Cuthbert/Drystan survived two terms at UCL. He went straight from Ramsay Hall to a squat in Euston to the park benches. It was a terrific, if not quite classic, debauched decline. And it was during this time that the ghost-brother first went missing from Cuthbert’s ambit of control. He seemed separate from Cuthbert. Indeed, Cuthbert had even begun to think of himself again, ever so slightly, as himself. For whatever reason, Cuthbert’s total replacement of himself with the wiser, more intelligent, more able, more erotic figure of Drystan came to a ragged end that coincided with the failure at uni.
For now, again, Drystan was gone.
FOR A WHILE, Cuthbert “searched” all over London for his missing brother, with no success, and afterward, tried to convince his parents to report him missing to the Metropolitan Police. But this request, as one might imagine, was seen by them as a kind of antagonistic lunacy, an effort to torment them.
Soon afterward, Cuthbert himself was homeless and sleeping rough in the capital.
His parents, from whom Cuthbert concealed his living situation, were by now totally inured to his ramblings about Drystan, and normally simply repeated, when the name was mentioned, “You saw your poor brother drown in Dowles Brook in 1968, Cuddy, and you blocked it out. And that’s that!”
Cuthbert didn’t believe a word they said, not anymore. No matter what anyone said, he would find Drystan; around this time, in 1980 or so, Cuthbert also started a habit of visiting, unannounced, his cousin Rebekka, who lived in Hemel Hempstead and worked as a school nurse.
Rebekka didn’t know how to coax Cuthbert back from his insanity.
“You look poorly,” she once said to him. “That’s the tragic truth.”
“Hang on. Hang on. What’s that?” Cuthbert once asked Rebekka. “You almost sound like you’re talking about me, Becks. Or do you mean Drystan? He wasn’t taking care of himself, was he?”
“Drystan? Oh, Cuddy, why are you bringing up your sweet brother?”
“Because you’re talking about him!”
“No,” Rebekka said. “Oh, Cuddy. I mean you. You need help, dear one. Couldn’t we find someone. To talk to you?”
“Look,” he said, “I’ll find him!”
Rebekka would sigh despondently, but she felt nothing she said would ever get through.
Meanwhile, Cuthbert himself, while imagining Drystan’s downhill slide, was of course frequently coping with his own drop into penury in central London. He was indeed looking poorly. His fingernails and teeth were gradually blackening. His clothes smelled of urine. He wore shoes with burst soles. For a while, he feared Drystan’s old schoolmates from UCL would recognize him as Drystan’s brother; after a year or two, he knew they wouldn’t.
Cuthbert’s delusions had become an unstable system. He no longer knew whether he was himself, or his brother, or someone else entirely. His flashes of lucidity often served only to confuse and to depress him more deeply, like matches lit in a pitch-black crypt.
“Was I the one at UCL?” he would ask himself. “Did I write letters to myself?”
His last complete grasp of reality in his lifetime, at around age twenty, was far more self-bewildering than what was to become his new normal—a calmer normal where Drystan, the last holder of the Wonderments on earth, was only “missing,” and he, Cuthbert Handley, was leading the search for him. In his life to come, he would take, in the rarest of moments, hold of the real truth, as his gran saw it—that Drystan was dead, and Cuthbert himself was actually the last to carry the Wonderments. But such knowledge, in the infrequent seconds that his mind would allow for it, proved such a crushing burden that he spent his life hiding from it—in Flōt stupors, in shame, in delusions florid and incessant. But Drystan and the Black Country of childhood would not stay away forever.
CUTHBERT EVENTUALLY MOVED BACK to Birmingham for a few years, but not to his parents’ house—they had told him never to come back. He loitered around the pubs in Handsworth, where his parents had met at the dance hall thirty years before. He would spend a night here and there in the local doss houses and missions.
He’d also plunged into his dreadful mysticism once again, stinking up bookstores and libraries to read about Sufism, the Mabinogion, the Legenda Aurea. He grabbed hold of a bit of Rastafarianism, too, and Navaho and Hopi myths. He started hugging other rough-sleepers when he would see them, exclaiming “Wa’ppun, mi key?”
One day, half-drunk, he was buying a tea in the coffee shop at the Selfridges department store in the Bullring, and something especially odd happened. Earlier, in a bin behind St. Martin’s church, he had found a big purple sequined dress, a sort of fancy old formal garment, like something from the 1950s. It had made him think of something tossed out after a funeral. It was enormous in size, the garment of a woman whose heart must have exploded. The top bit looked not unlike a kind of dress-up disco shirt, so Cuthbert cut it off with some old scissors he kept, and wore it into Selfridges.