And someone will try to put me out.
I reached upwards towards the lemon floating in the sky. I saw boys sewing a tent with ripples of colour like peacock eyes: dazzling emerald and deep-sea blues, and they were smiling and laughing. Goliath pointed to the university – its entrance carved in leaf-like patterns. A student sat on the steps, putting on his slipper-like shoe. There was a hole in it and his toe was sticking out. We continued along the streets of Cairo, hot and yellow, burnt. White donkeys with cargo, bright birds in wicker cages, moon symbols on doors and onion shaped towers reaching into the sky like telescopes. I wondered if there were princesses in the towers? Hair like a cloth of gold? But the princesses in Egypt would have hair as black as nightfall. Black as a theatre curtain closing. Black as an ending.
I saw the heads of men up here, little white caps and coloured turbans. Heads floating towards a blue Mosque. Star shapes imprinted on the walls. A temple of the night sky. I reached out and touched the magic shapes with my hands. Lay a hand on a star surface. An imprint.
“Do they worship the stars?” I asked Goliath.
“Yes. They believe when we die, we return to the stars,” he replied, and handed me some figs which I gobbled up. I tried to count the stars on the temple, but I ran out of numbers in my head and the stars took over. Head full of them, we walked on.
Two old men were bent over a game of draughts; I saw them move their pieces. Old knobbly fingers, white beards, missing teeth. A piss pot rested by the entrance to their home, freshly emptied. Onwards we walked, and I saw a great white bird fly overhead. Soaring. Its wings were made of angel pieces.
That is freedom. That is what freedom is.
V: 1887
The Underworld
Did I tell you that Daddy was dead? Yes, I think I did. He’s floating in space, somewhere. Space, that heavy spooky hole of stars. I remember the night before Mr Fingers came to our house, I looked up into the dark sky at all that glitter, at all that wonderland of emptiness and I wanted to be sucked into it. And I suppose, in some ways I got my wish.
I remember watching Mr Fingers stuff my father into the black obsidian Egyptian sarcophagus in the hall. He wanted my father to tell him where the grandfather clock was, the clock that was stolen. My father was crying – he had no idea. And then Mr Fingers shut the lid and my father disappeared like a magician’s assistant.
Goodbye, Daddy.
Mr Fingers, the man with the black spectacles and the waistcoat dancing with ladybirds. Some sort of magic man. Some sort of demon. Some sort of father. And he took me by the hand and we walked outside in the snow. Everything was so white, as soft as sugar dusting. Hand in hand through the garden we walked, our footsteps squelching into the fuzzy snow.
“Where are we going?” I asked. And he smiled, a smile of a thousand cats. A smile of angels. A smile of sharks. Ice cool. Devil hot.
A spiral staircase appeared in the earth and down, down, down we stepped into the Underworld. The layers of earth were moulded into human faces, whose eyes, bulging and swollen, watched us descend. Souls trapped in the mud. Some glittery and green, others with eyes like leaves. Green beetles burrowed into their eye sockets and laid eggs in their mouths. I wanted to touch them with my finger but Mr Fingers kept hold of my hand and we continued down into the wet darkness.
In the Underworld a black river coils like a serpent around the palace of the King of the Dead. It bubbles and shimmers and I imagine there are strange creatures underneath with black scissor teeth and eyes swelling like pearls. The palace of Mr Fingers is enormous and filled with clocks that chime every quarter of an hour. There are odd shaped rooms and strange carvings. It is like a museum or mausoleum, stuffed with oddities. He squeezed my hand. “You are now a prince of the Underworld. This is your playground,” he said, like any proud father. He is a kind of magician. He is a kind of madness.
My bedroom was in one of the towers. It was painted with stars and the cosmos. A great telescope peered out of the window like an enormous eye. I peered through it. What do the stars in the Underworld look like, I wondered? They seemed smaller, further away. Tiny dots of starlight, winking like fairy tale frog eyes. I am in the Land of the Dead. This is how the dead see the stars, at a greater distance. And this made me feel a great sadness.
I was in a great empty space. I was a prince of a great empty space. My room had a bookshelf stuffed with books, again, all on the stars and the planets. I sat on my bed and flicked through the pages of star charts and sketches of constellations. I held in my hands maps of the universe and yet I could only peer into them. Like my father, I had been placed in a tomb and I had disappeared.
I sat with my new father at the dinner table. My black-eyed Daddy. The clocks ticked round us.