I squeezed his nose with my hand and laughed. “Did she have a big nose like you?” and I cuddled him. Squeezed him with love.
Together we walked across the sands hand in hand. The land was marked out, divided with excavation digs. The Pyramids of the Kings surrounded us as though we were pieces on a board game. We moved through the squares. Watched our footing.
The Game
Tumbletee & Loveheart
And so I grew up in the Underworld. There was no sense of time down there. The Underworld clocks tick tocked and Daddy gobbled the seconds up. Tumbletee told me Daddy had sent him many times to the Earth to do things for him. He had been to Egypt and seen the tombs of the Pharaohs, and he had walked the streets of Paris and been to gentlemen’s clubs and danced with girls dressed in peacock feathers. Daddy said I was not ready to go to the Upperworld yet, but I was starting to change. My eyes, which were blue – the colour of my mother’s – had become ink squid black. My big brother, Tumbletee, said I was unnaturally beautiful. He liked unnatural things.
Daddy said, “You have the face of an angel, Loveheart. You have a face that will break hearts.”
I don’t understand beauty. I looked at Tumbletee’s face, it had pox scars. Its texture looked like porridge. If I ran my finger over his face and felt its lumps, would I feel ugliness? His face was a weird painting, a landscape of the moon. Craters and pits. I saw the galactic in him, the alien, the deep unknown.
Growing up in the underworld was like sinking into a deep well, black waters. I was losing myself, forgetting my name.
* * *
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart
Love love love love love
heart
heart
heart
* * *
At meal times we sat round the dinner table with our Daddy. All fourteen princes. Row upon row of wicked black eyes. We were eating a giant blood pie. Daddy cut the slices, oozing so much red.
“Eat up, my sons,” he said. “My wonderful boys.”
I ate the blood pie, chewed on it. Gobbled it down. I was growing into a big, strong boy. I was eating something I shouldn’t. It was poisoning me. I looked round the table at my brothers and I thought, I am the odd one out. The blood trickled down my throat, deep into my stomach. The more I ate Daddy’s food, the more I was changing, my insides turning to black ooze.
I could hear the tick tock of Daddy’s clocks – their constant noise. It filled my ears, drowned out other sounds. It was making me mad. He was making me mad. My mouth was full of blood, my head full of demented clocks. Year upon year. Year upon year. Layers of a trifle. I was the red jelly at the bottom, see me wobble.
Wobble on the plate
wobble
I remember my seventeenth birthday in the Underworld. Daddy was so proud of me. I was his favourite. Head full of fairies. Demented.
They called me Loveheart.
My big brother Tumbletee was taking me to the Upperworld. We were going to play a game. Wasn’t that nice. I was very fond of games. Tumbletee told me I had an ancestral home and vast estate. Apparently I am the richest man in England, isn’t that marvellous! If I played the game well, Daddy said I could go back to my castle and live in the Upperworld. I was wearing a lovely coat with red lovehearts over it. Daddy gave it to me as a present. I do like hearts, such a curious thing, the heart, and very tasty.
“What game are we going to play, brother?” I asked him.
Tumbletee put on his black top hat with a red sash, his white hair sticking out like silver threads, his voice a lizard hiss. “Follow me and you will find out, little brother.”
August 1887
I returned the same day I was taken. Snow rested on the ground. Mad weather for August. Everything was topsy turvy. Dangling on all the trees around my ancestral home were severed heads hanging from the branches, dripping blood onto the snow.
“Do you like my gift?” Tumbletee licked his lips.
There must have been a hundred heads or more. Mad fruit.
“Yes, yes. We are in the thick of it. Deep like custard,” and my big brother put his arm around me. “Before I leave you, you must do something for Daddy,” and he guided me towards the front door of my white home. A head hung from the doorknocker, its eyeballs wobbling about like jelly. He opened the door with a great silver key. Sitting at the hall table was my mother.
“I dug her up for you,” he joked.