Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  The gypsy girl protests her poverty, she weeps at the Fat Girl’s feet, she swears by every oath of heaven and hell and by many a curse heard in neither place, that she has no money, not even a tanner. But the Fat Girl is hard as a churn for all her appearance of being a mountain of butter. “If yer’ll not pay,” she says, “we’ll wait in caravan with yer mardy Mugger. Yer might as well lift us on way ter York. Happen yer’ll find soom quids theer, happen not.”

  So the Fat Girl bends and lifts the fallen Mugger in her voluminous arms and carries him up the caravan steps into the yellow interior of the wagon. And Gog follows her inside, while the gypsy girl gets onto the driver’s seat and starts the horse on a slow walk towards York, pulling the six humans on their way if the Fat Girl is counted as three.

  Once Gog enters the caravan, he feels that he has stepped into a miniature theatre. Along the wooden sides of the single moving room painted in red and yellow, two leather-topped benches are fixed, one of them ending in a wrought-iron stove with a chimney that projects through the roof. The bed at the end of the caravan is a small stage, inbuilt between a proscenium arch of plumed wood with two red curtains gathered at head and foot, ready to drop across the profiles of mattress and ochre coverlet that rest on the long cupboard beneath. Every cranny has been converted into a space for sitting or eating or sleeping or stowing the petty baggage of existence.

  Ahead of Gog, the Fat Girl is laying out the Mugger, a huge black length that scarcely fits the bed which can be no greater than the width of the caravan. As Gog turns to rest on one of the leather benches by the slatted side of the vehicle, he sees a little window cut into the wood and framed with polka-dot curtains and a pelmet no bigger than a frilly ribbon – the only superfluous thing in the whole small room that clops and sways by the tall hedgerows. A caw makes Gog look back towards the entrance door, which is constructed in two flaps like a stable’s. There he sees a pair of wooden cages hanging from the roof. From one, a raven with clipped wings regards him with tilted head and bold-bright eye. And in the second cage, a fox desperately circles, chasing its own tail as if it could escape by entering its own rump and burrowing to safety down its intestines. Gog thinks he recognizes the fox as the one chased by the hunt; perhaps, in seeking refuge from hound and horse and horn, it has found only the slower death of bar and gate and peg.

  Gog leans over towards the fox’s cage and slips the twine loop that secures its latch. The fox bursts out, falls scrabbling on the floor, and scurries out of the doorway, red brush whisking into the nettles of a ditch. The raven, however, does not take kindly to release. It considers the open door of its cage, then uses its beak to pull the door shut and put the twine loop back into place, cocking a knowing eye at Gog as if telling him that he will not get rid of this black-feathered spy so easily by the offer of mere liberty to limp about defenceless with docked plumes.

  “War’s bashed yer oop a bit,” the Fat Girl declares. “I doant think I’d fancy yer like I did oonce, if it weren’t fer ole times. ’Ow’s Arthur?”

  “Arthur?” Gog says, while words such as Lancelot and Bors and Gawain pound into his skull with each clip of a hoof outside.

  “Our boy,” the Fat Girl says. “Doant play mardy. Yer remember ’im. I know yer does. ’E’s in school oop way yer’ve coom from. Yer’ve been visitin’. Yer sly ’un! Yer doant need be with Rosie. I’m joost simple coontry maid what all world takes in.”

  While she speaks, the Fat Girl is padding about the room, tapping and listening at each slat on the walls and twisting the small rosettes that hide the joins in the wood.

  “Yes,” Gog says, “I did see a boy who could have been my son. Arthur, you say? When was he born?”

  Gog sees the boiling plum duff of the Fat Girl’s face break open in joy as if a great hot bubble has burst in her mouth. Her fingers have found a rosette which turns. She pushes the nearest slat, a section of which revolves outwards. Then she stuffs in a pudgy hand and pulls out the plum, a small leather bag tied with a thong. When she peers inside the bag, her whole face pops and explodes with glee. She tucks the bag away in some recess under the awning of her skirt, then she closes the slat. “That’ll learn ’er,” she mutters. “ ’Er’ll wish ’er give me five pound, all reight.”

  “You can’t steal whatever’s in there,” Gog says. “It may be all they’ve got. You’re always saying, Honest and fair’s fair.”

  “Hoosh,” the Fat Girl says, rummaging in a cupboard and throwing some corduroy trousers and a red shirt and a tatty jersey across to Gog. “Put on soom Christian clothes. Fair’s fair all reight, so long as it’s them treatin’ yer fair. But fair’s unfair, if yer’s but a poor coontry maid in wicked world. Do unto others what they woold do, Good Book says, but if yer do what they woold do yer’ll be done proper. Me, I do unto others what they woold do, but I do it first.”

  Gog puts on the Mugger’s spare clothes, which fit him tolerably well, then he begins to put on a pair of the Mugger’s socks and boots, which are tucked under the stove. “You’re not quite such a simple country maid as you make out, are you, Rosie? I should think when you get to the city, you’ll teach them a thing or two. Incidentally could you spare me a couple of quid? I’m out. And I did win the fight, after all.”

  The Fat Girl looks in her bosom, finds a single half-crown, and passes it to Gog. “Look at simple mardy me. Ruinin’ mesel’ fer a great git what ruined me. Yer didn’t win feight, Low Crooked did. An’ ’oo put Low Crooked in yer ’and? I shooldn’t give yer a lead farthin’, but me ’eart’s pure gold.”

  “If your heart’s pure gold,” Gog says, feeling the bruises on his neck with one hand and pocketing the solitary coin with the other, “I understand why you’re giving none of it away. Some people have milk in their breast, you’ve got a bank vault.”

  “Yer say that,” the Fat Girl says threateningly, “after all yer’ve doon ter me? Theer yer weer, wicked squire an’ all – it doant fool me yer callin’ yersel’ a stoodent – an’ yer coom up ter me perlite as a daisy an’ say, Wheer’s way ter Derby, miss? An’ next mo I’m rollin in ’ay, doant know ’ow fer life of me I ever did get theer. Ain’t all bootter an’ cream bringin’ oop brat on yer own, with father away gettin’ married ter French tart. Yer paid brass regular, I’ll say, but it wasn’t same. No dad aboot t’ ’ouse. Yer made me what I am, Gog, so ’elp me. An’ if I ’ave ter look after mesel’ in wicked world, yer learned me all reight.”

  The caravan passes through the grey stone walls and red roofs of Coxwald, the name of the town mounted on an old millstone that grinds flour no more, its use almost a forgotten memory. And hard as Gog tries to recollect something about the Fat Girl, his mind jibs at the thought of himself coupling in any hay with such a jellied Everest, even in the sharpest lust of his forgotten days of whisky and wild oats.

  “You like conning city folk, Rosie,” Gog says. “You’re not conning me, are you? I was mined, you know, I don’t remember very well. I don’t even know for sure if I have a son, and certainly not whether he’s yours or not.”

  “ ’E’s yers, all reight,” the Fat Girl says fiercely. “An’ mine. ’Appen mind’s like pocket, ain’t it? If it’s got ’ole in it, yer can say all yer brass slipped oot, an’ yer doant ’ave ter pay fer what yer’ve ’ad. ’Ow coold I con yer, Gog? If yer’ve seen Arthur, yer’ve seen ’e’s yers. ’Appen ’e coold ’ave ’ad other dads, an’ ’appen I took fer ’is dad a gentleman like yersel’. But nature’s foony, like. An’ it looks like ’e’s yers after all. Ain’t no con, Gog. It’s t’ loock of t’ kip.”

  “I’m sorry, Rosie,” Gog says, “I simply didn’t remember. You must have changed a bit in fifteen years. Arthur’s about that, isn’t he?”

  Rosie sits on the leather bench opposite Gog. She seems to spread over the entire length of the caravan which takes a dangerous tilt to the left, so that the rim of one of the wheels scrapes the outer slats. “Sit central, you gorgio cow,” the gypsy girl shouts from above and Rosie settles hersel
f on the bending floorboards of the caravan to restore a semblance of equilibrium. Her bulk totally fills the space between the benches, so that Gog’s calves are enveloped in a deluge of thigh. Rosie sighs. “I moost ’ave put on a pound or two,” she admits.

  “I didn’t promise you anything, did I, Rosie?” Gog says. “I mean, I didn’t let you down particularly.”

  ‘‘Arthur weer more’n I bargained fer,” the Fat Girl says, “but I always knew yer wooldn’t make no ’onest girl oot of me. Yer gob weer always open. I didn’t lissen. I liked way yer gob moved an’ yer cooldn’t be kissin’ all t’ time, coold yer? Yer used ter go on, ’ow yer ’ad ter get back ter t’ people. But it weer only way of sayin’ yer wanted ter ’ave me. Yer talked of roonin’ away ter Australia, t’last frontier yer used ter say. We coold ’ave seventeen brats theer, yer said, an’ we coold people t’empty earth. But I’d still cough after every time, ’opin’ I’d ’ave none. Then one day, yer oop an’ gone back ter books an’ stoodyin’. Fact is, yer weer off ter Gay Paree an’ tarts. I doant blame yer, Gog. Yer helped pay fer Arthur. But curds an’ whey doant mix, do they, tho’ both’s milk.”

  “I’m sorry, Rosie,” Gog says. “Still, Arthur’s off your hands now at school. Who looks after him in the holidays?”

  “Yer ma Merry,” the Fat Girl says. “I like ’er. ’Er’s real lady. Yer know what ’er said when ’er first saw Arthur? Gog’s little bastard, ’er said. Boys’re better that way.”

  A jealousy of his unknown bastard brother Magnus clots Gog’s belly on the sudden. Does his new-found mother Merry really love the smart-alec civil servant more than him, her legitimate child? Gog stares out of the open flap of the door as the caravan passes a small lake, sporting royal swans and muscovy ducks in the convenient alliance of the Second World War. Even the hedges of the great priory with its entrance hidden by gabled stables are clipped into a menagerie. Foxes and dogs and geese and deer stand in a line of green privet on the hedge-top; the careful clippers of the monk gardeners have made the lion lie down with the lamb in a vegetarian Utopia. “You’re not doing too badly for yourself now,” Gog continues. “At least, my mother’s taken the little mistake off your hands. She adores bastards. Why, it looks like I’m rather worse off than you are.”

  “Yer’ll be set oop cooshy when yer’re back in Lonnon all reight,” the Fat Girl says. “Yer’re not playin’ fer real now, no more’n yer weer playin’ fer real when yer first met me. Yer’ve got yer ritzy French tart an’ big ’ouse in Lonnon. An’ yer moost be rollin’ ter send me what yer do regular fer Arthur. I’m joost simple coontry maid but I ’ope I do ’alf as well as yer in Lonnon, when I get theer.”

  “If you play the simple country maiden like you do up here,” Gog says, “you’ll whip the tiara off Her Majesty in two minutes.”

  “ ’Oo’s talkin’?” the Fat Girl says. “ ’Oo’s boots ye’re wearin’?” And as Gog takes a guilty look down at the clodhoppers on his feet, the Fat Girl says, “Takin’ fer yersel’, that’s property, ain’t it? Losin’, that’s larceny.”

  Gog lies down on the long bench of the caravan and the Fat Girl also lies back on the floor, her head supported on the side of the inbuilt bed. Both snooze, with the Fat Girl snoring from time to time in counterpoint to the hooves. Once Gog, overcome by a ravening hunger, rummages in the cupboard over the stove and finds a half-filled saucepan of cold stew containing some indescribable savoury cold meat, which he devours. At other times, between dozes, he watches the countryside slowly retire in a shimmy behind the tail of the caravan. He sees the tall skittles of churns set out on roadside tables waiting for trucks to knock them down and take them away. He sees the farmhouses built now in grey stone and red brick with red-tiled roofs. He sees a pub pass by at Crayke, “The Durham Ox”, black bull hanging at the top of the final hill, down which the rosy houses of the village tumble onto the flatlands that stretch towards York. Once a white Yorkshire terrier follows the caravan for a few yards, parting its wide moustaches for long enough to loose a volley of black yaps after its disturber. But generally, the landscape is little more than an invitation to another doze, as level meadow beyond tall hedge succeeds level meadow beyond tall hedge, and the moors are gone away to the north like a fright in the night goes away in the day.

  A splintering, a cracking, a tearing, and a yelling wake up Gog from a deep drowse. He looks down to see the Fat Girl’s monstrous head and shoulders wedged between her ankles and jumbo feet. The middle of her body has vanished through a hole in the snapped floorboards so that her barrage balloon of bountiful buttocks is scraping and skidding along the tarmac. The Mugger is still out to the world on his bed; but the cart comes to a halt and the gypsy girl soon appears at the caravan door. When she sees her rival at her mercy, she dashes in to fetch the Fat Girl a clout on the left cheek, and then begins on the right cheek, gouging with her nails a tribal mark of four bloody parallel lines. Gog catches her hand before she can deepen the scratches into troughs, and he is bitten in the wrist for his pains. Then the gypsy girl is out of the caravan quicker than the fox. Gog hears her jump onto the driver’s seat and begin lashing at the horse, yelling, “Dearginni! Grondinni! Ta villaminni! Hup and go! Scrape off the lubbeny’s arse till she’s rawer than a rasher!”

  The caravan begins lurching off down the road at a furious pace. “Stop,” Gog howls, “stop!” But he is hurled from bench to bench and wall to wall, unable to keep to his feet in such a pitch and toss. “Pull me out!” the Fat Girl shrieks. “Pull! Me arse, me brass! O me brass in me arse!” Gog seizes her by thick wrist and thicker ankle, though his hands can scarcely get a good grip because they have such a vast circumference to span. He heaves mightily, while the caravan jolts half-way to the sun and three-quarters to the pit, and the shrill shrieking of the Fat Girl and the gypsy girl keen louder than a northern gale through a crack in a tunnel. A sudden plunge of the offside wheels into a hole in the road unbalances Gog, who slips his grip and lurches, flailing helplessly, through the open flaps of the caravan door. He falls in a heap onto the roadway, the hay knocked out of his bale. And the gypsy girl whips up the horse, singing above the wails of the Fat Girl a shrill Romany lilt:

  “Here the gorgio lubbeny see,

  With her jellicle arse on the tarmaci,

  She’ll rue the day with Romany rye

  She dared to meddle with a Romany chi.

  Romany chi. . .”

  So the last sight that Gog has of the Fat Girl is of a pendulous sack of flesh protruding beneath the wheels of the yellow caravan, as it disappears round the corner of the road. The bottom of the sack of flesh jounces and scrapes along the roadway as the Fat Girl is painfully and inevitably reduced in size and to shreds.

  The rest of the way to York is well-marked. Gog merely follows a trail of scraps of canvas and blobs of flesh and blood. Every so often, he finds a piece of leather and a gory gold guinea from the gypsies’ hoard which the Fat Girl stowed unwisely below her skirt. Gog picks up the gold and cleans it on his trousers and collects a fair handful of loot by the time that he reaches the watchtower on the outskirts of York, a large Rowntrees’ Cocoa factory. “The wages of sin,” he murmurs, counting the gold in his palm, “may be the death of poor Rosie.”

  Past the high red jetty of the factory, which breathes out a dark rich belly-washing smell fit to make Gog disgorge all into the scuppers of a ditch, he sees ahead the twin-funnelled stone ferry of York Minster moored on the horizon above the choppy red and black tiles of the city’s houses that break beneath it as ineffectively as wavelets beneath the ribs of a steamer. Now Gog has found his mark, the last three miles between him and the Minster seem as short as a walk down a pier. At one point in the suburbs just before the city walls, the trail of blood and canvas suddenly comes to a stop. In the gutter, Gog finds the spokes and the rim of one of the wheels of the caravan, now broken into twenty pieces. He imagines that the forcible slimming of the Fat Girl and the gallop ended with a spill, needing a smithy and a hospital. At
any rate, there is no sign of Gog’s recent companions on his way to the Minster, and the line of white dashes in the middle of the street is a more certain and reassuring guide than the gory blazes of revenge and loot.

  Just before Gog turns towards the evening towers of the great church, he decides to slake the dryness in his throat that feels as if it were lined with flour. He turns into a pub over which hangs the sign of a large anchor, for some odd reason labelled The Pick and Mattock. Curiously enough, the flukes of the anchor seem to have been used to dig the foundations of a tombstone that is painted in the background. Gog is puzzled by the sign, and when he has ordered his pint of bitter from the pubkeeper, a keg of a man with tattooed arms and the stern civility of ex-petty officers, he asks the reason why.

  “It’s me own pub,” the keeper says, “and a Free House too. Named it meself. I was twenty year at sea, and I allus swore that when I docked for good, I’d walk inland till I met a bloke who said, What’s that pick on your shoulder? And I’d lay me anchor down there in the middle of the land, where they’d never heard of the bleeding sea. And I’d drink meself to death. What’s this? A guinea? A golden guinea? I haven’t seen one of them for many a year, since we was docked off Aden. The Ayrabs won’t have nothing else but sovereigns and guinea gold. And it’s to drink me good health with? Well, I thank you, sir. That’s noble. For it’s a bad health I can drink meself with a whole gold guinea. And if you’re drinking yourself to death, it might as well be quick as slow, the beer’s all the same . . .

  “I’ve already carved me cross for me grave, sir. In whalebone it is, harpooned it meself, you don’t see that these days, either. And you know what it says, sir?

  Here Rests Nelson Smith

  Mariner

  Docked At Last

  NOT LIVETH BUT DEAD.”

  XVIII

  Greyly through the grisaille glass in the grey north transept of the grey Minster, the evening smears its wan oil of holiness on Gog’s eyes. The perpendicular windows called the Five Sisters stand side by side in their obscure transparence, wearing the slender habits of nuns so purged by prayer that all cloth and flesh is translated into luminous pointed shafts patterned with infinite panes of cloud. As rags of silver light sometimes patch the tears in layers of dark mist, so tatters of brilliance here and there break up the grisaille’s innumerable subtleties of shade between near-black and olive-green. Each of the Sisters wears a different pattern on her habit, as abstract as the symbols and keys that may unlock one of the ways through the skiey labyrinth towards the Almighty. Some Crusader in the thirteenth century must have returned with the idea of Islam, that the way to God does not lie through the reproduction of the human face, but through the ascending pattern; and the Crusader made Christian these patterns of the worshipping infidel by enmeshing them in the colours and web of chain mail. Thus the Five Sisters stand in front of Gog in all their glory of grey, chaste in their mysterious clarity, alike in their extraordinary differences, harmonious as a whole but contradictory in every part, the most unearthly hint of heaven ever set up in Albion.