Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  So the greatest director rears up on tiptoe and strikes a pose, his chin cleaving the breeze. And the minions say ah and yes with the soft assent of moving grasses. And Gog is taken away by the wardrobe lady and fitted out in a smock (made of brown paper) and a pair of cloth britches (made of nylon parachutes) and an iron helmet (made of cardboard) and a wooden pike (made of wood by some error). This war material, when filmed, apparently resembles the real objects more than the real objects do. With time and reality so well suspended, Gog finds himself drawn up in the front ranks of the King’s Men waiting for the clapper-boy to rap his boards together and start the Ironsides charging over the crest of the moor again.

  By Gog’s side, three extras stand, leaning on their pikes. They are the dregs of war, the rejects from national conscription, the epitome of the unfit, a long man and a short man and a tall man. Yet, like soldiers before a battle, they talk of war and wages.

  “John Bates mate,” the long one says to the short one, “it must be time for a tea-break.”

  “I think it be,” the short one says. “But we won’t get a cuppa before the take’s over.”

  “The next take won’t be the last take,” the tall one says. “We shall never see the end of it.” He turns to Gog. “Hullo, mate.”

  “Hullo,” Gog says.

  “Are you in the union?” the tall one says.

  “Mr. Hon Sternheim engaged me,” Gog answers.

  “That Nazi? We’ll see what the shop steward says about that, if you haven’t got your cards. He’ll call a strike, he will. We’ll down tools.”

  “Down pikes in face of the enemy?” Gog says, smiling. “I don’t know what Sternheim will make of that.”

  “He didn’t want to hire us,” the short man says. “But the union made him. Trash, he called us. Refuse. Just ’cause we couldn’t get in the real army. Give him a whole bleeding Panzer Division, and he still wouldn’t be happy. Worse than Hitler, he is, though he calls himself a Yank.”

  “He seems pretty much like you and me,” Gog says. “He may get a bigger wage, but then he’s got more to worry about. After all, he’s got to act like the master, or you won’t fight the way he wants. And if it’s all a flop, he suffers. You don’t. He’s probably more scared than you are about the outcome.”

  “I don’t care how shit scared he is,” the long man says. “I bet he’s not as insecure as us. We don’t know where the next battle’s coming from. The good shooting weather’s nearly over. They don’t want camera fodder in winters. So how do we eat, then?”

  “You don’t have to be here,” Gog says. “You’re not con­scripted. Perhaps you enjoy making films like he does. I think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.”

  “Well, why doesn’t he shoot a solo film?” the short man sneers. “Starring Sternheim, directed by Sternheim, written by Sternheim, produced by Sternheim, one long continual passion­ate close-up of Sternheim kissing Sternheim. It’s all his fault. If blokes like him didn’t offer us occasional jobs, we’d have to settle for regular ones, wouldn’t we?”

  “Perhaps the Battle of Marston Moor will be a bloody good film,” Gog says, “and you’ll have helped to make it.”

  “Marston Moor?” the long man says. “I thought we were waiting here for Agincourt. Day-for-night shooting. And who­ever wrote the script, give Shakespeare a credit, he’s box-office. I was just going to shout, For God, King Harry and St. George, and all that.”

  “No,” the short man says, “it’s the Wars of the Roses. Get you confused, all these battles do. Here today, gone tomorrow, as they say. You never know what side you’re on. One day I was a Saracen, next day a Crusader. You don’t even know who’s winning or losing. It doesn’t matter, really. You just go on slug­ging and nobody tells you what for. One week it’s the Vikings you’re clobbering, then the Normans. Then the Frenchies, then the Micks. Of course, it’s mainly Jerries and Japs we clobber now; but me, I prefer this costume stuff. Except it’s always the same old costume. They’ve only got two peasant dresses in the wardrobe from the Dark Ages to Waterloo. If it’s not a smock, it’s bare toes and a sack. Still, the action’s always the same. Waggle your cudgel when His Royal Mightiness yells at you, step out of the horses’ way, and don’t count your pay-packet, it’ll give you the screaming dib-dabs. Whoever wins these battles, it ain’t us. We just do what we’re told. Smear on the ketchup, count our bruises, lay around for the final corpse shot, then pack up and go home to starve, till the next epic rolls round. And don’t ask why.”

  Through a megaphone, a minion yells, “Action!” And the pikemen lift their weapons in a rattle and hold them forwards. And the Ironsides come charging over the hill and canter towards the King’s Foot. And Gog finds his hands trembling as the armoured men on their heavy horses loom up like bobbing tanks, their progress as inevitable as if they were on tracks rather than hooves. “Run, you fools, run,” the greatest director shouts, and the pikemen drop their pikes and turn tail and begin jog-trotting backwards. Gog stands alone and facing the enemy for a moment, hero and afraid, as the flanks of the horses of the godly Ironsides part on either side of him like the Red Sea waves at the command of de Mille. Then a Puritan captain leans down from his saddle, cursing blue murder. “Bugger off, you big nit! Who do you think you are, Douglas Fairbanks?” And a clout on the side of his head sends Gog reeling and staggering along with the horses, pursuing the fleeing King’s Men in the ranks of the New Model Cavalry, backed by the gold of the City to shatter Court and people, to confirm the rule of London.

  This charge should end the battle of Marston Moor. But on the flank of the Ironsides, a fox whisks past in a rusty puff of hairy wind. By its tail it drags along a yelping string of hounds, speckled in brown and white and black. A horn sounds (not in the script) for the counter-attack of the Cavaliers. And though the official King’s horsemen are streaming away in their gay doublets over the hill, a shock troop of mounted redcoats out of the wrong century and the wrong battle come charging in on the Roundheads’ flank, for King, for County and for St. Reynard. With a yoicks and a tally-ho, the Yorkshire Hunt rams the Roundhead charge and sends it into chaos and milling, rearing and rout, stalling and stampeding. In the maelstrom of hooves and boots, with whinnies and curses clapping like thunder and lightning in his ears, Gog lumbers out of the ruckus, climbs over a hedge and through a ditch, to lie hidden and safe beyond the fray where the bloodlust of the shires is once again wrecking all the best-laid plans of cameras and money and reasonable men.

  There is a rustle in the patch of nettles behind Gog, and he looks round to see the muzzle of the fox staring at him out of the stinging weeds. The fox looks at the man and the man looks at the fox and each decides to leave the other be. But at that moment, through a hole in the hedge, the hounds begin to scramble before they fall yelping into the ditch, Butcher and Bellman and Bugler and True, Slasher and Snitcher and Scurvy and Toast, Trumpet and Trusty and Jorrocks and Blight, the twelve pooches of the apocalypse scratch and scrabble their way from the depths to bark havoc behind the fox and to flush their quarry out of the nettles on his travels again. Gog only has time to glance at the sky above the hedge before it is filled with four­-legged bellies big as convex parachutes sailing over the twigs or merely clearing their path straight through the obstacle. Clods of mud fly like a cluster of soft grenades, hooves rip open the sod like booby-traps. With his position totally overrun by the hunt, Gog only wishes he had a foxhole to cower within. But all he can do is to curl up like a bristle-less hedgehog, his knees to his chin and his elbows tucked in and his hands clasped about his bowed head. Gog would even pray for safety, if he were not afraid that opening his mouth would lead to him gargling a spurt of mud.

  The assault seems miraculously to pass over Gog’s body with­out doing more hurt to him than soiling his smock from neck to hem. He is about to uncurl, when he hears a last and tardy horse galumph into position the other side of the hedge. The harsh voice of a Valkyrie shouts the winged command of the go
ds, “Hup, you bastard!” and the horse blunders straight through the thickest part of the hedge and collapses in the ditch. A great scarlet cuckoo in black bowler and jodhpurs is jounced from her saddle-nest and lands with the force of the yolk of a roc’s egg on the crouching Gog, timorous as any Sinbad. The wind is smacked from his lungs, the senses scattered from his skull, and the neighing of the foundered horse bids him a sweet good-afternoon.

  Gog wakes to see the scarlet cuckoo squatting beside him, smacking his cheek systematically with her black-gloved hands. Then she bends down her ripe, heavy face with the squeezed-grape veins of good living standing out in her full aged cheeks, and she nips the lobe of Gog’s ear with teeth which seem more suitable for the bit than the toothbrush. Gog squawks and sits up, gasping for air.

  “Keep your teeth to your own mouth,” he says.

  The woman lifts her large nose high and hoity-toity as a true lady, who can do as she pleases because even if she were found stark naked pissing in a Bible, the people would only close the holy pages reverently to preserve the mark of the true lady.

  “How dare you speak like that, Gog,” the scarlet bird-of-­passage declares, “to your own mother!”

  The harsh and hensure tone of the woman’s voice stirs a reflex in Gog’s left arm, so that he crooks his elbow over his head as if expecting a rap from her knuckles on his skull for some childish crime.

  “Mother,” Gog says softly, not daring to question, yet equally afraid of binding himself to the stranger by such a lifeline.

  “Your mother Merry,” the ripe lady says. “And don’t you be so insolent as to pretend not to know me! Everyone says I don’t look a day older than when we last met. When was that? About ten years, wasn’t it? Well before the war.”

  Gog looks for a sign of himself in the heavy and creased features of the woman beside him. She is still handsome in her sixties in the glossy, spongy way of a pumpkin left to ripen a little too long, a pumpkin which some near hallowe’en will deliver into the hands of small boys to disfigure with penknives into the mask of monster old age. Yet in the jut of bone over brow, in the spread mouth and puffy nose, Gog can catch a glimpse of himself bloated and unsexed by food and years.

  So Gog bends forwards in duty and obedience and kisses the hunting lady on the veins in her left cheek. “Mother,” he declares.

  “What are you doing,” Gog’s mother Merry says, “dressed in that ridiculous smock? I never thought any son of mine would dress up as a girl, and a filthy girl, too. You look just like a pregnant peasant.”

  “I’ve been playing a part in that film you interrupted, Mother,” Gog says. “I was one of the King’s men.”

  “Well,” Merry says, “it’s a change to hear of you on the right side for once. Has the war knocked all those silly pinkish notions out of you? I suppose fighting alongside our ally Ivan showed you just what a terrible fellow a Red is.”

  “The Russians,” Gog says, “did win the war for us, you know. They bore the brunt of the fighting. I’m just the same, Mother. On my way to London back to Maire, I suppose. And to see how the Labour government’s doing. The people ruling at last.”

  “Sometimes I wonder who was the bastard,” Merry says, “you or that brother of yours. You talk such utter rot I can’t have given birth to you. You’re somebody else’s child.” Then Merry’s face suddenly breaks up into a hundred wrinkles that run rapidly as ripples over her cheeks, so that an irresistible twitch of imitation breaks up Gog’s own set face into a smile. “Cat and dog, aren’t we, Gog my son? Always were. You’re your mother’s boy all right. Just as stubborn, always going your own way like her. But how you can talk of the people ruling when a member of the present misgovernment calls people like your mother lower than vermin, I simply can’t imagine. Unless you’re going up to Westminster to give them a good black eye from me.”

  “I’ll give them a pat on the back from you,” Gog says laugh­ing. “What was that about my brother? Our ship hit a mine on the way back home and I was fished out of the water and my memory’s still drying out. So you’ll have to forgive me and remind me. My brother? He’s not called . . . Magog, is he?”

  Merry laughs. “You haven’t wholly forgotten, have you? Though I must say, it was a bit of a shock, finding you didn’t even recognize your own mother. My little slip-up and your love-a-duck of a stuck-up half-brother, he’s called Magnus. Though you always call him Magog. You told me all about him last time we met. You’d seen him for the first time and he was already a pompous little ass on the make. Not like you and me, my dear. I’m afraid we’re a bit too much of the earth, earthy. Or of the county, county. But Magnus, he’s on his way up. Of course, he wouldn’t see me, his real mother. He pretends he belongs to those stuck-up Ponsonbys who adopted him. Though, my dear, what I don’t know about the Leicestershire Ponsonbys! It makes my little peccadilloes look like the vicar’s sermon to the young ladies’ finishing school. But Magnus, he would rather die than admit he was born the wrong side of the blanket. Though I can’t see that it matters what side of the blanket you’re born on so long as you are born. I mean, it can be very dis­tinguished to be a bastard, depending on whose bastard you are. And Magnus’s dad owned half Shropshire, or was it Worcester­shire, I can never get those western counties straight. I read in a book that mathematics prove we’re all descended from William the Conqueror, which makes us all bastards. I really can’t see what Magnus is fussing about.”

  “I’ll see him when I get to London,” Gog says, “and tell him not to fuss. I always thought I’d find Magog there.”

  “He’s in the Civil Service now. Doing terribly well, or so my spies tell me. Not that you do so badly yourself, since you inherited all that lolly from your great-aunt. I must say, Gog, thanks for that allowance which comes in every month, though I bet that mean wife of yours doesn’t know about it. You’re a good son. It’s nice not being a charity case any more. After all, though I’m pretty spry for my years, I can’t go on and on shaking rich boy-friends like conkers down from the trees. It’s nice to depend on my son, for a change, instead of on some old beast who doesn’t know the difference between his stable and my bed. Ever since that allowance began coming in, I’ve been able to pick and choose a bit. And didn’t some of those old Oliver Hardys get a thumb in their eye! They used to say there was a test to join the Inner Circle of the Hunt. You had to be able to ride three miles, drink three bottles of champers, and ride me three times in three hours. So they said. Now my repu­tation’s better than Queen Victoria’s. And why? Because I can afford to be discreet, my dear. We’re all sinners, Gog, but a steady income draws a blind over the bedroom windows.”

  Gog looks at his mother’s rueful, sensual, sagging face and feels a swell of love go out to this last redoubt of frank reaction and open lust. “You know, Merry,” he says, “you’re a marvel­lous lady to have for a mother.”

  “The very worst mother a child could have,” Merry laughs. “That’s what I’ve always been told. And that’s why you love me, isn’t it?”

  Gog is about to fling his arms round the rosy rogue who gave birth to him, when he feels his right palm driven excruciatingly into the sod. “Will you kindly ask your horse to move?” he says politely to Merry. “It’s treading on my hand.”

  “Satiricon!” Merry says sharply to her fat gelding. “Stop shaking my son by the hoof.” She rises and pulls her horse to one side, while Gog delicately massages the back of his hand and feels his finger-bones one by one to see if they are still whole under the imprint of the iron horse-shoe.

  “My father’s dead, of course,” Gog says. “Was it the First War?”

  “A dirty murdering bog Papist shot him in the back of the head in Dublin,” Merry says, “God rot his soul. I’d have been a respectable woman, but for that. You and your wars. They’re not a matter of men against men, you know. Wars are really fought when men are fed up with being run by their respectable wives in peace. So they up and murder each other, till there’re too few men to go around
and the respectable women have to become whores to get a chance at what’s left. There were times I’d rather have been dead like your dad than what I had to be to get a bit of paté on my melba toast.”

  Here Merry puts one foot in the stirrup and tries to swing herself onto the back of her gelding. “Give me a hand, boy,” she calls, and Gog shoves her astride by hoicking her free instep up on his shoulder, so that she can throw her other leg across the saddle, clipping his ear on the way. “Call in at Cropley Hall down the road,” Merry says, “and you can have a bath and a change and a good long natter with your old mother. And I’ll tell you how Arthur’s doing. It’s been a long time, too long . . .”

  Merry’s words break off in mid-flow as a hare gets up a few yards away and jinks off crazily through the brambles and feathery tall grass. A glaze drops over Merry’s eyes as if they were two balls of sudden porcelain, the toes of her riding-boots both kick out sideways like a jumping-jack’s before falling back with full spurpoint into the gelding’s flanks, and the horse bolts off breakneck down Scawton Moor after the hare. In less than a minute, flippety bobtail and bowler hat and flying mane have all disappeared into a fir grove so that Gog can follow after them slowly southwards, wondering if the saucers of torn turf at his feet were thrown up by hooves vanished a moment or a memory ago.

  XVII

  “Pegs, kind gentleman. Or shall I tell your fortune, sir?”

  So the gypsy girl speaks to Gog as he stands outside the ruins of Byland Abbey, with its arches broken into giant keyholes and the twin stone stumps above its entrance propping up the grey and closed sky. The toppling of time has turned one of the two taller remains of the Christian church into an Egyptian obelisk, the other into a minaret, so that the centuries seem to have con­fused the religions in their decline and fall. Gog turns away from the abbey to the speaker plucking at the sleeve of his paper smock. He sees a tall and thin girl, her black hair agley down to her hips, her skin swarthy as a toad, her soiled red silk blouse ripped carefully as a stripper’s to hint at bare breast and belly, her legs naked under a white draggled petticoat, and her eyes bold and black and slightly askew, so that she seems simul­taneously to be staring at Gog and signalling to an enemy just behind his back.