Barefoot in the Head

by Brian W Aldiss

  ‘Wait, first wait,’ said Colin Charteris, in his own English, brain cold and acid. ‘Think of Ouspenski’s personality photographs. There’s a high gloss. You have many alternatives. We are all rich in alternatives.’ He had been saying that all afternoon, during this confused walk, as he knew. Ahead a big blind wall. The damp smudged crowded city, matured to the brown nearest black, gave off this rich aura of possibilities, which Brasher clearly was not getting. Charteris had glimpsed the world-plan, the tides of the future, carried with them sailor-fashion, was not so much superior to as remote from the dogged Brasher and Brasher’s pale-thighed wife, Angelina, flocking on a parallel tide-race. Many alternatives; that was what he would say when next he addressed the crowds. Power was growing in him; he stood back modest and amazed to see it and recognise its sanctity like his father had. Brasher grabbed his wet coat and waved a fist in his face, an empty violent man saying ‘I ought to kill you!’ Traffic roared by them, vehicles driven by drivers seeing visions, on something called Inner Relief Road.

  The irrelevant fist in his face; teeth in close detail; in his head, the next oration. You people — you midland people are special, chosen. I have come from the south of Italy from the Balkans to tell you so. The roads are built, we die on them and live by them, neural paths made actual. The Midlands of England is a special region; you must rise and lead Europe. Start a new probability.

  Less blankly put than that, but the ripeness of the moment would provide the right words, and there would be a song, Charteris we cry! He could hear it although it lay still coiled in an inner ear. Not lead but deliver Europe. Europe is laid low by the psychedelic bombs; even neutral France cannot help, because France clings to old nationalist values. I was an empty man, a materialist, failed Communist, waiting for this time. You have the alternatives now to wake yourselves and kill the old serpent.

  You can think in new multi-value logics, because that is the pattern of your environment. The fist swung at him. The entire sluggish motion of man aiming it. Angeline’s face was taking in the future, traffic-framed, dark of hair, immanent, luminous, frightful. It seemed to me I was travelling aimlessly until I got here stone cold from hotter beds too young father I called you from that flooded damned bank.

  ‘I was just passing through on my way to Scotland, belting up the motorway in expedition. But I stopped here because of premonitions shy as goldfish thought. Think in fuzzy sets. There is no either-or black-white dichotomy any more. Only a spectrum of partiallys. Live by this, as I do — you will win. We have to think new. Find more directions make them. It’s easy in this partially country.’

  But Brasher was hitting him. World of movement lymphatic bursting. He looked at the fist, saw all its highways powerlines and tensions as Brasher had never seen it, fist less human than many natural features of the man-formed landscape in this wonderful traffic-tormented area. A fist struck him on the jaw. Colliding systems shock lost all loot.

  Even in this extreme situation, Charteris thought, multi-value logic is the Way. I am choosing something between being hit and not being hit; I am not being hit very much.

  He heard Angeline screaming to her husband to stop. She seemed not to have been affected by the PCA Bombs, carrying her own neutrality through the brief nothing hours of the Acid Head War. But it was difficult to tell; bells rang even when classrooms looked empty or birds startled from cover. Charteris had a theory that women were less affected than men. Stridulations of low tone. He would be glad to measure Angeline’s rhythm but disliked her screaming now. Bombardment of images, linked to her scream — theory of recurrence? — especially toads and the new animal in the dead trees at home.

  There was a way to stop her screaming without committing oneself to asking her to cease. Charteris clutched at Brasher’s ancient blue coat, just as the older wattled man was about to land another blow. The great wheeling scab of metropolis. Behind Brasher, on the other side of Inner Relief, lay an old building made of the drab ginger stone of Leicestershire, to which a modern glass-and-steel porch had been tacked. A woman was watering a potted plant in the porch. All was distinct to Charteris while he pulled Brasher forward and then heaved him backward into Inner Relief little watering can of copper she had.

  The lorry coming from the north swerved out to avoid. The old Cortina blazing along towards it spun across the narrow verge, swept away lady’s glass-and-steel porch, copper can gone like that, and was itself hit by a post office van which had swerved to avoid the lorry. The lorry still bucking across the road hit another oncoming car which could not stop in time. The world’s noise on granite. Another vehicle its brakes squealing ran into the wall within feet of where Charteris and Angeline stood, and crumpled to a prearranged device too quickly, cicatrices chirping open. A series of photographs, potentialities multiplying or cancelling, machines as bulls herded.

  ‘So many alternatives,’ Charteris said wonderingly. He was interested to see that Brasher had disappeared, bits of him distributed somewhere among the wreckage. He remembered the multiple crash on the autostrada near Milano. Or was it a true memory? Was the Milano crash merely a phantasm of a mind already on the swerge of delision or some kind of dreamplay-back awry both the crashes the same crash or another his own predestination already in the furniture maybe wrong delivery wrong addrents from the dreamvelope where that stamping grind unsorted the commutations of the nights post orifices or who knew who was in serge of what when on.

  At least the illusion was strong on particularity with the photograves unblurred. If it happened or not or would or did it on this internal recurrence was a jolt, sparky as all algebra, and he saw a tremendous rightness lathe blossom of the implact and shapes of wreckage; it was like a marvellous — he said it to the girl, ‘It is like a marvellous complex work of sculpture, where to the rigorous manformed shapes is added chance. Wider theory of numbers aids decimation. The art of the fortuitous.’

  She was green and drab, swaying on her heels. He tried looking closely at the aesthetic effect of this colour-change, and recalled from somewhere in his being a sense of pity like a serpentstir. She was hurt, shocked, although he saw a better future for her. He must perform a definite action of some sort: remove her from the scene and the blood-metal steaming.

  She went unprotestingly with him.

  ‘I think Charteris is a saint. He has spoken with great success in Rugby and Leicester,’ Army Burton said.

  ‘Wide to whatever comes along,’ Banjo Burton said. ‘Full of loot.’

  ‘He has spoken with great success in Rugby and Leicester,’ Robbins said, thinking it over. Robbins was a faded nineteen, the field of his hair unharvested; he was the eterminal art student; his psychedelic-disposed personality had disintegrated under the efflict of being surrandied by acid heads, although not personally caught by the chemicals of Arab design.

  They sat in an old room dark bodies curtains drawn tight and light a blur on the papered walls.

  Outside in the Loughborough streets night and day kept to the dialogue. Small dogs ran between stone seams.

  Army used his uniform as barracks. Banjo had been a thirdyearer, had turned agent, ran the pop group, the Escalation, operated various happenings; he had run Robbins as a saint with some reward, until Robbins had deflated one morning into the role of disciple cold cracked lips on the blue doorstep. They all lived with a couple of moronic girls in old housing in the middle of tumbletown, overlooking the square high moronic rear of FW Woolworth’s. All round the town waited new buildings designed to cope with hypothetical fast-growing population; but conflicting eddies of society had sent people hearing echoes in each other’s rooms gravitating towards the old core. The straggle of universities and technical colleges stood in marshy fields. It was February.

  ‘Well, he spoke with great success in Leicester,’ Burton said, ‘made them believe in a sex-style.’

  ‘Ay, he did that. Mind you, I was a success in Leicester,’ Robbins said, ‘Apathy’s like bricks there to build yellow chapels on some fi
elds you care to name.’

  ‘Don’t run down Leicester,’ Greta squeaked. ‘I came from there. At least, my uncle did the one with the dancing cat I told you about ate the goldfish. Did I ever tell you my Dad was a Risparian? An Early Risparian. My Mum would not join. She only likes things.’

  Burton dismissed all reminiscence with a sweep of his hand. He lit a reefer and said, ‘We are going to have a crusade, burn trails, make a sparky party of our Charter-flightboy, really roll. Play the noise-game.’

  ‘Who’s gone off Brasher then?’

  ‘Stuff Brasher. You’ve seen our new boy. He’s a song!’

  He could see it. Charteris was good. He was foreign and people were ready for foreigners and exotic toted even in a tuning eyeball. Foreigners were exotic. Charteris had this whole thing he believed in some sort of intellectual thing fitted the machine-scene. People could take it in or leave it and still grab the noise of his song. Charteris was writing a book too. You couldn’t tell he was real or phoney it didn’t matter so he couldn’t switch off.

  The followers were already there. Brasher’s following. Charteris beat Brasher at any meeting. You’d have to watch for Brasher. Big munch little throat. The man thought he was Jesus Christ. Even if he is Jesus Christ, my money’s on Charteris. He’s got loot! Colin Charteris. Funny name for a Jugoslav!

  ‘Let’s make a few notes about it,’ he said. ‘Robbins, and you, Gloria.’

  ‘Greta.’

  ‘Greta, then. A sense of place is what people want — something to touch among all the metaphysics, big old jumbos in the long thin grass. Charteris actually likes this bloody dump its dogshitted lanes. I suppose it’s new to him. We’ll take him round the houses, tape-record him. Where’s the tape-recorder?’ He was troubled by images and a presentiment that they would soon be driving down the autobahns of Europe. He saw a sign to Frankfurt, rubbed hands over his Yorkskull pudding eyes.

  ‘I’ll show him my paintings,’ Robbins said. ‘And he’ll be interested about the birds all close local stuff.’

  ‘What about the birds in all areas?’

  ‘A sense of place, you said with the jumbos in the long grapes. What they do, you know, like the city, the birds like the city.’ They liked the city, the birds. Took its bricks for leaves. He had watched, down where the tractor was bogged down in the muddy plough, stood himself bogged all day in content, the landscape the brown nearest black under the thick light. It was the sparrows and starlings, mainly. There were more of them in the towns. They nested behind neon signs, over the fish and chip shops, near the chinese restaurants, by the big stores, furniture stores, redemption shops, filling stations, for warmth, and produced more babies than the ones in the country, learning a new language. More broods annually. The seagulls covered the ploughed field. They were always inland. You could watch them, and the lines of the grid pencilled on the sky. They were evolving, giving up the sea. Woodgulls. The Greater Mole Gull. Or maybe the sea had shrivelled up and gone. Shrunk like melted plastic. God knows what the birds are up to, acid-headed like everything else. Doing the pattern thing themselves. ‘City suits the birds. It has built-in pattern.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ She loved him really, but you had to laugh. His dandy lion-yellow hair.

  ‘We aren’t the only ones with a population expulsion. The birds too. Remember that series of painting I did of birds, Banjo? Flowers and weeds, too. Like a tide. Pollination expulsion.’

  ‘Just keep it practical, sonny. Stick to buildings, eh?’ Maybe he could unzip his skull, remove the top like a wig, and pull that distracting Frankfurt sign dripping out of his brain batter.

  ‘The Pollination Explosion,’ Charteris said. ‘That’s a good title. I write a poem called The Pollination Explosion, about the deep pandemic of nature. The idea just came into my head. And the time will come when you try to betray me to leave me desolate between four walls.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘There could be trees in our future if the brain holds up.’

  Angeline was walking resting on his arm, saying nothing. He had forgotten where he had left the Banshee; it was pleasure padding through the wet, looking for it. They strolled through a new arcade, where one or two shops functioned on dwindling supplies. A chemist’s; Get Your Inner Relief Here; a handbill for the Escalation, Sensational and Smelly. Empty shells where the spec builder had not managed to sell shop frontage, all crude concrete, marked by the fossil-imprints of wooden battens. City pattern older than wood stamped by brainprint. Messages in pencil or blue crayon. YOUNG IVE SNOGED HERE, BILL HOPKINS ONLY LOVES ME, LOVES LOST ITS LOOT, CUNT SCRUBBER. What was a cunt scrubber? Something like a loofah, or a person? Good opening for bright lad!

  The Banshee waited in the rain by a portly group of dustbins exchanging hypergeometic forms, moduli of the cosmic rundown. It was not locked. They turned out an old man sheltering inside it.

  ‘You killed my husband,’ Angeline said, as the engine started. The filling station up the road gave you quintuple Green Shields on four gallons. Nothing ever changed except thought. Thought was new every generation, or they thought it was new, and she heard old wild music playing.

  ‘The future lies fainting in the arms of the present.’

  ‘Why don’t you listen to what I’m saying Colin? You’re not bloody mad, are you? You killed my husband and I want to know what you’re going to do about it!’

  ‘Take you home.’ They were moving now. Although his face ached, he felt in a rare joking mood as after wine in the deep home forests.

  ‘I don’t live out this direction.’

  ‘Take you to my home. My place. Where I build a sort of project from. I’ve started making a new model for thought. You came once, didn’t you, with Brasher in some untidy evening? It’s not town, not country. You can’t say which it is; that’s why I like it — it stands for all I stand for. In the mundane world and France, things like art and science have just spewed forth and swallowed up everything else. There’s nothing now left that’s non-art or non-science. A lot of things just gone. My place is neither urban nor non-urban. Fuzzy set, its own non categorisable catasgory. Look outwards, Angeline! Wonderful!’ He gave a sort of half-laugh by a wall, his beard growing in its own silence.

  ‘You Serbian bastard! There may have been a war, the country may be ruined, but you can’t get away with murder! Justice doesn’t just fuzz off! You’ll die, they’ll shoot you!’

  There was no conviction in her voice; his sainthood was drowning her old self, or whatever he had behind eyes.

  ‘No, I shall live, be justice. I haven’t fulfilled any purpose yet, a sailor but the ocean’s still ahead, hey?’ The car was easing on to the Inner Relief: Behind them, ambulances and a fire engine and police cars and breakdown vans were nuzzling the debris. ‘I’ve seen reality, Angeline — Kragujevac, Metz, Frankfurt — it’s lying everywhere. And I myself have materialised into the inorganic, and so am indestructible, auto-destruct!’

  The words stoned him. Since he had reached England, the psychedelic effect had gained on him daily in gusts. Cities had speaking patterns, worlds, rooms. He had ceased to think what he was saying; the result was he surprised himself; and this elation fed back into the system. Every thought multiplied into a thousand. Words, roads, all fossil tracks of thinking. He pursued them into the amonight: struggling with them as they propagated in their deep burrows away from the surface.

  Another poem: On the Spontaneous Generation of Ideas During Conversation. Spontagions Ideal Convertagion. The Conflation of Spongation in Idations. Agenbite of Auschwitz.

  ‘Inwit, the dimlight of my deep Loughburrows. That’s how I materialised, love! Loughborough is me, my brain, here — we are in my brain, it’s all me. The nomad’s open to the city. I am projecting Loughborough. All its thoughts are mine, in a culmination going.’ It was true. Other people, he hardly saw them, caught in bursts, crossflare, at last shared their bombardment of images.

  ‘Don’t be daft — it’s raining aga
in! Don’t go daft. Talk proper.’ But she sounded frightened.

  They swerved past factories, long drab walls, filling stations, long ochre terraces, yards, many genera of concrete.

  Ratty little shops now giving up; no more News of the World, Guinness. Grey stucco urinal. Coal yard, Esso Blue. A railway bridge, iron painted yellow, advertising Ind Coope, sinister words to him. More rows of terrace houses, dentured, time-devoured. A complete sentence yet to be written into his book; he saw his hand writing the truth is in static instants. Then the semis, suburbanal. More bridges, side roads, iron railings, the Inner Relief yielding to fast dual-carriage, out onto the motorway, endless roads crossing over it on primitive pillars. Railways, some closed, canals, some sedge-filled, a poor sod pushing a sack of potatoes on the handlebars of his bike across a drowning allotment, footpaths, cycle-paths, catwalks, nettlebeds, waste dumps, scrap-pits, shortcuts, fences.

  Geology. Strata of different man-times. Tempology. Each decade of the past still preserved in some gaunt monument. Even the motorway itself yielding clues to the enormous epochs of pre-psychedelic time: bridges cruder, more massive in earliest epoch, becoming almost graceful later, less sick-orange; later still, metal; different abutment planes, different patterns of drainage in the under-flyover bank, bifurcated like enormous Jurassic fern-trees Here we distinguish by the characteristics of this medium-weight aggregate the Wimpey stratum; while, a little further along, in the shade of these cantilevers, we distinguish the beginning of the McAlpine seam. The layout of that service area, of course, belongs characteristically to the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. Further was an early electric generating station with a mock-turkish dome, desolate in a field. All art, assuaging. Pylons, endlessly, too ornate for the cumbersome land, assuaging. Multiplacation.