Someone famous had once turned their face to the wall and died because they had run out of the words they cared about. The face couldn’t recall who they were and perhaps they hadn’t remembered either. When words turn your heart to dust, your who or why crumbles too.
He wondered if they had smelt the deep coldness of old plaster , or just let go anyway before they got there. Everything was only a breath away, even death. Especially death. How easy to close down our will over the chill of plaster. Plaster held its buried temperature, held together all these particles of the past, held him together so that he could watch and see. What was he thinking about just before? The plaster drew him again. His mouth smiled. It was the small matter of the last breath. He was not breathing nowadays anyway. Yet he was still here, watching those faces feeding on this air that kept their careless hearts beating. He watched how their their greed crawled about them, like Medusa’s snakes, slithering about their smiles, their scaly, glittering talk littered with snares.
Gulpers. Each word they uttered was painted in secret spite. Sometimes they hid their spite behind sweetly coated adjectives, but the spite always lurked about their edges if you listened and waited. People do have edges. You have to listen and then the trick was to watch out of the corner of your eye; for when you are not looking, you see. You learn and know. The face knew this watching his uncle’s pet hawks as a child. The hawks had taught him to wait and then when the prey felt safe, to punish without mercy.
George was different, awkwardly innocent. Innocence was awkward to live with. You had to clamber inside it and then everything hung off you and even your way of talking had a slouch to it. But the boy got angry with the metallic laughter of the visitors, crowding in on his Aunt’s forgotten fortune, seeking to judge her paintings, to sell them to H. R. Emerson of Lincoln.
That afternoon George had leant against the wall and wept. The world had gone from his eyes and he was crying out that he was lost. The face felt the boy’s hot grief wash all over the wall.He felt alive again, more than this echo of a person. The boy warmed him with his own face, smashed his forehead into his hair and then without knowing why, took a step back and saw him for the first time, trapped within the silent wall. The face felt the boys interest. They watched each other gently.
‘You need more air. More light. This place is too dark for you.’ George wiped his eyes and went over to the French windows taking the key from his Aunt’s smallest table.
It was the first time the face had seen a garden for years . It felt like he had stepped out of a ‘plane in some hot country. The plaster drew his head slightly to the left. The late afternoon air was dancing and the tall trees at the edge of the lawn seemed stood in coloured lights and the plaster started to lose the coolness and grow warm.
This was George’s first gift to him.
