NOTES

From CLIVE BARKER, BOOKS OF BLOOD

'What do you think?' Laura-May had asked Earl as she escorted him into her bedroom. Earl was too startled by what was in front of him to offer any coherent reply. The bedroom was a mausoleum, founded, it seemed, in the name of Trivia. Laid out on the shelves, hung on the walls and covering much of the floor were items that might have been picked off any rubbish tip: empty Coke cans, collections of ticket stubs, coverless and defaced magazines, vandalized toys, shattered mirrors, postcards never sent, letters never read - a limping parade of the forgotten and forsaken. His eye passed back and forth over the elaborate display and found not one item of worth amongst the junk and bric-a-brac. Yet all this inconsequentia had been arranged with meticulous care, so that no one piece masked another; and - now that he looked more closely - he saw that every item was numbered, as if each piece had had its place in some system of junk. The thought that this was all Laura-May's doing shrank Earl's stomach. The woman was clearly verging on lunacy.

'This is my collection,' she told him.

'So I see,' he replied.

'I've been collecting since I was six.'…She crossed the room to the dressing table, where most women would have arranged their toiletries. But here were arranged more of the same insane exhibits. 'Everybody leaves something behind you know,' Laura -May said to Earl, picking up some piece of dreck with all the care others might bestow on a precious stone, and examining it before placing it back in its elected position…always keeping something. As a memento.

Earl began to grasp the absurd poetry of the museum. In Laura-May's neat body was all the ambition of a great curator. Not for her mere art; she was collecting keepsakes of a more intimate nature. p. 87

'Incredible,' he murmured, quite genuinely. She smiled at him. He suspected she didn't show her collection to many people. He felt oddly honoured to be viewing it. p.88

Clive Barker, Books of Blood Vol. IV, Sphere, 1985, pp 87-88.

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