Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  Praise for GOG

  “Sureness of talent, intelligence, sophistication, energy, charm, wit, wild and lyric imagination.”

  Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times

  “This randy romp of images, prophetic, paradoxical, perverse, seems more a cross-section of the national unconsciousness than any novel can properly be . . . it will bear comparison with the most serious attempts to get at the matter of Britain. Sinclair is still warming up. We can confidently expect things of him that none of his contemporaries are capable of.”

  Robert Nye, The Guardian

  “A marvellous book. It is a thoroughly exhilarating, freewheeling performance full of panache, effortlessly contained history, and spilling over with scenes that are impossible to forget.”

  Daily Telegraph

  “Gog is written in the present tense but the atmosphere is medieval. It’s a Gothic fairy tale, all angles and distortions and devils in hobnailed boots; it’s a Norse mythology, full of giants with clubs and coalscuttle heads; it’s Druidic, Powysian, supernatural, the history of Albion, all her sons and daughters, all the rot and rain, all the pestilence, the horror, the dread and the delight bubbling up and erupting and resurrecting itself in the here and now, bursting out of the past as Gog tramps through the living land trying to fathom who he is. The book sears and scalds, it’s the vision of a cold, planetary eye, and somehow it all founders in the end, goes mad like a cancer and finally smashes in a blind fury of destruction. I’m still reeling. I think there’s genius in it.”

  Philip Callow, Books and Bookmen

  “It is an immense, sprawling, rambling, feverish hot-house of myth and gross vitality and confusion and fierce imaginative nightmare.”

  Northern Echo

  “The product of a very gifted imagination . . . brutal, beautiful, terrifying . . . an ambitious and extremely interesting book.”

  Glasgow Herald

  “A bustling, learned, feverish novel . . . a vivid nightmare with quiet interludes . . . full of energy, power, lust and humour. It sticks in the mind.”

  Oxford Mail

  “The author’s comic gifts and the novel’s core sincerity about themes which really matter make Gog well worth reading.”

  Minneapolis Tribune

  Also Available by Andrew Sinclair

  The Raker

  The Facts in the Case of E. A. Poe

  GOG

  A NOVEL BY

  ANDREW SINCLAIR

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1967

  First American edition published by Macmillan in 1967

  First Valancourt Books edition 2015

  Copyright © 1967 by Andrew Sinclair

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover by Henry Petrides

  To MAGOG

  MAY HE ROT

  Prologue

  The naked man lies on the sand spit between the two legs of sea. The waves well up the spit and wash the body of the man, who is nearly seven feet long. He is prone on his stomach, his face turned sideways, his mouth agape with scum running out of his gullet to join the backwash of the water. Long strands of seaweed foul him, dark as drying blood. One string of rubbery bubbled weed winds round his waist and drags back towards the sea. The man does not seem to breathe at all.

  On the beach below the cliffs, two soldiers are strolling, their tin hats in their hands. Seeing the body they run forwards. They hoick the man over and pull him by the legs up the beach a little way; they can hardly drag him for his huge weight. Then one soldier squats on the man’s chest and pushes down on his ribs, while the other raises and lowers the man’s arms. Water and green bile spew out of the man’s mouth, he gags horribly. The soldiers release him and prop him forwards, his head between his knees. One of the soldiers thumps his back. The man throws up more water, then, with a retch, he groans, the tears rolling down his cheeks from the salt behind his closed eyelids. The soldier at his back jerks his thumb at the other soldier, who begins stumbling away across the beach towards the cliffs. The soldier who stays by the naked man watches him for a little while. Then he goes over to the edge of the sea and makes a bowl of his tin hat and squats to fill it with sea and carries it back and begins to wipe off the weed from the flesh of the naked man. He works thoroughly, with the man moaning from time to time at the sting of salt on his grazes and cuts.

  When the soldier finishes with wiping off the weed, he takes a packet of Woodbine cigarettes out of his pocket, flicks the bottom of the packet with his thumbnail so that the tips of two cigarettes jump upwards, and offers the packet to the naked man. But the man does not see the soldier’s gesture. He is hunched forwards, his fingers twined together in one fist which rests on his closed kneecaps, while his forehead in its turn rests upon his locked hands. Above his forehead, a small and bloody hollow pocks his right temple. He breathes heavily and unevenly, occasionally coughing out a mixture of bile and seawater.

  “Did you hit a mine on that Yank convoy?” the soldier asks, getting no answer. So he smokes and looks out to sea, as though the reply lies on the stretch of waves which have delivered the naked stranger. From time to time, he studies the bowed figure of the middle-aged man beside him, whose belly is already beginning to drag down the skin on his ribs. Twice more, the soldier opens his mouth to speak, but he closes his lips and says nothing. Eventually, he smokes his cigarette down to its end, until the stub burns the tips of his thumb and forefinger and middle finger, which hold the cigarette in a triangle of flesh pointing inwards at his palm. He throws the stub away towards the sea and squats to examine the naked man closely.

  Something on the back of the left hand of the man interests the soldier, who leans forward onto his knees to study the mark. It is a tattoo of blue lines in the form of a fence round three letters that are half-hidden by the man’s cheek, so that the soldier cannot read them. But the soldier sees that each side of the fence is pricked out in a sheaf of wheat, while the top of the fence is formed by a sickle.

  “What’s that you got there?” the soldier says, but the naked man does not give a reply.

  The soldier is puzzled. He looks back towards the cliffs; but there is no sign of the second soldier or of other rescuers. So he crawls on all fours round to the right of the naked man to see whether he can find further marks of identification. Nothing shows on the body or legs of the man except a thick covering of hair from the navel down; but, on the back of his right hand, there is another tattoo, this time of five half-hidden letters fenced at each side by a series of wheels joined with a lever and closed at the top by a frieze of crowns linked with a chain.

  “You all right?” the soldier asks, anxious to read the hidden letters.

  The naked man lifts up his head from his locked hands and turns his face towards the soldier. The soldier sees a long, square chin, cleft in the middle; spreading lips cracked with salt that fall slack to show bleeding gums and teeth jostling for place in a narrow jaw; a nose as pitted and spread as a labourer’s thumb; heavy cheeks which sit like two firm pats of butter between eye-sockets and jawbone; eyes bloodshot with exposure and slitted against the light; a jut of bone which pushes out black eyebrows and makes the forehead seem to slope backwards; brown hair plastered back against a knobbled skull with large ears slightly protruding and awry. The so
ldier has never seen such a strong face, outside films of Chicago thugs. He would avoid it in a bar.

  The naked man tries to say something, but he gags and coughs out more water. The soldier looks back to see rescuers in white overalls running with the second soldier across the sand. “They’re ’ere,” he says, and he sees that the naked man has spread out the single fist of his locked hands on his bent kneecaps. The man is studying the two tattoos, as he gulps in and chokes on the air. His eyelids are blinking continually and tears are running down his cheeks. The soldier leans over the bare right arm of the man to read the three letters tattooed between the square of the sheaves and the sickles; the letters spell GOG on the back of the man’s left hand. On the back of the man’s right hand, between the square of the levered wheels and chained crowns is spelt the word MAGOG. The soldier sees the intertwined fingers of the naked man arch and pull and wrestle each versus each, so that the blue letters of GOG and MAGOG move in the struggle of the two hands against one another . . .

  I

  White.

  A slab of white with two edges which meet in a corner where a lamp shines.

  A white ceiling and three white walls and a green door and a window covered with black-out curtains.

  The iron bars of the foot of a bed.

  A ridge under grey army blankets that must be a body.

  Hands on the white sheet with knuckles and blue veins standing out under black hairs and a blue tattoo on the left hand saying GOG and a blue tattoo on the right hand saying MAGOG.

  Each finger can be set to work and move and bend at the joints.

  A grey shirt over chest and shoulders and another set of iron bars behind at the head of the bed and a white wall at the back and a brown table at the side with a slop pan and a glass of water.

  Silence.

  The man places himself in the room. Then he begins to shiver. Perhaps he cannot leave the room. Perhaps the white ceiling will lower itself and the white walls will shrink and he will be crushed within a contracting box of white. Perhaps they will come in and tie him to the posts of the bed and ask him questions, day after day of questions, until he cannot even remember how to think for fear that he will never find an answer. Yes, they will come into the white room soon. Who?

  “Gog,” the man says, reading the back of his hands. “Magog.” Syllables roll thickly across his tongue like beads of quicksilver. The man feels the sounds slur over fat lips. He must move. He levers himself upright into a sitting position against the iron bars of the bedhead and pulls his legs out from under the sheets and sits on the edge of the bed. He finds that his grey nightshirt reaches to the middle of his thighs. He puts one sole delicately on the floor, then the other, slowly transferring his weight onto his feet. As he does so, he finds himself falling. He puts out his palms to take the shock. His elbows bend. He falls, prone and face down, on the green linoleum.

  He draws up his knees. He raises his chest off the floor by pressing down with his knuckles. He begins to crawl slowly in circles round the linoleum. Cold planes his knees, shaves his finger-bones. He reaches a leg of the bed. His hands climb up the bed-post, gripping. They pull his body upright as they climb. Soon the man is standing, leaning on the bed-rail. He is bent, but on two legs. He walks three short paces, leaning on the iron cross-bar. He turns and walks back three short paces. He repeats the action several times, now taking two longer paces, learning to move erect. Then he launches himself on two legs across the linoleum. He reaches the facing wall before falling. He leans, bowing against the wall. When he has breathed deeply a few times, he stumbles to the bed-rail. After ten journeys from rail to wall and back again, he has learned to walk without support. Now he can go over to the door, feeling only the dizziness of hunger in his belly and the salt of thirst in his mouth. His knees bend beneath him as he moves, but they do not buckle. He turns the handle of the door and looks out.

  In the long corridor, a single woman in a grey uniform with a white peak of linen on her head, walking away. When she is gone, the man follows her along the corridor, treading delicately on the green linoleum, keeping one hand on the wall to steady himself. When his hand reaches the recess of a doorway, it skips to the far side of the door for fear of making a noise inside the room that may be behind the wooden panel. Eventually, the man reaches a small stone staircase that leads downwards. He slowly descends on his bare feet, smelling cooking. He comes to a closed green swing door and hears voices. He stops. Seeing a cupboard to his right, he clambers inside it, crouching among brooms and brushes, closing the cupboard door nearly shut. He waits. The line of light along the edge of the wood soothes him. If he were enclosed in darkness, he would have to shout.

  He hears the voices coming closer, the sound of light-switches being snapped, hinges screeching and leather soles on the stone floor and stairs. The voices and steps pass and fade and vanish. The man emerges out of the cupboard and goes into the kitchen. In all its dark space, there is no person. A thin scattering of light from glazed gratings above is sown over the sinks and tables and bins, so that the man can see well enough to go across to a large box marked BREAD, take out a loaf and begin tearing off lumps with his teeth to swallow. The man eats two loaves of bread and a leg of cold lamb from the meat safe. He drinks two jugs of cold water. In a basket, he finds soiled clothes, including a large pair of stained white trousers and a khaki drill jacket, spotted with grease. He puts on the trousers and the jacket. They fit him tightly, except that his ankles and wrists protrude from the bottoms of the sleeves and the trouser legs.

  When the man has dressed, he puts a loaf in each pocket of his jacket and leaves the kitchen, opening the swing door carefully to prevent the hinges from squeaking. He creeps slowly back up the stairway to the corridor. He turns down the corridor, which is still empty, until he finds himself in a large hallway. A porter in a blue uniform, his face shiny and thin under his blue peaked cap, sits behind a desk beside the large glass entrance doors, now covered over with brown paper. The man, seeing that there is no way of avoiding the porter, walks quickly towards the doors.

  “Hey, you,” the porter says in a nasal voice, “you’re new, ain’t you?”

  The man halts in front of the desk, wanting to walk on, but fearful of raising a cry behind him. “Yes,” he says, “I’m new.” He looks into the porter’s eyes, one of which is clouded white and rolls outwards. So he looks down to the razor-blade in the porter’s hand, lying against the pencil it was sharpening.

  “I wouldn’t have your job,” the porter says. “Not for all the tea in China. Cooking. It’s bad enough having to eat it these days.” He leans forwards across the desk and gives a jerk of the head. “Bet you knock off a few spare rations, don’t you?”

  “Rations?” the man says, not understanding.

  “You’re a fly one,” the porter says. “Mary’s little lamb. You wouldn’t know there was a war on, would you?”

  “No,” the man says.

  “We may have beat old Hitler. But, you take my word for it, those Japs’ll take ten years to beat. It’s horrible what they do to you in the jungles.” The porter’s cloudy eye rolls with excitement while his good brown eye trembles. “Put splinters up your nails and light ’em. Worse too. Of course, it ain’t worse than what they do to you in here. They’ll cut off your foot, the surgeons, sooner than cure a blister. As for the doctors, they wouldn’t qualify as knackers.” He looks darkly to right and left. “I’ve seen ’em carried in and I’ve seen ’em carried out. And often you wouldn’t know they was the same person. We’ll have a lot more bodies here too, the bits the Japs have left of ’em. Ten years more war, I tell you. Ten years more of bloody rations. Ten more years of being posted up here so far North you have to kip with a penguin if you want a bit. Hurry on, VJ Day. Then I can get back to London from the Arctic Circle. It’s always better there than what it is elsewhere in Blighty. But I bet I starve before I get back home. I’ll even have to turn cook, won’t I, chum, to get a square meal?”

  �
�Yes,” the man says and turns to go.

  “Not very matey, are you?” the porter says, then he sees the loaves in the man’s pockets. “Oi, oi, whipping a bit of bread, are you? I should report you.”

  The man opens the glass doors, and, as he goes outside, he hears the porter saying, “You’ve forgot your boots. You’ll forget your bloody head next. Then where’ll you put your hat?”

  The man is out of the building and plunges into the pitch of the night city streets. The houses all have shaded windows; the lamp-posts give no light, but serve as bludgeons to those that must grope their way about. The man’s eyes soon adjust to the summer-bright dark, with the mackerel sky reflecting the last of the sun’s glow off its surface of rusting mirror, so that the man can see alleys skid up and down the cobbled hills off the main street, which is looming and gloomy behind sooted granite fronts, with pillars and porticos snooty above shuttered shops, with pediments high under the slate roofs wondering how they strayed so far and so dingily from Greece. The people that pass in the street are smaller by a head and shoulder than the man; they have closed red faces with the blinds drawn down; they look straight and suspicious in the direction they mean to go. As the man lurches about the pavement, enormous and staggering, the people part to let him by, marking him down and deciding that he is none of their business. Far ahead, he sees two dark blue uniforms walking along under the domes of their dark blue helmets, with pieces of metal shining on their clothes. So the man ducks from some instinct down a side street, where the mock-classical houses give up the pretence and become tall tenements, straggling in black brick and broken papered windows down the hill.

  In the cave of a doorway, the man sees a small girl sitting on a step. She wears a ripped tartan dress. Her pudgy face has a bright red spot on either cheek, which might be from fever or from rouge. The man feels compassion well up within him and the need to show it. So he bends down towards her and says, “Shouldn’t you be home in bed? Can I take you there?” And the eyelids and snub nose of the girl pucker in contempt; she laughs shrilly and says, “Git awa’ wi’ ye, King Kong. Or tek me ’ome f’r a dollar. I’m a wee hoar.” And the man jerks upright in horror and stumbles away down the flint cobbles, slipping and recovering himself as the stones stud his bare feet.