‘All crap,’ Dryfeld announces, unnecessarily.
‘You guys!’ Mossy remarks, world-weary, but with something of admiration in his tone. ‘You fucking guys.’
He succeeded in spearing a spectacularly colourful glob of snot and prodded it across the counter. It was speckled like granite. He’d probably have it set into a signet ring.
‘You’re too fucking much.’ He killed a bottle of room temperature Lucozade, spun open the cap on another.
Dryfeld, totally ignoring the prices inscribed in the books, which bore no relation to their value, at auction, by catalogue, or any other method of trade known to humanity, started to put a heap of ‘possibles’ on the counter, ‘for negotiation’. He’s quite prepared to talk it through to dawn; or until the first shop opens in Hendon. Or until Mossy’s screaming cells demand another anodyne fix. Whoever talked about getting high hadn’t met Mossy. He absorbed, sweated, continued. He looked like an ill-shaved bison but he had a will that could only be measured in geological time. His stock might need carbon dating, but he wouldn’t crack.
First edition dealers are interested in nothing but condition, they couldn’t care less about the title or the contents so long as the book is fine, mint, untouched, intact, a second time virgin: they wouldn’t have a prayer here.
But Nicholas Lane is resilient, he starts to work through a mess of Horner’s Penny Stories for the People, so well-tanned they’re oven ready; pausing to examine one copy closely. He hasn’t blinked since they got out of the car: his pupils enlarge by a couple more points. He snatches up the whole pile, putting them under his arm. Then rapidly selects a hand of terminally distressed Austin Freemans, a ‘Lost Race’ yarn, lacking front free endpaper, a romance set in Burma, and a Jonathan Latimer paperback for his own use. Nicholas Lane and Dryfeld were remarkable figures in the book trade: they could both read, a book a day, between shops. The speed of Lane’s decisions was breathtaking and those who know him will recognise that he has made a find. All of the other choices are wrapping paper and can be painlessly junked.
The Late Watson is somewhat languid. The shop looks uncomfortably like a diagram of his stomach. He began to hallucinate. The room extended into the dreadnought hulk of Ripon Cathedral. It was raining, or the roof was melting. The pews were stacked with untitled proof copies, a thousand to every row, and somewhere in amongst them Graham Greene’s own copy, the original version, of Brighton Rock, with all the period racism not yet expurgated. He needed to run his head under a tap. He blundered through the main body of the shop, up some steps, into the back room.
The bowl of the lavatory was filled with painted female faces. Titles like Blue Blood Flows East, Lady – Don’t Turn Over, floated sodden on the surface. The Science Fiction titles were spread over the floor, along with a good supply of used and unused needles. Crunch across them, like walking on locusts. There is no light, he has a torch in his pocket, ready for winter morning markets, for nipping into forbidden cellars and peeping through the keyholes of locked rooms. Spots a tolerable copy of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, published 1985 at £9.95 and modestly marked up by Mossy to £15. That’s OK. He can get £40 for it. Picks up half a dozen others to jettison when they negotiate. Back to the shop, one sleeper, an inscribed copy of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor for a fiver: which brings him up to his day’s target.
The sole advantage of Mossy’s shop is that he does not offer coffee to dealers. This form of politeness has wrecked more stomachs than the combined forces of all the fast food dead-chicken combos.
‘You’re putting me on, man. This lot comes to £238 – I’m saying you can have them for £210. Two hundred. And ten. Pounds. What do you want, man, me to give them to you? For Chrissakes, man!’
Mossy’s indignation is perfectly assumed, almost genuine. He falls back, breathless.
Dryfeld, unmoved. ‘£60. Best offer.’
‘Get out of here! You know what they catalogue at? Are you serious?’
‘Sixty quid. Take it or leave it.’
‘I’m giving you nearly three hundred fucking quids worth of books, where else in this world are you even going to see these books? Giving, at £200. What you want? Bastard! You want to fuck my wife and kids as well?’
‘Sixty quid.’
Mossy swills Lucozade, dribbling orange bubbles into the cleft of his chin. Shrugs, half turns, appeals to the narrator, to Nicholas Lane who is performing various self-contained operations with cigarettes, resinous shavings, and a box of Mossy’s matches.
‘OK, guys, back to my house. Time? You’ve got time. Where else is open? My house. I’ll show you more stuff. Can you believe him? A fucking skinhead gorilla! £120 for three hundred pounds worth of books on fucking Red Indians, I throw in the needlework. Listen, man, don’t think you can tell me anything about Indians. I took courses with Olson at Buffalo, man. The fucking Library of Congress would fly over at that price. You want me to ring them?’
He grabs the amputated telephone and shoves it in Dryfeld’s face.
‘Bastard still wants to fuck about. I should have killed him the last time.’
‘Sixty.’ Dryfeld paces, uneasy in a room without newspapers.
You can climb up from the river through narrow passageways, where Dryfeld’s shoulders brush the algae from the damp walls, grey snow-melt leaking into Nicholas Lane’s paper-thin shoes; in spasm, through the secret intestines of the town. They pass, and ignore, the slumped shadow of Jamie, a smear on the pub window, dosing himself with Jamesons and cola chasers.
Mossy Noonmann’s wife is not made radiant by the prospect of her husband returning, no deal set, three half-crazed book-dealers at his heels, with their bundles of paper, their saurian determinism. The TV-set is on but the rest of the furniture has been wasted. Two small pale children of undetectable sex sit a yard from the set, not noticeably well-fed, though their unmatched pyjamas are witness to meals having been taken at some point in their recent history, involving plentiful use of the sauce bottle. Lank-haired and mute: they outstare the electronic fishtank.
The wife withdraws to practise what sounds like an advanced course in arc-welding in the kitchen: the negotiations continue. Dryfeld takes out a fat roll of notes and starts counting the sixty in fivers.
‘I’m asking one hundred pounds. You want to steal four hundred pounds worth of books, OK. Steal the fuckers. It’s your karma, baby.’
Before Mossy can grab the cash his wife’s hand appears, it’s gone, she’s gone, his performance of animation collapses, he nods out, shivers, turns down the sound on the TV; the carnage and mania is leaping in rabid cuts behind him, as if it was all escaping from just inside his eyelids. The children do not object, or move. The wife materialises once more.
‘Dick-head!’
Turns the sound back up, to the top. The windows shudder. The front door has been left open and the demented yelps and barks invade the otherwise silent street.
Dryfeld packs his Smithsonian Indians into a canvas holdall, straps running underneath for extra strength, sign of the professional runner.
Nicholas Lane can sense the narrowing of the lumen of the pylorus, the first delicate, almost sensual, ripplings of pain, the foretaste of vomit in the throat, Proustian recall, Glaswegian Dal Mosola about to resurface. He goes through the palest form of argument, cutting Mossy’s tenner to eight quid, agreeing a bulk price for the Penny Stories that anybody less desperate than Mossy would have junked to Oxfam. He makes it onto the frozen grass and sprays two or three pints of old food into an ornamental flower-bowl.
‘Spewed up his ring,’ thought the narrator, a phrase picked up in Walthamstow, of uncertain meaning, but strong displacement. ‘Spewed up his ring.’
Recorded violence and actual violence mix, faked blows and authentic shuddering of violated flesh: they head gratefully for the car, each with his secret triumph of books.
The car is waiting for them, useless. They stand around it, unable to get in, or on; Jamie in sleep, his head upon the bar-room
table.
The windows of the bar are mercifully frosted, keeping out all sight of the stone walls, this sandblasted town. Jamie wakes and fumbles for one of Nicholas Lane’s cigarettes. He has a lighter but it doesn’t work. There never was a case-hardened smoker who had a match. They measure out their days in bumming lights. Never was a true nicotine junkie who had a watch. It would be superfluous: they can weigh time in their craving for the burnt tongue, a lick of old ashtrays.
Dryfeld having flung his purchases into the holdall has no interest in examining them. He’s made his phone call. They’re sold. He’ll have his money before dawn and be on the Penzance train by breakfast-time. A bundle of still crisp newspapers.
He starts scribbling in the ring folder. His handwriting has been accurately described as looking like ‘poor quality knitting’. It has the advantage of being unreadable, even to him.
And though he can’t do two things at once he does them so closely together that they blend into one crumb-spattered shuffle. He writes, frowning, lips moving, breaks off, devours, tears up a plate of thick-cut cheese sandwiches. The virulent orange grains of moistened cheese rolling out of the corners of his mouth, generous beads of milky spittle. Savage vegan.
The narrator’s books are bagged also. And of no further interest. Once bought he’d sell them to anyone, for anything; preferably several times over. They are the stigmata of guilt, the visible sign that he remains in this tawdry profession: he does not have the spirit, yet, to be proud of these fine and active corruptions. Ancient pretensions glaze him into a sour inertia.
Nicholas Lane, concentrated, subdues the circling vortex of pain drilling into his gut; the true enthusiast. The warrior-knight who dredges up grail treasures out of the dead land, himself dying from open wounds. Gone in the teeth, but brilliant in eye and finger.
He knows that pain is life: every twist and bite flashes another synapse, a connection burns out, keeping his edge sharp. He unstrings the bundle of old papers. Throws back a brandy, hitting the ulcer wound like a shot of salt.
The first point he can reveal is that the outer wrappings bear no direct relation to the contents. A Penny Story, Out in the Wide World by Fannie Eden, fetching cover illustration of wistful young lady, Chatterton in drag, standing outside her attic window looking across the roofs of the city to the unfocused distance of St Paul’s and the sister churches, proves on closer examination to contain two sheets of prophetic millennial rantings pasted over a remnant of the original text.
‘“Master, master,” she cried out, “there’s a villain of a Jew gone up into that picture-place upstairs! He says as how the awful looking pictur’ belongs to him ’cause he lent the gentleman money on it, and he is carrying it away.”
Molly started up with a cry of dismay.
“Hush, Molly, do not trouble yourself! There must be some mistake,” Dr Maitland said. “Stay here, and I will see this Jew fellow,” and he turned and left her.’
A number of other yarns, involving tigers, boat races, abandoned waifs, bearded card-players, were left naked with no cover, no illustrations, no advertisements.
Some covers had been recklessly taped to quite alien interiors, some fixed with rubber solution into brown wrappings. But it had been the name of Beeton’s Christmas Annual and the search for the magic date, 1887, that had settled the purchase for Nicholas Lane.
There were copies; but they were split and scattered. Taped into a romance by H. Fitzgerald entitled Madeline’s Temptation was what appeared to be some version of the legendary Christmas Annual with the first printing of the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet.
The covers had gone, there were some annotations to the text. The date ‘1878’ had been altered to ‘1888’. The word ‘Nettley’ had been altered to ‘Netley’. Nicholas Lane paused to flick a globe of dry white spittle from his lips.
‘At worst,’ he said, ‘a variant. At best, a unique issue. A trial copy, or a proof of some kind. It could be the book that Ward Lock intended to publish, mentioned in Beeton’s Annual, but which has never been located.’
‘How much?’ enquired the always direct Mr Dryfeld.
‘Ten to twenty. Grand. Plus.’
Jamie woke with a spastic jerk, spilling the dregs of his whisky over the pages, which Nicholas Lane mopped frantically with an indescribable handkerchief. He ran out, now, his last long-reserved line, and snorted, while Jamie gazed on, waiting, unsuccessfully, for the invitation to take a brotherly poke.
‘Twenty grand, up. Way up, if it comes to auction in New York.’
The febrile and inhumanly sharpened and quickened brain of Nicholas Lane had perfect recall of every catalogue, article, book he had ever had through his hands. ‘Nettley’ was a spelling that didn’t exist in any known version of the text. He had, once again, uncovered a piece of history, a true splinter of the 1880s. And this was it, this was the big one, the white whale, the reason why we’re all in the game: he’d brought it in, finally, the ultimate score. And it was for sale.
Once Dryfeld had found the Department of Health and Social Security and shoved his anonymous document denouncing Mossy for child-abuse through the letterbox there was nothing else to do. They had burnt this place to the ground, there were other places to look for.
2
A wharfinger is a man of business, and eats accordingly. John Gull, Senior, his back to the land, attended to his breakfast with a severe and methodical concentration. He did not make two cuts where one cut would serve. Even the flesh of swine could be brought to use, divided in moral symmetry, tasted, swallowed, the worthy elements put to work, the worthless burnt in the stomach’s pit, stamped down, expelled: the sheep parted from the goats.
His great head like a trophy, unmoving, eyes fixed on the panels of his door, as if waiting for the day’s commandments to appear there; while, secretly, his hands served him, as his children did, his wife, his labourers. These hands, set off by starched cuffs, were honourably blackened, the nails broken; he was not too proud to exercise his talents, his pride was in the sweat of his brow.
His fist, like a pale crab, went among the warmed meats, slither of kidney, liver, blood-sausage, layered on thick muscular segments of potato. He chewed vigorously, exercising an already powerful jaw; animal fires became his fires. There was no pleasure of the senses in this. Work was life, life was work. ‘Blessed is he who has found his work.’ The weak must serve the strong, and be protected, as children served their parents, as women served men, as men served God: that savage and wonderful darkness.
His strong square teeth split the eye of an egg, squeezing the unfertilized life onto his tongue. He nodded assent as his wife, Elizabeth, lifted the kettle from the hob and brought it to him for his final cup.
He drowned the well-mashed food with scalding fern-water tea.
Young William watched him. The child was silent as the man. His stillness remarkable, utterly contained, acknowledged by his father, who allowed him to remain, standing, his chin at the edge of the table.
John Gull smoothed the cord of his moleskin waistcoat over a full but obedient stomach. A man of business. And the creature of his God. Above him, on the wall, a wooden board had been hung, no mere decoration, the legend burnt into its varnished skin: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might.
Black uneven marks. Runes. Sticks floating in gravy. The board balanced above John Gull’s head like a conjurer’s hat. These were shapes that could work miracles, could change the house into a boat. William saw his father above him, elbows upon the table, a man-tabernacle, his head in a helmet of letters.
The morning lightened, it was time to work. The sea was in the river and the river over the land. Rime and fret and rain, tides drifting in air, an unshaped world of ditch and channel. There were fish in the trees and owls swimming.
His house was an upturned boat. There were no others. We are the only people in the world, thought William. We are the first ones, the chosen. This is our Ark. The world is wat
er. But we shall be sent out over all the great wide fields of the ocean: we shall look upon God’s face. We are his Gull.
Aloga taimma a gaoow liifbb a baogy ho livin a hao s. The sharp point of the stone cut out a white trace against the slate. Sunlight flashed and darted on the estuary. William’s fingers pushed the stone up and down, taking pleasure in gouging a track for the letters he knew, but could not read.
‘T-t-taking a likeness, I suppose? T-t-this fine Armada of your f-f-father’s. Very cred-it-able.’
The tall shadow across his work stopped William. There was more, but now he would not mark it. The man breathed on his neck, warm horsebreath, as he bent to make a show of examining the work.
‘Making a testa met.’
The stranger sniffed at such precociousness and, without being invited, the child showing no sign of rising, sat on the ground alongside him.
‘W-w-will you read t-t-to me from your t-testament?’ He took great care to stress the missing letter.
‘Alongtimeagolivedaboywholivedinahouse.’ He had written no more. But could continue. Most of the slate had been filled, nobody had shown him how to do it: he could do it on his own. There were more slates to be found along the shore. Their edges were sharp, you could cut the heads from fish. You could split your tongue if you licked them.
‘A long time ago lived a boy who lived in a house. And it was big.’
‘And the boy’s n-n-name?’ said the stranger.
William turned to look at him. It was a hot pink man, a man with a naked face who had glass over his eyes, who wore a hat and carried a bag on his shoulder. Who smelled of too much soap.
‘I live in a house,’ said William.
‘D-d-do you live in t-that house?’ There was no other. A line of cottages, solitary, to a purpose, set in front of unworked fields. Landermere. Water around them, reeds, inlets. There was nowhere else.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 2