XII – The Hanged Man

Torchlight flared red with the wind as they danced by the riverside, and cast shadows on sweaty faces. Charles wore white tie and she a long, pearlescent dress; they made it, stumbling and smiling, to the survivors’ breakfast, arm-in-arm, then they went back to her place and slept.
After Cambridge he worked in the civil service. He lived in a flat in Islington, and found a new girlfriend on the dinner party circuit. Until, eighteen months later, she couldn’t cope and nor could he. No hyacinths could straighten this one out. He left her in silence, in a rose-garden in winter.
He went abroad and found pain. Agony. Locked in a Turkish jail for seven months, raped and beaten and interrogated with batons, and the madmen screamed on the rocks outside, and he sobbed until his throat bled.
Then he was released, because Turkey and Great Britain were on the same side, they were best pals, they were rubbing cheeks to ward off the grim gaze of the Great Bear. He went home, back to Islington, and found himself in the violet flames of the November Riots. The skies burned purple and black, lightning spat on the palaces of Chelsea, convicts and royalty ran naked in the streets.
Nobody had a clue what had happened. Gargoyles came alive and eat schoolchildren (they said); at night, anywhere in the world, you could hear the boom of field-guns and Molotovs as men tried their best to save the world with death.
The summer heat had been intolerable; now winter dragged on, pipes burst and froze, pensioners dropped and the living shivered and wept.
It was then that Charles Parris, after the torchlight and silence and agony and the shouting and reverberation, after all of that formative shit, walked from Islington to Westminster on Twelfth Night, barefoot and mad, his hair suddenly white, the violet glare of the sky in his eyes.
He went straight to the empty crucifix in front of Buckingham Palace, the one stained with oil and burnt gristle from a thousand immolated victims.
The frost took hold in his hair as he swayed, inverted, lashed to the crossbar with baling twine, his eyes wide and his hands folded behind his back. Nobody dared touch him or make a sound, and as the sun crept into a grey sky, leaves budded from the blackened wood, and flowers fell at the foot of the cross.