by Robert Irwin
So we just stood there silently gazing at one another. Then she suddenly burst into tears.
‘Peter, dearest Peter, these last few days have just been so horrible, but now I am with you I know it will be all right.’
I stepped forward to give her a comforting hug and she practically overbalanced on her high heels, so she had to cling very tight in order not to fall right over and I almost fainted in her arms.
‘You know I have been so worried about you,’ she whispered, her breath cool in my ear. ‘After what you told me, I was more afraid for you than anything.’
Then we broke apart and she started fishing in her handbag, for her make-up kit. She had to redo her mascara, before we could set out walking past the Maltings and up the hill between the laburnum hedges towards the cottage. Maud has become a fever in my head and a pain between my legs. I cannot think of anything except Maud. God knows how I am going to square this with Sally.
As we walked into the cottage, Maud turned to me and said, ‘We can be happy here.’ Then having realised what she had said, she blushed. ‘I mean, I know that you and Sally will be very happy here together.’
Sally, who had been standing on her head in the lotus position when we entered, hastily untangled herself and got to her feet so that she was face to face with Maud – no that is not right, for Sally’s head came no higher than Maud’s bosom. Maud, somewhat startled, looked down on her.
‘Hello again.’ And Maud extended her hand, holding it out in a way that suggested that she expected it to be kissed. Sally muttered something inaudible (for all I know, it was a curse), but she took Maud’s hand and shook it.
Then Sally turned to me and asked, ‘How long is she staying?’
Maud looked at me in mute appeal.
‘As long as she needs to, Sally,’ I said firmly.
Then Maud broke into tears again. Between sobs, she explained to Sally how she had left her job and fled her flat. How she had no friends in the world except me, Peter, and that she hoped Sally would be a good friend too. She knew she was being a drag, coming down here when the place was so small and only just big enough for the two of us, but she had nowhere else to go and she was absolutely terrified of all this supernatural stuff, and the dead animals on her doorstep in London had had pins stuck in their eyes. Maud did not want the Satanists to put pins in her eyeballs. After a while she was unable to get any more words out even in gulps. She just stood there bawling noisily like a small child.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Sally snorted and disappeared into the bedroom. I put an arm round Maud and she slowly quietened down. After about ten minutes, Sally reappeared with her sleeping bag.
‘She will have to sleep on the mattress in this room, until she has found a place to move to and she will have to roll up the bedding every morning.’
And Sally busied herself in laying out the bag and pushing all Maud’s luggage to one corner of the room, while Maud sat on a corner of the mattress and set about once more redoing her make-up. Then Maud started to unpack, but it was not long before she discovered that, in her panicky flight from London, she had forgotten to pack all sorts of things, including any underwear. So she set off into Farnham to do some shopping. When she reappeared hours later, she found Sally and me sitting out on the grass at the back of the cottage. Sally was still doing her yogic breathing exercises, while I was struggling to sort out some kind of filecard system for my thesis. However, Maud, who was evidently an enthusiastic shopper insisted on interrupting our peace by displaying her purchases. She put out her newly purchased items of underwear on the grass for our inspection. There were about a dozen items: several pairs of ornately lacy panties, some bras, a basque, a mulberry-coloured camisole, a midnight-blue slip. Sally thinks that less is more where underwear is concerned and she gazed on Maud’s purchases with incredulous distaste.
‘What do you think?’ Maud asked, looking carefully to her, as if Sally was her older sister.
Sally laughed incredulously.
‘Maud, you are absurd! Put them away.’
Maud blushed crimson and hastily gathered up the underwear and disappeared into the cottage. At length, she reemerged with her handbag. From this she extracted a diary and, seating herself some distance away from us, she busied herself in writing it. And I too am writing in my diary, surreptitiously looking up from time to time to gaze with bated lust on Maud, who scribbles away, biting her lips as she does so. I think that she must find spelling difficult. I had forgotten that Maud kept a diary. It obviously is a diary, one of those school-girly affairs with a heart-shaped lock. Well, at least now she has got something worth recording in it.
The afternoon, though still very warm, had turned dark and heavy. There were lots of midges about. For a long time there was no sound except the scratching of pens and the cooing of wood pigeons. Finally Sally broke the silence.
‘The sun is down over the yard-arm.’
What the hell is a yard-arm? Whatever. In our new ménage in the country, reference to the yard-arm is the traditional prelude to rolling an early-evening joint or two. Sally went to fetch the ritual Indian brass tray. Then she set to work slowly melting and crumbling the hash, rolling the cardboard tips and sprinkling tobacco on the Rizla papers. Sally maintains that the preparation of the joints is as important as their consumption. The whole business is like a Zen tea-making ritual and has to be done with slow ceremony. Maud, who still sat at a distance from us, looked uncomfortable and I guess that she was trying to nerve herself up to make some protest about drug-taking being illegal, or dangerous to mental health, or something, but she was too embarrassed and too conscious of her status as guest to make her protest.
At last Sally was ready to light up and, having taken one big draw on the joint, she crawled over to Maud to present her with it.
Maud raised a hand in an attempt to avert the evil object.
‘I’m afraid I don’t smoke.’
‘This isn’t smoking,’ Sally insisted. ‘It is a kind of initiation. You don’t smoke a joint. You just inhale from it and then you pass it to Peter. You have to participate.’
‘Yes, we are very strong on conformity here,’ I added.
Maud raised her eyebrows, but she took the joint and drew hard on it. The smoke filled her mouth so that her cheeks were swollen like a chipmunk’s as she struggled to get any of the smoke into her lungs. But she failed and fell into such a violent bout of coughing and wheezing that she bent double and threw the joint away. I retrieved it and then showed her how to take the experience more coolly. Part of the trouble with Maud was sheer nerves. She was expecting violent hallucinations the moment she had ingested any of the smoke. But hash is not like that. Not usually anyway. It is mild and subtle. Not that one would guess this from reading Aleister Crowley on the subject. This thought having struck me, I went inside to fetch one of my red sorcery notebooks in which I have transcribed a quotation from Crowley’s essay, ‘The Herb Dangerous – The Psychology of Hashish’:
‘Of the investigators who have pierced even for a moment the magic veil of its glamour ecstatic many have been appalled, many disappointed. Few have dared to crush in arms of steel this burning daughter of the Jinn; to ravish from her poisonous scarlet lips the kisses of death; to force her serpent-smooth and serpent-stinging body down to some infernal torture-couch, and strike her into spasm as the lightning splits the cloud-wrack, only to read in her infinite sea-green eyes the awful price of her virginity – black madness …. ’
In a way, Crowley was a great man, one of the forerunners of the Spirit of the 60s indeed, but this stuff was just so over the top that I had to desist from reading more. Sally and Maud were leaning against one another and giggling fit to bust. For a few moments it was a really good scene and I felt like the Old Man of the Mountains secluded in his paradise garden with a couple of members of his harem. The laughter got madder and madder and I was laughing too and I was vaguely aware of being possessed by the laughter, as if I had been invaded by a demonic
Thing. I experienced it as an entity which did not care what I did, or whether I lived or died. I was merely a vehicle for laughter, to be discarded once the Laughing Thing, hunting for another victim, had passed on its way.
This happened – the laughter passing, that is – when Maud wiped her eyes and tried to straighten up enough to talk. I believe that she was trying to prolong the mirthful spirit of things …
‘Sally, listen to this! This is really good! A man goes into a pub and he has got an insect with him. I have forgotten what insect it was, but that does not matter. Say it was a dragonfly – no hang on a minute – the insect has got to have legs. A cricket then. A cricket has definitely got legs. So anyway he says to the man – I mean the man he has met at the bar – “I have established that insects hear with their legs.” Then, the other man, the man he is talking to, asks “How have you worked that out?” Now, let me think … the other man says “As you can see, this cricket has no legs and when I ask it to move, it does not …”’
‘Hang on a moment,’ Sally interrupted. ‘Just a moment ago, you were saying that the cricket definitely did have legs. Are you sure you don’t mean that he had a dragonfly? That would make more sense.’
Maud was trying to work out why Sally was not right about this, when I tried to help her by pointing out that in fact dragonflies did have legs, contrary to what Sally was insinuating. However, this only seemed to make Maud more confused.
‘No, what I meant is that crickets in general do have legs, but this particular cricket did not have legs, because the man in the pub – the first man in the pub – had taken them off in order to demonstrate that crickets hear with their legs, because they don’t move when they are told to when their legs are taken off. Er … only I think I have told it slightly wrong. The cricket had its legs on when it was brought into the pub – ’
‘That would make it more like the rest of the cricket species,’ Sally added helpfully.
‘But then the man took the legs off to prove the point … But anyway, you get the point. He was not thinking logically, you see.’
Sally thought about it and, having thought about it, she was seriously pissed off.
‘That is just so dumb. It’s a real downer. Anyway, I don’t see how else the man could demonstrate that crickets hear with their legs. I certainly don’t believe that they hear with their ears, because I have never seen a cricket with ears.’
Maud was cast down. I thought of challenging Sally on how many crickets she has seen in her life, for I don’t believe that she has seen any, except for Jimminy Cricket in the Pinocchio film, but then I decided against saying anything. So, suddenly we were all silent once more and Sally set to work, rolling the second joint of the evening.
I was sleepily nodding to myself and thinking that Farnham was a good place to lie low in when I dozed off. Yet lie how low? Deep, deep, deep below the black waters. These waters which came rushing up from beneath me and engulfed not only me but also the whole of the lost town of Farnham. Slow, silent and alone I passed between the columns of moonlight which descended through the blackness and then I floated away from those refracted shafts of brightness, down the dark submarine snickets and alleyways which were beyond the reach of any illumination and consequently, from time to time, I blundered against barnacle-encrusted walls and doors. Once I emerged again into the High Street, I noticed how the moonlight conferred a dead-white glitter on the shop-fronts. I found that with some difficulty I could shimmy my way up to roof-level and, turning backwards from whence I had swum, I observed the scarlet roof of the Maltings, shining as bright as Satan’s Pandemonium. I observed everything. I remarked without regret how a filthy silt was drifting up to cover the lower shelves in the public library and how a ceaseless flow of bubbles rose from decomposing books. I visited the abandoned tennis-courts where shoals of minnows passed backwards and forwards through their netting. I saw without surprise that the familiar country streams and rivulets continued to flow quite unimpeded by the heavy tides of black water above them. I paddled over the foliage of the hop-fields which undulated with lazy menace, like the weed-banks of a dreadful Sargasso Sea, and beyond the hop fields I swam out to the halcyon peace of Surrey lawns. Everything was perfectly silent, except for the muffled tolling of church bells which, moved by the dark tides, never stopped and which kept time with the beating of my terrified heart. Otherwise the place was silent, abandoned, asleep in time, so that here where I am is not only now but forever August 7th, 1967. The spires of the churches and the towers of the Castle strain towards the surface so very far above. Deep, deep down below, I can only dream of flicking and kicking my way up until finally I might break through the surface and gaze on the limitless expanse of water rolling on forever under its dancing net of moonlight. The trouble is that I have water on the brain and it is this which makes me so heavy.
Such was my dream. Yet, when I come to think about it, I do not actually know whether I had this dream or not. It is only Pyewhacket, the hand which sees itself as a writer in its own right, which tells me that I had it and, once again, I fear that Pyewhacket has a mind of its own, not really mine at all. It is a warm summer evening, but I feel cold now. I had thought that I had escaped that hand, that literary voice. Somehow it has found me again. Perhaps Farnham will not be such a good place to lie low in after all.
I opened my eyes on my two beautiful houris. They were bent over the Indian tray and talking quietly to one another and I heard the raven-haired one whisper to the blonde,
‘You have beautiful hair. I should love to do your hair for you.’
But then Sally, suddenly suspicious that she was being buttered up, pulled away. The second joint was now ready for circulation. We passed it amongst one another without talking. I was not feeling better for my submarine doze. Also, I think I was feeling a bit guilty at having pressed Maud to join us in smoking dope. It was as if Sally and I had colluded in debauching this pathetically innocent girl. Maud is so eager to please and so young. But then we three are all very young. Everything is before us. The juices of youth are so fierce within us. Straights may suppose that we take dope to get high. Not so. Sally and I are high on being young – most of the time anyway. We take dope to come down.
The third time the joint came round, it was practically down to its nasty-tasting, cardboard roach, and I stubbed it out.
‘Gosh! Well, that was quite fun I suppose,’ said Maud as, yet again, she ferreted about for stuff in her handbag. ‘And, thank you, but I don’t think that I will ever take dope again. I would not like to become dependent on it. I do think that one can have a good time without being hooked on anything.’
‘Maud, you are being ridiculous again,’ said Sally patronisingly. ‘I’ve been taking hash practically every day for over a year now and I’m not addicted.’ Then, having thought about what she had just said, Sally got the giggles again.
Maud looked doubtfully at Sally.
‘Hash is less addictive than alcohol,’ I reassured Maud. Then unthinkingly, I added. ‘The same goes for LSD. That’s not addictive at all.’
Sally’s eyes lit up.
‘Yeah! You have got to trip. You’ll love it, Maud. Tripping is a fantastic buzz. Tomorrow, if it’s sunny, we’ll all take a trip together. It’s great, if it’s sunny, cos’ it will make the sunlight brighter.’
I can see that, on one level, Sally’s enthusiasm for LSD is perfectly genuine. She is always proselytising on behalf of ‘the miracle drug’. She really does believe that it is tragic that it is only a relatively small number of heads, like her and me, who have discovered what it can do. However, at another level, I know that Sally was pressing LSD onto Maud in order to wind her up and, if tomorrow, Maud did have a bad trip, Sally would not be at all displeased.
Indeed, Maud looked terrified.
‘Can’t I just watch?’
‘No. As long as you are here, you’ve got to participate. You have to see what we see. Peter and I will serve as spirit guides on your trip. LSD is a
friendly drug. It is thanks to LSD that you are here at all. It was the drug that warned Peter that you were in danger. So you definitely owe it something.’
Well, those were the main events of the day. Eventually we decided that the midges were too much for us and we went inside. Sally decided to cook Welsh-rabbit. Maud went over to stand beside Sally in the tiny kitchen and told her how she wished she had learned to cook. Would Sally teach her? But Sally was not interested in talking about cooking. Instead, smiling gently, she started reminiscing about former trips that she had taken.
That night Sally was extra-demanding in bed and she allowed me little sleep. But even when Sally had her legs wrapped tight around my head, I could hear Maud weeping in the next room.
Tuesday, August 8th
I woke up before Sally and went out to the sitting room – I mean lying room. Maud was nowhere to be seen and I briefly panicked that she might have left us. But then I saw that her dresses and underwear and lots of magazines were strewn all over the place. The back-door was open. I went out and stood on its step. In the sharp-edged light of early morning, I saw Maud moving swiftly from tree to tree. She punched the air and wheeled about to kick at trees, time and again just failing to connect with their trunks. Then she abruptly plunged to her knees and started knee-walking backwards and forwards across the grass. She moved at an eerie pace, like a dwarf on amphetamines. After a while, she somersaulted back onto her feet and resumed combat with her invisible adversaries. Maud was in her karate kit, coarse white trousers and a loose jacket secured by a brown belt. In her fighting gear, she appeared amazingly relaxed and graceful – not clumsy at all.
After watching for a while, I went inside and started tidying Maud’s things up. Sally emerged from the bedroom before I had finished.
