The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [9]
Paul didn’t mind. The big TV mast on Winter Hill at the northern edge of the Pennines meant that they got the English channels. With his mother asleep, he could tune into filth like Take Three Girls, or Country Matters. The latter, in particular, was a series so packed with female nudity it was spoken of in the playground at school with nothing short of awe. He sneaked a look at his mum. He went across and turned the television’s tuning dial. Granada and BBC2 were always the best bets for nakedness. He heard his younger brother, Patrick, creep down the stairs. Granada were showing some sort of documentary about the Troubles in the North. On BBC2, the weatherman was finishing up.
‘Just what I need to know,’ Patrick whispered from behind him. ‘I’m bound to rest easier, confident that East Anglia is looking at a fine late afternoon.’
‘Shush,’ Paul said.
They squeezed into the chair facing the TV, pushed together by the sagging springs, Paul putting an arm around his brother’s flannelette shoulder as he always did, waiting with some excitement.
It was The Old Grey Whistle Test. And what the two boys saw on it that night seemed to them more sinister than entertainment had any right to be. The band were costumed like medieval minstrels, in high pointed hats with bells and harlequin tunics and woven leggings. When they moved, they adopted the antic postures Paul recognised from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in his school history books. The song they did was ‘Tam Lin’, though he didn’t know that then. The evil-looking band performed as if under some kind of spell, their playing growing ever more possessed in its fire and frenzy as their singer chanted the verses. Her voice did not describe the Flemish world of Bosch, though. To the young Paul, it was a voice that belonged instead to the dark England of ancient and malevolent spells. It was an incantatory chant that evoked the Green Man and spiteful elves and John Barleycorn and cursed souls, shrieking, lost in the mists of moors and impenetrable English woods.
The sight and the sound of this performance truly dismayed him. He sat snuggled against his brother, disturbed and petrified, the television screen a grey window on a world of warped magic.
It was only eight or nine years later, at Trinity, that he heard the song again and was able to make sense of what he’d seen. They were called Fairport Convention, he learned. The boys were mostly from North Oxford and their singer had been a girl from Wimbledon called Sandy Denny. Among their players had been the guitarist Richard Thompson and the fiddle player Dave Swarbrick. And their appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test had unlocked in an impressionable boy a series of dreams so vivid and disturbing he had never really been able to forget them.
What Patrick had made of it, two years the younger, he had never thought to ask. It had not been something he had wanted, afterwards, discussion reminding him of. He did remember that after turning the television off and putting a cushion under their mum’s head and a coat over her, they had stolen upstairs and crammed into a single bunk in their bedroom together.
That had been the start of it, he thought now, lying in his nest in his rented flat in the night in Waterloo. Rain whickered and spat on his bedroom window. That had been the start of it. Not the Fischer house nor any of the other subsequent things, but that. It had been ‘Tam Lin’, all those years ago, that had sparked the fear in him that eventually found its proper cause and terrible justification.
‘How flattering that you remembered,’ Seaton lay on his back in bed and said aloud, descending into sleep, perhaps emboldened by the beer consumed listening to the loquacious Malcolm Covey. But despite the bravado, he wasn’t really thinking this. He was really thinking how awful, how defeating, that they should have known in the first place. As they knew everything, every detail, each debilitating flaw. Above him, in the puddles of the flat rainy roof of his block, he heard a skittering sound. It could have been the claws