The Weird

by Ann

  Thus Egnaro simultaneously hid from and revealed itself to him; in obliquities. ‘It was impossible to verify anything,’ he complained. ‘The taxi was always driving away from me; by the time I looked up it had gone. I always found I’d used the newspaper to light the fire. People took back books I hadn’t finished reading.’

  He searched through all the atlases and encyclopedias he could find, but discovered nothing (although once, in Baedeker’s Northern Italy, he came upon a typographical error which looked like ‘Ignar’ or ‘Ignari;’ it was on a map of Livorno, near the new port). Nothing was made public, but by now he could hear the conspiracy all around him. It made an expectant sound, he said, like people filing into a cathedral or an empty concert hall. It had affected the economy of the country, he believed; it had soured and complicated international relations. Fleets were outfitting on both sides of the Atlantic, in the Channel, the Baltic, and all along the Mediterranean seaboard, in a race to exploit the new country. Whoever got there first would reap enormous wealth from its mineral resources, the new sciences of its mysterious inhabitants, its incredible new animals; besides an immense strategic advantage. As soon as its exact whereabouts were known they would put to sea. Although this secret was jealously guarded, preparations so massive were necessarily known to many; ordinary people had been quick to pick up the rumor.

  ‘They discuss it as a place to go for their holidays!’ said Lucas, in tired disgust. ‘Will it be cheaper than Majorca? Its beaches less crowded than the Costa Blanca?’

  (‘Costa’? Costa’?’)

  Suddenly we were back at the beginning. His face had collapsed into self-pity again and he had buried his head in his hands. ‘Don’t you see?’ he appealed. ‘If I don’t find something out soon they’ll get there before me!’ His shoulders shook. ‘That’s the real horror of it, don’t you see? If there really is such a place then by the time I get there it’ll be just the same as it is here!’

  And he stared miserably at the maroon flock walls of the Lucky Lotus, the tears streaming down his cheeks again.

  What could I do? I was appalled by his condition. And yet what he had said did not really touch me. I had always rather admired his cynical resilience; I couldn’t begin to imagine as yet the state he had got himself into. I remember thinking, ‘How can anyone have become so desperately lost?’ But that may have been much later; and besides we never quite know what we mean by thoughts like that. Somehow I got him to cheer up and pay the bill. It was nine or ten o’clock at night by now. The waitresses fussed round him but he didn’t seem to notice them. He forgot his briefcase and they came running out after us with it. He thanked them absently. All it ever had in it was an old copy of Rustler and some broken pencils. When we emerged onto the deathly quiet streets behind Deansgate he said he’d walk up to the cab rank in St Peter’s Square. I went with him that far but I couldn’t wait.

  ‘You’ll be all right?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got a bit of headache now. I’ll have a couple of Veganin at home. They’ll get me off to sleep.’ He got hold of my arm. ‘It’s just a silly idea, all this, you know. I’ll get over it.’

  There he stood, looking battered and out of place in the February wind, his loneliness outlined by the great doorway of the Midland Hotel behind him. There didn’t seem to be many taxis about.

  The city center was slow to recover from that winter. March was bitter; late snow in April flattened the daffodils and filled the gutters with brown slush; Easter came early but did nothing to help trade. People were reluctant to come out in the sharp unseasonable winds: they had no money when they did. Turnover fell in all the luxury shops and most of the supermarkets. Deansgate took on a deserted, shabby appearance. You could find a few office workers hurrying out at lunchtime, but they were avoiding the pedestrian arcades of King Street where the spring fashions made colorful but somehow remote displays behind the plate glass windows. The sandwich bars were empty. How much of Lucas’s failure was part of this wider picture, how much his own fault, is hard to say.

  Towards the end of March, government waste committees threatened to cut the student grant for the third time in twelve months. (A few puzzled protesters marched down Peter Street with placards and a petition, only to drift off aimlessly when they reached the Square.) Shortly afterwards Lucas fell out with his main paperback suppliers, who were justifiably sick of him not paying his bills. Then, as the students trickled back and trade picked up, a series of leading articles devoted to ‘these brokers of porn and purveyors of filth’ appeared in the Evening News; and for a while the shelves at the back of the shop were raided almost every afternoon. This made Lucas’s staff nervous and edgy: they ran out of false names to give the police and, tiring of Lucas’s promises to have the tape player mended, left him one by one.

  Throughout this period he was preoccupied and indecisive. He fobbed his creditors off with increasingly dull excuses; absent-mindedly signed his own name on agreements he could not hope to keep; and, whenever he could find someone to look after the shop for him, sat upstairs trying to control his headaches with handfuls of Veganin. ‘You’d better start coming twice a month,’ he told me, sensing that someone had to keep track of his called-in loans, convoluted trade-offs and trails of broken promises. ‘Why don’t we work out a system for you?’ I suggested, but he couldn’t follow it, and he never wrote anything down now anyway. The take went straight into his trouser pockets at the end of each day and he paid off his bills in cash installments, twenty or thirty pounds at a time. When I complained that the VAT people weren’t happy with his figures he asked pettishly, ‘What sort of figures do they want? Surely that’s your job!’

  ‘I won’t just make things up,’ I warned him, and he shrugged. It was an argument we had been through before. ‘Everyone’s corrupt,’ he said. ‘In the end.’ I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a prediction. A worse row blew up between us in mid-April, when I found among his ‘accounts’ a bit of paper on which he’d written, Egnaro! My heart yearns for some sight of your cloud-capped cliffs! It was hard to read the rest, which had something to do with an oil rig disaster and a ‘secret’ television play.

  ‘I thought you’d got over this,’ I said, as lightly as I could. ‘I’m not sure what George will make of it.’ George Labrom was the Customs and Excise inspector. We were expecting him that afternoon. I knew him slightly: he was a decent, even indulgent man, but he disliked Lucas, and his patience was diminishing. ‘Still, if you want me to I’ll try and fit it in somewhere…’ But Lucas wouldn’t let me make a joke of it. He bit his lip, sighed heavily, and went over to the window where it would be easier to ignore me.

  ‘Come on Lucas,’ I said angrily. ‘Don’t make me do all the work.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You never “get over it”,’ he whispered. ‘I thought you understood that. It never lets you go.’ Then he laughed sourly. ‘What use is all this anyway? I’d rather have Egnaro than bloody George Labrom. If you don’t want to help me–’

  ‘I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,’ I pointed out. ‘Fuck off then if that’s your attitude.’

  And we faced one another across the desk, the litter of unpaid bills and falsified invoices stretching between us like a paper continent neither of us remembered how to cross. After that I got used to his silences as I had got used to the smell of his waste bin. Every fortnight when I pushed open the office door I would find him staring out of the window at the pedestrians below. ‘Christ, how I hate those bastards!’ he would say, apropos of nothing; or, pushing out his lower lip petulantly, complain about the headaches that stopped him from sleeping. ‘I had a sickener last night. A real sickener.’ I caught him pasting press cuttings into a series of scrap books he had kept since he was fourteen – recording with a kind of morose glee the bankruptcies and deaths of the fifties pop stars who had been his adolescent heroes.

  In his absence (for it was an absence, as I now know from experience,
even if he sat there all day) someone broke the shop window and stole most of the more valuable comics; he had allowed the insurance to lapse, and it was never properly reglazed. Inside he put up notices saying, We do not want people reading these magazines if they have no intentions of buying! – but by now his stock was so old that even the businessmen had abandoned the back shelves. (They were the last to go: years afterwards, you felt, they would still be wandering hopefully along Peter Street in their lunch hour, like animals searching for a lost waterhole.) Once or twice I sat behind the desk myself, putting books in bags under the dusty, flickering strip lights. It was a novelty at first but the cold cavernous silence, the filthy blue carpets, and the innuendos of the debt-collectors soon frightened me off. One Tuesday morning in May I had the bailiffs in, two heavily built men in sheepskin car-coats, who knew Lucas of old.

  They leafed through old issues of Cockade while they waited for him to turn up with his last quarter’s rent. It was, they said, a month overdue. When he arrived he was smiling, puffed, red in the face, the jacket of his safari suit flapping open as if he had been running all over the city since eight o’clock in the morning. ‘Oh, hello, gents,’ he said. ‘If you’d given me a bit more time…Still, I’ve got just under half of it here, and I’m off for the rest now.’ In fact he only had a third, and when he came back again he had nothing at all, so they took his keys, locked the shop up, and over the next few days sold off the remaining stock by auction. It went for an average of ten pence a book, I believe, and certainly didn’t fetch enough for the rent.

  Included among all the bales of Count, Peaches and Chariots of the Gods was Lucas’s collection from the upper room: every one of his Beardsleys, Harry Clarkes, first editions of Ishmael Reed.

  He wanted to try and buy some of the stuff back, so I went with him to the auction. It was a dismal affair conducted in a large empty Edwardian room. A lot of his competitors were there, nodding to him nervously as they bought up his assets, hoping he wouldn’t commit suicide in the lavatories and wondering who would ‘go bump’ next. He hardly bought anything. Lysistrata had gone at the beginning, stuffed in among a bunch of old science fiction magazines. He seemed stunned that no one there could tell the difference. ‘They can’t even bloody pronounce it,’ he kept saying. ‘The bastards!’ He drank a lot at lunchtime and began to complain of a headache. He seemed reluctant to be on his own and in the afternoon insisted we go to the cinema, where we watched uncomprehendingly some sort of comedy. The flickering of the screen made his migraine worse, and when we came out he was blinking and shaking his head.

  ‘What will you do now?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said irritably. ‘Go home and watch Crossroads, I suppose. What else is there?’

  It was the rush hour. As we pushed our way through the pedestrians the traffic was beginning to congeal at the junction of Peter Street and Deansgate, where no one ever obeys the traffic lights. Lucas turned down toward the shop. He had spotted quite a large crowd of students and children gathered in front of the cracked window. They seemed to be waiting for the door to open. The younger ones kept trying it, rattling the handle then pressing their noses to the plate glass; they peered into the gloomy depths of the place, where they could just make out looming empty shelves and torn posters. The students, meanwhile, leaned against the wall with their hands in their pockets; and it was one of them who got up the courage to approach us, unzipping a plastic holdall.

  ‘Want to buy some records?’ he asked in a slow voice. He offered the open bag for inspection. This seemed to incense Lucas, who blinked and rubbed his forehead wildly.

  ‘It’s closed down, you stupid bugger!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you see?’

  The rest of them turned slowly, like cattle interrupted drinking, and stared at him.

  ‘Closed! Finished! Understand? You won’t be getting any more of that here!’

  He laughed. He swayed.

  ‘What’s the matter Lucas?’ I said. ‘Come away!’

  He pushed at me.

  ‘Leave me alone, I’m all right,’ he said. In a quieter voice he advised the crowd, ‘Piss off and find someone else.’ They watched him stagger off down Peter Street towards the Midland Hotel, their eyes uncommunicative and inturned. Some of the younger ones laughed or catcalled uncertainly. He was obviously in difficulties. He kept stopping, holding his head, looking round as if he wondered where he was. I went after him. Suddenly he wobbled over to the edge of the pavement, got down on his knees, and began to vomit almost carefully into the gutter. People from the bus queues on the steps of the Free Trade Hall moved hesitantly toward him. He looked lonely and embarrassed, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, blinking and grinning up into the light that was causing him so much pain. ‘What can I do, Lucas?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Just piss off.’

  Twenty or thirty people now surrounded us. At the front stood the women from the bus stop, clutching their shopping bags and umbrellas, a ring of grayish anxious faces. Behind them men from the car showrooms and drawing offices struggled quietly for a better view. What was the matter? It was a car accident: it was two men fighting. A woman had fainted. It was a dog. Lucas squirmed about, moaning with pain, squinting up at them as they discussed him, screwing up the flesh round his eyes against the migrainous, coronal light that flared round their heads. Then, quite suddenly, the headache seemed to leave him. He shoved me away and jumped lightly to his feet. He looked more relaxed and healthy than I had ever seen him.

  ‘What do you know of Egnaro?’ he demanded in a loud and scornful voice.

  Surprised and puzzled, the crowd drew back from him. This seemed to amuse him. He laughed, and spat in the gutter.

  ‘What will you ever know?’ he pressed them.

  Some of them shook their heads. He winked horribly at the women, grinned at the men. They backed off further, but he had their attention.

  ‘You,’ he went on, ‘with your supermarket tunes and your Wimpey houses! You with your insurance policies!’

  He darted forward, ransacked briefly some woman’s shopping while she stared helplessly on, and held up a packet of ‘Daz.’ ‘You,’ he accused triumphantly, ‘with your Blue Whitener!’

  He sneered at them; he imitated their favorite TV personalities; his effect on them was astonishing.

  ‘If you want to know about the Golden Land,’ he challenged them, ‘you must go there!’ The schoolchildren worked their way forward through the crush and gazed up at him. He regarded them indulgently. ‘You must suffer as I have,’ he told them, ‘in its swamps! You must itch with its fevers and yellow rashes, tremble on its lee shores, wade through its fetid deltas until your feet rot on your legs!’

  The children cheered.

  Lucas shook his finger in admonition. He put his hands on his hips. ‘I know you!’ he cried. ‘You whisper that word among yourselves when you think I can’t hear! But dare you speak it aloud? Dare you?’

  I hadn’t any idea what to do for him. In the end I abandoned him there with his puzzled but enchanted audience: a fat latter-day Errol Flynn or Mario Lanza, recruiting for some trumpery, desperate expedition against the Incas among the crumbling jungles of Hollywood’s ‘new’ world. His eyes were flashing, his curly hair was plastered to his forehead, he had gone insane. As I walked off I thought, ‘He’s spent his life exploiting their fantasies to subsidize his own. This is his punishment.’ I was quite wrong.

  ‘That place is not for you!’ I heard him cry, and they groaned. ‘That place is for dreamers!’

  One word hung in the air above him, heavy with promise yet bubbling and buoyant, a marvelous word sparkling with mystery and force: he had only to open his mouth and it would speak itself. A policeman was approaching the crowd from the direction of St. Peter’s Square.

  That was four months ago. I did not see Lucas again until yesterday, although for a while I made regular visits to Peter Street, hoping he might be drawn back to the scene of his failure. What
I expected of him I don’t know: that he should recover from his breakdown, I suppose, and begin again – he had, after all, paid me in cash. I imagined him in the dirty streets behind Woolworths or the Ardwick Centre, trying to raise finance among the market stalls and pet shops where he had begun his career, two patches of black sweat growing steadily under the arms of his safari suit as his peculiar splay-footed walk carried him from disappointment to disappointment. But the place remained deserted (it was to re-open much later as an extension of Halfords’ already profitable bicycle department); Lucas seemed to vanish into his own fiction; and all I could do was stare at my reflection in the cracked plate glass.

  At about this time I began to have my own intimations of Egnaro.

  There was nothing original about my seduction; it was dismally similar to Lucas’s own, except that it began with a dream.

  I was standing in a high narrow room with white walls. It was very hot; but in through the room’s single window came the sound of waves, and those scents which water draws from a dry shore. There was a thread of music, one phrase repeated over and over again on some stringed instrument. I went to the window but the view was blocked by a tree. All I could see through its long dark branches was a blur of sunlight. Where a ray of light penetrated the curious leafage, it filled the room with a dusty glow the color of geranium petals; from this I guessed it would soon be dark. Standing in that room, soothed by its proportions, I knew I was in some country so foreign I could not imagine it. Hearing those few notes endlessly repeated, I felt assuaged and expectant, as if by a glimpse of happiness to come. I heard someone begin to say,