The Angel of Witness: Chapter One

The carriage was not crowded. Typical mid morning, mid week, October, most of the city already wherever it was going and supposed to be. Discarded newspapers and the odd paper cup lay abandoned. Remnants of the earlier rush hour always best missed. A woman opposite read something on her phone with the focused blankness of someone who had been reading the same paragraph for several stops, dressed for an office somewhere that wouldn’t care if she was there, or not. Two seats down, a man in a high vis jacket was fast asleep with the practised ease of a person who had learned that sleep was wherever the opportunity presented itself. The overhead lights flickered once as the train leaned into a curve somewhere beneath Notting Hill Gate and then steadied themselves and carried on.

I was going to see a mirror.

Not for the first time by any means. I had seen it before and it had grown familiar, the way a person who has built a career around a single kind of stone comes to know the objects that define it, more thoroughly than most people know the contents of their own kitchen drawers. The British Museum’s Aztec obsidian mirror was not a discovery to me. It was a fixture. I had stood in front of it on wet Tuesday mornings and busy Saturday afternoons and once, memorably, during a fire alarm evacuation that everyone else treated as an inconvenience and I treated as an opportunity, the gallery briefly empty and fallen silent, the case momentarily mine.

What had me on the tube that morning was not the mirror I knew. It was a second one, and the question of what it meant for the first. A footnote, of all places, tucked into the apparatus of a 1987 monograph on volcanic glass in ritual use that had been sitting in the university library for thirty nine years gathering the quiet nonchalant sadness of a book that nobody reads. A single sentence on a find in Kilmartin Glen, Argyll, in 1965: a disc of worked pitchstone, mirror form, reported once in a short annual digest of Scottish fieldwork and never mentioned again. No excavator named. No accession number I could trace. No later paper. No museum, in Scotland or anywhere else, that would admit to holding it. The monograph’s author had noted its disappearance in a single clause and moved on to more tractable matters. The path was cold.

I had not moved on.

I reached into my satchel at my feet. It was a good satchel, old leather, the buckles tarnished, a bag that carried the scars of having accompanied me through enough years to have earned a particular shape and familiarity. I did this without looking, by feel alone, and my fingertips found what they were looking for immediately out of habit: the book. Not the monograph, not one of the three texts I had been cross referencing for the volcanic chapter. This one was smaller, its cover plain in the way an object is plain when its plainness is a choice. An obvious stain from the bottom of my wine glass had branded it in a deep claret circle, and it was well thumbed. An ordinary book, to all appearances. But not ordinary at all. Not to me.

It was my journal.

On the front, in my handwriting, smaller than you would expect, deliberate in the way of someone who was taught to write carefully and never lost the habit, I had copied a quote. I did this with each new journal, and had done so since I was a student, a different quote each time, chosen for reasons that felt obscure in the moment of choosing and clarified slowly, if at all, over the months of use. This one I had chosen in the month of September. It was from Carl Jung: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.

I had not thought, when I wrote it out, that I was choosing this as reflection about myself. I had thought I was choosing a line about Dee.

The train slowed. Bond Street. The doors opened as a waft of warm heavy air rushed in. Air that had circulated through the darkness of tunnels gouged from the peace of soil that once held up meadows, fields and forests and had long since surrendered to the sawmill and demands of what our species perceive as progress. A handful of people got on, rearranging the carriage’s geometry for the moment. I opened the journal to a fresh page near the back and uncapped my pen, aware even as I did it of the performative quality of a person who knows they are the kind of person who uses a pen on a tube, and wrote nothing. The page stayed blank. I recapped the pen and looked out of the window at the dark of the tunnel and the occasional punctuation of municipal lighting sliding past like a startled ghoul. The gentle rocking of the train carriage and its warmth remained a comfort.

I had been a curator for eleven years. Before that a researcher, and before that a student who was told, on more than one occasion, that I had the affliction of caring too much about things that could not be made to matter in the ways institutions required. I had taken this as criticism at the time. Rejection even. I was less certain now. Age had mellowed me perhaps.

I knew the museum mirror down to its geochemistry. Its formation. The way it fractures with a conchoidal precision that ancient toolmakers understood and exploited for blades sharp enough to be favoured and used in precision surgery to this day. I knew its dating, Aztec in origin, most likely the fourteenth or fifteenth century, six hundred years old or more. I knew the story that archaeology, and the science that sits alongside it, provides. What I did not know, what the footnote had left me turning over for three days, was where its smaller sibling had gone, and why a find significant enough to catalogue was never significant enough, apparently, to keep. To suggest I was intrigued would be to coin an understatement. Obsessed would probably be a more accurate description. Overstepping academic boundaries and professional protocol, even more so.

I had stood in front of the museum mirror perhaps thirty times and it had never once been anything other than shut. A known object. A dated object. A safe one. What was different that day, and I could not yet say why, was that I was not going to look at a fact I already had. I was going to look at a question I could not answer, wearing the shape of something I thought I knew completely.

Windows, for instance. Between this world and others.

Tottenham Court Road. I gathered the journal quickly, fumbling with the satchel buckle catching under my fingers, impatient with myself for a haste that was not like me. I fastened the satchel. I stood with the slight pre emptive lean of a man who had ridden this line many times and knew the next stop was mine.

I had, I realised, been looking forward to this in a way that sat at an odd angle to my usual relationship with work. It was not the professional anticipation of a researcher visiting a significant object. It was something closer to the feeling of going somewhere you have been before, to see something you have not seen yet. An anticipation with an interior quality. A pull. The anticipation of something I had not felt in a very long time. City life had somewhat weathered me and had for all intents and purposes dulled my own blade in the process. As Samuel Johnson told James Boswell back in 1777, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Even an obsidian mirror from antiquity.

I did not examine these feelings too closely. The train slowed and shunted slightly, then the doors opened. I stepped onto the platform, joining a trickle of people moving toward the exit, too used at this point to the “mind the step” announcement to hear it any more, moving with them, upwards and into the streets and a grey October morning above.

British Museum, London

It had never looked like much. That was always the first thing. A disc of polished black stone, roughly the size of a small dinner plate, mounted behind glass in a room full of objects that had outlasted the hands that crafted them. A label. A case number. The Enlightenment Gallery going about its quiet business around it.

I didn’t know how long I had been standing there.

Behind me, a school group moved through the gallery in the way of school groups, not walking so much as accreting, pooling briefly around each case before losing its shape and reforming somewhere further along. October had come in with them. The smell of it arrived before they did: wet wool, damp rucksacks laden with gym kit, the odd forgotten apple or half eaten banana sandwich, the specific closed in warmth of children who had been rained on. Their shoes made a soft percussion on the mahogany floor, nothing so deliberate as footsteps, more the collective shuffle of bodies that would rather have been elsewhere. Several held clipboards. There were boxes to fill, predetermined observations to record, the whole experience already translated into a worksheet of compliant boredom before it had even begun.

They passed. The smell of October and ripe bananas lingered.

The surface of the mirror was not reflective in the way a mirror should be. It absorbed. I had known that for eleven years, and that morning the word arrived as if it were new. Light entered the obsidian and did not return. What came back instead was something else, a darkness that had a depth to it, that receded rather than reflected, that seemed to pull the eye inward rather than throw it back at itself. Ethereally watching. I felt observed.

Then it began.

Not gradually. The dizziness arrived as a fact rather than a progression, the room tilting slightly on its axis, the mahogany floor uncertain underfoot. Breath caught somewhere below my collarbone and stopped it moving freely, as though the air had thickened, as though breathing now required a conscious decision that it hadn’t needed a moment ago. A thought surfaced with the clarity of thoughts that arrive in crisis: oh Christ. This is what fainting feels like.

But I was not fainting. I knew the difference, though I hadn’t always.

The room didn’t go dark. It went deep. The edges of things, the glass case, the wall panels, the retreating shuffle of the school group, receded, not disappearing but becoming less insistent, as though the gallery was politely stepping back with reverence to make room for something else. The space behind my sternum opened. Not pain. Not quite pressure. Something more deliberate, more intentional than either. An attention that was not mine, moving through me like a question.

The first time this had happened I was in a different room entirely, years before, and I had no language for it. I thought I was ill. I stood very still and ran calculations, had I eaten, had I slept, was the room too warm, the whole desperate arithmetic of a mind trying to rationalise what the body already understood. I must have looked entirely ordinary. That was the goal. Look like a person standing in a room. Do not let your face show that the floor has become an infinite tunnel opening downward and that you are falling through it without moving.

Afterwards, the medium’s wife had taken me aside. She’d felt it too, she said, the shift in the room, the sudden presence. She’d watched something move toward me, drawn by the quality of my field, testing whether I was safe to enter.

“It wasn’t illness,” she said. “It was recognition.”

I knew that by then. I was trying to remember it again now, standing in the Enlightenment Gallery, with the smell of damp school uniforms and polished floors, my breath stuck in my throat, whilst the room’s breath was on the back of my neck with an interest in me far older than that of my immediate surroundings, or my own depth of understanding.

Something moved inside the glass. It had been waiting. I felt its gaze. My breath like that of the coils of an anaconda, pulling ever tighter with every intake of air. I felt a terror that took my breath.

I was doing my best to relax and let the breath come. I stopped trying to look like a regular person. I gasped and leaned forward to steady myself.

Pressure first, as though the air was condensing. Then heat, not from above but from below, from everywhere at once, a heat that had no outside to it because there was not an outside, everything was this, molten and absolute and screaming upward through the dark. The stone knew what it was. It had always known. It was not shaped into a mirror. It became one, cooling from chaos into something that held rather than released, that kept rather than scattered. A memory encoded in the moment of its making. A capacity written into its structure before any human hand endeavoured to manipulate its benevolent intentions, or otherwise.

Then hands found it. Not Dee’s. Older hands, darker, quick with practice, working stone against stone in strokes too fast to follow, sparks of black light flying with each pass. Heat, not the heat of the stone’s making now but the heat of bodies, many bodies, packed close in torchlit dark, breathing as one animal breathes. Copal smoke thick enough to taste, thick enough to see, curling low across a floor slick with something that was not water. Drums, or a heartbeat, the distinction gone. Chanting that was not words so much as a single word repeated until it became a deep guttural groan.

A priest, of sorts, adorned with feathers and bones, lifted the disc toward torchlight. His face streaked, his eyes rolled back to white, his mouth still moving with the chant though no sound reached it now. Saliva fell from his lips. The mirror did not catch the torchlight. It took it like an unquenchable thirst. The same darkness, the same depth, the same refusal to give anything back that would still be true a century and more later in a candlelit room, and four hundred years after that behind a sheet of museum Perspex. I felt these time frames within my being.

The chanting did not stop. It changed. Latin now, murmured rather than screamed, and the torchlight softened into candlelight, and the heat of many bodies became the heat of one small fire.

Then hands. A different darkness, interior, candlelit, the specific cold stone walls demand. The hands were ink stained at the first two fingers of the right. A scholar’s hands. The mirror, held with the careful reverence of someone who understood he was holding something that had existed long before he did and would exist long after. He tilted it toward the flame, not to see himself in it but to see past himself. The angle was deliberate, practised, the flame caught at the very edge so that the centre of the disc remained dark and depthless. I was feeling with his hands and seeing through his eyes.

The room around him was dense with the accumulated weight of a working mind. Books splayed open at pages, marked with scraps of paper covered in notation. Instruments whose purpose was not immediately obvious. Star charts on the wall. A globe. The smell of tallow and turned pages and something underneath both of those, something older, mineral even, like the earth before it learned to be soil.

Behind him, at a long table, another figure sat with a quill poised above an open ledger. Younger, broader, watchful with anticipation. His eyes were not on the mirror. They were on the space above it, or on something in that space that only he could see. A quill held like a poet’s did not move. A conductor holding the breath of an audience and the focus of an entire orchestra on a single note. Not moving. Not yet.

The candle guttered in a draught from somewhere. The older man’s hands tightened fractionally on the edge of the disc.

“Tell me what you see,” he said. I could feel the words moving through me, out of my own lips. Not a question. Not quite a command. The voice of a man who had been waiting a lifetime for an answer.

The younger man’s quill began to move.

The quill scratched. Then stopped mattering. The room folded, not faded, folded, the way a page folds when someone else’s hand turns it, and I was somewhere with no walls at all.

Gold first. Evening gold, moving, alive, a gold that had never once been indoors. Grass underfoot that was not underfoot, because I had no feet here, only the sensation of standing that people mean when they say they are somewhere. Woodsmoke. Whisky. A laugh, close and warm and entirely unafraid. Youth.

Then stone. A stone cottage, low, grown out of its own hillside, familiar in the way that unsettles rather than comforts, I knew this house from a childhood I did not have but it still felt like coming home. I knew this door before I had seen it open. I knew the weight of a key before any hand had closed around one.

Steps, going down. Cold rising to meet me before my feet, my absent feet, found the first one. Stone underfoot. Narrow walls. The dark of a room that had been shut a long time and settled into itself. Alone.

Something below waited. I did not reach it. The dark held itself closed as a fist holds itself closed, and I understood, without being able to say how, that I was not being shown what was down there. Only that something was. Only that it had been waiting exactly as long as the thing on Dee’s table had been waiting, exactly as long as the thing in the temple had been waiting, the same patience wearing time that had long outlived its companions.

A name arrived, a whispered echo out of the cloying darkness, though no one had opened a mouth. Mal.

Then another, quieter, arriving the way a fact arrives rather than a sound. Danny.

And beneath both, already known before either of the others surfaced, a third name whispered in my ear, belonging to the presence closest to me in the dark. Ros, the Sss rolled back into the darkness as the ebbing tide slips away to the vastness of an ocean.

I blinked. My eyes dry.

The gallery reassembled itself around me, the glass case, the overhead lighting, the mahogany floor under my feet solid and present. Somewhere behind me another school group was approaching.

I became aware that my hands were pressed flat against the display cabinet. I didn’t remember raising them, and removed them in my confusion.

I stepped back and breathed.

I read the printed information panel. I read it the way you read something after a dream, each word arriving separately, taking longer than it should to mean anything.

The mirror is Aztec in origin, carved from a single piece of volcanic obsidian, most likely in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. It was brought to Europe following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in the early sixteenth century. In Aztec cosmology, obsidian mirrors were used for divination and ritual communication, windows, it was believed, between this world and others. The mirror is associated with Tezcatlipoca, God of the night sky, whose name translates as Smoking Mirror.

It was once owned, the panel noted, by the mathematician, astrologer and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I.

His name was John Dee.

I read the name twice.

The warmth in my sternum had not gone away.

By the time I reached Balthazar the morning grey had lifted sufficiently to make the terrace viable, city autumn sunshine doing its best, the heat lamps doing the rest. Margo had chosen the table herself, naturally. She was already installed when I arrived, a specific corner of the covered canopy, angled to catch what light there was, close enough to the warmth to make sitting outside feel like a choice rather than an endurance. She looked wonderful, as she always did. Sixty two and entirely unbothered by it.

“Darling.” The smile arrived before the word, broad, genuine, the full warmth of someone who means it. “So good to see you.” She didn’t rise but offered both cheeks in turn, and I leaned in and kissed them and caught the Chanel No. 5 she had worn for as long as I had known her. Classic, unwavering, entirely her. “You look divine, my love. How are you? It’s been a while.”

Then, barely drawing breath: “How’s Marcus? Or dare I ask.”

I sat down.

I was doing my best to appear self regulated. Present. Engaged. The ordinary social performance of a person having lunch with an old friend on a Tuesday in October. But I was shaken in the way that seeing something indelible and unexpected can shake you, not dramatically, not visibly, but at some interior level that the surface hasn’t caught up with yet. The museum was still inside me. The disc of black stone. The tilting room. The hands.

I reached for the menu I didn’t need and set it down again.

I had ordered a Caesar salad. It sat where the waiter had placed it, largely undisturbed.

Margo was in full regaling flight as she brought me up to speed with our mutual dear friend Marcus and his comedic love life. All the familiar architecture of all the previous chapters, the initial enchantment, the red flags cheerfully ignored, the slow motion unravelling, the 4am call from somewhere implausible. This time Lisbon. A Portuguese architect, apparently. Fifteen years younger, emotionally sealed at the factory.

“I know,” I said, at what felt like the appropriate interval.

I didn’t know. I had missed the last several sentences entirely.

I was still in the museum. Part of me had not left the museum at all, and was still standing in front of that disc of black stone with my hands pressed against the glass. I was sitting on a terrace in Covent Garden in perfectly adequate autumn sunshine and I was also standing in a candlelit room that smelled of tallow and turned pages watching a pair of ink stained hands hold something ancient at a precise angle to the flame.

The Chablis was good. I knew this because Margo had told me so when it arrived, and I had agreed without tasting it. The glass had been in my hand and back on the table several times without my having any clear memory of the journey.

“Swore to me,” Margo was saying, “absolutely swore on his mother’s life that he was done with unavailable men. Done. We had this conversation in Ibiza in July, and he was so clear, so completely clear,” she paused to draw on her cigarette with the focused pleasure of a woman who has never seriously considered stopping, “and then of course the architect appears in September and every word of that conversation simply evaporates. Every. Word.” She exhaled with great deliberation. “He is,” she said, “a complete and utter askhole.”

I watched her pick up her glass with the quiet satisfaction of a verdict delivered.

I had known Margo long enough to understand what that word was really carrying. Not just Marcus. Never just Marcus. The thing about Margo and Marcus was that their friendship had been built, from the very beginning, on a shared fluency in romantic catastrophe. They had found each other in the wreckage of their respective disasters and recognised something, not just sympathy, but the deeper and more complicated bond of people who make the same kinds of mistakes for the same kinds of reasons. Margo had her own architect. Several, over the years. Different names, different cities, the same essential architecture, charming, elusive, constitutionally unavailable. Married, but exactly compelling enough to make the unavailability feel like a challenge worth accepting rather than a fact worth believing.

She had done the work. She would be the first to tell you so and occasionally did. The therapy, the honest accounting, the decision in her mid forties to stop choosing men who required her to be smaller or more patient or more forgiving than was reasonable. She had arrived, through considerable effort, at a version of herself she respected.

But I understand now that, sitting across from her, watching her exhale judgment with her cigarette smoke, I could see the thing she perhaps could not, that her impatience with Marcus was not quite the settled wisdom of someone who had moved beyond the pattern. It was the impatience of someone who recognised it too intimately. Who saw in his choices the shadow of her own and found that shadow irritating in the way that only our own reflections can truly irritate us.

She loved him. That was entirely real. She wanted better for him in the genuine way of someone who has experienced better and knows what it costs to get there.

But she was also, in some chamber of herself she had not fully examined, arguing with her own history every time she argued with his.

I had always known this. I had never said so. Some things you understand and simply carry, not because the truth would be unwelcome, but because the right moment never quite arrives, and then enough years pass that the knowing becomes its own kind of tenderness.

Outside that museum cabinet, the school children had shuffled past with their clipboards, recording their predetermined observations, seeing what they had been told to see.

I thought about that.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Marcus. I did. I had cared about Marcus through the Serbian film director and the married barrister and the personal trainer who had turned out to have a personal trainer of his own in the form of a long term boyfriend in Edinburgh. I had listened at reasonable hours and unreasonable ones, had said the things that were true and watched them be warmly received and entirely disregarded, had felt the specific disappointment of someone watching a person they’re fond of walk toward a door they have walked through before and will walk through again.

But that day the whole familiar film was playing at a slight remove, as though the sound had been turned fractionally down. As though I was watching Margo through the glass of a museum cabinet, present, visible, completely unreachable.

I had been trying, since leaving the museum, to find the words for what had happened. Not the physical part, the dizziness, the tunnel, the breath that stopped moving freely. I had words for that. I had been given those words years ago by a woman who had watched it happen and known immediately what she was seeing.

What I didn’t have a word for was the room. The candle. The hands.

The absolute certainty that I had not imagined it, that I somehow knew these people. These experiences, these visions for want of a better word, were not mine but had somehow sunk into me and had become as a memory. I was very confused.

A waiter materialised, removed our plates with the wordless efficiency of a good French brasserie, my salad barely touched, Margo’s steak frites a clean plate, and set a second bottle of Chablis into the ice bucket with a practised tilt.

Margo watched him go. Then she watched me.

“You’re very quiet,” she said.

I looked up. She was watching me with the attention she deployed when she had decided something required it, cigarette held slightly away from her face, head tilted, the effervescence briefly set aside.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Darling.” She said it with great affection and no conviction whatsoever. “You haven’t touched your lunch, and you’ve been somewhere else entirely since you sat down.” She tapped ash with one precise finger. “What’s happened?”

I looked at my plate. She was right about the food.

“I went to the museum this morning,” I said. “Before lunch.”

“The British Museum?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

I picked up my wine glass. “There’s something there I think I need to understand,” I said. “Something I wasn’t expecting.”

She studied me for a moment. Margo had known me since the early nineties, when I realised art college wasn’t for me at all and chased my archaeology career instead. I left St Martins and dropped out for a year, but we stayed friends and even lived in the same squat in Chelsea for a while. She had seen me navigate things she didn’t have the full picture of and had learned, over thirty years, when to push and when to simply top up the glass.

She reached for the bottle.

“Tell me,” she said.

And I found, to my own surprise, that I didn’t know where to begin.