Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  The kneeling people reply, “Amen,” and rise. And the old woman leans again on her sticks and hobbles back towards the ring. As she moves forwards, a sudden flare of light from a cracking log illuminates her shadowed face. In her long nose and thin jaw, in the crab-apple lumps on her cheek-bones that gather the lines of cracking skin from eyelid and cheek into polished red knobs, Gog seems to see a woman he once knew. His mouth opens in a cry of recognition; but he stays silent out of policy and fear, when he sees the old woman nod at a man in the ring, a man who bends down to pick up a small squealing box and lopes with it into the firelight so that Gog can recognize the abominable Crook, as tawny and furry as ever, but with his black pads in boots and his chest in a sailor’s jersey above his stained leather breeches.

  When Crook reaches the edge of the fire, he wrenches off the end of the box and pulls out a small black pig, which wriggles and screams continuously. Crook drops the box and takes a firm grip on the pig by tail and hind legs. Then he walks slowly round the fire, displaying the pig to the ring of people.

  “And Joanna wrote,” the old woman chants, “that the Devil came unto her in the likeness of a black pig, and lo, He was chastised by the True Believers and cast into the furnace.”

  The people of the ring bend and pick up stones or branches from the ground. And Crook throws the pig into the air with the cry of, “Hup, Satan.” And the pig dashes for safety across the clearing away from the fire; but every time it tries to break through the circle of people in their Sunday blue, it is chopped or bludgeoned or stoned until it is dragging itself about on three legs, still screeching out of its bloody snout. Then the people break the ring and surround the pig and batter it to death. And Crook runs in with a hook and chain, and he pulls out the corpse and he puts it on the hook and he takes it back to the fire, where the chain is put on the tripod and the corpse swung over the flame. And Crook watches the blood drop off the broken porker into the embers with a hiss and a splutter, and he licks his hands clean of gore, and he laughs to see the people begin dancing again in a circle, singing a new hymn.

  “Now Satan’s gone, shall Shiloh come,

  Descending in Millenium.

  Pour Satan’s ashes on thy head,

  And God will waken all the dead.

  Halleluiah, now no more

  Shall evil flourish on our shore.

  Halleluiah, good is nigh,

  Joanna cometh from on high.

  Let the faithful’s holy praise

  Rise to . . .”

  A rifle shot. The singing stops as if all the voices had been cut dumb by one bullet. The people of the ring turn. Gog sees khaki uniforms advancing in the moonlight from the far side of the clearing, as the local Home Guard charges with fixed bayonets. “Theer,” a yokel’s voice shouts, “I told ’ee. Spies. Signalling the Jap bombers.” The worshippers turn and run back towards Gog. “Halt,” a voice shouts, “or we fire.” But the worshippers scuttle off, with Crook in the lead dodging and jinking away into the birches quick as a stoat. One portly figure trips and the Home Guard surrounds him, pushing its bayonets at his throat and belly, while he weakly protests, “I say, we’re not spies. Really. Just followers of Joanna Southcott, the prophetess, don’t you know?” But the Home Guard pulls him up mercilessly and frog-marches him off and seeks further victims. The village soldiers, however, are too scared to stray out of the clearing into the recesses of the wood, who knows what enemy may not be laying in wait for them with machine-guns, and they already have their single captive to prove their devotion to duty. So even the old lady is allowed to hobble away to safety on her sticks as they shout, “Let the old witch go, or ’er’ll put the evil eye on ’ee.” She crouches down behind the bush by Gog and waits, panting. The Home Guard fires off a dozen shots into the air to ventilate the rusty barrels of its Lee-Enfields, then it forms up and smartly marches back through the wood along the way it has come, bearing off its prisoner to interrogate at leisure.

  When the village soldiers have gone, Gog looks out at the clearing and sees that the corpse of the pig has been reduced to a twisted stick of ash on the end of the hook and chain.

  “You’ve burnt a pig,” Gog says bitterly to the old lady. “You haven’t burnt Satan, granny.”

  The old lady peers up at Gog’s face, then suddenly cups her scaly palms about his cheeks and drags his face close to her own. “Granny?” She studies Gog’s face. “I can’t see in the dark. You’re not one of us. What are you doing here?”

  “I saw the light through the trees,” Gog says. “I’m on my way, walking if I can, to London. I turned off to see what it was. Pure chance.”

  “There’s no chance,” the old lady says. “It’s all intended. Intended. Revealed to Joanna and locked in her box. What’s your name?”

  Gog looks down at the old lady’s withered face, so familiar and yet so distant beyond memory. And he says, “They call me Gog.” And the old lady hooks her bent arm round Gog’s neck and kisses him on the mouth with her dry gums and snivels, “Ta, Gog. Gog Griffin. Granny indeed. Your own father’s mother. Maria, your own granny. There. Nothing’s chance. It’s all intended. All intended by the mind. The mind of God as revealed through Joanna his Bride.”

  Gog looks at the dark face of the old woman and he cannot remember, but as she seems to recognize him, he kisses her dutifully on the cheek, saying, “How lovely we should meet again.”

  “Home, my Gogling. Home. You and your old granny should not be sitting behind a bush in a damp wood at night, when there’s a home not far away, your home.” The old lady rises and says to Gog simply, as if she has always said the same thing, “Carry me.”

  So Gog picks up the woman who says she is his grandmother, he picks her up sticks and bones and all, and he carries her through the birch trees. She weighs no more than a large Christmas turkey and she lies in his arms, light and trusting, as though cradled again in contentment. She directs the way by pointing with one knobbled hand. Gog takes paths soft with wet leaves, he follows tracks that wind and double back through the trees. After a quarter of an hour, he comes to a rotting gate in a high wall so overgrown with moss and ivy that he cannot tell in the summer-dark whether it is built of brick or stone. He carries the old woman through the gate and up a paved path to the porch of some Victorian Gothic rectory, abandoned in the wood. He reaches a wooden porch, set askew on its supporting pillars of cast-iron frondage, and he deposits the old woman on her sticks and on the ground before the front door, chequered with lozenges of dark red and dark blue from the moonlight shining through the leaded glass between the pillars, with an occasional silver diamond in the pattern to indicate that a pane is missing.

  The old woman looks in the black pouch attached by a thong to her wrist and produces a large iron key, which she gives to Gog. He feels round the face of the door with the fingers of his free hand, reading the braille of entering, the recognition of the keyhole with questing fingertips and the guiding of the key into the lock, so that it can be turned to let the outside inside and gather men from nature to the protection of their own built imaginings. They enter a dark hole redolent with rank dampness, and the old woman strikes a match and lights an oil lamp in the cavernous hallway. In the streaks of wavering light Gog can intermittently see Persian carpets and pre-Raphaelite paintings hung alternately on the high walls. The carpets repeat the forms and the colours of the porch, so that vermilion and marine sprays and ferns run across lozenges and diamonds of deep black and red and blue. The paintings, too, are azure and turquoise and scarlet and crimson, with the white faces of the women bright as bare canvas under their copper hair and the medieval backgrounds as gaudy as fantasy fairs.

  “I left it just as it was when he passed away,” the old woman says, hobbling off to light another oil lamp. “Not a thing altered. He doesn’t like it. I only have to move a chair a foot or two and he tells me to put it back.” She sighs. “Ta, he bothers me all night, if I’ve budged even an antimacassar.”

  “I thought you
said he was dead,” Gog says, following the old lady from lamp to lamp, as she continues her round of lighting the wicks.

  “You know that,” the old woman says. “You know George Albert passed away twenty years ago. But he always was a talker. And now I can’t stop him talking . . .” The old woman sighs. “Ta, that’s the trouble with spirits. It’s very comforting hearing them when you live all alone. But it’s all one way. They talk and you listen. It’s not like a conversation.”

  Now that four of the lamps are lit, Gog can see that he is in a vast mock-baronial hall. Blue rafters studded with gold stars span the ceiling; where they meet, a red rose of carved wood opens its giant petals; where they join the walls, a dragon’s mouth erupts out of the brick and swallows the beam between its jaws. A great stone fireplace, the size of an attic, makes a cave in one wall. Strewn about the floor are tables and carved chairs of dark polished wood and covered with tapestry, so that the uncertain lights seem to make the embroidered griffins and unicorns and maidens dance and retire on the backs of benches or the seats of stools. Yet nothing in the hall is as it pretends to be. The tall windows are leaded and black; but where the moon shines through one perpendicular window, Gog can see that the glass is brown and yellow in a pale imitation of the medieval style. Everything in the room is copied from a heroic feudal age and nothing is correct. On the tapestries, the maidens are too maidenly, the lions are fierce and life-like instead of being sweet-mouthed and imaginary, even the griffins look as if they were copied from a zoo rather than a traveller’s tall tale. Gog feels that if a fair lady in a long flowing robe and trailing tresses entered the room, she would surely turn out to be a housemaid in a dressing-gown on her way from the bath.

  “It’s providential you’ve come, Gog,” the old woman says, lighting more lamps until the hall becomes relatively bright. “We’re always having so many disappointments in the Movement that it’s time Providence did something for us. Oh, what am I saying? Questioning the working of the Will of the Lord? But He doesn’t have to run an organization as human as mine. Still, as if He didn’t know best! It’s all your fault, Gog. Especially with a name like that, so unfortunate. I should call you George like your poor father. But everyone calls you Gog, although the name’s not at all well mentioned in Revelations.”

  “I know,” Gog says. “Magog and I are meant to put an end to the Millenium. And the world.”

  “Well, you’ll come in very useful for once,” the old lady says, sitting on a form of throne with a carved lion’s head at the end of each arm, its body the arm-rest, its tail the side of the chair-back, and a lion’s paw on a ball at the end of each leg. “I’ll have to explain to my flock why the Almighty allowed those stupid soldiers to break into our Service. And I’ll be able to say it was because Gog was at hand. They’ll understand that.”

  ‘‘What were you doing out there, granny?” Gog finds the word “granny” slips easily out of his mouth for the first time, although he still does not recognize the old woman sitting in front of him. “I thought it was a witches’ sabbat at first. And where did you meet the frightful Crook, the man who held the pig?”

  “Of course, it wasn’t a sabbat,” the old woman says, scandalized. “Ta, you naughty boy. You’re like the fools who call me a witch round here, just because I live alone and I’m old and I have the power of healing and know the truth, that Joanna was the Bride of God. The man who held the pig? I’ve never seen him before. He just happened to have a pig under his arm, when I was looking round for one and didn’t have the coupons, of course. He stole it, I suppose. Black pig, black market.”

  “You have the power of healing, granny?”

  “You know that, too. Don’t tease me, pretending you don’t know what you do know. Come here.” Although the old woman’s­ voice is thin, her commands lash the ears like a cane. Gog obediently goes to stand beside the throne-chair. “Kneel.” Gog kneels and bows his head so that his face is level with the seated woman’s.­ “Now tell me, what’s wrong with you, and I’ll intercede with the Most High that you shall be cured.”

  “Well, I’ve a bruised shoulder. Nothing much else wrong, except being alive.”

  “Don’t be clever. Which shoulder?”

  “The left one.”

  The old woman puts out her right hand onto Gog’s left shoulder and lays her left hand crossways upon the back of the other. She presses down on the shoulder, while Gog winces with pain. Then she raises her wrinkled eyes towards the rafters and says, “May the Divine Power flow from Thee, Joanna, Bride of God, through thy Divine Daughter Maria into the shoulder of this miserable sinner, and make him whole. Amen.” She lifts off her hands and Gog’s shoulder immediately feels a little better, since it has no pressure upon it. “Your cure’s not finished,” the old lady says. “Go over to that jug of water and dip this in it.” She hands Gog a small linen handkerchief, which she takes from her pouch. “It has been blessed by the Breath of Prayer,” the old lady says. “Wet it, put it in your mouth, suck, then lay the handkerchief on your afflicted member, and the pain will be taken from you.”

  Gog crosses the room, wets the handkerchief, sucks the linen, and puts the damp square under his shirt on his bare shoulder. He smiles inwardly as he does so; but the authority of the old lady’s voice and vestigial memories of boyhood make him obey with a grave face.

  “And while you’re over there,” Gog’s granny orders, “fetch me a bottle of the cordial by the jug.”

  Gog picks up a black bottle without a label, stoppered with a twist of paper over a plug of wood. He carries it and two glasses back to the throne-chair. “Ta, invite yourself to a nip, too,” the old lady says. “You never waited to be asked, ever. But manners makyth man, Gog.” Gog pours out two glasses of the cordial, gives one to his granny, and raises his own.

  “Here’s health to you, granny, and may you live to be eighty.”

  As Gog tosses back his drink, he feels his palate split in half and his gullet corrode into flakes of rust. Meanwhile, his granny says, “I’m already over eighty, you fool. And I’m past the age when you can flatter me by calling me younger. I’m not a young lady, you know, though I may look it.” She puts on a little simper, then says sternly, “You shouldn’t have swallowed my cordial in one gulp. You should sip it. Savour it.”

  Gog has put his hand over his mouth and is blowing breaths of fire that scorch his palm. He rushes over to the water jug and begins draining great gulps to quench the arson inside his belly.

  “You don’t need more water for your cure,” his granny says. “You’ve had quite enough. And water will dilute the taste of my cordial. I brewed it especially weak this year. I couldn’t find the belladonna. Ta, things are still shockingly short, though the war’s officially over. Did you like it, Gog? It’s a mild stimulant.”

  While Granny Maria sips down her cordial with little smacks of the lips, Gog finds his heart bouncing like a yo-yo and his eyes swivelling round in their sockets. The hall begins to whirl about topsy-turvy and helter-skelter and roller-coaster and uphill down-dale and askew-agley and clockwise-widdershins, until Gog feels himself spinning and falls into a large settee, manorial-­style with escutcheons cut all over the wooden rims and hauberks embroidered all over the seat.

  “Would you kindly get up and serve me another glass?” Gog’s granny says. “It’s so weak I can hardly taste it. Ta, I shall have to give it to the Vicar.”

  “Do you mind,” Gog says, “if you serve yourself? I’m feeling a bit giddy. Not your drink, dear, just tiredness. I’ve walked a long way towards London. All the way from Edinburgh.”

  “How ungallant of you, Gog,” the old lady says, pouring herself another stiff drink. “And if you’ve walked from Edinburgh, you’re walking backwards. The army has made you uncouth, and I hoped it would make you into an officer and a gentleman. But you wouldn’t have come running out of the woods with your pig-sticker fixed on the end of your musket to break up a Holy and Sacred Occasion?”

  “No, granny,” Gog
hears himself say, while the cordial in his stomach makes him see the strangest phenomena, tritons leaving their tapestries and floating away up the chimney, auburn-haired beggar girls sprouting lilies until a deluge of blossom covers the whole pre-Raphaelite painting, and Granny Maria levitating on her throne-chair and sticking to a carved rose on the ceiling, so faraway and distant is her voice in Gog’s ears.

  “I agree, Gog, that to the uninitiated, the ceremony must have appeared a little outré. But it was a Commemoration Service, begun by my Celtic father, your great-grandfather George Thomas, not George Albert like my husband. I told you about him, how he fathered me when he was a very old man. He even fought Boney. He was a sailor at Trafalgar, only fourteen he was, and he saw Nelson as close as you now see me.”

  To Gog’s skittering eyes, Granny Maria seems to be half a heaven away, riding her wooden lion among the stars and the black beams that hold up the universe, swooping past the dragons’ mouths that bellow and belch at her out of the walls of the firmament.

  “Well, when the war was over, he sailed back to England to find all the labourers starving and the machines in the factories making paupers out of free Britons. So a terrible rage came over him. He had fought the French all over the seven seas, he had endured hard tack and cannon-balls and years without stepping ashore, all for a handful of profiteers eating up the poor in their slum factories. So he gathered together a group of out-of-work labourers and they went round wrecking all the threshing-­machines they could find.”

  Who was it, then, who was it charged the threshing-machine on the Border when Cluckitt first sprang up like a pixie? Was it Gog who charged the machine eating men and men’s food, or was it great-grandfather George Thomas charging in the veins of Gog?