Antiquity II

IN MIDDLESBROUGH THERE IS A LEATHER CASE SOME 150-YEARS-OLD that hasn’t been opened for 149-years and if all goes to plan it never will be. It is owned by Sandra, a mother of three, and before her it belonged to her father who in turn inherited it from his father, who bought it from a stall along Portobello Road at the turn of the 20^thCentury with the spontaneous but explicit intention to hand it down to his as yet unborn child, Sandra’s father. So far, all has gone to plan.

It is a long sheet of half-centimetre thick leather, folded over to A4 size, with an overlapping section so it resembles a large, leather envelope. The overlap is fitted with a lock in the centre and there is no key. It is possible to pull the leather apart at the edges a little and peer inside, but there is a slightly smaller pocket of leather covering most of the contents. With a little effort and the aid of a flashlight, the top edge of what looks like a pile of paper and, yes, a pen, can be seen.

The leather envelope is to be passed to Sandra’s eldest daughter, Molly, on her 40^thbirthday (who could trust anyone any younger not to peek?) and then she should pass it on to her son or daughter, and so it will go on and on in this way through the years, unopened, until the end of the world or some disaster of crime or fire or biodegradation. We can only guess what genius or drivel is written on those pages, if anything at all. Every person is said to have a novel inside them and perhaps this is the original, unknown owner’s. It could be a startling, concise attempt at Proust, it could be a comic novel on a par with Kingsley Amis, or a miserable work of brilliance akin to Woolf. It could be utter garbage. It could be dirty drawings. It could be crayon scrawl, perhaps, after being left open and graffitied by some unknown child, then locked up again before the owner befell some awful fate: debtors prison, belongings sold? A train crash, the case propelled far into a field? Theft, death, unclaimed, auctioned. The beginning of its mystery.

It could be pages and pages of cock-and-ball doodles or watercolour landscapes. Beautiful scientific drawings of flowers and plants. Preliminary notes for Little Women?

Sandra takes it out sometimes from the fireproof safe and runs her hand over the soft brown leather and squeezes the pages beneath. What was its intention? Perhaps it isblank, all mint condition, thick and golden papyrus. Perhaps inside there are intricate plans for a flying machine? She takes comfort in the fact no one will ever know, because with every new generation the article is passed to the temptation will become greater and greater but so too will the sense of betrayal, until in some thousand years’ time the thing will have been elevated to god-like status as revered as an original copy of the bible. It will sit in a glass vacuum-case to preserve it and people from all over the world and galaxies far will come to see the binder and take photos and wonder, and there will be whole books of theory written about the object and university courses debating and studying the marvellous feat of family trust and perseverance and will-power.

And perhaps it is (and I kind of hope it is) just pages and pages of tits and dicks, doodled by some dirty, old, lonely man, from light-years ago.