

“You sure you’ve no family in the trade, dear?” one slightly miffed queen had asked when Zeno had materialised a striking piece of Boulle marquetry after a one-nighter in Hastings. Zeno had grinned lopsidedly. It was a mannerism he had been told passed for an answer—and he was surprised that most times it did. He didn’t have family ‘in the trade’, but his lighterman dad—now passed away, God bless him—would have been amused to hear it. Zeno himself wondered at his luck and the ease with which he had adapted to life on the road.

On the advice of one of his newfound dealer chums, he began investing the bulk of his rock-and-roll loot in small terraced houses in Fulham, so when his star set, unlike his other stellar chums who turned to mini-cabbing, Zeno Studd was able to continue living in some style. After his marriage, he was even able to purchase the grand Kensington house in which he awoke on the morning of the night.