Shaving a block and rolling up, long white scrivener’s fingers, the uninhibited exercise of skill; Nicholas Lane at home. The slats were down. Kernan in, hand out to grab the toke. The world at his elbow, heavy street door wide to the night, chains dangling impotent.
‘I’d like to examine that Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir. A Study in Scarlet. If you have it, Sir. If you can put your hand on it.’
Nicholas Lane is putting his hand on J. B. Priestley, his veterinarian finger wriggling into its rectum, sure that there is just one more scrape left.
Quinn hovered, twitched, a shadow, skin tight, eyes swollen from the operation. Mind flicking on/off; the blackouts better than the rest. Nothing, man? It’s great! Pains of light. Hitching up his trousers, he’s so much thinner, are these his trousers anyway?
The phone drills in on them. Sort it out. Howard Omega. All the good books hidden in the bed, family decamped, the Scotchman might have been casing the place. ‘Nice mirror you’ve got there, son, worth much is it? Get a few quid down the Lane for those dolls.’ Pointing to the blackened fetish objects. Who point back at him, phallic blasphemy, point him out.
Nicholas Lane takes Mr Klamm into the back room, a trail, beneath lethal towers of books, slippery canyons, lightless, towards the bed, peels back the sheets. Klamm does not blanch, sniffing his goal. Lane rummages, looking for the flimsy text among scattered 3-deckers, limited editions, movables.
Phone drills again, a delivery. Can Lane hold? Omega. On Suk’s behalf. Just for a couple of hours. Few mates will come round and collect. Worth an ounce or two.
As Omega walks towards the street-door, gets his foot on the step, the unmarked, but highly visible, squadcar jerks away. It could have been post-coital anguish, the seams of Policewoman Dudley’s sheer black stockings raked in a savage zigzag, takeaway chinese, hand job – or it might have been a remark. A misplaced compliment. Flushed tyres.
Omega, in his skull cage, saw nothing.
At last J. Leper-Klamm has the grail in his hands, it answers him, his life spills, everything connects. He transubstantiates; he is translated. The pages bleach to glass. The words float in sheets of crystal air. Released. Forming and reforming. ‘Deep in the enemy’s country… Nothing but misfortune and disaster… I was struck… shattered the bone… I should have fallen… worn with pain…’ Icy intimations freeze Klamm’s shirt to his back.
‘Have you settled a price, Sir, for this item? That might be agreeable, Sir, to all parties concerned.’
‘Eight thousand, five hundred,’ Lane added a quick five hundred, seeing Omega divide up the ounces on the threadbare turkey carpet.
‘Would a cheque be satisfactory, Sir?’ said Klamm, patting his pockets, not quite sure if the sum mentioned might not be lurking there, from his last trip to the off-licence.
Lane put a pen in his hand and for the first time in recorded history lifted his beret to mop his scalp.
The door to the room floated inwards like a vertical raft. Something was wrong; it was like looking up at a raft from under the water, some kind of distortion. It returned to the horizontal plane, crushing Omega’s uplifted arm. Quinn was swearing when an axe-handle caught him in the mouth, taking out three of his upper teeth, cleanly, painlessly, with some bits of a few more. He spat blood. Stared at it, hanging from his hand.
‘Get your faces into the floor. Bastards. I want all the stuff you’ve got. All of it.’
There were three of them, black stocking masks, rhino faced: two with axe-handles, the third had an axe-handle with axe attached.
They kicked over the straw laundry basket and pulled the heads off the children’s toys. They smashed up the glass-fronted cabinet. They took all the packets, powders, resins, cash. They destroyed sensationalist, surrealist, gothic, hermetic, lyric and domestic literature, with a fine lack of distinction. They also gave Nicholas Lane a bit of a kicking, staving in a couple of ribs and detaching a kidney. He’d been too busy to vomit for the last week: there was plenty to untank now. Brown and sour and smelling of death.
They took the pamphlet out of Leper-Klamm’s hands and tore it to shreds. If any other collector had been holding a copy it would, at that instant, have doubled in value. Nobody else was. That tunnel into time was sealed.
Perversely, at that precise moment, it flashed into the narrator’s mind that the name of the man who introduced Watson to Holmes was Stamford. So close to the name of the town where their book had been found.
The heavies settled themselves, took a blow, with a vodka bottle, and waited for the yelp of the hungry phone. They knew the whole operation. Omega is made to answer every call. Every mark is told to come on round and to bring the bread.
They arrive, get their heads banged, pockets cut, skewered face down to the floorboards. After a couple of hours the chaps are holding in excess of four thousand pounds. And all the stuff. A human carpet of fowl pluckings.
The phone insisted one last time; a punter looking for anything by Fredric Brown. The man with the axe took the instrument from the wall and wrapped it around Omega’s neck. ‘I think it’s for you, John.’ Was his parting quip. They were gone.
It could have been a mob from the Brewery, sharp-end boys, down on hippie trash, could have been connections of the Scotchman, could have been a double-cross by Suk, dumping some dud stuff, could have been furies from the ether, constructed out of their own paranoia, but whoever it was they wore well-polished black boots, with thick rubber soles, and blue shirts with size 17 collars.
When the worst has happened, and all your fears are confirmed, there is a momentary sense of great calm and well-being. Sometimes.
15
Break the skin, Quality Chop House, 94 Farringdon Road, Progressive Working Class Caterer; break the skin down the length of the sausage, split the pink sizzling meat, gristle and fear. Gathering the strength for an assault on the book stalls. Comfortable within this old wood booth, hands around a mug of tea; mindless detachment. Gone back.
From the street there is nothing to be seen. No other use of this time.
Inside the booth, showing solidarity with the workers by eating their sausage sandwiches, you commissars of Stoke Newington, dipping the damp white bread in a gush of crimson vinegar. Squatting on a line of power, aligned, for once, with the drift of the city. Down with the water, from the ponds, the caves of Pentonville, rush with the Fleet, beside its ditch, swept with the dead dogs towards Thames. The domes of Old Bailey and St Paul’s, the hulls of tenements, the office hulks. Everything in the end floats to Farringdon Road, deaths and libraries, sacks and tea-chests, confessions, testaments. The mysteries are shredded and priced. They are offered to the guided hand.
Fed, he plunges. In on a curve, the wall pulls, a knobbled blanket, galloping wave-pattern of the eye, buildings broken up, wide-horizon seizure, sweeping from Saffron Hill to Smithfield and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, rail track gleams below, a dead ladder. Now there are eyes in the back of the head, in the neck, the skin is clairvoyant, hysterical sharpness of nerve: touch is sight. The rippling wall threatens the eye. Eye bleeds into holistic awareness. All of the previous is there with him, he approaches himself, overtaking, rushing in, pain memories. The stalls are sheeted, roped. A lumpy bonehouse.
The MORNING STAR faces east: dim building titled to power. Red lettering, under the float of dust, making a sign but not a word. Low pulse red, receding. Where have you gone, Bill Sherman? Razor’d strips of cloud float in glass: postmortem windows.
The dealers huddle, converse in whispers. Slide a hand along the wall and penetrate the dome of Wren’s machine, whale-melon vibrating in thought-star with other leviathans of the city, to swim back up Thames, the great churches, in a moment of Apocalypse, drowning human frenzy.
The rag-bundle punters connect themselves to the roped tables, secret gases, pulped trees, socks, bones, melted pine veins; vortices of hope ignite. A Siberian railway platform. Clatter of wooden voices.
As he moves, move easy, a pillar of raised du
st settles into his heated absence, shadow pools soak his blistered feet. To make this wide sky London workable and safe. To take it on and make it interior. Set it in rain jungle, swallow it in vegetation, break the stones that they emerge again as calcium in the teeth of carnivorous animals. To take the buildings into the blood: as salt. This is his vision. The man becomes the building, the building floats free, shattering into other older structures, into fields of uninterrupted water.
The old men zone in on the tables. They are fierce and muted. They are driven back, abused, by the stallholder in his barber’s jacket, benevolent, tufty headed; as if with pockets of condoms to distribute, with ultimate pornographic secrets. The supplicants are forced against the wall, rubbing their coats on the brickwork, so that when the signal is given they will be propelled with greater velocity towards the naked rubble of books, their dole of half-calf. The skins of odd volumes itching to be consumed again in the cattlepens of Smithfield.
Without preamble I am seized by one of the old ones, not looking into my face, beside me, the tale that must be told, no rest from it. A trembling compulsion; not exorcism, mantraic keen-song. Over and over and over again, the argument of words: soothed, neutralised. I am witness, eyes set on the heap of books, leashed in, waiting. The story poured over me, bones in mud.
His uncle, yes, locked away now, many years, safe, a madhouse in the Surrey hills. Gestures, vaguely, with arm of raincoat lifted above the city, something blue and beyond. The uncle is freed for this time; while he is spoken of, he is with us. He hangs from the old man’s mouth in white beads of spittle.
The uncle in uniform had been one of the first into Belsen. Not believing: it changed everything. The smell, hanging for miles, of death. Solicitor; new pips, cap badge, pipe, polished spectacles. Whether he became something new, or whether that experience simply cut out some spectre that was always within him, is unknown.
The full-stomached officer is suddenly confronted with a vision of hell. The stench. The ground that had been blasted for ever by a mad vision, the essence of a whole people potentised, ashes cast on the wind, cursing the earth, seeding it with bone and desolate fear, taking it from use; divorced, alienated, made terrible.
He split his life. Brittle, but still functioning, he appeared on Saturdays at Farringdon Road, shabby, a fouled raincoat. Books were his world. He combed the stalls, looking for guidance, diving at Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Stein’s World History in the Light of the Holy Grail, Faust, The Rig-Veda, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsival. He hoarded, annotated, quested. Snatched at discarded pamphlets, crawled under the wheels to scrape the dirt from loose signatures of The Psychic Review.
His obsession could no longer be fed in a single day. He disappeared, went under. Now he stood in rags, coat tied with string; now came the dreams of the lance and the cup. Wet hair hung over his face. He haunted the backrooms of theological book-suppliers with doubtful political allegiances.
And then it was done. He was gone. Back to the grove of cherry blossom: a fully-convinced Nazi. The Reich of the Final Days. He went right over. But it was secret. At first there was almost nothing to see. The theatre was gradual: black Mercedes, leather gloves, wire spectacles. Violent gestures offered to wife and family. Perversions of the cupboard. The chemical form was morphine addiction. Let it soak into what he had become, tinting his memory. He preserved and sharpened his surface routine. Until the panic spider broke through and the scream became hot metal in his throat, guttural commands stuttered in his mouth; he howled bunkers, ash, suit soaked with urine. A fist-sized microphone pressed under his chin. At the mercy of his voices. An unborn head forcing his teeth apart. Heavy velour curtains drape it, shut out the quiet suburban street.
The stallholder nods, the word is given, we tumble forward. The punters shovel up all the books their arms can hold, stacking them against the wall. Ransack the shreds of dead lives. Golden Dawn texts were found here. The Magical Revival began with planted documents. There are bricks of gold to be found beneath the tattered dross. They dig with nail and elbow. If you pause, you are lost. See yourself and it is gone forever. Too late. The hunger is dead with me.
I pick up a worn booklet in buff wrappers, from the pavement, lettered in red and blue, Longmans, 1886, Fifth Edition, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I walk away.
Dr Loew drove a Buick and had twin sons. It was a matter of routine for all of them on Saturday mornings to visit the Farringdon Road stalls. Like many medical men he bought books, he collected them, shelved them and one day issued a catalogue and found himself a bookdealer.
Eye-specialists favoured the stalls, gut men preferred the monthly fairs at the Russell Hotel, soothed by a sense of regularity, psychiatrists stuck with jumble sales: one wretched GP, exiled in Brondesbury Park, hoarded nothing but publishers’ advance proof copies, shelf upon shelf of pink and pale blue unlettered spines, ghosts that would never become books.
Dr Loew’s boys pelted each other with loose bricks from the wall, while the doctor, distracted, paced the line, examining the inert volumes, and waiting for his receptionist to announce them.
A deal was struck: in return for nothing very much the doctor agreed to conduct me into the London Hospital Medical College Museum to view the skeleton and cast of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. Joblard would accompany us, with his leather bag and his sketch book.
Altruism today is beardless: above the turn of the stairs, the portrait of Sir Frederick Treves. Above a successful moustache, he hangs in oil. Fist on hip, a table of subservient bone fragments, paper in his hand, watchchain like an anchor. He stares us out.
Treves’ simple act of charity had to be explained. Fiction was its truth. There were errors in the account he gave: the names of streets faltered, time flowing always in the direction of decay, improving upon a clumsy excess of detail. The truth can only be remade out of lies. What horror! A life struck out of pure invention.
His monster was found, crouching, heated by a single warmed brick. Was taken in. Other freaks were also received: you will not read their stories. They are still there. Bottles in the pathology lab, abortions floating in sympathetic oils. Their life: a circle of blinded eyes.
The story of the Elephant Man rushes at you. You cannot avoid it. Ganesa of the Last Days, Elephant Head. The place was prepared.
The chamber was ready. The unfulfilled man stalked the streets. He did not ride, contained in his hansom, like that eminence, Gull, static, stone presence, lifted above the road, seated, hands among grapes, prayer wheels spinning, repeating, infecting and sealing the padded leather space. He did not hack through victimology to the oracle. But he was after the same cup. The doctors were all tuned to the millennial flare, the century dying, the erosion of imperial certainties.
He went into the streets, into the warrens, rat holes, spikes, spielers, caves: strolling with horror.
By the collaboration of the four, Aysch, Mayim, Ruach, Aphar, was made the Golem of the fourth element. Red clay of the brickfields, complete in all his members, laid out in the field of Matfellon, in that absence, where a church had been.
Treves walking seven times through the labyrinth, from right to left, so the body grew dark, red like fire. Treves again, returning into the spiral, from left to right, seven times, around the body, through Lion Yard, Old Montague, Bakers, Buxton, Spicers, Brick, Hanbury, Great Garden, so that the redness was extinguished, and water flowed through the clay, hair sprouted, nails grew. Then Treves placed in its mouth a piece of parchment, with the secret name; he bowed to the East and the West, the South and the North, reciting the words of the ritual. He blew breath into its nostrils and the Golem opened his eyes.
At daybreak Treves addressed his creature: ‘Know that we have formed thee from a clod of earth. Thou shalt be called Joseph and thou shalt lodge within my house.
‘Thou, Joseph, must obey my commands, when and whither I may send thee – in fire or water; or if I command you to jump from the houset
op, or if I send thee to the bed of the sea!’
The chamber was prepared and the creature secured. And then it began. You can call it benevolence. You can call it good will. But that is to curse it and make it nothing.
Treves wanted a reverse alchemy. He wanted to take gold and turn it to dross. He found a being composed of radical waters, a liquid thing swimming in its own inks, lost from the light. He took it up into the cape of myth. Its world was of his making. He made himself God.
But, equally, Merrick controlled him; appearing in the seductive guise of pure deformity. Making Treves vampire; returning compulsively. Visits by day and night. Arrangements.
Treves had the Elephant Man fed on powdered gold. Gold salts had proved effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis. Was there a gold toxicity? Adverse reaction? Rashes? Bone marrow depression? Homeopathy. Physiological Physic. Treating like with like. Treating light with stronger light. Treating darkness with death. Blood dyserasias. Gold stored in the tissue for prolonged periods.
Gold salts on his porridge. The pore sweats. The chamber-pot removed, the stool examined. To turn light to base matter. The flesh made word. The golden homunculus steams. The worm. But the excrement is pure. The excitement is dry. He puts powder to his nose. It is odourless. The creature himself stiffens, a volume of letters on the table, runs his fine hand against his cheek. Rooms bright with ornaments and pictures. Is become an exhibit again: a sun statue dying in autumn windows.
Merrick was destroyed by his deliverance, taken in out of his own distress and panic, rescued; he became a footnote in the myth of Treves. He was the animal part. His own energy withdrawn and stripped. He was the exhibition of Treves’ sanctity, he changed his impresario from the Silver King to the Surgeon. He was secured. He came in off the road.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 9
