Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  XXXIII

  Gog walks on through the night, approaching London, with an occasional glow-worm making a smear of light in the darkness. At last, rain and fatigue drive him to hunch in the hollow roots of an old oak by the roadside, his back supported on the trunk. He lies in a half-stupor, beached on the Dogger Bank between dry wakefulness and the deep of sleep. But as the cold and the dawn begin to shiver his limbs, he pushes his fists into the two peeled eggs of his eyes and forces himself upright on cramped and set legs. He is still compelling his sinews to work against the pain of willed movement, when he hears the bray of a donkey, the creak of wheels and the words of a song sung by a familiar voice:

  “Duck-legged Dick had a donkey,

  And his lush loved much for to swill,

  One day he got rather lumpy,

  And got sent seven days to the mill . . .”

  Gog looks down the road to see an old donkey hobbling on splay legs towards him. The white muzzle of the beast nearly touches the ground in its effort to pull at the black harness set about its shoulder-bones that start out of its hide as prominently as two scythes. Behind the donkey is attached a green cart with slatted sides, supporting a placard:

  MOKE’S TOURS

  We Get You There For Half

  Take Time Off To See The Sights Slow

  The cart is loaded with bodies, perhaps a dozen lying hunched in a heap for warmth. On a box at the front of the cart sits the Pardoner, a long whip in his hands. The points of his nose, his cheekbones and his chin form a diamond of skeletal points of light under the shadow of his broad black hat. He continues to sing in his prissy and coarse tone, the voice of man who has educated himself to con his own.

  “His donkey was taken to the green-yard,

  A fate which he never deserved.

  Oh! it was such a regular mean yard,

  That pardon! the poor moke got starved.

  Oh! bad luck can’t be prevented,

  Fortune she smiles or she frowns,

  He’s best off that’s contented,

  To mix, sir, the ups and the downs.”

  The bony Pardoner reins in the donkey by the side of Gog, although the beast still trembles and sways so much that it seems to be progressing at its former slow pace. He points his long whip at the pile of bodies that fill the surface of the undertaker’s cart behind him, and says, “Well met, sir. Only a tanner to London, just for the moke’s hay. You can spare sixpence, surely, for my friend Absolom. Pardon the crush, but this is a popular tour. Plenty of room there, plenty more room.”

  Gog looks at the human débris littered on top of each other on the cart and sniffs the smell of stale beer that hangs over the bodies like the mouldy umbrella of the Black Death. “I’d say you were overloaded,” he says. “If a sparrow fell on that heap, you’d break an axle.”

  The donkey sinks onto its two front knees and the Pardoner begins to whip it with relish and accuracy, trying vainly to pick a spot on its concave haunches that is not a sore nor a scar. “Pardon me,” he says, flipping the lash, “plenty more places behind dear Absolom.” He flicks his whip too far back on accidental purpose and twitches a piece of skin off the cheek of one of the sleepers, who curses and rolls over further onto the human pile and relapses into sodden slumber. The swearer does expose, however, an area as large as one buttock on the edge of the cart. “There, what did I tell you?” the Pardoner says. “You hop on there, sir, among the hop-pickers coming back from their sweet ramble among nature’s gift to beer. You lounge back among your fellow creatures and relax. You won’t think you’re on King George’s golden coach, I admit. But you’ll be in better company, pardon me, able to take your ease and survey the glories of the universe, while we progress on our merry way to London Town.”

  All the Pardoner’s exquisite flogging of the donkey produces no reaction except shuddering flanks, until the beast collapses in the end on the roadway. The Pardoner bends forward to screw the point of his whip into an abcess on the withers of the donkey; but Gog reaches out and pulls at the lash and gives the whip such a yank that the Pardoner is lifted out of his seat and is tumbled on the ground, his hat flying off and clinking its shells like castanets. “Pardon me,” Gog says. And he sets about flogging the Pardoner as hard as he can.

  The screams and howls of the Pardoner for mercy do not disturb the sodden mass on the cart. The donkey, however, revives enough to climb on its legs and watch with a large and grateful eye the beating of its master. Eventually, Gog breaks the whip, then leans down and pulls the blubbering Pardoner to his feet and sets his broad hat stitched with cockle-shells again on his skull.

  “I don’t care about beasts being cruel to each other,” Gog says. “That’s nature. But when a man’s cruel to a beast, he’s making a brute of himself, and he’s better than that.”

  The Pardoner smears the tears out of his rheumy eyes and looks at Gog through his crooked claws. “And when a man beats a man,” he says, “isn’t he a brute too, who ought to be beaten? Pardon me, isn’t it just brute force which sets one man above another?”­

  Gog feels the cold of the dawn lay its wet cloth on the righteous anger of his blood. “Yes,” Gog says. “I shouldn’t have beaten you. And I’m a brute for doing so.”

  “And what’s the use,” says the Pardoner, “if I’ll only beat Absolom ten times worse when you’ve gone? He’s got to get us to London and he’s got such a thick hide, he only understands the whip. If he sat in the driver’s seat and I was in the harness, he’d flog me. Pardon me, I wouldn’t beat him, you know, if I didn’t have to earn my way through the wicked world. Oh, you’re all right, sir, a big bloke like you, you can always get a bit of bread with a heave of your hand. But us thin ones, it’s not so easy. I’ve got to get my investment back. After Jonathan did the dirty and died on his old pal, I only had enough of the ready to buy old Absolom and the cart off a coster down at the hopping, and I’m skinned. If the moke gets a bit skinned getting us to London, he’ll get his gilt back quicker than I will. Pass it on, pardon me, sir, pass it on. That’s all we can do. People is like that. Pass it on.”

  Yes, Gog thinks, pass it on. Blows, breath, diseases, lungs, jobs, hare-lips, beds, crookbacks, deeds, cleft palates, photographs, paranoia, last wills, leukemia, pass it on. Never suffer what you suffer, give as bad as you get, pass it on. It’s not me, no, not me, sir, it is the past, the family, the country, the city, the weather, the wind, the gods, the government, the memory, the mind, the mistake, never my intention. Pass it on. We are here merely to pass on what we are to more passers-on in the chain of labourers humping the sack of existence, passing it on from Adam to oblivion.

  “Here,” Gog says, “this will pardon me for everything.” He reaches into his pocket and he takes out the twists of green notes that he finds there and he puts them in the Pardoner’s palm. And the Pardoner bends, brushing the rim of his hat with a clatter of cockles against Gog’s sleeve. And he tries to kiss the back of Gog’s hand; but Gog pushes him upright and drags him by the arm over to the donkey. “I’m buying Absolom,” Gog says. “Unharness him.” “He’s worth double,” the Pardoner complains. “Double what?” Gog says. “Double any money I can give you?” “He’s worth more as dogsmeat,” the Pardoner says. “No dog would touch him,” Gog says, examining the welts and scabs and rubbed patches of bare hide that make up the surface of the beast. “But being a man, Pardoner, I’ll take him.”

  The Pardoner unharnesses the beast. When he has done so, Gog takes him by the scruff of the neck and ties him up with straps and buckles in the place of the moke. “If you want your profits,” Gog says, “you haul the hop-pickers to London. They’ve paid their fare, they won’t want to walk. When they wake up, they’re not going to like it, stopping for so long.” And Gog sets off down the road with the donkey ambling beside him, until the soft whimpers of the Pardoner die away behind them, die because the Pardoner dare not shout from the harness in case his drunken cargo wakes and whips its human moke all the merry way to London Town
.

  So Gog reaches the outer suburbs of the great wen, London, with the hoary muzzle of an old donkey poking at his shoulder and a stupor of fatigue making a balloon of his head and cannonballs of his feet. The streets are cleared by the daily air raid of the early morning, which keeps the people in the linen shelter of their beds and allows only milkmen and postmen and coppers to patrol the empty avenues and deliver their duties. The war-grimy villas flaunt their unavailing eccentricities that cannot deny the horror of the box after box after box now built over the once-holy way to Canterbury. Here a house has a yellow door, there a green one, there a red. Here is a modern Tudor beam only an inch thick stuck onto pink plaster, there a cathedral spire a full two feet high dominating a porch. In this garden, a bird-bath rests on the crown of a plaster pixie; in that lawn all of two yards square, a goldfish pond big as a sunken bowl sprouts up an iron Cupid no larger than a rusting fungus. Yet all is the same in these family villas, three bedrooms and one attic, living- and dining-room, tool-shed and strip garden, fit for mother and father and only two children, never more and never less or something might change and all change is for the worse. In their hundreds and their thousands, the villas line the King’s Highway, only their hopeless nameplates crying out silently against the tyranny of numbers, showing in their dumb oblong mouths the protesting letters, Strathclyde, Mon Repos, Shalimar, Shangri-La, Aviemoor, Bonnie, The Lilacs, The Laurels, The Laburnums, screaming unheard for the utopias and the greenery and the wilderness that cannot be there in this no man’s land for respectable everyman between megalopolis and byre. Yet the vain quirks that speak for lost individuals in the ranks of the outer villas give way to the regimentation of desolation of the inner Victorian and Edwardian terraces, three rooms up and three down, where the clerks still breed and butter their thin bread with the oleomargarine of old glory. And there the paint and the bricks and the stucco are shabby as a regiment in retreat, carrying its battle-honours cut in plaster scrolls on the yellow brick flags of its fronts, Alma, Inkerman, Sebastopol, Balaclava, Khartoum, Pretoria, yes, Roberts villa and Kitchener villa cheek by jowl with Jubilee and Imperial and the pub at the end, The Empress of India.

  Gog’s courage runs down into his toe-caps at the repetition of this interminable gentility and he begins to stagger and weave all over the pavement as tiredness makes him into a drunken man. Absalom, however, finds the decayed hedges and shrubs of suburbia very much to its taste, and it fills up the drum of its belly with shrewd passing pilfering from the front gardens. It becomes almost skittish, and when Gog reels against it by mistake, it lets fly with a kick that fetches Gog up winded on a garden wall with two iron stumps pile-driving into his buttocks, the remnants of railings cut off to help the war effort.

  “Well, moke,” Gog says to the donkey, “if you’re feeling that sassy, you might as well give me a lift to anchor your feet to the ground.” So Gog catches Absolom by the rope halter attached round its head and he throws a leg over its sagging spine and he sits astride the beast with both of his soles still planted firmly on the ground. He finds that, if he bends his legs at the knee, he can lock his ankles under the donkey’s belly with his downdropping toes just off the tarmac. As Absolom moves on, Gog tends to fall off right or left, so he slouches forward, embracing the neck of the beast, his nostrils pressed against the rank mane of the moke, which slowly drags its way towards the city. The slight pitching and rolling of the donkey make the choppy swell of Gog’s fatigue wash over his consciousness and drown him in a billow of doze.

  Jogging into London with the Kentish men . . . men of Kent, the Kentish men . . . Jack Cade our leader, call him Mortimer . . . Jack Cade, old soldier, with twenty thousand Kentish men . . . How much longer will we stand for it? Tithes and extortion, stinking breath from Westminster, Lancaster and York, Wars of the Roses, thorns for the people, thorns and oppressors, we’ve come to rout them out, burn them out of London, Jack Cade and twenty thousand Kentish men . . . Cade on his horse, in gilt spurs and gilt helmet, in robe of blue velvet, striking his sword on London Stone, crying, Now is Mortimer Lord of this City . . . No taxes for the commons, sting the foreign merchants, take Lord Say from the tower, off with his head and spike it on London Bridge, drag Say’s lordly body at the cart-tail till the flesh cleaves to the cobbles from Cheap to Southwark, walk on the meat of the rich that waxed fat from the bones of the poor, slip on the bloody stone greased with the blood of the great . . . but the mob riots and plunders and Cade wears a crown and the Mayor goes to the Tower and the Kentish men plunder and flee back to their forests and furnaces with a pot or two of gold and silver . . . and Cade’s off with his loot downriver to Rochester, gulled by a free pardon, a free pardon for the Kentish men . . . but there’s no pardon for a rebel, once Magog’s sitting pretty in the City again . . . and the soldiers go out and Cade’s wounded and carried in a cart back to London, pitching and rolling to Blackheath where his great camp was, wounded unto death, the boards of the cart slippery with his own spewing veins . . . O, the poor bleed as bad as the rich do, what matters your estate when your ribs are stove in and your side is slit and your life ebbs spattering the boards of the cart and your head’s chopped off to rot on the same spike as Lord Say’s (now buried in hallowed ground), left to rot like a marrow in the sun on a spike on London Bridge, not falling down, not falling down, but standing up to the Kentish men and sending the soldiers South to pierce the people with their pikes and halberds . . . Cade is gone to London once, Cade he wears a crown, Cade is gone to London twice, stinking out the town . . . and the Kentish men, O you men of Kent, black with charcoal and toiling at your forges, never again will London be in the hollow of your hard hands, never, never, never . . . and London will creep out on grimy nails along the King’s Highways, creep out brick finger by brick thumb until the forests are gone and the forges are parlours and a Kentish man is a South Londoner, saying I’m all right, Jack Cade, what were you so fussed about?

  Gog wakes to find himself sitting in a puddle, embracing the donkey’s neck as it squats on its haunches eating the stuffing out of an abandoned chair on one of the many bombsites that pock the kempt rows of the city. By the side of the puddle in the rubble, daisies and marigolds and dandelions grow among the long grass that has already made the ruined houses into a plot of pasture. Gog climbs to his feet, brushing the wet off his buttocks; but as he rises, so Absolom falls onto its side, sticking out its four legs briefly and stiffly before they also collapse to the ground. Gog hopes the beast has expired; but it breathes rhythmically beneath the huffing cage of its ribs. Gog decides to leave it in its arcadian meadow among the broken bricks; but as he turns to abandon it, he notices a crowd of early morning housewives watching him over the wall, ready to denounce him for abandoning such a walloped old moke. So he turns again and tries to pull the donkey to its feet, crying, “Giddup,” but Absolom just reclines, occasionally rolling an eye and shrivelling its lips back over its yellow teeth to laugh the better at the idiotic efforts of the man. Gog is exasperated at the immobility of the moke and he is about to kick it in the haunch to force it upright, when he hears the crowd murmur behind him. So he yanks again, “Giddup, will you?” while Absolom lies like so many hundredweight of knacker’s prime cut. And the murmur of the crowd rises to a shrill protest and the housewives begin to wave their umbrellas and shopping-bags about and a policeman will come upon the scene any moment, so Gog is forced to turn and address the mob.

  “Dear madams,” Gog says, hoicking away at the donkey’s rope, “this poor brute I saved from a fate worse than death. I am but a poor Samaritan and I am taking him to the vet to be cured of his many wounds. I love our four-footed friends just as much as you. I am not responsible for the moke’s sorry condition, he was beaten by his former master.” Pass it on, pass it on, Gog, that’s the ticket, pass it on. “Could some kind lady direct me towards the nearest vet? And I promise you, if the poor beast is not well enough to walk, why, I’ll carry him myself.”

  So it is that Gog rash
ly promises and has to cross the River Thames at Westminster Bridge carrying a donkey on his back. It is a heavy scarf. In his left hand, Gog clasps the hind quarters of the beast; in his right hand, he holds the forelegs; on his bowed shoulders, the full weight of the belly of the animal bears down. Happy to be conveyed in its turn, Absolom rests its jawbone on the side of its neck and snuffles in Gog’s ear, occasionally licking away the salt sweat and the skin from his lobe with a tongue rougher than a file. As Gog crosses the bridge, a ship blows a derisory horn on the Thames, a paean of mocking, “PRRARP, PRRARP, proo-proo, PRRARP, PRRARP.” And the sun spills over the white wraps of the cumulus clouds, gilding the blackened towers and spires of the Houses of Parliament ahead, where the gutted windows of the bombed building open their square mouths as unheard as politicians. And the bright light strews palms at Gog’s feet on the ripples of the puddles that he sloshes through. And as he staggers over the bridge with the donkey on his back, he stops the passers-by with his question, “The vet. Where’s the vet?” And they sing back their hosannas, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m not from round here, I don’t know, why not ask a bobby, I don’t know, I’m a stranger myself, I don’t know,” they chant the muttered litanies of the great metropolis of the unknown and the unknowing and the visitors and the aliens and the passers-by and the passers on and the passers through, they mumble the matins and the evensong of the great human wash that flows and ebbs once a day, while the dirty tidal Thames sucks at the piles under the bridges twice as often in a feeble imitation of the great land tide above.

  And Boudicca’s charging with her spear held high behind horses of neighing bronze, her raped daughters clutching her haunches on the chariot floor, she’s charging full tilt across the bridge to put the Houses of Parliament to fire and sword, to burn out the misrule of London over Albion. But her chariot is bogged in immobile stone and the Houses of Parliament are guarded by Richard the Lionheart still standing in Old Palace Yard, iron Richard horsed on his plinth, still holding up his sword in his raised right hand, undamaged by bomb and fire and blast, except that the heat from the blitzed parliament has bent the sword a little way above the hilt, so that his weapon seems cracked by many mighty deeds of war, dented by the helmets of the million German houses he has riven in revenge with the downdropping iron hacking home from the high mailed glove of the bomb doors. And a tarpaulin backs the broken crosses of the windowless great window of St. Stephen’s Hall and an immense emptiness seems to sit behind the shutters upon the gutted House of Commons. But the donkey, seeing the vast stable of stone, scents good company, and it kicks free on Gog’s shoulders and scrambles onto the ground and gallops past two startled policemen through the entrance of parliament, braying its contribution to the deliberations of the representatives of the people. And Gog, lightened of his load, takes to his heels back towards Trafalgar Square, as the policemen yell and chase the hee-hawing beast through the corridors of parliament, stopping it from eating the brief-cases of undersecretaries and delivering the plans of the future in a series of smoking turds. And Gog runs towards the high column of Nelson, runs until he is winded, then floats, giddy and glad and alone, floats towards the North where a lost instinct drives him wafting and blowing as a pouter pigeon with tail feathers fanned out by a following gale.