“You a waitress?”
“Was.” And long months of waitressing.
Roland then gestured hopefully to the half-empty bottle sitting next to her; she passed it to him. Without pausing, he swung high the bottle of cider and pushed it vertical against his nose as he drained it, wheezed out the carbonation, and flung it into the bushes.
“Made by Japs, aren’t they?” He burped. “The Nips?”
“What?”
“Them.” Roland pointed to the transistor radio.
“Dunno,” she answered. “Never looked really.”
“The Jappos, fiendish really, up at all hours of the night and working until crow-pee under their filthy little microscopes, making those piss-sized paper transistors, no bigger than a bimp.”
The girl tapped the mesh of the little speaker. “Don’t work good in the park, this. Gets all buzzy it does. Blinky.” She tuned it up. It sputtered.
Her breasts, thought Roland. Flat as a warming pan.
“They could care. They shoot the moon back to Tokyo in Japan there with a nice little pocketful of good English bunce, yours and mine, luv. No sooner that happens, they come back here walking around in their bushy slippers so you can’t hear them and begin grinding out a billion more. Look around you. We’re rotten for Jappos. You don’t see them?” Roland snapped, with a gesture that swept the horizon. “All over the shop now.”
“Don’t bother me none,” she replied, delicately plucking a loose eyelash from her conjunctiva, “he got it on the whisper, anyway. Hire purchase and all that.”
“Glad and sorry system, eh?” Roland gave out with a dry noiseless laugh, the kind with no lungs behind it, like the chuffing of ashes. Then came a pause. “Who’s he, then?”
“He?”
“Him,” Roland winked, “the one what give you the radio.”
“Well, he’s”—she hesitated—“my uncle.”
Uncle! Here’s Harriet the Chariot, Roland thought, sitting in mid-air, sharking around alone, as wide open as the Birmingham motorway, and with this supposed uncle of hers? Tell that to the bleeding Bishop of Ballytrunion when he’s out on a toot in June, was what he thought, though when Roland asked her why she had come to Hyde Park she simply fluttered her eyes closed and said she was waiting about for the train to Pidley and was not exactly cruising around if that’s what he was implying, she thanked him very much.
At that moment, two grinning Sikhs strolled by, both with cameras slung around their necks. Probably from the Punjab, they passed by the bench, showing a native zeal for an unchecked but healthy self-esteem. The Indian’s was always a marked walk: one hand gripped in the trouser pocket, usually the left, they swung along, eyes rather vacant, their right arms also swinging with the regularity of piston rods, all giving the impression that they are wound to a tight spring, like a key clock, and set into motion in lovely, precise tickings. Both of these men wore plaited beards and turbans, one in a suit with a magenta waistcoat, the other the typical mode of Indian dress—a long Russian-collared tunic over white cotton jodhpurs crushed into wrinkles around the ankles into open sandals. Roland followed them with his eyes, staring glacially.
“Look at that. Indian coons, you see them? Right over from Monkey Island in bagsy trousers, proper winkle-pickers, and not a sixpence to scratch their asses with. It sends me up a pole.” Roland continued in a rather odd way, for his interest in the world rarely involved the reflections that might change things, which is to say, either his interest or the world. “Thing that gets me is, the law protects them. You hit a nigger, he dies on purpose to spite you.”
Racial misrule, for Roland, was far and away the worst of the many and world-besotted, inconceivable dooms. His was a revelation of England, gastronomically, as an infected cake or rancid pie shoved through with poisoned raisins, rotting currants, and split with dark, suspicious mould.
“Got marvelous rhythm.” The girl snapped her gum. “I’ll give them that.”
“More squeak than bloody wool, I’d say. Bugger them all.”
The girl suddenly stopped short, this side of an incipient bubble, and went slack in the mouth. “What about Little Jimmy?”
“Who?”
“And the Tokays. Your friends. They’re niggers. They sound like niggers.”
It was a fissure. Roland threw out his hand matter-of-factly. “Sort of, I guess. What, he autographed a photo for me mate once. Anyway,” he added, shifting abruptly on the bench, “that was way back when Pontius was pilot, so who cares.”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” the girl answered, her face as vacant as an empty plate. She snapped open her purse and pulled out a tube of purple lipstick, a bullet-shaped phallus called “Loveshine,” and began rubbing it over her lips. “They got a smashing beat. Groovy and sort of African-like. Mysterious, really. I like a mystery. It’s not like you know everything when there’s something you don’t know. I don’t know, I like a mystery.”
“That’s because,” Roland snorted, “that’s because they’re all Bolshies is why. Pinks, you see? You think they make those records over in ruddy Sopewell, for chrissakes? Or over in Wormwood Scrubs? They make them in Moscow in Russia is where they make them! The Bolshies what are niggers are worst. Try to touch one of them up for a cup of tea, a kip, or an excuse-me, and it’s cheery-bye for you, darling, and I don’t mean maybe. They keep microphones underneath their tongues and carry swords in their brollies, the bastards. See, so if you was to give them a jostle, say to nick a couple of needy bob for the night, then—shooooop!—in goes the sharp-o so you don’t even feel it, man, and next day you’re pissing out of your shoulder blades, you can count on that, don’t think you can’t. Look, don’t tell me, sister. I see them everyday, duffing around down in Hackney Wick or down in the Fruit Exchange, over with the kikes.”
Down the walk, then, passed a little Indian in a white suit; he was carrying a tennis racquet and a valise and moved with an obvious sense of mission.
“The Pansy Patrol,” Roland murmured drily.
“Who?”
“Him. A good bashing’d do him up proper. Comb him out.” Roland jammed his heel into the pavement and laughed crookedly. “Me mate once did a Chelsea pensioner who give him some lip in a shot-tower on Beak Street. Put the old fart’s nose right into parentheses, he did, and better he is for it, I’ve a mind. Them Indians, you have to watch out, they’ll razor you up just for your brass buttons. They’re taught that at school. They get rewards for it. They sleep with their mothers.”
“I always watch out, anyway,” she said with a high muffled giggle.
Roland sat back unimpressed. “Do your level best, do you?”
The girl folded her arms and turned to him. “Now, what’s that supposed to mean?” Rosamund wasn’t born yesterday.
Goddam, thought Roland, real north country: one of those wimps who know nothing from a titfer, and just enough to suds a sink, brown the bread, and scald the grapes or apples in their wretched pies. Or, Roland wondered, is she just fiddling in the woods here? After all, she smelled like a barman’s apron, looked like Mother Midnight, and showed no more interest in getting away than the Lady of the Limp.
“Those blokes will go after anything that stands still,” Roland explained. “That’s what I meant.”
“Well,” the girl offered mathematically, “it’s one thing to watch out, twice another to kick about with them.”
“Kick—!” The aposiopesis signified horror. Roland fiddled for words. “Look, back in 1960 or something, I think, I think, I seen one of the Tokays in a crapper in Shoreditch? So what am I to do, burst into bloody flames?”
The question hung in the air.
An old man, pulled on a leash by his infirm canine companion—a tiny Sealyham, which looked like a kidney covered with hair—zigzagged by, both looking as if they moved on power-induced artificial limbs. He hobbled shaggily along in screwy directions and, at intervals, peered for the sun. The sky, a dull gold with cool tones in middle afternoon and solid
as a hammerbeam roof, now seemed breaking up, broken, and all was now smoked in a mottled light, a gunmetal wash. Refractory little boys, now everywhere, were dragging tearfully on their mothers’ hands, bored, tearful, blubbering. Fathers, in various areas, stared disconsolately at ruined kites. The afternoon was passing.
“I want to go to the Dilly Bar, and dance,” she implied.
“Can’t.”
“Why not?” She masticated the gum quickly, gnashed a bubble.
Roland shrugged, sniffed. “Not a tusheroon on me.”
In the natural order of things, an effect followed hard upon a cause. The girl slipped her radio into her handbag and looked vaguely in the mood to set off.
“Show you the Round Pond, though,” Roland asserted, rakishly straightening out a loose strand of her hair which felt like a piece of dental floss. He patted her thigh. She didn’t flinch. The compass read bedward.
“Bold as a miller’s shirt, aren’t we?” she said, looking at him with her eyes shut. Now was his chance. Roland smiled; he had held on for the long run, drew the goalie out, and would soon be in like a ferret, pulling the ball wide of the net with his right foot, then, whap!—into goal with his left. An unstoppable shot. Roland, very bucked, turned toward her.
“Come on, time for a Dutch red and a glass.”
“Can’t.”
Came an hiatus.
“Why not?” Roland stood up. Roland sat down. “Now why the hell not?”
“Meeting my uncle.”
“Why get angry? Can’t hurt by asking, they say, huh?” Roland asked, hurt and angry and speaking suddenly in a low, menacing tone. “That it?” He burned. “Stuff your bloomin’ uncle.” It was an alternative.
“Uh-uh.” She disagreed—and stood up, balancing on her little heels. She headed away, flapping a hand somewhere behind her. Roland was on his feet.
“Rosie the Rivetter,” he yelled. “Rosie the grubbing, bleeding Rivetter, that right?” She turned and with a sweetly icy face nodded once.
“Rosamund, actually, thank you.”
Uncle! All bloody flap that was, and Roland knew that within a brace of shakes she’d be all hands to the pump in some cul-de-sac in the Edgeware Road, with those two drum-eared jungle bunnies who walked by, just begging for it. That, for Roland, was the osculum infame, roughly, “kissing the devil’s fundament.” The brain-racking insouciance with which he generally met the world here stung Roland into a cold fury, a splenetic grudge which ripened into a bouncing loath specifically for those smut-crazed piratical Asians, roasting with satyriasis and ready with their poison juices to roger anything warm and horizontal, only to send pullulating over the indiscriminate bedsteads of Christendom a witless, sponge-headed progeny of biological variants, all with three breasts and minds like silly putty, conceived to a one in a perfect Walpürgissnacht of pithecanthropic howls, reechy innuendo, and drools.
His resentment burrowed in bitterness the geometrical, if underground, trenches of philosophical Patriotism from which, when the whistle blew its warning, he would burst, plumed and armiferous, into the irrepressible English ozone, splintering the air with war cries like sprays of dynamite to call to the barricades, into the fight, all who would outface, and must, this Zulu, this Asian, with his endless streaming hordes, those dark plumed beings of the Middle Air, and buttress all his wrath against that flood which was spilling over the tidemark of the world like an endless tidal wave of paint and staining all an excremental brown. Love Thou Thy Land! Dieu et Mon Droit! Into the Valley of Death Rode the Six Hundred!
A howl suddenly tore the sky!
“Speaker’s Corner,” a side show of hammering hands and spitting rhetoric, had thundered alive. Shrieks jerked everyone into crazy attention and brought people running over each other with furious abandon. This particular area was like a bunch in the fabric of the park, where it seemed all the irregularities in the universe were detectable, thus leaving the useable portion spread wide, unrumpled, relatively pacific. Tourists hopped up and snapped photos in blitzes and sudden pops. Men and women seethed through each other, wrenched into position, blent like muffin mix. So crowded was it that someone might easily have blown another’s nose and easily escaped detection. They swayed, fell down, got up, leaped, yelled, and dizzily sang out retorts, insults, and repartee in the yaps and hoots they proudly felt were dialectic. But it was the speakers, the metal of Old England, who simply amazed, for it was singularly this vision-haunted (occasionally beer-irrigated) array of nobodies, filled with the arrogance of disenchanted insight, who, in the war between order and entropy, ran scratching hand-over-hand high into their makeshift boxes, and, flying into diatribes and mighty gusts of Homeric wrath against God, Devil, or anything else that bent their wick, they cast—on a Sunday of rain, on a Sunday of snow—imitation pearls before genuine swine. Roland punched and fought to the front of the wide, shifting assembly.
Woe betide you, as Jeremiah once said, you idiotic bastards! [‘Same to you, old boy, with knots on!’] All you so-called yoomans, glimps, toads, half-wits, and rushers-about in society out there looking up at me, why don’t you all go out, give yourselves a treat, and get your heads sharpened? [‘We use pencils, you nut!’] Why am I up here on this here thingummy, amongst all you pathetic twits, and not down in the Albie Hall with the swells where I should be? To talk to you is why: not about drainage, not about the Chelsea flower show, not about the price of mouse-shit in the Isle of Wight—but about wogs!! [‘Hogs, you say?’] I have something to say to you about blinkin’ wogs! I make no distinctions: chocolate, black, brown, yellow, red, and, if you like, West Indian aquamarine—all the colours in God Almighty’s rainbow, in fact, who stink! And what do I have to say, you’re going to ask. Well, don’t bother asking. I asked. I’ll answer, that fair? I say it’s bloody high time we go right ahead and tell every one of them to bung off!, to bung right thee hell off! ...
The invective, a delivery somewhat unprepossessingly short of being marcoaurelian, was all one man’s. He was waving his arms like a tic-tac man, trying to show, presumably, that the homologue on everything was writ large. A scullion of low breed, his face was swollen with erisypelas, blue jowls, and hair, and the collar of his open shirt hung askew, below two dysplastic ears, like a limp ferrule circumscribing a head three-fourth’s neck, in which a single hole, the width of a peg, beeped out a flitter of dirty bleats—mutations bred from the shotgun wedding of half-baked ideas and free speech, fraught, to be sure, with statistical pitfalls, but which always seemed to squeeze into one major annoyance: “Beelzebub Agragat!”
... Go ahead and laugh, you pinheads! [‘Aw, piss off!’] The escapee from Bedlam who just yelled that is a very sick chap. Now, listen: Look over at Whitechapel! Look at Brick Lane! It’s the wogs as is killing us and sending England, Home, and Beauty right up the bleedin’ spout, air mail, the filthy beggars. We’re humming with them, for chrissakes! We have an annual inflow of 50,000 dependants parachuting down like locusts, floating down hereabouts like Tinkerbelle. [‘He’s a fairy!’] Who isn’t, you? In fifteen or twenty years we’ll have three and a half million immigrants just from the Commonwealth alone seeping in here, spading up your gardens, and grunting around next to your nearest and dearest. Commonwealth, did I say Commonwealth? A catch-fart, I meant the barmy house! Consider, now: in the year 2000 there’ll be five to seven million of these devils in here sucking up your air, peeing in your parks, sticking their horny feet under your mahogany, and putting the boots to your women, see? So where, may I ask you, does it all end? [‘When your missus gets a bun in her oven?’] Belt up, you creep! There’s always one, isn’t there? Now see what I mean? A million every twenty years—legally, you twits, legally, and as easy as kiss my thumb. And it’s we’ve got to pay for it! It’s rank carelessness is what! We’ve already gone and kicked it through the uprights, haven’t we? Give over, now, haven’t we? It’s hardly worth the flippin’ candle for us what owns the place anymore, is it? Well, is it? ...
Furibund, the s
peaker thought he sniffed a whiff of complacent jackass. Not for him the pasteurized euphemism; he ranted, accused the crowd of bestial acts, peculiar preoccupations, and being interested in nothing more than a lifetime of French games. Then he leaned forward and surveyed his audience for just a bit of Complicity, and in spite of—perhaps because of—the shower of spittle that sprayed down from the shaky podium, Roland, looking about him, began to lead a cheer of loud hurroos, while thumping and drumming a paradiddle of agreement on the foot of the box like a weird little apostle.
The Corner looked like the Battersea Fair, and like the Battersea Fair it had a variety of entertainments: ratty escape artists rolling out of multi-padlocked bags; goosecap fools shaking bells; albinos with dowsing rods; cripples dancing the hornpipe; toothless buskers duck-squatting through everyone, playing the spoons, twanging ukeleles, or singing “Knees Up, Mother Brown”; and gymnosophists jumping up and down under umbrellas, like geysers.
Some had names, reputations established. An undeodorized little woman named Mrs. Budget had been to the Corner, she said, for 103 years, playing the foot-trombone.
Then, of some notoriety, was bespectacled Paul the Pseudoplutarch, American oligosyllabicist, ἀνυρωπάρεσχος, and poet laureate of rural Malawi, who scuttled around in his pants of beaten wool and round cap, waving copies of his own Velocity: The Key to Writing, (o.p.) a vade mecum for gerundmongers and the sourcebook of his widely cited, narrowly appreciated, long-held theory that one’s literary output should cease only when one ran out of possible dedications—and that remained, not a family, but a world away. A certain Mr. Sheekey, demanding his throne, claimed to be the disinherited bastard dauphin of France, and, since bastardy purges itself in the third generation, he insisted upon not only a massive triumphal march into Paris but also an immediate and costly coronation.
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