Barefoot in the Head

by Brian W Aldiss

  This led him on to discuss artificial manures and fertilisers, and agricultural chemistry, chemistry in general, and the great strides made by Russian industry.

  And here he took more wine and smiled.

  He then showed how well he was informed upon philosophy, perhaps in deference to his host.

  He spoke of melioration and told us all about spiritism, and went pretty thoroughly into what he called the materialisation of hands.

  What else he said we don’t remember, save that once he touched on cosmogony, a subject he had somewhat studied.

  He was the jolliest and certainly the happiest man in the room. And then he took more wine and smiled and said he must be off.

  Poor O had tried to interrupt this monologue but G had looked at him fiercely. Now O hung his head while A heartily shook hands with G and thanked him for a pleasant meal and a very interesting conversation. Glancing at the camera, G laughed slyly. His trap had worked.

  Afterwards, G jumps up and sings his song, and the disciples join in. Gradually, the whole screen is choked with whirling bodies.

  While the film was being pieced together, a French actor called Minstral was engaged to play Charteris. Because France had been neutral in the war, Minstral was one of the few prepsychedelic men left in Brussels. He played tough roles. When not filming, he kept himself apart, ate tinned food sent from Toulouse, meditated in a Sufic way, occasionally visited two young Greek sisters in the suburbs, and looked at volumes of beautiful photographs published by Gallimard.

  Boreas’ script director, Jacques de Grand, made his way out to the motorcamp on the lunatic fringes of the city with a haircut full of gentian hairoil. He wanted to get some background for the messiah’s life, him and his success-drive both.

  When de Grand arrived at the smokescream, the messiah was sitting on an old bedstead, picking his toes; from his two women he had only bad images; they would not yield to his healing power and he was feeling several things at once, that nothing could be done on any level unless women were involved in creative roles, that they were trapped in a history jelly, that he was a discarded I, and that the world was on the whole perched on the back of a radioactive tortoise.

  ‘We’re very fortunate to have you here at the early stages of your career, Mr Master, and witnessing the first miracles. How you like Belgium? Planning to stay long? Planning to resurrect anyone in the near future? My card!’

  The card held a hand in it on a detachable body materialising in rubber smokelp.

  ‘It was the vision I had in Mets. That’s what betrayed me on my adjourney north up the web of photofailures, fleeing that Italian camp.’

  ‘I see.’ Quick application of more refreshing hairoil, head chest mouth. Nom, but the PCA was thick here and all hair growing whispers on it. ‘You say photofailures, I gather from reports you enlarge Ouspavski’s thought?’

  ‘Well like Ouspavski I dig the west got too hairy with everyone and so the Arabian nightmare was just a justice and on the ill-painted poser the near-nordic blonde grew a moustache like a shadow across her force...

  ‘And so how about some more erections in the near future? Please speak clearly into the visiting card.’

  The whole mesozoic mess-up of the best west pretensions going themselves with the buns turning to gutter and silence is golden but a Diners Club card gets you anywhere. It was the whole city of a ruined version I had, he told de Grand. ‘Now Europe’s bracken up from a basic oil-need-greed and beggars can ride so even Gelina and Marta and me can’t get along in a harness and all clapped out of the big ambushes of Westciv, eh?’

  ‘I see. You think the bill’s at last been paid?’

  ‘Yes, the treadbill, trodden back to low point X and the city open to the noman. My friend, that was a short round we trod, less than two hundred degenerations the flintnapping cavesleepers first opened stareyes and we break down again with twentieth sensory perception of the circuit...

  ‘I see. More hairoil quick, and you think we’re back where we squirted?’

  ‘...which bust be the time for real awakening from machinality and jump off the treads into a new race that I will lead.’ And the new animals falling out of new trees on the old beaches of stone.

  ‘Yes, I see, Master. So you have no definite pains to insurrect anyone in the near future?’

  ‘Angelina sees if she’s not by now hyacinth-hipped the waters of sickness wrys and where we might have been balsam only balsa on the fiord but me urgenus impatiens spends on merely the unhealing womenwound that helotrope witch tows me with its bloodstone balmy fragrance unaveiling nector’s womenwound me my ackilleaseheal.’

  ‘You motion the waters of sickness, so you don’t entirely rile out the passibility of insufflation in the near-flowering fuchsia?’

  Taking back the visiting cod he filed his nail-dropping in a filing gabinetto.

  ‘I am a fugitive from that perfumarole yet all beneath our feet the quakeline blows and vulcanows which runway lies firm aground for all this ilyushine is a flight merely from other ilyushins and not from anything called real.’ The broken wind of his sail lay under the tall shrouds of offices.

  ‘I see. I see what you’re goating at. Like there’s been a disulcation. Hair owl? No? Tell me couldn’t you practise on a dead child if we brought you one?’

  Charteris coughed his eyeblink a world gone then back in its imposture. Lies he could take, not disfigurements.

  ‘Perfect sample of what I’m trying to gut over with the prolapse of old stricture of christchen moralcold all pisserbill it is are phornographable smirch as childermastication to be hung by the necrophage until strange phagocyte of the crowd.’

  ‘So you deignt insufect anyone in the puncture?’

  ‘Lonly Angina and the flowerhip-syrup girls.’

  He coughed. When world came back steadied, in the big carred-up arena, tyres were still burning. The smoke crawled and capered a black nearest brown; up the side of a ruinous housewall where wallpaper hung montaged, its shadow grew like wisteria in the palid sun. Over one side, some disciples in gaudy hats and ruby beards were making a sing-in on the torture song. Another, a guy stoked an old auto with its upholstery in flames by flinging on petrol arcing from a can. The flames flowered at him and he rolled over yelling. Several people looked across him and the unbelievable patterning of it all, life’s gaudy grey riches richer richness. The world of motion-in-stillness. All rested here today from the speed death but a migratory word and they would be away again, switched on to the signal the Master would unzip from his banana-brain. Right now, even as he proclaimed, all possibilities were open to them and under the crawling black tyresmog lay no menace that did not also swerve for poetry, so the tribe let all burn.

  A strip of the motorway south of Brussels to Namur and Luxembourg had been closed to traffic. Boreas’ men worked and sweated, hundreds of them, many skilled in electronics, to fake up the big smash-in.

  Some got through their work by being cowboys. Yipping and yelping, they thundered down upon the frightened cars, which stampeded like mad steers along the course, tossing their horns and snorting and backfiring in the canyon of their cavalcade. Branding irons transfixed hot red figures.

  Other men from Battersea treated the steeds as underwater wrecks. In mask and flippers, down they sank through the turbid air, securing limpet cameras to cabins and bows and battered sterns which would record the moment of the mighty metal storm, rigging their mikes unfathomably, helterscootering.

  Other men with mottled cheeks worked as if they were charge nurses in an old people’s home. Their patients were as smooth as they were stiff of limb, dummies with nude sexless faces, dummies without female fractures or male mizzenmasts, non-naval dummies, dummies lacking meatmuscle or temperature who pretended to be men, dummies with plaster hair and amenorrhoea who pretended to be women, dwarf dummies with a semblance to children, all staring ahead with blue eyes impevious, upholders all of the couth past wesciv world that could afford to buy its saudistruction, a
ll terribly brave before their oncoming death, all as unspeaking O as G desired.

  Rudely, the charge nurses pressed their patients into place, the backseat-drivers and the frontseat-sitters, twisted their heads to look ahead, to stare sideways out of the windows, to enjoy their speed deathride, to be mute and unhairy and non-drivnik.

  It was an all-day labour, and to wire the cars. The crews revelled that night in Namur, shacking in an old hotel or sleeping in a big marquee tent pitched on the banks of the Meuse, with a beat trobbing like a temple. Boreas went belting back to Brussels and with a shivering sight stripped virgin bare, gripped tight the snorkel in his crowned teeth and sank beneath the feathery roots of his water hyacinths. The plants were spreading like a nylon nile, growing in the steamy atmosphere over the floor and up the black-tiled walls.

  ‘Escrape from these lootless psychedelics showing their barbed crutches round the eyes,’ he gruntled wallowing, ‘as if I don’t own all my own univorce!’

  ‘Don’t you believe in Charteris as new Christ, darling?’ the nymph asked, floating pasturised cowslips on the sumper surface. She was delicious to his sight and taste, good Flemish stock.

  ‘I believe in my film,’ he said and grasping her alligator-like in his jaws he looted her down into her depths.

  Next day refreshed and bellyrolled, Boreas drove down towards the scene of the faked authentic speed death with his script director de Grand who gave golden speech about the Master between cranial embrocations.

  ‘Okay, so he was kinky about children and gone on flowers and didn’t seem to have plans about bringing anyone back from the deadly nightshade. Similar to thousand of people I know or don’t know as the case. Did you get a glimpse of his life story?’

  ‘You know those ruins out by Sacré Coeur, boss? They had a five gallow saturation bomb on them when the Arab air strike came down! You can’t hardly see out there. I was switched on myself and it seemed to me his logic was all logogriph and missing every fourth syllable of recorded time. That fabled bird, the logogrip, took wing, was really hippocrene in all his gutterance, where I way-did but could never plum.’

  ‘Cut out that jar-jargon, de Grand! A hell of a help you are! What about his bird?’ Chin belly and balls are jetting promontories.

  ‘I tell you the logogriph, the new pterospondee, roasts on his burning shoulder!’

  ‘His bird, his judy! Did you get to speak to her?’

  ‘He mentioned a part of her with some circunilocation.’

  ‘Godverdomme! Get her and bring her to me in my pallase tonight. Ask her to dinner! She’ll give me the low-down of this Master Man! Have you sot that straight in your adderplate?’

  ‘Is registered.’ And bennies quickly swigged down in oil.

  ‘Okay. And get some more snow delivered to Cass — some of the motorcaders need a harder ticket in the arterial lane. Comprenez?’

  They march from each other together in the web.

  His unit was already setting up the crash-in. Technicians swarmed about the location with cowherd and keelhaul cries. By somebody’s noon, the cars were all linked umbiliously with cables to the power control and the dummies sitting tight. They ran through the whole operation over and over, checking and rechecking acidulously to see if in their hippie state they had overlooked a technicolor tune error. The four-lane motorway was transfilmed into a great racetrick where the outgoing species could stunt-in for its one and only one-way parade, a great tracerack in tombtime where sterile generations would last for many milliseconds and great progress appear to be made as at ever-accelerating speed they hurtled on, further from shiftless and forgotten origins the unknown target. This species on the vergin of extinction bore its role with detachment, waxed unsentimentality, was collected, chaste, impeccable, punctual, stiff upper lip, unwinking gaze. Remembered its offices and bungalows of iron sunset. Its lean servants, ragged even, not so; excitement raced among them; they all believed in this authentic moment of film-life, cared not for a fake-up, slaved for Boreas’ belief; harboured their dimensions.

  And to Boreas when all was ready came his chief prop man, Ranceville, with shoulder-gestures and slime in his mouth’s corners.

  ‘We can’t just let them gadarine like this! It’s sadism! They are as human as you or me, in our different way. Couldn’t there be thought inside those china skulls — china thought? China feelings? China love and sincerity!’

  ‘Out my way, Ranceville!’

  ‘It isn’t right! Spare them, Nicholas, spare them! They got china hearts like you and me! Death will only make them reeler! Real china death-in!’

  ‘Miljardenondedjuu! We want them to look real, be real. What’s real for if you can’t use it, I ask? Now, out my way!’

  ‘What have they ever done to you?’ The mouth all slaving lotion. ‘What have they ever done?’

  Boreas gestured, brushing away a fly or snail from his barricaves.

  ‘I’ll tell you something deep deep down, Ranceville...I’ve always hated dummies ever since china shop-rows of them stared in contempt at me as a poor small boy in the ruptured alleys off Place Roup. That’s how I began you know! Me a dirty slum boy, son of a Flemish peasant! Weren’t they the privileged, I thought, all beautifully dresden every day by lackeys, growing no baggy genitals, working or spinning clean out the question, glazed with superiority behind glass, made in god’s image more than we? Dimmies I called them to belittle them, dimmies, prissy inhibitionists! Now these shop-haunting horrors shall die for the benefit of mankind.’

  ‘Your box-official verdict, so!’ Gesture of a gaudy cross. ‘Okay, Nicholas, then I ask to ride with them, to belt in boldly in the red Banshee beside these innocent chinahands. They’re sinless, guiltless, cool — I’ll bleed to death with them, that’s all I ask!’

  Open mouths gathered all round turned their stained suspicious teeth to ogle gleaning Boreas, who waited only the splittest second before he bayed from his mountain top.

  ‘Get looted, Ranceville! You’re hipped! You think you can’t die — you’re like a drunkard sleeping in the ditch, drowning for ever because he didn’t realise there was a stream running over his pillow!’

  ‘So what, if the drinking water has drunks in it, okay, that proves its proof. How can I die the death if those dimmies are not alive?’

  ‘You’ll see how real a phoney death is!’

  Now on the waiting road was silence while they chewed on it. Like workers who joined a continent’s coasts by forging a new railway, the unit stood frozen by their finished work, awaiting perhaps a cascade of photographs to commemorate their achievement of new possibilities: while behind them fashionably the unlined pink faces ignored them from the cars. The mouths came forward now, to see what Boreas would say, to hear out the logic, to try once again to puzzle out how death differed from sleep and sleep from waking, or how the spring sunlight felt when you weren’t there to dig it and flesh and china all one to me.

  Boreas again was sweating on the heliport, in his blood the hard ticket of harm as he filmed the climax of The Unaimed Deadman, had the negro, Cassius Clay Robertson, fight to start up the engine of his little glass-windowed invalid carriage. And then the longshot of the white man in his suitable garb running impossibly fast with big gloved hands from behind the far deserted sheds, the black sheds with tarred asphalt sides, running over for the kill with mirth on his mouth. Now he could have real death again, had it offered, because the occasional man was hepped enough on art to die for it.

  ‘Okay, Ranceville, as long as you see this is the big oneway ride, we’ll draw up a waiver contract.’

  Ranceville drew himself up thin. ‘I shan’t waver! As the Master says, we have abolished the one-ways. I believe in all alternatives. If you massacre innocents, you massacre me! Long live Charteris!’

  The watching mouths drew apart from him. One pair of lips patted him on the shoulder and then stared at the hand. Some sighed, some whispered. Boreas stood alone, bronze of his bare head shining. The invalid car had fired at la
st and was slowly lurching on the move. The white man with the terrible anger had reached it and was hammering on the glass, rocking it with his blows. They’d had a hovercamera in the cab with Robertson then, with another leeched outside the misting glass, and used for the final print shots from these two cameras alternately, giving a rocking rhythm, bursting in and out of Robertson’s terror-trance.

  ‘Get yourself in focus of the cameras!’ Boreas called huskily.

  With a sign to show he had heard, Ranceville climbed into the old Banshee, a scrapped blue model they found in a yard by the Gare du Nord and had hurriedly repainted. Ranceville had red on clothes and hands as he squeezed in with the dummies.

  Their heads nodded graciously like British royalty in an arctic wind.

  ‘Okay, then we’re ready to go!’ Boreas said. ‘Stations, everyone!’

  He watched all his mouths like a hawk, the only one sane, whistling under his breath the theme from The Unaimed Deadman. Things would fall apart this time from the dead centre.

  Marta was sprawling on the bed practically in tears and said, ‘You don’t understand, Angelina, I’d no wish to pot your joint out, but my loaf was nothing, not the leanest slice, and I was just a baby doldrums until the Father came along and woke all my other Is and freeked me from my awful husband and my awful prixon home and all the non-loory things I try now to put outside the windrums.’

  Angelina sat on the side of the bed without touching Marta. Her head hung down. Beyond, Charteris was holding a starve-in.

  ‘Fine, I sympathise with you when you stop whining. We’ve all had subsistence-living lives in rich places. But the way things are, he belongs to me you’ve got to get yourself another mankind. There’ll be a group-grope tonight — any grotesque grot they grapple — now that’s for you instead of all this ruin-haunting here!’

  ‘And supposing I pick on your Ruby you so despise! My life’s a ruin and the light dwindles on the loving couple. The Master said to me Arise — ’