Behind the canvas screen the tempo and volume of the rapping sounds had increased. Maybe, after all, they were cobbling a few random dynasties together or patching up a pyramid. But we’d never find out – Ancient Egypt was shut today ‘for restoration purposes’.
Since we were in the galleries I decided, in a roundabout way, to satisfy the boy’s notion to see a man-in-armour by taking him upstairs to view Rembrandt’s masterpiece on that very subject. On our way there I’d to explain to Jason that it was unlikely we’d come across any ice-cream vendors in the galleries, no, not even in the Italian one.
Jason, unimpressed by mere masterpieces, had settled for the living tableau of the floor beneath us, relishing the opportunity to look down on people for a change, to escape the bondage of diminutive size. Leaning my elbows on the rails I watched for a time, idly observing the antics of those mice who’d been lured from the grey skirting board of pragmatism to nibble at the cultural cheeses on offer. To’n fro they scurried. The children’s activity was especially frenetic; in fact, from this height they looked as if they were performing some kind of courting ritual. Randy wee buggers, they probably thought that ‘carbon dating’ was something new on the nookie front. Later, while wandering a corridor, I was to see a young girl fingering a man’s penis. The man in question was made of bronze, and, judging by the lustre of his prong, was well used to such frontal assaults. The groperette and her giggling pals made off amidst hoots of laughter.
In pacing those galleries, pausing, going on again, you find many portraits of civic gangsters who’ve stuck up the bank of Fame and got clean away with a reputation. Most of these mountebanks and lady-do-nothings you wouldn’t supply with a hard chair never mind wallspace, yet here they are, protected by alarm circuitry and artguards, safely lodged at the plush heart of the social pyramid, booked in for eternity, or at least until Ivan the Tourist comes snapping with his IBM flash camera. As I patrolled these slick, echoing chambers, young Jason toddled on ahead of me as if for him the paintings were changing patterns in a rainbow at the end of which he’d find the legendary crock of gold. Sorry, son, there’ll be nowt there, except, maybe, God and the Devil playing at fitba with da Vinci’s skull.
Rembrandt’s ‘Man In Armour’ was placed in a sort of cultural spotlight, and roped off from the public, which numbered about half a dozen folk when Jason and I approached to join their reverential gawp. Today I discovered that Rembrandt’s gallus use of light was failing to illuminate yon wee patch of inner dread and darkness which is sometimes referred to as ‘the soul’. The artist’s perceptions, those insightful arrows, rattled faintly on the great bell-jar of tedium that enveloped me. When before had I ever paused to consider what the actual man might look like once he’d crawled from the enhancing hug of his grandiose armour: a pale, wormish runt maybe. It was probably down to a constellation of events – Old Pike’s death; the nagging ache in my arm; sexual self-loathing, the aftermath of adultery, I don’t know which, but my cultural asdic was definitely on the blink. A lassie in a burgundy-coloured maxi coat with buttons as big as hand-grenades, and who had a ski-cap thing pitching like a yacht in the dark blue storm of her hair, rescued us all from our inarticulateness when, having sped her flexible and knowledgeable glance across the masterpiece remarked to her boyfriend, ‘He’s a dead ringer for Kirk Douglas, sure he is?’ I stopped off at Dali’s ‘Christ’ but found it to be more vapid than ever. I yawningly loitered to examine a Degas bather washing the varnish of classicism from her body, then I continued past those multicoloured boils that’d flared up in the face of European puritanism. I spent a much longer time though staring at ‘The Adulteress Brought Before Christ’.
I took Jason down the stairs and, at his request, we revisited the Evolution Room. A sandpit contained the blackened remains of a child, if you believed the affixed notice. To me, it looked more like a burnt-out campfire. Maybe old Pike’d looked like that when the firemen finally got to’m. Huh, so it was still there – the old Clydesdale horse. Daylight sluiced through its bone cage, spotlighting places it’d no right to be. The ‘auld hairy engine’ as Wattie Mullens would say, deserved better treatment than this, being shamelessly exposed to the very core of its former power for the feasting glances of idle visitors, those carrion eaters of history, who left it with fluid belches and the stink of death on their chops. Da Clay, who’d brought me on a rare visit here, had assured me that the skeletal Clydesdale had once been Benny Rooney’s coalhorse. ‘Aye, he steyed ower long in the boozer wan day and that’s how he found it when he came oot,’ he’d grinned. ‘They could fairly go their chuck yon Florence Street weans.’
The Weaponry Room next. Wandering amongst carbines, rifles, elegant pistolets, and all the other despoilers of the flesh, their grave-filling capacities lovingly detailed, a skunk memory flushed in the passing raised a sudden stink in my mind. Simon Rattray (note the conjunction of rodent and stinger in the very name) had been our factor in the Scabby. A weasel of a man he’d been, with a skull that looked like it’d been flattened by a shovel, the same stroke having rammed his head so deeply between his shoulders that he’d appeared as neckless as he’d been ruthless. His evil bones should’ve been preserved and hung back there in the Skull Chamber as a salutory warning of the degenerative possibilities which haunt our race: Rattray, the Leeching Man.
Rattray had been the Agent for a Miss Euphemia Pursemore of Cowes, lOW. How’s that for a debt-making duo – Pursemore and Rattray! The story goes that a certain John Divers – the Scabby’s political shaman – aware that Rattray was becoming too lazy to even turn a blind eye to the squalor being forced on his tenants through lack of repairs and downright custodial neglect, obtained by his usual devious means the absentee landlady’s address. As a consequence, one bright Cowes morning her ladyship found herself opening a bulky package which turned out to contain a dead rat – a whopper by Scobie Street standards – to the verminous body of which was attached the following limerick, said to’ve been composed by John Scobie himself:
Dear Miss P.
To give you a whiff of your slum
I could’ve wiped this with my bum,
But, since you’re such a louse,
Here’s a Scobie Street mouse,
With roaches and rats still to come!
I looked around myself. Many a gun was pointed at my heart. Older, slower guns now, dischargers of sluggish bullets which had been the fastest means of death in their day. Such progress since. A mere half-ounce of thumb pressure was enough these days to off an entire city. This bugbear of living your life at the heart of an omnipresent arsenal, the feeling that you’ve a button-implant at the nape of your neck and the itchy thumb of some political misanthrope hovering over it night’n day. Oh Hiroshima, Nagasaki, now we know the world’s gone waki . . . No sign of Jason. Expecting to find’m around every corner I worked my way amidst the tools of homicide. These modern kids, what was to be done about them? The way they madcapped around inside their brand new senses, going off the road every five minutes, scaring the hell out of their demented instructors. Five minutes later – still no sign of the boy. Down the bellicose centuries I strode. By the time I’d got to the stab’n hack days of claymore and battleaxe my neural circuitry was locking into an amber condition. Where’d the kid got to? I shouted his name a few times, expecting to hear the clatter of his feet as he came to me. No response. Conditon red declared. This is not a drill. Klaxons began to honk. Red alert . . . red alert . . . this is not a drill . . .
‘Have you seen a fair-haired boy in a red anorak carrying a toy plane?’ Over’n over this same question put to that stupid armadillo called The Public which was pebbled with inanely staring eyeballs and from which the same stupid counter-query arose: ‘Have you lost’m then?’ I stopped an artguard. He looked like a smudged V. Van Gogh self-portrait, and was in fact checking out one of his ears as I spoke to’m. He promised to keep an eye open for the lad. ‘Make that both eyes!’ I snarled, angered by his tepid interest. Maybe a mi
ssing troll was down as a bonus in his book. I continued to jitter around, trotting out the same harried question. Just as I was about to succumb to full-blown panic it dawned on me where the little squirt would be. I went there pronto. A bunch of kids were staring in at the diorama. Jason was amongst them. What a relief! I leaned over to tap Jason’s shoulder. He turned his blond head as the diorama pulled off its stale trick – summer becoming winter. The boy had been transformed too: eyes, the wrong colour; front teeth missing; face too pinched looking. My hand slid from the shoulder of the red anorak. ‘Sorry, son, thought you were somebody else . . .’
Recalling that Jason had shown a spark of interest in the Locomotive Models, I hurried there. A retired colonel type, all tweeds and plummy twang, looked up from the steam engine diagram he’d been studying in the company of a Joe 90 lookalike, his grandson, or nephew, probably. ‘A red anorak, you say?’ The colonel checked out his moustache for crumbs or something, then shook his head on which a deerstalker hat had been firmly clamped. ‘Sorry, can’t say that I have. Awfully sorry. Lost the little chap, have you?’ There was about as much concern in his voice as there was humour in the chunk of machinery being examined by Joe 90. ‘Carrying a Spitfire?’ Again the colonel wagged his head. ‘Haven’t laid eyes on’m. What about you Timmy?’
The boy who looked as if he was about to climb into the piston chamber, now said: ‘It wasn’t a Spitfire.’
I stared down at’m. ‘What was that, sonny?’
Timmy, who’d what at school we’d called ‘swotty’ eyes, looked at me with far less interest than he’d devoted to the workings of the steam piston. ‘It was a Hawker-Hurricane.’
I grabbed at his shoulder. ‘You saw’m?’ A different nod. ‘Where?’
‘With a man.’
My internal klaxons were shrilling now all right. ‘What’d he look like?’
‘Blond hair, red anorak . . .’
‘Not the boy – the man?’
‘Same as you, almost: old US combat jacket, tartan scarf, denims, scuffed pair of shoes.’
I sighed, but not with relief. Obviously, the little bugger was responding logically to the questions as framed by me. Had he seen Jason? Yes, he had, but when I’d been with’m, not as it’d first seemed, in the company of another man, a stranger – at least there was that. But they did not go away those images of some stone-faced pervert bundling the weeping Jason into a snow-covered car then driving off.
‘Where was this, then Timmy – the Evolution Room, eh?’
‘Ornothological Section.’
My scalp prickled. We hadn’t gone there, Jason and me. He’d said he didn’t want to look at dead birds and we’d bypassed it. ‘This man,’ I asked, ‘it was me, wasn’t it?’
‘Wasn’t it what?’
Plainly, he was getting bored. This was becoming a mess, I could’ve strangled the little bugger. He was shaking his head and sending longing glances towards the piston exhibit.
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘His jacket was cleaner than yours. The scarf was Stewart tartan, not MacGregor, shoes were different, and he didn’t wear a CND button.’
‘Thanks, son,’ I said, though why I was thanking him for doubling my dread I don’t know. I hurried off. ‘Hope you find the little chap,’ the colonel called after me. I waved an acknowledgement but by then Timmy had already succumbed to the far more seductive appeal of the nineteenth-century steam railway technology.
Anyone viewing my antics during the next five minutes or so, say from the upper galleries, could’ve likened my behaviour to the malfunctioning, not of antique machinery, but more recent technology – a Dalek gone wonky, its circuitry imploding, its mind smoking through metal seams and grilles, its gyrations becoming more and more manic. I claimed every artguard I came across and gabbled out my story. Much nonsense flowed, I wanted all doors locked, loudspeaker announcements, organised search-parties. The boy had been snatched. That’s right, by a man dressed much the same as myself – But what was the use? These dust’n debris agents were tuned into yesterday: give them a sniff of a knight’s codpiece and they’d deliver the aristo in no time at all. I demanded to see the curator or whoever was in charge. This meant that I was getting desperate, for what would an arts expert know about red-anoraked waifs carrying model aeroplanes? The attendant I happened to be berating for stepping away from me to chin a wee lassie about dropping a sweetie wrapper on the floor suddenly smiled. I turned to follow his pointing finger: toddling towards us in the company of another grossly-underpaid artguard was Jason.
‘Uncle Tom,’ he cried, ‘can I get an ice-lolly now?’
‘A chap found’m wandering,’ the guard explained after I’d thanked’m and taken a tight grip of my charge’s hand. ‘Tell you an odd thing, though, this chap who found your youngster, he was . . .’
‘. . . dressed much like me?’
He nodded. ‘Same everything.’
I touched my scarf. ‘Except this was Stewart tartan. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think he was wearing one of these – right?’ I was pointing to my CND button.
The guard who wasn’t to know I’d been chatting to the great, grand-nephew of Sherlock Holmes, himself, looked quite impressed. ‘Aye, now that you mention it . . .’
A minute or so later saw Jason and myself back at the diorama.
I got next to nothing out of the boy about my dress-alike. Presumably, since the guard hadn’t alluded to it we bore no facial similarity, me’n the kidnapper, which was just as well for that doppleganger stuff gives me the willies. They say that if you meet up with your double then your tea’s about out. Mine, then, must still be in the pot, but for how long? Jason’s story had such a matter-of-factness about it that I couldn’t help but sense he’d been put up to it, rehearsed; I mean the explanation bore vocal prints that weren’t his own. He claimed that he followed my dress-duplicate from the Weaponry Room thinking he was me. When he’d found out that he’d been tagging after a stranger he’d started to cry. The man had taken him to an attendant, and that was all there’d been to it. Nothing to write home about. A mere blip tadpoleing across the screen of normality. Step down the red alert, lock away the launch codebook. Make a brief report in the Incident File: ‘Loss of minor communication 1530 hrs. due to sartorial misidentification. Located and rectified. Normalcy restored 1550 hrs. (approx).’
Just as now’n again startling pains transit through your body, so unexpectedly and so overpoweringly, that you instinctively sense that if they were to remain for only a few seconds more, your dying from them would inevitably follow, so certain life-events, odd occurrences, convoying through your existence, can bear the same lethal threat. The boy waited with uncomplicated optimism for the rebirth of a new season but this tiny episode was serving notice on me that no longer need spring follow winter with the same old sun-plodding docility.
Jason chortled as once again the shabby trio re-emerged in their winter woollies. In a more sombre frame of mind (my arm was really giving me gyp now), I found myself thinking about Old Pike, Talky Sloan, and the stabbed youth, a trio who hadn’t made it back from the dark. My parents came to mind, too. It was really heavy, this knowing that for them continuity – well, spasms of return – into this life were chiefly down to me, to my ability to rekindle them in the spirals of my memory. So much for that splendid immortality Ma Clay had so fervently sung for in the Bleaker Memorial Church. Was this what the forever holiday in God’s Country amounted to – a will o’ the wisp in a forgetful son’s head?
For a long time after his burial (an entire month, at least), I’d fully expected to hear my brother Martin’s special tune – ‘Pedro, the Fisherman’ – being whistled by him, its melody jarring a bit because at the same time he was pelting up the tenement stairs, two at a time, to reach our joyous household and to receive the exuberant cuddles of Ma, Da, and me. In this fantasy Da Clay always had on his slippers which meant (no promises, mind) that maybe be’d bide a wee while longer. Martin, span
king gravedust from his clothes, would tell a breathless tale of escape, of how Granda Gibson’d come to his aid, showing him how to howk out a tunnel, bracing its roof with dead men’s thigh bones. He was often set-upon by Eastend gangs and plagues of red-eyed rats but, eventually, he’d burst through the putrid soil and sucked in great draughts of air. I hooked my arm about my brother and squeezed him with all the love and affection that I could muster.
‘Uncle Tom,’ he said.
‘Mmm?’
‘Uncle Tom, you’re hurting my shoulder.’
‘Sorry, son.’ I relaxed my grip on Jason.
‘I think I saw the bunny move,’ he said.
‘Aye, we’d best follow suit. Your Maw and Da’ll be daen their nuts.’
A smile creased the lad’s lips. In front of’m I’d blatantly committed an anti-Shermanism, a thou-shalt-not. I gave the back of my hand a couple of light, mocking slaps and grinned down at the boy whose lingual purity I’d sullied. ‘Sorry. I meant that your mater and your pater might be getting somewhat concerned about our prolonged absence.’
The wee rogue gave me a briber’s wink which implied: ‘I won’t tell about the man if –’
I was sentenced to another three ptarmigan-hare-and-stoat summers and the same in winters before I was sprung from the tyranny of the doombox.
Outside, nature’s diorama had got jammed in its winter phase; the snow gushed unstaunchably from the black hole that was the sky. As my hair whitened with the stuff I put on the trembly gait of a greybeard and tottered forward on an invisible walking stick. Jason’s whoops of laughter ceased abruptly when in the snowy phantom of a car by the kerbside a funereal window rolled down to reveal in all its glacial majesty the face of the Wicked Witch of the North.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 24
