Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

Below the lights, the darkness.

He twitched his head inquisitively.

A movement: glasses, glinting.

Drawn back to the lights: white and yellow. The heat seared into his eyes. He closed his eyes. Pulsing red. He looked to the darkness again. A blob of white flashed and faded — to blue, to nothing. Leaving a blacker arid nothing.

And there he stood, squinting.

The void was hot. Now he remembered. He had forgotten how it felt, that it could be felt, that it was hot — it excited him in a way he hadn’t felt in years. For this he used to live and on this he used to thrive.

To project, Maestro Tosi had said, was to propel goodness into the dragon’s mouth. If you do not believe in monsters, let it be nothing and the thing to fill it with is your soul. But for me, I am a Crusader of Palermo and what I have to give is Christian goodness.

So let it be nothing. This was how he derived his energy. From being on the edge of nothing. This was his element. Nothing. This was his challenge. To give something to nothing. Ringed by lights, inside the ring: nothing. He leaned into nothing.

To his surprise, nothing answered. From the middle of nothing a small light shone. Whiter than the white lights above, but cold, fixed in the dark like a star, but not like a star, stable in the light it threw out. He could sense its coldness from a distance, but not a great distance, no. All that he felt in his body told him he was looking down at the light, not across. The dark gave him no mooring, no reference, nothing to tell him that he was not looking down. But his chin was held high and his ribs were well spaced; how could he be looking down and not across? And what was this now? A rope, dangling from the stage, wrapped around his ankle, dropping off, out — down through the dark. It was made of a very long piece of grey woollen fabric and had a thousand knots in it. It waved, arced greatly in the dark, seeming to summon him, like a beckoning finger. Was this how he was to feed the void? To give himself, all of himself? It was time.

He had no say in the matter. Gravity ploughed him forward, the rope tightened around his ankle, and he was yanked upside down. The jerk and the snap broke the tension in his body, whipping his spine, but instilled a kind of suppleness. He fought against his harness, thrashing spasmically, spinning zanily, and making the rope bounce and the bind stab at his ankle. He knew by the pain that his show of defiance was futile, and he stopped, but a vestigial electricity fought on. Stop now, he urged his muscles. His body relaxed, and the physical laws took over. He rocked through a gentle torque. The rhythm of it was calming, slowing all the time. His arms hung limp, and he felt an odd sort of bliss. He was both constricted and free — his arms were like strings of blood sausages, or the necks of pheasants in a poulterer’s, or the ends of mammy’s mink scarf, or daddy’s shirt on mammy’s line — and he could have stayed like this for a long time. But then, having the urge to invigorate his fibres, he took the rope in his hands and twisted with a new stripling strength, and his ankle was liberated from the rope’s bind, and he flipped the right way up, and he slipped an inch, and then he carefully descended, taking knot by knot with his hands and feet. Only when he got to the end of the rope, dangling by his hands from the last knot, and his feet kicking in the dark, did he permit himself a look down.

He saw there Aisling, bright as a pearl, fathoms from him. He said, I want to reach you, lovey, but I am afraid of letting myself go in the dark. He pulled at the rope in his frustration and the last knot disappeared — he felt a thump as he dropped the three inches. He looked above him, at the rope tapering into the darkness, at the many knots he had let through his hands, at the many bound inches, and he started back up, snapping at every knot along the way, lengthening the rope by many more inches. When he had got half the way up the rope he thought that he might have added enough length to it to enable him to reach Aisling. But descending to the bottom again he saw that she was still a good distance from him. And so he went at it once more, shinnying past halfway, snapping out the rest of the knots as he met them. It was tiring work, and he felt the child in him disappear, and the stripling too, and he felt again like the old man that aeons ago he knew that he was. He twisted some of the rope around his wrist and his ankle and he rested. The rope smelt like rotten mutton, and it was clammy.

Then a lifeline came down for him: a white cable with a metal clamp on the end. It required no gymnastic effort to get across to the cable; it hung side by side with the rope. He threw his legs over the clamp and sat on it like a jack on a swing, intending to rest some more and build up his energy. His head was slumped forward and the cable was at his shoulder and he drifted into a semi-sleep, but he became alert again when torpidly he noticed the remaining knots in the rope trickle by, trickle by — the cable was being drawn up! It reeled him all the way back to the stage, dematerialising above him, and finally dematerialised in his hands, leaving him suspended for a moment in the air before he thudded to the boards. Immediately he was on the stage floor he scrambled around like some crippled vagrant thrown in a gaol cell. And he no longer sensed, as he looked into the dark, that he was looking down; when he looked up he felt that he was facing up, that up was up and down was down and across was across again.

Aisling hovered above him, almost within reach. She was wrapped in the grey wool of the rope. No pietà Madonna could have looked so sad. The cloth was wrapped around her head as a mourning shawl and wound about her body. The weave was caulked with thick body liquids. She chewed and sucked one loose end.

He sprang up. He sang:

‘If I die in this prison you will know before long,

But they give me no word of you.’

She began to unfasten the cloth. It unwound and broke down to a dust. The dust built up below her feet, making a picture. The picture built up around her until she was the figure in a medallion. The scene in the medallion was of a land barely green and the grey and black clouds that roofed it. The underclothes that she wore were the same colour as these clouds and the land that took on the colour of the clouds. They melted into and came of these clouds, even as her feet touched her little piece of earth, which seemed so cold and lonely.

White-Headed Boy:

‘Do not lose heart my Emerald Maiden —

For your friends are many in number!

Call to the lands where they bow to the ring,

They will raise in arms Peter’s great crozier!’

The clouds came down, enveloping entirely the scene in the medallion. She floated among them. The clouds parted but the undergarments of cloud remained. She stood aside in her medallion to a platform of grey rock and swept her arm to indicate a new scene. The sky was black and starless but held a faint faraway moon. Far below the grey rocky platform was a sea lough. There was no water in the sea lough except for a sluggish trickle. Did this water once meet the sea as an equal? Did the sea keep its distance because the moon was feeble? Was the sea as black as the dark, blacker still, devouring the moon in its stolid tarry waters? On both sides of the river’s weakly black course lay great flats of grey estuarine silt. No French longboat would reach this far, nor the row-barges of a relieving Spanish fleet. Her face carried the sad expression of the feeble moon, saying, I am fallen to an unconquerable conqueror, I am condemned to my destiny.

White-Headed Boy:

‘Though the clouds they have gathered to darken your skies