It was odd, he reflected, that it should be him hanging here. He supposed that it was the event he had originally come to witness. There was little doubt, really. Everything had gone perfectly.
The pain in his left hand increased.
He glanced down at the Roman guards who were playing dice at the foot of his cross. They seemed absorbed in their game. He could not see the markings of the dice from this distance.
He sighed. The movement of his chest seemed to throw extra strain on his hands. The pain was quite bad now. He winced and tried somehow to ease himself back against the wood.
The pain began to spread through his body. He gritted his teeth. It was dreadful. He gasped and shouted. He writhed.
There was no longer any light in the sky. Heavy clouds obscured stars and moon.
From below came whispered voices.
“Let me down,” he called. “Oh, please let me down!”
The pain filled him. He slumped forward, but nobody released him.
A little while later he raised his head. The movement caused a return of the agony and again he began to writhe on the cross.
“Let me down. Please. Please stop it!”
Every part of his flesh, every muscle and tendon and bone of him, was filled with an almost impossible degree of pain.
He knew he would not survive until the next day as he had thought he might. He had not realised the extent of his pain.
And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
(Mark 15: 34)
Glogauer coughed. It was a dry, barely heard sound. The soldiers below the cross heard it because the night was now so quiet.
“It’s funny,” one said. “Yesterday they were worshipping him. Today they seemed to want us to kill him—even the ones who were closest to him.”
“I’ll be glad when we get out of this country,” said another.
He heard Monica’s voice again. “It’s weakness and fear, Karl, that’s driven you to this. Martyrdom is a conceit. Can’t you see that?”
Weakness and fear.
He coughed once more and the pain returned, but it was duller now.
Just before he died he began to talk again, muttering the words until his breath was gone. “It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie.”
Later, after his body was stolen by the servants of some doctors who believed it to have special properties, there were rumours that he had not died. But the corpse was already rotting in the doctors’ dissecting rooms and would soon be destroyed.
A Winter Admiral (1994)
“A Winter Admiral” first appeared in the Daily Telegraph in March 1994.
A wholly non-fantastical story, it introduces another of the many and disparate members of the Family von Bek, one Marjorie Begg.
After lunch she woke up, thinking the rustling from the pantry must be a foraging mouse brought out of hibernation by the unusual warmth. She smiled. She never minded a mouse or two for company and she had secured anything she would not want them to touch.
No, she really didn’t mind the mice at all. Their forebears had been in these parts longer than hers and had quite as much right to the territory. More of them, after all, had bled and died for home and hearth. They had earned their tranquillity. Her London cats were perfectly happy to enjoy a life of peaceful co-existence.
“We’re a family.” She yawned and stretched. “We probably smell pretty much the same by now.” She took up the brass poker and opened the fire door of the stove. “One big happy family, us and the mice and the spiders.”
After a few moments the noise from the pantry stopped. She was surprised it did not resume. She poked down the burning logs, added two more from her little pile, closed the door and adjusted the vents. That would keep in nicely.
As she leaned back in her chair she heard the sound again. She got up slowly to lift the latch and peer in. Through the outside pantry window, sunlight laced the bars of dust and brightened her shelves. She looked on the floor for droppings. Amongst her cat-litter bags, her indoor gardening tools, her electrical bits and pieces, there was nothing eaten and no sign of a mouse.
Today it was even warm in the pantry. She checked a couple of jars of pickles. It didn’t do for them to heat up. They seemed all right. This particular pantry had mostly canned things. She only ever needed to shop once a week.
She closed the door again. She was vaguely ill at ease. She hated anything odd going on in her house. Sometimes she lost perspective. The best way to get rid of the feeling was to take a walk. Since the sun was so bright today, she would put on her coat and stroll up the lane for a bit.
It was one of those pleasant February days which deceives you into believing spring has arrived. A cruel promise, really, she thought. This weather would be gone soon enough. Make the best of it, she said to herself. She would leave the radio playing, put a light on in case it grew dark before she was back, and promise herself The Charlie Chester Show, a cup of tea and a scone when she got home. She lifted the heavy iron kettle, another part of her inheritance, and put it on the hob. She set her big, brown teapot on the brass trivet.
The scent of lavender struck her as she opened her coat cupboard. She had just re-lined the shelves and drawers. Lavender reminded her of her first childhood home.
“We’re a long way from Mitcham now,” she told the cats as she took her tweed overcoat off the hanger. Her Aunt Becky had lived here until her last months in the nursing home. Becky had inherited Crow Cottage from the famous Great Aunt Begg. As far as Marjorie Begg could tell, the place had been inhabited by generations of retired single ladies, almost in trust, for centuries.
Mrs. Begg would leave Crow Cottage to her own niece, Clare, who looked after Jessie, her half-sister. A chronic invalid, Jessie must soon die, she was so full of rancour.
A story in a Cotswold book said this had once been known as Crone’s Cottage. She was amused by the idea of ending her days as the local crone. She would have to learn to cackle. The crone was a recognised figure in any English rural community, after all. She wondered if it were merely coincidence that made Rab, the village idiot, her handyman. He worshipped her. She would do anything for him. He was like a bewildered child since his wife had thrown him out: she could make more in benefits than he made in wages. He had seemed reconciled to the injustice: “I was never much of an earner.” That apologetic grin was his response to most disappointment. It probably hadn’t been fitting for a village idiot to be married, any more than a crone. Yet who had washed and embroidered the idiot’s smocks in the old days?
She had been told Rab had lost his digs and was living wild in Wilson’s abandoned farm buildings on the other side of the wood.
Before she opened her front door she thought she heard the rustling again. The sound was familiar, but not mice. Some folded cellophane unravelling as the cupboard warmed up? The cottage had never been cosier.
She closed the door behind her, walking up the stone path under her brown tangle of honeysuckle and through the gate to the rough farm lane. Between the tall, woven hedges she kept out of the shade as much as she could. She relished the air, the winter scents, the busy finches, sparrows, tits and yellow-hammers. A chattering robin objected to her passing and a couple of wrens fussed at her. She clicked her tongue, imitating their angry little voices. The broad meadows lay across the brow of the hills like shawls, their dark-brown furrows laced with melting frost, bright as crystal. Birds flocked everywhere, to celebrate this unexpected ease in the winter’s grey.
Her favourites were the crows and magpies. Such old, alien birds. So wise. Closer to the dinosaurs and inheriting an unfathomable memory. Was that why people took against them? She had learned early that intelligence was no better admired in a bird than in a woman. The thought of her father made her shudder, even out here on this wide, unthreatening Cotswold hillside, and she felt suddenly lost, helpless, the cottage no lo
nger her home. Even the steeple on the village church, rising beyond the elms, seemed completely inaccessible. She hated the fear more than she hated the man who had infected her with it—as thoroughly as if he had infected her with a disease. She blamed herself. What good was hatred? He had died wretchedly, of exposure, in Hammersmith, between his pub and his flat, a few hundred yards away.
Crow Cottage, with its slender evergreens and lattice of willow boughs, was as safe and welcoming as always when she turned back into her lane. As the sun fell it was growing colder, but she paused for a moment. The cottage, with its thatch and its chimney, its walls and its hedges, was a picture. She loved it. It welcomed her, even now, with so little colour in the garden.
She returned slowly, enjoying the day, and stepped back over her hearth, into her dream of security, her stove and her cats and her rattling kettle. She was in good time for Sing Something Simple and would be eating her scones by the time Charlie Chester came on. She had never felt the need for a television here, though she had been a slave to it in Streatham. Jack had liked his sport.
He had been doing his pools when he died.
When she came back to the flat that night, Jack was in the hall, stretched out with his head on his arm. She knew he was dead, but she gave him what she hoped was the kiss of life, repeatedly blowing her warm breath through his cold lips until she got up to phone for the ambulance. She kept kissing him, kept pouring her breath into him, but was weeping almost uncontrollably when they arrived.
He wouldn’t have known anything, love, they consoled her.
No consolation at all to Jack! He had hated not knowing things. She had never anticipated the anguish that came with the loss of him, which had lasted until she moved to Crow Cottage. She had written to Clare. By some miracle, the cottage had cured her of her painful grief and brought unexpected reconciliation.
It was almost dark.
Against the sprawling black branches of the old elms, the starlings curled in ranks towards the horizon, while out of sight in the tall wood the crows began to call, bird to bird, family to family. The setting sun had given the few clouds a powdering of terracotta and the air was suddenly a Mediterranean blue behind them. Everything was so vivid and hurrying so fast, as if to greet the end of the world.
She went to draw the back curtains and saw the sunset over the flooded fields fifteen miles away, spreading its bloody light into the water. She almost gasped at the sudden beauty of it.
Then she heard the rustling again. Before the light failed altogether, she was determined to discover the cause. It would be awful to start getting fancies after dark.
As she unlatched the pantry door something rose from the floor and settled against the window. She shivered, but did not retreat.
She looked carefully. Then, to her surprise: “Oh, it’s a butterfly!”
The butterfly began to beat again upon the window. She reached to cup it in her hands, to calm it. “Poor thing.”
It was a newborn Red Admiral, its orange, red and black markings vibrant as summer. “Poor thing.” It had no others of its kind.
For a few seconds the butterfly continued to flutter, and then was still. She widened her hands to look in. She watched its perfect, questing antennae, its extraordinary legs, she could almost smell it. A small miracle, she thought, to make a glorious day complete.
An unexpected sadness filled her as she stared at the butterfly. She carried it to the door, pushed the latch with her cupped hands, and walked into the twilight. When she reached the gate she opened her hands again, gently, to relish the vivacious delicacy of the creature. Mrs. Begg sighed, and with a sudden, graceful movement lifted her open palms to let the Admiral taste the air.
In two or three wingbeats the butterfly was up, a spot of busy, brilliant colour streaming towards the east and the cold horizon.
As it gained height, it veered, its wings courageous against the freshening wind.
Shielding her eyes, Mrs. Begg watched the Admiral turn and fly over the thatch, to be absorbed in the setting sun.
It was far too cold now to be standing there. She went inside and shut the door. The cats still slept in front of the stove. With the pot holder she picked up the kettle, pouring lively water over the tea. Then she went to close her pantry door.
“I really couldn’t bear it,” she said. “I couldn’t bear to watch it die.”
London Bone (1997)
Another, much more up-to-date story from New Worlds now, appearing in the most recent issue, No. 222 (White Wolf), edited by David Garnett in 1997.
Earlier in this collection, in “Lunching with the Antichrist,” much was made of the wrongdoings of one Barbican Begg. There were plans for a whole novel to be named after him, but that project transformed itself throughout the ’90s, eventually appearing in 2000 as King of the City, a fast-and-furious, at times almost stream-of-consciousness first-person-narrative rail against the preceding two decades’ Thatcherite/Conservative-led excesses and abuses of power.
“London Bone” was in many ways a precursor to King of the City, sharing much of that book’s rapid-fire prose style.
For Ronnie Scott
1
My name is Raymond Gold and I’m a well-known dealer. I was born too many years ago in Upper Street, Islington. Everybody reckons me in the London markets and I have a good reputation in Manchester and the provinces. I have bought and sold, been the middleman, an agent, an art representative, a professional mentor, a tour guide, a spiritual bridge-builder. These days I call myself a cultural speculator.
But, you won’t like it, the more familiar word for my profession, as I practised it until recently, is scalper. This kind of language is just another way of isolating the small businessman and making what he does seem sleazy while the stockbroker dealing in millions is supposed to be legitimate. But I don’t need to convince anyone today that there’s no sodding justice.
“Scalping” is risky. What you do is invest in tickets on spec and hope to make a timely sale when the market for them hits zenith. Any kind of ticket, really, but mostly shows. I’ve never seen anything offensive about getting the maximum possible profit out of an American matron with more money than sense who’s anxious to report home with the right items ticked off the been-to list. We’ve all seen them rushing about in their overpriced limos and mini-buses, pretending to be individuals: Thursday: Changing-of-the-Guard, Harrods, Planet Hollywood, Royal Academy, Tea-at-the-Ritz, Cats. It’s a sort of tribal dance they are compelled to perform. If they don’t perform it, they feel inadequate. Saturday: Tower of London, Bucket of Blood, Jack-the-Ripper talk, Sherlock Holmes Pub, Sherlock Holmes tour, Madame Tussauds, Covent Garden Cream Tea, Dogs. These are people so traumatised by contact with strangers that their only security lies in these rituals, these well-blazed trails and familiar chants. It’s my job to smooth their paths, to make them exclaim how pretty and wonderful and elegant and magical it all is. The street people aren’t a problem. They’re just so many charming Dick Van Dykes.
Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They’ve become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can’t survive without it. It’s your duty to help them get their regular fixes while they travel. And when they make it back after three weeks on alien shores, their friends, of course, are always glad of some foreign bullshit for a change.
Even if you sell a show ticket to a real enthusiast, who has already been forty-nine times and is so familiar to the cast they see him in the street and think he’s a relative, who are you hurting? Andros Loud Website, Lady Hatchet’s loyal laureate, who achieved rank and wealth by celebrating the lighter side of the moral vacuum? He would surely applaud my enterprise in the buccaneering spirit of the free market. Venture capitalism at its bravest. Well, he’d applaud me if he had time these days from his railings against fate, his horrible understanding of the true nature of his coming obscurity. But that’s partly what my story’s about.
I have to say
in my own favour that I’m not merely a speculator or, if you like, exploiter. I’m also a patron. For many years, not just recently, a niagara of dosh has flowed out of my pocket and into the real arts faster than a cat up a Frenchman. Whole orchestras and famous soloists have been brought to the Wigmore Hall on the money they get from me. But I couldn’t have afforded this if it wasn’t for the definitely iffy Miss Saigon (a triumph of well-oiled machinery over dodgy morality) or the unbelievably decrepit Good Rockin’ Tonite (in which the living dead jive in the aisles), nor, of course, that first great theatrical triumph of the new millennium, Schindler: The Musical. Make ’em weep, Uncle Walt!
So who is helping most to support the arts? You, me, the lottery?
I had another reputation, of course, which some saw as a second profession. I was one of the last great London characters. I was always on late-night telly, lit from below, and Iain Sinclair couldn’t write a paragraph without dropping my name at least once. I’m a quintessential Londoner, I am. I’m a Cockney gentleman.
I read Israel Zangwill and Gerald Kersh and Alexander Baron. I can tell you the best books of Pett Ridge and Arthur Morrison. I know Pratface Charlie, Driff and Martin Stone, Bernie Michaud and the even more legendary Gerry and Pat Goldstein. They’re all historians, archaeologists, revenants. There isn’t another culture-dealer in London, oldster or child, who doesn’t at some time come to me for an opinion. Even now, when I’m as popular as a pig at a Putney wedding and people hold their noses and dive into traffic rather than have to say hello to me, they still need me for that.
I’ve known all the famous Londoners or known someone else who did. I can tell stories of long-dead gangsters who made the Krays seem like Amnesty International. Bare-knuckle boxing. Fighting the Fascists in the East End. Gun-battles with the police all over Stepney in the 1900s. The terrifying girl gangsters of Whitechapel. Barricading the Old Bill in his own barracks down in Notting Dale.
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 16