Juggling

by Barbara Trapido

  He could not remember when last he had found any project so intensely involving. And, as he’d worked, two meaningless lines of verse had gone round and round in his head. Round and round, like being trapped inside a revolving door. He could not bring to mind quite where the lines had come from, but for quite a while they would not go away.

  That the topless towers be burnt

  And men recall that face –

  Now where the hell was that from? God only knew, but Mr Cassidy, the art master, had been crazy about his picture. Jago shook off the praise as coming from a pretty indifferent source. Distinctly un-cool type, Mr Cassidy. Liked to wear fisherman’s smocks. So who gave a fucking toss for his opinion? Wheezy old mediocrity. Watery eyes. Facial hair. One of those all-time losers who imagine that a beard is a badge of masculinity.

  Now, as he made his way, sluiced and dressed, across the courtyard, two things dawned upon Jago. The first was that what he had been doing in the art room, was cutting up Pam’s face. The recognition sobered him and left him half afraid of himself. He wondered, suddenly, if he was going insane. Where had all that anger come from? And could anything ever assuage it?

  The second alarmed him even more and hit him like a cold wind. He was aware that something had happened to him that had never happened before.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ Jago said. He was aware that he had fallen in love with the Werewolf.

  At that very moment, he saw Christina. She was some ten yards from where he was walking and she was on her knees, groping on the ground. Her books and papers had fallen from her grasp and had dispersed themselves on a slight breeze.

  Jago promptly pursued them and, having gathered them up, returned them to her. His manner with her was unusually subdued and courteous. The gesture had been one of atonement to the sister of the violated girl.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a little bit damp, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Christina said. She stood up and, for the first time since she had come to the school, Jago hesitated beside her. Then they walked, side by side, and entered the building together.

  ‘I must go,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘No –’ Jago said. He caused her to hover in parting. She sensed that he was stalling. ‘This party of Henry’s tomorrow,’ he said, ‘are you planning to go, by any chance?’

  ‘Well –’ Christina said, and she stopped, feeling herself thrown into confusion. ‘Maybe. I don’t know –’

  ‘Come,’ Jago said. ‘Come with me.’ He hardly knew what he was saying. ‘Come,’ he said again. ‘And bring your sister. That’s if you’d like to.’

  Christina was aware that a weakness at the knees had followed Jago’s invitation. ‘I can’t speak for my sister,’ she said. ‘I think she’s rehearsing tomorrow night. She’s got this concert. You know. Or maybe you don’t? It’s for that church. The one that’s having a birthday.’

  ‘Well,’ Jago said, not knowing what Christina was talking about and hardly hearing the words. He was feeling, at once, frustrated and relieved that Pam, whom he wanted so urgently – so suddenly – was somehow protecting him by her benign absence for just a little bit longer; protecting him from himself, with her mysterious, divine remoteness.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said, affecting a composed semblance of normality. ‘Thing is, I’m “tricking and treating” tomorrow. I and a group of us.’ He smiled at her, the sister of the beloved; an engaging, satirical smile. ‘I and the groupies,’ he said, and he laughed. ‘But we’ll be all done by eight.’

  Christina smiled back at him. ‘The “groupies”?’ she said.

  Jago wondered again whether he was mad. What was he doing? Was he dating Pam’s sister, or what?

  ‘Diminutive of group,’ he said. ‘Hence, “groupie”.’

  ‘You?’ Christina said, incredulous. ‘Tricking and treating?’

  ‘Big fun,’ Jago said, bluffing it out. ‘Big, bigger, biggest. Chris, it’s going to be good.’

  Jago, Christina thought admiringly, had always possessed that flair for turning the tables on relative value. She appreciated a person with the authority to do that. She knew that one word from Jago could change the winds of fashion.

  ‘I’ve a plan to transform the groupies into a clutch of mental cases,’ he said. ‘Just you wait. They’ll be unrecognizable.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Christina said, and she wished, even as she heard herself speak the words, that she could have bitten her tongue. ‘Not if you’re getting them up as mental cases.’

  Again, Jago laughed. He was being inexplicably charming. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But will you recognize me?’

  To her annoyance Christina blushed. She was thinking shakily to herself that she didn’t recognize him already.

  ‘I’ll see you, then,’ Jago said. ‘Dog and Duck, okay? Eight o’clock. Be there.’

  ‘Yes,’ Christina said. ‘I’ll be there.’ And then they parted.

  The Ghouls, the Beata Beatrix and the Sister-Sprite

  Jago, by early afternoon, was in ever filthier mood. He was angry at himself and he had duly modified his Hallowe’en plans to make them less benign. It was his intention, by then, to induce fear in the populace, not to make people laugh. A fire-and-brimstone cleric would be bound to provoke simple mirth. So he would not go as a clergyman. No. He would go as a Nazi brain surgeon. And the groupies would be the gruesome products of his surgical experiments.

  It did not take much to inspire him, once he had come upon a crutch in a skip at the back of the boiler-house. And the Lost Property had, predictably, yielded up a number of old white towels and incidentals. Nor had it been a problem to persuade Marty to prove his daring by stealing a couple of kidney dishes from the medical store, along with something like fifty metres of crêpe bandage.

  It was delightful for Jago to witness how willingly the groupies collaborated in their own discomfort and belittlement. And he accomplished his effects so cheaply. A little joke-shop latex and a tube of fake blood.

  Only Stet had ventured to produce a sneer or two, and had duly been punished by the nature of his costume. True, it was less outspokenly grotesque than the others, but it was certainly destined to be the least user-friendly. Jago – having reduced Pongo to a one-eyed, gap-toothed cripple, with a crutch and an artificial hump, and Marty to a maimed, legless imbecile – felt Stet to be his masterpiece. Stet was a Mummy Man, a cloth-bound cadaver, among mere Brueghel outcasts.

  His concession to Stet had been to allow him free use of his limbs, but this had merely been in order that Stet could push Marty in the wheelbarrow. This last had been Pongo’s spontaneous contribution. He had found the wheelbarrow, new and gleaming, with the toolshed door’s chain and padlock slung carelessly over one of its hand-grips. A small key was fitted into the padlock itself, while a second key dangled invitingly from a little metal ring attached to the first. The head gardener, being a security freak, had always been perceived by schoolboys as constituting a challenge, and the theft was accomplished forthwith. Marty would be in the wheelbarrow, with his legs cobbled up in a sack.

  Stet was stripped to his underpants and T-shirt. He was then wound, head to toe, in crêpe bandages. No inch of him was left uncovered, though, with Jago’s artful readjustment, Stet could see out through tiny apertures in the gauzy film that all but covered his eyes. And Stet himself had managed to work a small, reptilian suck-hole in the latticework around his mouth.

  Jago’s disguise consisted almost entirely in altered speech and body language. He wore steel-framed spectacles from the Oxfam shop and he affected a slight but chilling facial twitch. He wore a white lab coat with steel implements protruding from the breast pocket. His hair and eyebrows were dusted lightly with grey powder. Yet, for all his minimal modifications, Jago had, unquestionably, taken on a new and sinister identity.

  Jago carried a list, fixed to a clipboard, upon which he had entered a few bogus names of ‘patients’. He consulted it before he spoke, icily quiet, as doors were ope
ned to them. His voice was a triumph of understated mimicry; his persona that of a mirthless, teutonic scalpel man. Out in the dark streets, even Stet was intermittently unnerved by him.

  Certainly, the householders were made uneasy by his presence. Any Hallowe’en jollity faded promptly, as doors were opened to them. Residents found that their smiles quickly died on confrontation with that steely gaze. Younger women looked haunted as Jago, with the merest hint of Prussian heel-clicking, reported – impressively deadpan, in his Nazi-butcher accents – that the householder was down on his list of candidates for exploratory surgery.

  ‘Please to schtep ziss vay,’ Jago said briskly. ‘Vee are finding zat procrastinazion ist immer ze sieff of time.’ And he offered an arm as escort.

  The groupies, meanwhile, had had their instructions. Stet was to remain completely silent, while the other two were permitted the faintest, demented moan. Marty and Pongo were softly unintelligible, their mooning, cleft-palate voices producing a sad, unearthly disharmony.

  ‘Some of my previouz patientz,’ Jago remarked crisply. ‘Unfortunate. Most unfortunate. Ze brain, gnädiges Fräulein. Es ist ein complex organ, nicht wahr? I vould like to assure you, Fräulein, that I am having alvayz ninety-zeven per zent succezz. Zis vay, please, Fräulein! Ze vaiting list is long, wissen Sie? Ze Nazional Heltz – ach ja!’

  Then, abandoning the bedside manner, Jago turned, suddenly tyrannical, upon Marty in the wheelbarrow. ‘Ze kidney dish, Dummkopf! Einz, Zwei, Drei.’ And, just as the householders had begun to recollect themselves and to shrink into their doorways, one or other of the Brueghel outcasts swiftly held out a kidney dish containing a few pathetic pennies and one boiled sweet.

  ‘Trick or treat!’ drooled the maimed ones.

  ‘Trick or treat!’ Jago yelled, suddenly maniac loud, the accent slicing sharply through the cold night air.

  Then there were the occasional, spontaneous variations. In one hallway, for example, where Jago spotted the souvenir tack of the Vatican, he explained to the female householder that the groupies had been the unfortunate victims of one-time abortion attempts and that he, personally, had rescued them, in the eleventh hour, from the sluice.

  ‘Vee are needing a little money for ziss valuable vurk!’ he said and, again, the cripples held forth the kidney dish, as the door was shut in their faces.

  The kidney dish was better received by the local publicans and their clientele, who were not only more robust about the Hallowe’en party’s bad taste, but buoyed up by their awareness of safety in numbers. As a result, they readily forked out and drinks were not infrequently offered on the house.

  This meant that the groupies were something under the influence by the time they reached the Dog and Duck. Jago, naturally, was as sober as a judge, but Stet – whose un-conducive costume had made him, in especial, an eager target for free drinks – had developed an unsightly, beery stain around the suck-hole in the bandages. Once or twice, en route, Stet’s burping had induced in Jago a silent, murderous inclination.

  Jago did not at first recognize Christina. She sat, all alone, waiting for him on the wall of the pub forecourt. What Jago saw was a slight, pastel-clad Pierrot figure, who wore a curious, delicate mask made of wire mesh. It was like a moulded, white-painted sieve, touched lightly with angel features. The mask did not so much block out the wearer’s face as transform it and enhance it. She stood up when she saw him and came forward. An insubstantial, dreamlike, androgynous figure. A visitation. For a moment Jago took her for Peter – but not so much for Peter at sixteen, as the spirit and essence of Peter from five or six years back. And then the figure spoke.

  ‘Hello, Jago,’ she said.

  Jago took off the Oxfam glasses and put them in the pocket of the lab coat. He handed the clipboard to Pongo and dusted the powder from his hair.

  ‘God Almighty,’ he said. ‘It’s you. But Chris – that mask. You look extraordinary.’

  ‘It’s a Nicaraguan carnival mask,’ she said. The mask had once been a present from one of her father’s Latin American authors.

  ‘Are you all on your own out here?’ Jago said.

  The mask face nodded at him, hauntingly. ‘My sister’s rehearsing with Peter,’ she said. ‘He’s playing the organ for her.’ For a moment, Jago’s anger almost rose to destroy the enchantment.

  Music was not one of Jago’s subjects. He had never learnt to play a musical instrument. Had he tried it, he might well have found that it came quite easily to him. As it was, he had never given himself the chance. He had sealed his own musical fate many years before when, upon befriending Peter Rusconi, he had discovered that Peter, at the age of eight, could already do two hands together on the piano. It was necessary, at once, for Jago to affect no interest in acquiring such a skill.

  His resolution had been reinforced, shortly thereafter, during a prep school clapping exercise. Peter, on that occasion, had had cause to explain to Jago that different pauses were necessary for minim and semibreve rests. Jago’s musical indifference had thereby been firmly cemented. He had never been comfortable, anywhere, in the role of second fiddle.

  Now, for a moment, he cursed his own shortsightedness, which had allowed Peter Rusconi this additional source of access to the Beata Beatrix. Here he was – he, Jago – with the wrong sister in a pub car park, attended by three drunken idiots, while Peter, with his two-year bloody head-start on the woman, was off somewhere in bloody church, playing the organ for her, as she rehearsed her sacred arias. Exultate Jubilate. Fat bloody chance of that for him.

  He was flooded with zeal to seek Pam out, but he didn’t even know which church. Would it be the school chapel? Definitely not. He’d have known, in that case, about the ‘birthday’. Was it the parish church? The Catholic church? Could it be that she and Peter were rehearsing together in that hideous Roman pile – that Victorian brick and concrete eyesore in the urban back-street? Now that he thought about it, Ms Angeletti must surely, habitually, frequent the eyesore – as did all the school’s Catholic contingent – for her weekly genuflections.

  Jago tried his damnedest, then, to summon scorn. Would Daddy Roland be stretching his ecumenical tolerance so far? he considered. Would he be sanctioning little Peterkin’s entrance there? But of course he would, for Christ’s sake. This was art, after all. This was a concert. This was music. Sacred music.

  Jago was aware of his own violent contradictoriness in wishing at once to pour ridicule upon Roland for his decent, Protestant persona and, at the same time, in wishing to take out for himself letters patent on Pam’s Catholicism. Religion, after all, meant nothing to him. Nothing, except for that childhood vision of his shining, maternal antecedents, lining the road to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela.

  Instead, he smiled gracefully at the dainty sister-sprite before him. He told himself to calm down; that this time everything would be different; that Pam would be forever; that Pam would wait and so would he. And that time no longer had meaning. For Pam, he was willing to go forever in and out of his days, seeking to capture dragon-fire with swords of ice from unknown frozen wastelands.

  ‘So you recognized me,’ he said.

  Christina laughed behind the mask. ‘I recognized the groupies,’ she said.

  The groupies, by then, were acting drunk. Stet had tipped Marty out of the barrow, and Marty, who had succeeded in freeing his legs from sackcloth, was charging it at Stet. Pongo, with his hump still firmly in position, was whirling his crutch somewhat hazardously about his head until Stet snatched it from him.

  Stet had clearly had enough. He was tired of taking orders from Jago and – unlike Marty and Pongo – was conscious of having been duped. Henry Beasley’s party would be getting underway and he wasn’t bloody well going along there wrapped in Matron’s bandages. He needed to get back and change. Meanwhile, here they were, hovering in a bloody car park while Jago – the only one of them who was looking his usual, gorgeous self – was scoring, as always, with a woman.

  ‘Sod this,’ he said
suddenly. ‘I’m off. Anyone coming with me?’ Jago took no notice. He was tracing the outline of Christina’s mask with his right index finger. Then, in a tender, brotherly gesture, he took both her hands in his own for a moment and smiled at her before he let them drop.

  Stet had begun to cross the road. The pub was opposite the south end of the wood that bordered the school on its east side. There was a sloping bank between the road and the woodland which Stet looked about to scale. He turned before he did so.

  ‘Anyone coming?’ he said. There was a sound of screaming brakes as a car veered round Marty who had stepped promptly into the road, pushing the wheelbarrow before him. Pongo laughed delightedly and dashed to join him . . . They clung to each other, laughing raucously. Neither was particularly steady.

  ‘Leave the fucking wheelbarrow, you morons,’ Stet yelled, in a voice not unlike Jago’s. ‘And hurry up! I’m going.’ Marty gave the barrow a shove, which sent it crashing back towards the verge. It landed upside-down, throwing the gardener’s lock and keys into the gutter. The three reviving ghouls then whooped drunkenly as they scrambled up the bank, which was knarled with the roots of trees.

  ‘Idiots,’ Jago said dismissively, his eyes on Christina’s face.

  ‘You ought to move that wheelbarrow,’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous lying there.’

  When Jago addressed himself to do so, the groupies had already managed to grope and scramble their way almost to the top of the bank. The Mummy Man got there first. He was using Pongo’s crutch to assist his cripple comrades in their conquest of the summit. Then all three of them made it to the top and were swallowed up by the darkness.

  Jago moved the barrow. Then he returned, with relief, to Christina. He was enjoying the groupies’ absence.

  ‘You look so amazingly pretty,’ he said. His sincerity quite surprised him. ‘You look so dreamy. Sort of like a mirage. Do you know that?’ Then he went on. ‘What a strange pair of girls you are,’ he said. ‘You and your sister. Really.’