He stood by the fire, the passport in his hands open, mumbling to himself the liturgy of its shards of autobiography. There were still so many blank pages of travelling Enderby to be filled, and they would not now be filled. He must appear, he thought, like some Zoroastrian missionary to these who skirted him warily in robes and yashmaks: murmuring a late afternoon office to the fire. And then, as he prepared to drop the well-bound document in, the act was, as by an Oriental miracle, arrested. A bony tanned wrist gripped his chubbier whiter one, pulled, saved. Enderby looked from wrist to shoulder, meekly surprised. Then up to face above that. A white man, though brown. Lined, crafty, the eyes blue but punished. The straight hair as though bleached.
‘I was,’ said Enderby with care, ‘just getting rid of it. No further use, if you catch my meaning.’
‘You cracked? You skirted? You got the big drop on? Grandmother of Jesus, I never seen.’ The man was not old. His accent and vernacular were hard to place. It was a sort of British colonial accent. One hand still gripped Enderby’s wrist; the other hand snatched the passport. The man then let go of Enderby and began to pant over the passport as if it were a small erotic book. ‘Holy consecrated grandad of Christ Jesus Amen,’ he said. ‘And this is you too on it and the whole thing donk and not one little bit gritty. The genuine, and you ready to ash it up. If you don’t want it, others as do. A right donk passy. Feel his uncle, O bastard daughters of Jerusalem.’
Enderby almost smiled, then felt cunning creeping along his arteries. ‘I tried to sell it,’ he said. ‘But I could find no buyers. All I wanted was a trip to Tangier. No money, you see. Or not very much.’
‘You better come over,’ said the man. ‘Ariff ’s got a swizer of that-there at the back.’ And he led Enderby across to the very soft-drink stall that had been thumbed to him by that driver.
‘Funny,’ Enderby said. ‘This man who brought me wanted me to wait there or something. I wondered what for.’
‘Who? One of the cab-nogs? Ahmed, was it?’
‘Don’t know his name,’ said Enderby. ‘But I told him I had to get away.’
‘You on the out, then? How did he know it was tonight? Some shitsack’s been on the jabber.’ He mumbled strange oaths to himself as he led Enderby over. The drink-stall was a square wooden structure covered in striped canvas. There was a counter with cloudy glasses and bottles of highly coloured liquids. There were oil-lamps, blind at the moment, since the sun had not yet gone down. A few Moors or Berbers or something were downing some sticky yellow horror. Behind the counter stood a lithe brown man in an undervest, snakes of veins embossed on his arms. Crinkled hair rayed out, as in shock, all over his bullet-head. ‘Right,’ said this British colonial man, ‘swing us two bulgies of arry-arry.’
‘Where do you come from?’ asked Enderby. ‘I can’t quite place the accent. No offence,’ he added hurriedly.
‘None took. Name of Easy Walker. Call me Easy. Your name I know but I won’t blart it. Never know who’s flapping. Well now, you’ll have heard of West Rothgar in New Sunderland. Fifty or so miles from the capital, boojie little rathole. Had to blow, see the great wide open. And that. And other things.’ As if to symbolize the other things, he stretched his left mouth-corner, as also the left tendon of his neck, and held the pose tremulously. This, Enderby seemed to remember, was known as the ki-yike. Easy Walker then scratched his right ear with Enderby’s passport and said: ‘You sound to me like from back.’ Enderby stared. Easy Walker snarled a full set in impatience. ‘Great Dirty Mum,’ he explained. ‘How shall we extol thee?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Who were born of thee,’ danced Easy Walker. ‘Here it is, then. Down the upbum or,’ he said, in a finicking uncolonial accent, ‘the superior arsehole.’ There were on the counter two tumblers of what looked like oily water. Easy Walker seemed to wrap his lips round the glass-rim and, with a finger-thud on the glass-bottom, drive the substance down as though it were corned beef hard to prise from its container. He smacked in loving relish. Enderby tasted what tasted of aniseed, lubricator, meths, and the medicinal root his stepmother had called ikey-pikey. ‘Similar,’ Easy Walker told the barman. ‘And now,’ to Enderby, ‘what’s on? Why you on the out, brad?’
‘You can’t really say “similar” if it’s the same again you want. “Similar” means something different. Oh, as for that,’ Enderby recalled himself from pedantry that reminded him poignantly of those good seaside days among the decrepit, ‘it’s partly a matter of a woman.’
‘Ark.’ Easy Walker was not impressed.
‘And,’ Enderby bid further, ‘the police are after me for suspected murder of a pop-star.’
‘You do it?’
‘Well,’ said Enderby, ‘I had the means and the motive. But I want to get to Tangier to see off an old enemy. Time is of the essence.’
This seemed reasonable to Easy Walker. He said: ‘See that. Right right. Gobblers watching at the airport and on the shemmy. Clever bastard that cab-nog, then. Ahmed, must have been. Well,’ he said, fanning Enderby with Enderby’s passport, ‘give me this and you can come on the lemon-pip by the long road. Fix you up in Tangey up the hill. No questions, get it? The gobblers leave it strictly on the old antonio. Wash me ends, though. Right up to you, brad. Never clapped mincers on you, get it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Enderby said. ‘Thank you very much. But,’ he added, ‘what are you on then, eh?’
‘Well,’ said Easy Walker, rolling his refilled tumbler. ‘It’s mostly Yank camps, junkies, had-no-lucks. See what I mean?’
‘American troops in Morocco?’ Enderby asked.
‘Riddled,’ said Easy Walker. ‘All off the main, though. Forts, you could call them. Very hush. Moscow gold in Nigeria I mean Algeria. PX stuff – fridges mainly – for Casablanca and Tangey. That’s why I’ve got this three-ton.’
‘A lorry? Where?’
‘Up the road. Never you mind.’
‘But,’ said Enderby with care, ‘what are you doing here, then?’
‘Well, that’s the real soft centre,’ Easy Walker said. ‘See these niggers here? Not the Marockers, more brown they are than the others, the others being from more like real blackland.’
‘The heart of darkness,’ said Enderby.
‘Call it what you like, brad. Berbers or Barbars. Barbar black shit, but no offence is what I tell them. They bring the stuff up with them for this here racketytoo.’
‘What stuff? What is all this, anyway?’
‘Everything,’ said Easy Walker, with sudden lucidity, ‘the heart of darkness could desire. Tales of Ali Baba and Sinbad the whatnot, and snake-charmers and all. Suffering arsehole of J. Collins, the sprids they get up to in this lot. Hear them drums?’
‘Go on,’ said Enderby.
Easy Walker did a mime of sucking in dangerous smoke and then staggered against the flimsy counter. The barman was lighting the lamps. ‘Pounds and pounds of it, brad. I’m like telling you this because you won’t gob. Daren’t, more like, in your state of you-know-what. They grind up the seeds and nuts and it burns cold, real cold, like sucking ice-lollies. The Yank junks go bonko for it.’
‘Drug addicts,’ questioned Enderby, ‘in army camps?’
‘Drag too,’ said Easy Walker calmly. ‘Human like you and I, aren’t they? Loving Aunt Flo of our bleeding Saviour, ain’t you seen the world? What you on normal, brad? What you do?’
‘I,’ said Enderby, ‘am a poet. I am Enderby the poet.’
‘Poetry. You know the poetry of Arthur Sugden, called Ricker Sugden because he played on the old rickers?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Enderby.
‘I know him all off. You can have the whole sewn-up boogong tonight on the road.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Enderby said. ‘What time do we start?’
‘Moon-up. Crounch first. You crounch with me. Little stoshny I got up this street of a thousand arseholes. Up above Hassan the hundred delights. Know what those are? Glycerine like toffees wit
h popseeds, stickjaw that’ll stick to your jaw, shishcakes and marhum. And I mean a thousand arseholes. Not my creed. Yours?’
‘I don’t like anything any more,’ Enderby said. ‘I just want to get on with the job.’
‘Right, too. Ah, here comes the jalooty.’ A sly black man came in. He grinned first then peered behind as he thought he feared he was being followed. He had a woolly cap on, a knee-length clout done up like a diaper, a stiff embroidered coat with food-stains on it. He carried a grey darned gunnysack. Easy Walker tucked away Enderby’s passport in the breast-pocket of his shirt, then from the back-pocket of his long but creaseless canvas trousers he pulled out a wallet. ‘This,’ he told Enderby, ‘is as it might be like my agent. Abu.’ The black man responded to his name with a kind of salivation. ‘Mazooma for pozzy, as my dad used to say. Died at Gallipoli, poor old reticule. It’s my Aunt Polly as told me he used to say that. Never clapped mincers on him myself. Abu grabs what per cent he has a fish-hook on. Leave it to him.’ To this Abu Easy Walker told out what appeared to Enderby to be no more than fifty dirhams. Then he took the gunnysack and shushed Abu off like a fly. ‘Now then,’ he said, his hand on Enderby’s arm, leading him out of the flared and oil-lamped sinister gaiety of the evening, ‘time for the old couscous. You like couscous?’
‘Never had it,’ said Enderby.
‘The best one of Ricker Sugden’s,’ said Easy Walker, as they walked among baskets and moonfruit in the reek of lights, ‘is The Song of the Dunnygasper. You not know that one, brad?’
‘What,’ asked Enderby, ‘is a dunnygasper?’ A youngish woman raised her yashmak and spat a fair gob among chicken-innards. Two children, one with no left leg, punched each other bitterly.
‘A dunnygasper is a bert that cleans out a dunny. Now, the pongalorum of a dunny is that bad that you’d lay out a yard in full view if you drew it in in the way of normality. So he has to like under water hold his zook shut then surface for a gasp. You see that then?’ An old man with a bashed-in turban tottered by, crying some prayer to the enskied archangels of Islam. Easy Walker started to recite:
‘Gasping in the dunny in the dead of dark,
I dream of my boola-bush, sunning in the south,
And the scriking of the ballbird and Mitcham’s lark,
And bags of the sugarwasp, sweet in my mouth.’
‘That’s not bad,’ said Enderby. ‘Not much meaning, though.’ Meaning? Too much meaning in your poetry, Enderby. Archdevil of the maceration of good art for pop-art. Kill, kill, kill. He could be calm at soul, whatever justice said.
‘For here in the city is the dalth of coves,
Their stuff and their slart and the fall of sin,
The beerlout’s spew where the nightmort roves
And the festered craw of the filth within.’
A moustached man, the veins of his head visible under a dark nap, called hoarsely at Enderby and, with flapping hands, showed small boys in little shirts lined up behind the lamp in his shop-front. A woman squatted on a step and scooped with a wooden spatula the scum from a seething pot on a pungent wood-fire.
‘That drink,’ belched Enderby, ‘whatever it was, was not a good idea.’
‘Feel like a sack of tabbies when you’ve gooled up a pompey of couscous.’
Graaarch, went Enderby. Perfwhitt.
‘God’s own grass for this porrow in my tail,
Surrawa’s lake for this puke and niff,
Prettytit’s chirp for the plonky’s nipper’s wail,
And the rawgreen growler under Bellarey’s Cliff.’
‘Rawcliffe,’ growled green Enderby. ‘It won’t (errrrgh) be long now.’
Easy Walker stopped in his tracks. A beggar clawed at him and he cleaned the beggar off his shirt like tobacco ash. ‘You say Rawcliffe, brad? Rawcliffe the jarvey you bid to chop?’
‘Plagiarist, traitor (orrrph), enemy.’
‘Runs a little beacho. Called the Acantilado something-or-the-next-thing. Not far from the Rif. Not there now, though. Very crookidy. Quacks pawing him all over on the Rock.’
‘In Gibraltar? Rawcliffe? Ill?’
‘Crookidy dook. He’ll be back, though. Says if he’s going to snuff he’ll snuff in his own dung.’
‘Rawcliffe,’ said Enderby, ‘is (orrrf ff) for me.’
‘We’re there,’ said Easy Walker. ‘Up that rickety ladder. Niff that juicy couscous. Yummiyum. Then we hit it. Moon’s up, shufti.’ Enderby saw it with bitterness. Miss Boland seemed to rage down from it.
‘This jarvey Rawcliffe,’ said Easy Walker, leading the way up the ladder, ‘is some big kind of a jarvey. Big in films and that. You sure you know what you’re on, brad?’
‘I (arrrp) know,’ said Enderby, following him up. A fresh beggar, wall-eyed, embraced his left leg passionately, shrieking for alms. Enderby kicked him off.
Part Two
1
1
ALI FATHI SAT ON the other bed and pared his footsoles with a table-knife honed to lethal sharpness on the window-sill. He was on the run from Alexandria, which he called Iskindiriyya, and was scornful of the Moors, whose language he considered debased. He himself spoke a sort of radio announcer’s Arabic, full of assertive fishbone-in-the-throat noises and glottal checks that sounded like a disease. He was very thin, seemed to grow more and more teeth as time went on, and was always talking about food. ‘Beed madruub,’ he said to Enderby now. He had a passion for eggs. ‘Beeda masluugha.’ Enderby said, from his own bed:
‘Mumtaaz.’ He was learning, though not very quickly. It was hardly worth while to learn anything new. Soon, he saw, he must give up giving money to Wahab to buy the English newspapers that were sold on the Boulevard Pasteur. They were a terrible price, and money was fast running out. When the hell was Rawcliffe going to come back to be killed? He read once more the latest Yod Crewsy news. It could not be long now, they reckoned. Yod Crewsy was in a coma. Day and night vigils of weeping fans outside the hospital. Stones hurled at windows of No. 10 Downing Street. Probability of National Day of Prayer. Mass of Intercession at Westminster Cathedral. In Trafalgar Square protest songs, some of them concerned with the Vietnam war. Attempted suttee of desperate girls in a Comprehensive School.
‘Khanziir.’ That was not right, Ali Fathi being a Muslim, but Enderby himself would not have minded a nice plate of crisply grilled ham. His diet, and that of Ali Fathi and the other two men, Wahab and Souris, was very monotonous: soup of kitchen scraps and rice, boiled up by fat Napo in the snack-bar below, the odd platter of fried sardines, bread of the day before yesterday. Enderby was now sorry that he had exchanged his passport for a mere jolting trip from Marrakesh to Tangier. He had discovered that British passports fetched a very high price on the international market. Why, this Ali Fathi here had looked at Enderby as if he were mad when he had been told, in French, what small and uncomfortable (as well as to him hazardous) service in lieu of money Enderby had been willing to take in exchange for a valuable document. If he, Ali Fathi, had it he would not be here now. He would be in Marseilles, pretending to be an Arabic-speaking Englishman.
‘Beed maghli.’ He was back on eggs again. Well, that valuable document, with its old identity razor-bladed and bleached out and new substituted, was now at its charitable work in the world of crime and shadiness. It was saving somebody from what was called justice. It could not, nor could its former guardian (Her Majesty’s Government being the avowed owner, though it had not paid for it) ask better than that. Enderby nodded several times. Encouraged, Ali Fathi said:
‘Bataatis mahammara.’ That meant, Enderby knew now, potato crisps. An inept term, soggy-sounding. It had been, Enderby admitted to himself, a boring trip on the move under the moon (courtesy of Miss treacherous bloody Boland), with Easy Walker reciting the collected works of Arthur Sugden, called Ricker Sugden because he had used, when composing his verses, to clash out the rhythm with the castanetting bones once a percussive staple of nigger, christy rather, minstrel shows. Easy Walker had giv
en Enderby not only a reprise of The Song of the Dunnygasper but also The Ballad of Red Mick the Prancerprigger, The Shotgun Wedding of Tom Dodge, Willie Maugham’s Visit to Port Butters, My Pipe and Snout and Teasycan, and other specimens of the demotic literature of an apparently vigorous but certainly obscure British settlement.
‘Kurumba.’ Some vegetable or other, that. Cabbage, probably. And then these American camps, off the main north-south motor route, with torches flashing through the Moorish dark, a rustling in the shadows and whispers as of love (money and goods changing hands), the loading – Enderby cajoled to help – of refrigerators, huge cans of butter, nitrited meatloaf, even military uniforms, all on to Easy Walker’s truck. And then more of Ricker Sugden – The Ditty of the Merry Poddyman, Wallop for Me Tomorrow Boys, Ma Willis’s Knocking Shop (Knock Twice and Wink for Alice) – till the next call and, finally, what Easy Walker knew as Dear Old Tangey. Well, Easy Walker had at least found him what seemed a safe enough retreat off the Rue El Greco (many of the streets here were named for the great dead, as though Tangier were a figure of heaven) – no passports needed, no questions asked of guests or tolerated of casual visitors to bar below or brothel above, but, on the other hand, too much cash demanded in advance, too little to eat, the bedclothes never changed, not enough beds.
The Complete Enderby Page 34
