Funderland

by Nigel Jarrett

  I couldn’t help making the connection between those odd men at the frontiers of research, tracing a phantom immobiliser as it spread cell by cell through the body then just as strangely reversing itself like the receding ice of spring, with those nights when your hands quietly palmed away my delirium and pacified for a while the rebellion in my glands, leaving me with memories of what seemed like a divine visitation. Your friend was right: I have contracted Exupéry’s Syndrome. It’s like Guillan-Barre but more emotional than physical. ‘Contracted’ – it sounds like a pact. Even as you fondled me I was regressing. In my body, the masculine side is temporarily in decline, leaving the feminine one in the ascendant for a while at least. It’s a rare condition. I’m almost a girl. Did you notice? Could you feel anything? Was I different? I voyage temporarily in a woman’s province. I ought to feel privileged. Dr Ferbusch would be delighted, at the proper time, to cut me up! Anyway, how are you enjoying Australia? Is it far enough away from both the fickle male (Nick) and the reluctant one (me)?

  I’m writing this at night. It is very late. Outside the window, London glows and wails. They asked me if I’d suffered any shock. (Apparently, trauma can set Exupéry’s in motion: I think of it as ‘Exuberance’, something deserved after misery, after a fright to the system.) I didn’t tell them exactly what I do as a Lab Technician Grade 2, but I’m fascinated more than horrified by the idea that Doctor Ferbusch’s first, ventral puncture in my presence may have started an endocrine revolt inside me. I remember it well, though some of the intervening donors between that and tomorrow’s coup de théatre no longer register. It was a Mr Purser, an elderly cove from St Leonard’s. (Most of them have had a good slog: you don’t think about offering your body for research until intimations of mortality grow benign.) I recall that his face wore the twitch of a grin. Doctor Ferbusch said, ‘Look at this, Morley. Bet he’s never bought a round in his life’, Doctor Ferbusch’s idea of stinginess being signalled by a beam of self-satisfaction. Purser was in good working order, so most of him had to come out, the weighty stuff as well as the hidden pearls.

  You don’t know this, but not long ago I started holding the hand of the corpse. I felt like a prodigal offering belated contrition to a parent whose capacity for forgiveness had expired. I looked down on humanity and wondered at the body’s ability to astound with the intricacy of its once-palpitating bits and pieces. I’m sure Doctor Ferbsuch thinks this way; it’s just that, until now, he has not brought himself to acknowledge what the subjects set before him tell us so plainly. (Nick likened Doctor Ferbusch at work to a diner nitpicking at a hearty meal.) Tomorrow, the occasion just might get the better of him and he will begin, ever so cautiously, to treat me as an equal.

  You should have seen the PM’s obituaries. Two whole pages in The Times, like an advert for one of those boring Pacific island dictatorships, with the smiling portrait we have all confronted so often. Such a busy committed individual, and so unavailing in my case. Doctor Ferbusch has always been a big fan and considers it an honour to be expediting the final wish, buried in the obit’s penultimate paragraph to clinch the case, if argument were needed, for a sweeping public-spiritedness. Doctor Ferbusch wasn’t obliged to identify our special guest until the actual unveiling. As it was, he left it until the last minute, so that I arrived home tonight in a daze and feeling not a tad privileged. Thus, I have not seen the PM prostrate and ivory-white, but I know exactly where he is, at what temperature he lies and which light washes the folds of his shroud with colour as the generator whirrs mysteriously.

  Dear Charley, we are all on the move in one way or another. Nick has grown quite tubby on examination success in Pathology and frolics with a harem of ‘girls’. Did you know that a median ventral incision from Adam’s apple to belly-button leaves behind the faintest streak of blood, or a black mark that used to be blood? It’s like a jet stream except that the deceased will no longer make the journey it signifies; unlike the ones we can see being made in the skylight, the vapour trails leading to safer havens far away.

  Ah well, the shadows of the living play fitfully on the brows of the dead. For a while, anyway.

  Yours wherever and whenever, and with some trepidation,

  Peter

  Uncle Kaiser

  Arundel Square, Islington

  Ever since that skinhead made my eyes water with his flamethrower breath, I’d wanted to find out about Johnny Harn. This was because I am a clever dick. Or so my Uncle Kaiser told everyone. He was pretty sharp, too. Other members of the family, huddling in their darkened havens, pleaded with us to make simpler connections. Even the sight of a white man running along the pavement scares them.

  I could say that I had been minding my own business if my business did not offer up a scent to the hunters with the lolling tongues. Two of them fell out of a car last week and strode towards me in that earnest gait of theirs. Then one grabbed me, scrunched his face close to mine and said: ‘Fuck off to the fucking jungle fucking Paki shit-shoveller!’

  It’s the physique of these men which impresses me. That, and the ferocity of what motivates them. They sometimes remind me of goblins on white chargers. And they are, of course, the heirs of Johnny Harn, in the 1930s an Oswald Mosley Blackshirt, though they’d probably have knocked him off the pavement if he’d got in their way. Harn was in his eighties. He was old and grey, as they say, but still walked the streets, as if still looking for trouble, for undying grief. Oh that mischief would die with the mischief-makers! Uncle Kaiser was obsessed by him, though they’d never met. At the end, I think my uncle wanted to meet him, shake his hand, erase the past and dissolve into the future. But it’s not all over. He has spawned them and my kind has spawned me and we eye each other across the road, a no-man’s-land.

  Redman’s Road, Stepney

  Uncle Kaiser was sizing me up in the bedroom of his council flat near Stepney Green. He’d called me over for something and told me to sit in the window, just behind the curtain. It was the usual Saturday morning bustle in the street below. He told me to keep looking. But I could sense him watching me. Watching me looking for Johnny Harn.

  ‘Give him five minutes,’ he said. ‘Harn always shows.’

  Five minutes of bronchial music behind me. Then a figure appears, someone I’d never seen before but strangely distinctive, a presence, shuffling almost, and carrying a Tesco’s bag.

  ‘This him?’

  ‘Describe what you see.’

  ‘Smartish old man, white hair with Foreign Legion cut, and…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sort of bent up.’

  ‘Curvature of the spine. Old age ramming home its message.’

  The Juniper Hotel, Bombay

  It was always the British who were so exasperated. Heirs to a fierce decorum, they hopped off the planes and marched towards Uncle Kaiser at Reception. He would smile at the race between a guest and an advanced booking. The guest invariably won.

  ‘But we sent a telegram four days ago.’

  ‘No telegram, sir.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Telegram delayed, perhaps?’

  ‘Delayed? Now look here, that’s a bloody contradiction in terms. Where’s the manager?’

  Uncle Kaiser aspired to management. He had two white shirts. Each night he dabbed the collars with tennis-shoe cream.

  ‘Manager at big meeting in Khalnapoor, sir.’

  I imagined Uncle Kaiser standing to attention amid the smell of disinfectant and spices, obedient to an imported habit of unflappability. This was not necessary with the journalists and the voyageurs sauvages. He once heard them talking about the emptying of bowels on the Khalnapoor road. It appeared that a family of six were crouched together beside the railway, bobbing up and down in unison. ‘India is a big country,’ he told them, to justify his contempt for latrines. ‘India can take it.’

  Redman’s Road, Stepney

  Uncle Kaiser was a life member of the cut-and-pummelled brigade. He once showed me a story he had writt
en for The Golden Bridge, a publication in Urdu. In the story, Bhata, a London bus conductor (you see how old this is), spots a white bullock in Marylebone Road and dashes out to control the traffic. A common theme, Uncle Kaiser said, the urge to do one’s best for a proud dislocation.

  Bhata, it seemed, led the bullock away through staring crowds, unaware of how stupid he looked.

  ‘You see,’ said Uncle Kaiser. ‘Inside, this Bhata is clean, so nothing can harm him. This filth, this oppression, is maya, illusion.’

  ‘Harn’s strictly second division,’ I suggested. ‘No hope of sainthood, surely.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. They need people like Harn to change the tune, modulate it, supply new hateful choruses. Harn was a Mosley lieutenant, a boot boy. But he’s survived. So they look up to him, the younger ones.’

  The Juniper Hotel, Bombay

  E.M. Forster was much discussed at reception, particularly among the British journalists, of whom Mary Hunter was one.

  ‘Anyone who marries an Indian marries half the country,’ Uncle Kaiser told them. ‘That Miss Quested – she knew what was what but chickened out. Now Mrs Moore was something else. She could have handled the scale of things earlier in life.’

  Uncle Kaiser was sure Mary Hunter understood. He learned from her that Britain was small, its clans circumscribed. In order to impress her, he went for the assistant manager’s job at the Lake Prospect. Sometimes they walked hand in hand to watch the waters lapping India.

  Chowpatti Beach, Bombay

  Mary Hunter had no problems of adjustment in Uncle Kaiser’s country. She did not even experience that symmetrical swing of the emotions suffered by expatriates at The Juniper, which begins with wonder, progresses to doubt and terminates in revulsion. Uncle Kaiser was the epitome of optimism. He would stand at the water’s edge and quote some obscure Himalayan hermit-philosopher on patent evidence of the eternal. The sea affirmed it. Yet he and Mary Hunter had both seen through the myth of spirituality in that land. Spirit of place, spirit of the wild, spirit of irrationality. Uncle Kaiser’s dismay lay in the contemplation of the ruins of fantasy. ‘In a country of such abundance, it is easy to do little,’ he would say. ‘So the great become inherently good. Our sin is that we know this but still do nothing.’

  Redman’s Road, Stepney

  Uncle Kaiser was keen on history in which he had been involved. When he told me this I immediately thought of the Independence movement, but he did not consider that being part of those waves of dissent in the dust counted, at least not in a personal way.

  ‘I was thinking more of one’s role as direct victim,’ he explained. ‘When we came over, Mosley’s legatees had lost interest in the Jews. I always pictured them sneering at usury then looking over their shoulders at this commotion in the docks – once, then twice for a long stare, open-mouthed, at another shock to their system. The Blacks. People like Harn were delegated to provide the amended rationale for hatred. But Harn has always been anti-Semitic. You sometimes see letters from him in the Courier, going on about Central European businessmen who change their names to dignify the making of fortunes. He means the Jews, you see. Englishmen have forgotten this. They’ve also forgotten that names no longer need to be changed.’

  Uncle Kaiser loved to prove that exceptional acts were nothing of the sort. Swamped by the clutter of his room, he looked bohemian. I suppose he was a sort of artist. He’d written ‘filler pars’ for the Indian newspapers.

  Lake Prospect Hotel, Bombay

  Uncle Kaiser now had his own office. It was not far from a new Reception but it had a window with a view of the Raj University. In that room he discovered solitude, or the means of its refinement, the redeeming pleasure of exclusion. Mr Singh, the manager, was not only forbidden by the caste system to share a table with him but, like all members of a privileged group, went out of his way to maintain the divide, letting go only when Mary Hunter came visiting.

  ‘I hear the membership rule is to be relaxed at the Bridge Club,’ he once said in a rapid-fire voice, tightening the knot in his tie as though he had been recommended for membership and was about to answer a summons from the vetting committee.

  Uncle Kaiser, amused by Mr Singh’s excitement at the waiving of a regulation, raised his eyebrows at Mary Hunter, inviting her to put Mr Singh out of his misery, one way or another.

  ‘I think not,’ she said. ‘Though there is talk.’

  Mr Singh’s face registered sadness at this postponement of entrée. Then he left.

  ‘What fun!’ Uncle Kaiser exclaimed. ‘The Raj builds its Bombay piles after its own fashion, thus insulting the society in which they are to stand, yet adopts the same society’s most obnoxious convention in order to preserve its integrity. Perhaps it should not stop there. Perhaps its womenfolk should set fire to themselves when their husbands die. This also is custom.’

  In his office, Uncle Kaiser began reading about Hampton Court, the British Museum, the Tower of London.

  Rillington Place, Notting Hill

  Ostracism killed Mary Hunter, according to Uncle Kaiser.

  ‘She was philosophical about it,’ he said. ‘But one should never underestimate the English capacity for narrow-mindedness behind that liberal exterior. I personally have always been shit-scared of bulldogs. And rightly so.’

  Ealing, where Mary’s parents lived, was probably untainted then by the veil of sleaziness which London has draped over itself. Old man Hunter, ravaged by war service, and Mrs Hunter, seared by proximity to the thought of invasion, were indifferent to their daughter’s marriage to Uncle Kaiser and rarely visited the house the couple rented three doors down from John Christie, then stashing away women’s bodies behind the walls of No.10. There were rows.

  ‘What is your pain to the deaths of so many?’ Uncle Kaiser had once shouted at her, referring not to the unsuspecting who clicked along the pavement for Mr Christie’s quack remedies but the subcontinent’s unremembered vales of suffering. It was bowel cancer. Uncle Kaiser wept two stones in six months. ‘To think I knew Christie,’ he would say later. ‘A smiling man, with a name so close to the celestial. A man in a cardigan, clipping the hedge.’

  Arundel Square, Islington

  Thus did Mary Hunter experience Purdah.

  N.R. Gaffur described the symbolism in Uncle Kaiser’s stories as ‘a tart’s jewellery’. This was clever, too, as Uncle Kaiser himself conceded, by sniping at the parts cleverly one could condemn the whole without elaboration. Coming from a Hindu critic based in London this effectively did for Uncle Kaiser in his efforts to munch on the lowland pastures of English letters.

  And it really is difficult not to see everything as portent when migration is so frustrated. Uncle Kaiser’s brother, my father, also married an Englishwoman. So here, between shrill Boat people and senile cockneys, between an appeal and its rebuttal locked in everlasting embrace, I stared at the mirror and saw a flame-coloured symbol of division against a strange drama enacted in a park opposite. A man entices a Staffordshire bull terrier to chew on an Arsenal scarf, then ties the scarf to the branch of a tree, almost out of the dog’s reach but not quite. The man sits on a bench to read his newspaper as the dog makes more and more frantic efforts to grab the end of the suspended scarf, which it eventually does, hanging there, spinning, in mid-air.

  ‘The front line is everywhere,’ Uncle Kaiser said. ‘Only one world is surveyed by those in a state of battle-readiness.’ In Uncle Kaiser’s case, it was fatigue but the images were no less potent. ‘Did you know that Johnny Harn served in India?’ he asked me. Uncle Kaiser had done his homework on Harn. For years he had been in crazy orbit around him.

  Redman’s Road, Stepney

  A man with bronchitis is a man attracting attention to himself.

  Street lamps bathed Uncle Kaiser’s flat in a cinematic half-light, enhanced when he drew deeply on his cigarettes.

  ‘I think I may beat Johnny Harn to the East London Crematorium,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you giv
e up smoking, then?’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘It’s only too late if you’ve got something terminal, such as curvature of the spine.’

  He tried to pass off a cough as a laugh.

  ‘If I go first, ask the superintendent how it was that the telegram from the Maker insisting on the survival of the ill-used over the tyrant never arrived. Tell him the non-arrival of such a message is a contradiction in terms.’

  In the final weeks he talked a lot about marching: Gandhi’s Salt Trek, Mosley’s Blackshirts in Cable Street, the column of exasperated guests at the Juniper, the trek from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, Johnny Harn and his Union Movement chums in Notting Hill, refugees everywhere in flight. I was at the flat when he died. It was several minutes before I realised that the furtive wheezing had stopped. As I brushed the palm of my hand across his eyes, like they do in films, an anonymous white male with four lungs called to someone on the other side of the city and the great bellowing arc clasped the night in a steel girdle. I thought of the world as it is. It is one world. As we see it is as it is. I thought of minarets and their wailing calls to prayer.