Barefoot in the Head

by Brian W Aldiss

  Trying to Love

  Angline

  Anjline

  Angelea

  Agelea

  Aglina

  Agline

  Can I miss-spell your attitudes

  Speech is silver silence earns no interest

  Angeline think of me in your own coin

  Angline

  Gelina

  Jellybeana

  Agile Geline

  In the timescapes of your countenance

  My hopes stand paralysed

  Paraphrased in flesh and pore

  O Ingeline

  Itchelino Age Old Ina

  One day I’ll get it right

  BOOK TWO

  Southwards

  STILL TRAJECTORIES

  The juke box played a number called ‘Low Point X’. It was pub favourite the night that Speed Supervisor Jan Koninkrijk was forced to stay in the second floor back room on his way home from Cologne. He looked out over small cluttered muttering roofs and heard the record, heard it again in his sleep, dreaming of speed and life’s intermittent fulfilments as the melancholy tug boats hooted outside the hotel where the Meuse became the Maars.

  The girl in the bar, so fair, good North Dutch stock in that dull south Dutch town, hair almost milk-coloured, face so pale and sharp, interested in the sports end of the paper. The fountain sparkled.

  She tried to be nice to me last night, to smile with warmth Koninkrijk, speeding into Belgium, said to himself. I’m not interested much in stray women any more, but her life has a mystery... The pathos, having to serve five percent alcoholic drinks and watch night after night games of cards played always by the same men, listening to the tugs and ‘Low Point X’. The numbskill acid famine snorting outside in the alleys. Was she signalling for help? I snooped on dialogues of the blood, Only silence there except for Low Point X Giving its coronary thud... I’d better get back to Marta, no signals from her prison. A wife of shutters. Maybe this time she will be improved, so weary.

  His Mercedes burned over the highway and hardly touched it, licking at one-sixty kilometres an hour along the autobahn from Cologne and Aachen through Brussels to Ostend and so across to England. All now Arab-squirted. Piercing his mazed thoughts, Koninkrijk kept a sharp eye for madmen: the highway’s crash record was bad — his switched-on cops called it Hotpants Highway since the days of the Acid Head War. But this overcast afternoon brought little opposition, so he plunged forward, whistled to himself joy, boy, joy, hoy jug-a-jig, hug a little pig, follow the band.

  She would be slowing, fewer admirers, maybe one faithful one, coming to the bar every evening. Days paid out in hurried washing-lines. Her good will under strain. She smiled and smiled and was a victim. If he pitied, he must still love. It was the possibilities she represented that he thirsted for. Her hand as she stretched out for his guilders. A fine line, ah, that marvellous mystery of the female, something so much finer than just sex. Streamlined. Her little nails like teeth. With an unDutch gesture, he had kissed her hand; they were alone; they had looked at each other, he not much the older. The room round them colouring. Had put ten cents in the juke box for her to hear ‘Low Point X’ again as he walked out. Just to please her.

  Had he really looked at her? Had she ever really seen herself? Had she something to reveal, hidden and sweet, to the man who went seeking properly for it? But that was his old romantic idea. No one went seeking others any more; under the psychedelic rains, they mainlined only after themselves — and never hit true heights,

  He lived at Aalter, just off the Highway, in a thin house. ‘My life is an art object,’ he said jokingly, heaving shoulders under shirt. There were the alternatives; his wife’s presence, that girl’s presence, his job, his possible new appointment in Cologne, his office, that mad Messiah in England; all were different nodes of his mind, all were substantiated by different nodes of the planetary surface; neither of which could be reached without the other; it was possible that one was the diagram of the other; all that was certain was that the linking medium was speed. It was the mixer, the mixen, cultural midden. Certainly there was speed, as the dial said, 175 kilometres, registering also in the coronary thud.

  For some miles, Koninkrijk had been neglecting his thoughts as his eyes took in familiar territory, divesting itself of former naturalistic implications. He was beyond Brussels now, the sound of its cold kitchens. Here the enlargements to the Highway were on a grand scale. Two more lanes were being laid in either direction, thus doubling the previous number. But the new lanes were all twice the width of the previous ones, to allow for the fuzzy-set driving of speedsters under spell.

  Lips of senile earth had been piled back, cement towers erected; long low huts; immense credit boards with complicated foreign names; lamps, searchlights for night work; gigantic square things on wheels and tracks, yellow-bellied cranes; scaffolding, tips, mounds, ponds, mountains of gravel; old battered cars, new ones gaudy as Kandinskis and Kettels; mofettes like the fudged vents of corpses; and between everything chunky toy figures of men in striped scarlet luminescent work-coats. Into the furrows he saw the new animal go. These men were creating the whole chaos only for speed, the new super fuzzy speed, the catagasm of snared minds.

  He slowed at the Aalter turn. It was impossible to say how much he had been affected personally by the sprays, but Koninkrijk recognised that his viewpoint had altered since they fell, although he was working in France at the time of Arablitz; France had remained neutral and the old lie that Tenenti TV protège les yeux. Piedboeuf. He slowed as he began the long curve off, its direction confused by impedimenta of construction on either side. Aalter was already being eaten into under the road-widening scheme, the old Timmermans farmhouse obliterated, its fields gone, the footpath under trees destroyed.

  The grim thin house occupied by the Koninkrijks was the only one left inhabited in the street, owing to the improvements. Seismological eruptions of the European psyche had thrown up a mass of agglomerate that half-buried nearby terraces. A bulldozer laboured along the top of the ridge like a dung beetle, level with the old chimneys where smoke had once risen from a neighbourly hearth. That was over now. There was no past or future, only the division between known and unknown, sweeping on, terminator of a phantom Earth. The daffodils stood stiff in the Koninkrijk drive against just such a contingency, keeping the devouring detritus at bay, narcotic in their precision.

  A thin rain, after moving across the North German Plain for hours, enveloped Aalter as Koninkrijk climbed from his Mercedes. The bellowing machines against my silent house so featureless and she in there, and the new animal with its wet eyes watching. He was not sure about the new animal; but he was slow now, on his feet and no longer stretched at speed, consequently vulnerable. Unpeeled. He bowed his head to the drizzle and made for the closed opaque glass porch. She would have no such refuge of privacy; only a back room behind the bar, all too accessible to the landlord when he rose at last, stale from his final cigar and five-per-center, to try and fumble from her person that missing combination of success he had failed to find in the hands of knock-out whist. Marta, as the unknown crept closer, at least had privilege of her devious privacy.

  Marta Koninkrijk awaited in this minute and all the other buried minutes a secret someone to crush her up into life; or so she hoped or feared. She sat away all the sterile hours of her husbands absence as if the bright spinning coin would never tarnish or the miser forget his hoard. Time never went by. The bombs had blessed her half into a long-threatened madness, though she was not so insane that she did not try to conceal from her husband how far she lived away from him among the everfalling motes, or to conceal from herself how cherished was the perfection of immobility. She sat with her hands on her lap, sometimes reaching out with a finger to trace a hair-fine crack on the wall. Daring, this, for the day was nearing when the cracks would open and the forces of the earth pour in’while the new machines rode triumphantly above the sprouting chimney-tops, bucking in like mnemonics of her deep-boring
paralysis.

  Koninkrijk had installed omnivision in the thin house for her. She could sit and comfort her barren self by leaving the outer world switched off while the inner world was switched on.

  From the living-room, with its frail furniture, glistening surfaces, and brilliant bevelled-edge mirrors, she could watch intently the row of screens that showed the other rooms of the house; the screens extended her senses, always so etiolated, palely over the unfrequented mansion, giving her unwinking eyes in the upper corners of five other rooms. Faintly mauve and maureen, nothing moved in them all day except the stealthy play of light and shade trapped there; nothing made a sound, until the receptors picked up the buzz of an early fly, and then Marta leant forward, listening to it, puzzled to think of life assailing the fudged vents of her life. No bicycle wheel turns in the unpedalled mind. The omnivision itself made a faint noise like a fly, fainter than her breathing, conducted so tidily under her unmoving little bust. The stuffy rooms had their walls hung with gleaming mirrors of many shapes and pictures of small children in cornfields which she had brought here from her childhood; they could be viewed in the omnivision screens. Sometimes, she flicked a switch and spoke with a tremor into an empty room.

  ‘Jan!’

  ‘Father!’

  The rooms were full of incident from her immobile bastion in a wooden-armed chair. Nothing moved, but in the very immobility was the intense vibration of life she knew, so intense that, like a girlhood delight, it must be kept covert. The very intensity almost betrayed the secrecy for, when the key intruded downstairs into the elaborate orifice of the lock, there appeared to be a universe of time before he would appear at the stair top and discover that long-tranced inactivity of hers. Only after several millennia had passed and the radiations of undigested thought subsided somewhat, and the rasp of the key registered in each room’s audio-recepter, did she steal quickly up, dodging the slender image of herself transfixed in every looking-glass, and creep onto the landing to pull the lever in the toilet, assuring him of her activity, her normality, her earthy ordinariness. Into the lavatory bowl rattled a fall of earth. One day it would flood the house and blank out the last mauve image.

  Always when he mounted the narrow stairs it was to this sound of rushing water. He put his wet one-piece neatly on its hook before he turned and embraced his wife her fudged vents of concussion. Dry compressed inflexible orifices tangentially met. When he moved restlessly round the room, disrupting all the eons of stillness, the furniture shook; and from without, the obscene grunts of a dirt-machine, pigging in to clay layers. Life had lost all its loot, as they said.

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘I haven’t been out. The machines. I didn’t really feel...’

  ‘You ought to get out.’

  ‘It’s menacing. Even the daffodils.

  He crossed to the omnivision, switched over to Brussels. Momentary warming images. Bursting latticework, phantom casements. Some confused scenes as if settling into deep water, in some sort of a stadium. The cameraman could be on a perpetual trip judging by his random hand. Unlike Germany, here a government of sorts still held. Perhaps it was some kind of a beauty contest; girls in bikinis strutted, rakish of breast and mons, and many older women had turned up too — some at least in their seventies, flesh grouty and wrinkled, all foxed pudding. One of them was shouting, angry perhaps at getting no prize. Crowds in tight macks, looking all ways, and the stripped shots of a grandstand roof. A band played — not ‘Low Point X’. He left it, looked at her, smiled, crossed to a narrow table and picked up the paper, neatly folded. The noise romping across her unwakened room.

  ‘You haven’t opened the paper.’

  ‘I didn’t have time. Jan — ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. How was Aachen?’

  ‘We’ve got this British saint, Charteris, coming through Aalter tomorrow, big crusade and fun you ought to take in.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘I’ll have to be on duty early.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll — you know — ’

  ‘He’s a great man,’ spoken not looking up as he searched the muddled columns. Renewed piracy in the Adriatic. The Adriatic. New ocean, unknown to pre-psychedelic man. Many such hideous discoveries made every day. Of what degree of reality?’A saint, at least.’

  On page four he found it, a brief mention. New Crusade. Thousands rallying to support new prophet of multi-complex event. From Loughborough in the heart of England’s stormy industrial midlands may emerge new movement for washing at least ten times brighter smiled Mr Voon and eventually embrace all of war-torn Europe says our London correspondent. Prophet of multi-complex event, soap powder with new secret psychotominietic ingredient Jugoslav-born Colin Charteris is rallying take place in absolute darkness and Flemish observers agree that no thousands to his inspirational thinking. His first crusade motorcade through Europe is refrigerators at Ostend at four p.m. today and leaves tomorrow for what one commentator describes as several hundred incinerators automobiles pouring down here past Aalter at full speed, I’m bound to have more than one crash to deal with; better ring area squads now. Permanent alert from five tomorrow. Inform all hospital services too. Show eager. The tumbling bodies doing their impossible catagasms among ricochetting metals the dirty private things too beautifully ugly to be anything but a hoke. Oh in my loins oh Lord disperse do they have the orange tip butterfly in England these killing years?

  Both in their frail beds, a gulf of fifty-seven point oh nine centimetres between them. Darkness and the omnivision switched off but that connection nevertheless merely dormant: there would be another time when the currents would flow and the impulses reestablish that which ancestrally was where the glades of the forest stood like wallpaper all round in murmurous shade when the murderous mermaid pulls aside her jalousie and letting in the whispering brands of braided hair stretching to the closed clothed pillows. Koninkrijk he, suddenly rousing, felt the vibrations welling up through him. It was true, one was the diagram of the others and nobody could decide which. Either vast machines were passing a hundred yards away on the arterial toad, shaking the house minutely in its mortared darkness; or else accumulated fats and silts were building up in the arteries about his heart, stirring his whole anatomy with the premonitions of coronary thrombosis. If he woke Marta, he could presumably decide which was happening; yet even then there was the growing ambiguity about what a happening actually constituted. He could now recognise only areas in which the functionvectors of events radiated either inwards or outwards, so that the old habit of being precise was misleading where not downright irrelevant. And he added to himself, before falling again into trembling sleep, that the Loughborough gospel of multi-complex was already spreading, ahead of its prophet, like disease outrunning its symptoms.

  Angeline was crying in the arms of Charteris on the long damp beaches of Ostend, timescape all awash. The Escalation dirged by a dying fire: Her mother married a sunlit Ford Cortina. All the cars, most of them oparted, many stolen, clustered about the red Banshee along the promenade where Belgians loitered and sang, switched on by the rousing words of Charteris, goaded by music’s grind.

  Take pictures of yourselves, he had said, pictures every moment of the day. That’s what you should do, that’s what you do do. You drop them and they lie around and other people get into them and turn them into art. Every second take a picture and so you will see that the lives we lead consist of still moments and nothing but. There are many still moments, all different. Be awake but inwards sleeping. You have all these alternatives. Think that way and you will discover still more. Cast out serpents. I am here but equally I am elsewhere. I don’t need so much economy — it’s the pot-training of the child where the limitation starts. Forget it, live in all regions, part, split wide, be fuzzy, try all places at the same time indecisivise time itself; shower out your photographs to the benefit of all. Make yourself a million and so you achieve a great still trajectory, not longwise in life but sideways
, a unilateral immortality. Try it, friends, try it with me, join me, join me in the great merry multicade!

  All Angeline said after was, ‘But you aren’t indestructible any more than I really saw a dog in a red tie that time.’

  He hugged her, half-hugged her, one arm round her while with the free hand he forked in beans to his mouth, at once feeding but not quite feeding as he said, ‘There’s more than being just organical, like translaterated with the varied images all photopiled. You’ll soon begin to see how fuzzy-set-thinking abolishes the old sub-divisions which Ouspenski calls functional defects in the receiving apparatus let go on too personal a closure. Be anti-breasted in a prefrontal sense. As I told the people, self-observation, the taking of soul photographs, brings self-change, developing the real I.’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Colin, you aren’t fun to be with any more when you talk like that! How do you think I can hang on as I do, not without my own traits unappeased anyway. Did you or did you not kill my husband, besides, I don’t see how you can get away with this multiple thing; I mean, some things are either-or, aren’t they?’

  With Angelina hanging crossly on his arm, he got up from the voluptuous sand and, moving to the water’s edge surrounded by midnight followers, flung the bean tin into the galilean dark.

  ‘What things?’

  Well, either I’m going to have your child or I’m not, isn’t that right. I suppose a pretty straight answer.’

  ‘Are you going to have a child?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Then there’s a third possibility.’ The chill thing flew to her.

  Some of them had lights and ran clothed into the water to retrieve his tin, sacred floggable relic, unmindful of drowning, their beads floating about them. And the bean can moved over the face of the waters, out of reach, oiling up and down with orange teeth, beyond the Sabine music. Beyond that, the ambiguity of lunar decline and terrestrial rotation filtering into the dischance of blank night powder with new secret psychotomimetic ingredient.