Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  When the freaks see Gog, they begin to gibber and moan in welcome, agitating their heads and arms in lunatic greeting. The lolling faces holler and the slobbery mouths split open so that the lips seem to peel back and the hands grope and paw at nothing. And Gog sees only the warped flesh of the innocent, who never asked to be born or to be kept alive, and he sees their two trim tidy tucked-in keepers all limber in their uniforms. And he bellows murder and he runs at the nurses. And the freaks huddle together in fright, and one of the nurses begins to scamper back through the wood, screeching, and the other grasps to her stomach a stick-like nodding wraith who clutches her and buries his face in her belly; but Gog picks her up by the waist so that the wraith falls down wailing and he carries her struggling body to a ditch by the side of the path and he throws her in among the nettles and the docks, where nature has been kinder and has grouped pain and antidote side by side. The nurse lies where she is fallen, the wind knocked out of the starched bib between her breasts. And Gog turns back to the freaks, who cluster in a pitiful huddle of despair, clinging to one another and miaowling to the indifferent heaven that has only ignored them all their lives. And Gog shouts, “You’re free, free. Go wander, holy ones, simple ones. Go into the sun, sing, do what you will. I give you liberty. Go.”

  A doughy boy with an old man’s paunch falls and jerks on the ground, convulsive in a fit, his tongue between his teeth and his face turning blue. And one shrunken young man comes flailing towards Gog, beating him on his ribs with no more force to his blows than if they were twigs blown by the wind. “Go,” Gog shouts, “go free. You’re free.” And the freaks cling together, wailing and moaning, refusing to move. And the nurse climbs out of the ditch and staggers past Gog to her charges, her hands already red and puffy with nettle rash. The freaks ring her round in their joy, patting her and stroking her and beseeching her for comfort, and she turns on Gog with the arms of the defective about her like withered ivy about a stone, and she cries out, “Monster. You Monster.” Then she caresses the freaks, saying, “Poor souls, you poor souls.”

  So Gog runs away, weeping through the wood, until the gibbering and the moaning is hushed far behind him. And he stops, his breaths making shards of pain in his panting lungs. And he sees in front of him a sapling twenty feet tall. And he hurls himself upon it in a rage, he pulls its bending trunk this way and that, he wrenches at the bark, digging down his heels and throwing his weight first to the right and then to the left and then backwards and then forwards. And he heaves the young tree out of the sucking ground, jerks it free in a snapping of roots and throws it down upon the earth, as though he were wringing the neck of all creation.

  IV

  On the road bridge over the South Esk river, Gog first realizes that he is being followed. A large black car, driven by a chauffeur, loiters by after passing Gog, who is standing look­ing down into the brown nibbling water, which bites at the rocks beneath a glossy gleam of rhododendrons in a sunken garden under the bridge. The car turns at the intersection of the road ahead and drives back past Gog. He sees the white face of a woman staring out of the back window. He does not notice the car again until he has walked past the two stone lions crouching on pillars that guard the drive to the great tall-windowed house of Arniston, no longer segregated in privacy and pride now that the war effort has cut away its iron gates for scrap metal and has turned its grilles into guns and its servants into soldiers. But as Gog takes the road to his right and trudges up the hill, with a puzzled bearded bullock eyeing him like a hairy Lucifer over the hedge, he sees the car pass the pillars and stop and reverse, dawdling in pursuit of him.

  To shake off the car, Gog decides on a short cut across the fields and moors. He is tiring now, and once over the fence into the meadow grass, he slumps onto his back, resting his head on his army pack. He finds that the only pleasure in walking is ceasing to walk; he feels the exquisite unlatching of his lying flesh. The wan sun eases the lines on his face; a pheasant starts up in a hiccup of feathers. Ahead are coppices on small hills and the scraped hide of the moors.

  When he has rested, Gog eats a little and finishes the water in his bottle, which he fills again in a dark burn with the cattle casting suspicious looks from the brown patches over their eyes at this spy mucking about with their water supply. Gog then follows his compass southward along the edge of a long barbed wire fence, set up to keep off animals more than Germans. A sudden stench of carrion offends his nose. He looks for the corpse of a rabbit or a fox; but he only sees some hundred small trailing pieces of black fur, each one carefully placed on a prong of the barbed wire. As thriftily as the butcher bird impales each of its victims among the small birds on a spine growing on its chosen thornbush and larder, so some farmer has killed and stuck each dead mole on a nail of wire. The govern­ment is probably paying a bounty for mole corpses, perhaps a penny a pelt; the life of a mole is not expensive, considering how much the skin of a dead human costs to drape on barbed wire.

  Beyond the last stone wall of the farm, with its barns lurching about its small grey sides and its trim slate roof like hulking sons about a dapper dad, Gog reaches the first stretch of moor, peat bog, coarse grass, white stalks of rushes among the brown-green turf, blackface sheep used to rough fare and wet hooves. These beasts stop tearing off the grass with the sound of vacuum cleaners to stare at the trudging Gog, the orange tufts in their ears glaring, the jet irises of their yellow eyes thin and horizontal, their dark legs too spindled under their thick grey mat of wool, only their udders and sudden kicking flight belying the ferocity of the horns curving about their black cheeks. Gog makes for an abandoned quarry, where sides of gravel delve a scoop of ochre into the flank of the hill, over which a distant lorry crawls slow as a beetle on the south road. Gog rests again briefly among the iron wheels and levers that flank the abandoned shack of corrugated iron and sacking, which once housed the diggers of the gravel. The machinery is desolate in its uselessness and has taken on the colour of the bleaker patches of the moor, the rusty brown with which the wind and the rain cloak all abandoned things in bare places.

  Once back on the straight road over the green Moorfoot hills, wallowing like stranded whales, encrusted by the barnacled lines of the stone walls and by occasional patches of weedy spruce, Gog notices the black car again behind him. This time, it does not pretend to skulk at his heels; but it drives past him to the crest of the hill a few hundred yards ahead. There the chauffeur stops the car on the grass verge of the road and descends and waits for the approaching man. When Gog is a few feet away, he sees that the chauffeur is a slim youth with soft features and full red lips beneath the peak of his green cap, with a round chest and large hips beneath the green jacket and trousers of his uniform. “Madam would like a word with you,” the youth says, opening the door of the car, which is large and box-like at the back; a glass partition walls off the rear seat in case contamination may come from the driver’s seat; there is a general impression of soft leather and shining metal and polished wood and clear glass that makes the interior of the car seem like the cabin in a yacht.

  Against the far window, a woman sits. She is dressed like the magpie on the monkey-puzzle tree, in piebald black and white, black boots and wide black striped trousers, a chessboard jerkin and a white bowler hat on top of her black hair, which is cut in a helmet about her head, so that its long raven sides fall down past each cheek to her shoulders, while its fringe across her forehead is shaped downwards to a point level with her eyes. The woman’s face is sallow and bland, her lips ripe and swelling under a sharp thin nose, her eyes pale blue under sooted lashes and eyebrows plucked into immaculate arcs that act as flying buttresses to her pointed fringe. “Get in,” the woman says, patting the seat beside her, while the leather gives soft poufs of disgust under her palm. And so Gog clambers inside the black box and settles himself on the soft subsidence of the upholstery and waits, watching the tended face of the woman speak against the back­ground of the rough roundness of the hills, cut off from any con
tact with the interior of the car by the metal frame and glass of closed windows.

  “You don’t know me,” the woman says in a curiously reflective voice. Gog does not know whether her words are a statement, a question or a wish.

  “I don’t think so,” Gog says. As he looks into her eyes of bleached blue, the colour washed away by that light which seems never to have touched her pale skin, he feels as if the cloud in his mind parts to show a rift of sky and then closes again.

  “You don’t think so,” the woman says. “Then you don’t. Just plain don’t. No one can say he thinks he doesn’t know a woman and get away with it – unless he is a stranger.” The woman laughs. “I certainly don’t know you. In those filthy trousers and that ghastly jacket. You look like a tramp. But . . .” she pauses and smiles again the smile that parts her lips without spreading sideways so that no lines of laughter show from nose to chin, “you are a tramp, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Gog says. “That is what I am called, I suppose.” He finds, to his surprise, a certain subtlety of expression coming back to him, a wariness of phrase that the smooth mockery of the woman conjures up defensively in his mind.

  “How’s pickings?” the woman says. “I don’t suppose the black market extends as far as charity. But in this case, though I don’t pretend that these ham sandwiches came out of my monthly pittance of official food, they are all yours. If you can’t gobble them down now, take them away with you. Your need is greater than mine and all that. Have you been tramping long?”

  Gog picks up the packet of ham sandwiches, wrapped in greaseproof paper, which the woman produces from a wicker basket at her feet. “Always,” Gog says, then adds more truthfully, “at least, as long as I can remember.” He begins to cram the sandwiches in his mouth, hardly bothering to chew them before swallowing.

  The woman crosses her legs so that her right ankle swings towards Gog; it is almost as thin as a stick in contrast to the wide turn-up of her black striped trousers. “I wouldn’t care for all that trudging,” she says. “I tried it once in the Landes . . .” She stares at Gog, her blackened eyelids hooding her eyes.

  ‘‘The land?” Gog says, his mouth full of bread and ham. “What land?”

  The woman laughs shortly, almost without moving her mouth. “I was with someone, a big chap, about your size . . .” Again she looks quizzically at Gog, then continues, “He hadn’t any­thing else in common with you. He was one of those intellectuals playing at hikers that you’d meet in every luxurious ditch in the thirties. He used his feet as if the only way to genius lay in getting bigger blisters on his heels. He had to prove he was a proletarian at heart by wearing a hole in his sole and his sock – and his foot, if he had some iodine handy. He just couldn’t get past a peasant without asking him how the grapes were getting along, when he couldn’t tell a vineyard from a cabbage patch. He had to prove that he, too, was a man of the people. And he wasn’t. Oh, I won’t deny his origins were obscure – I call them obscure because people aren’t to blame for their origins, however filthy they are, so I prefer to leave them uncertain. He didn’t choose to come from a Welsh nowhere and he’d got out – not by his bootstraps, he liked people to think that, but by his brains. And once you’ve left the herd because of your intelligence, no perversion of that intelligence can make it accept you back. You may lick a workman’s boot, but he’ll only kick you in the teeth for being a toff. He was highly educated, my big chap, in a strange sort of way. A bit potty, really, he knew all sorts of strange things about times so far back they were better forgotten. There wasn’t a stick or a stone he couldn’t tell you a story about – with footnotes. In fact, after some of his more rarefied flights of fancy, I got so fed up with breathing that pure intellectual air I used to send for an oxygen mask.” The woman paused and shrugged and put on an appealing mouth, slightly pouting her lower lip. “I’m sure I’m boring you. I do ramble on.”

  “Please,” Gog says, happy to have been able to finish his sandwiches in peace. A pleasant stupor of fatigue makes him slump in his soft seat, so that his slight paunch of middle age presses against his waistband. Yet his tiredness does not extend to his mind, where his brain does not cease hunting the coverts of memory to flush the coveys of the past.

  “Well, this other big chap . . . you wouldn’t know him, he was before your time . . . this other big chap, he tried to do an Isherwood and a Spender, you know, up the mountain tops to see if you can find a raison d’être on high. Personally, all I ever get out of the top of a hill, and I couldn’t possibly get higher than a hill, is an overwhelming desire to stay in the valleys for ever. But my big chap made me promise to tramp with him in the Landes in France for a day or two. Of course, he had meant to make it a month or two, sucking in those pine smells with deep yogi breaths, staggering around thigh-deep in sand and ozone, pretending he could scamper over the Pyrenees any time he felt it was his turn to go and win the Spanish Civil War for Stalin, and in the intervals, making love to me under a waxing moon. Well, the first night I gave in. The result? The few square inches that the mosquitoes left for tomorrow were skewered by pine-needles. Where I wasn’t a sore, I was a scab. So I struck and took a taxi straight back to Biarritz to recover. The poor lamb, I must say, he didn’t understand about a strike so close to home. He used to spend so much time telling people they ought to join the unions and wave the red flag that he hadn’t a clue about what to do when he got an individual striker on his hands protesting against all his back to nature nonsense. For four days, I didn’t see him. He went off in a huff in the wilds. I took all his money, naturally, he didn’t need it if he wanted to play at getting away from it all. I wasn’t out of the bath for three and a half days, and on the fourth, just as I’d picked up a poor waif and stray, fleeing from a life of idle luxury because it really was too gruelling, the big chap wanders in, all covered with burrs and complexes and stinking like a goat. Well, I forgave him, what could you do, and he really was rather sweet when he was jealous. And after that, I never heard a whisper from him about the great outdoors or best foot forward, we’re all toilers beneath the furs. I only had to say, Gog . . .”

  Gog has been looking out of the car window at the hills, noting the aimless sheep pick at the grass and amble jerkily over the occasional rocks. At the mention of his name, he jerks round.

  “Yes,” he says, “you were saying?”

  “Gog is your name, isn’t it?” the woman says. “It’s tattooed on your hand. I thought you weren’t listening. It’s not very polite, when you’ve broken my bread . . . as my big chap used to say so crisply and Christily . . . it’s not very polite not to listen. But, of course, tramps can hardly be expected to have manners.”

  “I’ve stayed long enough,” Gog says. “I thank you for your food. But giving food to somebody doesn’t give you the right to give advice.”

  “That’s a shrewd answer,” the woman says. “You haven’t lost all your wits. You might even have had an education, mightn’t you, big chap?”

  Gog looks at the woman beside him, wondering why she is taunting him. He presumes that he must remind her of her past lover. She has a crush on big men and can afford to track them down.

  “Thank you,” Gog says, rising abruptly. He opens the car door and turns away. He feels a vicious pinch on the back of his arm and swings back to face the woman. “Why did you do that?”

  The woman is lounging back in her seat, giving no sign that she has made the least movement.

  “What?” she says with casual innocence.

  “You pinched me.”

  The woman laughs. “You should pinch yourself to stop dreaming, big chap.”

  Gog stares hard at the woman, then turns to leave the car again. This time he feels a sharp kick on his left buttock that sends his face lunging into the metal jamb of the door, so that he loses his balance and falls back on the seat of the car. He swivels round furiously, to find the woman sitting in her previous position, her legs crossed and relaxed.

  “Clumsy, aren�
��t you?” she says. “But then you aren’t used to getting in and out of cars.”

  “Do you deny you kicked me?”

  “Please,” the woman says. “I’m really not quite that vulgar. I did once kick a dog for a bet, but the poor pooch turned up such a piteous face at me that I swore to use my toes thereafter for nothing but painting nails on.”

  “You kicked me,” Gog says.

  “I did not,” the woman says in a bored voice. “I had no motive. And I’m not mad. I don’t do things without a motive.”

  Gog looks into the bland pale face of the woman. He sees that the crowsfeet about her eyes have been smoothed away by some sort of grease disguised by powder; every wrinkle that can give interest or age to her face is hidden under a mask of matte paste. Even when she speaks, she is careful to push out her lips as though kissing the air; this pout prevents lines from forming at the corners of her mouth.

  “You may have a motive,” Gog says, “which I don’t know.”

  “If you’re so smart,” the woman says, “why are you tramping the roads?”

  “I want to,” Gog says.

  “No one wants to tramp,” the woman says. “They tramp because they haven’t got a decent alternative – like a sensible life with a wife at home, for instance.” Again she looks at Gog with a hint of interrogation.

  “I don’t agree,” Gog says. “I may have an alternative. But I don’t want one. I’m tramping to London, because that’s what I want to do right now.”

  “London,” the woman says. “You’re going back to London?”

  “Have I been there?” Gog says. “But why should you know? Perhaps I have.”

  “You’ll take a long time to arrive,” the woman says, “at the rate you’re going. I presume you’ll walk the whole way. Too proud to accept lifts and all that.”

  “I’ll walk,” Gog says. “I need to find out various things. Each day I tramp, I’ll find out a little more.”