Barefoot in the Head (8 page)

How they saw each other. Each in isolation shipwracked. Always a farther coast beneath the coastline. I now my own mariner seized from sealess Serbia crossed at last the saint rowing with muffed oars down foggy Port of London to the crimeship or Sir Francis circumaggraving the globe under my own prowess crossed the eggless waters to these shores this man this mantle.

They saw each other in a frost of violence crystallised recognised — a thousand self-photographing photographs fell about them on each a glimpse without its clue a fist a wrist a shoe a wall a word a cry Charteris we cry we hear his voice cry Paradise. What crazed triumph as Charteris foresuffers in utter puzzlement but yet did he not already do it all, in menace of future hour.

In contrast Brasher he. Ashen he mounts back his anger on an unsound rampant saying, ‘I’ll not ride anywhere with you or where the lorries sweep. Isn’t there’s a limit a limbo a limit somewhere isn’t there. You must know that I am the great Sayer and cannot in my mouth’s teeth be dumb before these my fellowers.’ They cheer and bring thin coffee always offstage like little paper faces. ‘Now you arrive here and fatal events begin spreading forward along my trail and every premonition to an ashtip. See all how even death is multi-valved and in its colour black nearest brown. Back into the traffic no not I! No more moving no more movement only to still and take what I teach.’

And all those present said, ‘Not the ashtits. Sickle ourselves on stillnesss,’ like the backrow of the chorus.

But Burton drew Charteris aside and said, ‘It’s the PCA bombs he’s not too bad will be glad to get home to his wife it’s just he’s psychic sees a bad image in you like and the menuts of a future hour.’

Bombardment of images. Peltocrat. White thighs with peonies curling between and the walk up narrow stair,
božur m’sieur
. All that he took and let the others burst about and drank his thin naked carcinomatous London coffee as they milled and mixed paper lips over china lip all textures communicasement.

And Brasher came near again something in a suit and narrowly said encouraged by Charteris’ absence of aggression, ‘You also pedal a belief, my foreign friend? From France if my infirmation is correct.’

‘Now I arrive here and fatal events spread forward along the trails. I am quoting, but we are nothing to each other and I have no word yet. I was a member in my own country of the party, but enough of that. I’m dazed here maybe not fully awake the afflict of that Arabian nightmoil.’

The heavy man now pressed against him against the banisters.

‘Tell me nothing you parisher this is my perish get it I had a miraculous survival from the air crash we’re going to hit great wheeling scabs of metropolis mouths teeth and you keep quiet. I’m the Sayer here.’ As panic stammer as if he still fell.

‘I’ll be getting on if you object. Objectivity of speeches. I have no feelings and the day spurs me, or Burton if he still wants to come.’

Tremor by the side of the mouth speaking independently.

‘Come on Phil,’ says Burton and to Charteris, ‘He’s coming but he’s just suspicious of you because he saw you in the crashing plane, an apparition. On him rides the word like.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Charteris. ‘That countryside rumpling upwards your distorted vision it was Brasher that interweaves my thoughts! I get it now the plane diving down to, well. I’m going thanks. I want no part of this man’s dream nor did I ever fly with him in any plane.’

As if this abdication soothed Brasher he came forward again and barred Charteris’ way brushing aside Burton saying, ‘On that plane among the vestal virgings southwards you usurped my sodding seat and as we came — ’

‘Driving, driving, I have not flown, now get that through your acid head — ’

‘I only spared the flashing plashing, and all those cute little bits of stuff — now look here my foreign friend, I have a right to my share of any bits of crumpet as suffer conversion to Proceed and you — ’

‘Let him go Phil, he only offered you a lift to Lough along with me so are you coming, and this lot and your harum can come on after.’ Thus Burton and in a closed sentence for Charteris, ‘He’s an old mate of mine or was till religion got him — now he’s worse to manage than the Escalation. Everyone’s the solo instrument in this scene.’

So was it that with papered-on cheers from the walk-on parts they took the legend down the dirty creaking stairs and to the floor below the tiles returning and in the darkness waited for a moment unknowing within the shelter of the judas house before the in ward-gazing judas-hole: and then went forth.

Precognition is a function of two forces he told himself and already wished that he might record it in case the thought drifted from him on the aerosolar light. Precognotion. Two forces: mind of course and also time: the barriers go down and somewhere a white-thighed woman waits for me —

These are not my images. Bombardment of others’ images. Autobreasted succubae again from Disflocations.

Yet my image the white-thighed, although I have not seen them already familiar like milk inside Venetian crystal all the better to suck you by. But my precognotions slipping.

It’s not only that mind can leap aside from its tracks but that the tracks must be of certain property: so there are stages I have crossed to reach this point the first being the divination of time as a web without merely forward progress but all directions equally so that the essential I at any moment is like a spider sleeping at the centre of its web always capable of any turn and the white thorn thighs turning. Only that essential Gurdjieffian I aloof. And secondly the trip-taking soaked air of London tipping me off my traditional cranium so that I allow myself a multi-dimensional way.

Zbogom
, what am I now if not more than man, mariner of my seven seizures.

More than pre-psychedelic man.

Me homo viator

She homo victorine

She haunts me as I hope to haunt her. Not so far north as Scotland.

In his treadmillrace he was on her thought scent moving along the web taking a first footfall consciously away from antique logic gaining gaining and losing also the attachment to things that keeps alive a thousand useless Is in a man’s life seeing the primary fact the sexual assertion that she took wing whoever she was near to these two strange men.

Then he knew that he was the last trump of his former formal self to ascend from the dealings at Dover by the London lane and the other caught cards of his pack truly at discard trapped in old whists and wists.

He had a new purpose that was no more a mystery only now in this moment of revelation was the purpose yet unrevealed. Magical now he played the car scudding and leaping and bouncing from the surface of the road to the madland of the midlands. He wondered if voices cried his name or a paper face tore screaming down to living flesh.

Low hills whirled by like bonfires.

And while Charteris took his frail barque into strange seasoned seas, life on the textbook level continued in the back of the Banshee where Brasher uncomfortably crouched next to the group’s equipment held forth to Burton once more of his traumatic trip when the wings failed the pilot’s part of reason.

‘I knew the flaming plane was going to crash before ever I got into it.’ Brasher reliving the drama of his predictive urges all terror cotta at his wattles.

As his simple sentence speared a few facts on the material surface, they twisted under and swam to Charteris through the accumulating fathoms of his flooding newness, garbed in beauty and madness speckled.

Brasher’s plane was one of the last to fly. It brought the members of the Stockholm Precognitive Congress back to Great Britain on flight S614 leaving Arlanda Airport from Runway 3 at 1145 hours local time or maybe it was later because the airport clock had taken to marking an imperceptible time of its own and your pilot was Captain Mats Hammarström who welcomes you a bored-looking man whose wooden face conceals a maelstrom of beauty caught from the falling aerosoused air. Takeoff kindly fasten

And soon we’re over the frosty snowy terrain astonishing Suggestive contours showing through the ecological extract a Ben Nicholson low relief with public hair

Frosted lakes new formations tracks to abstracks spoor of industry neat containments of terrain scarred forests pattern appearing as we rise where no pattern was where no pattern was intended. Models too precise for truth marvellous

Clouds scraping ground. As clouds thicken sun lights them draws a screen over the world soon the fantastic stage-set a new world solid appears untrodden by man whiter-than-white more-than-arctic world of cloudbergs where nothing polar could survive miraculous

All this mindmoving while trim succulent young air-hostesses minister to the passengers pretending in their formal blue uniforms courtesy SAS that they know nothing of ersex. To nobody’s deception. The masquerade keeps the serpent sleeping forms part of the formalised eroticism of pre-psychedelic times that these nubile and gleaming maidens should minister to men above the cloud formations incredible

Old concepts of godliness harnessed to conceits of airline schedules

What price the crack-up Brasher

The maidens are antidotes to this bleak world of freedom and their secret confined spaces stand alone against the idiot acreage of sky tremendous

Their suggestive contours show through the uniformal abstracts low reliefs in high style delicious

Delicate unpruned lips offer small torque before a tailspin

Plane begins to descend perhaps Brasher flinches at the white land as it rushes up but no impact. Is plane or cloud intangible. So swallowed by these mountains and valleys on which nobody ever built erewhonderful

Great wheeling scab of metropolis below thirty thousand streetscars cutting through the primaeval concrete crust. Silver paternal Thames threading through it a curling crack of sky and your Captain Mats Hammarström takes it into his capital notion to land upon it

All Brasher had lumbered in his bare cranian retort were an old Cortina and a lorry with Glasgow numberplate. So much for precognition. Next second. Your Captain got. Tower Bridge. Slap. In. The. Owspenskian Eye.

‘The plane sank in the flaming river like a stone and I was the only one who survived,’ concluded Brasher.

Charteris nearly ran into a group of people he swerved they scattered and adrenalin generated cleared his brain.

‘People all group,’ he said. ‘Changed living pattern.’

‘Aye, well, it’s the bombs,’ said Banjo Burton. ‘They’re regrouping, lost all loot. Ideas of solitude and togetherness have changed. They listen to a new sound semi-entirely.’

‘I was lucky to get away. I nearly drowned,’ Brasher insisted.

‘It’s a new world,’ said Charteris. ‘I can begin to hear it like an earquake.’

‘The group will be glad to see me back,’ said Burton. ‘The Escalation.’

‘My exploration of it,’ said Charteris with the vehicle vibrant.

‘Loughborough will welcome me,’ said Brasher. ‘And my wife of course.’

Charteris was laughing with a random note to mesh into the engine noise. The silver thread of road his narrow sea and he Sir Francis? Then where these Englishmen went might well prove his cape of good hope.

‘This infrasound really breaks people up,’ said Burton.

‘Robbins is no more than a feeble pseudo-saint,’ said Brasher. ‘I must train up a new disciple, find someone to master the illogic of the times or generally clamp a baffle onto the flux.’

‘Train me,’ said Charteris.

The road ran north and north and always on never homesick its own experience. They saw towns and houses and sometimes people in groups but more often trees heavy with a new black wooden winter growth and everything stretched very thin over the great drum of being. Juiced the car caperilled frowards northwoods. And the three men sat in the car, close together, also apart, with their wits about them knowing very little indeed of all the things of which they were entirely aware. Functioning. Of a function. Existing in more ways than they could possibly learn to take advantage of.

Fragment of a Much Longer Poem

Oh one day I shall walk ahead

Up certain sunken steps into a hall

Patterned with tiles in black and red

And recognise the colour and the place

As well as if I once walked back

In time up certain sunken steps

And came into a hall with black

And red tiles in a certain coded

Pattern that makes me think I tread

Up sunken steps into a hallway and

Confront a tiled floor patterned red

And black which makes me think I stand

Circadian Rhythm

I’ve got circadian rhythm

You’ve got circadian rhythm

We’ve got circadian rhythm —

So the town-clock’s stopped for good

In the night-time I see daylight

And my white nights outshine daytime —