“When I first saw you,” Vera told Egon Rhys, “you had cut your cheek. Do you remember? A line of blood ran down, and at the end of it I could see one perfect drop ready to fall.”
“That excited you, did it?”
She stared at him.
He turned away in annoyance and studied the heath. They had been on it now for perhaps three, perhaps four days. He had welcomed the effort, and gone to sleep worn out; he had woken up optimistic and been disappointed. Nothing was moving. The dwarf did not seem to be able to give him a clear idea of what to look for. He had thought sometimes that he could see something out of the corner of his eye, but this was only a kind of rapid, persistent fibrillating movement, never so much an insect as its ghost or preliminary illusion. Though at first it had aggravated him, now that it was wearing off he wished it would come back.
“My knee was damaged practising to dance Fyokla in The Battenberg Cake. That was chain after chain of the hardest steps Lympany could devise; they left your calves like blocks of wood. It hurt to run down all those stairs to help you.”
“Help me!” jeered Rhys.
“I’m the locust that brought you here,” she said suddenly.
She stood back on the hard cinders. One two three, one two three, she mimicked the poverty-stricken skips and hops which pass for dance at the Allotrope Cabaret, the pain and lassitude of the dancer who performs them. Her feet made a faint dry scraping sound.
“I’m the locust you came to see. After all, it’s as much as she could do.”
Rhys looked alertly from Vera to the dwarf. Ribbons of frayed red silk fluttered from his sleeve in the wind.
“I meant a real insect,” he said. “You knew that before we started.”
“We haven’t been lucky,” Kiss-O-Suck agreed.
When Rhys took hold of his wrist he stood as still and compliant as a small animal and added, “Perhaps we came at the wrong time of year.”
Something had gone out of him: Rhys gazed down into his lined face as if he was trying to recognise what. Then he pushed the dwarf tenderly onto the cinders and knelt over him. He touched each polished cheek, then ran his fingertips in bemusement down the sides of the jaw. He seemed to be about to say something: instead he flicked the razor into his hand with a quick snaky motion so that light shot off the hollow curve of the blade. The dwarf watched it; he nodded. “I’ve never been in a desert in my life,” he admitted. “I made that up for Vera. It sounded more exotic.”
He considered this. “Yet how could I refuse her anything? She’s the greatest dancer in the world.”
“You were the greatest clown,” Rhys said.
He laid the flat of the razor delicately against the dwarf’s cheekbone, just under the eye, where there were faint veins in a net beneath the skin.
“I believed all that.”
Kiss-O-Suck’s eyes were china-blue. “Wait,” he said. “Look!”
Vera, who had given up trying to imitate locust or danseuse or indeed anything, was en pointe and running chains of steps out across the ash, complicating and recomplicating them in a daze of technique until she felt exactly like one of the ribbons flying from Rhys’s sleeve. It was a release for her, they were always saying at the Prospekt Theatre, to do the most difficult things, all kinds of allegro and batterie bewilderingly entangled, then suddenly the great turning jump forbidden to female dancers for more than a hundred years. As she danced she reduced the distinction between heath and sky. The horizon, never convinced of itself, melted. Vera was left crossing and recrossing a space steadily less definable. A smile came to Kiss-O-Suck’s lips; he pushed the razor away with one fat little hand and cried:
“She’s floating!”
“That won’t help you, you bastard,” Egon Rhys warned him.
He made the great sweeping cut which a week before had driven the razor through the bone and gristle at the base of Toni Ingarden’s throat.
It was a good cut. He liked it so much he let it pass over the dwarf’s head; stopped the weapon dead; and, tossing it from one hand to the other, laughed. The dwarf looked surprised. “Ha!” shouted Rhys. Suddenly he spun round on one bent leg as if he had heard another enemy behind him. He threw himself sideways, cutting out right and left faster than you could see. “And this is how I do it,” he panted, “when it comes down to the really funny business.” The second razor appeared magically in his other hand and between them they parcelled up the emptiness, slashing wildly about with a life of their own while Rhys wobbled and ducked across the surface of the desert with a curious, shuffling, buckle-kneed, bent-elbowed gait. “Now I’ll show you how I can kick!” he called.
But Kiss-O-Suck, who had watched this performance with an interested air, murmuring judicially at some difficult stroke, only smiled and moved away. He had the idea-it had never been done before-to link in sequence a medley of cartwheels, “flying Dementos,” and handsprings, which would bounce him so far into the smoky air of the arena, spinning over and over himself with his knees tucked into his stomach, that eventually he would be able to look down on the crowd, like a firework before it burst. “Tah!” he whispered, as he nerved himself up. “Codpoorlie, tah!”
Soon he and Rhys were floating too, leaping and twirling and wriggling higher and higher, attaining by their efforts a space which had no sense of limit or closure. But Vera Ghillera was always ahead of them, and seemed to generate their rhythm as she went.
Deserts spread to the northeast of the city, and in a wide swathe to its south.
They are of all kinds, from peneplains of disintegrating metallic dust- out of which rise at intervals lines of bony incandescent hills-to localised chemical sumps, deep, tarry, and corrosive, over whose surfaces glitter small flies with papery wings and perhaps a pair of legs too many. These regions are full of old cities which differ from Vriko only in the completeness of their deterioration. The traveller in them may be baked to death, or, discovered with his eyelids frozen together, leave behind only a journal which ends in the middle of a sentence.
The Metal-Salt Marshes, Fenlen Island, the Great Brown Waste: the borders of regions as exotic as this are drawn differently on the maps of competing authorities, but they are at least bounded in the conventional sense. Allman’s Heath, whose borders can be agreed by everyone, does not seem to be. Neither does it seem satisfactory now to say that while those deserts lie outside the city, Allman’s Heath lies within it.
The night was quiet.
Five to eleven, and except where the weir agitated its surface, the canal at Allman’s Reach was covered with the lightest and most fragile web of ice. A strong moon cast its blue and gamboge light across the boarded-up fronts of the houses by the towpath. They don’t look as if much life ever goes on in them, thought the watchman, an unimaginative man at the beginning of his night’s work, which was to walk from there up to the back of the Atteline Quarter (where he could get a cup of tea if he wanted one) and down again. He banged his hands together in the cold. As he stood there he saw three figures wade into the water on the other side of the canal.
They were only ten yards upstream, between him and the weir, and the moonlight fell on them clearly. They were wrapped up in cloaks and hoods, “like brown-paper parcels, or statues tied up in sacks,” he insisted later, and under these garments their bodies seemed to be jerking and writhing in a continual rhythmic motion, though for him it was too disconnected to be called a dance. The new ice parted for them like damp sugar floating on the water. They paid no attention to the watchman, but forded the canal, tallest first, shortest last, and disappeared down the cinder lane which goes via Orves and the observatory to the courtyard near the Plain Moon Cafe.
The watchman rubbed his hands and looked round for a minute or two, as if he expected something else to happen. “Eleven o’clock,” he called at last, and though he couldn’t commit himself to a description which seemed so subject to qualification as to be in bad faith, added: “And all’s all.”
A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY TO VI
RICONIUM
On the day of the enthronement of the new archbishop, the “badly decomposed” body of a man was found on the roof of York Minster by a TV technician. He had been missing for eight months from a local hospital. He had fallen, it was said, from the tower; but no one had any idea how he had come to be there. I heard this on the local radio station in the day; what excited me about it was that they never repeated the item, and no mention of it was made either on the national broadcasts later in the day, or in the coverage of the ceremony itself. Mr. Ambrayses was less impressed.
“A chance in a thousand it will be of any use to us,” he estimated. “One in a thousand.”
I went to York anyway, and he came with me for some reason of his own-he paid visits to a secondhand bookshop and a taxidermist’s. The streets were daubed with political slogans; even while the ceremony was going on, council employees were working hard along the route of the procession to paint them out. The man on the roof, I discovered, had been missing from an ordinary surgical unit, so I had had the journey for nothing, as Mr. Ambrayses predicted. What interested us at that time was any event connected with a mental or-especially-a geriatric home.
“We all want Viriconium,” Mr. Ambrayses was fond of saying. “But it is the old who want it most!” That night on the way home he added,
“No one here needs it. Do you see?”
The 11:52 Leeds stopping train was full of teenagers. The older boys looked confused and violent in their short haircuts, faces and jaws thrown forward purple and white with cold; the girls watched them slyly, shrieked with laughter, then looked down and picked at their fingerless gloves. They stuck their heads out of the windows and shouted, ‘Fuck off!’ into the rush of air. Later when we got off the train we saw them hopping backwards and forwards over a metal barrier in the sodium light; unfathomable and energetic as grasshoppers in the sun. Sensing my disappointment Mr. Ambrayses said gently, “On occasion we all want to go there so badly that we will invent a clue.”
“I’m not old,” I said.
Mr. Ambrayses had lived next door to me for two years. At first I was only aware of him when I was trying to watch the news. A body under a coloured blanket, slumped at the foot of a corrugated iron fence; the camera moving in on a small red smear like a nosebleed cleaned up with lavatory paper, then as if puzzledly on to helicopters, rubble, someone important being ushered into a building, a woman walking past the end of a street. Immediately Mr. Ambrayses’s low appreciative laughter would come “Hur hur hur” through the thin partition wall, so that I lost the thread. “Hur hur,” he would laugh, and I felt as if I was watching a television in a foreign country. He liked only the variety shows and situation comedies.
His laughter seemed to sensitise me to him, and I began to see him everywhere, like a new word I had learned: in his garden where the concrete paths, glazed with rain, reflected the sky; in Marie’s cafe, a middle-aged man in a dirty suede coat, with jam on his fingers-licking at them with short dabbing licks like a child or an animal; in Sainsbury’s food hall with an empty metal basket in the crook of his arm, staring up and down the tinned-meat aisle. He didn’t seem to have anything to do. I saw him on a day-trip bus to Matlock Bath, wearing one sheepskin mitten. His trousers, which were much too large for him, so that the arse of them hung down between his legs in a gloomy flap, were sewn up at the back with bright yellow thread as coarse as string. The bus was full of old women who nodded and smiled and read all the signs out to one another as if they were constructing or rehearsing between them the landscape as they went through it.
“Oh, look, there’s the ‘Jodrell Arms’!”
“… the ‘Jodrell Arms.’ ”
“And there’s the A623!”
“… A623.”
The first time we spoke, Mr. Ambrayses told me, “Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.”
The second time, I had been out buying some Vapona. The houses up here, warm and cheerful as they are in summer, become in the first week of September cold and damp. Ordinary vigorous houseflies, which have crawled all August over the unripe lupin pods beneath the window, pour in and cluster on any warm surface, but especially on the floor near the electric fire, and the dusty grid at the back of the fridge; they cling to the side of the kettle as it cools. That year you couldn’t leave food out for a moment. When I sat down to read in the morning, flies ran over my outstretched legs.
“I suppose you’ve got the same problem,” I said to Mr. Ambrayses. “I poison them,” I said, “but they don’t seen to take much notice.” I held up the Vapona, with its picture of a huge fly. “Might as well try again.”
Mr. Ambrayses nodded. “Two explanations are commonly offered for this,” he said:
“In the first we are asked to imagine certain sites in the world-a crack in the concrete in Chicago or New Delhi, a twist in the air in an empty suburb of Prague, a clotted-milk bottle on a Bradford tip-from which all flies issue in a constant stream, a smoke exhaled from some appalling fundamental level of things. This is what people are asking-though they do not usually know it-when they say exasperatedly, Where are all these flies coming from? Such locations are like the holes in the side of a new house where insulation has been pumped in: something left over from the constructional phase of the world.
“This is an adequate, even an appealing model of the process. But it is not modern; and I prefer the alternative, in which it is assumed that as Viriconium grinds past us, dragging its enormous bulk against the bulk of the world, the energy generated is expressed in the form of these insects, which are like the sparks shooting out from between two huge flywheels that have momentarily brushed each other.”
A famous novel begins:
I went to Viriconium in a century which could find itself only in its own symbols, at an age when one seeks to unify one’s experience through the symbolicevents of the past.
I saw myself go on board an airliner, which presently rose into the air. Above the Atlantic was another sea, made of white clouds; the sun burned on it. The only thing we recognised in all that immense white space was the vapour trail of another airliner on a parallel course. It disappeared abruptly. We were encouraged to eat a meal, watch first one film and then another. The captain apologised for the adverse winds, the turbulence, of what had seemed to us to be a completely tranquil journey, as if apologising for a difficult transition from childhood to adolescence.
In Viriconium the light was like the light you only see on record covers and in the colour supplements. Photographic precision of outline under an empty blue sky is one of the most haunting features of the Viriconium landscape. Ordinary objects-a book, a bowl of anemones, someone’s hand-seem to be lit in a way which makes them very distinct from their background. The identity of things under this light seems enhanced. Their visual distinctness becomes metonymic of the reality we perceive both in them and in ourselves.
I began living in one of the tall grey houses that line the heights above Mynned.
You can’t just fly there, of course.
Soon after my trip to York I got a job in a tourist cafe in the town. It was called the Gate House, and it was attached to a bookshop. The idea was that you could go in, look round the shelves, and leaf through a book while you drank your coffee. We had five or six tables with blue cloths on them, a limited menu of homemade pastries, and pictures by local artists on the walls. Crammed in on the wooden chairs on a wet afternoon, thirteen customers seemed to fill it to capacity; damp thickened in the corner by the coats. But it was often empty.
One day a man and a woman came in and sat down near one another but at separate tables. They stared at everything as if it was new to them.
The man wore a short zip-fronted gabardine jacket over his green knitted pullover and pink shirt; a brown trilby hat made his head seem small and his chin very pointed. His face had an old but unaged quality-the skin was smooth and brown, streaked, you saw suddenly, with dirt-which gave him the look
of a little boy who had grown haggard round the eyes after an illness. He might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. He looked too old for one and too young for the other: something had gone wrong with him. His eyes moved sorely from object to object in the room, as if he had never seen a calendar with a picture of Halifax town centre on it, or a chair or a plate before; as if he was continually surprised to find himself where he was.
I imagined he had come up for the day from one of the farms south of Buxton, where the wind sweeps across the North Staffordshire Plain and they sit in their old clothes all week in front of a broken television, listening to the gates banging.
He leaned over to the other table.
“Isn’t it Friday tomorrow?” he said softly.
“You what?” answered the woman. “Oh, aye, Friday defnitely. Oh, aye.” And when he added something in a voice too low for me to catch: “No, theer’s no fruit cake, no, they won’t have that here. No fruit cake, they won’t have that.”
She dabbed her finger at him. “Oh, no, not here.”
Tilting her head to one side and holding her spoon deftly at an angle so that she could see into the bottom of her coffee cup, she scooped the half-melted sugar out of it. While she was doing this she glanced round at the other customers with a kind of nervous satisfaction, like an Eskimo or an Aborigine in some old TV documentary-the shy, sharp glance which tells you they are getting away, in plain view, with something that is unacceptable in their own culture. It was done in no time, with quick little licks and laps. When she had finished she sat back. “I’ll wait till teatime for another,” she said. “I’ll wait.” She had cunningly kept on her yellow-and-black-check overcoat, her red woollen hat.
“Will you have a cup of coffee now?” she asked. And seeing that he was gazing in his sore vague way at the landscapes on the walls, “Theer watercolours those, on the wall, I’d have to look to be certain: watercolours those, nice.”
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