Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  Sunday—how say it?—dawned, the only invincibility it seemed to possess. From its broken tenements, lonely streets, and empty squares had all emotions ebbed, and Houndsditch seemed a limit gone beyond, a kind of stone leprosarium of gutted doors through which the metaphorical inmates, as if suppurating with the afflictive screwworm or helminthiasis, willingly decamped in crawls, belled, as it were, to the nether of their dungeons where, in a sickly and zombie-like lacher prise from the weekly obligations that beat them down, they could spoon away their Sunday dinners, suck their dirty pipes, doze half-naked slumped into the sofa, or, without the slightest expectation, stare down silently through old thread-bare curtains with tired gull-like eyes to the streets below which sheered off abruptly at corners and in turn closed off pretty much of their world. Everyone had withdrawn, it seemed, so as not to be intimidated by the intimidating click that snapped them away like the catch of a cheap lock, shut fast and buried hopelessly within those monstrous building projects, tall as the Cities of the Plain, being everywhere winched toward the sky, where each building, disfigured, hulks higher and higher, its shit-coloured self rising into space like a cement Kraken out of the inattentive and varicose earth. It was like a surrealistic dream, as if all the buildings were actually cardboard and, if but tapped, would hurtle down in a spray of dust and scaffolding, revealing a vast desert of grey which reached to the fag-end of infinity.

  Roland stood at the crossing, a striped walkover that led to the park itself. Cars zoomed by. A little boy was playing on the pavement nearby. From all appearances, the game he was engaged in involved remonstrating with a small stone in front of him, impugning it, and offering it little nips from a lump of edible frozen water (tinted) on a stick—an example, presumably, of that faiblesse whereby under-fives convert inanimate objects into boon companions. The stone, however, did not seem terribly hungry for it, and the little boy continued sucking, making a lapping sound like a bunny.

  Thuck! Roland ducked, faked out the goalie on a run, swung left, and it was a sweet right foot long into the nets for the equalizer. He thought he heard the stadium go wild.

  “Yoiiieeeeeeeeee!” the little boy wailed, jumping in sudden fright and indignation, for Roland had just punted away—and presumably killed—the stone that for some time now had been incarnated as a turtle.

  “Belt up.”

  The child shook into hysteria now. “Wreeeaaaooooo!”

  “Belt up, you dink.”

  Suddenly, a huge woman appeared with an outsized waist of about sixty, a hair-studded cheek, and a handbag the size of the Goodyear Blimp. It was the child’s mother, possibly the turtle’s. She pulled the boy to her side and scraped his wet cheeks with a face tissue baptized in motherly spittle, all the while glowering in white stabs at Roland. She fixed her hat, shook her dewlaps, and marched away, her mouth a punt-gun of suppressed obscenities as she passed Roland, while the little boy yanked against her hand, screeching dreadfully from a wet, prune-like face. Roland followed her with eyes lit by neither the shim nor shadow of contrition. He threw back his shoulders and sucked a tooth. “Wicked old brass.” he said. Then he farted.

  What sanctuary was found from the empty Sunday, for Roland, began in the early morning. The early morning began with the cardinal, rather than ordinal, preoccupation of securing the football results from the sports page which could be quietly slipped, if he was on the street early and unobserved, from the heavy editions tied and humped in the corner doorway of Stoney Lane. It most frequently fell out that Roland was late and was ever grudgingly forced to pay the fat newsboy there, a stuttering half-wit with a mien best described as zoological, who was always pottering around with fistfuls of string and trying to read the Latin inscriptions on the pennies. Upon payment, he always looked up stupidly in acknowledgment from his crazy sockets, while his black grubby mittens, reaching only to the knuckle, slowly wrapped around the coin. Commerce, as ever, raced along in Great Britain.

  A long, unsparing hour followed, further sanctuary, in the walk-down toilet (dubbed “the shot tower”), a cold cast-iron street shelter marked “Gentlemen,” into which Roland disappeared, and, flashing pages on the stool above his rising smell, he sat and digested the match summaries with approval if he ticked the sheets, or, otherwise, with a disgust that was indicated by vicious spurts of rheum hacked fruitily up the glottis and spat through the open cabinet often missing by a mere windle-straw, and often not, the snuffling bums gathered there, smelling of old petrol, sleeping in circles like partridges, rolling fitful in their rags and urine, and secretly being eaten away by meth, nicotine fumes, and various unnamed diseases. They clapped their chops, sputtered over their crumb-strewn shirts. They barked in the cold from cracked raw faces, scratched against spider-bite, and semiconsciously shoved newspapers further down into their groins to buffer out the damping chill. Finished, Roland would slap his paper into the hopper, take the stairs two at a time, and make for the park, heading west down Cornhill, singing—no, not singing—rather snorting, roughly to a familiar Rugby tune, a tin sing-song:

  Why should we be pore?

  My bruvver ’awks ’is brahn;

  Why should we be pore?

  My sister walks the tahn;

  Farver’s a bit of a tea-leaf,

  Muvver’s a west-end ’ore

  An’ I’m a bit of a ponce meself,

  Why should we be pore?

  His was the lyrical mode.

  The trip to the park was usually rapid. Once into Cheapside, Roland would quickly produce a small half of a white loaf from his inside jacket; he would turn over toward Ludgate Hill, past St. Paul’s Cathedral, munching yeasty wads which he tore off with rude authority, then rolling bits of excrescent dough into sprout-sized pellets, and, dropping them to his feet, he would then trace them off with wild sweeping dead-ball kicks for the Tottenham Hotspurs to the indescribable delight of cheering, but imaginary, crowds. He tacked over the vacant streets that led down to Blackfriars with their foxy smells and putrefactive odours of sludge and cheap meat, and ducked along the long, gummed, beaten upon, and quaquaversal thoroughfares perpendicular to the dark lanes and alleys that rollercoasted down to the brown flowing Thames, sluicing with offal, and gave him the occasional glimpse, through the slits between begrimed warehouses, of the docks where the East End there is webbed with rigging and towered over by gawky, mile-high cranes. And all the way through Fleet Street dropped the bread, a fast cross to the near post, bang!—into the nets.

  Into the Strand Roland rambled, punting and heading his soft little footballs, ruthlessly blocking off and feignting at telephone poles, wraiths he termed rival halfbacks, and, occasionally, with a thudding heel, sending old barrels (which presumably threatened to break free on a rip into midfield) jouncing expeditiously into the gutter, falling completely upended and spilling in their wake a klaxon of tins, squishy dreck, and indistinguishable rubbish—all done, this, with a savage sense of sport which included weedy, imitative growls for his opponents, huge monocular Welsh cretins, he decided, running around with the stupidity ascribed to giants and salivating in leek-coloured uniforms, each one of whom he bashed with elbows into gibbering moans and easy compliance everytime he passed the reflecting glass of a shop front. Footstalk were closed; the streets were empty of traffic and shouts, pedestrians and taxis, constables, lorries, and bicycles and buses. There was, however, one man who could always be seen: the old hoary cripple, with a nose like the scranlet of a plough and the bulging eyes of a pill bug, who sat on an apple crate in front of Charing Cross Station. He always nodded to Roland, never said a word, but simply pointed off toward the west like a beaked weathervane. But it was of no account. For Roland, it was a solo run to open field, directly to goal—now something less than a mile away.

  The twitter of starlings, as he reached Cockspur Street, drew one’s attention high above the locked stores and bleak buildings which gave off a sensation of murkiness and grotesque desertion; the ghostly closure seemed the site of petty, mercile
ss secrets and, as well, seemed to prophesy, along with the swift approach of worse weather, the invisible but peccant setting for the hatching of some evil plot such as is generated when no human eye is looking.

  Further passage confirmed it all. The subsequent descent into the pedestrian subway, a dark tunnel that beehived with exits to various new viametric directions of the city—and directed Roland toward his last lap—revealed a corollary to that atmospheric malevolence by dint of private and public messages scratched hastily on the walls in weird, almost oghamic print and quasi-literate handscrawl by those for whom the urge to express oneself on a public urinal or any other fertile location was paramount.

  An underground wall is invariably the Rosetta Stone of the troglodyte. Roland skated his eyes over the surface of the wall which was scored with calligraphies barbed and illiterate. It was as full as the Personal Page in the London Times: pan-sexual suggestions (telephone numbers, trysts, preferences); a sprightly, if vile, series of anatomical studies done in indelible lipstick; single familiar verbs (nouns? adjectives?) spaced out alone; an omeletted reproduction of the Union Jack; the vivid declaration by Edwin of eternal affection for Angelina crossed out to question mark, crossed out to what read like the entire male population from Giggleswick to the lower Americas; unmetrical limericks; lavatorial allusions accompanied with hieroglyphs, predominantly tumescent; lovers’ names ballooned in asymmetrical hearts pierced through with shaky arrows; and, finally, in bright chalks, the socio-political proclamations of the chthonic historian burdened with unscrolling his views on immigration and ethnic balance, which tripped in large, semi-uncial slants through descending letters to frantic exclamation: “Down With The Tongs!” “Baboons Out, Now!” “Keep Britain White!”

  On this particular morning, Roland quickly slid out the key to his wash locker, spit into his palms, and with both hands diligently bore into the wall, with flaring cuts, shapes that suddenly spelled out:

  “Wogs, pack it off!”

  Hyde Park, that popular rus in urbe escape, where people hied to the world of trees and hopfrogs, spread out its wide acreage in tints impressionist green and whole wheat—a beautiful foliage of lungs for the respiration of all the natural children who, despite the autumn nip, came singing the praises of Pan. A commons, the elms, maples, and old gnarled oaks rose majestic and swaying over the bush grottoes, glades, and planes of dark, bright grass, which, all together, seemed to stabilize the worst of fractured episodes and enfold in the felicitous twits of birdsong and high leafy screens every man to the last: the indigent, curious, incurably peripatetic, or any another who, filled with little absorptions, chose of a Sunday to waffle away the hours in peace.

  On the pavement, chestnut sellers stoked their coals, while, nearby, purveyors were selling from large boards neck-chains, souvenir nail files, bangles, wide tenpenny ties, whoopee cushions, and fat little pincushions stitched and stuffed to the shape of Beefeaters. Bitterns cheeped. Bleating children skipped after each other in silly circles, all sticky from pink bouquets of candy floss. A young couple, sharing fig pinwheels and angel fingers from squares of waxed paper, sat under a sycamore, earnestly engaged in a discussion that was obviously a complicated affair of the heart. Artistes ambled along, wearing leghorn hats and tapping their walking-sticks. Unmarriageable sisters, arm-in-arm, paraded stiffly up and down The Carriage Road and past the severe flowerbeds, with perfect custody of the eyes, while, across the park, large families, benched along the Serpentine, wolfed down banana and chive sandwiches a half-meter in length and sipped cydrax from paper cups while their siblings splashed nearby, rude juvenescents who zapped their plastic dreadnoughts through the water with noisy roils and hisses. Along the expanse of water, sailboats drifted. And, romping with their nannies, little girls, who looked to a one like Tenniel’s hydrocephalic Alice in her white apron, chased their fluffy cats with squeals in silver octaves and hands high in surprise.

  The leaves soughed. Down a wide dustpath ran Rotten Row (the route de roi of George II): the once fashionable promenade where Nell Gwynn prammed her royal bastards and, later, a walk where prostitutes, so rouged and incarnadine they looked like cherry bombs, ambled slowly along in their Adelaide boots and solicited under the garish gaslight. Now, riders cantered their horses there in the cool early morning. The willing copulatrix, however, could still be found—here, there, in every quoin of the park. The Great Chain of Being went from the advanced voluptuary to the plain “fire-ship,” from the broom-riding old tart to teenie girls in glossie paraphernalia, just one step away from menarche, all the way down to the most gruesome of gruesome frigstresses. Foremost in that generic subculture of the titled were the Royal Tarts, then the Bankside Ladies, the Fulham Virgins, and not least—well, perhaps—the accurately, if rather uncharitably, termed “scrubber,” the two-bob hop or tupenny upright—neither eponym, however, really suggestive of discrimination, nor, in point of fact, the possibilities of high fortune.

  Roland dodged traffic over to the northwest part of The Ring and immediately noticed on his right—perched all alone on a bench, with a half-bottle of woodpecker cider and a plastic transistor radio the size of a lozenge, playing quite loudly—a plump, whey-faced girl, arms folded, and her legs crossed in a short rusty black skirt which fully revealed the iceblue thighs of a majorette, the one mobile foot raised and enticingly waving a figure eight in the wand of a tiny shoe. Spice, as it were, made a living thing. Her hair, teased into a chemical blond nest, wisped down into sparse, uneven bangs which blurred her heavily made-up eyes, arched, obviously, with a piece of rare coal and which, upon closer inspection, revealed the open moonlike face of the pert agitatrix, part obduracy, part infantile cunning: in nuce, a Rubens on the way to becoming a Braque. She snapped her chewing gum, and, with a downward smile and sidelong glance toward Roland, blew out a thin pink trifle like the rising bubble through a slice of rubber tyre. It popped. She placed a finger to her mouth in coy surprise. There was no question about it, he knew, her motor was running. Roland turned his head, spat over a cluster of phlox, and walked toward the girl. He made of the hello the hunting call it was.

  “You Gert?”

  “Rose.”

  “Not Gert, then, lives in The Cut, over in Waterloo?”

  “Rosamund, actually.”

  “I thought I knew you. I heard the music. I thought I knew you.”

  The girl shook her head, partly as an indication that she did not think he knew her and partly as a bopping accompaniment to the beat through the radio. It seemed a glutinously indefinite mind.

  “Little Jimmy and the Tokays,” she said, raising the transistor to her ear and bouncing rhythmically to the song. “Flippin’ well marvelous, they are. You fancy them?”

  “Cor!” Roland snapped his thumb and finger, once. A revelation of some sort was about to be born. “He’s a good friend of mine, Little Jimmy there!” He held high an oathful hand. “Straight as a pound of candles. Comes out to the Drum, him, the local. Well, night club, really. We’re like that” He shot two fingers together. The girl might be from the farmlands. One never knew.

  “You havin’ me one?”

  “Not bloody likely, Gert. I have his albums. Where else would I get them?”

  “Rose,” she corrected him. “Rosamund, actually.”

  There you are, thought Roland, a bloody hog-scrubber from Yorkshire or somewhere, noticing, as he did, the cruelly appointed marriage of adenoidal tendencies on top of a North Riding accent. She seemed the type who always moved her lips while reading the agony column. Roland quickly looked her over: not really Snow White, he thought, but that was all right; you don’t look at the mantel piece when you’re poking the fire, as he often said. Through the process of genetic drift, or simply a backstairs conception of elemental hygiene—clearly the problem was not detergent build-up—she revealed in close-up, skin the offensive colour of toilet porcelain, a slight hydrophobia, a small bust, and spatulate fingernails, raw and black from chronic nail-biting, aligned, prob
ably, to the attendant worries of budget squeeze, pimples, a hateful roommate, and, doubtless, long months of waitressing.