Prose Passage #1: Every Man For Himself

I paused in the corridor, did what I intended to do—it took but a moment—brushed the square of dust away with my sleeve and went to the head of the stairs. As fate would have it, Cousin Jack was coming up as I descended. There followed a conversation of sorts, though my heart beat so loud I scarcely heard it. The evening sun shone through the stained glass window on the landing and set his beard ablaze. ‘Ah,’ he said, peering. ‘It’s you.’ ‘The very same,’ I replied, dazzled. ‘Are we well?’ he asked. ‘Pretty well.’ ‘Excellent,’ he thundered, and stepped on past. One floor up the pet monkey hurled the length of its chain along the picture rail and leapt atop the banister. Later I reproached myself for being so jumpy. Jack may have an eye for commerce but in most other respects he’s monumentally blinkered. He is, after all, about his father’s business. In all the weeks I’d stayed at that house in Princes Gate we had never once dined together, although it’s true that we should have met for breakfast the morning after my arrival. On that occasion the cable working the dumb­waiter snapped between basement and dining room and the resulting cacophony of breaking china so unnerved me I fled before Jack appeared. At no time since had we occupied anything more spacious than the threshold of a room, he generally being on his way out as I entered, or the other way around. Beyond a grunt, possibly in reference to the weather, he had never acknowledged the cuckoo in his nest. I wasn’t entirely sure he even knew who I was. But then, he was nearly thirty years my senior and I no more than twelve years of age when he had last set eyes on me in the library of his father’s brownstone on Madison Avenue. I wouldn’t like to give the impression that I thought badly of Jack. Quite the reverse; it was he who told my aunt it was time she stopped feeding me moonshine in regard to my beginnings. Up until then I knew little of my parents, beyond they were both headstrong and dead, my father two months before I was born and my mother, half-sister-in-law to my Uncle Morgan, three years after. I wasn’t really bothered about the whys and wherefores, being well cared for by my aunt and my cousin Sissy, but often crazy images came into my head, either when I was on the point of dropping off to sleep or on the edge of waking, images of an old woman’s face lying next to me on a soiled pillow. And then I’d come fully awake and scream the house down, begging for the window to be opened to let out the stench of her breath. Sometimes, when the dream had been really bad, Sissy would push up the balcony window and hold me there in my night-gown, telling me to suck in the night air, and those times I stopped breathing altogether, for when I looked down at the gas-lit street it had sunk beneath the sluggish waters of a canal. I didn’t find the truth all that upsetting, though Sissy wept for days.