Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  Gog feels Maire’s reasoning whirl his brains round like a tee-to-tum; but he concentrates at looking up at the blank ceiling, willing its still whiteness to clear his mind.

  “The truth,” Gog says, “is what happened. And I can check on that. With old friends. With people I trust. If you weren’t a liar, you’d be able to confirm with me all I did with you since we met.”

  “Nonsense,” Maire says. “Two people can lie just as well as one. Look at all the arguments that break out when you try and say, Didn’t we do that? No, I say, we did this. And so on. We don’t remember the past the same. We all remember it differently. We all remember it for our own purposes. We drag it up, if we want to make a good case for ourselves in the present. Otherwise, it’s no use, is it? We live now. The past’s gone. There’s no truth, Gog, except what you see before you this moment.”

  “So that’s the truth,” Gog says. “All this way through my mind, all this journey through the past, just to find out it’s not worth a damn, this is all there is.” He allows his eyes to travel slowly round the room, taking them off the square white safety of the ceiling. “This is the truth, is it? Just what I see now, your face and your body, Maire. That’s the truth, the chair you sit on and the wall behind you and the poster of Jane Avril and Rosa-Josepha, that’s the truth just for the moment I see them. And the truth’s just what you say, the moment you say the words. And all else is the false past of hazard and chance and illusion, at the mercy of memory or post mortem or seeking for grubby motives.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Maire says. “I knew you’d soon come round to my way of thinking. Perhaps it’s a good thing you’ve lost your memory. Soon you’ll think just like I do and we’ll agree for once.”

  “So that’s the truth,” Gog continues, speaking for himself. “That’s what I’ve journeyed all this way to find. I see a face and a background. I hear words. I smell and I touch and I taste. That is the fact for the moment and only for the moment. All else is slipping and going, going, gone before I can grasp it and set it down. And if there’s really a truth which lasts, only God knows it and we can’t know God. And if there’s no God and yet there’s still a true world, it can only exist in the treachery of our minds and the lie of our reasons and the innuendo of our motives and the bunk of our written history. Maire, Maire, why can’t we have a true past? Why we can’t we plan the future? Why shouldn’t we make sense out of the nonsensical present? I don’t believe you. I can’t. Logic isn’t pure idiocy. Experience does repeat itself.”

  “Speak for your own sex,” Maire says grandly. “I’ve never understood philosophy. It’s all rot, the sort of thing men waste their time on because they don’t have children. Women are different. They know the truth and they know what’s happened. It’s biological. They’re mothers. They have to pass on the wisdom of the race and all that. The truth all women know is,” here Maire makes a pregnant pause and then gives birth to a delighted smile and the statement, “the truth all women know is that all women know the truth. And men had better believe what women say, or it’ll be the worse for them.”

  Gog turns his face against the pillow and groans. “Maire, Maire. You impossible woman. Maire.” He lies there, stupid and supine, and he feels Maire pull up the sheets and get into bed beside him and lie her silk-skinned body along his flank.

  “There,” Maire says, “there. That’s better. I can’t stay. I must go out with Jules. But I’ll cuddle you for a moment, and you’ll soon feel better. Don’t worry yourself so. It’ll soon be all right. Just do as I tell you, and it’ll soon be all right.”

  Gog stays prone on his stomach and speaks out of the corner of his mouth pressed against the pillow.

  “Tell me, when I was at Durham and met Miniver . . .”

  “You were dreaming of ’thirty-six.”

  “And the Bagman. Do you know who I mean by the Bagman?”

  “Of course I do. That weird man you met on the Borders before we met in Paris. You were full of him. You used to bore me all the time about him. You claimed he was a real prophet of the people, calling down fire and flood on London unless they gave him the B.B.C. I used to laugh at him, but during the blitz I wasn’t so sure.”

  “Ah, you do know them, then. I didn’t meet them just now for the first time.”

  “Gog, even if you tell me of someone you met who I haven’t heard of, perhaps he’s someone you’ve never told me of. A whore you’d rather forget.”

  “My son?” Gog says.

  “Your son?” Maire says, starting up. “We have no children.”

  “My son,” Gog says. “I had him by a fat girl in nineteen thirty-one. He’s at Downforth now, Arthur George Griffin Junior. My mother Merry brought him up, so the fat girl just told me.”

  “You’ve got a son?” Maire cries in fury. “And you never told me.” She begins to beat at Gog’s back with her fists. “A daughter. That I could forgive. I’d make her mine. But a son, another filthy man.”

  Gog laughs under Maire’s blows, glad to have shaken her composure. “Perhaps I’m dreaming it,” he says. “Like I dreamed the journey.”

  “Perhaps,” Maire says, dropping her fists. “Perhaps. I’m not sure. Perhaps you’re remembering the truth.”

  “Ah now,” Gog says. He turns over to look at the sitting body of his wife, rounded yet firm as that of a Greek youth. “You do believe some of what I invent on my dream journey.”

  “I can check on that. I’ll ring up Downforth this minute. I will.” Maire rises and prepares to walk out of the room, but Gog holds her back by the wrist.

  “Check on a statement of mine about the past?” he says. “Why should you be able to check and not I? I thought what’s past was past. What has it to do with the endless present?”

  “A boy’s a boy. Let me go. And if he’s yours, I’ll see about that.”

  “But he was a slip-up in the past. I didn’t mean him to be. It was before I met you. What earthly relevance has he to us, if he exists at all?”

  “I won’t have anyone else having your child,” Maire says. “Will you let me go?” She yanks her wrist free from Gog’s grasp and sits on the bed, rubbing the circulation back into her hand. “You’ve got a child. You’re like a rabbit.”

  “We don’t know I’ve got a child. And even if there is an Arthur Griffin Junior at Downforth, we won’t know he’s my son. He’s a wise child who knows his own father. And even if the fat girl says he’s my son, we’ve only got her word about something which happened fourteen years ago. And we can’t put much trust in that.”

  “But the boy’s there,” Maire says, nearly weeping. “And if he looks like you . . .”

  “It isn’t proof,” Gog says, swelling with joy at this first demonstration of his power to torture Maire in her turn. “A physical likeness may be mere coincidence. How do I know the fat girl wasn’t sleeping with my half-brother Magnus?”

  “In ’thirty-one,” Maire says, sniffing, “Magnus was only thirteen.”

  “It’s biologically possible,” Gog says with a grin. “And you said all truth was biology.”

  “That’s why a child’s the truth,” Maire says. “You can’t lie about a child who looks like you. He’s a living proof of what a dirty, lying, fornicating bastard I’ve married. Well, I’ll show you. I’ve always stood out against having any. Now you’ll have a whole brood of kids running round the house. And if any of them are yours, it’ll be my mistake.”

  “It’ll be your mistake in more than one way,” Gog says. “I won’t recognize them. And I’d divorce you.”

  “You’ll recognize them all right,” Maire says, “when they look up at you and lisp, Daddy. And I’m a Catholic like you are. Just because we’re lapsed, it doesn’t mean to say I’ll allow you to divorce me. You’ll never prove a thing against me, you clod. So there. I may have been good as gold till now, but just you wait. You didn’t deserve it. I’m ringing Downforth.”

  Gog catches Maire again as she rises and pulls her back on the bed.
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br />   “I’m glad to see you’re not always in control,” he says. “I’m glad to see you’re jealous. I’m glad to see you mind about anyone else having some sort of claim on me. At least you want me all for your own, even if you only want to torture me.”

  “Want you?” Maire screams. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Why couldn’t you stay in that old bugger of an army with all those stinking men. I’m sure it was made for you.”

  She begins to cry in real earnest, puckering up her mask of a face into creases and wrinkles that age her twenty years more than the ten years below her true age which her mask makes her appear. And Gog suddenly sees a human face by his, a face that is suffering and ugly and pitiable, and he puts his arm round Maire and he begins to kiss the swollen lids of her eyes and to lick away her tears with his tongue, tasting the salt of his sudden recognition of her equality with his condition.

  “There,” he says, “there. If I do have a son, it won’t be the end of the world. You can have as many as you like. But have them by me, it really would be better. I loved you, you know. I’ll learn to love you again. We’ve been separated too long. We don’t know each other any more.”

  “Beast,” Maire sobs. “Man.”

  After a time she quietens and she lays her head in Gog’s lap and puts her thumb in her mouth and is silent. And Gog looks out of the window over the garden, where a pile of ash smokes after a bonfire, he looks over Hampstead Heath to the city puffing out its breaths of soot and smoke against the bright morning. And he knows that he has sat here many times with Maire’s head in his lap and her thumb in her mouth, knowing that he will sit here many times more.

  “Here we are again,” Gog says. “Round and round. It might be ’thirty-nine now, mightn’t it? There might never have been a war, though it’s still going on in Japan.”

  “It’ll soon be over,” Maire says from Gog’s lap. “The Yanks dropped a single bomb on some Jap city ending with -ama or something like all Jap cities do. One bomb and it burned the whole city. It’s in the morning papers. The Japs’ll have to surrender now.”

  “The Bagman’s prophecy,” Gog says. “He told me the Lord would destroy two cities in the Far East like Sodom and Gomorrah as an Awful Warning to London. Two cities. Perhaps he’s wrong, there won’t be a second. He said God would do it though. Not the Americans.”

  “They act like God, if you ask me,” Maire says. “A whole city with one bomb. I saw a photo of it. A dirty great white cloud like a mushroom or a fist.”

  “I’m writing to the B.B.C. to give the Bagman the airwaves,” Gog says. “He’s better than Nostradamus.”

  There’s a knock on the door and Jules’s voice saying, “Madam, the car’s been waiting for half an hour and you’re late for your appointment.” And Maire rises, saying, “Blast, I’ve simply got to go. Extra ration cards don’t grow on gooseberry bushes. And now you’re back, I’ll have to have some or we’ll starve.”

  “Do you think we ought?” Gog says. “If everybody . . .”

  “Everybody has nothing to do with me,” Maire says, looking in a mirror and dabbing powder over the streaks of her tears. “And ought has nothing to do with anything at all. You don’t know how bad it is back here. You’re so used to living off the fat of the land in those occupied countries of yours, you’ve forgotten how the civvies starve at home. We’ve never been occupied, that’s the trouble. So we’ve never been able to organize a decent black market, where you can get what you ought to.”

  She finishes her hasty job of powdering and strides towards the door. “You’ve only got a kimono on,” Gog says. “It’ll come in useful,” Maire says, “if I want to get those ration cards.” She reaches the door, turns back, and gives Gog a smile that is both sweet and menacing. “Anyway,” she says, “I can tell you, if I meet a truck-driver, I’m coming back pregnant.” She strides out, slamming the door behind her.

  Gog sits at the window, hearing the car drive away from the front of the house, watching the still day set its polished lid over the great city. He wonders idly about his journey and decides that it doesn’t matter how he took it. On his feet or in his mind, wasn’t the journey the same? Think of the man who travels round the world and returns only to say, The view’s better at home, compared with the man who sits at his window without moving and sees in his mind’s eye the bowels of the earth or the rings of Saturn. To gallop without sight is worse than to squat with insight. If Gog has dreamed all from the ragbag of his recollections, yet he has travelled. Perhaps he has only travelled back down the roads he tramped as a youth and a man, back down the labyrinths of his research, back into the hidden places of his family and his blood and his island and his doings that he could never have understood without retracing his steps. He has travelled and he has travelled in hope that he will arrive. And he has arrived at his home and his wife in Ithaca, Hampstead. And it is all the same, the view over the heath towards London, the sight of nature’s denial of man’s brick sprawl.

  Yet if Gog is satisfied that a journey by mind is as valid as a journey by foot, if he knows that the mysterious windings and caches of the mind hold all of the truth that any man can know, yet some curious hankering after proof makes him start as the acrid whiff of charred cloth floats into his nostrils from the embers of the bonfire. He walks out of the room and down the stairs and into the garden to see what remains on the ashes. A rake is lying by the twisted flakes of charcoal and Gog harrows the burned stuff, pulling out with the steel teeth what he can find. Here is surely the hobnail of a boot, but perhaps it is a tack from an old piece of wood. And there, the twisted shape of a button from a coat, yet perhaps again, it is nothing but a molten bottle-­top. The fire has destroyed the evidence, has burned up the corduroys and the boots and the pack, as if they never were, and perhaps they never were. They rest only in the winding ways of the mind, which does not sort the false from the true, the fantasy from the fact, but retains both with the dreadful impartiality of memory.

  And as Gog in his red silk Chinese robe looks down at the ashes of the fire and across the heath to London, he feels dizzy and sits on the grass with his back against the trunk of an old walnut-tree. And the sun beats in his eyes until flames seem to be flickering again out of the ashes and the blood thunders in his ears as dully as distant bombs and his sense of time sloughs off him as his limbs weaken and his strength dissolves and he remembers when the city of London burned in the blitz and the trees of the heath seem to topple towards him like a wall, like a wall falling, falling, falling . . .

  The block of offices begins to fall forwards as though there is no back to it, a tall block with seven storeys, its front tilting into the street in a straight edge like a lid falling shut until it bangs on the block opposite. Then the dust and the explosion and the waft of hot air so that Gog bends forwards to lean upright against the battering ram of wind, and afterwards straightens, surprised to find that his clothes are still on his legs. And he looks up at the grating of the cross-section of the block, the flames skittering free in each room, yet the walls and floors making black bars longways and sideways that try to put grids of sense into the fire’s riot. And Gog waits helplessly for the engines to be called, the red engines that work round the clock now to contain the springing flames. There aren’t enough engines, there never are now, while London’s burning thrice nightly, fire, fire, pour on water, pour on water, but don’t bother to call the engines, they’re all called away, and we’re soon to follow, called away for ever.

  An old man with a red bucket marked FIRE in his hand walks delicately over the rubble and considers the burning block and picks his spot and puts his free hand to the bottom of the bucket and swings it forwards, but he is too old and the fire is too hot for him to approach, so that the water falls on the broken bricks only a little in front of his feet, yet the old man nods and walks off to fill his red bucket marked FIRE, because he’s doing his bit.

  Gog begins to weep in the streets of the City as the fire falls down the brigh
t-dark sky and the searchlights’ meeting makes triangles in the night and the anti-aircraft guns pop paper-bags all along the Thames and streets are whiter with burning in the black-out than on a summer’s noon and an aeroplane is Hailey’s comet until it hisses into the river and the shop windows are starred with sticking paper and white paint on the black walls says KEEP SMILING and pill-boxes squat in concrete lumps behind stickers that don’t make them news-stands and the labyrinth of London loses its thread with the street names painted out and only the taxi-drivers know where they’re going sometimes and the roads are a waste of brick except where St. Paul’s rears its high round hat as a pointer and a tribe of natives wanders in the waste keeping to queues for comfort and the men wear plain colours under tin bald heads and the women are men in stripy trousers over stacked heels and the children are solemn from the secret knowing that London’s burning here and now and it’s not just a nursery rhyme and perhaps their little piping has made it all come true and they’ll get a spanking for this super wizard of a bonfire if they don’t get evacuated all ticketed like a parcel.

  A fire-engine does come tolling in and the firemen roll out the hoses and the main is somehow working and the lone jet of water is gulped up in the maw of the burning building, no more useful than a stream of piss into an oven, and the firemen abandon the block to the flames and begin breaking and entering, thieves in a good cause, into the neighbouring houses, hacking with hatchets the windows into flotsam and the doors into jetsam, and watering with their hose the bricks as if these would flower in sudden geraniums. And they bring up the sandbags to barricade the inferno, poor little blue devils in shining helmets, part-time trainees for the fiery furnace, amateurs of the hot spot, but now war-made into Lucifers of the day and night shift.