erase anything, per your instructions. I'm using a loose-leaf notebook so that I can add where necessary if something miraculously comes to me later. And what I'm not doing is what I should be doing and what the whole world expects me to be doing: standing side by side with Raphael Robson, making that infernal ubiquitous nothing between the notes disappear.
Raphael Robson? I can hear you query. Tell me about Raphael Robson, you say.
I had milk in my coffee this morning, and I'm paying for it now, Dr.
Rose. My stomach's on fire. The flames are licking downward through my gut. Fire moves up, but not inside me. It happens the opposite, and it always feels the same.
Common distension of the stomach and the bowels, my GP tells me. Flatus, he intones, as if he's offering me a medical benediction. Charlatan, quack, and fourth-rate sawbones.
I've got something malignant devouring my intestines and he calls it wind.
Tell me about Raphael Robson, you repeat.
Why? I ask. Why Raphael?
Because he's a place to start. Your mind is giving you the place to start, Gideon. That's how this process is going to work.
But Raphael isn't the beginning, I inform you. The beginning is twenty-five years ago, in a Peabody House, in Kensington Square.
17 AUGUST
That's where I lived. Not in one of the Peabody Houses, but in my grandparents' house on the south side of the square. The Peabody Houses are long gone now, replaced by two restaurants and a boutique the last time I checked. Still, I remember those houses well and how my father employed them to fabricate the Gideon Legend.
That's how he is, my father, always prepared to use what comes to hand if it has the potential to get him where he wants to go. He was restless in those days, always full of ideas. I see now that most of his ideas were attempts to allay my grandfather's fears about him since in Granddad's eyes, Dad's failure to establish himself in the army presaged his failure at everything else as well. And Dad knew that's what Granddad believed about him, I suppose. After all, Granddad wasn't a man who ever kept his opinions to himself.
He hadn't been well since the war, my grandfather. I supposed that's why we lived with him and Gran. He'd spent two years in Burma as a prisoner of the Japanese, and he'd never recovered from that completely. I suspect that being a prisoner had triggered something inside him that would have remained dormant otherwise. But in any event all I was ever told about the situation was that Granddad had 'episodes' which called for his being carted off for a 'nice countryside holiday' every now and again. I can't remember any specific details about these episodes as my grandfather died when I was ten. But I do remember that they always began with some fierce and frightening banging about, followed by my grandmother weeping, and my grandfather shouting, "You're no son of mine' at my father as they took him away.
They? you ask me. Who are they?
The goblin people is what I called them. They looked like anyone else on the street, but their bodies were inhabited by snatchers of the soul. Dad always let them in. Gran always met them on the stairs, crying. And they always passed her without a word because all the words they had to say had already been said more than once. They'd been coming for Granddad for years, you see. Long before I was born.
Long before I watched from between the stairway balusters, crouched there like a little toad and frightened.
Yes. Before you ask, I do remember that fear. And something else as well. I remember someone drawing me away from the balusters, someone who peeled off my fingers one by one to loosen my grip and lead me away.
Raphael Robson? you're asking me, aren't you? Is this where Raphael Robson appears?
But no. This is years before Raphael Robson. Raphael came after the Peabody House.
So we're back to the Peabody House, you say.
Yes. The House and the Gideon Legend.
Do I remember the Peabody House? Or have I manufactured the details to fill in an outline that my father gave me? If I couldn't remember what it smelled like inside, I would say that I was merely playing a game by my father's rules to be able to conjure the Peabody House out of my brain at a time like this. But because the scent of bleach can still transport