‘A key … Right. Okay.’
‘Sorry about this.’
‘I wonder what it’s for?’
‘Like I say, it seems to be for a safety deposit box in Southend.’
I eat my full English breakfast sitting opposite Mr Buchanan while he picks out horses in the paper, taking notes in his notepad, muttering to himself about this jockey and that trainer. We don’t really speak much after our initial exchange. I don’t mind eating in silence. After I clear my plate, mopping up the egg yolk with thick-cut buttered toast, I stare out of the window, thinking about the safety deposit box. The sea is flat, mirroring the fattening vapour trails criss-crossing the sky above.
into the depths
I spend the morning wandering around the island in some kind of hushed daze. I venture up to Canvey Heights, which used to be the local dumping ground, its height the result of the island’s accumulated detritus. The views over to Leigh-on-Sea are extraordinary; to my right my eyes trace the built-up sprawl of Westcliff and then finally, in the real distance, the high-rises of Southend, and the pier, jutting out into the estuary. The sky above me is grey now; the vapour trails have all been covered up for the day. I look directly upwards, craning my neck, my head falling back. It’s immense and it frightens me a little, pressing down on me. I feel like I’m an ant or some other insect scurrying about in the dirt. It’s best to keep moving, to keep walking along so that I don’t notice it as much. I remember that I had decided to look in Uncle Rey’s shed after my breakfast so I head back to his caravan. I know the sky is above me all the way back, and it’s a struggle not to look upwards again, but I somehow manage it.
It takes me an age to find the key to the shed. I find it on Uncle Rey’s bedside table, which I think is an odd place to keep a key; he must have been in the shed each night, walking straight to bed with the key. The shed is much bigger than the other sheds scattered around the site. It’s set away from the caravan, a little further back from the perimeter fence. I open the door: the walls have been painted black so there’s not much light. I notice astronomical charts pinned to each wall. In the centre, before me, is the biggest telescope I’ve ever seen, easily bigger than me, set up on a tripod fixed to a round base that swivels. Next to the telescope, on the wall to the left, is a pulley-lever, a crude thing that Uncle Rey had obviously made himself. I naturally begin to pull it. A slanting shard of light bursts into the shed from the roof, which when I look up I notice is peeling back the more I pull. It’s made from thick, rubbery tarpaulin, and the more I pull the further it folds back, and the brighter the shed becomes. The light reveals a table behind the telescope that is stacked with more charts, books, notepads and coffee cups. I tie the pulley to a hook, leaving the roof open, and pick up one of Uncle Rey’s notepads. He’s listed everything he’d observed in the night sky: times, positions, durations and distances. I flick through pages and pages of the stuff. Underneath the table I spot two or three boxes, each filled with more notepads he’d used to record his stargazing over the years.
If only night would come now, for me to gaze into its depths, to see what Uncle Rey had seen, to reach into those ever-expanding depths. I want to study constellations, to try to work out their movements, just like he had done. I sit down and read through more of his notebooks. I spend about an hour or so doing this, before closing the roof and locking the shed back up. I put the key back where I found it. I feel excited, I’ve never really gazed at the night sky through a powerful telescope before and I can’t wait for night to fall. I sit on the bed thinking about this for some time before I notice the huge row of bookshelves on the opposite wall. I notice that it’s not filled with books, but with video tapes – old ones, some of them Betamax – DVDs, CD-ROMs and cassette tapes. At the foot of the bed are two video recorders, a DVD player, an armchair identical to the one in the other room, and a large TV. Next to the TV are four cine-cameras of varying ages, from an old VHS thing to some compact digital gadget. The TV is on a table, under which I spot a couple of old boxes filled with more CDs and DVDs, all of them, just like those up on the bookshelves, labelled by hand. I crouch down and run my fingers across them, stopping to read random titles. A number of them catch my eye.
Rewriting Aeneid #34 1988
Rewriting Aeneid #48 1991
Rewriting Aeneid #101 1999
Rewriting Aeneid #120 2002
I count well over two hundred of these recordings – or whatever it is they are – all of them with the same title: ‘Rewriting Aeneid …’. I know the book but I’ve not read it. At least I don’t think I have – I remember Uncle Rey being into stuff like that. I pick up one of the tapes from the shelf and switch on the TV and VHS recorder. I feed the tape into the machine and press play, sitting on the end of the bed to face the TV. Uncle Rey’s face suddenly appears on the screen. It makes me jump. The tape is from 1982 and he looks how I remember him: kind of old before his time, greying and wrinkled, his large oyster-shell eyes staring right back at me. He’s smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, sitting in his armchair, the one that’s still in the other room. He’s oblivious to the ash falling from his cigarette onto his T-shirt as he fidgets and positions himself before the camera. He starts to talk, at me, he’s talking at me, his voice hits me, it’s his voice, it’s unmistakably his voice. He stares into the lens, into me.
Rewriting Aeneid #8 1982
… I always wanted to achieve … a new understanding of Virgil regarding Western morality … These writings …
[He takes a long drag from his cigarette.]
… have impressed themselves, not merely upon my memory, but … on the very marrow of my being … They have rooted themselves deeply in the innermost recesses of my mind, my addled brain, the grey matter of my being … so much so that I have forgotten who wrote them in the first place, it seems … which rings true, I didn’t write that, you see, I wish I did, he did … all of this, everything I am trying to do, is a mere appropriation of it, nothing is original. It can’t be … He wrote the words for me, old Petrarch, who himself rewrote Virgil and Homer. Old Petrarch, king of the poets, lover … not lover, ha! … of Laura … Heavenly Laura … He wrote that, not me …
[He shuffles from his seat. He leans forward to adjust the focus on the camera, the screen blurs for a second before correcting itself. He glances at the TV to his right, smiles, stubs out his cigarette, wipes himself down and resumes his conversation.]
It’s like I have taken possession of them … Petrarch and Virgil … like them, my work is left open-ended. This book I cannot write, this book I try to finish, to construct each day, this fucking book which is killing me because I can’t reach the truth … I can’t write it without their words … it haunts me each day … I am ill-equipped to deal with this sorry situation without them by my side … And even then, it’s too much for me …
I hit the pause button. His large face is frozen, flickering a little, contorted on the screen mid-sentence, his mouth ajar like he is about to scream. His voice, his voice is so real, like sitting beside me, talking to me. Only he isn’t, he’s dead and these words are from 1982, another time, another existence. It’s a strange feeling, one that sends prickles of electricity through my skin. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself, I look around the caravan, at his things, his voice has brought life to them. I’m surrounded by his stuff, by him. His words have brought everything to life.
How long have I been planning this book, this work of beautiful fiction that will reach closer to the truth than any work of autobiography? Good question … to appropriate Virgil’s words, to bring them back into the light of day, to revalue them in my own formation, just to give them a crumbling sense of my own being, from the depth, from deep within, shedding light onto the blackness … bringing the mystery back into the light of day, each ink mark on the white page my struggle …
[He