Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Good heavens, Millie!’ I hear myself exclaim involuntarily. ‘Er, how do you keep the water oxygenated?’

  ‘Dear Gerry. Straight to the point as usual. Tablets, actually, but the poor creatures grow sluggish after a few hours so I empty them back into their tank.’ I now notice on the far side of the room a large aquarium, a mahogany monster apparently from the workshop of Thomas Chippendale. In this the usual unfortunate creatures are soundlessly repeating the same syllable through the thick glass of their cage: ob, ob, ob. ‘Whenever I wear them they unselfishly give me some of their wisdom.’

  ‘That’s good. Hey, I’ve only just heard about Rasmussen.’

  As predicted, Millie’s face takes on a grave expression and her voice drops professionally like that of a newscaster turning to the three children who died in a fire in Bradford last night. ‘It was a terrible shock. Poor, dear Rufus. He was a fabulous sailor – a true seaman born and bred. It was an honour to have raced agai––’

  ‘I gather he died peacefully in his sloop.’

  Millie turns an injured gaze on me. ‘It would pain me to think you were making a joke of it, Gerry.’

  ‘Certainly not. I only mean it wasn’t such a bad way to go, on his own boat and well away from his family.’

  ‘Naturally I sent poor Helga a message of condolence this morning. But what am I thinking of?’ Millie’s internal newscaster becomes sprightly again as she rejoices in a surprise win for the English cricket team against the strongest Eleven that Upper Volta has fielded for years. She turns back to her disciples or courtiers. ‘May I introduce Gerald Samper, who was an active consultant while I was writing my first book and has most kindly volunteered to be the same for my next? It was Gerry who passed on to me that CD of the mystical revelations off the Canaries which Tricia has done such valuable work in translating and which are giving our movement such incredible impetus worldwide.’

  While she was writing her first book? The woman is truly shameless. In fact, she’s so outrageous I can’t even feel outrage. At least it means that if she’s claiming everything I write as her own work then I can afford to make her next book really prize-winningly mediocre. If it’s to be my swan song then I intend to go out on a low note. Meanwhile, Queen Neptunia’s courtiers are goggling up at me in a suitably fishlike manner and I simper back at them, weakly.

  ‘How do you mean, “translating”?’ I ask Millie. ‘Surely those weird noises can’t have been a language?’ But silent glee begins seeping into my bloodstream. Can she really have swallowed it?

  ‘Tricia Brilov is an actual professor of languages, Gerry. You’ve probably heard of her. She’s a distinguished academic as well as a founder member of Neptune. She was the first person I thought of when you sent me that wonderful CD, her being so brilliant.’ (Really, these autodidacts’ reverence for anyone with some two-bit PhD to their name! It’s high time I began flaunting my A levels, gained at a time when they awarded them to people who could actually read and write and didn’t think ‘good’ was an adverb.) ‘She spotted at once that those apparently random noises really are a language. What do you think of that?’

  ‘I’m amazed,’ I say truthfully. ‘But if it’s a language, who is it talking down there at the bottom of the sea? Many experts believe this is impossible.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Millie cries triumphantly. ‘The answer to that question could be the most important piece of knowledge the human race has ever been given. It could be absolutely crucial to our future and to the planet’s survival. Tricia’s partner, Isolde Tammeri, is her ex-student and a visionary of genius besides being a brilliant scholar herself. She at once confirmed it. Some kind of speech is going on down there and at the moment we can only guess at who or what might be responsible.’

  I am fascinated by this drivel, as I am by a tiny scarlet fish that blunders into Millie’s hollow thumb, turns around and bumps into a knuckle from inside. From where I’m standing the confusion of polycarbonate and Waterford crystal is such that I almost expect the animal to start swimming up the stem of the glass she’s holding and choke to death in her gin and tonic.

  One of Queen Neptunia’s courtiers is nodding, a blonde girl with a pronounced overbite and exopthalmic blue eyes. Just as I might notice a well-stuffed pair of jeans, I notice she is sporting a well-stuffed white T-shirt inside her black leather jacket. ‘It’s incredibly exciting what Tricia and Isolde have translated so far,’ she assures me in the tones of Roedean or Cheltenham, managing to sound cool yet flirty at the same time. ‘True, we can’t yet understand everything the voices are saying, but we’re certainly getting a sense of it. I don’t know how familiar you are with the field of logogrammatic assay, but standard linguistic techniques of bitword frequency analysis and Junghans semantic algorithms have yielded some really suggestive stuff – more than enough to prove there’s nothing imaginary or fake about this.’

  Millie is gazing at her fondly. ‘That’s Debra,’ she explains to me. ‘She’s absolutely brilliant, too. Give Gerry a drink, Debra, and then you can read him some of the translation and let him decide for himself.’ She waves a gracious hand towards a minibar that might have been thrown together by the same Regency craftsman who was responsible for the TV console in the corner. From this cabinet a reassuringly generous g-&-t is conjured for me and I am offered one of the scrolled and fluted chairs. A respectful silence falls as Debra plants her feet and begins to read to us from a folder in her beautifully modulated voice.

  ‘“Many, many fear and is torrential, torrents in tribe our ciderpress family beseech. Turnip flagons walls with holes oncoming, coming on flying, flying tribe under many fear. Fear, fear, many ciderpress holes.”’ (‘We’re not yet absolutely sure “ciderpress” is right. Or “turnip”,’ she confides in a scholarly aside.) ‘Er, “Ciderpress holes push on red clouds. Veins, veins press together cider, dark mottles shot in the bottom. The mother many fearful lost under bottoms. Torrential fear in devoted shell-drift. Torrential bottoms over and torments dead tribe. Oh tubby unpushed turnips! Oh flagons family!”’

  There is a pause. As is usual at moments of other people’s high seriousness I am concentrating on not laughing. What this gibberish instantly reminds me of is one of those alleged translations of the Voynich manuscript, a mysterious document that was probably written as a scam by an Elizabethan con-man. The Voynich’s Renaissance hand is deceptively clear and the words appear in the normal patterns of a language, yet the language itself remains unidentified despite the best efforts of scholars and linguists with all the help that computers can bring. It is almost certainly meaningless: a brilliant simulacrum of a text designed to trick Rudolf II into buying this apparently ancient and impenetrably mysterious book for his royal library. This has not discouraged several amateur sleuths from presenting their own ‘translations’, all of which are precisely the kind of nonsense that Debra has just been spouting to her respectful audience. It was the word ‘veins’ that reminded me of a fragment of one Voynich translation that goes: ‘It is clothed with veinlets; tiny teats they provide (or live upon) in the outpimpling of the veinlets.’ It seems to me that Tricia and Isolde’s rendering into near-English of the electronic blithering of a load of transponders shares that exact outpimpling quality. What is it about veins, anyway? Debra is watching me with an indulgent smile.

  ‘I agree, Gerry,’ she concedes. ‘At first hearing it does seem obscure. But these are spirit voices. When you’ve worked on the text and studied it and lived with it as we have, something of its true meaning starts to come through. As I said, we have our doubts about whether we’ve read all the words correctly, especially “turnip” and “ciderpress”, and we’re not quite sure about “flagons”, either. At first sight they don’t seem to have many connections with the undersea world. Still, it’s obvious that the first sentence has to mean there is a family, a tribe, living in extreme fear. Fear of what? What else can “walls with holes oncoming” describe but fishing nets, probably drift nets? To underwater creature
s the nets would seem to be flying through the air even as they themselves are flying – or fleeing – the oncoming nets. Now look at “The mother many fear lost under bottoms.” If you visualize the sea-creatures’ world and look upwards towards the surface, what do you see but bottoms? The bottoms of ships, obviously, the trawlers and factory ships deploying the nets that threaten the mother. Just look at her anguished face –’ and Debra nods reverently towards the picture on the wall behind Millie. ‘We think the “red clouds” might also refer to ships’ hulls, which are commonly coated with red antifouling paint. Actually, that was Millie’s own idea. It’s a brilliant insight because it makes complete sense without straining the translation. And don’t forget that a “bottom” is recognized maritime terminology for a ship, notably in the insurance business, so it’s technically right as well. And now we can understand the intense fear in the “devoted shell-drift”, which is obviously the Great Mother’s marine family who lament the “dead tribe”, meaning those billions of sisters and brothers they have lost to the brutal international whaling and fishing fleets. What we have here is an impassioned cry of anguish by the creatures of the sea who are hurting from the savage despoliation of their habitat. The kingdom of Neptune, if you like.’

  Debra pauses for breath, clearly moved by her own fervour. All eyes are on me except Millie’s. Her attention is fixed on the little glittering creatures performing aquabatics in her arm: the Great Mother smiling at her flying tribe. My attention is taken by something else. In an awkward compartment of my consciousness an awareness has been growing that for no discernible reason Samper has acquired a stubborn erection. I take a distracted swig of gin.

  ‘You don’t think there may be some wiggle-room in this interpretation?’ I venture. ‘As it stands, it seems to leave out all the difficult bits. For instance, what was that stuff about mottled veins being shot in the bottom? It sounds more like a bad case of piles than a complaint about fisheries.’

  ‘Both Tricia and Isolde agree that sentence isn’t fully clear at the moment,’ Debra says severely. ‘Still, it’s obvious that whatever it means, it can’t detract from the overall sense.’

  ‘That it can’t.’ Lordy! Hook, line and sinker. Adrian will be ecstatic. Privately, I never really imagined that, uncanny as they are, those noises from the deep would fool anyone into believing they were made by living entities holding some sort of underwater discourse. I now appreciate that as a despairing marine scientist Adrian must be pretty familiar with Deep Blue thinking. And because he was around when the fundamentalist wing formed itself into the Loony Neptunies he would have understood much better than I that beyond a certain mysterious point any remaining ideological content in these movements becomes swamped by its nuttier members’ sheer torrential outpimpling. Throw in a picture like The Face and suddenly Poseidon is back on his throne on the seabed somewhere off the Canaries, calling for an end to drift-netting with the voice of a transponder.

  ‘Anyway,’ Millie says, still watching the tiny fish chasing one another in her forearm, ‘now they’ve broken the code so brilliantly the translation is coming along much faster. They hope to have the whole CD done by Christmas. But it’s already clear what it will be. Yes – it will be repetitious. Of course it will, because it’s a message to us, one that needs to be repeated over and over again until we arrogant humans understand it. It’s both a cry of anguish, as Debra says, and a terrible warning we ignore at our peril. If it hadn’t been for that moment of enlightenment, that sudden satori I was given when I was approaching the Canaries in Beldame, I, too, might still be oblivious to the awful damage we are doing our chances of survival on this planet. The sea is truly our Mother. It is She who ultimately gives us life. If we wreck Her, we will perish. Luckily, She spoke to me that night and told me not to fear, She would send me good winds and I was going to break the record. But in return She made it clear that I must make Her message known. She told me about the abominable slaughter of Her dearest children by long-line fishing fleets. It’s truly appalling, Gerry. They catch all sorts of poor creatures other than fish, you know. Things like turtles and sea birds. Not even that magnificent wanderer, the albatross, is spared. Hooked, pulled under and drowned.’

  ‘So you might say these long-liners were committing albatrossities?’

  ‘Really, Gerry! I’m surprised at you. There’s nothing remotely funny about it.’

  Her disciples mirror Millie’s reprimand by jerking their heads slightly while making small sounds of disgust. No, Samper, this is not the way to win friends. You were right to wonder how unserious you can afford to be.

  ‘I wasn’t laughing,’ I protest.

  ‘You made a bad joke of it, which is much the same.’

  ‘There are more ways of being serious than by being serious.’

  Millie looks at me pityingly. ‘Well, I agree it’s hard for you to break with your old ways all of a sudden, Gerry. I myself have changed so much since writing my book with you and it’s wrong of me to expect you to have done the same. But I promise the more we work together the more you will understand.’ Her attention is again caught by a tiny fish like polished shrapnel moving in her arm. I have to admire the old girl: her brachial aquarium is a real show-stopper. ‘Look at that,’ she says in a hushed whisper. ‘It’s like a flake of pure light. Sheer miracle.’

  Time for Samper to strike back. ‘Hardly that, surely,’ I say in a crotchety, rational tone. ‘Just evolution.’

  ‘You sound just like a scientist, Gerry,’ says Millie. It is not a compliment.

  ‘Who, me? No, more of a cook, really. But thanks to you, dear Millie, in the course of helping you write your book I did meet quite a few scientists, so I suppose I must have picked up bits of this and that. Still, I can’t help agreeing with the character in Norman Douglas who found everything wonderful and nothing miraculous.’

  ‘I have never heard of your Mr Douglas,’ says Millie with a touch of her former Lady Bracknell. ‘But we mustn’t be too hard. As I say, it’s early days yet and I’m absolutely certain that when you know more about the true nature of the ocean you, too, will find your scepticism dissolving and will come to understand how miraculous it is. And that is the only word for it.’ She turns to her disciples. ‘Gerry and I get on famously, of course. But just now and then he loves to be provocative. I expect it’s good for me, really, to be teased a bit. And we must none of us forget it was Gerry who introduced me to the Mother and Her message.’

  Everyone instinctively looks towards the flower-decked icon on the wall. It glowers back in an abstracted fashion, or as well as something entirely imaginary can. For the first time I notice a faint resemblance to whoever it was in Edvard Munch’s painting before he or she quite pardonably began screaming.

  17

  Civilized readers will naturally be familiar with the scene towards the end of The Magic Flute where Tamino is about to undergo the last part of his initiation ritual and is confronted by two men in black armour, the eighteenth-century version of Men in Black. Against the steady tread of an orchestral fugato these two guardians intone in octaves the chorale melody Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh’ darein. In this way the music calls on God to look down from heaven and be merciful while the MIBs sing, ‘He who wanders these streets deeply troubled will become pure through fire, water, air and earth.’

  This captures pretty well my mood as I escape the Dorchester and walk in the direction of Marylebone High Street and Derek’s flat. ‘Deeply troubled’ is about right. When Adrian and I had planned our prank with the CD up at Le Roccie it never occurred to me that my future and fortune could ever depend on writing a final book for Millie Cleat. It’s clear the prank has worked all too well. Not only has Millie been taken in, she seems entirely to have lost her marbles over it. I’ve never seen anything as preposterous as this superannuated old sailswoman standing there wearing a rubber dress and a false arm with fish in it, playing Queen o’ the Fathoms while acolytes read out nonsense masquerading as revelation. Bad as i
t was working with Millie in her role as everybody’s beloved sporting granny, it would be inconceivable to work with her in her newly transfigured state. A literary whore I may be, but even whores need to draw the line somewhere. So what began as a prosecco-fuelled joke has turned into an instance of Samper shooting himself in the foot or even, taking a cue from the Great Mother herself, in the bottom.