Barefoot in the Head (2 page)

Madame was working in the bar when he went down. Several of the little tables in the room were occupied by local people, jigsaw pieces. The room was large and dispiriting, the big dark wood bar on one side was dwarfed and somehow set apart from the functions it was supposed to serve, a tabernacle for pernod. In one corner of the chamber, a television set flickered, most of those present contriving to sit and drink so that they kept an eye on it, as if it were an enemy or at best an uncertain friend. The only exceptions to this rule were two men at a table set apart; they talked industriously to each other, resting their wrists on the table but using their hands to emphasise points in the conversation. Drab eyes, imperious gestures. One of these men, who grew a puff of beard under his lower lip, soon revealed himself as M’sieur.

Behind M’sieur’s table, standing in one corner by a radiator, was a bigger table, a solemn table, spread with various articles of secretarial and other use. This was Madame’s table, and to this she retired to work with some figures when she was not serving her customers behind the funereal bar. Tied to the radiator was a large and mangy young dog, who whined at intervals and flopped continually into new positions, as though the floor had been painted with anti-dog powder. Madame occasionally spoke mildly to it, but her interests clearly lay elsewhere.

All this Charteris took in as he sat at a table against the wall, sipping a pernod, waiting for the serving girl to appear. He saw these people as victims of an unworkable capitalistic system dying on its feet. They were extinct in their clothes. The girl came after some while from an errand in the back regions, and he motioned her over to his table.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Angelina.’

‘Mine’s Charteris. That’s what I call myself. It’s an English name, a writer’s name. I’d like to take you out for a meal.’

‘I don’t leave here till late — ten o’clock.’

‘Then you don’t sleep here?’

Some of the softness went out of her face as caution, even craftiness, overcame her; momentarily, he thought, she’s just another lay, but there will be endless complications to it in this set-up, you can bet! She said, ‘Can you buy some cigarettes or something? I know they’re watching me. I’m not supposed to be intimate with customers.’

He shrugged. She walked across to the bar. Charteris watched the movement of her legs, the action of her buttocks, trying to estimate whether her knickers would be clean or not. He was fastidious. Italian girls generally washed more scrupulously than Serbian girls. Bright legs flashing behind torn windscreen. Angelina fetched down a packet of cigarettes from a shelf, put them on a tray, and carried them across to him. He took them and paid without a word. All the while, the M’sieur’s eyes were on him, stains in the old poilu face.

Charteris forced himself to smoke one of the cigarettes. They were vile. Despite her neutrality in the Acid Head War, France had suffered from shortages like everyone else. Charteris had been pampered, with illegal access to NUNSACS cigars, which he enjoyed.

He looked at the television. Faces swam in the green light, talking too fast for him to follow. There was some excitement about a cycling champion, a protracted item about a military parade and inspection, shots of international film stars dining in Paris, something about a murder hunt somewhere, famine in Belgium, a teachers’ strike, a beauty queen. Not a mention of the two continents full of nutcases who no longer knew where reality began or ended. The French carried their neutrality into every facet of life, with TV their eternal nightcap.

When Charteris had finished his pernod, he went over and paid Madame at her table and walked out into the square.

It was night, night in its early stages when the clouds still carried hints of daylight through the upper air. The floodlighting was gaining on the cathedral, chopping it into alternate vertical sections of void and glitter; it was a cage for some gigantic prehistoric bird. Beyond the cage, the traffic on the motorway could be heard, snarling untiringly.

He went and sat in his car and smoked a cigar to remove the taste of the caporal, although sitting in the Banshee when it was motionless made him uneasy. He thought about Angelina and whether he wanted her, decided on the whole he did not. He wanted English girls. He had never even known one but, since his earliest days, he had longed for all things English, as another man he knew yearned for anything Chinese. He had dropped his Serbian name to christen himself with the surname of his favourite English writer.

About the present state of England, he imagined he had no illusions. When the Acid Head War broke out, undeclared, Kuwait had struck at all the prosperous countries. Britain had been the first nation to suffer the PCA Bomb — the Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that propagated psychotomimetic states, twilight ruptured its dark cities. As a nunsacs official, he could guess the disorder he would find there.

Before England, there was this evening to be got through... He had said such things so often to himself. Life was so short, and also so full of desolating boredom and the flip voluptuousness of speed-death. Acid Head victims all over the world had no problems of tedium; their madnesses precluded it; they were always well occupied with terror or joy, which ever their inner promptings led them to; that was why one envied the victims one tried to ‘save’. The victims never grew tired of themselves.

The cigar tasted good, extending its mildness all round him like a mist. Now he put it out and climbed from the car. He knew of two alternative ways to pass the evening before it was time to sleep; he could eat or he could find sexual companionship. Sea, he thought, the mysticism of materialism. It was true. He sometimes needed desperately the sense of a female life impinging on his with its unexplored avenues and possibilities, so stale, so explored, were his own few reactions. Back to his mind again came the riotous movements of the autostrada victims, fornicating with death.

On his way towards a lighted restaurant on the far side of the square, he saw another method by which to structure the congealing time of a French evening. A down-at-heel cinema was showing a film called SEX ET BANG BANG. He glanced up at the ill-painted poster, showing a near-naked blonde with an ugly shadow like a moustache across her face, as he passed. Lies he could take, not disfigurements.

As he ate in the restaurant, he thought about Angelina and madness and war and neutrality; it seemed to him they were all products of different time-senses. Perhaps there were no human emotions, only a series of different synchronicity microstructures, so that one ‘had time for’ one thing or another. He suddenly stopped eating.

He saw the world — Europe, that is, precious, hated Europe that was his stage — purely as a fabrication of time, no matter involved. Matter was an hallucinatory experience: merely a slow-motion perceptual experience of certain time/emotion nodes passing through the brain. No, that the brain seized on in turn as it moved round the perceptual web it had spun, would spin, from childhood on. Metz, that he apparently perceived so clearly through all his senses, was there only because all his senses had reached a certain dynamic synchronicity in their obscure journey about the biochemical web. Tomorrow, responding to inner circadian rhythms, they would achieve another relationship, and he would appear to ‘move on’ to England. Matter was an abstraction of the time syndrome, much as the television had enabled Charteris to deduce bicycle races and military parades which held, for him, even less substance than the flickering screen. Matter was hallucination.

He recalled he had had a pre-vision of this illumination upon entering the Hôtel des Invalides, although he could not precisely recall its nature.

Charteris sat unmoving. If it were so, if all were hallucination, then clearly he was not at this restaurant table. Clearly there was no plate of cooling veal before him. Clearly Metz did not exist. The autostrada was a projection of temporal confluences within him, perhaps a riverine duologue of his entire life. France? Earth? Where was he? What was he?

Terrible though the answer was, it seemed unassailable. The man he called Charteris was merely another manifestation of a time/emotion node with no more reality than the restaurant or the autostrada. Only the preceptual web itself was ‘real’. ‘He’ was the web in which Charteris, Metz, tortured Europe, the stricken continents of Asia and America, could have the being, their doubtful being. He was God...

Someone was speaking to him. Dimly, distantly, he became aware of a waiter asking if he might take his plate away. So the waiter must be the Dark One, trying to disrupt his Kingdom. He waved the man off, saying something vaguely — much later, he realised he had spoken in Serbian, his native tongue which he never used.

The restaurant was closing. Flinging some francs down on the table, he staggered out into the night, and slowly came to himself in the open air.

He was shaking from the strength and terror of his vision. For what passed as an instant, he had been God. As he rested against a rotting stone wall, its texture patterning his fingers, he heard the cathedral clock begin to chime and counted automatically. It was ten o’clock by whatever time-level they used here. He had passed two hours in some sort of trance.

In the camp outside Catanzaro, NUNSACS housed ten thousand men and women. Most of them were Russian, most had been brought from the Caucasus. Charteris had got his job on the rehabilitation staff by virtue of his fluent Russian, in many respects almost identical with his native tongue.

The ten thousand caused little trouble. Most of them were confined within the tiny republics of their own psyches. The PCA Bombs had been ideal weapons. The psychedelic drugs concocted by the Arab state were tasteless, odourless, colourless, and hence virtually undetectable. They were cheaply made, easily delivered. They were equally effective whether inhaled, drunk, or filtered through the pores of the skin. They were enormously potent. The after-effects, dependent on size of dose, could last a lifetime.

So the ten thousand wandered about the camp, smiling, laughing, scowling, whispering, still as bemused as they had been directly after the bombing. Some recovered. Others over the months revealed depressing character changes. Their guards were not immune.

The drugs passed through the human system unimpaired in strength. Human wastes had to be rigorously collected — in itself a considerable undertaking among people no longer responsible for their actions — and subjected to rigorous processing before the complex psychochemical molecules could be broken down. Inevitably, some of the NUNSACS staff picked up the contagion.

And I, thought Charteris, I with that sad and lovely Natrina...

I am going psychedelic. That godlike vision must have come from the drug. At least rainbows will flutter in those dark valleys where I shall tread.

He had moved some way towards the Hôtel des Invalides, dragging his fingers across the rough angles of the buildings as if to convince himself that matter was still matter. When Angelina came up to him, he scarcely recognised her.

‘You were waiting for me,’ she said accusingly. ‘You are deliberately waylaying me. You’d better go to your room before Madame locks up.’

‘I — I may be ill! You must help me!’

‘Speak Italian. I told you, I don’t understand German.’

‘Help me, Angelina. I must be ill.’

‘You were well enough before.’

She had sensed his strong angular body.

‘I swear...I had a vision. I can’t face my room. I don’t want to be alone. Let me come back to your room!’

‘Oh no! You must think I am a fool, Signor!’

He pulled himself together, recalling the way of thought.

‘Look, I’m ill, I think. Come and sit in my car with me for ten minutes. I need to get my strength back. If you don’t trust me, I’ll smoke a cigar all the time. You never knew a man kiss a pretty girl with a cigar in his mouth, did you?’

They sat in the car, she beside him looking at him warily. Charteris could see her eyes gleam in the thick orange light — the very hue of time congealed! — slicing off the walls of the cathedral. He sucked the rich sharp smoke down into his being, trying to fumigate it against the terrible visions of his psyche.

‘I’m going back to Italy soon,’ she said. ‘Now the war’s over and it is certain that the Arabs will not invade. I may work in Milano. My uncle writes that it’s booming there again now. Is that so?’

‘Booming.’ A very curious word. Not blooming, not booing. Booming.

‘Really, I’m not Italian. Not by ancestry. Everyone in our little village is descended from Albanians. When the Turks invaded Albania five centuries ago, many Albanians fled in ships across to the South of Italy to start life anew. The old customs were preserved from generation to generation. Did you hear of such a thing in Catanzaro?’

‘No.’ In Catanzaro he had heard the legends and phobias of the Caucasus, chopped and distorted by hallucination. It was a Slav, not an Illyrian, purgatory of alienation.

‘As a little girl, I was bi-lingual. We spoke Tosk in the home and Italian everywhere else. Now I can hardly remember one word of Tosk! My uncles have all forgotten too. Only my old aunt, who is also called Angelina, remembers. She sings the old Tosk songs to the children. It’s sad, isn’t it, not to recall the language of your childhood? Like an exile?’

‘Oh, shut up! I’ve never heard of Tosk. To hell with it!’

By that, she was reassured. Perhaps she believed that a man who took so little care to please could not want to rape her. Perhaps she was right.