Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  “Ta,” the minstrel says. “That’s handsome. I can have a really good blow-out. And I don’t get it often. Nobody much wants to hear the old folk-songs any more. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not the last of the minstrels.”

  “In twenty years,” Gog says, “who knows? Perhaps every doorway in Britain will be full of a folk-singer with a guitar. You can’t ignore the past for ever, you know. It has a way of coming back and tripping you up.”

  So Gog parts from the minstrel of the ballad of the Two Highwaymen. And he wanders on through the night city towards the south. On his way, he finds a fish-and-chip shop open, where he spends his two-and-sixpence on a vast cornet of fried cod and fat-brown potatoes, wrapped in the messy newsprint of The People. The grease stains through the items on crime and gambling and sex and war that tidily smudge the pages for the sabbath entertainment of all true Britons. But Gog is only concerned with stuffing into his belly the traditional night snack of beery Englishmen. And so, full and warmed, he comes to Micklegate Bar and the southern arches that run beneath the city walls.

  Under the long-faced gateways with two round towers like protruding ears beneath a frizz of battlements, Gog sees the black car of Maire progress and stop by the kerb. He ducks into a doorway, for he thinks he is unseen. Over the car’s bonnet, he watches the head of Jules appear in her peaked cap, as disembodied as the head of a traitor from the Pilgrimage of Grace or the Jacobite rebellion, a traitor’s head once made gargoyle by the elements on its spike upon Micklegate. Then Maire appears in a long black trailing cloak as queenly as any royalty coming up to the capital of the North in procession from London, to pardon the city for its sins. Leaning on the arm of her chauffeur, Maire walks into a lighted doorway just by the gate, as Gog sidles forwards to cut off her pursuit of his journey towards Magog.

  When Gog reaches the driver’s door of the black car, he sees that lady luck has left the pea under the thimble for once. Jules has forgotten the car keys in the ignition switch. So Gog can climb into the seat and turn the key and look along the dashboard in front of him for the starter. The various buttons and levers and dials of the dashboard seem strange, yet familiar, as a boyhood crystal set discovered after a lifetime can seem to an ageing man. But by trial and error, Gog discovers the right button, presses the engine into life, and allows his reflexes to put the car into first gear, to take off the hand-brake, and to drive out of town under Micklegate at a trotting pace of ten miles an hour. A scrabbling of fingernails on the boot of the car makes Gog switch into second gear and a cantering twenty miles an hour, so that the screaming face of Jules in the driving mirror falls back to a mere white point in the night and then to nothing.

  So Highwayman Gog rides out of York on his good steed, Black Bess, the paint on her flanks groomed into a glossy coat fit for Old Nick to wear. The engine snorts and the tyres paw the road, as Gog misses gear or reins in the brake too sharply. A constable blows his whistle as Gog gallops by without lights; but Gog presumes that the law will be after him and has forgotten under the streetlamps that cars need to carry their own lanterns. Horses never did.

  So ride again, Turpin, ride again from York, outlaw and highwayman, pistols cocked at the gentlemen and cock pistolled at the wenches, ready to lift a fob or crack a nob at any time in the line of trade. O sit there, steady as china in your three-horned hat, your black curls a-falling round your rosy cheeks and fringe of beard, your red frock-coat as bright as blood over your pink weskit, your high boots black as your mare and the saddlecloth green as the fields of your getaways. So you also sit in the Staffordshire piece that stands on the high shelf in Merry’s kitchen (where? where?) in the boyhood days gone by except in mind, the days when Gogling child is a-riding on the broom-handle down the streets, a wooden gun in his hand and in his mouth, “Bang, bang, you’re dead, don’t get up again!”

  Yes, hang, hang, you’re dead, Turpin, but do get up again, Gog the man is still riding the King’s highway on the leather saddle of his horsepower, riding to London town with stolen guineas in his pocket, riding to fight all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, all the machines of Magog and all the might of Mammon, living as only a lone outlaw can live, by his wits, on his own, fearing daily betrayal by the people, the people who’ll sing him as hero only when they’ve shopped him and laid him in lime in his prison grave.

  Outskirts of streetlights.

  Can’t see the road.

  Christ, headlamps! Which switch?

  Wipers moving, scraping on pane. Switch off.

  Own face staring in black mirror-back.

  Slow down.

  Approaching dazzle on windshield.

  Switch. Nothing.

  Press. Nothing.

  Dazzle growing, growing, burning comet all over glass.

  Slow, slow.

  Roaring dazzle shrivel eye.

  Swing wheel.

  Screech.

  Tilt fall.

  Black glass slam face.

  Wheel crash chest.

  Death?

  As Gog pushes his chest off the wheel with groggy arms, he finds himself beginning to smile with the surprise of being alive. The near door of the black car rammed deep into the ditch has sprung open so that Gog can fall out of the vehicle easily into softish mud. He picks himself up and finds glee welling up like a haemorrhage inside his bruised ribs, while his fingers explore to confirm that his cage of bending bones is still intact. Swaying and buoyed by joy as if smashed only on brandy, Gog climbs onto the tarmac to find the Bagman denouncing him out of his torrential white beard, with the radio jeep from the convoy parked unharmed down the road.

  “You, is it?” the Bagman thunders. “Anti-Christ and wrecker, minion of Satan. Coming like the Worm in the night to destroy the wheeled Word that wingeth its way over the airwaves to the ears of the multitude. For the time is nearly at hand, when the twin Far Cities of the East shall perish. The awful engines of destruction are already in the silver bellies of the avenging archangels of the Lord. And Gog rageth with Lucifer across the land, already half-way to London before his mighty battle with the supreme fiend, Magog, which shall herald the end of the world. But thou shalt not try to wreck the wheeled ark of the covenant, which the Almighty hath put in the care of his servant Wayland Merlin Blake Smith. Weak though I may be, Pilgrim, in the face of Apollyon, God shall nerve my right arm to destroy thee!”

  With these words, the Bagman lunges with a concealed metal aerial held in his hand and gives Gog a deadly thrust, which makes him give back as one that has received his mortal wound. As the Bagman makes at him again, Gog luckily falls backwards into the ditch on top of the ruined bonnet of the black car and faints clean away.

  When Gog wakes, he is being laid on a stretcher by a uniformed nurse, driver and orderly. They raise him past a large red cross painted on a white circle on the canvas side of a curious ambulance, which has been converted from a troop-carrier. Gog is slotted into place inside the vehicle and looks up past a lighted spirit-lamp and a medicine cupboard at the camouflage colours of brown and green that make blotches of false nature above the iron struts of the frame of the hood. “The Bagman,” Gog mutters. And the nurse bends over him, red and disinfected and reassuring, “There’s no one here but us,” she says. “No one at all.”

  “I am no one at all,” a low voice says behind the nurse. “Raise your hands for no one at all.” Gog turns his head with the nurse to see a figure completely shrouded in a black cloak, wearing a white silk hood over its face. “I don’t exist more than a nightmare does,” the figure adds, lifting forwards the silver blue gaze of the twin barrels of a shotgun. “I am a bad dream but this can fire.”

  “Maire,” Gog mumbles. “Yes, you’re a nightmare. Do you know the old English word for a woman was a mare? And you’re a nightmare. Always springing on me as I sleep.”

  “Hush yourself, man,” the figure says. “Deluded.” She motions the nurse out of the ambulance with a flick of her gun-barrel, and the nurse climbs down to join the or
derly and the driver on the roadway, where they are being forced to drop their coats and trousers by Jules, still wearing her green uniform and cap, but now sporting another white hood over her face and another shotgun in her hand. When the nurse reaches the two men, she is made to take off her own uniform and pick up all the clothes and throw them in the back of the ambulance. Then she is lined up with the men and Jules walks towards her and slowly rips open the front of her slip, so that she is forced to clutch her arms about her to cover her breasts. Jules now walks round to the driver’s seat of the ambulance, while Maire covers with her shotgun the three shamed messengers of mercy. The engine of the ambulance starts, the vehicle moves off towards the south. Maire goes to sit on the bunk opposite Gog and turns the shotgun on him.

  “Quite a day for highwaymen,” Gog says. “You’re the fifth I’ve met, including myself.”

  “Kidnapping the kidnapper,” Maire says, removing her hood. “It’s poetic justice. Wrecking Boanerges, my favourite car! I should fill you full of holes. Still, the insurance will pay. They always do, don’t they, it’s their job.”

  “The police will catch you,” Gog says.

  “If they do, Jules and I will be wearing hospital uniform. We’ll bluff our way. And since when did you ever say one good word for the police?”

  “Why do you follow me, Maire?” Gog says. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “We’re linked, my dear,” Maire says, “by our four bare legs. You drag me around with you, wherever you go. And you were following me. You stole my car. I was only trying to get it back. And as you wrecked it, I took the first available transport. You may leave whenever you wish. Though if you do, the gun may go off accidentally.”

  Gog smiles. ‘‘You wouldn’t really kill me, Maire.”

  “Who talked of killing?” Maire says. “I never did. I’m not a professional murderer, miscalled soldier. I’d just pepper you, my dear. Fill you full of shot so that you could suffer a little more exquisitely than usual. Then I could certainly get you to the place where I’m taking you.”

  “And that is?”

  “What they call a rest home, Gog. No one is called a lunatic there, because all pay to be called merely resting. You need a rest and a psychiatrist. In fact, you need a team of psychiatrists – the English do so love to take their sports in company. I know an excellent secluded spot in Cornwall near Land’s End. You can go for walks on the cliffs and feel quite at home in the lucid intervals between the electric shock treatment. Just to show you how much I care for your fantasies, very close to the rest home there are a couple of large rocks in the sea. Gog and Magog, the locals call them. So you will be happy there, won’t you? Your fantasies will reach bedrock at last.”

  Gog moves to sit up and take the gun from Maire; but he sees her face stiffen into hard paste and her finger whiten on the trigger. A sudden sharp headache makes him lie back again on his bunk. “Please, can’t you leave me alone?” he begs.

  “Never,” Maire says. “Not till you’re back to normal. They’ll get you back to normal down there in a few months with the shocks.”

  “And what is normal?”

  “Normal,” Maire says smiling, “is when you can’t leave me alone.”

  XIX

  Jolt, bump and sway, looking up at the canvas roof, dark and ribbed as a mackerel evening sky. Drop, jar and shake, a yielding hardness under the back, a smell of iodine rank and erotic as rotting grass, its stain yellow as corn-stalks. Lids drowsing, flicking open, drowsing back on the willy-nilly journey, arrival out of control. Long, long since, the sprawling Gogling lies thus dreaming of tall and impossible women on the top of a haycart in the short summer journey, rumble-mumble from rut to rut down the track to the farm, while the twilight drives the labourers and the small boys home, small boys creeping out from their slums by the docks of Holyhead, small boys winter-white as mortar before haying time, brick-red by the autumn before they go back for bad to their coal-black terraces running in seams down to the salt shore, where the ferries to Dublin sound their mourning horns night and day after the deadly crossing over the Irish Sea.

  Each morning, the wrapped bacon-sandwich and bottle of cold tea waits on the table, the dawn light so dim that the soot in the air seems to have layered the ledges and the china Turpin in dark dust, and Gog is out and away in jacket and buttoned boots before his parents have stopped moving and muttering in their chapel-holy bedroom, he’s out and away running through the shivering streets with the air sharp as a mincer, running towards the ball of the sun bobbing red-bright on the seal’s nose of the promontory above the rim of the flat black sea. Turn up off the tarmac down the twin titchy trenches of the cart-tracks, and hop from one to the other across the no man’s land booby-trapped with thistles and coarse grass with edges rough as rusty bayonets and beaded with the gory dew. Into the hay-field as the men and women yawn and stretch and lean on their pitchforks, gabbing in thick voices and drowned vowels, growling in Celtic gibberish and mockery of English. Soon the squat men pull at their fingers and begin to pitch and toss the hay bales high onto the slatted cart, resting on its wheels big as millstones, with the heavy horses slavering at the harness and making earth pancakes among the stubble with their iron-bound hooves. Dodge the prongs of the forks swinging alternately to the rhythms of the men and pick up the stray scraps of hay and pass them on to the women, squatting and chattering in their wide plump skirts as they bind the bales. And so until the noon is a white splash of glare and the sweat trickles down into smarting eyes. Then it’s the break and the sun-warm tea washes down the gritty bread folded over the cold salt fat meat and the boys’ voices wheel as swallows while the men and women rest as crows. Then to work again through the long afternoons that never end, no never end, and the boys slip away fading with the falling sun, wilting by the cart until it’s piled high and they can clamber up the scratchy slipping sides with the men prodding up the pitchforks in play at their scrabbling breeches. Then the final jog home with body flopped back on the cart, arms and legs asprawl, sleeping-waking under the dark fingering sky.

  It is not always this. No, later the time of the troubles, the Irish troubles. What cares Holyhead for Flanders and poppies and mud, when it’s the bog Papists across the water that are shooting down the King’s men and helping the Hun and making the khaki boys tramp away from France where King George is needing them, tramp away sullen onto the gangplank of the old paddlewheel steamer. See them file into her, men hangdog and silent, never a song among them, with rifles shaped like crutches and puttees wound round their ankles careful as brown bandages. Watch them go sullen and slouching into the iron bowels of the ship, as you stand with your mother Merry, and she is blubbing and crossing herself, and you pull at her sleeve, Mother, Mother, not here, Mother, as the crowd about you shrinks back from her sobbing Hail Marys, as the black-garbed Wesleyans recoil until the only clear space on all the cobbled quay is a ring about Gog and his mother. And the Welsh are all mumbling and whispering and pointing to the two Papist spies among them, Gog all of ten years old and his praying mother, with his father suddenly stepping up the gangplank among the line of soldiers, his father with bare neck under brown cap and Kitchener moustaches desperately drooping, his father looking backward in fear and weariness, looking until he sees Gog and his mother, who runs forward screaming, Griffin, George Griffin, you can’t kill them, you can’t kill them, my own people, you can’t kill them, Blessed Virgin, he can’t kill them, his brothers. And the two policemen seize her and pull her back and Gog runs forward and bites the policeman’s hand on his mother’s wrist, sinks his teeth into the knucklebones and hangs on, until a swipe on his ear sends him cowering onto the cobbles, hands over his head. And he peers upwards again through parted elbows to see his father turn away in denial as he is prodded forward by the khaki men advancing behind him, his father’s back turn away bowed under big pack and kitbag and rifle, his father turn away on the treadmill of uniform that falls into the belly of the paddleboat. And he sees no
more of his father, except the sepia photographs yellowing at the edges, except the telegram that Father is dead for his country in Dublin, except the letter from the adjutant that the dirty Irish Papists­ have shot Father in the back off duty for the wearing of the khaki.

  It’s short commons now in the shuttered house with the pinched fingers of charity bringing bowls of dripping for the bread, and the plump priest offering consolation when there’s none to be had, and the relatives always at their requiem. Well, what did you expect, Merry, if you would marry beneath you? And one day, Mother puts aside her drab weeds and rises in scarlet and feathers and she’s off to the town for the pickings from the processions of soldiers. And the uncles begin to stop by on their way to the ferry, hanging their braided caps on the deer’s horns in the hall, their Sam Brownes smelling of polish and linseed, the metal tips of their tan shoes digging dents in the Persian patterns on the carpet. And the uncles give way to a steady comer, the garrison Major ready for an Irish counter-sortie, the English squireen who treats Wales as a tribal reservation and Holyhead as a feudal village and Merry as a temporary wife, for any woman he is with must be a lady too respectable to be a whore. And the boys call out at Gog in the streets,

  “Blimey, blimey,

  Your ma’s got a limey . . .”

  till he’s so bruised with blind bashing at his tormentors, his mother forbids him to go out. O, the fights are bloodier and not so classy as the Fights of the Fancy and peerless Tom Cribb in Box­iana, conned page by loved page. But the Major keeps on coming, bold, bluff and booming with small spiky mustachios, brown and rough as an oak, used to striding across a whole shire and calling it, My Estate. And when Merry swells at the belly and talk changes to marriage, How would you like another Father, Gog? How would you like to go to boarding school? Don’t make a face now, say thank you to Major Meredith, don’t you want to make me happy? Then the Major’s off to the Somme for ever, transferred by request, and the relatives descend like cormorants and gulp down Gog like a codling, ready to disgorge him to the Jesuit fishers in the cold Northern moorland, where Catholic schoolboys learn to avoid perdition by Rod, Rigour and Restraint, the trinity of three R’s so good for the soul.