Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  Quickly, Yunnum Fun slid the small pellet into the opening of the ivory tube, and it rolled like a pea down into the chute until it hit the flat of his thumb, plugging the other end. The brass rail in front of him steadied and made firm the weapon on a ruled line now trained with geometric trim on the closed point of the angle between side and diagonal in the plane through which passed, one hundred feet below, the wretched vertices that were ranged in on, for the final time, the one perfect spot in the fatty tissues of Mrs. Proby’s neck.

  Fu Manchu drove the chopstick into the ear of the English lady, like a good door closes: clean. Yunnum Fun took aim and blew hard.

  An instant: Mrs. Proby was full on her feet: hypotrophied, an automaton saturated in her oils and perspiration and galvanized into the ready suck of a howl, an imperative bellow cut and formed into her throat but buffered by an eightieth of a second. She never said a word. The pin caught her silently and neatly one inch below the lobe of her right ear and artfully sliced into the web of medial, cutaneous nerves and the intercostal veins of the cervical vertebrae. Her eyes squinted, bulged the colour of white fishbone, and squinted again.

  Mrs. Proby sat down dead.

  A smooth calm and imperturbability made itself felt in the dark; Yunnum Fun sat in the silence, very still. A pale light shone from his eyes. He was tired, but he had been tired for years. The many mysteries hidden from the world and concealed from the often self-deceived had, so too, kept him hidden from the very world in which he found himself, too old to ask its secret, too tired to deceive, and so he smiled at the irony that mystery plays on itself and the mystery of that irony. Defeat? Defeat is before it was, yes, but surely never to be acknowledged either by useless remembrance or howls for quarter. Life was short; hope, long; opportunity, fugitive; experiment, delusive; judgement, difficult; and, especially, was outrage vain. Another smile crossed his face as a thought crossed his mind: my how is not necessarily their how, nor is theirs mine.

  Mr. Yunnum Fun unscrewed the black ivory tubes, replaced the pieces into the slots of green felt, and shut the box. The Anglicide was over. He locked the box, slipped it under his arm, and shuffled out of the theatre into the cool, inexorable rain. He threw his theatre ticket stub into the wind. Then he pulled on his dirty grey hat and waited under the tall metal arch where people queued for buses. He waited. He watched. “Simple,” said Yunnum Fun as he sat on the No. 22 bus which took him back to the Brompton Road roundabout, where he lived. It was his neighbourhood.

  CHILDE ROLAND

  Montes parturient; nascetur

  ridiculus mus.

  —Horace

  2

  I

  Once upon a time, in the heroic days when Harold Harefoot ruled the island, it was all a dark, pathless wood: trees shot up like towers from the beige expanses of forest marsh once zigzagged like the cardiogram of a bad heart by freshets, green dingles, and small bights of slub and oozing mud. Now, a stitchlike ramble of shortcuts was required through that densely populated section of London stretching in crooked, accidental streets all the way from Houndsditch to Hyde Park—but Roland McGuffey finally arrived. At the extremity of the park, he looked an odd child in all that space, and he came to a halt in a dirty shadow, swept his eyes up toward Marble Arch, entrance to nowhere, and immediately blew a blast of hot air through his stacked fists. It was a cold dark Sunday.

  “This goddam weather,” he grumbled, squinting up through his hair. It was a strange remark. Roland was not given to reflection.

  A handchime, presage of ice cream, sounded in a ripple of metallic pips. The jolly funstop, a Mr. Whippy van buffed cream and pink, was residentially pulled alongside the kerb. Whence the familiar tocsin. A little snuff-coloured man, a Pakistani, pencil-thin and lost in a stiff white service uniform, stood gazing into space and rocking abstractly in his frayed plimsolls which quite openly failed to shelter his toes, thrusting out, as they did, like fat yellow slugs from the mouseholes and chipped rubber. He wore a black plastic bow tie. A white leather captain’s hat swam oversize on his trapezoidal head which sprouted out of his thin neck like a wood cep. He came to recognizable life only when he tried to catch the attention of the immediate world, which he did, occasionally, with a mechanical and soullessly unreflective shake of his bells, a tinnitus of frightfully unmelodic and leaden binks that resembled, more than anything else, the dead rattle of sea shingle. Suddenly, a far more ominous noise split the air, for Roland, rounding the side of the van, had sent his hand slamming flatly against its tin side with all his might.

  “A Winkie!” he hooted.

  The attendant, gasping for a breath of scream, shot into mid-air and juddered to the ground, twitching and tightly gripping his ear. He swallowed, his heart having bulged to his mouth from the merciless jolt, and ran a cachexic finger down a painted sign that listed the available treats.

  “Jolly Jellies, Choc Ice, Squeezie Cups,” the Pakistani managed, “Cornish Splits, Ripple Sticks, or Fruities, please.”

  “The Winkie.”

  “We are not having the Winkie.” A hand-washing motion followed in silence. “Such are consumed.”

  Roland, with thumb and forefinger, pinched his eyes tight with weary impatience, and immobile, crotchety, poised there like a griffin, he spoke from under his hand.

  “Give us the Winkie.”

  “Otherwise,” rejoined the little man with sterling control, “Cornets or Wafers only.”

  “I hate Cornets or Wafers.”

  “Leave it or take it, sir.”

  “I’ll take it, dearie,” snapped Roland.

  “Whom, the Cornet?”

  Roland McGuffey leaned into the Pakistani’s vision and dropped out two words, incinerated as soon as pronounced. “The Winkie.”

  “Impossible.”

  “You—” The imprecation held. Roland looked away, then back to the Pakistani, appraising him through an exercised slit at the edge of his right eye and coyly advancing a question, as he did, with the subtlety of roundabout surmise. “You, ah, Mr. Whippy, then?”

  “The attendant of,” the little man sighed.

  Repetition, among other things, is predictable, and this kind of thing went on all the time, though, to be sure, it was usually a question put forth in the windy innocence and naïve lisps of babyfaced pre-pubescents in rompers, their eyes as wide and bright as beryls, who infallibly saw the driver as captain of The Good Ship Lollipop or, turnabout, Mr. Whippy. The name was legend, of course—the motto, “Yippee, It’s Mr. Whippy,” stained in perfect assonance on a waving pennant above the van and gleefully echoed just as it was written by those for whom, miraculously enough, the alphabet itself was as yet incomprehensible. In any case, the Pakistani, his unaffected pluck hidden by his deceptively submissive deadpan, wisely desisted from playing the game—or, better, he played it to perfection. His answer satisfied both the fantasy and fact. No ambiguity, it simply chalked a conclusion to a syllogism not his in the first place. He jiggled his change nervously and looked away. He had had one look at Roland. Two were not required.

  Roland’s was a sharp young English face: peaky, unamiable, suspicious. There was no shine to the cheek. It had a sallow appearance, drawn, spotted by a rash of comedones near the mouth which was hardly improved by a rather savage case of asymmetrical dentition. A pair of gooseberry-coloured eyes (one disfigured by a squint) were framed by two large, not overly clean, ears—somewhat elongated, elfin—and, quite like Pinocchio, out pointed a long white nose. His body looked one continuous bone, instead of flesh, exhaling, as it did, however, a smell damp and unsubdued: the unaromatic, at best quasi-camphoraceous, whiff of one who was a trifle heterodox in the matter of clean linen, smoked compulsively, and frequently handled strong eyewatering disinfectants and utilitarian soaps, disagreeably tangential, this last, to a painful year-round dose of scrotitis against which, so far, a whole pharmacological armoury had proven sadly ineffectual. Succinctly, Roland looked like a cruel broom.

  Bad luck dogged him, like
the foolish song that has been, with its irreverent chicane, tripping through one’s head since infancy. Roland more or less always showed himself down at the socks, perhaps for want of mothercare or some kind of agnatic pressure, living, as he did, on that limited but rather elastic income, his wits. He lived alone. In his sixteenth year, his parents had divorced each other, simultaneously of course themselves, and, sequitur, Roland, and then (post hoc ergo propter hoc?) met tragic ends: his mother took to female wrestling, was blinded by a flying chip at the Penywern Arena, and later disappeared—that regrettable but certainly logical correlative that inevitably attends upon those who grope—somewhere in the Laxative Islands; his father died on holiday in Blackpool (snorkel failure). Roland then took a single room. But he managed, he managed.

  “Have I failed to mention Drum Tubs,” the Pakistani piped up in the awful silence that was characterized by a thematically abusive stare, “which we have in abundance?” Roland made no answer. The Pakistani, nervously rubbing his hands over his arms now turning from brown to whitish-smalt in the cool air, flashed as best he could the exorable smile he hoped might be taken for either stupidity or goodness or naïveté—anything devoid of possible implication would do. “My, my, how I could tell you how very many people are satisfied by the Drum Tub. I have received letters on it.”

  “Wow,” said Roland dryly, bringing up and discharging past his shoulder a jetlike flume of mucus. Then he pointed to a cone with a knob of chocolate twirlie painted triple-size on the side of the van. He wanted it. He patted into place a lock of hair he had just combed in the fly-window and then took the cone. He halved it in a bite.

  A pale transparent, almost eastern light occasionally slivered the clouds and played in winks over the distance of the park which looked like a garment of diverse cut, torn here and there by boulders and ripped by gravel paths, as if along its threads.

  “Thruppence, right?” he asked as he shoved the other half away, garbling his words through a gob of thick ice cream and flapping some uningested goo from his thumb as he backed away from the movement.

  “Sixpence.”

  “Thrups, you said!”

  “The charge, sir, is sixpence. It is not otherwise.” The law of Excluded Middle was a comfort.

  Roland bore at him through his smirched eyes. Seconds passed, long as an afternoon. It was a case of brinkmanship. There was now an imperceptible grimace on the little man’s face, but the inborn civility, it seemed, of thousands of years of tribulation held it firmly as a mask against which the chipping fury of vicissitude could not make so much as a dent or even the least furrow of scoring rage. The silence held, held.

  “My friend, sir,” the attendant offered wistfully, moving a bit closer and pulling demonstratively at his thin cotton sleeve, “it is my duty to make one’s both ends meet, do you not understand? Is it or is it delicately not a question of financial money, please?”

  Roland wiped his hand across his face and smirked. A sudden bolting swerve of his shoulders seemed that dangerous idiotic prelude if not to the immediate frenzy of jactation before a spin-fit or conniption, then to one’s charging off on the run without paying. But the little man feared worse, grabbed out immediately for his wafers, and hunched cruciform, with ever-widening arms, over a pan of vitrescent toffy apples arranged there on a low shelf of the van. “These bothers,” he blurted out, his eyeballs agonizing skyward, “I don’t want all these bothers, my goodness, dammit.”

  “Thruppence, you say?”

  “Six”—he took a breath—“pennies.”

  The dissective enunciation was infuriating. Roland bit his lip white, reached deep into the flue of his pocket, yanked out a coin, and with a single thrust pitched it on a line directly through the tiny freezer door: “Have it your own way!”

  The Pakistani dove for the coin.

  “Have it your own farking way,” Roland snarled through a mouth which looked like a rip in the side of a bag. “This time!”

  Houndsditch was another country. The area, old brickfields once, had not changed, at least not transubstantially, for at sometime or other in the past, three or four totally forgettable days in history—history, perhaps, merely the composite of such days—the bricks had been hastily thrown together, sloppily limed, and sent up one upon the other in dreary red blocks, probably in the vague, long ago days of the pre-unification King Offa, possibly when grief-laden Edwy walked the earth, or during the redoubtable archonship of Harpocration in the year of the bangle. It was all now a crumbling and smoke-grimed necropolis in boarded windows, mummified everywhere by old railings, stagnant air, and cobwebs, where draughty hallways reek with the smell of stale cabbage, Blakean children weep soot, and merchants patter with Mammon and make God evanescent. The mercantile week thereabouts was busy, rather like the First Circle: from Eastcheap to Shoreditch, axeheaded harridans went slogging by in their hush-puppies, and old ladies like draggled ducks, with rush baskets and carrier sacks, nosed, bargain-wise, into the markets of Stepney for hukkabuk, Spitalfields for bruised vegetables, and into the arcades of Smithfield for low-priced, if purpureal, cuts of meat. It was like bush-fighting, and for the women it was soldiership they knew well. Every weekday morning as the steam of the world burnt away, their pertussic selves were revealed hobbling across gutters and crouching busily forward into the pushcarts of fabrics, produce, or fowl, with a relish for the contentious and a determination nothing if not evangelical. But on Sunday everybody had disappeared. The moving people hustle, as it were, and once having hustled move on. (That this has been said of fingers is only a synecdoche proving quite the same point.) Silence hung over everything like a nimbus. Sunday—notable especially within the creepy back-narrows spoking out of Houndsditch—was unendurable. It made limbo seem positively Neronian. Roland had to get away.

  It was part of his Sunday, his walk: prefatory, that is, to his nightly job, a necessary, if perhaps tertiary, contribution to the British labour force, which not overwhelmingly involved hosing down and scrubbing up the coaches and buses in a subterranean garage at Victoria Station, duties he performed with ill-camouflaged scorn and a minimum sense of art. Hyde Park was an alternative to that day of eerie, pestilential calm which threw cold and mystifying personality changes on him and fated, if Sunday be regular, the regular walk—a radical unwind inevitably visited upon him whenever he remained, uneventfully, in the grip of a certain devil, Restlessness. Perhaps it was curiosity. Perhaps it was the result of that arbitrary, furiously ill-defined goad which higgledy-piggledy sent the Dutchman flying, the Jew wandering, the Mariner riming. Or perhaps he was subtly hijacked by some grey, spliced-tongued little daemon lurking within the folds of his cerebellum and suggesting some kind of horrible search and subsequent malediction—a parallel, say, to that obsessive-compulsive moment alone in the crib when the child, whispering darkly to itself, wildly cracks open the rattle and, filled with the thrill that comes only on the edge of disgrace, stares with bugging eyes and cruel joy at the small bead found inside. “It all remains to be seen,” Roland had often said in contexts as many and as varied, “as the baboon said when he shat in the sugar bowl.” Roland kept joke books in his room.

  Comparatively, the stews of Houndsditch the night previous seemed a veritable Shangri-la, for a Saturday night at The Drum and Monkey, a cellar pub in a nearby black sunless mews, localized an erratically cheerful, if flinty, compensation to any who marched down the steps bellowing for succour, chiefly patrons, however subalternate or unparticular, who were just this side of being capsized by the working week, an importunate thirst, or the crucial urgencies of a not-as-yet thoroughly articulated libido. This was Roland’s pub. It was always dark inside, quaking with a 4/4 beat, and fogged through with the cumulative but hardly integrated smells of calcined sausages, overheated bodies, and what seemed like a trace of fowlpest. The room, spread over in photoposters and mushy daubs of psychedelic paint, reverberated in pockets of applause, throbbing music, pulmonic laughter, and the general buzzing of East End sc
at, a monoglot in refained twists of speech very like the chewing of rope.

  The pub boasted The Longest Bar in the World—one of the few hundred. A string of pomaded young men with loose jaws and vulpine faces, wearing just-about-serviceable black suits shiny at the sleeves and revers and vividly smelling of naphtha, sat rivetted to their tables, gravely sucking bitter and popping salted nuts. Off in a snug, three or four semi-defectives, with skin the colour of ship-biscuit and wearing aluminum idents on their wrists, took swipes at and hooted imprecations upon the flashing pinball machines that spread out before them in rainbows of glass, thumb-smudged and stippled with oily smears, each fracas followed by a renewal of deep absorption when, reaccumulating, they would again cramp together in a weird pinch of fellowship, jussling the flippers to the crepitant snaps of chewing gum and common profanities. A chimera of universal appeal was the dartboard, and, in a far corner of the hot low-ceilinged room, a drift of “skinheads” with the phrenological structure of spadoons disagreeably sniped at each other as they clomped around in their cherry-reds, collecting their darts from among the orts and metrics of dirty cigarette butts there on the floor, only to swing around and saunter back to the firing line where, aimless as loons and whistling snatches of “My Old Dutch,” they continued to prong the board with rapid gunshot flurries, usually with grins indicative of what seemed hopeless morbus castrensis.

  The place had remained a club of “Rockers” for years, spinning out, as the jukebox did, the old 45 records (detto: “the clutchers and huggers”), each one a pandect of incontrovertible yammer and windsong, that sang, generally, of Utopias (ring, dance, moon, you), of existential recusants in leather jackets, and of the wild surmises that always diligently refused to synchronize pain with love, or compromise idealism with reason, all to momentarily swab away from the teenager that bile always so identifiable, those tears the overflow of such hearts, such hearts. And while the music played, enriching motives, the young men would lark about, bumping into poles and barking their shins as they pursued girls in that darkness which so effectively, doubtless for Adam’s Fall, retarded a process charity alone forces one to term mating. That managed, dancing followed: a biological interlude spent groping for kisses and vacantly shuffling to and fro in the dirt which burst out like fire in the heat of woodash from the floorboards, at which juncture, it being showtime—for there was a show, a wee exode, a revue—blasts of scorching notes poured over the room like hot magma, roughly in the form of a song shrieked out by the songstress there billed as “Capri”—a nasty little piece of work with a bosom that looked too extensive to be comfortable, sequined ligatures, and a carrot fall which spread out, Medusa-like, in fiery points. She raked the room with a jumping hard-rock number, periodically swinging the microphone through her legs and kicking out lasciviously at the shabby, perforated amplifiers that seemed literally plugged into the four or five pale musicians in snake-skin jackets and bushes of long hair, who accompanied her on their heliotrope guitars. “Soopah! Soopah!” people yelled, “just soopah!” “Gorjus,” they howled, “absolutely gorjus!” “Maaaarvelous,” they hollered, drooling on their shoes, leaping up, and lurching about like red-eyed poppets to ferret out the toilet, secure a refill, or grab a handful of what one day, though it did not seem imminent, might possibly become an infinite source of nourishment to the infants of a softeyed, motherly dear who on that occasion might be breathing lullabies and answering sooner to the appellation Mother than the pseudonym “Capri.” But it seemed bootless to speak of the future. It was Now. It was Saturday night. It was the peak of divertissement. And that Sunday followed reinforced only once again that first of first principles which proved mutability constant.