Cigar smoke, the blue convolutions of it on the windscreen. Sherman sighed. At his fingertips, a grandsworth of prime auto; a sheepskin jacket on his back; hand-stitched shoes on his feet; in his mouth a hand-rolled cigar; and yet the man was sighing. Thoughtful of him but to kipper me with the aromatic reek of the thing – gave me an insight, no, wrong sense, an insniff into what I was missing in life, trappings which could still be mine if I settled down to being an industrious clockroach. Sorry, I can’t see it being worth the hassle. For Sherman the Havanas, for me – the bananas. Just the luck of the draw, that’s all.
‘Well?’ he glanced across at me. ‘Cat got your tongue, has it?’
A grey cone of ash detached itself from the cigar and with tiny red stars winking at the disintegrating heart of it made a soft landing in the ashtray. He indulged in a further sigh, a deeper, more melancholy sounding one. But it was all an act; Mammon’s robots aren’t wired for empathy, there’s no possibility of such greed-channelled androids being able to formulate even a primitive conception of what a poor man’s misery might feel like. Sherman’s sighs were as phoney as a whore’s climax.
‘What’s to be done with you?’ he asked.
Maybe, him being the solar asshole of the family (his very fart it’s said can brighten an entire room) Sherman assumed he’d the licence to put such impertinent questions to people. He also had the wheels of course, the means of getting me to some hangdog bus-stop in the Briggs, a district where human life of a kind is lived though I’ve yet to see the proof. In other words when there’s only one parachute on the plane it doesn’t pay to bad-lip the pilot.
Sherman, the robot, now did an astonishing thing – he reached up and unbolted his face, plucking from it the vital component that kept it together, namely, his rimless glasses. With haste, as if he knew he was vulnerable, he whisked a white hankie across the lenses. A sight to see, that naked coupon of his. It was like seeing a tyrannical headmaster in his drawers: who could take orders from him or ever again be in awe of such a purblind pod of flesh? Sherman, allowing the hankie to flop into his lap, rapidly seized hold of the specs by their legs and waggled them onto his face. He prodded at the gold bridge until the lenses were comfortable astride his gaze. Amazing how two ultra-thin wafers of glass restored his authoritative air, returned his combative edge. His face was fully functional once more. Just as Adolf H. had been his moustache so Jack Sherman was his specs. His self-image. Were they to get broken or become lost he would be correspondingly diminished. I don’t doubt that Phyllis wakening to find his undressed face asleep on the pillow beside hers would suffer a sense of foreboding. Unnerving it would be for a futurist like herself to see that her weighty hopes and plans were dependent on such a paltry and fragile prop as a pair of rimless eyeglasses.
He gathered his hankie from his lap and carefully refolding it returned it to some body compartment. ‘Know what I think did for you, Tommy, yon yoga stuff you used to be into. Remember? Squatting on the floor, hoo-hahing at your belly-button.’ His smirk deepened as no doubt he saw by certain of my physiological reactions that he was into pay-dirt; probably my jaw tightened, and my hands became fists, a change in my breathing pattern, maybe even a flush appearing on my face. ‘You were quite the closet Buddha, eh – the Guru of the Gorbals. I can just see you, sitting there’n your Y-fronts amongst the candles and the joss-sticks making vowel sounds. Or was it bowel-sounds?’ He laughed. ‘Same difference.’ After several attempts at puffing cigar smoke into my face, he managed to ripen a promising cough of mine into a chain-reaction of bronchial barking that left me peching, teary, and extremely irritated. His jibes went on. ‘Did you ever see it, Tom – the mystical Third Eye?’ He reached out to the ignition key but delayed turning it. ‘Maybe you found you’d been sitting on it all along.’ He gunned the engine then, as he released the handbrake, he gave me the benefit of some unsought advice: ‘Yeah, searching for Samhadi in your simmet’s a total waste of time, running away from life by sitting on your backside. It’s tantamount to –’
I don’t know how the rest of that lecture might’ve gone, nor shall I ever know for at that moment the panto manager – what an impatient guy he was – waved on the villains.
‘Get ready to hiss, kids.’
And they came rolling on in their flashing sleigh drawn by a panda – the giant ogres, Blowdeep and Blowgreen. Their square heads were jammed into chequered hats and their festive nightsticks freely swung. Clayman chortled with glee when he saw how put-out was the evil Goldgrabber. ‘Tee-hee,’ he said, ‘now he’s for it! Now he’ll get a bumful of holly . . .!’
A most interesting rap this between porker and parker. Having established that the driver was indeed the owner of the vehicle in question, the curlytail next wanted to know why Sherman was parked at the foot of a hill on such a night. Had he broken down? Was he waiting for someone? Or, had he just stopped to admire the scenery? Without being asked to Sherman produced his driving licence and passed it through the window to the officer – the fatal slip, surely, the dead giveaway! The document disappeared from view, was presumably examined, then returned to its quivering owner. I’ll never know if the fuzz got an early xmas present that night, a promise-to-pay tucked by to meet such a contingency, the driver’s ace in the hole. All I do know is that the pig’s highly sensitive snout which at that moment should’ve been reporting to his brain that it was in the immediate vicinity of a whisky distillery and a Chinese latrine, was, in fact, being withdrawn into the cold night air. I’d advise you to make your journey a short one, Sir – the roads are getting tricky.’
And, with that prosaic piece of advice Blowdeep, five, maybe ten pounds heavier than he’d been on his arrival, went crunching back to his magic sleigh which tinkled, flashed and merrily rang with the sounds of a festive crime wave.
32
ABOUT A MINUTE or so after our encounter with the curlytail Sherman was for dumping me in Anchorage, Alaska, or some such Arctic equivalent. It was a scraggy piece of tundra on the Southern outskirts of Fat Wallet, a moiled wasteland modelled on a post-battle Paschendale or Ypres. Excavation equipment, diggers, scoops, and what-have-you lay abandoned by the frigid roadside; a pair of cement-mixers, like fat canonry, presented their snow-packed muzzles to a trio of hag rowans who were conspiring at a crossroads. It was on this very spot that Sherman slewed the car to a halt.
‘Out!’ he ordered.
Out? Out there? He had to be joking. Like a rookie skydropper who’d gone chicken, I clamped myself to my seat. Out there was strictly for huskies. A wind, armed to the teeth with snow and hypothermia agreed with me as it came smoking along a poorlylit road that just might be the long way to Tibet. Sherman repeated his insane command. He even began to jostle me. Very uncool. ‘You heard’m,’ he gabbled. ‘Get off the road, he said.’ He was trying to reach past me to get at my door handle, but sore wing or not I managed to fend him off. I grasped what his problem was. How much running time’d his bribe bought? How long before those oinks declared open-season on’m again. A genuine worry. But what was an endorsement compared to yours truly being howked like a glazed garden gnome from a melting snowdrift come April next? No contest. The heartless bastard was still trying to dunt me from my seat, every sideways shunt of his forcing a gasp of pain from me. I couldn’t tough this out much longer. From Sherman’s lips poured fiction about there being a plenitude of hotels, inns, and welcoming peasants all waiting for me around the bend. Could I see it? Aye, with a pair of navy bins I could’ve zoomed right into a couthy wee tavern where a fire big enough to roast a Jack Sherman blazed in the hearth and a triple measure of the inverted gold awaited my coming. As it was, I’d merely my god-given peepers to rely on and the only sign of human habitation they were reporting was a scattering of construction huts and some vague shadowy things in the snowcovered fields – probably a caribou herd on the move to its winter-feeding grounds.
Sherman slammed into me again and pain ricocheted along my bones, augmenting itself like a fabulo
us pinball run, racking up the agonies to a score well beyond human toleration. Angrily, I swung round at’m. ‘C’mon for fucksake, Jack. What’s got into you? I don’t even know where I am.’
He told me but it meant nothing. According to him all I’d to do was to keep to the road for ten minutes and I’d be – stiffer’n Casanova’s pecker that’s what! Sherman began to froth more fiction about how close to civilisation I really was, then seeing that this was leaving no grooves on me, he mounted an even more ferocious assault. A Mafia hitman would’ve flinched at such callousness. As his shoulder ramming increased he showed his teeth, made savage snarling noises and fisted heavily at my fingers which clung now to the door-handle and prevented him from getting to it to force my ejection. His face, I noted, was becoming glossy with melting veneer.
I jerked my head. ‘Back there . . . maybe a mile . . . a hotel . . . Ow, ya bass, that’s bloody sore! Take me to it . . . and I’ll phone for a cab . . . Right?’
No dice. ‘Back there’ was where Blowgreen and Blowdeep lurked. Sherman was for another route home. This entailed his turning off right here’n now! The obscene little struggle literally took an even more vicious twist when he seized my crippled wing in his pincer-like grasp and began powerfully to squeeze on it. I let out such a roar it would’ve alerted the Marquis de Sade, himself, to the code of human decency he was violating. One just didn’t do this to people. It just wasn’t fuck’n on! My blanched fingers dropped from the door handle. The pincers relaxed, became a hand again, the fingers of which lightly patted my louping arm before falling away, a kind of tactile apology.
As he got the door open harsh blades of snow slashed at the left side of my face and plastered white my shoulder’n arm on the same side. The car’s headlamp beams lit a road from which all tyremarks had long been erased. I rubbed at my throbbing arm. ‘You’re sure there’s a hotel?’ His head about nodded itself from its rocker. To hear’m you would’ve believed that only a few minutes away, a quarter of a mile or so along the cottonwool road – you’d know you were close to it when you’d spotted Bambi gambolling with his woodland pals in a buttercupped meadow – was to be found a traveller’s haven simply hoaching with hotels, motels and even cartels, not to mention bed’n breakers by the dozen with loads of ‘Shangrilas’, ‘Dunroamins’ and ‘Restawearies’, with white-haired and floral-peenied grannies lined along their well-scrubbed doorsteps waving ‘Vacancies’ placards to the spoiled-for-choice tourists. In case I needed further persuasion the pincers returned to my sore arm. Not pressuring it, you understand, just there as a wee reminder of how even the best relationships can so swiftly degenerate into brutishness.
Fully aware of the facts of death, I stepped from the car into a snowdrift. The wind couldn’t credit its luck: it ran up to cuff’n slap at me to see if I was real, then, finding that I was genuine enough, though obviously a glimmerbrain, it capered gleefully around, running together its luminous palms. Sherman’s body was tilted in my direction as he reached to try’n claw the door shut.
‘You’re a topper, Jack!’ I shouted in at’m, ‘a real fuck’n top –’ Scared, maybe, that a remorse of conscience might rob it of its big witless playmate, the wind aided Sherman by snapping the door shut. You twat! a voice (it sounded like Vic Rudge’s) shouted in my head. You should’ve grabbed them off the bass! Grabbed what? His fuck’n specs, man. What a diddy. D’you think he really sees you giving him that vicky. Save your fuck’n breath as well, he can’t hear you. He’s offski. And so he was: fishtailing snow, the MG was soon nothing but dwindling tail-lights, its acceleration honouring its manufacturers promise by getting its speedo to sixty before I’d shouted myself into a coughing fit and, in trying to execute a double vicky, had aggravated my sore elbow so much the pain suggested it’d popped its socket.
Right enough, if I’d only thought to snatch his specs. What a stroke! It would’ve fixed him good, had him out of the cosy nest of his car floundering after me, begging, aye, just think of that, begging me to – Stop wanking your wishbone, the scunnered voice said, too fuck’n late. Maybe not. I could lay a hex on’m. My days dabbling in shamanism and parawhatsits had given me a few wrinkles in the art of striking one’s enemies from a distance. Tuning into the thousand hexoherts range I suggested that a busted axle should befall the MG, anything at all that’d see it getting written-off in spectacular fashion, just so long as the end result was Sherman with his backbone snapped five times over but remaining conscious throughout his ordeal, ultra-sensitive to each’n every pang that visited his flesh – and so mote it be until the uttermost breath had quitted his cracked and blackened lips.
Here, said Jeremiah, that’s a bit chancey – laying curses on your fellow man, especially at a crossroads. Don’t you know the earth hereabouts is Satan’s portion? Why else are suicides buried at such junctions? Be warned, curses tend to redound on their invokers at such unhallowed spots.
Redound, eh? My, he’d dug down to the bottom of the auld word bag for that yin. The act of redounding. Pissing against the wind, he means. Wouldn’t it be a pity to put at risk all the good fortune I’ve been recently enjoying, all the fun I’ve been having scuba-diving in Shit Lake? All right, I’ll lift the hex. Cobble his spine together again and replace those injuries with a bruise to the thumb and simple decapitation.
Safeguarded now in spirit I’d be able to pay heed to the needs of the old corpus crusty. Heat was its primo need, of course. ‘You’ll no’ gang faur oan a cauld firebox . . .’ as the cindery wee gem of railway lore has it. Sherman’s sheepskin jacket (what garment could be apter for such a lycanthropic owner?) and a flask of whisky, would’ve made me more confident about reaching the hotel which Sherman assured me awaited just around the next bend in the south-bearing road. Are you listening, landlord? I want to change my order: scrub the Scotch and sub it with a triple dark rum – the banana-flavoured kind – and a couple of green teardrops of ginger. Thanks. Pardon? My ETA? I reckon around ten minutes from now, give or take a grizzly bear or a famished wolf-pack. If I don’t show by then you’d best come a mushing with some huskies. How will you know me? C’mon, despite the coincidence of a double-dresser back’n the Art Gallery there just can’t be two of us tramping this white trash with tartan scarves wound about our bonces looking like a couple of spooks trudging home after yet another Wembley débâcle.
It would surprise me none to hear that John Mills, the film actor, had suffered more jawdroop than a jilted pelican during the making of Scott of the Antarctic. Those hours spent in the make-up trailer when his gorge rose before the sun did as they tweezered onto his flesh snowblight’n the seven scurves; the long day’s battle through phoney blizzards, cussing technicians, and worse-tempered huskies – it’s during such grisly episodes in an actress/actor’s life, when the studio set begins to look like an illuminated scaffold that the players get a glimpse of the stark reality awaiting them down the road – not the coveted Oscar, that tasteless chunk of metal, but Rubberland, itself, with its simple necessities: a cot, a chair, and a basket-weaving set.
At least at the end of a wearying day in his Spanish Antarctica John Mills could look forward to a shower and a decent meal, unlike poor Scott who, out there in the real, unscripted world, hadn’t only been unable to eat in the canteen – he’d been unable to find the bloody thing! What of yours truly, then – was my life about to dribble out in farce as well? Would I be brought back in the jaws of a snowplough, my rigid legs stuck up’n the air in a pathetic last vicky at the world? (In this scenario, which’ll be ditched just as soon as the promised hotel hoves into view, the script committee insist on the, to my mind, hackneyed notion of having the snowploughman whistling a few snatches from ‘Stranger on the Shore’.) For the moment, though, I’d just have to continue plodding on between the poles of endurance and hope. I’ve been doing this nearly all my life, usually sans snow, so what’s the big deal?
Recalling Scott’s entries in his last tragic diaries I began, just to keep the dreaded cranreuch at bay
, to mentally jot down some notes for my own journal, if I ever got to within pen reach of it again.
Sunday 22nd Dec. 196-
(I’ve long been an admirer of the decorous habit certain Russian authors employ in taking a hammer to Time’s sickle and flattening the soft lead of the given centuries decade into a flat wee rod of conjecture.)
‘For a long time I’ve been floundering along. My feet sink into the dazzling quicksnow. At any moment I may be taken; a flash of white, a single gulp, then gone, much like the shark victim’s last moments. For too long I have lived with this delusion of being a man, and one moreover who had no peers in the art of survival. Too late I’ve discovered myself to be a mere insect trekking across the wilderness of a teaplate. I turn, and yet endlessly turn, harried constantly by Fate’s stubby finger (nicotine stained, by the way) which prods maliciously at me. Sometimes it even flips me onto my back to gloat at my impotently writhing limbs. What frustration when, just as I think I’m making progress his mucky nail flicks me back all the way to the very rim of my journey.’
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 27
