His dread of being shut away from others as his father was became Matthew’s understanding of hell.
He had other memories of his father but in the selectivity of memory they were all part of his picture of the devil. He remembered how, very long ago, there had been a thunderous hammering on the door and how his mother in a long white nightdress, her flaming unbraided hair reaching to her waist, had sprung from her bed. She thought he was asleep but he had crept to the door, trembling and watchful. He had seen her standing in the middle of the kitchen, her terrified eyes on the outer door which shuddered beneath the blows someone outside inflicted on it. Suddenly the sharp edge of an axe broke through the wood and jammed. She screamed as the axe was dragged free and struck again.
It was winter and the range dampened for the night. She snatched an unburnt log and little specks of fire leapt into life as she hauled it into the air. With the smouldering log she waited. For Matthew the scene was set—the angel with the burning brand, the devil at the door reaching in from blackness. When he burst through she shrieked and rushed at him. The axe fell to the floor, he howled with pain and fled into the night. His mother sat in the kitchen all night guarding the damaged door but he did not return. Several days later Gran had arrived, her luggage piled on a cart.
To Matthew the scene had no human dimension. His mother had not been a frightened wife, his father had not been a violent drunkard. His mother was an angel, his father an intruding devil. Heaven and Hell had their counterparts in Matthew’s home. He knew Heaven had the warm, yeasty, floury smell of a kitchen and breadmaking. He knew Hell was the sectioned-off verandah where the devil was trapped; the devil who might for his amusement entice you to enter, who might perceive your secret fascination to discover his face.
It was the same fascination that enthralled him when he stood on the edge of a cliff or high step or bridge. He could jump. The power was there to destroy himself if he so willed. It was a shuddery feeling seeing himself stepping into nothingness. How would he fall? Would he dive like a gannet, plummeting into the water, or would he float, drift like tumbleweed caught in wind currents?
But he hadn’t jumped and he didn’t enter the room. Whatever the fascination he could resist and must.
Gran did not fear his father. Gran had a box and in it she kept some sort of magic. Matthew had asked her about the box one day and she had told him that it held the ‘keys to the shades’. He said he did not understand and she had told him quite seriously that it was her circle of privacy and she would not invite him into it. He was hurt. Gran did not usually exclude him. She saw his hurt, tipped her head sideways and sighed.
‘The shades are no place for you, Matthew. The young live in the present but as we grow older the past and the future intrude more. We distort the past by what we choose to remember and we measure the future by what we desire. Past, present and future become the shades of each other and these,’ she took some cardboard cutouts of letters of the alphabet from her box and laid them in a circle on the table, ‘these are my keys to the shades of the past and the future.
‘To be free of time, Matthew, to control it by perceiving it in some other way. Chronos, clock, timepiece, chronology. The chains of sequence which bind us to inevitability. To have every day a surprise. What would that be like, eh? To see the sun rise upside down?’
He struggled to follow her and gave up.
He liked her words although his mother disparaged them. They stretched his mind, made him wonder, made him wrestle with meanings that reached beyond a series of sounds on the tongue. Sometimes he felt that in catching the yearning in her he was able through an osmosis of feeling to share her thinking. But he had no words to express what it was he understood. He could not step from the filmy world of feeling into the clearer atmosphere of the mind, could not draw up his perceptions from the depths of the river of his consciousness to the shallower, brighter surfaces where things were clearer, but less mysterious, beautiful and subtle.
He knew that she used the ouija board to speak to her husband and he had heard her murmuring conversations. She would sit for hours while the glass slithered and bumped across the surface of the table. She did not invite him to share these occasions and ignored his peeping presence at the window. She accepted his curiosity without feeling compelled to satisfy it. Knowing to her was important, but so too were these moments when she acknowledged none of the demands of the present.
He knew Gran’s husband was dead but this death had nothing to do with the little grey room. Whatever Gran did was safe. Her secrets did not trouble him. He would have taken her hand and slipped with her through the magic circle into the shades with confidence.
Once he had asked what and where he had been before his birth. His mother had responded coyly ‘a twinkle in the eye of God’ to which Gran countered abruptly: ‘Nothing, as far as we know.’ Since he could not imagine himself without a body, since indeed he could not imagine himself without an ‘I’, he assumed that Gran meant that he floated in nothing. The loneliness of it horrified him.
To return to nothingness, to
