Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  Soldiers run past the man, soldiers getting out of it, soldiers hiding their cap-badges with upflung hand or else stuffing their berets in their pockets, soldiers forgetting their obligatory off-duty dawdle in the fear of punishment for a crime just committed. And the man sees the bulk of another man in the gutter; a shiny red helmet with a broken strap lies several paces away from him. The fallen man is huge in size. His skull is shaven and his scalp is split open, so that blood is running over his cheeks and ears and crown. A brass whistle on a lanyard, attached to a button on the tunic of his uniform, lies near one of his sprawling hands. By his other hand, a truncheon, tied by a leather thong to his wrist.

  The man with the bare feet kneels down to look at the face of the fallen man. At that moment, the lamps in the street glow weakly, then brighter and brighter until they light up the walls and the pavements. A great cheer swells ragged and hoarse over the city so that the very bricks and stones hear the sound of peace switched on with the lamplights, the very houses listen to the cry of war no more over the posters saying, WALLS HAVE EARS. And the kneeling man looks down to see an armband round the right bicep of the fallen man, on which is stamped M.P.

  “Magog,” the kneeling man whispers to himself. “Police.”

  He studies the bloodied features of the military policeman, the sharp nose swelling into an overripe bruise, the flared cheekbones with the sunken flesh beneath them tight on the gums, the ears growing into points as if they had been clipped like a dog’s, the jawbone too narrow for the lower row of teeth, the whole effect of the face that of a skull popping out of its wrapper of skin in order to burst its bone into the air. The kneeling man realizes that the military policeman is as tall as he is himself, nearly seven feet long; they are twins in their freakish height.

  Then the kneeling man notices the shine of the black uppers of the boots of the policeman. So he crawls down and undoes the elegant spats which cover the lying man’s ankles and begins to unlace the closed eyelets. The knots are tight on the laces and the man breaks two finger-nails; but in the end, he pulls a boot from each foot with a great two-handed heave at either heel and toe. Then he strips the grey knitted socks off the policeman’s feet, so that these flop back like two gutted white fish on the black slab of the pavement. Then the man puts on the socks and pulls on the boots, without bothering to tie the laces. He is about to go, when he notices the red helmet lying in the roadway. He walks across, picks it up and takes it back to the fallen man. He stoops and props up the head of the policeman with the helmet. The blood has stopped flowing from the wound in the fallen man’s scalp; he should live. So the man in his new boots walks away down the cobbles, leaving the policeman lying with bare feet, brought low under the new lamplight, his head cracked open by the clubs of other men.

  Out of the side street, into the main thoroughfare. As the man with the new boots watches, a gaudy red and blue light springs out of the stained glass window of a pub. A great roaring within builds up as the stream of light sprays out from behind the glass, until it spatters its colours across the road and waters the spiked golden flower on its sign, THE THISTLE. The man smiles to see the light and walks in through the wooden door of the pub into the boisterous roister and spree.

  Men in caps and dungarees, soldiers and sailors and airmen, women in boiler suits and worn-out dandy dresses, chippies and skivvies and troops in their civvies, all pushing up their hands to rip down the black-out and let out the light. And, on the piano, a man with a head the shape of an ostrich egg is belting out Waltzing Matilda on two fingers, Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, you’ll come a’waltzing Matilda with me, but there’s too much of a scrum to do more than a two-step on somebody’s toes, and the stench of beer and the stink of smoke tweaks hairs in the nostrils, and it’s a frantic fug of fun, with a bald sailor feeling down between the tits of a big blonde, saying that he’s looking for spies, and a skinny redhead with a mole on her nose, sitting on a stool and complaining, “I don’t want it to be bloody over, I like the war, it should go on for ever,” and her fat signaller lover replying, “There’s no bloody justice, is there? Like there’s no place like home to get away from.” Then it’s nothing but a hubbub of rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb in the large man’s ears, as he stands at the door of the pub.

  A pack of people shove into the pub behind the large man. They are wearing red rosettes. Their leader, a squat man in a brown suit, with slithery lips and eyebrows as trim as moustaches, yells, “Two ’undred seats. Two ’undred. Up the people.” And the bald sailor yells back, “Bugger the Tories.” And the pub explodes into laughter and nudges and squirms and bellows and belches and mucks in together. “Two ’undred seats,” the squat man shouts. “The Labour Party’s in by a double century. And you can put that in your stately ’ome and stuff it. And what’s the first thing Labour does for the people? Turns the ruddy lights on.” And the pub roars again and the man at the piano begins thumping out the Internationale and the words come into the large man’s mind, unasked, the words come in French and he knows that he speaks French and has seen Paris:

  . . . Debout, les damnés de la terre,

  Debout, les forçats de la faim.

  La raison tonne en son cratère,

  C’est l’éruption de la fin.

  Du passé, faisons table rase.

  Foule esclave, debout, debout.

  Le monde va changer de base.

  Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout.

  C’est la lutte finale,

  Groupons-nous . . .

  “Brother,” the squat man says, putting the gold ring round his forefinger on the lapel of the large man so that his cribbed, brilliantined hair reaches the level of his listener’s diaphragm, “we’re on top of ’em. And we’ll flush ’em out of their palaces. Back to the workers what they took from us. They’ll scarper like rats, except this ship ain’t sinkin’. All the vermin off after the Allousy Dollar. But that’s nothin’ to do with us. We’ve got it now and we’ll keep it.” His lips move so fast that his words do not trip off his tongue; they skid.

  “Got what?” the large man says.

  “Westminster. The ’Ouses of Parliament. We’ve got ’em. For five years, and another ten after that. You couldn’t even bomb us out, and they ’ad a try, they did. And you can’t buy us out. Because you can’t buy the people, can you, brother? Not when they’re rulin’ like lords in Westminster, London.”

  “I don’t know,” the large man says. “Perhaps.”

  The squat man peers upwards suspiciously at the large man.

  “You’re a worker, surely, brother. Of course, you’re educated, I can tell by your voice.”

  “Can you?” the large man says.

  “But education don’t mean you forget your brothers, do it?”

  “No,” the large man says. “You mean to say, the people . . . people like me . . . they rule in Westminster now . . . so there’s no rule, really, because the people rule themselves. Are you sure?”

  “What’s your name, brother?” the squat man says fiercely. “Rip Van Winkle? You been asleep for too long? The Labour Party, and that means the people, mister you and mister I, the Labour Party’s got in by two ’undred seats for the first time ever.”

  “Two hundred seats,” the man says. “That doesn’t sound like much room for all the people.”

  “Don’t be clever, mate,” the squat man says. “You know as well as I do, you’ve got to ’ave representatives. Of course, there ain’t room at Westminster for all of us. But now we’ve sent Joe Bloggs there just like you or me, you’ll see the fur fly. Ruddy ermine in shreds all over the Lords. And I wouldn’t wonder if some of them war profiteers aren’t in for a stretch, brother. And brother who, may I ask?”

  “My name,” the large man says, “is Gog.”

  The squat man laughs.

  “And mine’s Maurice and a gin and lime. You’re a big chap so why don’t you bollock over to the bar and get me one? And while you’re there, get me a double to make your journey wor
th it. Ta, mate, and up the workers.”

  Gog looks down at the glossy hair of the squat man and at the half-moon of his white, unworried forehead.

  “I haven’t any money,” he says.

  The squat man looks up at him and snaps, “Why couldn’t you say so to begin with?” and he’s off eeling his way through the press of people so quickly that Gog sees him at the far end of the bar in forty seconds, crying, “Up the workers and down the hatch,” to a laughing sergeant, who is buying a round of drinks and adds him into the circle of booze. The smoke is so thick now that Gog’s weakened eyes begin to water, until the massed faces of the people in the pub blur and become confused with each other in a pink cracked plate of flesh, and the voices rise into an incessant humming and grinding like a conveyor belt, and the piano has stopped playing and the radio is turned on full blast so that string melodies are blaring out as if drinking also needed Music While You Work, and the sweat of herded humans has the stench of hard labour, and Gog feels the horror like acid in his mouth and he opens his teeth and howls.

  Silence.

  All look at Gog.

  Gog stares about him, stammering at the waiting faces. “I . . . I . . . I,” he says, then stops. After a pause, inspiration strikes him and he cries, “Up the workers,” and the people in the pub yell the slogan back at him till the smoke eddies from their breath as if out of the barrels of guns, and Gog turns and bursts out through the door into the night street and cold air under the bright-dark summer sky.

  Gog begins walking down the pavement; but he realizes that he has no reason to walk anywhere in particular, except perhaps to London, however far that is, because the porter says it’s always better there than elsewhere in Blighty, or perhaps to Westminster, however far that is, to see whether the squat Maurice is right and the people are ruling there. But every time he stops to ask someone the way to London, the stranger hurries past, sidestepping quickly and fearfully, until Gog understands that his size terrifies people in the night. So he sits on a doorstep, waiting until an old woman, carrying a string bag full of cut grass, walks by, and he says, “Ma’am, would you tell me the way to London?” And the old woman jumps as if she were getting onto a broomstick to skip from the wrath to come; but she stops, clutching her bag to her chest in case Gog means to steal it from her rabbits, and says, “Lunnon? Tha’s foor hun’red mile, straight doon Sooth Bridge Road, ye canna miss it, it’s verra big.” “Is it that far?” Gog says. “Ye no mean to tramp it?” the old woman says. “I do, indeed,” Gog says, “I haven’t the money for the fare.” “It’ll tek ye after Sunday,” the old woman says and begins to hurry away. Gog rises and calls to her, ‘‘What city’s this?” The old woman stops in surprise. “Edinburgh, wheer else?” She turns and looks back to see Gog’s great height, then trembles and begins to run away at a tottering trot, screaming back, “Ye kin ha’ me life but no me grass.”

  Gog lets her get away, then he starts himself after her and turns down South Bridge Road, past the cold kirks lingering upwards into the night. As he walks, he leaves the people behind him, except in an occasional bus making for the suburbs. On his right, he passes a black dome topped by the thumb of a real giant, on which an impish angel stands, scraping a drizzle of stars from the night with the tip of a cross and pointing to the full-cheeked moon. Gog leaves behind the drab shops with their elegant top storeys, patrician noses ignoring the gobble of the mouths underneath. He strides on past stone proper houses, running to decay because the servants are away, yet with their black lawns cropped to the nap of the grass. Then out sudden by a little bridge over a mumbling burn, already outflanked by a long arm of suburb. The front lawns shrink in size, the houses drop from three to two storeys, then the city peters out in the occasional stone bungalow with twin gables under a tile roof, or a row of box houses with pebbled fronts and pastel woodwork, too cautious to go all out for any crude colour, even by moonlight.

  A sign says Liberton Brae, as Gog comes to a cemetery, locked in behind its rails and announcing, ONLY WEEKDAY VISITING. Even the dead get cold comfort on a Scottish Saturday night, and the same on a Sunday. Yet the birds are loud all around, squalling and tanging; the main road is more decorous, presenting a holy hush of no traffic in preparation for the sabbath. Gog meets his first stranger in half-an-hour, a white-haired young man who smiles at him uncertainly; but when Gog asks whether this is the road to London, the young man just smiles and shrugs and points to his ear, where the cord of a hearing aid dangles down uselessly.

  At the close of the Burdiehouse Road, the city decides finally to put a stop to itself, where a double-decker bus is parked at the end of its run on a tarmac roundabout. The pylons beyond the last row of houses are the new gatehouse to the South; the lines they carry shed an invisible wall of power, behind which the city can work and heat itself and see by night, if the walls are not breached by the enemy from ground or sky. As Gog turns towards the bus, to see if he can rest a little on its seats before trudging on through the moon-bright dark, a shape rises from the back seat of the bus and stands on its platform, saying in greeting, “Welcome, brother Israelite.”

  II

  In the powdering of the moonlight, Gog can see a spout of white hair on top of an army overcoat. Between the cataract of hoary locks flowing down beyond the coat collar and the cascade of mustachios and beard that deluge the coat’s lapels, a fierce nose parts the hairy torrent, while cheekbones like twin rocks break the surface below the spray of joined eyebrows. The man himself under the coat is thin and stooping, as if the burden of a sack of invisible sins sat on his shoulders. He has one palm extended upwards in a form of blessing or telling Gog to keep his distance. The other hand clasps a rusty iron cross chained to his chest. On the platform of the bus, the bearded man is as tall as Gog.

  “I am Gog,” Gog announces.

  The man shows no surprise nor fear; instead, he displays a kind of resignation, as though he has expected Gog’s coming.

  “So be it,” he says in a low cultured voice. “I myself am called Wayland Merlin Blake Smith, otherwise known as the Bagman. The fuzz term me the Wandering Jew and put me inside for vagabondage, as though the King’s Highway were not an Englishman’s home and castle. But the fuzz will get their orders in due course, when the errant air waves leap to my command . . . Come in, my brother of Israel. Enter my poor abode.”

  He bows towards Gog and, with a wave of his hand, invites him into the double-decker. “Thank you,” Gog says, touched by his graciousness, and enters. “Turn left,” the Bagman says, “and the couch to the right is thine.” Gog settles himself upon one of the large back seats of the bus and the Bagman reclines opposite him, supporting himself on one elbow like a Roman preparing to feast.

  “My friend,” the Bagman says, “first, the appalling necessities, to which our bellies make us slaves. You, I see, have loaves; I, naturally, have fishes. A miraculous swap will satisfy the inner man.” So speaking, he hands Gog a kipper wrapped in a piece of newspaper, while Gog returns the compliment by giving him a loaf. They begin to eat, the Bagman fastidiously picking the bones of the kipper one by one from between his beard and his mustachios, Gog eating the kipper bones and skin and all in the intervals of swallowing hunks of bread, washed down by swallows from a bottle of cold tea circulated as correctly as a decanter of port between the Bagman and his guest.

  “To remove the last obstacle from our perennial friendship-to-be,” the Bagman says, wrapping up the remnants of his kipper carefully in the newspaper and stowing it under the seat by his army pack, “how are you for cash?”

  “I have none,” Gog says.

  The Bagman sighs from disappointment or from relief or from a mixture of both.

  “Just as well,” he says. “Otherwise I would be obliged to find a means of removing it from you. For the cause of Israel, of course. Israel recognizes no robbery. What is done for her cause is done well. Moreover, cash may be a man’s best friend, but it’s the worst thing for coming between friends. But if yo
u’re sure you have no money . . . ?”

  “None,” Gog answers.

  “How prudent a reply . . . or how true?”

  “True,” Gog answers.

  “Three times denied means once perhaps,” the Bagman says. “I will allow that you may be in that state of bliss called penury. In that case, and only in that case, my conscience is clear. I cannot be accused of trying to convert you for profit, only for the sake of sweet Israel, whose followers are as numberless as the sands of the sea – if only they could see they’re part of the bloody beach.” The Bagman pauses. “You said your name was Gog.”

  “Yes,” Gog says.

  “By virtue of baptism?”

  “By virtue of tattoo.”

  “Ah, the original woad,” the Bagman says in a satisfied way. “I might have known it. Gog. Your reappearance was forecast by the Book of Revelations, before the end of the world and the coming again of Israel. It was fated we should meet, as you well know. Although God, I must say, does move in mysterious ways when it comes to choosing a rendezvous.” The Bagman looks up and down the empty rows of bus seats, all turning their square backs to him. “At any rate, Gog is fated to meet the leader of Israel on Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore. I am, incidentally, among other incarnations, the original Archdruid – not to be confused with other impostors of that name. Eisteddfod, my Welsh granny! All those official Druids couldn’t tell a mistletoe from a pig’s foot. I have as much to do with the official Druids as Christ had to do with the church that bears His holy name.”