Edward Mordake: In Love, At War.

By Paul White

A fictional account of the life and death of Edward Mordake.

Edward Mordake was reportedly the 19th century heir to an English peerage. He supposedly had an extra face on the back of his head, which could neither eat nor speak, although it could laugh and cry. Edward begged doctors to have his "demon head" removed, because, supposedly, it whispered Satanist language to him at night, but no doctor would attempt it. He committed suicide at the age of 23.
It is difficult to establish the facts behind Edward Mordake's condition due to the lack of reliable medical records. Not even his date of birth and death are recorded and there are conflicting accounts regarding his suicide, as well as placement and position of his extra face. Much of what is known is based on oral retelling. (Taken from Wikipedia).

The novel is set in modern day England and depicts Edward as a shy, house-bound young man who cares for his ill mother but whom, one day whilst shopping, meets a girl in red trainers. A relationship begins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul White
• Release date: Apr 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301631193

Paul White

Paul White was born in Leicestershire, United Kingdom in 1971. He moved to mid-Wales in 1983. His first passion is photography - his portfolio of ruined mansions and farmhouses throughout Wales can be seen at www.welshruins.co.uk He has written two novels: 'Winter Daffodils' and 'Raven on a Molehill'. His new short story for children and adults alike 'The Fable of Hungry Squirrels in the Village of Idiots' has just been released as a Kindle ebook. He is currently writing a fictional account of Edward Mordake.

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Edward Mordake; in Love, at War

Published by Smashwords. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright of Paul White (2013)

Edward Mordake at twenty three.

Edward Mordake is twenty three years old. He lives with his mother. His mother is eighty nine and spends most of her time nowadays in bed, ill with one sickness or another. Edward rarely leaves the house but today, March 21st, he has an appointment at the local unemployment centre. He has an interview with an advisor who will either deem Edward fit and able or not fit and able to work. Edward has been considered disabled for the last seven years, ever since he left school. Edward is not looking forward to the jobcentre interview since he has read a lot on the internet and it has also been reported on news that over the 70 percent of jobseekers with disabilities have recently been told that they are able to work and their benefits have been reduced to that of an able bodied person. It is not the extra money that Edward will lose if he is deemed fit and able to work. It is the fact that he will be forced to attend job interviews and this, this facing the world head-on, is what frightens Edward the most.

Edward leaves the house at 9:30am on March 21st 2013. The day is unspectacular and specks of rain begin to fall. They fall and obscure Edward’s vision and he has to constantly wipe his glasses. He is walking the three miles to the jobcentre. He does actually walk passed a bus stop and the digital display announces that the next bus is only five minutes away but there’s nobody else at the bus-stop and Edward has had a bad experience once before. About two years ago, the first and last time he tried to catch a bus, he stood alone at the bus stop and as the bus came up the road, Edward stuck out his hand to stop the bus. The driver looked at Edward and carried on without stopping. There were some school children on the bus and as it passed they opened one of the high windows and threw an empty drinks carton at him, which hit him, on his chest. He could hear their cries of laughter as the bus sped on and left Edward in utter despair. He walked home with his head hung low and tears filling his eyes. Perhaps a minor incident but one that has remained and dare I say shaped Edward somewhat.

So, today, Edward walks. It will take him almost an hour to get there and by the time he reaches the jobcentre he already knows he’ll be hot and sweaty. He also already knows that he won’t remove his coat or his hat. They are his comfort. They are his protection. There are too many people in the world who’d like to see him put down, set upon, locked up even.

Edwards walk is not an unpleasant one. The first section is half a mile through suburbia but then he can take a muddy footpath through a small stretch of woodland. He will meet some dog-walkers there but otherwise there won’t be anyone much else. He likes his privacy. Ideally he likes to walk without seeing anyone but that’s almost impossible anywhere in the world, it seems, he thinks.

After he reaches the end of the woods he then has a few more suburban streets and then through a park, Oakland’s Arboretum, with a rose garden which he loves. He knows this time of day there won’t be many people around, most will have already reached work and those that don’t work are not usually out and about at this time of day. Again, there will be just a few dog walker and the odd jogger and cyclist. He’ll watch a cat watching a bird. Edward wants to buy a bicycle. He would go out much more often. He could wrap a scarf around his neck, buy some slip-over sunglasses and speed around the city anonymously. He has enough money to buy a good bike but he hasn’t yet found the right time, or enough confidence, to walk into a bike shop and test-cycle a few. It’s on his list of achievable goals this year. It isn’t the top item. His top item is to meet a girl. He has never had a female friend since primary school. All the girls at secondary school considered him a freak and only spoke to him when they had found a new insult. The insults no longer hurt him. He was beyond hurt. He had heard every combination. They had soaked through the pores of his skin a long time ago and they flew around with his blood cells and merged. If Edward ever cut himself, a paper cut or something, then he’d study his blood. He had been convinced he’d find proof that alongside his white and red blood cells he’d find another kind of cell, the cell of hurt.

Edward is twenty three years old. He had never kissed a girl and other than the occasional time he went to the shops to buy food or when he had to make a phone call, he hadn’t properly spoken to a girl since early childhood – before children distinguish between the normal and abnormal. Edward was now firmly planted into the latter and there was little chance that that would change any day soon.

Edward Mordake was born with an extra face.

Edward Mordake was born with an extra face on the back of his head. The face was smaller and prettier than his own. It was a face of a female. Unlike Edward’s good front face, she has tiny features. Her eyes are small and dark. They moved around but it was never determined properly if they could focus. Her mouth and nose were also incredibly small. Her nose was not a proper nose. Doctors confirmed that the skin, just a couple of centimetres up had webbed over. It was an aesthetic nose, which was how one polite doctor had described it. Her mouth was always also open slightly and if close enough, a person could hear a shallow gasping falling from it. It slobbered and mucus sometimes dribbled from it. It had never spoken nor could it speak. It had no vocal chords, no throat as such. It was not attached to Edward’s proper vocal chords but Edward could find that if he held his nose and closed his proper mouth then he could breath, albeit barely, through his smaller mouth.

This wasn’t the most precious of gifts that God had ever given a man. Edward sometimes fantasised about his ability to breathe through two mouths and all the scenarios where this may be of importance; like when a murderer holds your head under water to drown you or even trying to impress a girl by smoking through one mouth and blowing smoke out of the other. Unfortunately the list of possibilities was not infinite and it wasn’t long before Edward became bored with his mini-fantasies and depression struck down upon him again, just a little harder, just a little more repressive.

Edward fortunately had a good mop of hair. It was thick and almost black and his mother had always fought the desire to have it cut. It was one of Edward’s great fears that someday he would begin to lose his hair and male pattern baldness would reveal his extra face to the whole wide world. That day had yet to come and it was something to be thankful for. Edward’s hair could be combed quite easily to obscure his second face. Unfortunately though when he totally obscured it he found his extra mouth made a louder breathing nose and had on occasion began to choke, obviously when a hair had been sucked down her throat. So Edward, whenever he went out, wore a hat. It was an elasticised flat clothe cap. It sat very tightly upon his head and it was not easily to fit. That said, neither was it easy to fall or blow off. The paradox being though that because Edward had so much thick dark hair, it made the hat fit uncomfortably and often, if worn for more than a hour, would give Edward a headache and his extra face breathing problems. A line of spots were also always present where the tightly rimmed hat fitted on his forehead.

Edward had more problems that any twenty three year old could ever only dream about. He complained to no-one though. His mother loved him just the way he was. His mother loved him the way any mother loves their son. His mother loved him more for his disability than if he hadn’t been disabled.

Marcel Mordake had been a successful woman throughout her twenties, thirties and forties but her fortune changed somewhere in the midst of her menopause. She lost her man, she lost a handful of promotions and then finally lost her job. She was 56 when she saw splinters and drowning of the shipwreck of her life. She saw herself at first treading water and then saw the waters pouring in. By the time her 56th year had ended, other than the house, she had little more than what she’d been born with all those busy years ago.

Marcel Mordake’s life had come a full circle. She began to frequent the bars and clubs and although washed up and washed out, she had little problem finding men. And then, much to her horror and all those involved, she became pregnant. She drowned herself in gin for the next seven months until she was certain there was no life left within her. She lay in her bed with a bottle and a dirty engraved glass. She could feel nothing and the little baby boy who was born seemed nothing more than a slightly heavy visit to the bathroom. She held her babe and cut the umbilical cord herself. She phoned the hospital and then, just before the ambulance arrived, she downed another half a bottle of gin. She felt like the titanic. She felt like her little baby boy was a lifeboat. She felt had sacrificed everything for this moment and this was one of the final moments of her life.

Marcel Mordake sat in the back of the ambulance and then she entered the hospital. Nurses took her baby and wheeled her into a private room. The hospital freaked Marcel out but she remained silent and singular and uncommunicative.

Edward was a small child with a mop of dark thick hair. When the afterbirth was washed from his scalp, the ward nurse let out a terrifying scream. Another nurse came running over and she too let out a small squeal. They gathered themselves and informed the ward nurse. And thus began a series of events where little Edward Mordake was visited by doctor, by specialist, by consultant, by civil servant. Leaks fell to the press and a photographer conned his way into the little boy’s hospital room. Edward Mordake was announced to the world. The news made waves in all the gutters of the world and then a little above the stench and filth. The specialists were confounded and nobody knew what to do with the little child. Eventually the little boy was returned to his mother and mother ceased her drinking ways for a few years.

Various doctors and social workers visited the mother and child but the years passed and little of their problems were solved and familiarity bred content. The professionals drifted away, the social workers battled on but who was there, when at 2am the boy began to cry and the smaller face too looked so distressed? Marcel loved her boy. She loved his face. She loved him for the creature he was and she bought a dog for the boy on his fourth birthday. But the dog saw Edwards’s second face as an infected wound and turned nasty. The dog was smacked with a spade and buried in a shallow grave in the rear garden. The death of the dog did not bother Edward very much but Marcel, the one who had swung the spade began to act differently. She herself could