‘I would be so very grateful if you could.’
I thanked the doctor, who bade me farewell in a vague, distracted manner, suggesting that we would see each other again very soon. As Trebunculus retreated once more into his room of travelling colours, I followed Menavino to a house in the village that had been prepared for my return. Everything came so naturally here that I felt no need to ask what was expected of me.
The sun had disappeared behind the hills, and a soft ruby glow filled the sky. The villa was a low ochre building lit with oil lamps that suffused the dim air with hazy halos. There was fruit and warm bread on the table, and a thick down-filled mattress had been laid out on the floor. I felt weary with the passing of the sun. My limbs grew heavy as I moved into the warm shadows of the villa. Menavino touched my arm and smiled mysteriously, watching me, awaiting my approval. I returned his smile and the boy backed quietly from the room, closing the door behind him as I sank gratefully into the bed.
As I slept, I dreamed of the crystal constellation and its gently changing colours, and the worlds that brushed against each other without quite touching.
When I awoke, I found myself back in my narrow bed, tucked beneath the faded candlewick counterpane in my chilly bedroom in Cole Bay.
Chapter 15
A Stab at Existentialism
‘You keep your bedroom like a rubbish tip,’ said my mother, using her chin to hold the case while she slipped the pillow in. ‘It’s a wonder we haven’t got rats.’ She dropped the pillow on my bed. ‘It’s like a dirty old museum in here. Can’t you put up some posters, brighten it a bit?’ She had a long wait if she was expecting me to cover the walls with pictures of busty birds, footballers and E-type Jags. There was a Victorian etching from the Lang edition of The Arabian Nights entitled ‘Zobeida Prepares to Whip the Dog’ that I quite fancied pinning over my bed, but it wasn’t exactly hot stuff.
Pauline ventured to the fireplace and gave the mantelpiece a cursory dab with a damp cloth, then began thrusting at it in earnest. ‘Look at this dust. With your lungs. I don’t know.’ She worked on, leaving the air filled with unspoken grievances. I tried to ignore her but she moved to the wardrobe, and at that moment I realised it had been a bad idea to let her in, because she opened the door and began folding clothes—an occupation she was capable of stretching infinitely—and I knew that she was waiting for a reassurance, just as I knew that I had to tell her of my decision.
‘Mum, I have to talk to you—’
‘How do you get your things in such a state?’ she asked, holding up a shirt with orange stains on the shoulders. ‘And where’s the nice cardigan Janine bought you?’
‘Mum, I’m leaving school.’
‘Your clothes don’t seem to last five minutes. What do you mean, leaving?’
‘I’m not going to stay on to do A Levels.’
Pauline turned from the wardrobe, her features setting in stone. ‘Oh, yes you are, Kevin. Don’t think you’re not.’
Uh-oh, I thought, full name warning. ‘I’m sixteen,’ I warned. ‘I’m old enough to decide for myself.’
‘Then you can decide to get some common sense into your head. I’ve never heard of such an idea. Your first set of O Level results were poor because you’d been ill, that’s all. You missed most of the revision tests. Your teacher agrees. You’d be throwing away your chances.’
‘That’s not why I do badly in tests.’
‘I don’t see what other reason there could be.’ She shifted about the room, looking for a chore with which to busy herself. ‘You’re a bright boy, Kevin, brighter than your brother ever was.’
‘I don’t see the point of passing exams,’ I tried to explain. ‘I’m not going to work in an office I hate for years, until I finally retire with just an engraved carriage clock to show for my life, like Grandad.’
‘Your grandad fought in the Great War,’ she snapped defensively. ‘He couldn’t do much after that because of his nerves.’
‘I’ve made up my mind. There are other ways to live your life, you know. I’m going to be an existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sartre.’
Although Pauline was unfamiliar with the concept, she had a gamely stab at discerning its meaning. ‘Oh, yes? How could you without proper training? You have to work your way up to become anything. It all takes planning, even exist—whatsit. There are children in Africa with no books to study from. One of them could have taken your place if we’d known you weren’t going to bother.’
She left the room and the house fell ominously silent for a few minutes. Then Bob’s weary feet trod the stairs. I could hear him hovering undecided on the landing before he came in.
‘Your mother says you want to leave school and become an expressionist.’
‘Existentialist.’
‘Listen, you can work in the Express Dairy as far as I’m concerned, so long as you put a brave face on it, but your mother is expecting you to stay on and make something of yourself. She’s had enough of all this dreaming and moping about.’
I needed Bob to sign the papers, without which the school would refuse to release me. My only hope was to appeal to his sense of logic. ‘My best subjects are English and history, right? The only way I’d be able to improve my knowledge is through higher education at university, and all that can train me for is lecturing, or being some kind of historian.’
‘I thought you were interested in becoming a journalist.’
‘Not any more. I thought about it and decided I didn’t want to be stuck covering flower shows for the Cole Bay Mercury.’
‘I think you should stay on. It’s for your own good.’ Bob seated himself on the end of the bed. ‘You’ll see the sense in the long term. There’s good money to be made by those in the know. A lot of people are out there getting their noses in the trough.’
‘What if I don’t see the sense?’ I asked. ‘What if I don’t want a place at the trough?’
‘Well, I suppose the main thing is to make sure that you’re happy. You’re old enough to choose for yourself.’ The moment the words fell out of his mouth Bob realised he’d made a mistake. Sensing defeat, he considered retreating downstairs and sinking the best part of a Watney’s Party Seven, but decided to stay and argue it out. His heart wasn’t in it, though. This was a man who spent his days ordering portions of boil-in-the-bag coq au vin and arranging paper napkin deliveries for the Churchill Suite of the Scheherazade. The high point of his week was getting pissed with Roy ‘Boy-O-Boy’ Maloy and His Big Band Combo after the Friends of Rommel dinner and dance on a Saturday night, while his wife sat at home watching Armchair Theatre with her arms tightly folded across her cardigan and her lips and eyes bitterly narrowed to slits.
I wondered if Pauline knew that Bob was having an affair. It was, perhaps, a little too exotic to describe it as an affair. He had an occasional fumble about with a woman called Doreen who was one of the hotel’s senior housekeepers. I found out because two years earlier he had been seen at the Roxy with her. Bob never went to the pictures, and would certainly never have gone to see Funny Girl. Then, in the wastepaper basket of the bathroom, I started finding wrappers from those skinny little packets of pink soap you get in hotel rooms. He was coming in and washing upstairs before having his dinner, so that Pauline wouldn’t smell perfume. Once Bob had triggered my strange-behaviour sensors, I turned the searchlight of my attention fully on him, and there was no escape. I noted the discrepancies in his timetable, watched the hotel through binoculars and stalked him to tawdry backstreet trysts. Bob didn’t actually seem that keen, and I got the feeling that he only went along with it because Doreen made all the arrangements and kept him topped up with miniatures from her minibars. I knew there would be hell to pay for all of us if my mother ever found out, so it was in my best interests to make sure that she didn’t.
I wondered how my parents would reply if anyone asked them whether they were happy. Phrases like ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘can’t complain’ came naturally to their lips. Number 1
4 Balaclava Terrace was a happy home, according to 1970 levels of happiness. There was no domestic violence. There was no thieving, no starvation-level existence. Only small cruelties occurred, each day as inconsequential as the one before, and the sheer accretion of routine crusted our little house into a prison. How much easier Calabash would have been to explain if I had suffered neglect or abuse. As it turned out, the situation didn’t prove to be quite that simple.
I figured there were four things I needed to escape from Cole Bay: money, guts, health and imagination, and I had one and a half of them. Unfortunately, the one and a half I had weren’t the one and a half I most needed, and staying on at school could offer little assistance.
Even though my mind was made up, I decided to hold a democratic vote. Pauline was Against. I put Bob down as a Don’t Know. Sean couldn’t vote on my future because he’d left school at sixteen. Janine, another early school leaver, now enjoying a successful career in Bap Management, was another Don’t Know. Julia, largely because she was planning to take a degree in biology and felt that it was wrong to waste the opportunity to continue studying, was Against. Miss Ruth, obviously and violently Against. Dudley Salterton was For, on account of the fact that he had left school at twelve(!) and had never looked back. Danny was Against because he argued with pristine logic that a university course would get me somewhere other than here, be financed by the state, provide me with a sex life, independence, good times, wider horizons and possible long-term happiness. But Danny had failed to escape himself and was a fine one to talk. And not one person who thought I should continue at school and stay in the system could come up with an answer to my basic problem, which was: What if you didn’t believe in the system? All across Europe and America, students were questioning the world their elders had created, and were dropping out rather than become a part of something they could not believe in. They had no illusions. They could see that the old ways were no longer working, and so could I, although in Cole Bay this made me some kind of visionary. And what did it matter if reality was lousy when I had somewhere fantastic that I could visit whenever I liked?
I suppose I began to detail my life in Calabash because I had to prove to myself that in some sense it was real. That morning I went down to the stationer’s and bought half a dozen hardcover notebooks. Then I began at the first page of the first volume and started recording my visits. I placed my chronicle of this other reality in a shoebox and kept the box taped shut, hiding it beneath the wardrobe. I came up with a variety of methods to booby-trap the hiding place, pasting hairs across gaps and tying fine threads to floorboards. I had never bothered to hide my Mesopotamia maps, but now Mesopotamia felt as though it had been a dry run for Calabash, and what was this city if not all the ancient cities of the world rolled into one? Byzantium had become Constantinople, and Constantinople had become Istanbul. The epicentre of one of the greatest civilisations on earth, yet historians knew next to nothing about it. My visits to Calabash reminded me of the lurid fever-dreams I had experienced in times of illness, with one vital difference. In Calabash, unlike anywhere else I had ever been, everything made sense.
And I had already solved one mystery. The scarf and cardigan I had lost. I had been reunited with both items in that impossible land. And the shirt my mother had complained about; it had been stained orange by the dyed satin sash I had worn to the Sultan’s banquet. To me—perhaps only to me—the city of Calabash was real.
Chapter 16
No Life Before Now
It was on my third visit to the city that Trebunculus attempted to provide a new reason for me to pass more time in Calabash. The doctor had encouraged the Sultan’s theatrical troupe to stage a performance of The Pirates of Penzance in their guest’s honour. Rickety benches had been constructed on the packed white sand of the palace parade ground, with awnings of saffron muslin hung from the branches of the almond trees to keep the afternoon sun from the faces of the audience. The main entertainment was preceded by a number of baffling marionette shows. The familiar overture, now rescored to Eastern taste and played on rababa, tabla, kawal and sagat, bore only a tangential resemblance to the original, and for the first time its Cornish setting incorporated the braying of camels. It seemed ludicrous to witness these proud, extraordinary people squeezed into Victorian corsets and bustles, but I understood that they were doing it to please me.
Rosamunde, the Sultan’s daughter, had been cast as an absurdly sultry Mabel. The pirates looked like Bedouins. The cast had learned their parts by rote, and very little of the recitative, tackled as it was at great speed, with the endings of sentences clipped off, made any sense at all.
Throughout her bizarre ululating rendition of ‘Poor Wandering One’, Rosamunde rolled her eyes at me and all but sat in my lap. Halfway through her chorus in ‘When the Foeman Bares His Steel’, she found the tight high-necked blouse too constraining, tore it free and threw it on the floor, finishing the song with bare breasts. The ladies of the court fell about laughing. The palace guards nudged each other with knowing leers. Only the eunuchs remained unmoved. At the end of the performance, the Sultan noisily showed his appreciation. He summoned me to his side.
‘The English sing-song is popular in your land, yes? Tara-diddle, tarantara, yes?’
‘It used to be, Your Majesty,’ I replied, not wishing to offend him. ‘Music changes just as people change.’
The Sultan was affronted. ‘People do not change here. Change brings trouble. We try to change as little as possible.’
‘But how can you grow?’
‘Plants grow. Kingdoms must endure. Every empire runs its course. You are English, surely this you understand.’
‘Certainly. We are no longer an empire, but we endure. There was a time…’
‘Time, bah! Time is an enemy that enslaves the weak. We have no use for clocks here. We do not wish to harbour the seeds of our own destruction.’
‘But time itself can’t destroy you,’ I explained, ‘only the mismanagement of it.’ I could sense Trebunculus tensing up as I disagreed with the Sultan.
‘You are young and foreign, so I forgive your impertinence. I dismiss it.’ He waved a hand across his turban. ‘I overlook it, yes? Here there is only the rising of the sun and its sister, the moon.’
‘You must understand,’ explained Trebunculus, ‘that while the concept of time per se exists in Calabash, its calibration can only lead to the demands for increased economic efficiency. If the passing of time can be measured in detail, the weaknesses of the nation’s workforce can be discerned so that—’
Now Rosamunde arrived by her father’s side to act as an ambassador. She was still draped in the torn white costume that had so constricted her lustrous breasts. ‘Father once gave the doctor a unique timepiece, a great clock specially constructed by the palace jewellers from an old drawing. It was a gift for saving my newborn life. But he did not allow the jewellers to make hands or an interior mechanism for the clock, for fear of spreading the infection of time throughout the kingdom. He believes that time is a thief that can only work best in the hands of our enemies.’
‘But I thought you had no enemies.’
‘Exactly,’ said the Sultan. ‘Here sensuality rules over science. How else can you have a notion of your life?’ He rose with a grunt and moved off to the cool interior of the palace, trailed by the Queen Mother, the Lord Chancellor, the Royal Concubine, the Semanticor and a number of irritating dwarves who were part of an acrobatic troupe that performed tumbling during scene changes. Rosamunde lingered at the rear of the entourage, watching me and smiling, until summoned from my sight by her father.
‘Ah, I thought as much,’ said Trebunculus as the rest of the audience filed away. I noticed that he had been observing me closely during the performance. He saw how I had reacted to the leading lady’s romantic overtures. ‘Of course you are enchanted by her, as who would not be?’ he sighed, but shook his head and said, ‘The Princess Rosamunde is not for you. She cannot marry an ajnabee. Her futu
re husband must be of royal extraction, and has already been selected.’
‘But the way she looks at me…’
‘She is probably just trying to annoy her father.’
‘Why would she want to do that?’
‘Because he has plans of his own for her, involving the son of the Lord Chancellor. You must put the Princess from your mind. It is simply that she enjoys seeing the confused effect of her flirtations. How do you think Menavino lost his tongue?’ Trebunculus spoke as if the answer was obvious. ‘Besides, I know of a girl who will please you just as much. It’s time for you to meet someone more…appropriate. Menavino will take you to the house of Parizade. I thought you should have a companion of your own age, someone in whom you can confide. Although Menavino is young and clever, alas, his dumbness is a hindrance to true companionship. Of course, he is also a boy, and while mutuality of gender is not always a hindrance to intimacy, I think perhaps Parizade will be more to your personal liking.’
Menavino led the way across the little village of pavilions and villas. Even here, curving marble embankments formed canals which led to pools and artfully constructed cascades, designed for no other purpose than to bring pleasure to those who passed. When the boy stopped before a small square house of coral stone, his face broke into a broad grin. Gesturing that I should follow, he made his way to a tiled courtyard at the side, and entered through a curved arch. A fountain pattered in the late afternoon sunlight. A black and white cat slept in an unshaded part of the garden, while a pair of cranes made careful progress along the edge of the roof. Menavino crossed to a low door and lightly rapped his knuckles on the wood. Then he made a sharp little bow and was gone.
The door slowly opened, and before me stood a girl of sixteen with thick, dark hair knotted loosely away from her face. It could not be said that Parizade was beautiful—her nose was a little too long, her figure a little too full, her face still a little too undefined—but she exuded a soft sensuality that took my breath away. She was an opening bloom, and everything of her suggested freshness and beginnings, a world of endless possibilities. ‘I am Parizade,’ she said, smiling, ‘and this is to be your house.’ And with a shy gesture of welcome, she invited me inside.
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