Barefoot in the Head (12 page)

She wanted him to have her, if she could square her conscience about Phil. He was okay, but — yes, a change was so so welcome. Sex, too, yes, if he didn’t want too much of it. The waste always lay outside the window. He was clean-looking; good opening for bright lad — where had she overheard that? Well, it was self-defence. Wow that smash-up, still she trembled.

The gulls rose up from the mounds of rotting refuse, forming lines in the air. A dog down there, running, free, so free, companion of man, sly among the mountains. Perhaps now man was going to be as free as his companion. Trees in their future? Green? Bare?

Tears trickling down her cheek. Tears falling new from her sad speckled dreams. Even if it proved a better way of life, good things would be lost. Always the loss, the seepage. My sepia years. Sorry, Phil, I loved you all I could for six of them, but I’m going to bed with him if he wants me. The big gymnastic sergeant marching marching. It’s you I’m going to betray, not him, if I can make it, because he really has something, don’t know what. I don’t know if he’s what he says, but he is a sort of saint. And you did hit him first. You hit him first. You were always free with your fists. You were that.

She went downstairs. Either that running dog wore a tie or she was going acid head like the others.

‘It’s a bastard work, a mongrel,’ he said. He was eating something out of a can; that was now his way, no meals, only snacks, the fuzzy feeder. Kind of impersonal.

‘I’m a mongrel, aren’t I? Some Gurdjieff, more Ouspenski, time-obsessed passages from here and there, no zen or that — no Englishmen, but it’s going to spread from England out, we’ll all take it, unite all Europe at last. A gospel. Falling like PCA. America’s ready, too. The readiest place, always.’

‘If you’re happy.’ She touched him. He had dropped a baked bean onto the masterwork. It almost covered a word that might be ‘self-fulfilment’.

‘See those things crawling in the bare trees out there? Elms, are they? Birds as big as turkeys crawling in the trees, and toads, and that new animal. I often see it. There is an intention moving in them, as there is in us. They seem to keep their distance.’

‘Darling, you’re in ruins, your mind, you should rest!’

‘Yes. Happiness is a yesterday phase. Say, think, “tension-release”, maintain a sliding scale, and so you do away with sorrow. Get me, you just have a relief from tension, and that’s all you need. Nothing so time-consuming as happiness. Nothing personal. If you have sorrow, you are forced to seek its opposite, and vice versa, so you should try to abolish both. Wake, don’t live automatic, I’ll get it clear. Time...I must speak to people, address them. You have some gift I need. Come round with me, Angelina? Take me on, share my sack.’

She put her arms about him. The big gymnastic sergeant. There was some stale bread on the table, crumbs among the books he was breaking up and crayoning. Activity all the time, her windows, wind over the turning mounds. ‘When you love me, love, there’ll be something personal in it?’

‘It’s all evolving, angel, stacked with loot.’

When the Escalation came along, the two of them were half-lying on the camp-bed, limbs entangled, not actually copulating.

Greta wept, supported by two of the group. Featherstone-Haugh touched a chord on his balalaika and sang, ‘Her mother was killed by a sunlit Ford Cortina, and the road snapped shut.’

Ruby Dymond turned his cheeks into a poor grey.

‘Man the Driver,’ Chapter Three. Literature of the Future Meeting Feeling of the Future. Ouspenski’s concept of mental photographs postulates many photographs of the personality taken at characteristic moments; viewed together, these photographs will form a record by which man sees himself to be different from his common conception of himself — and truer. So, they will suggest the route of life without themselves having motion. The truth is in static instants; it is arrived at through motion. Motion of auto-crash, copulation, kinetic self-awakenings of any kind. There are many alternatives. Fiction to be mental photographs, motion to be supplied purely by reader. Music as harpoon to sleeping entrails, down out the howls of smaller dogs. Action a blemish as already in existence. Truth thus like a pile of photos, self-cancelling for self-fulfilment, multi-valued. Indecision multi-incisive and non-automatic. Impurity of decision one of the drives towards such truth-piles; the Ouspenskian event of a multiple crash on a modern motorway an extreme example of such impurities.

Wish for truth involved here, Man and landscape interfuse, science presides. Machines predominate.

Charteris stood at the window listening to the noise of the group, looking out at the highly carved landscape. Hedges and trees had no hint of green, were cut from iron, their edges jagged, ungleaming with the brown nearest black, although the winds drove rain shining across the panorama. Middays reduced job-lots from Coventry. Vehicles scouring down the roads trailed spume. Roads like seas like fossilised thought, coproliths of ancestral loinage, father-frigger. The earlier nonsense about the terrors of the population explosion; one learned to live with it. But mistakes still being made. The unemployed were occupied, black midland figures of animated sacks, inplanting young trees along the grand syndlines and barrows of the embankments and cuttings and underpasses, thereby destroying their geometry, mistakenly interfusing an abstract of nature back into the grand equation. Got to banish that dark pandemic nature. But the monstrous sky, squelching light out of its darkest corners, counteracted this regressive step towards out-dated reality moulds. The PCA bombs had squirted from the skies; it was their region. Science presided.

There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship

Sailing every ha’penny.

The goods you buy with this new coinage

Weren’t made any place I heard of

They give out the meagerest sounds

But I don’t hear a thing any longer

Since I do my personal thinking in pounds

I had a good family life and a loving girl

But I had to trade them in for pounds

The damned birds were coming back, too, booking their saplings, grotesques from the pre-psychedelic twilife, ready to squirt eggs into the first nests at the first opportunity. They moved in squadrons, heavy as lead, settled over the mounds of rubbish, picking out the gaudy Omo packets. They had something planned, they were motion without truth, fugitive, to be hated. He had heard them calling to each other in nervous excitement, ‘Omo, Omo’. Down by the shores of the dead sea, down by the iron sunset, they were learning to read, a hostile art. And the new animal was among them by the dead elms.

Angeline was comforting Greta, Ruby watching her every fingertip, Burton was turning the pages of ‘Man the Driver’, thinking of a black and red tie he had worn, his only tie. Words conveyed truth, he had to admit, but that damned tie had really sent him. He thought he had tied it round the neck of a black dog proceeding down Ashby Road. Spread the message.

‘Greet, you didn’t hear of a dog involved in this pile-up?’

‘Leave her alone,’ Angeline said. ‘Let her cry it out. It’s like a tide.’

‘There’s been a dislocation,’ Burton said.

‘He did it, you know,’ Greta wept. ‘You can’t have secrets in this city any more. Well, it’s more of an urban aggregation than a city, really, I suppose. He pushed the whole chain of events into being, piled up all them lorries, killed by mum and everything.’

‘I know,’ Angeline said. The heart always so laden, the gulls always so malignant.

In the old kitchen among gash-cans where a single brass tap poured a thin melody out of one note, Ruby had her alone at last clasping her thin wrists by each tapering tendon her face still with youth in its whole imprint.

‘Don’t start anything, Ruby, get back to play your piece with the boys.’

‘You know how I feel about your continued days, how you always play my piece, and now I see you lay with Charteris.’

She pulled from him and he caught her again, a slight look of ox under his eyebrushes. ‘I mind mine, you mind yours, you hip me Ruby though I know you mean well!’

‘Look, the rumour is he killed Phil — ’

Frantic, and a churning mound of rubbish at the sill, ‘Ruby, if you are trying to make me — ’

‘I won’t kid, I never liked Phil, you know that, but to go round with the guy who did it — ’

She was as thin from her lethargy as stretched teeth could make her. ‘He has something that’s all I know, and hope I need among you scenemakers, I don’t have to trust him...’

In the next room they were calling and formationed birds dipped like sleet across her vision. ‘Remember me? I was around before you met Brasher, I knew you when you were a little lanky girl I used to come and play with your brothers, gave you your first kiss — ’

‘It’s looking back, Ruby, looking back,’ despairing.

‘I thought you loved me, you used to ride on my cycle.’

‘It’s past, Ruby.’ She was afraid of her own tears the very nature of her grottoed self. Leaning back over the choked draining board, she saw the face of him move across her visage like a lantern burning impatience, mutter, turn under its hairbush and leave her there with the one-note melody unlistened to but ever-piercing.

Creaming crowds in Nottingham to greet the Escalation, teenagers blurry in the streets, hardly whispering, the middle-aged, the old, the crippled and the halt, all those who had not starved, all those who had not died from falling into fires or ditches on roads, all those who had not wandered away after the aerosols drifted down, all those who had not fallen down dead laughing, all those who had not opened their spongy skulls with can-openers to let out the ghosts and the rats. All were hot for the Escalation under the seams of their grey clouts.

After two numbers, the boys, sensational and smelly, had the crowds throwing noise back at them. Burton stood up, announced Saint Charteris, asked if anyone had seen a stray dog wearing a red and black tie. The Escalation howled their new anthem.

Obdolescent Loughborough

With slumthing to live through

Charteris we cry

Is something to live by

Try a multi-valued slant

On the instant instant

He had scarcely thought out what he was going to say. The pattern was there, misty or clear. It seemed so apparent he felt it did not need uttering, except they should wake and know what they knew. The slav dreamers, Ouspenski and the rest, sent him travelling with his message through to his outpost of Europe. If the message had validity, it was shaped by journey and arrival. He couldn’t always stand helpless across the river. In Metz, he had realised the world was a web of forces. Their minds, their special Midland minds had to become repositories of thinking also web-like, clear but indefinite, instant but infinite.

If they wanted exterior models, the space-time pattern of communicationways with which their landscape was riddled functioned as a master plan, monster plan of mind-pattern. A1 the incoherent repirations that filled their lives would then fall into place. The empty old nineteenth-century houses built by new classes which now stood rotting in ginger stone on hillsides, carriageways either approached or receded like levels of old lakes, they were not wasted; they functioned as landmarks. No more eggless waters. Nothing should be discarded; everything would reorient, as the ginger stone mansions or the green stone churches were reoriented by the changing landscape dynamic, and the crash-ups escalated to a love-in. He was lead of the New Thought. The Fourth World System, Man the Driver, would appear soon, all would wake.

So the words sprang up like bolted birds.

Greta stood and screamed, ‘He killed Our Mum! Poor old girl with her flowers! He caused the multi-maxident on the Inner Relief. Kill him! Kill him!’

‘Kill him!’ also cried Ruby.

White-faced Angeline said from the platform for all to hear, ‘And he killed my husband, Phil, you all knew him.’ It was sin to her whether she spoke or not; she worked by old moralities, where someone was always betrayed.

Their troubled eyes all turned to his eyes, seeking meaning, like stars in the firment.

‘I thought they were going to crucify you,’ said Featherstone-Haugh after offering the Serb a glance through perspectives later to be of more transfixion over the desiccated lustrums of western worships, crowns of thorns, crosses of scorn, the love-kill. You couldn’t tell the bits of wreckage from the bits of victims. He couldn’t stop his heart beating.

‘It’s true! The lorry was sweeping along the great artery from Glasgow down to Naples, In Naples, they will also mourn. We are all one people now, Europeople, and although this massive region of yours is as special as the Adriatic Coast or the Dutch Lowlands, or the steppes of central Asia, the similarity is also in the differences. It’s the impact, as you must feel. You know of my life, that I was Communist like my father, coming from Serbia in Jugoslavia, that I lived long in Italy, dreamed all my while of England and the wide cliffs of Dover. Now I arrive here after the dislocation and fatal events begin, spreading back along my trail. It’s a sign. See how in this context even death is multivalued, the black nearest brown Brasher falling back into the traffic was a complex impulse-node from which effects still multiplicate along all tension lines. We shall all follow that impulse to the last fracture and serial of recorded time. The Escalation and I are now setting out on a motorcrusade down through our Europe, the autobahns, the war, dislocation, to ultimate unity. All of you come too, a moving event to seize the static instant of truth! Come too! Wake! There are many alternatives!’