by Bill Broun
CUTHBERT EVENTUALLY MOVED BACK to Birmingham for a few years, but not to his parents’ house—they had told him never to come back. He loitered around the pubs in Handsworth, where his parents had met at the dance hall thirty years before. He would spend a night here and there in the local doss houses and missions.
He’d also plunged into his dreadful mysticism once again, stinking up bookstores and libraries to read about Sufism, the Mabinogion, the Legenda Aurea. He grabbed hold of a bit of Rastafarianism, too, and Navaho and Hopi myths. He started hugging other rough-sleepers when he would see them, exclaiming “Wa’ppun, mi key?”
One day, half-drunk, he was buying a tea in the coffee shop at the Selfridges department store in the Bullring, and something especially odd happened. Earlier, in a bin behind St. Martin’s church, he had found a big purple sequined dress, a sort of fancy old formal garment, like something from the 1950s. It had made him think of something tossed out after a funeral. It was enormous in size, the garment of a woman whose heart must have exploded. The top bit looked not unlike a kind of dress-up disco shirt, so Cuthbert cut it off with some old scissors he kept, and wore it into Selfridges.
It had been a mistake to enter the store in his state. A young man about his age seemed to be following him, he noticed, a gent in a sort of New Romantic pirate costume, with sky-blue knee britches, a flouncy shirt with a lace jabot, and a cummerbund. He wore dramatic pink-and-black eye shadow and overstated cheek-lines, and he unnerved Cuthbert.
Cuthbert decided to take his tea out of the shop part of the store, but then the man hurried up to him. They ended up sitting on one of the Home Department sofas in a faux sitting room. An array of television screens blared in front of them.
“Adu?” asked the pirate, in a strong Brummie. He smiled gently. “Ow am ya? I don’t mean to worry yow—yow look worried. I just, I’m new to this, and, erm, I just wanted to say ‘adu.’” The man took a deep breath. “I like your top—but yow’ve got a face as long as Livery Street.”
On the televisions, a woman presenter wearing a kind of khaki photographer’s shirt with many little pockets was talking while she stood in what looked like a farm pasture.
Cuthbert didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to talk.
“Come on,” the pirate said. He scrunched his eyes and said, “I’ll flog yow at dawn, lubber. Oi’s there something rung with me?” He seemed wholly amused with himself, but Cuthbert was oblivious, absorbed by the reporter.
The reporter said: “This remarkable coin, or bracteate, was found on Undley Common in Suffolk by a local resident out with his metal detector. Its inscription, written in Anglo-Saxon runes, is being studied by researchers at the University of Leicester. I won’t try to pronounce it!”
On the telly screens was a close-up of an embossed image from the gold bracteate. There was a helmeted man in a beard above a she-wolf. Two little human figures, crouched below the animal, drank from its teats.
Cuthbert turned toward the pirate and daringly put his hand on his knee, as softly as a sparrow. He said, in his deepest Brummie, “Do yow feel like a lost bab? That’s as oi do.”
The pirate-man looked petrified for a moment, and excited, and he looked around to see if anyone was watching. When he saw that others indeed were, he at once stood up, squinting dramatically and pointing at Cuthbert, and said, “Oh, fuck off, yow . . . ya’ reek. It just bloody hit me. You’re just a street cunt, poncing about, aren’t yow—a poof probably, yeah?” He started walking away. “God damn it!”
“Oh, don’t do a bunk,” he said to the man. “Please.”
Shoppers turned to look. A man scowled at Cuthbert and pulled a little girl by the arm away from his vicinity.
Cuthbert felt humiliated at first, but also a bit pleased. This New Romantic odd-one—lashing out, fussy, wanton—had at least paid attention, had responded to his presence. It was as close to intimacy as he had been in ages. Cuthbert wondered if, given more time, he might have persuaded the man to take him to the gent’s and kiss him.
A university lecturer, a gaunt-looking man with long brown hair, was now being interviewed on the telly, and Cuthbert turned his attention and thoughts back to the television. The lecturer was saying, “It reads, ‘gægogæ mægæ medu.’ We don’t quite grasp what it means—not just yet—but we think that it’s a kind of blend of Old English and Old Frisian. It’s quite fascinating, really.” But Cuthbert felt he knew. Of course he knew. Gægogæ mægæ medu was the language of otters.
BY THE SUMMER OF ’81, when the first riots started in Lozells Road, homeless Cuthbert dove right into the fray along with everyone else, blessed by Jah Creator. He tried to help (rather ineffectively) turn over a few cars, stoke up the street fires. Hundreds of young men, Caribbean, Irish and English and Bangladeshi, rampaged together, and Cuthbert felt as happy as he had ever before or since. He ended up getting truncheoned by a copper, fracturing his cheek. An almost imperceptible crushed appearance endured on the left side of his face. It was the subtlest of features, and something that still remained part of his own bloated countenance—the slightest depression on the left hemisphere of his skull, as if the gradual loss of logic from his life, over nearly a century, were physically visible.
Cuthbert remembered Rebekka showing him a news clip about the riots from the Birmingham Mail. He’d hitchhiked down to Hemel Hempstead to visit her at her house, which she shared with a divorced Danish woman. (Cuthbert had worked out that Rebekka probably fancied women more than men, but she couldn’t seem to acknowledge it.)
“You read this,” she said, pushing a nearly clipped rectangle of newsprint across her tea table set. She had given him a handful of Penguin snacks for his pockets. “Read it, Cuthbert. It’s you.”
He read the article. In it, he encountered the confusing sentence: “West Midlands Police are currently seeking to interview the following individuals.” Near the bottom of a following long list of names was his own—and not Drystan’s.
“I, in the riot?”
“You old fool,” said Rebekka. “Why? You’re too bloody vulnerable, Cuddy. You better go talk to the bill and sort it out.”
“But where was Drystan? Where’s he bloody gone?”
Rebekka looked pale and shaky. She shook her head, taking a deep breath, and she tried to embrace him.
Cuthbert jerked away.
“Cuddy, no. Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Your darling brother—don’t you remember?”
But Cuthbert was getting out of there. He jumped to his feet quickly. He brushed dark, oily crumbs of Dundee cake from his trousers.
“I have to go, Becks,” he said. “Tararabit!”* He scampered out of his weeping cousin’s house. He yearned for the safety and florid possibilities of the streets—and for the next half century, it was the best home he’d ever had.
the £10 talisman
OUTSIDE THE ZOO, WHERE CUTHBERT HAD REMAINED, the man with the two ginger-haired daughters set them back into their own stroller, their legs kicking all the way in. A bobby who stood near the head of the poky stroller-return queue held one of the stroller’s handles to stabilize it. The girls sat, blinking at the officer, and one of them touched his steadying hand. The copper, who wore the red armband of the Watch Auxiliary, looked up and frowned at Cuthbert, who was getting closer to the head of the queue. The Auxiliary were nowhere near as antagonistic as the Watch, but they would not hesitate to message a Watchman if faced with Indigents who called attention to themselves.
Cuthbert tried to picture himself, in the queue, with his own make-believe family, but he could imagine only vague human figures with blanked-out faces like the owl kite. There was Rebekka, but she was a little older now, at age 101, and unreachable. To Cuthbert’s despair, she’d moved prematurely into a Calm House almost as soon as they opened, after the Property Revolts, and like almost everyone in them, she received no visitors and neither sent nor acknowledged messages. She lived shut away, Nexar-hooded for hours on end.
That last time he’
d seen Rebekka, in the mid-2020s, before she’d gone to the Calm House, he’d taken a rare train trip up from London to her former home in Hemel Hempstead. In the early 1980s, he had moved back to London, telling everyone he was going to “have a look for my brother,” but by that time he was out of his mind so often, he scarcely understood how, when, or why he’d even come back to the Big Smoke.* He had brought Rebekka a strange gift from the British Museum gift shop.
He considered the museum a hallowed ground so overstuffed with charmed talismans, angel-made objets d’art, and consecrated monuments that one in need could not help but be aided by all those healing powers. During one of his many visits, he’d spotted in the gift shop a silly old £10 zinc-nickel rendering of the Undley Bracteate. The reproduction was authentic-looking enough for tourists and fashioned into a handy key chain. He’d rubbed his thumb over the image of Constantine the Great on the obverse, and then the she-wolf suckling the two boys. He eventually wrapped it in a huge leaf from a plane tree, dropped it in his pocket, and, on a relatively halcyon summer day in 2024, brought it with him to Hemel Hempstead for Rebekka.
At the time, Rebekka shared a semidetached twin condominium with a chubby middle-aged school headmistress from Scotland named Louise.
He, Rebekka, and Louise sat for an awkward tea in the women’s sitting room. Cuthbert, who smelled of urine and sour Flōt, gulped his tea and ate one handful after another of thick wedges of a sticky Dundee cake; the two women asked him if he needed new clothes and shoes and handed him an envelope with £150 collected from their church. In the context of the 2020s—the Great Reclamation had just eliminated the Bank of England, and the violent Property Revolts were in full effect—it was an almost unthinkable act of bigheartedness, and Cuthbert felt unworthy. He was inebriated enough to fend off withdrawal symptoms, but comparably lucid.
“I don’t need this,” he’d said.
Louise rolled her eyes. “Yes you do!” she said to Cuthbert. He didn’t know Louise well, but he appreciated her robust, youthful personality. At least twenty years Rebekka’s junior, she had a short graying Afro and a pair of the new golden cloud-earrings hovering on either side of her neck.
“She’s right,” said Rebekka. “Don’t be a silly gorbie.”
When Rebekka hugged him, he didn’t want her to let go. Normally, he couldn’t deal with hugs. She was only in her seventies at the time, and remained quite attractive, with a petite frame, drowsy blue eyes, and pretty almond freckles on her arms and neck. Her voice was exceptionally breathy, almost hyperfeminized. She had never married, nor was she out as gay, and she exuded a delicate, muted sexuality that, for Cuthbert, came across as simple human tenderness.
“I don’t need a thing,” he said. But he kept the envelope without looking inside it.
He pulled the Undley Bracteate key chain from his pocket and unfolded the plane-tree leaf he’d wrapped the talisman in. He handed it over to Rebekka, who examined it almost too politely. He explained how he had heard about it, years ago, on a news program.
“Oh, it’s quite special, I can see that.”
Louise raised her eyebrows. “Is this some kind—something made out to look ancient or whatnot? It’s lovely.”
“It’ll keep you safe,” he said. “You keep it.” He looked at Louise’s cloud-earrings.
“Can I . . . touch one?”
“You can try,” said Louise. “But they’re illusions. It’s light. Pure light.”
Cuthbert reached beneath Louise’s ears, and indeed, nothing was there.
“Bostin!”* he said.
Rebekka asked, “You say you heard about this bracteate on a TV broadcast, in the 1980s, whilst you were living in Handsworth?”
“Arr. It’s all to do with Drystan, you know.”
“Drystan?” asked Rebekka. She looked at Louise, who smiled at Cuthbert with apprehension.
“Are you all right, Cuddy?” asked Rebekka.
“Read it. The inscription. It says, ‘gægogæ mægæ medu.’ That’s how—that’s how,” he said, his arms tremoring badly. “That’s how otters speak. Them’s the words I heard in Dowles Brook—when Drystan and meself almost drowned, roight? I heard it from this animal underwater, right? You say those words—gægogæ mægæ medu—and every time, animals hear you.”
Rebekka held her cousin’s shaky hand as he told her all this.
“What’s the matter, Becks?” he asked.
“Nothing, you. Just having a little sigh.” She looked at the Undley Bracteate in her palm, sniffing a little. “Now, Cuddy, what’s this all about really, now? What’s the matter, dear one? Have you got a place to sleep, in London?”
“Nothing. It’s for good luck. It’ll help us find Drystan. ’E’s somewhere in London, I’m convinced.”
“Oh, Cuddy. Listen, your brother, he passed away, I’m afraid.” Rebekka’s hand was taken up gently by Louise. Rebekka had tried, so hopelessly, so many times, to explain to her cousin, gently, what had happened to Drystan at Dowles Brook, she now relied on simple repetition.
“’E’s not,” said Cuthbert. “You shouldn’t talk that way. ’E’s gone to UCL, you know. ’E’s brilliant, he is.”
“Cuddy,” said Rebekka. “You’re the one that’s brilliant. You’re the one that went to London on that clever-clogs grant. You keep imagining your brother’s around, and we don’t always have the heart to say it otherwise, but you need to know, my dearest love. You need to know. Please, Cuddy. The poor boy—he died—in 1968, Cuddy—we all loved him. Any Drystan you imagine after that—it’s just you. It’s you, love. You’re the one you keep calling Dryst.”
“No one loved him—no one but Granny and me—and maybe you.”
“I’m sure your mum and dad tried to love him.”
“Bollocks,” he had said to Rebekka. “You’re a great girl and all that, but you’re wrong, Becks. I’ll find him.”
Rebekka insisted that Cuthbert keep the commemorative Undley Bracteate. He refused, but she finally pushed it into his trouser pocket, and he relented.
“You need it more than we do,” said Rebekka.
“But I have one—in my heart,” he said.
He learned a few months later that Rebekka and Louise had ended their relationship, partly because Rebekka couldn’t reconcile her own sexuality and her devotion to the Church, and she’d absconded in a matter of days to a Calm House. Cuthbert never saw either one again, but he liked to imagine her holding the bracteate in her hand even as a Nexar hood leeched away her soul.
Now he carried it in his pocket wherever he went. Apart from his mental illness, it was his only permanent possession.
CUTHBERT JUMPED OUT of the queue outside the zoo and stood awkwardly to the side. He was attracting serious unwelcome attention now. A single Eye3 scan of his face by a Watchman, and his life would be effectively over. He knew that much, if not as clearly as he ought. But it had fully dawned on him that he must leave the entire area or risk imprisonment and virtual lobotomization.
A man who had been behind him in the queue, with very old-fashioned, rectangular OHMD* glasses, the precursor to corneal readers, seemed reluctant to move into the gap where Cuthbert had been standing, and so Cuthbert moved away farther. The man raised his eyebrows and stepped into the spot.
“Thanks, Indigent,” the man said. “Ha!”
The red-arm-banded Watch Auxiliary officer from earlier began walking toward him, rubbing his fingers together. Cuthbert looked away from his stare, as if it were fire.
“Please, no, no, no,” Cuthbert whispered to himself. “I’ve got to bloody go.”
There was a bawling boy with leopard face paint among the families and other middle-class strangers. The paint was so ingeniously delicate that the boy did indeed look like a bipedal cat-child. He was punching a man’s knee—his father? uncle?—with a solemn effort. His tears made the yellow and black makeup runny below his eyes, drawing his humanness out, against his will. The boy’s fist was fat and soft and the man took little notice, except
for a passing smirk. Cuthbert felt an urge to accost this heedless man, to show him what violence could mean. The compulsion animated him, and he wove deftly through all the people, and away from the bobby. He felt unnoticed, too, in a familiar way—as if he had not just left the zoo after undertaking the first part of his scheme, as if the copper only recognized a common vagabond hanging about children and good parents.
But the animals noticed him—especially the lions. They were beginning to speak at him again, imploring him to stay.
“You can’t delay your solemn duty any longer,” Arfur the lion moaned. “You can’t—unless you want to look weak. You can’t go now.”
“I’ll return tonight—I promise,” he answered. “A promise is a promise.”
The lions roared angrily in reply. And there were monkeys crying, antelope nickering, and bobcats screeching miserably, threatening to escape the zoo themselves if left behind.
Stay! they all begged.
“Leave off now!” he pleaded, so loud that everyone around him looked at him, this man with dirty hands, this irritating Indigent, talking to himself.
He left the area quickly, trotting toward Camden Town station. After a while, he turned around and he saw that the Watch Auxiliary was back near the same queue. The hovering officer irked him, but Cuthbert also felt a new, feral kind of satisfaction, too, something he could not recall ever feeling so intensely.
