Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  But on the last day in Holyhead on Holy Island before the train will take him to the cassocks of Downforth, Gog runs across the narrow neck of land to Trearddwr Bay pointing towards Anglesey. And from the straits the sea creeps in crook-fingered along the low-lying mud-scratches that separate the hillocks of heather and granite and gorse. And the rabbit-tracks wind and scurry through the furze and the bracken, marked by brown pills of droppings. And Gog follows an inlet as it limps towards the straits, he follows it clambering over the stone walls and squeezing along the bushy ways until he reaches the brackish shore shelving in front of him, half-marsh and half-sand crying with curlew and gull. Crouch in the old familiar tree, the blackened bole of the old oak, charred and improbable, stricken and twisted and burned by some great heather fire or bolt from heaven. And watch, watch over the ridged table of the brown waves, watch the far shore where the trees mass like an army, watch like the Druids that Evans the Latin shouts over in school, Evans the Latin as thin as a ruler but snapped at the shoulder from a cradle-fall, his comma of black hair plastered down in a lick on his forehead, his teacher’s voice fierce and nasal, the holy horror of small boys. “Construe, construe, you, Griffin bach . . . You don’t sit at the top of the form to warm your bum . . . Construe your Tacitus . . . It took the Romans to beat us.” Halting and stumbling, tongue like a finger in treacle, dragging English words out of an alien language that has no relation to normal talk, Gog says, “Hostes . . . The enemy . . . many with many arms all together . . . stand on the shore. Women with black robes . . . with hair, I don’t know, sir.” “All out of place, like your construe,” says Evans the Latin, then he’s all wild and private and onto the old story, the dark story of old Holy Island or Mona which the fools confuse with Anglesey. And Evans raises his arms like the Druids from their white robes to call down fire from heaven and the Welsh women are howling and brandishing torches that flare among the sacred oaks and the Roman legions are massed on the far shore of the straits in a wall of bronze and iron, struck still by the force of magic called down by the Druids making their last stand by their last sacred grove. And the Druids cast mistletoe onto the waters to make the sea boil and bubble as pitch, but the old gods are deaf and Suetonius sounds the trumpets, ha ha, and the men of bronze and iron move into the water with their brass eagles held high, the cavalry swimming by their horses, the legionaries pushing off in captured coracles and timber rafts. And they swim across the straits as steady as the tide and the Druids pray to the gods to swallow them up in the great mouth of the sea. Will ye not listen to the Druids, the oldest and holiest of men of all time, the Druids who sent wisdom to Greece and Persia, the Druids who are the fathers of all religion and the teachers of the Brahmins and the Magi, the authors of all faiths after chaos and before Christ – or so says Dio Crysostom and St. Clement of Alexandria and Evans the Latin? But the gods of the Druids are still deaf, for the Druids have long sinned by following the heresies preached by Magus, son of Samothes and king of all the Britons according to Holinshed. So the sea does not boil nor swallow up the legions as a great mouth, and the Romans ride up the shelving shore on their horses or march in bronze and iron, and the Welshmen cast their clubs and spears and rush at the Romans in the breakers, but the lines of metal drive on and crush the Britons and the Druids, stamp them under and smite down the true faith and wrap the high priests in the flame of their own brands. And blood runs on the sand, the blood of Druid and seeress, of warrior and woman, until the last place of the ancient faith of all the world is razed and red and the sacred groves are hewn down and burned with fire and only one charred bole stands still by the shelving shore looking towards Anglesey and England, from where all evil comes, the men in boots and uniforms bearing swords or bayonets to cut up the true Britons of Wales and Ireland, to put out the light of the old faith called Celtic, to harry and occupy the land that was from the beginning the land of the Celts and their fathers’ fathers till time before memory.

  So speaks Evans the Latin in the ears of the small boys sitting at the benches and chalking pictures of hunchbacks on their slates called TEACHER, while they look at the broken body of Evans, who speaks fierce as ever in the mind’s ear of the lying grown Gog jolting along under the canvas roof of the ambulance. And he thinks back to that day, the last day in Holy Island before he’s packed off to Downforth to waste his youth among cassocks and corridors and skirted harsh holy men, black-robed where the Druids were white, their home a cell not an oak-grove. Never, never, never does he see Holy Island again, only the bleaker ruined rival holy isle across the sands from Northumberland, the wreckage of Lindisfarne where nature has taken back its own from the barren hands of the Benedictines. But on that last day in the true Holy Island, the young Gog sits in the charred oak, surely the last tree of the sacred grove, and looks over the straits to Anglesey like the last of the Druids. And he sees a curlew on the sand walking deliberate as a councilman, his neck stretched out and his long down-dipping beak held high. And the Devil puts a flint close to Gog’s hand and he picks up the stone and chucks it at the bird, as he’s done a thousand times as a boy and a thousand times missed. But today is the last day on Holy Island and the flint flies true and catches the bird on the shoulder as it begins to open its wings and run, so that it falls back onto the sand in a thrash of speckled feather. And Gog runs forwards, the blood hot in his ears, and he reaches the curlew as it staggers upright and begins to drag away, one wing crooked, and the sight of the escaping victim is thunder in his skull, and he jumps forwards and stamps and strikes with metal hobnails at the spread feathers until the bird is a still sandy lump on the corrugated sand. Then the cold wind chills the heat on Gog’s cheeks and he bends down, his fingers touching the gritty down of the bird’s white belly, then recoiling at the slime of blood, then creeping back again round the upstretched legs of the bird to pull it off the ground level with his own triumphant and terrified eyes. And Gog sees long scaly legs thin as a grass-snake, he sees a white underside, streaky with blood and sand and flecked with black arrowheads that also spot the grey-brown swell of the bird’s breast and its head loose-­dangling and its wings flopping downwards from dead joints and unstrung sinews.

  Now bury the body. Bury the evidence. For this is murder, murder. Find a cranny, there’s one, in the hollow at the side of the rock, where the wind’s scooped the sand away. Drop the body down, then crush it flat with both fists, feeling the thin bones breaking under knuckles, until the curlew’s sunk in sand and squashed on rock into a dish of feathers. Then up and scuffle the sand with boots until it covers the body, before bending to make a sandpie like a baby over the top of the curlew. Wipe, wipe bloody hands on the white sand, lick, lick at the last streaks of dried darkness on palms and knuckles, rub away the bloody mingling of boy and bird, of Gog and curlew, scrape till there’s no evidence of murder, until the black guilt of the stuck salt streaks is merely red raw skin to take home, where mother will never know before she packs Gog away for ever, for ever and a night from Holy Island where the Druids lived by oak and blood and live raven and died by iron and blood and brass eagle.

  So Gog remembers in the ambulance, jolting and dozing, while Maire sits on the bunk at his side, watching him with eyes hard and blue on either edge of her beaky nose. And she says, “Remembering? Remembering, Gog?” And he says, “Not a thing. I don’t remember.” And he lies back, his eyes closed, his arms crossed over his stomach. And he sleeps. And he wakes to Maire’s grip on his elbow and a piercing pain in his bare under­arm and the sight of Maire rising from the bunk beside him and stepping back in the still lorry. She has a syringe in her hand and she says, “Remember. You’ll remember now. You’ll have to remember all I ask you. You can’t lie to me now. You’ll tell me everything, and you’ll remember it for good.” And drugged with sleep, Gog hears himself mutter thickly, “Maire, Maire, what is it? Maire. Poison?” And she says, smiling, “Pentathol. The new truth drug. For making spies tell all. I found a bottle in the drug cupboard. I’ve given you
an abreaction, I had a doctor chap tell me how the intelligence does it in the war. Now you’ll remember. You haven’t got an option. You’ll answer all my questions and remember all you answer. Yes, you will, Gog. Then you’ll be mine, as you always were, before this blasted war. Mine.”

  And Gog feels the drug rising in his veins, exploring, thrilling, quivering until his tongue begins to tremble in his mouth, loosening ready to jabber in answer to the interrogator with the full lips who knows his past and who lies for her own interest.

  And Maire says, “Where were you born?”

  “From the sea, the sea, the bloody sea. Like Albion, born from the bloody sea.”

  And Maire says, “Who was your mother?”

  “A woman called Merry, who married beneath her and left her Catholic country house for a poor Celtic radical teacher. She could as well have been called Mary or Magog or Maire. All mothers are matriarchs. They rule the world through their sons, who cannot escape what they learned at the breast.”

  “And your father?”

  “I hardly knew him. I was ten when he was killed in the Great War that killed all the best and the least. I never even knew what sort of a man he was, because everybody lied about how noble and good and true he was meant to be, and nobody in the twenties ever believed a word they were told about the virtues of the Great War, not to mention the Irish Rebellion. What price glory? My father had Kitchener moustaches like two black sickles. But he didn’t have a chin, even before his jaw and the back of his head were shot off and he died of the khaki plague in Dublin.”

  “So you were brought up by women?”

  “Yes. Women in skirts and women in cassocks. Jezebels and Jesuits. Rapped on the knuckles with thimbles or rulers. Made to put on swollen gloves and bash in other boys’ noses, in case they bashed in mine in the name of sport. Always cold in parlours or schoolrooms. Sundays, strange scents and a chanting of Latin.”

  “An only child?”

  “There was a half-brother, but we didn’t mention him. He was born more than a year after my father died and sent away to London. Must hush up the scandal. I only found out years later. We had to think of the family. Griffins stay good or shut up.”

  And Maire says, “Why did they call you Gog?”

  “I didn’t like my name George and I used to like gooseberries. We called them goosegogs. And Merry used to say, ‘Don’t be a silly goose, George.’ Then one day, ‘Don’t be a silly goosegog.’ So I came to be called Gog.”

  “And Magog?”

  “That was my half-brother, after I’d found out about him. I called him that secretly, after Gog and Magog. I never knew his real name till much later. It was Magnus. He went into the Civil Service just before the war, the Home Office. He had been adopted into a family with connections. And he connected all right.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Yes. Several times on leave in the war. He was thin and slick and suited. My looks skidded off his sharp surface. He used to call me Dr. Griffin, though we were brothers. He didn’t want to acknowledge he was really a bastard. So we had to meet in secret, because he was curious. But in public, he’d have cut me dead, if I’d said Brother Magog. I was his skeleton in the closet, so he couldn’t call me his own flesh. He wouldn’t admit we had a blood tie.”

  “You envied him, didn’t you?”

  “Well, he’s very successful. He never makes a mistake, which isn’t a permissible error. Always moving up the ladder of success wrong by wrong. Always ahead on the promotion table. Everything calculated in advance, for his own advancement. You have to admire him. Though I don’t want to be in his shoes. I don’t like power. It corrupts.”

  And Maire says, “But you do really like power, don’t you?”

  “Not if it means being like Magog. He makes me squirm. I couldn’t lie like him, if necessary. Too much the politician. He does a good job, perhaps. But if it makes a man into a Magog, we shouldn’t have jobs like that. Or we should rotate them.”

  “You envy him?”

  “Sometimes. He’s so sure of himself. He likes ruling and knows he can. You have to envy him.”

  “And your marriage?”

  “It was in the Coupole I saw Maire. She was like a Modigliani. I could see her naked through her silk dress. It was July, hot, flies too lazy to crawl off you. Sweat stuck her dress to her breasts. She smiled at me, made me pay for her beer, went back with me to my hotel, was bored with me making love. She took my money, blued it on her painters and her girls, sucked me dry. Then, when I was packing to go, she came in with a handbag. That was all she had. ‘Take me with you, Goliath,’ she said. ‘Enough of this merde of a morgue.’ She always said Goliath without the h. ‘Golly-at,’ she used to say. She looked like a Renaissance David, a rounded beautiful boy with her back turned in her trousers, her bag like a sling-shot in her hand. She just wanted me to pay for her summer holiday. Then I got rich from my aunt. And I wanted her. So she married me. Maire.”

  And Maire says, “Liar. It wasn’t like that. Did you love her?”

  “Yes. I itched for her. I couldn’t keep my hands off. She had such a skin, soft surface, muscle beneath. She could make love any way, as if Jesuits and sin didn’t mean anything. I loved her. Even when I hated her. She deceived me. I knew it. But it was best to seem not to know. If I accused her, she always had an answer. Then tortured me for doubting her. And wouldn’t let me have her. And I had to have her. Maire. I cared for people till I met Maire. Then I damned them and cared for Maire.”

  “Then the war came?”

  “Then the war came. I joined the Intelligence. I was seconded to Africa. Then Italy. Then France and Germany. They can always use historians in Intelligence. It’s what we’re trained to do. Piece together bits of information to make a pattern. Sift the true from the false. Oh, that’s possible in war. The job’s easy. Merely to kill one another. But in peace, the job’s impossible. You can’t sift the false from the true. What’s killing one another compared to living with one another? That’s impossible. And what’s the truth, when it’s a question of loving one another?”

  “Did the war change you?”

  “It freed me from Maire. I learned to love the tommy, the soldier, the human. The people I said I’d loved before, oh they were an abstraction. Merely the folk. I wasn’t more rational than a Nazi. But I saw men crawling out to die, just to try and save a wounded stranger in the same uniform. I saw them laughing when they were croaking. And even at the worst times, a sense of decency. Imagine, we were shooting a spy in Caen. And we made him dig his own grave. Then he asked to crap before he died. So the sergeant pointed to his grave and said, ‘Crap in there.’ So he did and we shot him. And after he was dead in the grave he’d crapped in, a man in the firing squad said to the sergeant, ‘You didn’t need do that. A bloke shouldn’t have to crap in his own grave ’.”

  “How did the war free you from Maire?”

  “I didn’t see her. I couldn’t. At first, she’d crawl on me in my dreams. I’d wake crying. Then I got more scared of bullets than of her. Not so much of the bullets, but of not dying bravely. I didn’t know whether I could stand up under torture, if they caught me spying. I didn’t know I wouldn’t scream like a baby from a flesh wound. But they didn’t wound me or catch me. I got through scot-free, except for a scratch on the side of the head that makes it ache a bit. I may still be a coward, I don’t know. But I lost my fear of Maire because I feared my own cowardice much more.”

  And Maire says, “But you’re going back to Maire in London?”

  “Oh yes. But peace won’t be the same. The people rule in London.”

  “You know Magog still rules. The Civil Service doesn’t change. It’s permanent. It rules the ministers, doesn’t it?”

  “Then I must fight Magog.”

  “And Maire? She’ll still rule you, Gog.”

  “I’ll fight her too. She doesn’t know what war does. You learn to depend on yourself. There’s no one else sometimes. You can do without wo
men. They become irrelevant. Except to buy when you pass through a city. Two cigarettes, they cost in Germany now. They tell us to give no more, in case we spoil the price. I once gave a girl a whole packet of Player’s and she wept with joy. Her breasts were better than Maire’s.”

  And Maire says, “You bastard. You still love Maire?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it. For whole weeks, I didn’t even think of her. I don’t know. She’s so remote.”

  “What did you do in the war you were ashamed of?”

  “Nearly everything I did I was ashamed of. Taking a weekend’s leave off a man because he had dirty boots. Telling raped girls we couldn’t find the men. We could have, but we didn’t have the time and they were only Eyeties or Krauts, you know. There was one girl who just put a child on my desk and said, ‘Il vostro. Fatto in Inghilterra.’ And spat and ran out. We caught her, made her keep him. She hated him.”

  “What were you really ashamed of?”

  “Once they told me Bill was a spy. Bill in divisional H.Q. We didn’t know, but apparently he’d been a Mosleyite before the war. Not officially, they had no tabs on him. He was working for the Germans, they said. I liked him. Quiet chap. Knew a lot about coins. And sometimes a chat about numismatics was paradise in a mess full of talk about tarts made and laid. They told me to make it look like an accident. We went out duck-shooting near Cairo. He stopped to have a pee, turned his back. I blew off his head at five paces. An accident, naturally. I mistook his head for a duck in broad daylight. I didn’t even know he was a traitor. But orders, you know. I went through his pockets. Found nothing. We never did find anything, not even in his effects. There was just a tip that he was a traitor, which H.Q. believed. So I shot a friend in the back of the head while he was having a pee. And I don’t know. Perhaps all he knew about was coins. And he just liked Mosley for a time, some quite good chaps did before the war, I suppose.”