by Ann
Though he believed this, his cynicism wasn’t as simple as it seemed. The art student, with his baggy trousers and his magenta dyed hair, coming in for the latest Carlos Castaneda or John Cowper Powys; the shopgirl who asked in a distracted whine, ‘Got anything about Elvis Presley? Any books? Badges?’; the accounts executive in the three-piece suit who snapped back his cuff to consult his digital watch before folding the new issue of Young Girls in Full Color or Omni into his plastic attaché case: I soon saw that Lucas’s contempt for them stemmed from his fellow-feeling.
In unguarded moments he showed me some of his own collection: florid volumes illustrated in the Twenties and Thirties by Harry Clarke; Beardsley prints and Burne Jones reproductions. He had newspapers from the fifties and sixties, announcing the deaths of politicians and pop stars; he had original recordings by Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. If he knew exactly what the teenagers wanted to buy, it was because he was privy to their dreams; it was because he had haunted the back streets of London and Manchester and Liverpool only a few years before, searching for a biography of Mervyn Peake, a forgotten novel, a bootleg record. And if he hated them it was because he had lost their simplicity, their ability to be comforted, the ease with which they consummated their desires.
He was trapped between the fantasy on the shelves, which no longer satisfied him, and the meaningless sheaves of invoices floating in pools of cold coffee on the desk upstairs. Therein lay his susceptibility to Egnaro. Where my own lay I am not half so sure.
‘We all love a mysterious country,’ said Lucas.
We were sitting in his office, looking through his collection, warming our hands over the one-bar fire which drew a sour, failed smell from the piles of ancient magazines and overflowing waste bins. The accounts for February were finished. His takings were down, he claimed, his overheads up. All that month a wind from Siberia had been depressing the city center, scouring Deansgate from the cathedral eastward, and forcing its way into the shops. Downstairs the tape-player was broken. Students drifted listlessly past in ones or twos, or clustered round the window with their collars turned up, arguing over the value of the stuff inside.
‘For instance,’ Lucas explained, leaning over my shoulder to turn a page: ‘This tribe has lived for centuries under a volcano on an island somewhere off the south west coast of Africa. The exact latitude is unknown. Their elders worship the volcano as a god; they’re said to have inhuman powers.’ He turned several pages at once, his pudgy fingers nimble. ‘It’s the draftsmanship I love. There! You can see every head under the water, even the straws they’re breathing through. Look at that stipple! You won’t find drawing like that in the rubbish downstairs.’
He sighed.
‘I used to spend hours with this stuff as a kid. See the spider monkeys, trapped in the burning village? They act as the eyes of the witch doctor: he never sees anything for the rest of his life but flames!’
He had been preoccupied all day, sometimes depressed and edgy, at others full of the odd nostalgic eagerness which with him stood in for gaiety. He couldn’t settle to anything. Now he was showing me an illustrated omnibus of some American writer popular in the Nineteen Twenties, Edgar Rice Burroughs or Abraham Merritt, which had cost him, he said, over a hundred pounds. It had been privately printed a decade ago and was very hard to come by. I could make little of it, and was surprised to find he kept it with his treasured editions of Under the Hill and Salome. The pictures seemed badly drawn and drab, unwittingly comic in their portrayal of albino gorillas and wide-eyed, frightened women; the tales themselves fragmentary, motiveless and unreal.
‘I’ve never seen much of it,’ I admitted.
Personally, I told him, I had adored Kipling at that age. (Even now, if I close my eyes, I can still picture ‘the cat who walked alone,’ his tail stuck up in the air like a brush and that poor little mouse speared on the end of his sword.) When he didn’t respond I closed the book with exaggerated care.
‘It’s very nice,’ I said, ‘but not my sort of thing. Are you hungry yet?’
But he was staring down into the cold black street.
‘It’s almost as if he’d been there, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘Watching the way the ash drifts down endlessly over the pumice terraces.’
He was talking to himself, but he couldn’t do it alone. He was trying to woo me, even though we had so little in common he didn’t know what to say. His obsession had him by the throat, and the Rice Burroughs volume had only been an introduction, a way of preparing me. Later I would begin to recognize these moods, and learn how to respond to them. Now I merely watched while he shook his head absently, abandoned the window, and, breathing heavily through his mouth, made a pretence of fumbling through the heaps of stuff under the desk. The book he came up with fell open, from long usage, at a page about halfway through. I see now that this is what he had wanted to show me all along. He looked at it for a minute, his lips moving slightly as he scanned the text, then nodded to himself and thrust it into my hands.
‘I always wondered what this meant,’ he said, with a peculiar deprecatory shrug. ‘You might be interested in it: what he really meant by it.’
It was an American paperback, one of those with the edges of the pages dyed a dull red and the paper that smells faintly of excrement. There were newer editions of it in the shop downstairs; in fact it was quite popular. Its author claimed to link certain astronomical events with the activities of secret societies and Gnostic sects, although what he hoped to prove by this was unclear. It was called The Castles of the Kings, or something similar. The bookstalls have been full of this sort of thing for the last ten years; but Lucas’s copy had been bought in the mid-fifties when it was not so common, and its pages were tobacco brown with age. While I was reading it he fussed round the office, shuffling through the invoices, trying to tidy the desk, warming his hands at the fire: but I could feel him watching me intently.
‘We know what we see,’ the passage began, ‘or think we do…’ And it went on:
…but is it possible that the real pattern of life is not in the least apparent, but rather lurks beneath the surface of things, half hidden and only apparent in certain rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye? A secret country, a place behind the places we know, which seems to have but little connection to the obvious schemes of the universe?
In certain lights and at certain seasons the inhabitants of any city can see enormous faces hanging in the air, or words of fire. Also, one house in an otherwise dark street will be seen to be lit up at night for a week, even though no one lives there. From it will come sounds of revelry, although no one is observed to enter or leave it. Suddenly all is quiet and dark again, as if nothing had happened! But ordinary people will remember.
Scientists give us many explanations to choose from. Are we really to believe that reality is built from tiny motes whirling invisibly about one another?
There was more of this; an account of an eclipse witnessed in China during the fourteenth century; and then the following curious paragraph:
In India newly married couples wade in the estuarine mud catching fish in a new garment. ‘What do you see?’ their friends call from the bank. ‘Sons and cattle!’ is the answer. Are we to doubt that India exists? In the Dark Ages they had never heard of America! When the Jew of Tunis exhibited a fish’s tail on a cushion, did anyone doubt that it was a fish?
‘I don’t quite see what he’s getting at,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ said Lucas. He thought for a moment. He had expected my reaction, I could see, but was disappointed all the same. ‘You saw the hole in his argument though?’ He took the book gently from my hands and returned it to its heap. ‘You saw through that?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, as positively as I could: ‘I saw that.’
But he seemed dissatisfied. He stared at me for some time as if I had tried to mislead him over something obvious – the time of a train, say, or the name of a film actress. I put my coat on under his watery blue-e
yed gaze and we went out of the office in silence. It occurred to me suddenly that he saw no flaw at all in that ‘argument,’ such as it was; and I wondered briefly how many casual acquaintances like myself had been invited up to the office to puzzle over The Castles of the Kings; and how many more he had lent it to, in the hope that they would see what he saw in its skeins of unoriginal rhetoric and curious misinterpretations of the world.
Downstairs he looked round the shop with dislike; pocketed the take – perhaps eighty pounds – after a short discussion with the bored lad behind the cash desk; and locked up. As we stood on the doorstep, fastening our coats against the scatter of snow coming down on the black Manchester air, he turned to me and dismissed it all with,
‘Good for a laugh, though, that passage? Good for a laugh, anyway!’ And I had the feeling he’d said that many times, too. ‘By the way,’ he went on, in the same dismissive tone: ‘Have you heard of this place they call “Egnaro”?’
‘That’s the Javanese place on Cross Street, isn’t it?’ I said. I thought perhaps he was bored with Chinese food. ‘Would you like to try it tonight instead of the Lucky Lotus? We could easily go there.’
He looked at me as if this was the last answer in the world he had been expecting; then gave a queasy, almost placatory laugh.
‘Easily go there!’ he said, and took my arm.
Egnaro: it was a word, I found, that came easily to the tongue.
‘Do you ever think,’ said Lucas later, prodding his chicken curry, ‘that the only part of your life that really mattered is over?’ And, without giving me a chance to answer: ‘I do.’
We were sitting in the Lucky Lotus, listening to the wet raincoats dripping in the alcove behind us.
‘No, don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. Once your childhood’s over up here, they put you in the toothpaste factory. You get a council house in Blakely. You get piles, and watch Coronation Street for the rest of your life.’
He ate in the Lotus two or three times a week, mostly on his own, because it saved him the trouble of cooking for himself when he got home. The little Malay waitresses, I think, realized he was lonely, and surrounded him as soon as he sat down, joking about the weather in their gluey inexplicable accents. They had made of him a fixture, a fetish; and the Lotus, with its hideous maroon flock wallpaper, dirty tablecloths and congealed rice, seemed like a natural extension of the office on Peter Street. He ate his food with a sort of lugubrious greed, planting his elbows firmly on the table before he began, eyeing his plate suspiciously, and surrounding it with his forearms as if he thought someone might take it away before he had finished.
‘That hasn’t happened to you,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve got the shop. You’ve chosen a different kind of life.’
He stared for a long time at a piece of meat on the end of his fork. ‘You never escape,’ he said finally. Then: ‘Look, I don’t want to put you off, but could you just smell this?’ He waved the fork under my nose. ‘It tastes a bit funny.’
He had been in a curiously self-pitying state since showing me The Castles of the Kings. I suspect that he regretted revealing even this small corner of his private life. We make ourselves vulnerable with confidences. But whether this was so or not, now he had broached the subject he was unable to leave it alone. I had an uneasy impression that he was approaching some sort of crisis. He had drunk a lot of lager with the barbecued spare ribs, but I could see that it had given him little relief from whatever was worrying him. After I had reassured him about the chicken, which seemed perfectly all right to me, he said:
‘I used to think: “What if the maps were all wrong and the world was full of undiscovered countries!” Undiscovered countries! What a joke.’
His jaws moved slowly from side to side; then he shook his head, swallowed, and pushed his plate away.
‘It was too late even then. The world was full of housing estates.’ He stared into the distance. ‘The twenties and thirties – that was the time to be young. You could still have believed they’d made a mistake then.’
While I was thinking about this a waitress came up and asked, ‘Dya wa’ so’ costa’ na’?’
‘What?’ I said.
She giggled.
‘Wan’ costa’? Rass pa’?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lucas. ‘Custard and rice pud.’ He nodded vigorously at her. ‘I’ve been having that all week,’ he explained to me. ‘They soon get used to your habits here. Sometimes I can’t understand a word they say. I think that’s why I come.’
She brought him his sweet.
‘As a kid (and you’ll laugh at this, I warn you),’ he said, ‘I used to believe that I’d been born on some unknown continent and brought here by slavers. When I shut my eyes at night I could hear voices like hers, above the sound of the breakers on some rotting beach. It was the most frightening country in the world. The river deltas were full of radioactive silt. The natives mined a kind of green gold. They were beautiful – almost white, very intelligent, very tall and kind. It was somewhere in the Antarctic.’
He put down his spoon and stared around. He gulped suddenly. ‘Christ,’ he whispered. ‘I’d still rather be there than here!’ And he looked quickly down into the sticky mess on his plate.
I didn’t quite know what to say.
‘I’m sure we all feel like that sometimes,’ I tried. ‘But isn’t it escapism? Perhaps the housing estates are the real undiscovered countries–’
He gave me a look of contempt.
‘Very clever. You’ve never lived on one of the fuckers.’
He was silent for a long time after that. The place had been full of clerks and secretaries having their dinner before they went to the cinema round the corner on Deansgate, the women in their winter boots, the men in their three-piece suits. Now it emptied itself steadily, marooning me with him. The manager, who spoke no English though his arithmetic was perfect, came out from behind the bar; and, with the girls clustered twittering around him, began some sort of game at a vacant table. Lucas stirred his pudding round in its thick white dish until it was cold, taking small sips of the sticky, coffee-flavored liqueur he had ordered earlier. I bit my lip and concentrated on the wall, embarrassed. Suddenly he looked up again. Tears were running down his cheeks.
‘Are you sure you’ve heard nothing about Egnaro?’ he said. ‘The thing is,’ he continued, before I could say anything, ‘that I’ve just about convinced myself a place like that exists.’ He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I’m sorry. It’s that I get the feeling everyone else knows, you see: and they aren’t telling me.’ He laughed. ‘Stupid, isn’t it? I suppose we all get stupid ideas.’ He got up and pulled a roll of dirty five pound notes from his pocket. ‘Will twenty quid do you this month? I’m a bit short at the moment. You know how it is. I’ll get the bill.’
I made him sit down and drink a cup of coffee. I made him tell me about Egnaro, and now I wish more than anything else in the world that I hadn’t.
The dead miners of Egnaro lie looking up at the sun, the blackness of their flesh tarring the long bones. A gull spread-eagles itself on the air above them; a hot wind blows along the shore, peeling off a few flakes of gold leaf that still cling to their darkened skin. Egnaro! – it is a dangerous place, which steals over you like a dream. It is the name of your most basic questions about the universe, it is the funnel-tip from which your life fans back. All myths are perversions of its history; it is the secret behind the apparent history of the world. It is at once inside and outside you, and it signals all men at some time in their lives, like a flare of electricity along their nerves. It is as simple as a conversation half-heard on top of a bus –
‘A woman sitting near me spoke to her neighbor. It was my stop. The bus gave a lurch and I had to get off. Standing there on the pavement in the rain I realized she had said: “Egnaro, where they have so many more senses to choose from!” I knew immediately I had misheard her: I laughed and walked off. But I recalled it later, and it has come to ha
unt me.’
This was how Lucas began his explanation, under the dripping raincoats in the Lucky Lotus that evening at the end of February. I had to prompt him to begin with. (Had he, for instance, heard the other woman’s reply? It turned out he hadn’t.) But as his confidence grew, though he was often confused and incoherent, he seemed to exchange his self-pity for a kind of puzzled wonder: his eyes took on a watery glint of enthusiasm, his speech a crude lyrical quality. He spoke for a long time. Couples came in, ate under the dim lights, and went out again. The waitresses eyed us benignly and giggled. After all he was a fixture there. Would he like some more costa’?
‘Egnaro, where they have so many more senses to choose from!’
From the moment he heard that meaningless half-sentence, a kind of dam seems to have burst in his brain. ‘It was like rubbing condensation off a window pane and looking out at a landscape you don’t understand.’ He was inundated by hints and clues, often of the slenderest nature. In an issue of the Sunday Times Business News he had picked up from the floor of a train he read: ‘Exploration budget cutbacks could still stall our industrial recovery.’ He knew exactly what he was supposed to gather from that, but he couldn’t say how. In two critical lines of Louis MacNeice’s Streets of Laredo he discovered this misprint: ‘Egnaro the golden is fallen, is fallen/Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake.’ It was someone else’s copy of the book. And once, sheltering from a thunderstorm in the doorway of Tesco’s, he had this bizarre experience –
The lightning flickered like a broken fluorescent lamp. Between flashes the sky was dim and greasy. The porch began to fill up with cripples also sheltering from the rain. ‘Every poor handicapped bastard in Blakely seemed to have ended up in that porch.’ They had been gathered in, Lucas felt, not by the wind and the rain, but by omens and premonitions experienced that morning in front of the gas stove. They came prodded by ‘instincts that last meant something when we were all frogs.’ There were old ladies with blasted arthritic fingers and great varicose carbuncles; a tall man staring at the shiny stump of his left arm and singing hymns; a girl with a deformed lip and leg-irons. There was a very small woman with a hump on her back. ‘You felt,’ Lucas said, ‘that if you asked them why they’d come here the answer would be: “My dog spoke to me of Egnaro, the queer old thing, and I came”; or, “I heard we would all be cured there”. I felt that very strongly.’ But they only looked at him; and, when the rain had stopped, left him there with his shoes full of water. ‘None of them actually spoke.’
