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He listens to the boy for a while, his bedtime thoughts, his goodnight words to his mother, his waking mind trickling into visionary sleep. Then Dead Papa Toothwort leaves his spot and wanders off, chuckling, jangling in his various skins, wearing a tarpaulin gloaming coat, drunk on the village, ripe with feeling, tingling with thoughts of how one thing leads to another again and again, time and again, with no such thing as an ending.
Responsive to the light, I would call it. The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be. Which explains Lanny.
He has been represented on keystones, decorative stencils, tattoos, the cricket club logo, he has been every English trinket and trash, moral for cash, mascot and curse. He has been in story form in every bedroom of every house of this place. He is in them like water. Animal, vegetable, mineral. They build new homes, cutting into his belt, and he pops up adapted, to scare and define. In this place he is as old as time.
I’m a bad enough mother. I’m a good enough crime fiction writer. Lanny is nothing to do with the sickness of the human spirit I write about. He might see contamination coming and step gracefully aside. He will not become a malevolent or unhappy person because of what was in his mother’s Word documents. This is all in my head. Lanny is all in his own head. Who is judging me? I daren’t consider it.
I’m a million cameras, even when I’m sleeping, clicking, clicking, every second something is growing and changing. We are little arrogant flashes in a grand magnificent scheme.
Is it beyond your shrunken world view to imagine that something nice might exist without money ever needing to change hands?
Absolutely valid question.
Dinners where nobody speaks for a while, where we talk about books we’ve read, and someone falls asleep and it’s not weird or eccentric, it’s just slow and kind, unhurried and accepting. Acceptance is a fascination of mine.
Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope? I’m suddenly really annoyed. He’s too old for shit like this. Or too young. It’s fucking silly.
Dead Papa Toothwort has seen monks executed on this land, seen witches drowned, seen industrial slaughter of animals, seen men beat each other senseless, seen bodies abused and violated, seen people hurt their closest, harm themselves, plot and worry or panic and rage, and the same can be said of the earth. He has seen the land itself cut apart, its top layer disembowelled, stripped and re-plundered, sliced into tinier pieces by wire, hedges and law. He has seen it poisoned by chemicals. He has seen it outlive its surgeons, worshippers and attackers. It holds firm and survives the village
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He thinks our souls split off and wander around for a bit, seeing things properly. He thinks we see for the first time how things really work, how close we are to plants, how everything is connected, and we get it, finally, but only for a second. We see shapes and patterns and it’s incredibly beautiful like the best art ever, with maths and science and music and feelings all at once, the whole of everything. And then we just dissolve and become air.
The unlikeliness of Lanny. Nobody can remember whether he was good at football. He was fine at football. He sang a lot. Really? He sang a lot, but was good at football? He sang, therefore he was mocked. No, not Lanny, he had a kind of magic, we all accepted he was enigmatic and special. A kind of magic, and what, it worked on adults, kids, everyone? I don’t believe it.
How can we trust anything? How can we trust other people with our children? How can we trust ourselves? How on earth have humans lived in groups?
None of us actually feel anything for anyone else. It’s all pretend.
The very idea of a safe place is tyrannical.
Like the last speaker of any language he has had to forget in order to survive, but some knowledge of it lives in his marrow.
