The Currency of Paper

by Alex Kovacs

  Perhaps the other most significant resident in Ickenham’s history was living in the village at the same time as Vyner. This was one Roger Crab, a hermit who dressed in sackcloth and lived in a hut that he had built for himself. For the most part his diet consisted of water, dock leaves, and grass. Serving in the parliamentary army, Crab fought against Charles I during the English Civil War, eventually retiring to open a haberdashery in Chesham. After two years there, one day, digging in his garden (whilst facing the east) he suddenly saw “the Paradise of God.” Promptly selling his shop, he gave all his proceeds to the poor and then settled in Ickenham, where he gained some reputation as a mystic, doctor, and prophet. He was whipped on occasion for Sabbath-breaking and was forced to endure the stocks. In 1657 he took a journey into London in order to publish a book entitled Dagons Downfall, or The Great Idol digged up root and branch, a work that sees him lapse occasionally into verse.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, the annual village fair hosted a “greasy pig” competition. Only women were allowed to take part. Assembling at one end of the village, competitors awaited the aforementioned pig, who was covered in grease and released at the opposite end of the village whilst being steered towards his potential captors. The object of the game was to catch the pig and then hold on to it until a significant period of time had elapsed. Apparently there were many arguments as to who had been the victor, each year.

  Later, in 1917, Ickenham was the site for an R.A.F. base which came to account for much of the area’s population and which provided housing for its employees, an arrangement that led to the construction of many identical dwellings, with “standard issue” furnishings, décor, and even cutlery. Later the base was taken over by the U.S. Air Force and so many Americans moved to the area, along with a number of C.N.D. protestors.

  Once his initial investigations were complete—investigations that proved largely valueless—Maximilian took to producing a series of life-size painted polystyrene replicas of various portions of Ickenham. Learning how to do so was another arbitrary challenge. He spent over a year training himself to sculpt with this new material. That a substance essentially vulgar and industrial in character could be utilized in this fashion—to make, he hoped, something beautiful—was especially satisfying.

  Maximilian worked on these pieces in a large studio space that he had hired close to the scene. In each instance he selected a fragment of Ickenham and then proceeded to finish, first, an “accurate” model, and then revise its forms and structure until he felt that it had been sufficiently “improved.” Making both “before” and “after” models, he wanted to illustrate the range of utopian formulae that were available—but, sadly, unrealized—in suburban life.

  Taking, firstly, the local fish and chip shop, he reproduced its contemporary form with as great an exactitude as possible, paying attention to its sign with its different shades of brown, the pale brown tiles covering the floor, the brown, circular sticker on the front door stating that Luncheon Vouchers would be accepted here, the mural of fish swimming amongst streams of brown bubbles underneath the counter, posters announcing the various forms of produce available on the premises, steamed glass counters holding brown pies and sausages, bottles carrying quantities of salt and vinegar standing upright on the counter.

  After toiling to capture this scene with as much authenticity as possible, Maximilian then built his own version of the fish and chip shop, with fluorescent fish dangling from wires attached to the ceiling, a much larger and brighter mural placed underneath the counter which now also included both a mermaid and a submarine, an array of fairy lights attached to the walls, and fish-shaped stickers placed on the door bearing a series of quotations on the subject of fish, attributed (perhaps correctly) to one or another famous writer or personage.

  He next made a complete replica of the Ickenham Village Hall notice board, with its posters announcing the coming of the spring fair, the ploughman’s lunch soon to be held at the church, a floral arts society, a bowls club, a miniature railway, as well as minutes for the Village Hall’s Annual General Meeting, which at the moment of replication was due to be held in a fortnight’s time. For the purposes of accuracy he added some stray articles of litter on the ground, as well as a couple of cigarette ends which had been stamped out and flattened by a boot, not to mention a small clump of weeds sprouting from the ground.

  This he revised by building a frame painted in lurid shades of red and yellow, with posters announcing a reading group intending to focus its attentions upon newts, a Dadaist bowling union, an evening of Inuit food and poetry recitals to be held in a nearby café, a nude wrestling association, various descriptions of dreams recently experienced by members of the local population, as well as minutes for the Village Hall’s annual general meeting due to be held in a fortnight’s time.

  After this, he turned his attentions to a house of a kind quite common in the area. He strove to capture its gravel driveway, the fresh-cut lawn, the bed of marigolds and azaleas, an old tennis ball lying forgotten in the soil, a row of heavy stone pots with pink geraniums, a cat yawning and stretching, a red car of recent manufacture, a front door with the numbers “4” and “9” rendered in brass and fixed to the blue-painted surface, two storeys giving way to an attic, six windows looking out onto the street with curtains drawn across them, the roof rising upwards into a triangle, the pine trees towering above in the back garden.

  Attempting to subvert this, in the “after” model, he placed sculptures of indistinct snail-like forms across the spaces of the lawn and driveway, which he left overgrown with a variety of weeds. In place of a car there was a very large vehicle with no antecedent in human history, bearing a number of levers and dials of indistinct purpose, seats that rose high into the air and enormous but impractical wheels. The roof of the house was flat, with a number of triangular and trapezoidal chairs and tables arranged around various species of cacti. Above the front door he had added a large nose.

  In all, he was to create twelve different polystyrene sculptures of Ickenham. After 1986 they were to remain locked away and forgotten. Having probed the depths and many possibilities of Ickenham, Maximilian felt exhausted, incapable of returning to the area ever again. There were, as they say, “too many memories” for him there, too many places capable of inducing unpleasant emotional states. For some years afterwards, he was to find certain houses and street corners, first seen in Ickenham, now placed into strange new contexts, within the many tangled layers and narratives of his mind.

  Rumours of the Neighbourhood

  (1981)

  Pauline (57) had heard that the man in the bungalow used his home for regular meetings of an Anarchist terror organization. Apparently they were responsible for attempted attacks upon a range of targets including gardening centres, bowling alleys, village halls, and post offices. Their pamphlets were said to contain appalling essays that held the power to influence and corrupt even the most upright citizen. She deeply regretted that she had to live so close to such people. Whenever she passed the bungalow she stared at its exterior with fear and curiosity, and produced an inward shudder.

  Gary (6) had heard that the man in the bungalow was a magician. His friend had told him that the man could make things disappear or change. One time he had turned a cucumber into a limousine and another time he had taught pigeons to speak just like people! All the man ever ate was red liquorice and he wore purple pyjamas all day long and in the middle of the night you could sometimes hear him talking to aliens through a long plastic tube.

  Reverend Michaels (72) had heard that the man in the bungalow was a practitioner of the black arts, the leader of his own cult, one in which thin white cotton robes were worn and in which mysterious group chanting was undertaken, along with the drinking of goose blood and the printing of texts backwards so that they needed to be read in a mirror. In particular he was concerned about the possibility that ritual human sacrifices might be taking place in the bungalow and he was considering establ
ishing official contact with the police over the matter.

  Enactment of an Unknown Epic

  (1982)

  That year Maximilian devoted himself to writing and staging a play entitled The Unusual Adventures of Methuselah McGanaghan. Work on the project commenced in early January and after a few days of writing he began to devote much of his time to completing the piece, which he was adamant had to be performed before the termination of the year. The play’s sole performance took place in a cramped room above a pub in Camberwell on the evening of December the 30th and was attended by a tiny audience made up of men and women who had for whatever reason been intrigued by one of the posters that Maximilian had hung up inside the few theatres in London whose management would allow him to display one.

  The performance lasted for six and a half hours, with no interval. It described, in immense detail, the life of its titular protagonist. During the course of the piece, Maximilian played 143 different characters, assuming a different tone of voice for each and performing a frenzy of movements for his audience, as he jumped from one portion of the stage to another, generally on tiptoe, sometimes portraying semi-improvised five-way conversations which lasted for hundreds of lines. These were interspersed with long monologues delving into the richness and fury of McGanaghan’s life as it unfolded throughout the 1920s and on into the ’30s. Moving across a number of continents, McGanaghan met up with a great sweltering mass of humanity, including a chorus of shambling beggars and quick-witted conmen, lascivious sailors and alcoholic journalists, not to mention cameo appearances from a vast array of other individuals including a number of tennis players, anaesthetists, and international telephone operators. Furthermore, especially for this performance, Maximilian had undertaken several months of study mastering the art of vocal imitations, for example musical instruments and the sounds of nature—bodies of water, animals, weather—in order to suggest aspects of the environment that his protagonist would be passing through. Bubbling and rushing sounds stood in for rivers, oceans, lakes, and so forth. Pressing his tongue tightly against his teeth, he could create a buzzing that resembled a harmonica. His trumpet was a particular success. More than once, during the play, he attempted the sounds of an entire teeming marketplace, complete with a cloud of babbling voices and a frenzy of footsteps.

  Oil lamps and fairy lights were laid out across the stage, casting slanted shadows and pools of luminescent light, Maximilian’s attempt to project an aura of mystery, to imply a space in which mythology might possess a certain reality and in which the contemplation of supposedly impossible pursuits would become as natural to the audience as silence. Upon an enormous backcloth, shades of olive, vermillion, and gold alternated within depictions of a variety of key moments from the life of McGanaghan. Maximilian stood before it with pride, gesticulating wildly, chin held high, modelling a series of hats that changed with every new profession or pursuit that McGanaghan embarked upon, although at all times the star of the show was bedecked in a white cloth suit with red braces, a red handkerchief folded into a triangle and tucked conspicuously into his breast pocket. In such a costume Maximilian felt that he could adequately convey his ideas about centuries of English gentility and the odd relationship it possessed with the no less significant desire to dominate other nations.

  Brought up in conditions of dire poverty in the East End, Methuselah was determined to escape his background. Each of his fifteen brothers and two sisters made a brief appearance during the early scenes. They would be together in the street playing interminable games of football and cricket, occasions that would often collapse into violence, with fist fights and headlocks becoming increasingly common amongst the young men at the onset of puberty. Of the various members of the McGanaghan family, Methuselah alone found these grunting displays of power and bravado to be repugnant. Crying or glowering by himself on the doorstep of their house, he felt no sense of fraternity whatsoever, and future decades of disgust began to brew within him. He vowed to himself that he would be free. At last he couldn’t spend a day longer in the company of his family.

  Following these instincts, Methuselah took ship to America at the age of sixteen, joining the teeming crowds at Ellis Island before spending two months hopping freight trains as far as the corn fields of the Midwest, where he briefly obtained employment as a farm labourer. After this, he began to dream of a life as a film star, so he travelled to Los Angeles, succeeding only in becoming an extra in the film Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim. Glimpsed for a fraction of a second in a crowd scene, obscurity claimed him soon after.

  Depressed by his inability to make any real entrance into the world of film-making, he made his way to Paris. Trying to pass himself off as a poet in the cafés of Montparnasse, he soon made the acquaintance of a number of dissolute characters who led him into a life of criminality. Smuggling opium into the city and selling it to the city’s artists, he soon began to make quite considerable profits, but after a number of run-ins with the authorities, he decided to flee the country.

  After throwing a dart at a map of the world whilst wearing a blindfold, McGanaghan next chose to travel as far as the Siberian wastes by train, with the intention of learning elementary Russian and opening a cocktail bar. Instead, after enduring a series of long and barely comprehensible conversations with his fellow passengers, McGanaghan came to feel that he would very probably die there. In a monologue lasting nearly half an hour, he describes the many sounds that he thinks he can distinguish, listening to the winds at night as they whine and rattle against his window.

  Standing silent and frozen in a tableaux for some minutes (representation of the passing of six years and McGanaghan’s growing belief that Soviet Communism would be a failure), the play’s action abruptly shifted to the Moroccan city of Fez where McGanaghan was now living in fits of desolation, penniless, whilst dreaming of becoming the owner of a wallaby farm somewhere in the deserts of Australia. These dreams came to haunt his sleep on an almost nightly basis and Maximilian enacted a number of such nights, including various conversations McGanaghan shared with several favourite wallabies, indicative—dramatically speaking—of the character’s nervous collapse. He then became a goat herder on the blasted plains that lie between Marrakesh and Ouarzazate, but after a few months found that this life was no more tolerable than any of his previous ones. It wasn’t long before he hid himself on a ship that was sailing from Casablanca to Uruguay.

  After this shift in location, McGanaghan ran through something close to the entire spectrum of emotion that an individual might come to know during the course of a lifetime. On several occasions McGanaghan nearly died. In Venezuela, a waiter attempted to cut his nose off with a razor blade. In Peru, he suffered from the agonies of madness after licking the hallucinogenic skin of a frog. In Mexico, he was accidently buried in a coffin writhing with rattlesnakes. And on it went.

  The stage came to take on the dimensions of the world itself. Jumping, shuffling and gliding from one portion of the stage to another, he traversed many regions of time and space, so that a single footstep would represent on occasion a movement of many thousands of miles, a transposition from one continent to another, from one era to another. Maximilian took cosmic leaps, defying (in pantomime) the constraints of earthly life and affirming his freedom as an individual fully in control of his destiny. Maximilian believed all this to be his own innovation.

  Using the format of a one-man show, he hoped to investigate the manner in which an individual confronts society, the compromises he has to make in order to engage with the social sphere, and the complex range of tensions that arise whenever a strong-willed person defies the rules and conventions of the social order. He liked to see McGanaghan as a great individualist, a loner rebelling against the fate dealt to him by the whims of birth—who would come into his own as a human being through a series of decisive actions rather than the whims of fate, heredity, culture, and so forth. Better put, Maximilian saw the play as, principally, an examination of identity itself: the
different masks worn by an individual over the span of a lifetime. These personae differed so greatly from one period to the next that it was unclear where the self was in fact resident, the role with which it had the most natural affinity—the play explored the fragility of the self, the way in which the mask has superseded the face. All the while, simultaneously, though his audience could neither have noticed nor much cared, Maximilian was presenting a sly self-portrait, a record of his own shape-shifting, chameleonic stroll through the darkened backstreets of history.

  Of those citizens who had chosen to attend the performance, only three stayed all the way to the very end, but each who did so seemed to enjoy himself. Afterwards, in a doomed attempt to engage Maximilian in a discussion about his opus, these few spectators found themselves feeling no less alienated than those audience members who had abandoned the performance early, thanks to Maximilian’s extraordinary coldness. Maximilian simply pocketed the small amount of money that the play had generated and promptly marched out of the front door, alone, silent, tussling with his demons in ways that his audience would doubtless find largely incomprehensible.

  What Will Happen at this Juncture?

  (1983)

  A gradual movement towards the abstract in which any slender narrative you may have perceived to this point is abandoned in favour of dropping all recognizable characters and henceforth describing nothing but landscapes trailing off into secluded rooms and unknown corners of villages?