by Paul Sussman
But then, suddenly, one day, it stopped being fun. And poor old Walter paid for it with his life.
The beginning of the end came with the hot-air balloon. Walter spotted it first, as we emerged from a supermarket in Hammersmith where we’d been concealing some dead dormice amongst the frozen peas. It was 1976, springtime. Blossom was bursting on the trees and birds were cheeping amongst the blossom.
‘Look at that,’ cried my companion, pointing upwards into the pale morning sky. ‘Just take a look at that, will you!’
‘That’ was an enormous hot-air balloon, which at that very moment was passing almost directly overhead, about 500 feet up. It was bright red, shaped like a light bulb, and beneath it was suspended a small, barely discernible basket from which sporadic tongues of flame leapt upwards towards the monstrous receptacle above. So far as I could ascertain it was drifting roughly north-east.
Walter was transfixed by the thing. He stopped dead in his tracks in the middle of a crowded pavement and stared upwards at it with a rapt expression on his face, oblivious to the obstacle he was presenting to passing pedestrians, who were forced to eddy to either side of him like water about a large, weed-covered rock. Occasionally his nose would twitch, and he would mutter something unintelligible, but for five whole minutes his eyes never left the enormous red balloon.
‘Yes, by God, it’s our duty!’ he declared at last, his jaw fixed in a rictus of determination. ‘We mustn’t let it get away! We shan’t let it get away!’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, swigging from a bottle of Greek whisky, one of three we’d liberated earlier that morning.
‘The balloon!’ announced my friend. ‘We mustn’t let it escape. We must catch it!’
‘Catch the balloon?’
‘Yes, yes! Run it to ground. Bring it to bay. Corner the beast.’
‘Why, Walter? Why must we capture the balloon?’
‘Because,’ cried my friend dramatically, pointing up at the large red smudge above us, ‘it’s bad!’
‘Bad?’
‘Yes. Can’t you see? It represents everything we’ve been struggling against. It’s a symbol.’
‘It’s a balloon, Walter,’ I sighed, taking another slug of whisky. ‘Just a balloon.’
‘Yes, true, a balloon on one level,’ he huffed, pulling out his tea-towel and dabbing at his forehead. ‘But a balloon whose significance far transcends its simple . . . balloonishness. Don’t you see? It’s their eye. Their eye in the sky. We must catch it, or they’ll never stop looking at us. Come on! It’s our duty!’
He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me down the street.
‘I don’t want to follow it, Walter. You go. I’ll wait here.’
‘I can’t do this alone,’ he hissed. ‘I need you. It’s too big.’
‘I’m tired. My feet ache. For God’s sake, Walter, it’s just a fucking balloon.’
‘Please,’ implored my companion. ‘It’s what we’ve been working towards all these years. Everything up to now has just been a preparation. This is the big one. The climax. Trust me. We have to do this.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘I need you!’
Tears were by this point welling in his eyes, and his hands were shaking. I had never seen him so worked up.
‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘It’s getting away. I beg you.’
He seized my hand.
‘Please!’
‘All right, all right. If it means so much to you, I’ll come,’ I said, relenting. ‘Although I think you’re making a lot of fuss about nothing.’
Walter embraced me, jamming my face into his foetid armpit.
‘Freedom is many things,’ he announced, ‘but nothing isn’t one of them. Now come on, or we’ll lose sight of it. Follow that balloon!’
Which is what we did for the rest of that day, hobbling after it at a painful loping trot, stopping occasionally for a guzzle of Greek whisky, panting and sweating and coughing and choking, road after road, mile after mile, until eventually I passed into a sort of exhausted daze, moving forwards without really knowing what I was doing. And all the while Walter’s frantic exhortation:
‘Follow that balloon!’
We eventually caught up with it late in the evening, by which point we were both so drained we couldn’t have gone any further even if we’d wanted to.
‘Can’t carry on,’ I coughed. ‘Got to rest!’
Even as I spoke, however, and as the light thickened and faded and a huge full moon bobbed up in the west, we emerged from a small coppice to discover the balloon descending gracefully 400 yards away into a field behind a high wire fence. We were somewhere on the outer edge of North London, although where, I had, and still have, no idea.
‘Gotcha!’ wheezed Walter triumphantly. ‘The trap is sprung!’
We leaned against the fence and watched as our quarry came down in the field before us. Its two occupants threw ropes out to three men on the ground who scuttled around tethering the basket to a circle of thick iron stakes, into the centre of which the deflating balloon slowly sank. Once down it looked like a large, beached jellyfish, its sack slumped in a hopeless heap, its thin, sinuous tentacles radiating limply all around.
‘I’m thirsty,’ I moaned.
It was by this time all but dark, and somewhere away to our right a row of streetlights had come on. The five balloon keepers, now no more than a group of shadowy silhouettes, checked their charge, tugged separately on each rope to ensure it was secure, and then wandered off to the far side of the field, where they passed through a gate, locking the latter behind them and disappearing into the night. The moon was now well up, bathing the world in a pale and ghostly luminescence. It was very quiet.
‘The hour of reckoning approaches,’ intoned Walter. ‘Destiny calls.’
‘I’m shagged,’ I muttered.
We remained where we were for perhaps half an hour, getting our breath back, swigging Greek whisky, and then, at Walter’s urging, clambered unsteadily over the chain-link fence and scuttled forwards towards the deflated balloon. It was further away than it had looked, and by the time we finally reached it we were both red in the face and panting heavily. We crumpled to our knees and crawled under the silky, billowing canopy. My head was spinning, and I felt rather sick. I wasn’t having fun.
‘What now?’ I coughed.
There was a loud, snorting sound as Walter blew his nose on the side of the balloon.
‘Some graffiti, I think,’ he said. ‘Have you got the can?’
We always carried a can of spray-paint with us, and I withdrew it from my pocket.
‘Excellent,’ he sniggered, sending a billow of rancid whisky breath into my face. ‘Come on. We need to stretch the balloon out so it’s flat. Revolution!’
Wobbling to our feet, and with Walter whispering instructions, we each grabbed a handful of material and pulled in opposite directions as though stretching a sheet, repeating the process at intervals around the edge of the balloon until what had been a shapeless heap of crumpled nylon was transformed into a wide, flat, elliptical expanse of cloth, rippling slightly in the breeze.
‘The can!’ whispered Walter. ‘Give me the can!’
I handed him the spray-paint, with which, bending double, he wrote ‘UP YOUR ARSE’ in huge letters on the side of the balloon. He stood back to admire his handiwork in the moonlight, and then, crouching down, added ‘WFL STRIKES AGAIN’ and ‘DEATH TO MILKM—’, the last word remaining unfinished because the paint ran out.
‘That’ll show ’em,’ he chortled to himself. ‘Bastards!’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ve done what we’ve come to do. Let’s get out of here. Those men might come back.’
I took a few paces back towards the fence but then stopped, realizing Walter wasn’t moving.
‘What are you doing?’ I hissed. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
Walter, however, stayed where he was, staring at the balloon. He muttered something to himself and then, rea
ching into his pocket, pulled out a box of matches. More muttering.
‘What are you saying?’ I growled. ‘I want to go.’
‘It’s not enough,’ mumbled Walter. ‘We need a bigger gesture.’
‘What?’
‘Just a bit of graffiti. It’s not enough. This is a chance to make a giant statement.’
‘What?’
‘We must set it off.’
‘What are you talking about Walter?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his voice rising in excitement. ‘We must set it off. Fire her up and let her go. Reclaim the balloon for the people. What a gesture. We’ll be household names, like Malcolm Muggeridge!’
He hurried across to the basket and, tipping it over on to its side, began fiddling with the gas tanks.
‘I’ll get the burner lit,’ he said. ‘You untie the ropes.’
‘What are you saying, Walter!’
‘Don’t you see? That’s why we were drawn here. We’ve got to inflate the balloon and send it up into the sky. It’s all so clear.’
‘You have to be joking!’
‘No, no. It’s our mission. Go and untie the ropes.’
‘No way.’
‘You have to. It’s our duty.’
‘I won’t, Walter. This is too much!’
I turned and started to walk away, but he charged after me and, seizing me by the shoulder, spun me round. His eyes were burning, and there was a bubble of froth between his lips.
‘Untie the damned ropes,’ he snarled. ‘Just go and untie them. This is important.’
It was the first time he had ever raised his voice to me, and I was unnerved by it.
‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it. Keep calm.’
I stumbled off around the circle of iron stakes, removing the tethering ropes one by one whilst Walter got the burner lit. It hissed angrily, spitting a tongue of blue flame horizontally towards the base of the canopy.
‘Christ,’ I coughed, untying the last rope and hurrying across to the basket, ‘Someone’ll see us.’
‘No time to worry about that now,’ retorted Walter. ‘Help me lift the balloon.’
Shaking my head, and fighting back an urge to vomit, I grabbed the lower end of the balloon and heaved it up into the air so that its opening yawned like a large red mouth. Walter, meanwhile, cranked the burners up to their highest setting before joining me at the base of the canopy, where we both stood silently, swathed in material, our arms above our heads, the monstrous balloon undulating beside us like some gargantuan, oversized colon.
‘Go on, my darling,’ urged Walter. ‘Fill up! Fill up!’
For a long while it looked as if nothing was happening. Then, however, slowly, the canopy began to grow and swell, shuffling this way and that across the grass. It rose a few feet, fell, rose and fell again and then, with a great effort, its sides bulging, began to ascend directly upwards into the sky, gathering speed with every foot, dragging the basket up behind it. We backed away, ropes trailing all around us like creepers in a tropical forest.
‘We’ve done it!’ cried Walter, raising his arms in triumph, ‘Our quest has been fulfilled. The balloon is . . . aaaaaargh!’
This final startled exclamation was a result of my having stepped forward, seized one of the dangling basket ropes and wrapped it several times around my companion’s scrawny neck, tying it off with a swift knot and leaping aside as he shot up into the air, eyes bulging, legs kicking frantically. I did this because I was drunk, and because I was tired, and because I was angry at Walter for raising his voice at me. Above all, however, I did it because, standing there in the middle of that field, stinking, smelly, cold and worn out, it suddenly occurred to me that I was no longer happy being a tramp. The whole thing had stopped being fun and turned into a bit of a chore. I wanted out of The World Freedom League, and murdering its only other member seemed the most obvious way of making the point. It was an instinctive action, with little by way of malice aforethought. It just felt like the most appropriate thing to do.
As these thoughts spun dizzily around my head, the balloon, its canopy now fully swelled out, rose rapidly into the sky above me. I could just see Walter tugging at the knotted rope with his hands, swaying madly to and fro, legs flailing. One of his shoes fell off and hit me on the shoulder, whilst, as if to add to the indignity of his passing, his filthy trousers wiggled their way down around his ankles, revealing a pair of luminously pale white buttocks. I heard a strangled scream of ‘Spy!’, and then he was gone, floating into the face of the huge white moon, up and up and up, away across the rooftops of North London.
‘Goodbye, Walter!’ I called after him. ‘It’s been fun.’
I made my way slowly back into central London, polishing off the remaining bottle of liberated Greek whisky and collapsing, sometime around dawn, into an empty doorway halfway along the Strand.
Which is where Emily found me: sozzled, smelly, semi-conscious and swamped beneath five years’ growth of hair and beard. Whether it was luck she happened to be passing at that moment, or whether there were deeper forces at work, I have no idea. I looked up and there she was, right in front of me, as young and radiant and beautiful as ever.
‘Come on, Raphael,’ she said gently. ‘You can’t live like this. You’d better come with me. I’ll sort you out.’
And so she bundled me into the back of a black cab and we drove through the spring morning to Nannybrook House, windows wound down because I stank abominably. And at Nannybrook they seemed to be expecting us, because I was met at the front door by a puffing, red-faced doctor, and taken upstairs and bathed and shaved and examined and swaddled in new clothes, etc., etc., etc. And from that moment on I began as a whole new person.
One final incident to sign off those incident-packed years with Walter.
On the afternoon of the day I arrived at Nannybrook, as I sat in the dayroom, still acclimatizing to the warmth and cleanliness and comfort of the place, there was a great commotion out on Putney Hill. Fire engines whizzed past, and ambulances, and police cars, and overhead I heard several helicopters whirring. Residents crowded around the windows, thinking perhaps there’d been a car crash. Soon, however, word got out that a hot-air balloon with a naked man tethered underneath had come down slap-bang in the middle of Tibbet’s Corner, and, much to the horror of the warden, everyone poured outside to investigate.
Only one person remained behind, and that was me. Not, I should stress, because I felt in any way ashamed about Walter’s death. Far from it. Although it had only happened a few hours previously, the whole affair already seemed so distant I could barely connect with it at all. It was part of another world. Another life. I had moved on.
No, I stayed because it gave me the opportunity of moving some counters around in the game of backgammon I’d been playing with Bernie Mtembe. When he returned twenty minutes later it was to discover that a potentially winning position had somehow transformed itself into one that was quite beyond salvage. It was the first in a nine-year run of losses that was to make of Bernie’s financial situation something rather less secure, and of mine something rather more, than either of us had ever expected.
‘You got me, man!’ he wailed. ‘I gotta stop this backgammon. You wiped me out!’
CHAPTER FIVE
SOMETHING RATHER DISTURBING happened earlier. Someone knocked on the door of the castle. There’s a big brass knocker, greened with age, and someone banged it. Seven or eight times. Boom, boom, boom, the sound echoing through my home like a series of low, thumping groans. It gave me quite a shock, I can tell you.
No one ever comes up to see me in the castle, except Dr Bannen, but he only ever comes on Friday, and that’s not till tomorrow. I know no one else in the neighbourhood – I know no one else anywhere, for that matter – so I can’t think who it would be. The whole thing’s put me on edge. I want to be left in peace to get on with my death. But now someone’s come knocking on the door. I feel like my silence has been raped.
I should,
I suppose, have gone to see who it was. Told them to go away and leave me alone. I was so surprised by the sound, however, so troubled, so offended, that I simply couldn’t move. I just stayed exactly where I was at the top of my ladder, pen poised midway through my life with Walter, whilst boom, boom, boom echoed all around me. It stopped eventually, but even when silence had been restored the effects of the knocking remained, like ripples in the surface of a pond, and it was almost half an hour before I could get back to work.
I’m feeling better about the whole incident now. I’m sure it was just a one-off – someone who’d got lost, perhaps, or a wandering Jehovah’s Witness. Nothing to worry about. I do hope it doesn’t happen again, though. It somehow sullies my enjoyment of my note. Muddies the aura. And things are going so well too.
It’s now about 2 p.m, and, aside from the odd wine break and a couple of brief naps, I’ve been at it for well over 48 hours. I’m still not remotely tired. On the contrary: the longer I stay awake the more awake I feel. My back’s a bit stiff, my throat a little sore and my eyes somewhat glazed, but apart from that I feel absolutely fine. More than fine. Wonderful. Reliving my past appears to have imbued my present with a wholly unexpected vigour. I swear that my limbs are loosening, and that my handwriting has speeded up.
I’ve now written myself into, and about halfway around, the long gallery that occupies the entire eastern side of the castle’s ground floor. As you can see, it’s an attractive room, high and spacious, with two huge windows peering eastwards across the ocean. Light floods inwards across the parqueted floor, and for a while this morning it was so bright I was able to blow out my candle and work by the light of nature. I’ve now relit it, however, because the sun’s dropped west and everything’s become rather shadowy. I can’t stop sneezing for the dust.
It was on the threshold of the eastern gallery, at about 6 p.m. last night, just as I prepared to leave the front foyer, that I had something of a brainwave.
