The Many Deaths of Neptune Gilderoy by Alex Sinclair

I was seven years old when I first tasted death.

My father Nehemiah had sent me down the pit so he would have some drinking money, and I cut my leg on a jagged sail of rusted metal as I made my way down a tunnel.

It sang its way through my undernourished leg meat and by the time I had finished the day’s work,(my father would not have tolerated me shirking from an honest day’s graft, regardless of severe wounds. He had Guinness to drink) my peeling dealer boot was filled to its sloshing brim with a hot soup of blood.

Someone tugged the boot off and emptied it onto the grass, tipping it out in the same way you would pour a boiling kettle onto an ant’s nest, and as I watched the fingers of steam rise someone deadpanned “Anyone got a plaster?” but I didn’t get the joke until I looked down.

I looked down and my calf fell open like some gory volume. I looked inside at the intricate fibres woven within, and the world around me went blacker than the coal dust I was swathed in.

I returned to the living some days later, learning that it was my father who had called for a plaster because he said it again to me as I lay in bed, too pissed to remember that he had said it already.

“Need to stick a plaster on that,” he repeated to the stitched mouth on my leg before stumbling off.

My father’s face was curiously untouched by the thick soot that coated other men’s faces but no one ever called him a layabout.

His face was untouched by grime but by no means unscathed.

His face was scathed alright, scuffed and dented by foolishly thrown fists and darkened by the unpredictable weather of his moods.

You didn’t know which way his winds would blow.

I returned to the house after another day of toil(this time following a cart through town and picking up the idle pieces of coal that scattered the frost-glazed cobblestones in its wake) and there was a nag in the sparse patch of yard, tethered to a post and munching on the dying grass, its mane drooping over its eyes in a coarse fringe as its teeth and lips worked in tandem, the curled pinkish lips uprooting tufts and then feeding the clumps backward toward the mulching jaws.

I stood dumbfounded, amazed at the gigantic piles of shit everywhere.

Before long an intricately painted candy-coloured bow-top wagon with a door of lacquered crimson arrived and collected the horse.

A man was bent double over the reins, everything about him crooked and broken, from the bent fingers and busted knuckles of his outsized hands to the fag at his lip and the knackered trilby askew on his wonky head.

Even his nose was skew-whiff.

“My father,” my father said, which I thought was a stupid thing to say.

Of course it was.

I knew this, but it was like he was reminding himself.

The man was my grandfather and the happiest times I could remember were spent going to and fro grandad’s camp in that wagon, listening to the horses snort, watching their breath become vapour in the cold as my grandfather lilted stories in an accent I couldn’t understand from behind a perpetual fag.

At my grandad’s camp sat an anvil in a rickety workshop of his own cack-handed construction and I would marvel at the otherworldly prehistoric shape of the anvil and the wondrous uses Grandad could put the tusk-shaped hunk of metal to.

It seemed to emanate weird wisdom, and I thought perhaps it demanded worship.

I would watch my grandfather pull rods of glowing iron from the eyebrow-singeing heat of the forge and torture the iron into a myriad of shapes, horseshoes, pokers, and a variety of tools.

The artistic violence hypnotised me, the curious paradox of it. Careful and delicate brutality that would form something rigid and unbending into something that flowed.

I watched my grandad’s lopsided strength beating life into the metal, taming it and honing it into something else and I thought the old man was magic enough, a roadside wizard, until I saw him breathe eerie life into any musical instrument he touched; accordion, fiddle, tin flute.

We sat about a fire that spluttered smoke into my weeping eyes and drank strong tea. Peeled the meagre meat of rabbits from their sock-like pelts.

My father would scowl when I got home, and watch the wagon crawl off.

And he would say the same thing.

“My father.”

#

My next death was a few years later, at the age of fourteen.

My father was beginning to creak under the great weight of all the liquor he had drunk.

He was beginning to bend under it, so I took this as an opportunity to stand my ground and fight back against his petty tyranny.

The kitchen with its empty shelves was to be the arena, and why not; its barren bareness was emblematic of my father’s regime, a place that left us perpetually stranded in a sea of hunger.

Starvation was abandonment, food the only love, and by that measuring stick, we were loveless.

My famished little siblings, all twelve of them bible-named and half-feral, would be the spectators, whilst my mother would be the referee, a bandit’s mask of ugly bruising across her eyes masking her despair.

She would have to squint to judge the contest and wipe away the blood from the floor with a tea towel, lest one of us slip on our own leakage.

He lumbered at me, like something risen from a graveyard, and I hit him square in the teeth with the jab that he had demonstrated to me, on my younger brother Phillip.

(Phillip was an excellent punch bag, scared as he was to move or make noise.)

I jabbed and jabbed until my father reached for me with his long arms.

He was the worst kind of bony, all knuckles and elbows, the kind of bony that hurt you wherever it touched you.

He was gifted with the unnatural strength of steel cable and to fight back was to fight a malevolent telegraph pole.

I landed some shots that cut him about the eyes, thanks to the boulder-sized knuckles that his genetics had gifted me, and then he promptly felled me with a jumping headbutt, the signature move that had once spasticated an unsuspecting soldier while distracted by my mother’s fragile beauty.

Like a butterfly wing, my father used to say, To touch it was to break it.

The sound of angel wings fluttering in rapture filled my ears, and my vision spun away from the orbit of the earth.

Piss off I thought. I wasn’t religious, and angels were just half-swan know-it-alls.

Heaven was a coal mine I thought as I tumbled down into a jealously thick blackness.

I woke up some days later, thoroughly concussed and confused.

My father’s head was swathed in bandages, a sight which put me in mind of a demented bishop.

Bandages I thought. I only hit the bastard a few times.

For a short moment, I was proud to have at least wounded him, until my mother revealed that she had paggered him in the head with an iron in an attempt to stop him from finishing me off.

#

I collected several more little deaths over the years before I finally died for good; a horse’s kick, a fall into a frozen lake, and a bullet fired from an angry Polish man’s service revolver, destined to rest in my father’s heart.

I volunteered to take the bullet with a lunge, and a confused sense of duty rather than love.

My chest puckered and began to whistle away my breath.

I’m a kettle I thought, this cunt has turned me into a kettle.

When I finally opened my eyes Father promptly sent me back to the sheep with a short hook to the jaw.

When I woke up yet again, he told me that the next time I got in the way of one of his fights, he’d kill me.

“For good this time, boy,” he promised.

My father was cast adrift by life, and over time I forgave him.

He was a man with severed roots; a man called Paddy in Scotland and Jock in Ireland, a man who tried to chase the restlessness from his bones with violence and alcohol, the same restlessness that screamed from within me, demanding movement.

He hid what he was and tried to be something he wasn’t and it didn’t work.

By severing his roots he just severed himself, and severed us along with it.

We were cut to pieces.

I know now he was rootless as an excavated tree, as I was when I was alive, and as my children are now.

I tried to purge it from myself you see, but you can’t escape who you are.

I wandered far from the place my father insisted we call home(even though we knew it to be a lie. There was no home for us) and tried my best to earn my place at the table of the world, and I never saw them again, my father or any of them.

I walked toward the big smoke until my shoes failed and fell to pieces, and when I got there I took to the drink like a caged duck let loose in a big fucking pond.

I seethed in the corner of pubs as happiness and chatter broiled around me.

I ticked away, a bomb with arms and legs with a fuck off sign for a face.

I battered my liver with the same rhythmic violence of my grandad with his anvil, bang bang bang I would hammer away at it with a flagon of syrupy cider every night, daring it to make me old before my time, which it did before I noticed.

I woke up in ditches, gardens, draped over walls with ice hanging from my nose.

I crashed cars and pulled out my rank, rotten teeth rather than submit to the searing agony of weeping abscesses and a retreat to the dentist, where relief waited in the forms of drills and opiates.

I punched my marriage to death, and considered a smile to be a traitor.

I died for good at the age of sixtyish, from an ugly list of long-endured maladies ranging from pulmonary pneumonia to chronic old bastard syndrome.

My father had instilled in me a fear and distrust of hospitals, and to go to a doctor was to be weak, a coward.

It was to throw the towel in the midst of a bloody boxing match, and he would not tolerate it, even long after he was gone.

So I died slumped over my dinner in my lonely living room.

I was long divorced, so I died alone save for my old staffy, Bruce, who took the opportunity of my suddenly reached expiration date to messily scoff at my congealing roast dinner.

The little bastard was as indiscriminate as a dog-shaped dustbin, but once the pleasure of gravy and roast chicken subsided and he realised I would never be getting up, he sat on my meat mannequin, frozen by rigour mortis in an improbable yogi-like pose that in life my bad back would never allow, and howled the house down until the neighbours knocked at the door and realised I was a goner.

Soon the kids arrived, and I saw on each of their faces a mix of grief and relief, and I wished then for the black abyss that my father had headbutted me into years before, just so I didn’t have to confront the pain I had handed down to them.

Death, real death, had finally bestowed me with an unbearable all-seeing clarity that my life, clouded with pain could not afford me.

I could see for the first time that the only thing that joined us all together was a shared pain much larger than our collective whole.

Inherited grief, trauma passed down as a family heirloom, from incompetent father to angry son and so on in an endless hopeless chain.

From death’s flat vantage, I could see that this would go on forever.

I could taste my children’s tears, and they were bitter.

I would not be missed for who I was, but for who I might have been, and I realised I had failed to break the chain.

I had been just another link, violence my only virtue, melancholy my only introspective emotion, unable to say the only things that mattered.

I collected wounds instead of stamps, pushed instead of pulled, and laughed when I should’ve been crying my eyes blind.

No one sees your tears in the dark, but still, you have to laugh.

From within death’s cocoon, I am shielded from life’s cruel absurdities, immune from its ridiculous demands.

I want to tell my kids to smile, to take it with a pinch of salt, with a pinch of anything because everything ends, maybe even death, but they are trapped by the misery in their minds, a prison I helped them to create.

In death, I finally got the joke, and when I occasionally pass the shambling spectre of my father, we giggle at how seriously we used to take it all and lament our ghostly inability to sit over a pint or two together.

“Can’t get a fag in this place for love nor money,” he says, with a smile I never saw when he was alive.

I tell him I will see him again, and he shuffles off into the confusing geography of the afterlife. A foggy forest of memories, and not all of them my own.

Ghosts have ghosts too, do not think that we are immune.

#

Attending my funeral was not the jaunt I had believed it would be in life.

The kids were mostly angry, full of resentment. The ex-wife sat stone-faced with her new fella, the cyclist who she had left me for, and I could see the ragged hole I had left in everyone’s hearts.

I recognised it because I had the same hole in my chest.

One of my sons, Sin Jin, was absent, on account of being locked up in HMP Belmarsh(murder), and another one of my daughters, who shall remain nameless, hid her smirk in the shadows of reluctant grief that always seemed to crowd around a casket.

She had robbed me blind, and found my box of savings that I kept under the empty fish tank (I had a piranha in there once) as I lay candlestick stiff with a mask of cold mashed potato hiding my obviousness deadness.

She took everything I was intending to leave for all of the siblings and even shredded by hand the letters of apology I had hand-written each of them, and they will never know that I had left them anything except for psychic wounds that would have to go untreated.

#

The dead wander around and watch the living because there is nothing else to do.

The living are like telly for us.

I like to wander the woods, and I traipse across the fields at night to talk to the horses.

Jumpy skittish creatures are horses, and no wonder.

They’ve got dead cunts talking bollocks to them.

The number of restless spectres that harass them in the midst of a bat-busy night you’d be fucking skittish too.

I visit my daughter Innocence as much as I can.

She was always my favourite, (parents aren’t supposed to have favourites but they do) and she is the most like me out of all the kids.

She took my dog after I passed, thinking that in some way by keeping Bruce around she was keeping a piece of me too, but the dog grew old fast, and soon he was dead from a broken heart, and it was like I was dying all over again for her.

I watch my daughter Innocence, angry and alone, the yin and yang of the miserable and the broken, watching her do her best to drink away the ghosts of the past.

But cheap white wine won’t make us go away, not for £4.99.

A precariously constructed pyramid of dog ends fills an ashtray ensconced on the side table next to her, a tower of these little soldiers of death, each one burnt right down to the filter, their carcinogenic essence sucked dry.

She wants to die, I think, part of her at least.

She tried love with a string of shitty men all formed from my even shittier template.

Lately, she has been getting other ideas.

She gets out her tarot cards and fans them out across the carpet, squinting at the cryptic, cartoonish designs, trying to decipher their meaning from behind a wall of wine bottles.

Sometimes she tries spells.

Embroiled as she is in a dozen or so neighbourly disputes and feuds, she’s hexed a fair few people over the years, and as her father I’ve felt obliged to see to it that she wasn’t disappointed with the results.

I’ve watched her collect dead flies shrouded in cobwebs and bury them along with some unwitting enemies name written in purple ink on a piece of parchment, and I’ve watched her buy a cows tongue from a bemused butcher and slit it, stuffing it with another name on another piece of parchment.

I don’t want to see her lose hope, so I do my rounds.

I pushed one woman down the stairs whose son had been bullying Innocence’s own strangely quiet boy, my grandson Alec. Then I kissed cancer into the lungs of another old battleaxe as she lay sleeping, an old bag who had called up the council to suggest that my daughter had been simultaneously working and claiming benefits.

A few times, when she’s been really pissed, her eyes rolling, her face twisted in a mean sneer, she’s tried to communicate, tried to reach across whatever separates us.

She calls me a cunt and cries and I again give her what I think it is she wants.

I move furniture and rearrange books and walk up the stairs as heavily and clumsily as I can, making sure my feet make the tired old boards creak under my literally dead weight.

But she doesn’t notice.

She’s blinded by her own misery.

Watching the living you realise how vulnerable they are to life’s predations.

They are helpless and mostly oblivious to the carnivorous nature of existence, and they will only be safe from it the moment it all ends.

#

I’m back in the woods, watching the crows squabble, listening to them argue in their raucous beak-spat language, hopping from bony branch to bony branch, garbling out secrets that would change men’s fates should they understand them.

“Alright, Dad.”

I turn to face my son Sin Jin and the crows grow quiet.

Sin Jin has the classic Gilderoy look, a rawboned length of knotted violence topped with a Shock of dark hair.

Electric blue eyes that are only alive when they are angry.

The knowing grin of the newly dead is still lingering on his face, the punchable smugness that only a corpse can exude.

Prison killed him you see, that cold stone cell murdered him as surely as he murdered that poor woman.

The despair trapped inside that airless place sent him mad, and if it hadn’t, the food would have eventually.

He was always a fussy eater.

The crude noose of shoelaces that he had used to finish himself off now lies deeply embedded in the waxy flesh of his bloodless neck, one end hanging down his shirt front like a necktie.

He drags the grey frame of the bunk bed, his makeshift gallows, around with him wherever he goes.

It makes a terrible racket, the scuffed feet scraping along concrete and asphalt(you should watch him take it up a set of stairs), and he gags horribly as he pulls this torturous sleigh along.

But it’s his penance he says.

His punishment.

He never says much, he just comes out of nowhere now and then and he just stares at me, his eyes beetle black from the ruptured vessels and massive haemorrhaging, the hulking shape of the bunk bed behind him, and after a while, he crawls off to wherever he came from with agonising slowness, a hellish snail shape that soon vanishes into nowhere.

He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to.

I get the message.

Whenever I see him, I see the headline from the papers pass through my head like an angry train.

Jury Stunned: Millionaire Freed in Slaying Of Wife As Alleged Hitman commits suicide. A MURDER TRIAL COLLAPSES.

Sin Jin had tried to call me from Belmarsh and had written me countless letters incoherent with desperation, but I didn’t read any of them, and I still don’t know what they say.

I saw the woman’s face on the TV, saw it flash up during the news and I made sure never to turn the TV on again.

I left it to gather dust.

“I get it,” I tell him. I get it.

I was hard on Sin Jin, harder than I was with the rest, because he was smart and tough, and he had my face and my hands, and I tried to beat it out of him so he wouldn’t end up like me.

I tried to unmake him, and in doing so cast him perfectly in my image.

I turn away from Sin Jin and my father is back, his newfound affability gone, the sheepish smile I never saw in life that I have been seeing a lot of since we both popped our clogs made all the more horrific by the slyness there behind his lifeless eyes, the same slyness slashed across Sin Jin’s face.

And behind him is my grandfather, with his anvil and his hammer, and behind them stands another man whose features alone tell me he is an ancestor, despite the silliness of his theatrically out-of-date clobber.

We are kin.

Blood, and we are here in this place together, the abused and their abusers shackled together in a chain gang that probably reached across the horizons of time to the ancient horrible thing that must have spawned us.

Something I’m glad is too far away in the past for me to see.

I know where we are going now. I had no idea we were going there, but it’s clear now.

Some claim it will be hot, but I know the truth.

It will be cold because we deserve no warmth.

“All aboard the shoelace Express,” says Sin Jin, and to my surprise, he laughs.

We begin to walk, as one, the chains that I didn’t even notice until I was dead clanking, jangling, our steps cumbersome, a doomed worm crawling.

My name is Neptune Gilderoy.

I am sorry, but most importantly, I am dead.

Alex Sinclair

Image by Jean Louis Tosque from Pixabay – hore shoe glowing on an anvil