“Oh, nature’s a great teacher,” the woman sneers. “Pity I never went to that school. More what?”
“More about myself.”
“Tell me what you know about yourself.”
“There isn’t much to tell,” Gog says, “and besides, why should I tell you? I don’t confide in strangers. I never have.”
“No,” the woman says, “you never have.” She looks at Gog. “Tell me a little. Just to flatter my curiosity.”
“I don’t know much,” Gog says. “My ship hit a mine and I woke up in hospital in Edinburgh. I’m slowly remembering. Now, if you don’t mind, I should be getting on.”
“You really don’t remember,” the woman says. “You’ve never been to a place called . . . . Maire?”
“Why do you ask?” Gog says. “Do you know me?”
“I feel I do,” the woman says. “It’s because you look a little like the big chap I used to know. But he’s dead in the war. Everything ended in the war. Perhaps old things will begin again now, perhaps not. More likely not. I’d quite forgotten about the big chap till I saw you on the road.”
“Good-bye,” Gog says and clambers out through the car door, leaving his hand on the frame. The woman leans sideways and deliberately slams the tin trap on his fingers. Gog howls and puts his hand in his mouth. The woman raps on the glass partition between her and her chauffeur, who starts up the engine of the car. The woman finally closes the car door and leans her head out of its window. “One thing,” she says, “my dear tramp, you should know after a war. Cruelty is gratuitous. Pain is purposeless.” The car begins to move off down the road. “And I am particularly a woman of my time.” The head of the woman, framed by the two straight sides of black hair and the fringe cut downwards to a tongue between her eyebrows, disappears back into the interior of the car, which accelerates away, leaving the highway and the surrounding hills to Gog and the sheep and the silence of incomprehension.
V
As Gog stumbles on over the hills with swollen and burning feet in the evening, his pack drags on his shoulders like a hump. Gog has never had a hump before. He feels that even the hunchback is luckier, with a hump built on securely and packed well against his shoulder blades. But Gog’s hump is a detachable one of twenty pounds weight, with straps that cut the skin over his collarbone so that he has to hook his thumbs beneath them and lean forwards against the dragging load. And the hump has a will of its own. When there’s a head wind, it threatens to upend Gog tip over arse; when there’s a cross wind, it pushes him round clockwise or widdershins. When he is going uphill, the hump hangs like a Sisyphus stone, more ready to plunge back down to the bottom with each step nearer the summit; downhill, the hump hurries Gog breakneck into the valley. And what a hump! It’s no smooth boss of flesh sitting snug upon his spine. It’s a khaki canvas tumour sprouting strips of hide to tie down its flaps of skin. Gog would like to hurl it away every few minutes; but he packs stolen food and dry sleep upon his back. So he must malarky on, his monstrous shoulders gradually diminishing with each meal, eating his way through the contents of his hump, the only cannibal whose gorging diminishes his own weight. He envies the luck of the real hunchback, so compact and trim. If people were to rub Gog’s hump for good luck, they would get warts.
When Gog’s shoulders and soles can stand no more aches and blisters, he stops his stepping on the tarmac as delicately as Agag and he turns aside onto a strip of moorland beside a lulling burn and he takes off his boots and he ransacks his pack and he nibbles at a few more biscuits and he drinks half the brackish water in the bottle and he wraps the groundsheet round himself and he sticks his feet in the top of his pack for warmth and he finds a tuft of soft grass for a pillow and he fits his hipbone into a hollow so that he may lie on his side in comfort and he sleeps as tired as a fox after a chase, stirring each hour to change the position of his pains so that they do not set into cramps. Once he wakes to see the streaky stars overhead, blurred by his filmy eyes. And he feels that the heavens are his personal tent, until the clouds blow up and the drizzle falls and he knows, as he huddles in a ball under the ground sheet, that the tent can leak at any time.
Yet the drizzle passes and Gog falls into a nightmare trance. And the white-bearded Bagman is changed into a black-feathered bird, which sits on a sky-high oak tree and croaks: “And my second coming was as Merlin, prophesying woe; as the voice of the raven, I sang of blood and sword.” And on the right of the oak is an aspen tree with each leaf a naked human trembling for the guilt of being the tree and the makers of the tree on which Christ was crucified on the Cross. And lo, a red dragon rises from the roots of the aspen and consumes it utterly in its jaws of fire, with each human leaf shrieking before being swallowed up. And on the right of the oak tree stands the elder, on which Judas hanged himself; and its leaves are of beaten gold and silver and precious stones. And lo, a great pit opens, boiling with sulphur and shit, and it engulfs the elder, so that the gold runs away in pus and the silver melts in piss and the precious stones burst in the boils of the plague. And then the bird that is Merlin opens his black wings as wands. And lo, on the first branch of the oak tree, lambs graze in green meadows and girls sing at the butter churns and men lie in the shade of haycocks and children chatter round their mothers’ knees. And lo, on the second branch of the oak tree, a cobbler smiles as he works a shoe and a smith whistles as he hammers iron on the anvil and a weaver laughs as he moves the shuttle of the loom and a baker guffaws as he pulls a pan of hot bread out of the oven. And lo, on the third branch of the oak tree, a sailor opens his sea-chest and pours out spices and silks and green parrots, and a merchant pulls sweets and red ribbons out of his pockets to give to small girls in white dresses, and a banker puts on the red robe and white whiskers of St. Nicholas to shower small boys with bright pennies and oranges. And lo, on the fourth branch of the oak tree, a bishop in a purple cope smiles as he intones a blessing, and a general in shining armour salutes with his drawn sword to his lips, and a minister in a frock coat grins as he throws green banknotes out of the glossy tophat in his hand. And lo, on the fifth branch of the oak tree which curves upwards on either side of the top of the trunk to make a trident of wood, there is placed a golden throne, and the right side of the throne is a lion rampant and the left side of the throne is a unicorn couchant and the seat of the throne is a bulldog dormant, and upon that throne sits Britannia in a dress of red satin and white silk and blue organdie, ruling the waves that lap about the golden basin at her feet and holding in her left hand a blood-red orb the shape of the world and in her right hand a sceptre, the head of which is formed as a ship. And lo, on the top of the trunk of the tree sits the raven which is Merlin, and he croaks no more of woe, but he begins to chant a doggerel, and all the labourers and the craftsmen and the moneymen and the people of power and Britannia herself stand stock still and face the front of their branch and take off their wigs and their hats and their helmets, each in his proper place on his proper limb on the oak rooted for ever deeply in the soil of Albion. And they all sing the song of Merlin the raven, ruling by his magic vision of order:
Merrie England, it has been;
Happy days by fathers seen.
Merrie England, it will be;
Happy days will children see.
Merrie England never is;
But the people all know this –
Merrie England cannot be
If they chop down the old oak tree . . .
At that moment, a light glares down into Gog’s eyes, so that he starts awake, his hand shielding himself from this visitation in the darkness, his ears assaulted by the bleating and baabaaing of terror all around. He feels a heavy weight, warm and soft, across his legs, and he hears a voice that he knows say, “Christ, that big sod from the pub, but he’s got no pull.” And hands jerk him to his feet and other torches send out their masked beams and Gog can see a dozen men pulling the bodies of dead sheep towards the tailboards of three lorries parked by the road. A dead ram, the one whic
h was dropped on Gog’s legs, has a wide bloody mouth where its wind-pipe used to be. All about him, Gog can see a massacre of sheep, with men stunning them with hammers or twisting their necks by holding onto one horn to slit their throats with a bayonet.
“Less noise,” the leader shouts, and Gog sees that he is the friend of the workers from the pub, Maurice with the glib lips. “Give ’em the cold steel, you bastards,” Maurice shouts, “and shut their gobs. If each of ’em were a Jap sentry, you’d all be up the Irrawaddy.” He turns on Gog. “Now you wrap up too.” He slices his finger across his throat. “It’s so bleedin’ dark I can’t always tell the difference between ’uman and mutton.”
While the slaughter of the flock goes on, as the sheep are herded towards the lorries by four collies which rush continually about on the errands ordered by their masters as faithful as camp guards, Maurice grins broadly. “Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four,” he says, counting in the corpses past the tailboards. “We’ll prang more than on Battle of Britain day. Forty-five, forty-six. ’Oo’s for chops and chitterlin’s? Forty-seven. Keep up the bashin’, men. It’s the people we’re feedin’. Forty-eight, forty-nine. And where’s the ’alf-century? ’Obbs couldn’t ’ave got there quicker. There she goes, fifty. Up the scoreboard. And as for you, mate, you ain’t seen nothin’ and you don’t know no one, do you?”
Gog looks down at the slithering face of Maurice in the torchlight and says, “It’s an odd time to run a slaughterhouse.” And Maurice laughs and says, “This is war, mate. You can get yours any time of day or night.” And Gog says, “Are these your sheep?” And Maurice laughs, and so does his withered tall lieutenant, who has taken up the counting of the corpses.
“They’re mine now all right,” Maurice says. “But I’m good ’earted. I’m leavin’ the baas be’ind for the owner. That’s the one bit I can’t flog.”
At last, Gog sees the point. “Black market?” he says. The words produce a look of injured innocence on the face of Maurice.
“There ain’t no black market, brother,” Maurice says. “It’s a white market, as pure as the driven snow caper, a whiter than white deal. Look, I feel like a ruddy saint gettin’ the meat to the people. All that red tape. People’d starve before they could get out of all that red tape. A few ounces of meat a week, are you kiddin’? You should see the eyes of the old-age pensioners light up when I come in with a baron of beef . . .”
“Ye dinna gi’ it t’ old ’uns, Morrie,” the lieutenant says, “if they dinna gi’ ye back their pension.”
“What’s the difference?” Maurice says grandly. “I’m after gettin’ meat into mouths, that’s what. My best customer’s an old girl of eighty and if she’s got enough put aside not to need a pension, more chops in ’er chops, I say. It’s thrift what brings ’ome the bacon. As long as the meat still gets to them as appreciates it, I’m doin’ a public service. They’re goin’ to decorate me at the end of the war, straight they are. The M.B.E.” Maurice laughs. “Meat Bloody Extra.”
“Hoo aboot t’ C.B.E.?” the lieutenant says. “Costs Bluidy Extra.”
“If a bloke’s doin’ a bit extra, stands to reason ’e’s got a right to pick up a bit extra, don’t it, brother? Now I’m for fair shares for all, that’s why I’m out ’ere, missin’ me beauty sleep. Those farmers, they’ve been cleanin’ up a packet, subsidies and all. Ruddy profiteers. Should be ’ung, that’s what. If I knock off a few sheep now and then, it sort of shares out the government’s money a bit fairer. And if I flog it off ’andsome, you should see me wage bill. Something cruel. And the lorry tax, that’s straight stealin’ for the government. And the price I’ve got to fork up for black market petrol. It’s sheer ’ighway robbery.”
“Bluidy murder,” the lieutenant says and adds, “Se’enty-se’en,” as another moribund sheep joins the woolly pyramids in the lorries.
“I don’t do it for the money,” Maurice says. “I could clear more legit. I do it for the people. I do everythin’ for the people.”
“Which people?” Gog says.
“All the people. Why I’m a Robin ’Ood, sort of. Take from the rich and give to the . . .”
“Rich,” the lieutenant says. “Eighty-foor.”
“Them what deserves it,” Maurice observes coldly. “From each accordin’ to ’is capacity, to each accordin’ to ’is need. I know what’s right. Well, I’m good at knockin’ off meat, and I give it to ’im what needs it.”
“But aren’t these people’s rations you’re stealing?” Gog asks.
“Nah. Anythin’ I can knock off can’t add anythin’ to what you can get in the shops for all them coloured bits of bumph. This is extra meat. The farmers’d only flog it off on the side, if I didn’t. I’m cuttin’ down their filthy profits, givin’ a job to me fellow workers, puttin’ away a bit to be used for the cause of the people, which I ’ave up’eld and always will up’old. Get a move on, you bleeders, or I’ll ’ave your tripes to tot up the century.”
“Ninety-fi’,” the lieutenant says. “Tha’s tha’.”
“You get the ’undred,” Maurice says. “I’m runnin’ a business, not a rest ’ome for crippled dogs.” He whistles and the collies are sent off on a final errand to bring in the last of the straggling sheep from the other side of the burn.
“It’s a bit against the law, isn’t it?” Gog says. “I know the law’s an ass, and I break it often, but you can’t go too far, or we’d all be cutting each other’s throats.”
“But we are, but we are, brother,” Maurice says. “We’re all cuttin’ each other’s throats quite legal out in them Jap jungles. And what’s worse, makin’ a mutton chop or carvin’ up your neighbour with a yellow face? If one’s illegal and t’other’s legal, somethin’s wrong with the law, ain’t there? And, moreover, the law’s agin the people. The law’s a club to bash in the people, till the people rule.”
“But you told me the people do rule now, since recently,” Gog says.
“Ah yes,” Maurice says, “but they ain’t ’ad time to change the judges. And they can’t, ’cause it’s agin the law to change the judges in this country. Pretty, ain’t it? I want to change the law, but I can’t, because it’s agin the law. So till they change the judges, I’m a one-man outfit against oppression and for the people. I’m agin property, too, property what’s been stolen from the people. And I’m agin all them filthy farmer profiteers, what stayed at ’ome and turned a pretty penny from the blood of the British tommy.”
“And you,” Gog says, “you fought yourself?”
“Medically unfit,” Maurice says. “There I was, all ready to do and die for the people, and what? Flat feet and ’ernia. I’ve got a certificate to prove it. And I’d like to point out, they also serve what only slaughter sheep.”
The collies bring in five stray sheep into the hands of the waiting gang, who leap on them and slice open their throats and heave them into the lorries in a matter of minutes. Maurice consults his watch. “Luminous,” he says proudly. “Swapped it with a Commando. What did ’e want to know the time for? Didn’t get back from Dieppe.” Then he shouts, “All right, men. All aboard the Skylark. Twenty-five mins flat for a century. Bradman couldn’t ’ave done it, if ’e’d knocked it all in sixes.”
The men pile aboard the lorries, and the engines turn over and catch and roar steadily in the night. And Maurice pokes his thumb up into Gog’s navel and warns, “You don’t know nothin’, brother. Oo’s side are you on? The workers, I knew it.” And he slips a white bank-note into Gog’s pocket and he turns to go, muttering, “You ain’t easy to ’ide, a big bloke like you, so if the cops come after me, I won’t ’ave far to go to carve up the nark, will I? ’Nuff said, and cheery pip.” With that, Maurice reaches the cabin of the lorry, from which an arm descends and hoicks him upwards into the interior. The lorries move off down the road in a sedate convoy. Gog sees for the first time that they have large white circles painted on their sides, and each circle contains a red cross. And so the ambulances disappear from t
heir mission of mercy.
Gog spends only a couple of minutes in getting together his things and making away from the scene of the massacre. Already, light is beginning to trim the wrap of the night and Gog does not want to be found near the bloody pools on the peat. Although all is silence again, he seems to hear the bleating of the murdered animals about him; the blood of the dead ram has stained one of his trouser-legs so that it sticks to his ankle. In the end, he leans down and tears off the bottoms of his trousers and throws them away. Rather bare shins than a bloody flag.
VI
Beyond Innerleithen, the first attempt is made to kill Gog. He has walked through the bruised border town with its hopeful crest of a tame bear and bridled horse, supporting a shield, which shows St. Ronan calming the troubled waters that rear up a full inch high above the mottos Live And Let Live and Watch And Pray, as though these words had ever been the least defence against the boiling Border barons, who made the local ballads bloodier than anything since the Old Testament. And Gog has passed the old graveyard in the town where a weathered anchor is carved on a sailor’s tomb with the pious expectation, SOON LOST BUT NOT TOO SOON FOR GLORY. And Gog has passed Traquair House, standing among its trees in tall granite and freestone rubble, with its windows slit against arrows and crows. And he has sweated up the steep slope of his first real hill, the track towards Minch Moor on the short cut to Yarrow, with flies teeming about his burning face to drive him mad.
As Gog passes a stone wall by a thicket of undergrowth and ash trees, a hare hops mightily just in front of Gog’s feet and lands and soars again and slews sideways in mid-jump at a sudden blast from the thicket and falls and jerks on the ground with scrabbling legs that try to dig a grave in air; and is still. As Gog bends forwards to pick up the hare, he hears the second barrel of the shotgun huff out its pellets over his back and send one or two of the balls of lead into his upper arm. He grasps the dead hare by the ears and runs over to the thicket, before the hunter has time to reload. He sees a shape through a thick screen of brush and he throws the hare at the hunter, hitting him with the soft bleeding thud of his victim, as the hunter turns to run, his shotgun in the crook of his arm. But Gog trips in a bramble bush as he tries to pursue; by the time he is on his feet again, all torn and cursing, the hunter is waiting in the coverts or he is lying up as scared as if he were the hunted, he is in ambush or he is in hiding; and all Gog can remember is a thin figure with sloping shoulders and rounded hips under a green jacket, similar to the chauffeur of the black car.
Gog Page 5
