The Complete Enderby (46 page)

‘Go on,’ said Enderby.

Easy Walker did a mime of sucking in dangerous smoke and then staggered against the flimsy counter. The barman was lighting the lamps. ‘Pounds and pounds of it, brad. I’m like telling you this because you won’t gob. Daren’t, more like, in your state of you-know-what. They grind up the seeds and nuts and it burns cold, real cold, like sucking ice-lollies. The Yank junks go bonko for it.’

‘Drug addicts,’ questioned Enderby, ‘in army camps?’

‘Drag too,’ said Easy Walker calmly. ‘Human like you and I, aren’t they? Loving Aunt Flo of our bleeding Saviour, ain’t you seen the world? What you on normal, brad? What you do?’

‘I,’ said Enderby, ‘am a poet. I am Enderby the poet.’

‘Poetry. You know the poetry of Arthur Sugden, called Ricker Sugden because he played on the old rickers?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Enderby.

‘I know him all off. You can have the whole sewn-up boogong tonight on the road.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Enderby said. ‘What time do we start?’

‘Moon-up. Crounch first. You crounch with me. Little stoshny I got up this street of a thousand arseholes. Up above Hassan the hundred delights. Know what those are? Glycerine like toffees with popseeds, stickjaw that’ll stick to your jaw, shishcakes and marhum. And I mean a thousand arseholes. Not my creed. Yours?’

‘I don’t like anything any more,’ Enderby said. ‘I just want to get on with the job.’

‘Right, too. Ah, here comes the jalooty.’ A sly black man came in. He grinned first then peered behind as he thought he feared he was being followed. He had a woolly cap on, a knee-length clout done up like a diaper, a stiff embroidered coat with food-stains on it. He carried a grey darned gunnysack. Easy Walker tucked away Enderby’s passport in the breast-pocket of his shirt, then from the back-pocket of his long but creaseless canvas trousers he pulled out a wallet. ‘This,’ he told Enderby, ‘is as it might be like my agent. Abu.’ The black man responded to his name with a kind of salivation. ‘Mazooma for pozzy, as my dad used to say. Died at Gallipoli, poor old reticule. It’s my Aunt Polly as told me he used to say that. Never clapped mincers on him myself. Abu grabs what per cent he has a fish-hook on. Leave it to him.’ To this Abu Easy Walker told out what appeared to Enderby to be no more than fifty dirhams. Then he took the gunnysack and shushed Abu off like a fly. ‘Now then,’ he said, his hand on Enderby’s arm, leading him out of the flared and oil-lamped sinister gaiety of the evening, ‘time for the old couscous. You like couscous?’

‘Never had it,’ said Enderby.

‘The best one of Ricker Sugden’s,’ said Easy Walker, as they walked among baskets and moonfruit in the reek of lights, ‘is The Song of the Dunnygasper. You not know that one, brad?’

‘What,’ asked Enderby, ‘is a dunnygasper?’ A youngish woman raised her yashmak and spat a fair gob among chicken-innards. Two children, one with no left leg, punched each other bitterly.

‘A dunnygasper is a bert that cleans out a dunny. Now, the
pongalorum
of a dunny is that bad that you’d lay out a yard in full view if you drew it in in the way of normality. So he has to like under water hold his zook shut then surface for a gasp. You see that then?’ An old man with a bashed-in turban tottered by, crying some prayer to the enskied archangels of Islam. Easy Walker started to recite:

‘Gasping in the dunny in the dead of dark,

I dream of my boola-bush, sunning in the south,

And the scriking of the ballbird and Mitcham’s lark,

And bags of the sugarwasp, sweet in my mouth.’

‘That’s not bad,’ said Enderby. ‘Not much meaning, though.’ Meaning? Too much meaning in your poetry, Enderby. Archdevil of the maceration of good art for pop-art. Kill, kill, kill. He could be calm at soul, whatever justice said.

‘For here in the city is the dalth of coves,

Their stuff and their slart and the fall of sin,

The beerlout’s spew where the nightmort roves

And the festered craw of the filth within.’

A moustached man, the veins of his head visible under a dark nap, called hoarsely at Enderby and, with flapping hands, showed small boys in little shirts lined up behind the lamp in his shop-front. A woman squatted on a step and scooped with a wooden spatula the scum from a seething pot on a pungent wood-fire.

‘That drink,’ belched Enderby, ‘whatever it was, was not a good idea.’

‘Feel like a sack of tabbies when you’ve gooled up a pompey of couscous.’

Graaarch, went Enderby. Perfwhitt.

‘God’s own grass for this porrow in my tail,

Surrawa’s lake for this puke and niff,

Prettytit’s chirp for the plonky’s nipper’s wail,

And the rawgreen growler under Bellarey’s Cliff.’

‘Rawcliffe,’ growled green Enderby. ‘It won’t (errrrgh) be long now.’

Easy Walker stopped in his tracks. A beggar clawed at him and he cleaned the beggar off his shirt like tobacco ash. ‘You say Rawcliffe, brad? Rawcliffe the jarvey you bid to chop?’

‘Plagiarist, traitor (orrrph), enemy.’

‘Runs a little beacho. Called the Acantilado something-or-the-next-thing. Not far from the Rif. Not there now, though. Very crookidy. Quacks pawing him all over on the Rock.’

‘In Gibraltar? Rawcliffe? Ill?’

‘Crookidy dook. He’ll be back, though. Says if he’s going to snuff he’ll snuff in his own dung.’

‘Rawcliffe,’ said Enderby, ‘is (orrrf ff) for me.’

‘We’re there,’ said Easy Walker. ‘Up that rickety ladder. Niff that juicy couscous. Yummiyum. Then we hit it. Moon’s up, shufti.’ Enderby saw it with bitterness. Miss Boland seemed to rage down from it.

‘This jarvey Rawcliffe,’ said Easy Walker, leading the way up the ladder, ‘is some big kind of a jarvey. Big in films and that. You sure you know what you’re on, brad?’

‘I (arrrp) know,’ said Enderby, following him up. A fresh beggar, wall-eyed, embraced his left leg passionately, shrieking for alms. Enderby kicked him off.

ALI FATHI SAT ON
the other bed and pared his footsoles with a table-knife honed to lethal sharpness on the window-sill. He was on the run from Alexandria, which he called Iskindiriyya, and was scornful of the Moors, whose language he considered debased. He himself spoke a sort of radio announcer’s Arabic, full of assertive fishbone-in-the-throat noises and glottal checks that sounded like a disease. He was very thin, seemed to grow more and more teeth as time went on, and was always talking about food. ‘
Beed madruub
,’ he said to Enderby now. He had a passion for eggs. ‘
Beeda masluugha
.’ Enderby said, from his own bed:

‘
Mumtaaz
.’ He was learning, though not very quickly. It was hardly worth while to learn anything new. Soon, he saw, he must give up giving money to Wahab to buy the English newspapers that were sold on the Boulevard Pasteur. They were a terrible price, and money was fast running out. When the hell was Rawcliffe going to come back to be killed? He read once more the latest Yod Crewsy news. It could not be long now, they reckoned. Yod Crewsy was in a coma. Day and night vigils of weeping fans outside the hospital. Stones hurled at windows of No. 10 Downing Street. Probability of National Day of Prayer. Mass of Intercession at Westminster Cathedral. In Trafalgar Square protest songs, some of them concerned with the Vietnam war. Attempted suttee of desperate girls in a Comprehensive School.

‘
Khanziir
.’ That was not right, Ali Fathi being a Muslim, but Enderby himself would not have minded a nice plate of crisply grilled ham. His diet, and that of Ali Fathi and the other two men, Wahab and Souris, was very monotonous: soup of kitchen scraps and rice, boiled up by fat Napo in the snack-bar below, the odd
platter
of fried sardines, bread of the day before yesterday. Enderby was now sorry that he had exchanged his passport for a mere jolting trip from Marrakesh to Tangier. He had discovered that British passports fetched a very high price on the international market. Why, this Ali Fathi here had looked at Enderby as if he were mad when he had been told, in French, what small and uncomfortable (as well as to him hazardous) service in lieu of money Enderby had been willing to take in exchange for a valuable document. If he, Ali Fathi, had it he would not be here now. He would be in Marseilles, pretending to be an Arabic-speaking Englishman.

‘
Beed maghli
.’ He was back on eggs again. Well, that valuable document, with its old identity razor-bladed and bleached out and new substituted, was now at its charitable work in the world of crime and shadiness. It was saving somebody from what was called justice. It could not, nor could its former guardian (Her Majesty’s Government being the avowed owner, though it had not paid for it) ask better than that. Enderby nodded several times. Encouraged, Ali Fathi said:

‘
Bataatis mahammara
.’ That meant, Enderby knew now, potato crisps. An inept term, soggy-sounding. It had been, Enderby admitted to himself, a boring trip on the move under the moon (courtesy of Miss treacherous bloody Boland), with Easy Walker reciting the collected works of Arthur Sugden, called Ricker Sugden because he had used, when composing his verses, to clash out the rhythm with the castanetting bones once a percussive staple of nigger, christy rather, minstrel shows. Easy Walker had given Enderby not only a reprise of The Song of the Dunnygasper but also The Ballad of Red Mick the Prancerprigger, The Shotgun Wedding of Tom Dodge, Willie Maugham’s Visit to Port Butters, My Pipe and Snout and Teasycan, and other specimens of the demotic literature of an apparently vigorous but certainly obscure British settlement.

‘
Kurumba
.’ Some vegetable or other, that. Cabbage, probably. And then these American camps, off the main north-south motor route, with torches flashing through the Moorish dark, a rustling in the shadows and whispers as of love (money and goods changing hands), the loading – Enderby cajoled to help – of refrigerators, huge cans of butter, nitrited meatloaf, even military uniforms, all on to Easy
Walker’s
truck. And then more of Ricker Sugden – The Ditty of the Merry Poddyman, Wallop for Me Tomorrow Boys, Ma Willis’s Knocking Shop (Knock Twice and Wink for Alice) – till the next call and, finally, what Easy Walker knew as Dear Old Tangey. Well, Easy Walker had at least found him what seemed a safe enough retreat off the Rue El Greco (many of the streets here were named for the great dead, as though Tangier were a figure of heaven) – no passports needed, no questions asked of guests or tolerated of casual visitors to bar below or brothel above, but, on the other hand, too much cash demanded in advance, too little to eat, the bedclothes never changed, not enough beds.

‘
Shurbit tamaatim
,’ watered Ali Fathi, still slicing thin shives, as of restaurant smoked salmon, from a footsole. At once, as though he had spoken of the source of gingili or benne oil, the doorhandle began to turn. He poised that knife at the ready. The door opened and Wahab came in. Smiling teeth popped and rattled as the two men embraced, full of loud throaty crooning greeting, yum yum yum and the voice clearing of phlegm from pharyngeal tracts. Enderby looked with distaste on this, not caring much for sex of any kind these days really, for himself or for anybody else. Ali Fathi hugged his friend, knife still clutched in a hand that knuckled his friend’s vertebrae, all his teeth displayed in glee to Enderby. Enderby said coldly:

‘Le patron de l’ Acantilado Verde, est-il revenu?’

‘
Pas encore
,’ said Wahab’s back. Wahab was a Moor, hence his mind was despised by Ali Fathi, but his body was apparently loved. He had fled from trouble in Tetuan and was lying low till things cooled. He spent much of the day trying to steal things. Now, as evening prepared to thud in, tally-hoed on by the punctual muezzin, he grinningly pushed Ali Fathi temporarily away, then took off his long striped nightshirt with hood attached. He was dressed underneath in blue jeans and khaki (probably American army) shirt. He had a marsupial bag knotted round his waist, and from this he produced his spoils, neither choice nor lavish, holding them up for Ali Fathi to admire. He was not a very good thief; it was evident that he was not on the run for thievery; perhaps he had merely spat on the King’s picture. On the bed he placed, with a smile that was meant to be modest, a couple of gritty cakes of the kind
dumped
with the coffee on outside cafe tables, also a single Seville. Then he produced a small round tin labelled in English. Enderby could read that it was tan boot-polish, but Ali Fathi seized it with a kind of gastronome’s croon, probably believing it to be a rare (hence the exiguity of the tinned portion) pâté.

‘
Pour les bottines
,’ said Enderby helpfully. ‘
Ou pour les souliers. Pas pour manger, vous comprenez
.’ Soon Ali Fathi and Wahab saw that this was so, and then they started a kind of married wrangle. Enderby sighed. He hated these public homosexual carryings-on. Shortly Ali Fathi would have Wahab down on the bed, and they would perhaps indulge in the erotic refinement that they called
soixante-neuf
, which reminded Enderby of the Pisces sign on newspaper horoscope pages. Or else there would be plain howling sodomy. And to them Enderby was only a piece of insentient furniture – the only piece indeed, save for the two beds, in the whole room. Souris, the other man, would not come in till very much later, often when Ali Fathi and Wahab were already in bed, and then what took place took place, mercifully, in the dark. The bed was not big enough for three of them, so there was a lot of crying and writhing on the floor and, if a synchronized triple crisis was reached, which happened occasionally, the window rattled and the beds, one of them with tired but sleep-deprived Enderby in it, shook from the legs up. Souris was not a murine man. He was very gross and he sweated what looked like crude oil. He had hurt somebody very badly on the outskirts of Casablanca – a totally unwilled act, he swore frequently, an ineluctable side-issue of a process designed mainly for pleasure. When the three of them had completed their Laocoon performance, they would sometimes (Enderby had seen this in the moonlight, Miss Boland also grimly seeming to look down from the moon) shake hands, though not heartily: it was like the end of a round in a wrestling bout, which in a sense it was, though three were involved and there was no purse. Once or twice, Souris had then tried to get into bed with Enderby, but Enderby would have none of that. So Wahab, the youngest, was often made to sleep in his robe on the floor, as though it were the desert. He would sometimes cry out in his uneasy sleep, seeming to roar like a camel. This was no life for anyone.