Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  “You must find England very boring after all that refined slaughter,” Gog says.

  “Not at all, not at all. Even hunters grow old. And the shoots are so well-organized here. The English alone have the true sense of the kill. Anyone can organize the killing of humans, even my ghastly Nazi mother’s family, because humans cooperate so readily in their own massacre. But only the English know the most difficult of arts, the organization of the killing of the unhelpful birds. It’s a sort of national genius, the bringing up of the chicks on eggs and grain, the killing off of the foxes that might disturb the hen pheasants about their maternal duty, the sending out of armies of beaters to make sure that every bird has its chance to share in the glorious Twelfth of August and add its contribution to the grand total of the bag. Six hundred brace in a day, I’ve done it.”

  “I’ve known Otto bring home a mountain of grouse,” Merry says. “You’d think nothing ran or flew on the surface of the earth when he’d walked over it. I must say, Otto, you’re God’s gift to the twelve-bore.”

  The vision of hunters with shotguns stalking the crust of the globe confuses in Gog’s mind with the vision of the red area of the British Empire spreading its stain over the same crust.

  “It’s just occurred to me,” Gog says, “that Otto’s the real reason for our Empire. The gentry got bored of shooting pheasants and hares here. They wanted bigger game. So they set out on a safari that turned into a permanent colonization, just to find larger beasts and huger reserves of wild meat. In their quest after the okapi, they discovered Africa. The tiger was the reason for the conquest of India. Allow wogs to kill so noble a beast? Impossible. The British explorers were hunters first, last, and all the time. They planted the Union Jack to make sure of their sport. We must preserve our game preserves, they said. And where the sportsmen led, the merchants naturally came after. Trade follows the bag.”

  Otto looks up to heaven at the end of Gog’s speech as if the dull sky were less boring than the speaker. But he suddenly becomes alive, reaches quickly behind the chaise-longue, brings up a shotgun hidden behind the silk, aims aloft and fires. A pigeon falls slipping sideways down the air and comes to rest a yard from Otto. He has to rise to pick it up. “Damn,” he says. “Another tenth of a second and I’d have dropped it in my lap.”

  “Dinner with Otto,” Merry says, “can be a dangerous affair. You never know when he won’t produce a revolver from his buttonhole and take a pot shot at something. Champagne corks pop all right when Otto’s near, but only because he’s shot them off the bottle. I’ve seen him convert a chandelier into a brass meat-hook by picking off the glass droplets one by one till there was only the metal left. He never misses, Otto . . .”

  “He misses me,” Gog interrupts, “completely.”

  “Would you mind,” Otto says, “putting this petit four between your front teeth and opening your lips a little? I will then miss you completely, but remove the cake with a bullet. William Tell, I’ve always thought, was a yokel, despite his popular appeal. Only knocking an apple off his son’s head, and the child probably budged and knocked the fruit off himself! I’d rather fling my answer back in someone’s teeth – sportingly, of course.”

  Without a word, Gog takes a petit four, wedges it between his front teeth, curls his lips back over his gums and turns his profile to Otto. He waits, while Merry says, “For God’s sake, no.” Then there is a snap and the hard cake disintegrates, driving dry crumbs into Gog’s mouth so that he chokes and his teeth clack together.

  When Gog has finished coughing, he turns towards the smiling and triumphant Otto, who has the right arm of owner­ship round Merry’s shoulders while his left hand holds a long-­barrelled revolver.

  “It’s my turn now,” Gog says. “Would you please lend me your pistol and put a grape on the parting of your hair, so that I can shoot it off?”

  Gog watches Otto’s sure smile dissolve into a frown and then become a flickering rictus. “Don’t be absurd, my young friend,” Otto says. “How do I know you can shoot well?”

  “I know enough to pull a trigger,” Gog says easily. “Doubtless the gun will do the rest. And why should you worry about my aim? You’re a sportsman, aren’t you? What I let you do to me, you have to let me do to you. Fair’s fair, isn’t it? A game’s a game. Each side has to have the same chance. Weapons are equal. You can put a grape-pip on your head if you like, if you want to make it even more difficult and sporting for me.”

  “Merry,” Otto says, “will you please explain to your son that there’s a world of difference between a trained sportsman and an amateur playing at sport? I know that I will hit what I aim at. But your son George . . .”

  “I know I’ll hit what I aim at, too,” Gog says. “It rather depends what I aim at, doesn’t it?”

  Otto begins to tremble a little, while a look of concern that may even be a grin crosses Merry’s face. “I must say, Otto,” she says, “that much as I adore you, Gog has got his point. It’s only sporting to let him have a pot shot at you. You can’t always do the shooting, you know. It’s only fair that you should get in the line of fire from time to time.”

  “But he may kill me,” Otto shouts. “He may even mean to kill me. I’m a sitting duck. I haven’t got a chance.”

  “I’ll let you fly off, if you like,” Gog says. “Let nobody say I didn’t give another Anglo-Saxon a sporting chance, even if his Saxon half on his mother’s side was a bit too recent.” He makes a sudden grab and snatches the pistol out of Otto’s left hand. “Put the grape up,” he says, levelling the gun at Otto. “I won’t fire till I see the green of its skin. Or else you’d better run for it.”

  “I protest,” Otto yells.

  “So does everybody who’s a target.”

  “It’s not cricket.”

  “No. it’s not.”

  “It’s . . . murder.”

  “Very probably.”

  With trembling hand, Otto reaches forward towards the bunch of grapes on the table. Then his nerves give way with a shriek, and he’s off at a shuffling hop towards the dark entrance into Alfred’s Tower, followed by the laughter of Gog and Merry.

  “I’ll give you a minute’s start,” Gog calls. “Then I’m hunting.” He turns to Merry. “I hope I’m not about to wing your nearest and dearest.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty more where he came from,” Merry says. “It’s time for me to move on, anyway. I’ve spent a day over a long week-end with Otto and that’s too long. Country houses are only built for week-ends, and one week-end at that. By Monday, it’s limbo in one of those stately mausoleums, and by Tuesday, it’s doomsday, and by Wednesday, it’s inferno. Luckily, there are so many of them, all filled with exactly the same type of conquering zero, lecherous as a rabbit and just about as brave if the rabbit had the shotgun. But I shouldn’t complain. I’ve lived off the county all my life. There’s always a squire ready to take me in, as long as I can be bothered to take him in. I’ve never yet had to stay in an hotel, or hire a man or a horse. Alas, my dear Gog, I’d have been a respectable woman, if only I’d had my own stable. But the wrong men own the right nags. You can’t get a good horse between your legs without getting an indifferent chap ditto.”

  “If you can’t join ’em,” Gog says, laughing, “leave ’em.” And he helps his mother to her feet and walks with her towards Alfred’s Tower in search of Otto, who has disappeared into the black hole of the decayed entrance. A large sign warns: WAR DAMAGE – DO NOT ENTER THE TOWER. Royally impervious to the risk, King Alfred still stands in his stone oyster-shell over the doorway, his right hand clutched to his heart and his left hand on the cross that makes up the hilt of his long sword. Beneath him, a legend is cut into the stone.

  ALFRED THE GREAT

  A.D. 879 on this Summit

  Erected his Standard

  Against Danish Invaders

  To him We owe the Origin of Juries

  The Establishment of a Militia

  The Creation of a Naval Force

&n
bsp; ALFRED The Light of a Benign Age

  Was a Philosopher and a Christian

  The Father of his People

  The Founder of the English

  MONARCHY and LIBERTY

  As Gog reads of the achievements of King Alfred, who was the originator of so many of Magog’s devices of power and law in the name of defending the people, he does not want to walk under the heel of such a genius of ruling into the tower named after him. But Otto has gone that way, so Gog follows with his mother into the darkness of King Alfred’s neo-gothic chimney-stack, miscalled monument.

  “Monarchy and liberty,” Gog grumbles, “they’re enemies, not allies.”

  “Nonsense,” his mother answers. “The first ensures the second. You wouldn’t be free to sing the National Anthem if God didn’t save the King.”

  As Gog enters the tower, he is blinded. There is a sudden wind by his face and thump at his feet. He stoops to find a brick embedded in the soil, fallen by chance or thrown by choice from above. He looks up to see that the roof of the tower has tumbled down and a triangle of grey sky is his only cover from the wrath of God. A faint light trickles half-way down the two hundred feet of crumbling brickwork which make up the walls of the tower. Weather has blackened the bricks so that Gog seems to be looking up the immense length of a flue.

  Another brick crashes against the wall at the left edge of the doorway, just missing Gog. He quickly moves his body to one side out of the dangerous silhouette of the entrance. And he studies the darkness of the lower reaches of the walls, looking for Otto.

  “You’ll ruin your tweeds, Otto,” Merry calls up, “if you will insist on pretending you’re a chamois. And Gog’ll see you soon and make a bit of leather out of you for wiping windows. Why don’t you surrender and say you’re sorry?”

  “I surrender,” Otto calls out of the darkness.

  Gog peers in the direction of the voice and can just make out a dark crouching blob in the darkness that looks like a crow, huddled into itself against the cold.

  “Then stick up your hands,” Gog calls back.

  “I can’t. Or I’ll fall down.”

  “Then fall down.”

  “I can’t. Or I’ll break my legs.”

  Another brick whistles by Gog’s ear, scattering rubble over his head.

  “What are you chucking bricks with, Otto? Your teeth?”

  “No. I’m hanging on with them.”

  “Then what are you talking with?”

  “My tongue. No one talks with their teeth, you fool.”

  “Then where are the bricks coming from?”

  “The whole tower’s falling down.”

  “Then you’d better fall down.”

  “I can’t. I’m stuck. You’ll have to come and get me. Help! You can’t leave a fellow Anglo-Saxon stuck in a crevasse. Was this the spirit that braved the Matterhorn? Help!”

  So Gog tucks his pistol in his belt and starts up the sheer north face of crumbling Alfred’s Tower. Without crampons, without pompoms, without icepick or toothpick, without hope or rope, Gog starts a traverse over the dread brick cliff that no human foot has ever trod before. It would make the stoutest heart quail to see the human fly nearly seven feet tall inch his way upwards, fingers dug into the toeholds made by mortar crumbling between bricks, and toes dug into the fingerholds although his fingers are still there. “Ouch!”

  “I can’t hold on much longer,” Otto calls. “Will yet another life be sacrificed to the fearful north face? This is no sport, to pit one’s wits and nails against the brick. It’s murder.”

  Up, up, Gog scrabbles, scrambles, ambles, shambles, rambles, rumbles, grumbles, fumbles, tumbles, tangles, angles, wangles, tingles, jingles on this Alp of an Eiger of an Everest of a Popacatapetl, until Otto artfully dislodges seven lucky bricks onto his skull, making him see seven lucky stars. As Gog throws up a despairing hand, it clutches onto the left boot of the odious Otto, which is safely planted on a ledge. And down comes Gog and Otto and most of the north wall of the tower in an avalanche of rubble. As Gog skids into the ground, the pistol in his belt goes off and proves the last bullet which breaks the tower’s ribs. With a thunder louder than Thor dropping his worst clanger, with a topple worse than Babel’s curtsy, with a crack more absolute than the shattering of Humpty Dumpty’s shell, the whole tower of King Alfred’s Monument comes falling down,

  falling,

  falling,

  falling,

  falling,

  brick

  after

  brick

  DO

  W

  N.

  .

  .

  When Gog has coughed the dust out of his lungs and has pulled his limbs out from under the few fragments that miraculously are the only ones which have tumbled on him, he begins squirming, worming, storming, stalking, walking, baulking, bucking, mucking his way up the great pothole of red rubble above him. So the speleologist Gog comes out of the bloody womb of the earth to the peak of the high mountain of the fallen tower of might and majesty. And the breeze is blowing the red dust like a rusty mist. And an apparition clothed in powdered scarlet rises from the peak of the mountain, as the climber approaches the summit of F666 and says in an awful voice, “My son, you always used to bash in other boys’ sand-castles on the beach, but this is a bit too much.”

  XXV

  Gog leaves his mother sailing off stately home behind Methusaleh, who is the chauffeur of Otto’s Silver Cloud Rolls Royce. Merry wants a bath and what Merry wants, Merry gets. “After that, I’m staying with my steady in these parts, Sir Clifford Chastity – only he isn’t. Do you know, I’ve sometimes spent a whole week there. We’re almost married.” So Gog’s mother, really the scarlet woman under the layers of brick-dust, bids her son farewell and rides off, leaving Otto’s aged retainers to pick among the bricks in search of their master. But their task is like finding a powdered toad in an apothecary’s shop. It will take them light years to locate Otto among the débris.

  So Gog walks off, whistling Lili Marlene. He takes the old Saxon Hardway or Harrow Way along the ridge, past the smooth bark of beech groves hanging down the pointed fingers of their leaves. A sudden vale takes his eyes to the right; it ends in a herd of cows grazing in the jaws of the beech wood; the cattle also ruminate beneath a ruined stone pavilion set in the centre of the grass for no reason except to bear a little cross and to remind wayfarers that Christ, perhaps, cared for them. Gog looks back soon afterwards and seems to see the top of Alfred’s Tower still rising above the beeches. How can that be, when he has just seen it topple? Yet the quirky light of evening has already obscured Gog’s vision, so that the three turrets of Alfred’s Tower may well be three treetops, and Gog is certainly not returning a mile to check on whether his latest encounter is merely another dream. He hurries on to where the beech woods end on the high meadows and the chalky linen of White Sheet Hill ahead lures him towards London, as it flies its flag of truce from the earthworks of the ancient fort miles away, promising Gog repose.

  Gog plunges down the longest lane in all the world, walking on the tongue of grass between the two tractor ruts, with the high banks of brier and nettle and foxglove and cowparsley and buttercup putting blinkers on the willing horse following his nose straight towards the east. From the occasional thicket, pigeons get up in a mocking rattle of musketry, disturbed by Gog’s approach. But even the longest lane has its ending, and Gog arrives eventually on the hard chalk track across the downs proper. He is tiring now as if his strength were ebbing with the light and fatigue were cloaking him in the folds of the night. But the way is milky beneath his feet and it leads him under an arch of oak branches up White Sheet Hill past the ramparts of the old earthwork, until he finds an entrance into the fortress cut through the sloping walls. He climbs up the causeway across the ditch and double wall, his boots pushing through feathers of grass as tall as arrows, through plantains as heavy-headed as darts, and past pyramid orchids flaming purple in points of fire. He sinks bac
k onto the slanting inner bank of the earthwork and turns the two balls of his eyes down the entrance slope across the dark-olive fields, sliced sideways by the hedgerows, to the crow-winged hills, above which the last curve of the single ball of the sun is shut between the lower lid of the earth and the upper lid of the night. And sodden with good food and tiredness, Gog tumbles into sleep as deeply as down a shaft dug by an archaeologist on an interesting site.

  “This intriguing specimen of Neolithic man,” Miniver’s voice says in Gog’s ears, “has just been excavated, as you all see, in situ beneath this old causewayed enclosure on White Sheet Hill.” As Gog tries to move, he finds to his horror that his limbs have turned to bone or stone, and that he is bound down in place as if by the grasses that bind down decayed shells and fossils which the years in their millions have translated into the chalk subsoil of the downs. “The skull of this Neolithic man, as you see, has the prognathous jaw and protruding ridgebone which we would expect on a primitive of his type.” And indeed, as Gog tries to open his eyes to see Miniver discoursing over his body to a group of students, he finds that he has only sockets in his skull which can discern nothing at all.

  The lesson continues. “Although the earthwork we are inside is a Round Barrow of the Bronze Age, the skeleton before us is one of the earlier Neolithic or Windmill Hill people. Of course, he was uncommonly large for his time; he may even have been superstitiously thought to be a giant. We may reasonably suppose that he died defending his tribe from the superior weapons of the Bronze Age warriors, attacking from their mines in the Mendips and elsewhere.

  “You may well ask, what sort of a life did our Neolithic skeleton friend lead? He was semi-nomadic, cultivating grain here and there on virgin soil and moving his cattle and pigs and sheep to the increasing areas of cleared grassland on the chalk downs. As he did not yet know how to weave, he wore cowhides, prepared by antler combs and flint scrapers. Now that flint, indeed, which exists in large veins beneath the chalk, was mined by our Neolithic friend and gave him the advantage in war over his predecessors. You might well say that the men of flint conquered the men of softer stone and of wood, while they in their turn were conquered by the men of bronze, before these gave way to the men of iron.