Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  Gog and the Bagman cross over Tyne and climb the ridge, which Hadrian’s Wall follows. On the top of the hill above the river they find a timber cross twelve feet high. At its base, a plaque:

  Heavenfield

  Where King Oswald, being about to engage in battle, erected the sign of the Holy Cross and on his knees prayed to God and obtained his victory as his faith deserved. A.D. 635

  LAUS DEO

  Under the shadow of the symbol of the God of self-sacrifice and of the sacrifice of others, Gog and the Bagman rest to eat their food. The Bagman has filled his haversack with army rations from Maurice’s stores; he is clever at opening tin cans of spam with a bayonet. Gog still has the remnants of the food given to him and Cluckitt before they crossed the Border. The two men eat in silence, too drowsy and hungry to speak.

  An army convoy grinds up the hill, nose to tail, gears gnash­ing and exhausts farting. Somewhere ahead there is a breakdown or a halt. The middle of the convoy has to brake on the hill, engaging every cog to avoid slipping backwards. Gog sees the Bagman, till then sagging weakly with his back against the cross, suddenly lean forward, his sharp nose above his beard twitching with attention. Then he is on his feet, his haversack in his hand, running towards the road before Gog can even open his mouth.

  A solitary jeep sandwiched between lorries has stopped level with the cross. Its engine is idling, the lone soldier inside is yawning at the wheel. Without even a stumble, the Bagman clambers through the open space at the side of the jeep, clouts the driver with the haversack, and knocks him onto the roadway through the other side of the vehicle. Then the Bagman, spry as a youth, springs into the driver’s seat, reverses the jeep with a crash into the lorry at its back, and locks the wheel to swing the jeep in a tight semi-circle, narrowly missing the assaulted soldier who is sprawling on the tarmac. Gog watches agape as the Bagman accelerates downhill back towards the Tyne. He cannot understand this sudden mania, until he sees in the rear of the jeep the cause of the attack – an immense army radio set covered with knobs and dials and sporting an aerial as tall as a shivering aspen.

  Gog quickly gets to his feet and walks away from the cross. A knot of drivers in khaki has gathered round the fallen soldier. They pick him up and dust him off, carefully picking every piece of grit off his uniform, while he adjusts the hang of the creases of his trousers. One of the rescuers takes a cigarette from behind his ear, lights it, draws on it once, then passes it on to the victim of the Bagman’s assault. He in turn sucks at the cigarette, before passing it round to the next soldier, and so on, until the cigarette has done the ritual round of the pipe of peace and poverty and has been returned to its owner, who pinches out the glow care­fully between finger and thumb and replaces the butt behind his ear.

  As Gog tries to creep away, the soldiers move forward to surround him.

  “Oi,” the sharp-faced driver of the jeep says, “what about your mate? What about ’im?”

  “My mate?” Gog says. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “He were with you,” another driver says, his face as crumpled and cherry as his beret. “Muckin’ about under that cross there.”

  “Five minutes before you came, he did,” Gog says. “He cadged a bit of bread off me.”

  “ ’E’s lyin’,” the driver of the jeep says. “An’ even if ’e ain’t, someone ought to suffer.”

  The soldiers bring up their fists to batter Gog, but the convoy begins to move in front of them, so they have to drop their hands and run to the cabins of their lorries. The driver of the jeep, now finding himself alone before the hugeness of Gog, opens his fist in mid-air as it sails towards his foe, catches Gog’s palm and pumps it up and down. “Ta, mate. An ’elpin’ ’and is always grand.” He runs for a passing lorry and hops in over the tailboard. Once safe inside and on his way, he yells back, “An you an’ your muckin’ mate are goin’ to swing for it. Bloody ’ighwaymen.”

  The lorries grind and cough and racket by without inter­mission until Gog, walking on the far side of the road, finds that the metallic caterwaul trepans his skull and fills his lungs with the bad breath of exhaust. So he turns down the side-roads away from the military wreckage of Hadrian’s Wall, still con­veying the endless errands of war. Around him is the anarchy of the summer greenery, where the loudest engine is the buzz of the bee or the susurrus of the breeze in the leaves of the hedgerows. Gradually, the peace of the lanes which passeth all understand­ing flows into Gog’s ears, then seeps down his mind and damps his hot nerves, so that a languor wells through him and his stride becomes a saunter, then a stroll, then a lagging. In this drowsy meandering of the day, the memory of the underground hangar and the stealing of the jeep are as mere nightmares, spooks and waking dreams provoked by the shadow of combat that lingers wherever the Romans once passed.

  When Gog can hardly move any more for fatigue and the heat of the swelling sun, he chances on a large hay-tip to the right of the lane. Its reek of moist steamy rotting grass shrouds him with wet cloths of smell. He feels like the Duke of Clarence circling the vast butt of malmsey, trying not to reel under the influence of the rising fumes, trying and failing, then falling into the sweet wet stickiness of his final intoxication.

  Groggy and swooning, Gog stumbles across the lane and falls into the hay. The tip stretches twenty yards square and its depth is almost as much. It rests on a sunken field; wooden rails confine the hay and pack it into a dense cube below the level of the lane. Into this solid bath of stalk and softness, of prickle and give, of snap and sag, Gog plunges. His pack falls from his back, he slips off his coat and his sweater and his long shirt. He tumbles backwards, kicking his legs in the air. He pulls his wide cook’s trousers off over his boots, unlaces these, lets them sink off his feet, strips off his socks, and rolls sideways through the waves of summer stink that drown his senses, the spume of rotting sap, crushed blades, carrion greenery. Naked, Gog swims on the surface of the hay, his limbs threshing, throwing up the moist stalks about him until they wash over him. Then Gog dunks his head beneath the hay. The acrid reek of steaming and dying grass lines his nose and makes him cough and hold his breath. Each pore of his skin is pierced by a stalk, as stinging as salt spray. He wallows. The hay buoys him up, yet yields beneath him as the brine of the sea. Gog raises his face for air, gulps deeply, and plunges his face back beneath the surface. He is wrapped, swaddled, lulled, as the prickles of the stalks are crushed by his weight into soft waters. Vapours rise from the hay all about. The sun burns down on Gog’s back through the lapping blades. Then Gog sleeps, floating on the heady rankness of summer, his body supported as inevitably as upon a Dead Sea.

  Behind closed lids, Gog sees himself as a young man lying on the body of a woman, ammoniac from making love. He feels the hardness grow between his legs, the muscles of his thews and stomach tense and contract. On the blinds of his eyelids, nipples hard as bosses on shields of soft white flesh. A black-fringed red cleft splitting arched legs. A head thrown back in an agony of penetration, its helmet of black hair a jagged jet frame for ecstatic pain.

  “Maire,” Gog whispers, his lips mucous on the hay. “Maire, Maire, Maire, Maire, Maire, Maire.” And his desire seems to flow into his repeated incantation of the name of the object of his desire, until the sounds are a charm to his sleep.

  When Gog wakes, he feels his eyes gummed together and his body laid out immobile. He cannot stir for two or three minutes from his drugged doze, then he manages to turn his head aside and rest his right cheek on the grass. He blinks through an arch of hay-stalks to see an angel kneeling at the edge of the road, watching him. The angel is surrounded by a red-gold net of light. Gog puts up a hand to his eyes and rubs the film of sleep away on the inner side of his lids. Then he looks again towards the angel and discovers that he is a man, bare to the waist and covered with a fuzz of golden hair all over his red-brown skin. The hair grows on his flat belly and his spreading chest; it flares out over his nipples so that they look like two buds in a burning bush; it
wraps his arms in an orange down; it thickens at his beard and moustache, becoming spiky and ochre; it softens again to yellow at his cheeks; but then it coils in thick curls over his scalp, so that he seems to be wearing a helmet of gleaming bronze springs.

  From the waist down, the man is wearing stained brown leather trousers, tight as the hide of a beast, so that there is a large bulge at his crotch which suggests the capacity of a bull. He stands up, and Gog sees that he is lean and strong, broad at the shoulder and nipped in at the hip so that his loins are scarcely wider than his waist. He bends one leg at the knee and raises his foot to scratch the calf of the other leg with his toes. He wears no shoes. Golden hairs also cling to his ankles and cluster on the bridge of his foot. In all his body, only his sole is hairless, and it is as black and rough as a hoof.

  The man stands watching in silence, as Gog bellies up to his clothes to hide his stiff cock in an envelope of trousers. Gog dresses, burning with sun and shame. He does not blush for his nakedness so much as for being found playing the fool. When he is ready, he lunges forwards over the hay, springing and sink­ing until he reaches the tarred surface of the lane. The hairy man continues to stare at Gog steadily, surrounded by his yellow fur of sun. As Gog approaches, he sees that the man’s eyes are yellow, too, and strange. Gog cannot understand why they disturb him so much, until he notices that one of the pupils of his watcher’s eyes has spilt over into the iris, making a blob of black that does not alter with the light.

  “I was just having a sun-bathe,” Gog apologizes. “You caught me at it.”

  The man nods. A slight sneer lifts the corner of his mouth. “I don’t say for why,” he says. “Never.”

  “Yes, better not to explain,” Gog agrees. “Just do what you want and need to. Like a beast.”

  The man jerks his thumb towards the South. “Trampin’ that way?” he says.

  Gog nods. “I’d be glad of company.”

  The man nods, too. “They call me Crook.”

  “Gog,” says Gog, happy at last to give a full explanation to the silent stranger in a single syllable.

  The two men set off side by side towards the South.

  XII

  The two curses of walking are feet and flies. The flies raid in squadrons as soon as sweat indicates their target; only a barrage of wind will keep them away. Round Gog in the sun, the flies are as thick as a funeral veil. Every time that Gog waves his palm in the air in front of his face, he scores a hit on one or two flies. If he drops his hand for a moment, the flies dive in on his cheeks, neck, wrists. They do not even move when Gog stuns himself with slaps and murders his attackers as they suck the beads off his face. If Gog stops for a moment, the attack becomes a blitz. Gog can make a fly cemetery round his feet in a matter of a minute, but thousands more of the black insects will still whine about him and land on the runway of his skin. Only when his sweat dries will the flies take off for some Pandora’s Box with its lid open, where they breed in their myriads waiting for the radar of perspiration to scramble them into flight.

  Crook, however, does not slap at the flies. He seems hardly to sweat at all. So few flies approach him. Those that do are caught by a quick snatch with a cupped hand; they are squashed between finger-tip and palm and then are flicked away. Crook never misses a fly. His reflexes would outdo a cat. He moves stealthily, making no noise. His eyes dart from side to side, always on the alert. His thin mouth is usually a little open, showing the flickering point of a tongue between the hairs of his golden muzzle.

  Gog and Crook pass the tall old grey houses of Corbridge. They buy apples and bread and cheese and beer in the town, leaving Gog with some fifty shillings still to spare. Then they climb up a hill on the way to Durham with the Tyne still beside them. On their left, a high stone wall borders the road. Behind it, a park in which a dark wood grows.

  “Time for grub,” Crook says. He runs at the wall, as if to dash his body against it. But his momentum is such that he walks up its surface, catches the top with his hands, and is up and over.

  “It’s meant to keep us out,” Gog says. There is no answer from the other side of the wall. So Gog shouts, “Hey, I can’t climb that.”

  Crook’s head reappears on top of the wall like a bronze cat. “I’d leave yer,” he says, “if yer didn’t ’ave the beer. Keep up. Or yer on yer own.”

  Crook hangs down a thick wrist. Gog runs at the wall, leaps, catches the wrist with both hands, and is drawn up by a jerk that brings him chin-high to the top. Another hand grabs his waist and plucks him onto the wall. Crook’s snatch and heave is perfectly timed, that of a champion weight-lifter.

  “Yer can ’op down, I suppose,” Crook sneers. Then he jumps onto the fringe of meadow that borders the dark wood beyond and lands lightly on all fours, immediately springing up onto his feet. Gog jumps after him, landing heavily and falling on his knees before the jeering Crook.

  They eat and drink. Then Gog lies back on the grass in the sun, his paunch full, his eyes closed. A shadow comes between him and the red light on his closed lids. He looks up, expecting to see Crook’s head. Indeed, it is Crook’s head, but he has grown curving horns and his muzzle is black. The eyes are the same, yellow, and the beard; the same orange tufts of hair grow out of his ears. Then Gog hears Crook’s laughter behind him and Crook leaps over his body and seizes the blackface ram by its horns and twists its head sideways, until the ram falls on its knees, then kicking on the grass. Gog rises and claps at this throwing of the male beast; but Crook does not stop. He kneels behind the ram’s neck, lets go one horn and transfers his grip to its foreleg, then gives a sudden jerk and wrench. The ram’s spine snaps like a stick.

  “Christ, you’ve killed it,” Gog says.

  “Who dares ter meddle wi’ me?” Crook says, rising and laughing. He takes a knife out of the pocket of his leather breeches, bends, slices three times, strips back a layer of fleece from the ram, severs sinew and thew and joint, then carves off three strips of bloody flesh which he stuffs into his mouth one after the other. As Gog pales, he carves off another strip of flesh and offers it to Gog on the point of his knife.

  “Eat it,” he says in a hard voice. “Fer me.”

  Gog takes the raw meat off the knife and looks at it. He is about to throw it away, when he sees Crook’s eyes narrow and the point of the knife come forwards at his throat. So Gog smiles, throws back his head, and drops the strip of meat into his open mouth. He expects to vomit; but instead, he tastes a curious pleasure, flesh still warm with blood. He chews, then swallows quickly. His tongue licks the dark salt from his lips.

  “More,” Crook says, a statement rather than a question.

  Gog nods, and eats another slice.

  “Yer can git a taste fer it,” Crook says, smiling.

  Gog wipes his lips on the back of his hand, leaving a streak of blood on the blue veins between his finger bones. “Shouldn’t we get back on the road?” he says.

  Crook does not answer. He turns towards the cluster of ewes and lambs that huddle and tremble at his approach. He crouches on all fours and crawls up to the ewes, who bleat pitifully, yet seem mesmerized by the glare of his yellow eyes. When he is upon them, they each and all turn their rumps towards him, kneeling on their front legs, so that Gog has to laugh at the sight of the row of woolly backsides turned towards the human ram, their tails like downy G-strings waiting to flick out of the way.

  “You’ve got a way with sheep,” Gog says.

  “I were brung up on the moors,” Crook says. “ ’Swhy I’m called Crook. I were suckled on a sheep’s tit. Baa means Ma ter me, don’t it? An’ girl, when there’s nowt else.” Crook laughs and smacks the puckering rumps of the ewes one by one, send­ing them jerkily fleeing and bleating, their lambs skipping after. “But I like cunt when I can git ’er. An’ that’s when I want ’er.”

  “Really?” Gog says. “Even now? Here, for instance.” He waves his hand at the meadow, empty except for the sheep, and at the dark wood, where the trees wait.

/>   “I call for ’er,” Crook says, “an’ ’er come.” He begins to trill, piercingly and sweetly, then deepens his sound to a succession of throaty notes, somewhere between a gurgle and a chuckle. Then he opens his mouth wide and shouts high and clear, a noise of triumph and exultation, the call of the wild male beyond all challenge of rival. Crook pauses to draw breath, then calls again in rampage. And through the trees, a girl shows herself, wearing a maid’s overall, perhaps a servant from the hall lost in the dark wood. She is curious and diffident, peeking out her plump red face from behind a bush, cocking her round chin with wonder, shaking her curled brown hair at such a carry-on. “ ’Er,” Crook says.

  Then he is gone after his prey in a crouching run that skims the grass, barely leaving the servant girl time to turn and flee, screaming, through the pitchy alleys of the wood. Gog stands, watching Crook’s golden body and brown leather legs twist, dark-dappled, among the trees, until Crook vanishes into a black cleft, where a dead branch has fallen against the trunk of an oak to make an entrance. There is a silence, as Gog watches the wood. Then he hears a girl scream twice. Cloth tears, muffled and far. The girl calls, “No.” Then she stops crying on a choke. Gog lumbers forwards into the wood.

  Between the first trees, fern grows, green and hairy. But Gog has not gone ten strides, when brier begins to prick and bloody his ankles, and brown bracken to scrape his calves. Gog cannot see, for the darkness of the wood puts two wet black leaves on his eyes after the sun. He blunders on, scratching his forehead on a low branch, so that he has to put up an arm to shield his face. His sight adjusts to the twilight of the trees, and he can hear ahead of him a rustling, a grunting, the rooting of a pig. He passes between the cleft through which Crook has disap­peared, and he comes into a tunnel between two rows of oaks. Under the shade of their branches, which intertwine like veins, the ground is mushy with decaying leaf mould.