The View from Mount Dog (5 page)

They found the Poet deep in composition of his Song of songs beneath the cool pavilion of umbrageous sagathy. His Elegy lay in a half-completed pile and his gold nib flashed across the page as some livid jewel with a sun breaking at its heart. With what assurance, with what radiance did this slender golden monarch proceed his winding way; and behind him dressed in sombre black trailed his courtiers, his words. The Chamberlain watched in fascination. In whose kingdom moved this king? he wondered. It was of mere paper; and this mere paper lay within the greater Kingdom he himself served. And yet his King did not command it. He who reigned here was a ragged stranger with a ragged beard. Almost as if he had heard the thought, the ragged stranger raised his hand in salutation and looked up.

‘Greetings, Friend,’ he addressed the Headman. ‘You have brought a finely apparelled gentleman to this our ruined Paradise.’ And in truth he had to raise his voice in order to be heard above the roar of engines which seemed to encompass the glade at no great distance.

‘Chamberlain to His Majesty,’ the gentleman in question announced himself, striking the Poet lightly on top of his head with the ebony rod. ‘His Majesty commands:

‘Your as yet unsubstantiated fame has humbly crept, thanks to His serenest magnanimity, to the portals of the King’s ear,
which, having deigned to hear, is graciously curious to hear still more. Give me a poem that I may bear it with swiftest steps to Him who, having once delighted, is not slow to reward.’ He rapped the Poet’s crown again. ‘His Majesty commands.’

‘Which poem?’ asked the Poet. ‘They are so many, my dearest children whom even now the nursery cannot contain’ – and he indicated the doorway of his little hut through which dim and shadowy piles of paper could be descried almost entirely filling that humble dwelling. ‘Which of my children will you take and introduce to the outer world?’

‘How do I know which poem?’ asked the Chamberlain testily. ‘The best, obviously.’

‘Inter
pares,’
mused the Poet, ‘and with the magnificent exception of the Elegy on which I am currently at work,
primus
is perhaps my sonnet “In Praise of Praise”.’ He got up, went to the hut, rummaged for a while and returned with a small sheet of paper.

‘Read it,’ commanded the Chamberlain. ‘And it had better be good. It is ultimately for the ears of His Majesty, remember. There are no references in it to Democracy?’

‘None,’ said the Poet. Then he read in his strange and beautiful voice; and the leaves shivered and the twigs like silver tuning-forks sang in sympathy and the soft ringing of the glade seemed to drown the nearby bellowing of machinery and to abolish its very memory so all became once more just as it always had been. The Headman’s eyes filled with tears, so painfully did it remind him of days which were and could not come again, the more so since he had heard this poem many times before and loved its words without quite knowing why. And suddenly he was flooded with a great pity for his Friend.

The Poet ceased; and as from far away the noise of engines gradually returned.

‘Take it,’ he said at last, and held the paper out. But what was this? The Chamberlain was also weeping. Down his cheeks and down his beard and even down his ebony stick the tears ran, past rubies, onyx and the clearest amethyst, down into the clearing’s very dust. His shoulders shook, his lips framed bubbling syllables. He was weeping for he knew not what: for years wasted in foolish office, for the cruelties and the pleasures of his position, for a lifetime spent denying the Beauty that Is. From the very emptiness of his heart the tears sprang; for the Chamberlain was weeping for his Soul.

‘Go, my friend,’ said the Poet gently. ‘Bear my humble offspring to your great and good King, and may it speak to him as it has spoken to you. And now I must complete my Elegy since I feel a strange presentiment and dark forebodings of a waning light.’

So the Headman led the weeping Chamberlain away, who in time recovered, reached the capital and presented himself to his Monarch. ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘I have done as You commanded. I have found this Poet of whom You spake, although only after the greatest difficulties for the way to this, perhaps the remotest, part of Your Kingdom lies defended almost impregnably by the hand of Nature. All manner of rivers, deserts, swamps, mountain ranges—’

‘Silence,’ ordered the King. ‘We care little for your troubles. We gave you a task. Have you brought Us a poem?’

‘I have, Sire,’ said the Chamberlain, producing it. ‘And all that came to your August Ear concerning this Poet is true, and still more than true. He spoke this poem himself, and Nature paused to listen. The very birds were silent and my tears fell as the monsoon rains to hear him.’

‘You always were impressionable,’ said the King. ‘Well, read it anyway.’

So the Chamberlain read; and something he remembered of the Poet’s own cadence must have come back with the words, for as he spoke the King stopped fidgeting with his rings and the disdainful glance he cast through the window grew misty so that to his eyes the formal gardens of the palace took on the lineaments of Eden. Even the toiling figures of his subjects became transformed and for a moment unthinkably appeared as noble as himself. When the Chamberlain finished reading there was a long silence.

‘I have not heard the like before,’ the King said at last, to his Chamberlain’s amazement forgoing the Royal
We.
‘I feel I know things now I never knew; yet what they are cannot be said except in the very words you spoke. Truly, a kingdom within whose borders dwells a man like this is rich indeed. You say he lives in a swamp?’

‘More of a forest, Sire.’

‘A forest? A man of this greatness? It is absurd.’

‘Mr Ishugu’s men are cutting it down as fast as they can.’

‘Quite right, too. We can’t have forests. Nasty dank things; they make us look hopelessly primeval and underdeveloped.
Besides, I’m told they harbour guerrillas. No; this Poet shall be brought forthwith to the palace here and housed in the utmost style and comfort for as long as he desires. I shall have a suite of rooms cleared of women immediately. You will return at once and fetch him. Meanwhile the finest engravers in the land shall copy this poem on to a slab of the purest gold and it shall be presented to him on his arrival.’

‘Sire, it may be he would not come with me. He is a man of the simplest tastes and perhaps Your generosity will overwhelm him so that he feels unable to appear in Court, clad as he is in rags and beard.’

‘Well, who
would
he come with, then?’ demanded the King with a slight return to his old peremptory manner.

‘He has a friend, it seems; a Headman of the lowest caste. Maybe the Poet would go with him.’

‘Very well. Let this Headman bring him. There is no need for you to go at all: you will be better employed here, organising the Reception. Send messengers to the Headman.
Selah
.’

*

But meanwhile in the clearing time had passed in which the Poet, quite possessed by his creative act, laboured to complete his Elegy before he was engulfed by Progress. His gold nib flew, the pages mounted up. Daily he sent forth the Headman as his scout to keep him informed as to the advancing tide. His friend at his bidding slipped away through jungle paths. But when he came to where the loggers were he stopped and stared with superstitious awe.

Machines like mythic beasts on silver tracks roared and grunted, smashed down trees and tore their hides off. On all sides stretched a barren waste of splintered stumps, barkless trunks in pyramids. The undulating jungle floor which had been for ever hidden and engloomed now lay beneath the blazing eye of day, strangely bare and dull. Something in the Headman’s breast stirred in torment at the sight. Yet still more powerfully he felt excitement rise as in his inner mind he saw rolling acres of cassava plant, waving okra, golden maize. Never again need he wend a weary way about the forest tracks in search of food: no longer need he brave the cruel whipthorn to bring his children grubs and pods and acid fungus ears, bark and nut, berry and leaf.

Yet well he knew he would distress his Friend by giving an exact account of this desert’s steady advance. So back he went,
and the Poet said: ‘Tell me, what did you see?’

‘Nothing, Friend, but the shaking of leaves, the insects’ dance and the lazy shimmer of a summer noon.’

But the Poet, gazing up at him and hearing the nearby snort of powerful exhausts, said gently: ‘Headman, you lie. My ears hear more than your eyes see. Go now therefore once again and come and tell me how it goes.’

A second time the Headman sped away. But when he so quickly arrived at the edge of the great wound weeping its sap from uncounted broken stems his heart grew heavy. ‘I cannot tell him,’ he cried in anguish. ‘It is far better he should not know, but write until he fully makes an end.’ So back he went, and the Poet said: ‘Now, tell me truly: what did you see?’

‘The crested lizard on a branch, the spider in its delicate lair, the buttermoth on painted wing.’

This time the Poet laid down his pen. ‘I had not thought that all our years of Friendship could be so easily betrayed. It surely is not much to ask a Friend to do. It seems that I was wrong.’

And his face was so sad and stricken that the Headman turned in bitter grief and ran a third time and resolved to bear his witness true. But he now had hardly any distance to go. The topmost branches of the nearest tree were shuddering to the blade. At the edge of the clearing he turned round. At his back an ochre-yellow bulldozer poked its snout through a bush and stopped.

‘My Friend, my Friend, my dearest Friend,’ he called. ‘They’re here.’

Across the clearing the Poet looked up, looked down, wrote a word or two, drew a line and laid down his golden nib.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It is finished.’

Now, when dusk came and the bulldozers fell silent he went alone to sit as usual beside the rivulet. A light breeze sprang up as it always did; but no lemon-censers spilt their fragrance on the air, nor popped any husk of peppernut. A single cicada stropped its legs and then, embarrassed on its own behalf, fell to silence. Even the surface of the stream was iridescent with a film of diesel waste.

‘My lovely elverines,’ murmured the Poet; but they had fled away downstream and were gone. ‘Great and mysterious forest, my fastness and my home,’ he whispered. But of the forest only a single line of trees made a thin circle about the clearing. Between their ancient trunks showed an infinity of sky.

So he went to his hut and, composing himself upon his bed of manuscripts, gazed up in the dark to where a solitary firefly drew erratic scribbles in the thatch.

Light my way, firefly, he thought to the tiny insect. Light my way.

And when at dawn the Headman came he found the Poet lifeless with the worn-out firefly dead upon his breast.

Then the grieving Headman’s tears fell like rain. An hour he wept and thought about his Friend and, constantly remembering that golden speech to which even the forest had stooped its verdant ears, wept afresh. And as he did there stole from the nearest shadow a young and slender-limbed creature – as it were some newly dispossessed faun of the erstwhile forest – who mourning fell at the dead feet and kissed them and performed loving obsequies. Together they lifted up the body and washed it in the stream, calling upon their deities. Then the Headman took his knife and touched it to his lips and cut from the Poet’s body his heart, according to their custom. And they placed the heart in a box most exquisitely carved in secret over many months, and the sweetest unguents poured therein: most precious gums and balsamums, myrrhincense and liquid nard. They did it about with a rattan thong and buried it deeply at the foot of the beloved
tabitabi
tree.

In silence then they caught up the body and carried it to the hut. And the Headman took some pages from the just-completed Elegy (for in truth the entire manuscript was far too large) and placed them in the dead mouth. ‘For’, he said, ‘is it not professed in our tradition that the words of a man’s mouth shall return thereto?’ Then he set fire to the hut according to their custom, it being proper for a man’s works to perish with him that none might nourish an evil pride. For all things done beneath the heavens are sufficient unto themselves since none shall last, no, for even their smoke is blown away.

So, even as his works, the Poet’s body was consumed and became as nothing, and the smoke of it was blown away. There fell upon the clearing a silence as had never been; and the Headman went grieving thence.

In due time the messenger bore the news to the Chamberlain, who told the King how the great Poet was dead, how his works were ashes and his heart lay embalmed beneath the
tabitabi
tree. And the King was exceeding sorrowful.

‘Bring from this humble clearing’, he commanded, ‘that thing
which is the most precious in all my Realm and it shall be enshrined in our holiest temple with utmost pomp.
Helas’
(which being interpreted from that tongue means ‘It is meet to grieve’).

So back the Chamberlain went to that far-off region and found the Headman but lo! the clearing itself the Headman could not find, for it now extended eighty kilometres all about in a waste of stumps and stunted leathery shrubs and the deep ruts made by logging trucks. But after much searching he did come upon a filthy rivulet with close at hand what might have been the site of a long-extinguished fire. And all around were men in metal hats eating sandwiches among parked machinery.

Then, empowered as he was by the King’s Command, the Headman – who was soon to be appointed the region’s Reafforestation Officer – laid his hand reverently on that most precious thing which long since had been for him a source of hope and pleasure. And to the Royal Presence he despatched, in a Progress aided by a thousand willing hands, an ochre-yellow bulldozer.

Something happened to Carney Palafox one evening as he was running for a number 5 bus in London. He was running as fast as only somebody can who despises running and wishes to get it over with as soon as possible. He caught his bus and found a seat upstairs and was so stunned by the insight he had experienced thirty yards ago that he forgot even to pant. Breathing quite normally, this forty-one-year-old scriptwriter suddenly knew he was the greatest athlete who had ever lived. He also knew that he could only ever prove it five times in any specific event; once he had used up those five astonishing victories he would have to remember never to try again since on the sixth occasion he would perform like any other forty-one-year-old scriptwriter who despised sports.

From the moment he got off his bus to walk towards Sadlers Wells and home Carney Palafox was a changed man. His immediate life was utterly clear to him. He knew exactly what he had to do. All he could ponder was how best to go about it so as to make the utmost of his five chances and extract the maximum vengeful pleasure from this astounding windfall. For a start, whom could he tell? It was a ludicrous assertion just to come out with at his time of life, and he knew it simply by listening to an imaginary conversation he might have later that night, maybe while undressing for bed.

‘You know, Katie, I sometimes wonder if I couldn’t be something of an athlete if I tried’ – diffidently stepping out of his
underwear and glancing down at his neither fat nor thin physique.

‘You know, Carney, I’m thinking of becoming a concert pianist when I grow up.’

No; absurd. Suddenly he had turned into a man with a mission, and men with sudden missions were ill-advised to announce them rather than just get on and fulfil them.
Deeds.
But – and Carney knew as little about sports as a man can to whom it is a matter of pride to have forgotten how many players there are in a cricket team – he had a suspicion that demonstrating you are the world’s greatest might be catered for only by a slow and rigid system of entering a heat here, an event there, being picked for a team still later to perform at some sodden track on the outskirts of a city. He suspected there were few short cuts to events at which world records could be set, and with only five chances at each event he could not afford such a slow accumulation of credibility.

Sometimes it could slip his mind that he was under contract to a large and famous television company since he always worked from home and visited the monolithic block of studios and offices as infrequently as possible. However, he now remembered that this television headquarters contained whole suites of studios entirely given over to sports reporting. In particular, he found next day that most of these studios were occupied by the company’s star sports attraction, a programme named
Action
Replay.
Towards the lunch hour he paid these studios a visit and found a lot of middle-aged men sitting around reading magazines about car racing and horse racing and tennis tournaments. To a man they were wearing rather expensive clothes designed to resemble professional sportswear, things which looked to Carney like mohair track-suits. In addition they all had on running shoes with cleats and stripes and flashes. Their entire wardrobe was covered in brand names and they mostly had moustaches.

‘You’re Bob Struthers?’ Carney asked a man behind a desk which had across the front a large sticker reading ‘The Bob Struthers Experience’. He vaguely recognised the name. The man he had asked looked at him over the top of his magazine with genuine amazement and took his feet off the desk.

‘Do I look like Bob Struthers?’ he enquired.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Carney. ‘I’ve never met him as far as I know.’

‘Good grief,’ muttered the man, glancing round at his colleagues with an expression which was meant to make a conspiracy of their general disbelief and ridicule. They paid no attention since they were still reading their magazines. ‘In there,’ said the man, indicating a glassed-in sanctum to one side. ‘And you are?’

‘Carney Palafox.’

‘Never heard of you, either.’

‘I’m a scriptwriter on
Up
Yours!’

‘Well, you’ve given me a laugh already.’

Once inside the sanctum Carney recognized that the magazine-readers in the other room had all been mere clones of the original who sat before him. His track-suit had the sheen of raw silk, his training shoes had been hand-stitched by Italian craftsmen. His moustache said of itself ‘Bay Area leather bar’, but the wearer would possibly have been shocked to hear it. This time Carney found the face itself faintly familiar.

‘I’m Carney Palafox, I’m a scriptwriter on
Up
Yours!
and I need a simple piece of information about sports. Sorry to bother you, but I thought I’d better get it from our top man.’

‘Always happy to have the old brain picked,’ said Bob Struthers, waving at the sofa. ‘Chuck some of those mags on the floor and fire away. What’s this – a piece of authentic sporting stuff you’re writing into your series?’

‘Sort of…. It’s this. Supposing somebody were completely unknown in the sports world, no connection whatever, but had an amazing talent for – I don’t know – let’s say the hundred yards. How would he go about setting records and generally getting himself acknowledged as the world’s greatest?’

‘Well, now, Carney.’ The ex-athlete steepled his fingers. ‘Let’s take it from the top. For starters, do you really mean the hundred yards?’

‘Er … the hundred metres?’

‘What’s the world record for the hundred metres?’

‘You’re asking me? I haven’t a clue,’ said Carney. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Currently,’ went on Bob Struthers with his modulated announcer’s voice, very quiet when not being amplified, ‘it’s nine point nine-three. That’s seconds,’ he added helpfully.

‘Ah. Well, suppose this fellow came along out of the blue and said, “I can do it in eight seconds flat,” what would you think?’

‘This is all “let’s pretend”, right? You’d have to think he was
off his head. But if he really looked authentic – you know, probably a black American, right height, right weight, thigh muscles out here – I’d still think he was a nut. Maybe he could do it in ten-five on a good day with the wind behind him. But we’d know. If he was anyone at all, he’d have form. Nobody that good appears from nowhere.’

‘This one does exactly that.’

‘It’s a nice idea. Into the office walks this complete unknown whose muscular neck is destined for the weight of Olympic gold. Good stuff.’

‘But, playing along with the “let’s pretend” for a moment, what’s the next step?’

‘Well, if he’s really just off the streets he joins a club and runs his way to the attention of talent scouts or gets the sort of times and wins which would put him in line for a team selection.’

‘Yes, yes, in other words he works his way up. But this guy has neither the time nor the inclination for all that. He can break the world record
right
now,
so he doesn’t want to waste months joining the Haggleswick Harriers or the Aberdaff AAA.’

Bob Struthers glanced at his watch, a complex affair of overlapping dials and sweep hands, then patted the little high-life pot which his tailored track-suit almost concealed. ‘The Bob Struthers inner timing device,’ he said, ‘which is far more accurate than anything Omega ever made with quartz, tells me it’s time for a drink. Join me?’

Without waiting for a reply he reached back in his swivel chair to a shelf of
Wisde
ns
, opened it and disclosed a small refrigerator stacked with cans. ‘Now, this is the stuff,’ he said, selecting two and nudging the door shut. He handed Carney a can of No-Calorie Root Beer. ‘Do you know I can drink as much of this as I like every day for the rest of my life absolutely free? One more promotional freebie. I could fill my swimming pool with it and they’d be only too happy. “Who but Bob Struthers starts each day with a brisk 100 metres in invigorating No-Calorie Root Beer?” All that good stuff.’ His moustache crackled at the opening of the can. Seeing Carney about to speak he held up his free hand. ‘Don’t worry, I know what you’re thinking. But this isn’t just a lot of time-wasting bullshit I’m handing you. I’m trying to get across that international sport nowadays has very little to do with packed stands and centre courts. That’s the public-spectacle part and it’s almost incidental. We’re talking about big business, Carney, one of the biggest. Top athletes are
bought and traded like wheat futures; the real money is won and lost in boardrooms, not on tracks. Sponsorships, TV deals, promos, franchises, the international games circuit, the betting consortiums, the sportswear manufacturers, the drinks people, the fucking paper-cup makers….’

A note of something or other – passion? mere vehemence? – had crept into the famous voice. In a moment, Carney thought, he’ll be asking me to guess which of all the various signed photographs, awards, little silver television cameras on little silver tripods on display around the room had given him the most pride and pleasure, and the answer will undoubtedly be the dented cup over the door, ‘Victor Ludorum 1955’, which he had won when he was thirteen despite having just recovered from chickenpox.

‘… the hack writers, the ghosted-autobiography writers, the chat-show hosts, the groupies, the fan-club organisers, the exclusivity-rights lawyers, the city-hall lobbyists bidding to host the Olympics in twenty diddledy-three, the airlines who fly the Olympic teams about, the manufacturers of the nose-hair tweezers used by the pilot of the sodding plane which carried the victorious nation’s team back home…. You name it, Carney. And every one of those bastards is living and jet-setting and wining and dining and making his fortune on the backs of a few hundred people out there on the tracks and courts and pools, sweating their wretched guts out and praying the latest dope-test techniques are still a year behind what their managers are giving them. Shee …
it
!’

‘Heavens,’ said Carney mildly with what he hoped was an irritating other-worldliness. ‘I never thought it was all such a – well,
racket.
So what you’re saying is …?’

‘What I’m saying’ – Bob Struthers brought into his voice a fine edge of patience – ‘is that it’s next to impossible for someone like your guy to bull his way to the top in one easy move because it does a lot of people out of their cut. Once he’s a star, of course, they’ll be fighting over his body. But until someone’s identifiably a biggie with the prospect of being packaged and sold for real money the industry likes its athletes to be quite conventional and work their way up in time-honoured fashion. Life, Carney,’ explained Bob Struthers, ‘is a simple knock-out competition and you’d better believe it. You win the eliminator and move on to the qualifying rounds, and then you win and win and win and suddenly it’s the quarter finals, then the semifinals
and then by the Grace of Whatever it’s the bloody Final and you’re there…. Or not, depending. This isn’t hack philosophy, Carney. It’s what I see and know, every day, everywhere. Do you know what my proudest possession is in the whole of this room?’

‘No?’

‘That,’ said Bob Struthers, flicking the silver television camera on its silver tripod which stood on the desk before him, ‘because it’s this year’s. And that makes it better than last year’s and the year before’s.’

‘Well,’ said Carney, gathering his legs under him into an about-to-leave posture, ‘you’ve been very helpful, Bob. I really appreciate it.’

‘Just filling in some of the background for you, Carney; I haven’t finished yet. Now, what effect does all this have on the ordinary man in the street who, whenever he turns his TV on, hears and sees nothing but stars – names he knows as well as his own, faces he’s more familiar with than those of his own family? I’ll tell you. It’s made him a
fantasist
…. By the way, Carney, this is a pet theory of mine.’

‘You certainly seem to like your subject.’

‘I love it, Carney, I really love it. Now, it’s made him a fantasist because of the nature of publicity itself. My theory is that there are no real stars – very few, at any rate. What there is is star
dom
. It’s the top spot in whatever you like – sport, films, er … comedy’ – he nodded benignly towards his guest – ‘and the top spot is occupied by one of a constant stream of winners who come up, get that spotlight of attention full on them for a year or two, then move off into outer darkness. A lot of the people who find themselves briefly at the top are pretty unmemorable, frankly, and this is where your man-in-the-street fantasist comes in. He looks at those stars and he thinks: That bugger’s no different from me. Bit better built, nothing a few months of weights and saunas couldn’t put right, but that could be
me
being kissed by film actresses and accepting cheques from the Duchess of Doggydo and advertising a lot of rubbish with glucose in it on every high-street hoarding. All I need is the Big Break. He’s a fantasist, you see, because he leaves out the hard work bit: the months in the gym, the tons of weights, the pushups and the lonely miles along the A1 at dawn. He sees instant recognition, immediate fame. The Big Break.’

Bob Struthers reached down and pulled open a desk drawer
from which he grabbed a handful of loose sheets at random. ‘There you are,’ he said, dropping them on the desk. ‘Fantasy. Every day I get them, letters by the sackful.’ He picked one up. ‘“Dear Bob Struthers, I’m an avid watcher of your programme blah blah. You’re not going to believe this but yesterday, 3 July, at the Penge Sports Hall, I was timed at fifty-three point seven seconds for the hundred metres freestyle. I have six witnesses to prove it and the stopwatch was electronic and has since been checked by a certified jeweller blah blah. Could you please ensure that my name is put forward immediately to the England Team selectors for Honolulu next month? It is vital for the success of our country, whose reputation as a sporting nation I’m sure you blah blah. I am sending a copy of this letter by registered mail to Sir Benedict Frowde, Chairman of the Board of British Aquasports Selection Committees. Yours sincerely.” Typical.’ Bob Struthers let the sheet fall back to his desk. ‘The only thing he left out was the “PS I am not a crank. Please take this letter as seriously as it was intended.” Most put that in. But you see what I mean? Everybody connected with sports gets letters like that all the time. I just get more of them because I’m so exposed. The Big Break’s what everyone’s after: you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve tried
me.
Like those women.’ And Bob Struthers smiled tiredly to himself, to the letters on his desk, to the silver television trophy. ‘Does that answer your question yet, Carney?’