‘D’ye hear that?’ he said to a jury of strap-hangers.
Their eyes put Jim in the dock.
‘Did you hear him threatenin’ me?’ The little man appointed someone with a paper as foreman. ‘Did ye?’
The other man almost ate his paper with embarrassment. But someone further along the bus took up the cry, smelling blood.
‘Ah heard him all right, Sam,’ he said loudly. ‘It’s the polis ye want for that kind.’
There was a round of ominous murmurs on Jim.
‘Ah’ll go quietly!’ Jim said dramatically.
His jest was not appreciated. Mutters of ‘Enough o’ that!’ and ‘Who does he think he is?’ and ‘No’ safe in yer ain house any mair!’ were spat at him like poisoned arrows.
‘Ya buncha mugs!’ Jim stood nobly defiant, Rome surrounded by Huns. ‘Morons. All you can count up to is “Bingo!” Dae ye want me to stand here an’ let this wee runt do a tango on ma taes?’
‘Right, Jim. Here’s our stop,’ Andy said hurriedly.
They were a stop too early. But Andy decided a diplomatic withdrawal was called for. They managed to get Jim hustled off before he realized it. A woman sitting on one of the side seats by the door snarled at him like a maenad. Sneers and angry voices pursued them.
Outside, Jim ran to the front of the bus. He stood to attention at the kerb as the bus pulled away and gave all the inmates the fingers with both hands, bowing when they mouthed out at him.
‘Come on, ya half-wit,’ Andy said. ‘You’re definitely buckin’ for a pair o’ handcuffs the night.’
‘Not at all,’ Jim said. ‘An’ what did ye get off there for anyway? That’s no’ our stop. Ah was enjoyin’ it fine.’
‘Aye, that’s right,’ Andy said, catching up with Charlie. ‘Ah heard ye laughin’. Ah just didny fancy goin’ up to yer father the night an’ handin’ in a paira shoes an’ a coupla fingernails. “Hello, Mr Ellis. Here’s Jim. Divide him out among the weans.” You want to watch yer mouth, man.’
‘Me? Me? Ah want to watch? What would ye make o’ that, Charlie?’
Charlie said nothing.
‘Me?’ As they cut through the side streets, Jim expostulated with the world. ‘It’s no’ me. It’s all a bloody plot. Ah’m tellin’ ye. Ah mean, don’t think this is anything new. Ah’m hardened to it. If Ah go into the pictures just, they’re waitin’ for me. Somebody there is goin’ to pick me out. Specially. Some sixteen-stoner is goin’ to decide to use ma head for a footstool. Or else the smoke from ma fag is definitely goin’ to go into someone’s eyes.’
The door of ‘The Hub’ came like a hyphen in Jim’s diatribe, introducing a smoky parenthesis of brightness and noise.
‘Look at them,’Jim continued, crossing to the bar. ‘They’ve got the word already. He’s here. Have your insults ready. Will you have first nark, Cedric? Or shall I? Have a little mercy, friends. Ah, lead me to the malmsey-butt. Ah’m goin’ to do ma Clarence. Drown ma persecution complex in its depths.’
‘Three pints, please,’ Andy said. ‘Heavy.’
‘Very heavy,’ Jim added.
Andy repeated the order a couple of times because the place was still quite busy. Elbows were working against the minute-hand. ‘The Hub’ was purely utilitarian, as cramped and functional as a W.C. It afforded little more than room to stand and manipulate your arm, plus a small adjoining cubicle in which to make way for more beer. The only concessions to la dolce vita were a draughtsboard without draughts and a set of veteran dominoes, showing the hollows of missing pips like empty eyes. The bar had been named from its position at the centre of the town. But time had made it a misnomer in any but the shallowest physical sense. ‘The Hub’ had been the centre of a town where ‘wheel’ connoted stage-coach and penny-farthing. Inside, the past was preserved, pickled in alcohol. The steel bar-rail glowed dully, scuffed with several fashions of footwear. In the dim prints on the walls horses contested a forgotten handicap and dogs chased an eternal fox across dun fields. Outside, the town had reorientated, making this place as peripheral as a barnacle. But both the bar and ‘auld Simpsy’, who stood behind it, were too old for change. Cornered in the present, ‘The Hub’ clung like an arthritic hand to the past.
‘Three pints of heavy over here.’ Andy was touching his forelock like someone at an auction.
Simpsy relayed the order to his assistant.
‘Aye, in a minute,’ the younger man called over. ‘Ye can see how we’re placed.’
Hands were reaching out all over the bar, a Briareus of orders. A young man bumped Charlie roughly as he pushed towards the bar. Charlie found himself pivoted on his own anger and his hand shot out to clamp on the young man’s arm, an automatic extension of his mood. Acting without thought, he forced the young man back, aware distantly of a faceful of amazement at the end of his arm, an expression that was undefined and smudged with beer, that receded steadily until it merged into a background of others, a press of lurid faces, each one wearing its preoccupation like a mask. Distended mouths. Blank eyes. Gargoyles pouring out words like water. Was this all people were meant to be? Begetters of aimless actions? Celebrators of nothing? He looked round the vivid faces. All worshipping their private totems. Frenzied dancers round a fire that fed on their own flesh. Faces and voices fading inconspicuously into the dark. Unnoticed. Others took their place. No questions asked. Just be yourself. Don’t impinge on anybody else. And don’t let them impinge on you. Be casual. The password to manhood. Don’t care about things. Pretend that nothing is happening. Let each one die in lonely innocence. Never seek to know who lives behind the ridiculous pot-belly, the operational scar, the balding hair. It was all an extended joke. This was the refined way to die. Decorate the void with pointless little actions and concerns. Like his father’s grave. A hole covered with flowers. How long can you go on shutting out the smell of death with the scent of flowers? The flowers withered too. How long could you conceal meaninglessness behind clusters of little actions that stemmed only from their own purpose? How long could conviction last that was rooted in error? How long could you feed on lies before you were mortally sick? Some time you had to say ‘Enough!’ There had to be a time when you threw them back in their faces, when you said no to the easy smiles and the calm assurance and the unquestioning acceptance and the laughing intoxicated faces and Andy being sad and Jim being elaborately funny.
Suddenly he blundered from the bar and into the toilet. Almost before the door swung shut behind him, he vomited. An old man wavered on the edge of his awareness, seeming as distant as a tree on the horizon. While Charlie spewed, the old man buttoned his trousers and looked on philosophically.
“To much bad beer, son. Ah doot ye’ve been gettin’ the bottom o’ the barrel,’ he said, and went back into the bar.
In the bar Andy was drinking thoughtfully. Jim was apostrophizing his pint.
‘Aye,’ he said intimately, using his pint-glass like a microphone. ‘Ah’ve got it. A sudden inspiration. The Ellis Plan. How to turn failure to your advantage.’
Andy stood impassively beside him. He felt the night dim depressingly to boredom, like someone putting off street-lights in his head. They were swigging from the whisky bottle Jim had salvaged from the party’s wreck, shoving it to and fro along the counter. At last complete drunkenness, following them all night like a patient footpad, waiting for the right moment, had relieved them of sobriety.
‘I have called this press conference,’Jim said into what was left of his pint, ‘to inform youse of my latest venture. Everything to date in my life has only been a sort of preface to . . . Where the hell is Charlie?’
They faced each other across the question as if it was a misted pane of glass. The talk of the others in the bar ran out around them like water from an abandoned hose. Andy peered at Jim, like someone trying to remember where he had seen him before. His hand waved vaguely.
‘Ah thought he went for a pee.’
‘But his pint’s no’ touched.’
Andy’s eyes detoured towards the counter to corroborate the statement. Understanding staggered after sight. The pint glass was full and losing its ruff of froth.
‘His pint’s no’ touched,’ Andy informed Jim.
‘He hasny touched it,’ Jim relayed to the upper air.
A few moments were consecrated to the interment of the news.
‘He must be in the toilet.’
‘Must be.’
They straggled towards the toilet. Andy pushed open the door. It was empty.
‘Somebody’s spewed their ring up,’ Jim observed.
‘Charlie!’ Andy shouted. ‘Heh, Charlie!’
Jim crossed over and began to pummel the door of the W.C.
‘Open up in the name of the law,’ he bellowed. ‘I have a warrant for your arrest. The crime is arson.’
Muffled oaths took place behind the door like underground explosions. The jacket hanging there was pushed aside and a face was pressed against the frosted glass, peppered with transparent boils. Jim’s face met it on the other side of the glass, peering in an attempt to identify it.
‘Father!’ Jim shouted, throwing up his arms. ‘I’ve found you at last.’
There was the sound of a bolt being drawn. The door was edged open. A leg appeared round it, the trousers precariously clutched above the knee. A face, red and angry, followed at a higher level.
‘Whit the hell dae ye think ye’re on, Jock?’
‘Now, now, sir. Address me through the chair. Ye’re out of ordure,’ Jim said and gave a stillborn cackle.
Then at once they were both shouting, ‘Charlie’. They came back out into the bar, still shouting. Others in the bar turned to look at them. After watching them in amazement for a moment, a few others took up the cry in heavy irony, until soon almost everyone in the bar was shouting in mocking unison.
‘Charlie! Charlie!’ they chanted, a ludicrous chorus of loud and beery voices, while the pint still stood untouched on the counter. ‘Where are you, Charlie? Charlie! Charlie! Where are you?’
Chapter 18
HE WAS NOWHERE WHERE ANYONE COULD REACH HIM It was as if an avalanche had happened in his mind and he was trapped inside himself. Beyond the impenetrable rubble were other people and their lives. But he could not pass through to them. He had to turn back alone and find his way.
His mind spun like a broken compass. The buildings rising sheer around him were no more than vague hieroglyphs to him, the dim configurations of his thinking. The traffic and passing people tore at his consciousness like burrs or thorns, and with everything that touched his senses he bled. He wandered aimlessly and his feet made a desert of every place he passed through. Despair was like the millennium in his mind, crowning time triumphant, so that everything came to him ground to anonymous dust that sifted aimlessly back and forth. The crowds moving in the streets were no more purposeful than blowing sand. Faces drifted past him like fallen leaves. Voices blew in gusts about his head, sounding hollow as sea-shells. He was surrounded by a trackless waste in which there was no landmark of himself. But above his barren consciousness protruded one thought like a stunted tree on an empty horizon. It lay on his mind as if it was the last thing that was left of himself, recalcitrant against oblivion, like a hollow skull beneath an empty sky. He wanted to look at his father’s grave. He wanted to go there and see the headstone that had been erected. Using that thought as a landmark, he started to move himself towards the graveyard as if it were his home. That one intention seemed all that was left of him and it pushed him on towards the grave as if he would find himself there.
His progress was blind and instinctive. He was not aware of how the light and noise modified as he approached the outskirts, how country infiltrated gradually into town, how trees became more frequent, streets grew quieter, and the parentheses of darkness between the street-lamps lengthened. His hands slipped twice on the low moss-grown wall before he scaled it and dropped, his fall gagged by the green turf of a grave. The shock of his landing jarred his still senses into action for a moment, as a shaken watch may tick into life for a few seconds. It was long enough for him to observe the lighted window of the attendant’s house some fifty yards away, fenced in from the rest of the cemetery. The door opened, cutting a swathe of light out of the dark, and a misshapen ball bounced out into it, coming to rest as a dog sniffing the ground. A man appeared in the doorway, smoking a meditative cigarette. The dog wagged into the darkness. Some minutes passed like a cortege. The man took a few proprietary paces back and forth, looking around. Night watchman to the dead. Satisfied, he flicked the stub of his cigarette into the darkness. Ten o’clock and all’s well. As he turned back into the house, he whistled once, throwing the sound casually over his shoulder and pulling the dog in on it like a leash. The door banged shut.
Charlie stepped quietly on to the gravel path, like an uncertain thief who did not know what he was here to take. The moon disclosed a confused network of graves, a garden of tangled stone. Charlie moved among it, away from the lighted house. It was difficult to locate his father’s grave. Around him stone reared, blossoming into strange shapes in the moonlight. In many places stood pitchers draped with cloth. Miniature angels petitioned heaven, faces set in marble beatitude. Huge ornate stones dwarfed smaller ones, but signified the same. Above the earth vanity made its last flourish and individuality sought its final perpetuation in desperate stone. Beneath the earth were the impartial worms.
Charlie passed the shed where the workmen’s tools were kept. Outside it, a tap dripped water into a trough, near which stood a couple of lemonade bottles for carrying fresh water to the vases on the graves. A waste-basket was stuffed with withered flowers that rustled and sighed sorrowfully in the wind.
Charlie continued to walk slowly round the graveyard, patient as a prayer-wheel, until his persistence was answered. He saw the place on the small hill where only grass grew and the ground was unbroken. He walked on a little way down the incline until he came to the first headstone. Crossing over the newly turfed ground, he bent down and struck a match. The headstone was small and simple, hewn carefully as it was from John’s small wages. In the momentary flare of the match, Charlie made out his father’s name and the two dates under it before the wind peremptorily drew the darkness over them again. So closely did the carvings on the stone coincide with Charlie’s mood that it was as if only his coming to this place had put them there, as if his journey had culminated in a profound revelation. For this was truly all they could give his father for epitaph. This was the ultimate meaning he had for them. Here was their final pronouncement on his father. And Charlie, like his father’s only prophet, felt that he alone could interpret the true meaning of these hieroglyphs. For him they were written in fire, illumined by his experience, their significance entrusted to him, as surely as the tablets had been to Moses on the mountain. He understood their meaning. For what had his father’s life been but a hyphen between two dates? It had no place or meaning in the life that went on outside these walls. They gave it no acknowledgement. For them it was a pointless parenthesis. That was the meaning of the hieroglyphs. But what was their commandment?
Charlie crouched huddled over the grave, a pilgrim at the end of a strange pilgrimage. His mind was unnaturally still. And his body, like a restless servant, occupied itself mechanically in taking out cigarettes and lighting one. The wind honed itself on his face, ruffling his hair, and he was as insensate to it as the marble around him, transfixed as if in some strange ritual. He crouched over the grave as if he could exorcize its contents and conjure the chiselled dead out of their stone.
His hand, abandoned by the mind, moved restlessly and nervously of its own accord, as if frightened by what was being devised for it. A finger tapped dementedly on his cigarette as if it were a morse key that spelt out S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S.
Chapter 19
THE MAIN STREET SHOWED SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE last stages of decomposition. There were only a few twitching remains of the vitality that had been. T
he night had had its brief chronology. There had been the twilight time when the main street was suddenly in spate with people from the tributary lanes that led from the football ground until these washed home, leaving some isolated in picture queues that sifted grain by grain into cinemas, measuring time like an hourglass. There had been the dull flat time when newspaper-sellers shouted, melancholy as muezzins, and the streets were peopled strangely by those who followed private purposes. There had been the time when the steeples struck curfew for the prim, and the pubs scaled their drunks, spilling them bawdy and singing on the streets to trickle fitfully home to fireside philosophy and beery reminiscence. There had been the brief still time before the dance-halls launched their separate invasions of the young, and couples entered parks and shadowed places.
Now it was carrion time. The two cinemas on the main street were shuttered and dated for next week. A few papers and tickets littered the pavement like skeletal pleasure. The only people left were a few groups of young men, like pariahs, casually distributed at street corners, talking fast and interrupting each other, grabbing their share of what was left of Saturday. In the awning of shadow from a shop doorway a policeman stood, quietly smoking an illicit cigarette. In the empty bus-station a small capped man in wellingtons was hosing it out, oblivious of everything except the jet of water he controlled, holding the nozzle close into his side so that he looked like some monster of virility.
These activities gently ruffled the subconscious of the town like an eyelid’s flicker in a sleeper’s face, and across them Charlie passed like a troubled moment in a dream. He had no consciousness of walking or of the physical presence of the town. His body inhabited a separate world that followed its own laws, so that his legs obeyed their nature and led him home, as a horse might return to its stable, dragging its dead master hooked in a stirrup. But within the body’s automatism he lived in another place, without geography, that could not take its identity from the town, that had no home. He was given over to a force that denied the demands of time and place, the ties of home, that took possession of him darkly and swallowed his personal identity. Alien, it did not correspond to anything around him, had no reflection there. It did not obey the cause and effect of ordinary feeling, was not provoked by anything around it. It did not partake of ordinary life, did not belong to the world where desire and fulfilment co-exist, where wishes presuppose the possibility of their accomplishment. It had no finite origin and no predestined end. Cause and result, beginning and end, were all alike nowhere, and it was here, having begot itself upon itself. It resided in him like a dark divinity of feeling, unrelated to the finite world, superseding his identity, supplanting his very self.
Remedy is None Page 18
