The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Shortly after that he crossed the Atlantic for one of his rare visits to Europe to fulfil an engagement at a Promenade Concert where he was booked to play Rachmaninov Two. His appearances in England were now infrequent enough for it to be a real pleasure to return. In the earlier part of his transatlantic exile he had commuted a good deal between Boston and Basle, for the young wife he had taken with him to America had failed to adjust to life there and by the time she came to deliver their child Antoinette had gone home to her parents. It often struck Zebedee how odd it was to have a Swiss son; but then, that whole episode of marrying and parenting now seemed part of a previous period in his life, even to belong to a person who no longer quite existed, someone who had once been deeply unhappy in north London.

  In fact he found the pleasure of being back in London undercut more than expected by the memories it evoked. How pungently it returned, that atmosphere of despondency and dreaming; of endless hours at the keyboard in rented rooms, of lonely walks to all-night fast-food bars, of concerts and recitals from which he had gone home rancorous with envy. A particular stench of memory still clung around that brief episode with Anthony Raffish, he admitted. How did those few meetings of a long time ago still retain the power to make him feel awkward, even guilty? He had of course been very young then…. Had he betrayed himself in some way? He could no longer quite remember. Anyway, it hardly mattered now as he sat in his dressing room, clearing his mind in a professional manner of all but the music itself.

  For almost an hour he sat in stiff collar and shirtsleeves quietly reading the score and sipping black coffee until the bell went. The walk onstage afforded him considerable pleasure: it was only the second time he had played in the Albert Hall, and it was still something of a novelty to view the scene of his former yearning pilgrimages from the performer’s side of the platform. With a sense now of pleasurably relaxed homecoming he softly began the first of the eight chords which opened the concerto.

  Rachmaninov’s Second is a busy work for the soloist. In the first movement, at any rate, there are few of those moments common in concertos of a century earlier when he can sit back from time to time and let the orchestra introduce or develop its own material. Thus it was that Zebedee was too occupied to notice that all was not well with him until a good way into the first movement. The pain suddenly became acute enough to force itself on his attention and in so doing reminded him that it had been there in his stomach practically since the moment he had come onstage. He noticed the conductor watching him with concern; the keyboard became slippery. More and more his mind was diverted into holding himself together until the movement’s end while his fingers mechanically, professionally, played the notes. At last they were into the accelerando of the coda whose increasing pace and excitement made it easier for him to disguise and appease the pain by swaying his body, shifting position.

  Zebedee came to his feet almost as he played the final chord. On his hurried way across the platform to the exit he was conscious of little but gesturing vaguely to the conductor as he left, half-seeing on the other side the white fields of upturned faces like a hillside of moonflowers. Outside a St John’s Ambulance Brigade volunteer sat dozing on a canvas chair. Zebedee passed him at a run.

  Inside the lavatory and in something like blessed relief he let himself lean panting against one wall with his eyes shut while the external world came filtering back. There was a soft knock on the door and a man’s voice – the ambulanceman? – asked discreetly if he were all right.

  ‘I’m OK,’ Zebedee told the back of the door weakly. ‘I can’t go on again but I’m OK. Something I ate. You’d better tell someone.’

  He listened to the man’s footsteps recede. From his stomach and spreading to the rest of his body the pain of disappointment suffused him. The triumphant return was spoilt. He had played less than a quarter of the time spent beforehand reading the score in anticipation and so sudden and confusing had been the sickness it was difficult to believe that for him, at least, tonight’s concert was already over. Then almost immediately there came the distant sound of the concerto’s slightly delayed second movement starting. As he sat letting the anguish drain slowly out of him he wondered whom they had found as an understudy at such short notice. The movement was half over before Zebedee could slip out, a handkerchief pressed to his face.

  On the way to his dressing room he could not resist peeping in through the curtained entry on to the platform. There at the piano in the glare of the light sat a blond young man of melting good looks, albeit of a rather dated and foppish kind. He was in jeans and a sweater and was contriving to wring the music of its last romantic drops. These spattered his rapt audience as refreshing spring rain, but for Zebedee behind his curtain they flowed together into a certain once-familiar runnel of unease.

  At the sudden touch on his arm and the whisper he turned abruptly. But it was only the ambulanceman asking if he were all right.

  ‘Where did that boy come from?’

  ‘Lord knows, sir. Just popped up out of nowhere. Stepped into the breach in the nick of time, though, didn’t he?’

  And as Zebedee lay showered and weak on the settee in his dressing room the distant surf which was the sound of someone else’s wild applause oozed through the walls.

  At Even Ere the Sun Was Set

  The road towards dusk became full of the mauvish air which was sliding down from the mountains. On one side the sea with its groups of people picking their food from among the corals exposed by low tide; on the other the tall hot glooms of forest: wax trees, statue trees, palamandrons and the hollow cries of parrots. The road itself was dusty, a decaying patchwork of tarmac and concrete and rutted stretches of gravel which was an archaeological record of botched contracts, official indifference and local self-interest.

  Along this road towards dusk there now appeared a stringy old brown man in an unravelling frond hat pushing a cart which was principally a circular metal tub on two wheels. The wheels were of solid wood, nearly round and rimmed with strips cut from tyres. Without bearings the holes at their centres had worn so that the wheels flopped now this way, now that, groaning at all angles. By the man’s right hand as he pushed the cart was a small brass bell which he rang every few steps as punctuation to his cry: ‘Soup! Delicious! Fresh! Excrement soup!’

  Sauntering towards this old man was a figure in the utmost contrast, a man from another planet maybe: tall, blond, in a cool white shirt with a crimson silk scarf at his throat. In an apparent concession to local custom he had on his bare feet a pair of cheap rubber sandals. He was ambling as if entranced by the dusk, the peaceful breathing of the ocean, the evening calls and fireflies floating out of the trees, the early bats flittering their irregular circuits. Certainly at this moment and in this land he was at one with all other people slowly moving about while not going anywhere. For a moment a delicate member of the jonquil family caught his attention at the roadside. When he straightened up the oncoming old man with the cart was only a few yards away.

  ‘Excrement soup!’

  ‘Good evening, father,’ called out the stranger. At least, thought the old man, he speaks a bit of our language even if his accent is funny.

  ‘Good evening, sir.’ The stranger was relieved to find that he could at least communicate with the old bastard, not like that idiot from the south who had made such a fool of him in the market that morning, although he was still not at all sure about what this one was selling. ‘What’s that?’ he pointed at the cart.

  ‘Soup. Excrement soup. It’s delicious.’

  ‘Delicious. Hot, is it?’

  ‘God’s-teeth-and-buttocks, of course it’s not hot, you stupid fool,’ said the old man to himself. To this foreigner he said: ‘Cold, sir, with lots of ice as is the custom here. It’s delicious. Very refreshing, sir. Try some?’ He reached for the stained ladle which dangled from one shaft of the cart’s handle.

  The foreigner shook his blond mane with self-deprecating humour. ‘For a moment there I thou
ght you said “excrement”.’

  The old man did not smile.

  ‘Quite right, sir. Excrement.’

  ‘You mean – I want to get this right – shit soup?’

  ‘Precisely. I believe in the south they call it that. But we’re a bit more sophisticated round here, sir. We call it excrement soup. Besides, it’s more than mere shit: there’s vanilla and good white sugar and, of course, the ice.’

  ‘Delicious indeed.’ The stranger was nodding with serious anthropological interest, thinking: Christ’s-lights-and-bladder, why can’t I understand this sodding language by now? What can this stuff be that he’s selling? ‘Do you buy it ready-made, father? Er, bulk import?’

  ‘Dear me, no,’ the old man said, and his frond hat unwound a bit at his vehemence. ‘The very idea. No, I make it myself, fresh each morning, just like my mother did and her mother before her. This is original to our family. It’s genuine. Oh, I don’t blame your being sceptical, young man. One hears such stories nowadays. They say that in the City the excrement soup there – if you can find any, and it’s a big If – is practically all bogus. Chemicals and what-not. They say they put that monosodium glutamate in it to make up for the lack of flavour, as well as commercial vanilla essence. Can you imagine? There’s a kilo of home-grown vanilla pods in there.’ He pointed to the battered tin tureen with an ornate knob which covered the top of the tub like a grey alloy bell. ‘Excrement soup!’ he called towards the nearest knot of low-tiders and sent a brassy tinkle pealing down to the shore. It seemed to mark a temporary loss of momentum in the conversation.

  The blond foreigner still wore a friendly expression of grave interest and easygoing humour, but this was now being eroded from within by a puzzlement which might develop into further self-deprecation or into extreme tetchiness; only time would tell. Meanwhile the forest exhaled a spicy stink of hot rot. ‘Hot,’ he said conventionally and mopped his face with a floppy white handkerchief. For his part the old man flicked a long yellow fingernail against the alloy tureen with an irritating clacking sound.

  ‘Listen,’ he said and shook the handle of the cart. From within the tub came a dull clunking and bobbling as of hard and soft nodules in slow agitation. ‘That’s ice you can hear.’

  ‘I know, father.’

  Now was the time to go, a decisive bidding of good night, the onward and no less decisive walk. But at that impeccably judged moment the old man said: ‘You speak our language very well indeed, if I may say so, sir. How many years have you lived in our country?’

  ‘No, I don’t, only a little. Oh, about six months now.’ The moment was gone.

  ‘Six months only? I don’t believe it, sir. Why, I’ve met foreigners who have married one of our lovely girls and settled down here and at the end of ten years they still can’t speak more than a few words. And most of those are commands.’

  ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘It’s not right. So you must be very clever and hard-working.’

  ‘Good lord, no.’

  ‘Now, I’, the old man said, ‘am not at all clever, but I am hardworking. Every day up at four to make the soup. That takes nearly two hours to get it right – depending on the contributions I collect from family and friends. Then at five-thirty the block of ice arrives from the ice-plant, and I have to saw it up. By the time I get on the road it’s past six and here I’ve been all day.’

  ‘Heavens. It must be a hard life, father.’

  ‘Too right. You have to be an excrement soup-seller to appreciate just how hard making an honest livelihood is nowadays.’

  ‘Well, for example, how much have you sold today?’

  ‘About half.’ The old man joggled the shafts again and the knobbly sloshing could be heard. ‘Say, three gallons. Oy! Soup!’ He turned to the group on the foreshore, some of whom were now drifting towards the road. One or two boats were putting out behind them, unlit pressure-lamps suspended above their prows, turning towards the evening star. The flat calm, the immoderate tranquillity overlaid everything and produced in the foreigner a sudden feeling of equable resignation, albeit with a lingering residue of utter rage.

  ‘So what’ – he found himself asking without the least idea of how interested he actually was in knowing the answer – ‘what do you do with what’s left over at the end of the day? Keep it until tomorrow and mix it in with the new soup?’

  ‘Sacred pus, what kind of a question’s that?’ demanded the old man of himself. ‘Dear me, no, sir,’ he heard himself saying, ‘that would never do. No, I give it to the pigs. It fattens them up beautifully, does excrement soup. Lots of good nourishment there.’

  By now some of the low-tiders had reached the cart and were gathering round, staring at the foreigner with not unfriendly curiosity, the children silent but easily induced to giggle at a jab from a companion’s sharp little elbow.

  ‘So the whole lot’s fresh each morning?’

  ‘Exactly. The whole lot’s fresh each day, as I told you.’

  ‘He speaks our language,’ announced a boy in a T-shirt washed into holes. He was carrying a small octopus impaled on a short length of wire.

  ‘No, I don’t; only a little.’ Oh, the formulaic nature of his life’s conversations. He once more mopped his face.

  ‘Ah, but you do; you’re doing it now,’ a young man assured him wisely. Then, ‘You must be very rich.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Well, here I’m rich but not in my own country.’ Christ-on-a-rubber-crutch, did it never end?

  ‘Rich enough for some good excrement soup,’ observed the old man.

  ‘Look, father,’ said the blond foreigner, ‘I want to get this straight once and for all. In here’ – he tapped the tin tureen – ‘you have a soup made of, let’s see, excrement …?’

  ‘Excrement.’

  ‘Vanilla pods?’

  ‘Vanilla pods.’

  ‘White sugar?’

  ‘White sugar.’

  ‘And ice?’

  ‘Plenty of ice.’

  ‘What else?’

  The old man shook his head, and his hat further unwound. ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Now, that’s a trade secret. If everybody knew all the ingredients, they’d go off and make their own and I’d be out of business. Now, what I can tell you is that there’s a little bit of fruit mixed up in it, but I’m not saying what.’

  ‘Tamarinds,’ hazarded one of the onlookers.

  ‘Mangoes.’

  ‘Bananas.’

  ‘Jackfruit.’

  ‘Not saying,’ said the old man.

  ‘Well, it sounds delicious,’ said the agreeable foreigner.

  ‘Delicious,’ came a chorus of voices. ‘It really is delicious.’ There fell a short silence.

  ‘Er, how much is it?’ A collective sigh acknowledged that a fresh stage had been reached.

  ‘Now,’ said the old man, ‘it’s the end of the day and I can’t pretend it’s exactly as fresh as it was at five-thirty this morning. Also, of course, some of the ice has melted and it’s a bit runnier than it was. So’ – he paused and glanced up at the now deep violet sky well thronged with bats – ‘let’s say forty piku a glass.’ He reached forward to a rack between the shafts which held a selection of brown tumblers made from beer-bottles with their necks cut off, then paused. ‘On the other hand, sir’ – and he looked straight into the young foreigner’s face with the implacability of a vampire – ‘my life is very hard….’

  ‘Very hard,’ echoed the mesmerised stranger.

  ‘… and for you and as a special offer I should like to express my pleasure that you have taken the trouble to learn our language so well….’

  ‘No, I don’t; only a little.’

  ‘… and give you the opportunity of tasting our national speciality which so many guests in our country refuse to try, in my humble opinion very rudely.’

  ‘Very rudely.’ The tall figure, whose white shirt glimmered in the gathering night like the robe of a saint, bent its head.

  ‘So’, conclud
ed the old man, ‘for only four dankals I’m going to give you a full half-gallon pitcher.’

  A general murmur at the generosity and fairness of this offer surrounded the young stranger.

  ‘Oh. Thank you. Thank you many times, father.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’ The old face set itself into an expression of remorseless pleasure as he lifted the tureen-like cover, dipped deeply in with the ladle and swirled the tub’s contents around. From a hook on the side of the cart he took a red polythene pitcher. ‘You can let me have this back tomorrow. Or leave it with any of these people here. They’ll return it. See?’ He upended the pitcher and displayed a hieroglyph in paint on the bottom. ‘Now, then. Smell that.’

  The stranger in the martyr’s shift leaned forward over the tub. Dear Christ, it really was that all along; there’s no mistake. Well, there is but it’s not down to vocabulary.

  Up came the ladle full of blackish broth and ochre smears which plopped into the pitcher.

  ‘Delicious,’ said somebody.

  ‘Delicious.’ I don’t believe this.

  Now chunks of ice knocked against each other, but softly, padded by the thick slops. The stranger tried a joke.

  ‘Like diarrhoea.’

  The old man’s ladle paused and he shook his head severely.

  ‘No, sir. There’s no diarrhoea in my soup. That’s the cheap way out. Only good solids in this; but, as I said, during the course of the day the ice has melted a bit, which has thinned it all out. But it’s based on properly formed motions.’ The ladle dipped back in and resumed its unhurried transfer of the national delicacy. Soon his thin old wrist was ridged with tendons and trembling with the strain of holding half a gallon of his soup. He added another dollop and let the ladle fall back into the tub with a distant splosh. The red pitcher was brimful. Several rounded objects the size of gooseberries floated in the scum at its lip. ‘There we are, sir. Only four dankals. And I’ll throw these in as well for nothing’ – and he scrabbled in a box, coming up with half a dozen toothpicks.