Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  ‘Conceited trollop!’ Geraldine said. ‘That’s typical of the woman. She thought she was so attractive that every man she came across wanted to fondle her apricot!’

  Charlie blinked and stared at the ceiling. Where had his mother learned such expressions?

  ‘So she threw him out?’ Einstein said.

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘And then time passed and I wasn’t painting any more and I was working for the Pangloss Chicken Empire and I felt too ashamed to approach him.’

  ‘You wanted to be an artist,’ the Mariner said. ‘But you worked for a chicken butcher.’

  ‘Yes.' Charlie said.

  ‘Why?’ the Deep Time Mariner said.

  ‘I don’t know!’

  The Deep Time Mariner shook his huge head and sighed. The lives of these queer little monkey-men were so short and they seemed to squander their time in finding ways to deny themselves the pleasure of the days.

  ‘He had responsibilities,’ the ghost of Geraldine shrilled. ‘He had a wife and a big house and he wanted to start a family. That’s why he worked for the chicken butcher. Nobody forced him. It was his choice. And he should have been counting his blessings instead of carping all the time and sleeping with that horrid dog. He was never satisfied. He should have listened to his father. He could have been a barber and had his own business and everything. He could have been somebody.’

  ‘I wanted to be a painter!’

  ‘You worked for a chicken butcher!’ the ghost of his mother screamed, shaking dust from the curtains.

  ‘Can’t you keep her under control?’ Charlie pleaded, turning to the Deep Time Mariner.

  ‘She came from your head,’ the Mariner said, sweeping at the air with his long thin hands.

  Geraldine shrieked and darted away, knocking a picture from the wall. It was a small nude study of Baxter sitting in an armchair, an early watercolour from their liquorice allsorts period. Charlie rushed forward to save it but failed and trod on the glass.

  ‘Did you see Harry again?’ Einstein said, trying to maintain some sense of order.

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said, carefully picking Baxter from the fragments of glass and helping restore her modesty by pushing her under a cushion. ‘One afternoon I slipped out of the office and went down to the Church Street Gallery.’

  ‘And he was still there?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Charlie said. ‘He was still there but he’d returned to his old trade. The place was full of freaks.’

  ‘He was clever. He didn’t need you to support him,’ Geraldine said from the ceiling.

  ‘He had never needed me,’ Charlie said. ‘His freaks had been discovered by the London art critics. Some of them praised him and others attacked him and that created enough excitement to guarantee his success. He was the eye of his own thunderstorm. The critics called his work New-Structuralism and Nuclear-Dada and all sorts of similar nonsense. The art schools were new full of kids stuffing cats into cod fish and building giants from cow ones.’

  ‘Horrible!’ Geraldine said.

  ‘It was crazy,’ Charlie agreed. ‘It felt as if the whole world was suddenly anxious to admire the ugly and the deformed.’

  ‘But Fat Harry was famous,’ Einstein prompted. ‘He’d become something of a celebrity.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘After I walked out on him he had to do some fast thinking. He didn’t want to go back to a life on the road. But he knew that if he mounted his side-show in the gallery and sold tickets at the door that the police would raid him, charge him with obscenity and probably destroy his work. So he called the cannibal The Unknown Political Prisoner and he called the mermaid Memories of the Madonna and he wasn’t asking the hoi polloi to come to gawp at them. He was sending out invitations for people to buy them. And buy them for fancy prices. It wasn’t a freak show. It was a sculpture gallery. It was so simple it was really an act of genius.’

  ‘Did you approach him?’ the Deep Time Mariner asked.

  ‘Did you talk to him?’ Einstein said.

  ‘We went out to have a few drinks and talk over old times,‘ Charlie said. ‘But everything had changed.’

  43.

  They are peering down into the cocktail lounge of the latest London night-club and restaurant. The cocktail lounge is called the Greenhouse Effect. It’s the big sensation. The newest and smartest watering hole. The floors have been laid with a bright green artificial turf with clusters of polypropylene palms standing in corners. Beneath the palms are polythene penguins. The lights are low and the music is loud. Parakeets swing in wickerwork cages suspended from the bamboo ceiling. A polar bear holding a surfboard is striking a pose behind the bar. The owners are trying to sell the idea that global warming will create a new kind of paradise. A tropical Garden of Eden. There will be no winter. Everyone will bask in the warmth of perpetual summer and wallow in coral seas.

  Fat chance.

  Charlie is sitting at the bar with his Senior Statesman™ plastic attaché case balanced on his knees. He is drinking a Radioactive Waist—a sweet rum punch served in a goblet frosted with sugar. He looks hot and uncomfortable. It is three o’clock in the afternoon. He is watching a waitress in a sequin-encrusted swimsuit serving drinks and little bowls of salted nuts, potato chips and dishes of skinny green olives.

  The waitress is a young woman with a large red mouth and a head of perfect strawberry-blonde curls. She looks a little like Marilyn Monroe. There are five waitresses in the club and when he looks at them in turn, he discovers that they all look just a little like dead actresses from Hollywood’s Golden Age. There’s Marlene Dietrich busy mixing Martini Melt Downs and Bette Davis selling cigarettes. Mae West is standing at the club door, sharing a private joke with Jean Harlow.

  The owners had advertised for six identical Dorothy Lamours wearing sarongs and hibiscus flowers to serve the tables in paradise. But that had proved impossible and they’d eventually had to settle for these assorted legends in the standard Hollywood colour: blonde. There was no room for brunettes in this corner of paradise.

  Charlie is sitting with Harry “Enrico” Prampolini, the famous sculptor and man about town. It was his idea to visit the Greenhouse Effect. Harry has brought Charlie here because he wants him to know that he can afford the good life. Harry still believes in the good life. He is wearing a fine silk suit and a Rolex the size of a golfball. The pockets of his jacket are crammed with Cuban cigars. His wallet expands in a hundred pleats—an accordion of gold charge cards.

  ‘Remember the old days?’ Harry says, full of good humour as he sloshes back his second or third Catatonic Converter.

  ‘I’ll never forget them,’ Charlie says.

  ‘You painted them and I went out there and sold them. It was a clever racket, Charlie. A very clever racket. I found I could sell ’em so fast that you couldn’t meet the demand. You threatened to stamp out your landscapes with stencils. Remember?’

  ‘It wasn’t such a bad idea,’ Charlie says, smiling as he remembers the little attic and Harry’s approach as a salesman.

  ‘You’ve got to laugh,’ Harry grins.

  ‘There were good days,’ Charlie says.

  Harry looks at Charlie and feels proud to be his friend. Charlie is now a big success in the chicken industry and he’s heard that it’s a cut-throat business. He tries to make him talk about his work but Charlie seems reluctant to give anything away.

  'Do you make those Texan Chicken Burgers with the authentic Cowboy Sauce?’ Harry asks him. ‘I’ve always had a weakness for Texan Chicken Burgers.’ Harry enjoys his food, he can talk about it for hours, and the food he enjoys the most—like everything else in his life—is heavily processed and counterfeit.

  ‘No,’ Charlie says. ‘They’re made for Mr Rooster™ by Animal Meat Machine Retrievals. They’re not part of the company.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Harry grins. ‘I thought I might have a fighting chance of winning a lifetime’s supply. You can’t lick that Cowboy Sauce!’ he adds, remembering the ad
vertising. ‘Are you the people who make those new chicken cocktail weenies?’

  Charlie shakes his head. ‘That’s Mr Rooster™ again,’ he says.

  ‘They’re good!’ Harry tells him, smacking his lips at the memory. ‘And they come in three party flavours. Smoky bacon, beef and tandoori. You’ve got to laugh. Chicken that tastes like bacon. Don’t ask me how they do it!’

  Charlie doesn’t ask and Harry is sensitive to silence. ‘So tell me, how do you spend your time?’

  ‘I just shuffle paper for a living,’ Charlie mumbles unhappily. ‘It’s nothing very interesting.’ He picks at a pretzel, snapping the brittle stick with his fingers, coating his tongue with dust.

  ‘I suppose you have to travel,’ Harry says, concluding that Charlie must be a top-flight executive, since most senior company men in Harry’s long experience didn’t know or even much care if they were manufacturing marmalade or machine guns. They did nothing but write mission statements and read stock market reports. ‘A lot of travel in your line of work. Paris. New York. Tokyo. Do they eat Texas Chicken in Tokyo? I don’t envy you the travel. It’s a terrible kick to the nervous system. Airport to airport. Boardroom to boardroom. It snaps the springs in your body clock.’

  ‘I’d never volunteer for it,’ Charlie mutters. How can he admit that he works in a cubicle with nothing more exotic in view than a set of Korean ballpoint pens?

  ‘But it takes you away from home,’ Harry says, trying to smother a crafty grin by plugging his mouth with a Cuban cigar. Boardroom to boardroom. Brothel to brothel. Bombay to Bangkok. He hopes the poor devil is having some fun while he’s away from home.

  The waitress who is not quite Bette Davis bumps and grinds her way to the bar and strikes a match for Harry’s cigar. Harry sucks and winks at the girl who twinkles back at him through the smoke, hoping she might have been discovered.

  ‘You wouldn’t have a lot of time left for Baxter,’ he continues, dunking his paper parasol into the dregs in his cocktail glass. ‘That sort of life is hard on a marriage.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ Charlie says.

  Harry looks at Charlie and blows smoke rings at the ceiling. He doesn’t doubt that Charlie’s work must be important and confidential. Harry the mammonite understands the pressure that comes with success. He imagines Charlie as a young tycoon in a mighty business empire. He can tell that he’s an important man by the size of his plastic attaché case.

  Charlie looks at Harry and feels ashamed. He doesn’t know what to say to him. He doesn’t know how to explain. Perhaps it’s the booze or the stifling heat or the ear-bursting noise that makes him feel like he’s drowning. He wants to throw his arms around the fat man’s shoulders and talk about art and God and dreams. He wants to go back to their life in the attic and be given a second chance to play the game in a different way. He needs salvation. He needs a friend. He wants Harry Prampolini to take his hand and drag him ashore. And all they talk about is chicken.

  He sucks up his Radioactive Waist and hurries back to the office.

  44.

  ‘You should have gone back to him,’ Einstein said. ‘You could have worked together again.’

  ‘He wanted to take me to Frankfurt to help him with his new exhibition,’ Charlie said, ‘although we both knew it was impossible and, anyway, by that time Baxter was already…’

  But Einstein had stopped listening. He swivelled towards the window, cocked his ears and flared his nostrils. His whiskers quivered like telegraph wires. His face puckered into a grimace and he threw back his head and howled.

  ‘What is it?’ the Deep Time Mariner asked, bending over the little dog. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Einstein said smacking his nose with his tongue. He gulped nervously and turned back to the window.

  A storm was approaching from the south, a rolling fortress of cloud that cast a shadow over the city and sent bolts of lightning bursting like mortar shells into the streets. Violent squalls raced ahead of the battery, banging on doors and cracking windows, squeezing chimneys until they sneezed soot.

  As the storm rolled over the rooftops the city was suddenly plunged into darkness.

  Charlie felt the carpet move under his feet. The room seemed to to swell and shrink again, as if the building were gasping for breath.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he shouted through the uproar.

  But Einstein and the Mariner had no answer. They were staring, dumbfounded, at the window.

  It was raining fish.

  They were tiny, rainbow-coloured fish falling through a crackling, luminous rain. And with the fish there were small spider crabs and somersaulting squids squirting necklaces of ink and plummeting jellyfish trailing ribbons and nameless horrors of the deep with human heads and stinging tails. As they watched, the street was filled with flapping bodies, the walls of the buildings were gilded with fish scales, the gutters were running with blood.

  ‘Quickly!’ the Mariner snapped, turning from the window. ‘Who will finish this story?’

  45.

  The totem pole of skewered Burpie™ dolls was the centrepiece at the Women Against the Horrors of War exhibition and Baxter was soon surrounded by adoring Militant Mothers. Few of the Mothers were artists. There were one or two who called themselves potters, an occupation that Baxter despised as a morbid desire to shape turds from mud but the rest of them were strictly employed with the maintenance of their own reproduction. They were making their own world of children. They were raising an army of toddlers. Their wombs were constantly blazing kilns from which they shaped life in their own image.

  Baxter was shocked to discover that Patch Armstrong was the mother of four fat bawling infants, each child claiming a different father. There were many reasons for this rampant fertility.

  Motherhood was the natural fulfilment of women, whose bodies were miraculous machines built to reproduce themselves, quickly and efficiently, filling the world with future Mothers.

  Motherhood was not the duty of wives dependent on jealous husbands but the joy of independent women who could use strategic multiplication to influence the affairs of men.

  Motherhood was a form of magic greatly feared by the tribe of men who perpetually tried to frustrate fertile women with pornography, contraception and abortion.

  There were other reasons but Patch was content to leave these verses unsung because Baxter would find them in the Militant Mothers publications, A Window on your Ovaries and A Voyage down your Fallopian Tube.

  It wasn’t easy being a Mother without a husband’s sponsorship or a sympathetic employer prepared to establish a working creche. The Mothers struggled in poverty, many trapped in single rooms and living on modest state stipends.

  ‘The state owes every Mother a living,’ Patch said. ‘Children are the future of the world. What would happen if we stopped having children? Can you imagine the consequences?’

  ‘I guess I‘ve never really thought about it,’ Baxter said.

  ‘Everything would fall apart. Industry would collapse. The economy would stagnate. We’d be in big trouble. Why can’t they understand that? When the state interferes with the future by persecuting Mothers and children it casts the seeds of its own destruction. We should all be paid decent wages and given contracts of employment. There should be incentive schemes and paid holidays and all the rest of it. We’re the most important industry on the planet!’

  She was wearing a cotton sling, attached by a system of straps to the front of her dungarees and in this sling sat a silent, staring baby. Baxter, made uncomfortable by the monotonous scrutiny of this unblinking infant, tried smiling at it. The child looked astonished, as if Baxter had breached all established laws of etiquette, and gave her a disapproving scowl.

  This child was the result of a chance encounter with one of the following:

  1) Harry “Enrico” Prampolini, the famous Nuclear Dadaist, who had refused to make a donation to one of the Mother’s fund raising campaigns and then in an act of swift rev
enge, had been coaxed to donate his sperm instead through a brisk but effective knee-trembler. Harry had no trouble In rising to the occasion since he’d always been attracted to fat/bearded/tattooed women.

  2) George Carver whom Patch had found working in a deep pan pizza restaurant and who had managed, briefly, to tickle her fancy with anchovies and garlic bread. For Patch there was something deeply erotic about a man forced to work in a kitchen.

  3) Douglas MacArthur Figgens, a brooding young man who had spent many years nursing a crippled, insane father and who had insisted that she flog him with a wet towel before mounting her invasion of his person. She’d been more than happy to oblige.

  No-one knew who had fathered the child and Patch didn’t give a damn. She’d already forgotten their names. It was her child and she would fashion its life. Patch Armstrong agreed with Oscar Wilde that fathers should neither be seen nor heard, although she would have hated to have found herself in agreement with a man of any description.

  ‘Do you have a smidgen more of this cheese? It really is delicious,’ Patch said. ‘And maybe some olives?’ She had abandoned her Miracle Nature Diet™ in favour of the Paradise Protein System™. She had found it in a magazine. She was eating cheese, bananas, peanuts and milk.

  Baxter took the empty plate and cut another slice from the Stilton. She felt dwarfed by the bulk of Patch Armstrong, a stoker at work on a giant boiler.

  ‘We really need a nursery where the Mothers can meet once or twice a week and learn to relate to each other as women. Do you understand? We want to work through our fundamental problems until we’re a self-sufficient group with a coherent strategy for the future. We want to raise our personal worth assessment levels. Don’t you think that’s important? And we want to encourage our children to expand their social awareness in a non-hostile, non-sexist, non-political environment. We want them to be liberated from all the debilitating prejudices and neurotic nihilism of the state educational system. And we also need a place where we can have herbal massage and primal scream classes.’