M/F

by Anthony Burgess

  – I know it’s possibly asking too much, but would you be good enough to tell me the time?

  – Don’t use that special high-and-mighty way of talking to me, he said. It’s nearly time for the second performance, as you know all too damned well. But you needn’t trouble to be in this either.

  He turned the radio on, flicking from pop and jazz that might seem to abet my nuisance-frivolity and at last finding a very grim violin concerto. We passed from the world of commercial buildings – Pancarib Savebank, Yellowbird Assurance, Collembola Electrics, Springtide Sanitary Engineering, Rhabdos Housesoc and so on – to the suburbs with their buses and box-houses, the sea to the left flashing odd messages. Supposed to be in the show, was I? Then we came to a large open green. Here was the circus – big top, cages, electric generators, restaurant tent, cars and trailers, a spectators’ carpark filling up. Lights, the distant blare of a wind band. The grim concerto gave it all three fierce major chords in greeting. I was, behind all my confusion, excited. It was as if I were being taken to the circus.

  Dunkel kept to the road which was a perimeter to the green. The trailers of these travelling people were parked on the edge of the trampled acre or so. He slowed down and stopped by a large cream trailer, cutting the music off in the middle of an obscure orchestral struggle in which the violin had no place. Then he did a curt headflick at me, meaning this is it as you very well know and get in there and wait to be given hell to. My heart crashed and crashed in readiness for a mad or bizarre or totally lifechanging encounter as I got out of the car, walked up to the trailer door, opened it, and went in.

  He, the young man lying on a bunk and reading a paperback, was far more shocked than I. After all, I had more or less expected him, and he did not expect me. I recognize the difficulty my reader is now going to experience in accepting what I wish to be accepted as a phenomenon of real life and not as a mere property of fiction. The trouble is that he, you, is, are only too willing to accept it in that latter capacity, and this inevitably impairs ability to accept it in the former. A camera trick, a split frame! The deployment of coincidence to the end of entertainment. Excellent, a romance for bedtime or to splurch in with a peach in a summer hammock, its tradition being as old as Plautus and hallowed by Shakespeare, who had in his troupe the identical twins Walt and Pip Gosling, and yet light, lowbrow. Do please carry on. And it came to pass that I entered into that chamber and lo on his couch reading a profane book lay one that was as my twin self, though brother whether twin or younger or elder had I none as was well attested. And we did look on one another, and he was the more astonied since that I had a prior presentiment that such an one as he did in truth exist. It hath been said that each one in this world/Hath in an exact copy his true self/Though truly which th’ original is and which/ The copy who can truly say? My Lord,/I have read of this in Bellafonte’s work,/In Galen, Wace, Vitellius and him/That writ the Book of Sorrows. But that is not it at all, no. This was real, modern, now. My spitten image walking the garden of this world without excuse of true eggsplitting. A certain tiredness or inattention on the part of nature had contrived this, and it was meaningless.

  His clothes were almost but not quite mine: they were wellworn and subfusc like my own, but the material was better. His shirt like mine was open at the neck, but a gay foulard pampered his throat. In the days before still and motion photography I would have been puzzled at first in the encounter to see that he was both like and unlike: unless my portrait had been done, he should to my eye be a mirror image, the only counterfeit of myself I would know. But cameras had made me familiar with how I appeared to the world. And this must be true of him too. We looked at each other for a long time, hearing faint circus music to help make more clownish the competition in jawdropping that was our first dialectic. His dropped farther, of course, than mine. There was no doubt about it: the whole thing was astonishing: one looked for mere resemblance and was given the whole works of identity. Only the captious could catch at points like his set of the mouth or flare of the nostrils in surprise, different from mine, stupidlooking. Now we had to get beyond this simple wonder. There is more to life than people discovering they have identical appearances. As it happened, it was he who made the first remark, and he preluded it with a silly laugh that confirmed at the start what I felt I ought to feel about him.

  Only I, I think, listened to the other’s voice with care, to hear if the identity subsisted on the auditory plane. Most people think voices don’t matter; they regard a voice as a ghost or a garment or a cosmetic; it is a very detachable attribute of the visible or tangible body. When a voice is deliberately deformed, as in the toothless wartime oratory of Churchill or in glottal pop singing, it is not merely noticed but praised, praised because deformation has made it noticeable. But in reconstructing the personality of, say, Jesus Christ, glossohagiographs never come into the job. See him, yes, but never hear him in Aramaic that, for all we know, may have had a lisp in it. Not important. To most sound is mere décor. To this boy, Llew, my voice was a standard machine of communication, a jaloppy for getting around in and the hell with the make. To me his voice, which for some minutes I ate with nauseated hunger, was the hateful blessed key to a return to the total variousness of life against which he and I were blaspheming – no, he only, only he. His voice had much of my timbre, but the phonemes, learnable things after all, mere cosmetics, were American Welsh. Pennsylvania? Llew for Llewelyn, so he said.

  This was his travelling room. A door led to the travelling elementals of gas and water, and then there was the door to his mother’s room, not in use just now. Roomy, the whole contrivance. For travelling it was hitched to a Cyrano convertible which it was Llewelyn’s job to drive. Llewelyn what? His second name that, for first name name he was usually called Llew. His mother had abandoned the dull name stuff of the registrar and notary. She was Aderyn the Bird Queen. How would I like to have a mother who was a Bird Queen? His father? Dead of smoker’s cancer, a nervous eighty-a-day man who had had to retire from the tightrope. Neither of us even allowed the thought to materialize that we might have the same parents. Whatever he was, he was no twin of mine. The coarseness of his mind was glued to the fibreglass walls in vacant smirks and lolling bosoms, the odd sideburned guitartorturer, a quartet of haired and slobbering golden-disc musical philosophers. He had his spinner, his 45-r.p.m. plates scattered on the rushmatted deck like innutritious cakes of liquorice, vacant sleeves with brutal faces – Shove Up, The Scumsliders, Om and the Im, A Prayer to Black Hell, Stick and the Snatches. The paperback he had been reading was called Giant Cock, no fairy tale but obviously a loose story of crude leering conquests dripping with gissum, a representation of women’s agony as pleasure.

  The hate I felt had nothing of morality in it; it was what now, but not then, as I did not know the word, I see as ontological loathing. His very existence in the world was an affront to my innermost most tightly bound fibres of self. That this should look like me! I am sure he was too stupid to reciprocate. Rather he was vaguely complimented, as though a fullsize clockwork model of himself were going to be put on the market and I was a traveller’s sample. All he could at first see in me was an alibi. And then I would be a means of his exaltation in a narrow world where, even in the least skilful of roles, he had failed through slackness. Bounding in in a lionskin to frighten the clowns, banging his chest in triumph, roaring and then coughing, he had to bumble off in a panic when the real lions came in, even though they were in cages. That was his sole contribution to the conspectus of mad empty talents that made up a circus. And then he had sold his lionskin when he was without money and Aderyn the Bird Queen would forward him none on his next month’s allowance. Money of his own coming in, he told me, when he married, but he would not marry, oh no. His mother wanted him to marry, but oh no. He wanted his freedom. A tatty kind of freedom.

  He had been brought in, wearing simple tights, to help gather up the dinner plates at the end of the act of The Great Giro, who span them in multiple ac
cumulation on the tips of flexible upright poles. He had regarded this rightly as demotion and, after accidentally or otherwise tripping up The Great Giro at the end of his leaping and jumping bows to the applause and smart about turn for leaping and running off, there had been hard words and sulks. Now he was a chauffeur, no more, for Aderyn the Bird Queen. But, God, man, with my assistance – there were these chains, manacles and locks, masses of them, rusting away in one of the property baskets. They had belonged to The Great Bondaggio, or some such artist, who had died of a heart attack in his unretired sixties. There was also a cabinet with an inner revolving wall. It had been used for clownish mock disappearances, one auguste looking for another through endlessly circling blackness, an apparatus not now much in use. But think, man. If I, Selim (I called myself Selim to him; I would not dirty my true name by sticking it in his mouth), would be cruelly manacled and chained and locked by members of the audience who would hold the keys till the performance was over, then I would enter the cabinet, the curtain would be drawn, the inner wall would turn and he, Llew the Free, would appear almost at once unbound, though with duplicate chains and manacles in his hands like strangled snakes. It would knock everybody cold. It would exalt him, Llew. He would insist on a high salary and give me a percentage. But out of the ring there must be only one of us. Disguise was a simple matter. I have dark glasses here, also a hat. I will cut a lock of my hair and glue it on to you as a moustache.

  I nodded and nodded, submitting to his presence as I submitted to the throbbing head he started up again, thinking that I had better get back to New York, wiring Loewe first for an air ticket. Have seen light stop. I got a wink or glimmer of it, certainly, with my growing sense of the need to have that face that moved inanely in front of me, as though I myself were acting an idiot, changed to not-me. A large sum of money for facial surgery needed. I must fulfil all that my father’s will ordained. Or could I do worse and cheaper? Have, say, Dr Gonzi shoot him? But Gonzi would need ritual, not the benison of a chance encounter. Would he fall for my necessarily suicidal appearance in the prearranged lonely dark? Or I could get Llew drunk and throw him in the path of a couple of triggerhappy policemen. No, let me get away, having seen what I came to see, let me at least remove myself from the presence of this obscene abomination. But I delayed leaving, nodding, fascinated.

  The first words he spoke, by the way, were:

  – So that’s why my mam thought it was me, see, watching the fucking procession while I was in bed all the fucking time, man. Witness I had, too, but I didn’t want to bring her into it. Told my mam she ought to have her fucking eyes seen to, that’s what I fucking said, man. And it’s true, too, one of the fuckers anyway. Made her cry, that did.

  9

  And yet I did not leave right away. You can say that I was so determined to go that I was able to put off going. Or that the urge to leave was so strong that it seemed imposed from outside and hence had to be resisted. He had a cupboard full of tattered sex magazines published in, of all places, Adelaide, South Australia, the cover of one of which showed a girl screwing a complaisant kangaroo with a dildo. In the same cupboard he kept a lime-cordial bottle containing a cocktail of his own concoction – mainly vodka and stolen altar wine, or so he said. It tasted of a debauch in an operating theatre. Theatre, of course, came into my staying. I found it hard, being the exhibitionist I was, to reject his proposal.

  So Llew and a plump young man with dark glasses, a moustache, and a kind of fedora went round to the back area of the big top. I, as Llew, wore his clothes. I was not sorry for what he was prepared to make a permanent exchange, since they were better than mine. He had a cushion stuffed in my pants and he kept spreading his left mouthcorner in a nervous twitch – tiring, though, so he soon gave it up. This area was rich with activity but not too brightly lit, and the performers were too agitated with nerves, relief or malice to pay us much attention. But the real Llew insisted on pushing me towards The Great Giro, who was piling cold plates together like a trattoria waiter. The Great Giro snarled at me and said:

  – Vaffa nculo.

  – Up yours, wop, I replied. Shit on one of those plates, man, and give yourself a hot dinner.

  It was the veritable Llew. It was horrible. It was also not horrible. This was a grossly exciting place, warm with animals. The string of lovely ponies was being led out, reeking with nerves, still trotting in time to the tear-off of brass from the band in the arena beyond. Applause was like the sea. As in some pornographic novel of the Edwardian age, the moustachioed ringmaster was cursing a nearnaked pony mistress and even cracking his whip. The baby elephant gave out a sort of Bach trumpet shrill, and its placid grey mother let her comforting trunk play over its back like a stethoscope. Elephant dung was being shovelled up smoking hot and filling many buckets. Llew said:

  – That’s her there, man.

  I knew her, of course. I had seen her in the procession. She was erect, still, composed, with her back to us, waiting to go on. A red robe reached her ankles, her blueish hair her waist. A couple of ringhands were ready to push on two cages, both with perched birds in them. Meanwhile an interlude of clowns was lolloping on. I said:

  – I want to see the act.

  – Brought up on the fucking thing, man. But seeing as you’re me you can take me round there.

  We went round. The ticket girl looked at me with loathing, so I grinned. Llew was delighted by the whole simple deception, a boy easily pleased. We stood at the rear of the arena, our backs against the canvas. The tent was filled with Castitans whose joy in the show was expressed or sacramentalized in their fierce eating. Bread and circuses: that cynical summary was taken as a synchronic convention here. It was not only a matter of candyfloss, peanuts, chocbars, ices and fruitdrinks in cartons. Fat mothers had brought thick sandwiches and thermoi (?), and I am certain I saw one family with cold cuts on plates. Llew said:

  – See that auguste there – the one on the bicycle?

  – Yes?

  – A fucking clergyman, man, believe it or do the other thing. Father Costello. Does the mass on Sundays and holy days of fucking obligation. Hears confessions. I can see you don’t believe it. Right, then, you know what you can do, man.

  – But –

  A worker priest. I supposed being a clown was work. His trick cycle folded under him. He did a sort of soundless sobbing with his big painted mouth and then, without apparent motivation, the other clowns were on to him, buffeting and kicking, leaving the noise to synchronized rimshots on sidedrum and farts of tuba. Well, that violence had been done for real to his master, He Who Gets Slapped, again without apparent motivation. Llew said:

  – Glamour of the big top he called it. Becoming as a little child. Kingdom of fucking heaven.

  – Does he come under a bishop somewhere?

  – He comes under nobody and on top of nobody. A dry-ballocked bugger. What you’d call very devout, never has a woman nor anything else. On the payroll but what he does with his money fucked if I know. Chaplain they call him, man.

  Onomastically that was all right. Father Costello tumbled off carrying his cycle in two halves, howling loudly but silently. The other clowns waved in joy to the munching and clapping audience. Then the lights dimmed and a green spot picked out Aderyn the Bird Queen coming statelily on to music. It was In a Monastery Garden, complete with E-flat clarinet doing piercing birdsong obbligato, very banal. I wondered if Father Costello, still in clown’s makeup, would go off now to read his office in the smell of lion dung. Then I became fascinated with Aderyn, though her son merely groaned and muttered Oh Christ.

  The lights went up, and there was the austere brooding face with its curious patina as of henna. Two portable aviaries had been wheeled in, and scurrying hands were now skirring into position two headhigh metal perches, each about six feet long with two doublecastered feet. They faced each other across the arena. There was a third stand, at right angles to both, similarly castered, but this seemed to be a kind of bird buffet: a long narro
w tray held bits of unidentifiable meat which, I swear, smoked as if recently torn from living animals.

  One cage was full of hawks, the whole spectrum, as far as I could tell, from merloun down – gerfalcon, falcon gentle, falcon of the rock, falcon peregrine, bastard, sacre, lanner, merlin, hobby, goshawk, tiercel, sparrowhawk, kestrel. They perched unblinded, blinking, waiting, and, when their cagedoor was opened, they showed no impatience to be out. The other cage contained not hunters but talkers – the mynahs, starlings and parakeets of that morning’s procession. When their door opened their tongues moved in no excitement. And now the sickly music stopped in the middle of a bar and there was an almost inaudible warbling from the throat of Aderyn. At once, easily, in senior order of rank – emperor’s merloun first, knave’s kestrel last – the hawks left their cage and soared to the height of the tent, there to flutter on the mount for five seconds. The mouths of the audience, chewing suspended, were up and open, as if to catch the droppings. Then, this time in junior order, so that the kestrel was first, they stooped gracefully on their meat, each taking one morsel, and ended on their long perch one at a time, an interval of a second between each landing. The band played fourteen chords, one for each bird, in three-four, crotchet at sixty M.M., the synchronization as though oiled. The final chord was an imperial fortissimo for the merloun. They sat still, unmoved by the performance, bored. A feather or two twitched like a nerve when the applause started. The applause was long and very loud. Gaunt and stony, Aderyn made a slight head movement of acknowledgement.

  Now it was the turn of the talkers. They flew from their cage on a different signal – a sort of crooning sob, very quiet – and at once ranged themselves, in no particular pattern, on the opposed perch. Aderyn snapped thumb and finger. Without rush, the birds announced their names, one at a time. I forget the names; let us say they were: Iris, Angus, Charles, Pamela, John, Penelope, Brigid, Anthony, Muriel, Mary, Norman, Saul, Philip, Ivy. Then, all together, they began to make an astonishing noise which, in a moment, I was able to interpret as the noise of flying aircraft. For the hawks rose in group formation, the merloun as group-captain, split into two squadrons, then into four flights, and began to swoop down as if to pick the eyes of the children, who were nearly all in the front seats. There was delighted fear and then greater applause than before. The hawks took another reward of a meat morsel, then settled again, indifferent, on their long perch. The talkers, so far, had been fed nothing. To Llew I said, clapping my hands raw: