And, dear to the hearts of all, was the Italian midget named Mario—author of the bibliothecal rarity, his first and only manumission in the mysteries of hierodulic logic, Mother Mario’s Gnostrums, or A Demonstration of Just How the Holy Spirit has Two Right Wings, Wherein is Contained, Beside the Pleasantness and Sweetness of the Stile, A Letter penned in Shorthand in which is incontestably and logically Proved, among Many Sage Things, that the Aureola of the heresiarch St. Onan was Really a Donut. (8 vo., in white tortoise-shell boards, with juvenile “pop-ups” included)—who claimed to have been ordained a priest, but was, in fact, a paradoxically credulous atheist whose thesis was that he believed anything not found in the Bible; he also asserted that friars should copulate to generate new virgins ad majoram Dei gloriam; that indiscriminate fucking by Christians will defeat the fast-growing Communists; that he himself had been taught to read directly by St. Simon Stock; and that bed-wetting in children—the major sign that the infamous Beast 666 was roaming abroad seeking the ruin of souls—could be easily cured by the habitual wearing of a sterilized, papally blessed rubber snood, appended to the weenie by an elastic band, a totally effective device, he claimed, and which he sold for £5 each from the trayful of them that hung around his sacerdotal neck in place of the pectoral cross he insisted he once owned but had dutifully melted down for Mussolini to hasten the destruction of the heathen Ethiopians in 1935.
Meanwhile, the blue-jowled orator hulked forward, gripped the sides of the podium with what looked like two non-opposable thumbs, and held forth, scowling darkly, like the Christian-hating Emperor, Maximinius Thrax:
... Shift them out, shift them out! Into the drink with them all, I say! Else we’ll all be over flogging apples in Corned Beet Island, won’t we, twitching with the jerks, dodging the shitstorms [‘Manners! Language!’], or stoking bloody furnaces next to them Eyeties from Italy with beards and shoe sizes about 43-80, with no more respect due them than a thruppenny packet of bum fodder! Laugh, go ahead! [‘Ha, ha!’] You see laws being passed evenday, don’t you, stuffed into us like pork pies by Mrs. Windsor over there, don’t you, and by that overpaid, under-rehearsed vaudeville show over in St. Margaret Street, don’t you, slow as a wet week and not a one of them who can tell his arse from an umbrella! [‘Ahh, rats to you, you peckerhead!’] Buzz off, you stupid queer! Now, where was I? Oh, yes! Now, while these so-called legisla-tors of British yoomanity are trying to argue the leg off an iron pot, we’re pouring good English money down the grid, as if, mind you, as if each one of us was all like them big, gravy-slopped American-born stooges crapping all over us with their greasy dollars, spitting their dirty money all over the world! [‘Throw them out!’] Pre-cisely, mate! Because what we ain’t no longer is an Empire! A fact. No tricks. But we’ll soon be a dead spit for them Americans, you don’t think so?? This is only a little island, dearies, made of coal, surrounded by fish, and small as Rutland—so small, in fact, if we bent over, a pigeon could pick a pea out of our arses! You heard me! Our cools! And what we have no room for is room for a bunch of Pygmies clipping rings in their noses, wearing bits of sacking for underwear, and riding camels into the traffic jams in the Victoria Embankment. Who said that? A racialist? A common, boozed-up, bumph-minded yobbo of a racialist?? Sweet Fanny Adams it was! It was a Citizen! ...
Typically, he did not speak, he announced. No microphones were allowed into the park, but it did not seem to matter. The noise threshhold seemed infinite. Metaphors flew about like loose tiles. Each speaker seemed only interested in firing off squibs, like bananas, to disconcert the gravity of the orthodox, implicitly asking, as all did, that profound, if essentially poetic, question: into the nosebag of unbiased recapitulation can we accuse what historian of putting his snout? Speakers everywhere shot up high on their stands, amid the crowd, like foghorns blasting war news—an eristic jawing of bottomless fart-gas, messianic rant, bilk, and boozy guffaws, wherein guesses became prophecies; whim, dogma; and candour, far more frightful than caricature.
Nostrum peddlers, compulsive system-builders, and nature mystics gathered here in earnest and rewrote history, drew up plans, read stars, planned attacks, and gave warnings. Solutions far exceeded problems. It was, indeed, a Mecca: Ranters; Forest Saints; Expectants, with leaflets; Those With Not Just a Pretty Face; needle-workers; Atomists, who lived to tell; Anthroposophists; flat-earthists; Icthyophages; anarcho-syndicalists; Behemists; Lords of Misrule; dog-lovers; Druidicals, with scrip and staff; those who resented salads; Socialists; mispronouncers; Shaking Quakers, who shook; Unbelievers (who shook their heads); Millenaries; banana sahibs; dog-haters; Rechabites; Theobotanists; Futilitarians, yawning; Just Plain Workers, announcing new victories of Labour over Capital; victorious Capitalists, with wives in labour; Recent Reincarnations, in whom the dybbuk of past antagonists had recently, if inarticulately, entered; and, nisi quod potius, those not unpredictably epiphanizing the keenest of keen senses of community—the Communists.
... Communalism? Keeping bloody cute, sneaky, and together is what that means. Anglo-Indian, Indo-Anglian, Afro-British, blah, blah, blah. It’s the same song everybody tries to whistle, but nobody knows the tune! And where does it all end, huh? Huh? [‘In the grave?’] The comedian in the front row here can go home. We’re all laughing at you, you silly fart! Off the track now ... what happens is, they come over here for a slice of Resurrection Pie, and then, then!, when they’re set up on the doorstep, living on cat scrunch and budgie food, next they start trying to creep their mothers in here, then the grandfather, then Uncle Max, and then the whole family tree comes over the Channel at night in a rubber life-raft, eating chapatis and singing ‘Merrily We Bloody Roll Along’ as if they were going to an ice show at the Winter Garden in Clapham! [‘Why don’t you go and get stuffed!’] You in the back there, shut your hole! Shift out the whole lot of them, you hear? Into the dustbins with them! That’s my theory, sweeties! ...
Theory was to “Speaker’s Corner” what the chain-pull was to the Crapper Flushing System: a valve was pulled, the pipes flew fast into siphonic action, out emptied the cistern, and all was sent cascading down the flush pipe in a downrush of water that splashed into the pan, ringing like a peal of bells. Everybody had a theory. Advanced, notably, were: that bees hummed the one hundredth Psalm on Christmas Eve; that Shakespeare was a play written by Sir Francis Bacon’s Italian half sister Ameletta (Anglice: Hamlet!); that, at this minute!, an umbrella was being invented for retarding a ship when driving into a storm; that the elbow was the most beautiful part of the body; that the dichromatic game of the Persians, popularly known as chess, was a racist pastime; that licking the stamp rather than the envelope was the single source of cancer; that over in Woking a man had invented a pill that will grow leather on the footsole to do away with shoes; that God was a Mechanic and His screwdriver was coincidence; that the circular flow of money was the cause of all disease; that an Estonian gownsman named Tiit Priks had revolutionized travel when he fashioned a pair of three-foot-long canoe-shaped shoes out of wood and walked thirty-three miles down the Thames; that the two greatest of all books were, respectively, Walter Curtain’s Prelude to Aftermath and, then, the Bible; and, finally, that all invalids were selfish, dwarves mean, congenital diabetics petulant, and, of course, that the entire Capoid race was each, to a man, the living and demonstrable point d’appui of native recalcitrance to hard work.
... A coloured bloke over with me down at the job ... [‘The rag trade?’] I’ll forget that, the chap’s clearly a nut. Um, yuh, this bloke down at the job, as I was trying to say, who’d nick the pennies right off your eyes, is unable to see a ruddy hole through a ladder, browns off every time it clouds over, and is taking home twice what I am! Twice, goddamit! [‘What’s that, tuppenny ha’penny?’] The potty half-wit who just asked that had an American accent. Go home, you filthy little mouse. Anyway, twice, twice me, see? Cushy, man? Let me tell you. Bone-idle! And what really gives me the pip are these Indian thuggies pushing their bags of grunge, so you’ve he
ard, through little old lady’s letter-boxes. Oh, don’t pretend you’ve heard this for the first time, you cringing yahoos and swivets! Not only little old ladies, either! Little old ladies whose sons won fifteen or twenty bronze clusters fighting the Hun, some the George Medal, just so you all can freely take your tikes up to the zoo and not have to stop every two minutes and scream, ‘Wha’ whazzat?’ or ‘They’re bombing again, Alice!’ or ‘Hit the farking dirt!’ No, you look around. Them monkeys and terrapins are in a cage, not some plastic sack stitched up wholesale by trained gorillas in the so-called Republic of Botswana! Am I saying it’s rosy, though? You’re a liar if you said I said it, you miserable gets! [‘Oh, go crash your bike!’] Oh, piss off, you hopeless bastard. Rosy? White tenants are quaking, for godsakes! Take the letter-boxes. Naturally, these poor souls think it’s the mail, don’t they? Just imagine looking around for some kind of package posted down from your favourite aunty up in Mumbles and then, instead, simply finding—well, I don’t have to tell you, you can spell. [‘S-h-i-t?’] The person who just spelled that is a cramped and unhappy little jobbernowl down here who’s drooling all over himself. Ignore him. He’s a poor basket-case with nowhere to go. But you see what it all means? It’s all bung in your eyes is what! Didn’t one of them Greek philosophers from Greece tell us, ‘Life is a journey’? [‘What a stupid bastard he must have been!’] Get knotted! Now, where was I? Right, life being a journey and all that. That’s just what it is, a journey, and I say the clock hands are now pointing to zero. [‘That a Greek clock, you pimp?’] Ignore him, he’s mentally ill. Zero hour, yes! Journey time for the woggos! We don’t want them! We never did! What, do you tell me we did? We did not!! How do I know we didn’t? They do! Hear me now, hear it all! You shall not—not!—put up with this kind of horseshit anymore!
Abruptly, the speaker finished, flung a rag out, and bathed ribbons of sweat from a face radiating that kind of pride that can only come when one has established, on the spot, the Eleventh Commandment. Like a bride her garter, he threw his handkerchief into the crowd, and Roland snatched it, stuffing it into his pocket. The orator shinnied down. Eyes followed him: flat Goan and Bantu faces, Biafran and Congolese, some from Cameroon and Upper Volta, all silent, heavy-eyed, resentful, and tense with concentration.
“Bloody marvelous,” shouted Roland, having experienced a feeling very similar to that which we’re told follows parturition; he pumped the man’s hand, crying, “That’s the stuff, mate!” Then Roland shouldered his way imperiously past a small Negro wearing an Astrakhan fezlike hat and tribal marks on his cheek that looked like Hundertwasser spirals; Roland wanted to give the dithering little chap a shot to the ribs, a whack-up into the jaw, just from jubilation, but he was hungry and wanted to get to the tea shop on Chapel Street before closing time, the punctual but late-in-the-day consideration of his Sunday, when, ritually, he would have a quick supper of tinned pilchards, a few cold tea cakes, three cups of tea, and then, blotting his mouth with a trencher of bread, would be off. People drifted away. It was a diaspora of tired souls, bleary-eyed dogs, cranky children, and parents with big swollen feet. With such events do afternoons end, and this was no exception.
Roland was into Grosvenor Place, on the run.
Hyde Park engendered shadows. The dying greenery of hurt-bushes and larches, under the grey shells of clouds that now began to snap with rain, caught that feeble light in London, neither night nor day but rather that feeble compromise which, more than the presage of autumn, filled one with a sense of long-forgotten things and showed itself to be that time when vague yearnings and regrets begin to cumber the soul. Over the plains of grass burst puffs of irregular wind, sprits that spun the falling leaves, hectic, red, flapping through the wake in little side streets where, now, no one was to be seen, having long since hurried away through the silence and the telling cold. The ragged mirage of day had suicided into the cold dusk. Night fell.
Once into Victoria Station, Roland stopped and listened. There was no reflection, only shadow. No one was about. The station spread out before him. The trains, sealed shut, were pulled alongside each other until morning. Pipes dripped. He listened again. The sound of water was pouring from some sourceless spot, a broken aqueduct, perhaps, or maybe some conduit water spilling out of an ancient furrow or some lead Roman leakage of old Londinium. Roland blinked his eyes to adjust them to the darkness, then disappeared into a stairway like a bit of dirt into a Hoover—and stepped into the damp cellar. The cold light of tiny bulbs, blue and pennysized, strung out between eerie shadows and revealed a hushed ash-grey tomb, a cell of must, cannibalized, as if by Mulciber, into a warehouse for those who work by night—the dark, witching hours that slowly pass, soured, it always seems, by those deep and unassignable final causes that desperately remind us of our odd naked frailties and whisper to us we owe God a death. Down the width and breadth of the cellar, red and green coaches and buses, in for the night, sat dumb, heavy, humped asleep like pachyderms.
Roland shot open a door: his locker was filled with soaps, brushes, rags. He pulled his gear together, threw off his jacket, and suddenly bashed by pending work into a fiercesome frame of mind, he decided he needed a quick cup of tea. He charged upstairs, two at a time. And it was there in the waiting room that he saw, upended in the far shadows, the suitcase, tennis racquet, and, beside it all, alone on a bench and huddled into a tiny embryonic position like a small, brown croissant, a little Indian—the white collar of his shirt ironed into wings, fluttering to the rhythm of his snores—dead asleep. Roland moved no closer. He crouched, blinking in the half-shadows, and spoke once:
“What’s the game?”
II
Bong! Bong! Bong!—there were eight. An old high boxed clock with a crack in its wide face smiled down a sunny morning from the waiting room in Victoria Station and tolled in a wonderland of sounds in a stately measure that sensed the long night and overrode the drastic dark, keeping time known, pattern orderly, and rhythm alive. Dilip opened an eye, then two. He then sat up directly, rubbed his eyes, and clicked his tongue happily, mistily cognizant—just before he dismounted from his dream—of a sweet meditation he had had of Krishna who had been hop-footing, fecund, through his unconscious in a fountain of golden rain with his 16,000 wives and 180,000 sons in attendance, each holding up a moon-kissed rose that shone forth, in bubbles of blue dew, the Peace That Passeth All Understanding. In a mental communion, arranged by him so often over the years, he consulted his guru, Menu: “In no other ship than the barque of dreams may one ride so refreshed.” Dilip had a revelation: sleep was the thin white meal one took absolutely alone. It gave one a taste for solitary pleasures. He smiled at that, for he was alone. And now he was awake.
The waiting room, he saw, as cognition followed revelation, was like any other waiting room: dark, pigeon-flecked wood, patinaed over with the colour of faded bottle-green. Newspapers were strewn about. One light bulb dangled on a cord over the room; a large radiator pinked out noises; and some travel posters to Brighton, Winderby Sluice, and Aberystwyth, which he was unable to see earlier in the night, were posted high behind a coin-operated tea machine. It was still, however, somewhat shadowy in the room. Dilip unlocked his valise, took out a box of matches, and, walking over to the timetable board, held up the match to read the schedule. Satisfied, he dropped the match.
“They don’t like that.”
“Pardon?” Dilip blurted, spinning around quickly and collapsing frightened into the wall as his heart staggered. He swivelled his eyes over the far shadows to catch the parapsychological source of the voice. Roland McGuffey slowly lowered the morning paper.
“Throwing matches on the floor. They don’t like that. Chokes up the public utility.”
Dilip stooped down and retrieved the match from the floor, a utility public, and transparently Britannic, only in that generation after generation, pressing on to the trains, had pounded into it its hereditary dirt: the invisible memorials of endless evacuation. Dilip continued to read and r
e-read and re-read the timetable, a blur now before his embarrassment and slight shock. He looked like a shiny new spoon; his bright liquid eyes sparkled like black treacle and shone peacefully from the clean brown glabrous skin of the Aryan who, more than two thousand years ago, had thundered in hoof beats through the Khyber Pass during the invasions. Groomed perfectly back was his glistening black hair, as immaculate as the almost phosphorescent white suit he sported, pressed to a line and as crisp as a folded piece of origami work, a neatness that reached right to the perfect little half-moons on the nails of his slim brown fingers that now dexterously, if quizzically, tapped the board.
Roland slapped the paper.
“I’ll be stuffed,” he said. “A goddam vicar just come up on the pools, a vicar, a goddam vicar, a vicar. You see what I mean, where it all goes? I’ve been waiting to come up on the pools, what, five years? Six, maybe. Six years beating the streets, who’d believe it? Then this satchel-arsed son-of-a-bitch goes and does it, there’s his picture, tickling up the shillings to make sure they’re not tin. They get their tea and three slices, what, you don’t think so? Get onto yourself, for chrissakes, don’t you believe it. You’ll not find a sneakier lot. Perfect fiends. I see them up at the Duckery, the Stock Exchange, the Duckery. It’s for the money. Churches, see, they come up once in a way, on the tote. See what I mean, just churches? Nuns. They’re over at the betting office, putting around for a horse. What, nuns? They never stop.” There was no pause. “You going to Brighton, then?”
“Indeed, yes.”
“I thought so. I see you have a tennis racquet. Going to play some tennis, huh?” Roland nipped at his crow-coloured nails.
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